A daily life busied with rustic simplicities and the scents of primeval herbs - The Country of the Pointed Firs, domestic picaresque

Messing around  in the comments of a Jam & Idleness review of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, I amused myself by calling the novel a “domestic picaresque.”  In Don Quixote and Lazarillo de Tormes, the characters have adventures simply because they travel around.  There may be nothing more to the plot than movement and variety of experience.  The women of Cranford have adventures by moving around to each other’s houses for tea.  The adventure may consist of observing different domestic habits and eating cake.  Boy, Cranford ought to be dull.

The logical question, when inventing a new genre – based on Bing and the MLA International Bibliography, my idea is not purely original, but close – the next question is what other works belong to it.  The only title that occurred to me was Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), which I had not actually read.  Now I have, and the important thing I learned from it – the most important thing I can learn from any book – is that I was right.

A narrator much like the author (I will call her Sarah) spends a long summer in a coastal town in Maine, nominally to write, but soon the visitin’ begins.  Folks come to visit Mrs. Todd, Sarah’s herbalist landlady, and Mrs. Todd takes Sarah to visit others.  What do people do on these visits?  They visit.  I am introducing my own regionalisms here, which are not necessarily those of Maine.  They visit about the news and weather and the past. 

When zhiv, several years ago, called the book a “plotless novel” but also a “modern novel,” this is what he meant.  We are now used to calling this sort of organized prose fiction a novel.

A line that runs through the book, connecting the episodes, is Sarah’s adaptation to the town, so that it is a moment of triumph when, near the end (Ch. XX), she goes visitin’ on her own.  Other unifying themes are the series of eccentric or even damaged men, mostly widowers – this one is shared by Cranford, and true Mainers might suggest that what I call eccentric is what Maine calls ordinary.

Another line is housekeeping and cooking and Mrs. Todd’s herbs, the domestic rather than picaresque side of the book, a different genre.  I found an interesting study by Ann Romines, The Home Plot: Women, Writing & Domestic Ritual (University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), which puts The Country of the Pointed Firs at the head of housekeeping fiction, as in specific works of Willa Cather (who I barely know) and Eudora Welty.  Jewett’s touch on the latter’s “family get together” novels Delta Wedding and Losing Battles was clear enough even before I got to Chapter XVIII, “The Bowden Reunion.”  Romines never mentions Gaskell, which is odd.

The genres are proliferating, which was not my point.  I guess I will spend a couple of days with the book and its “sorrows and the remoteness of a daily life busied with rustic simplicities and the scents of primeval herbs” (Ch.  X).

Jewett and her narrator have a mild and pleasant sense of humor but this book is not nearly as wickedly funny as Cranford.  I will just get that out of the way here.  Jewett wrote a mild book.  It ought to be dull.

Look! there is my poor little girl out in the snow! - ghosts by Elizabeth Gaskell and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

The first two ghost stories of the week are “The Nurse’s Story” (1852) by Elizabeth Gaskell and “The Southwest Chamber” (1903 or so) by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman.  I am reading more or less randomly, which makes the similarities between these two stories almost uncanny.

The southwest chamber is where the old aunt died, the one who was “pitiless” towards her sister who married a poor man, and to her nieces, too, but they end up with the house.  They take in lodgers, but the aunt’s room turns out to be trouble.

“Well!” said Sophia, “of all the silly notions! If you are going to pick out rooms in this house where nobody has died, for the boarders, you'll have your hands full… I don't believe there's a room nor a bed in this house that somebody hasn't passed away in.”

But apparently none of those other people were so mean.

The amusing thing is that the aunt’s hauntings are entirely domestic.  She messes around with dresses and nightcaps and mirrors and, my favorite, her bed hangings, which she occasionally switches from a “peacocks on blue” pattern to “roses on yellow.”

This apparent contradiction of the reasonable as manifested in such a commonplace thing as chintz of a bed-hanging affected this ordinarily unimaginative woman as no ghostly appearance could have done. Those red roses on the yellow ground were to her much more ghostly than any strange figure clad in the white robes of the grave entering the room.

Next week, kids, Count Floyd will get a scary movie, he promises.

No, I joke, this is good.  The skeptical, tough niece learns that no matter how strong and sensible she is she cannot correct the sins of someone else’s past, even in her own family.  Just get away from it; move on.  A therapeutic ghost story.

Elizabeth Gaskell also conjures some ghosts from a sister’s old act of cruelty.  The nurse and her little ward end up in a house with the usual accoutrements – a sealed-off wing, a bitter old lady.  Gaskell employs James’s two turns of the screw (“what do you say to two children”), in this case one living and one  lost:

[B]y-and-by, without our noticing it, it grew dusk indoors, though it was still light in the open air, and I was thinking of taking her back into the nursery, when, all of sudden, she cried out, -

'Look, Hester! look! there is my poor little girl out in the snow!'

I turned towards the long, narrow windows, and there, sure enough, I saw a little girl, less than my Miss Rosamond dressed all unfit to be out-of-doors such a bitter night - crying, and beating against the window-panes, as if she wanted to be let in.

This is the pleasingly uncanny point where the reader interested in being frightened will enjoy himself.

The story’s end is a bit more thumping, with the story’s ghosts assembling before the living to re-enact the moment that created them many decades ago.

As soon as I saw the date of the story, I should have known what Gaskell was after.  “The Nurse’s Story” is another of her tales of female solidarity, with the nurse doing everything necessary to protect the little girl in her care, taking the ghosts in their own terms, figuring out their rules.  The evil act in the past is the opposite, one woman destroying another.  The only act of violence comes from a man, but a woman endorsing the violence against her own sister and niece is as worthy of a lifetime of guilt and ghosts.

So, two ghost stories that are feminist explorations of good and bad deeds within the family.

I doubt whatever else I read will pair up so nicely.

Elizabeth Gaskell's German Idyll

Given the constraints, North and South is a stunning artistic achievement.  The constraint is that authorial nightmare, weekly serialization.  Charles Dickens wrote, I think, four of them – The Old Curiosity Shop, Barnaby Rudge, Hard Times, and A Tale of Two Cities, and I would pick the middle two as his two weakest novels, and as fond as I am of The Old Curiosity Shop, it’s not so far from the bottom, either.  I mean, weak Dickens is pretty dang strong!

How difficult it must be to maintain any coherent sense of anything but the main thread, and how impossible it must be to set the delightful little traps that will only be sprung a hundred pages later, to develop the harmonies when you are scrambling to keep the melody intact.  Gaskell actually suffered from an additional constraint, perhaps as bad, continual interference from her annoying know-it-all editor.*  Given all this, I am surprised the novel is as good as it is, but not at all surprised that my favorite chapter is one Gaskell added later, when North and South was published as a book.**

In Book II, Chapter 21, “Once and Now,” our heroine Margaret returns to the childhood home, the village of Helstone, that she was forced to abandon three hundred pages earlier.  If it does nothing else, the chapter reinforces the “South” half of the title’s division, but it does much more, and is finely written, or about half of it is.  The second half is used to tinker with some plotty stuff that Gaskell must have thought was insufficiently explained in the serial.  She knew that train station recognition-manslaughter scene I complained about was a mistake and kept fussing with it, trying to fix it.***

The Helstone chapter is filled with flowers.  Roses, myrtle, lavender, honeysuckle.  It reminded me of German Idylls.  Margaret, too: “[The scenery] reminded Margaret of German Idylls – of Hermann and Dorothea – of Evangeline.”  Evangeline is not German, but it also once reminded me of a German idyll, so I see why it is here.  Hermann and Dorothea is Goethe’s 1797 domestic epic.  Gaskell, moving her characters to a different scene, has also gently slipped them into a German novella, with continual echoes of Goethe.  This is the “renunciation” chapter, the Bildungsroman chapter, where Margaret, having suffered any number of setbacks, begins to accept the loss of her past.  Margaret even includes a truly German uncanny element – sensitive readers, avert thy gaze! – the roast cat, which Margaret actually tries, unsuccessfully, to expel from the novel through reason.

Characters multiply, characters who obviously cannot be used again.  An entire vicar’s family, a crowded schoolroom, the staff of an inn.  Who are these people:   “a spectator or two stood lounging at nearly every station, with his hands in his pockets, so absorbed in the simple act of watching, that it made the travelers wonder what he could find to do when the train whirled away” – we know that once the train is gone, these marionettes are wrapped in paper and returned to their imaginary boxes.

Another anonymous gentleman, though, does return later.  Gaskell is able to set a retrospective trap, which she springs on the last page of the novel, a page she had already published.  Please note the association of the gentleman with roses, a “real” connection on the last page, a novelistic one in this chapter.  The innkeeper, speaking of roses, is for some reason reminded of the gentleman.  Only on the last page do we discover why.

One character is inanimate: “a straw-hat forced down upon a rose-tree as on a peg, to the destruction of a long beautiful tender branch laden with flowers, which in former days would have been trained up tenderly, as if beloved.”  I suspect Gaskell of employing symbolism, and look, there are the roses again.

The things a great novelist can do under maddening constraints!  The greater things a great novelist can do with time and reflection!

* Although Dickens had the same editor.

** See Dorothy W. Collin, “The Composition of Mrs. Gaskell’s North and South” in the Norton Critical Edition.

***  Actually, hang on.  So the hapless dead man is named Leonards, and Margaret and her godfather hash over his death in the dining room of the Lennard Arms, a name and place Gaskell invented in this new section, a little tribute to the martyr to her plot.

The taste that loves ornament, however bad - interior decoration in North and South, with a digression on the Indian shawl

In reading, one should notice and fondle details. There is nothing wrong about the moonshine of generalization when it comes after the sunny trifles of the book have been lovingly collected. (Vladimir Nabokov, “Good Readers and Good Writers,” Lectures on Literature)

I’m going to collect one of North and South’s trifles.  It is a particularly pleasant one to fondle, made of real Indian silk, with a “soft feel” and “brilliant colors,” or so I am told in the first chapter, when the Indian shawl is introduced.  In a mildly comic scene, our heroine Margaret is buried in shawls, “laden with shawls, and snuffing up their spicy Eastern smell.”  She seems to be doing a bit of fondling herself.  Anyone who has one is “a lucky girl.”  They are “very perfect things of their kind.”

At this point, the shawls serve two purposes:  this one detail, this excess of shawls, conveys the scope of the wealth of Margaret’s London relatives, and its source in Indian ventures; and Margaret’s modeling of the shawls gives Gaskell her first excuse to describe her protagonist to the reader.  A few pages later, the shawls are briefly mentioned again.  Margaret’s suitor, Henry Lennox, vulgarly admires their monetary value.

Difficult circumstances force Margaret to an industrial city, where her own Indian shawl, apparently a gift  from her aunt’s heap, takes on a personal meaning.  It is one of her few luxuries.  She is now the poor gentlewoman with the unusually nice shawl, something the poor children like to touch.

If the shawl is so important, it must be involved in the romantic plot.  Let’s see, when does Margaret meet Thornton?  Chapter 7:

Her dress was very plain: a close straw bonnet of the best material and shape, trimmed with white ribbon; a dark silk gown, without any trimming or flounce; a large Indian shawl, which hung about her in long heavy folds, and which she wore as an empress wears her drapery.

We’re seeing Margaret through Thornton’s eyes.  He is the no-nonsense self-made man of business, but his response to the shawl is poetic, entirely different than that of Henry Lennox.

I could continue with the shawl, but at this exact point in the novel, the shawl theme intersects with the interior decoration theme.  Margaret has just discovered that, in the industrial town, apartments are not only expensive but decorated in the worst possible taste.

She had never come fairly in contact with the taste that loves ornament, however bad, more than the plainness and simplicity which are of themselves the framework of elegance.

Hey, is that a dig at me?  I love ornament in fiction, although I like to pretend that I only like good ornament.

Every dwelling in the novel is at some point described in terms of the taste of its décor.  Taste is a signifier of – well, it depends on who is looking.  Henry Lennox, suitor #1, seeing the tasteful but faded carpets and curtains of Margaret and her family in Chapter 3 interprets them economically (the family is poorer than he had thought), just as he did the shawl, two chapters earlier.  Thornton, in the same situation (Ch. 10), notices all sorts of specific objects and intuitively understands them as an extension of Margaret herself, even though he barely knows her.  He also contrasts them with the sterile, uncomfortable (and, although he does not know it, tasteless) decoration of his own home.

Again, I could keep going, but will not.  The only point I really want to make is, this is skilled, controlled writing, yes?  Dang good.  North and South is rarely written along these principles.  It could have been.  Gaskell knew how to do it.

Gaskell grumbling - North and South, complaints first

Should I spend a few days writing about Elizabeth Gaskell’s mature industrial novel, North and South (1855)?  I fear I did not read it well.  Perhaps a kind-hearted reader will help me out.

I read Gaskell after and amidst some especially writerly writers.  After the exquisitely crafted patternings of Vladimir Nabokov, or the rhetorical cloud-castles of Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens, the plain ol’ novel writing of Elizabeth Gaskell looked pretty thin at the sentence level.  Competent, but the prose of Cranford, finished two years earlier, was a lot better than competent.

Since I was reading the Norton Critical Edition, I could at least turn to the selection of supporting materials for assistance with understanding the art of Gaskell.  Let’s see:  “Mrs. Gaskell and Christian Interventionism in North and South” -  well, that is not quite what I have in mind.  “Political Economy in North and South” – yes, there is quite a lot of that.*  “Factory Work for Women” – oh, now, come on.  All right, I see where this is going.  No one is too interested in fondling the details or unpacking the surprises of North and South.**   Critics and readers must bow their heads to the difficult task of improving the Condition of England.

Rohan Maitzen describes North and South as “both artistically and intellectually a better book” than Mary Barton (1848), and I agree completely, although Mary Barton is not such a high standard, nothing like the ingenious, richly imagined Cranford.  Jenny of Shelf Love declares Cranford “minor” and North and South “as complex and substantial as nearly any 19th-century novel I’ve ever read.”  If I were ranking 19th century novels by complexity and heft, North and South would be well down the list.  But my list would likely be topped by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, which should encapsulate the aesthetic differences between Jenny and me.

I did think the novel improved as it moved along.  Gaskell is excellent in individual scenes and passages, and there were more good ones in the second half – she has a deft hand with a death scene, and the back half of North and South has plenty of those.  The worst piece of plotting is in the back as well, though, but the less said about that, the better.  I can imagine a radical sequel in which Leonards’s brother comes to Manchester to stubbornly, passionately fight for justice; after many obstacles and the sacrifice of his health and true love, he sees both the murderer of his brother, and the corrupt magistrate who covered up the crime, imprisoned, bankrupted, and disgraced.  Neither the Critical Edition essays nor the blog posts I have surveyed have much interest in poor Leonards.***

Please read Jenny and Teresa’s discussion for the pro-North and South case.  Please visit Rohan’s post, which contains a long excerpt from one of the best (best written!) scenes in the novel.  Please point me to other well-written blog posts on the novel.  My survey of the terrain was disheartening.  For the next two days, my own pro-Gaskell case, or parts of it.

* See Book I, Chapter 15, in which the hero and heroine debate the question, with the hero representing the views of Thomas Carlyle, and the heroine also representing the views of Thomas Carlyle.  He is the “hard” side of Carlyle; she is the “soft.”  By the end of the novel, the characters work together to create the ideal Carlyle.

** Why, for example, does the novel begin and end in the same room, the “back drawing-room in Harley Street”?  Here is evidence of a novelist writing a novel.

*** I realize that this passage makes no sense to anyone who has not read North and South.  To those who have:  ???.  Also: did Gaskell invent the “I see her with another man oh she will never love me but the other man is actually her brother!” nonsense, or was it already a cliché in 1855?

Aha, a perfect Frenchman! - questions about A Tale of Two Cities

Two questions.

1.  Why did Charles Dickens write A Tale of Two Cities?  Many reasons, yes.  Imagining the germ of the story, or a character or two, was sufficient.  But I also presume that Dickens had another purpose.

Is this novel his own response to Hard Times, published five years earlier?  In Hard Times, the Condition of England is Not Good, and the workers are up in arms, but only figuratively.  In some sense, Dickens is on the side of those workers, but in some other sense he is on the side of everyone.  If only we would all be nicer to each other, etc.  The practical politics of Hard Times are incoherent, and I’m not sure the impractical policitcs are much better.

I’m currently, oh, a third of the way into Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855), listening to her characters rehash the same arguments.  Listening patiently, I hope.  This sort of thing is not the great strength of the novel as a form.  A strike is about to begin.  Perhaps the workers will begin breaking machines, forming committees, building barricades, and beheading noblemen.  There’s something the novel is pretty good at.

Charles Dickens does not want the workers to get to the point of beheading the mill-owners.  It would be easy enough to shade Hard Times into part of a call for revolution.  The events of 1848 left England untouched, but the example was fresh.  Perhaps A Tale of Two Cities is a piece of an extended novelistic argument – reform should go far, and Dickens is not quite clear on how far, but not that far, not as far as the French Revolution.  Earlier parts of the novel, the “Two Cities” sections, emphasize the poverty of London as well as Paris, but Paris and the Revolution swallow the novel.  The French go too far.

2.  Now, this will probably be of no interest to anyone who has not read the novel, and I believe I just made some unwarranted assumptions about those who have.

Please just go ahead and tell me this is nonsense:

Sydney Carton is Charles Darnay’s cousin or half-brother, yes?  We have the set of French twin brothers, Darnay’s father and uncle, and then we have his inexplicable English look-alike, who is, who must be, the illegitimate son of one of the brothers.

Dickens never mentions any of this – or there’s my question – did I miss it? The idea only occurred to me with about sixty pages left in the novel.  This passage did it:

‘But you are not English,’ said the wood-sawyer, ‘though you wear English dress?’

‘Yes,’ said Carton, pausing again, and answering over his shoulder.

‘You speak like a Frenchman.’

‘I am an old student here.’

‘Aha, a perfect Frenchman!  Good night, Englishman.’  (III.9)

A perplexing business.  Dickens wants to reassure me about Carton’s facility with Paris and with French, skills he needs to move the story along.  He sure does it in an odd way.

What I like about this idea – and, again, feel free to point out the so-obvious-they-are-not-even clues that I missed – is that Dickens, no stranger to over-explaining, omits all of this from the novel.  Maybe the resemblance between Darnay and Carton is just a freakish coincidence.  Maybe not.  Dickens never says.  Good for him.

Elizabeth Gaskell and Herman Melville aid the English poor

For some reason, I have been claiming that Mary Barton was published in 1849, which is wrong.  October 1848, that’s the right answer, amidst revolution and Communism and so on.  Good timing.

I don’t really know that Gaskell was the first writer to treat factory workers in the manner she did, sympathetically and, in some sense, realistically.  I doubt it.  Maybe Mary Barton is simply the first canonical book of its type.  It’s the first I know.

Charles Dickens introduces the working class, the factory class, for the first time in The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), but he presents them almost abstractly, in a sort of fantasy setting, like something from The Pilgrim’s Progress or Dante.  I called it an “industrial apocalypse” – wrathful monsters and black vomit and starved children.  It’s a powerful passage, but a lot of distance is built in, like a funhouse exhibit.  It's not so easy to see any actual people behind the expert rhetoric.

Dickens returns to the subject in the early part of David Copperfield, a book I have not read, but probably should.  Is it any good?  I recently read that Dickens told no one, no one at all, that he himself had worked in the blacking factory as a child.  Is that true?  Anyway, David Copperfield began serialization in March 1849.  How much had he learned from Gaskell?

Maybe nothing.  I know of one other 1849 novel that has, in just one scene, an uncanny resemblance to Mary Barton.  Had Herman Melville read Gaskell?  One of the early deathbed scenes in Mary Barton, in the “Poverty and Death” chapter I mentioned a couple of days ago, takes place in a dark, stinking cellar.

Quickly recovering themselves, as those inured to such things do, they began to penetrate the thick darkness of the place, and to see three or four little children rolling on the damp, nay wet brick floor, through which the stagnant, filthy moisture of the street oozed up; the fire-place was empty and black; the wife sat on her husband's lair, and cried in the dark loneliness. (Ch. 6, 60)

The husband is dying from typhoid, and the woman and baby are literally starving.  One paragraph tells us how John Barton and his friend feed the family drop by drop, like modern aid workers.  Another paragraph describes the “back apartment” of the cellar, “down which dropped the moisture from pigsties, and worse abominations,” and for which the family “paid threepence more for having two rooms” (64).

In his “first time at sea” novel Redburn (1849), Herman Melville describes a strangely similar scene.  The narrator is a young American sailor, wandering about Liverpool. He discovers, in a warehouse cellar

the figure of what had been a woman. Her blue arms folded to her livid bosom two shrunken things like children, that leaned toward her, one on each side. At first, I knew not whether they were alive or dead. They made no sign; they did not move or stir; but from the vault came that soul-sickening wail. (Ch. 37)

Young Redburn does what he can to help them.  No one else in Liverpool cares.  Both scenes are used to demonstrate the superior impulses of the protagonists.  The weaver John Barton is experienced in his charity; the sailor Redburn is a novice.  Melville ends his chapter

Surrounded as we are by the wants and woes of our fellowmen, and yet given to follow our own pleasures, regardless of their pains, are we not like people sitting up with a corpse, and making merry in the house of the dead?

The author of Mary Barton would not express herself so grotesquely, or vividly, and concludes her novel on an idealistic note, while for Melville, the episode is simply one piece of the moral development of his hero.  But both Gaskell and Melville are asking for an extension of our sympathy.

As if only one person wrote in that flourishing, meandering style! - Gaskell's style

Some Mary Barton first sentences:

Another year passed on. (Ch. 6)

One Sunday afternoon, about three weeks after that mournful night, Jem Wilson set out with the ostensible purpose of calling on John Barton. (Ch. 8)

The next evening it was a warm, pattering, incessant rain - just the rain to waken up the flowers. (Ch. 9)

The events recorded in the last chapter took place on a Tuesday. (Ch. 17)

I must go back a little to explain the motives which caused Esther to seek an interview with her niece. (Ch. 21)

A couple of things to say.  First, Gaskell is not exactly Flaubert here, is she?  Le mot ordinaire is more common than le mot juste.  But I beg the reader to remember Cranford’s butter-and-string passage, the greatest butter-and-string passage in world literature.

Second, not every chapter begins with an exact placement in time.  Maybe no more than one in four.  Enough, though, that a device that at first seems clumsy becomes an element of Gaskell’s style.  This is how, consistently, this story is going to be told.  One perverse effect is that it slowed my reading – if another year is about to pass, that chapter can wait until tomorrow, can’t it?

My title line is just a joke, from Chapter 21, where it refers to handwriting.  I’ll confess I don’t know what a flourishing style would look like, in penmanship or prose.  Nothing wrong with meandering, in its place. For example, from Chapter 21:

Towards the middle of the day she could no longer evade the body's craving want of rest and refreshment; but the rest was taken in a spirit vault, and the refreshment was a glass of gin.

There’s the specific time again – well, I have no trouble calling this good writing.  The euphonious cliché (“rest and refreshment”) that ends the first phrase is expertly dismantled in the second.  Eighteenth-century critics like Samuel Johnson often talk about “well-balanced periods,” and I seldom know just what they mean, but I believe they mean sentences like this one of Gaskell’s.

Or maybe this one, my favorite sentence in the novel:

It struck two; deep, mirk night. (Ch. 22)

That’s also an entire paragraph.  I read it with a strong accent on each syllable, with a pause for the weak beat.  Hey, it's another time-setting sentence.  I just noticed that, I swear.

There are worse-written books than Mary Barton.  But Gaskell sure gets better.

But who was he, that he should utter sympathy or consolation? - Mary Barton at the deathbed

Mary Barton is almost unrelievedly grim through its first half (and not a lot cheerier later).  Unemployment, fires, fevers, alcoholism, drug addiction, senility.  One character goes blind; another goes deaf and then goes blind.  And then dies.

The number of deathbed scenes is extraordinary, but purposeful.  The repetition of the scene allows Gaskell to catalogue and develop one of her Big Ideas – the importance of consolation.

'Come in, wench!' said her father. 'Try if thou canst comfort yon poor, poor woman, kneeling down there. God help her!' Mary did not know what to say, or how to comfort; but she knelt down by her, and put her arm round her neck, and in a little while fell to crying herself so bitterly that the source of tears was opened by sympathy in the widow, and her full heart was, for a time, relieved. (Ch. 6, 72)

This scene comes early in the novel, in the light and frothy chapter titled “Poverty and Death.”  Mary does not know how to console.  Her own tears come from she knows not where (self-pity, partly), but they are somehow comforting to the bereaved widow, even though it is not clear that they mean anything in particular.

Some children die in the very next chapter.  Mary again can only offer comfort mechanically, for which I hardly blame her.  Other characters seem to offer consolation more naturally.  Most simply, the novel is about how a woman loses her adolescent self-absorption and learns to regard others.

Her father takes the reverse path – he turns inward over the course of the book, with disastrous results.  His tragedy is his loss of sympathy.  In the idealistic end, all of the right characters learn to understand each other at just the right time.  That’s the story Gaskell is trying to tell.  That’s the Christian message underlying the book, as I understand – all men are brothers, yes, but our sense of connection requires continual effort.  All women are sisters, too, a theme Gaskell returns to in everything of hers I’ve read.  Mary Barton uses the word "sympathy" or a variation more than any novel I know.  Another piece of The Sympathy Project.

Rebecca Reid points out a difficult feature of the novel’s structure.  The first half or so seems to represent something like ordinary (miserable) life, and does not have much of a story.  The second half, surprisingly, becomes a proto-detective novel and courtroom novel.  Yet the thematic complexity of the book lies in the first part, while the more zippy second half is altogether simpler.  Another two hundred pages of ordinary life might have been a trial tot he reader, but the more exciting plot, the trial to the characters, tells us little we didn’t know.  The novel is at first slow and dull, but rich.  Then it becomes quick and lively, but thin.  Sort of odd.  Badly balanced.

The post’s title is from Chapter 35.

I want work, and it is my right. I want work. - Mary Barton, Thomas Carlyle, and work

This is "Work" (1852-65) by Ford Madox Brown, available for perusal in the City Art Gallery, Manchester.  Image, with much other information, from The Victorian Web.

I know there is too much detail in this complicated image to see what's going on.  In the center, we have some honorable, ordinary workmen, and, for some reason, several dogs.  Behind the workers are a number of representatives of the non-working class, the poshies - a mounted gentleman and his wife, a cute girl in a pretty dress, another woman distributing religious tracts.  To the left is a ragged flower-seller.  And to the right - see the smiling fellow with the hat and cane and beard? - is Thomas Carlyle himself, Victorian patron saint of Work.

It has been written, 'an endless significance lies in Work;' a man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seedfields rise instead, and stately cities; and withal the man himself first ceases to be a jungle and foul unwholesome desert thereby.

I’m in Chapter XI of Past and Present (1843), “Labour.”  Since the passage was written by Thomas Carlyle, it goes on for a while like this, in substance repetitive but in rhetoric variable and inventive, ending: 

The man is now a man. The blessed glow of Labour in him, is it not as purifying fire, wherein all poison is burnt up, and of sour smoke itself there is made bright blessed flame!

I think it is fair to replace the exclamation with a question mark and reply “Um, no.”  But for now, I won’t argue with Carlyle.  Work is inherently virtuous and meaningful, even heroic.

Mary Barton, published in 1848, is set during the economic hard times of 1839, the period of central Carlyle works like “Chartism” and Past and Present, his diagnosis of the Condition of England.  Not that Gaskell does not have her own ideas, but Mary Barton is suffused with Carlyle.  Carlyle provided one key to understanding what, exactly, Gaskell wanted, or wanted her readers to want.

Mary Barton’s father, John, is a factory weaver.  A fire at the mill, combined with an economic downturn, leaves Barton unemployed.  Gaskell is a keen observer of unemployment, and her psychology of the unemployed is consistent with the way sociologists treat the subject today – this is one of the ways in which Mary Barton is oddly modern.  A picture of the unemployed John Barton:

Once, when she asked him as he sat, grimed, unshaven, and gaunt, after a day's fasting, over the fire, why he did not get relief from the town, he turned round, with grim wrath, and said, "I don't want money, child! D--n their charity and their money! I want work, and it is my right. I want work." (Ch. 10, 115)

The lack of work eventually perverts and destroys John.  A quite different lack of work also ruins a young gentleman who pursues the pretty Mary Barton – he can dally with her not simply because he is rich, but because he is “unfettered by work-hours” (Ch. 7, 80).

The Carlylean echo here is not simply the celebration of work itself, but its separation from money.  Gaskell brings out the Marxist in me at this point, the pure materialist – higher pay for the workers, I say!  But I’m less convinced of the inherent meaning of work, and Gaskell and Carlyle believe, I think, that whatever material changes are necessary will follow the spiritual changes, somehow. 

The argument is made unnovelistically explicit at the very end of the book, when it is claimed that what John really wanted from his employers was not money, or improved working conditions, but that they would care about him, really care.  He wanted nothing more than sympathy.  “Sympathy” is the guiding word of Mary Barton.  It’s all about sympathy.  More sympathy tomorrow.

Page numbers from the Penguin Classics edition, by the way.

I know nothing of Political Economy, or the theories of trade - Elizabeth Gaskell, liar

Fiction writers are such liars.  That title is from Elizabeth Gaskell’s Preface to her first novel, Mary Barton (1848), a novel at times fascinating, often aggravating, and occasionally dull.  Yet it is, I now see, an Essential Victorian Text.  If only it were a better novel.  Well, sometimes you gets the one thing, and sometimes you gets t’other.

I’ll try to avoid going on and on and on about the aggravating and dullish parts.  It was a relief to learn that the single worst chapter in the novel, genuinely bad, was forced on Gaskell by her publisher.  Same thing happened to John Galt twenty-five years earlier, leading to the one bad bit of The Entail.  That willfully naïve preface was a publisher’s demand as well.  Writers, when cranky, are not often at their best.

I at times could hardly believe that the first chapters of Cranford, light and sparkly and trickily rich, were only two years in the future.  Gaskell learned fast.  Or, she found a style she thought was appropriate for the grim Mary Barton and stuck with it, for better and worse.  Eh, it’s a first novel with a lot of typical first novel problems.  The amazing thing is what Gaskell does well, which is to tie together so many Important Victorian Themes that one wonders if the novel had been commissioned by time traveling literature professors.  I’ll make a list, for my own benefit.

- Manchester.  I don’t know if this is the first novel set out in the new industrial cities.  It’s the earliest one I know.  But in 1848 they were not really so new anymore, so it was about time.  This single innovation, writing a novel about working class Mancunians, is by itself worthwhile.  The Manchester of Mary Barton is unfortunately not imagined at the artistic level of, say, the London of Dombey and Son (1847) or the Cranford of Cranford, but I thought it was sufficiently real.  It does not feel like a transplanted London, at least.

- Gaskell’s working class characters are her own, too, not reworked Dickens.  Gaskell sentimentalizes them in some ways, but it’s her own sentimentality, something new.  And Gaskell has almost no mediating characters, meaning we spend our time with the seamstress Mary Barton and her weaver father John on their own terms, in their own lives, not through the eyes of a more "respectable" character.

- And as soon as I write that, I realize that it is not true.  The respectable mediator is our narrator, who I’ll call Elizabeth Gaskell, who is endlessly intrusive, reassuring us that we can spend our time with these questionable people.  The narrator is so weird in places that I sometimes wondered if I was reading the novel correctly.

- A prostitute is treated with a great deal of sympathy, which I’m told is new.

- Good or bad, Mary Barton is a political novel with a serious purpose.  The reader, it is clear, is meant to be changed by the novel, by knowing more about these people.  I assume that much of this effect is lost on the modern reader.  The argument – the political argument – is odd, too.  Despite some fascinating echoes of Marx (the Communist Manifesto appeared a few months earlier) and plenty of Thomas Carlyle, the change Gaskell wants is fundamentally Christian.  I found this hard to understand, at first, but Gaskell led me through the argument, successfully.  She knew plenty about Political Economy.

Well, this is plenty vague to anyone who has not read the book.  I’ll spend part of the week making some sort of argument about Mary Barton.

The Wuthering Expectations Best of 2009

Three extra-large Humiliations were crossed off my list: Walden, The Scarlet Letter, and The Flowers of Evil, all highly rewarding.  Let's set those aside, though. 

Some fleeting highlights:

1. Thoreau recommends the "rich sweet cider" of the frozen-thawed apple.  "Your jaws are the cider-press."  ("Wild Apples").

2.  Charles Baudelaire smashes an itinerant glass saleman's backback of samples with a flower pot, just to hear the smash ("as of lightning striking a crystal palace"), to introduce some beauty into this ugly world of ours. "Make life beautiful! Make life beautiful!"  (Paris Spleen, "The Bad Glazier").

3. We spend eighteen hours or so sitting next to Judge Pyncheon.  Hawthorne tells us about the Judge's big day.  They're going to nominate him for Governor!  Why won't Judge Pyncheon move?  "Rise up, Judge Pyncheon!" (Chapter 18 of Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of Seven Gables).

4. A Kazakh railroad worker battles his prize bull camel.  We gaze upon a sturgeon; the sturgeon gazes upon us.  (Chingiz Aitmatov, The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years).

5.  All that Yiddish literature, so much, so good.  The futile attempt of I. L. Peretz's poor student to come up with a story that's not about the blood libel. ("Stories").  Hodl's farewell to her father, Tevye the Dairyman.  "Let's talk about something more cheerful.  Have you heard any news of the cholera in Odessa?" (Sholem Aleichem, "Hodl," Tevye the Dairyman).

6.  Arthur Hugh Clough can't get milk for his coffee.   ("Amours de Voyage").

7.  Cranford, Silas Marner, Villette.  Three perfect novels, allowing for some variety in one's standards of perfection.  The methods varied, too: Eliot compressed, Gaskell tied up loose ends, and Brontë pushed, hard.  If I end up marvelling more at Villette, it's because it is so complex, and because after just a bit of looking at secondary souces I have developed the crackpot notion that I possess an original idea about the novel.  Forthcoming in 2010, if I can bring myself to do the work, which I mightn't.

8.  The moment in Flaubert's "A Simple Heart" when they put the stuffed parrot - no, you'll have to go see for yourself.  Is this story the best thing Flaubert ever wrote?  Talk about perfection.

I just want to keep going.  The Mountain Poems of Meng Hao-jan.  Edouard Mörike's  Mozart's Journey to Prague.  Gérard de Nerval's Sylvie.  "The benediction of the air."  John Galt!

I should skip this last part.  No, it's eating at me, since I just read it.  Worst of the year:  the second half of A Study in Scarlet (1887), the first Sherlock Holmes novel.  The Holmes-free Utah section is so, so bad, an undramatic jangle of clichés.  It's not only terribly written on its own, but once we return to Holmes, its dreadfulness has somehow even soaked into Watson's journal, tainting the rest of the novel.  The first half was all right!

What colour are ash-buds in March?

"Now, what colour are ash-buds in March?"

Is the man going mad? thought I. He is very like Don Quixote.

"What colour are they, I say?" repeated he vehemently.

"I am sure I don't know, sir," said I, with the meekness of ignorance.

"I knew you didn't. No more did I--an old fool that I am!--till this young man comes and tells me. Black as ash-buds in March. And I've lived all my life in the country; more shame for me not to know. Black: they are jet-black, madam." And he went off again, swinging along to the music of some rhyme he had got hold of.

We're in Chapter IV of Cranford, "A Visit to an Old Bachelor." The "young man" who comes along is actually Alfred Tennyson; the line about the ash-buds is from a long, dullish poem called "The Gardener's Daughter; or, The Pictures."

Gaskell is delineating her method here. The art of the novel, or this novel, is in the accumulation of tiny details. But Gaskell is not Tennyson. All of her descriptive writing is about people, and not about how they look, but about their behavior, and their things - their food and furniture, and clothes, always their clothes. Nature is for the poets.

The poetry enthusiast wants to read a poem to the ladies, "and Miss Pole encouraged him in his proposal, I thought, because she wished me to hear his beautiful reading, of which she had boasted; but she afterwards said it was because she had got to a difficult part of her crochet, and wanted to count her stitches without having to talk." Pretty sharply observed.

Entire passages are devoted to hats, and the vulgarity of the name of the local doctor (Mr. Hoggins, "but, as Miss Jenkyns said, if he changed it to Piggins it would not be much better"), and the difficulty of using a particularly small set of sugar-tongs, evidence of miserliness: "Very delicate was the china, and very old the plate, very thin the bread and butter, and very small the lumps of sugar" (Ch. VIII).

Isn't "very" one of those empty words that a good writer is supposed to suppress? I guess a great writer is allowed to use it.

I didn't know the colour of the ash-buds myself. I'm not as good a poetry reader as that farmer, and probably would not have noticed that detail in Tennyson. But I'll remember it now, along with a hundred other marvels from Cranford.

Cranford in 1853, a great year for the English novel

Cranford was one of three major English novels published in 1853,* along with Bleak House and Villette. Should I add Gaskell's own Ruth to the list? It's still read, at least, which is more than I can say for any other English novels from that year. Feel free to correct me.

First, then, 1853, was a banner year for the English novels. Four that are still read, that is extremely rare. Only a few years in the 19th century can make that claim (miraculous 1818 has five). The 19th century English novel is one of the great achievements of human civilization, but that doesn't mean that there were three good ones every year.

Especially, setting Ruth aside, since I ain't done read it, three as good as these, which happen to be my favorite Dickens, new favorite Charlotte Brontë, and favorite Elizabeth Gaskell. Also, almost my only Gaskell, but given the nature of her other books, I bet it will remain my favorite.

All three books share tricky, innovative first person narrators. Bleak House's Esther Summerson is perhaps not so tricky herself - a little tricky, though - but she shares the novel with an omniscient third person narrator, a structure that works like a charm and solves any number of Dickensian problems. Dickens never used it again; nor did anyone else that I can think of. I have no idea why not.

The narrator of Villette, being a Brontë character, is, of course, some kind of supernatural spirit, an imp or an elf or something. Brontë uses Lucy Snowe to push her novel in some strange Modernist directions that I found appealing. Whatever it is, there's no other Victorian novel like it, although Lucy does resemble Cranford's Mary Smith in a number of ways. They both stay in the background, or say they do, and both have delightful, slightly cruel senses of humor.

But where Villette is very much Lucy's story, the narrator's attempt to exercise control of her own life, Mary Smith's function really is to tell us the story of the Cranford ladies. She intrudes into the story but is never quite a complete character. The real story belongs to some of the other characters, so Mary remains a device, to some degree, a necessary and useful means of telling a certain story. This almost sounds like a complaint, but it's not. Cranford has just as much of its narrator as it needs.

All right, that's my little digression into literary history. Interest in literary history is my bugbear fault. One of them.

* Bleak House and Cranford had been appearing earlier as serials.

Cranford and the strong female character

Every now and again I come across someone praising a book or movie because it features a "strong female character." I've never quite seen the inherent virtue in the notion. Many of my favorite novels feature nothing but weak characters, male or female. Weak, soft, foolish, pathetic, thin-skinned, vain, ludicrous, misguided, lunatic, stupid, and many other wonderful features. Wonderful because they're interesting.

Cranford begins with a strong female character, an inflexible tyrant, Deborah (pronounced, she insists, DehBORah), Jenkyns, ruler of the Cranford spinsters. That story is, in a way, about finding some softness behind her strength. After Chapter Two, Deborah passes away, leaving behind her helpless, simple, younger sister Matty. Matty, a  type specimen of the weak female character, subclass Victorian, turns out to be the unlikely heroine of the novel. I'm still a bit amazed with how much Gaskell does with her.

Near the end of the book, Matty loses her income, almost all from investments in a mismanaged bank. "'I shall lose one hundred and forty-nine pounds thirteen shillings and fourpence a year; I shall only have thirteen pounds a year left'" (Ch. XIII). All her life Matty has been dependent on the guidance of men, and her domineering sister; at this moment they have failed her, completely.

Matty, a rector's daughter, has been educated to do nothing. The narrator, who, as I have mentioned can be a bit sharp, runs down Matty's deficiencies for us: she cannot play piano, draw, sew anything fancy, or use globes, all useful for a governess. I should point out that the narrator forgives Matty for the globe business, since she doesn't understand them herself. Matty has trouble reading long words, spells terribly, and is confused by the act of making change. She is fifty-eight years old.

But it turns out that Matty can do one thing: suffer, endure, retrench, turn inward. She becomes to everyone's surprise a fine Stoic, based fundamentally on her kindness to others. And others respond with kindness. This is where Cranford turns out to be, however different the tone, a close relative of the Gaskell short stories I read in June. Acts of kindness, particularly between women, seem to be fundamental to Gaskell's world.

Like Villette, one of the challenges of Cranford is figuring out which subjects are open for mockery and which are not. In Cranford, poverty, true love, religious feeling - our clever narrator does not joke about those. Nor about Matty's endurance. Matty was protected from the world, and for what? There's a genuine tragedy at the heart of Cranford.

Indiscretion was my bugbear fault - Cranford's all-seeing narrator - Oh, gentility!

Cranford is the story of a group of spinsters and widows in a small town near Manchester. The men in the town - at least those "above a certain rent" - have all disappeared, off to Manchester or India or Heaven. The women are not exactly elderly, but are certainly not young. Except for one key character, the novel's narrator, Mary Smith.

Mary is a natural anthropologist. She is not actually of Cranford, but is an outsider, a family friend of the Jenkyns sisters. She visits for various lengths of time, lending a hand, going to the teas and card parties, where she stores away every ridiculous detail, which she then writes up and sends to a magazine published by Charles Dickens. One of the many arbitrary rules of Cranford society is that Dickens is too modern and vulgar to read, or at least to tell anyone you've read, so Mary Smith can betray every secret in safety, apparently. And as she says in Chapter XII, "Indiscretion was my bugbear fault. Everybody has a bugbear fault..."

The humor of the book is Mary's. Her insight is keen and her wit wicked, even mean sometimes. Key to her character is that she is barely in the book. She is present, she observes; she laughs, but silently. She sees the ludicrous side of almost everything. About the ladies' snobbery, their contempt for trade, their arbitrary rules about what is acceptable, and their hypocrisies, she is brutal. I don't think she means to be. She can't help herself. It's how she sees the world.

Late in the book, a character arrives who is a natural and gifted teller of tall tales and baloney. He tells a credulous lady that while hunting in the Himalayas, he was so high up that he shot a cherubim. She wonders if that might be sacrilege; he thinks she might be right. Mary knows him for what he is, immediately. And he knows that she knows. And she knows that he knows etc. etc. They're spiritual kin, even if her stories are all "true."

"Visiting," Chapter VII, is ur-Cranford, perfect. No men, no action, no story. Miss Betty Barker, who used to makes caps, and is thus a bit low on the social scale, has invited the ladies over for tea. Miss Barker does not quite know the rules, so she serves too much food, although it somehow all disappears. "However, Mrs. Jamieson was kindly indulgent to Miss Barker's want of knowledge of high life; and, to spare her feelings, ate three large pieces of seed-cake, with a placid, ruminating expression of countenance, not unlike a cow's."

Then, after cards, there's more food. "Another tray! 'Oh, gentility!' thought I, 'can you endure this last shock?'" Yet the oysters, jellies, and cherry-brandy all disappear as well.

And somehow, all a-scatter, I omitted the bit where Miss Matty accidentally wears two hats, and the whole discussion of Mr. ffoulkes, who "always looked down on capital letters, and said they belonged to lately invented families," but finds happiness when he meets Mrs. ffarington, "and it was all owing to her two little ffs."

I said that Mary see almost everything as ludicrous. Almost - I'll try to write about that tomorrow. Cranford is actually a pretty serious book.

I forgot to mention that at Age 30+... A Lifetime of Books, it's Cranford Read-a-Long month! The host plans to read one chapter a day, if she can restrain herself, which somehow will take twenty-seven days (perhaps she has the BBC-related Cranford Chronicles volume).

I often feel tipsy myself from eating damson tart - Cranford, what a book

Enough complaining. I just finished a book I just loved, beginning to end, top to bottom. It's Cranford (1852-3). I was surprised to find, earlier this year, a certain amount of humor in some of Gaskell's short stories, carefully rationed. I now see that she was saving all of the funny bits to put in Cranford.

There's the butter, obviously. The butter passage is preceded by the string and rubber band section, and followed by the candle section. "As we lived in constant preparation for a friend who might come in any evening (but who never did), it required some contrivance to keep our two candles of the same length, ready to be lighted, and to look as if we burnt two always."

And how about the contest between Dickens and Dr. Johnson - Dickens turns out to be fatal. Paris, too, visiting Paris is deadly. Miss Betty Barker serves the ladies of Cranford "the beverage they call cherry-brandy," which is "not exactly unpalatable, though so hot and so strong that we thought ourselves bound to give evidence that we were not accustomed to such things, by coughing terribly." (Ch. 7) That verges on the mean-spirited, "thought ourselves bound":

"'It's very strong,' said Miss Pole, as she put down her empty glass; 'I do believe there's spirit in it.'

'Only a little drop--just necessary to make it keep," said Miss Barker. 'You know we put brandy-paper over our preserves to make them keep. I often feel tipsy myself from eating damson tart.'"

To make it keep! Damson tart!

I would have finished this book a lot sooner if it were not for passages like this, which I had to immediately re-read. I did not have to read them all to meine Frau, though, because after one or two she snatched the book from me and read it all herself. Which, come to think of it, slowed me down even more.

How about the episode of the lace, and the cat, and the proper kind of story to tell a lady of quality. You would never guess where that lace has been.

Isn't Elizabeth Gaskell a crusading social reformer, her novels weapons in the arsenal of the poor and beaten down? I haven't read any of those books, so I can't be sure, although I think the answer is yes. At the same time Gaskell was writing Cranford, she was also working on Ruth (1853). Let's take a look at the entry for Ruth in the Oxford Companion to English Literature. Let's see: "orphan," "rescued from suicide," "seduced and deserted," "cholera epidemic." Mm hmm. So Gaskell was writing, at the exact same time, one of the funniest novels of the century, and one of the grimmest.

This week, it's all Cranford at Wuthering Expectations, always funny, never grim. Also, it turns out, not, in the end, so far from Gaskell the crusader.

By the way, I've learned a thing or two about Gaskell from JaneGS at Reading, Writing, etc., a great champion of Gaskell.

And this was Alice Wilson's second wooing - more comedy from Elizabeth Gaskell

"'Well, Mrs Frank,' he said, 'what answer? Don't make it too long; for I have lots of office work to get through tonight.'

'I hardly know what you meant, sir,' said truthful Alice."

Mr. Openshaw, a "capital accountant," a man of habit, had, earlier in the day, proposed to his landlady. This is all in Elizabeth Gaskell's short story The Manchester Marriage (1858).

"'Well! I should have thought you might have guessed. You're not new at this sort of work, and I am. However, I'll make it plain this time. Will you have me to be thy wedded husband, and serve me, and love me, and honour me, and all that sort of thing? Because, if you will, I will do as much by you, and be a father to your child--and that's more than is put in the prayer-book. Now, I'm a man of my word; and what I say, I feel; and what I promise, I'll do. Now, for your answer!'

Alice was silent. He began to make the tea, as if her reply was a matter of perfect indifference to him; but, as soon as that was done, he became impatient."

Alice has been married before, to a sailor who disappeared at sea, and has a child he never met. That's how she's "not new at this sort of work." Now, I don't think it is absolutely necessary, when including a shipwrecked sailor in your story, for that sailor to return after many years. But I'd read three other Gaskell stories before I read this one that were not - how to say it - afraid of melodrama. So I knew we'd see that sailor again. I've wandered away from the proposal scene.

''Well?' said he.

'How long, sir, may I have to think over it?'

'Three minutes!' (looking at his watch). 'You've had two already--that makes five. Be a sensible woman, say Yes, and sit down to tea with me, and we'll talk it over together; for, after tea, I shall be busy; say No' (he hesitated a moment to try and keep his voice in the same tone), 'and I shan't say another word about it, but pay up a year's rent for my rooms tomorrow, and be off. Time's up! Yes or no?'"

It's like The Producers. Mr. Openshaw is a wonderful character - narrow, rule-bound, weird. Not successful in spite of his weirdness, but because of it. I work with people like him. In her other stories, Lizzie Leigh, for example, Gaskell's women don't have to work too hard to be kind. Their kindness seems to be innate, or previously inculcated, at least. Odd Mr. Openshaw has to learn to open his heart. His ludicrous proposal is just a first step.

"'If you please, sir--you have been so good to little Ailsie--'

'There, sit down comfortably by me on the sofa, and let's have our tea together. I am glad to find you are as good and sensible as I took you for.'

And this was Alice Wilson's second wooing."

There are a lot of nice touches in this scene, perhaps best read without my interruptions, I suppose. Of course the male reader, four feminist stories behind him, would put most of his attention on the best male character, wouldn't he? But Gaskell allows herself to make him funny and foolish, which, with her women, she does not.

Not in these stories, I mean. Why haven't I read Cranford yet? The butter, the butter.

Do you ever read the moral concluding sentence of a story? I never do - some moralistic stories by Elizabeth Gaskell

It's not quite true that I'd never read Elizabeth Gaskell before reading Four Short Stories, Pandora Press, 1983. Pretty close, though. I assume that any of Gaskell's six novels are more typical starting places. In December, during the discussion of The Chimes, someone mentioned that if you wanted a better "fallen woman" story (a subplot of The Chimes), you should try Gaskell's Lizzie Leigh (1850). I didn't think I did want such a thing, yet here I am.

This collection is well chosen. The stories are of a piece. I assume that Pandora Press was a feminist publisher, because the stories all feature feminist themes and poor, kind heroines and sickly children. Three of the four - The Manchester Marriage (1858) is a little different.

All four are centrally about acts of kindness, though. In The Three Eras of Libbie Marsh (1847), a Manchester seamstress comes to care for the crippled child of an unfriendly neighbor. The mother of the prostitute Lizzie Leigh searches Manchester for her daughter, and finds her due to her own kindness, and that of a stranger. In The Well of Pen-Morfa (1850), a woman who has suffered various difficulties befriends a madwoman. The Manchester Marriage (1858)* is more about the consequences, tragic and otherwise, of a failure of kindness.

Humble women's fellow-feeling with other humble women and their children, that's much of what's here. These sorts of characters are not entirely absent from the fiction that precedes them, from Dickens or Balzac or Scott, say, but they are always minor characters, in the background, often little more than plot mechanisms. So Gaskell's focused attention was new to me, as was the Manchester setting (rural Wales in one case). Gaskell was expanding the reach of English fiction here.

The stories are moralistic, didactic, even, and explicitly Christian. The Three Eras of Libbie Marsh ends:

"Do you ever read the moral concluding sentence of a story? I never do; but I once (in the year 1811, I think) heard of a deaf old lady living by herself, who did; and as she may have left some descendants with the same amiable peculiarity, I will put in for their benefit what I believe to be the secret of Libbie's peace of mind, the real reason why she no longer feels oppressed at her own loneliness in the world.

She has a purpose in life, and that purpose is a holy one."

This is definitely to my tastes, but unfortunately it's the only evidence of a sense of humor in the story, or for that matter in Lizzie Leigh or The Well of Pen-Morfa, which are mostly subdued and solemn. More on that tomorrow, I think.

* The Manchester Marriage, published by Dickens in his Household Words magazine, was "written in Heidelberg in 1858 in order to finance a trip to Dresden" (Introduction, p. 7). Dresden is a marvellous place. This is perhaps the best reason to write a short story I've ever heard.

Where do we get our ideas about writers? or Tales of 10th Grade Terror

The Incurable Logophile is reading Bleak House, and is surprised to discover that Dickens is funny. Ha ha ha! How could anyone not know that!

I know one way. My 10th grade English class used a reader that included a massively edited Great Expectations. The editors ruthlessly excised any element that was remotely comic, as unnecessary distractions that encumbered the plot. We would have been better off with an edition that squashed the plot and kept the comic bits.

No one confronted with this literary freak would have the slightest clue that Dickens was funny in any way, much less that he's one of the three or four greatest comic writers in English.

I don't remember when I overcame this prejudice. I know how I did it - I read Bleak House.

Where do we get our ideas about writers? I've never read Thackeray, and somehow picture him as some sort of blend of Dickens and Trollope. Elizabeth Gaskell wrote dreary novels about social issues, right? But then what is this, from Chapter 5 of Cranford:

"Small pieces of butter grieve others. They cannot attend to conversation because of the annoyance occasioned by the habit which some people have of invariably taking more butter than they want. Have you not seen the anxious look (almost mesmeric) which such persons fix on the article? They would feel it a relief if they might bury it out of their sight by popping it into their own mouths and swallowing it down; and they are really made happy if the person on whose plate it lies unused suddenly breaks off a piece of toast (which he does not want at all) and eats up his butter. They think that this is not waste."

I've never read any Gaskell aside from this hilarious passage. My ideas about Gaskell are obviously completely wrong. Where did they come from? At least I know how to correct them.

This is why literary readers are always so neurotically worried about Reading the Wrong Book. It might be years, decades, before misconceptions are corrected.

Anyone else have stories like this? Irrational prejudices you're willing to confess? Bad teachers you want to blame?