13 October 21
I have added a new post to the Copy Book, On Having the Socks.
This is a passage from Erewhon (1872), Samuel Butler’s instant bestseller telling of a strange, hidden land and its people much in the spirit of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Both tales are satires on English society in their author’s day, and both worlds have aspects of utopia and dystopia.
In this extract, the subject is crime and sickness. The Government in Erewhon, we gather, ruthlessly prosecuted the sick, the jobless and the depressed, as harmful to society, but treated thieves, robbers and conmen with sympathy, as the victims of forces beyond their control. Butler’s tale is perhaps better known today for the chapter in which he imagined that dumb machines might one day evolve into thinking machines by a process akin to Natural Selection. That was whimsy too, but in both instances the whimsy is beginning to look more like prophecy.
Erewhon made Butler’s name, but he was never able to recapture its popularity in his later work. He himself believed that the sequel, Erewhon Revisited, was a superior piece of writing but he acknowledged that it had not been a great success. One thing we do learn from it, however, is that the narrator of Erewhon, who in that tale is not named, should be called Higgs.
Erewhon, Butler tells us, should be pronounced as three short syllables, e-re-won. It is an anagram of ‘nowhere’.
14 October 20
I have added a new post to the Copy Book, Cat and Cook, a fable by Russian fabulist Ivan Andreyevich Krylov (1769-1844).
Krylov found his true calling when he was forty. In 1809, he published a collection of fables which at once captured the Russian public’s imagination. More fables followed, and he became something of a celebrity. He was friendly with Emperor Nicholas I, and was one of a handful of literary figures honoured with a place on the Millennium of Russia monument in Veliky Novgorod, unveiled on September 8th, 1862.
The translator, Englishman (John) Henry Harrison (1829-1900), was an English teacher living in St Petersburg. He admired Krylov’s “ardent patriotism, his sound judgment, his fearless exposure of all abuses, and his sympathy, though belonging, by his education and literary connections, to what may be called ‘the old school’, with all really great reforms; witness his advocacy of the rights of the serfs.” Harrison was also something of a conservative, who denounced Tolstoy as ‘a dangerous and revolutionary socialist whose theories were anti-religious’. He protested loudly when British-American actor Ira Aldridge brought The Merchant of Venice to St Petersburg and, in addition to littering his speeches with German words and breaking up Shakespeare’s carefully crafted speech-rhythms with emotional pauses and histrionic gestures, dropped the whole of the fifth act. “His Shylock is just a vulgar moneylender,” grumbled Harrison, though the St Petersburg intelligentsia was charmed by Aldridge, who was indeed most gracious, “not the person represented by Shakespeare as persecuted by Christianity”. It is easy to see why Krylov, as a patriotic reformer with a strong sense of Russia’s heritage, so appealed to him.
The fable of the Cat and the Cook dates from 1812.
Acknowledgements to ‘Ira Aldridge: The Last Years, 1855-1867’ (2015) by Bernth Lindfors.
15 October 19
I have added a new post to the Copy Book: Traitorous Designs.
It is the text of the proclamation issued by King George III on August 23rd, 1775, in response to the growing rebellion in Britain’s colony in Massachusetts. The Proclamation reminded the colonists of the British government’s legal claims on their obedience, and of the colonists’ moral duty to the State that protected them. The King regretted to say that the colonists had been led astray by British activists, and called upon both law enforcement and the general public to find these men and turn them in.
The weakness in the King’s argument, as critics pointed out at the time, was that he thought solely in terms of his legal right to territories and the obedience of the people who lived on them, and ignored the rights of his subjects and what they could expect from their Government. The Americans were Englishmen like any others, but the King who claimed to protect them had not only refused them democratic representation, he had sent his troops against them. His angry proclamation did not convince vocal critics such as Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox, who went on speaking out despite the King’s attempted censorship, and it did not convince the Englishmen of America, who declared their independence on July 4th, 1776.
16 October 18
When Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets were published in 1609, they were very cleverly arranged in such a way as to form a continuous narrative, like a novel. They did not have this when they were written. We do not know who made this arrangement, or whether Shakespeare was involved in the publication of his sonnets at all. Consequently, the Sonnets do not have to be read in accordance the narrative given to them by the publisher.
That said, in the collection as it stands, the implied author, the narrator as we are asked to imagine him, is a lonely, middle-aged Poet who is insecure both in love and in art, and who takes a ‘fair youth’ for the Muse of his love poetry. This rather worthless young man, about twenty, is one of those pretty boys who but for a sudden caprice of Nature (says Shakespeare) might have been a girl, and is popular, a head-turner, promiscuous and self-centred. At first, the Poet urges him to settle down and marry, but he refuses. The two unequal friends are slowly driven apart by the Youth’s vanity, betrayals (he steals the Poet’s girlfriends) and neglect. The Poet finally shakes him off in Sonnet 126, and finds a nice girl for himself in the final two poems; but in Sonnet 90 he is still not master of his own will, and is more concerned that the fair youth is thinking of dropping him.
17 October 15
I recently added this post, Ministerial Myopia.
The passage is taken from The Idea of a Patriot King, written by Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, for the benefit of Frederick, Prince of Wales, heir apparent of George II. Bolingbroke contrasts two kinds of politician, the wise and the merely cunning, likening them to the man with sound eyesight and the man who is helplessly short-sighted.
The passage was included in Clay’s Advanced English Exercises (1939). He invited pupils to comment on the merits and defects of calling it ‘The Differences Between Wisdom and Cunning’ and ‘A Wise Minister’. What do you think of these titles, and what title would you give it?
18 October 13
I recently added this post, A Most Successful Holiday.
The author, Alfred George Gardiner, was a columnist for the long-running evening newspaper the Star (which was later absorbed into the Daily Mail) during and after the Great War. Gardiner wrote about matters which appealed to ordinary people in a manner that was light, yet treated his readers with respect. This extract, from the start of a piece entitled “On Coming Home”, is just such an essay. He explores that paradox that a holiday can be too enjoyable: if its effect is to send us home still wanting to be away, it has not done its job.