Recent reading
Apr. 29th, 2021 07:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regshoeEdward Thring, Headmaster of Uppingham: Life, Diary and Letters by George R. Parkin, volume 1 (1898). Read for Raffles and wider Hornung fandom reasons. Hornung attended Uppingham School in the 1880s, and this inspired Fathers of Men as well as the school backstory of the Raffles books. I was looking for historical sources on what Hornung's, and hence Raffles's and Bunny's, schooldays might have been like, and found this. Uppingham in the 1880s, it turns out, was no ordinary 19th century public school: its headmaster, Edward Thring, was a determined and brilliant reformer who built Uppingham from a small country grammar school into a famous and influential public school, all based on his own daringly novel ideas about how school and education ought to work, and apparently became very famous and successful. Lots of interesting historical side-paths to wander down. I especially enjoyed the early parts about Thring's own schooldays at Eton (more or less exactly what you'd expect from Eton in the 1830s). The later diaries about day-to-day life at Uppingham were certainly interesting from a historical and fandom research point of view, although sometimes irritatingly vague on the details. But it has given me some ideas to mull over about Raffles.
Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886). More romantic and slashy Jacobite-themed adventure novels! This one kind of approaches the Jacobites at a tangent: the main plot is about our hero David Balfour's quest to thwart the schemes of his evil uncle, a very appropriate adventure novel story, but after David is kidnapped on board a ship, he meets the historical Jacobite Alan Breck Stewart, who's travelling back and forth between France and the Appin Stewarts' lands in the Highlands, and much of the rest of the book is taken up with Alan and the other Stewarts' Jacobite drama. This is actually the first book of Stevenson's that I've read, and I found the prose and story much less engaging than e.g. Flight of the Heron (well, it's not everyone who can write like Broster...), but it was entertaining, and the relationship between David and Alan (within a few hours of first meeting, after they fight side by side against the sailors who've kidnapped David and are threatening to murder Alan: He came up to me with open arms. 'Come to my arms!' he cried, and embraced and kissed me hard upon both cheeks. 'David,' said he, 'I love you like a brother.') was good fun.
The historical parts of the plot involve the Appin murder—the murder, in 1752, of Colin Roy Campbell, government factor on the forfeited Jacobite estates in Appin. Alan Breck Stewart was the main suspect; the novel establishes his innocence! Eventually a relation, James Stewart of the Glens, was tried very unfairly indeed and executed as an accessory to the murder (these events are mentioned in The Gleam in the North), but who actually dunnit has apparently never been established, and the book doesn't clear that up either. Now, there's another mystery here: Stevenson sets the book in 1751, moving the actual date of the murder by a year; he points out the anachronism in the preface, and I was expecting that there'd be some important reason why the events of the novel had to take place in '51, but... there isn't? Unless I've missed something, there was no reason not to set the fictional plot in the right year for the real murder. Very odd.
I read this illustrated edition on Project Gutenberg. The back of the ebook, after the main text, has all the illustrations repeated at full size, and not realising this going in I thought the book was going to be about 50% longer than it actually was and was somewhat surprised when it suddenly ended. Perhaps that's why I found the ending very abrupt, but it did seem that things weren't really tied up as much as they could have been—in particular, the Appin murder and who's going to hang for it is still unresolved at the end. One final point—lovely as the illustrations are, the text describes David as being a foot taller than Alan, but the illustrator consistently depicts them as about the same height. I think this is cowardly and I'm glad this illustrator never got their hands on Flight of the Heron.
Er, altogether this was a good one!
Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886). More romantic and slashy Jacobite-themed adventure novels! This one kind of approaches the Jacobites at a tangent: the main plot is about our hero David Balfour's quest to thwart the schemes of his evil uncle, a very appropriate adventure novel story, but after David is kidnapped on board a ship, he meets the historical Jacobite Alan Breck Stewart, who's travelling back and forth between France and the Appin Stewarts' lands in the Highlands, and much of the rest of the book is taken up with Alan and the other Stewarts' Jacobite drama. This is actually the first book of Stevenson's that I've read, and I found the prose and story much less engaging than e.g. Flight of the Heron (well, it's not everyone who can write like Broster...), but it was entertaining, and the relationship between David and Alan (within a few hours of first meeting, after they fight side by side against the sailors who've kidnapped David and are threatening to murder Alan: He came up to me with open arms. 'Come to my arms!' he cried, and embraced and kissed me hard upon both cheeks. 'David,' said he, 'I love you like a brother.') was good fun.
The historical parts of the plot involve the Appin murder—the murder, in 1752, of Colin Roy Campbell, government factor on the forfeited Jacobite estates in Appin. Alan Breck Stewart was the main suspect; the novel establishes his innocence! Eventually a relation, James Stewart of the Glens, was tried very unfairly indeed and executed as an accessory to the murder (these events are mentioned in The Gleam in the North), but who actually dunnit has apparently never been established, and the book doesn't clear that up either. Now, there's another mystery here: Stevenson sets the book in 1751, moving the actual date of the murder by a year; he points out the anachronism in the preface, and I was expecting that there'd be some important reason why the events of the novel had to take place in '51, but... there isn't? Unless I've missed something, there was no reason not to set the fictional plot in the right year for the real murder. Very odd.
I read this illustrated edition on Project Gutenberg. The back of the ebook, after the main text, has all the illustrations repeated at full size, and not realising this going in I thought the book was going to be about 50% longer than it actually was and was somewhat surprised when it suddenly ended. Perhaps that's why I found the ending very abrupt, but it did seem that things weren't really tied up as much as they could have been—in particular, the Appin murder and who's going to hang for it is still unresolved at the end. One final point—lovely as the illustrations are, the text describes David as being a foot taller than Alan, but the illustrator consistently depicts them as about the same height. I think this is cowardly and I'm glad this illustrator never got their hands on Flight of the Heron.
Er, altogether this was a good one!
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Date: May. 1st, 2021 11:54 am (UTC)mere primary evidence cannot displace the higher poetic truth of Stevenson's Tiny Alan.
Quite right! :D (I mean, a description by the authorities might not have been very accurate, right...?)