All posts tagged 1898

Hawaiʻi: a kingdom crossing oceans @ the British Museum

I didn’t read the press and publicity stuff closely enough so I vaguely thought this would be a general exhibition about historical Hawaiian art and culture – but I was wrong. It’s far more structured, nuanced and focused than that.

Featherwork and ornaments that evoke a gathering of ali‘i (chiefs) on display in ‘Hawaiʻi: a kingdom crossing oceans’ at the British Museum © The Trustees of the British Museum (photo by MKH)

A meeting of kings

The centrepiece of the show is that 200 years ago, in 1824, King Kamehameha II and Queen Kamāmalu became the first Hawaiian monarchs to visit the UK. It took them and ten of their courtiers 5 months (November 1823 to May 1824) to sail here on a Royal Navy ship and when they arrived they were treated with the courtesy and respect according any visiting monarch.

They met with the recently crowned British monarch, King George IV (crowned July 1821), and exchanged gifts: they gave our king beautiful hand-made cloaks, and received in return a silver teapot and a watch, among other luxury objects. They were dressed in the latest fashions, had their portraits painted by the court painter John Hayter, went to the theatre, were even the subject of the usual scathing regency satirical cartoons.

Portraits, cartoons and sumptuous gifts are all included here, along with a map of their route (they stopped at Buenos Aires along the way, and handed out gifts there, too).

Portrait of King Kamehameha II (left) and Queen Kamāmalu (right). Hand-coloured lithographs by John Hayter © The Trustees of the British Museum

Tragically – disastrously – after a few weeks, the handsome young king and queen both caught measles and died from it. Their courtiers returned to Hawaiʻi with the gifts but without a king, who was promptly replaced by his younger brother Kauikeaouli, who became King Kamehameha III and went on to reign for 30 years (June 1825 to December 1854).

It is this extraordinary event which provides the centrepiece of this exhibition. The show can be divided into the following parts:

1. Background facts

It opens with a brief recap of the history of Hawaii, complete with maps. Here’s a summary:

Hawaiʻi consists of 137 volcanic islands spanning 1,500 miles that make up almost the entire Hawaiian archipelago (the exception is Midway Atoll).

The eight main islands, from northwest to southeast, are Niʻihau, Kauaʻi, Oʻahu, Molokaʻi, Lānaʻi, Kahoʻolawe, Maui, and Hawaiʻi, after which the state is named. The last is often called the Big Island or Hawaiʻi Island to avoid confusion with the state or archipelago.

The archipelago was settled between 1000 and 1200 by Polynesian seafarers navigating by the stars and following the flight of migratory birds. Over the centuries, the islands became the seats of numerous independent chiefdoms.

In 1778, British explorer James Cook was the first known non-Polynesian to arrive at the archipelago (he was to go on to be killed here, after a tragic cultural misunderstanding). The early British influence is reflected in the Hawaiian state flag, which contains a Union Jack.

King Kamehameha I, also known as Kamehameha the Great, unified the Hawaiian Islands by force and diplomacy, establishing the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi in 1795 and completing unification by 1810, creating a single, powerful monarchy from separate chiefdoms.

It was his son, Kamehameha II, who succeed Kamehameha in 1819, who undertook the journey to Britain. the backstory is that in April 1822, English missionary William Ellis arrived with a schooner, the Prince Regent, to add to the King’s growing collection of ships (!). It was a gift from George IV the King of Great Britain and Kamehameha II wrote to thank him, requesting closer diplomatic ties. It was from this gesture and this correspondence that the idea was born for the royal court to journey to the other side of the planet to meet the British king.

Display of Akua hulu manu (feathered gods) in ‘Hawaiʻi: a kingdom crossing oceans’ at the British Museum © The Trustees of the British Museum (photo by MKH)

Language and pronunciation

The Hawaiian language is referred to as Ölelo Hawali and terms and phrases from it are used throughout the exhibition.

Apparently, the correct pronunciation of Hawaiʻi is to insert a glottal stop before the final ‘e’ sound. What is a glottal stop? Imagine saying in a broad Cockney accent, the following phrase: ‘Wotta lotta little bottles’ so that it sounds like ‘Wo’a lo’a ‘li’el bo’els’, where you don’t voice the t sound. Same with Hawa [glottal stop] ee.

2. Hawaiʻi culture, beliefs and crafts

Having painted in this background, the exhibition then devotes the first big space to giving an overview of the gods, traditional beliefs, arts and crafts of the Hawaiian people at around the time of the royal visit. (Here we discover, amid much else, that the British Museum holds one of the largest collections of Hawaiian objects in the world outside of Hawaiʻi.)

Wooden ki‘i (images) that embody kua (gods) in ‘Hawaiʻi: a kingdom crossing ocean’ at the British Museum © The Trustees of the British Museum (photo by MKH)

Highlights include:

  • a nine-foot kiʻi (image) of the god Kū, the god of warfare and governance, dressed with a contemporary loincloth and standing atop a pole
  • a magnificent ʻahu ʻula (feathered cloak) sent in 1810 by the first king of unified Hawaiʻi, Kamehameha I, to King George III, the largest known example of its kind

There are striking statues of wooden gods (see above), wooden bowls, plumed hats, gorgeous cloaks made from bird feathers, and a wall of coloured barkcloths.

kapa (barkcloth) pieces on display in Hawaiʻi: a kingdom crossing oceans at the British Museum © The Trustees of the British Museum (photo by MKH)

Barkcloth: Kapa (barkcloth) is made from the inner bark (bast) of the paper mulberry and other plant fibres. As a medium, kapa is a connector between the land, the people and the gods. Different forms of kapa had many uses, from everyday life to ritual practice, including as chiefly garments, spacial dividers, blankets and wrappings for bones.

Helmets: Mahiole (helmets) were worn in battle and in ceremonial contexts, often together with ʻahu ʻula (feathered cloaks and capes). The head has particular significance in Hawaiʻi as one of three centres in the body where the aumākua (deified ancestors) hover. Each helmet is unique and identifies the bearer as a chief. The structure is woven from the aerial roots of a climbing plant called ʻieʻie and is often adorned with feathers.

Gods: Origin stories tell that the islands were birthed by the gods. High chiefs were manifestations of the gods on earth. Through rituals, chefs could protect the people and ensure the land’s abundance. In turn, the people revered their chiefs and cultivated the land, gathering materials and nurturing resources. Craftspeople created precious items that honoured their chief.

Kū and Lono: Kū is a Hawaiian god whose realm includes warfare and governance and that in the Hawaiian ritual calendar, the season of Kū begins in January-February and ends in October-November. At that point Ku is replaced by Lono, a deity associated with harvest, peace and recreation. (So we are currently in the season of Kū.)

Here’s one of the exhibition’s carved wooden artefacts, which experts thinks depicts a chief, as indicated by the loincloth round his waist and the feathered headdress.

ʻUmeke kiʻi (bowl with figure) © The Trustees of the British Museum

In addition, there are feathered cloaks worn by chiefs, powerful shark-toothed weapons, spears and clubs, and much more.

3. The meeting of kings

As described above, this is the centrepiece of the show and includes displays of ceremonial cloaks, lithographs of the king and queen, portraits and pictures of them at the theatre, the silver teapot, the silver watch and a couple of satirical cartoons depicting a lecherous King George groping a buxom native queen, in the comically gross style of Regency cartoons.

Installation view of ‘Hawaiʻi a kingdom crossing oceans’ at the British Museum showing the gallery devoted to the royal visit © The Trustees of the British Museum (photo by MKH)

Red

The exhibition displays a large Hawaa’ian feathered cloak near to George IV’s coronation surcoat and this triggers fascinating thoughts about a) the persistence of monarchy and king worship across the most diverse societies, b) the need these have for grand costumes and regalia, and c) the importance of the colour red. In fact red, as you can see from the images, is the really dominant colour of the exhibition: you can see for yourself that the cloaks in particular include yellow and black patterning, but it’s almost always against a core background colour of red.

King George IV’s coronation surcoat (left) and a cloak belonging to King Kamehameha II (right) displayed so you can make a direct comparison of size, shape, colour and impact, in Hawaiʻi: a kingdom crossing oceans @ the British Museum (photos by the author)

4. Alliance with Britain

Having established the close connection between Great Britain and Hawaiʻi which existed from its discovery by the West, the exhibition then explains that for 70 or so years after the 1824 visit, the two countries maintained close relations. When a zealous Royal Navy officer, Captain Lord George Paulet of HMS Carysfort, in 1843 illegally occupied Hawaiʻi and tried to formally annex the kingdom for Britain, King Kamehameha III wrote to the British government who recalled Paulet and assured the King of ongoing Hawaiian independence.

Negotiations were already underway which led in November of the same year (1843) to Great Britain and France signing the Anglo-Franco Proclamation, a joint declaration that formally recognized the independence and sovereignty of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi. This agreement committed both nations to never take possession of Hawaiian territory, either directly or as a protectorate.

There’s a copy of the Proclamation in the exhibition, on loan from The National Archives and the curators tell us that the precise date, 28 November 1843, is still celebrated in Hawai’i today as Lā Kū’oko’a (Independence Day).

5. Annexation by the US

However, as we progress through the exhibition, the next key moment in the nation’s history came when America annexed Hawaiʻi. Like all historical events, this was more complex and fraught than it is now presented, with a background of political problems within Hawaiʻi exacerbated by the commercial interests of European and American businesses which owned extensive sugar and pineapple plantations. In 1893 a group of Western businessmen persuaded the local American agent to allow US marines to take part in the (peaceful) overthrow of the native government and to establish the Republic of Hawaii; and then lobbied Congress and the Senate to formally annex the islands, which the United States did 5 years later, in 1898. (Just worth reminding ourselves that the nearest part of the Hawaiian archipelago is 2,000 miles from the American mainland.)

The Hawaiian monarch, Queen Liliʻuokalani, protested against the coup but, when weapons were found in the palace which might have been used by loyalist forces, was placed under house arrest. She appealed to the British government, invoking the Anglo-Franco Proclamation but, to our shame, and as so often, we did nothing to defend the monarchy we had so enthusiastically hosted in 1824. Instead, in 1895 Queen Liliʻuokalani was forced to abdicate, thus ending the Hawaiian monarchy.

Even at the time, there was a great deal of debate in America, among politicians and the press, about the rights and wrongs of the coup and President Grover Cleveland opposed annexation. However, he was replaced by President William McKinley who pushed for annexation, which formally took place in July 1898. There then followed the inevitable sequence of assimilation whereby, first of all, in February 1900, the Hawaiian Islands became a US ‘incorporated territory’; and then in August 1959, the territory was officially declared America’s 50th state.

(For comparison, the contemporaneous Spanish-American war of 1898 ended with the Treaty of Paris (1898) whereby Spain ceded 1) Puerto Rico, 2) Guam and 3) the Philippines to the United States. The Philippines were a US colony from 1898 until given independence in 1946 whereas Guam and Puerto Rico remain to this day parts of the US as self-governing, ‘unincorporated territories’, meaning people born there are US citizens, they use US currency and passports, but residents can’t vote in presidential elections and have limited representation in Congress.)

And then, just as inevitably, came the modern attack of imperial guilt and in 1993 the US Congress passed the Apology Resolution, apologising for America’s role in the illegal annexation of the Hawaiian nation, which was signed by President Bill Clinton.

Throughout the annexation process the majority of Hawaiians wished to remain independent and this is signalled here in the exhibition by a picture of ʻAuʻa Haunani-Kay Trask (1949 to 2021). Trask was ‘a prominent Native Hawaiian activist, scholar, author and poet who was a leading figure in the Hawaiian sovereignty movement. She was known for her fierce advocacy against US imperialism, the illegal occupation of the Hawaiian Kingdom, and the commodification of Hawaiian culture by the tourism industry.’

Trask is quoted, on the centenary of the annexation in 1993, making the simple statement: ‘We are not American’ and this is the text you see running in lines across this striking portrait, part of a series of 108 photographic portraits of Kānaka Oiwi (Native Hawaiians) made by Hawaiian artist Kapulani Landgraf.

Photo of ʻAuʻa Haunani-Kay Trask in ‘Hawaiʻi: a kingdom crossing oceans’ at the British Museum © Kapulani Landgraf 2025

All of which makes for a thought-provoking read in light of President Trump’s ongoing threats to annex Greenland against the wishes of its (57,000) population…

6. Contemporary Hawaii

After this striking photo of Trask, we enter the final part of the exhibition, which focuses on contemporary Hawaiʻi.

Contemporary arts

I haven’t yet found space to mention that throughout the show, right from the start, the older objects have been interspersed with contemporary works made in the traditional style but made by contemporary Kānaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) artists. These include:

Statue: A statue of historical figure Kekuaokalani, Liholiho’s cousin, who rebelled against the King’s decision to overturn the ‘ai kapu religious system. He was defeated and killed by Liholiho’s forces at the battle of Kuamo’o. The statue was made by contemporary carver Rocky Ka’iouliokahihikolo’Ehu Jensen after the traditional manner of articulated figures depicted in early drawings of Ahu’ena, defender of Hawaiian gods and faith.

Drum: Right at the start of the exhibition there’s a pahu or drum. Drums were thought to have been brought to Hawaiʻi by one of the first ancestors, named Laamaikahiki. The ancestors travelled from a place they called Kahiki, possibly in the Society or Marquesas Islands. But the point is that the drum in question isn’t an antique but was hand-carved by contemporary Native Hawaiian artist Dennis Kanale Keawe.

Akeanaliʻi by Dennis Kanaʻe Keawe (b. 1944). Made of kamani wood, shark skin, ʻaha (coconut cordage), carbon black soot coating, 2020

Contemporary videos

In the same spirit, sprinkled throughout the show are four or five short videos which show contemporary living practitioners of traditional arts and crafts explaining their practice. Take the drum, above – there’s a 90-second clip of La’akna Perry performing a mele or chant using the drum. Elsewhere:

  • Barkcloth: Hina Kneubuhl, a contemporary maker of kapa (Hawaiian barkcloth), explains how barkcloth is created and decorated, and how contemporary artists draw inspiration from ancestral works.
  • Hula: La’akea Perry, a Hawaiian kumu hula (dance master teacher), explains the importance of hula as a living practice and how it is taught today. He is filmed dancing with a newly made version of a ‘ulī’ulī (dance rattle), next to an historic example.

There’s also a general soundscape which floats across the displays, featuring the sound of waves breaking over lava beds and the sound of wind blowing through a coconut grove. All very soothing given that outside the Museum, the rain was pouring down in the gritty streets of central London.

Contemporary problems

No doubt there are all kinds of issues and ideas and things which could be written about contemporary Hawaii. The exhibition has selected a handful of areas where the state faces severe challenges and highlights how locals are trying to address them. these are mostly deep environmental issues which made for depressing reading.

1. Birds: Many of the mea kupuna or ancestral treasures on display in the exhibition – the many cloaks and other objects like coronets – were made from feathers taken from native birds. They were gathered sustainably – meaning the feathers were plucked in moderation from live birds which were then released – from species like the ‘ō’o, which was prized for its bright yellow plumage.

Today, many of Hawai’i’s unique bird species are extinct, including the ‘o’o. Those that survive are critically endangered. Avian diseases introduced from overseas have had a devastating effect, while natural habitats have been impacted by intensifying human activity. The art of featherwork continues but makers mostly use feathers from other bird species, often dyed.

2. The sea: There are almost one hundred Hawaiian fish hooks in the British Museum’s collection, reflecting the longstanding importance of fishing in Hawai’i, and also indicating the close interaction between early British crews and local fishing communities. There’s a display showing hooks with different shapes and materials designed to snare particular species of fish; the largest hook on show here was used to catch sharks.

Again, the contemporary situation is dire. Commercial overfishing in Hawaiian waters has led to a significant decline in fish populations and contributed to food insecurity for local people.

Fishing hooks in ‘Hawaiʻi: a kingdom crossing oceans’ at the British Museum (photo by the author)

3. Agriculture: Kalo (taro) is such an important crop in Hawai’i that it is described as an ancestor in origin stories. Its tuber is pounded to make a dish called poi. But over the century of American occupation much of Hawai’i’s agricultural land was turned into monoculture plantations of sugar cane and pineapples. Some communities are now reclaiming land, aiming to restore the environment by planting crops like kalo, but they’ve a mountain to climb.

7. Ownership

Quite often at these sorts of exhibitions the curators have to apologise for the fact that lots of the artefacts were looted or stolen from their original owners – so it’s nice to visit an exhibition where both sides were surprisingly polite and respectful. All the artefacts in the royal visit section are well attested as gifts from the royal delegation and many of the other arts and crafts objects are on loan from museums in Hawaii. The relatively small number of objects which were possibly stolen by naval officers or missionaries are all carefully marked and indicated.

Indeed the Museum goes out of its way to explain that the entire show was assembled in collaboration with Native Hawaiian stewards. Apparently this extended to an opening ceremony on the day it opened which started with a native Hawaiian ceremony to greet the sunrise, and then progressed to blessing this space which contains so many objects crafted by the ancestors.

And, as my summary indicates, wherever possible the curators have used terms and phrases from the ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian language) alongside the English captions. The entire thing radiates respect and sensitivity.

8. Hope

Is there any hope for the future? Well, obviously not, but in order to live we all have to pretend there is. And so the exhibition ends with the projection onto a wall of a video showing four young Hawaiian students reciting a poem of hope for the future written by Hawaiian poet Brandy Nälani McDougall. The pattern and rhythm echo a traditional chant we heard earlier in the exhibition, another example of the way the curators, and their Hawaiian advisers, have tried to tie ancient and modern together into a living fabric.

Wall-sized video of students from Kamehameha School reciting the poem by Brandy Nälani McDougall in ‘Hawaiʻi: a kingdom crossing oceans’ at the British Museum (photo by the author)

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by Simon on January 17, 2026  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on January 17, 2026

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2026/01/17/hawai%ca%bbi-a-kingdom-crossing-oceans-the-british-museum/

H.G. Wells reviews

Amory threw his coat and hat on the floor, loosened his collar, and took a Wells novel at random from the shelf. ‘Wells is sane,’ he thought…
(young Amory Blaine in This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald, page 113)

1890s

1895 The Time Machine – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701

1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers that the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids

1897 The Invisible Man – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders

1898 The War of the Worlds – the Martians invade, landing in Surrey and advancing on London, destroying everything with their Heat Rays and Black Smoke, a gripping account told by a terrified survivor

1899 When The Sleeper Wakes – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future

1899 A Story of the Days To Come – set in the same London of the future described in The Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth fall in love but descend into poverty and so experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps

1900s

1900 Love and Mr Lewisham – how the promising working class student Lewisham goes off the rails and ruins his life by falling in love with the uneducated pretty young assistant of a fraudulent ‘medium’, ending with them living in a poky flat and she has a baby

1901 The First Men in the Moon – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites who inhabit it

1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth – two scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, leading to a giants’ rebellion against the ‘little people’

1905 Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul – long, laboured account of boyhood, teens and twenties of the dim protagonist, Arthur Kipps, who escapes from apprenticeship in a soul-destroying haberdasher shop when he inherits a fortune, only to find himself forced to choose between two lovers, his uneducated childhood sweetheart or his ambitious, arty, wood-carving teacher

1906 In the Days of the Comet – a passing comet trails gasses through earth’s atmosphere which bring about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford

1908 The War in the Air – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Bun Hill in Kent, manages by accident to be an eye-witness to the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end

1909 Tono-Bungay – George Ponderevo’s long account of his boyhood then rise to fortune on the coat tails of his fraudulent huckster uncle Edward, packed with negative analyses of contemporary England and upsetting descriptions of his unhappy marriage and love affairs

1909 Ann Veronica – sympathetic portrait of a young woman rebelling against her conventional father and trying to make her way in London who falls into the clutches of a predatory blackmailer before – disappointingly – falling in love with an intelligent he-man who elopes with her to the continent

1910s

1910 The History of Mr Polly – the funniest of the social comedies, following the mishaps of his cheerful protagonist, Alfred Polly, who, characteristically, marries the wrong woman, endures increasing misery trying to make a go of a small-town haberdashery, until he breaks free and finds happiness with the jolly landlady of a country pub

1911 The New Machiavelli – supposedly a novel about contemporary politics which, in reality, is another defence of free love, a long justification by politician Richard Remington of his decision to abandon his wife and political career in order to run off to the Continent with young graduate Isabel Oliver (transparently based on Wells’s own elopement with the young author Amber Reeves)

1914 The World Set Free – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via the stories of a number of characters who are central to events

About Wells

1920s – Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf – 1. Reading and Writing (1) – Virginia Woolf strongly criticised Wells as one of the Edwardian ‘materialists’ who she was reacting against, three famous essays gathered in this selection, namely Modern Fiction (1919), Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown (1923) and Character in Fiction (1924).

1932 – Stamboul Train by Graham Greene where Wells is satirised in the character of Quin Savory, a popular, middle-brow novelist who is depicted as a ‘populist vulgarian’.

1932 – Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, who in letters and notes explained that his dystopia was to some extent a satirical rejection of Wells’s optimistic utopias

1982 The Culminating Ape by Peter Kemp – fascinating, if rather dogged, examination of recurring themes and images in Wells’s writing

2011 A Man of Parts by David Lodge – novel about Wells in old age during the Second World War looking back over his career, focusing mainly on his numerous affairs ,with (as in all Lodge) lots of graphic sex

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by Simon on January 8, 2025  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on January 8, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/01/08/h-g-wells-reviews/

Rupert of Hentzau by Anthony Hope (1898)

Thus Rudolf Rassendyll set out again for the walls of Strelsau, through the forest of Zenda. And ahead of him, with an hour’s start, galloped the Count of Luzau-Rischenheim, again a man, and a man with resolution, resentment, and revenge in his heart. The game was afoot now; who could tell the issue of it? (Rupert of Hentzau, Chapter 6)

Ha! Buckle your swashes and tighten your bodice – wicked Prince Rupert is conspiring his return to the central European country of Ruritania while the Queen’s loyal servants, led by heroic Englishman Rudolf Rassendyll, are hot on his heels to foil his dastardly plot!

Tone and control

Whereas the first person voice was perfect for the short pacey Prisoner of Zenda (1894), the sequel –  Rupert of Hentzau (1898) – is both longer, a bit more confusing, and a bit more revealing.

Plot

In the first novel the king of Zenda is kidnapped by his cousin, wicked Black Michael, and his remote English cousin Rudolf Rassendyll is drafted in to impersonate the king at his coronation and in his wooing of the beautiful princess Flavia, until the real king – trapped in the castle at Zenda (hence ‘the prisoner of Zenda’) – can be released. There is a serious motive for the action – wicked Michael’s kidnapping and threat to murder the real king of a European country – lending weight and excitement to numerous tense moments.

In the sequel the spring for the plot is much slighter – Flavia, still in love with English Rudolf (though now married to the real king of Ruritania), sends him a letter affirming her love but saying that, out of duty to her country, they must stop corresponding. The messenger carrying this letter is mugged by an underling of the dashing but wicked prince Rupert of Henzau and then the whole of the 200-page romance which follows describes the convoluted attempts of Rudolf, his manservant James, and the small group of noble assistants from the first novel, to foil Rupert’s plan to show the letter to the king and thus ruin Queen Flavia’s reputation and hasten the ill king’s demise. Mwah ha ha.

So this one is all about an incriminating love letter, compared to the motive in the first novel just not weighty enough to carry 200 pages packed with intrigue and complicated plot twists. A flimsy pretext which smacks of the kind of elaborate melodramas popular on the Victorian stage.

Narrator

The subtitle of the novel is ‘From the memoirs of Fritz von Tarlenheim’ and the narrative starts off being in the voice – the rather stilted Germanic voice – of this servant of the Queen of Ruritania. But after he is mugged in and the Queen’s incriminating letter is stolen from him, the action moves to other places – the capital city Strelsau and the castle at Zenda – which he has to strain to accommodate into a first person narrative.

In fact it strains too far and these other chapters are effectively told by the 3rd person omniscient narrator with a few token ‘or so I learned later’s thrown in to try and hold it together. So the text moves from 1st person to 3rd person, sometimes confusingly, and this distinguishes it from the first novel, told by the hero in a first person narrative that unfolds at breathless pace.

Chivalry

Whereas the first novel dealt with a masculine power struggle, the second one is driven by what seems to us a largely preposterous amount of effort to save the virtue and reputation of the Queen. If chivalry is a mask for the repression of women as free agents, if it is the lie which men in power tell themselves to conceal their own domination of women, then this novel reaches a kind of giddy height of chivalry/misogyny.

A number of high powered men pledge their lives to the service of the Queen and vow to die for her if necessary and, indeed, a number of men are (unbelievably) killed in order to retrieve this simple love letter. And yet the result of all their sacrifices is to leave the Queen trapped, powerless and unhappy. It is the doublethink of ‘Chivalry’ laid bare.

In its closing passages the novel goes to tremendous lengths to showcase the extraordinary gentlemanliness of its hero, the Englishman Rudolf Rassendyll. He is clearly held up as a role model, a fantasy figure, the absolutely perfect gentleman, driven solely by honour and concern not to hurt or offend others.

At an obvious level the novel is romantic escapism because the reader identifies with this perfect man, placed in numerous situations of physical and moral danger, who survives all of them with poise and control. Not unlike his grandson James Bond.

But at a slightly deeper level, the novel is escapist in the way it ignores all the social problems associated with the system which produces the Rudolf Rassendylls of this world ie the stunning economic and social inequality of late-Victorian England.

Not only is it escapist to vicariously identify with the all-conquering hero; and escapist to imaginatively inhabit the childishly simplified world of Ruritania, a world where only about 10 people matter and everyone else is a harmless yokel who can be bought off with a few gold coins; it is just as escapist to enter an imaginative realm where the fancy scruples of the hero appear to justify the grotesquely unjust society of 1890s England. The text allows us to escape the adult world in multiple ways.

The year after its publication the Boer War would break out and reveal the pitiful state of men living in Britain’s cities, badly shaking even conservatives’ faith in ‘the System’. And a decade later the world would plunge into the irremediable disaster of the Great War, which destroyed belief in precisely the values this novel epitomises.

In a deft piece of footwork, Hope contrives the final words of the novel to be ‘God save the Queen’. I felt like bursting into applause at this pirouette of patriotism. Yet it is the completely unquestioning nature of the text, the lack of any troubling elements, of any psychological depth or conflict, which means it is now a children’s book, its naivete about the world, society, human nature, men and women, meaning that, in fact, even modern children would find it lame.

Its appeal is in its deft combination of pure narrative drive – the excitements and tensions of a page-turning plot – with its deliciously prelapsarian empty-headedness .

Ruritania morphs into Fascist chic

Turn of the century Ruritania conjured for its Victorian readers a remote country which magically combined all the elements of period romance with modern excitements – thus medieval towns, castles and swordfights mingled with modern steam trains, telegraphs and revolvers.

The name Ruritania quickly became associated with the piddly royal family or upper class of a wholly inconsequential country who take themselves with comical seriousness, a seriousness inversely proportional to the country’s complete unimportance in the great affairs of Europe, let alone, of course, compared to the mighty British Empire of the books’ author and readers.

In modern times it is this quality of preening narcissism, of overdressed flunkies, of absurd ceremonial which has led the adjective Ruritanian to be applied comic-opera regimes like Colonel Gaddafi’s in Libya or to countless African or Latin American dictatorships. And the baddy, Prince Rupert, is as gallant as he is amoral, dressed in the finery of an officer in the Guards. But even though the fashion sense has caught up with the 20th century, the mindset remains as brainless as before, with the crushing problems of the world in the 1930s resolving down to two men having a swordfight around a large dungeon.

It is striking to see the change which comes over wicked prince Rupert by the time of the classic black and white movie version (1937). Now there is a whole new class of European baddy, immaculately dressed in black leather, suave and sophisticated and thoroughly evil. Nazi chic has replaced the old world courtesy of a middle European Uhlan.

Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. as Rupert of Henzau in the 1937 movie version of The Prisoner of Zenda

Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. as Rupert of Henzau in the 1937 movie version of The Prisoner of Zenda

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by Simon on January 24, 2014  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on January 24, 2014

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Youth by Joseph Conrad (1898)

Youth is a shortish short story (30 pages) which Conrad completed in June 1898, notable because it sees the debut of Charles Marlow, Conrad’s alter-ego, the fictional narrator of this and his two most famous stories, Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. Marlow’s arrival marks a step change in the quality of Conrad’s writing.

Marlow enforces narrative discipline

Because the story is narrated by a character, not by the omniscient narrator he’d used in all his previous works, Conrad has to make a big effort to rein in the stylistic excesses I have described in previous posts. For example, Conrad’s short story The Return strikes me as being almost unbearable to read for its sustained note of manic hysteria. In The Return Conrad uses free indirect style to take us inside the mind of Alvan Hervey as his wife’s infidelity triggers what feels, trapped inside his head, like a nervous breakdown. In this respect, The Return is just another outing for the hysterical, panic-stricken, horror-obsessed nihilism which characterises all of Conrad’s fiction up to this point.

It is with immense relief that one turns to Youth because this hysteria is reined right in and Conrad’s stylistic excesses, though still noticeable at moments, are in general held in abeyance in order to foreground the practical, no-nonsense voice of bluff Englishman, Charles Marlow.

The plot

The plot is simple. The 20-year-old Marlow is second mate on the Judea, contracted to take coal from Newcastle to Bangkok. The boat encounters a number of problems which repeatedly delay its departure from England, then it hits storms off Africa, and then the coal in the hold begins to spontaneously burn as they enter the Indian Ocean.

Eventually the crew are forced to abandon ship, and Marlow docks in the East having commanded a 14-foot ship’s boat and crew of two for the last week of the ill-fated journey.

Style

The style is blessedly restrained. Both the character of Marlow and the nature of the ‘story’ i.e. a detailed account of the maritime problems encountered by the ship – dictate a much more factual style than anything Conrad had previously written.

We had been pulling this finishing spell for eleven hours. Two pulled, and he whose turn it was to rest sat at the tiller. We had made out the red light in that bay and steered for it, guessing it must mark some small coasting port. We passed two vessels, outlandish and high-sterned, sleeping at anchor, and, approaching the light, now very dim, ran the boat’s nose against the end of a jutting wharf.

Shorter sentences. Fewer subordinate clauses. Much more factual content. A lot less tautology or redundancy. A blessed relief, though the old Conrad is still there, straining at the leash:

O youth! The strength of it, the faith of it, the imagination of it! To me she was not an old rattle-trap carting about the world a lot of coal for a freight — to me she was the endeavour, the test, the trial of life. I think of her with pleasure, with affection, with regret.

There was not a light, not a stir, not a sound. The mysterious East faced me, perfumed like a flower, silent like death, dark like a grave.

This was the East of the ancient navigators, so old, so mysterious, resplendent and somber, living and unchanged, full of danger and promise.

But the familiar lyricism, the repetition and apposition, is justified by the fundamental idea – that this is the character Marlow’s paean to the vividness and optimism of his naive and romantic youth. Well, just about justified.

Framing device

Youth starts with the identical setting made famous by Heart of Darkness, i.e. after a fine dinner in London, five mature and successful men of the world who have all experienced the sea sit and smoke cigars, chatting. The anonymous narrator is one of them; he sets this scene, describes the other men a little, and then lets Marlow begin his tale. This frame device, the tale-within-a-tale, does several things:

  • It distances the tale. No matter what happens we know that Marlow survived and is telling it to us now. Though we are caught up in the events he narrates, we are not actually lost in a moment-by-moment helter-skelter of hysteria with a totally unpredictable outcome, as we are in the key scenes of Almayer or An Outpost of the Islands.
  • Marlow is telling his tale to a suave and knowing audience. This has an important effect in toning down the hysterical style of the earlier novels and stories. Although Marlow is still given lines of improbable lyricism, Conrad is conscious of them, limits them, and excuses them – Marlow himself justifies them as he speaks them – because this is a tale of high spirits and boyish optimism.
  • Marlow is English. Unlike the protagonists of Almayer and Outcast and Outpost and Karain. It is as if hysteria is characteristic of the lesser Europeans, the Dutch and Belgians. Conrad emphasises Marlow’s Englishness by making him use the upper-class slang of the day – ‘Pon my soul’, ‘The deuce of a time’. And the Englishness of both the narrator and the audience guarantees a sang-froid, a stiff upper-lip mentality which limits and disciplines Conrad. Enforces restraint. And his prose is all the more effective for it.

For those who like patterns, Conrad published Youth, Heart of Darkness and The End of The Tether in one volume (in 1902), very conscious that the three stories represent a neat schema of youth, maturity and old age.

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by Simon on September 17, 2012  •  Permalink
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https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2012/09/17/youth-joseph-conrad/

Tales of Unrest by Joseph Conrad (1898)

After his first two novels Conrad turned to shorter forms, to novellas and short stories. He followed 1897’s novella, The Nigger of the Narcissus, with five short stories collected in 1898’s Tales of Unrest, being:

The Idiots

Conrad’s first short story, written March 1896.

The Lagoon

What Conrad considered his first authentic short story, written in July 1896. A white man stops at a gloomy lagoon where a solitary Malay has his hut along with his woman. The woman is dying of fever. Through the night the Malay tells the story of their doomed love, how they ran away from the king and queen who owned her as a servant girl, how they were pursued, how his brother gave his life to save them. At dawn she dies and the man is left utterly bereft.

Quintessential Conrad – a tale of utter bleakness, told in lush, decadent, tropical prose.

An Outpost of Progress

Published in two parts in Cosmopolis magazine in June and July 1897, Conrad considered this his best short story.

It is set in the Congo, drawing on his experiences there seven years earlier, and strongly linked with Heart of Darkness i.e. pretty much the same plot. Two white men are left high up the river, deep in the Dark Continent, to run a trading station. They fall to pieces physically and mentally and the end comes when a group of African slavers steal away their native staff, leaving ivory tusks in payment.

Having lost their self-respect they go quickly downhill, bicker about nothing until, after a trivial argument, one shoots the other then hangs himself.

Conrad all over. The tropical setting; the complete degradation of the protagonists; the vision of futility; the lush prose.

It is a bit mind-boggling that ‘An Outpost’ appeared just at the moment of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, June and July 1897. On 22 June there was a vast procession of colourfully-dressed colonial subjects through London to an open air service outside St Paul’s cathedral. On 23 June the Queen met some young Indian princes. On 2 July the Queen surveyed her colonial troops at Windsor. Both the June and July editions of Cosmopolis included length celebrations of the greatness and benefits of Empire (some quoted in this article). The Times published Kipling’s great poem, Recessional, on 17 July.

And over exactly this same period, Conrad was publishing this bleak nihilistic tale. You wonder how he avoided being lynched!

The Return

Completed in early 1897. In his preface Conrad says he hated writing this story. Arrogant, successful middle-aged businessman Alvan Hervey returns on the Tube to his smart West London house to find a message from his wife saying she has left him for a magazine editor. He is devastated, his world collapses, everything he has valued is torn away from under him etc.

He is just starting to feel like all the turmoil which Conrad heroes usually luxuriate in, when his wife, embarrassingly, returns. She’s changed her mind!

How does Conrad make such a slight incident (man comes home, reads note, is unhappy, wife walks back in) last for 60 pages?

With great torrents of prose describing Hervey’s anguish, mental collapse, fury, despair. Despite its untypical setting (London) it is classic overripe, hysterical Conrad, redolent of Strindberg or of a strung-out existentialist play like Jean-Paul Sartre’s play, Huis Clos.

Karain: A Memory

Published in Blackwoods Magazine in November 1897.

From the safety of Blighty the narrator remembers the days when he was a gun smuggler around the Malay archipelago. The striking figure of the native chief, Karain. Fine figure of a man. Everyone loved him. Yet he seemed somehow nervous. One stormy night (lol), he swims aboard the white trader’s schooner and tells them his story, viz:

A Dutch trader steals away a woman from his tribe. He and his best friend vow to track them down and erase the shame. For years they are on the trail together, travelling all over the archipelago in pursuit. But slowly the beautiful girl’s voice and then figure come to him in dreams and visions, talking, defending herself. Finally they find the Dutchman and the girl and his friend gives Karain a rifle and tells him to shoot the white man while he slays the girl with his dagger.

But, as his dearest, oldest friend leaps from the bushes to carry out this plan, Karain is overcome by the secret memory of the voice of the girl and her secret presence. Before he knows what he has done, he has shot his friend. He has spared the vile white man’s life. He gets away. But that night the girl’s voice doesn’t come to him. His friend’s voice and shape come to him. And from that night onwards he is pursued, followed, haunted…!

Conrad excelsis: a frame narrative around a tale of betrayal, despair and haunting.

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by Simon on September 17, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on September 17, 2012

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2012/09/17/tales-of-unrest-joseph-conrad/

The Day’s Work by Rudyard Kipling (1898)

‘Perfect! Perfect! There’s no place like England – when you’ve done your work.’
‘That’s the proper way to look at it, my son.’

Kipling collected the short stories he’d published in various magazines in the mid-1890s into The Day’s Work, published in 1898, the year after Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, the year before the Boer War broke out.

A character in one story, William the Conqueror, about British officers working to relieve famine in India, remarks, ‘It’s all in the day’s work’, and this is the focus of the stories – work, men’s work and duties, generally carried out by pukka junior officers of the Empire on which the Sun Never Sets, or by Kipling’s favourite type of man, the engineer.

That said there’s another consistent thread – personification or ventriloquism. A Walking Delegate and The Maltese Cat are both about horses who talk and organise things. The Ship that Found Itself features not just a talking ship but a ship whose parts speak and argue among themselves. .007 features American steam locomotives who welcome a new recruit to the line.

And comedy. A lot of the stories are good-humoured or contain wry humour, but An Error and My Sunday at Home are both obviously meant to be comedies. (Both are about Americans misunderstanding the English; compare and contrast with the fictions on the same subject of Kipling’s friend, Henry James.)

I’d recommend the first and the last stories as highlighting Kipling’s strengths (powers of imagination and description) and weaknesses (lack of depth, oddness).

The Bridge-Builders (1893) India. Encapsulates two big features of Kipling’s style – masculine, technological accuracy, and disconcerting fantasy. Chief Engineer Findlayson sees the work of three years, a giant bridge across the Ganges, just reaching fulfilment when there is an early monsoon flood which requires a panic-stricken clearing of all the equipment by native coolies. This section crammed with technical descriptions of the bridge and bridge-building. Shivering in the rain, he is persuaded to take a pill of opium and, high as a kite, scrambles onto a boat which is washed downstream and crashes onto a sandbank where he hallucinates a meeting of river animals who stand in for the Hindu pantheon of Gods who discuss the past, present and future of mankind. In their perspective, the deep history of mystical India, all Findlayson’s efforts are transitory…

A Walking Delegate (1894) Vermont. Encapsulates two other features – talking animals (vide the Jungle Books) and right-wing politics. A group of horses in a pasture in New England are chatting in their various American accents, when they are interloped by a bolshie, badly-trained yellow horse from Kansas who encourages them to rise up against their human oppressors.

Premonitions of Animal Farm. Some bitter repartee captures Kipling’s real hatred of trade unions, socialists and agitators who were a growing force in the States and Britain in the 1890s. In Kipling’s view they make the error of putting the individual before the group, failing to realise that we must all work and do our duty in order to keep society safe and peaceful.

The Ship That Found Herself (1895) The North Atlantic. Is this even a story, or a kind of fantasia of a technical diagram come to life? A new cargo steamer, built in Glasgow, steams across the Atlantic and all the parts of the ship are given voices and complain about the strain they’re under. Slowly, painfully, the parts realise that they all interlock and depend on each other to survive. By the time the ship arrives in New York, she is one co-operative unit, all the parts working together.

Identical to how groups of raw recruits are knocked into shape in Kipling’s idealised army. But done with imagination and fantasy…

‘If you lay your ear to the side of the cabin, the next time you are in a steamer, you will hear hundreds of little voices in every direction, thrilling and buzzing, and whispering and popping, and gurgling and sobbing and squeaking exactly like a telephone in a thunder-storm. Wooden ships shriek and growl and grunt, but iron vessels throb and quiver through all their hundreds of ribs and thousands of rivets…’

The Tomb of His Ancestors (1897) India. Young John Chinn, from a Devonshire family of Imperial administrators, arrives with his family regiment. The local tribespeople are called Bhils, they are primitive and childlike and owe ancestral allegiance to previous Chinns who have ruled them. The story is how young Chinn rises to the responsibility of managing them, including hunting the tiger which has been terrorising the tribes and which they’re convinced the spirits of his ancestor rides by night.

He does a man’s job, sir. Made into a BBC drama.

The Devil and the Deep Sea (1895) History of the Haliotis, a steamer with a disreputable history of smuggling, and other criminal activities. Finally, while stealing pearl oysters from government beds somewhere off Malaysia she is arrested by a local government warship, having been damaged by a big warning shell, and the local governor sentences the crew to serve in an inland war. At which point British public opinion is stirred and the British government contacts the governor’s government and pressurises him to release the crew and allow them to return, though still in captivity, to their ship. There they work day and night to rebuild the ruined engines under the instruction of the engineer Wardrop and, finally, manage to break their ropes and limp out of captivity. Along the way they commandeer ie steal a native vessel, towing it to a coaling harbour where they scuttle the Haliotis. Months later the gunship that attacked them runs aground the wreck and is sunk.

A strangely immoral story. I think the engineer Wardrop, is the hero, and the crew are somehow redeemed from their obvious criminality by the intensity of their hard work together.

William the Conqueror, parts one and two. India. There’s a famine in southern India. Martyn and his sister, William, go to help.

She does a man’s work, mainly because she is Kipling’s favourite type of woman – i.e. a man.

•007 ‘The Story of an American Locomotive’ (1897) America. Highly technical account of a new engine, inducted into the group of other engines in a company, and then its pulling and pushing adventures, the only notable one being helping rescue a big locomotive which has been derailed by a pig.

Barely a story. Reminiscent of Thomas the Tank Engine. Despite its railway setting, the tale is essentially that of the new boy at school (or new subaltern in the army), who feels out of place, but is befriended by a more experienced boy/sergeant, and goes on to prove himself in a match/skirmish, and so earns the respect of his peers and takes his place in the hierarchy of the school/regiment.

The Maltese Cat India. An epic polo match told from the point of view of the horses who, whatever their human owners think, are actually planning and running the match.

Bread upon the Waters (1895) Comedy. British coastal waters. The old engineer we met in the story of ‘Brugglesmith‘ (in the 1893 collection, Many Inventions) is sacked from his marine company by unscrupulous directors. Later he points out the unseaworthiness of one of their ships and has the satisfaction of seeing it wrecked, and towing it for salvage, and making a fortune.

This is a hard story to read, with tough Scotch accents and the plot is hard to follow. I think it’s meant to be a comedy but the tone is very badly spoilt for me by the anti-semitic references to the baddie of the story, the scheming Jewish director of the company who is brought low by his own greed. There are one or two other slighting references to Jews scattered through these stories. No thanks. Yuk.

An Error in the Fourth Dimension (1894) Comedy. A rich American, Wilton Sargent, comes to England to be Anglified, adopts all our customs and buys a country house with a railway line at the bottom of the grounds. He gets his man to flag down a train which runs through his land because he wants to pop up to London to check a collector’s piece. However, he is caught and restrained by train officials. Next day he’s charged with assault on the guard and pays the fine. But then the railway company threatens to bring further charges, and sends two officials down to visit while the narrator is providentially present. It becomes clear one’s a psychiatrist. They think Weston’s letters threatening to buy the railway line are the ravings of a maniac. At which point the narrator intervenes to point out that Wilton could buy their railway if he so wished. Embarrassment all round. Wilton sells up and returns to the States which, the implication is, he should never have left.

My Sunday at Home (1895) England. A straightforward comedy which made me laugh out loud. An American doctor on a train journey west, chatting to the narrator, misinterprets an announcement that a man has taken poison and leaves the train to administer an emetic, but mistakenly does so to a drunken navvy who then refuses to let go of him. Eventually he makes his escape in a horse and cart after the navvy’s passed out.

What makes this Kiplingesque is the uncomfortable juxtaposition of the broad comedy with the narrator’s purple prose descriptions of the beauty of the English countryside.

The Brushwood Boy (1895) England and India. Again Kipling combines the banal with disconcerting fantasy. On one level the story briskly describes the extremely idealised childhood, school days and then heroic army career of a pukka Englishman, from a big country house, who serves in India, beloved of his men, worshiped by women of whom he is oblivious. On another very Kiplingesque level, a strange and eerie tale because this epitome has dreams, penetratingly lifelike dreams of another land, so consistent he can draw maps of it, and these dreams lead him on to a strange and momentous realisation… I won’t spoil the outcome!

‘My one theory in regard to my work is that writing to order means loss of power, loss of belief in the actuality of the tale and ultimately to loss of self-respect to the writer. If a man once deviates from this rule (I speak for myself alone) he mis-says himself at every turn and at the last ceases to be the author of what comes from his pen…’

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by Simon on July 2, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on July 2, 2012

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2012/07/02/the-days-work-rudyard-kipling/