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 Wordsworth, though his best years were behind him, whittled away at his lengthy and laborious Prelude, unpublished in his lifetime, while basking in the light of his role as an aging literary lion.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.

The Wife of Bath

Of all of Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims, the "sely" Wife of Bath -- Alisoun, by name -- has been, from the very start, the most vivid and memorable. Her passion, her "wandering by the way," and her battles with each of the five husbands she had "at chirche door" are the stuff of legend.

And, as with other Canterbury pilgrims, the variants in Chaucer's manuscript reveal rich and complex possibilities that are lost in a standardized text or translation.  For instance, the Wife of Bath's Prologue famously begins:

Experience, though noon auctoritee
Were in this world, is right y-nough for me ...

Except that, in many manuscripts, it doesn't. In the Corpus Christi manuscript -- one of the oldest and finest known -- it runs this way:

Experiment though noon Auctoritee
Were in this world, is ryght ynough for me ...             (folio 100r)

What difference does that make?  An enormous one, both then and now, as the renowned British author Jeanette Winterson has noted:

I was trying to get away from the received idea that women always write about ‘experience’ – the compass of what they know – while men write wide and bold – the big canvas, the experiment with form. Henry James did no good when he said that Jane Austen wrote on four inches of ivory – i.e. tiny observant minutiae. Much the same was said of Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf. Those things made me angry. In any case, why could there not be experience and experiment? Why could there not be the observed and the imagined? Why should a woman be limited by anything or anybody? Why should a woman not be ambitious for literature? Ambitious for herself?

So, if you were editing the text of the Wife of Bath's Prologue, which word would you choose?  And why?

NB: If you like, you can look up the words experiment and experience in the Middle English Dictionary, which will show you how those words were used in Chaucer's day.