The Word Cloud

Last night, I read Bill Bryson’s book ’Neither Here Nor There’ in which he records his experiences traveling though Europe. During an idyllic few days on Capri, he recalls the English.

‘.....I began to feel that sort of queasy guilt that you can only know if you have lived among the English - a terrible sense that any pleasure involving anything more than a cup of milky tea and a chocolate biscuit is somehow irreligiously expensive....’  (p188)

This particular corner of England is one I knew well and I had found it an an easy pace to inhabit.  Sadly, this world seems to have disappeared - though I believe Alan Bennett knew it well.

I am not against money and everybody should have the opportunity to eat Belgium biscuits, and I realize that I made a terrible mistake with my life;  I should have devoted it to making loadsamoney and would now be a happy person,  

Novelisations.  
Tony posted a ‘blog’ about these sort of words.  The word  ‘Novelisation’ seems to have been around for some time.

(This ‘blog’ is only posted out of interest, but I am amazed at how much information is now on the ‘Internet’ and I could have written a long essay on the subject of why a life of Shelley had been the first ‘Penguin’ paperback.  (This about half a page )

In reply to a recent ‘Blog’ of mine concerning Shelley, Ms Whisks, replied that she recalled reading  a life of Shelley -  ‘Ariel’ by Andre Maurois - which had been the very first ‘Penguin’ paperback. (The company began in 1935.)   I had not read this book and had been under the impression that it is a novel,  I borrowed a copy from my local library and enjoyed the book. ‘Ariel’  is a light and easy read.    

 But why was a life of Shelley chosen as the first ‘Penguin?’

 Allan Lane picked ten books that were popular in 1935, and ones that he could obtain a publishing agreement to print. The library copy of ‘Ariel’ I read was a 1962  reprint of the 1924 ‘Bodley Head’ edition and ‘Penguins’ began it’s life as an imprint of this company.  A causal connection suggests this could be a reason for the choice of ‘Ariel’ and it is not a reason put on any web-site!

But why was a life of Shelley popular at the time?  

Maurois wrote his life of Shelley in 1924, The book is without an index or footnotes, and he includes invented dialogue.  Poetry is hardly mentioned and there are few extracts,  It is Shelley’s life constructed as a novel and  was the first of a genre that increased in popularity through the century.  ‘The Agony and Ecstasy’ by Irving Stone is quoted as a well known example.  We now call the genre ‘novelisations’ 

‘Ariel’ is no longer published by ‘Penguins’ and it seems a long forgotten book. This may be because Maurois compiled his book out of information available in 1924 - a time when the view of Shelley was that of Matthew Arnold: ‘a beautiful ineffectual angel beating in the void his luminous wings.’  Succeeding biographers have chipped away at this statue.

Can biographers ever be totally objective?  I quote one paragraph from the book.  Perhaps Maurois’s French background  - his republicanism - favored the views of Shelley? The paragraph refers to Shelley’s visit to Robert Southey in the Lake District when Shelley was an aspiring literary man.   Would a latter day Mary Shelley have surreptitiously slid a copy of ‘How to Make Friends and Influence People?” among her husband’s books?

Later Shelley.....’ read by chance  a review by Southey in which he spoke of George 111 ‘as the best king that ever sat upon a throne’.  A blatant piece of flattery of course but Southey aspired to be Poet Laureate, and the road to official honours is steep to climb.  Shelley never pardoned baseness of this sort.  He wrote to him that henceforth he should look upon him as a wage earning slave, up-holder of crime and he would see him no more.’

(just an idea)   I was curious as to why ‘Madame Bovary’ had not been made into an opera, as it seems to have a suitable plot.  Checking on the ‘Internet,’ last week, I noticed that two recent attempts have been made, but neither seems to have been well received.  The review of one version thought Emma Bovary the most unsympathetic character in fiction.

Sir Andrew Lloyd Weber and Sir Tim Rice,  are you tweeting.  ‘Emma Bovary, she’s a bitch/ a nasty scheming avericious witch’   This is Emma Bovary - the 'rock and roll’ version.  

Emma  marries a mechanic who works in the village  garage.  She is working class and they live on a local,  run-down council estate.   She becomes bored with her husband, her life and her child, and listens to a lot of pop music and dreams of a different life,   A  Sir Mick Jagger look-alike has bought up  the local nearby estate which had, at one time, been the house of the local aristocrat.  He is decadent and bored with all his groupies, 

 He takes his e-type jaguar for repair to the village garage, spies Emma who is very attractive and thinks he will have a bit of fun with her.  He invites her, and her husband , to a party at his estate where she is enthralled by the pop aristocracy there. An affair develops.

Emma goes to the local loan shark, as she needs to buy clothes to live up to what she thinks of as the pop stars’ expectations. The story follows, pretty much the original novel.  Emma builds up debts. The loan shark also deals in drugs, (or the local chemist.)  She cannot pay her bills, and is forsaken by the pop-star.  She finds drugs and  dies of a heroin overdose.   Throughout the play, the local villagers act as the chorus and disapprove of Emma, though they are secretly jealous.

This plot is probably due to my having read ‘The Doctor’s Wife’ by Mary Braddon - an English version of Madame Bovary - and then reading the original novel.  I have, no doubt, confused the stories in my mind.   In Braddon’s version, Emma is like a teenager dreaming of a pop-star on her bedroom wall.  What if the pop-star turned up in her life?

It is raining this afternoon and i have gone down to the shops and got a bottle of wine, so I am inflicting a ‘blog’ on Word Cloud’.  You can blame the weather for this. I suspect this is probably just GCE level for most people.

Rise like Lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number,

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you-

Ye are many — they are few"

This verse is the refrain of ‘A Mask of Anarchy’ written by Shelley in Italy, as a response to the Peterloo Massacre of 1919.    Can one make an exciting film about electoral reform?   (Well, at least a film with lots of sex; drugs, rock and roll, and lots of dead bodies.)  Possibly Richard Holmes could. 

Incidentally, I blogged that ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ could apply to Egypt.  I might be wrong about Libya as  ‘Ye are many - they are few’  does not apply.  A civil war has emerged between competing groups and not a universal uprising against a tyranny. But could the poem be applied to England in 2011?

Spangles queried as to my suggesting a parallel between the present government’s policies and the policies of the government of William Pitt the Younger,  who was PM during the Napoleonic wars, but I think the parallel is really with New Labour; the present government is really only continuing New Labour policies.

(A few dates follow)

Pitt was PM during the French Revolution of 1789 and his premiership includes the French revolutionary wars.  Pitt died in 1806, but many things did not change during the succeeding governments. George 111 was on the throne when Pitt was PM.   George 111  died in 1820 and was succeeded by George 1V.  The Napoleonic wars ended in 1814.

I do remember reading William Hague’s biography on William Pitt  the Younger, and i enjoyed it, but I read the book some years ago.   I am not a historian and it is not a subject I studied, but let’s say I never studied history to any degree.  I have been reading ‘Thompson’s ‘The Making of the English working Class’ and a colleague at work told me that, at one time, this was set as an A level text.  It was reading this book that made me think of the parallels.  

I think a few of you might argue that my views apply more to the Thatcher years, but ‘New Labour’ seems such a continuation of her policies. The expenses scandal and the banking crisis both happened under Blair and Brown - as did an unpopular war. (Taxation without representation and war are really the parallels, but there seems to be more complex parallels -  to do with a free market economy and problems that ensue when it is applied; though some will say that Brown was really a follower of Keynes in his creation of a job market.)

The first thing I came across  were the views  of the working and artisan classes, and the emerging intelligentsia,  towards the  aristocracy.  We now think of bankers in very much the same way.  Of course, one could argue there were good country squires who could well be played by Robert Hardy, as there might be good bankers, but most were an idle, exploitative and a bad lot.  

The second thing I came across was an unpopular war and who pays for it?  (There were government loans that paid out 4%  They were called 4% consols, though some books say 3% )    The working classes ended up paying for these loans and the interest accruing on them.  (But I am no economist and might have got this wrong.) We pay for the Iraq war out of taxes.  Of course, you could argue that the Napoleonic wars were popular.

Then there were the combination laws of 1799 and 1800  which were widely used to ban large political meetings and the formation of any sort of trade union activity.   

The Blair government tried to suppress marches against the  Iraq war and tried to gag the press.  ( Also,nothing was done to repeal the trade union laws of Thatcher. Blair, also, used the police force in the same way that Thatcher did.)  What about the church?  Arguing for a just war?   What about the profligate cost of the courts of George 111 and , especially  George 1V .  There are parallels here too.

One only has to replace the term sinecure with quango - jobs for the boys, let alone the expenses scandal.  On what terms does one buy a peerage etc.  It is all so similar.  Then there all the complaints that have been about the use of tax money for these purposes!

What about the  Poor law Act of 1834 - though this is of a much later period. I got this wrong and it happened under the Melbourne administration.  However, it evolved because the growing middle-classes were agitating about the cost of poor law relief.  The poor law act and the introduction of  work houses,  aimed to make it financially better to work than claim relief - even though jobs were going, and what jobs existed, were being done by cheaper labour, forcing down the prices and putting skilled workers on the labour market.   Sounds familiar?

Then there are the paradigms of the industrial revolution and ‘The Internet’  There are parallels here.  Structural rather than frictional unemployment.  New Labour has pursued utilitarian policies - the  rules of pure capitalism. Scrooge is the hero. And Gradgrind.   Work, Work, work.  For whom?  Who is getting rich?  There is no mention that the banking crisis is due to fault lines in the market system.  

What about the free movement of labour?   People come from Eastern Europe, undercut the rates of the local labour market, so the skilled artisans are put out of work and emigrate. Same thing happened during the industrial revolution. (In later years, one could compare the railway mania with the building boom of recent years. It is all pure,  financial speculation.)

One can go on and on , and I have done!!  Does anybody agree?

However, the best film about Shelley might well be about his relationship with his father.

But!

And many more Destructions played

In this ghastly masquerade,

All disguised, even to the eyes,

Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, and spies.

 

These are a few pages from 'Forty Years Recollections' by Thomas Frost 'Sampson and Low (1880)  Page 325 -326.  The book is a basic text for the Chartist Movement and Thomas Frost had been a journalist of the time.
In these pages he recalls his experiences in editing 'penny-dreadfuls'  and I think Spangles and Kiki might be amused.  (Or anybody else)  I have 'copy and pasted' from a downloadable source and am leaving it in the 'exported'  version and have not tried to re-set it.  Each line is end-stopped on this computer.  
For Mark - Percy B.St John is mentioned in the book.  He was employed by Chambers Journal which was another magazine that attempted to 'educate' the masses and might have been the successor to Charles Knight's
'Penny Magazine' of the previous decade.

The manuscripts submitted to me during my 

year's experience as the editor of a penny periodical 

consisted almost entirely of stories and poetry, or 

rather verses. The writers were, as a rule, unknown 

to fame, and a large proportion of them were not 

merely unpractised in authorcraft, but had not even 

cultivated the essential studies of grammar and 

composition. A short story, the writer of which 

had not attempted to depict phases of life with 

which he was unacquainted, or a little poem which 

did not take too lofty a flight, could sometimes be 

selected from a pile of manuscripts ; but the 

majority had to be rejected. As the longer stories 

were calculated to run through a dozen or fifteen 

numbers of the periodical, the reading of them 

would have been a terrible infliction if a large pro- 

portion had not betrayed, in the first or second 

chapter, an amount of incapacity for novel-writing 

sufiicient to preclude the necessity of reading the 

remainder. I never rejected a manuscript on the 

ground of its being avowedly a first attempt, or 

because the writer was unknown ; but inexperience 

was generally the least fault exhibited by the stories 

which were submitted to me. Impossible incidents, 

colourless or conventional characters, vapid or ex- 

travagant dialogue, often marred stories that indicated some idea of the manner in which a story 

should be told, and did not offend very seriously on 

the score of grammar and style ; and, as a rule, 

incapacity to construct a natural plot and develop 

character in a life-like manner was greater in the 

same proportion as the story was longer and more 

pretentious. 

Editors would be spared much trouble, and aspi- 

rants to record on the muster-roll of fame much 

disappointment, if those who aim at the honours of 

type in the department of fiction could be convinced 

that there is much that is essential to success, be- 

sides the desire to write a story, and the fancy that 

they are capacitated to produce one that will not 

carry its condemnation on its face. The would-be 

novelist must first learn to write grammatically, and 

to express his ideas intelligibly upon paper; and 

when these acquirements have been mastered, he or 

she would do well to go through a course of reading, 

not necessarily of works of fiction (which it would 

perhaps be best to avoid), but of the best pro- 

ductions of the great masters of English compo- 

sition. Having thus prepared himself, the aspirant 

may attempt a story, though it is very unlikely, 

unless he possesses qualifications for the task far 

above the average, that his first production will ever 

be printed; unless, indeed, he should achieve a name 

by subsequent stories, and be so unconscientious as 

to publish such a crudity on the strength thereof, 

and be rendered callous to criticism by the know- 

ledge that his repute will carry to the libraries any 

rubbish that bears his name on the title-page. 

His chances of success will be greatly improved, 

however, if he refrains from attempting to depict 

phases of life with which he has no acquaintance, 

and resolutely abjures conventional types of charac- 

ter. Many a story that might have been pronounced 

fairly good if the author had adopted this rule is 

marred by its neglect, which invariably stamps it 

with an air of unreality. The portrayal of charac- 

ter requires the development of the faculties of 

observation and delineation in a degree that is rare 

even among experienced fictionists; but embryo 

novelists would avoid those absurdities which editors 

are often asked to accept as representations of 

modern life and manners, if they would aim at 

depicting only the section or sections of humanity 

with which they are best acquainted. The man or 

woman who can write tolerable English may, by 

observing this precaution, produce a story that may 

be deemed worthy of acceptance, and even achieve a 

fair degree of success ; while its neglect may cause 

the manuscript to be laid aside on the perusal of a 

chapter or two, because the author betrays ignorance 

of the manners and language of the classes or 

vocations from which he has selected his characters. 

Last year I wrote a short blog about Shelley and ‘The Mask Of  Anarchy’ and I outlined a film plot.   Mary Shelley lands in England with her son Percy; they are returning home  after the tragic death of Shelley.  She tries to establish contact with Shelley’s father in order that her son might retain the Shelley estate and title.  The situation would allow flashbacks about her life with Shelley.   At the centre of the story would be the Peterloo Massacre of 1819  and Shelley’s response to the massacre with his poem, ‘The Mask of Anarchy’  (He died about three years later.)

The poem may be forgotten now, but it has resonance with the situation in the middle-east. (The poem resonated with Ghandi in Shelley’s advocation of passive resistance.)  How successful this resistance can be, can be been shown by what happened in Egypt last month, but the situation in Libya is even more potent in that, at Peterloo, the English government reacted to a peaceful  march with brutal violence.

The material for the film is well known and  A++++++  (and rather above my abilities and  the film become just speculation.)  The only person who could write the story effectively is Richard Holmes)

My personal  interest is in the radical press of the period and, through reading ‘Thomson’s ‘The Making of the English working Class,’ I wondered what would happen if Shelley had not died and returned to England with his wife and son?

The ‘Internet’ can be amazing and I found that Richard Holmes had written this counterfactual in an article in the Guardian in 2004.  I felt I bit piqued but, after reading the article, I felt rather pleased with myself in that, of any counterfactual I had thought of, the most likely one is that of  Richard Holmes.  We had come to roughly, the same conclusion. Shelley would have joined the chattering class of the time and gone for a broadening of political suffrage through constitutional reform.  He could even have crossed the bench, after resuming his title, and joined the whig party!  But I doubt if he could have joined Dickens’s circle.

However, there is another, I must admit, unlikely counterfactual.  From three separate sources, the feeling seems to be that a popular revolution did not occur before the 1832 Reform Act because no figure emerged with sufficient charisma to lead it.   Could Shelley have been this revolutionary figure?   Supposing he retained the Jacobin beliefs of his youth?  Richard Holmes had felt that Shelley would have emerged as a significant political thinker of the left;  another Karl Marx, perhaps.

When Shelley returns to England, he finds his poem has become the unofficial anthem of the Chartist movement.  He is a star!  He becomes involved in one of the groups that favours more forceful action and a civil - almost a class war - emerges.   There is no reason to suppose the government would win the war as there were considerable disaffected troops made redundant by the Napoleonic wars.

We seem to be heading for a restoration of a monarchy and  an even more reactionary squirarchy..  According to ‘Breakfast TV’ last week, monarchical plots are only now of interest to the film industry!

I attended the book party at the South Bank on Saturday evening - the book give-away  - and, by a strange coincidence, I had fragments of ‘the Mask of  Anarchy’ in my bag.   (Last year, I attempted to read some of the ‘Mask of Anarchy’ at a poetry meeting.   I used a download of the poem from ‘The Internet,’ as I could not find a copy in any anthology, and the copy turned up in a tray at work. I was taking it home.)

Under the present climate, and in view of the material read out at the party, I wonder what would have happened if I had been stopped by a security guard, and my bag searched?  Would I have been thrown out of the building?  Would I have been escorted to the nearest police station and put under arrest?   Metaphorically,  I suspect  I would have been!  

     Some months I posted a query as to what a journalist might have meant when he referred to himself as 'a radical and something more?'    The term does seem to have been current in the Victorian era.  I am reading  'Thomas Frost's 'Forty Years of Recollections ( Sampson and Low  1880) and Thomas Frost describes himself as 'a chartist and something more'    
The first three chapters of a later autobiography 'Reminiscences of a Country Journalist' recall his childhood in Croydon and he writes about the whole of South London at a time when most of the area was still country.  Is this of interest to the East Dulwich Writing Group?  I have made a PDF file of these chapters, but the books are downloadable.
     Thomas Frost had been a Victorian journalist much involved in the penny-press and his book is a source document for the Chartist movement.  He had also been a communist in his youth, and an Owenite.
The journalist I am researching, wrote an 'apologia' for Robespierre,' and one can only assume that the journalist had Republican sympathies and might even had Jacobin tendencies.    He might well have ascribed to  Thomas Paine and also, to the foundations of the French Revolution.  
I was rather distracted by recent,bibliographical entry which describes him and his two brothers as 'racist'    I have enquired over this.  Is it possible for someone with these set of beliefs to have been a racist?  In a story, he states, quite firmly that he is not.  The story is set in Texas - about the 1830's, at a time when slavery had not been abolished. 
The person who wrote the bibliographical entry was wrong in one respect - there were five brothers who were journalists, not three.   
I'm off to work now as I am using up my leave and have odd hours.





 

This is a continuation of my ‘blogs’ about ‘literary rubbish’ and is an argument for a film interpretation of Mary Braddon’s  novel ‘A Doctor’s Wife.’

Last Sunday it rained and I read ‘Madame Bovary.’ 

 A depression continued as, fitfully, I watched a film interpretation by Claude Chabrol; it was not till Thursday, that the clouds partially lifted. 

Chabrol!  The cast of ‘Thunderbirds’ could have portrayed the central characters with greater animation; this is especially true of Emma herself - cold, sexless and charmless.  I enquired, with a French colleague at work. over this radical interpretation of the character; she shrugged her shoulders in a  particularly Gallic way and said,’Mais oui, c’est Chabrol.    Others, lacking the generosity of myself and my colleague, pronounced the film ‘boring’ (Amazon reviews. Google)   The winter landscapes of Sweden, and the pitiless black and white lens of Bergman, would have made a suitable relocation for a literal filming of the book.

Madame Bovary is a relentlessly amoral tale.  The only words of comfort - no, advice - a reader can import, seems to be that, for those considering suicide, arsenic is not the best option.  David Lean, in his film, ‘Ryan’s Daughter’, and Mary Braddon, in her book ‘The Doctor’s’ Wife’  have made valiant attempts to ameliorate the situation, but it is only in ‘The Doctor’s Wife’ that the sun is given an opportunity to shine.   

Both Lean and Braddon portray the provincial doctor - the source of much Emma’s boredom - with greater sympathy.  Lean relocates the story to Ireland and cleverly adjusts the plot to an Irish village billeted by English soldiers during the first world war, while Braddon relocates to the provincial life of the English countryside.   Both Lean and Braddon kill the aristocratic lover.  In Lean’s  case, with the suicide of the commander of the English troops and, in Braddon’s case, the workings of fate - or rather the winding down of an engineered plot.  The death of the aristocrat, combined with the death of the doctor -in Braddon’s novel - allows a more positive resolution of the story.  In both Lean and Braddon, the menials are portrayed with greater sympathy, though there is no equivalent , in Braddon’s novel, to the draper in Flaubert, or the rather dubious and opportunistic IRA supporter in Lean’s film.

But Braddon’s departure from the plot is even more radical.  Isobel’s dreams of escape are those of an adolescent - she is in love with love.  She could be an adolescent dreaming of the pop-star on the wall.  Her aristocratic lover is, similarly, a Don Juan with a conscience.  (He responds to her plea for help and it is this plea that results in his death)   But, earlier, Isobel rejects his offer of elopement.  There is no sex in her dreams and it is as though his offer of escape has deflowered her romantic dream. (This does seem illogical, and, perhaps a mis-interpratation by me, but Braddon, like many Victorian writers, is a plotter)  

Films communicate by visual images and Braddon’s book allows this to excess.  The Pre-Raphaelites could provide both a period and imaginative counterpoint to Isobel’s dreams which are, also, associated with class and money - as are Emma’s.

Braddon has further undermined her tragic plot by the introduction of Sigismund Smith, the most unromantic of writers, who examines every building, and every situation, for dramatic ideas for his sensation novels.  Should Isobel imagine herself as Ophelia downing in the river, Sigismund might well have examined such a romantic setting for the demise of one of his heroines.  It is no surprise that the happy marriage of Sigismund ends Braddon’s novel.  But how much was Braddon’s tongue in her cheek in her description of Isobel’s romantic fantasies?   How much had she engineered her plot?   Were Sigismund’s dreams and Isobel’s entwined?  If not, then it might be necessary to entwine them,

I can only provide one more twist to the story of Braddon and ‘literary rubbish’.  The author she accuses of writing this ‘literary rubbish’ wrote a short story.  In 1848, he wrote about the ‘feuilletons’  - the French equivalent of the ‘penny-dreadful’ magazines in which, later,  Madame Bovary was serialized.  The  hero of his story reads these feuilletons to excess, and imagines himself as the hero of the romantic stories. 

I am right back where I started!

 Mary Braddon could read a newspaper over breakfast.  Opposite is her husband, She  discusses the articles  that cause offense, and her imagination leads her back to the writing of ‘The Doctor’s Wife’ and behind this novel, is the imprint of Madame Bovary;  Mary Braddon’s first career had been that of an actress.  But all this is a fantasy of my own and as unrealistic as Isobel’s.

Dear Frank,
I will post this here - so at least you can read it!
I cannot find your  post  (letter either) but I can remember what you wrote.  My comment  on your writing had been on satire in general and that the satires I can recall can be read in two ways. ie, 'Animal Farm' can be read as a political satire and a children's fable.  I felt the writing you posted, might have lacked this element. I am not really a critic so you shouldn't take what I wrote too seriously!
I think the period in which the journalists wrote might be  too late for you.   
  The journalist I mentioned, was born in the year Napoleon died. (His father was about 2o)  His father's childhood might well have been dominated by the Napoleonic wars but there would be no source material here and, I doubt any about the French Revolution and Ireland - though there would have been much more sympathy for the revolution in the Chartist press of the period.  By marriage, the journalists went back one generation earlier  - to the 'Father of Liverpool'  and it was believed there had been a 'link with the Mistletoe Bough'  I once spent ages trying to trace this link as it would be the  ballad's only practical link to the twentieth century but the link might not exist.  (A grandfather wrote parlour ballads too)
At the moment I am reading, E.V Thompson's 'Making of the English Working Class' and the previous history book I read  was 'The Age of Revolution '1789-1848'  by Hobsbawm, so I might  have a vague idea of what you are looking for, but the source material is rather difficult to find.    I am in full time occupation at the moment and have no time to do research - which is foot slogging to archives.   A great-great grandfather edited 'The Rebublican' while Robert Carlile was in jail for sedition and his beliefs might have been  passed down to his children. This great-great grandfather changed his name and came to London where, according to the 'DNB' he moderated his political views and adopted liberal persuasion - a practical necessity!  In my opinion  he had been a figure more in the tradition of  Leigh Hunt) All five of his sons became writers, but i lost count of how many writers there were in the family - a couple of dozen, I think.   

I tend to put any information I find in PDF format and Word Cloud' does not allow this format anyway.  My e.mail  address is mike.hugh.middleton@btinternet.com.