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tutorials, commentaries, and study guides on nineteenth century authors, biographical notes, and literary criticism

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A Commission in Lunacy

July 28, 2018 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study guide, commentary, further reading

A Commission in Lunacy (1836) is one story from the many which make up La Comedie Humaine. Its original French title was L’Interdiction and it features two characters – Eugene de Rastignac and Horace Bianchon – who appear in many of Balzac’s other novels and stories which constitute the fictional world he generated.

A Commission in Lunacy


A Commission in Lunacy – commentary

Structure

This story is a very brief episode in the vast work that is The Comedie Humaine. It has a simple but very powerful structure. Basically, it is in two parts, contrasting Greed and Honour, pivoting around Principle. It can also be seen as the ‘new’ values of vulgar social ambition contrasted with old-fashioned patrician modesty and restraint. In briefest terms, it is Self-interest versus Self-sacrifice.

We are introduced to a fashionable society woman who wishes to bring legal proceedings against her estranged husband. Her damning case against him is discussed in close detail.

The judge who will examine the case is then presented as a somewhat saintly figure – neglected by himself and the state, he spends his spare time and money helping the poor.

He then interviews both parties to the dispute. First the wife, who is exposed as a self-indulgent and money-grabbing villain. Then her husband, who is revealed as a man of integrity who has voluntarily repaid a family debt of honour.

Characters

The principal characters in the story illustrate perfectly the complex nature of La Comedie Humaine – its interdependent associations and overlapping events, as well as the recurrent appearances of its individuals.

Eugene de Rastignac and Horace Bianchon are old friends, both former student lodgers at the Maison Vauquer which features in the novel Old Goriot (1834). Rastignac was an ambitious student of law who has risen rapidly via social connections to become an influential politician.

Horace Bianchon was once a humble student of medicine who has mixed with raffish arrivistes but who has never lost his Hippocratic principles of helping those in need. He has risen to become a leading medical authority in fashionable Paris, and he appears in several other Balzac novels, including Cousin Bette (1846) and Lost Illusions (1837-1843).

Popinot the judge is Bianchon’s uncle, and he also appears in a number of other episodes in La Comedie Humaine. So too does the judge who replaces him in the final pages of the story. Camusot has recently arrived in Paris from the provinces: he presides over the report on the d’Espard case and decides in favour of the Marquis.

Interestingly, we learn in another novel Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life that Camusot is assisted in reaching this judgement by Lucien Rubempré, who also appears in several volumes of La Comedie Humaine.

What is a ‘commission in lunacy’?

This expression is not merely a picturesque example of translation. The French title of the story is L’Interdiction. The Commission in Lunacy was a body established (in the UK) in 1845 to oversee the treatment of people who were deemed mentally ill. It was a board comprising legal and medical experts, plus a cohort of laymen.

The main theme

At the heart of this story is a conflict between what Balzac sees as two sets of social values. The Marquise is greedy, self-obsessed, and full of vulgar social ambition. Her husband the Marquis on the other hand represents self-denial, honesty, and a respect for an old-fashioned but honourable system of values.

The Marquise is obsessed with appearances: she lies about her age and doesn’t even wish to be seen with her own teenage sons in case this reveals how old she is. She lives in luxurious surroundings, but wants to have her husband committed as a lunatic so that she can take over his money. She constructs what adds up to a pack of lies and distortion to defame him in court.

The Marquis on the other hand lives in a simple (but tasteful) fashion: he brings up his two sons; and he has lived within his means for twelve years so as to pay back to the Jeanrenaud family wealth that has been unfairly seized from them by his own grandfather. Meanwhile he is working (and providing employment for others) on a scholarly research project which has the backing of a distinguished Parisian publishing house.

The general picture

Balzac is renowned for his insights into the social, political, legal, and economic workings of society. Indeed Frederick Engels said of him “I have learned more from Balzac than from all the professional historians, economists, and statisticians put together”. Balzac exposes how society is governed via money, law (especially inheritance), property, political power, and ruling elites.

What is not so frequently remarked upon is how realistically he renders the material fabric of the living world he creates. He has acute powers of observation, and can depict both the architectural history of someone’s housing, plus their moral and aesthetic attitudes as revealed by interior decor.

[Monsieur d’Espard] restored the woodwork to those brown tones beloved in Holland, and by the old Parisian bourgeoisie, which, in our day, afford such fine effects to painters of genre. The walls we hung with plain papers which harmonised with the woodwork. The windows had curtains of some material that was not costly, and yet was chosen in a manner to produce an effect in keeping with the general harmony. The furniture was choice and well arranged.

Whoever entered these rooms could not fail to be conscious of a peaceful, tranquil feeling, inspired by the stillness and silence that reigned there, by the quietness and symphony of the colouring


Balzac – selected reading

The best current editions of the major novels are those published in the Oxford World’s Classics paperback series. Each volume contains a critical introduction, a note on the text, a bibliography of further reading, a chronology of Honore de Balzac, and most importantly a series of explanatory notes giving historical, geographical, and scientific information about details mentioned in the text.

Pere Goriot – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Eugenie Grandet – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Cousin Bette – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Ursule Mirouet – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Selected Stories – NYRB – Amazon UK

Cambridge Companion to Balzac – Cambridge UP – Amazon UK


Reading a Balzac Novel


A Commission in Lunacy – plot summary

Eugene de Rastignac and Horace Bianchon discuss the fashionable socialite Marquise d’Espard. Bianchon warns against women of this type, whilst Rastignac thinks a connection with her will assist his social ambitions.

Jean-Jules Popinot is a conscientious but neglected judge who dresses badly. He devotes his early mornings to supporting the poor and destitute. His nephew Bianchon arrives to discuss the petition made by the Marquise to have her husband declared insane.

The petition claims that Marquis d’Espard has become demented and is under the psychic influence of Mme Jeanrenaud and her son. The Marquis has also become obsessed with the subject of China, has taken his two sons away, and given Mme Jeanrenaud a million francs. Bianchon persuades his uncle to see the Marquise.

The Marquise devotes her life to looking young and maintaining an exclusive salon. She lives in luxurious surroundings and has taken on Rastignac as a protégé.

The Marquise explains how she was abandoned by her husband when she was twenty-two. But Popinot unpicks her arguments and exposes her as a greedy gold-digger.

The fat Mme Jeanrenaud visits Popinot and rejects the claims made against her. Popinot then visits the Marquis who lives modestly and tastefully in the Latin quarter. He is a patrician of the old school.

Questioned by Popinot, the Marquis explains that he has been repaying a debt of honour caused by his family’s illegal seizure of Jeanrenaud’s assets. He proposed this restitution to his young wife, but she refused to participate. He also explains his major research project into Chinese culture and history.

Popinot writes a report exonerating the Marquis to the Commission in Lunacy, but he is unable to present it in court, because he has compromised himself by socialising with the applicant, the Marquise. He is being replaced on the case by a new provincial lawyer Camusot. However, Popinot is awarded the Legion of Honour.

© Roy Johnson 2018


A Commission in Lunacy – characters
Eugene de Rastignac a socially ambitious man-about-town
Horace Bianchon a young and principled Parisian physician
Jean-Jules Popinot a scrupulous and neglected lower court judge
Marquis d’Espard an old-fashioned and high-principled aristocrat
Marquise d’Espard his estranged wife, a self-indulgent socialite
Mme Jeanrenaud the overweight head of family disenfranchised by the d’Espards

More on Honore de Balzac
More on literary studies


Filed Under: Honore de Balzac Tagged With: Honore de Balzac, Literary studies, The Short Story

A Laodicean

October 19, 2017 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study guide, commentary, further reading, web links

A Laodicean (1860-1861) was first published as a serial in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine and subsequently in novel form by Sampson Low in 1881. It bears two sub-titles – The Castle of the de Stancys and A Story of To-Day. It is one of Thomas Hardy’s lesser-known novels, but it incorporates many of his personal interests – particularly architecture and the effects of modern technology. It is one of the earliest novels you are likely to come across that features electrical telegraphy (the telegram) as part of the plot.

A Laodicean


A Laodicean – commentary

The sensation novel

Hardy wrote in the wake of the ‘sensation novel’ that had been popularised by writers such as Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon in the middle of the nineteenth century. Hardy never exploited to a similar extent the sensationalist elements of plotting that they had developed – but neither was he averse to including them as an obvious encouragement to gain readers and popular acclaim.

These elements show up more obviously in his weaker novels that do not have the compensating powerful psychological insights and credible dramas that pervade his greatest works.

A Laodicean includes the following typical elements of the sensation novel in its plotting:

  • sex outside marriage
  • illegitimacy
  • personation
  • theft
  • blackmail
  • forgery

William de Stancy has had an illicit sexual relationship in his earlier life. This has led to the birth of his son, who is therefore illegitimate. But the son goes under the name of William Dare (with ‘De Stancy’ tattooed on his chest) which is a form of ‘personation’ – someone masquerading under a false identity.

Dare steals George Somerset’s correspondence in order to become his assistant on the castle restoration project. He then steals the plans to form an alliance with the rival architect Havill. Meanwhile he is blackmailing his own father. He not only drains de Stancy of money to fund his self-indulgent life style, but he threatens to reveal the truth of their relationship, which would ruin Captain de Stancy’s social reputation and marriage prospects (which is eventually what happens).

On top of all that, Dare is guilty of forgery on two counts. He sends a telegram to Paula Power demanding money which purports to come from George Somerset. Then he forges a photograph that is constructed to show Somerset in a state of intoxication.

These are the stock-in-trade elements of the sensation novel, and it is interesting to note that Hardy relies on them more extensively than he does in his more serious novels, for which he is quite rightly better known.

Plotting

There are a number of issues and details in the narrative that are either unexplained or not followed up, once having been introduced. For instance there are two related issues at opposite ends of the novel.

In the first, George Somerset falls into the tower pit on one of his early visits to the castle. Whilst there he notices carvings in the wall:

Among these antique inscriptions he observed two bright and clean ones, consisting of the words ‘De Stancy’ and ‘W. Dare’ crossing each other at right angles. From the state of the stone they could not have been cut more than a month before

There are only two people in the novel who know the relationship between De Stancy and Dare, and those are the two individuals themselves. At that point neither of them have had access to the castle. Hardy clearly inserts George’s observation into the text to create a little mystery, but no subsequent explanation is given for how the names got there. Moreover, the incident and its implications are never mentioned again throughout the whole of the novel.

We know that as a result of an illness, Hardy was forced to complete the novel by dictation rather than longhand composition, and he may have simply forgotten this detail.

But in the second example at the other end of the novel Abner Power threatens to expose William Dare and his creation of a bogus telegram and a faked photograph to smear the reputation of George Somerset. Dare counters this attack by saying he will reveal Power’s role in the fabrication of an explosive device for a group of revolutionaries.

The result of this confrontation is a stalemate which does not affect the plot in any way. More importantly however, no explanation is given for how either of these characters came to have detailed knowledge of the other’s doings.

There are also ambiguities or elisions in the plot that seem to suggest that Hardy himself was not sure about the logic and coherence of his story. The destruction by fire of the castle contents at the close of the novel are the work of an arsonist described as a ‘flitting’ figure, who is not named.

This term ‘flitting’ immediately suggests a female – who might be Charlotte, putting an end to the burden of family history before she retires into a convent. But this would be uncharacteristic of such an honest, principled, and self-effacing young woman.

The other suspect – with a powerful motive of resentment – would be Dare, who we know has been denied his ambition to become a genuine de Stancy, and is still in the vicinity at the time. But it is hard to believe that a penniless and unscrupulous confidence trickster would burn paintings by Vandyck, Kneller, Tintoretto, Titian, and Giorgione when he could just easily steal and sell them.

Hardy does not seem to have made up his mind on this issue, and is content to leave an ambiguous, unresolved mystery hovering over the uncharacteristically ‘happy ending’ to the novel.

The basic plot is quite reasonable. An indecisive young woman is caught between competing interests – her instinct for love and a desire for social advancement. But the events of the narrative are stretched out to aesthetically unacceptable lengths. Perhaps this is a case where serial magazine publication worked against the best interests of the author. Hardy met his monthly quotas, but the net result is a novel that very few people bother to read – and one cannot blame them.

Wessex

Hardy makes very little effort to root the events of A Laodicean in a realistic manner. It seems that the location of de Stancy castle might be anywhere in southern England. It is certainly within easy reach of London by train.

But the local town of Markton in the novel is not mentioned in any of the other ‘Wessex’ works that constitute his essential oeuvre. Hardy was of course at liberty to produce fiction which stood independently of his other major productions. But the fictional world of ‘Wessex’ that he created in novels stretching from Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) to Jude the Obscure (1895) is of such power and is so vividly realised that it forms a gravitational field of an enduring intensity that affects judgements of all his works.

Structure

There are at least three major structural weaknesses in the narrative. The first is that the sub-plot of the villainous William Dare is set up successfully enough in the opening part of the story. Dare infiltrates George Somerset’s professional and romantic endeavours; he steals his designs for the rival architect Havill; and he has a secret desire to become a legitimate de Stancy. Indeed, he even has the name tattooed on his chest.

Yet in the middle sections of the novel, this Dare sub-plot disappears completely. The story switches to Somerset’s frustrations in trying to wring an emotional response out of the seemingly coquettish Paula Power. This section of the novel also embodies another subsidiary plot weakness – the over-elaborated passages of the theatricals and George’s adolescent torments of jealousy.

But these weaknesses pale into insignificance compared with the endlessly repetitive will-she-won’t-she pursuit of Paula by de Stancy during their excursion around Europe.

It is clear that Hardy wishes to show Paula under enormous pressure. George Somerset has been maligned by both Dare’s bogus telegram asking for money and the faked photograph apparently showing him in a state of intoxication. Paula is also being offered marriage into a family of pedigree. She will become Lady de Stancy if only she says “Yes”.

Dramatically, this is a credible plot, but de Stancy’s pursuit of Paula and her refusal to yield to his entreaties goes on and on, from one town to another, with no change, no development, and no new arguments – until the reader could be excused for losing the will to live.

It is astonishing to realise that only a few years before, Hardy had written a work as psychologically insightful as The Return of the Native (1878) and only a few years hence he was to produce his all-inclusive masterpiece The Mayor of Castebridge (1886) which bears fruitful comparison with King Lear in terms of universal scope and tragic intensity.


A Laodicean – study resources

A Laodicean A Laodicean – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

A Laodicean A Laodicean – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

A Laodicean A Laodicean – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

A Laodicean A Laodicean – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

A Laodicean The Complete Works of Thomas Hardy – Kindle eBook

Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

A Laodicean


A Laodicean – plot summary

Book the First. George Somerset

I.   George Somerset is refreshing his studies of English Gothic architecture under pressure from his father, a painter and academician.

II.   George comes across a modern chapel built in an ugly style. A baptism ceremony is taking place, but the attractive young celebrant refuses to go into the pool. He follows a telegraph wire that leads him to an old castle.

III .   Next day he looks over Castle de Stancy and its ancient contents. The ancestral portraits are decaying.

IV.   Charlotte de Stancy shows him round the castle and relates its history. It was bought by engineer John Power and is now being restored by his daughter. Paula Power has had a telegraph line installed and has contact with contemporary culture. The two young women are close friends.

V .   Next day George is invited to lunch with Sir William de Stancy (the previous owner) in his modern suburban villa. Sir William is obsessed with frugality and ‘luck’ He has lost all his money by extravagance and bad investments.

VI.   The following day George meets William Dare who wishes to photograph the castle. He then encounters the Baptist minister who is berating Paula theologically.

VII .   George debates biblical niceties with the minister, who gives up the argument. Paula speaks positively on Mr Woodwell’s behalf, and afterwards the two men are reconciled.

VIII.   George has lunch at the castle. He gets into an argument with fellow architect Mr Havill. There is general agreement that Mr Dare is an unreliable entity.

IX.   George falls into a pit in the castle turret, where he sees Dare’s name recently carved into the wall. Paula asks him to supervise the castle restoration. He proposes a competition with Mr Havill.

X.   Paula takes him round the castle whilst they discuss plans – without Havill. George moves to lodge in local village Markton.

XI.   Paula creates a studio for George in the castle. He feels more powerfully drawn to her – even though she appears enigmatic and even contradictory.

XII.   George goes to inspect Mr Power’s famous railway tunnel. He meets Paula there, and they are frightened by trains travelling up and down the line. Dare steals George’s correspondence and puts himself forward as his assistant.

XIII.   Paula holds a dinner party which George does not attend. She changes her mind about creating a Greek courtyard – then invites him to a garden party.

XIV.   An anonymous newspaper article appears, accusing Paula of desecrating the castle and its historic value. She tells George she wishes she were a de Stancy. They are spied on by Dare.

XV.   At the garden party George sacks Dare for idleness, then shelters from a rainstorm in a hut with Paula, to whom he declares his love.

Book the Second. Dare and Havill

I.   Dare finds Havill’s notebook containing the draft of the newspaper article. They then spy on George and Paula in the hut. Dare proposes a pact between them to steal George’s designs and cause trouble between George and Paula..

II.   Dare calls at Havill’s office and helps to bamboozle one of his creditors. Dare and Havill copy George’s designs in his studio. They then dine together, staying overnight at an inn.

III.   Havill wakes in the night and discovers Dare is carrying a gun. Dare then takes a close interest in an army brigade that arrives in the town.

IV.   George meets Charlotte with her brother Captain de Stancy and gives him Dare’s photo to show to the police. De Stancy is shocked on recognising Dare, and burns the photo.

V.   Captain de Stancy meets Dare, his illegitimate son, who is blackmailing him. Dare proposes that de Stancy should marry Paula and reclaim the castle and estates for the de Stancy family – of which he considers himself a member. However, de Stancy has taken a vow of adult celibacy.

VI .   The architecture competition is a tie. Dare explains to Havill his plan to bring Paula and de Stancy together. He discovers that Paula will look her most attractive when taking morning exercises in her private gymnasium.

VII.   Dare takes de Stancy to the gymnasium, where he is enchanted by the sight of Paula exercising.

Book the Third. De Stancy

I.   William de Stancy immediately becomes a changed man. He abandons his vows of teetotalism and avoiding women. He wants his sister Charlotte to help him in his pursuit of Paula, and he takes a sudden interest in the family history.

II.   William visits the castle and shows off his (very recently acquired) knowledge of the de Stancy family to Paula. Dare arrives, and they plan to make copies of all the family portraits.

III.   The copying begins, but William wants a portrait of Paula herself, which she refuses. Havill goes bankrupt and his wife dies. Paula is persuaded to split the project into two parts out of sympathy for Havill.

IV.   Havill has pangs of conscience and resigns from the project. Dare and de Stancy fear that the return of Somerset will spoil their plans.

V.   George wonders if his own family has a ‘pedigree’. When he goes to recover a genealogical document from the bank he sees Paula collecting a jewelled necklace.

VI.   George follows Paula to the Markton Hunt Ball. Charlotte is taken home in a faint when she sees Somerset. George learns that there are to be theatricals (Love’s Labour’s Lost) for which he designed the costumes.

VII.   George returns to the castle, but he jealously objects to Paula taking an active part in the theatricals.

VII.   He is further distressed when parts are changed and romantic scenes from Romeo and Juliet are interpolated.

IX.   A mysterious stranger enters, makes enquiries about Paula and de Stancy, then pays people to applaud them. George reproaches Paula for taking part in the final love scene in the play.

X.   Next day Paula hires a professional actress to take her part. After the performance she introduces the mysterious stranger as her uncle Abner Power – which gives George further cause for jealous worry.

XI.   Paula’s engagement is announced in a newspaper – but she denies it to George. She plans a trip to Nice. George discovers that the newspaper announcement was placed there by her uncle Abner.

Book the Fourth. Somerset, Dare, and de Stancy

I.   George and Paula exchange telegraph messages and letters. He continues to plead for signs of affection, and she continues to refuse.

II.   Abner Power wishes to influence his niece. George wants to visit her in Nice. She eventually stops writing to him – so he sends a message demanding to know what is happening.

III.   When he learns that de Stancy is also visiting Nice, George is inflamed with jealousy and immediately sets off to join them. The party has moved on to Monte Carlo, so he follows them there.

IV.   In the Casino George meets William Dare who tries to borrow money from him, which he refuses to do. Dare despatches a bogus telegram to Paula, claiming to be from Somerset and asking for money to pay a gambling debt.

V.   Paula despatches de Stancy with the money for Somerset. Dare turns up to collect it, but de Stancy refuses to hand it over.

Book the Fifth. De Stancy and Paula

I.   De Stancy joins Paula in Strazbourg where he returns the money. He declares his passion for her.

II.   They move on to Baden where de Stancy pesters Paula for attention and the reciprocation of his feelings. She refuses him, but he is supported by her uncle Abner.

III.   Dare catches up with de Stancy in Karlsruhe, flush with a recent gambling success. De Stancy advises him to return to England.

IV.   Paula asks to see Dare, who smears Somerset by implication then produces the doctored photograph apparently showing Somerset drunk.

V.   Somerset arrives and is treated coldly by Paula, who now accepts de Stancy as a potential suitor instead. Dare departs for England.

VI.   Somerset and Paula meet again by accident in Heidelberg, and they part with cold misunderstanding of each other.

VII.   Paula chooses to walk up a long hill with de Stancy, who continues to harass her with emotional demands. She continues to equivocate.

VIII.   The party sail down the Rhein on a pleasure boat. Paula and de Stancy discuss their relationship, and there are further supplications and equivocations.

IX.   De Stancy continues to court Paula as they journey through northern Europe. Somerset writes to say that he wishes to resign from the castle restoration project.

X.   Charlotte becomes ill in Amiens. Abner Power arrives from Paris saying that the proposed marriage must not go ahead. De Stancy harasses Paula yet again, then receives notice of his father’s death. Paula finally accepts him.

XI.   Dare checks on the marriage preparations and makes veiled blackmail threats. Abner Power arrives to expose the truth about Dare. But Dare counter-attacks with a history of Power’s making an explosive device for revolutionaries. They threaten each other with guns, then agree to call it quits. Abner Power disappears again.

XII.   Somerset meets Charlotte, who tells him about about the fake telegram. He goes next day to challenge Dare, but en route hears that the marriage has just taken place. He goes on holiday to Normandy.

XIII.   Charlotte is suspicious regarding Dare and uncovers the truth about the bogus photograph. Although she is in love with Somerset herself, she feels she ought to give the information to Paula.

XIV.   Charlotte reveals the truth to Paula on her wedding day. Paula threatens to have Dare arrested. When. De Stancy protests he is forced to admit that Dare is his son. The marriage is called off.

Book the Sixth. Paula

I.   Paula sets off for Normandy in search of Somerset. She traces him to Lisieux, where she just misses his departure for Caen.

II.   In the next town she meets Somerset’s father. When they move on to Etretat, George is seen in a dance hall. Paula feels she has been humiliating herself, and vows to go back home.

III.   Next day the two parties meet by accident. Paula re-appoints Somerset as architect, but does not reveal what she knows. George becomes ill. Paula visits him they are reconciled, and agree to marry.

IV.   A few weeks later Paula and Somerset return to Markton. De Stancy meets Dare, and they bemoan their separate lots.

V.   Charlotte retreats to a nunnery, and a fire consumes the contents of the castle. Paula and Somerset agree to build a new home alongside the ruins.


A Laodicean – characters
George Somerset a young architect
John Power railway engineer, who bought the de Stancy estate
Paula Power his daughter, current owner of the estate
Captain William de Stancy a middle-aged bachelot
Charlotte de Stancy Paula’s friend
William Dare de Stancy’s illegitimate son
Mr Woodwell a local Markston minister
Mr Havill a local Markston architect
Mrs Goodman Paula’s aunt and chaperon
Abner Power Paula’s uncle

© Roy Johnson 2017


More on Thomas Hardy
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories


Filed Under: Thomas Hardy Tagged With: English literature, Literary studies, The novel, Thomas Hardy

A Pair of Blue Eyes

October 6, 2013 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, web links, and study resources

A Pair of Blue Eyes was Thomas Hardy’s fourth novel, the first to be published under his own name, and the first to be serialised. It was published in Tinsleys’ Magazine in eleven monthly instalments between September 1872 and July 1873. Then it was produced as a novel in three volumes by Tinsley Brothers later the same year. The three-volume novel was very popular during the nineteenth century – a publishing format largely dictated by the rise of the commercial circulating libraries. It is the most heavily revised of all Hardy’s novels.

A Pair of Blue Eyes

Thomas Hardy


A Pair of Blue Eyes – critical commentary

The principal features of interest in this early Hardy novel are its three main characters – Stephen Smith, Elfride Swancourt, and Henry Knight. It is fairly obvious that Hardy divided the two ‘sides’ of his own aspirations between Stephen and Knight. Stephen is the would-be architect – the profession which Hardy himself actually practised. But whilst working as a draftsman in London, Hardy also aspired to literature as a career – without knowing at first which would be successful. And interestingly enough, Henry Knight also has two occupations – as a barrister and as a literary editor, though we see precious little evidence of practical application in the first, and only vague reports of the second.

Stephen Smith

The main driving force behind Stephen is his desire for self-improvement. He comes from a humble, but reasonably respectable background. His parents are workers on the Luxellian estate. He has been educated at a National school – institutions which were established for the education of the poor in the early part of the nineteenth century. After that his learning has been conducted by correspondence with his friend Henry Knight – which leaves Stephen with no practical knowledge of how to hold chess pieces or how to pronounce words in Latin.

Although Stephen has embarked on a career in architecture, it is worth noting that he has done so as an ‘improver’ – what we would today call an ‘intern’. That is, his parents have paid for him to gain experience in the hope of future employment in the profession. This explains Stephen’s secrecy and mysterious movements in the early part of the novel. He is moving in circles well above his own class background and feels insecure about being found out. Reverend Swancourt has assumed that Stephen is a young professional, which explains the reversal in his opinions and his ban on Stephen when he discovers that he is from humble origins. It of course illustrates at the same time the arriviste snobbery of Reverend Swancourt, who goes on to marry an ugly woman he doesn’t love for the sake of her wealth.

Henry Knight

Knight is the epitome of academic book-learning with no comparable emotional development. He is university educated, presumably has qualifications in law since he practises as a barrister (theoretically) and is an editor on The Present which has the reputation of a leading intellectual journal. But emotionally he is a possessive child who cannot tolerate the idea that his chosen love object has any connection with previous admirers. He also subjects Elfride to an extensive bombardment of self-righteous emotional bullying to extract information about her ‘past’. As J.M.Barrie observed, he is “simply the most insufferable prig in fiction”.

Elfride Swancourt

Elfride is a typical Hardy heroine – and it must be said something of a fictional construct rather than a realistic piece of characterisation. She is a very talented young woman: she plays the piano (and the organ); she sings; she plays chess; she writes a novel; and she holds quasi-philosophic conversations with Henry Knight. These talents might endear her to readers (and especially critics) seeking early examples of ‘the New Woman’ in Victorian fiction – but they do not add up to an entirely credible character.

It has to be said that she is in summary rather inconstant. Within the timespan of the novel she has four lovers. First Felix Jethway, who dies of love for her, according to his mother. Then Stephen Smith, with whom she is prepared to elope – but then changes her mind at the last minute. Next comes Henry Knight, overlapping with Stephen emotionally, but who eventually wins the higher ground. But when he withdraws his attentions on an emotionally costive principle, she fairly soon switches her attentions to the untalented Lord Luxellian – then marries him. Psycho-analytic interpretations of the novel might well then observe that she is ‘punished’ by dying in childbirth.

Structure

The twinning, repetition, and parallelism in the novel should be fairly evident.

Elfride plays chess twice – first with Stephen, then with Henry Knight. She loses an ear ring when kissing Stephen on the cliff; she later accepts Knight’s gift of ear rings; and then recovers the lost ear ring when with Knight in the same location.

Elfride walks on the parapet of the church tower – and falls off it – whilst she is with Knight. He then falls off the cliff whilst he is with Elfride. She also sits on the grave of Felix Jethway when she is with Stephen, then later when she is with Knight.

Coincidence

Many of Hardy’s plots rely on coincidence to an extent that some modern readers find rather taxing to their credulity. The use of this literary device was fairly common in the fiction of the late nineteenth century (and had been since Dickens was so popular in the middle of the century).

When Stephen and Elfride return from their failed elopement to Plymouth and London, their surreptitious arrival together is witnessed by none other than Mrs Jethway. She is the one person who has a motive for exposing Elfride’s reputation to public scrutiny – since her son was Elfride’s first lover, and died because of it – according to her.

This secret knowledge creates an element of suspense in the plot until Mrs Jethway is crushed by the collapse of the church tower – but only immediately after having written the letter to Knight exposing what she knows, and enclosing proof in the form of Elfride’s letter pleading for secrecy.

The example is important because a great deal of the tension and suspense in the plot rests on the possible disclosure of this knowledge. Mrs Jethway flits in and out of events, appearing at crucial moments, but withholding her information until the last minute.

A less important example, because nothing vital in the development of events rests upon it, is the coincidence that not only do Stephen and Knight get on the same train to revisit Endelstow, but the carriage transporting Elfride’s corpse is attached to it on the journey.

Similarly, there is a tension between probability and plot symmetry when Stephen and Knight visit the crypt to pay their last respects to Elfride – only to find Lord Luxellian there mourning his dead wife. So – all three of her lovers are brought together for the final scene, and the fourth is quite near too, in the graveyard outside. This is strained plotting on Hardy’s part, but nothing further in the story depends upon the melodramatic conjunction.

Loose ends

The issue of Elfride’s novel and Knight’s subsequent review of it brings the two characters together for the second dramatic strand of the novel – but once she has rescued him from hanging on the cliff, her literary skills appear to be forgotten. They form no further part of the drama.

Henry Knight has barrister’s offices in the City and a home out in Richmond. We are led to believe that he has been a reviewer on the magazine The Present but has risen to be something like a senior editor. His offices are littered with the impedimenta of an active editor – but there isn’t the slightest scrap of evidence that he practises as a man of law anywhere in the novel. It’s almost as if Hardy conceived Knight with one profession, changed his mind, and forgot to erase traces of his first choice.


Study resources

A Pair of Blue Eyes A Pair of Blue Eyes – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon UK

A Pair of Blue Eyes A Pair of Blue Eyes – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon US

A Pair of Blue Eyes A Pair of Blue Eyes – Wordsworth Classics edition – Amazon UK

A Pair of Blue Eyes A Pair of Blue Eyes – Wordsworth Classics edition – Amazon US

A Pair of Blue Eyes The Complete Works of Thomas Hardy – Kindle eBook

A Pair of Blue Eyes A Pair of Blue Eyes – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

A Pair of Blue Eyes A Pair of Blue Eyes – audiobook version at LibriVox.org

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

Red button The Complete Critical Guide to Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

Red button Authors in Context – Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

Red button Oxford Reader’s Companion to Hardy – Amazon UK

A Pair of Blue Eyes


A Pair of Blue Eyes – story synopsis

Chapter I.   Elfride Swancourt is in Endelstow, nervously awaiting the arrival of Stephen Smith from London.

Chapter II.   Stephen arrives at the rectory to make a survey of the church aisle and its tower for a restoration project.

Chapter III.   The rector Christopher Swancourt is very enthusiastic about Stephen and thinks he must have aristocratic family connections (which is not true). Elfride sings for Stephen, and they are both very impressed with each other.

Chapter IV.   Stephen surveys the church with Swancourt and his helper William Worm. Stephen promises to signal Elfride from the tower, but fails to do so.

Chapter V.   Stephen receives news that he ought to be back in London, and Swancourt is asked to retrieve a document for the local landowner Lord Luxellian. Stephen, Swancourt, and Elfride go to Endelstow House, where she is the favourite of Mary and Kate, the Luxellian children. Stephen disappears briefly but mysteriously, and appears to meet a woman.

Chapter VI.   Elfride is mystified by Stephen, who appears to be hiding something. She tries to extract the secret from him without success. Stephen departs, promising to return.

A Pair of Blue EyesChapter VII.   At his next visit to the rectory, Stephen plays chess with Elfride, which he has taught himself from books. He has also learned Latin by post from his friend Mr Knight. Stephen tells Elfride that he loves her. They go together up onto the cliffs to continue their flirtations. They exchange their first kiss, she loses an ear ring, and they declare their love for each other. But Stephen suggests that there is something which will prevent their marrying.

Chapter VIII.   They return to the rectory. Stephen is due to ask the reverend Swancourt for permission to marry Elfride, but he changes his mind and delays. Instead, he reveals his humble family origins: his mother and father are workers on the Luxellian estate, and his education has been via National school and his friend Henry Knight.

Chapter IX.   Stephen’s father is injured in an accident at the church restoration. Whilst Stephen visits his family home, the reverend Swancourt upbraids Elfride for forming an attachment to a commoner and forbids any engagement.

Chapter X.   Stephen visits his parents and spars with his mother about marriage and social class. She does not approve of Elfride. As he prepares to leave the rectory, he and Elfride hatch a plan to marry in secret.

Chapter XI.   Elfride discovers that he father has been conducting a secret correspondence, and he has a plan in mind for making them rich. She leaves the rectory secretly and travels indecisively to Plymouth to be married. But Stephen has registered the marriage in London – so they travel on there.

Chapter XII.   As soon as they reach London, Elfride changes her mind and they travel back to Endelstow – observed as they arrive together by Mrs Jethway. When she reaches home, Elfride is met by her father, who has married Mrs Troyton, a rich and plain widow who has bought the neighbouring estate. He claims it was done for Elfride’s sake. Mrs Troyton is old and rather flamboyant.

Chapter XIII.   Two months later Stephen visits his old friend Henry Knight in his London offices and asks his advice about accepting a job offer in India in order to save up to get married. Knight thinks the decision turns on the issue of the fidelity of the individuals during such a prolonged absence. He also has Elfride’s romantic novel to review.

Chapter XIV.   Some months later Elfride is living in Kensington and mixing in upper-class society because of the wealth and connections of her new step-mother. Her romantic novel is being reviewed. Mrs Troyton (now Mrs Swancourt) meets her distant relative Henry Knight in Hyde Park and invites him to visit them in Cornwall.

Chapter XV.   Elfride reads Henry Knight’s review of her romantic novel, which contains some strong criticism.

Chapter XVI.   Elfride writes to the journal The Present and receives a reply from Knight, who is shortly to visit Endelstow.

Chapter XVII.   Henry Knight arrives at Endelstow and engages in some (rather improbable) philosophic discussions with Elfride, stemming from his review of her novel.

Chapter XVIII.   Elfride shows Knight the local church and walks round the parapet of its tower, where she falls off. She then plays chess with him, and is beaten. She flirts with him and tries to extract compliments, but he refuses to flatter her and will only tell her about his preferences and the truth as he sees it.

Chapter XIX.   Knight reads from the Bible in the local church service whilst Elfride plays the organ – both of them observed from the back of the congregation by Mrs Jethway. Elfride asks the rather pompous Knight for guidance on vanity and women’s nature – subjects on which he has lots of theory but no practical knowledge.

Chapter XX.   Knight travels to Ireland and realises that he has fallen in love with Elfride. He buys her some ear rings, but she feels that she should refuse to accept them. Meanwhile Stephen sends her £200 he has saved towards their marriage, and is then despatched on a visit back to England to make building procurements for his work.

Chapter XXI.   Elfride goes onto the cliffs to watch for Stephen’s arrival back in England. There she meets Knight, and they become trapped on the cliff top. Elfride climbs up Knight to safety, but he remains stuck on a ledge.

Chapter XXII.   Knight clings to the cliff edge expecting to die, but Elfride saves him by tearing up her underclothes and making a rope with which he is hauled to safety – after which they embrace passionately with relief.

Chapter XXIII.   Stephen lands ashore and walking home sees Elfride and Knight in retreat from the cliff. He arrives at his family house to be greeted by conversations amongst his family and locals about flowers and pig-killing. He feels snobbishly resentful of the company.

Chapter XXIV.   Elfride fails to turn up to a planned meeting with Stephen, and she returns the £200 he has sent. Next day he travels to Birmingham to order his procurements.

Chapter XXV.   On return from Birmingham Stephen sees Elfride with Knight. He is also intercepted by Mrs Jethway who warns him against Elfride. As he makes his way home in a state of desolation, he learns that Lady Luxellian has died.

Chapter XXVI.   There is a discussion in the Luxellian family crypt regarding family history, questions of inheritance, and Elfride’s personal history.

Chapter XXVII.   Elfride’s change of heart in choosing Knight is explained whilst they are out riding. They visit the Luxellian crypt and meet Stephen. Elfride is worried about not having told Knight about her past relationship with Stephen.

Chapter XXVIII.   Elfride plans to reveal the truth about her past to Knight, but cannot face it when the time comes. They ride out to a watery glade where she now accepts his gift of the ear rings. Mrs Jethway turns up to reveal that she has damaging information – but will not use it just yet.

Chapter XXIX.   The Swancourts go on holiday to Europe, returning from London to Cornwall via a boat journey in the Channel. Mrs Jethway makes an appearance, which worries Elfride. She discusses the subject of ‘previous romantic experience’ with Knight who has none and assumes she has none either.

Chapter XXX.   Elfride finally reveals in discussion with Knight that she has previously had a ‘lover’. She delivers a note to Mrs Jethway, pleading with her not to reveal details of her liaison with Stephen. Knight begins to put together fragments of her previous comments, and his suspicions make him unhappy.

Chapter XXXI.   Elfride and Knight go up onto the cliffs, where she finds her lost ear ring. Knight continues to harass her for information about her past and wants to know what she is keeping secret from him. He admits that he is jealous and can only accept a wife who has absolutely no previous experience. Meanwhile, the church tower collapses.

Chapter XXXII.   Knight and Elfride go into the churchyard and sit on Felix Jethway’s gravestone. Knight pesters her further about her past. She first of all she hides behind an ambiguous blend of information about Stephen and Felix Jethway. Then eventually she is forced to admit that there were two former lovers. Knight badgers her into giving him the full story.

Chapter XXXIII.   Stephen finds Mrs Jethway crushed in the tower ruins. Lord Luxellian turns up, and they take the body back to her house, where Stephen sees that she has been writing a warning letter to someone.

Chapter XXXIV.   Next day Knight receives the latter Mrs Jethway was writing, plus Elfride’s pleading note to Mrs Jethway. He challenges Elfride again, and she admits to having been away overnight with Stephen on her journey to London. Knight immediately breaks off their engagement and goes back to his chambers in London.

Chapter XXXV.   Next morning Elfride turns up at his offices, begging him not to leave her – but her father then appears and takes her away again. Knight is in deep conflict over his feelings for Elfride, but he ends up closing his offices and going abroad.

Chapter XXXVI.   Some time passes. Stephen’s parents move to St Launce’s where they hear news of his architectural success in India.

Chapter XXXVII.   Knight travels extensively but pointlessly in Europe. More than a year later Stephen and Knight meet by accident in London. They compare notes about the fact that neither of them is married; but they are very reserved with each other.

Chapter XXXVIII.   The two men meet again in the evening, and eventually Stephen reveals the whole story of his romance with Elfride to Knight. This rekindles the interest of both men in Elfride: Stephen still loves her and thinks Knight has been rejected; Knight ‘forgives’ Elfride retrospectively and thinks Stephen is no serious rival.

Chapter XXXIX.   The two men claim to have urgent business, but in fact they give each other the slip in order to get to Elfride as soon as possible. They meet on the same train, and admit that they are both en route to ask for her hand in marriage. They continue to argue about who has the more valid claim to Elfride. Meanwhile, the train has a ‘death coach’ attached to it. When they reach their destination, they are met by a hearse – and they discover it is for Elfride.

Chapter XL.   They then learn after the death of Lady Luxellian, Elfride became the ‘little mother’ to the two Luxellian children, as a result of which she eventually married Lord Luxellian. But after travelling abroad she died of a miscarriage in London. Stephen and Knight decide to visit the Luxellian vault in the church, but when they get there they find Lord Luxellian grieving for his dead wife – so they both leave.


A Pair of Blue Eyes – principal characters
Reverend Swancourt a deaf, widowed, and largely bankrupt rector
Elfride Swancourt his pretty and clever young daughter
John Smith a master-mason on the Luxellian estate
Stephen Smith his young son, working in a London architect’s office
William Worm a bumpkin, with noises in his head
Henry Knight a barrister, literary editor, and distant relative of Mrs Troyton
Lord Spencer Hugo Luxellian local landowner, with ‘no talent’
Mary and Kate his two young daughters
Mrs Gertrude Jethway a poor and embittered widow, mother of Elfride’s first lover
Felix Jethway Elfride’s first lover
Mrs Charlotte Troyton a rich but plain widow who buys an estate next to Swancourt
Robert Lickpan a pig-killer
Martin Cannister a sexton

A Pair of Blue Eyes – bibliography

Laura Green, ‘”Strange [In]difference of Sex”: Thomas Hardy, the Victorian Man of Letters and the Temptations of Androgyny’, Victorian Studies 38/4 (1995), 523-50.

John Halperin, ‘Leslie Stephen, Thomas Hardy, and A Pair of Blue Eyes‘, Modern Language Review, 75 (1980), 738-45.

Rosemarie Morgan, Women and Sexuality in the Novels of Thomas Hardy, (London, Routledge, 1988).

Angelique Richardson, ‘”Some Science Underlies All Art”: The Dramatization of Sexual Selection and Racial Biology in A Pair of Blue Eyes and The Well-Beloved‘, Journal of Victorian Culture, 3/2 (1998), 302-38.

Mary Rimmer, ‘Club Laws: Chess and Construction of Gender in A Pair of Blue Eyes‘, in Margaret R. Higonnet (ed), The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Hardy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 203-20.

Robert Schweik, ‘”Life and Death are Neighbours Nigh”: Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes and the Uses of Incongruity, Philological Quarterly, 76/1 (1997), 87-100.

Rosemary Sumner, A Route to Modernism: Hardy, Lawrence, Woolf (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999).

Richard H. Taylor, The Neglected Hardy: Thomas Hardy’s Lesser Novels (Basingstoke: Macmillan 1982).

Jane Thomas, Thomas Hardy, Femininity and Dissent: Reassessing the Minor Novels (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999).


Map of Wessex

Hardy’s WESSEX


Further reading

Red button John Bayley, An Essay on Hardy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Red button Penny Boumelha, Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form, Brighton: Harvester, 1982.

Red button Kristin Brady, The Short Stories of Thomas Hardy, London: Macmillan, 1982.

Red button L. St.J. Butler, Alternative Hardy, London: Macmillan, 1989.

Red button Raymond Chapman, The Language of Thomas Hardy, London: Macmillan, 1990.

Red button R.G.Cox, Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1970.

Red button Ralph W.V. Elliot, Thomas Hardy’s English, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984.

Red button James Gibson (ed), The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, London, 1976.

Red button Florence Emily Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy, London: Macmillan, 1962. (This is more or less Hardy’ s autobiography, since he told his wife what to write.)

Red button P. Ingham, Thomas Hardy: A Feminist Reading, Brighton: Harvester, 1989.

Red button P.Ingham, The Language of Class and Gender: Transformation in the English Novel, London: Routledge, 1995,

Red button Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist, London: Bodley Head, 1971.

Red button Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006. (This is the definitive biography.)

Red button Michael Millgate and Richard L. Purdy (eds), The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978-

Red button R. Morgan, Women and Sexuality in the Novels of Thomas Hardy, London: Routledge, 1988.

Red button Harold Orel (ed), Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings, London, 1967.

Red button F.B. Pinion, A Thomas Hardy Companion, London: Macmillan, 1968.

Red button Norman Page, Thomas Hardy, London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1977.

Red button Rosemary Sumner, Thomas Hardy: Psychological Novelist, London: Macmillan, 1981.

Red button Richard H. Taylor, The Personal Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, London, 1978.

Red button Merryn Williams, A Preface to Hardy, London: Longman, 1976.


Hardy’s study

Thomas Hardy's study

reconstructed in Dorchester museum


Other works by Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Tess of the d'UrbervillesTess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) is probably the most popular of Hardy’s late, great novels. The sub-title is ‘A Pure Woman’, and it is a story which explores the tragic consequences of a young milkmaid who becomes the victim of the men she encounters. First she falls for the spiritual but flawed Angel Clare, and then the physical but limited Alec Durberville takes advantage of her. This novel has some of the most beautiful and the most harrowing depictions of rural working conditions which reveal Hardy as a passionate advocate for those who work the land. It also has a wonderfully symbolic climax at Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain. There is poetry in almost every page.
Thomas Hardy Tess of the d'Urbervilles Buy the book at Amazon UK
Thomas Hardy Tess of the d'Urbervilles Buy the book at Amazon US

 

The WoodlandersThe Woodlanders (1887) Giles Winterbourne, an honest woodsman, suffers with the many tribulations of his selfless love for Grace Melbury, a woman above his station in this classic tale of the West Country. She marries the new doctor, Edred Fitzpiers, but leaves him when she learns he has been unfaithful. She turns instead to Giles, who nobly allows her to sleep in his house during stormy weather, whilst he sleeps outside and brings on his own death. It’s often said that the hero of this novel is the woods themselves – so deeply moving is Hardy’s account of the timbered countryside which provides the backdrop for another human tragedy and a study of rural life in transition.
Thomas Hardy The Woodlanders Buy the book at Amazon UK
Thomas Hardy The Woodlanders Buy the book at Amazon US

 

Wessex TalesWessex Tales Don’t miss the skills of Hardy as a writer of shorter fictions. None of his short stories are really short, but they are beautifully crafted. This is the first volume of his tales in which he was seeking to record the customs, superstitions, and beliefs of old Wessex before they were lost to living memory. Yet whilst dealing with traditional beliefs, they also explore very modern concerns of difficult and often thwarted human passions which he developed more extensively in his longer works.
Thomas Hardy Wessex Tales Buy the book at Amazon UK
Thomas Hardy Wessex Tales Buy the book at Amazon US


Thomas Hardy – web links

Thomas Hardy at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major novels, book reviews. bibliographies, critiques of the shorter fiction, and web links.

The Thomas Hardy Collection
The complete novels, stories, and poetry – Kindle eBook single file download for £1.29 at Amazon.

Thomas Hardy at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of digital formats.

Thomas Hardy at Wikipedia
Biographical notes, social background, the novels and literary themes, poetry, religious beliefs and influence, biographies and criticism.

The Thomas Hardy Society
Dorset-based site featuring educational activities, a biennial conference, a journal (three times a year) with links to the texts of all the major works.

The Thomas Hardy Association
American-based site with photos and academic resources. Be prepared to search and drill down to reach the more useful materials.

Thomas Hardy on the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors, actors, production features, box office, film reviews, and even quizzes.

Thomas Hardy – online literary criticism
Small collection of academic papers and articles ‘favoring signed articles by recognized scholars and articles published in peer-reviewed sources’.

Thomas Hardy’s Wessex
Evolution of Wessex, contemporary reviews, maps, bibliography, links to other web sites, and history.

© Roy Johnson 2013


More on Thomas Hardy
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories


Filed Under: Thomas Hardy Tagged With: English literature, Literary studies, The novel, Thomas Hardy

A Scandal in Bohemia

August 31, 2016 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study resources, web links, and further reading

A Scandal in Bohemia was first published in July 1891 in The Strand Magazine with illustrations by Sydney Paget. As a stand-out character and detective hero, Sherlock Holmes had first appeared in Conan Doyle’s earlier novel A Study in Scarlet (1887) – but it wasn’t until the monthly stories appeared that the fictional character began to seize the public’s imagination. This effect was amplified by the publication in America in 1892 of these thirteen monthly episodes as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. This began a popularity for the figure of Holmes which continues to this day. There have been any number of radio, stage, and film adaptations of the stories, and there is currently a very successful television series in which the stories are transposed into present day settings.

A Scandal in Bohemia


A Scandal in Bohemia – critical commentary

Mise en scene

The setting, characters, and historical context of the story are all convincingly realistic. The story is set in a London that is thoroughly recognisable. Holmes lives in Baker Street in Marylebone, and Irene Adler in St John’s Wood. Many other places are mentioned – Edgware Road, Regent Street, and Charing Cross – and because they actually exist they help to establish realistic setting. Generations of tourists have walked up and down Baker Street searching for 221B – which is an invention on Conan Doyle’s part.

Watson gives an exact date at the start of the story – 20th March 1888. The king is from Bohemia, which was a separate state as part of the Austro-Hungarian empire during the nineteenth century – and still exists as part of the Czech Republic. He arrives in a ‘brougham’ – a Victorian horse carriage; and the driver is paid ‘half a guinea’. These details correspond to the historical picture we have of the world around that time and therefore make the background to the story seem credible.

The story is populated by a married doctor plus his friend and former flat-mate, an amateur detective. The other characters include a foreign aristocrat and an opera singer. Although Sherlock Holmes has unusually developed skills and Kings are not exactly commonplace, these characters form part of a world which seems reasonable, not unlike our own. They help to make the fictional world Conan Doyle offers us realistic.

The story begins in the streets of London, then continues to Holmes’ first floor apartment with its bachelor accoutrements of cigars and drinks cabinet. It moves on to the mews where servants are working, then a church in the Edgware Road and the avenue where Briony Lodge is situated. It reaches its climax inside the drawing room of the ‘bijou villa’ from which Irene Adler has recently decamped, and it ends as Watson and Holmes take to the streets of London again. All of these locations help to create a perfectly credible milieu.

The construction of character

The principal point of interest in the Sherlock Holmes stories and the reason that they have been so popular is the character of Holmes himself. The complete character study of Holmes can be best constructed from details about him which are scattered throughout the stories. However, from A Scandal in Bohemia alone we learn that he has an international reputation as a detective and is well known amongst European royalty. He has acute powers of observation and an ability to interpret visual data (see below). He is a master of disguise, and is able to transform his demeanour and actions into those of the person he is imitating.

In addition, he has an encyclopedic knowledge of society backed up by an archive of information on crime he keeps on index cards. He alternates between periods of lassitude which he spends in brooding reflection, and periods of dynamic activity in pursuit of his client’s problems.

Watson describes him as a man who ‘loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul’ – which tells us that he is radically independent. He also has a ‘cold, precise, admirably balanced mind’. He is an intellectual, one who sneers at ‘the softer passions’ – which is what makes his admiration for Irene Adler such an exception. He is also given to offering witty, epigrammatic apercus such as “When a woman thinks that her house is on fire, her instinct is at once to rush to the thing she values most … A married woman grabs at her baby – an unmarried one reaches for her jewel box”.

Holmes is philosophical, brilliant, charismatic, benevolent and enigmatic. At the end of the story he shows a lofty disregard for the King by ignoring his handshake, and his non-materialistic values are revealed when he chooses the photo over the proffered emerald and gold ring.

One rather surprising detail we learn about him is that he is a cocaine addict – what we might today call ‘an occasional user’. Fortunately, this does not seem to hamper his powers as a detective, but it does reinforce the idea that he a social ‘outsider’. We learn in a later story that he also plays the violin. All of this adds up to making him a fascinating and complex individual. If we add to this picture his lean, angular appearance, the deerstalker hat, and the meerschaum pipe, it is not surprising that he has become an iconic figure in popular culture.

Deduction or induction?

But of course the most amazing thing about Holmes is the manner in which he able to combine acute observation with profound intelligence and an incisive system of reasoning to reach revealing insights and surprisingly deft conclusions. It is a method of ratiocination clearly modeled on Edgar Allen Poe’s detective Auguste Dupin.

Holmes analyses the watermarks of the paper on which the King has written his introductory note, and works out from the abbreviations that the paper has been produced in Bohemia. Then he goes on to look at the message itself and observes that though the writing is in English, it uses a distinctively German syntax – with a verb at the end of the sentence.

Amongst critics there is often disagreement on the question of Holmes’ methods of detection. He observes very small details of a person’s physical appearance or clothing, and from these details arrives at a general understanding of their occupation, their habits, or their recent movements. This method of detection illustrates his acute powers of observation and often reveals his encyclopedic knowledge of arcane topics – such as being able to recognise the ashes of different brands of cigar.

In Watson’s narrative, he calls Holmes’ method ‘deduction’ – “I could not help laughing at the ease with which he explained his process of deduction.” Watson (and by implication Conan Doyle) is employing the term in its everyday sense of seeing a relationship between one thing and another which doesn’t at first seem to be connected to it.

But the method, strictly speaking, is ‘induction’ – a form of reasoning which derives general principles from specific observation. This is also known as ‘bottom up’ reasoning. Holmes notices on Watson’s finger the marks of silver nitrate, which was originally used as a disinfectant and to cauterise wounds. From this he reasons that Watson has probably resumed his former occupation as a doctor.

Deductive reasoning works the other way round – and is known as ‘top down’ logic. This starts from a general principle then works down to a specific instance. All men are mortal; Socrates was a man; therefore Socrates was mortal. Another term for this process is ‘inference’. This is a minor issue – and many people accept and use the term ‘deduction’ for both forms of reasoning.

Close reading

Close reading is not a skill that can be acquired in just a few minutes. It requires detailed attention to language, wide literary experience, and concentrated reflection on the technical minutiae of texts. These strands of analysis need to be brought together many times over. The skill also involves consideration of a text in at four levels – linguistic, semantic, structural, and cultural. That is – the words of a text in their grammatical sense; what the words mean in the context of the story; what links they might have with the overall structure of the work; and the broader meanings of the text in terms of cultural history.

In one sense close reading is quite like the analytic method used by Sherlock Holmes himself. It squeezes the maximum amount of meaning out of quite small observations. For instance what follows is a close reading of the opening sentence of the story: ‘To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman’. And in fact my observations will focus on just two words in the sentence ‘is’ and ‘the‘.

Linguistic. The use of the present tense – ‘she is’ – strikes an interesting note here. Most fiction is narrated in the past tense, but the present tense is sometimes used to give a sense of immediacy and urgency. This effect is reinforced here by the brevity and directness of the sentence. It starts the story on a bright note.

Semantic. The term ‘is’ also suggests something else here – that the high regard and rivalry between Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler has originated in the past but is still going on in the fictional present of the story. This is reinforced by the addition of the adverb ‘always’. Yet we learn from Watson at the end of the paragraph that she is the late Irene Adler. It is not clear if this means she is dead or that the episode recorded in the story simply took place in the past. Either way, the fact remains that she continues to have an influence on him

Structural. The opening sentence of the story is rather neatly echoed by the sentence with which it ends: ‘When he speaks of Irene Adler … it is always under the honourable title of the woman. This small structural link using repetition introduces an element of symmetry or pattern into the narrative, making it coherent and satisfying. It is an indication that the story is well designed.

Cultural. At the end of the Victorian and the beginning of the Edwardian period there were a number of male writers who produced work which featured a woman who is idealised, inaccessible, mysterious, and often either beautiful or cruel – or both. One thinks of Rider Haggard’s She (1886-87) or many of the stories of Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham.

This was a period in which women were becoming more socially and personally assertive – claiming the right to own property and the right to vote for instance. Holmes’ reverence for Irene Adler – a talented, enterprising, and clever woman – reflects this broader historical development, all in just two words – ‘the woman’.


A Scandal in Bohemia – study resources

A Scandal in Bohemia The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

A Scandal in Bohemia The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

A Scandal in Bohemia The Complete Sherlock Holmes – Penguin – Amazon UK

A Scandal in Bohemia The Complete Sherlock Holmes – Penguin – Amazon US

A Scandal in Bohemia The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Wordsworth – Amazon UK

A Scandal in Bohemia The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Wordsworth – Amazon US

A Scandal in Bohemia Sherlock Holmes – 1939 classic DVD box set – Amazon UK

A Scandal in Bohemia Sherlock – 2014 DVD box set – Amazon UK


A Scandal in Bohemia – explanatory notes
gasogene a soda syphon
vizard a half mask covering just the eyes
cabinet photograph small portrait, which replaced the visiting card
John Hare a famous English actor-manager
iodoform antiseptic compound of iodine

A Scandal in Bohemia – plot summaries

Short summary

Sherlock Holmes, a famous detective, is commissioned by the King of Bohemia to retrieve a potentially compromising photograph from Irene Adler, his former mistress. Holmes sets out in disguise to search her house but is sidetracked when he becomes caught up as a witness at her wedding. Later he returns and tricks her into revealing the hiding place. When he goes back next day however she has left a note saying she perceived his ruse and has emigrated, taking the photograph with her.

Long summary

Doctor Watson calls on his old flat mate in Baker Street, London. Sherlock Holmes is a famous detective with amazing powers of observation. They are visited by the hereditary King of Bohemia who is about to be married but is being blackmailed by Irene Adler, an opera singer with whom he has had an affair. She is threatening to reveal a compromising photograph.

Next day Watson visits Holmes who has been making a reconnaissance of Adler’s house whilst in disguise. Holmes learns that Adler has an admirer Godfrey Norton who is a lawyer. Norton and Adler leave the house hurriedly and Holmes follows them to a church, where he is pressed into acting as a witness to their marriage.

Holmes plans to make an illegal entry into the house the same night, and enlists Watson’s help. Disguised as a clergyman, he is at the house when a pre-arranged fight breaks out in the street. He dashes to protect Adler, and appears to be badly injured. He is taken into the house to recover, where he signals to Watson, who throws a smoke bomb into the house and raises the cry of ‘Fire!’. Ten minutes later, as they leave, Holmes explains how Adler revealed the hiding place of the photo.

Next morning the King accompanies them to Adler’s house, but she has already left England, never to return. She has left a letter for Holmes explaining that she recognised him and his methods, and she has retained the photo as a guarantee against any future action from the King.


A Scandal in Bohemia – further reading

Biography

John Dickson Carr, The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, London: John Murray, 1949.

Michael Coren, The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, London: Bloomsbury, 1995.

John L/ Lellenberg, The Quest for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Southern Illinois University Press, 1987.

Andrew Lycett, Conan Doyle: The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2008.

Pierre Nordon, Conan Doyle: A Biography, London: John Murray, 1966.

Hesketh Pearson, Conan Doyle – His Life and Work, London: Methuen, 1943.

Julian Symons, Portrait of an Artist: Conan Doyle, London: Whizzard Press, 1979.

Criticism

Don Richard Cox, Arthur Conan Doyle, New York: Ungar, 1985.

Owen Dudley Edwards, The Quest for Sherlock Holmes, Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1983.

Trevor Hall, Sherlock Holmes: Ten Literary Studies, London: Duckworth, 1969.

Michael and Mollie Hardwick, The Sherlock Holmes Companion, London: John Murray, 1962.

Howard Haycraft, The Art of the Mystery Story, Caroll & Graf Publishers, 1983.

Harold Orel (ed), Critical Essays on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, G.K. Hall & Co, 1992.

Julian Symons, Bloody Murder, London: Faber, 1972.

Robin Winks, The Historian as Detective, London: Harper Collins, 1969.

Jaqueline A. Yaffe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Boston: Twayne, 1967.


A Scandal in Bohemia – web links

A Scandal in Bohemia Sherlock Holmes at Wikipedia
Comprehensive biographical notes on the detective, extracted from all the stories and novels.

A Scandal in Bohemia The Sherlock Holmes Society of London
An active literary and social society with special events, a journal, meetings, newsletter, and shop.

A Scandal in Bohemia Discovering Sherlock Holmes
Repository at Stanford University – includes facsimile reproductions of stories from the original Strand Magazine

© Roy Johnson 2016


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A Study in Scarlet

August 23, 2018 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study guide, further reading

A Study in Scarlet (1888) marks the first ever appearance in print of Sherlock Holmes, the now world-famous detective. It was Arthur Conan Doyle’s first book to be published – for which he received the meagre sum of £25 for all UK rights. The novel first appeared in Beeton’s Christmas Annual for 1887 and was then republished as a single volume by Ward Lock & Co in July 1888.

A Study in Scarlet


A Study in Scarlet – commentary

Structure

The first part of A Study in Scarlet follows what I have called elsewhere the classic Sherlock Holmes formula. First we are introduced to the racy and enigmatic figure of Holmes himself. He is part-Bohemian, a violin player who relaxes with cocaine, and a freelance consultant detective who outwits Scotland Yard.

Then we are given a demonstration of his amazing powers of observation and clinical analysis. The story is related from the point of view of his colleague Dr John Watson. Next, someone (or a message) arrives at 221B Baker Street with details of a crime that has stumped the police.

Holmes then works out the solution to this problem by a combination of logic, closely observed details, his encyclopedic knowledge of crime, and a process of ratiocination. He then sets out in a series of detective-like escapades to prove that his theory is correct.

It is important to note that the mystery is solved via a process of thinking, the logic of which is usually revealed later. The adventures of pursuing criminals or witnesses are only necessary to prove that his theory is correct.

That is exactly the structure of Part 1 of the narrative of A Study in Scarlet. We are introduced to Holmes; he demonstrates his skills; he is presented with almost a locked-room conundrum – a murdered body in an empty house. He then solves the crime and delivers the culprit in handcuffs.

But in this, his first published work, Conan Doyle was presenting his new hero-sleuth via the form of a novel. This is a literary genre that normally requires more substance than the Sherlock Holmes formula provides. So in Part 2, Conan Doyle switches to what is essentially the ‘back story’ that has led to the crimes being committed.

This switch requires not only a change of location and time – from urban London boroughs to the plains of Utah earlier in the century. It is also a change in narrative mode from John Watson’s first person account to an impersonal third-person history of events. This is done without any subsequent explanation of how these two parts of the narrative are related.

The new topics covered in Part 2 introduce a catastrophic rift in the coherence of A Study in Scarlet, from which the novel never really recovers. We are introduced to scene settings of what was then the American ‘Frontier’ which might have been lifted straight out of a Fenimore Cooper novel. There are lengthy explanations for the strange beliefs and behaviour of the Mormons (the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints). The story-line also includes internal rivalries amongst the religious settlers which will explain later complexities in the plot.

This back story is simply too long-winded and complex, the timescale too regressive, and the introduction of significant new characters too disruptive to produce a satisfying whole. The novel could easily have been rescued by eliminating all the back story of Part 2, and simply following the arrest of Jefferson Hope with the explication Holmes gives in the final chapter of the novel.

It seems that Conan Doyle was aware of this weakness, for at a later date he described his own production as ‘having much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition by Euclid’. Certainly he did not make the same mistake again when introducing Holmes as a character in the novel-length work The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902). This work maintains its unity of characters, theme, location, and dramatic continuity.

The explanation

Most stories featuring Sherlock Holmes turn on his ability to interpret small details of evidence overlooked by others – particularly his rivals Lestrade and Gregson of the Yard. He deals with the first set of clues in A Study in Scarlet plausibly enough. The dead body in an empty room and the writing in blood on the wall provide him with clues that the muderer was tall, strong, that the blood was the murderer’s, that poison was involved, and that the word ‘RACHE’ on the wall is German.

These are all typical elements in a Holmes story. But Conan Doyle, perhaps because he was tackling a novel or perhaps because this was Holmes’s first fictional appearance, pushes these analytic processes to a level which strains credulity. We are asked to believe that Holmes can recognise and discriminate amongst the footprints of several people who have walked across a muddy pathway – not once in the same direction, but more than once in both directions.

Jefferson Hope (the murderer), Enoch Drebber (the victim), constable John Rance, and his colleague Murcher all trample across the path leading to the empty house on the night of the murder. But we are asked to believe that Holmes is able to accurately work out the sequence of their comings and goings, as well as similar movements of Hope’s horse-drawn cab.

These analyses are simply not credible – even making allowances for what is essentially a work of popular fiction. Some of the later Holmes stories have similar weaknesses, but they are piled on to an unacceptable degree in A Study in Scarlet. Together with the structural flaw examined above, they render the novel an interesting first attempt or a flawed prototype for the successful shorter fictions that were to follow.

Deduction or induction?

The most amazing thing about Holmes is the manner in which he is able to combine acute observation with an incisive system of reasoning to reach revealing insights and surprisingly deft conclusions. It is a method of ratiocination clearly modelled on Edgar Allen Poe’s detective Auguste Dupin.

Amongst critics there is often disagreement on the question of Holmes’ methods of detection. He observes very small details of a person’s physical appearance or clothing, and from these details arrives at a general understanding of their occupation, their habits, or their recent movements. This method of detection illustrates his acute powers of observation and often reveals his encyclopedic knowledge of arcane topics – such as being able to idetify different brands of cigar from their ashes.

In Watson’s narrative, Doyle sometimes calls Holmes’ method ‘deduction’ and other times ‘analysis’. Watson (and by implication Conan Doyle) is employing the term ‘deduction’ in its everyday sense of seeing a relationship between one thing and another which doesn’t at first seem to be connected to it.

But the method, strictly speaking, is ‘induction’ – a form of reasoning which derives general principles from specific observation. This is also known as ‘bottom up’ reasoning.

Deductive reasoning works the other way round – and is known as ‘top down’ logic. This starts from a general principle then works down to a specific instance. All men are mortal; Socrates was a man; therefore Socrates was mortal. Another term for this process is ‘inference’. This is a minor issue – and many people accept and use the term ‘deduction’ for both forms of reasoning. Holmes eventually explains his method to Watson as one of analytic reasoning:

Most people, if you describe a train of events to them, will tell you what the result would be … There are few people however, who, if you told them the result, would be able to evolve from their own inner consciousness what the steps were which led up to that result. This power is what I mean when I talk of reasoning backwards, or analytically.


A Study in Scarlet – study resources

The best current editions of the Sherlock Holmes novels and stories are those published in the Oxford World’s Classics paperback series. Each volume contains a critical introduction, a note on the text, a bibliography of further reading, a biographical chronology of Conan Doyle, and most importantly a series of explanatory notes giving historical, geographical, and scientific information about details mentioned in the text.

A Study in Scarlet – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

A Study in Scarlet – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

A Study in Scarlet – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

A Study in Scarlet – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

The Complete Sherlock Holmes – Amazon UK

Complete Works of Conan Doyle – Amazon UK


A Study in Scarlet – plot summary

Part 1

1.   Dr John Watson has retired injured from the army. He is introduced to Sherlock Holmes with a view to their sharing lodgings. Holmes is a mercurial character who dabbles in scientific experiments.

2.   Holmes has a patchy grasp of general knowledge but a profound understanding of forensic science and anatomy. He has written papers on the philosophy of deduction and works as a freelance consultant detective.

3.   Holmes is summoned by letter to assist in an unsolved murder in Brixton. He examines the dead body in an empty room whilst Scotland Yard detectives Lestrade and Gregson theorise about an explanation. There is rivalry between Holmes and the detectives – and between each other.

4.   Holmes delivers to Watson a working explanation of the crime, devised from a minute examination of the room and its contents. They interview the policeman who discovered the body, who confirms Holmes’ description of the potential murderer.

5.   Holmes advertises for the owner of a woman’s ring found at the crime scene. It is answered by an old woman who then gives them the slip when pursued.

6.   The newspapers give a variety of accounts of the crime. Gregson arrives at Baker Street claiming he has arrested the murderer – the son of the murdered man’s landlady. His rival Lestrade arrives to announce the murder of Drebber’s secretary, Stargerson.

7.   Lestrade describes tracking down Stargerson and finding him murdered. Holmes claims from the details now established that he has a complete answer to the mystery. He tests this by poisoning a dog. He is challenged by Lestrade and Gregson to reveal his findings, and when a cab driver is summoned, Holmes pronounces him the murderer – Jefferson Hope.

Part 2

1.   Many years earlier, John Ferrier and his adopted daughter Lucy are lost in the wilderness of Utah, USA. They are dying of thirst and starvation, but are eventually rescued by a caravan of Mormons.

2.   Brigham Young establishes the Church of Latter-Day Saints in Salt Lake City. After many years Ferrier becomes a successful and rich farmer. Lucy is courted by Jefferson Hope, a hunter and frontiersman.

3.   Brigham Young insists that because she is still single, Lucy should marry one of the Four Elders. Ferrier is given a month to decide.

4.   Elders Drebber and Stargerson menace Ferrier with their claims for Lucy. With only two days left, Jefferson Hope arrives and rescues Ferrier and Lucy. They set off for Carson City in Nevada.

5.   When Hope goes hunting for food, he returns to find that Ferrier has been killed and Lucy abducted by the Mormons. Returning to Salt Lake City, Hope learns that Stargerson shot Ferrier and Lucy has been forcibly married to Drebber.

When Lucy dies a month later, Hope seizes her wedding ring and begins a long pursuit of Drebber and Stargerson, seeking vengeance.

6.   Watson then reports the confession of the captured Hope. He followed the two Elders to London and stalked them as a cab driver. He takes Drebber as a drunken passenger and presents him with a box of pills, some of which are poisoned. Drebber takes one and dies. Hope then goes to Stangerson’s hotel and after a struggle stabs him in the heart.

7.   Hope dies in prison. Holmes explains to Watson how he analysed details of the case. Lestrade and Gregson get all the credit for solving the crime.


A Study in Scarlet – characters
Dr John Watson a retired army medical officer
Sherlock Holmes a freelance consultant detective
Lestrade a Scotland Yard detective
Tobias Gregson a Scotland Yard detective
Enoch Drebber a Mormon Elder who marries Lucy
Joseph Stargerson a Mormon Elder, Drebber’s ‘secretary’
Jefferson Hope an American frontiersman and hunter
John Ferrier a frontiersman who becomes a rich farmer
Lucy Ferrier his adopted daughter

© Roy Johnson 2018


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An Imaginative Woman

May 1, 2012 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

An Imaginative Woman was first published as a serial in Pall Mall Magazine in 1894. It was originally part of Wessex Tales (1896) but Hardy moved it into his collection Life’s Little Ironies (1912) for reasons that he explains rather cryptically in his preface, but which throw some light on how he meant it to be understood:

turning as it does upon a trick of Nature … a physical possibility that may attach to a wife of vivid imaginings, as is well known to medical practitioners and other observers of such manifestations.

There isn’t actually any ‘medical’ issue involved in the denouement of the story, so Hardy seems to be indulging in a little teasing provocation in this explanatory note. But it does hint at the crucial dramatic irony on which the story hinges that is discussed in the critical commentary below. It’s one of a number of stories Hardy wrote on the theme of injudicious or unsatisfactory marriages – For Conscience’ Sake and To Please His Wife are other typical examples. And of course Hardy had his own experience as first hand evidence of early-life romances which can lead into middle-aged misery.

An Imaginative Woman

Thomas Hardy


An Imaginative Woman – critical commentary

Irony – I

Contemporary readers can be forgiven if they do not spot the very delicate but crucial irony that Hardy inserts into the pivotal scene in the story when Ella undresses herself for a quasi-erotic solitary contemplation of Trewe’s photograph. Her rapture is interrupted when her husband Marchmill returns unexpectedly, and after refusing her hint that he sleep in another room (a passage from the original manuscript omitted from The Pall Mall Magazine publication) he kisses her and says “I wanted to be with you tonight.”

The very understated implication is that they have sex together that particular night. It was impossible to be explicit about such matters, writing at this time. So Marchmill’s final suspicion at the end of the story that his wife has been unfaithful to him during their holiday is doubly ironic. It was something she was trying desperately to achieve – but failing to do so. But the major point is that the child is certainly Marchmill’s, even though he rejects it.

The reader knows that Ella never gets to see or meet Trewe, even though she puts on his clothes, worships his photograph, and sleeps in his bed. Marchmill on the other hand is oblivious to his wife’s feelings and aspirations throughout the story, yet when he finally does come to feel a form of retrospective jealousy his suspicions lead him to a conclusion which is understandable but false.

This might seem to be playing fast and loose with the reader, but Hardy was writing under the very severe restrictions exercised by publishers at the time. It should be remembered that he stopped writing novels because of the outrage generated by Jude the Obscure. He turned his attention to poetry instead, and is now regarded as one of the greatest English poets of the period.

Irony – II

A second example of irony is that Trewe’s last poems were entitled Lyrics to a Woman Unknown, and he leaves a letter addressed to a friend in which he explains his yearning for a woman he has not actually met:

I have long dreamt of such an unattainable creature, as you know; and she, this undiscoverable, elusive one, inspired my last volume: the imaginary woman alone

So, at the same time that Ella has been pining after a Trewe she had never met, he has been searching for a female soul mate. They never actually meet; neither of them get what they want; and they both end up dead. You can see why Hardy is renowned for his tragic pessimism.

A curious feature

Robert Trewe commits suicide in the story by shooting himself in the head with a revolver – and yet he is buried in a cemetery. In the nineteenth century the stigma against suicide meant that the church would not normally allow someone who had taken their own life to be buried in consecrated ground. Hardy was well aware of these social prohibitions, as he had already demonstrated in Far from the Madding Crowd when Fanny is forced to bury her illegitimate dead child outside the graveyard. So it is slightly puzzling that he include such a scene in this story – unless he was merely reflecting the loosening of a formerly rigid social convention.


An Imaginative Woman – study resources

An Imaginative Woman Life’s Little Ironies – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon UK

An Imaginative Woman Life’s Little Ironies – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon US

An Imaginative Woman Life’s Little Ironies – Wordsworth Classics edition – Amazon UK

An Imaginative Woman The Complete Works of Thomas Hardy – Kindle eBook

An Imaginative Woman Life’s Little Ironies – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

An Imaginative Woman Life’s Little Ironies – audiobook version at Project Gutenberg

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

Red button The Complete Critical Guide to Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

Red button Authors in Context – Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

Red button Oxford Reader’s Companion to Hardy – Amazon UK

An Imaginative Woman


An Imaginative Woman – plot summary

An Imaginative WomanElla Marchmill is a romantic young woman with an artistic temperament and an unfulfilled personal life. She is bored with her marriage, and has written and published poetry under the pseudonym John Ivy. On holiday with her husband and three children in Solentsea (Southsea) they find lodgings normally occupied by a young poet Robert Trewe, who moves out to accommodate them.

Ella finds scraps of poetry written on the walls of Trewe’s room, reads the books he has left there, and becomes caught up in a romantic dream of their being soul mates, even though she has never met him or even seen him.

Various arrangements are made whereby he might call at the lodgings, giving her the chance to meet him, but they all come to nothing. Then she writes to him under her pseudonym and sends him some of her poems.

The Marchmills return home, and a family friend who is on holiday with Trewe is invited to stay en route back home. The friend arrives, but Trewe does not, apologising that he is in a depressed state of mind.

Shortly afterwards, Trewe commits suicide. Ella travels secretly to the burial, and is followed there by her husband, who is tolerant of her behaviour,

Ella subsequently has a fourth child, and dies as a result. Her husband finds that she has kept a photograph of Trewe and a lock of his hair as a romantic memento. He compares the hair with that of his new young son and falsely concludes that there has been a liaison between his wife and the poet whilst they were on holiday. He rejects the child.


Principal characters
William Marchmill a gunsmith from the English midlands
Ella Marchmill his wife, a romantic and unfulfilled woman (30)
Mrs Hooper a widowed boarding house landlady
Robert Trewe a romantic poet (30)

Map of Wessex

Hardy’s WESSEX


Further reading

Red button John Bayley, An Essay on Hardy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Red button Penny Boumelha, Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form, Brighton: Harvester, 1982.

Red button Kristin Brady, The Short Stories of Thomas Hardy, London: Macmillan, 1982.

Red button L. St.J. Butler, Alternative Hardy, London: Macmillan, 1989.

Red button Raymond Chapman, The Language of Thomas Hardy, London: Macmillan, 1990.

Red button R.G.Cox, Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1970.

Red button Ralph W.V. Elliot, Thomas Hardy’s English, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984.

Red button James Gibson (ed), The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, London, 1976.

Red button Florence Emily Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy, London: Macmillan, 1962. (This is more or less Hardy’ s autobiography, since he told his wife what to write.)

Red button P. Ingham, Thomas Hardy: A Feminist Reading, Brighton: Harvester, 1989.

Red button P.Ingham, The Language of Class and Gender: Transformation in the English Novel, London: Routledge, 1995,

Red button Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist, London: Bodley Head, 1971.

Red button Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006. (This is the definitive biography.)

Red button Michael Millgate and Richard L. Purdy (eds), The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978-

Red button R. Morgan, Women and Sexuality in the Novels of Thomas Hardy, London: Routledge, 1988.

Red button Harold Orel (ed), Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings, London, 1967.

Red button F.B. Pinion, A Thomas Hardy Companion, London: Macmillan, 1968.

Red button Norman Page, Thomas Hardy, London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1977.

Red button Rosemary Sumner, Thomas Hardy: Psychological Novelist, London: Macmillan, 1981.

Red button Richard H. Taylor, The Personal Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, London, 1978.

Red button Merryn Williams, A Preface to Hardy, London: Longman, 1976.


Hardy’s study

Thomas Hardy's study

reconstructed in Dorchester museum


Other works by Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Tess of the d'UrbervillesTess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) is probably the most popular of Hardy’s late, great novels. The sub-title is ‘A Pure Woman’, and it is a story which explores the tragic consequences of a young milkmaid who becomes the victim of the men she encounters. First she falls for the spiritual but flawed Angel Clare, and then the physical but limited Alec Durberville takes advantage of her. This novel has some of the most beautiful and the most harrowing depictions of rural working conditions which reveal Hardy as a passionate advocate for those who work the land. It also has a wonderfully symbolic climax at Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain. There is poetry in almost every page.
Thomas Hardy Tess of the d'Urbervilles Buy the book at Amazon UK
Thomas Hardy Tess of the d'Urbervilles Buy the book at Amazon US

The WoodlandersThe Woodlanders (1887) Giles Winterbourne, an honest woodsman, suffers with the many tribulations of his selfless love for Grace Melbury, a woman above his station in this classic tale of the West Country. She marries the new doctor, Edred Fitzpiers, but leaves him when she learns he has been unfaithful. She turns instead to Giles, who nobly allows her to sleep in his house during stormy weather, whilst he sleeps outside and brings on his own death. It’s often said that the hero of this novel is the woods themselves – so deeply moving is Hardy’s account of the timbered countryside which provides the backdrop for another human tragedy and a study of rural life in transition.
Thomas Hardy The Woodlanders Buy the book at Amazon UK
Thomas Hardy The Woodlanders Buy the book at Amazon US

Wessex TalesWessex Tales Don’t miss the skills of Hardy as a writer of shorter fictions. None of his short stories are really short, but they are beautifully crafted. This is the first volume of his tales in which he was seeking to record the customs, superstitions, and beliefs of old Wessex before they were lost to living memory. Yet whilst dealing with traditional beliefs, they also explore very modern concerns of difficult and often thwarted human passions which he developed more extensively in his longer works.
Thomas Hardy Wessex Tales Buy the book at Amazon UK
Thomas Hardy Wessex Tales Buy the book at Amazon US


Thomas Hardy – web links

Hardy at Mantex Thomas Hardy at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major novels, book reviews. bibliographies, critiques of the shorter fiction, and web links.

Thomas Hardy complete works The Thomas Hardy Collection
The complete novels, stories, and poetry – Kindle eBook single file download for £1.29 at Amazon.

Hardy eTexts Thomas Hardy at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of digital formats.

Hardy at Wikipedia Thomas Hardy at Wikipedia
Biographical notes, social background, the novels and literary themes, poetry, religious beliefs and influence, biographies and criticism.

Thomas Hardy web links The Thomas Hardy Society
Dorset-based site featuring educational activities, a biennial conference, a journal (three times a year) with links to the texts of all the major works.

Thomas Hardy web links The Thomas Hardy Association
American-based site with photos and academic resources. Be prepared to search and drill down to reach the more useful materials.

Hardy at IMDB Thomas Hardy on the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors, actors, production features, box office, film reviews, and even quizzes.

Thomas Hardy web links Thomas Hardy – online literary criticism
Small collection of academic papers and articles ‘favoring signed articles by recognized scholars and articles published in peer-reviewed sources’.

Red button Thomas Hardy’s Wessex
Evolution of Wessex, contemporary reviews, maps, bibliography, links to other web sites, and history.

© Roy Johnson 2012


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Filed Under: Thomas Hardy Tagged With: An Imaginative Woman, English literature, Literary studies, The Short Story, Thomas Hardy

Armadale

February 10, 2017 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Armadale (1864) was the follow-up to two previously successful novels by Wilkie Collins – The Woman in White (1860) and No Name (1862). It didn’t result in quite so many magazine sales, but it certainly helped to cement his position of the master of the ‘sensation novel’ – of which this was his longest. He was paid £5,000 for the complete work – money that went to support the two separate families he maintained in London’s fashionable West End at the same time

Armadale


Armadale – a note on the text

Armadale first appeared as twenty serial episodes in the Cornhill Magazine between November 1864 and June 1865. It then published in two volumes by Smith, Elder in May 1865. There were minor revisions to the text, and Collins added a preface and even an explanatory appendix to cover some of the issues he wished to address in the novel.

An American edition of the novel appeared as a serial in Harper’s Monthly Magazine from December 1864 to July 1865, then a one-volume edition published by Harper in 1866.

Collins also produced a stage dramatisation of the story, though this was never given a live production. He wrote this to protect his copyright, because at that time there was nothing to prevent pirated versions of a story appearing on stage – unless a separate version had been written by its original author.

This phenomenon of publishing in a variety of genres also illustrates the commercial enterprise of writers such as Collins and his friend Charles Dickens. They were keen to exploit all possible versions of their works – as newspaper and magazine serials, in volume form as novels, and as stage productions. This is not unlike contemporary dramas which may appear as television serials, cinema movies, novelizations, and boxed sets of CDs, as well as in downloadable digital formats.


Armadale – critical commentary

The sensation novel

Wilkie Collins, along with his contemporary Mary Elizabeth Braddon, became famous for the sensation novel in the 1860s. He made his name with The Woman in White (1860) and she had a best-seller with Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). These were novels that introduced elements of mystery, suspense, and crime into otherwise ordinary social settings.

They were also designed to titillate and shock readers by including topics that skirted as closely as possible to what was acceptable in popular fiction at the time. These topics included illegitimacy, secret marriages, forged wills, theft, contested inheritance, suicide, and even murder.

Armadale has its fair share of this type of subject matter embedded in the plot, which includes instances of concealed identity, spying, personation, secret marriage, drugs, attempted and real suicide, plus murder.

Names and identities

From its very start the novel is concerned with the relationship between names and personal identity. For instance the principal character is called Lydia Gwilt – a woman who weaves herself and her influence around several of the other characters in the novel.

But Lydia Gwilt is not her real name. Her original or true name is not known, She is a foundling and even she does not know what her name should be (Book the Third, Chapter XV). Her name has been attached to her by others.

As a result of her first marriage she becomes Mrs Waldron, and then through her second marriage Mrs Manuel – though we know that this marriage is illegitimate, because Manuel is still married to someone else at the time.

She then contracts a bigamous marriage with Midwinter – an illegal union because Manuel is still alive. And Ozias Midwinter isn’t his real name either. He is actually called Allan Armadale, a name which Lydia Gwilt wants to acquire so as to pose as the widow of the ‘other’ Allan Armadale after murdering him and claiming his money.

It is not surprising that this potpourri of names, identities, and relationships eventually leads her into states of illegality, then later into psychological breakdown and eventually to her suicide.

The villainous character

Sensation novels often have dubious, devious, villainous, or criminal characters – but Lydia Gwilt pushes the boundaries of credibility. She has a completely irregular provenance – with a past history in which she has manipulated men, and been ill-treated by them in her turn. She uses her sexual allure to work on the elderly and decrepit servant Bashwood, who is so besotted with her that even after discovering he is being manipulated, he ends up in a semi-demented state, imagining that he is about to marry her.

Yet Bashwood might be considered to have a lucky escape, because there is evidence that she murdered her first husband Waldron. She makes two attempts to poison Armadale in pursuit of his wealth; she is a serial bigamist; she is involved in deception and fraud; she is a drug user. addicted to laudanum; she is hostile and vindictive to anybody who stands in the way of her plans; and she both attempts and eventually commits suicide.

The one feature that redeems this stereotyped catalogue of villainy is that towards the end of the novel Wilkie Collins gives her a streak of sympathy and appreciation towards Midwinter, whom she perceives as a fellow outsider. She has married him in order to share his real name (Allan Armadale) but gradually she dimly realises that she loves him for his own sake.

Weaknesses

The enormous length and complexity of the plot makes unusually severe demands on the reader. This is a novel in which there are no fewer than four characters with the same name – Allan Armadale – and the relationship between them requires prodigious feats of memory on the part of the reader, because the connections are briefly adumbrated in the first pages of the novel then hardly mentioned again throughout the eight hundred pages that follow.

There are also several strands in the plot which first appear significant, but are then dropped or disappear without trace. For instance, the relationships of the ‘original’ Allan Armadale and the person who takes up his name (Fergus Ingelby) is lost in obscurity after the Prologue to the main story. The same is true of their marriages and their sons – also called Allan Armadale.

At the other end of the novel, Armadale’s relationship with Eleanor Milroy appears to be woven into the over-dramatic finale when she is transported to the Sanatorium, in a state of mental shock following the (false) news of Armadale’s death. The highly over-wrought sequence of attempted murder and switched rooms involving Armadale, Midwinter, and Lydia Gwilt brings the novel to its climax – but Wilkie Collins appears to forget that the other member of this quartet is also on the premises. Eleanor is simply not mentioned again until she makes a brief reappearance in the Epilogue as Armadale’s wife.

It also has to be said that the latter part of the novel collapses into Grand Guignol melodrama when all four principal characters are locked overnight into a mental asylum. Lydia Gwilt as the arch villain is plotting to murder Allan Armadale with poisonous gas, but Midwinter and Armadale have switched bedrooms. Lydia therefore fails in her quest and ends up (almost) poisoning her own husband – before killing herself.

Wilkie Collins also has the annoying habit of relating some scenes twice. He will deliver a sequence of events as a (very intrusive) third person narrator – but then have his characters go over the same events again, either in discussion or as explanation to each other. This might be a deliberate element of the serial form – reminding readers of ‘the story so far’ – but it is irritating for readers to be told something they already know.

These diffuse strands of plotting might be useful to sustain readers’ interest during their consumption of a serialized fiction – but they do not help to create the tight cohesion and thematic density that we associate with an intellectually satisfying novel. However, it is worth noting that the two cultural forms of the literary and the popular serial novel were coexistent at that time.


Armadale – study resources

Armadale Armadale – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Armadale Armadale – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

Armadale Armadale – Independent Publishers – Amazon UK

Armadale Armadale – Independent Publishers – Amazon US

Basil The Complete Works of Wilkie Collins – Kindle eBook

Basil Armadale – eBook formats at Gutenberg


Armadale

1879 edition


Armadale – plot summary

Prologue

I. A Scottish solicitor Alexander Neal and the paralyzed Englishman Allan Armadale arrive in the German spa town of Wildbad.

II. The local doctor asks a reluctant Neal to take English dictation from the dying Armadale, who will not trust the job to his beautiful wife.

III. Neal reads out the start of a long letter Armadale is writing as a confession to his son. His original name is Allan Wrentmore and he has inherited a fortune at the expense of Allan Armadale – whose name he must take. The original Armadale steals his bride-to-be but then is drowned during a storm at sea. Wrentmore reveals that he locked Armadale in his cabin as the ship was sinking.

The Wrentmore Armadale marries in Trinidad then goes to Europe where he is dying, comforted only by his son who is also called Allan Armadale. The confession is rounded off as a warning to his son to avoid any contact with other people in the drama (particularly the original Allan Armadale’s son) and is posted off to solicitors in London.

Part the First

I. Twenty years later the Reverend Brock looks back as tutor to the young Allan Armadale and would-be suitor to Mrs Armadale. When an advert appears in the Times seeking information on Allan Armadale she quashes all interest in it.

When brain-fevered outcast Ozias Midwinter appears, Allan Armadale assumes complete financial responsibility for him. Mrs Armadale is suspicious of the outcast and thinks he might be the ‘real’ Allan Armadale in disguise. She is also visited by her former young maid (Lydia Gwilt) whom she regards as pernicious. Shortly afterwards she falls ill and dies.

Another newspaper advert appears from the London lawyers requesting information on Armadale. Brock and Armadale go to Paris where they learn that as a result of three family deaths, Armadale has inherited his wealthy uncle’s estate in Norfolk.

A mysterious young woman (Lydia Gwilt) attempts suicide but is rescued. Armadale takes Brock and Midwinter on a cruise to the Isle of Man where Midwinter reveals to Brock his true identity as Allan Armadale.

II. Midwinter relates how his mother married Alexander Neal who beat him, and how he escaped with the rogue gypsy who gave him his odd name. He lives as a vagabond, ends up in jail, then spends two years working for a miserly bookseller. He responds to the Times advert and receives a salary from his share of the inheritance. Because of the kindness Armadale has shown to him, he decides to stick to the assumed name of Midwinter and ignore his father’s injunction to avoid Armadale. Midwinter burns his father’s confessional warning letter.

III. Midwinter and Armadale spend a desultory day on the Isle of Man where they meet the local doctor Mr Hawberry and go for a midnight sail in his boat. They end up stranded on the wreck of La Grace de Dieu, the vessel on which the original murder took place.

IV. They find themselves outside the cabin where Midwinter’s father killed Armadale’s father. Armadale is unaware of its history. Midwinter is tempted to reveal the truth, but feels deeply conflicted. Armadale has a dream whilst on the wreck , and later they are rescued by Hawberry. 

V. Armadale’s strange dream is interpreted by Hawberry using rational arguments from the previous day’s events. Midwinter remains convinced that the dream is prophetic.

Book the Second

I. Midwinter is worried about being made steward at Thorpe-Ambrose estate. The procuress Mrs Oldershaw advises Lydia Gwilt to pursue Armadale as revenge for her ill-treatment by his mother. Major Milroy takes up tenancy of the estate cottage with his invalid wife and young daughter. Lydia plans to apply for a job as their governess.

II. Armadale inspects his new estate. He meets Miss Milroy and instantly falls in love with her. He meets her father, who advertises for a governess.

III. Midwinter finds Armadale’s mother’s books in the room featured in Armadale’s dream. Armadale has insulted the old family solicitor and is approached by a new partnership in the town. The local gentry regard him unfavourably.

IV. Midwinter encounters grievance at the Milroy cottage. The locals do not like Armadale’s radical new attitudes. Armadale flirts with Miss Milroy and starts to entertain ideas of marriage.

V. Mrs Oldershaw tries to baffle Reverend Brock. Lydia Gwilt is in hiding, but is determined to marry Allan Armadale as an act of revenge. Mrs Oldershaw changes her name to Manderville and employs a maid to act as a decoy for Lydia.

VI. Armadale and an ebullient Midwinter visit the Milroy cottage. Midwinter creates an embarrassing scene, and Major Milroy exhibits his animated clock.

VII. Allan invites Eleanor to a picnic. Bashwood recounts to Midwinter the story of his disastrous family life. Lydia Gwilt is invited to the picnic when she arrives.

VIII. There is a boating party excursion onto the Norfolk Broads, with courtship and comic interludes. 

IX. The party returns to Thorpe-Ambrose, but Armadale stays behind to meet Midwinter, where he has a re-enactment of his dream when he encounters Lydia Gwilt.

X. Midwinter fears that Armadale is fulfilling his own prophetic dream. Lydia Gwilt’s arrival immediately upsets the Milroys. Midwinter checks on Lydia, but uses a flawed description of her supplied by Brock. Because of this he abandons his superstitious belief in the prophetic dream.

XI. Lydia Gwilt is in danger of being exposed, and she rightly believes that Mrs Milroy suspects her. She reports that Midwinter is in love with her. Mrs Oldershaw deploys her decoy maid to deceive Brock.

XII. Midwinter has banished all his earlier qualms about the dream and installed Armadale in his mother’s old room. Armadale announces to a mortified Midwinter that he is in love with Lydia Gwilt.

XIII. Armadale and Midwinter discuss Lydia. Armadale knows very little about her background. He wants Midwinter’s help, but because he too is in love with Lydia, Midwinter leaves Thorpe-Ambrose.

Book the Third

I. The invalid Mrs Milroy is fuelled by a jealous suspicion towards Lydia. She opens her mail and thinks she is trying to seduce the Major.

II. Mrs Milroy shares her hatred of Lydia with her daughter Eleanor, who reveals to her the connection between Lydia and Armadale.

III. Mrs. Milroy plots to send Armadale to London in search of further information on Lydia and her background which they both want.

IV. Armadale and lawyer Pedgift Junior go to London in search of Mrs Manderville, not realising that her real name is Oldershaw.

V. Armadale and Pedgift Junior trace the connection with Lydia Gwilt to a brothel in Pimlico. Armadale abandons the search but is pestered for evidence from the Milroys. The scandal of a challenge to Lydia Gwilt’s virtue without any evidence is made public in Thorpe-Ambrose.

VI. Pedgift Senior advises Armadale against Lydia Gwilt. She makes two attempts to visit Allan, but Pedgift insists that she is refused. Armadale is very reluctant to pursue further enquiries.

VII. Pedgift then reveals that Lydia has threatened Eleanor Milroy, and Armadale is persuaded to let Pedgift set a spy on tracing Lydia’s movements.

VII. Lydia knows she is being followed and she employs a love-smitten Bashwood as an informer. She meets Midwinter on his return to Thorpe-Ambrose and lies to him that she has been misunderstood.

VIII. Armadale and Midwinter argue about Lydia Gwilt – and in doing so re-enact a scene from the prophetic dream.

IX. Bashwood reports to Lydia on the argument and on Armadale’s refusal to accept Pedgift’s advice. Midwinter vows to leave Thorpe-Ambrose forever – but he writes to Lydia Gwilt and falls into her seductive trap by revealing his true identity.

X. Lydia Gwilt’s diary summarises the plot as she records Midwinter’s confession. She despises Allan but is attracted to Midwinter as a fellow outsider. She eavesdrops on Armadale’s marriage proposal to Eleanor and receives letters from Midwinter. She devises a plan of a secret marriage to Midwinter after which she will claim to be the widow of Allan Armadale following his death.

XI. Armadale and Eleanor discuss the legal requirements for a marriage. He decides to go to London to seek advice.

XII. Armadale and Lydia Gwilt leave for London on the same train – observed by the jealous Bashwood, who vows to seek revenge on Lydia Gwilt.

XIII. Bashwood applies to Pedgift, but gets little help. He then contacts his son, the private detective whom Mrs Oldershaw has also consulted.

XIV. Lydia checks the legalities of marrying Midwinter in her maiden name of Gwilt, then invents a false biography for herself. Major Milroy imposes a six month delay on Eleanor’s marriage to Armadale. Lydia notices she is being followed by spies, and she realises that she is in love with Midwinter.

XV. Bashwood Junior reports to his father on Lydia’s background. She was married to Waldron who died of poison. She was found guilty, then acquitted, then imprisoned for theft. Next she married Manuel, who absconded with all her money. The Bashwoods try to catch up with her but they are too late. Lydia marries Midwinter.

Book the Fourth

I. Two months later in Naples Lydia feels that her marriage has already gone sour. Midwinter is working as a journalist. They are joined by Armadale, who annoys her with his enthusiasm for a new yacht and his concern for Eleanor.

II. Lydia sees her former husband Manuel at the opera. She tries to poison Armadale, but he rejects the drink because she has added brandy, to which he is allergic. Manuel tries to blackmail Lydia, but she fobs him off with a scheme to murder Armadale for his money. Armadale sets out on his yacht, but Midwinter and Lydia do not go with him.

III. A month later Lydia is in London and Midwinter is in Turin. Armadale’s yacht sinks in a storm at sea. Lydia is worried about the handwriting on her marriage certificate.

She turns against Midwinter and seeks help from the abortionist ‘Doctor’ Downward. He agrees to be a fake witness for an exorbitant fee. She is visited by Bashwood Senior whom she sends back to Thorpe-Ambrose as a spy. Bashwood reappears with the news that Armadale is alive. Downward constructs a plan to lure Armadale into the Sanatorium he has bought.

Book the Last

I. Downward tries to persuade Lydia to enter the Sanatorium as a patient. She plays for time. Midwinter arrives in London unexpectedly.

II. Bashwood encounters Midwinter at the railway station and causes him some alarm. Midwinter follows Bashwood to Lydia and confronts her. When she reveals that she is not his legal wife, he collapses.

III. Lydia escapes into the Sanatorium. Downward shows visitors round the establishment and talks to Lydia about poisons. Midwinter meets Armadale at the station. They go to the Sanatorium where Eleanor is recovering from the shock of the news of Armadale’s death. Lydia plans to poison Armadale, who switches rooms with Midwinter. Lydia discovers the switch, saves Midwinter, then kills herself instead.

Epilogue

I. Nobody is found guilty, although Pedgift senior suspects the bogus doctor. Bashwood goes insane, and imagines he is about to be married to Lydia.

II. Midwinter is finally reconciled with Armadale who marries Eleanor. Midwinter also accepts Reverend Brock’s quasi religious views on the question of Destiny and free will.


Armadale – principal characters
Allan Armadale Englishman dying with paralysis (real name Wrentmore)
Allan Armadale his son,
Mrs Armadale his mixed-race beautiful wife
Alexander Neal a dour Scottish solicitor
Fergus Ingelby the original Allan Armadale
Mr Hawberry an Isle of Man doctor
Rev Decimus Brock young Armadale’s tutor
Lydia Gwilt an attractive foundling, governess, and poisoner
Maria Oldershaw Lydia’s confidante, a procuress
Major David Milroy Armadale’s cottage tenant
Anne Milroy his invalid wife
Eleanor Milroy his pretty young daughter
Felix Bashwood an elderly love-struck clerk
Mr Pedgift a clever elderly lawyer
Augustus Pedgift his son, a bon-viveur

Armadale – further reading

William M. Clarke, The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins, London: Ivan R. Dee, 1988.

Tamar Heller, Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.

Winifred Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.

Sue Lonoff, Wilkie Collins and his Victorian Readers: A Study in the Rhetoric of Authorship, New York: AMS Press, 1982.

Catherine Peters, The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.

Walter C. Phillips, Dickens, Reade, and Collins: Sensation Novelists, New York: Library of Congress, 1919.

Lynn Pykett, Wilkie Collins: New Casebooks, London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 1998.

Nicholas Rance, Wilkie Collins and Other Sensation Novelists: Walking the Moral Hospital, London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 1991.

© Roy Johnson 2017


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Filed Under: Wilkie Collins Tagged With: English literature, Literary studies, The novel, Wilkie Collins

Arthur Conan Doyle

August 31, 2016 by Roy Johnson

a short biography, video presentation & further reading

Arthur Conan Doyle was born in 1859 in Edinburgh and educated at Stonyhurst College in Lancashire – a public school run by Jesuits (alumni include Gerard Manley Hopkins and J.R.R. Tolkien). From there he went back to Edinburgh University to study medicine, meeting in the process Doctor Joseph Bell, a consulting surgeon whose powers of deduction and induction were later used as the basis for the creation of Sherlock Holmes. He also began to develop a youthful enthusiasm for writing around this time. In 1880 he signed on as ship’s surgeon on an Arctic whaling expedition, then after returning several months later, completed his degree and sailed off again, this time to Africa.

Arthur Conan Doyle

He set up his first practice as a doctor in Portsmouth, and in the long periods spent waiting for patients wrote stories which were published anonymously. In 1885 he married the sister of one of his patients and the year after wrote the book in which Sherlock Holmes made his first appearance – A Study in Scarlet. He went on to write historical romances, but when more Sherlock Holmes stories appeared in The Strand Magazine and became increasingly popular, he gave up medicine to become a professional author.

The Sherlock Holmes phenomenon made his fame and fortune, but because he thought of himself as a ‘serious novelist’ he killed off his by now famous detective hero by having the villainous Professor Moriarty pull him to his death over the edge of the Reichenbach falls in the appropriately named story The Final Problem.

Conan Doyle travelled widely in America, Egypt, and South Africa, working for a time as a doctor in the Boer War. In 1902 he was knighted by Edward VII for his enthusiastic contribution to the English war against the Boers.

Meanwhile the success of the Sherlock Holmes stories in America brought a renewed and very profitable demand for more. As a first move he wrote one of his best Holmes pieces – The Hound of the Baskervilles – but set it at a time before the supposed demise of his hero. However, the book was such an huge success that he was forced to resurrect Holmes completely, and he went on to write another series of the stories – though devotees of the cult claim that these are not quite so skilfully crafted as their predecessors.

Conan Doyle became a public figure and gave his name to a number of different causes. He stood for parliament on two occasions – both times unsuccessfully. He took up the cases of people he felt had been unjustly treated by the law. Most controversially, he gave money and time to advance the case of spiritualism.

In 1912 he published his second most successful work that does not include Sherlock Holmes – The Lost World. This was a novel of adventure featuring a prehistoric world of dinosaurs and mammoths discovered in the jungles of South America.

During the period 1914-1918 he occupied himself producing patriotic tracts, wrote a six-volume history of the war, and gradually transferred most of his attention to works of non-fiction. Then during the last fifteen to twenty years of is life he devoted himself almost entirely to the promotion of spiritualism.

At that time the phenomenon was in its heyday of seances in which the dead were summoned back to life at public meetings, psychic mediums extruded ectoplasm from their mouths, and photographs of ghosts and fairies were seriously offered as evidence of a hidden spirit world.



Despite the fact that these events were exposed as frauds by Harry Houdini – the escapologist he met and befriended in 1920 – Conan Doyle continued in his blind belief and damaged his public reputation with publications such as The Coming of the Fairies (1922). In his last years he toured Australia, the United States, and Scandinavia, preaching the spiritualist cause. When he died in 1930 his grave was inscribed:


STEEL TRUE
BLADE STRAIGHT
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
KNIGHT
PATRIOT, PHYSICIAN, MAN OF LETTERS


Arthur Conan Doyle – further reading

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

The Complete Sherlock Holmes – Penguin – Amazon UK

The Complete Sherlock Holmes – Penguin – Amazon US

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Wordsworth – Amazon UK

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Wordsworth – Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2016


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Filed Under: Arthur Conan Doyle Tagged With: Biography, English literature, Literary studies

Aurora Floyd

August 31, 2016 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study resources, plot summary, further reading

Aurora Floyd (1868) was the second of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s ‘sensation’ novels. It followed hard on the heels of her first major success, Lady Audley’s Secret (1867) with which it has a lot in common. Braddon became the doyenne of this new genre that combined stories of polite English society with elements of crime, mystery, blackmail, and even murder. Her work was published in newspapers, magazines, and most importantly in the circulating libraries such as Mudie’s. Braddon had been an actress before she took up writing, and her novels are full of dramatic incidents and well-organised, complex plots. She was an astonishingly prolific writer, with a total output of more than eighty novels.

Aurora Floyd


Aurora Floyd – a note on the text

The novel first appeared as a serial in thirteen parts in the monthly magazine Temple Bar from January 1862 to January 1863. The publishers, Tinsley Brothers, paid Braddon £1,000 (almost £100,00 today) for two years exclusive rights. The novel went through five editions in its first year. Its initial appearance as a single volume edition was at the end of 1863. No manuscript of the novel has survived, though Braddon made substantial changes (and deletions) to the original. For a full bibliographic account of the text, see P.D. Edwards’ note in the Oxford World’s Classics edition of the novel.


Aurora Floyd – critical commentary

The sensation novel

It was Wilkie Collins who is credited as the originator of the sensation novel, with the publication of The Woman in White in 1859. But Braddon adopted its features with relish and made them her hallmark. The sensation novel. sometimes described as ‘the novel with a secret’, pushed the limits of anti-social behaviour as far as they were allowed to be expressed in the mid-Victorian age.

The plots of these novels included mysterious identities, crime, blackmail, forged wills, secret marriages, illegitimacy, melodramatic revelations, madness, and incarceration. These were elements inherited from the Gothic romances of the late eighteenth century – but events were taken away from haunted castles in the Apennines and transposed to settings in polite English society.

Mystery

The mystery that drives the first two thirds of the novel is the ‘missing’ twelve moths in Aurora’s life after she leaves the finishing school in Paris. We do not know why she left the school, and she refuses to give an account of what happened to her. There is also a secondary mystery in her father’s distress, which is similarly unexplained. To these ingredients is then added the second major puzzle – how and why does the former jockey James Conyers have any hold over her?

Blackmail

Conyers exhorts a diamond bracelet from Aurora, and then a bribe of two thousand pounds to leave the country – but the secret of their marriage is withheld as long as possible in the narrative. After it is revealed, the element of the two thousand pounds is transposed into yet another staple feature of a sensation novel – the murder.

Murder

The murder in the plot serves two functions. It produces the violence and disruption threatening the peace and security of rather complacent upper class life. Braddon makes quite clear that John Mellish feels existentially threatened by the mere proximity of social disruption to his privileged and well-ordered estate.

He sat down to-night, and looked hopelessly round the pleasant chamber, wondering whether Aurora and he would ever be happy again: wondering if this dark, mysterious, storm-threatening cloud would ever pass from the horizon of of his life, and leave the future bright and clear.

The murder also introduces yet another element of ‘whodunnit’ mystery, since we do not know (at first) who shot the bullet that kills James Conyers. However, readers with ‘Chekhov’s gun’ theory in mind will know the identity of the culprit in advance of its being revealed.

This theory is a dramatic principle established by the Russian dramatist and short story writer Anton Chekhov – that everything in a narrative should be necessary and anything unnecessary should be removed.

If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.

We know that Stephen Hargraves stole a pistol from Archibald Floyd’s house – so, despite the circumstantial evidence of a connection between Aurora and Conyers at the murder scene that can throw suspicion onto her, we know Hargraves is likely to be the assailant.

Social pedigree

Eliza (and hence Aurora) comes from an indeterminate lower class. Eliza was an actress and her brother Samuel was abandoned as a child to become a cabin boy. This is counterposed with the snobbish Bulstrode who comes from the aristocracy and will not marry the woman he loves because she will not reveal a twelve month gap in her social history. He (rightly) fears that this might be a potentially damaging stain on the reputation of his family. Even though he later regrets that decision and assists her in defending her name, his caution is justified by the scandal that ensues in the narrative.

Bigamy

Until the later part of the twentieth century, bigamy was considered a serious crime. that had originally been punishable by prolonged imprisonment and even execution. Yet strangely enough, female bigamists were treated more leniently, because of their perceived lack of ‘moral agency’.

The issue that provides the plot of Aurora Floyd is the power that Conyers holds over Aurora because they are still married. He exploits this power by blackmailing her – and he nurtures the outside hope that when her wealthy father dies, he will ‘inherit’ all the money left to her. Until the Married Woman’s Property Act of 1882 a woman’s personal property automatically went to her husband – and she ceased to exist as a legal identity.

Aurora believes that her first husband James Conyers has been killed in a riding accident, but in fact he is only injured. Consequently, she becomes guilty of bigamy when she marries John Mellish – and Mellish is not only guilty himself, but he takes on ‘responsibility’ for his wife’s guilt as well.

There is a possibility that the element of bigamy is acting as a surrogate for sexuality in the novel. Adultery or sex out of wedlock would not have been acceptable as a literary subject at that time. But bigamy by ‘accident’ or through mistaken identity would pass the censorship ‘guidelines’ imposed by the circulating libraries, which were notorious for their prudishness.

Aurora as a spirited young girl is seduced by a handsome lower-class groom with dark hair, long eyelashes, and god-like looks. There is no mention of any sexual intimacy between them, but they are united by their interest in horses. Most commentary on the novel and its kind emphasises the fact that ‘horsey’ heroines were equated with ‘fast’ women who enjoyed the spice of danger and overt eroticism in their lives.

Moreover, having married once and believing her husband to be dead, Aurora has very little hesitation in marrying again. The gauche and good-hearted John Mellish is hardly an erotically charged figure at all, but by her early twenties Aurora has had two husbands and (statistically therefore) a considerable amount of sexual experience.

Marriage

Interestingly enough, in a novel whose central mystery and plot device is bigamy, Braddon seems to incorporate a great deal of direct and indirect comment on the subject of conventional ‘love and marriage’.

The aristocratic Bulstrode falls passionately in love with Aurora – almost at first sight. His snobbish notions of family pride prevent him from accepting her as a wife, and so he chooses Lucy instead. She is presented (and behaves) in a far less exciting manner, and yet their union is successful and happy.

Similarly, Mellish is presented as a bumbling and gauche countryman who Aurora accepts as a second-best choice to Bulstrode. Yet they too eventually establish a loving and trustful relationship from which passion seems to have been excluded.

It’s as if Braddon is presenting the case that passionate love is not necessarily a good recipe for a successful marriage, whereas concern, respect, and admiration are more likely to lead to happiness.


Aurora Floyd – study resources

Aurora Floyd Aurora Floyd – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Aurora Floyd Aurora Floyd – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

Aurora Floyd Aurora Floyd – Immortal Classics – Amazon UK

Aurora Floyd Aurora Floyd – Immortal Classics – Amazon US

Aurora Floyd Aurora Floyd – Kindle eBook – Amazon UK

Aurora Floyd Aurora Floyd – Kindle eBook – Amazon US

Aurora Floyd The Complete Works of Mary Elizabeth Braddon – Kindle eBook


Aurora Floyd – chapter summaries

I.   Archibald Floyd, a retired city banker, suddenly marries Eliza Prodder, a young and beautiful actress he meets in Lancashire. Polite society regards her as an upstart, but she is proud and devoted to her husband. However, after only one year of marriage she dies.

II.   The widower Floyd devotes all his attention to his daughter Aurora, who grows up to become a spirited and attractive young woman. He sends her to a Parisian finishing school, from which she returns just over a year later in a poor physical condition.

III.   Aurora has bad feelings about her time in Paris. She meets a man to whom she owes money. He father throws a ball to celebrate her nineteenth birthday, where she meets the proud Talbot Bulstrode.

IV.   Bulstrode is conscious of being remote and unloved. He thinks Lucy Floyd would make a suitable wife, but he is intrigued by Aurora, whose mysterious behavior he attributes to horse-racing gambling debts.

V.   Floyd employs the very unsympathetic Mrs Powell as governess to Aurora. They go to stay in Brighton, where Bulstrode has bought himself out of the army. Lucy is anguished because she loves Bulstrode, who is besotted with Aurora. They are joined by Bulstrode’s gauche Yorkshire friend John Mellish.

VI.   Bulstrode proposes to Aurora, but she rejects his offer (as she has just rejected an offer from Mellish). But then she accepts the offer next day – after reading of the death of an English jockey in Germany..

VII.   Preparations are under way for the marriage, but then out on a drive they meet Matthew Harrison, who demands money from Aurora. Bulstrode asks how she comes to know him – but she refuses to divulge the information.

VIII.   John Mellish returns from exile in Paris and accuses Bulstrode of ‘treachery’. He then confides in Lucy, and realises she loves Bulstrode. Constance Trevyllian, Bulstrode’s cousin, returns from the Paris finishing school, much to Aurora’s consternation.

IX.   Next day (Xmas) Bulstrode receives a letter from his mother revealing that Aurora ran away from her Parisian school and was missing for the following year. When Bulstrode asks for an explanation she pleads with him for understanding, but will not reveal where she was for the twelve months. He breaks off their engagement and leaves.

X.   Aurora falls seriously ill with a fever that lasts for four months. Floyd takes his daughter to Leamington for recovery, where they are joined by John Mellish. Floyd gives Mellish his blessing to wait for a possible change in Aurora’s feelings towards him.

XI.   The Floyd party go to northern France. Aurora continues to think about Bulstrode, but Mellish pressures her emotionally and offers to marry her without knowing the secret of her ‘missing year’.

XII.   Aurora becomes engaged to Mellish and is regarded by many as rather fickle. Bulstrode enters parliament, and is angry when he reads of the marriage. Aurora goes to live at Mellish Park where she develops two enemies – Mrs Powell and Stephen Hargraves, the repugnant groom, who is fired for mistreating her dog.

XIII.   John Mellish allows Aurora to dominate him, and Lucy is dismayed that her cousin can forget Bulstrode so easily. The Floyd party visit York races where they meet Bulstrode, who still feels bitter regarding Aurora.

XIV.   Bulstrode is invited to stay at Mellish Park, where he meets Lucy Floyd and realises that she is in love with him. He proposes to her and they are married shortly afterwards.

XV.   Aurora sees Stephen Hargraves lurking in the woods at Mellish Park. A letter arrives recommending the horse trainer James Conyers. Aurora faints at the mention of his name.

XVI.   Mellish questions his wife, who will only reveal that Conyers knows her secret. Mrs Powell is peeved on being excluded. The adventurer Conyers arrives at Mellish Park as trainer. Mrs Powell spies on him opening his letters – one of which is from Aurora.

XVII.   The unscrupulous rogue Conyers hires Stephen Hargraves as his servant. He forces him to deliver a letter to Aurora, who angrily assents to its contents.

XVIII.   Mellish decides to trust his wife, despite her enigmatic behaviour. Aurora goes to see Conyers at night, followed by Mrs Powell, who eavesdrops with Stephen Hargraves whilst Aurora tries to buy off Conyers. On return Mrs Powell locks Aurora out of the house in the rain, which alarms Mellish.

XIX.   Archibald Floyd is lonely without his daughter Aurora. He is entertaining Bulstrode and Lucy when Aurora and Mellish arrive to discuss ‘money matters’. Aurora asks her father for two thousand pounds, refusing to tell him what it is for. He gives her the money, making a record of the banknote numbers.

XX.   Captain Samuel Prodder arrives from Liverpool at Felden Woods where he is warmly welcomed by Mr Floyd. He has come in search of his sister Eliza, but learning of her death would like to see his niece Aurora.

XXI.   Conyers neglects his duties and abuses Hargraves. When Conyers arrives home drunk one night, Hargraves finds a paper in his clothes confirming that the two thousand pounds ‘agreement’ with Aurora is for him to quit England.

XXII.   Hargraves steals Mellish’s pistol at the house. Aurora arranges a meeting with Conyers. Mrs Powell snoops on all concerned.

XXIII.   The Mellishes have boring guests to dinner, but Aurora manages to leave the house to keep her late night appointment with Conyers.

XXIV.   During dinner Captain Prodder arrives at the house, but is turned away. He walks through the grounds and overhears Aurora rebuking Conyers. There is a pistol shot. Prodder reports back to the house that there has been a murder.

XXV.   Mellish and Prodder go out, recover Conyers’ body, and take it back to the Lodge. Hargraves is in bed and pleads innocence. A policeman discovers the message sewn into Conyers’ waistcoat. Prodder suddenly disappears. Mellish realises Aurora might be a suspect, and Mrs Powell refers to her being close to the scene. Aurora reveals that Conyers was formerly in her father’s employment. Mellish feels shattered by the onset of unhappiness and thinks he has not been socially virtuous enough.

XXVI.   The inquest is inconclusive and returns a verdict of ‘murder by person(s) unknown’.

XXVII.   However, Mellish is recalled by the coroner, who produces the blood-stained marriage certificate between Conyers and Aurora.

XXVIII.   Hargraves tells Aurora that the marriage certificate has been found. She feels ashamed of having deceived Mellish, and she runs away – intending to consult Bulstrode.

XXIX.   Mellish returns home, forgiving Aurora for her youthful indiscretion. Discovering that she has left, he prepares to follow her – but first he dismisses Mrs Powell.

XXX.   Aurora visits Bulstrode for his advice. She recounts the history of her youthful marriage to Conyers, his blackmailing, and his recent death. Lucy comforts her.

XXXI.   Next day Bulstrode meets Mellish, who is then reunited with Aurora. Bulstrode advises Mellish to re-marry Aurora as soon as possible.

XXXII.   The Mellishes visit Archibald Floyd, where Aurora confesses the truth to her father, who wonders where his two thousand pounds are. They return to London and are re-married – although they are being followed by two strange men.

XXXIII.   Samuel Prodder buys himself a new suit and returns to Doncaster where he overhears Stephen Hargraves implicating Aurora in the murder via mixture of circumstantial evidence and half truths. Prodder attacks him in outrage, but Hargraves produces Aurora’s note to Conyers to support his claims.

XXXIV.   The Mellishes return home, but Aurora feels the effects of the murder hanging in the air. The servants are suspicious of her sudden unexplained flight. Mellish’s pistol is found in the grounds.

XXXV.   The Bulstrodes arrive and realise that something is wrong. Aurora lies to Lucy, claiming John no longer loves her. Bulstrode badgers Mellish into revealing the truth – that suspicion points to Aurora. They meet detective Joseph Grimstone who reveals the existence of two letters accusing Aurora – both written by Mrs Powell.

XXXVI.   Bulstrode persuades Mellish to reveal what he knows, then relays this information to Grimstone, who has found a brass button at the crime scene.

XXXVII.   Grimstone locates the origin of the brass button on a pawn shop waistcoat, then traces the garment as a gift from the gardener to Hargraves.

XXXVIII.   Grimstone inspects Hargraves’ room in his absence but finds nothing, then he discovers that his assistant Chivers has lost track of Hargraves whilst stalking him.

XXXIX.   Mellish and Bulstrode wait impatiently at the house for news. Bulstrode visits Grimstone in Doncaster but there is nothing new to report. However, on his way back to Mellish Park he spots Hargraves in the Lodge. Hargraves attacks him, but Bulstrode is rescued by the sudden arrival of Prodder. The waistcoat and the money are recovered. Hargraves is hanged at York assizes, Mellish and Aurora travel to the south of France, where a baby is born and they are joined by Bulstrode and Lucy.


Aurora Floyd – principal characters
Archibald Martin Floyd a rich and retired city banker
Falden Woods his estate in Kent
Eliza Prodder a beautiful but poor actress, Aurora’s mother
Aurora Floyd a strong-willed and attractive young woman
Lucy Floyd Aurora’s friend and cousin
Talbot Bulstrode the proud intellectual son of an ancient family
John Mellish a rich, generous, but gauche Yorkshireman
Mrs Walter Powell Aurora’s unsympathetic governess
Steeve Hargraves a repugnant groom at Mellish Park
Joseph Grimstone a Scotland Yard detective
James Conyers a horse trainer, rogue, and adventurer

Aurora Floyd – further reading

Richard D. Altick Victorian Studies in Scarlet, New York: W.W. Norton, 1979.

Jennifer Carnell, The Literary Lives of Mary Elizabeth Braddon: A Study of Her Life and Work, UK: Sensation Press, 2000.

Ann Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992.

P.D. Edwards, Some Mid-Victorian Thrillers: The Sensation Novel, Its Friends and Its Foes, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1971.

Winifred Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.

Lyn Pykett, The ‘Improper’ Feminine: The Woman’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing, London: Routledge, 2013.

Anthea Trodd, Domestic Crime in the Victorian Novel, London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 1988.

Robert Lee Wolff, Sensational Victorian: The Life and Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, New York: Garland Publishers, 1979.

© Roy Johnson 2016


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Filed Under: Mary Elizabeth Braddon Tagged With: English literature, Literary studies, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, The novel

Basil

December 19, 2016 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Basil (1852) was the first major novel by Wilkie Collins and possibly one of the first sensation novels. Because of his friendship with the more famous writer Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins has been unjustly neglected, with the exception of his two best known novels The Woman in White and The Moonstone. But he was an energetic and prolific artist who, like his contemporary Mary Elizabeth Braddon, was amazingly successful in the mid-nineteenth century. Their novels were the cultural equivalents of today’s soap operas and multi-part television dramas.

Basil
Basil contains all the elements of a mystery story and a thriller, and is amazingly in advance of its time in depicting what we would now call existential angst. As a result of a casual sighting of an attractive woman, Basil gradually finds himself enmeshed in a life-threatening struggle with forces he only half understands.


Basil – a note on the text

Basil was first published in three volumes by Richard Bentley, London in 1852. The full title at that times was Basil: A Story of Modern Life. It was then reprinted in 1856 and reset in one volume, published by James Blackwood, London with no alterations.

Wilkie Collins then carefully revised his text (and eliminated the sub-title) for publication in one volume by Sampson Low, Son & Co, London in 1862. The changes he made were largely a reduction in the length of some of the longer scenes and the removal of items from doubled or trebled phrases which were a common feature of his style.


Basil – critical commentary

The sensation novel

The sensation novel came of age in the 1860s with the publication of Collins’ The Woman in White (1860) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1861). The genre has been described as ‘novels with a secret’ – and it is easy to see Basil as a precursor to these well known examples.

Basil certainly has a number of secrets that help to drive the plot and its suspense. The first of these is the enigmatic figure of Margaret Sherwin – a a woman who completely mesmerises Basil, but about whom we know nothing. Unknown to Basil she is conducting a secret relationship with the sinister character Mannion.

The second secret or mystery is Mr Sherwin’s bizarre proposal of a secret marriage for his daughter, followed by a twelve month chaste courtship. Why would anyone propose so unusual an arrangement? This puts Basil’s patience under strain, and it has to be said it the reader’s credulity too.

Mrs Sherwin is a ‘silenced’ woman and a bag of nerves. She is a second level of mystery – but it is obvious to the reader that she is being threatened into silence by her domineering husband. As a character, she seems to be signalling her disquiet to the reader above the heads of the other characters.

Mr Mannion is an additional mystery. He appears at first to have no ‘background’, and is only a clerk, yet acts in a superior manner. His employer Mr Sherwin rates him very highly. His background and the sources of his malevolent motivation are only revealed later in the novel

The double, twinning, and parallels

Underpinning both the structure and the characterisation of the novel is a pattern of twinning or parallels – commonly referred to in literary studies as the double. The most obvious case is that of the two women towards whom Basil is attracted – his sister Clara and his ‘wife’ Margaret Sherwin.

The two women are opposites. Clara is fair-haired and virtuous, loyal, pure, and long suffering. Margaret is dark-haired and scheming, duplicitous, sensual, and cruel. They represent the two sides of Basil’s attitude to sexuality.

He is drawn to Clara in a lofty, spiritual, and almost intellectual sense. She represents everything that is good and untainted in woman – though it has to be said that short of incest, there is no way this relationship can lead towards anything productive. It is interesting nevertheless that at the end of the novel Basil has gone into a very premature retirement, living with his sister.

But he is drawn towards Margaret by libidinous impulses that he simply cannot control. It is worth noting that the moment he recognises the force of these desires, he starts to feel guilty – towards his family and towards Clara in particular.

When Basil dreams, this division is symbolised by his struggle with two women. One is a fair creature in pure white robes trying to lead his towards heaven; the other is a dark-haired seductress who is dragging him into the woods.

I was drawn along in the arms of the dark woman, with my blood beating and my breath failing me, until we entered the secret recesses that lay amid the unfathomable depths of trees. There she encircled me in the folds of her dusky robe

This ‘twinning’ or ‘doubling’ is repeated in the figures of Basil and his arch-rival Robert Mannion. Both of them have been burdened by a negative legacy from their fathers. Basil is cursed by his father’s obsessive ancestor worship and his desire to keep the family‘s name and ‘honour’ free from any lower class contamination.

Basil is the younger, not the elder son – but for the majority of the novel his profligate brother Ralph is absent from the narrative. Mannion’s life has been blighted by the reputational disgrace of his own father, which has pursued him, thwarting his ambition.

Interestingly, Mannion’s father’s disgrace and execution was brought about by Basil’s father. This gives Mannion one powerful motive in his desire to wreak vengeance on Basil.

Both Basil and Mannion are attracted to Margaret Sherwin, and both of them try to ‘educate’ her – without success. Mannion is attracted to her physically but despises her morally. Basil appears to be different, but following the revelation of her duplicity he ends up hating her as well.

Both men have literary aspirations. Basil starts out writing a historical romance, but is side-tracked by his obsession with Margaret. Mannion too seeks fame in writing, but is reduced to hack work for third-class newspapers.

So the two men are locked in an antagonistic union. Basil’s ‘marriage’ to Margaret is destroyed by Mannion’s scheming seduction, and yet Basil’s family has been responsible for the destruction of the confidential clerk’s prospects in life. The two men have every reason to hate each other, and a logical conclusion to the novel might have left Basil in a state of permanent insecurity – but Collins kills off Mannion in a Cornish cliff top scene.

Just in case this ‘doubling’ of characters were not enough, Collins reinforces the effect with dramatic scenes that are significantly paralleled. The very day Basil’s twelve months of celibate waiting are over, his expectations of physical union with Margaret are thwarted by Margaret’s elopement with Mannion. Basil traces them to the seedy ‘hotel’ where he is forced to listen to Mannion and Margaret consummating their illicit relationship in the room next door.

In a similar climactic scene, Basil visits Margaret in the small room where she is dying of Typhus. He forgives her as she expires in a delirium, mocking his attentions and affection. But in another room next door Mannion is a silent witness to this tragic ‘goodbye’. The two men are locked into their conflict right up to the point of Mannion’s death

Literary relativism

The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, who was very fond of paradoxes and what might be called the metaphysics of literature, posited the notion that gifted writers could create their own predecessors. What he meant was that a writer in, say, the twentieth century, could express an idea or a feeling that caused readers to newly interpret the work of a writer from a previous age. The contemporary reader looks at the earlier work and sees meanings which were not previously evident to readers at the time the work was created. The words are the same as they have always been, but new meanings are revealed in them

What he was saying is that work created in the present can cause us to see elements of the same feelings, situations, and tensions in work of the past – but which were not previously evident. The idea is offered in a playful and entertaining manner – but it carries with it an important nugget of cultural history.

It is quite common for gifted writers to anticipate moods, feelings, problems, and situations in their work – consciously or unconsciously – which readers at a later date to perceive as prophetic. A classic case in point is Franz Kafka, who was a product of the extremely bureaucratic Austro-Hungarian Hapsburg empire in the early twentieth century. His work anticipated many of the intellectual nightmares of German fascism and Russian Stalinism which engulfed Europe in the 1930s, long after he was dead.

In Basil Wilkie Collins was exploring psychological states and existential crises that were explored later by writers such as Dostoyevski and Kafka. Basil’s narrative is an anguished account of his being trapped in a contradictory and very stressful emotional dilemma that is largely of his own making. And the more he tries to solve the problem he faces, the worse it becomes.

Basil’s state of anguish is very similar to that of Dostoyevski’s first person narrators – from the Underground Man to The Gambler; and Basil’s conflict with his father over his dishonouring of the family name is very reminiscent of the many well-known instances of father-son conflict in Kafka’s work. This is not to claim that Wilkie Collins was somehow being prophetic of later states of being – but it has to be said that he creates a distinctly modern form of existential angst in Basil.

It should also be noted that this particular variety of anxiety, like those of Dostoyevski and Kafka, has a distinctly sexual element in its foundation. Basil sees Margaret Sherwin with her mother on an omnibus ride in London – and falls obsessively in love with her at first sight. He knows nothing about her, except that she is good looking and has dark hair and eyes. And then apart from her social status as the daughter of a linen draper, he learns very little more about her, yet he is prepared to accept the bizarre arrangement of an unconsummated ‘marriage’ followed by twelve months of celibate courtship. Eventually, he is driven to the lengths of attempted murder in pursuit of his obsession.

Problems

This is the first really serious work in what was to become a prodigious output from Collins as a novelist – the ‘King of Inventors’ as his definitive biographer Catherine Peters called him. It is arguably the first ‘sensation novel’ – a genre that combined realistic fiction of English social life with domestic crime, mystery, suspense, and effects which would shock the reader. Nevertheless, it has to be said that there are some problems of narrative logic and credibility in the plot of Basil.

The main problem is that no convincing reason is provided for Sherwin’s strange proposal of a secret marriage followed by a twelve month period of marital abstinence – or Basil’s acceptance of this odd arrangement. Sherwin claims his daughter is too young to be married = she is only seventeen – and it might be thought that he sees Basil as an upper class social catch. But Basil is the younger son of the family and stands to inherit nothing.

The second important weakness is the characterisation of Margaret Sherwin. She hardly exists as a fictional character at all, and is only presented through Basil’s obsession with a love object. She does not act in the narrative; she is not dramatised; she hardly speaks; and we are given no access to her thoughts or motivation.

This is a weakness in the obvious sense of the novel having a character who simply fails to ‘come to life’, but in terms of Wilkie Collins anticipating the psychology of modernism, it is not altogether surprising. The story is intently centred on Basil’s psychology as an individual dealing with threats from all quarters of his life. This is why it is possible to see Collins’ narrative as a precursor of modernist concerns with the existential state.


Basil – study resources

Basil Basil – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Basil Basil – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

Basil Basil – Independent Publishers – Amazon UK

Basil Basil – Independent Publishers – Amazon US

Basil The Complete Works of Wilkie Collins – Kindle eBook


Basil – plot synopsis

Part I

Basil is writing his confession at the age of twenty-four in Cornwall. He recalls his rich but austere, ancestor-worshipping father and his elder brother Ralph who is profligate and has no interest in the inheritance of the family estate. His younger sister Clara is a beacon of virtue – selfless and unassuming. Basil is writing a historical romance.

On an omnibus ride he sees Margaret Sherwin and is immediately attracted to her. He follows her home and discovers that she is a shopkeeper’s daughter. He feels burdened by his duty to marry only into his own class, but is tormented by his desire for Margaret. He dreams of a dark-haired woman taking him off into a wood.

Next day he bribes a servant and intercepts Margaret on her way to market, spilling out his love for her. She dismisses his attentions, but it does not deter him. He writes to her but she refuses his entreaties on the grounds of their differences in rank. He then obtains an interview with her father, to whom he proposes a secret marriage which will be revealed at a later date.

Basil immediately feels guilty at concealing the plan from his family. At a second meeting Mr Sherwin proposes an immediate ‘private’ marriage followed by a twelve month supervised courtship, because Margaret is only seventeen. Basil’s father puts him under a code of honour to respect the family tradition before leaving for his estate. Clara wishes to share any of his sorrows or difficulties. Basil and Margaret are married in virtual secrecy, after which he goes home alone.

Part II

Basil is allowed to meet Margaret every day under the nervous supervision of Mrs Sherwin. He decides to educate Margaret in works of literature, but she only wants to hear trivial gossip about his family. They are joined by Sherwin’s confidential clerk Mr Mannion, who is cold, handsome, and mysteriously superior. He knows all about the secret marriage.

Basil goes home with Mannion, who is subserviently friendly and offers to help Basil ‘manage’ Mr Sherwin. Basil has brief glimpses of Margaret’s petulance. Mannion discretely helps him to overcome Mr Sherwin’s strictures.

Basil is summoned to the country by a letter from his sister. His father remains distant and severe. Clara guesses that Basil is involved with a woman. On his return to London, Margaret and Mannion both seem to be ill.

At the end of his year-long probation Basil finds that Margaret has gone to an aunt’s party with Mannion, He follows them and traces them to a seedy hotel of assignation. Realising he has been duped, he waits for Mannion to leave the hotel, then launches an attack to kill him.

Part III

Basil then has a nervous breakdown, during which he thinks back over previous events and how he has been duped. He is cared for by Clara. Mannion is not dead but has lost one eye and is horribly disfigured. He refuses to say anything about himself or what happened.

Basil receives a letter from Sherwin claiming that Margaret is innocent. This is followed by a second letter threatening to expose him. Basil’s father demands to know what secret Basil has been keeping from him. When he learns the truth he turns on Basil savagely and disowns him completely for disgracing the family name. Clara appears and pleads for clemency, but it is refused.

Basil confronts Sherwin, who argues that he must accept Margaret since she is legally his wife. Mrs Sherwin however supports Basil’s claims of duplicity, but then dies shortly afterwards. Basil discovers that Mannion has been sending letters to Margaret.

Basil reads Mannion’s long confessional letter describing his father’s crime of forgery against his employer (who was Basil’s father) and his being hanged as a result. Mannion is dogged by his bad family reputation, but eventually finds work with Sherwin and rises in status. He also covets Margaret, though Mrs Sherwin suspects his intentions.

Mannion has groomed Margaret, whom he secretly despises, and he has plotted revenge on Basil throughout his probationary twelve months ‘courtship’. Now horribly disfigured, Mannion threatens to pursue Basil and discredit his family’s name once he is out of hospital.

Basil’s brother Ralph suddenly arrives and offers to help him by negotiating with Sherwin and buying his silence. He is followed by a visit from Clara who offers shreds of comfort from home. Ralph returns with with the news that Margaret has joined Mannion at the hospital. Ralph has counter-threatened Sherwin, who has agreed to compromise.

Ralph and Basil go to the hospital where they learn that Margaret was followed by Sherwin who is in pursuit of her. Mannion is regarded as a monomaniac, and there is an outbreak of Typhus on one of the wards.

A week later Basil learns that Margaret is dying of Typhus she accidentally contracted during her visit. Dr Bernard invites Basil to visit her, which he does, watching through the night whilst she mocks him in her fever. But he eventually forgives her – shortly before she dies.

At Margaret’s graveside Basil is confronted by Mannion who menaces him again, threatening to blight his life and his family. Ralph advises Basil to leave London so as to protect Clara from Mannion. Basil goes to a remote village in Cornwall.

Journal

Basil lives in isolation, peacefully at first, until the villagers turn against him. He feels that Mannion’s evil influence is pursuing him, so he leaves. Whilst walking along the coastline in a storm he is confronted by Mannion, who then falls to his death into a chasm. Basil cannot get the image of Mannion out of his mind, and he has a nervous breakdown.

Letters

Cornish people check Basil’s papers and send word to his family in London. Ralph, Clara, and Dr Bernard rescue Basil, who is reconciled with his father. Nine years later Basil retires to a country cottage with Clara to live in obscurity. Following their father’s death Ralph becomes a reformed head of the family, and Basil consigns his confession to Dr Berard for publication.


Wilkie Collins

Wilkie Collins


Basil – principal characters
Basil a young man of 24
— his father, a proud ancestor-worshipper
Ralph Basil’s profligate older brother
Clara Basil’s devoted younger sister
Stephen Sherwin a nouveau-riche London linen draper
Mrs Sherwin his nervous and downtrodden wife
Margaret Sherwin their dark-haired and attractive daughter
Robert Mannion Sherwin’s confidential clerk
Dr John Bernard a friend of Ralph’s

Basil – further reading

William M. Clarke, The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins, London: Ivan R. Dee, 1988.

Tamar Heller, Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.

Winifred Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.

Sue Lonoff, Wilkie Collins and his Victorian Readers: A Study in the Rhetoric of Authorship, New York: AMS Press, 1982.

Catherine Peters, The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.

Walter C. Phillips, Dickens, Reade, and Collins: Sensation Novelists, New York: Library of Congress, 1919.

Lynn Pykett, Wilkie Collins: New Casebooks, London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 1998.

Nicholas Rance, Wilkie Collins and Other Sensation Novelists: Walking the Moral Hospital, London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 1991.

© Roy Johnson 2016


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Filed Under: Wilkie Collins Tagged With: English literature, Literary studies, The novel, Wilkie Collins

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