The Best Books of 1863 - how very few of these / Poor little busy poet bees / Can we expect again to hum

Ow, my eyes.  You can see the 1863 “Birth of Venus” by Alexandre Cabanel in the flesh – or in the marzipan (see the Zola quotation at the following link) –  at the Musée d’Orsay, although I do not know why you would, since that museum has so many good paintings.

The Best Books of 1863 were better than this painting.  But it was the year of the second-rate.

I would pick The Cossacks, Leo Tolstoy’s clear-eyed look at the desire to romanticize other cultures, as the best book of the year, but it is not quite first-rate Tolstoy.  Now that is an absurd standard, but the fact is that The Cossacks is dragged along behind Tolstoy’s great masterpieces.  It is read as much as it is, and will continue to be read, because of other books.

My list of surviving English novels for 1863 looks like this:

Romola, George Eliot
The Water-Babies, Charles Kingsley
Salem Chapel, Margaret Oliphant
Rachel Ray, Anthony Trollope
The Small House at Allington, Trollope, in the middle of its serialization.

Boy, there is always plenty of Trollope in the 1860s.  I have only read two of the five.  We see  some of the same phenomenon here, I think, certainly with Romola, possibly with the Trollope novels.  The exercise is to imagine that Romola were the only George Eliot novel.  Would anyone still read it?  The exercise is preposterous, so I will move on.  The English class of 1863 seems a little weak, is all I am saying.  Go to those links, though, the ones not to Wuthering Expectations.  A good case is made for every one of those books.

No idea what was going on in French literature this year (or Spanish, or Italian, or German).  American literature was almost put on hold by the Civil War.  Without a doubt, the great American work of the year is a speech, the Gettysburg Address, elegant, forceful, rhetorically brilliant, and now, in its way, one of the key  texts  of the United States.

Louisa May Alcott’s charming Hospital Sketches and Henry Longfellow’s Tales from a Wayside Inn can hardly stand that kind of competition, although both are enjoyable books.  The Longfellow book contains “The Birds of Killingworth,” a bizarre and superb poem of ecological apocalypse.

One more novel was not even second-rate artistically, but was all too significant, Nikolai Chernyshevksy’s What Is to Be Done?, a radical Utopia, written in prison, smuggled out, published illegally, eventually becoming a founding text of the Russian Revolution.  So if not such a great year for novels, 1863 was unusually well equipped with important political literature.

I wrote a bit about the Chernyshevsky novel while discussing Fathers and Sons, where I was startled to see a number of people declare that they wanted to read What Is to Be Done?  Are you all nuts?  But I will suffer along with the rest of you.  I should organize a readalong – it would be the least popular book blog event since the readalong of Herman Melville’s Clarel a few years ago.  And if it turned out a fifth  as well, that would be something.

I wonder what I am missing?  I never mean these posts to be completely comprehensive, and how could they be, but I do hope that any additional suggestions sound a bit desperate and little-read  – Walter Savage Landor’s last book of poems, how about that one?

Come to think of it, I have read that book.  Landor, eighty-eight years old in 1863, was a fine poet; it is a fine book.  But that is hardly my point here, as Landor knows:

The Poet Bees
There are a hundred now alive
Who buz about the summer hive,
Alas! how very few of these
Poor little busy poet bees
Can we expect again to hum
When the next summer shall have come.

One hundred and fifty years is a long lifespan for a book.  Seven novels, the Alcott book, the Longfellow poems, one of the greatest funeral orations, not bad, really.

A Salem Chapel this & that, with jokes, light effects, un-anxious influence - whatever I could think of

Since I do not want to write about Salem Chapel all week, I will resort to unconnected numbered points.

1.  Yesterday I suggested that Salem Chapel should have written from the bewildered, teary point of view of the “pink and plump” Phoebe Tozer, the butterman’s daughter.  In a comment, followed by a chain of post reading, Desperate Reader reminded me that thirteen years later Oliphant would publish Phoebe Junior, in which the title character is Phoebe Tozer’s daughter.  I have not read this one, but based on the Desperate description, I can see that Oliphant’s own thoughts were not so far off from mine. (Also, see Desperate Reader on Salem Chapel here).

2.  Oliphant was a sponge.  The Carlingford novels and their clergymen are openly derivative of Trollope’s Barchester series, which still had two novels to go when Salem Chapel was published.  Then there is her use of the sensation plot, a genre only three years old, although melodrama is as old as the hills.

Maybe even more interesting is the clear evidence that Oliphant had been carefully reading the hot new novelist of 1859, George Eliot, author at this point of Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, and Silas Marner, so not our Eliot but a smaller one, the author of tragicomedies about rural carpenters and mill owners, creator of scenes in which a small town’s tradesmen argue about the breed of a cow or who gets the family china.  Salem Chapel’s comedic plot features the same class of people in a somewhat more urban setting.

The Perpetual Curate moves up a notch or two in social class, so I had not made the connection, but the Tozers and Tullivers could comfortably exist in each other’s novels.

Penelope Fitzgerald claims, in her fine introduction to the Virago Salem Chapel, that the anonymously serialized novel was sometimes thought to actually be by George Eliot,  which “caused Oliphant an indescribable mixture of pleasure and annoyance.”

3.  One example of Oliphant’s humor.  The congregation has just heard a guest pastor:

… they were wedded to one [Vincent]; but the bond of union between themselves and their pastor was far from being indissoluble, and they contemplated this new aspirant to their favour with feelings stimulated and piquant, as a not inconsolable husband, likely to become a widower, might contemplate the general female public, out of which candidates for the problematically vacant place might arise.  (Ch. 21)

4.  And an example of Oliphant’s descriptive powers:

… it was to look at a female figure which came slowly up, dimming out the reflection on the wet stones as it crossed one streak of lamplight after another.  (Ch. 9)

Maybe she had been reading Dickens, too.

5.  I have complained about the dull plottiness of part of the novel.  Near the end of the novel, Oliphant recognizes my complaint.  Adelaide Tufton is a superb minor character, the invalid daughter of the previous minister who spends her life sitting next to a giant geranium knitting and collecting gossip.  She is enjoyably free from social constraint.  Vincent almost accidentally visits her in Chapter 41, within a few pages of the end of the novel, where he is horrified to hear her reduce everything he is suffering, every trial he has encountered throughout the novel, including an entirely separate Persuasion-like underplot I have not even mentioned, to small town chatter. 

The poor minister thrust back his chair from the table, and came roughly against the stand of the great geranium, which had to be adjusted and covered his retreat…  she did not show any pleasurable consciousness of her triumph; she kept knitting on, looking at him with her pale blue eyes.

Well, I got a lot of pleasure from it.  Well done, Miss Tufton.  Well done, Mrs. Oliphant.

The nebbish and his mother - Perfect victory attended the gentle widow in this passage of arms - this is still Salem Chapel

Margaret Oliphant moved in increments.  The 1863 novella The Rector is about an Anglican priest who moves to Carlingford and discovers that he is inadequate to the vocation.  He is, to his sorrow, a bad priest.  In Salem Chapel (1863), young Vincent is a Dissenter, not an Anglican, and has a real gift for preaching and argument, but he too learns that he is a bad priest.  The next novel, The Perpetual Curate (1864), stars a good priest, an ideal priest, as if Oliphant is still turning over the idea.

Mr. Vincent, whatever his talents, is too immature for his position.  He is in his early twenties but typically behaves like a fifteen year old.  He is self-absorbed, rude to his elders, dismissive of their advice, and baffled by and often even afraid of women.  The most frightening is Phoebe Tozer, “plump and pink, and full of dimples” (Ch. 1), who openly offers sex – at one point she brings the minister a leftover jelly!  “Mr. Vincent turned very red, and looked at the basket as if he would like nothing better than to pitch it into the street.”  When I say she offers sex, I mean through marriage, that she is available for marriage.  Vincent responds, mental fifteen year old that he is, by falling in love with the most unattainable woman in a fifty mile radius.

I remember wondering, early in the novel, what Oliphant was going to do with this plotline.  I thought, there is no way this nebbish is going to end up with this woman.  Oliphant was ahead of me.  There is no way.  This is the minister’s state of mind at the end of the novel:

Vincent had arrived at such a climax of personal existence that Susan [his ill sister] had but a dim and secondary place in his thoughts.  He was absorbed in his own troubles and plans and miseries.  (Ch. 39)

Much of this is just borrowed from Colleen’s recent post.  Vincent is a good character, well-drawn, credible, but surprising in plausible ways. A little hard to take sometimes. Why is he the way he is?  The novel’s next most important character explains it all.  He is a mama’s boy, or so we learn when we meet mama.

She has one tremendous chapter in the middle of the book.  Her son is away, ineffectively pursuing the sensation plot, leaving her to hold the fort in Carlingford.  The sensation stuff takes place outside of Carlingford, the comedy inside, so the mother is now part of the comedy.  She spends the day visiting the parishioners, defending her son, throwing cold water on pink Phoebe Tozer (“To think of that pink creature having designs upon her boy”), crushing all dissent, and destroying his enemies.  “Holding the fort” Was the wrong metaphor.  Mrs. Vincent is on offense:

Perfect victory attended the gentle widow in this passage of arms.  Her assailant fell back, repeating in a subdued tone, “Well, I’m sure!”  (Ch. 21)

I wish more of the thriller plot had been not only out of town but offstage.  Oliphant could let the reader hear about it second-hand, or read about it in the newspaper, like most of the characters in the novel do.  Maybe it should have been told from the point of view of poor pink Phoebe Tozer.  Then I could have had more scenes of combat over tea.  But that is saved for the next novel, for The Perpetual Curate.  Oliphant takes small steps.

Some ways in which Margaret Oliphant's Salem Chapel is interesting - his heart might have rejected every secondary matter.

Salem Chapel by Margaret Oliphant, 1863, the first long novel of the Carlingford Chronicles.  That is the text of the moment.  Strangely, Colleen at Jam & Idleness was reading it at the same time, by coincidence, and just wrote about it, which is handy for me.

Oliphant takes two big risks with Salem Chapel which make the novel both interesting and frustrating.  They are:

1.  The hero is a nebbish, and sometimes something worse.  Sometimes a “bit of a jackass,” says Colleen.  The kind of character violent readers want to slap and strangle.

2.  The plot and structure of the novel are hybrid.  A social comedy suddenly transforms, about a quarter through, into the hot thing of the early 1860s, a Sensation Novel, with (or with suggestions of) kidnappings, murder, brain fever, and the like.  But no, and this is what is interesting – a sensation novel is laid on top of the social comedy, which sort of flows along underneath the thriller story.  Or maybe the comedy is on top.  The two types of story interact in some curious ways, sometimes awkwardly, sometimes cleverly.

The story:

Vincent is a newly-minted, ambitious minister, eager to change the world, just hired by Salem Chapel in Carlingford.  He quickly discovers that his parishioners do not really need changing.  The shopkeepers are prosperous and the laborers well-behaved, their sins venial rather than mortal.  Carlingford is wasted on a reformer.  Here we have the basis for a comic novel like a reversed Cold Comfort Farm.  The new minister will, in the climax, flee the town because everyone is  too good.  There could be scenes where he tries to corrupt his flock in order to be able to reform it.  I have started making up my own story, one Oliphant did not write.

Before my imagined story gets going, Vincent’s mother appears and the thriller gets moving.  Vincent’s sister is planning to marry a man of, it now seems, dubious character.  Matters escalate as detailed above – kidnapping, vengeance, shooting, police inspectors, etc.

Vincent races around England trying to straighten things out, but since he is a nebbish he is completely ineffective.  Perhaps the point of the dual plots is to plunge the naïve young minister into a world of depravity and evil, where he is tested by a trial of courage which allows him to truly find his calling as a man of God.  That is not bad, either, as another story that Oliphant did not write, although Salem Chapel is a kind of Bildungsroman, even if it has as little Bildung as possible.  Vincent is, if anything, even worse once the sensation plot calms down.  Oliphant says so directly, in Chapter 38, almost at the end of the book:

His own affairs were urgent in his mind.  He could not keep his thoughts from dwelling upon Salem and what had occurred there [the social comedy plot], though no one else thought of it.  Had he known the danger in which his sister lay, his heart might have rejected every secondary matter.

I am as bad as callow Vincent, in that I thought the secondary matter, the comedy was excellent while the sensation plot was weaker, by which I mean more ordinary stuff, more contrived.   Side by side, though, some there is some artistic movement.  So I will write a little more about that.

The sensation plot has its own interest as a case study in how to adapt modern values – I mean mine – to the Victorian values on which much of the action depends.  That could be fun to write about.  The secondary story trains me in how to read the primary story.

I could explore the nebbishness of Vincent.  One other major character, Vincent’s mother, is also quite good.  In the sensation novel, she is a cliché, while in the comedy, she is original, forceful, and funny.  The mother’s personality perhaps explains some of the son’s milquetoastishness.

The agenda could be extended.  I do not want to write about Salem Chapel all week, but I could.  I still might.

But I don't approve of a man ending off neatly like a novel in this sort of ridiculous way - the well-plotted The Perpetual Curate

Although I breezily dismiss the value of plot for the sake of overemphasizing style, plot is really another dimension of style, another place to study the how, whatever the what.  Frank and Lucy, the stars of The Perpetual Curate, are going to overcome every obstacle and marry at the end of the novel.  This is perfectly evident within a few pages, simply because of the tone of the writing.  If this were a Theodor Storm novella, we might instead find a tale of renunciation and lost love, but this ain’t that.  Frank and Lucy marry – but how?

Oliphant impressed me with the ingenious way she introduces possible solutions while simultaneously rendering them unsatisfying.  We begin with the friction between the Curate and his trio of elderly aunts, who possess a clerical living and might or might not let Frank have it.  So that’s Solution #1.  But we have five hundred pages left, so things can’t be that simple, or, if they are, I, the reader, won’t be happy.  Soon, Oliphant brings in Frank's older brother, a clergyman who is leaving the Anglican church for Catholicism.  Ah, here is Solution #2:  Frank takes the family living and is thus able to marry as a consequence of his beloved brother’s agonizing crisis of conscience.  Oliphant has actually ramped up the challenge: now, she has to find a way to remove this solution, introduced too early, too ethically questionable, and too cheap.

Victorian novels can be a little too classbound for my tastes.  Nicholas Nickleby is the example I’m thinking of.  Nicholas has no money but somehow the idea of doing something “ungentlemanly” is not part of the novel.  The Perpetual Curate impressed me with the way it begins within conventional class limits and then gradually, logically, pushes past them, allowing Oliphant and her characters more interesting ways to end the book.  Readers looking for the Strong Female Character will appreciate the way Frank and Lucy mutually negotiate the satisfying ending.

They have an advocate in one of those aunts, one who is, for most of the book, a hysterical fool:

“There is one thing, and I must say it if I should die."  She had to pause a little to recover her voice, for haste and excitement had a tendency to make her inarticulate.  "Frank," said Miss Dora again, more solemnly than ever, "whatever you may be obliged to do - though you were to write novels, or take pupils, or do translations - oh, Frank, don't look at me like that, as if I was going crazy.  Whatever you may have to do, oh my dear, there is one thing - don't go and break people's hearts, and put it off, and put it off, till it never happens!" cried the trembling little woman, with a sudden burst of tears.  "Don't say you can wait, for you can't wait, and you oughtn't to!" sobbed Miss Dora.  She subsided altogether into her handkerchief and her chair as she uttered this startling and wholly unexpected piece of advice, and lay there in a little heap, all dissolving and floating away, overcome with her great effort, while her nephew stood looking at her from a height of astonishment almost too extreme for wondering.  If the trees could have found a voice and counselled his immediate marriage, he could scarcely have been more surprised. (478-9)

There is no way to really appreciate the surprise of this passage without having spent more time with Aunt Dora, but the little dissolved heap and the talking trees are excellent, and Aunt Dora’s vision of the worst possible careers – novels! - is a fine joke.

Especially since another aunt, the stubborn, stiff one, returns to the "novel" theme at the very end of The Perpetual Curate.  That’s her in the title of the post.  Because Oliphant, having resolved the central romance in a perfectly satisfactory fashion, pulls another ending, an outrageous one, out of one of the subplots.  When Frank tells Lucy about it, tells her that the obstacles are gone, she chides him for joking. “If I had been making up a story, I would have kept to what was likely,” Frank replies.  Aunt Leonora agrees:

"I suppose this is what fools call poetic justice," said Miss Leonora, "which is just of a piece with everything else that is poetical - weak folly and nonsense that no sensible man would have anything to say to.  How a young man like you, who know how to conduct yourself in some things, and have, I don't deny, many good qualities, can give in to come to an ending like a trashy novel, is more than I can understand.  You are fit to be put in a book of the Good-child series, Frank, as an illustration of the reward of virtue," said the strong-minded woman, with a little snort of scorn; "and, of course, you are going to marry, and live happy ever after, like a fairy tale." (535-6)

Frank replies with a good dig at his aunt.  What a help that Frank (and Oliphant) are funny.  I joked last week about Oliphant the Postmodernist, and this is what I meant.  If the reader finds the ending false or arbitrary – trashy – he has support from the text, which at the same time is actually arguing that, on the contrary, this ending is just right, which it is.

Not without seducing beauties of design - artful Margaret Oliphant

Mrs. Morgan is the wife of the rector of Carlingford.  She is, perhaps, the fourteenth most important character in The Perpetual Curate.  Her loathing of a carpet in the rectory is a small but crucial part of the plot of the novel.  One of the treats of a “small” novel like this is watching the author take some inconsequential detail and weave it into the substance of the book.  The Perpetual Curate is especially well-plotted in this sense.  Once the characters are set in motion, the story proceeds inexorably, with only minor exceptions.*

But nothing is actually inevitable.  It is all artifice, a creation of Margaret Oliphant.  It’s all a trick!

Chapter XLV, right near the end of the book, belongs to Mrs. Morgan.  The novel has an omniscient narrator, but we stay close to Mrs. Morgan here.

Mr Leeson was to come to dinner that day legitimately by invitation, and Mrs Morgan, who felt it would be a little consolation to disappoint the hungry Curate for once, was making up her mind, as she went up-stairs, not to have the All-Souls pudding, of which he showed so high an appreciation…  And Mrs Morgan took out some stockings to darn, as being a discontented occupation, and was considering within herself what simple preparation she could have instead of the All-Souls pudding, when, looking up suddenly, she saw, not Mr Proctor, but the Rector, standing looking down upon her within a few steps of her chair. (487-8)

To whom is darning a “discontented occupation”?  To Oliphant, or to Mrs Morgan?  Both, surely.  The horrible carpet appeared a page earlier.  The pudding theme is introduced in this passage.  Later in the chapter, Oliphant pulls in the fern theme, and the “wall that blocks the train” theme.  These are the attributes of Mrs. Morgan that have been strung through the novel.  Note how concrete they are.  Yet they are not necessarily “actual” objects, but objects in her thoughts, which is also where they exist for the reader.  The darning theme, by the way, is a new one, linking together bits of this single chapter.  For example:

She gave a sigh as she spoke, for she thought of the Virginian creeper and the five feet of new wall at that side of the garden, which had just been completed, to shut out the view of the train.  Life does not contain any perfect pleasure.  But when Mrs Morgan stooped to lift up some stray reels of cotton which the Rector's clumsy fingers had dropped out of her workbox, her eye was again attracted by the gigantic roses and tulips on the carpet, and content and satisfaction filled her heart. (493)

That, now that is how this chapter works. Two pages later:

She changed her mind in a moment about the All-Souls pudding, and even added, in her imagination, another dish to the dinner, without pausing to think that that also was much approved by Mr Leeson; and then her thoughts took another turn, and such a vision of a perfect carpet for a drawing-room - something softer and more exquisite than ever came out of mortal loom; full of repose and tranquillity, yet not without seducing beauties of design; a carpet which would never obtrude itself, but yet would catch the eye by dreamy moments in the summer twilight or over the winter fire – flashed upon the imagination of the Rector's wife. (495)

Pudding, carpet, imagination.

The chapter ends with Mrs. Morgan leaving the house and wandering about Carlingford for a single two-page paragraph.  It begins with “her vision of tasteful and appropriate furniture,” but then moves outward.  She thinks of or glimpses all of the other major characters.  She picks ferns “to decorate the peaches.”  More gardening.  The carpet again.  The difference between what Margaret Oliphant is doing here, and what Virginia Woolf is doing in Mrs. Dalloway, is real, but not large.

The substance of the chapter occurs in between everything I’ve mentioned, all of which, in a worse novel, would be omitted.  But Mrs. Morgan’s inner life, full of puddings and carpets and ferns – that’s the art of the novel.

* A couple of characters, related to the protagonists, know each other by coincidence, the only real bit of plot-fixing in the novel.  Not counting the end, which I want to save for tomorrow.

The undulations of the beard - Margaret Oliphant, writer

How many guidelines for good book reviewing did I violate yesterday?  I feel bad, genuinely, for omitting the slightest sample of Oliphant’s writing.  A mortal sin, but, I tell myself, that’s what the rest of the week is for.

Because: “The book is about X Y Z.”  Here, X = 19th century English religious controversy.  Perhaps you are someone who reads every book about 19th century religious controversy, in which case you will be excited to hear what The Perpetual Curate is about, except that you surely already know all about it.  For anyone else, though, who cares?  Every bad book is about something.  A great book can be about anything.  So, about: who cares.  How: that's better.  How does Oliphant write about X Y Z?  One example today.

Frank Wentworth, the Perpetual Curate, is having a battle of wills with his three aunts.  This is sufficient to get us 13% of the way through the novel, but probably won’t fill three volumes.  So, at the end of Chapter VII, Oliphant introduces Conflict 2, story type: A Stranger Comes to Town.  The stranger is somehow threatening to the family of the woman the Curate wants to marry, yet for some reason the Curate is protecting him.  Mystery upon mystery.  Chapter VIII begins with the stranger:

He was the strangest lodger to be taken into a house of such perfect respectability, a house in Grange Lane; and it came to be currently reported in Carlingford after a time, when people knew more about it, that even the servants could not tell when or how he arrived, but had woke up one morning to find a pair of boots standing outside the closed door of the green room, which the good old lady kept for company, with sensations which it would be impossible to describe. (69)

So I’m wrong.  We do not begin with the stranger, but with his boots.

Such a pair of boots they were too - muddy beyond expression, with old mud which had not been brushed off for days  worn shapeless, and patched at the sides; the strangest contrast to a handsome pair of Mr Wentworth's, which he, contrary to his usual neat habits, had kicked off in his sitting-room, and which Sarah, the housemaid, had brought and set down on the landing, close by these mysterious and unaccountable articles.

Oliphant then takes us into the kitchen, to hear the stranger ring his bell.  Then back to the boots, which are sent out to be mended.  Then his “shabby clothes.”  Then his underwear!  I mean, his linen, which he borrows from the Curate.  Next: his whistling (so beautiful that it astonishes a canary, “and the butcher's boy stole into the kitchen surreptitiously to try if he could learn the art”.  Then, his whittling (“he filled his tidy room with parings and cuttings of wood”).  Then a gift ("a needlecase") for the housemaid.

Oliphant is employing the same trick she used in the first chapter of the first Carlingford story: delay, delay, delay.  The special treatment of the maid turns out to be important for the plot, and the “green room” is actually a clue to the stranger’s identity, a clue available only to the reader, not the characters.

We, with the hysterical Aunt Dora, actually meet the stranger a few pages later, or, really, his beard.  The stranger has become all beard.  Just one sentence: “It was a great comfort to her when the monster took off its cap, and when she perceived, by the undulations of the beard, something like a smile upon its hidden lips” (74).

The undulations of the beard.  I’m reading Moby-Dick now, a book in which every single sentence includes some wonderfully spiky writerly thrill.  This particular sentence – not necessarily representative! – would not be out of place in Melville.

The stranger and his beard wander about the novel, nameless, for another 150 pages.

Page references to the 1987 Virago edition.

Margaret Oliphant's The Perpetual Curate - a review-like post

Geez, I take a break and I can’t write a word.  Wait, here I go.

Margaret Oliphant wrote most of her books in the middle of the night, after all of her children and deadweight relatives had gone to bed.  And this was her income!  With that kind of constraint, she was able to crank out a novel as good as The Perpetual Curate (1864), a novel AGAT* - it’s extraordinary.  And here I am dithering over a dang blog post.

The young, virtuous Perpetual Curate of St. Roque’s church in Carlingford is too poor to marry.  He comes from a wealthy family, but is, unfortunately, not only the fourth son, but the second clergyman, so the family living is unavailable.  His three maiden aunts own another living, and everyone assumes that it will go to the nephew once the current elderly occupant expires.  Except the Curate is a High Church Anglican, and the aunts are Low, and they are all principled, and stubborn.

One might pause here and note that, looked at in a certain way, the mid-19th century Anglican church appears to be hopelessly corrupt.  For the Curate, however, this is simply a fact to be faced.  He thinks he can’t marry Lucy on his current income, and the only path to a more money is a violation of his conscience.  How much is love worth, not in pounds, but in principles?  Should the Curate compromise with his aunts on religious matters in order to be able to marry?  Our hero is not so sure himself.  Nor was this reader.

This single conflict was sufficiently interesting for me, although it has to be expanded in various thematically relevant directions to fill out the book.  Another clergyman, that older brother, decides to convert to Catholicism.  Then another brother entangles the Curate in his dissolute life.  Church politics, town gossip, death, gardening – what else could I want from a novel?

It’s an easy book to recommend to anyone with any patience for Victorian novels, its humor a nice balance of sly wit about human weakness and some real sweetness.  The plot is genuinely clever in places - there are several fine reverses and small twists.  It is, like Trollope, image-poor, but also, like Trollope, character-rich.  It would make a good BBC telepic.  Jeremy Northam would be perfect as the Curate, except he’s now too old.  One of the aunts is, no, must be, Judi Dench.  Those aunts are hilarious.

Rohan Maitzen, writing about a later Oliphant novel (Hester), said it left her “feeling that thematic or philosophical interpretations are somewhat beside the point.”  I’m guessing that The Perpetual Curate is richer than Hester, but Rohan is correct.  I want to write about The Perpetual Curate for the rest of the week, but I have not the slightest interest in or insight about Oliphant’s themes or meaning.  I’m just going to write about craft.  The craft is a thing to behold.  This is a well-written novel .

A while ago, I expressed doubt that there could be eight Margaret Oliphant books worth reading.  Now, having read two, the existence of six more seems not just plausible, but likely.  But can any of them be as good as The Perpetual Curate?

* AGAT = As Good As Trollope.

On vacation. Plus: forthcoming on Wuthering Expectations

Away for a week.  Back Tuesday.

Which will give me four days for Margaret Oliphant's The Perpetual Curate (1864), hardly enough.  One day overview, one day of Oliphant the Modernist, one day of Oliphant the Postmodernist - then just one day left.  Quick summary:  As Good As Trollope.  Oliphant pulls off some surprising effects in this novel.  One example - there's a character who hates the pattern of a carpet, and this turns out to be a legitimate and necessary part of the workings of the plot.  A delight to see how Oliphant works this out.

Maybe after that, some of Ivan Turgenev's early fiction?  Since they're so short, I can read a bundle of them.

Then it will be time for Herman Melville's Clarel, or pretty close.  I'm reading his first book of poems now, Battle Pieces and Aspect of War, and am shocked - genuinely - to find them completely accessible, not at all obscure, or not particularly so.  Some basic (or basic plus) knowledge of Civil War history is helpful, I suppose.  Maybe I'm all wrong about Clarel.  Maybe it will be a breeze.  Ha ha ha!

I want to spend some time with some of Melville's contemporaries, too.  Mark Twain, for one, but also some other poets.  Emily Dickinson, maybe.  An aged Emerson.  Frederick Goddard Tuckerman?  His poem "The Cricket" is, I am told, the greatest 19th century English poem.  Take that, Jack Keats!  That'll take a week right there to sort out that crazy talk.

Everyone please have a nice week and read some nice books.

My absurd Margaret Oliphant reading list

Let's say that I, newly converted to the pleasures of Margaret Oliphant, wanted to put together an Oliphant reading list.  What do the People Who Have Read Oliphant think I should read?

The Doctor's Family and Other Stories (1861), so that’s one down
Salem Chapel (1863)
The Perpetual Curate (1864)
Miss Marjoribanks (1866)
Phoebe Junior (1876)  - these are all Carlingford novels.
Hester (1883)
The Beleaguered City and Other Stories (1880) – ghost stories
The Autobiography (1899), posthumous.

Only Miss Marjoribanks (Penguin), Hester (Oxford), and Phoebe Junior and The Autobiography (both Broadview) seem to be in print now. So that’s one snapshot of the Oliphant canon.  Time to get reading.

Hang on a minute.  I’ve gone from not really being sure I should read Oliphant at all to eight books, five of which are fat three-volume novels.  Can this possibly be right?

My copy of Treasure Island, an Oxford World’s Classics edition from the early 1990s, has a page in the back listing Oxford’s then-current offering of Anthony Trollope books.  They had thirty (30) Trollopes in print.  This is distinct from those attractive orange paperbacks Penguin was publishing at the same time, a set of fifty-three (53!) Trollope books.  Can there possibly be thirty good Trollope books, thirty still worth reading?

The standard Trollope list includes the six Barsetshire novels, the six Palliser novels, He Knew He Was Right, The Way We Live Now, maybe Orley Farm, and possibly An Autobiography.  So the pared-down Trollope is sixteen books.  I’ve read the Barsetshire set, and an abridgement of the travel book North America (historical interest: high, literary interest: low), which means if I read them all, and I’d like to, I’m up to seventeen books by Anthony Trollope.  And still out there: Cousin Henry and Is He Popenjoy? and Mr. Scarborough's Family ("A masterpiece of legal fiction," the undiscriminating back of the Oxford paperback informs me).

I have read seventeen books by how many writers?  Almost none.  Two, I think: William Faulkner and Vladimir Nabokov.  Close: Richardson (Clarissa counts as nine books, right?), Goethe, Balzac, Dickens, Calvino, John Banville, and I should say that for some of these writers, I have read too much, books that are at best marginal, and occasionally pretty bad.  My new addition to the list is Robert Louis Stevenson, sixteen or so books in the last six months, which in terms of page count probably amounts to a third of those seventeen Trollope books.

Even my ”eight book” list, which might someday include Margaret Oliphant, is quite short, and puzzling.  Why on earth have I read eight books by A. N. Wilson?  Why have I read only eight books by Penelope Fitzgerald?  I am probably forgetting some childhood writers – I seem to have read eight novels by Laura Ingalls Wilder, for example, and I would not mind rereading some of them.  The Antiquary was my seventh Walter Scott novel.  Seven by Jane Austen, John Galt, Herman Melville, Thomas Pynchon.  What should my highest priority be: my eighth Trollope book, my second Oliphant, my thirty-second Balzac nouvelle?  Or Middlemarch (Eliot #4) and The Portrait of a Lady (James # 2 or 3) and The Magic Mountain (Mann #2), genuinely important books, and, very likely, better books, that I haven’t read? 

I don’t normally think about books quite in this ludicrous way.  Making the Oliphant reading list emphasized the issue.  The horrifying truth is, those eight Oliphant books, at least, are probably all worth reading.  They are, I presume, well written, contain genuine insights about human behavior, have funny moments, and are instructive about their time and place.  Same with those thirty Trollope books.  I don’t expect to find the equivalent of Anna Karenina or Bleak House (both of which, to add another priority, I should read for the third time) among them.  But, give me enough years, and I bet I’ll read 'em.  Not the thirty Trollopes – I mean the sixteen.  And not – well, that’s enough of this.

Next week, a reason or two to keep reading, let’s say, too much Robert Louis Stevenson.

Nothing in the least like her had ever yet appeared before Dr Rider’s eyes - The Doctor's Family and Oliphant's Carlingford

Margaret Oliphant’s first three Carlingford stories – The Executor, The Rector, and The Doctor’s Family, all published in 1861 – are more interesting as a group than separately.  I am surprised how few characters she needed to fill the town.  Compare Carlingford to the Hungarian town in Dezső Kosztolányi’s Skylark, crammed with folks.  Carlingford in more like Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, in which the town without men turns out to not have more than a half dozen women, either, as long as we’re talking about a narrow class.

Who does Oliphant need to tell three stories about Carlingford?  The prosperous Dr. Marjoribanks and his still barely marriageable daughter Miss Marjoribanks, who will return in Miss Marjoribanks (1866).  The Wodehouse family, who we met in The Rector, with two daughters.  One of them may or may not marry the perpetual curate:

Ah me! And if he was to be perpetual curate, and none of his great friends thought upon him, or had preferment to bestow, how do you suppose he could ever, ever marry Lucy Wodehouse, if they were to wait a hundred years? (“The Rector,” p. 38)

All of which is presumably resolved in The Perpetual Curate (1864).  In these first stories, Oliphant was apparently preparing for a shelf of novels.

The Doctor’s Family stars a doctor with whom Oliphant spent a few pages in The Executor.  In that story, he botched a chance at a good marriage, so here he gets to try again.  Since we last saw him, his useless brother Fred has moved in with him.  The brother, also, nominally, a doctor, smokes, and sits, and smokes some more.  A story about the conflict between the two brothers, one having given up on life, the other not exactly a ray of sunshine but still active, would be good enough, yes?  But then the doctor comes home to find two young women in his house:

She was not only slender, but thin, dark, eager, impetuous, with blazing black eyes and red lips, and nothing else notable about her.  So he thought, gazing fascinated, yet not altogether attracted - scarcely sure that he was not repelled – unable, however, to withdraw his eyes from that hurried, eager little figure.  Nothing in the least like her had ever yet appeared before Dr Rider’s eyes. (75)

Who are these women?

There was a momentary pause; the two women exchanged looks.  "I told you so," cried the eager little spokeswoman.  "He never has let his friends know; he was afraid of that.  I told you how it was.  This," she continued, with a little tragic air, stretching out her arm to her sister, and facing the doctor -- "this is Mrs Frederick Rider, or rather Mrs Rider, I should say, as he is the eldest of the family!  Now will you please to tell us where he is?"

The doctor made no immediate answer.  He gazed past the speaker to the faded woman behind, and exclaimed, with a kind of groan, "Fred's wife!" (76)

Throw in three children, about whom the doctor knew nothing.  Now, this is the doctor’s family, and plenty of activity for a 140 page domestic novel.  Oliphant’s best insights come from two sources: the perverse psychology of useless people, and the even more perverse psychology of useful people.

I’m not sure that The Doctor’s Family has a single scene as good as the Rector’s crisis with the dying woman, although there’s another death scene that comes close.  Still, this short novel is my favorite of the Oliphant I’ve read.  She has a chance to stretch out her use of the town, but without needing any of the senseless plot mechanics Penelope Fitzgerald found in the longer Carlingford novels.

Recommended, easily, to anyone who enjoys Trollope or Gaskell or perhaps Jane Austen.  The more I read bloggers on Austen, the less sure I am of what they’re getting from her.  But that’s a topic for another day, or never.

Something mounted to her head like the fumes of wine - Margaret Oliphant, anti-feminist

I’ll slip away from Carlingford today.  Fay of Historical / Present has been filling me in on the hostility of some early feminist critics towards Margaret Oliphant.  It’s all sort of hilarious.  Oliphant’s feminist credentials were not in order.  She did not support women’s suffrage consistently and was shocked by Jude the Obscure and wore silk.*

This sort of thing is highly useful, because it gives later scholars something to do.  By using the advanced critical technique of Actually Reading Oliphant’s Work, or AROW, scholars have discovered that Oliphant might have had something interesting to say about women, and might havedone so in aesthetically interesting ways.  Although I am not a scholar, and risk misapplying the AROW technique, I discovered much the same thing.

Rohan Maitzen recommended I read the Oliphant short story “A Story of a Wedding Tour”**.  A pretty orphan, “young , and shy, and strange,” trained to be a governess, is lucky enough to attract a wealthy husband.  Or maybe, she discovers on her French honeymoon, not all that lucky.  Accidentally separated from her husband due to confusion over a train schedule, she is surprised at her sense of relief, or happiness, or even bliss. And then:

She spread them all out, and counted them from right to left, and again from left to right.  Nine ten-pound notes, twelve and a-half French napoleons – or louis, as people call them nowadays – making a hundred pounds.  A hundred pounds is a big sum in the eyes of a girl.  It may not be much to you and me, who knows that it means only ten time ten pounds, and that ten pounds goes like the wind as soon as you begin to spend it.  But to Janey!  Why, she could live upon a hundred pounds for – certainly for two years; for two long delightful years, with nobody to trouble her, nobody to scold, nobody to interfere.  Something mounted to her head like the fumes of wine. (431)

I’ve omitted, so far, how explicit the story is about sex, about the husband’s lust and Janey’s repulsion, and the consequences of sex.  Janey runs off, finds a hiding place in a Mediterranean French town, bears and raises her son, and lives.  Anything here a feminist critic might find interesting?

How about an Amateur Reader?  To return to the passage about the money:  the doubled counting is a sharp touch, just how a sensible woman like Janey would confirm this unbelievable change.  The “fumes of wine” invoke the honeymoon, even if most of the wine was imbibed by her husband.  The mock world-weariness of the authorial intrusion is funny, the "you and me" especially.

With the help of AROW, the pleasures and insights of Margaret Oliphant seem considerable.

I read “A Story of a Wedding Tour” in Nineteenth-century Short Stories by Women: A Routledge Anthology, ed. Harriet Devine Jump, Routledge, 1998.

* See the suitably irritated Elizabeth Langland, “Women’s writing and the domestic sphere,” in Women and Literature in Britain 1800-1900, ed. Joanne Shattock, Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 137.

** I’m not sure of the date of publication. Late 19th century, I think, long after the Carlingford books.

If there is anything I can do, if I can be of any use? - Margaret Oliphant and The Rector

Margaret Oliphant’s The Executor was published in Blackwood’s Magazine in May 1861.  I don’t know if it was her plan, but the story became the first of the Chronicles of Carlingford.  Did the glimpses of so many characters suggest that she continue with their stories, or was she already setting up her future work?  Regardless, the concept of a series of stories set in the same town, with recurring characters, perhaps borrowed from Trollope’s Barsetshire Chronicles (three novels and part of the fourth had appeared by this point), seems to have pushed Oliphant in some way.  How would I know, since I ain’t read ‘em, but Oliphant enthusiasts don’t seem to put much value on anything she wrote before the Carlingford stories.  And she improved in some ways even in 1861, as she proceeded to The Rector and the longer The Doctor’s Family.

Penelope Fitzgerald, in the essay that accompanies the Virago edition of The Rector, spends her time on the best scene in the story, although she makes a few errors or emendations, all of which are improvements, or at least make Oliphant’s story more like a Penelope Fitzgerald story.  Still.  Here it is.

The old Rector was a popular evangelical minister.  The new Rector is High Church, nervous and cold, a refugee from Oxford, known for “[h]is treatise on the Greek verb, and his new edition of Sophocles.”  He discovers that he is a bad minister, unable to fulfill his ordinary duties.  The crisis comes when he almost accidentally finds himself in the room of a dying woman who is desperate for spiritual comfort.  The Rector "had not his prayer book – he was not prepared."  He suggests the woman call a doctor; he counsels patience.  "You are very ill, but not so ill – I suppose."

The sick woman had turned to the wall, and closed her eyes in dismay and disappointment – evidently she had ceased to expect anything from him.

‘If there is anything I can do,’ said poor Mr Proctor, ‘I am afraid I have spoken hastily. I meant to try to calm her mind a little; if I can be of any use?’

‘Ah, maybe I’m hasty,’ said the dying woman, turning round again with a sudden effort – ‘but, oh, to speak to me of having time when I’ve one foot in the grave already!’

‘Not so bad as that – not so bad as that,’ said the Rector, soothingly.

‘But I tell you it is as bad as that,’ she cried, with the brief blaze of anger common to great weakness. (55-6)

And it is.  The perpetual curate, a true minister, and future protagonist of The Perpetual Curate (1864), arrives and does what a priest ought to do.  The Rector is, he discovers, a worse man than he had ever known.  Oliphant cleans up the mess and sends him back to Oxford, accompanied by his disappointment in himself, his “secret of discontent.”

It’s like Alice Munro or Tobias Wolff or something. Pretty sharp.

Margaret Oliphant wins a convert

All right, all right.  My resistance is broken.  Penelope Fitzgerald was right.  Margaret Oliphant was a good writer.  Exactly how good is the question I can’t quite escape, but I’m going to set that aside, since I’ve now read merely one (plus two stories) of her “nearly a hundred” novels.  The short novel, The Doctor’s Family, and the stories, The Executor and The Rector, all published in 1861, are good.

Maybe I have read three novels.  The Executor and The Rector are each around thirty pages long, with four chapters.  They feel more like tiny novels than short stories.  What do I mean?  Chapter I begins

‘The woman was certainly mad,’ said John Brown.

We find ourselves in a parlor full of mourners, apparently at the reading of a will.  An older woman in “new mourning, poor soul,” is devastated, since, as her daughter says “we thought we were to have it.”  The deceased’s servant, “a tall woman, thin and dry,” is blamed.  And so on.

What impresses me here is the parsimony of information, the way Oliphant gives us nothing more than what is necessary.  We have inferred that John Brown is an attorney before the fact is mentioned on page 3, and that the document is a will before it is identified as such on page 4.  Oliphant is willing to leave the reader just a little off balance.  At the end of the chapter, pages 8 and 9, she finally tells us exactly what is in the will, but not until then.  It’s all very clever, skillful.  At this point, the editor of the 1986 Oxford World’s Classics edition (The Doctor's Family and Other Stories) tells me, Oliphant "had already written over twenty [!] novels, none of them especially good" (ix). She had clearly learned something along the way.

The second chapter is even more interesting.  We spend a few pages with the poor relatives, then a bit with the old servant, then we move to the house of a gloomy young doctor (protagonist, a few months later, of The Doctor’s Family), and finally spend three pages with the attorney.  When I said The Executor feels like a miniature novel, this is what I meant, time spent in the heads of a number of characters, major or minor, and a slice of the town of Carlingford made visible, however briefly.

The story reminds me of Anthony Trollope, of The Warden (1855), in that the real action lies in a professional crisis of conscience that is invisible to outsiders and poorly understood by the central figure (Trollope’s warden, Oliphant’s attorney) himself, but is no less real for that.  Oliphant’s art, like Trollope’s, seems to lie in these small insights teased out from small incidents, some of which turn out to be not so small.  Her prose resembles Trollope’s as well – it’s always good enough, but rarely too much better.  The spine seldom shivers.  Let’s try a passage:

Nancy [the servant] had locked the house-door, which, like an innocent almost rural door as it was, opened from without.  She was upstairs, very busy in a most congenial occupation – turning out the old lady’s wardrobe, and investigating the old stores of lace and fur and jewellery.  She knew them pretty well by heart before; but now that according to her idea, they were her own, everything naturally acquired a new value.  She had laid them out in little heaps, each by itself, on the dressing-table; a faintly-glimmering row of old rings and brooches, most of them entirely valueless, though Nancy was not aware of that…  With these delightful accumulations all round her, Nancy was happy.  She had entered, as she supposed, upon an easier and more important life. (18)

The innocent door; the pointless sorting – rings in one pile, lace in another; sly, well-chosen words like “congenial” and “important” and, my favorite, “naturally” – there’s a lot to like here.  It’s well-written, smart, good. How good?

Penelope Fitzgerald convinces me to read Margaret Oliphant

So why not just plunge into Argentinean literature, if it's so great, which it seems to be?  The usual reason – too many books, or, really, too little focus.  Restlessness and curiosity and susceptibilty.  For example, I have to clear out some time for a novel or two or three by Margaret Oliphant.

Why?  Good question.  She’s Scottish, and I claim to be interested in the subject, although she didn’t write much about Scotland.  Frankly, though, I was happy to skip her, unless someone else insisted, or maybe just read her short Autobiography (1899).  She wrote, Penelope Fitzgerald tells me, “nearly one hundred novels,” plus stories, articles, travel books, and more.*  That’s not promising.

But then I read the rest of Penelope Fitzgerald’s essays on Oliphant, introductions to the Virago editions of four Oliphant novels.  Fitzgerald, reasonably, does not use her space to inform the reader of everything Oliphant does wrong.  She is making the best case she can.  That case is strong.

The four novels are The Rector, The Doctor’s Family, Salem Chapel, and The Perpetual Curate. The first three were all published in 1863 – not promising – and the last in 1864.  They are all part of the Carlingford series, about ministers and curates and so on in a small English city, very much like Trollope, except that Oliphant wanders further afield, into the working class neighborhoods, and even into the slums.  Fitzgerald argues that Oliphant’s art, at its best, consists of the sorts of "minor incidents that lead to major psychological insights" that I also associate with Trollope.

The Rector is the story of a new bookish minister who “[f]or the last fifteen years… has been immured in the college of All Souls, preparing an edition of Sophocles” (47).  In other words, he’s a bad minister, and is about to learn just how bad.  The climax of the novel is at the bedside of a dying woman.  The rector, called away from a party, does not have his prayer book, and “is at a loss for a prayer.”  He is helpless in the face of the woman’s need, and he understands that he probably always will be.  This seems pretty sharp.  I know, it’s just one scene, but still.

Fitzgerald makes The Perpetual Curate sound even more interesting.  Here, we have the priest who is too good, who ministers in other people’s districts and can’t keep his views to himself (he’s “viewy”), even when it means he’ll always be too poor to marry.  A good priest, but not a saint – Fitzgerald singles out a scene where he “has to restrain himself from whacking his aunt’s horrible dog” (67).

Fitzgerald suggests that Oliphant is actually at her best in her shorter work.  She argues that the three-volume novel did not suit Oliphant well, leading to plenty and padding and contrivances and plottiness that were far from her strength, which was exactly my suspicion.  But any reader of Trollope, or second-tier Dickens, for that matter, has hacked through plenty of underbrush to get to the good stuff.  Fitzgerald convinced me. I need to sharpen my machete and read some Margaret Oliphant.

*Penelope Fitzgerald, “The Mystery of Mrs Oliphant,” in A House of Air: Selected Writings, Flamingo, 2003, p. 69.  All quotations are from this cornucopia of a book. And I don't want to omit Rohan Maitzen's omnibus reference post on Oliphant.  Maitzen got me curious enough about Oliphant to read the Fitzgerald essays.