English Literature

["You must allow me to present this young lady to you."]

Over the past few weeks, my blogging voice seems to have evaporated from this site. That’s not because I’ve slipped into some eerie library limbo. My time and energies have instead been devoted to preparing a public presentation, “Elusive Jane: In Search of Jane Austen at the New York Public Library.” For ages, it seems, my desk has been buried under a small mountain of books by and about Jane Austen, necessitating a major excavation every time I needed a pencil or a piece of tape. But the hard part is over, and I’m finally ready to meet anyone curious about the life of Jane Austen this Friday, November 6, at 2:15.

Of the many facets of my job here at the New York Public Library, my favorite is the opportunity to get in front of a crowd of people and share my enthusiasm for my favorite authors. Don’t tell anyone, but I also get to read Jane Austen and call it work.

Is it necessary to know anything about Jane Austen’s life in order to appreciate her novels? Certainly not. But after researching the biographies and background materials available here at the library, I found that the novels I had always loved took on a depth and an emotional resonance they hadn’t had before.

Although there are more available biographies of Jane Austen than you would probably care to count, and the facts they contain remain quite consistently the facts, the interpretation of those facts seems to differ from biographer to biographer. It began with James Edward Austen-Leigh’s Memoir of his aunt’s life, which first appeared fifty years after her death. This gracefully written, kind, and loving work helped to rekindle interest in Jane Austen’s life and writing and was used by all later biographies as their foundation. At the same time, the Memoir created an essentially false image of a placid spinster who wrote her novels as a sort of hobby and didn’t pay much heed to the world outside her own narrow scope. “Of events her life was singularly barren,” he wrote, “few changes and no great crisis ever broke the smooth current of her life.”

This of a woman whose life paralleled the Napoleonic Wars and the American Revolution; who lived through the fears of a French invasion of British soil; whose wide reading included not only novels but histories, accounts of current events, travel books, essays, and religious works; whose cousin brought the French Revolution directly into the family home when her husband lost his head to the guillotine; and whose brothers (both Admirals in the Royal Navy) kept her well informed of events beyond the boundaries of rural Hampshire. It is now clear, as Tony Tanner points out in his critical study Jane Austen that she “was much more aware of contemporary events, debates and issues, of the wars and domestic unrest, of the incipiently visible results of the Industrial Revolution, and of a radical change taking place in the constitution of English society, than the conventional view allows, or perhaps wants to allow.” In addition, Jane Austen was very much a professional author who spent her life developing and perfecting her own manuscripts (which she referred to as her “children”), wrangled with publishers, and was honored by the Prince Regent. She was eventually able to earn an independent living from her writing--a feat few women of the day could boast.

This is the Jane Austen I will be discussing on Friday, November 6th, at 2:15 in the first floor classroom of the New York Public Library. If you can’t make it that afternoon--I’ll be giving the same talk again on December 3rd and January 8th, also at 2:15.

These talks will be alternating with Out of the Blacking Factory, the Charles Dickens presentation I introduced last year, on November 20th, December 18th, and January 22nd.

“Mrs. Hall, of Sherborne, was brought to bed yesterday of a dead baby, some weeks before she expected, owing to a fright. I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband.”

— from a letter of Jane Austen to Cassandra, October 27, 1798

The most magical thing about visiting London for the first time was the sense of being so close to the source of the literature I’d spent so much of my life reading. One of my sharpest memories is of the day I turned a corner in the National Portrait Gallery and came unexpectedly upon this likeness of Jane Austen done by her sister, Cassandra. Although I had previously seen reproductions of the unfinished sketch--always of special interest because it is only one of two authenticated images (the other is of Jane seen from the back, face hidden by a bonnet)--coming across the real thing was another matter. Time collapsed, and I felt almost in the physical presence of an author already deeply rooted in my imagination.

Maybe the resemblance is not the most accurate or truthful. The family seemed to think it was not a success. According to R. W. Chapman, when James Edward Austen-Leigh decided to include an etching of the portrait in his memoir, his sister, half-sister, and cousins gave it only “very guarded and qualified approval.” Although it “was not positively inconsistent with their youthful recollections,” they seemed to think that “perhaps it gave some idea of the truth.” Despite their reservations, the actual penciled work with its washes of watercolor is a great deal more delicate and beautiful than any reproduction would lead you to believe, and I stood in the gallery staring at it, transfixed. If there was anything wrong with the image, I thought, it wasn’t Cassandra’s lack of skill in capturing the likeness but rather in her inability to animate it with any of the intelligence, irony, or playfulness which any reader of Jane Austen would expect to find there.  read more »

A strange relationship is established with favorite novelists, particularly those who are our living contemporaries. In reading their work, we are reconstituting word by word their mental landscapes and experiencing the energy which has gone into the act of creation, thereby establishing an extraordinary sort of intimacy. Although it should work the same way with deceased authors, the relationship lacks the reassurance that they are safely off somewhere, working on their next book. Since these authors no longer inhabit our present reality, their fiction inexorably turns into historical fiction. When we have turned their last page, there is nothing beyond.

This February, Iris Murdoch will have been dead for ten years. For those of us who remember waiting anxiously for her new novels to appear—at the typical rate of one every year or two--that seems especially hard to believe. That sturdy, striking face from the book jacket photographs—with eyes that, if you stared long enough, seemed to puncture holes in you—suggested that mortality would never be an issue. Although hers was one of the most reliable literary voices throughout the latter part of the twentieth century, it was remarkable to discover, shortly after her death, that most of her monumental output (26 novels) was no longer in print. In our ever-accelerating information age, new books are kept on bookstore shelves for ever-decreasing amounts of time and allowed to go out of print with no apparent qualm on the part of publishers. It was gratifying to find, however, that over the last few years Murdoch seems to have emerged once again in paperback; but I wonder if she isn’t nowadays more remembered than read, due to the memoir of her final days by her husband, John Bayley; the Peter J. Conradi biography Iris: A Life; and Iris, the movie of her life with Kate Winslet and Judi Dench.  read more »

I generally enjoy the Christmas season if I don’t allow myself to get sucked up in the frenzy. Of course, the frenzy is almost irresistible: the catalogs start coming right after Labor Day, store owners regard Halloween as the beginning of the holiday season, and the stability of the global economy depends on how free and easy you are with your credit card. As for me, I’ve always thought of Christmas as "a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of other people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys." Yes, of course, that’s Scrooge’s nephew; but he and I seem to share the ideal of a benevolent, unhurried, and meditative Christmas in the midst of the contemporary tempest. What constitutes this traditional secular celebration? For me it is a cozy construct of movie images full of gently falling snow, music ranging from Bach’s Christmas cantatas to Jingle Bell Rock, some carefully sifted childhood memories, and of course, A Christmas Carol, the book that is probably Charles Dickens’s best-known and best-loved work, and the one which almost singlehandedly gave us the Christmas we know today.

Christmas Facts and Fancies, by Alfred Carl Hottes, places the roots of Christmas observance among a jumble of European influences, principally the Saturnalia of ancient Rome, a celebration of the harvest god which included feasting, songs, holly boughs and evergreen wreaths, candle-lighting, present-giving, and processions. This was the precursor of the Christmas season in early Britain, whose mostly rural population, under the auspices of local lords, combined the birth of Christ with the ancient Roman festival and spun out their celebrations over twelve days. By 1645, however, Oliver Cromwell and the Puritan forces detected a hot whiff of paganism in these rituals of the winter season and (Grinch-like) called an end to them. By the time Charles II was restored to the throne and the restrictions were rescinded, the traditions were largely forgotten and remained so for almost two hundred years. Even during the early part of the industrial Revolution, most people were too busy toiling and laboring to be bothered with a holiday which had fallen out of favor. Then, in the middle of the nineteenth century, Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in a blaze of creative enthusiasm, and it became an immediate sensation. The warmth and charity of Dickens’s vision struck such a powerful chord in both England and the United States that everyone suddenly wanted to celebrate Christmas again in the old fashion.

[Cigarette card: Sir Seymour Hicks, British actor whose most famous role was Ebenezer Scrooge]

The first printing of A Christmas Carol was 6000 copies, and it sold out in a matter of days. Dickens had personally designed and edited the book; but in his desire to produce as handsome an artifact as possible he spared no expense, and his profit was consequently much smaller than expected. For me, one of the most exciting parts of my public presentation Out of the Blacking Factory: Charles Dickens at the New York Public Library was the opportunity, courtesy of the Rare Books Division, to display that 1843 edition, the one which Dickens himself saw into print. It is an exquisite little gem of a book, in a reddish binding stamped in gilt, and it fits comfortably in your hand. Several of the familiar John Leech illustrations, such as “Mr. Fezziwig’s Ball” and “The Second of the Three Spirits” are hand-colored and seem to glow with a luminescence that is never captured in any of the reprints or on the Internet. You can see the Rare Books Division's copy again during my final presentation on January 16th. In the meantime, another copy of the same work is on display as part of the Berg Collection’s Literary Christmas Miscellany exhibition through January 4th, located in Room 315.

Like many others, my first exposure to A Christmas Carol was watching the old British movie with Alastair Sim on television every year, an event I looked forward to almost as much as the annual The Wizard of Oz. Those stark black and white images stuck in my head, and led to the feeling (which lingers in some form to this day) that the dark hours between Christmas Eve and Christmas morning contained some sort of potent magic and that interesting events on a ghostly plane were a distinct possibility. Still, no matter how many of the endless dramatizations and adaptations you’ve seen--and what winter season would be complete without one or two--there is no experience comparable to actually reading A Christmas Carol. I was in college when I discovered the book for the first time and recognized that what sets this work apart is Dickens’s unique voice. He is the narrator who, with the observation “Marley was as dead as a door-nail,” reflects that he himself might have regarded “a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of iron-mongery in the trade.” When Scrooge discovers the knocker with Marley’s face, it is “not in impenetrable shadow, as the other objects in the yard were, but had a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar.” And, after the night’s supernatural doings are over, he informs us that Scrooge “had no further intercourse with Spirits, but lived upon the Total-Abstinence Principle ever afterwards.” These are just a few of the verbal niceties that could never be captured on film. I’ve read A Christmas Carol almost every year for half a lifetime now, and the liveliness and energy of Dickens’s words never fail to cast their Victorian magic spell. These days, just before Christmas, I read it out loud to my wife, one stave per night, a routine which has become an indispensible part of our personal holiday tradition.

If you noticed me at any time during the last few weeks, skulking through the halls of the New York Public Library, I was probably clutching a plump little volume in one hand, wondering when I’d get another chance to read a few more pages. That copy of Dombey and Son was my loyal companion for a long time. Henry James might have derisively called nineteenth-century novels “loose, baggy monsters,” but I certainly appreciated the scope of this book, the sense of time passing, lives changing, characters intersecting on a vast, 900-page canvas. It made me wonder how much more intense the reading experience would have been, as it was originally conceived, in monthly numbers stretching over a year or so. The closest analogy I could come up with were the glory days of Masterpiece Theatre, before the VCR was even invented, when I just had to be home on Sunday night to catch the next episode of “I, Claudius” or “Jewel in the Crown.”

I have had some trouble with Dickens in the past. My initial enthusiasm in starting one of his books usually peters out after the first few hundred pages. Maybe I just start to long for a female character who does not so totally embody the concept of goodness. But, since I’ve been preparing my public presentation on Charles Dickens, I thought I’d try again and chose one of the few novels I’d never read before, Dombey and Son. To my surprise, it’s one of the most thoroughly enjoyable Dickens novels I can remember. Of course, I’m familiar with the phenomenon of talking myself into feeling the way I think I should be feeling, but in this case there are many substantive reasons for my enjoyment—one of which might just be that I came to it at the right moment in my life.  read more »