Ground-elder (Aegopodium podagraria)

 

Ground-elder (Aegopodium podagraria). Frome, 4 August 2022.

A colony of Ground-elder (Aegopodium podagraria, Sw: Kirskål) beside the River Frome, looking very beautiful in fruit. 

Older vernacular names include Herb Gerard (Lyte translating Dodoens' Herbal, 1578), Gout-wort and Ashweed (Gerard's Herbal, 1597). There are many other variants: Bishop's Weed, Goutweed, Dog Elder. . . But the names mainly fall into two categories: those that note the passing resemblance of the compound leaves to Elder or Ash, and those referring to its use as a treatment for gout. Sources differ as to whether St Gerard, Bishop of Toul (c. 935 - 994) actually used the herb himself, or was just the saint that medieval gout-sufferers usually prayed to.  

The Swedish name, on the other hand, refers to the plant being edible -- kål means cabbage -- (especially the still-folded young leaves and leaf stems, gathered before any flower stems are produced). 

Gerard (the herbalist, not the saint) and Culpeper both confirmed the effectiveness of Ground-elder for aching joints and inflammations. It could be taken internally or applied as a poultice. 

The plant is native to most of mainland Europe, but is only an introduction in the British Isles, often found near monastic ruins but probably planted ever since Roman times for its medicinal and culinary properties. In Sweden, too, it's generally considered an introduction, seemingly from as far back as the Iron Age.

Ground-elder (Aegopodium podagraria). Frome, 4 August 2022.

The longest section of the English Wikipedia entry on Ground-elder is, I'm sorry to say, headed by the dread word "Control" and is effectively an advert for glyphosates (Roundup et al), a repellent intrusion given the controversy over glyphosate use (which is not even mentioned here, but is well documented under the Wikipedia entry for Glyphosate). It's quite true that colonies of Ground-elder are difficult to eliminate, if you are not willing to do the hard work of digging and sifting out all the rhizome fragments (don't put them in the compost heap!). Since Ground-elder is fairly resistant to glyphosates, the proposed solution on our gardening sites is of course to use more glyphosates, in repeated applications. I'd suggest that a bit of patient trowel work, even if you don't succeed in eliminating all the Ground-elder on your first attempt, has got to be a better solution than poisoning your garden's ecosystem. You could also try the method used in Sweden, covering the whole patch with wet newspaper and then firmly anchored black plastic, thus excluding all light; but you'll have to leave this apparatus in place for two years, so it's a bit drastic. 

The Environmental Impacts of Glyphosate (Friends of the Earth Europe, 2013):

https://www.foeeurope.org/sites/default/files/press_releases/foee_5_environmental_impacts_glyphosate.pdf

Ground-elder (Aegopodium podagraria). Frome, 4 August 2022.

Ground-elder (Aegopodium podagraria). Frome, 4 August 2022.

Ground-elder, in the British Isles anyway, spreads more by subsoil rhizome activity and by humans carting soil from one place to another, than by seed. The seeds are relatively small by Apiaceae standards, egg-shaped and often tipped with two persistent styles bent back on themselves. The umbel has no bracts or bracteoles.

Some impressively comprehensive information (description, uses, properties):

https://www.healthbenefitstimes.com/goutweed/

Ground-elder (Aegopodium podagraria). Frome, 4 August 2022.

Odours that rise
When the spade wounds the roots of tree,
Rose, currant, raspberry, or goutweed,
Rhubarb or celery;

(from "Digging" by Edward Thomas. Source.)

My family roots are considered worthy,
before your very eyes, the glorious 'ground elder',
one can visualise a vigourous nature,
in which it has been shown, uplifted
to the point of recognition, the rhizome root
but where there' s need, not to be eradicated?

(from "My Family Roots -- The Ground Elder" by Titus Llewellyn. Source.)

Ground-elder (Aegopodium podagraria). Frome, 4 August 2022.

Ground-elder (Aegopodium podagraria). Frome, 4 August 2022.

Elizabeth Hervey: The Mourtray Family (1800)

I only have Volume 3 (of 4); the original owner of my copy was a certain Lord Torrington (*see NOTE), but I picked it up in a charity shop.

Coincidentally, if you look up "The Mourtray Family" in Google Books you will also get Vol 3 only.

Volume 3 begins with the family discovering the horrendous mess that young Henry has got himself into; he has fought a duel (without seconds) over a gaming debt, and fled leaving his opponent at death's door. Mr Mourtray and his daughter Emma are gravely distressed; the comic Mrs Mourtray is also distressed but insensible to the moral gravity of the situation, she is only concerned for her son's welfare. If you're able to read the blurry scan above, you'll enjoy the irrepressible Chowles adding fuel to everyone's distress. In Hervey's book this is just funny: compare it with the scene in Mansfield Park when Sir Thomas Bertram discovers the theatricals, and when Yates keeps on talking to him about the theatre while everyone else is desperate to change the subject; the painful topic is a much less serious matter in itself, but Austen makes us feel the scene as excruciating, because we are so much more deeply aware of the betrayal and shame.

The rest of the third vol focusses on Emma and her love for Miramont; by the end of it they are married, but I'm not sure if this is the end of their story or if there are still further twists to come; the meeting with Miramont's rival Lord Clannarmon is disquieting, and we wonder if Miramont has the moral stature that Austen has taught us to expect from the hero. The most exciting scene is when Emma, staying up late, notices a flickering light from Miramont's bedroom (they are both guests at a country house). This light can only mean fire, and Emma rouses the household, saves the gentleman's life, and is rewarded by his declaration of love, though not as yet by a proposal of marriage.       

But these comparisons with Austen are a little unjust. What Hervey already turns to good account is the typically captious eye of a spirited young heroine, employed as a moral instrument that is trained on her mother and her mother's circle; or on the envy and snobbery of those friends who are more socially established than herself but less sexually attractive. It is a healthy structure on which later novelists can build. 

Elizabeth (1748-1820) was only a young child when her mother remarried. Her stepfather was the fabulously rich William Beckford Sr, who owned twenty plantations worked by slaves in Jamaica, and she must have grown up in the opulent surroundings of Fonthill Splendens in Wiltshire. William Beckford Jr, author of Vathek, was her half-brother. In 1774 she married Col. Thomas Hervey, who promptly gambled away their joint fortunes**, perhaps supplying a financial motive for Mrs Hervey's subsequent composition of half a dozen anonymously-published novels. So when the author has Mr Mourtray say about Henry, "Gaming, too, is, of all vices, that which takes the deepest root in the heart", she was writing from bitter experience.


**But see David Oakley's comment to this post.


*

NOTE

It would be pleasant to think that my "Lord Torrington" was the great diarist-traveller John Byng, but he held the title for only three weeks, between his elder brother George’s death in December 1812 and his own death in January 1813. More likely this book belonged to George. (John’s famous diaries were written 1781-1794.)

And since we're talking nobility here, Elizabeth Hervey the novelist has no connection with her splendid near-contemporary namesake Elizabeth "Bess" Cavendish, nee Hervey, Duchess of Devonshire (1759-1824) - a confusion currently propagated by Wikipedia.

(2010, 2012)   

Charles Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities - "bestselling novel of all time". Allegedly.

The internet generally, and Wikipedia in particular, is obsessed with records. Consequently, you are quite likely to run across the widely repeated claim that  A Tale of Two Cities is (as the Wikipedia article on Charles Dickens puts it) "the best selling novel of all time".

It isn't the most unlikely statement I've ever heard, but when I tried to trace it back to an authoritative source, I at first got no further than a chatty review by the novelist David Mitchell  in the Daily Telegraph from May 8th 2010.

 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/7685510/David-Mitchell-on-Historical-Fiction.html

"Charles Dickens’ second stab at a historical novel, A Tale of Two Cities, has sold more than 200 million copies to date, making it the bestselling novel – in any genre – of all time."

 Did Mitchell know what he was talking about? Maybe, but it seems that no-one else does.


Digging a bit more, I found a 2009 GMAT Practice Exam, where the following sentence is used for grammatical comprehension purposes:

"By the year 2000, A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens' gripping book portraying the suffering of the proletariat under the brutal subjugation of the French aristocracy had around 200 million copies in print, making it more than that of almost any other English book ever written."

(The kids are supposed to correct the clumsy grammar towards the end)

And the earliest reference I've seen so far, is an anonymous ("staff") preview article on broadway.com for the musical Tale of Two Cities (24 March, 2008):

http://www.broadway.com/buzz/97173/the-best-of-times-a-tale-of-two-cities-to-open-at-broadways-hirschfeld-theatre-on-sept-18/

"Since its inaugural publication on August 30, 1859, A Tale of Two Cities has sold over 200 million copies in several languages, making it one of the most famous books in the history of fictional literature."

That's it, so far as I can find. (And yes, I searched Google Books, too.)

To be fair, there are Wikipedists who are aware of the vacuum behind this claim. (See the talk page for "List of best-selling books"). Arriving at aggregated worldwide figures for a massive seller over a long period of time is never going to be an easy matter. Once a book is out of copyright, whose job is it to keep track of sales? No-one's. You'd struggle to obtain a list of all the separate publications of  A Tale of Two Cities, even in English. Anyone can publish it, and they don't have to ask anyone's permission. Academic bibliographers normally aren't very interested in those later reprints, because they have no textual significance. And as for obtaining the sales figures! How would you go about contacting those fugitive publishers of the "World's Library of Great Books", which flourished in the 1930s? Then there's the issue of what counts as a sale. Classic books of this sort are often given away free (e.g. by Sunday newspapers). But the newspaper pays a publisher to produce the books. The reader buys the newspaper, maybe in part because of the free book. And these free books do account for a lot of present-day readers. So does that count as a sale or not? Now multiply all these little difficulties by the fifty or so languages into which Dickens has been translated. Rinse and repeat.

All I'm saying is that arriving at such figures is not straightforward. You'd need to be a specialist, not just in literary history but in the very specific department of literary history that understands the commercial side of publishing at a global level. While ideally I'd want to know exactly how this estimate was arrived at, the very least I'd want is the endorsement of a recognized authority.

A Tale of Two Cities might conceivably be a very high selling book worldwide. Though many diehard Dickens fans would agree with me in considering it almost his worst novel, it seems there are quite a lot of  not-so-diehard-Dickensian people out there who absolutely adore it. It has had a flourishing career in film and drama, above all in Selznick's film of 1935 starring Ronald Colman as Sidney Carton. On celluloid the rather lifeless lovers of the book became transformed into blockbuster romantic heroes/ines.

Whether you think it's Dickens' worst novel or not, there's at any rate no dispute about it being his shortest. It's widely studied as a school text.* As western culture has spread across the globe, Dickens has been promulgated as one of the west's representative authors. And if you're only going to dish out a single Dickens book to your class, then leaving aside the economic and logistical claims of brevity you could maybe argue that Cities is the most "global" Dickens novel. The greater novels, especially in their comedy, require and reward a detailed awareness of 19th-century English popular culture -- an awareness that is now fast disappearing. It's a familiar paradox: the most wonderful parts of an author's writings (to local fans), are what travel least well. Byronism was international, but Don Juan is untranslatable. Scott influenced the whole world, but the Scots dialect in his novels is a major impediment even to most native English speakers.

Cities doesn't have much of Dickens' comic genius. But it does have a good handful of the kind of discussion-topics that work well in the classroom - e.g. about injustice, violence, fanaticism, self-sacrifice. Topics with plenty of of juicy relevance in India, Brazil, Nigeria and everywhere else.

(But, reassuringly, one of the novel's clearest messages is that revolutions are very bad news indeed. All governments like that sort of message.)

Anyone know anything more about this?

*

* [Don't take my word for it, here's what Shmoop has to say:

Because it’s a bit more straight-forward plot-wise than many other Dickens novels, A Tale of Two Cities is also one of the most frequently-taught of Dickens’s novels today. Chances are you’re encountering it for the first time (or the second time, or the twenty-third time) in a classroom. That’s part of why we here at Shmoop are so taken with this novel: it’s an enduring testimony to the best and a searing critique of the worst of human nature. Dickens set out to make the French Revolution live in the hearts and minds of his readers. Take it from us, he’s done a pretty good job.

]

*

I may as well add here what I wrote about the book before:

Charles Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

Everyone should agree that the first few chapters of the book are good (up to Part II, Ch 5). And so, it seems to me, are the last few. But I keep getting the feeling that Dickens is using the French Revolution for his own ends. This is not a historical novel; it’s in a way more illuminating. His own preoccupations with prisons and resurrections are now more barely personal and psychological than they were in Little Dorrit. Yet his presentation of The Terror, something rather unlike what he had known yet extremely like some more recent societies, is deeply felt in its essence, though (or because?) it was imagined.

Psychologically, Madame Defarge and Sidney Carton are true images. The latter may need some defence, since we feel that Charles Darnay must, in logic, go to the wall and he speaks the plain truth when he says “Good could never come of such evil”. Charles and Lucie happy ever after is as impossible as Romeo and Juliet happy ever after. But still, Carton quickens the pulse; his expertise in this crisis and his flush of pride. Though he represents, perhaps, Dickens’ fantasy of a great, redeeming self-sacrifice; the fantasy of one who lives guiltily. I am certain that some have really gone to their deaths comforted by Carton at their elbow.

Of course this may seem a preposterous defence, and it needs no great effort to recall “the case against” - the tedium of those echoey footsteps in Soho, the perfunctory interest of Jerry Cruncher, and so on. Yet to flick through the pages again is to realize with what economy the book supplies scenes of great power. Since I’ve already mentioned the beginning and end, let’s review some of the inbetween: the child run over by the carriage (Part II, Ch VII); Monsieur the Marquis saying “You are fatigued” (Ch IX); Stryver’s courtship, and conversation with Lorry (Ch XII); Barsad’s visit to the wineshop (Ch XVI); Lorry’s conversation with Dr Manette about the latter’s collapse (Ch XIX); the death of Foulon (Ch XXII); Stryver’s remarks on Evrémonde (Ch XXIV).  

Still, these scenes are primarily dramatic scenes. It’s in the construction and the dialogue that the book is strong. (The construction, as we all know now, is based on an elaborate allegory of which the motif is “Recalled to Life”.) Another Dickens, the vigorous, comic, fanciful imaginer, is kept out of the book. The decriptive prose is thin, and the reason, oddly, is anger.  In the description of the grindstone (Part III, Ch 2) an account of hideous preparations for murder ends like this:

And as the frantic wielders of these weapons snatched them from the stream of sparks and tore away into the streets, the same red hue was red in their frenzied eyes; - eyes which any unbrutalised beholder would have given twenty years of life, to petrify with a well-directed gun.

The decription of the Carmagnole (Part III, Ch 5) is another example - the author hates it, and his fancy fails him. So, in the next chapter, Darnay’s acquittal - how unlike Pickwick’s trial, and even the English trial of Darnay himself. Nothing here like the Attorney-General who “turned the whole suit of clothes Mr Stryver had fitted on the jury, inside out; showing how Barsad and Cly were even a hundred times better than he had thought them, and the prisoner a hundred times worse”.

A Tale of Two Cities lends itself to dramatization, and to changes of title, because its own is an unhelpful one. The Only Way, by Freeman Wills. Let me make my own old-fashioned suggestion: The Death Penalty. This is a feature of the punitive apparatus that plays no part in Little Dorrit, but here it is made present. Culture, and history, and fantasy, all retire. But this anger, like the “well-directed gun”, claims to be tit for tat. When the wood-sawyer says, “But it’s not my business”, we expect a twinkle in his eye. It turns out that his “jocose” gestures do not mean sympathy. His little fancy (“Tickle, tickle; Pickle, pickle”) is a joke that denies human engagement. Jacques Three and Madame Defarge underline the point - they don’t soften. And so Dickens won’t soften either. His art becomes stalled and reactionary.

Yet in the moment of execution this doesn’t matter.

And now, while he was composed, and hoped to meet the end with quiet heroism, a new action began in his waking thoughts, which was very difficult to master. He had never seen the instrument that was to terminate his life. How high it was from the ground, how many steps it had, where he would be stood, how he would be touched, whether the touching hands would be dyed red, which way his face would be turned, whether he would be the first, or might be the last... (Pt III, Ch 13).

Dickens’s anger is displaced, I think; but his guillotine is very sharp.

(2002)

Sir Walter Scott: Ivanhoe (audiobook on Librivox)

[Image source: https://moviessilently.com/2018/07/22/ivanhoe-1913-a-silent-film-review/ . Poster for the silent film Ivanhoe (1913), produced by Herbert Brenon, with King Baggot in the title role, and Leah Baird as Rebecca. It was a big-budget movie, one of the first to be filmed on location (at Chepstow Castle in Wales). You can watch it here (with Dutch titles): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0ha89NyNo4 .]

I've just finished listening to this audiobook of Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe (1819): 

https://librivox.org/ivanhoe-by-sir-walter-scott/


Like many other Librivox recordings, this reading of Ivanhoe is shared between multiple readers:  nine in this case.

A great thing about Librivox is that, right up front, they emphasize to potential volunteers that it absolutely doesn't matter about your accent; the result is unexpectedly radicalizing. Making recordings of out-of-copyright classics has something painfully traditional about it; but on the other hand, all sorts of questions get stirred up by the appropriation of e.g. Ivanhoe to the strongly regional voices of Louisiana and Wolverhampton (these are guesses);  in short, to anything but the small range of accepted voices for reading. As for Christian al-Kadi -- I can't even guess; most of his Librivox readings are German, but he's done French and Spanish as well as English. His two chapters of Ivanhoe are quietly impressive; more impressive, perhaps, than their contents absolutely merit. But anyway, the point is, there's a rush of excitement about all this, a feeling of people - just people - invading the classics in a way that is hard to contain or predict.

Unintentionally or not, these reflections are peculiarly appropriate to Ivanhoe, a crucial textbook for understanding Victorian education, colonialism and imperialism; also a seminal essay in multiculturalism. It's a remarkable thing that when Scott the novelist let go of Scotland to go south to England (and simultaneously back in time to the 12th Century), the biggest thing that he found (or if you prefer, imagined) was an exotically oriental Judaism.

Ivanhoe and Rebecca, by Abazi

[Image source: http://abazi.deviantart.com/art/Ivanhoe-and-Rebecca-121178871. Fan painting inspired by 1982 TV movie with Anthony Andrews and Olivia Hussey.]



Ivanhoe's foregrounding of this Jewish material has a significance that is still only beginning to be appreciated. Michael Ragussis' book Figures of Conversion: "The Jewish Question" and English National Identity (Duke University Press, 1995) is the place to start: you can sample it on Google Books. Ragussis draws attention to Scott's visit to Isaac Nathan, the composer of Hebrew Melodies, in 1815. (A year before, Nathan had requested Scott to write the lyrics for his music; Scott modestly declined, but Nathan secured Byron and their joint work was published to great acclaim in April 1815.)

[Nathan's excellent music fell into obscurity after the mid-nineteenth century but you can hear fascinating performances of some of the best-known Hebrew Melodies here: http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/douglass/music/album-hebrew.html . Clearly San Jose is not just about Silicon Valley!]

Ivanhoe is, not infrequently, as shockingly badly-written as Quentin Durward. Scott is almost maddening when he wastes sentence after sentence on saying nothing and saying it badly. The bagginess is more acceptable on the page than when you read it aloud. A typical sentence:

While this dirge was sung, in a low and melancholy tone, by the female choristers, the others were divided into two bands, of which one was engaged in bedecking, with such embroidery as their skill and taste could compass, a large silken pall, destined to cover the bier of Athelstane, while the others busied themselves in selecting, from baskets of flowers placed before them, garlands, which they intended for the same mournful purpose. (Chapter 42)

Take out all the bagginess, and you're left with "Women were embroidering and making garlands for the bier". OK, that's a cut too far; I confess that there are some benefits to the slow turning of the imagination in an ample sentence; the opportunity, for example, to visualize those baskets of raw floral material. But still, this is pretty lifeless stuff for what is at best only scene-setting description.

Scott's style is also not a great vehicle for action-packed drama. Here is one of my favourite all-time disastrous sentences:

To snatch a mace from the pavement, on which it lay beside one whose dying grasp had just relinquished it—to rush on the Templar's band, and to strike in quick succession to the right and left, levelling a warrior at each blow, was, for Athelstane's great strength, now animated with unusual fury, but the work of a single moment;.... (Chapter 31)

This slack manoeuvring is somehow the obverse of the structural repetitions that make the book astounding in its great scenes; Scott is also a master of structure.

Example, around the captivities in the castle of Torquilstone. Four, count'em, chapters in succession, but simultaneous in time, that all end with the bugle call from without (nb Zola learnt from this idea and used it in The Debacle). These chapters aren't great; the captors insult and threaten the men (Unbelieving dog, swine of a Saxon, etc), or protest to the coveted beauties that "You do me an injustice". With some relief, we think that we finally approach the castle assault; not at all, we've hardly got started. Now it's time for a visit outside the walls to the Black Knight, Locksley, etc., then some protracted disguise with a visiting "priest", then God help us, a second visiting priest (a real one this time), then more discussion and dissension between the variously graded villainous Norman barons. Oh, and Ulrica and her past and her plan of vengeance. Deep Breath. So finally we'll get started.

And then Scott is brilliant. Far from at last letting the clock tick on, he goes back in time yet again, this time indeed much further back than before; all the way to the end of the tournament at Ashby, and now he gives us what we had almost forgotten, the wounded Ivanhoe. Or rather, Ivanhoe and Rebecca. And immediately we're reading at a totally different level of seriousness; this then, is the big scene. It is structurally, above all, that Scott quietly enforces the novel's (unforeseen?) displacement of the expected blue-blooded Rowena by the multiculturalist figure of Rebecca. When the assault finally takes place, it is described for us by Rebecca, looking out of a window. The exotic alien thus becomes, not a bloody participant (i.e. what Ivanhoe longs to be), but the model of a modern consciousness -- she becomes the reporter and the commentator. 

Rebecca et Ivanhoé blessé (Rebecca and the Wounded Ivanhoe), 1823 painting by Eugène Delacroix.

[Image source: Wikipédia . The painting is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.]

The other really great scene is the Black Knight's carouse with the Clerk of Copmanhurst. It isn't a coincidence that this scene, too, is primarily conversation. Here the matter is about royalty, nationality, and its bond with the common man: a familiar theme in Scott, but nowhere better handled than here. The big scene between Rebecca and Ivanhoe is a critique of chivalry and Christendom, and an analysis of the conditions of an oppressed people.

re: the Introduction to Ivanhoe. Scott is right; though Ivanhoe is inferior to most of the earlier books set in Scotland, yet its existence ameliorated the status of the author, and indeed those earlier books. If he'd carried on as before, he would have been considered a genre author.

Lawrence Templeton, in his Epistle to Dr Dryasdust, concedes: "... in England, civilisation has been so long complete, that our ideas of our ancestors are only to be gleaned from musty records and chronicles, the authors of which seem perversely to have conspired to suppress in their narratives all interesting details, in order to find room for flowers of monkish eloquence, or trite reflections upon morals".

We all know what he means. But two centuries on, it's sad to say that a modern reader will often make the same reflection about Scott's own once-glowing narrative, e.g.:

When Ivanhoe reached the habitation of Isaac, he was still in a state of unconsciousness, owing to the profuse loss of blood which had taken place during his exertions in the lists. Rebecca examined the wound, and having applied to it such vulnerary remedies as her art prescribed, informed her father that if fever could be averted, of which the great bleeding rendered her little apprehensive, and if the healing balsam of Miriam retained its virtue, there was nothing to fear for his guest's life, and that he might with safety travel to York with them on the ensuing day.

The main thing we'd like to know here is just what exactly Rebecca did, and with what wound or wounds. Just as, a couple of paragraphs previously, the rather casual statement, in passing, that "The fate of Miriam had indeed been to fall a sacrifice to the fanaticism of the times", distracts us with a Who!When?Why!? reaction. However, I am not criticizing Scott for this. As it happens, Scott is ahead of us here; our provoked curiosity is all a preparation for the dismaying judgment of the Grand Master. But this dense reservation does require the modern reader to re-focus their reading; in fact, to imagine intensely that which is not spelled out because in some tortuous way it would have infringed one of the period's innumerable rules about reticence. Spreading balsam on the wounds of a young knight (maybe unconscious, maybe not) is a sexy and intimate occupation.

*

The geography of Ivanhoe is concentrated on a narrow North-South line between York and Ashby-de-la-Zouch, a distance of some 100 miles. The novel begins in the neighbourhood of Cedric's Rotherwood, about half-way between the two. Rotherwood was a real manor, at Treeton, E. of Sheffield.

Scott liked to use real names when he could. Aethelstane's Coningsburgh = Conisbrough Castle, half-way between Rotherham and Doncaster. Scott apparently had visited it, though he seems to be wrong in claiming that the keep is Saxon; the name is, though. At the tourney:

"Sir Thomas de Multon, the Knight of Gilsland, rather," said Fitzurse; "Salisbury is bigger in the bones."

Baron Thomas Multon of Gilsland was a real person, though anachronistic (the barony was created in 1307). In Ivanhoe he's only a name, but in The Talisman he's a major character. Scott had visited Gilsland and had used it as a major location in "The Bridal Of Triermain". It seems to have been important to him to write about places that he had really seen.

Scott invented the name Copmanhurst by combining the names of two of Yorkshire's Templar Preceptories: Copmanthorpe and Temple Hirst. The preceptory in the novel, Templestowe, does not really exist, but the name is spot on. Evidently the name "Lawrence Templeton" came to the author out of the same semi-conscious detritus.

(Scott's invented names were, of course, soon borrowed, in this case to construct the built geography of Australia. Templestowe is in Victoria, Copmanhurst in New South Wales. He also invented the name Cedric: it's now rare as a boy's name in English, but very popular in French. Which in a way seems symbolic of how Scott has sometimes been more appreciated when he's read in translation!)

*

L'Enlèvement de Rebecca (The Abduction of Rebecca), 1846 painting by Eugène Delacroix

[Image source: Wikipedia , but I've brightened up the image. The painting, cosidered one of Delacroix's greatest, is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.]

Rébecca enlevée par le templier (Rebecca abducted by the templar), 1858 painting by Eugène Delacroix

[Image source: Wikipédia . Delacroix's second treatment of the subject, in which Bois-Guilbert carries Rebecca himself. This painting is in the Louvre.]

*

Among the other things I ran across while writing this:

Arthur Sullivan's opera Ivanhoe, a successful disaster, or disastrous success, in 1891. Julian Sturgis' libretto is very faithful to the book and very interesting.

The generally abysmal standard of Wikipedia's literature entries (especially as contrasted with their scientific or geographical entries) has been mentioned here before. The Wikipedia entry for Ivanhoe tells us that Wilfred "represents a middling individual in the medieval class system who is not exceptionally outstanding in his abilities" - would this be the same Ivanhoe who is King Richard's favourite and the all-comers winner at Ashby? Plot synopses may be the lowest form of criticism; they are, nevertheless, surprisingly difficult to get right. Some of the Ivanhoe plot summary may be borrowed from nineteenth-century public domain sources (as is the case with most of the other Wikipedia entries on the Waverley novels), but they can't be responsible for abbreviating Isaac of York's name to "York".

It's presumably Wikipedia, too, whom we have to thank for the peculiar arrangement of Scott's novels into three mutually exclusive categories. By this arrangement the "Waverley novels" no longer means Scott's novels as a whole, but only the leftovers when you have extracted the "Tales of My Landlord" and the two novels sub-titled "Tales from Benedictine Sources". Unfortunately this scheme has been widely copied across the Internet and lies behind such surprising assertions as that Ivanhoe is the fifth Waverley novel.

And what else do we find in the Wikipedia entry? The history of Ivanhoe criticism is: "Critics of the novel have treated it as a romance intended mainly to entertain boys": the reference is to the opening lines of an essay in Nineteenth-Century Fiction by Joseph E. Duncan (evidently the Wikipedia-author was not signed up to JStor, so could only see the preview page); this essay was published in 1955, and is not worthwhile evidence of the state of Ivanhoe criticism. But the Wikipedia-author knows no better.

There is no evidence that the author has any information about:- biographical circumstances of composition; context in Scott's oeuvre as a whole; critical reception; technical innovations; cultural and historical influence. All of these are suitably objective matters and they would be much more worth recording in an encyclopaedia entry than a bungled plot synopsis and some trivia. But this is wholly characteristic of Wikipedia's entries about literary works.

Perhaps you think the novels of Scott, the great unread, don't represent a fair sample of what Wikipedia can do. How about, well, Shakespeare? I've just looked up the entry for Henry IV, Part II and, believe me, it's just as useless as the entry for Ivanhoe. This farrago of misinformation and blank ignorance is the result of universities and the scholarly community sealing off open access to scholarship. Fellows, I hope you're proud of it.

[Addendum (2015): The Wikipedia entry for Henry IV Part II is still as bad as I said, but this isn't true of all Shakespeare plays. The Wikipedia Titus Andronicus is absolutely excellent.]

Shmoop student notes to Ivanhoe. These are really good; they make you want to read the book, and the character and scene analyses are generally terrific.

Not perfect, though. "Then what are the odds that Isaac bumps into Beaumanoir with the incriminating letter in his hand?" (Um.. Quite high - he had the letter written specifically in order to show it at Templestowe).

And what about this, of Rebecca: "When her beloved Ivanhoe implies that she can't understand the glory of battle because the Jews are not fighters, she gets right up in his face and tells him that the Old Testament is full of tales of heroic Jews. Just because she thinks warfare is stupid does not mean she is a coward. So Ivanhoe should just keep his mouth shut about what he does not understand. Even though Rebecca loves Ivanhoe and wants his admiration, she isn't willing to let him talk smack about her or her people." That sounds like a great scene, but it's a pretty free account of the actual conversation in Ch XXIX; it's what we'd like Rebecca to do; a sort of translation, not of the language but of the action, into the kind of scene Scott might have written if he was alive today and writing screenplays of Pirates of the Caribbean.

Being written for school students, the Shmoop notes are naturally very right-minded. Anti-Semitism is dealt with well: our guide even reproving Scott for making Rebecca so amazing that in the end he blurs the message about religious prejudice being wrong in all circumstances: "If Rebecca were ugly, stupid, and greedy, it would still be equally as wrong to discriminate against her for her religion."

Yes it would, but not equally as visibly wrong in the eyes of a sceptical and prejudiced readership. Compared at least with the high standards of his daughter, Isaac is moderately ugly and stupid and greedy (the last in particular); and what is the upshot? The anti-Semitism that rains down on him in the novel feels like it's being to a certain extent endorsed by the author, in spite of all the admirable authorial commentary. I think Scott's glamorizing of the oppressed (in Rebecca, Flora MacIvor, Catherine Seyton, etc) was a really great thing. Glamorizing is never entirely falsifying; it can also be an insight. In this case it set in motion profound changes in our understanding of the world, changes inadvertently testified to, two centuries later, by Shmoop's own high-mindedness.

Another thing that's great about Scott's presentation is that he shows anti-Semitism as present even in such otherwise admirable persons as Ivanhoe and Locksley.

Isaac does embody anti-Semitic stereotype; he is confessedly sourced from one aspect of Shylock (the aspect that cries "My ducats! My daughter!").

That's bad, but Scott uses this bad stereotype to a better end. First, he entirely eliminates Shylock's vindictiveness; instead, he introduces the more sentimental comedy of Isaac continually presenting himself as penniless when no-one is likely to believe him - the sort of lovable crotchet that was a staple of comedy in his Scottish novels. Then, Isaac's attachment to his wealth provides the starting-point for an exploration of the conditions in which his people were compelled to subsist and their likely expression in psychology. Isaac's embodiment of stereotype became a way of leading Scott's prejudiced readers to see that there might be something to admire and like in other cultures even when they are manifested in people who are not so perfectly lovable as Rebecca. And arguably Rebecca would not have had the impact she did, in that climate of prejudice, without Isaac to balance her.

This remark about Friar Tuck, I must admit, took me aback:

"It's a really old-fashioned kind of humor, since comedy based on the hypocrisy of a priest who is drunk all the time might seem less amusing or acceptable to modern audiences."

I'm suddenly feeling very unreconstructed. It hadn't occurred to me that it might be necessary to apologize for the possibly unacceptable comedy of Scott's merry friar. I'm still not sure which audiences are being placated here, but schools are ahead of the game in these things.

[Generally the Shmoop author is comparatively unenthusiastic about the greenwood, Wamba, Locksley and all that yeomanry stuff. Compared, I mean, to my own views or those of Scott's time: I definitely see these elements as among Ivanhoe's best things. Perhaps the Shmoop view might reflect the tastes, actual or anticipated, of college students. There's something of a parallel in Shmoop's treatment of Shakespeare's 2 Henry IV; the commentator takes hardly any interest in the Gloucestershire scenes with Shallow and Silence, not too much in Eastcheap, but much more in the rebellion and in the various nobles on either side. I sense that Shmoop's own vein of shrewd jocularity works best when analyzing straight characters.]

"Ivanhoe" Blueberry bush

[Image source: http://www.chrisbowers.co.uk/product/blueberries-ivanhoe/ . The commentary says: "Vigorous and very upright, good disease resistance. Ripening in mid August with heavy crops of high quality fruit that are darker in colour than other varieties." ]

Scott's novels: A brief guide