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The Hound of the Baskervilles

September 23, 2016 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and further reading

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) is possibly the most famous of the Sherlock Holmes stories – for three very good reasons. The first is that it is an intriguing murder mystery related in the fast-moving style of the best popular fiction. The second is that it incorporates a vivid and dramatic myth of an unseen but deadly beast which stalks the moors and threatens the fabric of polite society. The third is that it was the basis for a number of screen adaptations, including the very successful 1939 version starring Basil Rathbone. And of course it has as its stand-out hero the best known detective of all time – Sherlock Holmes.

The Hound of the Baskervilles – a note on the text

The Hound of the Baskervilles first appeared as monthly instalments in the Strand Magazine between August 1901 and April 1902, with illustrations by Sydney Paget. The first single volume book version was published by George Newnes in March 1902. The serial publication was a great success, and it is worth noting that it appeared alongside an equally poular tale, The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells.

Some critics class it as a long story rather than a novel. This is a view supported by the full title of the original which is The Hound of the Baskervilles – Another Adventure of Sherlock Holmes, So there are some reasons for regarding it as merely a longer example of the case studies that are collected in the series of short stories that constitute The Adventures, The Case-Book, and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. But the length of the text (50,000 words), the complexities of the plot, and the number of characters are more characteristic of a novel. It seems to make more sense to classify it along with its predecessors A Study in Scarlet (1888) and The Sign of the Four (1890) as a short novel.

The Hound of the Baskervilles – commentary

The method of detection

Most people will read any Sherlock Holmes story for the pleasure of witnessing his famous inductive method at work. Holmes observes very small details, and from them identifies larger issues and their causes at work. This short novel begins with a demonstration of exactly this method. A visitor to the famous consulting rooms at 221B Baker Street has left behind a walking stick. Holmes challenges Watson to apply the method, which Watson does, with partial success. But then Holmes tops Watson’s observations with an even more detailed account of the stick’s owner – all of which is proven to be true when he appears to recover it. Dr James Mortimer is exactly the sort of person Holmes has described (although he is something of a superfluous character in the narrative).

The ‘method’ is often described as ‘deduction , but technically, in philosophic terms, it is ‘induction’. For a discussion of the distinction between the two, see the tutorial on A Scandal in Bohemia.

The myth of the beast

One of the strongest horror elements of the novel is the idea of a gigantic and man-killing beast roaming loose on the Moors. The origin of the curse of the Baskervilles is that of a dastardly aristocrat who abducts a young lower-class woman. When she escapes he gives chase with his hunting hounds. But the villain is himself killed by a ‘a great black beast, shaped like a hound, yet larger than any hound that ever mortal eye had rested upon’.

It is not surprising to learn that the beast is ‘tearing at his throat’ – for all this is just one of the ingredients of this popular myth. Other elements are the Moors, the Beast which is heard howling but cannot be seen, and the deaths from fear alone. Conan Doyle adds a further layer of horror by giving Stapleton’s beast luminous jaws and eyes – rather unscientifically ignoring the fact that phosphorous would have a poisonous effect on the animal .

Such myths are still common today: tabloid newspaper frequently report of sightings of ‘the Monster of Exmoor’, ‘the Beast of Bodmin’, and (more recently) ‘the Essex Lion’. All of these ‘wild beast’ sightings (accompanied by fuzzy photographs or videos) turn out to be nothing much more than large cats or dogs. It is something or an ironic anti-climax in the novel to discover that Stapleton actually purchased his dog from a pet shop in the Fullham Road.

Mythical beasts almost always inhabit remote moors, dense forests, or other inaccessible regions where their existence cannot easily be verified. The same applies to reports of ‘the Abominable Snowman’, ‘Bigfoot’, and ‘the Loch Ness Monster’. To make matters topographically more dangerous, Conan Doyle also throws in a swamp, the Grimpen Mire, in which we are led to believe the villainous Stapleton meets his own well-deserved end.

In other words, the novel draws upon an idea which appeals to the popular imagination, even though there is very little evidence for its existence. It is an idea to which people are attracted – almost as if they wish to believe it exists. Of course Conan Doyle does produce a real (fictional) hound for the purposes of the story – but this is of secondary importance compared to the power of the myth.

The sensation novel

Wilkie Collins is often credited with the invention of both the detective novel and the sensation novel. Whilst Sherlock Holmes probably owes more to Edgar Allan Poe’s detective hero Auguste Dupin, The Hound of the Baskervilles certainly has many elements of the sensation novel which enjoyed a vogue in both popular and highbrow fiction in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

Sensation novels dealt with issues that pushed at the limits of what could be accepted in the realistic narrative. These were issues of crime, bigamy, secret identities, forged wills, blackmail, illegitimacy, and madness. The Hound has a full complement of these elements in its makeup.

The story begins with a case of forced imprisonment and aristocratic crime – when the dastardly Hugo Baskerville abducts the yeoman’s daughter and locks her in the upper part of the ancestral Hall. This incident is followed by the sudden and violent death of Hugo when the great black beast on the moor tears at his throat with its fangs.

This establishes the curse of the Baskervilles, which seems to repeat itself when Sir Charles meets his sudden and unexplained death in the Yew Alley of Baskerville Hall. But this incident (we learn later) has been engineered by someone masquerading under not one but two false identities.

The villain Stapleton is actually a Baskerville, but having stolen money and changed his name to Vandeleur, he returns to England from South America and sets up a school that fails ignominiously. He then changes his name yet again to Stapleton as part of his complex machinations.

These include another form of false identity (technically, personation) when he passes off his wife Beryl as his sister. This in its turn introduces very obliquely the notion of incest. But Stapleton also encourages a romantic liaison between Sir Henry and Beryl, since he himself has (illegally) proposed marriage to Mrs Laura Lyons. This complication produces an element that is difficult to name or categorise, but perhaps comes closest to potential bigamy..

This sexual and legal ambiguity is reinforced by Stapleton paying court to Mrs Lyons. She has a certain amount of money, and he has promised to marry her if she can obtain a divorce. This raises questions of either adultery or bigamy. However, Stapleton’s personal relationship with his wife also includes the sensation element of domestic violence. He bullies her and beats her into submission.

Sherlock Holmes makes the observation that “There can be no doubt that Stapleton exercised an influence over her which may have been love or may have been fear; or very possibly both, since they are by no means incompatible emotions”. When Stapleton beats his wife and ties her up in the house, she becomes a form of ‘madwoman in the attic’ – another stock figure from the sensation novel.

The Hound of the Baskervilles – study resources

The Hound of the Baskervilles – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

The Hound of the Baskervilles – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

The Hound of the Baskervilles – Penguin – Amazon UK

The Hound of the Baskervilles – Penguin – Amazon US

The Hound of the Baskervilles – Wordsworth – Amazon UK

The Hound of the Baskervilles – Wordsworth – Amazon US

The Hound of the Baskervilles – 1939 classic DVD – Amazon UK

Sherlock Holmes – classics DVD box set – Amazon UK

Sherlock – 2014 DVD box set – Amazon UK

The Hound of the Baskervilles – chapter summaries

1. Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson analyse a walking stick left behind by a visitor, concluding that its owner is a medical man who has retired to a country practice. The man himself James Mortimer appears, confirming their views.

2. Mortimer reads from an old manuscript. A maiden is abducted by Hugo Baskerville, escapes, and is pursued by his hounds across Dartmoor. When his colleagues follow, they find Baskerville dead, with a huge beast tearing at his throat. His descendent Sir Charles Baskerville has been found dead at Baskerville Hall from causes unknown, and a next of kin is sought to take over the estate. Mortimer adds that Sir Charles was in good health and he saw the footprints of a gigantic hound on inspecting the body.

3. Mortimer believes in a supernatural explanation, but as executor of Sir Charles’ will he needs advice on the new incumbent Sir Henry Baskerville. Watson and Holmes compare notes on clues offered by the garden where Sir Charles was found.

4. Henry Baskerville arrives next morning with a warning note he has received at his hotel. Holmes analyses its text cut out from a copy of The Times. Henry Baskerville also has one of his boots stolen from the hotel. Holmes and Watson discover someone following Baskerville, then they send a messenger in search of Times cuttings in nearby hotels.

5. Henry Baskerville loses another shoe at the hotel. Dr Mortimer reveals the identity of those who have profited from Sir Charles’ will – including himself. The total value of estate is close to one million pounds. A boot suddenly reappears. Holmes interviews the cab driver whose bearded ‘spy’ claimed he was ‘Sherlock Holmes’.

6. Baskerville, Mortimer, and Watson travel to Dartmoor, where a convict has escaped from the prison. They arrive at the dark and gloomy Baskerville Hall., where the butler Mr Barrymore and his wife wish to leave following the death of Sir Charles. Watson hears a woman sobbing late at night.

7. Watson is somewhat suspicious of Barrymore. He meets the naturalist Stapleton who already knows all about Watson and Holmes. Stapleton points out the treacherous Grimpen Mire, which swallows up a Dartmoor pony. They hear a terrible sound which he claims is the Baskerville hound. Watson meets Stapleton’s sister Beryl, who warns him to go back to London immediately, but then retracts her warning.

8. Watson reports to Holmes by letter that young Sir Harry has taken a fancy to Beryl Stapleton, and that Mr Frankland is a litigious neighbour. Watson spots Barrymore making suspicious movements in the house at night.

9. Watson and Sir Harry decide to spy on Barrymore. Watson also observes a meeting of Sir Harry with Beryl which is thwarted by Stapleton who disapproves of the relationship. However, he later apologises and asks Harry to wait for three months in his romantic endeavours. Watson and Harry catch Barrymore making a signal at the window. Mrs Barrymore explains that it is to her brother, the escaped convict. They go out to catch him, hear the hound, and see a tall figure on a Tor. The convict escapes capture.

10. Sir Harry agrees with Barrymore not to pursue the convict Selden, who plans to leave the country. Barrymore reveals that Sir Charles was due to meet a woman on the night of his death. Watson learns that this could be Mrs Laura Lyons, Frankland’s daughter. Barrymore reveals that there is another man on the Moor.

11. Watson interrogates Mrs Laura Lyons, who reluctantly tells him about her movements and explains that she is in an unhappy marriage. Later her father Falkland boasts of his successful law suits and reveals that he has seen a boy delivering food to the convict. Watson finds the hut on the moor where the man on the Tor is hiding – and he turns out to be Sherlock Holmes.

12. Holmes reveals that Beryl is not Stapleton’s sister but his wife. There is a cry of horror, and they find the dead body of Sir Henry at the bottom of a cliff. But it turns out to be the convict Selden, who has been given Henry’s old clothes in which to escape. Stapleton appears, claiming he was disturbed by the cries.

13. Holmes spots that one of the Baskerville family portraits looks like Stapleton. They pretend to go to London but interview Laura Lyons, revealing that Stapleton is married. She is outraged, and reveals the details of her letter to Sir Charles. Lestrade arrives from London, summoned by Holmes.

14. Watson, Holmes, and Lestrade stake out Stapleton’s house whilst Sir Henry is there for dinner. Their plans are threatened when a fog begins to descend. Sir Henry leaves after dinner, and Stapleton unleashes the hound on him. Holmes shoots the hound dead. They then find Beryl Stapleton bound and gagged in an upstairs room of the house. Next day they go in search of Stapleton on the Mire, but do not find him.

15. Some time later Holmes outlines the background details to the case. Stapleton was the son of a rogue Baskerville. He married Beryl (a Costa Rican) stole money, and changed his name to Vandeleur. He opened a school in Yorkshire, and when it collapsed moved to Devon. Only two people stood between him and the inheritance. Posing as a single man he paid court to Laura Lyons. After frightening Sir Charles to death with the Hound, he tried to kill Sir Henry but his plans were exposed by Holmes.

1939 film adaptation

The Hound of the Baskervilles – characters

Sherlock Holmes	an amateur consultant detective
Dr John Watson	Holmes’ friend, a retired army surgeon
Sir Charles Baskerville	the aged and infirm owner of the Baskerville estate
Henry Baskerville	the legitimate heir to the title (from Canada)
Jack Stapleton	a Baskerville, alias Vandeleur, alias Stapleton, a naturalist
Beryl Stapleton	his attractive wife, masquerading as his sister
John Barrymore	the butler at Baskerville Hall
James Mortimer	a country doctor
Mr Frankland	a litiigious neighbour at the Hall
Mrs Laura Lyons	Frankland’s unhappily married daughter
Selden	an escaped convict

The Hound of the Baskervilles – further reading

Biography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Criticism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Hound of the Baskervilles – web links

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

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

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

More 19C Authors
More on literature
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

The Hours

June 14, 2009 by Roy Johnson

the film of a novel about a book

When it first appeared, Stephen Daldry’s film of Michael Cunningham’s best-selling novel was subject to a number of niggling criticisms which made me apprehensive when I sat down to watch it. But I needn’t have worried. Every doubt was completely swept away by the overwhelming visual and emotional power of the film. For those who don’t know, The Hours is inspired by Cunningham’s deep appreciation of Virginia Woolf, and the film itself is split into three apparently unconnected stories.

The first of these is a fictionalised account of Virginia Woolf’s daily life working alongside her husband Leonard as she writes Mrs Dalloway, the story of a society hostess who is preparing to throw a party. We see her erratic behaviour and his patient attempts to deal with it; her addiction to cigarettes; a good account of her creativity; and eventually her suicide when she fills her pockets with stones and drowns herself in the river Ouse.

This narrative is intercut with the two others, the first of which is a John Cheever-like study of family life in a prosperous middle-class Los Angeles suburb in the 1950s. At the outset the only apparent connection is that the wife Laura Brown – superbly acted by Julianne Moore – is reading a copy of Mrs Dalloway. She bakes a cake for her husband’s birthday and plans his party.

However, it is made quite clear to us that she is deeply unhappy, and when she leaves her young son with a babysitter and checks into a hotel with a bottle of sleeping pills, it is seems she is going to commit suicide. But at the last minute she changes her mind. However, that’s not the end of the story.

In the third narrative, the connections are more obvious. The setting is contemporary New York, where an arty lesbian hostess called Clarissa (played by Meryl Streep) is arranging a party. This is to celebrate the successful publication of a book of poems by her close friend and ex-lover Richard who is dying of AIDS. He cannot enjoy the prospect of celebration because he knows what life has in store for him.

Clarissa goes to try to persuade him to come to the party, but he rejects her kindness, and as he starts hovering around the open window of his skyscraper apartment, readers of Mrs Dalloway know what is likely to follow.

These are just some of the many thematic links between the three narratives. Each one has its own tone, but they hang together beautifully, and the climax of the film is brought about by an amazing blending of all three into one.

As a drama it is wonderfully constructed, and as a film beautifully photographed. Despite the reservations of some critics, I thought the acting superb. Nicole Kidman generates a very convincing portrait of the nervy, clever bluestocking Woolf, and I was glad to see that there was little attempt to glamourise her.

Julianne Moore simply radiates the amazing tension which exists between her outer serenity and inner turmoil. Meryl Streep could be accused of over-egging her role as Clarissa, but not enough to knock the film off track. Ed Harris is very good as an anguished Richard, and there is a unusually persuasive portrait of Lara’s young son by Jack Rovello which will tug at your heart strings.

The film quite rightly gathered a whole swathe of awards; screenplay is by David Hare; and the accompanying music is by Philip Glass.

Buy the DVD at Amazon UK

Buy the DVD at Amazon US

Stephen Daldry, The Hours, 2003

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
More on the Bloomsbury Group

The House of Mirth

July 12, 2011 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, further reading

The House of Mirth (1905) was Edith Wharton’s first major success as a novelist. She had published short stories before, and even a best-seller on interior design – The Decoration of Houses (1897). Indeed she went on in her prolific career to produce travel writing, essays, journalism, and memoirs. But from The House of Mirth onwards, she regarded herself as a serious novelist – even though she claimed that her apprenticeship to the art of fiction only ended with the publication of her novella Ethan Frome in 1911.

Edith Wharton – portrait

She wrote about a subject she knew intimately – the upper echelons of ‘old money’ New York society and their amazingly clannish not-to-say snobbish notions of what was and was not socially acceptable. Everything rested on the appearance of respectability, no matter how far its remoteness from the truth of things.

Like other forms of upper class and aristocratic society its main impetus towards the preservation of power and influence via marriages based on wealth – preferably inherited. The possession of a family fortune means that a complete nonentity such as Percy Gryce is regarded as a desirable catch for any New York matron wishing to marry off a daughter, whereas even someone as beautiful and intelligent as Lily Bart has been unable to locate a husband, because she has no grand inheritance and has fallen in the social pecking order since the collapse of her father’s business. .

The House of Mirth – plot summary

Part I

Lily Bart is a twenty-nine year old New York woman who has been raised in an indulgent and well-to-do family. When her father’s business crashes and both parents die, she is taken in by her rather strict and old-fashioned aunt Julia. Despite her good looks and lively intelligence Lily has been unable to find a husband and fears that her times and chances are running out. She is attracted to the lawyer Lawrence Selden, but he feels that he does not have enough money to afford marriage.

The novel begins with a scene in which Selden invites her to afternoon tea in his bachelor rooms – an innocent enough gesture, but one which ultimately is to have a decisive influence on her destiny. She is spotted by two people leaving the building, and both of them seek to profit from their knowledge later in the story. Lily mixes amongst people who are much wealthier than she is, and she feel both financially and socially disadvantaged. She entertains the notion of attracting Percy Gryce, a boring but wealthy young bachelor. However, distracted by her interest in Lawrence Selden, she misses her chance to captivate Gryce, and he marries somebody else.

Having accrued gambling debts, and feeling that she cannot afford to keep up with the set with whom she mixes, she turns in desperation to Gus Trenor, a businessman who agrees to help her financially – but under rather vague terms that Lily chooses not to understand. She thereby puts herself under his influence, which includes being friendly to Simon Rosedale, a Jewish businessman who is buying his way into polite New York society.

One day a cleaner from Selden’s rooms (which Rosedale owns) blackmails Lily with some compromising letters she has salvaged from Selden’s wastebasket – thinking they are from Lily. They are in fact from Bertha Dorset, a married woman, but Lily pays them to protect Selden – and keeps them.

Enjoying newfound affluence as a result of Gus Trenor’s investment on her behalf, Lily is uncomfortable when he presses for reciprocal favours, but feels obliged to accept his ever closer friendship – even though he is married to one of her friends. In doing so, she develops something of an unfavourable reputation – which is reported to her aunt Julia by jealous rivals.

Gus Trenor eventually tricks her into joining him late at night in his town house where he is alone, and once again he presses her for reciprocity. Lily narrowly escapes his clutches, but is seen leaving the house by Lawrence Selden, who happens to be looking for her at the time.

Lily confesses her debts to aunt Julia, who refuses to help her. Finally Lily pins all her hopes on Lawrence Selden, who at one of their last meetings has declared that he could only help her by loving her. She has an appointment to meet him, but he doesn’t come. Instead, Simon Rosedale arrives with an offer to help her out of her financial problems, which she politely refuses.

Part II

Lily is invited on to a Mediterranean cruise by Bertha Dorset, and this distraction allows her to put her financial and social worries behind her. But the invitation is a ruse to keep George Dorset occupied whilst Bertha enjoys an affair with Ned Silverton, a young man with poetic inclinations. When a rift between the Dorsets threatens to become public, they close ranks and Lily is expelled publicly from the cruise.

She returns to America to find that her Aunt has died, leaving the bulk of her estate to her longtime companion Gerty, and Lily a legacy of $10,000 – precisely the amount she owes to Gus Trenor. Rejected by her former friends, she begins to mix with ‘new money’ people who are trying to climb into fashionable New York society. She is pursued by George Dorset, but rejects his advances, and finally offers herself to Simon Rosedale. But he will only accept her if she uses Lawrence Selden’s letters to bring about a truce with Bertha Dorset, which she refuses to do.

She goes to work as an assistant to a rich divorcee who is trying to gain entry into society, but Lily realises that this will once again tarnish her reputation, whether she is successful or not. So she then takes employment as a milliner, moves into a cheap lodging house, and begins to take comfort in drugs.

In despair, she finally sets out to reveal her possession of the letters to Bertha Dorset, but changes her mind when she realises that to do so will besmirch Lawrence Selden’s name. Instead, she calls on him to say goodbye and burns the letters on the fire whilst he is making tea for her.

Next day Selden has finally decided to act on his intention to help Lily instead of being merely a spectator to her life. But he arrives to find that she has died of an overdose, leaving behind a cheque to pay for all her debts to Gus Trenor.

The House of Mirth – study resources

The House of Mirth – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

The House of Mirth – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

The House of Mirth – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

The House of Mirth – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

The House of Mirth – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon US

The House of Mirth – Cliff’s Notes – Amazon UK

The House of Mirth – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

The House of Mirth – audioBook version at LibriVox

The House of Mirth – DVD of 2007 Terrence Davie movie – Amazon UK

The House of Mirth – Kindle eBook edition

A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The House of Mirth – characters

Lily Bart	a beautiful and intelligent woman – (29) an orphan, living with her Aunt Julia
Hudson Bart	her hard-working father, who is ruined financially
Lawrence Selden	a middle-class lawyer, sceptic, and bachelor who believes he doesn’t have enough money to marry
Percy Gryce	a rich, dull, bachelor and bibliophile
Mrs Gryce	a stern widow and matriarch, who controls her son
Simon Rosedale	a successful Jewish businessman who wishes to gain entry to upper class society
Gus Trenor	a coarse, gauche, and rich businessman
Judy Trenor	his snobbish and manipulative wife (40)
Gertrude Farish	Selden’s unmarried cousin who does charity work
Julia Peniston	Lily’s strict aunt, who looks after her following the death of her parents
Jack Stepney	Lily’s improvident cousin
Grace Stepney	his sister, companion to Mrs Peniston, who inherits her wealth
Bertha Dorset	a conniving socialite and flirt, who had a former relationship with Lawrence Selden
George Dorset	Bertha’s indulgent and cuckolded husband
Carry Fisher	an enthusiast for causes
Mrs Haffen	cleaner at the Benedick, who discovers the letters
The Wellington Brys	society would-bes
Ned Silverton	young hanger-on with poetic inclinations and an addiction to gambling
Little Dabham	society gossip columnist for ‘Riviera Notes’
Paul Morpeth	society artist who arranges the tableaux vivants at the Bry’s party
June & Ann Silverton	Ned’s sisters, who are trying to pay off his debts
Norma Hatch	young nouveau rich divorcee who employs Lily as a ‘secretary’
Nettie Struther	working-class young woman who is grateful for Lily’s help

The House of Mirth – film adaptation

2000 movie adaptation by Terence Davies

Manuscript page from The House of Mirth

Other works by Edith Wharton

Ethan Frome (1911) tells the story of a poor farmer, lonely and downtrodden, his wife Zeena, and her cousin, the enchanting Mattie Silver. In the playing out of this novella’s powerful and engrossing drama, Edith Wharton constructed her least characteristic and most celebrated book. In its unyielding and shocking pessimism, its bleak demonstration of tragic waste, it is a masterpiece of psychological and emotional realism. Every detail of the story contributes to a shocking and powerful conclusion you will never forget. This book is now regarded as a classic of the novella genre.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
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The Age of Innocence (1920) is Edith Wharton’s most famous novel, written immediately after the end of the First World War. It’s a brilliantly realized anatomy of New York society in the 1870s. Newland Archer is charming, tactful, and enlightened. He accepts society’s standards and abides by its rules, but he also recognizes its limitations. His engagement to the impeccable May Welland assures him of a safe and conventional future – until the arrival of May’s cousin Ellen Olenska puts all his plans in jeopardy. Independent, free-thinking, and scandalously separated from her husband, Ellen forces Archer to question the values and assumptions of his narrow world. As their love for each other grows, Archer has to decide where his ultimate loyalty lies.
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The Custom of the Country (1913) is Edith Wharton’s satiric anatomy of American society in the first decade of the twentieth century. It follows the career of Undine Spragg, recently arrived in New York from the midwest and determined to conquer high society. Glamorous, selfish, mercenary and manipulative, her principal assets are her striking beauty, her tenacity, and her father’s money. With her sights set on an advantageous marriage, Undine pursues her schemes in a world of shifting values, where triumph is swiftly followed by disillusion. This is a study of modern ambition and materialism written a hundred years before its time.
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Buy the book at Amazon US

Edith Wharton – web links

Edith Wharton at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major novels, tutorials on the shorter fiction, bibliographies, critiques of the shorter fiction, and web links.

Edith Wharton at Gutenberg
Free eTexts of the major novels and collections of stories in a variety of digital formats – also includes travel writing and interior design.

Edith Wharton at Wikipedia
Full details of novels, stories, and travel writing, adaptations for television and the cinema, plus web links to related sites.

The Edith Wharton Society
Old but comprehensive collection of free eTexts of the major novels, stories, and travel writing, linking archives at University of Virginia and Washington State University.

The Mount: Edith Wharton’s Home
Aggressively commercial site devoted to exploiting The Mount – the house and estate designed by Edith Wharton. Plan your wedding reception here.

Edith Wharton at Fantastic Fiction
A compilation which purports to be a complete bibliography, arranged as novels, collections, non-fiction, anthologies, short stories, letters, and commentaries – but is largely links to book-selling sites, which however contain some hidden gems.

Edith Wharton’s manuscripts
Archive of Wharton holdings at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

More on Edith Wharton
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

The Idiots

September 8, 2013 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Idiots was Joseph Conrad’s first short story. It was written in 1896 during his honeymoon and published in The Savoy magazine later that year. It was later collected in Tales of Unrest, 1898. The other stories in the collection are Karain, A Memory, An Outpost of Progress, The Return, and The Lagoon.

The Idiots – critical commentary

It is difficult to see this story as anything other than a study in congenital abnormality. Susan’s father was mentally deficient; she herself bears four children who all have the same defect; and she ends up acting in a socially aberrant manner, first of all committing murder (though under strong provocation) then losing her hold on reality when she has been abandoned by her own mother. Finally she commits suicide. It is amazing to think that these gloomy, savage, and tragic subjects were chosen by Conrad for a story he wrote whilst on his honeymoon.

In 1883, Sir Francis Galton, the half-cousin of Charles Darwin, formulated the notion of what came to be called eugenics – the idea that the race could be ‘improved’ by removing unwanted elements from the genetic pool from which human beings are created. These unwanted elements tended to be anything which was unusual or abnormal – without any scientific evidence linking the abnormality to a genetic cause. (This was in a pre-DNA era). In the early twentieth century the notion of eugenics was used as a pretext for all sorts of social engineering, including forced sterilization and euthanasia – the sort of head-measuring pseudo-science that led to the Nazis and their absurd notions of a ‘super-race’.

The discovery of DNA by Crick and Watson in 1953 and subsequent developments in molecular biology have put paid to much of these notions, but it is interesting to note the congruence of the dates in Conrad’s story and the origins of these ideas, which were taken up quite vigorously at the time they were first publicised.

The Savoy magazine

It is also interesting to note that Conrad published his first story in The Savoy magazine. This was newly founded in the same year, 1896, and was established by Leonard Smithers, Arthur Symons, and Aubrey Beardsley – all rather controversial figures in what at the time was called the ‘decadent movement’, which embraced the idea of ‘art for art’s sake’. Other contributors to the magazine included W.B. Yeats, Max Beerbohm, and Oscar Wilde. None of these figures constitute the sort of artistic context we nowadays associate with Conrad.

The magazine was named after the luxurious Art Nouveau hotel on the Strand which had opened in 1889, built by Richard D’Oyly Carte with the profits from his successful Gilbert and Sullivan operas. As a publication of contemporary art, it became quite famous, with a policy that declared it was ‘a manifesto in revolt against Victorian materialism’. But like many small and influential magazines, it had a lifespan of only eight issues, running from January to December in 1896.

The Idiots – study resources

Tales of Unrest – CreateSpace editions – Amazon UK

Tales of Unrest – CreateSpace editions – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Joseph Conrad – Kindle eBook

Tales of Unrest – eBook versions 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

Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Amazon UK

Notes on Life and Letters – Amazon UK

Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

The Idiots – plot summary

The story opens with a succession of mentally retarded children watching the narrator’s cart pass by. They are the offspring of a local farmer who is now dead. Jean-Piere Bacadou returned from military service to find the family farm run down. He decides to take over from his aged parents.

He gets married; his mother dies; and twin boys are born. The parents discover that the boys are retarded. Another son is born who is also retarded. As a reaction, Bacadou converts from a republican to Catholic royalist.

He feels it is a bitter injustice to have not just one but three retarded sons. When a retarded daughter is born, he regrets his religious conversion. He passionately desires a son who can take on the tradition and continuity of the farm. He takes out all his inner rage on his wife Susan.

One night Susan arrives at her mother’s house to announce that she has killed Bacadou, stabbing him with a pair of scissors. Since Susan’s father was ‘weak in the head’ her mother Mrs Levaille thinks there might be some hereditary curse, and she disowns her daughter. Susan runs off into the night, pursued by what she thinks of as the image of her husband.

One of the men from her mother’s shop pursues her, but she imagines in her panic and terror that it’s her dead husband. When he advances towards her in what she sees as a menacing manner, she throws herself off a cliff into the sea.

Joseph Conrad – video biography

The Idiots – principal characters

I	the un-named narrator
Jean-Pierre Bacadou	a Brittany farmer
Susan	his wife
Marquis de Chevanes	a rich landowner
Madame Levaille	Susan’s mother, a businesswoman

Joseph 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

Other writing by Joseph Conrad

Lord Jim (1900) is the earliest of Conrad’s big and serious novels, and it explores one of his favourite subjects – cowardice and moral redemption. Jim is a ship’s captain who in youthful ignorance commits the worst offence – abandoning his ship. He spends the remainder of his adult life in shameful obscurity in the South Seas, trying to re-build his confidence and his character. What makes the novel fascinating is not only the tragic but redemptive outcome, but the manner in which it is told. The narrator Marlowe recounts the events in a time scheme which shifts between past and present in an amazingly complex manner. This is one of the features which makes Conrad (born in the nineteenth century) considered one of the fathers of twentieth century modernism.
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Heart of Darkness (1902) is a tightly controlled novella which has assumed classic status as an account of the process of Imperialism. It documents the search for a mysterious Kurtz, who has ‘gone too far’ in his exploitation of Africans in the ivory trade. The reader is plunged deeper and deeper into the ‘horrors’ of what happened when Europeans invaded the continent. This might well go down in literary history as Conrad’s finest and most insightful achievement, and it is based on his own experiences as a sea captain. This volume also contains ‘An Outpost of Progress’ – the magnificent study in shabby cowardice which prefigures ‘Heart of Darkness’.
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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
Joseph Conrad complete tales

The Illustrious Gaudissart

July 2, 2018 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study guide, plot summary, study resources

The Illustrious Gaudissart (1833) features a character who will crop up in a number of Balzac’s later novels – Scenes from the Life of a Courtesan (1838-1846), Cesar Birotteau (1837), and Cousin Pons (1846-1847). Gaudissart goes on later to become the owner of a theatre, but is here put forward as the epitome of the travelling salesman.

The Illustrious Gaudissart – commentary

The story offers a wonderful example of Balzac as a satirical, ironic sociologist. He astutely identifies a new social type and pours mockery onto him as a vulgar parvenu, a man who (to quote Oscar Wilde) ‘knows
the price of everything and the value of nothing’.

The first part of the story is a detailed analysis of everything Balzac sees as meretricious and shoddy in this ‘hail fellow, well met’ type with his jokes, his sales patter, and his lack of social or ethical depth.

Balzac was a staunch conservative, royalist, and Catholic. He sees this new style of seedy entrepreneur as an example of the declining civic values following the revolution. Yet Balzac was himself an ambitious and hard-working provincial – with social aspirations. He cannot but partly admire Gaudissart’s persistence and enterprise – peddling newspaper subscriptions and life insurance policies, plus selling hats and the ‘article Paris‘ at the same time.

He takes from the luminous centre a handful of light, and scatters it broadcast among the drowsy populations of the duller regions. This human pyrotechnic is a scholar without learning, a juggler hoaxed by himself, an unbelieving priest of mysteries and dogmas, which he expounds the better for his want of faith. Curious being! He has seen everything, known everything, and is up in all the ways of the world.

The story is essentially an episode in which this vain, boastful, and over-confident con man is duped by wily provincials. The narrative peters out with a rather farcical conclusion, but leaves behind an interesting study in ‘enterprise’ which sits comfortably within the grand scheme of La Comedie Humaine.

Gaudissart II

In a later story by this title, published in 1846, the name Gaudissart is used as a generic term to describe all cunning salesmen. The story centres on a fashionable Parisian store in which the manager sells an Englishwoman an expensive shawl. He does so by a mixture of subtle sales techniques, psychological insight, flattery, and boastfulness mixed with a dash of sharp practice. Balzac sees this example of ‘Gaudissart’ as a social force.

The Illustrious Gaudissart – study resources

The Human Comedy – NYRB Classics – Amazon UK

The Human Comedy – NYRB Classics – Amazon US

Cousin Pons – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Cousin Pons – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

All characters in La Comedie Humaine

Cambridge Companion to Balzac – Cambridge UP – Amazon UK

The Illustrious Gaudissart – plot summary

Ch.I The commercial traveller as a new social type. He moves between the city and the provinces but belongs to neither. His task is to extract commissions by persuasion. Gaudissart is a successful example who is living in Paris in semi-retirement – all things to all men. He is approached to sell life insurance, and thinks to promote newspaper subscriptions at the same time – to both a Monarchist and a republican publication.

Ch.II Gaudissart promises to bring home wealth to his mistress Jenny Courand. He also plans to sell subscriptions to a children’s newspaper – and he nurtures secret political ambitions. He writes Jenny a letter from the provinces, boasting of his commercial success.

Ch.III He arrives in Tours, a city which prides itself on hard-headed realism. When Gaudissart tries his vague salesmanship on M. Vernier, the Tourangian as a joke steers him towards Margaritis, the local lunatic, pretending that he is a banker.

Ch.IV Gaudissart tries to sell life insurance to Margaritis, who in his turn tries to sell wine (which he doesn’t have) to Gaudissart. In the end Gaudissart buys the wine, and Margaritis buys subscriptions to the children’s newspaper.

Ch.V Gaudissart discovers that he has been duped and complains to Vernier. The two men quarrel and a duel is arranged. It turns out to be a farce, with Vernier shooting a cow in a nearby field. They call a truce, and Vernier takes out twenty subscriptions to the children’s newspaper. Gaudissart later brags about killing a man in a duel.

The Illustrious Gaudissart – characters

Felix Gaudissart	a 38 year old boastful travelling salesman
Jenny Courand	Gaudissart’s mistress in Paris, a florist
Vernier	a retired dyer in Tours
Margaritis	a lunatic in Tours who thinks he owns vineyards

More on Honore de Balzac
More on literary studies

The Impressions of a Cousin

May 27, 2013 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Impressions of a Cousin first appeared in magazine form in The Century Magazine for November—December 1883. It was then reprinted in book form amongst Tales of Three Cities in England and America by Osgood of Boston in 1884.

The Impressions of a Cousin – critical commentary

The unreliable narrator

The story is fairly obviously one of James’s versions of the unreliable narrator. Catherine Conduit is our only source of information, and James gives the reader every reason to mistrust her reliability.

She conceals her own identity for the first part of the story; she contradicts herself in her account of events, gets dates wrong, breaks her promises, and singularly fails to understand Mr Caliph and his intentions. At one point she even says that what she has written in her own journal to be wrong.

She also fails to register Adrian’s romantic interest in her, and she misunderstands the relationship between Eunice and Mr Caliph.

But the problem is that her lack of reliability does not seem to be linked to any hidden or alternative account of events. That is, nothing is hidden behind her mistakes or ignorance in the way that the governess in The Turn of the Screw reveals her own baleful influence on events whilst protesting her innocence and good intentions.

As readers, we do not have any alternative account of events by which to calibrate the truth.

Anti-Semitism

Mr Caliph is one of the most fully-rounded examples of a Jew in James’s oeuvre – and a figure who is likely to create a sense of discomfort in most contemporary readers. The narrator Catherine describes him in what we now are likely to see as a set of stereotypes:

rather ugly; but with a fine, expressive, pictorial ugliness … I have an intimate conviction that he is a Jew … I see that in his plump, white face … in the very rings on his large pointed fingers … I don’t think he looks like a gentleman

She calls him ‘Haroun-al-Raschid’ – from One Thousand and One Nights (though the historical original was an Arab) and feels humiliated at being corrected by him.

And Mr Caliph lives up to the stereotype: he misappropriates the funds put into his trust and brings financial ruin to the person whose interests he is supposed to be protecting. Moreover we are led to believe that when he miraculously restores the missing money he does so at the expense of his own step-brother, whose personal fortune suddenly disappears at the end of the tale.

The implication is that he has sacrificed it either to protect his step-brother or out of a sense of honour towards Eunice. So Adrian – who has a different non-Jewish father than Mr Caliph – acts honourably in his own inheritance to pay for his Jewish step-brother’s malfeasance.

The account of Mr Caliph is given entirely from Catherine’s point of view, and James provides no correctives to her opinions, except the fact that she clearly misjudges people.

Structure

There is nothing in the theory or practice of the ‘tale’ (or the short story) to suggest that all narratives must be properly concluded with every thread of the drama neatly resolved. But even with these tolerances.taken into account, The Impressions of a Cousin ends in a state of dissipated irresolution.

Two characters, Adrian and Catherine, suddenly change their locations from America to Italy; two potential marriages come to nothing; Eunice is still in contact with Mr Caliph, a man who has abused the role of trustee of her inheritance for his own ends; and nothing in the relationships between the principal characters has been resolved.

These very lose ends mean that the essential subject of the story remains undefined. The story is not fundamentally a study of Eunice, her inheritance, and her possible choice of marriage partner. It is not a tale of Adrian Frank and his preference for a woman who describes herself as ‘poor, plain, unloved and unloveable’. And it is not an account of Mr Caliph and his financial machinations.

This leaves only Catherine Conduit herself as the possible focus for the story, and she seems no wiser or more insightful at the end of the story than she does at the beginning. She has lost the favour of her cousin Eunice and is back drifting around Italy with no object in mind.

The Impressions of a Cousin – study resources

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

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

Complete Stories 1874—1884 – Library of America – Amazon UK

Complete Stories 1874—1884 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Impressions of a Cousin – paperback edition – Amazon UK

The Impressions of a Cousin – paperback edition – Amazon US

The Impressions of a Cousin – original text

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Impressions of a Cousin – plot summary

Part I

The narrative takes the form of a diary kept by Catherine Conduit, a woman who ‘sketches’. She has recently returned from Europe to live in New York, where she finds the city too ‘rectangular’ to inspire artistic creation. She is housed by her rich young cousin Eunice.

Catherine is slightly frustrated (yet tolerant) of her cousin’s lack of social enterprise. Eunice is rather restrained and conservative in her behaviour for a girl of twenty-one. She is due to inherit her mother’s property plus money from her father – all of which is looked after by a sole trustee, Mr Caliph.

Catherine is visited by Adrian Frank, Mr Caliph’s step-brother, who asks a lot of questions about Eunice. Catherine teases him and feigns ignorance of his apparently romantic intentions towards Eunice.

Catherine’s socialite friend Mrs Ermine urges Eunice to spend lots of her to-be inherited money on luxuries and to make a public demonstration of her wealth. Eunice refuses to do so.

Catherine and Eunice receive a visit from Mr Caliph, with whom Catherine is very impressed – though she is concerned that he appears to be Jewish. Mr Caliph suggests that Eunice should get married and asks them to be kind to his step-brother Adrian.

Mr Caliph makes further social calls on the two women, but never discusses business. Catherine would like to check on Mr Caliph’s background and reputation, but is held back by fears that this might cast aspersions on his reputation.

Mrs Ermine meets Mr Caliph and finds him wonderfully captivating. Despite his age and appearance, she suggests to Eunice that she should marry him.

Mr Caliph arrives again with an enormous bunch of roses for Catherine and asks to speak to Eunice privately. Mrs Ermine assumes that he is proposing to Eunice, and insults Catherine regarding the gift of the roses. Catherine is increasingly suspicious of Mr Caliph’s delay in dealing with the matter of Eunice’s trust.

Mr Caliph sends roses to Mrs Ermine too.

Adrian dines with Eunice and Catherine, who ‘pities’ him but describes him positively. Adrian talks to Eunice about Catherine, who he thinks is attractive.

Catherine meets Adrian in Central Park. His step-brother Mr Caliph has been encouraging him to pay court to Eunice, with whom he is not in love. Catherine says she cannot help him, and she seems completely oblivious to the financial motivation behind this match-making.

Adrian becomes a daily visitor and pays attention to both Eunice and Catherine.

Part II

Adrian discusses his hesitation about proposing to Eunice with Catherine, who then receives a visit from Mr Caliph who wants her help in urging Adrian’s union with Eunice. Adrian has his own property, and Mr Caliph makes the argument for an ‘arranged’ marriage. Once again, Catherine is suspicious of his motives, even though she appears to be completely blind to the financial implications of his plans. She is also attracted to him.

The two women move to Cornerville on the Hudson, where Catherine starts painting again. Catherine tells Eunice about Mr Caliph’s and Adrian’s plans, but Eunice reveals that she has already refused an offer of marriage from Adrian. Mrs Ermine still believes that Mr Caliph wants to marry Eunice.

Eunice reveals to Catherine that she is worried about money, but will not hold Mr Caliph to account. Catherine writes to Mrs Ermine for help, but Eunice forbids her to send the letter and swears her to secrecy regarding money matters. Catherine believes that Eunice must therefore be in love with Mr Caliph.

Catherine continues worry about the extent of what seem to be Eunice’s financial losses, and thinks that Eunice’s acceptance of what looks like Mr Caliph’s swindling must be an act of love. Meanwhile, Mrs Ermine prepares a lavish garden party which Eunice will hold (and pay for).

Mrs Ermine piles on the expenditure in party preparations. Eunice worries about what she will say to Mr Caliph, who has been invited. Adrian returns to New York for a few days.

At the garden party Catherine advises Mr Caliph to resolve Eunice’s financial affairs. They argue, and Mr Caliph repeats his wish that his step-brother should marry Eunice. Mrs Ermine thinks that Mr Caliph has proposed to Eunice.

Eunice falls seriously ill and wants to be left alone. Adrian returns from New York and proposes to Catherine, who refuses him but is very flattered by the offer. She urges him to marry Eunice, and reveals that Eunice is now ‘poor’ because of his brother’s mismanagement. She promises him her ‘devotion’ if he will rescue Eunice.

Eunice eventually recovers, and it transpires that all her money affairs are now in order. Adrian (who is suddenly ‘poor’) leaves for Europe, and when Catherine hears he is in Rome, she goes there. Catherine writes to Adrian saying that she will marry him if Mr Caliph ever marries Eunice, who cuts off relations with Catherine.

Principal characters

Catherine Conduit	the narrator, third cousin to Eunice
Eunice	a rich orphan of twenty-one
Mr Caliph	Eunice’s trustee, an old family friend
Adrian Frank	Mr Caliph’s younger step-brother
Mrs Lizzie Ermine	a society busybody and bore

Other works by Henry James

The Bostonians (1886) is a novel about the early feminist movement. The heroine Verena Tarrant is an ‘inspirational speaker’ who is taken under the wing of Olive Chancellor, a man-hating suffragette and radical feminist. Trying to pull her in the opposite direction is Basil Ransom, a vigorous young man to whom Verena becomes more and more attracted. The dramatic contest to possess her is played out with some witty and often rather sardonic touches, and as usual James keeps the reader guessing about the outcome until the very last page.

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What Masie Knew (1897) A young girl is caught between parents who are in the middle of personal conflict, adultery, and divorce. Can she survive without becoming corrupted? It’s touch and go – and not made easier for the reader by the attentions of an older man who decides to ‘look after’ her. This comes from the beginning of James’s ‘Late Phase’, so be prepared for longer and longer sentences. In fact it’s said that whilst composing this novel, James switched from writing longhand to using dictation – and it shows if you look carefully enough – part way through the book.
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The Ambassadors (1903) Lambert Strether is sent from America to Paris to recall Chadwick Newsome, a young man who is reported to be compromising himself by an entanglement with a wicked woman. However, Strether’s mission fails when he is seduced by the social pleasures of the European capital, and he takes Newsome’s side. So a second ambassador is dispatched in the form of the more determined Sarah Pocock. She delivers an ultimatum which is resisted by the two young men, but then an accident reveals unpleasant truths to Strether, who is faced by a test of loyalty between old Europe and the new USA. This edition presents the latest scholarship on James and includes an introduction, notes, selected criticism, a text summary and a chronology of James’s life and times.
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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
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

The Informer

September 12, 2013 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Informer was written before January 1906 and first published in December 1906, in Harper’s Magazine. It was later collected in A Set of Six, 1908 (UK), 1915 (US). The other stories in this collection of Joseph Conrad’s work are Gaspar Ruiz, An Anarchist, The Brute, The Duel, and Il Conde.

The Informer – critical commentary

Conrad took an active and well-informed interest in relations between anarchist or revolutionary movements (which at the time were thought to be one and the same thing) and the upper echelons of the very society they were supposed to be in the process of overthrowing.

This was a phenomenon he explored more thoroughly in both The Secret Agent (1907) and Under WesternEyes (1911). There he shows complex relationships and often contradictory policies between police and government officials in their dealings with anarchists – and certainly rivalries between foreign agencies.

The Informer encapsulates all these elements in one short tale. The anarchists are exploiting the sympathies of the upper-class young woman. She owns the house because her father is a rich government official – and he works in an office in the house next door.

The anarchists hide behind a veneer of respectability (which they are supposed to despise) and even carry on clandestine business activities in imitation of the bourgeoisie they theoretically wish to overthrow. They also have an informer, Severin, planted firmly within their midst.

But the major character study in political contradictions is Mr X himself – a man who operates at the highest levels of political activism: it is he who has been sent from Paris to investigate the possibility of a spy in the group. But in fact he is mainly taken up with the pursuit of everything that is a product of cultural refinement in bourgeois society – its artefacts, cuisine, and fine wines. He is very technically an anarchist in a very theoretical sense, but in fact all the values and the culture to which he devotes himself are the product of the leisured bourgeois class.

Conrad is fully aware of this glaring contradiction, and it is this which forms the principal interest in the tale. That is the reason that Mr X has been sent to the narrator as an example of a ‘collector’s item’ by his friend in Paris.

The Informer – study resources

A Set of Six – CreateSpace editions – Amazon UK

A Set of Six – CreateSpace editions – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Joseph Conrad – Kindle eBook

A Set of Six – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Amazon UK

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

The Informer – plot summary

The un-named English narrator, a collector of antiques, is visited, on the recommendation of a friend in Paris, by Mr X – a fellow collector, an anarchist, and a bon viveur. Mr X explains the complicity between anarchists and certain elements of the classes they wish to overthrow. He describes the Hermione Street anarchist headquarters in London set up in the house of a young middle-class woman supporter. The group take over the ground floor restaurant, establish a business exporting tinned soup on the top floor, and set up a printing press in the basement. But despite good organisation, all the actions planned there are foiled by the police. Mr X arrives from Paris to investigate the possibility of there being an informer in the group. He interviews the Lady Amateur patroness of the group, and meets her admirer Severin.

A plan emerges to blow up the building next door which houses a government department. Mr X is sure that the police will raid the Hermione Street headquarters, so he organises a fake raid by sham police, hoping to flush out the informer. When the bogus raid takes place the group are ‘arrested’ in the cellar, and then are joined by the Lady Amateur and her lover. Severin gives himself away to the fake inspector by trying to protect her, and when his mistake is exposed he takes poison and dies. Mr X then takes the Lady Amateur home.