Rebellion, or Uprising? In this Really Like This Book podcast scripts catch-up I’m in the middle of the British eighteenth century, looking at the ‘1745’, otherwise known as the Jacobite Rebellion, or Uprising, depending on which side you were on. This was the second attempt by the exiled Roman Catholic monarchy of Britain to reclaim what they thought was their rightful kingdom, so let’s have a wee bit of history to fix us in time and space, before I get on to John Buchan’s fascination with the subject.
The United Kingdom of England, Wales and Scotland had been inherited by James II and VII from his elder brother Charles II, in 1688. Unfortunately James’s open adherence to Roman Catholicism did not go down well with the Protestant government, and in due course he was forced to leave Britain for the Continent, and his daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William of Orange took the throne as the ‘Protestant Kings’, William III and Mary II. They were the penultimate Stuart monarchs, and their successor and sister, Queen Anne, was succeeded in 1714 by the Protestant Hanoverian dynasty, brought over from Germany. In 1715 James II’s son, James Stuart, called the Old Pretender by his opponents and James III and VIII by his supporters, attempted to lead an uprising against the British government and Hanoverian monarchy from Scotland. He was disappointed by his lack of supporters, fell ill and went back to France. He died in exile in 1766.
Thirty years later his elder son Charles Stuart, most famously known as Bonnie Prince Charlie, or the Young Pretender, attempted an uprising in 1745 by landing on the west coast of Scotland. He successfully gathered the clans to support him, including some senior Scottish noble families, and marched with a large army as far south as Derbyshire, about halfway down the island of Britain. But then the common sense of his military leaders took over, dismayed by their own dwindling support and rumours of Government troops massing to meet them, and he was forced to withdraw back to Scotland. The Uprising was decisively destroyed in April 1746 at the Battle of Culloden, near Inverness in the far north, and Charles Stuart escaped the British army – very famously – in disguise as Flora Macdonald’s maid. He landed back in France in September and never troubled the British government again.
So that was the Jacobite Rebellion, or Uprising. Like Flora, I am a Macdonald, descended from Clan Macdonald of the Isle of Skye. However, this took place over several centuries and follows the genealogy of only one of my many ancestors, so it’s a very selective way of claiming a heritage. I’ve never been convinced by the heady romanticism of the cult of Jacobitism. The idea of the glamorous prince from over the water, the tragedy of Culloden and the lost cause, and the resulting oppression of the Highlands, have produced a deliberate nurturing of Scottish nationalist sentimentality about English oppression and the nobility of lost Scottish causes. This can be uplifting, in very small doses, but is disturbingly divorced from historical fact. Vast numbers of novels have been written about the Jacobite theme. Until the mid-twentieth century it was one of the most important subjects in Scottish fiction, first made popular by Sir Walter Scott with his novel Waverley of 1814, and continued by, among thousands of others, John Buchan, about whom I’ve posted several times. Looking at Buchan’s Jacobite novels and how he treated the theme is a useful antidote to some of the glutinous and unhistorical nonsense that has been published about this military, political and dynastic disaster.
One of Buchan’s earliest short stories – a tiny fragment called ‘Afternoon’ published in 1896 – is written in the style of Kenneth Grahame’s Dream Days, about a little boy playing at Jacobites who has a private adventure. It’s not very much, but it’s indicative of the sentimental hold that the theme had even in the fin de siècle. Three years later another story – ‘The Earlier Affection’ of 1899 – copies part of the Waverley plot. Its about an English traveller who meets his cousin, a Jacobite fugitive, and finds himself fighting with him for the Jacobite cause just because of a few rousing words spoken in Gaelic, which sums up the sentimental mythology of the Uprising, or Rebellion.
Buchan’s third novel was A Lost Lady of Old Years, also of 1899, so we can see what his preoccupation was at this time in his writing life. It takes a very different approach to the ‘45 than is or was usual. The ‘Lost Lady’ of the title is Mrs Murray of Broughton, the wife of Mr Secretary Murray who was hanged for his part in the rebellion, though she escaped. The ‘Old Years’ means of times past: she herself was young and beautiful. History apparently records that she was a bad lot, but Buchan romanticises her spectacularly. His Mrs Murray is pure, perfect and brave in her unswerving support for the Prince, despite the treachery of her husband whom she is beginning to suspect. The main protagonist of the novel, a teenage delinquent called Francis Birkenshaw, is saved from a life of crime because Mrs Murray catches him breaking into her house, mistakes him for the Jacobite messenger for whom she is waiting, and gives him a highly secret political message to deliver to one of the great Jacobite leaders in the Highlands, Lord Lovat.
Miraculously, the trust she mistakenly places in Francis restores his wavering sense of honour and duty, and he decides to turn away from the path of petty crime down which he had been sliding, and to struggle back to being a gentleman again. He takes the message to Lovat, but he is too late, delayed by illness, and getting lost. He returns to Edinburgh to find the Cause also lost – for by now Francis is as devout a Jacobite as Mrs Murray had expected him to be – and he devotes his efforts to keeping her safe, and to getting her away to France after the execution of her husband. The story is desperately romantic, and cleverly patched in alongside the facts of history so nothing factual is disarranged very much. Francis meets the Prince, and Lovat, and other real figures, but they are all where they should be, and do what they ought to be doing at that time. Mrs Murray is too unimportant a figure in the male-centred version of how history should be written for it to matter how Buchan rewrites her character: there is simply very little known about her. A Lost Lady of Old Years is a rather good novel, for the splendid urgency that drives Francis on his quest, and the sense of redemption that the reader feels after his recovery from a life of arrogant, petty crime. Buchan doesn’t tamper with the Rebellion or Uprising at all, and is really most respectful of the facts.
His next Jacobite outing was a short story, ‘The Company of the Marjolaine’ in 1909. It combines two unrelated facts – that shortly after the American War of Independence the new nation of the United States of America was encouraged by Benjamin Franklin to look for its own king; and that Bonnie Prince Charlie was still alive, and hoping to be offered a throne. It’s a sad story of greatness come down in the world, since the Prince is now an alcoholic living thinly-veiled poverty, attended by his illegitimate daughter the Duchess of Albany and a single servant, as they travel about the Continent to no purpose. It’s also a story about endurance, about how it might have been for Charles Stuart to exist for a further forty years, the best years of his life, as a failed Pretender to a throne and country that did not want him. The story that lies behind Buchan’s iteration is of the Duchess of Albany herself, required to use this title to acknowledge her father’s claim to royal status, but denied ever finding a place for herself because her illegitimacy bars her from polite society, and her nobility requires her to withdraw the hem of her garments from anyone else.
Buchan’s best Jacobite novel is Midwinter, of 1923, because it is a very plausible story – Dr Johnson (yes, THE Dr Johnson) tries to stop an anti-Jacobite plot at the moment of the Jacobite army’s decision to march away from Derby, and helps to save the marriage of a young girl married to a traitor. It is brilliantly plotted with really memorable characters. We all have a vague idea of Dr Johnson, the grumpy and superior lexicographer sitting in state at a tea-drinking at Mrs Thrale’s house, a figure of importance. This Dr Johnson is a much younger man, and a humble but doughty tutor to the gentility. Whether he was at tutor at this point in his life is unimportant: Buchan makes Dr Johnson live, just as he makes the Jacobite cause live, and all the historical characters are fleshed out with life and vigour. There is also the heroic, romantic Jacobite clansman, Alastair Maclean, and Claudia, the woman he loves who is being so sadly betrayed by her treacherous young husband, and the great Duchess of Queensberry, and a fascinating underground network of outlaws and disguised Jacobite supporters whose reach stretches from Oxfordshire to Yorkshire. The plot is packed with action and high drama, with spectacular dramatic set-pieces of duels, struggles to escape deadly traps, creepings along corridors, long journeys undercover: it really is one Buchan’s best thrillers, drenched in the anguish of the lost Jacobite cause.
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.
Missee Lee (1941) is an adventure novel in Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons series, one of the two novels in the series whose extraordinary places and events really could not have happened. I don’t know how the Arthur Ransome Society would feel about this theory, but I’ve always held that Missee Lee, like Peter Duck (1932), is a story told by the children to each other, off the page, whereas their many sailing adventures in the Lake District, the Norfolk Broads and off the mud near Harwich, are realistic events that could happen to anyone, which is half of their charm.
The loss of the Wild Cat at sea by fire is a quickly described but searingly detailed episode, a rare moment where the children’s lives are threatened by spectacular events told in Arthur Ransome’s signature flat style. The most intense feelings, the most desperate moments, are given power by the quietness with which we are told the details. Something I don’t think anyone has noticed before (but Ransomeites can prove me wrong: I don’t have access to the Arthur Ransome Society’s publications) is that Ransome borrowed this episode from a newspaper account by Mark Twain of a real-life disaster at sea, nearly eighty years before.
On reading Twain’s account and immediately recognising its similarities with the episode in Missee Lee, I did some literary detection. It seems clear to me that Ransome borrowed freely from the account as Twain gave it, and from which subsequent accounts of the disaster were drawn. Twain’s account may not have been reprinted in the twentieth century until 1939, in Letters from Honolulu, although this was in a limited edition of 1000 copies by an American publisher, unlikely to have come Ransome’s way. 
Karen Russell, Swamplandia!
Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting
Larry Niven, Ringworld
This 
When Peter leaves school and comes home, he realises with cold horror that his cackling grandfather and demonic violent father are waiting eagerly for him to fall into their bullying, violent, cruel ways. Peter runs off to London and takes a job in a second-hand bookshop. This is a quite a jump in the plot, made possible by the meetings Peter has had in a mysterious junk shop in Treliss, where he encounters the enigmatic, romantic and also mysterious Mr Zanti, who offers him the job. Zanti is a deliberately curious character when he first appears, giving an impression of being all astrakhan coat and dark curling moustaches. He is important because he keeps appearing at all the turns in Peter’s fortunes. Consequently we take him at Peter’s estimation all through the novel: first as a figure of glamour and cosmopolitanism, later as a kind benefactor, then as a hapless victim, and finally as a devoted and loyal friend.
Fortitude is also the first of what would be later grouped together as Walpole’s eight London novels. London is quite clearly the centre of the known world for Walpole’s characters in this novel, with a range of Dickensian socio-economic and class settings. Walpole also added some pointed portraits of people who might well have been of his friends and acquaintances in the literary London of his own day, including Henry James, of whom he was a protegé. But the London parts of Fortitude begin in the 1890s, so as well as recreating his own early successes from the Edwardian period, Walpole also does a nice job of recreating the society that was withdrawing the hem of its garments from The Yellow Book, ten years earlier. Walpole is writing this novel for insiders and for those who wanted recent literary fashions revisited.
What makes this a true novel of 1913, if you ignore the now timeless Gothic bits and the David Copperfield plot, is the secret socialist circle and the anarchist bomb plot. Anarchism had been fashionable in fiction for some time, and Walpole duly inserts an anarchist episode into Fortitude. Closely linked to the Cornish Gothic is the new fashion for rural extravagance, to be made popular by Mary Webb’s novels The Golden Arrow and Gone to Earth, during the First World War. Walpole expends a great deal of effort establishing the character of the big, muscular, simple and faithful farmer and lovelorn suitor Stephen Brant, who waits and suffers for literally decades while the woman he loves is married to another man. Stephen is Peter’s faithful friend and protector, going to extraordinary lengths to keep him alive in moments of danger, and to bring him news from home. But as soon as the woman is free, she and Stephen hop onto a ship for Canada.
It’s not too far-fetched to read Peter as Stephen’s surrogate child and light of his life. Stephen does a fair amount of raging through the winter fields at sunset, recalling very forcibly the Starkadder brothers in Stella Gibbons’s much later Cold Comfort Farm, but he is out of place in London, even in the poorer quarters. There is a cataclysmic scene when Stephen and Mr Zanti and Peter are playing a riotously enjoyable game of romps with Peter’s baby son, and all seems happy and natural and all boys together, until Peter’s wife opens the nursery door and stands there, glaring icily down at them. She disapproves of them playing with the child at all, and she hates everything about Cornwall and Peter’s former life. Stephen is shrunken by her hatred, and he and Mr Zanti slink out of the door.
I don’t think Walpole knew or cared much about women, or babies. He was, as the obituaries in the quality press say, a confirmed bachelor. Clare is an appalling monster because of her weaknesses and improbable characteristics, whereas her mother is a masterwork of socially-sanctioned monstrous behaviour, who calmly moves into her daughter’s marital home at the first sign of trouble, and never leaves until disaster arrives. Compared to these London ladies, the demonic Gothic horror waiting for Peter when he finally returns to the House of Scaw was always going to be a damp squib. Walpole manipulates our expectations and produces a truly surprising, and oddly satisfying ending to the novel.
Some years ago I wrote a scholarly chapter on how clothes were used as social indicators in the fiction of P G Wodehouse and Dornford Yates. This was for 