Sunday 19 December 2021

#51: Charles Dickens Museum

 

48 Doughty St

‘Colour in Oliver’ says a leaflet for children I took away from the Charles Dickens Museum at 48 Doughty Street, near Russell Square in central London. On the top floor of the museum is a cartoon by Cold War Steve doing just that, showing Boris Johnson as fat Mr Bumble saying ‘no’ to Oliver, with Home Secretary Priti Patel grinning smugly behind.

Dickens moved into the house in 1837 as a journalist, along with his wife Catherine and son Charlie, and moved out two years later having finished The Pickwick Papers, Nicholas Nickleby and the hugely popular Oliver Twist, well on the way to making his name.


Inside the house

Initially I was sceptical about visiting the house since I had read that Dickens’s furniture from Gad’s Hill Place in Kent, where he moved 20 years later, was arranged here. I envisaged rather a miscellaneous jumble of objects in a house with little real connection with the writer.

But as I started to explore the house I was proved wrong, as it dawned on me what attention, planning and knowledge the curators had spent evoking what went on there, as well as Dickens’s life story and the life of the novels, then and now. In the downstairs dining room, where the Dickenses loved to entertain, are plates painted with the names of guests such as Thackeray, a recipe book (so many courses!), silver ladles featuring characters from The Pickwick Papers, and Dickens’s minute instructions to his butler to close the inner hall doors as soon as the gas was lighted.

The house gives a literal structure to Dickens’s life for us. On the first floor is Dickens’s writing desk, its surface a mass of scratches and marks. Next to it is a magazine showing an illustration of that very desk with an empty chair next to it, marking Dickens’s death in the Christmas 1870 edition of The Graphic. Then one floor up is a large print of that very photo enlarged on the wall opposite a bed. Nearby is the lock of Dickens’s hair along with the last instalment of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, half-finished when the author died. Nearby is a photo of the graves of his wife Catherine, daughter Dora and sister-in-law Mary Hogarth.

This repetition — first the actual desk with a picture of it in a contemporary magazine, then the same picture enlarged a floor up — is quite rare in museums and made me think of the house partly as an artwork as well as a scholarly creation, as though it were repeating a theme, appealing to the emotions as well as conveying information. Inside the death-themed room too it felt like an evocation of the writer’s death, a few metonymic objects standing in for the reality, rather than a scholarly explanation.

The exhibitions included so well parts of the books — the laundry copper, like the one where the Cratchits in A Christmas Carol boiled the Christmas pudding (in the book the pudding still smelt a little of boiled clothes); parts of Dickens’s life, such as a note from his doctor showing he had a high pulse rate after he had publicly read the episode where Bill Sikes kills Nancy in Oliver Twist; and ways Dickens has influenced others, like an advert showing Barnaby Williams as Fagin at the Birkenhead Hippodrome in 1921. It tactfully acknowledged the life, while seeming to accept that museums can never capture the life and fun of one of the Dickens’s dinner parties.

The ghost of Dickens

As I left the house onto the terraced streets in the outer edge of Bloomsbury, I found by worldview had momentarily changed – I noticed a dreadlocked Deliveroo driver – what would Dickens have made of the gig economy? – and bought a hot chocolate for a man begging outside Pret. A woman with a white cane was being led away from the Royal National Institute of Blind People. The ghost of Dickens, noticing those on the fringes of society, was briefly at my shoulder.



Sunday 17 October 2021

#50: Egyptian stela

"You'll be fine"

This stela (commemorative stone tablet) in Liverpool University’s Garstang Museum caught my eye. Two Egyptian figures lead a man in Greek dress to the afterlife. I had no idea the Egyptian and Greek civilisations overlapped. But more than that, the figure from a different culture, in between those two familiar side-on Egyptians, enlivened the piece for me.

The first Egyptian figure, with the head of Anubis, god of death and the underworld, looks back, grasping the man’s hand reassuringly. The figure behind seems to encourage him forward, or says goodbye.

I’m not sure why an alien figure in Greek dress should bring this to life for me more than it would if it had three Egyptians figures. It breaks it out of my expectations, I suppose, and makes the figures’ gestures less a matter of artistic form and more human. The middle figure is somehow my way in to that tableau. Were I to give it a title, I would call it The Reassurance of the Gods.

Can anyone enlighten me as to the Greek-Egyptian mix here?




Sunday 15 August 2021

#49: Listening to literature

 

Lately I’ve been listening to, rather than reading, literature, partly because of some eyestrain and partly because of reading Walter Ong’s 1982 work Orality and Literacy, in which he recommends ‘liberating our text-bound minds’. He describes how reading has shaped the human psyche, causing an ‘inward turning’, enabling ‘strenuous, interiorised, individualised thought’ of a sort ‘inaccessible to oral folk’.

In his view literacy has been necessary for consciousness to evolve and writing has enabled people to reach a greater potential by storing and passing on knowledge. In addition, writing is now our collective memory, freeing up our mental capacity to innovate instead of memorise.

Sight dissects, hearing unifies

Yet he warns against any devaluing of cultures which are or were oral, and rejects in particular the term ‘pre-literate’, which in his view is like defining a horse by saying what it lacks in comparison with a car. He speaks of thought and experience in oral cultures as ‘empathetic and participative rather than objective’. He comments that vision tends to a dissecting function, hearing to a unifying one, saying memorably: ‘sight situates the observer outside what he views… sound pours into the hearer’. Written text, he says, is divorced much more easily from the human life-world than speech is.

Listening now

But of course we don’t live in a culture wholly based on writing. Most of what we say is never written down, and despite the popularity of texting over voicemail (why?) continue to speak and listen. According to Ong we live in a ‘secondary oral culture’ in which radio and TV are types of ‘literate orality’. And of course our ways of listening and writing have expanded along with the types of technology we use, just as the particular characteristics of reading and listening are blurred. So listening, say, to a podcast can be just as solitary as writing. And with communication technologies written text can reach a group of people and be read simultaneously, no longer a solitary act.

So have I liberated my mind, as Ong recommends?

Noticing different things while listening

I was surprised, listening to Wordsworth’s The Prelude (on the excellent Scribd app), how much things I would normally focus on when reading — line endings, ambiguities — disappeared. But what came through strongly was the rhythm, Wordsworth’s iambs, which I would not notice so much on the page. Overall form came through strongly, especially the overflowing, cascading shape of ‘It Was an April Morning, Fresh and Clear’ (which I still haven’t read on the page). Initially this seemed a mass of levels, perceptions, feelings going well with the movement of water which the poem describes. In ‘Tintern Abbey’ Wordsworth talks of ‘the language of the sense’ — I wonder if this is the structure of the sense. Ong speaks of sound ‘pouring into’ the hearer but I would say this is more like being enveloped, the sound flowing around me.

Loss of control

Along with this reduced time to pause went a loss of control, and with that a relaxation. Less strenuous, as Ong says. And I do tend to fall asleep often while listening, not so much while reading. Another aspect of this loss of control is giving control to someone else’s interpretation and voice. So a kind of liberation, yes.

Other people’s experiences

I was curious about other people’s experiences of reading or listening, and did a straw poll of some friends (most names changed here). Jenni, doing a PhD in Shakespeare, said she preferred listening to his plays even than seeing them:

‘To fully engage with [the text] in radio/CD performance without the noise of visual clues or stage business is to engage directly, with only the actors’ intonation to guide you to THAT production’s interpretation. All the acting must come out of the voice and all the voice has to work with is the text, the text and nothing but the text.’

Another friend, June, said she doesn’t like listening, even to audiobooks, because the actor’s voice distracts her and she starts wondering about the actor as a person, for example how much work they have. In Ong’s terms, the ‘human life-world’ of the speaker disrupts the way she wants to enjoy the work.

Robert, a translator, said that he prefers listening because a health condition makes it difficult for him to read, and since he spends so much time with written words during his job wants a break.

Peter, who both reads and listens, spoke of storytelling as ‘an act of service’, even if recorded.

What’s clear is that listening and reading is no longer an either/or — they can complement each other, happen simultaneously or separately. Also people have rich ways and different reasons for choosing and even thinking about these two modes of communicating.



 

Wednesday 23 June 2021

#48: Aphorisms

 

Be careful with fears — they like to steal dreams

Sugar packets in Spain usually come with an aphorism; here are two:

Ten cuidado con los miedos

Les encanta robar sueños

(be careful with fears — they like to steal dreams)

And


Quien te lastima hace fuerte,

Quien te critica te hace importante,…

(Those who shame you make you strong, those who criticise you make you important…)

Of these I prefer the first, and in fact have it as a reminder on my desk. The second seems more questionable to me, though perhaps it is partly self-fulfilling — if you believe hard experiences make you stronger they are more likely to.

The power of aphorisms

Many of the aphorisms, like these, encourage strength in adversity. But whatever the advice, I find it a charming custom — it implies coffee time gives a moment to take stock and energise the spirit as well as the body. Aphorisms, according to literature professor Walter Ong and others, were characteristic of oral cultures since they encapsulated the maximum amount of wisdom in an easily memorisable, concentrated form. They are ‘mnemonically-tooled grooves’, in Ong’s striking phrase.

My sugar packet suggestions

So what would I put on a packet? I would keep the aphorisms, but add some packets with hard data which might surprise some — sourced of course. Here are my top three sugar packet suggestions:

In the last 20 years, the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has almost halved. (The World Bank and the United Nations, via Factfulness by Hans Rosling).

Average life expectancy in the world today is 72.81 years. It has risen every year since at least 1950 and the UN expect it to be almost 80 by 2100. (The United Nations)

and one for those seeking to increase equal opportunities in the UK:

In 2020, the percentage of state school pupils getting a place in UK higher education was: Chinese 71.7; Asian 53.1; Black 47.5; Mixed 39; White 32.6. (Universities and Colleges Admissions Service)

Don't do to others what you wouldn't like done to you

The Ong quotation comes from Orality and Literacy, p. 35. (second edition 2002 Routledge).

Sunday 4 April 2021

#47: Literary heritage

copyright: Puffin Books By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35076834


Childhood reading and literary inheritance

‘I now know that was the week I stepped into my inheritance,’ says children’s author Frank Cottrell-Boyce, speaking of first reading a children’s version of the Greek classics, edited by Roger Lancelyn Green, while on holiday as a child in Wales. ‘His retellings have stayed with me and they have become part of the matrix through which I see and think about the world.’ (The Reader Magazine, issue 71).

Strangely enough, one of my most vivid early reading memories is of a retelling by Green, King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, also on holiday as a child, though in a caravan in Suffolk. In that caravan Merlin brought the child Arthur, wrapped in his cloak, along the cliffs to England; Sir Gawain married the loathly Lady Ragnell to save the King’s life and then had to choose whether she would be beautiful by day or by night; and Sir Galahad leapt up from the Round Table one stormy night, his companions asleep, to follow the Grail wherever it might lead.

On one of the local holiday walks we would pass a dark wooded driveway with a metalwork gate bearing the name Greyfriars and a metal outline of a monk in silhouette, his hooded head bowed over his hands. This somehow blended in my mind with the realm of Logres described by Green, peopled by monks, ladies, knights and hermits, so that for all I knew real monks lived at the end of that driveway.

Why define a literary heritage?

I have never felt the need to define my literary heritage before, but I do now that much of the literature I love, and the traditions it comes from, seem to be under attack for being part of a world in which huge injustices and cruelties were practised (we are still in such a world — does that invalidate today’s literature?). Or, equally crudely, because some of these stories were written by people now regarded simplistically as ‘elite’. But enough negativity.

Is it important to have heritage?

I think so. Why?

Partly confidence and reassurance of stability. When Queen of Carthage Dido rescues the refugee Aeneas, in Virgil’s Aeneid, he and his men are ‘utterly spent by/Every disaster on land and sea, deprived of everything’, having come from Troy, destroyed by the Greeks after a 10-year siege. Young and old have been slaughtered and Troy burnt. She welcomes him: ‘Being acquainted with grief, I am learning to help the unlucky.’ She offers him a banquet with a service

Of solid silver on the tables; and golden vessels chased

With the legends of family history — a long lineage of glory

Traced through many heroes right from its earliest source. (I/640-642)

She is sharing her heritage with him — ‘the legends of family history’ — along with the food and drink, and you can feel how much Aeneas needs this reassurance of stability, along with physical comfort. He has lost confidence in himself and in the worth of his achievements and those of his country – when he tells Dido the story of the fall of Troy he says not even a Greek would be able to tell it without crying (II/7).

Why do the Classics form part of a modern British heritage?

And why should I, along with Virgil and Frank Cottrell-Boyce, consider stories written 2,500 years ago in a faraway country (Greece) part of my heritage? Because they have formed an important part of my subsequent reading, writing and thinking, and are part of the literature, philosophy, art and architecture I have lived and grown up with (for example, Lancelyn Green’s Tales of Troy was another of my childhood favourites).

In fact I have lived in both Greece and Italy but would certainly not regard the Greek and Roman myths as part of my heritage on that account. I think it is connected with the country, England and later the UK, where I come from and where the writers I am most familiar with do and did. It’s also connected with childhood and education. Personal preference and ability also come into it — there are other parts of Britain’s heritage I don’t feel so strongly about; for example, the proud tradition of technological achievement, such as the Bletchley Park code-breaking during World War II and development of the world’s first programmable electronic computer, the Colossus. But not being a computer specialist, this doesn’t feel part of my personal heritage, ‘the matrix through which I see and think about the world’, in the same way.

Local places

For me at least, it is tied up with place in a more intimate, local way as well. I think I will forever associate King Arthur with that mysterious shadowy driveway in East Anglia and with the nearby woods (now diminished through cliff fall, though otherwise marvellously similar to how I experienced them as a child). And another poem I return to fairly often, the Rubaiyat of Omar Kayyam, I would not consider part of my heritage, since it comes from the Arab world, which does not figure strongly in the English or British literary tradition. But because it was first translated into English and popularised in the UK in the 19th century by Edward Fitzgerald, now buried in the village of Boulge (coincidentally not so far from our childhood caravan), in countryside which I love, and where I have heard it recited (in Woodbridge library), it has added meaning to me.

Writing this, I’ve been surprised how much my heritage is connected with place, both in the sense of country and of localities. I expected something more free-floating, more in tune with being a world, or at least a European, citizen. But no.

Basic diagram of influences on my literary heritage — in reality the different elements overlap

Heritage is part of thinking and feeling

Heritage is not a package of national achievements to be accepted or rejected wholesale, and which can be slipped on or slipped off at will. My literary heritage is part of how I feel, how I think, what I enjoy, how I see the world Orwell’s (I think) ‘mental furniture’. Traditions are sometimes tied up with the desire to nation-, culture- and even empire-build, just as in the Aeneid Virgil wanted to bolster the legitimacy of the Roman Empire at the same time as tell a touching, thrilling story. But that does not mean they have to be rejected, just modified, understood and acknowledged in various ways.

Notes and sources

Virgil, The Aeneid, (OUP’s World’s Classics series, 1986) edited by Cecil Day Lewis in 1952, introduced by Jasper Griffin.

King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table was reissued in 2008 with an introduction by David Almond and a cover like a modern children’s fantasy, but still illustrated with the same paper silhouette pictures by Lotte Reiniger which fascinated me as a child. While writing this I learned that Reiniger was a groundbreaking German film animator and director.

Greyfriars turns out to be the childhood home of journalist John Simpson, which I learned after reading part of his autobiography.

I’m aware I’ve used the words ‘inheritance’ and ‘heritage’ interchangeably, and that the latter in particular has become a politically loaded word, in the hands, mouths, leaflets and websites of people with a wide range of political beliefs. On this score, I agree with this statement from a candidate in the 2021 London Mayoral Election (although I will be voting for another party): ‘Our modern United Kingdom was born out of the respectful inclusion of so many individual voices.The people of the United Kingdom are tired of being told that we represent the very thing we have in history stood together against. We are all privileged to be the custodians of our shared heritage.’ (Laurence Fox, Reclaim Party).


Saturday 9 January 2021

#46 Jane Eyre

 

A scene from Blackeyed Theatre's Jane Eyre, currently available to stream

Blackeyed Theatre’s production of Jane Eyre, wrote a reviewer last month, ‘has rejected the fashionable habit of presenting Jane as a rad-fem freedom fighter surrounded by grotesque male oppressors’.

I should hope so too. I’ve loved the novel ever since I first read it aged 11 or 12, and thankfully it’s never occurred to me to read it as men versus women. If it had, I would have enjoyed it much less. Such a reading would be part of ‘the steamroller of our cultural moment’, as blogger Maria Popova puts it, which levels the ‘beautiful, wild topography of personhood' into variations on identity politics, demolishing context, dispossessing expression of intention, and flattening persons into identities’.

Even an outline of Jane Eyre shows us that it is more complex than male oppression of women. It is Aunt Reed who locks Jane in the terrifying red room and sends her to an orphanage where children die from disease and semi-starvation. Rochester himself has been cheated and pressured into a tormenting marriage with Bertha Mason, his first wife. Jane’s cousin St John Rivers suppresses his natural instinct for love so he can work, single, as a missionary.

The ‘beautiful, wild topography of personhood’

But enough. This is too easy and is on the same level as the identity politics it rejects. What about the ‘beautiful, wild topography of personhood’? Where is that in the novel?

What about this, when Rochester, who wants Jane to marry him, is lying to her? He tells her she must leave his home Thornfield Hall to go to another governess post in Ireland before his chosen wife, Blanche Ingram, arrives. In doing this he nudges, even forces her, into a confession of her feeling for him:

‘It is a long way off, sir.’

‘No matter – a girl of your sense will not object to the voyage or the distance.’

‘Not the voyage, but the distance, and then the sea is a barrier –‘

‘From what, Jane?’

‘From England and from Thornfield; and –‘

‘Well?’

‘From you, sir.’

I said this almost involuntarily, and, with as little sanction of free will, my tears gushed out.

Strange reversal! That it is the moment when Jane loses most of her free will that is the honest one. And why does Rochester torture her by pretending she has to leave and by earlier flirting with Blanche Ingram? (Jane asks him this later and he replies that he wanted to make her jealous, which I don’t think gets to the heart of it – to me it is more like an angry conformance with what is conventionally expected of him). And is there not an undercurrent of humour, not just from Rochester but from Brontë, in her prospective new employer being ‘Mrs Dionysus O’Gall of Bitternut Lodge’?

Jane’s feeling here turns into a springboard for her declaration to Rochester later in the conversation that they are equal before God and that ‘I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you.’ It is as though her involuntary outburst has helped her to progress and use a renewed, strengthened conception of her own free will which she can look at from the outside and verbalise. Later Rochester persuades her that he is not joking, and she consents to marry him. But looking back with her narrator’s omniscience from the end of the chapter, she says ‘I could not, in those days, see God for his creature, of whom I had made an idol.’

A wild topography indeed, and most of these strands are not resolved in the novel, though I love the moment towards the end when Jane is sitting on Rochester’s knee and shudders and clings closer ‘involuntarily’, without apology, at the suggestion she should leave him. Her instinctive reaction at last has a home.

Some of these strands then – love, passion, frustration, need for religion – and yes, sexual identity – are here, but as things that change moment by moment not as, say, a battle between women and patriarchy, or passion and religion, which would be a caricature of the Victorian era and of our own.

'The whole hog'

So I would say that approaching a novel – the only type of book which gets ‘the whole man alive’ according to DH Lawrence – through the lens of identity politics or with assumptions about the power relations you will find there – already limits it before you start, as presenting Jane Eyre as women against men would do. It is breaking down an organic form into ‘identity-fragments’, as Popova says, which cannot get the whole person – 'the whole hog', as Lawrence says.

But wait – wouldn’t we be missing out if there were no feminist readings of Jane Eyre? Isn’t it the case that she is a woman oppressed within a male-dominated society, first at the orphanage run by the horrible Mr Brocklehurst, then as a penniless governess, one of the very few professions open to women at the time? Isn’t it a stroke of genius to interpret Mr Rochester’s first wife Bertha Mason, now mad and living in the Thornfield attic, in psychological terms as the part of Jane she must shut off in order to continue her bounded existence?

Yes, but I would argue that this broad-brush, less nuanced understanding finds a better home in politics, even campaigning politics, then in literary study. Politically, Jane Eyre might become an illustration or heightened experience feeding into a campaigning call, for example – and would be very powerful there. But in my view the generalised assumptions and polarisations of politics translate poorly into the moment-by-moment life of individuals in which the novel specialises.

Literature is already on the other side of politics, and to interpret a novel like Jane Eyre in over-generalised political terms drags it back to a level it has progressed beyond. Literature is about individuals, and I would argue is primarily descriptive rather than critical or analytical.

But literature pays a price for this. Still thinking. More later, I hope, with reference to A.S. Byatt, Yeats and Auden.

Blackeyed Theatre’s production of Jane Eyre can be watched here.