The Little Professor

The Practical Applications of Gothic Fiction

As we all know, one of the standard excuses for reading (gasp) novels has always been that fiction has a Deep Moral Purpose: it enlightens us about Life, Ethics, and even the Soul.  Of course, such justifications often collapse when confronted with fiction that appears to be merely Fun.  Anything in the Gothic line--horror, ghost stories, crumbling castles, the random demon--can only be regarded in the light of Frivolous Entertainment, not Philosophical Enlightenment.  I propose, however, that Gothic teaches us a number of useful life lessons, all of them essential to our continued well-being.  Many of these lessons are remarkably pragmatic in nature.  For example:

1.  Never rent.  Rentals are always haunted.  If there have been five or more renters in the past year, there is a strong likelihood that the apartment or house is occupied by the ghost of an axe murderer or serial killer.
2.  Travel is bad.  Any trip away from home will bring you face-to-face with a vampire, ghoul, or flying head.  Stay home and help preserve the environment (as well as your future well-being).
3.  If you must travel, bring a Latin grammar.  It may be necessary to conjugate obscure Latin verbs, especially when they are written on whistles.
4.  Avoid fine art.  Do not buy paintings, remove them from the attic, or even remain in the same room with them for any length of time.  If the painting moves or appears in your dreams,  it is generally advised that you relocate.  Immediately. 
5.  Make appropriate career choices.  Archaeology, for example, should always be avoided, since artifacts are usually cursed and tombs often house vampires.  Art history also has a number of drawbacks (see previous item).  Those contemplating a career in science should be especially cautious, since ghosts love to haunt scientists.   
6.  Double-check your betrothed's state of health before proceeding to the altar.  In some unfortunate instances, corpses have been known to appear at weddings. 
7.  Insist that your realtor disclose the history of all previous residents.  Avoid purchasing homes or apartments if they were previously occupied by judges, suicides, or anyone with a failed romance.
8.  Do not attend college.  The more degrees, the more likely you are to disbelieve in ghosts--which will result in your painful, drawn-out, and often bloody death.  If you must attend college...
9. ...then always listen to the housekeeper or butler.  All housekeepers' and butlers' reports about pale women walking through corridors at night, mysterious cold snaps, fountains of blood, etc. are true and should be taken seriously.
10.  Do not buy old books.   You will probably encounter a demon. 

Brief observation on an elephant: Victorian feminism and religion

I'm not "in" Women's Studies per se, although I spent a couple of years on my college's Women's Studies Board, so I cannot speak to what's going on in the average WS classroom.  These two posts at Feministe, however, gave me some pause: would it even be possible to think about the history of feminist activism without integrating it with religious belief? Both Fatemeh and Natalia Antonova are writing about contemporary feminist experience, which is fine, but certainly within my limited frame of scholarly reference (the UK), feminism cannot be conceptualized apart from religion.  And these religious beliefs operated in completely unpredictable ways.  One might predict that  Mary Wollstonecraft would be a feminist, but what about a very orthodox Anglican like Mary Astell--whose feminism was thoroughly grounded in spiritual as well as philosophical convictions?   On my home turf, the feminists associated with the Langham Place Group are a remarkably mixed theological bag, ranging from Catholic converts like Adelaide Anne Procter to ex-evangelical (but still devout) Christians like Emily Davies to outright freethinkers like Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon.  (Procter and Bessie Rayner Parkes show just how unpredictably faith commitments acted on feminist beliefs: Catholicism did not slow Procter's activism, but it appears to have entirely short-circuited Bessie Rayner Parkes'.)  Outside of the LPG, there are evangelical feminists like Josephine Butler, existing alongside the atheists like Elizabeth Wolstenholme-Elmy.  Similarly, as I noted a couple of posts ago, religious radicalism didn't necessarily translate into feminism, as the varyingly problematic instances of George Eliot (whose feminism is the subject of never-ending debate...), Eliza Lynn Linton (very not feminist), and Mary Augusta (Mrs. Humphry) Ward (anti-suffrage campaigner) indicate.  Specialists in medieval and early modern history could no doubt go on at greater length.  The point being that all and no religious belief systems provided both feminists and anti-feminists with the intellectual resources to theorize women's social position; from a historical POV, talking about an infinitely complicated subject like religion in terms of praise or blame doesn't yield especially useful results. 

The Unfinished: An Ongoing Adventure

You are sitting at a ROLLTOP DESK in front of a LAPTOP.  There are many BOOKS and PHOTOCOPIES here.

> look books

Scattered on the desk are eight Victorian religious novels, The Light Ages, and The House of Storms.

> what do The Light Ages and The House of Storms have to do with Victorian religious novels?

Nothing, you thick-skulled organic lifeform.  They're for that blog post about steampunk you started drafting this evening. 

> yeah yeah

Huh?

> look laptop

There is an INCOMPLETE BOOK CHAPTER here. 

> read chapter

It's forty-eight pages long.  Are you sure you want to do that?

> finish chapter

With what? Your bare hands?

> use keyboard

A fog swirls around the screen, and...

You are sitting at a ROLLTOP DESK in front of a LAPTOP.  There are many BOOKS and PHOTOCOPIES here. A BROWSER WINDOW is open to GOOGLE BOOKS.

> look window

The screen contains a list of full-text novels related to this CHAPTER.  You have not written about any of them.  Yet.

> noooooo!

Yessssss!

> noooooo!

Yessss, my precioussss!

> close window

The WINDOW refuses to close.

> close chapter

The CHAPTER refuses to close.

A fog swirls around the screen, and...

You are sitting at a ROLLTOP DESK in front of a LAPTOP.  There are many BOOKS and PHOTOCOPIES here.   

There is a RESEARCH LIBRARIAN standing next to the desk.

> it's 2:03 AM!

OK, so it's a NOCTURNAL RESEARCH LIBRARIAN.  Sheesh.

> talk librarian

"We've found another dozen bad Methodist novels about the Elizabethan settlement.  Isn't that terrific?"

> wail

I thought you liked reading lots of novels.

> gnash teeth

You know, your parents spent a lot of money on that orthodontic work.

> finish chapter

With what? Your bare hands?

> use fountain pen

A fog swirls around the screen, and...

You are sitting at a ROLLTOP DESK in front of a LAPTOP.  There are many BOOKS and PHOTOCOPIES here.  There is a NOCTURNAL RESEARCH LIBRARIAN here.

Another stack of books has appeared next to the desk.

> look books

You see several rare Catholic novels about the sixteenth century. 

> arrrrgghh!

That is not an astute observation.

> read books

They're all triple-deckers.  Are you sure you want to do that?

> not really

It's your research project, sweetheart, not mine.

> read books

They're all triple-deckers.  Are you sure you want to do that?

> I guess so

Such enthusiasm!

A fog swirls around the screen, and...

You are sitting at a ROLLTOP DESK in front of a LAPTOP.  There are many BOOKS and PHOTOCOPIES here.  There is a NOCTURNAL RESEARCH LIBRARIAN here.

Another stack of books has appeared next to the desk.

> what the heck?

I don't understand.

> help

If you research it, the books will come.

> stop books

BWAHAHAHA!

> end game

Sorry, kiddo.  This is why you took a sabbatical, remember?

Google Books meets library catalogs?

In an article at Library Journal (via), Mark J. Ludwig and Margaret R. Wells praise Google Books for its ability to provide both full-text searching and content, noting that "while users do need to watch out for the Google Books “doughnut hole,” i.e., the gap between scanned material out of copyright and new born-digital books fresh from publishers, materials in Google Books are far more visible and accessible than those in the local catalog and our collections." Quite understandably, they're concerned about Google Books' likely effect on a) smaller college libraries and b) the dissemination of academic monographs in general.  But both this article and Merrilee Proffitt's useful response (which raises the question of copyright law) ignore the by-now thoroughly dead horse (in fact, I'm starting to think that it's a zombie, ready to munch on academic brains) that I've been beating for some time: Google Books is digitizing books badly.  The scans can be blurry, distorted, or chopped in half--and scanning problems affect the search function. There are books missing their first page.  There are books missing their last page.  There are books missing random chunks of pages.  There are books with pages in the wrong order.  There are inconsistencies (are triple-deckers scanned as one volume? As three?).  And, of course, there is the sheer and utter uselessness of snippet view.  (I just suffered through yet another snippet view that landed me in the margin.  You know, the blank space on the page.)    From an academic POV, this lack of interest in anything resembling quality control is not a minor glitch or superficial inconvenience.   

As I've said on more than one occasion, I'm completely enamored with the idea of Google Books, and I have found all sorts of potentially wonderful material by using it.  But far too much of that potentially wonderful material remains just that--potentially wonderful. 

Let's kill two conspiracies with one stone!

While pondering steampunk for a future post (as per request) and looking for new Oxford University Press books over at Amazon, I stumbled over this publication.  My mind is now positively supercalafragibogglefied. 

I'm still waiting for someone to revive the nineteenth-century conspiracy theory that several of Sir Walter Scott's novels were really written by his brother and sister-in-law.   See also.   (I mean, I'd like to keep waiting, but surely it's only a matter of time.) 

Department of slightly unusual acquisitions

ALS from the evangelical novelist Emily Sarah Holt to Mrs. Mackenzie, December 18, 1877. 

"My sister" is actually her sister-in-law, Anna; the brother in question is James Maden Holt, MP (PDF).  Holt, who would have been forty-one when this letter was written, appears to have lived with them her entire life.  11 Southwell Gardens was part of a new housing development that began in the 1870s.   

As you can see, ESH had excellent handwriting, which (blessedly) also characterizes her private MSS.   

We're late, we're late, for a very important date

My editor at Choice posted a brief editorial about academics (and librarians) and their excuses for submitting late reviews.  Ssssh! Don't tell the students that we do this too. 

Part of my job at Modern Philology involved tracking down wayward reviewers and requesting that they mend the errors of their ways.  (If you've never been on the operational side of a journal, you might be amazed at just how many review copies silently vanish into the depths of the would-be reviewers' bookshelves.)   The most startling excuse involved a house fire...

Whither Housman?

I've been chewing over this Guardian blog post for a few days, ever since a family friend sent it on.  In sum, the author, Alex Larman, finds that A. E. Housman has "fallen out of fashion," bemoans the lack of a serious new biography (given that, as Larman has to admit, Housman's life lacked...adventure), and posits that he could perhaps be recuperated by reading him as a "queer writer."  And yet, Larman himself hits on the problem: "He was unfortunate in that he was neither a flashy aesthete nor a daring modernist, producing old-fashioned verse that used simple forms and unflashy language to evoke time, place and mood with consummate skill."  But...surely this makes Housman the kind of poet you would expect to "fall out of fashion"? Housman is indeed a technically skilled poet, witty (even at his own expense, as in the self-parody that opens "Terence, This is Stupid Stuff"), good at ringing the changes on such eternal themes as melancholy, death and forgetfulness, and the ephemerality of love.  As one of the commenters to Larman's post points out, Housman's sensibility is very close to Hardy's (especially when Hardy is in this sort of poetic mood; Housman had earlier published a couple of similar poems in A Shropshire Lad).*  He is, in other words, a fine, effective poet, often accessible to undergraduates in ways that his contemporaries just as often are not.  Nevertheless--as Larman has just conceded!--he's an unadventurous poet.  Even when Housman steps away briefly from his favored iambic or trochaic tetrameter and trimeter stanzas, with or without the occasional anapest, he tends to look backwards (e.g., a couple of poems written in fourteeners).    He prefers quatrains and rhyming couplets; read aloud, the poems sound "quiet," but as Frank Kermode notes, contemporary composers immediately saw their possibilities.  Yet this is all very conventional not just by 1890s standards or Modernist standards, but by 1850s standards.  Set Housman next to any of the major poets from the Victorian period--say, Robert Browning, Lord Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, G. M. Hopkins, A. C. Swinburne, Christina Rossetti,  perhaps Elizabeth Barrett Browning--and his use of form, meter, and language will still seem, as Larman says, "old-fashioned."    Note that this is not a matter of abstruseness or other high difficulty; it's a matter of experimenting and taking risks.  While adventurousness may lead to the literary-historical equivalent of crashing and burning (Spasmodics, anyone?), doing the poetic version of staying "[a]t home," as AEH says to Wilde in The Invention of Love, can't help but make the poet recede into the crowd a bit.**  Housman is hardly going to disappear, precisely because he is such a readable poet, but the "dullness" of his existence really can't be blamed for his slight fade-out.

*--The point had been made before. 

**--Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love (New York: Grove Press, 1997), 97.

"...the composure, the fortitude, the resignation, and the religion, which marked his last moments"

Jonathan Rowe's post on the posthumous Christianizing (or make that orthodox-izing...) of George Washington reminded me of the early 19th-c. British equivalent: the posthumous, but not altogether successful, Christianizing of William Pitt the Younger.  George Rose, whom I'm quoting in my title, did his best to help this process along, although the main responsibility devolved on Pitt's former tutor, the Bishop of Lincoln, George Pretyman Tomline, and Pitt's old friend, the Tory author and editor William Gifford.   Not all devout Protestants were particularly impressed by the end result, however.  Pitt's niece, Lady Hester Stanhope, did much to knock the legend on its head, thanks to her memoirizing physician, Charles Lewis Meryon.  Similarly, the evangelical William Wilberforce, a great friend of Pitt's,  had to admit that the religion of Pitt and his associates was not what it could have been (in fact, Wilberforce had compassionate, but sterner, things to say).  For a brief summing-up of Pitt's beliefs, or lack thereof, see the third volume of John Ehrman's standard biography  (826-29). 

Son of the further adventures in GoogleBooks (or, ILL vs. the Periodical of Doom)

One of the justifications for that infernal invention known as "snippet view" is that it allows researchers to identify a source and ILL it later.  A relatively rare periodical, The Edinburgh Christian Instructor, happens to have a long book review that I would like to see.  For reasons unbeknownst to me, the volume is available in snippet view only (despite being rather out of copyright, to say the least).  After many valiant attempts at finding the beginning and end of the review, I made a (semi-) educated guess and, crossing my fingers, my toes, and my cats' toes, sent it off to our ILL office.  Alas, my semi-educated guess may not have been educated enough, because...apparently, nobody can find either the right volume or the right page.  Or what I think is the right volume or the right page, because, you know, I can't determine that from what GB has made available.   I suppose I could always trek to Yale or to the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary...

As always,  I have no objections in theory to GoogleBooks, which ought to be a terrific resource for academics in my underfunded situation.  At times, it is a terrific resource.  But the sloppy execution is very, very frustrating, and actively undermines GB's scholarly usefulness.