Dickens’ problematic melancholy text, Little Dorrit: a large still book

Phiz (Hablot Browne), “Little Dorrit’s Party” — the chapter where we accompany Amy Dorrit and Maggie who walk, sit, and sleep on the streets all night long …

I pretend to-night that I am at a party … I could never have been any use, if I had not pretended a little … Three o’clock, and half-past three, and they had passed over London Bridge. They had heard the rush of the tide against obstacles; and looked down, awed, through the dark vapour on the river; had seen little spots of lighted water where the bridge lamps were reflected, shining like demon eyes, with a terrible fascination in them for guilt and misery. They had shrunk past homeless people, lying coiled up in nooks. They had run from drunkards. They had started from slinking men, whistling and signing to one another at bye corners, or running away at full speed. Though everywhere the leader and the guide, Little Dorrit, happy for once in her youthful appearance, feigned to cling to and rely upon Maggy. And more than once some voice, from among a knot of brawling or prowling figures in their path, had called out to the rest to ‘let the woman and the child go by! … This was Little Dorrit’s party. The shame, desertion, wretchedness, and exposure of the great capital; the wet, the cold, the slow hours, and the swift clouds of the dismal night. This was the party from which Little Dorrit went home, jaded, in the first grey mist of a rainy morning. — Bk 1, Ch 14, “Little Dorrit’s Party”

Dear friends and readers,

I must not shirk writing about my listserv group’s reading and discussion of Dickens’s magnificent masterpiece novel, Little Dorrit, which we began mid-October 2023 and have just concluded this past week, early January 2024. It is one of several such astonishing partly because so long works of art to appear in the mid- to later 19th century in Europe: they include Dickens’s own Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Eliot’s Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Anna Karenina; Trollope has several, Balzac, Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi. The type continues into the 20th century. I’m not eager to write about Dickens’s because there is a problem with it, recognized early on.

While it sold well (as did all Dickens’s novels), before the end of the century, the consensus was it was the “weakest” of Dickens’s novels! How can this be? Shaw was the first to counter and then override the condemnation by showing Dickens’s voiced view, is deep clearly articulated understanding of how society’s and gov’ts and institutions operate to keep a egregiously snobbish, greedy, lazy upper class (aristocracy and the very wealthy merchants and landowners just before) the only rich who control everyone else for the benefit of these specific individuals. We move from entities created in order to Do Nothing, to Thwart Anything Being Done, to keep Society dysfunctional for most, to the marketplaces of capitalism, from the smallest to the supposedly largest institution and ritual is laid bare before us. The epidemic disease is a fixation with getting as much money as possible and then spending it as ostentatiously as possible. Dickens’s characters are fitted into the lowest of echelons (debtor’s prison) to the upper middling (bankers) and we see how impossible it is for any one or any group of people to begin reforms until there is a change of heart among powerful so profound, they’d almost not be the same people any longer. I strongly recommend Helen Small’s edition for Penguin – her notes on everything you do need to know about London circa 1850s, explanations of the prisons, reprints of Dickens’s first drafts are essential.

When Mr Dorrit cracks, becomes confused and thinks himself back in the Marshalsea when in Venice, and quickly dies, and then Frederick out of grief and inability to carry on w/o him, is one of the book’s unbearably moving moments

“The night from which no one returns” — Phiz

What’s wrong with all this? Nothing. I loved those chapters for their content, as I did the use of imprisonment as a central trope of our lives in the book, the hatred in the book (if not quite honored in his own favorite characters) of worshipped rank, oodles of money, performative false manners, petty egotism, capitalism; I loved and bonded with the good Amy Dorrit (ever shouldering all the burdens of the lives of those she loves, exploited, berated!), the ascetically virtuous Arthur Clennam (who retreats from all forms of profit), was amused by and entertained into accepting many of the well-meaning floundering around them. I have nothing against the soul-wrenching and withering (murdering) of the bad major characters, Mrs Clennam, Mr Dorrit who, poignant as he is, he makes himself a terrific burden on others; these parents utterly ignorant their real impress on their daughter and son.

Trilling says there is too much use of cliché for shorthand, too much resort to generalization and abstraction; it won’t do to to have the narrator or story-teller to locate themselves in some non-personal will in which Dickens is seeking for and has some of his characters searching out for: Peace. Dickens explains too much, a muted despair seeps through the book. We miss the sardonic and sharp witted irony in the narrator of Bleak House, here oddly muttered of Bleak House — Sergeant George, Tulkinghorn, Inspector Bucket. The book lacks precisely what Andrew Davies claims for all Dickens novels in his prologue to his episodes: exuberance, buoyancy, crazy humor, excitement, bizarre characters, continual veins of vividness; sexual passion and violence imitated or parodied. This is what Davies introjects into the matter.

Claire Foy and Matthew MacFayden extraordinarily superb as Amy and Arthur

Why is the book so slow moving, over-wordy, dare I say indecipherable at moments, boring at others? because (I think) Dickens is himself tuning his anger to fit the melancholy and mourning of his hero and heroine; he keeps himself at a distance to provide cool appraisals. Characters like Mrs Clennam, Mrs Gowan, Mrs Merdle, Casby — from evil to abrasive to callous — are put forward for nakedly painful contemplation. There is more pity for Mr Dorrit, more poignancy in his longing in the first half of the book, and adamantine refusal in the second to be respected, not despised. Think of Frederick Dorrit’s hesitancy. There’s nothing funny here. Bleak, grim, extreme mortification (like when Amy Dorrit tries to Clennam for paying Tip’s debt so he won’t be put in the prison)

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Amy and Tim Courtney as Mr Dorrit — just pitch perfect especially in his mad phases

I’ve written (at some length) about the wonders, beauty, intimacy, “corrections” (Davies’s word) and improvements in Davies’ Little Dorrit (also Bleak house — vast worlds, and the mistakes of Edzard’s Little Dorrit) where I also tell the stories (details found most concisely at wikipedia)

In this blog I will therefore bypass most of the novel to talk of the ending where a veil is finally drawn aside to show us what was the profoundly inhumane violation that started all the action — Arthur’s 20 year separation from his family and England and his return and determination to find out what is the truth about his mother’s vile business and make reparations — for what, he finds sort of, may be finds out at book’s end.

At the core of this book remains an unnamed destroyed young woman, Arthur’s mother, whom Arthur’s father, Mr Clennam, married in some clandestine way (perhaps the ancient handfast vows) who Arthur’s uncle cast aside to override with a marriage to the religiously crazed and vindictive second Mrs Clennam (we never learn her first name). The unnamed woman ends up imprisoned in a lunatic asylum, tortured by burning and freezing techniques, and (what else could she do) dies. We are told a ghost haunts the nightmare Clennam house. Arthur was brought up in a continual round of punishment so he should not become like his mother …

Something similar happens in other Victorian novels: for example, Scott’s Heart of Mid-lothian. How many people talk about it as the story of a young woman, Effie, whose illegitimate baby died being born or was still born and is now accused or infanticide and about to be murdered by the state. No, it’s the story of Jeannie Deans and her heroic walk to save Effie, and Effie is presented as shallow, narrow, vain, almost deserving what happened to her because she did have sex outside marriage.

Sue Johnston is a central witness to what happens in Mrs Clennam’s house, especially the machinations about a will where money was left by the uncle who ended the first clandestine marriage of Arthur’s mother and Mr Clennam and overrode it with the second firmly legal marriage of Mrs Clennam to him. This uncle most improbably leaves a legacy to Amy’s uncle, Frederick, because he played such beautiful music to the unnamed woman at some point; this money is upon Frederick’s death to go to his brother’s youngest daughter. (Tus does Dickens’s go into convolutions to make his plot-design come to a compromised end). This is of course Amy — one of the witnesses is Affery, who all novel long is subject to the painful physical abuse of her husband Flintwinch and lives in terror of him. She is so browbeaten she has learned to think what she sees with her own eyes is a dream. Sue Johnston plays the part with just the frenetic anxiety and loss of selfhood such a person might evince:

But this makes no real sense. If Frederick had inherited money, why did he not share it with Mr Dorrit; why does he not tell Amy? It’s these kinds of utter contradictions that point to the book’s story weaknesses. What the point in Dickens’ mind seems to have been is to show this abused woman, this terrified good soul.

Another abused woman is Tattycoram, a mulatto orphan whom Mr and Meagles rescue from an institution, but cannot be made to understand they should treat her with consideration and respect, not make her work at the beck and call of their “Pet” daughter, give her the dignity of a human name (Tatty is a nickname one might give a cat). St the close of the book she must return all apologies and abjection to be taken back. Miss Wade who has a similar story of alienation from family but has become distrustful, embittered because of rejection, mistreats Tatty out of her own distorted nature. Little understanding is accorded Miss Wade.

A single scene between these fine actresses, Freema Agyeman as Harriet, Maxine Peake as Miss Wade, suggests more of their inner lives than Dickens can

Why did Dickens bring them up — in order to castigate them? This resembles the unnamed woman who is never done any justice to but at the end of the novel has her story covered up for the “good” of Arthur, his peace of mind. What?

A whole continuum of women deprived are slid over: the breathless agonizingly desperate (for something to do) Flora, not acceptable to Dickens as fat (like the wife he deserted), mentally child-like Maggie, who follows Amy about everywhere … Standing up for herself — by taking on the world’s values, we have Amy’s sister, Fanny, whose power is limited to what she can earn as a dancing girl unless attached to a male with money. I omit the villainesses. The only (inexplicably) jolly woman in the book is Mrs Plornish with her kindly husband also of limited power. The corresponding tender-hearted men include John Chivery, his father, Pancks (the rent collector who like Affery turns on his oppressor at book’s and movie’s end).

None of these characters drive the plot-design, where nothing much happens. For examples: the Dorrits are broke; the Dorrits are super-rich; the Dorrits are broke again. Pet (or Minnie), an apparently mindless child-woman brought up by the emotionally incompetent Meagles marries a petty sadist, Gowan himself, whose mother spends the book looking down on the unfortunate girl. Mrs Merdle with her large bosom covered with jewels goes bankrupt after her husband kills himself rather than be exposed as a fraud, embezzler, forger; she snubbed Fanny, Amy’s sister, now Fanny snubs her. Clennam rescues the inventor Doyce to set up a business for him, and then Doyce rescues Clennnam from imprisonment for going bankrupt. Pancks collects and then refuses to collect rent. Tatty leaves the Meagles for Miss Wade; Tatty leaves Miss Wade for the Meagles. Chivery’s heart is broken when Amy prefers Clennam. At least there is no reversal as if it were a fictional story. Have I omitted anything? Humor from the terror Cavaletto fears of Rigaud, a blackmailer and murderer — the great knot in the money angle of the book is Rigaud’s blackmail of Mrs Clennam. The book itself feels like a backdrop or nightmare apart and is still. You are entertained by moments of encounter and reversals.

Anton Lesser as Merdle (equivalent of Trollope’s Melmotte) meeting Emma Pierson as Fanny Dorrit holding her own

This is part of the book’s “problems”: it lacks a driving forward force.

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The book will teach you about the political and economic and social worlds around us today — anatomize or disclose the stupid heartlessness, and socially dysfunctional social systems we must live in today. Sudden insights into terrible aspects of the human character in much variety. Ditto — conveyed by dialogue as much as direct invective. There are extraordinary descriptions of all sorts — from prisons to the Alps, aching beauty caughtm then real streets, buildings, countryside A sudden cascading of characters’ activities which tells us where everyone is. The very ending is transcendent.

They paused for a moment on the steps of the portico, looking at the fresh perspective of the street in the autumn morning sun’s bright rays, and then went down.

Went down into a modest life of usefulness and happiness. Went down to give a mother’s care, in the fulness of time, to Fanny’s neglected children no less than to their own, and to leave that lady going into Society for ever and a day. Went down to give a tender nurse and friend to Tip for some few years, who was never vexed by the great exactions he made of her in return for the riches he might have given her if he had ever had them, and who lovingly closed his eyes upon the Marshalsea and all its blighted fruits. They went quietly down into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along in sunshine and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain, fretted and chafed, and made their usual uproar.
— the marriage at novel’s end

The book is also filled with unsolved problems — Dickens can carry on at such length only when he has an external plot-design based on outward suspense that truly interests us, e.g., Bleak House. He has not confronted his own buying into central mechanisms for keeping some groups in society miserable, especially women.

Ellen

More on winter’s tales for when the year ends: the ghost stories of M. R. James

From Number 13 (Greg Wise as Professor Ander hard at work and Tom Burke as Tom Jenkins, a cheerful sinister presence)

Gentle readers and patient friends,

A few years ago, pre-pandemic, I wrote a series of blogs asking what is a Christmasy Story, and basically came up with a moral model, often, tellingly, involved with the death of someone (or near destruction), most of the time with a redemption, or renewal of hope in the future at story’s end. As I did this year over Trollope’s two American Civil War Christmas stories, I brought up how central to these winter tale traditions was the ghost story, mentioning in passing how Dickens’s A Christmas Carol differed so in its happy ending, poetic justice. Most ghost stories are Kafkaesque, nightmarish, uncanny, unnerving.

What I’ve been leaving out is then a mystery of why these have been so much a part of Christmas, becoming explicitly so in the Victorian era. M. R. James in particular is utterly out of whack with most professed goals of festivity, joy, forgiveness and whatnot. This year seeking once again to watch and talk about Christmas stories on my now ancient Trollope & his Contemporaries listserv (@ groups.io), I proposed reading his Stalls of Barchester Cathedral and watching (it’s on YouTube), the 1971 film adaptation. I did both, but then dissatisfied with the weak film, too familiar with the story, I cast about to see what other films, if any, were available as ghost stories, and lo and behold discovered that in 2005 and again in 2017 the BBC attempted to revive the old traditions of the 1980s and make 30-40 minute films of short ghost stories, but this time in all cases, from M. J. James. The first one I watched was A View from the Hill (which held and made me very nervous), and then found short reviews of these, rightly recommending them.

Wandering in a tomb: “Imagine, if you will … ”

I found (as in the earlier ones), superb but not super-famous actors involved, intelligent subtle scripts, e.g., Number 13 (which begins in bright cheerful light). They do not seem to me as masterly as those done way back in the ’60s (Whistle and I’ll come to You, and the brought back Andrew Davies’s Signalman), but they are in color (not a small thing still), so beautifully photographed, or like illustrations, and as a group, compel me to wonder not why people want the thrill of magic, but why, as C.S. Lewis insisted, pain remorseless terror tropes of inexplicability as part of the season’s diet of renewal, remembering, human communal activities.

I’ve no good answer to that, for it’s not enough to say it’s a metaphoric experience which makes us take into account our own powerlessness against the forces of the natural and social worlds. These stories are much more effective when the ghost is genuine, not a psychological projection. I did several years ago write about Oliphant’s ghost stories and the relationship of the gothic ghost story to Christmas. What is terrifying about Whistle and I’ll Come to You is you feel you have yourself brought the ghost out without quite meaning to, and you are not sure you won’t be tempted to do or somehow do that again. This resembles how Hyde begins to be able to come out of Jekyll and take over at will.  The horror is also in this demon’s mocking breaking pf fundamental taboos against dwelling on death’s remains (e.g., playing with a corpse). Sometimes there was a crime perpetrated by the now victim (as in The Stalls) and sometimes (in Number 13), our researcher is digging up from the past real cruelties perpetrated by real people connected to present people’s interests and is warned away.

I now invite you to watch A View from the Hill (the notable actors are Pip Torrens, David Burke, Mark Letheren)

I provide four others in the comments.

So there is a typical structure and mood to all M. R. James whether in verbal story form or film. He builds mood slowly; a character goes to a remote place meaning to do research into the past. When he does, he evokes either a lingering malignant presence whom others living there are half-aware of and too unnerved to speak. Small things are felt; say a claw put out, a cat’s meow; this then grows nervily, louder, and from just an intrusion becomes overwhelming in its brutality. The demonic presence attacks him swiftly.  The ghost or revenant is not always a male in other authors, for example in Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black, where the ghost is a woman in black with unforgettable ferociously hating eyes, a mother whose child was taken from her and let die.

When this eruption from some other realm is effective, the attack is fatal; the person vanishes forever; but it can also be the ending is inconclusive, and you are left waiting with that victim-person who is trying to flee, like say in A View from the Hill, where our previous researcher is waiting for a train that is not coming. What’s chilling is the obtuse person (Pip Torrens) he is visiting appears not to know about this murderous presence and yet is ever leading our victim-character into danger — and then walking off. A blow by blow account — if you need it.

But this is what he sees:

From far

Then he is suddenly inside

In A View from the Hill it’s this pair of binoculars that allows the central victim-hero to see and be inside a cathedral that is no longer there literally. He is then (apparently) hanged for doing this.

The closest contemporary novels that come near this are by Kazuo Ishiguro: his Never Let Me Go has the same realistic surface as a ghost story, while the science fiction that is going on is cruel, and its apparent rational mirrors the senselessness of some modern medical technology uses — and connects us back to Shelley’s Frankenstein. But no one thinks of these as Christmas stories.

M. R. James

And now this delightful documentary by Mark Gatiss, about M.R. James as a man, his career, how these ghost stories emerged, and a brilliant analysis of them. It is 55 minutes, worth every second of it — many clips from BBC years. (I apologize if the link only takes you to a blockED video. You can type in M R James + Mark Gatis into the YouTube search engine and that may take you to this documentary. Poke around.) Gatiss suggests an important literary source of James’s visual imagination are the pictures in the medieval illuminated manuscripts James catalogued. And that James was repressed probably non-practicing homosexual. One amusing moment: Jonathan Miller (who did a brilliant adaptation) quietly insisting on how we are to see what happens in that story as nightmares (no ghost there literally), as if reassuring himself …

Any thoughts, anyone? at any rate, back again (we hope) next Winter Solstice.

Ellen

George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda: an immense continually thinking & feeling book

From Andrew Davies’ 2004 serial drama, three of the major characters of Daniel Deronda: Daniel (Hugh Dancy); Gwendolen Harleth (Romolai Gareth), and Grandcourt Mallinger (Hugh Bonneville)

Here I describe the experience of the book I’ve had over these 3 months, describe it generally and argue that the way of reading it as two separate sides is not adequate — though understandable. To read it as one tapestry with the Jewish story just one strand won’t do either. The problem is, Where is George Eliot in her book? and how is it a text we find her working her own deeper psychic problems out through.  She is mirroring her and Lewes’s life once again (as she did in Middlemarch) …

Ellen

Dear friends and fellow readers,

For the past 3 months, in four different ways, on top of reading the book silently to myself, I’ve been engaged socially through George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda. I took a course in the book (alas only 7 sessions, but we went over time — well past 90 minutes — a number of times) with the marvelously inspiring enchanting Maria Frawley online at Politics and Prose; I participated in a group reading and discussion of it with at least 20 people on the TWWRN face-book group, where each three days someone wrote about three chapters, often in detail, with summaries, evaluations, questions, pictures attached. It was a close read of a mighty meaty book. I listened to Nadia May reading it aloud in an unabridged form on CDs in my car. And I watched for an umpteenth time Davies’s brilliant adaptation (4 DVD form and streaming). This was probably my 4th time through over many years.

Early scene of Mirah (Jodhi May) singing for the Meyricks, Daniel to the side in attendance

This is a book which needs a book to do it justice, and I want to write a not overlong blog about these experiences. I will first write about it in the way literary critics often end up: divide my description into two stories, one about a pair of Jewish characters, Mordecai, dying when we meet him from some fatal organic disease or TB; and child-like Mirah Lapidoth, whom Daniel becomes involved with after he rescues Mirah from suicide by drowning, slowly falls in love with her, and so helps her build a career as a singer and teacher of music. Daniel goes on a quest within London and finds out for her her long-lost brother, Mordecai:  think of Shakespearean romances derived from the 3rd century Greek ones of vast watery worlds where after disaster, tragedy, there is renewal, reunion.

Mordecai (Daniel Evans) waiting and watching for a Deronda on a bridge over the Thames

The other story is, in this scheme, then about at least three groups of English characters, of whom the vulnerable (because monetarily bankrupted after being brought up to do nothing to be self-supportive) Gwendolen Harleth is the center; she marries a sadistic debauched cold man, Grandcourt Mallinger, who has a mistress, Lydia Glasher, now widowed, with four children by Grandcourt.   He, together with her forcible vehemence, haunt and cow the nervous, and proud (also child-like) Gwendolen.

Lydia (Greta Scacchi) terrifying figure for Gwendolen, found among some neolithic stones on Grandcourt’s property.

There is Daniel’s foster father, Sir Hugh Mallinger (brilliantly randy Edward Fox), genial, cynical, a relief for this reader (he is never solemn), the shaded face suggesting how he evades many questions:

Sir Hugh’s wife, daughters (no son); Daniel’s friend, Hans Meyrick, student painter whose family Daniel helps support themselves. Grandcourt’s sycophant Lush (James Bamber in the film).  The Arrowpoints who include a couple who hold out for marriage for love (lest they not get to pass the precious life they have together). And we must not forget Daniel’s mother, Leonora, now called the Princess or Contessa Maria Alcharisi (Barbara Hersey), a strange exotic figure, like Mordecai, a type of character straight out of Walter Scott. She probably belongs to the Jewish story, but she has fiercely thrown off this identity, and tried to erase Daniel’s; her connection to Daniel is through Sir Hugo who once loved her.

Told this way it almost seems an exciting read; the movie is exciting and mesmerizing to watch (strange and repellent beauty), but the book is slow-going, meditative, long passages filled with argumentative and poignant worked-out thoughts. If you look at it this way, you end up having to discuss some very questionable ideals (nationalism, zionism), a genuinely progressive agenda, pro-semitic or at least anti- anti-semitic, on the one hand, and, on the other, the usual attack on coerced mercenary marriages, run by cruel, indifferent and malign men, the subjection of women, with quite a number of them complicit.  This includes importantly Gwendolen’s lachrymose probably abused-as-a-wife mother, Mrs Davilow (played by the endlessly worried looking concerned Amanda Root) who nonetheless does nothing to prevent her daughter from marrying partly for that mother’s sake for money a man Gwendolen knows nothing about that does matter.  Mrs Davilow should & does know enough:

Daniel becomes the linchpin of this diptych, the man of integrity trying to serve all; identity-less when we first meet him, slowly discovering his Jewish heritage. His presence and needs leads us to think about how motherhood as practiced ideally then, and partly now too imprisons women; about adoption as an alternative way of bonding people: it worked for Daniel and Sir Hugo, who love one another, and for Daniel and his mother, who did have her career, though in the book Eliot thoroughly punishes her for it, making her endlessly miserable and now dying and still angry at her father imposing on her the subjected (to her stigmatized) identity of a Jewish wife, mother.

An interesting side-theme is the place of music in our lives, and how to build a career through aristocratic patronage. The learned radical musician Herr Klesmer presides over this: beautiful interesting quotations from Italian poetry of the era:

But there are other ways one could read the book. Here is a second, concentrating again just on the book itself. It’s not two separate stories, but a group of [English] interwoven strands, with Jewish one threaded in and out of the larger tapestry:  the Meyricks take in Mirah, Hans falls in love with her, Daniel’s foster father and his wife promote Mirah, protect Gwendolen after her monstrous husband dies — mostly from an accident he brought on himself. Daniel becomes Gwendolen’s adored trusted confidant, functioning as a psychiatrist-priest: they are the central couple.

Women’s stories might be said to predominate, with the hard deals they are dealt for the most part in life to the fore, but equally there are a group of male stories, with some of the men at least having had to make their way in the world as does Deronda. Even Lush (David Bamber), the failed academic should be considered a human being; he is a conduit for information whom Sir Hugo is not above using.

Both ways account for how basically we read the book in the P&P class and on face-book; how Davies would have us humanely interpret it, with an emphasis on the loving friendship between Mordecai and Daniel, as Daniel takes over Mordecai’s life work (and his sister) — Davies often brings out the male individuals in his film adaptations

The problem here for me is both descriptions omit George Eliot. Where is she? For me this book only becomes understandable when you see Eliot’s presence strongly everywhere — both in the book’s daring insights about women, especially motherhood and the limited choices given women otherwise; and in its odd flaws or sudden absences and contradictions.

What I bring together are Lydia Glasher’s fate: “it was as if some ghastly visions had come to her [Gwendolen] in a dream and said, ‘I am a woman’s life’ (Bk 2, Ch 14) and Mirah’s probable one. The book is at times hopelessly fairy tale stuff (part of its flaws); when Mirah’s basely fraudulent father left his wife taking Mirah with him as a child, he was later led to try to sell her to a man, and probably she would not have been able to escape; if she had made her way to London to find her mother and brother once more, it’s highly unlikely she would have been rescued by a Deronda.

Near suicide romanticized

Grandcourt’s death is too convenient (as is Raffles in Middlemarch, even if both deaths are used to show the ambiguity of murder itself in ordinary life),as well as the legacy aftermath which rescues from destitution Lydia Glasher and her children, and Gwendolen and her mother and sisters.  Eliot never seems to remember the probability in most families would be:  had such a huge estate been left to a nobody mistress and her bastard son, it would have been ferociously contested. Without Daniel’s generous subsidy, the Meyricks would have lived a subsistence life — a widow (Cecilia Imrie tries hard, but the “little mother” designation grates on me), and two or three daughters — they are basically women with one artist son without any money to back them up in life’s ordinary emergencies.

From the National Gallery, we see Eliot’s friendly alert face

I see in all the women of the book and Deronda himself surrogates for Eliot as she over and over again thought about and dramatized the life’s experiences she had known — breaking away from a stern, religious father, a vindictive brother, working for small sums as an editor in the house of a philandering man, not only her unmarried life with Lewes, but Lewes’s own life –Lewes is a model for Ladislaw in Middlemarch, so his burning idealisms (and very sick state) are poured into Mordecai who dies at the end. She was a step-mother to Lewes’s sons, whose lives were not easy.

I see George Eliot in all her fictions immolating central characters who have integrity and good natures. In “Janet’s Repentance,” Janet seems to have been blamed (for alcoholism), and her reward for escaping the brutal husband (also dead by the end) is to become a repentant depressive. Her husband beat her brutally and the community, Eliot shows, allowed this. At the close of The Mill on the Floss, Maggie drowns herself; in Romola, its heroine of the same name endlessly sacrifices all (sexless too). Dorothea gives all to others with little break. There’s the child-like guilty and self-effacing heroines of DD, Gwendolen (desperate to be good) and Mirah (who seems incapable of sustaining an angry thought). The only woman in the book who tried to follow her destiny was Daniel’s mother — presented in this light, not from the light of her career. From what I can see of Eliot’s life, though she’d break down (like Maria Edgeworth before her and Virginia Woolf after) after she published a book and could not read critics, she fulfilled herself mightily. She broke away for herself, spend an individual life of achievement, and did not turn into an exotic, though others from far may have seen her that way since it was felt she had to isolate herself or be subject to continual vicious attacks. The books’ greatness is to show us these predicaments; what makes them disappointing is the relentless pressure on the best major characters to renounce their worthwhile dreams and projects. Daniel has not really started his. It’s a saturnine joke that Lydgate having been forced to establish a lucrative practice among the rich in Bath achieves research about gout that is valuable.

I can only be suggestive: the best biographical study I know thus far is The Real life of Mary Anne Evans by Rosemarie Bodenheimer; one of the best books on her art, George Eliot’s Serial Fiction by Carol A. Martin; The Cambridge Companion has some fine essays, and for me very insightful is The Transformation of Rage: Mourning and Creativity in George Eliot.

Here she is, for example, as a poet, a foremother poet.

It has been a tremendously stimulating three months for me as I made my way through this book with all these other intelligent reading friends and companions.

Probably a bad edition (no introduction, no notes) but the best cover illustration …

Ellen

Dominic Edwardes interviewed @katehowereads

From the campaign to place a plaque in Westminster Abbey for Anthony Trollope

Friends and readers,

A briefer blog than usual (as to space): October 21, 2022, Kate Howe interviewed, the present Chairman of the London Trollope Society

Dominic Edwardes very perceptive on Trollope’s long fiction; he tells of Trollope’s place among his peers, his reputation then and now, his life, the mission of the Trollope Society to keep his books in print and read by as many people as the Society and internet can reach; Dominic also confides how he (DE) he came to read and love Victorian novels, then as among the best of them, Anthony Trollope, Dominic’s first introduction to the Society (he went to an event which he thought would be in costume and it turned out no such thing, so he was the only one there in costume) & what the Society is doing now: yearly dinner, lectures, trips, and a vast growing website where you find recorded information on Trollope’s fiction, on the illustrations to them, on editions, from many talks given at the every-other-week online general reading group, and information about other more local reading groups and lectures.

As prelude or preface to the interview, she includes a cornucopia of beautiful and effective illustrations from the fiction of the era — the sort of thing you find in the original illustrations to Trollope’s novels.

“Oh, George, if you knew all … ” (Francis Arthur Fraser, illustration for Trollope’s Golden Lion of Granpere, not included in Howe’s set, but the same sort of thing)

Posted by Ellen

On reading & watching & listening to Les Miserables

I don’t always make a blog from the books we read but I felt I ought to in the this case. It would be remiss not to — especially
since it is loaded with divisive concepts …

Friends and fellow readers,

It was in October of this past year, that a group of us on TrollopeandHisContemporaries@grous.io began to read the whole of Hugo’s massive novel as translated, introduced and massively annotated by Christine Donougher. We’ve just finished this week. During this time at least one person also read Graham Robb’s massive biography of Hugo, I returned to Bellos’s Novel of the Century, Victor Brombert’s Hugo and the Visionary Novel, and, with a couple of other people, re-watched Andrew Davie’s magnificent film adaptation, as well as the film version of the world-famous musical.

Myself I had seen Eric Schaeffer’s stage version twice (once in London), and concert presentation years before, and for good measure this time re-watched twice Simon Schama’s The Romantics and Us, whose second hour is mostly given over to Hugo as finally, or at the time of the writing of this book, radical revolutionary in his thought.

Mass protest scene from 2012 film

Given how the matter of all this material speaks so home to us today, I can’t see myself not making a blog about it, though I sincerely doubt I have anything new to add to all that has been said and written – and drawn and sung and danced too. One can say with the usual semi-pompous language, the book is an extraordinary prose narrative — a combination of history, political and philosophical thought, fantastic visions, with novel framework and larger than life presences we can call characters to carry us through. And the French is visceral poetry. Full of contradictions, not to omit much muddle.

But this does not put into language that what is so crucial is how it captures the misery, thwarted aspirations, and fleeting joy in grief of millions of desperately poor, imprisoned, ravaged people, most often seen today in the form of endlessly punished refugees. Jean Valjean is Leonard Peltier, Fantine is exploited, derided, and raped woman hidden in plain sight who when she fights back becomes an outcast Christina Casey Ford (she who accused Kavanaugh and ridiculed ended outcast) without funds or friends. Mabeuf our adjunct lecturer scholar. The vast disquisitions about Waterloo, and morphing of gov’ts rarely even addressing a country’s needs, and when it tries, quickly reversed by those who cannot bear to lose a stitch of power or authority. Each type, the good priest, the barbaric cop, the base criminal and his wife, the orphan child, selfless nun, street prostitute — they stand before us.

It seems to me important to say — and maybe another reason I write this blog — that you cannot rely on any of the movies (there have been several, and I’ve tried a couple beyond Davies’) or the musical or (worse yet) the recent popular film of the musical (2012, directed by Tom Hooper), to convey the spirit or meaning of the book to you. Everything is done that can be by way of setting and choices of scenes to turn Hugo’s book into a seeming Catholic religious parable where God’s mysteries are beautiful in his churches and good people there (a reductive travesty). The movies are apolitical, with personal love the key to people’s happiness.  Nothing could be further from the feel and mood of Hugo’s book despite so often the good people being a church functionary.

Of course in the film musical you are worked up to revolutionary-like fervor and cumulatively end crying at the deaths of these good well-meaning people. And there is tragic catharsis: I found myself beginning to cry at Marius’s song too: the words “There’s a grief that can’t be spoken/There’s a pain that goes on and on” felt directly a propos. Empty chairs: that’s a phrase found in an old Civil War song (union side). And the book’s true heroine, Fantine (according to my way of thinking but not the book where Hugo chose a shallow conventional hero and mindless version of the heroine) is taking its true hero off with her to where (like Lear) he will no longer be wracked on this world’s fiery wheel of searing loneliness, and find rest. In Hugo’s book the emphasis is not personal and its significance more like what is found in a Camus novel like La Peste.

Lily Collins as Fantine after the mountebank has done with her, gathering material for dolls

Hair also needed for wigs – and teeth?

I here single out Davies’ film for making modern secular humane sense, with attention to the pathos of several of the characters (reinventing or changing some, like Courfeyreau). Davies’ script shows how despicable are others (Fantine’s seducer, the thug Madame Thenardier, however brutalized by her husband), and terrifying (Ron Cook as the mountebank who scissirs off Fantine’s hair and yanks out her teeth to leave her looking memorably ghastly). He tightens up the story, makes some realistic turns for the story, makes far more sense of Javert as a character (homoerotic, and thus obsessed with Jean Valjean), as well as filling out and making consistent the other characters in ways that bring out the egalitarian strains in the book. The only film adaptation of a classic that comes up to the presentation of the relentless killing of ordinary people practiced by the militia of the state that we see in the Paris streets in Davies’s Les Miserables here is Davies’ own Dr Zhivago.

I don’t feel that Davies quite captures the sinister and chaotic reality of a senseless unjust society and downright evil in law and deepest thought patterns (punish, isolate) of Hugo’s book: in Davies’ Dr Zhivago he has the totalitarian state as run by seething madmen whom ordinary people are terrified by. Dr Zhivago differs from most of  Davies’ work where there is a Trollopian or Dickensian (Victorian?) comic-realistic vision of the world.  Hugo’s world is tragic and exaggerated so in feel with the beautiful French fantastic.  Both project in their different mediums, Hugo with his story, Davies with the considerable apparatus of film adaptations today, the prisons, trials, hierarchical social gatherings, servitudes, what good and powerless people have to contend with. Both are short of the kind of thing we must turn to Primo Levi to find presented consistently (in If this be Man).  Nonetheless because of Davies’ skill in characterization (dialogue, instructions for gestures, collaboration with Tom Hooper, the director), when you finish Davies’ film you will have understood the underlying politics and source of some of the passions of Hugo’s work better.

Hugh Jackman’s lonely face as the dying scene begins

An unusual moment for Madame Thenardier: Helena Bonham Carter bringing out a flatness Olivia Coleman never attempts (and is not in Hugo either)

As for the musical: as presented (no matter where, stage or film), the book script and songs assume we know the story. Hardly anything is explained. It’s arguable nothing need be explicated clearly, except I appreciated what the composers and lyric writers were doing now: it was one long symphony or piece of music which had interruptions for a little dialogue but basically one long song I’ll call it; it changes mood and character voice but it seemed to me consistently a expressionist reaction to Les Miserables basic concept: here are the wretched of the earth, mixed in with cruel senseless authority figures and rules which have nothing to do with these wretched people. At any rate do not help them but seek to control and to punish. Sometimes a voice of kindness is singing, sometimes profound loneliness. The driving rhythms are a build up of rage, passion kept caged and finally reaching some height as the people climb the barricades.

The out-of-whack piece, brought back more than once, “Master of the House,” is a subversive and mindless mocking contrast, with one of the lines referring to Voltaire — as music and song it seemed to say the Voltairian Candide vision might be seethingly hilarious, a release but no use at all to suffering people.  Costumes and settings are imitative of Marat/Sade (that wild grotesque burlesque protest piece of so long ago), intermixed with Dickensian tropes so Gavroche in the film musical is an adorable Artful Dodger cut down.

Reece Yates (2012 Davies’ film) escapes both the cuteness of the Hollywoodized Artful Dodger and Hugo’s own (to me) unfortunate way of not taking the boy quite seriously

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It is so much easier to write about a movie or stage musical than one of the grand novels of the 19th century. To say I loved the long supposed digression (but the book is more digression than it is story) on language and slang won’t do.

Donald Sumpter as Mabeuf (still prosperous, in front of the church with his volumes, 2018 film)

But in order not to go on for too long, we shall have to limit ourselves tonight for exemplary detail to the ending of Hugo’s Part 4, Book 8, Chapter 7, where Mabeuf, once a lowly functionary in a church, is living in a hovel, and due to conditions out of his control, finds he can no longer pay the ridiculous rent for such a place with what he once did.  He is driven to sell his precious collection of books. He refuses to take a gift of money left for him (he would not steal a loaf of break presumably) and takes it to a bank. The last place that needs it. The cry of anguish from his heart matches the cry of Marius’s mean ancien regime grandfather when he cannot threaten Marius into loyalty, much less love in just the previous chapter. At core there is stark grief in the old man’s unwillingness to open up to his grandson or inability, and in the destitute idealist.

This does happen. Charlotte Smith in the early 19th century had to sell all her books to keep herself and family afloat. It was a terrible bitter experience for her – she didn’t quite sell them all, but those which fetched a good sum. Ever after she couldn’t write the same books. I’ve a male friend who lost his tenure, and came to DC and tried to live and get a job and couldn’t and was finally driven to sell his books in order to pay up his rent, move back home (horrible place – deep south, utter Trump country) — but then he was okay for he had a small job there and place to live with his family , a family which the high-minded Marius would have rejected and, as he does in the book (improbably) make his way (to use a very Trollopian phrase).

Looking at the book from a distance, it is very controlled. The story is minimal but it has enough twists and turns and new archetypal characters to take us through several related climaxes while moving along a trajectory of imprisonment, desperation.  I refer to JVJ’s encounter with M. Bienvenu, the priest at the opening of the book whose transformative goodness to him finds a parallel in Jean Valjean’s transformative forgiveness or lack of vengeance to Javert.   Then luck and cleverness enable JVJ to build a business and take care of a whole community, Montfermeil. He is elected Mayor despite not wanting to call attention to himself. While the slender plot-design unravels – Javert finds him after he has rescued Cosette and secured a hovel room for them both.  Like the Zorro he is, he escapes with her (using a rope pulling her up a wall he climbed up himself)  into a convent, and finding a grateful friend, stays for 18 years. And so it goes. He and Cosette leave so she can enter the world, have a chance to see it, and the spite of an old woman once again precludes their quiet retired but unconventional life. Now and again we stop for long meditations, disquisitions on war, society, language, the right type of wedding …

Dominic West as Jean Valjean reading with the little Cosette before they are forced to flee and end up in the convent

Our Jean Valjean is all heroes. Today I have been reading Christa Wolf’s Cassandra, where the one good man in the whole of Troy and among the Greeks is Aeneas, with whom Cassandra falls in love. She plays a part like Dido’s, and he must desert her out of a sense of duty (pius Aeneas), to care for his people. Well this reminds me of Jean Valjean’s behavior towards the people of Montfermeil as mayor: he thinks about them when he is about to give himself up because he can’t face allowing another person to be taken for him and put in jail. Like Foyle (in the justly respected World War II British ITV mystery series), JVJ decides that the greater general hoped-for good (that when such a good mayor leaves, all the prosperity might fall apart) does not substitute for doing a clearly concrete moral act: you must not use someone else. So he gives himself in and must escape again before he can rescue Cosette, and Fantine dies without having seen her child, in Hugo’s book believing herself forever damned.

I think that Hugo does want us to remember Aeneas carrying his father on his back during the siege of Troy and saving his life when JVJ carries Marius on his back through a sewer, almost drowns with him in filthy quicksand. But when Jean Valjean pulls himself and Marius up and comes to the locked door, who is there? Thenardier asking for money. A sardonic joke subtextually.

True heroism is caring, strength to do the truly moral thing, though the world’s consequences show how you cannot escape hurting someone. Amid all Hugo’s investment in heroic maleness, Les Miserables is as anti-war as it is anti- the capitalist spirit. Thenardier let us recall in the book ends a slave-trader in the US.

Ellen

My Anthony Trollope Library

This is a scan of a postcard sent to me in 1994; it was done as part of the campaign to have a plaque for Anthony Trollope in Westminster Abbey

Dear friends and readers,

Now for something a little different. Just, or focusing on, photos. Over on the Trollope Society face-book page, someone suggested people send in photos of their Trollope books. So I took four photos of what I have that is real, physical books, folders, papers, and share them here.

First, there’s my main bookcase, which stands to the left of my desk: half books by Trollope (some several editions), the other half the first part of an alphabet of critical, biographical and other non-fiction books on Trollope or an area of concern to him. I didn’t get the very top, which is another row of books.

Second, behind me as I face my PC (some of it visible in videos), my folders of essays, all sorts of primary stuff xeroxed, hard-to-get texts by Trollope, especially lots on illustrations and handbooks:

Third, the books and folders that didn’t fit and are in the closet to the right of the shelves of folders:

And fourth, lastly, a row and a half of notebooks on (some screenplays I copied out) and DVDS of Trollope movies. It’s the second shelf starting one third the way through and the third. All in my enclosed porch where I keep all my DVDs and notebooks in two similar bookcases.

And of course separately, the short stack of what I’m reading now: two copies of Orley Farm, one with original illustrations. On a table in my workroom. After I finished my Joanna Trollope blog I put back her books. These or she sit/s in another room next to novels and travel books of Fanny Trollope (some of these in xeroxes in folders) and Thomas Trollope’s What I Believe.

I necessarily omit all that I now have as digital books and files in my computer. Around 2004 I stopped xeroxing things, stopped printing out except when I needed a final paper to take with me to a conference to read aloud (or now on zoom).  I now have a couple of books by Anthony Trollope as digital files (How the Mastiffs Went to Iceland is one of them), a few more secondary books and all the essays and articles gathered from online databases since.

Anthony Trollope by Julia Margaret Cameron, albumen print, 1864

I believe I could do the something similar (write a similar photo blog) of my Jane Austen library:  it would take two photos, one full bookcase of books by and on Austen (same size bookcase so 7 rows of books); and a second of three rows of shelves in my enclosed porch, not just notebooks and DVDs of Austen movies, but one of the shelves has sequels (many unread) and translations of Austen’s novels into French and Italian (some read).

Ellen

Reading two lesser-known Trollope novels: The Vicar of Bullhampton & John Caldigate

Frank Fenwick faces the community and the Marquis of Trowbridge, defying them on behalf of the working class Sam Brattle whom they are about to keep in prison for crime there is no evidence he committed (Henry Woods, first illustrator of Vicar of Bullhampton)

John Caldigate glimpses and is attracted to the independent Mrs Euphemia Smith seen for the first time aboard their shared ship going to Australia (Francis Moseley, 20th century illustrator of Folio John Caldigate)

Friends and readers,

Several months ago now on Trollope and his Contemporaries at groups.io I read with a group of people Trollope’s colonialist (even if much of it does not take place in Australia) novel, John Caldigate, together with Simon Grennan’s graphic novel post-text (it changes the story in several important ways) to the book, Dispossession.

One of the houses in John Caldigate as imagined and drawn by Grennan, probably the Caldigates — the endpapers to the graphic novel

Then about two months ago now, a rather intensive reading and discussion of Trollope’s Vicar of Bullhampton, took place on a facebook page run by a couple of people who opened a general page called The Way We Read Now I’ve read both before (see group read of John Caldigate on my website), and especially the first time was much drawn to The Vicar of Bullhampton: my father gave me a Dover copy to read during when I landed in Metropolitan Hospital on the upper East Side of NYC after a car accident, and it fully absorbed me.

These novels are alike in being lesser known novels, not overly long for Trollope, not widely read, with (as I realize now) The Vicar of Bullhampton having a distorted reputation as a sub-Barchester novel (it is very unlike these), and when it is remembered at all, John Caldigate the one novel where Trollope deals at length with bigamy: he wanted to call it Mrs John Caldigate, which would have called attention to the question, which of the two central female characters, Euphemia Smith or Hester Bolton is legally Caldigate’s wife.

But there is another angle on these books which leads me to want to write about them together and here. They both broach taboo topics and controversial issues in Trollope’s era and show him analysing and looking for revealing cracks and contradictions, cruelties, blind prejudices and injustices, at the same time as he is disappointingly deeply unfair to the central women characters of both. In The Vicar of Bullhampton (1868) Trollope was in fact way ahead of his time in his attitudes towards prostitution, working class people, and policing (the criminal justice system he did understand and was very sceptical about how it worked).

But when it comes to making inferences from his own rather different premises than the average person,Trollope goes right back to misogyny, especially sexual controlling and shaming and blaming of women. He presents an impossibly abject and self-hating young woman as Carry Brattle, a young woman no longer chaste, possibly quietly for a time living with this or that young man outside marriage, in the lingo of the time, a “castaway” as apparently the only way he could get himself to sympathize with such a young woman. He allows his central heroine, Mary Lowther, to take on the blame for acceding to an engagement all around her conspired to pressure her into (including by downright lies), and refuses to give her any solution to what to do with her existence except be sure she is in love with the man she is to make her master. The unfortunate male she engages herself to is berated by everyone in the book who encouraged him to stalk her. By contrast, the depiction of the prejudice and suspicion surrounding Sam Brattle for (in effect) simply walking about while working class is simply shown for the class bias it is. When the powerful man of the town angry that his prejudice is not going to reign supreme, encourages the dissenting minister of the town to build a church abutting the Vicar’s and spreads salacious rumors about the Vicar’s relationship with Carry — all to punish the Vicar for his courageous candor in defending both Brattles, there is a unbiased complexity about the various components of what we could call the Vicar’s authentic selfhood (similar to but not as brilliant as the one found within Josiah Crawley in The Last Chronicle of Barset.

In John Caldigate (1877) Trollope may be said to question marriage itself, and partly make a case for people being able to break a marriage if they find they are incompatible with or can do better elsewhere or are just tired of the person they chose, but when it comes to a trial and a judgement (and prison sentences) he only allows the male to be pardoned, and puts the woman in prison: this is one of the changes Grennan feels he must make — Euphemia Smith in his graphic novel goes as free as John Caldigate, and Grennan is a lot more candid than Trollope in dramatizing what happened in Australia and the probably clandestine marriage Caldigate entered into. At no time does Trollope’s hero ever show any remorse for his lies to various women he flirts with rather callously, nd his lies to Hester’s family. Once he returns from Australia he is automatically his father’s darling because the father was so lonely for him even though before he left he had driven up high gambling debts, would not allow his father to see him reading or doing anything intelligent (just rat-catching, and womanizing) because it seems he was determined to be seen to exercise his own will. After an initial even-handed presentation of Euphemia, when she returns to England, she is treated with the kind of calumny Trollope intends to scold readers for treating the Carry Brattles of the world. It seems the woman is not allowed to be at all successful in an aggressively competitive life while the man who returns with wealth is ultimately rewarded.

You could call these books problem novels where Trollope is examining extremely problematic behavior in societies towards conventionally tabooed and conventionally applauded behavior. Trollope shows the pernicious inadequacies (especially cruelty to vulnerable impoverished single women on board ships and in village life), and egregious injustices of society (who wins in courts) — at the same time as he upholds the white male patriarchy. They therefore function in a somewhat different way than he might have intended, depending on the reader. People who have the courage to engage with the topics broached by Trollope often tell more about themselves as they approve and accept, or critique and reject, what Trollope has dramatized. Trollope deliberately creates situations which de-stabilize accepted codes and norms: through the stories he rips open the contradictions and also morally awful behavior or standards or ideas to make us look at these.

I’ve put off writing about them since in both cases, I wrote individual postings on both novels, sometimes at length, sometimes several on different angles, and sometimes not just in response to the chapters at hand or their context, but also to the other person or people posting too. It would be a lot of work to distill them. into a blog. I have done this for other of the Trollope novels, but so much is omitted, and in these two novels’ cases the controversies Trollope meant to bring up and be discussed would have to be flattened or lost. It’s this that drove me to make the large sections on my website for some of the Trollope novels I read with others. I just reprint all the postings under the chapters they are about, occasionally festooned with illustrations, photographs or stills from relevant movies, e.g., this one on The Small House at Allington. I have been putting my postings on The Vicar of Bullhampton on my groups.io listserv just so there will be a place on the Internet where they can be found (as long as the archives are online). I also had promised myself I would make no more overlong blogs.

My solution this time is just reprint a couple of the postings from each group read that I hope will be of interest to a reader and leave him or her to find the rest on Facebook or groups.io or read the novels (and Grennan’s Dispossession if so minded). Since the Vicar was written earlier, is a mid-career Trollope book, I’ll put the postings about this novel first.

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Carey Mulligan as Bathesheba in Far from the Madding Crowd: she is subjected to similar pressures as Mary Lowther, also supposed beautiful — one important difference is Bathesheba has property, Mary has not enough to rent lodgings and buy food …

Vicar of Bullhampton, Chapter 2: Flo’s Red Ball:

The center of the chapter is intense pressure on Mary, the heroine, to marry a man she says she does not love. Here is Trollope’s narrator: “The parson and his wife were altogether of one mind in this matter, and thought that Mary Lowther ought to be made to give herself to Harry Gilmore.” She should be coerced, give herself means go to bed with him, give her body to him. Again, Trollope as narrator: “She knew very well that she would not accept him now” after he has her thinking is “was she not wrong to keep him in suspense.” We see she does also because he is encouraged to come and nag her. All the next paragraph is about how “she did not think she could ever bring herself to say she would be this man’s wife” (think what wife meant in that era) and “because she still doubted, she was told by her friend she was behaving badly.” Of course he behaves sweetly; he wants her, and he is encouraged to carry on, and pay no attention for real to her not wanting him. It has been suggested that Mary is a readerly type and he no intellectual. I think of Fanny Price deeply irritated when Henry Crawford carries on after she has said no several times — Crawford’s appetite was whetted by the no (that’s from Mansfield Park). In his introduction Skilton remarks critics in the period saw parallels between the two heroines (Carrie Brattle who has been mentioned once), but instead of focusing on Mary’s emotional life and needs (just emerging here), I’ll call our attention to the game of consent which is what is being put before us. That’s what we are looking at: coerced consent will turned be into just or plain consent once she says yes, for they will forget they coerced her on the grounds they know better what she is or what she needs than she does. Do they? We have before us the injunction that a woman must be willing turned into forced willingness. It’s forced consent that’s the problem (and allows rape to be not-rape). Mary has to be ever so careful not to seem to promise anything or they will leap on it. And how easily a ball falls into the water. Too much attention is paid to “no” when often in reality situations actually arise over consent itself where consent is used as a weapon. All this politeness (and Janet is not very polite) is a screen. As it happens, the latest issue of NYRB has Anne Enright talking about “the burden of ‘yes'” (so the issue yesterday is still the issue today), and I’ll end on a wonderful phrase where she sums up the larger perspective here: “you cannot assert an equivalence of desire between men and women when there is no equivalence of power.” Gilmore has inherited income, power, land, respect, can serve in powerful offices; Mary must live with relatives, and is dependent on their kindness to her. Are we told if she has any income of her own? Let us recall what frees Lily Dale at the end of her story is her uncle leaves her 3000 pounds a year.

Yes, she is poor- her whole fortune is 1200 lbs, perhaps 50/annum.

I thought of another analogous Victorian text which might be of interest: the other night I watched the 2015 film adaptation of Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, and it seemed to me there too the issue was this one of forcing Bathsheba to consent — also placing the story in a rural area. I can see Carey Mulligan as Mary Lowther

Chapter 17: The Marquis of Trowbridge

Thank you to Scott; as all others have said we are one-third through and have an important scene, moment, linchpin occurrence. This chapter contains one of the Vicar’s great heroic moments. He stands up against the powerful in the community to demand that a man against whom there is no evidence for any crime be freed. We are told leading up to the scene that the Marquis of Trowbridge is a bully who likes to inflict his power on others, and is insulted by the idea (with him the suspicion and class of the man, a son of a tenant, means he did it) Sam murdered someone on land near his. Gilmore and the Vicar are meanwhile called Damon and Pythias, a curiously homoerotic note here, but it does also mean constant close friendship. What Trowbridge really hates is anyone defying him. By contrast we are told how Fenwick tolerates the dissenting chapel right near the Anglican church he presides over at the same time as emotionally he resents Puddleham (given one of these allegorical reductive names); but Fenwick holds to a principle of toleration. The scene repeats one from Last Chronicle of Barset where Crawley stands up against the magistrates but cannot defy them because the “evidence” which supposedly proves he stole 20£ was found upon him. Fenwick takes his stand not on Sam’s innocence because we cannot know this, but the complete lack of evidence for any arrest or conviction. It’s a long scene with Trowbridge insisting he has an interest in arresting Sam because he owns so much property. He is backed up by that same dissenting minister, Puddleham (who it’s implied is doing this to gain power against Fenwick by enlisting himself under Trowbridge). Fenwick with Sam’s lawyer wins. But what really incenses Trowbridge is Fenwick has the “gall” (nerve, what an outrage) to mention Trowbridge’s daughters in the same breath as the Brattles because the Brattles are further bad-mouthed by the existence of a daughter, Carrie Brattle (who we know is a castaway). It seems like Sam’s walking about at night, his friendships, that she’s his sister is another insinuation to help arrest (and convict) him. It’s this mention of Trowbridge’s daughter which brings the scene to an end, thus intertwining the intense sexual plot-designs with this murder one. In both instances the Vicar is our hero and for once on the wholly right or moral side. I will remark here that one of the ironies Trollope wants us to see all along is that the Vicar has continually acted as if he were a powerful man, and gains power because of his position and his belief in himself, but Trollope wants us to see that the Vicar is relatively powerless against many forces and people in his community — not as powerless as the Brattles of course, or any “mere tenant” or any woman w/o control of property (none of them in this book thus far). The Vicar in other words has won this scene literally (Sam will be freed) but there is no indication he will win this larger battle with injustice as he seem to be losing gaining Mary for the convenience or desires of his wife and Gilmore. So the title of the book is partly ironic.

Chapter 36 – Sam Brattle Goes Off Again

I just loved how Sam was allowed to speak, and how his argument is cogent and persuasive. Also some of his motives & behavior. Says he, Is he not to be allowed an independent life because the police have not found out who killed Trumbull? can that be (just is his point) law? “a chap can’t move to better hisself, because them fellers can’t catch the men as murdered old Trumbull? That can’t be law — or justice.” The Vicar does begin by telling Sam that having been with this group of men trespassing a garden, he “has no just cause of complaint at finding his own liberty crippled (what a strong word), but then he agrees (narrator’s voice intermingled here too): “no policeman could have the right to confine him to one parish;” no shred of evidence he could give information. We’re told Sam argued the matter so well (“sharp and intelligent”) that Fenwick was convinced (it’s implied as long as Sam is available because bail was paid). Beyond wanting to escape very hard work at little pay in a hostile atmosphere, Sam has wanted to help Carry. He has infuriated the old man by trying to get the father to let Carry come back: “I just said a word to him, as a word was right to be said,” to the Vicar: “she ought to be let come home again, and that if I was to stay at the mill,I’d fetch her. The father said get out. Then the problem of where she went, how to find her, in talk brings out this kind of abject self-hatred from Sam paralleling Carry when the Vicar says he’ll take her in: “The likes of you won’t likely have a sister the likes of her.” We already know Janet won’t allow this: her excuse: the servants will object (worried about their reputations?) Sam says “she is not a bad ‘un,” to which the Vicar replies: “And as for bad, which of us isn’t bad? The world is very hard on her offense” (he separates the person from the act). Sam again gets the truly eloquent statement: “Down on her, like a dog on a rat” (I am sorry for the metaphor as it maligns dogs – but Trollope is not alive to animals as fully sentient beings and uses them as symbols). Then, as Melody says, back to the Vicar’s fight. I agree with John, all religious groups are entitled to worship, but that kind of hidden prejudice in the Vicar and his wife, is lost among what really makes it openly unbearable to the Fenwicks: the chapel is an eyesore, “a hideously ugly building, roofless, doorless, windowless.” Of course, the Anglican church has a lot more money and time to build pretty buildings. The bishop repeats his early performance by refusing to go into details (reminding me of the US supreme court with its “shadow” allowing laws to pass into being without having the courage to tell their unacceptable opinions). Then Gilmore tells the friend seeking support, well, he doesn’t see why the Vicar is so annoyed. Comically Janet is growing thin with this aggravation: it’s more than snobbery, it’s being made manifest that she is not as invulnerable and powerful in her own right (as Vicar’s wife) as she likes to think. What’s interesting to me here is how the Vicar finds his friends will not support him if it’s inconvenient to them. Now, Sam has acted in ways that show he does not always consult his own convenience.

“It went forth through the village that Mr. Puddleham had described Mrs. Fenwick as Jezebel, and the torch of discord had been thrown down, and war was raging through the parish.” Sad though all the discord is, imagining Mrs. Fenwick as Jezebel has to be worth a chuckle” –. Ginny

How absurd is Puddleham. Janet a Jezebel … but then this fits into low church imagery and he has no ability to think at all so he uses what he has read.

Trollope had input into what scenes would be illustrated (as well as which illustrator would be chosen). What is telling here is the way in which George Thomas pictured Crawley anticipates the way Henry Woods pictures Fenwick. First Crawley facing the magistrates

Then parallel to Crawley Fenwick facing Trowbridge. In both cases we see our hero from the back in what seems the subject position, the vulnerable person. Fenwick as drawn by Henry Woods for Vicar of Bullhampton facing the powerful of the community.

Carry Brattle at the window of her parents’ house, climbing in — one of the way the society inflicted punishment on young woman was if she was in the street, alone, she could be picked up as vagrant and put to hard labor and little food for three months (a character in Gaskell’s North and South dies from this treatment)

Chapter 69 (almost the end of the book): The Trial

I find many of Trollope’s court trial scenes fascinating: The Macdermots of Ballycloran, The Three Clerks, Orley Farm — to the non-lawyer they reveal the venality and pretenses that courts go through: in two of the above cases, the verdict is deeply unjust or just literally wrong, but it’s what the lawyer has maneuvered the community into agreeing to (Orley Farm) or is a product of the community’s desire to scapegoat a vulnerable person to assuage their fears (Macdermots). In Three Clerks, there is no punishment for the truly bad man, Undy Scott. I’ve not got the time it would take to go through all the turns of the scene which bring to an ironic or fitting climax what happened to the characters over the course of the book. I find this the fitting conclusion. I’ll pinpoint one piece. I happen to be beginning Les Miserables just now and the exemplary priest who opens the book sees an analogous scene where the agent of the state (here the defense lawyer) behaves as manipulatively, and ultimately amorally as this man: Monseigneur Bienvenu’s one remark is: “And where will the crown prosecutor face judgement?” The prosecutor had caught the man who counterfeited money by tricking the woman who loved him (after torturing her to no avail) into thinking he had another lover. So she told all. The person who ought to be punished is the defense attorney for his viciousness; he did not succeed in destroying Carry altogether. If there is a character in the books whose suicide would be understandable it’s hers — indeed she ought to be admired for not killing herself.  The immediate emotions of those in the court were on her side; they would not last of course and do her no good. His way of defending his client has nothing to do with what the client did. This is one of Trollope’s brilliant analyses and exposes of what happens in courts.  The scene also justifies and exemplifies what Margaret Oliphant wrote in her brilliant “The Grievances of Women,” where she says the core one is that whatever their pretended worship of women (she has no use for chivalry), men treat women with contempt, as of no value beyond what they use them for, with their main technique being ridicule just as this attorney throws at Carry. As for Acorn earlier in the book we are told that he had some decent qualities but that after he went to prison he came out a much worse and desperate man. His life is one of those thrown away by the Bullhampton community.

Yes the trial turned into a trial of Carry, as sister to one of the witnesses. A woman accuses a man of rape; he did it, and she is the one the public punishes; it is common for him to get off. And how to do it? well, ridicule her as in the case of Christine Casey Ford.

*******************************

Iconic 19th century Austalian watercolor: Ashton, A Solitary Ramble — a respectable white colonialist woman of the era

At the Leuven Trollope conference, Grennan told me he dressed Mrs Smith so she would have been recognizable in the era as a “Dolly Varden:” she is a character in Barnaby Rudge whose coy highly-sexualized self-presentation (Dickens just salivates over her) was taken up by music hall performers — after all Mrs Smith has been and returns to the stage (though the reader never see her do this). I admit I prefer to imagine Mrs Smith in her more somber outfits as a mature woman who confronts life and men frankly as their equal.

Pages from a graphic novel ‘Dispossession’ by Simon Grennan.
Mrs Smith dressed in a Dolly Varden outfit: cf the typical white colonialist woman of the era, and Francis Moseley’s portrait

John Caldigate, the first three chapters

We open with Daniel Caldigate who we are told is a stern man and made his daughter’s lives a trial, and wasn’t nice to his wife. They all died around the same time and then he regretted his behavior but it was too late and anyway had he had it to do all over again, Trollope tells us, he would have behaved the same. This is a realistic depiction of a Sir Thomas Bertram type.

So his son is a disappointment. John Caldigate. I am assuming others have read the text or will be by early this week — I see already in the description of John’s misdemeanours and bad behavior signs offered he has it in him to be better. But he isn’t — the idea I feel thrown out is John Caldigate is one of these people who resents control, resents anyone trying to enforce on him behavior that does not come easy or natural. Like studying, like reading, like behaving virtuously. Not only does he spend his time in rat contests and killing animals (here Trollope is not pro-hunt) but he gets into debt with a man called Davies and while we are told it’s gambling and over-spending, I see plenty of hints he is sexually promiscuous — spends his money on prostitutes. We are told how tall he is, how handsome. He spends his time at the Babington relatives’ house where they are similarly frivolous people. What he does not realize is they are tolerating him the way they do because he is a rich heir and they want him for one of their daughters, Polly. Polly is all right but he is not attracted but he finds himself just about engaged to her because of his aunt’s maneuvers. At the Shandy house he overtly teases Maria over a book later on, manipulating her into confessing how much she’ll miss him.

Trouble is he is in debt — who will pay his debts. He owes to the college and if he doesn’t pay will not get his degree. His father does pay this but he will not pay anything else. Young John will show no remorse and keeps his bad behavior up. Father is so hurt — he’s lonely — that he thinks to leave the property elsewhere! He hates primogeniture because, like his son, he hates to be controlled. Things going from bad to worse and now John is attracted to the idea of going to Australia to get rich quick mining gold. One needs money to go, he has these debts. Well the father will pay if he gives up his right to the property.

So what the hell, he agrees. Steps in the Boltons. Mr Bolton a lawyer who advises the father against this but he agrees to do what his employer wants and John comes to visit and there is Mrs Bolton, another one of these harridan puritan women whom Trollope hates and she is this beautiful daughter — ever so pure, ever so represssed, ever so innocent – -and of course John decides he will go to Australia, get rich, come back and in effect buy her

Wonderful descriptions of houses — the Boltons a real “puritan” group with 4 brothers who have followed the straight and narrow and prospered. The two chapters are named after the houses, Folking (this is an imagined specific place but you can find the area of Cambridge on the map) and Puritan Grange. Symbolic and effectively believable towns and cultures.

John Caldigate is a stud who thus far turns me off. I couldn’t care less what happens to him, and think he deserves whatever is coming to him (Trollope wants us to think this I suggest) and yet I know I am supposed to care – John Caldigate is supposed to matter to me. Trollope wants me to care about John Caldigate as a significant person.

When after Caldigate returns from Australia, marries Hester, she has a baby (all very rapidly) in the book, he tries to hold onto her as his property, but when she visits her parents and they are determined to keep her prisoner, she lays on the floor near the front door with her baby (from Dispossession)

It is getting to be an overlong blog so I must put the other two postings I’ve chosen and coda in the comments. Here are Chapters 33-36; 49-54; Diana Archibald’s wise commentary in her Domestic Imperialism and Emigration in Victorian Literature.

Ellen

Reading Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables together

So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation, which, in the face of civilization, artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates a destiny that is divine, with human fatality; so long as the three problems of the age – the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of woman by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night – are not solved; as long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words, and from a yet more extended point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless.”
Victor Hugo, preface to Les Misérables (Hauteville House, 1862)

Dear friends and reader,

As I started to read it, the text seems to me utterly contemporary and referring itself to what is all around us today; a book again
for our time … I became so excited with the beauty of the prose and the incisive suggestively rich allegorical underpinnings …

I’m hope I am not giving an impression that I spend my life making schedules for reading with other people: this the sixth such calendar I’ve put on this blog this year. In four cases they were part of syllabi for classes I teach (this year all online) but in two they are schedules for me and several other people (thus far we have 7) to read together over several weeks (here months) on a listserv. I put this one on because most unexpectedly when I shared a previous schedule for this book with two FB pages I found a couple of people joined the listservs where we are reading them, and more people were planning to read along than I thought would. It is a famous book, many movies, a stupendously successful musical, many editions, many translations, and a full secondary literature.

I then discovered I had been far too optimistic or naive about quite how long Victor Hugo’s profound masterpiece is. In the 2013 Deluxe Penguin edition I am reading the text in it’s 1416 pages, including notes bit excluding the introduction. So I revised it, and will now put it here and the URL to this blog in those two places as an amendment. I am also inviting people to join us this way. Go to:

https://groups.io/g/TrollopeAndHisContemporaries

or

https://groups.io/g/18thCWorlds

The novel is divided into 5 books, corresponding (as David Bellos shows in his wonderfully lucid nformative and enjoyable book on Les Miserables as The Novel of the Century) to five stories or narratives, the first three centered more or less on three of the major characters: 1) Fantine; 2) her daughter, Cosette; 3) the young man who falls in love with Cosette, Marius; 5) and our hero whose lifeline is the general backbone of the book, Jean Valjean. 4 appears to be centered on the rebellion that occurs in the novel in Paris, which all our still living major characters, even Javert, the police guard who goes in pursuit of Valjean, take part in. Parts 1, 2, 3, and 5 are 8 to 9 books each, with Part 4, 15 books.

I will be reading the recent Penguin translated by Christine Donougher (used by Bellos, recommended by him) and have followed the numbers I found there but also have the older Penguin Norman Denny (where two chapters said to be straight history are placed in the back of the book). This time I do not have the text in French (as I did when on these same listservs we read Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris).

For the week beginning Sunday,

Oct 3: Part 1, Bks 1-2
Oct 10, Part 1, Bks 3-5
Oct 17, Part 1, Bks 6-8
Oct 24, Part 2, Bks 1-3
Oct 31, Part 2, Bks 4-6
Nov 7, Part 2, Bks 7-8
Nov 14, Part 3, Bks 1-3
Nov 21, Part 3, Bks 4-6
Nov 28, Part 3, Bks 7-8
Dec 5, Part 4, Bks 1-3
Dec 12, Part 4, Bks 4-6
Dec 19 Part 4, Bks 7-9
Dec 26 Part 4, Bks 10-12
Jan 2, Part 4: Bks 13-15
Jan 9, Part 5, Bks 1-3
Jan 16, Part 5, Bks 4-6
Jan 23, Part 5, Bks 7-9

So we finish just as February is rolling round …

As you can see we’ve started already but we will take a longer time over the first Part (Fantine) to give people a chance to join in, get the book and catch up, become (we hope) immersed.

Harriet Walter reading aloud poetry (so did Tobias Menzies) from Simon Schama’s The Romantics and US: the third part includes an impressive meditation on Hugo

Translations and editions. For what it’s worth, here is an article about the merits and flaws of several central translations. The Wilbour translation is contemporary with Hugo, and the Isabel Hapgood is another good 19th century text (with pictures), but Hugo sanctioned and gave advice on a translation by Sir Lascelles Wraxall, which is online at Gutenberg. If you go to Part 1, Fantine, that will take you to the later books. Hugo’s original French is also online at Gutenberg: you begin with Part 1, Fantine. There is a venerable Everyman whose translator is not named. Here is my old Denny, quite lively English, with a good introduction. And the latest, an award winner by the highly praised Julie Rose for Modern Library

Group photo of actors in 2018/29 Les Miserables

Movies galore: I’ve watched several and think nothing competes with the most recent, however too short, by Andrew Davies, 2018/19: Dominic West, David Oyelowo, Adeel Akhtar; Lily Collins, Olivia Coleman; Ron Cook. Dir: BBC/Masterpiece. I’ve never seen a more terrifying poignant depiction, Lily Collins astonishing, unforgettable, without hair, without teeth, laughed at, spurned and finally dying without retrieving her child in time.

The musical needs no description here. Here is a blog where they read Les Miserables one chapter a day and compared the movies (it includes clips).

Signature theater production in Arlington (my husband, Jim, loved this one and wrote a now lost blog on it)

Here is Peter Brooks’s just, apt, enthusiastic review of David Bellos’ book (you can find none better in the new biography of a book mode) through having read about Hugo thoroughly and Les Miserables too. I’m also reading slowly as we go Graham Robb’s suave biography

Victor Hugo on the terrace of Hauteville House, Guernsey, where he wrote Les Misérables, 1868

Join us

https://groups.io/g/TrollopeAndHisContemporaries

or

https://groups.io/g/18thCWorlds

Ellen

Unsung heroes — and heroines: Alan Plater: Hearing the Music

Alan Plater (1935-2010), screenplay writer extraordinaire, playwright, musician-composer

Dear friends and readers,

Tonight in my efforts to watch a Region 2 version of the 1987 Fortunes of War, a brilliant 7 episode serial adaptation of Olivia Manning’s brilliant trilogies, The Balkan Trilogy and Levant Trilogy, I was driven to use my multiregional player attached to my flat TV. My vlc viewer just was not strong enough to get through the occasional damage on the disks (in this set there are 3), and I clicked by mistake on something called “Timeshift.” I just could not get out of this program, and was irritated until within a minute or so I realized it was BBC documentary, lovingly and intelligently done, appreciative, of the life’s work of Alan Plater: Hearing the Music (unfortunately not available from the site it’s now announced on).

In the 1960s (many one and two hour plays) and early 1970s he wrote over 50 screenplays for the BBC; he wrote fewer in the later 1970s and into the 1990s running up to 2000 (his last) but these include the memorable whole of the Barchester Chronicles, this Fortunes of War, and one of the best of the episodes of the important Danger UXB; his work includes Misterioso, The Good Companions (J. B. Priestley novel turned into a musical), A Very British Coup — so many it’s hard to look them all up. With many stunning performances, from Judy Dench to my favorite, Barbara Flynn, playing Jill Swinburne, whom Plater said was a version of himself.

Although this Guardian obituary does justice to Plater by beginning by naming him as one of the screenplay writers for British TV who made an important difference in the quality of its drama, and changed what you could represent and how ever after, in the tone of respect and felt appreciation for his work, the writer does not emphasize sufficiently Plater’s love of music, jazz and modern rock, his use of it in his work — and his political point of view (socialist). According to Timeshift (and other pieces I’ve read), Plater was a highly original writer for TV in the 1960s strongly because of his Hull and musical background (he studied to be an architect and that probably helped his sense of structure). At the time most shows displayed upper class accents and working class people were given cockney accents, with the dialogue often stiff or naive, or utterly conventionalized so as not to be realistic. With his roots in Northern England, especially Hull, he was one of those who changed all that, writing dialogue for the real spoken voices, kinds of accents different idiolects across Britain. He slowed down the action, and often wrote scenes between two or three characters conceived of as the core of the drama. Most of all he integrated music into his plays, conveying meaning through music. Music told the identity, the culture, the past, the feel of his characters; in talking of how he wrote his plays he called his process like that of Jazz; he has 12 bars, and within that he provides variations.

Here is one 10 minute segment on him, together with a discussion of a four season series made for Yorkshire ITV, the much respected and popular Beiderbecke Trilogy:

You hear and see Barbara Flynn talking too.

He conveyed how people really talk by writing less dialogue too and leaving spaces for pause, for really felt enacting by the actors together. He loved to develop what the author of a novel might have left out — what was the sermon the Reverend Slope spoke from Barchester Chronicles — it’s not in Trollope but improvised as the script developed by Plater.

Plater is not alone unsung. I cannot express how often I have had the experience of identifying a wonderful TV drama show by its writer, and been greeted by a blank look. If I’ve tried to tell the person who was the writer, what his or her career, what other programs he or she wrote, they politely wait for me to finish. They don’t seem to realize their love of Dickens is a love of Alexander Baron (prolific screenplay writer of the 1980s with some of them peculiarly fine, and a good novelist too) or Andrew Davies or Arthur Hopcraft or Simon Raven (of the Pallisers). Nowadays many women write these screenplays, Sandy Welch (Our Mutual Friend 1999) is an older practitioner, so too Fay Weldon (1979 Pride and Prejudice) more recently, Fiona Seres (2018 Woman in White). In the BBC until recently the screenwriter was the linchpin or (as the position is now called) one of the showrunners of the series. In cinema they are now named early in credits and paid much better; so too in some more prestigious (or pushed) serial adaptations (Poldark, Deborah Horsfield; Downton Abbey, Jerome Fellowes), but not as much (how many people know the names of the remarkable team writing Outlander under the general direction of Ronald Moore). Misterioso is perhaps one of his finest later dramas (1991, based on his own novel.

Hours, days, months, years of fine entertainment are due to such people — of course the cinematographer, the directors, producers, costumers, but in the case of the writer you can find biographies and you can trace a personality and point of view that is interesting across the work. I wish more people would pay attention to these unsung heroes and heroines. I hear in my head for hours afterwards the music that plays across The Fortunes of War …

As a coda treat, it is said of Plater he combined Coronation Street with the feel and outlook of Chekhov story or play. I cannot locate Misterioso (the name is after a Jazz number), nor anything more than the kind of 2 to 10 minute clip included in the above interview so instead here is one of those Play of the Month productions (not by Plater) but of how Chekhov has been seen and done on the BBC: Francesca Annis and Ian Holm, 1974 in The Wood Demon (I believe it’s the whole thing)

Ellen

A Spring syllabus: The Novels of E.M. Forster at OLLI at AU

E.M Forster by Dora Carrington (1920)

A Syllabus

Online at: https://ellenandjim.wordpress.com/2020/02/16/a-spring-syllabus-the-novels-of-e-m-forster-at-olli-at-au/

For a course at the Oscher LifeLong Learning Institute at American University
Day: Monday afternoons, 1:45 to 3:15 pm,
Mar 2 to May 4
4801 Massachusetts Avenue, Washington, D.C. 20016
Dr Ellen Moody

Description of Course

In this course we will read Forster’s best-known fiction, A Room with a View, Howards End, and A Passage to India. We’ll discuss what makes them such distinctive literary masterpieces capable of delivering such pleasure while delineating the realities, tragedies, comedy, and consolations of human life. We’ll place them in the context of his life, other works, Bloomsbury connections and era. We’ll also see clips from some of the brilliant films made from them. I ask that before class begins everyone read his short explanatory Aspects of the Novel.

Above young Lucy Honeychurch (Helena Bonham Carter) and Miss Charlotte Bartlett (Maggie Smith), 1987; older Lucy (Elaine Cassidy) coming into Florence, 2007 — Room with a View

Required Texts (these are recommended editions; there are other good ones you could buy, i.e, with notes and annotations):

EM Forster, Aspects of the Novel, ed. Frank Kermode. Penguin ISBN 978-0-141-44169-6
EM Forster, A Room with a View, ed. Wendy Moffat. Penguin ISBN 978-0-14-18329-9
EM Forster, Howards End, ed David Lodge. Penguin 978-0-14-118213-1
EM Forster, A Passage to India, ed PN Furbank. Everyman ISBN 978-1-85715-029-2

Above Leonard Bast (Samuel West) in a reverie sequence, 1992; Margaret Schegel (Haylet Atwell) at breakfast, 2018 — Howards End

Format: The class will be a mix of informal lecture and group discussion. Please read for the first session, as much of Aspects of the Novel as you can.

Mar 2: 1st week: Intro, syllabus, Forster’s life and work; the Bloomsbury group (one of his groups of friends); his aesthetic point of view. We’ll cover Aspects of the Novel, Intro, and Chapters 1-5

Mar 9: 2nd: Aspects of the Novel, Chapters 6-10. The first two novels. We begin A Room with a View: Part One

Mar 16: 3rd: A Room with a View: Part Two. We’ll see clips from the Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala Room with a View (1985) and Andrew Davies’s Room with a View (2007)

Mar 23: 4th A Room with a View, transitional; we begin Howards End: Chapters 1-14

Mar 30: 5th: Howards End: Chapters 15-26

Apr 6: 6th: Howards End: Chapters 27-43: We’ll see clips from Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala Howards’ End (1992); Lonergan’s 4 part Howards’ End

Apr 13: 7th: Forster’s Maurice; we begin A Passage to India, Chapters 1-11 (Part One)

Apr 20: 8th A Passage to India, Chapters 12-28 (Part Two)

Apr 27: 9th: A Passage to India, Chapters 29-37 (Parts Two into Three). We’ll see clips from David Lean’s A Passage to India (1984)

May 4: The other 46 years: travel writing, biography, essays, short stories.

Adela Quested (Judy Davis), Dr Aziz (Victor Banerjee) and Mrs Moore (Peggy Ashcroft), 1985 — A Passage to India

Recommended biography, essays & by Forster:

Beauman, Nicola. Morgan: A Biography of E.M. Forster. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1993.
Colman, John. E. M. Forster: The Personal Voice. London: Routledge, Kegan and Paul, 1975.
Forster, E. M. Abinger Harvest. London: Penguin, 1967.
Forster, E. M. Maurice, ed. David Leavitt. NY: Penguin, 2005.
Furbank, P.N. E.M. Forster: A Life. London: Harvest, 1997.
Moffat, Wendy. A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E.M. Forster. NY: Picador, 2010.
Shahane, V.A., ed. Focus on Forster’s Passage to India: Indian essays in criticism. India: Orient Longman, 1989.
Summers, Claude J. E.M. Forster. NY: Ungar, 1983. Excellent essays on the novels
Trilling, Lionel. E.M. Forster. NY: New Directions, 1965. Liberal imagination, humanistic perspective.

House (Peppard Cottage) used as Howards End in 1992 movie

Films:

Howards End. Dir. Hettie Macdonald. Screenplay: Kenneth Lonergan. Producer: HBO. Perf. Hayley Atwell, Matthew Macfayden, Joseph Quinn, Philippa Coulthard, Alex Lawther, Rosalind Eleazar. 2018.
A Passage to India. Dir. Screenplay. David Lean. Perf. Peggy Ashcroft, Judy Davis, James Fox, Alec Guinness, Nigel Havers, Victor Banerjee, Roshan Seth. Columbia, 1985
A Room with a View; Howards End. Dir. James Ivory. Screenplay Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Producer: Ismail Merchant. Perf: Denholm Elliot, Maggie Smith, Helena Bonham Carter, Cecil Day-Lewis; Simon Callow (Room with a View); Anthony Hopkins, Emma Thompson, Helena Bonham Carter, Samuel West, James Wilby (Howards End). 1985; 1992.
A Room with a View. Dir. Nicolas Renton. Screenplay. Andrew Davies. Producer: ITV. Perf. Elaine Cassidy, Timothy and Rafe Spall, Timothy West, Sophie Thompson, Mark Williams, Sinead Cusack. 2007.

Alex Lawther as the appealing impish, but marginalized Tibby in Howards End (2018) — the character reappears more fully developed, older, articulate in Cecil Vyse (played by Daniel Day Lewis) in A Room with a View

Four blogs:

Moody, Ellen. E.M. Foster’s Maurice, with a few words on the Merchant-Ivory movie adaptation. A blog-essay. https://ellenandjim.wordpress.com/2020/02/21/e-m-forsters-maurice-perhaps-the-finest-of-the-novels-with-a-few-words-on-the-merchant-ivory-movie-adaptation/ At Ellen and Jim have a blog, two. February 21, 2020.
————. E. M. Forster’s Howards End and A Room with a View. A Blog-essay. https://ellenandjim.wordpress.com/2018/11/29/e-m-forsters-howards-end-and-a-room-with-a-view/ At Ellen and Jim have a blog, two. November 29, 2018
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———–. E.M. Foster’s A Room with a View, partly a rewrite of Northanger Abbey. A Blog-essay. https://misssylviadrake.livejournal.com/43931.html At Under the Sign of Sylvia. Live Journal. March 30, 2011. Also https://reveriesunderthesignofausten.wordpress.com/2011/03/30/e-m-forsters-a-room-with-a-view-partly-a-rewrite-of-austens-northanger-abbey/ At Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two. Transferred.
Tichelaar, Tyler. A Working-Class Lover. Class and Homsexuality in E.M. Forster’s Maurice. https://thegothicwanderer.wordpress.com/2018/09/20/a-working-class-lover-class-and-homosexuality-in-e-m-forsters-maurice/ At The Gothic Wanderer. September 20, 2018.