Random reading round-up

I feel like I've been reading in bits and pieces recently. Partly because so much of my attention has been focussed on Yuletide writing, I suppose (it's going well!), but I don't seem to be able to get properly into a nice big absorbing book at the moment, and I want to. Hey, but it's almost time for the great annual Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell re-read...

The Hill: A Romance of Friendship by Horace Annesley Vachell (1905). Picked up as a recommendation from the advertisements in the back of my 1918 edition of Sir Isumbras at the Ford, which describe it as 'a wholesome, thoroughly manly novel'. It's a classic school story, and the sort of thing I think E. W. Hornung would have enjoyed. We follow the main character John Verney through his years at Harrow, seeing the development of his ridiculous crush on wholesome, thoroughly manly admiration for his friend Harry 'Caesar' Desmond and various moral conflicts involving the more dodgy characters at the school, especially 'Demon' Scaife, a distinctly unreliable sort who vies with John for Caesar's affections throughout their time at school. (I don't think Scaife's ludicrously unsubtle nickname is ever actually explained; meanwhile John is nicknamed Jonathan, by Scaife, because of his feelings for Caesar. It's that kind of a book.) I enjoyed it a lot, but couldn't take it terribly seriously. I think setting a school story at a real school was a bad decision; there's an awful lot of nonsense about the Pride and Importance of Harrow, forming boys into men who will run the Empire, etc., and the story is incredibly snobbish and elitist (Scaife's moral defects are attributed more or less entirely to the fact that, horror of horrors, his grandfather worked for his living, while the sympathetic characters all come from long lines of Harrovians—Etonians might be acceptable). This got a bit much after a while, even if the more ridiculous John/Caesar scenes went some way to redeem it.

Through England on a Side-Saddle in the Time of William and Mary by Celia Fiennes (published 1888, written 1680s-1710s). This is Celia Fiennes's account of her various travels through England (and, briefly, Scotland, which she doesn't think much of), originally written for private circulation amongst her family and published by relatives many years later. It contains all sorts of interesting little historical titbits: what a visit to the spa at Bath looked like, how much one paid for this or that sort of fish at various different towns' markets, how people in Cumberland baked their bread, the difficulties caused for travellers by the non-standardised length of a mile in different parts of the country, and loads and loads of detailed descriptions of specific places. Fiennes is especially interested in country houses, and we hear a lot about the architecture, interior decoration and garden layouts of various gentlemen's seats, but she also describes a variety of local industries at some length, from coal-mining to textiles. She's also kind of hilariously judgemental about other people: she thinks the Scottish are poor because they can't be bothered to exert themselves in any useful industry; at one point she's like 'there are lots of Catholics here. I pity their poor delusional ignorance' and then somewhere else she's like 'there are lots of Quakers here. I pity their poor delusional ignorance'. And she, the daughter of a Parliamentarian colonel, is very much a Whig! Her attitudes can be illuminating in historical terms, though—it's interesting to see what features she picks up on in describing this or that town as attractive or unpleasant, and her pre-Romanticism description of the Lake District makes a fascinating contrast to the later consensus. The book ends with her description of the city of London, concentrating mostly on various official and ceremonial structures: accounts of procedure at a coronation, how the Houses of Parliament and the legal establishment are put together, and so on. More very interesting history.

A third or so of The House by the Church-Yard by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1863). I don't often DNF books, because I always want to find out how it ends and if it ever goes anywhere better, but in this case there didn't seem much to resolve. The book is a historical novel set in Chapelizod, a suburb-village of Dublin, in the eighteenth century. I was hoping for more spooky gothic horror like Le Fanu's short stories and Uncle Silas, but at least the bit I read is a sort of farcical comedy dealing with the various petty dramas of the inhabitants of Chapelizod, and unfortunately Le Fanu's sense of humour is not mine at all. It didn't seem to be going anywhere interesting, and the meandering hijinks weren't interesting in their own right as that sort of thing can be with a good writer, so I decided another 300 pages weren't worth it. A disappointment; I hope the rest of his fiction is more like Carmilla than like this!

Doing Their Bit: War-Work at Home by Boyd Cable (1916). Another recommendation from Sir Isumbras—understandably, many of them deal with writing about the war. This is not as general as the title suggests—it's specifically about munitions manufacturing, and more specifically an account of the author's tour of various munitions-works written as propaganda to reassure everyone that we're absolutely going to make zillions more bombs and shells and Show The Huns What's What, etc. etc. Historically it's very impressive, if you can get past the author's horrible politics (I kind of want to hear more about the labour organising amongst munitions workers which he decries as deplorably unpatriotic): Cable describes factories of all kinds being converted to war-work, from big industrial sites to tiny operations making trinkets in someone's spare room, and new works being built at scarily efficient pace on a huge scale, while workers from all trades and classes, women as well as men, pile into the new works to Do Their Bit. Reading this, I feel like I understand a lot more about where Char Vivian's attitude to work comes from...!