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Nineteenth Century – literary timeline – part 3

September 29, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a chronicle of events, literature, and politics

1866. George Eliot, Felix Holt the Radical; Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters; Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; Fyodor Dostoyeski, Crime and Punishment; A.C. Swinburne, Poems and Ballads

1867. Russia sells Alaska to America for $7 million. The Second Reform Bill – votes extended to most middle-class men. Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach.

1868. Benjamin Disraeli becomes Prime Minister. Trades Union Congress formed. Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book. Wilkie Collins The Moonstone.

1869. Suez canal opened. J.S. Mill, The Subjection of Women (written in 1860). Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy. Margarine is developed. Hungarian Emanuel Herman invents the picture postcard. Anthony Trollope, Phineas Finn. Girton College (for women) opened in Cambridge

1870. Papal infallibility announced. French declare war against Prussia – and are heavily defeated. Paris occupied. Married Women’s Property Act. Forster’s Education Act (compulsory full-time schooling for under tens).

1871. Paris commune declared – then crushed (by the French). Limited voting introduced in Britain. Emile Zola begins Le Rougon Maquart cycle of novels. George Eliot Middlemarch. Religious entry tests abolished at Oxford and Cambridge.

1872. Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree. Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market.

1873. Walter Pater, The Renaissance, John Stuart Mill, Autobiography (posthumous)

1874. Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd ; Parliament reduces the working week to 56.5 hours. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina. First Impressionist exhibition in Paris.

1875. Disraeli buys Suez Canal shares, gaining a controlling interest for Britain. Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now

1876. Queen Victoria declared Empress of India. Bell invents the telephone. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda ; Thomas Hardy, The Hand of Ethelberta; Henry James, Roderick Hudson.

1877. Henry James, The American; Zola, L’Assommoir. Phonograph invented by Edison.

1878. Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native, Henry James, The Europeans. University of London admits women to degrees. Electric street lighting in London.

1879. Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House, George Meredith, The Egoist; Henry James, Daisy Miller.

1880. First Anglo-Boer war in South Africa. Education Act makes schooling compulsory up to the age of ten.

1881. The Natural History Museum is opened. President Garfield of the USA and Tsar Alexander II of Russia are assassinated. Henry James, Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady. D.G. Rossetti, Ballads and Sonnets; Henrik Ibsen, Ghosts. Gilbert and Sullivan write Patience, a comic opera that pokes fun at the aesthetic movement.

1883. Robert Louis Stephenson, Treasure Island. Olive Schreiner The Story of an African Farm

1884. The franchise is extended by the Third Reform Bill. Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn; F. Engels, The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State; Walter Besant gives a lecture entitled ‘The Art of Fiction’ and Henry James responds with an essay of the same title. First Oxford English Dictionary

1885. Radio waves discovered. Internal combustion engine invented. Death of General Gordon at Khartoum. Zola, Germinal. Rider Haggard King Solomon’s Mines

1886. Daimler produces first motor car. Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Henry James, The Bostonians.

1887. Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders. Conan Doyle A Study in Scarlet (first Sherlock Holmes story)

1888. English Football League founded. George Eastman develops the Kodak camera. English vet John Dunlop patents the pneumatic tyre. Rudyard Kipling, Plain Tales from the Hills; Henry James, The Aspern Papers. Jack the Ripper murders in Whitechapel, London

1889. Eiffel Tower built for the Paris Centennial Exposition. Coca-Cola developed in Atlanta. 10,000 dockers strike in London. Rudyard Kipling, Barrack-Room Ballads; Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler

1891. Work starts on the Trans-Siberian railway. The Prince of Wales appears in a libel case about cheating at cards. Anglo-American copyright agreement. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Gissing, New Grub Street, Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray ; Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

1892. James Dewar invents the vacuum flask. First edition of Vogue appears in New York. Tchaikovsky, The Nutcracker. Thomas Hardy, The Well Beloved. Keir Hardy first Labour MP.

1893. First motor cars built by Karl Benz in Germany and Henry Ford in the USA. Alexander Graham Bell makes the first long-distance telephone call. Whitcome Judson patents the zip fastener. Independent Labour Party founded.

1894. Manchester ship canal opens. Dreyfus affair fanned by anti-Semitism in France. Rudyard Kipling, Jungle Books.

1895. X-rays discovered. Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest. First radio broadcast by Marconi. First moving images displayed by French cinematographer.

1896. Wireless telegraphy invented. Abyssinians defeat occupying Italian forces – first defeat of colonising power by natives. Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure; Anton Chekhov, The Seagull. Daily Mail founded.

1897. Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton, What Masie Knew; Bram Stoker, Dracula.

1898. Second Anglo-Boer War begins. Henry James, The Turn of the Screw ; Thomas Hardy, Wessex Poems; George Bernard Shaw, Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant

1899. British military disasters in South-Africa. Henry James, The Awkward Age; Kate Chopin, The Awakening; Anton Chekhov, Uncle Vanya

1900. Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

1901. Queen Victoria dies — Edwardian period begins. Rudyard Kipling, Kim

1902. Henry James, The Wings of the Dove; Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

1903. First flight in heavier-than-air machine by Wright brothers in USA. James, The Ambassadors

1904. Henry James, The Golden Bowl; Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard

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Nineteenth Century Russian Novels

October 2, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Nineteenth-century Britain: introduction

July 13, 2009 by Roy Johnson

History, politics, and society in 19th century Britain

This introductory guide comes from a new series by Oxford University Press. They are written by specialists, aimed at the common reader, and offer an introduction to the main cultural and philosophical ideas which have shaped the western world. Christopher Harvie and Colin Matthew take head on the issue that the interpretation of historical events (even when we know the ‘facts’) is a political, an ideological issue. It was refreshing to see this form of Marxism still alive and well in their new Nineteenth-century Britain.

The early part of the century is dominated by the French revolution and Britain’s ambiguous role in the following Napoleonic wars. Thereafter, the emphasis, as one might expect, is on a steadily growing population, on urbanisation, industrialisation, and above all on trade. Theirs strikes me as a solidly traditional form of history – dominated by politics, government, law, and social reforms – though they do find space to mention writers, artists, and social philosophers whose ideas might have had an effect on the development of the nation.

This volume, like many of the others in this series, is like listening to a lecture delivered by a distinguished academic – but to an audience of peers. There are no concessions; details are not explained; and the reader is left to supply the context.

At the centre of the account and the century is the Great Exhibition of 1851 – just as the Festival of Britain was to be a century later. There’s a very strong sense of optimism and confidence. It’s a rich social tapestry: educational reforms; public health initiatives; the development of the railways; free trade; and the steady decline of religious belief.

I was rather pleased in a parochial sense to note the repeated prominence of my own home city of Manchester in the development of political radicalism.

They cite as illustrative evidence the work of the great Victorian writers – Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and Thomas Hardy.

The latter part of the book is devoted to a survey of the lower, middle, and upper classes, their habits, beliefs and their political affiliations.

The sense of a historical narrative picks up with greater and greater momentum towards the end, and the closing pages made me eager to pick up all the threads in its sister publication Twentieth-century Britain. This is a very interesting and attractive format – a small, pocket-sized book, stylishly designed, with illustrations, endnotes, suggestions for further reading, and an index.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Christopher Harvie and Colin Matthew, Nineteenth Century Britain: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp.1171, ISBN: 0192853988

No Name

January 29, 2017 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

No Name (1862) was the follow-up to Wilkie Collins’ big success with The Woman in White (1860) which established him as a best-selling author specialising in the ‘sensation novel’. He was an amazingly prodigious writer who produced twenty-five novels, more than fifty short stories, at least fifteen plays, and more than 100 non-fiction essays.

He was one of the most highly paid authors of his day, yet he never became rich. This was partly because he maintained two separate families in expensive London houses, and partly because he had a fairly lavish life style. He also became a cocaine addict – although the drug at that time (in the form of laudanum) was relatively inexpensive, and obtainable over the counter in most chemists’ shops.

No Name – a note on the text

No Name first appeared as a forty-four part serial in All the Year Round, the weekly periodical owned by Charles Dickens. The conventions of publication at that time were to develop a ‘readership’ or following via serial publication, then capitalise on this as soon as possible with publication in book format. Collins completed the manuscript of No Name on 24 December 1862, and a three volume edition was published a week later on 31 December 1862 by Sampson Low. This was too late to exploit the Christmas market, but an astonishingly rapid turn around given today’s enormously lengthy publication cycles.

This three volume edition sold out completely on the first day of its publication, and Collins was paid for it what then was considered the enormous sum of £3,000. This he badly needed, because he was hopelessly in debt.

Like many of Collins’ other novels, there is also a stage dramatisation of the story. This was published separately in 1863 but never performed. It was not written by Collins himself but commissioned from Bayle Bernard, because Collins was ill to write it at the time.

The main purpose of these dramatisations was to preserve the author’s copyright on the story, since under the law at that period a novel was not protected from piracy unless the author had first registered his own adaptation.

Collins produced his own stage version of the story later in 1870, but he was not very pleased with the result. He engaged Wybert Reeve to re-write it for him, and the play was staged but never achieved success.

No Name – critical commentary

The sensation novel

Wilkie Collins has a strong claim to being the father of the ‘sensation novel’ – a literary genre that became very popular in the 1860s and the years following. His first serious novel Basil (1852) is the strongest part of that claim, which he reinforced with The Woman in White (1860) which became an instant best-seller and his best known work.

The sensation novel – often described as ‘a novel with a secret’ – combined elements of the Gothic with social realism and everyday domestic life. The plots of these novels were designed to shock readers – within the limits of what was permissible at the time. Typical elements included bigamous marriages, disputed wills, forgery, domestic violence, imprisonment, assumed identity, and madness.

No name contains its fair share of these topics. It includes concealed identity, illegitimacy, a complex and disputed will, a false marriage, and all the ramifications of the English law of inheritance and its effects on women.

Identity

The central figure in the novel is Magdalen Vanstone, but once her parents have both died she loses her family name – because they were not married at the time of their daughter’s birth. From this point on she assumes a number of alternative identities. The first is as Miss ‘Bygrave’ as part of Captain Wragge’s theatrical management. Next she successfully impersonates her own governess Miss Garth in her confrontations with Noel Vanstone and Mrs Lecount.

After this she becomes Mrs Vanstone following her marriage to Noel. This lasts until his death, at which point she becomes technically nameless again – because the marriage is technically invalid, since she has given the false name of Bygrave on her marriage licence.

She then becomes ‘Louisa’, acting as a maid to Admiral Bertram in her quest to locate the Secret Trust. When her efforts are uncovered by his retainer Mazey she is expelled from the estate – at which point she takes up the name of Mrs Gray in her search for employment in London.

It is no accident that at this point she has a psychological breakdown. She has been dispossessed of her family, her ’rightful’ inheritance, and the name which establishes her position in society.

Illegitimacy

Norah and Magdalen are the daughters of Andrew Vanstone, who is the owner of a country estate in Coombe-Raven, Somerset. But unknown to them (and everyone else) they are both illegitimate children. This is because Vanstone as a much younger man married an American woman who was paid off by his family. He has been living with the woman who is mother to the two sisters, but doing so in an unmarried state.

When the American woman dies, Andrew and Mrs Vanstone hurriedly depart for London to get married. This would appear to regularise the status of the two daughters, but technically they remain illegitimate – because their father and mother were not married at the time of their birth.

This is confirmed when Vanstone and his wife die suddenly, and by the laws of inheritance Vanstone’s estate goes to his legitimate next of kin – who happens to be his estranged brother Michael. The two sisters are therefore denied their ‘natural’ right to inherit their father’s wealth, and they are evicted from their own home – by a combination of English inheritance law and the greed of their relatives. This is what propels the events of the whole of the remainder of the novel.

As Virginia Blain points out in her introduction to the Oxford Classics edition of No Name:

Illegitimacy, with its connotations of allowing no legal inheritance or possession of property, no given social class, no status as a responsible person in the eyes of the law, no legal name, serves here as an evocative and subversive metaphor for the position of all women as non-persons in a patriarchal and patrilineal society.

The will

Andrew Vanstone is the original source of the problematic sequence of inheritance. He makes a will, leaving his money and estate to his wife and two daughters. But at the time of making the will he is not married to their mother, and his daughters are therefore illegitimate. He marries their mother when his first ‘secret’ wife dies – but that is too little, too late. His will was drawn up before the marriage. His now legitimate wife Mrs Vanstone also dies at the same time as he does.

Under English law therefore, his entire estate goes to his next of kin – his estranged brother Michael, who heartlessly makes no concessions or recompense towards the two orphaned nieces, Norah and Magdalen, whom he regards as bastard children.

When Michael Vanstone dies the inheritance passes automatically to his son Noel, a feeble, mean, and self-indulgent aesthete who is in thrall to the scheming housekeeper Mrs Lecount. When he marries Magdalen, it looks as if she has secured some re-attachment to an inheritance that she regards as hers by moral right. But there is a factor which neither she nor Wilkie Collins seem to take into account.

She has married Noel Vanstone using a false name – Miss Bygrave – so the marriage is technically invalid. When Noel Vanstone suddenly dies she is not legally his wife and next-of-kin. But by then Mrs Lecount has also bullied him into drawing up a desperately complicated will with obfuscating clauses and a Secret Trust. This provides the plot driver for the final chapters of the novel, until the inheritance and its rightful owners are re-united by the marriage of George Bertram and Norah Vanstone in a somewhat fairy tale conclusion.

Problems

There are however a couple of serious problems lying at the heart of events and centred on Magdalen’s motivation. Having been disinherited by the combination of the law of primogeniture and the greed of her relatives, she embarks upon a scheme of recovering her inheritance by marrying the very man who has robbed her of her rights.

But it is not made clear how this would be in any way effective – since by English law at that time all her assets in money or property would automatically become the property of her husband. There is talk of making a ‘settlement’ on her – that is, specifying a separate allowance over which she would have legal control – but not much is made of that issue.

Moreover, any such arrangement would be legally invalidated by the fact that she marries under a false name – Miss Bygrave – which would render the whole marriage null and void in a court of law. She would be guilty of ‘personation’ – pretending to be someone else.

Her desire for revenge over her rapacious relative is understandable – but neither she nor Wilkie Collins seem to have a clear objective or ‘plan of engagement’. She cannot recover the money by marriage; she cannot reverse the system of inheritance; and short of murdering her husband (which she never contemplates) she cannot gain control over the estate.

Given the highly over-wrought state of Magdalen’s sensibility regarding her plan to regain the inheritance, it is also surprising that Collins makes absolutely no mention of the sexual consequences of her marrying Noel Vanstone. She does provide Robert Kirke with an account of her past, but by nineteenth century standards she has a lot of ‘past’ to account for.

She is an illegitimate daughter; she has previously been semi-engaged to a feckless neighbour (Francis Clare); her family has become impoverished because of its illegal status; she has acted on the stage under an assumed name; and she has been married to a man she despises for the sake of money. This is quite a substantial volume of what we might now call ‘baggage’ to make her acceptable.

It is worth noting that at that time women in the theatrical profession were generally regarded as not much more than prostitutes. Actresses moved round from one town to another, unsupervised, un-chaperoned, in the company of single and married men – just as Magdalene does with Wragge and his troupe. Robert Fiske takes on a wife who would not be acceptable into most households in polite society at that time.

Plotting

Magdalen’s plan of vengeance on Noel Vanstone doesn’t make clear how it will enable her to get justice or the inheritance – the money will remain her husband’s, and she will remain his property

It has to be said that towards the end of this over-elaborated story, the plot collapses somewhat into a spate of melodramatic improbabilities. Magdalen not only secures a job as maid in the very house where the Secret Trust is kept. She does this by impersonating someone else, but she manages to read the letter of Trust over the shoulder of the Admiral, who is inspecting his private papers whilst sleepwalking.

She is then detected in her spying by the Admiral’s loyal retainer Mazey, but allowed to escape from the estate next morning. She then falls into a state of destitution and dangerous illness, living alone in the poor streets of London – only to be rescued by Robert Kirke. This is a man who has just sailed back from China and who has only ever seen her once in his life before, but fallen in love with her at first sight. Wilkie Collins is very inventive in his plotting and characterisation – but these are a few coincidences and plot contrivances too far.

No Name – study resources

No Name – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

No Name – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

No Name – Independent Publishers – Amazon UK

No Name – Independent Publishers – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Wilkie Collins – Kindle eBook

No Name - first edition

first edition – title page

No Name – plot synopsis

The First Scene

I. The Vanstone family assemble for breakfast. A mysterious letter arrives from New Orleans, which means Mr Vanstone and his wife must go to London on ‘family business’.

II. Next day the governess Miss Garth is accosted by the dubious Captain Wragge who is making enquiries about Mrs Vanstone.

III. Miss Garth gets a letter from Mrs Vanstone explaining that Wragge is a penniless scrounger, and that she is in London to see a doctor, who has confirmed that she is pregnant. But this does not explain the letter from New Orleans.

IV. Neighbour’s son Frank Clare fails as an engineer and returns home. He is invited by the spirited Magdalen to join in a theatrical party at Clifton.

V. Magdalen becomes enthusiastically caught up in preparations for the theatricals – and her behaviour changes.

VI. At rehearsals for The Rivals Magdalen is a big success, and she goes on to play two parts. Her sister Norah disapproves, and Miss Garth worries what the success will lead to.

VII. Next day Norah reproaches Magdalen for her developing relationship with Frank Clare. They quarrel, and Magdalen is unable to effect a reconciliation.

VIII. Mr Clare receives the offer of an opening for Frank in the City, which he takes up without any real enthusiasm.

IX. Three months later Frank returns with the news that the company wants to send him to China for five years. Magdalen gets her father’s permission to marry Frank, but he proposes a probationary waiting period of twelve months.

X. When Mr Clare also agrees to the proposal, Mr Vanstone sends for his London lawyer, but then later the same day he is killed in a train crash.

XI. Mrs Vanstone goes into labour. The lawyer Pendril arrives and urgently requires her signature on a legal document. But she and her baby die the same day.

XII. Mr Pendril reveals to Miss Garth that Mr and Mrs Vanstone went to London earlier in the year to get married.

XIII. Pendril also reveals Andrew Vanstone’s past – married when young to an American woman, who had to be paid off. There are conflicts with his brother Michael and his will is useless because it was made before he was married.

XIV. Magdalen has listened to these revelations and reports them to Norah.

XC. Penril locates Michael Vanstone, who has inherited all his brother’s wealth and refuses to help Magdalen and Norah. Magdalen plans to challenge him. Miss Garth offers to look after the two sisters in London. Magdalen agrees reluctantly that Frank should be sent to China.

The sisters leave Coombe-Raven and go to live at a school run by Miss Garth’s sister in Knightsbridge. After a month Magdalen runs away, contacts the theatre manager Huxstable, then disappears.

The Second Scene

I. When Magdalen arrives in York to see Huxstable, she is intercepted by the rogue Captain Wragge, who preys on her vulnerability to divert and (virtually) abduct her. He persuades her to hide from detection in his lodgings.

II. Magdalen encounters the distressed and confused Mrs Wragge. The Captain defends his occupation as a swindler and offers to ‘help’ Magdalen.

III. Magdalen wants to retrieve her inheritance from her uncle and thinks to use Wragge as a spy and agent – despite her reservations about him. Wragge becomes her theatrical promoter (for 50% of her earnings) and organises their escape from York – at her expense.

Between the Scenes

Wragge chronicles his plan to turn Magdalen into a one-woman touring show. Contact is established with Norah via poste-restante letters, and @Magdalen is a big success on stage. Wragge makes enquiries for Magdalen about the inheritance, and when Michael Vanstone dies she turns her attention to his son Noel. She leaves for London with Mrs Wragge, whilst Wragge himself plots to betray her.

The Third Scene

I. From seedy lodgings in Lambeth Magdalen watches the house opposite where Noel Vanstone is staying. She learns he is due to leave the next day.

II. Magdalen disguises herself as Miss Garth and goes into town where she sees Norah suffering as a governess. Then she calls and meets Mrs Lecount and her aquarium, with a pet toad.

III. Magdalen has an interview with Noel Vanstone and Mrs Lecount. She asks him to return half the inheritance: he refuses. Mrs Lecount suspects Magdalen’s disguise and cuts off a fragment of her skirt.

IV. Wragge’s blackmailing letter arrives chez Vanstone, who dithers indecisively over replying. Mrs Wragge thinks she sees a ghost when Magdalen returns dressed as Miss Garth.

Between the Scenes

Vanstone replies to the Times advert offering only five pounds as reward. Wragge therefore toadies to Magdalen. Norah gives up her job. Frank leaves his job in China and breaks off his engagement with Magdalen, who goes into a state of shock. She employs Wragge to trace Vanstone, who has moved to Aldborough, Suffolk.

The Fourth Scene

I. Wragge rents a house under the assumed name of Bygrave. Magdalen reveals her desperate plan of revenge – to marry Vanstone.

II. Handsome Robert Kirke makes enquiries about Magdalen. He has fallen in love with her at first sight, but goes back to sea to avert his over-emotional confusion.

III. Wragge intends to court Mrs Lecomt and proposes to get rid of Mrs Wragge. Magdalen refuses this suggestion. They set out to meet Vanstone and Mrs Lecount.

IV. Wragge flatters Mrs Lecount with his mugged-up science, and Vanstone is charmed by Magdalen, to whom he extends a tea invitation.

V. Magdalen and Wragge visit Vanstone, but during the night Mrs Lacount guesses Magdalen’s true identity. On an outing next day Mrs Lecount tries to expose Magdalen by asking her about Miss Garth.

VI. Magdalen goes into hiding. Mrs Lecount writes to Norah and gets a reply from Mrs Garth herself. Wragge fends off Mrs Lecount’s enquiries and plots with Noel Vanstone to neutralise her influence.

VII. Mrs Lecount tells Noel Vanstone about the identifying moles on Magdalen’s neck. He calls to make an inspection, but Wragge disguises them. Finally, Vanstone proposes to Magdalen.

VIII. Vanstone is worried by Mrs Lecount’s vague threats, and he agrees with Wragge to marry Magdalen in secret. They make a verbal agreement on her settlement, and then construct a trick to lure Mrs Lecount away to her brother in Zurich.

IX. Magdalen feels oppressed. They leave for a few days, during which time Mrs Lecount does some snooping. Wragge makes elaborate plans to deceive Mrs Lecount and to get Noel Vanstone away from Aldborough.

X.Noel Vanstone leaves according to the plan. Mrs Lecount goes to the Bygrave house and is confronted by Mrs Wragge, who tells her the tale of seeing Miss Garth’s ghost in Lambeth.

XI. Mrs Lecount receives a forged letter from Zurich and writes to Noel Vanstone warning him about Magdalen. Wragge confirms that she is bound for Zurich then makes plans to obtain the marriage licence from London.

XII. Wragge and Vanstone travel to London to arrange for the marriage licence. Mrs Lecount’s warning letter arrives, and Vanstone prevaricates. They all return to Aldborough.

XIII. Magdalen has been enduring severe doubts about the marriage. She almost cancels the agreement, She writes a long letter to Norah then buys some Laudanum with the idea of poisoning herself, but backs out at the last minute.

XIV. Wragge warns Magdalen of the legal consequences of the (technically invalid) marriage. The wedding takes place. Mrs Lecount reaches Zurich, where she learns she has been duped. She returns immediately to England.

Between the Scenes

George Bartram describes his search for his cousin Noel Vanstone and Mrs Lecount’s arrival at St Crux. Vanstone goes into hiding, and Magdalen writes to Norah. Mrs Lecount makes legal enquiries to locate Vanstone, with vengeance in mind. It is discovered that Vanstone made a will after the marriage. Mrs Lecount reveals the illegality of the marriage to Norah and Miss Garth. She then traces Vanstone and Magdalen to Dumfries.

The Fifth Scene

I. Mrs Lecount arrives in Scotland whilst Magdalen is away in London. She reveals the truth about Magdalen’s identity to Vanstone. She produces the evidence of the Alpaca dress and the bottle of ‘POISON’ which they assume was intended for him.

II. Mrs Lecount persuades Vanstone that his life is in danger, then bullies him into making a new will, with herself as a substantial beneficiary.

III. She then persuades him to make an elaborate arrangement with his executor which she claims will give protection by locking Magdalen out of any future access to his money. She also takes control of all the documents he signs. Later the same night, Vanstone dies.

Between the Scenes
Magdalen goes to London to see Norah, but she believes that Norah and Miss Garth have conspired against her. Lawyer Loscombe thinks that the second will cannot be contested, but he suspects the existence of a Secret Trust. Magdalen is determined to get hold of the letter of trust.

The Sixth Scene

I. Magdalen is at a low ebb, feeling that everyone is against her. She asks her servant Louisa for help.

II. Magdalen proposes applying for the job as servant to Admiral Bertram, and asks her maid Louisa to train her.

Between the Scenes

George Bertram pays court to Norah. Magdalen’s plan is delayed by six weeks because of the death of the legatee in the Secret Trust.

The Seventh Scene

I. Magdalen works as a maid for Admiral Bertram in the guise of Louisa. She is shown over the house by his old retainer Mazey, who sleeps guarding his master’s bedroom.

II. Mrs Lecount goes to stay in Zurich. Magdalen is unable to fathom where the Secret Trust might be kept.

III. The old Admiral and George Bertram discuss his marriage prospects. The Admiral objects to Norah because of her connection with the disgraced Magdalen. George agrees to spend a week at the home of a suitable alternative to test his resolve.

IV. Magdalen finds keys in a garden shed, but she does not find the Trust. Later she encounters the Admiral sleep-walking and gets to read part of the Trust before she is arrested by Mazey. However, he lets her escape the next morning.

Between the Scenes
Norah refuses George Bertram’s offer of marriage. The Admiral becomes ill and dies, but the Trust cannot be found, so all his money and estate goes to George. Magdalen prepares to disappear completely.

The Seventh Scene
I. Robert Kirke returns from China and meets a destitute Magdalen living in poverty in London. She is dangerously ill, so he arranges for medical care.

II. Weeks of Magdalen’s illness pass by. She is visited by a newly prosperous Wragge and is gradually introduced to her saviour Kirke, who becomes more and more enamoured of her.

III. Norah marries George Bertram. Magdalen worries that Kirke will be deterred when he learns of her past. Frank has meanwhile married a rich old widow on his way back from China.

IV. Norah reveals hoe she discovered the Secret Trust hidden in a bowl of ashes. It leaves half of the inheritance to Magdalen, but she tears up the letter of Trust and accepts Kirke’s offer of marriage.

No Name – principal characters

Andrew Vanstone	a rich busineessman and property owner
Mrs Vanstone	his wife (to whom he is not married)
Norah Vanstone	their serious elder daughter
Magdalen Vanstone	their spirited younger daughter
Mrs Harriet Garth	the family governess
Captain Noratio Wragge	a professional swindler
Matilda Wragge	his confused and child-like wife
Mr Clare	a philosophic neighbour
Francis Clare	his feckless son
Mr Pendril	the Vanstone lawyer in London
Michael Vanstone	Andrew’s nasty and hostile brother
Noel Vanstone	Michael’s son, an aesthete and miser
Mrs Virginie Lecount	housekeeper to Michael and Noel
Robert Kirke	a handsome merchant captain
Admiral Bartram	a Vanstone family relative
George Bartram	his nephew
Mr Mazey	the Admiral’s elderly servant

No Name – 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.

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Nona Vincent

December 1, 2012 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Nona Vincent first appeared in English Illustrated Magazine in February—March 1892, then later reprinted in The Real Thing and Other Tales (London and New York, 1893). The other stories in the collection were The Chaperon, Greville Fane, and Sir Dominick Ferrand, which also has the title Jersey Villas.

Walter Sickert (1869-1942)

Nona Vincent – critical comment

At the time of writing this tale Henry James was in the midst of his own theatrical ambitions, writing plays in the hope of creating a name for himself as a major dramatist. His hopes came to nothing. After five years, his play Guy Domville was booed off stage on its first night.

Nevertheless, James made use of his experiences, and Nona Vincent contains many elelemnts of theatrical life – the difficult search for promotional backing, the stress of rehearsals, the issue of dramatic interpretation, and even the author’s embarrassed curtain call on the first night of his big success.

As a glimpse into the world of the theatre, it is witty and charming, but as a tale its parts do not hang together as well as they might. For instance, there is very little connection between the first part of the story and subsequent events in the second.

For instance there is an unexplained difference between Violet’s meetings with Mrs Alsager. Violet is visited by Mrs Alsager in Part II and provides what is the inspiration for Violet’s much-improved interpretation of her role as Nona Vincent. But Violet has already met Mrs Alsager in the first part of the story, and no reason is provided why the second meeting should have such a dramatic effect.

Wayworth seems to be depicted in the first part of the tale as a failure. He flits from one literary issue to another. Initially he is concerned with literary form, then scenic idea, and finally dramatic form. He is also unsuccessful for two years, which is realistic, but has little connection with his huge success in part two of the tale. He even writes a second play, which has no relevance to the overall story.

The tale also has a very conventional happy ending – with Wayworth’s marriage to the principal lady – though it is interesting to note the fact that she then abandons the stage. This perhaps reflects the fact that even as late at the end of the nineteenth century, acting was seen as a slightly improper occupation for women.

Nona Vincent – study resources

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

Complete Stories 1892—1898 – Library of America – Amazon UK

Complete Stories 1892—1898 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Complete Tales of Henry James – Volume 8 – Digireads reprint UK

Nona Vincent – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Nona Vincent – plot summary

Part I.
Allan Wayworth is a young aspiring dramatist who shares his literary enthusiasms with Mrs Alsager, the wife of a rish newspaper magnate. When he writes a play, it appears that the female lead character (Nona Vincent) is a thinly veiled portrait of Mrs Alsager. She is keen to help him find a theatrical promoter, but after a year with no success, he is reduced to no more than hack work, writing encyclopedia entries. He writes a second play, but that fares no better.

When a manager finally agrees to take up the play, Wayworth attends rehearsals, but is disappointed that the leading lady Violet Grey does not appear to fit her role and does not understand what effects Wayworth wishes to create via her character.

Mrs Alsager contrives a meeting with Violet then reveals to Wayworth that the young girl is in love with him. When he next meets Violet she tells him the same thing about Mrs Alsager.

Part II.
Wayworth begins to feel protective about Violet and has conflicted feelings regarding her future. Mrs Alsager manifests jealous feelings towards Violet. Tensions rise during the rehearsal period, but the first night is success. Violet however feels that she is inadequate for the principal role.

The next day Wayworth has a dreamlike vision of his fictional heroine Nona Vincent, and at that night’s performance, Violet puts on an entirely new interpretation of the role which is a big critical success.

Violet then reveals to Wayworth that she too had a visitation at the same time as his – but in the real form of Mrs Alsager, who provided the living substance and model she needed to understand, appreciate, and act Nona Vincent.

The play runs for two hundred performances, Wayworth marries Violet, and she retires from the stage. But Mrs Alsager continues to attend all Wayworth’s subsequent plays.

Principal characters

Allan Wayworth	an aspiring young dramatist (28)
Mrs Alsager	a cultural enthusiast (50)
Mr Alsager	her much older husband, a rich newspaper magnate, who does not appear
Mr Loder	a theatrical manager
Miss Violet Grey	a young actress

Henry James’s study

Other works by Henry James

Washington Square (1880) is a superb early short novel, It’s the tale of a young girl whose future happiness is being controlled by her strict authoritarian (but rather witty) father. She is rather reserved, but has a handsome young suitor. However, her father disapproves of him, seeing him as an opportunist and a fortune hunter. There is a battle of wills – all conducted within the confines of their elegant New York town house. Who wins out in the end? You will probably be surprised by the outcome. This is a masterpiece of social commentary, offering a sensitive picture of a young woman’s life.
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The Aspern Papers (1888) is a psychological drama set in Venice which centres on the tussle for control of a great writer’s correspondence. An elderly lady, ex-lover of the writer, seeks a husband for her daughter. But the potential purchaser of the papers is a dedicated bachelor. Money is also at stake – but of course not discussed overtly. There is a refined battle of wills between them. Who will win in the end? As usual, James keeps the reader guessing. The novella is a masterpiece of subtle narration, with an ironic twist in its outcome. This collection of stories also includes three of his accomplished long short stories – The Private Life, The Middle Years, and The Death of the Lion.
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The Spoils of Poynton (1896) is a short novel which centres on the contents of a country house, and the question of who is the most desirable person to inherit it via marriage. The owner Mrs Gereth is being forced to leave her home to make way for her son and his greedy and uncultured fiancee. Mrs Gereth develops a subtle plan to take as many of the house’s priceless furnishings with her as possible. But things do not go quite according to plan. There are some very witty social ironies, and a contest of wills which matches nouveau-riche greed against high principles. There’s also a spectacular finale in which nobody wins out.
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Henry James – web links

Henry James at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides, tutorials on the Complete Tales, book reviews. bibliographies, and web links.

The Complete Works
Sixty books in one 13.5 MB Kindle eBook download for £1.92 at Amazon.co.uk. The complete novels, stories, travel writing, and prefaces. Also includes his autobiographies, plays, and literary criticism – with illustrations.

The Ladder – a Henry James website
A collection of eTexts of the tales, novels, plays, and prefaces – with links to available free eTexts at Project Gutenberg and elsewhere.

A Hyper-Concordance to the Works
Japanese-based online research tool that locates the use of any word or phrase in context. Find that illusive quotable phrase.

The Henry James Resource Center
A web site with biography, bibliographies, adaptations, archival resources, suggested reading, and recent scholarship.

Online Books Page
A collection of online texts, including novels, stories, travel writing, literary criticism, and letters.

Henry James at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of eTexts, available in a variety of eBook formats.

The Complete Letters
Archive of the complete correspondence (1855-1878) work in progress – published by the University of Nebraska Press.

The Scholar’s Guide to Web Sites
An old-fashioned but major jumpstation – a website of websites and resouces.

Henry James – The Complete Tales
Tutorials on the complete collection of over one hundred tales, novellas, and short stories.

More tales by James
More on literature
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Nostromo – a review

October 13, 2009 by Roy Johnson

revolution and capital accumulation in Latin America

Nostromo is generally regarded by most Conrad commentators as his greatest novel. It embraces wide ranging themes of political struggle, international capitalism, the expansion of Europe and the United States into Latin America, various forms of personal heroism and sacrifice, and the dreams and obsessions which can lead people to self-destruction. The location of the novel is Costaguana, a fictional country on the western seaboard of South America, and the focus of events is in its capital Sulaco, where a silver mine has been inherited by English-born Charles Gould but is controlled by American capitalists in San Francisco.

Competing military factions plunge the country in a state of civil war, and Gould tries desperately to keep the mine working. Amidst political chaos, he dispatches a huge consignment of silver, putting it into the hands of the eponymous hero, the incorruptible Capataz de Cargadores, Nostromo. However, things do not go according to plan. It is almost impossible to provide an account of the plot without giving away what are called in movie criticism ‘plot spoilers’. But the silver does not reach its intended destination, and the remainder of the novel is concerned with both the civil conflict and the attitudes of the people who know that the silver exists, and their vainglorious attempts to acquire it.

The novel has a curious but on the whole impressive structure. The first part of the book is an extraordinarily slow-moving – almost static – account of Costaguana and the back-history of the main characters in the story. Then the central section – more than half the novel – is taken up with the dramatic events of just two or three days and nights in which rebel forces attack the town, the silver is smuggled out, and the scene is set for disaster.

This central section of the novel which covers the scenes of military insurgency and high drama conveys very convincingly the uncertainty of civil war, the powerlessness of individuals, and the force of large scale events. Bandits suddenly become generals, all normal communications are cut off, and nobody can be sure where to turn to for law and order. Amazingly, around two hundred pages of narrative cover only two or three days of action – much of it at night.

The main point of Conrad’s story is that the silver of the mine corrupts almost all who come into contact with it. The inheritance and running of the mine estrange Charles Gould from his wife; once Nostromo has concealed the silver, his knowledge of its location eventually corrupts him; and the rebel leader Sotillo is driven almost made with desire to possess it. Only the saintly Emilia Gould has the strength to resist it, refusing to know where it is buried, even when the information is offered by the last person to know, on his death bed.

A great deal of the narrative tension in this long novel turns on who knows what about whom, and many of the key scenes are drenched in dramatic irony built on coincidences which have all the improbability of the nineteenth century novel hanging about them. At one point a completely new character suddenly appears as a stowaway on a boat, and then improbably survives a collision with another ship in the dark by hanging onto the other boat’s anchor. And this is merely a plot device allowing him to transmit misleading information to his captors – and incidentally allows Conrad to indulge in a rather unpleasant bout of anti-Semitism.

In common with many other novels from Conrad’s late phase, the narrative is conveyed to us in a very complex manner. It passes from third person omniscient narrator to first person accounts of events by fictional characters. Authorial point of view and the chronology of events both change alarmingly; the narrative is sometimes taken over temporarily by a fictional character, or is recounted via an improbably long letter which we are meant to believe is being written (in pencil) in the heat of gunfire and other tumultuous events.

There’s also a great deal of geographic uncertainty. As reports come in from one end of the country to the other, and the loyalty of one province and its leaders is mentioned in relation to another – as well as its strategic position on the seaboard – I began to wish for a map to conceptualise events.

Once a heroic solution has been found for the plight of the beleaguered loyalists (an epic Paul Revere type ride on horseback by Nostromo) the story suddenly flashes forward to the successful years of recovery and the aftermath. Nostromo seeks to consolidate his successful position by a judicious marriage, but is distracted by his passionate love for his intended’s younger sister. Even this detail is linked to the silver of the mine, and it brings about the truly tragic finale.

Despite all Conrad’s stylistic peculiarities (and even some lapses in grammar) this is a magnificent novel which amply repays the undoubtedly demanding efforts required to read it. But that is true of many modern classics – from Mrs Dalloway to Ulysses and Remembrance of Things Past.

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Joseph Conrad, Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp.524, ISBN: 0199555915

More on Joseph Conrad
Twentieth century literature
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Nostromo – a tutorial

January 27, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Nostromo (1904) is Joseph Conrad’s ‘big’ political novel – into which he packs all of his major subjects and themes. It is set in the imaginary Latin-American country of Costaguana – and features a stolen hoard of silver, desperate acts of courage, and characters trembling on the brink of moral panic. The political background encompasses nationalist revolution and the Imperialism of foreign intervention. Silver is the pivot of the whole story – revealing the courage of some and the corruption and destruction of others. Conrad’s narration is as usual complex and oblique. He begins half way through the events of the revolution, and proceeds by way of flashbacks and glimpses into the future.

Joseph Conrad

Nostromo – critical commentary

Political theme

This is generally regarded by most Conrad commentators as his greatest novel. It embraces wide ranging themes of political struggle, international capitalism, the expansion of Europe and the United States into Latin America, various forms of personal heroism and sacrifice, and the dreams and obsessions which can lead people to self-destruction.

The location of the novel is Costaguana, a fictional country on the western seaboard of South America, and the focus of events is in its capital Sulaco, where a silver mine has been inherited by English-born Charles Gould but is controlled by American capitalists in San Francisco. Competing military factions plunge the country in a state of civil war, and Gould tries desperately to keep the mine working. Amidst political chaos, he dispatches a huge consignment of silver, putting it into the hands of the eponymous hero, the incorruptible Capataz de Cargadores, Nostromo.

However, things do not go according to plan. It is almost impossible to provide an account of the plot without giving away what are called in movie criticism ‘plot spoilers’. But the silver does not reach its intended destination, and the remainder of the novel is concerned with both the civil conflict and the attitudes of the people who know that the silver exists, and their vainglorious attempts to acquire it.

Structure

The silver of the mine

Narrative mode(s)

Nostromo – study resources

Nostromo – Oxford World’s Classics – Amazon UK

Nostromo – Oxford World’s Classics – Amazon US

Nostromo – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

Nostromo – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

Nostromo – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Nostromo – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Nostromo – Everyman’s Library – Amazon UK

Nostromo – Everyman’s Library – Amazon US

Nostromo – York Notes – Amazon UK

Nostromo – 1996 BBC adaptation on VHS – Amazon UK

Nostromo – eBook version at Project Gutenberg

The Complete Novels of Joseph Conrad – Kindle eBook editions

Conrad: Nostromo – Landmarks of World Literature – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Amazon UK

Nostromo – audioBook version at Project Gutenberg

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Routledge Guide to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad – Amazon UK

Notes on Life and Letters – Amazon UK

Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

Joseph Conrad at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Joseph Conrad at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study materials

Nostromo – plot summary

Charles Gould is a native Costaguanero of English descent who owns the silver-mining concession in Sulaco. He is tired of the political instability in Costaguana and its concomitant corruption, and puts his weight behind the Ribierist project, which he believes will finally bring stability to the country after years of misrule and tyranny by self-serving dictators. Instead, the silver mine and the wealth it has generated become a bone for the local warlords to fight over, plunging Costaguana into a new round of chaos. Among others, the revolutionary Montero invades Sulaco; Señor Gould, adamant that his silver should not become spoil for his enemies, entrusts it to Nostromo, the trusted ‘capataz de los cargadores’ (head longshoreman).

Nostromo is an Italian expatriate who has risen to that position through his daring exploits. (‘Nostromo’ is Italian for mate or boatswain, as well as a contraction of nostro uomo – ‘our man’.) He is so named by his employer, Captain Mitchell. Nostromo’s real name is Giovanni Battista Fidanza – Fidanza meaning ‘trust’ in archaic Italian. Nostromo is what would today be called a shameless self-publicist. He is believed by Señor Gould to be incorruptible, and for this reason is entrusted with hiding the silver from the revolutionaries. He accepts the mission not out of loyalty to Señor Gould, but rather because he sees an opportunity to increase his own fame.

A pivotal episode in the novel takes place at night, when Nostromo, together with an escaping French journalist Decoud, sets out at sea to save the silver – not realising he has a stowaway on board. His boat is in collision with a ship bringing the rebels, and he is forced to scuttle his boat and bury the silver on an island.

In the end it is Nostromo, together with a ruined cynic of a doctor and a journalist (all acting for self-serving reasons), who are able to restore some kind of order to Sulaco. It is they who are able to persuade two of the warlords to aid Sulaco’s secession from Costaguana and protect it from other armies. Nostromo, the incorruptible one, is the key figure in setting the wheels in motion.

In Conrad’s universe, however, almost no one is incorruptible. The exploit does not bring Nostromo the fame he had hoped for, and he feels slighted and used. Feeling that he has risked his life for nothing, he is consumed by resentment, which leads to his corruption and ultimate destruction, for he had kept secret the true fate of the silver after all others believed it lost at sea, rather than hidden on an offshore island. In recovering the silver for himself, he is shot and killed, mistaken for a trespasser, by the father of his fiancée, the keeper of the lighthouse on the island of Great Isabel.

Joseph Conrad – biography

Principal characters

Charles Gould	Owner of the San Tome silver mine
Emilia Gould	His principled and attractive wife
Dr Monygham	An English expatriate doctor, survivor of torture
Martin Decoud	Radical French journalist
Giorgio Viola	Ex-Garibaldian inn-keeper
Teresa Viola	Viola’s elder daughter – Nostromo’s ‘intended’
Giselle Viola	Viola’s younger daughter
Captain Mitchell	English harbour chief
Colonel Sotillo	Savage insurrectionary leader
Pedro Montero	Costaguanan war lord
Antonia Avellanos	a patriot
Sulaco	mining town on the coast of Costaguana
Costaguana	Imaginary country on the western seaboard of South America

Conrad’s writing

Manuscript page from Heart of Darkness

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad offers a series of essays by leading Conrad scholars aimed at both students and the general reader. There’s a chronology and overview of Conrad’s life, then chapters that explore significant issues in his major writings, and deal in depth with individual works. These are followed by discussions of the special nature of Conrad’s narrative techniques, his complex relationships with late-Victorian imperialism and with literary Modernism, and his influence on other writers and artists. Each essay provides guidance to further reading, and a concluding chapter surveys the body of Conrad criticism.

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Joseph Conrad’s writing table

The Complete Critical Guide to Joseph Conrad is a good introduction to Conrad criticism. It includes a potted biography, an outline of the stories and novels, and pointers towards the main critical writings – from the early comments by his contemporaries to critics of the present day. Also includes a thorough bibliography which covers biography, criticism in books and articles, plus pointers towards specialist Conrad journals. These guides are very popular. Recommended.

Other novels by Joseph Conrad

The Secret Agent (1907) is a short novel and a masterpiece of sustained irony. It is based on the real incident of a bomb attack on the Greenwich Observatory in 1888 and features a cast of wonderfully grotesque characters: Verloc the lazy double agent, Inspector Heat of Scotland Yard, and the Professor – an anarchist who wanders through the novel with bombs strapped round his waist and the detonator in his hand. The English government and police are subject to sustained criticism, and the novel bristles with some wonderfully orchestrated effects of dramatic irony – all set in the murky atmosphere of Victorian London. Here Conrad prefigures all the ambiguities which surround two-faced international relations, duplicitous State realpolitik, and terrorist outrage which still beset us more than a hundred years later.
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Under Western Eyes (1911) is the story of Razumov, a reluctant ‘revolutionary’. He is in fact a coward who is mistaken for a radical hero and cannot escape from the existential trap into which this puts him. This is Conrad’s searing critique of Russian ‘revolutionaries’ who put his own Polish family into exile and jeopardy. The ‘Western Eyes’ are those of an Englishman who reads and comments on Razumov’s journal – thereby creating another chance for Conrad to recount the events from a very complex perspective. Razumov achieves partial redemption as a result of his relationship with a good woman, but the ending, with faint echoes of Dostoyevski, is tragic for all concerned.
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Joseph Conrad web links

Joseph Conrad at Mantex
Biography, tutorials, book reviews, study guides, videos, web links.

Joseph Conrad – his greatest novels and novellas
Brief notes introducing his major works in recommended editions.

Joseph Conrad at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of formats.

Joseph Conrad at Wikipedia
Biography, major works, literary career, style, politics, and further reading.

Joseph Conrad at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production notes, box office, trivia, and quizzes.

Works by Joseph Conrad
Large online database of free HTML texts, digital scans, and eText versions of novels, stories, and occasional writings.

The Joseph Conrad Society (UK)
Conradian journal, reviews. and scholarly resources.

The Joseph Conrad Society of America
American-based – recent publications, journal, awards, conferences.

Hyper-Concordance of Conrad’s works
Locate a word or phrase – in the context of the novel or story.

More on Joseph Conrad
Twentieth century literature
More on Joseph Conrad tales

Novelists and the Theatre

May 10, 2016 by Roy Johnson

a tutorial essay with study resources

Novelists and the theatre have often formed an ambiguous relationship. Some of the earliest novelists such as Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett produced both novels and dramas (as well as non-fiction works) though they are currently regarded primarily as novelists and their writing for the theatre is more or less forgotten.

The same is true for Walter Scott, and even Jane Austen has a play (Sir Charles Grandison) amongst her lesser, that is almost completely unknown works. Charles Dickens was also a great lover of amateur theatricals, participating in them as an actor and a stage manager. He wrote a play The Frozen Deep (1856) in conjunction with his friend Wilkie Collins, based on Sir John Franklin’s search for the Northwest Passage. But despite rave reviews this work is now a museum piece, whilst his novels are as popular as ever.

It is difficult to pinpoint a cause for this phenomenon of failed theatrical works, except to say that as the novel rose as a medium of both popular and highbrow cultural values, the theatre was in a period of relative decline. From the eighteenth into the nineteenth centuries more and more people were literate. Newspapers and magazines (in which many novels first appeared) grew in popularity, whereas the number of theatres remained relatively static. Circulating libraries grew in popularity, as did the sales of novels in both serial and volume form.

In the twentieth century works of a theatrical nature came to be transmitted first via cinema, then radio, and finally by television, which is now established as the most popular medium for the expression of imaginative drama. The crossover from the dominance of one medium over another is nowhere more neatly illustrated than in the case of James Joyce – one of the most experimental of modern novelists – who was the first person to open a cinema in Dublin, Ireland in 1909.

Here are a few examples of novelists and their attempts to diversify in terms of their medium. Perhaps their lack of theatrical success can also be attributed to the enormous shift in artistic practice that the switch from page to stage inherently demands.

Henry James is a very famous case of the ambivalent results of a novelist’s dalliance with the theatre. His novels are packed with dramatic incident, sparkling dialogue, and well-orchestrated plots – so he had every reason to believe that he would succeed in writing staged dramas. From 1890 onwards he wrote half a dozen plays, but only one of them – a dramatization of his novel The American (1876) – was produced with any degree of success.

Then in 1895 he put all his energy into the long drama Guy Domville which he wrote especially for the opening of the St James’s Theatre in the West End of London. This proved to be a disaster, and James the playwright was booed off stage on the first night. He was seriously depressed by this response, and was forced to return to the novel genre as the principal outlet for his creative imagination.

However, the story does have a positive ending, because he recycled the content of these dramas into the plots of some of his later novels such as The Other House (1896) and The Outcry (1911). Interestingly enough, James converted The Other House back into play form in 1909, but once again it failed to reach production.

Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle – Amazon UK

Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle – Amazon US

Thomas Hardy gave up writing novels because of the public outcries of indecency over Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1894). Afterwards he turned his attention to the ‘theatre’ and spent six years writing his epic verse drama The Dynasts. This huge panorama of the Napoleonic War was published in three parts, nineteen acts, and one hundred and thirty scenes in 1904, 1906, and 1908. It is written in verse, and is more or less impossible to present on stage because of its complex battle scenes and its sheer length.

It is worth noting that many other nineteenth century poets and writers had written verse dramas which are now confined to the of literary history – from Shelley’s The Cenci (1819), to Browning’s series more than half a dozen verse dramas published under the collective title of Bells and Pomegranates which were published but hardly ever produced on stage

Hardy’s The Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall is a one act play published in 1923 and first performed by the Hardy Players, an amateur theatrical group for whom Hardy wrote the drama. The full title reflects his desire to have the play performed: The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall at Tintagel in Lyonnesse. A New Version of an Old Story Arranged as a Play for Mummers, in One Act Requiring No Theatre or Scenery.

Complete Works of Thomas Hardy – Kindle – Amazon UK

Complete Works of Thomas Hardy – Kindle – Amazon US

Joseph Conrad had established his reputation as the author of technically challenging and morally complex novels when he first felt drawn to the world of theatre. He might have known that the result would be problematic, because he immediately ran into the issue of censorship. At that time all works written for the stage had to be submitted to the Lord Chamberlain’s office for approval by the Censor of Plays. This is a power which was not repealed until the Theatres Act of 1968.

In 1905 he wrote One Day More a one-act play which was an adaptation of his story To-Morrow (1902). The play was actually a modest success, but Conrad felt the experiment was a disappointment. However, he was outraged by the arbitrary legal requirement and he railed against the public censorship of dramatic productions by the Lord Chamberlain in his very scathing essay The Censor of Plays – An Appreciation (1907), speaking of

th[is] monstrous and outlandish figure, the magot chinois whom I believed to be but a memorial of our forefathers’ mental aberration, that grotesque potiche

However, despite this unsatisfactory experience, he embarked on further theatrical ventures, none of which were particularly successful. In 1920 he was persuaded to adapt his story Gaspar Ruiz for the cinema and produced a film script with the title Gaspar the Strong Man, but the cinematic version was never produced.

He adapted his novel The Secret Agent (1904) for the theatre – a play staged with reasonable success at the Ambassadors Theatre in 1922, but which he felt to be a failure:

The disagreeable part of this business is to see wasted the hard work of people who depend upon it for their livelihood [the actors], and for whom success would mean assured employment and ease of mind. One feels guilty somehow.

Then in 1922 he wrote a play Laughing Anne which was criticised by his friend John Galsworthy as being technically naive and ‘threatening to present an unbearable spectacle’. This was because the original story, Because of the Dollars (1914) features a man with no hands who bludgeons a woman to death. It proved to be his last attempt at writing for the theatre.

A comparison of the play script and the story reveals the weaknesses of the theatrical version. The play reaches its dramatic climax with a fight sequence in which Laughing Anne is killed by the man without hands (MWH). All the action takes place in semi-darkness.

DAVIDSON (To SERANG on board) : Send four men ashore. There is a dead body there which we are going to take out to sea, (He moves, carrying the lantern low, followed by four Malays in blue dungaree suits, dark faces. Stands the lantern on the ground by the body and looking down at it apostrophizes the corpse.) Poor Anne! You are on my conscience, but your boy shall have his chance.
(As the kalashes stoop to lift up the body CURTAIN falls.)

Quite apart from all the superfluous scene description, this version omits some of the key events and the ironic aftermath to the story. In the prose narrative Because of the Dollars Davidson buries Anne at sea and gives the child to his wife to look after. However, his wife suspects that the child is actually his by Anne, and she turns against both of them. Eventually she leaves him and goes back to her parents. The boy is sent to a church school in Malacca, where he eventually does well and plans to become a missionary. Davidson is left alone with nobody.

In 1924, as a fellow novelist and author of plays, Galsworthy accurately summed up Conrad’s relationship to the theatre:

his nature recoiled too definitely from the limitations which the stage imposes on word painting and the subtler efforts of a psychologist. The novel suited his nature better than the play, and he instinctively kept to it.

Complete Works of Joseph Conrad – Kindle – Amazon UK

Complete Works of Joseph Conrad – Kindle – Amazon US

D.H. Lawrence is well known as a novelist, a writer of short stories, and even as a poet; but the amazing thing is that he wrote eight plays, only a couple of which were staged during his own lifetime. The full list is as follows: The Daughter-in-Law (1912); The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd (1914); Touch and Go (1920); David (1926); The Fight for Barbara (1933); A Collier’s Friday Night (1934); The Married Man (1940); The Merry-Go-Round (1941).

Many of these works anticipate the ‘kitchen sink’ phase of British drama which emerged later in the 1950s and 1960s. They dealt in a fully realistic manner with powerful conflicts of class, gender, and individual liberty set in working class milieux. A number of these works have been successfully staged and turned into television dramas in the twentieth century – but they have had little impact on his critical reputation, which remains firmly based on his work as a novelist and writer of short stories.

Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence – Kindle – Amazon UK

Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence – Kindle – Amazon US

James Joyce had only published a short selection of poems (Chamber Music 1907) a collection of short stories (Dubliners 1914) and his first novel (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 1916) when he produced his only play Exiles in 1918. He had been heavily influenced by the work of the Norwegian dramatist Ibsen whose powerful dramas had challenged many of the suppositions that lay behind public and private morality in the late nineteenth century.

Exiles was rejected by W.B. Yeats for production at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, and it had to wait until 1970 for a major London performance when it was directed by Harold Pinter at the Mermaid Theatre.

Complete Works of James Joyce – Kindle – Amazon UK

Complete Works of James Joyce – Kindle – Amazon US

Virginia Woolf had no serious intention to be considered a playwright, but she did take part in amateur theatrical productions mounted by members of the Bloomsbury Group for their own amusement, and she did eventually write the play Freshwater. This is a satire of the bohemian world of her aunt, the Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. But Woolf took the play seriously enough to produce two versions – a one act version in 1923, and then a longer three act version in 1935.

Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle – Amazon UK

Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle – Amazon US

Officers and Gentlemen

March 18, 2018 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study guide, commentary, web links

Officers and Gentlemen (1955) is the second volume of Evelyn Waugh’s Second World War trilogy Sword of Honour. It follows Men at Arms (1952) and precedes the concluding volume, Unconditional Surrender (1961). The novels can be read separately, but their significance is far greater when considered as a whole. For a detailed examination of the parallels and constructive differences, see the excellent introduction and explanatory notes to the Penguin edition of Sword of Honour edited by Angus Calder.

Officers and Gentlemen – commentary

The war

Waugh captures magnificently the chaos of war – the orders issued in ignorance, then immediately countermanded, the administrative departments at emnity with each other, and the assessments of ‘progress’ which are based on completely bogus information.

They had no transport, they had no cooks, they had far too many officers and sergeants, they wore a variety of uniforms and followed a multitude of conflicting regimental customs, they bore strange arms, daggers and toggle-ropes and tommy-guns.

More importantly Waugh exposes the reflection of the English class system into the armed forces. There is absurd concern with rank and petty deference to rules and regulations. There is suspicion and hostility between various parts of the military, the air force, and the navy. Officers educated on the playing fields of Eton behave as if they are dealing with teams from a rival college.

The ruling elite are concerned with who salutes whom; they conduct their social life with servants and batmen as if they were in gentlemen’s West End clubs; and they are largely ignorant of the organisational and technical details of the war they are fighting – and they are supposed to be leading.

The novel also emphasises the ironic contrast between appearance and reality. The officers are tasked to uphold honour, duty, and courage in the face of adversity. Instead they are shown evading responsibility and going to pieces.

Colonel Campbell is obssessed with explosives and finishes by blowing himself up. Major Fido Hound steals his own troops rations, loses his way and becomes delirious. Guy regards Ivor Claire as the embodiment of English chivalry – but Claire abandons his men and deserts his post when threatened by the German advance. He is posted to India to avoid possible Court Martial. And Guy is sent a long way back home so that he will not compromise this diplomatic move.

This is where Evelyn Waugh shows his main strengths. Although he is a conservative, with a sceptical view of progress, democracy, and egalitarianism, he exposes the weaknesses of the ruling class which he sees as failing and hopelessly ill-equipped to face the twentieth-century world.

The narrative

Waugh has a habit of making leaps in his narrative which leave certain important details unexplained. This may be the result of the trilogy being conceived as a whole, but written and published as a succession of separate novels.

We do not discover until this, the second novel in the trilogy, that Trimmer (a major character in the first volume) was once a hairdresser using the name ‘Gustave’. He worked on board the cross-Atlantic liner Aquitainia where one of his regular customers was Virginia (formerly Guy’s wife) travelling to meet her third husband Mr Troy.

Similarly, it is not at all clear from Officers and Gentlemen what happened to Major Hound in Crete and the survival boat skipper on their escape to Alexandria. These events are related mainly from Guy’s point of view, and we are given the impression that he became delirious and was then traumatised until his revival in the hospital at Alexandria.

But in the third volume of the trilogy, Unconditional Surrender, we are given the impression that Ludovic is terrified that Guy will reveal the truth about these disappearances when they meet at a party in Chelsea. The clear implication is that Ludovic has murdered Hound and thrown overboard the skipper of the boat on which they escaped.

It is somewhat ironic that the character of Ludovic was reputedly based on the real-life figure of the Ukranian-born Ludvick Hoch who fought with the British army during the war. He later took out British nationality and changed his name to Robert Maxwell before becoming a member of parliament and the head of a gigantic publishing empire. He was later revealed as a crook and an embezzler owing millions of pounds, who died in ‘mysterious circumstances’ by falling off his private yatch. An example, perhaps of Oscar Wilde’s dictum of ‘life imitating art’?

One of the other oddities of Waugh’s methods as a novelist is that he introduces standout characters who make serious appearances in the plot – only to be discarded or forgotten. The laird of Mugg and his crazed Nazi-supporting niece deliver memorable performances in the early part of the novel. Their macabre dinner at the Gothic and inhospitable castle is a comic masterpiece. Yet they never reappear and are written off later in a single sentence.

The great explosion which killed Mugg and his niece was attributed to enemy action.

It is quite clear that Ludovic has murky intentions: he has an arrogant attitude to his superiors; he keeps a secret diary; and he has a lofty and detached manner concerning the events in which he participates. Waugh suggests that ‘it is supposed’ that Ludovic threw overboard the sapper who was in control of the escape boat from Crete, but no reason is provided for such an action. In the third volume it is revealed that he is a Communist, and more surprisingly he writes a (bad) best-selling novel.

Waugh creates a convincing account of someone sliding into psychological collapse when Colonel Fido Hound becomes disoriented and lost in the retreat from Crete, but we do not really know what happens to him in the end. Waugh’s own notes to the novel claim that Ludovic might have killed Hound – but we are given no reason why this should be the case – except that Ludovic has earlier hinted menacingly that some officers were being shot by members of their own lower ranks. Yet Ludovic has earlier saved Colonel Hound when he was lost.

Officers and Gentlemen – study resources

Officers and Gentlemen – Penguin – Amazon UK

Officers and Gentlemen – Penguin – Amazon US

Sword of Honour – Paperback – Amazon UK
The full war trilogy – with explanatory notes

Sword of Honour – DVD film – Amazon UK
Channel 4 TV series adaptation – with Daniel Craig

Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited – Amazon UK

Evelyn Waugh – by Henry Lamb

Officers and Gentlemen – plot summary

In 1940 Guy Crouchback returns from his posting in Africa to London and shelters from the Blitz in Bellamy’s Club. He reports next day for duty, but nobody expects him. His father old Mr Crouchback’s tenure at the seaside hotel is under threat because of petty regulations. Colonel Jumbo Trotter delivers Guy’s new orders and commandeers transport for the belongings of Apthorpe, who has died in Africa. Guy is posted to Scotland on ‘secret operations’ with X Commando.

On the Isle of Mugg Guy meets Trimmer McTavish and hands over Apthorpe’s gear. Guy goes with Tommy Blackhouse to a comically absurd dinner with the Laird of Mugg, who is obsessed with explosives and is rabidly Scottish. His niece is a mad supporter of Hitler against the British.

Trimmer goes to Glasgow on leave and picks up Virginia, Guy’s former wife. The laird shows Guy more of his explosives, and a ‘nutitionist’ doctor takes men on survivalist training expeditions. When the transport ship arrives for the unit’s mission there is great secrecy and confusion about their destination and objectives. Operation Hookforce sails to Cape Town, whilst Ritchie-Hook disappears on a flight to join them.

The operation travels on to Egypt without a commander, whilst moves are afoot in London to remove Hookforce as an irregular unit that is causing embarrassment. Guy lunches with the diplomat Stritch and his wife Julia in Alexandria.

In London, Trimmer is put in charge of Operation Popgun along with Ian Kilbannock as observer. He meets Virginia again, who is a friend of Ian’s wife. The Operation sails by submarine for an island in the Channel, but surfaces at the wrong destination on the German-occupied French coast. There is a botched attempt at demolition, but their sortie is reported a huge success. Trimmer is feted as a patriotic hero.

Guy and X Commando are despatched to assist at the evacuation of Crete, which is a grim shambles. Troops are in disarray and retreat; they are harrassed by the German Luftwaffe; and there is a complete lack of overall command.

Guy and Major Hound try to establish contact with someone in authority on the island. They are engulfed by soldiers in retreat. Hound becomes slightly delirious, gets lost, and is robbed by a Cretan partisan. He is rescued by Ludovic. Guy tries to join the retreating forces, but Hookforce has been ordered to remain covering the evacuation.

In London, Ian Kilbannock has problems trying to promote Trimmer, who has become obsessed with Virginia. On Crete, after a partial retreat, the remaining forces are ordered to surrender. But Guy and Ludovic manage to escape on a boat, hoping to be rescued.

Recovering in hospital, Guy is suffering from what today would be considered post-traumatic stress, until Julia Stritch arrives and takes him to recover in her house. She recounts Ivor Claire’s desertion of his troops in Crete and his ‘escape’ posting to India. Guy wishes to remain on active service, but is recalled to London.

Officers and Gentlemen – main characters

Guy Crouchback	an idealistic and honourable young officer
Ian Kilbannock	a former journalist
Tommy Blackhouse	Guy’s friend and Virginia’s second husband
Colonel Jumbo Trotter	an old Halberdier
Ivor Claire	a dandy, horseman, and coward
Colonel Hector Campbell	the laird of Mugg, a virulent Scot
Katie Carmichael	his mad niece, a Nazi-supporter
Virginia Troy	louche ex-wife to Guy and Tommy
Corporal-Major Ludovic	a mysterious and dangerous character, and would-be writer
Julia Stritch	glamorous wife of a diplomat in Alexandria
Trimmer McTavish	a womaniser, spiv, and former hairdresser

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Old Friends (Clive Bell)

May 23, 2009 by Roy Johnson

sketches of the Bloomsbury Group and its members

Clive Bell was one long term member of the Bloomsbury Group who did not leave behind a substantial oeuvre. These are biographical sketches and his memories of various Bloomsbury figures with whom he was closely associated over thirty years. Some of his reflections are offered as correctives to the false impressions which began to circulate about the Bloomsbury Group and its influences shortly after its heyday.

It’s easy to forget that Bloomsbury was under critical attack by the cultural establishment from 1930 onwards. Despite the fact that many of them were radicals and socialists, their aestheticism led them to be attacked from both left and right in the period leading up to the war. Bell’s subjects are those people he knew best – and for longest. For instance, Lytton Strachey who he had met at Cambridge in 1899; John Maynard Keynes who was also at Cambridge and was a fellow member of the Apostles and the Midnight Society.

There’s also Virginia Woolf whose sister he married; and Roger Fry with whom he shared an interest in art criticism – to say nothing of a personal connection with Vanessa Bell, about whom he has surprisingly little to say.

He writes as if he still had one foot in the glorious nineties of the previous century: he’s much given to bitchy point-scoring and bon mots a la Whistler and Wilde, and his style is Mandarin – lofty, opinionated, and full of the posturing which he deplores in his subjects.

His account of Lytton Strachey recalls the formation of the Midnight Society at Trinity College Cambridge, which was to form the nucleus of the Bloomsbury Group, and certain moments are unforgettable: for instance, John Maynard Keynes sending word to the conscientious objection tribunal that he was far too busy to attend.

His writing on Roger Fry takes him deep into the realm of art criticism and the debate about ‘Significant form’ which they had discussed throughout their long friendship. But he completely dismisses his competence as a practising artist, reducing his achievement to ‘those plain white pots and plates … he did for the Omega’ – though he rates his as the greatest ever critic of art.

Some of his other opinions will surprise modern readers. On Virginia Woolf he states quite firmly:

Neither male nor female can be wholly objective about Three Guineas; but for my part I feel sure it is her least admirable production.

But of course this seminal text was dedicated to exposing the prejudice, cant, hypocrisy, and sham which formed the basis of the very class to which Clive Bell belonged – and of which he was a shining example.

Yet considering that he knew all these people so well – he was after all married to Virginia Woolf’s sister – there is remarkably little personal revelation about any of them. You would not know that Keynes and Strachey were homosexuals, or that Roger Fry had been his wife’s lover.

Bloomsbury is famous for the complex personal relations and the gossip of its members, yet Bell’s overall message is that we should be cautious about believing everything they wrote and said about each other – because quite a lot of it (he claims) was simply not true. And he knew because he was there.

He was amazingly well connected in the art world, and devotes a chapter to his relationships with Matisse, Derain, Cocteau, Satie, and Poulenc. This chapter culminates in a famous party which included Stravinsky, Picasso, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust. Joyce arrived late and fell asleep; Proust showed up even later, enquiring of Stravinsky which of Beethoven’s work he admired most. “I detest Beethoven” was the reply. One can almost imagine Proust saying “I’ll get my coat” – except that he would already have been wearing it.

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Clive Bell, Old Friends, London: Cassell, 1956, pp.200, ISBN 030431479X

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