In this entry for The 1951 Club, I reread The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, edited by Iona and Peter Opie. I love excavating the history behind the relics of history cast up as sayings and idioms, and as nursery rhymes. When I was little, reading the Puffin nursery rhymes book that I still own, tattered and torn though it is, I thought this was the saddest rhyme I had ever read.
Here am I
Little Jumping Joan
When nobody’s with me
I’m all alone
Existential crisis or what? But according to the Opies, who made the study of the nursery rhyme and playground song an academic discipline in its own right, this is about a 17th-century prostitute. Well! That certainly makes a difference to how I might also think about Little Miss Muffet. The Opies list many theoretical origins for Miss Muffet, but my favourite is that she was one of many parodies (along with ‘Little Mary Easter sat on a tester’, ‘Little Miss Mopsey sat in the shopsey’, ‘Little Polly Flinders’, ‘ Little Poll Parrot’ and ‘Little Jack Horner’) of the cushion dance in which someone had to sit and wait for something. Maybe it was a May Day ritual, or a marriage rite, or a folk custom lost in prehistoric mists. What the Opies don’t say is that these rhymes follow (more or less) the metre of dactylic trimeter or tetrameter, ie a waltz tune. Maybe it was a dance around the sitting person?
The Opies said of their Dictionary ‘we believe we have assembled here almost everything so far known about nursery rhymes together with a considerable amount of material hitherto unpublished’. In their Dictionary they included ‘nonsense jingles, humorous songs, and character rhymes, the more common lullabies, infant amusements, nursery counting-out formulas, baby puzzles and riddles, rhyming alphabets, tongue twisters, nursery prayers, and singing games’. It doesn’t include ‘rhymes of divination, magic spells and fairy tales in verse’, which is perhaps a good thing.
I wonder about ‘the more common lullabies’: I don’t think I ever sang a lullaby to my children in the 1990s, because singing to them in their cots meant to infant minds that it was time for them to get up and dance. How common were lullabies in the 1950s, or earlier? This is perhaps the point, that in 1951 it was felt necessary to record and collate in a scholarly way the lineage of traditional rhymes, whether destined for nursery or schoolroom, because they were dying out. The collected scraps and snippets of ancient poetry are also garlanded with historical context: ‘a knowledge of their past adds to the pleasure of them in the present’. The Opies researched thoroughly in the standard collections, but also advertised for contributions, especially for material ‘never seen in print’, to try to capture the oral tradition that stretched its fingers of memory back to the nineteenth century and beyond. Their research crosses the sea: many of the ‘English’ rhymes are actually American (‘Three little kittens they lost their mittens’) and British rhymes have North American variants.
The Dictionary is a treasure, especially if you’re looking for historical events preserved in folk rhyme. ‘To market, to market, to buy a fat pig’ is from the sixteenth century, as is ‘Ding dong bell, pussy’s in the well’. ‘London Bridge is falling down’ dates from the seventeenth century. ‘Hot cross buns’ is from the eighteenth century. It has apparently been suggested that ‘Dr Foster went to Gloucester’ derives from an incident in the reign of Edward 1, from the thirteenth century. I don’t actually care whether that is true or not true: it’s a wonderful idea that oral traditions preserve the words that people sang for pleasure, and what they sang about, reused and revived periodically.
There is a good novel buried in this sprawling, self-indulgent fantasy of irony and class consciousness. Rachel Ferguson wrote A Footman for the Peacock (1940) right at the beginning of the Second World War: it was her eighth novel and fourteenth book. Comparing it to its immediate predecessor, Alas Poor Lady (1937), one can only assume that the frustration and gloom of impending war had addled her sense of proportion. Her earlier novel, the triumphant, magnificent The Brontes Went to Woolworths (1931) is now her most well-known novel due to the Virago reprint of 1988, and rightly so: it is a work of pure fantastical genius. Alas Poor Lady, also snapped up by the unerring eye of a successful reprint publisher, is one of the novels that epitomises Persephone Books’ project of rescuing unjustly neglected novels for their literary quality and the gifts of their social commentary. Both novels are written with control and sensitivity, matching Ferguson’s precise observations to her magical ability to conjure pathos out of the ludicrous by showing the power of human feelings over all social considerations.
Compared to these novels, A Footman for the Peacock fails embarrassingly. I haven’t always been too enthusiastic with what the Dean Street Press have kindly sent me to review (A Chelsea Concerto was the dazzling exception). My impression has been that either my taste in books is very different to their collective taste, or they are reprinting novels that other reprint houses are not bothering with for good reason. Of course, it could just be me. Earlier reviews of A Footman for the Peacock had me wondering if I had read the same book. But its publicity is also bizarrely at odds with what I actually read, so much so that I seriously considered whether their back cover blurb had been written by a marketing person who had been told about the book, but hadn’t read it for themselves. This is the first offender:
What utter, utter tosh. There is a peacock. It prowls the lawns of the English country mansion, Delaye, and keeps an eye on the Roundelay family and its servants. It attacks Angela, the younger Roundelay daughter, when she offers it half a hard-boiled egg, but the alert reader will already have spotted the reason for that when it occurs. The peacock has a close connection to the eighteenth-century family’s running footman Thomas Picocke, who died bloodily in the top attic bedroom, due to his murderously exhausting job. It waits, presumably; listens, possibly; but it does not guide, and it certainly does not signal. As for the succeeding line, ‘may be aiding the Nazi cause’, this interpretation comes from the original Furrowed Middlebrow review of this novel, which is a straightforward misreading. It’s undoubtedly useful in the blurb, to pull in readers attracted to a plot about Nazi avian espionage. The niche readership will be disappointed, but they’ll already have bought the book.
Other assertions in the blurb may be due to the Furrowed Middlebrow’s knowledge of British social and literary history. It says that the novel was ‘controversial when first published’: well, no, it wasn’t. It was peculiar, Margery Allingham gave it a ‘guarded’ review (not unusual for her), and Punch loved it. If there is any evidence to prove the ‘controversial’ tag (so useful for whipping up sales), Dean Street Press don’t prove it.
The next phrase mentions ‘a loathsome upper-crust family dodging wartime responsibility’. Yes, they’re upper-class; yes, they’re dodging war-time responsibility by resisting billeting of evacuees, but most novels of the war written before the Blitz will depict this. So are the Roundelays ‘loathsome?’ No, I don’t think they are. Ferguson spends the entire novel making us feel how dear and charming and nice these people are, as well as vague, eccentric and exceedingly old-fashioned. She creates people, and shows us their lives, makes them live with human preoccupations, tirednesses, aggravations and struggles, and then presents them in wartime, struggling to cope as everybody had to cope, in peculiarly individual ways. Not loathsome, no: just human. The blurb and I will have to disagree on this one.
Rachel Ferguson in the 1930s
Getting into Ferguson’s plot, the novel’s fantasy elements of the strange other-worldly village of Rohan, Angela’s shuddering sensitivity to the haunted room with the glass inscription, the mystery of Sue Privett’s relationship with the peacock, and the eighteenth-century mysteries of the running footman’s death, the sacking of Polly Privett and Marguerite Roundelay’s fatal self-exile to Revolutionary France: all these belong in a potentially excellent mystery novel that Ferguson never allowed herself to write. Instead, she clarted her plot with a slapped-on morass of witticisms, as if she were clearing out a hoard of old jokes, clever take-offs and satirical interjections (some are very good). She romps for pages and pages, sending-up high society and its ways, forgetting that she’s supposed to be writing a novel with a plot. Characters appear and then wither away, forgotten. Tag-ends of plot lines multiply as if seeded by an anxious editor, hoping to pull some of this farrago together. The chaos is frustrating, because there is so much here that could have been so good. But Ferguson decided (or perhaps just needed to get something published) to throw everything she had into the pot. It’s a mess.
The novel is ill-served by its Introduction, which is expected to cover all three Ferguson novels reprinted in the Furrowed Middlebrow series, and is presumably reprinted in all three. This approach is needlessly cheapskate, and fails the novels by only giving them half a page each. Why wasn’t Elizabeth Crawford given the space to do the job properly?
You’ll detect that my exasperation with a good novel wasted is exacerbated by the publishing decisions for this edition, and that this is not a happy review. Many of you will think this beside the point, or needlessly pernickety. But these things matter: if you’re going to do reprints, you should take them seriously as novels, not just sales opportunities, consider their merits objectively, and not fob readers off with material that is so much less than it could have been. I don’t say that A Footman for the Peacock should not have been reprinted, but I would only recommend it for Ferguson completists.
In this week’s Really Like This book podcast scripts catch-up, I’m in the English Renaissance, pricking across the plain with the Red-Crosse Knight, in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. This is the biggest and most elaborate courtly flattery ever written, and it’s not even complete. Edmund Spenser was a subject of Queen Elizabeth, the first of that name, and she was a very experienced, very wily old lady of 66 when he wrote the poem to gain her favour. No doubt she was flattered and mightily amused when he personified her as Gloriana, Belphoebe, the Fairie Queene and the Queen of Love in an epic on the moral virtues. It was planned as a poem in 12 books, with each book consisting of 12 cantos, and each canto consisting of 12 stanzas, which were verses of 9 lines each. Spenser only managed to write the first six books, which means he completed nearly 8000 lines of verse. And that was only half of what he had planned. Some fragments of later cantos exist, but the poem effectively halts at the end of book 6. The Faerie Queene is the western world’s longest poem from this period, an action epic, and a Renaissance version of the chivalric romance. Spenser wrote a long letter to Sir Walter Raleigh explaining what he meant with the poem, which is one of the easier ways to get to grips with it before reading.
The first thing to notice is that it’s an allegory: a work where characters are not rounded personalities as we would expect them to be in novels, but flat, and unchanging. They represent qualities, symbols, abstract concepts. This makes the multitude of characters very easy to remember: they don’t change, and they are simple black and white personifications. The aim of the Faerie Queene is to show how a gentleman ought to behave, through a series of adventures where knights battle with monsters, and are frequently rescued by King Arthur.
Whoa. What is King Arthur doing in a Renaissance poem? Arthur was from the middle ages, the Dark Ages even, a character who emerged after the Saxon invasions and was established long before the Normans, 400 to 600 years earlier than Edmund Spenser. Arthur belongs to a literary tradition that began with relatively primitive poems about military muscle and ended with delicate philosophical discussions about love in a fantasy boudoir. He doesn’t fit in the Renaissance world of Sir Philip Sidney and the Earl of Essex. However, Arthur is also an allegorical figure. In Spenser’s day he was still thought of as the perfect knight, and was, obviously, very well known. As a figure in a poem dealing with the twelve moral virtues, he would have no ulterior motives, or be anything other than a perfect kingly paragon of virtue.
The plot of the poem is, broadly, that Prince Arthur is on a quest to find his beloved Faerie Queene, an allegorical portrait of Queen Elizabeth, and is continually interrupted by entering the adventures of other characters. Spenser separates the figure of Arthur completely from the ‘matter of Britain’ that we usually associate him with (by which I mean Lancelot, Guinevere, the Holy Grail) by transplanting him into a totally different fantasy landscape. Queen Guinevere doesn’t exist in this new incarnation of Arthur’s story: he’s a single knight in pursuit of a new lady as the object of his courtly love, the Faerie Queene herself. In the six different books of the poem, Arthur functions as the all-conquering knight to rescue those in need.
Britomart of Book 2
Each book is about one of the moral virtues. Book 1 is about Holinesse, the second is about Temperance, the third is about Chastity, with a female knight as the hero, the immortal Britomart. The fourth book is about friendship, the fifth is about justice, and the sixth is about courtesy. Each book tells the adventures of a different knight, and that knight’s lady, and the monsters they encounter, the temptations they struggle with, and how they embody their book’s particular virtue. The story is very stylized, and utterly unrealistic, which can be explained by thinking about how story, as tales told in poetry, was evolving in English literature. By the sixteenth century, when the Faerie Queene was written, readers of romances and poetry were a bit bothered about the apparent disinterest that much earlier writers, for instance Chaucer, had in noticing the difference between fact and fiction. Renaissance readers felt that romance needed to be quite clearly romance, and narratives of exploration and discovery needed to be believable and true, and usable as guidebooks. The form of the narrative wasn’t important: a poem about the exploration of the New World would have been quite acceptable as an emigrants’ guide. What mattered was the presentation of facts as facts, and fantasy as fantasy. So the characters in the Faerie Queene do not show anything like real-life behaviour. They are also unfazed at encountering cave-dwelling monsters, talking trees, processions of foul fiends in the wilderness, or dragons. This is all standard, and this is why the Faerie Queene is such fun to read, if you like that sort of thing.
Una and the Lion, from Book 1
Book 1 is a self-contained epic on its own, and is thus the one book most widely studied in university classes. The story is also very attractive: the Red-Crosse Knight (who represents Holinesse) begged the Faerie Queene at her court to be allowed to undertake his first quest. He was weary of hanging around the court as a junior untried squire: he wanted action. So, graciously, the Faerie Queene, or Gloriana, agreed that the next quest to be announced at court would be his. The next day, a maiden of great purity arrived, asking for help from a brave knight to rescue the kingdom of her father, the Emperor, which was being terrorized by a dragon. Gloriana announced that she had just the knight for the job, a most experienced and doughty warrior; may I introduce the Red-Crosse Knight?
You will have spotted that Gloriana was not telling the maiden what the knight had told her, and I’m not quite sure why: I haven’t looked deep enough into the critical literature to see what the experts think of this apparent continuity flaw, or deliberate falsehood by the queen of truth and beauty. Anyhow, the maiden, whose name was Una, gladly accepted the knight’s service, and off they went. Almost immediately (because this story does not hang around, each canto has quite a bit of action) Una and the Red-Crosse Knight are misled and separated by a wizard called Archimago, disguised as a holy friar, and a strangely smiling lady called Duessa. These two are better known to Spenser’s original readers as Satan and Duplicity, and they force the two holy heroes to endure many trials and terrors, all connected with belief, and with chivalry, and the terrible lure of Catholicism, before being rescued by Prince Arthur. That ends Book 1, and we enter Book 2 with gusto, appetite whetted for more fantastical adventures.
To understand the odd religious bias again Catholicism, we need to remember the persecution dealt out to Catholics during the reign of Elizabeth, and the persecution dealt out to Protestants during the reign of her elder sister, Mary I, or Bloody Mary, a generation earlier: practical effects of the history of the Protestant reformation in England. Spenser was aiming to please his own particular Protestant queen, so he packed this first book of the poem with spectacularly simplistic, negative messages about Catholicism. These too are part of the poem’s fascination, in decoding and untangling what Spenser’s audience would have understood immediately.
We do not need to read the Faerie Queene in translation: it is remarkably accessible in Elizabethan English. If you can understand Shakespeare you’ll be able to understand this. But I suggest that you try it as an audio book or CD, if you’re nervous about antiquated spellings putting you off your stroke. English has changed much less in sound from Elizabethan times than it has in its spelling, so focus on what the words sound like. On the other hand, if you can get hold of one of the lovely nineteenth- or early twentieth-century facsimile editions of the Faerie Queene, you can enjoy the classic layout of the stanzas of each canto in double columns, and the helpful rhymes at the start of each canto that summarise the action.
I was persuaded by the excellent word of mouth praise for A Notable Woman: The Romantic Journals of Jean Lucey Pratt, which is an unlikely-sounding smash hit. I was delighted. Also appalled by its weight and size: this is NOT a book for taking on holiday unless you do the ebook thing. A very absorbing, moving and impressive read, but over on Vulpes Libris I have views about the editorial choices made to get 45 diaries down to two inches of book.
Existential crisis or what? But according to the Opies, who made the study of the nursery rhyme and playground song an academic discipline in its own right, this is about a 17th-century prostitute. Well! That certainly makes a difference to how I might also think about Little Miss Muffet. The Opies list many theoretical origins for Miss Muffet, but my favourite is that she was one of many parodies (along with ‘Little Mary Easter sat on a tester’, ‘Little Miss Mopsey sat in the shopsey’, ‘Little Polly Flinders’, ‘ Little Poll Parrot’ and ‘Little Jack Horner’) of the cushion dance in which someone had to sit and wait for something. Maybe it was a May Day ritual, or a marriage rite, or a folk custom lost in prehistoric mists. What the Opies don’t say is that these rhymes follow (more or less) the metre of dactylic trimeter or tetrameter, ie a waltz tune. Maybe it was a dance around the sitting person?
The Opies said of their Dictionary ‘we believe we have assembled here almost everything so far known about nursery rhymes together with a considerable amount of material hitherto unpublished’. In their Dictionary they included ‘nonsense jingles, humorous songs, and character rhymes, the more common lullabies, infant amusements, nursery counting-out formulas, baby puzzles and riddles, rhyming alphabets, tongue twisters, nursery prayers, and singing games’. It doesn’t include ‘rhymes of divination, magic spells and fairy tales in verse’, which is perhaps a good thing.
I wonder about ‘the more common lullabies’: I don’t think I ever sang a lullaby to my children in the 1990s, because singing to them in their cots meant to infant minds that it was time for them to get up and dance. How common were lullabies in the 1950s, or earlier? This is perhaps the point, that in 1951 it was felt necessary to record and collate in a scholarly way the lineage of traditional rhymes, whether destined for nursery or schoolroom, because they were dying out. The collected scraps and snippets of ancient poetry are also garlanded with historical context: ‘a knowledge of their past adds to the pleasure of them in the present’. The Opies researched thoroughly in the standard collections, but also advertised for contributions, especially for material ‘never seen in print’, to try to capture the oral tradition that stretched its fingers of memory back to the nineteenth century and beyond. Their research crosses the sea: many of the ‘English’ rhymes are actually American (‘Three little kittens they lost their mittens’) and British rhymes have North American variants.
The Dictionary is a treasure, especially if you’re looking for historical events preserved in folk rhyme. ‘To market, to market, to buy a fat pig’ is from the sixteenth century, as is ‘Ding dong bell, pussy’s in the well’. ‘London Bridge is falling down’ dates from the seventeenth century. ‘Hot cross buns’ is from the eighteenth century. It has apparently been suggested that ‘Dr Foster went to Gloucester’ derives from an incident in the reign of Edward 1, from the thirteenth century. I don’t actually care whether that is true or not true: it’s a wonderful idea that oral traditions preserve the words that people sang for pleasure, and what they sang about, reused and revived periodically.
