Elizabeth Gaskell died in 1865 leaving behind a wide range of works – novels, novellas, short stories, poetry and non-fiction.  Her final novel, Wives and Daughters lay unfinished, just shy of the final chapter or so.  There is some common ground here between Elizabeth Gaskell and the later writer Edith Wharton, who died before the completing the final chapters of The Buccaneers (1938).  Both writers had their incomplete novels published posthumously.  Both writers decided to set their final works in an earlier time.  Edith Wharton, writing in the 1930s, decided to return to the 1870s in The Buccaneers.  Elizabeth Gaskell, writing in the 1860s, returned to the 1820s in Wives and Daughters.  It is interesting, that at this stage of their lives, both writers decided to revisit a bygone age. Elizabeth Gaskell and ‘Wives and Daughters’

In some ways it is difficult to know where to start with Wives and Daughters.  It is a large, and in some ways, a complex novel spanning some 580 plus pages.  At the heart of the novel is the story of young Molly Gibson and her journey from childhood into maturity and the relationships she forms with those around her.  However, in many ways, this is an oversimplification of a very rich text.  Gaskell explores some complex issues and the novel contains many carefully drawn characters.  It features not only birth, marriage and death, but secrets and lies, conflict and humour, and is much more than a simple tale of Molly’s maturation.  It opens in a fairy-tale like manner:

To begin with the old rigmarole of childhood. In a country there was a shire, and in that shire there was a town, and in that town there was a house, and in that house there was a room, and in that room there was a bed, and in that bed there lay a little girl; wide awake and longing to get up, but not daring to do so for fear of the unseen power in the next room…

The ‘unseen power’ is Betty the maid, and the little girl is the aforementioned Molly.  The ‘sing-song’ rhythmic nature and the use of repetition is a little like a nursery rhyme, but it also achieves an image which moves from a wide view to a specific focus. Whether you find this opening endearing or a little off-putting, please forge ahead as you will not be disappointed.

Like many Victorian novels, Wives and Daughters was initially serialized in the Cornhill Magazine, beginning in August 1864 and concluding in January 1866.  Frederick Greenwood, the editor of Cornhill provided the ending using Gaskell’s notes and information from her family.  Cornhill had previously serialized her work, Cousin Phillis.  Initially, Gaskell was reluctant to write for the magazine after her friend and publisher George Smith had approached her, fearing a higher standard would be required than Household Words and All the Year Round, published by Charles Dickens.  She was also cautious as her friendship with Dickens had become somewhat strained following a number of disagreements over such issues as the word limit of North and South and the ending of her short story ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’.  She had complied with Dickens on the former, but stood her ground regarding the latter.  Nevertheless, she outlined the plot of her new venture which she envisaged as a triple decker novel.  She need not have worried as the serialized version of Wives and Daughters was very well received by a reading public who eagerly awaited each new instalment. Elizabeth Gaskell and ‘Wives and Daughters’

Cast of Elizabeth Gaskell

The early chapters establish Molly’s happy life living with her widowed father, the local doctor.  The fairy-tale theme continues initially as Molly becomes overwhelmed at the much-anticipated Gala Day which had caused her early and excited awakening in the opening paragraph.  This is held at the resplendent Towers, one of the homes of local aristocracy Lord and Lady Cumnor. Molly seeks solace in the gardens, loses her way in the hot sunshine and falls asleep in the shade of a cedar tree.  She is embarrassed to be discovered by two ladies who turn out to be the Cumnor’s married (and titled) daughter and their former governess Clare, now widowed.  Clare creates quite an impression on Molly: ‘She was the most beautiful person she had ever seen, and she was certainly a very lovely woman. Her voice, too, was soft and plaintive…’ (Chapter 2).  Clare takes care of Molly who is now suffering from heatstroke and orders some cool water and lunch, most of which she consumes herself.  Clare’s charm starts to slip slightly as she does not correct the assumption that Molly ate all of the hearty lunch, and was probably ill through over-eating. Molly is taken to rest in one of the bedrooms but is anxious about missing her ride home and pleads with Clare:

‘Please ask somebody to waken me if I go to sleep. I am to go back with the Miss Brownings.’

‘Don’t trouble yourself about it, dear, I’ll take care’, said Clare… And then she went away and thought no more about it.

Thus, the most beautiful creature Molly had ever seen turns out to be untrue to her word.  Molly is discovered much later by the maids who come to make up the room, long after all the carriages have departed.  Poor little Molly is awestruck and fearful of the aristocratic Cumnors and when Lord Cumnor says in his best Daddy Bear voice ‘Are you the little girl who has been sleeping in my bed?’ she fears his anger is real as she has never read the ‘Three Bears’.  Her fear deepens as he continues with his jokes, making reference to Sleeping Beauty and it appears as though Molly will have to spend the night at the Towers.  Fortunately, and greatly to her relief, her father comes to the rescue on his horse, along with her pony, and she is able to return home.

The narrative skims over the ‘calm monotony of life’ (Chapter 4) and we next encounter Molly at the age of seventeen in the appropriately titled Chapter 5 ‘Calf-Love’.  The Calf-Love in question refers to the infatuation of one of Dr Gibson’s students for Molly.  The poor lovestruck student is fast dispatched from the premises before Molly becomes aware of his ardour. This leads Dr Gibson to decide he needs to take a wife to provide Molly with a feminine influence over her moral development. His thoughts are further confirmed when he receives an unexpected visit from Lord Hollingford who observes the rumpled and rather stained tablecloth.  Hollingford suggests Dr Gibson should remarry:

… if you found a sensible, agreeable women of thirty or so, I really think you couldn’t do better than to take her to manage your home, and so save you either discomfort or wrong; and, beside, she would be able to give your daughter that kind of tender supervision which, I fancy, all girls of that age require.  (Chapter 9)

Thus, the fairy-tale tone has vanished. There is no hint of romance. Marriage is merely a practicality and Molly soon gains a stepmother and a stepsister.

This is not too much of a spoiler though, as this occurs quite early on in the novel.  Molly is not encumbered with a wicked stepmother a la Cinderella, however, the new Mrs Gibson soon proves herself to be somewhat shallow and self-obsessed.  She immediately makes plans to remodel the house deeming it too rustic for her refined tastes.  On their first evening home after the honeymoon, she is disappointed her husband is urgently called out to tend to a patient and bemoans to Molly:Elizabeth Gaskell and ‘Wives and Daughters’

‘… I think your dear papa might have put off his visit to Mr Craven Smith for just this one evening.’

‘Mr Craven Smith couldn’t put off his dying.’ said Molly bluntly.

‘You droll girl!’ said Mrs Gibson, with a faint laugh. ‘But if this Mr Smith is dying, as you say, what’s the use of your father’s going off to him in such a hurry? Does he expect a legacy, or anything of that kind?’  (Chapter 15) Elizabeth Gaskell and ‘Wives and Daughters’

Many of the moments featuring Mrs Gibson have touches of wry humour about them and it is no accident she is frequently depicted producing endless decorative but useless embroidery, and is highly critical of any intelligent conversation.  Gaskell uses this self-interested character to highlight the importance of education for women lest they turn out like vain Mrs Gibson.

Elizabeth Gaskell Tower, Knutsford

Biographer Jenny Uglow[1] suggests simply drawing out the thread of Molly’s story is a huge over-simplification in such a rich tapestry of a novel, and I must agree, even though this is what I have just done. The community of characters Gaskell created in her earlier novel Cranford is achieved with even greater skill in this text.  As the title suggests, familial relationships take centre stage, but not just in the sense of wives and daughters.  There are generational conflicts such as those within the Hamley family between the Squire and his sons Osborn and Roger.  This makes way for some deeper contextual issues to be explored through the anti-Catholic and anti-French attitudes held by the Squire, and the political context of Tory versus Whig as well as the roles of science and art in late 1820s society.  The rise of science and knowledge forms an important plot point and it is no coincidence that Elizabeth Gaskell had previously begun to map out ideas for the novel whilst on holiday in Edinburgh after visiting her relative Charles Darwin.  Initially she had some difficulties deciding upon a title and it could be she was inspired by the title of Ivan Turgenev’s 1862 novel Fathers and Sons, particularly as both writers were aware of each other through mutual friends.

Wives and Daughters is often thought of as Gaskell’s masterpiece and it is all the more remarkable when considering the extreme pressure she was under both personally and professionally.  Producing an instalment each month required working to a tight schedule, although she found Cornhill less pressurized to write for as she was given more freedom than in her previous dealings with Dickens and Household Words.  However, there were many calls on her time during this period, as there were problems within her own family.  Her eldest daughter Marianne had been engaged to her second cousin Thurston for some time.  Thurson’s father was not happy about the engagement as he wanted his son to make a more financially advantageous marriage, a theme which made its way into Wives and Daughters.  In addition, her second daughter Meta was recovering from health issues.  To add to her stress levels, she was also involved in a house purchase which her beloved husband knew nothing about, a venture which would have been highly unusual in Victorian times.  Her plan was to buy The Lawn, near Alton in Hampshire, far away from industrial Manchester, as a place for her husband to retire to.  She was using money from her novel to finance the deal, but even in the nineteenth century, house purchases were far from straightforward and this no doubt added to her stress levels.

Although Elizabeth Gaskell was unable to complete what many have described as her best novel, the point at which she leaves off, and the concluding remarks offered by the editor of Cornhill provide a satisfying close to the narrative. So, allow Molly to lead you through the fortunes and trials of the Gibsons, Hamleys and many more interesting characters.

[1] Jenny Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories (London: Faber and Faber, 1999)

Main image: Elizabeth Gaskell House, Manchester. Credit: Allotment boy 1 / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 1 above: Cast of Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865) Credit: World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 2 above: Elizabeth Gaskell Memorial Tower and King’s Coffee House, King Street, Knutsford, Cheshire. Credit: John Keates / Alamy Stock Photo

For more information on Elizabeth Gaskell’s life and works, visit: The Gaskell Society 

Details of Elizabeth Gaskell’s house can be found here: elizabethgaskellhouse.co.uk

Our full range of her titles, including our collection of her excellent ghost stories, can be found here

Elizabeth Gaskell and ‘Wives and Daughters’

Elizabeth Gaskell and ‘Wives and Daughters’

Elizabeth Gaskell and ‘Wives and Daughters’

Elizabeth Gaskell and ‘Wives and Daughters’

Elizabeth Gaskell and ‘Wives and Daughters’

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Bleak House (1851-53) is one of Dickens’ greatest novels. It has an integrated plot which develops naturally, encompassing and involving the vast array of characters in a unified tale that Dickens brings forth from his fertile imagination. Unlike some of his other works, this novel contains no episodes that do not have a direct relevance to the main plot. Professor J. Hillis Miller, author of Charles Dickens, The World of his Novels, observed that in writing Bleak House: ‘Dickens constructed a model in little of English society in his time. In no other of his novels is the canvas broader, the sweep more inclusive, the linguistic and dramatic texture richer, the gallery of comic grotesques more extraordinary.’

The story revolves around an infamous court case, Jarndyce versus Jarndyce, which has been rolling on for years in the court of Chancery with little hope of it ever being resolved. All the characters in the novel are in some ways touched by this impenetrable lawsuit. It is Dickens’ merciless indictment of the Court of Chancery and its bungling and morally corrupt handling of the Jarndyce case that gives the novel scope and meaning. It ruins and taints all who come into contact with it.

Esther Summerson, who narrates much of the story, gives an account of her unhappy childhood and becoming a protégée of the honest and worthy John Jarndyce, who is guardian to Ada Clare and Richard Carstone. Richard and Ada wish to marry but his vacillations in choice of career and his inability to stick with his choices lead him to put all his faith in the resolution of the Jarndyce case in which he has a financial interest. This inevitably leads to tragedy.

The story is developed by the introduction of the pompous Sir Leicester Deadlock and his proud wife, Lady Deadlock. She harbours a dark secret, which is slowly unravelled by the coldly calculating heartless lawyer Tulkinghorn – one of Dickens’ greatest creations.

Numerous other characters contribute to the complex portrait of society which emerges from the novel. They include Harold Skimpole who pretends he is ‘but a child’ and has no talents whatsoever as he leeches on others; Krook, the rag and bottle shopkeeper who dies a hideous death from ‘spontaneous combustion’; Mrs Jellaby, neglectful of her own family while spending her energies on ‘Telescopic Philanthropy’, caring for natives in Africa; and one of my favourite players in the drama, Guppy, the young clerk, the unrequited lover of Esther Summerson – he is both a sad and comic character, but brilliantly portrayed. Of particular importance to the moral design and message of the novel is Jo the crossing sweeper whose brutish life and death are the instrument for one of Dickens’ most savage judgements on an indifferent society.

The novel has an interesting narrative structure which, it has to be said, has not pleased all the critics. The story is told by a third-person narrator who is both dispassionate and objective; and also by a first-person narrator, Esther Summerson, who describes the circumstances of her life and those of her acquaintances with a sensitive and emotional voice, as is natural for a character at the heart of the maelstrom of drama in the novel – rather like David in David Copperfield and Pip in Great Expectations. As result of this approach to storytelling, the contrast in narrative styles in Bleak House gives the reader a much more detailed and comprehensive view of events.

George Gissing and G.K. Chesterton are among those literary critics and authors who considered Bleak House to be the best novel Charles Dickens ever wrote. And I cannot disagree with them. As Chesterton put it: ‘Bleak House is not certainly Dickens’ best book; but perhaps it is his best novel’. Daniel Burt, in his book The Novel 100: A Ranking of the Greatest Novels of All Time ranks Bleak House at number 12, while Stephen King named it among his top ten favourite books.

In the late nineteenth century there were three minor stage plays based on the novel. However, an evening in the theatre can in no way encompass the vast and intricate scope of the novel or its vast cast of characters and so these dramas cut out much of the text and   concentrated on the role of the street sweeper Jo.

Bleak House BBC 2005

There were two silent movies in the 1920s, one of which starred Sybil Thorndyke as Lady Deadlock, but since then movie makers have steered clear of the novel, realising that to capture its brilliance would require hours and hours of screen time. That is where BBC Television comes in. They have produced three serials over the years. The first was in 1959: an eleven part series of thirty minute episodes with Andrew Cruikshank as John Jarndyce and John Phillips as Mr Tulkinghorn. The performances of the cast were praised by the press, but the narrative was squeezed somewhat and a number of interesting characters such as Mrs Jellaby and Mr Skimpole were lost. The second television adaptation in 1985 starred Diana Rigg as Lady Deadlock , Robin Bailey as Sir Leicester and Peter Vaughan as Tulkinghorn. This was a fine series but it has since been eclipsed by a version produced in 2005 with a stunning script by Andrew Davies, encompassing all the themes and tropes of the original book along with a stellar cast, all of whom were on top form. The cast list is too long to hand out bouquets to them all, but special note must be made of the stunning performances of Charles Dance as Tulkinghorn, Gillian Anderson as Lady Deadlock and Anna Maxwell Martin as Esther Summerson. This series remains one of the jewels in the BBC’s crown.

Bleak House is a dark, rich confection, high in drama, deep in meaning, running the gamut of tragedy and farce. It is steeped in its time and yet speaks clearly to the modern reader. Dickens knew that costumes and manners were incidental to the workings, emotions, trials and tribulations of mankind. In this novel, all human life is there. I commend it to your attention.

Main image: ‘Attorney and client: fortitude and patience.’ Wood engraving after a 19th-century American edition of ‘Bleak House.
Credit: GRANGER – Historical Picture Archive / Alamy Stock Photo

Image above: BBC production of Bleak House 2005, photo: © BBC / Courtesy: Everett Collection
Credit: Everett Collection Inc / Alamy Stock Photo

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It cannot be denied that Complete Nonsense is above all intended to entertain. The sudden occurrence of the unexpected is generally regarded to be among the most successful ways of generating comedy, and Lear takes this to an extreme. All bets are off when the reader of Nonsense Cookery, instructed in the art of making of an “Amblongus Pie”, is finally directed to “serve up in a clean dish, and throw the whole out of the window as fast as possible”. Likewise, the reader cannot possibly predict that the eponymous Four Little Children would “return immediately to their boat with a strong sense of underdeveloped asthma”. In the limericks, which account for a large portion of Lear’s output, there is no logical connection between the location by which the character is identified (“Old Man of the Hague”), their state (“whose ideas were excessively vague”) and the action (“he built a balloon to examine the moon”). Each element is linked by rhyme rather than rationale. Such unpredictable and incongruous twists and turns are Lear’s most consistent way of ensuring his stories and songs elicit a humorous response.

For the same reason he frequently employs fanciful made-up vocabulary, the most famous of which is “runcible”: the “runcible spoon” from The Owl and The Pussycat inspired so much curiosity that many different, and contradictory, rumours circulated regarding the origin of the neologism. As well as completely invented terms, such as “slobacious”, “beasticles” and “scroobius”, Lear also engaged in witty word-play at all points along the spectrum of sophistication. Two of his characters, for example, leave home to play “battlecock and shuttledore”, a spoonerism of the early sport battledore and shuttlecock. Two others, searching for sage to season their stuffing, are told that they can find some on the hill, and indeed, upon climbing up “among the rocks, all seating in a nook, They saw that Sage a-reading of a most enormous book”.

Satire also plays its part in Lear’s comedy. Although he insisted that “in no portion of these Nonsense drawings have I ever allowed any caricature of private or public persons to appear”, he still found ways to poke fun at features and characters of real life. Some of the ribaldry is self-directed, with a high proportion of the caricatures and limericks focusing on characters with large or ridiculous noses:

“There was an Old Man with a nose,

Who said, “If you choose to suppose

That my nose is too long, you are certainly wrong!”

That remarkable Man with a nose”

In the autobiographical How Pleasant to Know Mr Lear, the poet himself acknowledges that:

“His mind is concrete and fastidious,

His nose is remarkably big;

His visage is more or less hideous,

His beard it resembles a wig”.

One of the most important relationships in Lear’s life was his friendship, which is said to have bordered on obsession, with Sir Franklin Lushington, a barrister and judge. When the Four Little Children spot “somebody in a large white wig, sitting on an arm-chair” which actually turns out to be “the co-operative Cauliflower”, we might wonder whether this is Lear lightly teasing his old friend. And in telling his young audience that “you have only not to look in your geography books to find out all about” the places he describes, Lear is hinting that not all useful knowledge need be learnt in the formal environment and manner usually associated with education.

In fact, in addition to the “innocent mirth” of Complete Nonsense, it also has evident educational value itself. The advanced vocabulary, as well as its historical and cultural references, indicate the type of child the author imagined reading his work. Talk of Vitruvius, Homer and Xerxes (often when Lear seems lost for another word beginning with X) would not have been lost on the “the great-grandchildren, grand-nephews, and grand-nieces of Edward, 13th Earl of Derby” to whom the first book was dedicated. And yet there is also much that is more readily accessible in the nonsense writings too. Perhaps the most comprehensible of Lear’s many forms are his alphabets, which are largely devoid of neologism and avoid random jumps between subjects. Each short poem focuses on a word beginning with a letter of the alphabet, a model still used today in even the most stringently academic children’s books:

“L was a lily,

So white and so sweet!

To see it and smell it

Was quite a nice treat””

“R was a rattlesnake,

Rolled up so tight,

Those who saw him ran quickly,

For fear he should bite.”

As well as this straightforwardly educational content, Lear’s nonsense also conceals a number of complex ideas about society and identity. Although told with fanciful language and impossible narratives, his stories and songs convey real and important human emotions including love, curiosity and insecurity. The Dong with the Luminous Nose tells the tale of unrequited love:

“The Dong [who] was happy and gay,

Till he fell in love with a Jumbly Girl

Who came to those shores one day.

…

For day and night he was always there

By the side of the Jumbly Girl so fair,

With her sky-blue hands and her sea-green hair;

Till the morning came of that hateful day

When the Jumblies sailed in their sive away,

And the Dong was left on the cruel shore

Gazing, gazing for evermore.”

The Nutcrackers and the Sugartongs, despite the evident impossibility of the situation, expresses an all too authentic concern about one’s own ability, a desire for adventure and the satisfaction of achievement:

“The Nutcrackers sate by a plate on the table;

The Sugar-tongs sate by a plate at his side;

And the Nutcrackers said, “Don’t you wish we were able

Along the blue hills and green meadows to ride?

Must we drag on this stupid existence forever,

So idle and weary, so full of remorse,

While everyone else takes his pleasure, and never

Seems happy unless he is riding a horse?

…

The Frying-pan said, “It’s an awful delusion!”

The Tea-kettle hissed, and grew black in the face;

And they all rushed downstairs in the wildest confusion

To see the great Nutcracker-Sugar-tong race.

And out of the stable, with screaming and laughter

(Their ponies were cream-colored, speckled with brown),

The Nutcrackers first, and the Sugar-tongs after,

Rode all round the yard, and then all round the town.”

The overcoming of one’s own insecurities and of one’s critics is a constant theme throughout the nonsense stories and poetry. Just as the Nutcrackers and Sugar-tongs prove the Frying-pan wrong, so too do many other characters defy the naysayers. Interestingly, their triumphs are often paired with, or the result of, a journey far away. The last words from these particular kitchen utensils is “We will never go back anymore!”, a sentiment echoed throughout many stories. The wall-climbing Mr and Mrs Discobbolos, having decided that to “never go down again” happily pass their life “far away from hurry and strife”. “They never came back” is a repeated motif in Calico Pie, and in The Pelican Chorus, the leading pelican literally flies the nest, leaving her fellows remarking that:

“She has gone to the Great Gromboolian Plain,

And we probably never shall meet again.

She dwells by the stream of the Chambly Bore,

And we probably never shall see her more.”

Lear himself travelled frequently from the age of thirty, most often visiting Italy, where he eventually settled at the San Remo home he nicknamed Villa Tennyson. The youngest surviving child of 21 and raised by his elder sister after his father’s bankruptcy, his early years cannot have been easy. In view of this childhood upheaval, it is easy to see Lear’s departure for Italy as an escape from negative influences and memories at home, a hypothesis that seems all but confirmed by the theme of separation and distance that persists throughout even his most light-hearted work.

Rainbow Lorikeet

A similarly weighty topic sometimes veiled by the frivolity of Lear’s style is that of death. Death has its place in many of the nonsense writings, but in none more so than The History of the Seven Families of Lake Pipple-popple. In this story, the parents of seven families, each a different species of animal, send their young off into the wild with one clear warning. For the parrots, it is “‘if…you find a Cherry, do not fight about who should have it”, for the geese “whatever you do, be sure you do not touch a Plum-pudding Flea”, and so on. On venturing into the wide world, each group of siblings eventually falls foul of the very trap illustrated for them by their parents. In fact, all the young animals die, and on hearing the news the parent animals commit a sort of ritual suicide: “they filled the bottles with the ingredients for pickling, and each couple jumped into a separate bottle, by which effort of course they all died immediately, and become thoroughly pickled in a few minutes.”

Lear had started his artistic career as an ornithological draughtsman for the Zoological Society and although, rather unusually, he drew birds from the live animals rather than skins, he would no doubt have been used to seeing dead specimens on a regular basis. In general, Victorian society was far from shy when it came to the subject of death, exemplified by the Queen’s decades of elaborate mourning for Albert. The mortality rate, although much improved from the preceding centuries, was far higher than today’s, especially among children, and many more deaths occurred in the home surrounded by family. It was thus an inescapable part of life, as indeed it is.

As evidenced by the references to the ancient world, the children for whom Lear writes would have grown up on stories of the Trojan war, where death abounds with ruthless finality. Contemporary children’s literature, by the likes of Lewis Carroll, William Blake and later J.M. Barrie, also carry a similar undercurrent, with characters well aware “that sudden death might be at the next tree, or stalking him from behind”. These writers have by no means been cast from the canon, but their popularity has been superseded by modern children’s books and entertainment, which by and large avoid the explicit theme of death.

It is difficult to image a parent today choosing The History of the Seven Families as a bedtime story for their child. Simple reasoning might say that it runs the risk of frightening or upsetting them, and in the short term this may be true, but omitting the concept of death from early development must have long-term effects. How much more terrifying to discover it as an unexpected and unavoidable fact when confronted with the real thing, rather than coming to know the realities of life through story and song. Death gives meaning to life, and Lear provides an important service in introducing it gradually, gently and even with humour in his Collected Nonsense.

Main image: Drawing by Edward Lear from his book ‘Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets,’ first published in 1871. Credit: The Granger Collection / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 1 above: Edward Lear 1862. Credit: Ian Dagnall Computing / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 2 above: Rainbow lorikeet, after an illustration by Edward Lear. Hand-coloured lithograph from Georg Friedrich Treitschke’s Gallery of Natural History, Naturhistorischer Bildersaal des Thierreiches, Liepzig, 1840. Credit: Florilegius / Alamy Stock Photo

The post Complete Nonsense by Edward Lear appeared first on Wordsworth Editions.

If we needed a reminder of the ability of the British to erase the blood-steeped events of our imperialist history, look no further than the late Queen’s funeral. Charlotte Higgins, writing for The Guardian (online September 19), noted acutely that where there is a lacuna, there lies an anxiety: ‘that the Commonwealth was so lavishly invoked during the funeral rites was a reminder that the angry ghosts of empire are massing outside the palace and cathedral doors’. Throughout the ceremony, Commonwealth was elided with Empire, without a note of irony. There was one mutter about ‘difficulties’ but otherwise one might have thought that there’d been a seamless, painless slide from British rule over the many countries represented, to their independence. And the presence of their many representatives colluded in this view, though there was an occasional nod in the clothing of leaders to their national identity. 15 of the Commonwealth realms (out of 56) still have the British monarch as their titular head of state, including, extraordinarily, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. Antigua, mentioned in my recent blog on Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, retains the monarchy. The monarch in these Commonwealth realms is represented by, usually, a Governor-General – literally the viceroy, the substitute for the king. Of course, as in the United Kingdom itself, the monarch’s constitutional powers are purely symbolic. This was written into the Balfour Agreement (1926): our present King has no jurisdiction whatsoever over the remaining members of the Commonwealth who recognise him as head of state. Similarly, they have no obligation of any kind to the British Government*. Though these connections are symbolic, they are woven heavily into the fabric of British culture. And at times – as with the Queen’s funeral – the public may be forgiven for forgetting that they are only symbolic, because the rhetoric and panoply of the occasion encourages them to see them as meaningful. They may also be forgiven for thinking that the Commonwealth as a political entity has some constitutional link with the United Kingdom. It doesn’t.

The British Empire 1893

What, you might be wondering, has this to do with fiction? Well, my last three blogs have tried to answer that question. But here I want to open up the discussion, air the oppositional view, and consider whether literature really matters in current debates about Empire – or to put that in reverse, whether Empire really matters in debates about literature. Regular readers of my blog will know which direction I’m coming from, but I’ll also play devil’s advocate.

To take from Wordsworth authors an example at the extreme end of the spectrum: John Buchan (1875-1940) is generally recognised as upholding values of Britishness, and therefore Empire. No surprise there. But it is interesting to look in more detail at the way in which, for example, Greenmantle (1916, in Wordsworth’s The Complete Richard Hannay Stories) explores anxieties about the threat of Islam in the First World War. Its hero Hannay, invalided out of the Battle of Loos, is recruited by the Foreign Office ‘to discover and neutralise a German-inspired plan in the Middle East to galvanise the Muslim world and ignite a powerful “Jehad” against the Allies’. This quotation (and subsequent information) is from Keith Jeffery’s 1916: A Global History (192-3), and Jeffery shows throughout this work, most notably in the chapter on Gallipoli, the fear the British had about a possible Islamic uprising. The head of the Ottoman Turkish Empire, Sultan Mehmet V (allied with the Germans), who ‘as caliph claimed leadership of Muslims throughout the world’ (13), issued a fatwa at the start of the First World War against French, English and Russian forces (179). Over 60 million of the 300 million inhabitants of British-ruled south Asia were Muslims. Could there be a pan-Islamic mobilisation against the Allies? This came down, at a local level in Gallipoli, to the decision to replace two Punjabi (Muslim) battalions with Gurkhas, for fear of uncertain Punjabi loyalties. (27)

Now, when we read Greenmantle, does the average reader ever think about that? Or indeed whether Hannay’s values are right?  In this rollicking adventure, and after the establishment of Hannay as hero extraordinary in The Thirty-Nine Steps, we don’t (unless we are historians of Empire) stop to think about the calculations the British were making about their imperial hold on power in Asia. But calculating they were, even as they were using those Asian troops to fight and die for them – possibly the best demonstration of imperial power. One wonders what an individual Muslim soldier, fighting ‘for’ the British against fellow-Muslims, might have thought. Of course, such thoughts are not represented.[1] Meanwhile Buchan’s Greenmantle, published in the midst of the First World War, pulled its readers along on an exciting story, as it still does, carrying an imperialist narrative in its wake.

But with Buchan, we know where we are; that he ended up as Governor-General of Canada from 1935 to 1940 just completes the circle. More interesting, perhaps, are those works whose reference to imperialism is hidden, as in the examples I have explored in previous blogs. Many of these come from the nineteenth century, perhaps the greatest age of British fiction, and it is not surprising that the most powerful literary emanations of that age reflect its dynamics of power. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1816-1855, Jane Eyre published 1847) has been relentlessly investigated for its representation of Mrs Rochester, both in terms of its misogyny and its possible racism. Jean Rhys’s The Wide Sargasso Sea (1890-1975; 1966) is the best possible creative counterpoint to Brontë’s novel. If we read the two together, we get a complex picture without reducing the power of either. Similarly, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) has called forth the postcolonial novel Foe (1986) by South African Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee (b. 1940).

So, the Empire writes back. And this way fiction remains rich and non-reductive. But what of the argument that fiction is simply fiction, and should be read as such, without consideration of political dimensions, especially if these are hidden so far below the surface of the narrative that it takes a literary critic of superhuman powers of hewing to reach them? And after all, literary critics are not known for their powers of hewing. One argument against the retrospective analysis of earlier works of fiction from a later politically-informed viewpoint, is that a sort of anachronism is going on in reverse. Attitudes, knowledge even, that the writer concerned could not have shared are used as an index against which to measure that writer’s worth. In each of my blogs, on Kipling, Conrad and Austen, I have tried to demonstrate that each writer was in fact aware of some of the issues of Empire raised. But there is sometimes something soulless in looking for that buried issue, in the smallest detail, and magnifying it beyond the span of the world of the novel itself.

The British Empire Magazine 1910

I’d like to end with an example from the other end of the ‘Empire’ spectrum to Buchan: James Joyce. Joyce’s dates, 1882-1941, match Buchan’s very closely. Yet in 1916, just as the frankly imperialist Greenmantle was published, the full edition of Dubliners was also published, Joyce himself was self-exiled in Trieste having chosen a European rather than an Irish identity, and he had begun to write his great work Ulysses, the early episodes of which were published in 1918. Joyce’s understanding of the ideas we have been discussing goes behind the issues of English imperialism to that of Irish national identity, and he imperiously dismisses both in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce’s view, held throughout his creative life, was that the artist must stand outside any restrictions, borders, identities placed upon him. The pull of Irish identity, and particularly the identity of the Irish writer, may have had a particular effect here. Though he speaks it fictionally via Stephen, Joyce certainly lived by the precept: ‘When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight … I shall try to fly by those nets.’

Joyce was born in a country which was itself the subject of English imperial power. But his strength as a writer is to resist both that power and the siren song of Irish national identity. In Ulysses, his hero is an Irish Jew, an inherent outsider/insider. When racism rears its head in the Cyclops chapter, Joyce weaves a complicated story of attack and defence around Bloom. His mode is as ever intertextual, ironic, never allowing a prevailing view. Yet the outcome of the chapter is to undermine the ‘citizen’ who utters and embodies anti-Semitic views. In the end Bloom’s insistence that ‘A nation is the same people living in the same place’ provokes the citizen to ask of Bloom, ‘“What is your nation if I may ask?” Bloom’s reply: ‘“Ireland. … I was born here. Ireland.”’

This exchange is replicated in countless exchanges in Britain a hundred years later. People who were born here being asked where they are ‘really’ from. This is a direct result of both the trans-national migrations of Empire (often encouraged by the ‘mother’ state, as with Windrush) and the attitude, like that of Joyce’s citizen, that race somehow supersedes one’s place of birth and therefore negates it. Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireland is a witty, self-deprecating but utterly damning account of the workings of the British Empire on those who were its ‘subjects’. Dip into a few of its pages and you won’t come out quite the same.  Sanghera looks at the complications of imperialism for its subsequent generations, both the ‘ruling’ and the ‘ruled’. It is entirely to Joyce’s credit that he understood back in 1916, when few others had that understanding, not just the wrongness of one country’s taking authority over another by force, but also the wrongness of a purely nationalistic reaction to that. Not only that, the joyful playfulness and intertextuality of his writing threatens any monolithic narrative.

Taking my cue from Joyce, who to my mind really does ‘fly by the nets’ of any form of national identity, I commend most those works that ask questions of Empire. That includes Heart of Darkness, for all its flaws, alongside, yes, even Kipling’s Kim. Neither gives a straightforward account of the imperialist enterprise. Yet both works are driven by a powerful narrative which leads us away from rather than towards any questioning. The power of narrative to seduce is, at bottom, why we all read. We love the story, the adventure, the relationships, the world that we enter. That is precisely what makes novels so powerful, and why they can carry ideas and ideologies – indeed must do so, as cultural emanations of their moment in time. Part of the pleasure of reading is to be carried along in their narrative stream. But another pleasure is to be observant of the complicated threads I have been trying to untangle in this short series. I honestly think we can enjoy both.

*A Facebook reader of the original published draft of this blog has kindly pointed out the counter-example of Governor-General of Australia Sir John Kerr’s dismissal of elected Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, November 11^th 1975. Kerr was at the time anxious to demonstrate that he did not inform or consult the Queen abot his decision, but papers made public in 2020 shows a prior correspondence with the Queen’s Private Secretary Sir Martin Charteris about the possibility of this dismissal. There was also discussion with the then Prince Charles.

Jane Austen: Mansfield Park

Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre

John Buchan: The Complete Richard Hannay Stories

John Buchan: The Thirty-Nine Steps

Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe

J. M. Coetzee: Foe

Jean Rhys: The Wide Sargasso Sea

Keith Jeffery: 1916: A Global History, Bloomsbury, 2015

Sathnam Sanghera: Empireland, Viking, 2021

[1] I have mentioned, in a previous blog on the Nobel Prize, Abdulrazak Gurnah’s After Lives. This novel looks, inter alia, at Muslim Africans fighting for Germany in the First World War.

More information on the life and works of John Buchan, visit The John Buchan Society website

Main image: British India:  An English family enjoy the comforts of the British Empire. Credit: Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo

Images above:

1. Map of the British Empire 1893 Credit: Antiqua Print Gallery / Alamy Stock Photo

2. The British Empire Magazine Plate 1910. Credit: Retro Ad Archives / Alamy Stock Photo

The post Empire appeared first on Wordsworth Editions.

Anne was the last of the six Brontë children, born at Thornton in Yorkshire, on January 17, 1820, eighteen months after her closest sibling, Emily. In April 1820, the family moved to Haworth, where her father had a ‘perpetual curacy’. Her mother, Maria, died there of cancer in September 1821, when Anne was only a year and nine months. Thereafter the children were brought up by Patrick and by their mother’s sister, Aunt Branwell, who came to live with them, and to whom Anne was particularly close (they shared a bed). When Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte and Emily were all sent in 1824 to the unhealthy Cowan Bridge school for the daughters of the clergy, Anne remained at home. Her older siblings Maria and Elizabeth both died of tuberculosis contracted at Cowan Bridge, Charlotte and Emily were brought home from school, and the three girls, with their brother Branwell, were then all educated at home. During this period Charlotte and Branwell began their first excursions into the Glass Town/Angria fiction until Charlotte’s departure in January 1831 to go to school at Roe Head. Left together at home, Anne and Emily became much closer, wandering the moors freely, sometimes with Branwell. It was now that Emily and Anne drew on the Angrian precedent, beginning to create their own privately imagined world of Gondal (though none of these early Gondal manuscripts survives). It was out of this Gondal world that Anne’s poetry would eventually emerge.

Charlotte returned to Roe Head as a teacher in 1835, and Anne joined her later as a pupil. Her departure was precipitated by a sudden illness, possibly accompanied by some sort of religious crisis, and in late 1837 she returned to Haworth, soon followed by Charlotte. Emily records the ensuing period at home as a happy time, in one of the diary papers she and Anne shared, written on June 26th 1837, ‘Anne and I writing in the drawing-room – Anne a poem beginning “Fair was the evening and brightly the sun” … All tight and right in which condition it is to be hoped we shall be this day 4 years [i.e. 1841]’. At this time, the family’s hopes were still fixed on Branwell, and it became incumbent on Charlotte and Anne to make their way in life, with Emily staying at home to oversee the care of their father. Few roles were open to women of their education and class; other than marriage, there was teaching, or – a somewhat dreaded fate – being a governess. (https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/the-figure-of-the-governess)

In April 1839, at the age of 19, Anne took up that position with the Inghams of Blake Hall, Mirfield, with two young charges. Though she was dismissed at the end of the year, apparently for her failure to improve the children’s educational attainments, she acquired the experience which became a model for her first novel, Agnes Grey. We do not know whether she began its writing at this time, as there is no extant manuscript, but she continued to build up experience of the complicated role of the governess in her next position, with the Robinsons, at Thorp Green, near York, where she went in 1840. Here her charges were three girls, Lydia aged 15, Elizabeth, 13, and Mary, 12. Anne must have formed good relationships with them as Elizabeth and Mary visited her at Haworth in 1848 long after she had left their employ. Some of the poems she wrote at this time express homesickness, e.g. ‘Home’, where, reflecting on the beautiful parkland surrounding her, she asks instead, ‘give me back my barren hills’. (For digital access to a range of Anne’s poems, go to https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/anne-bronte.)

Nonetheless, she stuck at her post, bringing Branwell to the establishment early in 1843 to act as a tutor to the family’s young son, Edmund. Branwell’s disastrous affair with Mrs Lydia Robinson is now well known; in June 1845 Anne resigned her post, and in July Branwell was dismissed, marking the start of his decline into alcoholism and addiction. That experience too fed into Anne’s writing, this time into her second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

At this stage, however, she was still completing her first novel, noting in her diary paper of July 31st 1845, ‘I have begun the third volume of passages in the life of an Individual (sic)’ – this was the working title for what would become Agnes Grey. In this same period, when all four siblings were at home again at Haworth, Charlotte came upon Emily’s notebook containing 43 poems. Anne also offered up 21 poems, and a joint publication by all three sisters was conceived. In May 1846, a selection of their poems was published under the pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, subsidised by the sisters’ own funds, under the imprint of Aylott and Jones. The ordering of the names here, against alphabetical convention, gives a clue to the sisters’ own self-perceived pecking order. Although the Poems did not flourish, they were now at least published authors, and Charlotte now began to offer their novels to various publishers. In the summer of 1847, T. C. Newby accepted Anne’s and Emily’s novels (Agnes Grey and Wuthering Heights) but not Charlotte’s (The Professor). However, Newby was a dilatory publisher, and it wasn’t until Charlotte’s second novel, Jane Eyre, had been published by Smith, Elder, in October 1847 that he finally brought out Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey together, in December 1847. Anne’s novel was again last in line – this time it made up the third volume of the joint publication, with Emily’s novel forming Volumes One and Two. And though Agnes Grey had been completed before Charlotte’s Jane Eyre was begun, the sensational success of her sister’s novel eclipsed Anne’s, with its prior portrait of a plain, principled heroine. However, Anne’s second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, followed soon after, in July 1848, though the unscrupulous Newby suggested to an American publisher that it was a second work by Currer Bell. This led Charlotte and Anne to present themselves at the offices of Smith, Elder in London, to prove their separate identities. Tenant was successful enough to go into a quick second edition in August. In November 1848, Smith, Elder took over the sisters’ publication, with a new edition of their Poems.

They were now in safe publishing hands and the way was clear for all three sisters to forge ahead as writers. But neither Anne nor Emily had a chance to enjoy the fruits of their success. Following quickly on Branwell’s death in September, Emily died in December 1848, and Anne fell ill in the same month, also with tuberculosis. She confronted her possible death bravely, though she did not wish for it; writing to Charlotte’s friend Ellen Nussey early in 1849, she said: ‘I have no horror of death; if I thought it inevitable I think I could quietly resign myself to the prospect … But I wish it would please God to spare me not only for Papa’s and Charlotte’s sakes but because I long to do some good in the world before I leave it.’ On May 24th, Charlotte and Ellen accompanied her to Scarborough in the last faint hope that the change of air would effect an improvement. On May 28th, she died and was buried in St Mary’s churchyard in Scarborough, the only one of the siblings not to be buried at Haworth. She was 29 years old.

The posthumous fate of Anne Brontë’s fiction and poetry was not helped initially by Charlotte, who told Smith, Elder that The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was not worthy of republication. The firm did republish Agnes Grey in an edition with Wuthering Heights, and with some of the poems, though only 7 of Anne’s poems were included. In 1854 Thomas Hodgson, another London publisher, brought out what has been called a mutilated edition of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall; badly and summarily edited, it even omits Gilbert Markham’s opening letter, one of the key narrative framing devices of the novel. (www.mick-armitage.staff.shef.ac.uk/anne/mutilate.html) Versions of this edition persisted well into the twentieth century, further marring Anne’s reputation. The original Newby edition, but incorporating the corrections of the second edition, was restored with Oxford’s Clarendon Edition in 1992 – the same text as that used by Wordsworth Editions.

Anne Brontë’s novels are now hailed for their observant understanding of key social concerns of the day, including the socially uncomfortable role of the governess, the rights of women at a time when a wife could have no property of her own, it accruing by right to her husband, and the possibility this allowed for violent abuse within marriage. In Helen Graham, the heroine of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, depicts a spirited woman artist who challenges the power structures of marriage. In that novel too she uses an innovative double framing narrative, which allows the reader shifting perspectives. Anne Brontë’s realist eye can be seen by the modern reader as truly feminist.

Sally Minogue

Further Reading

Edward
Chitham, A Life of Anne Brontë, Oxford, Blackwell, 1991

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After a brief legal career Buchan simultaneously began both his writing career and his political and diplomatic career, serving as a private secretary to the colonial administrator of various colonies in Southern Africa where he worked with the High Commission on reconstruction after the Boer War. He eventually wrote propaganda for the British war effort in the First World War. Once he was back in civilian life Buchan was elected Member of Parliament for the Combined Scottish Universities, but he spent most of his time writing.

As Baron Tweedsmuir he was awarded the post of Governor-General of Canada from 1935-40. He died in Canada on the 11th February 1940.

Whilst he received great deference from the English establishment his loyalties were always torn between England and the country of his birth, and his literary work is seen to reflect this. He wrote a great deal of non-fiction work, including biographies of Isaak Walton, Montrose, and Walter Scott, but is best known for his adventure stories featuring Richard Hannay. Hannay first appeared in The Thirty-nine Steps, followed by Greenmantle, Mr Standfast, The Three Hostages and The Island of Sheep. All five stories are collected together into one volume in the Wordsworth edition, The Complete Richard Hannay Stories.

Additional resources about Buchan.

• John Buchan – Wikipedia

The post Buchan John appeared first on Wordsworth Editions.

Now in the thirty-fifth year of its theatrical run on both sides of the Atlantic and showing no sign of stopping, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera has completely assimilated Gaston Leroux’s original character. Official accounts of the musical’s creation, therefore, downplay the cultural significance of Le Fantôme de l’Opéra (1910) as if it were a dead text waiting for the megamusical to breathe life into its corpse. In The Phantom of the Opera Companion (2007) by Lloyd Webber and Martin Knowlden, the composer describes picking up a ‘second-hand’ copy of the book, to which the corresponding Wikipedia entry adds ‘long out-of-print’. (The 1976 musical by Ken Hill, which Lloyd Webber and his producer Cameron Mackintosh knew well, is similarly reduced to a cursory reference.) In the 1991 Virgin edition of the novel – with Michael Crawford on the cover – sold at Her Majesty’s Theatre alongside the Companion, the posters, the mask, the rose, and the music box, the word Peter Haining uses repeatedly to describe Leroux’s novel in his introduction is ‘forgotten’. He also erroneously claims that the book was not particularly well-received by critics or readers on publication, describing Leroux himself as ‘a somewhat shadowy figure’ known only to the ‘keenest students of supernatural fiction’. This is an odd claim given that the author was made a Chevalier de la Legion d’honneur in 1909. Leroux, in fact, was a prolific and jobbing novelist, having retired from a colourful – and sometimes dangerous – career in journalism just before he turned forty. He wrote thirty-nine novels, many of which have been forgotten, especially outside France; Le Fantôme de l’Opéra is not one of them. The novel was serialised in France, Britain, and America to considerable acclaim, and had already been filmed twice by the time Leroux died in 1927, with a steady run of cinematic and TV adaptations continuing ever since. It has never been out of print either in French or English. Leroux’s ‘Phantom’ was a gothic icon long before the West End and Broadway got hold of him.

That said, it is to the original novel that Lloyd Webber describes returning in the Companion, having tried but failed to find a way to plot the story on stage after studying the two Universal film adaptations, starring Lon Chaney (1925) and Claude Rains (1943). Both films deviated from the original plot of the novel. The 1925 version added a more emphatic climax with Chaney pursued through Paris by an angry mob, while the 1943 film portrayed the Phantom as a struggling musician whose life’s work is stolen. He is then horribly scarred in the ensuing fight with the plagiarist and presumed dead, plotting his revenge from the vast network of cellars beneath the Palais Garnier and obsessing over the young soprano Christine Daaé. Relocated to London, this plot was recycled by Hammer in 1962 – Herbert Lom taking the title role – the character’s revival initiated by the ‘Phantom’ episode in the 1957 Chaney biopic Man of a Thousand Faces starring James Cagney, reminding everyone how good the original silent movie had been. The device was then used again by Brian De Palma in his surreal 1974 rock opera Phantom of the Paradise, in which the eponymous antihero has his face destroyed by a record press. To make the story work as a musical production, Lloyd Webber wisely stripped out the revenge tragedy of the film interpretations and focused instead as what he perceived as the original ‘love triangle’ between the innocent singer Christine, her aristocratic suitor and childhood friend Viscount Raoul de Chagny, and Erik, the ‘Phantom’. In doing this, the Phantom is rewritten again, this time as a brooding romantic hero whose dangerous and undoubtedly sexual magnetism makes him considerably more attractive to most of the audience than the rather frilly Raoul, a conventional melodramatic ‘hero’ to Christine’s ‘damsel in distress and a hangover from the fairy-tale simplicity of the film narratives. While remaining broadly melodramatic, as popular musicals must be, Christine is now given a more difficult choice. This transition from villain to hero was completed in Lloyd Webber’s sequel, Love Never Dies (2010), in which the Phantom is revealed to be the real father of Christine’s son ‘Gustave’, while Raoul becomes a drunken gambler. (Meg Giry turns nasty as well.) Based on Frederick Forsyth’s novel The Phantom of Manhattan (1999), which concludes with millionaire Erik helping scarred First World War soldiers, this was clearly an attempt at full rehabilitation that went too far for fans of the original musical, and the mawkish Love Never Dies was a rare failure for Lloyd Webber. Bad boys cease to be appealing when they clean up too much. Continuing the trend to diminish the original text, Forsyth in his introduction describes Leroux’s novel as quickly ‘falling into virtual oblivion.

Leroux is one of those writers whose life was as interesting as his novels, and many of his own adventures as a foreign correspondent ended up in his fiction. Leroux’s family came from Normandy, though he was born in Paris after his mother went into labour on a train. His father – who claimed to be a direct descendant of William the Conqueror – sent his son to Paris to study law in 1889. This was an occupation that held little interest for Leroux, and he spent much of his time writing poems and short stories. He managed to pass the bar but then his father died suddenly leaving him an estate worth close to a million Francs. He breezed through the lot in under a year. Facing bankruptcy, he took a job as a court reporter and theatre critic for L’Écho de Paris. Combining both roles to make the court reporting less boring, Leroux started trying to solve the cases in advance of the verdicts, interviewing prisoners and in one case finding evidence exonerating the accused, humiliating the Prefect of Police, and getting a prison governor fired. ‘Curiously,’ he later noted in an interview, ‘it was my newspaper colleagues who were the most annoyed.’ Despite breaking the unwritten rule of journalism and becoming the story himself, Leroux’s reputation was now ensured, and he built on this through a talent for getting exclusive interviews with prominent public figures at home and abroad. And if he couldn’t get the interview – which happened when he blagged his way into the office of the British Secretary of State for the Colonies, Joseph Chamberlain, during the Second Boer War – he wrote a column on how he didn’t get the interview. This popular notoriety led to a post on Le Matin as an international correspondent, and assignments in Scandinavia, Russia (he was present during the 1905 Revolution), Morocco and Egypt (where he travelled disguised as an Arab), Africa, and across Western Europe.

By 1907, Leroux had become exhausted by travel. He abandoned journalism for fiction and achieved notable success with his first serial novel, Le mystère de la chambre jaune (The Mystery of the Yellow Room, 1907), which introduced the brilliant young reporter turned amateur sleuth ‘Joseph Rouletabille’. (Roule ta bille or ‘Roll your marble’ was French slang for ‘Globetrotter’, an obvious alter ego of the author). Leroux greatly admired Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and the influence of both can be seen in his seven Rouletabille novels. Like Sherlock Holmes, Rouletabille is fiercely intelligent and does not suffer fools gladly, especially policemen. He even has a ‘Dr Watson’ in the form of ‘Sainclair’, his companion and chronicler. Following Poe, The Mystery of the Yellow Room is an intense ‘locked-room’ murder mystery, and Leroux’s literary reputation in France is that of one of the fathers of modern detective fiction. Le Fantôme de l’Opéra, originally serialised in the daily newspaper Le Gaulois from September 1909 to January 1910, was his seventh novel.

Leroux was a big, ebullient man, larger than life in every regard. When he finished a novel, he would fire a pistol into the air and encourage his wife and children to join the celebration by throwing crockery out the window. What he would have made of the different incarnations of his ‘Phantom’ is anyone’s guess, but my instinct is that they would have caught him funny. Though there is a modicum of sympathy for ‘poor Erik’ towards the end of the novel, Leroux’s original character is a grotesque and megalomaniacal criminal lunatic, much closer to H.G. Wells’ ‘Invisible Man’ or George Du Maurier’s ‘Svengali’ than the tragic genius of Lloyd Webber’s musical. He is a monster inside and out, and while Gerard Butler’s scarring in Joel Schumacher’s overblown 2004 adaptation of the musical is so minimal he still looks better than most guys his age on a normal day, Leroux’s Erik is a ‘living corpse’ whose ‘hands smelt like death’:

‘He is extraordinarily thin and his dress-coat hangs on a skeleton frame. His eyes are so deep that you can hardly see the fixed pupils. You just see two big black holes, as in a dead man’s skull. His skin, which is stretched across his bones like a drumhead, is not white, but a nasty yellow. His nose is so little worth talking about that you can’t see it side-face; and the absence of that nose is a horrible thing to look at. All the hair he has is three or four long dark locks on his forehead and behind his ears.’

It is this look that Lon Chaney memorably captured in the 1925 film. By this time, Leroux had founded the film company Société des Cinéromans with the actor René Navarre and the playwright Arthur Bernède. This bought him into contact with Carl Laemmle, the co-founder and owner of Universal Pictures when the latter visited Paris in 1922. Legend has it that Laemmle had just been to the Palais Garnier and gushed to Leroux about the famous opera house. Never one to miss a chance, Leroux made a gift of his novel, which Laemmle read in a night. Already on the lookout for another vehicle for Lon Chaney to follow The Hunchback of Notre Dame (then under production), Laemmle snapped up the rights to The Phantom of the Opera. Universal went on to create a soundstage replica of the opera house and its vast cellars so elaborate and solid that it remained active until 2014 when it was finally dismantled, having been used in hundreds of movies and TV shows, including, unsurprisingly, the 1943 remake. As the producer who brought the European gothic to Hollywood, Laemmle had immediately understood the potential of the novel, and Chaney’s silent masterpieces inaugurated the ‘Universal Monster Cycle’ of movies that included Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Wolf-Man, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon. The Phantom of the Opera is therefore at the start of the cinematic gothic, just as it is at the end of the literary tradition.

As cinema was rapidly becoming the dominant art form of the twentieth century, the gothic discourse transferred from page to soundstage, subverting the realist film narrative just as it had the literary in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Phantom of the Opera is on the cusp of both forms. Written before the First World War, there is still a hint of the fin de siècle about Leroux’s original novel, while its setting is the nineteenth century, about ten years into the French Third Republic, around 1880. This makes the story broadly contemporaneous with late-Victorian English gothic fiction, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde having been published in 1886, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891, and Dracula and The Invisible Man in 1897. George Du Maurier’s bestselling novel Trilby, meanwhile, in which a young woman falls under the influence of the sinister mesmerist ‘Svengali’ in Paris, becoming a great but ultimately doomed singer, had been serialised in 1894. The following year, Freud published his Studies in Hysteria, and Nina Auerbach has written a ‘key tableau of the nineties’ involving older men ‘leaning over female bodies: Svengali, Dracula, and Freud.’ The 1890s also saw literary fiction exploring similar themes of appropriation and fetishism of the model by the artist, the performer by the mentor, in The Tragic Muse by Henry James (1890), and ‘The Muse’s Tragedy’ by Edith Wharton (1899); the common feature running between gothic fantasy and literary realism being the erotic relationship between the dominant figure and the submissive. (George Bernard Shaw would follow Leroux in 1913 with another spin on this dynamic in Pygmalion.) Leroux is certainly tapping this vein in The Phantom of the Opera and pushing it to the extremes of sadomasochism with an almost ghoulish delight. His novel is both emotionally and physically violent, the horror then frequently offset by gallows humour. The author, meanwhile, presents himself as a ‘historian’ although his gleefully morbid delivery foreshadows the campy American ‘horror hosts’ of the 1940s and 50s, such as ‘Raymond’ in the Inner Sanctum Mysteries radio show and the ‘Crypt Keeper’ in EC’s infamous Tales from the Crypt comics. Like these characters, there is a touch of the sideshow barker about Leroux’s narrative voice, which perfectly suits the carnivalesque mood of his novel.

And, like Lon Chaney, Leroux is also following Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), both novels taking the fairy-tale premise of de Villeneuve’s La Belle et la Bête (1740) to fatal extremes. (Christine at one point introduces Raoul as ‘Prince Charming’.) There are also mythic undertones, and Orpheus and Eurydice are obvious symbols. Erik is a Hades figure, if not Satan himself; as Christine tells Raoul, ‘everything that is underground belongs to him!’ It is also notable that the operas performed during the story are Verdi’s Otello, foregrounding murderous sexual jealousy, and Charles Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette – the ‘star crossed lovers’ –and Faust. Christine has made a devil’s bargain with her secret mentor, first the ‘Angel of Music’, later the ‘demon’, and he has come to claim his due…

The novel is framed by a prologue ‘In which the author of this singular work informs the reader how he acquired the certainty that the Opera Ghost really existed.’ This is a wonderful fictional ‘hook’ on which to snag the reader’s attention and hold it: he pretends it’s all real. And this is not such a leap for his readers, the labyrinthine cellars – built to house huge painted backdrops, props, costumes, and even a stable (there really is a lake under there as well) – having by then inspired a couple of generations of superstitious opera-goers and employees to circulate ghost stories. Leroux the journalist – the ‘historian’ – then documents his research process, beginning at the ‘archives of the National Academy of music’ and supplemented by The Memoirs of a Manager by ‘Armand Moncharmin’ (who along with ‘Firmin Richard’ take over management of the theatre at the start of the story). On reading various accounts of the ‘Opera Ghost’ from thirty years before, the straight-faced Leroux claims to have become convinced this legendary figure must have been connected in some way with the mysterious death of Comte Philippe de Chagny and the disappearance of his brother Raoul along with the singer Christine Daaé. It was assumed by investigators at the time, we are told, that the brothers quarrelled over the girl and that Raoul murdered Philipe. A friend of the family urges Leroux to keep digging, assuring him that the brothers would never hurt each other. The plot thickens when a body is discovered in the bowels of the opera. This is dismissed by authorities as ‘a victim of the Commune’ (the opera house, then still under construction, had been used as a garrison and then prison during the Siege of Paris and the Paris Commune of 1870). Leroux, however, is sure this is his ‘Phantom’. He tracks down the examining magistrate in the ‘Chagny Case’, and through him finds an elderly Arab known only as ‘The Persian’ who furnishes him with various documents, including the letters of Christine Daaé, which Leroux authenticates by comparing the handwriting with papers held in the archives. ‘The Persian’ also offers his own statement, dismissed at the time as a fantasy, and ‘reprinted’ in full as ‘The Persian’s Narrative’, which takes over the novel entirely from Chapter XXI to Chapter XXV. (Artfully covering his tracks, Leroux notes that ‘The Persian’ died shortly after their interview.) The author also cites various other sources of information, including retired police officers, architects, historians, and former opera employees, several of whom are quoted in the main body of the narrative. The novel proper then begins, with the murder of the chief scene shifter. After seeing the ‘ghost’ and giving an account of his appearance, Joseph Buquet is found hanging in the third cellar ‘between a farm-house and a scene from the Roi de Lahore’, an ill omen that prefaces the tragedy to follow and the first of many references to the artifice of the opera and Erik’s subterranean ‘empire’. A balancing epilogue concludes the novel with a biography of Erik, pieced together from Leroux’s ‘research’. The fake veracity of the story is further enhanced by an appended ‘Publisher’s Note’ on the history of the Paris opera house in relation to Leroux’s story. As with the operatic intertexts, and the opera house itself, the prologue is another aspect of performance in the novel.

As Leroux was first and foremost an author of detective fiction, The Phantom of the Opera is introduced as a mystery to be solved, an answer to the questions:

1. What really happened to Christine and the Chagny brothers – who really killed Philipe, and why?

2. What is the true story behind the ‘Opera Ghost’, the bones unearthed in the cellar?

3. How are these two sets of people related?

The reader knows the end before they begin; two people are dead, and two are missing. What is not known is how and why this happened. Because this is such an iconic text, we already have a good idea of the answers, even if we’ve never read the original novel. The same is true of Frankenstein, Dracula and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which are similarly fragmented narratives made up of different accounts and pieces of quoted evidence that are so culturally endemic it’s impossible not to know the stories. But in 1910, nobody knew these answers. In reading, we must try to recapture this contemporary innocence and enjoy the revelation of the narrative. And when returning to the source of familiar literary characters like these, one will always be surprised and delighted by what one finds there. The movies are never the same.

The other form of narrative that deploys fragmented text is the Gothic. The gothic anti-novel thrives on multiple points of view and conflicting ‘evidence’ to undermine the set interpretation of the realist text and thus add another dimension of unease to the reading experience, rendering it, like the story itself, uncanny. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, for example, is framed by Captain Walton’s letters to his sister, while the main body of the text is Victor Frankenstein’s confession, which is, in turn, annexed mid-point by the first-person narrative of his creature. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, meanwhile, offers a third-person frame plus ‘Dr Lanyon’s Narrative’ and ‘Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case’. Bram Stoker’s Dracula – which in theme and construction The Phantom of the Opera most closely resembles – is the most eclectic gothic narrative of all, comprising:

• • Jonathan Harker’s Journal.
  • Letters from Lucy Westenra to Mina Harker.
  • Mina Harker’s Journal.
  • Newspaper cuttings.
  • A long letter from Dr. Seward to Arthur Holmwood.
  • Lucy Westernra’s Diary.
  • Dr Seward’s Diary.
  • Professor Van Helsing’s notes, were recorded on a phonograph.

This level of narrative disintegration functions as a series of competing frames of explanation, creating a tension between natural and supernatural possibilities, like a series of witness testimonies in a complicated murder trial. Multiple points of view are also a feature of postmodern narratives, in which the unstable nature of the Self is reflected in the instability of the text, key examples being Franz Kafka’s The Trial, the early novels of Thomas Pynchon, and Samuel Beckett’s ‘Trilogy’. It could be argued that Leroux is doing something similar with The Phantom of the Opera. Although inspired by the English Gothic, the French romans noir is less interested in monsters and tends more towards psychological depth in the tradition of Poe, using the relationships between characters – and themselves – to show the fears and contradictions at the heart of the human experience. The Phantom of the Opera is therefore a tale of love and obsession, as well as an exploration of gender, identity, race, and social class. Raoul and Phillipe are aristocrats, Erik is almost comically bourgeois in his marital ambitions, while part of his otherness stems from an oriental past; Christine is proletarian and bohemian, the daughter of a failed Scandinavian musician who is spied on as much in the story by Raoul as she is the Phantom. There is also a Freudian subtext about a girl who loves the ‘Angel of Music’ she believes has been sent by her dead father, and a broken boy who lives in an underground house full of his mother’s possessions… Jung’s theory of archetypes is equally in play: the relationship between the Self (‘the totality of the psyche’), the Persona (‘a kind of mask’), and the Shadow (the ‘instinctive and irrational’). And not just Erik wears a mask; as Leroux writes in Chapter III: ‘In Paris, our lives are one masked ball.’ ‘Poor Erik’ is Persona trying to achieve unified Selfhood through love but instead becoming only a Shadow, a description used repeatedly by Leroux to emphasise his ‘ghostly’ comings and goings. As to whether he finally achieves any sort of redemption, as suggested by the musical, you’ll just have to read the book for yourself.

After the Phantom, we must look to the cinema for our gothic icons. This is not to say that the gothic novel ceased to exist, only that with Leroux’s creation the archetypal pantheon had been filled. He stands with the other giants of the genre, most of whom remain linked through those early Universal pictures. (Only Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde belonged to Paramount.) At 110-years-old and a global brand, the old ‘trapdoor lover’ is oddly looking pretty good for his age. Like Dorian Gray, he remains forever young, his story endlessly retold, re-invented, and re-imagined across media, while the actors who play him on stage periodically change like Dr Who. But that’s not his real story. That still resides in this remarkable French novel by an equally remarkable French author. The Phantom of the Opera is truly the last gothic novel and should be read and respected as such.

Main image: Lon Chaney in the 1925 Universal Pictures film version. Credit: Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo

Image in text: Poster for the same film. Credit: Granger Historical Picture Archive / Alamy Stock Photo

The post Stephen Carver looks at The Phantom of the Opera appeared first on Wordsworth Editions.

The subtitle of Charles Dickens’ novel – For These Times – is usually dropped in modern editions, but it is significant for his writerly intentions. Dickens is announcing: I want to say something about now. And perhaps my own intentions in choosing to write about this particular novel are the same. We are living in hard times. The particular exigencies may be created by the pandemic, but it is the old hard times, those that are always with us, that link this 21^st century back to the 19^th. Harsh working and living conditions for the poor, created and sustained deliberately by the rich; a woeful level of protection from labour laws (worse in the 21^st century, because the protection that had improved has again diminished); exploitation of women who live on a further level of powerlessness (yes, still); an education system nakedly designed as an instrument of capitalism; a brutal disregard for the works of the imagination.Dickens highlights all of the above in his portrait of Coketown, but I should issue a caveat: in old-fashioned ideological terms, his narrative viewpoint is bourgeois. His exposé of the relations of power is dimmed by his own prejudices – against unions, against women taking power into their own hands, against the rebellious working man. He shows the flaws, institutional and personal, in those who control capital and education, but in the end the working man and woman must be kept contained. Stephen Blackpool, one of the most original of Dickens’ creations, an intelligent working man who cannot accommodate the views of either the unions or the masters, and who even challenges the sexual mores of his time by trying to sue for divorce in order to marry his companionate Rachael, has of course to fall down an abandoned pit-shaft and die, just as he is on his way back to Coketown to clear his name.

No getting out of that hole. Furthermore the wife he has tried to divorce must perforce be a drunken good-for-nothing, while his beloved Rachael must spend the rest of her life doing good works and thinking good thoughts, ‘sweet-tempered and serene, and even cheerful’. So while Stephen is placed before us as a sort of working-class hero, he cannot be allowed to triumph, and his philosophy of life is insultingly reduced to ‘’aw a muddle’, a befuddling of the clear-cut entrenched system set against him. There are no nuances for Stephen and his class.

But then there are no nuances for anyone in this novel. Hard Times is perhaps better taken as a satirical caricature than a realist novel, and if we see it like this we can accept its broad brushstrokes, most evident in Dickens’ choice of names for his characters. Blackpool’s name prefigures his own fate. Bounderby is a bounder, but his name also conjures his supreme lack of concern for those he bounds over (remind you of anyone?). Gradgrind is such an inspired name that it has become a lasting synonym for the attitude to education that the character encapsulates – though the name of his assistant, Mr. M’Choakumchild, is more comically graphic. Dickens was satirising a utilitarian philosophy of education specific to his time, but the reductive instrumentalism that Gradgrind’s values embody is certainly evident in today’s education system, damagingly so in our universities where the Humanities, once cherished as embodying the central values of a university, are in rout, in favour of supposedly ‘useful’ subjects (implying wrongly that there is no ‘use’ in Humanities). I’d been thinking to compare Gradgrind with Michael Gove, from his days as Education Secretary (2010-2014); yet that’s not quite right. Who, after all, could accuse the Right Honourable Secretary of State of sticking to ‘Facts … Facts alone … nothing but Facts’? I see however that his present title is itself worthy of a place in the high satire of the novel. He is now, amongst other things, Secretary of State for Levelling Up.

Dickens’ representation of the working man and woman may be limited, but he does at least give them representation in their own voices, and he was thorough in researching this. In a letter to his correspondent Mark Lemon, February 20th, 1854, he asked, ‘Will you note down and send me any slang terms among the tumblers and circus-people?’, so that he could give authenticity to the speech of Sleary and his circus companions. Likewise he worked hard on getting the voices of Stephen Blackpool and Rachael right, drawing on a contemporary reference book, A View of the Lancashire Dialect, by John Collier. [www.charlesdickenspage.com] In this he may have been piqued by the competition from Elizabeth Gaskell. Gaskell had already used a remarkably faithful representation of Manchester working-class speech to great effect in Mary Barton (1848, well ahead of Dickens). Dickens, as editor of Household Words, placed the serialisation of Gaskell’s North and South, another Manchester novel (September 1854-January 1855), to follow immediately from the serialisation of his own Hard Times, (April-August 1854). There was surely something of a power play here. Gaskell certainly felt compromised in her aim to represent a more complex picture of a Northern industrialised town, when that was to follow immediately on from Dickens’ monolithic view of Coketown. And initially the reception of her novel was less successful than that of Hard Times, while the weekly sales for Household Words during the serialisation of Hard Times rose by 237%.  From our long vantage point, it’s now generally recognized that Gaskell’s is the more empathetic representation of working people – men and women – and their speech. But in his time Dickens was undeniably the more popular writer. [For more on Mary Barton, see Stephen Carver’s excellent blog, August 21st, 2021 here.]

Let’s for now set aside Dickens’ patriarchal impulse to control fictional representation and reception through his editorship (what was I saying earlier about female powerlessness?)  The power of his creative vision is undeniable, as is his highly inventive and playful use of language in its service, and both come down clearly on the right side in the debate between utility and imagination. Some of the most enjoyable passages in Hard Times are devoted either to showing the absurdity of a rationalism pushed to its most reductive end, or to conjuring the opposing charm of the world of imagination, brought to life in Sleary’s circus. Without that magical world, and the characters who belong to it, this would be a grim novel indeed. Dickens was fascinated by the circus world well before he wrote Hard Times. As a child he made several visits to Astley’s, one of the major Victorian circuses [www.bl.uk], and wrote about that experience in Sketches by Boz (1836). He also gave an account of Astley’s and its appeal in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41):

What a glow was that, which burst upon them all, when that long, clear, brilliant row of lights came slowly up; and what the feverish excitement when the little bell rang and the music began in good earnest. … Then the play itself! The horses … the ladies and gentlemen … the firing … the forlorn lady … the tyrant … the pony who reared up on his hind-legs … the clown … the lady who jumped over the nine-and-twenty ribbons and came down safe upon the horse’s back – everything was delightful, splendid, and surprising!

This is an account from the beglamoured observer’s point of view. In Hard Times the circus world is fleshed out more fully. Certainly it is a symbol for all that is denied by Gradgrind’s system, but we see into the world itself, beyond the meaning attached to it.  True, when we are first introduced to it, we can’t make much meaning of it. The circus patois employed by Childers and Kidderminster, as they try to explain to Bounderby and Gradgrind what has happened to Jupe, Sissy’s father, is a barrier to rather than a means of communication. The circus is a private world with its own backslang designed to repel invaders. But this is of course part of its very charm. And for those within it, it is a shambolic family whose embrace is always comforting, never judgemental. When Sissy realises that her father has abandoned her, she receives primeval comfort. She ‘broke into the most deplorable cry, and took refuge on the bosom of the most accomplished tight-rope lady (herself in the family way), who knelt down on the floor to nurse her, and to weep over her.’ Sissy is practically given mother’s milk (Dickens was surely aware of the double meaning of ‘nurse’), so abundant is the embrace she is held in, not just by the tight-rope lady, but by the whole circus. The ring and the big top represent a whole other world, and even an outsider who is lucky enough to be taken into the circle will be given nourishment (witness the rescue of Tom Gradgrind at the end of the novel).

So not only is Sleary’s circus an alternative to the harsh educational economics of Gradgrindism, it is an alternative to the bourgeois Victorian family itself. Bonds here are not made by blood but by community. When Bounderby avers that he is ‘willing to take charge of you, [Sissy] Jupe, and to educate you, and provide for you’, Sleary offers an alternative, an apprenticeship, but in circus arts and terms, a strange admixture of the world of capitalism with that of illusion:

If you like, Thethilia, to be prentitht [apprenticed], you know the nature of the work and you know your companionth. Emma Gordon, in whothe lap you’re a lying at prethent, would be a mother to you, and Joth’phine would be a thithter to you.

Sleary paints such an appealing picture that it’s hard to understand why Sissy doesn’t stick with her circus family. But Sissy wants more; she wants education, and most of all she wants to do what her father wished for her. The farewell offered to her by the circus family is affecting:

The basket packed in silence, they brought her bonnet to her, and smoothed her disordered hair, and put it on. Then they pressed about her, and bent over her in very natural attitudes, kissing and embracing her: and brought the children to take leave of her; and were a tender-hearted, simple, foolish set of women altogether.

This is a largely feminine scene, but Sleary too ministers to her in the end: ‘opening his arms wide he took her by both her hands, and would have sprung her up and down. … but there was no rebound in Sissy.’ There was no rebound in Sissy – a sad conclusion. She has to find her own way forward now, having made her choice. Yet she fares better than Louisa (Gradgrind), who makes a far harder choice, that of marrying Bounderby.

This Dickens novel is rare in that these two female characters are more fully conceived than his usual heroines, shown being faced with hard and complicated choices. Even if their agency is limited by their gender and their expected social role, we are at least shown them in the act of agency, making their decisions. Sissy and Louisa couldn’t be further from the infantilised Dora of Great Expectations, the continually miniaturised, eponymous Little Dorrit, or (another little) Little Nell of The Old Curiosity Shop. These women are never allowed by their author to truly grow up. By contrast, both Sissy and Louisa have to confront their own life choices, and in doing that each has to deal with a father, actual (in Louisa’s case) or missing (Sissy). Louisa’s is the striking case to a 21st century eye. We are introduced to her thus: ‘She was a child now, of fifteen or sixteen’; then we see Bounderby, thirty years her senior, entering what is effectively still the nursery and demanding a kiss:

“I’ll answer for its being all over with father. Well, Louisa, that’s worth a kiss, isn’t it?”

“You can take one, Mr Bounderby,” returned Louisa, when she had coldly paused, and slowly walked across the room, and ungraciously raised her cheek towards him, with her face turned away.

“Always my pet; ain’t you, Louisa?” said Mr Bounderby.

This chill scene is followed by Louisa rubbing her cheek ‘until it was burning red’, and exhorting brother Tom to ‘“cut the piece out with your penknife if you like”’.  But that doesn’t stop Tom from turning Bounderby’s soft spot for Louisa to his own advantage (and what layers of meaning lie in that phrase ‘soft spot’). Eventually the formal institutions of a marriage proposal are pursued by Bounderby to Louisa’s father Gradgrind. Theoretically, Louisa still has a choice, one that is dramatised by Dickens in the encounter between her and her father. Louisa looks for a sign that her father understands her inner turmoil, and Dickens gives us a sense that that is almost imminent; but too great is the distance between them. There is a great deal about lack of communication in this novel. All that Louisa says is ‘”Yet when night comes, Fire bursts out, father’”. Fire does eventually burst out for Louisa, but not before she has been sacrificed on the twin desires of her brother (to curry favour with Bounderby in order to further his own career) and her father (whose motives are unclear, except that he is influenced by convention). They give her over to Bounderby, effectively. That ‘soft spot’ is in fact a hard spot.

Hidden in all of this is that Louisa is a sexual sacrifice. The writing conventions of the time mean that Dickens could not state this, but it is conveyed subtly. That first unwanted kiss – insignia of power, silently condoned by brother and father; the period before the wedding, when ‘Love was made … in the form of bracelets … and took on a manufacturing aspect’; to the wedding itself, when Tom congratulates his sister on being ‘a game girl’. All the men involved – including Dickens – know what is really involved in such a marriage. Does Louisa? There is something in her submission to that first Bounderby kiss that says she does. But the real sadness is that she knows that her father and brother know it also, and let it happen.  When ‘the happy pair departed for the railroad’, we know, as does Dickens, that ‘happy’ is not the right word.

But Louisa finds her own way forward, and not the expected one of fleeing to the romantic attraction of James Harthouse – though who could blame her if she did? Instead, she reflects, and also causes her father, whom she consults, to reflect. Theirs is a mutual learning, dependent on a considerable act of charity on Louisa’s part given his initial hard-headedness. Whether or not we fully believe in Gradgrind’s extraordinary reformation, we do believe in Louisa’s slow burn of understanding. In the final chapter, Dickens unusually leaves it up to the reader as to how we think of Louisa’s fate. But one thing (he authorially avers) is certain for Louisa:

Happy Sissy’s children loving her; all children loving her; she, grown learned in childish lore; thinking no innocent and pretty fancy to be despised; trying hard to know her humbler fellow-creatures, and to beautify their lives of machinery and reality with those imaginative graces and delights … did Louisa see these things of herself? These things were to be.

There is always the threat of sentimentality in Dickens. But in this finale I think what he foresees for Louisa is not sentimental, because he has prepared the ground in the various stages she has had to go through to find this state of being. Along the way she is accompanied and sustained by Sissy. Theirs is a sisterhood worthy of the circus – not of blood, not of class, but of shared experience, knowledge, and finally love from one to the other. It carries through into the final pages, and is the closing story of the novel. In this it acts in counterpoint to the philosophy which is perhaps given its greatest imaginative life in Hard Times, even through Dickens’ disapproving satire of it. Bitzer – Gradgrind’s zealous convert to utilitarianism – puts it thus, when asked to overlook Tom’s breaking the law:

I am sure you know that the whole social system is a question of self-interest. What you must always appeal to, is a person’s self-interest. It’s your only hold. We are so constituted.

In Hard Times Dickens shows that we are not so constituted, or at least we need not be. Indeed a novel for these times.

Wordsworth publishes all the aforementioned Charles Dickens novels, as well as those of Elizabeth Gaskell.

Main Image: Hard Times by Oscar Gustav Rejlander (c.1860) Credit: Steeve-x-foto / Alamy Stock Photo

Additional images: Hard Times page proof (1854); Astley’s: Last 6 Nights of Mazeppa!  (1838) Both held by the British Library

The post Sally Minogue reflects on Hard Times appeared first on Wordsworth Editions.

As the nights grow longer and colder and we move inexorably towards Halloween, the readerly mind turns naturally towards the ghost story. And while pumpkins are carved and displayed as an invitation to trick-or-treaters, let us not forget that their original purpose was to ward off the evil spirits that walk on All Saint’s Eve, the same night as the ancient Gaelic festival of Samhain. Originally carved from turnips, the tradition of the Halloween Jack O’Lantern began in Ireland as a symbolic representation of a soul in purgatory. According to Irish folklore, the original ‘Jack’ met the Devil on the way home from a night’s drinking and trapped him up a tree by cutting the sign of the cross into the bark. Before releasing him, Jack strikes a bargain that the Devil will never claim his soul. After a life of debauchery, Jack’s soul is barred from Heaven, but Hell won’t take him either. To make him go away, Satan hurls a burning coal like a publican discouraging a stray dog. Freezing, Jack places the coal in a hastily hollowed-out turnip and fashions a lamp. His lost soul has been wandering Ireland ever since carrying his lantern – lit by the eternal fire of Hell – and looking for a resting place. (The pumpkin was adopted by Irish immigrants to America, being more physically impressive and a lot easier to carve than a turnip.) According to Irish mythology, during Samhain the door to what the Celts called the ‘Otherworld’ swung open, letting supernatural beings and the souls of the dead into the world of men. While ‘Bealtaine’ (May Day) was a summer festival for the living, Samhain was a festival for the dead. It is thus in every way appropriate that the father of the modern ghost story, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, was an Irishman…

If you’ve not read Le Fanu yet, chances are you’ve come across one of the film or television adaptations, especially if you’re of my generation and therefore cut your gothic teeth on Hammer Films and the BBC’s Ghost Stories for Christmas in the 1970s. I got into Le Fanu as a kid having been traumatised by the BBC dramatization of Schalcken the Painter. The vision of the young artist’s first love, Rose, cavorting with the ‘livid and demoniac form of Vanderhausen’ in the catacombs beneath Rotterdam gave me nightmares for weeks. I, of course, immediately searched out the original story, and picked up a second-hand anthology with Peter Cushing on the cover published to promote The Vampire Lovers, the Hammer version of Le Fanu’s vampire story, Carmilla. I was still using this copy at university, which raised a few eyebrows, I can tell you, and Hammer went on to produce their ‘Karnstein Trilogy’, following The Vampire Lovers with Lust for a Vampire and Twins of Evil. Not that these were the first Le Fanu movies; there is also the haunting German Expressionist Vampyr (1932), directed by Carl Dreyer. Who’d have thought lesbian vampires would have had such enduring appeal?

The descendant of a noble Huguenot family, Dubliner J.S. Le Fanu (1814–1873) was in his own time a bestselling author. He was known for his historical, mystery, and sensation fiction (he is credited with inventing the ‘locked-room mystery’ with his story ‘A Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess’ published in 1838, three years before Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’), and above all horror. Described by his friend Alfred Perceval Graves – the father of Robert – as ‘one of the greatest masters of the weird and the terrible’, after his early death at the age of 58, Le Fanu’s reputation was crowded out of Victorian literature by his contemporaries, Dickens, Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, and the Brontës; all of whom he in some form influenced and whose sales he frequently rivalled.

Although called to the bar, Le Fanu chose instead to devote himself to writing, following in the footsteps of his great-uncle, the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, a precarious profession he later described in his novel All in the Dark:

Literary work, the ambition of so many, not a wise one perhaps for those who have any other path before them, but to which men will devote themselves, as to a perverse marriage, contrary to other men’s warnings, and even to their own legible experiences of life in a dream.

He began contributing articles, ballads, and short stories to the Dublin University Magazine in 1838 including his first supernatural tale, ‘The Ghost and the Bone-Setter’, which is played for laughs, and the chilling ‘Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter’, which isn’t. From 1840, he began acquiring financial interests in several Irish newspapers. Le Fanu had been fascinated by folklore and superstition since his childhood, the Irish journalist Samuel Carter Hall wrote of him:

I knew the brother’s Joseph and William Le Fanu when they were youths at Castle Connell, on the Shannon … They were my guides throughout the beautiful district, and I found them full of anecdote and rich in antiquarian lore, with thorough knowledge of Irish peculiarities.

William became a civil engineer, and Joseph never gave up on those ‘Irish peculiarities’, becoming, in the words of E.F. Benson, one of his twentieth-century disciples, an ‘unrivalled flesh-creeper’ whose ‘tentacles of terror are applied so softly that the reader hardly notices them till they are sucking the courage from his blood.’

Prior to his marriage to Susanna Bennett in 1843, Le Fanu wrote prolifically for the Irish magazine market, producing a series of gothic, historical and humorous short stories for the Dublin University Magazine later collected as The Purcell Papers. These were written under the framing umbrella of being ‘extracts’ from the ‘MS. Papers of the late Rev. Francis Purcell, of Drumcoolagh’, a fictitious Catholic priest, were posthumously collected and edited by an unidentified friend, adding both a sense of authenticity and gothic ambiguity to the narratives. These include the story ‘A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family’ (1839) which shares significant similarities of the plot – aristocratic bigamy and the ‘madwoman in the attic’ – with Jane Eyre (1847). The best of the rest of Le Fanu’s early ghost stories were anthologised by M.R. James in Madam Crowl’s Ghost and Other Stories in 1923, marking the beginning of a revival of interest in Le Fanu’s supernatural fiction. James’ introduction is expansive, declaring that Le Fanu ‘stands absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories’, continuing ‘Nobody sets the scene better than he, nobody touches in the effective detail more deftly.’ James chooses twelve tales that are representative of Le Fanu’s art, including haunted houses (‘An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street’); Faustian pacts (‘Sir Dominick’s Bargain’); Irish legends (‘The Child that went with the Fairies’); warnings from Hell (‘The Vision of Tom Chuff’); bitterly contested inheritances (‘Squire Toby’s Will’); portents of doom (‘The White Cat of Drumgunniol’); historical curses (‘Ultor de Lacy’); and terrible, long concealed crimes (‘Madam Crowl’s Ghost’). The dying caste of the Protestant Anglo-Irish – like Le Fanu’s own family line – is a recurring motif, as is the similar decline of the Catholic aristocracy, symbolised by the ruined castles that dot Le Fanu’s textual landscape. There is also a dark sense of humour running through these tales, which sets Le Fanu’s style apart from his contemporary, Edgar Allan Poe. Like James’ own stories, these are presented as first-hand accounts of events occurring in living memory, usually related to, or collected by a gentleman scholar or antiquarian. Elegantly structured, the stories follow James’ prescription for the perfect ghost story:

Two ingredients most valuable in the concocting of a ghost story are, to me, the atmosphere and the nicely managed crescendo … Let us, then, be introduced to the actors in a placid way; let us see them going about their ordinary business, undisturbed by forebodings, pleased with their surroundings; and into this calm environment let the ominous thing put out its head, unobtrusively at first, and then more insistently, until it holds the stage.

James notes that these tales are now ‘forgotten’ and were frequently published anonymously. He, therefore, concludes with the appeal that, ‘I shall be very grateful to anyone who will notify me of any that he is fortunate enough to find.’ In comparing the style and tone of James’ famous Edwardian ghost stories with those of Le Fanu, it is clear how much of a debt was owed.

After a promising start, Le Fanu largely abandoned fiction in favour of political journalism and a growing family (Susannah bore him three daughters and a son), although he did write two minor historical novels in the manner of Walter Scott and Harrison Ainsworth, The Cock and Anchor (1845) and Torlogh O’Brien (1847) and publish the collection Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery (1851). By birth and inclination a Conservative, Le Fanu broke ranks and supported Nationalist politicians John Mitchel and Thomas Francis Meagher in lobbying the indifferent British government to intervene during the Great Famine. As a newspaper proprietor, he was courted as an advocate by William Smith O’Brien, and it was through these connections that he found himself inadvertently on the fringes of the failed 1848 ‘Famine Rebellion’ which saw Mitchel, Meagher and O’Brien transported for sedition. This cost Le Fanu his nomination to be Tory MP for County Carlow, effectively ending his political ambitions and leaving him, like many other Irishmen, caught between the opposing forces of Protestant Ascendancy and Catholic Nationalism. This tension, subtly allegorised, can be felt in much of his later writing in an ambivalent stance towards religion, while the destructive recurrence of history in the present is a key motif, as it is in Northern Ireland to this day.

These tensions were also present in Le Fanu’s domestic life. His father-in-law, George Bennett QC, the son of the even more formidable Tory MP Judge John Bennett, was a bastion of the Anglo-Irish gentry and unimpressed with his son-in-law’s indirect flirtation with the ‘Young Irelanders’. This put Susannah, already a nervous woman, between husband and father and undoubtedly contributed to her growing anxiety and depression. This was compounded when Le Fanu ceased to attend church due to his increasing interest in the writings of the Swedish philosopher and Christian mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). Susannah’s fragile mental state was made worse by the unexpected death of her father in 1856. From then on, she became increasingly neurotic, Le Fanu recording in his diary that:

If she took leave of anyone who was dear to her she was always overpowered with an agonizing frustration that she could never see them again. If anyone she loved was ill, though not dangerously, she despaired of their recovery.

The crisis came to a head when Susannah had a vision of her dead father:

She one night thought she saw the curtains of her bed at the side next the door drawn, & the darling old man, dressed in his usual morning suit, holding it aside, stood close to her looking ten or (I think) twelve years younger than when he died, & with his delightful smile of fondness & affection beaming upon her [he said] ‘There is room in the vault for you, my little Sue.’

(Twelve years earlier was when Susannah married Le Fanu, from which she presumably dated the breach with her father.) Not long after, in April 1858, she died suddenly from a ‘hysterical attack’ aged only thirty-four. The grief-stricken Le Fanu stopped writing entirely for the next three years.

It was another death, this time that of his mother in 1861, that triggered the next, most significant, and final stage in Le Fanu’s literary career. That year, he bought the Dublin University Magazine for £850 and became both its editor and principal contributor. A period of intense productivity followed as Le Fanu vanished from Dublin society so completely that his friends dubbed him the ‘Invisible Prince’, Graves later recalling that:

He was for long almost invisible, except to his family and most familiar friends, unless at odd hours of the evening, when he might occasionally be seen stealing, like the ghost of his former self, between his newspaper office and his home in Merrion Square; sometimes, too, he was to be encountered in an old out-of-the-way bookshop poring over some rare black letter Astrology or Demonology. To one of these old bookshops, he was at one time a pretty frequent visitor, and the bookseller relates how he used to come in and ask with his peculiarly pleasant voice and smile, ‘Any more ghost stories for me, Mr.—?’ and how, on a fresh one being handed to him, he would seldom leave the shop until he had looked it through.

There followed an uninterrupted run of serial novels, commencing with the eclectic historical mystery The House by the Churchyard (1863, later a key point of reference in James Joyce’s even madder Finnegans Wake). This was followed by Wylder’s Hand and Uncle Silas (1864); Guy Deverell (1865); All in the Dark (1866); The Tenants of Malory (1867); A Lost Name and Haunted Lives (1868); The Wyvern Mystery (1869); Checkmate and The Rose and the Key (1871); and Willing to Die (1872). The majority of these novels reflected the current popular trend for Sensation Fiction (with the exception of All in the Dark, which was a satire on Spiritualism), and the author with which Le Fanu was most often compared was Wilkie Collins.

Le Fanu’s son, Brinsley, later described his father’s writing process to the literary historian Stewart Marsh Ellis:

He wrote mostly in bed at night, using copy-books for his manuscript. He always had two candles by his side on a small table; one of these dimly glimmering tapers would be left burning while he took a brief sleep. Then, when he awoke about 2 a.m. amid the darkling shadows of the heavy furnishings and hangings of his old-fashioned room, he would brew himself some strong tea – which he drank copiously and frequently throughout the day – and write for a couple of hours in that eerie period of the night when human vitality is at its lowest ebb and the Powers of Darkness rampant and terrifying.

As the Rev. Jennings, the haunted protagonist of ‘Green Tea’ proclaims, ‘I believe that everyone who sets about writing in earnest does his work, as a friend of mine phrased it, on something—tea, or coffee, or tobacco.’ Brinsley believed the excessive caffeine intake contributed to the nightmares that plagued his father, and that these bad dreams were the source of many a story. It is difficult to read this anecdote and not think of the malevolent black monkey of ‘Green Tea’, glaring, blaspheming, and shaking his tiny fists at the doomed Jennings.

Several of these novels were expanded rewrites of earlier stories. His best-known novel, the gothic mystery Uncle Silas, started life as ‘Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess’ via ‘The Murdered Cousin’ from Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery. A Lost Name was based on ‘The Evil Guest’ (also from the Ghost Stories), which in turn was a revision of the early story ‘Some Account of the Latter Days of the Hon. Richard Marston of Dunoran’. ‘A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family’ became The Wyvern Mystery. It is as if the early short fiction served as roadmaps for the novels, ways in which Le Fanu could explore and interrogate the themes that clearly haunted him: his Swedenborgian views on the afterlife, the destructive cycle of family history, that which is hidden (locked rooms are a recurring device), doppelgängers, and the decline of the Irish aristocracy. He also contributed to All the Year Round, and was greatly admired by Dickens, who sought his advice on ‘spectral illusions’ when writing his seminal ghost story ‘The Signalman’ (1866). In addition to these novels, Le Fanu also compiled his remarkable collection of supernatural stories In A Glass Darkly (1872), comprising the stories ‘Green Tea’ (first published in All the Year Round), ‘The Familiar’ (originally ‘The Watcher’ from the 1851 Ghost Stories), ‘Mr. Justice Harbottle’ (a prequel to ‘An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street’ in which the story of the hanging ghost is told), ‘The Room in the Dragon Volant’ (a tale of drug-induced catalepsy and premature burial that would give Poe a run for his money), and the novella Carmilla, a forerunner of Dracula. He was planning the novel The House of Bondage – a reworking of his short story ‘The Mysterious Lodger’ – when he died, quite suddenly, in his sleep on February 7, 1873, probably from a heart attack. Dublin legend has it that he had been plagued by a recurring nightmare of a derelict house he feared would bury him and that when his body was found, the attending doctor looked into his dead, horrified eyes – like a character from one of his stories – and declared, ‘So the house has fallen at last.’ His children always disputed this, claiming the look on his face was serene.

It was M.R. James’ recommendation that all those coming to Le Fanu for the first time should begin with In A Glass Darkly, ‘where they will find the very best of his shorter stories.’ This is very good advice. In A Glass Darkly is for scholars of the Victorian gothic the definitive collection of nineteenth-century ghost stories, the zenith of the so-called ‘Golden Age of the Ghost Story’, the period roughly between the last of the original gothic romances and the decline of Spiritualism before the Great War when supernatural fiction became so ubiquitous that it descended into cliché (much as it has again today through the industrial output of television streaming services): the era of Poe, Dickens, G.W.M. Reynolds, Charlotte ‘J.H.’ Riddell, Amelia B. Edwards, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edith Wharton, Kipling, and, of course, Le Fanu.

‘In A Glass Darkly’ paraphrases the King James version of 1 Corinthians 13:12: ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.’ The original passage refers to our necessarily partial knowledge of God, which St. Paul likens to a reflection in a dim or tarnished mirror, before the coming of Christ will allow us to know God and his ways as he knows us now in full revelation. Le Fanu, however, is giving this a much more Swedenborgian spin, as explained by the collection’s framing narrator (framed, himself, by another editor like Father Purcell before him), the occult detective Dr. Martin Hesselius, an ancestor of Stoker’s Professor Van Helsing and William Hope Hodgson’s Thomas Carnacki, the ‘Ghost-Finder’:

Of those whose senses are alleged to be subject to supernatural impressions—some are simply visionaries and propagate the illusions of which they complain, from diseased brain or nerves. Others are, unquestionably, infested by, as we term them, spiritual agencies, exterior to themselves. Others, again, owe their sufferings to a mixed condition. The interior sense, it is true, is opened; but it has been and continues open by the action of disease.

This is pure Swedenborg, as cited by the unfortunate Rev. Jennings in ‘Green Tea’: ‘When man’s interior sight is opened, which is that of his spirit, then there appear the things of another life, which cannot possibly be made visible to the bodily sight.’

The essence of Swedenborg’s mystical theology, outlined in his Arcana Cœlestia (Heavenly Mysteries or Secrets of Heaven, 1749) is his ‘correspondence theory’ that there is a relationship among the natural (‘physical’), the spiritual, and the divine worlds. Swedenborg claimed to be able to see these other worlds as clearly as his own as a result of a divine revelation and related these other planes of existence directly to his interpretation of the bible. (Victor Hugo suggests in passing in Les Misérables that Swedenborg, once a respected Enlightenment scientist, had ‘glided into insanity’.) Le Fanu, however, appreciated the more gothic possibilities of the correspondence theory, as later noted by W.B. Yeats in Explorations:

It was indeed Swedenborg who affirmed for the modern world, as against the abstract reasoning of the learned, the doctrine and practice of the desolate places, of shepherds and midwives and discovered a world of spirits where there was scenery like that of earth, human forms, grotesque or beautiful, senses that knew pleasure and pain, marriage and war, all that could be painted on canvas, or put into stories to make one’s hair stand up.

This ‘opening of the interior sense’, as Hesselius calls it, means that some hapless individuals – the subjects of his case studies, who he never saves – are alert to the inhabitants of these other planes, which appear as apparitions, demons, or hallucinations, depending upon the official explanation. (Doctors in Le Fanu are always wrong, and priests aren’t much more reliable.) This is similarly true for the protagonist of ‘The Familiar’, Captain Barton, who is, like Jennings, stalked by something terrible:

The fact is, whatever may be my uncertainty as to the authenticity of what we are taught to call revelation, of one fact I am deeply and horribly convinced, that there does exist beyond this a spiritual world—a system whose workings are generally in mercy hidden from us—a system which may be, and which is sometimes, partially and terribly revealed.

The implication is clear: When we can see them, they can see us.

Hesselius’ strangest case, and probably his most culturally influential (though ‘Green Tea’ is very popular with horror anthologists), is that of Carmilla. It was, he wrote, ‘involving, not improbably, some of the profound arcana of our dual existence, and its intermediates.’ Originally published as a serial in the London magazine The Dark Blue, the story is narrated by an elderly woman from Styria in Austria, ‘Laura’, recalling the summer in her teens when a mysterious young woman, ‘Carmilla’, a homeless and itinerant noblewoman, came to stay at the family castle. Laura is lonely and Carmilla is the perfect companion, being charming, affectionate, and beautiful. The two also share an affinity having each, apparently, dreamed of the other as children, and Carmilla’s designs on Laura seem to go beyond mere friendship:

Sometimes after an hour of apathy, my strange and beautiful companion would take my hand and hold it with a fond pressure, renewed again and again; blushing softly, gazing in my face with languid and burning eyes, and breathing so fast that her dress rose and fell with the tumultuous respiration. It was like the ardour of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet over-powering; and with gloating eyes, she drew me to her, and her hot lips travelled along my cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, almost in sobs, ‘You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one forever.’ Then she had thrown herself back in her chair, with her small hands over her eyes, leaving me trembling.

Young women in the nearby village, meanwhile, are dying of a mysterious illness while Laura dreams at night of being visited by an enormous black cat…

Aristocratic vampires were not new in 1872. That distinction goes to Byron’s physician Dr. John Polidori, whose 1819 short story ‘The Vampyre’ introduced the Dracula-like (and Byronic) ‘Lord Ruthven’. There had also been the penny dreadful Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood (1845–47) by James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest (the creators of Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street). That said, the similarities between Carmilla and fellow Irishman Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) are striking. The name of Dracula’s insane familiar, ‘R.M. Renfield’, echoes Bertha Rheinfeldt, a friend of Laura’s family and another of Carmilla’s victims. Both stories have elaborate framing narratives and feature sexually magnetic antagonists posing as descendants of themselves; Carmilla and Count Dracula target female heroines, and both can transform into animals and pass through locked windows and doors. (Stoker’s Lucy Westenra is also both a Laura and Carmilla figure, being first human prey then undead predator.) Le Fanu’s ‘Baron Vordenburg’ is a similar expert to Van Helsing, and their method of killing vampires is essentially the same, as are the described symptoms of vampirism. The original opening chapter of Dracula, cut from the final draft and published separately as the short story ‘Dracula’s Guest’, features the female vampire Countess Dolingen von Gratz, and is also set in Styria. Fans of Stoker tend to play down the parallels, but why not read Carmilla and see for yourself? After all, as Picasso famously said, ‘Good artists copy, great artists steal.’

Had Le Fanu lived longer, he would probably have entered the Victorian gothic pantheon alongside Stoker and Stevenson. But for our purposes, part of the fun of Halloween is finding something scary that we don’t already know by heart, and, as M.R. James himself conceded, ‘I do not think that there are better ghost stories anywhere than the best of Le Fanu’s.’ So, this All Hallow’s Eve, settle back with Madam Crowl’s Ghost or In A Glass Darkly, preferably in the dead of night and, even better, in a solitary chamber, and when the house creaks suddenly, a branch brushes the window, or door swings slowly open by itself, it will be, as Le Fanu advised, ‘a pleasing terror’ that will thrill you.

Image: Engraving from Le Fanu’s 1872 Carmilla Credit: Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo

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