Lucinda Elliot's Blog, page 4

Post Two on Albert Zuckerman’s quote: ‘What counts in judging a character for the reader is what we actually see the character do, as opposed to what is said about him.”

In my previous post, I was writing about Albert Zuckerman’s quote and its applicability to questionable anti-heroes, or heroes who convert from anti-heroes into actual heroes in stories. I mentioned how often readers in general are happy to discount these characters’ former shabby or downright hateful deeds, as long as they are not described graphically in the present. I mentioned a few examples from some classic best sellers over the ages.

A series which certainly ought never to be off the best seller list, and which contains an example of such a male character is Rebecca Lochlann’s epic saga ‘Child of the Erinyes’.

In this, the reincarnated heroine, once the Queen of Crete, is torn through the ages between her conflicting love for two men, two half-brothers who reincarnate along with her. I have noted how various women readers prefer the upholder of patriarchy Chrysaleon to the man who secretly ascribes to worship of the female principle, Menoetius. The author establishes early on what Chrysaleon’s general attitude towards women is – brutal even for a mainland warrior from that era. Here’s an account of his carryings on after a battle:

‘One year ago, Mycenae had made war on Iolkos, in Thessaly…His (Menoetius’) most vivid recollection was of Chrysaleon. His half brother laughed when he cut down one of the enemy’s finest soldiers, who happened to be the king’s youngest son. He hacked the warrior’s leg halfway off at the knee and left him to bleed to death. Later he sliced a woman’s throat from one ear to the other because she refused to stop keening her grief over a dead warrior. After the battle, Chrysaleon and a gang of Mycenaean soldiers raped and sodomized numerous captive women and young girls. Many were killed. Menoetius tried to rein in his brother, but Chrysaleon, drunk on bloodlust, wine, and victory, wouldn’t be stopped. They came to blows. Three of Chrysaleon’s cronies had to overpower Menoetius from behind, knocking him unconscious with the butt of a sword..’

I have been following the series eagerly, as I have said elsewhere. Here, the author leaves the reader in no doubt about this man’s savagery and rapist propensities, which are depicted in a wholly unromantic light through Menoetius’ recellections.

Despite this, the fact remains that many of the women readers still prefer Chrysaleon to Menoetius. Either they cast that ugly scene quickly to the back of their minds, preferring to concentrate on the romantic present where the magnificient, golden maned warrior falls for the fearless and carefree Aridela, or they like him despite it, or – to my mind higly unfortunately – they like him because of it (that last is hopefully, less usual with young women these days than it was with the generation who swooned over ‘The Flame and the Flower’).

To go into the role of rapist ‘heroes’ in romance would be to stray off topic. The point is, that for whatever reason, a large number of readers of this series (which, by the way, does anything but condone rape and which I can’t recommend enough) are able to put aside Chrysaleon’s moral drawbacks and think of him only as an exciting lover for Aridela.

Later on in the series, by the way, Chrysaleon does all sorts of brutal things ‘on stage’ – including raping the heroine – so I assume it becomes a lot more problematic for those readers who prefer him to defend him. My comments only really refer to the first book, where his worst acts take place in the form of anecdote or flashbacks and are therefore, easier for the less careful reader to put aside.

A character whose worst deeds take place offstage, as ancedotes from other people, is one I have always enjoyed discussing, the opportunist romantic interest in Elizabeth Gaskell’s historical novel about the whaling community in Whitby, ‘Sylvia’s Lovers’; this is the the dashing whaler Charley Kinraid.

This is a man of boundless energy, who goes in for flashy heroics at sea and being a ‘light o’ love’ onland. This is quite apart from being the bravest chief harpooner on the Greenland Seas, the life and soul of the company whereever he goes, and a tireless teller of sailor’s tales. His party piece is dancing a hornpipe at three in the morning. Besides, this, he is possessed of dark wavy hair, shining dark eyes, and flashing white teeth.

What chance does his rival for the naive young farmer’s daughter Sylvia Robson, the quiet and respectable shopkeeper Philip Hepburn, have against him?

When we first hear of Charley Kinraid he is engaged in a fight to the death with a press gang exceeding their remit, and determined to impress the returning crew of a whaler. He sends his men below and stands over the hatches to defend them with a pistol and whaling knife, asserting that they are all married but himself (this is all very heroic, but leaves unexplained why his friend Darley, later described as single himself, is hiding below when he is shot dead).

Kinraid reputedly shoots down two members of the press gang. However, he is not arrested for mutiny, being shot in turn himself and ‘kicked aside for dead’. The elderly captain revives him, he recovers and is feted in Whitby as a hero. As he recuperates at his uncle’s farm, he takes to visiting their neighbours, the Robsons. They happen to have a very pretty and obviously admiring young daughter, already infatuated with ‘the closest approach to a hero that she had ever seen’.

Sylvia thinks Kinraid is quite wonderful, never mind the disturbing rumours that he has had a string of girlfriends, and that he caused the sister of Philip’s business partner Coulson to die of a broken heart. Coulson, a devout Quaker, and therefore, hardly a man to tell a lie, remarks that after the break up with Coulson’s sister, he heard Kinraid went on to treat another couple of girls in the same way.

Sylvia, dismissing this as jealous back biting on Hepburn’s part, becomes secretly engaged to Kinraid herself. At this time, Kinraid assures her that he will ‘either marry her, or none’. Then he is snatched by the press gang on his way back to his ship. By a convenient co-incidence, Philip Hepburn sees this as he walks to catch the coach to Newcastle himself. Kinraid gives him a message of ‘faithful love’ to pass on to Sylvia. Later in the inn where he is staying overnight, Hepbrn is about to write a letter about this when he overhears a group of sailors talking of Kinraid’s reputation for daring exploits, and for trifling with one girl after another.

Outraged, Hepburn puts off passing on the message. Then he puts it off some more, and in the end, becomes so absent minded that he forgets to pass the message on at all, what with his business preoccupations and his eageness to marry Sylvia himself. Kinraid’s hat being found on the shore, everyone thinks that he has been drowned. This causes an outcry from one of his female cousins, who insists that she was engaged to him. Sylvia doesn’t believe a word of it, of course…

Of course, Kinraid returns – after Sylvia is married to Hepburn. He has now become an officer in the royal navy and a war hero. Well, after all, he had to use his energy for something in his three years away at sea.

In a dramatic confrontation, Kinraid and Sylvia berate Hepburn for his duplicity. Kinraid suggests that Sylvia come away with him, as his admiral is bound to be able to obtain a divorce for her (this sounds a likely story to me, given how difficult that was in that era). She won’t leave the baby, and both Hepburn and Kinraid go off.,Hepburn to enlist as a marine, and Kinraid to be feted as a war hero, subsequently promoted to captain.

Within eight months Kinraid has married an heiress. This girl in fact pays Sylvia a visit, assuring Sylvia that Hepburn has saved Kinraid’s life at the Siege of Acre, and so paving the way for a final reconciliation between Sylvia and Hepburn.

Sylvia is startled at Kinraid’s ‘fickleness’ in finding comfort elsewhere so soon. But in fact, the reader has no cause to be. The hints about Charley Kinraid’s opportunism and shallow nature were all there if s/he cared to take notice of them. In fact, various defenders of ‘the honest sailor’ (as he calls himself when berating Hepburn) take the view that he should be regarded indulgently, and that his treatment of Coulson’s sister and the two girls after her, and all the other hints about his ‘light o’ love’ reputation, including his younger cousin Bessy Corney’s view that they were unofficially engaged, mean nothing.

This is, of course, because this is all anecdotal evidence, and easily discounted by readers who want to believe in the character’s integrity. Besides, none of it is vividly depicted as current events.

The same is true about Kinraid’s general opportunism. As ‘specksioneer’ (chief harpooner) he violently opposes the press gang to the point of shooting two of its members dead. After he is press ganged into the Royal Navy and promoted into captain, he would have had to rely on the press gang himself to raise enough of a crew to leave shore, and inevitably (as is emphasized in the Hornblower stories) they had to break the rules and take men supposedly protected from their raids. However, this inevitable about face on the use of the press gang is a fact easily overlooked by those reaeders who want to believe the best of the dashing war hero.

These are just a couple of the many examples which can be found all about in readers’ reactions to a character’s questionable integrity in novels , which I think show the truth of Albert Zuckerman’s words. For geneal readers, what matters is the behaviour he or she sees. What has taken place ‘out of sight’ and is recounted by anecdotes, receives less weight. But unlike the so often groundless gossip in real life, if the author has carefully inserted these unattractive aspects of a character’s past, it may well serve as an true reflection of that character’s moral defects.

Elizabeth Gaskell as a christian, of course, believed that justice belongs beyond the grave. From that point of view, there is perhaps nothing odd about her giving a killer and trifler with young girls’ feelings such a happy ending in this world, untroubled by conscience. When he thinks he is dying at the Siege of Acre, Kinraid has no guilt about any wrongdoing at all, and in fact, only pities his wife the massive loss she will suffer in losing him. This piece of vanity in the face of eternity that seems to trouble none of his defenders, though it should be pointed out that Kinraid is not irrelgious himself – he admits he ‘took to praying of nights’ during a particularly hazardous voyage past a great iceburg. Married to a worshipping heiress as superficial as himself, he is promoted to Captain. He even survives his second serious wounding at the Battle of Acre without any lasting damage; when we last see him, he is ‘walking vigorously’, his silly wife hanging onto his arm (it was highly unlikely that a broken leg could be mended without leaving something of a limp, even in Gaskell’s own time).

By contrast, Philip Hepburn undergoes a miserable existence of abject poverty after he is horribly disfigured in the wars, and lives in abject povety for months. He is only reconciled with Sylvia a few hours before his death. Sylvia dies early, forever mourning her earlier rejection of him. They are punished in this world for their wrongdoings, and while Hepburn is confident of immediate divine forgiveness, Sylvia fears punishment. While it is often mentioned by both Gaskell and by her critics that besides his self-serving duplicity, as a christian Hepburn breaks the first commandment in worshipping another human being in Sylvia, I have only read one critic {JG Sharps) who notices that Sylvia does the same with Charley Kinraid. Undoubtedly, though too ignorant to understand its implications, she does ‘make an idol’ out of her hero. Undoubtedly this leads to misery for her in turn, first in her anguish at being kept apart from him by Hepburn’s dishonesty, and then in her later disillusionment.

It may have been that in being so indulgent towards the’ lost sailor’ character to whom she had obviously given some of her lost sailor brother’s characteristics (as she had to Will Wilson in ‘Mary Barton’ and Frederick Hale in ‘North and South) Elizabeth Gaskell was allowing herself to weaken in her purpose through her longing to give such a happy ending to her real life unaccountably missing brother. Or it may, of course, have been Gaskell’s intention to punish Philip Hepburn and Sylvia Robson in this lfie, whereas Charley Kinraid, oblivious to spiritual issues in this world, faces at least some atonement in the next.

The intriguing thing is, that certainly in the case of Charley Kinraid in ‘Sylvia’s Lovers’, this partial interpretation and dismissive attitude towards anecdotal evidence mentioned by Zuckerman applies to several academics as well as general readers. For instance, the critic Andrew Sanders takes a wholly approving attitude towards the opportunist heartbreaker Kinraid, seeming to think that his dishoourable trifling with innocent girls is of no importance compared to his war hero activities. Marion Shaw is able to dismiss these ugly stories as ‘anecdotal’ has justified Kinraid’s undeserved happy fate by suggesting that if he had been given a sad destiny as well, that would ‘tip the balance too far into tragedy’. Given that this is the ‘saddest novel that Elizabeth Gaskell ever wrote’, I don’t see how that could be. I thnk it would have emphasized the general message that we live in a ‘vale of tears’.

Post Two on Albert Zuckerman’s quote : ‘What counts in judging a character for the reader is what we actually see the character do, as opposed to what is said about him.”

In my previous post, I was writing about Albert Zuckerman’s quote and its applicability to questionable anti-heroes, or heroes who convert from anti-heroes into actual heroes in stories. I mentioned how often readers in general are happy to discount these characters’ former shabby or downright hateful deeds, as long as they are not described graphically in the present. I mentioned a few examples from some classic best sellers over the ages.

A series which certainly ought never to be off the best seller list, and which contains an example of such a male character is Rebecca Lochlann’s epic saga ‘Child of the Erinyes’.

In this, the reincarnated heroine, once the Queen of Crete, is torn through the ages between her conflicting love for two men, two half-brothers who reincarnate along with her. I have noted how various women readers prefer the upholder of patriarchy Chrysaleon to the man who secretly ascribes to worship of the female principle, Menoetius. The author establishes early on what Chrysaleon’s general attitude towards women is – brutal even for a mainland warrior from that era. Here’s an account of his carryings on after a battle:

‘One year ago, Mycenae had made war on Iolkos, in Thessaly…His (Menoetius’) most vivid recollection was of Chrysaleon. His half brother laughed when he cut down one of the enemy’s finest soldiers, who happened to be the king’s youngest son. He hacked the warrior’s leg halfway off at the knee and left him to bleed to death. Later he sliced a woman’s throat from one ear to the other because she refused to stop keening her grief over a dead warrior. After the battle, Chrysaleon and a gang of Mycenaean soldiers raped and sodomized numerous captive women and young girls. Many were killed. Menoetius tried to rein in his brother, but Chrysaleon, drunk on bloodlust, wine, and victory, wouldn’t be stopped. They came to blows. Three of Chrysaleon’s cronies had to overpower Menoetius from behind, knocking him unconscious with the butt of a sword..’

I have been following the series eagerly, as I have said elsewhere. Here, the author leaves the reader in no doubt about this man’s savagery and rapist propensities, which are depicted in a wholly unromantic light through Menoetius’ recellections.

Despite this, the fact remains that many of the women readers still prefer Chrysaleon to Menoetius. Either they cast that ugly scene quickly to the back of their minds, preferring to concentrate on the romantic present where the magnificient, golden maned warrior falls for the fearless and carefree Aridela, or they like him despite it, or – to my mind higly unfortunately – they like him because of it (that last is hopefully, less usual with young women these days than it was with the generation who swooned over ‘The Flame and the Flower’).

To go into the role of rapist ‘heroes’ in romance would be to stray off topic. The point is, that for whatever reason, a large number of readers of this series (which, by the way, does anything but condone rape and which I can’t recommend enough) are able to put aside Chrysaleon’s moral drawbacks and think of him only as an exciting lover for Aridela.

Later on in the series, by the way, Chrysaleon does all sorts of brutal things ‘on stage’ – including raping the heroine – so I assume it becomes a lot more problematic for those readers who prefer him to defend him. My comments only really refer to the first book, where his worst acts take place in the form of anecdote or flashbacks and are therefore, easier for the less careful reader to put aside.

A character whose worst deeds take place as either offstage, as ancedotes from other people is the one I have always enjoyed discussing, the opportunist romantic interest in Elizabeth Gaskell’s historical novel about the whaling community in Whitby, ‘Sylvia’s Lovers’; this is the the dashing whaler Charley Kinraid.

This is a man of boundless energy, who goes in for flashy heroics at sea and being a ‘light o’ love’ onland. This is quite apart from being the bravest chief harpooner on the Greenland Seas, the life and soul of the company whereever he goes, and a tireless teller of sailor’s tales. His party piece is dancing a hornpipe at three in the morning. Besides, this, he is possessed of dark wavy hair, shining dark eyes, and flashing white teeth.

What chance does his rival for the naive young farmer’s daughter Sylvia Robson, the quiet and respectable shopkeeper Philip Hepburn, have against him?

When we first hear of Charley Kinraid he is engaged in a fight to the death with a press gang exceeding their remit, and determined to impress the returning crew of a whaler. He sends his men below and stands over the hatches to defend them with a pistol and whaling knife, asserting that they are all married but himself (this is all very heroic, but leaves unexplained why his friend Darley, later described as single himself, is hiding below when he is shot dead).

Kinraid reputedly shoots down two members of the press gang. However, he is not arrested for mutiny, being shot in turn himself and ‘kicked aside for dead’. The elderly captain revives him, he recovers and is feted in Whitby as a hero. As he recuperates at his uncle’s farm, he takes to visiting their neighbours, the Robsons. They happen to have a very pretty and obviously admiring young daughter, already infatuated with ‘the closest approach to a hero that she had ever seen’.

Sylvia thinks Kinraid is quite wonderful, never mind the disturbing rumours that he has had a string of girlfriends, and that he caused the sister of Philip’s business partner Coulson to die of a broken heart. Coulson, a devout Quaker, and therefore, hardly a man to tell a lie, remakrs that after the break up with Coulson’s sister, Kinraid went on to treat another couple of girls in the same way.

Sylvia, dismissing this as jealous back biting on Hepburn’s part, becomes secretly engaged to Kinraid herself. At this time, Kinraid assures her that he will ‘either marry her, or none’. Then he is snatched by the press gang on his way back to his ship. By a convenient co-incidence, Philip Hepburn sees this as he walks to catch the coach to Newcastle himself. Kinraid gives him a message of ‘faithful love’ to pass on to Sylvia. Later in the inn where he is staying overnight, Hepbrn is about to write a letter about this when he overhears a group of sailors talking about Kinraid’s reputation for daring exploits, and for trifling with one girl after another.

Outraged, Hepburn puts off passing on the message.. Then he puts it off some more, and in the end, becomes so absent minded that he forgets to pass the message on at all, what with his business preoccupations and his eageness to marry Sylvia himself. Kinraid’s hat being found on the shore, everyone thinks that he has been drowned. This causes an outcry from one of his female cousins, who insists that she was engaged to him. Sylvia doesn’t believe a word of it, of course…

Of course, Kinraid returns – after Sylvia is married to Hepburn. He has now become an officer in the royal navy and a war hero. Well, after all, he had to use his energy for something in his three years away at sea.

In a dramatic confrontation, Kinraid and Sylvia berate Hepburn for his duplicity. Kinraid suggests that Sylvia come away with him, as his admiral is bound to be able to obtain a divorce for her (this sounds a likely story to me, given how difficult that was in that era). She won’t leave the baby, and both Hepburn and Kinraid go off.,Hepburn to enlist as a marine, and Kinraid to be feted as a war hero, subsequently promoted to captain.

Within eight months Kinraid has married an heiress. This girl in fact pays Sylvia a visit, assuring Sylvia that Hepburn has saved Kinraid’s life at the Siege of Acre, and so paving the way for a final reconciliation between Sylvia and Hepburn.

Sylvia is startled at Kinraid’s ‘fickleness’ in finding comfort elsewhere so soon. But in fact, the reader has no cause to be. The hints about Charley Kinraid’s opportunism and shallow nature were all there if s/he cared to take notice of them. In fact, various defenders of ‘the honest sailor’ (as he calls himself when berating Hepburn) take the view that he should be regarded indulgently, and that his treatment of Coulson’s sister and the two girls after her, and all the other hints about his ‘light o’ love’ reputation, including his younger cousin Bessy Corney’s view that they were unofficially engaged, mean nothing.

This is, of course, because this is all anecdotal evidence, and easily discounted by readers who want to believe in the character’s integrity. Besides, none of it is vividly depicted as current events.

The same is true about Kinraid’s general opportunism. As ‘specksioneer’ (chief harpooner) he violently opposes the press gang to the point of shooting two of its members dead. After he is press ganged into the Royal Navy and promoted into captain, he would have had to rely on the press gang himself to raise enough of a crew to leave shore, and that (as is emphasized in the Hornblower stories) they had to break the rules and take men supposedly protected from their raids) . However, this is a fact easily overlooked by those reaeders who want to believe the best of the dashing war hero.

These are just a couple of the many examples which can be found all about in readers’ reactions to a character’s questionable integrity in novels , which I think show the truth of Albert Zuckerman’s words. For geneal readers, what matters is the behaviour he or she sees. What has taken place ‘out of sight’ and is recounted by anecdotes, receives less weight. But unlike the so often groundless gossip in real life, if the author has carefully inserted these unattractive aspects of a character’s past, it may well serve as an true reflection of that character’s moral defects.

Albert Zuckerman: ‘What counts in judging a character for the reader is limited to what we actually see the character do, as opposed to what is said about him.’

The quote is, of course, from Zuckerman’s book ‘Writing the Block Buster Novel’. It is made with reference to a certain Don Corleone. Zuckerman is showing how Puzo makes him sympathetic.

That general advice is very good, but I was particularly fascinated by this quote in particular, as it is so astute, and explains an attitude on the part of many readers where they seem to discount anything that contrasts with their – often blinkered – view of some character that they find admirable.

It certainly holds with countless anti-heroes inhistorical romances, for instance,, who are described as libertines. The reader is spared from descriptions of the hero’s worst excesses or acts of heartlessness, and treated to signs that whatever people say about him and his attitude towards women before he met the heroine, she has evoked a diffferent response from him than the inevitable contemptuous lust.

It is useful for all sorts of morally ambiguous individuals, of course. If a decent mist of obscurity can hang over their former misdeeds, well – it’s easy to put them out of mind or to dismiss them as exaggerated, or – that convenient excuse – ‘based on hearsay’ . I can think of various classic novels where the authors use this device, whether consciously or otherwise,

Rinaldo Rinaldini, of course, is a ‘terrible robber captain’. He is also a stereotypical Latin lover, and while we see him doing various good things, we don ‘t actually, see him commit many acts of violence and brutality. For instance, he rescues the gypsy girl Roselia from the woman who treats her as a slave, giving her the choice of either staying with him or going off on her own (Roselia, already infatuated, chooses to stay with him,with unfortunate results for her). He also rescues the woman he worships as a pure object of worship, Aurelia, from the husband who has been abusing her. Oddly, it is never shown why she doesn’t complain of her husband’s abuse to her uncle, who aftter all married her off to him.

Earlier, he made determined plans to abduct her on her way to her wedding. As these plans are foiled, it isn’t made clear whether he would have forced her to come with him if she had proved unwilling, and the reader is never told whether he plans to rape her or not. How far this was due to the censorship of the age, I don’t know. For all I know, there may at that time hae been a censorship on vivid descriptions of violence in novels, too. Certainly, after he has attacked her husband the count’s castle, when she pleads with him to let her go off to a nunnery, he agrees to it.

This, of course, is after taking a suitable, brutal revenge on the count in cutting off his nose. This is, of course, one of the few brutal acts that Rinaldini does ‘onstage’ in the novel. Few gruesome details are given, any more than they are about the various battles and fights in which he in involved. The whole episode is summed up in a few words. As the count is depicted as having made a habit of insulting Aurelia for being illegitimate, forcing her to put up living with his prostitutes, and beating her, we may assume that the reader is meant to find Rinaldini’s savagery to some extent excusable.

Another unscupulous act which Rinaldini does is one where he robs a countess he and his men run into. She makes the mistake of jeering about Rinaldini, calling him a ‘cut purse’. It seems he objects to being described in such low terms. Perhaps, ‘the dreadful robber chief’ is different. Anyway, he gets her to admit that she would find it amusing to encounter the low thief Rinaldini. Then, naturally, he ‘throws off his disguise’. He demands a ‘trifling sum’ and her watch in return for gratifying her wish to meet him. Presumably this is meant to be funny, but it doesn’t exactly depict him in a gallant light.

Rinaldini, though we know that a robber chief is obviously responsible for many murders and robberries, is generally depicted symapthetically. His regrets about being an outlaw and his attempts – invariably foiled – to reform are giv en far more prominence than those robber chief activities. His followers worship him, men are happy to follow him, women almost invariably fall in love with him (we are never told exactly what Aurelia feels about him: maybe, as a ‘pure’ young woman of the time, she isn’t suposed to feel anything for a man until it is respectable for her to do so).

‘Rinaldo Rinaldini’, written in 1798, is of course, a very early novel and as an adventure story, more concerned with blood and thunder than with the states of mind and feeling which occupy the still earlier ‘novels by Fanny Burney and Samuel Richardson. All of them lack much deep psychological insight. Nevertheless, Rinaldini is a good example of an anti hero with a terrible past depicted sympthetically. When other characters sit in harsh and simplistic moral judgement on him – that unlucky countess, Aurelia’s uncle Donatelllo ‘(Your love is an abomination’ ) and others, the reader tends to feel that in discounting the fact that he is quite a nice villain as villains go, he is being treated unfairly.

Mafia dons and robber chiefs are fairly extreme examples. But the technique is the same for authors depicting morally ambiguous characters with less acts of moral turpitude to their account.

In real life, adopting a sceptical attitude towards possibly malicous rumours about a new acquaintance until they are proven, is one thing. While in a novel, these sinister hints may also be groundless, and set up to make a character duboius about another one, they may well also be hints from the author that this character is not necessarily what she or he seems, and is possibly not to be trusted. In the classic novels, which tend to be less morally ambigiuous than modern ones, they can be subtle warnings.

For instance, in the late Victorian novel by Rhoda Broughton ‘The Game and the Candle’ (1798) ‘, the heroine, Jane, is given various hints that her true love John Miles is of fairly low intelligence, uncultured, often insensitive, at the very least a flirt, emotionally superficial and certainly an opoortunist. Worse for a romantic like Jane, given to quoting poetry which he has never heard of to express her feelngs, he excells at telling coarse jokes after dinner.

She ignores them all, convinced that her view of him is the correct one. No doubt late Victorian readers would have been dismayed by some of the things that he does which wouldn’t trouble modern ones. In the end, though, the cummulative evidence that he has been carring on with other women during her Victorian year of mourning is too overwhelming even for Jane to ignore.

There are various other Victorian writers who leave subtle hints about the integrity of a character, who is finally revealed as lacking in the qualities for which an infatuated young woman, drawn by his good looks and vigorous masculine appeal, adores him. Quite often, readers can be as almost as ready to overlook shabby episodes only recounted as ‘hearsay’. I have cetainly come across that with the author and character I am going to mention in the conclusion of this post next week. Regular readers won’t be surprised to learn that it is Elziabeth Gaskell, and her ambiguous character the light o’ love Chief Harpooner Charley Kinraid in ‘Sylvia’s Lovers’.

Re-reading Mario Puzo’s 1969 ‘The Godfather’

I first read this at seventeen, longer ago than I care to admit.

I thought the writing style was poor in places even then.

I re-read it because Albert Zukerman recommends studying the techniques the author uses as a writer of popular fiction.

He is all admiration of Puzo’s ability to create a larger than life character in Vito Corleone, He explains how he makes him sympathetic to the reader, his plotting techniques, and the methods he uses to create and build tension, etc. I can see that there is no doubt that Puzo is skillful in these areas, or that his writing is vivid and his story gripping.

Zuckerman makes the interesting general point that, ‘What counts in determining character for the reader is limited largely to what we actually see the character do as opposed to what is said about him.’ This is interesting; it can be applied to all sorts of morally ambiguous characters whose worst deeds take place out of that reader’s sight.

Early on in the book, we see Don Corleone grant the wishes of various people who have been unjustly treated. This is without any financial reward, and so a clever stroke on the part of the author. The Don appears as less evil than the corrupt representatives of powerful institutions.
However, I do find the writing style to be dire in places. For example, descriptions are repeated too often; for instance, Sonny’s ‘heavy cupid face’.

I leave out the descriptions of a more intimate parts of him. I did, in fact, once see a man endowed like that – exposing himself to me on the underground. Evidently, he hadn’t found another Lucia, who worships Sonny’s organ (her problem could probably have been solved by her doing a lot of pelvic floor exercises rather than resorting to an operation).

Of course, a book should only be judged by the standards of the era in which it was written. This was written in the late 1960’s, about Italian Amerians in the immediate post war era. Accordingly, we shouldn’t expect it to reflect attitudes towards women that are anything but repressive. I suppose in a way, the fact that Lucia is depicted sympathetically was comparitively advanced for the time.

Still, I don’t think that excuses the purile humour, that attitude of gloating dirty mindedness. A reader on Goodreads likened it to Benny Hill. That nudge-nudge-wink-wink attitude wasn’t an inevitable attitude as the 1970’s emerged from the 1960’s (yes, I’m so ancient I actually remember the 1970’s) . Interestingly, it doesn’t feature in the film, which came out quite soon after the book.

Three stars for the cleverness of writing a book with such massive general appeal, even if the writing style is often dismal.

I saw that a reader on Goodreads who gave a low star rating was admonished by another reader that she ought to ‘enjoy the well written book’. Perhaps I will be given the same advice.

Review of ‘The Tryst’ by Michael Dibden (1989)

“‘One of my patients thinks somebody’s trying to kill him,” Aileen Macklin says to her husband over breakfast. A psychiatrist with a fading marriage, Aileen is haunted by the glue-sniffing lad who comes to her in a panic, begging to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital for protection. Gary Dunn clearly needs help: ravaged by his squalid existence, he is paralyzed with fear about a murder he has witnessed and convinced he may be next. Unfortunately for Gary, he may just be right. And unfortunately for Aileen, she becomes far more involved in his case than professional ethics would recommend.‘

I found this an intriguing story. The separate threads of the story gradually interweave, while the atmosphere of vague threat increases. The author has written this story in such a way that a ‘natural’ explanation is possible – if flawed by a few improbable co-incidences. A ghostly one is also hinted at: the decision seemed to be left in the hands of the reader.

This was a fairly complex book, and I may have missed on certain points that interconnect the interwoven plots.

It is also set in the 1980’s – an era I remember well, the one before the rise of the internet, mobile phones, social media. Car culture was only just taking off as a mass addiction in the UK.

Another sort of addiction – glue sniffing – was comparatively new, too.

Intriguingly, I found the callousness of the characters who together form a sort of diverse, malevolent collective antagonist almost shocking.

There is Aileen’s husband Doug, for instance. The depiction of his relentless attempts to destroy her – always shaky – self confidence is a coolly objective description of long term emotional abuse. Although at this time understanding the destructive nature of ‘gaslighting’ as a destructive weapon against a marriage partner or family member had not developed, the author clearly realises how terribly destructive this treatment is, and that it is deliberate. Doug subjects Aileen to a decades long campaign of emotional abuse of various forms, and yet, Aileen never thinks of leaving him.

‘Her…mistake…was to try and discuss openly with him the deteriorating state of their marriage. ..Her husband had not only refused to talk about it, but had rejected her description of the situation as distorted and exaggerrated. “If you don’t mind my saying so,” he had said in that solicitous tone which she had come to fear and loacan the, “I think you read a good deal too much into things. When I come home in the evening, I’m far too exhuasted to have any interest in playing the sort of games you’re talking about.’

It is perhaps an indication of some unsuspected strength of characer that Aileen has been able to survive this onslaught for the best part of twenty years. when reading this, it was never clear to me exatly why she has married Doug, even given her being so distraught after her preferred lover’s death and her failed suicide attemp. Surely, any security that Doug offers is offset by the fact that she doesn’t even seem to find him physically attractive, even apart from all this mental torture. Even fifty years ago, few women were likely to resign themselves to quite so bleak a marriage as hers if they had any sort of financial independence, and the childless Aileen has a well paid enough job as a psychologist. For me, this required more of a suspension of disbelief than any of the seemingly supernatural events.

To object to some practical detail in the plotting as improbable in a ghost story may sound absurd, and perhaps it is a comment on how convincing most of the writing is. Of course, that trick of the widly improbable being made to seem probable by the use of realistic details making up wholly a convincing background is just what is recommended to write a gripping novel.

Aileen is, in a quiet way, quite lovely to look at: ‘Aileen had always had a difficult relationship with those regular features of hers…the moment she tried to do anything with it, her face turned dumpy, common and ordinary. ‘ Her wild and unreliable preferred lover -who died before he could reveal quite how shallow and self serving his interest in Aileen was, saw this. So did another man, but to reveal who this is would be to write a spoiler.

Other characters who behave with gratuitous cruelty include, hardly surprisngly, the glue-sniffers with whom Aileen’s client, the fiften-year-old Gary Dunn lives in a sordid squat somewhere in West London. As they turn to making a living by mugging pensioners, it should have come as no surprise to me that they finally scheme to murder him. Nevertheless, I found the scene where he finds this out especially horrific. Their wits have obviously been scrambled by their drug abuse. Gary Dunn – or Stephen Bradley, is ironically rescued by them from the police. ‘He’d seen them before, the stiff robotic march, the swollen plastic bags clutched in their hands, his eyes glazed like those of the fish heads he sometimes came across, scavenging in bins for his supper.’ One of them claims that Steve is his younger brother, and he goes to live with them. He contributes some money by deliering fre newspapers.

An element of insecure, transitory cosiness is added when an old man on Gary’s round begins to pay him to do some shopping . This man is scared of going outside. He goes in dread of a strange man who seems to be shadowing him. He invites Steve into his house: ‘They were sitting in the snug clutter of the basement room in Grafton Avenue, the man and the boy. To celebrate the commencement of the story he had promised to tell, Ernest Matthews had prepared a high tea of soft-boiled eggs with bread and butter cut into inch wide fingers. ..Steve sat by the table, his eyes fixed on the stove, where rising currents of hot air made the tiles of the fireplace ripple like stones on the bed of a stream.’

He begins to tell Steve the story of his life: ‘You should have heard the clock that stood in the housekeeper’s parlour at the Hall…The chimes were as mellow as the drops of wine I used to taste out of the gentlemen’s glasses sometimes after dinner. And all day long, and all through the night, the pendulum swung to and fro, tick tock, tick tock. Ah, things were different then! There were sixty minutes to an hour in those days. Now time is nothing but rubbish, short measure and shoddy quality…’

Matthew’s mother was a housekeeper in a country mansion in the Edwardian era, where he grew up (this story being set in the 1980’s, there were still a number of old people who remembered World War I and the era immediately before it). The peace of this secluded childhood is abruptly shattered when the owner of the great house dies. Soon after this, one of his sons , the poetic Maurice, becomes obsessed with a vision of a lovely fair woman in a white robe he sees crossing the lawn at night. He soon falls to his death while pursuing it to the old hunting lodge.

When war breaks out, Matthews volunteers, lying about his age. Here he meets Aubrey Deville, a friend of the dead Maurice, and finds out about the bizarre circumstances in which Maurice fell to his death, and how the local gypsies lving nearby concealed the body for fear of being blamed. Then, Matthews sees horrors in his first action and suffers nightmarishly from thirst and being trapped, wounded, in ‘No Man’s Land’ . Then he begins to see the figure of Aubrey Devillle, who has recently been killed in action, shadowing him. No-one else can see the figure, and when those in command hear of his talk, and he starts firing on this figure nobody else can see, he is discharged from the army as mentally unbalanced.

In mental hospital based in a big country house, he is untroubled by visions of the ghost. Any trip outside, however, leads to the figure’s haunting him again. ‘My dreams of freedom had all turned sour… Remember that, lad, if e er you have need; get into hospital…’I would be there myself if they hadn’t put me out in the end. ..’ He came to live in this London house inherited from his aunt.

Steve has seen a strange, sinister man lurking about the old man’s house, and believes that he is the ghost figure whom Matthews is talking about. He shcemes to be put in a psychiatric unit ny feigning mental illness. That is how he encounters Aileen, who notes how much he looks like her former lover, Raymond…

Aileen herself, intolerably persecuted by Doug, begins to show signs of mental strain. She begins to wonder if this boy is not in some impossible way, the baby she miscarried after her suicide attempt after Raymond’s death.

It is a bleak enough story, yet there are such brilliantly humorous touches in it that I found it compulsive reading. For instance:

‘Whatever the stotters other shortcomings, a morbid sensitivity to each others’ moods was not among them. Steve was perhaps told to stop wanking about rather more often than usual during the week that followed, but the nearest anyone came to asking him to account for his behaviour was when Jimmy demanded, “You been on the glue, or what?”

A ghost story where it is difficult to distinguish between the psychological and the supernatural elements is always fascinating. This is one of the most cleverly crafted that I have read.

Cardboard Characters, Lovable, Rounded Characters, Larger Than Life Characters,and Mere Ciphers: How Sympathetic Must a Character Be to Keep You Reading?

Well, every Austen reader knows what scene this depicts. ‘She is tolerable,but not handsome enough to tempt me…’

In my last post, I was talking about my new fledged writer friend being upset at the savagery of a one star review (though she felt a bit better when I showed some of the fine specimens I have come by). Readers of this blog might remember that the main criticism was that her book was ‘Boring!!!’

The second front was opened over the issue of the characters, who according to this reviewer, were both unsympathetic and unbelievable, in fact, so like a lot of walking cardboard cut outs, that it was impossible for the reader to care what became of the lot of ‘em.

While the image of a lot of cardboard cut out characters stalking through the pages of a story is intriguing material for a fantasy story – I must give one on those lines a go, sometime – those concluding side swipes obviously cut my notice writer colleague to the quick.

This is clearly the last thing that a writer – who has probably spent hours making notes on background details on the past life of those characters, to fill them out in her/his mind – wants to hear. Well, everyone’s idea of a sympathetic or believable character is different – some people even find Heathcliff sympathetic and believable (well, so do I, having the psychiatric treatment he so clearly needs)  but it did make me mull over how far it is necessary to like the characters in a story, in order to enjoy it.

Obviously, and unfortunately, if a reader both thinks the plot is dull and the characters  uninteresting, then there isn’t very much to hold the attention. Yet, as I said last week, and as I pointed out to the writer in question (just call me Polyanna) that as the reviewer  also maintained that she kept reading to the bitter end, something obviously did hold her attention, even if it was how much she hated the characters and the plot, so all was not lost. As I said in my first post, if someone keeps on reading, however much s/he hates what you’ve written, then I count that as a victory.

How much sympathetic characters matter depends a lot, obviously,  on genre. If you are writing some traditional type murder story where you are going to bump off a lot of the characters, then it’s probably best for the reader’s peace of mind if s/he doesn’t get too fond of them. Perhaps that is why most of the characters in traditional, ‘country house murder’ Agatha Christie type detective stories are like a lot of walking stereotypes, often deliberately made hateful.

If, as Colonel Blimp is holding forth about Young People Today and Hanging and Flogging from the depths of his armchair in his club, his face a fine shade of puce, and  all his captive audience suddenly see him snatch at this throat and gargle, dropping his glass of vintage port, nobody is going to feel much outrage.

All the interest lies in the intellectual puzzle: was it his Estranged Wife who poisoned the port? Was it his nephew, the Dastardly Young Heir (entailed property, you see), who is rumoured to have Anarchistic Tendencies? Or was it the Colonel’s daughter, who has been kept at home in dowdy clothes and quietly besotted by her cousin these ten years?  Or was it the Waitress, whose mother he Ruined thirty years ago? I just wrote that off the top of my head, and no prizes for guessing that of course it was the last.

On mystery and detective stories, the Sherlock Holmes stories are, of course, notoriously well written. But the secondary characters are necessarily, just a series of ciphers. There isn’t space for anything more  in a short story, even if the Victorian short story was generally far longer than one for a magazine today. There is the Spirited Governess, the Unimaginative Shopkeeper, the Dastardly Stepfather, the Haughty Unbending Aristocrat, and one of the nicest characters – the Gallant, Dashing Gentleman Sailor –in ‘The Adventure of the Abbey Grange’, my favourite.  I do like a love story as part of an adventure or mystery story – but I am wandering from the point.

Conan Doyle sometimes called Sherlock Holmes ‘a reasoning machine’. This is not doing justice to the subtlety of his creation. In ‘A Study in Scarlet’ when Watson and Holmes first start sharing rooms, Watson does create a list of the areas of Holmes’ supposed areas of knowledge and others where he supposedly shows a startling lack of it. For instance,  he claims not to know that the earth revolves round the sun, which I think we may assume was a joke at the expense of the sometimes credulous Watson. Later on, Conan Doyle ignored – or possibly, even forgot about – this list, much as he forgot about the location of Watson’s wound by the time of, ‘The Sign of the Four’.

Thus, while Holmes’ knowledge of literature is supposedly nil, he sometimes makes remarks on quite abstruse literary figures, for instance, his cynical (and  unfortunately, true, at least for women as sex roles stand) quote at the end of  ‘A Case of Identity’: ‘“There is danger for him who taketh a tiger cub, and danger also in whoso snatches a delusion from a woman.” There is as much sense in Hafiz as in Horace, and as much knowledge of the world.’

Then again, nobody seems to expect the characters in macho war stories to be anything but stereotypes. If they developed scruples about killing the enemy  or something stupid like that, it would spoil everything for the readership, so none of that.

Dracula climbing down the wall of his castle, from a 1916 edition of the work.

Then again, as another writer friend of mine pointed out, in ‘Dracula’ (I think that was Mari Biella) while Count Dracula and his adversary Van Helsing are strongly drawn characters, the supporting cast comprising Mina and Jonathan Harker and her ex-pupil Lucy and her three admirers are very thinly drawn. However,  this doesn’t detract from the readers enjoyment of the story. The two main opponents have so much personality that there is no need for the others to need more than a few strokes of the pen.

That modern readers we require sophisticated and consistent characterisation from authors at all, shows how far our study, or perhaps, our introversion regarding human character has progressed since, say, the Bronze Age ‘Iliad’ or even the Mediaeval Arthurian Legends, when the characters often behave wholly inconsistently.

I suppose, though, it must be conceded that while most of the characters in these lasting stories (as distinct from the indistinguishable war hero types) are ciphers, they are carried by the strongly drawn main ones much like an outstanding actor supporting a while cast of mediocrities.

It is also certainly true that there are genres where characterisation is all important. This is true of most so-called ‘women’s fiction’ and is certainly true of psychological thrillers  and has to be true of love stories.

Even with love stories, though (I’m distinguishing these from ‘romance’ which is a separate genre, with set expectations of an inevitable Happy Ever After Etc from the reader) it is still possible to enjoy the story, if you find just one of the main pair appealing. That is rather similar to how it is when a friend sets her heart on someone who you think is as dismal a choice as she could make. You still want her to win through, even if you know disillusionment lurks round the corner.

I would appear to be one of the few readers of Jane Austen who doesn’t like, or admire, Mr Darcy. In fact, I thought he was a priggish so-and-so, and I delighted in Jo Baker’s less than flattering picture of him in her brilliant novel ‘Longbourn . ’ I never could imagine how Elizabeth Bennett could be happy with a man with whom she couldn’t share a laugh, and I still can’t.

However, I did like Elizabeth Bennett. So if she had the poor taste to want the boring fellow (and no, no, I’m honestly not saying anything about the  Freudian implications of her joke about the sight of the grounds of Pemberley swaying her choice) , I wanted her to be able to win him, so I stayed interested until the end.

I mentioned dashing sailors earlier, and on this, and good or bad love choices, and on how it is still possible to fnd a book fascinating while not liking any of the main characters, I can think of at least one classic novel which has long intrigued me where I didn’t particularly like any of the main characters. In one, I actively disliked the two rival flawed heroes and wasn’t especially fond of the heroine. Yes, it’s – wait for it  – ‘Sylvia’s Lovers’ by Elizabeth Gaskell, about which I have often written before.

But this post is getting too long.  So more of that next time.

Review of ‘Lady Adelaide’ by ‘Mrs Henry Wood’ (Ellen Wood)

To start with the positive, like a good reviewer. I may not generally admire ‘Mrs Henry Wood’s’ writing style, but I do admire the way she managed to write a string of best sellers to save her family’s financial situation after Mr Henry Wood went bankrupt,and obviously that style was perfectly adapted to the tastes of the time. I assume it must have made people feel comfortable;that is what popular authors – especially best selling ones – generally do.

There is definitely something about her plots and her characters which draw the reader back to find out what happens,even though you know full well that there will be a happy ending with the upright citizens vindicated, the people who lapsed badly punished, and those in the middle only given a slap on the wrist. This ability in an athor to lure back the reader, even if s/he despises what s/he is reading, is an indifinable quality, but it is invaluable.

‘Mrs Henry Wood’ was wonderfully productive; she not only wrote over thirty novels, but bought, edited and wrote much of the ‘Argosy’ magazine, to which Christina Rossetti and other respected authors contributed.

This workload (I just misread that was ‘wordload’!) almost certainly accounts for occasional pointers earlier in the novels which are never fully developed later on. For instance, in this one, the servant Ravensbird looks about the old, vault like room where the dead bodies of deceased members of the Dane family are displayed, and says that he knows it, though he has never been there before. This is never explained. Perhaps she planned a connection between the secret passages leading to this vault and the criminal element – on whom Ravensbird could have been spying when he would not account for his activities on the night of Harry Dane’s disappearance -and this vault, which is never fully developed in the final version of the story. Anyway, she neglected to delete that incongruous remark from the manuscript. In those days, of course, editing manuscripts was a far more tedious, laborious task.

Humph: I found the snobbery in this truly dismal. I couldn’t enjoy the absurdities of the melodramatic nonsense of the plot because of it.

I freely admit to having problems with the ‘conservative’ approach adopted by the author. Generally, though, I don’t believe that readers and reviewers can be objective, even if they try to be, so it is best for them to declare their particular biases in advance. I don’t believe that the author should be subject to self-righteous indignation because her views on social class are distasteful to our own age.

A future age will probably view the people of this age as morally reprehensible. ‘Mrs Henry Wood’s’ social prejudices are those shaerd by many in her era, and an author should of course, only be judged by the standards of his or her age.

An assumption that working class people wery living in degrading conditions, often unthinking and usually physically smaller would these days be ascribed to their economic circumstances , to crowded housing, lack of educational opportunities, poor diet etc. Mrs Henry Wood, though a devout Christian, seems to some extent have put their lifestyle and physical and mental lack of development down to some inherent inferiority. Such a view was common at that time. I think this sort of attitude is one that modern day readers often find hard to recognise from the hints in the text. It is, of course, a view that any modern day Tory would find repellent; but it was widespread and obviously shared by ‘Mrs Henry Wood’.

I could ignore the uncritical acceptance of the rigid class system of Victorian England in ‘East Lynne’ , because I was too busy laughing at the absurd melodrama. There was an excess of that, what with the caddish, moustache twirling seducer, the adulterous wife returning to work in her husband’s house as a governess, disguised in a pair of blue glasses and ‘bands’ wrapped about her face, and all the rest of the absurdities. To me, this made it seem like a spoof. I wasn’t surprised to read that it had been lampooned many times.

Wihile the plot of this tale is also wildly improbable, it is less luridly enjoyable. In fact , the author actually appears to be taking seriously the nonsense about a viscount’s son falling over a cliff after the slight diversion of kicking the odd confidential servant downstairs. Naturally, he comes back disguised, in this case, by a purple shade over his eyes. The snobbery, however, is much more obvious.

For instance: ‘They were a couple of dull, stupid clodhoppers, of that species of rustic whom we are apt to marvel at, and almost question whether they can be human beings; possessing just sufficient brains to get through their day’s work at the millers.’

‘Lydney looked as little like a housebreaker as it was possible to conceive.’ I suppose that means he wasn’t wearing the regulation outfit of the mid-nineteenth century ‘hooligan’, complete with striped sweater, heavy boots and belt with a heavy buckle, mask and dark lantern to hand.

Although supposedly raised in the US, Lydney seems to behave with all the stiffness of an English gentleman. He uses such terms as ‘Goody’ and ‘My Good Woman.’ (I don’t know what he calls bad women).

Lydney, alias the viscount’s heir, is sadly not the wicked poacher that the respectable commoners think him. He, in fact, upholds the law against taking game with particular reverenence, never mind that the land in question would probably have been stolen by his ancestors from the locals during the common land enclosures of earlier centures:
‘You intimated just now your cognizance of my rank! I do not forget it, I assure you, neither am I likely to disgrace it.’

One of his relatives has, however,forgotten his rank,and disgraces it. He almost certainly goes out poaching. However, the reason for that is his father refusing him an allowance, causing his household to teeter on the verge of starvation. You would think that he might be able to get a menial job of some sort – perhaps at the mill-to support them, but that doesn’t seem to occur to him or anyone else.

I found it hard to understand why this story was called ‘Lady Adelaide’, as this anti-heroine is so passive. Her trickery in being engaged to Lord Dane’s second son to distract attention from her secret meetings with his cousin Herbert Dane initiates the drama of the struggle on the clifftop and his plunging to his supposed death, it’s true. After that, she perjures herself to save the man she loves.

Then, in an anti-climatic move, rather than go back to living in Scotland, she marries another admirer she doesn’t love. This one is a widower and another distant relative of the Danes’, known as Squire Lester.

I don’t understand why Lady Adelaide doesn’t have an honest conversation with Herbert Dane to find out whether he was guilty of attempted murder in the struggle she saw between Harry and Herbert Dane on the clifftop when Harry Dane falls over and is assumed dead. I don’t see why she doesn’t admit to him that she saw them. Is it meant to be moral cowardice? Does she assume that he meant to kill Harry Dane? Living in doubt would surely be worse. To me it makes no sense she is unwilling to face the truth about whatever it is, yet is willing to perjure herself, swearing that she didn’t see them when she was out that night, and ran back in a fright. As she has done the other wrongs, to me it is irrational that she won’t admit to Herbert Dane that she suspects him and that is why she has what appears to be a dread of marrying him. Her motives appear to be based on superstitious fear as much as anything.

After marrying, the eponymous anti-heroine does very little to drive the plot forwards, except to make the home uncomfortable for her husband’s older children. She has lots of children herself, runs her husband into debt by spending a huge amount on dress,and plays the stereotypical wicked stepmother in a torpid sort of way. It seems to me Squire Lester is as much to blame as she is for the neglect of his children from his earlier marriage.

She is always depicted externally, and it is only at the end that we learn something of what has been going on in her mind all these years. It seems she never stops loving Herbert Dane. I suppose that does make it quite a punishment when he comes back from abroad and wants to marry her pretty young step-daughter.

The wronged now viscount tells her to repent, and there is a strong hint that she will take his advice.

Anyway, all ends happily: ‘The stately old castle and its waving flag; the group of humble friends gathered there, tendering their homage and affection;and the fine young chieftain standing to receive it,bare-headed, free and noble, his face lighted up by the setting sun. A fine face!’

I don’t think I am likely to read any more of ‘Mrs Henry Wood’ for quite a while. Charles Garvice is practically subversive in his views compared to her. A relative gave me a pile of early editions of her books. All offers gratefully accepted.

Romantic Novels and Working Class Characters

Certainly, I haven’t come across many love stories – let alone love stories that can be defined according to the current definition of ‘romance’  — which are set amongst ordinary, working people, let alone the impoverished, historical or otherwise.

And certainly, too, it is difficult to think of higher emotions, of anything but ones stomach if one is hungry. Perhaps this is why so many traditional rhymes turned into nursery rhymes seem to be about food. Henry Mayhew, who chronicled the lives of the London poor, comments on that in his mid-nineteenth century study ‘London Labour and the London Poor’.

Besides, even when not actually living hand to mouth, the normal lifestyle for working people in former ages was hardly conducive to romantic feelings. They had to labour for soul destroying hours, live in cramped, often damp, sparsely furnished housing, wear shabby clothing  which they could not afford to have laundered frequently, while eating a sparse and unvaried diet.  

It is true that most readers of historical novels who prefer a glamorous setting and a hero with social and political power might not choose to read stories about those low in social and economic status. They don’t make for comfortable reading, as they must by definition bring in questions of social justice and economic equality, and people don’t generally read romance to encounter too much emphasis on that. 

Yet, after all, that might be just a prejudice of our own age. The nineteenth century, for instance, had a great thing about the romance of unrecognised geniuses starving in garrets: hence the fate of the consumptive seamstress Mimi  ‘La bohème’, which features an impoverished poet and painter living in the Latin quarter of Paris. The opera, though considered highly romantic at the time, does not have a story which would meet the criteria for a romantic novel today. Then, a few centuries back, Shakespeare’s age had a conception that the pastoral life, and shepherds and shepherdesses in particular, were romantic. Or anyway, this was the idea of certain more privileged members of society.  The abandoned baby Perdita, adopted by a shepherd living in a shepherdesses in ‘A Winter’s Tale’, is portayed as a highly romantic figure who acts as hostess in a sheep shearing feast, already having caught the eye of the prince.

Fortunately, only a section working people in early modern Britain and Europe suffered from actual want. Those slightly higher up the social scale, such as tradesmen and tenant farmers, were a long way from poverty.

The situation of the Robson family, where ex-whaler Daniel Robson is now a tenant farmer employing a labourer who lives as more or less one of the family, in Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘Sylvia’s Lovers’ where the family lead a reasonably comfortable, though hard working life, would be fairly common. They eat porridge for supper, and have few luxuries, relying on rush lights and firelight after dark. However, Sylvia’s parents can afford to treat her to material to make up an unnecessary new red cloak from the haberdashers in town.

In fact, there is a striking story of romantic love in this novel. However, the general theme of the novel is the unromantic one ofhow wrong it is to worship another human being. Whatever the readers opinion of the character of the whaler Charley Kinraid, whom the foolish Sylvia Robson hero worships for standing up to the press gang (I have often stated that I think he is a shameless opportunist), the author’s portrayal of a young girl’s infatuation with a dashing young man is vivid and believable.

The surroundings are always prosaic. The setting is usually such places as the haberdasher’s, where Charley Kinraid’s rival Philip Hepburn works, inside the Robson’s  farmhouse on evenings spent at the fireside, with the women sewing and listening to the men boasting of their adventures at sea, or at the untidy and crowded neighbouring farming family’s New Year’s party, or in the byre or dairy at the  Robson’s.  Despite these mundane surroundngs, Sylvia’s besotted admiration of the Specksioneer (chief harpooner) Charley Kinraid is depicted as fully as romantic as those of young girls swooning over some untameable aristocratic hero in a ballroom.

A large proportion of young people in the early modern age worked as servants, where the amount of work required varied according to the status of the master and the size of the household. Footmen in aristocratic households had a reputation, deserved or otherwise, for being lazy. Housemaids in less affluent houses had to do a lot of heavy, dirty work.

No doubt it is for this reason that the heroine of Samuel Richardson’s 1740’s bestseller ‘Pamela’, is a lady’s maid (without a lady to serve after the death of her master’s mother) whose work consisted largely of sewing, and therefore was considered to be ‘a higher servant’, unlike the coarse Nan, with whom she at one time shares a bed and the touch of whose coarse, red hands would never tempt the would-be ravisher Mr B.

Jo Baker’s best selling, highly praised and award winning 2013 novel ‘Longbourn’, definitely contains a romantic love story and has been called ‘Achingly romantic’ by the “Library Journal ‘.

The heroine Sarah is a maid of all work, complete with reddened hands (a highly unromantic and realistic touch) from washing the dishes in the days before washing up liquid, and the laundry, carrying pails from the pump in icy weather, etc.  (maybe it is the unaesthetic effect of years of rough housework on the hands, which puts off writers of romance from making heroines out of maids of all work?).  The story of Sarah’s shared passion with the mysterious James Smith is vividly recounted.  

My criticisms of the novel are few, and not connected with this love story; they are for instance, that it is unfair to assume that Wickham was a paedophile from his running off with the fifteen-year-old Lydia Bennett – the age of consent being twelve at the time. The other was that later when working as Elizabeth’s lady’s maid, Sarah, who in that role would do so many intimate tasks for her, could not possibly have missed her pregnancy for so many months.

In my own novel ‘The Peterloo Affair’ I wrote about a love affair between a couple where the heroine indeed does not know where her next meal is coming from, if the vegetable patch runs out of potatoes or the poached rabbits stop coming in. The heroine comes from a Lancashire weaving family in the early nineteenth century in the era of terrible want following the Napoleonic Wars. They are gradually reduced to being on the verge of starvation.

While l would like to think that the story has a successfully recounted romantic love between a couple living in dire poverty, that is not for me to say.  However, here is the link on Amazon, should any readers try it for themselves.h

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Twelfth Night and Traditional Revels and Feasting

It is an interesting thing, that it is very easy to get the impression that life in the UK of  pre-industrial times was, for the majority of the population if not for the tiny upper class, one of unrelenting toil  and uniform drabness.

This image is surely mistaken.

Everyday life was certainly hard, and life expectation was low (partly due to the tragically high rate of infant mortality). The standard of living for the majority of the population, who would have been working primarily in agriculture and in home based manufacturing, involved  working from a very early age to contribute to the family income, crowded living conditions,primative forms of medical treatment, a minimal education, a dull and often sparse diet, very few luxuries and a narrow existence.

However, the  times of extended hard work and little play were varied with periods of festivity and general feasting. There were fairs,  dances on the green, processions, and religious celebrations which were all occasions for general light hearted fun.

This was especially true of the Chistmas season culminating in the Twelfth Night revels, or the Twelve Days of Christmas.  In Europe of the Middle Ages, this was a time of a series of saints’ days where only a minimal amount of work was done and there was general feasting and merrymaking. Many pagan customs from Yuletide were incorporated into the Christian celebrations.

On Twelfth Night (Epiphany) a Lord of Misrule (usually a peasant) was appointed to preside over the Feast of Fools, and it was traditional for communities to stage a play, usually a comedy: hence the name of one of the most famous of Shakespeare’s own.

How much the view that an ‘all work and no play’ atttitude towards life for the masses became the official idology after the industrial revolution, is surely illustrated by the mid-Victorian novella,  ‘A Christmas Carol’.

In Victorian times, employers often only allowed their staff to have one day off – Christmas Day – and some shopkeepers even remained open for part of the day.

In the story, Scrooge, of course, is shown to be a joyless old miser who has forgotten how to be charitable, and he is roundly condemned for refusing to celebrate Christmas Day and for grudging his clerk Bob Cratchit even one paid day off.

Yet, it is worth noting, that the length of the old festive celebrations had been massively curtailed for everyone.  When Scrooge wakes up on Christmas morning a changed man, he is,  for instance, is able to buy a goose to send Bob Cratchit’s family. Some shops are obviously still open, for the morning at least.

This is interesting, as Charles Dicken’s own  early Victorian depiction of Christmas is often taken to be ‘The official English Christmas’. In fact, many aspects of that Victorian Christmas are not especially traditional. For instance, the Christmas tree was a relatively new tradition imported into Britain from the German states by first of all, Queen Charlotte, wife of George III, and then by Victoria’s husband Prince Albert.  However, using evergreen plants – holly and ivy, for the purposes of decoration was an old tradition, as was kissing under the mistletoe.

Twelfth Night now, as then, brings to an end a period which is effectively the culmination of the old year. Now is the time when  New Year’s resolutions must be put into effect.

I have made a couple of  serious ones with regard to real life. The lighter ones, and those with regard to writing, include finally getting round to that Christmas ghost story.

Besides that, a couple of years ago, I urged fellow writers to think of rescuing that stranded manuscript in the drawer as a New Year’s resolution.

Regard it as an act of charity towards the poor things…A writ of habeas corpus applied to manuscripts, perhaps.

For myself, I have just retrieved a quarter completed manuscript that has been on hold for eighteen months.

For anyone who might be intersted, it is all about a topic I touched on in ‘Alex Sager’s Demon’ – characters from novels coming to life….

To end this post, here is a nice picture of Charles Dickens. Regular readers will know my opinion of his outrageously hypocritical treatment of his wife in middle age, when he became infatuated with the young actress Ellen Ternan. Our image of him, in fact, tends to be from photographs of the middle aged man he was at that time. Therefore, it is refreshing to see one of him as a younger man who looks entirely different.

The younger Dickens, at about the time that he wrote ‘A Christmas Carol’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Review of ‘It Came Upon a Midnight Clear’ A Free Ghost Story by Mari Biella

This is actually an image from the winter of 1962,
but Mari Biella’s ghost story gave me the sme sort of feeling.

 

Merry Christmas (as merry as you can, anyway!, in the circumstances of the resurgence of this wretched virus) to all readers.

I posted on Twitter, offering to read and review a new indie ghost story for Christmas, but got no responses, so here is a review of a fine ghost story by fellow writer Mari Biella whose work I  much admire.

This is a gripping Christmas ghost story; I expected it to be well written, obviously. One tends to take that for granted with this author – the day Mari Biella starts writing about cardboard characters or sprinkling their  dialogue with exclamation marks is the day I start to offer guests marmite sandwiches for dinner.

It is first of all, very atmospheric, the first requirement of a ghost story, and I think particularly a Christmas ghost story. We want a comfortable shiver as we read, perhaps sipping a glass of  something festive and alcoholic, and wriggling our toes by the fire.

Here, we get that at once:

 ‘Maynings, the house was called: a large and rather gloomy building that dated from the middle of the last century. It looked proud but also somewhat forlorn as I approached it that dim winter afternoon… It was oppressive, too: I felt a deepening sense of gloom creeping over me as I walked along the overgrown drive. That could, however, have been due to nothing more than the dimming light and the loneliness of the spot.’

Set early in the twentieth century, this story revolves around the Christmas visit of Charlson, the protagonist, to a deserted house belonging to the family of his only friend at university, Atherton. Atherton, who comes from a far more affluent background than Charlson, has suggested that as he has declined an invitation to spend Christmas with Atherton’s family, he might like to spend it there instead.

Charlson, who is convalescent after a bad bout of ‘flu, and who wants to catch up with his studies, is happy enough to accept the invitation to spend his Christmas there. He is an orphan, and has no relatives with whom to spend Christmas. He doesn’t want to be an object of pity to Atherton’s relatives, and sees himself as something of a natural recluse, prickly and gruff.

Inside the house is substantial, but pervaded with melancholy. Charlson comes to learn that Atherton’s great-aunt Airington lived there. He sees a faded sepia portrait of her in the room where he decides to set up quarters, a seemingly stern and conventional looking woman.

Charlson begins to hear noises that he should not, and discovers that one of the attic rooms still has a barred window. He begins to feel unwell again, shivery and feverish, and though he had intended to spend the holidays studying, he finds it a great effort to concentrate on them.

Then, from the local station master, Charlson learns that the house was rumoured to have a grim secret…

I won’t write a spoiler and reveal any more of the plot, save to quote to paragraphs which I particularly admired:

‘My voice sounded weak, cracked. It elicited no reply, other than a sudden explosion of rooks from the trees. They burst into the pallid winter sky, and their cries and the beating of their wings filled the air.’

‘The snow glittered, reflecting the moonlight back at the sky, and stars pricked the mantle of heaven. Something moved on the edge of the lawn, near where the trees stood in a protective circle. I caught my breath, and then watched with mounting horror as something emerged from the woods and began to lurch across the lawn…’

Tersely written, and full of elegant word pictures and a mounting atmosphere of fear, ‘It Came Upon a Midnight Clear’ is a short but powerfully written gem of a story.