Collected 19th Century English Literature: Book Review: 2013-
Similar to the movie watching I was doing at the same time, much of this reading was undertaken because the combination of public domain rights and ereaders meant I could read these books for free without actually reading a physical copy. It was just a question of lining them up and knocking them down.
THE MOONSTONE BY WILIKE COLLINS (3/29/12)
BOOK REVIEW
The Moonstone
by Wilkie Collins
p. 1868
Read on Ipad/Ebooks
Project Gutenberg Edition
This is a book I tried to buy on Amazon- because I liked his other hit, The Woman in White- but I couldn't find a copy for a reasonable price...perhaps because this is a 650 page DETECTIVE STORY. I can see why a Penguin Classics or Oxford's World Classics would be like "uhhhhhhhh...no."
There is a brand new Harper Collins Classics (?) edition out as of the end of last month. (AMAZON) The copy I got of Woman in White was shitty- a DOVER GIANT THRIFT edition. If I have to chose between Dover Thrift edition and reading the same title on an Ipad/Kindle- I'll take the ereader everytime.
Wikipedia calls The Moonstone an epistolary novel, but I think Wikipedia is wrong in this case. Epistolary, of course, means "written in the form of a letter" and the texts that make up The Moonstone are more in the form of sworn statements under perjury, i.e. the "writer" is swearing to tell the whole truth to the best of their recollection. (1)
Big difference between that and a true Epistolary novel like Pamela by Samuel Richardson. Epistolary was the original novel style, and Collins, writing in 1868- a century and a half after Pamela was published- certainly was doing something more with format then writing an epistolary novel.
Wilkie Collins was a bosom bro of Charles Dickens- the indexical entry in Peter Ackroyd's Charles Dickens is itself over half a page long and has entries like: Collins, Wilikie: travels abroad with CD 677-82; visits huanted house, 870; CD conceals absence from Gad's Hill from, 999. ETC.
Collins was famous, in his time as the foremost exponent of "sensation novels" although he worked with already existing themes like Gothicism or Ghost, he brought an easy to read, audience conscious style to the material and was buddies with Charles Dickens- so you can see where people would be coining new genre terms to describe the work.
Whereas Woman in White is largely devoted to sprucing up Gothic/Supernatural themes, The Moonstone is widely considered to be the first Detective novel- not the first Detective story- but the first long form novel.
If you actually read this entire book- all 650 Ipad sized pages of it- it's easy to see both why the book was famous at the time and why it is less beloved today. First, it is easy to read- none of the stylistic peculiarities of 18th century Gothic fiction. Second- it inherits from the Epistolary novel or embodies an aspect of that format in that it is VERY LONG. Epistolary novels are ALL VERY LONG because of the attempts of Authors to simulate "reality."
The fact that it takes Collins 600 pages to get to the denouement speaks against the lasting quality of this book, and although it gets the credit for being the first Detective novel, it's arguable that detective fiction is best in smaller doses. Like short story size doses. Certainly not 650 pages worth to resolve the theft of a jewel. 650 pages and ten years of "book" time. Yikes! Solve that crime already, guys.
NOTE
(1) I looked at the corresponding wikipedia entry for Epistolary Novel and it's clear that Wikipedia has an expansive view of the term Epistolary novel as a "novel consisting of documents," whereas I would say the documentary novel is different then an Epistolary novel because letters are different then legal depositions. A small point, perhps.
Modes of Production of Victorian Novels by N.N. Feltes (5/7/12)
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| Three Volume Set of Jane Austen's Emma |
BOOK REVIEW
Modes of Production of Victorian Novels
by N.N. Feltes
University of Chicago Press
p. 1989
Format is important in Art. An Art Work doesn't actually exist until it takes some shape outside the mind of the creator(s). The format in which a specific Art Work exists directly impacts the potential size of the Audience for that Art Work.
An excellent example of this aspect of Art is in the earth sculpture/"environmental art" field- you might recall the Gates project in New York City, the Running Fence in Sonoma and Marin counties in Northern California, or the time he wrapped the Reichstag in Berlin. Christo is an extreme example of an Artist using the format of his/her work (large scale, interacting with the location itself) being decisive in creating the relationship between Artist and Audience.
Of course, most Art Works are not so bold in their choice of format. Many Artists utilize existing formats because those formats have established Audiences. You can consider the 3:00 45 single OR the use of the three volume Novel format in the late 18th and 19th century in England.
The three volume production format of the novel is the starting point for Feltes analysis in his book, Modes of Production of Victorian Novels. Modes of Production purports to offer a "dialectical analysis [which] leads to a comprehensive explanation of the development of novel production into the twentieth century." I would call shenanigans on that conclusion, i.e. Feltes FAILS to provide a comprehensive explanation of the development of novel production into the twentieth century.
However, Feltes does provide a well researched back ground of the novel formats themselves, of which he identifies five:
1. part-issue
2. three-volume
3. bimonthly
4. magazine-serial
5. single-volume
Each of these formats created a different relationship between the Artist, his Audience and the intermediaries between the Artist and Audience. The two stand-outs are the three-volume format and the temporally later magazine-serial format. Feltes places his analysis of the three-volume format in the 1850s, but of course the three-volume format was in use when Jane Austen was publishing a half century before.
Feltes' formats are temporally organized- chapter one, the part-issue examines the cultural "moment" of the publication of Charles Dickens Pickwick Papers in 1836. Then after the three-volume format he proceeds in order, arriving at the modern tradition of the single-volume novel.
It's somewhat endearing that even as Feltes provides materialist explanations for Artistic products, he adheres to the mid 1980s conventions of Marxist literary criticism, providing little exegesis' of novels like Middlemarch in the middle of a discussion of the economic negotiations between Eliot and her publisher.
The weakness of the Marxist analysis in this book is his placement of the formats in historical sequence. First of all, this is simply inaccurate. Jane Austen and her contemporaries were published in three-volume format in the early 19th century, well before the 1852 production of Thackeray's Henry Esmond.
Both the magazine-serial format and single-volume format continue to exist side by side in the modern world. The emergence of the Ereader in the last year suggests the potential emergence or re-emergence of prior formats.
The Marxist idea of there being successive periods in history culminating in a final phenomenon is the part of their theory that has been shown false by recent historical events, so the part of Modes of Production that adopts that analysis is bogus, but the rest of it is really useful in that it contains in depth discussion of the importance of format for Art Works.
Middlemarch by George Eliot (3/13/13)
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| Juliet Aubrey as Dorothea Brooke in BBC Adaptation of Middlemarch |
Book Review
Middlemarch
by George Eliot
p. 1871
Oxford World's Classics
OK so I've literally been reading Middlemarch for three months. Originally published in seven separate "numbers" the one volume Middlemarch clocks in at a cool 780 pages. The subject matter is life in a small town in England in the early 19th century. George Eliot has four novels in the 1001 Books list- Adam Bede, Mill On The Floss, and Silas Marner. Middlemarch was published eight years after Silas Marner and has been a huge, monster hit/classic upon publication. (1)
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| Rufus Sewell as William Laidslaw in BBC adaptation of Middlemarch |
Eliot is, by critical consensus, the first "modern" novelist. (2) Unfortunately the early period of modernism is characterized by "realism" i.e. lots and lots of boring detail about small town life. Welcome to the modern era of the novel!
The heroine of Middlemarch is Dorothea Brooke- a young woman who marries a "dry-as-dust" scholar Edward Casaubon. The first 3/7 books mostly deal with her unhappy marriage- then the husband dies and the story shifts largely to the marraige of Rosamund Vincy to Tertius Lydgate. The plot concerns subjects standard to the Victorian novel: Marriage! Inheritance! Family Secrets! Small Town Scandal! What is different between Eliot's writing and the writing of contemporaries like Anthony Trollope is her mastery of the inner life of her characters. Eliot's Middlemarch is what we would call "fully realized" and it's that realization that led to her instant acclaim as a master of the art form.
It's also why people still read George Eliot- again- compare her present popularity to the (lesser) popularity of Anthony Trollope- who was also hugely popular during the 1860s-1870s
Finally, I find it significant that Eliot's success as a novelist was proceeded by 20 some odd years writing as a critic and her long term relationship with another successful, well regarded critic. In other words, Eliot laid the ground work for her success by setting up a network of people who were ready to acclaim her novels.
Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens (3/17/13)
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| Anna Friel as Bella Wilfer in film adaptation of Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens |
Our Mutual Friend
by Charles Dickens
published 1865
1. A Christmas Carol - 1081 views. June 2012.
2. David Copperfield - 468 views. August 2012.
3. Oliver Twist - 138 views. July 2012.
4. Nicholas Nicoleby - 82 views. June 2012.
5. Charles Dickens biography - 48 views. 2011.
6. Bleak House - 65 views. Sept 2012.
7. Martin Chuzzlewit - 42 views. July 2012.
8. The Dickens World - 14 views.
What's interesting about the popularity of the Charles Dickens books listed above- is that Martin Chuzzlewit is, in fact, his least popular novel. A Christmas Carol is his most popular work- don't think you can question it. David Copperfield in second place. No review of Great Expectations- I love Gillian Anderson as Ms. Havisham though. I would say Great Expectations is maybe 2nd above David Copperfield and Oliver Twist.
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| Mr. Riah from Charles Dickens Our Mutual Friend- Can you guess... he's a Jew! Charles Dickens was a wee anti-semetic |
Chuzzlewit is the only book on the list that was a critical and commercial disaster- people didn't buy it when it came out and Charles Dickens was bummed. NOT in the top 5 is The Old Curiosity Shop which was a huge, huge hit that just happened to have been published immediately before Martin Chuzzlewit. In Chuzzlewit Charles Dickens "departs from his formula" and doesn't provide the hearty sentimentality of A Christmas Carol or Oliver Twist. And he was punished for it: First by the paying Audience and then by the critics. Our Mutual Friend was published in serial form between 1864 and 65. It was his last completed work. Oliver Twist was published in 1837. That's 28 years of writing hits.
The Charles Dickens who wrote Our Mutual Friend was a man who had witnessed great change. Specifically, the increasing influence of money and business on people living in the London metropolitan area. The Sui Generis impact of his early work has been deadened by three decades of other authors absorbing his style and and learning from his successes. Every Dickens novel was an event, and every author writing during that period was conscious of what audiences and critics thought about each work.
Martin Chuzzlewit was literally Dickens only "bomb." Although his biography always contained a fair amount of drama, he never struggled financially and had was still hugely popular at his somewhat untimely death. Our Mutual Friend is interesting because of the money consciousness that pervades the plot, but its also labored and lengthy-- even for a Dickens novel. This may have to do with Dickens writing Our Mutual Friend as a Victorian multi-plot novel rather then a first-person narrative.
Our Mutual Friend also has some of the elements of the "Sensational" novel that was pioneered by his buddy Wilkie Collins. The character of a police inspector is again present- as in David Copperfield- as a kind of stock character and an attempted murder is garishly depicted. The character of Bella Wilfer actually sounds like she has read novels like Vanity Fair in the way that she talks about her "mercenary nature."
NOTES
(1) From my review of Adam Bede:
I would argue that George Eliot had four 'hits,' all of which appear on the 1001 Books To Read Before You Die (2006 ed.) list: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss(1860), Silas Mariner (1863) & Middlemarch(1871). Today, Middlemarch is the most popular of the four. Silas Mariner is arguably the title to be dropped from the 1001 Books Before You Die update, if you look at it in terms of popularity. Middlemarch's status as the most popular is undoubtedly due to the popularity of Middlemarch as a proto-Modernist text from the mid-late 19th century. Middlemarch has been in vogue since the late 1950s and early 1960s, which is a key sign that popularity of a specific text relates to its appreciation among the academic market.
(2) "It is one of her principal claims to fame that she is the first modern novelist. That first period of the English novel that begins with Henry Fielding ends with Anthony Trollope; the second: the period of Henry James...begins with George Eliot." Early Victorian Novelists by David Cecil, pg. 213 (1934).
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (book) by Lewis Carroll (3/18/13)
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| Mia Wasikowska as Alice in Wonderland in Tim Burtons terrible 2010 film. It certainly was Disney who decided that Alice would only be seen in a blue dress for all eternity- I didn't see that description of her clothing in the book. |
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (book)
by Lewis Carroll
p. 1865
Like A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll is a narrative that has transcended it's original format and become the modern day equivalent of a myth. There have to be at least 10 million people in the world who have only heard of the Disney film franchise or vaguely know that there is a book and have never read the original text. And why would you? Certainly there is nothing particularly compelling at Alice in Wonderland in its original format except for it actually being the original telling.
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| Here is the classic depiction of Alice in Wonderland from the 1951 Disney film. In the book the character of Alice is recognizable to anyone who has read the Bronte sisters or Jane Austen she is a child, but behaves like a little Victorian adult |
The only format that Alice in Wonderland is missing from its stable of hits is a the big budget Broadway Musical/Re--invention a la Wicked or Into The Woods. If I read tomorrow morning that Green Day's Bilie Joe Armstrong had been hired by Disney to pen a musical adaptation of Alice in Wonderland it wouldn't shock me.
And who could forget the terrible Tim Burton lackluster live action version of Alice in Wonderland from 2010. (6.5 on IMDB.) The only thing the 2010 Tim Burton film had going for it was casting Mia Wasikowska. Some truly, truly bad casting in that movie. It's not entirely clear why you would even want to update the 1951 Disney Film, which is basically itself a bigger classic then the original novel.
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| Anne Hathaway as the White Queen in Tim Burtons 2010 film version of Alice in Wonderland. |
Many Authors from the Victorian period (like Charles Dickens) didn't obtain the full extent of their recognition UNTIL the 1950s, so the fact that Disney's version came out in 1951 puts in that same time period of critical reevaluation of early-mid period Victorian source material.
Presumably in 1951 there was some Disney executive with a copy of Water Babies by Charles Kingsley and Alice in Wonderland on his desk and a report about why Alice was the project to green-light.
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| Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen in the 2010 film. WHAT A DISASTER AND WASTE OF MONEY!!!! |
Equally interesting is the emergence of Alice in Wonderland as a metaphor itself OR the use of poetics derived from the book/film. Certainly the most memorable of these is the conversation she has with the Caterpillar about eating a mushroom to make your larger or smaller. This scene comes off just as trippy as it does in the 1951 film.
Like Water Babies, Alice in Wonderland is a "children's book" from a time when children were essentiallly treated like tiny adults. Certainly your average 10 year old today would be hard pressed to enjoy the book, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Or maybe I'm wrong about that. I can see why you'd WANT a child to read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: Carroll/Dodson is nimble prose stylist and still manages to keep the story simple enough to engage someone with a 10 year olds attention span.
Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll (4/19/13)
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| Jabberwocky |
Book Review
Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There
by Lewis Carroll
p. 1871
Through the Looking Glass is the sequel to Alice In Wonderland published six years after the first book. Through the Looking Glass is an extended chess metaphor with a heavier dose of logically dense dialogue than the first book. Through the Looking Glass has memorable Alice in Wonderland characters like the Jabberwocky, Tweedledum and Tweedledee and Humpty Dumpty.
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| Tweedledum and Tweedledee |
I read this book on my bare bones kindle and it was a drag- this is the kind of book that you want to read in a large format with color pictures. Truth be told I did not get much out of Through the Looking Glass except for understanding where the Jabberwocky and Tweedledum and Tweedledee come from.
Honestly I'm dreading the approaching 20th century. I kind of feel like the novel peaked in the late 19th century when the Russians, English, French and Americans all had classic hits in the same decades.
Far From The Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy (5/5/13)
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| Jenifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games. I get to use this picture because Katniss was named after the main character in Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy |
Book Review
Far From The Madding Crowd
by Thomas Hardy
p. 1874
I'm struggling to find an angle for the five or so Thomas Hardy books I'm going to be reading over the next several months. Hardy, along with George Eliot and Anthony Trollope, was a quintessential Victorian period Novelist, both in terms of his rural subject matter and voluminous output. Although Far From The Madding Crowd was published in the 1870s, the action appears to take place 20-40 years prior, in the rural district of Wessex. Wessex was the fictionalized location for many of Hardy's novels, and it proved to be a popular invention.
Far From The Madding Crowd was the Novel that secured Hardy's literary reputation. After it was published he felt secure enough to quit his day job and work full time on literature. For a modern reader, perhaps the most relevant detail is the name of the main character, independent farmer and proto-feminist Bathsheba Everdeen. Bathesheba is the acknowledged name sake of Hunger Games lead character Katniss Everdeen
Far From The Madding Crowd echos prior books by Trollope and Eliot in terms of the rural setting. Elements of the plot also feel familiar. The story of Far From The Madding Crowd concerns Bathsheba Everdeen and her bad marriage decisions. Wooed by a hustling young farmer in the first act, she turns him down flat. After inheriting her own farm from an Uncle, she turns down a more established farmer in the second act, and instead falls for a solider, who turns out to be a wastrel. The soldier ends up disappearing on her, and in his absence she agrees to marry farmer number two. Then soldier returns, and farmer number two kills him and is imprisoned for the murder, leaving Bathsheba Everdeen free to marry farmer number one, who she should have been with all along.
The idea of pairing a rural marriage drama with a dramatic final act murder is a device that appears to have been developed in the Victorian period as "serious" Novelists considered a way to increase the popular appeal of their work with a mass audience. Far From The Madding Crowd most resembles George Eliot's Adam Bede in this regard. Adam Bede, published in 1859, centered around the dramatic child murder and subsequent imprisonment of teen mom Hetty. Unlike Bede, in Far From The Madding Crowd the murder is more a plot device to resolve the marriage story. In Bede, Eliot spent much of the third act dealing with the trial, imprisonment and attempts to avoid the execution of Hetty.
When reading the "serious" novels of the 1860s ad 1870s, it is important to understand that sensationalist novels were also hugely, hugely popular at the same time. No doubt Hardy felt pressure to deliver excitement within the framework of his pokey rural drama, and you can't do much better then a murder.
I'm having trouble getting motivate for the next 40 years of literature. 10 years of this guy, and then after the century barrier I get a decade of Henry James. Really dreading Henry James.
He Knew He Was Right by Anthony Trollope (5/15/13)
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| Jennifer Aniston as Rachel Green on Friends, the modern successor to the Victorian multi-part novel. Wonder what a degree in British literature helps you do? Write sitcoms. Ross and Rachel is what you call the "A" plot, or the equivalent to the Louis/Emily Trevelyan |
He Knew He Was Right
by Anthony Trollope
p. 1869
Oxford World's Classics 2008
foreword/notes by John Sutherland
Anthony Trollope seems like an impossibly prolific author. He Knew He Was Right- which is 930 pages flat in a standard paperback format- was only one of two novels that he published in 1869 alone. The other, Phineas Finn, also made it onto the 1001 Books To Read Before You Die list, as did the Last Chronicle of Barset (1867).
I'm interested in the way Audiences receive the work of prolific Artists, and Trollope wrote in a well documented era where criticism had begun to assume some of its modern forms, so I went ahead and picked up the excellent Anthony Trollope: The Critical Heritage, edited by Donald Smalley- part of the The Critical Heritage Series by Routledge & Kegan Paul. This book collects the various reviews of all of Trollope's many, many novels. I was curious to see if contemporary critics had a similar response to Trollope in 1869 as I did in 2013.
It seems to me that the pleasures and depth of a prolific Artist are something that can only be fully appreciated with the passage of time. For example, lets say a musician puts out two soundtracks, two EPs and an LP during a calendar year. The Audience: critics and general audience alike, will focus on the LP because that is the work that is most in sync with the needs of the marketplace. Let's say the other four releases are ignored. Then the LP is released and hailed as a masterpiece- it seems to me like then the Audience size for the other ignored releases increases and then over time there is the potential for a level of growth until the Audience size for each work is roughly equal.
For someone interested in these questions, Anthony Trollope is a fertile field of inquiry since he was both incredibly prolific and well documented. One irony that I've noticed from reading the 2013 opinions about Trollope vs. 1869 opinions is that today Trollope is regarded as being psychologically astute in terms of his character development, whereas in 1869, critics complained that his characters were unrealistic and that he dwelt on the surface instead of diving to deeper motivations. (1)
Critical notices in the 1860s and 1870s were unsigned- none of the reviews in The Critical Heritage volume contain by-lines. The condescending attitude of Victorian society towards journalism itself is embedded in the very plot of He Knew He Was Right. He Knew He Was Right is an example of the "multi-plot Victorian Novel." The nearest analogue today is the structure of a network sitcom or hour long drama where you have an "A" story, a "B" story and/or "C" and "D" stories among a group of inter-connected characters.
Here, the "A" story is that of the Trevelyans: She, a young bride who grew up in the British colonial Empire, he a wealthy lord: Emily and Louis. Louis becomes obsessed over Emily's relationship with an old friend of her father and his degeneration into insanity and the impact it has on Emily is the main plot.
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| Courteney Cox as Monica on Friends, Monica/Chandler was the "B" story on Friends. Sitcoms are the spiritual and stylistic successor of the Victorian Multi Plot novel, of which He Knew He Was Right by Anthony Trollope is an excellent example. |
However the "B" story is the relationship between Hugh Stanbury and Nora, Emily's sister. Stanbury is an old buddy of Louis Trevelyan. Unfortunately he decides to be a journalist instead of a lawyer and is therefore "unsuitable" to marry Nora. Mind you, this takes 930 pages to play itself out.
There is also a "C" story that shows up pretty late in the game, which is the marriage of Charles Glascock, an unsuccessful early suitor of Nora to Caroline Spalding: An American. Caroline and her American counter parts are, to my knowledge, the first such depictions of American chicks marrying British lords in literature.
Oh and a "D" story involving yet another marriage. 930 pages!
Summaries of He Knew He Was Right typically focus on the "A" plot but that's like saying that Friends was simply about Ross and Rachel: Sure, their on again, off again relationship was the undisputed highlight of that show, but it wasn't the only story line. Monica and Chandler? Joey and no one?
NOTES
(1) "His writings have no aesthetic purpose; they mean nothing more than they say; they are not written at the reader; the author thinks of nothing but how his work may be made a correct copy, complete and minute; he looks at human nature as a man looks out of a window, painting exactly what he sees, up the exact square of a pane." - Unsigned notice, The Times, published August 26th 1869, pg.4 published in Anthony Trollope: The Critical Heritage, edited by Donald Smalley- part of the The Critical Heritage Series by Routledge & Kegan Paul
The Hand of Ethelberta by Thomas Hardy (5/28/13)
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| Nothing generates pageviews like a painting of English Novelist Thomas Hardy. He is a real panty dropper. |
The Hand of Etherberta
by Thomas Hardy
p. 1876
This is just a grim, depressing slog through a literary hellscape. I've still got like, three more Thomas Hardy novels to go, and I'm really not sure why this one made it. Actually, that's not true... I get it. Hardy's Ethelberta is a more interesting than usual Victorian heroine. The details of her biography should be enough to raise eyebrows:
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| Ethelberta |
1. Daughter of a butler, she eloped with the young son of the family who employed her as a governess That son soon died, leaving her a widow as a child.
2. Placed under the protection of her mother in law, she authors a book of light verse which becomes all the rage in London, giving her a literary career, but alienating the mother in law.
3. In London, she schemes to marry a wealthy husband while purposefully obscuring her humble origins... with great success
Hardy is of course most well known for his depiction of rural settings, but this book is almost full blown London, down to a fashionable Bloomsbury address. Hardy's London in The Hand of Etherlberta is recognizable as Victorian London: descriptions of room interiors and fashion make this book very contemporary (for 1876.) Again, this is a far cry from the usual when it comes to Hardy.
The marriage centered plot with a healthy dose of inheritance and class distinctions is classic Victorian Novel. It's hard to think of an English novel from this time period that doesn't implicate all THREE themes between the covers. It's clear to me that this consistency is evidence and perhaps proof that the AUDIENCE for these novels was mostly young women who were looking to marry up: the literate daughters of the working and middle classes in England in the 1870s. Hardy succeeds in The Hand of Ethelberta because he addresses the concerns of this Audience in a convincing and sympathetic manner.
It's worth noting that Hardy is perhaps the first novelist to use the old "private marriage" move, where a gentleman "privately" marries a woman from a lower class and the marriage is either entirely a ruse with no legal merit, or unproveable as a matter of law. This was a fairly common motif in the 18th century, and it got so bad that the British Government actually outlawed the traditional private marriage and required open publication of all marriages. Thus, the culmination of The Hand of Ethelberta, with relatives of both bride and groom racing to forestall the marriage between Ethelberta and Lord Mountclere, involves actually getting to the Church in question and finding out they are too late because the marriage information has been published.
So it's not really a private marriage per se, but a late 19th century reboot of an old theme.
Daniel Deronda by George Eliot (6/3/13)
Book Review
Daniel Deronda
by George Eliot
p. 1876
Yeah so I figure I spent 450 minutes reading this book? God that's like a whole day of my life. Reading Daniel Deronda. It clocks in at 978 pages flat. Here's how I read this book. I would figure out some time in the day when I would have 45 minutes available, and then i had the print size set large enough so that I could read a "page" in a few seconds, and then I would just page through like a demon until I had made it 10% down the road. It was a joyless affair, I don't mind telling you.
All I could think about while I was reading Daniel Deronda is that people back then must have had so much time to sit around and read books. Seriously, who has 8 hours to read this book? The decriptions of Daniel Deronda have described it as Eliots most "experimental" novel, and I suppose that's true by the stadards of novelistic experimentation circa 1870. Half the book is devoted to a stadard marriage/inheritance plot involving the beautiful and shallow Gwendolen Grandcourt nee Harleth. She is one of the more unsympathetic Victorian era heroines, someone who marries for money and then acts suprised that life isn't just a bowl of cherries afterward. The other half involves the titular character, who is the adopted "son"of a wealthy English Baron but yearns to know about his birth parents.
Along the way Deronda rescues Mirah Lapidoth, a young Jewess in distress, and probably the first literary Jewish heroine in British literature since Rebecca in Sir Walter Scotts's Ivanhoe half a century earlier. It's clear that Eliot means to provide a sympathetic portrayal of Judaism but it's hard not to wince at some oc the more stereotypical descriiptions of Jews provided by Eliot.
Over all though Daniel Deronda is simply exhausting because it's close to a thousand pages long. Who does that? And who reads that book in 2013? Me I guess.
Return of the Native (1878) by Thomas Hardy (6/7/13)
Book Review
Return of the Native
by Thomas Hardy
1878
God that random post on Internet Art I did a couple weeks back is the most popular thing on this blog since I reviewed Uncle Tom's Cabin, which, of course, is the most popular post on this blog in the last four years.
I'm going to level with everyone, I am not particularly enjoying the mid-late Victorian period in literature. I can appreciate the deepening moral complexity of a Thomas Hardy v. an Emily Bronte, but that doesn't make for a fun read. Hardy is notable as writer because of his ability to bring some moral complexity to the marriage/inheritance axis of the Victorian novel. Hardy's characters are complicated and interesting, they work in multiple dimensions. Return of the Native is named after one of the four main characters, Clym Yeobright. Return of the Native, like many, many, many other of Hardy's novels, is set in the fictional English countryside of Wessex, which in this book is played by the Egdon Heath. Basically, Clym Yeobright is a succesful diamond merchant living in Paris. He returns back to Egdon Heath to visit his Mom and falls for Eustacia Vye, a pretty and vacant girl living with her grand dad near Mom's house. Eustacia Vye is single, but is sought byDamon Wildeve, a local inn owner who is not very rich and not very classy, but who is supposed to marry Thomasin Yeobright.
So...then... Eustacia Vye and Clym Yeobright end up getting married because Eustacia thinks he will "take her away from all this" but surprise: Clym wants to "go local" and become a school master. Eustacia is not stoked but this is the 1870s and she can't do shit. Meanwhile Clym marries Damon instead, who still wants Eustacia.
Then... Clym gets sick because he's reading in the dark (yay 1870s!) and loses his eye sight, so he can't continue to study and is rescued to collecting moss from the floor (for fuel?) Eustacia is even less stoked after Clym becomes a manual laborer and THEN Damon inherits a ton of money which is ironic because Eustacia specifically chose Clym because he was going to have more money. Andddd.... Eustacia and Damon end up drowned in a river (is there any other way to die in a Victorian novel?) and Clym becomes a sad itinerant preacher and Thomasin ends up marrying the "Reddleman," Diggory Venn.
The character of Diggory Venn is fascinating. "The Reddleman" is a guy who would travel the English country side selling red dye to sheep farmers. It was a good gig, but the "Reddleman" was a kind of English bogey man who was conjured to scare misbehaving children i.e. "The Reddleman'll come and getcha!"
Diggory Venn is into Thomasin, so he's bummed when she marries Damon and then he gets the girl at the end. He also plays central role in the second act, where a misunderstanding over money between Clym, his mother and Eustacia, which ends up with the death of Clym's Mother. This death provides the trigger for a split between both Clym and Eustacia and Damon and Thomasin and THAT ends up with Damon and Eustacia dead in a river.(of course!)
Hardy makes observations of his characters that stand out among his contemporaries and provide a solid basis for classic status. Here is a great passage:
She went indoors in that peculiar state of misery which is not exactly grief, and which especially attends the dawnings of reason in the latter days of an ill-judged, transient love. To be conscious that the end of the dream is approaching, and yet has not absolutely come, is one of the most wearisome as well as the most curious stages along the course between the beginning of passion and its end. (pg. 116)
That passage is prefigures the doubt and ambiguity that would later characterize the attitude known as "modernism" but in 1878. If you've ever experienced the end of love you know how perfectly accurate Hardy is in the above passage.
Erewhon by Samuel Butler (6/20/13)
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| Samuel Butler, author of Erewhon |
Erewhon
by Samuel Butler
p. 1872
Wrapping up the 19th century portion of 1001 Books To Read Before You Die means doing some clean up duty, but luckily I was able to hit Powell's books and pick up several hard to find titles. Erewhon was in that category but rather then hold out for Powell's I bought the "Dover Thrift Edition."
"Nothing Says "Minor Classic" Like a Dover Thrift Edition. It's fair to say that a budget line of print books is threatened dramatically by the Ereader, because... who wants to buy a cheap book when you can buy a cheaper Ebook? And yet... they persist. It's hard to carp about someone trying to bring classics to the masses for cheap, but the resulting product mirrors the "Thrift Edition" description: BUDGET.
Erewhon is in the category of Utopian fiction, common comparisons include Gulliver's Travels and News From Nowhere by William Morris. Like other Utopian novels, you get two parts: journey to Utopia and then lengthy discussions involving the strange ways and beliefs of the Utopians. Here, the residents of Erewhon hate all machines and attribute moral characteristics to physical ill health. Thus, being infected with a disease like measles or mumps results in a death sentence. At the same time what we would call "crimes" are treated the way we treat physical illness. It's like a reversal.
Thus, Butler's Erewhon is somewhere in between a Utopia and a Dystopia, and I'm pretty sure I missed a lot of what he was criticizing/satirizing.
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| Here is Rufus Sewell in the 1997 film of The Woodlanders- he is playing Giles Winterborne |
Book Review
The Woodlanders
by Thomas Hardy
p. 1887
I should have read The Mayor of Casterbridge (also by Thomas Hardy) first, because it was published in 1886, and The Woodlanders, while serialized in 1886, was published in book form in 1887, and that is the controlling publication date as far as I'm concerned.
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| Emily Woof as Grace Melbury |
I'm honestly surprised that Hardy serialized his work, it must be a reflection of the market for literature in the UK in the 1880s because his prose lacks many of the characteristics that are the hallmark of serialized 19th century literature. To whit, there aren't pages and pages of minor characters, location descriptions, digressive minor plots that bear little or no meaning to the central plot, etc. In fact, despite his setting (almost?) all of his books in the past, it is easy to see that in terms of prose style and plot development Hardy is a thoroughly contemporary writer who simply chooses to place his books in the not-so-distant past.
For example, The Woodlanders take place in semi-rural England in 1857. The reader knows this because a major plot point concerns the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, which allowed civil, non religious divorce for the first time.
The plot of The Woodlanders is a more-or-less standard marriage plot involving Grace Melbury, raised by her yeoman father to think of finer things. She is married to the educated but deeply flawed Edred Fitzpiers. In order to do so, Melbury breaks the heart of her neighbor, to whom she has been promised by her father because the father stole HIS wife from the neighbor's father. Following? The neighbor in question is Giles Winterborne.
No sooner are they married (Melbury/Fitzpiers) then Fitzpiers takes up with the wealthy widow Mrs. Charmond. I couldn't put it better then wikipedia itself:
The novel reflects common Hardyan themes: a rustic, evocative setting, poorly chosen marriage partners, unrequited love, social class mobility, and an unhappy ending to the plot. (WIKIPEDIA)
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| Ciaran Hinds plays Michael Henchard in the 2003 television movie of The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy |
The Mayor of Casterbridge
by Thomas Hardy
p. 1886
I know I promised three Thomas Hardy novels in a row, but I'm going to do Germinal by Zola and the Kreutzer Sonata by Tolstoy before I tackle ole Tess of the D'Ubervilles. Like I ementioned the other day, Thomas Hardy is interesting because he is a late Victorian novelist who sets all of his novels in the early-mid Victorian period. Thus, if the reader is not hip to this fact, theyr could easily be deceived into thinking that Hardy was a contemporary of the Bronte sisters rather then Zola.
Even though his novels are set in the past, Hardy is not writing historical novels, rather he is writing very "Modern" novels with modern themes and modern characters that are simply set in the past. And while The Woodlanders reads like Hardy's take on the conventional Victorian marriage plot, The Mayor of Casterbridge is closer to the historical epics of French novelists like Hugo and Balzac, only without the epic sweep of current events.
In the Mayor of Casterbridge we witness the fall and rise and fall of the titular character, Michael Henchard. In the first scene- which is set up as a stand alone flash back that wouldn't be out of place as a narrative device in a contemporary novel- Henchard sells his wife and child during a drinking bender. Stricken by remorse the next day, he pledges never to drink again.
Fast forward twenty years, and the wife he sold, Susan Henchard, returns after the death of her "husband" (the sailor who bought her) along with "their" daughter Elizabeth Jane, in tow. In the intervening 20 years Michael Henchard has risen to become the Mayor of the small agricultural trading center of Casterbridge. Complications then ensue regarding Henchard, his hired hand Donald Farfrae, Henchard's soon to be jilted betrothed/mistress Lucetta and of course Newsom, the sailor/"husband" who is thought to be dead. Any casual reader of 19th century English literature will know from the first mention that any character thought to be dead in a novel is never, in fact, actually dead.
Hilarity, or rather darkly comic tragedy ensues, but once again the plot moves around a brisk, late Victorian clip and by the time we reach Henchards' ruin at the end the reader feels satisfied but not overwhelmed. I suppose Hardy represents a last moment of late Victorian respite before the maelstrom of Modernity overwhelms all conventions and destroys everything before it.
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| Tragic Tess of the d'Urbervilles |
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
by Thomas Hardy
p. 1891
Spoiler alert, Tess hangs at the end. Tess of the d'Ubervilles was Hardy's most controversial novel because it depicts what passed for immorality back in the 1890s. Today, Tess would be running just about par for the course on conventional morality but Victorian prudery was in high dudgeon when Tess was published. Tess is a famous tragic heroine of the late Victorian/early Edwardian era, again, Hardy is pulling his trick of setting a book in the recent past but importing "Modern" themes.
Here, Tess is seduced by an arriviste cousin, has a child, the child dies, then she marries another guy, doesn't tell him about her misfortune before the marriage, tells him AFTER the marriage, is abandoned by said husband, then picks up again with the cousin who got her in trouble in the first place, then her husband returns to claim her and she murders the other dude. Then she hangs.
Tragic, to say the least. Tess of the d'Urbervilles is a good example of a work that had a mixed reception upon initial publication but which then gained lasting status as both a classic and hit due to critics simply being wrong/judging the work on the basis of "morality" as supposed to artistic merit or success at entertaining the Audience.
Despite the rural settings, Hardy was a strong precursor to the modern Novelist, if only because his pacing, plotting and command of theme elevates him above the discursive style of the Victorian Novel (George Eliot excepted.) As the Wikipedia page says, Hardy's work carries the "ache of modernity," and I would not disagree with that assessment.
The War of the Worlds
by H.G. Wells
p. 1898
For my money The War of the Worlds is the best of H.G. Wells top hits because he wrote it before the concept of "World War" i.e. World War I, World War II, was current. In other words, his War between Worlds preceded the concept of a global war, and it seems like his story may have even provided the inspiration for the phrase "World War" considering the publication date of 1898, and the coming of the Great War/World War I almost 15 years later.
The War of the Worlds, in addition to being the first novel written about an interplanetary conflict, is also the first novel to describe the mass destruction of an industrial society that would become commonplace in the 20th century. It's hard to imagine the impact that The War of the Worlds must have had among the initial audience. I can't think of another book that comes close to describing the Biblical-level destruction that the Aliens wreak on the area around London before they are felled by their lack of immunity to our germs and diseases (praise Darwin!!)
The War of the Worlds is also interesting for Wells' description of what essentially sound like robots before such a term existed. Truly, The War of the Worlds is a clear indicator that the genre of science fiction had great potential for power as a popular literary genre.
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| The Invisible Man, film version. |
Book Review
The Invisible Man
by H.G. Wells
p. 1897
Investigating the origins of art genres is always worthwhile. Considering how important genre and classification are in any field of art criticism, it behooves an interested individual to have an idea of how genres start and be familiar with Artists who themselves create genres. You might think of Pablo Picasso or Jackson Pollock in the field of painting. And while you might argue that H.G. Wells didn't invent science fiction, he is almost certainly responsible for the creation of the genre osf fiction that we today refer to as "science fiction." His best known stories involve a plot that revolves around a perhaps plausible scientific innovation whose presence triggers whatever story he is going to tell.
Here, it is the invention by the invisible man himself, called Griffin, of a method to render human substance transparent by means of a poorly described chemical reaction. The Invisible Man often reads like a variation on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, except Griffin is a permanent Mr. Hyde. The Invisible Man is obviously considered a classic because of its enduring popularity because the plot mechanics are very awkward.
The Invisible Man starts with Griffin arriving at a provincial inn. He is soon discovered and has to flee the town. He goes to Port Burdock and tells his story in a long winded flashback to his former classmate Dr. Kemp. The story then returns to the present and Griffin is hunted and captured, returning to his visible self.
During the lengthy mid novella flashback, it becomes clear that Griffin is a psycho- he blows up the house of his landlord, violently assaults children for no reason and is quick to administer an invisible beating. Griffin is not a sympathetic character struggling with a dual identity, he is a "monster" in the vein of Dracula. This creation of unsympathetic/monstrous villains is a key development in genre fiction, and is an approach that novels like The Invisible Man (and Dracula) passed straight through to Hollywood, where the "movie villain" convention became firmly established as a character archetype.
Born In Exile
by George Gissing
p. 1892
Consider the character of the alienated intellectual. If you had only read literature of the 20th century, you might assume that such a figure has played a central role in the development of the novel as an art form, so prominent is his/her position in the great works of the 20th and 21st century. And yet this character is relatively recent development, with sporadic appearances in French literature, a more significant role in Russian literature and almost entirely absent in British literature until George Gissing hit the scene. Gissing actually wrote two novels that essentially created this character: He published New Grub Street in 1891, and Born In Exile in 1892. New Grub Street is an incredibly bleak look at the entire life and times of a failed novelist. Born In Exile is a less despairing look at a similar figure- but this time the main guy is a scientist and would-be clergyman rather then a writer.
Godwin Peak is a man born to lower/middle class parents. He quickly demonstrates an aptitude for study and begins course work at a nearby college, only to have his dreams thwarted when a Cockney Uncle opens up a restaurant across the street from his college. Of course he quits college rather then put up with a lower class relative opening up a restaurant nearby, it makes perfect sense!
After leaving school, he suffers multiple crises of faith before deciding to pursue a clerical career, only to have his plan wrecked by this earlier dabbling in religious criticism, which is brought to the attention of his clerical sponsors. Unlike New Grub Street, which ends in utter misery, Born In Exile has a marginally less depressing finale where Peak inherits money from the sister of a friend, and is able to travel the world where he dies...also in Exile. Do you see the irony there? Because the book is called
News from Nowhere
by William Morris
p. 1890
William Morris is best known today for his association with the Craftsman design movement. For example, the home that I live in here in San Diego was built in 1913 and bears "Craftsman" type design features, like wooden floors and slatted wood walls on the exterior. When we redid our fireplace, we used Craftsman inspired tiles for the design and at various times we had different kinds of "Craftsman" style furniture. But Morris was simply a design theoretician- he actually made stuff and he also wrote a bunch, including News from Nowhere, his utopian/sci-fi novel about a Communist future which is nowhere near as interesting as that description just made it sound.
I don't know what it is about utopian literature that makes it so deathly dull, but it's probably the same principle that lessens the power of films which require a voice over narrator to explain the plot points: exposition is boring/show don't tell. News from Nowhere is essentially a 150 page dialogue/travelogue between the Rip Van Winkle protagonists and the happy residents of 21st century England, which resembles the kind of Utopia that Mao was shooting for during the Cultural Revolution: A peasant heavy agricultural society with emptied out cities.
Book Review
The Yellow Wallpaper
by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
p. 1892
I think this is the shortest story on the entire list of 1001 Books To Read Before You Die- 6000 words according to Wikipedia. I have no idea how this made it onto the list, except to observe that Gilman is both a woman and American, to qualities that are in relative short supply between Harriet Beacher Stowe and the 20th century. The description emphasizes that it is a decent into madness depicted in the first person, and that it represents some sort of important feminist statement. Honestly, it has probably obtained classic status just because it is so short that any moronic undergraduate can muddle his or her way through it, and because the themes are so obvious that that same moronic undergraduate would be able to grasp "the point" or "points" contained therein.
Woo woo doesn't that sound like a BLAST? We're not that far removed from the days when Communism was a powerful global force, but even now there is faint smell of ridiculousness to the more intellectual attempts to explain how a successful Communist society would function. In News from Nowhere Morris describes a world without economy or industry, where everyone is (basically) happy and the Government has withered away (remember how that was supposed to happen after the end of the dictatorship of the proletariat?)
The England of the imagined Communist future is a mirror of the England of the Medieval past that Morris found so intriguing: minus all the unpleasantness. If you combine the backward looking novels of Thomas Hardy with Morris' past-is-future Utopia it is clear that at the turn of the 1880s/90s Nostalgia was already an established force in the market for literature. Perhaps it always was.
Jude the Obscure (1895)
by Thomas Hardy
Boy I wish I'd read all these Victorian period novels about failed marriages BEFORE my own marriage failed. Before I got married, if only to gain insight into the various ways that things fall apart between two peoples. If I had, I might have been able to recognize the seeds of different things the culminated for me in divorce. The Victorian/Edwardian obsession with the marriage plot in the Novel reaches a kind of dark resolution in Thomas Hardy's last book, Jude the Obscure. Often described as the "darkest" "most experimental" and "best" novel Hardy wrote, Jude the Obscure reaches new heights (depths?) in the lengths to which Hardy goes to describe the utter misery that can be inflicted on two people by marriage.
The heart of Jude the Obscure is the life, loves & death of Jude Fawley, a working class mason with aspirations of attending college and becoming learned. He fails fails fails in his quest, mostly because of his messy relationships get in the way- we're talking a period of a decade plus here. First, he is seduced by Arabella, the serving wench/pig farmers daughter. She tricks him into an early marriage with a (made up) pregnancy scare. Jude is forced to give up his original plan of studying for college to support his wife and his expected child. When it turns out that no child is forthcoming, they fight and Arabella takes off for Australia.
Jude resumes his solitary existence in a nearby town, where he continues his studies. He soon meets Sue Brighthead, his cousin and what we would today call a "feminist." A tortured quasi-romance ensues, only to end when Sue marries Mr. Philloston, her scholarly mentor (also he's old.) Jude accepts the marriage with a modicum of grace, but Sue does not, and leaves her husband for Jude. From this point on Philloston is essentially ruined by Sue and he wins a Pyrrhic victory only in the last few pages.
Sue and Jude live together, they have two kids and then get a third kid via Jude's Australian wife. Oh yeah and then the third kid HANGS the other two kids and HANGS himself and they all die. WHAT THE FUCK ???? After that Sue gets super religious and remorseful and returns to her original husband, and Jude hooks back up with his original wife, Arabella, who has been to Australia and back and buried her second husband. Jude ends up alone and dead, and Sue ends up married and miserable. The End.
Jude and Sue never actually get married because of what essentially amounts to a superstition regarding their family history. Sue, of course, can never keep her mouth shut about that fact, and they end up getting hounded from location to location. The darkness of Jude the Obscure is complete- there is not but a single ray of light or comic relief in the entire story. Something I've learned about myself while reading and watching movies the last few months is that I like my themes dark, and I don't mind them slow. Making a work of art that is dark and depressing but yet endures is the hardest thing to do because Audiences don't really like dark artistic themes. They also don't like thematic complexity. Hardy has both of those things going.
Jude the Obscure did not go over well. Many called it obscene and immoral, presumably because of the way Jude and Sue refuse to actually get married at any point, and yet live together and have children and tell people that they are married. Hardy never wrote another novel- he lived for another 32 years, possibly because critics were so harsh (and maybe also because he didn't need the money?) That makes the Jude the Obscure a good, specific example of the type of work that can be poorly received by the initial audience only to obtain classic status at a later date.
I think there are three different characteristics that these works tend to have in common: dark themes, complexity, poor distribution. If you are looking for under rated classics- those are three good things to look for.
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| Bela Lugosi as the iconic film version of Dracula. |
Book Review
Dracula
by Bram Stoker
p. 1897
This may actually be the worst book on the entire 1001 Books To Read Before You Die list. It's obviously included because it has been tremendously popular and served as more or less direct inspiration for a century plus worth of Vampire culture, but it really is a shitty, shitty novel.
Why so, you may ask. Well, Dracula is a kind of epistolary novel- where everything is written down by the various characters in the form of journal entries. The epistolary novel was en vogue in the 18th century- Samuel Richardson- largely regarded as the first true "Novelist" wrote exclusively in this format, but it was soon abandoned by writers because it is clunky and subject to the inevitable "I am writing this even as the murderer enters into the room, oh there I can see him now with the knife gleaming in the candle light by which I write this now... I must go..." type of up to the minute narration.
This kind of narration might have cut it in the 18th century before a hundred years of innovation rendered it utterly obsolete, but unless Stoker is writing as an homage (and I'm pretty sure he isn't) it just comes across as antiquated and amateurish. So ultimately you are talking about the importance of the character of Dracula, and the genre of Vampire horror. I have little respect for either. Dracula has no depth- he is simply a monster. A charming monster, but a monster. And as for Vampire horror. Well. I'm not sure which is worse- the Twilight films/books or True Blood but both of them fucking suck. Anne Rice sucks, books and movies.
Vampires are just stupid, and Dracula is terrible.
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| Cover of the Pneguin Classics edition of The Diary of a Nobody |
The Diary of a Nobody
by George and Weedon Grosssmith
p. 1892
2012 London Daily Telegraph article on the centenary o the death of author George Grossmith
Ooooooooh goody here comes the English Comic Novel. Oh brother. You know who likes the English Comic Novel? The English, and no one. Surely, the comic novel has played an undeniably important role in the development of comedy itself, particularly if you include the 18th century English Comic Novels like Tom Jones. But The Diary of a Nobody isn't a sprawling 18th century proto novel, it's a magazine serial concocted by two authors who were laughing at their subject. The Diary of a Nobody was serialized in the British satirical magazine Punch and you can almost hear the sniggering of the Audience that The Diary of a Nobody targeted. It's the same critique that Sinclair Lewis develops in Main Street: The Grossmiths protagonist is a British version of what he called a "Babbitt." Actually, that comparison is not entirely apt because Charles Pooter is hesitant to venture out into society, and Lewis' Babbitt is a man of associations and clubs.
The Diary of a Nobody is literally a diary of this Charles Pooter, but it is made clear that Pooter is a figure to be laughed at. It's not an entirely mean spirited effort- in the end Pooter is rewarded with a great new job, but along the way he does things like prat falls and breaking glass objects with careless abandon. Ha, ha, ha.
It's a blistering societal critique of conformity and the company man to be sure, and I am just as sure that there is about to be a whole bunch of similar critiques in the years ahead.
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