NW

Zadie Smith's NW opens with a quote that dates back to the London of 1381, when a large gathering of common folk marched into the city down the old Kent Road, demanding higher wages and the abolition of serfdom. John Ball, one of the rebellion's nominal leaders, put forth the rhetorical question: "When Adam delved and Eve span / who was then a gentleman?" -- which by implication rejected the idea of there even being such a thing as a gentry class. King Richard II addressed the rebels from the opposite side of the River Thames (safely out of arrow reach) and promised clemency for all. When they laid down their arms, Richard had their leaders executed, their heads mounted on spikes outside the Tower of London. Richard's speech, interestingly, was the first known instance of an English king actually speaking English (since 1066, England's Norman rulers had spoken French).

Fast forward six hundred years or so, and set your compass for NW, a quadrant of London created by the postal system. There are a few "posh" or middle-class neighborhoods there -- Hampstead and its heath, College Park, and St. John's Wood (pronounced "sinjuns wood"), the last of which was home to a record high price paid for a private home. But large areas of the district are working class and poor, their inhabitants dwelling in council flats (what we'd call public housing) in places with names like West Hendon, Cricklewood, Wood Green, Tottenham, and Colindale (the latter once home to the British Library's newspaper room, before it went digital and was closed down). There's no Mary Poppins here, no Jane and Michael Banks -- but there are plenty of Leroys, Kevins, and Olivers -- and, in Zadie Smith's world, Leahs, Keishas, Felixes and Nathans.

Theirs is a world of unpredictable outcomes and mixed verdicts, of ambitions simmering in a pot from which there's no easy escape. Some are "cleaning up" their lives, though sometimes it turns out that it doesn't matter; others have "arrived" at higher class status, but still lead lives doubled by subterfuge. Cultural identities are jumbled in the heap, and while coming from a Jamaican or Pakistani family doesn't prevent some from climbing the class ladder, it also doesn't guarantee any kind of group solidarity -- it's every man and woman for themselves.

The structure of the novel mirrors this jumble, with short epiphanies and snippets of chatter sprinkled among longer, more narrative passages. Some sections take one down the proverbial stream of consciousness, while others are almost entirely dialogue. Typographically, that dialogue is handled rather differently here: we don't have traditional lines of speech with quote marks, but rather a smaller typeface, inset from the main text, as though we were momentarily donning another lens. The effect can be mesmerizing, but also confusing. You also may find yourself puzzling over a word -- of course, you can always Google it -- but you may also find the slang dictionary at peevish.co.uk to be of some use. Oh, and a map of course! -- this one is scalable, though this one's more fun; another will show you how to get about by bus. There's even a map of poverty itself, which will show how intermixed and variegated it is.

A Small Place

With her book A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid takes on the most difficult of dialogues -- that between the native of a 'small place' such as Kincaid's home of Antigua, and the tourist who comes to visit. Not long ago, the government bureau in charge of Antigua launched a marketing campaign, complete with photographs of turquoise waters and palmy beaches. The slogan: "It's your island." Except it's not.

The current slogan, "The beach is just the beginning," is not much of an improvement.

Kincaid's book is very explicitly addressed to the tourist who visits Antigua, and the text very directly summons this reader as "you." There aren't many books like this, written in the second person -- it doesn't allow for distance, and can make some readers uncomfortable. In this case, that's exactly the effect Kincaid is aiming for.

But are "you" responsible for the problems of Antigua? Perhaps "you" have never gone there. But people like you have gone there, and when they have gone as tourists, they experienced all the things Kincaid's "you" experienced -- lovely beaches, tropical-themed mixed drinks, and lovely clean hotel rooms. More important, though, is what "you"will not see: the pothole-filled uneven road, paved only once for the visit of Queen Elizabeth; the sewage outlets that pollute the only beaches available to Antiguans, or the island's only library, its roof partially collapsed and many of its books ruined. "You" may be frustrated with the educational or career choices open to you, but they will probably be much greater than those available to Antiguans, whose only post-secondary school is a school that trains hotel workers.

When I've taught this book in the past, students sometimes feel offended; they reason that they themselves haven't done what this "you" did, or else that, after all, the tourist dollars that Antigua gets are vital to its economy, which would only be worse off if "you" stopped going. But that's the bind of tourism; if it's the only business in town (or on the island), it doesn't bode well for the natives of the place, whoever they are.  What is picturesque to one person is poverty to another; what seems a boon to one is a curse upon the other.  And, as Kincaid observes, "Every native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere." It's only that, with the economic systems of former colonies such as Antigua, the native never gets the opportunity to exercise this potential. We may well say, in political terms, that European countries no longer have colonies in the Caribbean, but in economic terms, alas, this is not yet true.

NB: Along with this book, I'm asking everyone to read Kicaid's "Columbus in Chains."

The Empire Writes Back

In the film The Name of the Father, the link between the English oppression of the Irish and the inhabitants of its many later colonies is made clear. Daniel Day-Lewis's character, the (falsely) accused IRA bomber Gerry Conlon, arrives in the prison commissary and is offered a piece of a jigsaw puzzle of the British Empire -- to eat! Seeing his puzzled expression, one of his fellow inmates, from Jamaica, explains that the puzzle has been soaked in LSD: "we been droppin de British Empire for the las' six months!"

It's the perfect subterfuge for the "subjects" of this multi-century colonialist project, an empire upon which -- for a very long time -- the sun never set. When finally it did, many of the former colonies found themselves torn apart by internal forces, sometimes with the "help" of ill-considered partitions such as those between Ireland and Northern Ireland, or India and Pakistan. One of the most persistent aspects of this old imperial grasp has in fact been the English language itself; in every country its fall from dominance played out differently. In Jamaica, English morphed into "Patwah," a version of English which re-arranges subject and object pronouns, elides initial and terminal consonants, and has even developed its own system of verb conjugations. Throughout the Caribbean, different such versions developed, once wrongly characterized as mere "dialects," but now recognized as Englishes in their own right, part of what the Trinidadian-Canadian poet Marlene Nourbese Philip calls the "Caribbean demotic." A similar evolution occurred in the former English colonies in West Africa, as well as on the Indian subcontinent, and even in Hong Kong and Singapore. The English of Singapore -- dubbed "Singlish" -- is a phenomenon all in itself.

So this week, we'll be reading -- and listening to -- a few brief works from a variety of these cultures. We'll start with Philip's “Discourse on the Logic of Language," part of her larger collection She Tries Her Tongue: Her Silence Slowly Breaks. After that, we'll read an essay by the late Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola, originally written for a collection I was editing, “My Vernacular.” We'll also read two poems by the Jamaican poet Louise Bennett: “Jamaica Language” and “Colonization in Reverse." Lastly, we'll listen to two powerful pieces by the dub poets Smiley Culture (“Cockney Translation") and Ranking Ann (“Kill de Police Bill”). I'd note that this last track was a protest against a proposed policing and crime bill in the UK Parliament, a response to the Brixton "Riots" of 1981 (like the L.A. "Riots" of 1992, they were seen by many poor and Black people as more of an uprising than a riot). In an added irony, the recording of Ranking Ann's song was financed by her local County Council (these were later to be dissolved under Margaret Thatcher's conservative government).

p.s. I've added a few notes on "Cockney Translation"

Waiting for Godot

 4, 3, 2, 1. As the cast members of his plays diminished in number, Samuel Beckett only grew in stature. And so, although it's in many ways a minimalist play, with just two principal characters and a brief visit from two others, one might say that his Waiting for Godot falls in the middle of Beckett's range. From the start -- it premiered in Paris in 1953 --  it's been his most frequently performed play, bringing together a strange range of actors, from Bert Lahr and E.G. Marshall (shown above), Zero Mostel and Burgess Meredith, to (most recently) Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, it has, like a rubbery cartoon character, been run over again and again and still holds its shape.

At my alternative high school in the 1970's, we put on a production that I still very vividly recall. Given its long strings of seemingly non-sequitur lines, we built in a back-up: if anyone realized they didn't know the next line, the actor was to say "What time is it?" -- and the other to reply "Why beleaguer the obvious?" -- at this cue, nonchalantly walking 'round to the back of the tree (then, as ever, the only prop on stage) and consulting a copy of the script concealed there.

The old reading was always that "Godot" was a stand-in for "God" -- and then, of course, the tree for the Cross, and so on. It's a reading that Becket rejected (although, hey, he's dead, so what matter?), but in any case, it's hardly the only way to see it. We have all waited -- in lines at state offices, for our lives to turn 'round, for babies to be born and old folks to die. What of it? There is something in the mere flow of language, the putting of one word -- any word -- after another -- that speaks to the bare essence of our human condition.

Streams of Consciousness

 Dorothy Richardson began working on what became Pointed Roofs -- the first of what would eventually be the thirteen volumes of her Pilgrimage -- in 1911.  James Joyce was still struggling to find a publisher for Dubliners, and was at work on revising his early novel Stephen Hero into Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man, which would not appear until 1914; his Ulysses -- which many assume to have been the first novel to make use of "stream of consciousness" -- came out in 1922, by which time Richardson was on her sixth volume.  The very term was coined by May Sinclair, in her review of Richardson's novels, which appeared in The Egoist in 1918.  And yet today, when it comes up, it's nearly always associated with Joyce.

Richardson herself was not fond of the term; she preferred "interior monologue."  And to be sure, her version of this approach was not overtly experimental; it did not do away with punctuation, nor did it frame itself in terms of the random jumble of thoughts that mark the mental pathways of Joyce's Leopold Bloom.  No, it was a much more centered, clear, and thoughtful interior -- indeed, it was based upon Richardson's own life, with a delay of about five years from lived experience to novelization.  Of course Joyce's characters, too, were plainly autobiographical, although Stephen Dedalus eventually evolved into a less central character -- but somehow, when a man, even today, draws from his own life in his fiction, it's fine -- but if a woman does it, it makes it somehow less "serious," as the British novelist Jeanette Winterson recently noted in Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Two other writers, of course, inevitably come to mind when we consider these streams -- Joyce's Ulysses and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. Ulysses still looms largest, in part because Joyce had, by the time it appeared, been a sort of one-man-band of its forthcoming. It first appeared in parts in The Little Review in its March 1918 issue, with the full novel following on Joyce's birthday in 1922. There were all sorts of issues with the text, not the least of which was Joyce's habit of penning in many corrections per page on the proofs, and the fact that the French printers charged with its publication spoke almost no English! All that said, its impact has been profound and lasting; have a look at part I ("Telemachus) and the final part, "Penelope," narrated in the most fluid version of consciousness's stream by Leopold Bloom's wife.

Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927) is no less a monument to the power of language to find unexpected ways to frame time and space; like the arrival of Godot some years later, the trip to the lighthouse is almost indefinitely postponed; one of the novel's key challenges is the second "Time Passes" section, which must set its gossamers across the chasm of a decade, one in which the entire First World War begins and ends. Have a look at the beginning, and feel free to dip in here and there; you'll see that Woolf's version of stream-of-consciousness is its own very distinct thing, neither Richardson's nor Joyce's.

Yeats

 One of the little ironies of twentieth-century 'British' literature is that most of the best of it was written by people who were born outside of Britain, in places like Bombay, Dublin, Cape Town, Bloemfontein, Ogidi, Abeokuta, Berdychiv, and even (in the case of adopted Brit T.S. Eliot) St. Louis Missouri. And the first harbinger of this shift from the purported center of Anglophone writing was, without doubt, the 'Irish Literary Renaissance' that had its origins in Dublin in the 1880's and 1890's. Ironically, the first wave of this movement sought to restore Irish Gaelic language and culture; its leaders, such as Douglas Hyde and his Gaelic League, scorned English as the tongue of the oppressor. At the same time, however, a small and loosely affiliated group of writers in Dublin were starting to establish a national literature and theatre in English; among their numbers were the poet George William Russell (known as Æ), the playwright John Millington Synge, along with James Stephens, Ella Young, Lady Gregory, and George Moore. 

Yeats, a brash young poet, was among the first to gain wider recognition, and in fact after a relatively brief period when he was active in Dublin's Abbey Theatre, spent most of the rest of his life in London. His early poems were steeped in the old Irish tradition, beginning in 1889 with The Wanderings of Oisin (a sort of Irish 'Ancient Mariner') and evocations of traditional ballads ("The Song of the Wandering Aengus")  In his middle years, he dabbled in occultism, joining the somewhat infamous Order of the Golden Dawn (which counted Aleister Crowley and S.L. MacGregor Mathers among its members) and becoming enamored of Wyndam Lewis and the "Vorticist" movement. He captured the spirit of Irish resentment ("An Irish Airman Foresees his Death") and memorialized the Irish rebellion with "Easter 1916." His poetry continued to evolve throughout his career, culminating in the rich, dark, ironic modernism of "Sailing to Byzantium," "The Second Coming," and "The Circus Animals' Desertion." By the end of his life, Yeats could be seen to represent a new efflorescence of lyricism, something not known in English since the Romantics, and not -- alas -- heard much since.

Hard Times Contexts

 As we finish Hard Times, I thought it might be a good occasion to offer some cultural contexts to our main text. Some of them are specific to particular characters or scenes, while others are more general, having to do with the broad issues of industrialization, education, and the stratified class society of Britain at the time.

Doorway at Georgiaville Mill

Bounderby of course is a comic exaggeration, but also representative of his class. Builders and owners of factories were, in the nineteenth century, fast rising to the top of a class system in which wealth had previously been determined by property ownership. Think of any Austen novel and the idea of £10,000 a year -- these thousands came not from industry or labor, but from rents on land, much of which had been in family hands for generations. Now, the Bounderbys of the world could command no less an income, and perhaps even more, though they were still exploiters of those who generated their wealth (bear in mind that Marx and Engels first came up with their theories of this while living in England). Here in Rhode Island, of course, our own local Bounderbys have left their names on their mills and thus the landscape -- Christopher Olney gave his to Olneyville, Zachariah Allen to Allendale, and so forth. Allen also owned the Georgiaville Mill in Smithfield; although now converted to condominiums, the entrance still bears his initials: ZA and the date 1853 -- while his stately home in Providence is now the Brown Faculty Club.

As to the circus and "trick" riders, this was another aspect of cultural life enormously popular at the time. The best-known establishment of this kind was Astley's Ampitheatre, which Dickens himself visited on my occasions. One of its stars around this time was Pablo Fanque, later to be immortalized by John Lennon in "Mr. Kite" (Lennon took most of his lyrics from an old theatrical poster he'd bought at a junk shop):

The Hendersons will all be there

Late of Pablo Fanque's Fair, what a scene

Tom's use of a "blackface" disguise also brings up another uncomfortable history, that of blackface minstrel shows. Dickens, in fact, was partly responsible for the spread of this form of entertainment to Britain; while touring the United States he penned an account of his journey, published in 1842 as American Notes. In it, he described seeing a talented young African-American dancer known as "Juba"; in 1848 Juba himself arrived in London, and was billed as "Boz's Juba" (Boz being Dickens's nickname); the enormous success of his appearance there paved the way for touring American "minstrel" shows, which then became lastingly popular in Britain -- so much so that a television show in blackface, the Black and White Minstrel Show, ran on the BBC from 1958 to 1978(!) Charities, police associations, and even cub scouts often sponsored their own minstrel shows as fundraisers; some of these continue to this day (having switched to clown makeup) and are known as "Gang Shows."

Lastly, we'd be remiss if we didn't consider the very large class of persons -- of which Mrs. Sparsit is a shining example. The BBC estimates that, as of 1901 (the peak of the profession), no fewer than 1.5 million people were employed as domestic servants. The wealthy of course employed a large and specialized force, with lady's maids, housemaids, butlers, and gardeners -- but even a moderately well-off middle class household probably employed at least one or two. Life in service could be perilous -- if one were dismissed from one's position with prejudice, it was almost impossible to obtain further employment -- and of course, servants were often the witting or unwitting witnesses of all manner of domestic jars.

Hard Times

 

Thomas Gradgrind (looking well-squared)

Consider this a sort of open letter to the American education system. It's been twenty years since the passing of the "No Child Left Behind" law, and in my college classes, I now have students who've experienced its effects for much, if not all, of their primary and secondary educations. The neo-utilitarians have had their day, and here are the results: a generation of students who have absorbed the real lesson of the new regime: hunker down, follow instructions, and learn whatever is going to be on the test. Fiction is out; nonfiction is in; reading for pleasure is out; reading for content is in. After all, the only skills that matter are the ones that can be measured.

This approach forces students to discard their interests and passions, and instead think strategically about how to focus their efforts on measurable things. They inevitably develop a habit of scanning syllabi and readings to see what will be tested, but this makes for poor readers; when they encounter an ambiguity, or a difficult reading, they tense up in anticipation of being taken to task for some vague failure. My endeavor has always been to share my love of literature, to (I hope) instill in students an excitement, an interest, a sense of something personally significant for themselves, in everything they read -- but it's getting trickier each semester. Their curiosity has been hammered; their personal experience belittled, their idiosyncrasies ironed out. As a result, it sometimes seems that the pleasure of discovery of something new has gradually given way to an anxiety about the unfamiliar.

Are they better prepared for the wonderful world of employment? Perhaps, so long as the employment they find demands repetitive goal-oriented work, with little room for innovation and frequent employee evaluations. They may, so long as they've had the prerequisites, do well in science, technology, engineering, and math -- though only at a rudimentary level. Curiosity seems to have been largely amputated, and in its place our brave new Benthamites have instilled a simple wish for nothing more than a clear set of instructions and evaluative rules. Learn, do, demonstrate. Wash, rinse repeat.

And this regime clearly has its roots in the Victorian era. Dickens parodied it in multiple ways, from Wackford Squeers in Nicholas Nickleby to Bradley Headstone in Our Mutual Friend. Indeed, it seems he had no more bitter foe than the soul-killing utilitarian "education" of his day. How sad, indeed, that his greatest fight has been almost forgotten -- and that we today are blindly marching into these same self-dug trenches. And, interestingly, we are here now considering these histories at an institution which began its existence in the very same year Hard Times was published -- 1854 --with a course of instruction for teachers quite similar to the one that the freshly-minted Mr. M'Choakumchild had completed (you can read the whole history of the Normal School, now RIC, here).

The London Poor, Police, and Education

 The poverty of Victorian London was, though not unlike in kind from poverty elsewhere, unique in its concentration, its ubiquity, and its endless variety of cruelties. As documented by Henry Mayhew, the London poor engaged in so many endeavors to sustain themselves, that there were literally thousands -- mostly children -- who specialized in a single 'profession' such as collecting dog droppings (referred to as "pure"), dragging the mud of the Thames at low tide ("mudlarks"), or sweeping the filth from the streets so the "better sort" could cross unsullied. Street-vendors sold every many of goods from coffee and tea to ballads and oysters. Those working on the streets offered entertainments as well -- Punch-and-Judy, the Chinese Shades, and even a street-exhibition of views of the Moon via telescope. The poor, however poor they were, also had at least some entertainments of their own, among them the raree-show and the "penny gaff" -- the latter a sort of tawdry theatre full of obscene songs and guffawing, often set up in an empty storefront on a short-term basis. Mayhew's description of his visit to one is hilarious for his breathless condemnation of all he sees and hears -- but in the case, as with others of his hundreds of columns for the Morning Chronicle, he figuratively held his nose in order to obtain the first-person accounts of the darker corners of London which had become, oddly, a source of entertainment for his middle-class readership.

Charles Dickens, remembered to this day as a champion of the poorer classes in his fiction, had a complex relationship with the actual poor. On the one hand, he inveighed against the worser sort of public "solutions" to poverty, such as workhouses and ragged schools. On the other, he became a sort of voyeur of poverty, extending his "Night Walks" to the worst parts of London, often in the company of his redoubtable guide, Chief Inspector Charles Frederick Field of Scotland Yard. And, as we'll see in Hard Times, he took a very critical view of the sort of "education" provided to the poor.

The late great Victorianist Richard Altick documented those schools in his groundbreaking work the English Common Reader, in which he showed that the real goal of such schools was to keep the poor in their place, rather than to give them any way to move up the class ladder. Indeed, as he documents, the educational methods used -- rote memorization, drills, and quizzes -- were so harsh that many who learned to read at them never read after completing their studies -- merely to open a book was to bring back nightmares.

NEW: Have a look at the uncanny resemblance the standards and assumptions of the 19th-century and those of the "latest" Common Core Curriculum!

Lyrical Ballads

 

Lyrical Ballads, although far more conservative in form and scope than the (then almost unknown) work of Blake, nevertheless was in its own way a revolutionary book. These self-declared "experiments" borrowed from vernacular traditions such as the ballad, gaining a new kind of authenticity while rejecting the "gaudiness and inane phraseology" of other poets of the day. It is hard for us to feel this same quality today, as so much of what the Romantics accomplished and made new has since become a cliché; for me, this is embodied by Bullwinkle J. Moose's cartoon rendition of "I wandered lonely as a cloud" -- here the sublime meets the ridiculous, and the ridiculous wins.

Nevertheless, there remain shards of untapped sublimity here and there in the poetic ruins of this endeavor -- the "Lucy" poems, "We are Seven," and "The Mad Mother" retain a sort of odd, folksy, haunting quality, and "Tintern Abbey" still summons forth the beauty and strangeness of its scene. And, above all, Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancyent Marinere" still stands aloof, untouched for the most part by the ravages of time, unless to seem and feel more authentically "ancient" than it was originally framed as being. "We were the first to ever burst / into that silent sea" -- rarely has the essence of the Romantic version of the natural sublime been more magnificiently cast.

The future of the two poets also revealed telling differences. Wordsworth, though his best years were behind him, whittled away at his lengthy and laborious Prelude, unpublished in his lifetime, while basking in the light of his role as an aging literary lion. As described by Thomas Carlyle in the 1840's, he sat aside, hidden behind the green glass filter he brought with him to the table, absently nibbling on raisins as the conversation raged on. Coleridge, alas, burned brighter and burned out sooner; after the last flickering flame of Kubla Khan, he retired to the home of his friend James Gilman and his wife, who took care to moderate his opiate addiction as best they could. They were remarkable hosts, even building an extension on the house to accommodate their poetical guest. No more brilliant poetry spilled from his pen, but a substantial and influential body of semi-autobiogaphical criticism, published as Biographia Literaria, was completed there before his death in 1834. Carlyle visited there as well, and his description is worth quoting:

Coleridge sat on the brow of Highgate Hill, in those years, looking down on London and its smoke-tumult, like a sage escaped from the inanity of life's battle ... The practical intellects of the world did not much heed him, or carelessly reckoned him a metaphysical dreamer: but to the rising spirits of the young generation he had this dusky sublime character; and sat there as a kind of Magus, girt in mystery and enigma; his Dodona oak-grove (Mr. Gilman's house at Highgate) whispering strange things, uncertain whether oracles or jargon ...

Dark Satanic Mills

William Blake was a sort of singularity -- a mystic, but uninterested in followers, a harbinger of the Romantics but not one of them, an engraver and printmaker by trade, and (by some accounts) a gifted singer with a remarkably high and clear voice. He arrived at nearly the same time as England's Industrial Revolution, and though most at home in a pastoral setting, wrote incisively of the squalor of the urban poor, and of the 'dark Satanic mills" that were beginning to dot the bucolic countryside. It's those mills, perhaps, that link us most to his moment, as the technology for spinning and weaving cloth with the aid of water- and steam-powered machinery was exported to Rhode Island early on, when Samuel Slater brought this new technology from England to the mill that bears his name in 1790. Some of the earliest acts of resistance against mechanized modernism began around that time, when groups such as the "Luddites" began attacking the mechanized "frames" that were putting hand-made stocking makers out of business.

In his time, Blake spent in both country and town, and his work is full of metaphorical dichotomies along those lines. First and foremost among these is Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789-1994), published in two parts, As with his other books, the poems were engraved on copperplate, printed, and hand-colored, many of them by his wife Catherine. The Blakes sold these tiny "chapbooks," as they were called, for a few shillings each, many to friends.

These tiny masterpieces now fetch -- when they become available at all, tens of thousands of dollars. Facsimile editions -- replicating every detail -- are available, and some of these have become collector's items in their own right. Happily, in this electronic age, scanned copies can be had for free, and the William Blake Archive offers scalable versions of almost all their images.

The poems themselves seem oddly ageless, almost as though they were suspended in time. With many children as their subjects, and what may seem a child-like simplicity to their verses, they are all the same uncannily complex. Have a look at the poems I've selected for this week -- but go further if you can. I've also made the poem "Jerusalem" available above, and if you haven't seen it, don't miss the famous Monty Python sketch -- or, if you're in the mood for something a bit more solemn, you can hear the massed choir version of Sir Hubert Parry's musical setting, which became a famous English anthem, adopted with his permission by the Women's Suffrage movement, and later used as an elegiac hymn for the dead of two world wars.

UPDATE: It's worth noting that this book has also inspired multiple musical settings and adaptations. The earliest was undertaken in the 1950's by the composer William Bolcom; you can learn about his efforts in this NPR story. Then, in the 1980's, folk musician Greg Brown put forth his own entirely different version. Most recently, in 2012, the African-American singer-songwriter Martha Redbone released her Garden of Love: The Songs of William Blake.

The Madness of King George

Americans haven't always been very keen on Kings -- having gone through a war to be rid of them -- but in the twentieth century, monarchs -- particularly British ones -- have made quite a comeback, both in fictional and filmic versions, and in popular culture.  We've been especially fond of the Tudors, both Elizabeth I (whom we love) and Henry VIII (whom we love to hate); in films and TV shows as various as Shakespeare in Love, The Tudors, and Elizabeth, we have reveled in their regalia. Later monarchs have not always fared as well -- Queen Victoria in particular, whose name has become a by-word for severe constrictions of all kinds -- and until this film, George III, the very monarch we revolted against, has been at the bottom of the historical pile. And yet, somehow, here he is redeemed, becoming, by way of an unflinching portrayal of his illness, a character with whom we empathize enormously, and who at the end, simply by standing and waving his hand, becomes a kind of hero for us.  How was this done?

It started in 1991 with a stage-play, "The Madness of George III," by Alan Bennett. The play's director,  Nicholas Hynter, and its star, Nigel Hawthorne, both returned for the 1994 film.  While it's based on the actual history of the King's mental illness, it also takes in the larger issues that so often arise when a monarch struts upon the stage, as when the freshly-deposed Richard II calls for a mirror to see his own face, and find whence from it his majesty has gone:

Give me that glass, and therein will I read
 No deeper wrinkles yet? Hath sorrow struck
So many blows upon this face of mine
And made no deeper wounds? O flatt'ring glass,
Like to my followers in prosperity, 
Thou dost beguile me! Was this face the face
That every day under his household roof
Did keep ten thousand men? Was this the face
That like the sun did make beholders wink?

Alas, it is not a rival, but himself that threatens to depose George III, and therein hangs this tale. The king's removal from court and from Queen Charlotte, his confinement in a chair, and his long torments are partly fictionalized, but the agony he feels, in Nigel Hawthorne's memorable performance, is real.

NB: You can stream the film for free via Tubi, though you'll have to put up with a few advertisements.

Dr. Johnson

Dr. Samuel Johnson was blessed that particular alloy of irritability and genius which, though often imitated, remains extraordinarily rare. He began life as a poor man, so poor indeed that during his brief time as a student at Pembroke College, Oxford, he could not afford new shoes to replace the tattered and nearly useless ones he possessed. A kindly fellow, aware of this difficulty, quietly left a new pair by Johnson's door, but he refused to wear them. When his money ran out entirely, he left Pembroke rather than accept the charity of others. The rest of his storied life would scarce fit in these pages, but his success as a periodical writer, and his great work, the Dictionary, are too well-known to require rehearsal. Suffice it to say that he became in his lifetime -- and remains today -- a sort of icon of learning and its good effects upon the mass of humanity.

But what sort of man was Johnson? He was brusque, opinionated, and so rude on occasion that some latter-day diagnosticians believe he suffered from Tourette's Syndrome. He did not so much speak as blurt, and many of his exclamations have joined the list of immortal quotes: "Patriotism is the last refuge of a Scoundrel," "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money," and "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of Life," to name but a few. 

In the Blackadder episode, "Ink and Incapability," the learned Doctor is portrayed by Robbie Coltrane, with every bit of bluster one might expect from such a man. Dr. Johnson's rising irritation as Blackadder peppers him with portmanteau words -- "interphrastrically," "pericombobulations," and "extramuralisation" -- is priceless. And yet it may surprise many to learn that Johnson's own accent was anything but the posh pretentiousness of Coltrane's memorable performance; he had, in fact, a very thick and distinctive Staffordshire accent; according to Jeffrey Meyers' Samuel Johnson: The Struggle, he said "shuperior" for superior, "woonse" for once, and "poonsh" for "punch."

I hadn't realized this myself, until on listening to the audiobook version of my novel PYG -- in which the learned Doctor meets the Learned Pig (this is based on contemporary accounts) -- that I heard Simon Callow's marvellous personation of Johnson's voice, which perfectly and richly evokes both the accent and the man.

So have a browse at his Dictionary, and some of his remarks on men and letters as transcribed by his longtime sidekick and eventual biographer, James Boswell, and leave a few words here in comment or reply. Feel free to blurt!

Journal of the Plague Year

Given that our class needs to cover at least three centuries of literary history, I was pleased to recall that one of the books I had in mind -- Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year -- was published almost exactly 300 years ago in 1722. It's a book that of course seems timely today, as we're still in the grip of our twenty-first century adversary, COVID-19 -- and, as you read it, you'll see all sorts of parallels, from daily "Bills of Mortality" (lists giving the number of those who'd died that week from the plague), to quack cures, charlatans, and the periodic percolations of panic that came and went with each new "wave." On its title page, the Journal is attributed to "a Citizen, who continued all the while in London," and its tone is that of an eyewitness to a slow-unfolding disaster.

Except that, in fact, it isn't -- it's a work of fiction. Defoe made use of actual journals (including possibly his own uncles), public records, and newspaper articles as his sources, mimicking the language, tone, and apparatus of his sources, tossing in their numbers and dates  to set the seal of truth upon his sly fiction. He'd done it before, of course -- writing Robinson Crusoe as though it were the actual tale of a man who survived thirty years on a desert island (though again, he borrowed freely from history, particularly the tale of one Alexander Selkirk, whose history was similar in some respects.

So what do we call this? If written today, we might say "creative nonfiction" but that category didn't exist in 1722. Back then, it might have fallen under the broad umbrella of historical chronicles, many of which were embellished with fictitious or semi-fictitious episodes (Holinshead, who was the source for many of Shakespeare's plays, wrote a famous one), though there was also the category of facetiæ -- deliberately and patently untrue narratives posing as true ones to a greater or lesser extent (Swift's Gulliver's Travels is perhaps the best example), which often verged on broad satire (assuming one recognized the purport of its barbs.

Today, we live in a universe of 'alternative facts' and truthiness -- and the printed page seems to be growing almost as unreliable as the conspiracy-theory laden internet. Defoe, though, did not aim to deceive, nor to undercut any accepted notions of what happened during the plague in London -- he stays well within the lines -- but rather to add a sense of verisimilitude by using a direct first-person narrator. Like the long-running radio and television series once hosted by Walter Cronkite, he took the known history and made it more immediate -- because, as Cronkite intoned "You are There."

Welcome to English 208

 

What does it mean to read? And, over the past few centuries, during which the ability to read passed from a small elite of priests and clerics to the professional classes generally, and finally became nearly universal, how has the meaning of the act of reading changed? In this section of British Literature, we’ll survey a variety of texts from 1722 to the present, looking both at the stories and characters they contain, but also at their changing relationship to society in a time of steadily increasing literacy. In the end, we’ll look back to see how, and why, some of these texts emerged as part of an evolving literary “canon,” while others came and went, or never reached that space at all. Our path must needs be a crooked one, and the scope of three centuries allows little time for gawking – but we’ll certainly give it a try.

Along the way, we’ll visit London during the pandemic – the one of 1665 -- ponder the pages of Dr. Johnson’s famous Dictionary, and curse the bloodless schoolmaster with Blake. Next we’ll visit the humble cottager with Wordsworth, and sail into silent seas with Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner.  Once back in port it will be time to put away such fancies, and enjoy the furtive fruits of widespread social repression; it will be time for the tightening of corsets as we wander the fountains and crystal palaces (built just on top of open sewers) known as the Victorian Age.  We will explore both the surface world of pre-Raphaelite pleasantries and patent processes, as well as the underworld of cheap lodging-houses, twelve-hour workdays for children, and a London in which more than 250 people a month died of typhus and water-borne diseases  (including Prince Albert!).  Among our guides here will be Charles Dickens, Henry Mayhew, and George Eliot.  

Having indulged, by then, in one too many rich pastries (or perhaps expired from drinking a glass of Thames water), we’ll toss all we’ve studied once more into the rubbish bin of history, and try to shore a new modernism against these ruins. Lastly, having ridden the roller-coaster of modernism, we’ll watch it all crack up again, with the exploded generations of two world wars, the bitter reaction against Britain’s colonial exploitation, the emergence of postcolonial poetry and art as empire’s evening returns into sand, amidst which two vast and trunkless legs . . . and so it goes.