MOOCs: Literature of the English Country House? Jonathan Bate’s Shakespeare & His World

The great hall at Penshurst

Dear Friends and Readers,

The other night I embarked on listening to another of these sets of videos sent out by English universities and designated MOOCs: Mass Online Courses. My second is from Warwick University, thus far the lectures are by the somewhat mesmerizing Jonathan Bate. He begins with Shakespeare’s life (week 1) and how his play, The Merry Wives of Windsor (week 2) closely reflects aspects of Shakespeare’s community, parentage, boyhood: “Shakespeare and His World.” Bate speaks of Shakespeare’s apparent bisexuality, gives a real sense of his life’ story and career that makes sense, and dismisses the snobbish nonsense that won’t attribute the plays to this player, writer, ordinary man. He speaks eloquently himself, quotes beautifully and expatiates on his texts, and (for week 3) his discourse about the world of plays and dreams, the birth of the professional theater fills the silence of my lonely room with a vibrant mind.

The series also functions as an advertisement for the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust at Stratford: we are invited to contemplate artifacts from the Trust as relics.

Well my first try was the Literature of the English Country House, from Sheffield presented by a husband and wife professor team, the Fitzmaurices, and as, on the whole it was a disappointment, I thought I would not write a useless screed of complaints; but now I’m seeing another, which is much better to begin with (the professor is much franker and really knows something about his particular topic), yet shares some of the traits, I thought I would suggest what was valuable, and why people argue MOOCs are not true forms of learning, e.g., most glaringly little was told about the specific houses filmed in: many were supported by corrupt violence, slavery, vicious practices in factories, and the reality of how the wealth came to be gotten which put these houses up and paid for their is said to be a sore topic in the tourist and heritage industries. I include what little was said about enclosures, provincial playing of plays, politeness literature, Rousseau and education (nonsense poetry for adults), gothics (Radcliffe, Dickens) and Oscar Wilde’s “Canterville ghost,” the soul of man under socialism. Not much to do with country houses …

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A corner shot of the Penshurst gardens

They began at Penshurst, doubtless because of Ben Jonson’s poem:

Thou art not, Penshurst, built to envious show,
Of touch or marble; nor canst boast a row
Of polished pillars, or a roof of gold;
Thou hast no lantern, whereof tales are told,
Or stair, or courts; but stand’st an ancient pile,
And, these grudged at, art reverenced the while.
Thou joy’st in better marks, of soil, of air,
Of wood, of water; therein thou art fair.
Thou hast thy walks for health, as well as sport;
Thy mount, to which the dryads do resort …
Here no man tells my cups; nor, standing by,
A waiter doth my gluttony envy,
But gives me what I call, and lets me eat;
He knows below he shall find plenty of meat.
The tables hoard not up for the next day;
Nor, when I take my lodging, need I pray
For fire, or lights, or livery; all is there,
As if thou then wert mine, or I reigned here:
There’s nothing I can wish, for which I stay.
That found King James when, hunting late this way
With his brave son, the prince, they saw thy fires
Shine bright on every hearth, as the desires
Of thy Penates had been set on flame
To entertain them; or the country came
With all their zeal to warm their welcome here.
What (great I will not say, but) sudden cheer
Didst thou then make ’em! and what praise was heaped
On thy good lady then, who therein reaped
The just reward of her high housewifery;
To have her linen, plate, and all things nigh,
When she was far; and not a room but dressed
As if it had expected such a guest!
These, Penshurst, are thy praise, and yet not all …
Now, Penshurst, they that will proportion thee
With other edifices, when they see
Those proud, ambitious heaps, and nothing else,
May say their lords have built, but thy lord dwells

For the first week on Penshurst, the texts included excerpts from Jonson’s “To Penshurst,” a paean to Robert and Barbara Sidney, who were among his patrons and decent humane values; excerpts from Margaret Cavendish’s Sociable Letters, and snatches of Shakespeare’s Twelth Night. The visuals included the gardens, which I have been to. Jonson’s poem is a beautiful set of images whose values are deeply appealing. Robert Sidney is all generosity (liberal, free). This is a table where guests all eat from the same set of foods — that implies there are places where some are sat at other tables with lesser food. No one is watching him, counting, either to see him show off or to make him feel he is taking too much. Everything you could want in your room is provided — and that’s where no one would see if you were deprived. It was like this when King James and his son came — so you are treated like a king & heir. Barbara Sidney does not disdain to do the work herself — or at least supervise and get involved. She has had many children — the value of fecundity, implying that some women of this era did know how to control their reproduction. Records suggest thought that most women of this milieu endured endless pregnancies. Virtue is taught here – -and all the country arts. Others show off, but you really live in this place.

At the same time I liked how Professor Cathy Shrank exposed the delusion that masters and servants were all lovey-dovey and insisted on the continual tensions between tenants and owners — the enclosure movement was part of what gave rise to More’s Utopia (a communist tract in effect though More didn’t know the term): it’s Utopian, presents an ideal ironically; More does not expect anyone will follow it, but uses it heuristically. How central More’s profound treatise, Utopia, and Bolt’s play, A Man for All Seasons seem to me more than ever today in trying to understand underlying motivations and types we see in our political world today. Together with Machievalli’s The Prince (it’s said Hussein would shoot his enemies dead at a table) and Erasmus’s Praise of Folly (on madnesses).

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The central hall of Hardwick (familiar on the Net) was filmed in, but nothing said about the tapestries

Week 2 we were taken to Hardwick Hall where very little was permitted to be photographed; the presenters seemed to delight in presenting the Duchess as formidable, but she left no diary — she was not introspective enough to keep one, and too ambitiously busy in the world. I learned something new — or that an attitude and belief had changed. When I was studying the Renaissance it was thought that these companies only went into the provinces when there was plague, or a specific invitation or someone in the company lived near the great house or some specific event was happening there — like a queen’s visit. Now they assert that the companies traveled frequently and provided much entertainment. But one reason for the thinness of the lectures for Week 2 is they seem to know hardly anything about these performances. Is there no paper trail? They were not sure where they were played, which plays chosen.

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Nostell Priory Stables

The third week was filmed in one spot at Nostell Priory and the third and fourth week in several at Chatsworth (a tourist place nowadays) and the topic was politeness — well-taken if not fully explained. A long history of the 18th century by Paul Langford uses politeness in its title to capture a new central quality or value of the era. As England comes a thoroughly commercialized society where people did business with strangers as a matter of course and had to interact learn to trust one another, shared manners was essential. The two professors don’t bring out this economic basis. It was a value in itself, performative sociability, giving you presence and status so an entertainment house, Nostell Priory would be a place where you showed your politeness for all sorts of reasons. They cited Addison’s Spectators, a good choice: when I was young, they charmed me for their tone but now I know how snobbish this one we read it. Like Emma Mr Spectator expects people to modulate their tones.

Taking us to Chatsworth enabled them to talk about the “corruption” of this ideal later in the century: where politeness is used to manipulate and screw people. Instead of allowing for socialabilty it is a disguise behind which real social dysfunctions lurk. They don’t say that: a problem with these videos is the two people are so aware they don’t know who is listening and fear offending, so their language is so banal, neutral, it’s empty of any kind of judgement. So they say next to nothing about Chesterfield’s letters, at the time a scandal, called the letters of whore master because there is no pretense at fake morality to his son.

The choice of a central text was brave; Georgiana Spencer’s Sylph. but of course they did not discuss how the text relates to her life. She was an inordinate high player and was hounded for debts as was her husband. In the novel she is pressured to go to bed with someone in lieu of paying debts. They omit that these great houses were places where high play and gambling went on until the wee hours and people lost great sums.

They naturally brought in Austen as Chatsworth was used for the 1995 P&P film’s Pemberley: Austen’s books participate in the literature of the country house — from Pemberley; Norland, Barton Delaford, to Donwell Abbey, Mansfield Park & Sotherton; Donwell and Northanger Abbeys; Kellynch-Hall are all such places. There was not a single comment on what was Austen’s stance towards these places.

They also omitted how these houses were power linch-pins of aristocratic, elite life, central to Mark Girouard’s Life in the English Country House. These houses were places from which wealthy and influential people controlled the landscape and local economic and political life of “their area.” Their size, their networking capacity, their large staffs, how the family actually lived in London most of the time — all show us how unreal Downton Abbey is. Girouard also says it’s wrong to think of them as farms with tenant farmers) as DA encounages; Yes, but the purpose was to wrest rent from everyone; it was the rent rolls that mattered. So it mattered that the farms do well but that also depended on trade and connections across the county and outside too — tied to colonies as well. Girouard describes specific houses and like so many his emphasis is on the Renaissance and 17th century when these house first went up. They were extended in the 18th century and renovated in the 19th.

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Satis House where a room is kept in imitation of Miss Haversham’s room in Great Expectations

The fifth week was called “Gothic” and included Haddon Hall which Ann Radcliffe knew. Two new presences energized the experience. Angela Wright’s two talks, one 9 and the other nearly 8 minutes on the gothic, Anne Radcliffe and Haddon Hall I thought excellent. What she showed was the suggestiveness of the prose and intertwining of narrator and main character. She talked rightly of how much study Radcliffe did of the countries she described and never went to – she also extrapolated from where she had been, Germany, and England all over the place, Scotland into the Highlands.

The opening epigraph poem written by Radcliffe herself: Her” voice seems to refer to Fate but it could also be the person who suffered the “nameless deed.” By not naming it, the suggestion is it breaks deep taboos — so how about incestuous rape? In Romance of the Forest an uncle attempts incestuous (it turns out) rape on the heroine (who is his niece we later learn). On the famous movement into Udolpho: she gazed … The adjectives connect the building to levels of darkness and light, mostly darkness; the uncertainty of what we see in this gloom reflects Emily’s deep feeling of insecurity. Words like “melancholy awe” and “gaze” are overtly connected to Emily but they spill over to “silent, lonely, sublime: Emily feels the silence, her loneliness, that she is nontheless in this special — sublime — environment. Uncertainty pictured in: “its features became more awful in obscurity,’ ” till its clustering towers were alone seen,” the carriage moves under “thick shade.”

One question we could ask since we do have very quiet free indirect discourse making for high subjectivity in the narrative all along, where is Radcliffe? how does she relate to acts like incestuous rape? by being so reticent and withdrawn (anticipating say Flaubert) she deflects such questions, but we do ask of other authors where are they in their lives and imagination in the fiction.

It made me yearn to go to the Ann Radcliffe Sheffield conference — Three days, maybe the first conference wholly on her — a 250 anniversary of the publication of Udolpho.

Again filming of the house was extremely limited, and Fitzmaurice could make anything boring (he is often interlocutor), so bland and careful are any of his comments. He did try to talk scarily – he was elephantine. They filmed themselves in the dark in one of Haddon House’s rooms. They also filmed Haddon House from the outside at an angle which suggests how it could be this building Radcliffe was thinking of when she imagined Udolpho.

Then Amber Regis spoke and she was good on Satis House: she had less time so there was much less about dickens (maybe they assumed we know something). It was amusing to see that the National Trust keeps one room of Satis House in a mess — paper coming away … What was especially good was Amber Regis’s exposition of Great Expectations and the remarks on autobiography and its relationship to Great Expectations. Of her questions about the text she chose I wrote: How does Pip know this though? Has he brooded analogously? What is this order of her Maker? Did God make her suitor desert her at the altar and implicitly demand that Miss Havisham “get over it?” Why should she be punished? what has she done? Was she at fault for the suitor not showing up? These are bad vanities: the “vanity of penitence, the vanity of remorse, the vanity of unworthiness, and other monstrous vanities ” But there are worse evils. the novel faults Miss Havisham for bringing Estella up to hate and hate men. It’s an odd pivotal figure to hang upon a load of the world’s grief and misery.

I am drawn to the idea that Miss Havisham is approaching annihilation — she is herself dying before our very eyes. Since I have read the novel, I’d ask how this relates to our first sight of Magwitch in a grave yard, a convict fleeing the daylight world of law and police, someone who was treated as abominably as anyone (far worse than being stood up at an altar I should think) — since Pip grows to be a gentlemen out of these two people’s influence, is being a gentleman presented symbolically dependent on the deaths of others?

The two women had such cut glass chiseled accents — I thought that had gone out. So I wondered what Sheffield is like as a place to work … It was once a textile city and beautiful shawls came from there, sheep all around – -there was also much enclosure, much misery from industrialization — and radical and reform movement arose there in the 18th century and chartism in the 19th. I’ve wondered why does no one make a film adaptation of The Mysteries of Udolpho — you could incorporate some of the best of the Romance of the Forest as well as The Italian? The country house ruined is the center of the gothic, its underbelly, its cruelties — it’s on behalf of keeping it up that primogeniture was partly set up.

Elaine Pigeon who participated too wrote: “I was surprised by the gothic aspects of Great Expectations, the creepiness of Miss Havisham. The emphasis on decay reminded me of the ruin of the Lestrange family in Rhoda Broughton’s Cometh Up as a Flower. The idea of corruption and moral decay fits quite well as new money is taking over while the nobility of the past simply evaporates. It also made me think of William Faulkner’s famous short story, ‘A Rose for Emily,’ which as you probably know is considered a good example of Southern Gothic. There is a reversal in that tale, as Emily keeps the corpse of the groom in her bedroom, laid out on the bed as a fully dressed skeleton. If I recall correctly, he had tried to jilt her, but she put a stop to that.”

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Brodsworth Hall: a modern play area outside the house for children

The 6th week is worth discussing for what was not discussed and what was deeply wrong about this MOOC. Perhaps others will disagree – I would like to hear if anyone liked or disliked this week – but I found this week’s series irritating – it had all the faults of the previous weeks and then some. Brodsworth Hall was presented as unusual for its children’s nurseries and an excuse to launch into educational treatises. I had not noticed in previous weeks but this time it was glaring. We were never told who owned Brodsworth nor why It has this vast wing for children.

I looked it up and found on Wikipedia a pdf dissertation which explained the family were fabulously rich and much of their money derived from slavery – -especially the worst kind where one worked people to death in the western hemisphere to make huge sums on sugar and other products. Even cursory reading of “Slavery connections of Brodsworth Hall (Final report for English heritage – you can find the pdf on Wikipedia if you type in Brodsworth) showed that Peter Thelluson could be used an antidote to Lord Grantham: we are told at one point this poor man was squeezed and forced to take a position at court in the Ottoman empire (reminding me of the pity we are to feel for the Scottish lord In Downton Abbey just “forced” to go to India and live there as a courtier). Reading about this family reminded me of all the evils of primogeniture and how it was used for the patronage system – I read yesterday of how Thomas Paine attacked primogeniture in Part 2 of his famous Rights of man.

The first inference to take is such a nursery cannot be common. Our presenters never told us 1) What was the average childhood of Victorian times, nor how common is such a wing for other country houses. But answer came there none because no one asked the question. Which generation of the family built this wing? Which woman? Who were the servants? How many governesses and nursemaids did they have? Was there a tutor? You learn far more from Tillyard’s book about the Lennoxes in this regard than anything cited here.

Then they went over two poems (Lear and Carroll), two men who never married, and not children’s literature from country houses. What were the real books given these children and what the books written about them in the era and after. I am startled by how well behaved the questioners are but maybe there are many people like me who refrain from asking obvious questions that might be uncomfortable – MOOCs are dependent on the inhibitions of people in large public cyberspace where they know very few people – but I did notice that none of the offered subjects were at all about the house, the family who owned it and came to build such a wing. We are not encouraged to learn about how children really fitted into this environment.

Cynically I’d say this angle was chosen because there was someone on the Sheffield staff whose speciality was nonsense verse and fantasy pictures and the last thing she wanted to discuss was what it was all about (the fantasy pictures are highly erotic). We got the silliest exposition of ideas about childhood in the 18th century: Rousseau was cited but not Locke’s Thoughts Concerning Education. All they could say was the bland idea that children were not longer little adults and seen as the product of sin or wild savage animals. In fact they were not seen this way from the Renaissance on. There is a history of educational literature which starts in the 16th century — how to teach children in school and this history is taught (or used to be) in better graduate school programs – like Columbia’s Teacher’s college. Much of the earliest enlightened thought was against beating — to no avail in many places but it was against it. Healthy environments, keeping children from “corruption” (sexual knowledge).

The true importance of Rousseau’s treatise is he argued you must take the child’s nature and keep his gifts in mind. Lock was willing to impose goals a family might want – insofar as one is able. Rouseau wants to find out the particular child and develop programs which address this. He also tried to break with latin learning and make it far more practically oriented. The Lennox sisters actually followed Rousseau’s regimen – they were famous for it. One of them married the tutor she hired — an enlightenment type. This is revolutionary — maybe you’d like your son to be a naval officer but if he has no inclination or ability in that direction, all the beating in the world will not make him a successful officer. They may have mentioned that this did not go for girls: Rousseau assumes the nature of all girls is to be come sexual objects and mothers and wives. It needs Mary Wollstonecraft, Madame de Genlis and others to object against this and argue for a real education for a girl too — which developed into finishing schools for the rich.

Diane Reynolds participated and here is some of what she wrote about week 6: ” … Samuel Johnson, among others, defended corporal punishment in schools as, while unpleasant, the only way to compel children to learn. He and
others defended it as long as it caused no lasting damage to the body — no maiming, no blinding, no visible scars. It was seen as transitory suffering far outweighed by the enduring quality of an education. Pain went away, but the knowledge wrought by pain — reading, writing, etc — lasted a lifetime. Though many people were highly uncomfortable with this logic, having endured horrors themselves, it took more than a century of case building to establish the enduring psychological harm caused by corporal punishment, and, also important, the fact that the mass of children could learn effectively without being beaten … This is the period of locking children into dark closets (which we should understand more as small rooms than our current closets — our clothes closet function was supplied by wardrobes) and dark basements for minor infractions. The lecturer tells us that the wing is no longer decorated as a child’s wing, but does not tell us what it would have looked like — it would have been interesting to have been shown contemporary photographs or read contemporary accounts or memories of the children as adults. But no. The house might well have simply arisen from the ether. The nonsense verses were hardly nonsense but all about power and oppression, though we are prompted to see them as “nonsense.” At the end, the lecturer mentions they are about power (well, duh) but never goes on to provide anymore context or explanation or even her own theory about them.

I am sure it would have offended some people to highlight the house being built on the profits of slave labor, but for me that raises a larger question of academic integrity and truth-telling. If it is indeed the truth that this is where the money came from, it seems to me we need to face that. I have never understood why people get so offended at truth telling. I would think sweeping unpleasant facts under the rug would be more offensive. This becomes history functioning as fantasy or fiction: dangerous.”

I replied: I now seriously doubt any of those who talked had read Rousseau. They were mouthing the safest truisms they knew of – or else they just didn’t want to discuss his text at all nor its place in education. The Renaissance began the drumbeat to stop physical beating — it occurs very early in the literature and when (for example), Sarah Fielding in her Governess reaffirms its use, it is more than horrifying because she has added another aspect Johnson meant to decry: moral blackmail. Not only do you beat the child, but you instill in it deep attachment to you, in both Rousseau and Madame de Genlis, you cut the child off from other children (that is part of the drive to educate privately) so poor Emile and Adele have no one to turn to. Rousseau is quite explicit about this; Madame de Genlis is ruthless in the way she manipulates the daughter. I say Madame de Genlis because Adele et Theodore is transparently autobiographical: she is describing how she brought up Pamela and Henriette. She didn’t dare do quite that level of bullying to the man who became the citizen king (who was devoted to her in later life) and was one of her pupils later on.

One of the major changes in the 18th century is a growth in psychological awareness and seeing things from a psychological standpoint. Richardson anticipates Freud says Diderot (in effect).

And there is something to this — at least this kind of twisting of children to make them envy this or that, long for this or that can have very bad effects on them morally — maybe you teach some ambition and those who are that way to start with (competitive) thick-skinned and maybe more shallow in feeling do okay but it can instill deep inward injury (class based then and now, race based now).

When I read Rousseau I thought his idea of following the child’s nature a form of true liberation in the earliest years and this kind of thing can create great love between tutor and student — it does link to what Austen makes fun of through Marianne Dashwood. Marianne says if she was doing wrong she would know it because she’d feel it. That’s out of Rousseau finally and the idea is its innate — this understanding of what’s right and wrong or good and bad. Rousseau said famously man is born free but everywhere in chains. He’s not all wrong: one practice of enslavers suggests they knew at some level they were committing horrific crimes — they get rid of every document they can about their slaves but those which relate to buying and selling. One part of that I think is shame — they want to erase what they have perpetrated. Not enough not to not do it. And they did advertise to get back slaves then shamelessly identifying slaves by scars showing terrible brutality. Dickens used that in his American Note

In letters Madame de Genlis’s daughter, Pamela, wrote late in life (after she married Lord Fitzgerald and he died) she said she hated her mother. She described Madame de Genlis as a hypocrite: she tells of how the woman coerced another daughter into marriage in order to get money and how when the girl tried for and got a divorce Madame de Genlis was among those who countered that Enlightenment statute (alas abrogated in 1803 or so) by refusing to acknowledge the divorce. The man was brutal and a crook — one of these embezzling types. OTOH, Pamela never did become estranged: she couldn’t imagine life without this woman who was to her toxic (so she says). Her letters are an early version of Mommie Dearest ….

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Bowood from Morris’s County Seats, 1880

In the 7th week all pretense at discussing country houses was given up and an Oscar Wilde expert (Dr Andy Smith) trotted out — the texts included The Happy Prince, “The Canterville Ghost” (a short story), The Importance of Being Earnest, and “The Soul of Man under Socialism” (a short treatise). There was some general talk of the decline of the country house, the agricultural depression of the 1890s — in terms you can get straight from Downton Abbey. In DA we learn of (oh how sad) how rich people lost their estates — that’s about what they said; you could find it in a magazine article

Not once was there a hint that Wilde was a homosexual man. The escape from a trap using a hidden identity (Bunbury) is what a gay man has to do. The move into anarchism as freedom under socialism is an escape from commercial pressures which also force people to live hidden lives. James was mentioned and The Turn of the Screw is about how the twisted heterosexuality of the normative conventions destroys people and has twisted the mind of the governess. Other of James’s stories invite similar interpretations. “The Canterville Ghost” mocks the form of the ghost story at the same time as it uses it to tell of dire events obliquely.

I was prompted to write more than before:

I have a real connection with the Oscar Wilde material. Again it’s Jim: I have two shelves full of books by Wilde — a big fat seat of everything he ever wrote, multi- old volumes where you have to own a special cutter instrument to open the pages as you go. I’ve Wilde’s letters, a couple of books of criticism, and some selections of his plays, a biography. I’ve a similar library of George Bernard Shaw. Together Jim and I saw a number of Wilde’s and Shaw’s plays. Jim liked Shaw’s criticism and politics. Of Wilde it was all sorts of things, even Wilde’s poetry. I have read in some of the material and some of the texts quite through but especially for Shaw he read a lot of it. I once ended up in a cartoon movie watching Wilde’s “Happy Prince” with Laura as a child; it’s a deeply melancholy story and she watched with great absorption but did not like it at all

So since I’ve never read “The Canterville Ghost” or “The Soul of Man under Socialism” I found them and this morning read “The Canterville Ghost.” It was still uncut so Jim never got this far. “The Soul of Man under Socialism” is in the volume which contains “De Profundis,” the whole book cut so Jim read that one. I am interested in ghost stories.

It’s a send up of the ghost story convention. It appears to follow the outline of Wharton’s powerful “Afterward.” American family buys a property said to have a ghost and find it titillating. In Wharton’s story it ends in cataclysmic tragedy — the women is widowed at the end, devastatingly. Wilde though asks what’s to be afraid of. So you see a ghost. So what?

He makes his Americans thoroughly pragmatic and into inventions to improve the ghost’s existence and their own. They torment the poor ghost by continually washing up a blood stain. They unnerve him. They set traps and tricks. At the same time Wilde shows he can do ghost stories too. The ghost manages to kidnap the daughter at one point and the family then does become terrified. She vanished — that’s what ghosts do. In this part of the story he shows how he can whip up landscape and also labrythine corridors. It does end in death but then turns round to provide a cheer-y mocking ending.

Yes it takes place in a country house — and is part of a subgenre of mystery stories occurring in country houses. But Wilde is not interested in that – -it reminds me of a poor play Izzy and I saw a couple of weeks ago: the humor is really gay humor — you are upending heterosexual norms and showing them to be absurd. Wilde would understand _the Turjn of the Screw_ in the way it was meant but at the same time find the horrified sensibility hilarious — or write a story where he appeared to. He was highly performative.

The story did make me think about this: when my father died I had my first insight into ghost stories: they were about what couldn’t be retrieved; you could not bring the person back; at the same time it’s likely bad things occur much you are remorseful for and there is much guilt so the ghost story rehearses this endless circular re-enactment of guilt, justice, revenge.

Now I see the story itself, the frame is part of what it’s about – how this in itself clasps you round and you need it, live in it, cannot lose its meaning, at the same time like the ghost who removes the heroine for a while it devours you.

Wilde is pointing out how under socialism there can be little individual liberty. When I did my paper on “liberty in the Poldark novels” I read a lot about different kinds of liberty, and the one that only recently has concerned philosophers (since Mill) is civil liberty. It has to do with individual belief systems and how we are allowed to go about our daily lives; it’s a liberty of the private man. Recently privacy has come under attack as a concept, but while much of our privacy is now invaded (see the two Ted lectures), I believe the concept is valid.

Wilde was remarkably brave and continued to be — or he had an urge to be “found out.” There’s a complicated (thoughtful) essay by Colm Toibin on Wilde’s self-exposure which i could try to find and share if people are interested.

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To sum up: in this MOOC about country houses and their literature, the speakers never discussed the general structure of these houses, who made them, the architects, any non-fiction texts actually about them, not even one book which is about a country house culture. Penshurst was as close as they came. They assert things about what went on in the house if they have someone on their staff who knows about that thing but do not demonstrate the thesis. Their offerings of close reading were hilariously inadequate: it’s not wanted, not understood by most readers. Most of the comments in the comments in the comment section were contentless and as bland as the professors’ frequent mush.

What was valuable was when the passages chosen were themselves remarkable even if ripped out of context or when a few of us turned actually to read together and discuss some of the works broached: Georgiana Spencer’s The Sylph for example; from there a few of us went on to read A Woman in Berlin; and then two of us two more 18th century novels, one also attributed to Georgiana (Emma, or the Unfortunate Attachment) and one connected to her (Sophia Briscoe’s epistolary, Miss Melmoth, both 1770s). For myself I then read an excellent essays by Isobel Grundy on the increase of misattribution and minor Richardsonian novels.

The crux of what’s wrong with MOOCs: the superficiaility of the relationships among the people unless they go off site and begin to form a subgroup for real. Yahoo is just now trying to destroy the self-containment of the Yahoo groups as much as it can. A recent phenomena is the appearance on some listservs of ads for others where someone is said to have joined it. As if there is no different between what group you are in … The crucial thing that has made Janeites and other listservs (3 long running ones I moderate)is a self-contained group where the people get to know one another — and are willing to contribute real genuine content. There are people trained to avoid content, but long term relationships bring us out. Blog rings may be made up of genuine groups of people who know one another. On facebook the problem with open groups is so many strangers: people are embarrassed to post content because they do not trust one another.

Ellen