Recent reading

Letters and Journals of Mrs Calderwood of Polton (written 1756; edited and published by Alexander Ferguson, 1884). Some more tangentially-Jacobite writing! Margaret Calderwood was the sister of James Steuart (the family helpfully avoid confusion with all the other Stewarts and Stuarts involved in Jacobite history by coming up with yet another spelling of the name), who had the misfortune to help BPC out with a bit of political manifesto-writing when he was in Edinburgh in '45; apart from this he doesn't seem to have been a particularly committed Jacobite, and the family in general were Whigs, but this didn't save James from being excluded from the Act of Indemnity and forced into exile in the Netherlands for many years. Anyway, in 1756 Margaret went to visit him, bringing her husband and two sons with her, and this book is her account of her travels through various places in the Low Countries on that visit (apparently written largely in the form of letters to her daughter in Scotland, though all the letter-formatting matter is removed in the published edition).

It's a really enjoyable and colourful bit of historical travel writing; Margaret Calderwood is both very observant and highly judgemental, says exactly what she thinks of all sorts of things (the ugliness of London architecture and the condemnable incuriosity of the English; the strange shapes and construction of Dutch houses, and the sad lack of ventilation for stoves in Brussels; the folly of impoverished aristocrats who disdain to work for a living; the practices of the Jesuits; etc. etc.) with a lively frankness commended at some length as a general characteristic of old-fashioned Scottish ladies by the editor in his introduction, and describes all sorts of interesting historical curiosities. Her interactions with the people she meets on her travels were also entertaining—she's clearly one for taking the initiative, and not speaking the local languages does not prevent her from dealing decisively with the tradespeople furnishing her house, the Jesuits educating her sons and various other people. Of actual Jacobite history there isn't very much, apart from the insight the descriptions give into the life of exiled Scottish Jacobites on the continent. I was pleased to see Andrew Hay of Rannes and his famous height make an appearance; we also meet the nephew of Francis Towneley, and an Irish peer named Bellew who 'laughs and is so merry, and then comes a deep sigh' at Mrs Calderwood's stories of Scottish Jacobites. She writes at some length about Catholic religious practices, of which she thoroughly disapproves (at one point our editor tells us that he was obliged to excise one passage which got too vehement in its anti-Catholicism), and gets into some arguments about religion, observing that 'it is surprizing how weakly men of the best sense [and] the outmost freedom of thinking in everything, and even in many things regarding the church, talk upon certain points of their religion.' All very entertaining.


Despised and Rejected by Rose Allatini (A. T. Fitzroy) (1918). Written before the end of the First World War, this novel about gay pacifists was banned for political subversiveness shortly after publication; I had been wanting to read it for a while, and recently edwardianspinsteraunt very kindly lent me a copy. It is indeed historically fascinating! We meet the hero, Dennis Blackwood, as a sensitive young composer significantly not quite fitting into the society of his family shortly before the outbreak of war; Allatini makes a lot of the meaningful link between music and queerness, which is also such a notable feature of e.g. Edward Prime-Stevenson's writing. Anyway, Dennis is travelling in Cornwall when he meets an amazingly beautiful and passionately socialistic young man named Alan Rutherford who is learning about the lives and thoughts of the workers in a geographically-dubious coal mine; Dennis falls in love at first sight and, terrified, runs away after giving Alan a terribly significant musical composition to explain his feelings. Then the war starts; both Dennis and Alan become conscientious objectors, and in the pacifist society of London, surrounded by various other colourful anti-war characters, they meet again. Meanwhile Dennis has also met our heroine Antoinette de Courcy, who lives with her stifling French family in London and has a habit of falling in love with unavailable women and then falling out of love as soon as they return her feelings. Tormented by his knowledge of his sexuality, Dennis tries to carry on a relationship with Antoinette, and between Dennis's attempted self-deception and Antoinette's distaste for masculine romantic attention the relationship is a failure on both sides... until Antoinette's feelings change.

Now, I had heard this plot described roughly as 'lesbian falls in love with a man, but it's complicated'; I'm not sure quite what I was expecting from that, nor am I quite sure what to make of what I actually got. Certainly Antoinette's queerness is acknowledged—mostly by Dennis, who tells her she is 'tainted' in the same way he is—there's no explicit suggestion that by falling for Dennis she is fixed or made normal, it seems highly significant that the only man she can have feelings for is queer, and it's quite possible to read her as a slightly strange sort of bi rather than lesbian. So it's not egregiously offensive in the way it could have been; but it is very frustrating, for several reasons. I got pretty impatient with the way Antoinette's hopeless possessiveness over Dennis, and her eventual jealousy of Alan, is described—in terms fairly typical of het romance, despite the general oddness—but what I found most frustrating was Antoinette's passivity and the lack of a distinct perspective from her on the situation. As I say, it's Dennis who identifies her as queer, and despite her own important feelings for women she doesn't seem to care about this as such nearly as much as she cares about her unrequited love for Dennis. Nor does she particularly care about pacifism; it's explicitly stated that she only holds the opinions she does because of Dennis. I also found Dennis pretty frustrating; his struggles over his sexuality are very understandable in context, of course, but the way he treats both Antoinette and Alan as a result is really pretty shabby. Let's talk about Alan instead! Alan—earnest and bold socialist, pacifist and most courageous of conscientious objectors—is an actual sweetheart and I love him. He seems far less troubled about his sexuality than Dennis is, and I would have loved to get more of his internal point of view on that and on how he developed his political opinions. Frankly he deserves far better than Dennis.

The other problem with the book is that it's just not very well written. 'Allatini does not know how to use dialogue tags, and it gets really annoying,' she smiled condescendingly; she's also sadly fond of phonetic accents and speech impediments, inserts authorial-mouthpiece didactic speeches whose narrative clumsiness isn't really redeemed by their wisdom; the pacing is weird and sometimes clumsy, there's no real ending (although that can perhaps be excused by the historical circumstances of the book's composition, the war not being over yet and all that) and very little setting description.

Apparently the pacifism was much more of a factor in the book's banning than the queerness; one can see why this was so threatening to the authorities in 1918, as Allatini is very frank about aspects of the treatment of conscientious objectors which the Government were keen to keep quiet. Both Dennis and Alan, refusing 'non-combatant service' by which they would still have been made to support the war effort, are sent to prison, and the abuses they and other men in their position suffer there are described in some detail. Unfortunately, as a result of its being banned the original edition of the book is virtually impossible to obtain; a great shame, as I'm not aware that it's been digitised anywhere and it would be a brilliant one to put up on Project Gutenberg.

I think I've done very well in getting this far without mentioning The Charioteer, but I have to quote this remarkable speech from Alan:

'...I think we fought side by side before now. In ancient Greece, perhaps, or Rome. Sometimes I have dreams.... and in those dreams you are always my comrade in battle, my comrade in love.'

Er, no mention of how this might sit oddly alongside being a pacifist; I think Renault thought the image through more carefully, if so much more painfully. Anyway, I totally ship Alan and Andrew now, with or without time travel.