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

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Ellen

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The Crown, Seasons 3 (1964-74) & 4 (1975-90): The price of the crown (1)

Elizabeth (Olivia Coleman), Philip (Tobias Menzies) and Anne (Erin Doherty) — Seasons 3-4

Elizabeth (Claire Foy), Philip (Tobias Menzies) Seasons 1-2 (1947-1955)

Not only are seasons 1 & 2 one story, with a couple of overriding themes; seasons 3 & 4 are the same story morphing later in time: the cost of the crown to all who are connected to it in the warping of their characters, destruction of dearest hopes. Most of the characters who have any depth of integrity or individual gifts find they must give up fulfilling an individual identity or desire in order to act out a conventional role that pleases the public; for money and prestige, they trade inner liberty, and several of them happiness. There seems to be no retreat for anyone, and for those who stay, as they age, they grow harder or more silent in order to survive … Even with the absence of virtuoso displays of emotion — except Tobias Menzies once, Josh O’Connor once, and fleeting arresting moments by Helena Bonham Carter, Geraldine Chaplin (as Duchess of Windsor) and even the reigned-in, mostly iron self-controlled Olivia Coleman — there is real depth, as in a novel by Ishiguro or Austen, just beneath the calm surface.

Friends and readers,

It’s been a rather long time (2018) since I wrote a blog on the first two seasons of this well-done effective serial. At the time I suggested that one story shaped both seasons centrally; that of Elizabeth (then Claire Foy) and Philip (Matt Smith), with the side characters exemplifying parallel themes, so now I’m here to say that similarly Seasons 3 ad 4 are one story shaped by the same theme for a younger pair of characters, Charles (Josh O’Connor) and Diana Spenser (Emma Corrin), with the older Elizabeth (Olivia Coleman) and Philip (Tobias Menzies) showing the results of their choices and insisting the next generation make the same sacrifices they did. But season four so complicated by nearness of events in the lives of Charles and Diana, it will take two separate blogs to do both seasons justice.

The young Margaret (Vanessa Kirby) on the phone with Peter Townsend

Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter), many years later showing the human cost of her role

The films depict slowly, at length and consistently a development of inexorable embedded emotional burdens each of the major characters finds he or she has to bear as a result of being related to, and supported by (financially especially) the Crown. Most of the characters who have any depth of integrity or individual gifts find they must give up fulfilling an individual identity or desire in order to act out a conventional role that pleases the public. For money and prestige, they trade inner liberty, and several of them happiness. There seems to be no retreat for anyone, and as they age, they grow harder or more silent in order to survive. The individual situations of these privileged people are made to resonate with experiences the ordinary person can identify with, or watch Writ Large. Seasons 1 & 2 Elizabeth and Philip begin with an idealistic love, and after years where she is driven to not keep her promise to Philip to let him fulfill his desires and have a say in his choices equal to hers, and betray others like her sister, Margaret (Vanessa Kirby), Elizabeth hardens into a partly self-alienated person. She wants to control others too, like the space and power and ever-so-respected functions she acts out. Seasons 3 & 4, Elizabeth has hardened, Philip has reconciled himself (with occasional strong regrets), and Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter, superb in the part) alternates between bitterness and an avid devouring of what is thrown to her by way of compensation. All are warped. At the third season’s end though we see the cost open up through Margaret’s near suicide and her and Elizabeth’s conversation of what this life has cost them. In the fourth, Margaret is the only one among the older generation to voice any doubt about the infliction of marriage on Charles to a girl he doesn’t know, understand and it seems cannot love

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The real Elizabeth I, The Crown‘s Elizabeth — at Aberfan (Season 3, Episode 3) where miners lost dozens of their children

Philip in mid-life crisis, both “Bubbikins” and “Moonstruck” (Episodes 4 and 7): he find he must acknowledge who his mother is; he jeers at the institution of a church where men meditate, only to find himself glamorizing the astronauts, dreaming of himself as one, in need of companionship and confession

The first four and seventh episodes swirl around the question of what Elizabeth has become as a person, how much she now thinks it’s her job to remain estranged from usual human emotion, and how far this has become natural to her. It’s a role that does not give Coleman much opportunity for virtuoso emoting. Her best moments are in “Aberfan” (4:3) where she slowly bends, and “The coup” where, the political matter, Mountbatten’s (Charles Dance) attempt to stage a coup is overshadowed for Elizabeth too as she sees what happier warmer person she’d have been if she had been allowed to make horses her life (caring for them, racing them) alongside someone with a similar empathic nature, Porchey (John Hollingwood a rare carryover from Season 2), how happier she would have been. Philip is a tamed man, it seems also sexually, but if you watch the character, he is the same man (or type) as in Seasons 1 & 2 with the difference he is repeatedly given the last word on an issue, his conservative pragmatism honored, his shame over his mother, then thwarted masculinity sympathized with, given room. Tor me the best episode in the season is “Moonstruck”, not so much for his naive glorifying of the astronauts, but the way he comes down from deriding the incoming Dean of Windsor Robin Woods (Tim McMullan) to asking for help, from distrust to deep friendship. As opposed to Season 2 where Elizabeth is presented as understanding the boy Charles better than his father, “”Tywysog Cymru” shows Elizabeth out of sympathy with Charles presented as sensitive, literary, seeking validation when confessing, wanting to assert his truth against hers as a lead in to why. The second finest is the last episode: Margaret’s story glimpsed in “Margaretology,” and again here and there, but brought out emphatically and movingly in “Cri de coeur” where suddenly she is presented as an overt parallel to a hidden Elizabeth, who wonders what she has done with her life as the UK seems to have gone down (she means in prestige and power).

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I move on to individual episodes and dwell more on those episodes most strong. One must remember a lot is fiction, and sometimes politically what is asserted to have happened didn’t, e.g., Margaret did not persuade Johnson to lend the British enormous amounts of money, did not revel in his vulgarities; Mountbatten did not propose a coup; he was approached by a reactionary cabal of Tories who loathed the success of socialism under Atlee, and the liberal-social consensus of Wilson (Jason Watkins), and he turned them down twice.

Episode 1, “Olding,” Elizabeth moves from instinctive distrust of the new labor PM, Wilson, an inheritance from Churchill; she worries he’s a mole from Moscow, when betrayer turns out to be her much respected art historian, Sir Anthony Blunt (Samuel West), here a vengeful oily cold calculating villain who trades threat for threat with a newly stern Philip at hour’s end (don’t you know all communists must be vile?). Random moments showing the Snowden marriage (Ben Daniels) is none, Margaret in distress, drinking slips into Episode 2, “Margaretology:” with Coleman and Menzies all quiet self-controlled, Carter steals the scenes, but Johnson (a thankless role for Clancy Brown) a caricature, simply a frivolous vulgarian, behaving from silly motives of vanity flattered, with the thwarted artist (Daniels) given hardly any screen time.

Episode 3: “Aberfan.”:

Actual footage from the mining disaster

Brilliant and daring use of voice-over and narration, attributing inner thoughts to the ravaged faces of parents we see. The film-makers (director, script) turned a disaster remembered ever after when the queen showed she could be or was heartless, indifferent, stone cold into an explanation of how she felt deeply but couldn’t get herself to show it — and so rendered the incident deeply moving — they hired well known actors for bit parts of the parents: I spotted Ruth Wilson; Richard Harrington had speaking lines. We saw how everyone else was grieving — or couldn’t help themselves spontaneously — from the PM, to Margaret, to Tony Armstrong-Jones, to Phillip (Menzies managed to steal the show each time he flinched).

This did sideline the real problem: the board had not kept up regulations so that the mine became dangerous — it was pointed out it was under the Tories the situation evolved but this was turned into Mrs Wilson berating Wilson for being “a wimp” and not going after someone else, i.e., the queen as scapegoat. It was therefor hard to film on location: many remember what happened less than 50 years ago, many still suffering and the lack of any true social relief or active compassion from these super-rich Tory types has not been forgotten. Olivia Coleman did show strength in her her fierce lighting into Wilson when he turned up for “going behind her back” (as if they both controlled the newspapers) is memorable but the episode is too much “See the Queen learn a lesson; poor lady can’t get herself to cry.” Let us recall that Hillary Clinton held herself firm, and it was held against her, while were she to have wept she’d have been mocked. Still you won’t forget this episode.  I noticed some holdovers from Season 2, in actors playing Elizabeth’s near entourage; this provides needed felt continuity.

It’s the way the disabled & abused Princess Alice (Jane Lapotaire) in her nun’s outfit smokes that makes her seem so vulnerable

Episodes 4-6. “Bubbikins:” Philip wants to make himself felt: goes on TV to say Royals are not overpaid, derided, so makes a documentary about how ordinary they are, and it tanks terribly. Jane Lapotaire is profoundly memorable in the way she seems to capture the phases of this unfortunately disabled woman’s life, and so at last Philip learns a lesson against pride and vanity when he accepts her, now living in the palace (against his will) way upstairs, near Princess Anne, but found by reporters what she had to say resonated with the public. “The Coup” went a step too far for me. Not Charles Dance’s magnificent performance as Mountbatten, and Mountbatten had a ancien regime heart, fiercely militaristic (would have recited Kipling with gusto), but the sympathy for the coup, democracy made a veneer that doesn’t matter (see Frederick Wiseman’s City Hall if you think that). All hinged on the queen saying no. This reminded me of On the Waterfront, which justified informers (these are not to be confused with whistleblowers), justified Elia Kazan for naming names at the HUAC hearing in 1950s. The queen’s lesson was lamenting to Porchey (John Hollingworth looking remarkably like Joseph Kloska) and then trying to live this other not permitted unlived life, when she is needed to stop coups. I was touched by her regret,  but disbelieved the coup story as improbable (and see above) — had just seen the powerless Alice. The episode ended with Philip coming in the room, talking of Dickie, and admiring her. She makes a sign she will go to bed with him tonight, and he is all quiet delight. After all the queen’s life is not so bad is what Coleman suddenly radiates …

Porchey and Elizabeth snacking inbetween places, races, horse riding …

“Tywysog Cymru” The investiture of Charles in Wales moving, the episode built very slowly to create genuine feeling of real relationship between the Welsh politician anti-monarchical tutor, Tedi Millward and Charles, so Elizabeth’s hard cold reproaches to Charles for adding his own ideas into the ceremony come as a shock, as cruelty. Psychologically she is herself deeply repressed, (we might see) resentful over that unlived life she grieved for in previous episode. Maybe we are to infer the aim of her her life is not to have a self, as she repeats, do nothing, repel the inner life, something she is determined to inflict on Charles. Olivia Coleman acts the deeply dislikable mother memorably but is such a hard icy-presence that this viewer found Josh O’Connor’s the multi-faceted performance — if his ability to be piteous without incurring disdain (on display here), were more to the fore in season 4, the evenness of the presentation of the pair until 4:8 when we see that Charles will not give Diana a chance — will not pick up that phone — we would not feel that Diana was the only victim sacrificed on the altar (say it) of riches and prestige for the Windsor (German name now lost) family.

Episode 7: “Moonstruck:” At last they gave Tobias Menzies something adequate to his talents: Philip feeling the frustrations of existing in a fish bowl and spending his “job” time as a symbol at occasions that seem silly, and also those worthy. It all begins with his irritation at having to go to church by 9 am and listen to a doddering old fool of a Dean. So the queen hired a new man she thought Philip might like: Robin Woods, but Philip is not going to church any more. This new man asks if he can have the use of one of the unused buildings on the property as a center for spiritual renewing; Philip finds himself asked to go and when he has to sit there listening to these depressed men, he bursts out in cruel excoriation of them, ridiculing them. He tells them they will feel valued and part of the world if they were active. “How about cleaning up this floor!” he nearly shouts and he rushes out. The camera on the face of McMullan as Wood intensely controlled.

Philip then gets so caught up with watching intensely the moon landing as whole Royal family gathers around the TV.   But they leave after a few hours maybe, while Philip sits there it seems for days. He is identifying, bonding and thinking himself an “airman” himself, their equivalent and to prove it endangers himself and a courtier with him by flying the machine way too high. Then he demands 15 minutes with heroes (he did meet them). We see him writing questions, and when finally (most reluctantly) they come in, he finds his questions cannot be asked — they are young, inarticulate, hardly gave deep thought to what they were doing –too busy. They have silly questions about life in the palace for him.

Then cut to Philip walking away and then close up he is sitting and talking very gravely at this misapprehension he had of them and as he goes on we realize he is facing Wood and his clergymen needing spiritual renewal — Menzies delivers an extraordinary speech baring his soul insofar as such a man could, apologizes to them. Then we see them walking out and Philip looking more cheerful. An intertitle tells us the real Duke formed a close friendship with Wood and in later years this organization became one Philip was very proud of. The queen seen in the distance walking her dogs, looking on. Her face lightens with relief and cheer.

Doesn’t sound like much. Watch it. Or read the speech:

There wasn’t a specific moment, uh, when it started. It’s been more of a gradual thing. A drip, drip, drip of of doubt disaffection, disease, dis discomfort. People around me have noticed my general uh, irritability. Um Now, of course, that’s that’s nothing new. I’m generally a cantankerous sort, but even I would have to admit that there has been more of it lately. Not to mention, uh, an almost jealous fascination with the achievements of these young astronauts. Compulsive over-exercising. An inability to find calm or satisfaction or fulfillment. And when you look at all these symptoms, of course it doesn’t take a genius to tell you that they all suggest I’m slap bang in the middle of a [CHUCKLES] I can’t even say what kind of crisis … [I skip some of the words] … Some of which I can admit to in this room, and some of which I probably shouldn’t. My mother died recently. [CLEARS THROAT.] She she saw that something was amiss … It’s a good word, that. A-Amiss … “How’s your faith?” she asked me. I’m here to admit to you that I’ve lost it. And without it, what is there? The The loneliness and emptiness and anticlimax of going all that way to the moon to find nothing, but haunting desolation ghostly silence gloom. … And so Dean Woods having ridiculed you for what you and these poor, blocked, lost souls [CHUCKLING.] were were trying to achieve here in St. George’s House I now find myself full of respect and admiration and not a small part of desperation as I come to say help. Help me. And to admit [CHUCKLES.] that while those three astronauts deserve all our praise and respect for their undoubted heroism, I was more scared coming here to see you today than I would have been going up in any bloody rocket! [CHUCKLING]

I do think that the conception of the queen this time just doesn’t give Olivia Coleman enough to work with — to show her hidden life they would need really to break with the conventions against over-voice and they would be ridiculed or criticized.

Charles and Camilla falling in love

Anne usually choral figure, presented as Philip’s favorite, here Doherty given love-making scenes, but as ever wry

Episodes 8-10: “Dangling Man:” There was a falling away, here and these with their concentration on Charles and Camilla, Anne and Andrew Parker-Bowles left me bored with its thinness. What depth the episode has is in the aging, frailty, death of Edward VIII, now Duke of Windsor (Derek Jacobi) and as strong an actress as ever, as Mrs Simpson, now Duchess, Geraldine Chaplin, grieving over her dead husband, she’s unforgettable. We believe in the relationship between the dying Duke and young Charles — only with Mountbatten in the second season (the gentle Gregg Wise) had Charles had a loving authority figure before him (with the Welsh tutor it’s respect – the real Charles did learn enough Welsh to read and to try to talk).

Duke and Duchess of Windsor stepping outside their lair: Jacobi and Chaplin captured the two presences swiftly perfectly

Josh O’Connor superb at earnestness (remember him as Larry Durrell in The Durrells with Keely Hawes his generous mother)

Heath now PM.

“Imbroglio:” the criss-crossing of the Parker-Bowles with the Windsors is broken up by queen who (in time-honored manner) sends Charles away and with some help from her parents, pushes Camilla into marriage with Andrew. Heath had been brought in briefly in the previous episode and presented as fatuous; now we turn to the miners’ strike (David Wilmot memorable as Scargill); registering lives with other kinds of hard behaviors..

Margaret and Roddy meet

With her lady-in-waiting, Anne Lady Gleconner watching beach at Mystique island

The circle indicates the press taking this photo … of Margaret and Roddy (Harry Treadaway), he obediently putting cream all over her

“Cri de coeur:” This is perhaps the second best episode of the season and a powerful end. It’s about Margaret’s clinging to Armstrong and how tired of her he is, but how he finds it necessary to possess her at the same time as he is discreetly unfaithful. She cannot bear this and drawn by her Lady-in-Waiting, she finds a replacement, a young man substitute. What so strong about the episode is Margaret is presented as unconsciously obnoxious. She cries out against having to obey the conventions to hold onto her position, without apparently realizing every minute of her existence is pampered privileged, and all her comforts created by an army of obedient people around her. We do feel for her because her aging is so clear and her emotional need. We do wonder as we watch her drunken songs on her island, and her saying her happiness is finally here as she sits next to this child of a man whom she treats condescendingly. We see Elizabeth sympathizes with both Tony and Margaret, and in this episode it’s the Queen mother who acts to demand Margaret come back from the island when the newspapers photographer publishes a splash: her and Roddy’s affair. In Tony’s interview with Elizabeth (she summons him to see what she can do) he produces photos of her when younger; we see fleetingly Claire Foy and Matt Smith in a relaxed moment. The theme of this final episode is probably more about how time has gone by, and how old they’ve become than how everyone all around them kowtows — though this is emphasized too.

Summoned herself, by the Queen Mother, Margaret returns to find Tony waiting for her. Both of them kick the used Roddy out — but he was letting himself be used. The next scene, the queen has bid adieu to the prime minister, and news of Margaret’s attempt to kill herself has broken. A secondary story seen briefly: Wilson replaces Heath, but he cannot stay for he has Alzheimer’s and we see him and Elizabeth bid adieu; they had become friends, he calling her a lefty and himself a royalist. Margaret had asked her how many PMS have there been since she was queen: seven, says Elizabeth. The background story of Labor win, Wilson’s return as PM but what Elizabeth suddenly makes explicit is she’s been there to record England’s decline. Margaret all in pieces in the penultimate scene. Margaret’s act implies she finds nothing in life to satisfy her; but it is Elizabeth who expresses doubt about what her life has been worth, what has she done for her kingdom. Margaret has been terrific at being a sister. And then Margaret tells Elizabeth they must carry on. And it ends on the day of the jubilee.

In a “recap,” Carolyn Hallemann suggests the best scenes of all four seasons are those given over to Margaret’s story. Roddy’s work as her gardener is the equivalent of her lady-in-waiting, there to serve her desires. This last episode has brilliantly suggestive moments conveying the different relationships so quickly; Margaret and her lady-in-waiting, Lady Alice Glenconner (Nancy Carroll), a seemingly casual moment caught by a camera. Margaret says that is their function, to paper over cracks and Elizabeth glad to see Wilson in their weekly meet-ups.(He is her favorite after Churchill.)  This is just an outline; the depth of feeling in this one is perhaps the greatest of all this season, for finally we see at its end that (whether true or not) Elizabeth says she needs Margaret to help her stand it. Not Philip, not her son. Margaret’s role as sister has been performed magnificently.
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Note how we end: private lives must give way, the eye of the monarch on seeming to be there stable as ever, as groundwork for political belief-system (to be cont’d).

Geraldine Chaplin as Duchess of Windsor aka Mrs Simpson embodied the theme of private life ravaged — what happens when you won’t give it up, proud lonely woman near breakdown.

It’s as if the serial had set out to justify the decision of Harry and Meghan to walk away.

Ellen

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Poldark: The Fifth season, Episodes 1-4: an evaluative review

One of several competing portraits of Edward Marcus Despard (wikipedia offers a barebones outline of the man’s life)

Promotional parallel shot of Aidan Turner as the somewhat aging Ross Poldark, and Vincent Regan as Despard in his last 4 years (Season 5)

Friends and readers,

I had not written until now on the fifth season of Debbie Horsfield’s Poldark because I’m in several minds about it. Having watched the whole season twice, and now going through carefully each episode Sunday by Sunday I know had this been the first group of serial drama episodes I saw I would never have gone on to read Winston Graham’s Poldark novels. I first read the first four quartet (Ross Poldark, Demelza, Jeremy Poldark and Warleggan, written 1945-53, and set between 1783 and 1793) after watching the first four episodes of the 1975-76 Poldark (scripted by Jack Pullman, mostly directed by Christopher Barry).

I learned later Winston Graham detested Pullman’s adaptation of Ross Poldark (Pullman departed radically in linchpin scenes), but I found myself having a deep affinity with them, and unexpectedly, as the series was itself ceaselessly disdained as romance costume drama [for women], and I assumed the books would be perhaps a cut above what was called “bodice rippers” (historical fiction except for a very few writers had fallen to a debased level in the early part of the 20th century), fell in love with them. They seemed to me fine historical fiction with something serious to say to readers barely out of, recovering from the devastation of World War Two.

Horsfield seems to have made the decision to fill the ten year interval between the ending of the first trilogy of Graham’s Poldark novels (The Black Moon, The Four Swans, The Angry Tide, written & published 1974-77/8, set 1794-99), and the beginning of the second The Stranger from the Sea, The Miller’s Dance, The Loving Cup, written & published 1982-4-84, set 1811-15) — not from the fragments of details about the intervening years found in the later five books, but by inventing a story whose source and treatment resembles that of Graham.

In my paper on the use of documentation in Graham’s historical and suspense fiction I demonstrated Graham had a penchant for choosing the minor real figures of history who were just and decent men scapegoated (using law and state terror and legal violence) by or part of a reactionary establishment but often meaning to do good or not wholly bad men. His deepest sympathy was for the humane rebel, the Che Guevara type combined with the elegance of Gainsborough historical romance males that his own hero, Ross Poldark, represents. To have picked a man like Edward Marcus Despard speaks very well of her, we must give her the credit of calling attention to this man to a wider audience than ever reads non-fiction about the French revolution, the analogous upheaval in the UK in the 1790s for reform (prompting the reign of state terror by Pitt and his state machinery).

As the promotional photo for the series suggests, in real life Despard was such another as Ross Poldark in Jeremy Poldark where we see him come near to hanging and/or transportation because his very real illegal activities leading a huge group of local ordinary desperate people to remove and use for themselves the flotsam and jetsam of two wrecks from a violent storm were used by his enemies (and the local state apparatus) to make an example of him to deter people from combining to demand a far better life and share in the good things of the earth than they had ever had. Apparently Despard was part of a revolutionary group whose deepest aims were to radically alter, overthrow (if you will) the oligarchical and unjust orders of the 18th century European gov’ts, but he was not guilty of what he was accused of. He was rather a political enlightenment Anglo-Irish Protestant around whom revolutionary people swirled, and was potentially willing to lead a rebellion if one could succeed — with say the help of the French in Ireland.

Promotional shot of Kerri McLean who plays Catherine (Kitty) in this fifth season of Poldark –

She also brings to the viewer’s attention other people who lived during this ten-year interval and whose life history also has much to say to us today. Joseph Merceron, a corrupt Godfather boss of Bethnal Green (or Spitalfields, as a blog about this older area of London calls it), a Trump type colluding with Pitt’s gov’t to spy on and help imprison, transport, execute anyone who wanted to change the status quo. James Hadfield, a pathetic religious fanatic, crazed by his life and experience, who tried to kill George III (Andrew Gower, fresh from his brilliant complex portrayal of Prince Charles Edward Stuart makes the few moments we glimpse this man memorable).

Catherine Despard, about whom records are sparse, come from just the period of her (probable) marriage to Despard, life with him, continual remarkable unusual pro-active activities on his behalf, including publicizing the horrific conditions in the prison he was thrown in for two years (Coldbath Fields), showing herself (probably a Creole, daughter to a freed African woman living in Nicaragua, herself alas the owner of enslaved Africans) to be better educated than many European women, until the time of his execution, whereupon she disappears from public records. It is thought she took her and Despard’s children to Ireland in an effort to appeal to the consciences of his Anglo-Irish protestant family. No picture survives

Geoffrey Charles (Freddie Wise) and Cecily Hanson (Lily Dodsworth-Evans), the only conventionally romantic couple in the season ….

Catherine is interestingly accurately likened to the wholly fictional Cecily Hanson, daughter of Ralph Hanson (Peter Sullivan). Catherine was an educated woman who understood how to negotiate with upper class people and could hold her own in political salons (it takes Demelza many years to learn this). Cecily shows self-esteem and agency in her choosing to engage herself to Geoffrey Charles, and then when (in a later episode), she finds he is beaten senseless by her father’s thugs and cannot begin to hold onto their relationship, give him up. A feel of poignancy hovers around Geoffrey Charles, as the orphaned son of Francis and Elizabeth Poldark.

Hanson’s name harks back to a real brutal plantation owner from the Caribbean, Hanbury, a composite figure (such men did make money producing natural wood for mahogany found in mosquito-infested places), who Hanson attempts to coerce into an advantageous marriage with the sadly-reduced but still cruel and amoral widower George Warleggan (Jack Farthing sustains the difficult part of a man hallucinating from grief and guilt, rescued from heinous treatment by Dwight Enys, Luke Norris in the familiar Graham conception).

I’ve discovered Debbie Horsfield’s William Wickham was an under secretary of state, working for Castlereagh in 1802, the supervisor of a group of spies (see Conor’s Life and Times). (There was another William Wickham, official in the foreign office during Canning’s time — and given Graham’s respect for Canning and in the later novels make his Ross an reporter-spy-negotiator for Canning — so to use the name could leave room for a return to the 8th novel, Stranger from the Sea, which there are various signs in even the first four episodes of this series Horsfield and the film-makers, crew and actors would be willing to do. She’d conflate the two figures.)

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Promotional shots push viewers to liken Demelza to Tess and Demelza in this series is presented as seeing herself in Tess

So with all this important history for interested intelligent viewers to explore, which can also be linked back to Graham Winston’s own novelistic achievements and politics, what can be the cause of my dismay? 1) that Debbie Horsfield’s interpretation of Despard is that of the authorities and establishment of the later 19th century which stigmatized and degraded Despard into a “nut,” a deluded naive upper class male who courted his own destruction. Nothing could be further from the truth, but in scene after scene we have Ross and Demelza and Catherine stopping a foolish man from following the obviously provocative antics of envious revolutionary thugs; 2) that freed from any text, Horsfield abandons the middle-of-the-road perspective of Graham on the revolution (his stance might be likened to the Girondists) continually to condemn any rebellion as coming from envy and dense stupidity, actuated by spite. She turned Graham’s Keren Daniels (who had some cause for discontent) into a dense promiscuous thug; now she invents such another in the character of Tess (Sofia Oxenham). I also cannot stand the way she re-interprets Demelza to be an pro-actively distrustful wife.

It is painful for me to consider (as I do) that Debbie Horsfield might be accurate: there are scenes of Demelza showing hurt, anger and resentment at Ross’s cold distrust of her in the second half of Jeremy Poldark and after her love affair with Richard Armitage. Similarly in Graham’s suspense novels post-World War Two, and later Poldark novels Graham evidences a great conservatism. That’s why I am in several minds. I may have been misreading Graham for all these years.

I face the reality that my love of many film adaptations derives from my love of the source book and the original conceptions of the key characters. I have no doubt that Debbie Horsfield’s conception of Demelza as frequently vexed with Ross, dominating when she can (masculine in her approach — as made visible in her mannish outfits), pro-active on behalf of the material needs of her family makes sense prudentially. It might appeal to non-romantic women in the 2nd decade of the 21st century that Horsfield introduced the idea that Ross regards Demelza as his savior, and he repeats this ad nauseam in season 5. Demelza likens herself to Catherine Despard (Eleanor Tomlinson must follow the script she is given) by asserting she too “entrapped” a man whose kitchen she also was (this is a startling travesty of what happened in Graham’s Ross Poldark, Jack Pullman’s adaptation and also Horsfield’s own Episode 4 in the 2015 Poldark). I can only assert and ask those who have read the books if I am correct: Graham’s Demelza is the underdog, a different kind of misfit from Ross, having given her ego, her very soul into her relationship with Ross; like him, finding deepest pleasure in disinterested activities and quiet solitude. What is so appealing about their relationship is they never bicker, are unself-conscious about their deep compatible character geniality.

Now that she is freed of Graham’s texts, I feel Horsfield travesties all Graham major women characters, but Verity, who is dropped, perhaps with relief? (Several of the students I taught Graham’s novel, Ross Poldark to, maintained she was a female Ross as understood in that humanely idealistic book, figures who found peace in solitude.) Graham’s Morwenna loathed the child Whitworth impregnated her with; Horsfield’s is turned into a sentimental fanatic, trailing around abjectly after the boy child, barely protected by the vulnerable (because low-class) Drake (Harry Richardson). She is made to behave as self-destructively and more than half-mad as Horsfield makes George Warleggan in his grief for Elizabeth. Debbie Horsfield is more comfortable or wants exaggerated emotional states: in the later novels we are told George grieved, felt guilty, remembered ever after all Elizabeth’s finer qualities, but he did not go mad: Jack Farthing’s acting carries it off as would Elisse Chappell were I not embarrassed for her — perhaps some viewers will be embarrassed for George:

I found irritating Morwenna and Rosina being turned into tenderly loving schoolmistresses — back to the patriarchy. Caroline (the now anorexic-looking Gabrielle Wilder) reminds me of the medieval statue of Barbara, always with lamp except she carries around a deliberately chosen fat dog. She is now resentful and jealous of Catherine whom Dwight does seem drawn to. Even he is travestied, becoming belligerently aggressive toward Ross in order to pressure Ross into giving up his loyalty to Despard (as imprudent). Dwight’s complete lack of this kind of emotional blackmail has escaped Debbie Horsfield (or she is glad to shed him of a characteristic generosity and inability to pressure others many would despise him for). OTOH, as in the books he shows himself to be his own man; he has his professional conscience and follows it despite his wife’s upper class prejudices and ignorance.

Dwight helping George by taking him to his wife’s grave: he utters an idea which is a play on a sentiment that Graham ends The Angry Tide with: all we have is that we are alive here today and that is what we must make what we can of

I find the relentless pace of these four episodes and constant switching back and forth of the scenes destructive of any development of conversation or thought. Many of the recap blogs wax snarky over this. Debbie Horsfield does trust her viewer to have the patience to see small moments develop slowly. We cannot dwell in the relationship of Ross and Demelza when it is deeply companionable because the scenes are so rushed and embedded in distractions (juxtaposition, switching back and forth):

The look on Eleanor Tomlinson’s face here suggests to me she has read Graham’s books, and some of her comments show how much she has invested in Graham’s heroine ….

I realize the larger content, the actual thrust of episodes is so often sheerly repetitive of the first seven books and earlier seasons. Again Ross is saving countless victim- miners and their children from death in an avalanche. Again he risks all his estate and fortune, this time to save the miners from unemployment. At least in Graham’s books, he does this to begin a business for himself, because he is guilty over Francis’s death and wants to control Elizabeth, make her dependent on him.

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Opening of episode 1: gradually we focus in on Ross out in his boat, and watch him come into shore

A few elements to praise:

I wish there were more moments in the four hours that derive from Graham’s Poldark books or conceptions, which the reader of Graham’s novels, someone who has read some 18th century history and knows the importance of the French revolution and the Enlightenment to a modern way of life today, and the lover of thoughtful period costume drama is left alone in peace to enjoy. Examples: At the opening of the first episode this season we see Ross out in a boat fishing by himself quietly. He is taking a needed break. George at first leaving Trenwith to rot; then his beginning to see Elizabeth and returning to Trenwith to find her is touching. I thought the conception of George’s half-craziness and coldness towards his son well done by Farthing, though he is blackened since in the books he did pay for Geoffrey Charles’s education as far as Geoffrey Charles asked for. The depiction of less major characters too — that Morwenna will have a hard time coping with sexuality is at first presented with sensitivity as is Demelza’s attempt to win over the workers.

Episode 2 has much that is persuasive and interesting politically — as a historical film (the way the first four seasons presented mining, farming and other realities of the era). The 1790s was a period of severe repression — unfairly because the English protesters were out for reform, but Pitt and the wealthy were frightened by what had happened in France. And they did frame people, and use just such printed circulating pamphlets. The gov’t did have surveillance techniques. Despard was far smarter than she presents him, he was impulsive and used to using violence; all characteristics praised and honored by the establishment of this era — very like Nelson (who he was friends with, worked with in the Caribbean) in some ways, only more controlled.

Episode 3: There is an anticipation of a sixth season in the behavior of the children: the young Clowance looking yearningly over the fence at Trenwith. We will find her there in the first phase of The Stranger from the Sea. Sam and Rosina slowly getting together over Bible-reading. Valentine ever alone wandering, picked up by the kindly Ross (who we see is his father from visual resemblance).

Ross watched by spies, enemies ….

In this interim plot-design, we are shown how slowly Hanson and Merceron in London draw a noose of inference and suspicion around both Despard and Ross, to accuse them of treason. This was done in the 1790s and people were tried, imprisoned, hung — 10 famously got off partly by the brilliant defense, Godwin’s publication of a treatise on equity and justice, and the reality the population was deeply against this repression. Of course our characters use Tess as their mole and encourage her to get at the head of gangs to destroy houses and people (highly anachronistic the idea any mob of men would automatically obey a woman). A noose of inference and suspicion is gradually being unfolded around Ross, ever oblivious in her desire to help his friend, bring about meaningful reform, love his wife and children …

Harry Richardson as Drake Carne attempting to care for a mentally distressed young woman delivers a pitch perfect performance; his behavior a parallel to Dwight Enys in the fiction; Luke Norris has his character as far sterner, but then he does not love the people he is treating.

Epitomizing shot

The linking together of the neglected Valentine with the once abused Morwenna is valuable symbolically.

I’ll conclude with my finding that several of the heroes of Graham’s suspense novels involve themselves politically, usually on the left, and act in ethical ways against their own interest, endangering their lives. In one I have been studying, Greek Fire, a depiction of the US-UK ruthless intervention in Greek politics in the 1940s and 50s to destroy social democracy — it result in years of dictatorship, but then Papandreos took power by election and a social democracy for years emerged — Graham’s hero is characterized in ways that recall Ross. Greek Fire was written not long after Warleggan. Here is one typical characterization: a friend wants the hero to give up his ethics, morality, efforts: and the man says here you are “pushing on, never letting up, … why do you not accept life as it is instead of trying to worry it with your teeth all the time, like a terrier with a bone. Is this not Ross too?

Ellen

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Andrew Davies’s Les Miserables: a film for all seasons, but especially ours ….

Lily Collins as Fantine sometime after she sells her hair and teeth

Dominic West as Jean Valjean on the barricades

Joseph Quinn as Enjolras, the serious revolutionary

Bishop: Myriel: God tells us to love our fellow men.
Jean Valjean: How can I love my fellow man when he treats me worse than a dog?

Andrew Davies produces video masterpieces as regularly as other people simply go out to a movie, and in the last few years or so, the only material that (it seems) will do are the kind of literary masterpieces considered crucial and extraordinary works politically as well as socially. On top of this he has a penchant for choosing among such books precisely those where a previous film has been made with super-popular actors or some super-respected film-maker and seen by so many people and accepted as “unsurpassable.” Usually he has been polite about the previous (clearly to him inadequate and dated effort), as in the cases of David Lean’s Dr Zhivago, Ang Lee and Emma Thompson’s Sense and Sensibility, the earlier BBC Bleak House (1985 Arthur Hopcraft), War and Peace (1972, Jack Pulman), but he revels in using them while inventing a new conception and in just about all the previous films he’s redone, correcting (Lean turned Pasternak’s book into anti-communist propaganda) or simply superseding them. What’s special about this new Les Miserables is Davies frankness in accurately describing the musical as “a travesty” (the 2012 film is frequently awful), and how watching it brings home to most viewers they didn’t know or understand Fantine’s story at all, hadn’t realized how crucial Waterloo and an honest depiction of street fighting against a ruthless gov’t is to Hugo’s anti-war reformist book (the 1998 film presents what it does of the complicated stories incoherently).

Thenardier (Adeel Akhtar)

Madame Thenardier (Olivia Colman)

But this is a movie which makes us want to read the book; since Davies got only 6 hours (as opposed to the more than 9 he had for War and Peace, 2016), he makes us aware we are watching a suggestive and quick-moving surface. As the novel very early on includes Waterloo and has a long historical meditation on the significance of this battle and the lost war, Davies opens on Waterloo (he is apparently the only of the many movies made from this book even to include the battle) and brings Thenardier (Adeel Akhtar) to the fore as the first active character we see: he is stealing from corpses and near dead men, not rescuing anyone as he later on claims. David Bellos (in The Novel of the Century, indispensable) says (rightly) the Thenardiers are not funny figures in Hugo. These characters represent people who are key obstacles to political progress. Bellos asks what makes them hate, resent and fleece others so. They are the kind of people who loathe the poor when they are themselves part of this class. And it’s not just greed, but a passion, they bear “grudges,” “deep furnaces of hate.” and resentful revengeful grief. Like the woman supervisor in Valjean’s factory, they want to “get back” at anyone living more easily, or anyone who rouses their considerable repertoire of hurt. We so want Fantine to return and take her child back. Olivia Colman plays Madame Thenardier as an accomplice, complicit in anger and harm of others as the most convenient rout of survival.

The Thenardier family evicted — Colman’s face registers one origin of brooding resentment that emerges as jeering abuse of others

Bellos suggests that Hugo asks, what can be done to stop such people from undermining any compassionate law, rule, institution. Davies adds that they are punished as decisively and ruthlessly as those they resent and take it out on: Thenardier beats his wife casually, her daughters too, and when last seen Madame Thenardier has been parted from her daughters and left in miserable prison.

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It opens brilliantly with shots in black-and-white of innocent animals killed (especially horses in extremis,in agons, in black silhouette), animals and trees used symbolically (crows), the exquisitely dark and dream like atmosphere is kept up in the first half — that is until we meet a grown up Cosette, and her demand that she be placed in a bourgeois environment where she can “learn about life,” catapults Jean Valjean (Dominic West) into a fiercely guarded island of an apartment in Paris. This reminds us of the Pontmercy home with the ancient grandfather (David Bradley) fiercely rejecting his son and bringing his grandson up to become an aristocratic of the now defunct ancien regime.

Church to one side, naturally, police headquarters prominently there. The wild landscape of white clay, rock, brick, the wretched prison quarters, the chains and whips everywhere are to the fore. In episode 2 The people Fantine meets are costumed like nightmare circus figures (Ron Cook as the man who cuts off Fantine’s hair and cruelly wrenches her teeth out is heavily made up) and the low budget set of streets is like the bleak corner or marketplace of a slum. So in contrast, Father Myriel’s (Derek Jacobi) hospitable table, deep gentle kindness, determination to do and be good, and the Mother superior’s convent are experienced as intense relief.

Lily Collins as Fantine, holding Mallow Defoy as the child Cosette (Episode 2) seeking work and a place to keep her child

Fantine meets Madame Thenardier: I’m on my way to Montreuil.
I’ve heard there’s some good work to be had there.
Where’s hubby? Erm He’s He’s dead.
Oh, dear.
So you’ve had a hard time of it, I dare say.
Yes, I have.
But once I get into a steady job, I’ll soon be on my feet again.
Yeah, of course you will.

The set in the second half expands outward from the provincial towns of the first, the wood where Valjean hides his treasures and earned money, and we find ourselves in Parisian gardens, then in the streets as people pour out and set up barricades, and when the fierce killing is over, in the sewers some have escaped to. The contrast is now the countryside to which Jean Valjean finds another refuge before dying. The whole ambiance is far more symbolic and artificial than Davies usually is as he tries to cover so much swiftly. For example, Jean Valjean and Cosette sitting in the snow:

Typically in all his films Davies brings new insight into the book he is realizing, and here importantly he provides further explanation for Javert’s obsession: his feeling goes beyond the homoerotic, his rage is the rage of frustrated, the man who cannot understand the humane emotions and behavior of Valjean and loathes the man as a threat. The two men are photographed in close proximity again and again:

It takes considerable skill to convey this kind of hidden and criss-crossing emotionalism (for as portrayed by West, Jean Valjean does not participate in this) and the brilliant David Oyelowo is pitch perfect, down to an intense nervousness and sense of someone at the ready for an insult from his subordinates; he is perpetually on the edge. He is fascinated by Jean Valjean (“you astonish me”) and his eyes and body convey deep attraction. This throws light on other pairs of pursuer and pursuit from Frankenstein and his creature, to Caleb Williams and Falkland — to modern doppelgangers. But he is still a police officer:

Javert upon meeting Thenardier when he is in search of ValJean:

Did he say what he wanted the girl for? No, but we’re men of the world, Inspector.
Not hard to guess.
Doesn’t bear imagining.
Y All right.
That’s all.
– That’s all? But look here – What? What are you going to do for me? Nothing.
You should think yourself lucky that I don’t charge you.

His suicide as Javert is given time– the writing of his resignation,

JAVERT: I beg, Monsieur Le Prefet, to consider these proposals for improvements to the service.
First, that we end the practice of prisoners returning from interrogations being made to remove their shoes while they await transport back to the prison.
Many are coughing when they return to their cells.
This leads to hospital experiences.
Second, a prisoner who drops a thread in the weaving room loses 10 sous.
This is an abuse of HIS RECOMMENDATIONS OVERLAP: Third, special regulation of the Fourth, surveillance is generally Fifth, gendarmes Prisoners coming back from the –

Writing this he is pictured and writes as an elegant man. Davies gives him time for a silent agon when he cannot bear to jump into that dark waters but does. He lived his life in darkness and amid filth and cruelty and hatred inflicted on others, now he ends in the dark filth. Davies’s Les Miserables includes Javert as among the wretched of the earth even if it’s he who is a relentless punisher of the wretched.

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Master crook (Ron Cook)

I can single out only a few scenes, performances, themes. In Episode 2 Lily Collins astonishingly powerful-pathetic as Fantine — without hair, without teeth, laughed at, her mouth filled with blood, spurned and finally dying, crying crying crying because she has lost her beloved daughter and is afflicted with the idea this is God’s punishment. Only if the child arrives on time, can she feel she is forgiven. This is Davies’s overlay of interpretation on the effect of religion on those like Fantine whom society condemns. Ron Cook is a nightmare masquerade figure with his dolls for sale using the human hair and teeth he has wrenched out of the vulnerable.

Josh O’Connor as Marius

Episode 3: a riveting and unexpected theme brought out is the danger of being innocent. Innocence and ignorance helps the vicious, ruthless. Davies presents Marius and Cosette as utterly innocent and ignorant. In Marius’ case the cause is a reactionary hateful embittered rich grandfather; in Cosette’s a deeply humane loving victim of the society, once a life convict, our Jean Valjean. The result is the same: show Cosette a group of prisoners being treated like animals you mean to murder shortly except put on top of this is vicious cruelty and she says what bad men they must be — and I know in Davies’ version will be automatically horrified when Valjean tries to tell her his story. Showing her these men is his first step and see the result: she rejects him. Show Marius Thenadier and have him listen or remember his own innocent father’s gratitude to Thenadier and Marius assumes he is a “great hero” of war (as was his father — without ever thinking what the war was about and what killing is); Marius goes to the police (!) to tell them of how an older man (fully described by Marius) is about to visit Thenadier and Javert suspects this Is Valjean and is there to re-capture him. It’s like informing the FBI that some good black people are in trouble from criminals: the FBI would come in in the 1970s and murder all the black people.

Eponine (Erin Kellyman)

Gavroche (Reece Yates)

Mabeuf (Donald Sumpter) — a poor man who works at the church Marius’s grandfather’s woman servant takes him to each Sunday

The one innocent who hurts no one is Eponine: she seems so without any partisan or protector. Similarly, her younger brother (or step-brother, in the novel he is only semi-adopted, Gavroche (Reece Yates) who thinks what is happening is a game, tries to protect his younger brothers, and dies senselessly. The old man, Mabeuf (Donald Sumpter), his one revolutionary gesture in a spirit of fine hope is killed by sniper fire

The revolutionary young men: Enjolras (Joseph Quinn), Courfeyrac (Archie Madekwe), Grantaire (Turlough Convery)

Parts 5 and 6: the street fighting. In this version the revolutionaries are not presented as frivolous students, but genuinely aroused revolutionaries; yes some of them drink, they make bad decisions, but they are serious about demanding a better life for all. Marius is an outsider. With all the talk about street fighting that I have come across (the one book I know is Tariq Ali’s) this is the very first attempt I’ve come acrosss to show how terrifying it is to revolt against a govt, and really give a feel of the what it’s like to know a bunch of paid human beings are there to murder you, and see it happen all around you. Davies’s switches points of view, partly as individuals go down, but the most frequent is Enjolas. The episode even had a warning for viewers that the violence here is exceptional: it’s not; what’s rare is to show how paid police and militia will kill citizens. During the Obama era only glimpses were seen of what was done to the Occupy Wall Street people when some prominent person’s son or daughter’s body was destroyed — not all die when they are horrifically maimed nowadays. It was very moving when Grantaire (Turlough Convery) chooses to die standing with Enjolras. I’d say Joseph Quinn had a major role in this film

The death scene

The death scene of Valjean collapsing and put to bed with Cosette next to him put me in mind of Andrei’s death in Davies’s War and Peace. Davies had more time in War and Peace (9 episodes of differing length) so he showed the process of dying (and James Norton is a virtuoso actor) — but we may ask, Is it enough for this man that Cosette loved him? There is a bit too much poetic justice perhaps: Thenardier tells us in his losing scene that he is ending in shit. Hugo’s Les Miserables is not Shakespeare’s Lear

ValJean dying with Cosette by his side:

WEAKLY: Are you still there? Yes, Papa.
I had things to tell you.
Never mind.

Somewhat differently conceived a narrator and over-voice would have helped. Davies has rightly conceived of the piece as an epic but is driven down to individual metonymy too often. Is it though right to feel that Jean Valjean has let us down? Had he made it an educational opportunity for Cosette from all we have seen I doubt she could have understood.

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Father Myriel

Sister Simplice

Bellos mentions as another flaw in Hugo’s book the long sequence about the convent. In a book overtly anti-clerical, rightly critical of the church’s role in repression, to make two of the characters, Myriel at the opening and now the mother superior (Georgie Glenn) as well as Sister Simplice (Natalie Simpson) near saints does more than tend to mute the radical point of view on life. Bellos suggests that like many authors, Hugo is ambivalent; his politics are also partly conservative at times — as would be understandable given his background

We must have the upper class couple: Ellie Bamber as Cosette grown up; Josh O’Connor as Marius

Davies counters this: in each of his adaptations, while it is Davies’s spirit and presence that unites them all (and there are remarkable parallels among the actors he chooses for his heroes), in each he is reacting to and producing a content which is partly a recreated version of his author’s so he is reacting to the author. In Les Miserables Davies turns a sentimentality towards Catholicism at times into a humane secularism, and convent and moral life become symbols for finding peace and safety amid the evils of human nature and the society this nature creates. Davies pulls out of Hugo’s retreat narratives what a good person wants in life is peace and safety. His good people are rarely ambitious; they may want to work hard for the meaning of this, to help others, but they most of them do not seek high position. The bad people are those who value others for their high rank irrespective of anything else. What Jean Valjean seeks for Cosette and himself as the best that can be gotten generally is a framework, a place apart from the world that allows each individual to know individual private happiness in whatever way he or she can achieve – play music, read, whatever.

The priest, the mother superior and the nun who cared for Fantine, were seeking and created peace and safety for all under their protection. That more than any religious belief is the point; it’s the respect the state pays to religious space and offices that allows them to do this for Jean Valjean. We see in the revolutionaries that although Enjolras is a good man and well meaning, all the men surrounding him are too vain, follow their appetites, and simply haven’t the firepower to achieve what this man is after — some other mode of achieving more for “mankind” is needed. So in the meantime we make do.

Voltaire’s famous ending of Candide throws scepticism on the ability of Candide and his friends to protect their garden, and the sense is how tenuous and fragile their space is, it can be invaded at any time.

Another important original move is to genuinely hire as many black as white actors: this is a thoroughly color-blind and integrated cast, from Thenardier, from Arab backgrounds to many black and white actors and actresses, not omitting the usual blonde princess Cosette. There was a black population in France from the 18th century on, but this casting mirrors an ideal for our own times.

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Douglas Hodges as the unbowed Lydgate with whom the film adaptation begins (the book begins with Dorothea)

Juliette Aubrey as Dorothea hard at work on her plans for workers’ cottages, which are never built

To conclude, I have been watching Davies’s films as a kind of year-long marathon, and much as the originality and relevance of Les Miserables to today, makes it the one to see now, I suggest that his finest art, the ones beyond those I cited in my opening paragraph, the finest of his film adaptations occurred in the 1990s; I’m thinking of film adaptations like Moll Flanders (1996), Vanity Fair (1998), and early 2000s The Way We Live Now (2001), Daniel Deronda (2002), and especially Middlemarch (1994, the narrator’s voice is Judi Dench and by the end I find myself weeping uncontrollably as the destinies of each play out). This Les Miserables is another of the better recently dumbed-down serial dramas: the language is simple, crude, not much given over to subtlety of thought such as we find in his mid-career films.

Enjolras and Marius in front of the other revolutionaries:

I have to say, first, I’m not royalist any more.
What are you now then? I’m a Bonapartist and a Democrat.
Now, that’s a step in the right direction.
Napoleon was a defender of the Republic before he made himself Emperor.
Well, have a drink.
Yes, have a lot of drinks.
[THEY SING AND CHANT] I say down with all nations and down with all kings.
What about emperors? An emperor is just a king by another name, only worse.
I won’t have it.
Napoleon made this country great.
He brought reforms through his conquests.
What a joy to serve under such a man as that.
What could be greater? To be free.
I want to be a citizen of the Republic, not a subject of a king or an emperor.
One day we’ll all be fighting to the death about that, on one side or another.

Ironic and satiric comedy is closer to Davies’s own spirit (and can be just glimpsed abovve), and deep musing grief for the price we all pay for our failures in life and society’s control, punishment and thwarting of our dreams and innate selves, but also a buoyant enough spirit for self-examination to find strength to play out the roles that are offered us as ethically as we can. Davies does not despair. He offers deep filmic pleasures and humane liberal content still, and has created a wealth of video libraries from books — early on more in his own right individually (education and daily ordinary life his theme), then from popular romance and sentimental novels (Delderfield), from the 1990s on the very entertaining and relevant (House of Cards) as well as some of the greatest novels ever written.

Fingers crossed his star is rising again, and he has the years left to do a new The Pallisers.

Ellen

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Factual Fictions & Fictional Facts

Scenes from the recent Poldark series, with the accent on historical accuracy

Dear friends and readers,

My last blog was partly prompted by my reading through in chronological order Winston Graham’s contemporary suspense and Poldark and historical fiction and non-fiction books; I write again quickly because I’ve just put onto academia.edu, my third essay delivered at an 18th century conference on the Poldark books. The first at an EC/ASECS (East Central subdivision) at Penn State College (2011) whose theme was “liberty,” is called “‘I have the right to choose my own life’:” Liberty in the Poldark novels, and I put it prettily on my website, where you can see the titles of the other papers, and a more plain  copy at academia.edu.

Norma Streader as Verity asking Robin Ellis as Ross to provide a place for her to get to know Captain Blamey so she can decide whether to marry him or not ….

The second at an ASECS conference in Los Angeles (2015) that (appropriately perhaps) made film making and film adaptations a central concern:  “Poldark Re-booted, Forty Years On.”

An emphasis on community

For my third I discerned five phases or perspectives. a shifting genuinely liberal humane point of view politically, shaping Graham’s Poldark novels.

“After the Jump:” Winston Graham’s Uses of Documented Facts and Silences.

Contemporary playing cards

I had originally intended to call it “The Poldark Novels: a quietly passionate blend of precise accuracy with imaginative romancing.” Maybe I should have stayed with this, but it’s not the topic I actually wrote on.  I wrote on Graham’s different uses of fictional facts.

The cloak that Ross buys Demelza in the 2015 adaptation

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

To explain:  At the recent ASECS (American Society, 18th Century Studies) held in Denver, Colorado (a convention hotel downtown), I was one of seven people scheduled to give papers on two panels on “Factual Fictions,” one on early Thursday morning, and the other late Friday afternoon, a session I was to chair.  Both panels organized by Martin Lansverk, president of NWSECS (Northwest subdivision). In the event, in this “subgroup” as I may call it, there were five papers, three on the morning I gave mine, and two on the late afternoon I was panel chair. I have a copy of a sixth paper (a good one), and I put it in the comments. I can offer the gist of the other two papers that Thursday morning: Lee Kahan (“Edgeworth’s ‘Lion Hunters:’ Defining Character in an ‘Age of Scandal'”) traced a shift in attitudes towards what was regarded as accurate personality portrayal. In newspapers supposedly captured real people’s characters by surface portrayal, external scandal, and events; the novel was recognized as different and superior by its endowing characters with depth, subjectivity, interior motives. A gender fault-line can be seen as novelists were then often women and women it was felt were “attuned to intimate understanding.”

Maria Edgeworth by John Downman (1807)

Martin Lansverk (“Laughter and Truth-telling in Jane Austen”) found a pattern of development in Austen’s uses of humor and comedy in her books which parallel emergent and developing theories of humor and comedy in the 18th century. He described what kind of laughter we find in Austen’s novels and what kind of humor and wit is practiced in good and bad characters in the different novels. In brief, honest laughter is a sign of an ethical character; where fake laughter shows amorality (brutal laughter comes in here as well as crude ridicule). He also found a continuum which in Austen and others moves from gentle teasing and silent (sometimes ironic) smiles (Elinor Dashwood) to nervous release (Mrs Palmer) to hard aggressive mockery (bullying and sneering).

Hattie Morahan as Elinor Dashwood (walking alongside Edward Ferrars, 2008 S&S scripted Andrew Davies)

For the two papers on Friday afternoon I can offer a bit more detail because I am myself so engaged by the artistic work of John Gilpin. Tom Hothem (“Natural Fictions: Landscape Aesthetics and the Spatial Imagination”) turned out to be a beautiful meditation on Gilpin’s moral philosophy as made manifest in his idealized picturesque drawings, watercolors and illustrations. Gilpin was reaching for topographical archetypes as truths within all landscapes. Gilpin used aesthetic rules he found in novels (like that of Fielding), his autobiographical experience and apprehension of what he imagined as well as saw. His vision took the “best materials” in order to take “possession of the heart.” The trajectory of thought here leads to modern environmentalism and conceptions underlying urban renewal planning. He showed a number of slides of landscapes, parks, built houses, which (in effect) took us to architects in Italy, England and the US — Olmstead comes out of such schools of thought.

William Gilpin, Matlock from Views of Derbyshire (alluded to in Austen’s P&P)

Jacob Crane (“‘The Algerines are Coming!’ Fakes News, Islamophobia, and Early American Journalism”) revealed newspaper sensationalism and demonization of Muslims in North Africa, actuated by understandable fears of being captured and enslaved by pirates in the waters off the shores of the US. He offered the history of real border and trade conflicts and crises becoming in public media reports of fantastic barbarity. At one point it was claimed that Benjamin Franklin had been captured and enslaved. Again we glimpsed a liminal space (which can’t easily be checked) where fact and fiction were used as arguments and rationales by colonists, emigrants; Jacob quoted specific reports by captains and others, some true or partly true and some faked.

Anne Vallayer-Costa, White Soup Tureen

I will be writing more about this ASECS, one for my Austen reveries, a paper on Walter Scott from a session on the Jacobite uprising; on Andrew Davies’ adaptation of Northanger Abbey; on the theater as a career for actors, and scene painters, and the presidential address by Melissa Hyde on professional woman painters of the 18th century (including two almost unknown women, Marianne Loir and a Mlle or Madame Lusuler), and two here, further on film adaptations of texts written or set it the 18th century (Poldark, Outlander, The Favourite, Games of Thrones, Banished) and landscape gardening, Gilpin to Frank Lloyd Wright

Marked up page of Gilpin book

Ellen

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English Lake District and the border tour: Roman, ancient Celtic and Reivers Britain; more castles, houses, churches and mines (4)

Vindolanda

John Millais’s loving portrait of a young John Ruskin

Friends and readers,

Though I had heard of Hadrian’s Wall, I had never thought there must have been a world of people inside this wall the Romans were seeking to protect and control. During the two weeks, our group visited a number of sites revealing Roman settlements all around the north west and western parts of today’s Great Britain. They came to extract the minerals in the ground and take it back to Italy to be hammered into thousands of objects. On different days over the two weeks we rode and walked over included the mountain top Hardknott Roman Fort, smaller forts, and finally near and by Scotland the vast excavation site of Vindolanda, and Hadrian’s Wall.

The areas we covered in the two weeks further north have also known incessant violence from continual internecine warfare by groups of maraunders (gangs of tribes and family groups) who came to be called the Borders Reivers: they are recorded from medieval history as living by stealing and killing and we visited and went pass their forts, Peel towers (places of refuge), heavily built castle-like dungeons. Carlisle, the city is found amid what once were these scenes and it has a marvelous museum remembering its history from the Vikings, through the Romans onto feudal and Victorian-Edwardian times: Tullie House and Museum, and there we were treated to the best lecture we heard: on the Reivers and this area in the 15th through early 18th century. Here too we came into contact with earlier Celtic and early Christian worlds at Lindisfarne island.

Throughout we often took the equivalent of or actual old Roman roads newly fixed, once important arteries for transportation.  (We stayed off main highways.)  One of the guides maintained the first language written down in the British Isles which we can find is Latin. Art works, and celebrity souvenirs, guide books support this remembering of history which gives meaning and a long-term identity to Northumberland and Cumbria and their specific localities.

This basic outline of local particular history that we traveled through was varied with visits to family estates thrown open to the public and (if they had one) castles or manor houses. One day we visited another poet’s house, from which he drew and wrote, supported artists and working people’s causes: education for all, better housing, civil rights: John Ruskin’s Brantwood. There were Roman and early gothic churches and vast cathedrals, more museums, more mines still being worked or open to the public for display and sales. Art objects at all these places and guidebooks could help you remember what you saw — as well as use of your cell phone or ipad or fancier camera.

I have summed up what is to come so we can have perspective and move through the  rest of the two weeks more quickly.

Hardnott Pass – the picture is not large enough to show the ribbons of road or their steepness

Friday morning dubbed “a day of high adventure” we drove up a terrifying Hardknott Pass: a zizgag of a narrow path going ever higher but at corners demanding that the bus turn narrowly on its wheels in a new diagonal one way and then that, often at the edge of a steep incline, where the bus was really at risk of toppling over — except for intrepid guide drivers, excellent brakes and super-sturdy mini-buses.

Remains of Roman Fort

Once we got to the top, everyone had to have thick shoes, and we walked around an vast open space to look at the remains of Baths, forts, and living quarters for Roman soldiers and all those living with them (household, women, horses).

Here’s a piece of this place:

You’re right: it’s a stone wall.

We then drove to Muncaster Castle where we were treated very well.

Muncaster Castle

The present owner, married into the Penningtons (a family who go back to Elizabethan Britain) gave a lecture as he took us around the bottom part of the castle now set up for tourists and also groups coming in for occasions (weddings, barmitzvahs, parties) and then showed us where we could walk in the garden. Meant to amuse us, show the whirligig of time has not favored the aristocrats of England, the owner told us the present family lives in the basement. I’ll bet that’s a word that covers a suite of beautiful rooms below, complete with glass windows and window doors.

A sixteenth century bedroom on the top floor

I liked how simply and obviously the rooms were got up to display different functions. Inside the house were many genuinely fine works of art from the 16th through 18th century. There was a rich library of sets of books and rare books, which he said was undergoing digital cataloguing.

The Muncaster library

Then it was time to go to lunch. We ate in the castle in a room from which we could see the gardens. After lunch we could walk about (the grounds reminded me of Bignor Park which I saw during the Charlotte Smith conference) and we did and then at 2 a falconry show (every Tuesday and Friday afternoon). Basically three young adults, and the owner too, with three birds attached to each of the three falconers flew and played around him or her. It felt like more than a show because the birds were made to fly low and fly quite far in the sky. This part reminded me of Longleate where the public was supplied with entertainment (a zoo, a ferry, picnic grounds), only again something more select, unusual was done. I have read one of the Pennington’s diaries, and thought about how hard it was to run this house now as a business.

It was now later Friday afternoon we drove back over Corney Fell, where we made frequent stops, and I began to be aware of how many sheep we were continually seeing:

The scenery was spectacular: I felt like I was in a picture postcard:

Saturday’s big event was our visit to Brantwood house, John Ruskin’s home and we were led to dwell for a few hours on this man’s life, his friends, his work. First we saw a half hour film which emphasized his social and political activities (his schemes adumbrated the national health, public housing, pensions) and then plenty of time to explore his wonderfully appointed large house (a museum as private dwelling) and extensive gardens overlooking a lake.

A detail from John Millais’s portrait of Ruskin with a backdrop of the natural world — it is not sufficiently appreciated how often the Pre-Raphaelites painted the natural world in great careful detail

We were told Ruskin bought Brantwood sight unseen for £1500 (or was it £15,000?)

Brantwood house — 1862; he lived there the rest of his life with a small band of family, friends, servants

In each of the rooms there were albums with writing and pictures commemorating eras in Ruskin’s life, drawings and paintings, many by him, many by friends, often of nature using primitive cameras to become more exact.

Brantwood room: note the Pre-Raphaelite like pictures

We saw the furniture he used, the musical instruments everyone played, his desk.

All round the house were smaller buildings with exhibits (on birds, an ice house, young artists today). It really took a couple of hours to explore. The effect was to reveal how much richer he was than anyone else around him. But he also was much beloved and befriended: I felt all the people living around him were not faking. He really was a deeply kind and decent man who made accurate pictures of nature.

The next phase was lunch on a garden terrace where room was found for a restaurant overlooking the lake:

From there we caught a Victorian looking steam boat and rode across the lake.

The lake we crossed seen from on high …

We looked at the Coniston Falls, said to be the inspiration for his famous poem of daffodils; click here to read Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere journal on Ullswater. This time the later afternoon stop was Langdale, where we stopped to take pictures and look out at the valley:

I learned what was meant by a pike (a word Trollope often uses in his descriptions of Cumberland in Can You Forgive Her? and Lady Anna — his sister had a house there when she was married where his mother visited and presumably he too):

Langdale pikes

Sunday was dubbed a free day. The guides had a day off and got some needed rest.  The group was invited to take ourselves to the different ferries crossing different parts of Lake Windermere and going to different towns — we were given maps and tickets to a fery.  I had had enough of company, 6 and more hours a day on the mini-bus, staring at lakes, and it looked like it would rain (it often did) so chickened out. I sat by a warm and pretty (though faked) fire (it looked like wood burning but was a gas fire) in one of the common rooms and read Voltaire’s Lettres Philosophiques. In the afternoon I took a walk by myself. I discovered I couldn’t get far and how much we did need those mini-buses and shuttles to reach any where near for a town.

The next day, Monday, we all rose early, packed, and with an extra bus for luggage, drove a number of hours to get to our second hotel, a converted 10th century castle, Otterburn in Cumbria, whose picture of which I supplied in my first blog, but here is a publicity shot, meant to allure people to come to the place as a hotel — inside it is much renovated and much of it rooms rebuilt during the later 19th and 20th centuries, though a central block is 13th century and has a large still working fireplace (renovated 18th century) where I would sit in the later afternoon:

It’s worth noting that most of the castle ruins we saw were in Cumbria, further north near the border, most of the ancient small churches, all of the dungeons

A castle ruin we passed by at some point during the following week

Otterburn church near the castle:

Another publicity shot

We had entered the area historically once of high violence and more primitive conditions, about which I’ll be writing next time. I bring out this perspective to distinguish the Lake District from the border country.  In the lake district we were shown trains and how today too a privately run one is kept up to unite small towns. We went to libraries and sites “sacred” to writers, poets, artists. The landscapes were the epitome of beauty.  In the border lands one finds many ugly bleak places, dungeons, towers, mostly ruined or uninhabited castles, castles whose function is utterly changed. Among the rare ones still a family, Alnwick Castle, now known for housing Harry Potter at school on films, one episode in Downton Abbey, and three in the older TV farce, Blackadder. For me the context is still the great 18th century painter, Canaletto whose painting makes it so idyllic, so appealingly picturesque:

Antonio Canaletto, Alnwick Castle, 1747

But it took the real form it did because its origins and its present place, however peaceful today, and just in Northumberland, are in these more northern border places:

Alnwick Castle photographed by a Road Scholar pilgrim from a bus stop

We didn’t go into Alnwick because you did have to make an appointment and to see each part of the castle was separate fee on top of the parking fee. Nota bene, gentle reader.

I will be attending a course on the poetry of Robert Frost in a couple of weeks. Now thinking about how I became an English major, and how my choice to become an English major was clinched when I read Wordsworth and yes the other Romantic poets (also Lamb, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley), and how I’ve ended up where I am, in solitude, going on a holiday to these sites with a group of pilgrim-strangers as friends, I’ll end on Frost’s great poem,

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

But my choice was not so free. I chose the road less traveled by because out of my class origins, my gender, my character I was not able even to conceive of following the one most people chuse (18th century spelling).

Ellen

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English Lake District and the Borders tour: the Wordsworth circles, Keswick & a stone circle (2)

Tarn Haws — a place we stopped at where three lakes intertwined nestled in hills (@Dorothy Glass, one of the people who had a remarkable camera, attached to a computer back in the hotel)

“Prologue to the Lakes District” with apologies to Geoffrey Chaucer
By Margaret Lapetina August 2018

In August, after daffodils ended season
Come Pilgrims from the colonies, for this reason–
To the lakes , to walk the fells , all most enthused
Road scholars, –funny spelling though
They mused.

A group of scholars, you know who you are
For Romanticism to Turbulence travelled far.
To share their knowledge they did yearn
And gladly would they teach and gladly learn.

Our psychologist bard named Bob
Reading Wordsworth did a daffydilly job
After dinner in the poet’s home.
For his pains, he was lauded and
Did admit to being chuffed when we applauded.

Poor Dora, sister-bound to William
In her time not praised for her words’ worth.
Today, the world would not dare ignore her
She might have had the chance to be our Nora.
Nora writes, and researches, publishes and edits;
Commands our great respect, to her great credit.

Sisters L. And G, all smiles and harmony
Long grown in years of mutuality
At dinner played a trivia game with Rick
Alas, they say he drove them quick–
To drink!

The doctor, Steve, in lean and quiet power
Eschews the scalpel now to photograph the flower
He wandered every bastle tower, strode on every trail
He seemed to take delight in fine detail

Suzanne ,the Carolina girl
Enjoys this second chance at traveling her world
To England is in thrall.

A late arrival, Cape Cod Sarah
Lifelong learner, seeks it all.
We hear she has a special yen for Hadrian’s wall.
From loss to strength; though short she stands quite tall
And thus is to be well admired by all.

Our Dave, who on his sweater sports a safety pin
Will help to bring the next election in.
With Sandy he has sailed Italy before
And now they stand in Windemere in awe.

On seeing Carlisle church’s window art
Dorothy, an expert in this part,
Taught some of us the elements to parse
The mysteries of the stunning stained glass

A Rick there was, and that a worthy man
To subjects erudite and small his fine mind ran
Over dinner he brings laughter and good talk
Outside he seeks to help all ladies as they walk.
In darkness he will offer light
He is the very perfect gentle knight

Host Peter J would rather make his way
By foot, we guess ,on fells than drive the bus each day.
He entertains with facts, tales nice or gory
Driving over Hardknott telling stories.
By far the best, the Wednesday highlight
Was dodging bullets in the twilight
Through the military camp …
No wonder he prefers the sweet green fell
He makes us love it and the sheep as well.
And so we thank you, from our 16 seater, Peter.

What irony prevails to name host Anne, Anne Strange?
Could not the world agree to rearrange a
name to celebrate her warmth and charm, her ease
To call her Anne the Friendly, pilgrims please?
For cycling through the sun and rain in Spain
next week
she’ll do 200 kilometers, no strain.
A riding holiday to end the year.
And so we wish her well, Anne-not- Strange, my dear

Road scholars we, though not of Chaucer’s place;
I hope, time comes, to see again each face …

Dear Friends and readers,

I’m back from my Road Scholar touring experience, and like last August’s at Aigas House, in Inverness, Scotland, I mean to share what I can. I’ve written a different sort of framework: A Canterbuy Tale, the human dimension because this time the people on the tour made the experience what it was a lot more than last, where (without meaning to regret this at all) the time was shaped far more by John Lister-Kaye, Lady Lucy, and the various interns. Romance and Turbulence, the title given the itinerary by Road Scholar, is a mix of cultural, landscape, social and physical activity (moderate) events. Accordingly, I’ll divide my story into artists (the Wordsworths, Beatrice Potter, Johns Ruskin); ruins and archeaological sites; landscapes and towns. There were three lectures and a film and I’ll bring them in as they occurred. Within this division, I’m more or less going chronologically.

The first evening we were together, Peter, one of our guides, walked with us from Lindeth Howe Hotel to Lake Windermere, the largest of the lakes. We were near the busy town of Bowness from which many cruise boats (day long, a couple of hours) come and go. Lots of shops, quick food areas, tourist items on sale (for local English people too) and an amusement park. Eventually we discovered there are long lines for the ferries up and down the lake to various smaller towns.

The next day we spent the morning at Wordsworth sites. First Dove Cottage (not far from the hotel).

Dove cottage — before renovated for conservation and tourist gazing by the Wordsworth Trust site

What is most memorable is how small and plain the rooms are, low the ceilings, yet at the same time it was not a hovel, but a gentleman’s residence. The house had much of the original furniture, and you saw chairs and tables one could sit in and work at, provision for different kinds of tasks, all set out in an orderly way. Downstairs one or two of the rooms had been part of an inn; there was a separate place in one room for cooking, in another for quiet activity. Upstairs was room that was flooded with light and it has a day bed, a desk, chairs, a built-in bookcase: William Wordsworth’s study; there was a room for the children, which was lined with newsprint paper to keep out the cold. The people in the rooms talked of how Wordsworth deliberately lived more meagrely than he had to in order to participate in the community: well he was and was not one of them. So too undoubtedly his sister, their poetic and political visitors. At Rydal Mount, it was emphasized that he was a generous man to all the people he and Dorothy came into contact with — he had more money then. That he was liked by the local community and sociable enough. I imagine he was respected if thought a bit odd.

From the outside

We then went into the directly nearby Wordsworth Museum. What an astonishing array of Wordsworthiana this place has — and impressive rich archive of manuscripts and older printed books. There were several full exhibits (lots of plaques, writing, pictures, book printed and manuscript) about the various woman associated with Wordsworth — taking off from the book The Passionate Sisterhood. The men were not left out: relics of Shelley, Southey and the radical Thelwall, an exhibit about DeQuincey (for a while a good friend of the Wordsworths). I was very impressed by the numbers of letters, pictures, paraphernalia of all sorts, and the lists of manuscripts just in the open rooms. The portraits were remarkable; a number I had never seen before (DeQuincy, again early on a frequent visitor)

Robert Southey — this was one there (he supported several of these people eventually)

Every attempt was made to bring the women to the fore in all the museums we were in; one of the exhibits here was titled to emphasize the women who lived in the cottage and visited, and kept it up and wrote. I was surprised at the amount of material about Mary Shelley, for after all she never came here and was not directly part of this group until after Shelley’s death and she became a woman of letters herself. But there is so much more about her to show visually than some of the Wordsworth women.

Here is one by Sara Coleridge, Samuel’s daughter, which reveals that she needed opium to help her sleep: an eerie poem: life was not so easy in that cottage or the others these people inhabited:

The Poppies Blooming all around
My Herbert loves to see,
Some pearly white, some dark as night,
Some red as cramasie;
He loves their colours fresh and fine
As fair as fair may be,
But little does my darling know
How good they are to me.
He views their clustering petals gay
¬And shakes their nut-brown seeds.
But they to him are nothing more
Than other brilliant weeds;

O how should’st thou with beaming brow
With eye and cheek so bright
Know aught of that blossom’s pow’r,
Or sorrows of the night!
When poor mama long restless lies
She drinks the poppy’s juice;
That liquor soon can close her eyes
And slumber soft produce.
0′ then my sweet my happy boy
Will thank the poppy flow’r
Which brings the sleep to dear mama
At midnight’s darksome hour.

From Peter Swaab’s edition of Sara Coleridge: Collected Poems, 2007:

She was Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s daughter; she was Robert Southey’s niece; she was an accomplished translator who was proficient in six languages and who published her first translation (a three-volume treatise, from the Latin, about equestrian tribes in Paraguay) when she was just eighteen; she was a nineteenth-century mother who suffered from bouts of anxiety, post-natal depression and, finally, breast cancer; she was a writer of children’s books, a theologian, an editor of her father’s works; she was an artist’s model, first for William Collins’ painting in oils of her as Wordsworth’s Highland Girl in 1818 and then for a watercolour by Edward Nash in 1820. Invariably, all these other facets of Coleridge’s life and work jostle with her poetry for scholarly attention. Faced with the difficult task of selecting a particular angle or approach, no one to date who has made the decision to write about Sara Coleridge has chosen to make her poetry a prime focus of study. And the reason for this, I think, is because Coleridge’s poetry is markedly different from the kind of poetry we’re more used to reading.

When it came to writing poetry, Sara Coleridge stuck closely to the advice Robert Southey later gave a young Charlotte Brontë. She was content to “write poetry for its own sake; not in a spirit of emulation, and not with a view to celebrity.” She was, in the best sense of the word, an amateur who pursued poetry-writing for the same reasons that anyone pursues any recreational hobby: “Just as I would have any one learn music who has an opportunity, though few can be composers, or even performers of great merit,” she explained, “I would have any one, who really and truly has leisure and ability, make verses. I think it a more refining and happy-making occupation than any other pastime-accomplishment

The piece de resistance was a talk by Melissa Mitchell, Assistant Curator about what we can learn from working in archives on manuscripts. Ms Mitchell quoted Philip Larkin on two values: the magical, a relic before the present person’s eyes and in hand of the literal circumstances of the writing; the intimate: we reach a level of closeness and shared experience to see private letters. She had a digital copy of a letter in the museum written at age 16 by Dorothy Wordsworth to a friend, Jane Pollard: the sheets are completely filled and only cross-hatched (to save money) on the outer part of the paper which served as an envelope. One feels one gets close to the creative process by what Dorothy describes of her behavior towards others and by what intelligent company reviewers could glean from visits. We see how sad Dorothy could be, how her aunt and uncle behaved meanly, coldly, harshly to her (their standards for dealing with wards is I hope not replicated today). Dorothy’s hope lies in joining her brothers, she dreams of sharing a cottage and making a garden.

Here is one by Dorothy after many years of living with William, and then with his wife and children and amid all the other romantic poets and writers: she still was a person who remained apart in herself:

Floating Island

Harmonious powers with nature work
On sky, earth, river, lake and sea;
Sunshine and cloud, whirlwind and breeze,
All in one duteous task agree.

Once did I see a slip of earth
By throbbing waves long undermined,
Loosed from its hold—how, no one knew,
But all might see it float, obedient to the wind,

Might see it from the mossy shore
Dissevered, float upon the lake,
Float with its crest of trees adorned,
On which the warbling birds their pastime take.

Food, shelter, safety, there they find;
There berries ripen, flowerets bloom;
There insects live their lives—and die:
A peopled world it is, in size a tiny room.

And thus through many seasons’ space
This little island may survive,
But nature (though we mark her not)
Will take away, may cease to give.

Perchance when you are wandering forth
Upon some vacant sunny day
Without an object, hope, or fear,
Thither your eyes may turn—the isle is passed away,

Buried beneath the glittering lake,
Its place no longer to be found.
Yet the lost fragments shall remain
To fertilize some other ground.
(1828-29; 1842)

See my “Foremother poet: Dorothy Wordsworth (1771-1855).

Mitchell didn’t finish her talk as there were so many good questions and the answers took her in other directions from this letter and manuscripts as such. We don’t have all Dorothy left as her grandson crossed out lines to make her writing illegible. Dorothy was a deeply passionate young woman, she seemed so different from many people, slightly (or a lot) wild. Mitchell took down from the shelves of the room (like Chawton a room set aside for first editions of the writers of the era) a first edition of Milton which had been Wordsworth’s own copy; it was rebound either by Wordsworth or shortly after his death and Ms Mitchell read aloud a description on the inside by Mary Wordsworth about the rebinding of the book. It was an emotional experience to hear this kind of talk. Mitchell told of the story of Dorothy’s anguish the night before William married Mary (and how Dorothy wore the wedding ring that night on her hand) and the finding of the love letters of Mary and Wm which show they were tenderly in love. At the top of the museum is an exhibit intended to remind the visitor of Dorothy’s last years suffering senile dementia: the state of medicine at the era is seen in a replica of her last bed and the treatments attempted to alleviate her helplessness.

The politics of era and fine line these writers had to walk not only socially but politically, was eschewed and the presence of Pitt’s gov’t. We were not quite told how William was just finally (through patronage) offered a paying job, nor of the kind of surveillance, pressure and destruction that could be wreaked on any of the individuals in the circle who became too overtly radical in his public lifetime. Think of the imprisonment of Leigh Hunt, with whom, and about which experience Daisy Hay opens her book (see below). I cover this in my review of Kenneth Johstone’s Unusual Suspects: Pitt’s Reign of Alarm and the Lost Generation of the 1790s:

The bookshop is worth going to because upstairs they have older used books and the volumes up and downstairs have been carefully chosen and culled to include the best scholarship on the writing and visual art of the region. I bought two paperbacks I could carry by authors whose essays I’ve enjoyed:

We had lunch as a group in an old pub in Keswick and then were left to our own devices for a couple of hours. I found a good bookstore with little trouble. It was place for local people to sit in the square and talk, there were all sorts of ordinary shops and tourist places intermingled. I went to an art exhibit of lovely watercolors and then in the church found an historical exhibit about mining in the area and some remarkable chalk drawings of the mines and quarries sometimes executed with the picturesque in mind. I wished I had had room in my case to bring back some of these pictures that I saw.

Keswick, central town square

On the road again, “in the minibuses,” we passed by and made a quick visit (half an hour) to a famous slate mine, now turned into a perpetual shop for items made of slate for passersby and tourists to buy. One must keep in mind how what these sites are today are places for visitors to come and look at as snatched out and preserved pieces of history. That is their function and so they direct themselves to those who are using the sites to have (they hope) numinous or pleasant experiences. Every attempt is made to declare the site special, somehow lifted from the ordinary, and (to my mind) these are only successful when not too many people come to them and they remain relatively unchanged or are (as in this case) openly redirected as a store

Slate Mine — we stopped by several later in the week — I bought a new pair of earrings and a barret (to replace the one I had to give up going through security at one point because forsooth it made too much noise and I had a plane to catch and no time to cope with explanations)

Then we drove to a high point of a hill and looked down on Buttermere, a spectacularly beautiful lake just as the sky is darkening, whereupon we drove in another direction way, higher and higher, in circles, and suddenly found ourselves stopped at the bottom of a hill. Climb it and you find yourself in a small circle of neolithic stones.

Castlerigg can be found in wikipedia and is said to be among the most visited of the neolothic stone sites of Cumbria.  The question is of course what were these open air temples or airy-buildings for? I wish we had had more lectures or that the guides could have furnished more information, but what they said was true: we don’t know for sure what these circles were used for. This small one had the merit that on that day it appeared to our eyes relatively unknown (the guide suggested this) so there was no crowded parking lot, and only a few people around. It was late in the afternoon, and I could see it’s quietly taken care of or it would not last. It’s a kind of time capsule today; seen a couple of centuries ago Keats was not that impressed: “Scarce images of life, one here, one there,/Lay vast and edgeways; like a dismal cirque/Of Druid stones, upon a forlorn moor…“ Maybe the weather was bad that day: we had sun, if not as much as in the photo: its landspace is protected by the National Trust

Castlerigg

An extraordinarily good book I bought when visiting Stonehenge, Avebury (both crowded with tourists, restaurants, tours) and Stanton Drew (like Castlerigg left alone basically) with Jim, Laura, and Isobel, Christopher Chippindale in his Stonehenge Complete tells of how vulnerable these stones are to defacement and from the weather. Peter talked of control of the weather by neolithic farmers and told a couple of stories: I suspect cruel sacrifices may have gone on in one, but like many historical sites de mémoire, the shell of what was can now be made to harbour and represent quite different meanings. Such preserved places carve out a space which can image present-day human resistance to the destruction and chance and loss; they can stand for the opposing impulse: human resistance to taking into account what really was — though this was not true of the Road Scholar tour as we went to the grim prisons (I’ll talk of the Hermitage, a castle with dungeons on the Scottish side of the border and Etal Castle (near Flodden Field another day). They show us too since they have been left to survive what human beings potentially can reverence and make socially functioning places to come to and experience together. Somehow the places become something more in memory after we left them.

In the evening after dinner three of us, me, Barbara, and Sara, accompanied a seemingly tireless Peter on a sort of zig-zag hop until we reached the top of our local Windermere pond. He said he had had enough of being on a bus for many hours.  He is a 76 year old man, originally from London, now lives in a small house on a sort of island in Cumbria. He was ever pushing us higher and higher and we actually got to the top and gazed out across the landscape just near the hotel:

This is one of the hotel’s promotional shots: it does show the gardens which have been much developed since Beatrice Potter’s day: a short history:

it is not a big glamorous modern hotel; rather it is a converted and expanded country mansion (not that big originally, imagine 9 rooms on 2 floors, with a stable nearby, plus kitchen garden). It was owned by Beatrice Potter first as a summer home, then a place to put her aging mother. During WW1 a tiny hospital, then a bed and breakfast, now a hotel. It is just outside Bowness, a large town on one shore of Lake Windermere, not far from where Wordsworth once lived. I should add it now has 30 plus “guests, 4 common rooms (for different purposes), dining room with piano, bar, office, kitchens&c, three medium gardens (the largest of which supplies the photo perspective), parking lot …

Ellen

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Poldark: the fourth season (2018): after watching the British version

Aidan Turner as Ross Poldark (Episode 1, after prologue)

Eleanor Tomlinson as Demelza singing (also Episode 1)

Of course there has to be an end. Of course. For that is what everyone has faced since the world began. And that is — what do you call it — intolerable. It’s intolerable! So you must not think of it. You must not face it. Because it is a certainty it has to be forgotten. One cannot — one must not — fear a certainty. All we know is this moment and this moment. Ross, we are alive! We are. We are. The past is over, gone. What is to come does not exist yet. That’s tomorrow! it’s only now that can ever be, at any one moment, now, we are alive — and together. We can’t ask more. There isn’t any more to ask — Demelza to Ross, concluding words of The Angry Tide, almost the last words of the 1977 iteration but not forcefully enough spoken by Angharad Rees)

Friends and readers,

So we have come, alas, to the end of a second iteration of the first seven marvelous Poldark novels of Winston Graham, with Debbie Horsfield transmuting the tragic and stoic pain of the (by no means) darkest of these novels, The Angry Tide, into hope for compromise and renewal (two of our couples, Ross and Demelza Poldark, Dwight and Caroline Enys); healing after the self has been shattered it would seem beyond repair (Drake and now Morwenna Carne); and maddened rage turned into a stone-y acceptance (as George Warleggan stands over the grave of Elizabeth with two of her children in tow, Valentine and Ursula).

Jack Farthing as George Warleggan (the last shot)

We’ve had four years rather than two, and hour long rather than 45-50 minute episodes. One script writer instead of seven. The last two episodes of this iteration were as powerful as found anywhere in contemporary TV drama. It took time for me to recover after both. When I did, I felt sorrow that Turner could not find his way to live in this role for another say three years (which it might have taken for the concluding quartet, Stranger from the Sea, Miller’s Dance, Loving Cup, Twisted Sword; and coda,  Bella  (Graham originally named it far more appropriately Valentine).

Duelling scene: establishment shot

When seen against the backdrop of the last half of The Four Swans and The Angry Tide (Poldark 6 & 7, the two novels adapted), and the corresponding episodes of the 1977-78 Poldark (Episodes 8-13, scripted by Alexander Baron, John Wiles and Martin Worth), one is driven to same kinds of conclusions as the previous three seasons.

Judy Geeson a much more deeply felt Caroline in the 1977 episodes (Part 10).

At its best the new Poldark provided much much more closely literal transposition; they were much more willing to show the characters deeply disquieted, angry, vexed at one another. Horsfield repeatedly focused on intense vulnerable and angry (and all sorts of) psychological encounters, up-close, up front in ways not quite permitted by the decorum of the 1970s BBC costume dramas. To this was added Ross’s rousing protest against the hanging of innocent and starving men as “examples” (“pour encourager les autres,” as Voltaire famously wrote in Candide), scenes of explicit radical political proposals by Ross in parliament (hinted at in the books and omitted in the 1970s), rousing radical political proposals by Ross in parliament (anachronistically standing on the wrong side of aisle, as otherwise how could he have been protesting against the Tory party as he represents the Tory grandee Boscawen, Lord Falmouth). There was some stunningly memorable photography around the scene of the duel:  the landscape seems to go from dissolve to water and back again. Some fine virtuoso acting, showing the BBC still has this in its pocket if it will only give the actors the nuanced lines and the time: it would be invidious to single any one out, but the particularly hard and poignant role of Morwenna was more or less fully realized by Elise Chappell (she was a bit hampered by the determination of Horsfield to squash Graham’s Morwenna’s revulsion against the reincarnation of the man who nightly rapes her sadistically; that is to say, the baby forced on her by Whitworth).

And it’s not that easy to be as purely obnoxious and contemptible while actuated by genuine predatory power as Christian Brassington managed in the thankless role of complacently incessantly corrupt vicious Vicar Whitworth. Robin Ellis appeared a couple of times this season as a slightly softened Rev Halse who condescends to hint to Ross some good advice, and he was joined by another “old-timer” bought back to lend some subtlety to the proceedings: as Sir John Mitford, Adrian Lukis (Wickham in the famed 1995 P&P scripted Andrew Davies), lets George know that his power as a magistrate to arrest someone is not going to be taken over on behalf of George’s personal vendetta.

I felt repeatedly a good feeling engendered across sequences of scenes as the actors now comfortable in their roles and doing (in the fiction) positive useful work together, socializing back in Cornwall. (Socializing in London is presented as in the book something hollow, hypocritical, dysfunctional if the aim were really friendships or building relationships). Good feeling in Episode 3 with the back-and-forth of over-voice for letters between Demelza reporting to Ross how things are going and a very different life from that in London, from which he confiding in her, his voice over turning into flashback vivid scenes. Episode 5 had effective structure, with the unexpected manslaughter of Whitworth, and then the anguished turnaround of Drake (Harry Richardson) from the girl Demelza and his brother, Sam, have engineered him into promising to marry (Rosina) and his feeling of coming promising joy, security, a peaceful existence. Almost immediately he turns back to the now abused grieving girl he has loved so deep he cannot divest himself of a need to protect her, to be with her as his comfort too. They understand one another intuitively. Then the interlace of cruel destructiveness on the part of the ever seething villain George Warleggan sending the monster Harry and the girl’s father to destroy Drake’s forge desolating.

Harry Richardson as Drake seeking Morwenna along the cliff

The home we see he had prepared for himself and Rosina destroyed (Episode 5)

Emma’s return to tell Sam she will marry someone else is full of empathy. She loves him and he her, but his religion is a barrier they will not be able to get past. She will not be accepted by his flock; he will not be able to understand her and she cannot spend her life pretending. She enjoys the more vulgar, coarse man.

At its worst was again shameless fetishizing of Aidan Turner (the prologue to episode 1 was grotesque). As in previous seasons what had been in the books handled in a naturalistic probable way became contrived improbable and melodrama, e.g. in the first episode Drake and Sam Carne wholly innocent of any wrong-doing come close to being hung.  Horsfield seems wholly out of sympathy with or cannot understand the development of the character of Demelza as realized across the books. Demelza does not have an affair with Hugh Armitage to revenge herself on or triumph over Ross, or to show power. Eleanor Tomlinson repeated this explanation, suggesting she had not read the books or thought about what adultery means even today. When Ross first married Demelza, it was not after a romantic courtship between equals, but as his servant that he had come to like and be dependent on, but someone also decidedly beneath him, younger than him; Armitage was her first introduction to romance, to poetry. Horsfield has Demelza bicker and Ross become abject (wholly out of character). Horsfield also has Demelza, Demelza (!) inform Drake just before he is to wed Rosina that Whitworth is dead and Morwenna supposedly free. That’s the last thing Demelza would do. She has done everything to bring it about. In this episode he asks Demelza why did she tell him? Good question. In the book he hears from someone else, and himself first tells Rosina and while hurt, she forgives him. Horsfield has Demelza say that she had to tell Drake or he’d have never forgiven her!  Who is Demelza considering here? But Drake reproaches this new Demelza, which has the effect of ripping him open again —  and so he is until the 8th episode when finally Morwenna freed (by the luck of a miscarriage) comes to him.

This last season was also reduced, made so much shallower by the continual presentation of George as an almost one-dimensional villain, the hater of Ross, with his uncle Cary as a chuckling minor devil. I wish too that Horsfield had not (as the previous Poldark series did) blackened the character of Elizabeth. In the 1970s Jill Townseend was ambitious and of course therefore cold; this time Heida Reed exults in George’s amoral tricks, looking unconcerned on who he hurt. Thus if it was (and I suspect this is so) that Horsfield wanted us to see Elizabeth as wishing her death (as Horsfield has her taking laudanum drops to endure her), she makes it hard for the viewer to feel the pity of the demise of a just and intelligent if conventional woman.

Heida Reed by her mirror contemplating herself and the drug Dr Anselm has given her to bring on early parturition

Still I am among those who wrote to Macmillan saying that if they were to print the scripts from the third and fourth season, I would be eager to buy them. There is much richness and care in this season and my guess is that as with the first two season (where the scripts were published), the script had more potential than was realized. The scripts can help the viewer get past the brevity of the scenes in the actual film which go far more swiftly than reading them does and the continual switch-back-forth is not as distracting.

Was there anything significantly different about this year’s episodes and those of the previous. It seemed to me that Turner had become so comfortable in this role of truly moral hero that at moment he provided a coda to scenes of anguish: as in the previous seasons, Horsfield is not willing to allow any other character to be the one who won out in catastrophe. So in the book it’s Sam who rescues most of the people from a mine flood; here we had to have Ross in the scene; in the book, it’s Drake who flies to retrieve Morwenna from Trenwith and Warleggan; here we had to have Ross come first. Here we have Ross trying to intervene to help Dwight live with whatever grief he has. The eighteenth century liked an exemplary hero who was a strong, good, earnestly emotional man.

Robin Ellis as Ross not invited to the party, the outsider — he was not the same kind of exemplary figure, but far more elusive, look at his steely eyes behind which we sense pain from simply enduring existence on the terms it’s offered

In this scene Monk Adderley snidely takes Ross for a threadbare troubadour (1977 Poldark) — a shallow back-biter

The last three episodes of both Poldarks (1977, 11-13; 2018, 6-8), both taken from the concluding third The Angry Tide can be aligned. Episode 11 (1977) and 6 (2018) both realize the lavish party George throws in Cornwall as a prelude to his coming career in Parliament and in both the socipathic murderer, Monk Adderley (Malcolm Tierney in 1977; Max Bennett, 2018, both uncannily mocking evil) meets Ross talking to Elizabeth in the garden. Alignment as in the previous years show how much has been lost of detailed novelistic complexity in the dramaturgies of the new era where so many events of different types are piled in within an hour when the older dramaturgy actors could develop a single scene a length. The older series took such time to dramatize the ball; while the new one twists and turns over scene after scene with lighthening speed so we can’t savor the build=up to George’s sudden fury and are to ball back on quick shots of the ravaged face of Elizabeth once Geoffrey Charles has pronounced his half-brother, Valentine, as the “spittin’ image of Uncle Ross,” and George has shut her and Valentine out again.

One flaw in the final ending: far too much emphasis was given to Ross’s relationship with Elizabeth as the central thread of the whole series, by going back to the initial prologue of the first episode of the first season. The invented flashback scene to 1780 in the last episode had the effect of giving us time’s perspective and how things turned out so unexpectedly (the one man Elizabeth didn’t marry was Ross) but we are asked to use this material to reduce all that has gone on between. Elizabeth is not the muse of the books. She is one of three major characters to die at or towards the end of each set of books: Francis’s death desolates Warleggan; now Elizabeth’s Angry Tide; and Jeremy at Waterloo in Twisted Sword is not to be gotten over by Demelza ever. It’s these larger patterns within which several story lines go on that matter. Horsfield softens the incompatibility of Dwight’s idea of a meaningful useful life with Caroline’s (in the novel frankly) boredom. She leaves us with a simple easily assimilable pattern and scarcely does justice to the experience she has offered over four years.

The young George and young Francis

At core the Poldark books are melancholy. Ross Poldark is a driven man, angry at the world’s injustice, striking out now and again insanely. Demelza provides for him a center of stability and hopefulness. I thus conclude this blog with Graham’s very last written story, “Meeting Demelza”  The text has been published in a magazine long ago, and I cannot find it online but there is an audiobook. “Meeting Demelza.” Graham was near death when he wrote it, and in the story he looks to join his most beloved characters: Ross, Demelza — and Dwight — I just knew he loved Dwight as much as Ross and Demelza (Luke Norris this season began to hit the true note that Richard Morant seemed to capture effortlessly so long ago). It will take 12 minutes to listen to.

A ghost story before we go into that night. Ross (let’s recall) begins as a revenant.

Ellen

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Moving days

Dear friends,

It’s not quite been like a UHaul, but it has taken a couple of weeks since I needed instruction and help and the actual transition was done by a remarkably generous digital expert at groups.io. I have been busy this last few days moving three lists from the continually deteriorating Yahoo groups social platform, to groups.io. In the last three years and accelerating when Verizon bought Yahoo, all the software on the social platform of yahoo groups has been debased and then increasingly ignored so that outages, glitches and endless individual problems go unfixed. Sometimes the whole group site vanishes for a time. And not even a boilerplate message explaining what has happened and if anything is being done. There is nowhere to ask a question or for a live individual to help. As the demise of net neutrality sinks in and brings changes based on commercial considerations of the largest profit, at any time Verizon could leave the yahoo groups vanished.

So rather than wait when it will be too late to retrieve archives, like others with communities at Yahoo who care about one another and their shared experiences, we’ve moved to groups.io. This is a new social platform run by Mark Fletcher, who invented the original ONElist, morphed it into egroups, sold it to Yahoo, come back to rescue this specific kind of experience. Among the astonishing attractions of groups.io is you can have its basic services for free, and they transferred the archives, all postings, all photos, all files (essays and whatever). A group’s identity is centered in its memory, which means its history. This the new site preserves.

Email groups are not obsolete. They still offer a kind of closed community interaction, which allows for longer messages, and encourages replies and relationships among the people posting much more frequent and much stronger than is found on blogs, face-book and other large anonymously-directed venues.

So very satisfied by what has happened, as I gather are many other Yahoo groups who moved there (I don’t have firm statistics for how many), this evening I thought I’d tell all the readers of this blog who are interested in Trollope and (a liberally defined) Nineteenth Century (1815-1914); Long Eighteenth Century studies, which I now expanded from just the terrain of the Enlightenment itself to historical fiction, romance and film (1660-1815); and women writers, artists of all kinds in all countries, all ages, and women’s issues; that the three lists I moderate have moved to this new version of the original site and have slightly new titles.

for Trollope and His Contemporaries, which now has the nifty abbreviation (I didn’t think of it) Trollope&Peers

https://groups.io/g/TrollopeAndHisContemporaries

New Banner: George Hicks, At the Post Office

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Donald Pleasence as Mr Harding playing his violoncello (1983 BBC Barchester Chronicles, scripted Alan Plater)

for WomenWriters:

https://groups.io/g/WomenWriters

New Banner: a collage of several paintings by Maud Lewis

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Anonymous depiction of Christine de Pizan writing

for 18thCWorlds

Antonio Canaletto, Northumberland House

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Eleanor Tomlinson as Demelza Poldark, singing as she brings a basket of food to the coal mine owned and run by her husband

The first two have retained the same goal as they’ve had.

Trollope and His Contemporaries — a group of people who behave as friends and read and discuss Anthony Trollope, any 19th texts by other authors and 20th century one relevant to Trollope, by authors as supremely good as he is as a writer People are invited to discuss other books they are reading at the same time, and any movies or art seen and music heard …

Women Writers — a community of women readers. We discuss issues of interest to women as well as their art, writing, music, crafts and lives. We are much more a literary than political list, but it is assumed you are a feminist and progressive in outlook … Men are welcome but we stay with art by or (in the case of film) made with women in mind. We do sometimes have group readings and discussions

I’ve changed the last to encourage people reading historical fiction, romance and watching historical films (and adaptations) to join us and hope to start group reading and discussion of contemporary favorites. The older version only went for texts written in the 18th century (Boswell & Johnson, Fanny Burney, novels, poetry, educational treatises):

18th Century Worlds — for people who are interested in all things in the long 18th century (1660-1830): politics, history, literature, arts, music, society and culture. I also welcome readers and viewers of historical fiction and romance and films set in the 18th century … Books written in the 19th through 21st centuries about or set in the 18th century, or time-traveling tales are part of our terrain.

Sylvia Plath

Ellen

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Outlander, the second season, a differently framed Dragonfly in Amber

Claire grieving over her stillborn child, POV Mother superior (Caitrionia Balfe, Frances de la Tour, Episode 7, Faith)

Jamie (Sam Heughan), one of the last shots of the season (he has told Claire she must leave and he return to Culloden)

Jamie: “I’ll have Ross and Fergus take you home to Lallybroch.”
Claire: “No.”
He: “Claire.”
She: “I can’t do that either. Listen to me. If I if I go back, then it will just be like lying in that ditch again, helpless and powerless to move, like a dragonfly in amber except this time it will be worse, because I’ll know that the people out there dying alone are people I know People I love.I can’t do that, Jamie. I won’t lie in that ditch again. I can’t be helpless and alone ever again. Do you hear me? ”
He: “I hear ye. I promise whatever happens, you’ll never be alone again.”
She: “I’m going to hold you to that, James Fraser.”
He: “You have my word Claire Fraser”
— a wholly characteristic dialogue of woman’s romances, variations on which repeat throughout seasons 1 and 2:

Dear friends and readers,

It’s been eight months since I last blogged on Outlander; thirteen months since I first blogged on the first episode: Sassenach: Radcliffe Redivida.

In the first season or first year I was at first enthralled, then deterred (bored when Claire began to be much less the focus of the story); and then, suddenly returning to become deeply engaged by the mini-series to the point I blogged twelve times; and in the last compared the book (which I listened to as read aloud beautifully by Davina Porter). For this second season or year I’m posting but once for all because I haven’t found the time to blog as often, but I found the same pattern in my reaction: at first riveted, then deterred (this time grated upon by the pruriency of the sequences in France); and then, returning I don’t know quite why, found the last section in Paris and the whole of the close in Scotland resonating deeply and irresistibly in my psyche.

Jamie and Murtagh confronting so many deaths of comrades after pyrrhic victory at Prestonpans (Sam Heughan, Duncan Lacroix, Episode 10, Prestonpans)

In the first season I account for the deep appeal of series by its the dream-archetypes and their relationship to other romances (I was reviewing Martha Bowden’s Descendants of Waverley at the time), by its increasingly emotional use romance tropes (the series moves from Border Lord stuff to a spirit or encompassing tone like that of the best Arthurian romance); and then I compare the mini-series to the source book, Outlander, to show how a centrally woman’s book has been altered to make a male the central agon victim, and the book’s loving portrayal of Scottish home life replaced by thrilling and traumatized and gypsy adventure. This time again I’ll compare book, the second one, Dragonfly in Amber, to the mini-series, and then my concentration for this single blog will be how once either real history, or women’s real traumatic experiences are dramatized, the mini-series grips us once again.

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

Claire waking 200 years later to find them “all gone” (Episode 1, Through a Glass Darkly)

The framing is much changed from the book. The framing of Dragonfly in Amber which begins in Scotland 20 years after Brianna was born, with the Reverend Wakefield’s adopted son, Roger Mackenzie, having returned to Inverness to clear out his father’s papers with an idea never to return is altered, softened and switched to become part of the first and second episodes of the third season (The Battle Joined and Surrender). Instead Claire is seen bewildered and grieving after she has passed through the stones without herself experiencing Culloden itself.

The great power of this episode and each one which juxtaposes the present in the 20th century, whether Scotland or Boston, to which Claire and Frank (Tobias Menzies) move, is that the past, Scotland in the 18th century becomes a metaphor for death. Everyone so vivid and shivering with flesh-y life is dust, dead, once Claire crosses over, and her longing to go back, is a longing to beat death. She longs to be with Jamie who is in real time dead 200 years. I identity and bond with her then.

The action in Scotland gradually turns into maddened gothic (the behavior of the French aristocratic king), neurotic fantasy (the behavior of Bonnie Prince Charlie so brilliantly caught by the performance of Andrew Gower), or deep loss (the death of the first child of Claire and Jamie, the whole hospital scene in the first half), and finally barbaric and tragic deaths of most of the principals. It’s this insight into death and a longing to beat death (the center of Shakespeare’s late tragic and Greek romances) made the core of the second mini-series by Roger Moore (producer, developer, often screenplay writer and director that has turned Diana Gabaldon’s romancing into a serious experience in and through modern film.

Frank contemplating the 18th century clothes Claire was wearing (Tobias Menzies)

Episode 1 (“Through a Glass Darkly”) Claire finds herself hurtled onto the ground in 1948, her cry is they are “all gone,” and she asks a passerby (astonished at her outfit): “‘Who won?’ ‘Who Won?” He cannot understand how she doesn’t know the Allies won WW2 early in autumn in Poland. With Frank, she is playing a part, however grudgingly. Her happiness is telling Mrs Graham of what was — or is in the recent past.

Mrs Graham (Tracey Wilkinson) listening to Claire in the garden

Whenever we are in this liminal time in the TV program, moving between the present and 18th century past, there is such an increase in unease and longing. Frank demands she promise to forget Jamie; he wants no third in his bed. She promises but later cannot. They have sudden quarrels: he uses the word “flog” for the way the newspapers are treating her disappearance and she demands he never use that word in her presence. Rev Wakefield (James Fleet) enacts the role of adopted father and Frank follows suit:

By the end Claire’s outstretched hand to reach Frank has reached Jamie, and the series switched to one of the port cities of France. with Murtagh in tow. Here we meet the evil Count de St Germain (Stanley Weber) who is hiding a small pox epidemic. At this point the mini-series begins closely to dramatize all the incidents in the novel, and mostly in the order these occurred.

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

Charles (Bonnie Prince) Stuart (Andrew Gowan)

Episodes 2 – 7. It is true the French court mid-century was licentious openly and probably vulgarly bawdy but not the way they were doing it — they were trying for bawdy comedy and I’m not sure it came off. Virtuoso acting manages to overcome the feel of voyeurism. There is much that can be labelled bizarre in what literally happened, the stage business. Nonethless or because my attention was riveted for a span, from the king trying his courtiers for treason and having one of his ruthless supporters murdered in cold blood right in front of them. I found the apothecary and his shop, Master Raymond (Dominique Pinon) fascinating: the thread throughout the novels is medicine then and now. The boy they pick up as a son-pickpocket, Fergus (Romann Berrux) is humanely appealing. Mary Hawkins (Rosie Day), raped in the streets and later taking her revenge on her rapist is a satisfying character. I was especially moved by Claire’s miscarriage and her relationship with Mother Hildegarde, who encourages her to train as a physician insofar as she can. The plangent tone was to me irresistible, as well as the beauty of the burial.

Louise de Rohan, Charles’s pregnant mistress (Claire Sermonne)

I did have to force myself through the prurient sex — though it is true to say that the French court at this point practiced this. I also find all the plot-arrangements that come out of what-if stories — how Jamie and Claire are trying to avoid Culloden and yet not get in the way of other history ludicrous. But again this central erotic romance is the deep key to the series feeling; the two actors have this very well and I am now convinced as I was in the first season, the writers and directors and all film-makers produce hours superior to those in Poldark when it comes to embodying a range of emotional expressionism usually taboo.

Against that we had again what seemed to me this hatred of homosexuality in Episode 6 (“Best Laid Scheme”). Jamie challenges Randall because Randall buggers Fergus cruelly. I can understand some of the retrograde implications, all the while feeling this. Another anti-homosexual event is intertwined. I’ve now become aware that the hero of her second sequence of novels, Lord John (David Berry), is a homosexual and presented as the best of men: loyal, kind, decent, and that Gabaldon has said it’s a misunderstanding to focus on Randall’s infliction of pain on men: he’s “an equal opportunity sadist” she is said to have written. But there is such a stress on anal intercourse as a painful perversion. It’s a horrible scene between him and the boy, and surely encourages viewers to regard all gay men as vicious this way. This fita a deeply conservative bias in the depiction of religion too. Claire has a miscarriage because she follows them to the duelling spot and tries to stop the duel.

Episode 7 (“Faith”– the name of the stillborn child) was just astonishing; it’s what Daphne DuMaurier and l’ecriture-femme try for and rarely hit. It includes a very late miscarriage so a baby born dead and Claire’s intense grief — the half-crazed behavior captures something rarely seen. They again have some great supporting actors/actresses: this time Frances de la Tour as the mother superior. To get Jamie freed from prison after his duelling with (once again) black Jack Randall, Claire must have sex with Louis XV in Episode 8 (“The Fox’s Lair”) and this one reminded me of scenes in The Handmaid’s Tale the way Balfe presented herself and experienced the sex. It was even filmed similarly — but it must be coincidence. They caught in Charles Stuart (Bonnie Prince) his insanities, his stupidities, delusions, egotism. Also how Louis XV murdered people on a whim.

Mother Hildegarde (Frances de la Tour)

Elaboration: Faith is the name the Mother Superior gives Clare’s baby who is born dead. Clare had been overworking herself and bleeding and not resting enough. The stress of watching Jamie duel with Black Jack Randall after he has promised not to (lest the modern Frank not be born) was too much and she began to bleed a lot. Rushed to the nun hospital, she gives birth to a dead baby girl. She nearly dies because she is running a high fever and only an apothecary Clare has made a friend of realizes her placenta needs to come out. In a flashback memory scene we see she was allowed to hold the dead baby in her arms and wept intensely. She gives it up to Louise to take away. She at the present moment is being asked by Jamie to forgive him and she tells him she hated him at first – there is much dialogue about how we need to forgive people because God tells us to. Well in this episode there’s a lot to forgive: very evil events ordered by King Louis XV (Lionel Lingelser) whom everyone obeys.

The set of scenes over the childbirth, death, and then grieving I found very moving, and a concluding ritualized burial which reminded me of the ending of David Nokes’s film adaptation of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa where Clary is similarly buried. The music in the background was very like that in Clarissa in the brothel and other dark places; in movie association it’s gothic.

The hard delivery, pregnancy, childbirth and death told in the way they do mark this as a woman’s romance.

The season picks up terrifically when they return to Scotland (8 into 9). I returned to the series because I am now aware how central the defeat at Culloden was for the Scottish people; this crushing enabled a horrific slaughter by the colonializing power (the English), then ruthless ethnic cleansing, followed by utter betrayal of the chieftains turned into landlords emptying the land of people and then exploiting it in such a way as to render it further barren. Scotland in the 19th century is comparable to the middle east in the 21st with the US in the role of the landlords and English imperialism. And it seemed to me that once the actors returned to Scotland all the resonances of memory, history, deep feeling gave the hours an intensity it lacked in the French sequences (much more “made up”). The series is enormously popular in Scotland, the last three episodes of the second season the battles and defeats leading up to Culloden.

The Jacobite army on the march ….

At the end of episode 9 (“Je suis prest” — I am ready), there are two Scots songs sung from the period, one rousing military — the theme song of the paratexts of all the episodes is an old tune from the Isle of Skye, the “Skyeboat song” — I can’t find words for the intensity of the atmosphere as they line up to march to meet with Prince Charles before Prestonpans. They have automatic intense irony as we watch the men make preparations, and the women provide for them, all train because we know it ended in a tremendous defeat. So here is a good instance of where knowing not only how it ended but the aftermath was is central. Gabaldon and her script writers emphasize all the disadvantages (hindsight working), how the men are sparsely armed; how many of them had to be forced; their technological awkwardness, lack of heavy canon, the conflicts (so some Scots are for the Hanoverians); Jamie’s grandfather is careful to look as if he’s for both sides.

It’s this kind of thing historical novels can do well, films of course — and makes them implicitly political if realistic. Poldark loses out on both counts: there is no crucial historical incident and the script is inferior. Whatever may be the faults of Outlander the series (they have absurd conniptions about this or that), the scripts are remarkably literate and naturalistic and often subtle in language and idea.

Both Rupert Mackenzie and Angus (two close Scots friends, semi-comic roles until now) die

A good deal of the deep feeling in Episode 10 (“Prestonpans”) depended on the viewer remembering what happened at Prestonpans and how the Scots won that particular battle. We see how they managed to win when they did: absolute surprise in the dead of night, coming on smallish band of Hanoverian men utterly unprepared for a savage relentless attack from axes, swords. What makes this anti-war beyond the barbaric ferocity of what we watch is characters we have affection for do get killed — and we see some barbaric acts. A secondary subtheme is Claire’s memories of World War 2 (her post-traumatic stress disorder) which this experience ignites — we have flashbacks in her mind as she remembers back. The episode succeeds because of the emphasis on death, and the deaths of beloved characters.

Elaboration: it is so passionate it electrifies: this central real battle which the Scots won using the element of surprise attack in the dead of night just got everyone intensely over the top. It’s acceptable because the beat is (paradoxically) not on the win, but on death. Council scenes where everyone bitterly quarrels and especially Murray — who was against that ridiculous “assault” on the Hanoverians at Culloden. What we see at length is a couple of our “friends” die miserably and horribly and great grief. When Dougal Mackenzie kills savagely and this is presented,he is framed as barbaric, having lost it,and is condemned by Prince Charlie (who is an idiot but persists in wanting not to slaughter the English wantonly thinking they will then accept him — no they wouldn’t have and anyway they weren’t all English). I have a hunch Gabaldon does not present it this way. In the feature films she comes on as just thinking of characters and nothing more — an act. Fergus picked up as an effective pickpocket has killed someone and is upset by himself having killed the man. Later (season 3) he will have his hand chopped off by a Scot who he needles for betraying the Jacobites; his character is forming slowly

There is left room also to see the Hanoverian or southern English point of view; that is, that these tribal people are a dangerous nuisance. I know since 9/11 the term terrorist has spread ridiculously (it began be used extensively in the Reagan era when his govn’t sent murderous squads into Latin and South America) but if language were used truthfuly I think these nation states (groups of people who have legitimacy over others, because of an accepted monopoly on violence and imprisonment) regard terrorist as a dangerous nuisance. Neither nation-state has any interest in understanding what is driving the tribal and individual violence against them.

This connection to history, quite direct, gives the program a seriousness. I can see it’s using the usual “delaying” techniques since the Episode 13 (“Dragonfly in Amber”) is not Culloden but Claire returned to the 20th century with her daughter grown up and telling her who her biological father was. The season opened with her return before the battle got underway and returns to the same scenes in Inverness with Roger and her daughter, Brianna.

The Duke of Sandringham (Simon Callow)

Episodes 11 & 12 (“Vengeance is Mine” and “The Hail Mary”). The turning back of the Jacobite army from where they had gotten in significant. Historians have debated why the Scots did this when they were getting so close and in the dialogue the reasons surface: Julian Wadham is playing General Murray (he’s aged — what a superb actor) talks of how much they are outnumbered; we hear the local places they have passed have seen no major uprising with them; there are 3 British armies in the field. The British have cavalry, much better artillery. Still Jamie (knowing about what Culloden will bring) says let us try to it or we lose whatever we have gained. Again the foolish prince says no, and refers himself to God. His talk continually shows him living in an unreal universe, not seeing the people in front of him.

Retribution occurs spectacularly. A horrible death by beheading inflicted on Sandringham (Simon Callow, a brilliant actor in this) by Murtagh. These episodes mount up the dead. Two parallel deaths — through juxtaposition. Column Mackenzie (Gary Lewis) comes to die, to hand his clan to Jamie, to warn against fighting for the Jacobite cause and there is a moving scene between him and his brother, Dougald (Graham MccTavish), a great actor who acts like a barbarian in the field. Contrastingly, we have Alex Randall (Laurence Dobiesz) discovered in a nearby town dying with Mary Hawkins caring for him (she escapes her uncle Sandringham’s clutches to sell her in marriage), and powerfully Tobias Mendez as Black Jack shows up – a man driven by “dark” forces, angry, violent, partly in a rage because his good brother is dying and he lives. Alex is dying a painful death from TB and it is shown what TB was, how felt, and the methods used to alleviate the inability to breathe somewhat. Black Jack is intensely reluctantly persuaded to marry Mary who is pregnant by Alex — to give her his pension, status. Clare having suggested to Jamie they kill the prince to stop Culloden is overheard by Dougal, and Jamie is driven to murder hjis uncle. Murtagh is spared for next season as Jamie has him march their band of men off home rather than see them slaughtered.

When this second season ended I had no idea what can be the substance or content of season 3 beyond Culloden (not yet dramatized) because so many characters have now been killed off. Sometimes audiences can really like a character in one season and what do you do if they are not equally taken by the replacement in the next? that is the problem the Poldark novels face.

What interested me — what I’ve been paying attention — is the script writer was for the first time Diana Gabaldon herself. Thus far she had written the scripts for none of them though she was endlessly listed as advisor – that is not the same as script editor for example. What was striking was a strong mixture of wild humor — sometimes just jok-y in the way of her books, but sometimes self-consciously over-the-top, almost but not quite campy — I feel the director stopped the trivialization that would have occurred. This partly confirms me in my idea that the books have this vein of frivolousness, or snarky laughter that I had not seen before. It didn’t hurt the program because the actors were their usual deeply dramatic selves; a tone has been established.

Mary Gowan, POV Claire (an earlier episode occurring in France)

But now we know Frank’s true heritage! Black Jack had been told (the first season) by Claire he will die April 16, 1745 — in a few days (we will witness this bitter fight to the death between him and Jamie at Culloden in the third season). Again there is much prejudice fomented against homosexuals through the way this man is presented: he balks at marrying because he says he could beat Mary; as a boy he beat Alex (it comes out). Of course the novelists “secret” comes out that th gentle generous Frank, Claire’s English seeming 20th century husband is descended from Alex, not the bad man John Wolveton Randall (as we had supposed). Jamie proposes a raid, the kind of surprise attack that won them Prestonpans, but Prince Charles gets lost and then turns back. So Culloden must happen. The last moment of the twelfth episode is Sam Heughan as Jamie standing in the coming dawn so still. He has emerged as a fine actor in this second year.

Roger Wakefield (Richard Rankin) and Brianna Randall (Sophie Skelton)

Episode 13 (“Dragonfly in Amber”): I found this one very moving. deeply feelingful. Each time the mini-series returns to present time and we are in retrospective I find it so — here it’s the use of time-traveling over death. Claire longs to beat death again to join Jamie. In Episode 1 the present time Vicar Wakefield (James Fleet, with an allusion to Goldsmith I’ve pointed out before) has died but he left papers and this leads to Clare having to tell her skeptical daughter about this past, and Brianna at first deeply resentful comes to feel less anger, but does not believe her mother is telling a truth, or all this happened. During the 13th episode Geillis Duncan (Lotte Verbeek) turns up (she does age) and returns to the past through the stones — after having immolated her husband by fire as a sacrifice.

Geillis is for devolution

But this last episode is flawed: it is too much coincidence to make the adopted son of Wakefield the descendant of the son Geillis had by Dougal (who we are told was born before she was burnt – only she cannot have been burnt) and then have him fall in love with Briana the direct child of Jamie and Clare. Incommensurate time scales here too, and the young couple are too bright, too without trauma. Again and again first Gabaldon and then Roger Moore show they have no feel for middle class life in the 1950s or they are confusing what was put on TV with the way people really lived in the 1950s in the US: closer to The Honeymooners than Ozzie and Harriet (which is alluded to). The utter self-sacrificing love of Claire for the embittered daughter strikes me as too sentimental in that we are in efect urged as women to enact Claire. I can believe the spoiled daughter. The episode ends on Claire with too overtly shining eyes dreaming of returning to Jamie because Roger has found evidence that Jamie did not die at Culloden. The writing and over-voice of Caitronia Balfe, melancholy, longing, real, as Claire, carries us over for now.

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

Claire as last seen in Scotland

I asked myself, Are we to have a third novel registering the highland clearances? I have since learned (by watching the third season and reading The Outlandish Companion, Volume 1) that this does not happen; rather the novel switches to the US and the prologue to the American revolution in the 1760s. And the problem in the third season is the feeling of fakeness in the scenes from middle class life in the US in Boston.

Nonetheless, I’m deeply engaged by this mini-series now — maybe it is very like what I felt after reading the Poldark books and watched the 1970s mini-series. I did see the flaws in the Poldark mini-series: too softened, too sentimental. In my own exoneration (before myself) with Poldark it was the books first, but now it is this mini-series first, and I do believe that Ronald Moore is responsible, he is the executive producers, producer for each too, writes a numbers, directs a number, does all the features. He saw in this material potential. I’ve gone on long enough and will save the brilliance he shows in his features, discussions of these (on the DVDs) and deleted scenes for a separate blog.

Ellen

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