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.