Month: September 2020

The History of England – Jane Austen

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Although entitled The History of England this actually makes up quite a small proportion of this book which includes two pieces from Juvenilia, the other being Lesley Castle, both works were written when Austen was sixteen and show a remarkable talent even at such a young age. Jane Austen is not known for her comedic writing but both of these short works are very funny in completely different ways. This book was published as part of a set to mark fifty years of Penguin Classics in 1995.

The History of England

Subtitled “From the reign of Henry the 4th to the death of Charles the 1st, by a Partial, Prejudiced and Ignorant Historian” this certainly lives up to the initial billing. Jane’s prejudices are specifically pro Yorkist and later pro Stuart and hence very anti Lancastrian and Tudor. This means that Henry VI, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I come out of this rather badly whilst Richard III unusually for the time gets a rather reasonable write up solely due to him being from the House of York. It is best to give some idea of the style of Jane’s writing by quoting a section and I have chosen the opening paragraph on Henry VIII.

It would be an affront to my Readers were I to suppose that they were not as well acquainted with the particulars of this King’s reign as I am myself. It will therefore be saving them the task of reading again what they have read before, & myself the trouble of writing what I do not perfectly recollect, by giving only a slight sketch of the principal Events which marked his reign.

The complete disinterest in dates reminds me of the much later work by R J Yeatman and W C Sellar 1066 and all that, and I can’t help but wonder if they had come across the young Jane Austen’s effort before they wrote their larger but also funny summary of English history. The pictures used on the cover of this slim volume are the ones drawn by Jane’s sister Cassandra for the original manuscript of The History of England.

Lesley Castle

This much longer work is the start of an unfinished novel written in the form of letters between five ladies. There are ten letters and a short enclosed note in all in what was completed and I can only wish that she had written more as she has assembled such a disparate cast of characters that the interaction between them has so many possibilities. That there is also a wonderful bitchiness about the letters just adds to the amusement, I’d love to see it performed with each character reading out the letter as they wrote it with maybe the recipient reacting as though just reading it.

In such a short work we have Charlotte Lutterell being far more concerned with the potential waste of food that has been prepared for the wedding banquet of her sister. That the fact that the match is off because her sister’s fiancee has fallen off his horse and broken his neck is seen by her as a minor inconvenience, she also cannot understand why her concern over how they will eat all the food already prepared is not shared by her sister and the suggestion that at least some of it could be used for the funeral, whilst a practical suggestion, is not seen favourably by her. Her correspondence with Margaret Lesley, one of the two unmarried sisters living in the titular Lesley Castle also covers the surprise wedding of their widowed father and the subsequent difficult relationship between the girls and their new stepmother.

Margaret is apparently also incapable of regarding anybody else’s feelings as the extract below from the final letter between her and Charlotte when Margaret finally comes down to London from Lesley Castle which is up in Scotland.

In short, my Dear Charlotte, it is my sensibility for the sufferings of so many amiable Young Men, my Dislike of the extreme Admiration I meet with, and my Aversion to being so celebrated both in Public, in Private, in Papers, & in Printshops, that are the reasons why I cannot more fully enjoy the Amusements, so various and pleasing, of London. How often have I wished that I possessed as little personal Beauty as you do; that my figure were as inelegant; my face as unlovely; and my Appearance as unpleasing as yours! But ah! what little chance is there of so desirable an Event;

If asked to sum up Jane Austen’s well known novels in one word ‘humorous’ would be very low down on the list of possibilities, but these short works show that, at least as a teenager, she was possessed of a sharp and dark wit.

Longhand – Andy Hamilton

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Andy Hamilton is best known as a comedy script writer and actor for TV and radio and his shows have been a constant favourite of mine since he started in the 1970’s especially the BBC Radio 4 long running series Old Harry’s Game which he writes and stars in as Satan. Not a particularly obvious subject for humour but as always with Hamilton he finds a new way of looking at the character and that is what imbues him with comedy. In this book, his second novel, he takes another mythological character and brings him to life in a surprising way telling his story and allowing him to debunk a lot of the myth around him.

We first meet our hero, for hero he is even if he doesn’t like it and for reasons that swiftly become clear he shuns publicity as much as he can, frantically writing a very long letter to the woman he loves because he has to leave her and for the first time in thousands of years feels that he has to tell her why. As you can see below the joy of the book is that we get the letter, the whole book, all 349 pages of it, is handwritten, with crossings out and edits just as Malcolm would have written it.

The reader finds out almost immediately that Malcolm is actually Heracles and has lived for thousands of years always having to move on as firstly he never ages so starts to look odd to people who know him for a long time but secondly, and as it turns out more importantly, Zeus is determined he will never be happy and has tormented him throughout the millennia. The letter he writes to his darling Bess over a period of three days is funny yet also tragic; it is without doubt a love letter but also a confession and Hamilton handles the emotional roller coaster perfectly. I found myself reading late into the night as I simply didn’t want to stop finding out more about Malcolm and Bess and the ways that he tries to disguise his enormous strength and immortality from all those around them.

I have read many versions of the Greek myths so knew Heracles’s story but it isn’t necessary to know any of that before reading this book, Hamilton takes us right through the tales mainly so Malcolm can explain why they are so wrong and what really happened. It’s a brilliant idea and, to me at least, a completely original approach to mythological story telling, Malcolm is so ordinary because he has to be but his back story is one of wanton destruction and tragedy, he so despises that aspect of his early life and just wants to be ‘normal’. With Bess he has found that normality he craves but as the letter explains he is being forced to abandon the happiness he now has and at a truly awful point in time.

By the end of the book you are totally invested in the tragic love story of Malcolm and Bess, a tale that fit right in with the classical Greek mythology that Hamilton has mined for his characters’ source. We never hear from Bess in the whole book, other characters are reported verbatim but Bess is always heard through the medium of Malcolm’s letter as he explains what had just happened in the hope that she will forgive him. Fortunately we know right from the beginning that she does and that she still loves him as there is one other letter included right at the front and that is typewritten ostensibly from a firm of solicitors to the publisher. I read this first as that is where it is placed but rereading it after finishing Malcolm’s letter you understand it better.

The book is published by Unbound, a crowd funded publishing house, and I subscribed to it before Andy Hamilton even started to write, based partly on the pitch that he made on the site but also as a fan of his work over many decades I knew that he would produce something well worth reading and he has certainly delivered. As a subscriber I received a signed copy on publication and my name is in the list of around five hundred people who supported the work through to publication.

Their Darkest Materials – Penelope Hemingway

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20200908 Their Darkest Materials

With a title clearly inspired by the ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy by Philip Pullman this book heads off in a completely different direction with a theme of death and destitution in the world of knitting and spinning (with a little bit of sewing thrown in). I use the word thrown advisably because although like the proverbial Curate’s Egg it is good in parts, it just feels like a lot of research notes have just been thrown into a mix and the book came out the other side.

The first few chapters are particularly random with a list of press cuttings and court reports where the person who died was either knitting at the time, had knitting about their person when they died or was knitting before they were executed. However as the book later makes clear the poor in the 17th and 18th centuries would normally have some knitting or possibly sewing on the go as it was portable and could be done in times when their normal work was not needing them and could in that way bring in some much needed extra income. The second chapter looks at knitting and spinning in fairy tales with a large section on the folk tale of Rumpelstiltskin but this topic is never referred to again and comes in between chapters one and three which really belong together.

After a while Hemingway gets into her stride and what is actually quite an interesting book emerges as she goes on to explore exploitation in workhouses, mills and something I had not come across before knitting and spinning schools. If Hemingway had expanded her research and written a book about these subjects, which she almost did, then we would have a fascinating work. I loved learning about the knitting and spinning schools of the north east of England and Wales where poor children could get a simple education and learn a trade whilst producing goods for sale which paid for school. In the best of them the children even earned a wage which would help keep the rest of their family from destitution.

The sections on the dark satanic mills as described by William Blake, whilst covering more familiar ground also added much that was new to me. Extracts from wage books show just how desperate things were with families barely able to keep their heads above water even with everyone from the youngest child to the oldest grandparent bringing in as much as they could by working all hours possible. This was well before unions and universal suffrage so the poor had no say in their lives and the mill owners, who could as property owners vote, made sure that laws to improve the lives of their workers struggled to get passed. It took years to get the ten hour limit applied to a workers day and even then it could be avoided by getting the work done at home rather than at a mill when the people were on piecework so paid by output not the time they took to get there.

There is also a chapter on the introduction of artificial dyes which spends most of its time covering the incarceration in an asylum of the wife of one of the pioneers. This sad tale was definitely new to me but it means that the chapter is far too short to tell the story of this revolution in colour which is wonderfully covered in Simon Garfield’s book Mauve, which I really must reread and review in this blog, instead we get a brief overview of the chemists work, which only fits in with the darkest materials theme because it focuses on the story of Mary Dawson.

The real problem with the book is the obvious lack of proof reading, the work is littered with spelling and typographical errors. Most of the spelling mistakes are missing letters in words whilst there are also a lot of words run together with the space between them omitted and numerous examples where sentences suddenly move to the next line part way across the page. There is also a lot of repetition so stories are told again a few chapters later or in one particularly bad example a paragraph is repeated directly after itself.

20200908 Their Darkest Materials 2

It’s a pity that editing wasn’t done properly as there is definitely an interesting book in there but the sloppy way that it has been put together lets it down. It is clearly self published as the publisher is given at the start of the book as ‘At the Sign of the Pretty Baa Lamb Press’. Unfortunately if you follow the website link also given there then you find that the publisher is given as ‘Pretty Baa Lambs Press’, Lamb or Lambs doesn’t really matter but it is an indication of the lack of attention to accuracy in this publication which screams out for a decent editor.

Folio Society Poetry Miniatures

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20200915 Folio Miniature Poetry

Starting in 1991 the Folio Society introduced a short series of miniature books of poetry. This was back in the day when the society operated as membership scheme and to retain your membership you had to buy four books a year, you would also receive a free book each year you renewed your membership which was that years presentation volume. As an extra incentive to buy all your books in one go at the start of the membership year they would sometimes have an extra gift which was often available to buy in the annual collection and would only be on offer for free for a month or so; these books were that extra offer in the 1990’s. Obviously it made sense to get as much income as possible early on as the costs of publishing had been incurred and for cash flow reasons you need to offset that cost as quickly as possible as soon as a collection was announced so these books were an extra incentive to get that order in early. The books are bound in moire silk on boards and illustrated with wood engravings by various artists, they are roughly the same size although they vary slightly and they also all have gold coloured card slipcases.

1991 The Lady of Shalott – Alfred Lord Tennyson

20200915 Folio Miniature Poetry 1

This edition simply consists of one of Tennyson’s best known poems beautifully printed with five wood engravings by Howard Phipps.The poem is a retelling of one of the Arthurian legends about the Lady of Shalott who whilst imprisoned in a tower up river from Camelot is cursed never to look out of the window. Unfortunately she sees Sir Lancelot in the reflection of a mirror and is drawn to the window to see him better. Leaving the tower the curse befalls her and she dies in a boat heading to Camelot. The version used is the 1842 revision which makes it less clear than the original 1833 version that she knew she would die if she left the tower and therefore was effectively committing suicide by doing so as this was very much against Victorian morality.

The book was reprinted in 1993, with this volume being the only one to have a second edition apart from the final book in the series.

Printed by The Bath Press and bound by Hunter and Foulis – Size 116 x 83 x 8mm, typeface 9 point Monotype Ehrhardt

1992 The Pied Piper of Hamelin – Robert Browning

20200915 Folio Miniature Poetry 2

I must admit that until I owned this book I hadn’t realised that Browning wrote a version of the Pied Piper story, it had completely passed me by, in common with the rest of the series of books it is illustrated with lovely wood engravings, this time six of them by John Lawrence. For the most part the poem covers the most common version of the story although here the piper leads the children away immediately after he is cheated out of his payment for removing the rats and the townspeople are magically immobile so cannot prevent him doing so rather than returning later as I had read in an alternate telling. It also has a ending where instead of the children being led into the magical cave and never being seen again they do reappear but in Transylvania rather than Germany.

Printed by The Bath Press and bound by Hunter and Foulis – Size 116 x 85 x 7mm, typeface 9 point Monotype Blado

1993 The Garden & Other Poems – Andrew Marvell

20200915 Folio Miniature Poetry 3

Andrew Marvell is the earliest of the featured poets in these little books as he was writing from the mid 1630’s onward and was a friend of John Milton. Along with ‘The Garden’ there are seven other poems, ‘The Picture of little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers’, ‘The Mower Against Gardens’, ‘Damon the Mower’, ‘The Mower to the Glow-worms’, ‘The Mower’s Song’, ‘The Garden of Appleton House’ and probably his most famous work ‘To His Coy Mistress’, these are accompanied by nine wood engravings by Harry Brockway. The four Mower poems comprise a set covering the four seasons in a meadow and the man who works it, the first is dismissive of gardens planted by man in imitation of nature when all around him in his meadows there is beauty. ‘To His Coy Mistress’ doesn’t really fit in with the other works but due to its fame I can see why it was included at the end.

Printed by The Bath Press and bound by Hunter and Foulis – Size 115 x 85 x 7mm, typeface 9 point Monotype Fourmer

1994 Sir Patrick Spens & Other Ballads

20200915 Folio Miniature Poetry 4

We are going back even further than Marvell in this collection of four old Scottish ballads illustrated with five wood engravings by Jane Lydbury but in this case no authors are known and there are multiple variants known of each of them. The versions chosen appear to be from the anthology by Francis James Child first published in 1860 but this isn’t confirmed in the book as no source is given for any of them. Apart from ‘Sir Patrick Spens’, there is ‘The Battle of Otterbourne’, ‘The Demon Lover’ and ‘Waly, Waly’, the final page consists of a useful glossary of the Scots dialect words used. As befits ballads these are best appreciated spoken out loud and I found myself doing just that whilst reading the book. If it wasn’t for the 1995 offering this would probably be my favourite book in the series.

Printed and bound by Mandarin Offset – Size 117 x 86 x 8mm, typeface 9 point Monotype Joanna

1995 The Raven – Edgar Allan Poe

20200915 Folio Miniature Poetry 5

My personal favourite of these short works is this one and it is of course bound in black to honour The Raven and contains seven wood engravings by George Tute. I fell in love with this poem many decades ago, the rhythm of the words as you read them, again like the book of ballads this is best done out loud, drew me in at an early age and I visited the one surviving home of his in Philadelphia in the mid 1980’s when it was basically just an empty property. It still has no furniture in it but from the website it appears to have more going on there than thirty five years ago. The place being empty made me think of The Raven for some reason as you could imagine a man alone in the rooms at midnight being visited by that dark and terrible bird with it’s single word vocabulary that struck terror into the night.

Quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermore’

Printed and bound by Mandarin Offset – Size 117 x 85 x 7mm, typeface 10 point Monotype Bulmer

1996 Fifty Folio Epigrams – edited by Sue Bradbury

20200915 Folio Miniature Poetry 6

A distinct oddity in a series of poetry books, quite a few of the epigrams are taken from larger works but some, like the example by Max Beerbohm shown above are simply pithy quotes, the number of illustrations has also shot up from the earlier books and there are now eighteen wood engravings by Peter Forster. The collection is edited by Sue Bradbury who was Editorial Director at The Folio Society for many years and varies from Confucius to Dorothy Parker via Sophocles and W.C. Fields amongst many others. The Shakespeare quote by the way is from Richard II, Act 4, Scene 1.

Printed by BAS Printers and bound by Hunter and Foulis – Size 117 x 86 x 7mm, typeface 10 point Monotype Baskerville

1997 Fifty Folio Love Poems – edited by Sue Bradbury

20200915 Folio Miniature Poetry 7

This collection is also edited by Sue Bradbury and none of the selections are longer than a page, along with them are thirty two wood engravings by Simon Brett, one of which is repeated. The selection must have been popular because it became the only the second of these little volumes to be reprinted, in this case in 1997. Shakespeare and The Bible are of course included along with that particularly prolific author Anon. I was particularly pleased to find in Budapest a statute to Anonymous in recognition of his or her massive contribution to literature. Some are deep and passionate but there are also funny ones to offset the seriousness.

Printed by The Burlington Press and bound by Hunter and Foulis – Size 116 x 84 x 8mm, typeface 11 point Monotype Van Dijck italic

The bibliographic details at the end of each entry above are taken from Folio 60 which is the most recent of the bibliography volumes produced by the Folio Society and which was printed in 2007.

Busman’s Honeymoon – Dorothy L Sayers

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20200901 Busmans Honeymoon

I decided to top and tail the four major science works in August with something lighter, and a couple of detective fiction novels fitted the bill nicely, specifically Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie and this book Busman’s Honeymoon by Dorothy L Sayers. For those people not familiar with the origins of the title a busman’s holiday is where somebody takes a break from work but still ends up being involved in their career in some way for example a bus driver who holidays by taking a coach trip. Whilst Lord Peter Wimsey isn’t a professional detective, being instead an extremely wealthy junior member of the aristocracy with a talent for detection, it was of course inevitable that he would end up solving a crime on his honeymoon.

This book is the eleventh and final novel written by Sayers about Lord Peter and first published in 1937, there would be some later short stories but this is his last outing in a significant work and rounds off nicely the ongoing romance between Lord Peter and Harriet Vane which began in “Strong Poison”. Although Harriet is definitely not interested in getting to know Lord Peter any more than she has to at that time as he manages to prove her innocence on a charge of murder. There follows more novels involving the two characters as he eventually manages to persuade her to accept his proposal of marriage at the end of “Gaudy Night”. As a wedding present he buys her the house Tallboys that she loved as a child and they decide at the last minute to take their honeymoon there. Arrangements are made with the previous owner to collect the keys and retain the furniture for a month until they can replace it with their own but on arrival late in the evening he is nowhere to be found and the house is locked up. The first mystery is therefore where is Noakes?

They eventually get access to the house via some spare keys and spend the night before discovering the body of Noakes in the cellar but not with injuries that he would have received if he had for instance fallen down the stairs, in fact the injury that clearly killed him could not have occurred in the cellar at all so how did he die? Cue a cast of characters several of which could have done the deed or at least have a motive but no obvious murder weapon to be found. There are several twists as Lord Peter and the local police force come up with various options for who? and how?, all of which hit the main problem that the house was locked up from the inside so how would anyone get away after killing him? The book was adapted from a play of the same name first performed in 1936 and it still has set pieces that feel like a stage setting, especially the limited number of locations used and the gathering of the entire cast in the front room for the denouement.

It has to be said that Busman’s Honeymoon is by no means the best of the Lord Peter Wimsey stories, for me that would either be “The Nine Tailors” or “Gaudy Night” but it did fulfil my requirements of a pleasant light read after the heavyweight works over the last few weeks. If you have never encountered Lord Peter Wimsey and Bunter his faithful manservant I heartily recommend them although don’t start here, the first novel is “Whose Body?” written in 1923 which introduces the characters.