Book Corner – October 2019 (5)

The Claverings – Anthony Trollope

The nights are drawing in and it is time to curl up with another Trollope. The Claverings, written in 1864 but not serialised in the Cornhill Magazine until 1866 and published in book form until a year later, could rightly be described as one of Trollope’s unappreciated gems. The author was rather pleased with it, noting in his Autobiography that it was well-written, with both humour and pathos. The problem, though, as he noted, was “I am not aware that the public has ever corroborated that verdict. I doubt now whether anyone reads The Claverings”, he sniffed.     

Well, if very few read it then, matey, these days it has pretty much fallen off the radar screen. If anyone reads Trollope nowadays it is probably going to be the Barchester series or the Pallisters or The Way We Live Now, which is a shame. The Claverings is classic Trollope and a perfect introduction to his world and style.

Yes, it is a tad long-winded – what Victorian novel, especially one written for serialisation, isn’t? – but has a pace about it and an engaging enough story to keep the reader interested. It is almost as perfect a novel as you can imagine, not a thread left undone, every loose end tied up. Trollope playfully cross-references the Barsetshire series, Bishop Proudie forbidding Henry Clavering, the rector, from fox hunting. So, why did it never find much favour with the reading public?

Part of the trouble, I think, lies in the fact that the lead characters are a tad ordinary with all the human failings of the common man. As the narrator of the story says, “men as I see them are not often heroic”. The plot revolves around a love triangle. The story opens with Julia Brabazon rejects the marriage proposal of Harry Clavering, a man she loves but who has very modest prospects, in favour of hooking up with the loathsome, dissolute but rich, Lord Ongar. In answer to the obvious Mrs Merton question, Julia “had no reliance on her own power of living on a potato, with one new dress every year”.       

The marriage was an ordeal but Lord Ongar quickly succumbed to the strains imposed on his body by his dissolute lifestyle. Meanwhile Harry has plighted his troth to Florence Burton, the daughter of his boss. When Julia reappears on the scene, what should Harry do, return to his first love or remain faithful to his vow of marriage? Cue much soul-searching and wringing of hands as all three protagonists try and work their way through this moral Gaudian knot.      

It takes an intervention of Neptune as an improbable and extremely convenient deus ex machina to resolve the dilemma. The accident, telegraphed well before it occurs, suggests that Trollope was grappling for a way out for his story and many might see it as a structural weakness which detracts from the reader’s enjoyment of the book. I find with many a Victorian novel you need to suspend credulity when considering the plot. Whether you consider the device to be a cop out or not, it does free the main characters from their torment.

I thought Trollope treated the moral anguish of the characters with sympathy and gave the reader an insight into their psychologies. On a more superficial level, the book is full of humour, social insight and pathos. Along the way we meet some wonderful characters including a supposed Russian spy, the sporting and devious Captain Boodle, who I’m sure gets a namecheck in Phineas Redux, a belligerent cleric, Dr Saul, the brothers Clavering, Sir Hugh of the hard heart and Archie, the feckless one, a sleazy foreign Count and many more.

I enjoyed the book and as a book that stands alone as opposed to being one of a series and being of moderate length (by the standards of the day) it is a good introduction to the author.

What Is The Origin Of (235)?

Darby and Joan

There are some benefits to growing old. Admittedly, the limbs are not as supple as they once were, there are more aches and pains and the faculties are not as sharp, but it is a pleasure to be able to do what I want at a pace of my choosing. My wife and I are in danger of becoming that archetypal elderly couple, Darby and Joan, spending our final years, decades I trust, in contentment. Where does the phrase come from and who were Darby and Joan, if anyone?

There is a tendency, as we have seen, in etymological researches to seek to identify a phrase with real people, often erroneously. That may be the case here. The starting point is a reference that the eccentric lexicographer, Samuel Johnson, in the Literary Magazine in 1756 to a ballad about Darby and Joan. Johnson may have had in mind an anonymous poem, printed in the weekly journal, the Gentleman’s Magazine, in March 1735, entitled The Joys of Love never forgot. It contains these lines; “Old Darby, with Joan by his side,/ You’ve often regarded with wonder:/ He’s dropsical, she is sore-eyed,/ Yet they’re never happy asunder.”

The devoted couple are thought to have been John Darby and his wife, Joan, a printer who lived and worked in Bartholomew Close in London. The poem is ascribed to Henry Woodfall who worked for him. However, in The Literary Janus, edited by J Wilson and published in the early part of the nineteenth century, there is a similar poem by the title of The Happy Couple. The only difference in the text is you’ve is replaced by I’ve in the second line and in the fourth line reads “and yet they are never asunder.” The couple are supposed to be long-standing residents of a Yorkshire village, three miles from Tadcaster, called Healaugh, and the poem is attributed to Lord Wharton, who was Lord of the Manor of the village.

It is difficult to know what to make of this. A reason to doubt the Woodfall story is that Darby the printer is thought to have died in 1704. Is it likely that he would have waited thirty years to laud his master and his devoted wife? The Yorkshire Darby and Joan seemed to have lived an idyllic life, Darby smoking his pipe and quaffing his ale while Joan “in all the garrulity of age, relating tales of days long passed away” and going to church on Sundays. Are these the prototypical happy, contented couple? I’m not sure it matters.

What is clear is that by the beginning of the nineteenth century the phrase was well established. The Times noted in its edition of May 26, 1801 that a new dance by the title of Darby and Joan was being “received with loud and general plaudits” and in June there was a ballet of the same name doing the rounds. On February 1, 1802 the Thunderer announced that what it termed as a “comic divertissement” was being performed at London’s Royalty Theatre by the name of Darby and Joan; or The Dwarf.

By the middle of the century Darby and Joan was being used to describe a seemingly devoted couple. In He Knew He Was Right, published in 1869, Anthony Trollope wrote, “when we travel together, we must go Darby and Joan fashion.” The verbose Henry James, writing in The Golden Bowl, published in 1904, described a couple thus; “their silence eked out for her by his giving her his arm and their then crawling up their steps quite mildly and contentedly, like some old Darby and Joan…” Darby and Joan were the names given to the devoted couple who provide hospitality in Herman Melville’s Omoo from 1847.

There was a popular song in the 1890s, written by Frederic Weatherly, entitled Darby in Joan in which Joan serenades her hubby with these words; “Darby dear we are old and grey,/ Fifty years since our wedding day./ Shadow and sun for every one,/ as the years roll by.” The couple also made an appearance in Hammerstein and Kern’s 1937 classic song, The Folks Who Live on the Hill.

Whoever they were, they have been an enduring symbol of a long and happy marriage and long may it continue.

Book Corner – May 2019 (5)

The Doctor’s Family – Margaret Oliphant

Although a longer work than The Rector, The Doctor’s Family, also published in 1863, is little more than a novella, but one that packs quite a punch. It is highly autobiographical, I gave a brief summary of Oliphant’s life last week ( https://wp.me/p2EWYd-3km ), and is full of anger and frustration at the lot of women.

Dr Rider is one of two doctors in Carlingford, the other being Dr Marjoribanks. While the latter looks after the ill-to-do of the town, Rider’s practice serves the lower orders. His peaceful existence is rudely interrupted when his brother, Fred, turns up on his doorstep from Australia. Fred is a heavy-smoking, alcoholic, ne’er do well who takes up residence with the good doctor and proceeds to sponge off him as well as pollute the house with his foul tobacco smoke. There is a strident anti-smoking theme to this book.

Fred has omitted to mention, as you do, that he is married and, sure enough, two women and three unruly children turn up on the doctor’s doorstep from Oz. Susan, Fred’s wife, is as selfish and irresponsible as her hubby but Nettie Underwood is a paragon of virtue. Nettie recognises that it her duty to look after her relatives and it is she, not the feckless parents, who ensures that the family is clothed and fed and have a roof over their heads.

Nettie is the point of interest in this story. She bears her trials and tribulations with fortitude and courage, putting up with her lot, even though her relatives show not a jot of gratitude for all she does. The Doctor is grateful that Nettie has taken these wretches off his hands but has moments of doubt as to whether he should be doing more to help this saint.

The good folk of Carlingford are interfering old so-and-sos but for once their meddling does some good. Miss Wodehouse, whom we met in The Rector, impresses upon Nettie that she needs to think of herself more. Nettie’s resentment of her position crystallises when her sister wants to take the family back to Australia, dragging her with them as a de facto child-minder. Nettie’s resentment and Oliphant’s indignation at the lot of a woman who finds herself in this situation is encapsulated in this sentence; “Not all the natural generosity of her mind… could blind her eyes to the fact that she had given up her own happiness; and bitter flashes of thought would intervene, notwithstanding the self-contempt and reproach with which she became aware of them.”

Of course, Oliphant was, in real life, in exactly the same situation. She was forced to look after her own drunken brother and the offspring of another of her brothers as well as her own children. As a writer, she is speaking up for the many women who found themselves in such a situation, giving them a voice and trying to fight their corner.

The book ends up as you would hope it would. The family goes back to whence they came but Nettie asserts her independence by staying put in Carlingford. And she meets her love match. I won’t spoil your enjoyment by naming the lucky man but it doesn’t take much to guess who it is.

Having read the Rector and this book, I couldn’t help thinking that there were remarkable similarities to Trollope’s The Warden and Barchester Towers. It may just have been the setting and subject matter but it may well have been that Oliphant was nodding her bonnet in Trollope’s direction. What is clear, though, is that her tone and perspective is radically different.

Book Corner – May 2019 (4)

The Rector – Margaret Oliphant

Am I on a one-man mission to rehabilitate the reputation of the Scottish writer, Margaret Oliphant, or am I just addicted to series of books? If the latter, I’m going the wrong way about it as having recently read Miss Marjoribanks, which is a later book in what is known as The Carlingford Chronicles, I have now picked up The Rector, which is considered to be the first, or possibly second, of the series.

First, though, a little about the Scottish writer, Margaret Oliphant (1828 – 1897). Unusually for the time, her mother was keen that the young Margaret was as well-read as possible and so received a far better education than many of her sex. She published her first book, Passages in the Life of Margaret Maitland, in 1849, which received some critical success, and went on to become a prolific contributor to magazines, principally Blackwoods.

In 1857 she married her cousin, Frank, but the marriage was short-lived, her husband succumbing to tuberculosis seven years later. Left with three children, debts and later an alcoholic brother, Willie, and three children from her other brother, Frank, she needed to find the means to support them all. Career options were limited for women at the time and so Margaret relied upon the power of her pen. Over the course of her writing career she penned over one hundred novels, many of them whoppers, spreading over three volumes.

It was a prodigious effort but, not unnaturally, less is often more and her the quality of her output was variable. The uneven quality and sheer size of her literary efforts meant that her critical reputation suffered and over the years she has fallen out of favour. Indeed, many of her books are out of print. Thank heavens for digitised books. She also suffered the handicap of being a direct contemporary of Anthony Trollope whose own prolific output was more consistent in quality and of being a woman.

The Rector was published in 1863 and because of its length, at just 35 pages it is a mere pamphlet by mid 19^th century Victorian standards, usually goes hand in hand with The Doctor’s Family, which I will turn to another time.

Despite its brevity, the novella deals with some important issues. In short, it can be seen as an essay on the difficulties of an outsider breaking into and settling down in a closed community, the suitability or otherwise of someone from the groves of Academe doing a job in the real world and the role of the necessity of looking after an aged relative in career decisions.

A new Rector has been appointed to Carlingford and the good folk of the town are all a-twitter as to whether he will be Low or Broad Church and whether he is an eligible bachelor. Morley Proctor, a fellow of All Souls, Oxford, has taken up the post, mainly so that he can provide a home for his aged mother. But he soon finds that he has no aptitude for the role of a parochial clergyman, his sermons are stiff and boring and he has no empathy for the sick or dying, his hopelessness confirmed when he watches his rival, Mr Wentworth, the curate of St Roque’s, administer to a dying woman.

His mother urges him to get a wife and his attention is drawn to the eligible daughters of Mr Wodehouse. Although the elder daughter, nearly forty, mild and kind, would be the more suitable match, Morley is drawn to the younger, wilder, more beautiful, Lucy, but soon realises he is out of his depth.

Embarrassed, frustrated, he retreats to All Souls, accommodating his mother nearby in a lodgings in Oxford.

And that’s that – a simple tale, nicely told.

Book Corner – May 2019 (3)

Phineas Redux – Anthony Trollope

At the risk of being accused of going all Julian Clary-like, there is nothing better in the long winter evenings than settling down with a Trollope. I’m working my way through the Palliser Series, of which Phineas Redux, published as a book in 1874 after being serialised in The Graphic, is the fourth of six and the sequel to the second of the series, Phineas Finn. Reading Trollope is no light undertaking, this book running to 80 chapters and a tad less than 700 pages. Thankfully, I read it as an ebook, otherwise I would have had a limp wrist.

One of the characteristics that marks out a classic is its universality, allowing the reader, however removed by time from the author, can find themes and topics which speak to them. In a time when the British parliamentary system is creaking at the seams, Phineas Redux resonates loud and clear. The Prime Minister introduces a controversial bill into Parliament, no not withdrawal from the EU but the disestablishment of the Church of England, which his own party is against and for which he has no majority. His motion, which is turned down by a thumping majority, leads to his resignation and the opposition, who intuitively support the motion, assuming power. It wouldn’t happen today, would it? Trollope’s narrative is a masterpiece on the venality and hypocrisy of politics and stands the test of time.

Another major theme running through the book relates to the deficiencies and inefficiencies of the English legal system, highlighted by the trial of Phineas Finn, the hero of the tale, for the murder of fellow parliamentarian, Mr Bonteen. Finn is on trial for his life and much of the evidence brought against him is circumstantial at best. His eventual triumph is more to do with the determination of his female friends to prove his innocence than the wheels of justice. Finn emerges from the horrors of the trial a changed man and turns down the political office he was desperate to secure in the early part of the book. The book is really the story of his transformation from a shallow careerist, dazzled by the glamour of society and the cut and thrust of politics to one who sees the world as it really is,

To the modern reader, what is astonishing is how reliant Finn is upon his female friends and admirers. They implicitly believe in his innocence and between Madame Max Goesler and Lady Glencora Palliser, she becomes the new Duchess of Omnium during the course of the book, his defence is constructed. There is love interest too. Lady Laura Kennedy has the hots for Finn but is trapped in a loveless marriage with a husband whom, I think unfairly, is described as mad. He probably had just cause to feel aggrieved as his wife upped and left him but, anyway, he conveniently dies leaving Laura on the market.

Madame Max Goesler also has eyes on Finn and she has the advantage of being unencumbered with the need to spend the appropriate period of time mourning a dead husband and having pots of money. In a moment akin to the famous Mrs Merton/Debbie McGee exchange, the near-penniless Finn throws up his ministerial career to marry Goesler. Apart from her millions, what did he see in her?

There are some fine comedic episodes, not least the on-off love affair involving Adelaid Palliser and her ne’er do well lover, Gerard Maule, and Mr Spooner. One of the book’s leitmotifs is the dispute between Lord Chiltern and the Duke of Omnium over foxes which is funnier than it might seem, there is a lot of fox hunting in the book. I also enjoyed Mr Quintus Slide who represents all that is bad in journalism and who has a major role to play in Finn’s downfall.

In summary, I found the book an enjoyable read, a good story with a few twists and turns and one which deals with themes that resonate to this day.