The Little Professor

This Week's Acquisitions

• C. Robert Wynne, Not Peace But a Sword (RTS, [1915?]).  Reprint of an 1897 novel about a young Protestant woman witnessing to an Irish family.  The last time I checked, however, "C." was not the appropriate initial for "George"--the author is George Robert Wynne.  This reprint belongs to one of the RTS' jury-rigged series, "Advance," along with a few earlier  novels by Emma Leslie and some twentieth-century novels published in 1915 (hence my guess about the date).  (Biblio)
• Eugene McCabe, Death and Nightingales (Bloomsbury, 2002).  Reprint of McCabe's 1992 historical novel set in late-Victorian Ireland.  (eBay)
• Suzy Anger, Victorian Interpretation (Cornell, 2006).  Studies hermeneutics in a number of disciplines, religious and otherwise.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Peter K. Garrett, Gothic Reflections: Narrative Force in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cornell, 2003).  Narratological connections between Gothic and classical realism.  (eBay)

One of these things is not like the other

It's time for my annual (semi-annual? monthly?) rant about treating R1 institutions as though they were typical of all academic campuses.  Some of AcademHack's commenters called it already, but let's expand on that discussion a bit, taking comprehensives as an example...

1) Yes, we do have at least one thing in common: we exploit badly-paid adjunct labor. 
2) We do not have doctoral candidates.  While may have MA candidates, we may or may not allow them to teach; comprehensive colleges like mine usually have graduate programs intended for the professions (business administration, for example) or for teacher credentialing.  Debates about the function of Ph.D. programs and their economic purpose do not translate to our MA programs especially well.
3) While the amount of "service" teaching will obviously vary from program to program, it is nevertheless the case that t-t faculty at comprehensives (and SLACs, for that matter) will shoulder a heavier burden of lower-division courses and spend less time teaching advanced courses in their own fields.  In English departments, this often includes one or more sections of freshman composition, no matter the professor's rank and seniority.  (Right now, I'm teaching two sections of our mandatory "Introduction to Literary Analysis" course and one Victorian course; in the fall, I'm down for two lower-division courses--composition & the second half of the Brit Lit survey--and one as-yet undetermined Victorian course.  This 3-3, incidentally, is a nice teaching load for a comprehensive; 4-4 is frequent and 5-5 hardly unheard of.)
4) My own campus gives non-tenured faculty slightly more travel money.  I'm told that at least one of the SUNY "Big Four" eliminates travel funding after tenure! Anecdotal evidence, at least, suggests that this isn't a particularly uncommon practice.
5) By the same token, my campus dissuades non-tenured faculty from doing much in the way of service work, then ramps up service requirements after tenure.  This also doesn't seem to be atypical.
6) Research may be great (and may generate merit pay) but it doesn't get you release time or much else in the way of favors.  (See also: no doctoral candidates, above.) 
7) In general, while seniority certainly yields some goodies (like being rotated out of the non-major courses, for example), there are usually far fewer goodies than at an R1. 

Those who teach at SLACs or community colleges will have their own list of differences.  The point being: generalizations drawn from R1 campuses produce generalizations about R1 campuses.  And R1 campuses are the minority. 

Very

Victorian critical observation of the day:

"Very fine writing is very fatiguing to read, and is almost always very incomprehensible."  (Rev. of A[nna] H[anson] Dorsey, The Sisters of Charity, in The Catholic Magazine and Register 11 [April 1850]: 109.)

Cf.

Devalued

Brandon's comment on this Paul Krugman post reminds me why I dislike "Victorian values" talk so much.  As Brandon points out, Krugman's griping about Gertrude Himmelfarb glosses over the "Victorian pedigree" of Krugman's own economic and political allegiances.  "Victorian values" rhetoric, positive or negative, frequently imposes an artificial homogeneity on a very heterogeneous period: after all, there were Victorian feminists critiquing the institution of marriage right next to the conservatives insisting that marriage and motherhood was women's destiny, Victorian socialists next door to the capitalists, Victorian anti-evangelicals next to the evangelicals, and so on.  In other words, one could just as easily and accurately--or inaccurately--turn the Victorian period into a Golden Age of left-wing, secular, anti-bourgeois radicalism.  It would be just as wrong, to be sure, but perfectly possible. Depending on when and where he looks--we're talking about approximately seven decades and multiple countries, after all--the reader in search of an intellectual ancestry can find just about any representative "Victorian value" to suit his taste. 

Oliver Twist (II)

The second half of Oliver Twist creates a new narrative trajectory for poor, passive Oliver: he moves from an ad hoc, permanently dysfunctional family (Fagin, Nancy, Bill, and co.) to another ad hoc and presently dysfunctional family (Brownlow, Rose Maylie, and Leeford/Monks).  Both families transform themselves around Oliver's presence.  Oliver's preternatural innocence, which attracts Nancy and exerts at least some positive effect on Fagin, turns out to be wildly disruptive when it appears in a criminal context; if Oliver inspires Nancy and even Fagin to do good, their only reward for it is a brutal death, whether salvific or otherwise. (Mike Hale was on the button when he called Fagin's demise "outright martyrdom." More on that in a moment.)  By contrast, in the Brownlow household, the truth of Oliver's goodness inspires Rose Maylie to become a model of virtuous, heroic femininity and Mr. Brownlow to become an ideal patriarch.  Meanwhile, Leeford/Monks, here Brownlow's grandson, is shipped off to the Indies, leaving his half-brother Oliver to take his place as the good heir to Brownlow's estate.   (Which, one notes, Oliver is not persuaded to share.)   Turning the Brownlow-Maylie-Monks relationship into a matter of genetics and guardianship, rather than coincidence (we're near the end of the novel before Brownlow meets Rose), creates this parallel between the two "families"--a parallel emphasized further when Sikes brings Oliver back to Fagin to recuperate, instead of leaving Oliver behind at the Maylies.  Monks' erotic and, one suspects, potentially abusive fixation on Rose now doubles Bill Sikes' obsession with Nancy.  Nancy's spontaneous affection for Oliver anticipates Rose's apparently innate sentiments.  And Fagin, of all people, turns out to be a warped Brownlow.  

By the end of the adaptation, in fact, we are far, far away from the novel.  Bill Sikes, for example, still murders Nancy, but instead of accidentally hanging himself during his escapade on the roof, he deliberately hangs himself in a sewer drain.  (It's as though somebody decided to invert the location for his death.)  The Artful Dodger isn't transported; instead, after the dual traumas of Nancy's murder (for which he is partly and accidentally responsible) and Fagin's execution, he inherits Bill's still-lively dog and, we are led to believe, sets off to become a miniature replica of Bill himself.  While Oliver settles down to a pleasant existence with his newfound family, the Dodger, who has lost his family, winds up remaking himself according to the worst male role model he can find.  And then, of course, we have Fagin's fate.  The policemen sneer at him as a "Jew" and kill his pet bird; the jailers feed him bacon-soaked bread; the jury convicts him of something that suspiciously resembles the blood libel.  At his sentencing, Fagin refuses to pray to Christ in order to obtain "mercy," and one of the guards derisively snatches the yarmulke off his head.  What's interesting about this final overload of Victorian anti-Semitism is that it contradicts the adaptation's otherwise enthusiastic endorsement of nature over nurture.  Oliver's goodness transcends its context, but the ending suggests that Fagin's criminality is the only possible outcome of a culture this rabidly prejudiced.   

Brief notes on GladCAT

GladCAT is the digitized catalog of William Ewart Gladstone's library at St. Deiniol's.  The catalog is devoted entirely to Gladstone's personal collection (as opposed to the entirety of St. Deiniol's Library) and is of particular interest because it incorporates most of Gladstone's annotations--which the user can also search.  At present, users need a free PIN to access the catalog.  The search interface is easy enough to use, and (an added plus) can generate results with e-mail links and in different citation styles; there doesn't seem to be any way of saving searches, but the catalog provides download and print options.  Gladstone's annotations themselves are transcriptions, not images, which is probably just as well.  My only caveat about the display format is that the catalog runs each volume's marginal notes into single-spaced paragraphs, which makes reading them somewhat difficult. 

Using the catalog will not eliminate the need to travel to the library, because only the marginal notes make sense out of context; the catalog indicates pages with underlining, question marks, carets, and the like, but doesn't identify what has been underlined unless there's a marginal note attached. Still, online users can discover Gladstone's opinions about Fanny Burney's The Wanderer ("marvellously [sic] elongated") and inept poetry translations (next to one instance, he snaps "hardly one").   Gladstone also seemed given to collecting books about Eton.  His Tennyson holdings, meanwhile, included a copy of Enoch Arden translated into...Latin?!  (A reviewer was polite but dubious.) 

This Week's Acquisitions

• Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn (Vintage, 2000).  Orphans + gangsters = revisionist crime fiction.  (Lift Bridge)
• Dan Simmons, Drood (Little, Brown, 2009).  Neo-Egyptian rituals, laudanum, sexual shenanigans, cannibalism, murder...and, of course, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. (BOMC)
• Marcus Tanner, Ireland's Holy Wars: The Struggles for a Nation's Soul, 1500-2000 (Yale, 2003).  A journalist's take on Ireland's history from the sixteenth century to the present.  (Amazon [secondhand])

Alien-ated Jane?

Yes--it's Pride and Predator.  Plus news of vampire Jane!

Drood

Charles Dickens' notoriously unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) has inspired any number of  attempts to solve the murder [1].   The reader who picks up Dan Simmons' Drood looking for a continuation of Dickens' novel, however, will be in for a shock--because Drood doesn't attempt to finish Dickens' novel so much as to turn it inside out.  Like Simmons' last neo-Victorian novel, The Terror, Drood joins a straightforward historical novel in the classical realist mode to a Gothic tale; in this case, Wilkie Collins' vexed relationship with Dickens (and with his own writing) runs alongside a threatened invasion of England by an Egyptian cult, headed by none other than the title character.  Needless to say, this is not the solution to The Mystery of Edwin Drood.  Perhaps more unexpectedly, the narrator is not Dickens but Collins.  And dear Wilkie may not be the most reliable of narrators...

Given that our narrator is a novelist obsessed with another novelist, it should come as no surprise that the nature and effect of Dickens' storytelling itself forms part of the plot.   Collins plays a narrative trick on the reader right from the beginning: in the first chapter, he retells Dickens' account of his first meeting with the horrific and mysterious Drood in the aftermath of the Staplehurst railway crash; in the second, he actually describes the conditions under which Dickens told him the story.  As it happens, what Collins delays telling us is that Dickens first tried to mesmerize him, but failed--because, as Collins sternly announces, "My will is too strong" (29).  Or did Dickens fail? Hmmm.  In any event, Collins initially refuses to believe in Drood's existence, especially once Dickens cheerfully announces that "cannibalism" is involved:

...It was true that during his narration of the accident, I'd held serious doubts about the description and even the actual existence of this "Drood"--the man seemed more a character out of a sensationalist novel than any human reality that could be encountered on the tidal train from Folkestone--but I had ascribed that possibility of hallucination to the same sense of shock and disorientation that had robbed Dickens of his voice.  But if Dickens were imagining cannibalism, it was quite possible that the accident had robbed him of his reason as well as his voice.  (31)

This amusingly metafictional passage sums up the narrative challenges facing both Dickens (when dealing with Collins) and Collins (when dealing with us).  Collins interprets "Drood" as a monster of the mind, shaped suspiciously like a creature from a genre novel; he initially finds this product of a shocked imagination far less interesting than Dickens' realist account of the accident's many horrors.  This conjunction of  and conflict between realism and the Gothic miniaturizes the novel's own two-way plot.  Dickens, though, wishes to make the fantastic seem just as "real" as the material horrors of the accident, and Collins fails to see that while his friend/rival has lost his physical voice, he has not lost his creative voice.  Dickens does his best to make Collins believe in the reality of Drood and Drood's evil plot against England, taking him on an eerie adventure through the London sewers (some readers may be reminded of Clare Clark's The Great Stink) and insisting that Drood has been staring through the window.  Still, Collins resists, even though Inspector Charles Field, who has fallen on somewhat hard times, believe that something is afoot. 

Nearly three hundred pages in, though, Collins has a horrific vision during one of Dickens' public readings, in which he sees Dickens as Drood--a proof that Drood really is a "figment of the writer's imagination," which Dickens has invented for "[a] mischievous sense of power over others" (285).  Dickens' novelistic power over his audience morphs into a different kind of narrative skill, in which the great novelist wickedly "plots" in such a way as to trap his friends and foes into living out a novel; as Collins tells Field, "[w]e are now involved, you and I, in Charles Dickens' Game of Drood" (287).  But Dickens himself pushes the point further, for he tells Collins that Drood has singled Dickens out on account of his authorship (385); to make matters worse, Drood soon proceeds to chain Collins to his writing desk, as it were, by inserting a scarab beetle into his brain.

Er, what, you ask?

Collins struggles with writer's block throughout the novel, and sometimes believes that his mysterious double, the "other Wilkie," is writing for him.  (The real Collins reported hallucinating a doppelganger.)   Drood transforms both writing and audience reception into a matter of Gothic magic and horror, simultaneously inexplicable by purely rational methods, frighteningly powerful, and often deeply agonizing.  (I suppose you could read this novel as a descendant of Stephen King's The Shining.)  When Collins undergoes an Egyptian ("Egyptian") ritual during one of his opium dreams--or thinks he does, anyway--the terrors of the scarab echo the more mundane terrors of writing for pay, "a pain of pressure on top of the pressure of pain crawling and digging its way through my screaming brain and body" (481). Despite Collins' frequent turns to literary criticism, his experiences with Dickens and Drood suggest that the inspired writer is a possessed writer--a horror-novel update of a very old trope.  And the enthralled audience, in turn, may be a possessed audience.  Lurking behind Collins' very Trollopean interests in pages produced and cash received, then, is a much more dangerous history of the Victorian novel, one that threatens the last remnants of both the writer's and the reader's control...

Drood's reworking of The Mystery of Edwin Drood begins, in fact, with this heavy injection of Gothic horror.  Turning Drood into an evil, cannibalistic death-monger almost comically inverts the original: Dickens' Drood exemplifies twerpitude in action, to put it mildly (the closest equivalent in this novel is young Edmond Dickenson, who comes equipped with a significant name); his trip to Egypt obviously never comes off.  British activities in Egypt here become faux-Egyptian activities in Britain, in a neo-Victorian take on imperial gothic similar to Simmons' The Terror. There are a number of obvious borrowings from TMOED, including characters like Dradles (Durdles) and Hatchery (Datchery), and Collins' love-hate obsession with Dickens--not to mention Collins' eventual decision to kill Dickens--mirrors Jasper's obsession with his nephew.  (Which, incidentally, does make Dickens Drood--but not in the way that Collins first thinks.)   Readers will also recognize various settings from Dickens' novel, here turned back into their geographic originals.   All of this, however, interfaces with Collins' own autobiography and fiction--in particular, the Egyptian "invasion" of England owes much to The Moonstone.  Collins, in effect, writes himself into a sensation novel, complete with horrific hauntings (based on Collins' real, laudanum-induced hallucinations) and multiple murders. 

Having said all this, I felt that this novel had exactly the same problem as The Terror, only magnified: the realist plot (Collins vs. Dickens) has the potential to be much more interesting than the horror elements.  In fact, Drood and the mock-Egyptian material all struck me as more silly than scary.  Perhaps Simmons thought so too, because he keeps dropping the Drood plot to concentrate on Collins, Collins' insecurities, Collins' drug-taking, Collins' mistreatment of the women in his life, Collins' jealousy of Dickens, Collins engaging in literary criticism, and so forth.   Collins, I fear, is a connoisseur of excellent whine, and he whines for 771 pages; there's nothing wrong with an unpleasant narrator--some great narrators have been deeply unpleasant--but if he's going to hang about for nearly eight hundred pages, then more subtlety is in order.  Given that Collins is "writing" this novel, it's possible that we are supposed to take the kitschy Egyptian stuff as part of the supposed confessions of a second-rate mind, so to speak, along with the horses that "vomited from the smell" of refuse (65; seriously, not possible) and the narrative's meandering plot construction.  However, I have doubts.  (See also the novel's final plot twist, although the alert reader will have figured it out much earlier.)    I also could not help noting that Collins rarely wrote Dickensian doorstops, Armadale and The Woman in White aside. Like The Terror, this book would have been far more effective if it had been far shorter, with the three-by-five cards less in evidence and put to better use [2]. 

[1] Gaslight has an e-text of the novel in its serial format, along with links to some of the solutions (and discussions thereof).  For a bibliography of such attempts, see the Dickens Drood Collection at the University of Minnesota.  Here's a nineteenth-century continuation in which Drood is not murdered at all (although John Jasper thinks he is). 

[2] A case in point: we get a nearly four-page digression about the actor William Charles Macready (223-27), who plays a very minor role in the plot, but not even a tag to explain the identity of the briefly-mentioned Augustus Egg. 

Oliver Twist (I)

As I observed the last time I discussed an adaptation of Oliver Twist, the problem with Oliver Twist is Oliver Twist.  Oliver epitomizes the flat character: his morality is entirely innate, the product of genteel nature instead of brutal nurture, and none of the horrors he encounters sully his personality in any form.   Not surprisingly, adaptations generally work around the title character.  This newest Oliver Twist, however, clearly has more revisionist ambitions. 

Like the recent Bleak House and the slightly older David Copperfield, OT relies on warp-speed plotting to get from one narrative post-hole to another; poor Oliver has barely made it to Mr. Brownlow's before he gets returned to Fagin and Sikes.  The production team amps things up further with a heavy dose of farce (Oliver's escape from the Sowerbys), not to mention aggressively anachronistic underscoring that yokes rock n' roll guitar stylings to the Victorian era.  In addition, the art direction conveniently color-codes Oliver's movement through space, from the dull greys of the workhouse to the dull wood of Fagin's lair to the bright creams and whites of the spartan Brownlow house.  This is not to say that the adaptation neglects the usual conventions for representing Victorian London, including mud, dirt, and...ahem...an emptied chamber pot.  (Not to mention multiple closeups of bad teeth.  Oliver's teeth seem oddly good, one must note--innate gentility has its uses when you're stuck in a workhouse, I suppose.)  The London streets frequently look claustrophobic, with lots of shots through winding passage-ways, jostling crowds, and dank alleys.

Writer Sarah Phelps and director Coky Giedroyc do their best to amp up Oliver as well: this Oliver doesn't just ask for more, but also talks back, far more than his original ever did.  His moments of aggressive spunk go well beyond exacting vengeance on anyone who insults his mother, whether it's throwing a plate at the Artful Dodger or staring down Bill Sikes.  At the same time, Phelps seems trammeled by Dickens' plot, in which Oliver gets toted about passively from place to place, and her Oliver ultimately suffers a similar fate; viewers may be tempted to count the number of times somebody grabs Oliver by the collar and drags him off.  Unfortunately, matters are not helped by the young actor's frequently blank stare, and the Artful Dodger could have stood some injections of zest.  (As well as better diction.)

The production clearly wants to underscore Dickens' political points about how the rich exploit the weak, although its zippy plotting sometimes undermines the proceedings.  The running theme of food--where is it, who has it, who gets to eat it, what's in it--sums up the desperate struggle that characterizes the life of the poor.  Clothing, too, plays a similar role, from the "flash" dress of Fagin and his lot to the restrained but appropriately genteel garments of Brownlow and co.; in a sense, Oliver, being a blank himself, undergoes his most profound changes in identity when he changes his clothes.  Most obviously, the adaptation makes oppression a matter of race and religion as well as of class.  This Fagin may be a thief--and physically grotesque to boot--but  he's also a devout Orthodox Jew (the sausages and bacon are reserved for the kiddies); his "business" takes on Robin Hood-esque overtones.  This take on Fagin holds up Dickens' own text for critique, although we should note that anti-anti-Semitic Fagins are not original.  By contrast, the Afro-Caribbean Nancy seems to be less a riposte to Dickens than to our own stereotypes about the racial makeup of Victorian Britain.