The Life of Charlotte Brontë - Elizabeth Gaskell

When Charlotte Brontë died in 1855, she was a famous novelist. Her literary reputation was high after the success of Jane Eyre, Shirley & Villette. However, her personal life was still a subject for gossip & ill-informed rumour. When Charlotte's friend, Ellen Nussey, read an article that mixed critical acclaim with gossipy innuendo about Charlotte's life, she encouraged Charlotte's father, Patrick, & her widower, Arthur Nicholls, to commission a response that would silence the gossip. Although Arthur would have preferred a dignified silence, Patrick was persuaded & he agreed with Ellen that Elizabeth Gaskell was the right person to write such a response. Elizabeth Gaskell was not only a respected novelist herself but had known Charlotte in the last years of her life. The familiar story of the Brontë sisters begins with Gaskell's biography so, instead of retelling that story, I'm going to focus more on the writing of the biography & its effects on Brontë biography ever since.

The book that resulted is one of the greatest biographies ever written about a writer. Gaskell had admired Charlotte & had a profound sympathy for her struggles as a writer & as a woman. She had been just as avid as everyone else to discover the identity of the author of Jane Eyre, which had been published under the pseudonym Currer Bell in 1847. Through her friendship with philanthropist Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth she met Charlotte & they became friends. Gaskell heard from Charlotte herself the sad tale of death & illness that had haunted her family & observed at first hand the struggle Charlotte made to overcome her shyness & her ill-health to enjoy the fame that her books brought her. They corresponded & visited each other so Gaskell was already predisposed to defend Charlotte from any slights when she was asked to write a memoir of her friend. The charge that Jane Eyre was a  "coarse" book, unsuitable for young girls to read, was especially offensive to Gaskell & so she was determined to emphasize the dutiful womanliness of Charlotte Brontë. Her book would show that the unique experiences of Charlotte's life & her devotion to the truth had fed into the work & charges of coarseness & unwomanliness were completely unjustified.

The publication of the Life caused an immediate storm & scandal. The public's desire to know more about the author of Jane Eyre was amply satisfied by the book although those who felt slighted or slandered were not long in coming forward. Gaskell's research had uncovered the truth behind the Lowood scenes in Jane Eyre & she did not scruple to name names when she described Cowan's Bridge & its head, the Rev Carus Wilson, the original of the odious Mr Brocklehurst. She also retold the story of Branwell Brontë's employment with the Robinson family & believed his story of his passion for Mrs Robinson & blamed her for Branwell's decline into alcoholism & death. When Gaskell was writing the book, she jokingly asked her publishers, " Do you mind the law of libel. I have three people I want to libel ...". Unfortunately it was no joke when she was threatened with lawsuits by Lydia Robinson (she had remarried after her husband's death & was now Lady Scott) & the family of Carus Wilson. A second edition was already in print but the third, corrected, edition took her months of work & was eventually longer than the first edition. The edition I read was the first edition which has all the libelous bits intact. Gaskell's righteous anger is clear in these passages & also her reliance on the evidence she gathered from Patrick Brontë & Ellen Nussey as well as Charlotte's own letters.

Patrick Brontë admired the book & felt that it did justice to his daughter but his reputation suffered as well. The picture of Patrick as a stern misanthrope, cutting up his wife's silk dress & destroying his children's coloured boots as too frivolous, made him seem a crank. Gaskell got these stories from a couple of disgruntled former servants but she was too intimidated by Patrick to ask him for his side of the story. He generously refused to reproach her for the portrait she drew of him & it has been said that his reputation has only recently been rehabilitated by the work of biographers like Dudley Green & Juliet Barker. Gaskell also suppressed evidence that didn't fit with her thesis of a woman made great by suffering. She went to Brussels, where Charlotte & Emily Brontë attended the Pensionnat Heger. Here, Charlotte fell in love with her teacher Constantin Heger, the model for Paul Emanuel in Villette. She wrote him passionate letters which Madame Heger had kept & which she showed to Gaskell. Horrified by this evidence of Charlotte's love for a married man, Gaskell attributed Charlotte's misery during her second year in Brussels to worries about Branwell & her family. The secret of the letters was kept until the early 20th century when the Heger's son donated them to the British Library.

One of the great strengths of the biography is the use that Gaskell made of Charlotte's letters. Charlotte's own voice, in her letters to Ellen, to her publishers George Smith & William Smith Williams & to Gaskell herself, is vigorous & alive. Her opinions are pithy &, even though Gaskell edited the letters carefully to remove any details or comments that detracted from the image she wished to present, it was impossible to silence Charlotte's unique voice. Gaskell was a novelist & the narrative reads like a novel, once the early scene setting chapters are past. The story itself could not be more compelling & although she fudged some unpalatable facts & got things wrong, Gaskell's version was substantially true. She may have emphasized Charlotte's domestic virtues over her literary talent, but those domestic virtues were part of Charlotte's life just as much as her work. It wasn't until the later twentieth century that the Brontë Myth (as Lucasta Miller calls it in her wonderful book of that name) of the scribbling sisters in their isolated moorland home was overturned. Gaskell's version of Charlotte's life isn't the only one to read if you want a complete view but it's the only biography written by someone who knew Charlotte & who had a profound sympathy for her life & her work, a fellow novelist who admired the work & was passionately committed to the rehabilitation of her memory.

The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe - Elaine Showalter

Shiny New Books no 10 went live a few days ago & I'm very pleased to have a review in it. I enjoyed Elaine Showalter's new biography of Julia Ward Howe very much. Here's the beginning of my review,

Julia Ward was born in 1819, to a wealthy New York family. Her father’s fortune was in banking and, despite his strict religious beliefs, he felt no guilt about his wealth and spent it accordingly. After Julia’s mother died of puerperal fever after giving birth to her seventh child at the age of only twenty-seven, Samuel Ward’s grief took the form of stricter religious observance. Julia and her sisters were brought up as accomplished young ladies, while her brothers were sent to school. The Ward girls were taught French, dancing and music at which Julia excelled. Their social circle was restricted to family and Sundays were dominated by church services and improving literature. Julia later wrote,

The early years of my youth were passed in seclusion not only of home life, but of a home life most carefully and jealously guarded from all that might be represented in the orthodox trinity of evil, the world, the flesh, and the devil.

You can read the rest here.

There are lots of other enticing reviews in this new issue. New biographies of Thomas De Quincey & Anne Brontë (both of which I definitely want to read), more British Library Crime Classics, the new OUP edition of Flaubert's Sentimental Education (which I've just finished & will be reviewing soon), reprints of books by Eric Ambler, Angela Thirkell & Eudora Welty & much more.

An Autobiography and other writings - Anthony Trollope

I was very pleased to be sent a review copy of this new edition of Anthony Trollope's Autobiography, as I loved it when I read it a few years ago. Trollope is one of my favourite authors & his autobiography is a portrait of a lovable man who survived a miserable childhood & created a happy life for himself, both personally & professionally as a novelist. He was also a very practical man, who kept working in the Post Office for many years while writing his novels. He didn't wait for inspiration to strike but was woken by a servant with a cup of coffee early every morning & wrote his quota before breakfast & heading off to work. This matter of fact attitude to writing & his descriptions of finishing one book on Monday & starting the next on Tuesday, dismayed some early reviewers of the book. His reputation didn't suffer any lasting damage though, as his novels have stayed in print & were among the most popular books (alongside detective novels) read in air raid shelters during the Blitz.

I've linked to my review above but I can't resist quoting this passage again where Trollope answers those critics who think that a writer should live a rarefied life of the mind. Practical & level-headed indeed.

I am well aware that there are many who think that an author in his authorship should not regard money,- nor a painter, or sculptor, or composer in his art. I do not know that this unnatural self-sacrifice is supposed to extend itself further. A barrister, a clergyman, a doctor, an engineer, even actors and architects, may without disgrace follow the bent of human nature, and endeavour to fill their bellies and clothe their backs, and also those of their wives and children, as comfortably as they can by the exercise of their abilities and their crafts.

This new edition also includes some of Trollope's literary criticism, principally a lecture that he gave called On English Prose Fiction as a Rational Amusement. In the lecture, Trollope surveys English novels from the Elizabethan beginnings, through the giants of the 18th century to the present day, although he doesn't mention any living novelists. He divides fiction writers into two camps - before & after Sir Walter Scott, whose work he sees as a high water mark for the art. Trollope declares that novel reading can not be bad for young people, one of the debates that had gone on for as long as novels had been published. Although he is dismissive of the Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe & the even earlier work of Defoe, after Scott, there can be no hesitation in allowing the young to read fiction.

And I will begin by suggesting that if novel-reading be bad for young people, it is bad also for the old. I am disposed to think that the distinction which so many of us make in this matter is similar in its nature to that which we have instituted between the one-o'clock and the seven o'clock dinner. We who are the elders have the richer puddings and the more piquant sauces,- not because they agree with us better than with our children, but because we are able to get them. When I hear of ladies beginning to read French novels after they are married, I always think of the privilege which grown-up people have in spoiling their digestive organs. ... If novels, or any classes of novels, be bad for young women, than they are also bad for young men.

Trollope also refuses to denounce Sensation novels in preference to the Realist novel. He believes that novels should be a combination of both sensation & realism. A novel with no sensational elements in the plot would be boring. His own novels contain forgery, thefts, violent death & real wickedness but just piling on the tragedy will not hold the reader if the characters are not alive to the reader so that the reader cares about them. He gives examples from Scott, Thackeray & Charlotte Brontë,

Truth let there be;- truth of description, truth of character, human truth as to men and women. If there be such truth I do not know that a novel can be too sensational.

Other articles include an extract from his writings on Nathaniel Hawthorne & a few pages on the critical biography on Thackeray that he wrote for a Men and Letters series. I can't finish without quoting his opinions on Jane Austen. Trollope admired Austen & these comments were written in the his copy of Emma & in the travel book he wrote, The New Zealander, where he said,

With Mr and Mrs Bennet and Lady Catherine de Burgh we are quite at home. With the Mansfields and the Crofts we have our sympathies and antipathies with the surrounding families in our own village or our own circle. The return of Sir Thomas is as when our own father came upon us in our juvenile delinquencies; and we can hardly help believing that we ourselves received Mr Collins' letters each with one of Rowland Hill's penny stamps in the corner of the envelope.

Even here, Trollope can't resist a mention of the Post Office.

He wasn't quite so fond of Emma.

Her conduct to her friend Harriet,- her assumed experience and real ignorance of human nature - are terribly true; but nowadays we dare not make our heroines so little. Her weaknesses are all plain to us, but of her strengths we are only told; and even at the last we hardly know why Mr Knightley loves her.

The Introduction by Nicholas Shrimpton discusses the reception of the Autobiography, which was published after Trollope's death, & the way that Trollope's revelations about his working habits & his almost entire effacement of his personal life affected his reputation among critics.

Oxford University Press kindly sent me a review copy of An Autobiography and other writings.

Deadlier Than the Male - Jessica Mann

In 1981, Jessica Mann wrote Deadlier Than the Male. As the subtitle says, it's An investigation into feminine crime writing. Last year, it was released as an eBook with a new Foreward by the author. As I've always been interested in the authors Mann investigates - Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham & Josephine Tey - I'm almost sure I read the book when it was first published. However, that was a long time ago & I was interested to see what the landscape of women's crime writing was like 35 years ago & whether I would agree with Mann's opinions on the women known as the Queens of Crime.

The first half of the book is a survey of the development of the crime novel & the different types of hero & heroine. The second half concentrates on the five authors & gives an account of their lives & careers. I found it fascinating to read of the many forgotten novelists whose work had not survived but who have recently been reprinted in series such as the British Library Crime Classics. Mann suggests that their work just wasn't good enough to survive but tastes change & what was seen as irredeemably old-fashioned 50 years after publication is seen as fascinatingly retro after 85 years. The availability of digital publishing has also made the work of a lot of forgotten authors available again & I think that phenomenon helped to create the appetite for Golden Age mysteries that has been satisfied by the many reprints we're enjoying now.

One comment that I had to smile at referred to

... the numerous excellent writers like Margaret Kennedy, E M Delafield, Angela Thirkell and Storm Jameson, to mention only a few, whose sensitive and literate novels are out of fashion now.

All these authors have been reprinted as paperback or eBook editions in the last few years & are enjoying quite a revival. Even more delicious is that the revival of "sensitive and literate" women's fiction owes so much to Jessica Mann's sister, Nicola Beauman, founder of Persephone Books. That's just a tangent but I couldn't resist quoting it as an example of how our reading lives have changed for the better & our access to books has broadened since the 1980s.

Mann discusses the appeal of crime fiction in the twentieth century & argues that the chaos of life leads to a desire for order which is satisfied by a novel that creates order out of strife. The popularity of mystery novels focusing on murder & disruption during WWII would seem counter-intuitive but, on the contrary, there was a feeling of reassurance in reading a novel that tied up all the loose ends & restored normal life at the end. Crime was the most popular genre during the War & the puzzle detective novel was at its height during the 1940s. Exotic settings, in an age when foreign travel was more difficult & unusual, added another layer to the reader's enjoyment. Agatha Christie set her books in the Middle East, Egypt & the south of France as well as in St Mary Mead & London. Closed communities - from a wartime hospital to a fashion house, theatre or Oxford college - were also popular & the authors that used these settings often knew them intimately. If you're a reader of Golden Age crime, you'll recognize those settings & the authors all made use of either personal experience or detailed research to make the books unforgettable.

Mann also contrasts the formulaic novels of the Golden Age with their stock characters & bloodless corpses with the more realistic thrillers that were published in the 1960s & 1970s. She describes the difference as ...between optimism and pessimism, almost, in some cases between hope and despair. Formula may bring a sense of comfort but greater realism was inevitable as society changed after the War. Even Agatha Christie, whose novels relied more on fiendish plotting than on description of either character or place, tried, not always successfully, to move with the times in her novels written in the 1950s & 1960s. The continued popularity of these writers is also remarkable & most of them continued writing after the period that has become known as the Golden Age. Dorothy L Sayers stopped writing detective fiction in the late 1930s but her books have never been out of print & Mann sees them as the books that can be read with pleasure as novels even after the reader knows the denouement of the plot (I agree with that. Sayers is one of the few detective novelists I reread often for the pleasure of revisiting the 1930s). Margery Allingham died in 1966 & Josephine Tey in 1952 but they are still popular, maybe even more so now than in the 1980s when Mann was writing. Ngaio Marsh was the only one of the five authors alive when Mann wrote Deadlier Than the Male (Marsh died in 1982).

In her quest to discover why these "respectable English women" (Marsh was a New Zealander & Tey was Scottish but they both mainly set their books in England) are so good at writing about murder, Mann looks at their lives & careers.

... I believe that their experiences tended to induce in them similar assumptions: that stability was desirable, and when threatened, should be restored; that reason should prevail over violence; that the customs of a secure and unthreatened class had an intrinsic merit. I think that the ethos they expressed in fictional form was acquired during and from their own lives, and was equally attractive and admirable to readers less able to express it.

The biographical details of the writers' lives are briskly told. She looks at the trajectory of each author's career, from Dorothy L Sayers quite openly admitting that she wrote the Wimsey books for money & stopped when she discovered something else that she wanted to devote herself to (her translations of Dante) to Margery Allingham's pragmatic desire to write books that will sell (she came from a family of writers). Josephine Tey & Ngaio Marsh were much more interested in the theatre. Tey wrote some successful plays & referred to her detective novels as her knitting while Marsh wrote to finance her theatrical work, producing plays, especially Shakespeare & her crime fiction was very much in second place. Mann knows the work of all these writers well & can discuss plot & the development of character. The reticence of these five writers about their personal lives may have led them to write detective fiction with its strict rules & conventions rather than more personal forms of fiction. They would be unlikely to be completely comfortable writing thrillers like Patricia Highsmith, with her fascination in the character of the criminal or like Ruth Rendell & P D James, who write much more realistically & graphically about murder & about the effects on those who come into contact with it. She sees writers of romantic suspense, like Mary Stewart & Helen MacInnes, as the heirs to the Golden Age writers, rather than crime writers who tear away the veil of respectability & look at evil so directly.

Deadlier Than the Male is a great overview of the development of detective fiction & the work of these five women writers in particular. Although there have been many biographies & critical volumes devoted to these writers, Mann's insights into the influence of the life on the work & her judgements on the work, are still very relevant today.

Charlotte Brontë : a life - Claire Harman

2016 is the bicentenary of the birth of Charlotte Brontë. There will be many books & articles published next year about Charlotte of which this new biography by Claire Harman is just the first.I've read dozens of books about the Brontës but can never resist just one more, especially when it's written by Claire Harman, who has written so well about other writers - Fanny Burney, Sylvia Townsend Warner & Robert Louis Stevenson.

The story of the Brontë family is so well-known that, instead of retelling it here, I thought I'd focus on some of the aspects of this book that particularly struck me. The last major biography of Charlotte was published in 1994, Lyndall Gordon's wonderful book, Charlotte Brontë : a passionate life. I have a recording (taped from the TV in the olden days) of a BBC program from 1995 about Charlotte which I've watched many times. It focused on two photographs that had recently been identified as being of her. One of these was discovered in the archives of the National Portrait Gallery & the other belonged to Audrey Hall, a member of the Brontë Society & a connection of Ellen Nussey, Charlotte's friend. The program followed Audrey Hall as she tried to authenticate her photograph &, incidentally, allowed some of the odder members of the Brontë Society to discuss their psychic experiences of being contacted by Charlotte & their disapproval of Charlotte's husband, Arthur Nicholls for only being interested in Charlotte once she was famous.

Lyndall Gordon was interviewed in the program & spoke very movingly about the letters Charlotte wrote to Monsieur Heger. She also talked about the thesis of her book, which did away with the image of Charlotte as a dutiful daughter & sister with her writing coming out of nowhere which had been promoted by Elizabeth Gaskell in her biography of Charlotte. Gordon's book portrayed Charlotte as a professional writer who used the circumstances of her life in her fiction. She also used the NPG photograph of Charlotte on the cover of her book instead of the portrait by George Richmond which is a very flattering image of Charlotte if it's compared with descriptions of Charlotte by those who knew her. I was fascinated when reading Claire Harman's book to discover that the NPG photo is now thought to be of Ellen Nussey rather than Charlotte so the Richmond portrait is back on the cover of the book (there's more about Claire Harman's theory about the photographs in this TLS article).

Claire Harman is very good at exploring how Charlotte used her experiences in the fiction. Not only the major events, such as her unrequited love for her teacher in Brussels, Monsieur Heger, or the scarring experience of the Cowan Bridge school that became Lowood in Jane Eyre, but the emotional resonances of the deaths of her two older sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, when Charlotte was only a child.

But the griefs and fears expressed in Charlotte's dream (when she was at boarding school, that Maria and Elizabeth returned but were society ladies who dismissed her) touched a nerve that resonated painfully all her life : the understanding that there was a loss beyond loss, that bereavements might not only multiply but intensify. Such feelings torment the protagonist of Villette at the novel's crisis, the eye of suffering tin that most suffering book : "Methought the well-loved dead, who had loved me well in life, met me elsewhere, alienated: galled was my inmost spirit with an unutterable sense of despair." Time does move on for the bereaved, but alarmingly. Healing, 'recovering', from a death is also a form of estrangement, a further loss.

I also enjoyed the way that Harman sees Charlotte using the vast body of juvenilia in her later work. Charlotte & her brother, Branwell, created a world they called Angria. They wrote millions of words about the characters of Angria, stories, histories & fantasies that Charlotte came to call "the world below". She finally realised that her indulgence in her Angrian fantasies was like a drug & she famously wrote her Farewell to Angria when she decided to leave it behind. However, elements of Angria crop up in her novels, especially Jane Eyre.

With the massive literature of Angria and The Professor to her credit already, Charlotte had served as long and hard an apprenticeship as any writer could expect, but the perfection of Jane Eyre still takes one by surprise. The story itself is one of the most gripping ever written, and the telling of it effortlessly clever and assured: Adele's childish prattle as she introduces herself to Mademoiselle guilelessly exposes Rochester's chequered past; Mrs Fairfax is both friendly and secretive; ... And, although the novel is thoroughly Gothic in its use of dark stairways, mad women, mysterious laughter, fire, exile, near-starvation - the whole glorious gamut, in other words - Jane's resolute common sense, fatalism and instinct for the rational allow the enjoyment of all this "burning clime" material without degenerating into the incredible.

One phrase of Harman's that I loved was her description of Charlotte's authorial interruptions as "Another bog burst from Charlotte's seething substratum". The bog burst refers to a real incident from Charlotte's childhood when Branwell, Emily & Anne were out on the moors one day with a servant when there was a bog burst caused by a build up of gases in the peat. Although Charlotte wasn't there, she would surely have heard about it & read the poem her father, Patrick, wrote about it. The particular bog burst referred to here is in Shirley, when Charlotte suddenly breaks into a passage about Shirley's charitable plans for the neighbourhood with an extraordinary description of a scheming (non-English) woman the author has once known, obviously Mme Heger.

Charlotte (or the narrator) breaks in to all the novels with these asides to the reader - the most famous being "Reader, I married him" in Jane Eyre. What did the first readers of the novels make of it? They must have been mystified. What did the Hegers make of it & what did they make of Villette, the novel most closely associated with Charlotte's time in Brussels? Charlotte tried to prevent her novels being translated into French but was she still trying to make contact with Monsieur Heger even though he had refused to reply to her letters? Had she turned her unrequited love into rage? Claire Harman also speculates that Madame Heger retrieved & pieced together Charlotte's letters to her husband (which he'd thrown away) to use as proof that Charlotte was mad if any scandal ever touched her school. I feel as though I need to reread all the novels again as I'd never noticed that description of Madame Heger in Shirley. What else have I missed?

Claire Harman's book is a sober, low key retelling of Charlotte's story. There's very little new information, although she does identify a drawing in an atlas owned by Charlotte as a self-portrait, but I did enjoy Harman's insights into the novels & the way that Charlotte's experiences in Belgium are evident in all her fiction, not just The Professor & Villette.

More - Max Beerbohm

Max Beerbohm is an acquired taste. He has that witty, fin-de-siècle style reminiscent of the authors of the 1890s - Oscar Wilde & the writers at The Yellow Book are probably the best-known examples. Beerbohm's essays remind me of the languid figures in Aubrey Beardsley's drawings. I'm never quite sure when he's being serious but then, that's half the fun of reading his essays.

The only other book by Beerbohm that I've read is Zuleika Dobson, a complete fantasy about a girl so beautiful that whole groups of Oxford undergraduates fall into the river while gazing at her. Complete nonsense but a lot of fun to read. I felt a little like that about the essays collected in More. This book was published in 1899, when Beerbohm was only in his late 20s. It was his second book of essays (hence the title) & I think the best way to read them is to read one or two at a time. That's what I did, I read one nearly every night & although I'm sure I didn't always catch the irony, I did enjoy reading Beerbohm's opinions on the many subjects he pokes fun at here.

Maybe the best way to decide if you're going to enjoy Beerbohm's style is to read a few examples. In "The Sea-side in Winter", he enjoys his melancholy,

After the first day or so, my melancholy leaves me.The very loneliness of the place does but accentuate my proprietary sense. From the midst of all this lifeless monotony I stand out, a dominant and most romantic personage. Were I in London, who would notice me, no prince there? Even here, in the Season, I had but a slight pre-eminence over other visitors. But now I need but show myself to create a glow of interest and wonder. The blind man, standing by his telescope, knows my tread and tries, I think, to picture my appearance. The old gentlemen see in me the incarnation of splendid youth; the shop people, a dispenser of great riches; the school-girls, a prodigy of joyous freedom from French verbs. I could not have levied these tributes in the month of August.

On trying to convince shopkeepers that their window displays are so much less effective that the traditional sign-boards of the past,

Are you a jeweller? You fill your window with a garish and unseemly chaos of all you have : bracelets, sleeve-links, penknives, tiaras - toute la boutique. Your rival in Paris, even in New York, is much wiser. He understands the value of a reticent symbolism. Very little he puts into his window. What he puts is good. Men and women, beholding, praise it. Their imagination has been stirred, their appetite whetted from the things that are withheld, and they long to enter in at the door. Last winter, in the Rue de la Paix, I saw a jewel-window, sir, that should serve for an example to you. It was lined with scarlet velvet and illustrious with electric light. In the very middle of it, lay, like a bomb in a palace, one beautiful black pearl. Had I been rich, I must have entered.

He manages to insult the local jeweller, give a back-handed compliment to New York & exult himself as an arbiter of good taste while also admitting that he hasn't the money to afford the beautiful things he craves.

In an essay on Going Back to School, he remembers the awfulness of the journey to the station at the end of the holidays, counting down the hours & minutes until he arrived (even paying for a first-class seat himself so as to avoid his companions for as long as possible,

Not that I had any special reason for hating school! Strange as it may seem to my readers, I was not unpopular there. I was a modest, good-humoured boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable. At school, my character remained in a state of undevelopment. I had a few misgivings, perhaps. In some respects I was always too young, in others, too old, for a perfect relish of the convention. As I hovered, in grey knickerbockers, on a cold and muddy field, round the outskirts of a crowd that was tearing itself from limb to limb for the sake of a leathern bladder, I would often wish for a nice, warm room and a good game of hunt-the-slipper. And, when we sallied forth, after dark, in the frost, to the swimming-bath, my heart would steal back to the fireside in Writing Home and the plot of Miss Braddon's latest novel.

I can't disagree with him there! I have to believe that he was joking when he deplores the Fire Brigade's habit of putting out fires & thereby saving ugly buildings from destruction. That's surely taking aestheticism too far. Some of his essays are still relevant today. A Cloud of Pinafores is about the cult of the child, "But, now that children are booming, the publishers and reviewers are all agog." I loved the observation that children could now be as impertinent as they liked without being told to mind their manners. In Victorian times, the nursery was a stern place, full of discipline & cautionary verses to keep a child on the straight & narrow. Now, children have such absolute freedom that they are shocked by real life when they leave the nursery,

Finding no pleasure in a freedom which they have always had, incapable of that self-control which long discipline produces, they will become neurotic, ineffectual men and women. In the old days, there could have been no reaction of this kind. The strange sense of freedom was a recompense for less happiness of heart. Children were fit for life.

What would Beerbohm have thought about children's fashion labels, babycinos & the abolition of prize-giving at sports days because "everyone's a winner"?

Other essays on the state of the music hall, the novels of Ouida & Madame Tussaud's waxworks are equally entertaining. You probably know by now whether or not Max Beerbohm is for you. Simon has also reviewed More in the latest issue of Shiny New Books.

The publisher, Mike Walmer, kindly sent me a copy of More for review.

The Life of Charles Dickens - John Forster

It might seem odd in the 21st century to read a biography of Charles Dickens that was written in the 1870s, the middle of the Victorian period, a time notorious for hushing up scandals & publishing hagiographies of the great & good. If you really want to know about Dickens, surely it's better to read Slater, Ackroyd, Tomalin or Johnson? After all, you won't find out about Dickens's cruel behaviour to his wife or about his affair with Ellen Ternan in a book written just after his death by his best friend. It's true. Forster barely mentions Catherine Dickens (in Dickens's letters she goes from being called Kate to Catherine to poor Catherine to silence) & I only caught one mention of Ellen (I assume the E mentioned is Ellen) at the very end of the book. Dickens is recounting a dream in a letter to Forster,

On Thursday night in last week, being at the office here, I dreamed that I saw a lady in a red shawl with her back towards me (whom I supposed to be E). On her turning round I found that I didn't know her, and she said "I am Miss Napier."  All the time I was dressing next morning, I thought - What a preposterous thing to have so very distinct a dream about nothing! and why Miss Napier? for I never heard of any Miss Napier. That same Friday night, I read. After the reading came into my retiring-room, Mary Boyle and her brother, and the Lady in the red shawl whom they present as Miss Napier! These are all the circumstances, exactly told. May 30, 1863 quoted in Volume 3, Chapter 19)

But, I loved this big, baggy monster of a book. I'm not sure exactly how baggy it is. I listened to Volume 1 on audio (beautifully read by Greg Wagland from Magpie Audio) & read Volumes 2 & 3 as ebooks as part of the Delphi Classics Dickens, but it must be over 1,000 pages. I bought the illustrated, abridged edition for my library a few years ago & that's 500pp. Forster has always struck me as a bit of a plodder - Watson to Dickens's Holmes - & it's true that his writing is quite pedestrian. He was one of those Victorian literary men who are forgotten today except in their relationships with other famous Victorians. I've always been fascinated to know that John Forster was engaged to the poet, L.E.L. (Letitia Elizabeth Landon). As a woman making a living from her writing, Landon was a controversial figure, who was rumoured to have had affairs & borne children out of wedlock. Forster asked her to refute the rumours & she asked him to investigate for himself. Apparently he was satisfied but she broke off the engagement because she said she couldn't marry a man who distrusted her. Forster strikes me as so cautious & careful that I can't imagine him engaged to Landon in the first place. I believe that Lucasta Miller (author of The Brontë Myth) is writing a biography of Landon & I can't wait to read it. Forster is mainly remembered these days as the friend & first biographer of Dickens.

Forster tells the story of Dickens's life - his childhood, family, early attempts at writing, the overnight success of The Pickwick Papers, the growing readership with each new novel, the periodicals he "conducted", his travels to America & Europe & the famous series of readings of his own work that made Dickens even more famous by the end of his life. The writing is genial & painstaking. However, as soon as Dickens makes a personal appearance in his letters or in an anecdote Forster remembers from their long friendship, the narrative fizzes. This is the real attraction of the book for me & makes me keen to read more of Dickens's letters. The letters show what a genius Dickens was. Everything he wrote became a story & some of his letters are as well-shaped as a chapter from the novels. The story of the death of the raven, Grip, is so moving yet so very funny. Magpie Audio chose this section of the book as the audio sample on Audible &, after hearing that, I just had to listen to the whole book.

The advantages that Forster brings to the familiar story lie in his intimate acquaintance with Dickens. Forster was not only a friend but a literary adviser, reading the novels in proof as they were written & advising on titles, illustrations & dealings with printers & publishers. He was one of the few people who knew about Dickens's experiences as a child - his father's imprisonment for debt & his own period of humiliation working in the blacking factory. It was in this biography that Dickens's reminiscences of his childhood were revealed for the first time. I found those early chapters very moving, even though I've read the story many times before. Imagine how the first readers would have felt, seeing the inspiration for many of the characters & plots of the novels based so closely on the author's own experiences.

Although Forster is discreet to the point of impenetrability at certain moments of Dickens's life, his personal knowledge of the man allows him to give some insight into his character which is impossible for any later biographer because it comes from personal observation. This is how he describes Dickens at the time of the breakdown of his marriage in 1858,

An unsettled feeling, greatly in excess of what was usual with Dickens, more or less observable since his first residence at Boulogne, became at this time almost habitual, and the satisfactions which home should have supplied, and which indeed were essential requirements of his nature, he had failed to find in his home. He had not the alternative that under this disappointment some can discover in what is called society. It did not suit him and he set no store by it. ... It was among those defects of temperament for which his early trials and his early successes were accountable in perhaps equal measure. He was sensitive in a passionate degree to praise and blame, which yet he made it for the most part a point of pride to assume indifference to; ... His early sufferings brought with them the healing powers of energy, will, and persistence, and taught him the inexpressible value of a determined resolve to live down difficulties... (Volume 3, Chapter 7)

The subject of the public readings Dickens gave is one where the two men disagreed quite decisively. Forster was against the readings. He felt that they would not enhance his reputation & the implication is that they were a little beneath him. They were too close to theatre & actors were regarded as socially & morally suspect (Claire Tomalin's book, The Invisible Woman, gives an excellent account of the world of the Victorian theatre & the less than respectable reputation of actors in relation to the Ternan family). Forster also feared that Dickens's health would not be up to the strain - & he was right about that. Dickens was determined to go ahead. He was a showman & loved the theatre, putting on plays with his family & for benefit performances for fellow writers. He loved to be in charge & he conducted his theatrical adventures as he did every other part of his life, with 110% effort & commitment. He was also tempted by the considerable sums of money that managers & entrepreneurs were willing to pay him.

I found myself wondering what the first readers & critics made of this. Trollope was derided for seeing his writing as a job, writing so many words every day & being pleased with the money he made, which he described in his Autobiography. Dickens may have loved being on stage but he loved the money he made just as much. Letter after letter to Forster lists the takings from each night's readings, the effect his reading had on the audience (women fainting & having to be taken from the theatre) & the queues of people desperate to get tickets.

The last years of Dickens's life were plagued by ill health. He was involved in the Staplehurst railway crash & this shook his nerves as well as resulting in physical problems. His left side was affected, especially his foot, which swelled so much at times that he couldn't walk. For a man who could walk all night without any ill effect (& often did), this meant that he was deprived of an outlet for his energy that he needed. His night walking also helped him to think through his work & gave him that intimate knowledge of London & the countryside around his home at Gad's Hill that he used so well in the novels. Forster tried to convince him to give up the readings & slow down but this was Dickens's reply,

"Too late to say, put the curb on, and don't rush at hills - the wrong man to say it to. I have now no relief but in action. I am incapable of rest. I am quite confident I should rust, break, and die, if I spared myself. Much better to die, doing. What I am in that way, nature made me first, and my way of life has of late, alas! confirmed.I must accept the drawback - since it is one - with the powers I have; and I must hold upon the tenure prescribed to me."

Forster describes the grief of people from all over the world when Dickens died & quotes the letters that he received. He describes his purpose in writing the Life to be to show the man himself, the way his books were conceived & written, using the letters written to him & the recollections of others. He says that he used barely half the letters in his possession & I think I read somewhere that he destroyed all the letters when the book was finished. If only he hadn't burned the letters! One of the many If onlys in literary history (If only we had Emily Brontë's second novel, if only we had Charlotte Brontë's letters to Mary Taylor, if only Dickens himself hadn't had so many bonfires of his correspondence, if only Princess Beatrice hadn't censored Queen Victoria's letters...). Still, there's no use crying over burnt letters & at least we have the hundreds of quotations in this book.

I wouldn't recommend Forster's Life as the first book to read about Dickens but it's definitely worth reading if you've read the modern biographies & want a more intimate view of the man. For all the discretion & the obfuscation, Forster's Life is fascinating in the way that Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë is fascinating. The authors knew their subjects & the sense of intimacy & personal knowledge makes up for the evidence suppressed & the curtains drawn over the less attractive aspects of their subject's character.

Women Writers and Detectives in Nineteenth-Century Crime Fiction : the mothers of the mystery genre - Lucy Sussex

I've always been interested in how the literary canon is decided upon. Who makes the decisions & which authors are left out & why? As a lover of mystery & detective fiction, this is an area that particularly interests me. Having read Lucy Sussex's earlier work on Ellen Davitt & Mary Helena Fortune (two Australian women crime writers featured in this book), I'd had my eye on this book for some time. It's part of Palgrave Macmillan's Crime Files academic series & quite pricey so I borrowed it on Inter Library Loan & I'm very glad I did. Don't be put off by the academic tag. This is an immensely readable survey of early women crime writers & it made me want to immediately get hold of more of their work.

Sussex begins with a look at early crime fiction, the Newgate novels about criminals, the role of newspapers in retelling the stories of crimes as they happened - the report of the crime itself, the investigations, then the trial & the outcome. The Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe introduced elements of crime & mystery as did novels of the 1830s such as Eugene Aram by Bulwer Lytton & Jack Sheppard by William Ainsworth. Edgar Allan Poe's stories featuring Chevalier Dupin were published in the 1840s & are often seen as the beginning of crime fiction but already Sussex has demonstrated that the genre stretches much further back.

I particularly enjoyed reading about the lives of the women writers featured in the book. I knew Catherine Crowe as a writer of ghost stories- her book The Night Side of Nature is a classic account of psychic phenomena. However, I didn't know about her crime novels, The Adventures of Susan Hopley; or Circumstantial Evidence & Men and Women. Susan Hopley was published in 1841, the same year as Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Its success is shown by the fact that it was soon parodied & a stage version was produced. Crowe's novels use female amateur detectives & complex plots. Her life was as fascinating as her books. She was an eccentric women, who wrote novels, stories & plays, held literary salons & was pilloried for her interest in the supernatural. She had a nervous breakdown which led to her wandering naked in the streets of Edinburgh one night. This incident led to her becoming a figure of fun in the literary world, even though she soon recovered from her illness.

Other authors are better known. The work of Mary Elizabeth Braddon has had quite a resurgence in recent years. She was one of the most prominent authors of Sensation fiction & often compared favourably with Wilkie Collins. Her private life, like Collins's, was unconventional. She lived with her married publisher, John Maxwell, for years as he couldn't divorce his wife. She looked after his six children & she had six of her own, while writing & publishing a phenomenal amount of fiction. Many of her novels had elements of crime, especially in later years when the enthusiasm for sensation had waned. Ellen (Mrs Henry) Wood is best known today for her bestselling Sensation novel, East Lynne. Her private life couldn't be more different to Braddon's. Very little is known apart from a hagiographic memoir written by her son after her death which portrays her as an eminently respectable wife & mother. Ellen Wood wrote many novels of varying quality & this may be one reason why she & Braddon are not as respected as their male contemporaries.

The most interesting chapter of the book was about two Australian authors, Ellen Davitt & Mary Helena Fortune. Davitt wrote the first mystery novel published in Australia - Force and Fraud (1865) - & Fortune, the longest running crime serial. Lucy Sussex has brought these two women out of the shadows with her extensive research into their lives & work. She continued the research of John Kinmont Moir, who investigated Fortune in the 1950s when there were still people alive who remembered her. Fortune's long career involved writing serials for newspapers, badly paid work that often left her nearly homeless. She knew about the law from both sides - her second husband was a mounted police trooper & her son, George, spent over 20 years in prison& had a lengthy criminal record. Sussex has edited the work of both women & I remember reading it when it was published in the 1980s. Ellen Davitt has been commemorated in the awards for women's crime fiction awarded each year by Sisters in Crime Australia.

The American writer, Anna Katherine Green, is often called the mother of the detective novel. Her bestseller, The Leavenworth Case, was published in 1878 so, having read this book, it's easy to see that there were many women who came before Green. She was still an important writer as she wrote several detective series, two of them featuring women detectives. Another American writer, Metta Victor, published her detective fiction under the androgynous pseudonym Seeley Register. She wrote across many genres, including household advice & anti-slavery polemics. Her detective novel, The Dead Letter, is still in print & has been regarded as technically innovative & tightly plotted.

I wanted to read almost every novel Sussex discussed. I have quite a few of them, especially Mary Elizabeth Braddon's & I've downloaded several free ebooks. More have been added to wishlists. I can recommend this book to anyone interested in the development of the crime novel & especially the contribution of women writers, many of them unjustly forgotten until recently. Lucy Sussex has a new book about to be published which I'm also looking forward to reading. Called Blockbuster!, it's the story of another Australian crime fiction phenomenon, Fergus Hume's The Mystery of a Hansom Cab.

The Letters of Lord Byron - selected by R G Howarth

Lord Byron is one of the most famous literary figures the world has ever known. Whether his fame is due to his romantically early death in the cause of Greek independence or because of his scandalous private life, Byron was famous amongst his contemporaries & remains famous today. His fame should rest on his wonderful poetry & his letters, which I've been reading over the last month, rather than speculation about whether he had an affair with his half-sister or what he could possibly have done to make his wife leave him only a year after their marriage. The letters are full of fun & wit. I laughed out loud often but Byron also writes of his misery over the death of friends; his despair at his famously unhappy marriage & the aftermath of his separation from Annabella. He tells a fantastically good story & often skewers an opponent (often his much-loathed mother-in-law, Lady Noel) with a witty phrase.

His correspondents include his half-sister, Augusta, his friends, Thomas Moore & John Cam Hobhouse, & his publisher, John Murray. The letters to Murray are my favourites. In between instructions for the publication of his latest work, he implores Murray to send him supplies of magnesia, corn plasters & tooth powder. Quotations from Shakespeare (particularly Macbeth), Scott & other favourite authors are just dropped in everywhere, in the middle of sentences, as if his thoughts were a mixture of  his reading & his own experience.

Most of the letters were written in his self-imposed exile in Italy, where he went to escape the gossip surrounding the end of his marriage. Byron was already famous for his poetry by this time, especially Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which drew on his experiences travelling in Greece & the Middle East. His style is so readable, racy & colloquial, like a novel in verse, giving the impression that it was just dashed off, written as quickly as it can be read. The public confused the man with his creations & the image of the Byronic hero was an amalgam of Byron himself & his characters. His relationships, most notoriously with Lady Caroline Lamb, who called him "mad, bad and dangerous to know" & wrote a novel, Glenarvon, about their affair, added to the mystique surrounding him.

As you can see, I kept putting sticky notes in my copy as I read & I'd much rather share some of my favourite passages so you can hear the man himself rather than me trying to describe him.

To Anne Isabella Milbanke, after their engagement,

I did not believe such a woman existed - at least for me,- and I sometimes fear I ought to wish that she had not. I must turn from the subject.
My love, do forgive me if I have written in a spirit that renders you uncomfortable. I cannot embody my feelings in words. I have nothing to desire - nothing I would see altered in you - but so much in myself. I can conceive no misery equal to mine, if I failed in making you happy,- and yet how can I hope to do justice to those merits from whose praise there is not a dissentient voice?
14 October 1814

To his sister, Augusta,

I heard the other day that she (Annabella) was very unwell. I was shocked enough - and sorry enough, God knows, but never mind; H (Hobhouse) tells me however that she is not ill; that she had been indisposed, but is better and well to do - This is a relief. As for me I am in good health, and fair, though very unequal spirits; but for all that - she - or rather the Separation - has broken my heart. I feel as if an Elephant had trodden on it. I am convinced that I shall never get over it - but I try.
8 September 1816

To Thomas Moore,

I rejoice to hear of your forthcoming in February - though I tremble for the 'magnificence' which you attribute to the new Childe Harold. I am glad you like it; it is a fine indistinct piece of poetical desolation, and my favourite. I was half mad during the time of its composition, between metaphysics, mountains, lakes, love unextinguishable, thoughts unutterable, and the nightmare of my own delinquencies. I should, many a good day, have blown my brains out, but for the recollection that it would have given pleasure to my mother-in-law; and, even then, if I could have been certain to haunt her - but I won't dwell upon these trifling family matters.
28 January 1817

To John Murray,

The story of Shelley's agitation (on the famous night when Byron, the Shelleys & Dr Polidori told each other ghost stories & Mary Shelley had the nightmare that resulted in her writing Frankenstein) is true. I can't tell what seized him for he don't want courage. He was once with me in a gale of Wind, in a small boat, right under the rocks between Meillerie and St Gingo. ... The sail was mismanaged, and the boat was filling fast. He can't swim. I stripped off my coat - made him strip off his and take hold of an oar, telling him that I thought (being an expert swimmer) I could save him, if he would not struggle when I took hold of him ... He answered me with the greatest coolness, that 'he had no notion of being saved, and that I would have enough to do to save myself, and begged not to trouble me.' Luckily, the boat righted, and, baling, we got round a point into St Gingo ... 
And yet the same Shelley, who was as cool as it was possible to be in such circumstances ... certainly had the fit of phantasy which Polidori describes, though not exactly as he describes it.
15 May 1819

To John Murray,

Dear Murray,
I have been thinking over our late correspondence, and wish to propose to you the following articles for our future:-
1stly That you shall write to me of yourself, of the health, wealth, and welfare of all friends; but of me (quoad me) little or nothing.
2dly That you shall send me Soda powders, tooth-powder, tooth-brushes, or any such anti-odontalgic or chemical articles, as heretofore, ad libitum, upon being re-imbursed for the same.
3dly that you shall not send me any modern, or (as they are called) new, publications in English whatsoever, save and excepting any writing, prose or verse, of (or reasonably presumed to be of) Walter Scott, Crabbe, Moore ... or any especial single work of fancy, which is thought to be of considerable merit. ...
5thly That you send me no opinions whatsoever, whether good, bad, or indifferent, of yourself, or your friends, or others, concerning any work, or works, of mine, past, present, or to come.
24 September 1821

This edition is a reprint of the 1933 selection of the Letters by R G Howarth. Byron's Letters were originally collected & published by Thomas Moore, who deleted some material considered too shocking or embarrassing for publication, replacing the offending words with asterisks. It wasn't until Leslie Marchand's 12 volume Collected Letters was published in the 1970s, that an unexpurgated edition was available.

Thank you to Mike Walmer for sending me a review copy.

The Road to Middlemarch - Rebecca Mead

The subtitle of this book is My Life with George Eliot. Rebecca Mead has read Middlemarch every five years since she was 17 & has been profoundly influenced by the novel. She is also fascinated with the author & this book is a combination of personal memoir, biography of Eliot & exploration of Middlemarch, the characters & their origins.

I enjoyed this book so much. I think Middlemarch is a remarkable book. I've read it twice, most recently last year for dovegreyreader's group read, Team Middlemarch (all the posts are still there if you want to start your own group read) & it's completely absorbing. I was a little apprehensive about the idea for The Road to Middlemarch as there's a great temptation for the author to gush & for the personal story to overwhelm the criticism. I think Rebecca Mead has balanced the different aspects of the book very well. The genesis of the book was an article Mead wrote for the New Yorker (almost exactly three years ago, on February 14th, 2011) about Eliot but her interest in Eliot was already deep. The book is structured as the novel is, in eight Books with the chapters of The Road to Middlemarch bearing the same titles as the original.

Born in the UK but living in the US for most of her adult life, Mead tells her own personal story alongside Eliot's. She also visits many of the places associated with Eliot & I loved these sections. Mead handles the manuscript of Middlemarch, visits the place where Eliot was born, travels to libraries in the UK & US to see & touch objects Eliot owned. She describes Eliot's life, from her provincial childhood to her renunciation of religion, decision to live in London, her work as an editor, meeting with George Henry Lewes, the man she would live with for 20 years & her work as a writer. She quotes from Eliot's notebooks & letters & the recollections of those who met her. Following in her footsteps gives Mead a chance to meditate on the changes time has wrought on the places Eliot once knew as well as sparking memories of her own life.

The most interesting part of the book for me was the deep exploration & discussion of the plot & characters of Middlemarch. Mead explores the beginnings of the book. Eliot wrote the first Book, Miss Brooke, first & only then decided to introduce Tertius Lydgate & his story which made the novel more ambitious & expansive. As the subtitle of the novel puts it, A Study of Provincial Life. She discusses the possible models for Dorothea & Casaubon; the authorial voice; the humour in the book & the things that Eliot leaves out. For instance, we learn a lot about Lydgate's childhood & origins but virtually nothing about Dorothea's. Eliot writes that Dorothea's parents died when she & her sister, Celia, were "about twelve years old." This imprecise statement puzzles Mead every time she reads the novel but she concludes, "George Eliot doesn't need to provide Dorothea with a fleshed-out childhood, or a detailed history. She comes into the world of the novel fully developed, like a second Minerva." I also enjoyed the discussion about Mary Garth, one of my favourite characters. I was glad to see how seriously Mead considers Mary & her relationship with Fred Vincy. Their relationship is one of the love stories in the book, just as important as Dorothea & Will Ladislaw or Lydgate & Rosamond.

Middlemarch has not given me George Eliot's experience, not on my first reading of it, or my latest. But in reading her works and her letters, and learning about her life and the lives of those near to her, it becomes clear to me that she could not have written this novel without her individual contact with sorrow. And as I continue to read and think and reflect, I also realize that she has given me something else: a profound experience with a book, over time, that amounts to one of the frictions of my life.

The friction of life, mentioned in the quote above, is a reference to something Eliot said, "There must be the actual friction of life, the individual contact with sorrow, to discipline the character." Mead's exploration of the writing of Middlemarch, the life of the author & her own life as it has been affected by the author & the novel is a wonderful exploration of the effect reading can have on one's life. I've always loved reading around my favourite books. Knowing about the circumstances of composition, the reception of the work & where it fits in the life of the author & the period enriches my experience of reading. It may not be necessary to "know" who Casaubon was based on (& there's more than one candidate, anyway) but it's fascinating to look at the parallels between life & fiction. The Road to Middlemarch is a book that has enriched my understanding of the novel & made me want to reread it all over again.

Selected Letters - Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith was a 19th century clergyman who is probably best known today, if he's known at all, for his letters. He was born in 1771 & educated with his brother at Winchester College (two other brothers went to Eton). He became a clergyman & lived in Edinburgh for some years where he was one of the founders of the Edinburgh Review, an influential periodical on literature, politics & social issues. even after leaving Edinburgh, Smith continued to contribute reviews & articles. He then moved to London, becoming well-known as a preacher & in society. He held the living at Foston-le-Clay in Yorkshire for many years, later moving to a living in Taunton near Bristol & later becoming a canon of St Paul's. He was happily married to Catherine & was a fond father to his daughter, Saba & son, Douglas.

If I was trying to describe Sydney Smith, the words good humoured & liberal come to mind. He had a genius for friendship. He wrote regularly to Francis Jeffreys & John Murray in Edinburgh. When he moved to London, he was introduced by his brother, Robert (known as Bobus), to Lord & Lady Holland, the great Whig political couple, where he become a frequent guest. He kept up a correspondence with both after he moved to Yorkshire. His letters are always respectful but never obsequious or servile. He is honest in his opinions & always interested in their family & friends.

Smith never received the preferments his friends believed him entitled to. He was a liberal Whig in an age of conservative Tory government. Church appointments were a matter of patronage & influence & Smith's friends never had the influence that would have helped him to high office. I don't see him as a particularly ambitious man, though. When he went to Foston, there had been no resident clergyman there for 150 years. He set about rebuilding the vicarage, built up the farm that came with the living & was a much-loved pastor to his parishioners. He was allowed to spend a few weeks away from his parish every year & went to London where he revelled in society & enjoyed the intellectual stimulation that he missed at home. His personality is particularly attractive to modern readers because he espoused many causes that weren't mainstream at the time but have become so. He was anti-slavery, he was in favour of Catholic emancipation & his inclinations were liberal in social matters while always being a devout Anglican.

In later life, he moved to a living near Taunton &, during a brief period of Tory government, he was appointed as a Canon of St Paul's which meant he could spend more time in London.

I think Lord Grey will give me some preferment if he stays in long enough; but the Upper Parsons live vindictively, and evince their aversion to a Whigg ministry by an improved health. The Bishop of Ely has the rancor to recover after three paralytic strokes, and the Dean of Lichfield to be vigorous at 82 -  and yet these are the men who are called Christians. Letter to J A Murray January 24th 1831

His father & brother died, leaving him enough money to live comfortably. Apart from the usual ills of old age, & the death of his son, Douglas, in 1829, he was a contented man by the end of his life.

The best way to demonstrate Sydney Smith's personality, though, is not to try to describe him but to quote his letters. This description of himself in 1805 held true throughout his life,

You ask me about my prospects. I think I shall long remain as I am. I have no powerful friends. I belong to no party, I do not cant, I abuse canting everywhere, I am not conciliating, and I have not talents enough to force my way without these laudable and illaudable auxiliaries. This is as true a picture of my situation as I can give you. In the mean time I lead not an unhappy life, much otherwise, and am thankful for my share of good. Letter to Francis Jeffrey July 4th 1805

Here he advises a friend how to improve her low spirits. I can only agree with all 20 of his precepts but here are just a few,

1st. Live as well as you dare. 3rd. Amusing books. 6th. See as much as you can of those friends who respect and like you. 8th. Make no secret of low spirits to your friends, but talk of them freely - they are always worse for dignified concealment.12th. Avoid poetry, dramatic representations (except comedy), music, serious novels, melancholy sentimental people, and everything likely to excite feeling or emotion not likely to end in active benevolence. 15th. make the room where you commonly sit, gay and pleasant. 17th. Don't be too severe upon yourself, or underrate yourself, but do yourself justice. Letter to Lady Georgiana Morpeth February 16th 1820

He was popular in literary as well as political circles.

Dear Moore,
I have a breakfast of philosophers tomorrow at ten punctually. Muffins and metaphysics; crumpets and contradiction. Will you come?
Letter to Thomas Moore November 12th 1841

My dear Dickens,
I accept your obliging invitation conditionally. If I am invited by any man of greater genius than yourself, or one by whose works I have been more completely interested, I will repudiate you and dine with the more splendid phenomenon of the two.
Ever yours sincerely,
Sydney Smith     Letter to Charles Dickens May 14th 1842

However, my favourite quote comes from his Memoirs,

Thank God for tea! What would the world do without tea? How did it exist? I am glad I was not born before tea.

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2013 is the 200th anniversary of the publication of Pride and Prejudice. I planned to reread this most famous of books early in the year but there was so much hype about the anniversary that I put the book aside, knowing that the right moment would present itself sometime during the year.

That moment proved to be last week when I watched the 1980 BBC TV series of Pride and Prejudice for the first time probably since it was first broadcast. The overwhelming success of the 1995 version with Jennifer Ehle & Colin Firth has eclipsed this series & the BBC only seem to keep one version of their classic series available on DVD at any one time. I hadn't seen the 1980 series with Elizabeth Garvie & David Rintoul since it was repeated on television in the early 1980s. Remember, these were the dark ages, before VHS or DVD. You watched it on TV at the time it was shown or you missed out entirely. So, I was very pleased to discover that the 1980 series was available from Amazon UK in this Dutch packaged version. I've bought a couple of other series in this European packaging & as long as you remember to turn off the subtitles, it's fine.

I'm not going to tell you the plot of Pride and Prejudice. If you haven't read the book, I'd be surprised if you haven't seen one of the many film & television adaptations or read the sequels & clones that fill the romance section of any bookshop. The love story of proud Mr Darcy & prejudiced Miss Bennet is well-known. I thought I'd just quote some of my favourite lines & tell you about the 1980 series which was scripted by Fay Weldon.

I was intrigued by this version because Susannah Fullerton, President of the Jane Austen Society of Australia, & author of a lovely book about Pride and Prejudice called Happily Ever After, considers it one of the best adaptations. I have to agree with her. It's in five episodes rather than the six of the 1995 version. Most of that extra episode was taken up with Andrew Davies' extra scenes for Mr Darcy. We see Darcy writing, fencing, searching London for Wickham & Lydia, surprising the eloping couple at Ramsgate &, most famously, emerging from that lake at Pemberley. In the 1980 version, Mr Darcy more prosaically appears around a hedge to confront Elizabeth, preceded by his dog. The 1995 version also has several scenes of Darcy & Bingley talking while playing billiards etc which never appear in the novel because, famously, Jane Austen never has a scene with only two men talking together.

The script is very close to the novel & there are only a few changes that I picked up. When Lydia's elopement is revealed to Lizzie in a letter from Jane, she is at the inn at Lambton where Darcy finds her in great distress. In this version, Lizzie runs to Pemberley, bursting into the drawing room in search of her uncle Gardiner. I thought that was ridiculous & not an improvement on the scene as written. The final scene is the second proposal & it fell rather flat. We also miss out on the scenes of astonishment when the Bennets hear that Lizzie is to marry Darcy who she has openly disliked for much of the novel. There certainly isn't the same chemistry between Garvie & Rintoul as there was between Ehle & Firth but I think they're both very good in their roles. I think I prefer Garvie as Elizabeth. She has all the vivacity & liveliness of Lizzie & there are several scenes where Garvie is heard in voiceover reflecting Lizzie's thoughts as we read them in the book. Darcy is a difficult role because he spends more than half the novel stalking around looking proud & disagreeable. It's not until he meets Lizzie & the Gardiners at Pemberley that we see him at ease. David Rintoul was very good in the first proposal scene & I much preferred the portrait of him at Pemberley to the one of Colin Firth in the 1995 series.

The rest of the cast are also very good. I loved Priscilla Morgan's Mrs Bennet & Irene Richard, who was Elinor Dashwood in an early Sense and Sensibility, was plain & sensible as Charlotte Lucas. Mr Collins was played by Malcolm Rennie in a beautifully smiling, fat, unctuous manner. Judy Parfitt was very aristocratic as Lady Catherine. She didn't even bother to acknowledge Mrs Bennet when she arrives at Longbourn to confront Lizzie about her intentions towards Darcy. This is an excellent adaptation & I think I prefer it now to the 1995 version. The production values may have been higher in the later version but there were fewer heaving bosoms & overt sex appeal in the earlier series & I think I prefer that.

So, my favourite scenes from the novel. There are so many witty lines that make me laugh out loud but here are a few scenes that give me a quieter pleasure.

When Lizzie goes to Netherfield to look after Jane who is ill, she has to contend with Miss Bingley's  snide comments & her attempts to ingratiate herself with Mr Darcy.

'Mr Darcy is not to be laughed at!' cried Elizabeth. 'That is an uncommon advantage, and uncommon I hope it will continue, for it would be a great loss to me to have many such acquaintance. I dearly love a laugh.'
'Miss Bingley,' said he, 'has given me credit for more than can be. The wisest and the best of men, nay, the wisest and best of their actions, may be rendered ridiculous by a person whose first object is a joke.'
'Certainly,' replied Elizabeth - 'there are such people, but I hope I am not one of them. I hope I never ridicule what is wise or good. Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies do divert me, I own and I laugh at them whenever I can. - But these, I suppose, are precisely what you are without.'

When Darcy & Elizabeth meet at Rosings, he tries to explain away his rudeness at the Assembly Ball by saying that he didn't dance because he knew nobody outside his own party of friends & lacked practice in recommending himself to strangers. Lizzie doesn't allow him to get away with this, comparing his lack of social grace with her skill at the piano,

'My fingers,''  said Elizabeth, 'do not move over this instrument in the masterly manner which I have seen so many women's do. They have not the same force or rapidity, and do not produce the same expression. But then I have always supposed it to be my own fault - because I would not take the trouble of practising. It is not that I do not believe my fingers as capable as any other woman's of superior execution.'
Darcy smiled and said, 'You are perfectly right. You have employed your timer much better. No one admitted to the privilege of hearing you, can think anything wanting. We neither of us perform to strangers.'

Then, at the end of the novel, we have another of Jane Austen's proposals when we don't hear the words spoken, only the gratifying effects,

Elizabeth, feeling all the more than common awkwardness and anxiety of his situation, now forced herself to speak; and immediately, though not very fluently, gave him to understand, that her sentiments had undergone so material a change, since the period to which he alluded, as to make her receive with gratitude and pleasure, his present assurances. The happiness which this reply produced, was such as he had probably never felt before; and he expressed himself on the occasion as sensibly and as warmly as a man violently in love can be supposed to do. Had Elizabeth been able to encounter his eye, she might have seen how well the expression of heartfelt delight, diffused over his face, became him; but, though she could not look, she could listen, and he told her of feelings, which, in proving of what importance she was to him, made his affection every moment more valuable.

The Betrothed - Alessandro Manzoni

I've discovered so many new (to me) authors & books through my 19th century bookgroup & this is another one. I'd never heard of Manzoni although he's one of the best-known Italian authors of the 19th century. Verdi wrote his Requiem in his honour & this novel, The Betrothed, is considered one of the finest historical novels of the period. It struck me as I was reading this novel that I've read many English, French & Russian novels written in the 19th century but very few from other European countries. The conveners of my 19th century bookgroup are doing their best to remedy this lack in my education.

The Betrothed has a simple story at its heart. Renzo & Lucia are in love & wish to marry. They live in a village in the Duchy of Milan. The story takes place in the 1630s when this part of Italy was ruled by Spain. The peasants are hard-working but at the mercy of petty overlords who act with impunity & are virtually tyrants. One of these, Don Rodrigo, wants Lucia for himself & will stop at nothing to possess her. Don Rodrigo's bravoes (hired thugs) have intimidated the nervous, cowardly priest, Don Abbondio, until he's too afraid to perform the marriage ceremony. The couple fear Rodrigo's next move &, when their plan to trick Don Abbondio into marrying them fails, they, along with Lucia's mother, Agnese, leave the village to escape Rodrigo's influence.

The couple are advised by the Capuchin monk, Father Cristoforo. He is a brave, fearless man who has entered the monastery as penitence for his own misdeeds. He confronts Rodrigo & tries to shame him into leaving Lucia in peace but this only results in Rodrigo using his political influence to have Father Cristoforo transferred to a faraway monastery. Lucia has been advised to take refuge in a convent with the mysterious Nun of Monza while Renzo heads to Milan to consult the Capuchins there. The lovers must undergo many trials in their long separation. Lucia is kidnapped from the convent & her fate is looking dire until rescue comes from an unexpected source. In her relief, she pledges her virginity in gratitude to the Virgin for her deliverance as she now believes that she will never see Renzo again.

Renzo reaches Milan after several adventures on the road but is then caught up in riots caused by famine & finds himself with a warrant for his arrest after he's taken for one of the ringleaders. Then, war breaks out & Lucia & her mother, along with Don Abbondio & his wily housekeeper, Perpetua, must take refuge from the approach of enemy soldiers. After this, plague breaks out. In all this time, Lucia & Renzo have had little news of each other apart from some comically misinterpreted letters written by friends as the lovers are illiterate. When Renzo survives the plague, he is determined to find Lucia & sets off on his final long journey.to discover the truth.

The Betrothed is a wonderful book with enough romance, adventure & evil to satisfy any reader. The characters are beautifully drawn. Lucia is good, honest & beautiful, determined to stay true to Renzo & well-supported by her feisty, resourceful mother, Agnese. Renzo is brave & impulsive although unfortunately prone to drinking a little too much in taverns & making impulsive speeches that get him into trouble. He's always worked hard - he has a farm but is also a trained silk worker - & he's not intimidated by Don Rodrigo & his thugs. He has an innate belief in his own self-worth & won't accept that evil, in the form of Don Rodrigo or any other petty tyrant, should have power over his life.

The portraits of the religious characters are interesting. The village priest, Don Abbondio, is timid with his superiors but confident with his parishioners. He just wants an easy life & his cowardly dithering is very funny. His housekeeper, Perpetua, keeps him in line, mostly for his own good. Father Christoforo is a penitent man who does all he can for Lucia & Renzo. His advice is good although his powers don't match his desire to help. Lucia's refuge at the Convent at Monza leads to the strange story of  Gertrude, the Nun of Monza, who was forced into the convent by her wealthy family & who becomes enamoured of her power. Finally, Cardinal Borromeo, based on a real person, is the model of a churchman - kind, charitable, learned.

The many people the lovers meet on their travels, from the mysterious Unnamed, a petty tyrant like Rodrigo who undergoes a miraculous change of heart to the kind relatives & friends who help Renzo with food & work on his journey, are all fascinating & all individual. The epic scenes of famine, war & plague are horrifying yet compelling & obviously based on extensive historical research. Our narrator does digress occasionally into a chapter or two of exposition on the causes of the war or the political situation & this can become a little tedious. The only exception to this is the chapters on the progress of the plague which were compelling reading if disturbing in their detail about the horrors people suffered. But, as soon as we return to Lucia & Renzo, the pace picks up & I raced on to the end to discover their fate.

Happily Ever After - Susannah Fullerton

January 2013 marks the 200th anniversary of the publication of Pride and Prejudice. As Jane Austen's most famous novel regularly tops lists of the world's favourite novels, the celebrations of this milestone have been gathering steam for some time. I plan to reread the novel itself very soon but I've also been reading this lovely book about the phenomenon that is Pride and Prejudice by Susannah Fullerton, President of the Jane Austen Society of Australia.

Happily Ever After tells the story of the novel from its first incarnation as First Impressions to the publication of the book By A Lady, to the first reviews by the critics &, more importantly, Austen's friends & family. She discusses the style of the novel & Austen's use of free indirect speech & irony which set it apart from other novels of the time. Having just read Fanny Burney's Camilla, I can only agree that Pride and Prejudice represents quite a departure from other books of the period. Fullerton looks at the characters & the plot, dissects that famous first sentence & looks at the aspects of the story that have spawned a million romance novels from Mills & Boon to Bridget Jones's Diary & the pastel-covered chick lit of the 1990s.

Pride and Prejudice has been translated into over 20 languages & has been the subject of countless sequels & continuations. Elizabeth & Darcy's marriage has been analysed in every possible way & they're even the sleuths in a series of detective novels. The futures of most of the other characters have also been speculated about. My personal favourite has to be the novel where Mr Collins is killed off leaving Charlotte a happy widow. Then there are the erotic & horror novels that are "inspired" by Pride and Prejudice. I would much rather reread the original than read any of these but it's fun to read about them & I'm grateful that Fullerton has done the disagreeable work for me so that I will never feel the need to read them myself.

There have also been stage & film adaptations of Pride and Prejudice . The most famous of these are the 1940 film with Greer Garson & Laurence Olivier, the two BBC series in 1980 & 1995 & the 2005 movie with Keira Knightley & Matthew Macfadyen. I've always had a fondness for the 1940 movie because I love Olivier, even though Greer Garson is too old, the costumes are all wrong & the screenplay was based on a stage version rather than the book so some of the plot points are mangled. I love Melville Cooper as Mr Collins & Edmund Gwenn as Mr Bennet. I must have seen the 1980 series with Elizabeth Garvie & David Rintoul at some stage but I don't remember much about it. It's available on DVD so I'm tempted to buy it as Susannah Fullerton obviously has a great fondness for it & Elizabeth Garvie's performance is generally regarded as excellent.

The 1995 series with Jennifer Ehle & Colin Firth needs no introduction. I love it & have watched it many times. I didn't like the 2005 movie at all & have no desire to see it again although I probably should as my experience of it in the cinema was ruined by giggling teenage girls so I may have been too irritated to appreciate it. I'm sure I don't need to see some of the other adaptations discussed, especially the Mormon version made in 2003 or the 60 min version made for American television in 1959. The actress playing Elizabeth was 40 & the film ends with Elizabeth asking Darcy his Christian name. When he replies Fitzwilliam, she sighs happily & says "Ah, how nice." There's a still from the film in the book & even the costumes look wrong - Victorian, I think.

Happily Ever After concludes with a look at the merchandising that has been produced, especially since Darcymania took over the world after Colin Firth & that wet shirt scene set a million hearts fluttering. I find it quite odd that that scene, which of course isn't even in the book, has become so imitated (very wittily in Lost in Austen) & parodied that the character of Darcy has floated free of the book entirely. It's not even Elizabeth & Darcy, just Darcy or maybe it's really Colin Firth that everyone sighs over. Merchandising isn't new. There were Pamela gowns, fans & prints inspired by Samuel Richardson's novel in the 18th century & Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White inspired clothes & even a quadrille in the 19th century. However, there's been nothing to match the Jane Austen industry that has flourished in the 20th & 21st centuries. Everything from jigsaw puzzles to heritage-themed holidays has been linked to Jane Austen & her books.

Happily Ever After is a delightful book about one of my favourite novels. Pride and Prejudice isn't my favourite Austen novel. It would come third after Persuasion & Sense and Sensibility but I'm looking forward to reading it again & probably getting out my DVDs & watching Elizabeth & Darcy fall in love many times over the next few months.

The Great Charles Dickens Scandal - Michael Slater

This is just the kind of book I love. Michael Slater is one of the foremost Dickens scholars in the world. His biography of Dickens was published a few years ago & I loved it. Slater brought something new to the life of Dickens by focusing on the journalism &, in so doing, broadened our idea of Dickens as a writer & a professional journalist & editor. This new book has a rather sensational title & vaudevillian cover but the content is serious, well-reasoned & very unsensational in its conclusions.

The great scandal of Dickens's life was the breakdown of his marriage to Catherine. They had been married over 20 years, they had 10 children & Dickens's image as a family man was a major part of his public persona. In 1858, Dickens separated from Catherine in a sudden & very cruel manner. He took all but one of the children to live with him & he never saw Catherine again. Dickens had met a young actress, Ellen Ternan, known as Nelly, while performing in a charity production of Wilkie Collins's play, The Frozen Deep. Nelly was 17, Dickens was 45. He was immediately infatuated & seemed to see in Nelly all the qualities of innocence, beauty & purity that he had so admired in other young women in his past life & that he portrayed in many of his heroines in his fiction.

Dickens had had two experiences in his youth that had influenced him ever after. His first love was a young woman called Maria Beadnell. He was poor & unknown; she was capricious & her parents didn't encourage her relationship with Dickens. She rejected him & he never forgot her. Then, after his marriage to Catherine Hogarth, her sister Mary came to live with the couple. Her sudden death one night after an evening at the theatre, shocked Dickens profoundly. He never forgot Mary & she became an idealized figure in his imagination. Catherine, meanwhile, must have found it difficult to live up to these ethereal images of womanhood. She seems to have been a kind, loving, not very intelligent woman who was almost constantly pregnant & gradually putting on weight with every year. She must have found it difficult to keep up with her dynamo of a husband with his restlessness & his great capacity for work. Dickens was the superstar of the age & news of the breakdown of his marriage caused a tremendous scandal.

When the scandal broke, Dickens took steps to try to contain the story. He allowed his close associate, W H Wills, to circulate the contents of a letter which detailed his unhappiness in his marriage & complained that he & Catherine had never been suited to each other & had never been happy. His vague comments about a young lady whose name has been coupled with his but who was as innocent & pure as his own daughters only fanned the flames of rumour. Most people seemed to believe that he was having an affair with Catherine's sister, Georgina, who had lived with the family for years & had helped Catherine look after the household. Dickens's warm comments about Georgina in the letter only encouraged this idea. Dickens then made the mistake of publishing an Personal Statement in The Times which only excited more gossip. The Statement vehemently denied the rumours without spelling them out so the many people who didn't know about the scandal yet were mystified & eager to find out what it all meant.

In these last twelve years of Dickens's life, he hid his relationship with Nelly so effectively that there is very little documentary proof of where they lived, if they lived together, how often they met. Scraps of evidence have come to light, including rate notices that show that Dickens paid the rates on a house in Slough where Nelly lived with her mother. He used several false names, including Charles Tringham. Nelly seems to have spent time in France & it was rumoured that she had a child there, who died young. Nelly & her mother were with Dickens on the train that crashed at Staplehurst in 1865. Dickens covered his tracks there as well & Nelly's name was never mentioned in all the publicity about Dickens's work on that day as he helped the wounded & comforted the dying. Nelly spent the rest of her life hiding her relationship from Dickens. She married & had children but they knew nothing about their mother's relationship with Dickens until after her death.

Slater's book really takes up the story after Dickens's death with the attempts by scholars & biographers to discover the truth about Nelly. Dickens's first biographer, John Forster, was a close friend &, although he certainly knew the truth, he did not reveal it in the book. Biographers were circumspect while Dickens's children were alive. But, after the last survivors,  Kate & Henry died in the 1930s, the revelations began to be published. Kate had spoken to Gladys Storey, who published a book, Dickens & Daughter, which told the story of the child who died. Sir Henry Dickens & the Dickens Fellowship effectively stymied other writers by refusing permission to quote from family letters but the books & articles kept coming & the speculation about the relationship ranged from it being a chaste relationship to a torrid affair complete with scenes of anguish & torment.

Slater explores the gradual drip of information & speculation that reached its climax in 1990 with the publication of Claire Tomalin's wonderful book, The Invisible Woman, which brought Nelly out from the shadows of the Dickens story. Tomalin's book brought together all that was known about the affair & her interpretation of the facts where there was no hard evidence. The Great Charles Dickens Scandal is an absorbing account of the lengths Dickens & his family went to to hide Nelly & the equal lengths researchers went to after his death to find out about her. We probably know all there is to know now unless something sensational turns up like Dickens's letters to or from Nelly or the birth certificate of the child that may have been born to them. Dickens destroyed so many letters & documents that it's hard to believe that there's anything left to find but a letter about his separation from Catherine was discovered just the other day so anything is possible. In this Dickens Bicentennial Year, this witty, intelligent, well-reasoned book should not be missed.