dovegreyreader scribbles

Bookish Delights 2011 No 4 :: Charles Dickens - A Life ~ Claire Tomalin

So I read it and loved it and it's weeks since I finished it, but I haven't stopped thinking about Clare Tomalin's magnificent Charles Dickens - A Life.

I doubt a day goes by at the moment without some reference to the Dickens 200 and the website is well worth exploring if you don't want to miss any of it. I'm back in London in March and have a list of exhibitions to see including a visit to the house in Doughty Street and the Museum of London's Dickens and London which I have on good authority is excellent, and a must-see.

Has anyone else seen it yet...or planning a visit??

And I am poring over the Christmas schedules to make sure I don't miss anything, especially the new BBC three part adaptation of Great Expectations currently being advertised to the music of Leontovych's Carol of the Bells, completely haunting and catching my attention every time I hear it, so it might as well catch yours too...

And might Great Expectations be my favourite Dickens' book after Our Mutual Friend??

I'm still not sure I have read enough of them to decide but I did read Claire Tomalin's book with an idea that I would see if I could tell which her favourite might be, but true to Hilary Mantel's observation on the back cover..

'Claire Tomalin is the finest and most disinterested of biographers.'

...well I couldn't second guess so I'm relieved to have seen a television interview where I'm sure Great Expectations snatched Claire Tomalin's vote.

There is no idolatory here, no judgement passed and the whole felt sufficiently non-directive to allow space for the reader to think for themselves too, perhaps draw a few conclusons of their own which I like a biography to allow me to do. An excellent well-balanced journey through the life of undeniably our most famous author whose bi-centenary we are celebrating... and yet for all his gifts and my admiration for the novels I just can't help but have misgivings about the man.

I sensed ultimately a fear of entrapment. Every employment situation that required commitment led to eventual extrication so little wonder that the entrapment of serial writing caused such stress in his life. Whilst two more aspects struck me as disingenuous, the first, the obvious hot potato about Dickens' behaviour towards his wife Catherine and his children. Catherine permanently pregnant and discarded when prettier young blooms in the shape of Nelly Tiernan arrived, but also the children. The poor children who seemed to have a performer for a father, one who was writing like crazy to keep his family afloat, but alongside emerged the impression of Dickens as the extrovert who needed to be the centre of attention with all he did and with everyone he knew.

Eventually no one but no one stole Charles Dickens' limelight.

Worse, and no matter how hard I try to bury it I can't help but sense that his philanthropy was of that slightly self-serving  variety, charity that needed to be noticed. So the more extreme and seemingly insurmountable the cause the better for all the attention it would draw ..like the fallen women of London, or the plight of the city's children.

I'm feeling bad for making such a call, especially given that I trained at the hospital he helped to found, and where he may still be mentioned in reverential tones, but it has all been sufficient to make me want to reappraise some student nurse brain-washing and read Jules Kosky's book again... Mutual Friends - Charles Dickens and Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital in the light of my new knowledge.

Emotionally labile, impulsive, one moment effusive, the next withdrawn, driven by a work ethic that would keep him at the centre of a world that revolved around him, a childlike trait that Charles Dickens seems to have cultured for his entire life, a man who needed to be needed, and needed to be loved, and by as many people as possible. An audience was required 'to nourish his spirit'.

Claire Tomalin is nothing but frank and honest and very much on the case as Nelly moves into the picture...

'... the darkest part of his character was summoned up. He was ready to be cruel to his wife. A raging anger broke out at any opposition to his wishes. He used lies as weapons of attack and defence. His displays of self-righteousness were shocking. He was determined to be in the right about everything. He must have known he was not but he had lost his judgement. The spectacle of a man famous for his goodness and his attachment to domestic virtues suddenly losing his moral compass is dismaying.'

All I can sense is that this was barely concealed all along and it's interesting to speculate quite what opprobium the media of today would rain down on such behaviour... would Charles Dickens be a national treasure??

So thanks to Claire Tomalin  I have a renewed perspective on Charles Dickens, one still laced with the utmost respect for the writing and its legacy, and much respect for the skills of a biographer who may have wanted to cry as she wrote...

'In September 1860 he performed a ritual act. ridding himself of the past by burning thousands of letters accumulated over the years on a bonfire at Gad's Hill. His appointed biographer, Forster, was not consulted.'

Dickens had much to hide it would seem, perhaps much of which he was ashamed, and much we will never quite know for sure, including events on the day of his demise which I had quite thought was the stroke on the sofa finale. In fact Claire Tomalin suggests that Dickens may well have been taken ill at Nelly's home, was bundled unconscious into a two-horse brougham and sent home to die at Gad's Hill.

If the eyes have it, this single picture expresses more than a million words in my mind....there is kindness but there is a self-reflecting sadness too, a pleading sort of melancholy.

Eventually buried in Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey apparently against his wishes (which seems very out of character with the Dickens I had come to know throughout this book) and with just fourteen mourners present, no singing, no eulogy, just the words of the burial service. A tragically strange and underwrought departure at odds with the man who loved to be centre stage and worshipped, and all sufficient to make me wonder whether perhaps in his ending and his clear instructions for how it would be managed, Dickens was finally facing up to and acknowledging to himself the truth about his flaws. Did he see himself as ultimately undeserving of the respect and the audience he had sought and courted all his life, thus denying any opportunity for the public displays of mourning which his death would surely engender??

I am so pleased that I have read this book before the Dickens 200 really swings into action because I suspect I may have been drawn into the myth which as Claire Tomalin argues, Dickens had desecrated himself by his own behaviour. I have two feet firmly on the ground, romantic notions dispelled, and remarkably reading Charles Dickens - A Life has left me mad keen and wanting to launch yet another attempt on the mountain upon which I have been left impaled and floundering at base camp for about the last four Christmases.

Yes it's time to rope up for Bleak House Summit Attempt No 5, and this time I'm quietly hopeful. I have already passed all those heaps of previously discarded equipment and moved on from Tulkinghorne - Dedlock base camp, stared up at the North Wall of the Jarndyce and have just traversed the Jellyby crevasse. I'm roped up and on my way and the conditions seem favourable.

 

Letters to Vicky

What a fine time I have been having this weekend reading Letters to Vicky which, since finishing Helen Rappaport's book Magnificent Obsession, now makes for even more interesting reading.  In fact it's quite easy to see how all things Victorian can become an obsession as I shelve most of the 20th and 21st century in order to continue my stately progress through Claire Tomalin's Charles Dickens - A Life, and George Eliot's letters and journals to get in the mood for Team Middlemarch which will be rolling into town tomorrow (and with gifts).

I am very fortunate to have been sent the Folio Society edition of Letters to Vicky, Queen Victoria's correspondence between 1858 and 1901 to her eldest daughter Victoria, Empress of Germany. I could never afford these editions in the past because there was membership and the minimum number of purchases involved, but the rules are changing and Folio Society books can now be bought individually. Introductions are now written by authors as diverse as Carol Ann Duffy and David Vann, and there is now a newly opened Folio Society 'Reading Room' in Bloomsbury...wish I'd known that last week.

Talking about the beauty of a book compared to a Kindle as we were, and really this is like comparing a Reliant Robin (with apologies to all three-wheeler devotees) to a Rolls Royce. These are books you want to have as special gifts and to hold and read and to see on the shelf, and though I used to find them a bit elaborate and unnecessary... what's wrong with my well-worn paperback after all, it hasn't stopped me picking up quite a few Folio Society editions second-hand down the years and I still do (a lot of Trollopes for a start and some Virginia Woolf) I have to admit that I treasure them, and if I had my time over I think I would have made more of an investment in them for children and Godchildren.

But Letters to Vicky now has heightened resonance since I have been furnished with the detail. I knew snippets but I'll own up to getting in a bit of a muddle previously with all the children and the sequence of births, marriages and deaths.

I now have a much fuller picture so I read of Victoria's unconcerned mentions to Vicky of Albert's failing health with interest...

February 16th 1861

'Poor dear Papa has been suffering badly with toothache since three days...it comes from inflammation at the root of the tooth...I hope however it is a little better today, but dear Papa never allows he is any better or will try to get over it, but makes such a miserable face that people always think he's very ill. It's quite the contrary with me always; I can do anything before others and never show it, so people never believe I am ill or even suffer.'

Perhaps Victoria may have lived to regret expressing such confidence in her own fortitude which, when put to the ultimate test of grief, crumbled so spectacularly. And poor Albert, his gravestone inscription really should have read 'Told you I was ill.'

November 30th 1861 (remembering Albert will die two weeks later)

I can begin by saying that dear Papa is in reality much better - only so much reduced and as usual desponding as men really only are - when unwell..

Also evident, and something Helen delineated so clearly in her book, is Victoria's unshifting faith in the 'admirable' Dr Jenner. Interestingly a trust that seems to have been unshaken by Albert's death given that some years later he remains in attendance and continues to reassure with

'no cause of alarm but anxiety'.

as the Prince of Wales writhes on his bed in the agonies of typhoid fever and something excruciatingly painful in progress with his leg. And who sees nothing unfavourable in the symptoms of Alice's diphtheria just two days before her death.

Whilst after the death of Victoria's beloved John Brown...

'On Tuesday we were so much happier about him and Sir William Jenner who knew him well and is never over-sanguine or ever misleads you told me that evening at 10 o'clock I need not be so much alarmed, that his pulse was better and he took plenty of nourishment and the eruption had not spread! An hour after, all was over in his sleep!'

Perhaps the good doctor's role was to sooth and contain anxiety in a fragile monarch, nothing more and with little expectation of happy outcomes. It will certainly be interesting to reflect more on that role in the nineteenth century given that doctors had so little at their disposal in terms of effective treatments, and to follow  Dr Lydgate's progress in Middlemarch as one of the first general practitioners to feature in English literature. I have been reading George Eliot's journals too. There's another one who was a martyr to an unpredictable and painfully bilious digestive system... enough to make me wonder, from reading the symptoms she describes, whether she may have had gallstones. It would certainly explain the prolonged episodes of debilitating pain and sickness that delayed the writing of Middlemarch.

The Queen is not averse to the writing of George Eliot either ..

November 17th 1860

'I have finished The Mill on the Floss and I must say it made a deep impression on me. The writing and the descriptions of feelings is wonderful and painful! Poor Maggie! Why must they be drowned, but poor Philip Wakem I pity the most of all! Stephen did behave very ill, Tom had much good but was very hard.'

And throughout the letters, mother and daughter discuss their reading.  Vicky is riveted by The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins to the point where 'I can hardly get away from it.' Victoria reads Jane Eyre aloud to Albert, she mentions that Elizabeth Browning's poem Aurora Leigh whilst at times seems 'dreadfully coarse', yet still finds it 'an incredible book for a lady to have written.'

Vicky replies three days later...

'I have read Aurora Leigh and dislike it extremely...I think it thoroughly without taste and poetry. The feeling is very crude and does not touch me - in fact I put it down with disgust.'

The Queen is right back at her with

I think you judge Aurora Leigh too severely; that is I mean you have overlooked the decided genius and some most beautiful passages...

And mention of a book that has intrigued me...

February 17th 1886

'I send you two books which I think you will find interesting and very powerfully written. The author (whose real name I do not know) is only 21 - and I must say I think the writing worthy of George Eliot and Currer Bell. Donovan should be read first. I have not yet read We Two but Beatrice has and many others and men of intellect who are immensely struck by it...'

It transpires the writer is Edna Lyall, the pseudonym of Ada Ellen Bayley (1857-1903)...does anyone know her??

I certainly don't and the books seem to have vanished without trace, though I see there is a Kindle edition and a free download here.

And all mixed in with the politics of the time, and of course Vicky well-placed to keep her mother informed about the wider European picture, are fascinating details about the search for a bride for the errant Bertie, Prince of Wales. Defects as various as strange manners, loud laughs, a bad figure in a low gown, broad square shoulders, foolish and frivolous parents rule countless victims out of the running, and one can only wonder whether letters from our own Queen might reveal anything similar should they ever see the light of day....though I'm not sure who she'd write too, and perhaps she does e mails anyway.

So a real gold mine of a book that has kept me deeply rooted in the nineteenth century all weekend.

Right... is everyone ready... let's bring on Team Middlemarch tomorrow.

 

 

Charles Dickens - A Life ~ Claire Tomalin

I'm hoping everyone is braced and ready for wall-to-wall Dickens centenary celebrations in 2012. I'm preparing in advance but I'm also hoping for some great books and some good media coverage through next year.

Years ago I bought a nice hardback edition of Claire Tomalin's biography Katherine Mansfield - A Secret Life from a second-hand bookshop. To my delight, tucked inside the book was a hand-written card from Claire Tomalin dated 1991 and sent to the previous owner of the book who had obviously done what I said I was going to start doing and had written to the author. I seized upon this little token as if it were my own, as if I had somehow inherited the goodwill in Claire Tomalin's really lovely reply...

'Thank you for your lovely letter, quite undeserved but so nice of you. I went abroad for three weeks, hence my delay in answering...'

And somehow I've always felt an affinity with Claire Tomalin ever since. I moved heaven and earth to hear her talk about Thomas Hardy The Time-Torn Man when she came to Plymouth University a few years ago and so it has been a seamless endeavour to move straight onto her new biography Charles Dickens - A Life in the wake of my recent read of Helen Rappaport's Magnificent Obsession. I feel so bathed in the nineteenth century I now can't wait to start on our read of Middlemarch which I think we will launch on November 22nd, George Eliot aka Mary Ann Evans 192nd birthday (better check the maths someone... 1819)

The first point to make is that as long as books remain the thing of beauty that Charles Dickens - A Life is, then the Kindle will always be a handy Fisher-Price-like reading device for travel purposes (and I would be lost without mine) but never a complete replacement for the real book-lover, the book as object will remain supreme. A printed hardcover with a half slip band dust jacket in fetching shades of sepia and eau de nil combined with superior weight and quality paper make this volume a real joy to hold and to read, which with a £30 price tag is a good thing. Whilst book prices have steadily increased I haven't always seen the paper quality improve accordingly, there will be no foxing of this book in years to come you can be sure of that.

I am not as big a fan of Charles Dickens' novels as I would like to be so this needs to be interesting. I have a few firm favourites and usually because I have been made to read them for study and ended up admiring them (Our Mutual Friend, Great Expectations, Dombey ....) but so many of the books I pick up under my own steam, and then start and stop and start and give up on, so it is quite refreshing to read a very honest appraisal of each one, as Claire Tomalin weaves her narrative of Dickens's life around the novels as they happen. Perhaps a sign of the best biographies is neither hint of craven idolatory nor out and out dislike, and thus far Claire Tomalin achieves a disinterested and very balanced critical approach to the life of a man who perhaps undoubtedly remains the greatest novelist in the English language.

The book reads as a novel and I think I can promise that if you settle down to read it you will be drawn into the life of Charles Dickens in the most intimate and endearing way. But with it came for me a real resurgence of  enthusiasm to give it another go, to pick up yet another Dickens' novel over yet another Christmas and promise myself a read. I have decided to plump for the one that Claire Tomalin might raise above the rest in her estimation and I am wondering which it might be as each comes under her meticulous scrutiny. David Copperfield seems to be winning so far, but it is only 1850 and some lesser know works are also coming to light which I should like to explore too.

And not only the novels, but the life and with it a real appreciation of the bench mark that Dickens set himself and the pressure incurred by having to write for serialisation. Week in week out he had a deadline to meet, a story to concoct, imagination to find, but alongside it rest all his flaws, and I am wondering quite how I will emerge from the traumas ahead.

Poor Catherine, 'pregnant again' seems to be a recurring chorus, Nelly Ternan is about to enter stage left and I can hardly bear it, because despite knowing the general gist of what is to come, I decided to start the book with an open mind. Thus far I have warmed to this manically busy, clever, imaginative man with a philanthropic heart beating in there somewhere,  but alongside this book another little Dickens volume has arrived... Dickens' Women by Miriam Margolyes and Sonia Fraser, and published by Hesperus.

This is a transcript of Miriam Margolyes's one woman show  of the title's name, and reading her introduction I am getting a sense of the strength of opinion that abounds  ...letters from Dickens about Catherine described as ' a tissue of self-serving lies,' whilst Miriam Margolyes states quite baldly and assertively 'I cannot forgive him,' damning Dickens as the abused turned abuser. Valid but subjective opinions, and so I am intrigued to see how Claire Tomalin walks this particular biographer's tightrope.

I'm wondering what you all think about Dickens and his treatment of his wife... and I wonder how I'm going to feel?? Will I forgive him in the grander scheme of things ... I can't wait to find out, and of course I will report back.

 

 

 

 

Magnificent Obsession - Victoria and Albert and the Death That Changed the Monarchy ~ Helen Rappaport

'The Times was confident: 'we have on the throne a Sovereign whose nerves have been braced rather than paralysed by the chill of adversity'. But the newspapermen did not know the Queen as Lady Lyttelton did. Albert's death was, she had no doubt, a ' heart wound' that had torn her world apart.'

I have been unashamedly looking forward to Magnificent Obsession (published today) having followed Helen Rappaport's Facebook updates as she wrote the book... reading of her disappointments when travelling miles to a dusty archive full of anticipation only to find letters which yielded little.. or the excitement when something unexpected gave up its long-held secrets. The trials and tribulations of a writer's life coupled with the certainty that I always enjoy Helen's writing style, books grounded in meticulously accredited scholarly research but all presented in an accessible and informative way; the same style that instantly drew me into No Place for Ladies, Ekaterinburg and Beautiful For Ever.

So I settled into post-London recovery mode...

The book opens with a scene that may well enter my pantheon of Extracts to Read Every Christmas, as Helen describes Christmas 1860 for Victoria, Albert and their children. It creates a wonderful and cleverly contrasting setting for what it is to follow as the Royal family settle down to their traditional Christmas holiday at Windsor Castle, and the coldest for some fifty years.

The ice on the Serpentine is thirteen inches thick and on December 20th the snow started to fall. Windsor is decorated to the hilt with countless Christmas trees whilst the 360lb baron of beef along with fifty turkeys are being roasted in the kitchens. By now Victoria and Albert have been married over twenty years and have nine children ranging in age from three to twenty and the atmosphere is one of spirited happiness as the corridors of Windsor echo to the noise of playful children interspersed with outings for sledging and skating...

And so the scene is set for the dawn of 1861 and Victoria little knew of the annus horribilis that was to follow as she noted in her diary...

'Dearest Albert and I took leave of the old year and wished each other the joy of the new...'

A great deal of fascinating, and to me unknown, detail is revealed as the burdens upon Albert become more apparent. His responsibilities as Prince Consort have become increasingly onerous as he assumes a greater role in the running of the country, whilst Victoria has spent much of the last twenty years mired in pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood; a role which, by her own admission she enjoyed much less than I had realised. Health issues prevail for Albert and with little sympathy from his wife who dismissed many of his problems as being of the 'man flu' variety...and the really-if-men-had-to-give-birth-where-would-we-be genre. So poor Albert, suffering with increasingly worrying gastro-intestinal problems weakens before our eyes, yet largely unnoticed by his devoted wife and eventually the seriousness hidden from her by her closest family and advisors. Albert is on his death bed before the panic sets in and Victoria, still in denial, is prepared for the worst.

Gathering momentum alongside has been Victoria's own grief reaction at the death of her mother, the first such serious loss she has suffered in her life, and as a portent of things to come a clear indicator that the Queen's emotional coping strategies are limited and there may be trouble ahead. Even the excesses (as we may now view them) of 19th century mourning practices cannot contain Victoria's emotions, whilst the evidence of sanctification of the deceased holds worrying predictors. If Victoria is this distraught over the mother she steadfastly maligned then how on earth will she react to the death of the man she loves with all her heart. It is only a stern rebuke from Albert that pulls the Queen to her senses, but when the Prince Consort's time comes there will be no one to do likewise, and the Queen's grief will know no bounds.

Whilst I was aware of the generalities, I had little idea of the fine detail of Victoria's mourning, and as Helen Rappaport burrowed down into the diaries and letters in order to add substance to it all I slowly developed a fascinating picture of an emotionally labile woman, seemingly selfish and woefully oblivious to the needs and feelings of those around her, as any resilience she may have is severely tested to its limits. Helen Rappaport's account steers a steady course through both the personal and the political as the Queen's increasingly alarming retreat from public life leaves the country wide open to talk of revolution and republicanism. Interestingly it is illness that twice saves the Monarchy, firstly when a seemingly hale and hearty Victoria, whose fragility is constantly given credence and fiercely protected by her personal physician William Jenner, does fall prey to a serious illness. This included the miserable spectre of an excruciatingly painful abscess some six inches in diameter under her arm which Lister is called in to lance and drain ... unimaginable. The wayward and troublesome Prince of Wales's near brush with death during a bout of typhoid is all sufficient to arouse public sympathies further, conveniently bringing the populace neatly back on side.

What emerged for me was the pitiful vision of a very lonely, socially detached, unreachable woman, blind to the state of her nation and its people... present-day theraputic parlance might deem Victoria 'psychologically unavailable'. No one can physically touch Royalty... protocol dictates that you can't go and give them a hug (remember the scandal when the Australian premiere may have 'touched' the Royal back?) Royalty are thus effectively cut off from the emotional support that many of us may rely on in times of grief, sometimes the kindness of strangers, whilst Victoria, remote and bereft of that physical contact with others, and especially with Albert, had only the conversations with her grieving family and her courtiers to sustain her. And despite their best and strenuous efforts for many years, especially those of daughter Vicky in her letters, few seemed to came close to offering the comfort that might penetrate Victoria's wall of sadness and make any difference. Nowadays I'd want to give Victoria the Cruse helpline number for a start ...send her along to Kate Boydell's Merry Widow website... make sure she knew about The Way Foundation, whilst all Victoria can do is retreat alone to her beloved Balmoral wearing her widow's weeds and planning yet another national memorial in her dearest Albert's name.

Further latter-day theories could also usefully be employed, especially that of 'secondary gain' where the perpetuation of symptoms can become, for the sufferer, a conscious or sub-conscious means of avoidance. Victoria seemed bereft of confidence and terrified of public exposure in the absence of Albert which, for all that their love seemed deeply genuine, gave me serious pause for thought about the dependency and control he may have exerted over her during their marriage. His death certainly left her seriously disempowered and it became perhaps easier for Victoria to unwittingly sustain her grief as an excuse rather than have to face up to the rigours of her public duties as a monarch, issues which Helen Rappaport explores to the full ...and of course a stance increasingly difficult for Victoria to sustain credibly when Scottish ghillie John Brown comes into her life, bringing with him his down-to-earth no-nonsense philosophies and not a little joy and mirth at his Balmoral hoe-downs.

Utimately good things, if they can be called that, did emerge as Victoria's sensibilities became so carefully attuned to the impact of loss and bereavement, it became her specialist subject and to the point where, with mounting personal bereavements as the years went by, 'her sacred monopoly on grief transcended all criticism'. The death of daughter Princess Alice on the same day as her father some seventeen years later, sealing the deal. Always the first to sympathise with others in times of loss, and something of an expert on the etiquette of mourning practice, yet from somewhere, through it all Victoria did ultimately find the courage and steely determination to endure.

Helen has added an appendix that really did interest me. As I read the book it was hard not to speculate about the possible differential diagnoses for Albert's final illness. Long thought to be typhoid though with very little investigation and no post-mortem results this was questionable, and Helen has extracted some compelling evidence, along with symptoms of an ongoing and chronic gastro-intestinal condition, that may now suggest a possible diagnosis of Crohn's Disease.

So a remarkable book. A brilliant read, great illustrations including one of Albert on his deathbed, and now I really am looking forward to hearing Helen Rappaport's November 15th talk on Magnificent Obsession at the V&A more than ever.

And you still have time to listen to Helen talking about the book on Monday's edition of Woman's Hour here.

 

 

Home again...

...and lots to tell you including the low-down on this,

and how I came by a bottle of Laureate's Choice, Carol Ann Duffy's sherry butt stipend,and which is now gracing my Bookroom.

But it's all about books and I was very excited to find a pile waiting for me when I arrived home including this which I have been waiting for with much antsinthepantsation and will be making a start this very evening...

Magnificent Obsession by Helen Rappaport to be published next week. I'm going back to London for a whistle-stop and to hear Helen talking about this book at the V&A on November 15th...unmissable.

Charles Dickens A Life by Claire Tomalin. I saw Claire Tomalin interviewed a few weeks ago and she said quite clearly this will be her last biography, but both these books seem like perfect scene-setting for our forthcoming year of Middlemarch and George Eliot so I'm going to dive in.

Someone mentioned George Eliot's birth and death dates as November 22nd and December 22nd respectively... so shall we kick off on November 22nd as a start date for beginning the first instalment of our shared read of Middlemarch and we could aim to end the book on December 22nd 2012.

Victoriana...

I am always delighted to have much-anticipated books lurking on the literary horizon, and one of several I have been waiting for is Helen Rappaport's Magnificent Obsession - Victoria Albert and the Death That Changed the Monarchy, and reading the pre-amble it's not hard to see why...

"When Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, died in December 1861 the nation was paralysed with grief. He was only forty-two and official bulletins had, until the day before he died, given no cause for alarm.

But in fact Albert had been in a progressive physical decline for years – worn out by overwork, stress and the exacting standards he set himself. His death was a catastrophe for the queen, who not only adored her husband but had, through twenty-one years of marriage, utterly relied on him: as companion, father of their children, friend, confidant, wise counsellor and unofficial private secretary. There was not a single aspect of public business on which she had not deferred to his advice and greater wisdom. She would even consult him on what bonnet to wear.

 Britain had lost its king. For that is the role that Albert had performed in all but name. Politicians and the press agreed that his death was a national calamity. The public, totally unprepared, responded with a massive outpouring of grief.

This royal death had a profound impact on Britain. Cast adrift and alone, the Queen donned the widow’s weeds that she would wear for 40 years, till her own death in 1901. Her grieving was relentless. Without Albert to guide and support her, with a feckless heir who had caused her nothing but anxiety, and a family of nine children to parent alone, she retreated into a state of pathological grief which nobody could penetrate and few understood. Her stubborn refusal to return to public life rapidly began to alienate even her closest family and friends and to bring a resurgence of republicanism. There was even talk of abdication.

For the 150th anniversary of Albert’s death, this book examines the circumstances leading up to it, the ritual of his funeral and obsequies, and offers new theories on what killed him. It will describe the overwhelming despondency of a country plunged into mourning: bells tolling, shops shuttered up, everyone – no matter how poor – clad in black. Albert’s death and the Queen’s demand for the most rigorous observance of mourning, while precipitating months of anxiety about its effect on business, also fostered an explosion in the funeral trade and mourning ephemera. The Whitby jet trade went into overdrive to cope with the demand for black jewellery. Over the next ten years, the Queen’s single-handed mission to memorialise and commemorate her husband in perpetuity set in train plans for a range of artistic and cultural monuments that would transform the British landscape and set their visual stamp on the second half of her reign."

I have kept in touch with Helen since writing about her really excellent book No Place for Ladies The Untold Story of Women in the Crimean War. It was a book that offered me well-researched history in an entertaining and readable way whilst making no sacrifices to quality, and as a result I have read Helen's subsequent books, Dark Hearts of Chicago, Ekaterinburg, and Beautiful Forever.

It can be interesting when you semi-know the authors too, because you follow and hear snippets about the progress of the book. The highs and lows, the disappointments shared on Facebook after a hope-filled day spent poring over old letters or documents only to find nothing of relevance, or the joyous news of hitting the information mother lode. I still quote Helen's presentation on Ekaterinburg and the demise of the Romanovs all delivered with passion and emotion on the anniversary of the massacre, as one of the most moving literary events I have ever attended. As well as being a Russianist Helen was for many  years an actress and so brings something very unique to her live events, they are not to be missed (and I would say the same about Carol Drinkwater) so I am equally excited to be meeting up with Helen again this November when she will be talking about Magnificent Obsession at the V&A Museum, London on Tuesday November 15th at 7pm.

With all this revisiting of all things Victorian in mind I was therefore delighted when a copy of Letters To Vicky arrived from the Folio Society. This is the correspondence between Queen Victoria and her daughter Victoria, Empress of Germany, 1858 -1901.

The book is going to be sumptuous before I even open it in that case isn't it. The slipcase and the beautifully decorated and embossed spine and cover, fine paper, soft and silky to the touch, and nice bundles of glossy photographs plus an informative introduction from Andrew Roberts.

But the letters, oh my the letters.

What a prolific and wonderful letter-writer Queen Victoria was and how revealing this selection made from six available volumes are; the letters from a woman about whom so little was known by her subjects, and I will write more when I have read them in depth.
 
But it all leads me to think how, for all that we live in the media age wherein we expect to know every last detail, yet how little we know of the details of our own Queen's life.

I wonder  whether our own Queen is a letter-writer and might a volume like this appear 150 years from now with news of Philip's snoring or the rage over the corgis frozen dinner.

Did you hear about it?

Terrible kerfuffle, apparently the palace chefs are under strict instructions that the corgis must o-n-l-y e-v-e-r be fed freshly cooked meat and the Queen draws up special menus for Linnet, Monty, Willow, Holly, Cider, Candy and Vulcan each week. Imagine the chefs leaning on the worktops chatting on the day that Her Maj walks unexpectedly into the Balmoral kitchen and says she'll serve it up herself only to find ...oh heck this is awful... you'd better sit down... the meat was still partially frozen in the middle.

The truth slowly dawned, the corgis were eating re-heated meals... re-heated meals for god's sake. Royal tempers fugit big style etc and apparently no one has seen Her Maj quite so cross in a very long time.

A bit of me wants to laugh like a drain... but I won't because another bit of me admires the Queen's fortitude and commitment to public service so I can make allowances for foibles, and the last bit of me doesn't really fancy the Tower with autumn coming on.

 

 

The Dead Man's Message by Florence Marryat

No sooner was I deposited in post-Booker nineteenth-century rehab with my prescription ready to be dispensed, than to my rescue with emergency supplies came Catherine of Victorian Secrets, a small independent publisher busy reviving neglected nineteenth-century works.
Would I be interested in reading Florence Marryat's The Dead Man's Message?
Well yes I most certainly would because this felt like an unusual way back via a writer and a book I'd never heard of and today being the 110th anniversary of Florence’s death seems like a good day to do my bit to resurrect her for some general perusal.
I’ve had a really pleasurable time looking Florence up in books various on my shelves here. Background research I find can often be as engrossing as the book itself, entries and mentions often slight but they have all helped me build up a picture for myself to go alongside Greta Depledge’s introduction to this book.
There is no doubt that Florence was definitely the daughter of Captain Frederick Marryat of The Children of the New Forest fame and with the Oxford DNB assertion that Florence wrote over seventy-five novels,  well that's an awful lot of novels for me never to have heard of either author or titles, especially given that one of them was  Miss Chester, as indeed was I until the age of twenty-two.
Florence Marryat was very much the middle-class woman who supported her family with her writing which included playwriting 'as part of her broader career as a woman of letters'.
In fact at one time nine adaptations of Florence's novels were out there running simultaneously in provincial theatres, and nor were they tucked away on the fringe in private theatres or clubs but out there being performed in popular accessible venues.
Interestingly,

'While women playwrights struggled to participate on something like equal terms with their male colleagues, the theatre was voracious in its devouring of women's fictional texts.'

Yet still I had never heard of Florence Marryat.
Kate Flint suggests in her excellent book The Woman Reader 1837-1914 that despite the male researchers of the day suggesting otherwise, Florence Marryat was indeed a truly popular writer among young girls and that perhaps those interviewed had offered suitable rather than accurate responses to the questions, thereby pushing Thomas Carlyle slightly higher up the popularity list than he really deserved to be.
On my shelves, one of  Bookhound’s ancient old £1 market finds, thrown out of Exeter Library, a 1910 edition of The Literature of the Victorian Era wherein Florence's father Frederick Marryat is crowned the laureate of the British sailor for his sea-faring novels, our best first-hand authority on the great age of the English navy and who can know the wealth of tales he returned home with  after fifty battle engagements.
Good to know this then

‘Like Thackeray, Marryat transmitted to a daughter Florence, a portion of his literary gifts; but it appears in an attenuated form , and is, of course, exercised on other fields.’

So having satisfied my curiosity it was clear that invisibility had beckoned for Florence here until now, and what a good read The Dead Man’s Message has proved to be, as the domineering and patriarchal scientist Professor Aldwyn wakes from a quick nap to discover that he’s actually dead.
Really properly dead, but still very much of this world as a spirit.
This rational and scientific man now finds himself plunged into the abyss of his own cynicism about the existence of an afterlife by actually being forced to live his own. Worse is to come because all his sins are about to jump up and bite him as he is kept chained to his own body and must stand by and listen to what everyone has to say about him. Understandably it’s not pretty.
Childhoods blighted by a domineering father have taken their toll on son Gilbert and daughter Maddy whose mother Susan has died, and under what repressed circumstances I could only begin to guess. Comfort must now come from the Professor's long-suffering but highly sympathetic second wife, Ethel, rather disconcertingly called Mumsey by Maddy, which is a mirthful diminutive used here on occasion.
There is much in here that offers primary source information about Victorian beliefs in spiritualism and communicating with the afterlife, one of Florence's greatest interests. Fascinating insights into the world of spirit photography alongside interesting and seemingly early psychological explorations of how parents as a role model for their children may well reap what they sow.
I find Florence Marryat quoted elsewhere (Guardians and Angels - Parents & Children in 19th Century Literature by David Grylls) as saying of the influence of parents

'Not one hundredth part of the men and women who marry are fit to become fathers and mothers.'

When Professor Aldwyn is finally faced with the potential outcomes of his lifetime of vile behaviour...well, I'll leave you to discover that for yourselves.
Plenty of wonderful Victorian melodrama but all underscored by some profound and, for the time, some forward-thinking language and ideas from Florence Marryat. This novel first published in 1894, perhaps at a time when all those fin de siecle anxieties may  have been looming. This edition blessed not only with a good introduction but also a really useful Appendix of added contemporaneous writing on several of the issues highlighted in the book.
Alongside this I can highly recommend Justine Picardie's book If the Spirit Moves You, which I had coincidentally just finished reading. It offers a really interesting latter-day perspective on so many of those issues that exercised Florence too, as Justine explores that year in her own life after her sister Ruth's death and seeks answers to those eternal questions,

...of the search for the afterlife in the age of reason, of scepticism, of science. It tells of the yearning for a voice among the silence, of how we fill the space that appears when someone dies; of how the space fills itself.'

           

The Magnificent Mrs Tennant by David Waller

  A quick glance at an e mail containing the words Tennant and David in the subject line and it's a mistake there for the making.
Once I'd realised it wasn't David Tennant I was still very grateful to David Waller for ensuring that I read The Magnificent Mrs Tennant.
I love it when consecutive reads connect because I then moved on to Frances Partridge, The Biography by Anne Chisholm.
I'll explain Gertrude Tennant in a minute, but amazing to discover that by marriage she was connected to Frances Partridge.
Now you'll need to focus here...Frances Partridge's father's cousin, Frederic Myers- the psychical researcher and essayist, was married to Gertrude's daughter Evie.
There, a small world even in 1880.
In many ways Gertrude Tennant's life bears comparison to that of Frances Partridge, not only for its longevity, spanning almost an entire century from 1819 to 1918 (beautiful symmetry of numbers there), but also for its links to the literary milieu of the time and for Gertrude's own record of that life.
I can't begin to imagine what this must have felt like, but author David Waller was given access to two oak chests, unopened for half a century and stashed in the family attic containing,

'layer upon layer of books, bags, envelopes...bundles of letters...old newspapers, diaries of parchment and leather...manuscripts...someone had tied a blue ribbon around one particular bundle of letters , and in an antique hand labelled them : Correspondence From Various Distinguished Persons, Do Not Throw Away...and thousands of family letters.'

Born a few weeks before the death of George III, in the same year as Queen Victoria and just days before George Eliot, Gertrude was one of seven children adding to the extensive ranks of the Collier family, spending her childhood largely in France when the tide turned on the family's naval fortunes.
It was here that Gertrude not only met Victor Hugo but also became a lifelong friend of Gustave Flaubert.
Returning to England and now happily married to Charles Tennant, Gertrude gave birth to six nicely alphabetical children Alice, Blanche, Charles,etc and then proceeded to live her life in the shadow of many great men.
As the London hostess extraordinaire, Gertrude created a literary and artistic salon at her Richmond Terrace home. The salon, based on those she had come to know as a young woman living in France became a magnet for just about every 'it' name of the nineteenth century.
Anthony Trollope...'a large burly, bald-headed man, with a thick grizzly beard, and a strange expression about his mouth, as if continually puffing out smoke.'
Tennyson, George du Maurier, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, John Ruskin, Mark Twain, Robert Browning and many more all crossed the threshold.
What makes the book such an interesting read is not only Gertrude's many literary connections and her life events all so carefully recorded, joy at the births and then unbearable sadness and grief at lost children, but also the history ticking along quietly in the background.
'The Queen is becoming very unpopular' writes Gertrude in her diary , 'they now call her The Woman in Black.'
David Waller adds further historical context, grounding the book even more firmly in the nineteenth century.
As if it wasn't enough to entertain the rich and famous, Gertrude's daughter Dolly married that nineteenth century intrepid explorer himself, Henry Morton Stanley of 'Dr Livingstone I presume fame'.
Think of the biggest celebrity wedding of recent times and there you have Dolly and Henry's.
This all makes for very revealing reading because all was not as it seemed with this hero of the times. Stanley, despite a knighthood,  was snubbed by the establishment and permission was refused for his burial next to Livingstone in Westminster Abbey.
A book I might never have found and a read I have really enjoyed for its difference, the voice of an ordinary woman who was actually quite extraordinary in her provision of a social record of the times.
Never one to mince her words I'll give you one guess as to which of Flaubert's novels, a signed first edition sent as a gift, is causing our hostess such anguish,

'but I will tell you straight that I am astonished that you, with your imagination, and your admiration for everything that is beautiful, that you have written, that you have been able to take pleasure in writing something so hideous as this book! I find it all so bad! '

Now an afterthought suddenly occurs, might book blogs be the literary salons of the 21st century?
Might they be those virtual trunks in the virtual attics?

The Taste of Sorrow by Jude Morgan

'All overgrown by cunning moss,
All interspersed with weed,
The little cage of "Currer Bell"
In quiet "Haworth" laid.'

My desk reading this year is The Poems of Emily Dickinson, a beautiful hardback edition propped on a book rest to my left hand and there for the browsing while I wait for the computer to do something or I might just stop what I'm doing, rest my chin on my hand on my elbow and immerse myself completely. A stop and stare moment which I think Emily Dickinson would have appreciated, turning over a page every few days and all the while discovering that Emily really had a message for just about every situation.
So 146, the Brontes and there I was in the aftermath of the final page of Jude Morgan's forthcoming novel The Taste of Sorrow and feeling quite bereft of a book that took me hostage keeping me Bronte-bound for the duration.
Anyone who may question the need for another Bronte book can just keep on asking and I will keep on saying I think this could be the one we've been waiting for.
Jude Morgan has remained true to historical events, so faction rules but be reassured, if you know little you'll know it all by the end and anyone who knows their Parsonage from their Personage will still settle down comfortably into this and safely get busy investing emotion and passion into the Bronte lives as never before. Expect the characters and personalities to blossom on the page as if they were old friends that you thought you knew well, but now it's as if they've been to visit for a few weeks. Unlike Johnson's three day-old fish they don't stink, you really don't want these guests to leave, even Branwell feels welcome.
Poor poor Branwell, brilliantly and sympathetically portrayed with his innate fear of growing up, of manhood and responsibility, of having to make his way in the world,

'the king who never seems to come into his kingdom'

His final decline and passing taking a huge toll on the family because on Branwell's shoulders rested the unfulfilled hopes of his father and sisters.
Then the fiesty Emily, the distant, detached, remote free spirit (I'd have her and Branwell on the autistic spectrum...that's half the nineteenth century I've diagnosed recently, but Branwell tirelessly lining up all those soldiers time and again, it's obvious)
Meek, unassuming, self-effacing Anne but so perceptive of those around her, and of course Charlotte, constantly struggling to acknowledge her true feelings

'like a hot, heavy dish righteously burning her fingers'

and of course happiness always came at the cost of overwhelming guilt,

'like an accusation of some small, slinking crime.'

Patrick Bronte the broodingly serious and emotionally constrained father, the Haworth incumbent so brilliantly caring of his parish yet lost when finding himself in such personal and emotionally over-wrought territory, not quite knowing what is expected of him as he grieves behind that closed study door for the loss of his family one by one.
Jude Morgan brings the entire cast to centre stage and under a new and revealing spotlight clearly demonstrates the effects of early grief and loss on the Bronte family, firstly their mother, then Maria and Elizabeth. Suddenly that sense that of course this cannot possibly be ignored, pervaded my understanding of the Brontes and revealed new insights. From being a child who was happily wedged in the midst of a happy brood of siblings suddenly Charlotte is thrust onto the periphery to become the oldest,

'torn from the warmth of the middle, exposed.'

the most responsible, the one who must protect the others, care for her father and that responsibility weighs heavily.
There are moments of pure literary genius in the writing when these disparate souls in a form of stream of consciousness think as one, but actually you are reading an expression of the individual hopes and fears of all four siblings. It's hard to describe how cleverly this is done but it's a wonderful melding of their close-knit yet vastly differing personalities.
I'm also secretly hoping that someone's thinking about optioning the film rights as a result because, as I read, I couldn't recall a decent film of the Brontes but knew that in this book I was reading the perfect account. I suppose Kiera will have to be in it somehow, probably stick-thin consumptive Emily and give us a good death scene. In fact obviously just about everyone gets a death scene though I was thankful by the end that Charlotte's was left to an Author's Note and my imagination because I'm not sure I could have borne the grief of another one.
Oh yes it's all there and, though many who read The Taste of Sorrow will know it all down to every last detail, I for one knew that I had never read it written quite like this before.
How difficult it must be to make something so familiar to many feel so refreshingly vibrant and renewed and I suspect also equally alluring to those who come to the Brontes with no knowledge of the detail.
Nor does it take a Mystic Meg to predict a Bronte reading revival on the back of this book. I couldn't wait to pick up something, nay anything Bronte-related and with those memories of  the sisters reading Charlotte's words so firmly fixed in my mind it was The Professor for me,

'Anne finds the Brussels part fascinating: just occasionally as she reads out Charlotte catches in Emily's eye a peculiar sceptical look, as if she were hearing a particularly elaborate lie. Which of course is what fiction is.'

I wish Jude Morgan so much success with this book, it really is a masterpiece.

PS Don't miss the next short post below for the new arrangement regarding prize draw copies.

Brontemania

'The first requirement for myth status is a story that is so compelling in its original form that it is endlessly reinterpreted according to the tastes and concerns of each contemporary society and the literary genre which captures them.'

Wise words from Patricia Ingham in her book The Brontes for the Oxford World's Classics - Authors in Context series and I've read most of it recently and browsed a pile of other Bronte books, all to help me cope with that bereft feeling as I turned the final page of Jude Morgan's forthcoming book The Taste of Sorrow. My thoughts on that very soon when I've recovered and can speak slightly less hysterically of its manifold virtues.
While I'm on the subject of Jude Morgan I've just made a start on his previous novel, Passion. What a truly astonishing writer he is and who knows what reading trails that book will open up, but meanwhile I've now got a really bad bout of Brontemania to contend with. I know for a fact that I can buy into the Bronte myth with great ease, can't we all  and if you can't you might just want to skip this.
The whole Haworth - Parsonage - windswept moorland - lonely sisters - drunken brother scenario never ceases to draw me in, though I've stopped short of joining The Bronte Society, but it's been a close run thing during previous exacerbations.
We've been on the pilgrimage too, 2005 to be exact.
there's me outside patiently waiting my turn.
This was a hot July day almost everywhere else  in the country except Haworth, where the wind whistled and we froze but so easy to feel the myth every which way you turned.

But thankfully there is so much more to explore than the homage to Haworth and the myth and whenever it happens I don't want to waste an ounce of the energy that Brontemania creates, so with a fair chunk of Sally Shuttleworth's excellent Charlotte Bronte and Victorian Psychology under my belt and Lisa Appignanesi's Mad, Bad and Sad to hand as well, I'm reading The Professor and will hopefully calm down a bit.
Talking of epidemics which the world seems to be right now, it's been fascinating to explore the issues of mental illness and cultural pressures that prevailed back in the nineteenth century when, though it might not have been Swinfluenza, a fear of insanity was equally at epidemic proportions, as Sally Shuttleworth comments,

"...where no physical symptoms might arise to give lie to professional judgement, and fear of the disease might itself be the source of infection.'

and with it the underlying message that self-control was the only available preventative measure. Beyond that the only people who could monitor the progress of insanity were the physicians with their apparent ability to somehow 'gaze into the recesses of the soul' and diagnose, and alongside that came their powers of forcible commital to an insane asylum if required.
I've barely scratched the surface of all this with some embryonic thinking, and my coverage here is simplistic at best, but thanks to Sally Shuttleworth I'm interested now to see how Charlotte Bronte writes this power of the penetrating gaze into her fiction. How the secrets of one lie in the hands of another,

'To enter into the hidden secrets of another is to rob them of control : knowledge becomes absolute power.'

and in Sally Shuttleworth's words how those secrets then display

'...the glittering eye of insanity'.

Of course when you've been on the Haworth pilgrimage trail there's only one place to go next, just a few miles down one hill and up another.
But that's another reading trail entirely and this one's enough for now.

 

Eugenie Grandet by Honore de Balzac

George Eliot and Charlotte Bronte found Balzac's books distasteful but after my first one I'm impressed, and there's no quick way to impart all this, so if you have the time, be my guest, get the coffee on and settle down for dovegreyreader Bigs Up Balzac.
In fact I have given myself quite an extraordinary surprise by reading  Eugenie Grandet, because it was excellent, start to finish. I was expecting a bit of a plod because I had quite thought of Balzac as probably impenetrable and dense because everyone always speaks of him in hushed, reverential tones which have always implied an insurmountable degree of difficulty to me.
Pshaw or words to that effect.
I suspect Eugenie Grandet was a good launching point into Balzac. Just under 200 pages and I was quickly drawn into the realist writing and Family Grandet of Saumur, as mother and daughter Eugenie cope with the tyrannic cruelty of a miserly husband and father who, despite having the wealth of Croesus stashed in his room, purports to have not two sous to rub together,

'Financially speaking, Monsieur Grandet had the qualities of both a tiger and a boa-constrictor. He had the art of lying in wait, hidden, studying his prey for a long time, and finally jumping on it; then he would open his purse, gulp down a load of coins, and lie down again quietly to digest, like a serpent, impassive, cold, and methodical.'

Allegations abound of Balzac's insufferable and garrulous attention to detail, all likely to leave a reader feeling on the brink of asphyxiation and rising claustrophobia with no gaps and silences, nothing left to the imagination; well none of it held any quarter here because I just wallowed in this tale of life in rural France. Admittedly I felt a good deal of ambivalence towards the characters, little seemed destined to arouse my sympathies so perhaps I hadn't been encouraged to imagine much in those lives beyond the page as I drank in all the extraneous detail, but I suspect a second read would deal with that.
Kicking off my need-to-know-much-more about Honore de Balzac with the little Hesperus Brief Lives biography by David Carter was probably a good move. Bite-sized digestible chunks of Balzac's life plus handy little snippets such as the anecdote about the women scrabbling on the floor for locks of his hair when he had it cut.
With my interest now waxing obsessive I delved further and spent good money (£3) at Book Barn on an old  copy of Balzac by the superlative Stefan Zweig, whilst leaving behind a shelf full of well-thumbed and beautifully pencil-annotated Complete Works.
Let's not run before we can walk etc
Thanks to Stefan I discovered that it was all down to Balzac's attention to women in his writing that gained him such a loyal following,

'Women always have a preference for a writer who is concerned with their problems, and Balzac's predilection for his women characters whom he depicted as the unhappy, misunderstood victims of man, the allowances he made for their failings, his sympathy with abandoned, outcast or ageing females...'

Plenty of detail from Stefan Zweig about Balzac's legendary writing routine too, the white robe, the stack of special paper with a blue-ish tinge to prevent eye strain, only raven's feather quill pens would do, and the coffee, a special three-bean brew (Bourbon, Martinique and Mocha and why aren't Costa serving up a Balzac Latte?) mixed only by the man himself and an estimated 50,000 cups downed in his lifetime.
Correct me if I'm wrong but I'm also thinking Balzac may have invented the fashion for the obligatory long drawn-out Parisian literary death.
A jolly good Parisian death seems to outdo any other death anywhere ten times over, and Balzac notched up a fine selection of gruesome and messy ailments ,dropsy, peritonitis, blisters and gangrene for which the treatment of choice in 1850 included a hundred leeches on his stomach.
Stefan Zweig gives an incredibly moving account of Balzac's demise following his carefully stage-managed arrival for the first time at his recently completed Parisian dream home, Pavillon Beaujon. The house would be glowing with light and bursting with fresh flowers to impress the mistress who had finally become his wife (perhaps suspecting this wouldn't take long) only to be rapidly faced with a fulminating bout of death from all his complaints combined,

'Balzac died at half-past ten on the evening of August the 17th, 1850. His mother was the only person present, his wife having long since retired. His end was terribly lonely.'

David and Stefan between them certainly equipped me to face the demons and my first foray into the world of Balzac.
As always there is an informative introduction to the Oxford World's Classics edition, in this case written by Christopher Prendergast and in which he offers an interesting take on the definition of a classic and the value of multiple readings,

' A better way of construing the 'identity' of  the classic would be to see it as that which is porous to multiple reading, hospitable to changing interpretations, in which something can always be found which hasn't been noticed or stressed before. This can apply to the re-readings of individuals over time as well as to shifts of taste and pre-occupations across generations of readers.'

That all set me to thinking about 'my classics', those books which read so differently each time I pick them up and how I wish I'd read Balzac years ago to benefit from all those multiple readings, then I feel a mild sense of panic, does anyone else?
So many good books still to be read.
But take heart because I've managed a Parisian link with tonight's stocking filler prize draw, don't miss it whatever you do.

Realistic realist revision

I rashly mentioned back in August that I had set myself a read through the winter months of Peter Brooks' latest book Realist Vision published by Yale University Press. This was to be a wallowing revision of that wonderful year spent studying the nineteenth century novel back in OU days. This all in an attempt to tune into that 'Pleasurable Swotting' lobe in my brain. I've always got a real buzz from my autodidactic tendencies and it's time to revive it all now that I will have some spare brain RAM available, but I want to use the space fast before it fills with something rubbish like shopping lists or cooking ingredients I might need for Christmas.
Or perhaps I hadn't quite committed myself so fully to the Peter Brooks task but had just hinted that I'd read a bit of it here and there?
Well, I've been reading along with Peter and he has a beguiling way with him, all so interesting I couldn't but help start to follow the realist novel trail he was laying. A guided read through the nineteenth century via Balzac, Dickens and Flaubert, then a good gaze at the realist paintings of Courbet, then back to books with George Eliot, Emile Zola and some comparisons with George Gissing, more looking and impressionist gazing at Manet and Caillebotte and a final flourish into the twentieth century with Henry James, Proust, Joyce and Virginia Woolf.

'Seeing through the roofs and facades of the real to the private lives behind and beneath...how centrally realist literature is attached to the visual, to looking at things, registering their presence in the world through sight.'

It'll take months and months especially as I'll be doing it all wrong and substituting a few of my own choices instead of following Peter's suggestions.
I'm already Floss-ing instead of Deronda-ing for the George Eliot chapter, though Daniel Deronda is also very high on my list of must-reads.Then I've already read Peter's suggested book, Hard Times by Charles Dickens, several times under duress and am tentatively thinking about wheeling in Little Dorrit instead, it's looking good on the TV so far.
This is a high risk strategy, Boz and I have a chequered history, we haven't really hit it off since Our Mutual Friend in 1971.
But anyway all that aside I thought I'd just skip Balzac, never really read any so I'd get by with just reading what Peter thinks, honestly, call this a reading project.
OK I admit it was cheating and Hesperus intuiting the perfidy of my ways sent me some Honore de Balzac. Firstly a tempting little biography from the Brief Lives series and then the dinkiest of novellas,The Vendetta, just eighty pages or so and now Oxford University Press have sent me even more. Slimmish with delectable artwork covers, Eugenie Grandet and Pere Goriot  and suddenly I'm looking at crisp neat new books and thinking perhaps I can cope with Balzac after all. Poor old Balzac, there's no kind way to say it and I expect I'll find out if his mother loved him, but he wasn't exactly the handsomest Frenchman sur le rue was he. Apparently much has been made of the fact that Balzac's mother didn't breast feed him and he ended up staying with the wet nurse for four years which doesn't bode well. I'll report back on my findings but meanwhile let's see what Peter thinks with Chapter One, it sounds like a big deal, Balzac Invents the Nineteenth Century.

Autumn reading

I'm not sure how I can be thinking this far ahead but I'm already booked in for the surgery Christmas dinner and if summer's going to be this bad, let's just forget it and cut right to the mists and mellow fruitfulness thing. I can't explain what it is, but the minute a leaf falls off a tree it's back to the realism of the nineteenth century novel for me.
There's plenty of controversy around a prize list like the Booker, people telling me they can't read contemporary fiction, wouldn't give a second glance to a Booker novel, but I say thank heavens it's all still being written in all its forms, weary or not, flawed or not and that we at least have the choice. Look back and see how those early shortlisters have become much loved classics, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Pym, Penelope Lively, J.L.Carr, Paul Bailey, Jane Gardam, Penelope Fitzgerald, Bernice Rubens to name a few.
Sad also to miss out on those books still being written in the great tradition of the nineteenth century novel just because they are Bookers.
I think Charles Dickens would give his eye teeth and probably Nelly Ternan's too to be able to read The Northern Clemency. Henry James would be riveted looking through all those house of fiction windows but pretend not to be, George Eliot would adore whilst making sure we all knew she had thought of it first. Mrs Gaskell would be worried for the children of the striking miners, while Zola of course would complain there were no bodies in back streets or it was all lacking a meaty bit of mortuary dissection, though perhaps Philip still has that up his sleeve?
Talking of Charles Dickens,so far so very good with my reading of Girl in a Blue Dress, Gaynor Arnold's Booker longlisted novel published by Tindal Street Press.The fictional Arthur Gibson bears more than a passing resemblance to the celebrity author who has just been buried amid huge scenes of public grief, cue his wife to tell it like it was. So far she's telling it in the most self-effacing and moving way imaginable and I'm praying the book doesn't succumb to a dip in style.
I'd been hankering after some Henry James again and perhaps a bit more Emile Zola and then a book arrived, Realist Vision by Peter Brooks, published by Yale University Press and suddenly I had my vade mecum for the project. A refreshingly new guiding hand is always helpful and you'd expect good things from someone who was for some time Eastman Visiting Professor at Oxford. Peter Brooks presented a series of public lectures on the subject while he was there and this book is the result.
I knew it the minute I read the opening line

' I think we have a thirst for reality. Which is curious, since we have too much reality, more than we can bear. But that is the lived reality of the everyday. We thirst for a reality that we can see, hold up to inspection, understand. "Reality TV" is a strange realization of this paradox : the totally banal become fascinating because offered as spectacle rather than experience - offered as what we sometimes call vicarious experience, living in and through the lives of others. That is perhaps the reality we want.'

Like many, I certainly have more than my fair share of reality in a working day so what's so good about coming home and sinking into a book where you get even more?
That's it, 'spectacle rather than experience', be an onlooker, let someone else sort out the problems for a change.
Chapters include old favourites such as Dickens, Flaubert, George Eliot, Henry James and Zola, but there's also some Balzac and I've been meaning to go there for a very long time. George Gissing gets a look in too and there's even a handing over of the baton to Joyce, Proust and Woolf in the final pages. You know about me and Dickens, our history together is a little shaky, but I would love to settle down and read Little Dorrit this winter before the forthcoming BBC TV serialisation.
Kirsty over at Other Stories has made a persuasive and compulsory case for reading George Eliot's Mill on the Floss, Susan Hill's Woolf For Dummies sorts out the Virginia problem nicely, but Joyce and Proust have always scared me witless in thought let alone opening the first page, however if Peter Brooks is leading the way perhaps I'll be all right?

Mrs Darcy's Dilemma

There has been a flurry of interest around the blogs this week in Diana Birchall's sequel to Pride and Prejudice, Mrs Darcy's Dilemma, originally written in 1994 I think, so I hope this post won't tip you over into a bout of hyperdarcyitis, that would be vexing indeed. Harriet Devine has contributed her thoughts to the round of  reviews of Diana's book and Diana herself is blushing away madly in California because here's the first point Harriet makes,

'Reports of Jane Austen's death must have been greatly exaggerated -- she is obviously alive and well and living in California. And at last she has decided to publish her long-awaited sequel to Pride and Prejudice.'

Let's cut to the chase, no time to mess about, because Diana and I have had some hilarious e mail conversations this week.
I mean is nothing sacred?
An American writer has had the audacity to take a revered chunk of our finest English literary heritage and plump up a sequel.
And why not I hear you rightly cry?
But how very dare she will cry others.
I've been doing some background reading on the unholy tug-of-war that seems to have raged down the years between the Janeites claiming Jane Austen for popular culture and the academic literary corps hanging onto her for grim death and their own purposes. As Claudia L. Johnson elaborates in her excellent essay Austen Cults and Cultures in The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen , ' the process by which academic critics deprecate Austenian admirers outside the academy'.
It's all terrifying but when you've had cause to read or study Pride and Prejudice in whatever guise, you do at least have a feel for the basics, the language, appropriate literary devices, the tone, what feels right, what sounds so completely out of place as to be ludicrous and many sequels that I've read have fallen into all the traps. To my admittedly lowly knowledge Diana doesn't fall into any of them and Mrs Darcy's Dilemma was a complete, very unexpected and surprising reading treat.
It's twenty-five years on, the Darcys and their three children are happily settled at Pemberley but the social demographics around them are shifting, Victoria is about to accede to the throne and life as Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam knew it is on the cusp of huge change.I don't want to give away a single thread of the plot because finding out exactly what hand life has dealt to the Bennet family and exactly which paths the children take in life is part of the joy of reading this book, quite a few little surprises in store.
There is so much to admire in the way that Diana handles all this that it's difficult to know what to flag up , but I particularly liked the way that she cleverly identified all those character traits we associate with the young Elizabeth and Mr Darcy and then has taken into account maturity and developed them further. Then very ingeniously all those traits are genetically merged and divided out amongst the DNA of the offspring. I leave to your imagination what to expect of one of Lydia's children and there are a few surprises amongst the Darcy brood too. Nor will I divulge who has to face up to the inevitable audience with Lady Catherine de Burgh, suffice to say Diana doesn't do the obvious.
Irony was of course Jane Austen's speciality and Diana doesn't miss a trick here, she has that mischievous and witty way with words, measured and accurate when it must have been so tempting to go completely overboard in twentieth century style.
Mr Bennett's brief death bed utterance absolutely priceless (sorry that might be a spoiler, Mr Bennett dies, but give him his due he must be getting on)
So what purpose can a sequel like this serve?
Well,I suspect this will be different for every reader but for me, as well as sating that incurable curiosity of the 'what happens next' variety I am now living proof that well-written books like this can bring reluctant or ambivalent Jane Austen readers back into the fold.
These books and their power to do so should not be dismissed out of hand.
The purists can and indeed may choose to leave this book to one side and that's absolutely their choice. However then there's the likes of me who admire but don't love, or what about those who may often feel themselves a bit excluded from the party? Nose pressed to the glass, gazing in through the brightly lit windows at everyone else dancing the quadrille and wondering what's so good about it?
Well we may all suddenly find ourselves hooked back into Jane Austen by default after reading Mrs Darcy's Dilemma.
Let me confess.No amount of cajoling by those who rate Emma highly has ever induced me to read it.
There I've said it
My name's dovegreyreader I'm fifty four (honestly) and I've never read Emma.
But this week I have picked it up. It's a bit of a moment indeed, and I am reading eagerly with refreshing new eyes for dialogue and all those clever little things that Jane Austen did which it's so easy to miss. There, perhaps I do have the sense and sensibility gene after all.
I have Diana Birchall to thank , so I think we should award her Honorary British Citizenship for at least salvaging the precarious reading reputation of dgr scribbles, let alone writing a truly worthy Austen sequel...if she wants it that is?

Did you know George Gissing lived at...

I had found nothing to dislike about George Gissing first time round, New Grub Street about five years ago, and was suddenly moved to pick up The Nether World when I found myself stuck in the nineteenth century of late, waddling round in my bombazine gown.I'm still reading Bleak House in daily instalments and, once I reach the end of that and this one perhaps that will be my current addiction satisfied for a while or at least until it snows and I feel all nineteenth-century again.
George Gissing writes unrelenting gritty, tell-it-like-it-is fiction, it could be argued that he does for London what Emile Zola does for Paris and if I can cope with the despair of the lives he portrays I am gleaning a huge amount 200 pages into this latest read. If ever you want to read a fine readable fictional account of day to day life in nineteenth-century London look no further, you can almost see, hear and smell it on every page of The Nether World. The desperate ends that poverty-stricken people would go to for money, the struggle for survival both physical and emotional all keenly wrought.

The Oxford World's Classics cover picture declares this book with perfect accuracy and it intrigued me enough to track down the complete painting.
Behind the Bar 1882 by John Henry Henshall, and in The Museum of London.
Look at that little face proffering a bottle over the counter and the moribund looking babe in arms, probably being quietly slipped a top-up dose of Mrs Winslow's Soothing Syrup, fondly known as 'Quietness' according to my 1879 edition of Hints to Mothers. Dr Bull issues dire warnings about the use of Syrup of Poppies, but at half-a-crown the cost of this book doubtless prohibitive to the very people who could have done with reading it, if they could read that is.
George Gissing knew and wrote about all this and much more.
By chance I discovered that George Gissing had lived for some time up the road in Exeter and, proudly claiming Exeter as my place of birth, I was suddenly interested and had to know exactly where George had kicked off his boots and plonked his feet on the grate to toast his toes through the holes in his socks...I'm making a few assumptions there.
Does this happen to anyone else?
It's going to be a nigh on useless piece of information when I find it, just an address, nothing more, but in the finding of I had such a good time scouring the online 1891 census returns and eventually find it I did.
24 Prospect Park and George Gissing (spelt Gessing to fool me) had lived there with his wife Edith and, in the house at the same time, an editor, Charles Rockett.
In the end just 500 yards as the crow flies from the Priory Road house I was born in...er sixty two years later, as long as the crow survives crossing the main Exeter to London railway line that is.The stork made it OK.
So you see, nothing gained from that whatsoever but it all somehow fulfills the need to know.
Now finally I've found the John Halperin biography Gissing, a Life in Books which had been elusively mis-shelved here under Women's Diaries.
Halperin dishes the dirt and reveals that Gissing's marriage to Edith,

'a respectable girl of humble origin...she was no beauty'

was one made in hell, the woman who was

' to bear his children, to torture him for years, to drive him almost mad, and once more to make a financial slave of him'.

Except apparently in the ten weeks after first meeting Edith, George wrote New Grub Street so something must have inspired him.
I expect all she wanted was a new kitchen or the bathroom painted or something but according to H.G.Wells

'never did a man need mothering more'

and there's a man who must have known what he was talking about.

Gissing entered a form of literary exile in Exeter by all accounts and was thinking up ways to

'keep my mind active without the help of congenial minds.'

which doesn't say a lot for life in the West Country in 1891.Now of course it's increasingly chock-full of congenial minds and wait until I tell you about the forthcoming Peninsular Arts programme any day soon; some highly respected literary figures trekking down to Plymouth to speak in the coming year.We're all very excited.
Suddenly The Nether World, New Grub Street and all the other Gissing's waiting to be read seem like a worthwhile reason to hang around in the nineteenth century just a bit longer, especially as snow is forecast any day and there is a new biography of the man being published and now I can't wait to read it,  George Gissing, A Life by Paul Delany due from Orion in February.
So I will refrain from mothballing my bombazine away in the trunk just yet because there will be renewed interest in all things Gissing for sure and we can all say, yes we've always liked him, did you know he lived at 24 Prospect Park, Exeter, Devon?
While everyone else says either 'George who?' or ' You really should get out more.'

Washington Square

Having announced I'm firmly back in with Henry James on the principle that why should a few extra words per sentence scare me off, I was relieved to find that I did get to the end of Washington Square with the book unscathed. I hadn't thrown it across the room in despair, in fact I couldn't wait to pick it up each time I had a spare reading moment, but I did shout at it once or twice.
Published in 1880 and considered a short, witty masterpiece by many but possibly disliked by Henry James himself. According to Mark Le Fanu's introduction to the Oxford edition, when Henry James attempted to reread Washington Square he failed miserably and considered it poor.
How on earth did that happen? He clearly needs a blogger's assistance.
Set in New York society Catherine, motherless but most certainly not fatherless, struggles against the insidious emotional tyranny of the two men in her life, her father Doctor Sloper and her first and only suitor, Morris Townsend. Morris seeks her hand in marriage rather suspiciously after a couple of meetings and a glimpse of the £20,000 fortune.
You and I would have known better than to court any nonsense from a man who suggests,

"that books are tiresome things; only...you had to read a good many before you found it out"

From the off, every time Morris appeared I was shouting 'don't listen to him' and whenever the strangely cruel doctor entered stage left, I'd happily have beckoned a carriage and instructed it to run him over. So the male role models in Catherine's life hardly life-affirming and you can almost predict the future you want her to choose for herself, sad though it will ultimately be.
Catherine's self esteem negligible after a lifetime's exposure to insult and humiliation at the hands of her father, a man described by others as 'shockingly cold-blooded', so how on earth was she supposed to make a wise decision about marriage? Yet in spite of everything I appalled myself by storing up just one tiny gram of understanding for the ghastly Dr Sloper.
As Dr Sloper constantly and arrogantly reminds everyone, because he's a doctor he's a fine judge of character and in many ways you have to admit that he has judged Morris with great accuracy.Even so the denouement remains heartbreaking and you somehow know that, given a better range of emotional tools to work with, he could have achieved his outcomes differently if he had truly loved his daughter.
Does he have his daughter's happiness at heart or is he just being sadistic as he seeks to prevent the marriage?
He must have had a heart because, **spoiler**, in the end it does stop beating, but heaven alone knows where it was.
So many useful insights provided by Mark Le Fanu that have added something extra to the book for me.
Henry James careful use of crying in his female characters for one.
I had never thought about it quite so carefully but indeed there is a skill in knowing when to make a woman cry in the narrative, because lets face it, we hardly know ourselves when it might happen.It takes a good deal of insight to get it right and the unbearable moment in the doctor's study when Catherine pleads for her suitor's cause has the tears timed to perfection.
Mark Le Fanu tactfully refers to Henry James's

'total richness of detail that deepens the portrayal of individual character...strictly in excess of the necessary ...and yet not in excess at all, because it is through such detail that the characters are embodied as living'

and I'm with him on that. I emerged the other side of Washington Square fully satisfied that I had just read a very good book indeed.
Now Henry come along, if I can read it so can you.You have another go.

The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction

I'm so stuck in the nineteenth century with my reading at the moment I'm thinking I may purchase nine yards of sprigged muslin and run up a new gown.Perhaps bombazine (why do I think a bolt of that could explode?) might be more practical now that winter has finally hit the West Country and I'd certainly need a calash or two to cope with the rain down here.If the cat eats the lace Cranford-style I'll do without I can promise you that.I'm giving orders to cook each day and going out calling and leaving cards every afternoon.
I'm certainly not safe with a book called The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction, The Art of Being ill by Miriam Bailin.I tend to wade in and unhinge all the arguments in these wonderfully erudite books, make them fit what I'm reading, but my eyes have been on stalks of incredulity with this book, so much that had just never occurred to me before.
'The pervasive presence of the sickroom scene in Victorian fiction' just mention the words and suddenly I'm noticing sickrooms all over the place and sitting up and taking more notice of what's going in them. It's not just about women writers employing particular diseases that reflected women's social roles, like anorexia or a touch of hysteria, oh no indeed and it's not just the women writers who used the device.Thackeray, Dickens and Kingsley took their characters to the sickroom as often as Bronte, Eliot and Gaskell.
Likewise many writers spent an inordinate amount of time in the sickroom themselves, Florence Nightingale virtually lived in hers as the only room of her own where she could get through her prodigious work load in reforming the nursing profession.Of Charles Darwin, his granddaughter Gwen Raverat noted that at her grandparent's house 'it was a distinction and a mournful pleasure to be ill...ill health was considered normal'
As Miriam Bailin explains, 'the sickroom in Victorian fiction is a haven of comfort, order and natural affection', so much so that it's almost preferable to stay there. The normal social boundaries shift and illness becomes an escape, a refuge from the constraints of society and often held benefits far in excess to those of being well. For girls apparently invalidism was often a foolproof incentive for attracting the attention of a busy father, well retrospectively now I see something I hadn't really taken that much notice of before.
Elizabeth Gaskell seems to hold the record for sickroom scenes because Ruth contains no less than twelve and of course nursing the sick was the ultimate act of saintliness, a suffering in itself.
I've only read the first fifty pages of this very readable book, I skipped the odd paragraph that felt a bit doctoral-thesis-y and that wasn't an excessive amount and I'm looking forward to moving onto chapters about the writing of Charlotte Bronte, Dickens and Eliot eventually.
Meanwhile I'm playing Spot the Sickroom swiftly followed by What's Going On in the Sickroom and Who's Mopping Which Brow and already it's proving very interesting.Bleak House, my Dickens of a Read probably has plenty of sickrooms for me to wander through and my read of that will begin once Christmas does.
That's Wednesday evening here and some holiday from work.Christmas not the happiest time for so many families and a lot of fire-fighting goes on at the front line.I'm relieved not to be sitting by the phone holding my breath and praying it doesn't ring on Christmas Eve this year, but like all good teams we share the load so I shall be sitting there on New Year's Eve from 9am to 5pm thinking the same.

Adalbert Stifter

The writers become increasingly obscure as my Nineteenth Century Rehab post-Booker therapy takes me deeper and deeper into unknown but very exciting mittel European book territory.
Amongst the books from Angel Classics some excellent discoveries and names unknown to me so I've made a start with Adalbert Stifter (1805 -1868).
Thomas Mann described him as

'one of the most extraordinary, the most enigmatic, the most secretly daring and the most strangely gripping narrators in world literature.'

thus making his current invisibility even more surprising.
Perhaps, like Irmgard Keun, a resurgence is imminent as I discover Pushkin Press will be adding to the available work of Adalbert Stifter next year and Brigitta, the book I'm reading also readily available.Let's hope his Amazon ranking of 1,575,263 takes a turn for the better because it deserves to.
Austrian writer, poet and painter born in Bohemia.
By all accounts a sad life, but you begin to wonder how possible happiness was in those days, impossible to judge by present-day expectations.
His father was crushed to death by an overturned wagon when Adalbert was twelve but thanks to his grandfather, Adalbert's education continued and he studied Law at the University of Vienna.After a five year courtship his marriage to Fanny, the true love of his life, was forbidden by her parents so he settled for the beautiful but uneducated Amalia. Finding themselves childless they tried to adopt Amalia's neices but one ran away and another disappeared and turned up drowned in the Danube four weeks later.
Adalbert became a tutor to the aristocrats of Vienna and was held in high esteem there at least and gradually established a profitable writing career.Sadly life and his liver went into a terminal decline and with it his mental faculties until finally Adalbert slashed his throat with a razor at the age of sixty-three.He died two days later which doesn't bear thinking about and is probably best glossed over.
So there you have the man and with no expectations about his writing I embarked on Brigitta, a book of novellas translated by Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly and the first story Abdias.

I quickly realise that this is where Stifter explores those slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. The stuff of life and what it can throw at you.

'For the ancients this was fate, frightful, final, inflexible cause of events, farther than which one can see and beyond which nothing more exists, so that even the gods themselves are subject to it: for us it is destiny, therefore something sent by a higher power which we should accept. The strong submit to it humbly, the weak rebel against it complainingly, and the base are dully amazed when the monstrous occurs, or go mad and commit crimes.'

The scene is set for us to follow the life of the Jew Abdias, now a stooped ninety-year-old figure sitting outside his house day after day.

Set initially in Africa and later in Europe, Abdias is born into a wealthy trading family living in the desert lands beyond the Atlas Mountains.Cosseted and pampered by his mother, his father has the right but slightly misdirected idea and eventually pushes him out into the world with just a camel and gold coin and parting words along the lines of 'don't come back until you've sussed it.'

'since man owns nothing in the world apart from what he acquires for himself and what he can acquire for himself again at any moment, and since nothing makes us secure except this ability to acquire, go out now and learn it.'

It is fifteen years before Abdias returns, rich in both gold and life experience and all constantly put to the test for the rest of his days. Arguably chronically emotionally wounded by it all Abdias is both wily and ruthlessly cunning, but equally capable of deep love and quiet, gentle emotion and this is never so evident as when he is left to raise his baby daughter.
On occasion fate deals him a seemingly good hand and it is fascinating to surmise on all this as you read, because good hands for Abdias so often hold promises of woe. However I suspect it was a genuine royal flush the day that the only animal nearby when the baby needed feeding was a lactating donkey.
I had always understood that donkey milk was the closest in composition to human milk, more so than cow's milk, so little Ditha was lucky indeed and here's startling evidence to confirm.
There is certainly an overwhelming and melancholy sadness to the story, a sense of lives tossed around helplessly in the storm, but it is beautifully crafted. Underlying elements of vision and ways of seeing prevail as the story unfolds and as the translator suggests in the introduction

'if one sees with the eyes only, one is blind.One must see with the heart'

Stifter cleverly suggests that readers suspend judgement on Abdias and in the end I didn't feel like passing any at all on a man who had lived the life he was given and dealt with whatever it threw at him to the best of his ability.
What more can be asked of any of us?

Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain from Mary Shelley to George Eliot by Janis McLarren Caldwell took some concentration and much marginalia but it's paid dividends, because I don't have a thesis up my sleeve and so I have been able to dive into it  purely for pleasure.
'The similar ways of reading employed by nineteenth century doctors and imaginative writers...the complexities and creative exchanges of the relationship between literature and medicine'.
I haven't quite knitted all my thinking together yet but I think I've grasped, very simplistically, that we're talking about the way that writers mixed the natural and the super-natural and doctors had started taking a medical history that relied both on the patient's narrative, their own detailed story of their illness, and the actual physical signs evident on examination.
In hospital it used to be quaintly called clerking, but probably has a big long fancy name now. Patient Information Gathering Specification or something, PIGS for short, would be much more NHS 2007.I tell you it's all abbreviations these days, COAD, SNAF,CAMHS and worse. I'm a great one for halting meetings to ask for a decipheration ( nb grammar police, new word) and I don't believe I'm always the only person in the room who doesn't know.
RIDDOR is my latest addition after being mandatorily trained last week.
But I didn't really need to get my head round any of that to enjoy the chapter entitled  'Wuthering Heights and domestic medicine'.In fact so much so that I dashed to the shelf and opened my copy forthwith at very great speed.
There have been countless readings of  a novel like this and Janis (sorry I don't do the academic surname thing) flags up quite a few obvious readings of Wuthering Heights that make you feel a bit daft for not noticing them before. Then there are the others you may have suffered in a past life, feminist, psychoanalytic, structuralist, deconstructionalisticism  the mystical romance.There's some good down to earth stuff from Arnold Kettle as you'd expect from Open University old school,

'The story of Wuthering Heights is concerned not with love in the abstract but with the passions of living people, with property ownerships, the attraction of social comforts, the arrangement of marriages, the importance of education, the validity of religion, the rich and the poor.
There is nothing vague about this novel; the mists in it are the mists of the Yorkshire Moors.'

You can almost hear Arnold saying 'we'll be having none of that modern rubbish talked here'
But Janis advances something very interesting. A reading focused on the cult of the child, the idea of prolonged childhood,the characters who

'grow physically larger, they marry, but they remain emotionally pre-adolescent, unwise, demanding and unswervingly loyal.'

Then some more elaboration,

'Reading Wuthering Heights as a novel fundamentally about childhood does explain many of the so-called mysteries...Bronte signals through incessant references to childhood and childishness and that, in this enclosed little corner of Yorkshire, nearly all the players remain children'

So a sort of paediatric reading, well I should be able to do that.
There are some excellent references to Stevie Davies' invaluable thinking on Wuthering Heights as the novel whose 'power lies in its ability to awaken the reader's own experience of childhood' and suddenly I'm fired with enthusiasm and now quite desperate to read the book again in a new light after all these years.
Of course others may think, huh, forget it, it's a gurt great big tragic read and leave it at that, but if we're talking getting your moneysworth out of a well-known novel yet again, then for me this all adds a bit of spice, excitement and interest to a book I thought I knew quite well.
More on my paediatric reading of Wuthering Heights soon.
Other chapters in Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain on Frankenstein, Thomas Carlyle, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Darwin and of course no book combining the words nineteenth-century-literature-medicine in its title could possibly dare to leave out Middlemarch.
This chapter, 'Middlemarch and the medical case report' deserves a post of its own because there are some brilliant observations on the need for a more dynamic model for doctor/patient relationships, you'd like to see that chapter, and a study of Middlemarch, on the training syllabus for all would-be doctors.It covers just about every base.
More on that soon too.
The only tragedy here is the prohibitive price of this book, at £45 I assume you're paying for the scholarly research but it should be available from a library somewhere near you and well worth the 90p reservation fee.

Cramming for Cranford

In readiness for the forthcoming BBC production of Cranford I thought it was time to dust off my copy of Elizabeth Gaskell's novel and have a re-read.I can easily sneak it into my 19th Century Rehab reading which you may recall was supposed to aid my recovery from Booker longlist reviewing and a surfeit of contemporary literary offerings.
The trouble is I keep relapsing because a new book will catch my eye and have to be read before the moment passes.
I haven't read Cranford since I was about fourteen and it was a set book at school. In fact it was no chore because I remember loving it. I had a bad  bout of hyper-gaskellitis last Christmas when I read too much Elizabeth so a small dose of Cranford should suffice.My passion for Oxford World Classics editions remains undimmed with this stunning and expressively beautiful cover.
The BBC cast list, with Dame Judi Dench at the helm as Miss Matty Jenkyns, looks stellar and I can't wait for this one to appear.
I'm quite a few televised Gaskell's behind and really should catch up. I bought the DVD's ages ago when Amazon were having a clear out but always like to read the book first so Wives and Daughters is waiting patiently.
Meanwhile my thoughts on Cranford some forty years after first reading will be on here soon and it will doubtless be a good moment to share some thoughts from one of those unassuming looking books bought second-hand which I knew would come in handy one day.Female Friendships and Communities, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell by Pauline Nestor.
Then there are the Winifred Gerin and Jennifer Uglow Gaskell biographies and the letters and the journals, stop, stop, there I go again, just Cranford this time round.

19th century companions

More companions to my 19th century rehab reading and as I recounted I deemed it wise to start with a definitive tale of the Queen of them all, Victoria
I've dipped in and out of Queen Victoriana reading matter down the years.
A few biographies here and there, Queen Victoria that great big purple Cecil Woodham-Smith tome that the book clubs were doing years ago and must be on every shelf in the land as an "always meant to read" though I expect plenty of you have, just not me cover to cover.Her Little Majesty by Carolly Erickson another good one. I'm now well up to speed on Victoria.
Then off on a diversionary trail.
I was a cover to cover devotee of The Victorian House by Judith Flanders so have been looking forward to her latest book Consuming Passions Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain published last year and so far I'm not disappointed.The transformation of people's lives gradually centred around

"urban living, industrial employment, shopping and professional entertainment.The Industrial Revolution brought with it factories, railways, mines and machines. It also brought travel, department stores, leisure and pleasure"

and it will be interesting to see how, if at all, this is reflected in the fiction I plan to read.
The paperback now out and call me picky but I think it has a much nicer cover than the hardback.I'm noticing a trend for the predominantly sepia cover, the original old photo, tinted up with some bright neon colours and they don't do much for my eye.
As an aside I was interested to read in this book about the advent of W.H.Smith's "Newspaper Agents, Booksellers and Binder" business soon to become "Stationers, Travelling-case and Pocket-book Makers and Newsmen".
Obviously the confusion about what they sell in WHS is nothing new.
Ours is currently looking like a very tacky and bazaarish version of a fairground stall.Someone has gone beyond the "pile 'em up to the ceiling" strategy and added in "riot of colour" to the shop floor strategy. It's a complete and very garish assault on the senses and getting more horrific by the day. I won't be surprised to see vegetables in there soon and I would no more buy a book within its doors than eat squid's liver right now.
So much to distract out of the corner of your eye and barely any room for customers either, all hideously out of synch with expectations for 2007.
But I mustn't jest because never let us forget that one of the younger W.H.Smith's, the one born in 1825, attended school here in Tavistock and as I've told you before we have  a blue plaque to prove it.
What's the betting even the WHS of 2007 haven't a clue about that?

 

Going into rehab

I'm feeling like I just want to talk jibberish today.
All that improving reading has taken its toll, I've overdosed and will need to go onto reducing amounts of contemporary fiction and then I'm going to have to check into rehab. I've had a place booked in the 19th century for several weeks and this has become an autumn tradition.
As surely as shortlist follows longlist so cometh the falling of the leaves, the burgeoning of the sloes and the departure of the swiftswallowhousemartins.They are our constant companions here and have reared their usual two little flocks in the verandah nests.They guard and protect their territory fiercely and even the cats have been too terrified to go out there.
The day the birds leave always feels still and silent and makes me feel quite melancholy.
But it also means that The X Factor is back, Strictly Come Dancing isn't far off and it's time to cast on and knit.
I have been busy gathering supportive assistance for my retreat to the 19th century and wondering where to go this time round.Nothing stirs the mind like a stack of pristine books and my love of Oxford World's Classics remains undimmed from the set texts of Open University days.I've grown attached to the covers, the paper quality, the chronologies and the Select Bibliographies which have set me off on many inspiring reading trails over the years.
Then there are the introductions.
Sufficiently detailed to challenge and allow for some new thinking (and always read after the book here) but not so far off into the academic stratosphere that I can't understand them.
I feel I know my way around an OWC, they are like old friends.
I've been plucking a few off the shelves and I'm going to read them all with a bit of The Moral Imagination in mind because Gertrude Himmelfarb has certainly made her mark here.I expect in the annals of literary theory we're now in the phase of deconstructionist post-moral imagination because time moves on in a week, but this is an informative  and readable book.
So it's Bronte time.
The Letters of Charlotte Bronte have been manna in amongst Booker madness and I'm going to have a reread of a Bronte that I haven't touched in years, Emily's Wuthering Heights plus Anne's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall which I've never read. Last year I read Agnes Grey for the first time.
Then I must head for my annual By George read.
George Eliot and I are firm friends but I still have some to read, last year Adam Bede and a re-read after forty years of Silas Marner. This year I hanker after Daniel Deronda and may squeeze in The Mill on the Floss if I'm up to it.
I also have another tiny little treasure of a book from Oxford University Press which was my acupuncture treatment book of the week and is proving an excellent foundation for my rehab, more soon.
That's a whole lot of reading with much potential for excess of initial enthusiasm leading to an eventual slump so I will spread it all over several months, because last year I got hyper-Gaskellitis over Christmas after too much Elizabeth so I must be careful.