#58: Prejudice warning

Love in a Cold Climate, published by Penguin Random House

I was dismayed to open a newly bought copy of one of my favourite novels, Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate, to find this on an introductory page:

In this book are some expressions and depictions of prejudices that were commonplace in British society at the time it was written. These prejudices were wrong then and are wrong today. We are printing the novel as it was originally published because to make changes would be the same as pretending these prejudices never existed.

 

My objections

These are my objections to this warning of prejudice:

1. It is preachy, lecturing the reader on how they should read and think.

2. It denigrates British society as a whole, by saying these prejudices were common.

3. It implies a central purpose of publishing is to moralise — it says the prejudices are only allowed to remain in order to show us they existed. It does not consider that they were part of a complex culture and way of thinking which forms the society portrayed in the book which, just like ours, was not uniformly bad or good.

4. It is inimical to the spirit of literature. Such ideologically-based statements tend to kill literature since their broadbrush, political, often fundamentalist approach does not sit well with individual experiences, the food of the novel. (I have explored this more deeply in another post on Jane Eyre.)

5. It is especially inimical to Nancy Mitford’s funny, wry, gently ironic tone.

What are we being warned of?

So what are the editors warning us about? The story of Boy Dougdale, the ‘lecherous lecturer’, molesting his young relatives and fascinating them with it? ‘And I got some great sexy pinches as he passed the nursery landing. Do admit, Fanny,’ says Jassy Radlett after one visit. Boy’s behaviour makes his beautiful niece Polly Hampton fall in love with him, and eventually they marry. Friend of the family Davey reports back on their wedded state when he returns from Sicily, where the couple have gone to live: ‘Well, all I can say is I know it is wrong, not right, to arouse the sexual instincts of little girls so that they fall madly in love with you, but the fact is, poor old Boy is taking a fearful punishment. You see, he has literally nothing to do from morning to night, except water his geraniums, and you know how bad it is for them to have too much water; of course, they are all leaf as a result.’ The last sentence is Davey’s wonderfully true-to-life gay humour and Mitford’s delicious comedy. Not exactly a prejudice, but a different take on sexual behaviour with minors.

Or perhaps we are being warned about this early description of the Hampton family’s aristocratic ancestry: ‘… in 1770, the Lord Hampton of the day brought back, from a visit to Versailles, a French bride, a Mademoiselle de Montdore. Their son had brown eyes, dark skin and presumably, for it is powdered in all the pictures of him, black hair. This practice did not persist in the family; he married a golden-haired heiress from Derbyshire and the Hamptons reverted to their blue and gold looks, for which they are famous to this day.’ Oh dear — implied negativity about a dark complexion. Well, since the book informs us this dark-featured man had ‘a great and life-long friendship with the Regent’ perhaps we should not take it as the plain evidence of British prejudice which the editors encourage us to.

Escaping the ideological filter

How boring it is to read literature in spot-the-prejudice mode. Mitford’s wry comedy is, like Boy’s geraniums, a sensitive growth, one which is spoiled by top-down moralising directives. But ideologies have overwhelming voices. Despite my determination to the contrary, to my dismay when I started to read the book alarm bells started ringing at examples of wrong thinking, to the detriment of the story. But I recovered in time to enjoy the story of this extended family: Polly and her exuberant young relatives Jassy and Victoria; Cedric the heir from the colonies (Canada) who, as Polly is cut off from our inheritance by her marriage, gains everything material that she might have had. Does he feel guilty about this? Not a bit. ‘No cruel looks at One,’ he says, referring to himself. ‘Fair’s fair, you know’. He changes the appearance, and the life, of Polly’s mother by giving her the full-time occupation of becoming beautiful with ‘creaming and splashing and putting on a mask and taking it off again and having her nails done and her feet and then all the exercises, as well as having her teeth completely rearranged and the hair zipped off her arms and legs’. And lastly, there is the counterfoil, Fanny the plain narrator with her unruly heather-like hair and unworldly academic husband.

So what motivates such prejudice warnings?

I assume such warnings are inserted because the publishers do not want to be seen as endorsing everything in the work they publish. But surely we don’t believe they do endorse everything — freedom of imagination, and the often conflicting views this produces, is one of the things which keeps literature alive, and publishers can’t agree with everything. And in that case we should have warnings on the Bible, Silence of the Lambs, On the Road, The Naked Lunch… and countless others. There is certainly a place for warning people about upsetting content, but Love in a Cold Climate is no candidate for that. Publishers, please trust the reader a little more to make their own judgements, and to realise that societies of past times had different values to ours.