19thC – Kate Macdonald

A House Full of Daughters, by Juliet Nicolson

I was in two minds about this book all the way through, and I’m still unclear how I feel about it. It’s certainly compelling, but it is three stories bundled into one narrative, and sold under the bookshelf-friendly title of yet another memoir from the Sackville-West / Nicolson dynasty. (The full title, A House Full of Daughters. Seven Generations. One Extraordinary Family rather forces this aspect on the reader.) It uses the Nicolson surname to suggest that the author is a literary personality (this memoir is her fourth publication) who wants her life to be interesting to the public, like that of her father Nigel Nicolson, the former Member of Parliament and co-founder of Weidenfeld & Nicolson, and possibly also of her brother Adam Nicolson the historian, about whose books I have written here, and here. A House Full of Daughters is also a personal memoir, of the callousness of the English upper-classes when they are really selfish. Thus if you are looking for Bloomsbury spin-off material you’ll be disappointed, though it is rich in Sissinghurstiana, and unhappy rich people’s lives.

The three intertwined stories are: (1) yet more details from the Sackville-West / Nicolson history, (2) the chilly upbringing and tragic life of the author’s mother, Philippa Tennyson d’Eyncourt, and (3) Nicolson’s own story of how she and her mother both battled loneliness and alcoholism in their otherwise comfortable lives. The subtitle tells us that the memoir is about seven generations: Catalina, Pepita, Victoria, Vita, then Vita’s daughter-in-law Philippa, and her daughter Juliet, and Juliet’s two daughters. As an act of recovery of women’s lives in the twentieth century this book is undeniably interesting, but the lives of Catalina Duran and Pepita de Oliva in nineteenth-century Spain have been covered already, as Vita Sackville-West’s forebears, and Victoria and Vita Sackville-West are well-studied figures. The views and experiences of the seventh generation, Juliet’s two daughters, are barely mentioned, and they do not fit into the rather artificial framework that Nicolson creates around what she calls the ‘bargains’ that the six earlier women made with their husbands or fathers to gain the lives they wanted.

These ‘bargains’ are hardly a new phenomenon: women living in a patriarchy have always had to bargain with their bodies and domestic service to make their lives work out as best they can. For this memoir, access to surviving documentation is the real value (though I’d like to know where Nicolson found the intimate thoughts and feelings of her otherwise totally obscure Spanish great-great-great grandmother). The very private family documents that Nicolson quotes from, for example, that reveal the details of her great-grandparents’ exuberant sex life, are indeed a privilege to read, because Nicolson (with her brother) is the administrator of the estate. By using her access to reveal more of the Sackville-West / Nicolson story, Juliet Nicolson does an excellent job of conveying the human predicament of an Edwardian first-time mother determined never to be pregnant again, and of the ‘sexual desertion’ of the young husband suddenly denied access to his wife in every way.

Two generations later, Nicolson deals with her appalling grandparents, Sir Gervaise and Lady Tennyson-D’Eyncourt, most impressively. They were rich, with several homes, but wealth and comfort do not improve a naturally cold temperament. Nicolson describes her grandmother judiciously as unloving: ‘disapproval and contempt were Pamela’s default settings … She was wholly unhuggable and in her own way just as unmaternal as Vita’. I don’t agree that Nicolson’s mother Philippa was born ‘at a bad time to be a daughter’, since millions of other girls her age had wonderful lives. It’s obvious that Philippa was born into a family that didn’t want a daughter, and she suffered accordingly, expected to exist until marriage like every other girl of her class. It was Love in a Cold Climate in real life, but without the loving support of friends and a large family: after she finished school, the poor girl was completely isolated, and seems to have had no inner resources of her own. Philippa then had the additional bad luck of marrying the charmingly selfish Nigel Nicolson MP who wanted a wife to keep his parliamentary constituents happy, and didn’t have any other use for her. When a daughter writes so critically of her parents, and of her grandparents (Harold Nicolson seems to have been the only grandparent of the four who knew how to be nice to people), the effect is startling. The accounts of Philippa’s miseries, and of the scourge of tuberculosis in her life and in her mother’s life also, reflect horrible English class cruelties deriving completely from their privileged setting.

The last story is the very personal one of Juliet Nicolson’s life to date, and dwells on her loving relationship with her father (who seems to have manipulated her just as he did her mother) and her rejection of her mother in favour of the Sissinghurst connection. It is heartfelt, and not comfortable reading. I am also uncomfortable with the way Nicolson joins her own life’s details to the historically documented and well-published accounts of her forebears’ lives, since one will automatically expect comparable accomplishments and achievements, not just a connection by birth. But Nicolson does not inform us about any of her own writing, we hear almost nothing about her professional life, and far too much about her emotional travails, which have meaning only for her personal circle.

The value of this strand of the narrative is in how Nicolson’s life’s trajectory was similar to and yet differed from that of her mother, and how they both dealt with feelings of inadequacy and rejection through alcohol. This story doesn’t depend on who the protagonists are: it would be equally compelling as the story of total unknowns. Their story is about strength of character, the efforts of friends and family that did and did not help them, and why one woman died by her wilful destruction of her liver, and the other decided to survive after a final intervention that made a difference. We don’t need names, or family privilege, or the earlier, celebrated generations, to value this part of the memoir as it deserves. The effect is a patchwork of biography, that reduces its impact of its most meaningful aspects.

Juliet Nicolson, A House Full of Daughters. Seven Generations. One Extraordinary Family (Vintage 2015), ISBN 978-0-099-59803-9, £9.99

A working girl in New York: Louisa M Alcott’s Good Wives

In this week’s Really Like This Book podcast scripts catch-up, I re-read that bit in Louisa M Alcott’s Good Wives (1869) where Jo March goes to work in New York. (I should warn any Alcott scholars looking in that I haven’t read any Alcott criticism for years.) Alcott was a great believer in work – on evangelical grounds, also from common sense, and because she herself had to work to survive. Her four girls from Little Women never seem to stop working, but the housework and the self-educational didactic work episodes are not as convincing as the simple need to earn a living. Jo is my particular Little Woman, the one I like best and identify most with (and I know I’m one of millions, but we can share her), so the more I read about her, the more interested I was in the stories.

Rereading Good Wives as an adult – because I don’t think I’d read it for at least twenty years – was extraordinarily interesting, as well as soothing, entertaining, delightful, and mildly irritating. I was amazed at how early this novel was published: 1869 is nearly 150 years ago, five generations ago, but Good Wives is totally fresh in its dialogue and how the characters develop. The blurb on the front of my Puffin edition (marketed to girls in the 1970s) calls it a ‘period piece’: well, it may be set in a different period, but it’s a modern story about growing up and embracing responsibility, as well as getting married. Nothing ‘period’ about that, and there is barely any history in the novel to ground it in the American nineteenth century. Little Women had the Civil War lurking in the background all the way through. Good Wives only has the merest hint that the war had happened, because (spoiler) John Brooke gets wounded and comes home to marry Meg. But the causes of the war are barely mentioned.

At the very end of Good Wives, when Jo’s new venture, a school at Plumfield, is being described, we’re told that a ‘merry little quadroon’ was one of the abandoned boys that she and Professor Bhaer took under her care, even though folk said (and I’m sure these were the background chorus of ‘society’ that the eternally perfect March family lived among, like the Pharisees), that taking him in would ruin the school. Well, that’s quite a divisive statement. A quadroon is an outdated term for a person with one black grandparent, or some ancestry approximating to that, so the novel is noting that mixed-race children existed in the comfortable and victorious North of the 1860s, and were being abandoned. It was Jo’s duty, as well as her pleasure, to take in a stray child like this and look after him. This boy has disappeared by the time the Plumfield sequels Little Men and Jo’s Boys was published, so perhaps Alcott didn’t want to develop him as a character, but only use him as a social indicator of a different kind of destitution that society needed to take responsibility for, rather than have people like Jo and Professor Bhaer do it through private charity.

alcott-5 — Laurie encounters Amy in mourning

Jo’s sense of responsibility is matched by Professor Bhaer’s general perfection and goodness. I was never very sure about a girl like Jo marrying a man of nearly 40 when she was 26, and I still don’t find them at all romantic. Laurie and Amy are much more glamorous and exciting for the romance that Alcott could write really well when she wanted to. Professor Bhaer is a father figure of Jo’s very own. She doesn’t need to share him with her sisters, like she has to with their own father, and she can take him away to live in Plumfield, the house where she was forced to spend dreary hours as a girl being a companion to crotchety Aunt March. So in Good Wives, Jo gets to remake her family life to suit her own requirements, in which money is not a very important consideration, as long as they have enough for their needs. She gets a husband and children of her own; she’s able to write as much as she likes without criticism because she has to, to increase their income; and she is an equal partner in the enterprise of the school. Such terrific feminist and creative messages really appealed to me as a girl, and probably continue to appeal to girls like I was. It’s a great wish-fulfilment ending: the result may not be to everyone’s taste, but it certainly suits Jo, especially that Aunt March has been tidied out of the way and her house is now Jo’s.

However, Jo has to meet Professor Bhaer before any of this can happen. Since (I think) one of the points of Good Wives is to find out what Jo will do next, the episode where she goes to New York alone to work is fascinating. Her parents let her go: that is quite interesting enough as a start, because it shows the huge difference there is between novels about girls’ lives written in a British context, and those in an American setting. In Mrs Gaskell’s North and South, which was published only 15 years earlier than Good Wives, the poor heroine Margaret Hale is trapped at home being an angel of the house, and is totally tied to the selfish vagaries of her inadequate parents. There is no way that she can go out to work: her class and her society will not allow it, even though she shows signs of making an excellent district nurse and social worker. Class and society’s expectations are certainly a consideration in Good Wives, but Jo’s parents see nothing wrong with her working for her living. Mrs Hale of North and South would have apoplexy at the thought, as would the terrifying Mrs Thornton, Margaret’s future mother-in-law.

alcott-7 — Jo (in 1940s Hollywood style) tells Laurie off for being lazy

Mr and Mrs March also see nothing wrong with Jo moving out alone to work in the big city. Mrs March’s first and only worry is class-based: she is unsure that Jo would be suited to ‘going out to service’ as she puts it, working as a governess or nursery maid. Living and working in a big boarding-house is not a bother to them, or to Jo, because the owner, Mrs Kirke, is a family friend. It would be unusual in a British Victorian novel to have the daughter of a minister of religion at the same social level as a boarding-house keeper. In fact, I think it would be impossible to find a British Victorian novel where a boarding-house was described as a desirable place to live for a middle-class girl of some education. I don’t think this is just the social snobbery of the period: there is something about the sanctity of the home in British Victorian fiction that makes living with your family the default mode for the middle classes, and these long, didactic, moralising and serious novels were written for the Victorian middle classes. For the British, the boarding-house was several social steps down. It’s not like that for the Americans, which is a rather different society. This is why I like Good Wives so much. It’s a completely different world.

alcott-6 — Meg gets married, in the 1930s

The real point of letting Jo go to New York alone, apart from letting her meet her future husband, is so that she can try out being a professional writer with only her own judgement and initiative to help her. Annoyingly, Alcott souses this episode with morals, so although Jo does really well in writing fiction that the cheap periodicals market will buy, and sells her stories successfully, entertaining a new readership – the teenage boys and young thoughtless men that she has so much affection for – Professor Bhaer is brought in to point out the great harm that the magazines that she publishes in, do to young readers, and how he would destroy all magazines like them rather than let young people read them. This is a pretty strong and impressive message – it stops Jo in her tracks, makes her burn all her stories that she’d sold to these terrible magazines (I never understood why she burned them, unless it was to hide from the so-admired Prof. Bhaer that she had soiled her purity with such writing?), but she does not give away her precious earnings. That would be a moralistic step too far: if Jo had still been living at home, under Marmee’s eye, she’d have given the money to the poor or something equally depressing. But as she’s an independent writer, she chooses to keep the cash as the payment for her time, even if the results are now in the fireplace. This is a relief. If you’re going to work for the money rather than for the sake of the novel you long to write, you may as well keep the money if you get it. There’s no point being a martyr once you’ve done the work.

alcott-1 — the only cover I could find that actually features Professor Bhaer, who doesn’t look so bad, really

And what, may I ask, is so wrong with the blood and thunder magazines that Jo was writing for? Why did Alcott, who wrote herself for similarly sensational genres, come over all holier than thou about the moral turpitude of sensation writing? Because the evangelical message that permeates all of the Little Women novels will not be quenched. Christian evangelism as a norm is another thing that I found very surprising on this re-reading: the unquestioned conviction that there is life after death; that Beth, when she dies, will be well again. These are strongly dogmatic Christian beliefs that Alcott obviously felt deeply, and are presented as the foundation of the common-sense morality that enables the March family to live with dignity in relative poverty, according to their class values. By dabbling in sensation fiction Jo is stepping away from these values, and Professor Bhaer is brought into the plot to bring her back to the fold, and marry her as well. He’s not as perfect as John Brooke, but he is still a Victorian male paterfamilias.

And after Alcott, there was Coolidge: next week I’ll be reading Susan Coolidge’s heavenly trilogy What Katy Did, What Katy Did at School, and What Katy Did Next. I read these incessantly as a girl, and I recently located the sequels, about Katy’s sister Clover and her adventures in life. After reading Louisa May Alcott’s relentless evangelical messages – I haven’t even mentioned the temperance propaganda in Good Wives – I want to read more of the same, but without the religion, and with a lot more teenage drama.

The Rudyard Kipling novel no-one ever remembers: The Naulahka

This week in the Really Like This Book podcast scripts catch-up, I plunge into Rudyard Kipling’s least read novel, The Naulahka. It was an absolute joy to read, because it was a rare treat: a novel by one of my favourite authors that I hadn’t already read, despite having been reading Kipling for about 40 years. I simply don’t understand how I’d never read this novel before. It’s not as if it’s a new discovery, or an obscure short story no-one’s reprinted yet. Kipling has been studied intensively in the last 30 years, and there are many editions of his stories and novels available. I’ve even read his The Light That Failed, a thoroughly depressing and gloomy novel that can’t have many fans. But somehow The Naulahka had not crossed my book radar until recently.

It is one of those novels that needs to be read, if not at a sitting, then with a lot of concentration. When I finished it I was still immersed in a part of India I had never read Kipling writing about before, and among characters I had never read him describing. So why all these differences, and obscurities, compared to Kim, and all the Kipling stories I know practically by heart? Because this was a co-written novel, a joint project between Kipling and the man who would have become his brother-in-law if he hadn’t died before the wedding. The involvement of Wolcott Balestier in the novel’s planning and creation has brought out the snobbery in Kipling critics who snoot at his role in The Naulahka’s invention. I picked up a sense that critics excuse Kipling for being saddled with this unfinished novel by his dear friend Wolcott that he obviously never wanted to co-write in the first place.

From the evidence in the early, American section of the novel, Balestier seems to have been developing a writing style and subject in parallel with Willa Cather, one that she would go on to make her own, and which Owen Wister was already exploring. Balestier writes of the American West and frontier life with clear, passionate description, and a practical awareness of the expectations from life of the women who kept the frontier houses clean and fed. But the novel is not about sod houses and shoot-outs, but the civilised life of first-generation frontier towns that already have the furnished houses, the water supply, and the town newspaper, and now want the railroad and mining investment too.

Most importantly for The Naulahka, Balestier’s impetus got Kipling to write a novel about a woman; in fact about three women, and their effect on the American hero, Nick Tarvin. He will chase halfway across the world to steal a fabulous necklace from one woman, to give to another, so that he could marry the third. Kipling didn’t normally write about women very much – Mrs Hauksbee is the only memorable and reused female character in his fiction – and he hardly wrote about contemporary Americans, except an unintelligible arms dealer in two of his South African stories. So I found that The Naulahka, to my great pleasure, has a lot of new territory for Kipling: novel-length female protagonists, an American hero who doesn’t understand the meaning of ‘no’, and the drive and business sense of the American West applied to British India and Rajput cunning. The Naulahka itself is a necklace that is the soul of the state of Gokral Seetarun, consisting of a monstrously-sized emerald, ruby, sapphire, diamond and a black diamond. The traps and mishaps that threaten Nick’s life, by the malice of his enemy the gypsy queen, are excellent reading. The corruption of the Maharajah’s court and the indifferent impotence of the British Resident are fascinating: this is British India written, for once, from a non-British perspective, and it is not complimentary.

There are flaws and annoyances, of course. The central premise of the plot is that the heroine’s desire to dedicate her life to serving the poor women of India as a nurse is a waste of time, because Indian women will not respect her since she has not yet had children. Kate’s true destiny is to be a good wife to the hero: I gritted my teeth through Nick’s self-satisfied assumptions that Kate would eventually come to her senses about this destiny. I shared her outrage on finding that he had travelled to India before she got there on her nursing mission, and that he will not go away and let her do her work. I was increasingly infuriated that Nick lies and deceives to try to steal the Naulahka, and expects Kate to share his triumph in having carried off a spectacular scam. I was horrified that the culmination of his brilliant plotting was that Kate’s life is in danger simply because Nick has tangled with the gypsy queen. Nick is a great creation, but his moral sense is distinctly shabby. One of the great satisfactions at the end of the novel is his realisation that he cannot have everything, no matter how cleverly he has planned things.

One of the strengths of the novel, according to the critics, is the portrait of the very young prince, the Maharaj Kunwar. I’m not sure I agree. Kipling has depicted young Indian boys far better – the small boys in Lucknow in his greatest novel, Kim, are more convincing – and since much of the speech of the Maharaj is in Indianised English, he isn’t his own person, he is a creature of the British Raj. The situations that the Maharaj leads Nick and Kate into, on the other hand, are definitely interesting: power and plotting follow him everywhere, and when he isn’t a protection to them, he’s a danger. Kipling worked out a fiendishly clever plotline to do with the transfer of the necklace, the safety of the prince, and how far the gypsy queen will go to get her revenge. The really refreshing thing about Nick is that he is written in Kipling’s instantly identifiable style, but he isn’t English, and my word, what a difference that makes.

Kipling’s English heroes are all steeped in an awareness of honour – their own, or other people’s – and Nick’s sense of honour is, compared to Kipling’s average British army subaltern, definitely skewed. The two other key women in the novel – the wife of the railway magnate, and the gypsy queen – are also excellent creations, making this novel the most interesting exposure of how Kipling wrote women characters. The railway magnate’s wife has tremendous power, or so we are led to believe, but doesn’t seem to realise the way of the world. If she had actually accepted a necklace of colossal value from Nick, and then tried to persuade her husband to take the railway through Nick’s town instead of through the slightly more suitable rival town, I think we’d all be justified in wondering what else she had offered Nick in exchange for such a magnificent jewel that she has not the wit to appreciate. There’s something wrong with Kipling’s understanding of human nature there, even if the railway magnate’s wife is not interested in Nick.

The only woman to try seducing Nick does it with murder in mind: the gypsy queen is a marvellous creation, and deserves her ascendancy in the corrupt zenana schemings. Kate herself is an unfinished creation. Kipling can’t convey the truth of religious fervour to convince us that her vocation comes from a revivalist meeting, but he is completely persuasive when writing about her grim months of nursing training, and her capacity for hard work in the hospital. I also believe her completely when she continues to urge Nick to just go away and let her get on with her job. It’s maddening that Nick doesn’t listen, and refuses to take her desires seriously when they don’t coincide with his own, but it’s also very modern. While a lot about this novel is great Victorian fiction, there are some highly suggestive elements which make this a thoroughly modern novel of feminist aspiration.

This is a complex novel, a very enjoyable read, and is totally gripping in its last three chapters where Nick and the gypsy queen try to outmanoeuvre each other with hostages and hidden gunmen. It’s vastly underrated, and undeservedly forgotten.

Submission and cross-dressing: Tennyson’s The Princess

We’re in the 19th century for the Really Like This Book podcast scripts catch-up, in the Victorian era, when the British Poet Laureate, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, published an epic poem called The Princess, on the subject of what to do about bizarre ideas about women’s education, independence, and silly things like that.

The submission of Victorian women was expected due to their supposed intellectual inferiority. A woman who tried to educate herself was violating Nature, because women were to be angels in the house, and to stay there, expecting nothing more from life than to serve their husbands (because they would all of course get married), and to raise their children as perfect souls. The artist and critic John Ruskin was particularly annoying on this subject, since he believed in some terrifying double standards. The Victorian woman must be incapable of error, incorruptible, infallible (though I’d like to know where she was to get this wisdom if she wasn’t allowed to leave the house), and would rule men in her own domestic domain. If the woman of the home allowed danger or harm to enter the house, it was her fault, because then the house would not be a home. He made no space for the possibility that a man might bring the danger home (his list included disease, crime, drink, and false religion). A man might also refuse to be ruled by his wife. Imagine that.

Thankfully for common sense, these ideals, though widespread, were also widely disagreed with. Many Victorian novels (including those we teach now, for their alignment with modern thinking) will show you that middle-class women in particular were disturbed by these restrictions, because the plots seem to try to winkle them out of such restricted lives and show them a different way of living, even if they all rush nervously back to the drawing-room and predictable safety.

So where does that leave us with Tennyson? He published The Princess in 1847. It consists of a Prologue, and seven Books: this marks it as an epic in form alone. It’s one of Tennyson’s earlier works, but is very well-known because of some of the individual poems within it, called the ‘intercalary poems’. It’s very easy to read, because it’s written in blank verse, a classical conversational form in unrhyming iambic pentameters.

Here’s the story: Princess Ida retreats from male society and creates a university for women where nothing male may enter. This feminine intellectual paradise is infiltrated by the Prince to whom she is betrothed, plus a couple of his friends, all disguised in frocks. He tries to persuade her to relent and marry him after all, and then his aggressive father declares war on her father, and the university is turned into a war hospital. The poem ends with Ida being persuaded by the Prince that they can co-exist harmoniously in marriage.

This poem is a ‘problem poem’, but it’s designed to be a comedy (in the Shakespearian sense), in that the women are made to see the error of their ways through the gentle persuasion of love. The Princess has to surrender, although she ends the poem in a ‘triumphant union’ with the Prince. She is sad that she can’t continue her resistance to patriarchal society (conservative, brutal, instinctive, unthinking) or continue her mission of a separate educational establishment for women (an intellectual, futuristic and abstract goal).

The Princess really is a very odd poem, because it’s self-consciously archaic, and deliberately farcical in many respects. It begins with a hissy-fit by the Prince’s father, a mighty king, who is furious when Ida’s father sends a message that the Princess has decided not to marry his son. He stomps and rages, and tears things up, and vows to send an army to crush the Princess’s pride. The Prince, who seems a resourceful sort of chap, suggests that he goes to discuss things with the Princess, but his father, still in a right old temper, forbids him, Naturally, the Prince, and his two best friends Florian and Cyril – I don’t know why I can’t find the Prince’s name: perhaps he’s an Everyman character – disobey this petulant ruling, and slip out of the palace at night to travel to Princess Ida’s realm. But remember that this is a women-only realm: no men may enter. So the three gallant gentlemen dress up as women, and here’s where the farce begins. Cross-dressing is a staple ingredient in British comedy: we really do find it funny when men wear frocks. They register at the Princess’s university as gentlewomen students, and attend classes in philosophy led by, ta da!, Florian’s own sister, Psyche, with whom Cyril immediately falls in love.

photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron to illustrate The Princess — photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron to illustrate *The Princess*

Princess Ida is treated with respect in the poem, though there is a bit of undergraduate sniggering when she first meets the three adventurers. We know that they’re men fooling the girls, and so we can enjoy the humour of the situation where Ida gravely lectures them on how unnecessary men are, and how much better a society is when it is ruled by women. Ida is a symbol of heroic will rather than a spoiled girl who won’t do what the men want. She embodies heroic comedy, rather than the domestic comedy which is what all the marriage-making is about. Marriage is a comic symbol, the ultimate in joining and making.

But is it a good poem? Is it enjoyable? It does use many different tones, which shows that, in trying to do too many things, Tennyson was never going to succeed. It’s also a right old mix of genres, using the heroic, the comic, the domestic, the epic, the lyrical, the idyllic, almost all at the same time. Good professional showmanship of technique, but is it good art? Some attempts at genre effect fail completely: the poem is framed by a Prologue and a Conclusion set in a standard mid-Victorian country-house party, and the seven Books of the poem are supposed to have been narrated by seven different speakers (to whom we were introduced in the Prologue), yet their voices are indistinguishable. They were supposed to have different personalities and points of view, yet the background society from which they come is so conventional, that in comparison with this fantasy landscape of Princes and Princesses, they are all the same.

Something I rather like about this poem is that it is particularly British. It uses Arthurian and chivalric ideas and terminology as a basis for the university experiment, and for the actions of the three young male invaders, who are knights errant on a quest in the service of love. It is totally fantastical, utterly unrealistic, a delirious exercise in sheer romantic silliness. The great Victorian satirists Gilbert and Sullivan saw its potential immediately, because this was the inspiration for their magnificent comic operetta Princess Ida. The Princess is fun to read; do try it.

Antony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda

Antony Hope’s invention* of the cardboard kingdom in The Prisoner of Zenda is the subject of this week’s Really Like This Book podcast scripts catch-up. Hope was a respectable Victorian London lawyer, but he had a secret passion for the romantic and dramatic, and wrote many novels. His most famous is The Prisoner of Zenda, from 1894, in which Rudolf Rassendyll, a flaming-haired English gentleman, travels to Ruritania for a holiday, and discovers that he is the spitting image of that nation’s king. This is not a great surprise, because Rudolf Rassendyll is also descended from the Ruritanian royal family, after a dangerous liaison between Rudolf V and his married grandmother, earlier in the century. But Rudolf arrives at the moment of a crisis. The king, also a Rudolf, is about to be crowned, but he has also just been kidnapped, by his wicked half-brother Black Michael, and if he does not ascend the throne at the appointed time, Michael will take it, and his fiancée, their cousin, the impossibly beautiful Princess Flavia, from him. Step in, replacement cousin Rudolf, and take the throne, take the princess, and take out Black Michael. Just temporarily, you understand, until the real Rudolf is found and rescued. But what if the replacement Rudolf and Princess Flavia fall in love? What if during the duels and sword-fights to rescue the king, the king accidentally gets spiked? What if the will of the Ruritanian people, who are very keen on their king marrying the princess, rushes the impersonator to the throne? Could an English gentleman ascend the throne of Ruritania?

This delicate political point is the reason for the long, long popularity of this novel. It is a terrific swashbuckler, full of action, and tense moments of physical drama. It is delightful to read so much dashing about on horseback and swimming across moats. The moments of passion between the English Rudolf and Flavia are believable because they’re so cinematic: we can reframe the Victorian melodrama into a nice period costume film. But they’re also believable because, at heart, every reader would like to think that they are as a good as a king, or princess, and could ascend a throne. And this is why Antony Hope invented what is now called the cardboard kingdom. It’s related to Arcadia, an invented country, a not-real place, to which the characters can go to have rollicking adventures in freedom, or retire from the world to sort out their problems. This is a very old literary trope. Shakespeare used it all the time, for instance in As You Like It. Hope developed the idea by making Arcadia a kingdom. It has to have a royal presence, and a throne to be fought over, and a dynasty to save. The whole point of the cardboard kingdom is that a gentleman outsider will arrive and sort out their problems. In the hands of Victorian English excursions to the cardboard kingdom, this was a way of affirming the superiority of the English, the world leaders at sorting out other nations’ problems. Hope’s Ruritania was the first of many similar fictional kingdoms, which is why the name of his cardboard kingdom has become the generic term for the concept.

The kingdom also has to be located somewhere in middle Europe. In relation to Britain, it should not be as far east as Kazakhstan, but also not as close as Germany. The cardboard kingdom needs to be vaguely familiar: in the atlas, but not on a page we’ve looked at very often. That way, a gentleman traveller can be sure that the trains will run there (for there are always trains in Europe), and that he will be able to leave when he wants to, without consequences, to return to his own world. Sometimes the inhabitants of the cardboard kingdom come to Europe, and then go back into cardboard land. This happened with Elinor Glyn’s notorious and scandalous novel Three Weeks, in which a young English diplomat found himself having an affair with a glamorous foreign lady in her rented villa off Lake Geneva, only to find that she was the queen of a cardboard kingdom, and, later, that he had become a father. That’s the most interesting inversion of the idea that I’ve come across: most cardboard kingdom novels by Dornford Yates, or John Buchan, for example, just copy what Hope did, in different ways.

What Hope did to make his novel so long-lasting, and so popular, was to distill the essence of romance and adventure into a very short novel. It won’t take you more than an evening to read. It begins at a late Victorian breakfast table. Rudolf’s sister-in-law is a slightly prissy Victorian lady, embarrassed at the very existence of an illegitimacy scandal in her husband’s family. But when Rudolf arrives in Ruritania, somehow he’s gone back a few more decades, to a way of life that feels more Napoleonic rather than Victorian. By the time that he and his accomplices are plotting their rescue of the king, and dealing with chamber maids and henchmen, their language has become positively Shakespearian. Time seems to slip in Ruritania, but a gentleman’s honour is timeless. The English Rudolf is the soul of honour, and this drives his conduct throughout the story. He will not betray or abandon the king by refusing to help him, or by allowing him to die in his prison, but, since the king has shown no interest in Princess Flavia, it’s perfectly fine for Rudolf to fall in love with her, and to woo her, to the great delight of the population. She, in turn, is pleased by his attentions, and finds that the new Rudolf is a much more attractive person than he had been before, until it’s too late and she is just as much in love with the new Rudolf as he with her. It’s an interesting point of behaviour, how not to betray your king by falling in love with his impersonator, but Flavia’s honour is strong: she will not renounce the king, and she will do her duty (probably through gritted teeth). However, every year, she sends the English Rudolf a red rose in a box, with the message ‘Rudolf – Flavia – always’. So romantic. Also very, very transparent, because it’s the interception of this box that brings about the sequel to The Prisoner of Zenda, the even more dashing and magnificent Rupert of Hentzau.

Peter Sellers in the Stewart Granger swashbuckling role?

Rupert is the maverick in the otherwise perfectly ordered world of the Ruritanian deception. All the other Ruritanians seem not to notice the difference between Rudolf the king and the English Rudolf, which makes the set-up seem a little like a pantomime. But Rupert can see the marks of the English Rudolf’s shaved moustache and crown imperial beard, and the unaccountable difference in the king’s attitude towards Flavia after the coronation, and her blushes and generally infatuated demeanour which were simply not in evidence before. These, taken singly, might not add up to much. But Rupert also knows that the king is in prison, because he is one of the king’s noble guards, and potential murderers. So when he sees the English Rudolf play-acting as the king in Strelsau, he just laughs up his sleeve, and awaits developments with enjoyment. Rupert is fun. He is absolutely modern, utterly irreverent, has a wicked sense of timing, and is a terrific duellist. He and the English Rudolf battle with swords and revolvers, and both secretly swim across the same moat at midnight on the same night. They’re clearly the same kind of adventurous chap. But Rupert is amoral, not a bad chap exactly, but not at all the upright soul of honour that English Rudolf represents. It’s fine for a Ruritanian to have a flexible understanding of honour, but for an Englishman, this cannot be so. Rupert is Rudolf’s foil, his wicked alter ego, and he completes the enjoyment of this fine swashbuckling novel.

* Hope didn’t invent the cardboard kingdom: Neil Harvey points out that Robert Louis Stevenson’s Prince Otto predates Zenda, and so does Meredith’s The Adventures of Harry Richmond. For more on the subject, see Raymond P Wallace, ‘Cardboard kingdoms’, San José Studies 13:2 (1987), 23-34.

Mark Twain’s A Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

Launching into a new miniseries of podcast scripts from Why I Really Like This Book, the next few weeks will see a long and enjoyable wallow in stories about King Arthur. This will include early British history, fantasies about Merlin, and the utterly compelling theory that when the Romans pulled out of Britain, somehow the Saxon warlord culture that emerged also brought forth the stories about Arthur that were medievalised into the knights of the Round Table. I don’t begin with Sir Thomas Malory, because, entrancing as the Morte Darthur is, it’s rather hard to read, since it isn’t a novel at all, but a collection of repetitious events stuck together. I’m going to start with the American writer Mark Twain’s satire on knight errantry, A Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, first published in 1889, and now more commonly known as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. (Warning: here be spoilers.)

Mark Twain was irreverent. This work of Arthurness may have come as a shock to the pious late Victorians who were used to swooning over Tennyson’s Arthurian poems from The Idylls of the King, only a few years earlier. Tennyson wrote as though he were a Pre-Raphaelite without a sense of humour. The whole point of the Yankee is that the story juxtaposes the ignorant 6^th century against the knowitall, up to the minute, technologically superior 19^th century, and the 19^th century wins, right until the last chapter. Twain makes no explanation as to how his 19^th-century man, one Hank Morgan, travels back in time and place from Hartford,, Connecticut, to 6^th-century England; he just wakes up one morning and there he is. He is also dealt with as any 6^th-century stranger would be: he is challenged by a knight, refuses to fight, and is taken prisoner as that knight’s personal property, and condemned to die at the stake. Luckily (and this is the most ridiculous coincidence in the novel) Hank just happens to know that in a day’s time there will be an eclipse of the sun, so on the strength of that, he sends out word that he is a wizard, and will cause mighty terrible things to happen unless he is released. He is not, the eclipse happens, the populace are very much impressed and terrified, and Hank Morgan becomes King Arthur’s prime minister.

He can see a lot of scope for his brain and superior knowledge, and the nice thing is, none of it is for his own aggrandisement. The Boss, for that is now his name, is not at all interested in getting rich, or commanding power where he doesn’t need it. He is a reformer, and is determined to reform 6^th-century society with judicious applications of 19^th-century technology. The first things to make their absence known are the basic necessities of life; no soap, no matches, no mirrors. There were no books, paper, pens or ink, and no glass for windows. There was no sugar, coffee, tea or tobacco: and now I think we get the picture. Twain’s hero is not at all interested in enjoying life in the 6^th century; he just wants to return to his own time as fast as he can, or, if that isn’t possible, to make where he is like his own time. It helps that the entire nation thinks that he is a magician, and that Merlin (who in this novel is a doddering and malign old man with no power whatsoever) is not going to get in his way. At least, he won’t get in the Boss’s way once the Boss has blown up Merlin’s tower with homemade dynamite. Now that the Boss really is the boss, King Arthur’s sole advisor, the Boss can get on with a more noble long-term plan, of relieving the oppression of the poor, and removing the tyranny of the knightly class. The rest of the novel is part adventure, part philosophical nature ramble, on how an ignorant and illiterate populace can be persuaded to help turn themselves into a republic. Spot the American influence.

Not that Twain has anything against King Arthur. Arthur remains a noble and honourable figure throughout (I think it would be hard to change his character in any circumstances), but he is a bit dim. Twain does an excellent job of thinking through how 6^th-century man might think, speak, and reason, and he sticks to it. There is very little anachronism here, in the way of 6^th-century people thinking like 19^th-century people, that can’t be explained by sustained exposure to the Boss’s own speech and thought processes. His chief assistant, Clarence, learns fast how to keep up with the Boss and his schemes and planning, but he still speaks in the way he was brought up: he’s just a fast learner with the flexibility of youth. King Arthur, on the other hand, is a great and noble savage, with excellent instincts for truth and justice, but that’s about it. The Boss takes Arthur on a tour of his kingdom in disguise, so that the king may see the common people close up, but Arthur’s inability to act common nearly gets them caught several times, and in the end they are sold as slaves. The Boss, in his turn, has to act like a 6^th-century knight, especially when a fair maiden arrives at court with a tale of woe and captured ladies. He is provided with a horse and weapons and armour (complicated to put on and manage), and off he goes on a quest, with the lady sitting behind him chattering unstoppably. Problems begin when the sun gets stronger and the shade gets weaker, and he gets hotter, and has an itch on the back, and a fly inside his helmet. These unbearable conditions force him to dismount, and get Sandy (the lady’s name is Alisande, so naturally he calls her Sandy) to take his helmet off and pour water inside his armour until he is comfortable again. Only now, he can’t get back on the horse, so he walks and Sandy rides. By such means are the impracticalities of knight errantry skewered lengthily and lovingly by Twain.

Bing Crosby as The Boss?Not very believable. — Bing Crosby as The Boss? Not very believable.

They run into Morgan Le Fay, a terrifying witch, married to King Uriens, who is a doddering old man with no courage (very much like the Red Queen and Red King from Alice in Wonderland, which had been published a few years earlier). In Morgan’s castle the tone of this novel begins to turn sharp, since real human misery and cruelty are here, in her dungeons. The Boss sets people free, and does what he can to alleviate suffering, but he can’t wipe away years of torture and confinement. This is what I admire about this novel. It is not fantasy wish-fulfilment, in which all ills are easily wiped away by a stroke. Actions have consequences, which can’t be got rid of. People get killed and die of other means: the casual brutality of the 6^th century is accepted by the Boss, possibly because in the 1880s there was a lot of casual 19^th-century brutality as well. The Boss blows people up, kills people, arranges for things to happen that will inadvertently kill people: it’s all rather shocking but also very real. This is what people are like. He deals with the knightly class once and for all by first defeating his most hated enemy in a joust with a lasso, and then with a revolver. Many knights die, and no-one thinks anything of this, because (we are reminded) jousting was not about the spectacle and the romance, it was about maiming and disabling your opponent with heavy, fast and sharp weapons and then cutting his head off. If death has to happen the Boss’s method is cleaner and faster and more humane. In a passage near the end, when the Boss is describing the advance of newspaper journalism in Arthur’s kingdom, he mentions as an aside that the first novelist to have his book published made a bad joke once too often, and so the Boss suppressed the book and hung the author. That sort of thing comes as a shock when we also read about the Boss’s enlightened practices and useful inventions for the betterment of mankind. He really is not like us at all. He’s like we might have been over 120 years ago.

Will Rogers and Maureen O'Sullivan? Much better. — Will Rogers and Maureen O’Sullivan? Much better.

What does this novel have to say about Arthur, and the Round Table? Arthur is untouchable: a bit gullible, but a hero and a great man. Guenevere is a bored and foolish queen in love with Sir Launcelot, which Arthur knows about, but is more sad that the queen doesn’t seem to love him. Sir Launcelot is the greatest of the knights, and a sportsman as well, we can’t say anything bad about him. This eternal love triangle brings the kingdom to ruin in the end, as it must, because you can’t change the end of this story, even if the middle has been seriously messed around with. And after the death of Arthur, in comes the Church, about whom the Boss has been railing all along, since he is afraid of the Church, and rightly so. He had plans for getting rid of the Catholics and encouraging an early growth of Protestantism, but something else demanded his attention, and so the Reformation had to wait for another thousand years. Most sad of all (spoiler alert), now that the Boss has married Sandy and they have a baby girl, he inadvertently gets killed by a malign knight and is flung forward to his own time, where the reader first met him. Luckily he dies not very long afterwards, because to be missing your wife and child who have been abandoned 1300 years ago is torture we don’t want to hear much about.

But don’t be sad: there is so much humour in this novel. Satire means laughter, and the witty asides and terrific snappy dialogue in the inner thoughts of the Boss make this a novel to treasure.

Working is good for you: Louisa May Alcott’s An Old-Fashioned Girl

Louisa May Alcott’s most famous novel, Little Women, and its three sequels make her still a highly popular author, but until fairly recently these were her only novels that most people could name. Many of her Gothic thrillers and sensational potboilers have been resurrected by scholars, the most well-known of which is a rather depressing adult novel of moral rectitude called Work (1873). The novel that I reread most often – certainly more often than I go back to Little Women – is An Old-Fashioned Girl from 1870. Apparently it was made into a film in 1949, starring nobody that I’ve ever heard of.

It’s a morality tale, it’s the town mouse and the country mouse, it’s a romantic love story with a happy ending and with some satisfactory twists to keep it fresh, and it’s a novel of women’s emancipation in the Gilded Age of America in the late 19th century. It is also a novel that wants its readers – who were originally Victorian teenage girls – to learn about work and the American Victorian way. When I first read it (one of my mother’s Sunday School prizes) I was transfixed by its century-old American slang. For years I was worried what ‘coasting’ meant, because this is not a word for sledging that ever came near my vocabulary. As well as enlarging my vocabulary, the story kept opening out for me as I got older. From being just the story of a family, it became a story of Boston, then of business and making a living, and then of men’s worlds and women’s worlds. Now I read it as a novel of life in a small college town, packed with the names of things I can’t recognise, and with the routines and rhythms of life seen from the domestic perspective.

We don’t see very much of the world of men in this novel. Tom Shaw and Will Milton go to college, and Mr Shaw and Mr Sidney go to their offices. Frank Moore and other nameless young men about town don’t seem to do much of anything, and when Tom isn’t in class, which is most of the time because he’s an easily distracted student, he’s at the club, at balls and parties and at the opera. Sometimes he’s on a horse; he’s usually with a friend or a girl. But all this is on the fringes of the story: the central characters of An Old-Fashioned Girl are his sister Fanny Shaw, and her country friend Polly Milton, who is the old-fashioned girl of the title. The story is of their friendship, their friends and their lives, but above all the novel is about how women work.

The story is full of how work is desirable for a balanced life, and how too much work is bad for a normal life. Working leads to desirable independence, but also does not mix with moving in high society, which does think work at all desirable for ladies. Working and being independent are excellent goals, but achieving them will mean sacrifices. Those who can’t or won’t or don’t work lead useless and fruitless lives (this message seems a bit harsh). To work hard repays the trust of others. Above all other characters in the novel, Polly is a paragon in working for others.

The novel is in two parts: it begins when the girls are aged around 14, and Polly comes from her country home to pay Fanny a month-long visit in Boston. She is unused to city life and fashionable ways, and so we the readers explore the routines of life for rich Bostonians along with Polly. Like Polly we find much to puzzle us, and there is much that is downright inexplicable to 21st-century readers. The episodes in the story are often just bald little morality tales, but they present an unfolding narrative – how Fanny follows her fashionable friends but isn’t as bad as some of them; how Tom is neglected by his father and laughed at by the rest of the family, and so is turning into a lazy dilettante; and how their little sister Maud is constantly demanding and cross because no-one pays her any attention or even plays with her, except Katy the maid.

Where are the rich parents in this obviously dysfunctional family? Mrs Shaw is not, as we might have expected from other Victorian morality tales, always out dancing and neglecting her maternal duties. She’s a hypochondriac, so illness and weakness is her profession, and she stays in bed, or on sofas, demanding attention. She’s a burden, and unlike that other great American sickbed sufferer, Katy Carr in Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did, she does not make her sickroom the centre of the home for her family. She just sucks attention from others and is needy and weak where Alcott thinks she should be selfless, caring and giving. Mr Shaw works too hard to enjoy and nurture his family, so he is a shadowy authority figure whom Polly has to fuss over when she sees that he’s tired, since his own children are too scared of his autocratic temper. Polly works to bring everyone together throughout the first section of the novel, with upsets and hurt feelings along the way. She isn’t perfect, but she’s very lovable, and her anxiety to learn how to behave properly frames the second half of the novel.

This begins six years later, when Fanny, Tom and Polly are all young adults, and romances are the focus of their lives. Well, not Polly’s life – she is firmly fixed on earning a living as a music teacher, since her family are not rich like the Shaws. Her brother Will can go to college if Polly can earn her own living, so he attends class alongside Tom, or would do if Tom were not so often absent from class. Will refuses to play as hard as Tom, but Polly mothers him. There isn’t much sophisticated fun for these two country mice, but they are perfectly satisfied with cheap concerts and country walks, until Polly starts to break out to have fun and flirtation. Her good intentions and hard work are frustrated when she sees Fanny, and Tom, constantly out on the razzle. Trouble begins when Polly’s innocence, wisdom and beauty attract Fanny’s young man away from Fanny, and away from Tom’s own girlfriends. Fanny is a lovely and kind girl, but society manners dictate that she must be sharp and snappy, and she can be both when Polly starts attracting the attention of the man Fanny loves. Through Polly’s frivolity Alcott seems determined to show her girl readers that a woman earning her own living is making a virtuous sacrifice, but never has fun compared with the lives of the social butterflies. To appreciate the real beauty and value of women working we need to look at a different corner of Boston society.

The antidote to these episodes of lavish dresses and misunderstandings comes when Polly takes Fanny to meet her own friends. She lodges in the house of Miss Mills, who opens her house to the needy and unwanted, and sews for the poor. Polly and Fanny visit a studio shared by Bess the engraver and Becky the sculptor, where they are shown that women’s work is about the representation of truth and beauty. They meet Kate King the authoress – a rather nice self-portrait of Alcott herself – who is worn out by work, and buffeted by the stresses of fame that the unexpected success of one of her novels has brought her.

The novel comes to its climax when Mr Shaw’s business fails, the family moves into a smaller house without servants, and Maud and Fanny have to do all the work of keeping house themselves. Tom goes out West to earn his living with Polly’s older brother, and Polly guides the family through the mysteries of how poor gentlefolk must live. My absolute favourite part of the novel is when Polly shows Fanny how to renovate and make over her worn-out clothes to keep her nicely dressed for the first year of comparative poverty. It’s very rare in Victorian fiction to get such fascinating practical details of how dresses were made and remade, and how their construction allowed the reuse of fabric by turning and retrimming. In due course the pretty dresses and virtuous hard work do their work, marriages take place, and all ends happily.

whoops, different girl — whoops, a different old-fashioned girl

An Old-Fashioned Girl is a very satisfying novel, with thoroughly enjoyable characters and plot. The moralising is not as intrusive as you might expect, because it is so obviously from the author’s heart and not from a box of standard Victorian precepts shaken out over the story as perfunctory seasoning to taste. Alcott really believed in her message, that working was good and necessary for a healthy and happy life. Nothing to quarrel with there, I think.

This was part of a mini-series in my podcast Why I Really Like This Book, on novels by American women writers about work. Next time, I’m dragged in the wake of a classic American social climber, in Edith Wharton’s magnificent and chilling novel The Custom of the Country, from 1913. Undine Spragg only exists to enjoy herself, which means that she lives off the work of her father, and any man she marries.

Category: 19thC

Submission and cross-dressing: Tennyson’s The Princess

Antony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda

Mark Twain’s A Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

Working is good for you: Louisa May Alcott’s An Old-Fashioned Girl

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