Max Goldsworthy

11 months after my first post, I have finally read enough “early English” novels to write a part 2. This was less of a self-contained spree than my first endeavour, and I did take breaks to read other things which I have omitted from this post in order to keep things a bit more focused.

Still, as I alluded to at the end of my last post, my plan was to read a couple books from each of: Dickens, Hardy and Eliot after which I would no doubt feel satisfied and able to move onto a different pocket of literature – maybe modernism or American lit. Things, however, did not go to plan.

Far From the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy

Of all the novels I read across both sprees, this is the only one I feel deserves to be much more forgotten than it already is.

It tells the story of a love square centered on Bathsheba Everdene, who inherits a farm from her uncle and decides she will run it herself against societal expectations. If this sounds like the start of an underdog, feminist narrative to you, then you are forgetting that this book was written by a Victorian man. We are informed that:

“Bathsheba, though she had too much understanding to be entirely governed by her womanliness, had too much womanliness to use her understanding to the best advantage.”

and this is just one of at least a dozen instances where the authorial voice stops to say something sexist and thereby undermines any potency the narrative may have had. Probably the most striking example of this is in the scene where Bathsheba appears most sympathetic – when she enters into the male exclusive corn exchange determined to do business:

“Among these heavy yeomen a feminine figure glided, the single one of her sex that the room contained. She was prettily and even daintily dressed. She moved between them as a chaise between carts, was heard after them as a romance after sermons, was felt among them like a breeze among furnaces. It had required a little determination — far more than she had at first imagined — to take up a position here, for at her first entry the lumbering dialogues had ceased, nearly every face had been turned towards her, and those that were already turned rigidly fixed there.

Two or three only of the farmers were personally known to Bathsheba, and to these she had made her way. But if she was to be the practical woman she had intended to show herself, business must be carried on, introductions or none, and she ultimately acquired confidence enough to speak and reply boldly to men merely known to her by hearsay.

[…]

Strange to say of a woman in full bloom and vigor, she always allowed her interlocutors to finish their statements before rejoining with hers.“

These interjections could maybe me ignored if it didn’t feel like Hardy’s sexism was imprinted so heavily on the character herself. She is headstrong, yes, but she’s also incompetent, consistently ignores useful advice and generally acts more on capricious whims than by developing a strong understanding of anything and using it to her best advantage (damn her womanliness!).

The male love interest, Gabriel “Sturdy English” Oak, (the nickname is mine – but I couldn’t resist adding it whenever I read his name) is just extremely passive throughout the majority of the novel, bordering on sappish, so it’s hard to feel much interest in the love story either.

Apparently one of the major attractions of Hardy for other people is how well he describes landscape, which does precious little for me, but if you want to read about a bunch of bozos being irritating in a beautifully described field, then this might be the book for you.

Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

Okay, so I almost immediately veered from my plan. In my defense, I did false start a couple different Dickens books, and I frequently looked up the word count of Middlemarch before deciding I needed something short and a bit different to get the wind back in my sails. Woolf is technically outside my self-imposed brief, because she wrote after WWI, but she’s close enough that I’ll count it here.

Mrs. Dalloway is a stream-of-consciousness novel that shifts perspective between multiple different characters – but chiefly focuses on Clarissa Dalloway, the 52-year old wife of a Tory MP and frequent diner party hostess and Septimus Warren Smith, an ex-soldier with some combination of shell shock and schizophrenia, together with his wife Lucrezia.

The novel takes place over a single day as the characters move about London (without directly interacting with each other much), and so I thought it would be fun to try and read it in a day too. I actually think this is the ideal way to read this book if possible, since there are no chapters and few convenient stopping points.

To give a flavour of the text, here is a memorable passage where Mrs. Dalloway looks into a mirror:

“How many million times she had seen her face, and always with the same imperceptible contraction! She pursed her lips when she looked in the glass. It was to give her face point. That was her self—pointed; dartlike; definite. That was her self when some effort, some call on her to be her self, drew the parts together, she alone knew how different, how incompatible and composed so for the world only into one centre, one diamond, one woman who sat in her drawing-room and made a meeting-point, a radiancy no doubt in some dull lives, a refuge for the lonely to come to, perhaps; she had helped young people, who were grateful to her; had tried to be the same always, never showing a sign of all the other sides of her—faults, jealousies, vanities, suspicions, like this of Lady Bruton not asking her to lunch; which, she thought (combing her hair finally), is utterly base! Now, where was her dress?”

This paragraph gives the key to understanding the text (and perhaps the justification for focusing on such an outwardly dull character as Mrs. Dalloway in the first place). Woolf wants to portray consciousness as ultimately fragmentary – and further, that those fragments are often “incompatible” with each other, such that bringing them into a single coherent identity requires “some effort”.

Sepitmus’ condition can therefore be seen as this aspect of consciousness taken to it’s extremity:

“Happily Rezia put her hand with a tremendous weight on his knee so that he was weighted down, transfixed, or the excitement of the elm trees rising and falling, rising and falling with all their leaves alight and the colour thinning and thickening from blue to the green of a hollow wave, like plumes on horses’ heads, feathers on ladies’, so proudly they rose and fell, so superbly, would have sent him mad. But he would not go mad. He would shut his eyes; he would see no more.

But they beckoned; leaves were alive; trees were alive. And the leaves being connected by millions of fibres with his own body, there on the seat, fanned it up and down; when the branch stretched he, too, made that statement. The sparrows fluttering, rising, and falling in jagged fountains were part of the pattern; the white and blue, barred with black branches. Sounds made harmonies with premeditation; the spaces between them were as significant as the sounds. A child cried. Rightly far away a horn sounded. All taken together meant the birth of a new religion—

“Septimus!” said Rezia. He started violently. People must notice.“

So what did I make of all this? I must say I find her prose drifts between being genuinely beautiful or feeling a bit overwrought. Likewise the transitions between different character’s perspectives (and the transitions between different thoughts within the same character’s head) was sometimes satisfyingly fluid, and other times bewildering – but it’s all done to such deliberate effect that I can’t help but admire it.

To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

To The Lighthouse was written after Mrs. Dalloway and, while it still relies heavily on stream-of-consciousness, it employs the technique in a more structured, easier-to-follow way. To me, Mrs. Dalloway feels like a ‘proof-of-concept’ for how Woolf wants to portray her characters, whereas this book is the mature Woolf using her characters to a more pointed effect.

I was blown away by it – specifically, by the way the book uses it’s structure to reinforce it’s themes. In fact, I was so taken by it that I don’t want to spoil it by saying anything further.

Great Expectations, Charles Dickens

If you needed a measure of how much I enjoyed To The Lighthouse though, it’s this: it finally gave me enough momentum to get through a Dickens book. I don’t know exactly why I feel so intimidated by Dickens, but if I had to guess I’d say it’s because his books are usually massive and my overwhelming suspicion is that I’d find them ‘alright’.

Admirers claim his books are funny, but I always suspected (and with Great Expectations, at least, confirmed) that I would find them occasionally amusing at best.

Admirers point to the sheer range of his memorable and lovable characters and, if the memorability can be discredited by pointing out that his characters are often broad caricatures, it is harder for me to deny the lovability: there is a real warmth here that I imagine pervades a lot of Dickens’ work.

Finally, admirers enjoy how playful he is with language and – whilst sometimes his sentence construction is just utterly baffling – there is no doubt plenty to enjoy about his use language.

The following quote I feel is a good representation of the joy of Dickens:

“My sister Mrs. Joe Gargery, was more than twenty years older than I, and had established a great reputation with herself and the neighbours because she had brought me up “by hand”. Having at that time to find out for myself what the expression meant, and knowing her to have a hard and heavy hand, and to be much in the habit of laying it upon her husband as well as upon me, I supposed that Joe Gargery and I were both brought up by hand.“

But it’s true: ultimately I did find this book to be just ‘alright’, but it’s an ‘alright’ said with a nod and a fond smile, rather than with a grimace and an elongated ‘i’ sound.

I’m unlikely to rush out and read more Dickens soon, but I have earmarked him as my test subject for experimenting with audiobooks – not least because in Dickens’ own day, after he published a new section of his book, he would earn extra money by reading them aloud publicly or in the houses of rich families. Plus, given the massive casts of characters some of his other books have, I have a childlike desire to hear someone read it aloud to me and ‘do all the voices’.

Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Bronte

I have no compelling explanation for why I chose this book next; but after learning a bit about it’s publication history, I feel compelled to make a case for it. It was a sensation when first published, but it was also heavily censured (even more than Wuthering Heights) for it’s unflinching, grounded portrayal of domestic abuse. After Anne died, Charlotte Bronte prevented it’s republication from some cocktail of motives including an apparent patronising belief that ‘sweet, gentle Anne’ was ill-suited to be writing about such things.

Some years later, an entirely mutilated one-volume version of the text was published and this frequently passes today unremarked on in editions as the apparent full text. Unbeknownst to me, the version I initially started reading (The project Gutenberg ebook) was the mutilated text, and to add insult to injury, the introduction of this text was written by a late Victorian woman who spends the entirety of her introduction explaining in great detail why she thinks Anne is rubbish. To quote her directly:

“It is not as the writer of “Wildfell Hall,” but as the sister of Charlotte and Emily Brontë, that Anne Brontë escapes oblivion.”

I think it is this lack of availability plus the early prejudice against the novel that have dwarfed Anne’s reputation, much more than any literary shortcomings since – whatever else this book is – it was gripping enough to have me up until 4AM trying to finish it.

That’s not to say that the book will be to everyone’s tastes, since it is obviously quite a harrowing read and much less “Romantic” than either of her sister’s books.

The following illustrative quote does contain (light) spoilers, so read it at your peril:

My greatest source of uneasiness, in this time of trial, was my son, whom his father and his father’s friends delighted to encourage in all the embryo vices a little child can show, and to instruct in all the evil habits he could acquire – in a word, to ‘make a man of him’ was one of their staple amusements; and I need say no more to justify my alarm on his account, and my determination to deliver him at any hazard from the hands of such instructors. I first attempted to keep him always with me, or in the nursery, and gave Rachel particular injunctions never to let him come down to dessert as long as these ‘gentlemen’ stayed; but it was no use; these orders were immediately countermanded and overruled by his father: he was not going to have the little fellow moped to death between an old nurse and a cursed fool of a mother. So the little fellow came down every evening, in spite of his cross mamma, and learnt to tipple wine like papa, to swear like Mr. Hattersley, and to have his own way like a man, and sent mamma to the devil when she tried to prevent him. To see such things done with the roguish naivete of that pretty little child and hear such things spoken by that small infantile voice, was as peculiarly piquant and irresistibly droll to them as it was inexpressibly distressing and painful to me; and when he had set the table in a roar, he would look round delightedly upon them all, and add his shrill laugh to theirs. But if that beaming blue eye rested on me, its light would vanish for a moment, and he would say, in some concern, – ‘Mamma, why don’t you laugh? Make her laugh, papa – she never will.’

Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift

Perhaps unsurprisingly after The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, I was after something a bit lighter. Gulliver’s Travels tells the story of Lemuel Gulliver on four separate adventures, with precious little connection between each of them.

The first adventure – the one that most people have heard of – is where he travels to Lilliput, a land where everyone is tiny and, after initially making himself useful to the kingdom, Gulliver gets brought down by courtly intriguing that he is almost entirely ignorant of.

Next he travels to Brobdingnag, a land where everyone is big. Ostensibly the satire here is Gulliver trying (and failing) to explain the majestic structures of European governments to a wise princely giant, but really much more of the chapter is taken up by him fighting off rats and house flies. When this story is cut up and sold as a children’s book, typically only these two chapters get included.

In the full text, however, he then travels to Laputa: a floating island populated by academics who have one eye permanently turned inwards and the other turned upwards at the sky. All the crops are failing because people have developed a taste for ambitious, revolutionary projects (with just a few minor practical obstacles to be surmounted first) – including the absolute highlight, a man who: ‘had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers‘.

Finally, he visits the land of the ‘Houyhnhnms’, a land of hyper-rational horses (their name is supposed to be pronounced with a ‘neighing’ sound) and Yahoos, who are brutish, non-verbal humanoids. After staying here a while and observing the two races, he comes to realize that humanity as a whole are just yahoos with better languages skills and resolves to stay here forever, until he is banished because the horses realise the same thing.

Here’s the problem with the last two chapters of Gulliver’s Travels: they are much more fun to describe than they are to actually read. The last chapter in particular goes on for ages about all the things that are irrational in human society, and I kept getting flashbacks to a play they put on at primary school where aliens come to earth and are baffled why this funny species of ‘humons’ don’t do their recycling properly.

Still, I think the book is fun and worth reading for the sheer imagination alone, but I also fully support the mutilation of it and the appropriation of it by children. It is much more fun imagining what it would be like to be small than it is to read wry commentary on the shortcomings of the 18th century legal system.