The Little Professor

This Week's Acquisitions

• Jenn Ashworth, A Kind of Intimacy (Europa, 2010).  Woman takes self-help advice perhaps somewhat too seriously. Gore and mayhem ensue.  (UCLA Bookstore)
• Simon During, Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Harvard, 2004).  Argues for the cultural significance of magic separated from its religious origins.  (UCI Bookstore)

A behind-the-scenes look at the research process

Regular visitors to this blog are aware that I tend to read books that are not, shall we say, first in line for canonization in the near future.  Or the far future.  Or...any future, really.  This is what happens when you have a taste for doing literary history.  In any event, prior to hanging out at UCLA's Sadleir Collection,  I decided to read the first volume of an 1829 novel that, for reasons not immediately clear to me, exists on GoogleBooks in volumes one and three, but not, as far as I can tell, volume two.  The Sadleir Collection, however, has all three volumes.  Isn't that lucky?

Ahem. 

The novel is Oldcourt, by Sir Martin Archer Shee, a man who usually did other things with his time than write novels.  Needless to say, I ought to have taken that as a sign.  Of impending doom.

For the edification of my readers, allow me to reconstruct the experience of reading volume one.  With allowances, of course, for some...self-dramatization. 

Pp. iii-v.  Shee breaks out the modesty trope.  Everybody in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is modest.  All books impose on the public.  Nobody publishes anything remotely interesting, noteworthy, or otherwise unusual.  It's a wonder that the novel even exists as a literary form, once you think about it.

Under the circumstances, this is not cause for concern.  Yet.

The introduction.  An Irish family sits around debating the state of contemporary fiction, its decline and fall (or rise and flourishing, depends on which character you ask), the merits of Sir Walter Scott, the brilliance of Fielding and Sterne, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseam.   Presumably, Shee wants to justify writing a novel.  The less-than-charitably inclined, however, may feel an urge to remind him that introductions should not be forty-two pages long, and that it is generally considered advisable to get to the plot.  Alas, as Shee has been dead since 1850, it is somewhat difficult to point this out to him. 

Perhaps now would be a good time to invest in a ouija board, or conduct a seance.

Page 43.  Shee explains that this novel will be about the Oldcourts.  The reader, continuing to feel less than charitable, gently observes to no-one in particular that she knew this already, because the Oldcourts took up the first forty-two pages of the novel. 

Also, the book is called Oldcourt. Unless that's supposed to be some sort of bait-and-switch.

Page 44.  Shee decides that now would be a good time to discuss in medias res.  The innocent reader begins to feel a nagging concern.

Page 50.  Shee has been discussing the various problems facing poets, biographers, and novelists.  The reader, beginning to feel somewhat put-upon, wonders when we are going to get to the plot.

Page 50.  Wow! We're going to get to the plot!

Page 61.   The reader was, it seems, getting ahead of herself...and of Shee.  By page 61, we know something of the Oldcourt family background, and we know that they are Catholic.  But why, exactly, this book has come to exist upon the face of the earth, remains obscure.  And yet, surely, this novel must actually be about something?

Anything?

Hello?

Page 62.  The dawning of a new chapter.  Unfortunately, this dawn, no matter how rosy-fingered (rosy-fonted?), fails to bring the plot with it.  Instead, Shee's oh-so-playful narrator admits that his "powers of amplification" might be insufficient to produce a triple-decker.  The increasingly irate reader, shaking her first in the general direction of her Acer Aspire One (on which she is reading Oldcourt), points out sternly that this is a triple-decker, and that Shee's "powers of amplification" are all too obviously on view.  Because we still don't know a [insert epithet or expletive of choice here] thing about what the [insert second epithet or expletive of choice here] book is actually about, or why we should be reading it.

The reader calms herself.

Pages 65-66.  Shee is discussing historians, biographers, and novelists.

Again.

The horrified reader suddenly realizes that Shee is imitating Henry Fielding's digressions.  In a fit of inspiration, she wonders if it might be possible to charter a red phone booth and travel back in time to the eighteenth century, where she will eliminate Henry Fielding's novels from the historical record, thereby rendering Oldcourt impossible.  After further thought, she concedes that this might be overkill, and is somewhat unfair to Fielding.

Plus, she hasn't the slightest clue where to find a red phone booth.

Page 76.  NOW SHEE IS WRITNG ABOUT HOSPITALITY WHAT IS THIS I CAN'T I DON'T EVEN

After this moment of inarticulate rage, the reader reminds herself that she is an academic, and should therefore be approaching this novel in a state of scholarly calm.  Moreover, she further reminds herself, just because Shee has yet to establish a plot, the hint of a plot, or even the teensiest wisp of something that, with considerable TLC, could someday be a plot, doesn't mean that he's incompetent.  He might be subverting the conventions of linear narrative, thereby generating an altogether new sense of historical transformation that critiques Sir Walter Scott's post-Enlightenment theories of cultural progress!

Or he might be incompetent.

Page 77.  Shee admits that he might be "going off, as it were, at a tangent..." As it were? As it were?? As it were?!!!

For those of you keeping track, the reader remains in the dark about why this novel has emerged from the depths of GoogleBooks to seize her in its Cthulhu-like tentacles.

(Cthulhu does have tentacles, I think.)

Page 82.  The family Oldcourt reappears.  The reader nearly faints from the shock. What next--a story, even?

Her hopes begin to rise.

Page 92.  There are many anecdotes about the Oldcourts and their various self-destructive behaviors.  This is not quite a plot, but one must applaud any move in that direction on the author's part.  Yet the reader is somewhat distressed to realize that the Oldcourts now under discussion are not the same Oldcourts as those hanging out in the introduction.  The forty-two-page introduction, in case you've forgotten.  

The reader's hopes, initially up, now begin to sink.

Page 93 ff.  Something vaguely resembling, not a plot, but at least a coherent narrative, puts in an appearance.  The reader wonders if she should faint, dance around the room in celebration, or some combination of the two. 

Page 115.  The narrator, who had temporarily digressed from digressing, is now digressing from his non-digression.  This prompts the reader to contemplate defenestrating the book.  Good sense, and an unwillingness to blow another three hundred dollars on a new Acer Aspire One, intervenes.

Page 189.  The narrator puts in an appearance at the Oldcourts' chapel.  The reader takes a moment to tell him exactly what she thinks of him.  For some reason, the narrator remains unconcerned. 

Page 240. After undigressing from the digression from the nondigression which followed the original digressions, the narrator begins redigressing.  (Reredigressing? The reader has lost count.)  By this point, given the choice between unconsciousness or continued perusal, the reader elects unconsciousness.

Several hours intervene, uninterrupted by any dreams pertaining to awful nineteenth-century novels.

Unfortunately, the reader awakes, and upon recollecting the novel's existence, rails at the heavens.  Why has she been forced to bear this burden? Is this some punishment for an unspeakable crime?

After striking some melodramatic poses, however, the reader concedes that this really is her fault, and reminds herself that if she had decided to specialize in Dickens, this would not be happening.

Onward!

Page 270ff.  It appears that Shee dislikes dueling.  The reader gathers this, because we now enter upon a lengthy set-piece about dueling, in which a character expounds his theories of same at length.  Considerable length.  So much length that one of the Oldcourts tries to get him to can it.  If only the author had taken his character's hint!

Page 357.  After much hobnobbing about dueling, the actual duel goes kerflooey. 

Kerflooey, incidentally, is a criminally-underused theoretical term. 

(ETA: I apologize for my lapse in time-travel tech awareness.  Dr. Who fans may consider me appropriately chastened.) 

"Liberality,--A Sketch" (Part II)

[Second half of a deleted section from Book Two, analyzing an Irish Protestant response to Catholic Emancipation in 1829.  Originally, this section was part of a larger examination of "interchangeability" in nineteenth-century pro- and anti-tolerationist rhetoric.  See the post below for Part One.]

As Montgomery/Mortimer dryly notes, he cannot dine with the Catholic priest because his “real sentiments” would produce a sensation most “unpleasing” (42); convivial politeness cannot survive Protestant truths, which the local community will later denounce as “rancor and bigotry” (44). By the end of the story’s first part, the Protestant critique of anti-Catholic prejudice emerges as a form of silencing: in this act of framing avant la lettre, the Protestants render anti-Catholic language unspeakable by describing it as “bigotry,” and create a public sphere indifferent to religion by systematically negating all attempts to bring the Bible to bear on any denomination. In the story’s second half, Egerton’s wife comments that “Protestant writers” (126) bear the responsibility for negative views of Catholics in the nineteenth century, an assertion of bias that the rest of the narrative promptly disallows: the Protestant narrative of the past is the right narrative, from which pro-tolerationists deviate at their peril. From a devout Protestant point of view, the response to Montgomery’s/Mortimer’s sermon, which “did not allow that all religions were alike, or that, in point of fact, no religion was really requisite” (45), reveals the fault line in the logic of interchangeability, for while the curate disallows that religions are interchangeable, the populace demonstrates that an indifferentist attitude to religion is interchangeable with total secularism. In this context, any attempt to delineate a positive truth seems not only rude, but violently disruptive, “tending to set man against man” (44)—a pointedly ironic contrast to the imagery of martyrdom and warfare preserved in Egerton’s library. What the Protestants have done, then, is confuse perceived rhetorical violence with actual physical violence, while suppressing the historical and Biblical narratives that properly differentiate between the two. As we have seen in Egerton’s case, toleration for Catholicism requires Protestants to be bad readers or non-readers, resisting the very texts that would declare pro-Catholic attitudes out of bounds.

The second half of the story devotes itself to restoring the sense of difference between Protestantism and Catholicism. Mr. Egerton receives a series of shocks, all of which reinforce the story’s main point: Catholics believe that the two religions are incommensurable. First, a Catholic servant is refused last rites because he will not allow his Protestant daughter to attend the local Catholic school; Egerton, understandably troubled by the priest’s behavior, nevertheless insists that “We must not, however, judge of churches by individuals: and I shall continue to respect the religion of the Church of Rome, though I cannot but feel shocked at the inhumanity of one of her ordained ministers” (128). Egerton’s resistance to reading the priest symptomatically, however, soon runs into further difficulties. A new priest arrives who undermines the Egertons’ attempts to maintain a Protestant school in the town. Even worse, Egerton, accustomed to regard Moneyrogue as a safe seat, discovers that the Catholics have decided to oppose him. When a loyal Catholic servant of Egerton’s continues to work on his behalf, he is brutally murdered, his “head literally pounded to pieces” (132). Although the perpetrators are caught and executed, Egerton—who loses his parliamentary seat after all—must hear the priest “[speak] to them and of them, as if they had been martyrs” (132). Catholics, who have benefited from Protestant toleration, reassert their difference from Protestants through both physical violence and alternative narratives; if Protestants refuse to identify themselves with their own history of martyrdom, the Catholics are only too happy to represent justice for murder as martyrdom in the cause of truth. The Catholics win the war of rhetorical framing because Protestants falsely associate Scriptural truths with deadly violence. At the same time, the story insists that Catholic rhetoric ultimately produces violence in a way that Scriptural truths do not.  Protestants are right to believe that some religious discourse exemplifies “rancor and bigotry,” but they just happen to be wrong about which religion will have this effect. The story’s ending, with the Protestant turfed out of his parliamentary seat and replaced by a Catholic tool, the alternative school reduced to “silence,” and the countryside glowing with vaguely apocalyptic “bonfires” and the “distant thunder” of Catholic celebrations (133), lays out the ultimate effect of toleration: not egalitarian relations in a polite public sphere, but the brutal removal or suppression of Protestant influence from the nation’s culture. Protestants who keep silent, in other words, will be silenced.

"Liberality,--A Sketch" (Part I)

[One of the frustrations of any scholarly project: the amount of material you wind up deleting from it.  What follows was originally part of Book Two, but wound up being too much of a distraction from the chapter's main point. I've added some notes and hyperlinks, and clarified a few points lost without the original context.  The second half of the excerpt will be in the next post.]

We can see the Protestant historical argument against pro-Catholic toleration at work in a two-part short story that began running in the staunchly anti-Catholic Christian Examiner and Church of Ireland Magazine in July 1829--just two months after the Catholic Emancipation Act passed.  One of the first (if hardly the best) fictional reactions to Catholic Emancipation, “Liberality,--A Sketch” describes the act's after-effects from two points of view.  The first is that of the new Protestant curate, known as Mr. Montgomery or Mr. Mortimer depending on what page we’re reading, and the second of the local landlord, Mr. Egerton. In the first half, the narrative lays out Mr. Montgomery’s/Mortimer’s Protestant critique of Catholic toleration; in the second, it proves that the curate is right and Mr. Egerton wrong about the effects of pro-Catholic sentiment. Taken as a whole, the story charts the dangers of what we now call “framing”: at this post-Emancipation moment in time, the “liberals” have successfully defined themselves as the representatives of enlightened modernity, allowing Catholics an equal place in the public sphere while denouncing all opposition thereto as antiquated, not to mention potentially threatening, prejudice. As the title announces, such sentiment derives from “liberality,” and the story immediately yokes liberality to both commercialism and the Gothic: the town, after all, is called “Moneyrogue,” an aesthetically-pleasing but spiritually-deadened “market town,” governed by the principle of exchange, and it is “grievously afflicted by a spirit—a spirit! Yes, by a spirit of liberality."¹ (By "liberality," the author means something close to John Henry Newman's definition of early Victorian liberalism, the "anti-dogmatic principle."²)  The first paragraph begins by associating this problematically-named town with taste (the lovely church, the picturesque location), modernity (a fine local doctor), and benevolence (the resident landlord), but sprouting in the midst is the architectural monstrosity of the Roman Catholic chapel, “most enormous and overgrown” (37), which spoils both the view and the religious feeling of the area. But the ironically Gothic “spirit” haunting the town does not, in fact, reside in the Church; it resides in the entire town. In fact, this “spirit” has other unusual qualities, for it is not the uneasy remnant of some unsettled past, but an artifact of contemporary and living culture. Nor does the spirit unsettle those under its sway. Quite the contrary:

¹ “Liberality, A Sketch,” The Christian Examiner and Church of Ireland Magazine 9 (July 1829): 37.

² For an extensive discussion of this and other meanings of "liberal," "liberality," and "liberalism" in Victorian religious discourse, see Michael Wheeler, The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century English Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), 245-72. 

This Week's Acquisitions

• Frans G. Bengtsson, The Long Ships, trans. Michael Meyer (NYRB, 2010). Reprint of 1941 novel about Vikings! In the tenth century! Sailing, swashbuckling, and generally causing mayhem! (Borders)

Stone's Fall

The structure of Iain Pears' Stone's Fall will be familiar to anyone acquainted with his earlier An Instance of the Fingerpost: three male narrators tell stories which, in some way, touch on industrialist John Stone, Lord Ravenscliff, and his wife, a mysterious Hungarian named Elizabeth. The title presents us with what is supposedly the mystery--how could Stone accidentally topple out of a window when he was afraid of heights?--but it also turns out to be a pun, for Stone's fall turns out to be as moral as it is physical.   To get to that point, we go back in time.  The novel begins in 1953, with the first narrator, Braddock, attending Elizabeth's funeral; it then jumps back to 1909, as Braddock, then a struggling journalist and would-be Socialist, is asked to investigate both the mysterious child mentioned in Stone's will and the circumstances of his "fall"; then back to 1900, as elite spy Henry Cort reminisces about the time he stopped several European powers from destroying the British Empire, an enterprise that involves both Stone and Elizabeth; and then, finally, to 1863, as Stone himself tells the story of his adulterous affair with Louise Cort (Henry's mother).  As we move through the narrative layers, it becomes clearer that Stone's "fall" is not, after all, a singular event...

As a neo-Victorian novel, Stone's Fall turns out to be rooted (intentionally or otherwise) in some very recognizable Victorian traditions.  Without being a retelling of any particular novel, it owes much to the worlds of Trollope's The Way We Live Now and Dickens' Little Dorrit--crossed with Frankenstein.  (That last is actually very Victorian: Frankenstein imagery crops up frequently to describe the threat posed by the working classes.)  Unlike one of Scott's historical novels, in which modernity clashes with some outdated cultural formation, Stone's Fall drops us directly into the era of industrial capitalism, in which power is money. Characters live and prosper only insofar as they grasp this salient fact. And money is both liquid and neutral.  Thus, Stone cheerfully builds torpedoes for England and any other nation that can pay his bill; or, as he says to Henry Cort, "'It is the task of a company to generate capital.  That is its beginning and its end, and it is foolish and sentimental to apply morality to it, let alone patriotism'" (286).  Nations impose "restraints" on companies, which those companies then in turn "strain forever" to undermine and subvert--all in the name of "profits" (287).  Stone's ideals are not, in other words, those of Carlyle's Captains of Industry, let alone of Dinah Craik's John Halifax.  But if companies may function in this fashion, Stone ultimately cannot.  Despite his habit of using "I" as a convenient shortcut for discussing his immensely complicated international empire, Stone runs abruptly aground when it comes to intimate relationships.  Erotic desire, as Elizabeth successfully demonstrates in her career as a well-paid mistress, can be successfully managed and turned to profit by anyone willing to separate affect from sex; love, however, is the spanner in the capitalist works.  Unlike the ostensible neutrality of Stone's capitalist maneuverings, love demands reciprocity, self-forgetfulness, an awareness of consequences.  Where the novel's capitalism is relentlessly global, love turns out to be entirely local.  And Stone may not be much of a Christian, but love forces him to recognize his "sins" (593).   Ironically enough, Stone's love for Elizabeth, far from being personally redemptive, ultimately ejects him from his own capitalist Eden of pure profit-driven exchange. 

But this love-glitch is only part of the problem.  Invoking Frankenstein, Braddock tells Henry Cort that Stone's "companies had come alive; he had created a monster, and it was acting in its own interests, no longer taking orders" (230).  Although this is, in fact, clearly part of Stone's problem, Braddock nevertheless gets the answer to the mystery wrong--as any reader should guess, seeing as how his explanation comes about halfway through a nearly six-hundred page novel--and that's part of the more general problem.  Braddock, Cort, and even Stone are all given to believing in their own stories, until it is too late; they are first-person narrators who aspire to omniscience.  (This even though some of them, like Cort the master spy, argue that their lives subvert all the conventions of the thriller genre.  Cort is up on the relevant plot elements, but miscalculates anyway.)  The moment a character believes s/he not only grasps the situation, but also can fully manipulate it, s/he is lost.  As morals go, this one is perfectly Victorian.  This is true of supporting characters as well: one man dies because, too confident, he fails to realize that he's caught up in multiple plots, while Louise Cort turns out to be a kind of Jane Eyre parody, a woman who makes her way up the food chain on the power of Gothic narrative.   The only character who succeeds is the protean Elizabeth, whose career is a rather bleaker version of Becky Sharp's--but, as far as the reader can tell, she succeeds in part by abandoning Stone's world altogether, investing the entirety of her fortune in orphanages "run on the very latest humanitarian principles" (5). Significantly, though, Elizabeth does not know and never tries to discover her true origins, and this ignorance keeps her functional.

This Week's Acquisitions

• Emily Lawless, With Essex in Ireland... (Smith, Elder & Co., 1890).  Historical diary novel in the voice of Essex's fictional secretary, who records the expedition's increasingly disastrous experiences.   There's a brief overview of Lawless' career here.  (AbeBooks)
• Nnedi Okorafor, Who Fears Death (DAW, 2010).  Apocalypse novel set in Africa.  (Lift Bridge)
• Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Thou Art the Man (Valancourt, 2008).  The former fiancee of a man framed for murder investigates the crime.   First published in 1894.   (Amazon)

The Singing Fire

Jews are not especially prominent in neo-Victorian fiction and film.  Occasionally, they're the leads (the 1998 film The Governess).  More often, they're supporting characters (Byatt's The Children's Book) or just part of the urban scenery (Palliser's The Quincunx). Lilian Nattel's multiplot The Singing Fire, then, is something of a departure for the genre.  It follows the careers of two immigrant women, both of whom have run away from what seem like (or are) insupportable lives: Nehama, from Plotsk, the youngest daughter of a tailor, who runs away to London seeking a better destiny for herself than an arranged marriage; the wealthy Emilia, from Minsk, escaping the terrors of her abusive father (and the impending dangers of her out-of-wedlock pregnancy), who also runs to London in search of comfort and safety.  London, of course, turns out to be anything but safe.  But the dangers arise not just from the predators who prey on innocent foreign girls, but also from pressures on Jewish culture.   Although the characters here rarely have direct contact with politics or earth-shattering events, problems trickle down to them--debates over the "Jewish Question," for example, or the belief that Jack the Ripper was a Jew from the East End.  Characters debate the propriety of speaking "the Jargon," Yiddish.  And some upper-class Jews press for total assimilation, others seek to negotiate between the older traditions and English social expectations, and still others resist the call to submerge their Jewishness. 

The Singing Fire combines Biblical allusions and Jewish folklore with magical realism, fairy tales, and, yes, plots borrowed from nineteenth-century fiction.  To take the last first, Emilia's and Nehama's plots are skewed versions of Pride and Prejudice and Oliver Twist, both referenced explicitly in the text.   Oliver Twist is especially important in Emilia's case: she reinvents herself as first an orphan, and then a Gentile orphan, but ultimately cannot conceal her Jewish identity--rather like Oliver and his ineradicable gentility.  (There are other Dickensian overtones, like the opening paragraphs and their evocation of a "smoky," fog-heavy Whitechapel [1].) At the same time, both characters' romance plots rework Pride and Prejudice, whether in terms of potential unsuitability (Nehama had been forced into prostitution, the full facts of which she conceals from her eventual husband, Nathan) or of religious identity and prejudice (Emilia's husband, Jacob, initially chooses her because he thinks she's a Gentile).  And, yet again, Emilia and Nehama's journeys through working- and upper-middle-class London society rewrite the story of Ruth, who "left her mother's house for a strange country with strange customs and took them on as her own" (83).  As Emilia's mother, psychologically unable to leave the house, tells the story, Ruth the Moabite abandons her origins (associated with the mother) for her new life--but in the Bible, Ruth is actually following her beloved mother-in-law, Naomi, and the new "customs" in question are Jewish.  This tension between the Biblical narrative and Mrs. Rosenberg's retelling works itself out both in Nehama's very limited accomodations with English culture and Emilia's far more insistent attempts to assimilate--attempts which temporarily lead her to abandon not just her biological mother, whose nineteenth-century hysteria prevents her from fleeing her nightmarish husband, but also her "mother" Israel.  She is, in effect, doubly self-orphaned.

Overall, though, these are romance plots, but romance plots which return to the common concerns of both Victorian and neo-Victorian fiction when it comes to women's "careers."  The novel resists the Cinderella resolutions that characterize some neo-Victorian novels--in fact, whatever their initial travails, both Emilia and Nehama wind up in the same class where they started.  Nehama's experience in England launches her into a prostitute narrative, in which she is victimized, in short order, by a Jewish crook, police, doctors, and the otherwise unnamed Squire--her pimp.  Her sole comfort resides in female solidarity with Sally, a Catholic prostitute, and then Minnie, the working-class Jewish woman who spontaneously engineers her rescue.  Once rehabilitated, she marries Nathan, who only vaguely understands what her previous life was like.  Nehama's upward mobility, however, remains limited; the daughter of a tailor marries one, and the two of them eke out a relatively comfortable but nevertheless precarious existence.  Emilia, meanwhile, abandons her illegitimate daughter to Nehama, then launches herself back into the upper middle classes by taking a job as a shop girl.  When it came to Victorian anxieties about female sexuality, shop girls were just a few steps above prostitutes when it came to erotic danger; between her job  and her illicit pregnancy, Emilia is as problematic a marriage prospect as Nehama.  In a Victorian novel, both marriage plots would constitute cultural nightmares of the worst order, with "fallen women" illicitly transforming themselves into would-be virtuous wives and mothers.  (Dickens and Collins only allow for such rehabilitation outside of England.) And in some neo-Victorian novels, Nehama's and Emilia's sexual experience, whether abusive or not, would ground some sort of individualist, liberatory politics.   Here, though, the boundary between performance and reality turns out to be permeable, so that Emilia, Grandfather Zalkin's "good yokhelta," can turn out after all to be his "good yiddina" (287).  And the two women aspire not to individual freedom per se, but rather to comfortably settled domestic lives. 

This emphasis on women performing their roles is part and parcel of the novel's structure: the book is divided into acts and features frequent outings to the Yiddish theater, with appearances by the legendary actor Jacob Adler.  In part, the theater miniaturizes the immigrant experience.  "No one in the world loved theater more than Londoners," the narrator tells us, "and among them none more than the Jews.  When they came to the free land, the old made a match with the new, and a butcher from home who changed his name to Smith built the Yiddish theater" (3).  Jews are Londoners, but they are also of their own culture; a Jew takes one of the most anonymous English names possible, yet holds on to his distinctive language.  Immigration and acculturation have their own romances, producing what may be, in the end, a rather awkward marriage.  In fact, as both a space and a venue for imagination, the theater frequently turns out to be problematic.  Emilia is seduced at the opera, and her mother undergoes a crucial mental breakdown there.  Nehama hears Jacob Adler giving voice to the sufferings of "the poor, the lost, the defeated" (88), only to suffer yet another miscarriage; later, in an echo of Villette, the crowd at the Yiddish theater, caught up in a historical drama, turns "an effect of stagecraft" (124) into a blaze, resulting in a panicked stampede that kills several people.  And even at the end, when Nehama's (and  Emilia's) shy daughter Gittel-Sarah finally finds her public singing voice--a moment that would normally signal feminist self-discovery--she does it in a bar in front of the horrifying Squire, inadvertently running the risk of repeating her mother's victimization.  Imagination and performance turn out to be consistently liberating and dangerous, self-fulfilling and deadly.  

Englishness turns out to be one of the most dangerous performances of all.  Nehama is at her most English as a prostitute, but shows little interest in English culture per se once she escapes.  Although she enjoys reading English fiction, England for her primarily represents economic opportunity--even if she and her husband do agree that "a woman in the free land didn't need to wear a wig" (118), one of her few appropriations from her new surroundings.  The East End Jews are generally uninterested in the Gentile world outside, except insofar as it impinges on them (as in the Jack the Ripper case), and Nehama believes in the grand literary potential of Yiddish.  By contrast, middle- and upper-class Jewish society takes thorough-going assimilation as its mantra.  As Mrs. Zalkind explains to Emilia, "[h]er sons were born in the East End, but you would see no sign of it in their demeanor now.  They were British through and through, as she often told them" (155).  The not-so-implicit Jewish anti-Semitism at work here finds its fullest manifestation in the Jewish Board of Guardians, funded by "middle-class Anglo-Jews whose hearts went out to the oppressed in Russia and recoiled from them in East London" (186), and the Jews' Free School, where students are warned by the headmaster that their parents' Polish origin "will defile you if you allow it" (209).  Above all, students at the Jews' Free School are warned not to speak Yiddish, a prejudice Emilia shares.  But at a Free School commemoration, her husband Jacob articulates the novel's critique of such suppression: "'Where else than here, among you, my friends, should I confess that, despite my entire loyalty to this, the country of my birth and my grandfather's refuge, I sometimes have un-English yearnings?'" (312)  Rather like Nehama and Gittel-Sarah, whose dreams never fully turn into reality, Jacob finds that his call for a truly Anglo-Jewish identity meets with little sympathy--indeed, he never manages to finish his speech.  Nevertheless, this moment solidifies Emilia's decision to reveal her secret, and suggests that the English Jew and the Jewish immigrant may be able to shape a future that might join Englishness and Jewishness without swamping one by the other.

But this secret could not be revealed without the intervention of the novel's two ghosts, Nehama's grandmother and the first Mrs. Rosenberg.  Visible to Nehama, Emilia, and occasionally others as well, the two ghosts memorialize both Jewish suffering and Jewish strength. As the narrator explains, "earth is for people, and the mother of a people has to go with them [...] And though her grandchildren would speak a different mother tongue and have customs unknowable to her, they would also rise from the graveyard for the sake of their children, so that they would not be abandoned in their exile" (3).  Although the standard-issue reason for haunting is unfinished business, these ghosts choose to haunt their descendants (or affiliates) so that the "business" of Judaism may never be finished.  Far from demanding vengeance or seeking to repeat long-ago crimes, these ghosts (especially the grandmother) offer practical advice and pointed interventions, as long as Nehama and Emilia are willing to listen.  The Jewish past is a nurturing mother, even when, as in the case of the first Mrs. Rosenberg, she is an adoptive mother (just as Nehama adopts Gittel-Sarah).   But these mothers are also ferocious protectors who would protect their daughters "[e]ven from the next world," as Nehama promises Gittel-Sarah (316).    Even though the novel's men carry most of Judaism's public burden, it is ultimately its women whose passionate energy maintains its essence. 

In search of lost GoogleBooks periodicals

One of the interesting questions raised by GoogleBooks has to do with what we might call scan recycling: POD publishers who just rip GoogleBooks scans, turn them into cheap paperbacks, and sell them.  (Or, alternately, turn them into e-Books and sell them.)  A colleague of mine told me today that some of the nineteenth-century German periodicals he had been consulting on GoogleBooks had vanished, only to be replaced by links to POD versions...which are now purportedly "copyrighted," even though the only thing the publisher has done is reprint the scan.   For obvious reasons, this was a cause for concern, so I decided to see what was going on in my neck of the woods.  I went looking for The Bulwark, and got these results:

Even after dickering around slightly with the search terms, I was only able to pull up five volumes of the journal, and only one of those five volumes was available in full text.  The other four are inaccessible POD copies.   But wait! Where are all the other copies of The Bulwark--like the ones in my library?

I was relieved to see that they were still all present and accounted for.  Yet they don't appear in a general search.  For example, a general search brings up only the POD copy of volumes one and two.  However, going to the "About this Book" page of the single full-text search result and clicking on "other editions" brings up...you guessed it...the full text of those same volumes.  This is not what I would call an efficient search protocol.  I had similar results with the Christian Remembrancer: a general search pulled up only the POD of volume fifty-three, but fooling around with the "other editions" on one of the full-text results brought up a full view copy.  (Looking at "other editions" of a POD version, incidentally, yielded only more POD "editions.") In both cases, the only way to pull up the full-text version in a general search was to specify the volume number in the search box (e.g., "'christian remembrancer' volume 53").   This limits the usefulness of GoogleBooks' search results for anyone trying to get a sense of what's actually available in the collection--how many people will know there's a volume fifty-three of the Christian Remembrancer?

Books cost too much, addendum

Dad the Emeritus Historian of Graeco-Roman Egypt suggested that I wander over to the Chronicle and read this article on reducing the cost of textbooks.  Now, I have not written a textbook, but for over a dozen years, I have been helping out said Dad and others with their textbook--what I call "one of the oddest lines on my CV"--and not everything in the article quite squared with this experience.  Obviously, YMMV. 

The author, David W. Lewis, is concerned that "colleges" are insufficiently involved in textbook purchasing.  His definition of "college" seems to be entirely administrative and institutional, as it appears to exclude the actual faculty--those people exerting their "own preferences" as to which textbooks to order.  So.  The faculty choose textbooks; the publishers "sell those selected textbooks to each student through bookstores"; and, last but not least, "the institutions usually take no ownership interest in the intellectual property that their faculty members create for textbooks, even when the resulting income to the faculty member is significant."  What he wants to do, then, is strip as much profit from the entire deal as possible.  Publishers charge less; faculty earn less (or, it sounds like, earn nothing); students, supposedly, pay less.     

What's really puzzling is this claim: "After a year or two, with investment at that scale, enough content would be in place that a modest student book fee of, say, $50 could be easily justified, and, within three to five years, that fee could rise to $100."  This is...odd.  Dad and his three co-authors signed a contract with Oxford in 1994; the first edition of their book came out in 1999.  This, he notes, is considered relatively speedy in the history textbook writing world (an acquaintance of his spent ten years writing a highly-regarded world history textbook).  Now, it might well be faster to put together an open-source introductory math text, or to anthologize content produced by other online sources, but a fully finished and fact-checked college-level history textbook, with maps, images, and charts (not to mention permissions from all the relevant publishers¹), will require much more than a "year."  In a year, you might have a rough draft.  (Of a few chapters.)  Moreover, Dad went on to point out, there's no sense here that a textbook counts as a book, with an actual "plot."  Even anthologies generally have some sort of plot.    (And, in English, "textbooks" are rarely useful; I need editions, anthologies, and the occasional monograph.  See previous "Books" post for why, so far, it's really difficult to teach using what's currently available online.) 

¹ Because once faculty move away from the informal "let's grab some articles off the web!" model and move to "let's generate content that's going to produce cash for the university!", things will look a little different.