The Little Professor

This Week's Acquisitions

• Harriet Beecher Stowe, Agnes of Sorrento (Ticknor & Fields, 1862).  3rd ed. of Stowe's (mostly forgotten) historical novel set in Italy at the time of Savonarola; in the UK, published in the Cornhill right before Eliot's Romola.  (eBay)
• [Sarah Towne Martyn], Ilverton Rectory; Or, the Non-Conformists in the 17th Century.  Founded on Fact (American Tract Society, 1864).  Historical novel about the fate of a clergyman and his family after the Act of Uniformity of 1662 (which resulted in the Great Ejection).  Towne Martyn (nee Smith) (1805-79) was an American novelist and editor who frequently wrote religious fiction about Protestants in the UK and on the Continent.  (eBay)
• A. H. Edgar, John Bull and the Papists; Or, Passages in the Life of an Anglican Rector (Garland, 1976).  "Novels of Faith and Doubt" reprint of a novel first published in 1846.  Despite the title, this is actually a pro-Catholic controversial novel.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Linda Ferri, Cecilia, trans. Ann Goldstein (Europa, 2010).  Historical novel about St. Cecilia, originally published in Italian.  (Lift Bridge)
• Deborah A. Logan, ed., Harriet Martineau and the Irish Question (Lehigh, 2012).  Collects Martineau's journalism on Irish topics.  I'm reviewing this for Choice.  (Review copy)
• Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Belknap, 2012).  Traces the "hyperpluralism" of modern culture back to the side-effects of Protestant upheaval.  (Amazon)
• Donald M. Lewis, The Origins of Christian Zionism: Lord Shaftesbury and Evangelical Support for a Jewish Homeland (Cambridge, 2009).  Studies Shaftesbury's role in the nascent Christian Zionist movement.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Nicholas Penny, ed., Sir Joshua Reynolds (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986).  Exhibition catalog from the Royal Academy of Sir Joshua Reynolds' work.  (The Bookery)
• Katherine A. Lochnan, ed., The Earthly Paradise: Arts and Crafts by William Morris and His Circle from Canadian Collections (Key Porter, 1996).  Textiles, wallpapers, printing, stained glass, etc.  (The Bookery)
• Peter Tomory, The Life and Times of Henry Fuseli (Thames & Hudson, 1972).  Biographical and critical study of the Swiss painter, best known for The Nightmare.  (The Bookery)

Recalculating

This morning, as I was getting ready for work, the following thoughts  meandered through my mind:

1) We're getting close to midterms.

2) Hey, I should talk to the Gothic class today about midterms!

3) Usual spiel: objective section, short ans--wait, I've lost ten minutes of class time. 

4) Drat! How do I reorganize my exams?

For the past thirteen years or so, my midterms in the straightforward literary courses (as opposed to skills classes like intro to lit analysis) have broken down, percentage-wise, into 10-20-70.  Ten points for the objective section* (a.k.a. "Did you or did you not do the reading?"), twenty for short answer identifications, and seventy for the essay.  This arrangement gives the student a bit of leeway, since they can (in theory) make up for a poor showing in one spot with a strong showing in another: if they do extremely well on the first two sections, then they can still pass the exam even after suffering a momentary block on the essay, and vice-versa.  (On the other hand, if they didn't do the reading  and are trying to bluff their way through, the result isn't going to be an A.) 

It doesn't make much sense to me to keep all three sections while abridging the first two, and I really don't want to eliminate the essay.  Moreover, because I would like them to have five minutes or so of breathing space at the end, I feel a little unconfortable doing four short answer IDs; they need at least five minutes for each one, and the essay takes thirty minutes.   (I have visions of a classroom full of frantic students, leading to Gothic results for yours truly.)   Right now, I'm leaning toward a slightly longer objective section, while giving the essay more weight--something like 15-85. 

*--My philosophy of quotation/title matching, in case you're wondering, is that being able to recognize quotations is a survival skill in literary studies, not makework.  The next step is learning to recognize that something very probably is a quotation, and taking steps accordingly.

On the road again

My usual reason for trekking to Ithaca, NY (home to gorges and Cornell) involves academic bookstores, of which there are noticeably more than in Brockport.  (Before you ask: there are none in Brockport.)  However, tomorrow I'm trekking to Ithaca with an aggravated cat in tow.  Victoria, who will be thirteen shortly, decided that she would celebrate her impending birthday with a discombobulated thyroid.  (This is not uncommon among cats of a Certain Age.)  Oral meds? Not working very well.  Transdermal meds, applied in the ear? Massive allergic reaction.  (I was on the other side of the country at the time, so there was some long-distance cat wrangling going on--between bouts of bronchitis-induced coughing.)  So, as Vicki is an extremely healthy cat otherwise, we're going to nuke the problem.  No, seriously: radioactive iodine treatment.  Which, alas, means a) driving 100 + miles to Ithaca, where she'll be treated at the Cornell veterinary hospital (arrrrgggh), b) leaving her there for a week or more in quarantine (because, radioactive cat), and c) driving her 100 + miles back from Ithaca (repeat arrrrgggh).  Unfortunately for my ears, Vicki is a cat of...Strong Opinions.  So we're talking at least two hundred miles' worth of what my family refers to as Furry Sirens.  Sigh.   

The Story of a Red Velvet Bible and Richard Blake and His Little Green Bible

Although nineteenth-century Christian it-narratives included missionary boxes and cushions among their protagonists, adventurous Bibles were a popular subject, from Sarah Wilkinson's Adventures of a Bible (1821) onward.  In the 1860s, the prolific children's novelist Matilda Horsburgh wrote two such narratives, The Story of a Red Velvet Bible (1865[?]) and its conveniently color-coded sequel, Richard Blake and His Little Green Bible (1868), which exemplify some of the most common strategies in these evangelical texts.

Given the target audience, both novels emphasize the child's agency in adult conversions, although without endorsing the kind of full-blown preachiness one finds in something like Charlotte Elizabeth's Judah's Lion (whose angelic child has the aggravating habit of addressing the Jewish protagonist as "Mr. Jew").  This agency resides not in going door-to-door as youthful evangelists, but rather in reading their Bibles, exemplifying Christian virtues in their day-to-day lives, and, when called on, celebrating and explicating prooftexts for less enlightened readers.  Notably, we never see either child receiving formal instruction from a clergyman or parent (although Richard grows up in a Christian household); solid Protestant beliefs (especially those about Christ's Passion) derive transparently from attentive reading of the text, no catechism required.  Although Horsburgh usually avoids any sort of confessional polemic, we get a remarkably eye-popping moment in Richard Blake, which informs us that a young servant girl with an Catholic upbringing has no idea who this Jesus fellow is (RB 32).  (Even for garden-variety Victorian Catholic-bashing, that's a bit extreme.) 

Although the novels trace different social worlds, they are structured the same way.  The red Bible goes to an upper-class girl, who resides in a sadly worldly family with a non-wicked, but definitely class-conscious, stepmother; the green Bible to a working-class boy on his way to be apprenticed in the big city.  (We see the green Bible sold at the beginning of the first novel.)  The girl, Amelia Delany, discovers real (as opposed to nominal) Christianity by reading the Bible; her devotion to the Bible in turn inspires her little half-brother, her governess, the poor woman whom she visits, and even her mother, although her father "might have been saved, but he would not" (TS 93).  Richard Blake, who is already a boring paragon of devotion at the beginning of his novel, similarly brings various random people into contact with his Bible, but with more emphasis on the urban working (and non-working) poor; as in the first novel, there are two holdouts, one of whom dies having "'spurned the gift'"  (RB 81).  In both cases, the failure is figured in terms of 2 Corinthians 2:16: "To the one we are the savour of death unto death; and to the other the savour of life unto life. And who is sufficient for these things?"  For the child protagonists, the Bible speaks only life, in part because it is initially received as a source of innocent pleasure (RB 26) that, in turn, prepares for the transformative moment of conversion in which Bible reading flips around: the Bible reads the child, forcing her to consider "[w]hat sort of spirit had she?" (28).  These transformative readings occur virtually at random--here, Amelia opens the Bible and finds that it lands on Romans 8:11 (28)--and are a much-Protestantized version of the sortes sanctorum (divination by Bible verses), still popular in the nineteenth century.  No longer does the random Bible verse foretell the future; instead, it shocks the reader into plumbing the depths of her soul.  Or, to put it differently, it shocks the reader into discovering that she has a soul.  The vulnerable child is far more open to being reborn into both salvation and Protestant subjectivity than are the adults, who must undergo considerable pain and suffering before they can humble themselves before the Bible's message.  In a way, the adults have to learn how to unread, stripping themselves of their accumulated ideologies about worldly living before they can truly hear the Word. 

Like other Bible it-narratives, however, both the Red Velvet Bible and the Little Green Bible have a problem on their way to being read: their profitable place in the bookselling and publishing industries.  Aileen Douglas' seminal article on eighteenth-century it-narratives argues that they "exploit and strengthen an emerging consumer culture," and tracks how such narratives both savage and salvage the new social relationships that emerge from a society based on increasingly free trade--trade that encompasses not just a nation, but an empire.¹  Bibles were certainly a mainstay of Victorian religious publishing, circulating in crushing quantities; the British and Foreign Bible Society alone managed to distribute over 27 million copies in fifty years.²   But both Horsburgh's novels and the other Bible it-narratives I've read so far do their best to remove the Bible as fast as they can from commercial exchange, even though they may otherwise offer John Halifax-esque praise of the hardworking young man who makes good (as is the case with Richard Blake).  After the initial purchase of the red and green Bibles, they circulate entirely through gift exchange, accidental or chance reading, bedside storytelling, and loans.    The sale of the green Bible certainly suggests that it challenges the normal rules of profit-making: the seller, who "was noted for never giving a book, or, indeed, any article, a penny under its real price," is inspired by a chance text from the red Bible to knock down the price from half-a-crown to two shillings (RB 7).  But as the narratives unfold, we see that there is no congruence between the Bible's monetary price and its actual worth, which emerges only when a reader engages with the Word.    Even though the Bible's materiality is crucial to these narratives, they try to erase the scene of purchase--the Bible's moment of "profane" value, as it were--as soon as possible.    In some Bible it-narratives, there is no moment of purchase at all: the Bible is simply gifted from one person to the next, or handed down as an heirloom.  The exchange value is, after all, not truly quantifiable.  This is something I intend to work out in more detail over the next few months.    

¹ Aileen Douglas,   "Britannia's Rule and the It-Narrator," Eighteenth-Century Fiction 6.1 (1993): 68. 

² Michael Leger-Lomas, "Mass Markets: Religion," The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume 6, 1830-1914, ed. David McKitterick (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009), 329. 

This Week's Acquisitions

• John Sayles, A Moment in the Sun (McSweeney's, 2012).  Epic (nearly 1000 pages!) historical novel set during the Gold Rush.  Yes, that John Sayles.  (Lift Bridge)
• Audrey Schulman, Three Weeks in December (Europa, 2012).  Parallel-plot historical novel about two young Americans experiencing both animal and human violence in East Africa.  (Lift Bridge)

OMG

Our ILL department actually managed to get a copy of Cyril Westward for me.  I am STUNNED.  Stunned, I say! And on Valentine's Day, too.  I shall squee all the way over to the checkout desk.  (As it's in the low thirties, the squees will be a trifle icy.  But still squee-ish.) 

A somewhat belated request to Mary Augusta (Mrs. Humphry) Ward in re: Robert Elsmere

Would you please stop mangling quotations?!

(Seriously.  Every "exact" quotation so far has been wrong.  And we won't even go into trying to track down a French original from an *ahem* free *ahem* translation.) 

Reasons Why Stats Peak on Wednesdays

Ever since the dawn of time--or, at least, since the dawn of this blog--the stats have always peaked on Wednesdays.  I have some theories:

1.  Unexpected influence of Odin on academic blog readers.

2.  At midweek, academics are desperate enough that they need to read blogs, but not yet desperate enough to drop everything and head for the bars.

3.  A general sense of woe?

4.  Because it's the middle of the week, everyone feels perched on a peak of perilous equilibrium.  Therefore, they read blogs in order to tip themselves over, one way or the other.

5.  Everyone is procrastinating on Thursday and Friday course prep.

6.  Some kind of Foucauldian distribution of power-knowledge.

7.  Academics realizing that they have scheduled all of their students' papers to arrive, once again, on Wednesday; they turn to blog reading as solace.

8.  The expectation that I will be unusually brilliant on Wednesday? (As opposed to dull the other days?)

9.  Manifesting the ineluctable power of centrism.

10.  The ongoing war between superego, id, and ego resulting in a stalemate that leaves the reader no other mode of intellectual activity than reading blogs.  On Wednesdays. 

This Week's Acquisitions

• [Charles Benjamin Tayler], Arthur and His Mother; Or, the Story of a Child That Belonged to the Church. A Book for Christian Children (Carlton and Lanahan, n.d.).  Pirated and revised edition of the second edition of Tayler's didactic novel, changed from Anglican to Methodist in the process (see post below).  (eBay)
• Kate O'Brien, That Lady (Virago, 2006).  Reprint of O'Brien's historical novel about Ana de Mendoza y de le Cerda, Princess of Eboli.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Christopher Hibbert, King Mob: The Story of Lord George and the London Riots of 1780 (1958; Longmans, 1959).  Study of the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots, which inspired Dickens' Barnaby Rudge.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Debora Kuller Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity (U of California, 1998).  Analyzes, among other things, the role of Biblical narrative in shaping early modern selfhood.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Harvard, 2008).  Philosophical study of the meanings and origins of secularism and its relationship to modern religious pluralism.  (Amazon)

The Perils of Pauline Using Pirated American Editions of British Fiction

US scholars who work on British religious fiction face a number of logistical problems, but there's one problem in particular that causes considerable anxiety: relying on US editions of things.  On the one hand, the Americans stole reprinted British religious fiction with considerable abandon, so there's a lot of it available to hand (and, in some cases, it may be impossible to find the relevant British text anywhere in the JK); on the other hand, the American publisher may have hacked, whacked, or otherwise revised the text without deigning to explain what's been altered.  And, of course, since religious fiction is very much a niche field (although of late, the niche seems to be expanding), there are very few detailed attempts to track transatlantic changes. 

As it happens, thanks to the joint efforts of eBay and GoogleBooks, I have an example to hand.  The text in question was authored by Charles Benjamin Tayler (sometimes Charles B. Tayler or C. B. Tayler), an Anglican clergyman with strong tolerationist beliefs when it came to Protestant denominations and equally strong prejudices when it came to Roman Catholics.  Tayler was a fairly industrious novelist, and quite a few of his works made it across the pond.  They did not, however, always make it there quite intact.  Such was the fate of The Child of the Church of England.  A Book for Children (1834), which Tayler revised as Arthur and His Mother; Or, the Child of the Church of England.  A Book for Children  (1852).   The first edition was reprinted in the USA by 1843 as The Child of the Church, but maintained Tayler's explicitly Anglican preface; I've not yet identified when the second edition put in its appearance.  Unfortunately, there are no digitized versions of the UK first edition (which is only owned by the British Library, it seems), but the 1843 US edition ends on a rather glum note with a chapter entitled "Arthur in Sin and in Disgrace," in which poor little Arthur, who had been shooting "hating and hateful thoughts" (89) in his brother's direction, is led to discover that he has been violating commandment #6.  The novel concludes with Mama explaining that he must first apologize, then spend some time in meditation and prayer.   Arthur thus never quite makes it to the point of full repentance in the narrative.  This may accurately represent the UK original; after all, the second edition is "enlarged." 

Perhaps Tayler decided that little kids might find the original ending a little depressing (being accused of murder, even in the heart, could do that to you), or perhaps he thought that there were too many Romanists on the loose--more likely the latter.  In any event, the revised version contains two more chapters, one on Dissenters (OK) and one on Roman Catholics (not OK, although good little Christians aren't supposed to be mean to individual Catholics).  Instead of ending on Arthur meditating on his sins, it now ends with Arthur receiving a very special present: his very own Bible, "plainly but handsomely bound in dark Morocco leather, with small silver clasps," embossed in gilt (133).  Although the novel spends much time showing us how Arthur's mother teaches him to read and interpret the Bible, this moment, in which the gift Bible replaces the Catholic (or Tractarian?) gift book sent to him by his aunt, symbolically marks his entry into the invisible church of Christ.  However, the novel's emphasis on man's total depravity remains unaltered.  

What happens in the American reprint of the second UK edition? First, it suddenly becomes anonymous, even though Tayler's other works had cropped up in the USA with his name attached.  Second, it loses three of its eight engravings.  Third, it gets some new chapter titles: "The Soul" becomes "A Talk about the Soul," "The Church" turns into "About the Church of Christ," and "The Chastening of the Lord" is now "The Death of the Baby."  (Talk about avoiding euphemisms.)  Fourth, and more seriously for the academic reader, the chapter on Dissenters vanishes entirely, although the Church of Rome stays put.  Fifth, the publisher reworks the text in spots to make it more accessible to US Protestant children, although the target audience appears to be Methodists.  Throughout, "clergymen" turn into "ministers."  Arthur's definition of a church--"an old building of grey stone" (US 68)--has obvious problems in the US context, so instead it's "a large building of stone, brick, or wood,"¹ without any spot for the clerk.  The tone of the chastening/deceased infant chapter changes slightly, as the UK version includes a bar between the end of the mother's discourse and her suggestion that they leave the room (hinting that the two contemplate the dead child in silence for some time), while the US version has her immediately indicating that they should leave, followed by "[a]nd the mother and the boy walked slowly out of the chamber of death" (US 78)--found nowhere in the original.   Some other alterations turn Anglican rites into their Methodist counterparts.   For example, here's Baby's baptism in the UK edition:

"Not only," said Arthur's mother, "is this dear little Baby brought every day to God in our prayers, in the prayers of your father, and myself, and in the prayers of Edward, and Lucy, and in your prayers, but all the Church of Christ, and more especially our own Church of England are daily praying for him, for he has been admitted into the number of those who are called the people of God, and Christians after Christ by baptism. You remember, Arthur, when we went to Church with Baby, and the Clergyman prayed, and we all prayed; and then his Godfathers and his Godmothers promised, in his name, that he would 'forsake sin; that is, have nothing to do with any kind of sin, that he would believe God's word, and obey God's holy will and commandments, and walk in the same all the days of his life.'" (UK 43)

The US edition erases "and more especially our own Church of England," along with the godfathers and godmothers ("we" make the promise instead) (US 38).  By the same token, Arthur's trek to church with mom becomes a visit to "the old meeting-house" (US 85), moves the baptismal font from the entry to "inside the rails of the altar" (conceding in a footnote that one is not likely to find such a thing in a Methodist church...) (US 86), eliminates the chancel, has the Commandments painted directly on the wall instead of on wood, and axes Mom's Book of Common Prayer.  (Other references to the Book of Common Prayer become "the hymn book" instead [e.g., US 31]).   Even though the changes seem minor (aside, that is, from the completely missing chapter...), they totally transform the text's original Anglican affiliation--which is exactly the sort of change of which we need to be wary. 

¹ Arthur and His Mother; or, the Story of a Child that Belonged to the Church.  A Book for Christian Children (New York: Carlton and Lanahan, n.d.), 57-58.