Saturday, October 24, 2015

Charles Dickens: A Child’s History of England (1851-53)





It would be sensible to read nothing of Dickens but his novels, which are all-sufficient. But since much of the material of A Child’s History is now outside the common knowledge of adult readers, it has become a more interesting book. The most satisfactory part, probably, is the earlier phase up to the sixteenth century, when Dickens is competently summarising the national epic, mixing lively narration with a very faint colouring of Dickensian satire, rhetoric, and romance. Mainly satire, since the epic is concerned with the actions of kings and queens, and Dickens is temperamentally hostile to this sort of company.

Within a week or two after Harold’s return to England, the dreary old Confessor was found to be dying. After wandering in his mind like a very weak old man, he died. As he had put himself entirely in the hands of the monks when he was alive, they praised him lustily when he was dead. They had gone so far, already, as to persuade him that he could work miracles; and had brought people affected with a bad disorder of the skin, to him, to be touched and cured. This was called “touching for the King’s Evil,” which afterwards became a royal custom. You know, however, Who really touched the sick, and healed them; and you know His sacred name is not among the dusty line of human kings.

This is a quotation, not to sell the Child’s History to you, but to give you a fair idea of what it is like. Most of the things that can be criticized are exemplified here: tendentiousness, condescension, opinionatedness, a basic lack of sympathy with his materials, and even with the business of history itself. At the same time we are undoubtedly learning something about Edward the Confessor – and so, though I really don’t want to sell the book, it strikes me as perfect for someone who wants to read some history but whose tastes don’t lead them towards ordinary historians.


If I wanted to sell it, I’d move forward a couple of pages, to the close of the next chapter:

O what a sight beneath the moon and stars, when lights were shining in the tent of the victorious Duke William, which was pitched near the spot where Harold fell – and he and his knights were carousing within – and soldiers with torches, going slowly to and fro, without, sought the corpse of Harold among piles of dead – and the Warrior, worked in gold thread and precious stones, lay low, all torn and soiled with blood – and the three Norman Lions kept watch over the field!

Dickens was seriously uninterested in history, but he was not averse to legends, and when we read the earlier part of the book (say, up to the reign of Elizabeth) we are reading material that we more or less accept as legends, because no character-sketch by Dickens or anyone else will convince us that we really can know what the character of, say, Edward Longshanks, was like. Considering the serious uninterest, we must admire the competence he nevertheless demonstrates; he can still make us read this book. And when he has a great story to tell (the White Ship, Thomas à Becket, Agincourt, or Mary Queen of Scots) he tells it with all the necessary spirit. 

But with the entry of James I, the great tension between Dickens and his material starts to cause buckling. It doesn’t matter very much what Dickens, or anyone else, thinks of Richard Coeur de Lion, because we accept that this material is just mist and you can make what you like of it. But the seventeenth century was, clearly, still a “live issue”. Dickens really intends to persuade us of the picture he supplies here (I first wrote, “he really believes in the picture”, but that’s more than I’m sure of)  – this is, though he doesn’t say so, a Macaulayan, anti-Tory interpretation of the recent past. He is dead against the Stuarts – all of them, but especially James I and Charles II, for whom he reserves his most ponderous humour (James is constantly referred to as “His Sowship” – Buckingham’s phrase, apparently – while his account of the “Merry Monarch” makes dismal play of the word “merry”). This distaste drives him towards the strange positions of almost-hero-worship for Cromwell and William of Orange. This back end of the book is interesting for the recurring sensation (never experienced in the novels) that the Dickens processing-plant is being set to work on material that is wholly unsuited to it – and the material rises up and begins to suggest a fundamental critique of the processing. But the author himself is uneasy, and you can feel that he is beginning to find it all a bit of a problem, which writing a “child’s history” should never be – for controversy and polemics require a greater commitment to historical detail than Dickens is prepared to give. His perfunctory accounts of the Plague and the Fire of London suggest flagging belief in the project. After all that has gone before, his closing sentence on Victoria seems like a tight-lipped joke.

She is very good, and much beloved. So I end, like the crier, with GOD SAVE THE QUEEN!  

Unlike the crier, we suppose, he is tired and wants to get shot of the thing. 

I think I have been extremely sensible about A Child’s History, so I am doubly pleased to have made the chance discovery of this wilder piece, by Howard MacAyeal: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/9688/aae-Myoldman.htm which might be the only story ever written that is concerned with Dickens’ book – and it’s a good one.

(2003)

 [The story has long since disappeared: so has Geocities. I leave the dead link for old times' sake.]


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Thursday, October 22, 2015

oil sands





http://www.newsweek.com/trudeau-might-not-be-canadas-climate-savior-385219
https://news.vice.com/article/what-trudeaus-liberal-victory-means-for-canadas-oil-sands







He was hungry; he was ready with strike-through.
Condenza
exposed to the wind; an apple-tree barking.
A destiny propels the ark, its console finisher isn't free.
Rich; with a horror of poverty, or a single assassin, locked to small arms and airports.
He watched his father intelligently, while he spat Patsey's flesh.
Outside the house, the topiary of willow-leaved pear, his wife shaped with clippers.
You cannot come in here like that, he tried to say firmly,
with the elements of fortune and ours.

I shall keep this separate from my other wealth.





[Sort sort of flat-topped Japanese cherry (I'm guessing 'Shirotae', but I won't know till next year), with numerous holes in the leaves, illuminated by a pub spotlight.  N. Swindon 19:37 on 9th October 2015.]

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Thursday, October 15, 2015

Charles Dickens: The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41)




The Old Curiosity Shop and King Lear

“The old gentleman again!” he would exclaim, “a very prepossessing old gentleman, Mr. Richard – charming countenance, sir – extremely calm – benevolence in every feature, sir. He quite realises my idea of King Lear, as he appeared when in possession of his kingdom, Mr. Richard – the same good humour, the same white hair and partial baldness, the same liability to be imposed upon. Ah! A sweet subject for contemplation, sir, very sweet!” (Ch. LVII)

This is Sampson Brass speaking to Dick Swiveller. Sampson is at a very early and tentative – indeed nervous – stage in complying with Quilp’s instructions to dispose of Kit. Old Mr Garland as Lear is the same kind of gloriously not-quite-right rhapsody that, soon afterwards, has him saying of the pony “He literally looks as if he had been varnished all over”. Sampson's speech also exemplifies something rather frequent in The Old Curiosity Shop; words that seem to have one intention about one thing but really and semi-ambiguously are concerned with a different matter altogether. For obvious examples one might note nearly everything that the parties say to each other during, and on the day after, the trip to Astley’s: especially Barbara. Or the narrator’s refusal to tell us in plain words that Nell’s health is failing when that's just what he is insistently suggesting. We describe the nature of this duplicitous talk in various ways according to the circumstances: delicacy, embarrassment, coyness, euphemism, playing with our emotions, cruelty, evasiveness, fraud, etc.  But it’s when we don’t have a label ready to hand that things are most interesting.

Memories of Lear do huddle in the shadows of The Old Curiosity Shop. When the Victorian public sent agonized letters to the author imploring him to spare Little Nell, they were registering something like Samuel Johnson’s shocked reaction to the death of Cordelia, the scene he could not endure to re-read until he edited the play. The long pages in which the author whispers to us of Nell’s decline (LII-LV) have seemed to most later readers as dull a succession of chapters as you can easily find in Dickens; these were the pages, however, that troubled generous hearts and drove up the circulation figures. (Edgar Allen Poe’s review [http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/poe/dickens.html] gives a good idea of their impact on contemporary readers. For him the outstanding figures in the book were Nell, her grandfather, the man by the furnace, and the sexton.)



The last scene of Lear is patently Dickens’ template for Nell’s grandfather in Chapter LXXI: "'She used to feed them....'....Of the strangers he took no heed whatever.... It was her hand, he said – a little – a very, very little – but he was pretty sure she had moved it....'There was ever something mild and quiet about her...'...'You plot among you to wean my heart from her...'"

But the most important parallel with Lear is the radical breakdown of a unified narrative when Nell and her grandfather desert London (end of Chapter XII). The heroine thus becomes isolated from further plot-development, just as Lear does when he makes for the heath (end of Act II). Each of them, once homeless, enters a different space, closely allied to insanity and already premonitory of death, a space in which the fundamental terms of existence become a prominent theme. It may perhaps be said that in each case the hero/heroine has forestalled the final chapter by leaving the party early. Whatever happens to them from this point already carries the burden of threnody; they can go on, but they can never go back. And in each case I think the audience stirs uneasily; something of dramatic tension is being given up. On the other hand, the “seriousness” of the work (in potential, at any rate) is cranked up several notches.

Nell and her grandfather, therefore, spend a large part of the novel in the comparatively timeless space that is usually only opened up in Chapter the Last. When The Old Curiosity Shop’s own Chapter the Last finally arrives, it contains a few surprises. The vaguely positive pantomime energies of the villainous Quilp are eventually developed into his boy Tom Scott’s career as a tumbler with an Italian name. Then there are these:

two wretched people were more than once observed to crawl at dusk from the inmost recesses of St. Giles’s, and to take their way along the streets, with shuffling steps and cowering shivering forms, looking into the roads and kennels as they went in search of refuse food or disregarded offal. These forms were never beheld but in those nights of cold and gloom, when the terrible spectres, who lie at all other times in the obscene hiding-places of London, in archways, dark vaults and cellars, venture to creep into the streets; the embodied spirits of Disease, and Vice, and Famine.

These houseless wretches, so like and yet (by sheer authorial manipulation) so extremely unlike Nell and her grandfather, are the Brasses.

The final image of the book is also unexpected:

He [Kit] sometimes took them [his children] to the street where she had lived; but new improvements had altered it so much, it was not like the same. The old house had been long ago pulled down, and a fine broad road was in its place. At first he would draw with his stick a square upon the ground to show them where it used to stand. But he soon became uncertain of the spot, and could only say it was thereabouts, he thought, and that these alterations were confusing.

Kit’s pettish vagueness is very unlike his character as we have seen it in the rest of the novel. It suggests that the alterations are not to the street alone, and disquietingly enacts the sexton’s account of how graves cease to be tended, and Nell’s grief “that those who die about us, are so soon forgotten” (Ch. LIV). On that occasion the schoolmaster persuades her that “There is nothing, no, nothing innocent or good, that dies, and is forgotten”; its “blessed work” persists. At the end of the book Dickens finally seems prepared to lay that comfortable thought aside. 

The accidental novel

Improvisation plays a fairly generous part in all Dickens’ early novels, but The Old Curiosity Shop is often thought of as the most extreme instance, since Dickens was already engaged on it (as a low-key amusement in a miscellany called Master Humphrey’s Clock) when he was forced to re-envisage what he had written as the beginning of a full-length novel. Dickens’ initial conception was no doubt vague but must have been a sentimental narrative based around the child, perhaps not unlike his later Christmas Book, The Battle of Life (1846). The novel was thus already embarked on and committed to certain lines of development before there was any plan of a narrative sufficient to fill the pages.

This workroom view supplies some useful insights but is ultimately misleading. The insights are these:

One obvious way of elongating a narrative that had got itself started without a plan was to disembarrass it of continuous plot and to restructure it along picaresque lines, and that may be why Dickens thought of sending his heroine on her travels (and thus away from the titular shop where he had doubtless at first planned to keep her). However, that still left some London-based characters who were plainly born to plotting and subterfuge, and who now found themselves scrapping over an essentially empty pot. The fault-lines are apparent; Quilp’s malignity loses its object and has to be re-trained against Kit; Dick Swiveller’s character is steadily re-modelled as we go along. At its most distracted, this hand-to-mouth improvisation produces the idling of chapters XLVII-XLVIII, in which two minor characters (the single gentleman and Kit’s mother) fail to spark each other into life during a journey that leads to no result whatever.

Improvisation also seems like quite a good explanation for the deep and inchoate material that the book liberates but does not master in a rational way; for the disengagement of the surface business of the book from centres of interest that are barely at the level of consciousness; for our recurrent sense that the characters in the book (magnificent as they may be) are, like characters in a dream, inconstantly symbolic of other things and of each other.

But it’s misleading, I think, if we then assume that Dickens never got his head right about the novel and just made a game play of the hand he’d unintentionally dealt himself, the result a novel that is still amazingly good in a patchily-inspired early-Dickens kind of way but undeniably rather a mess. It seems clear, on the contrary, that the author got serious about what he was doing at quite an early stage. “The difficulty has been tremendous – the anguish unspeakable,” he wrote to Forster. He was not talking about pulling the plot back on course (and in fact, as is apparent, he did not work very hard at that), but about a project he had become profoundly immersed in, particularly with regard to Nell. The “difficulty” implies a deeply-nurtured objective, though the “anguish” is the author’s own grief about young and innocent death, not any particular anguish of technical realisation. But his own strong feeling is, I suppose, conceived as instrumental in producing a feeling narrative. 

The wanderers

This commitment to a definite and envisaged course must, I suggest, have come to birth very early indeed – perhaps around the time that Master Humphrey dismisses himself from the novel (end of Ch III). The next chapter already introduces Mrs Quilp, whose subsequent questioning of Nell (Ch VI) will cause the loans to dry up and precipitate the crisis that makes the old man and his grand-daughter run away. During that conversation the theme of Nell and her grandfather wandering “in the fields and among the green trees” is first introduced; what’s more, Nell associates it with the timeless country where her dead mother is said to have flown. In these same chapters Dickens begins to give casual indications of the season – early and fresh summer, with the trees in full leaf.

When Nell and her grandfather first talk about taking their chances in the open fields (Ch IX), this is Nell’s childish ideal and it has no meaning for her grandfather; he is still hoping to borrow more money, and besides it's not a very sensible plan. The sensible solution that most penniless people would look for (to go and live for a while with a friend) is in fact proffered in Ch XI. There would be difficulties, no doubt (i.e. overcoming the grandfather’s distrust of Kit), but Dickens does not make clear that Nell would refuse. In the end it is the grandfather who precipitates their flight; he derangedly submits to her manifestly childish idea and the whole subject is so sacred to her that Kit’s alternative is never discussed. Both parties are already half-driven by a death-wish though neither foresees the harshness of their choice.




The wanderings are described in three groups of chapters; in between them the scene switches back to what the London crew are getting up to. The first phase is Chs XV-XIX (departure from London, Codlin and Short, the races). The second and longest phase is Chs XXIV-XXXII, describing the stay with the schoolmaster and then the time with Mrs Jarley; this is the most settled phase but it’s also when the grandfather’s re-exposure to gambling starts to sound ominously. The third phase (matching the first in length) is Chs XLII-XLVI; the flight from Jarley’s, the barge trip, the night by the furnace, the collapse and the schoolmaster’s apparent rescue. The last section assigned to Nell is the static and premonitory graveyard chapters mentioned earlier (Chs LII-LV). It’s clear that Dickens designed the architecture of all this very attentively.

Once roofless, seasons become critical. Dickens is very unemphatic but he has a good grasp of their passing, and as it happens they closely match the actual dates of serialisation, from April 1840 to February 1841. When Nell and her grandfather set off it is early summer (“June” – Ch XII), the time of full sunlight before waking, of country fairs and horse-races and flowers, the corn still green. It’s the perfect time of year for forgetting, at least for a while, that we can’t really live out of doors; the prospect of fair weather extends hopefully into so dim a distance. During their time with Mrs Jarley it’s high summer: close weather, a thunderstorm, the long tranquil evenings of following the sisters. By the time they depart there are indications of September – morning mist, and a day or so later (when the barge arrives in the industrial town) a long, cold rain. When Nell (after the schoolmaster has rescued them) is looking out from the church porch she looks at fallen leaves strewing the paths. She is autumnally gardening during the premonitory chapters, and thinking of spring. When Kit and the others travel west to find her already dead, it’s midwinter.  

Chapter XV begins with a description of leaving London in early morning; but “description” is an inadequate word for the astounding excitement of these fateful pages. They pass through the commercial districts and through wide tracts of populous poverty until

At length these streets, becoming more straggling yet, dwindled and dwindled away, until there were only garden patches bordering the road, with many a summer-house innocent of paint and built of old timber or some fragments of a boat, green as the tough cabbage-stalks that grew about it, and grottoed at the seams with toadstools and tight-sticking snails..... Then came a turnpike; then fields again with trees and haystacks; then a hill; and on the top of that the traveller might stop, and – looking back at Saint Paul’s looming through the smoke, its cross peeping above the cloud (if the day were clear), and glittering in the sun; and casting his eyes upon the Babel out of which it grew until he traced it down to the furthest outposts of the invading army of bricks and mortar whose station lay for the present nearly at his feet – might feel at last that he was clear of London.

Near such a spot as this, and in a pleasant field, the old man and his little guide (if guide she were, who knew not whither they were bound) sat down to rest. She had had the precaution to furnish her basket with some slices of bread and meat, and here they made their frugal breakfast.

It’s a blissful spot. If we share with that generalised traveller who stands on the hill a shout of joy arising from the liberation of this comprehensive survey, we are suddenly reminded by that parenthesis in the second paragraph that our two wanderers are not in his case. They are not roaming for pleasure, they are never going back, and they’re not on their way to anywhere else in particular; Nell, as guide, is merely heading out. The strangeness of their situation comes back to us.

They are an odd and damaged pair, and the damage is best understood as referring to their lethal relationship rather than to the two of them separately. Nell’s grandfather is helpless without Nell, and he is helpless to Nell; in fact he closes off any practical course of survival. At the very first labourer’s cottage they stop at (still in Chapter XV) they are offered the chance to stay overnight, but the old man's fretfulness means they have to toil onward instead. Even during this first idyllic picnic, he soon becomes distressed:

“I can do nothing for myself, my darling,” said the grandfather, “I don’t know how it is, I could once, but the time’s gone. Don’t leave me, Nell; say that thou’lt not leave me. I loved thee all the while, indeed I did. If I lose thee too, my dear, I must die!”

The mechanism of the relationship couldn’t be clearer. He has slipped into mental dependence on a child, and the child is helpless to resist his emotional demand. She cannot think beyond her duty; he would die! Her own existence becomes purely a carer’s, and revolves entirely around him. She can have no pleasures unrelated to him – that is, no normal pleasures (she just sleeps through the Punch and Judy show). At the public-house the landlady is kindly to her, but

As nothing could induce the child to leave him alone, however, or to touch anything in which he was not the first and greatest sharer, the old lady was obliged to help him first.

To call Nell idealised or lacking in personality is to miss the point. She cannot possibly help behaving in an “ideal” way because the relationship has steadily developed along lines that force her to do this. It’s impossible to speculate how she might “naturally” behave without the constraint of this relationship, which is lodged so deeply that she only exists within it. The frequency of early mortality in Dickens’ time is often mentioned in connexion with The Old Curiosity Shop – the frequency of juvenile self-sacrifice is just as relevant.  

Dickens, therefore, takes us on a tour of England through the eyes of two wanderers who are incapable of engaging with it except in damaged and morbid ways. The picaresque momentum, the promise of action-filled episodes and inset narratives by people they run across, the promise which perhaps first led Dickens to send them forth on their wanderings, never in fact develops, because Nell isn’t interested.

The extremism of Nell’s viewpoint comes out during this very first stop. The pleasant field reminds her of a picture in the Pilgrim’s Progress, and she says:

“Dear grandfather... only that this place is prettier and great deal better than the real one, if that in the book is like it, I feel as if we were both Christian, and laid down on this grass all the cares and troubles we brought with us; never to take them up again.”

“No – never to return – never to return” – replied the old man...

(He appears to agree with her, but he isn’t really listening; each is locked in a separate though equally drastic view of their experience.) Nell does not see the place they’re in as different in kind from Christian’s allegorical vale; she sees it as precisely a place with that significance, and though noting that it is prettier and better, she does not understand sanely that this is because it has the reality of what we call an actual place; in fact she finds it less real than the place spoken of in the book, with its immense potential for spiritual resignation. In any landscape her eye only quickens at portals to the world in which her imagination lives: graveyards and death-beds above all. She doesn’t know she is doing this to herself; her eye registers an utter disengagement from the things that other people live for. It’s only as a carer for the dead that her life has a meaningful role and she can enjoy a mournful companionship; it’s only in the environments of death that she becomes eager to learn something. 

The novel’s account of their wanderings is therefore continuously duplicitous: it promises a wealth of participatory detail, and Dickens is always getting started on this as only he can, but in Nell’s story all local colour is a dream in which she cannot involve herself. 

The dancing-dogs, the stilts, the little lady and the tall man, and all the other attractions, with organs out of number and bands innumerable, emerged from the holes and corners in which they had passed the night, and flourished boldly in the sun. 

Dickens could give way to the delights of race-day, as to the delights of Astley’s, but a sombre and highly judgmental undertone is lurking here. Nell's presence constrains him from quite giving way even to Mrs Jarley’s view of her wax-work, and we end up not quite disbelieving in Mrs Jarley's lowness of spirits. Nell (“frightened and repelled by all she saw”) automatically turns race-day into a test that is pre-determined to fail; she plucks her humble nosegays not in the practical hope of earning some money but as a pitiful cry for attention, which only other unhappy people (like the ruined lady in the carriage) can interpret.

Many a time they went up and down those long, long lines, seeing everything but the horses and the race; when the bell rang to clear the course, going back to rest among the carts and donkeys, and not coming out again until the heat was over.

This in fact gives a true sense of how huge entertainments are experienced in a filtered way, and not only by Nell; none of the stallholders would get to see much horse-racing. The narrator abdicates his position as master of ceremonies. Nell’s viewpoint is therefore challenging, since she shares an unillusioned point of view with all the other people whose daily agenda is merely to keep head above water. Also, we see how Nell’s frail nosegays are, for us and the merry visitors, just another detail in the agreeable local colour.

Nell as action hero

It is not to be supposed that a child who so greatly values seclusion, humility and meditation will undertake such actions as to get her involved in the world around her. But she does have great power.

The child sat silently beneath a tree, hushed in her very breath by the stillness of the night, and all its attendant wonders (nb the stars). The time and place awoke reflection, and she thought with a quiet hope – less hope, perhaps, than resignation – on the past, and present, and what was yet before her. (Ch XLII)

The word “hope”, at first qualified by “quiet” and then progressively withdrawn (because how would you think hopefully about the past, and how meagre is that expression for the future, “what was yet before her”?) emphasises the extent to which she has shut down. At the sound of the clock she goes home, and passing a gipsy encampment makes “a movement of timid curiosity”, the utmost she can stretch to; the gipsies being at any rate not quite so occluded as Miss Monflathers and her like behind their gates. Then, realising her grandfather is by the fire, she creeps along the hedge to spy, in a carer’s sort of way.

In this way she advanced within a few feet of the fire, and standing among a few young trees, could both see and hear, without much danger of being observed.

Dickens suppresses the inevitable dogs in order to make it conceivable that Nell could execute this R L Stevenson kind of manoeuvre, and very agile she seems among the young trees: if she were a stayer-in at nights, this could hardly be expected; but then she might have had a support network, which would have been much more useful. As it is, her only (strong and impassioned) response to what she discovers here is to drag her grandfather away on a hopeless escape that can only end one way. And it does, of course, though the good fortune of meeting the schoolmaster delays it for a few months. It would be incorrect to say that she chooses her death, or that it’s a cry of rage or any kind of statement for the attention of the world she has been indifferent to. But she does make it happen.



*

In between the end of The Old Curiosity Shop and the beginning of Barnaby Rudge, Dickens briefly returned his readers to Master Humphrey and his companions. They voice some disquiet about why the “single gentleman” is never given a name. Master Humphrey has a surprise in store for us.

‘My friends... do you remember that this story bore another title besides that one we have so often heard of late?’

Mr. Miles had his pocket-book out in an instant, and referring to an entry therein, rejoined, ‘Certainly. Personal Adventures of Master Humphrey. Here it is. I made a note of it at the time.’

I was about to resume what I had to tell them, when the same Mr. Miles again interrupted me, observing that the narrative originated in a personal adventure of my own, and that was no doubt the reason for its being thus designated.

This led me to the point at once.

‘You will one and all forgive me,’ I returned, ‘if for the greater convenience of the story, and for its better introduction, that adventure was fictitious. I had my share, indeed, – no light or trivial one, – in the pages we have read, but it was not the share I feigned to have at first. The younger brother, the single gentleman, the nameless actor in this little drama, stands before you now. 

The story is thus unexpectedly re-oriented into an account (characteristically cloaked) of “the chief sorrows of my life”.  Poe in his review complained that Master Humphrey and the single gentleman do not even look like each other, and when The Old Curiosity Shop was published independently, this revelation was dropped. 

Nevertheless, it’s an odd and beautiful idea. It must have arisen at the same time that Dickens was disentangling Master Humphrey from his narrative at the end of Chapter III (though Humphrey’s sorrows are mentioned at the very start of Master Humphrey’s Clock). How, he no doubt asked himself, to account for this deeply interested party having no further involvement in Nell’s story; not being thought of, for instance, when Nell and her grandfather are desperately seeking an escape from their situation? Then he suddenly reviewed Master Humphrey’s presence in the curiosity shop and re-conceived it as a fiction within the fiction: a fiction of a kindly but helpless wraith who observes the other characters interacting, but to whom no-one says anything that tends to involve him in their affairs. And now we understand that the Master Humphrey who appeared as an old man alongside Nell’s grandfather was in fact an anachronism; these scenes took place twenty years formerly, when Master Humphrey was still in the full vigour of middle age; and when he was urgently searching for Nell but would never see her alive. What is also poignantly emphasised is the isolation of Nell from anyone who could have helped her: an isolation that she and her grandfather impose on themselves, but absolute nonetheless. The shrewd visitor who sees at once how much is amiss; who should be her salvation; proves to be merely a fictional “if-only” who expresses the unconsolable regret of another character in a later time. 

*

In the days when people tried to draw maps of Little Nell’s Journey, it was agreed that she died in Tong (Shropshire) – a location confided by Dickens himself. The industrial town would probably have been Birmingham. The earlier part of their journey was thought to pass by Hampstead and across Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire in the direction of Warwickshire. But in the account of the journey itself all place-names are pointedly absent.




[This essay was previously published in Intercapillary Space]

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Monday, October 12, 2015

Charles Dickens: The Pickwick Papers (1836-37)


Pickwick in the barrow, by Phiz



Charles Dickens (Una Pope-Hennessy, 1945)


Forster, Johnson, Kaplan... the Lives of Dickens aren’t inspiring, and this is surely something to do with the man himself. No-one who read a biography of Dickens without knowing his books (impossible supposition) would suspect him of having written anything worthwhile. He emerges as frivolous, dandyish, conventional, an energetic businessman; on the whole, unamiable. His friends are not astounding (just think of Scott’s...) - he scarcely reads, is a philistine in art, drifts rather helplessly through married life and divorce, takes his notions from Carlyle of all people, is driven by motives it is hard to understand, constantly takes on too much, muddles through, lets people down. His unastounding friends patronize him even when they are overwhelmed by him, and we see their point of view. If Scott tends to underrate his own significance, he at least sees his art in recognizable terms. Dickens airily alludes to himself as “the Inimitable”, and that seems to be that. The features of his work that he openly discusses are trivia - he hopes to have “a great effect” with little Paul, or The Chimes... That’s something like the way you suppose Desmond Wheatley or Frederick Forsyth would put it.

Presumably all this is an essential aspect of (one can hardly call it an insight into) the unusual kind of greatness we encounter in Bleak House, Little Dorrit... in all his novels to some extent, for even the worst of them (let’s say, Tale of Two Cities) has a uniqueness, a fire about it that becomes apparent when we try to place it in the same universe as other books. Dickens, more than any other writer, permitted his imagination to cut loose from his own conscious life and opinions. Who else could do so? No-one who was not so naïve, so unintrospective, so ill-educated, so insensitive, so buoyed up by early success that he never had time to anxiously plan for.

And perhaps this peculiar situation does give some clue to why, though his greatness exceeds any other English novelist, it is not entirely happy. What I mean is that, although Little Dorrit is our greatest novel and Bleak House the most stupendous imaginative creation that is a novel, we always assert Dickens’ claim with a dissatisfied sense of paradox - his failures and limitations are peculiarly gross, he doesn’t happily supersede his competitors in every way (thus we have come to think of Shakespeare), or even in most ways. Just in a few ways, but in those, beyond argument.

And still, in those few are infinities. In all that line of big books our chief sense is of prodigal wealth - of how little we are wearied by repetition or perfunctory narrative. When, as occasionally in Hardy or Kipling or Conrad, we catch someone trying out a Dickensian sentence, we are embarrassed by their lack of confidence - into this sea of creation they will never plunge. I thought how unlike Mr Pickwick is to his author - and then I realized that all Dickens’ characters are quite unlike the Dickens of the biography - he seems never to have met himself. I suppose he never kept a journal - I can’t imagine its voice.
[*I since learnt that he tried keeping one for about a week, but couldn't get excited about it. On the other hand he was a very enthusiastic letter-writer.]





I think I have read all his novels at least twice - most of them three times, and some four or more. Even so, when I touch one of them, or pass the “Collected” in a corridor of Marston House, I’m impressed with a sense of the powerful energies contained within. They certainly are not “inexhaustible”, and I doubtless absorbed the essential image on first or second reading, but I know I’ll go back sometimes. London is spoiled for me because I still see it as Dickens’ London with flyovers - which means, I suppose, that I don’t see it very accurately - or perhaps “London” is a bagatelle, a will o’ the wisp, a Boojum (I have forgotten the word I want) that only exists in literature; there’s nothing but this kerbstone, this pigeon, this bus-lane... my sense that This is London - all the connotations and the “atmosphere” - are created by art alone - mostly by Dickens.

[This was written in 2001. I decided a long time ago not to chase around my Brief History trying to keep it all in line with what I currently believe; the variety is more entertaining. In this case what changed my idea of Dickens’ life and friends was the brief and powerful “In Memoriam : W. M. Thackeray” (Cornhill, Feb 1864). Here was witness to sides of Dickens not often seen. “We had our differences of opinion. I thought that he too much feigned a want of earnestness, and that he made a pretence of undervaluing his art, which was not good for the art that he held in trust. But, when we fell upon these topics, it was never very gravely, and I have a lively image of him in my mind, twisting both his hands in his hair, and stamping about, laughing, to make an end of the discussion.” Though Dickens’ poetic was certainly enigmatic, I now think he maintained the enigma because he grasped that it went beyond what could then be verbalized.]

Charles Dickens: The Pickwick Papers (1836-37)

It was 1985. After nearly six months as an IT trainee I joined the support team for the Accounting section of the Property Services Agency. This was at Ashdown House, in Hastings. (The building still stands, but appears to be unoccupied, like Tollgate House in central Bristol where I spent the rest of my civil service career – the sight of both buildings now filling me with the same sense of awe and ugliness, not unmixed with a certain joy.*) I was to witness the PSA’s obsolescence, decline and fall. In my first months, it was part of the Department of the Environment; it even had a venerable and meaningful history as the former Ministry of Works. (And, to my delight, a historical connexion with Chaucer.) The present didn’t seem half so meaningful. Only the old name gives any idea of what it was all for, which was basically to maintain government property: army barracks, ancient monuments, safe houses, Whitehall, mute office blocks in provincial towns, great parks, palaces, remote radio masts... But privatisation, the scaling down of the forces, and a fashion for senseless administrative fiddling (apparently designed to disrupt operations) soon did for all that. At least, that’s how it seemed to the staff.

Staff morale was treated with perfunctory contempt. Occasionally we were summoned into the canteen to hear a man in a suit say things like this:

“What that means effectively is that... Essentially the winners in those environments are those prepared to get out and compete and to take the knocks from trying to get your views across... In terms of the timescale it’s been altered by the announcement ... The number-one goal is to keep PSA services as a single entity... That will be announced, probably in the next couple of days... looking to... (raises palm in self-deprecation) That’s an awful jargon word... We can expect personnel functions to come down the line, away from the old centralized personnel function... an early-versus-later privatization... pie-in-the-sky... Clearly, in going into that wider marketplace we need to go where our strengths lie... the head-in-the-sand view... play to your strengths... Germany Region where we have to deal with the German Construction Association, or the German equivalent of that... aggressive... input once-and-once-only... In terms of handling that, what we’re looking to do is avoid any compulsory redundancy... You take Croydon and London, it tends to be a non-issue... We will have an arms-length relationship with them... If you look at... you tend to... Essentially what you’re looking at... What I see it as being is an issue that you tackle ‘as and when’. You won’t get... funny-money discussions... the real world doesn’t work like that... The simple answer is I don’t know but I have asked the question and I’m waiting for an answer on that... I’m taking the view that I’m looking to manage this problem... Effectively there’s nothing that’s not being looked at.”

It couldn’t have been clearer. A skip full of buff folders and find another job fast.

There were other voices. Sometimes, as if they weren’t used to it, they appeared in cards on the noticeboard. “Never knew I had so many friends... I have a passion for crystal-cut glassware...” “For Sale. Beautiful ivory wedding-dress, long sleeves, plus train, worn for a few hours.” “Just a small note (♪) to thank you for your kind wishes, and truly hope that things work out for you... I expect to be popping back to Hastings occassionally (that doesn’t look as though its spelt right, still never mind) so don’t be surprised if you see me around, especially at Christmas!”

Meanwhile IT management made its own efforts at communication:

IT TRAINING – WHO NEEDS IT

You may know the feeling – you just leave the office to make a cup of coffee and when you get back your desk has broken out with a severe case of PC fever. Wherever you turn Personal Computers seem to be mushrooming and multiplying. It is no surprise perhaps, when you realise that there are currently in excess of 120,000 terminals and PCs in the Civil Service.

A support officer notes:

These users are sometimes nervous of new IT invading their offices, but they quickly tame the whirring beast and use it with some sophistication, pushing the software to its limits.

But I’m looking ahead. Let’s go back to 1985. I was so new that the only thing I didn’t understand was the long, gentle, bearded faces of my calm colleagues. I never would.

In our team Gerry was the acknowledged expert on the labyrinthine suites of COBOL programs that ran in batch overnight. Files of code filled shelves all along one side of the long office. There were no screens; the terminals we used resembled typewriters, our entries and the computer’s responses being printed out on rolls of paper that were stored for several months like medieval scrolls. Testing of programs was a slow business. To run a program we had to embed it in a test job, with all the physical devices and files specifically assigned, and make up a punched card, which was submitted later that evening in the distant and cavernous computer hall. This initiated the test run. Down there in the computer hall, shifts of operators readied tape drives, ran off prints, and so on.  

Though Irish by ancestry, and a republican, Gerry was English in accent and in all his tastes. He was a sweet-tempered and interesting man. His face had the “worn” impression that always intrigued me about people who had been in the same place for quite a long time - I was still young enough to regard seven years as an almost millennial stint. (At the other end of the long office sat our HEO, the diminutive Peter West, another paternal and awesome figure. He was blind, and operated various complex braille and speaking devices which enabled him to “see” the computer system with a clarity that none of us could match.) I think now that perhaps I was never fully accepted into this team, but at the time I loved working with Peter and Gerry. It was with them that I first heard the sort of civil-service speech, so evocative of the fifties and still so influenced by the second world war, that I now realize was on the verge of extinction.  By this I don’t mean Whitehall and public school, I am talking about junior civil servants.  For example, administrative and procedural information was for some reason always distributed (typed and cyclostyled) on yellow paper - presumably because this was the only way to make it stand out, the typeface being an invariable Courier. These handouts were always referred to as “yellow perils”. Sometimes, when we were in a meeting, the room would seem a bit dark and someone would flick a light on, invariably saying: “Let’s have a little light on the matter.” (This same ageing generation can now be discovered belonging to the Caravan Club and taking out its “Mayday” breakdown cover.)

Gerry and I had literary conversations. Sometimes they were about Bulldog Drummond (I could not contribute much to this, except from analogy with John Buchan). Otherwise they were about Dickens, and principally if not exclusively the Pickwick Papers, whose opening chapters Gerry admired - I think he considered the cricket match to be Dickens’ highest achievement. When, after writing about the biography, I took up Pickwick as the only Dickens novel currently on my bookshelf, I glanced at Chapter 12 and fell in with it; I recognized that it satisfied a need (now much less pressing than in the past) for “light” reading - a need formerly met by Buchan and Wodehouse. No other Dickens novel does this, and I began to understand Gerry’s opinion.

Incidentally I also saw how seminal the book had been for Wodehouse. In Chapter 12 we have the “conversation misconstrued as a proposal of marriage”; in Chapter 13 plying the electors with drink, laudanum and green parasols; later, the necessity of kissing a baby (“’Wouldn’t it have as good an effect if the proposer or seconder did that?’ ... ‘Very well’ with a resigned air ‘then it must be done’” - we almost hear Bertie Wooster saying “lead me to it”); in Chapter 14 the bar-side storytelling with captious comments, a constant feature of the Mulliner stories; later, numberless glasses of hot punch, with gradual change of personality; in Chapter 15, the argument about Tupman’s choice of fancy dress - a bandit (the germ of many Wodehouse conversations about Pierrots). More radically transformed, the master-and-servant relationship is a source of Jeeves and Wooster. Dickens does all these things once - in Wodehouse they become motifs, an epic diction that composes a “world” (the phrase “epic diction” is taken, I think, from Stephen Medcalf). [I was too hasty, however; the “change of personality caused by imbibing alcohol” does, in fact, recur several times - for instance when Pickwick drinks cold punch and falls asleep in a barrow.]

* Tollgate House, a 3-spoked office high-rise in Bristol, built 1975, demolished in 2006 - it was part of the site on the edge of St Jude's now gleamingly occupied by Cabot Circus.

(2001)



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Sir Walter Scott: The Talisman (1825)


[I don't know anything about the provenance of this illustration. The artist has transformed the shallow and histrionic Queen Berengaria into the undisputed heroine of the picture, which I suppose goes far to explain her confidence in all dealings with her husband. King Richard looks stupefied. And the book's intended heroine Edith is presented in the chilliest manner, lurking in the background.]

Image source: http://www.mainlesson.com/display.php?author=scott&book=talisman&story=_front&PHPSESSID=03b9af320e0baf3ce03c1afce714225e]


Kudos to Lizzie Driver for her excellent solo reading of The Talisman on Librivox.

*

The Talisman was published in June 1825 along with The Betrothed,  as "Tales of the Crusades". But its more interesting connection is with Ivanhoe (1820).  

Defining that connection in a word is not easy. Whatever the imagined chronology, it doesn't feel quite right to call The Talisman either a prequel to Ivanhoe or a sequel to it (the former would seem the historical sequence, but the latter seems a better fit to changes in Richard's nature).

Yet Richard Coeur-de-Lion is a major character in both novels. Thomas of Gilsland, little more than a name in Ivanhoe, now steps forth in a significant role. The Knights Templar, unsympathetic in Ivanhoe, are positively villainous here. Most significantly, the interest in an exotic multiculturalism, first developed in the Jewish characters of Ivanhoe, is now pursued in the Muslim characters of The Talisman. That makes a difference, but not because Scott knew either culture very well.  In Ivanhoe Scott had to grapple with deeply-rooted anti-Semitism, especially about Jews in Britain. In The Talisman, the first of his novels to be located (as he was acutely aware*) in a place he had never visited, he was freer to be much more simply enthusiastic about his Muslim characters. Ethically they have the best of it all through the book, and make a powerful commentary on the extremely imperfect behaviour that characterizes the Christians.

At least, nearly. There's also Saladin's sudden decapitation of the Grand Master, which casts such a deep chill over the subsequent dinner. Saladin explains that this instant punishment was required because if Giles had tasted the sherbet then Saladin would be bound by laws of hospitality. The implication of the chill is that Scott allows his Christian readers to admire and be fascinated by Muslim culture, but only in a picture-book, only from a distance.  When Edith reacts with horror to the idea of being married to a Muslim prince, Scott probably intends us to feel that her horror is a right and proper emotion. (Even if it conceals her own prior interest in Sir Kenneth.) Richard's own bluff indifference to whether she marries a Christian or a Muslim is supposed to indicate a soldier's insensibility.

For much of the book the positions of normative and Other are to some extent reversed. Though we are in Palestine, we are in the Crusader camp and see the somewhat exotic behaviour of the Age of Chivalry through the unillusioned eyes of Adonbec el Kakim (Saladin).

But there's a double-twist here, because Scott takes it for granted that readers will understand, even if they smile at, the excesses of the chivalric age. All Saladin's wisdom cannot shake the book's certainty that he and his world are necessarily beyond the pale of the culture that inherits and understands chivalry from within.

The Talisman is the last of Scott's novels to be completed before his own world was re-shaped by multiple griefs. It isn't a masterpiece but it does have sustained interest.

* The 1832 preface, where Scott admits his lack of direct contact with the East, is a mess; Scott was by then in no condition to write even a Preface. He begins by giving cogent reasons why he should not have attempted to write a book set in Palestine. He then says that he felt, nevertheless, that he could contribute something of his own to the genre; presumably he means his portrayal of Richard, but at this point the argument flickers and gutters out. (The poetic illustrations of the medieval tradition of Richard's cannibalism are, however, appallingly interesting. )



History

Giles Amaury (The Grand Master of the Templars) is a made-up name. Scott may have based him vaguely on Roger de Sablé.  though it was his predecessor Gerard de Ridefort who was, in fact, beheaded by Saladin. Richard had good relations with both.

"Conrade of Montserrat" is given a villainous role. As Scott admits, this is entirely made up. The historical Conrad of Montferrat was indeed a rival of Richard; in fact Richard was accused of having him murdered. [It seems that Scott was already thinking about The Talisman at the same time he was writing St Ronan's Well (1824). The earlier novel refers more than once to twelfth-century Palestine, and even to  a confrontation between Conrade of Montserrat and Richard.]

Saladin negotiated for a marriage between Richard's widowed sister Joan and Saladin's brother Al-Adil. She refused. Richard's views are unknown. When Conrad turned over his Muslim hostages to Richard, he had them all killed.   (Richard may bear responsibility for the anti-Jewish violence at the time of his coronation, also.)

So the chivalrous conception of Richard, and his broad-minded attitude to Islamic and other cultures, is very much Scott's own vision.



*
Masses of the slimy and sulphurous substance called naphtha, which floated idly on the sluggish and sullen waves, supplied those rolling clouds with new vapours... (Chapter I, description of the Dead Sea)

More strictly, Asphaltum. In Edward Turner's Elements of Chemistry (1833) he says:

Naphtha occurs in some parts of Italy, and on the banks of the Caspian Sea. ...  Asphaltum is found on the surface and on the banks of the Dead Sea ....
(p. 808)

But, as Turner realized, the two inflammable substances were closely related.

I notice that on my bottle of Redex for diesel engines, one of the ingredients is "Naphtha (petroleum)".


*

In the final chapter, it's revealed that Sir Kenneth of the Leopard is, in fact, Prince David of Scotland.

On the whole, there were already too many royals in disguise. (The two principal Muslim characters, it turns out, are both Saladin.) Shakespeare's Henry V may lie behind it, or ancient folk motifs, maybe. James V of Scotland was said to like travelling amongst his people incognito, as he does in The Lady of the Lake (1810). In Ivanhoe (1820), the motif was done really well (relevant to theme and well motivated), but it began to be annoying in Quentin Durward (1823) which shares a lot of The Talisman's less admirable features.

Anyway, now it turns out that even our hero is royal.

Of course this resolves the issue of Sir Kenneth's social inferiority to Lady Edith very conveniently. But the "lost heir" resolution [of Tom Jones etc] only works if the heir is genuinely lost. Kenneth wasn't a lost heir but a disguised heir: he knew all the time that he had royal blood. And this means that the most affecting scenes in the earlier part of the book, surrounding Kenneth's sense of unworthiness before his lady and his shame at being lured from his post for a once-in-a-lifetime chance to do her some service, are in retrospect almost nonsense. (Indeed so attached are we to our former reading that we're inclined to treat this late revelation as not to be taken seriously.)

Yet it's evident that the revelation is no afterthought. There are multiple subtle hints, as early as the opening chapter, that Kenneth is in disguise and is probably someone pretty notable. And a careful reading of those middle chapters reveals that though Kenneth is entirely sincere in his chivalric abasement, yet he feels no social inferiority to Edith or even to Richard.

Too many monarchs altogether. The crusade brings together a rabble of them, all with different aims. Meanwhile the royal enemies Saladin and Richard cultivate a chivalrous regard that is almost lover-like.

There is a kind of point to this. At the multicultural borderline, there is a collapse of the hierarchic social structures of monoculture.  The foreigner affects us much the same whether they're an untouchable or a king. The romancer is apt to elevate the picturesque other to a kind of sovereignty, a sovereignty of the mysterious sphere to which he belongs and in whose ways the outsider is so inept. In this novel, even those few who are not kings (the hermit of Engadi, or Thomas of Gilsland) have something king-like about their distinctness. Nectabanus certainly thinks that he does.

Nevertheless, The Talisman almost expires for lack of common people.   




Scott's novels: A brief guide

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Tuesday, October 06, 2015

three songs




BABY, I’M FEELING IT NOW


I drove the Stagecoach, the 55 to Calne
But I lost my way one evening and bounced it off a barn
A lady in the back she said I was asleep
And the Stagecoach inspectors agreed.
Well nobody died
They mostly just cried
But baby I’m feeling it now.

If I could meet my sister then I would say to her
“I wanted to come with you out to Australia
Where I could ride horses, take the boys to the sea,
Get to know my own family.”
I can’t really say
It would’ve turned out that way
But baby I’m feeling it now.

If I could make a pile, like those I lost before
Then I would buy a bottle and drink it by the shore
In the Palace of Fortune I’d stand there all day
And I’d watch my money dribble away
And I sit in a taxi to the far side of town
And I’d burn that barn to the ground.
What other people feel
Never seems real
But baby I’m feeling it now.




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