Literary studies Archives - Page 32 of 77

Leonard Woolf – Stories of the East

October 3, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

Leonard Woolf, Stories of the East (1919)

This publication contained three short stories – ‘Pearls and Swine’, ‘A Tale Told by Midnight’, and ‘The Two Brahmans’, with a cover illustration by Dora Carrington.

These three pieces are of vital importance in understanding Leonard Woolf’s mistrust of and dislike for colonialism. The stories provide disturbing commentaries about the disintegration of the colonial process and the uncomfortable moral ground occupied by the servants of the British Government in Ceylon prior to the Great War.

“Stories of the East was published in April 1921 in 300 copies and very nearly sold out. At the end of the first year, the Hogarth Press had sold over 230 copies, to realise a profit of £6 11s. 5d. When Leonard Woolf closed the account in January 1924, Stories of the East had sold 267 copies. Of the six books published by Hogarth in 1925, Leonard’s stories outsold all but Gorky’s second book, The Notebooks of Tchekhov and Virginia’s Monday or Tuesday, and in the scale of press operations it was a successful venture.”

J.H. Willis Jr, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press 1917-1941

This book had a yapp binding, as does Prelude, and Eliot’s Poems. Dating from the nineteenth century, the yapp binding is limp, with “overlapping flaps or edges on three sides” and was originally used for binding Bibles meant to be carried in the pocket.

Elizabeth Willson Gordon, Woolf’s-head Publishing: The Highlights and New Lights of the Hogarth Press

Hogarth Press studies

Woolf’s-head Publishing is a wonderful collection of cover designs, book jackets, and illustrations – but also a beautiful example of book production in its own right. It was produced as an exhibition catalogue and has quite rightly gone on to enjoy an independent life of its own. This book is a genuine collector’s item, and only months after its first publication it started to win awards for its design and production values. Anyone with the slightest interest in book production, graphic design, typography, or Bloomsbury will want to own a copy the minute they clap eyes on it.

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Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: Hogarth Press, 1917-41 John Willis brings the remarkable story of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s success as publishers to life. He generates interesting thumbnail sketches of all the Hogarth Press authors, which brings both them and the books they wrote into sharp focus. He also follows the development of many of its best-selling titles, and there’s a full account of the social and cultural development of the press. This is a scholarly work with extensive footnotes, bibliographies, and suggestions for further reading – but most of all it is a very readable study in cultural history.

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Leslie Stephen biography

September 21, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Leslie Stephen (1832-1904) has every right to be considered the father of the Bloomsbury Group, since it was his sons and daughters who eventually formed the network of friends and lovers which came to be given that name. But he was equally distinguished in his own right – as an author, critic, and a mountaineer. He is perhaps best known as the editor and principal author of the Dictionary of National Biography. Born in Kensington, London, he was raised in a family which belonged to the Clapham sect of evangelical Christian social reformers. He was educated at Eton College, then at Trinity Hall, Cambridge where he remained for several years as a fellow and a tutor of his college.

He became an Anglican clergyman, but in 1865 renounced his religious beliefs and left the church. In 1869 he married Harriet Thackeray, the daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray. They had a daughter Laura (1870-1945) who developed a form of incurable brain disease and was institutionalised for the majority of her life. When his wife died rather suddenly in 1875 he married Julia Prinsep Jackson, the widow of Herbert Duckworth. She brought with her two sons, George and Gerald, the latter of whom went on to found the Duckworth publishing company.

Settling at Hyde Park Gate in Kensington, London, he made his living as a journalist, editing the Cornhill Magazine which published the work of Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James. He also contributed to the Saturday Review. Macmillan, and other periodicals. In his spare time he became a famous mountaineer, and was the first person to climb a number of Alpine peaks. He was one of the first presidents of the Alpine Club and wrote The Playground of Europe which became a mountaineering classic.

With his second wife he had four children – two sons, Thoby and Adrian, and two daughters, Vanessa and Virginia who became Vanessa Bell the painter, and Virginia Woolf the writer. He was the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography and he wrote The Science of Ethics which was widely adopted as a standard textbook on the subject.

When his second wife died in 1895, his daughter Vanessa took over the running of the Stephen household. He established what both his daughters describe as an emotionally demanding regime – but it has to be said that as a free-thinker, he also gave them free reign to pursue their artistic ambitions. In fact it is often observed that although Virginia, like other women of her time, did not go to university, she nevertheless received a first-class education at home, merely by being given free access to her father’s library.

When Leslie Stephen died in 1904 all four of the Stephen children lost no time in setting up home independently in what they saw as a more liberal and tolerant atmosphere. They even decorated their new premises in Gordon Square Bloomsbury in lighter colours, as a reaction to the dark tones of the Victorian period they were leaving. However, the politically liberal, free-thinking (non-religious) intellectual atmosphere their father left them as an inheritance was to form the basis of what they had created within a few years as founding members of the Bloomsbury Group.

Bloomsbury Group – web links

Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, featuring designs by Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, and others.

The Omega Workshops
A brief history of Roger Fry’s experimental Omega Workshops, which had a lasting influence on interior design in post First World War Britain.

The Bloomsbury Group and War
An essay on the largely pacifist and internationalist stance taken by Bloomsbury Group members towards the First World War.

Tate Gallery Archive Journeys: Bloomsbury
Mini web site featuring photos, paintings, a timeline, sub-sections on the Omega Workshops, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant, and biographical notes.

Bloomsbury: Books, Art and Design
Exhibition of paintings, designs, and ceramics at Toronto University featuring Hogarth Press, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Quentin Bell, and Stephen Tomlin.

Blogging Woolf
A rich enthusiast site featuring news of events, exhibitions, new book reviews, relevant links, study resources, and anything related to Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf

Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search the texts of all Woolf’s major works, and track down phrases, quotes, and even individual words in their original context.

A Mrs Dalloway Walk in London
An annotated description of Clarissa Dalloway’s walk from Westminster to Regent’s Park, with historical updates and a bibliography.

Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Annotated tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury, including Gordon Square, University College, Bedford Square, Doughty Street, and Tavistock Square.

Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
News of events, regular bulletins, study materials, publications, and related links. Largely the work of Virginia Woolf specialist Stuart N. Clarke.

BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
A charming sound recording of a BBC radio talk broadcast in 1937 – accompanied by a slideshow of photographs of Virginia Woolf.

A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephens’ collection of family photographs which became known as the Mausoleum Book, collected at Smith College – Massachusetts.

Bloomsbury at Duke University
A collection of book jacket covers, Fry’s Twelve Woodcuts, Strachey’s ‘Elizabeth and Essex’.

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Twentieth century literature

Letters to Monica

March 4, 2015 by Roy Johnson

poetry, academic gossip, sex, equivocation, and death

Philip Larkin first met Monica Jones at University College Leicester in the autumn of 1946 when they were both twenty-four. He was the newly appointed Assistant Librarian and she was a Lecturer in English. In 1950 he moved to Belfast, and then on to Hull, while she remained at Leicester. She started as a correspondent and friend, became his lover and confidante, and spent forty ears as his sometime muse and psychic nursemaid until his sudden death in 1985.

This is a selection from the almost two thousand letters he wrote to her – though he wrote double that number to his mother. Unfortunately, her side of the correspondence is embargoed in the Bodleian Library until 2035.

They were rather an oddly matched couple. He was shy, reserved, and socially very conservative. She was a flamboyant blonde who was given to wearing short skirts, fishnet tights (sometimes with holes) and high-heeled shoes. He was assiduous in his attitude to work (even though he didn’t like it): she on the other hand never published a word in her whole career as a university lecturer

The letters begin as Larkin, newly appointed as assistant librarian at Queens University Belfast, is seeking estimates for a privately printed edition of his poems. Given his later fame, this is a salutary lesson for any would-be writers. He also begins what was to become a long series of equivocations when setting up meetings with Monica.

They tested the temperature of the other’s enthusiasm from the tone and content of their letters. Yet his hesitation and contradictions regarding their planned assignations are amusingly reminiscent of Kafka. Timetables, routes, hotels, and dates are discussed in excruciating detail, potential excuses for a no-show are set up in advance, and penny-pinching attention to the cost are flagged up in a clear display of his ambivalence about the relationship.

Larkin’s complex romantic life is now quite well known, but what the letters reveal is very much a meeting of minds. They had similar literary tastes and similar isolationist tendencies – though the editor of this volume Anthony Thwaite puts it differently, saying that “e;they fed each other’s misery”e;.

Larkin comes across as breathtakingly pompous and arrogant when lecturing Monica on how she should modify her style of conversation – though it should be said that first-hand accounts report her as hectoring people in general, and paying no attention to what they said in reply – which were precisely his criticisms.

There are persistent complaints and self-criticism about his lack of productivity, and yet sadly thirty volumes of his personal diaries were destroyed after his death. The request was his own; it was enacted by Monica as his literary executor; and the journals were shredded in Hull library by his secretary.

There is an enormous amount of moaning, complaints about illnesses (real and imaginary), disgust at his own ineffectuality, and endless reasons for not getting married, which Monica was clearly expecting him to propose. Indecision and a stolid bachelor inertia dogged his every step. In one single letter he goes into a rage about the noise from a neighbour’s radio, then turns down the opportunity of renting a spacious flat because it would be too big and ‘No sound would ever have penetrated its walls’.

The year 1955 should have been a high point in his life: he had secured the job at Hull on a good salary (£1,500 pa) and the first volume of his poems was being published to some acclaim. Yet his letters are full of self-loathing and despair:

I do feel absolutely sick at heart, my blankness has been goaded into revulsion & I am up in arms again, sufficiently fed up to start moving [address] again, back at the point when not moving is worse than moving. And I can’t do anything, not now: I must endure the weekend, & all next week, & … This state of mind is different than my earlier howls: this is a kind of nausea, as if life were some milk-skin clinging to my lip. I don’t, at the moment, see how I am going to endure it, it’s all so frightful

This is the sort of volitional paralysis and neurasthenia (to say nothing of the hypochondria) which reinforces the comparison with Kafka – another literary bachelor who was riven by contradictions, moved from one set of rented lodgings to another, and agonized endlessly about his fear of marriage.

What makes the letters bearable and very entertaining amidst all the misery is their fluidity and inventiveness, his gossipy wit, adoption of comic personae, abrupt variations in register, his heterogeneous topics, and his cultivated intelligence.

Larkin is voracious in his reading and not at all snobbish in taste – everything from renaissance poetry to contemporary fiction. He championed Barbara Pym and helped to restore her reputation. His essential favourites are classics, and his enthusiastic notes on Bleak Housemake you feel like reading it again, as do his observations and deep feelings for Hardy’s poetry.

It’s easy to see why Monica was so exasperated by his failure to ‘commit’. When he was taken into hospital following a collapse, she rushed from Leicester to his bedside, yet he wouldn’t let her stay in his (empty) flat in case she read his diaries. And when she raised the question of money and inheritance, he claimed to have a phobia about making a will.

He makes hardly any effort to visit her – even though she lived only a few miles from his mother, who he visited regularly. Or he would ‘call in’ for just an hour on his way back from London. Even when he had two sabbatical terms as a fellow at All Souls Oxford, he found all sorts of reasons not to make the make the short journey up to Leicester, including not wishing to drive at night.

There is quite an excruciating series of letters in 1964 and 1965 where he tries to wish away her wounded feelings when she found out about his parallel affair with Maeve Brennan, a colleague in the Library at Hull. He admits his culpability, but doesn’t feel he can do anything about it, and admits he would be ‘shattered’ if she were to do the same from her independent base in Leicester. It’s perhaps as well that Monica never seems to have realised at the time that there was a ‘third woman’ with whom he shared sexual comforts – his matronly secretary Betty Mackereth.

Later in their tortured lives, the tensions between them were eased somewhat by the arrival of ill health. Monica fell downstairs, then afterwards developed shingles. Larkin took her into his house and looked after her, finally acknowledging that they were a ‘couple’. He made her his literary executor, then following his own sudden demise, Monica stayed living in the house until her own death in 2001.

He was an amazingly acute observer and a sound judge of character. One of Monica’s favourite students (and would-be swain) went on to become a lecturer at Manchester University, where he was renowned for his idleness. Larkin pins him down in a single sentence: “e;[he] will will get on up to a point – the point at which has to do some work”e;. This makes his sketch of F.R.Leavis (then at the height of his fame) all the more amusing:

Well, Leavis … what a ghastly little man! … one of the bores of the century, I’d say — and really a typical Oxbridge don, cocky, smart, full of petty cattiness. Oh dear. And what a bore. ‘I live on my nerves’, he told me .. I don’t wonder that Cambridge, or Downing, can’t stand him at any price … I’ve never met a man so full of himself. Stupid little sod, the ideas rattling in him like peas. No, a typical don, one who likes being a don … I’ve not met a sillier man for many a long day … I’m awfully glad to reflect that I don’t possess a single book by him. Not a single book.

These are a very welcome addition to the successful volume Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, and they seem to cry out for a future collection in which Larkin’s letters are placed alongside those written in reply by Monica Jones. But we will have to be very patient: her correspondence is locked in the Bodleian Library for the next twenty years.

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Anthony Thwaite (ed), Letters to Monica, London: Faber and Faber, 2010, pp. 475, ISBN: 0571239102

Literary Criticism – a new history

September 7, 2010 by Roy Johnson

aesthetic theory from the classical period to the present

Gary Day’s main argument in his impressive study Literary Criticism – a new history is that literary criticism is like a pendulum that swings backwards and forwards in different historical epochs. At one moment it emphasizes the text, and at the next its effect upon the reader. He traces all the main schools of literary criticism, starting with classical Greek and Roman writing on aesthetics, and he shows that many of the notions people imagine to be new have actually been around for two thousand years or more. This makes his book a good antidote to the mistaken idea that literary criticism began in the 1970s with the discovery of French structuralism.

He takes the history of both literature and literary criticism through the distinct phases of its historical development, starting with the classics, then looking successively at Medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, Romantic, and Modern phases. His emphasis on the whole is on English criticism, though it does not preclude an occasional consideration of other cultures.

His examination of criticism relating to the earlier periods has the instructive effect of condensing their ideas and ‘theory’ into digestible chunks. He points out that in the medieval period for instance there was no concept of either literature or criticism as we know them – only ‘commentary’ on sacred texts. The Greco-Roman classics for instance were interpreted as guides to (Christian) moral behaviour. The medieval period also gave rise to the concept of the auctor (author). It also saw, towards its end, the rise of the written vernacular. Latin was the language of learning, but as trade between nations increased there was more reason than ever for people to use and learn each other’s native language.

In the Renaissance period Day argues that a crucial issue was the Protestant-inspired translation of the Bible into English. This gave the common man both access to divine scripture and the right to its interpretation – previously only in the remit of the church itself. The introduction of printing and the establishment of a vernacular English that pushed out Latin and French as the lingua francas of official discourse led to the publication of books for readers’ pleasure. This in turn gave rise to a literature of the popular marketplace and a need to make distinctions between such products and a canon of revered classics. It is easy to see the point that Gary Day makes several times throughout this study – that many of the critical issues debated with such recent ferocity were evident in literary history centuries ago.

His chapter on the English Enlightenment draws interesting parallels between criticism and finance. If the intrinsic value of a paper five pound note was certainly not five pounds, because there was not a one-to-one correspondence between signifier and signified, so the value of a work of literature could not be determined by the accuracy of its correspondence with some value in the real world.

There is a strong period of Neoclassicism in the eighteenth century that Day attributes to a desire for order, proportion, and rule-based authority after the uncertainties created by the Civil War. However, he argues that it failed to take permanent root and only sprang back into life now and again during politically reactionary phases.

In his chapter on the Romantic period he argues that the cult of individualism, ‘sensibility’, and nature was a reaction to the industrial revolution which reduced man to a mere part in the economy of mass production. Thus the literary criticism that emerged emphasized the possibilities of individual response to and interpretation of a text. This tendency reached its apogee in the art for art’s sake movement at the end of the nineteenth century when all connections between art and moral improvement were finally denied completely.

When it comes to the twentieth century he understandably sees Freud, Max Plank and Picasso as exemplars of revolutionary thinking, though the literary critics he first considers are the very unfashionable Walter Orage and G.K. Chesterton. But in fact the main focus of interest in his final chapter is the establishment of English Studies in the UK university system – a surprising phenomenon both in its recency and the controversy that surrounded it.

Fortunately, he does finish by looking at three major figures critics who were influential from the mid-century onwards – I.A.Richards, William Empson, and F.R.Leavis. He explains their critical methods and their significance, and finally lets himself off the leash to take a few well-aimed swipes at Catherine Belsey, who is obviously his bete noir.

This is not simply gratuitous rival-bashing however, for one of Day’s habits that I found quite entertaining was his demonstrating links between debates held centuries ago with those of the last two or three decades – to show that there is very little that is totally new under the sun. And he is also much given to taking pot shots at the current academic culture of ‘skills’ and ‘performance indicators’ that have come to replace a serious interest in the subject of literature and literary criticism.

He has very little to say about contemporary forms of literary criticism which range from feminism, postcolonialism, post-Modernism, and queer theory – except to conclude somewhat radically that

the sheer variety should not distract us from one fundamental truth: that the demands of bodies like the Quality Assurance Agency are making the study of literature ever more prescriptive for students while the Research Assessment Exercise has distorted it for academics. Criticism is better off outside the academy.

This sort of writing could signal the beginnings of a long overdue and very welcome change in the practice of academic literary criticism.

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Gary Day, Literary Criticism: a new history, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010, pp.344, ISBN: 0748641424

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Literary Theory: a short introduction

August 4, 2009 by Roy Johnson

brief guide to critical approaches to literary studies

This introductory guide to literary theory 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. Jonathan Culler avoids the common approach of explaining the various schools of literary criticism by choosing instead a set of topics and showing what various literary theories have to say about them.

There’s a certain amount of sleight of hand. In explaining ‘theory’ in its modern sense he doesn’t acknowledge the profound difference between this loose use of the term and a scientific theory, which can be proven or disproven. Nor does he acknowledge the sort of special pleading and self justification which is passed off as ‘philosophy’ in the work of someone such as Michel Foucault. But he does have a persuasive way of explaining some of these difficult ideas in terms which the common reader can understand.

The topics he chooses turn out to be very fundamental questions such as ‘What is literature?’ – that is, are there any essential differences between a literary and a non-literary text. These are questions to which common sense supplies rapid answers, but when Theory is applied, unforeseen complexities arise.

In fact when he looks more closely at the nature, purpose, and the conventions of literature, he claims that one of the purposes of Theory is to expose the shortcomings of common sense.

There’s an interesting chapter on language and linguistic approaches to literary theory where he discusses Saussure and Chomsky, the differences between poetics and hermeneutics, and reader-response criticism. Any one of these approaches is now the basis for a whole school of literary theory.

When he gets to genre criticism there’s a useful explanation of lyric, epic, and drama – though it’s not quite clear why he separates narrative (stories and novels) into a chapter of its own.

However, when it does come, his explanation of narrative theory is excellent. His account of plot, point of view, focalisation, and narrative reliability will help anyone who wants to get to grips with the analysis of fiction.

He ends with brief notes explaining the various school of literary theory which have emerged in the recent past – from New Criticism, through Structuralism, Marxism, and Deconstruction, to the latest fashions of Post-Colonialism and Queer Theory.

In one sense the book’s title is slightly misleading. It should be Modern Literary Theory. But 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.

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Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp.149, ISBN: 019285383X

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Literary Theory: the basics

May 24, 2009 by Roy Johnson

schools of literary criticism 1900-2000 explained

Despite its title, this is a survey of modern literary criticism. Hans Bertens starts from a critique of Matthew Arnold’s liberal humanist and essentially romantic appeal that literature exists on a higher spiritual plane that we are invited to visit. He then goes on to show the links with T.S.Eliot, Ivor Richards, F.R.Leavis, and the New Criticism of the United States in the early decades of the last century. Then its on to the Russian formalists and Prague structuralism – Shklovsky, Propp, and Jakobson .

These progress by a slightly dog-legged chronology to the French structuralists of the 1960s and 1970s. Roland Barthes picks up Saussure and runs with the ball of structuralism. Genette develops the same lines in his theories of narratology. When it came to Marxism I had a minor quibble with his account of ideology and I think he lets Georgy Lukacs off rather lightly – but on the whole it’s an even-handed treatment.

I enjoyed his explanations of feminism, race, and gender theory, and I couldn’t help feeling that his own interests were transmitted more infectiously as his story approached the present. What a rich choice of approaches any young student of literature has today.

When he arrives at the ‘poststructuralist revolution’ you have to be prepared for an excursion into the realms of philosophy. Literature seems a long way off, but you’ll get an account of Derrida which makes him seem almost accessible. The same is true of his chapter on Lacan

We know now that the deconstructionists took literary theory to a point where it appeared that nothing certain could be said about a text. So what happened afterwards? Well – it’s interesting that the fashions in literary theory which followed tend to focus upon on a single topic – race, class, sexuality, colonialism, or gender, and erect a series of abstact generalisations upon it.

Bertens gives very generous considerations to these late twentieth-century developments. The strength of this approach is that the theories are explained very well. The weakness is that we don’t get to see them applied. Literary texts themselves seem a long way off, and only get the occasional mention. It’s really difficult to see what ‘queer theory’ can tell us about Bleak House or The Odyssey. Go on – prove me wrong.

Nevertheless, I think this is a book worth recommending to people embarking on literary studies at undergraduate level, if for no other reason than it gives a reasonable account of what these theories claim without shirking from their weaknesses. And as he points out, although the latest of them tend to claim the intellectual high ground, their predecessors are still in general circulation.

Each separate chapter is followed by an annotated bibliography of further reading. I mention the annotation because this makes it far more useful to the reader than the long bare listings you usually find in books of this kind.

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Hans Bertens, Literary Theory: The Basics, Abingdon: Routledge, 2nd edition 2007, pp.264, ISBN: 0415396719

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Literature and Revolution

June 5, 2010 by Roy Johnson

collected essays, articles, and reviews

Marxists have always had a problem with theorising Art. Radical proposals for changing the State and replacing the power of one class with that of another does not sit easily with a taste for Beethoven, Michaelangelo, and Marcel Proust. And political sympathy for an oppressed class (the proletariat) has often resulted in wishing its artistic achievements into being. When a revolution (of sorts) did take place in St Petersburg in 1917, expectations were high that a different art would be formed in the new type of society. And at first it did start to happen. The graphic art of Rodchenko and El Lissitzsky, the architecture of Tatlin, and the poetry of Mayakovsky produced a native form of modernism whose influence is still alive today, almost one hundred years later. Literature and Revolution is Victor Serge’s on-the-spot essays engaging with the new literary endeavours of the period.

But none of these artists were working class, and before long Party apparatchiks were calling for the suppression of their work and demanding art that followed the Party line. Since the party had a monopoly of the means of production and even the supply of paper, they got what they called for. The result was worthless propaganda of the ‘boy meets tractor’ variety.

Victor Serge was able to avoid these ideological traps more than his contemporaries (and his predecessors) for two good reasons. The first was that throughout his life he retained a critical integrity that kept him free from any Party line prejudice. The second was that unlike many of the so-called theorists of his time, he was a practising artist. Even though he worked in the most appalling circumstances and spent the last twenty years of his life in exile, he produced two excellent trilogies of novels, as well as his amazing memoirs and other works.

The first part of this collection of his writings is on the subject of literature and politics, under the title of ‘The Theory of Proletarian Literature’. Serge is defending the political gains of the revolution and pointing out quite rightly that the proletariat is too busy defending itself and producing enough to sustain life to be creating great works of art.

The development of any intellectual culture takes for granted stable production, a high level of technique, well-being, leisure and time.

The so-called proletarian writing produced under Party diktat turned out to be entirely schematic, with heroes ‘bearing no resemblance to any human being one had actually ever met.’ But his argument is that this was to be expected.

The second part of the book is a collection of critical essays on literary topics written in the heat of events during the early 1920s. It’s interesting to note that they were all published in France – a fact which established Serge’s reputation outside Russia and later helped to save his life when he was granted permission to leave Russia at a time when his contemporaries were simply being shot.

These essays provide what’s called ‘A Chronicle of Intellectual Life in the Soviet Union’. Apart from beating the drum for Russian achievements at a time of austerity and shortages, the only artists to emerge from this honourably are the poets – Blok, Biely, Yesenin, and especially Mayakovsky, whom Serge puts into a category of his own, presumably because he was the most committed Bolshevik and therefore (in 1922) above criticism. The only other writer to emerge with laurels is Leon Trotsky, whose own Literature and Revolution closely resembles Serge’s own work.

There’s a section on individual writers – tributes to the poet Blok, novelist Boris Pilnyak who was an influence on Serge’s own literary style (shot during the purges) Gorky and Mayakovsky. Because so many of these articles were written during the early 1920s they have an optimistic tone and they speak of literary potential which is yet to be fully realised. Knowing as we do what happened shortly afterwards, they have a sort of unreality about them. It is therefore fortunate that the collection ends with appreciative notes on some of the same writers as they began to ‘disappear’ in the purges of the mid 1930s and onwards. This is why Serge was happy to accept Trotsky’s description of ‘the revolution betrayed’.

It is a dark but honest note on which to end the collection – his outrage at the murder of Osip Mandelstam and countless others in the purges, but it confirms that his line of argument on politics and literature was consistent, and it has been proved to be true.

Serge never fell into any of the crude over-simplifications of propagandist writing in his own fictional creations. His artistic practice was based firmly on the literary traditions which he and his fellow theorists would call ‘bourgeois’, and even though his material existence was light years away from the comforts of the western literary world of 1920-1945, he was in his own way a contributor to ‘modernism’.

He removed the central ‘I’ from the controlling individual consciousness of his narratives, and put in its place a more general ‘We’. That was his conscious political choice. We read his novels and come away with a sense of collectives or representatives of general social tendencies, rather than Big Individuals.

And his other literary techniques fit comfortably alongside other literary modernists – from Conrad to Woolf and Beckett. He uses extended metaphors, repeated motifs, sparkling imagery, blurs the distinctions between prose and poetry, flits from one point of view to another with no clunky connecting passages, and has what might be called a ‘mosaic’ rather than a linear approach to narrative.

Serge survived in terrible conditions in Mexican exile until 1946, and thank goodness he was able to produce his finest novels in those last years. The Case of Comrade Tulayev, Unforgiving Years, and The Long Dusk stand as testaments to a passionate belief in truth, a militant critic, and a great artist.

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Victor Serge, Collected Writings on Literature and Revolution, London: Francis Boutle Publishers, 2004, pp.367, ISBN: 1903427169

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Literature and the Great War

June 9, 2013 by Roy Johnson

conflict, culture, language, and literature 1914-1918

Literature and the Great War is a study of the relationship between language, literature, and the events of the conflicts that took place between 1914 and 1918. It also addresses the fact that quite a lot of what we call ‘war poetry’ and ‘first world war memoirs’ was not produced during that period, but many years later – for very good reasons.

With the exception of poetry, which can quickly capture impressions and emotions on the fly, most writing about major events in other genres such as stories, novels, documentaries, histories, and autobiographies require a period of reflection and digestion before they can be properly expressed. This is especially true of events as cataclysmically disruptive as the first world war – which turned the whole world’s view of itself upside down.

There were memorable and enduring works written during the conflict — Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire (1916) and the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Edward Thomas. However, the majority of works which seem to encapsulate both the horrors of the war and the almost universal sense of disillusionment which followed were produced almost a decade later — Robert Graves Goodbye to All That (1929), Ernest Hemingway A Farewell to Arms (1929), Richard Aldington, Death of a Hero (1929), Siegfried Sassoon Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928), R.C. Sheriff Journey’s End (1929), Erich Maria Remarque All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)

There are a number of explanations for this delay. Many people felt that the horrors of the war were almost too shocking to write about at the time – especially when official propaganda and the newspapers were telling everybody about ‘heroic’ victories and not mentioning the vast number of men slaughtered (the hundreds of thousands killed were described as ‘wastage’).

After the war very few combatants wanted to talk about their experiences, and those who had survived understandably wanted to simply get back to normal life, often feeling guilty about those they had left behind on the Somme, Passchendale, and Gallipoli.

Because everyone had been persuaded that it had been a ‘war to end all wars’ there was a general sense that optimism would prevail. But then in the 1920s came a period of economic collapse, austerity, and poverty throughout most of Europe. Instead of having fought a war to achieve a better world, it appeared that nothing had been achieved at all, and the huge sacrifice of lost lives had been wasted. .It was the period from late 1920s onward when the spate of angry, critical, and anti-establishment narratives concerning 1914—1918 were produced

Nor should it be thought that during the war itself the public were eager for critical accounts of the carnage, the gassings, and the colossal numbers of people killed. Some of the most popular publications at the time were patriotic and religious works speaking to ‘heroism’, ‘sacrifice’. and ‘victory’.

Stevenson’s (persuasive) argument is that society in the post-war period felt saturated by this sort of language, and writers purged their vocabularies of these now-corrupted abstract generalisations. They used instead a language of concrete nouns, in which only that-which-can-be-known was named. Hence the rise in popularity in the 1920s of writers such as Ernest Hemingway, whose terse and pared-down literary prose style had been shaped by his experience of the first world war:

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain … I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago …. Abstract words such as glory, honour, courage or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929) were enormously popular at the time, and went on to influence two or three generations of writers (particularly writers of thrillers and crime fiction) until the fashion for this sort of writing faded (following Hemingway’s suicide) in the 1960s.

Stevenson argues that the war produced a fracturing of time and language. Events began to be described as ‘pre-war’ and post-war’; double summer-time was introduced; and ordinary men and women were plunged into a linguistic vortex in which official language in no way reflected the reality they faced every day in the trenches.

An interesting point he makes about the language of the war is that many of the volunteers and conscripts who took part from the early days of 1914 onwards would be young men (almost boys) who at that time had probably never travelled more than a few miles beyond their own towns and villages. Consequently, since there was at that time, no national broadcasting system, they would never have heard speech other than their own regional accents.

In addition to this, they were plunged into Picardy, where the vast majority of them had never heard the French language spoken before. It is not surprising that towns such as Ypres and Auchonvillers were translated into ‘Wipers and ‘Ocean Villas’ and indeed the satirical newspaper produced by the troops was called the Wipers Times. Newly conscipted men also had to grapple with enormous amounts of army slang and jargon – some of it remnants of the imperial past. Words such as cushy, blighty, and dekko were Hindi or Urdu in origin.

The latter part of the book is devoted largely to the reception and evaluation of poetry produced during the war and in the years since, reminding us that at the time religious and patriotic poetry was far more highly regarded, whereas the critical reputation of writers such as Owen, Thomas, and Sassoon has taken much longer to establish

I was glad to see that he put the reputation of Rupert Brooke into perspective. Brooke had glorified a jingoistic sense of Englishness and war prior to 1914 but didn’t actually have any first-hand experience of combat – dying of a rather inglorious flea bite before he reached Gallipoli.

Stevenson does his best to be fair to modernists such as T.S.Eliot and Virginia Woolf, but he misses the opportunity to note that almost the whole of the Bloomsbury Group and its adherents were pacifists during 1914-1918. And this was not based simply on an unwillingness to fight, but on a genuine sense of internationalism and the belief that the war was a huge mistake which need not have taken place. Indeed, before the war had even ended Leonard Woolf helped set up the League of Nations (which went on to become the United Nations) with the sole aim of preventing any further conflicts of its size and kind between nations.

This was an extremely unpopular view to hold at the time – though it has become increasingly sane with hindsight. People were jailed for ‘conscientious objection’ and of course this is a period when young men were executed and crucified in no-man’s-land for crimes of ‘cowardice’ and falling asleep on duty. The only other people to oppose the war on internationalist grounds were figures such as Trotsky and Lenin.

Stevenson’s final chapter considers revisionist histories of the war which have been produced in recent years. He gives their defence of the blundering generals and the gigantic carnage a fair hearing, but eventually undermines their arguments with a few well chosen quotations that emphasise his concluding argument – that we need to read closely and not be swayed by rhetoric and false metaphors.

Revisionist history cannot be accused of ignoring the war’s loss and mutilation. [Gary Sheffield’s] Forgotten Victory is regularly attentive to the ‘callous arithmetic of battle’ and the ‘butcher’s bill’ that resulted. Yet Sheffield also suggests that at one stage that the Canadians’ capture of Vimy Ridge in 1917 was achieved ‘with relatively little difficulty, although at the cost of 11,000 casualties’. Such remarks cast doubt on his promise of ‘analysis based on firm grasp of the facts’. Avoidance of difficulty, even relatively, at the cost of 11,000 casualties, is not fact but interpretation, the kind of interpretation the generals were apt to make themselves.

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Randall Stevenson, Literature and the Great War 1914-1918, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp.262, ISBN: 019959645X

Literature and the Internet

November 1, 2009 by Roy Johnson

resources, techniques, and issues for literary studies

In the field of literary studies, people have been creating digitized texts and making concordances for quite some time now. But until the advent of the Web it was difficult to get an overview of criticism and scholarship which was easily available. In fact it’s still not easy. As the authors of this excellent guide Literature and the Internet point out, it remains common for the latest work to be made available only in the form of conventionally printed books and the dinosaur publishing methods of scholarly journals.

But at last the Internet is now making ever more material easily available to us, and it is the purpose of this guide to advise students, teachers, and scholars how to make the most of the opportunity to retrieve it. They start with a general survey of the pros and cons of the Internet for literary studies, quite rightly pointing out that despite all its obvious advantages, there are still many shortcomings:

It has large and obvious gaps, it cannot cover the literary ground as even a moderately well-stocked library can, and it cannot equal the contemporary appeal of a good bookstore.

In fact the differences between books in libraries and texts on the Net are intelligently explored, before we get down to some practical advice on usability. This centres logically enough on using search engines, and they offer an explanation of the different techniques which can be deployed, as well as alerting users to the differences in kind amongst the sources which might be located.

The centre of the book is an extensive list of resources. These are arranged as web site address – in categories ranging from libraries, journals, literary periods, literary criticism, discussion groups and email distribution lists, to individual authors – from Achebe to Zola – and their home pages.

Mercifully, these lists are annotated with useful evaluative comments, making clear distinctions between sites which are commercial, fan pages, and the results of scholarly research. It’s interesting to note how many of the award-winning sites are the work of dedicated individuals (such as Jack Lynch at Pennsylvania and Mitsuharu Matsuoka in Japan) and departments in little-known colleges in the back of nowhere. Major institutions are noticeably thin on the ground.

I felt reassured that the authors had done their homework, had visited the sites they discuss – and were not frightened of levelling criticism at some quite well known names in the literary establishment. They point out the need for more qualitative evaluation of online resources and web site reviews.

This is followed by advice on the evaluation of sites, including a series of basic questions we can ask on arrival. Is the information accurate? Is it complete? And is there any acknowledgement of the sources being used?

There is also a section for teachers, discussing how computers and the Internet can be used in literary studies, with suggestions (for instance) for hypertext assignments and web essays – though I hope their term Webliographies doesn’t catch on.

They consider the nature of electronic texts – from plain ASCII, through the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) and HyperText Markup Language (HTML), and even as far as the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and Extensible Markup Language (XML).

These are only touched on lightly, with their differences briefly explained, but this is a valuable topic to raise in the consciousness of students and teachers, especially in the light of controversies surrounding the form in which commercial electronic books are being issued.

The guide ends with considerations of the theoretical and political connections between literary studies in an era of digitized text – exploring some of the notions raised in recent years by Jay Bolter, George Landow, and J. Hillis Miller.

They even have some interesting comments to make on the likely impact of Information Technology on academic careers – including the vexed issue of academic publishing, which must surely be due for major convulsions in the next few years.

Many people have argued that it’s now rather pointless issuing printed resource guides which will be quickly outdated. But there is a reason for such publications. The fact is that it’s often quicker to locate information in a book, rather than searching through files or favourites using a browser.

Certainly, I’m very pleased that this book is on my desk, and I look forward to exploring its suggestions and passing on any gems to my own students – who are currently learning how to write, link, zip, and upload their first web essays.

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Stephanie Browner, Stephen Pulsford, and Richard Sears, Literature and the Internet: A Guide for Students, Teachers, and Scholars, London/New York: Garland, 2000, pp.191, ISBN: 0815334532

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Little Dorrit

August 12, 2015 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, characters, and plot

Little Dorrit was first published in monthly instalment between December 1855 and June 1857, then in a single volume by Bradbury and Evans in 1857, with original illustrations by Hablot K. Browne. It was a huge and immediate success, with monthly instalments selling 35,000 copies in 1856.

first edition – title page

Little Dorrit – critical commentary

The principal theme

The overarching metaphor for the entire novel is that of the prison and imprisonment. The novel begins with two men in prison – Rigaud and Cavalletto – in Marseilles. In the very next chapter, a collection of English travellers (the Meagles family and Clennam) are ‘imprisoned’ in quarantine (against the plague) in the same location.

In fact the novel also ends in a prison during the hot months of summer, when debtor Arthur Clennam is nursed by Little Dorrit in the late stages of his illness. When Clennam finally gets home, it is to find his ‘mother’ imprisoned by her bitterness and self-inflicted martyrdom in the family home which has become almost a tomb.

William Dorrit has been in the Marshalsea prison for twenty-three years – so long that he has become its self-appointed father figure. His daughter Amy has even been born in the prison, and is the love object of John Chivery, the prison warder’s son.

When the newly-enriched Dorrits embark on their Grand Tour of Europe, even the convent at the summit of the Great Saint Bernard Pass is likened to a prison – because it is divided into Spartan cells.

There are also various forms of psychological imprisonment – in addition to Mrs Clennam. William Dorrit is first of all imprisoned in delusions of grandeur. He ignores the fact that he has been in a debtor’s prison for almost a quarter of a century, and gives himself lofty airs and graces, extracting handouts (which he calls ‘tributes’) from his fellow prisoners.

When Dorrit actually does become rich, he is almost equally deluded by his snobbish exercises in social climbing. He seeks out the wealthy and the fashionable in society, and conveniently ignores the fact that he is an ex-jailbird. It is significant that at the height of these endeavours, his psychological collapse takes him back to where he has come from when he makes a bizarre speech at the dinner given by Mrs Meagles, at which he believes he is back in the Marshalsea Prison.

In fact Dickens takes the metaphor of the prison to universal proportions when he creates one of his many pictures of London:

The last day of the appointed week touched the bars of the Marshalsea gate. Black, all night, since the gate had clashed on Little Dorrit, its iron stripes were turned by the early-glowing sun into stripes of gold. Far aslant across the city, over its jumbled roofs, and through the open tracery of its church towers, struck the long bright rays, bars of the prison of this lower world.

Ingratitude

A strong secondary theme running through the events of the narrative is ingratitude. It is often counterpoised against the saintly devotion of Little Dorrit and the gentlemanly code of honour that Arthur Clennam tries to maintain – often to his own disadvantage.

Tip and Fanny, Little Dorrit’s brother and sister, show no gratitude for what is done for them. Amy secures employment for her sister, who returns the favour with nothing but bad grace, and Tip goes from one job that is found for him to another – without a word of thanks or shame that he is so feckless. He even reproaches Clennam for not lending him money when he asks for it – though after an illness in Rome he appears to reform morally, offering to make his sister Amy rich, even if he inherits all his father’s money.

Henry Gowan displays similar levels of selfishness and a cynical unconcern for others. He has had a self-indulgent life, has run up personal debts, pretends to aspirations as a ‘painter’, yet claims he is ‘disappointed’ that his family has not done more for him. There is very little resolution to this strand of the novel.

Plot weaknesses

When Affrey Flintwinch hears noises and has ‘dreams’, the reader may realise that she is sensing that something is wrong in the house of Clennam. But Dickens does not really play fair with the reader, who can have no notion of a twin brother for Jeremiah Flintwinch, a fact which is concealed for the majority of the novel. This is the literary equivalent of pulling a rabbit out of a conjurer’s hat.

Similarly, Pancks’ uncovering of Dorrit’s inheritance is something the reader can know nothing about – it comes as something of a deus ex machina to move the plot forward from Book the First (Poverty) to Book the Second (Riches). There is no really satisfying explanation of how Panks located the information, and his own account is muddied by his idiosyncratic manner of speaking.

The full complications of the plot are exposed by Blandois in his blackmail attempt on Mrs Clennam at the dramatic climax of the novel. This too is resolved in a slightly unsatisfactory manner.

Whilst Blandois is something of a stock villan himself, complete with hooked nose and black moustache, his aquisition of the important information regarding the Clennam family secret comes from Flintwitch’s twin brother who he has met at a quayside tavern in Amsterdam. This is pushing the bounds of coincidence and improbability to an unacceptable degree for most modern tastes.

Another weakness is the lack of continuity between important elements and characters being introduced in the early part of the narrative, then not taken up again until much later. Of course this is a now-recognised feature of the serial novel – multiple plot lines and characters used as points of interest to drag readers through the part-issues of the whole work.

Little Dorrit – Study resources

Little Dorrit – Oxford World’s Classics – Amazon UK

Little Dorrit – Oxford World’s Classics – Amazon US

Little Dorrit – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

Little Dorrit – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

Little Dorrit – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

Charles Dickens – biographical notes

Little Dorrit – eBook at Project Gutenberg

Little Dorrit – audioBook at LibriVox

Little Dorrit – complete Hablot K. Browne illustrations

The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens – Amazon UK

Little Dorrit – York Notes at Amazon UK

Little Dorrit – Brodie’s Notes at Amazon UK

Little Dorrit – Audio book (unabridged) – Amazon UK

Charles Dickens’ London – interactive map

Oxford Reader’s Companion to Charles Dickens – Amazon UK

Little Dorrit – plot summary

Book the First – Poverty

Ch. I John Baptist Cavalletto and Monsieur Rigaud are being held in jail in Marseilles during a hot summer. Rigaud recounts the history of his marrying a rich young local widow, and her sudden death following an altercation between them. He is taken away to face trial.

Ch. II Arthur Clennam is returning from twenty years in China following the death of his father. He is in quarantine with the Meagles family, to whom he relates his harsh upbringing. Mr Meagles recounts the history of their daughter Pet and her curious maid, Tattycoram. On release they make their adieux, and Tattycoram complains ambiguously to the mysterious Miss Wade.

Ch. III Clennam arrives home on a miserable Sunday to a cheerless reception from his puritanical mother. He possesses a watch given to him by his dying father. Servant Mrs Flintwinch relates her curious marriage to Jeremiah and the fact that Clennam’s childhood sweetheart is now available as a widow. Clennam notices Little Dorrit in his mother’s room.

Ch. IV Affrey Flintwinch has a ‘dream’ in which she sees her husband in a meeting with his double who takes away a metal box. Flintwinch catches his wife and threatens her in a menacing manner.

Ch. V Clennam announces to his mother that he is quitting the family business, and in spite of her venomously wrathful response, he asks her if his late father has ever wronged somebody (which he suspects may be the case). His mother immediately appoints Flintwinch as a business partner. Affrey then tells Clennam about Little Dorrit, which arouses his curiosity.

Ch. VI Although Dorrit is not named, the chapter recounts the history of his twenty-five year incarceration in the Marshalsea Prison. It includes the birth of his daughter Amy in the prison. He stays there so long that he becomes the ‘father of the Marshalsea’, to whom fellow inmates give ‘tributes’ (charitable gifts) when they are released.

Ch. VII The history of Amy (Little Dorrit) and her childhood in the prison. She becomes a guardian to her helpless father, and finds employment for her elder sister Fanny as a dancer. Her brother ‘Tip’ fails in every job he is given, and ends up back in the prison as a debtor.

Ch. VIII Outside the prison, Clennam meets Frederick Dorrit (‘Dirty Dick’) who introduces him to his brother William. Clennam meets Amy and her brother and sister. Dorrit explains the system of ‘Testimonials’, and Clennam gives him money. However, Clennam is caught by the night curfew and is forced to spend the night in the prison. He perceives a link between the Dorrit family and his mother.

Ch. IX Clennam receives Amy at the prison, then they walk out into London, where he quizzes her about the connection with his family. She asks for understanding and tolerance for her father, and reveals that his main creditor is Tite Barnacle. On return they meet her simple and undeveloped friend Maggy.

Ch. X Clennam visits the Circumlocution Office in search of information regarding Dorrit’s creditors. Barnacle Junior refers him to Tite Barnacle in Grosvenor Mews, who refers him back to the Office, where various officials are completely obstructive. He meets Mr Meagles, who is frustrating the enquiries of the patient inventor Doyce. They all repair to Bleeding Heart Yard, where Doyce lives.

Mr Flintwinch has a mild attack of irritability

Ch. XI Rigaud has been acquitted at his trial, and escaped to avoid public censure. He meets Cavalletto at a boarding house in Chalons-sur-Soane and seeks to enlist him as a servant again – but Cavalletto escapes early the following morning.

Ch. XII Clennam, Meagles, and Doyce visit Bleeding Heart Yard in search of Plornish, who finds it hard to obtain work (and has been in prison himself). Mrs Plornish explains their connections with Little Dorrit which come via Casby, the landlord of the Yard. Clennam arranges via Plornish to pay off Tip’s debt to a dubious horse trader.

Ch. XIII Clennam then visits the Casby household, and realises that Casby is an empty fraud. He also meets Panks, the rent-collector, then his childhood sweetheart Flora Casby, who has become an embarrassing featherbrain. He feels so sorry for her that he accepts an invitation to stay for what turns out to be a comic dinner. Afterwards he walks with Panks into the city and comes across Cavalletto, who has been run over by a mail coach.

Ch. XIV Little Dorrit arrives at Clennam’s lodgings with Maggy at midnight to ‘thank’ him for releasing Tip. She thinks Mrs Clennam has learned the secret of her prison home from Flintwinch. Amy and Maggy are locked out of the prison because it is so late, and spend a grim and frightening night in the streets, where they encounter a woman who is about to commit suicide.

Ch. XV Affrey Flintwinch again encounters mysterious noises in the house, then overhears a dispute between her husband and Mrs Clennam. She is menaced by her husband once again.

Ch. XVI Clennam walks to Twickenham to see Mr Meagles, and on his way. meets Doyce, who needs a business partner for his enterprise. Clennam thinks of falling in love with Minnie (Pet) Meagles, but then decides against it. Tattycoram has been in touch with Miss Wade, who has offered her a position if she needs one. Clennam asks Meagles for advice regarding a plan to join Doyce as partner.

Ch. XVII The following day Clennam meets Henry Gowan at the ferry and immediately becomes jealous of him. The company are joined by Barnacle Junior for dinner, and Doyce reveals Gowan’s dubious background and feckless nature to Clennam, who remains deeply conflicted in his feelings about Pet.

Ch. XVIII John Chivery, the Marshalsea lock-keeper’s son has nursed a life-long romantic passion for Amy. He presents cigars to William Dorrit on a Sunday, then locates Amy on the Iron Bridge, where he wishes to declare his feelings for her. But she refuses to let him do so.

Ch. XIX William Dorrit tries to encourage his bedraggled brother Frederick to smarten himself up. He then notes that the lock-keeper Mr Chivery is not as friendly to him as usual and complains to Amy about Frederick’s descent into wretchedness. He falls into a passion of maudlin self-pity, alternating with periods of delusory self-aggrandisement. Amy watches over him throughout the night.

Ch. XX Amy goes to visit her sister at the theatre where she is a dancer. Fanny takes Amy to see Mrs Merdle whose son has proposed marriage to her. Fanny has misled Mrs Merdle into thinking that she comes from a distinguished family. However, Mrs Merdle thinks it would be social suicide to have her son marry socially beneath him and she bribes Fanny to stay away from the boy, who is a hopeless booby. Fanny complains unjustly to her sister in a patronising manner.

Maggie – Little Mother

Ch. XXI Mr Merdle’s prodigious wealth and his position in Harley Street at the pinnacle of Society. His step son Sparkler is a feckless wastrel who proposes marriage to young women at random. Merdle throws a lavish reception attended by prominent people from the Law, the Church, and the Treasury who toady up to him and dine at his expense whilst he consumes very little himself. Although his physician confirms that there is nothing physically wrong with him, Merdle suffers from a mysterious ‘complaint’.

Ch. XXII Dorrit becomes critical of Clennam because his ‘testimonials’ are not sustained. Gatekeeper Chivery asks Clennam to visit his wife, who reveals that her son has fallen into a permanent fit of despair because he has been rejected by Amy. She pleads with Clennam to intercede with Amy on her son’s behalf. Clennam meets Amy on the bridge, then Maggy, who bears begging letters from Dorrit and Tip addressed to Clennam. He pays Dorrit, but not Tip.

Ch. XXIII Meagles arranges for Clennam to become Daniel Doyce’s business partner. Clennam is visited at the workshop in Bleeding Heart Yard by Flora Casby and Mr F’s Aunt. Flora flirts with Clennam, claiming that she wants to help Little Dorrit. Pancks reveals that Casby had nothing to do with Little Dorrit’s placement with Mrs Clennam and he asks Clennam for information on the Dorrit family. Clennam tells him, on condition that Panks reveals any new information about them. Panks then collects rents in the Yard.

Ch. XXIV Little Dorrit visits the Casby home where Flora says she wants to employ her. Flora paints an over-romanticised picture of herself and Clennam designed to establish a claim on him. After-dinner Panks interviews Amy: he knows all about her family and claims to know what her future will be. After this he becomes omnipresent in the lives of the Dorrits.

Ch. XXV Panks’s second life lodging with the Ruggs in Pentonville. He invites John Chivery to a Sunday lunch and introduces him to Anastasia Rugg who has sued a local baker for breach of promise. Panks also befriends Cavalletto who is now lodging in Bleeding Heart Yard.

Ch. XXVI Clennam cannot sustain his resolution not to be attracted to Pet Meagles, and he cannot fight down his dislike for his rival Henry Gowan. The cynic Gowan patronises Doyce and invites Clennam to visit his mother at Hampton Court. Over dinner there is a snobbish exchange on the nation’s decline and ancestor worship of the Barnacles and Stiltstalkings. Mrs Gowan quizzes Clennam about Pet, claiming that the Meagles are social climbing, trying to make an alliance with her family. Clennam tries to explain that this is not the case but she refuses to believe him.

Ch. XXVII Meagles suddenly reports to Clennam that Tattycoram has gone missing. They trace her to an old house in Mayfair where she is staying with Miss Wade. Meagles entreats her to return to the family but she refuses. Miss Wade behaves scornfully to the two men and reveals that she like Tattycoram is an orphan with no name.

Ch. XXVIII Meagles advertises for Tattycoram in the newspaper but in return only receives begging letters from the public. Clennam and Daniel Doyce go to the Meagles for the weekend, where Clennam meets Pet by the river. She plucks at Clennam’s heart strings by telling him how happy she is to be in love with Henry Gowan. Clennam thinks that she is destined to be unhappy but swallows his unrequited love and congratulates her.

Ch. XXIX Mrs Clennam quizzes Little Dorrit about Panks who was taken to visiting the house more frequently. Little Dorrit tells her nothing. When Panks leaves, Affrey accidentally shuts herself out of the house, but Blandois (Rigaud) suddenly appears in the street and climbs through a window to let her in.

Ch. XXX Blandois and Jeremiah Flintwinch appear to recognise each other when they meet. Blondois has arrived with a letter of introduction and credit from Paris. He wishes to meet Mrs Clennam who is surprisingly open and even confessional with him. He asks Flintwinch to show him around the house, tries (and fails) to get him drunk, and predicts that they will become close friends. Yet next day he goes straight back to Paris.

Ch. XXXI Mrs Plornish’s impoverished father Old Nandy is let out of the workhouse for his birthday treat. Little Dorrit takes him to the prison, meeting her sister Fanny en route who snobbishly thinks Amy is lowering the family’s social standing. The birthday treat is paid for by Clennam who joins them whilst Dorrit loftily patronises Old Nandy. Tip appears and insults Clennam for not lending him money. Dorrit reproaches his son.

Ch. XXXII Clennam seeks an audience with Little Dorrit at the prison and asks her why she has been avoiding him. He fails to see that she is in love with him. He wants to know if she’s hiding anything from him, which she denies. She feels completely embarrassed by his revelations regarding his feelings for Pet Meagles. Panks suddenly appears, takes Clennam to meet Mr Rugg, and reveals that they have uncovered some important documents.

Ch. XXXIII Mrs Gowan explains to Mrs Merdle why and how she has ‘consented’ to the marriage of her son Henry to Pet Meagles. The truth is that they want her son Henry’s debts paid off. Mrs Merdle then reproaches her husband for being too preoccupied with his work. Edmund Sparkler appears and confirms that he is a dimwit who knows virtually nothing.

Ch. XXXIV Although Clennam is still trying to be honourably fair to his rival Henry Gowan he is disturbed when Gowan reveals his cynical and disappointed views at not having succeeded socially and not been better treated by his family. The marriage goes ahead and is attended by many of the Barnacles.

Ch. XXXV Panks reveals the he has uncovered a huge legacy due to Dorrit. He has financed the search with his own money plus loans from Rugg and Casby. Clennam goes to the Casby house where Flora is as garrulous as ever but kind to Amy. Clennam and Little Dorrit go to the prison and break the news to Dorrit, who promises to repay everybody.

Ch. XXXVI Dorrit immediately becomes imperious with the prison Marshal; Fanny buys dresses and bonnets; and Tip re-pays Clennam’s loan in a condescending manner. There is a celebratory feast for all the Collegians then a grand departure at which they forget Amy. Clennam brings her down from her room where she has fainted.

a monthly instalment

Book the Second – Riches

Ch. I The Dorrits, the Gowans, and Blandois all converge in a convent at the summit of the Saint Bernard Pass on route to Italy. Little Dorrit meets Pet Meagles (now Mrs Gowan) for the first time, befriends her, and shows her a message from Clennam.

Ch. II Mr Dorrit has hired the lofty Mrs General at great cost to complete the education of his two daughters. Mrs General is devoid of opinions and is entirely composed of surface polish.

Ch. III Fanny and Edward snobbishly reproach Amy for helping Mrs Gowan and for her connection with Clennam, who they now regard as beneath them socially. Dorrit mediates but thinks Clennam should cease to be acquainted with their family. Dorrit protests when he finds someone in their hotel rooms, but backs down when outfaced by Mrs Merdle. Amy now feels separated from her father and oppressed by the presence of a maid. The party eventually reaches Venice where Amy travels around alone.

Ch. IV Little Dorrit writes to Clennam telling him she has met Pet Meagle and thinks she should have a better husband than Henry Gowan. She also tells him that she misses the Dorrit of old, and that she wishes to be remembered as she herself was previously. She asks Clennam not to forget her.

Ch. V Dorrit complains about Amy to Mrs General because she is keeping the memory of the Marshalsea prison alive. He then cruelly reproaches Amy on entirely selfish grounds – to which Mrs General responds by offering tips on pronunciation. When Amy wishes to meet the Gowans, Tip reveals that they are friends of the Merdles. Dorrit sees this as a seal of approval – at which his brother Frederick suddenly erupts in protest against all this snobbery and money worship.

Ch. VI Fanny and Amy visit Gowan who is painting the portrait of Blandois. When Gowan’s dog takes a dislike to Blandois, Gowan kicks it into submission. On the way back, Fanny and Amy meet Sparkler who is besotted with Fanny. He is invited into the house and then in the evening to the opera, where Blandois reveals that the dog is now dead.

Ch. VII Fanny thinks Mrs General is setting her cap at her father. Sparkler is still in pursuit of Fanny. Henry Gowan grudgingly accepts a commission from Dorrit. Amy and her friend Minnie both dislike Blandois, who they think killed Gowan’s dog. There is a patronising visit from Mrs Merdle after which the family transfer to Rome.

Ch. VIII Clennam takes up Doyce’s patent application with the Circumlocution Office, ‘starting again from the beginning’. He is missing Little Dorrit and starting to feel that he is now too old for sentimental attachments. Dowager Mrs Gowan calls on the Meagles and patronises them regarding her son and his wife. She continues to maintain the fiction that they pursued her family.

Flora’s hour of inspection

Ch. IX The Meagles decided to go to Italy to look after Pet, who is expecting a baby. Henry Gowan has run up further debts. Clennam sees Tattycoram with Miss Wade and Blandois. He follows them to Casby’s house, but is delayed in a comic interlude by Flora and Mr F’s Aunt. When he asks Casby about Miss Wade he gets no information. However, Panks reveals that Casby holds money for Miss Wade, which she collects occasionally.

Ch. X Late one night Clennam meets Blandois going into his mother’s house, and wonders what the connection between them can be. Clennam protests his being there, but Mrs Clennam treats Blandois as a business contact. Flintwinch is summoned, and Mrs Clennam asks her son to leave whilst they conduct their business. Affrey Flintwinch cannot tell Clennam what is going on.

Ch. XI Little Dorrit writes to Clennam from Rome describing the Gowan’s poor lodgings and Pet’s being very much alone. Gowan is continuing his dissolute lifestyle, and yet his wife continues to be devoted to him. They now have an infant son. Sparkler has followed Fanny to Rome, and Little Dorrit herself feels homesick and keeps the memory of her former poverty alive.

Ch. XII Mr Merdle gives one of his lavish dinners which is attended by the Great and the Good. Powerful dignitaries regale each other with mind numbing anecdotes and jokes which are not funny. They agree to support the advancement of Sparkler, and are pleased to note his social connection with the now-wealthy Dorrit family. Merdle and Decimus Tite are brought together, after which it is announced that Sparkler is appointed to a high position in the Circumlocution Office.

Ch. XIII Panks calls on Mrs Plornish in her new shop (Happy Cottage) in Bleeding Heart Yard. Cavalletto is frightened after seeing Blandois in the street. Clennam calls by and invites Pancks to dinner. Pancks reveals that he has invested thousands in one of Merdle’s enterprises. Clennam obliquely tells Panks of his misgivings about his mother. Panks tempts him with easy money to be made from investments. He thinks he can’t lose because of Merdle’s immense capital and government connections.

Ch. XIV In Rome, Fanny feels trapped by her association with the gormless Sparkler, and is particularly resentful about being patronised by Mrs Merdle. She confides in Amy, but ends up engaged to be married to Sparkler.

Ch. XV Dorrit wishes Amy to announce his forthcoming marriage to Mrs General, but she refuses to do so. There is a stand-off between the two women. Fanny gets married then goes off with Sparkler and Dorrit to England, leaving Amy alone in Rome with Mrs General.

Ch. XVI Dorrit in London is visited by Merdle, who offers to ‘help’ him financially, now that they are connected by the marriage of their children. Dorrit basks in the glory of his association with the fabulously wealthy Merdle.

At Mr John Chivery’s tea table

Ch. XVII Flora Casby visits Dorrit at his hotel, in quest of information about Blandois who has gone missing after visiting Clennam and Co. Dorrit visits Mrs Clennam that evening, but nobody has any additional information on Blandois. Further mysterious happenings are noted by Affrey Flintwinch.

Ch. XVIII Dorrit is visited by John Chivery, who he first abuses but then gives £100 for a treat to the Collegians. He then travels across France to Italy making plans and buying presents for Mrs General on the way.

Ch. XIX Dorrit arrives back in Rome late at night and is peeved to observe the close harmony between Little Dorrit and his brother Frederick. He insists that Frederick is ‘fading fast’ and begins paying court to Mrs General. However, it is Dorrit himself who is fading, and at a dinner given by Mrs Meagles he makes a speech believing he is back in the Marshalsea prison. Amy takes him back home, where he dies the same night.

Ch. XX Panks has located Miss Wade at an address in Calais, which Clennam visits, seeking information about Blandois. She reveals that she has employed him for some dubious purpose in Italy, but will tell Clennam nothing further. She produces Tattycoram, and they argue about her sentimental links with the Meagles family.

Ch. XXI Clennam reads a biographical note given to him by Miss Wade. In it she recounts her unhappy childhood as an orphan, and her perverse nature by which she spurns all offers of friendship and help. She forms passionate but conflicted attachments to both men and women, and feels a strong kinship with the cynic Henry Gowan.

Ch. XXII Doyce goes to work abroad, leaving Clennam in sole charge of their enterprise. They discuss the need for fiscal caution. Cavalletto recognises Blandois from Clennam’s description, and agrees to go in search of him.

Ch. XXIII Clennam is frustrated by his lack of information about Blandois. He visits his mother and appeals to her, but she refuses to help him or tell him anything. He also asks Affrey, but she is scared and merely refers to mysterious noises in the house and the recurrence what she calls her ‘dreams’.

Ch. XXIV Fanny is bored with her husband Sparkler. Her brother Edward (Tip) has sacked and paid off Mrs General following the death of his father (and uncle). They are visited by Mr Merdle who is in a rather strange state. He borrows a penknife before leaving them.

Ch. XXV Mrs Merdle attends a society party where rumours of a peerage for Mr Merdle are circulating. But the host is later called out when it is revealed that Merdle has committed suicide in the public baths. He has been exposed as a forger and a robber, and his bank collapses.

Ch. XXVI Clennam has invested everything with Merdle, and is now ruined. He is distraught about his responsibility towards his partner Doyce. He makes a public confession of his culpability, despite Mr Rugg advising him to be cautious and restrained. He is imprisoned in the Marshalsea, and is given Little Dorrit’s old room.

Ch. XXVII Young John Chivery battles with his feelings of rivalry whilst showering comforts on Clennam in the jail. He explains his discomfort in a comically ambiguous manner, but finally reveals to Clennam that Little Dorrit is in love with him. Clennam is puzzled and does not know what to do with this information.

Ch. XXVIII Clennam is visited in jail: first by Ferdinand Barnacle, who advises him to give up his struggles with the Circumlocution Office; next by Mr Rugg who wants him to enter into litigation; and finally by Blandois, who writes a letter to Mrs Clennam giving her a week to accept his ‘proposal’ – which is a threat of blackmail. Blandois taunts Clennam regarding his connections with Miss Wade and Mrs Gowan. Mrs Clennam agrees to meet Blandois in a week’s time.

Damocles (Blandois)

Ch. XXIX Little Dorrit returns from Italy and visits Clennam in jail. She has come with her brother Edward who is enquiring into his father’s will. Amy offers Clennam all her money to release him from bankruptcy, but Clennam turns down her offer on very high-minded principal, and even advises her to stay away from him and the prison, and enjoy a better life for herself.

Ch. XXX Blandois visits Mrs Clennam, where Affrey finally rebels and refuses to obey Flintwinch’s commands. Blandois is threatening Mrs Clennam with information regarding the family’s secret history and the codicil to a will, all of which he has obtained from Flintwinch’s twin brother in Antwerp. He has also given copies of these compromising documents to Amy in the prison in a tightly controlled plot. It is also revealed that Mrs Clennam is not Arthur’s mother.

Ch. XXXI Mrs Clennam gets up from her wheelchair to dash to the prison, where she confesses the truth to Amy, who forgives her in saintly fashion. They dash back to the house to meet the deadline set by Blandois, but on arrival they find that the house has collapsed, killing him.

Ch. XXXII Clennam continues to be ill in jail. Casby bullies Panks, who finally rebels and resigns from his job as debt collector. He humiliates Casby by cutting off his hair in front of his tenants in Bleeding Heart Yard.

Ch. XXXIII Mr Meagles goes in search of the papers secured by Blandois. He asks Miss Wade in Calais, who denies all knowledge of them. But on his return to London Tattycoram brings him the original metal box and wishes to be reunited with the Meagles family. He passes the box over to Little Dorrit and goes off in search of Doyce.

Ch. XXXIV Little Dorrit once again offers to share her ‘entire fortune’ with Clennam, but he again refuses her offer, whereupon she reveals that she has no fortune – all her money disappeared in the Merdle collapse – and she confesses her profound love for him. Flora visits to recount her love for her ‘rival’ Amy, and Mr Meagles arrives with Doyce to take up his business again with Clennam, following which Clennam and Amy get married in a quiet ceremony.

Mont Blanc – Charles Dickens special edition

Little Dorrit – principal characters

John Baptist Cavalletto	a Genoese sailor and adventurer
Monsieur Rigaud (later Lagnier, then Blandois)	a bogus ‘gentleman’ and an assassin
Mr Meagles	a retired banker
Mrs Meagles	his wife
Minnie (Pet)	their pretty and pampered daughter (20)
Tattycoram (Harriet)	Pet’s conflicted maid, a foundling
Arthur Clennam	a gentleman and former businessman (40)
Mrs Clennam	his ‘mother’, a bitter and puritanical martyr
Jeremiah Flintwinch	her servant and later business partner
Affrey Flintwinch	his browbeaten and abused wife
Miss Wade	a strong-willed man-hater and orphan
William Dorrit	an elderly self-deluded debtor – the Father of the Marshalsea
Frederick Dorrit	his brother, a down-at-heel clarionet player
Amy (Little) Dorrit	William’s selfless and loyal daughter (20)
Fanny Dorrit	her sister – a dancer
Edward (‘Tip’) Dorrit	her feckless and wayward brother
Lord Decimus Tite Barnacle	controller of the Circumlocution Office
Clarence Barnacle	his son
Ferdinand Barnacle	his lacklustre son
Mr Plornish	a plasterer at Bleeding Heart Yard (30)
Sally Plornish	his wife
Maggy	Amy’s simple friend (28 – but mentally 10)
Daniel Doyce	an engineer and inventor
Christopher Casby	landlord of Bleeding Heart Yard
Flora Casby (Finching)	his daughter, Clennam’s old sweetheart, now a garrulous and feather-brained widow
Pancks	his nail-biting rent collector
Mr F’s Aunt	Flora’s ‘legacy’ from her late husband Finching
Henry Gowan	a talentless and cynical would-be ‘artist’
John Chivery	Amy’s admirer, the prison lock-keeper’s son
Mrs Mary Chivery	a tobacco shop keeper
Mr Merdle	an unscrupulous and wealthy banker
Mrs Merdle	his vicious social-climbing wife
Edmund Sparkler	Mrs Merdle’s dim-witted son by her first husband
Mr Rugg	Pentonville debt collector and Panks’s landlord
Amastasia Rugg	his daughter, a husband-hunter
Lord Lancaster Stiltstalking	a retired Circumlocution Office official
Mrs Gowan	a snobbish elderly ‘Beauty’
Mrs General	widow, governess to the Dorrits

Charles Dickens – Further reading

Biography

Peter Ackroyd, Dickens, London: Mandarin, 1991.

John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, Forgotten Books, 2009.

Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph, Little Brown, 1952.

Fred Kaplan, Dickens: A Biography, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

Frederick G. Kitton, The Life of Charles Dickens: His Life, Writings and Personality, Lexden Publishing Limited, 2004.

Michael Slater, Charles Dickens, Yale University Press, 2009.

Criticism

G.H. Ford, Dickens and His Readers, Norton, 1965.

P.A.W. Collins, Dickens and Crime, London: Palgrave, 1995.

Philip Collins (ed), Dickens: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 1982.

Jenny Hartley, Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women, London: Methuen, 2009.

Andrew Sanders, Authors in Context: Charles Dickens, Oxford University Press, 2009.

Jeremy Tambling, Going Astray: Dickens and London, London: Longman, 2008.

Donald Hawes, Who’s Who in Dickens, London: Routledge, 2001.

Other works by Charles Dickens

Pickwick Papers (1836-37) was Dickens’ first big success. It was issued in twenty monthly parts and is not so much a novel as a series of loosely linked sketches and changing characters featured in reports to the Pickwick Club. These recount comic excursions to Rochester, Dingley Dell, and Bath; duels and elopements; Christmas festivities; Mr Pickwick inadvertently entering the bedroom of a middle-aged lady at night; and in the end a happy marriage. Much light-hearted fun, and a host of memorable characters.
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Oliver Twist (1837-38) expresses Dickens’ sense of the vulnerability of children. Oliver is a foundling, raised in a workhouse, who escapes suffering by running off to London. There he falls into the hands of a gang of thieves controlled by the infamous Fagin. He is pursued by the sinister figure of Monks who has secret information about him. The plot centres on the twin issues of personal identity and a secret inheritance (which surface again in Great Expectations). Emigration, prison, and violent death punctuate a cascade of dramatic events. This is the early Victorian novel in fine melodramatic form. Recommended for beginners to Dickens.
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Charles Dickens – web links

Charles Dickens at Mantex
Biographical notes, book reviews, tutorials and study guides, free eTexts, videos, adaptations for cinema and television, further web links.

Charles Dickens at Wikipedia
Biography, major works, literary techniques, his influence and legacy, extensive bibliography, and further web links.

Charles Dickens at Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts of the major works in a variety of formats.

Dickens on the Web
Major jumpstation including plots and characters from the novels, illustrations, Dickens on film and in the theatre, maps, bibliographies, and links to other Dickens sites.

The Dickens Page
Chronology, eTexts available, maps, filmography, letters, speeches, biographies, criticism, and a hyper-concordance.

Charles Dickens at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations of the major novels and stories for the cinema and television – in various languages

A Charles Dickens Journal
An old HTML website with detailed year-by-year (and sometimes day-by-day) chronology of events, plus pictures.

Hyper-Concordance to Dickens
Locate any word or phrase in the major works – find that quotation or saying, in its original context.

Dickens at the Victorian Web
Biography, political and social history, themes, settings, book reviews, articles, essays, bibliographies, and related study resources.

Charles Dickens – Gad’s Hill Place
Something of an amateur fan site with ‘fun’ items such as quotes, greetings cards, quizzes, and even a crossword puzzle.

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Little Dorrit – critical commentary

Little Dorrit – Study resources

Little Dorrit – plot summary

Little Dorrit – principal characters

Charles Dickens – Further reading

Other works by Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens – web links

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