In March 1855 Dickens was inspired to begin Little Dorrit by his rage at the Government’s mismanagement of the Crimean War, the public’s gullibility, and his anguished recognition that we are all ‘miserable humbugs … involved in meshes of aristocratic red tape to our unspeakable confusion, loss, and sorrow’. Little Dorrit is an angry, satirical portrait of a nation in thrall to “an accursed Gentility” and run by the Circumlocution Office composed of a vast family of upper-class twits and scoundrels called the Barnacles, one of whom Frederick happily and proudly chants the informing idea of the novel: “We must have humbug, we all like humbug, we couldn’t get on without humbug. A little humbug and a groove, and everything goes on admirably if you leave it alone” (Book II, chapter 25). The Barnacles are obfuscators who treat all who will not leave them alone, such as Clennam, Doyce, and the Meagles, with “official condescension”, while insisting “that what they had been doing … had been … a sacrifice” (say) for the Meagles’ “ own good” (chapter, 34).

Humbug and obfuscation pervade all institutions in Little Dorrit and are manifest in a wide range of arch self-deceivers who displace their true motives for action through a series of proxies. Thus, Mrs Merdle claims to be “pastoral by nature” but the demands and decorum of “Society” thwart her; Mrs Gowan (a Barnacle) “diligently nurses” the “pretence” that the marriage of her debt-ridden son and consummate hypocrite,  Henry, to the rich commoner Pet Meagles is “a most unfortunate business”; and Fanny Dorrit furiously displaces her own anxieties about her prison origins upon her sister, Amy, who is unable to join her in “the game” of Society, so essential to her desire for security and status. Mrs Clennam maintains the fiction “I was but a servant and a minister” and Mr Casby poses as “the patriarch”, but both are “screwers” by “deputy” who transfer the dirty work of the business to  Flintwich and Pancks, respectively.

Mr Dorrit, “The Father of the Marshalsea” prison is the purest, most pathetic, and most powerful example of self-deception in the novel. His broken speech interrupted by a series of ‘hems’ and accompanied by a range of brilliant gestures (‘opening and shutting his hands like valves’) superbly registers his excruciating awareness ‘all the time of that touch of shame, that he shrunk before his own knowledge of his meaning’; in this instance that his elaborate circumlocutions are designed to persuade his daughter Amy to suborn herself, by encouraging rather than refusing, the romantic attentions of John Chivery whose courtesies and generosity are so essential to his status and well-being in the Marshalsea (chapter 19).  Little Dorrit accepts and recognises that she is her father’s proxy and willingly does the dirty work of earning a living outside, while living in, the jail, and silently enduring the shame that imbues her father’s grotesque humbug re. his gentility and status: and then,  after the family are rich she lives with the terrible knowledge that ‘once she leaves her family alone, they pervert everything’. So divorced is Dorrit by the corruptive power of his elaborate fictions from his own natural energies that he cannot even acknowledge the symptoms of his own imminent death,  ascribing them by proxy to his brother Frederick: “You are very feeble”, and “Greatly broken”. Dorrit’s death is one of the greatest sequences in English literature, beginning with his demented address to Mrs Merdle’s dinner party welcoming the guests ‘to the Marshalsea’ with the assurance that his request for “testimonials” does not “compromise” him; and then for ten days with his faithful daughter by his side ‘They were in jail again’ and he asks her, as of old, to pawn his watch and sundry trinkets. ‘And he even told her, sometimes, that he was content to have undergone a great deal for her sake’, thereby aptly, if unwittingly, reprising the humbug and guiding principle of the Barnacles and the Circumlocution Office that enables them to avoid responsibility for both their actions and their inevitable, collateral abuse of others. They all inhabit a world in which nobody is to blame in a novel that was originally called “NOBODY’S FAULT’.

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I do not have space to dwell at the same length on Lord Jim and Nostromo. The sequence from the former that made me cry terminates chapter XXXIII and it records Marlow’s anguished conversation with Jewel the day before he leaves Patusan for the last time. Jewel is fearful because she is convinced that Jim will one day leave her and she is puzzled because she knows “There is something he can never forget.” Marlow sets himself the task of exorcising her fears and he assures her that “in the whole wide world there was no one who ever would need his heart, his mind, his hand”:

“… ‘Why?’ she murmured. I felt the kind of rage one feels during a hard tussle. … ‘Why?’ she repeated louder; ‘tell me!’ And as I remained confounded, she stamped her foot like a spoilt child. ‘Why? Speak.’ ‘You want to know?’ I asked in a fury. ‘Yes!’ she cried. ‘Because he is not good enough,’ I said brutally. … Without raising her voice, she threw into it an infinity of scathing contempt, bitterness, and despair.

“‘This is the very thing he said. . . . You lie!’

“The last two words she cried at me in the native dialect. ‘Hear me out!’ I entreated; she caught her breath tremulously, flung my arm away. ‘Nobody, nobody is good enough,’ I began with the greatest earnestness. I could hear the sobbing labour of her breath frightfully quickened. I hung my head. What was the use? Footsteps were approaching; I slipped away without another word…”

My instant tears over Marlow’s earnest ‘Nobody, nobody is good enough’ were (again) uncomplicated because they were sobs of self-recognition. I knew that like Jim I would never be faithful to ‘that ideal conception of one’s personality every man sets up for himself secretly’ – especially as a 20-year-old ex-theology student who had rejected the evangelical Christian faith of his youth. Such tears, however, did perhaps testify to the perennial attraction (especially for the young?) of Conrad’s multi-faceted, complex, yet tender presentation of the great themes of lost honour and the search for redemption.

My third passage closes Part Third, chapter Three of Nostromo which recounts the hasty exodus in the dark of the Blancos from Sulaco to the Campo where their safety has been guaranteed by Hernandez, a bandit they had always feared, but who is now in the topsy-turvy world of Costaguanan politics translated into ‘a general in the memorable last official act of the Ribierist party, whose watchwords were honesty, peace, and, progress.’ Gould has accompanied Antonia and her stricken father Don José to the ford outside the town when he is accosted by ‘The emissary and compadre of Hernadez’ who ‘spurred his horse up close’:

“Has not the master of the mine any message to send to Hernandez, the master of the campo?”

The truth of the comparison struck Charles Gould heavily. In his determined purpose, he held the mine, and the indomitable bandit held the Campo by the same precarious tenure. They were equals before the lawlessness of the land. It was impossible to disentangle one’s activities from its debasing contacts. A close-meshed net of crime and corruption lay upon the whole country. An immense and weary discouragement sealed his lips for a time.

“You are a just man,” urged the emissary of Hernandez. “Look at those people who made my compadre a general and have turned us all into soldiers. Look at those oligarchs fleeing for life, with only the clothes on their backs. My compadre does not think of that, but our followers may be wondering greatly, and I would speak of them to you. Listen señor! …soldiers must have their pay to live honestly when the wars are over. It is believed that your soul is so just that a prayer from you would cure the sickness of every beast, like the orison of an upright judge. Let me have some words from your lips that that would act like a charm upon the doubts of our partida, where all are men”

“Do you hear what he says?” Charles Gould said in English to Antonia.

“Forgive us our misery!” she exclaimed, hurriedly. “It is your character that is the inexhaustible treasure which may save us all yet; your character, Carlos, not your wealth. I entreat you to give this man your word that you will accept any arrangement my uncle may make with their chief. One word. He will want no more.”

On the site of the roadside hut, there remained nothing but an enormous heap of embers, throwing afar a darkening red glow, in which Antonia’s face appeared deeply flushed with excitement. Charles Gould with only a short hesitation pronounced the required pledge. He was like a man who had ventured on a precipitous task with no room to turn, where the only safety is to press forward. At that moment he understood it thoroughly as he looked down at Don José stretched out, hardly breathing, by the side of the erect Antonia, vanquished in a lifelong struggle with the powers of moral darkness, whose stagnant depths breed monstrous crimes and monstrous illusions.

My tears over Antonia’s hurried exclamation, “Forgive us our misery!” (not our trespasses) were, looking back, rather grown-up compared to the self-pity lurking behind my sobs over Winnie and Jim. In some dim way, I was responding to Conrad’s tragic vision of the terrible odds stacked against the possibility of a decent civic life in lawless Costaguana, where competing factions and antagonisms and (as ever) humankind’s egoism, greed, and vanity rendered any political solution impossible; and we share Gould’s anguished dismal recognition that ‘a close-meshed net of crime and corruption lay upon the whole country’ and that noble, patriotic idealists such as Don José are ‘vanquished in a lifelong struggle with the powers of moral darkness’. Comparable, as I learned subsequently, to both Conrad’s parents and the Russians in Under Western Eyes who endured what the old teacher of languages describes as ‘the moral corruption of an oppressed society where the love of justice, the sense of pity, and even the fidelity of simple minds are prostituted to the lust of hate and fear, the inseparable companions of an uneasy despotism.’ Antonia, as I learned several years later, anticipated Natalia in Under Western Eyes whose ‘youth’ is ‘robbed arbitrarily … of natural lightness and joy’ because she is caught up in ‘the hazards of a furious strife between equally ferocious antagonisms.’  (Such powerful, comprehensive, and tragic formulations, incidentally, sound a new note in the English novel and indicate why Conrad is much the greatest political novelist in our language. He knew as Eloise Knapp Hay said many years ago, that politics constitutes ‘the great spring of modern tragedy’).

Antonia’s plea both moves and disturbs us because her appeal to Gould’s ‘character that is the inexhaustible treasure that may save us all yet’ depends on a dubious distinction that, inadvertently, alerts us to Gould’s consuming faith in ‘material interests’, in the benefits of capitalism, when the silver mine itself is the locus of the antagonisms between the poor and the rich and which we learn at the end will generate a clash between the emerging communists and the Blancos. And as Dr Monygham pronounces “There is no peace … in the development of material interests.” Moreover, the emissary of Hernandez’s deluded, superstitious faith in the justness of Gould’s ‘soul’ and in his magical restorative powers is both touching and mistaken, amusing and desperately sad, as is the Blancos’ self-protective and ignorant belief that Father Corbelán “has wrought a miracle in the heart of a most merciless robber.” Nostromo is both an analysis and a prophecy of the issues and conflicts which have dominated so-called Third World countries for some one hundred and fifty years. ‘It examines’, as I wrote thirty years ago, ‘the attempt to graft Western capitalist enterprise, cultural norms, and political institutions, upon the stock of a peasant, superstitious, undeveloped country, recently emerging out of Spanish colonial rule, and governed by a series of ‘pronunciamentos’ which have rendered the country chronically unstable.’

Looking back, I realise my tears were in fact temperamental and expressed my pity for characters ensnared in, contributing to, and desperate to resolve the monstrous, competing antagonisms that render Costaguana ungovernable.  Temperamental because they were expressive of and anticipated the sheer helplessness and rage I, and I am sure many of my readers share, as we read about and see on television the terrible effects of global capitalism, of Western invasions of the Middle-East and Afghanistan, of the religious fanaticism and sectarianism, of the corruption, greed, factionalism that is displacing scores of thousands of ‘poor humanity’ in lawless countries where competing antagonisms eschew compromise, rendering their countries ungovernable. ‘The powers of moral darkness’ encompass East and West and their ‘stagnant depths breed monstrous crimes and monstrous illusions’ that have become our daily bread.

On that cheerful note, I bid my readers farewell and urge you all to read the works of Joseph Conrad, born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, one of our greatest novelists for whom English was his third language, after Polish and French.

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These personal reflections are an adaptation of my closing address to the  40th Anniversary Conference of the Joseph Conrad Society (U. K.), founded at a conference at Kent University in 1974. This talk was my last after 20 years of being Chair of the Society and after much dithering, at the very last minute, I decided, as the saying goes, to ‘get deep down and personal’ and talk about how I first stumbled upon Conrad as an undergraduate at Leeds in the spring of 1961 and what he meant to me then.  ‘Stumbled’ is exactly right because when I first arrived at Leeds in the autumn of 1959 I was a theology student. More than halfway through my first term I was leaving a seminar on Hinduism and shared my enthusiasm for polytheistic religions with an earnest older chap who hoped to become a Methodist minister and he replied: ‘It’s all right Keith, but it’s not t’t true faith, is it?’ I found myself saying, ‘Ray, you’ve done me a huge favour’. ‘’av I upset you?’ ‘No Ray, but you’ve crystallised something for me. I’m getting out.’ I went straight over to the English Department Office and asked to speak to the Chair, Prof. Norman Jeffares who had told his secretary that he did not want to be disturbed. I pleaded with her to allow me to knock on his door and understandably Jeffares was deeply irritated to meet an importunate young man pleading with him ‘to help me to change my life’. Fortunately, he was a genial Irishman who laughed heartily when I told him about Ray and he said I could start an English degree the following year. ‘No’ I replied, ‘I have to start it now’; and when he protested that I had missed too many classes, especially in Old English which was compulsory, I assured him that I could catch up with the latter over Christmas and that I had already done much of the reading for the Introductory course on Modern Literature because I was lodging with students studying English. ‘What books have you read’ he asked, and I replied ‘I’ve read a lot of YEETS’. ‘Have you really?’ he asked, and then we talked about our shared fondness for YEETS for some 20 minutes and he allowed me to join the English Department forthwith. Later that day, I told my fellow lodgers that I was now an English student and learned that the correct pronunciation of Yeats was ‘YATES’ and that A. N Jeffares was the world’s foremost authority on him and that the volume of Yeats I had been reading was in fact edited by him!  (Incidentally, I instantly recognised that Jeffares had manifested an extraordinary grace in not correcting an ignorant youngster).

Because the intellectual climate in the Leeds English Dept was a mixture of Leavis and Marxism you will not be surprised to learn that I began with Conrad’s great political novels The Secret Agent and Nostromo, together with Lord Jim. As a 20-year-old my admiration for Conrad was sparked by the drollery and black comedy arising out of the multiple cross-purposes of the characters and by Conrad’s astonishing switches of voice, point of view and chronology. I was dimly aware that Conrad demanded an active reader who was willing to construct the chronology of events in Nostromo for himself and to negotiate the puzzling, opposing viewpoints on, and interpretations of, a given event such as Jim’s jump or of a totemistic commodity such as the silver in Nostromo from which there is no escape in this world. And I remember struggling feebly with the notion that the sub-title of The Secret Agent was ‘A Simple Tale’. But, and this is my subject, I am sure that my love of Conrad was sealed by the tears I shed on first reading The Secret Agent, Lord Jim, and Nostromo.

I concentrate on the three passages that prompted my tears. Let us turn to the first, taken from the closing pages of the penultimate chapter (X11) of The Secret Agent when Winnie Verloc rushes out of the shop after stabbing her husband and terrified of the gallows and bent on suicide falls into the astonished arms of the philanderer, Ossipon, who is loitering and hoping to ‘fasten himself’ upon Winnie ‘for all she’s worth’ because he mistakenly thinks that it was Verloc who had been blown to pieces by the bomb and not Stevie, Winnie’s simple-minded brother. Like most first-time readers I was amused and appalled by the black comedy generated by the characters’ misreading of each other and by the narrator’s mischievous description of Ossipon’s amazement at his swift success with Winnie and his consternation when she tells him that she has spoken to the police; and then his sheer funk and panic after he stumbles upon ‘Mr Verloc in the fullness of his domestic ease reposing on a sofa’ with a knife stuck in his chest! From this moment on, Winnie for Ossipon, the disciple of Lombroso the criminologist-anthropologist   who even to a twenty-year-old was a patent fool, is like her brother, Stevie, “a degenerate” but “of a murdering type.” Hence he fears for his life and cannot wait to abandon her on the train. Ossipon’s strangled Lambrosian reflections lead into the sequence that prompted my tears:

“He was an extraordinary lad, that brother of yours. Most interesting to study. A perfect type in a way. Perfect!”

He spoke scientifically in his secret fear. And Mrs Verloc, hearing these words of commendation vouchsafed to her beloved dead, swayed forward with a flicker of light in her in her sombre eyes, like a ray of sunshine heralding a tempest of rain.

“He was that indeed,” she whispered, softly, with quivering lips. “You took a lot of notice of him, Tom. I loved you for it.”

“It’s almost incredible the resemblance there was between you two,” pursued Ossipon, giving a voice to his abiding dread, and trying to conceal his nervous sickening impatience for the train to start. “Yes, he resembled you.”

These words were not especially touching or sympathetic. But the fact of that resemblance insisted upon was enough in itself to act upon her emotions powerfully. With a little faint cry, and throwing her arms out, Mrs Verloc burst into tears at last.

Ossipon entered the carriage, hastily closed the door and looked out to see the station clock. Eight minutes more. For the first three of these Mrs. Verloc wept violently … She tried to talk to her saviour, to the man who was the messenger of life.

“Oh, Tom! How could I fear to die after he was taken away from me so cruelly! How could I! How could I be such a coward!”

She lamented aloud her love of life, that life without grace or charm, and almost without decency, but of an exalted faithfulness of purpose, even unto murder.  And, as so often happens in the lament of poor humanity rich in suffering but indigent in words, the truth-the very cry of truth-was found in a worn and artificial shape picked up somewhere among the phrases of sham sentiment.

“How could I be so afraid of death! Tom, I tried. But I am afraid. I tried to do away with myself. And I couldn’t. Am I hard? I suppose the cup of horrors was not full enough for such as me.”

The whole sequence is desperately sad as we watch Winnie clutch at straws, inventing a past relationship with the appalling Ossipon whom she now regards as her ‘Saviour’. I began to cry over the narrator’s compassionate testimony to Mrs Verloc’s ‘exalted faithfulness of purpose, even unto murder.’ Mark was my favourite gospel so I picked up on the echoes of Christ in the garden of Gethsemane lamenting ‘My soul is exceedingly sorrowful even unto death’ and then her ‘very cry of truth’ (‘I suppose the cup of horrors’) recalled Christ plea to his Father to ‘Take this cup away from me.’ Conrad’s linking of the humble Winnie with Christ’s agony in the garden is humane and moving, but the floodgates opened when I read ‘As so often happens in the lament of poor humanity rich in suffering and indigent in words.’ My tears manifested an uncomplicated response because I felt at that moment and still feel today that Conrad’s beautiful formulation spoke for my mother and grandmother and women like them who were indeed like Winnie ‘rich in suffering’ when, following the Second World War they struggled for decency and against poverty, sometimes alone because their husbands had been killed, and sometimes with hapless, damaged men, in damp, small, terraced houses in a smog-laden, dirty slum in central Manchester. Women like my mother and maternal grandmother gritted their teeth and demonstrated a ‘faithfulness of purpose’ as they devoted their lives to their children’s welfare and future, as Winnie and her mother had for poor Stevie. When I was eight my mother married a sweet, intelligent, damaged Irish navvy who after a few drinks topped by brandy was transformed into a nasty and abusive drunkard; and, of course, we were all in his firing line and I was aware that my mother’s love for me was something he couldn’t handle. My mother’s ‘indigence in words’ accompanied her fearful sense ‘that things are not worth looking into’ and that personal feelings must be repressed: otherwise all hope of maintaining family decencies would be shattered—as, of course, they often were. Winnie’s unconditional love for Stevie took place behind her husband’s back and proved, cruelly, to be of no avail and she sups the cup of horror to the full; without the unconditional, protective, self-sacrificing love of my mother and grandmother, I would not be standing here today.

In 1961 I did not realise that I was responding to Conrad’s commitment in his ‘Preface’ to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ to presenting ‘the obscure lives of a few individuals out of all the disregarded multitude of the bewildered, the simple, and the voiceless.’ Nor did I realise then that I would become preoccupied, especially in my teaching, by the great task that Wordsworth (as far as I’m aware) initiated, of how to give voice to the voiceless, and of the difficulties of representing them using ‘the real language of men.’

In 1961 I had, in fact, not read much English Literature and Conrad’s astonishing ironic method of working for both pity and scorn was new to me and my tears took me by surprise. And, of course, I never thought of them as a fit subject for an undergraduate essay. I was then, however, owing to my theological interests, a devotee of Dostoevsky and I had devoured Crime and Punishment, The Devils, and The Brothers Karamazov. And if I remember rightly I wrote a superficial, look-at-me-I’ve-read-Dostoevsky essay on The Secret Agent and Nostromo on the ways Conrad’s ‘caricatural presentation’ (‘Author’s Note’) of Vladimir the cynical Russian diplomat and the motley anarchists and of such vain, foolish figures as General Montero and Sotillo reminded me of Dostoevsky’s scornful, often savagely funny portrayals of such muddled social theorists as Lebezniatkov in Crime and Punishment and Shigalov in The Devils. I cannot resist citing the latter who offers to his fellow dreamers ‘my own system of world organisation so as to make any further thinking unnecessary’ only to discover that ‘my conclusion is in direct contradiction to the original idea with which I start. Starting from unlimited freedom, I arrived at unlimited despotism. I will add, however, that there can be no other solution to the social formula than mine’. (I discovered years later that Conrad’s pithy version of the same appalling [prophetic?] possibility [truth?] appears in an early letter of 1885: ‘Socialism must inevitably end in Caesarism’ (Collected Letters, 1, p.16).

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Michael Irwin’s Introductions to Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (2000), and Desperate Remedies (2010).

Mike is steeped in Hardy and all his Introductions are concise, lucid, authoritative and very readable. His ‘Introduction’ to Tess immediately acknowledges that it is indeed ‘a novel wonderfully easy to enjoy: it is rare for a great work of literature to charge so small an entry fee.’ Mike’s wit is beguiling, easing the reader into a challenging argument: ‘Although often, and understandably, read as a realist novel in the best Victorian tradition, it also anticipates many of the fictional experiments of the century ahead.’   Mike briefly shows that ‘To discuss Tess in terms of moral responsibility, whether social or individual, is tacitly to identify it as a realist novel with a marked psychological interest’. He swiftly establishes, however, ‘that such an approach yields only moderate returns’ because Alex d’Urberville and Angel Clare, ‘are two-dimensional lovers’ (p. IX). Hence ‘The greatness of the novel must be sought elsewhere’, and Mike demonstrates that Hardy’s concern ‘is not with personalities, but with ideas’, and in Angel’s case ‘in trying to define the nature of the love he feels for Tess. Thus, ‘Repeatedly Hardy shows that Angel’s feelings for Tess are determined by the context in which he comes to know her’, for example milking at dawn when she appears ‘the visionary essence of woman’ (p. X). For Hardy, throughout the novel ‘things are what we perceive or believe them to be’ and ‘human beings, in general, are prone to idealise, to think and feel beyond the limits of physical fact’, including the drinkers at Rolliver’s whose ‘souls expanded beyond their skins’ and the dancers at Trantridge who feel ‘as sublime as the moon’ and who are all treated with ‘affectionate irony, but also with delicacy and beauty’. Again, Mike demonstrates ‘The interplay between realism  and modernism’ in the abundant documentary detail in the novel describing (say) clothes and work, which is deployed ‘in such a way as to derive from it a variety of ‘modernist’ effects of patterning, association and metaphor.’ Similarly, the great scenes in Hardy’s fiction are not generated by the interactions of two or more characters as in realist fiction; rather they ‘often depict a single individual involved in a landscape’ as when Tess ‘gathering cuckoo-spittle on her skirts…staining her hands with thistle-milk and slug-slime … drew quite near to Clare’ and unobserved listens to him playing the harp (pp.108-9).  ‘To appreciate the richness and complexity of such an episode it is necessary’ Mike finely notes ‘to be at home with Hardy’s ‘unique blend of dense realism and abstract suggestion.’ (436)

Mike’s most recent Introduction (2010) begins with a great joke and two resounding statements: ‘Desperate Remedies was an improbable literary début—rather as though Jane Austen had written a first novel called Murder in the Shrubbery. It offers two reading experiences for the price of one. There is the mystery story, a page-turner dealing lavishly in death, deception, detective work, flight and pursuit. Yet in that context are to be found serious literary experiments of great originality’. Hardy dismissed the novel as apprentice work and ‘the plot becomes preposterous, propelled by coincidences and flawed by ‘contradictions’, but  Mike picks up on Hardy’s subsequent observations that Desperate Remedies ‘was written at …a time when he was feeling his way to a method’, subordinating the ‘novel of physical sensationalism’ (made fashionable by Wilkie Collins)  to ‘the psychical’ where ‘the effect upon the faculties’ of the extravagant events ‘is the important matter to be depicted’. (567) Thus early in the novel (pp.26-7), Mike shows that Hardy  swiftly establishes that Cytherea and Springrove fall in love on a short boat trip, even though their conversation consists solely ‘of the most trivial and commonplace remarks,’ because of   ‘a complex of sensuous effects –shifting lights, … which serves as a metaphor for a turmoil of shifting moods and emotions.’ Hardy is also ‘boldly experimental in his initial presentations of character’ as when Cytherea, expecting to see her brother’ happens to look at her future lover from the feet upwards: ‘she acquired perceptions of the newcomer in the following order; unknown trousers, unknown waistcoat; unknown face’ (p. 25). ‘These eccentricities of description’ anticipate ‘Hardy’s later work in showing the fallibility of our impressions of one another. He depicts human beings as volatile, Protean, unpredictable.’ Hardy, Mike resoundingly concludes ‘owed a great deal to Desperate Remedies. It provided a context within which he could express himself freely and experiment with characterisation, situation, description and metaphor. … Desperate Remedies was not essentially atypical: Hardy’s greatest novels were to prove uneven, their force and originality perhaps felt the more strongly because spasmodic and unpredictable.

Keith Carabine

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Mike has written very fine introductions to Wessex Tales (1999), Tess (2000), The Mayor of Casterbridge (2001), Desperate Remedies (2010) and The Collected Poems (2002). The reader knows he is in good hands from the assured opening to Mike’s Introduction to Wessex Tales (his first for Wordsworth): ‘Thomas Hardy was a great novelist and a great poet. In both mediums he shows remarkable consistency, not in the sense that everything is equally good – he could be a very uneven writer – but in that all his work, from first to last, displays the same habits of vision and imagination. The mind-print is utterly distinctive.’ Mike illustrates these ‘habits’ at work in Hardy’s presentation of time ‘as both a developing and a destructive process, changing lives and landscapes’, and even objects such as ‘the family mug’ in ‘the Three Strangers’- ‘a huge vessel of brown ware, having its upper edge worn away like a threshold by the rub of whole generations of thirsty lips that had gone the way of all flesh.’ Mike’s intelligent, lucid, and deeply felt appreciation of Hardy’s distinctive ‘habits’ and achievement is evident in the final reflections of his Introduction to Wessex Tales:

In these stories, as in Hardy’s fiction in general, we are invited to see human life from great distances, to reflect with melancholy upon its frailty, its brevity and its sorrows. As a tale closes, its characters recede, recede into the remote specks he so often describes. But within the stories, in passionate counterpoint, is a recurring awareness of how brilliantly, how unreservedly, we can be enthralled by life from moment to moment, relishing hope, love, a dance, an adventure, a spring day, a moonlit night. The brevity of our existence is so sad precisely because its promises can be so bewitching. What is often described as Hardy’s pessimism is the shadow cast by the intense light of his imaginative and emotional vitality.

If any reader has read anything on Hardy’s fiction finer than these beautiful reflections, please let me know and I will include your suggestion in a future ‘Note.’

Keith Carabine

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‘Wordsworth Classics’ began on the 5th of May 1992 when the founders, Mike and Helen Trayler, fulfilled their long-held dream of making classic fiction and non-fiction books available to the general reading public for a price they could afford, publishing twelve novels, including Robinson Crusoe, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, David Copperfield, Tess, and  Sons and Lovers. They cost £1, a staggeringly low price, given that Oxford World’s Classics and Penguin Classics cost between £4.99 and £6.99. In 1996, when Wordsworth could proudly boast that ‘that this series of £1.00 classics has won millions of admirers around the world’, the founders decided to match their rivals for quality while keeping their price at £1, and I was asked to choose and write an introduction to Joseph Conrad: Selected Short Stories. It appeared in 1997 with an 8000-word ‘Introduction’, a new, classy royal blue binding and an evocative cover illustration, By the Quayside: Newlyn Harbour, 1908 by Stanhope Alexander Forbes, a founding member of the Newlyn School of painters. Shortly afterwards I was invited to become the ‘General Adviser’ for Wordsworth Classics, commissioning editors, and overseeing all ‘Introductions’ and ‘Notes’. Since then around 150 ‘Classics’ have been published and the scores of editors I commissioned readily agreed to write ‘jargon-free introductions’ ‘that would appeal’, as I said in the ‘General Introduction’ to each volume, ‘to both the general reader and students.’

I have chosen to discuss the ‘Introduction’ to The Great Gatsby because it is popular with both groups, it is our best seller, and I greatly enjoyed collaborating with Guy Reynolds, who was then a colleague and friend in the English Department at the University of Kent. Guy boldly decided to sidestep the mass of critical commentary the novel has attracted, especially on ‘the American Dream’, providing instead a surprising and fresh ‘Introduction’ entitled “The ‘constant flicker’ of the American scene”. This strangely oxymoronic phrase occurs twice in the novel: Nick Carraway the narrator confesses that he is fascinated by the mechanical vitality of New York and by ‘the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye’ (Reynolds’ emphasis); and Nick repeats the phrase: ‘Over the great bridge with the sunlight making a constant flicker upon the moving cars.’  This ‘constant flicker’ characterises ‘the distracted modern consciousness’, but Reynolds notes that it also ‘functions as the distinctive symbol of modernity, of the new’, prompting a finely detailed discussion on the technological circulation in the 1920s of such innovations as ‘electric lighting; cars; telephones; the movies and photography.’ ‘Artificial light’, Reynolds observes, ‘creates an original form of the modern landscape, a kind of urban pastoral that is both natural and man-made’; and he dwells on the uses of the telephone by crooks, criminals and conmen to show that Gatsby ‘is the confidence novel’ [think Huckleberry Finn] rewritten for the modern machine age.’ Furthermore, Reynolds suggests that ‘The Great Gatsby’s concision and splicing together of scenes echo the urgent rhythm of film’, and ‘The novel’s distinctive vignettes rest in the mind like a series of photographic images: Gatsby stretching his arms out to the green light; the panorama of the great party; the car crash; Gatsby’s body in the pool’.

In the closing pages of his introduction, Reynolds observes that ‘the leisure society’ Fitzgerald depicts ‘is a new formation of capitalism, driven by finance and speculation’ and the banking business is compared ‘to the magic of alchemy’: ‘I [Nick] bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew.’  (So, what else is new, we might ask?). Reynolds closes with the provocative claim that ‘Fitzgerald’s purpose, in the broadest sense, was to write a compressed and poetised novel about production in America’, leading to a concise description of how the novel ‘as an act of literary production had its own’ (complicated) ‘history’.

When I began 18 years ago it was widely thought that only Oxford and Penguin published good, prestigious editions of the ‘Classics’, but it is now evident that Wordsworth Classics match their rivals for quality, often at one-fifth of the price. Thus, though there are numerous editions of The Great Gatsby on the market, only the Wordsworth, I suggest, is worth buying for its introduction alone.

In future ‘Notes’ I plan to appreciate the very fine ‘Introductions’ by Michael Irwin to the works of Thomas Hardy and of Sally Minogue to the Brontës.

Keith Carabine

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