Author: bookramblings142

The Mystery of Orcival – Emile Gaboriau

On By bookramblings142In Reviews1 Comment

Emile Gaboriau is largely forgotten now, especially in English translation, but he was a near contemporary of Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle and his detective Monsieur Lecoq who appears in five novels and one short story by Gaboriau along with four novels by other writers all produced after Gaboriau’s untimely death at the age of just thirty six in 1873. Indeed Gaboriau was well enough known for Doyle to refer to him directly in the very first appearance of Holmes in the novel ‘A Study in Scarlet’ in 1887.

“Have you read Gaboriau’s works?” I asked. “Does Lecoq come up to your idea of a detective?”

Sherlock Holmes sniffed sardonically. “Lecoq was a miserable bungler,” he said, in an angry voice; “he had only one thing to recommend him, and that was his energy. That book made me positively ill. The question was how to identify an unknown prisoner. I could have done it in twenty-four hours. Lecoq took six months or so. It might be made a text-book for detectives to teach them what to avoid.”

A Study in Scarlet – Arthur Conan Doyle

Watson is upset at having two of his favourite detective writers dismissed as such amateurs, Gaboriau’s Lecoq along with Edgar Allen Poe’s Dupin

I felt rather indignant at having two characters whom I had admired treated in this cavalier style. I walked over to the window, and stood looking out into the busy street. “This fellow may be very clever,” I said to myself, “but he is certainly very conceited.”

A Study in Scarlet – Arthur Conan Doyle

To be fair to Holmes Lecoq is certainly an unusual character even wearing disguises at work so that his enemies, presumably people he has prosecuted and their associates, cannot find him to exact revenge “I have been a detective fifteen years, and no one at the prefecture knows either my true face or the colour of my hair.” He is clearly very intelligent and like Holmes sees inferences in the slightest clue which enables him to leap ahead of the other people on the case, what he lacks is a Watson where the conversations between the two keep the reader up to date with the plot. I enjoyed my first encounter with Lecoq in this his second novel although I also own a copy of his first appearance ‘L’Affaire Lerouge’ so I doubt it will be my only dalliance with this early policeman, and indeed the first time in fiction of a French detective. 

If I have one criticism of the novel it is the sudden appearance of a lot of back story, which in my copy starts on page 109 and runs until page 195, almost a third of the entire novel, and which kills the entertaining narrative up until then, effectively providing a pause in the story. This would probably have been better handled in an earlier part of the novel rather than pull the reader back to a time before the various crimes have been committed and deal with the relationships between the various characters, some of which are already dead by the time this extra information is provided. The sheer length of this section became frustrating as up until then the story had proceeded apace but suddenly we became bogged down in apparently irrelevant details, some of which do prove to be extremely relevant later. Yes we need this information to make full sense of the story but I don’t think it needed to be done in this way. This however is my only criticism of the novel, the various twists, that are revealed are very well done and whilst the reader can congratulate themselves in spotting the main suspect very early on the fact that this is confirmed just ninety pages in shows that you are probably supposed to work out the original protagonists according the provincial justice department were just red herrings.

The story when it eventually restarts at the case in hand is just as fast moving and ingenious as it was previously with Lecoq in control of chasing down the murderer whilst also willing to bend the law to protect the woman he is with, who would surely otherwise be dragged through the courts with her honour besmirched unnecessarily. Apart from the slow mid section of the novel I greatly enjoyed this early detective story from the 1860’s and Gaboriau was clearly an extremely capable pioneer of the genre who deserves to be far better known today than he is.

Haiku & Lips too Chilled – Matsuo Bashō

On By bookramblings142In ReviewsLeave a comment

A Japanese poem of seventeen syllables, in three lines of five, seven, and five, traditionally evoking images of the natural world.

Oxford reference

Almost certainly the master, and certainly the best known outside Japan, of the Japanese poetry style known as haiku is Bashō, a poet who lived from 1644 to 1694 and produced the most elegant works in this form. However as can be seen from the definition of haiku it is an extremely difficult poetic style to translate as in theory to do it properly the translator has not only to render the meaning of the poem but also to express it in the syllable limitations. Which between two such different languages as Japanese and English, or indeed any of the ‘western’ languages, adds an extra level of complexity to the task which frankly could destroy the meaning.

The two short volumes I have of Bashō’s poetry are both by Penguin although published twenty years apart, one to mark sixty years of Penguin Books (in 1995) and the other eighty (2015). They are both extracts from the Penguin Classics volume ‘On Love and Barley: Haiku of Bashō’ originally published in 1985 and translated by Lucian Stryk a Polish born American poet and professor of English at Northern Illinois University. This book has six haiku on each page and has sixty one pages of poetry so just over 360 poems in all. whilst ‘Haiku’ has a wonderful austerity of design with just one poem per page over sixty pages and ‘Lips too Chilled’ has two per page over fifty six pages. There is surprisingly little duplication between the two short books so I have somewhere around 150 haiku by Bashō which admittedly is still well short of half of his output but allows for an appreciation of his work. Stryk does sometimes attempt to stick to the rigid format of haiku but is quite happy to divert from this where the sense of the poem would be lost in translation, which I think is a perfectly fair way to approach the rendering between the two languages as I would much rather appreciate the meaning of the poets words than suffer the pedantic imposition of form. Let’s explore a little of the poets work in the title poem from the 2015 volume:

Lips too chilled
for prattle –
autumn wind

Not perhaps his finest work, I prefer:

Storming over
Lake Nio; whirlwinds
of cherry blossom

As with that I can picture the scene and the paucity of words adds a starkness to the image which would be lost with a longer form. So who was Matsuo Bashō? Well as I mentioned at the beginning he lived in the second half of the 15th century in Japan and as is common in the far east his first name (Matsuo) is his family name. Bashō is not even his real given name as he was born Matsuo Kinsaku, he took the name Bashō from the Japanese banana plant outside the hut built for him by his followers in the later part of 1675 as by then he was already a well known poet and this hut clearly inspired him.

New Year – the Bashō-Tosei
hermitage
a-buzz with haiku

Bashō is also well known in Japan as a traveller making many long walks, usually alone despite the dangers of bandits. But his best known walk, taking 150 days and covering roughly 2,400km (around 1,500 miles) was done in 1689 with one of his students and inspired his great travel book ‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North’, which when it was published posthumously further embellished the master’s fame.

Journey’s end –
still alive, this
autumn evening

Around the World in Eighty Days – Jules Verne

On By bookramblings142In Reviews1 Comment

I could have sworn I read this book as a child, but as I continued reading nothing came back to my memory, of course I knew the basic plot, but as it is a very well known work I could have picked that up at any time however the more I read the less I recognised and I loved the full story. So how come I have clearly never read this before?

The base story, as I think everybody knows, is that Phileas Fogg, a man who notoriously goes nowhere other than to his home or club and whom is so punctual and set in his habits that you could set a watch by his movements raises the subject of the possibility of travelling around the world in just eighty days. When other members of the Reform Club are incredulous he agrees to wager the massive sum of £20,000 (£1.8 million in today’s money) that he can make such a journey and whats more without any prior planning for he will leave from the card game they are playing immediately. I also knew that he arrives back in London having been delayed and believes he has taken eighty one days and is financially ruined but is rescued by having crossed the international date line in an easterly direction and therefore has gained a day’s grace so makes it back to the club just in time. That is all I knew when I started the book, I had assumed that some travel disaster had occurred to delay him and was surprised by the true reason and knew nothing of the policeman, Fix, who had dogged his trail around the world in the mistaken belief that Fogg was the man who stole £55,000 from the Bank of England a few days before he set out on his journey.

I also knew nothing of Aouda who accompanies Fogg from India as I believed that his sole companion was his newly employed valet, the Frenchman Passepartout, whose name is the French for a master key which will enable you to go through any door in an establishment. Jules Verne must have spent a considerable amount of time pre-planning the trip as it is exquisitely timetabled, just how long each trip would take and how much time the travellers would have to make the next connection and how long they would have to wait if they missed such a rendezvous is all set out and is completely believable. Having sat down with railway and ship timetables to work out long over land and sea journeys in the past for my own holidays I am very aware just how complicated this could be before the age of the internet.

I loved the story, the development of the characters and the ingenious ways that Verne managed to keep them hearing ever onwards. Yes it is possible now to get round the world in less than a handful of days by simply getting on a plane, a mode of transport unavailable to Fogg back in 1873 when the novel was written and back in 1988 Michael Palin proved it was still possible to get round the world in eighty days without the use of aircraft, taking roughly the same amount of time as Fogg did in the novel. I heartily recommend this wonderful tale and I’m simply amazed that this was the first time I read it.

About the only thing I didn’t like about this Folio Society edition is the fold out map tucked into a pocket in the rear cover. It is unfortunately extremely difficult to read, which is a shame as clearly a lot of work had gone into it and it could also have been considerably improved by including a line indicating the path that Fogg and his companions took, definitely a missed opportunity there. The images in this blog were taken from the Folio Society website which I downloaded before the edition sold out and the book was removed from the site. As can be seen it is copiously illustrated with headings and tailpieces to each of the thirty seven chapters by Kristjana S Williams who also drew the map and the front cover.

42 – edited by Kevin John Davies

On By bookramblings142In ReviewsLeave a comment

Fifteen years was a long time to be stranded anywhere, particularly somewhere as mind-boggingly dull as Earth.

Douglas Adams – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

OK, I haven’t spent fifteen years on this book as it only came out in 2023 but sometimes it felt like it, which is odd as Adams is one of the funniest writers I know of but this book seems to have things included just because it seemed a good idea at the time and the material was too hand. Things like his old school reports, although why on Earth Douglas still had those is beyond me, mine were binned years ago. Lots of the handwritten documents are transcribed, even if they are perfectly legible, but annoyingly the notes for Douglas’s first Doctor Who script, ‘The Pirate Planet, are not transcribed and I really struggled to read those so could have done with a typed version. The book looks great though with hundreds of documents from the life and career of Douglas Adams reproduced in pretty well chronological order so you can follow his development as a writer and also marvel at the mass of material represented here, the man doesn’t seem to have ever thrown anything away. From letters of apology to girlfriends to odd notes on ideas which may or may not have been used at some point to pages from scripts showing ideas being rejected or improved frankly it should have been more fascinating than I found it to be.

Douglas Adams was sadly taken from us at the age of just forty nine, dying of a heart attack whilst working out in gym so we never got to see what he would really have done with his unfinished work ‘The Salmon of Doubt’. It was intended to be the third Dirk Gently book but according to this volume it could have morphed into the sixth Hitch-Hikers novel. The problem with Adams was that he used to take an inordinate amount of time crafting each of his books or scripts and often would only actually complete something when absolutely forced to and as quoted in the posthumously published ‘The Salmon of Doubt’ which included what he had written so far along with various other articles by Adams and others.

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

Having said all I have earlier regarding the selection and sometimes presentation of what is included there is nevertheless much to enjoy in this book including a lot of not very well known material in the later sections detailing Adams’s work on the computer game Starship Titanic and his environmental endeavours with naturalist Mark Carwardine and also the charity Save the Rhino. Whilst I knew about and loved the radio programme, and book, he and Carwardine made called ‘Last Chance to See’, where they travelled the world looking for endangered animals I wasn’t aware before reading this of just how involved Adams had been with Save the Rhino. His involvement with rock band Pink Floyd was also a surprise and I would have loved to see the projected Millennium work outlined in this volume which I knew nothing about.

All in all this is probably a book for dipping into rather than reading from cover to cover and I’m sure I’ll enjoy reading sections again in the future but won’t attempt to read the whole thing again. It is also large (30cm x 21.7cm and 320 pages) and heavy (just over 1.8kg) so not a very comfortable book to hold, but it needs to be that big to reproduce the documents at mostly full size.

The editor certainly knows his stuff and worked on numerous projects with Adams over the years, from designing the Illustrated Hitch-Hikers Guide and directing for the BBC the documentary ‘The Making of the HItchhikers Guide along with a retrospective of the first thirty years of Doctor Who. The book is another crowd funded production by Unbound of which I have several examples now and will undoubtedly get more as they keep coming up with interesting production ideas.

Letters from Fairyland – Charles van Sandwyk

On By bookramblings142In Reviews1 Comment

Charles van Sandwyk was born in South Africa and raised in Canada; he taught himself calligraphy and intaglio printing as a teenager, his first self-published book appeared when he was just twenty, and won a national award. Since then his work has been archived by the National Library of Canada and rightly so as his art is truly beautiful. Van Sandwyk has produced illustrations for several Folio Society editions but this is the first one I have bought whilst taking advantage of the end of year half price sale they were running which meant that I only paid £25 rather than the £50 original. However having now got a copy I’m thinking about the ones I have missed, such as the limited edition of Alice in Wonderland which was published by The Folio Society to mark the 150th anniversary of the first edition and sold out rapidly. Sadly I can’t see me being able to obtain original books by Van Sandwyk as they are produced in tiny numbers and are mainly snapped up by collectors in Canada so the Folio Society editions will have to do.

The story goes that many years ago a young artist living in Canada received, out of the blue, a letter from a nine year old English girl, Miss Emma Gladstone. Emma had read some books about fairies which the artist had published and she was writing to ask his advice about the little people who she sometimes could see out of the corner of her eye. She wanted to invite the fairies to come and live in her garden, but she did not know how to make contact with them. The pull out letter is included in a folder, just the first of several items that can be taken from the book and examined by the reader and this is one of the many charms of this edition which includes the gorgeous Modigliani Neve paper that it is printed on which resembles a heavy duty watercolour paper and perfectly sets the beautiful illustrations.

The artist replied with a letter to Miss Gladstone and the book goes on to tell the story of how he had received a summons from the Royal High Secretary to the King of the Fairies, commanding him to paint His Majesty’s portrait; how he had shrunk in size and travelled to Fairyland in a coach drawn by a mouse, and everything that happened to him there. The first edition of the book was published in an strictly limited edition of 200 copies which Van Sandwyk presented to members of an exclusive club, the High Branch Society, which unfortunately I have been unable to find out anything about. The double page spread above includes the finished portrait and an envelope containing fairy money which was apparently Van Sandwyk’s payment. The Folio edition explains that it is an expanded version of this original volume being twice the length but even so it is a very short book being just twenty four pages long, excluding the individual pull out items and it was this very shortness that made me originally hesitate to purchase it as it worked out at just over £2 a page. But it is so lovely that I should have really have got it sooner and treated it as an art purchase rather than a book.

Sadly the Folio Society sale has obviously tipped a few others into making the purchase so the stock of this, the 2020 first edition in this form has now sold out. If this little book has piqued your interest in Van Sandwyk’s work as much as it has mine then you may find the following link useful, I certainly had a great deal of fun exploring other works by this wonderful artist.

Collecting Charles van Sandwyk Artist Books

I Hate and I Love – Catullus

On By bookramblings142In ReviewsLeave a comment

A collection of forty three poems by Gāius Valerius Catullus, a Roman poet born in 84 BCE and who died in 54 BCE, but in his short life he wrote a number of poems, 116 of which have survived to the present day. Penguin published a complete volume translated by Peter Whigham which I don’t possess however this selection from that larger volume is part of the Penguin Little Black Classics all of which I purchased when they came out. Catullus’s poetry is normally categorised nowadays into three main subject types, those dealing with his friends, those about a woman he loves but refers to only as Lesbia rather than her real name which was probably Clodia Metelli and the rest are largely described as invective or works attacking other people, which was quite a popular style at the time. This volume is mainly poems in the ‘friends’ or ‘Lesbia’ categories with just seven of the ‘invective’ style represented although over fifty of the surviving works are categorised as ‘invective’. An example of the invective style is poem 43 which attacks the girlfriend of Formianus.

Apologies but photographing the poems without breaking the spine of the book has led to the distortions in the images. The next poem that I want to select to illustrate the tone of Catullus is one which describes his desire to travel now that the warmer weather is here. I have deliberately selected three of the shorter works although few are what we would regard as long, but the descriptions of personal experiences and desires is what marks Catullus as one of the writers known collectively as poetae nov or ‘new poets’ as poetry moved away from the epic heroic style favoured before then. The works of Catullus were almost lost to us completely as a single manuscript was found in the Chapter Library of Verona around seven hundred years ago. This document was copied twice before it was again mislaid and one of the copies was in its turn copied twice before being lost. So the 116 poems have come down the centuries due to these three surviving precious documents.

That one feels very modern with Catullus looking forward to a holiday in Turkey and hoping to meet up with friends there. For my third example it has to be one of the famous Lesbia poems although not the best known, which is poem 5, as that extends over a page in this edition so is difficult to include here. But poem 51 expresses his desire for Lesbia and how he feels when in her company although it is worth pointing out that poem 85 refers to her husband so Catullus was probably one of several men she had affairs with, including Rufus the subject of invective poem number 77 written after Catullus found out about their relationship.

A few others are quite ribald so I don’t feel I can put them on this blog. Although I have certainly enjoyed reading the collection it does nowadays probably need to come with a warning regarding adult themes, The title by the way is from the opening line of the very short poem 85, which is just two lines long:

I hate and I love. And if you ask me how.
I do not know. I only feel it, and I’m torn in two

Catallus 85 translated by Peter Whigham

The Madman’s Library – Edward Brooke-Hitching

On By bookramblings142In ReviewsLeave a comment

In July last year I wrote about the second book published by Edward Brooke-Hitching, ‘The Phantom Atlas‘, this more recent volume, first published in 2020 was a gift I received least Christmas, Brooke-Hitching is the son of an antiquarian book dealer and his love of books shines through in this guide to some of the oddest works ever produced from books like The Blood Quran which was written in beautiful calligraphy using around fifty pints of Iraqi dictator Sadsam Hussain’s blood as a major constituent of the ink in 1997 to ones that use arsenic as the dye for the covers so could literally kill the reader as the poison leaches from the boards. It is six years to the day since I started this blog and I think this book about books is an appropriate subject to mark this milestone of three hundred and fourteen articles and almost three hundred thousand words about books in my own library.

The book starts with a fascinating history of books and their precursors such as clay tablets or Sumerian foundation cones along with parchment scrolls including one that was used to wrap an Egyptian mummy. Then there are books that conceal other things such as one with a built in gun for self defence or astronomical equipment or objects that look like books but are actually boxes made from a specific wood with leaves and seeds from the tree inside them. I was reading about these and thinking it would be interesting to own one when the author pointed out the smell of decay that goes with them which somewhat put me off. There is also a long section on literary hoaxes such as biographies of people that didn’t exist or travel books of journeys that never happened several of which I am tempted to track down examples of.

There are further sections on books of the occult and religious oddities which include some of the strange animals depicted in medieval manuscripts and then examples of tiny and gigantic books. I have a love of tiny books, see my blog on the Lilliput Press so this section was particularly interesting and whilst I do have huge books such as the Folio Society’s Temple of Flora I don’t have anything like the atlas made for Charles II which is 1.76 metres tall and 2.3 metres wide when opened and is truly spectacular. There is a special mention in this section for the classic Audubon work ‘The Birds of America’ which exists in several editions but which is most prized for the version where all the birds are depicted life size which as this includes pelicans and flamingos gives some idea as to its immensity.

All in all this is a really interesting compendium of literary oddities, some of which I knew about but a lot that I didn’t and like the other books by Brooke-Hitching is again richly illustrated and it’s well worth a space on the shelf of anyone who loves books.

A Stroke of the Pen – Terry Pratchett

On By bookramblings142In ReviewsLeave a comment

The first of the books I received for Christmas to be reviewed is this collection of stories written by Terry Pratchett whilst he was still learning his trade as a writer and working as a journalist for the Bucks Free Prres in Beaconsfield. These stories however were mainly written for the Bristol based Western Daily Press so Pratchett wrote under the pseudonym of Patrick Kearns, Kearns being his mothers maiden name. The stories were rediscovered by Pat and Jan Harkin during a massive trawl through the British Library newspaper archive in search of a story they knew existed ‘The Quest for the Keys’ and in doings o they came across the other works by an unknown writer Patrick Kearns that sounded and felt familiar as they used places and characters from the tales written by Pratchett for the Bucks Free Press under the name of Uncle Jim which have now been collected in four volumes, the fourth coming out after I wrote my original review of those books. Apparently the fourth book is to be the last but ‘A Stroke of the Pen’ adds another twenty short stories by the young Terry Pratchett for us to enjoy and yes they do feel like the Uncle Jim stories and indeed one of them, ‘Mr Brown’s Holiday Accident’ did originally appear in the Bucks Free Press as by Uncle Jim.

The scale of the archive work done by the Harkin’s can only be appreciated when you know that despite being very short each of the stories were published in multiple parts with the longest, and the only one to be credited to Terry Pratchett in the Western Daily Press, being ‘The Quest for the Keys’ which appeared in thirty six individual sections from 30th July to the 13th October 1984. Also nobody knew about Patrick Kearns as a pseudonym so it was only the style and content that tipped them off that here was an until then unknown source of Terry Pratchett works. Also although ‘The Quest for the Keys’ was known to exist, because of the way it was clipped from the newspaper and saved the dates and indeed the newspaper which printed it were lost so they had to go through four possible newspapers archives from the earliest probable date (1972) up until 1984, when Terry’s first Discworld novel, ‘The Colour of Magic’, was printed, in their search. Fortunately they decided to work forwards rather than back or they would have found ‘The Quest of the Keys’ a lot quicker and probably not stumbled on the works of Patrick Kearns.

Enough of the history, what of the stories themselves? Well I love the Uncle Jim stories and these are more of the same, indeed there are a couple of reworked Uncle Jim tales under the name of Patrick Kearns which provides confirmation, if any was needed, that this is indeed the same author. The first story included is clearly inspired by Roy Lewis’s ‘The Evolution Man’ with its stone age man main character discovering major advances such as fire. My personal favourite of the ones in this book however is ‘The Fossil Beach’ in which the curator of Blackbury museum is taken to the beach by a local geology student where they find a fossilised deckchair, radio and a copy of today’s newspaper in the mouth of a small dinosaur. How these all got there is a mystery they are determined to solve. Pratchett is clearly already a very competent fantasy writer by the time he wrote as Patrick Kearns, not as good as he would become but definitely worth reading.

Sadly I cannot recommend this hardback book as it currently exists, as it has been announced that there is a story missing from it which Colin Smythe, who had commissioned the Harkin’s to undertake their quest, accidentally omitted when he sent the text to the printers which means that the paperback, due out in April this year will be the complete book and anyone who has the hardback first edition, like mine, will have to buy the paperback as well in order to read the missing tale.

A.S.B. Glover – Tim Graham

On By bookramblings142In Reviews1 Comment

Subtitled ‘The Unacknowledged Genius of Penguin’ this is part biography and part a collection of correspondence and it is the letters both to and from Glover that give the clearest picture of the character of the man. For those people not familiar with the name A.S.B. Glover, which I suspect is most of the people reading this blog, he was responsible for proof reading and editing several series for Penguin Books over a period of sixteen years especially the factual Pelicans as well as editing various books for other publishers. This was a role that ideally suited this remarkably erudite man who could read and write in multiple languages including Ancient Greek, Latin and Sanskrit and was also a renowned scholar in religious texts and the saints of the various Christian denominations and yet left school with no qualifications. Biographical details regarding Glover are difficult to find, he was born in 1895 as Alan McDougall and changed his name sometime in the 1920’s possibly due to his regular imprisonment during World War I as a conscientious objector under his original name. One thing that I definitely didn’t know about him that Tim mentions is that his body was covered in tattoos, including his face, although these facial ones were later removed leaving some scarring and that he may have earned a living for a time as a tattooed man in circuses. Tim cannot find any evidence of a McDougall or Glover working in such a role but it is entirely possible that he had yet another name that he worked under at the time.

He first came to the attention of the publishing world by sending numerous letters containing corrections to books they had recently published to the extent that Penguin realised that it would probably be cheaper to employ Glover to catch mistakes before they went to print rather than amend books for subsequent publication. I’ve mentioned before that you see more of Glover in his letters and the following example dealing with a matter close to his heart after his years in prison is a case in point.

The book by Trevor Gibbens never saw light of day despite Glover’s repeated attempts to get the author to finish it.

This book however is published in a limited run of just 600 copies by The Penguin Collectors Society and designed to look like a Pelican from the period Glover was in charge. At the time of writing this review it is available from the society for £12 plus postage, follow this link if interested. All in all it is an really good book about a fascinating man, who although he didn’t get on all the time with his colleagues and particularly not his boss, Allan Lane, was nevertheless essential to the accuracy and therefore the authority that Pelican Books established under his control.

The Haunted Man – Charles Dickens

On By bookramblings142In ReviewsLeave a comment

The Haunted Man and The Ghost’s Bargain to give the book its full title is the fifth and final Christmas book by Charles Dickens. I have a copy as part of my collected volume of Christmas Books published by Gerald Duckworth Ltd in 2005 as part of their failed series of facsimile reproductions of the famed 1937 Nonesuch Press collected Dickens. I say failed as there was originally supposed to be twenty four volumes published at a rate of six a year from 2005 but six years later only twelve books had appeared (six in 2005, three more in 2008, and a final three in 2011) before the project was abandoned. The private Nonesuch Press Dickens was one of the finest editions of his collected works ever produced and was limited to just 877 sets, the odd number being due to the inclusion with each set of an original engraved steel plate from the first edition printed by Chapman and Hall Ltd. They had 877 plates in storage, all of which were purchased by Nonesuch and included in a box made to look like one of the books. As I don’t have the several thousand pounds needed to buy one of these sets nowadays, the Duckworth reprint looked like a good option until they stopped printing them. Happily they did include all five of the Christmas stories, combined in one large book as one of the first six volumes printed.

I must admit that apart from ‘A Christmas Carol’, which I read regularly and reviewed on Christmas Day five years ago, the other four Christmas tales by Dickens are ones I have rarely, if ever, dipped into. I’m pretty sure that I have never read ‘The Haunted Man’ before but I really enjoyed it now that I have finally done so. The story concerns a chemist, and lecturer in the subject, Mr Redlaw whose home and teaching establishment occupies part of an old educational building in a somewhat poor and rundown, but otherwise unidentified, part of London.

His dwelling was so solitary and vault-like,—an old, retired part of an ancient endowment for students, once a brave edifice, planted in an open place, but now the obsolete whim of forgotten architects; smoke-age-and-weather-darkened, squeezed on every side by the overgrowing of the great city, and choked, like an old well, with stones and bricks; its small quadrangles, lying down in very pits formed by the streets and buildings, which, in course of time, had been constructed above its heavy chimney stacks; its old trees, insulted by the neighbouring smoke, which deigned to droop so low when it was very feeble and the weather very moody;

From Chapter one: The Gift Bestowed

One of the joys of reading Dickens is his power of description, in a few words he has created a vision of the building occupied by Redlaw and his servants and I can see it clearly in my minds eye. The servants consist of a man and wife along with the mans aged father who continually, and comically, keeps repeating that he is eighty-seven whilst hanging the holly for Christmas Eve. But what of Redlaw, why are we concerned with him? Well he is the haunted man of the title and unusually, in an interesting twist of the traditional ghost story, he is haunted not by the dead but by himself, or at least a simulacrum of himself. Mr Redlaw is a troubled man, deeply wounded by the death of his sister and apparently unable to recover from that loss and it is to apparently offer succour that the phantom has appeared. It suggests that forgetfulness would be the best solution but it is not simple forgetfulness of his sister that is part of the gift it is so much more and the power to continually pass on this ‘gift’ even unwillingly. After great indecision Redlaw consents.

The second chapter appears at first to have abandoned Mr Redlaw as we move to the nearby Jerusalem Buildings, an even more rundown part of the neighbourhood, and the home of the Tetterby’s, A small man running a decrepit shop that has tried, and failed, to make money with all sorts of endeavours. Indeed the only thing that the Tetterby’s have succeeded in is the production of children, of which there are a great many and very little money to go round to support them leading to possibly my favourite and most typically Dickensian passage in the book, the description of their meal for Christmas Eve.

There might have been more pork on the knucklebone,—which knucklebone the carver at the cook’s shop had assuredly not forgotten in carving for previous customers—but there was no stint of seasoning, and that is an accessory dreamily suggesting pork, and pleasantly cheating the sense of taste. The pease pudding, too, the gravy and mustard, like the Eastern rose in respect of the nightingale, if they were not absolutely pork, had lived near it; so, upon the whole, there was the flavour of a middle-sized pig.

From Chapter two: The Gift Diffused

Into this poor but happy home comes Mr Redlaw in search of a student of his whom he has been told is unwell and lodging with the Tetterby’s but brought with him is his curse of forgetfulness of familial ties which leads to fractiousness of the children and more concerning wonders between themselves as to why Mr and Mrs Tetterby ever married each other. He spreads his contamination of discontent between the student and his carer before fleeing into the night so as not to cause more disagreements amongst those whom until his arrival were not just content but happy with their lot.

I’m going to say no more regarding the story except to recommend that you read it as it is wonderfully written, as I would expect from Dickens, and the denouement in chapter three is as unexpected as it is heart warming. If you can’t find a physical copy of the book it is available here on Project Gutenberg.

Merry Christmas