Tag: 19th century

Day 733: Little Women

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Cover for Little WomenOver the past months I have occasionally reread a childhood favorite to see what I think about it now. The Secret Garden and Anne of Green Gables, for example, came through with honors. Not only were both beautifully written, but I found them as entertaining as an adult as I did as a child.

Little Women doesn’t fare quite as well. I found some of the same parts of it affecting as I did when I was young. Who wouldn’t sympathize with these girls, bravely coping without the things their friends have, doing without their father for over a year, getting along as cheerfully as they can? However, as a child reading the book, I didn’t notice that almost every chapter ends with a moral lesson.

The novel covers about 12 years in the lives of the March family, beginning during the American Civil War. For the first half of the novel, Mr. March is away as a chaplain for the Union army. The main character is Jo March, at the start of the novel a tomboyish, gawky 15-year-old who loves writing and putting on plays, reading, and writing stories.

Her older sister Meg is more ladylike and laments having to wear old things to parties. Beth is the third sister, who is too shy to go to school. Amy is the youngest and a little spoiled. Although there are certainly events in their lives, the story is about how Marmee, their mother, raises them all to be good, productive women.

One of the closest relationships in the novel is the friendship between the family and their neighbor Laurie, a rich young man being raised by his grandfather. This and other relationships are warm ones, and the Marches all seem like real people, as do their friends.

If Alcott could have let up a bit on the moralizing, I would have enjoyed the novel more. The other two novels I mentioned earlier also have moral messages, but they leave the reader to figure them out themselves. Still, I’m sure any young girl reading this novel would be as drawn by it as I was years ago.

My comments have made me wonder what I would think of Eight Cousins, which was actually my favorite book by Alcott when I was a child. I’m a little afraid to find out.

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Day 730: The Sea Captain’s Wife

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Cover for The Sea Captain's WifeSince she was a little girl, Azuba has wanted to marry a sea captain and leave her home on the Bay of Fundy to live with him at sea. Although such arrangements are not usual, they are also not unheard of. She envisions a life of romance and adventure, traveling to the distant realms of the earth.

This is the life she plans with her suitor Nathaniel Bradstock, but once they are married, he changes his mind. Azuba is bored and discontented at home for years alone and feels he will be a stranger to their daughter Carrie. After a traumatic miscarriage, she decides to insist he take them with him on his next voyage.

In her loneliness, Azuba has befriended the young Reverend Walton. Just before Nathaniel is due to return, carelessness and misjudgment result in a scandal for the two of them. When Nathaniel learns about it, he decides she cannot be trusted home alone and makes immediate plans to leave instead of staying ashore awhile as planned, taking along Azuba and Carrie.

Azuba has got her way, but she is not happy. Aside from the misunderstanding with her husband, she has not realized the dangers and inconveniences of the voyage. To make matters worse, Nathaniel sees her and Carrie as more burdens among the many he must juggle as captain. The terrifying voyage around the Horn is the first in a series of mishaps that endanger them all.

I found this a fascinating book in its knowledge of sea lore and the ports of the time. The main characters are complex, the novel focused on Azuba and Nathaniel’s struggle to design the conditions of their marriage. I have one plot quibble when Mr. Walton reappears in Belgium, where he is studying to be a photographer. After booking Azuba and Carrie on a relatively safe journey home by steamship, Nathaniel suddenly decides to keep them with him. There is no explanation of this decision, and we don’t even see the scene where it is made. It seems awkward, as if Powning made the decision just to further the plot.

Finally, Nathaniel and Azuba don’t actually work out their conflict. Instead, the decision that resolves it is forced on Nathaniel. Still, I found this novel of absorbing interest. But one more quibble. Sometimes stopping to explain what Azuba or other female characters are wearing actually interferes with the story-telling.

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Day 725: The Warden

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Cover for The WardenThe Warden was the first of Anthony Trollope’s Barchester novels, inspired by a setting and a series of Church of England preferment scandals. A chronicler of 19th century life, Trollope was interested in the intersections between practical and emotional considerations. He was a prolific writer known for complex, realistic novels.

The main character of The Warden is Mr. Harding, a kindly, well-meaning canon who is warden of a charitable hospital, sort of a retirement home for poor old men. For his care of the twelve old men’s spiritual well-being, he receives a salary of £800 a year. It is a position that involves little work and also includes a comfortable house, where he lives with his younger daughter Eleanor.

John Bold has been a friend of this house since a young boy, and Eleanor’s friends are expecting to hear of their engagement. John is a wealthy young man who doesn’t have to work for a living, so he has turned his attentions to reform. After a preferment scandal in another town, he decides to look into the will of the man who endowed the hospital. He finds that the pay of the warden has increased 25 times since the endowment 400 years ago, while the residents’ stipends have not increased, although of course the cost of their food and lodging and medical care has increased and is taken care of by the trust. In fact, the only increase the residents have had has come out of Mr. Harding’s own pocket.

Despite his sister’s advice, instead of taking this issue up with the church or the trust, John Bold brings a lawsuit on behalf of the hospital residents and takes the issue to The Jupiter, a powerful newspaper. His lawyer gets most of the elderly residents to sign a petition, rashly promising them £100 a year each. (Note how well the math works here. Even if they took all of Mr. Hardings’ salary, they wouldn’t have enough money to pay each of the residents £100 a year.)

It is Mr. Hardings’ reaction that forms the core of the novel, for he is not interested, like the lawyers and his son-in-law the archbishop, in whether the case will be won or lost but in whether the plaintiff’s point is morally correct. Although he has never given his position any thought, in fact is simply an employee of the trust, he is concerned that the intent of the original will might have been that the recipients of the charity should receive a larger share of it.

Except for his mild-mannered friend, the bishop, he cannot find anyone who will even enter into a discussion with him on this topic. And the bishop is completely dominated by his son, the archbishop Dr. Grantly. Dr. Grantly pushes aside Mr. Hardings’ concerns, which he considers weak, disregarding his wife’s ascerbic comments on how poorly he is handling her father. Soon, a newspaper article has appeared that makes poor Mr. Harding look greedy and grasping.

Not only is Trollope interested in exploring the differences between the reactions of Mr. Hardy, high-minded and feeling, and the lawyers and Dr. Grantly, all business and practicality, but he is also interested in the ramifications of reform. Although he shows there is corruption, this corruption is more of the institutional kind that has evolved over time. No one is purposefully trying to cheat anyone. On the other hand, he wants to point out that the alternatives to these entrenched systems might actually be worse.

We can predict that Mr. Harding ends up financially worse off than he started but that the hospital inhabitants do, too. Trollope’s first Barsetshire novel is quiet and slyly ironic. Trollope is not as often read these days, but he is certainly worth reading.

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Day 720: Galway Bay

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Cover for Galway BayGalway Bay is fiction based on the stories of Mary Pat Kelly’s great-great grandmother about leaving Ireland in the first half of the 19th century to come to America. The novel covers a lot of ground—the iniquities of Ireland’s Anglo-Irish landlords, the Great Famine, early Chicago, the American Civil War, the Fenian Brotherhood—and ends with the Chicago World’s Fair.

Honora Keeley is a young girl living in a fishing village on Galway Bay when she meets Michael Kelly and they fall in love at first sight. They want to marry, but they have to convince Honora’s family, because Michael owns nothing but his horse. However, he earns enough to marry by winning a horse race in Galway.

Honora’s sister Maire, who was married the day Honora met Michael, is soon a widow after her husband dies in a fishing accident. On Honora’s wedding night, Maire saves Honora from the landlord’s droit du seigneur by volunteering in her stead. I’ll say something about this later.

Michael is no fisherman. Honora and Michael have a tough enough time of it farming but are making out okay when the potato blight hits. The behavior of the landlords and the British government during this time is shameful, and Kelly depicts it vividly. After several years of the blight and other misfortunes, Honora finally is able to convince Michael to leave for America, to Chicago, where his outlawed brother Patrick is said to reside.

Although this novel has a fairly good story, there is something about the narrative style that bothered me. It is told in first person, but in a modern style that is not convincing. Many things happen, but I didn’t ever feel as if I understood much about the characters’ personalities. Especially early on, when we are getting to know the main characters, often opportunities for revealing dialogue turn into storytelling episodes, where we hear another Irish legend. Everyone has one or two identifying characteristics, but they don’t feel like real people. I think the novel may have been more successful in the third person.

Finally, I was highly skeptical of whether droit du seigneur would have occurred in the 19th century, as it is usually associated with Medieval times. I’m sure this event is based on family legend, but I think Kelly could have treated this one with a little skepticism, especially as the lord’s behavior is abetted by a priest. I attempted some research on the topic and was surprised to find a lot of discussion about whether it was ever actually practiced at all. But with one exception, the references were to Medieval mainland Europe, not the British Isles. That exception was a Facebook page about Ireland, but I was unable to find the actual reference on the page to see if it cited any sources. I have read several history books about Ireland and took a graduate course in Irish history, and I have never heard anything about this, although the other abuses are well known. (I have since found one source for this alleged practice, Arthur Young, the author of a book called Tour of Ireland in 1780, who stated it was commonly practiced in rural Ireland. He is listed in Wikipedia as an agriculturalist who traveled to observe agricultural practices. Still, with this little information, we have no idea if his statement is based on rumor or fact, and this report is 50 years or so before the time of this novel.)

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Day 716: The Siege of Krishnapur

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Cover for The Siege of KrishnapurThe Siege of Krishnapur, the second in J.G. Farrell’s trilogy about the British Empire, is a novel of ideas, full of the mordant humor and irony that characterizes the first book, Troubles. Farrell based his novel on the true-life 1857 siege of Lucknow, during which British residents held out for five months against attacks from Indian sepoys.

As author Pankaj Mishra explains in the introduction, this siege and similar incidents generated at the time a popular romantic genre of fiction, wherein two young English people meet in India just before the rebellion and bravely withstand privation to prevail in the end. In The Siege of Krishnapur, Farrell is among other things satirizing this genre.

George Fleury arrives in Calcutta with his sister Miriam just before news of the first sepoy rebellions. Like Farrell’s protagonist of Troubles, Fleury is an unformed young man, and worse, he tends to the pedantic. He is inclined to the romantic and likes to lecture about the supremacy of feelings and ideas over the new plethora of objects and inventions resulting from the current Industrial Revolution.

In Calcutta, Fleury and Miriam meet another brother and sister, Harry and Louise Dunstable, offspring of one of Krishnapur’s doctors. Harry is a young lieutenant, and Louise is thought to be the prettiest (English) girl in India. Fleury is taken by her, but she spends her time flirting with the young soldiers.

Once the young people reach Krishnapur, it is not long before the rumors of trouble turn into reality. The Collector, who is in charge of the district, has been paying attention, though. The others have been ridiculing him for surrounding the Residency with trenches and sending his wife home to England.

The Collector can’t quite comprehend why the natives would want to attack the British, who in his mind are bringing them the wonderful benefits of civilization. He himself attended the Great Exhibition and has filled his house with some of the marvels exhibited there, including electroplated busts of some of the great poets. (Shakespeare’s head turns out later to make a great cannonball; Keats’ does not.)

Once the British are under attack, there are thrilling yet funny descriptions of the fighting, bravely and innovatively conducted by Harry and the other soldiers, who have limited resources, and incompetently assisted by Fleury. Fleury is continually arming himself with some bulky and impractical weapon. Inside the Residency, the British begin by maintaining strict social levels and having tea parties. Once Fleury and Harry have rescued Lucy, a suicidal fallen woman, from her bungalow outside the compound, the other ladies are horrified at having to share quarters with her, even though they are sleeping on billiard tables.

Many vibrant characters inhabit this novel. The Padre is an Anglican clergyman who endlessly tries to convert his flock’s thoughts into more pious channels, haranging them even in the midst of battle. Dr. Dunstable is so incensed by the more modern treatments of his rival, Dr. McNab, that he challenges him to verbal debates and eventually gets himself killed trying to prove Dr. McNab is wrong about the cause and treatment of cholera. Even when Dr. Dunstable’s death proves Dr. McNab is right, the supposedly rational and enlightened British still somehow believe he is wrong. The Magistrate is so interested in phrenology that he shocks everyone by feeling the back of Lucy’s head to determine its amativeness and is slapped for it.

As conditions in the Residency deteriorate, the true nature of the British rulers of India emerges, petty, jingoistic, and chauvinistic, caring little for the natives, who do not appear much in the novel except as servants or attackers. In one revealing speech, an opium grower rejoices at how much money has been made by forcing the Indians to grow opium and then using it to addict the Chinese. In fact, it was just at this time that the 8th Earl of Elgin stopped to hear about the rebellion in northern India while he was on his way to China to force the Chinese emperor to admit British opium dealers.

The novel tells a great story, while still being full of wit and philosophy.

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Day 713: Salem Chapel

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Cover for Salem ChapelBest Book of the Week!
Because of the order the books were listed in on Wikipedia, I thought that Salem Chapel was the first of Margaret Oliphant’s Chronicles of Carlingford. However, the introduction to the book says it is the second. When I started to read it, I thought it was going to be, like Miss Marjoribanks, a light satire on society, only a different level of society. But it is much more dramatic than that.

Arthur Vincent proudly takes up his first clergy position as the Dissenting vicar of Salem Chapel at Carlingford. He is an educated gentleman of some ability, and he is certain he will soon be an accepted member of the best Carlingford society. But he receives a shock when he meets his congregation of buttermen, poulterers, and greengrocers and their wives. He soon finds, too, that he is expected to bend to their wishes, as they pay his salary.

Arthur is a proud young man of good family, and this doesn’t sit well with him. Still, he makes an impression with his first sermon and dutifully goes about his business until he is struck by the sight of the beautiful, young Dowager Lady Western. Although a mutual acquaintance tries to warn him not to make anything of her warm manner to him, as she is like that with everyone, he doesn’t pay attention. Soon, he is informed that his parishioners are displeased. He has been seen paying a call in Grange Lane, the home of the upper-class residents of Carlingford (and setting of Miss Marjoribanks), who all attend St. Roque’s.

Arthur has also made the acquaintance of a less prosperous woman, Mrs. Hilyard, an impoverished gentlewoman who takes in sewing. Mrs. Hilyard is an odd and unfortunate woman, and it is a favor she asks of Arthur and his family that drives the larger actions of the plot.

Up until the major events are set in motion, I found the book amusing, as when Arthur, moonstruck by the sight of Lady Western, spends an entire week daydreaming about her. His congregation interprets this lack of activity as a scholarly application to his sermon and is impressed.

This novel contains wonderful characters who can be a bit Dickensian, like the well-meaning butterman Deacon Tozer or the disturbing Mrs. Hilyard, who reminds me a bit of Rose Dartle in David Copperfield. From humor, the novel soon takes a more serious turn.

The introduction to this novel says that once Mrs. Oliphant was one of the most well-regarded of the Victorian novelists, but she is now nearly forgotten. I have found the two of her novels I’ve read to be very entertaining. I think she reminds me, with a delicate touch, more of Jane Austen than any other writer I’ve encountered, and some of the events of Salem Chapel are remindful of Pride and Prejudice. I can only hope that more people will decide to read the works of Margaret Oliphant.

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Day 710: The Kept

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Cover for The KeptBest Book of the Week!
The Kept is a mysterious and darkly moody novel that I found compelling from the first sentences. Elspeth Howell arrives home on a snowy winter day in upstate New York near the turn of the 19th century. She has been away for months working as a midwife. But when she reaches home, she finds that her husband and all of her children that live in the house have been murdered. Only her 12-year-old son Caleb, who has taken to living in the barn, is alive, but he has been hiding in the pantry for days, and when she opens the pantry door, he shoots her in terror.

Caleb spends the next few days alternately trying to take care of his mother and dispose of the bodies of the rest of his family. He cannot bury them in the frozen earth, but in his attempt to burn them, he accidentally burns down the house. He ends up caring for his mother in the barn.

The Howell’s home is isolated and difficult to find. As a young girl, Espeth was driven from her home for having spoken to Jorah, the man she later married, because he was Native American. But there are other reasons for the family’s isolation. In any case, Elspeth thinks the murderers must have sought for their house.

When Elspeth is barely healed, she and Caleb set forth to find the three men who murdered their family, men whom Caleb watched from the barn. They stay briefly with an old couple who have been terrorized by the same three men and who point them in the direction of a town on Lake Erie with a terrible reputation. There, with Elspeth disguised as a man, they go to search for the men.

Beginning as a straightforward revenge novel, the book goes on to explore deeper themes. One of them is that of unintended consequences, as Caleb finds that their troubles result from Elspeth’s own actions years before.

This novel is well written and packed with atmosphere. It is vivid and brutal and beautiful.

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Day 706: The Devil’s Backbone

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Cover for The Devil's BackboneThe Devil’s Backbone is a western adventure tale related in an unsophisticated vernacular style in both first person and third person. It is an unusual novel but reminds me most of, perhaps, True Grit or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The third person narrator is barely there but relates the first person story his father told him. The book is illustrated by Jack Unruh.

Papa, as the third-person narrator calls him, is a young boy growing up in the Texas Hill Country when his father Karl kills a horse after a dispute about it with his wife Amanda. Amanda saddles up her horse Precious with the concho-decorated saddle her father gave her and leaves. After Karl has gone off for a few days and returned, a neighbor, Miz Choat, arrives to tell Karl that she has promised Amanda to send the boys to school, so she takes Papa and his older brother Herman back with her. But after Herman has attended school awhile, he takes off.

Papa enjoys his time with the Choats, but after a few months his father arrives to take him back. At home he has installed another woman, Miss Gusa, who is pregnant.

Papa has clearly been brought home as a cheap source of labor. Eventually, Karl’s brutality makes Papa decide to leave and look for his Mama. On his journey he encounters outlaws, a dying Indian, a prematurely born baby, a family of Mexican migrant workers, and several loyal friends, including the cowboy Calley Pearsall.

I enjoyed this tale. At first, I thought it might become a series of tall tales, but nothing happens in it that seems wildly exaggerated. However, it does have the flavor of a folk tale. The only thing I found a little irritating was the double narration. We learn nothing at all about the narrator, so I don’t really see the purpose of that approach, which leads occasionally to such confusing constructions as “I said, Papa said.”

Although this novel may sound like children’s fiction, I don’t think I would recommend it for younger children because of some of the events. Older children would probably like it, as it has lots of adventure. Some of the subject matter may be inappropriate, however, as there are events such as murders and death in childbirth, so use your discretion. This book was a choice of my book club, all adults, and we all enjoyed it.

I have been on the Devil’s Backbone (pictured on the cover). These days it is a narrow two-lane highway across a ridge with spectacular views on each side. I heard it had been widened, but to think it was once so narrow is amazing.

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Day 699: Rustication

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Cover for RusticationBest Book of the Week!
I was captured by this dark, twisty novel from the moment I started reading it. I only feared it may eventually disappoint, but it does not.

In winter 1863, Richard Shenstone, 17, appears without warning at his mother’s new home, a large dilapidated house on the southern coast of England. He has been rusticated, sent down from Cambridge for reasons not immediately explained.

Having received word of his father’s death too late for the funeral, he is surprised to find his mother and sister living in apparent poverty. Furthermore, although he doesn’t at first tell them he’s been sent down, his arrival is met by a surprising lack of welcome, indeed hostility on the part of his sister Effie.

There is some mystery about his father’s death, that is clear. His father’s pension has been denied to the family, and Richard’s mother is suing for her father’s estate as well. Effie is also up to something, for he twice sees her out accompanied only by a tall man, not proper behavior for a lady.

Richard is not a pleasant person, obsessed as he is by desire for every girl or young woman he meets and also addicted to opium. The novel is told as excerpts from his journal, interrupted by copies of a series of hateful letters that soon begin arriving at the homes of various people in the district. It is also clear from the beginning that some crime has been committed and the journal is a look back into the past. It is not clear to readers, however, how reliable a narrator Richard is or what’s going on when he roams the countryside at night in his opiated state. Soon the letter writer begins leaving corpses of mutilated sheep behind him.

This novel is atmospheric in the extreme and completely absorbing. As Richard begins trying to figure out who the letter writer is, he finds the finger pointed toward himself. He takes unwarranted leaps of logic that cause him to make many mistakes and ignores some clues that he has. Still, exasperating and unlikable as the main character is, you are urged along to the end of the novel.

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Day 688: The Age of Innocence

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Cover for The Age of InnocenceI have certainly read The Age of Innocence before, but it was not until this rereading that I gained a full appreciation for its subtlety and complexity. I may have read it years ago, but I became really interested in it after an interview with Martin Scorsese about his movie adaptation (my favorite film ever) where he commented on “the brutality under the manners” of the upper class New Yorkers in the novel, set in the 1870’s, and likened them to gangsters.

This novel is about the tension between individual desires and the expectations of a rigid society. However, it is also about the two main characters trying to do the right thing in the face of yearning and passion.

Newland Archer is an intellectually inclined young man interested in art and travel who thinks he understands but sometimes is a little impatient of the rigid and insular customs of his time and social class. He has just become engaged to May Welland during a difficult time for the Welland family. May’s cousin, the Countess Ellen Olenska, has returned to New York to her family, having left her husband, and society is shocked to see them bringing her to parties and the theatre. Archer decides to show solidarity with the Wellands and soon finds himself drawn into the Countess’ affairs in his professional capacity as a lawyer. Countess Olenska wants to divorce her husband, and the family is horrified, asking Newland to convince her not to.

Newland succeeds, but he soon realizes that he is in love with Ellen Olenska himself. Ellen is determined not to betray her cousin.  When she admits she loves Newland, she comments that by getting her to drop her divorce, he has assured that they can never be together. A disappointed Newland marries May.

Within a short time, Newland regrets his marriage and foresees a gray existence of doing the same things with the same people year after year. The innocence and purity he saw in May is actually an incuriosity and inability to grow or change. Although Newland doesn’t see Ellen, who has moved to Washington, he has begun to think of her as the only real corner of his life. All these feelings are brought to a climax when the Countess returns to New York and her family decides she should reunite with her husband.

This novel is vivid with carefully observed descriptions. Underlying it all is an understated yet savage critique of petty and provincial New York society of the time. Almost every sentence is double-edged, such as when Wharton describes a soprano’s solo in the first chapter:

She sang, of course “M’ama!” not “he loves me,” since an unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.

Nice! I understand that when this book was published, nearly 50 years after its setting, members of New York society were still able to match most of the characters in the novel with their real counterparts.

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