History Entertains Us!

     .... Last night I read the first few pages of Robert Harris's future medieval dystopian Britain mystery novel, The Second Sleep (2019).

Harris precedes the narrative with a pull quote from Thomas Hardy's 1886 novel, The Mayor of Casterbridge, which is a descriptive passage of meditation upon the excavated skeleton of someone who belonged to much earlier time.

"They had lived so long ago, their time was so unlike the present, their hopes and motives were so widely removed from ours, that between them and the living there seemed to stretch a gulf too wide even for a spirit to pass."  

1886, three years before the state I was born in became a state. So we are aware how deep into our consciousness of time, of what is past, present and future Harris is going to take us.

Harris, writing in the present, looks to the past, which looks even further past, then writes a novel of the future, which is like the past. I admit I am smitten by this.

Then, even better, but proceeding purrfectly from the Hardy quotation, his opening passages could come directly from a Hardy or George Eliot -- or even Daphne du Maurier, who like Harris here, evokes the past through describing a chronologically labeled landscape excavated by the author, matched by language, pace and rhythm. Here is the first sentence of Harris's The Second Sleep:

"Late on the afternoon of Tuesday the ninth of April in the Year of Our Risen Lord 1468, a solitary traveller was to be observed picking his way on horseback across the wild moorland of that ancient region of southwestern England known since Saxon times as Wessex...."

It's elegant, pitch perfect to Harris's subject and place within the time evoked out of the reader's present -- a reader, who, if the world is fortunate, may transmute into a reader of the future -- through one time after another, beginning with Hardy, like nested Russian tea dollsm then turning around again into the present with the reader. No longer just smitten, I'm in love.  It's been a long time since a novel's opening has done this to me.

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     . . . . I recently re-watched Ridley Scott's The Gladiator, so hungry do I get for scenic historical epics.  It would be appreciated if there would be at least one of these once a year in the theaters to look forward to.  (Though more often than not, one will likely be disappointed.)

What I really appreciated even at the time of Gladiator's original release (2000) was how the cinematography showed us how much land Celtiberia had that seemed created in mind of the Goddess for raising some of the very best horses in her world.

I also simultaneously had a fair amount of trouble believing the coincidence that Crowe-Maximus arrived at his Spanish horse breeding latifundia, just after his family was massacred, starting from a point nearly 2000 miles away.  I don't have trouble believing he could have ridden that far within what seems about 3 weeks, because historically Roman soldiers and messengers could travel very long distances, even over inhospital ground -- an on little food when called to.  In this case accomplishing such a travel feat would demand the wherewithall to constantly replace Maximus's horse.  We see no evidence that Maximus is carrying a cache of cash into the battle. He presumably isn't going the direct routes, and finding horses between Germania and Spain as often has he would need to change mounts would be iffy.  I always bump into this.

Also dogs were used by a Roman army.  I haven't run across references to this use but then I'm no scholar of Roman military history beyond quite broad strokes, unlike my much more comprehensive understanding of how slavery operated within the Roman Empire. 

However, I recalled the Gladiator  dogs when re-watching the really unfairly slagged and dumped Beowulf: Return to the Shieldlands (2016 -- available to stream on amazon prime), because there are some truly terrifying dogs used by some of the villains in this series. The Shieldlands are the buffer zone between the ever shrinking terrain of the "Mudborn" and "The Old Lands', what looks like the remains of what had been a Roman Empire -- with various objects, styles, patterns and visitors received from there. Which is how it worked for sure as we see from excavations in Nordic and Germanic lands.

Sample of the mise en scene of Beowulf: Return to the Shieldlands (2016)

BTW, for those who are fond of these not strictly historically correct productions -- anyway, Beowulf is a fiction, as, say, Roland is not -- I was better than reasonably entertained.  A mixture by Brit sensibility of the American frontier western and Dark Age Sword and Sorcery that doesn't take itself overtly seriously, it's at least as much fun, with more interesting characters and monsters than The Witcher.  Another plus is Shieldland's  mise en scene ....

Screen Time

     . . . . Did anyone watch the first episode of Sanditon last night on PBS?

The Brit reviews when it played there last year were fairly unanimous that this was dull and tedious, lacking any sizzle or wit.

I can stream it, but am reluctant without some recs from people who have seen it.

     . . . . It's shame that Hustlers and JLo got shut out of #oscarssowhitemen. Additionally, Hustlers is the Little Women for our time. Four principals, diverse in background and skin tone including J Lo as Marmee as well as Jo, they are the March sisters we all need, reflecting our Reel Amurica!

Four Sisters Who Aren't the Marches, Praise the Lord!

The Irishman was a great film.  But I honestly feel that Hustlers was its superior according to all the criteria by which we judge these matters. The exception is the screen interpretation and record of the history and culture of the USA. As historical and cultural commentary The Irishman and Hustlers are equal.

Under The Bright Surface, the Darkness of Jane Austen's Novels's Depths

    . . . .  This is a perceptive essay by a mature reader and literary scholar, 

Poor Fanny at the bridge of the ha-ha.

who sees a different Jane Austen than did her younger self, one that is far more true to the age in which they were written than the fantasies woven about them these days by so many contemporary female readers.

The author, Mikita Brottman, spends several satisfying paragraphs on Mansfield Park. Something new -- these days, her students, so sensitive to bullying and victimization, feel a deeply personal, sympathetic bond with Fanny Price, so unlike many feminist literary students of my era.

I now see Austen as a very dark writer and Mansfield Park as her darkest work, a book full of sexual repression and unconscious conflict, with no forgiveness or redemption for anyone who dares struggle against the social code. The world of taffeta and lace exists only on the surface; underneath it, these well-bred young women are trapped like rats. 

"Trapped like rats," describes how I've seen almost all the women in Austen's works.

Mary Crawford seduces plays the harp for Fanny's Edmond.

(The single exception may be the most conventional of them all, Emma. But then her cage is the most gilded of Austen's protagonists. She has the least to gain or lose --  by breaking out, with the exception of Mary Crawford, who we are to abhor for stealing Fanny's beloved. *)

At one point, she (Fanny) overhears Maria flirtatiously asking their neighbor, the handsome Henry Crawford, whether he thinks she’s as lively as her sister.

Henry’s reply is ambiguous. “You have a very smiling scene before you,” he observes.

“Do you mean literally or figuratively?” says Maria. “Literally, I conclude. Yes, certainly, the sun shines, and the park looks very cheerful. But unluckily that iron gate, that ha-ha, give me a feeling of restraint and hardship. ‘I cannot get out,’ as the starling said.”

Maria Bertram is using a reference to Lawrence Sterne's 1768 A Sentimental Journey to describe her own condition.  Who would have thought that such a superficial privileged pretty young woman could have the knowledge and the intelligence to see the similarities between herself and this incident in Sterne's novel?  Surely such perceptions are confined to darling, bookish, insignificant perfect Fanny, hmmmmm?

. . . . .To give weight to her feeling of being trapped, Maria alludes to an incident in A Sentimental Journey, Laurence Sterne’s 1768 novel. The narrator, Yorick, is visiting the Bastille, thinking that imprisonment there might not be so bad. The prison, he muses, is just a kind of tower, and is a tower really so different from a house you can’t leave? Suddenly, he hears the same words repeated twice over—“I can’t get out—I can’t get out”—and looking up, sees a starling in a little cage. He tries to free the bird, but discovers the cage is locked in such a way that you can’t open it without destroying both cage and bird. All at once, Yorick is brought back to reality. “Mechanical as the notes were, yet so true in tune to nature were they chanted, that in one moment they overthrew all my systematic reasonings …”

Like the starling, Austen’s heroines cannot get out. . . .

Nor does darling rigidly conventional Fanny object to the consequent very real imprisonment abroad of Maria as punishment for breaking out. But she has the very most to lose by breaking out -- until she does and goes home and consaequently performs a 360, proving her very conventional value to the family whose blood daughter really did break out. Fanny's happy ending is the only happy ending a female can achieve -- doing everything according to society's demands.

Neither Austen nor her readers were about to see things the way we see things these days.  And that world was a dreadful, truly dreadful prison for just about all women.

 “The greatest blessing to every one of kindred with Mrs. Rushworth,” thinks Fanny, “would be instant annihilation.”

What does this say about contemporary young readers, one wonders.  That they adore Fanny for suffering, but have no sympathy for a woman who kicked over the traces of what she was condemned to by family and society?  It's as though we have all gone backwards again as a gender, a society and a culture.

The 19th century illustrations of Austen novels, of course, have helped feed that non-reality based, nursery rhyme - fairy tale perception of subsequent generations of fanciful female readers.

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Does this not just make you sick?  Mansfield Park and Austen do not deserve this!

*   Only the deluded could really believe that the brilliant, independent Mary Crawford fell even the least little bit for that stick, Edmund.

P.S. Mansfield Park has become my favorite Austen by far.  It shows no mercy.

Pepys, Austen, Marriage and Family Webs of Wealth Aggregation Demonstrated

I remain puzzled that I hadn't previously made the connection from the self-revelations in Samuel Pepys's diaries detailing his highly profitable war profiteering in the King's service during the Dutch-English wars,

with the rise and fall in financial fortunes of Jane Austen's characters in the age of the Napoleonic wars.  It was reading The Love of Strangers  that set off that connection -- in particular the bit about the architect who is a Pepys descendant.

p.52 of Nile Green's The Love of Strangers: What Six Muslim Students Learned in Jane Austen's London (2016) --

... in 1809 an imposing town hall was completed on the High Street. . . . it was designed by the fashionable architect Samuel Pepys Cockerell (1754-1827). A surveyor to the East India Company and a descendant of the diarist Samuel Pepys, Cockerell was a leading  player in the orientalizing fashions of the period.

Sezincote House, Samuel Pepys Cockerell's most famous ediface 

Cockerell is direct proof of what it means to have an ancestor who got a place in a royal office. In Samuel Pepys's case it was the office charged with supplying the King's navy with 'victuals', hemp, lumber, sailors' slops -- and even more significantly, the office in charge of the accounts of taxes and borrowing of the funds to finance all the navy's needs.  Samuel Pepys diaries document from the beginning of his landing this place, he take sharp and quick advantages of the many opportunities to collect 'presents' [bribes] from those anxious to get on the gravy train of contracts to service the needs of King and country.

Pepys starts small.  His 'presents' are provided often as gifts of fine gloves to his wife, barrels of oysters, a silver mug.  But as his abilities, devotion to the work -- especially the keeping of the accounts -- his shrewd, assiduous politicking, buttering up those above him,  the good fortune that his social skills and company are excellent -- people generally like him* -- he gathers power and influence with more important and lucrative matters put directly into his hands.  By the 1660's he's no longer receiving appreciation of gloves and pork and dishes, but cash in larger and larger amounts. In the summer before the Great Fire, the sums are approaching 500 pounds.  This in a time when an annual income of 30 - 50 pounds allowed a London middle-class family to live comfortably.

Pepys doesn't feel secure in his new wealth and position, though he enjoys it and wields it sharply to assist his family.  In the 1666 summer the already-poor and less well-off are bearing the burden of manning and funding the badly handled Anglo-Dutch war. There's already been a long period of plague and many others have and / or are dying of famine. Every able-bodied man that can found is impressed on massive scale into the navy and army, further worsening the condition of already desperate women and children. Pepys is very frightened of a future he thinks he sees coming, particularly as the King and his slovenly, useless courtiers are perpetually broke, yet "pay no attention to business," and there's nothing with which to pay wages, finance the navy or run the war.

At times women riot about food.  They also riot in protest of not being paid the impressment money they were to have for husband and son, or their husbands' back pay, which is months and months unpaid. Mobs pour into the naval office's the inner yard. Women, obviously starving, scream at him outside his office windows.  He's also afraid Parliament, in reaction to the badly performing navy, will do him out of his position in the Navy commission. However, Pepys remains mostly happy and content, satisfied that he's acquired so much wealth that, as he and his wife discuss, they can retire to the country and buy an estate and establish themselves well if he loses his place in the naval office.

Harlestone House, Northamptonshire, which has some of the elements of Mansfield Park's Mr. Rushworth's Sotherton Estate 

This is the template for a Bingley uncle, a Mrs. Elton's brother-in-law, Mr. Weston's purchase of a 'neat little estate', Emma's personal fortune of 30,000 pounds, Mr. Rushworth, Mansfield Park's buffoon, engaged to Maria Bertram, who is so proud of his landscaping 'improvements'. Undoubtedly in the course of the creation of these picturesque landscapes he has displaced many working people and taken arable land out of cultivation.** As well, in the course of these improvements either what had been a common resource of wood and stream was either destroyed or the access to has been removed for the small farmer and poor laborer.

Additionally this re-read for the first time in decades of Raymond Williams's Farnham chapter in his The Country and the City, further pulled it together, particularly this page (110) quoting Cobbett:

[Williams] What was happening meanwhile to the landowners, and to their social structure, as rural capitalism extended? Cobbett looked very carefully at this, and made a familiar distinction between

[Cobbett] . . . a resident native gentry, attached to the soil, known to every farmer and labourer from his childhood, frequently mixing with them in those pursuits where all artificial distinctions are lost, practicing hospitality without ceremony, from habit and not on calculation; and a gentry, only now-and-then residing at all, having no relish for country-delights, foreign in their manners, distant and haughty in their behavior, looking to the soil only for its rents, viewing it as a mere object of speculation, unacquainted with its cultivators, despising them and their pursuits, and relying, for influence, not upon the good will of the vicinage [another term for geographical vicinity, neighborhood, community], but upon the dread of their power. The war and paper-system has brought in nabobs, negro-drivers, generals, admirals, governors, commissaries, contractors, pensioners, sinecurists, commissioners,  loan-jobbers, lottery-dealers, bankers, stock-jobbers, not to mention the long and black list in gowns and three-tailed wigs [i.e. the legal professionals].  You can see but few good houses not in possession of one of the other of these. These with the parsons, are now the magistrates.

[Williams] . . . . What Cobbett does not ask is where the 'invaders' came from.  Many of them, in fact were the younger sons of that same 'resident native gentry', who had gone out to these new ways of wealth, and were now coming back. Yet, 'native' or 'invade', the pressure on rents, and so through the tenant-farmer on the labourer, was visibly and dramatically increasing.  Cobbett shortens the real time-scale, but then sees what is happening as agrarian capitalism extends. . . . .

Williams goes on to connect Cobbett's journalist's vision, his reporting of the country-side, and his advocating on their behalf, to the coming changes to the novel from the 18th century to what will begin emerging in the 1830's. The 1830's are when the novel begins to be the dominant literary form as well as that of popular entertainment. However, in the meantime:

[Williams] But this change in the novel did not happen in Cobbett's time. Through his middle years Jane Austen was writing from a very different point of view, from inside the houses that Cobbett was passing on the road.  When he was writing about the disappearance of the small gentry he was riding through Hampshire, not far from Chawton.  It was also in Hampshire he made his list of the new owners of country-houses and estates, from nabobs to stock-jobbers.  We can find ourselves thinking of Jane Austen's fictional world, as he goes on to observe:

[Cobbett] The big, in order to save themselves from being 'swallowed up quick'. . . make use of their voices [the vote and their relatives and friends in Parliament and government] to get, through place, pension, or sinecure, something back from the taxes [for the wars with Napoleon, including paying Russian and others not to ally with Emperor.]  Others of them fall in love with the daughters and widows of paper-money people, big brewers, and the like; sometimes their daughters fall in love with the paper-money people's sons, or the fathers of those sons . . . . But the small gentry have no resource.

Nor do the wage labourers and agriculture labourers have the privilege of the vote, friends and relatives in places of influence or any other resource to pressure those who are oppressing them.  So they starve at the sides of the roads running past these great estates.

How thoroughly Austen's novels expose the historic political and economic purpose of marriage as survival and increase or loss of influence and wealth!

The more complete our understanding of that world broadens of which she forged her fictions the better we understand how the same factors of wealth, power, influence and politics are in play in our own times.*** 

Which is one of the aspects that make great works of art endure, yes?

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* On the other hand. the more time I spend with Pepys, the less charming he becomes.  It's not even his profiteering and infidelity -- it's his sexual abuse in particular that spoils his authentic family loyalty, his joy in music and the arts in general, his curiosity to learn as much about everything in the scientific and technological realms, his genuine hard work and general honesty with the King's property.  The turning point came during one of those riots of starving London women needing their husbands' back pay -- they are all gotten away through force of arms.  However, the prettiest one, he holds back and brings into his office.  He gives her money, dismisses her, and swiftly follows in a his coach, picks her up and takes her where they can eff.  He does this with other desperate women too, exchanging assistance for sex.  He even does so with his wife's maid while his wife is in the house. Nor, of course by the rules of the time's engagement for prosperous men, can she object. This doesn't occur to him.

He lecherously speculates about every black' woman he encounters, no matter how virtuous, just assuming she would be willing to accomodate his sexual curiosity, if the opportunity should arise. (Evidently no opportunity to prove him right or false arises.)  He's also an awful hypocrite, preying sexually on every woman who he can buy or persuade, but furiously anxious that some man will have designs on his wife.

** The very kind of opportunities for creating family webs of generationally aggregating wealth and influence deliberately denied to antebellum slaves by the conditions of the slave-breeding economy and slave selling economy. The bottom line of both depended first upon the perpetual, systematic shredding of the African American family. African Americans have not yet been able to catch up, thanks to the legally embedded racial system of ongoing oppression and repression and various sorts of exploitation that still, as a class, plunders their wealth the economic benefit of others.

*** The most desirable marriagable women seeking the best prospects don't have debut balls or Almack's (though they may, and some do, and these balls are becoming more common again), but compete to get into Harvard and go to ski resorts in Vail on vacation. See current studies that documentexogamic marriage has become increasingly rare, in terms of changing class, with the rise of private education in the pre-unversity years and the soaring costs of both. More than ever, for those already in the families of wealth and influence, practice endogamy. For awhile, in the first half of the 20th century this had changed with the massive influx of young women of all classes and background working in business offices of companies and institutions, where often romance blossomed with a young man with prospect or already established.  U.S. movie romcoms particularly glorified this, in the 30's 40's and 50's.

Which makes the reader understand that in terms of the country and city, Jane Bennett and Elizabeth Bennett would never have been able to meet Bingley and Darcy unless they showed up in their less populated (i.e no wealthy rivals) and less formal vicinage.  In other words, it would be highly unlikely their paths would have crossed in London -- and the competition by more prosperous and better connected women to secure their attentions would have been fierce.

Even more unlikely it would be that Elizabeth might have encountered Darcy in the more relaxed sociability of Bath, as who can imagine Darcy in Bath?

"Three Around Farnham" - Reading Wednesday

    A discussion in the UK Guardian got me to dig out my well-thumbed, well-scribbled in copy of a cultural-economic study of English literature, which I haven't looked at in a long time.

"Three Around Farnham" is the title Raymond Williams gave the 11th chapter of his classic The Country and the City (1973), a survey the changing attitudes toward country and city in English Literature.

Parson Gilbert White

   The "Three Around Farnham" are writers who lived within the same 30 mile radius around Farnham: Gilbert White (1720-1793). Jane Austen (1775-1817) and William Cobbett (1763 - 1835). What each sees -- and equally significant do not see -- in their shared countryside are vastly different. Williams does a comparison and contrast of these three's vision of the country and its relationship to the city in their time in order to describe the price extracted from the laboring classes.

William Cobbett

  The very food that has been plundered from the laborers, by enclosure of public lands and plunging wages has gone to prop up the prosperity of the higher classes during the consolidation of England's Industrial Revolution and colonialism (slavery)-- and decades of nearly perpetual war and the extortionate taxes in money and kind put upon the poor. However, the laboring, voteless, thus non-represented classes, get nothing back from these extortions of land and cash taxation.  Their betters, however, with a vote and members in Parliament get in return other sources of income from government, the army and navy, the church, the law and opportunities for doing business between all these institutions and the colonies.

  Read Cobbett's Rural Rides (1830) and look in vain for the country walks of Pride and Prejudice (1813).

   However, the other two knew White's book well, and must have recognized some of what he saw -- White was was a pioneer naturalist / ornithologist. Parson White's The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne,* or just The Natural History of Selborne (1789).

Cobbett's Rides

While White remains at least a sidebar in most English literature studies that cover the 18th and early 19th century writers now, it was different in the days of Austen and Cobbett.. Austen was a precocious fourteen and living 17 miles away in Steventon the year's White's book was published. Her brother wrote a poem about the book.  On August 31st 1811, when Jane was 36, she dined with White's niece (Rebecca Parker Terry) at Hill House in Alton.

Cobbett, the pioneering social and economic critic of the conditions imposed upon the rural laborer by those who live in the many lovely homes that populate this 30 mile radius around Farnham, refers to White's book in his spoken and written opinions, as can be seen here.

One of Williams's conclusion as to what this means to English literature is expressed by his description of Austen's keen powers of observation, put down in writing within the houses set off from the roads Cobbett rode, observing right on the verge of these same roads that run far off from those houses, the hovels in which the poor attempted to survive rain and cold.

Nevertheless, Williams finds embedded in the familiar texts of her novels, all these social changes, and how the families of all her communities are rising, maintaining, or, as with several figures, as is clearly described in Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion, falling.  Those whose fall is staved off, are those whose younger sons find other economic security away from the entailed estates, often in the Church (much like Gilbert White himself), and even the great estates themselves such as Darcy's -- are sustained by other means than the land itself, whether from plantations in the West Indies as with Mansfield Park, or as hand wavium explained in Emma, whose fortune of 30,000 pounds comes "from other sources,"** not her father's small estate itself.

I'd argue further. while Austen tends to be assumed to be always looking inward, and at personal relationships, the relationships themselves are created even, by the social changes that are coming with this consolidation of the Industrial Revolution and imperial power.

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* Can be found on Gutenberg, here.

**   So somewhere -- and not so long ago in reality -- lands granted by Henry's VIII team in the Dissolution,  a fortune gained from piracy and privateering in Elizabeth's time, or lands achieved during the Commonwealth, or, closer to Emma's era, from manufacture, slavery, or other not so respectable means that about which surely Emma, Tory snob of snobs, would prefer us not to speculate.

'Tis the Dark Season - Short Days and Long Nights - Reading Wednesday

The lovely time of year, the crawl up to the winter solstice, is here, days of light filtered as through a martini, night dark and sweet as deep piled blue velvet.  We want our pleasure reading to enhance the alternating chill and coziness. The high Middle Ages and the Plantagenets fill this seasonal bill so well, since so many of our anglo Christmas and Yule traditions are associated the periods of their reigns. Here follow some suggestions.

Thus we may begin in the 13th century with Four Queens: The Provencal Sisters Who Ruled Europe  (2007) by Nancy Goldstone.  The four sisters in question are Marguerite (married to the King of France), Eleanor (married to the King of England), Sanchia (married to the King of Germany), and Beatrice (married to the eventual King of Sicily). Born and raised in Provence, these sisters played a large role in European politics for most of the 13th century.  These four sisters were as unequal in the power to influence politics as they were in the happiness of their marriages. There was much sisterly jealousy, jostling for first position in the great public feasts of the day, and therefore, some very public temper tantrums, and less public plotting against each other.

We continue with The Greatest Knight: The Remarkable Life of William Marshal, the Power Behind Five English Thrones (2014) by Thomas Asbridge.

William the Marshall was known throughout Europe as the greatest warrior of his time. But despite having served five different kings in close and trusted capacity, much of his life was difficult, not to mention dangerous.  Shoot, without even factoring in wars and battles, being close to rulers is dangerous in itself.  He  ascended to acting regent for the young Henry III (cr. 1216 - d.1272), son of the catastrophe that was King John, by the close of his long, remarkable life.

It was in the reign of Henry III that the "Tales of Robin Hood" began to circulate, due to Henry III's grasping nature and general incompetency (yet, considering he kept his throne all those years, he must have known how to do something right).  He it was who expelled the Jews from England, which, as the consequence, as we have seen elsewhere and in other eras, made the country poorer.  Much of what he grasped went into the beautification of his many homes and sumptuous living.

Henry III was father to Edward I, Hammer of the Scots.

Certainly the word pictures of the luxuries to be found in the castles of the Romances so popular in these times were what Edward I grew up among in the homes of his father, and his mother, Eleanor of Provence (this is one of the sisters of Four Queens).  Eating on gold and silver, drinking the finest wines and wearing the finest silks was matter of course.

A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (2008) by Marc Morris tells the long tale of Longshanks, as this Edward was also known because his legs were long, was long-lived -- 1239 - 1307, and had a long reign -- 1272 - 1307. However that Scots business and Wallace were right at the very end of his reign.

After Longshank's own death, another generation of luxurious Christmas living in the reign of his son, Edward II, is celebrated in that wonderful Christmas poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Richard's reign had problems but it was certainly a period of high literary achievement. Other excellent associated reading for the season is Geoffrey Chaucer's Romaunt of the Rose, and The Book of the Duchess, dedicated to the deceased Blanche of Lancaster, wife of the First Duke of Lancaster,l John of Gaunt, (1340- 1399. Lancaster was uncle to King Richard II.  Lancaster eventually made his mistress, Katherine Swynford, his third wife. Katherine's sister, Philippa, was married to Geoffrey Chaucer and had served the Duchess Blanche.  Further, Katherine, with the Duke of Lancaster, became an ancestor of Princess Diana Spencer as well as to members of all the dynasties that followed the end of that of the Plantagenets.

By now we're heading out of the medieval era into the modern the world, the 1400's, which will bring us the Age of Exploration and the collision of Europe with North and South America.  However, in Spain, the light of the Renaissance and the modern had not yet dawned.  It was pretty darned dark there in the mountain hideway where Isabella's mother secreted herself and her children from the murderous intentions of her husband the King.

The story of Isabella: The Warrior Queen (2014) by Kirstin Downey, who funded Christopher Columbus, makes a solid bookend to stories of the Plantagenets -- which are deeply entwined with that of the Iberian Peninsula during the preceding century via marriage, including that of Duke of Lancanster to his second wife, Constance, a Spanish infanta.  (Alas, this marriage never led to Lancaster crowned King of Spain, as he'd hoped.)

Isabella, who was the driving force to the union of Spain and driving out the Moors, is as exciting* as the Cantar de Mio Cid, and one essentially unknown to English-only reading readers.  For this reason alone I'd be grateful to Downey for writing this book.  It fills in much about British and French history in the 13th and 14th centuries as well, because the author carefully fills us in on Isabella's immediate family. Her survival in earlier years was as precarious as any princess's or prince'd in the family of the Delhi Moghul rulers of a somewhat later era.  Spain was a literally cutthroat political situation -- but then no more so that that of England, which all these works show in great and fascinating detail.

The greatest difficulty faced in reading these books is that everyone -- except for Blanche and Constance -- have the same names, over and over, generation after generation.  Especially Eleanor.  And I didn't even include a book specifically about her!  But then, she's 11th and 12th centuries.

However, her life certainly influenced many of the Arthurian Romances, particularly via the popularity of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, which remained equally popular in the time of Henry III and Edward I.

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*   This is not to be taken as an endorsement for what the Isabella and Ferdinand did, expelling both the Moors and the Jews. See, above, that Spain wasn't feelin' the Renaissance, or at least not in the way other parts of Europe did.  They definitely felt the invade and conquer part.

Even in Edward I's time, the English court made as much fun of the clothes and customs of his Spanish bride, Eleanor of Castile (she put carpets on the stone floors!) as it reputedly did about Henry VIII's Spanish Catherine of Aragon -- though that seems to be rather exaggerated or perhaps even pure invention of fiction and drama writers -- and Charles II's Portuguese bride -- she who brought him the profits of several trading cities of western India. Not that even that was enough to fill Charlie's constantly empty coffers and privy purse and to satisfy the ever demanding paws of his favorites and consorts.  For that he had to resort to slave trading. And selling his wife's personal jewels and furniture.

Reading Wednesday - The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects

The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects (2015) W.W. Norton

English professor Deborah Lutz applies contextual historical material culture to illuminate the lives and works of the Brontës via, as the title so speaks, nine material objects that have survived since their deaths.

The chapter titled "Death Made Material" centers the amethyst bracelet that features on the book's jacket, worn by Charlotte, made from "the entwined hair of Emily and Anne."  The bracelet was made most probably by a professional "hairworker," a profession that employed thousands in 1830's and 40's Britain.

Mourning jewelry as part of the grieving process was only part of what hairworkers provided, but objects incorporating a beloved dead person's hair was the largest part of the profession.

Manuals for how people could and prepare the hair in their own homes and incorporate it into other objects, such as keepsake portraits of the dearly departed, drawn landscapes and tableaus incorporating graveyards and other melancholy signatures were available and popular.

As would be the case with this sad though very talented family, much of The Brontë Cabinet deals with illness, death, grief and mourning. However it also retrieves the economic and social constructs around the matters of women who write professionally, household pets and genteel women's letter writing -- which latter brings us to the development and history of mail, the penny post, Valentines and other matters.

The author, not needing to, doesn't mention that as much as hairworkers, letter writing and the post office are dead letters now.  That, though not expressed, says more about how distant in time now the Brontës are, than anything else.  Yet their work endures, and we remain as fascinated by anything that had physical contact with this family as the celebrity seekers in their own time, As the author does point out this determination to own something of figures that impact their fans is as old as saints' relics and this is anything but a dead matter.

Often, as with many Brontë collections the relics need not even be authentic. What matters is what the possessor believes s/he possesses.

The Life of Shakespeare - Historical Drama Mini-series

The Life of Shakespeare 6-part series was shown on ITV in 1978.  It was scripted by John Mortimer (he who is responsible for Rumpole of the Bailey and many other things).

 Shakespeare is played by Tim Curry while Ian McShane plays Kit Marlowe. The period London's influential gay population is given parity in this series.  I've only watched some of it so far, but am enjoying it a great deal.  It's lively and energetic.  The costumes are splendid as is appropriate for a series that sets so many scenes within the theater with the costume makers forever chasing Richard Burbage and other famous board treaders about for fittings.  The more the watcher knows about this era of England politics, both power and literary, the more the watcher will enjoy.

The discs were obtained from netflix.  The color values are a lot higher than on many dvds from this era of English television, though it doesn't play full screen.

 The vitality of the period, the place, the London theater. the man and his cohorts are fundamental to this series, and a fine way to observe the splendid fact that my broken elbow is healing well and I feel so much better -- and energetic myself.

McCrumb's Top 100 Novels Written In English - No. 14, Vanity Fair

William Thackeray's Vanity Fair (serialized in Punch, 1847 -1848), takes its title from the first work McCrum discusses in his Observer series, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress.  This delighted me, from the moment I learned of this novel's existence; the delight consisting in my knowledge that I knew this -- having already learned about The Pilgrim's Progress from both Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and history of literature sections in the volumes of The Book of Knowledge, part of a whole bookcase of series that included an encyclopedia, one on science and another on the geography and cultures of the world.

Just when I learned there was a novel titled Vanity Fair, or learned of William Thackeray for that matter, these things I cannot recall, as it was too long ago and too far away. I came of reading age in era and a place where the classic masterpieces of English and American literature, and especially the novels, were part of the educational air we breathed.  That is, they were part of that air if one were a bookish, imaginative child; for other sorts, awareness of book titles and authors was surely as negligible an interest as in any other time and other place.

Beyond The Book of Knowledge volumes, another principle reason for this childhood familiarity of authors and titles was that by this time of the post-modern and the American century, our English language masterpieces, had been relegated to publishers' Classics imprints, as the money now was in Saul Bellow & Co. Classics were classified as juvenile literature,* i.e. books that all children should know by the time they graduated from high school, so the books were on our school libraries' shelves -- particularly in the place I grew up, as we were so removed from the mainstream of contemporary, suburban American culture.  Even the game Authors, marketed to children, reflected that. So this is likely where I first learned of Thackeray and Vanity Fair; there was suite for Thackeray in our Authors game.

Novels had only (relatively) recently joined academic curricula in England and the U.S. as a fit subject of scholarly study;  And American fiction had been added even later than that.

When I got to high school age, my education in the classics and now in the moderns proceeded apace. I was so fortunate in having as my high school teacher a young fellow (though he looked old to me then) who was pursuing lit studies in grad school while teaching us.  He shared everything he studied with me, and loaned me so many books.  Among them, I'll never forget, was Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim.  The first time I read it, the reading was mostly conducted sprawled upon the couch of one of my grandmothers.  I kept roaring with laughter.  My grandmother would ask me, reasonably enough, to share with her what was so funny.  I'd read out the passage and she, reasonably enough considering the circumstances, couldn't understand what it was about, much less why it was funny. This, of course, I am now ashamed to acknowledge, made me feel smug and smart. I was so stupid in those days. * *

In conclusion, do read the comments to this entry; they are for the most part an actual discussion not snark snerk sneer smirk by people who don't have anything informed or even quirky to add.  It's particularly so in the discussion of Austen's Emma (1815), which McCrumb puts into his No. 7 slot of best 100 novels in English.  This commentator's remark are particularly useful, as we all continue to grapple with how does Emma remain in our affections when she's such a bitch and snob?

• The lead up to the Cole's dinner party is one of my favorite passages in fiction; a fabulous and funny study in self-deception.
  However it is also important because it shows clearly what a lot of people do not like to accept (perhaps influenced by the "Paltrowisation" of Emma), what a little bitch she is.
  The Coles are coming up in the world but their origins are in trade:
  
  

  The regular and best families Emma could hardly suppose they would presume to invite-- neither Donwell, nor Hartfield, nor Randalls. Nothing should tempt her to go, if they did; and she regretted that her father's known habits would be giving her refusal less meaning than she could wish. The Coles were very respectable in their way, but they ought to be taught that it was not for them to arrange the terms on which the superior families would visit them.

  This last bit is important. Emma doesn't just not want to go to the party, she wants her refusal of a hypothetical invitation (which in the first part of that passage she has decided is too presumptuous to occur) to be understood to be a slap that puts them in their place. It is truly horrible behaviour.
  It is also intellectually dishonest. Emma claims that she thinks that they will hardly presume to invite the best families. But she doesn't really think this because she knows fine well that there is only one person silly and snobbish enough to refuse in Highbury. Because in the next line:
  

  This lesson, she very much feared, they would receive only from herself; she had little hope of Mr. Knightley, none of Mr. Weston.

  So she is perfectly well aware that the other most "respectable" people, including the major landowner Mr Knightley, are not going to help her slap the Cole's down.
  Time passes and her invitation doesn't arrive. According to the forgoing she ought to be pleased by this. The Cole's have not presumed to invite the superior Miss Woodhouse. But of course she is not. She is a bit put out, in fact.
  

  Donwell and Randalls had received their invitation, and none had come for her father and herself; and Mrs. Weston's accounting for it with "I suppose they will not take the liberty with you; they know you do not dine out," was not quite sufficient. She felt that she should like to have had the power of refusal;

  Not so much now as to slap the Coles down but because:
  

  the idea of the party to be assembled there, consisting precisely of those whose society was dearest to her, occurred again and again, she did not know that she might not have been tempted to accept.

  The bare possibility of it acted as a farther irritation on her spirits; and her being left in solitary grandeur, even supposing the omission to be intended as a compliment, was but poor comfort

  So now she is starting to be put out about not getting the invitation that she was put up about the idea of having originally.
  Finally the invitation arrives.
  

  
  It was the arrival of this very invitation while the Westons were at Hartfield, which made their presence so acceptable; for though her first remark, on reading it, was that "of course it must be declined," she so very soon proceeded to ask them what they advised her to do, that their advice for her going was most prompt and successful.

  So she goes, and she has a good time. But the evolution of her ideas about this are a truly brilliant evocation about the way we delude ourselves, and also shows us why Austen thought she is " a heroine whom no one but myself will much like."
  For much of the novel, she is not just a snob but a rather nasty snob capable of looking forward to publicly snubbing people who have done absolutely nothing to her. Without Austen's mastery of free indirect narration it is hard to imagine that anyone would like her. But that mastery is such that the real unpleasantness of Emma's snobbery is largely masked.

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As this process was completed,  Leslie Fielder noticed.  He provided an excellent discussion of the why of turning our great books into children's literature in his then ground-breaking work,  Love and Death in the American Novel (1960). This work of Fielder's remains an excellent starting place for education into the American novel. Though Fiedler's work fell out of favor in the last decades of the 20th century, there appears to be come-back, judging by citations and indices in studies of American social, media and literary history. This fall in Fielder's status coincided with academia's devaluing the hmanities generally and the rise in identity studies.  Among Fiedler's other interests, still de-classé in his time in academic circles, were Science Fiction,  film and television, particularly the western --

Richard Slotkin's trilogy defining the mythology of the Old West, particularly in the movies, refers frequently to Fielder.

* *  For that matter, as I potter along, I look back at even the most recent phrases of my life and am astounded at how stupid I was.  Alas, it seems this pilgrim's progress is doomed to stasis.