The Little Professor

Scribbling clergymen

I've just stumbled across  a short story by, of all people, the Rev. John Cumming, an ardent Scottish clergyman--his portrait should be next to the dictionary definition of "tub-thumping"--known for "anti-Catholicism and apocalyptic prophecy."  (And for getting his ears soundly boxed by George Eliot.)  The novel-writing clergyman is, if you think about it, a rather interesting nineteenth-century phenomenon, given the period's well-known debates about the dangers of fiction (which anticipate today's well-known debates about the dangers of television, movies, the Internet, and video games).  Moreover, nineteenth-century religious fiction had a sometimes dubious reputation, and not just with skeptics and agnostics like Eliot or W. M. Thackeray; its target audience could be anxious about mixing fiction with doctrine, or, like Caroline Fry, contemptuous of the entire endeavor.   It would be interesting to know how the clergyman-novelist shaped Victorian attitudes to the reading and writing of fiction as a moral (or, at least, not immoral) activity; certainly, authors like John Henry Newman were well aware that fiction could be harnessed for any serious evangelizing project.  That being said, nearly all of the most influential religious novels of the nineteenth century were not written by clergymen, but by laymen--in fact, by lay women. 

Out of curiosity, I decided to hunt down a sampling of novel-writing clergymen whose work was available on the Internet.  I've confined the list to writers from the UK and Ireland.  Obviously, this is just the tip of the iceberg; in addition, there are more clergymen-novelists whose work hasn't been digitized yet (e.g., Edward Lewes Cutts or Arthur Brown).  Nor are the authors below represented exhaustively (e.g., Crake, who wrote many more novels than have yet appeared online). 

1. Aveling, Thomas William Baxter (d. 1884).  Congregationalist.  The Irish Scholar (later reprinted as a single volume).
2. Crake, Augustus David (1836-90).  High Church Anglican.  Edwy the Fair; Alfgar the Dane; The Rival Heirs; The House of Walderne.
3. Cobbold, Richard (1797-1877).  Anglican.  The History of Margaret Catchpole; Freston Tower. 
4. Croly, George (1780-1860).  Church of Ireland/Anglican.  Salathiel (also known as Tarry Thou Till I Come); Marston. 
5. Cunningham, J. W. (1780-1861).  Evangelical Anglican.  The Velvet Cushion. (See also John Styles' response.)
6. Drew, Rev. Francis (1858-?).  Roman Catholic.  Credo; Veni Creator; Ave Maria; Ora Pro Nobis; Oremus. 
   
7. Farrar, Frederick William (1831-1903).  Anglican.  Eric; Or, Little by Little; Gathering Clouds.
8. Gresley, William (1801-1876).  High Church Anglican.  The Siege of Lichfield; The Forest of Arden; Bernard Leslie; Holyday Tales. 
9. Kingsley, Charles (1819-1875).  Anglican ("Broad Church").  Hypatia; Westward Ho!; The Water-Babies; Alton Locke; Hereward the Wake; Yeast; Two Years Ago. 
10. Millington, T[homas] S[treet]  (?).  Anglican (Evangelical?).  Under a Cloud; Moral Tales...for the Young.
11. Neale, John Mason (1818-1866).  High Church Anglican (Anglo-Catholic).  Herbert Tresham; Duchenier; Theodora Phranza; The Lily of Tiflis; The Quay of the Dioscuri; The Bride of Ramcuttah; The Sea-Tigers; Lucia's Marriage;  Agnes de Tracy; The Followers of the Lord; Stories from Heathen Mythology and Greek History; The Farm of Aptonga.
12. Newman, John Henry (1801-1890).  Roman Catholic (previously Evangelical and High Church Anglican).  Callista; Loss and Gain.
13. Paget, Francis Edward (1806-1882). High Church Anglican.  Tales of the Village; Tales of the Village Children; Luke Sharp; The Curate of Cumberworth and the Vicar of Roost; St. Antholin's; The Warden of Berkingholt.
14. Pollok, Robert (1798-1827).  Presbyterian.  Tales of the Covenanters; Helen of the Glen; The Persecuted Family.
15. Reed, Andrew (?).  Probably Congregationalist (father is this Andrew Reed).  Alice Bridge of Norwich.
16. Sewell, William (1804-1874).  High Church Anglican.  Ursula.  (For some unfathomable reason, only the second volume of Hawkstone has been digitized at both the Internet  Archive and GoogleBooks.)
17. Tandy, William (?).  Roman Catholic.  Terry O'Flinn's Examination of Conscience. 
18. Wiseman, Nicholas (1802-1865).   Roman Catholic.  Fabiola. 

 

This Week's Acquisitions

• Philippe Grimbert, Memory: A Novel (Simon & Schuster, 2008).  A man recovers the truth about his parents' experiences in France during WWII.
• J. M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (Viking, 2007).  Political novel about political writing, featuring three narratives running simultaneously.
• Russell Banks, The Reserve (Harper, 2008).  Sordid doings, romantic and otherwise, in the 1930s Adirondacks.
• Lauren Groff, The Monsters of Templeton (Hyperion, 2008).  Woman seeks truth about her background, finds various and sundry oddities.
• Amy Bloom, Away: A Novel (Random House, 2007). Russians Jews in the USA, circa the 1920s.  (With characters named Burstein, no less.)
• Charlotte Elizabeth, ed., The Protestant Annual (Francis Baisler, 1841).  A religious riposte to the more famous annuals, like The Keepsake; strong evangelical slant.  Second of the only two volumes. 
• Christopher Hill, Antichrist in Seventeenth Century England (Verso, 1997).  Famous series of lectures on the protean nature of "the" Antichrist.  (This was one of those "huh, shouldn't I own this already?" purchases.) 
• Richard Menke, Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems (Stanford, 2008).  The novel and the Victorian "new media."  I'm reviewing this for Choice.

If you never hear from me again, this is why

Beginning today, I'll be teaching the late Alain Robbe-Grillet's The Erasers (Les Gommes) to a group of freshmen, many of whom are not English majors.

Either the students will be intrigued, or they'll hire an exorcist. 

A new theory of bookcases?

Scott McLemee's article on "Bookshelf and Shelf" includes the following wise paragraph:

The online conversation generated by Seligman’s and Klein’s remarks has at times reflected a kind of guilt that no really bookish person would feel. For there are, it seems, people who feel stress about owning volumes they haven’t read. Evidently some of them believe a kind of statute of limitations is in effect. If you don’t expect to read something in, say, the next year, then, it is wrong to own it. And in many cases, their superegos have taken on the qualities of a really stern accountant — coming up with estimates of what percentage of the books on their shelves they have, or haven’t, gotten around to reading. Guilt and anxiety reinforce one another.

When I purchase contemporary fiction, I assume that I will read it during some moment of leisure at an indefinite point in the future.  When I purchase Victorian religious fiction (*sigh*), I assume that I will both read and write about it at a more definite point in the future.  And when I purchase scholarly work, I assume that I will read at least some of it for a very definite purpose...whenever I need to do so (which, one hopes, will be more than once).  Timetables come into it only when the books need to be read for professional reasons.  Surely part of the fun of having books around is the knowledge that they're there, waiting for you, whenever you're ready?

I'm very fond of my bookcases, but they aren't performances of identity.  They're for storing books. 

History meme

This morning, I felt the oddest sensation, as though a tentacle was poking me in the back.  But soon it all made sense, because I realized that Pharyngula had tagged me for a meme.  History meme ahoy:

1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. List 7 random/weird things about your favorite historical figure.
3. Tag seven more people at the end of your blog and link to theirs.
4. Let the person know they have been tagged by leaving a note on their blog.

I guess it's time to roll out the Benjamin Disraeli anecdotes:

1. If you believe that William Pitt the Younger's last words were "I think I could eat one of Bellamy's veal pies," then...blame Disraeli, who is one of the people responsible for popularizing the story (although he didn't invent it).
2. Then again, if you believe that Disraeli said that "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics," then...blame Mark Twain, who is the only source for that quotation.
3. An issue of Blackwood's Magazine from the 1880s or 1890s features an anecdote about telling an anecdote about Robert Browning telling an anecdote about Disraeli to Gladstone.  (Whew.)   Apparently, Disraeli praised an art exhibition to the skies during the official dinner, but whispered to Browning afterwards that he thought the whole shebang was, well, dreck.  According to Browning, says Blackwood's, Gladstone was appalled; according to someone else, though, Browning was appalled and Gladstone thought the whole thing was hilarious.  Which is true, Maga wonders. There's a version of the innermost anecdote in Hesketh Pearson's biography of Disraeli.
4. Disraeli is England's only novel-writing prime minister, which surely counts for something.  (The historical novelist Winston Churchill is not that Winston Churchill.)
5. Disraeli occasioned what may be John Stuart Mill's only recorded joke: "Mr. Disraeli offers his Reform Bill to the householders of the towns, and they say 'Thank you, Mr. Gladstone.'"  (This is Sir Algernon West's version; Bruce Kinzer reports the same joke, worded slightly differently.)  If John Stuart Mill ever demonstrated any other signs of something resembling a sense of humor, please let me know.
6. In a diary entry for May 28, 1863, the radical politician Sir John Trelawny reports suspicions that an exasperated Disraeli may have "kicked" a fellow Conservative in order to shut him up (see The Parliamentary Diaries of Sir John Trelawny, 1858-1865, 252).
7. Wherever he is, Disraeli cannot possibly be happy about the decision to stick his memorial statue in Westminster Abbey right next to Gladstone's.

If you'd like to have a go at this meme, be my guest. 

I'm not sure I understand this publishing model...

I was just typing away at my article/conference paper/book chapter (all rolled up into one!), and suddenly found myself in need of Aubrey de Vere's historical verse drama Mary Tudor (1847).  Alas, my notes are apparently on my office computer, so I trotted over to GoogleBooks and...lo! Mary Tudor.  A later edition, but it will do until I find my notes.  In any event, I was startled, to say the least, by the discovery that the now-ubiquitous Kessinger Publishing has decided to reprint it.  Originally, Kessinger specialized in occult and related texts--they were responsible for keeping all of Bulwer-Lytton in print, among other things--but now they clearly aspire to be a hardcopy GoogleBooks.  There's no explanation of how this is economically viable, although the mode of delivery looks like POD.  Is there anyone out there besides yours truly, for example, even remotely interested in Mary Tudor--and willing to shell out $25.80 (after Amazon discount) to buy it? Obviously, I have no objection to publishers who want to reprint completely obscure Victorian texts with target readerships of approximately three people, but...

This Week's Acquisitions

• F. M. Mayor, The Rector's Daughter (Virago, 1987).  Reprint of Mayor's 1924 novel about a woman who has grown up in a constrained, barely post-Victorian clergyman's household.
• Eliot Bliss, Saraband (Virago, 1987).  Reprint of early 1930s novel about a young woman's coming-of-age.
• Agnes M. Stewart, Earl Nugent's Daughter; Or The Last Days Of The Penal Laws: A True Story (Kessinger, 2007).  POD reprint of a Victorian Catholic historical novel set during the Gordon Riots (cf. Charles Dickens' Barnaby Rudge).
• Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (Vintage, 1994).  Beauty, obsession, and disappointment in Japan, based loosely on a real incident.
• Jonathan Coe, The Rotters' Club (Vintage, 2003).  Trials and travails of growing up in 70s Birmingham.
• James Buzard, Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels (Princeton, 2005).  Classic British fiction as ethnographies of Englishness.
• Catherine Gallagher, The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel (Princeton, 2005).  Languages of economics, languages of fiction. 

U of C grad students: in search of funding

The CoHE reports that graduate students are protesting the University of Chicago's new graduate funding packages--not the packages themselves, but the university's decision that they will be "available only for graduate students who enrolled beginning in the 2007-8 academic year."  (You can see the funding blog here.)  Graduate student funding at the U has apparently not budged very far with inflation; the $1500 that one poster notes is the stipend for a TAship, for example, is in the ballpark of what I earned as a TA in the  mid-90s.  I had an external fellowship, so I don't recollect exactly what the university's living stipends were in the '90s, but the $12K I see cited here looks awfully familiar.   

When I was at the U of C, graduate students resisted unionization because, as one fellow doctoral candidate noted, the U was doing a lousy job of exploiting us.  The real problem at the time was not too much teaching, but too little.   The U has always prided itself on putting t-t faculty in front of undergraduates; moreover, graduate students noticeably outnumber the undergraduates. And no freshman composition!   During my stay from '92-'97, the English department guaranteed students one--count 'em, one--TAship, which meant leading a once-per-week discussion section.  Students needed to be in their sixth year to apply to teach a full course on their own.  (I managed to finagle a second TAship because, as even I was capable of realizing, there was no way in heck, hell, or any other "h" that I could get a job on the basis of  ten one-hour discussion meetings.  [I couldn't get a job with two of them, either...])  There were a few other teaching opportunities available on campus, like the Little Red Schoolhouse or university extension, but most students adjuncted or worked as graders at area colleges.  Things have now changed a little, with students in English guaranteed at least one stand-alone course. 

The Ungodly

I approached Richard Rhodes' The Ungodly: A Novel of the Donner Party (1972) with some trepidation, as the skills that make a good narrative historian do not necessarily translate into the skills that make a good novelist.  (Exhibit A: Simon Schama's attempt at fiction in Dead Certainties.)  In fact, The Ungodly turned out to be an absorbingly grotesque--sometimes downright gruesome--rewriting of some very popular cliches about pioneer spirit, community in the face of adversity, and the romance of the settler experience. 

Rhodes structures the novel as a trip log or diary, subdivided into five sections that move from "The Trail" to "Afterwards"; instead of chapters, each section is organized according to the calendar.  While the narrative is thus perfectly linear, as the characters move day-by-day from April 15, 1846 to April 22, 1847 (the "Afterwards" section is really a partially-undated epilogue), this linearity does not add up to progress in our usual sense of plot development.  In fact, the characters spend most of the novel quite literally not making progress, either geographically or psychologically, and both calendar time and nature qualify as the novel's deadliest "villains."  Moreover, the log isn't written by anyone in the novel, although it incorporates actual texts written by Donner party members like Patrick Breen.  At times, the text appears to be the product of a kind of group mind, an effect heightened by Rhodes' use of sparse, sometimes fragmentary prose with virtually no internal punctuation, occasionally salted with dialect or German ("He's coming after me oh Jesus looket him come got to get this powder poured oh Jesus" [113]).  At other times, we see the omniscient narrator more obviously at work, as when the action abruptly shifts from one space to another without any concessions to the reader; the narrator can move, even if the characters can't.  But however we take the log, the narrative voice often maintains a near-Olympian detachment that reinforces the characters' helplessness and isolation.

As one might expect, a novel about the Donner Party is a novel about suffering--and, of course, cannibalism (which, after all, is probably the first thing that comes to mind when someone says "Donner Party").  The Ungodly, however, does not make suffering either redemptive or transformative;  the character who seems to undergo the greatest change, the German immigrant Lewis Keseberg, only changes in the direction of temporary insanity.  Thus, Peggy Breen is pointedly "her old self again" (338) once rescued--any change in personality is a temporary deviation, not an organic development.     Once food becomes scarce, the Party collapses as a community: families refuse to feed non-members, extract extravagant payments for food, and sometimes steal from each other.   The novel's hero, Will Eddy, stands out not because of his intelligence or charisma, but because he determines that "he would save them or die trying..." (197).  Under these horrible circumstances, unselfishness becomes an astonishing act of virtue.   There is no essential reward for heroism, though; Tamsen Donner, one of the strongest figures in the novel, survives almost everything only to be raped and murdered by Keseberg.   

The monstrous Keseberg, whose voice dominates the novel's fourth section, is a one-man parody of both community and the will to live--both celebrated elsewhere (if somewhat ambivalently) in the text.  Keseberg anoints himself "King of the Forgotten Dead" (348), and imagines himself preserving the identities of the dead settlers through cannibalism.  Eating corpses, he imagines, leaves a "mark" that will result in suffering first equal to Christ's (347), then to Faust's (348); indeed, he fantasizes that "Almighty God had singled him out to show how much misery a man can bear" (349).  As part of these hubristic fantasies, in which he veers between damnation and godhood, his meals become a reverse communion, constructing a "community" of sorts by incorporating the dead into his own body.   A violent, brutal man, Keseberg murders Tamsen Donner because she plans to move on after her husband's death (356); eating her preserves the growing community within himself, "carried" "as a woman carries a child" (356).  Here we have the inverse of Will Eddy's heroism, in the form of something nearly vampiric.