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Charles Dickens greatest works

September 30, 2009 by Roy Johnson

introductory notes to his most outstanding novels

Charles Dickens (1812-1870) is a novelist whose work appeals to both general readers and serious literary critics alike. This is because at its best it operates at two levels simultaneously. Entertaining incidents and characters abound at the surface level, and deep beneath them exist profoundly serious themes and psychological insights into human nature. His early novels are rich in enjoyable knockabout entertainment, and his later works explore the darker side of moral and social issues with which he was so concerned throughout the whole of his working life.

Turn to any work in his huge output, and you will find linguistic invention, tremendous imaginative flair, memorable characters, vivid scene-painting, dramatic incidents, high comedy and tragic pathos packed into alternate chapters, and an overwhelming sense of joie de vivre.

There was a time when his fondness for melodrama and plots which hinged on improbable coincidence were thought to be fatal weaknesses, but modern readers now tend to be more tolerant of these nineteenth century conventions. They focus attention instead on his endless inventiveness and his mastery of the novel form.

Readers with less literary experience might choose to begin with early works such as The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist , or even David Copperfield. Those used to reading long novels with complex plots and a huge cast of characters could go straight to the late, great masterpieces such as Dombey and Son, Bleak House, or Great Expectations.

Your choice of editions is enormous. The most scholarly, with full introductions, notes, glossaries, and background details are the Oxford University Press and Penguin Books editions.

Pickwick Papers (1836-37) was Dickens’ first big popular success, written when he was only twenty-four years old. 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 episodes recount comic excursions to Rochester, Dingley Dell, and Bath; duels and elopements; Christmas festivities; Mr Pickwick inadvertently entering the bedroom of a middle-aged lady at night; and in the end a happy marriage. Much light-hearted fun, and a host of memorable characters.

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Oliver Twist (1837-38) expresses Dickens’ sense of the vulnerability of children. Oliver is a foundling, raised in a workhouse, who escapes suffering by running off to London. There he falls into the hands of a gang of thieves controlled by the infamous Fagin. He is pursued by the sinister figure of Monks who has secret information about him. The plot centres on the twin issues of personal identity and a secret inheritance (which surface again in Great Expectations). Emigration, prison, and violent death punctuate a cascade of dramatic events. This is the early Victorian novel in fine melodramatic form. Recommended for beginners to Dickens.

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Dombey and Son (1847-48) is Dickens’ version of the King Lear story, in which Dombey, the proud and successful head of a shipping company, loses his son, wife, and daughter because of neglect and his lack of sympathy towards them. Even his second wife is driven into the arms of his villainous business manager – with disastrous results. Eventually his empire collapses, and he lives on in tragic desolation – until his daughter Florence returns and finds a way back to his heart. This is the first of Dickens’ great and powerful masterpieces.

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David Copperfield (1849-50) is a thinly veiled autobiography, of which Dickens said ‘Of all my books, I like this the best’. As a child David suffers the loss of both his father and mother. He endures bullying at school and a life of poverty when he goes to work. The book is packed with memorable characters such as Mr Micawber, the fawning Uriah Heep, and the earth-mother figure Clara Peggotty. The plot involves Dickens’ recurrent topics of thwarted romance, financial insecurity and misdoings, and the terrible force of the legal system which haunted him all his life.

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Bleak House (1852-53) is a powerful critique of the legal system. Characters waiting to gain their inheritance from a will which is the subject of a long-running court case are ruined when the delays and costs of the case swallow up the whole estate. At the same time, Ester Summerson, one of Dickens’ most saintly heroines, is surrounded by mystery regarding her parentage and pressure to marry a man she respects but does not love. Unraveling the mystery results in scandal and deaths. Many memorable characters, including ace sleuth Inspector Bucket; Horace Skimpole a criminally irresponsible house guest; and Krook – the ‘chancellor’ of the rag and bone department, who dies from spontaneous combustion – something which Dickens actually believed could happen.

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Little Dorrit (1855-57) features Dickens’ recurrent themes of prison, debt, and the negative effects of wealth. William Dorrit and his daughter Amy have been paupers for so long that they actually live in the Marshalsea debtor’s prison. When he is suddenly released because of an inheritance, his place is taken by the middle-aged hero Arthur Clenham when he falls on hard times. Amy is devoted to them both. There is also a murky sub-plot involving doubtful parentage, a mysterious secret, and a villain with two names. Also includes a satirical critique of nineteenth century government bureaucracy in his depiction of the Circumlocution Office. Another of the greatest of Dickens’ works.

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A Tale of Two Cities (1859) was Dickens’ account of the French Revolution – with the story switching between London and Paris. It views the causes and effects of the Revolution from an essentially private point of view, showing how personal experience relates to public history. The characters are fictional, and their political activity is minimal, yet all are drawn towards the Paris of the Terror, and all become caught up in its web of suffering and human sacrifice. The novel features the famous scene in which wastrel barrister Sydney Carton redeems himself by smuggling the hero out of prison and taking his place on the scaffold. The novel ends with the memorable lines: “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.”

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The Oxford World Classics are the best editions of Dickens’ work. They are largely based on the most accurate versions of the texts; and they feature introductory essays, a biography, explanatory notes, textual variants, a bibliography of further reading, and in some cases missing or deleted chapters. They are also terrifically good value.

Great Expectations (1860-61) traces the adventures and moral development of the young hero Pip as he rises from humble beginnings in a village blacksmith’s. Eventually, via good connections and a secret benefactor, he becomes a gentleman in fashionable London – but loses his way morally in the process and disowns his family. Fortunately he is surrounded by good and loyal friends who help him to redeem himself. Plenty of drama is provided by a spectacular fire, a strange quasi-sexual attack, and the chase of an escaped convict on the river Thames. There are a number of strange psycho-sexual features to the characters and events, and the novel has two subtly different endings – both adding ambiguity to the love interest between Pip and the beautiful Stella.

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The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens contains fourteen essays which cover the whole range of Dickens’s writing, from Sketches by Boz through to The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Some address important thematic topics: childhood, the city, and domestic ideology. Others consider the serial publication and Dickens’s distinctive use of language. Three final chapters examine Dickens in relation to work in other media: illustration, theatre, and film. The volume as a whole offers a valuable introduction to Dickens for students and general readers, as well as fresh insights, informed by recent critical theory.

Charles Dickens – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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More on literature
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Charles Dickens web links

December 11, 2010 by Roy Johnson

a selection of web-based archives and resources

This short selection of Charles Dickens web links offers quick connections to resources for further study. It’s not comprehensive, and if you have any ideas for additional resources, please use the ‘Comments’ box below to make suggestions.

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.

The Oxford Companion to Dickens offers in one volume a lively and authoritative compendium of information about Dickens: his life, his works, his reputation and his cultural context. In addition to entries on his works, his characters, his friends and places mentioned in his works, it includes extensive information about the age in which he lived and worked: the people, events and institutions which provided the context for his work; the houses in which he lived; the countries he visited; the ideas he satirized; the circumstances he responded to; and the culture he participated in. The companion thus provides a synthesis of Dickens studies and an accessible range of information.

Mont Blanc pen – Charles Dickens special edition

More on Charles Dickens
More on literature
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Confidence

August 3, 2014 by Roy Johnson

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

Confidence was Henry James’s fifth novel. It first appeared as a serial in Scribner’s Monthly from August 1879 through to January 1880. This was a magazine which James actually disliked, but it paid high rates for work published. The novel first appeared in book form in two volumes published by Chatto and Windus in December 1879, and it was published in America by Houghton, Osgood & Company in February 1880.

It is worth noting that the English and American editions differ substantially (and from the Scribner’s serial) in terms of punctuation and wording. The surviving manuscripts and their variants suggest that James was deliberately targeting what he saw as two different audiences – in England and America. And it is just possible that – copyright agreements being rather hazy at that time – he was consciously creating two different ‘versions’ for commercial and legal reasons.

cover design by Parish Maxfield

Confidence – critical commentary

This is probably one of the least well known of James’s early novels – indeed, it could almost be counted as completely unknown to most people other than James specialists. It has certainly not been in print recently in any popular or paperback editions – with the honourable exception of the Library of America series. It was not included in the New York Edition published in 1907-1909, which suggests that James himself did not consider the novel worthy to stand alongside his more substantial achievements.

The novel was written in between two early novels which have generally remained popular with the reading public – The Europeans of 1878 and Washington Square of 1880. Like The Europeans there is very little action or dramatic tension in the story, just a great deal of conversation between the principal characters. This is James developing his interest in what we now call the psychological novel. His principal concerns are with the ways his characters understand, mis-understand, and interact with each other.

This is highlighted in the central character of Bernard Longueville. James creates a clever account of Longueville’s psychological processes in dealing with Angela Vivian. He cannot understand her shifting attitudes yet feels drawn to seek explanations and cannot fathom why he finds her so fascinating. It is quite clear to the reader that he is falling in love with her – but this is not apparent to Bernard himself. As the narrator eventually remarks on the dawning of his self-knowledge half way through the narrative:

a great many things had been taking place in his clever mind without his clever mind suspecting them

But although this oblique presentation is successful, the novel lacks the sharpness and the depth of interest of his more successful works published around this time. Events are very slow-moving and schematic, and for all its subtleties, the final resolution is quite unconvincing. We are told (via Angela’s letters to Bernard) that she has succeeded in converting Gordon’s wounded pride and jealous rage into a calm acceptance, but the events are not dramatised – we are not shown any of this process taking place.

There is also a problem of characterisation when compared with James’s more successful novels. Angela Vivian is certainly an intriguing figure – intelligent, witty, yet mysteriously contrary. But it is difficult to take the central character Bernard Longueville seriously at all – a man of endless wealth and a complete lack of purpose. Even the narrator describes him as ‘culpably unoccupied’.

However, there are two further possible readings of this spindly and makeshift plot. The first is that Bernard’s initial report to Gordon of finding Angela to be a flirt and not suitable for marriage, represents another unconscious stratagem on his part – a smokescreen to deter Gordon, so that Bernard himself can stake a claim in a woman he finds so fascinating.

The advantage of this reading is that it would fit neatly alongside his being unconsciously in love with her at that stage in the narrative. However, there is very little direct evidence in the text to support this idea. If James had this possibility in mind, he makes no mention of it in his notes for the story or in the novel itself.

But a second reading, made possible in the light of many texts from James’s later work, is that the story is a thinly veiled study in homo-eroticism – written unconsciously it should be added. In his notes for the story, James stresses the bond between the two men, as well as emphasising their different personalities:

The two men are old friends – closely united friends. The interest of the story must depend greatly upon this fact of their strong, deep friendship and upon the contrast of their two characters. They are in effect, singularly different [Bernard] must be represented as the (roughly speaking) complex nature of the two – the subtle, the refined, the fanciful, the eminently modern … [Gordon] is simpler, deeper, more masculine more easily puzzled, less intellectual, less imaginative. He is greatly under the influence of his friend and has a great esteem for his judgement.

Gordon summons Bernard to Baden-Baden, wishing to both display the woman he has fallen in love with and asking for Bernard’s critical approval of her. Bernard promptly falls in love with the same woman. It does not take a brass plaque on anyone’s front door to realise that when two people share the same love object, it is often a psychological displacement of their attraction to each other.

And this also proves to be the principal plot denouement. The story is not resolved by Gordon’s being reunited with his scatty wife Blanche, nor does it end with Bernard’s marriage to Angela (which is given no dramatic substance at all). It ends when the two men are reunited with each other – and concludes (literally) with Gordon writing Bernard “the longest letter he had ever addressed to him”, and then even more pointedly the narrative ends with these words: “The letter reached Bernard in the middle of his honeymoon.” Gordon has actually re-united himself with Bernard during the consummation of his friend’s marriage.

Confidence – study resources

Confidence – Library of America – Amazon UK

Confidence – Library of America – Amazon US

Confidence – Tark Classics – Amazon UK

Confidence – Tark Classics – Amazon US

Confidence – Kindle edition

Confidence – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James – biographical notes

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study resources

Confidence – plot summary

Chapter I. A young American Bernard Longueville is touring Italy when he meets a woman and her daughter in Siena. He includes the attractive daughter in a landscape picture he paints, which she regards as presumptuous.

Chapter II. Two months later he is in Venice when he receives a letter from his friend Gordon Wright imploring him to come to Baden-Baden to give his opinion on a woman with whom he is in love.

Chapter III. On arrival in Baden-Baden Longueville meets Mrs Vivian and her charge, the talkative Blanche Evers. Then they are joined by the Englishman Captain Lovelock and Miss Vivian, who refuses to acknowledge their earlier meeting in Siena.

Chapter IV. Bernard discusses with Gordon his being in love, which he is finding a painful experience. Bernard conceals from his friend the fact that he has already met Angela Vivian in Siena.

Chapter V. Gordon explains his love for Angela, who moves home from one place to another in Europe with her widowed mother. Gordon has followed them from Dresden to Baden-Baden.

Chapter VI. Bernard spars conversationally with Angela Vivian, who will still not refer to their earlier meeting in Siena. He finds her puzzling but fascinating.

Chapter VII. Next evening they continue to argue and flirt verbally. She is concerned that Captain Lovelock is a penniless trifler, leading on the gullible Blanche Evers. Bernard challenges her directly about their Siena meeting.

Chapter VIII. She refuses to explain, but Bernard spends more time in her company than Gordon, whom she treats politely but indifferently. Gordon reveals that he proposed to her some weeks earlier, but was turned down. He is now perplexed by her.

Chapter IX. Bernard wonders why Mrs Vivian seems to disapprove of him, and discusses Angela with Miss Evers and the Captain.

Chapter X. Bernard decides to ‘interview’ Mrs Vivian, who reveals that she thinks Gordon is very rich and therefore a suitable match for Angela.

Chapter XI. Gordon has to go to England to see his sister. He leaves Bernard with a request that he study Angela closely during his absence.

Chapter XII. Bernard visits Mrs Vivian and Angela where there is further intellectual sparring between them, and a hint that Angela is concealing something about her recent past.

Chapter XIII. Bernard’s thoughts are increasingly taken up with Angela, who correctly guesses that George has asked him to keep an eye on her. Bernard thinks she might marry George for his money, even though she does not love him.

Chapter XIV. Gordon’s return is delayed. Bernard impulsively decides to leave Baden-Baden, but when he mentions it to Angela she asks him to stay – which he does.

Chapter XV. When Gordon returns Bernard reveals his reservations about Angela’s intentions – and then uncharacteristically goes to the casino, where he wins lots of money. Next day Gordon suddenly leaves Baden-Baden, but does not say why. Bernard fears he might have misjudged Angela and done the wrong thing.

Chapter XVI. Suddenly the Vivians and Blanche Evers leave Baden-Baden and travel to Lausanne. Captain Lovelock cannot leave Baden-Baden because of debts he has run up, so Bernard, feeling uneasy about his winnings, lends him money – which he promptly loses in the casino. Bernard then leaves to go round the world alone.

Chapter XVII. Two years later Gordon writes to Bernard to say that he is getting married to Blanche Evers. Bernard travels to New York, where he finds them both very happy with each other.

Chapter XVIII. However, Bernard thinks that Blanche might have married Gordon for his money, and he wonders how his friend can be happy with such a frivolous and garrulous wife. When social gossip about Bernard and Blanche begins to circulate because of the time they are spending together, he decides to leave, whereupon Blanche claims that Gordon does not care for her at all.

Chapter XIX. Bernard goes to California, finds nothing to keep him there, then decides to go back to Europe. As he leaves, Captain Lovelock arrives to stay at Gordon’s house.

Chapter XX. Bernard goes to Normandy where he meets Angela again on the beach. He feels that he has wronged her by spoiling her chances of a marriage to Gordon. They spar with each other again, as in the past.

Chapter XXI. Bernard finds Angela as remote as ever, yet he feels that she does not bear any grudge against him. He takes Mrs Vivian and Angela to the local casino – then suddenly realises that he is in love with Angela.

Chapter XXII. In fact he realises that he has been in love with her for the past three years – and the idea frightens him. He decides to leave immediately, but the next day goes for a long walk instead. When he goes to pay his respects to the Vivians, they have suddenly left for Paris.

Chapter XXIII. Bernard follows the Vivians to Paris, where Mrs Vivian is welcoming and Angela is as polite yet as indifferent as ever.

Chapter XXIV. Visiting frequently, Bernard eventually tells Angela that he has been in love with her since they first met. She accepts his declaration, and Mrs Vivian gives her blessing to them. Bernard apologises for ‘wronging’ her in Baden-Baden, and she explains that she was angry at being a pawn in Gordon’s ‘assessment’ of her.

Chapter XXV. A wedding is planned, but then Gordon, Blanche, and Captain Lovelock suddenly arrive from New York. Blanche is as silly and flirtatious as ever, and Lovelock is a pompous bore, acting as if he is Blanche’s lover.

Chapter XXVI. Bernard and Gordon go for a private walk to resume their close friendship – but they meet Mrs Vivian and Angela, which results in Bernard’s revelation that he is engaged to marry Angela. Gordon does not like the news, and walks off.

Chapter XXVII. When Bernard reports Gordon’s annoyance to Angela she reveals that Gordon asked her for a second time to marry him – even after Bernard had filed his critical report on her. However, she refused him, so Bernard need no longer feel that he had misled either of them.

Chapter XXVIII. Blanche suddenly arrives with Captain Lovelock in tow and gushes indiscreetly about herself and Gordon, claiming to be ‘unwell’. She is eventually surprised to learn about Angela’s impending marriage to Bernard.

Chapter XXIX. On the next day Bernard visits Angela and finds Gordon there. Gordon is angry, feels betrayed, claims his wife is about to leave him, and wants Angela to postpone her marriage so as to give him another chance. She agrees to do so.

Chapter XXX. Angela argues to Bernard that Gordon is actually in love with his wife but doesn’t realise it. She plans to get rid of Captain Lovelock and reconcile Gordon and Blanche. Bernard is exiled to London, where Angela writes to him each day with news of progress. After just over a week, she has persuaded Gordon that all is well.

Chapter XXXI. Angela’s plan works, and Bernard returns to Paris, where he and Gordon are happily reconciled. Gordon takes Blanche to Cairo, and Bernard marries Angela.

Baden-Baden – the Kurhaus

Confidence – principal characters

I	an un-named narrator who makes occasional appearances
Bernard Longueville	a rich American with no purpose
Gordon Wright	his equally rich friend, who dabbles in chemistry
Mrs Vivian	a Bostonian widow
Angela Vivian	her attractive, spirited, and intelligent daughter
Captain Augustus Lovelock	a penniless English hanger-on and bore
Blanche Evers	a featherbrained and garrulous young woman in the care of Mrs Vivian

Henry James’s study

Other works by Henry James

The Aspern Papers (1888) is a psychological drama set in Venice which centres on the tussle for control of a great writer’s correspondence. An elderly lady, ex-lover of the writer, seeks a husband for her daughter. But the potential purchaser of the papers is a dedicated bachelor. Money is also at stake – but of course not discussed overtly. There is a refined battle of wills between them. Who will win in the end? As usual, James keeps the reader guessing. The novella is a masterpiece of subtle narration, with an ironic twist in its outcome. This collection of stories also includes three of his accomplished long short stories – The Private Life, The Middle Years, and The Death of the Lion.
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The Spoils of Poynton (1896) is a short novel which centres on the contents of a country house, and the question of who is the most desirable person to inherit it via marriage. The owner Mrs Gereth is being forced to leave her home to make way for her son and his greedy and uncultured fiancee. Mrs Gereth develops a subtle plan to take as many of the house’s priceless furnishings with her as possible. But things do not go quite according to plan. There are some very witty social ironies, and a contest of wills which matches nouveau-riche greed against high principles. There’s also a spectacular finale in which nobody wins out.
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Daisy Miller (1879) is a key story from James’s early phase in which a spirited young American woman travels to Europe with her wealthy but commonplace mother. Daisy’s innocence and her audacity challenge social conventions, and she seems to be compromising her reputation by her independent behaviour. But when she later dies in Rome the reader is invited to see the outcome as a powerful sense of a great lost potential. This novella is a great study in understatement and symbolic power.
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Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henry James on the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations of James’s novels and stories for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production features, film reviews, box office, and even quizzes.

More on Henry James
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Cousin Bette

July 12, 2017 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, web links

Cousin Bette (1846) is often regarded as the greatest of Balzac’s many novels and stories. It is an action-packed story that deals with all his favourite themes – financial greed, sexual desire, and the drive for social status – plus some spectacular examples of successful and failed revenge. The setting is upper-class society in Paris, most of whose inhabitants are ruthless social climbers, wallowing in financial corruption, adultery, and a world of polite hypocrisy.

Cousin Bette – background

La Cousine Bette (full French title) was first published as a serial in La Constitutionnel in 1846. This was a newspaper featuring commerce, politics, and literature. In 1847 the novel appeared in book format, published by Chlendowski. A year later it appeared as Volume XVII in the definitive Furne edition of Balzac’s collected works, given the title La Comedie Humaine.

The novel began life as a long story called Le Parasite (an ironic reference to Bette’s role in the family) and from the start it was seen as a companion novel to Cousin Pons which appeared the following year. Balzac wrote the whole of Cousin Bette in only two months – an astonishing rate of literary production, even by his normal standards.

In fact he abandoned his usual practice of editing his work on printers’ proof copy. Instead he sent his instalments directly to the newspaper editor. He never saw his work until it was published, and he had to write feverishly in order to stay ahead of the daily instalments. These are still available at Le Constitutionnel online archives (in the original French). See entries for 8 October to 3 December 1846.

It is worth noting that his original text was split into short scenes, each of which was given a descriptive and sometimes ironic title (‘A third father for the Marneffe child’). These titles were removed in later editions in order to save space – but they make the novel much easier to read, and offer an additional level of entertainment.

Cousin Bette – commentary

Sex and money

It is quite clear from this novel that Balzac sees the principal forces driving his characters as their desire for sex and money, quite apart from their social climbing and a taste for sumptuous living. The main character Hulot is an example of sexual obsession, who ruins his family in his pursuit of courtesans and young girls. His counterpart Valerie Marneffe uses her sexual allure to achieve a rich and comfortable life in the upper echelons of society. The two items – sex and money – are often directly related.

But it is interesting to note the differences in the ways these two topics are treated Whilst there is no shortage of desperation, dramatic irony, and social ruin into which characters are prepared to put themselves in their pursuit of sex – the female characters passively and the males actively – there is remarkably little explicit mention of any sexual activity.

This can be explained by the literary conventions of the period. It would simply not have been possible to publish descriptions of explicit sex in the early nineteenth century – either in France or any other European country. In fact novels produced in France were considered dangerously racy for even hinting at sexual desire.

Yet the reverse is true of the financial connections that dominate the characters’ lives. Everybody seems to be aware to the last Franc how much people are worth, how much they spend on their homes, how much it costs to maintain a mistress or furnish an apartment, and how big some daughter’s dowry will be.

Characters such as Crevel and Hulot offer quite clearly defined sums of money in return for sexual favours from their mistresses – sometimes in the form of regular incomes. Crevel offers to pay a specific dowry for Adeline’s daughter Hortense if Adeline will become his lover. When she refuses, his similar offer to Valerie Marneffe makes even clearer the business-like nexus between cash and sex:

Be all mine. You won’t regret it. To start with, I’ll give you a share certificate with eight thousand Francs a year, but as an annuity. I won’t give you the capital until you’ve been faithful to me for five years.

The separation of sexual desire from conventional marriage might strike many readers as rather surprising, if not shocking. But there are legal and socially structural reasons why this was prevalent. For an explanation of the French establishment of the Napoleonic Code and its effects on marriage and inheritance, see my comments on Balzac’s earlier and equally powerful novel Old Goriot (1834).

Baron Hulot

From the opening of the novel until its very last sentence, Baron Hulot is obsessed by his pursuit of sex. He disgraces and ruins his family by his behaviour, he spends (squanders) thousands and thousands of Francs on keeping one mistress after another, and he neglects his saintly wife who dies with shock when she overhears him propositioning a kitchen maid when he is eighty years old: ‘My wife hasn’t got long to live, and if you like you can be a baroness’. For good measure, he is also guilty of embezzlement. He sets up a fraudulent operation in government military supplies to Algeria, and when the crime is exposed his elder brother has to repay the debt in order to save the honour of the family.

Valerie Marneffe
Hulot spends much of the novel in thrall to the young and attractive Madame Marneffe, until he is displaced by Crevel – who has more money. She is adept at sustaining multiple simultaneous relationships, extracting money from her admirers, and living in luxury at secret locations. Even though she is married to the seedy clerk Marneffe, she counts Hulot, Crevel, Steinbock, and Montes amongst her lovers. When she becomes pregnant she manages to persuade all five men that they are the father of her child. Her success appears unstoppable, until she and Crevel are poisoned by the jealous Montes – both of them dying in a gruesome and lingering manner.

Cousin Bette
Bette is the ‘poor relation’ of the novel. She is a cousin of the Hulot family, and bitterly resents their patronising attitude to her. She is motivated entirely by revenge – in a series of psychologically complex manoeuvres. First she takes Steinbock under what is supposed to be her maternal wing; but she is intensely jealous when he marries Hortense and becomes a member of the family. She allies herself with Valerie Marneffe in order to extract money from the Hulots, and she gradually becomes obsessed with the idea of marrying Hulot’s elder brother and being a countess. But none of her schemes are successful, and she dies of tuberculosis, taking her secret hatred of the family to her grave.

Cousin Bette – study resources

Cousin Bette – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Cousin Bette – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Cousin Bette – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Cousin Bette – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

Cousin Bette – Everyman – Amazon UK

Cousin Bette – Everyman – Amazon US

Honore de Balzac

Cousin Bette – plot summary

Monsieur Crevel calls on Adeline Hulot to pay court to her. He reveals his illicit relationship with the singer Josepha, whom Adeline’s husband Hector Hulot stole to be his own mistress. Crevel predicts that Hulot will ruin himself with expenditure on women, and he offers to supply a dowry for Adeline’s daughter Hortense in exchange for her ‘favours’ as a lover. She flatly refuses his proposal.

Cousin Bette is a ‘family parasite’ who remains stubbornly unfashionable. She secretly has under her protection Count Steinbock, a young sculptor, but as his patroness, not his lover. She files legal papers to record the financial support she has given him.

Josepha leaves Hulot for a much richer man. Adeline consoles her husband for this loss, and he promptly takes up with Madame Marneffe. Their daughter Hortense meets Steinbock, who immediately falls in love with her. Hulot promotes Steinbock, who immediately rises to fashionable success.

Mme Marneffe reveals the relationship between Steinbock and Hortense to Bette, who is furious. The two scheming women become accomplices. Bette vows to avenge herself on Steinbock and the Hulots. Crevel seeks revenge on Hulot as a sexual rival.

Bette has Steinbock arrested for debt so that he cannot marry Hortense, but he is released the same day. Hulot engages in fraudulent business deals to fund his daughter’s marriage and his own expenses in keeping a mistress. He moves his wife into a smaller apartment to save money.

Crevel is envious of Hulot’s possession of Mme Marneffe. Bette accumulates money from Crevel and Hulot, both of whom think she is working on their behalf. She also ingratiates herself with Adeline. Hulot incurs further debts which the family cannot meet. Bette schemes to marry into the family as an act of revenge.

Tbe young Brazilian Montes suddenly appears as Mme Marneffe’s youngest lover. She hides him in her bedroom whilst Hulot rages jealously about Crevel. Valerie then tricks Crevel into deposing Hulot as her ‘protector’. Crevel reveals his hidden love nest to Hulot and pretends that they are both better off without her. Next day they all meet at Valerie’s where she is deciding between Crevel and Montes as her ‘protector’.

Steinbock’s reputation declines and he lives extravagantly. Bette persuades him to borrow money from Mme Marneffe Steinbock flirts with Valerie and asks her to pose for a sculpture. He lies to his wife Hortense, and they quarrel, but are reconciled by Adeline. Valerie becomes pregnant with Hulot’s child.

Hortense leaves Steinbock and goes to live with her mother. Montes, Crevel, Hulot, and Steinbock all believe they are the father of Valerie’s child – and Monsieur Marneffe pretends to be. Hulot’s fraud in Algeria is uncovered. He continues to meet Valerie Marneffe in Crevel’s love nest, until there is suddenly a police raid. This is exposed as a trap set by Mme Marneffe herself. The official report of Hulot’s Algerian fraud is silently quashed by his young boss as a favour.

But Hulot must find money to cover up the Algerian swindle. His wife Adeline offers herself to Crevel in exchange for the money. Crevel turns her down – but is touched by her piety and offers to lend her the money.

Hulot’s brother pays the missing Algerian money in order to protect the family’s good name – but he then dies. Adeline seeks to ‘rescue’ her husband morally, but he runs away and hides in secret, pursued by debtors.

He visits Josepha, who sets him up in an embroidery shop with money and a sixteen year old mistress. Valentin Hulot and his mother Adeline are also given money and jobs. Valerie Marneffe bears a stillborn child, and her husband dies.

Adeline visits Josepha where they both learn that Hulot’s embroidery business has gone into debt and he has run off with another young girl. Josepha promises to help her find Hulot. Bette finds Hulot and lends him money to set up another business with the girl.

At a courtesan’s dinner party it is revealed to Baron Montes that Valerie Marneffe is about to marry Crevel and has Steinbock as a lover. Crevel vows to kill her, but even when confronted in the love nest with Steinbock, she bluffs her way out

Crevel and Valerie Marneffe both become infected with the deadly disease Montes has threatened to use as a revenge. They both die, leaving money to the Hulots.

Adeline meets the fifteen year old Atila who is living with Hulot in hiding. She takes her husband back home, and the whole family is re-united. Cousin Bette dies, along with her secret hatred of the family. Adeline discovers Hulot seducing the young kitchen maid and dies of shock, after which Hulot, now eighty years old, marries the maid.

Cousin Bette – principal characters

Baron Hulot	a 60 year old rake, ex-army administrator
Count Hulot	his honourable older brother
Adeline Hulot	the Baron’s attractive and saintly forgiving wife (48)
Hortense Hulot	their daughter, who marries Steinbock
Victorin Hulot	the son, who becomes a successful lawyer
Lizbeth Fischer	their cousin, an old maid at 41
Celestin Crevel	a wealthy rake, mayor in Paris, former perfumier
Celestine Crevel	his daughter, married to Victorin Hulot
Josepha (Mirah)	young Jewish singer, mistress to Crevel and Hulot
Valerie Marneffe	young and attractive, with multiple lovers
Jean-Paul Marneffe	her seedy and depraved husband
Wenceslas Steinbock	a young Polish count and sculptor
Baron Montes de Montejanos	a rich Brazilian, lover to Valerie Marneffe

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Decline and Fall

March 24, 2018 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study guide, commentary, web links

Decline and Fall (1928) was Evelyn Waugh’s first novel. It was very well received on first publication, and he followed it up with similar acerbic social satires in Vile Bodies (1930), A Handful of Dust (1934), and Scoop (1938). Waugh is probably best known for his later novel Brideshead Revisited (1945) which was the basis of a very successful television series. But Decline and Fall has the distinction of introducing what became a hallmark of Waugh’s style – the use of black comedy.

Decline and Fall – commentary

The novel is in the comic tradition of the naive young innocent who becomes the victim of ever increasing disasters. This is a theme that goes back to Voltaire’s Candide (1759). Paul Pennyfeather is an orphan who is punished for a misdemeanour he did not commit and is cast out into the world with virtually nothing.

He is the blameless victim of the Bollinger Club’s vandalism, then his guardian refuses to give him his rightful inheritance and expels him from home. All the people he then meets (with the exception of Peter Beste-Chetwynde) are frauds, liars, criminals, and social failures living in a world of deception, incompetence, and villany.

Dr Fagan, his employer, is a posturing academic fraud who runs a seedy private college (a ‘public school’) with no regard for the students education or welfare. Fagan has a ‘butler’ Philbrick who turns out to be a confidence trickster, and who is later arrested for fraud. The glamorous and wealthy Mrs Beste-Chetwynde might have poisoned her husband and lives off the earnings of prostitutes. The prison governor Sir Wilfred Lucas-Dockery is a naive penal reformist who is responsible for a prisoner being murdered.

Contemporary readers will have little difficulty in seeing this as a radically irreverent critique of what in the 1920s was politically correct. The targets for Waugh’s satire range from moral blindness to modernist architecture. But there are also some excruciating passages which reveal the astonishing levels of racism that were considered acceptable at that time.

Margot Beste-Chetwynde arrives at the school sports day accompanied by her black lover Sebastian ‘Chokey’ Chalmondley. The reactions of the other guests are voiced using expressions that seem quite shocking: ‘What price the coon?’, ‘I think it’s an insult bringing a nigger here’, and ‘to put it bluntly, they have uncontrollable passions … it’s just their nature. Animals, you know’.

These opinions might reflect the social blindness and narrow prejudices of the fictional characters in the scene, but Waugh also makes Sebastian himself a figure of fun. Whilst wishing to claim an appreciation of traditional English culture, he responds to most enquiries with the stock phrase ‘I sure am that’. He makes a perfectly articulate plea for tolerance and understanding, but it is difficult to escape the impression that Waugh to some extent shares the prejudices he is satirising. For a fuller discussion of this topic, see David Bradshaw’s excellent introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Decline and Fall.

Black humour

In addition to the comically villanous characters, there are several instances of what we now call black humour scattered throuout the narrative. These often involve a certain amount of criminality or violence. Three years befor the story opens, the Bollinger Club dinner featured a caged fox that had been stoned to death with champagne bottles. At the school sports day, the young Lord Tangent is shot in the foot by the drunken Prendergast with his starting pistol. It is mentioned quite casually in a later chapter that his foot has been amputated.

Margot Beste-Chetwynde not only owns a chain of brothels in South America, she demolishes a listed Tudor building, to put in its place a monstrosity of plate glass, lifts, leather walls, and modernist furniture designed by a twenty-five year old ‘professor’ of foreign extraction. Moreover it is quite possible that she has poisoned her husband (with ground glass).

The governor of the first prison to which Paul is sent is a theoretical reformist who believes hardened criminals can be reformed by appealing to their ‘creative’ instincts. When a religious maniac reveals that he was formerly a cabinet-maker, the governor issues him with a set of carpenter’s tools – which he promptly uses to saw off a man’s head.

The scenes at the Llanabba College that feature locals are drenched in anti-Welsh sentiment. Waugh captures brilliantly the fractured syntax of the local stationmaster speaking in English, which for him is a foreign language:

‘To march about you would not like us? … We have a fine yellow flag look you that embroidered for us was in silks.’

The stationmaster divides his time between squeezing more money out of Dr Fagan and trying to sell his sister’s services as a prostitute at cut-price rates. Doctor Fagan then philosophises about the Welsh in general:

From the earliest times the Welsh have been looked upon as an unclean people. It is thus they have preserved their racial integrity. Their sons and daughters mate freely with the sheep but not with human kind except their blood relations … The Welsh are the only nation in the world that has produced no graphic or plastic art, no architecture, no drama. They just sing and blow down wind instruments of plated silver.

Waugh attributes these outrageous opinions to the foppish and incompetent Doctor Fagan, but once again it is difficult to escape the suspicion that he is hiding his own prejudices behind this literary strategy. When introducing the local brass band into the narrative he does so in third person mode that is just as insulting:

They advanced huddled together with the loping tread of wolves, peering about them furtively as they came, as though in constant terror of ambush; they slavered at their mouths, which hung loosely over their receding chins, while each clutched under his ape-like arm a burden of curious and unaccountable shape.

In fact the black humour and the comic potential of naively thwarted expectations are rather prescient of attitudes that only became more popularly widespread in Britain after the Second World War. Evelyn Waugh was well ahead of his time in this respect.

Decline and Fall – study resources

Decline and Fall – Penguin – Amazon UK

Decline and Fall – Penguin – Amazon US

Decline and Fall – York Notes – Amazon UK

Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited – Amazon UK

Decline and Fall – DVD film – Amazon UK

Decline and Fall

Evelyn Waugh – by Henry Lamb

Decline and Fall – plot synopsis

Prelude Paul Pennyweather has his trousers removed by the Bollinger Club and is unjustly sent down from Oxford University for ‘indecent behaviour’.

Part One

I. Paul is castigated by his guardian for this misadventure. He withholds Paul’s rightful inheritance and expels him from home. Paul secures a post as schoolmaster at a private college in Wales.

II. Paul arrives at the inhospitable Llanabba Castle, where he meets Dr Fagan and his daughters. He is given as special subject something he knows nothing about.

III. He meets student Peter Beste-Chetwynde and ex public school Captain Grimes, who regales him with stories of his failures. Grimes is engaged to the unappetising elder Fagan daughter.

IV. Paul meets ex-clergyman Prendergast, who bores him with tales of his fundamental religious doubts.

V. Paul tries to establish discipline with his form, and becomes popular. Doubts are cast about Philbrick.

VI. Paul is offered £20 compensation from Oxford, thinks to refuse it on principle, but Grimes accepts it on his behalf. Paul will treat his colleagues to dinner with the money.

VII. Dr Fagan makes grandiose arrangments for the sports day. The ‘butler’ Philbrick reveals his unsavoury (and imaginary) criminal connections to Paul, and reveals his intention to marry Diana Fagan.

VIII. The sports events are a mis-managed farce. Prendergast, who is drunk, shoots a boy in the foot with his starting gun.

IX. Mrs Margot Beste-Chetwyde arrives with her black lover Sebastian ‘Chokey’ Chalmondley. He is the object of virulent racist commentary from the guests.

X. In the aftermath of the sports day, Paul has fallen for Mrs Beste-Chetwynde.

XI. The butler Philbrick has given the staff various fantastic stories about his origins.

XII. Dr Fagan disapproves of Grimes as a potential son-in-law. The staff go out to celebrate Grimes’ forthcoming marriage to the principal’s daughter. Grimes (who already has a wife) laments falling into the trap of matrimony.

XIII. Grimes is depressed by his marriage, and resents being patronised by Dr Fagan. The police arrive to arrest Philbrick for fraud. Grimes stages his own disappearance.

Part Two

I. Margot Beste-Chetwynde demolishes a historic Tudor building at King’s Thursday and has a modern replacement designed by young modernist ‘Professor’ Otto Silenus.

II. In the Easter holidays Peter Beste-Chetwynde invites Paul back to his mother’s new house.

III. There is a weekend party to show off Margot’s new modernist construction. She stays in bed, taking drugs. Paul proposes marriage to her, and he is accepted.

IV. Grimes reappears, working for a Latin-American night club consortium owned by Margot.

V. Margot is in London, interviewing hostess applicants for her Latin-American night club business (brothels).

VI. Elaborate preparations are made for the wedding. Paul moves in to the Ritz. Paul’s friend Potts is working for the League of Nations. Paul goes to Marseilles to sort out visa problems for the hostesses. He returns to his much-publicised marriage day, but is arrested by the police.

Part Three

I. Paul is sentenced to seven years imprisonment for white slave trafficking. At the trial Potts is chief witness for the prosecution. Margot flees to her villa in Corfu. The prison is run in a repressive and punitive manner. Paul meets Philbrick as a fellow prisoner and Prendergast is the prison chaplain.

II. Paul wishes to remain in solitary confinement, which is against the rules, so the governor makes him the subject of a rehabilitation experiment.

III. Paul exercises with a religious homicidal maniac, and complains to the governor. Since the man was formerly a cabinet maker, the governor issues him with a set of carpenter’s tools for ‘therapeutic rehabilitation’. The prisoner saws Prendergast’s head off.

IV. Paul is transferred to Dartmoor prison, where he meets Grimes, who has been sent down for bigamy. Peter Beste-Chetwynde becomes an Earl. Margot visits to announce her forthcoming marriage to Miles Maltravers (son of the Home Secretary).

V. Grimes escapes from Dartmoor but is thought to have perished in a mire. Paul thinks of him as inextinguishable.

VI. The Home Secretary arranges for Paul’s removal to a nursing home owned by Dr Fagan. A fake death certificate is provided by a surgeon who is drunk. Paul is smuggled away to Margot’s villa in Corfu.

VII. Paul recovers in Corfu, where he meets ‘Professor’ Silenus again. Paul returns to his old college at Oxford to study theology.

Epilogue Peter Beste-Chetwynde, now Earl Pastmaster, visits Paul as an undergraduate at Oxford. Margot has married Maltravers and become Viscountess Metroland, with Alastair Digby-Vaine-Trumpington as her accepted lover.

Decline and Fall – principal characters

Paul Pennyweather	a young student of theology
Dr Augustus Fagan	foppish Llanabba Castle headmaster
Captain Grimes	schoolmaster with wooden leg
Mr Prendergast	ex-clergyman with a wig and religious doubts
Solomon Philbrick	college ‘butler’ and fraudster
Professor Silenus	a modernist architect (with no experience)
Margot Beste-Chetwynde	rich and glamorous society woman
Peter Beste-Chetwynde	Paul’s friend and student
Miles Maltravers	marries Margot, and becomes Vicount Metroland
Alastair Digby-Vaine-Trumpington	Margot’s lover

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Despair

March 7, 2016 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, plot, and study resources

Despair was written in 1932 when Vladimir Nabokov was living in exile in Berlin and it was first serialized as Otchayanie in the émigré review Sovremennye Zapiski in Paris. It was then released in single volume book form by the publishing house Petropolis in Berlin in 1936. The following year Nabokov made a translation into English (his third language) which was then published by John Lane in London in 1937.

Nabokov re-translated the novel in 1965 as part of the post-Lolita refurbishment of his earlier works that had been written in Russian and were largely unknown to readers in the English-speaking world. In an author’s foreword he admits that “I have done more than revamp my thirty-year-old translation” – and it is certainly true that the current text bears a number of the hallmarks of Nabokov’s mannered later prose style.

Despair – critical commentary

The unreliable narrator

This is one of Nabokov’s many fictions in which a first person narrator is seriously deranged or neurotic almost to the point of madness. An early example is the self-obsessed Smurov in The Eye (1930); the most famous is Humbert Humbert, the confessional paedophile narrator of Lolita (1955), and in 1962 Charles Kinbote the fictional editor of Pale Fire turns his madness into a work of literary interpretation. All of these characters, despite their self-regard and even their crimes, remain grotesquely fascinating because of the entertaining prose style Nabokov gives them by which to transmit their stories.

Hermann is unreliable in the sense that his narrative is a novel-length study in self-justification. He has nursed the illusion of having met his own double, has murdered him both to collect on the insurance and as he believes, a creative work of artistry – the perfect crime. Hermann is vain, boastful, and even admits to being a liar; he misinterprets events; he is blind to his wife’s adultery, and he thinks himself superior to everyone else in the novel.

Nabokov’s literary skill is in creating a first person narrator through whose eyes all available information is relayed to the reader – who is nevertheless able to discern the ‘truth’ lying behind the events and opinions in the narrator’s account. Nabokov offers a playful and complex game of literary hide-and-seek to the reader, planting clues in his text for the reader to enjoy and decipher.

He always plays fair by the rules of narrative logic and gives readers a chance to work out the subtlest of clues. For instance Hermann is caught out in his crime because he leaves Felix’s walking stick (which also bears his name) in the car he has abandoned in the countryside – but both the stick and its signature have been mentioned previously, planted deep within the narrative for the attentive (or eagle-eyed) reader to spot.

Narrative mode

Even though it is not easy to see how much the original Russian version was ‘improved’ during its later translation, the narrative is clearly very sophisticated. Technically, Herman is delivering the story after its events have concluded. He has read newspaper reports of his crime and decides to compose his own account of what happened.

But throughout the novel Nabokov very skilfully combines a timescale that includes the narrative present, with Hermann’s reflections on his own account of events, plus flashes forward in time. Yet in order to retain the reader’s interest, Nabokov must not give away too much of the story which is yet to come – so Hermann’s ‘premonitions’ are masked as psychological curios or mere eccentricities. But they are actual pointers to the fact that he knows what will happen because he is giving his account in retrospect.

For example, early in the novel, when Hermann visits the countryside allotment with Lydia and Ardalion (Chapter Two) he feels that the locale is ‘familiar’. It is familiar to him, because it is where he has just killed Felix before starting to write his narrative. .

Conversational style

Nabokov exploits the full range of possibilities offered by a first person narrative mode and the quasi-conversational manner that he made famous. As the narrator, Hermann addresses the reader, he thinks aloud, interrupts himself, ( ‘Well, as I was saying’) and comments on the process of composition, often trailing off onto irrelevant topics:

‘but I am digressing, digressing—maybe I want to digress … never mind, let us go on, where was I?’

Built in to the narrative is a meta-critique of fictional techniques and novel clichés – many of which are clearly self-referential:

‘How shall we begin this chapter? I offer several variations to choose from. Number one (readily adopted in novels where the narrative is conducted in the first person by the real or substitute author):

He also criticises alternative conventions of literary presentation – including the epistolary novel:

‘it would be possible now to adopt an epistolic form of narration. A time-honored form with great achievements in the past. From Ex to Why — “Dear Why” — and above you are sure to find the date … The reader soon ceases to pay any attention whatever to the dates’

With almost predictable irony, Hermann himself abandons his sequence of chapters, and adopts a popular literary mode — “Alas, my tale degenerates into a diary … the lowest form of literature” — complete with dated entries, the last of which is April 1st.

Despair – study resources

Despair – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Despair – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Otchayanie – Russian original – Amazon UK

Otchayanie – Russian original – Amazon US

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov Amazon UK

Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years – Biography: Vol 1

Vladimir Nabokov: American Years – Biography: Vol 2

Zembla – the official Nabokov web site

The Paris Review – Interview with Vladimir Nabokov

Nabokov’s first English editions – Bob Nelson’s collection

Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Vladimir Nabokov at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study materials

Despair was also made into a film in 1978 by the German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. It features Dirk Bogard in his last starring role as Hermann, and has a screenplay written by Tom Stoppard.

Despair – film on DVD – Amazon UK

Despair – principal characters

Hermann	a Russian of German descent living in Berlin (35)
Lydia	his scatterbrained wife (30)
Felix Wohlfahrt	a vagrant
Ardalion	Lydia’s cousin, a would-be painter
Orlovious	a bachelor friend of Hermann

Despair – chapter summaries

Chapter One Herman is in Prague on chocolate factory business. Strolling on a local hill, he comes across Felix the tramp. Hermann is convinced he is his double.

Chapter Two Hermann is a communist sympathiser, whilst Lydia is not. He starts growing a beard and avoids mirrors. He gives a self-centred account of Lydia and her scatter-brained attitudes , and then describes his experience of physical disassociation. Herman and Lydia visit an allotment her cousin Ardalion has bought in the countryside.

Chapter Three Herman reflects on his childhood passion for writing, which he thinks of as ‘lying’. He introduces the character Orlovius, and mentions problems in the chocolate business. Meanwhile, he makes further visits to Ardalion’s countryside retreat.

Chapter Four Herman writes to Felix with an offer of work and arranges to meet him. Lydia spends a lot of time with her wastrel cousin Ardalion. Herman visits the town where he is to meet Felix. Elements of the town remind him of other places he has visited.

Chapter Five Herman meets Felix and pretends to be a film actor, then spins him a yarn about wanting an understudy. Felix doesn’t believe him and refuses the offer. Herman takes him back to his hotel room for the night and explains the real plan. He wants him as a visual alibi whilst he does something illegal. In the early morning, Herman leaves Felix asleep and goes back home.

Chapter Six It is clear to the reader (but not to Hermann) that Lydia is having an affair with her obnoxious cousin Ardalion. Someone calls at the house asking for Hermann, who has him sent away, thinking it is Felix. But it turns out to be a friend of Ardalion, and Hermann suddenly wonders if Felix will write to him.

Chapter Seven Hermann goes to the post office and collects letters left poste restante from Felix. They complain then menace him with vague threats of blackmail. He writes to Felix with instructions then tries to bribe Ardalion to go to Italy.

Chapter Eight Ardalion borrows money and is much delayed in his departure for Italy. Hermann invents a story of discovering a long-lost brother for Lydia. He has a scheme of planting his own identity on Felix, killing him, then collecting the insurance money. He rehearses Lydia’s part in the plot, even though she is very reluctant to participate.

Chapter Nine Hermann reflects on his literary enterprise. He has plans to send his manuscript to a famous Russian émigré writer. He drives into the countryside, where he meets Felix. He shaves Felix, exchanges their clothes, and then shoots him. He then escapes by train.

Chapter Ten Hermann supplies his narrative with an ending in which all his plans are successful – but then returns to the truth. He goes to a quiet French hotel near the Spanish border. When the murder is reported in newspapers he goes into complete denial and is angry that they make no mention of the similarity of victim and murderer. He decides to write his own version of events.

Chapter Eleven Hermann buys another newspaper and reads that his car has been discovered. He re-reads his manuscript and realises that Felix’s walking stick (which bears his name) was in the car. He picks up a pre-arranged letter from Lydia, but it turns out to be an offensive rebuke from Ardalion. He moves to rooms in a little village, but is immediately recognised, detected, and his account ends whilst he is awaiting arrest.

Vladimir Nabokov – web links

Vladimir Nabokov at Mantex
Biographical notes, book reviews, tutorials, study guides, videos, web links, and essays on the Complete Short Stories.

Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia
Biographical notes, list of major works, bibliography, and web links

Lolita USA
A ‘geographical scrutiny’ of Humbert and Lolita’s journey across America. Essay and photographic study by Dieter E. Zimmer.

Vladimir Nabokov Writings – First Appearance
An illustrated collection of first editions in English. Photographs with bibliographical notes compiled by Bob Nelson

Vladimir Nabokov at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, plot, box office, trivia, continuity errors, and quiz.

Zembla
Biography, timeline, photographs, eTexts, sound clips, butterflies, literary criticism, online journal, scholarly essays, and an online annotated version of Ada – housed at Pennsylvania State University Library.

Nabokov Museum
A major collection housed in Nabokov’s old family home (now a museum) in St. Petersburg. – biography, photos, family home, videos in English and Russian.

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov Vladimir Nabokov held the unique distinction of being one of the most important writers of the twentieth century in two separate languages, Russian and English. This volume offers a concise and informative introduction into the author’s fascinating creative world. Specially commissioned essays by distinguished scholars illuminate numerous facets of the writer’s legacy, from his early contributions as a poet and short-story writer to his dazzling achievements as one of the most original novelists of the twentieth century. Topics receiving fresh coverage include Nabokov’s narrative strategies, the evolution of his world-view, and his relationship to the literary and cultural currents of his day. The volume also contains valuable supplementary material such as a chronology of the writer’s life and a guide to further critical reading. Buy the book here

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Desperate Remedies

November 3, 2016 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, further reading

Desperate Remedies (1871) was Thomas Hardy’s first published novel. He wrote it following the disappointment of having his first work The Poor Man and the Lady rejected for publication by Chapman and Hall. To court commercial success he cast his second work in a genre that was very popular at that time – the sensation novel. These were tales which in the words of critic John Sutherland were ‘designed to jolt the reader’. They did this by the inclusion of topics considered very daring at that period – such as bigamy, sex outside marriage, fraud, disputed wills, and crime of all kinds.

Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon had written amazingly successful novels which we might now class as ‘thrillers’ – The Woman in White (1861) and Lady Audley’s Secret (1861) both exploited subjects such as dark family secrets, bigamy, and imprisonment.

Hardy was to have plenty of trouble with the censorship of his later and more famous novels, but even here in his first, he manages to include suicide, attempted rape, lesbianism, and murder.

Desperate Remedies – a note on the text

The novel was first published anonymously by Tinsley Brothers in 1871 in the three-volume format which was common at the time. There was an American edition in 1874, a ‘New Edition’ in 1889, and a further edition for the first collection of Hardy’s work, the ‘Wessex Novels’ published by Osgood, MacIlvaine in 1896. This definitive edition was then superseded by the ‘Wessex Edition’ of 1912.

Hardy made many revisions to the original text of Desperate Remedies for these later editions, but they were largely minor issues concerned with distinctions of social class, the use of dialect amongst rural characters, and the topographical integration of the setting into what by the latter part of the nineteenth century had become known as ‘Wessex’.

For a full discussion of these textual revisions, see the bibliographical essay by Patricia Ingham that is part of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of the novel, which reprints the 1871 version of the text.

Desperate Remedies – critical commentary

The very nature of the sensation novel is to introduce mysteries and withhold crucial information to create suspense and drama in the narrative. The following commentary contains what are called ‘plot spoilers’ – that is, revelations about the secrets and concealed details in the story. These comments assume that you have read the novel – so if you have not, ‘look away now’ as they say in television sports reporting.

The sensation novel

This novel quite deliberately exploited the conventions of the sensation novel which had become very popular in the 1860s under the influence of writers such as Wilkie Collins and May Elizabeth Braddon. Yet Desperate Remedies was not a big success at the time of its publication, and it remains even now one of Hardy’s lesser-known works.

However, it throws a very interesting light onto his later, darker, and more tragic works. These more famous novels quite clearly use the elements of sensationalism, but are rarely recognised as doing so, because Hardy embedded these ingredients into a heavily sculpted world of pastoral realism that he made his own and called ‘Wessex’.

The sensation novel was called ‘a novel with a mystery’ and usually included elements of irregular sexuality, hidden relationships, deviant behaviour, and crime. These novels pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable in the literary novel at the same time as appealing to a popular audience – in much the same way that television soap operas and serial dramas do today.

The very foundation of the central mystery in the novel is one of illegitimate birth. Miss Aldclyffe was seduced as a young girl by her older cousin. She gave birth to a son, and then abandoned the child – who grew up to be Aeneas Manston – the central character and villain in the novel. The secret relationship between them is hinted at but not revealed until the very last pages of the narrative.

Manston blackmails his own mother into persuading Springrove to marry his cousin Adelaide rather than Cytherea. Blackmail was another favourite topic in sensation novels.

There is a hint of bigamy when Manston falls in love with Cytherea and asks her to marry him. He does this whilst he is still married to Eunice Manston – though nobody else knows about her at the time. Ironically in dramatic terms, Eunice suddenly reappears and is thought to die in the fire – but the truth is that she is murdered by Manston when she threatens to expose him,

It is therefore a double irony that as a result of this murder Manston becomes technically free to marry Cytherea, which he does – only to be thwarted in his attempts to consummate the marriage.

He then lives with a prostitute (Anne Seaway) whom he passes off as his wife Eunice – which is technically illegal and called personation. Finally, when his crimes are exposed, he commits suicide.

There is also what we would now call an attempted rape when Manston escapes capture and goes to the house where Cytherea is living. However, the incident is problematic in terms of interpretation across a time gap of one hundred and fifty years.

First it should be noted that technically he is married to Cytherea, and legitimately married, since his first wife is now dead. Second, he is well aware of his legal rights: “let me come in” he symbolically demands – “I am your husband”.

The interpretive difficulty here is tha he is not acting illegally. At that time in the mid nineteenth century the concept of rape within marriage would not be recognised, so Manston is acting within ‘rights’ that he is very keen to pursue.

Hardy is clearly exploring the boundaries of marriage, legality, sexuality, and moral behaviour, as he was to do in his later novels which often had similar elements of ‘false’ and unconsummated marriages, as well as perverse relationships – up to his very last novel Jude the Obscure.

If the legality of this incident seems amazing, so is the curious scene of lesbianism between Miss Aldclyffe and Cytherea on the girl’s arrival at Knapwater House. This episode is noteworthy for a number of reasons.

First, the abruptness of its occurrence. Miss Aldclyffe has met her new chamber maid Cytherea only two hours previously, on her retirement after dinner. Second, the very explicit nature in which it is described: Miss Aldclyffe actually gets into bed with Cytherea, where there is undressing and demands for more passionate kissing. Third, this burst of homosexuality has almost no bearing on what follows in the plot: there is no further evidence of any Sapphic inclinations on Miss Aldclyffe’s part.

But there are two further points worth making about the scene. At the time that Hardy was writing, there was hardly any public consciousness of sexual desire between women. When parliament made sex between two people of the same gender a crime (1885) the bill only included males, who would be accused of ‘gross indecency’. Women were not included because (it is now thought) to do so might draw their attention to it as a possible activity. The well-known story about Queen Victoria not being able to understand lesbianism is a myth generated during the 1970s.

Consequently, this now-famous passage in the novel passed without comment or outrage in 1871, but when Hardy came to revise the novel later in the century, he toned down the scene. Mrs Aldclyffe’s Sapphic lunges were made more ‘maternal’ – to fit with the vaguely protective behaviour she exhibits towards Cytherea during the later parts of the novel.

Hardy packs a number of sensation novel elements into Desperate Remedies, and it is worth noting how topics such as sex before marriage, bigamy, ‘false’ marriages, rape, and murder crop up in later works such as Far from the Madding Crowd (1874>, The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891).

Letters

It is amazing what a large part written communications play in the plot of the novel. Letters are written, stolen, forged, hidden, and in general form important links in the communications shared by the participants.

Miss Aldclyffe sets two major strands of the story in motion when she places advertisements for a house-maid and then a land steward. This brings both Cytherea and Manston into her household and under her influence – though it could also be argued that both Miss Aldclyffe and Manston (mother and son) fall in love with Cytherea.

Miss Aldclyffe also sends Manston a bogus letter which purports to come from the Society of Architects, to make sure that he applies for the job of steward.

A casual note written by Cytheria to Manston is used by Miss Aldclyffe to persuade Springrove that Cytherea is in love with the steward, and possession of the note is a crucial element in its persuasiveness.

A copy of a poem found in Eunice Manston’s sewing box written by her husband turns out to be significant. It mentions the colour of her eyes as ‘azure’, whereas the woman masquerading as Eunice (Anne Seaway) has black eyes. This helps to expose Manston’s guilt and duplicity.

Later, Manston himself places bogus adverts in London newspapers asking for news of his wife Eunice – whom he knows is dead, because he has killed her. He then composes fake replies to those adverts which purport to come from Eunice, but he has Anne Seaway transpose them into an imitation of his wife’s handwriting.

Manston also intercepts a letter written by Springrove to Owen Gaye. Manston changes some of the incriminating information it contains, then re-inserts it into the postal system. (It is worth noting that the credibility of the plot becomes rather strained at this juncture.)

Finally, Manston’s last contribution to written information is his prison confession. In this he explains the exact circumstances of murdering his wife and how he concealed the body. This is a neat resolution to the mystery – because this is information only he could know.

Sex in the novel

During the mid to late nineteenth century it was not possible to depict scenes of explicit sexual behaviour in English novels. There were unwritten conventions prohibiting the mention of such subjects, and these unofficial forms of censorship were most severely enforced by circulating libraries such as Mudie’s who accounted for a large proportion of book sales.

But like most skilful and inventive novelists, Hardy found a way round such prohibitions by writing about sex using symbolism and metaphor Two scenes from Desperate Remedies illustrate this point – and both involve Cytherea and the two men who wish to possess her.

In the first, Edward Springrove takes Cytherea rowing in the bay at Creston Harbour. They have only just met, and it is the first time they have been alone together.

They thus sat facing each other in the graceful yellow cockle-shell, and his eyes frequently found a resting place in the depths of hers. The boat was so small that at each return of the sculls, when his hands came forward to begin the pull, they approached so near to her bosom that her vivid imagination began to thrill her with a fancy that he was going to clasp his arms around her. The sensation grew so strong that she could not run the risk of again meeting his eyes at those crucial moments, and turned aside to inspect the distant horizon; then she grew weary of looking sideways and was driven to return to her natural position again.

In the second scene Cytherea is sheltering from a thunderstorm in the house occupied by Aeneas Manston, who is masquerading as an eligible bachelor. He entrances her by playing music on his home-made organ:

She was swayed into emotional opinions concerning the strange man before her, new impulses of thought came with new harmonies, and entered into her with a gnawing thrill. A dreadful flash of lightning then, and the thunder close upon it. She found herself involuntarily shrinking up beside him, and looking with parted lips at his face.
He turned his eyes and saw her emotion, which greatly increased the ideal element in her expressive face. She was in the state in which woman’s instinct to conceal has lost its power over her impulse to tell; and he saw it. Bending his handsome face over her till his lips almost touched her ear, he murmured without breaking the harmonies – “Do you very much like this piece?”

In both cases a young single woman is alone and unsupervised in the company of a man. Victorian conventions of protection and chaperoning went to elaborate lengths to prevent such situations. Cytherea is noticeably disturbed in both scenes. In fact Hardy brings his heroine into a state of almost orgasmic excitement just because her clothes are touching those of Manston. Hardy even theorises about it, as narrator:

His clothes are something exterior to every man; but to a woman her dress is part of her body. Its motions are all present to her intelligence if not to her eyes; no man knows how his coat-tails swing. By the slightest hyperbole it may be said that her dress has sensation. Crease but the very Ultima Thule of fringe or flounce, and it hurts her as much as pinching her. Delicate antennae, or feelers, bristle on every outlying frill. Go to the uppermost: she is there; tread on the lowest: the fair creature is there almost before you.
Thus the touch of clothes, which was nothing to Manston, sent a thrill through Cytherea, seeing, moreover, that he was of the nature of a mysterious stranger. She looked out again at the storm, but still felt him.

Desperate Remedies – study resources

Desperate Remedies – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Desperate Remedies – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

Desperate Remedies – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

Desperate Remedies – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Thomas Hardy – Kindle eBook

Desperate Remedies – chapter summaries

I. Ambrose Graye falls in love with Cytherea, who turns down his offer of marriage for reasons she cannot explain. Eight years later he marries a woman who dies, leaving him a son Owen and a daughter also called Cytherea. She sees her father fall to his death, which leaves the siblings in debt. They move to the West Country to start new lives.

II. Owen works in an office, and Cytherea asks him about the young head clerk Springrove, who she meets on a boat excursion.

III. Owen recounts a tale of the old Cytherea’s meeting with an older woman in Hammersmith. Springrove takes Cytherea rowing and declares his love for her – but there is something he will not tell her.

IV. Cytherea is interviewed by Miss Aldclyffe who is attracted to her and employs her in the position of lady’s maid.

V. Cytherea arrives at Knapwater House where Miss Aldclyffe reveals a locket containing the portrait of Cytherea’s father Ambrose Graye. They share the same first name, but they quarrel,

VI. Miss Aldclyffe gets into bed with Cytherea and tries to seduce her. She rails against men, then reveals that Springrove is already engaged to be married. Her father Mr Aldclyffe dies the same night and Cytherea stays on as companion to Miss Aldclyffe/

VII. Miss Aldclyffe decides to make improvements to the estate and wishes to appoint a steward. She advertises, but then writes to Aeneas Manston, who she appoints against the judgement of her solicitor.

VIII. Relations between Cytherea and Miss Aldclyffe improve. Cytherea meets Adelaide Hinton who is engaged to Springrove. The locals perceive a connection between Manston and Miss Aldclyffe. Cytherea is enraptured when Manston plays his organ during a thunderstorm.

Volume II

I. Manston is enamoured of Cytherea, who wonders at all the coincidences linking her and Miss Aldclyffe, who receives a letter from Manston’s estranged wife which is a threat and a plea. She confronts Manston and he agrees to take his wife back.

II. Manston misses his wife’s train. She goes to the Three Tranters Inn where a fire breaks out at night and she is killed. Springrove and Manston arrive late and meet in the church as rivals for Cytherea.

III. Next day Manston asks Miss Aldclyffe to help him win Cytherea by persuading Springrove to marry Adelaide. An inquest concludes that Mrs Manston’s death was accidental. However, old Springrove is obliged to rebuild the cottages his fire destroyed. Miss Aldclyffe argues with Edward Springrove that he has a duty to marry Adelaide. She produces evidence that persuades him.

IV. Cytherea continues to pine for Springrove. Manston proposes to her, but she refuses. Her brother Owen has medical problems but Manston is kind to him. Miss Aldclyffe argues the case for Manston. When Manston proposes moving Owen into his house to recuperate, Cytherea agrees to marry him.

V. On the eve of the wedding Adelaide suddenly marries a rich farmer. Springrove arrives at the wedding – but is too late. Cytherea loves him as much as ever, even though he appears to be dying. A railway porter then confesses to seeing Eunice Manston on the night of the fire. Edward jumps on a train to pursue the newlyweds. He locates Cytherea in Southampton. Owen arrives and takes his sister to a separate hotel.

Volume III

I. Manston goes home, procrastinates, and then places an advert in London newspapers for his wife Eunice. She eventually replies, appearing to think he still loves her. Manston takes her back.

II. Owen is promoted, and moves with Cytherea to a different town. Springrove proposes to Cytherea, but she refuses because ‘scandal’ is now attached to her name. Springrove believes Manston knew his wife was still alive. Owen wants to find proof.

III. Owen and Cytherea make enquiries about Eurnice Manston at her former address in London. Springrove tracks down her sewing box and posts the contents to Owen, unaware that he is being followed by Manston.

IV. Manston intercepts Owen’s letter and substitutes a photograph then posts it on. When the letter reaches Owen, he thinks a third party might be involved in the mystery.

V. Owen checks the colour of Mrs Manston’s eyes, which are not the same as those mentioned in a poem found in the box. They seek the rector’s advice, but he is baffled. Springrove arrives from London with news that Mrs Manston is an impostor. Manston and his lover Anne Seaway fear that their plot will be exposed if the real Mrs Manston returns.

VI. Anne breaks into Manston’s desk and reads complaining letters from Eunice. The rector presents the evidence on Manston to Miss Aldclyffe, but she refuses to accept it. Anne eavesdrops on Manston and Miss Aldclyffe. He is desperate for her help. He tries to give Anne a sleeping draught, but she follows him to an outhouse where he retrieves a sack and is then watched by a detective and Miss Aldclyffe, followed by Anne. He buries the sack then runs off. Anne and the detective dig up the sack, which contains the body of Eunice Manston.

VII. Manston evades capture and goes to Cytherea where he attempts to ‘rape’ her, but she is rescued by Springrove. Manston is arrested.

VIII. In prison Manston writes a confession of how he killed Eunice, then hangs himself. Miss Aldclyffe sends for Cytherea and reveals that Manston was her illegitimate son. Next morning she dies.

Epilogue. Miss Aldclyffe leaves all her estate to Manston’s wife – so Cytherea inherits Knapwater House and marries Springrove fifteen months later.

Desperate Remedies – principal characters

Ambrose Graye	an architect
Owen Graye	his son, also an architect
Cytherea Graye	his daughter
Edward Springrove	handsome head clerk
Miss Aldclyffe	mistress of Knapwater House
Mrs Morris	housekeeper at Knapwater
Aeneas Manston	estate steward at Knapwater
Eunice Manston	an American actress, his wife
Adelaide Hinton	engaged to Springrove
Mr Raunham	the rector at Knapwater
Anne Seaway	Manston’s mistress, a prostitute

Other works by Thomas Hardy

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

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

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

Thomas Hardy – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DH Lawrence and Cinema

May 28, 2016 by Roy Johnson

film adaptations of D.H. Larence’s novels and stories

Lawrence had a great deal of trouble getting his work to the public. Many of his major novels were first censored then banned for reasons that now seem ridiculous. He was one of the first major writers to bring honest and explicit consideration of human sexuality into the realms of literature, and he did so using language that was frank and realistic.

It is therefore slightly ironic that his work has been so readily and popularly adapted for film and television. (The same is true of plays he wrote, many of which were not performed during his own lifetime.) The selection listed below vary in both their quality and their fidelity to the original texts, but they are all good examples of translation from one medium to another.

Sons and Lovers (novel 1913 – TV film 2013)

Paul Morel is the sensitive son of a rough miner and an artistic mother living in the Nottingham coal fields. He is caught between the two worlds they represent. As he grows to maturity he tries to establish relationships with women, but he is hampered by his attachment to his mother. When she dies he is left with nothing.

Directed by Stephen Whittaker. Screenplay by Simon Burke. Starring – Sarah Lancashire, Hugo Speer, James Murray, Rupert Evans, Lyndsay Marshall, and Esther Hall. Filmed on the Isle of Man.

Sons and Lovers – film adaptation on DVD – Amazon UK

Details of the film – [different version] – IMDb

Sons and Lovers – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

Sons and Lovers – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

Lady Chatterley’s Lover (novel 1928 – film 2006)

This is a French adaptation based on the second less well known version of the novel. Directed by Pascale Ferran. Screenplay by Ferran and Roger Bohbot. Starring – Marina Hands (Constance Chatterley), Jean-Louis Coulloch (Mellors), Hippolyte Giradot (Sir Clifford Chatterley), Helene Alexandridis (Mrs Bolton), Helene Filleres (Hilda). Filmed in Limousin, Correze, and Ambazac, France.

There is an earlier French version (1955) directed by Marc Allegret, and a version directed by Just Jaekin in 1981 which features the soft-porn actress Sylvia Kristel. Most recently, the BBC produced a TV film version directed by Jed Mercurio (2015).

Lady Chatterley’s Lover – 2006 adaptation on DVD – Amazon UK

Details of the film – Internet Movie Database

Lady Chatterley’s Lover – a tutorial and study guide

Lady Chatterley’s Lover – Collins Classics – Amazon UK

Lady Chatterley’s Lover – Collins Classics – Amazon US

The Rainbow (novel 1915 – film 1989)

This is Lawrence’s version of a family saga. The novel traces the history of three generations of Derbyshire farmers the Brangwens. Ken Russell’s film focuses attention on Ursula, the younger of two sisters. She dreams of emancipating herself, becomes entangled in a lesbian relationship with an older woman, then trains to be a teacher. She has a passionate affair with a Polish soldier, but in the end chooses to remain independent.

Directed and produced by English maverick Ken Russell (1989). Screenplay by Ken and Vivian Russell. Starring – Glenda Jackson (Anna Brangwen), Sammi Davis (Ursula Brangwen), Paul McGann (Anton Skrebensky), Amanda Donohoe (Winifred Inger), David Hemmings (Uncle Henry). Filmed in Borrowdale and Keswick, Lake District, England.

The Rainbow – film adaptation on DVD – Amazon UK

Details of the film – Internet Movie Database

The Rainbow – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

The Rainbow – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

Women in Love (novel 1920 – film 1969)

This story is a continuation of The Rainbow, following the development of Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen. The sisters explore new types of relationships with two men who are good friends. The results are successful in essence but ambiguous in one case, and disastrous in the other. A very stylish and successful adaptation by maverick British director Ken Russell, with very good performances from an all-star cast.

Directed by Ken Russell. Screenplay by Larry Kramer. Starring – Alan Bates (Rupert Birkin), Oliver Reed (Gerald Critch), Glenda Jackson (Gudrun Brangwen), Jenny Linden (Ursula Brangwen), Eleanor Bron (Hermione Roddice), Vladel Sheybal (Loerke). Filmed in Derbyshire, Gateshead, Sheffield, England, and Zermatt, Switzerland.

Women in Love – film adaptation on DVD – Amazon UK

Details of the film – Internet Movie Database

Women in Love – a tutorial and study guide

Women in Love – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

Women in Love – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

The Virgin and the Gipsy (novella 1926 – film 1970)

Yvette and Lucille are the daughters of a vicar in a drab and stifling village in the English West Midlands. Their home life is pervaded by a life-killing sense of meanness and puritanism, and they are dominated by their tyrannical grandmother. Yvette encounters a gypsy family who awaken her sense of rebellion and sensuality. When a flood engulfs the village Yvette is saved by the gypsy, who breathes life back into her, whilst her grandmother drowns nearby.

Directed by Christopher Miles. Screenplay by Alan Plater. Starring – Joanna Shimkus (Yvette), Franco Nero (The Gypsy), Honor Blackman (Mrs Fawcett), Maurice Denham (The Rector), Mark Burns (Major Eastwood). Filmed in Derbyshire and Lee International Studios, England.

The Virgin and the Gypsy – film adaptation on DVD – Amazon UK

Details of the film – Internet Movie Database

The Virgin and the Gypsy – collected novellas – Amazon UK

The Virgin and the Gypsy – collected novellas – Amazon US

More on D.H. Lawrence
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

Dombey and Son

October 23, 2015 by Roy Johnson

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

Dombey and Son was first issued in monthly instalments by Bradbury & Evans between October 1846 and April 1848. It was then published in a single volume with original illustrations by Hablot Knight Brown (‘Phiz’). The full description on the title page reads Dealings with the firm of Dombey and Son, Wholesale, Retail, and for Exportation.

monthly serial cover

Dombey and Son – critical commentary

Title

The title of this novel is particularly apt, because it incorporates principal aspects of its two major themes. The term ‘Dombey and Son’ is obviously the name of a commercial firm. It conveys the notion of a business enterprise which has passed through at least two generations and is therefore effective and reliable.

But in fact the enterprise has this name before the birth of his son. He already has a daughter, but he does not consider her adequate to represent his dynastic ambitions. So all his hopes are pinned on his son Paul

But he has put so much of his energy and enterprise into his commercial endeavours, he has lost the ability to love even his own offspring. So the term ‘Dombey and Son’ also encompasses the second major theme of the novel – which is the gulf that separates parent from child.

Dickens’ primary meaning in his title is the commercial establishment. This is signalled by his full description of the novel on its title page – Dealings with the firm of Dombey and Son, Wholesale, Retail, and for Exportation.. But the secondary meaning coexists without any doubt.

Educating the child

Much of the first part of the novel is about the poor raising, the neglect, and the false education of children. Paul Dombey (senior) has his expectations set on a son who will inherit the commercial success of Dombey and Son and promote its good name into the future. The father ignores and neglects his firstborn child Florence because she is female. He sees her as insignificant in the paternalistic dynasty of business and inheritance. As he says to her: “Girls … have nothing to do with Dombey and Son”.

Yet when his wife bears him a male child (Paul junior) the son is immediately removed from his primary sources of emotional comfort – first of all from his mother because she dies, then from his beloved nurse, Polly Toodles, because Dombey fires her. Dombey then submits his son to the dubious care of his stupid sister Mrs Chick and her friend Miss Tox. Even worse, he subsequently sends Paul to the appalling establishment run by the fraudulent Mrs Pipchin in Brighton. She neglects the children placed in her care to an almost criminal extent.

Following this ruinous beginning, Paul is sent to a boarding school owned by Dr Blimber, who is obsessed with teaching ‘classics’ (Latin and Greek language and history). Blimber runs the establishment on the Spartan and cheerless lines of an English public school (that is, a fee-paying, private school) where Paul is miserably unhappy. It is significant that the only real learning he imbibes is delivered to him by his elder sister Florence, whom he loves dearly and acts as a substitute mother to him.

Dombey péreis a cold, unloving and distant father who wants a son who will continue the commercial enterprise he has created – but he has no love for that child as a human being. He is more interested in the idea of Dynasty than his own flesh and blood.

Paul is intensely aware that he has lost his mother, and he clings to his sister Florence as a means of emotional support.

Point of view

Dickens often appears in his own novels commenting on events, characters, and the situations he has created. But in terms of ‘point of view’ he does something very interesting in the case of young Paul Dombey. It is quite clear to the reader that Paul is a weak and sickly child. He is fragile and enervated; he has been emotionally neglected; and he leads an intense inner life frequently immersed in thoughts about his mother – of whom he has no conscious recollection, since she died immediately following his birth. These thoughts are often bound up with images of the sea and the stars.

The actual nature of his disability is never made clear. [Given Paul’s precocious and philosophic turn of mind, we might today think he was autistic] But Dickens’s masterstroke is that he gives an account of Paul’s demise and eventual death – entirely from the boy’s own point of view. Paul does not want to be a trouble to anybody, and keeps repeating ‘Tell my papa I am quite well’ (this to the father who has essentially neglected him). Paul merely wishes to be surrounded by the people he loves and who have been kind to him – his sister ‘Floy’, his old nurse Polly, and his friend Walter Gay.

Given that Dickens is often accused of being sentimental, his rendering of Paul’s death is wonderful piece of pathos – because Paul feels that he is quite happy to be drifting in and out of fantasies of his mother and the sea, whilst it is clear to the reader that the child is dying:

Sister and brother wound their arms around each other, and the golden light came streaming in, and fell upon them, locked together.
“How fast the river runs, between its green banks and the rushes, Floy! But it’s very near the sea. I hear the waves! They always said so.”
Presently he told her that the motion of the boat upon the stream was lulling him to rest. How green the banks were now, how bright the flowers growing on them, and how tall the rushes! Now the boat was out at sea, but gliding smoothly on. And now there was a shore before him. Who stood on the bank! —

As Dickens wrote in his own notes for the novel: ‘His illness only expressed in the child’s own feelings – Not otherwise described’.

The main theme

Unlike the other major novels of Dickens’ mature period – Bleak House (1852-53), Great Expectations (1860-61), and Little Dorrit (1855-57)- Dombey and Son is mainly focused on family and personal matters, even though there are similarly larger political and financial issues in the background to the events of the narrative.

Dombey is the head of a commercial enterprise, and he invests his trust in his villainous manager Carker – who betrays him by bad business practices and attempting to steal his beautiful wife. But the actual mechanisms of commercial deceit are never examined in any detail.

Dombey is rich and powerful. He is proud, emotionally guarded to the point of being a psychopath towards his own daughter (and others). His empire eventually collapses, and he realises that he has no friends and no family as comforts against the catastrophic nature of his downfall. He is psychologically injured by the shock of events, but he recovers, supported by the unstinting devotion of his daughter, and he ends in a tranquil old age devoted to his two grandchildren.

Characterisation

Two major issues of characterisation haunt the novel. Florence’s devotion to her father and her endless search for his love are stretched almost to breaking point. She has been neglected, ignored, and even beaten by him – yet after her marriage to Walter she comes back to Dombey to beg his forgiveness for deserting him. This is virtue, patience, and devotion taken to an almost masochistic level.

The other major problem is Dombey himself. He spends nine tenths of the novel as a ruthless, cruel, and heartless businessman and father, but when his company collapses we are asked to believe that he suddenly realises the error of his ways and regrets a lifetime of bad parenting to the extent of becoming a devoted father and grandfather. Dickens is clever enough to plant thoughts of Florence into Dombey’s mind even before this spiritual transformation, but this transformation of character takes place too rapidly to be really credible.

Dombey and Son – study resources

Dombey and Son – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

Dombey and Son – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

Dombey and Son – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Dombey and Son – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Dombey and Son – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

The Complete Works of Charles Dickens – Kindle edition

Charles Dickens – biographical notes

The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens – Amazon UK

Dombey and Son – plot summary

Ch. I. Mr Paul Dombey (senior) is a proud and severe businessman who thinks his long-awaited and newly born son will fulfil the destiny of the firm Dombey and Son. His sister Mrs Chick gushes with family pride at the event, but Mrs Dombey dies following the birth.

Ch. II Mr and Mrs Chick argue about the provision of a nurse for young Paul. Their friend Miss Tox arrives with the Toodles family. Dombey reluctantly and suspiciously hires Polly Toodle as a nurse, re-naming her Richards.

Ch. III Polly comforts Florence Dombey, who has been ignored by her father because he has been waiting for a son who will inherit the firm. Polly tries to bring Dombey and his daughter closer together, and in doing so she encounters the waspish Susan Nipper, Florence’s maid.

Ch. IV Ship’s instrument maker Solomon Gills questions his nephew Walter about his new job as a clerk at Dombey and Son. His own trade has been failing and he wants to provide Walter with a good start in life. They are joined by Captain Cuttle, with whom they share a bottle of Madeira.

Ch. V Miss Tox assumes more significance in Paul’s upbringing. Paul is christened on a cold and grim day, an event followed by an unappetising and cheerless lunch given by Dombey, who establishes a scholarship for Polly’s eldest son Robin.

Ch. VI Polly and Susan take Paul and Florence to the Toodle’s house in Camden Town. The two groups mingle affectionately, but on returning Florence gets lost and is abducted by an old hag Mrs Brown. Florence eventually finds her way to the river and meets Walter Gay, who returns her to the Dombey house. Polly is immediately sacked from her job as Paul’s nurse.

Ch.VII Miss Tox takes up active supervision of young Paul’s welfare and spurns the attentions of her would-be suitor and neighbour Major Bagstock.

Ch.VIII Paul gets a new nurse Mrs Wickam. He is a sickly and strangely precocious boy who asks his father difficult questions on morbid subjects. Dombey decides to send him to Brighton for the sea air. Paul is placed with Mrs Pipchin, a fraudulent ‘child developer’ who mistreats her charges. Paul is fascinated by her ugliness.

Paul and Mrs Pipchin

Ch. IX Walter has romantically cultivated his connection with Florence Dombey and is worried that his uncle Solomon Grills seems depressed. The reason is that he is in debt after honouring payments to Walter’s dead father. Walter brings in Captain Cuttle who hasn’t enough money to help his friend, but who suggests an appeal to Mr Dombey.

Ch. X Major Bagstock goes to Brighton and inveigles himself into acquaintance with Dombey, with whom he begins to socialise. Whilst there, they are visited by Walter and Captain Cuttle who make an appeal to Dombey for financial help for Gills. Dombey is reluctant, but he puts the appeal to his son Paul, who approves it

Ch. XI After a year at Mrs Pipchin’s, Dombey sends Paul as a boarder to Doctor Blimber’s prep school. The establishment is cheerless, uncomfortable, and entirely centred on classical studies. Paul is very unhappy at the prospect of remaining there.

Ch. XII Paul is supervised by the astringent Cornelia Blimber — that is, given a pile of books and expected to teach himself. The school follows a strict regime imposed by Doctor Blimber. Florence buys copies of Paul’s text books and coaches him privately during their weekend meetings. Paul is a wistful, dreamy, and introspective boy

Ch. XIII Dombey and Son needs a junior clerk for its Barbados office. Walter is appointed. James Carker the manager humiliates his elder brother John in front of Walter and Dombey. Afterwards John Carker reveals the cause of his shame to Walter (he stole from the firm) and gives him his support and blessing.

Ch. XIV Cornelia Blimber gives Paul a quasi-mathematical ‘annalysis’ of his character, and concludes that he is ‘too old-fashioned’. Paul merely wants to be liked by others. He hopes they will think kindly of him when he ‘goes away’. He is befriended by the head boy Toots and his tutor Mr Feeder. He has a serious illness which other people seem to regard as terminal. There is a dancing party at the end of term where everyone is kind and conciliatory to him.

Ch. XV Walter seeks advice from Captain Cuttle regarding his concern for his uncle and the new job in Barbados that he feels he cannot refuse. Captain Cuttle is perplexed and decides to appeal directly to Mr Dombey in secret. Paul meets Susan Nipper who is searching for Polly Toodles at Paul’s request. They locate her and hasten to the Dombey House.

Ch. XVI Paul has been unwell for some time. He drifts in and out of sleep, dreams, and waking fantasies. Finally he calls for Polly and Walter, commends them to his father, then dies.

Ch. XVII Captain Cuttle’s plan to see Dombey fails, and he is forced to reveal Walter’s West Indian job to his uncle. Then he sounds out his manager Carker instead, but Carker deceives him by pretending to agree with everything he says.

Ch, XVIII Paul’s funeral and its gloomy aftermath. Dombey retreats into solitude. Florence enviously watches children in a neighbouring house who have a loving father. Mr Toots arrives and presents her with Diogenes, the dog from Blimber’s school. Florence reaches out to her father for some sign of affection, but he rebuffs her.

Ch. XIX Walter is sadly preparing to leave his uncle when Florence and Susan Nipper appear at the shop. Florence proposes to befriend uncle Solomon during Walter’s absence, and wants to befriend Walter himself – but as a substitute brother. John Carker arrives to say goodbye, and Walter sets sail on the >Son and Heir for Barbados.

Ch. XX Mr Dombey and Major Bagstock make a railway journey to visit Leamington. Backstock criticises Miss Tox as a wanton jade. Dombey vaingloriously credits himself with a monopoly on loss and suffering following Paul’s death. Thoughts of Florence enter his head for the first time.

Major Bagstock is delighted to have the opportunity

Ch. XXI In Leamington they meet the aged coquette Mrs Skewton and her beautiful daughter, the widow Edith Granger. Bagstock flirts with Mrs Skewton, and Dombey takes an interest in Mrs Granger, who paints, sings, and plays the harp and piano. She too has lost a son.

Ch. XXII James Carker refuses his brother John’s pleas on behalf of their sister Harriet. Carker does not act on Dombey’s written request to recall Walter, and then he places Rob the Grinder as a spy with Solomon Gill. Toots is in love with Florence but is held at bay by Susan Nipper and Diogenes.

Ch. XXIII Florence lives alone in her father’s house whilst he is absent. She continues to wish he would love her, and wonders if she can eventually win his affection. There has been no news of Walter’s ship for a long time. Florence consults Captain Cuttle, who brings in his friend the ‘oracle’ and ‘philosopher’ Captain Bunsby, who turns out to be an empty windbag.

Ch. XXIV Florence visits the Skettles at the same time as Dr and Mrs Blimber, and is also approached whilst out walking by James Carker, to whom she feels an instinctive aversion.

Ch. XXV Solomon suddenly disappears, leaving Captain Cuttle his keys and a note expressing his final wishes. Cuttle searches for him, fearing he might have committed suicide. He moves out of his lodging with Mrs Mac Stinger and takes over Solomon’s place in the shop.

Ch. XXVI Carker visits Dombey and Major Bagstock in Leamington. He tries to subtly poison Dombey’s mind against both Walter and Florence. Major Bagstock visits Mrs Skewton and they plot a marriage between Dombey and Edith Granger.

Ch. XXVII Carker encounters Edith on his morning walk. He then joins Dombey and Bagstock for breakfast with Edith and her mother. They all go to Warwick Castle where Carker pursues Edith knowingly whilst she is obliged to demonstrate her artistic skills. Edith explodes with outrage to her mother for being used as a lure to catch Dombey, who will call the following day to propose marriage.

Mr Carker introduces himself

Ch. XXVIII Florence is very suspicious of the attention being paid to her by Carker. Mr Toots continues to make comic visits to her. She and Susan Nipper return home to London where Dombey introduces her to Mrs Skewton and Edith who is to be her new mother. The two young women immediately feel a bond.

Ch.XXIX Mrs Chick visits Miss Tox and reveals that her brother Dombey is going to take a second wife. Miss Tox faints at the shock of this news – at which Mrs Chick accuses her of secretly scheming to marry into her family. She excommunicates her friend as a result, but receives no sympathy from her husband.

Ch. XXX Florence is befriended and comforted by Edith, who invites her to stay in her Brook Street house. Florence is apprehensive about meeting her father. Mrs Skewton wants Florence to stay with her during the forthcoming honeymoon, but Edith threatens to call off the marriage if this happens, fearing that Florence will be ‘contaminated’ by Mrs Skewton’s influence.

Ch. XXXI All the major characters of the novel are involved on the day of the wedding. After the service there is a breakfast at which Cousin Feenix (MP) makes a rambling and incoherent speech and there is much drunkenness both above and below stairs.

Ch. XXXII Captain Cuttle is hiding away in Sol’s shop , fearing that Mrs Mac Stinger might find him. He is visited by Toots and the Chicken who come from Susan Nipper in search of Solomon. They have news of the Son and Heir being wrecked at sea, with all hands lost. Cuttle checks the news with Carker, who insults him and throws him out of the office.

Ch. XXXIII James Carker’s luxurious home is contrasted with the poorer dwelling of his sister Harriet and brother John. Harriet is visited by a mysterious stranger who knows John’s story and wishes to help them both. Harriet then helps a destitute and ex-convict woman (Alice) who is on her way to London.

Ch. XXXIV Good Mrs Brown is living in abject poverty. Her daughter Alice returns from Australia. She has been hardened by the experience of ‘transportation’ and points out the lack of parental care in her upbringing. Her mother hints at some mysterious connections with the Dombey family and Carker. When it appears that there is also a connection with Carker’s sister Harriet, they go to her house, but she defiantly repudiates their offers of help.

Ch. XXXV Dombey and Edith return home from honeymoon to their lavishly refurbished house. Dombey makes the first signs of recognising his own daughter Florence. Edith and Florence are reunited, but when Florence asks her for help in winning her father’s love, Edith explains that she cannot do so.

Florence and Edith

Ch. XXXVI Dombey initiates a series of doom-laden dinners and soirees. Cousin Feenix tells an embarrassing anecdote about a rich man who marries a beautiful woman who does not love him. The soiree is a disaster, and Dombey reproaches Edith for her coldness to her guests in front of Carker.

Ch. XXXVII Next day Carker menaces Edith by threatening to reveal Florence’s connections with Walter and Captain Cuttle to Dombey. Mrs Skewton has a stroke and becomes even more selfish and demanding towards Edith.

Ch. XXXVIII Miss Tox visits the Toodles, where Rob the Grinder is under suspicion of being secretive. She ‘offers’ to become a friend of the family and a regular visitor – because she wants any news of the Dombey family.

Ch. XXXIX Mr Toots requests a formal friendship with Captain Cuttle. Rob the Grinder announces that he is leaving the shop. Feeling alone, Captain Cuttle thinks of himself as Robinson Crusoe. He reads Solomon’s will with Commander Bunsby, then is invaded by Mrs Mac Stringer, who Bunsby charms away from the shop and takes back home.

Ch. XL Dombey blames Florence for the lack of feeling that exists between them. He demands of Edith that she respect and obey him in a deferential manner. She offers to compromise with him for the sake of peace between them, but he scornfully refuses. Dombey orders the transfer of Florence, Edith, and her mother to Brighton, under the supervision of Mrs Pipchin. They encounter Good Mrs Brown and her daughter Alice, with whom Edith feels a strange instinctive kinship.

A Chance Meeting

Ch. XLI Florence meets Mr Toots, who takes her to revisit Dr Blimber and their old school. Toots and Mr Feeder share romantic confidences. After her stroke, Mrs Skewton gets steadily worse, finally dies, and is buried in Brighton.

Ch. XLII Rob the Grinder goes to work directly for James Carker. Dombey makes Carker his confidential agent in dealing with his wife. He demands that she obey him, and he forbids her to befriend his daughter Florence. Dombey falls off his horse, and Carker takes the news home to Florence and Edith.

Ch. XLIII Florence feels increasingly conflicted because of the hostility between her father and her step-mother. She visits their rooms late at night. Edith is in a period of black despair, but she comforts Florence.

Ch. XLIV Susan Nipper finally delivers a critical broadside to Dombey because of his appalling treatment of Florence. Mrs Pipchin is brought in to fire her. Susan leaves the house under the protective custody of Mr Toots.

Ch. XLV Edith is confronted by Carker who flatters her, pretends to have her interests at heart, and presses his intimacy upon her. But he also warns her about Dombey’s threats regarding her obedience and her attitude to Florence.

Ch. XLVI Rob the Grinder is accosted by Good Mrs Brown and interrogated regarding Carker and Dombey. Carker taunts and insults his brother John, and he feels conscious of having gained closer access to Edith.

Ch. XLVII Florence is puzzled by Edith’s remoteness, but her stepmother (acting under orders from her husband) says the separation is necessary. On Dombey’s second wedding anniversary Edith refuses to attend a celebration party. Dombey instructs her via Carker whilst they are sitting at the same dinner table. Edith explodes and demands a separation. Carker intervenes (unsuccessfully) on her behalf. Later that night Edith leaves the house and elopes with Carker. Florence commiserates with her father, who responds by striking her in a rage – so she too runs away from home.

Ch. XLVIII Florence escapes to Gills’ shop where Captain Cuttle looks after her and puts her to sleep upstairs. Mr Toots arrives with a garbled story that Cuttle is required at Brogley’s the Brokers, to which he immediately repairs.

Ch. XLIX Captain Cuttle repeatedly alludes to Walter’s death at sea, and then eventually reveals that he was a survivor in the shipwreck. Walter enters and is reunited with Florence ‘in a brotherly way’.

Ch. L Walter and Captain Cuttle discuss finding Susan as a companion to Florence. Toots appears and goes off in search of her. Florence and Walter engage in contorted discussions regarding their relationship, but in the end she proposes marriage to him.

‘Let him remember it in that room’

Ch. LI Dombey is in a state of denial and does not want to discuss the scandal of his wife’s elopement. Feenix and Bagstock offer their services to challenge Carker – but nobody knows where he is.. The staff at Dombey and Son enjoy drunken celebrations.

Ch. LII Dombey arrives at the hovel where Mrs Brown and Alice have access to news of Carker and Edith’s whereabouts. They hide Dombey in an adjacent room then threaten Rob the Grinder, who reveals that Carker and Edith have arranged to meet in Dijon.

Ch. LIII Dombey sacks John Carker because of his association with his brother. Mr Morfin arrives to explain the history of Carker’s secret mismanagement of the company and his own offer of help. Alice visits Harriet and explains her own grudge against Carker, which is that she has been ‘sold’ to Carker as his mistress by her own mother.

Ch. LIV Edith is in a Dijon apartment where dinner is being served. Carker joins her, but she turns on him, unleashes a torrent of criticisms, and threatens to murder him. She runs off, and he tries to follow her as Dombey arrives at the front door.

Ch. LV Carker suddenly panics and feels he will only be safe back in England where he can hide. He has a fear of being followed and has no plans or even purpose in his flight. He travels non-stop, and arriving back in England he travels by rail to a remote village. But he cannot escape from his tortured thoughts and fears. Finally, fearing that he has been tracked down by Dombey, he falls in front of an approaching train and is killed.

Ch. LVI Florence is reunited with Susan Nipper, and Walter prepares for both marriage and a naval commission to sail to China. Toots attends the final reading of the banns. Solomon Gills suddenly reappears, and the Chicken dismisses himself as companion to Toots.

Ch. LVII Florence and Walter get married in a small, dusty, and obscure church, then set off on their sea journey. Captain Cuttle and Solomon postpone celebrating with the last bottle of Madeira.

Ch. LVIII A year later Dombey and Son crashes and goes bankrupt. Dombey ruins himself repaying his debts. Harriet and John Carker inherit their brother James’ wealth, but arrange with Morfin to secretly pay most of it back to Dombey. Harriet visits Alice who is dying and learns that she is the illegitimate daughter of Dombey’s brother.

Ch. LIX The bailiffs and loss adjusters move into Dombey’s house; staff are paid off by Mrs Pinchin; and the contents of the house are sold at auction. Mrs Pinchin goes back to Brighton. Miss Tox lays siege to Dombey, who realises he has no friends or family. He wanders round the empty house late at night, bitterly regretting the loss of Florence – who then suddenly appears to beg his forgiveness and announce the birth of her son, Paul.

Ch. LX Mr Feeder marries Cornelia Blimber and takes over the prep school. At the wedding. they are joined by Toots, who has married Susan Nipper. Commander Bunsby is reluctantly married to Mrs Mac Stinger.

Ch. LXI Florence looks after her father, who is very ill and haunted by his past. Cousin Feenix arrives and takes Florence to meet Edith, who he has rescued from France and is taking to live in Italy. Tentative forgiveness is offered from Edith to Dombey, but she parts from Florence ‘forever’.

Ch. LXII Dombey recovers and is devoted to his two grandchildren – Paul and Florence. Captain Cuttle joins Solomon in the business. Mrs Toots has another child, and Harriet marries Mr Morfin.

Dombey and Son – principal characters

Mr Paul Dombey (senior)	a cold, proud, snobbish, and imperious business man
Paul Dombey (junior)	his frail and visionary son
Florence Dombey	his neglected daughter
Mrs Louisa Chick	Dombey’s foolish sister
Mr John Chick	her husband, a compulsive singer
Miss Lucretia Tox	friend to Louisa Chick
Mr Toodle	an engine fireman
Polly Toodle	his fecund wife, who becomes Paul’s nurse
Robin (Biler) Toodle	‘Rob the Grinder’, their wayward eldest son
Susan Nipper	caustic-tongued nurse to Florence Dombey
Solomon Gills	a ship’s instrument maker
Walter Gay	Solomon’s nephew, who works for Dombey and Son
Captain Edward (Ned) Cuttle	Solomon’s friend with a hook for a hand
John Carker	prematurely aged office ‘junior’ at Dombey and Son
James Carker	John’s brother, the malicious office Manager with white teeth
Mrs Pipchin	a fraudulent child ‘developer’
Major Jack Bagstock	windbag neighbour and suitor to Miss Tox
Doctor Blimber	prep school principal, obsessed with classics
Cornelia Blimber	his spinsterish and pedantic daughter
Mr Toots	head boy, who writes letters to himself from famous people
Mr Feeder B.A.	teacher who befriends Paul and Toots
Mrs Skewton	an ancient coquette who develops palsy
Edith Granger	Mrs Skewton’s daughter, a beautiful young widow
Commander Jack Bunsby	empty windbag ‘philosopher’ and friend of Cuttle
Sir Barnet Skettles	a social climber, who claims to know people but doesn’t
the Chicken	a low life bruiser and friend of Toots
Good Mrs Brown	a derelict who steals from children
Alice Marwood	her daughter, a former convict
Mr Morfin	an employee at Dombey and Son

Mont Blanc – Charles Dickens special edition

Other works by Charles Dickens

Pickwick Papers (1836-37) was Dickens’ first big success. It was issued in twenty monthly parts and is not so much a novel as a series of loosely linked sketches and changing characters featured in reports to the Pickwick Club. These recount comic excursions to Rochester, Dingley Dell, and Bath; duels and elopements; Christmas festivities; Mr Pickwick inadvertently entering the bedroom of a middle-aged lady at night; and in the end a happy marriage. Much light-hearted fun, and a host of memorable characters.
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.

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

Dracula – a study guide

February 10, 2011 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Dracula (1897) is not the first novel to deal with the myth of vampyres. It follows a tradition which includes Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764), William Polidori’s ‘The Vampire’ (1819), James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney the Vampire (1847), Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla‘ (1872), and George du Maurier’s Trilby (1894). But it is undoubtedly the best known, perhaps because it combines just about every aspect and manifestation of the myth – blood lust, sexual deviation, the UnDead, murder, bats, wolves, imprisonment, madness, and infanticide.

It also has the classic settings of Gothic horror stories – a castle in Transylvania, a ruined abbey, dungeons, crypts, graveyards, and a lunatic asylum. To this mixture is added virgins in distress, pseudo scientific experiments, drugs, telepathy, and hypnotism. It also has to be said that the novel is built from a fascinating and complex series of separate narratives and contains memorably vivid scenes and characters. The story lends itself to a number of different interpretations, and its fame was enhanced by the German silent film classic Nosferatu made in 1922 – which you can watch in its full length version below.

Bela Lugosi as Dracula (1931)

Dracula – critical commentary

The novel attracts critical commentary on a number of recognisable themes, some of which overlap with each other.

The New Woman

Lucy and her friend Mina can be seen as examples of women who are prepared to take their destiny into their own hands. Mina has an independent career as a schoolteacher, and she is competent in shorthand. She uses a typewriter and can memorise train timetables. Although Lucy is something of a lightweight socialite at the start of the novel, she deals reasonably with her three proposals of marriage on a single day. They enjoy their friendship and dine out in a fashion which Mina actually likens to the appetites of the New Woman. Later in the novel when the gallant brotherhood of four men repeatedly exclude her from the pursuit of Dracula, it is she who not only persuades them otherwise but supplies the information that leads to his capture.

West Vs East

Modern studies of the post-colonial world have encouraged a view of the novel as a Victorian allegory of the Christian west fighting against the corrupt forces of the east. Many of the novel’s details support this view. The four blood brothers are all representatives of the western orthodoxy. Arthur Holmwood actually becomes Lord Godalming during the course of the novel; John Seward is a respected head of a medical institute. Quincy Morris represents the protestant new world, and Van Helsing the equally imperialist Dutch. All of them are Christians and several times swear religiously to overthrow the foreigner, the alien Dracula.

He is not only from what in the late nineteenth century was perceived as the eastern ‘edge’ of Europe (Romania), but he draws his inspiration and heritage from Turkey, which is still further east.

The Rise of Science

Dracula is drenched in references to the latest scientific developments and what we would now call new media. Both John Seward and Van Helsing are neuroscientists; they experiment with drugs, hypnosis, and telepathy in their dealings with both Lucy and Mina. The narrative includes a whole array of what were the latest technical developments at the end of the nineteenth century – the London underground, typewriters, a phonograph, shorthand and dictation, telegrams, and a camera. In the final stages of the chase to catch Dracula, Mina even acquires a portable typewriter in order to transcribe the contents of the various diaries and journals which record events.

Sex, blood, and sublimation

Lucy has three suitors who propose to her on the same day – John Seward, Quincy Morris, and Arthur Holmwood. In the central section of the novel, dealing with the aftermath of Lucy’s encounter with Dracula in Whitby Professor Van Helsing arrives and later mentions that he too is ‘in love’ with her. He proscribes blood transfusions as the only way of saving her. All four men in turn ‘give blood’ in a manner which is distinctly sexual by implication.

On each occasion attention is drawn to Lucy’s red lips, open mouth, pink gums, and white teeth – a clear image of the vagina dentata if ever one was in doubt. The experience of transfusion leaves the men depleted and exhausted, but brings life and colour back to Lucy’s cheeks. Van Helsing also observes that there might be possible jealousy between the suitors if they knew that their rivals had made this connection.

At one point Seward and Van Helsing also put Lucy in a bath of warm water to revive her, and although no reference is made to what she is wearing, it is reasonable to assume that she is not clothed. Moreover, throughout the whole series of treatments, they keep giving her drugs – morphine and opiates – which Van Helsing sometimes injects into her. Dracula takes in the blood of others in order to survive, and so does Lucy, but under medical supervision.

The climactic scene where Arthur takes the lead in killing Lucy is described in unmistakably sexual terms

Arthur took the stake and the hammer … placed the point over the heart … Then he struck with all his might … The Thing in the coffin writhed, and a hideous blood-curdling screech came from the opened red lips. The body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions, the sharp white teeth champed together till the lips were cut and the mouth was smeared with a crimson foam… Arthur never faltered … his untrembling arm rose and fell, driving deeper and deeper the mercy-bearing stake, while the blood from the pierced heart welled and spurted up around it. His face was set, and high duty seemed to shine through it … And then the writhing and quivering of the body became less, and the teeth ceased to champ, and the face to quiver. Finally it lay still… Great drops of sweat sprang out on [Arthur’s] forehead, and his breath came in broken gasps. It had indeed been an awful strain on him…

And when Dracula visits Mina, the connection between them is even more sexualised.

With his left hand he held both Mrs Harker’s hands, keeping them away with her arms at full tension, his right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white nightdress was smeared with blood, and a thin stream trickled down the man’s bare breast, which was shown by his torn open dress. The attitude of the two had a terrible resemblance to a child forcing a kitten’s nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink

It was once thought that semen was a condensed form of blood, and the reference to milk in the simile reinforces this connection, as well as suggesting that a form of forced fellatio is taking place in the scene.

Dracula – study resources

Dracula – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Dracula – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

Dracula – York Notes for students – Amazon UK

Dracula – York Notes for students – Amazon US

Dracula – Spark Notes for students – Amazon UK

Dracula – Spark Notes for students – Amazon US

Dracula – Cliffs Notes for students – Amazon UK

Dracula – Cliffs Notes for students – Amazon US

Dracula – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

Dracula – full cast dramatisation BBC audioBook – Amazon UK

Dracula – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon US

Dracula – encyclopedia entry at Wikipedia

Dracula – scan of the first edition

Dracula – Francis Ford Coppola’s film version – Amazon UK

Dracula – 1931 Tod Hunter film version with Bela Lugosi – Amazon UK

Buffy the Vampire Slayer – complete boxed set – Amazon UK

Dracula – plot summary

English solicitor Jonathan Harker travels to Transylvania to visit Count Dracula, who has bought properties in London. He is hospitably received, but then is held prisoner in the castle, where he encounters three female vampires. Harker writes letters to his fiancée and employer asking for help, but Dracula intercepts them. Dracula then takes a boat journey to England. On the journey the entire crew disappear one by one. The ship is driven ashore at Whitby, Yorkshire during a violent storm.

Meanwhile, Minna Murray, Harker’s fiancee is in Whitby with her friend Lucy Westenra, who has had three proposals from different suitors on the same day. She eventually accepts Arthur Holmwood. The two young women witness the aftermath of the storm, and Lucy begins to sleepwalk, finally making a mid-night encounter with Dracula, who leaves his signature fang marks in her neck.

Dr John Seward, one of Lucy’s suitors, is in charge of a lunatic asylum located in the grounds of one of the properties that Dracula has bought. He is principally occupied with Renfield, a zoophagic patient who is violent and keeps trying to escape.

Word arrives in England that Harker is in a church hospice in Europe, recovering from a nervous collapse. Mina travels to see him and they are married.

Lucy begins to suffer from anaemia, and she is consulted by Dr Seward and Professor Van Helsing, who perform repeated blood transfusions on themselves and Lucy’s fiance Arthur in order to keep her alive. Whilst she is recovering, an escaped wolf from London Zoo attacks the house. Lucy’s mother dies of fright, having left her estate to Arthur.

Despite further blood transfusions, Lucy dies too. Meanwhile Mina and Jonathan return to Exeter where Mr Hawkins makes them his inheritors, then suddenly dies. When Jonathan visits London for the the funeral he sees Dracula in Piccadilly, looking younger, following which there is an outbreak of attacks on young children in the London area. They report being abducted by a beautiful lady.

Van Helsing reads Lucy’s diaries and letters, then visits Mina and Jonathan in Exeter and reads the typed copies of their journals, which Mina has made. He then recruits John Seward to visit Lucy’s tomb, which turns out to be empty when they visit it at night. On returning in the daylight however, they find her there. He then recruits Arthur Holmwood and Quincy Morris, and the four men confront Lucy in her vampire mode outside the tomb. Next day they return in the daylight and Arthur drives a stake through her heart, following which Van Helsing cuts off her head.

The four men agree that they must locate Dracula and kill him, Van Helsing suggests that they exclude Mina from the group for her own safety. They visit Dracula’s house and locate some of the boxes of Transylvanian earth he has brought to England. Meanwhile, Mina is visited by Dracula at night.

Renfield is savagely attacked and dies, then the four men catch Dracula with Mina, who is now in his thrall. Dracula escapes, and the four men begin to purify the boxes of earth, to block off Dracula’s acces to a secure resting place. They break into his house at Carfax and two other properties on the Thames, and his house in Picadilly. They plan to kill him, but when he returns home he once again escapes.

Mina, still in Dracula’s thrall, is hypnotised by Van Helsin, and reveals that Dracula is on board a ship, presumably on his way back to Transylvania. The Gang of Four swear to track him down. First they once again exclude Mina from their plans for her own safety, but she argues that she will be valuable in the search, However, she makes them promise to kill her if Dracula’s influence over her should get worse. They agree, and embark on along journey which culminates almost where the novel began – on the Borgo Pass close to Dracula’s castle.

Van Helsin and Mina are confronted by the three female vampyres, who are driven away with Christian symbols back to the castle, Van Helsin follows and murders them in their coffins. Finally all the characters converge on the Pass where they intercept the cart containing Dracula in his box of earth trying to reach the castle before sunset. They capture the box, open it, and decapitate him.

Dracula – film version

There have been many film adaptations of the Dracula story – but F.W.Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) is the first and most famous. It’s now regarded as a masterpiece of German expressionist cinema, along with works such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). Bram Stoker’s widow Florence understandably but foolishly tried to defend her husband’s copyright to the story. She even went to the extent of buying up and destroying copies of the film. Murnau was forced to change the names of the characters, and to transpose the location from England to Germany. Some characters are missed out altogether – but the essence of the story remains the same, and the visuals are spectacular, much enhanced by the performance of Max Schreck as Count Orlok.

Principal characters

Jonathan Harker	a young solicitor
Peter Hawkins	an Exeter solicitor, his employer
Wilhelmina (Mina) Murray	Jonathan’s fiancee then his wife, an assistant schoolmistress
Count Dracula	a Transylvanian aristocrat
Lucy Westrena	Mina’s friend, a socialite
Dr John Seward	head of a lunatic asylum, suitor to Lucy
Quincy P Morris	an American bachelor, suitor to Lucy
Arthur Holmwood (later Lord Godalming)	engaged to Lucy
Renfield	a zoophagic lunatic patient in Seward’s asylum
Professor Abraham Van Helsin	a Dutch pysician and lawyer

Literary criticism

Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Paul Barber, Vampires, Burial and Death: Folklore and Reality, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.

Glennis Byron, Dracula: New Casebook, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999.

Christopher Frayling, Vampires: Lord Byron to Count Dracula, London: Faber, 1991.

Ken Gelder, Reading the Vampire, London: Routledge, 1994.

William Hughes, Bram Stoker’s Dracula: A Reader’s Guide, London:Continuum, 2009.

Rob Lathom, Consuming Youth: Vampires, Cyborgs, and the Culture of Consumption, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Clive Leatherdale, Dracula: The Novel and the Legend: A Study of Bram Stoker’s Masterpiece, Brighton: Desert Island Books, 1993.

Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Si&eactue;cle, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997.

Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1763 to the Present Day, London: Longmans, 1980.

Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Find Si&eactue;, London: Virago, 1992.

Montague Summers, The Vampire, 1928, London: Studio editions, 1995.

Trivia and parallels

When Harker arrives at the castle, Dracula makes his meals, waits on him as a servant, makes his bed, keeps him up at night talking, and even wears his clothes. Are these hints of the ‘Double’?

Lucy Westrena has three offers of marriage – and Dracula has three ‘brides’. The three suitors all become ‘blood-providers’ in the transfusion experiments on Lucy. The three female vampires are blood-providers for Dracula.

Dracula climbs up and down the wall of the castle to reach Harker’s room – and Harker in turn climbs up and down the wall to reach Dracula’s room.

Harker writes letters asking for help to escape from the castle – but Dracula intercepts the letters, then forces him to write a parallel set of false letters describing his departure from the castle.

Jonathan Harker is a solicitor, and acts as a conveyancer for Dracula’s purchases of property around London. Dracula has his castle, and establishes a property portfolio in England. Arthur inherits his title when his father dies, and then also inherits Lucy’s legacy because of an ‘entailed property’ clause in the family will. Jonathan Harker inherits the solicitor’s business from Mr Hawkins.

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