Please don't throw it on the fire: it's a library book - more of Hugo's Condemned Man

The story so far: in 1829 Victor Hugo wrote and published The Last Day of a Condemned Man as a protest against capital punishment. In 1832, he republished the story, adding a fiery preface that included grisly tales of malfunctioning guillotines and calls for prison reform.

But just a month or two after initial publication, back in 1829, Hugo had already added a sort of preface, one of the strangest I've ever seen. It's an 8 page play titled "A Comedy about a Tragedy". Characters include The Elegiac Poet, The Fat Gentleman, and The Philosopher. They debate the merits of the latest novel:

"The Ladies: Which novel is that?

The Fat Gentleman: Enough, sir, I know the one you mean. The title alone grates on my nerves.

Madame de Blinval: And on mine. It's a dreadful book. I have it here.

The Ladies: Oh, do let us see.

[The book is passed from hand to hand.]

Somebody [reading aloud]: The Last Day of a...

The Fat Gentleman: Madam, I beg of you!

Madame de Blinval: Quite so; it is a shocking book, a book that gives you bad dreams and makes you feel quite ill.

A Lady [aside]: I must read it."

Hugo gleefully skewers the idiots: the poet who wants to be Romantic, but not too Romantic; the lawyer who worries that the book will influence juries and undermine the social fabric; the reader who doesn't want to read about anything depressing; the philosopher who says that "[t]he subject required cogent debate", and "[a] play or a novel prove nothing." Hey, that one is me! Hugo is mocking me. My feelings are hurt. And at the end, the Philosopher is mostly concerned about whether there will be food at the party. That's also me.

I first supposed that this preface would be too topical, made up too much of inside jokes. On the contrary. The caricatures and reactions are instantly recognizable and still with us. The jokes are funny. The whole company has finished taking turns attacking Hugo:

"Ergaste: Oh, the vile book!

Madame de Blinval: Please don't throw it on the fire: it's a library book.

The Chevalier: Let's speak of the good old days. Everything has gone downhill since, both taste and standards. Do you remember what it was like in our days, Madame de Blinval?

Madame de Blinval: No, sir, I don't."

I know, it's just a joke in the "never mention a lady's age" genre. I have the highest respect for writers who, however serious their purpose, can't resist going for the joke. Always go for the joke.

This was not on the agenda! - choice bits from The Last Day of a Condemned Man

The Last Day of a Condemned Man, whatever its political purpose, is a fine work of art. The range of moods and variety of ideas impressed me. The story if only 67 pages long, but it's broken into 49 chapters. The prisoner rages and consoles himself; he describes his cell and his guards; he hears a song, watches other prisoners leave, and gives away his coat. The short chapters allow Victor Hugo to squeeze in everything he can think of. If he rarely develops an idea, or leaves fragments scattered around, he simply reflects the emotional state of the prisoner.

One of the longest chapters, over six pages, is one of the best. The condemned man is watching a group of prisoners depart for the prison at Toulon, where they will serve out their time doing hard labor. It's also a death sentence for most of the prisoners, but who knows, maybe they will survive, like Jean Valjean in Les Miserables, or Balzac's master criminal Vautrin, or a couple of bad dudes I'm currently reading about in The Count of Monte Cristo. I guess if you were a fictional prisoner, you were pretty likely to survive, actually.

Here's a bit of Chapter 14, when the prisoners are assembling. There's an audience to see them off:

"Some of them, as convict celebrities, were greeted with cheers and applause, which they acknowledged with a kind of becoming modesty. The majority of them had hats of a sort that they had woven themselves from the straw in their cells, always bizarrely shaped so that the wearer would be recognized by it in the towns they passed through. The applause for these men was even greater. One in particular, a young man of seventeen with the face of a girl, received a rapturous ovation. He had come from the cell where he had been in solitary confinement for a week; from his bale of straw he had made a garment that clad him head to foot, and he came cartwheeling into the courtyard with snake-like suppleness. He was a strolling player convicted of theft. There were waves of clapping, and joyful shouts." pp. 41-2.

The acrobat in the straw suit - that's good stuff. As the chapter continues, the mood darkens, as does the weather. One more quote:

"Only one old fellow remained cheerful. He shouted out, as he tried to dry himself with his wet shrt, that this was not on the agenda; then he started to laugh, and shook his fist at the sky."

An example of a completely different tone, as, in a later scene, the prisoner imagines the afterlife:

"I feel that the sky will glow with its own luminosity, that stars will be dark speckles, and instead of being golden spangles on black velvet, as they are for living eyes, will appear like black spots on a cloth of gold...

Or perhaps I shall awaken after the blow to find myself on some flat and slimy surface, on hands and knees in the darkness and turning round and round like a head as it rolls. With a high wind at my back, and buffeted every so often by other rolling heads... When my eyes swivel upwards, they will behold nothing but a pitch-black sky, its heavy layers bearing down on them, and in the far distance will loom up great arches of smoke that is blacker than the darkness. Tiny red sparks hovering in the night will turn into birds of fire as they draw closer. And thus it will be for all eternity." p. 79.

These visions of heaven and hell has some relation to Dante, I suppose. But they sound original to me; the context is certainly original.

Hugo would return to the subject of The Last Day. Notre Dame de Paris, written just three years later, ends with an execution, and a good part of Les Miserables is about crime, punishment, and injustice. Come to think of it, The Red and the Black, published in 1830, also features a prisoner condemned to death. Stendhal's treatment of the subject could hardly be more different than Hugo's. Curious.

I mentioned yesterday that Hugo later added a polemical preface to the original story. He added something else as well, something very peculiar. I'll save that for tomorrow.

Victor Hugo and the death penalty - The Last Day of a Condemned Man

Victor Hugo's The Last Day of a Condemned Man (1829) is a novella-length story, 67 pages in the edition I read, a first person account of a man condemned to the guillotine. It's not the prisoner's confession - the chapter headed "My Story" is actually blank - but his moods and reflections, his suffering and panic and anger. The condemned man is supposed to be writing all of this while awaiting his punishment, so we do not actually witness the execution. The story ends when the prisoner stops writing: "The sniveling lackeys! Here they come, back up the stairs... FOUR O'CLOCK". That's it.

This is a political book, propaganda, meant to assist in the abolition of the death penalty. It was first published anonymously, not exactly as if it were an authentic account, but at least allowing for the possibility. A few years later, suddenly famous and disgusted by the failure of the 1830 Revolutionaries to carry through on their promise to abolish capital punishment, Hugo added a long (22 page) preface in which he makes his argument explicit. In contemporary American terms, the logical argument of the book is that capital punishment, specifically the period between the sentencing and the execution, amounts to “cruel and unusual punishment”.

But The Last Day is fiction, not a tract, so the argument of the story, and even of the preface, is not presented in logical terms. The effect is emotional, psychological. I'm a hard-headed fellow, and this is not a method that is likely to convince someone like me of much of anything. Not just me, I guess, since the death penalty was only abolished in France in 1981.

The 2002 Hesperus Press edition I read is itself an explicitly political book, a sort of memorial to a classic of anti-capital punishment literature. The cover features "death row photographs", and the afterword is by the Director of Amnesty International UK, Kate Allen. Her case against the death penalty is presented in two efficient, logical, hard-headed pages and is exactly the sort of thing to convince someone like me. Different tools for different jobs.

Anyway, this has all been about The Last Day of a Condemned Man as political argument. For a number of reasons, I think the book fails in its political purpose. One of the reasons is that Hugo refuses to simplify his story, and sometimes even argues against himself. But - or perhaps, so - as a work of art, it's a great success, very much worth reading. I'll save this for the next couple of days.

It's somehow thicker'n other water - Mendele Mocher Sforim's "Fishke the Lame"

"The Little Man," from 1864, is Mendele Mocher Sforim's first Yiddish story. "Fishke the Lame," from 1869, is his third. "The Little Man" may have marked the creation of modern Yiddish literature, but it obviously took a while for things to get moving. In the meantime, Mendele / Abramovitsh wrote in Hebrew, and translated an enormous variety of stuff into Yiddish and Hebrew - biology textbooks, Russian history, Jules Verne.

In "Fishke the Lame," Mendele the Book Peddler tells us about poor Fishke; later Fishke tells us his own story:

"Cross-eyed, one arm twisted back, limping heavily on one leg, Fishke was no delight to behold. He was such a freakish creature that the town didn't even want him as a cholera groom."

A what? To end an epidemic, a town would try to create luck for itself through forced marriages of its "cripples, scoundrels, and beggars." Even grotesque Fishke finally gets to marry a blind woman, and together they hit the road with a troupe of beggars. This is obviously a story about the poorest of the poor. It's vivid, funny, and sort of horrible.

Fishke had worked as a tout at a village bathhouse. In Odessa, disillusioned with his travels, he decides to return to the baths, but discovers that the big city bathhouses are not like the one at home:

"I went to other baths, but ain't none like ours - they don't even smell like our brick bathhouse in Glupsk. Now, their ritual baths are a joke. In our mikve you can darn near cut the water, 'cause it has a special odor, a different color, and it's somehow thicker'n other water. Right away you know it has a Jewish flavor, but there the mikve water is clear, plain old water, you could even drink it."

Vivid, funny, and horrible.

Both "The Little Man" and "Fishke the Lame" are in Classic Yiddish Stories of S. Y. Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem and I. L. Peretz, 2004, edited and translated by Ken Frieden.

But I'm getting off the point - Mendele Mocher Sforim's "The Little Man"

Despite working on this week's lists, I did not really plan to immediately start reading Yiddish authors. But the lists sharpened my appetite, so I went right to the beginning, to Mendele Mocher Sforim's "The Little Man", a short story published in 1864 in the Yiddish supplement to a Hebrew newspaper. Before this story, there was no such thing as modern Yiddish literature; after, there was.

I don't think anyone would know that just by reading the story. I mean, it's pretty good. Mendele the Book Peddler tells us a little about himself, and then tells us how he was present at the reading of a strange will. The will is part autobiography, part confession, of an unpleasant rich man who raised himself from poverty.

It's a bit like the 16th century Spanish picaresque, Lazarillo de Tormes. The narrator of the will tells how he moved from one terrible job to another, each worse than the last. But where Lazarillo de Tormes has no real ending - Lazarillo presumably just moves on to another bad job - the dead man figured out the path to riches. He learned to become a "little man", a hypocrite and a flatterer. In the will, he confesses his sins and leaves most of his money to charity, so everything is all right, yes?

So there are some of good satirical touches like that. But the humor of the story mostly comes from the way it is told. Mendele's refrain is "But I'm getting off the point." He's always on the verge of a serious digression, but always pulls himself back. And he lards the story with dubious Jewish wisdom:

"It's true that the rabbi is a fine and honest man - I should only have his good name - although still, in this world, one has to deceive people. Even the angels had to follow the way of the world and put one over on Abraham, when the Torah says that they ate, although they only pretended to eat. But that's really not at all what I'm driving at."

It's this sort of voice that Sholem Aleichem is going to perfect, twenty years or so later.

"The Little Man" stands in the company of Richardson's Pamela, which launched the epistolary novel craze in the 18th century, and Scott's Waverley, which caused an avalanche of historical novels. Neither of those books are the best of their genre, or even of their authors. But they did something unusual. Mendele Mocher Sforim did not just create, or popularize, a new genre, though. He created a new literature. It's a creative act that is hard for me to comprehend, really, and the story itself, good as it is, does not help much.

A 19th century Yiddish reading list, pt. 3 - Dybbuks, postcards, and King Lear

More early Yiddish writers, on stage and in America.

S. Ansky (1863-1920), a scholar and ethnographer, wrote The Dybbuk (1914), a landmark in the Yiddish theater. The Dybbuk and Other Writings is the book I'll look at first, but his account of the Russian Army's devastation of the shtetls during World War I, The Enemy at His Pleasure: A Journey Through the Jewish Pale of Settlement During World War I, sounds fascinating.

The Yiddish theater seems to have been most active in the United States. For example, Jacob Gordin's The Jewish King Lear (1892), which is not quite just what it sounds like, but pretty close. This play was only recently translated - Stephen Greenblatt's review of it in The New Republic several months ago is one of the spurs to this project. God, Man, and Devil: Yiddish Plays in Translation includes another Gordin play, and who knows what else. An older collection, Six Plays of the Yiddish Theater, may also be worth a look.

The short story writer Lamed Shapiro (1878-1948) may push too far out of the 19th century. On the other hand, he seems to be amazing. Last year's The Cross and Other Jewish Stories is the place to go. Wyatt Mason posted an entire story in July.

I'd like to read Abraham Cahan (1860-1951) someday - The Rise of David Levinsky, or Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto - but I think he wrote in English. We'll see. I have to draw a line somewhere.

How about poetry? The earliest Yiddish-American poets I know of, Mani Leib and Moyshe Halpern, start their careers just a little too late, I think. If I change my mind, Ruth Wisse's study A Little Love in Big Manhattan will fill me in.

Wisse also edited a collection called A Shtetl and Other Yiddish Novellas. No idea what's in it. Or in No Star Too Beautiful: Yiddish Stories from 1382 to the Present. Or in Great Works of Jewish Fantasy. I could go on.

Two books of photos look interesting. Roman Vishniac's A Vanished World (1947) contains photos of ghetto life in the 1930s, mostly in Poland. As one might guess, the book was published as an act of remembrance. But what Yiddish-related book is not an act of remembrance now. For example, Yiddishland, which collects actual shtetl postcards. See left. Amazing.

Please fill me in on your favorites - literature, history, art, criticism. I've told you everything I know, almost. I've listed more books than I will actually read. Point me in the right direction.

Update: David Bergelson was a major omission from the original post.

A 19th century Yiddish reading list, pt. 2 - Mendele Mocher Sforim, Sholom Aleichem, and I. L. Peretz

Three authors are at the core of early Yiddish literature: S. Y. Abramovitsh aka Mendele Mocher Sforim (1836-1917), Sholom Aleichem (1859-1916), and I. L. Peretz (1852-1915).

Mendele Mocher Sforim* / S. Y. Abramovitsh is the inventor of modern Yiddish literature. He wanted to write for ordinary Jews in their own language. Abramovitsh published his first Yiddish novel, The Little Man serially in late 1864 to 1865. It is narrated by Mendele Mocher Sforim, Mendele the Book Peddler. I don't think he meant it as a pen name, but Abramovitsh brought Mendele back again and again, and the name stuck.

A number of Sforim novels have made it into English at one time or another. The Travels and Adventures of Benjamin the Third (1869) is a must, as well as Fishke the Lame. Other titles: The Wishing-Ring, The Nag aka The Mare, and The Parasite. My library has an anthology, Selected Works of Mendele Moykher-Sfarim, so I'll see what's in that.

Sholom Aleichem's Yiddish collected works fills 28 volumes, mostly short stories, mostly monologues, mostly about rural Jews in the Russian Pale of Settlement. Aleichem is a sort of Yiddish culture hero, and is almost famous because of The Fiddler on the Roof. Tevye the Dairyman (1894-1914) is the source for Fiddler, eight stories in which Tevye tells us about his troubles with his daughters. "Maybe you can tell me, though, why it is that whenever something goes wrong in this world, it's Tevye it goes wrong with?" That's the tone, always comical, or tragicomic, or comitragic.

The Railroad Stories (1902-1910) are also high on my list. This time, it's railroad passengers telling us their stories. After that, what? I have a little Dover collection, Happy New Year! and Other Stories, selected from the 1959 Stories and Satires. I've counted up at least ten other story collections in English, with who knows how much overlap. There's a lot out there.

Aleichem wrote a fake travel guide for the town he used in many stories, Inside Kasrilevke. Chapters include "Hotels", "Theaters", "Fires", "and "Bandits." I can't pass that up. There are at least a couple of novels to try, as well: The Nightingale, Or the Saga of Yosele Solovey the Cantor (1886), and Mottel the Cantor's Son (1916), which takes us to America, along with the author himself, who left Europe for New York City in 1914. Aleichem's funeral was attended by 150,000 mourners, and was covered on the front page of the New York Times.

Aleichem's contemporary I. L. Peretz is a little easier to deal with because of The I. L. Peretz Reader, ed. Ruth Wisse. Peretz mostly wrote short stories, as well, but this volume also includes some poetry, travel writing, and a memoir. I've come across at least six other collections as well. My understanding is that Peretz is more of a modernist than Aleichem or Sforim.

The anthology Classic Yiddish Stories of S. Y. Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and I. L. Peretz, edited by Ken Frieden, is just what it says, and is meant as an accompaniment to Frieden's study Classic Yiddish Fiction, which would be a logical place to continue my research.

Tomorrow, I'll continue my list with everyone who is not named Sforim, Aleichem, or Peretz. I encourage readers to leave any suggestions they might have.

* Or Seforim, or Sefarim.

A 19th century Yiddish reading list, pt. 1 - Why?

Before I went to Senegal last year, I put together a little reading list, a reader's bibliography, of Senegalese literature. Making the list was highly educational for me. So was reading the books, sure.

I don't have any plans to go anywhere anytime soon, so I am going to repeat the experiment with some place that can now only be visited through books: the Pale of Settlement, the shtetl, the New York City tenements. I'm going to read some Yiddish literature.

Modern Yiddish literature was created in the late 19th century, specifically 1864, in the serialized short novel The Little Man by S. Y. Abramovitsh aka Mendele Mocher Sforim. Before Abramovitsh/Sforim, there were traditional tales in Yiddish, and some religious writing, but no novels, no short stories. The elite wrote in Hebrew, which could not be read by most Jews. Sforim wanted to popularize, and to preserve.

Preservation - that's the center of the study of Yiddish now. Yiddish is a dying language, despite the wealth of its literary tradition. Harold Bloom, a native Yiddish speaker, recently wrote about this in an uncharacteristically humble essay in The New York Review of Books, highly recommended. Bloom foresees the day when Yiddish survives only in its literature. I'm not much help here - I'll be reading translations.

The three great early Yiddish writers, Sforim, Sholom Aleichem, and I. L. Peretz, all wrote, extensively, about the Jewish villages, the shtetl, in what is now Russia, Ukraine, and Poland. And so did later writers - I. B. Singer, Chaim Grade, Lamed Shapiro. This world is gone, utterly gone, destroyed by the Nazis. Irving Howe's anthology A Treasury of Yiddish Stories is dedicated "To the Six Million." Can a reader of Yiddish literature get out from under the shadow of the Holocaust, and read these writers on their own terms? Should he?

The strange, wonderful thing is that all three of these authors are basically comic writers - the whole tradition is basically comic, in the face of pogroms and persecution and poverty. That's one good reason to read them - they're funny. Or so I'm led to believe.

Tomorrow, I'll put together my little reader's bibliography of Sforim, Aleichem, and Peretz. Then on Wednesday, I'll move on to everyone else. I'm sticking to the 19th century, so no Singer brothers, for example. But there's plenty to read, and I don't think I ever mentioned that the Wuthering Expectations 19th century is longer than one might think, ending on November 11, 1918.

I'm going to create a sidebar for these posts as an invitation to help me fill out my list of books. What should I read? The mysterious, vanishing obooki says that 2009 is his year for Yiddish literature, too. So that's two of us.

Nothing, for here nothing was being heralded - Adalbert Stifter's Rock Crystal

OK, here's a real Christmas story.

Two children are trapped on a mountainside during a blizzard on Christmas Eve. They are saved by a miracle, or by chance, or perhaps the series of coincidences that allow them to survive are themselves the miracle.

This is Adalbert Stifter's sweet, mysterious Rock Crystal (1853). It's a real Stifter story - the landscape of two imaginary but perfectly credible mountain valleys and the pass between them is described in possibly tedious detail. Much of the story is really about the landscape, and the childrens' direct experience with it as they wander off the path and somehow make their way up the mountain. The story is a genuine example of the sublime - unmediated nature is beautiful and thrilling but also threatening, deadly. A truly Burkean sample, where the human bells are the Beautiful and Nature's silence is the Sublime:

"At this very moment all the bells were ringing, the bells in Millsdorf, the bells in Gschaid, and on the farther side of the mountain there was still another little church whose three clear-chiming bells were ringing out. In remote places beyond the valley there were innumerable churches with bells all ringing at this very hour; from village to village, the waves of sound were floating, and in one village you could at times hear through the leafless branches the chiming of the bells in another. Away up by the ice, however, not a sound reached the children; nothing, for here nothing was being heralded. Along the winding paths of the mountainslopes lantern lights were moving; and on many a farmstead the great bell was rousing the farm-hands,- unseen here, and unheard. Only the stars twinkled and shone steadily down."

Many of Stifter's stories seem to occur in a great hush. This passage is strangely both silent and noisy, with the web of sound connecting the villages below the children. Those final bells, the ones rousing the farm-hands, are, like the lantern-lights, part of the miracle, the search parties already on the childrens' path.

And something, it turns out, is being heralded, even in the void. Something happens immediately afterward, in the stillness of the ice, that I will leave to the reader. Rock Crystal is definitely a Christian Christmas story.

I read the original 1945 edition of the translation NYRB has republished, so I didn't benefit from the wisdom of W. H. Auden's introduction, although I get to see a dozen primitive, useless illustrations that I pray NYRB omitted.

Have a good holiday. Wuthering Expectations will be on vacation for a while.

Work - work - work! - a Carlylean Christmas poem from Thomas Hood

In case readers of The Chimes were hankering for more Thomas Carlyle in their Christmas, here's the beginning, and then some more, of Thomas Hood's The Song of the Shirt:

With fingers weary and worn,
  With eyelids heavy and red,
A Woman sat, in unwomanly rags,
  Plying her needle and thread -
    Stitch! stitch! stitch!
In poverty, hunger, and dirt,
And still with a voice of dolorous pitch
She sang the 'Song of the Shirt!'

***

"Work — work — work!
  My labour never flags;
And what are its wages? A bed of straw,
  A crust of bread — and rags.
That shattered roof — this naked floor —
  A table — a broken chair —
And a wall so blank, my shadow I thank
  For sometimes falling there!

And there's more, though not a lot more. This was a Christmas poem, in a December 1843 issue of the comic magazine Punch. My understanding is that it was genuinely popular, reprinted many times. The part that really links it to Thomas Carlyle (Past and Present dates from just a few months earlier) is that "Work -- work -- work!" line, echoing Carlyle's emphasis on labor.

The most reductive message of A Christmas Carol (published at the same time as this poem) or The Chimes is "Remember the Poor at Christmas." Punch published something similar every Christmas, by many different poets. I'm going to get out my credit card now and remember the poor.

The Wuthering Expectations Year in Prospect

I'm not going to plan a year of books. I'm not, I'm not.

Still, I can make some predictions for Wuthering Expectations 2009.

The novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the novels of Herman Melville, almost all new to me. More Dickens, always more Dickens, including, following up on my Carlyle reading, Hard Times. And Elizabeth Gaskell, who I have not read. And more George Eliot.

A single comment by The Little Professor - nay, a single word - inspired a keen desire to read John Galt (who?)*, so I see a Galt roundup in the future.

Lots more mid-century Germans: Heinrich Heine, Eduard Mörike, Jeremias Gotthelf, Gottfried Keller, Theodor Storm, maybe even more Adalbert Stifter.

I can imagine a reader saying "The Scarlet Letter and Moby-Dick? More Stifter? So wadda ya got for 2010? A root canal?"

For some variety, I want to spend some time with 19th century Yiddish writers, something like this project of obooki's. Maybe this will be along the lines of what I did for Senegal.

There are some clever book challenges out there in bookblog world, but I don't need any help organizing my reading. I need help disorganzing it.

Next week: Christmas.

* I will never get tired of this joke.

The Wuthering Expectations Year in Review

The most important statistic first, Number of Books Read: 107, assuming I finish Vanity Fair soon. 107! Awesome! What's that? Is one of these books basically two pages long? Yes, what's your point? No, no, no, it totally counts.

So one thing that happened this year was that I read shorter books than usual. Really short, hundred pagers, or poetry collections that, if stripped of white space, might be fifty pages. One reason was the trip to Senegal. For a variety of reasons, including some constraints of West African publishing, many of the most famous Senegalese books are very short.

Another reason was the sudden, surprise trip to Tokyo. In that case, I deliberately selected short books.

A final reason was that it's simply a myth that the 19th century is particularly characterized by long books.

I hope that was the final reason. Another possibility is that I read short books in order to have something to write about. I hope not. I just started The Count of Monte Cristo for balance.

What does length mean, anyway? The Hardest Book of the Year was a very short one, Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, recommended by some well-meaning, I assume, commenters. My poor head, my poor head, it trembles yet.

Best Book of the Year: Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls, the Greatest Novel of the First Half of the Nineteenth Century. I state that opinion with great confidence - not confidence that anyone will agree with me, but that I am unlikely to change my mind. Vanity Fair, which I love, probably won't quite make it that far. This is a bet a fellow wants to lose, so I hope that Dombey and Son or Mary Barton or The Count of Monte Cristo really knock me out. But I have my doubts.

De-Humiliations: Meaning, famous books that I read for the first time. Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, and Theodor Storm's Immensee. I should point out that although I enjoy this game, I do not actually find it humiliating that I have not read whatever books I haven't read, even if those books are Middlemarch, Walden, or Les Miserables. I mean, I want to read them, but the Amateur Reader does not, and should not, actually feel bad that he hasn't. Maybe I should also count Adam Bede as a de-Humiliation, since I had never read George Eliot before.

More Favorites: Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights; Honoré de Balzac, Eugénie Grandet; Jeremias Gotthelf, The Black Spider; Prosper Mérimée, Colomba; Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas; Aminata Sow Fall, The Beggars' Strike; Ousmane Sèmbene, God's Bits of Wood; Nikolai Gogol, "The Overcoat"; Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Artist of the Beautiful". Theodor Storm's stories were generally very impressive.

Robert Browning, Dramatic Romances and Lyrics; One Hundred Poems from the Japanese, translated by Kenneth Rexroth; a 17th century obscurity called Hamlet (thanks, Nigel!)

Christpher Benfey, The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan ; Jonathan Spence, The Death of Woman Wang; Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol.

The mention of Machado de Assis reminds me of a special category, Worst Editing I Saw All Year: Oxford University Press, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Machado de Assis. I read the 1996 first edition, the flagship title in their Library of Latin American Literature.

There was a major editing error every three pages or so. Some were like "now\know", some were like "hedl\held". They were spread through the entire novel. My favorite howler was in the introduction, where the novel is compared to Erasmus's In Praise of Polly, twice on the same page. Now, I would love to read that book, presumably an ode to Erasmus's favorite parrot, but it unfortunately does not exist. Late in the novel, the narrator mentions In Prasie of Folly, suggesting that the editor of the introduction did not read the actual novel too carefully.

Well, it was only a major English edition of the greatest Brazilian novel. Why knock yourself out.

Anyway, what a lot of good books.

Next: next.

Best Books of the Year - 1808

1808 was an unusual year for literature. I have not been able to find many enduring books from this year, but one of them happens to be among the greatest masterpieces ever written.

Goethe had been working on his version of the Faust story for thirty years before he published Faust, Part I, in 1808. Goethe was 59. He would finish Part II in 1832, 24 years later. Unbelievable.

Faust was immediately considered, in the German-speaking world, a masterpiece. It would have topped the Top 10 lists in Germany, if there had been such things. I don't know much about it's reception elsewhere. My impression is that German-readers like Samuel Taylor Coleridge were just as enthusiastic. It would still be a consensus candidate for greatest German work of all time, like Hamlet in English.

That should be enough for one year. What else was there? A lot of Heinrich von Kleist, the plays Penthesilea and The Broken Jug, as well as the ethically disturbing novella The Marquise of O. I remember nothing about Penthesilea, but The Broken Jug is a favorite, still quite funny.

The big literary news in England seems to have been Walter Scott's Marmion, a big drop from Kleist, much less Faust. A lot of major Wordsworth poems date from the previous year, which doesn't mean there was nothing this year. Coleridge, Crabbe, Landor, a young Byron - maybe there was something. The Penguin Book of English Verse covers the year with a single Thomas Moore poem.

The polyglot, pan-European literateur of 1808, making bets about what would survive, would probably have picked Marmion as a more significant work than The Marquise of O. Well, he would have gotten Faust, Part I right. That was an easy one.

In a way, I'm amazed anything was published in 1808. Not anything of value, anything at all. I put my favorite portrait of Napoleon, the only one I really like, up at the top, the 1808 Antoine-Jean Gros painting "Napoleon on the Battlefield of Eylau", now in the Louvre. That's what was going on in 1808.

Best Books of the Year - 1818

1818 was one of the greatest literary years of the 19th century. It saw the publication of two Jane Austen novels, Persuasion and, sadly, Northanger Abbey (sad, of course, because it was only published as a result of Austen's death). Walter Scott published The Heart of Midlothian, one of his best books. Mary Shelley published Frankenstein, a novel so rich in ideas that I forgive its infelicities. Finally, Thomas Love Peacock wrote Nightmare Abbey, which is not what it sounds like.

Meanwhile, Byron, Keats, and P. Shelley were all in peak form. Byron published the Venetian adultery comedy Beppo, not a favorite of mine but enjoyable for its light touch. Keats published the long, mythical Endymion, very far from a favorite. For P. Shelley, it was a highly productive year, but for most of us only one poem will really matter: "Ozymandias."

It's funny how central Percy Shelley is here. Besides his wife's book, Byron and Keats and Peacock were close friends, and Shelley is even the central character of Nightmare Abbey, a tiny little novel-like thing that should be read more:

"When Scythrop [that's Shelley] grew up, he was sent, as usual, to a public school, where a little learning was painfully beaten into him, and from thence to the university, where it was carefully taken out of him; and he was sent home like a well-threshed ear of corn, with nothing in his head: having finished his education to the high satisfaction of the master and fellows of his college, who had, in testimony of their approbation, presented him with a silver fish-slice, on which his name figured at the head of a laudatory inscription in some semi-barbarous dialect of Anglo-Saxonized Latin." (Ch. 1)

So that's five novels with some life today. Two (Persuasion and Frankenstein) are among the best of the century. Two, by coincidence, are Gothic parodies with "Abbey" in the title; one of these is sadly neglected. And major work by three great poets. This did not happen most years. Note that if magazines back then published "Best Books of the Year" lists, the only one I'm sure would make the lists is Walter Scott's.

This has all been awfully British. What else was going on? In America and pre-Romantic France I will go ahead and say, confidently, nothing. In the German principalities, there was quite a lot, although Goethe and E. T. A. Hoffmann seem to be between books this year. Either one may have been, and probably was, publishing in journals. Giacomo Leopardi was writing his Cantos and essays at this time, I am sure, but I have never sorted out his confusing chronology.

Still, there aren't that many years in the 19th century which contain five still-read novels from all of Europe, so I don't fell too bad about ending my researches here.

Nevertheless, I put an engraving of Francisco Goya's 1818 The Giant up top, just to make the year a little less British.

Best Books of the Year - 1828

1828 was one of the worst years for literature in the entire 19th century. I think I have read one novel from this year, Nathaniel Hawthorne's Fanshawe, a disgrace, although possibly of interest to alumni of Bowdoin College. Hawthorne himself agreed with me - his wife did not learn of the novel's existence until after Hawthorne's death in 1864.

I've scrounged around, trying to look up more novels. How about Edward Bulwer-Lytton's first novel, Pelham? Or Benjamin Disraeli's Popanilla? Walter Scott, poor, sick Scott, must have published something - let's see, yes, The Fair Maid of Perth. I suspect that I will remain ignorant of the contents of these books.

A number of poets were just beginning their careers at this time - Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, Thomas Hood, Edgar Allan Poe - and Heinrich Heine, Alexander Pushkin, and John Clare were established. None of them seems to have published any books in 1828. There must, at least, be some good poems scattered around. The chronological Penguin Book of English Verse picks out Hood's "Death in the Kitchen",* and a surprisingly late Samuel Taylor Coleridge sonnet ("Duty Surviving Self-Love").

What else? Plays, essays? Charles Lamb was writing; William Hazlitt was alive. Surely there's something there. Goethe was 79 years old, working on part two of Faust, but I doubt he was publishing much. The first volume of Audubon's Birds of America, does that count (to the left, the Kentucky Warbler)?

The entire last half of the 1820s was a sort of literary disaster, actually. Take out Heine and Pushkin, and there's not much left. Two very different prose masterpieces, Manzoni's epic The Betrothed, and Eichendorff's anti-epic Life of a Good-for-Nothing, the poets mentioned before, Hazlitt and Lamb and Thomas de Quincey, and not much else. Feel free to claim otherwise.

But of course, a small mountain of books were published. For this single year, 180 years of erosion have left a nearly flat plain; the scree has been pulverized and washed into the Rare Book collections. The December year-end lists always remind me of this. I don't mean to say that nothing but bad books were published in 1828. Obviously not. No, it's just that time and history are relentless.

Tomorrow, I'll attack my own point with a rather different year.

* Hood's "On the Death of a Giraffe" is also from 1828.

The value of A Christmas Carol

I have a semi-crazy quote from Carlyle's Sartor Resartus permanently stuck at the bottom of Wuthering Expectations:

"Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it in God's name!"

I love the hysterical tone, and accept the goading, though I'll never Produce! Produce! like some of the great 19th century phenomena. Balzac and Dumas and Hugo; James and Twain; Trollope and Dickens. Unbelievable shelves of books. But of course any number of nearly forgotten writers have written just as much to less purpose. Some of those fractions of a Product really are infinitesimal.

I have been thinking about the example of A Christmas Carol in these utilitarian terms. It must be among the most economically valuable stories written in modern times. It did well enough for Dickens, especially when he began performing a 70 minute version of it. Since his time, think of the plays, the movies, the lazy television parodies. Scrooge McDuck and Mr. Burns. I myself, in the 9th grade, played Young Scrooge, a formative role. Actually, all I remember about it was my utter failure to learn to waltz decently, even for 30 seconds.

What other writers have created something so economically enduring? The Austen Industry is worth a lot now, although I think that's recent phenomenon. Meine Frau reminds me that performances of The Nutcracker are the means of survival for many ballet companies, so E. T. A. Hoffmann should get some credit for that. I'm amazed how little-read "The Nutcracker Prince and the Mouse King" actually is. It's as good as A Christmas Carol, which I unfortunately can't quite say about Dickens's other Christmas books.

Which reminds me to encourage reading of The Chimes. Commentary at The Valve begins Deember 19 or so. Only 100 pages! Be sure to get a copy with the illustrations.

Cease to be a hollow sounding-shell of hearsays, egoisms, purblind dilettantisms - Carlyle in The Chimes

One reason I haven't mentioned for reading Carlyle's Past and Present is that it is about Hard Times, and since we are in the middle of some Hard Times now, I thought the perspective would be interesting.

Our Hard Times are certainly nothing like those of mid-19th century England - massive unemployment with a minimal safety net, riots, and then, in 1845, the beginning of a true disaster, the Irish Famine. Remember that Carlyle was writing in 1843. Things got worse, and in some respects, he must have seemed prophetic.

What I really wanted to know, being a practical, utilitarian sort of fellow, was, what does Carlyle want people to do, what's his solution to it all. Well, how about this (the Morrison's Pill is a cure-all, of which, says Carlyle, with wisdom, there is none):

"If thou ask again, therefore, on the Morrison's-Pill hypothesis, What is to be done? allow me to reply: By thee, for the present, almost nothing. Thou there, the thing for thee to do is, if possible, to cease to be a hollow sounding-shell of hearsays, egoisms, purblind dilettantisms; and become, were it on the infinitely small scale, a faithful discerning soul. Thou shalt descend into thy inner man, and see if there be any traces of a soul there; till then there can be nothing done! O brother, we must if possible resuscitate some soul and conscience in us, exchange our dilettantisms for sincerities, our dead hearts of stone for living hearts of flesh." (Ch. 4)

This is probably wise advice whether Times are Hard or Soft. I'm not sure it would have the salutary effects Carlyle expected, though.

Not just Carlyle. If I understand this correctly, and if I understand The Chimes correctly, this is exactly the lesson Dickens has poor Trotty learn after his ghostly vision of the future. I was puzzled by what Trotty was supposed to learn. Scrooge, after all, is rich and powerful. When he reforms, he can actually do something, like buy a big turkey for his clerk. Trotty is powerless. Well, Trotty ceases to be a hollow-sounding shell and resuscitates his soul and conscience. No small thing.

The Chimes is in some ways a direct response to Carlyle. The red-faced gentleman who was nostalgic for the Middle Ages was actually my first clue, since the first half of Past and Present is an examination of life in a medieval abbey. By the end of The Chimes, though, there seems to be some direct connection to Carlyle's ideas.

I'll have to pay more attention to this in the future. I have been detecting a Carlylean strain in some of Dickens' writing, but since Dickens employed such a wide range of rhetorical moods and was a gifted mimic, I had thought it was parody. Which it may well be, but there is more contact with at least a certain strain of Carlyle than I had imagined.

I clearly need to read Hard Times. And Elizbeth Gaskell. And William Morris. And...

Why, the four-footed worker has already got all that this two-handed one is clamouring for! - Carlyle's terrible ideas

I had this idea that I was going to make some sort of argument about Thomas Carlyle's Past and Present. It's too late; I'm too tired. So instead I'll just describe Carlyle's arguments, as I understand them.

The aristocracy should be our rulers. But the current aristocracy is completely useless. What people do, what they produce, is central to Carlyle's vision of the world. The aristocracy produces fox tails, which they nail to their stable doors. Carlyle does not see this as useful.

Maybe the new Captains of Industry will be able to fill the role of the aristocracy. Get moving, says Carlyle.

The rule of the people, democracy as such, is a joke, a phase England will pass through before the return of true heroic leadership.

Heroic leadership = Oliver Cromwell. Or the Norse chief who was eventually deified as Odin. Or the poet Robert Burns. Ha ha! No, Carlyle is kind of serious about that.

Everyone adores Gurth, the lovable serf in Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, who has a brass collar affixed around his neck as a symbol of his servitude. Doesn't his life basically seem pretty nice? Most people would be better off as serfs. Or, if they're Africans, slaves.

Enough of this. I've made Carlyle sound sufficiently horrible. If I'm unfair, it's because I have some idea of how Carlyle's ideas evolve, and I may be reading his later authoritarianism into Past and Present. Or knowing his later ideas may help me see how they were already present. Let's look at Scott's Gurth again:

"Gurth, a mere swineherd, born thrall of Cedric the Saxon, tended pigs in the wood, and did get some parings of the pork. Why, the four-footed worker has already got all that this two-handed one is clamouring for! How often must I remind you? There is not a horse in England, able and willing to work, but has due food and lodging; and goes about sleek-coated, satisfied in heart." (Ch. 3)

Here's a more humanist idea side by side with a rather different kind. People ought to be treated at least as well as pigs and horses. Possibly better.

Carlyle is very hard to place in his politics. Past and Present was influential with radicals - Marx and Engels, for example - and with more mainstream reformers. Some of his ideas seem fascistic, while others are more classically liberal.

I think he's a greater artist - writer, rhetorician - than a thinker, but I read him for both reasons. His prose is fascinating; his ideas are challenging. Tomorrow, let's see if I can bring Dickens back into this.

Thousand crowned, coroneted, shovel-hatted quackheads - or, the Condition-of-England is not good.

In the 1840s, the condition of England was pretty terrible for a lot of people. England was going through the same sort of transition that we see in China, for example, today – agricultural workers were moving in massive numbers out of the countryside to work in manufacturing and mining. Combine this with the growth in railroads, steamships, and related industries, and the beginnings of a poorly understood population explosion. Massive changes everywhere.

The change must have been bewildering to many people, and the costs incredibly high. The working class, on average, lost ground during the 1830s and 1840s. The average height of working class adults born at this time, for example, declined substantially, meaning that they had received fewer calories as children or expended more in work, or both (the answer turns out to be: both). The same thing happened in the northern United States around the same time. I don’t know what was going on in Germany or France, but the events of 1848 make me suspect things can’t have been any better.

This is all from memory, I’m afraid. It would be fun (fun for me!) to include graphs of coal and iron production, for example, or railroad miles over time, and a lot less fun, but instructive, to see the trends in height or pauperization. But I’ll restrain myself.

Thomas Carlyle, at this point a genuinely popular writer due to the success of this 1837 history of the French Revolution, called the question of working class poverty “the condition-of-England question,” which seems unwieldy to me, but the name is still used by scholars today. I think he introduced the phrase in Chartism (1839), Ch. 1, “Condition-of-England Question.” I would include a quotation, except that I find Chartism nearly incomprehensible.

I can hardly believe that Carlyle was allowed by other journalists and reformers to take the lead on this issue. He is such a strange writer. His rhetoric is exhausting, and his continual irony makes him difficult to interpret.

Here are the first two sentences of his 1843 Past and Present, which are pretty clear for Carlyle:

“The condition of England, on which many pamphlets are now in the course of publication, and many thoughts unpublished are going on in every reflective head, is justly regarded as one of the most ominous, and withal one of the strangest, ever seen in this world. England is full of wealth, of multifarious produce, supply for human want in every kind; yet England is dying of inanition.”

We’re so rich; why are so many so poor? Fair enough. What, then, to make of this, from Chapter 3:

“Fair day's-wages for fair-day's-work! exclaims a sarcastic man; alas, in what corner of this Planet, since Adam first awoke on it, was that ever realised? The day's-wages of John Milton's day's-work, named Paradise Lost and Milton's Works, were Ten Pounds paid by instalments, and a rather close escape from death on the gallows.”

Complaining that Milton was underpaid 150 years earlier seems like a strange issue to bring up at all in the context of today’s impoverished factory workers. The passage continues:

“Consider that: it is no rhetorical flourish; it is an authentic, altogether quiet fact,--emblematic, quietly documentary of a whole world of such, ever since human history began. Oliver Cromwell quitted his farming; undertook a Hercules' Labour and lifelong wrestle with that Lernean Hydracoil, wide as England, hissing heaven-high through its thousand crowned, coroneted, shovel-hatted quackheads; and he did wrestle with it, the truest and terriblest wrestle I have heard of; and he wrestled it, and mowed and cut it down a good many stages, so that its hissing is ever since pitiful in comparison, and one can walk abroad in comparative peace from it;--and his wages, as I understand, were burial under the gallows-tree near Tyburn Turnpike, with his head on the gable of Westminster Hall, and two centuries now of mixed cursing and ridicule from all manner of men.” (Ch. 3)

Did anyone actually read all of that? Well, it’s actually part of why I read Carlyle – that’s some prose , all right. The point, a point, is that people are not properly rewarded for their work, not in the 17th century, and not now. Carlyle is going to spend the rest of the book arguing for a sort of religion of work. Boy, his book is full of bad ideas. Tomorrow, I’ll try to see what some of them are.

I was inspired to read Past and Present, by the way by So Many Books’ notes on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s notes on the book.

I can prove it, by tables - in which I discover that The Chimes is about something other than what I thought it would be about

In The Chimes (1844), an old porter, Trotty Veck, has an eventful New Year's Eve. As a result of either supernatural forces or a combination of stress and indigestion, he is shown a horrible vision of the future which leads him to reform his selfish ways.

This sounds a bit, just a bit, like A Christmas Carol, published the Christmas before, with two minor changes. First, Trotty, unlike Scrooge, is poor, and second, he's a fine fellow with no selfish ways whatsoever. Maybe these are not such minor differences. They sure do muddle the story, although not to the extent of the last Dickens Christmas novella, The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain (1848), which approaches incomprehensibility. I suspect that running a poor man through Scrooge's trials was a challenge Dickens set for himself in The Chimes. Anyway, it allowed him to get at something else, something obscured in A Christmas Carol.

Early in the story, Trotty meets the three fellows to the left; Trotty's the one with the rumpled hat. The three gentlemen are investigating Trotty's supper of tripe.

"'But who eats tripe?' said Mr. Filer, looking round. 'Tripe is without exception the least economical, and the most wasteful article of consumption that the markets of this country can by possibility produce... I find that the waste on that amount of tripe , if boiled, would victual a garrison of five hundred men for five months of thirty-one days each, and a February over. The Waste, the Waste!'" (Ch. 1 aka "First Quarter")

Ah ha, Mr. Filer seems to be some sort of Utilitarian. The second fellow is another kind of reformer - a magistrate who is determined, whatever the problem, starvation, young mothers, suicide, to Put It Down. And the third is perhaps a nostalgist, or perhaps something else:

"'The good old times, the good old times,' repeated the gentleman.' What times they were! They were the only times. It's of no use talking about any other times, or discussing what the people are in these times. You don't call these, times, do you? I don't. Look into Strutt's Costumes, and see what a Porter used to be, in any of the good old English reigns.'

'He hadn't, in his very best circumstances, a shirt to his back, or a stocking to his foot; and there was scarcely a vegetable in all England for him to put into his mouth,' said Mr. Filer. 'I can prove it, by tables.'"

You tell him, Filer! I was actually planning to save my tables for later in the week. This talk of how things were better in the olden days by the unnamed gentleman with the red face and blue coat* sounds suspiciously like it was drawn from another book from the previous year, Thomas Carlyle's Past and Present. Which means - and there's more evidence than just this - that The Chimes is not just about charity or compassion or combatting one's selfishness.

No, this is a topical novel. A novel about social issues. A Condition-of-England novel! That's what Carlyle called England's Hard Times, the Condition-of-England question. For some reason, it stuck, and scholars still use it. I felt perfectly happy floundering around in the swamp - no, mire - no, no, cesspool - strike all that, crystalline fountain - of Victorian religion last week, and since many countries seem to be facing a new round of Hard Times, why not test my ignorance about the Condition-of-England question. Tomorrow: what exactly is Thomas Carlyle going on and on and on about?

* A little mystery with this fellow. He's never named, and later in the book only mentioned once more. My first question for The Valve: who is he?

I hope I'm attracting people to the Chimes event at The Valve, rather than scaring them away. I think those passages up there are hilarious.