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Recent reading
Jun. 26th, 2021 04:49 pmMiss Meredith by Amy Levy (1889). I had thought Amy Levy only ever wrote two novels, so was very pleased to learn that I was wrong! Unfortunately, this one isn't as good or interesting as The Romance of a Shop or Reuben Sachs, but it was still an enjoyable read. It's the story of an English girl, Elsie Meredith, who goes to Pisa as governess to an aristocratic Italian family, has various adventures and eventually finds love in a rather dramatic fashion. I liked the descriptions of Pisa and Elsie's life as a governess, although I think the first chapter describing her family in England was really my favourite part—Levy gives the characters a lot of colour in a little space, in a mood rather similar to The Romance of a Shop, and I'd happily have read more about them.
John Halifax, Gentleman by Dinah Maria Mulock Craik (1856). This is a strange one! I think I'll describe it in two parts.
It's a historical novel, set from the 1790s to the 1830s in and around the (very thinly fictionalised) town of Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire, where we meet John Halifax as a poor young boy determined to find work to support himself. He attracts the notice of Abel Fletcher, the wealthy Quaker owner of a tannery business, who gives him a job; John steadily works his way up the business, eventually taking it over entirely after Abel's death and branching out into his own enterprises as he becomes more and more successful and wealthy. He meets and marries Ursula March; they have several children and set up a veritable model of the happy proto-Victorian family home, and the later part of the plot deals with the now grown-up children's romantic and other adventures. Along the way, Craik brings in so much historical colour that it's practically a summary of the early nineteenth century from a Victorian perspective: we see the young John de-escalating a bread riot during the economic turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars; religious discrimination against Quakers and other Nonconformists and Roman Catholics, and the beginnings of legal changes to lessen it; the development of industry and the introduction of steam-powered machinery and railways; the rise of the industrial middle class as exemplified by John, and the corresponding decline of the decayed and decadent aristocracy (who speak French and become atheists and get divorced); the corrupt state of elections, and the improvements brought by the Great Reform Act; the development and eventual success of the abolitionist movement; etc. etc. etc. There's a lot in there! It's all historically fascinating, especially as a way of seeing the Victorian view of society as developed in a story about 'how we got here'. Craik's insistence on eating her cake and having it re. John's origins and status as a gentleman somewhat undermines the major themes, but then perhaps we wouldn't be Victorians without horrifying and logically inconsistent views on class.
...and then there's the other side of the novel. As I've just demonstrated, I can summarise the plot without even mentioning him, but the book is narrated by Phineas Fletcher, Abel's son, who first notices John at the beginning. Phineas is disabled (he's so self-effacing that the exact nature of his disability isn't really clear—it seems to be some kind of chronic pain/fatigue condition, with occasional flare-ups of more severe illness), and he is absolutely, devotedly and all but textually in love with John from the moment he first sees him:
and possibly ship him with Laurent de Courtomer.
(I also enjoyed Abel's old-fashioned Quaker dialogue, full of 'thee's, which made me keep wanting to read it in a Yorkshire accent even though he's clearly from Gloucestershire. Nice details of religious history...!)
After that I decided that I'd perhaps had enough Victorians just for a little while, and went back to turn-of-the-century Sweden:
The Treasure by Selma Lagerlöf (1903; not actually sure who translated the English edition on Gutenberg, it doesn't say). This is another unsettling historical fairytale-ish story, set in the sixteenth century. A wealthy priest and his family are murdered for the money; their restless ghosts seek to bring the murderers, three Scottish mercenaries, to justice, while the sole survivor of the murders, the priest's adopted daughter Elsalill, is torn between her wish to help the ghost of her foster-sister and her love for the chief murderer. She's still in love with him while knowing he's the murderer, which is... a little bit doubtful from a character perspective, but Lagerlöf's detached fairytale style perhaps allows for a little more of that than you'd get away with in a more psychologically realist book. The atmosphere throughout is just the sort of thing she does well, and the descriptions of the ghosts are wonderfully creepy; I also enjoyed the chillingly-written Scandinavian winter weather (God Himself ensures the murderers are brought to justice, by keeping the sea frozen so the ship they were planning to escape on can't go anywhere—all beautifully described). More allegorically the book is a feminist story about solidarity between women triumphing over the evil purposes of men, and there's a scene at the end emphasising this point which is very striking.
I'm off work for the next week, so I'm looking forward to doing lots of reading—time for another D. K. Broster, amongst other things...
John Halifax, Gentleman by Dinah Maria Mulock Craik (1856). This is a strange one! I think I'll describe it in two parts.
It's a historical novel, set from the 1790s to the 1830s in and around the (very thinly fictionalised) town of Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire, where we meet John Halifax as a poor young boy determined to find work to support himself. He attracts the notice of Abel Fletcher, the wealthy Quaker owner of a tannery business, who gives him a job; John steadily works his way up the business, eventually taking it over entirely after Abel's death and branching out into his own enterprises as he becomes more and more successful and wealthy. He meets and marries Ursula March; they have several children and set up a veritable model of the happy proto-Victorian family home, and the later part of the plot deals with the now grown-up children's romantic and other adventures. Along the way, Craik brings in so much historical colour that it's practically a summary of the early nineteenth century from a Victorian perspective: we see the young John de-escalating a bread riot during the economic turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars; religious discrimination against Quakers and other Nonconformists and Roman Catholics, and the beginnings of legal changes to lessen it; the development of industry and the introduction of steam-powered machinery and railways; the rise of the industrial middle class as exemplified by John, and the corresponding decline of the decayed and decadent aristocracy (who speak French and become atheists and get divorced); the corrupt state of elections, and the improvements brought by the Great Reform Act; the development and eventual success of the abolitionist movement; etc. etc. etc. There's a lot in there! It's all historically fascinating, especially as a way of seeing the Victorian view of society as developed in a story about 'how we got here'. Craik's insistence on eating her cake and having it re. John's origins and status as a gentleman somewhat undermines the major themes, but then perhaps we wouldn't be Victorians without horrifying and logically inconsistent views on class.
...and then there's the other side of the novel. As I've just demonstrated, I can summarise the plot without even mentioning him, but the book is narrated by Phineas Fletcher, Abel's son, who first notices John at the beginning. Phineas is disabled (he's so self-effacing that the exact nature of his disability isn't really clear—it seems to be some kind of chronic pain/fatigue condition, with occasional flare-ups of more severe illness), and he is absolutely, devotedly and all but textually in love with John from the moment he first sees him:
I do not attempt to account for [my liking for him]: I know not why "the soul of Jonathan clave to the soul of David." I only know that it was so, and that the first day I beheld the lad John Halifax, I, Phineas Fletcher, "loved him as my own soul."He ends up spending the rest of his life as part of John's household, 'uncle' to the children and John's closest confidant after Ursula. Everything we see, we see through his eyes: John's role as the ideal pre-Victorian gentleman, made clearer through Phineas's adoring descriptions; John and Ursula's perfect conventional marriage, to which Phineas reacts by repeatedly insisting that of course he's not going to be jealous, heterosexual love is the law of nature and the right and fitting thing for his friend, and of course it's only proper that he himself can never have anything like that... The sheer amount of internalised ableism in Phineas's narration honestly gets a bit much at times, but his constant presence on the margins of the straightforward story brings an entirely different interesting theme to the book, and it really caught me. I'm sure there's a fascinating thesis out there somewhere on the relationship between disability, gender and (queer) sexuality in Victorian fiction, with this book as a prominent example, and I'd love to read it. So, in the end, for all the interesting historical stuff in my first paragraph, my main feeling about this book is that I really want to give Phineas a hug
(I also enjoyed Abel's old-fashioned Quaker dialogue, full of 'thee's, which made me keep wanting to read it in a Yorkshire accent even though he's clearly from Gloucestershire. Nice details of religious history...!)
After that I decided that I'd perhaps had enough Victorians just for a little while, and went back to turn-of-the-century Sweden:
The Treasure by Selma Lagerlöf (1903; not actually sure who translated the English edition on Gutenberg, it doesn't say). This is another unsettling historical fairytale-ish story, set in the sixteenth century. A wealthy priest and his family are murdered for the money; their restless ghosts seek to bring the murderers, three Scottish mercenaries, to justice, while the sole survivor of the murders, the priest's adopted daughter Elsalill, is torn between her wish to help the ghost of her foster-sister and her love for the chief murderer. She's still in love with him while knowing he's the murderer, which is... a little bit doubtful from a character perspective, but Lagerlöf's detached fairytale style perhaps allows for a little more of that than you'd get away with in a more psychologically realist book. The atmosphere throughout is just the sort of thing she does well, and the descriptions of the ghosts are wonderfully creepy; I also enjoyed the chillingly-written Scandinavian winter weather (God Himself ensures the murderers are brought to justice, by keeping the sea frozen so the ship they were planning to escape on can't go anywhere—all beautifully described). More allegorically the book is a feminist story about solidarity between women triumphing over the evil purposes of men, and there's a scene at the end emphasising this point which is very striking.
I'm off work for the next week, so I'm looking forward to doing lots of reading—time for another D. K. Broster, amongst other things...
