She initially began writing it at the age of nineteen under the title ‘Elinor and Marianne’ as an epistolary novel, a form which was very popular at this time. She had begun the novel shortly after completing an early draft of ‘First Impressions’ which was later to become better known as Pride and Prejudice.  Both novels were laid aside for some years and Austen was thirty-six by the time Sense and Sensibility was published.  She updated her novel to reflect the change in reading tastes by adopting a third person narrator rather than the story being revealed through a series of letters.

Whilst reworking her novel she put some money aside to cover the costs of self-publishing as she feared she would lose money through her business venture.  The novel was published in October 1811 and the title page merely identified the author as ‘a Lady’.  She was delighted to receive highly positive reviews and instead of being out of pocket, Austen made a profit of £140 from the first print run.  In current terms this is approximately £14,000.  According to biographer Valerie Grosvenor Myer[i], if this novel had not been a success Austen would have been unable to afford to publish her subsequent works.

Popular images of Jane Austen are often of a genteel lady writer passing time writing at an elegant but small writing desk.  However, when the first edition of Sense and Sensibility had sold out, she was already at work on Mansfield Park, from which she had to break off in order to edit the manuscript of Pride and Prejudice. So, at this point, Austen was effectively a serious writer, earning a reasonable income, despite the necessity to maintain the image that writing was merely a pastime.

Title page of 1811 First Edition

In many ways, Sense and Sensibility is a much less genteel novel than Pride and Prejudice, particularly in how Austen approaches the issues of inheritance and marriage.  The problems faced by the Dashwood family of Sense and Sensibility are far more serious than those hanging over the Bennet sisters in Pride and Prejudice.  The protagonists of Sense and Sensibility, Elinor and Marianne and their younger sister Margaret are in a very precarious position.  Once again, we have an estate which is entailed down the male line of the family, the background of which is established in the first chapter.  Mr Dashwood, through no fault of his own, will have to leave the estate of Norland to his son John, from his first marriage.  To his second wife and their three daughters he is only able to leave a small income.  When he realises his health is failing, he beseeches his son John to ensure his half-sisters and stepmother will be amply provided for.  This should not be a problem because John has already received a very healthy inheritance from his mother, the first Mrs Dashwood.  John makes such a promise and reassures his father.  The only problem is, John is of weak character and his wife has questionable morals. The narrator informs us ‘Mrs John Dashwood was a caricature of himself, more narrow-minded and selfish.’ (Chapter 1) Thus, the selfish Fanny Dashwood easily persuades her husband that they should take up residence in Norland following the death of his father.  She also convinces him that his father:

…did not know what he was talking of, I dare say; ten to one but he was light-headed at the time.  Had he been in his right senses, he could not have thought of such a thing as begging you to give away half your fortune from your own child.  (Chapter 2)

Feeling a moderate amount of guilt for turning his stepmother and sisters out of their home, John decides to ensure they are provided with a good annual income.  However, his generosity is a bit too much for Fanny who declares ‘people always live for ever when there is any annuity to be paid them; and she is very stout and healthy, and hardly forty.’  Thus, the calculating Fanny not only ousts the Dashwood ladies from their home but succeeds in reducing their income from £1000 to £500 per annum to the occasional £50.  Subsequently, the Dashwood women depart from Sussex and find a modest cottage to rent in the grounds of Mrs Dashwood’s cousin Lord John and Lady Middleton in Barton, Devonshire. Sense and Sensibility

Over the years, much focus has been given to the different characteristics of the two sisters Elinor and Marianne.  Elinor is endowed with sense, self-control and ‘coolness and judgement.’  Marianne has the less desirable qualities of sensibility, she is ‘eager in everything; her sorrows, her joys, could have no moderation.’ (Chapter 1) These differences are indeed important in structuring the story of the two sisters as well as providing the title.  Without revealing too much, lest you should be unfamiliar with the novel, both sisters fall in love, both sisters face heartbreak, both sisters deal with their troubles in very different ways.

There have been numerous adaptations of the novel, including Ang Lee’s film of 1995 and the BBC three-part series of 2008.  Whilst both of these offer more action and a greater sense of drama, the novel provides a darker view of life for women in Georgian England.  Jane Austen is renowned for her detailed social observations, but her creation of several unlikeable characters in this novel is particularly biting.  Of the aforementioned Lady Middleton the narrator informs us:

‘her first visit was just long enough to detract something from their first admiration, by showing that, though perfectly well-bred, she was reserved, cold, and had nothing to say for herself beyond the most common-place inquiry or remark.’ (Chapter 6)

This is one of the milder criticisms, and is somewhat suggestive of the lack of education available for girls, which may account for Lady Middleton’s limited conversation.  Formal education for girls at this time consisted of little more than what finishing schools were later to become and offered very little academic content. Sense and Sensibility

This absence of education becomes evident when the Dashwoods are forced to socialise with the Steele sisters.  Of the two, Elinor prefers Lucy finding her ‘amusing as a companion for half an hour’ although any longer becomes trying.  This is because, as the narrator informs us, Lucy:

had received no aid from education, she was ignorant and illiterate, and her deficiency of all mental improvement, her want of information in the most common particulars could not be concealed from Miss Dashwood. (Chapter 22)

So much for the genteel lady writer!

Of marriage Austen has much to say and it is unsurprising this is the driving force behind the plots of her novels.  Marriage was the only way in which women (and to some extent, sometimes men) could improve their lives, depending on the wealth of the marriage partner.  The Dashwood sisters discuss the prospects of the honorable Colonel Brandon who is unmarried at the age of thirty-five, which is somewhat late for men to marry in 1811.  A man such as this would be likely to marry a much younger woman and on this Marianne says:

… there would be nothing unsuitable. It would be a compact of convenience, and the world would be satisfied.  In my eyes it would be no marriage at all, but that would be nothing. To me it would seem only a commercial exchange, in which each wished to be benefitted at the expense of another.  (Chapter 8) Sense and Sensibility

Alan Rickman in the 1995 Ang Lee film

It is significant that such a statement comes from Marianne and not Elinor.  As previously mentioned, Elinor is the sister associated with sense. Marianne is associated with sensibility, because she is led by her emotions, which she experiences in the extreme, and even worse, she does not attempt to hide her feelings.  To some extent Austen is playing safe by having Marianne speak such controversial words, as she is frequently censured for her lack of control and improper behaviour by Elinor, the sister the reader is presumably meant to exalt.  Yet, having any character speak such words was still a bold move.

Of the marriages depicted, most of them are far from happy. Sir John and Lady Middleton are somewhat incompatible.  As already mentioned, Lady Middleton is dull whereas her husband is only content when socialising.  Similarly, their relatives the Palmers appear to be opposites.  Mr Palmer demonstrates his superiority to all and treats everyone with contempt, including his wife.  Meanwhile, his wife seems to find everyone extremely amusing, including her husband and frequently laughs at this rudeness.  On reflection, maybe they do make a good match.

Again, Austen emphasizes the perception that a woman’s looks are her marketability whilst a man’s income is his and because of this Elinor’s brother becomes concerned about Marianne’s appearance.  Marianne has experienced a period of unrequited and unreturned love and John Dashwood notes she ‘has lost her colour, and is grown quite thin.’  He goes on to say ‘I question whether Marianne now will marry a man worth more than five or six hundred a year at the utmost, and I am very much deceived if you do not do better.’ (Chapter 33) A fine example of damning with faint praise.

The critiques of the marriage process continue through the characterisation of the Middleton’s over indulged children.  The acidity behind the narrator’s description of the following scene featuring Lady Middleton and her children is unmissable: Sense and Sensibility

‘John is in such spirits today!’ said she on his taking Miss Steele’s pocket handkerchief and throwing it out of the window.  ‘He is full of monkey tricks.’

And soon afterwards on the second boy’s violently pinching one of the same lady’s fingers, she fondly observed, ‘How playful William is.’

‘And here is my sweet Annamarie,’ she added, tenderly caressing a little girl of three years old, who had not made a noise for the last two minutes.’ (Chapter 21)

The juxtaposition of the children’s actions alongside their mother’s reactions is a fine example of the many instances of dark humour, which also demonstrates a far from idealized view of marriage and parenthood.

The driving narrative force may be the story of Elinor and Marianne and how their different personality traits lead them to cope in opposing ways with the trials and tribulations of life.  Yet Austen once again richly endows her text with sharp criticism of the society in which she was living.  The elegantly furnished houses with their well-dressed occupants enjoying a leisured life cannot hide the very real problems women encountered.  Inheritance laws favoured men, which in turn ensured marriage was a commodity.  The lack of education and opportunity available to women made the marriage market a highly pressurised environment.  Thus, the frustrations of a genteel lady writer are not always completely disguised.

[i] See Valerie Grosvenor Myer, Jane Austen: A Biography, 1997

Main image: Kate Winslet, Gemma Jones and Emma Thompson in the 1995 Ang Lee film. Credit: The History Collection / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 1 above: Title page of the 1811 First Edition, credited to ‘A Lady’. Credit: United Archives GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 2 above: Alan Rickman in the 1995 film. As Colonel Brandon, he was ‘warm and subtle’. Still looked like the villain, though.

For more information on Jane Austen’s life, visit: The Jane Austen Centre Bath

Our Collector’s Edition Sense and Sensibility can be found here: Sense and Sensibility

The post Book of the Week: Sense and Sensibility appeared first on Wordsworth Editions.

Elizabeth Gaskell died in 1865 leaving behind a wide range of works – novels, novellas, short stories, poetry and non-fiction.  Her final novel, Wives and Daughters lay unfinished, just shy of the final chapter or so.  There is some common ground here between Elizabeth Gaskell and the later writer Edith Wharton, who died before the completing the final chapters of The Buccaneers (1938).  Both writers had their incomplete novels published posthumously.  Both writers decided to set their final works in an earlier time.  Edith Wharton, writing in the 1930s, decided to return to the 1870s in The Buccaneers.  Elizabeth Gaskell, writing in the 1860s, returned to the 1820s in Wives and Daughters.  It is interesting, that at this stage of their lives, both writers decided to revisit a bygone age. Elizabeth Gaskell and ‘Wives and Daughters’

In some ways it is difficult to know where to start with Wives and Daughters.  It is a large, and in some ways, a complex novel spanning some 580 plus pages.  At the heart of the novel is the story of young Molly Gibson and her journey from childhood into maturity and the relationships she forms with those around her.  However, in many ways, this is an oversimplification of a very rich text.  Gaskell explores some complex issues and the novel contains many carefully drawn characters.  It features not only birth, marriage and death, but secrets and lies, conflict and humour, and is much more than a simple tale of Molly’s maturation.  It opens in a fairy-tale like manner:

To begin with the old rigmarole of childhood. In a country there was a shire, and in that shire there was a town, and in that town there was a house, and in that house there was a room, and in that room there was a bed, and in that bed there lay a little girl; wide awake and longing to get up, but not daring to do so for fear of the unseen power in the next room…

The ‘unseen power’ is Betty the maid, and the little girl is the aforementioned Molly.  The ‘sing-song’ rhythmic nature and the use of repetition is a little like a nursery rhyme, but it also achieves an image which moves from a wide view to a specific focus. Whether you find this opening endearing or a little off-putting, please forge ahead as you will not be disappointed.

Like many Victorian novels, Wives and Daughters was initially serialized in the Cornhill Magazine, beginning in August 1864 and concluding in January 1866.  Frederick Greenwood, the editor of Cornhill provided the ending using Gaskell’s notes and information from her family.  Cornhill had previously serialized her work, Cousin Phillis.  Initially, Gaskell was reluctant to write for the magazine after her friend and publisher George Smith had approached her, fearing a higher standard would be required than Household Words and All the Year Round, published by Charles Dickens.  She was also cautious as her friendship with Dickens had become somewhat strained following a number of disagreements over such issues as the word limit of North and South and the ending of her short story ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’.  She had complied with Dickens on the former, but stood her ground regarding the latter.  Nevertheless, she outlined the plot of her new venture which she envisaged as a triple decker novel.  She need not have worried as the serialized version of Wives and Daughters was very well received by a reading public who eagerly awaited each new instalment. Elizabeth Gaskell and ‘Wives and Daughters’

Cast of Elizabeth Gaskell

The early chapters establish Molly’s happy life living with her widowed father, the local doctor.  The fairy-tale theme continues initially as Molly becomes overwhelmed at the much-anticipated Gala Day which had caused her early and excited awakening in the opening paragraph.  This is held at the resplendent Towers, one of the homes of local aristocracy Lord and Lady Cumnor. Molly seeks solace in the gardens, loses her way in the hot sunshine and falls asleep in the shade of a cedar tree.  She is embarrassed to be discovered by two ladies who turn out to be the Cumnor’s married (and titled) daughter and their former governess Clare, now widowed.  Clare creates quite an impression on Molly: ‘She was the most beautiful person she had ever seen, and she was certainly a very lovely woman. Her voice, too, was soft and plaintive…’ (Chapter 2).  Clare takes care of Molly who is now suffering from heatstroke and orders some cool water and lunch, most of which she consumes herself.  Clare’s charm starts to slip slightly as she does not correct the assumption that Molly ate all of the hearty lunch, and was probably ill through over-eating. Molly is taken to rest in one of the bedrooms but is anxious about missing her ride home and pleads with Clare:

‘Please ask somebody to waken me if I go to sleep. I am to go back with the Miss Brownings.’

‘Don’t trouble yourself about it, dear, I’ll take care’, said Clare… And then she went away and thought no more about it.

Thus, the most beautiful creature Molly had ever seen turns out to be untrue to her word.  Molly is discovered much later by the maids who come to make up the room, long after all the carriages have departed.  Poor little Molly is awestruck and fearful of the aristocratic Cumnors and when Lord Cumnor says in his best Daddy Bear voice ‘Are you the little girl who has been sleeping in my bed?’ she fears his anger is real as she has never read the ‘Three Bears’.  Her fear deepens as he continues with his jokes, making reference to Sleeping Beauty and it appears as though Molly will have to spend the night at the Towers.  Fortunately, and greatly to her relief, her father comes to the rescue on his horse, along with her pony, and she is able to return home.

The narrative skims over the ‘calm monotony of life’ (Chapter 4) and we next encounter Molly at the age of seventeen in the appropriately titled Chapter 5 ‘Calf-Love’.  The Calf-Love in question refers to the infatuation of one of Dr Gibson’s students for Molly.  The poor lovestruck student is fast dispatched from the premises before Molly becomes aware of his ardour. This leads Dr Gibson to decide he needs to take a wife to provide Molly with a feminine influence over her moral development. His thoughts are further confirmed when he receives an unexpected visit from Lord Hollingford who observes the rumpled and rather stained tablecloth.  Hollingford suggests Dr Gibson should remarry:

… if you found a sensible, agreeable women of thirty or so, I really think you couldn’t do better than to take her to manage your home, and so save you either discomfort or wrong; and, beside, she would be able to give your daughter that kind of tender supervision which, I fancy, all girls of that age require.  (Chapter 9)

Thus, the fairy-tale tone has vanished. There is no hint of romance. Marriage is merely a practicality and Molly soon gains a stepmother and a stepsister.

This is not too much of a spoiler though, as this occurs quite early on in the novel.  Molly is not encumbered with a wicked stepmother a la Cinderella, however, the new Mrs Gibson soon proves herself to be somewhat shallow and self-obsessed.  She immediately makes plans to remodel the house deeming it too rustic for her refined tastes.  On their first evening home after the honeymoon, she is disappointed her husband is urgently called out to tend to a patient and bemoans to Molly:Elizabeth Gaskell and ‘Wives and Daughters’

‘… I think your dear papa might have put off his visit to Mr Craven Smith for just this one evening.’

‘Mr Craven Smith couldn’t put off his dying.’ said Molly bluntly.

‘You droll girl!’ said Mrs Gibson, with a faint laugh. ‘But if this Mr Smith is dying, as you say, what’s the use of your father’s going off to him in such a hurry? Does he expect a legacy, or anything of that kind?’  (Chapter 15) Elizabeth Gaskell and ‘Wives and Daughters’

Many of the moments featuring Mrs Gibson have touches of wry humour about them and it is no accident she is frequently depicted producing endless decorative but useless embroidery, and is highly critical of any intelligent conversation.  Gaskell uses this self-interested character to highlight the importance of education for women lest they turn out like vain Mrs Gibson.

Elizabeth Gaskell Tower, Knutsford

Biographer Jenny Uglow[1] suggests simply drawing out the thread of Molly’s story is a huge over-simplification in such a rich tapestry of a novel, and I must agree, even though this is what I have just done. The community of characters Gaskell created in her earlier novel Cranford is achieved with even greater skill in this text.  As the title suggests, familial relationships take centre stage, but not just in the sense of wives and daughters.  There are generational conflicts such as those within the Hamley family between the Squire and his sons Osborn and Roger.  This makes way for some deeper contextual issues to be explored through the anti-Catholic and anti-French attitudes held by the Squire, and the political context of Tory versus Whig as well as the roles of science and art in late 1820s society.  The rise of science and knowledge forms an important plot point and it is no coincidence that Elizabeth Gaskell had previously begun to map out ideas for the novel whilst on holiday in Edinburgh after visiting her relative Charles Darwin.  Initially she had some difficulties deciding upon a title and it could be she was inspired by the title of Ivan Turgenev’s 1862 novel Fathers and Sons, particularly as both writers were aware of each other through mutual friends.

Wives and Daughters is often thought of as Gaskell’s masterpiece and it is all the more remarkable when considering the extreme pressure she was under both personally and professionally.  Producing an instalment each month required working to a tight schedule, although she found Cornhill less pressurized to write for as she was given more freedom than in her previous dealings with Dickens and Household Words.  However, there were many calls on her time during this period, as there were problems within her own family.  Her eldest daughter Marianne had been engaged to her second cousin Thurston for some time.  Thurson’s father was not happy about the engagement as he wanted his son to make a more financially advantageous marriage, a theme which made its way into Wives and Daughters.  In addition, her second daughter Meta was recovering from health issues.  To add to her stress levels, she was also involved in a house purchase which her beloved husband knew nothing about, a venture which would have been highly unusual in Victorian times.  Her plan was to buy The Lawn, near Alton in Hampshire, far away from industrial Manchester, as a place for her husband to retire to.  She was using money from her novel to finance the deal, but even in the nineteenth century, house purchases were far from straightforward and this no doubt added to her stress levels.

Although Elizabeth Gaskell was unable to complete what many have described as her best novel, the point at which she leaves off, and the concluding remarks offered by the editor of Cornhill provide a satisfying close to the narrative. So, allow Molly to lead you through the fortunes and trials of the Gibsons, Hamleys and many more interesting characters.

[1] Jenny Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories (London: Faber and Faber, 1999)

Main image: Elizabeth Gaskell House, Manchester. Credit: Allotment boy 1 / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 1 above: Cast of Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865) Credit: World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 2 above: Elizabeth Gaskell Memorial Tower and King’s Coffee House, King Street, Knutsford, Cheshire. Credit: John Keates / Alamy Stock Photo

For more information on Elizabeth Gaskell’s life and works, visit: The Gaskell Society 

Details of Elizabeth Gaskell’s house can be found here: elizabethgaskellhouse.co.uk

Our full range of her titles, including our collection of her excellent ghost stories, can be found here

Elizabeth Gaskell and ‘Wives and Daughters’

Elizabeth Gaskell and ‘Wives and Daughters’

Elizabeth Gaskell and ‘Wives and Daughters’

Elizabeth Gaskell and ‘Wives and Daughters’

Elizabeth Gaskell and ‘Wives and Daughters’

The post Elizabeth Gaskell and ‘Wives and Daughters’ appeared first on Wordsworth Editions.

Bleak House (1851-53) is one of Dickens’ greatest novels. It has an integrated plot which develops naturally, encompassing and involving the vast array of characters in a unified tale that Dickens brings forth from his fertile imagination. Unlike some of his other works, this novel contains no episodes that do not have a direct relevance to the main plot. Professor J. Hillis Miller, author of Charles Dickens, The World of his Novels, observed that in writing Bleak House: ‘Dickens constructed a model in little of English society in his time. In no other of his novels is the canvas broader, the sweep more inclusive, the linguistic and dramatic texture richer, the gallery of comic grotesques more extraordinary.’

The story revolves around an infamous court case, Jarndyce versus Jarndyce, which has been rolling on for years in the court of Chancery with little hope of it ever being resolved. All the characters in the novel are in some ways touched by this impenetrable lawsuit. It is Dickens’ merciless indictment of the Court of Chancery and its bungling and morally corrupt handling of the Jarndyce case that gives the novel scope and meaning. It ruins and taints all who come into contact with it.

Esther Summerson, who narrates much of the story, gives an account of her unhappy childhood and becoming a protégée of the honest and worthy John Jarndyce, who is guardian to Ada Clare and Richard Carstone. Richard and Ada wish to marry but his vacillations in choice of career and his inability to stick with his choices lead him to put all his faith in the resolution of the Jarndyce case in which he has a financial interest. This inevitably leads to tragedy.

The story is developed by the introduction of the pompous Sir Leicester Deadlock and his proud wife, Lady Deadlock. She harbours a dark secret, which is slowly unravelled by the coldly calculating heartless lawyer Tulkinghorn – one of Dickens’ greatest creations.

Numerous other characters contribute to the complex portrait of society which emerges from the novel. They include Harold Skimpole who pretends he is ‘but a child’ and has no talents whatsoever as he leeches on others; Krook, the rag and bottle shopkeeper who dies a hideous death from ‘spontaneous combustion’; Mrs Jellaby, neglectful of her own family while spending her energies on ‘Telescopic Philanthropy’, caring for natives in Africa; and one of my favourite players in the drama, Guppy, the young clerk, the unrequited lover of Esther Summerson – he is both a sad and comic character, but brilliantly portrayed. Of particular importance to the moral design and message of the novel is Jo the crossing sweeper whose brutish life and death are the instrument for one of Dickens’ most savage judgements on an indifferent society.

The novel has an interesting narrative structure which, it has to be said, has not pleased all the critics. The story is told by a third-person narrator who is both dispassionate and objective; and also by a first-person narrator, Esther Summerson, who describes the circumstances of her life and those of her acquaintances with a sensitive and emotional voice, as is natural for a character at the heart of the maelstrom of drama in the novel – rather like David in David Copperfield and Pip in Great Expectations. As result of this approach to storytelling, the contrast in narrative styles in Bleak House gives the reader a much more detailed and comprehensive view of events.

George Gissing and G.K. Chesterton are among those literary critics and authors who considered Bleak House to be the best novel Charles Dickens ever wrote. And I cannot disagree with them. As Chesterton put it: ‘Bleak House is not certainly Dickens’ best book; but perhaps it is his best novel’. Daniel Burt, in his book The Novel 100: A Ranking of the Greatest Novels of All Time ranks Bleak House at number 12, while Stephen King named it among his top ten favourite books.

In the late nineteenth century there were three minor stage plays based on the novel. However, an evening in the theatre can in no way encompass the vast and intricate scope of the novel or its vast cast of characters and so these dramas cut out much of the text and   concentrated on the role of the street sweeper Jo.

Bleak House BBC 2005

There were two silent movies in the 1920s, one of which starred Sybil Thorndyke as Lady Deadlock, but since then movie makers have steered clear of the novel, realising that to capture its brilliance would require hours and hours of screen time. That is where BBC Television comes in. They have produced three serials over the years. The first was in 1959: an eleven part series of thirty minute episodes with Andrew Cruikshank as John Jarndyce and John Phillips as Mr Tulkinghorn. The performances of the cast were praised by the press, but the narrative was squeezed somewhat and a number of interesting characters such as Mrs Jellaby and Mr Skimpole were lost. The second television adaptation in 1985 starred Diana Rigg as Lady Deadlock , Robin Bailey as Sir Leicester and Peter Vaughan as Tulkinghorn. This was a fine series but it has since been eclipsed by a version produced in 2005 with a stunning script by Andrew Davies, encompassing all the themes and tropes of the original book along with a stellar cast, all of whom were on top form. The cast list is too long to hand out bouquets to them all, but special note must be made of the stunning performances of Charles Dance as Tulkinghorn, Gillian Anderson as Lady Deadlock and Anna Maxwell Martin as Esther Summerson. This series remains one of the jewels in the BBC’s crown.

Bleak House is a dark, rich confection, high in drama, deep in meaning, running the gamut of tragedy and farce. It is steeped in its time and yet speaks clearly to the modern reader. Dickens knew that costumes and manners were incidental to the workings, emotions, trials and tribulations of mankind. In this novel, all human life is there. I commend it to your attention.

Main image: ‘Attorney and client: fortitude and patience.’ Wood engraving after a 19th-century American edition of ‘Bleak House.
Credit: GRANGER – Historical Picture Archive / Alamy Stock Photo

Image above: BBC production of Bleak House 2005, photo: © BBC / Courtesy: Everett Collection
Credit: Everett Collection Inc / Alamy Stock Photo

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It cannot be denied that Complete Nonsense is above all intended to entertain. The sudden occurrence of the unexpected is generally regarded to be among the most successful ways of generating comedy, and Lear takes this to an extreme. All bets are off when the reader of Nonsense Cookery, instructed in the art of making of an “Amblongus Pie”, is finally directed to “serve up in a clean dish, and throw the whole out of the window as fast as possible”. Likewise, the reader cannot possibly predict that the eponymous Four Little Children would “return immediately to their boat with a strong sense of underdeveloped asthma”. In the limericks, which account for a large portion of Lear’s output, there is no logical connection between the location by which the character is identified (“Old Man of the Hague”), their state (“whose ideas were excessively vague”) and the action (“he built a balloon to examine the moon”). Each element is linked by rhyme rather than rationale. Such unpredictable and incongruous twists and turns are Lear’s most consistent way of ensuring his stories and songs elicit a humorous response.

For the same reason he frequently employs fanciful made-up vocabulary, the most famous of which is “runcible”: the “runcible spoon” from The Owl and The Pussycat inspired so much curiosity that many different, and contradictory, rumours circulated regarding the origin of the neologism. As well as completely invented terms, such as “slobacious”, “beasticles” and “scroobius”, Lear also engaged in witty word-play at all points along the spectrum of sophistication. Two of his characters, for example, leave home to play “battlecock and shuttledore”, a spoonerism of the early sport battledore and shuttlecock. Two others, searching for sage to season their stuffing, are told that they can find some on the hill, and indeed, upon climbing up “among the rocks, all seating in a nook, They saw that Sage a-reading of a most enormous book”.

Satire also plays its part in Lear’s comedy. Although he insisted that “in no portion of these Nonsense drawings have I ever allowed any caricature of private or public persons to appear”, he still found ways to poke fun at features and characters of real life. Some of the ribaldry is self-directed, with a high proportion of the caricatures and limericks focusing on characters with large or ridiculous noses:

“There was an Old Man with a nose,

Who said, “If you choose to suppose

That my nose is too long, you are certainly wrong!”

That remarkable Man with a nose”

In the autobiographical How Pleasant to Know Mr Lear, the poet himself acknowledges that:

“His mind is concrete and fastidious,

His nose is remarkably big;

His visage is more or less hideous,

His beard it resembles a wig”.

One of the most important relationships in Lear’s life was his friendship, which is said to have bordered on obsession, with Sir Franklin Lushington, a barrister and judge. When the Four Little Children spot “somebody in a large white wig, sitting on an arm-chair” which actually turns out to be “the co-operative Cauliflower”, we might wonder whether this is Lear lightly teasing his old friend. And in telling his young audience that “you have only not to look in your geography books to find out all about” the places he describes, Lear is hinting that not all useful knowledge need be learnt in the formal environment and manner usually associated with education.

In fact, in addition to the “innocent mirth” of Complete Nonsense, it also has evident educational value itself. The advanced vocabulary, as well as its historical and cultural references, indicate the type of child the author imagined reading his work. Talk of Vitruvius, Homer and Xerxes (often when Lear seems lost for another word beginning with X) would not have been lost on the “the great-grandchildren, grand-nephews, and grand-nieces of Edward, 13th Earl of Derby” to whom the first book was dedicated. And yet there is also much that is more readily accessible in the nonsense writings too. Perhaps the most comprehensible of Lear’s many forms are his alphabets, which are largely devoid of neologism and avoid random jumps between subjects. Each short poem focuses on a word beginning with a letter of the alphabet, a model still used today in even the most stringently academic children’s books:

“L was a lily,

So white and so sweet!

To see it and smell it

Was quite a nice treat””

“R was a rattlesnake,

Rolled up so tight,

Those who saw him ran quickly,

For fear he should bite.”

As well as this straightforwardly educational content, Lear’s nonsense also conceals a number of complex ideas about society and identity. Although told with fanciful language and impossible narratives, his stories and songs convey real and important human emotions including love, curiosity and insecurity. The Dong with the Luminous Nose tells the tale of unrequited love:

“The Dong [who] was happy and gay,

Till he fell in love with a Jumbly Girl

Who came to those shores one day.

…

For day and night he was always there

By the side of the Jumbly Girl so fair,

With her sky-blue hands and her sea-green hair;

Till the morning came of that hateful day

When the Jumblies sailed in their sive away,

And the Dong was left on the cruel shore

Gazing, gazing for evermore.”

The Nutcrackers and the Sugartongs, despite the evident impossibility of the situation, expresses an all too authentic concern about one’s own ability, a desire for adventure and the satisfaction of achievement:

“The Nutcrackers sate by a plate on the table;

The Sugar-tongs sate by a plate at his side;

And the Nutcrackers said, “Don’t you wish we were able

Along the blue hills and green meadows to ride?

Must we drag on this stupid existence forever,

So idle and weary, so full of remorse,

While everyone else takes his pleasure, and never

Seems happy unless he is riding a horse?

…

The Frying-pan said, “It’s an awful delusion!”

The Tea-kettle hissed, and grew black in the face;

And they all rushed downstairs in the wildest confusion

To see the great Nutcracker-Sugar-tong race.

And out of the stable, with screaming and laughter

(Their ponies were cream-colored, speckled with brown),

The Nutcrackers first, and the Sugar-tongs after,

Rode all round the yard, and then all round the town.”

The overcoming of one’s own insecurities and of one’s critics is a constant theme throughout the nonsense stories and poetry. Just as the Nutcrackers and Sugar-tongs prove the Frying-pan wrong, so too do many other characters defy the naysayers. Interestingly, their triumphs are often paired with, or the result of, a journey far away. The last words from these particular kitchen utensils is “We will never go back anymore!”, a sentiment echoed throughout many stories. The wall-climbing Mr and Mrs Discobbolos, having decided that to “never go down again” happily pass their life “far away from hurry and strife”. “They never came back” is a repeated motif in Calico Pie, and in The Pelican Chorus, the leading pelican literally flies the nest, leaving her fellows remarking that:

“She has gone to the Great Gromboolian Plain,

And we probably never shall meet again.

She dwells by the stream of the Chambly Bore,

And we probably never shall see her more.”

Lear himself travelled frequently from the age of thirty, most often visiting Italy, where he eventually settled at the San Remo home he nicknamed Villa Tennyson. The youngest surviving child of 21 and raised by his elder sister after his father’s bankruptcy, his early years cannot have been easy. In view of this childhood upheaval, it is easy to see Lear’s departure for Italy as an escape from negative influences and memories at home, a hypothesis that seems all but confirmed by the theme of separation and distance that persists throughout even his most light-hearted work.

Rainbow Lorikeet

A similarly weighty topic sometimes veiled by the frivolity of Lear’s style is that of death. Death has its place in many of the nonsense writings, but in none more so than The History of the Seven Families of Lake Pipple-popple. In this story, the parents of seven families, each a different species of animal, send their young off into the wild with one clear warning. For the parrots, it is “‘if…you find a Cherry, do not fight about who should have it”, for the geese “whatever you do, be sure you do not touch a Plum-pudding Flea”, and so on. On venturing into the wide world, each group of siblings eventually falls foul of the very trap illustrated for them by their parents. In fact, all the young animals die, and on hearing the news the parent animals commit a sort of ritual suicide: “they filled the bottles with the ingredients for pickling, and each couple jumped into a separate bottle, by which effort of course they all died immediately, and become thoroughly pickled in a few minutes.”

Lear had started his artistic career as an ornithological draughtsman for the Zoological Society and although, rather unusually, he drew birds from the live animals rather than skins, he would no doubt have been used to seeing dead specimens on a regular basis. In general, Victorian society was far from shy when it came to the subject of death, exemplified by the Queen’s decades of elaborate mourning for Albert. The mortality rate, although much improved from the preceding centuries, was far higher than today’s, especially among children, and many more deaths occurred in the home surrounded by family. It was thus an inescapable part of life, as indeed it is.

As evidenced by the references to the ancient world, the children for whom Lear writes would have grown up on stories of the Trojan war, where death abounds with ruthless finality. Contemporary children’s literature, by the likes of Lewis Carroll, William Blake and later J.M. Barrie, also carry a similar undercurrent, with characters well aware “that sudden death might be at the next tree, or stalking him from behind”. These writers have by no means been cast from the canon, but their popularity has been superseded by modern children’s books and entertainment, which by and large avoid the explicit theme of death.

It is difficult to image a parent today choosing The History of the Seven Families as a bedtime story for their child. Simple reasoning might say that it runs the risk of frightening or upsetting them, and in the short term this may be true, but omitting the concept of death from early development must have long-term effects. How much more terrifying to discover it as an unexpected and unavoidable fact when confronted with the real thing, rather than coming to know the realities of life through story and song. Death gives meaning to life, and Lear provides an important service in introducing it gradually, gently and even with humour in his Collected Nonsense.

Main image: Drawing by Edward Lear from his book ‘Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets,’ first published in 1871. Credit: The Granger Collection / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 1 above: Edward Lear 1862. Credit: Ian Dagnall Computing / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 2 above: Rainbow lorikeet, after an illustration by Edward Lear. Hand-coloured lithograph from Georg Friedrich Treitschke’s Gallery of Natural History, Naturhistorischer Bildersaal des Thierreiches, Liepzig, 1840. Credit: Florilegius / Alamy Stock Photo

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If we needed a reminder of the ability of the British to erase the blood-steeped events of our imperialist history, look no further than the late Queen’s funeral. Charlotte Higgins, writing for The Guardian (online September 19), noted acutely that where there is a lacuna, there lies an anxiety: ‘that the Commonwealth was so lavishly invoked during the funeral rites was a reminder that the angry ghosts of empire are massing outside the palace and cathedral doors’. Throughout the ceremony, Commonwealth was elided with Empire, without a note of irony. There was one mutter about ‘difficulties’ but otherwise one might have thought that there’d been a seamless, painless slide from British rule over the many countries represented, to their independence. And the presence of their many representatives colluded in this view, though there was an occasional nod in the clothing of leaders to their national identity. 15 of the Commonwealth realms (out of 56) still have the British monarch as their titular head of state, including, extraordinarily, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. Antigua, mentioned in my recent blog on Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, retains the monarchy. The monarch in these Commonwealth realms is represented by, usually, a Governor-General – literally the viceroy, the substitute for the king. Of course, as in the United Kingdom itself, the monarch’s constitutional powers are purely symbolic. This was written into the Balfour Agreement (1926): our present King has no jurisdiction whatsoever over the remaining members of the Commonwealth who recognise him as head of state. Similarly, they have no obligation of any kind to the British Government*. Though these connections are symbolic, they are woven heavily into the fabric of British culture. And at times – as with the Queen’s funeral – the public may be forgiven for forgetting that they are only symbolic, because the rhetoric and panoply of the occasion encourages them to see them as meaningful. They may also be forgiven for thinking that the Commonwealth as a political entity has some constitutional link with the United Kingdom. It doesn’t.

The British Empire 1893

What, you might be wondering, has this to do with fiction? Well, my last three blogs have tried to answer that question. But here I want to open up the discussion, air the oppositional view, and consider whether literature really matters in current debates about Empire – or to put that in reverse, whether Empire really matters in debates about literature. Regular readers of my blog will know which direction I’m coming from, but I’ll also play devil’s advocate.

To take from Wordsworth authors an example at the extreme end of the spectrum: John Buchan (1875-1940) is generally recognised as upholding values of Britishness, and therefore Empire. No surprise there. But it is interesting to look in more detail at the way in which, for example, Greenmantle (1916, in Wordsworth’s The Complete Richard Hannay Stories) explores anxieties about the threat of Islam in the First World War. Its hero Hannay, invalided out of the Battle of Loos, is recruited by the Foreign Office ‘to discover and neutralise a German-inspired plan in the Middle East to galvanise the Muslim world and ignite a powerful “Jehad” against the Allies’. This quotation (and subsequent information) is from Keith Jeffery’s 1916: A Global History (192-3), and Jeffery shows throughout this work, most notably in the chapter on Gallipoli, the fear the British had about a possible Islamic uprising. The head of the Ottoman Turkish Empire, Sultan Mehmet V (allied with the Germans), who ‘as caliph claimed leadership of Muslims throughout the world’ (13), issued a fatwa at the start of the First World War against French, English and Russian forces (179). Over 60 million of the 300 million inhabitants of British-ruled south Asia were Muslims. Could there be a pan-Islamic mobilisation against the Allies? This came down, at a local level in Gallipoli, to the decision to replace two Punjabi (Muslim) battalions with Gurkhas, for fear of uncertain Punjabi loyalties. (27)

Now, when we read Greenmantle, does the average reader ever think about that? Or indeed whether Hannay’s values are right?  In this rollicking adventure, and after the establishment of Hannay as hero extraordinary in The Thirty-Nine Steps, we don’t (unless we are historians of Empire) stop to think about the calculations the British were making about their imperial hold on power in Asia. But calculating they were, even as they were using those Asian troops to fight and die for them – possibly the best demonstration of imperial power. One wonders what an individual Muslim soldier, fighting ‘for’ the British against fellow-Muslims, might have thought. Of course, such thoughts are not represented.[1] Meanwhile Buchan’s Greenmantle, published in the midst of the First World War, pulled its readers along on an exciting story, as it still does, carrying an imperialist narrative in its wake.

But with Buchan, we know where we are; that he ended up as Governor-General of Canada from 1935 to 1940 just completes the circle. More interesting, perhaps, are those works whose reference to imperialism is hidden, as in the examples I have explored in previous blogs. Many of these come from the nineteenth century, perhaps the greatest age of British fiction, and it is not surprising that the most powerful literary emanations of that age reflect its dynamics of power. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1816-1855, Jane Eyre published 1847) has been relentlessly investigated for its representation of Mrs Rochester, both in terms of its misogyny and its possible racism. Jean Rhys’s The Wide Sargasso Sea (1890-1975; 1966) is the best possible creative counterpoint to Brontë’s novel. If we read the two together, we get a complex picture without reducing the power of either. Similarly, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) has called forth the postcolonial novel Foe (1986) by South African Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee (b. 1940).

So, the Empire writes back. And this way fiction remains rich and non-reductive. But what of the argument that fiction is simply fiction, and should be read as such, without consideration of political dimensions, especially if these are hidden so far below the surface of the narrative that it takes a literary critic of superhuman powers of hewing to reach them? And after all, literary critics are not known for their powers of hewing. One argument against the retrospective analysis of earlier works of fiction from a later politically-informed viewpoint, is that a sort of anachronism is going on in reverse. Attitudes, knowledge even, that the writer concerned could not have shared are used as an index against which to measure that writer’s worth. In each of my blogs, on Kipling, Conrad and Austen, I have tried to demonstrate that each writer was in fact aware of some of the issues of Empire raised. But there is sometimes something soulless in looking for that buried issue, in the smallest detail, and magnifying it beyond the span of the world of the novel itself.

The British Empire Magazine 1910

I’d like to end with an example from the other end of the ‘Empire’ spectrum to Buchan: James Joyce. Joyce’s dates, 1882-1941, match Buchan’s very closely. Yet in 1916, just as the frankly imperialist Greenmantle was published, the full edition of Dubliners was also published, Joyce himself was self-exiled in Trieste having chosen a European rather than an Irish identity, and he had begun to write his great work Ulysses, the early episodes of which were published in 1918. Joyce’s understanding of the ideas we have been discussing goes behind the issues of English imperialism to that of Irish national identity, and he imperiously dismisses both in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce’s view, held throughout his creative life, was that the artist must stand outside any restrictions, borders, identities placed upon him. The pull of Irish identity, and particularly the identity of the Irish writer, may have had a particular effect here. Though he speaks it fictionally via Stephen, Joyce certainly lived by the precept: ‘When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight … I shall try to fly by those nets.’

Joyce was born in a country which was itself the subject of English imperial power. But his strength as a writer is to resist both that power and the siren song of Irish national identity. In Ulysses, his hero is an Irish Jew, an inherent outsider/insider. When racism rears its head in the Cyclops chapter, Joyce weaves a complicated story of attack and defence around Bloom. His mode is as ever intertextual, ironic, never allowing a prevailing view. Yet the outcome of the chapter is to undermine the ‘citizen’ who utters and embodies anti-Semitic views. In the end Bloom’s insistence that ‘A nation is the same people living in the same place’ provokes the citizen to ask of Bloom, ‘“What is your nation if I may ask?” Bloom’s reply: ‘“Ireland. … I was born here. Ireland.”’

This exchange is replicated in countless exchanges in Britain a hundred years later. People who were born here being asked where they are ‘really’ from. This is a direct result of both the trans-national migrations of Empire (often encouraged by the ‘mother’ state, as with Windrush) and the attitude, like that of Joyce’s citizen, that race somehow supersedes one’s place of birth and therefore negates it. Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireland is a witty, self-deprecating but utterly damning account of the workings of the British Empire on those who were its ‘subjects’. Dip into a few of its pages and you won’t come out quite the same.  Sanghera looks at the complications of imperialism for its subsequent generations, both the ‘ruling’ and the ‘ruled’. It is entirely to Joyce’s credit that he understood back in 1916, when few others had that understanding, not just the wrongness of one country’s taking authority over another by force, but also the wrongness of a purely nationalistic reaction to that. Not only that, the joyful playfulness and intertextuality of his writing threatens any monolithic narrative.

Taking my cue from Joyce, who to my mind really does ‘fly by the nets’ of any form of national identity, I commend most those works that ask questions of Empire. That includes Heart of Darkness, for all its flaws, alongside, yes, even Kipling’s Kim. Neither gives a straightforward account of the imperialist enterprise. Yet both works are driven by a powerful narrative which leads us away from rather than towards any questioning. The power of narrative to seduce is, at bottom, why we all read. We love the story, the adventure, the relationships, the world that we enter. That is precisely what makes novels so powerful, and why they can carry ideas and ideologies – indeed must do so, as cultural emanations of their moment in time. Part of the pleasure of reading is to be carried along in their narrative stream. But another pleasure is to be observant of the complicated threads I have been trying to untangle in this short series. I honestly think we can enjoy both.

*A Facebook reader of the original published draft of this blog has kindly pointed out the counter-example of Governor-General of Australia Sir John Kerr’s dismissal of elected Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, November 11^th 1975. Kerr was at the time anxious to demonstrate that he did not inform or consult the Queen abot his decision, but papers made public in 2020 shows a prior correspondence with the Queen’s Private Secretary Sir Martin Charteris about the possibility of this dismissal. There was also discussion with the then Prince Charles.

Jane Austen: Mansfield Park

Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre

John Buchan: The Complete Richard Hannay Stories

John Buchan: The Thirty-Nine Steps

Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe

J. M. Coetzee: Foe

Jean Rhys: The Wide Sargasso Sea

Keith Jeffery: 1916: A Global History, Bloomsbury, 2015

Sathnam Sanghera: Empireland, Viking, 2021

[1] I have mentioned, in a previous blog on the Nobel Prize, Abdulrazak Gurnah’s After Lives. This novel looks, inter alia, at Muslim Africans fighting for Germany in the First World War.

More information on the life and works of John Buchan, visit The John Buchan Society website

Main image: British India:  An English family enjoy the comforts of the British Empire. Credit: Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo

Images above:

1. Map of the British Empire 1893 Credit: Antiqua Print Gallery / Alamy Stock Photo

2. The British Empire Magazine Plate 1910. Credit: Retro Ad Archives / Alamy Stock Photo

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Anne was the last of the six Brontë children, born at Thornton in Yorkshire, on January 17, 1820, eighteen months after her closest sibling, Emily. In April 1820, the family moved to Haworth, where her father had a ‘perpetual curacy’. Her mother, Maria, died there of cancer in September 1821, when Anne was only a year and nine months. Thereafter the children were brought up by Patrick and by their mother’s sister, Aunt Branwell, who came to live with them, and to whom Anne was particularly close (they shared a bed). When Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte and Emily were all sent in 1824 to the unhealthy Cowan Bridge school for the daughters of the clergy, Anne remained at home. Her older siblings Maria and Elizabeth both died of tuberculosis contracted at Cowan Bridge, Charlotte and Emily were brought home from school, and the three girls, with their brother Branwell, were then all educated at home. During this period Charlotte and Branwell began their first excursions into the Glass Town/Angria fiction until Charlotte’s departure in January 1831 to go to school at Roe Head. Left together at home, Anne and Emily became much closer, wandering the moors freely, sometimes with Branwell. It was now that Emily and Anne drew on the Angrian precedent, beginning to create their own privately imagined world of Gondal (though none of these early Gondal manuscripts survives). It was out of this Gondal world that Anne’s poetry would eventually emerge.

Charlotte returned to Roe Head as a teacher in 1835, and Anne joined her later as a pupil. Her departure was precipitated by a sudden illness, possibly accompanied by some sort of religious crisis, and in late 1837 she returned to Haworth, soon followed by Charlotte. Emily records the ensuing period at home as a happy time, in one of the diary papers she and Anne shared, written on June 26th 1837, ‘Anne and I writing in the drawing-room – Anne a poem beginning “Fair was the evening and brightly the sun” … All tight and right in which condition it is to be hoped we shall be this day 4 years [i.e. 1841]’. At this time, the family’s hopes were still fixed on Branwell, and it became incumbent on Charlotte and Anne to make their way in life, with Emily staying at home to oversee the care of their father. Few roles were open to women of their education and class; other than marriage, there was teaching, or – a somewhat dreaded fate – being a governess. (https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/the-figure-of-the-governess)

In April 1839, at the age of 19, Anne took up that position with the Inghams of Blake Hall, Mirfield, with two young charges. Though she was dismissed at the end of the year, apparently for her failure to improve the children’s educational attainments, she acquired the experience which became a model for her first novel, Agnes Grey. We do not know whether she began its writing at this time, as there is no extant manuscript, but she continued to build up experience of the complicated role of the governess in her next position, with the Robinsons, at Thorp Green, near York, where she went in 1840. Here her charges were three girls, Lydia aged 15, Elizabeth, 13, and Mary, 12. Anne must have formed good relationships with them as Elizabeth and Mary visited her at Haworth in 1848 long after she had left their employ. Some of the poems she wrote at this time express homesickness, e.g. ‘Home’, where, reflecting on the beautiful parkland surrounding her, she asks instead, ‘give me back my barren hills’. (For digital access to a range of Anne’s poems, go to https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/anne-bronte.)

Nonetheless, she stuck at her post, bringing Branwell to the establishment early in 1843 to act as a tutor to the family’s young son, Edmund. Branwell’s disastrous affair with Mrs Lydia Robinson is now well known; in June 1845 Anne resigned her post, and in July Branwell was dismissed, marking the start of his decline into alcoholism and addiction. That experience too fed into Anne’s writing, this time into her second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

At this stage, however, she was still completing her first novel, noting in her diary paper of July 31st 1845, ‘I have begun the third volume of passages in the life of an Individual (sic)’ – this was the working title for what would become Agnes Grey. In this same period, when all four siblings were at home again at Haworth, Charlotte came upon Emily’s notebook containing 43 poems. Anne also offered up 21 poems, and a joint publication by all three sisters was conceived. In May 1846, a selection of their poems was published under the pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, subsidised by the sisters’ own funds, under the imprint of Aylott and Jones. The ordering of the names here, against alphabetical convention, gives a clue to the sisters’ own self-perceived pecking order. Although the Poems did not flourish, they were now at least published authors, and Charlotte now began to offer their novels to various publishers. In the summer of 1847, T. C. Newby accepted Anne’s and Emily’s novels (Agnes Grey and Wuthering Heights) but not Charlotte’s (The Professor). However, Newby was a dilatory publisher, and it wasn’t until Charlotte’s second novel, Jane Eyre, had been published by Smith, Elder, in October 1847 that he finally brought out Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey together, in December 1847. Anne’s novel was again last in line – this time it made up the third volume of the joint publication, with Emily’s novel forming Volumes One and Two. And though Agnes Grey had been completed before Charlotte’s Jane Eyre was begun, the sensational success of her sister’s novel eclipsed Anne’s, with its prior portrait of a plain, principled heroine. However, Anne’s second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, followed soon after, in July 1848, though the unscrupulous Newby suggested to an American publisher that it was a second work by Currer Bell. This led Charlotte and Anne to present themselves at the offices of Smith, Elder in London, to prove their separate identities. Tenant was successful enough to go into a quick second edition in August. In November 1848, Smith, Elder took over the sisters’ publication, with a new edition of their Poems.

They were now in safe publishing hands and the way was clear for all three sisters to forge ahead as writers. But neither Anne nor Emily had a chance to enjoy the fruits of their success. Following quickly on Branwell’s death in September, Emily died in December 1848, and Anne fell ill in the same month, also with tuberculosis. She confronted her possible death bravely, though she did not wish for it; writing to Charlotte’s friend Ellen Nussey early in 1849, she said: ‘I have no horror of death; if I thought it inevitable I think I could quietly resign myself to the prospect … But I wish it would please God to spare me not only for Papa’s and Charlotte’s sakes but because I long to do some good in the world before I leave it.’ On May 24th, Charlotte and Ellen accompanied her to Scarborough in the last faint hope that the change of air would effect an improvement. On May 28th, she died and was buried in St Mary’s churchyard in Scarborough, the only one of the siblings not to be buried at Haworth. She was 29 years old.

The posthumous fate of Anne Brontë’s fiction and poetry was not helped initially by Charlotte, who told Smith, Elder that The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was not worthy of republication. The firm did republish Agnes Grey in an edition with Wuthering Heights, and with some of the poems, though only 7 of Anne’s poems were included. In 1854 Thomas Hodgson, another London publisher, brought out what has been called a mutilated edition of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall; badly and summarily edited, it even omits Gilbert Markham’s opening letter, one of the key narrative framing devices of the novel. (www.mick-armitage.staff.shef.ac.uk/anne/mutilate.html) Versions of this edition persisted well into the twentieth century, further marring Anne’s reputation. The original Newby edition, but incorporating the corrections of the second edition, was restored with Oxford’s Clarendon Edition in 1992 – the same text as that used by Wordsworth Editions.

Anne Brontë’s novels are now hailed for their observant understanding of key social concerns of the day, including the socially uncomfortable role of the governess, the rights of women at a time when a wife could have no property of her own, it accruing by right to her husband, and the possibility this allowed for violent abuse within marriage. In Helen Graham, the heroine of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, depicts a spirited woman artist who challenges the power structures of marriage. In that novel too she uses an innovative double framing narrative, which allows the reader shifting perspectives. Anne Brontë’s realist eye can be seen by the modern reader as truly feminist.

Sally Minogue

Further Reading

Edward
Chitham, A Life of Anne Brontë, Oxford, Blackwell, 1991

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After a brief legal career Buchan simultaneously began both his writing career and his political and diplomatic career, serving as a private secretary to the colonial administrator of various colonies in Southern Africa where he worked with the High Commission on reconstruction after the Boer War. He eventually wrote propaganda for the British war effort in the First World War. Once he was back in civilian life Buchan was elected Member of Parliament for the Combined Scottish Universities, but he spent most of his time writing.

As Baron Tweedsmuir he was awarded the post of Governor-General of Canada from 1935-40. He died in Canada on the 11th February 1940.

Whilst he received great deference from the English establishment his loyalties were always torn between England and the country of his birth, and his literary work is seen to reflect this. He wrote a great deal of non-fiction work, including biographies of Isaak Walton, Montrose, and Walter Scott, but is best known for his adventure stories featuring Richard Hannay. Hannay first appeared in The Thirty-nine Steps, followed by Greenmantle, Mr Standfast, The Three Hostages and The Island of Sheep. All five stories are collected together into one volume in the Wordsworth edition, The Complete Richard Hannay Stories.

Additional resources about Buchan.

• John Buchan – Wikipedia

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Now in the thirty-fifth year of its theatrical run on both sides of the Atlantic and showing no sign of stopping, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera has completely assimilated Gaston Leroux’s original character. Official accounts of the musical’s creation, therefore, downplay the cultural significance of Le Fantôme de l’Opéra (1910) as if it were a dead text waiting for the megamusical to breathe life into its corpse. In The Phantom of the Opera Companion (2007) by Lloyd Webber and Martin Knowlden, the composer describes picking up a ‘second-hand’ copy of the book, to which the corresponding Wikipedia entry adds ‘long out-of-print’. (The 1976 musical by Ken Hill, which Lloyd Webber and his producer Cameron Mackintosh knew well, is similarly reduced to a cursory reference.) In the 1991 Virgin edition of the novel – with Michael Crawford on the cover – sold at Her Majesty’s Theatre alongside the Companion, the posters, the mask, the rose, and the music box, the word Peter Haining uses repeatedly to describe Leroux’s novel in his introduction is ‘forgotten’. He also erroneously claims that the book was not particularly well-received by critics or readers on publication, describing Leroux himself as ‘a somewhat shadowy figure’ known only to the ‘keenest students of supernatural fiction’. This is an odd claim given that the author was made a Chevalier de la Legion d’honneur in 1909. Leroux, in fact, was a prolific and jobbing novelist, having retired from a colourful – and sometimes dangerous – career in journalism just before he turned forty. He wrote thirty-nine novels, many of which have been forgotten, especially outside France; Le Fantôme de l’Opéra is not one of them. The novel was serialised in France, Britain, and America to considerable acclaim, and had already been filmed twice by the time Leroux died in 1927, with a steady run of cinematic and TV adaptations continuing ever since. It has never been out of print either in French or English. Leroux’s ‘Phantom’ was a gothic icon long before the West End and Broadway got hold of him.

That said, it is to the original novel that Lloyd Webber describes returning in the Companion, having tried but failed to find a way to plot the story on stage after studying the two Universal film adaptations, starring Lon Chaney (1925) and Claude Rains (1943). Both films deviated from the original plot of the novel. The 1925 version added a more emphatic climax with Chaney pursued through Paris by an angry mob, while the 1943 film portrayed the Phantom as a struggling musician whose life’s work is stolen. He is then horribly scarred in the ensuing fight with the plagiarist and presumed dead, plotting his revenge from the vast network of cellars beneath the Palais Garnier and obsessing over the young soprano Christine Daaé. Relocated to London, this plot was recycled by Hammer in 1962 – Herbert Lom taking the title role – the character’s revival initiated by the ‘Phantom’ episode in the 1957 Chaney biopic Man of a Thousand Faces starring James Cagney, reminding everyone how good the original silent movie had been. The device was then used again by Brian De Palma in his surreal 1974 rock opera Phantom of the Paradise, in which the eponymous antihero has his face destroyed by a record press. To make the story work as a musical production, Lloyd Webber wisely stripped out the revenge tragedy of the film interpretations and focused instead as what he perceived as the original ‘love triangle’ between the innocent singer Christine, her aristocratic suitor and childhood friend Viscount Raoul de Chagny, and Erik, the ‘Phantom’. In doing this, the Phantom is rewritten again, this time as a brooding romantic hero whose dangerous and undoubtedly sexual magnetism makes him considerably more attractive to most of the audience than the rather frilly Raoul, a conventional melodramatic ‘hero’ to Christine’s ‘damsel in distress and a hangover from the fairy-tale simplicity of the film narratives. While remaining broadly melodramatic, as popular musicals must be, Christine is now given a more difficult choice. This transition from villain to hero was completed in Lloyd Webber’s sequel, Love Never Dies (2010), in which the Phantom is revealed to be the real father of Christine’s son ‘Gustave’, while Raoul becomes a drunken gambler. (Meg Giry turns nasty as well.) Based on Frederick Forsyth’s novel The Phantom of Manhattan (1999), which concludes with millionaire Erik helping scarred First World War soldiers, this was clearly an attempt at full rehabilitation that went too far for fans of the original musical, and the mawkish Love Never Dies was a rare failure for Lloyd Webber. Bad boys cease to be appealing when they clean up too much. Continuing the trend to diminish the original text, Forsyth in his introduction describes Leroux’s novel as quickly ‘falling into virtual oblivion.

Leroux is one of those writers whose life was as interesting as his novels, and many of his own adventures as a foreign correspondent ended up in his fiction. Leroux’s family came from Normandy, though he was born in Paris after his mother went into labour on a train. His father – who claimed to be a direct descendant of William the Conqueror – sent his son to Paris to study law in 1889. This was an occupation that held little interest for Leroux, and he spent much of his time writing poems and short stories. He managed to pass the bar but then his father died suddenly leaving him an estate worth close to a million Francs. He breezed through the lot in under a year. Facing bankruptcy, he took a job as a court reporter and theatre critic for L’Écho de Paris. Combining both roles to make the court reporting less boring, Leroux started trying to solve the cases in advance of the verdicts, interviewing prisoners and in one case finding evidence exonerating the accused, humiliating the Prefect of Police, and getting a prison governor fired. ‘Curiously,’ he later noted in an interview, ‘it was my newspaper colleagues who were the most annoyed.’ Despite breaking the unwritten rule of journalism and becoming the story himself, Leroux’s reputation was now ensured, and he built on this through a talent for getting exclusive interviews with prominent public figures at home and abroad. And if he couldn’t get the interview – which happened when he blagged his way into the office of the British Secretary of State for the Colonies, Joseph Chamberlain, during the Second Boer War – he wrote a column on how he didn’t get the interview. This popular notoriety led to a post on Le Matin as an international correspondent, and assignments in Scandinavia, Russia (he was present during the 1905 Revolution), Morocco and Egypt (where he travelled disguised as an Arab), Africa, and across Western Europe.

By 1907, Leroux had become exhausted by travel. He abandoned journalism for fiction and achieved notable success with his first serial novel, Le mystère de la chambre jaune (The Mystery of the Yellow Room, 1907), which introduced the brilliant young reporter turned amateur sleuth ‘Joseph Rouletabille’. (Roule ta bille or ‘Roll your marble’ was French slang for ‘Globetrotter’, an obvious alter ego of the author). Leroux greatly admired Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and the influence of both can be seen in his seven Rouletabille novels. Like Sherlock Holmes, Rouletabille is fiercely intelligent and does not suffer fools gladly, especially policemen. He even has a ‘Dr Watson’ in the form of ‘Sainclair’, his companion and chronicler. Following Poe, The Mystery of the Yellow Room is an intense ‘locked-room’ murder mystery, and Leroux’s literary reputation in France is that of one of the fathers of modern detective fiction. Le Fantôme de l’Opéra, originally serialised in the daily newspaper Le Gaulois from September 1909 to January 1910, was his seventh novel.

Leroux was a big, ebullient man, larger than life in every regard. When he finished a novel, he would fire a pistol into the air and encourage his wife and children to join the celebration by throwing crockery out the window. What he would have made of the different incarnations of his ‘Phantom’ is anyone’s guess, but my instinct is that they would have caught him funny. Though there is a modicum of sympathy for ‘poor Erik’ towards the end of the novel, Leroux’s original character is a grotesque and megalomaniacal criminal lunatic, much closer to H.G. Wells’ ‘Invisible Man’ or George Du Maurier’s ‘Svengali’ than the tragic genius of Lloyd Webber’s musical. He is a monster inside and out, and while Gerard Butler’s scarring in Joel Schumacher’s overblown 2004 adaptation of the musical is so minimal he still looks better than most guys his age on a normal day, Leroux’s Erik is a ‘living corpse’ whose ‘hands smelt like death’:

‘He is extraordinarily thin and his dress-coat hangs on a skeleton frame. His eyes are so deep that you can hardly see the fixed pupils. You just see two big black holes, as in a dead man’s skull. His skin, which is stretched across his bones like a drumhead, is not white, but a nasty yellow. His nose is so little worth talking about that you can’t see it side-face; and the absence of that nose is a horrible thing to look at. All the hair he has is three or four long dark locks on his forehead and behind his ears.’

It is this look that Lon Chaney memorably captured in the 1925 film. By this time, Leroux had founded the film company Société des Cinéromans with the actor René Navarre and the playwright Arthur Bernède. This bought him into contact with Carl Laemmle, the co-founder and owner of Universal Pictures when the latter visited Paris in 1922. Legend has it that Laemmle had just been to the Palais Garnier and gushed to Leroux about the famous opera house. Never one to miss a chance, Leroux made a gift of his novel, which Laemmle read in a night. Already on the lookout for another vehicle for Lon Chaney to follow The Hunchback of Notre Dame (then under production), Laemmle snapped up the rights to The Phantom of the Opera. Universal went on to create a soundstage replica of the opera house and its vast cellars so elaborate and solid that it remained active until 2014 when it was finally dismantled, having been used in hundreds of movies and TV shows, including, unsurprisingly, the 1943 remake. As the producer who brought the European gothic to Hollywood, Laemmle had immediately understood the potential of the novel, and Chaney’s silent masterpieces inaugurated the ‘Universal Monster Cycle’ of movies that included Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Wolf-Man, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon. The Phantom of the Opera is therefore at the start of the cinematic gothic, just as it is at the end of the literary tradition.

As cinema was rapidly becoming the dominant art form of the twentieth century, the gothic discourse transferred from page to soundstage, subverting the realist film narrative just as it had the literary in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Phantom of the Opera is on the cusp of both forms. Written before the First World War, there is still a hint of the fin de siècle about Leroux’s original novel, while its setting is the nineteenth century, about ten years into the French Third Republic, around 1880. This makes the story broadly contemporaneous with late-Victorian English gothic fiction, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde having been published in 1886, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891, and Dracula and The Invisible Man in 1897. George Du Maurier’s bestselling novel Trilby, meanwhile, in which a young woman falls under the influence of the sinister mesmerist ‘Svengali’ in Paris, becoming a great but ultimately doomed singer, had been serialised in 1894. The following year, Freud published his Studies in Hysteria, and Nina Auerbach has written a ‘key tableau of the nineties’ involving older men ‘leaning over female bodies: Svengali, Dracula, and Freud.’ The 1890s also saw literary fiction exploring similar themes of appropriation and fetishism of the model by the artist, the performer by the mentor, in The Tragic Muse by Henry James (1890), and ‘The Muse’s Tragedy’ by Edith Wharton (1899); the common feature running between gothic fantasy and literary realism being the erotic relationship between the dominant figure and the submissive. (George Bernard Shaw would follow Leroux in 1913 with another spin on this dynamic in Pygmalion.) Leroux is certainly tapping this vein in The Phantom of the Opera and pushing it to the extremes of sadomasochism with an almost ghoulish delight. His novel is both emotionally and physically violent, the horror then frequently offset by gallows humour. The author, meanwhile, presents himself as a ‘historian’ although his gleefully morbid delivery foreshadows the campy American ‘horror hosts’ of the 1940s and 50s, such as ‘Raymond’ in the Inner Sanctum Mysteries radio show and the ‘Crypt Keeper’ in EC’s infamous Tales from the Crypt comics. Like these characters, there is a touch of the sideshow barker about Leroux’s narrative voice, which perfectly suits the carnivalesque mood of his novel.

And, like Lon Chaney, Leroux is also following Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), both novels taking the fairy-tale premise of de Villeneuve’s La Belle et la Bête (1740) to fatal extremes. (Christine at one point introduces Raoul as ‘Prince Charming’.) There are also mythic undertones, and Orpheus and Eurydice are obvious symbols. Erik is a Hades figure, if not Satan himself; as Christine tells Raoul, ‘everything that is underground belongs to him!’ It is also notable that the operas performed during the story are Verdi’s Otello, foregrounding murderous sexual jealousy, and Charles Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette – the ‘star crossed lovers’ –and Faust. Christine has made a devil’s bargain with her secret mentor, first the ‘Angel of Music’, later the ‘demon’, and he has come to claim his due…

The novel is framed by a prologue ‘In which the author of this singular work informs the reader how he acquired the certainty that the Opera Ghost really existed.’ This is a wonderful fictional ‘hook’ on which to snag the reader’s attention and hold it: he pretends it’s all real. And this is not such a leap for his readers, the labyrinthine cellars – built to house huge painted backdrops, props, costumes, and even a stable (there really is a lake under there as well) – having by then inspired a couple of generations of superstitious opera-goers and employees to circulate ghost stories. Leroux the journalist – the ‘historian’ – then documents his research process, beginning at the ‘archives of the National Academy of music’ and supplemented by The Memoirs of a Manager by ‘Armand Moncharmin’ (who along with ‘Firmin Richard’ take over management of the theatre at the start of the story). On reading various accounts of the ‘Opera Ghost’ from thirty years before, the straight-faced Leroux claims to have become convinced this legendary figure must have been connected in some way with the mysterious death of Comte Philippe de Chagny and the disappearance of his brother Raoul along with the singer Christine Daaé. It was assumed by investigators at the time, we are told, that the brothers quarrelled over the girl and that Raoul murdered Philipe. A friend of the family urges Leroux to keep digging, assuring him that the brothers would never hurt each other. The plot thickens when a body is discovered in the bowels of the opera. This is dismissed by authorities as ‘a victim of the Commune’ (the opera house, then still under construction, had been used as a garrison and then prison during the Siege of Paris and the Paris Commune of 1870). Leroux, however, is sure this is his ‘Phantom’. He tracks down the examining magistrate in the ‘Chagny Case’, and through him finds an elderly Arab known only as ‘The Persian’ who furnishes him with various documents, including the letters of Christine Daaé, which Leroux authenticates by comparing the handwriting with papers held in the archives. ‘The Persian’ also offers his own statement, dismissed at the time as a fantasy, and ‘reprinted’ in full as ‘The Persian’s Narrative’, which takes over the novel entirely from Chapter XXI to Chapter XXV. (Artfully covering his tracks, Leroux notes that ‘The Persian’ died shortly after their interview.) The author also cites various other sources of information, including retired police officers, architects, historians, and former opera employees, several of whom are quoted in the main body of the narrative. The novel proper then begins, with the murder of the chief scene shifter. After seeing the ‘ghost’ and giving an account of his appearance, Joseph Buquet is found hanging in the third cellar ‘between a farm-house and a scene from the Roi de Lahore’, an ill omen that prefaces the tragedy to follow and the first of many references to the artifice of the opera and Erik’s subterranean ‘empire’. A balancing epilogue concludes the novel with a biography of Erik, pieced together from Leroux’s ‘research’. The fake veracity of the story is further enhanced by an appended ‘Publisher’s Note’ on the history of the Paris opera house in relation to Leroux’s story. As with the operatic intertexts, and the opera house itself, the prologue is another aspect of performance in the novel.

As Leroux was first and foremost an author of detective fiction, The Phantom of the Opera is introduced as a mystery to be solved, an answer to the questions:

1. What really happened to Christine and the Chagny brothers – who really killed Philipe, and why?

2. What is the true story behind the ‘Opera Ghost’, the bones unearthed in the cellar?

3. How are these two sets of people related?

The reader knows the end before they begin; two people are dead, and two are missing. What is not known is how and why this happened. Because this is such an iconic text, we already have a good idea of the answers, even if we’ve never read the original novel. The same is true of Frankenstein, Dracula and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which are similarly fragmented narratives made up of different accounts and pieces of quoted evidence that are so culturally endemic it’s impossible not to know the stories. But in 1910, nobody knew these answers. In reading, we must try to recapture this contemporary innocence and enjoy the revelation of the narrative. And when returning to the source of familiar literary characters like these, one will always be surprised and delighted by what one finds there. The movies are never the same.

The other form of narrative that deploys fragmented text is the Gothic. The gothic anti-novel thrives on multiple points of view and conflicting ‘evidence’ to undermine the set interpretation of the realist text and thus add another dimension of unease to the reading experience, rendering it, like the story itself, uncanny. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, for example, is framed by Captain Walton’s letters to his sister, while the main body of the text is Victor Frankenstein’s confession, which is, in turn, annexed mid-point by the first-person narrative of his creature. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, meanwhile, offers a third-person frame plus ‘Dr Lanyon’s Narrative’ and ‘Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case’. Bram Stoker’s Dracula – which in theme and construction The Phantom of the Opera most closely resembles – is the most eclectic gothic narrative of all, comprising:

• • Jonathan Harker’s Journal.
  • Letters from Lucy Westenra to Mina Harker.
  • Mina Harker’s Journal.
  • Newspaper cuttings.
  • A long letter from Dr. Seward to Arthur Holmwood.
  • Lucy Westernra’s Diary.
  • Dr Seward’s Diary.
  • Professor Van Helsing’s notes, were recorded on a phonograph.

This level of narrative disintegration functions as a series of competing frames of explanation, creating a tension between natural and supernatural possibilities, like a series of witness testimonies in a complicated murder trial. Multiple points of view are also a feature of postmodern narratives, in which the unstable nature of the Self is reflected in the instability of the text, key examples being Franz Kafka’s The Trial, the early novels of Thomas Pynchon, and Samuel Beckett’s ‘Trilogy’. It could be argued that Leroux is doing something similar with The Phantom of the Opera. Although inspired by the English Gothic, the French romans noir is less interested in monsters and tends more towards psychological depth in the tradition of Poe, using the relationships between characters – and themselves – to show the fears and contradictions at the heart of the human experience. The Phantom of the Opera is therefore a tale of love and obsession, as well as an exploration of gender, identity, race, and social class. Raoul and Phillipe are aristocrats, Erik is almost comically bourgeois in his marital ambitions, while part of his otherness stems from an oriental past; Christine is proletarian and bohemian, the daughter of a failed Scandinavian musician who is spied on as much in the story by Raoul as she is the Phantom. There is also a Freudian subtext about a girl who loves the ‘Angel of Music’ she believes has been sent by her dead father, and a broken boy who lives in an underground house full of his mother’s possessions… Jung’s theory of archetypes is equally in play: the relationship between the Self (‘the totality of the psyche’), the Persona (‘a kind of mask’), and the Shadow (the ‘instinctive and irrational’). And not just Erik wears a mask; as Leroux writes in Chapter III: ‘In Paris, our lives are one masked ball.’ ‘Poor Erik’ is Persona trying to achieve unified Selfhood through love but instead becoming only a Shadow, a description used repeatedly by Leroux to emphasise his ‘ghostly’ comings and goings. As to whether he finally achieves any sort of redemption, as suggested by the musical, you’ll just have to read the book for yourself.

After the Phantom, we must look to the cinema for our gothic icons. This is not to say that the gothic novel ceased to exist, only that with Leroux’s creation the archetypal pantheon had been filled. He stands with the other giants of the genre, most of whom remain linked through those early Universal pictures. (Only Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde belonged to Paramount.) At 110-years-old and a global brand, the old ‘trapdoor lover’ is oddly looking pretty good for his age. Like Dorian Gray, he remains forever young, his story endlessly retold, re-invented, and re-imagined across media, while the actors who play him on stage periodically change like Dr Who. But that’s not his real story. That still resides in this remarkable French novel by an equally remarkable French author. The Phantom of the Opera is truly the last gothic novel and should be read and respected as such.

Main image: Lon Chaney in the 1925 Universal Pictures film version. Credit: Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo

Image in text: Poster for the same film. Credit: Granger Historical Picture Archive / Alamy Stock Photo

The post Stephen Carver looks at The Phantom of the Opera appeared first on Wordsworth Editions.

The subtitle of Charles Dickens’ novel – For These Times – is usually dropped in modern editions, but it is significant for his writerly intentions. Dickens is announcing: I want to say something about now. And perhaps my own intentions in choosing to write about this particular novel are the same. We are living in hard times. The particular exigencies may be created by the pandemic, but it is the old hard times, those that are always with us, that link this 21^st century back to the 19^th. Harsh working and living conditions for the poor, created and sustained deliberately by the rich; a woeful level of protection from labour laws (worse in the 21^st century, because the protection that had improved has again diminished); exploitation of women who live on a further level of powerlessness (yes, still); an education system nakedly designed as an instrument of capitalism; a brutal disregard for the works of the imagination.Dickens highlights all of the above in his portrait of Coketown, but I should issue a caveat: in old-fashioned ideological terms, his narrative viewpoint is bourgeois. His exposé of the relations of power is dimmed by his own prejudices – against unions, against women taking power into their own hands, against the rebellious working man. He shows the flaws, institutional and personal, in those who control capital and education, but in the end the working man and woman must be kept contained. Stephen Blackpool, one of the most original of Dickens’ creations, an intelligent working man who cannot accommodate the views of either the unions or the masters, and who even challenges the sexual mores of his time by trying to sue for divorce in order to marry his companionate Rachael, has of course to fall down an abandoned pit-shaft and die, just as he is on his way back to Coketown to clear his name.

No getting out of that hole. Furthermore the wife he has tried to divorce must perforce be a drunken good-for-nothing, while his beloved Rachael must spend the rest of her life doing good works and thinking good thoughts, ‘sweet-tempered and serene, and even cheerful’. So while Stephen is placed before us as a sort of working-class hero, he cannot be allowed to triumph, and his philosophy of life is insultingly reduced to ‘’aw a muddle’, a befuddling of the clear-cut entrenched system set against him. There are no nuances for Stephen and his class.

But then there are no nuances for anyone in this novel. Hard Times is perhaps better taken as a satirical caricature than a realist novel, and if we see it like this we can accept its broad brushstrokes, most evident in Dickens’ choice of names for his characters. Blackpool’s name prefigures his own fate. Bounderby is a bounder, but his name also conjures his supreme lack of concern for those he bounds over (remind you of anyone?). Gradgrind is such an inspired name that it has become a lasting synonym for the attitude to education that the character encapsulates – though the name of his assistant, Mr. M’Choakumchild, is more comically graphic. Dickens was satirising a utilitarian philosophy of education specific to his time, but the reductive instrumentalism that Gradgrind’s values embody is certainly evident in today’s education system, damagingly so in our universities where the Humanities, once cherished as embodying the central values of a university, are in rout, in favour of supposedly ‘useful’ subjects (implying wrongly that there is no ‘use’ in Humanities). I’d been thinking to compare Gradgrind with Michael Gove, from his days as Education Secretary (2010-2014); yet that’s not quite right. Who, after all, could accuse the Right Honourable Secretary of State of sticking to ‘Facts … Facts alone … nothing but Facts’? I see however that his present title is itself worthy of a place in the high satire of the novel. He is now, amongst other things, Secretary of State for Levelling Up.

Dickens’ representation of the working man and woman may be limited, but he does at least give them representation in their own voices, and he was thorough in researching this. In a letter to his correspondent Mark Lemon, February 20th, 1854, he asked, ‘Will you note down and send me any slang terms among the tumblers and circus-people?’, so that he could give authenticity to the speech of Sleary and his circus companions. Likewise he worked hard on getting the voices of Stephen Blackpool and Rachael right, drawing on a contemporary reference book, A View of the Lancashire Dialect, by John Collier. [www.charlesdickenspage.com] In this he may have been piqued by the competition from Elizabeth Gaskell. Gaskell had already used a remarkably faithful representation of Manchester working-class speech to great effect in Mary Barton (1848, well ahead of Dickens). Dickens, as editor of Household Words, placed the serialisation of Gaskell’s North and South, another Manchester novel (September 1854-January 1855), to follow immediately from the serialisation of his own Hard Times, (April-August 1854). There was surely something of a power play here. Gaskell certainly felt compromised in her aim to represent a more complex picture of a Northern industrialised town, when that was to follow immediately on from Dickens’ monolithic view of Coketown. And initially the reception of her novel was less successful than that of Hard Times, while the weekly sales for Household Words during the serialisation of Hard Times rose by 237%.  From our long vantage point, it’s now generally recognized that Gaskell’s is the more empathetic representation of working people – men and women – and their speech. But in his time Dickens was undeniably the more popular writer. [For more on Mary Barton, see Stephen Carver’s excellent blog, August 21st, 2021 here.]

Let’s for now set aside Dickens’ patriarchal impulse to control fictional representation and reception through his editorship (what was I saying earlier about female powerlessness?)  The power of his creative vision is undeniable, as is his highly inventive and playful use of language in its service, and both come down clearly on the right side in the debate between utility and imagination. Some of the most enjoyable passages in Hard Times are devoted either to showing the absurdity of a rationalism pushed to its most reductive end, or to conjuring the opposing charm of the world of imagination, brought to life in Sleary’s circus. Without that magical world, and the characters who belong to it, this would be a grim novel indeed. Dickens was fascinated by the circus world well before he wrote Hard Times. As a child he made several visits to Astley’s, one of the major Victorian circuses [www.bl.uk], and wrote about that experience in Sketches by Boz (1836). He also gave an account of Astley’s and its appeal in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41):

What a glow was that, which burst upon them all, when that long, clear, brilliant row of lights came slowly up; and what the feverish excitement when the little bell rang and the music began in good earnest. … Then the play itself! The horses … the ladies and gentlemen … the firing … the forlorn lady … the tyrant … the pony who reared up on his hind-legs … the clown … the lady who jumped over the nine-and-twenty ribbons and came down safe upon the horse’s back – everything was delightful, splendid, and surprising!

This is an account from the beglamoured observer’s point of view. In Hard Times the circus world is fleshed out more fully. Certainly it is a symbol for all that is denied by Gradgrind’s system, but we see into the world itself, beyond the meaning attached to it.  True, when we are first introduced to it, we can’t make much meaning of it. The circus patois employed by Childers and Kidderminster, as they try to explain to Bounderby and Gradgrind what has happened to Jupe, Sissy’s father, is a barrier to rather than a means of communication. The circus is a private world with its own backslang designed to repel invaders. But this is of course part of its very charm. And for those within it, it is a shambolic family whose embrace is always comforting, never judgemental. When Sissy realises that her father has abandoned her, she receives primeval comfort. She ‘broke into the most deplorable cry, and took refuge on the bosom of the most accomplished tight-rope lady (herself in the family way), who knelt down on the floor to nurse her, and to weep over her.’ Sissy is practically given mother’s milk (Dickens was surely aware of the double meaning of ‘nurse’), so abundant is the embrace she is held in, not just by the tight-rope lady, but by the whole circus. The ring and the big top represent a whole other world, and even an outsider who is lucky enough to be taken into the circle will be given nourishment (witness the rescue of Tom Gradgrind at the end of the novel).

So not only is Sleary’s circus an alternative to the harsh educational economics of Gradgrindism, it is an alternative to the bourgeois Victorian family itself. Bonds here are not made by blood but by community. When Bounderby avers that he is ‘willing to take charge of you, [Sissy] Jupe, and to educate you, and provide for you’, Sleary offers an alternative, an apprenticeship, but in circus arts and terms, a strange admixture of the world of capitalism with that of illusion:

If you like, Thethilia, to be prentitht [apprenticed], you know the nature of the work and you know your companionth. Emma Gordon, in whothe lap you’re a lying at prethent, would be a mother to you, and Joth’phine would be a thithter to you.

Sleary paints such an appealing picture that it’s hard to understand why Sissy doesn’t stick with her circus family. But Sissy wants more; she wants education, and most of all she wants to do what her father wished for her. The farewell offered to her by the circus family is affecting:

The basket packed in silence, they brought her bonnet to her, and smoothed her disordered hair, and put it on. Then they pressed about her, and bent over her in very natural attitudes, kissing and embracing her: and brought the children to take leave of her; and were a tender-hearted, simple, foolish set of women altogether.

This is a largely feminine scene, but Sleary too ministers to her in the end: ‘opening his arms wide he took her by both her hands, and would have sprung her up and down. … but there was no rebound in Sissy.’ There was no rebound in Sissy – a sad conclusion. She has to find her own way forward now, having made her choice. Yet she fares better than Louisa (Gradgrind), who makes a far harder choice, that of marrying Bounderby.

This Dickens novel is rare in that these two female characters are more fully conceived than his usual heroines, shown being faced with hard and complicated choices. Even if their agency is limited by their gender and their expected social role, we are at least shown them in the act of agency, making their decisions. Sissy and Louisa couldn’t be further from the infantilised Dora of Great Expectations, the continually miniaturised, eponymous Little Dorrit, or (another little) Little Nell of The Old Curiosity Shop. These women are never allowed by their author to truly grow up. By contrast, both Sissy and Louisa have to confront their own life choices, and in doing that each has to deal with a father, actual (in Louisa’s case) or missing (Sissy). Louisa’s is the striking case to a 21st century eye. We are introduced to her thus: ‘She was a child now, of fifteen or sixteen’; then we see Bounderby, thirty years her senior, entering what is effectively still the nursery and demanding a kiss:

“I’ll answer for its being all over with father. Well, Louisa, that’s worth a kiss, isn’t it?”

“You can take one, Mr Bounderby,” returned Louisa, when she had coldly paused, and slowly walked across the room, and ungraciously raised her cheek towards him, with her face turned away.

“Always my pet; ain’t you, Louisa?” said Mr Bounderby.

This chill scene is followed by Louisa rubbing her cheek ‘until it was burning red’, and exhorting brother Tom to ‘“cut the piece out with your penknife if you like”’.  But that doesn’t stop Tom from turning Bounderby’s soft spot for Louisa to his own advantage (and what layers of meaning lie in that phrase ‘soft spot’). Eventually the formal institutions of a marriage proposal are pursued by Bounderby to Louisa’s father Gradgrind. Theoretically, Louisa still has a choice, one that is dramatised by Dickens in the encounter between her and her father. Louisa looks for a sign that her father understands her inner turmoil, and Dickens gives us a sense that that is almost imminent; but too great is the distance between them. There is a great deal about lack of communication in this novel. All that Louisa says is ‘”Yet when night comes, Fire bursts out, father’”. Fire does eventually burst out for Louisa, but not before she has been sacrificed on the twin desires of her brother (to curry favour with Bounderby in order to further his own career) and her father (whose motives are unclear, except that he is influenced by convention). They give her over to Bounderby, effectively. That ‘soft spot’ is in fact a hard spot.

Hidden in all of this is that Louisa is a sexual sacrifice. The writing conventions of the time mean that Dickens could not state this, but it is conveyed subtly. That first unwanted kiss – insignia of power, silently condoned by brother and father; the period before the wedding, when ‘Love was made … in the form of bracelets … and took on a manufacturing aspect’; to the wedding itself, when Tom congratulates his sister on being ‘a game girl’. All the men involved – including Dickens – know what is really involved in such a marriage. Does Louisa? There is something in her submission to that first Bounderby kiss that says she does. But the real sadness is that she knows that her father and brother know it also, and let it happen.  When ‘the happy pair departed for the railroad’, we know, as does Dickens, that ‘happy’ is not the right word.

But Louisa finds her own way forward, and not the expected one of fleeing to the romantic attraction of James Harthouse – though who could blame her if she did? Instead, she reflects, and also causes her father, whom she consults, to reflect. Theirs is a mutual learning, dependent on a considerable act of charity on Louisa’s part given his initial hard-headedness. Whether or not we fully believe in Gradgrind’s extraordinary reformation, we do believe in Louisa’s slow burn of understanding. In the final chapter, Dickens unusually leaves it up to the reader as to how we think of Louisa’s fate. But one thing (he authorially avers) is certain for Louisa:

Happy Sissy’s children loving her; all children loving her; she, grown learned in childish lore; thinking no innocent and pretty fancy to be despised; trying hard to know her humbler fellow-creatures, and to beautify their lives of machinery and reality with those imaginative graces and delights … did Louisa see these things of herself? These things were to be.

There is always the threat of sentimentality in Dickens. But in this finale I think what he foresees for Louisa is not sentimental, because he has prepared the ground in the various stages she has had to go through to find this state of being. Along the way she is accompanied and sustained by Sissy. Theirs is a sisterhood worthy of the circus – not of blood, not of class, but of shared experience, knowledge, and finally love from one to the other. It carries through into the final pages, and is the closing story of the novel. In this it acts in counterpoint to the philosophy which is perhaps given its greatest imaginative life in Hard Times, even through Dickens’ disapproving satire of it. Bitzer – Gradgrind’s zealous convert to utilitarianism – puts it thus, when asked to overlook Tom’s breaking the law:

I am sure you know that the whole social system is a question of self-interest. What you must always appeal to, is a person’s self-interest. It’s your only hold. We are so constituted.

In Hard Times Dickens shows that we are not so constituted, or at least we need not be. Indeed a novel for these times.

Wordsworth publishes all the aforementioned Charles Dickens novels, as well as those of Elizabeth Gaskell.

Main Image: Hard Times by Oscar Gustav Rejlander (c.1860) Credit: Steeve-x-foto / Alamy Stock Photo

Additional images: Hard Times page proof (1854); Astley’s: Last 6 Nights of Mazeppa!  (1838) Both held by the British Library

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