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Novelists and the Theatre

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a tutorial essay with study resources

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

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

Novelists and the Theatre

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

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

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

Henry James portrait

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

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

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

Novelists and the Theatre Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle – Amazon UK

Novelists and the Theatre Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle – Amazon US

Novelists and the Theatre

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

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

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

Novelists and the Theatre Complete Works of Thomas Hardy – Kindle – Amazon UK

Novelists and the Theatre Complete Works of Thomas Hardy – Kindle – Amazon US

Novelists and the Theatre

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Novelists and the Theatre Complete Works of Joseph Conrad – Kindle – Amazon UK

Novelists and the Theatre Complete Works of Joseph Conrad – Kindle – Amazon US

Novelists and the Theatre

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

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

Novelists and the Theatre Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence – Kindle – Amazon UK

Novelists and the Theatre Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence – Kindle – Amazon US

Novelists and the Theatre

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

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

Novelists and the Theatre Complete Works of James Joyce – Kindle – Amazon UK

Novelists and the Theatre Complete Works of James Joyce – Kindle – Amazon US

Novelists and the Theatre

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

Novelists and the Theatre Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle – Amazon UK

Novelists and the Theatre Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle – Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2016

Officers and Gentlemen

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tutorial, study guide, commentary, web links

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

Officers and Gentlemen

Officers and Gentlemen – commentary

The war

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The narrative

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Officers and Gentlemen – study resources

Officers and Gentlemen – Penguin – Amazon UK

Officers and Gentlemen – Penguin – Amazon US

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

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

Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited – Amazon UK

Officers and Gentlemen

Evelyn Waugh – by Henry Lamb

Officers and Gentlemen – plot summary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2018

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Old Goriot

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tutorial, commentary, study resources, web links

Old Goriot (1834) is the second masterpiece to come out of Balzac’s multi-volume project to dramatise the whole of French society – La Comedie Humaine. It tells the story of an old man who is reduced to poverty by the rapacious greed of his own daughters. He loves them dearly, but they spend all his money on lovers and self-indulgent lifestyles.

Old Goriot

The novel also covers the rise in society of Eugene de Rastignac, an ambitious young law student from the provinces who is attracted to the glamour of fashionable society. He rapidly acquires a beautiful mistress whom he cannot afford, but he retains sufficient moral integrity to stand by his old friend Goriot in his dying hours.

Old Goriot – critical commentary

The serial novel

This is the first of the Comedie Humaine series in which Balzac introduced the device of recurring characters. A secondary character in one volume might crop up as the principal character in a later novel. Alternatively, a character might appear in several volumes in the series. Balzac was plotting the rise (and fall) of individuals in what is now called ‘serial fiction’. This is roughly the same device that came to be used in twentieth century radio soap operas, or twenty-first century multi-part television drama series.

For instance, the character of Rastignac is introduced into Old Goriot as a young law student from the south of France who has arrived in Paris as a student of law. He becomes caught up in fashionable society and rises (very rapidly) because of social and family connections. In later volumes of the Comedie Humaine Rastignac rises even further and becomes a member of the government and eventually a peer of the realm.

Balzac was exploiting the technological means of distributing his literary product which were available to him at that time. He wrote obsessively, sent his manuscripts off to printers, re-wrote and corrected proofs, sometimes for publication the following day. His work appeared in newspapers, magazines, and printed book formats – often all at the same time. He was immensely productive, became very successful and rich, but lost a lot of his money because of reckless business ventures and an extravagant lifestyle. He was almost like one of the characters in his own novels.

The Napoleonic Code

Following the French revolution Napoleon established a new legal code in 1804. It was designed to replace archaic and over-complex laws relating to people and their property. One of its stipulations (still in force today) is that the inheritance of property and capital must pass through a strictly defined path of family relations

One of the side effects of this requirement (and in common with other countries with monarchies and aristocracies) was that people with money were more inclined to form marriages based on someone’s wealth (and social status) rather than on any romantic attachments.

There was also a dowry system in common usage that required a potential bride to be offered along with a substantial financial incentive to any prospective husband. The marriage was a legal contract between two owners of property or capital. Romantic liaisons were a separate matter, conducted discretely or secretly once the formal marriage had been established.

Balzac’s novels are a clear illustration of this system in practice. Anastasia de Restaud is married, but spends her afternoons with her lover Maxime de Trailles. In fact she is in conflict with him because she is paying off his gambling debts. Rastignac’s cousin Mme de Beauseant makes no secret of her affair with the Portugese nobleman Marquis d’Ajuda-Pinto. She too is in conflict with her lover, because he is threatening to marry the rich young woman Berthe de Rochefide.

Delphine de Nucingen is married to the German banker Baron Frederic de Nucingen – but you would hardly think so. She spends her evenings at the theatre with Rastignac, whilst her husband spends his time with a mistress (also from the theatre). Old Goriot eventually pays for a separate apartment where Rastignac can live and where his daughter is free to visit as a lover. Goriot dislikes Nucingen, and feels no qualms at all in facilitating his daughter’s adultery in this way.

Anyone doubting the persistence of this system of hypocrisy and double standards should acquaint themselves with the recent history of the English Prince of Wales who was married to Diana Spencer but was also conducting a long term affair with the married woman Camilla Parker Bowles – whom he eventually married after his wife’s death in what many see as mysterious circumstances.

Narrative compression

Events move very rapidly in this novel. Rastignac arrives in Paris as a humble law student, yet almost immediately via the social connections provided by his aunt, he is circulating amongst fashionable society. And he just as immediately conceives a socially ambitious project to raise his status to that of the young aristocratic blades who are his contemporaries.

His main problem is that he lacks the financial wherewithal to live such a life. He borrows money from his mother and sisters – and repays it; he gambles and has astonishing (barely credible) good luck; and his good looks win him the love of an attractive woman with a rich husband. He also has the protection of the godfather Old Goriot, who supports him and even organises for him a bachelor apartment in a fashionable district of Paris.

This ultra-rapid rise has something of the fairy-tale about it, but it should be kept in mind that in Balzac’s scheme of French society Rastignac had still further to go. In later volumes he becomes a politician, then a minister, and eventually a peer. Balzac was plotting the stages of social advancement, ascents up the greasy pole of social climbing and the careers of arrivistes .

This is not to say that the whole of La Comedie Humaine needs to be taken on board before an appreciation of its individual parts can be made. But it does help in making an assesment of a particular volume that Balzac had other parts of his grand scheme already written or planned which threw light on each other.

Balzac and 19C literature

Balzac was a towering figure in nineteenth century literature, with an influence that stretched across Europe and beyond to America. He himself had been influenced by the pan-European influence of Walter Scott, and he was to influence Charles Dickens and contemporaries such as Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. He was a great influence on Henry James, whose novel Washington Square (1880) is almost an American version of Eugenie Grandet.

Balzac more or less invented what we now call the ‘serial’ novel. That is, a fictional world in which characters come and go from one episode or novel to another. They might be a minor character in one episode, then the major figure in another. This literary technique was facilitated both by the technical means of production and Balzac’s prodigious creative powers in being able to supply the text for the newspapers, magazines, and books in which his characters made their appearances.

He had a great influence within the realm of French literature, and his style of realistic detail was taken up by Emile Zola in his series of twenty novels called the Les Rougon-Macquart (1871-1893). These novels sought to document society under the Second Empire. Forty years later Marcel Proust created an account of the collapse of the French aristocracy at the start of the twentieth century in Remembrance of Things Past. This has many elements and echoes of Balzac’s work.

Old Goriot and King Lear

It should be apparent to anyone familiar with King Lear that Old Goriot follows a similar plot and is concerned with the same principal theme. Shakespeare’s character King Lear is a rich patriarch who divides his kingdom for the sake of his daughters – only to be then neglected and betrayed by two of them.

In Old Goriot the sisters Anastasie and Delphine behave towards their father exactly like Goneril and Regan do towards their father King Lear. They accept all the money he gives them and demand more, whilst showing him no respect or thanks at all. And similarly to the plot of King Lear their husbands seek control of the daughters’ inherited wealth to support their oiwn ends.

Anastasie squanders huge sums of money paying off her lover’s gambling debts, whilst Delphine’s husband Nucingen wants the money to support his dubious property development schemes. Both daughters pretend to be respectful but shamelessly neglect their father. Neither of them can be bothered to be present when he is dying, and even at his funeral they send token empty carriages

The parallels with King Lear are neatly completed by the minor figures of Taillefer and his daughter Victorine. The dubious Taillefer is a fabulously wealthy man who has unjustly disowned his daughter. She loves him with unquenchable devotion, and represents the third daughter Cordelia in the Shakespeare tragedy. Cordelia is rejected by Lear throughout the drama, but then is reunited with him only in death. Victorine too is ultimately re-united with her father on his death bed, but she does inherit his wealth.

Henry James however, in his extended essay on Balzac, casts doubt on the novelist’s acquaintance with the Shakespeare text:

Balzac’s masterpiece, to our own sense, if we must choose, is Old Goriot. In this tale there is most of his characteristic felicity and least of his characteristic infelicity. Shakespeare had been before him, but there is excellent reason to believe that beyond knowing that King Lear was the history of a doting old man, buffeted and betrayed by cruel daughters, Balzac had not placed himself to be in a position to be accused of plagiarism. He had certainly not read the play in English, and nothing is more possible than that he had not read it in such French translations as existed in 1835.

The accusation of plagiarism simply does not arise. Shakespeare himself took the plot outline of his play from an earlier source (Holinshed’s Chronicles) and even if Balzac was intimately acquainted with the Lear text, he transforms and re-imagines the story line completely, making it into something quite different – which he describes as ‘this obscure but appalling Parisian tragedy’.

Old Goriot – study resources

Old Goriot Old Goriot – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Old Goriott Old Goriot – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Old Goriot Pere Goriot – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Old Goriot Pere Goriot – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

Old Goriot Old Goriot – Everyman – Amazon UK

Old Goriot Old Goriot – Everyman – Amazon US

Cambridge Companion to Balzac – Cambridge UP – Amazon UK

Old Goriot

Old Goriot – plot synopsis

A Family Boarding House

The Maison Vauquer is a seedy boarding house in the Latin Quarter of Paris. Run frugally by the widow Madame Vauquer, its principal inhabitants are Pere Goriot, a retired pasta merchant, Eugene de Rastignac, a law student, and Vautrin a shady character of unknown occupation.

When Goriot first arrives he is quite prosperous and Mme Vauquer has designs on him. She tries to allure him but fails, and so turns against him. Later, Goriot’s fortunes begin to decline, and malicious rumours are circulated about him. He is visited by young women, but he explains they are his two daughters.

The ambitious student Rastignac is provided with an entree into fashionable society by his aunt. Goriot is selling off his silver plate to the money lender Gobseck. Mysterious fellow boarder Vautrin seems to know everybody’s business. Rastignac visits Anastasia de Restaud where he is snubbed by both her husband and her lover Maxime.

Rastignac then goes to see his cousin Mme de Beauseant who is engaged in a dispute with her Portugese lover. There he learns the history of Goriot’s two daughters and their rejection of their father. Rastignac vows to enter fashionable society, and writes to his mother and sisters for money.

Entry on the Social Scene

Rastignac’s mother and sisters send him money. Vautrin outlines to him the difficulties of professional success and lists the vices and corruption underlying fashionable society. Vautrin reveals his plans to become a rich plantation owner and proposes a devil’s pact with Rastignac. He will find him a rich wife in exchange for a lump sum. He has in mind fellow boarder Victorine, whose father is a wealthy man.

Rastignac gets new clothes and is introduced to Delphine de Nucingen at the theatre. He flatters her unashamedly. He reports the meeting to Goriot , who deceives himself about the devotion of his daughters.

Rastignac gambles at roulette for Delphine and wins money which she owes to her former lover, who has just left her. Rastignac indulges himself in fashionable society and gets himself into debt. He borrows money from Vautrin, gambles successfully again, and pays off his debts.

Vautrin is revealed as an ex-convict (‘Death Dodger’) whose real name is Jacques Collin. Rastignac is frustrated by Delphine, so he pays court to Victorine Traillefer. Goriot reveals his scheme to house Rastignac in an apartment that his daughter Delphine can visit. Vautrin has meanwhile arranged for Victorine’s brother to be killed in a duel.

There is an impromptu party at Maison Vauquer where Vautrin drugs Rastignac and Goriot – but next day he is betrayed to the police and arrested. The woman who betrayed him is forced to leave.

Goriot takes Rastignac to the bachelor apartment he has arranged and paid for. Mme Vauquer is upset at the loss of boarders. Rastignac receives an invitation to a grand ball. Anastasie has money problems. Delphine has kept Rastignac dangling for almost two years.

The Father’s Death

Nucingen’s property schemes are in trouble, and he needs control of his wife’s money. Anastasie has sold her husband’s family diamonds to pay off her lover’s gambling debts – but she still needs more money Rastignac gives her a bill of exchange for twelve thousand Francs. The sisters quarrel and harass their ailing father.

Goriot is dying, but both sisters go to Mme de Beauseant’s ball. The old man is nursed by Rastignac and young doctor Bianchon, neither of whom have any money. When Goriot dies, he is given a pauper’s funeral.

Old Goriot – principal characters

This is a quick guide to the main players in Old Goriot. For a comprehensive survey of all the characters in La Comedie Humaine, see the excellent compilation of notes by Anatole Cerfberr and Jules François Christophe at Gutenberg.org. They give an alphabetical list of potted biographies of all the main characters in the whole series of novels

Given any single Balzac novel as a starting point, you can trace where a character has come from and what happens to them in subsequent parts of the great work.

Madame Vauquer widowed boarding house keeper
Eugene de Rastignac an ambitious law student from the South
Old Goriot a retired and impoverished pasta merchant
Vautrin a celebrity convict (‘Death Dodger’) real name Jaques Collin
Marquis Ajuda-Pinto a Portugese nobleman, Claire de Beauseant’s lover
Horace Bianchon a medical student and friend of Rastignac’s at Maison Vauquer
Monsieur de Trailles Anastasie’s lover, a playboy and gambler
Monsieur Taillefer a rich but heartless father
Victorine Taillefer his devoted but neglected daughter
Anastasie de Restaud Goriot’s elder daughter
Delphine de Nucingen Goriot’s younger daughter
Baron de Nucingen corrupt German banker and speculator

© Roy Johnson 2017

More on literature
More on the novella
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More on short stories

Orlando

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tutorial, characters, video, resources, further reading

Orlando (1927) is one of Virginia Woolf’s lesser-known novels, although it’s critical reputation has risen in recent years. It’s a delightful fantasy which features a character who changes sex part-way through the book – and lives from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Using this device (which turns out to be strangely credible) Woolf explores issues of gender and identity as her hero-heroine moves through a variety of lives and personal adventures.

Virginia Woolf

Orlando starts out as an emissary to the Court of St James, lives through friendships with Swift and Alexander Pope, and ends up motoring through the west end of London on a shopping expedition in the 1920s. The character is loosely based on Vita Sackville-West, who at the time was Woolf’s lover. The novel itself was described by Nigel Nicolson (Sackville-West’s son) as ‘the longest and most charming love-letter in literature’.

Orlando – plot summary

The novel tells the story of a young man named Orlando, born in England during the reign of Elizabeth I, who decides not to grow old. He is briefly a lover to the decrepit queen, but after her death has a brief, intense love affair with Sasha, a princess in the entourage of the Russian embassy. This episode, of love and excitement against the background of the Great Frost of 1683, is one of the best known, and is said to represent Vita Sackville-West’s affair with Violet Trefusis.

Woolf - OrlandoFollowing Sasha’s return to Russia, the desolate, lonely Orlando returns to writing The Oak Tree, a poem started and abandoned in his youth. This period of contemplating love and life leads him to appreciate the value of his ancestral stately home, which he proceeds to furnish lavishly and then plays host to the populace. Ennui sets in and a persistent suitor’s harassment leads to Orlando’s appointment by King Charles II as British ambassador to Constantinople. Orlando performs his duties well, until a night of civil unrest and murderous riots. He falls asleep for a lengthy period, resisting all efforts to rouse him.

Upon awakening he finds that he has metamorphosed into a woman—the same person, with the same personality and intellect, but in a woman’s body. For this reason, the now Lady Orlando covertly escapes Constantinople in the company of a Gypsy clan, adopting their way of life until its essential conflict with her upbringing leads her to head home. Only on the ship back to England, with her constraining female clothes and an incident in which a flash of her ankle nearly results in a sailor’s falling to his death, does she realise the magnitude of becoming a woman; yet she concludes the overall advantages, declaring ‘Praise God I’m a woman!’

Orlando becomes caught up in the life of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, holding court with the great poets (notably Alexander Pope), winning a lawsuit and marrying a sea captain. In 1928, she publishes The Oak Tree centuries after starting it, and winning a prize.

Study resources

Orlando Orlando – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

Orlando Orlando – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

Orlando Orlando – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

Orlando Orlando – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

Orlando Orlando – Vintage Classics edition – Amazon UK

Orlando Orlando – free eBook editions

Orlando Orlando – audio book (abridged) – Amazon UK

Orlando Orlando – a film screenplay = Amazon UK

Orlando The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

Red button Virginia Woolf – biographical notes

Orlando Orlando – Sally Potter’s 1992 film adaptation – Amazon UK

Red button Selected Essays – by Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Red button Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

Orlando Orlando – Sally Potter’s film archive

Red button The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Red button Virginia Woolf at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links,

Red button Virginia Woolf at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study resources

Orlando – film version

1992 film adaptation by Sally Potter

Redbutton See reviews of the film at the Internet Movie Database

Orlando – principal characters
Orlando the protangonist – a man, then a woman
Sasha a Russian princess, who Orlando loves
Shel a gallant seaman, in love with Orlando
Archduke Harry a cross-dresser who is in love with Orlando
Sir Nicholas Greene a 17C poet then later a 19C critic
Alexander Pope himself – an 18C poet
Rustum an old Turkish gypsy
Queen Elizabeth I English monarch, in love with Orlando
Rosina Pepita a Spanish gypsy dancer
Clorinda a mamber of St James’s court
Favilla the second of Orlando’s loves at court
Euphrosyne Orlando’s ‘intended’ before he runs off with Sasha
Orlando

Further reading

Red button Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972.

Red button Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

Red button Marsh, Nicholas. Virginia Woolf, the Novels. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.

Red button Mepham, John. Virginia Woolf. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.

Red button Reinhold, Natalya, ed. Woolf Across Cultures. New York: Pace University Press, 2004.

Red button Rosenthal, Michael. Virginia Woolf: A Critical Study. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979.

Red button Sellers, Susan, The Cambridge Companion to Vit=rginia Woolf, Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Red button Showalter, Elaine. ‘Mrs. Dalloway: Introduction’. In Virginia Woolf: Introductions to the Major Works, edited by Julia Briggs. London: Virago Press, 1994.

Red button Woolf, Virginia. The Common Reader. New York: Harvest Books, 2002.

Red button Zwerdling, Alex. Virginia Woolf and the Real World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

Original inspiration

Vita Sackville-West

Knole – Kent, UK

Knole - Kent

365 rooms, 52 staircases, 12 entrances and 7 courtyards

Other works by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf To the LighthouseTo the Lighthouse (1927) is the second of the twin jewels in the crown of her late experimental phase. It is concerned with the passage of time, the nature of human consciousness, and the process of artistic creativity. Woolf substitutes symbolism and poetic prose for any notion of plot, and the novel is composed as a tryptich of three almost static scenes – during the second of which the principal character Mrs Ramsay dies – literally within a parenthesis. The writing is lyrical and philosophical at the same time. Many critics see this as her greatest achievement, and Woolf herself realised that with this book she was taking the novel form into hitherto unknown territory.
Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse Buy the book at Amazon US

The Complete Shorter FictionThe Complete Shorter Fiction contains all the classic short stories such as The Mark on the Wall, A Haunted House, and The String Quartet – but also the shorter fragments and experimental pieces such as Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street. These ‘sketches’ (as she called them) were used to practice the techniques she used in her longer fictions. Nearly fifty pieces written over the course of Woolf’s writing career are arranged chronologically to offer insights into her development as a writer. This is one for connoisseurs – well presented and edited in a scholarly manner.
Virginia Woolf - The Complete Shorter Fiction Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf - The Complete Shorter Fiction Buy the book at Amazon US

The Bloomsbury GroupThe Bloomsbury Group is a short but charming book, published by the National Portrait Gallery. It explores the impact of Bloomsbury personalities on each other, plus how they shaped the development of British modernism in the early part of the twentieth century. But most of all it’s a delightful collection of portrait paintings and photographs, with biographical notes. It has an introductory essay which outlines the development of Bloomsbury, followed by a series of portraits and the biographical sketches of the major figures.

Ralph Partridge Buy the book at Amazon UK
Ralph Partridge Buy the book at Amazon US

Virginia Woolf – web links

Red button Virginia Woolf at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major works, book reviews, studies of the short stories, bibliographies, web links, study resources.

Virginia Woolf web links Blogging Woolf
Book reviews, Bloomsbury related issues, links, study resources, news of conferences, exhibitions, and events, regularly updated.

Virginia Woolf web links Virginia Woolf at Wikipedia
Full biography, social background, interpretation of her work, fiction and non-fiction publications, photograph albumns, list of biographies, and external web links

Virginia Woolf web links Virginia Woolf at Gutenberg
Selected eTexts of the novels The Voyage Out, Night and Day, Jacob’s Room, and the collection of stories Monday or Tuesday in a variety of digital formats.

Virginia Woolf web links Woolf Online
An electronic edition and commentary on To the Lighthouse with notes on its composition, revisions, and printing – plus relevant extracts from the diaries, essays, and letters.

Virginia Woolf web links Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search texts of all the major novels and essays, word by word – locate quotations, references, and individual terms

Red button Virginia Woolf – a timeline in phtographs
A collection of well and lesser-known photographs documenting Woolf’s life from early childhood, through youth, marriage, and fame – plus some first edition book jackets – to a soundtrack by Philip Glass. They capture her elegant appearance, the big hats, and her obsessive smoking. No captions or dates, but well worth watching.

Virginia Woolf web links Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury – including Gordon Square, Gower Street, Bedford Square, Tavistock Square, plus links to women’s history web sites.

Virginia Woolf web links Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
Bulletins of events, annual lectures, society publications, and extensive links to Woolf and Bloomsbury related web sites

Virginia Woolf web links BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
Charming sound recording of radio talk given by Virginia Woolf in 1937 – a podcast accompanied by a slideshow of photographs.

Virginia Woolf web links A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephen compiled a photograph album and wrote an epistolary memoir, known as the “Mausoleum Book,” to mourn the death of his wife, Julia, in 1895 – an archive at Smith College – Massachusetts

Virginia Woolf web links Virginia Woolf first editions
Hogarth Press book jacket covers of the first editions of Woolf’s novels, essays, and stories – largely designed by her sister, Vanessa Bell.

Virginia Woolf web links Virginia Woolf – on video
Biographical studies and documentary videos with comments on Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group and the social background of their times.

Virginia Woolf web links Virginia Woolf Miscellany
An archive of academic journal essays 2003—2014, featuring news items, book reviews, and full length studies.

© Roy Johnson 2010

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

Our Mutual Friend

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

Our Mutual Friend is the last novel Charles Dickens completed. It first appeared in nineteen monthly installments between May 1864 and November 1865, published by Chapman and Hall. These booklet-sized publications were priced at one shilling (1s) which was not exactly cheap in the 1860s – and of course a second profit was made when the novel was printed in book form (in one or three volumes) a much higher price. Each issue featured thirty-two pages of text and two illustrations by Marcus Stone.

Our Mutual Friend

a mothly instalment

Our Mutual Friend – critical commentary

Characters

Dickens generates his usual gallery of characters and caricatures – some of them serious portraits of human psychology (such as Wrayburn and Headstone) others vivid and memorable but two-dimensional figures such as Jenny Wren (real name Fanny Cleaver) and Sloppy, the foundling who is summarised by his buttons and a gigantic laugh.

Wrayburn is not unlike Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities – a depressed and slightly misanthropic barrister who has no clients. He is listless and without purpose – until he encounters Lizzie Hexam, with whom he falls in love. Although she too is in love with him, they think there is too wide a gap in their social class to permit marriage. At the end of the novel he commits the selfless act of marrying her on his death bed, to give her social status. But in fact he recovers.

Headstone is an interesting study in erotic fixation and obsessive jealousy. He too falls in love with Lizzie Hexam, but is entirely consumed by his jealous hatred of Wrayburn, his rival for her affections. This obsession drives him to a savage act of attempted murder, and when Riderhood threatens to expose his identity as the attacker, he kills both his blackmailer and himself in the Weir.

There is a great deal of social satire focused on the nouveau-riche Veneerings, people who not only display their wealth in a vulgar and ostentatious manner, but who establish around themselves a social circle of ‘friends’ characterised by the fact that in fact nobody knows anybody else.

There is a great deal of critical commentary on one of the less successful characters in the novel – Mr Riah the Jew. Dickens was criticised by a number of people for his anti-Semitic depiction of Fagin, the Jewish gangmaster in Oliver Twist. Mr Riah is almost like an apology and a compensation – a figure of unalloyed goodness, patience, and sympathy who is obliged to enforce the ruthless debt-collection service owned by the villainous Fledgeby.

Plot

It has to be said that the story line of the novel is way below the normal level of invention and credibility one expects in a Dickens novel. First of all there are the complications of John Harmon’s multiple aliases in Julius Handford and John Rokesmith, and his barely-credible motivation for keeping his identity secret. Fortunately, the secrets of these maneuvers are revealed half way through the novel, so the reader can participate in the development of Harmon’s later ambitions.

But a great deal of the second half of the novel is based upon a cheap trick whereby Dickens conceals vital aspects of the plot from the reader, and has his characters acting out a charade of pretence to support the deception.

The prolonged concealment of Boffin’s knowledge of Harmon’s true identity is a literary sleight of hand which cheats the reader to an unacceptable degree. This is because the plot device violates essential conventions of a realist narrative. The reader is given no possibility of knowing or working out the truth of the matter.

It is also bad literary faith because so many of the events of the novel rest upon the deception. Boffin’s obsession with misers and apparent ill-treatment of Harmon as his secretary, plus Bella’s own drift towards mercenary life, are important elements of the narrative, and most readers are likely to feel have a sense of anti-climax bordering on feeling cheated when the truth is revealed at the end of the novel.

The same is true in the case of Mr Venus in his secret pact with Boffin against the scurrilous Wegg. Even the most attentive reader has no opportunity to see this in advance, and since these two plot revelations come in rapid succession they undermine the logic and persuasiveness of the narrative. In terms of story telling, they are cheap and vulgar devices, hardly worthy of a great novelist.

Symbol

The novel is dominated by the central symbol of the River Thames. The story begins and (more or less) ends there – with death a common feature of both scenes. In the first, Gaffer Hexam drags a dead body from the river at night, which sets the whole events of the novel in motion. And and in the final drama of the narrative Headstone drags Riderhood to their deaths at the Weir on the upper reaches of the Thames.

It is on the river that Lizzie goes into hiding, and it is there that Betty Higden goes to die in retreat from the Workhouse. The river is repeatedly emphasised as a source of trade and commerce, but it also acts as a metaphor for rebirth and renewal. Wrayburn is savagely attacked on the riverbank by Headstone and left in the water for dead: but he miraculously recovers. Even the villainous Riderhood is apparently drowned when his boat is rammed by a steamship: but he too recovers, to boast that he is a man who cannot be drowned.

Concealment

There is a repeated motive of concealment in the novel – all instances of which are instrumental in providing the element of suspense which has led many critics to describe the novel as a riddle or an elaborate puzzle. But of course an element of suspense is natural in a serial narrative. The commercial necessity of publishing in this format of monthly episodes requires that readers should be induced to purchase successive volumes to know what is coming next.

John Harmon conceals his identity more than once. First he exchanges clothes and identities with his shipmate George Radfoot. This is designed to enable him to escape the burden of inheritance, but it results in the murder and mutilation of his comrade. Immediately following the crime, he adopts the first of two aliases – Julius Handford, under which name he deals with Mortimer Lightwood and the police. Following this he adopts the alias of John Rokesmith, under which name he seeks employment with the Boffins.

Eugene Wrayburn even conceals his good motives from himself. He starts out as the cynical and unsuccessful barrister-friend of Lightwood, and then finds it difficult to understand his own motivation once he has met Lizzie Hexam – when it is clear to the reader that he has fallen in love with her. His is a case of ‘concealment; across a very wide class divide, which is only bridged when he makes the self-sacrificing gesture of marrying her when he is on what he thinks will be his death bed.

In her turn, Lizzie has concealed her love for Wrayburn for the majority of the narrative – because she believes there is no possibility of bridging the class divide between them. Headstone (also besotted with love for Lizzie) conceals his identity and actually disguises himself as Riderhood to make his murderous attack on Wrayburn.

Wegg wants to conceal his dust-sifting and his intention to expropriate his employer Boffin. At the same time, Mr Venus conceals from Wegg the fact that he is acting as a sort of double-agent on behalf of Boffin (which is one of the factors which makes the conclusion of the novel so unsatisfactory). The Lammles first of all conceal from each other the fact that they have no money, and in order to continue living in upper middle-class society they then conceal their intentions towards Georgiana Podsnap and Bella Wilfer, hoping to use them as pawns in their career of self-advancement

Narrative style

Despite weaknesses in the plot and structure of the novel, there is one feature of the manner in which the narrative is presented which remains as impressive as Dickens at his greatest (as in Bleak House, Dombey and Son, and Great Expectations. That is the narrative voice – the compelling, passionate, infinitely flexible, and endlessly inventive manner in which Dickens operates as the teller of the tale.

The narrative is written in (technically) third-person omniscient mode: that is, the author remains (theoretically) outside the story, but reveals the thoughts and feelings of the characters. However, Dickens operates almost like a circus ringmaster, dipping in and out of his own narrative in an oblique (almost concealed) first person mode.

He introduces his characters, and will even address them, speculate about them, and ask them questions. He introduces a subject (say, the Veneerings’ arriviste social climbing) and speculates about the topic, thinking aloud as part of the story, rhetorically asking the reader’s opinion – sometimes even addressing society in general, as he does when ironically punctuating old Betty Higden’s criticism of the Poor-house system:

“Kill me sooner than take me there. Throw this pretty child under cart-horses feet and a loaded wagon, sooner than take him there. Come to us and find us all a-dying, and set a light to us all where we lie and let us all blaze away with the house into a heap of cinders sooner than move a corpse of us there.”

A surprising spirit in this lonely woman after so many years of hard working and hard living, my Lords and Gentlemen and Honourable Boards! What is it that we call it in our grandiose speeches? British independence; rather perverted? Is that, or something like it, the ring of the cant?

It is also worth noting from a stylistic point of view that he is also much given to sudden switches in tenses – particularly from the past tense into the vivid present; to the use of verbless and subjectless sentences; and the use of extended metaphors, some of which he even addresses as if they were characters, instead of the things for which they stand.

Our Mutual Friend – study resources

Our Mutual Friend Our Mutual Friend – Oxford World’s Classics – Amazon UK

Our Mutual Friend Our Mutual Friend – Oxford World’s Classics – Amazon US

Our Mutual Friend Our Mutual Friend – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

Our Mutual Friend Our Mutual Friend – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

Our Mutual Friend Our Mutual Friend – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

Red button Charles Dickens – biographical notes

Red button Our Mutual Friend – eBook at Project Gutenberg

Red button Our Mutual Friend – audioBook at LibriVox

Red button Our Mutual Friend – complete Marcus Stone illustrations

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens – Amazon UK

Red button Our Mutual Friend – York Notes at Amazon UK

Red button Our Mutual Friend – Brodie’s Notes at Amazon UK

Great Expectations Our Mutual Friend – Naxos audio book – Amazon UK

Red button Charles Dickens’ London – interactive map

Red button Oxford Reader’s Companion to Charles Dickens – Amazon UK

Our Mutual Friend – plot summary

Book The First – The Cup and the Lip

Chapter I.   Poor river worker Gaffer Hexam and his devoted daughter Lizzie are scavenging on the Thames when they locate a corpse and are challenged by a rival, Rogue Riderhood, a desperate riverside character.

Chapter II.   A comic dinner takes place at the Veneerings, where guest solicitor Mortimer Lightwood recounts the story of Harmon (the Dust King) and his will in which he left his empire to son John on condition that he marry Bella Wilfer, a woman he has never met. But it is John Harmon who has recently been reported drowned.

Chapter III.   Charley Hexam reports the finding of John Harmon’s body to Mortimer Lightwood. They visit the body at the police station , together with stranger Julius Handford. Next day the coroner reports the unsolved crime as murder.

Chapter IV.   John Rokesmith takes up lodgings with the Wilfer family and their now ‘widowed’ daughter Bella who was due to marry John Harmon.

Chapter V.   Nicodemus Boffin (the Golden Dustman) employs Silas Wegg to read Gibbon’s Decline of the Roman Empire to him. Wegg goes to Boffin’s Bower (formerly known as Harmony Jail) which is Harmon’s old house.

Chapter VI.   Rogue Riderhood spreads malicious gossip about Gaffer Hexam in the pub to the landlady Abbey Potterson. She questions Lizzie, who thinks Riderhood himself might be the murderer. Abbey bars both men from her pub. Lizzie sends her brother Charley away to be a trainee teacher, and he departs with his father’s curse.

Chapter VII.   Mr Wegg calls on Mr Venus the melancholy taxidermist regarding his leg bones. Venus confirms Harmon’s great wealth, and reveals that he has been taking an interest in the murder case. Venus is unhappy because his lady friend objects to his trade.

Chapter VIII.   Mr Boffin reluctantly inherits the Harmon estate. He instructs Lightwood to issue a large reward on the river for information about the murder, and wants a ‘tight’ will drawn up in favour of Mrs Boffin. He then has an offer of being unpaid secretary from John Rokesmith

Chapter IX.   Childless Mrs Boffin wants to adopt a male orphan and the ‘widowed’ Bella Wilfer to make up for her loss of a husband. The Boffins apply to Reverend and Mrs Milvey, then persuade Bella to live with them. Whilst there they meet John Rokesmith. There is rivalry between Lavinia and Bella Wilfer, and the first signs of attraction between Bella and Rokesmith.

Chapter X.   Social adventuress Sophronia marries Alfred Lammle in a lavish ceremony hosted by the Veneerings where nobody actually knows anybody else. Afterwards on honeymoon they discover that neither of them has any money at all. They are both deceived, but decide to form a pact against society.

Chapter XI.   Pretentious Mr Podsnap decides to throw a lavish birthday party for his very shy daughter Georgiana. Mrs Lammle sets out to ‘befriend’ Georgiana, egged on by her husband who hopes to profit from the connection.

Chapter XII.   Lightwood and Wrayburn join forces in a business and take a house on the river. Roger Riderhood visits and accuses Gaffer Hexam of the murder, claiming that Hexam has confessed it to him. They all go to the police station where Mr Inspector takes Lightwood and Wrayburn into the Followships pub.

Chapter XIII.   They drink mulled wine and wait for Hexam to reappear. Wrayburn spies on Lizzie. Riderhood goes out to look for Hexam, but reports back that he has found his boat empty and adrift.

Chapter XIV.   When the search party goes out to the boat, Mr Inspector eventually reveals that Gaffer Hexam was drowned, apparently caught up in his own ropes. Lightwood is delirious with fatigue and stress. Wrayburn suddenly disappears from the scene.

Chapter XV.   Mr Boffin is overwhelmed by his paperwork at the Bower, so he gladly accepts Rokesmith’s offer of being an unpaid secretary. He also asks Wegg to move into the Bower and look after it when he moves to a more fashionable address.. Mrs Boffin starts to see the ghosts of previous occupants of the Bower (the Harmons).

Chapter XVI.   Rokesmith looks after all Boffin’s affairs, but does not wish to deal with Lightwood. He takes Mrs Boffin to visit Betty Higden to see about adopting a child, where they meet Sloppy and the child Johnny. Rokesmith meets Bella and announces that she will soon be welcome at the new Boffin residence in town.

Chapter XVII.   The Boffins move into their new aristocratic house in town – and are immediately bombarded with visiting cards, invitations, and begging letters.

Our Mutual Friend

‘The Bird of Prey’ – Marcus Stone

Book The Second – Birds of a Feather

Chapter I.   Six months later Charley Hexam and headmaster Bradley Headstone go to meet Lizzie Hexam, where she is living with spirited invalid Fanny Cleaver (Jenny Wren) the doll’s dressmaker. Charley and Lizzie disagree about their relationship to a poor upbringing. Lizzie is romantically attached to the river. Headstone seems interested in her, but Wrayburn is lurking.

Chapter II.   Eugene Wrayburn arrives at Lizzie’s to report that he has no fresh news on Riderhood, who he has been watching. He wishes to help Lizzie and Jenny, and eventually persuades them to accept his offer. Jenny’s father returns home drunk and abject; so she scolds and reproaches him like a parent.

Chapter III.   Veneering decides to enter parliament, and sets up a network of ‘agents’ amongst people he knows to curry influence and favour for him. He also puts up a £5,000 bribe, and is selected by Pocket Breeches where he has never even been before.

Chapter IV.   Mr and Mrs Lammle continue to cultivate the gullible Georgiana Podsnap. They introduce her to the rich booby Fledgeby, and there is no rapport between the two young people at all, despite a dinner party and a trip to the opera.

Chapter V.   Next day Lammle visits Fledgeby at the Albany to ask him about Georgiana, but Fledgeby refuses to answer any of his questions. Fledgeby then goes to see his ’employee’ at Pudsey & Co, Mr Riah, who introduces him to Lizzie Hexam (who he is teaching) and Jenny Wren who buys his waste fabrics.

Chapter VI.   Lightwood asks Wrayburn about the recent movements and mysteries in his life, but Wrayburn denies that any exist. They are visited by Charley Hexam and Bradley Headstone who come to protest against Wrayburn’s interest in Lizzie and his paying for her education. Wrayburn acts contemptuously towards them both. He admits to an interest in Lizzie but can’t say towards what it is heading.

Chapter VII.   Silas Wegg resents Rokesmith being put in charge of the Bower, and wonders with Mr Venus if Harmon hid things in his waste heaps.They agree to conduct clandestine searches, hoping to find valuables or papers.

Chapter VIII.   Bella is prompted by Rokesmith to visit her old home , but when she arrives there are squabbles with both her mother and sister Lavvy. Rokesmith appears with a gift of £50 from Mr Boffin, which Bella spends on clothes for her father and an afternoon out at Greenwich.

Chapter IX.   Rokesmith arranges for the sickly child Johnny (who Mrs Boffin wishes to adopt) to be taken to a children’s hospital, but is too late to save him and he dies, having willed his toys to another sick child.

Chapter X.   Mrs Boffin then decides to drop the idea of naming an adopted child after John Harmon, and chooses the awkward Sloppy as Johnny’s replacement.

Chapter XI.   Bradley Headstone has fallen in love with Lizzie at first sight. He visits her and makes an embarrassed plea that she give up being educated at Wrayburn’s expense. He wants her to let Charley (and himself) teach her instead. She flatly refuses – because she is secretly in love with Wrayburn and wishes to reform him.

Chapter XII.   Riderhood receives a visit from the mysterious ‘Captain’ who is wearing the clothes of George Radfoot, who has been horribly killed. He has knowledge regarding Gaffer Hexam and the Harmon murder. He menaces Riderhood, yet offers to split the reward money with him.

Chapter XIII.   The mysterious Captain is actually John Harmon, alias Julius Handford, alias John Rokesmith. He is revisiting the scene of his supposed murder, and the narrative reconstructs his back story through his efforts to reconstruct events.

He and George Radfoot were shipmates and confidants, returning to London. Harmon felt oppressed by his father’s wealth and intentions, so exchanged clothing with Radfoot in order to circulate incognito. Radfoot visits Riderhood; Harmon is poisoned; Radfoot is mutilated and murdered by mistake. Harmon then escapes via the river and hides away, living off money from Radfoot’s coat.

He debates with himself about revealing his true identity, and concludes that since he is amongst true friends and loves Bella, he should remain as Rokesmith. But when he returns home Bella petulantly reproaches him for daring to pay court to her.

Chapter XIV.   Betty Higden decides that she must separate herself from Sloppy and approaches the Secretary for a loan to set up as an itinerant worker. The Secretary arranges for Sloppy to be given lessons from Headstone, and writes a letter of recantation for Riderhood to sign.

Chapter XV.   The besotted Headstone and Charley visit Lizzie in a churchyard so that Headstone can present his proposal of marriage to her – which she rejects. Charley then pleads his friend’s case, and this leads to an argument between them. Lizzie is escorted home by Mr Riah and the imperious Wrayburn.

Chapter XVI.   At a celebratory breakfast to mark the first wedding anniversary of the Lammles, it is reported that Lizzie Hexam is missing, and Mrs Lammle asks Twemlow to warn Mr Podsnap against her own match-making mischief regarding Georgiana.

Our Mutual Friend

‘Bella Righted by the Golden Dustman’ – Marcus Stone

Book The Third – A Long Lane

Chapter I.   Mr Riah delivers his accounts to Fledgeby, who abuses him with anti-Semitism. Lammle arrives to reveal that the Podsnaps have written to break off relations. Fledgeby orders Riah to buy up some debts on the cheap. Riah then reports that he has offered Lizzie sanctuary, away from her suitors and tormentors.

Chapter II.   Mr Riah and Jenny Wren show Riderhood’s recantation to Abbey Potterton (and they make a copy of it). A steamer on the river runs down another boat in the fog, drowning its owner – Rogue Riderhood.

Chapter III.   Riderhood is brought into the pub and thought to be dead, whereupon people begin to feel sympathetic towards him. But he is revived, and becomes his nasty self again.

Chapter IV.   The Wilfers celebrate their wedding anniversary, which is characterised by under-cooked chicken and Mrs Wilfer’s miserable and lugubrious recollections. Bella then confides to her father the marriage proposals she has received and her fears that Boffin’s wealth is turning him into a mercenary.

Chapter V.   Mr Boffin patronises Rokesmith, preaches money values to Bella, and collects books on misers. Mrs Lammle cultivates Bella, who is sceptical and divided in her feelings. Boffin moves Rokesmith into his own house – to save money and have him permanently on hand.

Chapter VI.   Boffin has Wegg read to him from lives of the great misers, and then he goes out to extract something from the great dustmounds (observed by Wegg and Mr Venus). He then announces that he has sold off the dust heaps.

Chapter VII.   Wegg reveals to Venus that he has found a tin money box containing Harmon’s will, which Venus takes from him. They plan to use it against Boffin and his entourage. Venus also reveals that his inamorata is Riderhood’s daughter, Pleasant.

Chapter VIII.   Betty Higden has been out on the roads on the upper reaches of the Thames, selling her wares and getting weaker and weaker. She is determined to stay out of the Workhouse. But eventually, worn down and alone, she runs out of life force and dies supported only by the kindness of a stranger – who turns out to be Lizzie Wexham.

Chapter IX.   At Betty’s funeral Rokesmith and Bella discuss Lizzie’s predicament. Rokesmith thinks Lizzie might be suffering some social stigma from the false accusations made against her father. On becoming friends, Lizzie tells Bella about Headstone who frightens her and Wrayburn who she loves but thinks is above her.

Chapter X.   Wrayburn is being pursued for his bad debts by Mr Riah (working for Fledgeby). Wrayburn wants to discover where Lizzie is hiding, but Jenny refuses to tell him. He is visited by ‘Mr Dolls’ (Jenny’s drunken father) who offers to find out for a fee. Meanwhile Wrayburn is being followed by Headstone and Charley. Wrayburn takes Lightwood out to lead Headstone on a wild goose chase, following him through the streets. Lightwood is horrified by the desperation on Headstone’s face.

Chapter XI.   Headstone is consumed by jealousy and hatred of Wrayburn. Whilst spying on him at his Temple Chambers he meets Riderhood and pays him money as a bribe for information about Lizzie.

Chapter XII.   The Lammles are in debt, and think their ‘friend’ Fledgeby is holding off Mr Riah as collector. They plot to undermine Boffin’s confidence in the Secretary. But Fledgeby calls, and despite Mrs Lammle’s pleas, he goes to his office and orders Riah to collect the debts.

Chapter XIII.   Fledgeby is still in his office when it is visited by Jenny Wren and Twemlow, who reveals that he has a debt being called in by Mr Riah. When Riah returns, Fledgeby forces him through a grotesque charade of pretending to ask for leniency which Riah is obliged to refuse. The silent witness is left with the impression that Mr Riah is unpleasantly ruthless.

Chapter XIV.   Venus has a change of heart and reveals to Boffin that he has Harmon’s will and wishes to end his pact with Wegg. Boffin asks him to delay his decision. Wegg threatens to harass Boffin. Mrs Lammle reveals to Boffin that Rokesmith has made a proposal to Bella.

Chapter XV.   Boffin accuses Rokesmith of being a duplicitous schemer who is only after the money he is going to settle on Bella, and he sacks his loyal secretary with scorn and reproaches. But Bella leaps to Rokesmith’s defense, criticises Boffin as a man who has become corrupted by money, and leaves the Bower to go back to her family home.

Chapter XVI.   Bella goes immediately to her father’s office in the City, where they are joined by Rokesmith, whose marriage proposal she now accepts. She returns home, where Lavvy defiantly faces down their mother’s disapproval of everything.

Chapter XVII.   Mrs Lammle warns Twemlow that Fledgeby is the real power behind Riah’s debt collecting – though she has no proof of her claim. Twemlow then attends a big dinner at the Veneerings, where the ‘smash up’ of the Lammles is discussed. Mr Dolls delivers Lizzie’s address to Wrayburn.

Our Mutual Friend

‘Miss Wren fixes her idea’ – Marcus Stone

Book The Fourth – A Turning

Chapter I.   Headstone is in disguise, following Wrayburn along the river. He meets Riderhood who is now keeper at the Weir Mill Lock. After locating Wrayburn and Lizzie he returns to the lock, where Riderhood discovers that he is impersonating him visually by wearing similar clothes.

Chapter II.   The Lammles, now destitute, try to cultivate the Boffins, who hold them at bay and buy themselves off with a £100 sympathy payment. Georgiana tries to be generous towards the Lammles, but Boffin intercepts her gifts, and the Lammles depart, hoping to live somewhere in Europe on the money they have scrounged.

Chapter III.   Wegg and Venus summon Boffin and menace him with their plan to take over the Harmon estate. They humiliate him then split the estate into three parts, with especially stringent penalty clauses for Boffin, who is very anxious that his wife shouldn’t discover their impoverishment.

Chapter IV.   Bella gets married in secret to Rokesmith, accompanied only by her father.

Chapter V.   Announcement of the marriage causes friction and dissent amongst Mrs Wilfer, Lavvy, and George Sampson, then hysterics, followed by self-congratulatory forbearance. Rokesmith works in the City, and offers Bella wealth, which she declines. They live in a state of domestic bliss.

Chapter VI.   Wrayburn pays court to Lizzie by the river, but she refuses his advances, even though she loves him, because of the difference in their social class. Wrayburn is attacked by Headstone (disguised as Riderhood) and left for dead. Lizzie rescues him from the river and takes him to the local Inn.

Chapter VII.   Headstone returns to Riderhood at the Lock in a disheveled and bloodied state. Riderhood then follows him and recovers his discarded clothes of disguise. Charley Hexam criticises and renounces Headstone for hindering his rise in society.

Chapter VIII.   Fledgeby visits Jenny and tries to bribe her for Lizzie’s place of hiding. When she visits him in his Albany rooms the next day, Lammle is just leaving, having given Fledgeby a thrashing.

Chapter IX.   Jenny visits Riah, having guessed that Fledgeby owns Pudsey & Co. Fledgeby fires Riah, who retreats with Jenny, only to encounter her father dying from alcoholism in Covent Garden. No sooner has he been buried than Lightwood arrives with the news that Wrayburn is dying and requests Jenny’s presence.

Chapter X.   Wrayburn is close to death, but asks of Lightwood that his attacker should not be brought to justice – because it will damage Lizzie’s reputation. He claims that it was not Riderhood. Believing that he is certain to die, he wishes to be married to Lizzie as an act of atonement.

Chapter XI.   Lightwood arrives at the Rokesmiths to take them to the ceremony, but John Rokesmith refuses to attend because he does not want to be recognised. A group is assembled, and en route they encounter Headstone, who collapses in a fit when he hears that Lizzie is to be married. The wedding takes place, and Wrayburn begins to revive.

Chapter XII.   A few months later, after Bella has had a baby girl, the Rokesmiths bump into Lightwood in London. John Rokesmith is forced to admit to his Julius Handford alias. He is explaining one part of his implication in the Harmon affair to Bella when they receive a visit from Mr Inspector. He takes Rokesmith to the pub, where he is identified. Rokesmith quits his job and moves Bella to live at the Boffins’ house.

Chapter XIII.   The Boffins then reveal to Bella how they guessed John Harmon’s true identity and have been acting out a charade of becoming miserly as a negative lesson for Bella. Even the ill treatment of Rokesmith was all an act. Harmonious relations are restored.

Chapter XIV.   Mr Venus announces to Wegg that he is to be married to Pleasant Riderhood. He and Wegg go to settle accounts with Boffin, but it transpires that Venus has secretly been on Boffin’s side all along. They have Harmon’s will, and were leading on Wegg to a greater downfall. John Harmon has his inheritance, but has given Boffin the Dust Heaps. Sloppy throws Wegg out into the street.

Chapter XV.   Headstone feels guilty and realises his plan has failed. Riderhood visits him at school and reveals his knowledge of the attack on Wrayburn. When Headstone visits him at the lock he demands money and threatens to bleed him dry. Headstone tries to leave, but in the end kills them both by dragging Riderhood into the weir.

Chapter XVI.   The Wilfers visit the Harmons, still arguing amongst themselves. Sloppy is becoming a cabinet maker. He visits Jenny Wren and pays court to her. Wrayburn visits Harmon and they discuss the problem of mixing Lizzie in polite society.

Chapter XVII.   Lightwood goes to dinner at the Veneerings, who are about to ‘crash’ and plan to live in Calais. Lady Tippings taunts him snobbishly about Wrayburn’s marriage to Lizzie. He is surrounded by prejudice and nastiness.

Postscript   Dickens comments personally on the composition of his novel – on its plot and credibility, perhaps unconsciously acknowledging that he had dropped below his usual standards.

Our Mutual Friend

‘The Wedding Dinner at Greenwich’ – Marcus Stone

Our Mutual Friend – principal characters
Harmon original creator and owner of the ‘dust’ empire
John Harmon his son, alias Julius Handford, alias John Rokesmith, alias the Secretary, true heir to the Harmon estate
Nicodemus (‘Noddy’) Boffin alias ‘The Golden Dustman’. former servant to Harmon Snr, who inherits his wealth and house
Mr Fledgeby a pompous dandy, who owns Pudsey & Co
Bradley Headstone the headmaster in a school, obsessed with Lizzie Hexam
Jesse (‘Gaffer’) Hexam a rough Thames waterside man
Lizzie Hexam his devoted and attractive daughter
Charley Hexam his headstrong but clever son, apprenticed to Headstone
Roger ‘Rogue’ Riderhood a desperate and unpleasant riverside character
Pleasant Riderhood his daughter, an unlicensed pawnbroker
Mr Inspector a police officer
Betty Higden keeper of a ‘minding school’ and a mangle
Our Johnny an orphan great-grandson of Betty Higden
Sloppy an awkward foundling, adopted by Mrs Higden
‘He do the police in different voices’
Alfred Lammle a socialite and fortune-hunter
Mortimer Lightwood a solicitor and attorney with only Harmon as his one client
Eugene Wrayburn his friend, a barrister without a brief, an indolent and unambitious misanthrope
Silas Wegg a ballad seller with a wooden leg who reads to Boffin
Mr Venus a taxidermist who is disappointed in love
Rev Frank Milvey a curate with a large family
Mr John Podsnap a member of society, a pompous self-satisfied man
Mr Riah a venerable Jew, of noble and generous nature, Fledgeby’s employee at Pudsey & Co
Fanny Cleaver a doll’s dressmaker, referred to as ‘Jenny Wren’
Mr Cleaver Jenny Wren’s drunken father, referred to as ‘Mr Dolls’,
Miss Emma Peacher a teacher in love with Headstone at his school
Miss Abbey Potterson landlady of The Six Jolly Fellowship-Porters
Reginald Wilfer ‘The Cherub’ – a henpecked clerk
Mrs Wilfer his wife, an angular and dyspeptic misery
Bella Wilfer their elder pretty daughter, protege of the Boffins
Lavinia ‘Lavvy’ Wilfer their younger sharp-tongued daughter
George Sampson a feeble young man, engaged to Lavvy

Mont Blanc pen

Mont Blanc – Charles Dickens special edition

Further reading

Biography

Red button Peter Ackroyd, Dickens, London: Mandarin, 1991.

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

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

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

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

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

Criticism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens Pickwick PapersPickwick 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.
Charles Dickens Pickwick Papers Buy the book here

 

Charles Dickens Oliver TwistOliver 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.
Charles Dickens Oliver Twist Buy the book here

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.

© Roy Johnson 2014

More on Charles Dickens
More on literature
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

Pale Fire

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tutorial, study guide, commentary, and web links

Pale Fire (1962) is a bizarre and playful ‘novel’ from the master of literary inventiveness, Vladimir Nabokov. It was written at the same time that he was editing his scholarly translation of Pushkin’s novel in verse, Eugene Onegin. What Pale Fire offers is a comic parody of the same enterprise. It is a novel comprised of a spoof academic introduction written by the editor, a long poem written by his neighbour which gives the novel its title, and then the editor’s elaborate commentary which purports to explain hidden meanings in the text. All the notes are cross referenced with a scholarly apparatus. He then even adds an index.

Pale Fire

Pale Fire – critical commentary

Structure

Perhaps the most interesting feature of the novel is its successful parody of an academic study – complete with bibliographic introduction, cross references, a scholarly apparatus, critical commentary, and index. All of these are brought to bear on the central text – John Shade’s poem Pale Fire – which has absolutely nothing to do with the Boy’s Own adventure story into which it is embedded.

Moreover, as a self-proclaimed ‘editor’, Charles Kinbote is a comic failure in his enterprise. He not only completely fails to understand Shade’s poem; he gets lots of details wrong; he fails to spot things that are obvious; he can’t be bothered to follow up his own ‘researches’; and he sets up links in his commentaries which turn out to be non-sequiturs.

Nabokov also makes Kinbote quite laughable as a character. He misunderstands what is happening around him. He is insensitive to the reactions of the people he encounters. And he is given quasi-absurd opinions – such as his half-baked critique of Proust and A la recherche du temps perdues (which is incorrectly capitalised in the index).

The unreliable narrator

Nabokov was a master of fiction delivered by unreliable narrators. From his earliest works as a writer of short stories such as The Eye (1930) and Spring in Fialta (1936) he created narrators who recount events that the reader is invited to interpret otherwise. Some of these narrators tell lies or attempt to mislead the reader. They play a form of literary hide and seek in which they deliver information which does not seem quite consonant with the rest of the story – and we begin to doubt their judgement. It is a skilful manipulation of point of view on the author’s part, and an invitation to readers to ‘participate’ in creating the ‘true meaning’ of the story.

This literary device can sometimes be stretched over the length of a novel. Henry James used it in The Sacred Fount (1901). But it is usually confined to the short story or the novella – for good reasons. The most important reason is that once the reader has realised that information is coming from an unreliable source, dramatic tension in the tale is put at risk.

It should be immediately apparent to most intelligent readers of Pale Fire that the editor-narrator Kinbote is both unreliable and not who he claims to be. In the Foreward he relates that a certain ‘ferocious lady’ says to him ‘What’s more you are insane’. She is quite right, and most readers will have no trouble realising that his account of the King’s ‘escape’ from Zembla is his own (factitious) autobiography. Shortly afterwards, if not at the same time, they will realise that the whole story is the delusion of a madman.

The problem is that they will realise this quite quickly, when there is still considerable plot-commentary to be revealed – which dilutes the effectiveness of any dramatic tension that follows. To offset this weakness, Nabokov introduces a second plot element in the character of political gangster Jakob Gradus whose role is to pursue and assassinate King Charles.

This too turns out to be part of Kinbote’s delusion – for the man who shoots John Shade is not a foreign political assassin but an escapee from a lunatic asylum seeking to avenge himself on the man (Judge Goldsworth) who has sent him there.

Interpretation

It has to be said that the apparent levels of fictionality in the novel have thrown critics into all sorts of acrobatic interpretations. There are some who believe that the commentary to the poem was written by John Shade himself, and others who think the ghost of Hazel Shade is somehow involved.

Nabokov, as the author of all the mischievous hints and clues scattered throughout the book, muddies the water even further by introducing a character called Professor V. Botkin, whom he describes as ‘an American scholar of Russian descent’. This sends other commentators into analytic raptures, pointing to the fact that the name Botkin is merely Kinbote in reverse. Perhaps Kinbote is the alter-ego of Botkin – or the other way round?

But the multiple levels of fictionality are apparent rather than real. Kinbote is clearly a fictional character, created by the author Vladimir Nabokov. Kinbote is operating as a teacher in a fictional (but credible) American university called Wordsmith College in the Appalachians. Kinbote claims to be the exiled king of a not-so-credible country called Zembla – and his escape from it is related via cardboard and comic operetta sequence of events. He is clearly delusional and his tale is a fantasy-invention. Interpretation of the novel is much simpler than its complicated story.

We know that Nabokov ‘lost his kingdom’ and had to flee Russia following the revolution; we know that he eventually emigrated to America; we know that he taught at a provincial college (Wellesley College) and wrote about the experience in other fictional productions (such as Pnin). We know that Nabokov had been translating and editing a scholarly version of Eugene Onegin – which comprised an introduction, the text of Pushkin’s poem/novel, and two volumes of commentary plus an index.

Pale Fire is nothing more than a literary spoof which re-mixes these biographical elements to offer a playful charade, a jeu d’esprit that is laced with the sorts of in-house jokes, narrative tricks, and literary spasms (wordplay, neologisms, and obsessive alliteration) that mark his later works following the high point of Lolita in 1955.

Extras

It should be clear from a few pages into the novel and everything following that Kinbote is a homosexual. What is not clear is why Nabokov should add this characteristic to his protagonist. The repeated and coy references to young boys and ‘manly behaviour’ become quite irritating – mainly because they are not in any way connected to the rest of the narrative. They eventually assume a sort of schoolboy smuttiness and reinforce other silly elements of the plot.

Pale Fire – study resources

Pale Fire – Penguin – Amazon UK

Pale Fire – Penguin – Amazon US

Pale Fire – Library of America – Amazon UK

Pale Fire – Library of America – Amazon US

Nabokov’s Pale Fire – Princeton – Amazon UK

Celestial Keys to Pale Fire – Sputnik – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov – Amazon UK

Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years – Biography: Vol 1

Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years – Biography: Vol 2

Zembla – the official Nabokov web site

The Paris Review – Interview with Vladimir Nabokov

Pale Fire

Pale Fire – plot summary

Foreward

The ‘editor’ Charles Kinbote presents a scholarly description giving the provenance of John Shade’s poem Pale Fire. He details the rivalries surrounding ownership and publication of the manuscript. He meets Shade and his wife Sybil when he becomes their next door neighbour whilst teaching at the same institution – Wordsmith College. Kinbote is a figure of fun at the college, and is clearly a homosexual.

Pale Fire

The poem in four cantos is an autobiographical meditation on Shade’s domestic life and his reflections on the borderlines between life and death. His parents die when he is young, and he is raised by his aunt Maude. He loses his religious belief, but searches for a meaning in life and wonders about the possibilities of life beyond the grave.

He meets his wife Sybil at high school, and still loves her forty years later. They have a daughter Hazel who is solitary, dyslexic and unattractive. She goes out with friends as a teenager and is shunned by the group. She pretends to go home, but drowns herself in an icy lake.

Shade meditates on life as a preparation for what will happen after death and the possibilities of reincarnation. He wonders who we might meet in the afterlife. Sybil thinks she receives signals from their dead daughter. After giving a lecture one evening Shade has a minor heart attack and a ‘vision’ of being briefly ‘dead’, when he sees the image of a white fountain. When he reads of a woman who has had the same experience he goes to interview her – but she thinks it is a social call. Nevertheless, he feels he has discovered some hidden pattern in life which gives it meaning.

He reflects on the difficulties of poetic composition and describes shaving whilst in the bath. He thinks about his wife, his dead daughter, and the books of poetry he has written. Finally he finds some comfort in his appreciation of the everyday life that surrounds him.

Commentary

Charles Kinbote examines the poem in close detail and explains meanings hidden in the text. He has forcibly befriended his neighbour the American poet John Shade and recounted to him the amazing story of King Charles II’s escape from a revolution in Zembla. Kinbote hopes that Shade will re-tell this story in a long poem on which he is currently working.

Kinbote’s story is that when a revolution occurs in Zembla, the king is imprisoned in his castle, from which he escapes via a secret passageway. He travels over mountains and eventually reaches the seashore. Zembla is divided politically into supporters of the king (Karlists) and their rival Extremists, including would-be regicides (the Shadows) who elect Jakob Gradus as their assassin.

The king is eventually parachuted into the USA where his friend Sylvia arranges for him to teach at Wordsmith College. He rents a house from Judge Goldsworth, next door to John Shade and his wife Sybil. Although he has only been there a short time, he claims to be close friends with Shade – though it is quite clear that these feelings are not reciprocated.

Kinbote spies on Shade day and night, whilst Sybil makes transparent excuses to protect her husband’s privacy by keeping Kinbote away from the house. Meanwhile the stupid and incompetent Gradus is making his way across northern Europe in search of King Charles. Gradus fails at every point, until he is eventually instructed to go to America.

Kinbote is saving a big surprise for John Shade when he completes his poem. It is quite clear that this is the revelation that he is King Charles. But on the very day the poem is finished and Kinbote has invited Shade for a celebratory drink, Gradus arrives and bungles the assassination, killing Shade in error.

Believing that Kinbote tried to protect Shade from the assassin, Sybil gives him the right to be the poem’s official editor. Gradus turns out to be an escaped lunatic who has gone to kill the person who sentenced him to an asylum – Judge Goldsworth, Kinbote’s landlord. Gradus subsequently commits suicide in jail.

Kinbote confiscates the manuscript of Pale Fire and at first is horrified to realise that it contains no mention of his escape from Zembla. Later he convinces himself that Shade has cleverly hidden the account in minor details of the poem – and so his commentary is designed to squeeze meaning out where none exists.

Pale Fire – principal characters
Charles Kinbote the deposed King Charles II of Zembla
John Shade an American poet and college teacher
Sybil Shade his protective wife
Hazel Shade their teenage daughter who commits suicide
Jakob Gradus aka Jack Grey a bungling criminal and lunatic
Judge Goldsworth the absent owner of Kinbote’s rented house

© Roy Johnson 2018

More on Vladimir Nabokov
More on literary studies
Nabokov’s Complete Short Stories

Point of View

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the perspective of authors, narrators, and characters

Point of view – what is it?

An important part of analysing fictional narratives is to take into account the point of view from which a story is being told. Point of view is the manner or perspective from which events and characters are seen or being depicted. The term should not be confused with its everyday meaning of ‘a personal opinion’.

The point of view can be created and controlled in a number of different ways. For instance, by –

  • the author’s attitude towards the events and characters – which could be comic, serious, or satirical
  • the attitude of a narrator towards the events and characters being described
  • the perspective of characters as they participate in the events of the narrative

Point of view

Point of view – the author

A typical example of authorial point of view is the well-known ironic and witty opening of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813). She is poking gentle fun at her characters in a mild satirical manner:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

Pride and PrejudiceThis way of seeing things influences very strongly the way in which readers are likely to understand the novel. It would be difficult almost to the point of impossibility to see Pride and Prejudice as anything other than a comedy of manners. So the point of view is a powerful factor in our understanding and interpretation of this narrative.

This example is an authorial point of view because Austen has chosen a traditional third person omniscient narrative mode. Readers can be confident that such remarks reflect the author’s own attitudes to characters and events – because she does not create any distancing effects between herself as author and herself as omniscient narrator. Direct authorial comment giving a point of view is sometimes referred to as ‘authorial generalisation’.

Point of view – the narrator

This occurs when the author creates a separate character to tell the story – who is called the narrator. And the narrator can be objective, biased, or even unreliable in relaying information, depending on how the author wishes to affect the reader. The narrator may or may not be an active participant in the events of the narrative. The important thing to keep in mind is that the author and the narrator are not necessarily one and the same.

Fyodor Dostoyevski chose the first person narrative mode for his novella Notes from Underground (1864). The protagonist and narrator is a fictional character who is not even given a name, and whose ‘story’ is a long tirade against society and even against himself:

I am a sick man … I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don’t consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious). No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite.

Russian novels - Notes from UndergroundDostoyevski is now seen as one of the precursors of the movement in philosophy known as existentialism, and this novella is an exploration of an individual who is stripping away all comforting ideas and exposing his personal inner-demons in an age which is losing the reassurance of religious belief.

The importance of point of view in this case is that the reader is forced to accept this rather perverse and unpleasant man’s vision of the world, because no alternative is made available to us. Dostoyevski makes no attempt to present his character as attractive or likeable. We are simply being invited to consider his peculiar and often contradictory views.

When authors create first person narrators in this way, there is often a temptation to think that the narrator reflects the author’s own views. In some fiction (usually of poor quality) this might be the case; but in general (and certainly in good quality work) this is not or may not be true.

Many traditional ‘life history’ fictions use a first person narrator – such as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (1850). This device usually has the effect of drawing the reader close to the narrator as a fictional character and lending credulity to their account of events.The reader is being encouraged to think of the character as a ‘real’ person.

Studying FictionStudying Fiction is an introduction to the basic concepts and technical terms you need when making a study of stories and novels. It shows you how to understand literary analysis by explaining its elements one at a time, then showing them at work in short stories which are reproduced as part of the book. Topics covered include – setting, characters, story, point of view, symbolism, narrators, theme, construction, metaphors, irony, prose style, tone, close reading, and interpretation. The book also contains self-assessment exercises, so you can check your understanding of each topic.
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Point of view – the character

It is also perfectly normal for authors to give an account of events from the perspective of a character (or characters) in their narratives. This enables the author to create a credible vision of the world in which the character exists, and to invite readers to share (or reject) their personal point of view. This view can shift from one character to another, or it can stay with one character.

Franz Kafka’s dark and expressionistic novel The Trial (1925) opens with an innocent man being arrested:

Somebody must have been telling lies about Joseph K, for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested. Frau Grubach’s cook, who brought him his breakfast every day, did not appear. That had never happened before. For while K waited—from his pillow he saw the old woman who lived opposite watching with, for her, quite unusual curiosity—but then, both perplexed and hungry, he rang. Immediately there was a knock at the door and a man he had never seen in the apartment came in. He was slimly yet solidly built and was wearing a close-fitting black suit which, like an outfit for travelling, was equipped with a variety of pleats, pockets, buckles, buttons, and a belt that made it appear especially practical without its precise purpose being clear.

The TrialAfter the opening sentence of the narrative, all the information we are given is delivered from Joseph K’s point of view. The non-appearance of his breakfast; the absence of the cook; his being observed (whilst in bed!) by an old lady opposite; and the sudden appearance of a stranger in his room – who has come to arrest him. Sometimes authors use the points of view of a number of characters in order to create a multi-dimensional account of reality which might be more complex and therefore more convincing than an account from a single perspective.

William Faulkner uses an interesting version of this mode in his novel As I Lay Dying (1930) in which members of a poor southern American family are transporting their dead mother in a coffin to be buried in a distant town. The narrative is a series of interior monologues in which each of the the characters reflect in turn on the others. This even includes the dead mother, from inside her coffin.

Strategies of this kind become in effect a series of overlapping first person narratives. The English novelist Laurence Durrell pushed this approach even further in his sequence of novels The Alexandria Quartet (1957-1960). Four novels cover the same set of events as seen (largely) from the point of view of the four characters – Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea – who are involved in them.

Virginia Woolf developed an approach to narrative which used this device at a micro level. In her novel Mrs Dalloway, the reader is invited to view events largely from the point of view of her protagonist Clarissa Dalloway, but from time to time the view shifts momentarily to that of other characters:

She stiffened a little on the kerb, waiting for Dornall’s van to pass. A charming woman Scrope Purvis thought her (knowing her as one does know people who live next door to one in Westminster); a touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious, though she was over fifty, and grown very white since her illness. There she perched, never seeing him, waiting to cross, very upright.

Virginia Woolf Mrs DallowayThe character Scrope Purvis never appears again in the novel, but for this single paragraph as they pass each other in the street we are invited to share his view of Clarissa. We see her from the point of view of a close neighbour, who knows she has been ill, and who admires her appearance and her manner. Later we will see her from the point of view of a close friend, an old admirer, and from the slightly antagonistic view of her own daughter.

This fluctuating point of view helps to generate what might be called a ‘three-dimensional’ view of the character, and it is closely associated with Virginia Woolf’s belief in the fluidity and relativity of human character – that a person can be one thing to one person and somebody quite different to another.

© Roy Johnson 2015

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Put Out More Flags

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tutorial, study guide, web links, plot summary

Put Out More Flags (1942) is the sixth novel by Evelyn Waugh. It deals with British society at the outbreak of war in 1939 and features characters who first appeared in his earlier novels Decline and Fall (1928), Vile Bodies (1930), and Black Mischief (1932). Most of the characters are drawn from upper-class society, but there are also satirical portraits from metropolitan Bohemia and the higher echelons of government and publishing. The story line is dominated by the outrageously unscrupulous character Basil Seal – a clever, womanising, ne’er-do-well.
Put Out More Flags

Put Out More Flags – commentary

This is something of a transitional work for Evelyn Waugh, containing much of the comic satire (and the characters) of his earlier novels, but at the same time it looks forward to the more serious elements of Brideshead Revisited (1945) and the Sword of Honour trilogy (1952-1961).

Whilst being largely a farcical comedy, it also contains interesting elements of well-observed social history – particularly the decline of the English upper class, the institutions of government, and ideological movements of the period in what we would now call ‘culture wars’.

Social history

The novel opens with Basil Seal’s sister, Barbara, trying to maintain a sense of normality in her two-hundred-year old country manor house. The servant class, on which her family’s privileged comforts have depended for generations, is melting away in the face of better employment prospects elsewhere. “Edith and Olive and me have talked it over and we want to go and make aeroplanes”.

For servants, the pay would be better working in a manufacturing industry, but they would also have more personal liberty and be free of the patronising and authoritarian discipline imposed by traditional upper-class employers. They would be free of the stifling deference required by the landed gentry who for generations had regarded themselves as superior beings.

This well-observed social development is also accompanied by a movement in the opposite direction – the arrival of evacuees from the larger cities. To protect children from the threats of bombing which were expected, it was government policy for them to be sent into the countryside. This social experiment had mixed results. Not all of the evacuees wanted to be there, and not all were suited to rural living. Waugh makes comic plunder of these issues in the scenes where Basil Seal acts as a bogus billeting officer.

Fashionable art

One of Evelyn Waugh’s favourite targets for satire in his early novels was contemporary fashions in the arts. In Decline and Fall the society Margot Beste-Chetwynde (later Lady Metroland) destroys a historic Tudor building to put in its place a monstrosity of plate glass, leather walls, and modernist furniture. In Put Out More Flags Waugh aims at the literary world. Much mention is made of the two proletarian poets Parsnip and Pimpernel.

They were great supporters of the republican cause during the Spanish Civil War, but as soon as Britain was under threat they emigrated to the United States. This is a satirical dig at Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden who did exactly that in 1939.

Poppet Green is a feather-brained ‘artist’ who follows whatever the latest fad happens to be – which in 1939 was surrealism. Her subjects are:

bodiless heads, green horses, and violet grass, seaweed, shells, and fungi, neatly executed, conventionally arranged in the manner of Dali. Her work in progress on the easel was an overlarge, accurate but buttercup-coloured head of the Aphrodite of Melos, poised against a background of bull’s-eyes and barley sugar.

She is also a communist – of a particularly simple-minded type. When her friend Ambrose Silk goes to work in the Ministry of Information, she immediately labels him a ‘fascist’ – and even worse, a Trotskyist. She thinks in slogans and labels: this is an accurate account of left wing orthodoxy at the time.

Characterisation

Ambrose Silk is a more subtle and nuanced example of fashion. He is a dandy and an aesthete who has been a communist sympathiser – a fellow traveller in the jargon of the time. Waugh pokes fun at him on two fronts. He is terrified of what might happen to him if the Germans invade Britain – since he is aware that the Nazis have persecuted left sympathisers. And more comically, he is writing a memoir Monument to a Spartan which describes his love for Hans, a German brown shirt fascist youth.

Ambrose eventually morphs into a slightly tragic figure – exiled in Ireland – which rescues him from being a two-dimensional character. The same is true of Angela Lyne, Basil’s ‘so-called’ lover. She is estranged from her husband the dilettante architect Cedric, and at the outset of the novel she is returning from the south of France where she has been fruitlessly waiting for Basil.

She closes her grand London home and moves into a top floor flat in Grosvenor Square. There, she gradually becomes a sad and lonely alcoholic. She maintains a veneer of respectability on her rare appearances in public – only ever drinking Vichy water. Alone, she slumps into an oblivion of vodka and Calvados cocktails. There are some truly touching scenes as this rich and fashionable society woman slowly degenerates and loses touch with reality.

So, amidst all the absurdity and tomfoolery in the rest of the novel, Waugh displays a mature touch as a writer in creating characters who change in time, who are not two-dimensional or vehicles for fun. Another example is Alastair Digby-Vaine Trumpington. He first appeared in the very opening scene of Decline and Fall, a Hooray Henry at Oxford, and he has lived a very conventional upper-class life ever since. Very rich, slightly naive, yet maintaining a ‘schoolboy’ sense of honour:

For him there was no ‘they’. England was at war; he, Alastair Trumpington was at war. It was not the business of any politician to tell him when or how he should fight. But he could not put this into words

And true to his principles, whilst the other characters are all trying to scuttle into cosy government sinecures or soft commissions as officers, Alastair volunteers to join the ranks. He endures the miseries of basic training without complaint (although he makes sure his wife Sonia has booked a comfortable nearby hotel for weekends). And in the end he is volunteering for Special Services – though it does seem to be the Boy’s Own Adventure prospects which appeal to him. But he is a character who develops, and he obviously represents what Waugh sees as the remaining strand of decency in upper-class values.

Put Out More Flags – study resources

Put Out More Flags – Penguin – Amazon UK

Put Out More Flags – Penguin – Amazon US

Six novels by Evelyn Waugh – Amazon UK

Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited – Amazon UK

Evelyn Waugh: The Height of his Powers – essay

Books of the Times: Put Out More Flags – essay

Put Out More Flags

Evelyn Waugh – by Henry Lamb

Put Out More Flags – plot summary

Chapter I.   At the outbreak of the Second World War Barbara Sothill’s country manor at Malfrey loses staff who prefer to work in factories. The estate is surrounded by evacuees from Birmingham. Lady Cynthia Seal asks her friend Sir Joseph Mainwaring to find a position for her wayward son. Angela Lyne returns in disappointment from the south of France, having been let down by her lover Basil Seal. In Fitzrovia, mixing with arty bohemians, Basil is living in a dissolute manner, and he bungles the army interview that is arranged for him.

Ambrose Silk visits the Ministry of Information where memos are exchanged regulating the display of personal effects in government offices. As an aesthete and a well-known left-wing sympathiser, he is concerned about his safety in the event of a German invasion. Basil is in the same building, promoting the idea of annexing Liberia.

Chapter II.   Basil goes to stay with his sister at Malfrey, where three delinquent evacuee children are forced onto them. Basil pretends to be a billeting officer and dumps the children onto a retired couple in their beautiful old home. When a few days later they are at their wits end, Basil charges the couple money to take the children elsewhere.

Alastair Trumpington endures the petty bureaucracy of life in the ranks. Ambrose Silk is working at the Ministry of Information, worried that even fellow-travellers might be at risk. Angela Lyne has shut down her home and is enduring a lonely existence in a Grosvenor Square flat. Alastair Trumpington is involved in absurd training exercises.

Chapter III.   Basil sells the three delinquent evacuee children to an adjacent billeting officer and returns to London. He bluffs his way into the War Office and is taken on as an intelligence agent by an old acquaintance. Lord Peter Pastmaster is trying out a girl with a view to marriage. They meet a bemused and drunk Angela Lyne at a cinema. Basil consoles her.

Cedric Lyne goes to see his estranged wife before his departure for Norway. Basil plans to reveal Poppet and Ambrose as communist sympathisers. Cedric is met by a shambolic embarkation of troops at the port.

Ambrose writes about his lost love for Hans, a German brown shirt youth in Mr Bentleys new magazine The Ivory Tower. Basil persuades Ambrose to change his memoir, making it more pro-German. He then reports him to the War Office as a Nazi sympathiser.

When warrants are issued for arrests Basil helps Ambrose escape to Ireland and takes over his Bloomsbury flat – to which he invites Susie, secretary to his boss. The police are only able to arrest Mr Rampole, the magazine publisher. Cedric Lyne is in a disoriented state on the battlefield and is killed in an attack.

Epilogue

Sir Joseph Mainwaring believes all the myths and rumours circulating about the war. Alastair is posted to coastal defence and wishes for more excitement. Rampole reads ‘light fiction’ in prison, and Basil joins a special service unit.

Put Out More Flags – main characters
Basil Seal a disinherited playboy, womaniser, and confidence man
Lady Cynthia Seal his widowed mother
Sir Joseph Mainwaring a government minister and confidant to Lady Seal
Barbara Sothill Basil’s sister
Mrs Angela Lyne Basil’s lover, daughter of a millionaire
Cedric Lyne her estranged husband, a dilettante architect
Ambrose Silk left-wing gay Jewish aesthete
Alastair Trumpington an aristocratic bohemian
Sonia Trumpington his wife
Poppet Green a surrealist painter and ‘communist’

© Roy Johnson 2018

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Ravelstein

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tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Ravelstein (2000) was Saul Bellow’s last novel. It follows a pattern established by his earlier work, Humboldt’s Gift (1975) in being a fictional character sketch based on one of his real-life friends. In this case the novel is a homage to Allan Bloom, a philosopher and cultural theorist colleague with whom he collaborated at the University of Chicago.

Ravelstein

And like the earlier work it is also a double portrait, since we learn as much about the first-person narrator, his biographer ‘Chick’, as we do about the subject Ravelstein. There is every reason to believe that Chick is a fictionalised version of Saul Bellow – who like Chick is a distinguished intellectual beset by problems with women, old age, and money.

Ravelstein – critical comment

Biography

The novel raises interesting problems in the relationship between imaginative fiction and the lives of real historical human beings. Allan Bloom and Saul Bellow were colleagues at the University of Chicago, and like their fictional counterparts (Ravelstein and Chick) they ran joint seminars on political and social philosophy.

It is quite clear that, apart from changing a few names, Bellow makes little attempt to hide or blur the distinctions between fiction and reality. The novel becomes a sort of memoir-cum-documentary, and it should be said that it is very much a ‘campus novel’. Ravelstein might be a larger-than-life character – but the depiction of university life is perfectly credible. Ravelstein is hated by his colleagues because of his cleverness, and because he has produced a best-selling book.

Ravelstein promotes the interests of his favoured students, who remain faithful to him when they pass on to employment in the institutions of government and state. And both he and his friend Chick hold the rest of the staff in lofty disregard, honouring only a few eccentrics and originals.

Some of the more amusing excesses are clearly exaggerations of Allan Bloom’s personal idiosyncrasies. However, the difficulty for most readers is that the boundaries between literary invention and documentary memoir are quite blurred. Ravelstein is technically a fictional character, and should be interpreted as such – but the gravitational pull towards regarding the events and opinions of the novel as representing an accurate portrait of Allan Bloom are almost too strong to resist.

The novel was controversial when it was first published – largely because it presented a frank depiction of Allan Bloom’s homosexuality, which had not been widely recognised previously. Even more so, the novel presents an unsparing depiction of his death from HIV-AIDS, which many commentators felt was an unwarranted trespass upon his privacy.

Bellow’s defence is built in to the novel itself. Bloom (Ravelstein) had asked Bellow (‘Chick’) to write a memoir which was truthful and did not hold back on any unpleasant details. Both writers are now dead – so the debate on taste and accuracy can take place with time and distance from the historical events.

The subject

The novel is an amusing and very entertaining character study of the larger-than-life university professor Ravelstein. It is also a portrait of his friend ‘Chick’, the fellow academic who is composing the fictional memoir. Ravelstein is trying to keep alive classical erudition in the face of cultural vulgarity and what we now call ‘political correctness’.

Chick casts himself as a supportive colleague who appreciates Ravelstein’s ‘greatness of soul’ and who struggles in his own social wake of previous wives, financial problems, and worries about his own cultural identity. What they have in common, and what becomes the gradually emerging subject of the novel is their Jewishness. As Ravelstein approaches death he becomes more and more concerned with the standards against which he measures the people. He is particularly acute at spotting the faintest traces of anti-Semitism, and holds every suspect up against their record of political allegiance in the 1930s and the Second World War.

Chick is initially sceptical about Ravelstein’s demanding standards, but he too eventually reflects on the very big issues of Jewish identity in the twentieth century:

I’m thinking of the great death populations of the Gulags and the German labour camps. Why does the century—I don’t know how else to put it—underwrite so much destruction.

This is the real subject of the novel – and what makes it a powerful statement, almost a summation of Saul Bellow’s work over a quarter of a century. These are major world issues, and he does not shrink from including the Gulag with Auschwitz and Treblinka

In connection with the issue of race and American society, it might be worth mentioning that at no time does Bellow consider the subject of African-Americans who were also ‘immigrants’. They however were imported against their will into a protestant God-fearing society who exploited and persecuted them.

He was not obliged to cover every racial issue in the flux of American life in this one novel. But it is slightly surprising that the close parallels between European Jewish immigrants (fleeing from persecution) and Africans (imprisoned in a slave culture) did not occur to him as a fruitful point of comparison.

Structhure

The first three quarters of the novel are entirely homogeneous. The subject matter, tone, and location are skilfully integrated and fluently handled. But then following the death of Ravelstein there are switches in location and subject, which severely disrupt the unity of the novel’s effect.

At this point Ravelstein disappears as the central figure of interest, and the geographic location switches from Boston to the Caribbean island of Saint Martin. What was a study in intellectual history, a comic study of academic life, and a meditation on death becomes a satirical critique of shoddy popular tourism.

This part of the story leads to Chick’s gastric poisoning and his own confrontation with near-death. In this sense there is a continuity of the theme of ‘meditations on death’. But then the final scenes of the novel are packed with Chick’s hallucinatory fantasies which add very little to the novel’s central concerns.

Bellow describes Chick’s close encounter rather than lingering over the details of Ravelstein’s final days – and the parallels of the two acute medical experiences help to rescue the book’s structure in its final stages. But there is a very unnerving narrative wobble for fifty pages which almost ruins the book’s final effect.

Ravelstein – study resources

Ravelstein Ravelstein – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Ravelstein Ravelstein – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Ravelstein Ravelstein – Library of America – Amazon UK

Ravelstein Ravelstein – Library of America – Amazon US

Ravelstein Saul Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Ravelstein Saul; Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Ravelstein Saul Bellow (Modern Critical Views) – essays and studies – Amz UK

Ravelstein Saul Bellow (Modern Critical Views) – essays and studies – Amz US

Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow – Amazon UK

Ravelstein

Ravelstein – plot synopsis

Abe Ravelstein and his colleague Chick are academics from Chicago staying at the Hotel Crillon in Paris. Ravelstein wants someone to write an account of his life before he dies. His older friend Chick reflects on the nature of biography. Ravelstein is rich, successful, and has connections in high places.

Ravelstein has very expensive tastes in food, clothes, and home decor. Previously he was in debt, but Chick persuaded him to write a popular book on political philosophy. It was a big success and made him wealthy – but he has remained unpopular with his colleagues. In Paris Ravelstein buys an expensive jacket, but then spills coffee on it.

Chick is tolerant of his foibles, because he feels that Ravelstein has important issues in view and is maintaining high standards in cultural values. At the same time however, Ravelstein throws pizza parties and invites his students to watch sport on television, meanwhile taking phone calls from state department insiders on the progress of the Gulf War.

Chick’s English colleague Battle thinks that Ravelstein is looking even more ill than normal. Chick reveals that Ravelstein had an attack of an unspecified disease (HIV-AIDS) whilst in Paris. He recovers slowly, continuing to smoke whilst in hospital.

Ravelstein buys an expensive BMW for his lover Nikki. Whilst waiting for his discharge from the clinic, Chick reads a biography of John Maynard Keynes, which is focussed on Jews present at the Armistice negotiations in 1919 and anti-Semitism amongst the participants. Chick also reveals being divorced by his previous wife Vela.

Ravelstein arrives back from the clinic in a hospital bed, severely disabled by AIDS. Chick reflects on his childhood and what he has learned from life. Ravelstein was critical and jealous of Chick’s earlier marriage to Vela. He also criticises Chick as a fellow Jew for escaping into what he regards as a phoney arcadia of New Hampshire. And he is scathing about Chick’s socialising with a Balkan charmer who was a pre-war Nazi sympathiser.

Both Chick’s brothers die, and Vela sues him for divorce. Ravelstein again asks Chick to write his memoir. Chick prectises by producing sketches of their colleagues Rackmiel Kogan and Morris Herbst. Battle and his wife visit Ravelstein for advice about their planned suicide pact. Chick and Ravelstein discuss the onset of death and what it means.

Six years later Ravelstein is dead. Chick has problems starting his memoir. Instead, he considers mass exterminations in Russia and Germany in the twentieth century. He recalls Ravelstein’s last days and their discussions of anti-Semitic writers Kipling and Céline.

As he approaches death, Ravelstein turns to his Judaism and urges Chick to do the same. Chick reflects on ‘the final solution’.

After Ravelstein’s death, Chick and Rosamund take a vacation in the Caribbean. It is supposed to be a paradise of relaxation, but Chick describes it as a ‘tropical slum’. He falls ill with an infection that becomes quite serious. They fly back to Boston where he is taken into intensive care with pneumonia. He becomes delirious and starts hallucinating and at one point is put into a strait-jacket. He almost dies, but revives with the help of doctors and his wife Rosamund. On recovery he realises that he owes it to Ravelstein to start work on the memoir.

Ravelstein – principal characters
Abe Ravelstein a professor of philosophy and classics at the University of Chicago
Tay Lang (“Nikki”) Ravelstein’s Malaysian gay lover
’Chick’ Ravelstein’s old friend at Chicago – the narrator
Vela Chick’s previous wife, a chaos theorist
Rosamund Chick’s current wife and former student
Radu Grielescu a Balkan charmer and former fascist

© Roy Johnson 2017

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Reading a Balzac Novel

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If you read any of Balzac’s famous novels – say Cousin Bette, Eugenie Grandet, or Old Goriot – you will probably have in your hands a paperback or an old hardback single volume that offers you all the elements of a traditional novel. It will have memorable characters, a complex plot, and a detailed insight into the workings of French society.

Reading a Balzac Novel

It will also be self-contained. The narrative it presents will be complete, and all the information you need to understand the story will be contained in the one volume you hold in your hands. And yet that sense of completeness will be slightly deceptive – because the world Balzac created in his fiction actually expands beyond the confines of any single novel. What he created was an entire world documenting French society between (roughly) 1800 and 1840.

La Comedie Humaine

Balzac began publishing fiction in 1820s, but from 1834 onward he conceived of his novels and stories as free-standing but interlocking elements in a huge study of French society to which he gave the general title of La Comedie Humaine. (This is a nod towards Dante’s The Divine Comedy.)

He used the device of recurring characters and overlapping events to produce a sort of three-dimensional literary portrait of post-revolutionary France. This grand scheme includes (as he categorized them) Scenes of Provincial Life, Scenes of Parisian Life, Scenes of Military and Political Life, and what he called Philosophic Studies.

Between 1820 and 1848 Balzac produced a total of over ninety finished novels, short stories, and novellas, plus enormous amounts of journalism and theatrical endeavours, the latter of which are largely forgotten today. He was astonishingly productive, and in any given year he might be working on not one but two or three novels at the same time – novels which are now regarded as masterpieces of European literature.

Characters

He was so absorbed in the fictional world of his own creation, he eventually came to regard it as real. This is rather like contemporary fiction in serial form such as the radio programme “The Archers”. Listeners commonly discuss the Ambridge characters as if they were real people.

In his late novel Ursule Mirouet (1841) Balzac introduces a character, the abstemious and entirely virtuous clergyman Abbe Chaperon:

Abbe Chaperon’s arguments with his maid about household expenses were more meticulous than Gobseck’s with his – if indeed that notorious Jew ever did employ a housemaid.

The Abbe is being compared with a character Gobseck (a rapacious money-lender) who is the central figure in the novella, Gobseck (1830). He also crops up in a number of the other works as a minor character – in Old Goriot (1834), Cesar Birotteau (1837), and The Unconscious Comedians (1846). But Balzac makes this comparison as if his readers will be fully conscious of who is being discussed – as indeed they might have been at the time.

Similarly, a mysterious character called Vautrin appears in Old Goriot. He seems to know everybody’s business; he has very cynical views about society; and it turns out that his real name is Jacques Collin. He reappears in a later novel, Lost Illusions (1837-1843), but this time masquerading as Abbé Carlos Herrera, a Spanish diplomat. He is in fact a French master criminal who has escaped from prison and is leading the life of an adventurer, attracted mainly to handsome young men.

After taking his young protégé Lucien Rubempré to Paris he sets him up in stylish quarters with a lover Esther Gobseck (daughter of the above-mentioned money lender). This forms the main plot of A Harlot High and Low (1838-1847). Subsequently Vautrin is arrested and goes back to prison, but he manages to secure his release and later joins the police force as an informer.

This complex literary technique has two important outcomes. First, it allows Balzac to create a three-dimensional account of society. A fictional character might have a very small role to play in one novel, yet that same person might be the entire subject of a major drama in another work. Second, the reader is offered what might be called a ‘stereoscopic’ reading experience.

For instance, in those scenes set in middle and upper-class Paris, any visit to the theatre or the opera is likely to include mention of Eugene de Rastignac, Lucien Rubempre, Horace Brianchon, and Daniel D’Arthez. These are young men about town who know each other and form a fashionable entourage or backdrop to the events of the story. Yet each of these characters has a complex personal history which forms the substance of the other novels in La Comedie Humaine.

Rastignac is a former law student who rises in society, marries into the rich Nuncingen family, and eventually becomes a peer of the realm. Rubempré (born Lucien Chardon) has talent but lacks principles, and ends up hanging himself in prison. D’Arthez is a writer with talent and principles who resists the lure of journalism and produces work of outstanding quality. Bianchon is a humble and self-sacrificing doctor who acts honourably whatever the circumstances, and is admired at all levels of society.

La Comedie Humaine contains over two thousand named characters, of which five hundred appear in several different novels and stories. The introduction of these overlapping and reappearing characters is designed to generate the sense of a real, knowable world in all its complexity. But as the literary critic David Bellos points out, it also produces the opposite effect, which is nevertheless life-like:

The paradox is that a device designed to give solidity to a vast panorama of social life actually gives it what is perhaps its most life-like feature—inexhaustible fragmentariness. Balzac’s world opens on to infinity through the central device that first appeared as a means of closing it off.

If you wish to track any of the characters and their appearances in Balzac’s whole oeuvre, you will find a huge list on line with detailed biographies at – The Repertory of the Comedy Humaine

Choosing a text

During his short life Balzac wrote a prodigious amount – novels, stories, novellas, essays, and even plays. His work appeared in newspapers, magazines, and as individual printed books. Because he is so famous as a classic novelist, his works have been translated many times, and they are available in any number of formats.

Reading a Balzac Novel

1905 edition in sixteen volumes

There are modern translations, older versions from the nineteenth century, ‘collected works’, and all sorts of eBook compilations which probably don’t even mention the name of a translator.

One thing is worth noting in making your choice of text. Balzac broke up the overflowing torrent of his original narratives into separate chapters with sub-titles. These individual headings were particularly suitable for newspapers and magazines, where unbroken blocks of text are not visually attractive. But in various editions of his work produced later in book form, these sub-titles were sometimes omitted in order to save space.

This apparently innocent change can be a sad loss – for two reasons. The first is that the novels become more difficult to read without these chapter breaks. The second is that Balzac’s choice of sub-titles often present a form of satirical running commentary on the content of the events he describes. They are both an aid to interpretation and a source of amusement. They also reveal the structure of the work, which is not always apparent when the story is presented as one continuous block of text.

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

© Roy Johnson 2018

Balzac – selected reading

Pere Goriot – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Eugenie Grandet – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Cousin Bette – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Ursule Mirouet – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Selected Stories – NYRB – Amazon UK

Cambridge Companion to Balzac – Cambridge UP – Amazon UK

Reading a Balzac Novel

More on Honore de Balzac
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