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Ulysses by Hugh Kenner (1980)

The more we know of someone, the harder it is to say what he is about, he is about so many things…
(page 21)

Few writers have been more intensely, intimately autobiographical.
(p.171)

Hugh Kenner

Hugh Kenner (1923 to 2003) was a Canadian academic who spent his time teaching at universities in the United States and writing a series of critical books about modernist literature. I read his masterpiece, ‘The Pound Era’ (1971), in the late 1970s and it changed my life. It gave me a deep grounding in the modernism of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and the rest of them, providing handy background info for my English A-level reading of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, and helping me to ace my university entrance exams. ‘The Pound Era’ is not just a dazzling overview in the mindset of the modernist moment just before the Great War, packed with insights and arcane learning, but immerses you in a whole new way of seeing the world and books.

Although Kenner did his PhD thesis on James Joyce, published as a book in 1956, he only wrote about him periodically thereafter. This book was published in 1980 as part of the then-new Unwin General Library shortly after the publication of another Joyce book by him, ‘Joyce’s Voices’ – I wonder how much overlap there is between the two.

The Unwin General Library volumes were intended as study aids but Kenner’s book is every bit as opinionated and eccentrically informative as his other works. From the blizzard of digressions and divagations, here are the bits which stood out for me, starting with the obvious and moving on to the arcane and inspired.

Learnings

Bloomsday ‘Ulysses’ is set over the course of one long day, from 8am on Thursday 16 June to the early hours of the following morning, Friday 17 June, 1904. The book’s millions of fans long ago christened 16 June ‘Bloomsday’, and celebrations are held in Dublin and elsewhere every year.

Victorian It’s worth stopping right there to reflect that although the novel was published in 1922 and had a huge impact on between-the-wars literature, it in fact depicts a world which was barely even Edwardian, was in fact late-Victorian in culture, economics and mindset (Queen Victoria died on 22 January 1901; the Boer War had only just ended, May 1902).

Let’s go back to ‘Ulysses’ prequel, ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, and reflect that almost its entire action takes place in the reign of Queen Victoria. For example, the scene where Stephen Dedalus watches a girl on the beach is supposed to take place in 1898. Only the very last scenes in the book are not Victorian, as Kenner reckons the scenes where Stephen prepares to quit Ireland take place in 1902. So although it became a totem of the Jazz Age, all the music in ‘Ulysses’, the clothes, the culture, the political and social mood, are late-Victorian.

Daylength An awful lots happens in the minds of the protagonists of ‘Ulysses’ but then they have a lot of time. At the latitude of Dublin, the sun rises at 3.33 am and sets at 8.27 pm. The action of the novel actually starts at 8am on top of the Martello Tower at Dalkey on Dublin Bay and continues until 3am the following morning.

Mourning Both the book’s male protagonists, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, are dressed in mourning black for the entirety of the novel, Stephen mourning his recently deceased mother, Bloom in black to attend Paddy Dignam’s funeral. It is a novel about two men in mourning, or two Men in Black.

Locations Joyce began writing ‘Ulysses’ in Trieste sometime in 1914 and continued for the next 8 years, in Zurich (during the Great War) then Paris (after the war). It was published in Paris on 2 February 1922, the author’s fortieth birthday. It was promptly banned by the authorities in Britain and the USA, where it was only allowed to be published in 1936, and 1933 respectively. (It was never banned in Ireland because the authorities new they didn’t need to; no respecting publisher dared publish it or bookshop sell it.)

Modernist peers Of Joyce’s three great modernist peers:

T.S. Eliot admired what he called ‘the mythic method’ of basing the novel on Homer’s Odyssey, welcoming it as a whole new way of ordering ‘the panorama of anarchy and futility that is the contemporary world’ (‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’, 1923)
Ezra Pound, on the contrary, dismissed the mythic method but welcomed the novel as an encyclopedia of contemporary stupidity, a kind of grotesque continuation of the realism of Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pecuchet (‘James Joyce et Pechuchet’, 1922)
Wyndham Lewis saw it as a sign of how the modernism he’d helped inspire with Vorticism had gone off course, into trivia and technique, dismissing the use of interior monologue as a simple extension of Charles Dickens’s Alfred Jingle (‘Time and Western Man’, 1927)

Sui generis Kenner considers ‘Ulysses’ one of the small number of great modernist works which created a new genre for themselves, much as ‘The Waste Land’, ‘The Cantos’ and Molloy did. Personally, surveying the literary output of the 2020s and earlier, it feels like the modernist moment was a great digression or diversion. Much was learned and much fanfare was made about the revolutionising of the novel but with a decade novels, by and large, settled back into a 20th century version of the traditional mould (Waugh, Orwell, Greene).

Thoms For the geography of Dublin, Joyce in exile relied very heavily on ‘Thom’s Official Directory of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland’ published in 1904.

Chiasmus Joyce is fondness for chiasmus, the ‘a rhetorical device where grammatical structures or ideas in a sentence are repeated in reverse order, creating a mirrored or X-shaped pattern (A-B-B-A)’. Here’s a not quite perfect example.

An ecstasy of flight made radiant his eyes and wild his breath and tremulous and wild and radiant his windswept limbs. (‘A Portrait’)

Kenner points out that the overall structure of ‘A Portrait’ is chiasmic in the sense that it both opens and closes with fragments (p.68).

Technology Ulysses is notably more mechanical than ‘Portrait’ in the sense that there is more modern technology in it. Stephen takes an electric tram into the city centre, the newspaper office has enormous printing machines, people use typewriters, telephones. In ‘A Portrait’ all transport is horse-drawn. Reflecting the sweeping technological innovations which came in between completing ‘Portrait’ in 1914 and writing ‘Ulysses’ in the later teens.

Performance Much can be made of the opening sentences:

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:
—Introibo ad altare Dei.

Mulligan is an actor Kenner makes two points: 1) Mulligan is acting, he is prancing and performing for his own pleasure; 2) and he is performing a mockery of the Catholic Mass, a mockery Kenner goes so far as to say is like an invocation of the Satanic Black Mass. This feels unlikely to me, it feels more like youthful high spirits. But I agree with Kenner’s diagnosis that it 1) introduces the entire novel as an enormous performance and 2) is a cultural critique, suggesting that Ireland and Irishmen are all playing a part, cheerfully and humorously, but somehow alienated from their true selves.

Inside, outside and in-between The narrative never gives Mulligan free indirect speech from his point of view because he has no inside. He is all performance, a mummer, a mocker, a clown. In this he is in stark contrast to Stephen who is almost entirely inside, and whose stream-of-consciousness thoughts reach an early peak in chapter 3. So Stephen and the Buck are yin and yang, chalk and cheese. From this perspective, Bloom comes along, in chapter 4, as a synthesis of opposites, a happy balance of the internal (psychological) and external (sensual) worlds. Very neat. Although in later chapters, this simple model is itself superseded (p.45).

Divisions The division of the book into three parts, of 3, 12 and 3 chapters each, is clear for everyone to read in its table of contents. Kenner suggests it’s also in two parts: the first ten or so chapters are all done in a roughly similar stream-of-consciousness style: Kenner calls them ‘the naturalistic episodes’ (p.53) and tells us that Joyce himself referred to them being in ‘the initial style’ (p.62). From ‘Sirens’ onwards however, each individual chapter has not only a style, but a format of its own. And a possible reason for this? Because between chapters 11 and 12 Boyle sleeps with Molly. Up to then all the chapters are a sort of anticipation and show Bloom in what Kenner insists is virtually a state of shock; afterwards, they become extremely idiosyncratic.

Bloom’s Jewishness Kenner points out that Jewish affiliation is passed down through the mother but Bloom’s mother was Ellen Higgins, herself the daughter of Fanny Hegarty i.e. no Jewish female inheritance there. Moreover, his (Jewish) father converted to Protestantism in which Leopold was raised, and Poldy himself converted to Catholicism before marrying Marion Tweedy. So he is doubly an outsider: although he played with Jewish friends as a boy, and although he has a Jewish name and appearance, he is not part of Dublin’s small Jewish community (p.43). But although he has been baptised a Catholic, on the one occasion he briefly pops into a church, there is plenty of time to make clear that he’s never taken communion, so he is also an outsider to Dublin’s cradle Catholic culture (p.71). ‘Most readers never realise that Bloom by Jewish standards isn’t Jewish’ (p.152).

Narrative skips Despite bombarding us with ‘its din of specificity’, ‘Ulysses’ is oddly silent about key facts. I was puzzled in chapter 4 by the way we get Bloom giving milk to his cat and popping out to buy a pork kidney and then having a poo in his out-house – but we do not get a description of him running, getting into or out of his bath, although he refers to having had a bath many times later on. It is oddly omitted. Far more significant is how Bloom comes to know that Blazes Boylan is popping round to plook his wife at 4pm. He knows and all the commentators know, but how? He doesn’t take a sneaky peek at Boylan’s letter, and in fact it is weirdly absent from the entire final colloquy between Bloom and Molly before he leaves the house for the day. For all its bombardment with facts, many key aspects of the narrative are mysteriously glossed over. (p.49)

Where’s Blazes? The more commentary you read, the more central the event of Boylan shagging Molly becomes, and yet not only is this central scene not described, but Boylan himself is barely even a fleeting presence in the novel, only briefly glimpsed on a couple of occasions (chatting up girls in ‘Wandering Rocks’ and ‘Sirens’). His, also, is a deliberate and glaring absence (p.53).

Timetable of Stephen’s day

8am: Stephen gets up ‘displeased and sleepy’, having been kept awake by Haines raving about shooting a black panther. Since Haines actually has a gun and Stephen is wearing black in mourning for his mother, he is justified in feeling anxious. He refuses to bathe in the sea with Buck and Haines, and makes a date to meet Mulligan at the Ship pub at 12.30.
9 to 10.30am: walks to his school in Dalkey and gives a history lesson, then has the interview with the school’s head, Mr Deasy, who gives him a letter to take to the newspaper.
10.30 to 12 noon: tram to Haddington Road where he toys with going to see his Aunt Sara to ask if he can stay the night with her but instead goes for a walk on Sandymount Strand.
12 to 12.30pm: decides not to meet Mulligan and sends a telegram telling him so. Instead walks across the river to the offices of the Evening Telegraph.
12.30 to 1pm: delivers Deasy’s letter to the newspaper editor.
1 to 1.30pm: drops into Mooney’s bar a few doors down from the Ship.
1.30 to 4pm moves onto another bar then goes to deliver another copy of Deasy’s letter to A.E. at the Irish Homestead where he is (probably) told the A.E. is in the National Library. So Stephen goes to find him there which is where the narrative finds him again in chapter 9 trying to impress A.E. and John Eglinton with his Shakespeare theory. Leaves the Library with Mulligan, bumps into an Italian acquaintance who tells him he should become a professional singer, bumps into his impoverished young sister Dilly but doesn’t give her any money. Given to highfalutin’ rhetoric about Irish nationalism and escaping nets, he lacks charity or fellow feeling for his own family.

Stephen’s plight Kenner sums up Stephen’s situation by 4pm, the cardinal hour when Boylan is plooking Molly: Stephen has nowhere to stay, barely has a job and no prospects, has given it his best shot to impress Dublin’s literary elite and failed miserably. It is flashy superficial Mulligan who will be going that night to George Moore’s gathering of ‘the best wits in town’. His is the bitterness of the outsider. Very depressed, he decides to carry on drinking, accepting his fate as his fluent but shiftless father’s son. We don’t meet him again till 10pm, at the maternity hospital, by which time, having been drinking all day and eaten no lunch, he is shitfaced.

David Hayman and The Arranger Kenner says the critic David Hayman was the first to nail Ulysses’ main technical innovation which was the irruption half-way through the book into the text of a voice which belongs to none of the characters nor to any narrator, but just intrudes. For example, the 63 newspaper captions in ‘Aeolus’, who is ‘saying’ that? No-one. And as the narrative continues, you realise that, yes yes yes we are getting the famous ‘stream-of-consciousness’ thoughts of the leading characters, but that there is another voice who adds phrases in among the characters’ thoughts. Hayman gives it a name, calling it The Arranger and Kenner devotes a whole chapter to describing its effects.

Parallax Parallax means viewing the same thing from different positions. Kenner explains that thousands of details, moments, perceptions, scraps of speech occur multiple times in ‘Ulysses’, but often seen from two or more angles, described hundreds of pages apart. No one reading can spot all these repetitions, but each rereading leads you deeper into the vast labyrinth of correspondences and correlations Joyce has constructed, building up the impression of infinite interconnection.

Delays Classic detective stories delay the explanation until the end, when Holmes or Poirot make everything clear in One Big Reveal which shows how all the pieces of the puzzle are connected. One Big Revelation explains everything. In ‘Ulysses’, by contrast, there are thousands of little revelations, repetitions and correlations which shed a little light on this or that mystery from earlier in the text. Not one big reveal but thousands and thousands of small reveals because ‘Joyce is all trivia’ (p.76) so no individual one of them transforms our reading, but taken together all immeasurably deepen the experience.

Songs performed in Sirens The primary songs performed or mentioned in the ‘Sirens’ chapter, in chronological order of their appearance or performance:

The Bloom is on the Rye, hummed or thought of by Bloom as he watches the barmaids
‘Love and War’, a duet performed by Ben Dollard (bass) and Father Cowley (tenor) shortly after Bloom enters the dining room
‘Tutto è sciolto’ (from Bellini’s La Sonnambula), whistled by Richie Goulding as he and Bloom sit in the dining room
‘M’appari’ (from Flotow’s Martha): the emotional centre of the episode, sung by Simon Dedalus at the piano
‘The Croppy Boy’: a nationalist ballad performed by Ben Dollard toward the end of the episode as Bloom prepares to leave
‘Love’s Old Sweet Song’: although not fully performed in the bar, its melody and lyrics recur throughout the episode in Bloom’s thoughts and are associated with Molly Bloom and Blazes Boylan
other musical pieces referred to or hummed include ‘Those Lovely Seaside Girls’ and various motifs from operas like ‘Don Giovanni’ (specifically the minuet played by Father Cowley)

Circe After long trying days, both Stephen and Bloom need purging. According to Aristotle’s classical theory, the form which purges emotions is the drama, the play, so a play is needed to purge his characters. And both men need to confront their ghosts so this shall be a ghost play, wherein Stephen will confront the accusing ghost of his mother and Bloom will see the ghost of his dead baby, now grown to be an 11-year-old boy. These themes were first mooted when Stephen himself dwelled at length on the nature of theatre in his long disquisition about Hamlet and Shakespeare at the National Library

The nightmare of history Kenner makes one really big point about ‘Circe’. You remember Stephen’s famous declaration to the Unionist headmaster Deasy, which is often quoted out of context, that: ‘History is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake’? Well, maybe ‘Circe’ can be seen as a dramatisation of the nightmare of history, with its trials and revolutions and politics and crowning of kings and burning at the stake and haunted terrors. Maybe it is the nightmare of history come to life.

THE REVEREND MR HAINES LOVE: (Raises high behind the celebrant’s petticoat, revealing his grey bare hairy buttocks between which a carrot is stuck.) My body.

John F. Taylor and the Gaelic revival It was a commonplace of Irish nationalism to equate the small oppressed Irish nation with their its subaltern language and zealous about its religion struggling to be free, with the Israelites in Egypt, small in number, with their own minority language, struggling to be free. This comparison did all kinds of things, giving the struggle for Irish independence the authority of the Bible, guaranteeing that each generation’s independence leader would be dubbed the ‘Irish Moses’, and so on. In the area of language it supported calls for the revival of Gaelic to accompany campaigns for independence.

On 24 October 1901 the lawyer, orator and man of letters John F. Taylor delivered a speech to the Law Students Debating Society pointing out that if Moses had given in to reason, learned Egyptian and aspired to a high place in the Egyptian administration, we’d have never had the ten commandments, Judaism or Christianity. Well, it is this speech which Professor MacHugh recreates in the office of the Freeman’s Journal in ‘Aeolus’.

Gaelic and Hebrew In questions 98 and 99 of ‘Ithaca’ this topic is treated to debunking irony when Bloom and Stephen try to demonstrate their ancestral languages (Hebrew and Gaelic) to each other and it turns out they can both only manage a few lines of songs, and then scrawl down a handful of characters, of their supposed ancestral tongues. Comedy of mutual ignorance.

Ithacan program Kenner usefully pulls together the thoughts scattered in Ithaca’s question and answer format to clarify that Bloom has parental fantasies about Stephen. Bloom fantasises that he will:

become a permanent lodger at Eccles Road
pay rent
take singing lessons from Molly in return for which he’ll tutor her in Italian
distract her from Boylan
pass evenings of civilised conversation with him, Bloom
become a successful and profitable tenor in Bloom’s travelling troupe of singers
in time fall in love with and marry Bloom’s daughter, Milly
and produce a little light literature on the side

It’s quite the package, then, for a drunk, depressed young man completely adrift in life, the offer for him to become a son-in-law for Bloom and a replacement for Bloom’s dead son, Rudy. But when you list all the elements like that, you can also see it’s a trap, closing off all of Stephen’s ambitions. When it’s put like this you can see why Stephen politely walks away.

Is Bloom Jewish?

For:

he has a Jewish name
almost everyone treats him as Jewish i.e. with antisemitic slurs
in ‘Cyclops’ he becomes angry and says persecution of ‘his people’ is going on right here, right now
and the chapter climaxes with him yelling at the Citizen that ‘Christ was a Jew like me’
he owns some of the paraphernalia of Jewish ceremonies inherited from his father and grandfather
in ‘Eumaeus’ he delivers a defence of the Jews to Stephen

Against:

he is uncircumcised (Nausicaa)
nowhere is a bar mitzvah mentioned
the novel opens with him buying and eating as pork i.e. no-kosher kidney
his mother wasn’t Jewish but Irish and so was his grandmother (Ithaca)
he has received not one but two Christian baptisms (as a Protestant and a Catholic)
crucially he rolls back from his shouted taunt at the Citizen, in Eumaeus telling Stephen: ‘I mean Christ, was a jew too and all his family like me though in reality I’m not.’
and in ‘Ithaca’ question 68:
- What, reduced to their simplest reciprocal form, were Bloom’s thoughts about Stephen’s thoughts about Bloom and about Stephen’s thoughts about Bloom’s thoughts about Stephen? is answered thus:
- He thought that he thought that he was a jew whereas he knew that he knew that he knew that he was not.

So in a religious (christenings) and biological (mother and grandmother) and dietary and ceremonial way, Bloom is not a Jew. And yet in a cultural and self-identifying kind of way Bloom clearly still identifies with ‘his people’, his ‘race’, feels their persecution (and experiences it for himself), stands up for them whenever he can. So yes and no.

Molly’s lovers Question 275 in ‘Ithaca’ asks ‘What preceding series?’ and the answer proceeds to list 25 men. For 40 years or more these were taken at face value as a list of Molly’s lovers. Only in the 1970s was the list reinterpreted and came to be seen as anyone who had given Bloom any cause at all to be jealous, and since jealousy can be completely irrational it explains why the list includes a priest (her confessor), her doctor, Simon Dedalus (a drinker not a swiver), and others of the same ilk. And so the list is nowadays reinterpreted as anyone who got close to sexy Molly and triggered jealousy in young Bloom, and so Molly’s reputation has been completely rehabilitated. Scholars have returned Blazes Boylan to his rightful place as the only man Molly has been unfaithful with which also, of course, makes far more sense of why it’s such a big deal for Bloom (p.143).

Bloom’s books ‘Ithaca’ contains a number of catalogues or lists. Kenner notes that the list of (23) books on Bloom’s shelf (in answer to question 292) shows that he does not own a copy of The Odyssey.

Archaeology In a characteristic stretch, Kenner associates the list of memorabilia Bloom finds in his drawers with archaeology. Archaeology reached a golden age in the late nineteenth century; it was in the 1870s that Schliemann excavated Troy in Turkey, capturing the public imagination. Kenner points out that the detailed inventory ‘Ithaca’ makes of the contents of Bloom’s house, in one way treats it as an archaeological site.

Sherlock A little more obvious is the fact that the list of Bloom’s books contains one by Conan Doyle (The Stark-Munro Letters) which makes us think of Sherlock Holmes, and the rather more obvious idea that ‘Ulysses’ is, as well as everything else, a book which is packed with clues which we are meant to find and decipher, starting with the way the parts and chapters of the book are deliberately left unnamed. Whether this world of clues in the end reveals anything beyond the astonishing ingenuity of its own creation – well, that’s a different type of question.

The acme of naturalism Kenner ends with some high-level meditations. In one way ‘Ulysses’ took the late-nineteenth century passion for naturalism (think Émile Zola) to a logical conclusion in a novel where very little happens but we are overloaded with thousands upon thousands of details. The line of thinking anticipated by Ezra Pound.

Eternal recurrence Joyce gets his characters to mull over whether life is predestined and fated, a question of eternal recurrence. Odysseus returns, maybe everything returns.

Picasso, Einstein, Joyce They’re often grouped together because they all removed the distance between the observer and the observed, and so demolished he old-fashioned notion of ‘reality’.

Art: Picasso’s works are rarely and barely ‘about’ the subject (still lives, women in his studio, bullfighters) in the old way that the artist painted a separate reality: the cubist works in particular declare that the subject of the work of art is the work of art itself; the interesting thing is the style and the treatment. (Which explains what, in my opinion, is Picasso’s boring poverty of subject matter, the same half dozen subjects again and again – because the interest is in the style and treatment.)

Physics: In Newtonian physics the observer walked through a fixed, mechanical universe and the two (observer and universe) were completely separate. In Einstein’s view, the observer, their position and speed, create the world. The classical separation between observer and observed is eliminated.

Joyce: in the traditional novel the author writes about something, they are separate from the world and depicting it. Joyce takes late-nineteenth century realism and pushes it to the max and beyond, in a text which became notorious for his pedantic attention to detail, for verifying every aspect of the Dublin of June 1904. But in doing so, he created a text which doesn’t depict the world so much as become a world.

And following from that thought is the idea that at just the moment that the novel reached a peak of naturalism, in Joyce’s idiosyncratic hands, it became an utterly verbal construct. The reader may think they’re reading about the street layout or businesses of Dublin but that world of details’ deeper purpose is to create an encyclopedic system of self-referencing verbal nodes – a vast system of references and clues which no reader can hope to encompass and decipher in just one reading, which demands multiple readings, at each of which the reader notices new details and makes new connections. Each reader writes their own version of ‘Ulysses’.

Somehow it manages to be a vast concordance of objective facts and a Rorschach test of subjective responses, at the same time.

Key books about Ulysses

In a useful appendix, Kenner lists and summarises the main scholarly books written about ‘Ulysses’ in the decades between its publication (1922) and this one (1980).

1920: Joyce sent a schema of ‘Ulysses’ i.e. the Homeric title and parallels for each chapter, along with what happens in each, they style and other structural aspects, to Carlo Linati to help him prepare a lecture. In 1921 Joyce sent a comparable schema to Valery Larbaud for a book he was writing. The key thing is that the two schemas differed in many details.

1930: James Joyce’s Ulysses by Stuart Gilbert: helped by Joyce himself, this was a semi-official guide to the book. It revealed an intensely detailed schema Joyce claimed to have worked to, which showed not only the hour-by-hour events of the day, but revealed that they all take place under a specific Symbol, Colour, Bodily Organ, Art and so on, plus the Homeric parallels. So for a while it set everyone looking for systems and structures.

Gilbert schema for Ulysses

1931: Axel’s Castle by Edmund Wilson set ‘Ulysses’ in the wider context of late nineteenth century European symbolism and modernism. Wilson was puzzled by the aspects which wouldn’t yield to ‘a naturalistic-psychological interpretation’.

1934: James Joyce and the making of Ulysses by Frank Budgen, an ex-sailor and painter, a non-literary type which is why Joyce liked him. Budgen took a more down-to-earth approach, making Bloom an ordinary everyman, the centre of the narrative. It contains accounts of many conversations Joyce had with Budgen about his book as he wrote it in Zurich during the years 1918 to 1920.

1937: Word index to James Joyce’s Ulysses by Miles L. Hanley: meticulously lists and locates every word in James Joyce’s novel ‘Ulysses’, acting as a foundational reference for understanding its complex vocabulary and linguistic patterns.

1939: James Joyce: The Definitive Biography by Herbert Gorman: a modest account, heavily edited by Joyce himself who wanted to present himself as a visionary martyr to art.

1941: James Joyce by Harry Levin: Levin was able to take account of the recent publication of ‘Finnegan’s Wake’, which made ‘Ulysses’ no longer the climax of Joyce’s oeuvre but a way station on the road to something even bigger and weirder.

1947: Fabulous Voyager by Richard M. Kain: used both the Word Index and Thom’s Directory to showcase Ulysses’ amazing amount of local fact and detail, and link these with the book’s larger themes.

1958: Joyce among the Jesuits by Kevin Sullivan: analyzing James Joyce’s early life, education and writings, focusing on the profound impact of his Jesuit schooling (at Clongowes Wood and Belvedere College) on his works, particularly ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, exploring themes of faith, rebellion, and the Catholic tradition he later rejected.

1959: James Joyce by Richard Ellmann: transformed Joyce studies with its scale and detail (it contains 50% more words than ‘Ulysses’). In the context of this immense biography, the works shifted from being standalone masterpieces to being episodes in Joyce’s heroic life.

Credit

‘Ulysses’ by Hugh Kenner was published by George Allen and Unwin in 1980.

Joyce reviews

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by Simon on March 4, 2026 • Permalink

Posted in Irish literature, Literary criticism

Tagged 16 June 1904, 1904, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A.E., Alfred Jingle, Aristotle, Aunt Sara, Axel's Castle, Baptism, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed, Bellini, Belvedere College, Ben Dollard, Black Mass, Blazes Boylan, Bloomsday, Boer War, Bouvard and Pécuchet, Buck Mulligan, Carlo Linati, Catholic Mass, Charles Dickens, chiasmus, Circe, Clongowes Wood, Conan Doyle, Cyclops, Dalkey, David Hayman, Deasy, Dilly Dedalus, Don Giovanni, Dublin, Dublin Bay, Edmund Wilson, Einstein, Ellen Higgins, Emile Zola, Eternal recurrence, Eumaeus, Evening Telegraph, Ezra Pound, Fabulous Voyager, Fanny Hegarty, Father Cowley, Finnegan's Wake, Flaubert, Four Quartets, Frank Budgen, Gaelic, Great War, Haines, Hamlet, Harry Levin, Herbert Gorman, History is a nightmare from which I'm trying to awake, Homer's Odyssey, Hugh Boylan, Hugh Kenner, interior monologue, Ireland, Irish Moses, Irish nationalism, Ithaca, James Joyce, James Joyce and the making of Ulysses, James Joyce et Pechuchet, James Joyce's Ulysses, James Joyce: The Definitive Biography, Jazz Age, Jewishness, John Eglinton, John F. Taylor, Joyce among the Jesuits, Joyce is all trivia, Joyce's Voices, Kevin Sullivan, La Sonnambula, late-Victorian, Law Students Debating Society, literary criticism, Literature, Love and War', Love’s Old Sweet Song, Marion Tweedy, Martello Tower, M’appari, Miles L. Hanley, Milly Bloom, Modernism, modernist literature, Molloy, Mooney's bar, Mr Deasy, National Library, naturalism, Newtonian physics, Paddy Dignam, Parallax, Paris, Picasso, Professor MacHugh, Queen Victoria, Richard Ellmann, Richard M. Kain, Richie Goulding, Roman Catholicism, Rudy Bloom, Sandymount Strand, Schliemann, Shakespeare, Sherlock Holmes, Simon Dedalus, Sirens, Stately plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, stream-of-consciousness, Stuart Gilbert, T.S. Eliot, The Arranger, The Bloom is on the Rye, the Cantos, The Croppy Boy, the Freeman's Journal, the Gaelic revival, the Irish Homestead, the mythic method, the panorama of anarchy and futility that is the contemporary world, The Pound Era, The Stark-Munro Letters, The Unwin General Library, The Waste Land, Thom's Official Directory of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Those lovely seaside girls, Thursday 16 June, Time and Western Man, Trieste, Tutto è sciolto, Ulysses, Ulysses Order and Myth, Valery Larbaud, Word index to James Joyce's Ulysses, Wyndham Lewis, Zurich

Posted by Simon on March 4, 2026

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Ulysses by James Joyce: Oxen of the Sun

Sir Leopold that was the goodliest guest that ever sat in scholars’ hall and that was the meekest man and the kindest that ever laid husbandly hand under hen and that was the very truest knight of the world one that ever did minion service to lady gentle pledged him courtly in the cup.
(Leopold Bloom’s character done in medieval style)

morbidminded esthete and embryo philosopher
(Stephen Dedalus’s character in Romantic style)

A plumper and a portlier bull, says he, never shit on shamrock.
(Vincent Lynch in demotic mode)

The words of their tumultuary discussions were difficultly understood and not often nice.
(Too true)

Irish by name and irish by nature, says Mr Stephen, and he sent the ale purling about, an Irish bull in an English chinashop.
(Stephen Dedalus unwittingly summarising the format of the entire book: Irish content causing mayhem in the English language and literary tradition)

A quick reminder of the chapter numbers and names in ‘Ulysses’. (Note: none of the Greek chapter titles are actually indicated in the text of ‘Ulysses’; they were given by Joyce to early commentators who published them in books and articles about the novel and have been used by critics and commentators, including me, ever since, but none of them actually appear in hard copies or online versions of the text):

Part 1. Telemachiad or the odyssey of Telemachus

Telemachus
Nestor
Proteus

Part 2. Odyssey

Calypso
Lotus Eaters
Hades
Aeolus
Lestrygonians
Scylla and Charybdis
Wandering Rocks
Sirens
Cyclops
Nausicaa
Oxen of the Sun
Circe

Part 3. Nostos or Return

Eumaeus
Ithaca
Penelope

Plot

Middle-aged advertising salesman Leopold Bloom visits the National Maternity Hospital on Holles Street in Dublin, where a friend of his family’s, Mina Purefoy, is giving birth. She has been in the hospital for several days having a difficult labour and he is worried about her (kindly Bloom cf his active charity to Paddy Dignam’s widow). Here he finally meets over-educated, unemployed graduate Stephen Dedalus, who has been drinking with his medical student friends and is awaiting the promised arrival of of his frenemy Malachi ‘Buck’ Mulligan. As the only father in the group of men, Bloom is concerned about Mina Purefoy in her labour. He starts thinking about his wife, Molly Bloom, and the births of his two children. He also thinks about the loss of his son and heir, Rudy, who died aged just 11 days.

The young men are drunk and rowdy, and start discussing topics relating to fertility, contraception and abortion. There is also a suggestion that Milly, Bloom’s daughter, is in a relationship with one of the young men, Bannon. Half way through a nurse announces that Mina has given birth to a son so, after some more banter, the drunken crew leaves the hospital to go on to a pub to continue drinking.

Homeric (and literary) parallels

In the Odyssey, Odysseus and his crew land on the island of Thrinacia, home of Helios the sun god’s immortal sheep and longhorn cattle. Both Circe and Tiresias have warned Odysseus to avoid the island but if they go there, not to harm Helios’s oxen – sacred symbols of fertility – or the gods will punish the offenders with annihilation. After making his crew swear that they will leave the cattle alone, Odysseus hikes inland, prays to the gods for help getting home and falls asleep. Meanwhile, contrary to orders, his men kill and eat some of the oxen of the sun. Odysseus returns and is horrified and as his ships leave the island, Zeus strikes them with a devastating lightning storm, killing everyone except Odysseus, the only one innocent of violating sacred fertility.

In ‘Ulysses’ the rowdy behaviour of the gang of drinkers – Stephen Dedalus, Dixon, Lynch and Madden, Lenehan, Punch Costello, and Crotthers – effectively ‘profanes’ the sanctity of the maternity hospital, resulting in their ‘annihilation’ in the form of a collapse into complete incoherence at the end of the chapter. Bloom alone remains compos mentis by virtue of not having drunk anything and acted respectfully throughout.

On another level, you can see it this way. The inconsiderate drunk party not only disturbs the mums-to-be, it represents waste as against fertility. The pregnant women have fulfilled their destiny, whether you see that as ordained by God and his Catholic Church or Darwin and the scientists, women are made to breed and the women in the maternity hospital have fulfilled their fate. Which is completely unlike the eight or so young men who should be setting off on productive careers but instead are frittering away their evenings in dissipation.

It is an allegory of Fertility versus Infertility and this rings throughout the varied topics of conversation, underpinning for example Bloom’s memory of losing his virginity to a prostitute, or the couple of pages of facetious banter about contraceptives, or the story about the bull sent to fertilise Ireland’s women, or Mulligan’s joke plan to set up a fertility clinic.

Even tiny details contribute to this binary. Even the fact that it was flashy but shallow Buck Mulligan who was invited to George Moore’s soiree while Stephen spaffs away his God-given talents getting pissed with medical students, is an avatar of the central opposition between fruitful labour (literally labour, as in women giving birth) and sterile drunken wasters.

The oxen theme is present throughout insofar as the drunken party discuss the foot and mouth outbreak among Ireland’s cattle, prompted by Lenehan’s news that the letter Stephen took to the newspaper from Mr Deasy on the subject has been published in the evening paper.

So it is this theme, this binary between purposeful fecundity and funny sterility, which is subjected to a comic variation when the crew pile in to elaborate a long drunken comic fantasy about a mighty bull sent to Ireland which turns out to be sexually attractive to women. This is a farcical allegorical skit about papal bulls and Henry VIII, the Reformation and England’s relationship to Ireland.

But when Stephen jokily describes it as ‘an Irish bull in an English chinashop’ he is unwittingly summarising the format of the entire book: anarchic boisterous Irish content barely contained in a genre associated with England (the novel) and causing mayhem with the English language (a concern of Stephen’s ever since the ‘tundish’ episode in ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’).

Also, anyone who remembers one of the most unruly books in the English literary canon, Tristram Shandy, knows that it ends after 500 pages with the comic punchline that the whole thing has been a story about a cock and a bull.

Format

As explained, all the chapters subsequent to ‘Sirens’ are subject to big formatting ideas (over and above the challenges of the stream of consciousness technique which Joyce deployed in the first 10 or chapters, the so-called ‘initial style’).

The dominant mode of these later chapters is parody and let’s just remind ourselves what that means. Parody = ‘an imitation of the style of a particular writer, artist, or genre with deliberate exaggeration for comic effect.’ I think the key word here is exaggeration.

Thus it is that the text of Aeolus, set in a newspaper office, is punctuated by 63 newspaper headlines giving mockingly exaggerated summaries of the sections they precede. The text of Cyclops is interspersed with 33 extended passages which describe the main narrative’s events in the style of, among many others, Irish mythology and legend, legal jargon, journalism (again), sports commentaries and gossip columns, the Bible and even nursery rhymes.

It’s no surprise, then, if still striking, to find that most of the next chapter, Nausicaa, which describes a series of events focused round a naive and sentimental young woman, is written entirely in the style of a popular ladies romance ‘with deliberate exaggeration for comic effect.’ Previously the parodic elements had been episodic: now they take over the first half of an entire chapter. And so it is with the next one.

Parody in the Oxen of the Sun

Chapter 14. Oxen of the Sun, is something else again. From start to finish a third-person narrator or the ‘initial style’ don’t make an appearance, as the entire chapter consists (after an initial invocation) of a tissue of parodies which recapitulate the entire history of the English language. There are parodies of Anglo-Saxon, medieval romance, Elizabethan and Jacobean prose, Daniel Defoe, Addison and Steele’s Spectator, Oliver Goldsmith, Edward Gibbon, Gothic prose, Charles Lamb, Thomas de Quincy, Charles Dickens and Cardinal Newman to mention only the highlights. I can’t find online an exact list of the targets of all of the paragraphs; this is the nearest I could find, which omits half a dozen of the early ones.

Joyce’s Stylistic Parodies in the “Oxen of the Sun” Chapter of Ulysses (1922)

That in itself is a graspable idea, and in fact I found it very enjoyable. But the chapter opens with a sort of invocation and there’s no way you could understand this (or the chaotic way it ends) without consulting a guide.

The opening incantations

The chapter opens with a made-up incantation which mixes Gaelic and Latin elements:

Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus.

You have to look this up to discover that ‘Deshil is an Anglicization of the Irish deasil which carries the general meaning of ‘turning to the right’ or ‘turning toward the sun’, while Eamus is Latin for ‘Let us go’ – so ‘Deshil Eamus’ means something like ‘Let us turn to the right’ or possibly ‘toward the sun’. Since ‘Holles’ Street is the location of Dublin’s National Maternity Hospital, the whole thing can be broadly translated as ‘let us turn to the sun in Holles Street’, which both references the oxen of the sun, but also the book’s insistent theme of paternity, namely the son Stephen looking for a father, and the birth of a baby boy which happens half way through the chapter.

This incantation is followed by two more incantatory sentences, each of them performing a threefold repetition of a threefold sentence: 3 x 3 x 3. Which are themselves followed by two paragraphs of highly Latinate prose, one in the prose style of historians Sallust and Tacitus, the second in medieval Latin prose. All this before we get to the start of the parodies.

It always confused me that the chapter didn’t just start at the beginning with Anglo-Saxon, but the commentaries explain that these preliminaries amount to 1) a parody of a religion incantation (fair enough) and 2) combine Celtic, Latin and English as a kind of forewarning of the three linguistic elements out of which Irish English grew.

Also, I couldn’t detect a distinctly Viking-Danish section, which I thought odd because it was the Vikings who founded Dublin: the internet tells me they established a fortified settlement around 841 AD at the ‘black pool’ (the Dyflin or Dubh Linn) where the Rivers Liffey and Poddle meet. But maybe it’s there and I just didn’t get it.

To recap: there is 1) a religious invocation, 2) 3 paragraphs representing the Latin of the Roman conquerors of ancient Britain, before 3) Anglo-Saxon announces the start of the series of paragraphs each of which represents a different era in the development of English prose.

And this chronological sequence is mapped onto the growth of a baby in the womb because we are in a maternity hospital.

The plot

In the plot what seems to have happened is Bloom caught a tram from Sandymount into the centre of Dublin meaning to check up on Mina Purefoy. He bumped into a Dr Dixon who treated him the previous month for a bee-sting and tells him to come along to the common room where a few of the lads are gathered and are drinking and carousing so this is what Bloom does, although he is careful to tip his glass away without drinking, just as he dodged having to drink anything in Cyclops (‘For he never drank no manner of mead which he then put by and anon full privily he voided the more part in his neighbour glass and his neighbour nist not of this wile.’)

Stephen is there and he is hammered. He has been drinking for 6 hours on an empty stomach, victim of all kinds of frustrations and resentments. He is the wildest of the crew. His heart is full of bitterness – ‘for he had in his bosom a spike named Bitterness which could not by words be done away.’

Further to the numbers mentioned above (3 x 3 x 3), Hugh Kenner points out that it takes Bloom 11 paragraphs to get into the common room; there follow 40 paragraphs of prose pastiches, representing the 40 week gestation of a foetus; and then 11 paragraphs describe the breaking up of the party in the common room and everyone going their separate ways – Bloom and Stephen separately making their way into Nighttown, the red light district of Dublin. So it is another example of Joyce’s favourite rhetorical device, chiasmus: ‘a rhetorical device that reverses the order of words, phrases or ideas in two parallel clauses, creating an A-B-B-A pattern’. In other words, symmetry: 11 opening, 40 central, 11 closing.

The parodies

So the chapter consists of forty paragraphs each one done in the styles of different eras of English prose, presented in chronological order. Apparently, Joyce relied heavily on reference books like Saintsbury’s ‘History of English prose Rhythm’ (1912). To see what happens (if patterns emerge), and as a quick overview you can skim through to get the effect, I’m going to quote the first sentence of all 40:

Before born bliss babe had. Within womb won he worship…
(Anglo-Saxon alliterative prose of Aelfric)

Some man that wayfaring was stood by housedoor at night’s oncoming.
(Anglo-Saxon)

Of that house A. Horne is lord [see Cast, below]. Seventy beds keeps he there teeming mothers are wont that they lie for to thole and bring forth bairns hale so God’s angel to Mary quoth.
(Medieval)

In ward wary the watcher hearing come that man mildhearted eft rising with swire ywimpled to him her gate wide undid…
(Alliterative Middle English of Piers Ploughman)

Loth to irk in Horne’s hall hat holding the seeker [Bloom] stood. On her stow he ere was living with dear wife and lovesome daughter that then over land and seafloor nine years had long outwandered…

As her eyes then ongot his weeds swart therefor sorrow she feared. Glad after she was that ere adread was…

Therefore, everyman, look to that last end that is thy death and the dust that gripeth on every man that is born of woman…

The man that was come in to the house then spoke to the nursingwoman and he asked her how it fared with the woman that lay there in childbed…

And whiles they spake the door of the castle was opened and there nighed them a mickle noise as of many that sat there at meat. And there came against the place as they stood a young learningknight yclept Dixon.
(Medieval travel stories from the 1400s)

And in the castle was set a board that was of the birchwood of Finlandy and it was upheld by four dwarfmen of that country but they durst not move more for enchantment.
(Arthurian legend from the 1400s)

And the learning knight let pour for childe Leopold a draught and halp thereto the while all they that were there drank every each..

This meanwhile this good sister stood by the door and begged them at the reverence of Jesu our alther liege Lord to leave their wassailing for there was above one quick with child, a gentle dame, whose time hied fast.

Now let us speak of that fellowship that was there to the intent to be drunken an they might.

For they were right witty scholars. And he heard their aresouns each gen other as touching birth and righteousness…

But sir Leopold was passing grave maugre his word by cause he still had pity of the terrorcausing shrieking of shrill women in their labour and as he was minded of his good lady Marion that had borne him an only manchild which on his eleventh day on live had died and no man of art could save so dark is destiny.

About that present time young Stephen filled all cups that stood empty so as there remained but little mo if the prudenter had not shadowed their approach from him that still plied it very busily who, praying for the intentions of the sovereign pontiff, he gave them for a pledge the vicar of Christ which also as he said is vicar of Bray.
(Elizabethan history chronicles)

Hereupon Punch Costello dinged with his fist upon the board and would sing a bawdy catch Staboo Stabella about a wench that was put in pod of a jolly swashbuckler in Almany which he did straightways now attack… [until Nurse Quigley comes and tells him to stop singing]

To be short this passage was scarce by when Master Dixon of Mary in Eccles, goodly grinning, asked young Stephen what was the reason why he had not cided to take friar’s vows and he answered him obedience in the womb, chastity in the tomb but involuntary poverty all his days….
(Miltonic Latinate prose from the 1600s)

Thereto Punch Costello roared out mainly Etienne chanson but he loudly bid them, lo, wisdom hath built herself a house, this vast majestic longstablished vault, the crystal palace of the Creator, all in applepie order, a penny for him who finds the pea.

A black crack of noise in the street here, alack, bawled back. Loud on left Thor thundered: in anger awful the hammerhurler.

But was young Boasthard’s fear vanquished by Calmer’s words? No, for he had in his bosom a spike named Bitterness which could not by words be done away.
(Religious Allegorical prose of John Bunyan)

This was it what all that company that sat there at commons in Manse of Mothers the most lusted after and if they met with this whore Bird-in-the-Hand (which was within all foul plagues, monsters and a wicked devil) they would strain the last but they would make at her and know her.

So Thursday sixteenth June Patk. Dignam laid in clay of an apoplexy and after hard drought, please God, rained, a bargeman coming in by water a fifty mile or thereabout with turf saying the seed won’t sprout, fields athirst, very sadcoloured and stunk mightily, the quags and tofts too…
(17th century English diarists such as Samuel Pepys)

Lenehan announces that the letter Mr Deasy gave Stephen in chapter 2 has indeed been published in the newspaper which triggers a long discussion about one of the real life issues of the book, the outbreak of foot and mouth disease among Ireland’s cattle and how to treat it.

With this came up Lenehan to the feet of the table to say how the letter was in that night’s gazette and he made a show to find it about him (for he swore with an oath that he had been at pains about it) but on Stephen’s persuasion he gave over the search and was bidden to sit near by which he did mighty brisk.
(English journalist Daniel Defoe)

Enter Buck Mulligan and Alec Bannon. They’ve been caught in a shower of rain.

Our worthy acquaintance Mr Malachi Mulligan now appeared in the doorway as the students were finishing their apologue accompanied with a friend whom he had just rencountered, a young gentleman, his name Alec Bannon, who had late come to town, it being his intention to buy a colour or a cornetcy in the fencibles and list for the wars.
(Early 1700s periodical essays in the style of the Tatler and Spectator)

Mulligan presents a farcical plan to set up a hospital to inseminate women wanting a baby.

He proposed to set up there a national fertilising farm to be named Omphalos with an obelisk hewn and erected after the fashion of Egypt and to offer his dutiful yeoman services for the fecundation of any female of what grade of life soever who should there direct to him with the desire of fulfilling the functions of her natural. Money was no object, he said, nor would he take a penny for his pains.

He’s gone so far as to have a card printed:

Whereat he handed round to the company a set of pasteboard cards which he had had printed that day at Mr Quinnell’s bearing a legend printed in fair italics: Mr Malachi Mulligan. Fertiliser and Incubator. Lambay Island.

After which he is referred to by various jokey names such as Le Fécondateur. Back to the first sentences of each paragraph:

Valuing himself not a little upon his elegance, being indeed a proper man of person, this talkative now applied himself to his dress with animadversions of some heat upon the sudden whimsy of the atmospherics while the company lavished their encomiums upon the project he had advanced.
(18th century Anglo-Irish novelist and clergyman Laurence Sterne)

Amid the general vacant hilarity of the assembly a bell rang and, while all were conjecturing what might be the cause, Miss Callan entered and, having spoken a few words in a low tone to young Mr Dixon, retired with a profound bow to the company…
(18th century Anglo-Irish novelist, poet, and playwright Oliver Goldsmith)

At this point Nurse Callan comes to announce that Mrs Purefoy has finally had her child:

The young surgeon [Dixon], however, rose and begged the company to excuse his retreat as the nurse had just then informed him that he was needed in the ward. Merciful providence had been pleased to put a period to the sufferings of the lady who was enceinte which she had borne with a laudable fortitude and she had given birth to a bouncing boy.

After Nurse Callan leaves, Costello makes rude comments about her which triggers Dixon to make a long facetious defence of her honour and womanhood.

To revert to Mr Bloom who, after his first entry, had been conscious of some impudent mocks which he however had borne with as being the fruits of that age upon which it is commonly charged that it knows not pity…
(18th century Anglo-Irish philosopher Edmund Burke)

But with what fitness, let it be asked of the noble lord, his patron, has this alien, whom the concession of a gracious prince has admitted to civic rights, constituted himself the lord paramount of our internal polity?
(18th century satirist Junius)

This is a paragraph unexpectedly containing sustained criticism of Bloom, including his penchant for masturbation: ‘A habit reprehensible at puberty is second nature and an opprobrium in middle life’ and ticks him off for flirting with the serving girl Gerty when he has a fine wife at home, ‘Has he not nearer home a seedfield that lies fallow for the want of the ploughshare?’ and again: ‘The lewd suggestions of some faded beauty may console him for a consort neglected and debauched…’

The news was imparted with a circumspection recalling the ceremonial usage of the Sublime Porte by the second female infirmarian to the junior medical officer in residence, who in his turn announced to the delegation that an heir had been born…
(Philosophical historian Edward Gibbon)

Then a parody of Gothic:

But Malachias’ tale began to freeze them with horror. He conjured up the scene before them…
(Gothic novelist Horace Walpole)

This deals with the sudden appearance of the Englishman Haines in the common room. He’s come to tell Mulligan to meet him at the Westland Row station at 11.10pm to catch the last train back to Sandymount (location of the Martello Tower) and get back to the Martello Tower.

What is the age of the soul of man? As she hath the virtue of the chameleon to change her hue at every new approach, to be gay with the merry and mournful with the downcast, so too is her age changeable as her mood…
(Romantic essayist Charles Lamb)

Bloom reminisces about losing his virginity to Bridie Kelly, a symbol of fruitless sterile sexual encounters, compared with inseminating Molly and the next two paragraphs continue Bloom’s thoughts.

The voices blend and fuse in clouded silence: silence that is the infinite of space: and swiftly, silently the soul is wafted over regions of cycles of generations that have lived…
(Romantic essayist Thomas De Quincey)

Onward to the dead sea they tramp to drink, unslaked and with horrible gulpings, the salt somnolent inexhaustible flood.

The next one cuts to Stephen and a query about old schoolfriends triggers an important statement of the power of the author to conjure up characters.

Francis [Costello] was reminding Stephen of years before when they had been at school together in Conmee’s time. He asked about Glaucon, Alcibiades, Pisistratus. Where were they now? Neither knew. You have spoken of the past and its phantoms, Stephen said. Why think of them? If I call them into life across the waters of Lethe will not the poor ghosts troop to my call? Who supposes it? I, Bous Stephanoumenos, bullockbefriending bard, am lord and giver of their life.
(In the style of Walter Savage Landor’s ‘Imaginary Conversations’)

‘Bullockbefriending bard’ being the joke nickname he imagines funny Buck Mulligan giving him after he’s told him about the letter from Deasy about foot and mouth disease. But also continuing the theme of oxen of the sun, and the cock and bull joke thread. In fact this paragraph evolves away into a detailed description of the Gold Cup race in which Lenahan and others lost money when the outsider Throwaway won in the final furlongs.

However, as a matter of fact though, the preposterous surmise about him being in some description of a doldrums or other or mesmerised which was entirely due to a misconception of the shallowest character, was not the case at all…
(Essayist and historian Thomas Babington Macaulay)

The debate which ensued was in its scope and progress an epitome of the course of life. Neither place nor council was lacking in dignity. The debaters were the keenest in the land, the theme they were engaged on the loftiest and most vital. The high hall of Horne’s house had never beheld an assembly so representative and so varied nor had the old rafters of that establishment ever listened to a language so encyclopaedic…

Which of course refers to this chapter, this text itself, with its encyclopedic ambition.

It had better be stated here and now at the outset that the perverted transcendentalism to which Mr S. Dedalus’ (Div. Scep.) contentions would appear to prove him pretty badly addicted runs directly counter to accepted scientific methods…
(Biologist and essayist Thomas Henry Huxley)

Meanwhile the skill and patience of the physician had brought about a happy accouchement. It had been a weary weary while both for patient and doctor. All that surgical skill could do was done and the brave woman had manfully helped…
(Charles Dickens)

There are sins or (let us call them as the world calls them) evil memories which are hidden away by man in the darkest places of the heart but they abide there and wait…
(Cardinal Newman)

The stranger still regarded on the face before him a slow recession of that false calm there, imposed, as it seemed, by habit or some studied trick, upon words so embittered as to accuse in their speaker an unhealthiness, a flair, for the cruder things of life…
(English essayist Walter Pater)

Mark this farther and remember. The end comes suddenly. Enter that antechamber of birth where the studious are assembled and note their faces. Nothing, as it seems, there of rash or violent.
(Art critic John Ruskin)

After a lull, Stephen suggests they leave the hospital and move on to a local pub:

Burke’s! outflings my lord Stephen, giving the cry, and a tag and bobtail of all them after, cockerel, jackanapes, welsher, pilldoctor, punctual Bloom at heels with a universal grabbing at headgear, ashplants, bilbos, Panama hats and scabbards, Zermatt alpenstocks and what not…
(Scottish essayist and satirist Thomas Carlyle)

And they pile out of the boozy common room and into a corridor of the hospital.

Nurse Callan taken aback in the hallway cannot stay them nor smiling surgeon coming downstairs with news of placentation ended… The door! It is open? Ha! They are out, tumultuously, off for a minute’s race, all bravely legging it…

Only Bloom pauses to tell the nurse to give his best wishes to the mother, and then asks Nurse Callan: ‘Madam, when comes the storkbird for thee?’

The air without is impregnated with raindew moisture, life essence celestial, glistening on Dublin stone there under starshiny coelum. God’s air, the Allfather’s air, scintillant circumambient cessile air. Breathe it deep into thee.

Coda

The procession of historical parodies having (apparently) reached the present day, as the drunken crew bursts out into the night air, the text disintegrates into drunken chaos, barely comprehensible. As stated at the start, this collapse of thought and expression into complete chaos is Joyce’s equivalent of the annihilation of Odysseus’s sailors by the angry gods, in Homer.

All off for a buster, armstrong, hollering down the street. Bonafides. Where you slep las nigh? Timothy of the battered naggin. Like ole Billyo. Any brollies or gumboots in the fambly? Where the Henry Nevil’s sawbones and ole clo? Sorra one o’ me knows.

You need a guide to understand almost all of this. As well as the Homeric parallel, maybe it’s also intended to reflect the atmosphere of a packed pub in central Dublin near to closing time?

Query. Who’s astanding this here do? Proud possessor of damnall. Declare misery. Bet to the ropes. Me nantee saltee. Not a red at me this week gone. Yours?

Hurroo! Collar the leather, youngun. Roun wi the nappy. Here, Jock braw Hielentman’s your barleybree. Lang may your lum reek and your kailpot boil!

Waiting, guvnor? Most deciduously. Bet your boots on. Stunned like, seeing as how no shiners is acoming. Underconstumble? He’ve got the chink ad lib.

’Tis, sure. What say? In the speakeasy. Tight. I shee you, shir. Bantam, two days teetee. Bowsing nowt but claretwine. Garn!

You move a motion? Steve boy, you’re going it some. More bluggy drunkables? Will immensely splendiferous stander permit one stooder of most extreme poverty and one largesize grandacious thirst to terminate one expensive inaugurated libation? Give’s a breather. Landlord, landlord, have you good wine, staboo?

I think closing time comes to the pub and everyone’s chucked out onto the street:

Closingtime, gents. Eh?… Bonsoir la compagnie… Where’s the buck and Namby Amby?Skunked? Leg bail. Aweel, ye maun e’en gang yer gates. Checkmate. King to tower.

‘King to tower’ meaning Buck Mulligan has left the group to catch the last tram back to his Martello tower.

Golly, whatten tunket’s yon guy in the mackintosh? Dusty Rhodes. Peep at his wearables. By mighty! What’s he got? Jubilee mutton. Bovril, by James.

Your attention! We’re nae tha fou. The Leith police dismisseth us. The least tholice. Ware hawks for the chap puking. Unwell in his abominable regions. Yooka. Night. Mona, my true love. Yook. Mona, my own love. Ook.

Which Hugh Kenner annotates: ‘The Leith police dismisseth us’ is a test the police administer to late night revellers to test how drunk they are. And Yooka, yook and ook are Joyce’s words for someone puking.

Hark! Shut your obstropolos. Pflaap! Pflaap! Blaze on. There she goes. Brigade! Bout ship. Mount street way. Cut up! Pflaap! Tally ho. You not come? Run, skelter, race. Pflaaaap!

In which Pflaaaap! indicates a clap of thunder. In other words this is an ironic (and quite submerged) reference to the thunder and lightning Zeus sent after the departing Odysseus and his men after they had slaughtered the sun god’s cattle (see above).

The final paragraph indicates that drunk Stephen persuades drunk Lynch to accompany him to Nighttown, Dublin’s red light district, to seek out a brothel:

Lynch! Hey? Sign on long o’ me. Denzille lane this way. Change here for Bawdyhouse. We two, she said, will seek the kips where shady Mary is. Righto, any old time…

And so off they stagger towards the next chapter, ‘Circe’:

Come on you winefizzling, ginsizzling, booseguzzling existences! Come on, you dog-gone, bullnecked, beetlebrowed, hogjowled, peanutbrained, weaseleyed fourflushers, false alarms and excess baggage! Come on, you triple extract of infamy!

Cast

The group of drinkers are listed several times, in different voices, in styles appropriate to the era being parodied:

So were they all in their blind fancy, Mr Cavil and Mr Sometimes Godly, Mr Ape Swillale, Mr False Franklin, Mr Dainty Dixon, Young Boasthard and Mr Cautious Calmer.

Leop. Bloom of Crawford’s journal sitting snug with a covey of wags, likely brangling fellows, Dixon jun., scholar of my lady of Mercy’s, Vin. Lynch, a Scots fellow, Will. Madden, T. Lenehan, very sad about a racer he fancied and Stephen D. Leop. Bloom there for a languor he had but was now better

As to individual characters in the chapter:

Leopold Bloom – ‘Mr Canvasser Bloom’, ‘staid agent of publicity and holder of a modest substance in the funds’, the main protagonist of ‘Ulysses’. The Oxen of the Sun directly follows Nausicaa in which Bloom was on the beach at Sandymount Strand outside Dublin and had a sexual encounter with a young woman he’d never met before (he masturbates while she, from a distance, shows him her stockinged legs and knickers).

In the gap between the two chapters he catches a tram back into central Dublin and walks to the maternity hospital in Holles Street because he’s concerned for a family friend, Mina Purefoy, who’s been in labour for several days. Here a doctor he knows, Dr Dixon, recognises him and invites him to join a drinking party in the doctors’ common room. Here half a dozen lads-about-town are having a riotous party, led by young Stephen Dedalus who Bloom has heard about but never met.

It was now for more than the middle span of our allotted years [i.e. past 35] that he had passed through the thousand vicissitudes of existence and, being of a wary ascendancy and a man of rare forecast he had enjoined his heart to repress all motions of a rising choler and, by intercepting them with the readiest precaution, foster within his breast that plenitude of sufferance which base minds jeer at..

Dr Horne – a real-life figure, Sir Andrew J. Horne, a prominent Dublin obstetrician and the Joint Master of the National Maternity Hospital.

Nurse Quigley – continually telling the drunken gang off for keeping the pregnant women in the ward above awake with their racket. ‘an ancient and a sad matron of a sedate look and christian walking, in habit dun beseeming her megrims and wrinkled visage,’

Dr Dixon – junior doctor at the hospital. Recognises Bloom and invites him to join the party in the common room. Later goes to attend Mrs Purefoy who’s finally had her baby.

Vincent Lynch – friend of Stephen’s when they were students. Recipient of Stephen’s long disquisition about aesthetics in ‘Portrait’, now just another drunk medical student – ‘Lynch whose countenance bore already the stigmata of early depravity and premature wisdom.’

Lenehan – ‘He was a kind of sport gentleman that went for a merryandrew or honest pickle and what belonged of women, horseflesh or hot scandal he had it pat. To tell the truth he was mean in fortunes and for the most part hankered about the coffeehouses and low taverns with crimps, ostlers, bookies, Paul’s men, runners, flatcaps, waistcoateers, ladies of the bagnio and other rogues of the game or with a chanceable catchpole or a tipstaff often at nights till broad day of whom he picked up between his sackpossets much loose gossip.’

Crotthers – ‘the Scotch student, a little fume of a fellow, blond as tow’ – ‘Crotthers was there at the foot of the table in his striking Highland garb, his face glowing from the briny airs of the Mull of Galloway’

Madden – ‘the squat form of Madden’ another drunk medical student.

Stephen Dedalus – ‘of all them, reserved young Stephen, he was the most drunken that demanded still of more mead’ – ‘he was of a wild manner when he was drunken’ – ‘so grieved he [Bloom] also in no less measure for young Stephen for that he lived riotously with those wastrels and murdered his goods with whores.’ Stephen is very drunk and dominates the table with a series of facetiously learned disquisitions. He is very frustrated that after his clever Shakespeare presentation at the National Library it was flashy, superficial Mulligan who was invited to a soirée at the home of Irish writer George Moore (4 Upper Ely Place, just a few blocks from the maternity hospital). Using his wits to entertain drunk medical students is a pitiful waste of his god-given gifts.

Suddenly I realised that Stephen isn’t Hamlet, as he fancies himself to be. He is young Prince Harry, son of Henry IV, isn’t he? An educated man wasting his days hanging round with lowlifes and routinely getting trolleyed – except, unlike young Prince Hal, Stephen has no kingdom to inherit to redeem himself.

Frank ‘Punch’ Costello – ‘Costello, the eccentric’ – ‘From a child this Frank had been a donought that his father, a headborough, who could ill keep him to school to learn his letters and the use of the globes, matriculated at the university to study the mechanics but he took the bit between his teeth like a raw colt and was more familiar with the justiciary and the parish beadle than with his volumes. One time he would be a playactor, then a sutler or a welsher, then nought would keep him from the bearpit and the cocking main, then he was for the ocean sea or to hoof it on the roads with the romany folk, kidnapping a squire’s heir by favour of moonlight or fecking maids’ linen or choking chicken behind a hedge.’

Malachi Buck Mulligan – ‘the primrose elegance and townbred manners of Malachi Roland St John Mulligan’. Comes fresh from a literary soiree at the house of George Moore which Stephen jealously wishes he had been invited to. ‘Valuing himself not a little upon his elegance, being indeed a proper man of person’ he wears a primrose vest. His coat is spotted with rain because they were caught in a shower. Eternal joker.

Alec Bannon – ‘the figure of Bannon in explorer’s kit of tweed shorts and salted cowhide brogues’ – in ‘Calypso’ we learned that he is dating Bloom’s daughter, Milly, from a letter she sent him (Bloom)

Nurse Callan – a nurse working at the National Maternity Hospital on Holles Street. She is an acquaintance of Leopold Bloom who opens the gate for him and provides updates on Mina Purefoy’s difficult, three-day labour.

Haines – the Englishman, staying with Buck Mulligan in the Martello Tower. Terrified Stephen overnight with his nightmare shoutings, then in the morning insulted him with his casual English dismissal of our mistreatment of Ireland for centuries.

Bridie Kelly – young working class woman Bloom lost his virginity to and reminisces about here (she also appears in Circe and Eumaeus), in one of the Gothic paragraphs described as ‘the bride of darkness, a daughter of night’.

Credit

‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce was published by Shakespeare and Company in 1922.

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by Simon on February 6, 2026 • Permalink

Posted in Comedy, Literary criticism, Novel

Tagged A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Abortion, Addison and Steele, Aelfric, Aeolus, Alec Bannon, Anglo-Saxon, Arthurian legend, Bloom, Bridie Kelly, Buck Mulligan, bullockbefriending bard, Cardinal Newman, Celtic, Charles Dickens, Charles Lamb, chiasmus, Circe, contraception, Crotthers, Cyclops, Daniel Defoe, Deshil Holles Eamus, Dixon, Dr Dixon, Dr Horne, Dublin, Edmund Burke, Edward Gibbon, England, English prose, fertility, fiction, foetus, foot-and-mouth disease, Frank Costello, Gaelic, George Moore, gestation, Gothic, Gothic prose, Hamlet, Helios, Henry VIII, Holles Street, Homer, Horace Walpole, Hugh Kenner, Imaginary Conversations, infertility, Ireland, Irish literature, Ithaca, James Joyce, John Bunyan, John Ruskin, Junius, Lambay Island, Laurence Sterne, Le Fécondateur, Lenehan, literary criticism, Literature, Lynch, Madden, Malachi Mulligan, Malachi Roland St John Mulligan, Martello Tower, medieval, Milly Bloom, Mina Purefoy, Mr Deasy, Mr Quinnell’s, narrative, National Maternity Hospital, Nighttown, novel, Nurse Callan, Nurse Quigley, Odysseus, Odyssey, Oliver Goldsmith, Oxen of the Sun, Paddy Dignam, parody, Pepys, Piers Ploughman, Punch Costello, River Liffey, Saintsbury's History of English prose Rhythm, Sallust, Sandymount, sex, Shakespeare, Shakespeare and Company, Sir Andrew J. Horne, Sir Leopold, Sirens, Stephen Dedalus, stream-of-consciousness, Tacitus, Telemachiad, The Leith police dismisseth us, the Odyssey, the Oxen of the Sun, the Reformation, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Thomas Carlyle, Thomas de Quincey, Thomas de Quincy, Thomas Henry Huxley, Thrinacia, Throwaway, Tiresias, Tristram Shandy, Ulysses, Vikings, Vincent Lynch, Walter Pater, Walter Savage Landor, Westland Row station, Zeus

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The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse (1938)

The sinister affair of Gussie Fink-Nottle, Madeline Bassett, old Pop Bassett, Stiffy Byng, the
Rev HP (‘Stinker’) Pinker, the eighteenth-century cow-creamer and the small brown leather-covered notebook.
(Bertie summarises the plot at the beginning)

‘Man and boy, Jeeves,’ I said, breaking a thoughtful silence which had lasted for about eighty-seven
miles, ‘I have been in some tough spots in my time, but this one wins the mottled oyster.’
(and the plot hasn’t really kicked in yet)

‘Travel is highly educational, sir.’
‘I can’t do with any more education. I was full up years ago.’
(Servant and Master repartee)

‘Good old blackmail ! You can’t beat it. I’ve always said so and I always shall. It works like magic in an emergency.’
(Aunt Dahlia proving what a good egg she is)

‘Didn’t you tell me once that the Code of the Woosters was “Never let a pal down”?’
(Stiffy explaining the title of the book)

‘The Code of the Woosters’ is the third full-length novel to feature Bertie Wooster and his valet Jeeves.

The Jeeves and Wooster narratives come in two forms: in the 1920s Wodehouse published about 35 J&W short stories; thereafter he switched to novels and wrote 11 novels (from 1934 to the last one, in 1974). What’s interesting is the way the novels refer back to events in the short stories. It’s as if the short stories defined a sort of palette of colours, which he then invoked in the larger canvases of the novels. To be less pretentious, the novels regularly refer back to incidents featured in the stories, say something like ‘Remember old so-and-so; it was him I was involved with in the adventure of the so-and-so’. Thus at various points Bertie, the posh dim narrator, reminds us:

that his Aunt Dahlia edits a lady’s magazine to which he once contributed an article (as told in ‘Clustering Round Young Bingo’)
that Madeline Bassett’s father is a judge who once fined him £5 for disorderly conduct (as told in ‘Without The Option’)
of the occasion when Gussie Fink-Nottle gave a speech at a school prize-giving while very drunk (in the previous novel in the series, ‘Right Ho, Jeeves”))
(twice) of the time Roberta Wickham persuaded him to sneak into the bedroom of a fellow guest at a country house and puncture his hot-water bottle with a darning-needle on the end of a stick (‘Jeeves and the Yule-Tide Spirit’)
of the time when the American millionaire J. Washburn Stoker kidnapped Bertie who escaped by blacking up with boot polish to pretend to be part of a minstrel party (‘Thank You, Jeeves’)
the time a temporary replacement for Jeeves named Brinkley, tried to attack Bertie with a carving knife then set fire to his cottage (‘Thank You, Jeeves’)
the time Bertie had to look after his Aunt Agatha’s dog (‘Jeeves and the Dog McIntosh’)
the time Bertie saved the Cabinet Minister A.B. Filmer from a wild swan (‘Jeeves and the Impending Doom’)

The effect is very much to create a world of its own, full of references to a fairly small number of characters in its orbit. Bertie himself is made to notice the fact:

It bore out what I often say—viz, that it’s a small world.

Except that it is very much not a small world. It is a very big world with over 8 billion people in it who mostly speak languages you and I can’t speak, and hold values and beliefs we can’t relate to. Which is why it’s so comfy and reassuring to retreat to a small, hermetically sealed and safe place like WoosterWorld.

The cup of tea on arrival at a country house is a thing which, as a rule, I particularly enjoy. I like the crackling logs, the shaded lights, the scent of buttered toast, the general atmosphere of leisured cosiness.

Nothing wrong with that. Highfalutin’ critics like to claim that fiction engages with the world, subverts this or that power structure etc, missing the obvious point that sitting in a quiet room or train or plane, quietly reading a novel is more or less the opposite of engaging with the world.

The Mixture as Before

When Somerset Maugham published a volume of short stories in 1936 The Times rather rudely described it as ‘the mixture as before’. This nettled Maugham so much that he titled his next short story The Mixture As Before. The same could be said of Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster novels. He had established a set of comic conventions for the series, including:

Bertie struggles to find the right word

There was a brief and—if that’s the word I want—pregnant silence.
A confirmed recluse you would have called him, if you had happened to know the word.
She made what I believe is known as a moue…. Is it moue?.. Shoving out the lips, I mean, and drawing them quickly back again.
‘What? Incredulous!’
‘Incredible, sir.’
‘Thank you, Jeeves. Incredible!’
‘Spode, qua menace… is it qua?’
‘Yes, sir. Quite correct.’
‘I thought so.’

Bertie struggles with classic quotes

‘You remember that fellow you’ve mentioned to me once or twice, who let something wait upon something? You know who I mean the cat chap.’
‘Macbeth, sir, a character in a play of that name by the late William Shakespeare. He was described as letting ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would, ‘like the poor cat i’ th’ adage.’
‘Well, that’s how it is with me. I wabble, and I vacillate—if that’s the word?’
‘Perfectly correct, sir.’

The joke in this one is you have to know that ‘The Sensitive Plant’ is the name of a poem by the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, the kind of thing soppy Madeline knows and Bertie is clueless about.

‘I remembered something Jeeves had once called Gussie–’A sensitive plant, what?’
‘Exactly. You know your Shelley, Bertie.’
‘Oh, am I?’

Shelley crops up again later on:

After what Gussie had said, I ought to have been expecting Stiffy, of course. Seeing an Aberdeen terrier, I should have gathered that it belonged to her. I might have said to myself : If Scotties come, can Stiffy be far behind?

Which is a reference to Shelley’s well-known poem, ‘Ode to the West Wind’, the line being ‘If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’ Mind you, Bertie can pull off the big quotes when he wants to; in a previous novel he referred to Keats’s sonnet ‘On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer and he goes to town on the key lines here.

Pop Bassett, like the chap in the poem which I had to write out fifty times at school for introducing a white mouse into the English Literature hour, was plainly feeling like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken, while Aunt Dahlia and Constable Oates resembled respectively stout Cortez staring at the Pacific and all his men looking at each other with a wild surmise, silent upon a peak in Darien.

And it’s not just Bertie who struggles with classic quotes and has to be put right by Jeeves. Here’s Stiffy struggling to remember the right name of a literary character:

You remind me of Carter Patterson… no, that’s not it… Nick Carter… no, not Nick Carter… Who does Mr Wooster remind me of, Jeeves?’
‘Sidney Carton, miss.’
‘That’s right. Sidney Carton.’

That would be the Sidney Carton who ends up being the hero of Charles Dickens’ novel ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ by offering to lay down his life to be executed by the French revolutionaries so that the male lead of the story, Charles Darnay, can escape. Not that Bertie sees him as the hero. Later on he reflects:

I drew no consolation from the fact that Stiffy Byng thought me like Sidney Carton. I had never met the chap, but I gathered that he was somebody who had taken it on the chin to oblige a girl, and to my mind this was enough to stamp him as a priceless ass.

Jeeves’s literary quotes

It feels slightly new that Jeeves recites famous literary quotations in their entirety, not prompted by Bertie, with the comic intention of showing that Bertie hasn’t a clue what he’s on about. Mostly from Shakespeare because it’s a fair bet that Wodehouse’s original audience should have known their Shakespeare:

‘I quite understand, sir. And thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, and enterprises of great pitch and moment in this regard their currents turn awry and lose the name of action.’
‘Exactly. You take the words out of my mouth.’
(Shakespeare: Hamlet)

‘Childe Roland to the dark tower came, sir,’ said Jeeves, as we alighted, though what he meant I hadn’t an earthly.
(Shakespeare: King Lear)

I remember Jeeves saying to me once, apropos of how you can never tell what the weather’s going to do, that full many a glorious morning had he seen flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye and then turn into a rather nasty afternoon.
(The italicised phrase is from Shakespeare, Sonnet 33)

Jeeves and clothes

In almost all the stories, right at the start Jeeves and Bertie have a falling out over an item of clothing, there follows the long complicated narrative, and by the end of the story Bertie is so grateful to him for solving everything that he gives in. Not in this one. But there are still some choice ‘clothes moments’. Bertie is getting dressed for dinner when Jeeves advises a quarter inch adjustment in the trousers, prompting Bertie to say:

‘There are moments, Jeeves, when one asks oneself “Do trousers matter?”‘
‘The mood will pass, sir.’

In this case, the plan which starts the story, Jeeves’s wish which Bertie categorically refuses but then, by the end of the complex series of events, finds himself exhaustedly acquiescing in, is the idea of going on a cruise.

The comic strategy of stating the obvious

I call her a ghastly girl because she was a ghastly girl. The Woosters are chivalrous, but they can speak their minds.

The antique shop in the Brompton Road proved, as foreshadowed, to be an antique shop in the Brompton Road.

I spoke with satirical bitterness, and I should have thought that anyone could have seen that satirical bitterness was what I was speaking with.

He had been looking like a man who had missed the finer shades, and he still looked like a man who had missed the finer shades.

Clash of registers

It’s a tried and tested comic trope to have two characters who speak in different registers – the straight man who expresses things in a high-falutin pretentious style, and then the comic who puts it in the crudest demotic. Jeeves and Wooster embody a variation on this comic trope. Bertie expresses something in his poshboy slang and then Jeeves repeats the same idea but expressed in his refined, restrained, verbosely intellectual manner. The result = comic contrast.

‘You agree with me that the situation is a lulu?’
‘Certainly a somewhat sharp crisis in your affairs would appear to have been precipitated, sir.’

The village constable

Speaking of registers, Wodehouse briefly gives the village constable a comic accent, the tone of the officious provincial copper.

‘I was proceeding along the public highway,’ he began, in a slow, measured tone, as if he were giving evidence in court, ‘and the dorg leaped at me in a verlent manner. I was zurled from my bersicle.’

Abbreviations

Either a) trimming a word of a few syllables or b) paring it right back to the first letter. Sometimes a little hard to follow.

Trimmed

And now it was plain that he was hep.

I uttered an exclamash.

That is the posish, I fear.

I had managed to put in two or three hours’ sleep in my cubicle, and that, taken in conjunction with the healing flow of persp. in the hot room and the plunge into the icy tank, had brought the roses back to my cheeks to no little extent.

The gravity of the situash had at last impressed itself upon her.

It was entirely owing to Stiffy that I found myself in my present predic.

One letter

I told the man to take me to the nearest Turkish bath. It is always my practice to linger over a Turkish b.

That sojourn of mine in the T. bath had done much to re-establish the mens sana in corpore
what-not.

I sank into a c. and passed an agitated h. over the b.

‘Let me explain, aged r.’

I sank into the chair which she had vacated, and mopped the b.

The sight of Gussie and Madeline Bassett sitting side by side at the other end of the table turned the food to ashes in my m.

‘You’re talking absolute rot,’ she said, but it was with a quaver in the v.

I turned on the h. again.

Kipling was right. D. than the m. No getting round it.

I proceeded to work off the pent-up f’s.

I let out a mirthless l.

Formulaic phraseology

Homer is famous for coining poetic phrases or formulas to describe common objects (rosy-fingered dawn, wine-coloured sea) and Wodehouse does something similar by devising humorous phrases for common elements in Bertie’s life. They’re a sort of Metonymy which is ‘a figure of speech where a word or phrase is replaced by another’, in this instance by related adjectives but shorn of the expected noun – so in that respect also a kind of abbreviation.

I was able to imbibe about a fluid ounce of the hot and strengthening before he spoke. [tea]

Her eyes were misty with the unshed, and about the size of soup plates. [tears]

Inappropriate

Related to which is using inappropriate terminology, often using phrases normally used to describe inanimate objects to people, as if from sales brochures advertising houses or cars.

I looked round. Those parted lips… Those saucerlike eyes… That slender figure, drooping slightly at the hinges…

For Madeline Bassett was undeniably of attractive exterior—slim, svelte, if that’s the word, and bountifully equipped with golden hair and all the fixings.

Slang phrases

Sometimes Bertie uses phrases which may reflect the slang of his class but are obscure to us.

In that shop, on the other hand, he had given the impression of a man who has found the blue bird. [?]

After that exhibition of his at the prizegiving, she handed Gussie the mitten. [dumped him]

The news of the betrothal was, therefore, conveyed to him by letter, and I imagine that the dear girl must have hauled up her slacks about me in a way that led him to suppose that what he was getting was a sort of cross between Robert Taylor and Einstein. [boasted]

‘Suppose old Bassett does find that book, what do you think will ensue?’ I could answer that one. ‘He would immediately put the bee on the wedding.’ [cancel]

‘Consult Jeeves, you mean?’ I shook the lemon. [head]

Stiffy’s map, as a rule, tends to be rather grave and dreamy. [face]

I can testify that when you are riding [a bicycle] without your hands, privacy and a complete freedom from interruption are of the essence. The merest suggestion of an unexpected Scottie connecting with the ankle-bone, at such a time, and you swoop into a sudden swerve. And, as everybody knows, if the hands are not firmly on the handlebars, a sudden swerve spells a smeller.

The nibs [higher-ups, those in authority, clever ones, superiors]

‘Ha!’ said Spode, and biffed off with a short, sharp laugh. [left, walked away]

I got into the full soup and fish, and was immediately conscious of a marked improvement. [evening dress]

Brass rags had been parted by the young couple… [they’d broken up]

I racked the bean. [head, brain, mind]

‘Who do you think you are, coming strolling into a girl’s bedroom, sticking on dog about the right way and the wrong way of pinching helmets?’

I lit a cigarette and proceeded to stress the moral lesson to be learned from all this rannygazoo.

Aunt Dahlia’s insults

In the second novel it became noticeable how Aunt Dahlia lost no opportunity to cheerfully insult Bertie and the pattern continues here. She calls him:

‘Hello, ugly’
my little chickadee
young hound

What feels new is that Bertie feels confident enough to bandy friendly nicknames right back at her, to her face calling her:

aged relative
my fluttering old aspen
my dear old mysterious hinter
old ancestor
old flesh and blood
old thicker than water
My dear old faulty reasoner
my misguided old object

Jeeves’s wisdom

‘We are as little children, frightened of the dark, and Jeeves is the wise nurse who takes us by the hand and–’,
‘Switches the light on?’
‘Precisely.’

Sir Roderick Spode

Rather surprisingly, this Sir Roderick Spode turns out to be leader of a Fascist party i.e. is a satire on the real-world English fascist leader, Oswald Mosely.

‘Don’t you ever read the papers ? Roderick Spode is the founder and head of the Saviours of Britain, a Fascist organization better known as the Black Shorts. His general idea, if he doesn’t get knocked on the head with a bottle in one of the frequent brawls in which he and his followers indulge, is to make himself a Dictator.’

Bertie clarifies an important element:

‘By the way, when you say ‘ shorts,’ you mean ‘ shirts,’ of course.’
‘No. By the time Spode formed his association, there were no shirts left. He and his adherents wear black shorts.’
‘Footer bags, you mean?’
‘Yes.’
‘How perfectly foul.’
‘Yes.’
‘Bare knees?’
‘Bare knees.’
‘Golly!’
‘Yes.’

Spode is a huge, threatening bully right up to the moment when Bertie discovers he has a dark secret and threatens to reveal it – at which point he becomes oilily sycophantic i.e. like all bullies, can be instantly deflated. When pressed, right at the end of the novel, Jeeves reveals Spode’s guilty secret: it is that he moonlights as a designer of women’s underclothing and is the uncredited owner of the emporium in Bond Street known as Eulalie Soeurs. Would ruin his reputation as a manly Fascist if that ever came out. A ludicrous puncture of his sub-Mussolinian braggadocio.

Plot

This third Jeeves and Wooster novel feels longer and even more insanely complicated than its predecessors. Wodehouse has this reputation for comedy and I start off loving the tone and characters but do rather find that halfway through the novels they begin to seem quite long, and the blizzard of farcically improbable twists and turns does, eventually, become quite wearing. I’m always very relieved as I enter the final furlongs.

As briefly as I can:

Uncle Tom Travers is a collector of silverware and has his eye on a fine silver cow creamer at an antique shop on the Brompton Road. His wife, Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Dahlia, wants Tom not to buy it, as she needs to touch him for money to fund her magazine, Milady’s Boudoir, particularly as she has just signed up an expensive lady novelist to write some articles for it.

In the event the cow creamer is purchased by Sir Watkyn Bassett, the odious magistrate who fined Bertie £5 for drunkenly stealing a policeman’s helmet a few years earlier, and who has now retired to his country estate, Totleigh Towers. This Bassett has a daughter, soppy Madeline Bassett, who’s still in love with the hopeless newt-fancier, Bertie’s friend Gussie Fink-Nottle, who Sir Watkyn thoroughly disapproves of. At the same time, Bassett’s niece, Stephanie ‘Stiffy’ Byng, who lives at the Towers, is in love with the local curate, another old college pal of Bertie’s, one Harold ‘Stinker’ Pinker. Another guest of Sir Watkyns is a giant of a man called Roderick Spode—leader of a silly fascist organisation called the Black Shorts—who takes an instant dislike to Bertie when he happens to bump into him in the Brompton Road antique shop, and keeps a fierce and jealous eye over Stephanie Byng. There’s one last element which is that Gussie, a guest at Totleigh Towers, has been keeping a notebook containing very unflattering portraits of both Bassett and Spode.

Right. That’s a summary of the cast and main issues. The ball gets rolling when Bertie is summoned to Totleigh by a telegram from Madeline, asking his help to sort out her troubled engagement to Gussie; but he has simultaneously been instructed to get his hands on the silver cow creamer, in order to placate her husband Tom. Then Stiffy arbitrarily decides to test her boyfriend Harold’s devotion to her, by demanding that he knock off and steal the helmet of the local constable, Oates, because she thinks he’s been beastly to her beloved dog, Bartholomew. Then Gussie stupidly manages to lose the notebook full of incriminating descriptions of Bassett and Spode.

For an impressive 300 pages, Wodehouse manages to wring every conceivable variation on these themes, having all the couples fall out with each other, make impossible demands, threaten Bertie, while the silver cow, the notebook and the policeman’s helmet all get stolen, stolen again, hidden, found, searched for, accompanied by all manner of threats and blackmail between various characters far too complicated to set down in detail.

In the end it is Jeeves who saves the day, managing to blackmail both Sir Watkyn (with a suit for malicious libel and damages) and Spode (with revealing his guilty secret) into acquiescing in the marriages of the two young couples, and releasing Bertie from the various charges he faced. This is because, at various points, Bertie is angrily accused of stealing all the two central objects – the cow creamer and the policemen’s helmet – which he keeps being caught red-handed with because the actual thieves (Aunt Dahlia and Stiffy, respectively) dump them on him at incriminating moments – anyway, once all the comic complications have been utterly wrung out of the plot, Jeeves manages to get Bertie cleared of all charges, in return for which, as I mentioned above, Bertie acquiesces in Jeeves’s wish to go for a big cruise.

Cast

Bertie Wooster – narrator of the stories, amusingly dim upper-class layabout
Jeeves – his suave and hyper-intelligent valet
Aunt Dahlia aka Mrs Dahlia Travers
Uncle Tom Travers – her husband, famous for his delicate digestion, and (newly introduced in this novel) a keen silverware collector:

This uncle is a bird who, sighting a nephew, is apt to buttonhole him and become a bit informative on the subject of sconces and foliation, not to mention scrolls, ribbon wreaths in high relief and gadroon borders, and it seemed to me that silence was best.

Anatole – their legendary cook, from Provence
Gussie Fink-Nottle – ‘a fish-faced pal of mine who, on reaching man’s estate, had buried himself in the country and devoted himself entirely to the study of newts’
Madeline Bassett – ‘A droopy, soupy, sentimental exhibit, with melting eyes and a cooing voice and the most extraordinary views on such things as stars and rabbits’
Sir Watkyn Bassett, CBE – retired judge, father of Madeline, residing at Totleigh Towers, Totleigh-in-the-Wold, Gloucestershire
- Butterfield – his butler
Sir Roderick Spode – guest of Sir Watkyn’s and leader of the Fascist organisation, the Saviours of England; according to Bertie a ‘Big chap with a small moustache and the sort of eye that can open an oyster at sixty paces’
Pomona Grindle – popular novelist – funny how popular novelists like Wodehouse or Agatha Christie, enjoy putting fictional popular novelists into their novels to satirise
Miss Stephanie Byng aka Stiffy – Madeline’s cousin, who lives at Totleigh Towers
- Bartholomew – her dog
Constable Oates – the local policeman
Harold Pinker aka Stinker Pinker – village curate who Stiffy’s engaged to – ‘a large, lumbering, Newfoundland puppy of a chap—full of zeal, yes—always doing his best, true, but never quite able to make the grade; a man, in short, who if there was a chance of bungling an enterprise and landing himself in the soup, would snatch at it’

The Junior Ganymede club

The Junior Ganymede is a club for gentlemen’s personal gentlemen in Curzon Street, to which Jeeves has belonged for some years. Under Rule Eleven, every new member is required to supply the club with full information regarding his employer. This not only provides entertaining reading, but serves as a warning to members who may be contemplating taking service with gentlemen who fall short of the ideal.

Menus

I have often lamented that in the majority of Great Literature people regularly have meals, lunches and dinners, but the author never tells you what they ate, which is extremely frustrating. In this book there’s a rare mention of a complete menu of a country house dinner:

Grade A soup (content unknown)
a toothsome fish (species unknown)
a salmi of game which
asparagus
a jam omelette
some spirited sardines on toast

A jam omelette?

On aunts

One minute aunts are the bane of his life:

‘If I had my life to live again, Jeeves, I would start it as an orphan without any aunts. Don’t they put aunts in Turkey in sacks and drop them in the Bosphorus?’
‘Odalisques, sir, I understand. Not aunts.’
‘Well, why not aunts ? Look at the trouble they cause in the world. I tell you, Jeeves, and you may quote me as saying this—Behind every poor, innocent, harmless blighter who is going down for the third time in the soup, you will find, if you look carefully enough, the aunt who shoved him into it.’

But on the other hand:

‘I should have known better than to doubt Aunt Dahlia. Aunts always know. It’s a sort of intuition.’

Why so many aunts? And why are aunts such figures of fun? Aunts dominate almost all the J&W stories and crop up in many others outside the series. They are also prominent in works by other popular authors as figures of fun, such as Agatha Christie. Why? Two big reasons.

1. Because aunts are parent replacements. They are parents but without the strict control of parents. They are representatives of the older and so, in theory, controlling generation, the generation which should bridle and control the young, but without any of an actual parent’s actual legal responsibilities and duties. This is partly why they’re figures of fun: they’re parents but stripped of all actual parental authority.

2. Because they’re female. A hundred years ago fathers were figures with total legal control over their children until they reached the age of 21, as well as dominating moral and psychological power. An uncle is a male authority figure from the parental generation but, typically, stripped of responsibility, is classically considered a more approachable and sympathetic figure, someone you can turn to for help and advice, maybe. Whereas an aunt is two times removed from the figure of authority being a) not the legal guardian and b) a female, and so one step removed from the classically male patriarchal authority role.

Why are they funny, exactly? Tradition

P.S. Mind you, the whole point of the 1920s was the widespread feeling that the younger generation scorned parental control, something Bertie himself comments on:

A glance at her [Madeline] was enough to tell one that she belonged to that small group of girls who still think a parent should have something to say about things…

Bertie on girls and women

This aunt is a formidable old creature, when stirred.

Earnest Americans, academics and feminists have plenty of ammunition to denounce Bertie – and through him, Wodehouse – as a misogynist. Certainly he misses no opportunity to roll his eyes about women, and the underlying premise of the stories is his morbid fear of ever losing his bachelor status and getting hitched to a woman. I read it, I’m aware of it, but I read it as a comic trope, like Bertie’s own stupidity, his heedless drunkenness, like Jeeves’s Godlike omniscience, like the bad-tempered old judge, the priceless chef, and so on. They’re all stereotypes. But for the record I’ll record some of the grosser incidences.

I stared at the young pill, appalled at her moral code, if you could call it that. You know, the more I see of women, the more I think that there ought to be a law. Something has got to be done about this sex, or the whole fabric of Society will collapse, and then what silly asses we shall all look.

When you really read many of these comments them, you realise the real victim of them is Bertie, because any time he expresses any opinion about anything, he reveals what a dimwit he is.

‘I am implying nothing derogatory to your cousin Madeline, when I say that the idea of being united to her in the bonds of holy wedlock is one that freezes the gizzard. The fact is in no way to her discredit. I should feel just the same about marrying many of the world’s noblest women. There are certain females whom one respects, admires, reveres, but only from a distance. If they show any signs of attempting to come closer, one is prepared to fight them off with a blackjack.

If you wanted to take a feminist line, I suppose you could say that, no matter how humorously intended, the anti-women sentiments which are found throughout Wodehouse’s works are just one more brick in the huge wall of misogynistic patriarchy which dominated British society until late in the 20th century and can, of course, still be found in many places. I.e. the humorous context doesn’t count, or doesn’t invalidate the essentially negative attitude. Whether funny or not, it’s still negative.

‘You know, Jeeves,’ I said, ‘when you really start to look into it, it’s perfectly amazing how the opposite sex seems to go out of its way to snooter me. You recall Miss Wickham and the hot-water bottle?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And Gwladys what-was-her-name, who put her boy friend with the broken leg to bed in my flat?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And Pauline Stoker, who invaded my rural cottage at dead of night in a bathing suit?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘What a sex! What a sex, Jeeves! But none of that sex, however deadlier than the male, can be ranked in the same class with this Stiffy.’

Or:

‘She wasn’t kidding. She meant business. She was fully aware that she was doing something which even by female standards was raw, but she didn’t care. The whole fact of the matter is that all this modem emancipation of women has resulted in them getting it up their noses and not giving a damn what they do. It was not like this in Queen Victoria’s day. The Prince Consort would have had a word to say about a girl like Stiffy, what?’

It’s a literally humourless interpretation, but I’m sympathetic to it…

Bertie and Sherlock and Hercule

In my review of the previous novel, ‘Right Ho, Jeeves’, I pointed out the surprisingly large influence on Wodehouse of Sherlock Holmes, so much so that Bertie refers to his adventures as ‘cases’ and the people who come to him and Jeeves for help as ‘clients’. And very obviously the entire idea of a partnership solving problems, one of whom is the super-intelligent problem-solver while the other is his dim sidekick (i.e. Jeeves and Wooster), obviously echoes Holmes and Watson.

The Holmes influence is toned down in this novel so that there’s only one reference to Watson and one to Holmes. Instead what surprised me is that Wodehouse chucks in a reference to Hercule Poirot! It’s an interesting indication of how Christie’s detective had penetrated so deeply into popular culture that he could be jokily referenced in other popular fiction.

I mean, imagine how some unfortunate Master Criminal would feel, on coming down to do a murder at the old Grange, if he found that not only was Sherlock Holmes putting in the weekend there, but Hercule Poirot, as well!

But in fact there’s more to it than that. Wodehouse deliberately drops a number of Christie references throughout the novel, turning the text itself into a sort of Christie-esque mystery.

Bertie is reading a murder mystery

To while away the time I pulled the arm-chair up and got out the mystery story I had brought with me from London. As my researches in it had already shown me, it was a particularly good one, full of crisp clues and meaty murders and I was soon absorbed.

And the novel even gives him clues what to do, as when he’s looking for the hidden notebook and the mystery he’s reading has the detective recommend looking on top of the suspect’s wardrobe.

Comparison with thrillers: Here’s Bertie recruiting Jeeves to help him write out a summary of the situation:

‘I think it would help if we did what they do in the thrillers. Do you ever read thrillers?’
‘Not very frequently, sir.’
‘Well, there’s always a bit where the detective, in order to clarify his thoughts, writes down a list of suspects, motives, times when, alibis, clues and what not. Let us try this plan. Take pencil and paper, Jeeves, and we will assemble the facts. Entitle the thing ‘ Wooster, B.—position of.’

That’s exactly what Poirot does in many of his stories.

Adversary Earlier there’d been a passing reference in a telegram. Bertie had described Bassett being suspicious of him as:

like ambassador finding veiled woman snooping round safe containing secret treaty.

This is precisely what happens in one of Christie’s early spy adventures, The Secret Adversary.

Fiddling Further, in chapter 4 while wondering what to do, Gussie stands at the mantlepiece and fiddles with a statuette on it. This is exactly what Poirot does in many of the Christie stories, rearranging bits and bobs on mantlepieces or desks under the influence of his symmetry obsessive compulsive disorder.

Little grey cells And it becomes unquestionable that Wodehouse is parodying Poirot when a moment later:

He pondered, frowning. Then the little grey cells seemed to stir.

This phrase is copyright Poirot, occurs in all the stories, and lays any doubt to rest.

Psychology Christie was at pains to distinguish Poirot from Holmes in all sorts of ways but one is to make Poirot focus not on material clues but on analysing the psychology of the murderer. Well, it’s no coincidence that throughout this novel Bertie, and others, insist on Jeeves’s superior reading of psychology. It is clearly meant to align him with Christie’s Poirot.

In these delicate matters of psychology [Jeeves] never errs.
‘I think we can find one [a solution], sir, if we approach the matter from the psychological angle.’
‘Oh, psychological?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘The psychology of the individual?’
‘Precisely, sir.’
‘Jeeves,’ I explained to Stiffy, who, of course, knew the man only slightly, scarcely more, indeed, than as a silent figure that had done some smooth potato-handing when she had lunched at my flat, ‘is and always has been a whale on the psychology of the individual. He eats it alive.’

Gooseflesher Incidentally, Bertie converts the thriller into his own poshboy argot and refers to it as a gooseflesher.

Comic phrases

About seven feet in height, and swathed in a plaid ulster which made him look about six feet across, he caught the eye and arrested it. It was as if Nature had intended to make a gorilla, and had changed its mind at the last moment.

I had described Roderick Spode to the butler as a man with an eye that could open an oyster at sixty paces, and it was an eye of this nature that he was directing at me now. He looked like a Dictator on the point of starting a purge.

‘Oh, Bertie,’ she said, in a low voice like beer trickling out of a jug, ‘you ought not to be here.’

She looked at me like someone who has just solved the crossword puzzle with a shrewd ‘Emu’ in the top right-hand corner.

Stiffy stood for a moment looking after him a bit yearningly, like a girl who wished that she had half a brick handy.

I turned to Aunt Dahlia, who was making noises like a motorbicycle in the background.

Animal similes

He paused, and swallowed convulsively, like a Pekingese taking a pill.

The Dictator had to shove his oar in. He asked if he should call a policeman, and old Bassett’s eyes gleamed for a moment. Being a magistrate makes you love the idea of calling policemen. It’s like a tiger tasting blood.

I turned to Gussie, who was now looking like a bewildered halibut.

He gave me a hard stare. The eyes behind the spectacles were cold. He looked like an annoyed turbot.

Old Bassett had been listening to these courtesies with a dazed expression on the map—gulping a bit from time to time, like a fish that has been hauled out of a pond on a bent pin and isn’t at all sure it is equal to the pressure of events.

I now gazed at him hopefully, like a seal awaiting a bit of fish.

However, the last female had no sooner passed through the door than Gussie, who had been holding it open, shot after her like a diving duck and did not return.

He was staring incredulously, like one bitten by a rabbit.

She snorted like a bison at the water-trough.

Old Bassett, who had gone into a coma again, came out of it and uttered a sound like the death-rattle of a dying duck.

There came the sound of furniture being dragged away, and presently the door opened and his head emerged cautiously, like that of a snail taking a look round after a thunderstorm.

I don’t say I didn’t leave my chair like a jackrabbit that has sat on a cactus.

The Drones club

Wodehouse’s fictitious Drones Club was located in Dover Street, off Piccadilly. A drone is a male bee that does no work and lives off the labour of others so the name is a satire on the 1920s stereotype of rich, idle young men. The Drones Club appears in not just the Jeeves and Wooster stories, but the Psmith and Blandings series, as well as others. Members mentioned in this book are:

Bertie
Freddie Widgeon
Bingo Little
Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright
Barmy Fotheringay-Phipps
Oofy Prosser

Addresses

Bertie’s address:

Bertram Wooster
Berkeley Mansions
Berkeley Square
London

Aunt Dahlia’s address:

Mrs Dahlia Travers
47 Charles Street
Berkeley Square
London.

Credit

‘The Code of the Woosters’ was published in 1938 by Herbert Jenkins. I read it online.

Related reviews

P.G. Wodehouse reviews

This lax post-war world

She was naming the Price of the Papers. In other words, after being blackmailed by an aunt at breakfast, I was now being blackmailed by a female crony before dinner. Pretty good going, even for this lax post-war world.

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by Simon on December 8, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Comedy, English literature, Novel

Tagged A Tale of Two Cities, A.B. Filmer, abbreviations, Aberdeen terrier, Anatole, Aunt Dahlia, Barmy Fotheringay-Phipps, Bartholomew, Bertie Wooster, Bingo Little, Black Shorts, Bond Street, braggadocio, Brompton Road, Butterfield, Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright, Charles Dickens, comic novel, Comic simile, Constable Oates, Curzon Street, dictator, Dover Street, Dr Watson, Drones Club, Einstein, Eulalie Soeurs, fascism, Feminism, fiction, Freddie Widgeon, Gloucestershire, gooseflesher, Gussie Fink-Nottle, Hamlet, Harold Pinker, Herbert Jenkins, Hercule Poirot, humour, J. Washburn Stoker, Jeeves, Jeeves and Wooster, Junior Ganymede, Keats, King Lear, Kipling, little grey cells, Macbeth, Madeline Bassett, metonymy, Milady's Boudoir, misogyny, Murder Mystery, Mussolini, newts, novel, Ode to the West Wind, Oofy Prosser, Oswald Mosely, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Piccadilly, Poirot, Pomona Grindle, Pop Bassett, Provence, Psychology, Queen Victoria, rannygazoo, Rev HP Pinker, Robert Taylor, Roberta Wickham, Roderick Spode, Shakespeare, Sherlock Holmes, Sidney Carton, silverware, Sir Roderick Spode, Sir Watkyn Bassett, Somerset Maugham, Spode, Stiffy Byng, Stinker Pinker, the Black Shorts, the Code of the Woosters, the Drones Club, The Junior Ganymede club, the Saviours of Britain, The Secret Adversary, The Sensitive Plant, The Times, Totleigh Towers, Totleigh-in-the-Wold, Uncle Tom Travers, Upon Reading Chapman's Homer, WoosterWorld

Posted by Simon on December 8, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/12/08/the-code-of-the-woosters-p-g-wodehouse/

Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf – Introductory notes

As well as her famous novels, Virginia Woolf wrote a prodigious number of essays and reviews, over 500 in all. The definitive edition of her collected essays runs to six ‘meaty’ volumes and contents range from the book-length polemics A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, through numerous book reviews, talks and lectures, introductions to other people’s books, critical essays about novels and biography, meditations on women’s writing, descriptions of London and the countryside, to fugitive pieces she contributed to student magazines. Tracking these down has been a labour of love and taken decades.

The Oxford World Classic edition of ‘Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf’ edited by David Bradshaw brings together 30 of these prose pieces and groups them under four headings:

Reading and Writing
Life-Writing
Women and Fiction
Looking On

Summarising each of the essays was taking so long that I’ve broken my review up into separate blog posts. This is by way of being an overall introduction to the main themes and ideas.

Woolf’s aestheticism

I found Woolf’s essays hard to read for a number of reasons. On the face of it the essays cover a range of topics, at different lengths, and using different approaches, from the reasonably logical to the whimsical and impressionistic. But they all have two or three things in common, which, I suggest, are:

their foundation on a doggedly aesthetic or arty set of values
an emphasis on a poetic approach to writing, which explains and justifies her often impressionistic and hard-to-follow style
all of which sounds radical but embodies an underlying attitude which is often surprisingly conservative and backward looking

The modernists I read as a lad – T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and T.E. Hulme – consciously rejected the hazy verbosity of late-Victorian Romanticism and called for a new poetry and art which was to be hard, brief and unsentimental, hence Imagism in poetry and Vorticism in art.

Woolf is the opposite. Her heroes are the hard-core Romantics John Keats in poetry and Charles Lamb and Thomas de Quincey in prose writing and her prose displays the very qualities of belle-letterist posing, of poetic prose and digressions and imaginative fantasias, which those other modernists despised and rejected.

In her most famous essays, the ones criticising the Edwardian novelists and setting out her own views of what fiction should be about, Woolf is making a polemical point and so is reasonably easy to follow. But much of the time she approaches her subject in a deliberately roundabout, digressive manner and in a prose style which continually strives for very conservative notions of Elegance and Beauty.

Above all, Woolf committed the anti-modernist sin of constantly making her prose aspire to the condition of poetry. Her writings are obsessed with this thing called Poetry which she very narrowly insists represents the highest possible art, the highest expression of human values, harping on about Truth and Beauty in a way which makes her sound just like John Keats from a hundred years earlier.

Woolf’s conservative conception of the essay

Woolf’s conception of the essay is surprisingly conventional, almost conservative. She looks back to the classic English essayists of the nineteenth century, Hazlitt, Macauley, etc and especially to the essays of Charles Lamb who she regularly name-checks (‘no one has approached the Essays of Elia’).

In her view an essay doesn’t set out to analyse or explain anything. Instead it is a charming distraction, an entertainment whose main purpose is to reveal the character of the author, a magic spell. In this, as in so much else, Woolf has a very late-Victorian, Aesthetic attitude.

The principle which controls [the essay] is simply that it should give pleasure; the desire which impels us when we take it from the shelf is simply to receive pleasure. Everything in an essay must be subdued to that end. It should lay us under a spell with its first word, and we should only wake, refreshed, with its last. (Modern Essays)

It’s not just me who finds her whole attitude puzzlingly anti-modern, nostalgic and backward looking. The editor of this edition and big Woolf fan, David Bradshaw, freely acknowledges it:

At a time when Modernists such as Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot turned their backs on the ‘amiable garrulity’ of the late-Victorian and Edwardian personal essay, Woolf embraced this belletristic model as an appealingly ‘egotistical’ model. (Introduction p.xiii)

So even a devoted fan and scholarly expert on Woolf concedes that she is deliberately belletristic, she is consciously egotistical, she is contrivedly poetical, in a deeply old-fashioned way – Keats and Lamb.

Personally, I’ve never really bought the idea of Woolf as a modernist precisely because her style is so self-consciously mellifluous and euphonious, elegant and refined. No matter how fragmented and experimental her narrative structure, when it comes to style her primary concern always seems to be to maintain good taste and good manners. It’s a snobbishly high-minded attitude which explains her disdain for the vulgar energy of more realistic and rackety writers from Dickens to H.G. Wells, the ‘materialist’ novelists who she famously criticises in several of the essays included here. Hers is consciously fine writing which you are meant to savour in the same way that a connoisseur savours fine wine.

So: Woolf’s essays are often hard to read because they are more concerned with maintaining a style appropriate to this aesthetic worldview, and with the airy digressions thought appropriate to the belles-letterist tradition she espoused, than in conveying her thoughts clearly and concisely. You often have to wade through passages of highly subjective verbiage or deliberately whimsical digressions to find the nuggets of insight.

Admittedly these nuggets are usually well worth the effort, and she does have interesting things to say, especially about her core subject, modern fiction and modern novels. Some of the observations of contemporary life, and even some of the fantastical passages, are rich and rewarding. I can see that 1) she was a great writer and 2) her opinions about writing are historically and aesthetically important, 3) her writings on feminism and women authors ditto – but God, what a slog wading through the swamp to get there.

Maybe a savvier way of putting it is that Virginia Woolf’s essays can be, and often are, every bit as demanding as her most demanding novels.

It is symptomatic that of all the authors in a collection of modern essays which she reviews (in Modern Essays) she thinks by far the best is Walter Pater because of its aesthetic ‘purity’.

There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay. Somehow or other, by dint of labour or bounty of nature, or both combined, the essay must be pure — pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter. (p.15)

You can see from this excerpt how earnestly she aspired to a refined and aesthetic purity untainted by facts, arguments or even opinions.

So if you’re looking for logic and argument you might, like me, find it a grind to work through her deliberately digressive and self-consciously elegant style. If, on the contrary, you are happy to be beguiled and distracted, and to submit to her many extraordinary fantasias, passages of delirious description which make barely any sense – such as the storm which seems to end civilisation at the end of Thunder at Wembley or the death visions in Flying over London or the extraordinary description of the whole planet dying in The Sun and The Fish – to submit to her magic spell, then there is much to revel and lose yourself in.

But I couldn’t help continually comparing all this with the straightforward intellectual pleasure offered by the lucid essays of George Orwell or the perspective-changing insights of T.S. Eliot’s wonderful essays. Much easier and much more opinion-changing, because so much clearer.

Woolf’s long career but narrow range

Woolf had a long writing career. She published her first reviews in the Times Literary Supplement in 1905 and her last novel in 1941 – 36 years of writing and publishing, in total. And she was incredibly prolific: besides the nine novels and two biographies, her collected essays fill six ‘meaty’ volumes.

The Oxford World Classic edition claims these 30 essays show Woolf’s thoughts on ‘a range of subjects’ but when you look closely, the most striking thing is just how narrow her range of subjects was. I’ve tweaked Bradshaw’s section titles to make their subject matter clearer.

Writing Fiction and Criticism
Writing Biography
Women and Writing
Miscellaneous pieces

Writing novels, reading and criticising novels, writing biography, criticising biography, theorising about fiction and biography, women and writing, writing about the world around her, mostly London – it’s not a massive range, is it? After a while it feels like Woolf circles round and round a relatively small number of the same issues like a goldfish in a bowl. A word about her background maybe helps to explain why.

Like father, like daughter

Virginia Stephen grew up in a highly literate and bookish household, deeply influenced by the example of her father, Leslie Stephen, the eminent author, critic, historian and biographer. To quote the biographical note to this volume:

Both her parents had strong family associations with literature. Leslie Stephen was the son of Sir James Stephen, a noted historian, and brother of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, a distinguished lawyers and writer on law. Her father’s first wife was a daughter of the great Victorian novelist, William Makepeace Thackeray. His second wife was an admired associate of the Pre-Raphaelites and had aristocratic connections. Stephens himself is remembered as the founder of the Dictionary of National Biography but he was also a remarkable journalist, biographer and historian of ideas.

So her father was a writer of journalism, essays and biography and she grew up to be… a writer of journalism, essays and biography. The fact that Bradshaw’s first two categories are ‘Reading and Writing’ and ‘Life-Writing’ (biography) indicates just how little distance she travelled from her father’s interests: literature and biography. And, as above, it’s not just me saying so. Bradshaw’s introduction to this book quotes Woolf scholar Rachel Bowlby as saying:

Woolf was directly following in her father’s footsteps, in a move that was composed of both rivalry and honour; in fact, she took over where he left off, quite literally, since she began publishing… just after he died [in 1904]. (quoted in the introduction, page xii)

Woolf was a nepo baby

So she had the big advantage in terms of instruction, guidance and support of having a famous, well-connected literary figure as your dad – then you learn that her first two books were published by the company set up by her half-brother George Duckworth – and you begin to get a feel for the immense advantages in terms of useful family connections which Virginia Woolf enjoyed compared to most other women (and male) writers of her time. D.H. Lawrence grew up in a cramped coal miner’s house and could only read what he found in the school library.

There’s no doubting that Woolf was a nepo baby, which the internet defines as: ‘a term for someone whose career is similar to their parents’ successful career. It’s short for “nepotism baby”.’

Harsh? Not according to Rachel Bowlby: ‘Woolf was directly following in her father’s footsteps.’ What she added to her father’s interests were 1) an interest in just observing the life around her, especially the hectic street life of modern bustling London and 2) her feminism.

1. Woolf’s observational essays

1) Mrs Dalloway, Orlando and The Waves famously contain passages doing nothing more than describing London’s endless hustle and bustle; To The Lighthouse is so wonderful for the calm and lyrical descriptions of life on the idyllic holiday island; and this selection contains many impressionistic essays in the manner of Street Haunting (1927), The Docks of London (1931) and Oxford Street Tide (1932).

Then again, this was hardly a new subject. Charles Dickens (who the snobbish Woolf disliked for his vulgarity and lack of artistic purpose) began his career with ‘Sketches by Boz: Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People’, observations of London life and people published in various newspapers and periodicals between 1833 and 1836 i.e. just about a century before Woolf’s comparable pieces. Obviously Woolf’s pieces deploy the distinctive subjective, free-associating point of view which she perfected in her modernist novels, but the basic idea is the same.

2. Woolf’s feminism

The one category in this book which is definitely new and unique to Woolf (unlike Dickens, her father, Lamb, Macauley or Samuel Butler or any other male writer) is her feminism. Personally, I don’t think any of the six feminist essays included here really cut it. They all pale by comparison with her book-length polemic Three Guineas which is a masterpiece.

In my opinion, anyone who’s interested in Woolf should read Three Guineas. Reading even the modernist novels can easily give you the impression of a posh, privileged, upper-middle-class white woman who writes airy, dreamy, drifting fantasias about other dreamy, impractical middle-class women (Clarissa Dalloway, Mrs Ramsay, the female characters in The Waves, Mrs Swithin and Isabella Oliver in Between the Acts) who drift along in a cloud of flowers and tea parties.

Compared to the studied inconsequentiality of her novels, Three Guineas is a revelation of Woolf’s stone-cold fury at the legal, financial, traditional, educational and professional oppression of women, at women’s systematic exclusion from all aspects of life except marriage and baby-making by a ferociously repressive and woman-hating patriarchy, right up to the time of its writing, the 1930s. It’s a sensational, eye-opening book, not only for the genuinely shocking roster of facts it marshals but for the unexpected fury of the author.

Woolf’s mental illness

But for me the really distinctive quality Woolf brings to her observational essays is her mental illness. I thought her description of a ramble across London at dusk, Street Haunting, would be a fun description of the bits of London I know as they appeared a hundred years ago and, up to a point, it is. But the most powerful passages describe her mind being assailed by multiple selves clamouring for expression and rather harrowingly portray her desperate attempts to calm her neurotically anxious thoughts.

The same anxiety dominates the piece titled Evening Over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car, namely the problem of how to control the many voices in her head. And what you’d expect to be a larky in the essay titled Flying Over London, contains extended passages about wanting to be dead.

I don’t raise this as a criticism. As the father of two children with mental health problems I feel pretty sensitised to the issues. Which is in fact why, maybe, I feel so sensitive to the thread of mental illness running through all her texts, fiction and non-fiction, why I can almost physically feel the difficulty she had concentrating, her evasion of the dangers of introspection, her preference for escaping into long descriptions of a steady stream of surface images, passing sights and sense impressions, rather than risk deeper thoughts. I find it in all her writings and it has deeply coloured my response. Basically, I feel desperately sorry for her.

Woolf is weird

And, last point, many of the essays contain passages which are strange, often very strange, far stranger, more lateral, random and sometimes inexplicable than David Bradshaw makes out in his sensible and useful introduction. Woolf was often just plain weird.

It’s one reason why you should always read her works rather than summaries and commentaries by academics. Academics and critics have to make sense and if you only read them you’d think Woolf did too. But she often really didn’t and rejoiced in the fact, and her refusal to conform to ‘male’ standards of reason and logic may, after all, be a really important aspect of her enduring appeal.

Credit

‘Selected Essays of Virginia Woolf’ was published by Oxford World Classics in 2008. Most of the essays can be found online. The OWC introduction can be read on Amazon.

Related reviews

Virginia Woolf reviews

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by Simon on April 14, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in English literature, Essays

Tagged A Room of One's Own, Aestheticism, belle-letterism, belles-letters, Between The Acts, Biography, Charles Dickens, Charles Lamb, Clarissa Dalloway, D.H. Lawrence, David Bradshaw, Dickens, Dictionary of National Biography, Essays, Essays of Elia, Evening Over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car, Ezra Pound, Feminism, Flying Over London, George Duckworth, George Orwell, H.G. Wells, Hazlitt, Impressionism, Isabella Oliver, John Keats, late-Victorian, Leslie Stephen, London, Macauley, mental illness, Mrs Dalloway, Mrs Ramsay, Mrs Swithin, nepo baby, Orlando, Oxford World Classic, prose, Rachel Bowlby, romanticism, Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Sir James Stephen, Sketches by Boz, Street Haunting, T.E. Hulme, T.S. Eliot, The Waves, Thomas de Quincey, Three Guineas, Times Literary Supplement, To The Lighthouse, Virginia Stephen, Virginia Woolf, Walter Pater, William Makepeace Thackeray, Wyndham Lewis

Posted by Simon on April 14, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/04/14/selected-essays-virginia-woolf-introduction/

The Culminating Ape by Peter Kemp (1982)

Carey and Dickens

In 1973 the literary critic Professor John Carey published an entertaining study of Charles Dickens’ imagination entitled ‘The Violent Effigy’. Instead of analysing Dickens’ novels in terms of themes or issues or morality or symbolism, of gender or class or race and so on – Carey instead devoted a chapter each to half a dozen primal aspects of human experience which really fired Dickens’s writing, identifying the situations and subjects which triggered his most vivid writing, starting with violence and working through topics like fire, food, sex, death and so on.

Each chapter was stuffed with examples from the novels (and essays and travel books) as if Carey had read Dickens’s complete works with a set of index files constantly open by his side in which paragraphs or entire scenes would be assigned to each theme and sub-theme. The result was chapters made up of quotes and scenes and characters and events and words and phrases and metaphors illuminating each particular topic. Thus the opening chapter, on violence, shows how powerfully, repeatedly and obsessively Dickens was attracted by public hangings, raging fires, murderers, how his gargoyle imagination created characters who burst into flame or wanted to eat one another, and so on and so on.

Kemp and Wells

Well, in 1982 literary journalist Peter Kemp did something similar to H.G. Wells.

Introduction: the Darwinian worldview

Kemp starts from the basic premise, readily attested by umpteen quotes from Wells himself, that the year Wells spent studying under the great promoter of Darwinian evolution, Thomas Henry Huxley, at the South Kensington College, was the most important of his life. And that the central learning of that year was a kind of biological reductionism, the radical teaching that humans are animals like any other, just another twig on the vast tangled bush of life, entirely physical and material in nature, with no hint of a God to promote our sense of specialness and apartness from all the other living things.

No, we are living organisms, one species among the million or so others which have evolved over three billion years of chance and accidents, most closely related to the family of primates and, within that family, to the great apes. In this brief opening chapter Kemp gathers together a dozen or so Wells quotes all repeating the same idea, that ‘humanity is but animal rough-hewn to a reasonable shape’, but ‘an etherealised monkey’, ‘a creature not ten thousand generations from the ape his ancestor’, is:

no privileged exception to the general conditions that determine the destinies of other living species.

Just like all the other animals, humans need to ‘eat, mate, find a congenial habitat, and survive danger – by fighting, escaping or co-operating with other members of his species’. Man is, in other words, ‘the culminating ape’ i.e. the culmination, in the present, of the line of descent from the apes (‘in the present’ for who knows what mutations and evolutions await in the future).

So, having established that this materialist, Darwinian view of humanity underpins everything Wells wrote, Kemp then does a Carey, and devotes a series of chapters to looking in great detail at specific aspects of this human-as-animal worldview, and how these fundamental aspects are embodied and dramatised and described across the full range of Wells’s forbiddingly vast oeuvre.

Kemp’s five big chapters address:

Food (The Edible Predator)
Sex (The Slave Goddess)
Habitat (The Redeveloped Basement)
Survival Mechanisms (The Pugnacious Pacifist)
Self Image (The Grand Earthly)

And just like Carey’s book, Kemp’s is stuffed to overflowing with as many examples, quotes, scenes and passages, keywords, symbols and metaphors as he could find about each of these core issues from all over Wells’s works. What it lacks in ‘theory’, Kemp’s entertaining book makes up for in its hundreds of juicy examples and entertaining quotes. It sometimes contains ideas and thoughtful interpretations but really it is a riotous guided tour of the phantasmagoria of Well’s unquenchable imagination, and so it is a riot to read.

1. Food

Having just read it I can confirm that the real message of ‘War of the Worlds’ is not so much alien invasion but the idea that humans, so long accustomed to being top of the food chain, suddenly find themselves the prey and foodstuff of the Martians. Just like rabbits and grouse and all the other animals we’re used to hunting, now we have to go on the run, find burrows, hide during the day and only come out at night.

‘The Island of Dr Moreau’s central idea is to blur the boundaries between the human and the animal, as Dr Moreau does in his demented vivisection experiments. Closely connected to it is the notion of cannibalism, as his half-man half-animal creations show no reluctance to kill and eat people or each other. Kemp offers a summary of Wells’s overall intention:

The cannibalism and carnivorous preying in his books are designed to frighten man into a full awareness of his biological condition. (p.34)

‘The Food of the Gods’ is, as the name suggests, entirely about the impact of a wonderfood which makes babies grow into giants and the social disruption this brings.

One of the Invisible Man’s many problems is that when he eats anything it is, to start with, entirely visible inside him as half-digested chunks of matter. Only as his system breaks food down and absorbs it into him does it become invisible which explains why, after eating, he has to hide till this biological process has been achieved (p.49).

Kemp cites Wells writing that he aimed to counter and refute what he called ‘Bio-Optimism’ i.e. the sentimental belief that evolution means things steadily improve, countering it with a healthy dose of what could be called ‘Bio-Realism’ (p.12). Certainly his scientific romances all point to the disasters that mankind’s accelerating technologies seem liable to bring.

The phrase Bio-Optimism made me think that, if the dictionary definition of ‘woke’ is being ‘alert to racial prejudice and discrimination’, you could conceive a term closer to my sense of things, which would be ‘biowoke’, meaning being ‘alert to the evolutionary, biological, Darwinian nature of human beings’ and, indeed, of the entire natural world we live in.

Anyway, the opening passages about Wells’s polemical materialism soon get swamped by the avalanche of Kemp’s examples, which feel like they quickly wander far from the point and descend to a kind of fascinating triviality.

Leaving the marvels of the scientific romances mentioned above for the bathos of Wells’s social novels, Kemp explains at some length how ‘The History of Mr Polly’ is a novel about a man who is a martyr to his bad digestion (pages 52 to 54). In fact, Kemp shows how Wells’s own personal history of stomach and digestive problems is echoed in lots of novels and characters.

In Mr Polly he builds a whole book around human indigestion…basically, it is the story of a man who leaves a bony woman who is a bad cook for a plump woman who is a good cook. (p.52)

Having just read it, I was amused by the accuracy of this summary. Kemp neatly balances Polly (about bad food and indigestion) with ‘Tono-Bungay’, which is a novel about a cure for indigestion which becomes a worldwide smash hit and propels its creator and his nephew, the book’s narrator, to giddy heights of fame and wealth – but all based on exploiting the bad guts of its credulous consumers (p.55). And so it makes a neat counterpoint to Polly:

Real ills are displayed in Mr Polly; spurious remedies in Tono-Bungay. (p.54)

Kemp modulates from the level of considering entire plots of novels to zooming in on particular aspects of food and eating. He gathers quotes from umpteen novels to show us that Wells had a thing about tentacles e.g the horrible tentacles gathered at the mouths of the hungry Martians and the tentacles of giant crabs the time traveller encounters in the dying days of the planet, through to the social comedies where, for example, innocent Ann Veronica feels harassing Mr Ramage’s hands ‘stretching [like]

hungry invisible tentacles about her’.

And teeth – when we see other people’s teeth we realise they are descended from countless generations of animals which have used them to rip and tear to pieces other living animals. The front teeth are acceptable but sight of the incisors should make anyone with an imagination shiver, so Kemp then proceeds to give us loads of examples of monsters with horrific teeth, or people with notable teeth, examples of where teeth are used as symbols or metaphors, and so on.

So when Kemp is at level 1, showing how a theme or idea dominates an entire narrative, such as ‘War of the Worlds’ or ‘Moreau’ or, in a domestic vein, ‘Polly’ or ‘Tono’, Kemp is interesting and useful. When he shifts down to level 2 and throws at the reader loads of quotes describing tentacles or teeth, he persuades us that these are recurring obsessions of Wells’s which we will, as a result, be more aware of next time we read a Wells text. But you can’t help feeling he is descending to trivia when, at level 3, he has a few pages telling us that Wells repeatedly gives characters food names and rattles off a long list of examples, from Amontillado (a cardinal in Meanwhile) to Wensleydale (in The Sea Lady) via characters named Butter, Beans, Bramble, Cranberry, Cabbage, Lettice. Or when he gives us a few pages full of quotes showing that Wells also liked to use similes comparing people to food (a veiled bride looking like confectionary, an albino having a head like a coconut, someone who is ‘egg-faced’, a man who looks like a chestnut, and so on and so on). You can’t help feeling that, by this stage, the method has dwindled down to a form of stamp collecting or train spotting.

On the other hand, though, this stamp collecting approach does remind you of the thousands of throwaway details in a novel which you enjoy at the moment but tend to forget in the sweep and overall shape of the narrative, and it is enjoyable to be reminded of these details, and hundreds and hundreds of forgotten details is what this book overflows with. I’d forgotten that in the future when ‘The Sleeper Awakes’ the white cliffs of Dover are covered in advertising hoardings – things like that which spark sudden memories of the feel and flavour of books you read a while ago…

2. Sex (The Slave Goddess)

Scientific premise: All animals have to mate. Humans breed. Society replenishes itself with new generations.

Kemp kicks off, a bit tangentially, by highlighting the handful of places where Wells tangles with eugenics, the idea of breeding a better standard of human, but Wells was the first to admit that science didn’t have the first idea how to do this, knowing nothing of genetics.

This chapter gives the impression of flitting about the large subject of sex and love and reproduction almost at random. Next thing we know Kemp is describing the basis biographical fact that Wells married his cousin when he was a very young man, discovered she was dim and sexless so ran off with one of his students, but soon enough got bored of her and embarked on a series of affairs, some of which caused public scandal. The point of all this is just how often he recycled these facts in his novels, marriage to someone markedly beneath the protagonist’s intellectual and cultural level in ‘Love and Mr Lewisham’, a dry and disappointing marriage followed by a happier one in Mr Polly, running away for the sake of true love in Ann Veronica, and so on.

Then Kemp spots that Wells, in his autobiography, says his first sexual stirrings came from the images of Britannia and other female national symbols he saw in Punch (the weekly humorous magazine), followed by seeing big bare-breasted sculptures in art galleries, and Kemp goes on to list all the male characters who admit to the same foible scattered through his fiction. And then specific instances of Greek goddesses being cited, Aphrodite or Athena.

The scene of a boy or young man looking up at a girl sitting on a wall occurs in Tono-Bungay and Mr Polly. These and other women are generally a social class above the protagonist, who is looked down on in both a literal and metaphorical sense.

Proposals or love happen at elevations. Helen Walsingham crowds Kipps into proposing to her up the old keep at Lympne. Ann Veronica finally knows passionate love in the Alps, and many other examples.

The ultimate high place is flying, which is described with sensual lavishness in Tono-Bungay.

However, these high-up women invariably end up very much the junior partners, and Kemp brings together the many places where female characters explicitly refer to their men as Master or King, as Ann Veronica does in the Alpine section of her novel. Kemp cites a whole series of characters who are sceptical of women’s ability to have original thoughts and of women who are all too ready to abase themselves as helpers to strong men.

In fact Kemp more or less lists a whole load of sexist attributes which Wells consistently gives to his women, which includes:

making his women honorary men or boys
making women describe themselves as slaves who venerate their beloved men as King or Master
ridiculing women’s intellectual ability as non-existent
making them indulge in childish play talk with their lovers
characterising women as extravagant spenders of men’s hard-earned cash

All the early social comedies feature a woman ‘wrecker’ who diverts and destroys a promising man’s career, reworkings of the autobiographical fact that Wells gave up his studies to marry his cousin who turned out to be intellectually dim and frigid – ‘research disruptors’ such as Ethel in ‘Love and Mr Lewisham’, Marion in ‘Tono-Bungay’, Miriam in ‘Mr Polly’, Remington’s career ruined by his elopement with Isabel Rivers in ‘The New Machiavelli’).

Many of the novels feature a love triangle, itself the trigger for jealousy, sometimes murderous rage.

By contrast, his various utopias envisage a jealousy-free world of free love.

For an advocate of free love Wells is surprisingly judgemental about smut and sordid fumbling and horrible male banter. This is all muddy and grubby. It is contrasted with the ‘clean’, pure love of clean young men and women for each other as, for example, Ann Veronica.

Wells the Victorian anathematised what he saw as the moral collapse of the 1920s into obscenity and pornography. Thus he thinks Brave New World demonstrated that Aldous Huxley was obsessed with sex (which is a bit rich coming from the notorious old philanderer). When the Sleeper Wakes he discovers the future has Pleasure Cities where the lascivious and promiscuous exhaust themselves in hedonism till they die childless, what Kemp calls ‘camouflaged extermination chambers’ (p.109). Like everyone who enjoys speculating about utopias and perfect worlds, Wells knows it will require exterminating quite a lot of the actual existing human population.

What comes over is that Wells consistently thinks of sex as a powerful urge which has to be slaked but shouldn’t be over-indulged in or get in the way of work. Incidentally Kemp quotes at length the description of Ramage from Ann Veronica which summarises very well a certain experimental male attitude to sex as endless quest and adventure:

His invalid wife and her money had been only the thin thread that held his life together; beaded on that permanent relation had been an inter-weaving series of other feminine experiences, disturbing, absorbing, interesting, memorable affairs. Each one had been different from the others, each had had a quality all its own, a distinctive freshness, a distinctive beauty. He could not understand how men could live ignoring this one predominant interest, this wonderful research into personality and the possibilities of pleasing, these complex, fascinating expeditions that began in interest and mounted to the supremest, most passionate intimacy. All the rest of his existence was subordinate to this pursuit; he lived for it, worked for it, kept himself in training for it.

Ramage is an example of the City gent as sexual hypocrite, all immaculate facade and coercive exploitation. Another type of hypocrite is the sexually repressed Oxbridge don, such as Prothero in ‘The Research Magnificent’ (1915).

Although he counsels restraint and balance in his books, between grubby promiscuity and his other enemy, celibacy, ‘that great denial of life.’ Celibacy is particularly dangerous when the sexually abstinent take out their frustrated energy in other mediums, especially politics, as Rud Whitlow in ‘The Holy Terror’ (1939).

I’ve just finished reading his feminist novel, ‘Ann Veronica’ so was surprised that Kemp pulls out so many quotes demonstrating Wells’s intense antipathy to the suffragettes. Wells thought they would be a sisterhood of pure-hearted statuesque females as per his fantasies. Instead he was disillusioned to realise they were a screeching rabble, addicted to violence and hooliganism. He has one of his characters describe suffragettism as ‘The Great Insane Movement’.

Kemp is funny on Wells taking the mickey out of the suffragettes. I liked his characterisation of Wells dwelling on the feminists’ preference for ‘damage over debate’, and how, in order to demonstrate the special qualities of reason and compassion which women said they would bring to politics, they set about burning letter boxes, smashing shop windows, spitting at cabinet ministers, assaulting the police, slashing paintings and sending letter bombs. Feminists and our culture, generally, nowadays downplays the impressive Suffragette bombing and arson campaign which contemporaries and the activists themselves referred to as terrorism.

3. Habitat (The Redeveloped Basement)

Scientific premise: species, and life in general, are shaped and moulded by their environments. Man is the first species which can substantially alter his environment and, Wells argued, he needs to do it more and faster if he is to survive.

Basements: The odd chapter title derives from the fact that Wells spent his early formative years living in a series of basements (in his parents’ shop, then when his mother became a housekeeper at Up Park country house, then he was apprenticed to various drapers’ shops). These grim subterranean experiences meant that, once he escaped from a life of humiliating toil, Wells’s imagination fantasised about high, light, open places. And it’s this dichotomy, between dark cramped dingy underground and light bright upstairs, as dramatised in umpteen ways throughout his writings, which this chapter explores.

As with the other chapters, it starts by exploring the theme very literally and then slowly moving out to more metaphorical or related topics.

TM: Probably the most striking example of this upstairs-downstairs dichotomy in The Time Machine between the sunny happy world inhabited by the Eloi, who are preyed on by the Morlocks who emerge from their underground dens, but that’s not where Kemp starts.

Rising: Kemp starts by showing us how very widespread the description of basements is, particularly in the social comedies. By contrast, he shows us that when Wells characters go up in the world they not only rise up the social hierarchy, but move to bigger higher lighter houses (with bigger windows).

Uncle Edward’s ascent: He particularly focuses on Tono-Bungay in which Uncle Edward Pondorevo, as he amasses more wealth, rises from living in a basement in Highbury, to living in a house, to moving out to a house in the country (big windows, aery rooms) and the logical conclusion of all this rising which is to commission his own house to be built on a hilltop. Clearly, this physical ascent out of the gloomy underground to a rich man’s mansion on a height mirrors Uncle Edward’s social ascent, as he climbs the social ladder, taking lessons in etiquette and elocution along the way.

Disorder: But ‘Tono-Bungay’ also demonstrates related topics. For Wells the country house of Bladesover represents order and hierarchy. Kemp demonstrates how ‘Tono-Bungay’ contains a dazzling variety of embodiments of disorder, chaos, collapse, disintegration. This extends from the speech patterns of many of the comic characters who can barely speak or have odd mannerisms, through to the symbolism of ‘quap’ which rots and decays everything it comes into contact with. Kemp lists and explains a whole raft of images of decay which infect the novel at every level and this passage really deepened my appreciation of the novel (pages 131 to 137).

Ruins of the future: In this respect, ‘Tono-Bungay’ is deeply connected to ‘The Time Machine’ because the latter describes collapse and decay but in a science fiction context, as when the time traveller goes exploring the ruins of latter-day London far in the future, and Wells luxuriates in page after page of descriptions of ruined buildings and statues covered in vines etc, images which have become standard in sci fi but which must have been phenomenally powerful to those first readers.

London cancer: This segues into a brief section about Wells’s dislike of the way London has spread out chaotically, like a cancer, swallowing up the nice orderly villages around it (compare E.M. Forster’s similar dislike of London’s inexorable spread, destroying the surrounding country e.g. the end of Howards End).

New York: By contrast Kemp describes Wells’s admiration for New York, with what was then (1910s/1920s) its unprecedented array of soaring skyscrapers. Its height and space dazzled Wells on his first visit (in 1906, described in ‘The Future in America’) and triggered admiring references throughout his writings.

Ideal cities: New York’s mathematical orderliness of avenues and streets was a model for some of the ideal cities of Wells’s utopias and this takes Kemp on to a consideration of the new worlds described in his various utopias which, of course, consisted of high light aery buildings. If they have undergrounds these echo the fundamental dichotomy laid out in The Time Machine as in When the Sleeper Wakes, with its extensive network of of ‘underways’.

Magic transformation of society: This leads Kemp, in passing, to note how bad Wells was at thinking through the process whereby humanity would get from its chaotic present to the gleaming futures he imagines. In one a man falls asleep and wakes up 200 years later. In another a comet passes through the earth’s atmosphere, trailing a chemical which brings about a complete transformation in human nature. In ‘Things To Come’ only a ruinous war which almost destroys civilisation can clear the ground for the bright new future.

Relations between the sexes have always been poor with both sides complaining long and bitterly about the other, and the modern ubiquity of feminism means that it is difficult to think, write or talk about men and women, love and sex, without triggering an avalanche of parti pris comment from one side or another of the toxic culture wars. So the sex chapter (above) felt vexed and embattled.

By complete contrast, this chapter about spatial and geographic metaphors in the life, autobiographies and fictions of H.G. Wells – free of gender cultural controversy – felt enlightening and rather wonderful.

4. Survival Mechanisms (The Pugnacious Pacifist)

Scientific premise: Animals have three strategies to cope with threat: fight, flight or co-operation.

Fight

Destruction: As Kemp’s title suggests he is at pains to show that, although Wells described himself as a pacifist, his imagination overflowed with images of war, specially in the science fiction and utopias. World war destroys civilisation in ‘The War in the Air’ and ‘the World Set Free’ and in ‘The Shape of Things To Come’, and ‘The War of the Worlds’ revels in massive destruction.

Soldiers: His autobiographies reveal that he loved playing with toy soldiers and imagining himself a general as a boy. But once war arrived, in 1914, after an embarrassing early rush of blood to the head (in which he wrote unforgivable things about conscientious objectors) he grew increasingly haunted by the realities of war and Kemp quotes some choice passages from the novels which describe various protagonists at the front squidging through rotten corpses, seeing maggots breeding in dead bodies, rotting faces covered with flies etc.

Wells’s temper: Moving on, Kemp tells us that Wells had a very short temper and was quick to fury. One aspect of this was the scathing letters he wrote to reviewers and fellow authors, the blistering caricatures he carried out at book length (Henry James caricatured in ‘Boon’, Ford Madox Ford in ‘The Bulpington of Blup’).

Anti-Catholic: Wells’s fiction takes swipes at clerics, lampoons bishops and develops a really blistering hatred of the Roman Catholic church, leading up to the gassing of the Pope in ‘The Shape of Things To Come’.

Violent chaps: Wells has surprisingly violent characters: it’s easy to forget how homicidal the invisible man becomes or just how violent us ‘Uncle Jim’ who aims to maim and injure the hero of ‘Mr Polly’, turning what ought to be the bucolic Potwell Inn into a warzone.

Flight

Bicycles: In a typically lateral move, Kemp associates the ‘flight’ part of an animal’s response to danger with The Bicycle. Wells was an early adopter and proselytiser for bicycles, his happiest characters ride one (e.g. Mr Polly) and he wrote an entire novel about a draper shop assistant’s cycling holiday, ‘The Wheels of Chance’. Bert Smallways, hero of ‘The War in the Air’, goes from running a bicycle repair shop in a Kent suburb to witnessing the end of civilisation.

Running away from domesticity: Kemp cites lots of evidence from Wells’s autobiographical writings of his need to escape the chains of custom and habit and the humdrum, which translates into his small trapped men who try to run away – Lewisham, Kipps, Polly. Many of his novels are studies in frustration by a man who moved restlessly from love affair to love affair, and also moved house regularly, and at one stage planned to have four dwellings, two in Britain, two in France, which he could move between, restlessly in movement (p.166). Wells later wrote that the entire novel ‘The New Machiavelli’ was ‘a dramatised wish…about going off somewhere.’ Ann Veronica performs a series of escapes ending up with her running off with her lover, Capes.

Suicide: I think Kemp misses a trick by not mentioning suicide; he doesn’t discuss it and it doesn’t appear in the index and yet a number of his heroes in the social comedies feel so wretchedly trapped that they consider suicide. The most florid example is Mr Polly. After 15 years trapped in a loveless marriage and a poky little shop, the only way out he can conceive of is to cut his throat and set fire to the shop. It is comic that he sets fire to the shop alright but then bottles out of the suicide and so finds himself in the middle of a raging house fire, and it is farcical that this quickly runs out of control into the Great Fire of Fishbourne.

Adventure running: Obviously, in the science fiction adventures there is a great deal or running, such as the narrator running from the Martians or Graham going on the run in ‘Sleeper Wakes’ and the invisible man is on the run from London where he’s committed various crimes. Kemp thinks the scene where Bedford is racing across the moon crater trying to keep ahead of the creeping shadow of the lunar night is the most exciting thing Wells ever wrote. Here, as at other points, Kemp comes close to banality because, when you think about it, almost all adventure stories involve chase scenes…

Flying: Paralleling the passage Kemp devoted to cycling, he then has a section citing all Wells’s references to flying. First there’s the fact that Wells himself became addicted to flying and took early flights to and within a variety of countries. Then Kemp lists the characters who fly, including George Pondorevo who’s a flight designer as well as Graham in ‘When The Sleeper Wakes’, but many other, and not forgetting the ultimate extension of flying, Bedford and Cavour’s flight to the moon.

Co-operation

Finally, Wells thought of flying as having the capacity to bring mankind together into the kind of world state he fantasised about, in two ways: one, commercial travel would bind together countries in common economic and cultural ties. Two, the mere fact of airplanes diminishes the idea of the self-contained nation state. No country is secure once manned flight gets off the ground, every country becomes vulnerable to aerial attack, and so the arrival of manned flight would, Wells, thought, provide a great spur towards nations weakening their identity and moving towards a world government. Some hope. Thus, for example, the fact that the new world order in ‘The Shape of Things To Come’ is established by a brotherhood of engineer aviators, represented in the movie version, ‘Things To Come’ by the aviator hero John Cabal.

In his factual writings Wells used his biological training to highlight examples of co-operation or symbiosis in the natural world and spent 50 years repeating over and over than humanity had to do the same, to coalesce, to become one organism, sometimes meaning it almost literally. Look at the world today: Gaza, Ukraine, Xinjiang, Sudan, Syria, drugs gangs everywhere. Is Wells’s vision of a united human race under a world government any nearer than during his lifetime? No, because it is a profoundly stupid idea which reveals the basic shallowness and naivety of his ‘thought’.

This explains why the three massive factual books he wrote between the wars, the so-called ‘Outline of History’ trilogy – The Outline of History (1920); The Science of Life (1930); The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (1931) – are completely unread today, because they had little of enduring value to say.

Never judge creative writers for the power of their ‘ideas’ which are almost always tripe. Assess them on the power of their imaginings and their prose, which are often transformational.

All Wells’s writings about a World State are based on one primordial error, which is the assumption, so common up to the present day among western liberals and writers and commentators, that western values are world values, that the values of the west (democracy, human rights, freedom of speech, freedom of expression) are universal values, but they are not. Russia, China and the entire Islamic world are cultures and places where some of these values are paid lip services but other values are more important, nationalistic values in Russia and China and Islam in the Islamic world.

Remember the Iraqi farmer who told Rory Stewart that Iraq would never be a democracy, never. Why not? Because the great majority of its people don’t want it to be – democratic values of the kind Wells spent 50 years (from the 1890s to the 1940s) banging on about, are a particular outcome of the particular religious, social, cultural, economic and military histories of western countries. Other peoples and places haven’t had the same experiences and so prioritise other values. In Iraq identity is predominantly about family, tribe, region and religion, a long way from western notions of deracinated, rootless, atomised units of labour, citizens detached from ancient identities who are free to debate, assemble and vote according to their consciences.

Kemp entertainingly highlights the complete contradiction between Wells’s lifelong hectoring of mankind to co-operate and collaborate more, and his complete failure to collaborate with anyone in his own life. Anybody, like scientist Julian Huxley, who worked with him on joint authored books struggled with his domineering decisions. Beatrice Webb wrote scathingly about his inability to work with anyone in the Fabian Society, his bad manners, rudeness and dictatorial style. And the film professionals he wrote screenplays for complained about Well’s inability to compromise and respect others’ specialisms.

It’s like an alcoholic preaching to everyone about abstinence before passing out from inebriation.

A concrete barrier in Wells’s own writings about a unified mankind was that he himself was riddled with prejudices. Kemp confirms what I’ve noticed in all his books which is a consistent antisemitism, and selects quotations whose gross stereotyping sometimes make Wells sound like a Nazi.

Mind you, Kemp goes straight on to give us quotes where Wells comprehensively badmouths the Germans, who he began criticising during the Great War and didn’t stop for the next 30 years. Germans, in his view, are insensitive, brutish and only happy when obeying orders.

Kemp then quotes Wells’s views on Black people which are at best patronising (colourful clothes, happy smiles, upbeat music) and at worst, casually belittle Blacks with comments about their supposed stupidity and vanity. Wells’s fears are dramatised in ‘When The Sleeper Wakes’ in which, during the world revolution, colonial Black police are sent to London bringing their terrifying reputation for rape and violence. In the Fourth Year (1918) includes the quote:

It is absolutely essential to the peace of the world that there should be no arming of the negroes beyond the minimum necessary for the policing of Africa. (quote p.185)

5. Self Image (The Grand Earthly)

Scientific premise: human beings aren’t really individuals but collections of moods, emotions, personalities and so on. What gives humans a shaky unity is what Wells calls the persona.

This is a promising idea but Wells expresses it in a terrible wishy-washy, humanist manner. Compare and contrast Sigmund Freud’s dazzling succession of theories about the unconscious and the dynamic nature of mind, or Carl Jung’s theories about archetypes, the anima and so on, and Wells is nowhere. (Kemp picks out a passage where Wells explicitly says he prefers Alfred Adler’s theory of the inferiority complex to Freud’s theories of the human mind, quoted p.194).

Still, we’re not interested in Wells as a ‘thinker’ where he’s a non-starter, but as an entertainer. As Kemp aptly phrases it, we enjoy his best works because they are:

enriched with unexpected detail scooped from life by deftly imaginative phrases. (p.214)

In this respect Kemp kicks off with a consideration of how many of his characters pretend to be someone else, associate, worship, model themselves on others.

Kemp starts with the men Wells modelled himself on, paying repeated tribute to the medieval scientist Roger Bacon, but the central figure is Thomas Huxley, who moulded his thinking on scientific lines, who showed the central importance of education, and who showed that being an educator could lead to fame and respect.

So his entire life was dedicated to the role of public educator with reams of articles and lots of books designed to educate the public away from religion and superstition and towards science. He became hysterically convinced that society was in a ‘race between education and catastrophe’, as he put it in ‘World Brain’. And Mr Lewisham has the slogan ‘Knowledge is Power’ pinned to his garret wall.

Yes but knowledge of what? And what kind of power?

Wells makes the two same mistakes most commentators do of thinking a) that most people give a toss about ‘education’, when quite obviously plenty of people hated school, left as soon as they could, and passed on their know-nothing attitude to their kids, whilst many people just aren’t suited to academic study; and b) that education means one commonly agreed thing: i) 100 years later educators are still squabbling about what to teach and how; ii) in many parts of the world, for example the Muslim world, teaching religion is hugely more important than ‘western science’, compare Saudi Arabia’s funding of madrassahs across the Muslim world.

So Wells’s vast output of texts advocating for ‘education’ are i) irrelevant to most people ii) based on an untenable notion that there is just One Education, one kind of knowledge, one incontestable Science which everyone needs to be converted to and which, it becomes clear as his books progress, simply equates to his own views, a utopia where ‘world government’ is the simple-minded answer to all problems.

So it’s a meaningless concept, and even if it had any meaning, it’ll never happen. In fact the error is summed up in Kemp’s pithy opening sentence:

A scientific education saved Wells’s life; he assumed it would do the same for the world. (p.1)

But he was wrong.

Back to the books, Wells spoke about all knowledge being brought together into a ‘World Brain’ (the title of a book) and Kemp links this back to the colourful idea of the Grand Lunar who rules Selenite society in ‘First Men in the Moon’. (This explains the title of this chapter, for the Grand Lunar, essentially one big brain yards wide, cannot believe that earth society is run by governments of men. ‘Is there not a Grand Earthly? he asks.)

The dominating importance of education moves onto the dominating educator. We’ve seen how Wells talked about co-operation but was in practice a difficult domineering personality.

From there Kemp moves on to discuss dictators in Wells’s work, men who exercise total control. He praises Adler because he thinks the inferiority complex and the will to power operate continually whereas Freud’s sex instincts are more intermittent.

But Wells doesn’t venerate one particular leader. In his prophetic writings he went on and on about an elite, what he calls the Samurai in ‘A Modern Utopia’, the subject of his essay ‘An Open Conspiracy’. In ‘After Democracy’ he calls for ‘a Liberal Fascisti, for enlightened Nazis’ (p.196).

He prided himself on his access to the powerful, to the great minds of the age, a trend which reached its peak in his notorious meeting with Stalin. His idiocy about the world reaches a kind of climax, as he subsequently wrote that Stalin is modest and self-critical and that no-one is afraid of him (p.197). Someone that completely wrong about one of the key figures of the twentieth century and everything he represented is hardly to be trusted on any other subject.

All this can be seen as an astonishing achievement for the son of a housekeeper. More subtly you can see how it is motivated by the wish to create an alternative hierarchy of values and achievers – scientists and educators – than the hierarchy Wells was brought up in and oppressed by – aristocrats and their parasites, religion and superstition.

The exorbitance of his imagination is revealed by the books titles, 11 of which have ‘world’ in the title, most of the others overdoing it – First and Last Things, The Fate of Homo Sapiens, Mankind in the Making.

And the length – many of them are very, very long. Wells freely explained that many of the reasonable length novels (Kipps, Ann Veronnica) were fragments of what he originally planned.

And the unstaunchable prolificness, the terrifying amount he wrote, came at the price of repetition. Many of the later novels echo or repeat plots and characters from earlier ones. Kemp points out that the novels about sexual relations show a tendency to fall back on the same limp scenarios and emotions.

That said, Kemp makes the interesting point that scientists, previously thin on the ground in English fiction, throng Wells’ novels and short stories i.e. he helped to make the serious research scientist a plausible figure, many of them Fellows of the Royal Society, which, as he grew older, Wells yearned to be elected to.

Alliteration

It’s not a heavy theoretical book, there aren’t really many ideas in it although lots of insights, but Kemp clearly set out to enjoy himself and to entertain his readers. One amusing aspect of this is his fondness for alliteration:

Drudgery in draperies sapped his energy… (p.1)

He bounded energetically towards affluence and achievement… (p.1)

Subsisting on a medical menu, Mrs Tewler is duped and doped to death… (p.57)

It’s a trivial detail, really, but Kemp’s enjoyment of his own alliteration is infectious and worth mentioning.

Conclusion

This kind of book has at least two definable merits. One, its selection of quotes and scenes and examples reminds you of moments in the novels which you’d forgotten, so it works as a pleasurable aide memoire, a collection of memory jogs.

Secondly, the extended descriptions of basements and downstairs spaces in Wells’s own life and then in his fiction – as of all the other topics and themes which Kemp lists and describes – don’t explain the novels, they enrich them. They bring all these aspects – which it is easy to overlook in the hurry of reading for the plot – to life. It makes them 3D. it gives them an extra power and pungency. It makes reading or remembering these themes and images in the novels more rich and pleasurable. It enhances your enjoyment. This is a very enjoyable and enriching book.

Credit

The Culminating Ape by Peter Kemp was published by Macmillan Press in 1982. References are to the 1996 revised paperback edition.

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by Simon on January 6, 2025 • Permalink

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Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul by H.G. Wells (1905)

You figure him a small, respectably attired figure going slowly through a sometimes immensely difficult and always immense world.
(Wells describing the simple, overwhelmed protagonist of this novel, page 212)

The first edition bore a preface by the author:

Kipps is essentially a novel, and is designed to present a typical member of the English lower middle-class in all its limitations and feebleness. Beneath a treatment deliberately kindly and genial, the book provides a sustained and exhaustive criticism of the ideals and ways of life of the great mass of middle-class English people.

From which you can see that Well’s social novels (his realistic depictions of Edwardian life as opposed to his scientific romances) all have an agenda and a program. This is what people like Virginia Woolf didn’t like about him: in her ideal, a novel is a self-contained aesthetic object carefully crafted to be an exquisite thing of beauty, beautifully capturing the beautiful thoughts of beautiful sensitive people, mostly women. For Wells, the novel was the exact opposite, a device or tool designed to convey social satire, sociopolitical criticism, highlight abuses and issues, in stories and prose designed to appeal to a mass audience, to be popular, mostly featuring lower class, under-educated and often quite shallow men, in plots which ramble and shamble with a cheeky chappy narrator pushing and prodding and pointing the moral in case you missed it.

Woolf was a snob and deplored the fact that Wells’s novels depicted ‘counter jumpers’, literally sales assistants in shops who, in Woolf’s view, ought to know their place in the social hierarchy, ought to remain silent functionaries serving her beautiful sensitive friends, instead of having vulgar futile ambitions for a better life. But to Wells, people who worked in shops, in retail, in domestic service, on the railways, on ships, the clerks and receptionists and so on, the great army of functionaries who made society run smoothly, these were people too, people who had had rough starts in life, been let down by a ruinous ‘education system’, and been condemned to lives of shabby poverty and small horizons.

‘Love and Mr Lewisham’ is the story of a very young and naive pair of impoverished lovers: it has many lovely things in it but left me feeling poor and downtrodden. And ‘Kipps’, also, starts off lovely, light and breezy when Kipps is a boy playing carefree on Romney Marsh, but also turns into a bit of a grind. Initially ‘Kipps’ is funnier. Wells maintains his facetiously comical attitude to all his characters, but his phrasing comes off more often:

The eldest Quodling lisped, had a silly sort of straw hat and a large pink face (all covered over with self-satisfaction)…

Mrs. Woodrow — a small partially effaced woman with a plaintive face and a mind above cookery…

Quite regardless of the subject matter I find Well’s throwaway phrasing wonderfully vivid and suggestive:

His own knowledge of French had been obtained years ago in another English private school, and he had refreshed it by occasional weeks of loafing and mean adventure in Dieppe.

Half-way to the wreck Kipps made a casual irrelevant remark. ‘Your sister ain’t a bad sort,’ he said off-handedly. ‘I clout her a lot,’ said Sidney modestly…

He was a youngster of fourteen, thin, with whimsical drakes’ tails at the poll of his head, smallish features, and eyes that were sometimes very light and sometimes very dark, gifts those of his birth; and by the nature of his training he was indistinct in his speech, confused in his mind, and retreating in his manners.

‘Retreating in his manners’, that’s just not the kind of thinking or phrasing you find in modern fiction – curious, odd, unexpected, highly expressive.

Affairs of clothes and vanities they were, jealousies about a thing said, flatteries and mutual boastings, climaxes in the answering grasp of hands, the temerarious use of Christian names… (p.39)

Kipps felt himself a creature of outer darkness, an inexcusable intruder in an altitudinous world. (p.46)

‘You’re right,’ he said, and then looked at her with an entire abandonment of visage. (p.54)

‘You’ll have a good time,’ he said abruptly, with a smile that would have interested a dentist. (p.114)

Sometimes there are thoughts which have strayed in from the scientific romances and have a sudden depth or power:

He wondered where he could be. He had a curious fancy that the world had been swept and rolled up like a carpet and that he was nowhere. (p.105)

When he’s like this I find Wells highly readable.

‘I like gardenin’,’ said Kipps, with memories of a pennyworth of nasturtiums he had once trained over his uncle’s dustbin. (p.135)

Mrs. Walshingham turned a little beam of half-pathetic reminiscence on the past. (p.146)

Sid spoke offhand as though there was no such thing as pride. (p.160)

There was an interlude of matches. (p.205)

He saw them clasp their hands, heard Coote’s characteristic cough—a sound rather more like a very, very old sheep, a quarter of a mile away, being blown to pieces by a small charge of gunpowder than anything else in the world… (p.234)

A faint, tremulous network of lights reflected from the ripples of a passing duck, played subtly over her cheek and faded away. (p.245)

He dismissed their previous talk with his paragraphic cough. (p.258)

For a while they abandoned themselves to ejaculating transports. (p.287)

It was like the rush of water when a dam bursts and washes out a fair-sized provincial town; all sorts of things floated along on the swirl. (p.296)

I’ll return to Woolf’s critique at the end of my plot summary.

The shadow of Dickens

The influence of Charles Dickens haunts the novel: 1) beginning with the basic conception of focusing on very common people, leagues below the lords and ladies of James or EM Foster, the permanently embarrassed lower middle classes and lower, as Dickens did.

2) Then there are Dickensian echoes in the setting of rural Kent, which continually reminds you of ‘Great Expectations’. Pip grows up on the edge of Romney Marsh and Kipps grows up in a sweetshop in New Romney.

3) Wells has a Dickensian way of expressing character through dialogue and, in particular, through idiolects or distinct turns of speech, which really bring out a character. He pays a lot of attention to Kipps’s working class speech, or what he calls ‘his clipped defective accent’ (p.138)

‘Isn’t it a Go!’ said Kips. ‘I ‘aven’t nearly got to believe its reely ‘appened yet. When that Mr. Bean told me of it you could ‘ave knocked me down with a feather…. It’s a tremenjous change for me.’

Even more so Uncle Kipps’s mangled accent:

‘Ain’t bort a dog yet?’
‘Not yet, uncle. ‘Ave a segar?’
‘Not a moty car?”
‘Not yet, uncle.’

4) And then there are Dickensian tricks, such as making a house or its furnishings into living, comic entities.

The rug, the fender, the mantel and mirror conspired with great success to make him look a trivial and intrusive little creature amidst their commonplace hauteur, and his own shadow on the opposite wall seemed to think everything a great lark and mocked and made tremendous fun of him…. (p.113)

And later in the same scene:

He picked a piece of cotton from his knee, the fire grimaced behind his back, and his shadow on the wall and ceiling was disrespectfully convulsed. (p.119)

5) And then the carefree direct address of the author to the reader:

Coote, a sort of master of the ceremonies. You figure his face, blowing slightly with solicitude, his slate coloured, projecting but not unkindly eye intent upon our hero.

Book 1. The Making of Kipps

I. The Little Shop at New Romney

As to the plot it certainly opens with a sort of ‘Great Expectations’ vibe with young Artie Kipps being abandoned by his parents to the care of his aunt and uncle who kept a sweetshop in New Romney. I really enjoyed the description of him running wild across the marshes with the boy next door, Sid Pornick, playing at cowboys and Indians, exploring mysterious shipwrecks. Sounds wonderful. He develops a puppy love for the girl next door, Sid’s sister, Ann. As they hit adolescence their friendship suddenly takes on a mysterious new depth which is puzzling to both of them. Ann swears that they’ll never be apart and:

Then a great idea came to him, in a paragraph called ‘Lovers’ Tokens’ that he read in a torn fragment of Tit Bits. It fell in to the measure of his courage – a divided sixpence! He secured his aunt’s best scissors, fished a sixpence out of his jejune tin money-box, and jabbed his finger in a varied series of attempts to get it in half.

In fact, Kipps fails to cut it and it falls to Ann to manage this task and, when Kipps is getting on the bus to Folkstone, to rush after him and thrust the half a sixpence into his hand.

For then he is sent to a ludicrous private school, ‘Cavendish Academy’, run by a preposterous charlatan:

George Garden Woodrow, F.S.Sc. – letters indicating that he had paid certain guineas for a bogus diploma

Part of Wells’s sustained criticism of the dire state of English education for anyone below public school level.

2. The Emporium

Age 14 Kipp is bound an apprentice to a haberdasher and draper’s shop in Folkestone run by a Mr Shalford who lacks all innovation, planning or intelligence, and whose idea for business is not to innovate in any way but to screw the maximum surplus labour out of his extensive staff.

Mr. Shalford rose, and handing Kipps a blotting-pad and an inkpot to carry – mere symbols of servitude, for he made no use of them – emerged into a counting-house where three clerks had been feverishly busy ever since his door handle had turned.

Nicknamed the Emporium, this establishment is like a department store and has sleeping quarters for most of the staff, including a dormitory for the apprentices like Kipps.

3. The Wood-Carving Class

Long years of soul-destroying drudgery pass, running errands for the older staff and being routinely shouted at and nursing a huge resentment against the world. As he turns 20, the only door into a wider world is a woodwork class Kipps takes with a symbol of the wider world and all the culture he knows nothing about, young woodwork teacher Helen Walshingham.

Kipps shyly falls in love with her, a situation commented on by a freckly girl who adores Helen and points out to her that Kipps loves her. There’s a central symbolic incident where Miss Walshingham tries to open a window in the classroom, can’t, Kipps enthusiastically volunteers and manages to push his hand through the glass, making a long cut down his arm, quickly bleeding profusely. Miss W and the freckled girl both take this as an example of his heroism.

But the class comes to an end and it’s back to work work work, long hours on his feet and complete subservience to hoity-toity customers.

Then three things happen in a hurry, a flurry of coincidences which the characters make much of, as if Wells the author is a little embarrassed by them:

‘It’s about the thickest coincidence I ever struck,’ said Chitterlow…

[Chitterlow] threw out a number of long sentences and material for sentences of a highly philosophical and incoherent character about Coincidences. (p.127)

4. Chitterlow

Kipps is out walking on his afternoon off when he’s run over (or bumped into) by a fellow named Chitterlow riding a bicycle. Sort of posh, or posher than Kipps, this chap apologises effusively and takes him back to his room to offer a drink and to sew up Kipps’s trousers which have been ripped. They become friends. Kipps learns that Chitterlow is a wanna-be playwright who’s been working for years on a Great Tragedy and a Wonderful Farce, neither of which quite get written.

Their early conversation involves a drink, then two, then a top-up, then a lot more conversation about plays and theatre and critics and so on and it turns into a chapter to Kipps and Chitterlow getting completely plastered. Maybe this was intended as a comic tour de force with its description of Kipps’s increasingly confused perceptions but I found it a bit trying. Long story short: Kipps gets do disgustingly drunk that he ends up spending the night on Chitterlow’s sofa thus not returning to the Emporium before lockup at 11pm.

5. ‘Swapped’

Next morning Kipps has a thumping headache and makes his way timidly to the Emporium, only to be called into Mr Shalford’s office and told that, for this breach of the rules governing his apprenticeship, he is being immediately ‘swapped’. This term is never explained by appears to mean sacked.

6. The Unexpected (i.e. Kipps inherits a fortune)

It’s Chitterlow who draws Kipps’s attention to an ad in a newspaper asking for anyone with the surname Kipps, with a mother named Euphemia, and born in September 1878, to get in touch. Long story short: Kipps inherits a fortune. We piece together from scattered conversations with his uncle and aunt that Grandfather Kipps was a stern successful businessman, that his son got Kipps’s mother, Euphemia, pregnant; that Grandfather Kipps sent his son off to Australia and Euphemia gave birth before handing the child over to the uncle and aunt who raised him. Then, on his deathbed, Grandad Kipps realised what a mistake he’d made in preventing the couple from ever marrying, and decided to try and make it right, and so changed his will at the last moment, charging his lawyers, Watson and Bean, to track down his grandson and make him his heir.

And so Kipps inherits property (houses in Folkestone) and other assets which give him an annual income of £1,200. The narrative cuts to five days later and Kipps wearing fashionable dress strolling round town and admiring his main house, an impressive stucco-ed pile.

A scene where Kipps goes back to the Emporium and the entire staff rally round and insist on breaking open champagne and toasting him (obviously only possible because dictatorial Mr Shalford is away in London), featuring some of the named characters he’d been rooming with, ‘Buggins, Carshot, Pierce and the rest of them’. A warm vision of lower middle class solidarity.

Book 2 Mr. Coote, the Chaperon

1. The New Conditions

Mr. Chester Coote. You must figure him as about to enter our story, walking with a curious rectitude of bearing through the evening dusk towards the Public Library, erect, large-headed—he had a great, big head full of the suggestion of a powerful mind, well under control—with a large, official-looking envelope in his white and knuckly hand. In the other he carries a gold-handled cane. He wears a silken grey jacket suit, buttoned up, and anon he coughs behind the official envelope. He has a prominent nose, slatey grey eyes and a certain heaviness about the mouth. His mouth hangs breathing open, with a slight protrusion of the lower jaw. His straw hat is pulled down a little in front, and he looks each person he passes in the eye, and directly his look is answered looks away.

Kipps obviously has no idea to do with his inherited wealth and the impression given by the opening chapters of part 2 is that he is co-opted by people who want to get their hands on it. He had met Chester Coote at Helen Walshingham’s wood-carving class where he gave a sense of lofty superiority. He offers to take Kipps under his wing and guide him through the world of etiquette required of a gentleman in his position.

As the evening wore on Coote’s manner changed, became more and more the manner of a proprietor. He began to take up his rôle, to survey Kipps with a new, with a critical affection. It was evident the thing fell in with his ideas. ‘It will be awfully interesting,’ he said. ‘You know, Kipps, you’re really good stuff.’ (Every sentence now he said ‘Kipps’ or ‘my dear Kipps’ with a curiously authoritative intonation.)

As Coote slowly inveigles his way into role of Kipps’s mentor, I don’t think we’re meant to think of him as a crook exactly, but kind of sinister:

That sinister passion for pedagoguery to which the Good Intentioned are so fatally liable, that passion of infinite presumption that permits one weak human being to arrogate the direction of another weak human being’s affairs, had Coote in its grip. He was to be a sort of lay confessor and director of Kipps, he was to help Kipps in a thousand ways, he was in fact to chaperon Kipps into the higher and better sort of English life. He was to tell him his faults, advise him about the right thing to do… (p.119)

2. The Walshinghams

Coote invites Kipps for tea, shows him books and art, discusses his future. When they go down for tea they discover Miss Walshingham has been invited. Coote had attended Miss W’s wood-carving class periodically. Now there is a very strong feeling that Coote is pushing Kipps towards Walshingham, almost as if he might get a commission for pairing them off.

Kipps is invited for tea at the home of Helen Walshingham and is introduced to her discreet scheming mother. Although it’s all told from Kipps’s point of view the plot is as old as the novel, namely eligible young woman angling to marry well i.e. money. There is no mistaking that Helen and her mother both have their beady eyes on the newly rich Kipps (note her mother’s ‘quiet watchfulness’, p.138). This ought to be funny but I found it sad. Apart from anything else we discover that Helen, who Kipps perceived as a window onto the great world of ‘Culture’ when he attended her classes, in reality lives in a dingy little house, with cramped little rooms and a tiny little back garden.

Even sadder is the refrain repeated by both Helen and her mother that she’s a woman with a lot of potential who never had the opportunities, never had the springboard to become what she ought to.

3. Engaged

Under gentle pressure from Coote and Helen, Kipps changes his lawyer from respectable old Mr Bean who had dealt with his inheritance and gives full charge of his affairs to Helen’s brother, an insignificant detail here, which is to have large consequences at the end of the story…

Fifty-three days later Coote organises a day outing to Lympne, to the romantic ruined castle on the marshes, and while he himself makes a play for the freckled young woman who’s come along, Helen inveigles Kipps into climbing to the turret of the castle with her and in the subtlest way possible makes it clear that she’s in love with him, calls him ‘dear’ (which, apparently, in Edwardian England clinched the matter) because Kipps replies, ‘You mean…you’ll marry me’ (p.144).

It’s been a running joke since he inherited that Kipps has bought several books of etiquette (with titles like ‘Manners and Rules of Good Society’) and pores over them late into the night, but nonetheless is paralysed by fear of making a social faux pas, even when making the slightest social visit, and also that he keeps wearing very expensive and obviously brand new polite clothes.

Well, Helen Walshingham now sets about the work of every wife, which is to reform her future husband and begin to house-train him into what to wear and how to behave (p.154). In among this satire about small people with cramped horizons, what you could Wells’s visionary tendency keeps intruding:

Something like awe at the magnitude of his own fortune came upon him. He felt the world was opening out like a magic flower in a transformation scene at the touch of this wand of gold. And Helen, nestling beautiful in the red heart of the flower. (p.149)

4. The Bicycle Manufacturer

Kipps buys a car and, as far as I can tell, hire a chauffeur, who promptly drives him out to Romney where he announces his magnificence to his aunt and uncle. It is taken for granted that Kipps will share his good fortune with them and they can sell the family toyshop and retire.

In New Romney high street he bumps into his boyhood friend, Sid Pornick, now running his own bicycle manufacturing company in Hammersmith. He is not pleased to hear Kipps has inherited so much money because he is now a Socialist and delivers a bit of a rant about unearned income and the class system.

5. The Pupil Lover

Subtle analysis of the way Kipps’s feeling for his fiancée change which is that, somehow even he doesn’t understand or is really aware of, he’s stopped loving her. Partly due to her growing tendency to mother and boss him about. Somehow they’ve persuaded Kipps to hand over legal responsibility for his affairs from his grandfather’s firm to Helen’s brother. Mrs Walshingham refers to her children as her Twin Jewels. Somehow it is assumed that he will come to live with them when they move to London.

The scene where Kipps is airing himself at Folkestone bandstand when he is bumped into by old mates from the Emporium, Buggins and Pierce, but when Coote turns up he is distinctly cool towards these men who are obviously not gentlemen and Kipps finds himself very embarrassed caught in the middle, and being pressed into denying his past and his character in order to ‘get on’.

6. Discords

Having mastered the skills of the bicycle, Kipps cycles from Folkstone to Romney to announce his engagement to his uncle and aunt when who should he bump into by Ann Pornick. She’s 7 years older, taller, a proper woman, but oh how easily he falls into conversation as they walk together, how happy and relaxed he feels. She mentions the half a sixpence they shared, and he feels an overwhelming urge to kiss her.

With some reluctance they part, he goes onto his uncle’s and can’t remember a thing they talked about then cycled back to Folkestone thinking about Ann all the way, and into the evening and wakes up the next day thinking about ‘Ann, the bright, the desirable, the welcoming’ (p.185).

A few days later he’s back in Romney, finds Ann again in the high street, they go walking down to the sea, talk about the old days, mention the half sixpences again and then, in the poppy-strewn pebbly beach, he kisses her. The rest of the chapter describes his steady alienation from Helen, who now fills the days with criticism and tips for his improvement. He is pestered by Chitterlow who invites himself round, gets drunk and somehow implies that Kipps is to be the new main investor in his forthcoming play at the bargain price of £2,000. That night he is almost in a panic, which is clinched the next day when he receives a letter from aunt and uncle telling him they’re coming to Folkstone to be introduced to his lady love (meaning Helen). Kipps’s feelings for Helen have now curdled to dislike sometimes bordering on hatred. This letter throws him into a panic and he packs a bag and catches a train to London.

7. London

Obviously on the train he feels bad about running out on his aunt and uncle. Then has a panic that they’ll track down the Walshinghams and visit without him as mediator. (He’s ashamed of their roughness.) Now Kipps had visited London precisely once before, when he was taken by Helen’s brother, had stayed at the Grand Hotel at Charing Cross (the London station for Kent) and gotten used to taking hansom cabs everywhere.

He takes an expensive room at the hotel but is intimidated by the formal dining room so goes wandering down the Strand then up to Clerkenwell but is intimidated by either being too ignorant of etiquette or too smartly dressed, to go in anywhere. He’s getting hungry when he is tapped on the shoulder by his old mate, Sid Pornick, who takes him by tube to Hammersmith where Mrs Sid has made a lovely mutton dinner and he meets their adorable baby boy, who repeats his name over and over while banging a spoon on the table. He’s never been so happy.

Then Sid takes him upstairs to meet their lodger, Masterman, who Sid insists is a great Socialist and intellectual, author of a book about ‘Physiography’, reviewer of books for magazines and so on. Masterman is knackered, slumped in a shabby bedroom, but as he gets fired up he sits up and becomes inspired, delivering a long monologue about the evils of capitalism, the rottenness of society, class, corruption, all the usual.

Cut to Kipps mooching moodily along Rotten Row in Hyde Park, torn between two lovers, Helen who’s he’s come to really dislike for her bossy ways, and Ann, who he’s ashamed of. As Sid said goodbye he told Kipps that Ann (who works as a servant) had taken a position in Folkestone – in other words, Kipps might be out strolling arm-in-arm with Helen when they come across Ann! Before you even get to the kissing, there’s the enormous social embarrassment of telling Helen he’s good friends with a member of the servant class etc etc. nightmare. If only he could break free.

There is a set-piece scene where he goes down for dinner at the Grand Hotel and is comprehensively humiliated in every way imaginable, by lofty waiters, menus in French, incomprehensible dishes and swanky neighbours tittering at him, until he retreats in embarrassment and humiliation. This scene reminded me of Charlie Chaplin who made his first short movie 9 years later, in 1914, and introduced the character of The Tramp the following year.

The last section is another scene of humiliation in the hotel, this time on a day when he decides it would be a smart move to tip all the stuff which backfires as he realises them all in groups in corridors, dining room and foyer, sniggering at him. It’s cast as a competition between Kipps and the hotel to score points and in the end Kipps retires, having been comprehensively defeated.

8. Kipps Enters Society

So, thoroughly defeated by London after just three days, Kipps catches the train back to Folkestone. Here he attends a posh party where the guests each have a card with an anagram on it to break the ice. Inevitably, the servant who opens the door to him is Ann and both young people stand there frozen, till the hostess sweeps past to greet him. He has another attack of class hatred:

Here were all these chattering people, with money, with leisure, with every chance in the world, and all they could do was to crowd like this into a couple of rooms and jabber nonsense…Abruptly resolution stood armed in his heart. He was going to get out of this! (p.228)

God, I know that feeling.

He tries to explain to Helen that he hates this life but she happily bats away his objections, explaining that he has to learn to swim in the small insipid pool of Folkestone before they move to a flat in London and set about creating their own social circle

The climax comes at a dinner given by a Mrs Wace, attended by a supposed author and luminary, Revel. First of all Helen is wearing a dazzling evening dress which brings out her wonderful figure and, for some reason, finally exterminates all traces of affection for her in Kipp’s breast. Second, conversation turns to unreliable servants and one of the guests, Mrs Bindon Bott, tells about a servant at her house who, at the end of the anagram party of a few days earlier, had burst into floods of tears and gave her notice at the end of the evening. Kipps realises this must be Ann and realises she must have learned that Kipps was engaged to Helen, which so upset her.

Long story short, Kipps flees the dinner party, goes right round to Mrs Bindon Bott’s house where Ann opens the door and tells him to come back to the servant’s door and after 9pm, when she’s ‘off’. When he comes back, he proposes, asking her to run away to London with him and get married and, after much hesitation and tears, she says YES!

9. The Labyrinthodon

So they flee by train to London and then by cab to Sid’s house in Hammersmith, who’s delighted to see them, delighted to learn they’re to get married, delighted to put them up.

A labyrinthodon is a type of dinosaur. The chapter title derives from the fact that there’s a life-sized plaster model of one in Crystal Palace and that’s where they go on a day out and to discuss their future, namely marriage and a nice little house in Hythe. And so they get married with no description at all of the ceremony.

Book 3. Kippses

1. The Housing Problem

Once married they have to find their dream house. This proves impossible, most English housing, then as now, being crap, so Kipps conceives the extravagant plan of building his own house, eventually persuaded to hire an architect for the actual design.

It’s an unhappy process designed to show how spoiled Kipps has been, not by the money but by the snobs who gathered round him, Coote and Walshingham. Ann dreams of a cosy little cottage but Kipps finds himself being bamboozled, influenced by his aspiring Uncle, into agreeing to an 11-bedroom mansion, though by the time building commences, neither he nor Ann really want it.

2. The Callers

They are miserable. They are bored. They live in a rented house with a view of the grey relentless sea and nothing to do. Kipps goes for a walk and is cut by Coote, plunging him into unhappiness. He walks on to the muddy building site for the house which is bereft of workers or activity, is surprised the marked-out rooms look so small, has a strong suspicion that the builders are bilking him.

When he gets back his misery is made complete when he discovers that, in his absence, Ann was on her hands and knees enamelling some tiles which their servant, Gwendolin, had made a hash of, and it was at that moment that they had their first callers, the wife and daughters of the local vicar. And Ann had gone down to answer the door dressed like a skivvy and the vicar’s wife asked whether Mrs Kipps was in and Ann acted the part of a servant and said ‘no ma’am’, took their cards and closed the door. Now she can never face them and is humiliated.

But Kipps gets unusually angry with her for behaving so badly and putting off their first ever callers! (These poor babies, with their ‘ their poor little troubled heads’, lost in the big world of grown-ups.) They were going to have a nice tea of buttered toast but end up arguing and going to bed in silence where, in the dark of the night, Kipps hears Ann crying.

3. Terminations

In the final chapter, Kipps discovers that Walshingham – Helen’s sister and his lawyer – has been speculating with his money and lost it all! Kipps is completely broke! He goes of walking across the Downs to process the disaster.

But next day goes to see the old lawyer, Bean, who tells him it’s not a total loss. Walshingham couldn’t speculate away the half-built house so they can probably sell that for £500 and there’s rent and half a mortgage on the house in Folkestone. All told they might clear £1,000. Kipps shares with Ann a dream he’s been nurturing of opening a shop. Drapery? asks Ann. No, a nice little bookshop.

Three things happen: 1) Kipps does indeed set up a bookshop, though there’s loads of boring detail about his getting involved in an American chain of bookshops called the ‘Associated Booksellers’ Trading Union (Limited)’ which may have been a satire on a contemporary concern but now appeared unnecessarily clotted and complicated.

2) Ann has a baby. There was no mention of her pregnancy and his description of her after labour is embarrassingly patronising and obtuse, but maybe reflects Kipps’s naivety and obtuseness.

She had the look of one who emerges from some strenuous and invigorating act. (p.293)

Well, of course she bloody did!

3) Remember Chitterlow with his madcap schemes for plays, and him inveigling Kipps into investing in one: well, it turns out to be a wild success and Kipps is assured of profits.

Two years later

An abrupt jump and the narrative quickly explains that Chitterlow’s play really did become a runaway success, playing to packed houses every night, so that the return on Kipps’s investment has brought him back to being about as rich as he was before Walshingham ran off with his money.

Nothing changes

Globalisation

‘Man is a social animal with a mind nowadays that goes around the globe, and a community cannot be happy in one part and unhappy in another. It’s all or nothing, no patching any more for ever.’ (Masterman)

World run by and for the rich

‘Today,’ he said, ‘the world is ruled by rich men; they may do almost anything they like with the world. And what are they doing? Laying it waste! Collectively, the rich today have neither heart nor imagination. No! They own machinery, they have knowledge and instruments and powers beyond all previous dreaming, and what are they doing with them?… God gives them means of communication, power unparalleled of every sort, time and absolute liberty! They waste it all in folly! … They grudge us our schools, they grudge us a gleam of light and air, they cheat us and then seek to forget us…. There is no rule, no guidance, only accidents and happy flukes…. Our multitudes of poverty increase, and this crew of rulers makes no provision, foresees nothing, anticipates nothing…’

Global warming

‘Very hot,’ said this lady. ‘Very hot, indeed – hot all the summer – remarkable year – all the years remarkable now – don’t know what we’re coming to – don’t you think so, Mr. Kipps?’ (p.227)

Housing crisis

A whole chapter describing how English houses in 1905 were built to poor standards by penny-pinching developers.

When the houses were not too big, then they were almost invariably the product of speculative building, of that multitudinous hasty building for the extravagant multitude of new births that was the essential disaster of the nineteenth century. The new houses Ann refused as damp, and even the youngest of these that had been in use showed remarkable signs of a sickly constitution, the plaster flaked away, the floors gaped, the paper mouldered and peeled, the doors dropped, the bricks scaled and the railings rusted…There were occasions when it seemed to them that they must be the victims of an elaborate conspiracy of estate agents… (p.253)

And, strikingly:

Everyone hates estate agents. (p.254)

The Woolf critique

You can understand the criticism made of Wells the ‘popular’ novelist by ‘serious’ novelists such as Henry James, Joseph Conrad or Virginia Woolf, writers (in their different ways) committed to turning the novel into an Art Form.

1. Wells’s novels seem episodic and, a word frequently used, improvised, meaning you often get a strong sense that he had another bright idea for a satirical swipe at Edwardian society and so chucked in a new 3 or 4 page section, heedless of the overall design or flow.

2. Wells directly addresses the reader in the manner of 18th century authors, in a way which seemed clumsy and vulgar to artists like Woolf who were trying to make the novel into self-contained artworks. Direct address:

Perhaps you know those intolerable mornings, dear Reader, when you seem to have neither the heart nor the strength to rise, and your nervous adjustments are all wrong and your fingers thumbs, and you hate the very birds for singing. (p.191)

Or:

Mrs. Kipps is the same bright and healthy little girl woman you saw in the marsh; not an inch has been added to her stature in all my voluminous narrative. (p.252)

An attitude demonstrated at greater length in part 2, chapter 5, section 4:

But you must not imagine that the national ideal of a gentleman, as Coote developed it, was all a matter of deportment and selectness, a mere isolation from debasing associations. There is a Serious Side, a deeper aspect of the true, True Gentleman. The True Gentleman does not wear his heart on his sleeve. He is a polished surface above deeps… (p.177)

Initially I liked this, but came to find it irritating and arch. It doesn’t have the freshness of Henry Fielding or Dickens and ended up feeling lame. This is particularly true of the last couple of pages where the narrator comes clean and says Kipps is based on a real person and you can visit his bookshop in Hythe today, and have a chat with him, only don’t tell him that Wells has put him in a novel and his name is Kipps. I can appreciate the meta aspects of this but it felt lame, it undermined the force of what went before. I can understand the Woolf objection.

3. If the intrusive narrator feels like watered-down Dickens the same is true of many of the characters – I had the strong sense that the handful of recurring characters (Coote, Uncle Kipps, Walshingham, Chitterlow) should all have been more vivid. Surely Dickens would have made all of them more colourful, given them more vivid quirks of speech or odd hobbies. Wells just gives them very cursory distinguishing features, such as Coote’s thick jaw, and that’s it. Actually the uncle is given the mildly amusing habit of buying up rubbish antiques which he assures Kipps are priceless bargains, a fairly comic indication of the hopeless ignorant optimism of his type. But this kind of mild quirk lacks the manic energy of Dickens’s mad imagination.

4. The most effective part of the critique is the accusation that Wells’s characters are extremely shallow, have no souls and that these social novels all-too-accurately capture:

The stupid little tragedies of these clipped and limited lives. (p.279)

The accusation is that the characters are boring and given to little or no thought, no ideas, nothing for the intelligent reader to latch onto. After a while you realise the problem of having a central protagonist who is, as Wells describes him, ‘simple’, who lacks all education or depth, who is a bundle of nerves in all social situations, with no knowledge of books, culture, politics or current affairs, the wider world or any interesting friends, is that it’s very…limiting. Kipps is a ‘simple soul’ but the book is, in the end, also rather simple, in content and form. Simple-minded. Towards the end the narrator says that, due to their lack of education or experience:

It was a tortuous journey when the Kippses set out to explain anything to each other. (p.288)

But he doesn’t follow through to the obvious conclusion that it is often a tortuous journey to watch them trying to explain anything, to themselves or each other. Periodically Wells describes, very well, what it’s like to be stupid and unreflective:

Out of the darknesses beneath the shallow, weedy stream of his being rose a question, a question that looked up dimly and never reached the surface. It was the question of the wonder of the beauty, the purposeless, inconsecutive beauty, that falls so strangely among the happenings and memories of life. It never reached the surface of his mind, it never took to itself substance or form, it looked up merely as the phantom of a face might look, out of deep waters, and sank again to nothingness.

This is haunting and poetic but moments like this are rare. 300 pages is a long time to spend in the company of a character who can barely fashion a thought and struggles to express himself at even a basic level.

5. And finally, as a novel, it justifies its existence via its humour – I found it fairly humorous, fairly often, as indicated by the odd or humorous sentences I listed at the start of this review – but, in the end, not funny enough, nowhere near as funny as Wells, I think, intended. There are long passages which aren’t particularly funny and aren’t particularly interesting. I liked the first 50 pages of his carefree childhood on the marsh then all the rest was an effort to read.

The film

Kipps was made into the 1967 movie Half a Sixpence, conceived as a vehicle for English song and dance star Tommy Steele, featuring its hit song, the brilliant pastiche of Edwardian music hall, ‘Flash, Bang, Wallop!’

Credit

Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul by H.G. Wells was published in 1905 by Harper Brothers. References are to the 1993 Everyman paperback edition.

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by Simon on December 20, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Comedy, Novel

Tagged Ann Pornick, Associated Booksellers' Trading Union Limited, Buggins, Cavendish Academy, Charing Cross, Charles Dickens, Chester Coote, Chitterlow, class system, Clerkenwell, comedy, Crystal Palace, Dickens, Discords, Edwardian England, Edwardian society, EM Foster, Engaged, England, English literature, estate agents, Euphemia, fiction, Flash Bang Wallop, Folkestone, George Garden Woodrow, global warming, globalisation, Grand Hotel, Great Expectations, Gwendolin, H.G. Wells, Half A Sixpence, Hammersmith, Helen Walshingham, Henry James, housing crisis, humour, Hyde Park, Hythe, Kent, Kipps, Kipps Enters Society, Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul, Kippses, London, Love and Mr Lewisham, lower middle class, Manners and Rules of Good Society, Masterman, middle-class English, Miss Walshingham, Mr Bean, Mr Chester Coote, Mr Shalford, Mr. Coote the Chaperon, Mrs Bindon Bott, Mrs Kipps, Mrs Walshingham, Mrs Woodrow, New Romney, novel, Physiography, Pierce, Romney Marsh, Rotten Row, Satire, Sid Pornick, social criticism, socialism, Swapped, Terminations, The Bicycle Manufacturer, The Callers, The Emporium, The Housing Problem, The Labyrinthodon, The Little Shop at New Romney, The Making of Kipps, The New Conditions, The Pupil Lover, the Strand, The Unexpected, The Walshinghams, The Wood-Carving Class, Tommy Steele, Virginia Woolf, Walshingham, Watson and Bean, wood carving

Posted by Simon on December 20, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/12/20/kipps-h-g-wells/

Pen, Pencil, And Poison: A study in Green by Oscar Wilde (1891)

Pen, Pencil and Poison is an essay by Oscar Wilde, a witty and provocative summary of the life and career of the notorious Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, who was a painter, essayist, aesthete, literary critic and famous serial killer from the first part of the nineteenth century.

A first version of the essay was published by Frank Harris in the January 1889 edition of The Fortnightly Review. Wilde then revised it for inclusion in the volume of four essays titled Intentions which he intended to use to position himself as a major critic of late Victorian art, literature and theatre, and which was published in May 1891.

(The same year saw the publication of his collection of short stories, Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and the expanded, book-length version of The Picture of Dorian Gray. The following year the first of his social comedies was produced. Critic. Short story writer. Novelist. Playwright. Within two years Wilde very impressively proved himself the master of all these genres and manoeuvred himself into the centre of London’s literary and intellectual life.)

Thomas Griffiths Wainewright

The story of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright (1794 to 1847) was well known by Wilde’s time and had been written about by a number of authors. The Essays and Criticisms of Wainewright had been published in 1880 and the history of his crimes was used by Charles Dickens as the basis for his story ‘Hunted Down’ and by Edward Bulwer-Lytton for his novel Lucretia. Indeed Wilde’s essay features quotes and memoirs of people who knew or met or read Wainewright, such as Hazlitt, de Quincey, Charles Lamb, with anecdotes about William Blake et al. Even the title isn’t original having been borrowed from Swinburne.

What obviously attracted Wilde was the close connection between art and crime. Wainewright’s letters, writings and memoirs reveal a man of high artistic sensibility and great psychological sensitivity. Yet the same man set about poisoning to death a number of those nearest and dearest to him.

His delicately strung organisation, however indifferent it might have been to inflicting pain on others, was itself most keenly sensitive to pain.

Biography

According to Wilde, Wainewright was born in 1794 in Chiswick. His mother died in childbirth. She was just 21 and followed soon after by the death of his father, so the baby was raised by its grandfather and then uncle.

Right from the start the essay displays the deliberately, comically casual juxtaposition of conventional biography with Wainwright’s activities as a poisoner i.e. the bland phrases of standard biography are interspersed with very casual mention of his murders.

His father did not long survive his young wife, and the little child seems to have been brought up by his grandfather, and, on the death of the latter in 1803, by his uncle George Edward Griffiths, whom he subsequently poisoned.

A similar flippancy underlies Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and The Canterville Ghost, whose achievements in scaring various Canterville relatives to death or terrifying visitors out of their minds are listed as subjects of great amusement. It is the bluntness of the juxtaposition which achieves the effect.

Wainewright joined the army, buying a commission in 1814, but was too sensitive for the rough vulgarity of barrack life, had a nervous breakdown, was cashiered out, went back to stay with his uncle in a fine house in Turnham Green, and became ever more interested in literature. His maternal grandfather was editor of the Monthly Review and Wainewright had been raised in a bookish intellectual milieu. In 1819 he embarked on a literary career. He wrote essays. He had them published, most often in the London Magazine. Literary figures of the day began to take notice.

Wilde is particularly pleased that Wainewright wrote essays for literary journals under a number of pseudonyms. This plays right into Wilde’s fondness for masks and artificiality.

Janus Weathercock, Egomet Bonmot, and Van Vinkvooms, were some of the grotesque masks under which he choose to hide his seriousness or to reveal his levity. A mask tells us more than a face. These disguises intensified his personality.

Dandy

And Wainewright was a dandy:

Like Disraeli, he determined to startle the town as a dandy, and his beautiful rings, his antique cameo breast-pin, and his pale lemon-coloured kid gloves, were well known, and indeed were regarded by Hazlitt as being the signs of a new manner in literature: while his rich curly hair, fine eyes, and exquisite white hands gave him the dangerous and delightful distinction of being different from others.

Wilde obviously sees him as a precursor to himself:

It is only the Philistine who seeks to estimate a personality by the vulgar test of production. This young dandy sought to be somebody, rather than to do something. He recognised that Life itself is in art, and has its modes of style no less than the arts that seek to express it.

Wilde likes Wainewright because in his writings he cultivated a cult of his own personality, liberally telling his readers not only his views on art, but where he dined and who he met and what they talked about and what he was wearing, very much a precursor to Oscar himself.

Wainewright’s collection

Wilde goes on at length about Wainewright’s collections of beautiful objects from a wide variety of sources, and his writings not only about art in the narrow sense, but about all beautiful things from the past, statues and jewels, rare books and cameos and engravings, he delighted in letting his soul wander among masterpieces in a way Wilde thoroughly approves. The truly beautiful fly free from a particular age and congregate in a timeless imaginarium.

All beautiful things belong to the same age.

Wainewright the artist

Wainewright also painted and sketched to a very high standard. He was trained by John Linnell and Thomas Phillips, he produced a portrait of Lord Byron, made illustrations for the poems of William Chamberlayne, and from 1821 to 1825 exhibited narratives based on literature and music at the Royal Academy. So he had a practitioner’s inside knowledge of the craft when he came to write about art, and Wilde quotes passages which talk in technical terms about colours, design and glazes.

The critic seeks the thing in itself

He approves Wainewright’s aesthetic writings and above all the idea that the critic shouldn’t apply standardised rules to a work, but instead be flexible and respond to the thing as it is.

‘I hold that no work of art can be tried otherwise than by laws deduced from itself: whether or not it be consistent with itself is the question.’

Wainewright’s prose poem responses to art

That said, Wilde admires the way Wainewright responds to art with long prose poems which seek to mimic or replicate their effect in words.

The conception of making a prose poem out of paint is excellent. Much of the best modern literature springs from the same aim. In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other.

Wilde’s approval of Wainewright’s technique of ‘criticising’ a work of art by writing a long florid prose poem based on it explains why so much Victorian writing about art is unpleasantly vague and gaseous. In my opinion it also explains why English taste in art remained so conservative and retarded until well into the twentieth century.

Van Gogh and Gauguin while Wilde was still alive, and then the Fauves, the German Expressionists and the Cubists within a few years of his death, completely tore up the nineteenth century rulebook of art to create all kinds of marvellous new images and sensations which Wilde’s style of limp-wristed prose vaporings were completely inadequate to understanding or explaining.

Wilde sits at the end of a fagged-out tradition. His aestheticism was new in the 1870s but tired by the 1890s. His love of the classical world was merely the exquisite climax of a tradition which had dominated the British education system for a century. Wilde comes at the end of both these traditions, before the turn of the twentieth century ushered in entirely new ways of seeing and thinking. For all his brave talk about The New, praising new sensations in art and life, Wilde revered the past and hadn’t a clue about the revolutionary turn all the arts were about to take. His approach, his whole aesthetic, was a glorious dead end and that’s why he was a back number even before he died.

Wainewright the poisoner

Half-way through the essay which had, up to this point, been a charming stroll through Wainewright’s art criticism, aesthetic stance, prose poetry and delightful collection of rare and precious objects – Wilde turns with a flourish and an ironic smile to the fact that this gorgeous proto-aesthete was also a murderer. In doing so he uses a very characteristic phrase which is worth dwelling on:

However, we must not forget that the cultivated young man who penned these lines, and who was so susceptible to Wordsworthian influences, was also, as I said at the beginning of this memoir, one of the most subtle and secret poisoners of this or any age. How he first became fascinated by this strange sin he does not tell us, and the diary in which he carefully noted the results of his terrible experiments and the methods that he adopted, has unfortunately been lost to us.

The words ‘strange’ and ‘sin’ are very characteristically Wildean. He uses ‘strange’ a lot throughout the essays in Intentions as a buzzword, a key word, a key adjective which indicates the mood of weird, fin-de-siecle mystery Wilde likes to shed around his own personality, the great works of art he reverences and so on. When Wainewright returns to England in 1837, it is very characteristic of Wilde to say he did so because of ‘some strange mad fascination’.

However, on closer examination, there’s often nothing at all ‘strange’ in what he’s describing. Thus there is nothing ‘strange’ about being a murderer.

Something similar with ‘sin’, Wilde enjoys saying that this or that personality or work of art hints at ‘sin’. If you stop and think about it he is stealing a Catholic Christian term and dressing it in the vague, heavy velvet of the Decadence and then attributing it – like his other favourite words ‘strange’, ‘curious’, ‘dangerous’ – to people or actions which, on closer examination, do not merit it. He uses it in a spirit of high symbolist melodrama to conjure an overripe atmosphere but empty of precise meaning.

It is tempting to go along with Wilde’s prose and be carried away into the purple and gold world of luxury objects illuminated by flickering candlelight which phrases like ‘strange sin’ suggest. Except Wainewright was a murderer, pure and simple. Nobody would write about the ‘strange sin’ of Harold Shipman or Fred West. There was nothing either strange or sin-nish about either multiple murderer.

Wainewright’s victims

(This section borrows freely from the Wikipedia article as Wilde’s account is factually incorrect. To give the most obvious example Wilde has Wainewright dying in 1852, whereas it was 1847.)

The key fact to grasp is that, although Wainewright had inherited £5,250 from his grandfather, it was invested at the Bank of England, he was unable to touch the capital and receiving only the dividends of £200 a year. This combined with the income from his journalism was nowhere near enough to maintain the extravagant lifestyle, with the collection of fancy art works Wilde delights in describing, not to mention a wife he’d married in 1817 (when he was 23).

On two occasions he forged the signatures of powers of attorney in order to withdraw the capital from the Bank, the second time leaving his account empty. Now he was in desperate financial straits and it is this which explains the series of murders he now embarked on.

By 1828 the Wainewrights were in severe financial trouble again and forced to move in with the elderly George Griffiths, still living at the Wainewright estate in Chiswick. He died in agony shortly afterwards. and it is suspected Wainewright poisoned him to inherit the property.

Eliza’s mother married again, becoming a Mrs Abercromby, and had two further daughters, Helen and Madalina, before being widowed again. They too moved into the estate, and Mrs Abercromby settled her will in favour of Eliza. She died shortly afterwards. It is strongly suspected he murdered her.

In 1830, he and Eliza insured the life of his sister-in-law Helen with various companies for a sum of £16,000. She died in December of the same year after showing signs of strychnine poisoning. The insurance companies refused to pay and Wainewright fled to Calais in order to escape legal action and his increasingly clamorous debtors. Victorian authors speculate that he also killed his mother-in-law and a Norfolk friend.

In 1837 Wainewright returned to England, was arrested for bank fraud, convicted and deported to Hobart, Van Diemen’s Land, where he spent the last ten years of his life, dying in 1847.

Wilde’s account contains detailed descriptions of further murders, such as the father of a lady friend with whom he was staying in Boulogne and who he is said to have murdered purely to spite the insurance companies.

Wilde’s calculated heartlessness

The tone Wilde describes all this in is deliberately flippant and superficial. He doesn’t take the murders seriously and instead is tempted into characteristic raptures about art and beauty. Thus Helen, his wife’s sister:

was about twenty years of age, a tall graceful girl with fair hair. A very charming red-chalk drawing of her by her brother-in-law is still in existence, and shows how much his style as an artist was influenced by Sir Thomas Lawrence, a painter for whose work he had always entertained a great admiration. De Quincey says that Mrs. Wainewright was not really privy to the murder. Let us hope that she was not. Sin should be solitary, and have no accomplices.

A lot is going on in this passage but the obvious points to me are the way Wilde goes out of his way to be more interested in the painting of Helen done by the murderer than the fact that he murdered her. Making fine art critical comments about the painting are more important than the fact of murder. Wilde’s position is not immoral, as such, but it is a very calculated promotion of Wilde’s ideas that art comes first, art is paramount, that art triumphs over the sordor and messiness of life, that art soars above facts, that art isn’t limited by bourgeois morality and petty notions of right or wrong.

The second obvious point is his use of ‘sin’. As stated above, Wainewright’s acts weren’t really ‘sins’, were they? They were crimes. Accepting the word ‘sin’ is to enter Wilde’s fin-de-siecle world of decadence and ‘strange’ practices. He intends the word ‘sin’ to shimmer with scarlet associations and strange cries in velvet-lined rooms, and yet it comes over as naughty schoolboy. Poisoning someone for the insurance money isn’t a ‘sin’. It’s a crime.

Wilde thought of his encounters with quite a few rent boys as ‘strange’ ‘sins’ and yet they weren’t. He was paying for sex. He was using sex workers. Some of them were under age so nowadays he would be convicted of paedophilia and put on a Sex Offenders Register.

Wilde set himself up to try and redefine how people talked about these things. It was a battle of discourses or lexicons. He tried to persuade his time of the value of ‘strange sin’. The law courts of his time saw a man who practiced and promoted sex crimes.

The provocative heartlessness of Wilde’s stance is crystallised when he quotes Wainewright. When he was in Newgate prison awaiting transportation, his cell became ‘for some time a kind of fashionable lounge’ (doesn’t sound very likely, does it?), one gentleman visitor asked him why he murdered his innocent young sister-in-law:

He shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘Yes; it was a dreadful thing to do, but she had very thick ankles.’

It is very funny in its deliberately heartless way. Wilde moves briskly on, to get back to ‘sin’. He tells us that Wainewright loathed the sea journey to Australia, and tells us why.

Crime in England is rarely the result of sin. It is nearly always the result of starvation. There was probably no one on board in whom he would have found a sympathetic listener, or even a psychologically interesting nature.

This suggests that Wilde is interested not in the sordid ‘crime’ committed by the wretched poor all the time. What interests him about Wainewright is the combination of fantastically refined sensibility with murder. It is Wainewright’s refined sensibility which converts what would be mere ‘crime’ in you and me into ‘sin’. ‘Sin’ is what the refined do; the rest of us merely break the law.

Crime and art

Wilde concludes his essay by speculating about the effect of his crimes on his art. Wainewright was allowed to sketch and paint in the prison colony, completing more than 100 portraits on paper using coloured wash, pencil and ink, and many survive to this day. Wilde says the effect of his crimes (er, ‘sins’) on his art is ‘subtle and suggestive’.

One can fancy an intense personality being created out of sin.

This is obviously the central theme of The Picture of Dorian Gray, the notion that ‘sin’ adds depth and interest to one’s style. Obviously one has to have a refined sensibility and be an artist and critic and writer in order to have a style in the first place and to benefit from these ‘sins’.

He ends with a barrage of opinions against conventional morality, variations on the theme of the superiority of the artist to social norms and standards:

The fact of a man being a poisoner is nothing against his prose. The domestic virtues are not the true basis of art, though they may serve as an excellent advertisement for second-rate artists.

There is no essential incongruity between crime and culture. We cannot rewrite the whole of history for the purpose of gratifying our moral sense of what should be.

This latter is an implicit rebuke to the trend of modern progressive ideology in the humanities which is to pull down statues, ban books and films and plays and art by anyone judged to have transgressed the strict morality of our times. Wilde believes the contrary:

I know that there are many historians, or at least writers on historical subjects, who still think it necessary to apply moral judgments to history, and who distribute their praise or blame with the solemn complacency of a successful schoolmaster. This, however, is a foolish habit, and merely shows that the moral instinct can be brought to such a pitch of perfection that it will make its appearance wherever it is not required. Nobody with the true historical sense ever dreams of blaming Nero, or scolding Tiberius, or censuring Caesar Borgia. These personages have become like the puppets of a play. They may fill us with terror, or horror, or wonder, but they do not harm us. They are not in immediate relation to us. We have nothing to fear from them. They have passed into the sphere of art and science, and neither art nor science knows anything of moral approval or disapproval.

Not in our modern world, in 2024, where moral disapproval is the central occupation of so many critics and commentators, poring over the art and writing of the past in an endless quest for transgressions to call out and cancel, to scold, chastise, disapprove of and, ideally, ban. Wilde would have been horrified.

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by Simon on July 19, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Essays, Literary criticism

Posted by Simon on July 19, 2024

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The Decay of Lying: An Observation by Oscar Wilde (1891)

‘The aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilized society.’

Originally published as a magazine article in 1889, Wilde substantially rewrote this essay for inclusion in his volume of four long critical essays, Intentions (1891). In De Profundis Wilde refers to it as ‘the first and best of all my dialogues’ (Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde edited by Rupert Hart-Davis, page 157).

The dialogue form

It is in dialogue form, harking back to the Platonic dialogues Wilde would have studied for his Classics degree, and signalling Wilde’s embryonic interest in drama – and his realisation that his ‘ideas’ were maybe less amusing than his taste for paradox, for surprising reversals of expectations, for sudden bon mots and witty phrases – all of which are easier to engineer in dialogue form. Dialogue allows:

quick fire interchange
one person to develop an idea at length until it is in danger of becoming boring, at which point – the other person interrupts with a deflating remark or a witty summary of the argument so far; this means that:
treatment of individual notions can be pages long or made in a throwaway one-liner; and
the case of the proponent can itself subjected to irony and satire by the interlocutor – Wilde can parody or ironise his own argument

His earlier essay, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, is a straightforward essay, no dialogue, so Wilde has to go a long distance in his own voice and strains a bit to make a consistent ‘argument’. The digressions and cul-de-sacs are there for all to see. In Lying, as soon as the dramatic lead (Vivian) tires of one line of witty sophistry, his foil (Cyril) can interrupt – not understanding, or pooh-poohing the idea, or asking for clarification, thus neatly ending one line of thought and setting up the next one.

The Argument

All Art is lying, wonderful imaginative lying.

Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.

However, in Wilde’s time more and more artists were determined to drag the ‘real world’ into their art, making it ‘relevant’, addressing ‘issues’ and thus showing a tragic misunderstanding of what Art is and is for, and – the great crime in Wilde’s eyes – destroying their individuality – so that all the writers end up sounding like Parliamentary reports and all the artists end up creating works which are grim and depressing.

Now, everything is changed. Facts are not merely finding a footing place in history, but they are usurping the domain of Fancy, and have invaded the kingdom of Romance. Their chilling touch is over everything. They are vulgarising mankind.

Art is a form of lying, of rejecting the banality of ‘reality’ and creating something marvellous from our imaginations. Wilde must have had notebooks packed with sentences starting ‘Art is…’:

The object of Art is not simple truth but complex beauty.

Art itself is really a form of exaggeration; and selection, which is the very spirit of art, is nothing more than an intensified mode of overemphasis.

The proper school to learn art in is not Life but Art.

Art never expresses anything but itself. This is the principle of my new aesthetics; and it is this, more than that vital connection between form and substance, on which Mr. Pater dwells, that makes music the type of all the arts.

Taking this as his point of departure, the entire essay enjoys contradicting the popular view of the day (Wordsworth, Ruskin, Morris), that we must somehow get ‘back to Nature’, that Nature is a cure for modern industrial society. Quite the opposite:

What Art really reveals to us is Nature’s lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition… Art is our spirited protest, our gallant attempt to teach Nature her proper place. As for the infinite variety of Nature, that is a pure myth. It is not to be found in Nature herself. It resides in the imagination, or fancy, or cultivated blindness of the man who looks at her.

If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture, and I prefer houses to the open air. In a house we all feel of the proper proportions. Everything is subordinated to us, fashioned for our use and our pleasure. Egotism itself, which is so necessary to a proper sense of human dignity’ is entirely the result of indoor life. Out of doors one becomes abstract and impersonal. One’s individuality absolutely leaves one.

And then Nature is so indifferent, so unappreciative. Whenever I am walking in the park here, I always feel that I am no more to her than the cattle that browse on the slope, or the burdock that blooms in the ditch. Nothing is more evident than that Nature hates Mind.

Provocation 1. The incongruous

Wilde enjoys provoking his reader, which takes at least two forms: one is the witty application of homely phraseology in an unexpected way, to create a humorously incongruous effect.

Nature has good intentions, of course, but, as Aristotle once said, she cannot carry them out…Art is…our gallant attempt to teach Nature her proper place.

A great artist invents a type, and Life tries to copy it, to reproduce it in a popular form, like an enterprising publisher.

Thus, as he endeavours to show his friend Cyril how far lying has decayed, the protagonist Vivian makes a humorous survey of the professions, all on the witty assumption that they are and have been professed liars, so that he is in the witty position of lamenting the decay of lying in professions which most Victorians would assume to have been the bedrock of British honesty and probity:

CYRIL. Lying! I should have thought that our politicians kept up that habit.

VIVIAN. I assure you that they do not. They never rise beyond the level of misrepresentation, and actually condescend to prove, to discuss, to argue [!]…Something may, perhaps, be urged on behalf of the Bar. The mantle of the Sophist has fallen on its members. Their feigned ardours and unreal rhetoric are delightful…They…have been known to wrest from reluctant juries triumphant verdicts of acquittal for their clients, even when those clients, as often happens, were clearly and unmistakably innocent [!]. But they are briefed by the prosaic, and are not ashamed to appeal to precedent. In spite of their endeavours, the truth will out. Newspapers, even, have degenerated. They may now be absolutely relied upon [!]. One feels it as one wades through their columns…

Many a young man starts in life with a natural gift for exaggeration which, if nurtured in congenial and sympathetic surroundings, or by the imitation of the best models, might grow into something really great and wonderful. But, as a rule, he comes to nothing. He either falls into careless habits of accuracy…or takes to frequenting the society of the aged and the well-informed. Both things are equally fatal to his imagination! and in a short time he develops a morbid and unhealthy faculty of truth telling, begins to verify all statements made in his presence, has no hesitation in contradicting people who are much younger than himself, and often ends by writing novels which are so like life that no one can possibly believe in their probability.

Later, he manages to include journalists in his list of the lying professions. The same journalists who would hound him into prison and cackle around his fallen corpse.

Lying for the sake of a monthly salary is of course well known in Fleet Street, and the profession of a political leader writer is not without its advantages. But it is said to be a somewhat dull occupation, and it certainly does not lead to much beyond a kind of ostentatious obscurity.

Provocation 2. Anti-England

Like any man of feeling or imagination, Wilde is depressed by the small-minded, xenophobic, philistine culture of England (something which has always driven our best writers abroad, to escape our stifling conformity and seek out a wider world). An attitude given bite by the fact that he was, of course, Irish and saw himself, as so many literary men of the Modern period (1890s onwards), as an outsider.(1)

Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease. Fortunately, in England at any rate, thought is not catching. Our splendid physique as a people is entirely due to our national stupidity.

Nonetheless, one trembles when one reads his casual insults of England and the English. For, as we know, the English were going to have their total and humiliating revenge on Wilde and to drag all his witty paradoxes down into the lowest mud.

A thoughtful young friend of ours once told us that it reminded him of the sort of conversation that goes on at a meat tea in the house of a serious non-comformist family, and we can quite believe it. Indeed it is only in England that such a book could be produced. England is the home of lost ideas.

But in the English Church a man succeeds, not through his capacity for belief but through his capacity for disbelief. Ours is the only church where the sceptic stands at the altar, and where St. Thomas is regarded as the ideal apostle.

The solid stolid British intellect lies in the desert sands like the Sphinx in Flaubert’s marvellous tale, and fantasy La Chimere, dances round it, and calls to it with her false, flute-toned voice.

The contemporary scene

Wilde gives a fascinating summary of the contemporary literary scene, of which he laments: ‘the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.’

He is to be found at the Librairie Nationale, or at the British Museum, shamelessly reading up his subject. He has not even the courage of other people’s ideas, but insists on going directly to life for everything’ and ultimately, between encyclopaedias and personal experience, he comes to the ground, having drawn his types from the family circle or from the weekly washerwoman, and having acquired an amount of useful information from which never, even in his most meditative moments, can he thoroughly free himself. The loss that results to literature in general from this false ideal of our time can hardly be overestimated.

In his way Wilde is echoing Robert Louis Stevenson’s essay on Romance, a conscious revolt against the Gradgrindish obsession with facts, a wish to escape, to soar on the wings of free imagination. Although Stevenson is first in line to be criticised:

Mr Robert Louis Stevenson… is tainted with this modern vice [of realism]… There is such a thing as robbing a story of its reality by trying to make it too true, and The Black Arrow is so inartistic as not to contain a single anachronism to boast of, while the transformation of Dr. Jekyll reads dangerously like an experiment out of the Lancet.
Mr. Rider Haggard, who really has, or had once, the makings of a perfectly magnificent liar, he is now so afraid of being suspected of genius that when he does tell us anything marvellous, he feels bound to invent a personal reminiscence, and to put it into a footnote as a kind of cowardly corroboration.
Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty, and wastes upon mean motives and imperceptible ‘points of view’ his neat literary style, his felicitous phrases, his swift and caustic satire.
Mr George Meredith! Who can define him ? His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language: as a novelist he can do everything, except tell a story: as an artist he is everything, except articulate.
Mr. Hall Caine, it is true, aims at the grandiose, but then he writes at the top of his voice. He is so loud that one cannot hear what he says.
Mr. James Payn is an adept in the art of concealing what is not worth finding. He hunts down the obvious with the enthusiasm of a shortsighted detective.
The horses of Mr. William Black‘s phaeton do not soar towards the sun. They merely frighten the sky at evening into violent chromolithographic effects.
Mrs. Oliphant prattles pleasantly about curates, lawn tennis parties, domesticity, and other wearisome things.
Mr. Marion Crawford has immolated himself upon the altar of local colour. He is like the lady in the French comedy who keeps talking about ‘le beau ciel d’Italie.’ Besides, he has fallen into a bad habit of uttering moral platitudes. He is always telling us that to be good is to be good, and that to be bad is to be wicked. At times he is almost edifying.
‘Robert Elsmere’ is of course a masterpiece – a masterpiece of the ‘genre ennuyeux,’ the one form of literature that the English people seem to thoroughly enjoy. It is only in England that such a book could be produced.
As for that great and daily increasing school of novelists for whom the sun always rises in the East End, the only thing that can be said about them is that they find life crude, and leave it raw.

Wilde prided himself of his knowledge of French culture – their poetry and painting vastly more advanced than their English counterparts. But he is equally as damning of the new French realist school:

M. Guy de Maupassant, with his keen mordant irony and his hard vivid style, strips life of the few poor rags that still cover her, and shows us foul sore and festering wound. He writes lurid little tragedies in which everybody is ridiculous; bitter comedies at which one cannot laugh for very tears.
M. Zola is determined to show that, if he has not got genius, he can at least be dull. And how well he succeeds!.. The author is perfectly truthful, and describes things exactly as they happen. What more can any moralist desire? We have no sympathy at all with the moral indignation of our time against M. Zola. It is simply the indignation of Tartuffe on being exposed. M. Zola’s characters have their dreary vices, and their drearier virtues. The record of their lives is absolutely without interest. Who cares what happens to them? In literature we require distinction, charm, beauty, and imaginative power. We don’t want to be harrowed and disgusted with an account of the doings of the lower orders.
M. Daudet is better. He has wit, a light touch, and an amusing style. But he has lately committed literary suicide… The only real people are the people who never existed, and if a novelist is base enough to go to life for his personages he should at least pretend that they are creations, and not boast of them as copies. The justification of a character in a novel is not that other persons are what they are, but that the author is what he is. Otherwise the novel is not a work of art.
What is interesting about people in good society – and M. Bourget rarely moves out of the Faubourg St. Germain, except to come to London – is the mask that each one of them wears, not the reality that lies behind the mask. It is a humiliating confession, but we are all of us made out of the same stuff. In Falstaff there is something of Hamlet, in Hamlet there is not a little of Falstaff. The fat knight has his moods of melancholy, and the young prince his moments of coarse humour. Where we differ from each other is purely in accidentals: in dress, manner, tone of voice, religious opinions, personal appearance, tricks of habit, and the like. The more one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear. Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature. Indeed, as any one who has ever worked among the poor knows only too well, the brotherhood of man is no mere poet’s dream, it is a most depressing and humiliating reality!

But he likes Balzac:

Balzac was a most wonderful combination of the artistic temperament with the scientific spirit. The latter he bequeathed to his disciples: the former was entirely his own. The difference between such a book as M. Zola’s L’Assommoir and Balzac’s Illusions Perdues is the difference between unimaginative realism and imaginative reality… A steady course of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows, and our acquaintances to the shadows of shades. His characters have a kind of fervent fiery-coloured existence. They dominate us, and defy scepticism… But Balzac is no more a realist than Holbein was. He created life, he did not copy it.

Art does not express the world, Good Lord no! It expresses the individuality, the genius, of the artist.

Art should be quite detached, quite useless

Where Morris the Marxist argued that Art in an ideal world would be the results of happy men expressing their creativity, especially in decorating the everyday objects of our lives, so that everything a happy fulfilled worker makes is Art – Wilde the hyper aesthete argues that all Art should be quite useless, quite irrelevant to our everyday lives and concerns: that is its point.

The only beautiful things, as somebody once said, are the things that do not concern us. As long as a thing is useful or necessary to us, or affects us in any way, either for pain or for pleasure, or appeals strongly to our sympathies, or is a vital part of the environment in which we live, it is outside the proper sphere of art. To art’s subject matter we should be more or less indifferent. We should, at any rate, have no preferences, no prejudices, no partisan feeling of any kind…

I do not know anything in the whole history of literature sadder than the artistic career of Charles Reade. He wrote one beautiful book, The Cloister and the Hearth, a book as much above Romola as Romola is above Daniel Deronda, and wasted the rest of his life in a foolish attempt to be modern, to draw public attention to the state of our convict prisons, and the management of our private lunatic asylums. Charles Dickens was depressing enough in all conscience when he tried to arouse our sympathy for the victims of the poor law administration; but Charles Reade, an artist, a scholar, a man with a true sense of beauty, raging and roaring over the abuses of contemporary life like a common pamphleteer or a sensational journalist, is really a sight for the angels to weep over.

Life imitates Art

So far, so plausible. Wilde has moved beyond outraging the bourgeoisie to establish his main point: Art is a wonderful kind of lying which, in his age, was everywhere in danger of being hobbled by the mania for Realism. But the essay goes to another level when Wilde pushes the conceit further to say that, not only is dull and vulgar Life bad for Art, but that Life itself actually copies Art.

Paradox though it may seem, it is none the less true that Life imitates art far more than Art imitates life. We have all seen in our own day in England how a certain curious and fascinating type of beauty, invented and emphasised by two imaginative painters [the Pre-Raphaelites Rossetti and Burne-Jones], has so influenced Life that whenever one goes to a private view or to an artistic salon one sees, here the mystic eyes of Rossetti’s dream, the long ivory throat, the strange squarecut jaw, the loosened shadowy hair that he so ardently loved, there the sweet maidenhood of The Golden Stair, the blossom-like mouth and weary loveliness of the Laus Amoris, the passion-pale face of Andromeda, the thin hands and lithe beauty of the Vivien in Merlin’s Dream.

And it has always been so. A great artist invents a type, and Life tries to copy it, to reproduce it in a popular form, like an enterprising publisher. Neither Holbein nor Vandyck found in England what they have given us. They brought their types with them, and Life, with her keen imitative faculty, set herself to supply the master with models.

As it is with the visible arts, so it is with literature. The most obvious and the vulgarest form in which this is shown is in the case of the silly boys who, after reading the adventures of Jack Sheppard or Dick Turpin, pillage the stalls of unfortunate apple-women, break into sweet shops at night, and alarm old gentlemen who are returning home from the city by leaping out on them in suburban lanes, with black masks and unloaded revolvers… The boy burglar is simply the inevitable result of life’s imitative instinct. He is Fact, occupied as Fact usually is with trying to reproduce Fiction.

And, he goes on:

Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism that characterises modern thought, but Hamlet invented it. The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy.
The Nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Tourgenieff, and completed by Dostoieffski.
Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People’s Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.
The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac. Our Luciens de Rubempre, our Rastignacs, and De Marsays made their first appearance on the stage of the Comedie Humaine. We are merely carrying out, with footnotes and unnecessary additions, the whim or fancy or creative vision of a great novelist.

Wilde doesn’t say there is a tendency to copy art: he thinks it is an absolute rule:

Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life, and I feel sure that if you think seriously about it you will find that it is true. Life holds the mirror up to Art, and either reproduces some strange type imagined by painter or sculptor, or realizes in fact what has been dreamed in fiction. Scientifically speaking, the basis of life – the energy of life, as Aristotle would call it – is simply the desire for expression, and Art is always presenting various forms through which this expression can be attained. Life seizes on them and uses them, even if they be to her own hurt. Young men have committed suicide because Rolla did so, have died by their own hand because by his own hand Werther died. Think of what we owe to the imitation of Christ, of what we owe to the imitation of Caesar.

This anticipates Raymond Chandler’s 1930s comments about his hoodlums and gangsters modeling themselves on the movies, a sentiment echoed by Alistair MacLean in his thrillers of the 1960s, and of what I know of Auden and his circle modelling their posing, the way they lit and held cigarettes, on the movie stars of the 1930s. It seems to me a very persuasive argument indeed that Art gives us the models and then people enthusiastically set about copying them – except that Wilde probably wouldn’t call movies, TV and pop videos Art: but they are what provide contemporary humanity with our models for behaving and talking.

Nature imitates Art

And Wilde’s comic style, his essential humour, combines wonderfully when Vivian is goaded by Cyril to go one step further and suggest that Nature imitates Art – the precise opposite of what most of the nineteenth century has been telling itself:

Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows ? To whom, if not to them and their master, do we owe the lovely silver mists that brood over our river, and turn to faint forms of fading grace curved bridge and swaying barge ? The extraordinary change that has taken place in the climate of London during the last ten years is entirely due to this particular school of Art.

Nature is no great mother who has borne us. She is our creation. It is in our brain that she quickens to life. Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us.

To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. Then, and then only, does it come into existence. At present, people see fogs, not because there are fogs, but because poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects. There may have been fogs for centuries in London. I dare say there were. But no one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them. They did not exist till Art had invented them.

Now, it must be admitted, fogs are carried to excess. They have become the mere mannerism of a clique, and the exaggerated realism of their method gives dull people bronchitis. Where the cultured catch an effect, the uncultured catch cold.

And so, let us be humane, and invite Art to turn her wonderful eyes elsewhere. She has done so already, indeed. That white quivering sunlight that one sees now in France, with its strange blotches of mauve, and its restless violet shadows, is her latest fancy, and, on the whole, Nature reproduces it quite admirably. Where she used to give us Corots and Daubignys, she gives us now exquisite Monets and entrancing Pisaros. Indeed there are moments, rare, it is true, but still to be observed from time to time, when Nature becomes absolutely modern. Of course she is not always to be relied upon.

The fact is that she is in this unfortunate position. Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on to other things. Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating this effect until we all become absolutely wearied of it. Nobody of any real culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of a sunset. Sunsets are quite old fashioned. They belong to the time when Turner was the last note in art. To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism of temperament.

But I don’t want to be too hard on Nature… That she imitates Art, I don’t think even her worst enemy would deny now. It is the one thing that keeps her in touch with civilized man.

Art doesn’t reflect its society and times – it creates them

In the same spirit, Wilde rejects another cliché, that Art reflects the society and times it was created in. Wrong, says Wilde; the precise opposite: Art doesn’t reflect: Art creates the style and look of its times.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist. Take an example from our own day. I know that you are fond of Japanese things. Now, do you really imagine that the Japanese people, as they are presented to us in art, have any existence ? If you do, you have never understood Japanese art at all. The Japanese people are the deliberate self-conscious creation of certain individual artists. If you set a picture by Hokusai, or Hokkei, or any of the great native painters, beside a real Japanese gentleman or lady, you will see that there is not the slightest resemblance between them. The actual people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English people; that is to say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing curious or extraordinary about them. In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people.

The Japanese people are, in fact, simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art. And so, if you desire to see a Japanese effect, you will not behave like a tourist and go to Tokio. On the contrary, you will stay at home, and steep yourself in the work of certain Japanese artists, and then, when you have absorbed the spirit of their style, and caught their imaginative manner of vision, you will go some afternoon and sit in the Park or stroll down Piccadilly, and if you cannot see an absolutely Japanese effect there, you will not see it anywhere.

The fact is that we look back on the ages entirely through the medium of Art, and Art, very fortunately, has never once told us the truth.

A new world

The essay ends, with a witty call for a revival of lying at all levels of society, beginning in the nursery and extending through school and into the higher professions. In a kind of satire on the millennial, revolutionary rhetoric of this decade of revolutionaries and nihilists and anarchists, Wilde looks forward to the overthrow of the present dull world of facts and the rebirth of a wonderful world of lying and imagination:

The solid stolid British intellect may not hear the voice of fantasy now, but surely some day, when we are all bored to death with the commonplace character of modern fiction, it will hearken to her and try to borrow her wings. And when that day dawns, or sunset reddens how joyous we shall all be! Facts will be regarded as discreditable, Truth will be found mourning over her fetters, and Romance, with her temper of wonder, will return to the land.

The very aspect of the world will change to our startled eyes. Out of the sea will rise Behemoth and Leviathan and sail round the high-pooped galleys, as they do on the delightful maps of those ages when books on geography were actually readable. Dragons will wander about the waste places, and the phoenix will soar from her nest of fire into the air. We shall lay our hands upon the basilisk, and see the jewel in the toad’s head. Champing his gilded oats, the Hippogriff will stand in our stalls, and over our heads will float the Blue Bird singing of beautiful and impossible things, of things that are lovely and that never happened, of things that are not and that should be. But before this comes to pass we must cultivate the lost art of Lying.

Three principles

And the essay winds up with some more generalisations from Wilde’s books of sentences about Art.

1. Art never expresses anything but itself. It has an independent life, just as Thought has, and develops purely on its own lines. It is not necessarily realistic in an age of realism, nor spiritual in an age of faith. So far from being the creation of its time, it is usually in direct opposition to it, and the only history that it preserves for us is the history of its own progress.

2. All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals. Life and Nature may sometimes be used as part of Art’s rough material, but before they are of any real service to art they must be translated into artistic conventions. The moment Art surrenders its imaginative medium it surrenders everything… It is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned. M. Zola sits down to give us a picture of the Second Empire. Who cares for the Second Empire now? It is out of date. Life goes faster than Realism, but Romanticism is always in front of Life.

3. The third doctrine is that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life. This results not merely from Life’s imitative instinct, but from the fact that the self-conscious aim of Life is to find expression, and that Art offers it certain beautiful forms through which it may realize that energy.

It is a revealing moment when Wilde jokingly says that society must return to its ‘lost leader’, the skilled liar. Mostly this is paradoxical wit – but the phrase ‘lost leader’, by 1891, already referred to Charles Stewart Parnell, whose affair with a married woman split the Irish Parliamentary Party of which he was leader, and, arguably, set back the cause of Irish independence by a generation. Wilde’s oblique reference to a man hounded to his death by the British establishment because of his private life has a terrible reverberation for us who know what Wilde’s fate was to be.

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by Simon on July 17, 2024 • Permalink

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Tagged 1891, Aestheticism, Anti-England, Aristotle, art, Balzac, Burne-Jones, Caesar, Charles Dickens, Charles Reade, Charles Stewart Parnell, Christ, Comedie Humaine, Corot, critical essay, Cyril, Daudet, Decay of Lying, dialogue, Dick Turpin, Dostoieffski, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, essay, Flaubert, George Meredith, Guy de Maupassant, Hall Caine, Hamlet, Henry James, Hokkei, Hokusai, Holbein, humour, Illusions Perdues, Intentions, Irish Parliamentary Party, Jack Sheppard, James Payn, Japanese art, L'Assommoir, Life imitates Art, Literature, Lucien de Rubempre, lying, lying professions, Marion Crawford, Monet, Mrs Oliphant, Nature, Oscar Wilde, philistine culture of England, Piccadilly, Pissaro, Pre-Raphaelites, Rastignac, Rider Haggard, Robert Elsmere, Robert Louis Stevenson, Robespierre, Romance, Rossetti, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Second Empire, the Black Arrow, The Decay of Lying, The Soul of Man under Socialism, Tourgenieff, Vivian, Werther, Wilde, William Black, Zola

Posted by Simon on July 17, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/07/17/the-decay-of-lying-oscar-wilde/

Executions @ the Museum of London Docklands

For over 700 years London was the scene of public executions, a practice which wove itself into the city’s history and popular culture. This excellent and imaginatively designed exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands explores all aspects of public executions in London, using a combination of artifacts, letters, informative videos, songs and voices, paintings, engravings and caricatures, and some really gruesome exhibits.

Above all, it is amazingly comprehensive – it touches on all the aspects of the subject I’d expected beforehand but goes on to explore all kinds of nooks and crannies I’d never have thought of. I’d never thought about the effort some condemned prisoners put into being well dressed for their trip to the gallows. Well, the exhibition tells the stories of condemned men and women who went to great lengths to look their best on their death day, and even has the fine dress and fancy suit worn by a female and male executionee:

on the left, the ‘white muslin gown, a handsome worked cap and laced boots’ worn by Eliza Fenning who was hanged for attempting to poison her employers
to the right, the ‘superb suit of white and silver, being the clothes in which he was married’ worn by Laurence Shirley, Earl Ferrers, was hanged on 5 May 1760 for the murder of his steward John Johnson, whom he shot in a rage

(The door on the right of this photo is one of the three doors you had to pass through to enter Newgate Prison. The architect George Dance thoughtfully positioned swags of chains and shackles over the main entrance door at Newgate to terrify and intimidate new prisoners.)

I’d never thought about what happened to the bodies of the hanged after their execution. Turns out that from the mid-16th century the bodies of executed criminals were given to the Company of Barber-Surgeons and the Royal College of Surgeons for dissection and medical research. The thought of being dissected filled the condemned with horror. Fights could break out at executions as friends and family of the deceased would attempt to stop the surgeons claiming bodies. In the same spirit I had no idea that life sized casts of the heads of the executed were often made – there’s a selection of them on display here, which, as the nineteenth century progressed, were used to study ‘criminal’ physiognomy. Alternatively, the casts of notorious criminals were kept in a special display at Newgate where they could be viewed by visitors, who included Charles Dickens.

I knew that broadsheets and leaflets were often sold at executions which claimed to give the last speech of the condemned man, along with a ballad poem describing his fate – but I’d never had the opportunity to read some of these before. Ditto the last letters condemned men wrote to their loved ones. There’s not only letters but rings and coins sent by those condemned to transportation instead of execution in the mid-nineteenth century.

I knew that prisoners in gaol were often shackled but I don’t think I’ve seen a collection of the different types of handcuffs, shackles and ‘waist belts’ used for this purpose on display before. Apparently the weight of shackles prisoners were manacled with sometimes meant they could barely move. As well as direct punishment of the prisoner, the sound of all this metalwork clanking through the echoing vaults of the grim prisoner had a demoralising and terrifying psychological effect on other inmates. The practice of routinely keeping prisoners shackled in irons ceased in the 1820s.

Shackles and handcuffs used in Newgate Prison at the ‘Executions’ exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands © Museum of London

I’ve certainly never seen a real actual gibbet before and I didn’t know that they didn’t come in a standard size, but that a gibbet ‘tailor’ took the corpse’s measurements and built the gibbet to perfectly fit. In line with the state of the art interactivity of the exhibition, the display of this real-life gibbet had a gruesome audio soundtrack with the noise of flies buzzing round the rotting corpse.

I was at first puzzled why the gibbet was so elaborate but realised that a lifeless body would flop in all directions unless its limbs were very strictly compassed and controlled. The effect can be seen in this illustration of the body of the notorious pirate Captain Kidd.

Captain Kidd, gibbeted near Tilbury in Essex, following his execution in 1701

More criminals were gibbeted in the greater London area than elsewhere in the country. The bodies of murders and highwaymen were gibbeted on heaths located on the outskirts of London and main highways into the capital, especially on the wide open Hounslow Heath which became famous for the number of gibbets.

Capital punishments

Between the first recorded execution at Tyburn in 1196 and the last public execution in 1868, there were tens of thousands of executions in London. Nobody knows the precise number because records weren’t kept before the 18th century.

Right at the start there’s a wall-sized video which shows a scrolling list of all the offences which carried the penalty of capital punishment. By the end of the 18th century some 200 crimes were punishable by death in a list which became known as the ‘Bloody Code’. London’s courts condemned more people to die than those in the rest of the country combined.

Types of execution

Most ordinary criminals were hanged. More florid ways of being despatched were reserved for VIPs.

1. Drawing, hanging and quartering

An ancient punishment for treason, the prisoner was ‘drawn’ or dragged from prison to the execution site, hanged until they were nearly dead, then castrated, disembowelled, beheaded and cut into quarters. Thee practice continued into the 19th but by then prisoners were hanged first and then beheaded.

there’s a vivid engraving of the fate of the Gunpowder Plotters who, after being found guilty in 1606, were publicly executed over two days in St Paul’s Churchyard and Old Palace Yard, Westminster, where they were dragged by horses through the streets, hanged, castrated, disembowelled and cut into pieces.

2. Burning

In 1401 an Act of Parliament made burning the punishment for heresy. It aimed to ‘strike fear into the minds’ of people who questioned the teachings of the church. Women convicted of murdering their husbands or counterfeiting could also be burned to death. By the 18th century they were strangled first.

The exhibition features illustrations of the Protestant martyrs burned at the stake at Smithfield. Over 280 religious dissenters were burned at the stake during the five-year reign of Mary I, known as ‘Bloody Mary’. Besides Smithfield others were burned to death at Stratford-le-Bow, Barnet, Islington, Southwark, Uxbridge, Westminster and throughout England.

Woodcut depicting John Rogers, the first of the ‘Marian martyrs’, being burned at the stake in Smithfield (1555)

3. Boiling

Death by boiling was a rare punishment. In 1531 a cook named Richard Roose poisoned the porridge of the household of Bishop John Fisher, causing two deaths. Henry VIII was so disgusted he declared this crime treason and Parliament passed the ‘Acte for Poysoning’ ordering those who murdered by poison to be boiled to death. Roose was boiled at Smithfield. Eleven years later Margaret Davies suffered the same fate for poisoning four people. Edward VI abolished this execution method in 1547.

4. Beheading

Members of the nobility condemned for treason were often beheaded out of respect for their high status, rather than suffering the agony and humiliation of drawing, hanging and quartering. Most beheadings took place in public on Tower Hill before a large crowd.

5. Hanging

Most ordinary criminals were executed by hanging. There appear to have been two methods. Initially the condemned were placed under a gallows (in the very early period just a tree) standing on a cart. A rope was noosed round their neck and the cart slowly pulled away by horses or oxen till the condemned fell off the back of it and was left dangling. This could be a fairly slow, excruciating death. Laster the ‘short drop’ method was introduced, where the condemned stood on a raised platform and, with the flick of a handle, a trapdoor opened underneath them, dropping them through and making it more likely their neck would snap with the sudden ratchet of the noose. But both methods were far from foolproof and family members or the executioner often pulled the legs of the hanged person to speed up their death.

Places of execution

In the City of London you are never more than 500 metres from a former place of execution. London was packed with them. Early on in the exhibition there’s a useful wall-sized video, with a bench to sit and watch it, which shows maps of London from early medieval times onwards, showing not only ow its street plan grew and developed (interesting in itself) but where the ever-growing number of places of execution were sited (indicated on the maps by entertaining ochre blotches of blood).

1. Smithfield

In the medieval and Tudor periods Smithfield was used for various public purposes, including a livestock market, fairs and executions, as in the burning of the Protestant martyrs mentioned above.

2. Tyburn

Tyburn stood slightly to one side of the current position of Marble Arch at the north-east tip of Hyde Park. It served as London’s principal site of execution for around 600 years. The earliest account records the execution of William FitzOsbert in 1196. Until the late 18th century it was a semi-rural location, easy to get to and easy for crowds to assemble and watch the spectacle.

A huge amount of popular tradition and iconography grew up around the public hanging of criminals at Tyburn. The exhibition contains umpteen engravings and pictures, stores and facts, not least about the carnivalesque atmosphere which reigned along the route of carts transporting convicted criminals from Newgate Prison, via St Giles’s-in-the-Fields church and then along what is now Oxford Street. Many of the condemned went to their execution drunk, in fact it became customary for the cart to stop off at a pub at St Giles where the executioner and victim shared a last pint of beer. This became known as ‘the St Giles Bowl’.

Bernard Mandeville wrote that ‘all the way from Newgate to Tyburn, is one continued Fair, for whores and rogues of the meaner sort.’

In 1961 construction began on new pedestrian subways by Marble Arch and the excavators found large quantities of human bones around the site of the Tyburn gallows which archaeologists presume are the remains of the executed who were buried where they died.

Execution at Tyburn by Thomas Rowlandson (1803)

A lot of slang and catchphrases grew up about the place. The scaffold was known as ‘the Tyburn tree’. To ‘take a ride to Tyburn’ (or simply ‘go west’) was to go to one’s hanging. The ‘Lord of the Manor of Tyburn’ was the public hangman while ‘dancing the Tyburn jig’ was the act of being hanged because of the wriggling, dancing movement of the hanged in their last moments.

The last execution at Tyburn was of John Austin, a highwayman, on 3 November 1783.

3. Newgate

With the closure of Tyburn London’s public executions moved to the open space in front of the rebuilt Newgate Prison. This was to be London’s principal site of public execution for the next 85 years until public executions were discontinued in 1868.

The move meant the end of the great public procession from Newgate to Tyburn. It was an assertion by the authorities of their control over the timing and atmosphere of the executions. The Newgate scaffold featured two beams with capacity for up to 12 hangings.

Newgate Prison itself closed in 1902. The demolition of one of London’s most iconic buildings aroused considerable public interest and relics of the prison were sold at auction. A keystone from the main doorway is on display here, as is one of the heavy wood-and-metal doors (see first photo).

4. Horsemonger Lane

Public executions at Horsemonger Lane in Southwark took place on the roof of the gatehouse, making them highly visible to spectators.

5. Tower Hill

A small number of noble men and women, soldiers and spies were privately executed within the walls of the Tower of London. Many more – at least 120 between 1388 and 1780 – were executed in public on Tower Hill. Beheadings and hangings, were common enough for the ‘posts of the scaffold’ to become a landmark. It was here that Thomas, Earl of Strafford, a key ally of Charles I, was executed on 12 May 1641, as part of the political divisions which opened up before the outbreak of civil war the following year.

6. Execution Dock

On the Thames near Wapping, Execution Dock was used for more than 400 years to execute pirates, smugglers and mutineers who had been sentenced to death by Admiralty courts. The ‘dock’ consisted of a scaffold for hanging. The last executions there took place in 1830. Just up the river at Blackwall Reach where it bends bodies of convicts were gibbeted so as to be more visible to boats entering the city.

7. Charing Cross

Public executions took place at Charing Cross in the 16th and 17th centuries. A pillory that locked the head and hands of a criminal into a wooden frame for public humiliation was later erected at the site.

8. New Palace Yard and Westminster Hall

The area around the Palace of Westminster was used for public executions, the display of body parts and pillorying criminals.

9. Kennington Common

From at least 1678 until 1800 Kennington Common was the principal execution site for the county of Surrey.

The execution and embowelling of Jacobite rebels on Kennington Common mid to late 18th century)

10. Cheapside

Temporary gallows were erected on several occasions at Cheapside between the 14th and 17th centuries. They were in place for over 100 days in 1554 following the execution of two rebels involved in a Protestant uprising against Mary I.

Ordinary criminals and reprieves

The exhibition contains the story of what feels like 50 or so ordinary criminals, whose names are preserved for some or other aspect of their crime or their trial or their plea for pardon or the way they died. One by one their pitiful stories build up into an upsetting profile of the generally poor and wretched who committed often petty crimes and went to their deaths miserably.

As the number convicted of capital offences rose in the later 18th century the number of reprieves increased, if only to manage down the number of executions which threatened to swamp the system. The exhibition features letters written by the condemned, their friends and relatives and influential contacts. I like the story of the Dane Jørgen Jørgenson, who was convicted in 1820 of robbery but managed to get a letter to the Duke of Wellington for whom he had worked as a during the Napoleonic wars. The exhibition includes a letter from the Duke pardoning Jørgenson on condition he ‘transports’ himself out of the country.

The most famous victim: Charles I

Probably the most famous execution ever to take place in London was not of a common criminal or aristocratic traitor but of the king himself, namely Charles I, brought to trial by the Puritan junta and found guilty of treason against his own people. The exhibition devotes a large case to his execution, on 31 January 1649, with several contemporary illustrations and a number of artefacts said to be linked to it, namely a pair of royal gloves he was said to have taken with him, and even the silk undershirt he insisted on wearing to prevent him shivering with cold (it was January in London) which, he told his attendant, Sir Thomas Herbert, might be misinterpreted as fear.

Later on in the exhibition there are several objects pertaining to the punishment of his killers. 59 leading Puritan generals and MPs signed the king’s death warrant and so came to be known by their enemies as the ‘regicides’. On his Restoration in 1660, Charles II had special agents arrest any of the regicides living in England and track down those who had fled abroad and assassinate them.

Three of the leading regicides, Oliver Cromwell, John Bradshaw and Henry Ireton, had already died of natural causes and been buried at Westminster Abbey, but in 1661 Charles’s Cavalier Parliament ordered their bodies to be exhumed, executed and decapitated. Their heads were displayed on poles outside Westminster Hall. Cromwell’s head remained there until 1685.

The most famous criminal: Jack Sheppard

John ‘Jack’ Sheppard was convicted of robbery in 1724, aged 22. Sheppard was one of London’s greatest criminal heroes. Notorious for escaping multiple times from Newgate, he became a symbol of freedom for London’s working classes. An apprentice carpenter, Jack fell into a life of thieving, reputably led astray by ‘bad company and lewd women’. Although eventually executed at Tyburn at the age of 22, his effrontery and skill in challenging authority ensured his story was recounted in popular books and plays for generations. The artist James Thornhill paid one shilling and sixpence to visit him in his cell to draw this portrait.

Portrait of Jack Sheppard by Sir James Thornhill (1724)

In the 1850s the campaigning journalist Henry Mayhew discovered that ‘chapbooks’ recounting Sheppard’s exploits were hugely popular in low lodging houses, where they were read aloud to illiterate youths. He interviewed 13 boys who confessed to thieving in order to pay for a theatre ticket for the current play about Jack’s life.

The most famous executioner: Jack Ketch

In 1685, the Duke of Monmouth, illegitimate son of Charles II, led a rebellion to seize the throne from his uncle, James II. The rebellion was defeated, Monmouth was captured, condemned for high treason and beheaded on Tower Hill. Despite asking to be killed with one clean blow, Monmouth’s executioner, Jack Ketch, made a right monkeys of the procedure, failing to despatch the Duke after two strikes with an axe and being forced to resort to a knife to cut through the neck while the Duke made a grim effort to rise from the block to the horror of onlookers. As a result of this heroic failure Ketch’s name became infamous and, eventually, became a byword for public executioners, who, by and large preferred to keep their identities secret.

Transportation

A final section of the exhibition explains how crimes which had previously resulted in execution were amended to ‘transportation’ to the colonies, generally meaning Australia. In fact the first convicts transported out of England had been despatched as long ago as 1718, when they were sent to America to supply plantations there with labour. Thus Moll Flanders, heroine of Daniel Defoe’s 1722 novel, is convicted of a capital offence but gets it commuted to transportation to British America.

Transport to America ended when that country became independent in 1776 but, as luck would have it, just a few years earlier (in 1770) Australia had been discovered and provisionally mapped by Captain James Cook. Between 1788 and 1868 over 160,000 convicts were sent to Australia from England and other parts of the Empire.

The exhibition includes a few paintings of the first settlement, which are fairly predictable – but I had never heard about ‘convict tokens’ before. Apparently, convicts awaiting transportation presented loved ones with smoothed coins engraved with messages of affection. Often created by prisoners skilled in metalwork, for a fee, the tokens could be highly decorative and became known as ‘leaden hearts’. Half a dozen examples are on display here.

The campaign to abolish public executions

The advent of Queen Victoria to the throne in 1837 marked a sea change in social attitudes. The young queen consciously rebelled against the louche morals of her rakish predecessor, William IV. She wanted a chaste, sober court and her high moral tone and sincere Anglicanism set the style for the new reign among the aristocracy and aspiring upper middle classes. There was a general wish to make all aspects of public life more respectable and, in time, the new mood extended to the utterly disreputable practice of public executions, with all their opportunities for immorality of every description which this exhibition has chronicled.

In 1840 William Makepeace Thackeray attended the execution of the Swiss valet François Courvoisier, executed for murdering his master, Lord William Russell. He wrote that ‘I feel myself ashamed and degraded at the brutal curiosity which took me to that brutal sight…I came away…that morning with a disgust for murder, but it was for the murder I saw done.’

In 1849 Charles Dickens had attended the execution of Maria and Frederick Manning and wrote a furious letter to The Times criticising the ‘inconceivably awful behaviour’ of the crowd. Describing public execution as a ‘moral evil’, he doubted communities could prosper where such scenes of ‘horror and demoralisation’ could take place.

Prison reform had been an issue since the start of the nineteenth century and combined with the campaign to abolish public executions. The exhibition cites the MP Thomas Hobhouse in 1866 arguing that the spectacle, instead of instilling fear of crime and respect for the law, resulted in the crowds who became ‘hardened and literally acquired a taste for blood.’

The exhibition features a powerful satirical cartoon published in Punch magazine mocking the commercialisation of state executions. The scaffold is a theatrical stage with a sign for ‘opera glasses’ and a booth selling tickets while the mixed crowd is worked by hawkers and costermongers. ‘Ere’s lots o’ the rope which ‘ung the late lamented Mr Greenacre, only a penny an inch!’

The Trial for Murder Mania, illustration for Punch, 1850

After several attempts to move a bill in Parliament, the Capital Punishment Amendment Act was finally passed in 1868 public executions in Britain were officially banned. The last person to be publicly executed in London was the Irish republican Michael Barrett, on 26 May 1868. Three days later the practice was outlawed.

But it wasn’t the abolition of the death penalty, though. Another century was to pass before that occurred. Only in 1965 was the death penalty for murder in Britain suspended for five years and in 1969 was this made permanent. And it wasn’t until 1998 that the death penalty in Britain was finally abolished for all crimes. The last people executed in the UK were Peter Allen and Gwynne Evans on 13 August 1964.

Amnesty International

Things take a very earnest turn at the end of the exhibition with a large video screen showing an interview with Paul Bridges from Amnesty International. He reminds us that 55 countries still retain the death penalty (although, admittedly, many have not used it for some time). Nonetheless, Amnesty International recorded 579 executions in 18 countries in 2021.

Summary

This is an outstandingly interesting, comprehensive, thought-provoking, sometimes funny, but mostly grisly and gruesome exhibition, beautifully staged, with absorbing interactive elements. You have two more weeks to catch it.

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by Simon on April 5, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Exhibition, History

Tagged Admiralty courts, Amnesty International, Australia, Barnet, beheading, Bishop John Fisher, Blackwall Reach, Bloody Mary, British America, Burning, Captain James Cook, Captain Kidd, cartoons, castration, Charing Cross, Charles Dickens, Charles I, Charles II, cheapside, Company of Barber-Surgeons, Daniel Defoe, death penalty, Duke of Monmouth, Duke of Wellington, Earl Ferrers, Earl of Strafford, Eliza Fenning, England, engraving, Execution Dock, exhibition, François Courvoisier, gallows, George Dance, gibbet, Gunpowder plot, Gwynne Evans, handcuffs, hanging, hanging drawing quartering, Henry Ireton, Henry VIII, history, Horsemonger Lane, Hyde Park, Irish republicanism, Islington, Jack Ketch, Jack Sheppard, James II, James Thornhill, Jørgen Jørgenson, John Bradshaw, John Rogers, Kennington Common, Laurence Shirley, London, Lord William Russell, Marble Arch, Margaret Davies, Maria and Frederick Manning, Mary I, Michael Barrett, Middle Ages, Moll Flanders, Museum of London Docklands, Napoleonic Wars, New Palace Yard, Newgate prison, Old Palace Yard, Oliver Cromwell, Oxford Street, paintings, Peter Allen, pirates, popular culture, Protestant martyrs, public executions, Punch, Queen Victoria, regicides, Richard Roose, Royal College of Surgeons, shackles, short drop, Sir Thomas Herbert, Smithfield, Southwark, St Giles's church, St Paul's cathedral, Stratford-le-Bow, Surrey, the 'Bloody Code', the Capital Punishment Amendment Act, the Restoration, The Times, Thomas Hobhouse, Thomas Rowlandson, Tilbury, Tower Hill, Transportation, Tyburn, Uxbridge, Wapping, wars of religion, Westminster, Westminster Hall, William FitzOsbert, William IV, William Makepeace Thackeray

Posted by Simon on April 5, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/04/05/executions-the-museum-of-london-docklands/

A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh (1934)

Brenda and Tony

Five or six years ago Brenda Rex married Tony Last. She is Lord St Cloud’s daughter, ‘very fair, [with an] underwater look’. They lived in a flat in London till Tony’s father died two years later, and left him an impressive Victorian country house, Hetton, loving described in a page of purple prose. But what with the upkeep of the big draughty place and wages for the fifteen or so servants (including the butler, Ambrose), they don’t have much disposable income and can’t afford to go up to London very often.

They have a simply adorable little boy, John Andrew, who has a tut-tutting nanny. One of the other servants is a riding master, Ben Hacket, who’s teaching the boy how ride and jump fences on his pony, Thunderclap (and in a comic recurring theme, also exposing the boy to rather fruity phrases which nanny considers wholly inappropriate).

Enter John Beaver

One weekend, John Beaver, a non-descript young man comes to stay. He has no money and no title and no relatives. One night when Tony was up in town he found himself in the bar of his club, Bratts, almost alone except for this Beaver fellah, and they had a few drinks and then dinner and Tony, out of politeness, asked him to come down to stay at the country place. Never dreamed he would. But here he was, having caught the train down.

There are no other guests so he and Brenda put a brave face on entertaining the young man, carefully assigning him the coldest spare bedroom (Sir Galahad; with Victorian heaviness, all the bedrooms are named after characters from the King Arthur stories) with the most uncomfortable bed, in a bid to get rid of him asap.

During the day Tony makes excuses to go out on estate business, see to his tenants, pop into the local town, go to church on Sunday morning and generally avoid young Beaver. So it falls to Brenda to engage him in conversation and try to keep him entertained.

At first, when Beaver has gone to dress for dinner or whatever, when she is alone with Tony, she complains about how tiresome he is. But Beaver is used to staying at country places, he’s the non-descript, unimportant chaps who makes up the numbers at countless society parties and weekends, and so he puts on a good display of conversation and pretends to be interested in the house and ends up staying an extra night. By the time he leaves on Monday morning Brenda is describing him as quite tolerable, you know.

Their affair begins

Thus begins the slow slide by which Brenda Last commences an adulterous affair with bland John Beaver, to her own surprise, the amazement of her sister, Marjorie, and the delight of gossip-starved wider society.

(Brenda’s sister, Marjorie is married to Allan, ‘the prospective Conservative candidate for a South London constituency of strong Labour sympathies’. They are hard up, too hard up to afford a baby, but popular. They live in a little house in the neighbourhood of Portman Square, very convenient for Paddington Station and they own a Pekingese dog named Djinn, who various other characters find objectionable.)

John’s backstory

John’s backstory is that his father is dead and he was laid off from the one job he’s ever had, in an advertising company, during the Slump. Now he lives with his mother, Mrs Beaver, in her small house in Sussex Gardens. He calls her ‘mumsy’. She runs a small business providing furnishings for the London homes of the rich. He has the dark little sitting-room (on the ground floor, behind the dining-room) and his own telephone. His clothes are looked after by an elderly parlourmaid.

Beaver has one distinction – he is a universal backstop guest for posh parties. If a society hostess is arranging a smart dinner party and a male guest lets her down at the last minute, John is the man she calls. Thus John spends the early part of every evening sitting beside his phone, waiting for a call, and is rarely disappointed. Someone, somewhere, needs a presentable man at short notice and, from his base in Sussex Gardens, he can walk or catch a cab to be with his hostess in as little as fifteen minutes, sometimes arriving just as the guests are going in to dine, sometimes after they’ve completed their first course.

Tony the model squire

Tony Last’s distinguishing feature is his immense love for his rambling old house, Hetton, and the plans continually revolving round his head of how to renovate and improve it. He attends church every Sunday (sitting in the family box pew his father had specially built, which is big enough to hold an armchair!), chats with the rather gaga vicar (‘the Reverend Tendril’) after the service, makes friendly conversation with the villagers, many of whom are his tenants. He is a sentimentalised vision of the modern squire, hard up in the modern way, forced to scrimp and save, but benevolently patriarchal and well meaning. His quiet, rural integrity stands in time-honoured opposition to the shallow, immoral infidelities represented by the big bad city.

Familiar plot

In fact the outline of the plot is time-honoured and traditional. Young society girl marries nice chap with house in country, moves to country, produces son and heir, becomes bored, then very bored, then has fling with first halfway eligible man who crosses her path.

Obviously there’s lots of precisely imagined and described detail, both of the affair and the London high society it takes place amongst. One of the striking things for a modern reader is how Brenda and Beaver make no attempt to hide their affair. They attend the usual round of high society parties so that within days their names are being bandied about over dinner party tables and morning phone calls. Very quickly everyone knows they’re having an affair, everyone except poor Tony.

Waugh indulges in a little editorialising, repeating the idea floated in Vile Bodies that people read gossip columns, and gossip generally, in order live fuller lives via other people. The key word is ‘vicariously’, which occurs here and in the similar passage in Bodies:

The morning telephone buzzed with news of her; even people with whom she had the barest acquaintance were delighted to relate that they had seen her and Beaver the evening before at a restaurant or cinema. It had been an autumn of very sparse and meagre romance; only the most obvious people had parted or come together, and Brenda was filling a want long felt by those whose simple, vicarious pleasure it was to discuss the subject in bed over the telephone. (p.57)

Gossip is a key part of Waugh’s fiction. Waugh is the poet laureate of gossip.

A love nest in London

The affair takes a step up when Brenda persuades Tony that she needs a little flat in town, a pied a terre, an idea suggested by Mrs Beaver who is converting a Victorian house into stylish bedsits containing a bedroom and ensuite bathroom. Tony reluctantly lets Brenda rent one and then accedes to her sudden desire to spend rather a lot of time at it. For a front she claims to want to take an adult degree in economics, it will help her manage accounts at Hetton. Tony innocently believes this obvious lie.

For his part, John is chuffed to be treated with new respect by the polite society which he has previously only been on the fringes of.

And Beaver, for the first time in his life, found himself a person of interest and, almost, of consequence. Women studied him with a new scrutiny, wondering what they had missed in him; men treated him as an equal, even as a successful fellow competitor. ‘How on earth has he got away with it?’ they may have asked themselves, but now, when he came into Bratt’s, they made room for him at the bar and said, ‘Well, old boy, how about one?’ (p.58)

So the plot – bored married woman has affair – may be pretty run of the mill, the pleasure comes from: Waugh’s beautiful style; a thousand and one acute observations about the people and posh lifestyles he’s describing; and, more subtly, the precise way Waugh conceives and records the slow change in Brenda’s attitude and in the climate of her marriage. If you want to drag ‘morality’ into literature, then it is a moral decline, but recorded, annotated, measured, in psychological details.

‘Princess’ Abdul Akbar

Brenda stays away from Hetton more and more. When she comes back to Hetton Tony is pitifully glad to see her. Our sympathies harden against Brenda when she conspires to palm off a free single woman on Tony. With atrocious misunderstanding of her husband, she thinks if she can push him into having an affair, then they’ll be morally equal.

So Brenda comes down to Hetton with two posh society friends and Mrs Beaver, who is now offering to do up the main rooms in the house (to Tony’s dismay). But the point of the visit is an extended comic passage about a ‘Princess’ Abdul Akbar (real name Jenny), a heavily made-up and over-scented vamp who Brenda and the other women take every opportunity to leave alone with Tony, as she flirts with him, gives him a silly nickname, hints at her tragic past, declares she simply loves the house and in every way tries to tempt him into an affair which will then justify Brenda’s brazen, heartless adultery. But it is a comic fail. They’ve all underestimated Tony’s good, true, faithful heart.

The Shameless Blonde

Tony’s best friend, Jock Grant-Menzies, comes for the weekend bringing his latest girlfriend, a thoroughly modern divorcée who the two men have nicknamed ‘the shameless blonde’. Her actual name is Mrs Rattery and she was American by origin but is now thoroughly internationalised, having lived for years in the best hotels in capital cities around the world. She turns out to be supremely capable and flies in her own plane to Hetton, which she lands in the park, climbing out, tall and limber in her flying outfit, the model of a 1930s, Art Deco, über-woman.

Next day is the big fox hunt which young John Andrew has been excitedly looking forward to for months. Waugh describes the buildup and hunt with the same thoroughness and accuracy that he brings to any subject if he sets his mind to it (compare the numerous factual descriptions in his travel books). For me, fox hunting doesn’t become any the less ludicrous the more the traditions and rituals surrounding it, are described. Most Londoners get more foxes in their gardens than the Pigstanton Hunt gets in this novel. But it is an important symbol of the life of the country squire, that sense of deep English heritage which also informs, say, the novels of Saki or Siegfried Sassoon.

Death of John Andrew

Half way through the book comes its devastating shock. Little John Andrew is really enjoying the hunt but his father made Ben promise to bring him back before 1pm and as 1 approaches, despite John’s whines to be allowed to ride some more, Ben tells him they must return.

All morning there have, of course, been numerous other riders and horses. The most notable was Miss Ripon riding a very difficult, temperamental bay horse her father has been trying to get rid of for years. She’s packed in following the hunt and joins them on the ride along the road back to the stables, with John to her right and Ben on the outside. At a bend in the lane one of the country buses unexpectedly appears coming the other way but slows right down and pulls over. Bit nerve-making but OK. But, alas, Miss Tendril, the vicar’s niece, has come up behind the horses on her fashionable motor bike and at that precise moment it backfires with a terrific, loud report.

Miss Ripon’s horse starts and panics, rearing sideways and knocking John Andrew off his mount and onto the tarmac road. Ben yells at Miss Ripon to whip her horse, which she does and it regains focus and shoots off down the road. But not before it lashes out with a powerful rear hoof which connects with John Andrew’s head and sends him flying into the ditch where he lies perfectly still. He is killed instantly.

The impact of John’s death

In his previous novels Waugh had deliberately underplayed the deaths of various characters, they happened peripherally, that was a deliberate tactic in creating the sense of the brittle, heartless high society he wanted to portray.

Here, it is the opposite. We arrive back at Hetton to find Tony has been informed of his son’s abrupt, tragic and quite meaningless death. Like the stiff upper lip English gent he is (or fancies he is, or Waugh fancies he is) he is dealing capably with all the social obligations and arrangements which a death in the family entails. The workmen redecorating the drawing room have been sent home. Mr Tendril the vicar pays a sombre visit. With typical empath and selflessness, Tony is most concerned about Miss Ripon who was in a terribly emotional state and kept blaming herself. Ben arrives and gives his side of the story. Jock arrives and is with Tony alone.

Everybody agrees it was nobody’s fault, no one is to blame. This phrase is echoed again and again by various characters and with each iteration becomes more meaningless. It is a cruel, shocking insight into a universe with absolutely no purpose or concern for anybody.

Tony is most worried who will tell Brenda. He’s phoned her at her London flat umpteen times but no reply. Jock, who, like everyone else, knows about Brenda’s affair with Beaver, volunteers to go to London and tell her. Initially Mrs Rattan, the brisk, effective American divorcée, offers to fly them both up to London but something in Tony’s tone makes her change her mind. It is notable that, out of all the characters, it is the only non-English person, the American divorcée, who grasps just how deeply Tony is in shock, that he is on the verge of going completely to pieces. So she says she will stay with him, overriding all his objections, meaning Jock will take the train up to London. And stay she does during the long empty afternoon of his newly desolate life, trying to distract him with numerous different card games. The understated power of this passage brought tears to my eyes.

Brenda’s reaction

Meanwhile, there is another scene designed to shock. Jock makes it to London, knocks on the door of Brenda’s flat, only for her neighbour to open, none other than the vampish, self-dramatising ‘Princess’ Abdul Akbar’. She knows where Brenda is, at Polly Cockpurse’s place where a gaggle of posh ladies are having their fortunes read by the latest fashionable fortune reader. When Brenda emerges from her session she sees from her friends’ faces that something bad has happened and she rushes downstairs to see Jock. He tells her to prepare herself and then tells her that John is dead.

Brenda goes white and has to sit down. But as Jock begins to tell the details of the death, about the hunt and the horse, Brenda becomes confused, perplexed – and then realises Jock isn’t talking about John Beaver, he is referring to her son, John Andrew. At which point the novel screeches off its hinges into a terrible moment of moral indictment. In that split second of realisation, Brenda is relieved that it was only her son who was killed, not her adulterous lover.

[Jock] ‘I’ve been down at Hetton since the week-end.’
[Brenda] ‘Hetton?’
‘Don’t you remember? John was going hunting to-day.’
She frowned, not at once taking in what he was saying. ‘John… John Andrew… I… oh, thank God…’ Then she burst into tears.
She wept helplessly, turning round in the chair and pressing her forehead against its gilt back. (p.118)

God. Has any fictional character ever been so totally skewered? She is relieved to learn that it’s only her son who’s died. And realises it in the same moment, realises what a terrible terrible thing that is to have thought and felt.

Jock drives Brenda back to her flat, sits while she packs her things in shock, drives her to the station to catch the train down to Hetton. She makes a feeble attempt to excuse herself, saying she didn’t know what she was saying. Jock says bluntly: ‘You know what you said.’ He drives to his club. He stands at the bar saying nothing to anyone.

A few days later, when Jock goes down to Hetton to keep Tony company, he listens as Tony explains why Brenda told him she had to get away from the house, how deeply upset she must be, how he wishes he could help her. Jock says nothing. He doesn’t tell anyone what she said. God, the buttoned-up, repressed, tight-lippedness of these people.

Brenda and Tony attend the inquest. Afterwards she moves slowly, mechanically. Sits in a daze. Stares out the window. This is really beautifully conveyed, her sleep-walking dazedness. She tells Tony it’s all over, she must get away. He doesn’t understand. Not till she writes him a letter from back in London saying she is in love with John Beaver and wants a divorce. Tony is incredulous. He… he trusted her.

The divorce

An entire chapter is devoted to a detailed description of the absurd lengths one had to go to in the 1930s to gain a divorce. Because Tony is a gentleman he ‘does the right thing’ which is arrange to be the guilty party. He contacts a divorce solicitors who organise the usual procedure, which is that he goes to a hotel somewhere (he chooses Brighton) with a woman of his choice (Jock and Tony give this a lot of thought and then go visit a dingy ‘nightclub’ they’d visited one very drunk night earlier in the story, and alight on the blowsy prostitute, Milly). They explain the deal to Milly, explaining it will be purely a business transaction, no sex required. When Milly asks if she can bring her 8-year-old daughter, Winnie, Tony briskly refuses. Nonetheless, when Milly arrives at the station to meet Tony for the train to Brighton a few days later, she has brought Winnie who proves to be a world class pain in the butt during the following tortuous weekend.

So they catch a train together to Brighton, accompanied at a distance by the two private detectives hired by the divorce solicitors who will testify to Tony’s adultery in court and so win the divorce. Winnie keeps whining, wanting ‘ices’ and insists on being taken to see the sea despite there being a howling rainstorm. Tony outrages his detectives’ sense of professional propriety by socialising with them, buying them drinks and then cocking up the all-important ‘morning after’ scene by having such an early breakfast in the hotel restaurant with whining Winnie that it is an effort to then put a dressing gown on (over his other clothes) and clamber into a big double bed with Milly (who’s tired and grumpy) so they can be served by hotel staff who will later testify to finding them in bed together etc.

An unpleasant obligation, required by his impeccable good manners and sense of responsibility, is finally completed.

Payback

Back in London Tony is visited by Brenda’s elder brother, Reggie, an obese archaeologist. At this point it gets nasty.

It should probably be pointed out that Waugh himself was betrayed by his first wife and went through a very painful divorce. They were married for precisely one year before she revealed she was having an affair with a good friend of both of theirs. It is not difficult to see the passage that follows, this scene with Brenda’s adipose brother Reggie, as cold-blooded revenge. Waugh shows very clearly how Tony’s honesty and fidelity and good manners are systematically traduced by every member of her family and all her friends.

The humiliating ordeal he put himself through in Brighton and his offer of £500 a year settlement are thrown back in his face as bullyingly insufficient. The brother, Reggie, tells Tony that Brenda wants at least £2,000 a year. Lots of relatives think Tony is behaving badly by refusing to take Brenda back. Give it a year, suggests Marjorie, and she’ll get over Beaver and be ready to come back. Tony should wait. He should be forgiving.

In a cold fury at Reggie’s demands Tony phones Brenda and asks if this is really what she wants. £2,000 a year. She admits that John Beaver put her up to it. Beaver’s pointed out they’ll both be quite hard up so will need Tony’s money to live on. Tony asks her if she understands that this will mean he’ll have to sell Hetton. She stumbles and hesitates and starts crying and tells him to stop bullying her, but then admits, yes, she knew.

That’s all he needed to know. He puts the phone down and strides back into the restaurant where Reggie is waiting. And tells him he can fuck off. He’s cancelling the divorce, the whole trip to Brighton was a sham and he has witnesses to prove it. He’s not going to divorce Brenda or give her a penny. Tough. He gets up and walks out. The reader is meant to be on their feet, cheering. The worm has finally turned. After a long narrative of being betrayed, lied to and laughed at behind his back, Tony rejects the whole stinking lot of them.

On a journey

The final quarter of the novel presents another surprise. The scene has moved utterly from England. We find Tony aboard a ship heading for South America (!). Why? How?

Avoiding his former clubs, Bratts and Brown’s, for fear of running into Beaver or indeed anyone he knows, Tony had taken to frequenting the third club he’s a member of, the Greville Club. This is a more highbrow, donnish place, and it is here that he meets the short, brown figure of Dr Messinger. Tony had been leafing through travel brochures toying with going on a long journey with no particular idea where. Over lunch Dr Messinger tells him about his ongoing quest for a lost Shining City in the Amazon, which he has various maps and native accounts of. By the end of lunch Tony has agreed to accompany him. Why not?

And so there follows a long beautifully described sea voyage from the cold grey English Channel through the big waves of the Atlantic and on to the azure seas of the Caribbean. Descriptions of fellow passengers and a brief flirtation with the 18-year-old daughter of an eminent Trinidadian family.

Then he arrives at a port on the coast of South America, rendezvous with Messinger and they set off upriver into Amazonia with a team of eight blacks, chugging upstream in a shallow boat for ten days. At this point they leave the boat and make a stash of supplies – base camp – before walking to a nearby Indian village. Here they recruit a dozen or so men and women to carry their supplies for a week or more further into the interior. These people are from the Macushi tribe. They go so far but , after a week’s tramping, refuse to go further because it means crossing into Pie-Wie territory. Dr Messinger hopes these remote Pie-Wie people will be able to guide them to the Lost City.

Waugh himself went on a three-month long expedition into Amazonia which he described in Ninety-Two Days. Much of the detail of Tony and Messinger’s trip is based on that, not least a) descriptions of the umpteen different type of fly, mosquito, jiggers and even vampire bats which assail them during the day and are a serious menace by night and b) precise descriptions of the black crew on the boat and then the indigenous Indian porters, silent, self-contained movements, their unconquerable fear of the other tribe.

Vivid descriptions of each stage of the Amazon journey are juxtaposed with developments back in London, namely the rather inevitable falling out of the adulterous lovers Brenda and John. Beaver tires of Brenda’s clinginess, Brenda, with no support from Tony, becomes desperate for money, lowers herself to ask for a job at Mrs Beaver’s shop and is mortified at being turned down.

Final developments

To summarise, beneath the impressively authentic details of Amazonian natives and fauna, key things happen:

1. Tony comes down with fever – Messinger nurses him for days.

2. Their food runs low and Messinger is forced to leave feverish, hallucinating Tony and set off for help, in the canoe, down the river. Unfortunately, he is swept over a waterfall and drowned.

3. Tony’s pitiful weakness is powerfully described. The way he tries to fill the empty lantern with paraffin but is so weak he knocks the can over and listens helplessly as the precious liquid gouts out into the soil, weeping helplessly, was very affecting.

4. The scene cuts to some days later when an exhausted, fever-ridden, delirious Tony stumbles out of the jungle. Indians spot him and take him, shambling, covered in bites and rashes and cuts, to the only educated man in the area, a Mr Todd.

The bleak ending

Mr Todd nurses Tony slowly back to health, but when Tony mentions it is time for him to leave, Mr Todd makes excuses. Things take a sinister turn. Mr Todd has a collection of mouldy, ant-eaten old books, including a complete set of Charles Dickens. He asks Tony to read to him for a few hours every afternoon. He used to have another man staying with him who did this. He shows Tony the poor wretch’s grave. Slowly Tony realises the other man was stuck there, trapped, a slave, forced to read Dickens in exchange for food. He realises Todd intends to keep him there in the same way, nursing him, feeding him, but never letting him go.

Tony is stuck because Mr Todd’s shack is so isolated. He lives off food provided to him by the native Indians and a few items of livestock. For scores of miles in every direction there is only barren savannah where Tony would starve and parch to death, or the impenetrable rainforest he stumbled out of. If he tried to escape in either direction it would be without food or water and so, as Tony realises, he would die within days. And so he is forced to stay

One day a European explorer stumbles into the clearing. Todd makes sure he is never alone with Tony but before the explorer continues on his way, Tony slips him a note saying he is alive and well. The explorer disappears back into the forest and Tony spends months and months in hope his message will percolate down to the coast and someone will come looking for him.

One afternoon Mr Todd tells Tony the villagers are having a feast, it might interest him to observe and take part. So they spend the evening at the little local village eating cooked meat and drinking generously from the home brewed alcohol. Tony wakes with a terrible hangover to discover his watch has gone from his wrist. Mr Todd comes into his room in the shack and informs him that a search party of Europeans had come looking for him. The native feast was a ruse to drug Tony and hide him out of the way so that when the search party arrived, Mr Todd was able to tell them that Tony had, alas, perished, to show them the grave of Tony’s predecessor saying it contained Tony, and to give them Tony’s watch as proof. Thus they were sent away with bearing a conclusive account of Tony’s sad death in a faraway country back to all his friends and family in England.

Mr Todd calmly explains all this to Tony and it is a sign of Waugh’s tremendous technique that he doesn’t give us Tony’s reaction at all. We don’t see him, hear him utter a word, share his thoughts, there is no description of his response to the fact that he is now doomed to spend the rest of his life, stuck in a crappy clearing in the middle of nowhere, eating the same awful subsistence food day after day, and forced, in order to survive, to read the complete works of Charles Dickens to a madman.

Coda

With new of Tony’s death Hetton passes to his nearest relatives, the ‘poor Lasts’, a cadet branch of the family we had heard about a few times earlier in the narrative. They are decent people but have to downsize the domestic staff and energetically set about expanding the farming operation, specially of lucrative silver foxes, bred for their fur.

Brenda, as a widow, is free to marry. John Beaver had, some time earlier, heartlessly abandoned her in order to accompany his mother on a business trip to America. From this nadir of her fortunes, she manages to recover herself and brings off the coup of marrying Tony’s old friend Jock Grant-Menzies. It speaks volumes about both of them that Jock notoriously heard her first reaction when told that ‘John’ had died, and so fully knows what a heartless , selfish bitch she is – and yet goes ahead with the marriage.

Author’s message

The world is cruel and pointless. Human life, by itself, is meaningless.

For a month now [Tony] had lived in a world suddenly bereft of order; it was as though the whole reasonable and decent constitution of things, the sum of all he had experienced or learned to expect, were an inconspicuous, inconsiderable object mislaid somewhere on the dressing table; no outrageous circumstance in which he found himself, no new, mad thing brought to his notice, could add a jot to the all-encompassing chaos that shrieked about his ears.

Religion is rarely mentioned in the book, none of the characters take it seriously, it only features in the form of the slightly gaga comedy vicar, with his comic name, Mr Tendril. And yet anyone who knows that Waugh converted to Catholicism in 1930, can sense that the more he emphasises the cruel, amoral heartlessness of the world, the more this vision of despair cries out for a countervailing force, for a force which will restore meaning and purpose and morality to the shabby lives of these broken puppets. Without mentioning Catholicism once, it can be interpreted as a deeply religious book.

Waugh’s way with words

London:

Dawn broke in London, clear and sweet, dove grey and honey, with promise of good weather; the lamps in the streets paled and disappeared; the empty streets ran with water, and the rising sun caught it as it bubbled round the hydrants; the men in overalls swung the nozzles of their hoses from side to side and the water jetted and cascaded in a sparkle of light. (p.190)

The day of the inquest:

A day of fitful sunshine and blustering wind; white and grey clouds were scarcely moving, high overhead, but the bare trees round the house swayed and shook and there were swift whirlpools of straw in the stable yard. Ben changed from the Sunday suit he had worn at the inquest and went about his duties. Thunderclap, too, had been kicked yesterday and was very slightly lame in the off fore.
Brenda took off her hat and threw it down on a chair in the hall. ‘Nothing to say, is there?’

The way the eloquent description is capped off by the taut, abbreviated dialogue is masterly. The desolate scene in the stable yard echoes, mirrors, symbolises or represents Brenda’s state of mind. So that all is needed by way of dialogue is not a long speech of anguish but the opposite, a short taut sentence saying it all. It’s not rocket science, it’s not a new technique in the novel; it’s just done very, very well.

Tony aboard a cheap steamer heading in bad weather down the English Channel, which is carrying one other passenger:

The wash of the ship was quickly lost in the high waves. They were steaming westward down the Channel. As it grew to be night, lighthouses appeared flashing from the French coast. Presently a steward walked round the bright, upper deck striking chimes on a gong of brass cylinders, and the genial passenger went below to prepare himself for dinner in hot sea water which splashed from side to side of the bath and dissolved the soap in a thin, sticky scum. He was the only man to dress that evening: Tony sat in the mustering darkness until the second bell. Then he left his greatcoat in the cabin and went down to dinner.

For me it is a physical, imaginative and psychological pleasure greater than anything a movie or TV adaptation could possibly give me, to read words like this. The precision of what they describe, the precision of their vocabulary, the fluency of their expression, the contrasting rhythms between the opening three relatively short sentences and then the long middle one which rolls and rights itself like the ship it describes. The subject matter may be bitter and grim, but it is always an immense pleasure to read Waugh’s beautifully clear and expressive prose.

Evelyn Waugh reviews

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by Simon on December 15, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in Comedy, Literature, Novel

Posted by Simon on December 15, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/12/15/a-handful-of-dust-evelyn-waugh/

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All posts tagged Charles Dickens

Hugh Kenner

Learnings

Key books about Ulysses

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Part 1. Telemachiad or the odyssey of Telemachus

Part 2. Odyssey

Part 3. Nostos or Return

Plot

Homeric (and literary) parallels

Format

Parody in the Oxen of the Sun

The opening incantations

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The Mixture as Before

Bertie struggles to find the right word

Bertie struggles with classic quotes

Jeeves’s literary quotes

Jeeves and clothes

The comic strategy of stating the obvious

Clash of registers

The village constable

Abbreviations

Trimmed

One letter

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Inappropriate

Slang phrases

Aunt Dahlia’s insults

Jeeves’s wisdom

Sir Roderick Spode

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Bertie and Sherlock and Hercule

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This lax post-war world

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Woolf’s aestheticism

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Woolf’s long career but narrow range

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Woolf was a nepo baby

1. Woolf’s observational essays

2. Woolf’s feminism

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Woolf is weird

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Carey and Dickens

Kemp and Wells

Introduction: the Darwinian worldview

1. Food

2. Sex (The Slave Goddess)

3. Habitat (The Redeveloped Basement)

4. Survival Mechanisms (The Pugnacious Pacifist)

Fight

Flight

Co-operation

5. Self Image (The Grand Earthly)