The Little Professor

Scanners (Don't) Live in Vain

A few months ago, I bemoaned the blizzard of photocopies settling in file drawers, piling up in odd corners, and drifting across the floor.  The situation, I gathered, called not for a snowblower, but for a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500.  Flash forward to last week, when two important things arrived: a new computer (the old one, already marked for replacement, developed Worrying Symptoms of Imminent BSOD) and the aforementioned scanner.  Thanks to eBay, the scanner did not produce other Worrying Symptoms--namely, Worrying Symptoms of Imminent Pocketbook Meltdown. 

So, I've been scanning.  This involves pushing one illuminated button, helpfully marked "Scan."  (You can't expect academics to pick up on such things by themselves.) Well, that and removing staples.  Some thoughts:

• Speed.  The scanner is as fast as advertised.  I've scanned at least one hundred and fifty articles--in other words, nearly one thousand pages--since Friday, without being chained to my desk. 
• Curse you, humidity! As anyone who has cussed out their department photocopier knows all too well, humidity does aggravating things to paper, which in turn does aggravating things to the automatic feeder mechanism.  The ScanSnap is equally suspect to humidity-induced discombobulation.
• Got creases? The scanner handles creased, battered, bumped, and otherwise bolluxed paper with reasonable equanimity.  
• Direct line.  It's good that the scanner handles creased etc. paper well, because if you don't perfectly align the document in the feeder, Paper Jams of Rage occur.  And then your uncreased paper will be, well, creased.
• Size.  I've found that the scanner can handle pages of different size within the same document, although I gather from reviews that not everyone has had that experience.
• Mark TWAIN.  Or, rather, the lack thereof.  As several people on the Amazon page point out, there's no TWAIN driver, which means that you can't just add newly scanned pages to an old PDF.  This will be cause for irritation if you want to update old files with new scans.    However, there's a workaround for documents that run over fifty pages.  
• Got IFilter? If you're running Windows 7 (*waves*), you can't search PDFs via the Windows search box, even if you have the right TIFF setting.  (You can work around this by searching directly in Acrobat.)  This may cause a great disturbance in the Force.  It doesn't help that Adobe Acrobat does not yet have a Windows 7 filter in place, for reasons that are clear...to nobody, really.    After I bewailed this discovery on Facebook, a friend pointed me in the direction of Foxit, which does have the Windows 7 filter.  Available for free, no less. 

Tales of a Jewess

In every scholar's life, there comes a time when he or she finishes reading a book, looks off into the distance (or, at least, into the computer screen), and, in a state of advanced perplexity, asks one unanswerable question:

"Who could have possibly thought that this was a good idea?"

The otherwise-unknown Madame Brendlah's Tales of a Jewess (1838) is that kind of novel.  In fact, given that it was never finished--only the first volume exists--the Victorian reading public may also have been asking itself that question.  Montagu Frank Modder comments, with some irony, that the novel is "[n]o doubt a well-intentioned volume," but concludes that "[t]he execution is both weak and egotistical."¹  In theory, Tales of a Jewess is about the conversion of a young Jewish woman to Christianity, partly due to the carelessness of her family: they schlepped her off to a Christian boarding school.  Our heroine, Judith, yearns "to see my beloved mother and brothers put from them the bigotry of Jews, and become in spirit, tolerant Christians" (106).  Tales of a Jewess does, in fact, demonstrate some "tolerance" : the novel's most devoutly Christian character is the family's African servant, Joseph--Judith herself scorns a potential suitor who is a "slave dealer" (6)--and we also encounter a virtuous, wronged woman of partly Indian descent.    Nevertheless, in a case of truly spectacular self-deconstruction, this brief for "tolerant Christians" comes in the middle of what is quite possibly the most anti-Semitic novel I've read since Gwendolen--except that, unlike Gwendolen, this is supposed to be an evangelical conversion novel.  Tales of a Jewess drops a passing allusion to the blood libel in the preface, repeating it again towards the novel's conclusion ("She has often heard her brothers exclaim, that they would sooner have stabbed her to the heart, and drunk her blood, than that she should have married a Goyer" [vii]).  Judith's idea of a practical joke runs to tricking a rabbi into eating meat basted in pork juices, a story she's sure that her ideal Christian beloved Hartford will "enjoy" (56).  Other examples of "fun" (ahem) include "accidentally" helping another rabbi to fish cooked in butter, thereby making it impossible for him to eat the meat served for the main course, and exploiting the prohibition against travel on the Sabbath by trapping several Jews on an island without any food.  Characters tell stories celebrating Jewish skills in such matters as theft and blackmail; Judith's own father, a Catholic convert to Judaism, gleefully describes the time he attempted an assignation with a nun, despite being married at the time.  The principal rabbi is a villain out to destroy Judith by any means possible.  Judith's Jewish bosom buddy, Ellen, turns out to be a viper in disguise.  Only Judith's mother appears to have much in the way of redeeming virtues, and even she condemns Judith for converting to Christianity.  Beyond the...charms...of the various Jewish characters, the novel also introduces a number of familiar anti-Semitic topoi, including the child persecuted for owning a New Testament, the rote and insincere nature of Jewish religious practices, and the underlying abusiveness of the Jewish family (a "disordering of authority and gender"²).  

Even considered purely as a novel, Tales of a Jewess is remarkably inept.  Brendlah structures the plot as a series of inset narratives: after the plot inches ahead for a few moments, a character stops and tells a story.  Rinse, repeat. For some reason, a number of these stories are about Napoleon, with whom Judith's father served; it's never clear why, although I'm guessing that Mme. Brendlah was trying to kill two potential literary markets with one stone.    One of the first inset narratives, by Judith's mother, is never actually finished, despite her promise to do so (perhaps Mme. Brendlah just forgot, or perhaps she meant it for one of the following volumes).  Judith's father speaks with a pronounced accent, except when he inexplicably drops it for an entire chapter.  And, in an unintentionally hilarious moment, Judith and the young lady from India share a spontaneous, sentimental moment of "mutual confidence," in which Judith "told her all her history" (168)--a fine example of TMI, to be sure, after what appears to be about five minutes' acquaintance.    

Nevertheless, there are some points of interest here.  Unlike the cheap fiction of the late 1840s and later, Tales of a Jewess evinces an almost raucous interest in errant sexuality that sometimes characterizes other religious novels of this period. (We also get an open discussion of circumcision, to which Judith objects.)  When the novel isn't thwacking us over the head with its anti-Semitism, it's dwelling intensely on the threat of uncontrolled eroticism.  Judith's mother hints strongly that her marriage to a supposed convert to Judaism has not been happy (and certainly the husband's tales hint at a certain lack of fidelity), while Judith's brother Emanuel trifles with the feelings of a Christian girl.  More seriously, a young woman is betrayed by her fiance and her twin sister, bears an illegitimate child, and goes insane, ultimately leading to her impending death, an attempted infanticide, and the suicides of both fiance and sister; Judith's brother Adolphus engages in an illicit interfaith relationship with Judith's friend Bertha that results in a "still-born son" (21) and Bertha's own death; another one of Judith's friends, Isabel, gets herself entangled in a love affair with a soldier that, combined with some other personal traumas, provokes her into committing suicide (the reader will, by now, have noted a certain trend); Judith encounters a young man, Thomas, who accidentally kills his pregnant sister and then murders her lover; and a madman turns out to have murdered his own wife, the better to wed another woman.  Even Judith's young visitor from India is a woman betrayed by an Englishman who turns out to be a bigamist.  (There's enough death by sex here to make one wonder if this is actually a modern slasher film in Victorian disguise.) In all of these instances, lust--or even love--unregulated by Christian faith results in suffering at best, death and damnation at worst.  The after-effects of desire wreck both individuals and their families, spiraling out from supposedly private romances. The universe of Tales of a Jewess is, in fact, an intensely sexual one, in which the chaotic force of the erotic (leading, as it keeps doing, to death and despair) affects even the most apparently virtuous of beings, like Bertha.  This world, suggests Nadia Valman, is "chaotic and uninterpretable," largely because man's fallen desires render it so.³ After all, Bertha's and Isabel's Christianity fails to halt their inexorable collapse.  But woman's Christian faith alone is useless; without any reform of the novel's many lustful males, womanly devotion proves a weak shield.  In that sense, the novel rejects the theories of female "influence" that were growing increasingly popular at about this time: far from redeeming the corruptions of male public and private life, here female virtue simply implodes under the weight of mutual desire. 

Judith's decision to elope with William Hartford, then, albeit with Joseph's approval, was probably meant to set up some kind of disaster in the second volume.  Notably, the narrator condemns the decision, arguing that "rashness of action" (199) was one of the less positive aspects of Judith's character.  This sinful decision, says the narrator, will irrevocably separate Judith from her mother: "Merciful Father! forgive the transgression of the child, in disobeying so good a parent" (199).  Judith turns out to be a terrible reader of all the inset narratives the novel has inflicted upon us so far.  Although her romance plot with William Hartford inverts her mother's--instead of the man converting to Judaism, the woman has converted to Christianity--she nevertheless indulges in the same rejection of authority that characterizes just about every one of the novel's tragic mini-romances.  Judith chooses pleasure over the suffering of self-denial, and therefore may have put herself on the road to doom.  After all, remarks the narrator, "Should the reader ask, had she no other happiness? The reply is, Yes! But, after being caressed, beloved, and universally admired, to be scorned, despised, and forbidden ever again to enter the presence of her family, was a trial, which nothing but a firm reliance in her new religion could enable her to sustain" (204-5).  Judith's decision to elope suggests that this "firm reliance" has, instead, given way, insofar as she has chosen earthly "happiness" over the "other happiness" (i.e., faith in salvation through Christ) promised by her newfound beliefs.   Her true faith, that is, lies in the salvific power of romance with her one true beloved--even though the novel keeps insisting that all romance plots run into a dead end (quite literally).   At this phase of the novel's development, in other words, it's not altogether clear that her much vaunted conversion has actually worked. 

¹ Montagu Frank Modder, The Jew in the Literature of England to the End of the Nineteenth Century (1939; Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1944), 413. 

² Nadia Valman, The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), 66.  I discuss such attempts to render Jewish and Catholic families pathological in “Protestants against the Jewish and Catholic Family, c. 1829-1860,” Victorian Literature and Culture 31 (2003): 333-57.

³ Valman, 68. 

Dis vs. D'Is, take two

Nearly five years ago, I offered some scattered remarks about the great Dis vs. D'Is controversy--namely, did Victorian writers who spelled Benjamin Disraeli's name as "D'Israeli" (i.e., did not pay attention to the normalized spelling) do so for anti-Semitic reasons?   At that time, I suggested that it could not, in fact, be concluded that anti-Semitism was necessarily the reason: everything from his father's ongoing fame (and, therefore, the D'Israeli spelling) to ignorance might be in play.   It recently occurred to me that this is one of those questions that could be addressed, albeit not settled, by a trawl through GoogleBooks. 

The search parameters: full-view results (so I could check context), using only the English-language results; US results considered separately from those of the UK & Ireland.  Obviously, mentions of "Benjamin D'Israeli," the grandfather, had to be separated from "Benjamin D'Israeli," the PM.   

Excluding duplicates, irrelevant results, & foreign language references, here are approximately the first twenty examples.  I started at the end of the search results:

From the UK & Ireland, D'Israeli spelling with no obvious reference to Judaism or anti-Semitism:

• An 1852 letter from Douglas Jerrold, reprinted by Mary Cowden Clarke, which praises the ascension of a "man with ink in his veins" to the position of Chancellor of the Exchequer. 
• He's ID'd as "D'Israeli" in the Parliamentary returns for 1837. 
• In a case of massive proofreading failure, the returns for 1852 spell his name both ways. 
• Augusta Theodosia Drane, A History of England for Family Use and the Upper Classes of Schools (Burns and Oates, 1881).  Consistently ID'd as "D'Israeli."
• "Bishop McIlvane," The Literary World 24 (14 Oct. 1881): 247.  Passing mention. 
• Rev. John S. Simon, "Thomas Miller, Basket Maker," Golden Hours: A Monthly Magazine for Family and General Reading 15 (1882): 759-60.  D is praised for his loyalty to the gentleman of the title, and described as a "complex character."
• Henry Grey, A Bird's-Eye View of English Literature, from the Seventh Century to the Present Time (Griffith & Farran, 1883), 68.  D listed as novelist. 
• Lord Ronald Gower, My Reminiscences, 2 vols. (Kegan Paul, Trench, & Co., 1883), 2:253.  Later on, Gower (who knew D personally) refers to him as "Lord Beaconsfield," and speaks admiringly of him.  
• Samuel Carter Hall, Retrospect of a Long Life: From 1815 to 1883, 2 vols., (Richard Bentley, 1883): 1:149.  Quotes one of D's sonnets. 

From the UK & Ireland, laying heavy emphasis on the Judaism, with or without anti-Semitic overtones:

• The Churchman 39 (May 3, 1879): 489.  Reprints a tidbit about the likelihood that D and John Henry Newman were out playing in the same place as little kids, and notes the incongruity of the "handsome little Jew boy" and the "Puritan" having the careers they did.  

From the USA, D'Israeli spelling with no obvious reference to Judaism or anti-Semitism:

• Henry Coppee's English Literature: Considered as an Interpreter of English History (1878), praises him as a "persevering, acute, and able statesman" (469).  (Coppee obviously thinks he's a better politician than novelist.)
• The Baptist Review 3.11 (1881): 408.  Lothair crops up in the new books section. 
• Ainsworth R. Spofford and Charles Gibbon, eds., The Library of Choice Literature..., 8 vols. (Gebbie & Co., 1881), I:342.  Passing mention in a headnote about his father.
• E. W. Tullidge, "Was Bacon Shakespeare?", Tullidge's Quarterly Magazine 1.4 (July 1881): 583.  Passing mention. 
• John Savage, '98 and '48: The Modern Revolutionary History and Literature of Ireland (P. J. Kenedy, 1882).  Passing mentions. 
• Bayard Tuckerman, A History of English Prose Fiction from Sir Thomas Malory to George Eliot (G. P. Putnam, 1882), 292-93.  Refers to D as a "great statesman" (and definitely finds him a better politician than a novelist). 
• S. P. Linn, Golden Gleams of Thought..., 10th ed. (A. C. McClurg, 1909).  Hey, it's the twentieth century, and we still can't get the spelling right?

From the USA, references  laying heavy emphasis on the Judaism, with or without anti-Semitic overtones:

• "The Jew and the Turk," The Guardian 29.9 (Sept. 1878): 264 ff.  Rather ambivalent article in a Reformed Church magazine about the Jews in the modern world; argues that "[a]lthough a professed Christian, he is still a Jew at heart." Praises D's abilities, however.  
• "Benjamin D'Israeli--The Jew," The Southern Review 24.48 (Oct. 1878): 373-84.  Um, no ambiguity there.  Insists on D's essential Jewishness; throws "oriental" stereotypes around with gleeful abandon.  Admires his accomplishments. 
• "The Miracle of Hebrew History,"  The Gospel in All Lands 10 (Aug. 1881): 91.   Missionary article.  Praise for D in passing, but noticeable grumpiness about Jewish "selfish interests."  

(I observed that in the 1870s, at least one Jewish author went out of his way to note that D had altered the spelling of his name.  One wonders if he thought people were in need of a reminder.)

Twenty is not, of course, a statistically useful sampling.  As a beginning, though, the trends are interesting: most of the D'Israeli spellings occur in contexts where Judaism never comes up; some come accompanied by highly admiring comments; and the error still kicks in even after D's death.  Right now, the Dis vs. D'Is issue looks like a bit of a damp squib.  Some writers apparently use the D'Is spelling as a slur, but others just seem to think that that's how you spell his name (including people, like Gower, who actually knew the man!).    At some point, I'll run a decade-by-decade search to cover the earlier phases of his career, and see if that affects the results.  Someone who wanted to pursue a real research project on the topic would have to search nineteenth-century newspapers (and break out the statistics). 

Scattered Academic Musings

• Er...remember that neo-Victorian graduate seminar I was going to teach in the Spring? Not teaching it.   I put on my Director of Graduate Studies hat and realized that there were no graduate courses in 19th c. British Lit currently slated for this year, which struck me as a bit of a problem.  (Whereas someone is teaching another contemporary British lit seminar this semester.)  Ergo, back to the Victorians.  Specifically, I'm going to break out the big loose baggy monster course I've been thinking about for a few years: Vanity Fair, Bleak House, Middlemarch, and The Way We Live Now.
• For someone like myself, who works on non-canonical texts and interdisciplinary prospects, open peer review potentially sounds very interesting: it would greatly increase the chances that somebody would actually have read some of the novels or poems I write about, and might bring in comments from more scholars outside literature proper (the occasional religious studies person or theologian might be awfully nice, for example).  I wonder, though, if this approach will have vitriolic infighting as one of its downsides.  (Presumably, the comments section wouldn't be wiki-ish enough to generate peer review edit wars ["Professor X needs to quit deleting my comment about Professor Burstein's use of "Indeed!"].)  Granted, blind peer review generates its own vitriol, but public attacks register very differently from  private ones--especially, I would think, on junior faculty.  Commenter #4 at the CoHE similarly points out the potential dangers for those who write on heavily-politicized hot topics.
• The Tenured Radical's suggestion that "Journals should not accept articles they are not ready to put into production in the next year" reminded me of the close of my tenure at Modern Philology, when we were in the position of accepting articles that we were going to publish almost immediately.  That was a cause for panic, not jubilation: having no backfile was not, as I recall, a particularly reassuring feeling.   The journal was never swamped with submissions when I was there, although things may have changed in the meantime.
• While part of me wishes to sympathize with the guy hanging out in the sand, the rest of me notes that a) s/he has a two-two teaching load and b) the proper way to protest the situation is, as some commenters pointed out, to make the case for additional pay to the administration while taking his or her "turn."   It would be one thing if the department was inequitably dumping this mysterious service commitment on only the unpopular folks, or if they suddenly decided to quit compensating for it when they got to the sandy professor.  But refusing to take on a rotating service commitment, no matter how unwelcome, just burdens the rest of the department (and, quite possibly, is forcing someone else to do more than their fair share of the work).        

Cambridge Library meets scanning

Fellow travelers in offbeat paths may be interested in the Cambridge Library Collection, which features books scanned from, yes, the Cambridge University Library.  It started publishing in 2009, but doesn't appear to have received the same attention as the British Library's initiative.  (Again, I have to ask the British Library: what happened to the Kindle platform? Amazon claims such books don't exist.)  In any event, there are all sorts of interesting things in there, ranging from a complete Lives of the Queens of England... to Charlotte Montefiore's A Few Words to the Jews.  

Scattered musings

• In the comments to my July 29 post (of agony), Jonathan asks "if one of your essays has ever been returned with comments suggesting that some other group of wholly unknown Victorian novels are what anyone remotely familiar with the subject should have been citing, etc."  To which the brief answer is: no.  (The more usual response could be paraphrased as follows: "Who are these people?!")
• Meanwhile, CJ Colucci wonders how I stumbled onto this "particular corner of literature."  Looking back, the early symptoms of my fatal attraction to non-canonical literature manifested themselves in an eighteenth-century literature course at the U of C, in a paper I wrote about theatrical responses to the Jewish Naturalization Act (1753).  However, things really kicked into high gear when I started working on my doctoral dissertation, which eventually turned into Book One.  The dissertation required me to spend a lot of time reading these books, and I suppose you could say that they were gateway texts, as it were.  More seriously, though, it became clear to me very quickly that the narratives structuring those texts were predominantly Christian (with different denominational emphases, of course), and that if I wanted to understand them, I had to pay attention to the many manifestations of nineteenth-century Christianity.  From there, I got interested in nineteenth-century religious controversy more generally...at which point I couldn't help noticing that the quantity of fiction and poetry on this subject didn't occupy just a corner, but pretty much a full room.  So off I went.  Despite my not-infrequent wails of agony, I do, in fact, find the material genuinely interesting to write about.  And, as I occasionally have to remind people, it's part of a religious literary tradition that is alive, kicking, and generating rather significant quantities of cash.  Some of these Victorian novels are still alive and kicking, too--Elizabeth Rundle Charles' Chronicles of the Schonberg-Cotta Family, one of the most successful Reformation tales, was reprinted in an edited & retitled edition as recently as 2003.
  
• As a brief respite from Montmorency, I knocked off Michael Dibdin's The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, which I skimmed many years ago but had never read in full.  There was an ulterior motive there as well, because I've been considering something Jack the Ripper-ish for the neo-Victorian novel course.  I don't think the book will work for my purposes, although it would fit quite nicely in the lower-division international lit course I occasionally teach on mystery (supernatural & detective varieties).   The Last Sherlock Holmes story is, after all, largely about the logic of plotting a detective story, and the point at which such plotting tips over into full-blown conspiracy theories...especially once you begin to question the detective's (and/or the narrator's) authority.  If you cease to trust Holmes, then what do you make of a figure like Moriarty?  Anyway, it might be fun to do an "Afterlife of Sherlock Holmes" course at some point.
• The British Library informs me that "65,000 19th century books were made available through Amazon’s websites in the UK, US, Germany and France."  But...what happened to the "free downloads for the Kindle wireless reader"? Searching Amazon reveals a lot of POD books, none of which are available in Kindle format (let alone for free).  Am I missing something? The Kindle store claims to be entirely innocent of any British Library publications.   

Montmorency: A Roman Catholic Tale

One of the points I've made here before is that controversial fiction is almost never intended to convert Catholics to Protestants, Jews to Christians, Protestants to Catholics, or anything else of the sort; instead, it's usually written to shore up beliefs already held by adults, or to reinforce the communication of those beliefs to their children.  (Which is not to say that controversial fiction was never used "in the field," as it were.)   A case in point is the anonymous Montmorency: A Roman Catholic Tale (1846-48), serialized in The Protestant Magazine before being released in single-volume form by Seeleys.  (The amount of time involved is misleading: it's a very short novel, serialized in equally short chunks.) The Protestant Magazine was published by the staunchly anti-Catholic (and still extant) Protestant Association, originally under the editorship of the Irish evangelical Charlotte Elizabeth [Phelan Tonna].  The magazine usually avoided novel-length fiction, sticking instead to allegories or sketches, although it did have a penchant for somewhat unfortunate poetry (bottoming out with a thirteen-line sonnet by someone who was not John Hollander). 

The first installment of Montmorency comes sandwiched between an urgent call to the Irish to throw off the priests (culminating in an example of the aforementioned unfortunate poetry) and a letter celebrating the fall of Sir Robert Peel; later installments during the first year sit between exposes of Catholic doctrine and warnings to fellow Protestant associations, or an account of a young Cambridge scholar converted to Catholicism and encouraging words to Irish Protestants.  In practice, this means that the studied ambiguity of the subtitle--Catholic novelists also used variants of "Roman Catholic Tale"--simply vanishes.  More to the point, the novel both sensationalizes and sentimentalizes the magazine's frequently apocalyptic rhetoric.  Sensationalizes, because of the standard-issue Gothic trappings that frequently characterize novels in this genre (wicked Jesuits, a dungeon, a murder, a young woman threatened with torture); sentimentalizes, because not only does the narrative play out in terms of conflicts within and between families, but also in terms of frequently overwrought emotional responses.  Contemporary Catholics frequently grumbled about Protestants (especially of the evangelical variety) and their turn to "feelings," and this is a novel in which religious feeling is very much on display.

As in several post-Father Clement novels, two families square off: the slightly decrepit but aristocratic Montmorency family and their relatives (Catholic, French) and the Willoughby family and their relatives (Protestant, English).  Given this plot structure, it's no surprise that the novel dwells heavily on Roman Catholicism's supposedly deadly effect on the nuclear family.  Thanks to the influence of The Evil Priest ^(TM), Sir Hubert ejects Philippe, a loyal family retainer, after he converts to Protestantism, setting off a chain of events that leads to Philippe's martyrdom and his wife Annette's death.   Later on, when Sir Hubert's daughter Clara herself converts--thanks partly to her memories of Annette and the providential arrival of her orphaned children--he connives at having her kidnapped, imprisoned in a convent, and eventually sent to the convent's dank and gloomy dungeon (this being an anti-Catholic novel, dungeons are an important fashion accessory).  Matters are not materially improved by Clara's cousin Frances, a fanatical Catholic who assists with the kidnapping, becomes a nun herself, and eventually rises to the position of Abbess (but is unhappy, of course).  Hubert, meanwhile, hangs out with the Willoughbys, and is riddled with doubt after he witnesses the "good death" of his friend, Ernest Willoughby.  After all, his own mother, Lady de Montmorency, had died in fear and doubt, terrified that her own Church had led her astray: "'Nay, dear Hubert, pray to the Saviour. What if she told me truth! Oh! horrible uncertainty! all is dark! I see no light. Great God! if I die trusting in delusion, grant me thy pardon!'" (VIII.369).  Lady de Montmorency's spiritual testimony, delivered in terror, is a providential warning instead of the requisite calm exhortation to the living; this is hardly an instance of someone "resigned to God's will, able to beg forgiveness for past sins and to prove his or her worthiness for salvation."¹  

This conflict between Ernest's good death and Lady de Montmorency's bad one drives the novel: the end of life, represented here as the true test of religious faith, reveals that only Protestantism supplies the believer with authentic grounds for assurance.  Urging Hubert not to "'grieve,'" Ernest reminds him that "'No fires of purgatory await my departing spirit, but a Saviour's bosom, a father's arm, an inheritance undefiled. Yet why? Not that I am worthy; ah, no, from first to last a sinful creature. I die as I have ever lived, and Calvary's cross, Emmanuel's perfect sacrifice, procure me pardon now, peace, perfect peace, and glory, immortal glory, in the world to come'" (IX.38).  The novel advances the usual argument that Catholics are terrified of purgatory and unsure of their eventual salvation.  Ernest, by contrast, figures the next life as a new domestic haven, resting on the "Saviour's bosom" (an image as maternal as it is paternal) and a "father's arm," not the false allures of a wrongly-elevated Virgin.  Lady de Montmorency's belief that she could perfect herself on earth through obedience, confession, penance, and the like comes to naught at the end; Ernest's belief in his own depravity and the sufficiency of Christ's atonement, meanwhile, turns death into a joyous homecoming.

The test, then, is how you feel.  After Lady de Montmorency's death, Hubert sorrows without respite; later, he is tormented by much "painful musing" on her death (VIII.397), and Clara admits to him that she can only "'fear God'" now (VIII.398). Years pass, and Clara suffers from "restlessness" (VIII.424), a sign of religious ennui, but her openness to the truth manifests itself in the classically sentimental "flood of tears" she sheds after hearing of Philippe's and Annette's fate (VIII.427).   Again, after Ernest dies, Hubert finds himself beset with "conflicting feelings," a "loss of self-command," and an "agony of feeling," which turns into "horror" when he berates himself for befriending a Protestant (IX.72).  This welter of confused feelings, combined with what we are to take as the "unnatural" posthumous rejection of the friendship, once more dramatizes Roman Catholicism's sheer uselessness in the face of death.  Even for a sentimental novel, the undirected quality of Hubert's reaction is problematic--it provokes no real self-reflection and has no positive (evangelical) impact on society at large.  In fact, the Evil Priest ^(TM) takes advantage of the illness that follows to convince Hubert to bring Clara back to the Protestant fold (only temporarily, as it turns out).  By contrast, Frances, the devout Catholic, brings "ambition" (IX.104) to her religion--in these novels, a frequent sign of a would-be nun--and icily denounces those who hope for her ex-lover Ernest's salvation as proponents of "false liberality" (IX.147).  Hubert's ungoverned sentimentalism meets its match in Frances' willed heartlessness.  But even though both function here as products and proof of Catholicism's inadequacy, Hubert's excessive feeling, provoked by doubt and fear, is better preparation for conversion than Frances' antagonism to feeling, which she controls with physically and emotionally self-destructive disciplines.  

In this logic, either the Catholic explores doubt by reading the Bible and embracing its message, or represses doubt through an ever-more rigorous regime of ritual observances.  (Jane Eyre's Eliza Reed, who chooses Catholicism precisely because of the structured rituals, is a direct descendant of characters like Frances.)  But Frances' route ultimately leads to a life of permanent spiritual lack, registered in the "doubts" and "misgivings" that continue to plague her long after she takes the veil (X.9).  Without even Lady de Montmorency's tentative gestures toward Protestantism, Frances dies badly, "fearfully shrinking from the judgment to come" (X.10).  By contrast, Sir Hubert, even though still "nominally" Catholic (X.8) dies well, leaving his children with pious words of wisdom.  It's no wonder that Clara, now fully Protestant, nearly breaks out into a "smile of exulting joy" when she thinks of her father's welcome into Heaven (X.8).  Here, finally, is true Protestant feeling, the "tear of natural grief" (X.8) overcome by her total trust in Christ. 

¹ Pat Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family (Oxford: OUP, 2000), 26. 

It was? They did?

I'm finishing up (at least, I hope I am) a short essay on the Brontes' reception history,¹ which has required me to write about Swinburne's attitude to George Eliot.  "Huh?" you say. T. Wemyss Reid's Charlotte Bronte: A Monograph (ser. 1876; rev. and rpt. 1877) makes a passing reference to Eliot; Swinburne's (positive) response to Wemyss Reid, A Note on Charlotte Bronte (1877) is all about the Eliot-thrashing.  (Short version: CB was a genius; GE, not so much.)  In any event, in search of some further context for Swinburne's anti-Eliot crusade, which seems to have somewhat puzzling roots, I came across Swinburne's review essay on Charles Reade.  Swinburne has some amusingly snarky things to say about Reade--"No man was ever at more pains to impair his own prospects of literary survival" (272)--but what brought me up short was this comment: "The now fashionable comparison or contrast of Charles Reade with George Eliot seems to me altogether less profitable and less reasonable than a contrast or comparison of his work with that of the two most copious and spontaneous masters of romance [Scott and Dumas]" (278).  To a twenty-first century reader, this is not an obvious comparison.  (It apparently was to Reade, however, and not to Eliot's benefit.)  Some googling about suggests that there still was a vogue for linking Eliot and Reade up through the early twentieth century...a vogue which ebbed along with Reade's reputation.  Today, Reade is mostly remembered for impassioned social crusading, and he's entirely out of print (except in the usual post-Google POD editions).²  As is so often the case, what at first looks like a familiar critical constellation (Swinburne, Bronte, Eliot) turns out to contain a dead, yet once important, star...

¹ Attentive readers will note that I'm actually writing about something that has to do with a canonical author.  Stop the presses!

² At one point, though, AMS brought the complete works out as a facsimile edition.  I know this, because I own it.  And I own it because I bought the whole shebang at the South Loop Powell's, then wrangled it several blocks to the nearest #6 express stop, and then several more blocks from the Hyde Park stop to my apartment.  I think my arms were a few inches longer by the time I was finished...

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.