Dracula by Bram Stoker

First, let's be clear, Stoker was not moving about the lay figures of Marxist/Feminist/Freudian criticism when he wrote Dracula, he was working straight out of 'the foul rag and bone-shop of the heart'. The mind of a civil servant is a strange and hideous place, a lair of filth, corruption and latterly, brown envelopes. I never, ever read the introductions to novels in the fancy academic editions lest the wearisome lucubrations of the scholastic infect me with its turbid literalness: but having read Dracula for the nth. time I invited Maud, Daughter of Richard, Ellmann into the clean well-lighted place that is my mind. Alas! I think a first reading at least should be a naive one - in which our reader encounters this novel for the first time. Besides the critic may be careless of spoilers.

"Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own free will". He made no motion of stepping to meet me but stood like a statue, as though his gesture of welcome had fixed him into stone. The moment however that I had stepped over the threshold, he moved impulsively forward and holding out his hand grasped mine with a strength which made me wince, an effect which was not lessened by the fact that it seemed cold as ice, more like the hand of a dead than a living man. Again he said
"Welcome to my house! Enter freely. Go safely and leave something of the happiness you bring."

Ah yes, was ever a more prophetic invitation made. Note the quiet old-world dignity of the formula and the implication that all motions of the soul are fundamentally free. Can there be such a thing as a willing victim? When you join the ranks of the Undead you do so by invitation. He invites you to a mockery of eternity, you accept. As Dr. Van Helsing makes clear later in the case of Lucy she must first have let the Count in.


The conventions that create the illusion of verisimilitude are freely used in this novel. The Bradshaw Railway timetable both English and Continental is plied freely, we can be certain that the indefatigable Van Helsing can do those journeys to fetch his kit in the time that is allotted to him. In a sort of a way the normal narration of a novel is subverted and real history with its profusion and methodology of documentation is aped. Even the phonograph, the latest killer app of the day is pressed into use. Nobody knows what anybody else is thinking unless they are told and we do not know unless that is recorded by one or other of the participants. There is an inevitable muting of character development using this sort of narration but the point of Dracula is the play of forces.

It is the nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance. And yet unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which 'modernity' cannot kill.

However it is Mina Harker nee Murray using all modern methods who collates the evidence in 'a mass of typewriting' that allows each to know of the adventures of the other. Only Van Helsing of Amsterdam, Dr. Sewards old professor, appears in the annals of the rest having none of his own if I rightly remember.

It is surprising how many people think that Dracula is an ill written farrago or pulp and just don't bother with it taking the movie with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee as the fons et origo. That is a mistake. There is much excellent stuff in it. Here is the passage where Jonathan Harker discovers that his host dispenses with stairs:

What I saw was the Count's head coming out from the window. I did not see the face but I knew the man by the neck and the movement of his back and arms. In any case I could not mistake the hands which I had some many opportunities of studying. I was at first interested and somewhat amused, for it is wonderful how small a matter will interest and amuse a man when he is a prisoner. But my very feelings changed to repulsion and terror when I saw the whole man slowly emerge from the window and begin to crawl down the castle wall over the dreadful abyss, face down with his cloak spreading out around him like great wings.......

There is some humour also, perhaps unconscious, but I think not. In Dr. Seward's Diary we are told of the first meeting with Mina Murray of the mad zoophagite Renfield who is in clairvoyant contact with the Count :

She came into the room with an easy gracefulness which would at once command the respect of any lunatic for easiness is one of the qualities mad people most respect.

Extract from Ombhurbhuva's journal:

I have finished Dracula today, and now I see that it is the Day of the Dead. Of course I observed the usual precautions and only read it during the hours of daylight. I am comforted by the wild rose in the hedge and an abundant supply of garlic in the kitchen. As ever I was relieved that Kukri and Bowie knife accomplished their grim task giving peace at last to the Count who in his day, we must not forget, was a great patriot.

A Mirror of Shalott by Robert Hugh Benson

This is the season of the pooka, a good time for stories of the supernatural. In a paperback anthology I found a slight tale by Robert Hugh Benson benson excerpted from a book called A Mirror of Shalott. This is available on Internet Archive. IA The suite of stories are told by a group of Catholic clerics meeting in a house in Rome I'm not sure that everyone would consider them real chillers, there are no fat boys like the one in Pickwick that will make your blood run cold, with a recitation of the blood drinkers burial in character but in an understated way that sharpens your sense of both the supernatural and the infranatural, they have a power.

Benson was a priest himself so the material plane was merely a diaphane that could be backlit on occasion. My sense is that these tales are more or less the true stories that he had heard from his colleagues in the ministry. It is the near irruptions into the everyday of other worlds where you can't be quite sure whether it was imagination or not that are the most effective. One story of a dream told by Father Stein :

He was slow of speech and thought and movement, and had that distressing grasp of the obvious that is characteristic of the German mind.

However the story that he tells of an archetypal dream is worthy of the best of Carl Jung.

Another story involves the concept of mystical substitution which a man proposes to the priest who is recounting it, a practical man not well up on the idea.

Well, I didn't understand him at first, but we talked a little, and at last I found that the idea of mystical substitution had seized on his mind. He was persuaded that he must make an offering of himself to God and as to be allowed to bear the temptation instead of his brother. Of course, we know that that is one of the claims of the Contemplative but to tell the truth, I had never come across it before in my own experience.

Not a good idea as it turned out. This man had previously gone for the priesthood and we are told:

The man's health simply could not stand it. But he led a most mortified and interior life with his wife in his London house, with a servant of two to look after them and was present daily at mass at the church that I served then.

Diverting and edifying. Quite!

The Sin of Father Amaro by Eca De Queiroz

The Amateur Reader (Tom) at Wuthering ExpectationsARin his exploration of Portuguese literature mentioned Eca De Queiroz favourably and I spotted his famous novel The Sin of Father Amaro in a tottering pile on the floor of the second-hand book shop (€5). In the later translation I note that it is called The Crime of Father Amaro which seems an odd variant as sin and crime are readily distinguished from each other.

The Sin of Father Amaro is a swingeing attack on the clergy of Portugal in the 19th.C. both individual members and institution. They are what their Lord and Master Jesus Christ would have called whited sepulchers using the Church as a cover for their sordid plotting, lusts and avarice. The ‘beatas’, that band of addled women oppressed by scruples and in thrall to the priests that batten on them in a spiritual vampirism meet at the house of a lady who is the the mistress of the Canon. This individual is also the mentor of a young priest who has been appointed to the local cathedral. De Queiroz’s description of the old ladies and the leech priests are like illustrations from Lombroso’s people to avoid supplement.

Dona Josepha, the canon’s sister, was also there. She was nick-named the Peeled Chestnut. She was a little withered creature, crookedly formed, with shrivelled, cider-coloured skin and a hissing voice; she lived in a state of perpetual irritation, her small eyes always alight, her nervous system eternally contracted, her whole attitude full of spleen. She was dreaded by all. The malignant Doctor Godhino called her the Central Station of the intrigues of Leiria.

In the woman’s house in which Fr. Amaro is staying is the 22 year old daughter; beautiful, fresh, virginal and prone to sentimental religiosity. Clearly in liturgical terms, a ‘suitable victim’.

Amaro is at first given charitable indulgence by the author; he has been, after all, press ganged into the clergy by a sponsor in the nobility who reared him and his sister. He is a fine vigourous handsome fellow whose health has markedly improved since his curacy in the mountains. The chief element of his cure was wrought by a facilitating shepherdess.

The leniency of the author becomes strained as he delineates beautifully the insidious seduction by the paroche of Amelia. From this point in our history we know how cult leaders can prey on the impressionable and devout. It is true that there are clergy who use the office to cloak their abuse but the author seems a misanthrope who finds no good in anyone, lay or clerical. This is perhaps a weakness in a purported realist. All the characters without exception are hypocrites, fools and knaves, the priests in particular combining all those traits in an odious melange. The progress towards tragedy is inevitable and the ebb and flow of the tide of guilt and ecstasy is closely observed.

First published in 1875, my translation by Nan Flanagan is from 1962. In 2002 Dedalus Books presented a new translation by Margaret Jull Costa. They have issued more of her translations of Eca De Queiroz which I shall be looking out for.

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

Going by the author information in the front of the book there is some congruence between the life of the author Richard Yates and the protagonist of Revolutionary Road. They are of a similar age, war experience, job experience. Whether the picture window was part of the vista I don’t know but in the large corporation , Remington Rand, where he worked, there would be plenty of suburbia to go around.

The focus of the book is on the Wheeler family, Frank & April parents, Jennifer and Michael the children up in Connecticut. That perennial American stranger, the absent father, is in both the Wheelers lives. The novel opens with an amateur drama production of Sherwood’s The Petrified Forest. Being a Googleamus I find that it is a sort of key or ‘clef’ if you will. (from the play)

Gabby (undeterred): We could go to France, and you’d show me everything, all the cathedrals and the art—and explain everything. And you wouldn’t have to marry me, Alan. We’d just live in sin and have one hell of a time.

Squier: That’s a startling proposal, Gabrielle. I hadn’t expected to receive anything like it in this desert….

Gabby: Wouldn’t you like to be loved by me?

Also foundmarin

plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, April.

Both the Wheelers are in the Holdenesque argot of the era (1955) phonies, actors in search of a character or something. The little grace notes of observation honed by empirical acquaintance are delicate. Frank Wheeler drinks dry sherry on a Sunday. It is I suppose almost Calvinist after the hard liquor of the week and slightly brittle and sophisticated. Not that they are narcissistic, Narcissus had an image that he loved, they are looking for one that someone else can love.

I won’t say anything about the plot. Period note: She decamps to the couch. Let’s not be too snotty about Suburbia, how do you think you got to College, punk. This is a very fine novel by someone I had never heard of. It is one I will reread.

More on A.E. Coppard from V.S. Pritchett and Frank O'Connor.

Frank O’Connor and V.S. Pritchett speak highly of Coppard and they are both of them masters of the short story. There’s peer review. Pritchett talks about him in an interview from 1985. I came across it looking for Irish influence in the work of Coppard. Irish characters crop up and theres a Celtic aspect. He was part of a group called the New Elizabethans in Oxford along with W.B.Yeats The universal element in folk stories which Lady Gregory and Yeats were discovering and recording seemed to grasp that chthonic power which eluded the over elaborate productions of the modern mind. James Stephens comes to mind as one tuned to the same station.

B.F.: I'd like to ask a little more about the first short stories you read. You said that in Dublin you read D.H. Lawrence and Joyce's Dubliners.

V.S.P.: Yes... yes, I read them, and I also read an English writer who is now rather forgotten but who was an extremely gifted writer of stories, in a very small compass, a man called A.E. Coppard. I admired his stories enormously. And in fact I used to know him, when I was living in the country. He was a nearby neighbour. And he was a very strange man; he was a warehouse‑man's clerk or something like that who had decided to be a writer, so he had gone out and lived in a shed in the woods in Buckinghamshire, entirely on his own, with no sanitation and his drinking water from a well, in a shallow well in the earth. And he was a natural perfectly spontaneous man, not muddle‑headed he was absolutely clear‑headed. I don't think he had any views about life in general, any kind of intellect, but he had a marvellous appreciation of the instant; he could describe a squirrel very well, he could describe a game‑keeper, he could describe a couple of old farmers arguing about whether, beef is better than veal to eat, or what pork is like, and things like that. He had a great decorative sense of comedy. He was unfortunately, when I look back upon it, a rather folkish writer; he came at a period when the peasantry were dead really and they only existed in pockets in England, in little places, and their traditional customs by that time had almost gone. It was when suburbia spread out and the countryside died. That curious old England went out. Another writer who was very good, in the same way, in his early stories, who came later, was H.E. Bates. He wrote very well, very good English, had a good style, but was also brief.

from Journal of the Short Story
journal of the short story


I can see where the folkish which has a disparaging tone could come from. There is a narrative quickness, a blending of worlds, a suspension of ordinary judgment of the probable and the possible, beggars, pilgrims and beautiful shy girls. Pritchett is a master of penny plain truth, Coppard will do you a nice tuppence coloured and thrupence de luxe. Can’t do better than that guv’. What you often get is a fragment like the flow of a stream around a rock where there is an order wrought by the nature of all the elements in the event but this order is never repeated.

Frank O’Connor in The Paris Review 1957 has this to say (

Yesterday I was finishing off a piece about my friend A. E. Coppard, the greatest of all the English storytellers, who died about a fortnight ago. I was describing the way Coppard must have written these stories, going around with a notebook, recording what the lighting looked like, what that house looked like, and all the time using metaphor to suggest it to himself, “The road looked like a mad serpent going up the hill,” or something of the kind, and, “She said so-and-so, and the man in the pub said something else.” After he had written them all out, he must have got the outline of his story, and he’d start working in all the details

paris review

A.E. Coppard

Ah, sir, wisdom was ever deluding me, for I’m not more than half done - like a poor potato. First, of course, there’s the things you don’t know; then there’s the things you do know but can’t understand; then there’s the things you do understand but which don’t matter. Saving your presence, sir, there’s a heap of understanding to be done before you’re anything but a fool.

(from Simple Simon by A.E. Coppard)

This is from a short story collection, Black Dog by A.E. Coppard (1878 -1957) first published in 1923 then issued in the pucca ‘Travellers’ Library’format put out by Jonathan Cape in 1926, reprinted in 1926, 28, 29, 51, 57. My copy looks like it came out of a box in the back of a warehouse. Nice 7“ x 5“ cloth that can slip into the pocket of your coat, print beautifully struck. No.2 in the series. I also have Adam and Eve and Pinch Me in the same format, also republished several times. Penguin brought out a selection in 1972, Dusky Ruth and Other Stories from his various collections. It has a short introductions by Doris Lessing who is a big fan. By the bye is Doris Lessing the worst writer in English ever to have won the Nobel Prize?

The Penguin selection mostly stays clear of the mystical, magical, fabulous stories which are a distinct element in his work. In these times we don’t Adam and Eve it. In that title story Adam and Eve and Pinch Me a man travels in his astral body through his house and thinks that he does it in his corporeal form. There’s a wonderful flowing exalted sense conveyed by the writing and at the same time the stress of the man who tries to communicate with the others who are in a different plane but whether that plane is this sublunar one is not quite clear.

There was Bond (the gardener) tinkering about with some plants a dozen yards in front of him. Suddenly his three children came round from the other side of the house, the youngest boy leading them, carrying in his hand a small sword which was made, not of steel, but of some more brightly shining material; indeed it seemed at one moment to be of gold, and then again of flame, transmuting everything in its neighbourhood into the likeness of flame, the hair of the little girl Eve, a part of Adam’s tunic; and the fingers of the boy Gabriel as he held the sword were like pale tongues of fire.

These volumes are what I call ‘barrowed’ treasure. Never having heard of him I could only find them there. Due a revival.

PS: Adam and Eve and Pinch Me is available to download from Internet Archive A&E and Pinch Me with some extra stories compared to British Edition.

A Glastonbury Romance by John Cowper Powys

At the striking of noon on a certain fifth of March, there occurred within a causal radius of Brandon railway station and yet beyond the deepest pools of emptiness between the uttermost stellar systems one of those infinitesimal ripples in the creative silence of the First Cause which always occur when an exceptional stir of heightened consciousness agitates any living organism in this astronomical universe. Something passed at that moment, a wave, a motion, a vibration, too tenuous to be called magnetic, too subliminal to be called spiritual, between the soul of a particular human being who was emerging from a third-class carriage of the twelve-nineteen train from London, and divine-diabolic source of the First Cause of all life.

Is this the oddest and yet quite truthful start to a novel that has ever been written? Scholiasts of recurring heresies will note the Gnostic element but that is but a facet of the ingredients in the cauldron kept bubbling with clippings from The Thorn. To say that it is complex and a worthy proposal in its anfractuosities as a special subject on Mastermind would be to claim that a clock that builds new cogs as required and is lubricated by the best butter is nevertheless a sure chronometer. Nay sir, this novel includes history and concludes it.

There are 1120 pages in all, don't take less, and it would not be giving too much away to say that The End is not a conventional marker but a part of the novel. This requires strategy. Mine is baptism by immersion. Simply allow each paragraph to draw you on to the next and soon you will be attuned to its, and here I doff my cap step back and with a deep bow and flourish say, its cosmic vibrations.

ME CHEETA, the autobiography (as told to James Lever)

James Lever admits that in the middle of the writing of a previous novel that was too beautiful to let go off as though the adhesions would tear too much of his soul away and leave him raw and unable to efface the world; he read Infinite Jest and remained impaled on his couch abandoned to the despair of perfection. But then an editor gave him a deadline and an idea - write the biography of an animal star as though by that animal. Thereby Me Cheeta was born. At first Lever was kept from the limelight, you know what stars are, till it finally leaked out that it was an ‘as told to’ James Lever.

It’s a classic and I’m going to go out on a limb here (don’t bounce up and down) and say that it moves into the region of greatness. No, no, I mean it,Cheeta’s a wonderful person and a beautiful human ape. There’s the standard spoof of the genre which is itself classical Yiddish self-deprecation allied with sprinkles of bombast and comfort pleat ego. Cheeta sees the goings on of the stars and is a favoured guest at their parties with many a salacious aside but there is a genuine pathos in his worship of alpha male Johnny Weismuller. He sees but he doesn’t get the meaning of what his heroes do, a bit like us, and he misses the obnoxiousness of Niven and Flynn and their pranks. His original capture he understands as a rescue from the jungle which is a dangerous place for animals.

You liked Black Beauty you’ll love this. It will touch your heart.

Gissing and The Nether World

George Orwell might have written the biography of George Gissing. He was asked to do so by a publisher in 1946 but he was on his way to the island of Jura and so had to decline the offer. Instead he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four which is a decent swap. Orwell was born in 1903 the same year that Gissing died and they both lived to the age of 46 each succumbing finally to lung disease. I am relying here on the biography George Gissing: A Life by Paul Delany. Therein the point is made that whereas Orwell took to tramping to research his books on poverty, Gissing merely walked the streets and visited the workshops of Clerkenwell to do research for his novel The Nether World but it could also be maintained that Gissing had no need of sentimental immersion as he had just buried his first wife Nell two weeks before starting that novel. He had first met and fallen in love with her when he was a brilliant young student and she a young prostitute. Though he, through the multiple scholarships which he had won, was well off, for a student, still that was not enough to keep her off the streets and he began to steal from his fellows at Owens College (later Manchester University). The month in goal that he received for his crime was the beginning of his real research into the nether world. Expelled from college in disgrace he went to America that place of dubious sanctuary but when he came back after a year took up with Nell again. His plan was to turn her into a ladylike companion but she kept up with her trade and her drinking throughout their marriage. Delany suggests that she infected him with syphilis, the disease that finally killed her and may have exacerbated the weakness of his lungs.

There are many of us who have been scorched by the fire of a fatal relationship but have come out the other side with a here be dragons map engramatically engraved on our brains . Gissing continued to explore that territory. What he needed was a nice intelligent work-girl that he could mould to a suitable companion. His second wife went mad and fought with the servants.

By being expelled from Owens College he had lost his chance to rise in the world. He later wrote in a letter:

The life of a Fellow at Oxford or Cambridge is, I should think, almost ideal. He has his man-servant, his meals either in private or at the public table, an atmosphere of culture and peace.

The way that the clever student can con his lessons well and deliver them back in the same diction as the professor, that sincere flattery that brings academic honour, could be the very mimesis that hobbles his style. It’s not there all the time, that constraint that makes him seem like a foreigner that was attempting the speech of a class always beyond him and that he could never be sure he was getting right. There is a concept of what is ‘writerly’ that stifles the life of his prose sometimes but I do not deny that this may be a function of his hurry. He began the novel on 19th.of March and finished it on the 18th. of July. In our more leisurely days that would probably be the time allotted for a first very rough draft .

Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy

I was watching this arts show, last year or the year before, The View, which ought to be called The Dim View because nobody ever likes anything much. Then a terrible and unprecedented thing happened; one after the other they agreed that Maile Meloy's Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It was just very good. This is to be read. And they were right. There's that clear and distinct prose that allows the occasional unstressed effect to drop you through the story levels like a fast lift. In Travis. B. Chet Moran who through a touch of polio and horse wrangling accidents has a limp.

His father drove him to Great Falls, where the doctors put a steel rod in his good leg from hip to knee. From then on, he walked as though he were turning to himself to ask a question.

His gait is almost a mirror of his mind. He has got into the way of taking on winter ranch minding jobs in Montana which he likes but he senses that he is getting too solitary.

He got afraid of himself that winter; he sensed something dangerous that would break free if he kept so much alone.

For a while he takes an office job in Billings but he realizes that his hip is not up to all that sitting around so again he takes a winter feeding job.

He made it through Christmas, with packages and letters from his mother, but in January he got afraid of himself again. The fear was not particular. It began as a buzzing feeling around his spine, a restlessness without a specific aim.

He's about 21, too young to be talking to his horse so he goes into town and cruises around for some pinochle action or something. There are lights on at the school and people going in so he joins them. He signs up for a class on school law. Beth Travis a young lawyer is giving the class. He talks to her after the class and thus a sort of relationship begins which is complicated by the fact that she has to drive back to the town where she has her day job, a nine and one half hour trip.

He wondered how he might court a girl who was older, and a lawyer, a girl who lived clear across the state and couldn't think about anything but that distance. He felt a strange sensation in his chest, but it wasn't the restlessness he had felt before.

Maloy has the ability to get into the mind of the young man. She's a friendly anima. Travis. B. goes on to its denouement with that accumulation of detail that builds a believable world.

Only a couple of the stories in the collection of 11 drop below a very high standard. If you like the short story form especially the American short story where they do what Ernie said they should, leave something out that only the author knows is left out, this is a treat.

Lytton Strachey

It takes Basil Willey in Nineteenth Century Studies to put us right about Lytton Strachey’s scalpel job on Thomas Arnold in his Eminent Victorians. He does not deny that it is exquisitely done with the contrast of high minded quandry and banal fact that leads to bathos. Arnold’s earnest wresting with evil is followed by:

His legs, perhaps, were shorter than they should have been; but the sturdy athletic frame especially when it was swathed (as it usually was) in the flowing robe of a Doctor of Divinity, was full of imposing vigour; and his head, set decisively upon the collar, stock and bands of ecclesiastical tradition, clearly belonged to a person of eminence.

Strachey’s chum Virginia Woolf once described James Joyce as underbred. We must therefore accept that she might have considered Lytton overbred or in any case some sort of genetic cul-de-sac that it would be unsafe to breed from should he have been so inclined. The character of St. John Hirst in The Voyage Out is said to be modelled on him. “There’s Hirst...........And he’s as ugly as sin”

Strachey’s way with Thomas Carlyle in a shorter piece collected in Portraits in Literature is similarly deflationary, prophetic fire reduced to a fart in a biscuit tin.

He had higher views: surely he would be remembered as a prophet. And no doubt he had many of the qualifications for that profession - a loud voice, a bold face and a bad temper. But unfortunately there was one essential characteristic that he lacked - he was not dishonoured in his own country. Instead of being put into a pit and covered with opprobrium, he made a comfortable income , was supplied by Mrs. Carlyle with everything that he wanted, and was the favourite guest at Lady Ashburton’s fashionable parties. Prophecies, in such circumstances, however voluminous and disagreeable they may be, are apt to have something wrong with them. And in any case, who remembers prophets? Isaiah and Jeremiah, no doubt have gained a certain reputation; but then Isaiah and Jeremiah have had the extraordinary good fortune to be translated into English by a committee of English Bishops.

The loss to English literature of Jane Welsh is blamed on the Sage of Chelsea. No, Lytton, no, this must be the easiest sum ever presented to the felicific calculus. The misery of two people was obviated by them marrying each other.
Finally one must judge Strachey to be an unreliable critic though a wonderful stylist with an accurate but not deadly sting. His major works are available on the Gutenberg Project.

Marianne Dashwood

They only see what they want to see. They don't know they're dead.
Cole from The Sixth Sense.

Finding value at the heart of reality. It is a truth that we create our own worlds, up to a point. In noticing what we notice when not under threat there is implicit a scale of valuing. The altering of these constructions is a favourite theme of Jane Austen's. The heroine at the end of the novel has a new world, a more 'real' world. It is more real in that it is more complete, the blank or missed bit is now present. In 'Sense and Sensibility' the modern reader must regret to a degree the punishment of Marianne, it seems too comprehensive and she appears to me at least to be too reduced, too broken to be put together without permanent disability. That is all too often life, sigh!

In the Year of Jubilee

In The Forsyte Saga John Galsworthy chronicled the upper middle classes for the lower middle brow reader. The opening of the novel is set in 1886 which is one year before the jubilee of Queen Victoria. In the Year of Jubilee George Gissing writes about the lower middle classes. His audience is perhaps upper middle brow. There is no chance whatever that his work will be turned into a superior soap to beguile the winter schedule with a Christmas episode.

The close attention to class and the minute division in those classes that are opaque to the outsider is a theme of Gissing’s. In general his people are ill fed, ill housed and ministered to by mutinous servants. When introduced in the novel they are sketched in like types from a Lombroso catalogue.

A younger girl of much slighter build with a frisky gait, a jaunty pose of the head, pretty, but thin-featured and shallow-eyed; a long neck, no chin to speak of , a low forehead with the hair of washed-out flaxen fluffed all over it.

Due to the new universal education they, the 3 French sisters, are able to read but to what end.

But on tables and chairs lay scattered a multitude of papers, illustrated weeklies, journals of society, cheap miscellaneous penny novelettes and the like.

The 3 are living in De Crespigny Park, more genteel than their previous residence on the Camberwell Road. The husband of the eldest Ada is Arthur Peachey who is a leading light in a manufactory dedicated to disinfectant. Their deceased builder father left them some money.

Beatrice and Fanny had learnt to support themselves, Beatrice in the postal service, and Fanny, sweet blossom! by mingling her fragrance with that of a florist’s shop in Brixton; but on their fathers death both forsook their employment and came to live with Mrs. Peachey.

The other family in the novel are the Lords, Stephen the father, Nancy and Horace the children. Fanny French has designs on Horace whom she reckon will come in for half of the plunder when the old boy dies. He is a dealer in pianos, a lucrative trade when every parlour that fancied itself had to have one.

One thing about Gissing; if you want to know how people lived when the Empire straddled the globe and the Old Queen reigned he’s your man. Interiors, food, hairstyles, dress both male and female he covers everything with special attention to the shoddy and the tawdry. He’s much the better writer than Galsworthy in the rendering of texture. His depiction of the squalid and evil conditions of Victorian England distorting the lives of the masses is excellent. His women are fell creatures, his men mostly hapless. All his works are on Gutenberg. Recommended: New Grub Street, The Odd Women. I am at present reading The Nether World about life in the tenements. Not many jokes.

The Forsyte Saga

I’ve just finished reading The Man of Property by John Galsworthy being the first volume of The Forsyte Saga. Absolutely first rate as one of his characters might think but not say, after all it doesn’t do to be too enthusiastic. The Forsytes give nothing away; they amass, they collect and finally surrender only to take a profit. When the novel opens it is 1886 just before the Jubilee Year of 1887 and the family meet up for the engagement party of June Forsyte at the house of her Grandfather Jolyon. His brothers and sisters with all their children are there. The family saddle of mutton is also there, for they love succulent, simple and ample food, floury potatoes and the gourmand brother Swithin drinks champagne by the pint. Collectively they live in those areas like Park Lane and Kensington where property values are on the rise and their family conversations are like moves in real monopoly.

Soames Forsyte son of James the brother of old Jolyon is married to the beautiful Irene. They are not happy and there is talk of separate bedrooms. She has brought nothing to the marriage but her beauty which is in itself an indication of a lack of judgment on his part. Her father was a professor, not much money in that, and after the death of her mother he remarried a much younger woman. The step-mother was anxious to have Irene off her hands and enhance her own chances. Pertinacious Soames wore her down after several refusals. They have been married for 3 years and she is now about 25. He is 32 or so and his name is in the style and title of a firm of solicitors.

It’s an interesting thing how the intentions of the author often fail to coincide with the depiction of his character. Irene suffers from what we can today easily recognise as Dickens disease. Under that sanctified plaster we wonder whether there is functional plumbing. A little thought suffices to reassure ourselves when we recollect that the refined love of the best of everything has been traded for conjugal rights with a man that physically repelled her even in her days of chaste courtship.

But I will say no more; these short reports are merely an incitement to read. Find it on Gutenberg Project (Complete Saga)http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4397

Room by Emma Donohue

Emma Donnohue's Room is not a book that I normally would have read being allergic to Booker hype but I was staying in a house that had a copy so I took it up. I hardly left it down until it was read. It is told from the perspective of Jack a just 5 year old and the setting is that of a garden shed in which he and his mother are the captives of a man that is referred to as Old Nick. Jack has been born into captivity and to him the TV which they have is no more than images from the dream time with no connection to any free reality. Ma knows that from now on this reality must be adjusted and the real nature of their predicament made clear so she begins to raise that magical diaphane on the misty neverland of Dora the Explorer.

It seems to me that Donohue has brought us into a world that does not bear thinking about, one of profound horror and anxiety as we jog along in the banality of evil hoping that they may somehow escape and that their captor will in turn get a room of his own in the big house. Good read.

Weighting for the Barbarians

So I finished Waiting for the Barbarians and I've been thinking about it. The first thing that occurred to me was that in an age of muskets and bows, empire and Barbarian horde, in a time of danger, no god is invoked. When I looked to check it struck me that god is all through it in the form of god's own tense, the nunc-stans of the continuous present. That this hadn't been apparent to me before because I normally can't abide the intrusiveness of it, that buttonholing, is an indication of the skill of the writing. So if God is in the grammar, where's the devil? In the diction, Mo.

The magistrate narrator is a weighing scales. The sentences are perfectly weighted to the dynamic of the action, he is balanced between the meddling Empire and the nomadic Barbarians. His attachment to a Barbarian girl who has been partially blinded and lamed by the emissaries from the centre causes the pointer to tilt in the direction of folly. He mounts an expedition to return the girl to her people.