Mapping Trollope; or, Trollope as geographer

Trollope’s Barsetshire

Dear Friends and readers,

You may recall how proud I’ve been of my chapter on the original illustrations to Trollope’s novels in my Trollope on the ‘Net, my love of pictures and my huge section of illustrations to Trollope’s novels on my website. Not such happy memories: when I told you of how the North American Victorian association rejected my proposal to discuss how Trollope used cliches in his illustrations. My argument would have been how Trollope used sentimental pictures of minor stories where there is no counterpart full dramatic scene to provide heroine’s stories we don’t quite get. These provide a countervailing set of patterns for women from the ones the novels which have male readers’ tastes primarily in mind.

Well I’m trying again. I’ve sent a proposal to the Sharp Society (History of authorship, reading and publication) again to talk about my original research into nearly 500 images for Trollope’s books. This time to accord with the conference’s themes, “Geographies of the Book,”, I proposed to talk about how Trollope creates worlds for his novels which seem coterminus with real worlds we experience, but are filled in with imagined places to the point that you cannot quite map Trollope’s worlds with say southeast England, or London, or, for that matter, southwest Ireland of the other cities in the world he imagined so concretely.

I told of how when I went to an Trollope Society AGM in London in 1999, we went on 1 of 6 circuitous detailed maps drawn from the Pallisers books, but which had locations for characters across Trollope’s whole oeuvre as well as from Trollope’s own life as far as we know it. We walked round Trollope.

I thought I’d deal with how this imagined space influences us, both for good and bad, for, like Dickens, Trollope omits and stigmatizes space. Space where the abysmally poor or people who have to operate outside the norms and laws and customs his society conferred respectability on lived and worked. I’ve not only been influenced by recent book illustration histories and Franco Moretti’s famous Atlas of the European Novel, but my reading about Bath and its bogus as well as real history (see Peter Borsay, The Image of Georgian Bath).

Trollope also idealizes spaces the rich lived in, and his illustrators exploit well-known picturesque motifs. Engravings are just so important; writers like Radcliffe (believe it or not) actually relied heavily on these. For example, this is precisely the sort of illustration that picturesque writers has in mind:

Wm Westall (1781-1850), Rievaulx Abbey from Duncombe Terrace

In the illustrations themselves, emblematic objects, dress, costume, the way a particular character’s body fills (or does not fill) out space conveys evaluations of their status, position, character.

Alice Vavasour (Caroline Mortimer) in the window-seat at Matching Priory (Palliser 2:3): she’s reading in the early morning just before Mr Palliser (Philip Latham) comes to see and accuse her of what he takes to be her “abominable” conduct in taking his wife, Lady Glencora (Susan Hampshire) out to the priory ruins late at night.

People are unaware of how many city, country- and even seascapes he has in his books.

Kate O’Hara from An Eye for an Eye (illustrator Elisa Trimby)

Like other Victorian novelists, Trollope chose what passages in his book would be illustrated, and when he was at his height of success he could dictate what kind of illustrator he would have, change illustrators mid-way if he didn’t like what was drawn. Even late in his career, we find his strong influence.

Again I want to show how some of these illustrations influence the choice of actor and scene, production and costume design of the film adaptations of Trollope. Conscious departures count too.

Phiz, Burgo Fitzgerald and the Beggar Girl (Can You Forgive Her?)

Film adaptations (costume dramas, for Trollope they must be mini-series so as to give time for development) influence our dreams and longings; and the best of them picture the price we pay for our social identities, with our the hurt of those thrown away and the losses of those who sustain their roles:

Jane asking George, “What am I to do”? juxtaposed in the series with

Lady Glen in her agon having just sent Burgo away (Can You Forgive Her?, Pallisers 3:5).

I wrote it telling myself it would probably not be accepted and I must live with this as I have no particular status myself, but I’m not dismal over this, and gentle reader, you must hope with me that this time my proposal is accepted. Hope springs eternal …

A facsimile reprint: on the cover the original map

Ellen

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On a really enjoyable reading by Colm Toibin

Colm Toibin when much younger

Dear friends and readers,

Last night we went to a local bookstore which regularly hosts talks and classes about books (as well as a weekly storybook hour for children and tours too), Politics and Prose. We’d never been there before, and to the area only once, when last July we were invited to come to a fourth of July barbecue (what a treat for us). A member of the Irish embassy asked all those who came to read James Joyce’s Ulysses on Bloom Day. We heard about this because Jim got an email from the Irish embassy which now has his name.

A large old-fashioned bookstore, two floor (!), where books are actually set up by their categories and within that the author’s name. A couple tables upfront with latest sellers, and in the back audiobooks on CD. You can wander about and come upon treasures just like this. I saw Alice Kessler-Harris’s A Difficult Woman (a biography of Lillian Hellman) on display, but had decided for Toibin’s Love in a Dark Time: And Other Explorations of Gay Lives and Literature, a book of somewhat rewritten essay-review meditations published elsewhere (the LRB, the NYRB and other places). If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know how much I like his essays, and how I’ve loved those of his novels I’ve read thus far. It turns out I’ve read 4 of 7 (In praise of Colm Toibin: Un-put-downable).

Last night he was there to promote his latest novel (apparently the 7th), The Testament of Mary. Yes the central character is the Virgin Mary (does she have a last name like the rest of us?). It’s a really a novella, a short one at that, and from what he wrote a retrospective meditation by Mary some 20 years after the brutal crucifixion of her son. She is now living in safety, relative peace, left to herself by all and two visitors show up, one Lazarus. Yes he takes liberties — good historical fiction often does. The core idea is the irretrievableness of what happened and how she cannot forget and if she could change it, do it differently somehow, how she longs to. It’s memories poured out. As a subjective narrative by a women it harks back to his great The South. He seems to have a predilection for writing heroine’s texts (Brooklyn, Henry James in The Master is a kind of male heroine).

What a large crowd. It did not overwhelm the store, but it was much larger than we’d expected of such an intellectual sensitive author. There were not enough chairs for all.

He began by telling us of his trips to Venice and two paintings of the Virgin he had stood before repeated: a Tintoretto, perhaps The Presentation of Jesus at the Temple, and a Titian, The Assumption. What he seems to have liked especially about the latter was her red robe and how she soared above reality. He is himself getting older.

Recent photo — he does look like this, only he is a small man, somewhat bent, light brownish-white skin, light brown hair

Today I see that the Tintoretto has Mary in a red robe too, and the picture’s content against the reason for its festival, takes us across her life.

They were the inspiration for the book. He did not tell us why he wrote it, only that he would like it to be taken seriously and he didn’t mean it as a mock. He didn’t think the church would bother notice it — he said this in answer to one question afterwards. He does read very well, and his voice was how I’d imagined it, Irish lilt but not too heavy. I stayed awake and listening for much of it, though when his register came too low I couldn’t hear it all. We were in the back, having arrived only ten minutes before the “reading” started.

It was obvious he’d done this many times. He was smooth, and seemed such a sweet man. These sorts of things are part of what makes an author successful. The book launch. He’s learned how to do it. Among questions asked were does he have a routine, a place he always writes, what does he write with. He said he writes anywhere and with any thing (mostly a pen) and no he’s not a routine type. He does sometimes have to write a book quickly or whatever quickly lest he forget it; get it down, and then he comes back to work at it. He is not a man who has written a lot of very long books, say like Dickens, Trollope, Margaret Oliphant, Wm Dean Howells, and they all had fixed routines and places they wrote. He has made his career through socializing too and his oeuvre (in pages) most actually be preponderantly non-fiction.

I wanted to reply to something he had said before starting his readings. He said that other “classic” fiction novels, 19th century, were no help “here.” He comically alluded to Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Dickens’s Miss Havisham, they could not help him. Nor Henry James. Perhaps Mrs Touchett (Ralph’s mother, isolated, alone, an “odd” woman.) While he was reading I thought of Daniel Deronda’s mother, Eliot’s older heroine who returns 25 years after giving her son up to another so she could have an operatic career, a life of her own. Now bitter, not remorseful, but regretful because after all she ended up marrying and having children anyway. The dreams she had had not been realized and how here was this son reproaching her.
But the mike was too far away.

I didn’t try to buy anything directly afterwards. The line became very long. Instead we walked three stores down to the Comet, a pizza place with ambience. A large screen played over and over the poignant short Italian film, The Red Balloon. No sound just the images before you. The walls gray. The tables ping-pong, the seats benches. Soft lights. We had two pizzas, small, a white (all cheese, garlicky nothing else) and a red (just tomato sauce topping, more spicy, reminding me in its heavy dough and yummy surface of pizza in NYC in the 1950s, so-called Napoles-like). A carafe of chianti. The place was moderately full.

We talked. We realized this was probably the first book reading we’ve ever gone to as such. Play readings by a group, lectures, maybe a book reading within a performance of other things, but not alone. Jim said we never went to the Folger poetry readings because they cost. This was for free. Also the people were less known and there was obviously time for too much talk. So too much egoism would be on display he felt. I remembered going to listen to Empson read his poem in the Graduate Center in the 1970s. How he read little and talked much of his poetry. But the talk was splendid, really insightful (as Toibin’s was not quite, though not deliberately misleading as say Andrew Davies on his films), and how John Hollander got up to ask questions, all admiring and how Empson (spiteful in this but perhaps made uncomfortable) cut him down, half-mocked him. Also a lecture by Margaret Mead at the Museum of Natural History. All I can recall is how intelligent and humane she was and ever after have reacted to all dismissals of her work, denigrations of her with a memory of this seeing her and knowing they are unfair to her.

We decided we would try some more at this place. Then to support the bookstore, we went back. That’s when I bought Love in a Dark Time. All the Testaments to Mary were gone. To tell the truth, I was not sure I wanted it, as I felt it would be wrapped up in Catholicism as some level, and I’m an atheist. I was sure it’d be feminist in intent. If Toibin had said he found out or invented a last name for her, and told us of it, I might’ve. They had only had his most recent novels: (Blackwater Lightship two copies, one still left, and mostly Brooklyn and The Master, latest and best known. I have them all plus The South and Homage to Barcelona (not there). But there was suddenly one copy as if from deep in a basement (the girl at the counter said it was “a backlist” book), this book of essays. So I snatched it. His essay on Wilde’s exposure of his homosexuality as “found out,” as a person wanting to be “found out” has influenced my thinking ever since.

We got home by 10ish, not too long to write one final blog on Jane Austen’s letters. I’m not going to give them up, but maybe go yet slower and do it by myself. The prompting from Austen-l helps, and the sense (however deluded) of reaching people, but the flak, the continual cliched readings and occasional either preposterous or theoretical agendas don’t help me at all. I waste time and make no friends refuting them.

Earlier that day I had talked on WWWTTA about Temple Grandin’s film about how animals form bonds, friendships, and people’s perception of them, and the trajectory the film belonged to. Really worth while and gotten into other debates on the growing dissemination of how it’s okay for women to subjugate themselves to sadism, even light fun … ), but I’ll add these as brief comments here later today.

We wished we could have more such nights. People are only gradually becoming aware of what a delightful city DC is slowly turning into. The neighborhood around there is small houses, apartments further off, and some shopping blocks. It’s marred by a large street which traffic streams through daily and that obscures the quiet ambience of the play otherwise. I’ve vowed to myself to read Love in a Dark Time, Homage to Barcelona, and (connected to Toibin and the project on book illustrations to Trollope which I’ve just finished — a blog this weekend), Amy Tucker’s The Illustration of the Master.

Reprinted by Tucker, it was chosen by James as a frontispiece for A Portrait of Lady, and could serve as frontispiece for Toibin’s The Master.

Ellen

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East Central ASECS, in the Baltimore Hyatt across the way from the Inner Harbor, the theme Infamy (1)

Jean Henri De Latude (1725-1805) escaping

Roger Daltrey as Macheath (Sheppard) singing a rousing Handelian drinking song (1987 Jonathan Miller’s production of Gay’s Beggar’s Opera)

Dear friends and readers,

We returned from the East Central American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies conference late Saturday night. I found it rejuvenating — there may be in the world a set of people as enthusiastic over 18th century studies, but surely nowhere is any group more devoted.

The topic for the conference was “What does infamy matter — when you get to keep your fortune” [Juvenal], but of course not everyone does. I had not realized what a fruitful angle this could be until I came to listen to the papers. This was not the emphasis of the papers, but it seems to me a craving for money and all it can buy of luxury, and for respect and all it can gratify of pride and self-esteem were primary motivations leading to the infamy all figures I heard about the first day of the conference endured when they failed, perhaps kept failing, and then tried and tried again. Chance and and the changes of times then wove the kind of curtain or exit each won when they grew old and/or died. This does not cover all cases: women become infamous if they lose their virginity or chastity in an socially unacceptable way. Sometimes people can courageously defy a powerful man and yet not he but they become infamous.

For the 2nd part click here.

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Typical vision of a period trial: the seven bishops at trial

Three superb papers in the first session on Friday morning: “Infamous Conduct: Treason, Bigamy and Escape Artistry.” The chair was Jack Fruchtman. In these three cases (as in a couple of others) I offer more detail than I have of late or I do of the others because the papers offered in the first session had such interesting and (to me) new content, but it should not be taken that I’ve gotten the whole of these papers; these are just outlines where I omit much detail, nuance, and post-modern and other arguments.

Jane Wessel spoke on the trial of the 7 bishops. A man could be hung, drawn, and quartered for performing a seditious text in 1688. In 1687 James II suspended the penal laws against Catholics, and debates everywhere (public, private, at work) ensued whether he had the right to do so. James then asked that clergy and bishops read his proclamation;’ in May 1688 the bishops in effect declared that the king had not the right unitaterally to impose tolerance and suspend the penal laws for Catholics. The clergy did not want to read this petition because that was tantamount to saying they approved (they did not).

Well, the bishops had been foolish enough to show up at James’s request to talk to him. It seems the two sides had been alone. James then had them indited for a misdemeanor. The bishops themselves did not publish their petition, but it quickly appeared and no one could say how or who was responsible. So the prosecution focused on publication: they argued that the act of writing was itself a form of publication, writing an armed act of rebellion, a violent act. The defense rejoined that a peer of the realm could not be brought to trial for a misdemeanor.

The prosecution was unsuccessful when the justices could not come to a decision and the jury were appealed to. So the prosecution tried again; a new inditement accused the bishops of “vi et armis.” One of the peers who challenged this was Heneage Finch, later 4th early of Winchilsea (Anne Finch’s husband); a state of mind was not treason. Again the prosecution countered that the Anglican church had a doctrine of passive obedience; writing was active rebellion. Justices split and jury again ruled in bishops’ favor.

This case bring before us the interrelationship of publishing, writing, political engagement with and without arms. The trial transcript was printed, and was over 100 pages.

Barbara Villiers Palmer, Duchess of Cleveland (1640-1709)

Ashley Shoppe discussed the liaison and marriage of Robert (Beau) Fielding to Barbara Villiers, Palmer, Duchess of Cleveland and Castlemaine. Fielding was nearly allied to some powerful people, and he inherited a fortune from his father-in-law. He proceeded though to squander it, and from then on made a career for himself by marrying rich older women. She was 65 when they married; she demanded a divorce and got it pronta. It was on Nov 25th that they married. Meanwhile much earlier Fielding had tried to marry another woman for money and instead ended up marrying Mary Wadsworth. He was before this involved with Anne de Laure. The time together and part included brutal beating by Fielding of Cleveland, emotional humiliation, assault. He was imprisoned as a Jacobite though he had not involved himself in politics. In 1706 Fielding was found guilty of bigamy, which carried a death penalty. Nothing like it was ever inflicted. It should be noted that Fielding and Cleveland later reconciled themselves to one another. It’s important to remember that Cleveland could have had children but apparently did not.

Two popular memoirs were printed not that long after:one memoir defended her as an upper class woman and therefore allowed; Henry is someone who is used to watching his wife flirt and more with his friends and brothers. The other condemned her a worse than useless aristocrat; it has Steele in it as someone who acted out of individual desire and that the reader should emulate his actions.

The one by Richard Steele lampooned Fielding as Orlando the Fair and ridiculed both people, showing real disdain for aristocratic corruption. Steele is criticizing the Tories and that Fielding was mad. Steele was an orientalist and applied sexualized imagery to Valeria. In this tale the seraglio exercises a fascination, and the Stuart abuse of power roundly criticized. His usage of Cleveland is called barbarous; and he is presented as effeminate, ridiculous.

Latude memoirs

Michael J. Mulryn delivered the last paper. Jean Henri de Latude was a man who achieved notoriety by his many escapes from prison, the persecution (as he felt it) from the Marquise de Pompadour armed with an initial lettre de cachet. She had gained power first as the king’s mistress and then as the woman who organized his seraglio and saw to his every need. Today she has been given a positive press as a patroness of the arts. Latude has been depicted as a con artist and madman; he depicted himself as a victim of the excesses of the ancien regime. His Memoirs were popular, and part of the anti-Bastille literature. (One should remember there were people who supported the lettre de cachet system and Bastille, e.g., Sade’s mother-in-law.) The Bastille was stormed to get arms.

Who was he? A fast-talking “Houdini” who eventually had 4 aliases, and could talk himself into and out of situations; he had been the illegitimate child of a domestic servant, and so could not inherit anything. He decided to tell the Marquise of a plot to assassinate her and threaten her that if she did not pay him, the plot would go through. She did fear assassination and put him in prison. Probably this plot was a bunch of lies.

He then (like Sade) spent many years in prison; he became famous for his extraordinary escapes but would be brought back. One of the most famous occurred in the Bastille, notoriously difficult to get out of. This escape included building a ladder, climbing chimneys, getting past grates and sentries, hours spent in a frozen moat. He was helped by a friend, a famous engineer, who organized the escape and he ended up in Charenton. He said he’d rather die than write a letter of apology to the Marquise. He claimed she cast spells on him. In 1777 the Charenton monks at Charenton helped him to escape but when he got out on the streets he mugged someone. One of his re-arrests occurred in Holland in 1756 when he cashed a letter of exchange sent him by his mother. The Marquise herself kept hunting him down, using the state’s resources for this. At last he ended in one of the worst prisons, meant for ordinary people (no gentlemen), where he somehow managed to write copiously (he would use his own blood it’s said).

His Memoirs were then transferred to someone outside the prison and in 1784 published. Many people sympathized and came to his defense; Louis XVI revoked the original lettre de cachet and he was freed. Later in life he dined with celebrities like Thomas Jefferson. After the demolition of the Bastille he was paraded through the streets like a revolutionary hero. Stories of all sorts were printed and it is very hard to distinguish fact from fiction. One historian, Brentano, wrote a tract on behalf of the gov’t; another defended Latude who could present himself as a gentleman. It is possible he was simply a clever common criminal. He was probably emotionally disturbed; his father never would recognize him. Towards the end of his life he had a pension and lived in a lovely apartment.

Then we had a lively question-and-answer period. Someone asked where do the trial transcripts of the Fielding-Cleveland case come from? Ms Wessel said the state published them after the “glorious revolution” (James II ousted); the 1706-7 Memoir is a 9 page cheap publication; Lawrence Stone told the story and there was a popular biography in the 1980s. Someone else was surprised that the King met the bishops alone and had himself insisted on the interview. What went on in the bigamy trial itself? Fielding tried to insert his marriage to Mary Wadsworth and was able to use benefit of clergy to avoid execution. I asked if the brutality he displayed at all influenced the outcome and she said it’s hard to know. A final set of questions were about Latude. Mr Murphy suggested that Latude had a grandiose view of himself, that he never was a loner type. What is telling is how quickly the Marquise could enlist the state apparatus and spies to locate Latude and extradite him from Holland.

It seemed to be felt by everyone that the way the powerful king, the lawyers, and the 7 bishops behaved and the stories of Latude and Pompadour had parallels to our own era of eroding civil rights, and how cases prosecuting whistle-blowers and so-called terrorists show the same avoidance of central issues to argue small points to get the case thrown out of court, the same use of harassing hounding police forces and state apparatus. The class parallels: upper class people are allowed; or upper class people are drones. I see a parallel in the Fielding case in that he was let off and had been so treacherous and brutal to the women he preyed upon.

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Sir John Hill (1716-75) where he’s called a botanist and that his “provocative and scurrilous writings involved him in many quarrels, both in the field of science and that of literature.”

Mid-morning we listened to George Rousseau’s plenary lecture on John Hill; this session and a reception later on were really book launches. As Mr Rousseau’s was a talk and included many anecdotes about himself, the Royal Society (he’s a fellow), and the people he’s known, I omit much only bringing in what seems to me might be of interest about Hill and the book. Mr Rousseau’s salient idea is that Hill sought celebrity as a way of getting money; that he was socially a borderline personality, often “badly behaved,” an outsider whose untamed genius led him to offend and outrage all sorts of people so he was continually changing professions or simply involved himself in many areas of life so that he can function as a sort of “filter” or mirror which manifests central aspects of 18th century life. To me Hill seemed a polymath.

Among the stories told were how Hill was blackballed three times by someone in the Royal Society and so Hill never was a member. He was the 2nd son of a clergyman who owned more than 100 books and taught the boy himself (including Greek, Latin, science). His employers included Stukeley (who uncovered Stonehenge); his patrons included the Earl of Richmond, a man living on a cosmopolitan estate, Goodwood, where a highly cultured informal community interacted; Emmanuel de Costa was a geologist and friend whom Hill betrayed by plagiarizing Costa’s research, but then de Costa embezzled funds from the Royal Society and went to prison for this. Hill went after Christopher Smart and was badly behaved to Garrick. Through Hill’s connection with Bute (see below) and Linneaus Hill was knighted. One he tried to fake his own death.

Hill’s writing was enormously varied and continual: like a Grub Street denizen he wrote around the clock to make money, scandal chronicles, early fiction, science, operas, farces, routs (perhaps as many as 200 works). He paid 50£ to get a certificate as a physician; he began a newspaper with Ralph Griffiths called The Daily Advertiser where Hill wrote twice-weekly columns where he made 1500£ a year. He wrote on reproductive science, a treatise on tobacco which correlates it to cancer. Angry that he never got into the Royal Society, he wrote a prose satire about it which like the Dunciad degrades people and names names. Lord Bute, George III’s tutor became a friend, both loved botany and Hill functioned as a master gardener and then published a huge work on vegetables.

Among those who drew or painted him was Allan Ramsay when Hill was 37. Hill married twice, the first time to the daughter of Earl of Burlington, she died early. He then remarried the Viscountess Ranelagh with whom he had 10 children; 6 survived

Mr Rousseau did not seem to like Hill very much, nor be sympathetic. He assumed that his audience would not care for Hill either. In the question-and-answer period someone seemed to suggest perhaps Hill was really most driven into extremes by a need for money. For my part the portrait as presented prompted some empathy nonetheless. I liked Hill for his reactive defiance and anger and non-conformity, counter-productive though some may find it.

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Mary Robinson at the height of her beauty as painted by Joshua Reynolds

After lunch, I went to two sessions, and heard five papers altogether. In the first session, Caroline Breashears’s “Secret and Celebrated: Life-Writings by and About Notorious Figures” Ellen Malenas Ledoux’s on Mary Robinson’s Memoirs, was on the now familiar material of a subjective reading of the actress’s images: did Robinson invite interviews half-undressed and breast-feeding and chose the peculiar format of her memoir, 3/4s written by a pious daughter in order to frame herself as good mother to exonerate herself from the infamy of having been the prince regent’s mistress or was she titillating her reader.

Jonathan Wild (1683-1725) in his prison (1725)

Jack Sheppard (1702-24) just before he was executed as drawn by John Thornhill

Peter Staffel’s paper presented Wild in four ways: what we can know of his life, how he is presented by Defoe, John Gay, and finally Fielding. Wild was a highly successful cutthroat businessman type who as first someone in the prison and then a fence-receiver and thief-taker governed a ring of associates, cunning and cruel, he was unable to recognize the resentment and angers of others (e.g., Sheppard), and himself was terrified of execution and tried to kill himself by poison in order to avoid the abuse (physical too) of the hanging scene. His grave was in fact robbed and the body stolen 3 days later — perhaps by people fascinated by him who thought they could learn about his brain this way. As with Michael Murphy, Mr Staffel showed us the difference between what we know of the actual facts of the man’s ilfe and character, the writer’s texts, and various legends.

One question was how did he achieve such notoriety? Prison had been a step up for him, a place he could organize from, terrible though such places were and despised the people in them in this era, with incarceration not seen as a punishment, but a period of waiting either to be freed or murdered by the state apparatus. Wild became Mary Melliner’s lover, herself an effective brothel madam there; he learned a lot from Hitchen, a master in Newgate and the Old Bailey. Wild kept a ledger, had stolen goods to offer others, was a good interviewer of people, could extract high fees and recognized strong desires for given things and manipulated this into high fees.

Isla Mair as Jenny Diver (Mary Melliner? the 1987 Beggar’s Opera)

We didn’t talk very much about the three texts, all of which are read today, nor was there any time to go into the different realizations of Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, out of Gay, as black farce (Bertold Brecht), as opera (Benjamin Britten). I found myself remembering how Jonathan Miller in a brilliant BBC production in 1987 aided by theatrically effective actors turned the comic material into invigorating satiric bleak tragedy by its close. More interesting perhaps how certain characters and details Mr Staffel had mentioned still turn up in this production

Patricia Routledge and Stratford Johns as Mr And Mrs Peachum (1987 Beggar’s Opera) pour over those central ledgers

For the last session of the day, Eleanor Shevlin’s “Book History, Bibliography and Textual Studies” see comments.

Ellen

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Found in Translation: To translate seemed to me a beautiful thing to do

In the long winter of 1784, which I passed in Normandy, this little Novel fell into my hands … for their amusement, I translated [into English] as I read [the French], the most striking passages of the story; which appeared to me so interesting that I was induced to translate the whole; or rather to write it anew in English — Charlotte Smith, from her preface to her Manon

The idea of making a name for myself in the Republic of Letters animated all my faculties — Victorine de Chastenay, on first beginning to translate Radcliffe’s Udolpho

Pierre Arnaud’s recent translation of The Romance of the Forest

Dear friends and readers,

You will instantly recall that last month under a similar heading, I wrote about how I was working on a proposal to give a paper at this coming summer’s Chawton conference on women and translation: I didn’t fall asleep over my book after all (!). Well I did a good deal of reading and sent along two different options.

I discovered that Charlotte Smith really changed Prévost’s Histoire de Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut (1731) and Gayot de Pitaval’s Causes Célèbres et Interessants (1734-44) to bring into the English imaginary explosively transgressive reality-based material from sexual and familial life. In Smith’s Manon L’Escaut, or the Fatal Attachment, Prévost’s enigmatic text intended to justify amoral decisions for aristocratic male readers becomes a story genuinely focused from the point of view of a pro-active heroine with a realistic pragmatic consciousness. I also found that her Ethelinde, or the Recluse of the Lake (1790) her first fully poetic landscape novel was translated into French by M. De Montagne, who made of it a romantic “paysage.” Montagne’s romantic translation is really melodious, I loved the sounds of the French, it was like verse in prose. Smith turned gothic and sentimental romance into vehicles for critiquing the ancien regime as it was experienced in the UK at the time. Montagne helped make these sort of landscapes an accepted mode in France.

Lidia Conetti’s recent Italian translation of Radcliffe’s Udolpho: sometimes it’s better than Radcliffe or Chastenay

When I went back to Chastenay’s 1798 translation of Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) I discovered Chastenay resembles Radcliffe in her reformist radical agenda, in her case much modified by her family’s devastating experience of the revolution (including imprisonment, lose of property, and her father having nearly been guillotined). She also identifies with Emily St. Aubert, Radcliffe’s heroine. What Chastenay loses in subtlety, she replaces in much more social understanding of real life experiences of unjust imprisonment, familial abuse, murders, and harrowing hostage experiences. She carries over Radcliffe’s sheer sensibility of into a focused forceful romantic paysage which adds to Radcliffe’s nightmare scenarios of dreams of nervous distraught pursuit and chase, and perhaps remembered experiences of near rapes (incest?).

A later 19th century cover to Chastenay’s translation shows an awareness of the depth of inward strangeness in Radcliffe-Chastenay

Nonetheless, I wanted to suggest that reading these texts (as people still do) as sheer female gothic obscures their critiques of the social, economic and political order which are valuable in themselves, which influenced other important books (e.g., George Sand’s Consuelo/La Comtesse de Ruddolstadt, influenced by Radcliffe through Chasteney).

Alas, I think I wrote about this more clearly here than I did in the official mandarin-type proposal. I am just so much better at writing casually in letter style. I thought by having two sets of texts I could make my argument about the value of these translated texts more strong. I would not present an analysis of each text as that would take far too long but just my findings. It interested me too that Smith’s Manon was suppressed — perhaps people thought her strong amoral heroine dangerous — and people are still today unaware of how she alters that text to make Manon the center and an active heroine (at least in Manon’s mind). Montagne’s Ethelinde is also a nearly anonymous and thus disrespected text. So they make a neat comparison with Chastenay’s whose text is still read in France and countries where French is read. There are on the Net still the frontispieces for the volumes of her 1798 text. I saw a popular copy in a good bookstore when I was in Paris for 2 weeks once. Hers also has prestige and is well-known and yet I think there is but the one article by Dorothy Medlin on 4 (!) different translations of Udolpho into French and only one small part is on Chastenay text.

A frontispiece to a French text of one of the memoirs, life-writing, travel books to emerge from the French revolution & Napoleonic wars

On the other hand, it would be fun to to expand more on Udolpho and on Mémoires de madame de Chastenay, 1771-1815 (written between 1810 and 1817, published 1896). Chastenay lived to the mid-19th century; she knew and spoke with Napoleon (who treated her with respect); she translated Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village as Le village abandonne as a genuinely protest text. I’d really like to tell more people, expand on what I’ve already written about Radcliffe’s A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794 (published 1795) (see my Nightmare of History in Radcliffe’s non-fiction Landscape). Radcliffe is so beautifully well-read in art books, architecture, cultures, and she is a sort of Girondist (rather like Madame de Roland), a serious reformer who means her novels to be taken in the way other novels of her era were which critiqued society. In her case the ancien regime.

Using Smith’s Prevost, Montagne’s Smith and Chastenay’s Radcliffe, a configuration of the three texts, I’d write and talk about translation. If I study Radcliffe & Chastenay’s lives, life-writing, travel, I’d write and about the two women writers, though the centerpiece would be a comparative translation study.

My larger goal is to call attention to a large body of work still ignored, to which these translations belong. When these books are studied the arguments often resemble those film adaptations once had to contend with: evaluation and judgement based solely on a one-to-one literal comparison with the assumption the first text is necessarily the most important and better. I want to show micro-analysis is still at the core of translation study but when we change our assumptions how much we have to learn and how many new and fascinating texts to read.

Hubert Robert’s Hermit in a Garden

I really enjoy reading and doing translation. It’s a real urge as such. One sits with books and books, dictionaries, thesauruses, different previous translations. Sheer language endeavour. Poetry as such. Books I’m interested in from this terrain include Isabelle de Montolieu’s influential translations of Austen into French (both of which I just bought from Amazon, complete with prefaces): Raison et Sensibilite (someone retyped the whole text, four columns a page), and La Famille Elliot, ou L’Ancienne Inclination (a facsimile, the volume labelled I contains the whole text). When Montolieu writes her prefaces to her translations of Austen, she assumes in the first no one will ever hear of Austen a decade from now nor S&S, and in the second her respect has grown enormously (she’s read Emma and MP) and feels she must translate more strictly but her sense of Austen’s place does not come near how she regards Smith (she translated one of Smith’s Solitary Wanderer‘s tales and provides a preface again).

I have written on and just delighted in Felix Fénéon’s gem, Catherine Morland (1898/99, reprinted by Gallimard 1946), and recently bought Pierre Goubert’s serious literary biography of Austen, a rare treatment in French (biographies of Austen do not abound outside English, not in French either); he translated her earlier novels and wrote about them in the Pleiade. I’ve read one of two 1807 translations Stael’s Corinne, ou L’Italie into English (one read and much admired by Austen), and it’s a cross between Radcliffe and Austen! have wanted to try Isabel Hill’s 1884 Victorian and did read thoroughly the brilliant Corinne or Italy by Sylvia Raphael (often unmentioned, she died young, her book printed as an Oxford Classic, 1998).

And I do want to read more translation studies. On my TBR pile is Belllos’s Is that a Fish in Your Ear? and Suzanne Levine’s The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American fiction. I need some outside goal, deadline, to help me do all this for if it’s so pleasurable, it’s hard work.

My proposal was turned down. I think probably most unfairly. To do myself justice and also keep my thoughts where I can find them again and share them with others, I’ve put my proposal on my website. “To translate seemed to me a beautiful thing to do: Translation as Matching Creative Act”. I’ve at least done myself that much justice. (Freedom the press and speech belongs to the woman who has a website.) As you know if you ever read my Sylvia blog I’m just an honorary Duchess aka ex-adjunct lecturer.

Ellen

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Class and literature: the sense of entitlement that matters

The question is what we really want out of life, for ourselves, what we think is real [has] to do with our social panic, with our fear of losing status. One cannot afford to lose status on this peculiar ladder, for the prevailing notion of American life seems to involve a kind of rung-by-rung ascension to some hideously desirable state — James Baldwin, from Nobody Knows My Name

How is this book packaged: for whom; how framed

Dear friends and readers,

My good friend, Kathy, (Frisbee here on WordPress) has been writing about the attack on bloggers from Sir (note the Sir) Peter Stothard, a Man Booker Prize Judge: bloggers are destroying literature, damaging the future of writing. She did not go to Oxford, she is not one of his friends. How dare they? they are not selected by winnowing editors like him with his values. To look at film adaptations (whose appeal is partly rooted in the audience’s desire to identify with a higher richer class than lower middle or working), you’d think school was central.

An iconic picture of Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews in Brideshead Revisited

And I mentioned it first. But look at a panoply of stills, and you see the house (ah, the house: consider Downton Abbey and how Americans lap it up), its grounds, the bar, Venice, trips, cars, dinners, Rex (the businessman son-in-law) networking his way into power. In a way what’s needed first is an understanding of power, how it works: class confers power.

I answered Kathy in two ways and want to put my answers in a blog here to prompt thought and discussion further — as this is an important topic. The way Scott Walker and Ryan win elections is to pretend they are lower class: Scott Walker had a commercial where he showed himself driving himself to work with his lunch in a brown bag: he had to save for his kids college. Ryan pretends to be a orphan working his way up; his father died, when he was young, but the whole family are local businessmen who have contacts, networks, money, connections and he today lives in a big mansion on the place where a factory once stood.

School is mythic and it’s the mythic way school functions that enables ALEC’s corporations who want to end public education so they have put their hands into the 600 billion that go to educating young people to fool others. Parents want their children to rise from school. But school is only one part of what makes a person a member of the upper middle and upper classes.

As I wrote, looking at what school and what year a British person ended his schooling at does not tell much about class. Princess Diana never did her A levels. In the 18th about the connections of the whole family (so George Austen’s sons could go to university) but not how the immediate nuclear family would fare in the position game. In the 19th century it told about money and the success of the father at the time. Trollope always regarded himself as a gentleman. Jim my husband went to a public school as day boy; his origins were working class and lower middle. It tells something but only in a larger context.

Funny — it’s a good contrast. I’ve always been alive to class though I was told from the time I went to school that the US was classless. I knew it was a lie. My parents were very poor and my father was a socialist at one time. That’s part of it. I could see with my eyes the difference between my neighborhood (East Bronx) and those in the north west Bronx. I knew others had self-esteem I didn’t have. When I grew older and lived in Queens (Kew Gardens) I had friends with parents who lived in beautiful homes, but it was the way the other children somehow knew to be independent and interact with others that I didn’t. In the UK when I went to live there class was overt, but its underlying abilities (for those with knowing parents and higher expectations) and those without was no different. The US did sometimes substitute race for class. Black people in the US filled the role of white working class in the UK. Think of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. Do read it if you’ve not already. Sister Carrie. In An American Tragedy a young working class man is picked up and becomes part of an upper class group. He has a chance to marry a girl from this elite group (romance). His girlfriend, working class like he, is already pregnant. He is so driven by his guilt that he drowns her in an attempt to rid himself of her. Carrie is from poor working class people. She can hang into a local car-dealer and move with him to NYC and enter the acting profession, but there are limits on how far she can go at the time. She lacks a certain know-how to leverage herself any further than medium positions on the stage.

Dreiser’s and other literary naturalist books from the US and France and England too are all about the devastations of class. The old argument between Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

Class is money, manners, being told how to negotiate and present the self in a certain way, education, expectations, your habitas (all of it). In the US university people with degrees (the Ph.D) can seem to transcend class or enter a new one, but watch what happens during a depression. Some of them have children who carry on being upper class; others have children who in the next generation are in retail shops. The difference is what class the individuals really belong to: what money, connections, the sense of entitlement their grandfathers had. This firm sense of entitlement that matters is the key to why some people can use liberty and some cannot: see my “I have a right to choose my own life” on “Liberty in the Poldark novels.

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We had a related revealing conversation about Tereska Torres’s first novel (Women’s Barracks, see image at top of blog) and her writing life on Women Writers through the Ages at Yahoo two days ago. One friend told us about Teresa Torres. An unusually effective obituary-biographical sketch told about Torres’s life in WW2 and as a writer. From the Independent: John Lichfield: Teresa Torres: War Heroine and Reluctant Queen of Lesbian Pulp Fiction. Do read it. At least look at the photo of her: in war uniform (which makes all seem equal) shouldering an oar: you see she’s working physically. The book meant for a Booker Prize usually sports original art or a reproduction of a high culture 19th century painting.

The discreet masochistic erotica of Edward Burne-Jones is presented as core Arthurian

Lichfield’s essay-biography is cleverly well-written, discreet too. How did Torres move from one stage of that life to another? Meet those people? Her steps are staged movingly, to the end: “The last sound that mummy heard was the sound of children laughing and singing where she had herself lived as a little girl in the 1920s. It was as if life had gone full circle.” But the daughter cannot know what her mother’s mind’s ear heard just as she died.

This is not to say the life is not admirable and fascinating. She was part of a semi-elite, or moved within one of the edges of the upper class, the art part where literary people make their lives if they are lucky. Not all can: music people like say Whitney Houston (who remained black) in her personal life never left her original class and people.

One of the important give-aways is the opener and sentence worth critiquing

The writer says she “was a well-regarded novelist” and in the next
sentence: ‘to the rest of the world she was ” the mother of lesbian-erotic pulp fiction.” Unacknowledged is the reality that only a few people really understand what they read and have a judgement worth listening to. That does not mean they are the reviewers or people who write in magazines I hasten to add. These few can include online bloggers, academic writers, or people who don’t write but read intelligently. “The rest of the world” is those who make money for writers, and why they buy what they do is also not known.

Now it might not be that the vast majority of buyers of Women’s Barracks thought it lesbian, but look at that packaging. For all we know some read it as a good war novel, but it was presented as a salacious erotic book for men to titillate themselves with about women in uniform (the way some people read salacious erotic books and pornography featuring nurses). Paradise Road I was told was partly seen that way and great efforts were made to stop this perception.

It’s salutary to ask people why they read what they read; most of
the time they won’t answer or can’t tell you quite but when they do it’s all over the place. (Sadly, like voting. why people vote for whom they do is equally hard to get at.)

Richard Sennet in his Hidden Injuries of Class suggests class is a more painful reality in the US than the UK or its commonwealth because it’s hidden, made shameful, lied about, distorted. Let us not be fooled or manipulated into despising ourselves for not belonging to what is presented as easy to belong to. It’s not.

Ellen

P.s. For another aspect of attacks on bloggers and reviewers too see: We are an injured body.

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We are an injured body … on selling books & blog & other reviewers

Dear friends and readers,

Perhaps this blog belongs on my Austen Reveries since it is Austen’s sceptical and wise defense of novelists (in her time much despised) that is my touchstone (in the Arnoldian sense), but since my catchment area is so broad, I’ve decided to put my thoughts in response to a far from unbiased New York Times column here. It seems we must all be suspicious of on-line reviews, and bloggers in general, since David Streitfield (doubtless paid) came across a story about a man who makes just oodles of money writing fatuous blog reviews of books: The Best Book Reviews &c

Speaking generally (but remember Blake: “to generalize is to be an idiot”), Mr Streitfield is telling us home truths about publishing and selling books today, and also the tendency of reviews not only on-line but in paper. First, it’s getting harder and harder to get a book, any book, into print, and even harder (that’s why publishers are so reluctant) to make a profit: there are just so many for free texts, so many books on sale in so many different places, such an embarrassment of easy-to-reach other things to do (to say nothing of the potential reader having a full-time job, or perhaps 2 or 3 part-time ones), that selling books has become retail, one-on-one.

And I am aware of how publishers use bloggers: I’ve refused numbers of books — where the person also says it’s understood I will praise it. I especially get offers of Jane Austen sequels, which I turn down regularly. I did accept one this way, found it awful, said so, and the publishers was livid. I have done reviews for friends but only when I think well of the book. Again, speaking generally, one cannot go to most reviews for real advice on whether to buy or take out of a library, and try to read a book.

So, what’s forgotten here is how many reviews published in paper are anything but trustworthy. They are done by the writer’s friends, or someone part of his or her group. No one dares say anything adverse lest his or her book get a reciprocal treatment;the editor receives complaints from his or her friends. It is also not the way to make friends. I’ve had the experience several times now that after I’ve read the book for real and more carefully than any review I come across, write a scholarly review where I generally praise the book highly, outline its contents specifically (so as to let readers know what’s in it), but then have a paragraph or two of objections, evaluative critique or downright objections, the person who wrote the book is resentful and lets me know it. They don’t care if the reviewer at TLS or LRB didn’t read the book, appears to know nothing beyond the first chapter; all they want is praise.

Many blogs produce fatuous praise; that’s what wanted by the mass readership. Common readers don’t understand evaluative criticism. I’ve had very angry responses to those reviews I do of more popular novelists — like Ann Patchett. That one is paying a writer a high compliment by “rational opposition” (here comes Austen), genuinely engaging in central issues of conversations to which the book belongs is not understood. There are readers for whom reading a book is a version of identity politics; they also get indignant: how dare you. Who do you think you are? And the attacks one gets connect to why many writers in print and in blogs are so reluctant to tell personal details of their lives that are not conventional, upbeat.

I demur not only at the unqualified singling out of bloggers as somehow inferior (stupider), more corrupt than people paid by institutions and businesses, but also the over-glamorizing and supposed success, the amount of money this man (who stands as an example), it’s implied, bloggers can make if they write ecstatic to vapid (“how wonderful”) reviews. I’ve read numerous tales of the real living or even huge sums a blogger can make; if these stories were true, a lot more bloggers I know would be making good money; they are not. Bloggers who are paid a living wage or more work professionally on line for a conventional publication. Ta-Nehisi Coates makes a decent living because he is blogging for the Atlantic. How many people write books? is it probable that anyone would have such notice as to attract so many people a day. $5 a review. The idea that one can write them out as if one were a programmed machine is behind this kind of aspersion.

Streitfield is not exactly a disinterested witness.

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My good friend, “Frisbee” who has an excellent blog on her life as a reader, she sometimes talks about the complaints and false perceptions of bloggers that she has to deal with when it comes to readers (E-attention spans, blogging and culture) and then has asked, Should or Shouldn’t We? (blog). Clarion call with Jane: yes we should.

Fellow bloggers, we are in the position of classic book film adapters today, of novelists yesterday: Let us not desert one another:

We are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded as much and more and continual extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world [once you own a computer and are attached to the Net, for free], no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers

Ellen

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On re-rereading books, re-rewatching movies slowly, recurring characters. Naivetes behind spoiler alerts.

I am glad that I have ended my revisal of this dreadful scene. It is not to be endured — Samuel Johnson, Othello [Desdemona. But half an hour! Othello. Being done, there is no pause. Des. But while I say one prayer! Oth. It is too late. Smothers her.]

I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already.” Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time

1988 Pan edition (1st one I read for 1st time)

2009 source edition (the one I could get into the book store for my students and which I have now read with them twice)

Dear friends and readers,

An important side topic emerged on one of the Yahoo reading listservs I am grateful to be a member of, Inimitable-Boz, where a group of people are reading Dickens’s Bleak House, a few it seems for the first time, and most for far more than the 2nd or 3rd: why do we re-read a book, how does the pleasures of rereading, and re-rereading differ from the first reading.

It came out of one of these inevitable (it seems) protests from someone that as I am reading this book for the first time, I must not be told anything about what I have not yet read yet, which behavior I have learnt since coming onto the Net is regarded as a “spoiler” and must be labelled “spoiler alert.” Honestly as far as I was conscious of this I never came across this idea before the Internet, but since has become so familiar to me that I know many a reader protests in puzzlement against introductions and prefaces to books (carefully prepared for them by a publisher, paid for) and which [honored, respected] behavior may be found carried to the extreme of not allowing someone to describe a film at all before attending, lest knowing something “spoils” it for this person. Admittedly this last is an extreme response that I’ve seen trotted out by people mostly in order to silence any talk about films that might be serious, or prevent anyone from asking or discussing with the person some thoughtful or content-rich reaction.

One member of the listserv sent along an insightful column by Stanley Fish where for once (usually I dislike the personality he projects too strongly to read anything he writes), I felt grateful to Prof Fish for explaining the obvious: “What Do Spoilers Spoil”. What distresses me is the demand often has a chilling effect on sharing, talking about, and enrichening our experience of books.

Among the points Fisher makes that I want to repeat:

In August 2011 two researchers at the University of California at San Diego reported (in the journal Psychological Science) that in a controlled experiment, “subjects significantly preferred spoiled over unspoiled stories in the case of both … ironic twist stories and … mysteries.” In fact, it seems “that giving away … surprises makes readers like stories better “perhaps because of the “pleasurable tension caused by the disparity in knowledge between the omniscient reader and the character.

and

The positive case for spoilers is even stronger if you are persuaded by those who argue, in the face of common sense, that suspense survives certainty. This is called “the paradox of suspense” and it is explained by A. R. Duckworth: “1. Suspense requires uncertainty. 2. Knowledge of the outcome of a narrative, scene or situation precludes any uncertainty. 3. [Yet] we feel suspense in response to fictions we know the outcomes of

I like when Prof Fish talks of different kinds of pleasures, as the one you have on a second time reading when you know what’s going to happen and can see so much more the ironies and how things are working out, appreciate the skeins of imagery and also his theory of a paradox of suspense even when you know. I experience that — or I’d call it a paradox of engagement. I had begun rereading Winston Graham’s Warleggan for the third time the other night. I came upon the long terrible (hard to read) sequence where Francis Poldark, a major character, one beloved by me, who when not simply (justifiably) angry, depressed, embittered, suicidal, is man with gifts to be cherished, a tender heart,when he dies – slowly — hanging in the end to a nail to prevent himself drowning while he waits for people to realize he’s gone missing and come and rescue him. I knew he was going to die, had not made it. It didn’t matter. I suffered just as much reading the text, maybe more and felt the last lines as keenly — though the first shock or surprise was over.

I leave my reader to go over and read Fish to see how this is.

Equally dismaying, if you take these protests seriously, you are not allowed to talk of anything in the book, story or characters as that’s not yet known. There is, I submit, an inexorable intransigent anti-intellectualism at work here. I should not tell stories revealing how blank some students can be but one a propos comes to mind: I had a student last term who when she realizes I had read Sense and Sensibility more than once looked just amazed. Really. “Why did I read it more than once? whatever for? I knew what was in it.” What can one say to this? I can’t make up my mind if it was faux naivete, surely it was. Or was she coying me, quizzing, mocking at some level.

And yet those wanting to talk are made to feel they are sociopaths trespassing.

Another member of Inimitable-Boz suggested

Spoilers ought to be with mutual consent. Otherwise they can be received as deliberate aggressions. The first pleasure of discovery is like (male or female) virginity. Once lost it is for ever. Why do we re-re-read? perhaps it is to recapture what we nevertheless know is lost for ever. Or is it in order to experience better what we missed or did ill the first time?

I find the demand for spoiler warnings intimidating, aggressive in itself, imposing on others one kind of reading and making you avoid discussing the book as a whole seriously. The solution of everyone reading the book first before even beginning is in fact the one way you can avoid stifling discussion. But that’s unrealistic in terms of realities of people’s way of using cyberspace reading groups (it’s a way to get oneself to read a book in the first place for some). I wonder how much discussion people have after the book was read and closed or movie seen and ended. My feeling is people like to discuss a book while they are reading it.

There’s also this: an author will often not tell us something explicitly but expect us to know it. He or she may not tell it explicitly so we will respect the character may, enjoy the paradox of suspense more or certain ironies. For example, Jane Austen does not tell us until near the end of Northanger Abbey that General Tilney has not imprisoned his wife in chains and left her half to starve. She expects us to know that Mrs Tilney is really dead, died 9 years ago, this is not a cover-up story. Thus when Catherine goes wandering about the abbey looking for her it’s funny. She is absurd. Austen doesn’t tell us explicitly in order for us to empathize with Catherine’s upset and distress. In Bleak House we we are expected to know who the disguised woman is (Lady Dedlock) and by Chapter 5 what her relationship is to Esther Summerson (her long-hidden mother) and who Nemmo is: the father. Dickens doesn’t tell us explicitly.

I did have students in my classes who expressed disappointment and dismay when it turned out that Mrs Tilney would never be on stage. One of them said to me, you said Mrs Tilney is an important character. Yes, that does not mean she has to be alive. These are unsophisticated readers who have not gotten into the conventions. I know that Woodcourt will be the hero who loves Esther shortly after he comes on the stage and Dickens expects me to know this. It’s not giving anything away to talk about it. In the case of Lady Dedlock she is powerful and upper class and she makes Joe’s life a misery after she leaves him. We are to see her ignorance about these sorts of things. I suggest the novelist gets that paradox of suspense Fisher talked of, plus that if it were made explicit we would not respect the characters in the same way. It gives them a distancing integrity; we take their views seriously, now Lady Dedlock wants to remain secret; she is disguised.

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On to re-reading & recurring characters.

1988 Pan edition (the 1st one I read for the first time

2009 Source book (the more appropriately illustrated Pan 2008 for Demelza is not available here in the US)

I’m just now struggling — gentle reader, truly struggling — to fit in the Poldark novels by Winston Graham and the 1975-78 two season mini-series film adaptations as part of my serious reading this summer while doing two linked projects on Jane Austen. I’ve discovered I must carve out 1 1/2 to 2 hours every couple of days genuinely to go beyond where I’ve gotten to take in the novels more fully. Or I’m going through grazing the surface and not taking in the structures and rich content specific to each book. As to times, I’ve probably read Ross Poldark four times, Demelza three, Jeremy Poldark three, and Warleggan twice (all written just as WW2 was ending to 1953); the second quartet, The Black Moon, Four Swans, The Angry Tide (1973-77) merely twice each, with the later quartet, The Stranger from the Sea, The Miller’s Dance, The Loving Cup, The Twisted Sword (1981 into 1990) and coda, Bella (2003), once each (see handy list).

I don’t re-read just to experience better what I missed before or read ill last time. Maybe that is true for a second or third reading but after a while one doesn’t experience that. I don’t re-read to recapture the surprise either. (In life I’m not particularly keen on surprises, dislike them in fact and reassure my students all the time we will not have any surprises in our class and I will work hard to ensure your grade is no surprise to you. [I know that's not possible for all students as some delude themselves.])

I re-read simply because I love the presence in the book, the author implicit there, or the characters, or the world that’s created and want to experience it again.

I say of Austen she never fails me. It would take a lot of words to say what I mean by that but that’s why I reread now — even when I’m tired of her, and sometimes think her very narrow and even over-rated, when she irritates me. I’ve just started Trollope’s Kellys & OKellys; I’ve read about 2 times I think and it’s not failing me at all. I’m just gaining strength as I read; it’s like iron in the blood. Some books make me feel better. I’ve read a number of Trollope’s Barsetshire and Palliser novels countless times. I love Mr Harding as he appears in his first novel, The Warden, comic-tragic political fable. And I love his trick of recurring characters.

In Trollope and other novelists who write very long novels of social critique peopled densely, there’s the phenomenon of recurring characters. By that is meant a character who exists in one novel turns up in another – and what’s more they fit. So, for example, Dolly Longestaffe (a cynical useless drone type male who lives off others and does nothing himself) is first seen in The Way We Live Now but then turns up at the racecourse in The Duke’s Children (an entirely different book in spirit mostly except this one sub-plot where suddenly there’s Dolly). I’m not talking about series of cycical novels (sometimes called romans fleuves) for then the story is kept going and so the characters naturally are evolving too. Modern detective fiction uses the central detective who is the focus of novel after novel and he or she comes with other characters.

To distinguish Trollope’s art from Dickens’s, it would be rather say if Esther Summerson from Bleak House would re-appear in say Our Mutual Friend to offer Lizzie Hexam advice. We would know for sure this would be very good advice. In Trollope’s Miss Mackenzie Lady Glencora Palliser shows up running a successful auction. She would. In Ayala’s Angel, the hunting set are a bunch of characters we first met in The American Senator. They live nearby. Mr Harding turns up in the very late Kept in the Dark as a sort of joke. Someone wonders if he has married a harridan, and we know it is just not possible.

Readers often love this. They get a great kick out of some favorite or memorable character recurring in another novel by the same author.
What I’m getting it is how real Trollope made his world to him and how interconnected: a vast oeuvre which he writes bits off of in different moods, then you would or might see this phenomenon, but we don’t do we? Asked how many novels or books he had written, Trollope replied he’d written 88. Some such number in the 80s. He did not say I wrote 47 novels, so many short stories, so many this or that. But 88 stories. I think he really did see his work as continuous and the novels interconnected even if they are not set up say like Proust’s or Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time.

It’s not cheapening characters to do this — or not necessarily but they come out of the “larger context that defines them …” (Bob’s phrase over on Inimitable-Boz). Now Winston Graham has made a world of 12 novels with the same central evolving characters for the first 7. And I’m drawn to nearly all the central characters quite intensely, but especially Ross, Demelza, Dwight Enys, Jud, Elizabeth Chynoweth, Francis Poldark, Drake Carne, Mowenna Chynoweth.

This feeling is not true for me for Dickens. I don’t go to him for this. I like Andrew Davies’s two adaptations and Sandy Welch’s Our Mutural Friend because they correct and improve and turn Dickens’s into an experience I can return to again and again. I’ve taken Davies’s film adaptation, Little Dorrit with me on trips the way I do some novels, in order to get me through bad patches. I find travel very difficult and vacations also a strain, a displacement.

The experience need not be a novel. I feel this way about Samuel Johnson who is his best in his life-writing and essays.

It can happen for just a specific book that grabs one over and over again. For many women including contemporary African-American this seems to be true of Gone with the Wind (Margaret Mitchell’s central woman’s historical novel classic of the mid-20th century turned into The Wind Done Gone). Jane Eyre. For me Byatt’s Possession. Some are so intense or painful it’s hard to read them a second time but I do. My husband has read Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time countless times. He never tires of all 12 books.

Some people can feel this way about a movie or a film-maker (Bergman never fails my husband; we go to all the Bergmann films.) Some filmmakers are highly uneven. I find this to be true of Woody Allen.

There are books written about reading that talk about this: Maureen Corrigan’s Leave Me Alone I’m reading really ought to be called Rereading.

Then another person commented:

Ultimately, as far as I am concerned, I reread or re-reread because of a drive to understand human experience, which, in the last analysis, is my experience. If the issue of identity and self identity has any meaning, it lies here. Who am I? means what values do I stand on and embody through existence AND what urges and drives push me on consciously and unconsciously in the present world.

Reading, re-reading, re-re-reading and so on matters to me too, in this way and also re-seeing, re-watching, and then watching again very slowly (using the vlc media player so I can slow down the film and capture stills and take down words). Where am I in the fiction or whatever it is is an important question and what does this text bring home to us. This past week I saw a magnificent performance of Britten’s Peter Grimes (HD opera transmission from Teatro alla Scala, Milan, with mostly British cast). What matters here? what are the artists showing us too? Then I went home and reread the Crabbe and then wrote a blog so as to understand what I had experienced and also express it. Get it down.

But I think we have to take into account something irreducibly personal. The book or books and the author works at some level into our deeper personal experiences, background, belief, longings and soothes or teaches us what over and over it helps us to be reminded of. Or have articulated for the first time, and then again and again.

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Nell Blaine (1922-1996), Summer Interior with a Book

Some people say that life is the thing, but I much prefer reading. — Logan Pearsall Smith

Books are our friends too. I read to be with like spirits. Contra this is the idea we must not re-read for there are so many yet unread a first time. Life is short and soon we’ll die. Also when we re-read a long time afterward (or even a shorter) we may be so disillusioned, dismayed by what we liked.

I tell myself it’s a fatal puritanic (using the word in its ordinary condemning sort of sense, self-flagellation) super-work ethic kind of outlook that has to as a kind of appetite somehow get as much “new” experience as we can before we die. We must not waste time. (Self-improving for me does include listening to books in my car; I started partly because I hated the waste of time in the car, the hours driving my daughters and driving to and fro to work; the whole world outside NYC where I can’t buy a milk without getting into my car.) I have that impulse I must learn something new.

It’s silly. New experiences come from older known things and facts do not necessarily enrichen us. Facts are constructs too. Last night I finally found a book I can read at night! Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. I caught myself saying to myself I can read this because I know all this already, and wishing I could read instead a book in Italian by Elsa Morante. But what do I mean know all this already — Tudor history. I don’t know what she has to offer me in her vision and she is just superb in recreating a living world at the opening of the 16th century.

I too have had the experience of disliking a book I once liked. Sometimes I can get sick of Austen. It’s more coming back at another time in life or in the world. We see the earlier work differently. It’s that way for me with Richardson’s Grandison. I find I have no patience for it, and once I loved it, wrote a long chapter in my dissertation on it.

There I suggest no use fetishizing a book. We don’t fetishicize people. If we don’t like to go clubbing any more and indeed dislike what we see, well we’ve gone on. Though I admit I like to remember reading as something special.

It’s revealing what we long to re-read. Sometimes such longings (favorite books from when we first began) bring us back to our original selves before we became so “adult” and we find our primal emotions and what counts to us again.

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Joshua Reynolds, His niece, Theophila Palmer re-reading Clarissa

On Eighteenth-Century Worlds someone is reading Richardson’s Clarissa for the first time and sent in a passage by Clary she found riveting, significant:

Oh, my dear, ’tis a sad, a very sad world! -While under our parents protecting wings, we know nothing at all of it. Book-learned and a scribbler, and looking at people as I saw them as visitors or visiting, I thought I knew a great deal of it. Pitiable ignorance!-Alas! I knew nothing at all!

I responded that I have a matching passage which I keep in a sort of online commonplace books:

What a world is this! What is there in it desirable? The good we hope for, so strangely mixed, that one knows not what to wish for! And one half of mankind tormenting the other, and being tormented themselves in tormenting…

I liked hers; it had a moral turn in it of fighting back (implied), of at least having the salutary gain of knowing more. I added it to my commonplace book.

I first read Richardson’s Clarissa (in the Angus Burrell abridgement) at age 19-20 (I was older than 18, probably some 2 years older). It gripped me like some disease, a fever in the blood. This is the third edition and it does include some dazzling letters by Lovelace; said to have been written earlier but kept out because he thought they blackened Lovelace too strongly. Rather they are so colorful, such ripe fairy tale fantasies of exhilaration in triumph and escape that they make Lovelace more appealing, though if you think about it even less capable of any feeling for others. I began not to look in corners lest I see Lovelace lurking there. Then I reread it in graduate school in the unabridged Everyman edition. On this 5 year later re-reading I did a talk in a class and then a paper where the teacher suggested I had a dissertation topic here and he would be my advisor. Robert Adams Day was the man’s name, now dead, he died more than 10 years ago now. I did the dissertation and called it Richardson, Romance and Reverie (about the special super-alert pictorial-dramatic visions a poet must conjure up to write a novel).

I didn’t make up my mind then but after another year of graduate study and more courses in the 18th century I decided I would not “do” the Renaissance after all, but the 18th century and make my dissertation Clary.

I read Clarissa countless times while doing my dissertation and also read _Grandison_ at least twice through. Then coming onto the Net I lead a group reading the book in 1995 — we did it according to the calendar in the novel. Started January 15th and ended December 18th. Some days the texts were so long it was very hard to read it all in the time allotted. It was after that I made this region of my website. Just scroll down and you’ll see the postings.

I’ve re-read Clarissa twice since, two years ago and the year before that. I did a paper defending the film adaptation and finally dealt directly with what for me counts centrally in the book and makes it relevant today: its treatment of rape. I’ve not tried to publish either beyond this. Why drive myself up a wall to please some editor and have to change (ruin partly) my work when if anyone wants to read and to learn whatever there is to from the paper, it's there. I also put up the proposals with them and some of my findings about the scenes and letter relationships. Always it’s the letters, the relationships between them that the final keys or clues to the book lies somehow.

Now this last time (two years ago) while I see all Anna Howe’s flaws and inadequacies, I began to like her — especially since Nokes’s movie. I also was very moved by the visit of HIckman to her. The movie is utterly inadequate on Hickman. Male made movies often cannot get themselves to do justice to the sensitive ethical man. Nokes hired a tough-looking actor but did not present the inner core of Hickman’s character at all. At the same time his substitute of Belford for Colonel Morden as the man who murders Lovelace in the climactic duel is brilliant, just right.

And this time through book and film I was with Clary all the way fighting Lovelace after the rape. His attempts at further rapes. I loved when she ran away and when she kept saying no, she will not be coopted by anyone. She's not even for rent for anyone.

Infamy? to give way to them is to conform to rules made up by evil-minded people and then you surely will be destroyed by them when you put yourself in their narrow grasps. I have ever rejoiced for her when she died — not that I believe in any afterlife or God but that she knows oblivion at last. Is safe.

The film of course emphasizes the intense grief and waste and ends on the stone. The heart of the film, the basic unit of the grammar is the still picture.

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2008 Pan Jeremy Poldark (the only one of this text I have)

1988 Pan Black Moon (my favorite of my two Black Moons)

So, gentle reader prepare yourself for more meditative accounts of the Poldark and other re-read and re-listened to books, books not necessarily fashionable at all, and detailed accounts of Downton Abbey the second season and Poldark and other mini-series and good films. As long as I can get up the energy …

Ross (Robin Ellis) and Demelza Poldark (Angharad Rees) on the night before he must return to prison for the trial (Poldark Season 1, Part 9, no equivalent scene in Jeremy Poldark)

I do love these films. The central heroes & heroines are gentle at heart. I can put myself to sleep dreaming of them and their landscape which I long to visit.

Ellen

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“Decorated entirely by women, under their direction”: Women’s Building Library (Chicago, 1892-93)

Our books, dear Book Browser, are a comfort, a presence, a diary of our lives. What more can we say? (Carol Shields, Swann)

Mary Cassat, Modern Women (mural) for Women’s Building

Mary Cassatt, detail of mural as a painting

Dear friends and readers,

Some may remember that I reported on a lecture and book I learned about on the Women’s Building at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1892-93 where the stupendous aim was to gather a copy of every book published by a woman since 1492, and while they came short of that goal, they came as close as anyone could in 1892-93. I wrote a blog that got many hits about the lecture and book, Right Here I see My Own Books: “I did not think there were so many books in the world written by women … ”

In this year’s issue (it comes out once a year) of the Woman’s Art journal, there is an essay on the pathetically little art that has survived from this heroic endeavor, complete with a few photos of the building before it was torn down.

Women’s Building, Northern Pavilion

Women’s Building, Reading Room (Hall of Honor)

The crime — or tragedy – is how all was destroyed and dispersed again — by plan! The article is by an independent scholar, Charlote Garfinkle, “Progress Illuminated: Two Stained Glass Windows from the 1893 Woman’s Building, Woman’s Art Journal, Spring summer 2012. The survivors are two murals and a church-like stained glass window. I’ve put these and the photos of this exhibit to which thousands came in an album for us. You see above the Hall of Honor where you could read some of the women’s books as well as one of the murals: Mary Cassatt’s Modern Women.

As the two presenters of the lecture and writers of the book, “Right Here I see My Own Books“, Sarah Wadsworth and Wayen Wiegland, did say the art of this place was limited by the mainstream range of the types of women who ran the clubs which engineered this feat and it may seem a bit stodgy to look at Massachusetts as Mother hovering over the (as yet) coming woman of liberty, but the ideals were all we would want today (and rarely have). Mary Cassett’s mural has women working in a garden like another mural I’ve seen by her, and Mary MacMonnie’s Primitive Women remind me of Puvis de Chavannes (everyone dressed in pseudo-Greek like dresses):

The title of Elizabeth Parsons, Edith Blake Brown and Ethel Isadore Brown’s stained glass contribution, Massachusetts Mothering the Coming Woman of Liberty, Progress and Light is embarrassing, and the imagery highly traditional:

Garfinkle thinks Mary Crease Sears’s Seal of Boston has much private imagery:

Here is a final surviving photo:

The East Facade

The Woman’s Art Journal is itself a marvelous periodical: printed on art paper, it’s just filled with images. It has several long essays, and 23 pages of reviews of a couple of columns each. Expect more from me taken from this periodical from time to time.

For example (one more article): A long essay on the once popular caricatures by Minna Citrone, Jennifer Strebe’s “Minna Citron’s Feminanities: her commentary on the culture of vanity.”

Citron, Hope Springs Eternal/Bargain Basement (1930s)

Citron’s art was social realism intended to critique the present political and social order, especially the workings of unameliorated capitalism. Here’s a cornucopia of her art; and here some of her fellow women print-makers.

She also worked in traditional tropes. Her self-image of the artist makes herself out to be a powerful woman, but not quite no vanities (look at the pretty shoes and improbably fancy dress with the scarf), living in an apartment in the city, where she is not at all cut off from its realities …

Ellen

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Richard III: Receiving emergency care after mauling by Shakespeare — by Robert Fripp

Robert Fripp’s website

Dear readers and friends,

I am honored and delighted to have a guest blogger today. Robert Fripp, the author of Dark Sovereign, a thoroughly researched play that does justice to Richard III. Robert came across my blog-review of the WSC’s production of Richard III: WSC Richard III: a parable about politicians. He liked what I wrote and was prompted to write himself about this king and his play here:

Richard III: Receiving emergency care after mauling by Shakespeare

Discussing Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Richard III, Ellen recently wrote, “They [the WSC] mean to take [Richard III] into the 21st century; as the director says, it’s not a history play anyway (as nowadays we know Shakespeare was repeating heavily shaped Tudor propaganda).”

“It’s not a history play anyway.” Too true. Shakespeare’s Richard III comes close to emulating British pantomime, where a rough-looking male with five o’clock shadow plays a wicked step-mother, and the leading lad is a nubile young woman in tight-fitting Robin Hood garb. Shakespeare’s Richard III goes far beyond character assassination. It crosses the line into farce.

Someday we may recognize 1983 as a watershed year in the history of research and reportage on the subject of Richard III; not because 1983 marked the 500th anniversary of Richard’s accession to the throne. Rather, because a current affairs television producer in Toronto (me) got so fed up with the quasi-history and fabulous (in the literal sense) character assassination of Richard III that I started writing a “better” play than Shakespeare to produce a plausible King Richard. I’ve written my play, Dark Sovereign, in the English it was available to for Shakespeare—which I learned to write “fluently.”

Strange projects may spawn stranger outcomes. Whether Dark Sovereign lives or dies as a play, overnight it is now the longest drama written in Renaissance English. Dark Sovereign bumps Hamlet and Richard III from being the first and second longest down to being second and third. I never intended Dark Sovereign to be performed at full length. My Introduction invites directors “to grab a machete and roll up their sleeves.”

Now to our new Richard III. As a boy, he took military training at Middleham Castle, in the North Riding of a northern county, Yorkshire. Much later, he married Lady Anne Neville, who grew up at Middleham. In Dark Sovereign, before Richard proposes to Anne, Robert has Richard remind her:

“ ’Twas in your father’s house I learn’d to war.
Remember wi’ yourself, how I bethought was
to play David in Golias’ armour;
whilst did you, a little golden girl, sit out and pick pied daisies.”

Five hundred years after the king’s death in battle, two Richard IIIs stalk England. Shakespeare’s ambitious psychotic still enjoys a warm welcome in the South. But many Northerners won’t hear a bad word against Richard. In many respects he was a benign governor in the North. When you enter a pub in Leeds, Leicester, Nottingham, Manchester or York, be careful what you say.

For nearly a decade Richard served as military commander in the North, defending the border against Scottish raiders on behalf of his brother, King Edward IV. In Dark Sovereign, a letter informs Richard that King Edward’s ambitious queen, Elizabeth Woodville, appears to be reaching for regal command herself, and Richard’s allies demand that he hurry to London. Richard angrily responds:

Richard: “I am to Edward shield and general captain
in the office of a wall against the Scot.
But these would have me hole the wall,
lay down my arms, quit vigilance, invite invasion.
Is England so phantastically king’d, that I
—while Scotsmen ravish English wives—
must haste to London,
there to save my brother from his queen?
Psha! Though it be comfort-killing, yet the Border is my stage.
I’ll order myself in the play I have in hand.”

When King Edward dies, Queen Elizabeth Woodville is able to use Edward’s underage heir, their son, as a rubber stamp to enact mischievous policy. Richard in turn is forced to react. Given the opportunity to seize the boy, he joins forces with Harry, Duke of Buckingham, who reminds Richard how many members of his immediate family had already been killed during England’s war for dynastic power:

BUCKINGHAM: “Our hurt’s not small;
no more is the common griefs of England.
Spare for no cost, no more than if it were the cause of all.
          A time and times the Rose that bare you
wept death-wearied tears for York, which,
claiming England’s dear-bought majesty,
did quit it debt with dearest blood. [110]
‘Twere the devil’s undeserving profit, did your father
—his three sons withal—untimely fall in grave.
For nothing!
          To sway the diadem doth mitigate abominations.
To lose the rule were death. And treason.
Standing: I’ll take me out a pissing while.
I’d purge the wine of fellowship on daisies.”
BUCKINGHAM goes.

RICHARD GLOUCESTER:
“Alone. At last alonely and alone.
The nighted hours pass, a quiet wilderness without,
contráry to the noise keeps coil within … [120]
          … How should I think? nor why, with voice of word,
lend mettle and substantial form to thought?
Springs up this maund’ring from a sudden fury of the night?
or wells it from a lock’d up inly fount? …
          … ‘Tis said the soul is fed with charity,
but charity contendeth ever to prevail upon base fearful parts.
The mind of man is wax, wherein old use sets to his seal. [130]
I’faith, it is his learn’d experience breeds each his habitus.
This man, this habitus, is phoenix-like his gather’d self,
but wanting Charity’s pure phoenix-fire
came to his years unpurified.
Seldom suck’d I Charity wi’ nurses’ milk.
How the devil can I express her?”

At this point, Richard broaches a topic much debated in late medieval and early modern times. Dante Alighieri had introduced this question in his Divine Comedy: Does the Will or Reason provoke action?

“Whence welleth thought? and whither flows?
Being mine alone, I speak to me alone. But which self speaks?
and whether, as Another I, doth arbitrate his thought,
I may not know. Some humour feeds the tongue, [140]
which, being feeding, moves noise, so.
Other chooseth out th’opinion ears give audience
and which reject, as they were darts turn’d by a buckler.”
          Lights: Dawn breaks.

Enter BUCKINGHAM silently. He listens.

“Speaks Reason to my Will?
or doth proud Will to Reason speak?
The Comedy did anciently set forth how wayward Will
strove with his government, the passive voice of Reason.
O, would I wist which captain order’d thought,
Prescrib’d it me, dictated every deed.
Whether doth the Will or Reason urge me fasten on occasion [150]
of this night to sway the rule on England?
If either door gaped wide, mankind would wholly righteous be
—or damn’d! How stony is the way ‘twixt Reason and the Will,
to judgment.”

I published Dark Sovereign in Arden style, meaning that the text shares the pages with footnotes, giving actors and students instant reference to precise meanings. Precision extends to the language in which his play is written as well as the history. My aim: “The language of Dark Sovereign is precise. It is written in the vocabulary, idioms and syntax of the period from about 1579 (Sir Philip Sidney’s Old Arcadia) to precisely 1626, a cutoff date dictated by technical reasons involving Francis Bacon. This interval of forty-seven years marked the renaissance of English letters. Every word in Dark Sovereign, each syllable, word-sense, expression, verb ending, tense and function, as well as word order, metaphor and construction patterns, is present because the author found precedents in English written before the year 1626.”

Robert Fripp’s URL: RobertFripp.ca/ & LinkedIn (Toronto)
Dark Sovereign: Available in Paperback from Internet vendors
Tags: Robert Fripp, Shakespeare, Richard III, Dark Sovereign

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William Hogarth (1697-1764), David Garrick as Richard III (1745, a detail)

Gentle reader,

Allow me to add that it was in the 18th century the first revisionings of the Tudor myth began: with Horace Walpole (see his Historic Doubts). The source for Shakespeare’s propaganda play was Thomas More (a strong defender of Henry VIII — even after Henry VIII decided that More was more than dispensable). The subject is covered in Peter Sabor’s splendid Horace Walpole: The Critical Heritage. Paul Murray Kendall’s study reprints parts of More history and Walpole’s Historic Doubts.

Perhaps the 18th century stage, with turning away from beliefs in numinous kings, its scepticism, and new histories (David Hume, Catherine Macaulay), and its great empathetic actors first stirred pepple to doubt the accuracy of Shakespeare’s powerful play. The love of medievalism which fed into the gothic also created sympathy for the Catholic and Stuart point of view (for example, Sophia Lee’s The Recess, a gothic novel about the supposed twin-daughters of Mary Stuart by Bothwell, and Scott’s novels, Kenilworth and The Abbot) helped create a climate for revision.

E.M.

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Bob Dixon: “what picture of the world is presented to children through literature?”

From recent movie attempt to improve the Robinson Crusoe perspective: Crusoe (Aiden Quinn) and the Warrior (Ade Sapara) in Caleb Deschanel’s Crusoe Arthurian tales often show the process of rising slowly through violence and obedience in an aristocratic society — that’s what the boys are shown.

Dear friends and readers,

Another blog which is partly intended for my students. I was asked to provide a more sophisticated understanding of texts for my students, which would (inevitably?) lead them not only to want to publish, but to go about such projects in ways that ensure publication (what is the topic of converse this year, the actual self-interested goals of participants).

I didn’t quite do that because I know that most students don’t have a discipline, much less know what is the state of place in that discipline. Instead I assigned a couple of books which analyzed the cultural values behind our children’s language; the lack of choice; and devised projects so we could hear one another’s hard-worked upon papers, projects, hopes and dreams.

The first book was Bobbie Ann Mason’s Girl Sleuth: In search of Nancy Drew, Judy Bolton and Cherry Ames. I’ve written a blog summarizing, critiquing Mason’s book and setting it in the context of a short history of children’s literature.

Now I turn to Bob Dixon’s invaluable revelations — in the context of no talk at all about such things, his readings are revelations. Mason and Dixon function as two witnesses, two genuine cultural analyses of the values we find endorsed in classic and popularly distributed childrens’ books in schools and bookstores, and stories in magazines.

As Dixon says often what librarians and teachers present as their books and the reasons for choosing these are just lists or they simply describe a book through its blurb in praise or a rousing good tale …. As to popular series book, Mason says many of these books do not even turn up in schools and are not given prizes: they are just rewritten and distributed.

It needs also to be said first that many “classics” that young adults think they read — say Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe or Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels are a silently rewritten, dumbed-down, abridged and often sanitized or re-normed version of the original book.

And second, that everyone agrees much more common is to assign books with males as heroes; women writers will use their first initials to try to hide that the author is a woman. The book sells better. J. K. Rowling conforms precisely to both habits. Young male at school; she is J. K.

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Bob Dixon (1931-2008), grapefruit juice in hand

Who was Bob Dixon? He is highly unusual in reaching us because he was anti-capitalism as presently practiced. I’d call him a progressive, a strong progressive. Born in country Durham in the UK, brought up by grandparents, ill from TB when young so did not go to public school, but got into university and became a writer, teacher, poet, peace activist. He did not try to take on the establishment when teaching the way J. L. Carr did.

Bob wrote much poetry but his best known books are Catching Them Young and Playing Them False in which he showed how the same elitist, sexist and racist attitudes and political ideas were being instilled through toys, games and puzzles, and he exposed the role of the commercial interests in priming the compliance of future consumers and the mass media.

His autobiography is called The Wrong Bob Dixon shows clearly how his childhood in a family broken by narrow attitudes towards his unmarried mother, his illness and the war had affected him, and how his life post war had been blighted by those same narrow attitudes and the political system that confines the ambition and natural talent and creativity of young people in the education system.

A tribute was paid to his memory in 2008 during a demonstration against war. He is not in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography nor the Literature Resource Center. The establishment erases him.

Those chapters I chose from Catching Them Young deal with issues of real concern today, sore ones: class; the imperialist-colonialist thinking and feeling which leads to devastating wars abroad; how religious allegory is used to squash an understanding of today’s world’s organizations and structures and bewilder any attempt to ameliorate the lot of most people on the earth.

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From John Boorman’s Excalibur, an Athurian epic-romance:
Arthurian tales often show the process of rising slowly through violence and obedience in an aristocratic society — that’s what the stories from the point of view of a boy show us centrally

Snakes and Ladders

Dixon opens with Plato because with Plato begins the idea you can type people and also have ideal types everyone should aspire to. Dixon then asks the question why everyone we go we see a form of social apartheid and the visibilia of rank. Until the 19th century not only in the US but the UK the way the classes were explained were it’s God’s doings. Only by charity should or can you act to change this and that means only the “deserving poor.”

This is followed by a section on language and how language is used to differentiate and stigmatize people. Stigmatizing goes on all the time in all sorts of ways.

What we have is a literature that mirrors what is expected of a middle class child and norms. This is true of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Namesake. We see this reflection in Bobbsey Twins, for example, on TV it’s been shown that the way people dress, the jobs we see that are given respect are middle and upper middle. Dixon suggests that working class norms are different, less demanding probably because less is expected. IQs and in the UK 11 plus exams where used to send some children to college and the rest to vocational schools and stop education early.

Dixon goes over fables and stories of people winning money and what they do with it: the moral here is to be happy with your lot. Know your place. It’s where you belong. We might say in the US this is not so (pp. 47-51).

Another important line of thought offered; this is the mantra of US public arenas. It’s asserted that anyone can have anything you want, you need only will it. Will it read hard, not for doctors’ wives just again.

Therefore if you don’t have everything you want, it’s your fault. It’s not the schools, lack of opportunities, connections, not knowing the right manners that stop you.

At every turn in most stories there are implications about social class, status and politics. It’s unavoidable because it’s implicit in our lives. What he is pointing out is the particular single perspective that is repeatedly imposed on children.

Dixon teaches us how to read: he makes points rarely made, e.g. “the germ of virtually every work of literature is conflict. The key is to look at the way the reader or view’s sympathies are aligned. I’ll give an example from a decent recent police procedural: Prime Suspect with Helen Mirren. It is very unusual for someone to sympathize with illegal immigrants in hiding. The story concerns the murder of two young woman who clean hotels for a living. The murderer is a male Bosnian who has raped one of them and wants to cover this up; they also know about a massacre that occurred that was covered up and he killed the other lest she tell once her sister was dead.

It’s not childlike for they are not presented as saints — no Uncle Toms — but real people interacting with real motives, of fear, desire for revenge, for jobs in hideous circumstances of wars brought about by ethnic rivalries is the way this show presents it.

Authors chosen not evil; they are middle class and this is their world, Nesbitt’s animal fables (p 58). I asked about the short answers the test about The History of Sandford and Merton so maybe I had better skip these two pages. But I”ll read them anyway (pp. 60-61). But little Tommy reminds me of little Trixie: how terrible to be rich they say; it’s our duty to accept and be glad our condition is no worse they say.

Forgotten is the idea that society is a contract and all of us are in it together and need one another and use one another.

Another problem is one we find in Dickens: the poor or working class are seen entirely from outside. Why do condescending, demeaning, implausible fictions continue to be shown? Downton Abbey showed two servants utterly abject before the master lord of the house; he is just generosity itself as he is not going to fire the aging woman but pay for her cataract operation. Won’t up her salary nor conditions of employment (pp. 67-69)

It’s an intensely class conscious world: He exposes a whole array of such books and only in the 1930 did they begin to circulate widely. takes these books and shows how the same paradigms are working out in classics movies for children are still made from: Francis Hodgson Burnett’s Little Princess, Secret Garden

Chapter ends on Tarzan of the Apes: Tarzan an aristocrat in leopard skins, heredity all.

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Lagaan, a re-reading of British imperialism

Empire: Fiction follows Flag

This is an important chapter because it is so rare for people to go beyond showing racism in the US towards African-Americans and bring out the colonialist ideology that supports these terrible wars we partly fund by funding the gov’ts that pursue them.

A three page piece on Robinson Crusoe which I assigned. It’s a more peaceful book than some (p. 75) The ultimate arbiter and justification of all these is that Christianity is a better religion, the western way of life superior. At one time this was tooted unashamedly, now these ideas come in through the back door in the form of programs – in Iraq a number of laws passed to turn the essentially tribal structure of the society into a capitalist friendly one, and they passed laws against unions. They do not help women.

Killing an important part of this tradition (p. 77) as well as justification by Christianity, imperialist. Except later on as sex objects by and large women don’t turn up in these action-adventure tales and we will see very few in Ox-Bow Incidents which has some of the features of cowboy stories (p 78).

Many close imitations and (pp. 78-98) give us many variations on these foreign glamor stories, and ends on Kipling — who I think got a Nobel Prize – as to style he can write (1907). India is still a major realm in western literature; witness Jhumpa Lahiri.

The books mentioned here include authors that Mr Ellerbee’s son, Edgar in A Month in the Country, wants to win as a prize for church-going. Coral Island is the book Edgar longs for (p. 85). The aim of colonialism was to relieve unemployment at home — you could snatch land. Read the tones (p. 82). There has been change here: the Black Hole of Calcutta is now presented as part of the war of independence for India in films (p. 83) — but the presentation of the ungrateful (unnatural?) people who don’t appreciate our arms, and companies is found in the way Afghanistan is discussed today, Iraq and Iran (p 83). They don’t want us; we make things worse. The story of the Indian girl who fawns on the hero, saves him, wants to be Anglicized. That’s our Pocahontas myth (p 84). She’s really part English the way peasant girls turn out to be princesses. Part of fairy tale.

As a bye-blow these stores enforce kidnapping, child abuse and kidnapping, but I carry on. G. A. Henty, another author writing in this vein. Henty wrote hundreds of these action-adventure, sometimes science fiction, sometimes boys’ adventure-stories.

Later 19th century religion in retreat, more children are educated in schools, schools are placed where children may be indoctrinated in patriotism: the belief it’s in your interest to go to these wars and kill or be killed (p 89)

Rider Haggard (She, King Solomon’s Mines) a heady mix of sexism, imperialist wars, native Tarzan stuff. Kipling’s Jungle books: boy scouts come out of this era, Baden Powell drew heavily on the jungle books. 3. These show much cruelty to animals, don’t appear to take seriously they have feelings and an existence of their own.

These formulas remain unchanged, are only tweaked some so I didn’t assign anything on the later books except Heinlein as that allows us to see him in the context or generic background out of which his work comes and to which it belong (p. 114): Starship Troopers, a very popular glorification of war;

It ought to be a strange idea that “fighting and killing people” makes one a man only it isn’t. Ultimately all this destruction, death, maiming do come forward at the Met. I’ll come back to times where small tribes fought small tribes but the conditions have so changed that this evolved point of view functions very differently today.

I did omit Roald Dahl (pp. 111-113); his are colonialist in thrust. I find Dahl’s books so nasty where horrible things happen apart from the hero, they startle me. I have read they are liked because they fuel children’s intense resentment, give children a chance to act out revenge. Alone among popular books they are sometimes analysed and critiqued adversely. I think it’s because they do encourage hostile emotions to adults. He makes adults uncomfortable. I have read by one student a real defense of Dahl’s relatively unknown Matilda which I admit to no longer remembering but thinking the student had understood what the manipulation was.

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Fangorn Forest, just outside Fairfax county

Supernatural: Religion, Magic and Mystification

The basic paradigms or story lines and suppositions are found in early religious didactic literature where after all a belief in the supernatural is central. Religion depends on a belief in a supernatural realm and beings.

Dixon begins with Winstanley because many religious groups have been rebels against the social order; most of them ruthlessly squashed – by the present establishment and its religious leaders. Doctrines are important in order to control ways of thought. Do not want people believing in too wild ideas; you want to control the fantasy.

I read Pilgrim’s Progress when a girl. Its sales were once close to the Bible; it’s written in very simple English with simple allegories a child can follow. Copies that are sold today are often rewritten in modern English (pp. 121-22 for Robinson’s mindset).

We are taught hard lessons in such schools. Where we learn what social quietism, obedience is how children experience patience; you must learn to suffer, nothing against social order ever.

He points out such books teach children self-contempt: the way the girl sleuth presents an impossible ideal is what the girl cannot not coming up to and so gives her a false body image (“I am fat”), and illegitimate norms she must and yet cannot follow, so “feelings of personal worthlessness” and self-abasement are part of children’s religious literature. Awe is one favorite mood.

Books made cheap and they are used to reinforce from another stand point what we see in action adventure. We are to despise the poor, the losers they are called in US society. I believe Romney said he had no interest in the poor. Some huge percentage of the US population nowadays.

We have the usual suspects, books proselytized for and no explanation of their values given — J. R. R. Tolkien, Ursula Le Guin (who I know from being on a listserv with her — as a poet), Madeleine L’Engle, Richard Adams and C. S. Lewis. He does cite some that are good and changing the mode: I’ll cite The Golden Compass by Philip Pulman (heroine). We get action adventure female-heroes in these. As we do in modern detective novels. and police procedural there are a few. Alas, often sexed up sex objects.

Basically Dixon objects to teaching them to die as a matter of course, and teaching them they can be prostitute, Five hours as beautiful. I’s how they mystify life and make you accept whatever is by making all a mystery; they also allow us to defy laws of nature: gravity, death; great escapist quests, sometimes with animals that we can identify with. The works slide into science fiction and allegories. Allegory where acts and people easily stand for concepts part of the terrain.

Evil is this disembodied force or someone is simply shown as maliciously evil (usually the result of envy — you are not to envy others what they have; if you are outcast, it’s your fault

Evil not located in the poor; anyway this often takes place where poverty is irrelevant; rather it’s class and place antagonisms that are manipulated. Great love of ceremony and ritual (p 149).

I agree with Dixon that the asserted idea children like a black and white world has yet to be proved; but if it’s a childish way of seeing the world, why do adults promote it? (p. 150)

2008 cover for Wrinkle in Time

Dixon’s comments on Madeleine L’Engle are eye-opening: enforced conformity seems to stand for communism so it’s really a political struggle that she disguises with mysticism. Her idea is matter is getting unbalanced. Her books makes no sense of the world to children.

Watership Down: a kind of smug complacency, highly authoritarian military warren. The rabbits set up a police state. In another book Adams makes no distinction between the kind of suffering that is endemic in human nature in a society (so religion becomes a kind of comfort, a hoped-for protection) and the kind that can be changed by changing human social circumstances (p 154.)

To me the sickest book I’ve read for children is G. H. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters. Dixon says the self-absorption it encourages makes all that happens outside the self unimportant. I remember it justifying death; a kind of medieval attitude towards miracles as what we wait around for. Devils everywhere who must be smashed. Lewis makes it explicit that the Narnia books have a Christian allegory at the center. Among other things he’s a fervent monarchist, ridicules progressive schools. He married for the first time late in life and part of his outlook is naive.

Ends on a book that shows some change. TwoPence a Tub by Susan Price. It sets up an actual debate. Death is God’s way of punishing these strikers. Does God want these people to suffer. The strike doesn’t achieve much: the men go back to longer hours and cut wages.

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To conclude:

Political correctness is a phrase hurled at people who are perfectly sincere in wanting to improve the world. They don’t talk or act the way they do to obey some strange convention or impress others; they really want to see a better life for all.

What we see on TV, in the movies, read in books has a profound influence on what we do and act effectively towards gaining a good adult life for ourselves and others.

Ellen

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