All posts tagged Mr Bean

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.

Related links

Related reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on December 20, 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in Comedy, Novel
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on December 20, 2024

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

The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design by Richard Dawkins (1986)

I hope that the reader is as awestruck as I am (p.37)

I first read this book 25 years ago and in the intervening years I had forgotten how naive, silly and embarrassingly earnest Dawkins can be.

The blind watchmaker

The basic premise is easily summarised. In a theological work published in 1802 – Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity – the English theologian William Paley said that if you were out for a walk and stumbled over a stone, you wouldn’t think anything of it, it is so obviously part of the natural world and you unthinkingly accept it as a product of impersonal geological forces.

But if you were out for a walk and stumbled over a watch, particularly if it was an 18th-century, ornately fashioned pocketwatch, you would immediately deduce that something so wonderfully crafted, with so many carefully calibrated inner workings clearly designed for a purpose, presupposed a designer – a craftsman who consciously and deliberately designed and built it.

Well, says Paley, same for the natural world about us. When we look at the countless examples of marvellous design in the world about us – our own eyes, the interaction of insects pollinating flowers, the perfect design of fish for swimming and birds for flying – who can look at all these marvels and not be prompted to declare that there must, on the analogy of the watch, be a conscious designer, an all-powerful entity which created the entire world and all the creatures in it so that they would all perform their functions perfectly? In other words, God (and, since Paley was an Anglican clergyman) the Christian God.

In fact Paley’s book was just the latest in a very long line of works promoting, describing and explaining what is called Natural Theology, the view that the existence of an all-powerful loving God can be deduced solely from observation of the world around us, without the need of any holy books or revelations. This line of argument is recorded as far back as the Biblical psalms and is believed by many people right up to the present day.

Dawkins’s book is a refutation of this entire way of thinking as it relates to the natural world i.e. to living organisms.

As Dawkins points out, it was reasonable to hold Paley’s beliefs in his day and age, it was a reasonable hypothesis in the absence of any better explanation for the origin and diversity of life we see around us.

But since Charles Darwin published On The Origin of Species in 1859, all forms of natural theology have been rendered redundant. We now have an infinite simpler, more satisfying and more believable explanation for the origin, spread and diversity of life forms on earth, which is Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection.

Thus Dawkins’s 340-page book amounts to a sustained argument against natural theology, and against the whole crew of Christians, Creationists, theists, bishops and poets and philosophers who still espouse it, because they are wrong and Richard and the other evolutionary biologists he cites are right.

The book combines a battery of supposedly ‘philosophical’ arguments with an overview of natural history, biology and – in particular – what was then, in 1986, the latest thinking about genetics and DNA – in order to ridicule, rubbish and refute every possible variation of natural theology and to promote Darwin Darwin Darwin.

One long argument

To describe The Blind Watchmaker as argumentative is an understatement. The book is expressly not a straightforward exposition of Darwin’s theory, it is more a series of arguments which Dawkins has with proponents of the views he wishes to demolish, as well as with other biologists whose theories he disputes, and sometimes even with himself. If it moves, he’ll argue with it. It is like an explosion in an argument factory.

And Dawkins is addicted to making elaborate and often far-fetched analogies and comparisons to help us understand evolution. In other words, you have to wade through a lot of often irrelevant argumentation and distracting analogies in order to get to the useful information.

Another key part of Dawkins’ approach, something I found initially irritating about the book, then found ludicrous, and ended up finding laugh-out-loud funny, is the way he makes up people to argue with.

He will invent a naive believer of this or that aspect of natural theology, someone who can’t credit evolution with explaining everything about the natural world, put words into their mouths, and then gleefully demolish their made-up arguments.

I think it’s the purest example of an author using convenient straw men to set up and knock down that I’ve ever read. Thus in the first 40 pages he invents the following figures:

  • a distinguished modern philosopher who he once sat next to at dinner and revealed to a horrified Dawkins that he didn’t understand why the evolution and diversity of life required any special explanation (p.5)
  • a ‘hypothetical philosopher’ he invents and claims would, at this stage of Dawkins’s exposition, be ‘mumbling something about circular argument’ (p.8)
  • a hypothetical engineer who starts ‘boring on’ about the whole being greater than the sum of the parts (p.11)
  • he creates another engineer (‘our engineer’) to act as a foil for his explanation of how bat echolocation works in chapter 2
  • with similar condescension he refers at various moments to ‘our mathematicians’ in order to dismiss their arguments
  • the second half of the book is littered with references to ‘creationists’ and ‘creationist propaganda’ and ‘anti-evolution propaganda’ which he doesn’t actually quote, but whose views he briefly summarises before pulverising them

On page 13 he dismisses ‘readers of trendy intellectual magazines’ saying that, if you read them you might have noticed that:

reductionism, like sin, is one of those things that is only mentioned by people who are against it.

This thought then rapidly gets out of control as he goes on to say that calling yourself a reductionist is the equivalent, ‘in some circles’ of admitting that you eat babies.

He then goes on to compare the hypothetical simple-minded ‘reductionist’ who he’s just invented with his own, more sophisticated, materialist reductionism, and then writes:

It goes without saying – though the mythical, baby-eating reductionist is reputed to deny this – that the kinds of explanations which are suitable at high levels in the hierarchy are quite different from the kinds of explanations which are suitable at lower levels.

You can see that he’s making a serious point, but can’t help wondering why it required inventing a straw man and then attributing him the bizarre characteristic of eating babies!

This is just one tiny snapshot of Dawkins’s technique, in which serious and often interesting points are surrounded by relentless argufying and quarrelling, more often than not with entirely fictional, made-up figures who are often given ridiculously caricatured views and qualities.

In among the vast army of people Dawkins picks fights with are some real Christian or anti-evolutionary figures who he briefly invokes before subjecting them to withering criticism.

  • the ‘distinguished sceptic’ who refused to believe Donald Griffin when the latter first explained the secret of bat echolocation at a 1940 conference (p.35)
  • Bishop of Birmingham, Hugh Montefiore (1920-2005) whose book The Probability of God Dawkins credits with being an honest attempt to prove God but which he quickly dismisses for its widespread use of what Dawkins calls The Argument From Personal Incredulity i.e. ‘I find it hard to understand…it is difficult to see how…’ etc which only goes to show the ignorant the author is (p.37)
  • Francis Hitching (b.1933) author of The Neck of the Giraffe or Where Darwin Went Wrong (1983) which appears to be a sustained attack on Darwinism
  • The Duke of Argyll who, apparently, supported Darwin but with the modest proviso that the loving Creator God did, of course, intervene in evolution to create new species and generally give evolution a helping hand (p.248)
  • the editor of Creationist magazine Biblical (p.251) who is quoted leaping onto the controversy surrounding the (then) new theory of punctuated equilibrium in order to claim it undermined the entire Darwinian edifice

The remorseless battering of opponents, real or hypothetical, builds up to a climax in the final chapter where Dawkins tackles head-on half a dozen or so alternative explanations for the existence of complex life forms including the Big One, Christian Creationism.

Naivety

There’s a stunning moment before the book’s even properly begun which reveals Dawkins’ amazingly earnest naivety about the real world.

He describes taking part in a formal debate (organised, apparently, at the Oxford Union). Afterwards he is seated at dinner (the book includes lots of anecdotes about conversations over dinner; Oxford is that kind of place) next to the young lady who argued against him in the debate, and made the creationist case – and Dawkins is horrified to discover that she doesn’t necessarily believe all the points she made!!

Indeed, Dawkins reveals to his shocked readers, this young lady was sometimes making arguments simply for the sake of having a debate! Richard is horrified!! He himself has never uttered a word he didn’t believe to be the complete truth! He cannot credit the notion that someone argued a case solely for the intellectual challenge of it!

At first I thought he was joking, but this anecdote, told on page two of the Preface, establishes the fact that Dawkins doesn’t understand the nature of intellectual debate, and so by implication doesn’t understand the worlds of law or politics or philosophy or the humanities, where you are routinely asked to justify a cause you don’t particularly believe in, or to argue one of any number of conflicting views.

When I told my son this he recalled being made to take part in school debates when he was 11. Learning to debate different points of view is a basic teaching, learning and cultural practice.

Philosophical simple-mindedness

Dawkins likes to brandish the word ‘philosophy’ a lot but none of his arguments are truly philosophical, they are more rhetorical or technical. For example, early on he asks ‘What is an explanation?’ before giving this definition of how he intends to use the word:

If we wish to understand how a machine or living body works, we look to its component parts and ask how they interact with each other. If there is a complex thing that we do not yet understand, we can come to understand it in terms of simpler parts that we do already understand. (p.11)

This isn’t really philosophical, more a straightforward clarifying of terms. And yet in chapter 2 he refers back to the opening chapter in which this and much like it occurred, as ‘philosophical’. Quite quickly you get the sense that Dawkins’ idea of ‘philosophy’ is fairly simplistic. That it is, in fact, a biologist’s notion of philosophy i.e. lacking much subtlety or depth.

Same goes for his attitude to the English language. Dawkins is extremely proud of the care with which he writes, and isn’t shy about showing off his rather pedantic thoughts about English usage. For example, he stops the thrust of his argument to discuss whether it is better to write ‘computer programme’ or ‘computer program’. Towards the end of the book he mentions ‘the great Japanese geneticist Motoo Kimura’

whose English prose style, incidentally, would shame many a native speaker (p.303)

There is no reason for this unnecessary aside except to let everyone know that he, Richard Dawkins, is a first class judge of what constitutes good English, and isn’t shy about letting you know it. As with the ‘philosophy’, Dawkins’s comments about the English language are fairly obvious, but presented with a great hoo-hah and self-satisfaction.

Dawkins’s sense of humour!

Way before he has given any kind of account of Darwin’s actual theory, Dawkins is assailing us with his sense of humour, sometimes with short squibs, sometimes with extended ‘humorous’ passages.

You can tell when he’s made a joke, or said something he’s really proud of, because he rounds off the punchline with an exclamation mark!

It’s quite a while since I’ve seen quite so many exclamation marks in a text and it made me realise that their cumulative impact is to make you feel the author is poking you in the ribs so you will laugh and/or marvel at the wonderful anecdote they’ve just told!

Here’s an example of the way that genuinely fascinating natural history/science is buried in Dawkins’s rib-nudging approach. Chapter two is about echolocation in bats, and moves from:

  1. a detailed description of how bat echolocation works – which is riveting
  2. to pondering what it is like to be a bat and live in a bat’s body and live and perceive the world entirely by echolocation and sonar – which is sort of interesting, but speculative
  3. to an extended passage where Dawkins imagines a conference of scientific bats – he does this in order to imagine his scientific bats listening to one of their colleagues presenting a paper with the flabbergasting discovery that humans use a previously unknown sense called ‘sight’, employing two bulbous receptors in their faces called ‘eyes’ in order to analyse light signals which appear to create in their brains 3-D models of the world which help them navigate around – almost as well as bats!!

Now this final passage is sort of helpful, maybe, if you’re in the mood, and sort of humorous. But it is at the same time more than a little ludicrous in what purports to be a serious scientific book. Above all, it gives you a powerful whiff of Dawkins’s world, a world of self-important Oxbridge academics. It does this in two ways:

  1. the choice of an academic conference as the setting for his imaginary fantasy tells much you about the milieu he inhabits
  2. the fact that he thinks he can spend an entire page of his book sharing this extended joke with his readers tells you a lot more about his supreme, undentable self-confidence

Unintentional autobiography

Dawkins likes to think he is making ‘difficult’ science more accessible by giving the poor benighted reader plenty of analogies and examples from everyday life to help us understand these damn tricky concepts. But it is one of the most (unintentionally) enjoyable aspects of the book that many of the examples he uses betray a comic out-of-touchness with the modern world.

I laughed out loud when on page 3 he writes:

The systematic putting together of parts to a purposeful design is something we know and understand, for we have experienced it at first hand, even if only with our childhood Meccano or erector set.

He explains the Doppler Effect by asking the reader to imagine riding a motorbike past a factory whose siren is wailing. Motorbike? Wailing factory siren? This sounds like a W.H. Auden poem from the 1930s. He goes on to explain that it is the same principle as the police use in their radar traps for speeding motorists.

Elsewhere he begins to explain the unlikeliness of organic molecules coming into existence by asking us to ponder the number of his bicycle lock (and later assures us that ‘I ride a bicycle to work every day’, p.84). On almost every page there is an unreflecting assumption that we will be interested in every detail of Professor Dawkins’s life, from his bicycle lock to his personal computer.

He suggests that the advantage even a slight improvement in the ability to ‘see’ would give an evolving species can be considered while ‘turning the colour balance knob of a colour television set’ (p.84).

He explains that the poor Nautilus shellfish has developed the hollow orb of a primitive ‘eye’ but lacks the lens facility that we and all mammals have, making it rather ‘like a hi-fi system with an excellent amplifier fed by a gramophone with a blunt needle’ (p.85).

Gramophone? Later he refers to ‘hi-fidelity sound amplification equipment’ (p.217). It’s possible that Dawkins is the most fuddy-duddy author I’ve ever read.

When describing the transmission of DNA he suggests it might help if we imagine 20 million ‘typists’ sitting in a row. When I asked my daughter what a ‘typist’ is she didn’t know. Reading the book now is like visiting a lost world.

The common brown bat Myotis emits sonic clicks at the rate of ten a second, about the same rate, Dawkins tells us, as a Bren machine gun fires bullets. An analogy which seems redolent of National Service in the 1950s.

His comic-book enthusiasm bubbles over when he tells us that:

These bats are like miniature spy planes, bristling with sophisticated instrumentation. (p.24)

Spy planes. Gramophone players. Factory sirens.

If you put to one side the science he’s trying to explain to us, and just focus on the analogies and stories he uses so liberally, a kind of alternative world appears – a portrait of an incredibly earnest, other-worldly, high-minded Oxford don, a man whose secure upper-middle-class childhood gave him an enduring love of toys and gadgets, and who has the sublime self-confidence of thinking he can change the world by the sheer power of his boyish enthusiasm and the secrets of his bicycle lock.

At the end of chapter 8 (which has been about positive feedback loops in evolution) he digresses into a lengthy description of the new-fangled ‘pop music’, which is introduced by what he describes as the ‘mid-Atlantic mouthings of disco jockeys’ on the radio, and reflected in something which he fastidiously refers to as the ‘Top 20’.

The whole sub-culture is obsessed with a rank ordering of records, called the Top 20 or Top 40, which is based only upon record sales. (p.219)

His point is that records are often bought by young people based on their popularity alone, not on their intrinsic artistic merit and that this is a form of arbitrary positive feedback loop, such as may also be true of some characteristics exaggerated in the course of sexual selection, such as the peacock’s tail.

But the real impact of reading this page-long digression is to make you realise that Dawkins is a real-life version of the stereotypical out-of-touch judge who has spent so long in the bubble of the legal profession (as Dawkins has spent virtually his whole life in the bubble of an Oxford college) that one of the barristers has to patiently explain to him that ‘The Beatles’ are a popular rhythm-and-blues group.

Elsewhere he refers to this new thing called ‘the mass media’. He refers to bodybuilders as members of a ‘peculiar minority culture’ (p.289). It doesn’t seem to occur to him that being a don at an Oxford college is even more of a ‘peculiar minority culture’.

Hi-fidelity gramophones. Factory sirens. Mid-Atlantic mouthings.

Then there are the directly autobiographical snippets – the references to his idyllic childhood in Africa (where he played with his Erector Set or admired a huge swarm of soldier ants), to his High Anglican public school, and on to the rarefied atmosphere of Oxford, where he spent his academic career from 1970 to 2008, and has had so many stimulating conversations over High Table which he is not shy about repeating for our benefit.

Thus, in the middle of an explanation of different theories about the speed with which evolution works, he stops because he:

cannot help being reminded here of the humiliation of my first school report, written by the Matron about my performance as a seven-year-old in folding clothes, taking cold baths, and other daily routines of boarding-school life: “Dawkins has only three speeds: slow, very slow, and stop.” (p.245)

Similarly, he begins Chapter 8 with a reminiscence of a schoolmaster of his who became uncontrollably apoplectic with rage, as an example of ‘positive feedback’.

This is followed by the story of a recent experience he had of attending Oxford’s Congregation, at which the hubbub of the large crowd slowly died away into silence – which he gives as an example of negative feedback.

My point is that The Blind Watchmaker is characterised by many pages of self-indulgent autobiography. It is an obtrusive element in the book which often gets in the way of the factual content he wants to convey. Dawkins is so in love with the sound of his own analogies and whimsical digressions, and so keen to share with you his ripping boyhood memories and High Table anecdotes, that it becomes at times, almost physically painful to read him.

Distracting analogies

But the real problem with all these analogies and reminiscences is that too often they get in the way of actually understanding his scientific points.

For example, chapter seven has an extended explanation of what arms races are in the context of evolution i.e. when predators and prey develop characteristics designed to help them outdo each other. So far so good. But then he goes off into an extended comparison with the race to build dreadnoughts before the Great War, and then to a description of the actual arms race between the USA and USSR building larger and larger nuclear weapons during the 1970s and 1980s.

My point is that the analogy takes on a life of its own, goes on at unconscionable length, and becomes steadily less useful and increasingly distracting and misleading.

Same goes when he asks us to imagine 20 million typists sitting in a row copying out a message as if that makes it at all easier to understand DNA, instead of puzzling and distracting.

Or when he spends a couple of pages calculating just how many monkeys it would take to type out the complete works of Shakespeare, as a demonstration of the power of cumulative selection i.e. if evolution really did work at random it would take forever, but if each version typed out by the monkeys kept all the elements which were even slightly like Shakespeare, and then built on that foundation, it is surprising how few generations of monkeys you’d need to begin to produce an inkling of a comprehensible version of the complete works of Shakespeare.

He thinks he is a scientific populariser but the examples he uses to explain scientific ideas are often out of date or far-fetched as to be harder to understand than the original scientific idea.

In the worst example in the book, chapter 8 about punctuated equilibrium doesn’t start with an explanation of what punctuated equilibrium actually is – instead, it starts with a two-page-long extended description of the ancient Israelites spending forty years wandering in the wilderness after fleeing Egypt.

Dawkins then invents (as so often) a hypothetical figure to mock, in this case a hypothetical historian who, he says, takes the story of the Biblical exodus literally and so calculates that, since the distance from Egypt to the Holy Land was only 200 miles and the Bible says it took them 40 years to cover, this must mean that the Israelites covered just 24 yards per day or 1 yard per hour.

‘Is the attitude of the Bible historian I have just invented ridiculous?’ asks Dawkins. ‘Yes, well, that’s how ridiculous the theory of punctuated equilibrium is.’

This example is at the start of the chapter, setting the tone for the entire discussion of punctuated equilibrium. And it lasts for two solid pages.

It is a classic example of how Dawkins is so in love with his own wit and that he a) never really gets round to clearly explaining what punctuated equilibrium is, and b) really confuses the reader with this extended and utterly irrelevant analogy.

(The theory of punctuated equilibrium takes the extremely patchy fossil record of life on earth as evidence that evolution does not progress at a smooth, steady rate but consists of long periods of virtual stasis or equilibrium, punctuated by sudden bursts of relatively fast evolution and the creation of new species. Some Creationists and Christians seized on the publication of this theory in the 1970s as evidence that Darwin was wrong and that therefore God does exist. Dawkins devotes a chapter and a host of ideas, sub-ideas and extended analogies to proving that the theory of punctuated equilibrium does not undermine the Darwinian orthodoxy – as Creationists gleefully claim – but can be slotted easily into the existing Darwinian view that evolution takes place at a slow steady pace: the core of Dawkins’s argument is that the fossil record appears to suggest long static periods interspersed with periods of manic change, solely because it is so very patchy; if we had a fuller fossil record it wold vindicate his and Darwin’s view of slow steady change. In other words, the theory of punctuated equilibrium is an optical illusion produced by the patchiness of the fossil record and not a true account of his evolution works.)

The whole tenor and shape and flavour of the book is dominated by Dawkins’s analogies and similes and metaphors and witty ideas but I can’t help thinking it would have been so much better to have devoted the space to killer examples from the natural world. Too often Dawkins’s long comparisons take the reader away from the wonders of life on earth and push you into the broom cupboard of his oddly sterile and unimaginative analogies.

To give another example, it is fascinating to learn that many bat species have scrunched-up gargoyle faces (which have terrified generations of humans) because their faces have evolved to reflect and focus their high-pitched echolocation signals into their ears. But when Dawkins tries to make this fact more ‘accessible’ by writing that bats are ‘like high-tech spy planes’, his analogy feels not only trite but – here’s my point – less informative than the original fact.

I have just read E.O. Wilson’s stunningly beautiful and inspiring book about the natural world, The Diversity of Life, which is all the more amazing and breath-taking because he doesn’t impose anecdotes about his own childhood or love of gadgets between you and the wonder’s he’s describing: the wonders are quite amazing enough without any kind of editorialising.

The Blind Watchmaker computer program

This un-self-aware, naive enthusiasm comes over most strongly in chapter three of the book which is devoted to the subject which gives the book its title, the computer program Dawkins has devised and titled The Blind Watchmaker (and which is advertised for sale at the back of the book, yours for just £28.85 including VAT, post and packaging).

At this early stage of the book (chapter 3) I was still hoping that Dawkins would give the reader a knock-down, killer explanation of Darwin’s theory. Instead he chooses to tell us all about a computer program he’s written. The program begins with a set of nine stick figures or ‘genes’, as he calls them, and then applies to them a set of instructions such as ‘double in length’ or ‘branch into two lines’ and so on. Here are the basic ‘genes’.

Basic ‘tree’ shapes developed by Richard Dawkins’ Blind Watchmaker programme

The idea is that, if you invent rules for transforming the shape of the basic ‘genes’ according to a set of fixed but arbitrary rules and then run the program, you will be surprised how the mechanical application of mindless rules quite quickly produces all kinds of weird and wonderful shapes, thus:

More advanced iterations produced by Dawkins’s Blind Watchmaker program

The point of all this is to show how quickly complex ‘creatures’ can be created by a few simple rules and endless iterations.

Having explained his program Dawkins artlessly presents it as a strong proof for Darwin’s theory. He calls the multi-dimensional cyberspace thronged with a potentially endless sequence of mutating life forms stretching out in all directions Biomorph Land, and the metaphor is invoked throughout the rest of the book.

Dawkins boyishly tells us that when he first ran the program and saw all the shapes appearing he was so excited he stayed up all night!

It’s difficult to know where to start in critiquing this approach, but two things spring to mind.

  1. At the point where he introduces the program the book still hasn’t delivered a clear exposition of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. During this chapter I began to realise it never would, and that instead the book would be all about Richard’s own ideas and inventions.
  2. Does Dawkins really think that a dyed-in-the-wool, Christian fundamentalist would be the slightest bit persuaded to change his or her lifelong beliefs by a lengthy explanation of a toy computer program which Richard has developed at home on his Dell computer? If he does, he is fabulously self-deluded and, as I’ve said, above all, naive about the ways of the world and how human beings actually think and live.

Dawkins’s declared intention is to change the world, or the way people think and what they believe about the world and the diversity of life around us – and yet virtually every word he writes – certainly extended passages like the long chapter devoted to the self-written computer program which gives the book its name – show you how completely inadequate his view of human nature is.

The book may well have explained and elucidated various concepts around evolution and genetics to an educated, secular audience which had hitherto (in 1986) had relatively few if any popular accounts to read on the subject. But given Dawkins’s fierce anti-Creationist rhetoric all through the book, his invention of all kinds of Christian or just ignorant critics of evolution throughout the book who he can pulverise with his arguments and analogies – it would be fascinating to learn if The Blind Watchmaker ever converted anyone to abandon their Christian or theist beliefs and become an atheist.

Précis of the contents of The Blind Watchmaker

Chapter 2 Bats and echolocation

Chapter 3 Cumulative changes in organisms can have massive consequences when subjected to non-random selection.

Chapter 4 Creationist propaganda often mocks the theory of evolution by pointing out that according to the theory exquisitely complicated features such as eyes must have evolved from next to nothing to their present stage of perfection and What is the point of half an eye? But Dawkins robustly replies that even 1% of an eye is better than no eye at all, and there are many animals with what you could call half or a quarter or less of a wing (i.e. bits of stretchable skin which help with gliding from tree to tree), which function perfectly well.

Chapter 5 ‘It is raining DNA outside’ as Dawkins describes the air outside his study window being full of down and dandelion seeds, innumerable flower seeds floating past on the wind. Why Life is more like a computer programme (i.e. DNA is a transmissible digital code) than pre-Darwinian ideas about blobs of matter and life forces.

Chapter 6 The idea of ‘miracles’ considered in the context of the 4.5 billion years the earth has existed, and a detailed summary of A.G. Cairns-Smiths theory of the origin of life (i.e. that replicating organic molecules originally took their structure from replicating inorganic clay crystals.)

Chapter 7 Genes are selected by virtue of their interactions with their environment, but the very first ‘environment’ a gene encounters is other genes, within the cell, and then in sister cells. Cells had to learn to co-operate in order to form multi-celled organisms. Cumulative selection produces arms races between rivals in ecosystems.

Chapter 8 Positive feedback and sexual selection, compared to steam engines, thermostats and pop music.

Chapter 9 Is devoted to taking down the theory of punctuated equilibrium put forward by the paleontologists Niles Eldridge and Stephen Jay Gould and opens with two pages about a hypothetical and very dense scholar of Biblical history.

Chapter 10 There are countless ways to categorise living things, as objects, but there is only one true tree of life based on evolutionary descent. Although in this, as everything else, there are different schools and theories e.g. phyleticists, cladists, pheneticists et al.

Chapter 11 A summary of various alternatives to Darwin – Lamarckism, neutralism, creationism, mutationism – are described and then demolished.

What is really striking about this final chapter is how cursory his dismissal of Christian creationism is – it only takes up a couple of pages whereas his analysis of Lamarckism took up ten. It’s as if, once he finally comes face to face with his long-cherished enemy, it turns out that he has… nothing to say.

Conclusion and recommendations

Back in the mid-1980s this book had a big impact, garnering prizes and making Dawkins a public intellectual. This suggests 1. the extent of the ignorance then prevailing about Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection and 2. the low bar set in the Anglo-Saxon world for the definition of ‘public intellectual’.

Then again, not many people actually had computers in 1986. I think the impact of the book came less from his countless and tiresome anti-Christian arguments, and more from the crisp modern way he compared DNA to a computer program. That was a genuinely innovatory insight thirty-five years ago. He was there right at the beginning of the application of computer technology to genetics and biology, a technology which has, ironically, rendered almost everything he wrote out of date.

– If you want to really understand Darwin’s theory there is no replacement for reading On The Origin of Species itself because, although many of the details may have changed and Darwin’s account notoriously contained no explanation of how variation came about (because he lacked any knowledge of genetics), nonetheless, the central idea is conveyed with a multitude of examples and with a persuasive force which really bring home what the theory actually consists of, far better than any later summary or populist account.

– If you want to read an up-to-date book about genetics and its awesome possibilities, I’d recommend Life At The Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life by Craig Venter.

– If you want to read about the wonders of the natural world, you could do a lot worse than E.O. Wilson’s wonderful and inspiring book The Diversity of Life.

The Mr Bean of biology

Having ground my way through this preening, self-important book, I came to the conclusion that ‘Richard Dawkins’ is best seen as a brilliant comic creation, a kind of super-intellectual version of Mr Bean – filled with comic earnestness, bursting to share his boyish enthusiasm, innocently retailing memories of his first Meccano set or his knowledge of spy planes and motorbicycles, inventing fictional ‘distinguished philosophers’ and ‘sceptical scientists’ to demolish with his oh-so-clever arguments, convinced that his impassioned sincerity will change the world, and blissfully unaware of the ludicrous figure he cuts.

It’s a much more enjoyable book to read if you ignore Dawkins’s silly argufying and see it instead as a kind of Rabelaisian comedy, told by an essentially ludicrous narrator, with characters popping up at random moments to make a Creationist point before being hit over the head by Mr Punch’s truncheon – ‘That’s the way to do it!’ – interspersed with occasionally useful, albeit mostly out-dated, information about evolution and genetics.

Credit

The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins was published by the Harvard University Press in 1986. All references are to the 1994 Penguin paperback edition.

Related links

Reviews of other science books

Chemistry

Cosmology

Environment

Evolution

Genetics

Human evolution

Maths

Origins of Life

Particle physics

Psychology

1 Comment
by Simon on January 11, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in Biology, Books, Evolution, Nature, Science
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on January 11, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/01/11/the-blind-watchmaker-richard-dawkins/