Edwardian – Kate Macdonald

Wonder Woman, screenplay by John Buchan

JL_Wonder_Woman I saw Wonder Woman last night, and have things on my mind (there will be SPOILERS if you read on). There were only seven people in the cinema (Tuesday night, 17.40 showing, my own private cinema), but by god the Dolby surround was loud, we needed more bodies to absorb the boom.

The Themiscyra parts were epic and idyllic, but the Amazon civilisation seemed only to consist of a warrior elite and ruling class: where were the farmers? stonemasons? armourers? weavers? bakers? brewers? (Though, no-one is actually seen eating or drinking: did they not need sustenance?) They may have been self-sufficient for most things (silk-worms?) but where did they get the twelve books that told Diana all she wanted to know about sex? Written on the island? There was a suggestion that some applicants for the soldiery might be rejected if not good enough, but we weren’t seeing much more than a Bronze Age hierarchy. Fantastic workmanship from their leather-working tradition, by the way.

The Amazons fighting, training, performing their military exercises were epic. I read a snatch of an Entertainment Weekly article about how the Amazons were played by real-life police officers, soldiers, stuntwomen, athletes and so on, and how much fun they had training to be an elite fighting force. It shows: those women were magnificent, and totally believable.

Then Steve Trevor crashes into the sea, followed quickly by the Germans in hot pursuit. What sea, exactly, is Themiscyra in? I’m happy to accept that it’s protected by a gods-given dome of opacity that lets the sunlight in to create a Mediterranean climate, so if Steve stole the notebook from a location in the Ottoman Empire (I will come back to geography), and then flew away with it in a stolen plane (with a fuel range of what?), it’s the Adriatic. (Updated after correction in the comments, below.)

At this point Reason raises her head and says ‘It’s a story. Diana is a god. She’s fighting Ares. Does it matter where the bloody plane crashed?’. Yes. Yes, it does. The film is set in an alternative history of the world, so gods and mortals can walk the earth together. But if the First World War is part of that alternative history, with all its domestic detail and the social codes of the period (there will be much more on this), then that’s a part of alt hist that needs grounding, to be attached to the mythic elements. And it’s fuzzed over.

Diana and Steve leave Themiscyra (can she ever go back? options for sequels abound) and next morning are sailing up the Thames underneath London Bridge, because they ‘caught a ride’. If the Adriatic is where they started sailing, it would take DAYS to get to the Thames. It’s also not explained from whom they ‘caught’ (horrible anachronistic vocab) a ride: or whether the fishermen boggled at seeing an American in German uniform and a black-cloaked woman in leather armour on a Greek ship in their waters.

Diana is met by a helpful woman (the very funny and tonally perfect Lucy Davis) who shows her how to buy suitable clothes for 1918 England. Very good scene, but why did no-one in the shop notice, laugh, object, or gather in crowds to see this strange woman with a sword? Also, women of the class that Diana is placed in did not try on clothes openly in public view. Her eventual outfit is pretty good, on the whole, as an approximation of what might be worn at the time, though the collar would not have been open, but buttoned high. Her glasses are wrong (‘you’re … too distracting’), but they’re soon to be crushed in a fight.

Diana arrives at a high-level military meeting, and goes into the room as if by right, which is fine characterisation, but astonishing: soldiers would have been on duty, far more people would have prevented her getting in. I don’t know what rank Steve was (Captain?) but he is too low on the military ranking to have attended meetings with generals, let alone be allowed to walk about the room berating them. I did like the repeated line ‘There’s a WOMAN in the room’, but this was one of the few historically plausible details.

At this point I was powerfully reminded of John Buchan’s novel The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), in which the lone hero addresses the military bigwigs about his secret mission. Bells began to ring. When Steve and Diana gather a group of trusted colleagues to go on a secret mission behind the Front, I was reminded of John Buchan’s novel Greenmantle (1916), in which exactly this happens, German disguises and all, AND Buchan’s heroes foregather in Constantinople and have much to do with the forces of the Ottoman Empire. Their mission is to find the secret German laboratory that is creating a deadly poison gas: see John Buchan’s novel Mr Standfast (1919), in which EXACTLY the same plot point, deployed on the eve of the Armistice, creates the thrilling end to that excellent novel of British and American espionage. Wonder Woman‘s script-writers clearly knew their Buchan, usefully long out of copyright, but it’s quite astonishing that no-one else has noticed. Perhaps I can help writing the next First World War action thriller.

Geography and linguistics time. Diana is taken to a Flemish part of the Western Front, and speaks perfect Flemish to a distressed civilian in the trenches (no civilians would have been allowed anywhere near the trenches, or would have been blown up trying to get there). She has already shown off her language skills, but this was very pleasing: a war film that acknowledges geographic reality, that the Western Front was not all francophone. The photographer in the village has a French accent: again, perfectly plausible, the Belgian professional and upper classes used French habitually. But the Germans have thick German accents when they’re speaking to themselves, whereas the Flemish speak Flemish when they’re in their own village. Where’s the consistency there?

ww3.0 By this time, as Steve and Diana and friends weave their way through the trenches, I’m beginning to wonder whether, as a god, Diana simply isn’t noticeable by mortals, whether she assumes invisibility. Otherwise why is no-one groping or whistling at her, why aren’t officers and sentries forcing her back to the supply lines, and how did they get to the trenches in the first place? One does not simply walk into Passchendaele. And then she magically appears in full leather short-skirted kit (where did the nice grey clothes go?) and climbs the ladder over the top into No-Man’s Land (good reasoning, Eowyn). It’s magnificent, the most splendidly heroic part of the film, but really? She isn’t ripped apart by massed machine-gun fire and mortars because she’s got a shield? Reason throws up her hands and stalks away.

The summit, the pre-Armistice gala thing that gets Diana into a blue evening dress with the sword shoved down the back of the dress like an ornate jewel: where did that come from? And why were women allowed so near the Front? German women in stealable frocks too? What part of Belgium are we now in, close enough to allow German civilians to arrive in evening clothes, all the way from, ooh, let’s say Aachen to Antwerp, to attend a party, in a war zone?

Other historical niggles: I was dubious about the four-engined bomber that Steve flies at the end, because I thought they only came in during the Second World War, but I’ve been corrected in the comments, below. Diana is given an ice-cream on the station, in a cone, from a station vendor. The ice-cream cone was in existence at the time, but ices were generally taken in glasses and eaten with spoons, ladies didn’t eat food in public while walking along, and women always wore hats in public too. When Diana loses hers she doesn’t bother with a replacement, and consequently breaks a major sartorial rule in society for that time. Even girls wore hats in public, if they had them.

However, Diana is a god, she’s fighting a god (David Thewlis’ ‘tache is perfect for the period, a superb Adolfian nod to the further future, but looks totally stupid on a Transformer-like Greek god), and none of this matters. It’s a film, it’s a fabulous fantastical creation, Patty Jenkins deserves many more film projects, and I’m almost tempted to see that Superman Batman film that everyone hated so I can see more of Gal Gadot, who is the best thing in Wonder Woman by light years. She is the most well-rounded authentic superhero character in cinema for years, certainly the best female hero since Imperator Furiosa. Go see it.

H G Wells: Mr Britling Sees it Through

101 years after publication, this week’s Really Like This Book podcast scripts catch-up is H G Wells’s novel Mr Britling Sees It Through. It was sold to a public who really did not know which way this war would go, in a strange category of literature, the in-war novel: neither pre-war, nor post-war. The author does not know the outcome of a war endured and won (or, much less commonly, a war lost. Apart from Jünger’s Storm of Steel I don’t know German, Italian or indeed Austro-Hungarian literature at all, but there must be novels from those literary traditions dating from 1919 onwards about the war that was lost.) Britain has been fortunate – which is a whopping understatement but the best I can do – in not having been on the losing side in war or invasion since 1066, unless you count Dutch William coming over in the late 17th century but that was by invitation. So British literature of war has always been from the winning side’s perspective, which will nuance how we understand Mr Britling‘s first readers’ responses.

The First World War was the first war to really involve the British civilian population directly, in that they could read about the fighting fairly soon after it had happened, they could hear the guns from France in Kent, they knew their fishing fleet and merchant shipping were in greater danger off-shore than ever before, and they could see the wounded and returning soldiers getting off the trains and boats all round the south and east coasts of England. British cities and towns were bombed from the air for the first time in this war. Wells puts this into this novel, but also notes that this destruction and terror and violence was no different from what the British had inflicted on the peoples of Polynesia and Africa.

Mr Britling is the main character in the novel, and becomes the focalising character – the one through whose perspective we see what happens – about two thirds of the way through. His name is a giveaway for his Everyman symbolic role. He represents the British man sending his son and friend to war, and struggling to understand the changes that have overcome his life. Mr Britling is also H G Wells himself, a famous writer and popular commentator, writing books and articles for the newspapers to explain things to the ordinary man, to make his living. And, as the title of the novel suggests, Mr Britling sees it through. He endures the war, as far as it goes, and suffers terrible changes in his life. He also goes through large changes in his understanding of what the war was for and about. The war breaks through Mr Britling’s sense of being in control and well satisfied with the world as he has arranged it, because a very loud and violent thing is breaking through these paper defences.

Mr Britling has a mistress who has been playing him off against a younger man, but once war begins Mr Britling has no patience with her petulant games, and simply forgets all about her. War is more absorbing to him and his family than her demands, and his self-esteem somehow now doesn’t need the propping up and cossetting that she performed. His secretary Teddy goes to war, so Teddy’s young wife Letty takes over his job, perfectly competently. Mr Britling thus has Letty and her child and her sister Cissie on his hands, as well as his own wife, his three sons and a houseful of servants. His eldest son Hugh joins up secretly, a year under age. His long letters to his father about life in camp and, later, at the Front are extraordinary letters for a wartime novel, because they criticise bitterly the conduct of the officers and the incompetence of the army’s grasp of supplies, catering, training, and tactics. Hugh’s superior officer doesn’t believe in maps or measurements. I don’t know if Wells was using the letters sent him by friends, or whether he was inventing them, but Hugh’s letters sound very similar to those in Siegfried Sassoon’s novel Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, published long after the war in full possession of the facts about army incompetence. Yet Wells was able to pass these views to the public tucked neatly inside his story, and evaded the Defence of the Realm Act (which prevented newspapers and other public disseminators from printing information prejudicial to the morale of His Majesty’s forces), for which we should all be thankful.

One fascinating aspect of life in wartime rarely covered in fiction of this period is how household finances were affected. Mr and Mrs Britling were of the leisured classes whose income comes mainly from investments placed carefully in banks all over Europe. The war stops payment on many of these. His profession as a pundit suffers when the wartime newspapers and magazines change their editorial policies, so he publishes a great deal less, and makes less from his books than before. His gardener has long gone to a better-paying job, so he is not replaced, the garden is neglected, which affects the impression of prosperity and sufficiency that the Britling world has always had. Not that Mr Britling just sits in his study doing nothing: he is as busy in wartime as he was in the days of peace, but not for pay. He patrols the lanes at night as a special constable, which gives him a lot of time for thinking, and then writing long drafts of a new way to explain the war and to prevent war in the future. Wells’s also wrote long letters to the newspapers complaining about the things that the novel complains about, so there is an obvious connection between his concerns, and how he filled the plot of this novel. Both men are very anxious to work out why this war had happened, since it seemed to have arrived on the doorstep without any warning.

This was a brave book to have published in the midst of war, when the typical British attitude was belligerent, itching to fight back and take revenge of the dastardly enemy who were killing our boys. Wells populates the community of Matchings Easy – the Essex village where Mr Britling lives – with types who represent England and the English. The most noxious and repellently loud of these is Lady Frensham, a great lady of the district,. She is titled, rich, and quite accustomed in the Victorian manner to saying what she thinks and expecting everyone to agree with her. She is intensely, patriotically jingoistic in a bellowing right-is-might sort of way. Her rants about what is really happening in the war, and about the conduct of those around her who do not agree with her views, are stunningly appalling. She is rude, inaccurate, ignorant, demanding, poisonous and violently abusive. She may be the first example of The Jingo Woman in First World War literature – the character who hands out white feathers to any man not in khaki, taking it on herself to apply public humiliation from the safety of her own self-righteous opinions, and knowing that she will never be called on to die for her country in uniform.

Lady Frensham’s views about the Germans are objected to violently by Mr Britling, because he has a different relationship with ‘the Germans’. He had had a lovely summer holiday with German families before the war. He has employed Heinrich, a young German tutor for his younger sons, as a long-term guest in the Britling household. Heinrich is a bit of a joke when the novel begins – so earnest, so organised, so obsessive, and yet so anxious about the prospect of war because it will interrupt his planned trip to an Esperanto conference in Boulogne. Heinrich is obedient and dutiful, and knows that he must study philology because it is what he is expected to do by his professors and parents. He returns to Germany at the beginning of the war in great distress: he does not want to fight, he sees no reason why Germany should want a war, but it is his duty to return. Poor Heinrich is always asking for explanations, but no-one gives him any.

Heinrich is not the only foreigner caught up by the war. The bemused American visitor Mr Direck, who arrives at Matchings Easy in early August to visit Mr Britling, gets thrown out of Germany when he attempts to conduct a private fact-finding mission, and ends up joining the Canadian army because the American army is not planning to fight at the present. His sub-plot is the most conventional part of the novel, with an arrival, a falling in love, a development in character, and a resolution, but that way lie spoilers so I won’t go any further in that direction. Let’s talk about Winston Churchill instead.

You’ll probably know Churchill’s name as Britain’s Prime Minister in the Second World War, but possibly not that he was First Lord of the Admiralty in the First World War, which meant that in the first years of the war he was the politician in charge of the most senior military command. Lady Frensham criticises him roundly for his apparent failings, as did many people in real life, which Wells considered to be simply personal spite. It’s true that Churchill was sacked from his post during the war, though his modernising suggestions for sea and land equipment were later adopted. At one point in the novel Mr Britling whispers to himself, trying to give himself hope that Britain will win this terrible war: ‘We shall fight them in the air … We shall beat them on the seas’. Does that ring a faint bell? In H G Wells’ published letters there is a letter from Winston Churchill congratulating Wells on Mr Britling, which he had just finished reading. In the Second World War one of Churchill’s most famous speeches, on becoming Prime Minister, contains the famous line ‘We shall fight on the beaches’, and also ‘we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air’. It may be that both authors were drawing their declamatory style from earlier sources, possibly the Bible, maybe Shakespeare, but not Latin literature, since Wells did not have that kind of upper-class education. But I contend that Churchill borrowed from H G Wells.

Mr Bitling Sees It Through ends with a powerful essay by Wells, or Britling, that begins as a letter to Heinrich’s parents in Pomerania. But there is simply too much to say, and the letter grows into what Mr Britling calls with exasperation, a dissertation: academic, sweeping, impersonal. He keeps trying again, trying to find the words to write to these German parents whom he has never met when he sends back Heinrich’s violin, to express what he feels about the war. It’s a powerful ending because the casualty figures were rising rapidly in 1916, and thousands of British soldiers were coming back from the war with permanent physical damage, visible war-damage on the streets and in neighbouring houses all around. How can a message of mutual understanding and reconciliation have had any effect at that time? This is not a war book: it’s an anti-war book. Mr Britling’s desperate search for war work, and for a way to explain the war to himself, turns into a personal mission to stop war ever happening again. Teddy’s wife Letty devises a terrible punitive campaign by the world’s women to kill all the generals.

I love this novel because it is so human. There are many wonderful conversations between characters who need things explaining to each other, thus allowing us, one hundred years later, to eavesdrop on what people might have been thinking at the time. I would so much rather read Mr Britling than any modern novel about the war which has been written with the inescapable knowledge of hindsight, as well as modern preoccupations that the Edwardians would never have thought about.

Sax Rohmer’s The Mystery of Fu-Manchu

Rohmer 1 Sax Rohmer (listen to the podcast of the earlier version of this review here) was obsessed with what he and the lower reaches of the pre-First World War popular British press used to call ‘the Yellow Peril’ (I hope you notice the inverted commas around that phrase). After the war, things began to get less twitchy and close-minded in fiction about the Other – people with different religions and skin colour and who didn’t live in the British Empire. Anti-Semitism and general racism became less overt, and even less necessary to the plots, even in the most formulaic fiction. But the fiction continued, peddling residual values and opinions that formed a layer of familiar views, even if they were not the current views of later readers.

Sax Rohmer was a prolific author in the first half of the 20th century, but is now only remembered for his extraordinary creation of Dr Fu-Manchu, the tall, terrifying and sinister Chinese doctor and chemist who devoted his life to the triumph of the Chinese race and the defeat, in any way possible, of the white race. These phrases are straight from the novel: don’t shoot the messenger. It’s going to be difficult to talk about this book without using racist quotes, so please do be reassured that I’m enthusiastic about this novel because of its social history value, and its existence as a piece of cultural flotsam, not because I approve of its racial politics.

Rohmer 2 Rohmer was a British writer who began his career writing for the music hall before writing novels. He seems to have fostered a reputation for being active in the occult, and certainly wrote a great many novels in the 1920s and onwards that dabbled in mysterious religions. The Fu-Manchu books did not have so much to do with the supernatural or the weird as with basic Imperialism, with a dash of drama based on science. They were serialised in weekly fiction magazines, and were wildly popular, with Rohmer being persuaded after a ten-year break to write more Fu-Manchu novels from the 1930s, until his death in 1959. I’ve only read two or three, but because they were very formulaic, and had a simple structure, I’m going to assume that they shared the same form and delivered the same messages to the readers, who wouldn’t have bought them in such large numbers otherwise.

Rohmer 3 The narrator of The Mystery of Fu-Manchu (the American title of the novel was The Insidious Fu-Manchu, by the way, if you’re looking for the free download from Project Gutenberg) is Dr Petrie, and he is a medical man, as he often tell us. He is settling down to do some writing one evening, when his old friend Nayland Smith walks in, and the drama begins. Dr Petrie and Nayland Smith are a very obvious Watson and Holmes re-run, right down to the eccentric investigator’s smoking habits, and his ability to make deductions out of nothing. But unlike Sherlock Holmes stories, the pace of the action in this first Fu-Manchu novel is, initially, a headlong torrent. There is no let-up for the reader. It seems as if Rohmer wanted to write an action-packed thriller with a dollop of detection, where the speed of events and the drama were to be the attraction for the reader. There is no time for narrative reflection, but, interestingly, there is a lot of time in Petrie’s narration for repetition, and repeated tirades against the ‘Yellow Peril’ which threatens the entire white race. Reading this fiction now, it seems extraordinary that anyone could have thought in such a way, or even enjoyed the sweeping generalisation, because it is so blatantly all for effect, not for sense, rationality, or even plausibility. And that’s where the interest in novels like this lie: people liked this kind of writing, and bought it to read for pleasure. What does that tell us about what their enjoyment was based on? And should we read this stuff today?

Rohmer 5 Let’s go back to the plot. Nayland Smith is a civil servant, an old Burma hand, back in England on leave because he knows that Dr Fu Manchu has reached these shores, and is going to do evil and terrible things. The plot progresses as Petrie follows Nayland Smith from one locked room mystery to another, in which Eastern experts die in horrible and inventively implausible ways. It’s interesting that the power and secret knowledge that the East wants is located in the West. There is no shortage of knowledge in the East, as well as secrecy, glamour, villainy and multitudinous deadly methods: it’s astonishing how much nonsense was laid at the East’s door that the readers of the West were willing to believe. Again, that’s something worth thinking about: why did readers fall for such claptrap, even if only at the level of reading cheap and entertaining fiction?

Dr Fu-Manchu is always at the back of the devilish crimes in this novel, which are usually based on abstruse chemistry, poison left waiting, or inhaled, or delivered by an insect. The point of all the deaths is that Fu-Manchu is trying to destroy the West’s ascendancy. Because America was an important market for British fiction, the idea that Fu-Manchu was taking on the British Empire didn’t last long in the narrative, and ‘the West’ and ‘the white race’ were trumpeted as his bitter enemies, thus involving the American reader in the attempt to whip up hate and demonise Asian characters.

By killing off Eastern experts Fu-Manchu denies their services to ‘the white West’, but sometimes he wants their services himself. So he invents a drug that will produce the appearance of death, but when an antidote is injected, the victim recovers. This happens in the nick of time in the case of engineering genius Lord Southery, shortly after he has been put in his coffin and parked in the mausoleum, but not before his burial. Good thing Nayland Smith and Petrie got there in time to open the vault at midnight, in the moonlight, and administer the antidote. This episode is a blatant steal from Dracula, from only twenty years earlier. I expect the readers loved it for that reason.

Rohmer 6 In another case, Petrie is taken to see the recovery of an Egyptian boy, Aziz, because the boy’s sister, the lovely Karamaneh, has been vamping Petrie from the moment she appears in the book. She wants Petrie to help her escape from Fu-Manchu’s clutches, and so she keeps appearing in exotic outfits wearing a highly traceable scent, to tell Petrie to come with her secretly and not tell Nayland Smith, and the poor fool does it every time. He is really a very unprofessional sidekick, constantly getting himself into danger, and never learning from his mistakes. Karamaneh starts off as just a glamorous villain, but Rohmer seems to have changed his mind about her quite quickly, possibly because he had such a good time writing about Petrie’s susceptibility. Petrie even thinks about marrying her, but in the end, she and her brother sail back to Egypt, and Nayland Smith gives Petrie an ambiguous mission to Egypt as well, to encourage the readers to buy the next instalment.

Nayland Smith himself is a peculiar creation: very given to histrionics, to striding up and down ceaselessly, to spilling his tobacco all over the carpet, to gripping his knuckles until they are white, and so on. Demonstrative sort of cove, as a P G Wodehouse character might have said. He is the high-handed lone detective working independently from the police, with such fine-tuned investigative instincts that he develops a supernatural awareness of the presence of Fu-Manchu. He is an Empire sniffer dog with a specialism in the mysterious East. But Nayland Smith is also closely associated with the East himself, because he is an old Burmese hand, and one of his most frequently-used descriptive characteristics is his Burmese sunburn. The idea of a ‘good’ East and a ‘bad’ East is something that Rohmer doesn’t do anything to develop – it’s not that kind of novel – but it’s certainly there, waiting for attention. There is also a morally-weighted doubling of doctors. Petrie keeps telling us that he is a ‘medical man’, that he risks losing his licence from the BMA if he resuscitates Aziz. He keeps taking personal charge of all the rescued victims of Fu-Manchu who still need care, so he is the good doctor, a ‘physician of the white races’. Fu-Manchu is the evil doctor, also a non-white doctor, and thus pagan and unprincipled.

The ordeals that Fu-Manchu puts Petrie and Nayland Smith through are wildly imaginative, probably the main attraction of the Fu-Manchu novels. The first part of the novel has them tackling the aftermath of locked room mysteries, and wrestling with monkeys, Indian bandits and giant centipedes. We’ve come across these before, in James Bond and Indiana Jones films, so I expect that Sax Rohmer was their original inspiration. But in the second part of the novel, when Fu-Manchu turns his attention to Nayland Smith and Petrie directly, they are imprisoned in an underground dungeon, and then trapped in a cave full of giant psychotropic fungi and phosphorescent mushroom growths that eat people. You really can’t get better than that for thrilling, extraordinary, ludicrous entertainment, even if the quality of the prose is a bit pedestrian, and the politics entirely beyond the pale. So although I’m not recommending Sax Rohmer as a top novelist, and I’m certainly not recommending the Fu-Manchu novels as a sophisticated literary experience, these novels have energetic and wildly inventive methods for dealing death to our unstoppable detective heroes. Just leave your political correctness at the door.

E F Benson and Dodo’s Daughter

This time in the Really Like This Book podcast scripts catch-up I’m reading a novel of utter frivolity. It’s called Dodo’s Daughter, and is a sequel to the earlier and unforgettably frivolous novel of Edwardian society life, Dodo. Dodo is a ditzy lady, invented by that great chronicler of society silliness, E F Benson. Nowadays he is much better known for his creation of the immortal Lucia and Miss Mapp, and their battles to social death in Tilling and Riseholme in the early 1920s. But Benson had been frivolling for twenty years before Miss Mapp and Lucia were born, and the stories about Dodo are a pretty good introduction to what the Edwardians thought was witty about his writing. In this novel, Dodo, who is about to embark on her third marriage to the man she jilted for his brother as her first, has a problem daughter, from her second marriage. Yes, it’s complicated. She knows when to take herself off to bed, and has a greater awareness of her need for sleep and a happy home life than she did as the epitome of heartless frivolity at age 18.

Dodo’s Daughter is really two books in one. It’s a conventional romantic melodrama, written with a hint of camp tongue in cheek. It’s also a modern story of heartless girls and boys living a meaningless life in which being amused is their only goal. They have a great many things to say about the modern Edwardian girl – her choices in life, why she gets married, and what marriage was really for. Naturally, these are rich girls and boys: all through the novel no-one does a stroke of work because Benson writes about them as an isolated bubble of upper-class society.

Nadine is Dodo’s daughter, a chain-smoker (which was very daring), and the leader of the pack. She is an appalling flirt and an empty conversationalist: her attitudes are really so much like those of a caricature of the 1920s flapper that I had to check the date of this novel twice. But it really is 1913, and prewar. Nadine and Dodo are both totally egotistical, but they both cheerfully admit this, and expect the world to accept them as they are. They aren’t malevolent at all, they are very concerned that everyone has a nice time and gets what they want. But their efforts to get what they want take priority over the desires of anyone else.

The third most important character is Seymour, an early tryout for Georgie Pillson of the Lucia books – with his jade dusting, his embroidery (interestingly contemporary with Peter’s embroidery in Rose Macaulay’s The Lee Shore), his devoted female servant, his effeminate airs – but this (in the gender politics of the day) is all a pose. Seymour is quite aware of how he appears, and seems to rather enjoy allowing the worm to turn. He breaks away from his languid poses to come over all masculine and domineering when he becomes engaged to Nadine. He rages at his tedious mother and sister for assuming that his effeminate pose gives them the right to order him around, and he becomes the most formidable character in the book, because he is simply the most intelligent man on the stage.

Benson does a very well-executed job of mixing styles of writing. He combines the epigrammatic late Victorian style of Oscar Wilde with an unexpected and unstudied close analysis of emotion and social realities. He juxtaposes melodramatic plot details- of attempted murder and an older woman braving childbirth – with intense self-analysis and an almost stream of consciousness dialogue (very ahead of its time). This combination feels abrupt because it’s disconcerting, but it is also completely under control. Benson knows what he’s doing.

The last third of the novel is all about Hugh, who is in love with Nadine but has been jilted by her for Seymour, and won’t stop hanging around suffering. Will Hugh die, or recover, or recover without the use of his legs, after a dramatic sea rescue of a shipwrecked boy? (Whom we never see again, incidentally.) This drama brings out the more interesting aspects of their characters. Hugh develops the stiffest upper lip I’ve ever encountered in prewar popular fiction. Nadine actually stops thinking about herself for minutes at a time. But Seymour becomes terrifically complicated, and takes refuge in bitter campness to avoid being devastated by Nadine’s weather-cock behaviour. He also comes off better than Dodo, by demonstrating the emotional maturity and self-awareness that none of the others possess.

The effect of all these agonies under a light dusting of frivolity is to produce a really modern novel that examines the emotions swirling around inside an eternal triangle. There are clear signs that Benson is struggling to free his writing from the grip of the Victorian romantic novelette, and from the Wildean drawing-room comedy of epigrams. But the novel is clearly Edwardian: the incessant chain-smoking of Nadine and her mother should tell us that at least.

Dodo’s Daughter is also rather interesting if you’re looking for early feminist fiction. Dodo herself is a financially independent woman (thanks to both her former marriage settlements), but she is also an independent woman in terms of making her own decisions, deciding whom she will marry, where she will live, and so on. She keeps having to throw her drunk ex-husband out of the house (that’s the second one, who was a German prince of very Prussian characteristics), and she won’t ask her third husband to do this. She goes downstairs herself and gets rid of the awful tyrant Prussian, time and again.

Her closest friend is Edith, an eccentric composer, who reminded me so much of the suffragette composer Ethel Smyth that I had to read up on her on Wikipedia, and yes! She was! Apparently Benson put Smyth into all his Dodo books, and she loved her portrait. Edith is a monomaniacal composer, and when the muse strikes, she just keeps on composing on the dining room table while her meals are brought to her and placed around the sheets of music paper.

Nadine is a mouthpiece for arguments about the role of women, what girls are to do with their lives, whether there is an alternative to marriage, and whether it’s possible to do without men. It’s a fairly safe guarantee that any time she is in a scene, feminist discussion will begin. Through her, Benson makes some fascinating remarks about the current generation of girls managing without men in the future. Because this novel immediately precedes the First World War and the 1920s, the ‘decade of single women’, this seems like seeing into a very grim future indeed. But it may be that Dodo’s Daughter is anecdotal evidence that even before the war and the slaughter of a generation of young men, women were thinking that life without an obligatory husband or other male authority might soon be a social possibility. Or not. Since Benson was a satirist, who can really tell what he was laughing at, and what he was wistfully hoping might come true?

Arnold Bennett builds a theatre: The Regent

A highly satisfying novel of wish fulfillment bounds onto your screen in this Really Like This Book podcast scripts catch-up. In Arnold Bennett’s The Regent (1913), a wealthy provincial magnate builds a London theatre by whose success he confounds the city folk who know better than he does. There are no agonies and no tense little scenes of social drama in this novel. It is pure uncomplicated pleasure.

The hero, Edward Henry Machin, is a man too big for his house, and for his town, so when he is let loose on London it’s a big relief for us all. He is a Bursley businessman who hasn’t enough to do. He’s made all the money he wants, he is driving his wife and mother to distraction forcing new domestic inventions into the house that they don’t want and don’t see the need for. His mother in particular is grimly resistant, and his exasperated wife just wants him out of the house so that she can get on with housekeeping the way she wants.

Arnold Bennett was a stiff-necked and highly capable Staffordshire writer, author of over thirty novels and short story collections, and plenty of non-fiction as well. He was proudly provincial, but also European, having lived for many years in France where he cohabited with a French actress. He wrote many novels about The Potteries, the crockery-making district of the Midlands of England, and most of his characters have Midlands roots and values, representing the heartland of England as an industrial nation. Bennett has been labelled the epitome of middlebrow writing because he wrote novels to entertain and to sell, not to experiment or to create innovation.

The Regent absolutely entertains but it also holds a mirror up to a rapidly changing and modernising society. The story is packed with admiration for modern inventions that make life easier and business more efficient. Edward Henry uses the telephone all the time, and pulls off a remarkable little deception using the phone which I would never have expected in a novel of 1913: it’s exactly what I would have expected from a ruthless business deal of the 1980s.

Edward Henry goes out in a huff one evening, hurt that his domestic helpfulness is rejected in his own house. He finds himself at the theatre. To his surprise some business cronies invite him to join them in their box, and he finds himself being lobbied to buy 50% of an option to develop a plot of land off Piccadilly into a theatre. That’s Piccadilly, London, not Piccadilly, Manchester, and Edward Henry has hardly ever been to London. But he does know business and he is no fool. Somehow, as part of the discussion, he rises to an additional challenge, which is to stay at London’s most exclusive hotel, the Grand Babylon, while he’s down there looking at this plot of land. (The Grand Babylon Hotel is an invention, of course, by Bennett, whose rather good novel of the same title was published in 1902.)

He at last has a project that takes all his time and attention, and is suitably audacious for his formidable energies. He learns about London ways, but he also deals with London people by applying simple business techniques to the management of money. Nobody quivers with tension for chapters on end, and nobody is slighted or crushed for ever by the cold lift of an aristocratic eyebrow. Maybe I’ve been reading too many 1913 novels about sensitive souls who take themselves too seriously, but The Regent was so refreshing for its complete lack of pretension. It is also pleasant to read an English novel in which London is not the centre of the universe, just for a change.

Edward Henry brazens it out, with extreme attention to detail, and the ensuing sub-plot of how he will impress the Grand Babylon staff is an excellent undercurrent of humour for the remainder of the novel. He secures a valet, orders new clothes, takes a suite, and starts to look the part that he is now playing in earnest: a wealthy entrepreneur about to move into the London property market, and the theatre. He’s still quaking inside, but he know that he’s tough, and that he can do this, and he carries the reader’s confidence with him.

When Edward Henry meets the other shareholders he finally feels in control. They’re all theatrical types; more concerned with naming the as yet unbuilt and undesigned theatre than with discussing its business plan or its capacity. Edward Henry can run these amateurs singlehanded, and in fact he runs them off the project entirely, getting rid of this useless baggage by buying their shares. They’re all so impoverished they will happily take his ready cash and abandon the idea of their own theatre in return of the assurance of some rent paid and expensive meals. And now that they’re off his hands, so he thinks, Edward Henry can get down to making his own plans for the theatre.

This is the clever thing about the story: Edward Henry had no interest at all in taking on a theatre project at the beginning, but when he found an opportunity asking to be taken up, suddenly building a theatre was exactly the thing he wanted to do. It solved his domestic problems too, because he could rampage about London instead of about his beleaguered house and a town he already controlled and was bored of.

Bennett 3 — See, THIS is what happens when cheapskate print-on-demand firms slap together a cover design for a book they’re selling that they’ve never bothered reading

How he manages his campaign, how he navigates past London’s aristocratic lawyers, how he wriggles out of the manipulations of actresses and the cunning of journalists, all these make up the joy of this novel. We’ve already had the highly satisfying encounters with pretentious actor types, and now we meet the completely unpretentious Lady Waldo, the owner of the freehold and a former actress who would just love to go back to the stage. This gives Edward Henry just the lever he needs to get her lawyers off his back and release the land for a theatre instead of a church for their preferred religious sect. I particularly enjoyed Edward Henry’s avoidance tactic for Miss Elsie April, the leading femme fatale of the stage, who plans to conquer him in her usual manner. She is discomfited by Edward Henry bringing his wife and children down to London especially to meet her. He also manipulates Isabel Joy, the roaming suffragette, who is on a round the world tour of no more than 100 days in which she has undertaken to be arrested a certain number of times. Because the papers are more interested in her, than in Edward Henry’s new Regent Theatre, he has to find a way of getting her off the front page, or getting onto the front page with her.

A different author might have had Edward Henry run off with Elsie April, or have his venture fail, but Bennett was not writing melodrama, but domestic sensibility. It’s a good thing to keep your feet on the ground, to know where you come from and what your worth is, and it will not stop you having adventures. Edward Henry is also nicely uninterested in being a star himself. He appears on stage to congratulate the audience on liking his first production, but that’s because he can’t think of anything else to say, and by that point he is in the thick of his planning for his next endeavour. He’s a producer, not a director, and operates steps ahead of everyone else in the business. He is a gust of refreshing no nonsense, as is this excellent novel.

Rose Macaulay’s The Lee Shore

Today’s novel from the Really Like This Book’s podcast scripts catch-up is about art: buying it, faking it, selling it, advising on it, collecting it, and valuing your life by what you say about it. Rose Macaulay’s novel The Lee Shore really is completely forgotten, but is a fascinating read. It’s one of a clutch of Macaulay’s pre-war novels that she herself didn’t want to be reprinted once she had become successful in the 1920s, and which have largely avoided being rediscovered by modern publishers. (You can get it as a free ebook download if you shop around between apps.) But in its day it was a triumph. It won a fabulous prize of £1000 from Hodder & Stoughton (about £50,000 in today’s money), which enabled Macaulay to leave home and set herself up in literary London an author.

In the Edwardian period Macaulay wrote a lot about the danger of slipping out of your class if you were upper class, and the importance of maintaining your personal honour and integrity, even if this meant abandoning or being abandoned by your class and all that you had been brought up to expect to have as your life. The way she combines these two contra-indicators makes The Lee Shore a serious investigation of modern and traditional mores.

She uses what we in the trade call the free indirect voice, which is when the reader not only sees the action of the story from one or more characters’ perspectives, but is shown their point of view, their feelings, by having parts of the narrative told in their own words, as if their thoughts had taken over the narration. It’s a hugely effective way to reveal, for example, underlying nastiness or hypocrisy in a character, by having their unpleasantness emerge in how they say what they say. In the case of this novel, all the characters are painfully concerned with their class position, and what they ought to be doing, wearing and saying, because of their birth and status. The tensions caused by the inevitable have-nots clashing with the haves produce disasters. The focus of the novel is the nicest character of all, a kind and helpful and honest young man called Peter Margerison. His free indirect voice is used as the narrative to show us, despite the awful things that happen to him, how he manages to maintain cheerfulness and hope.

We first meet Peter when he is being carried off injured from the football field by the god of his public school, Denis Urquhart. Denis is captain of rugby, and is slightly related to Peter in the sense that Peter’s widowed mother was once married to Denis’s father. Denis inherits money and property and a very comfortable life, while Peter has to struggle to keep up with the class into which he has been born. But he himself isn’t very interested in class status, it’s the standards that his class insist on that drive his life.

Peter makes his living by advising the wealthy and ignorant what art to buy, how to decorate their homes, and tries to educate their taste. He is such an honourable person that he takes great pains to work with his clients’ taste, and to steer them away from the hideous in favour of the beautiful. All this goes very well, and Peter builds up good relationships with his distant Urquhart relations. Until one day he and his main client travel to Venice, and come across a terribly pretentious and possibly fraudulent local art newspaper which advises its readers to buy things that Peter knows are fakes, or impossible to acquire at the prices quoted. To his horror, he finds that the editor of this nasty little newspaper is his own half-brother Hilary.

Hilary is the elder of the brothers by a good ten years or more. He makes sure that Peter feels obliged to follow his lead, and to defer to him as the de facto head of the Margerison family. He is a masterful portrait of petulant entitlement, he is quite the most horrible character in this novel, and it is against him and his shoddy values and slippery standards that Peter has to struggle. But which come first: family solidarity and blood ties, or the abstract values of integrity and honour? Peter chooses honour, in the sense that his honour will not allow him to see his brother fail and go under, and he also chooses honour by refusing to let Hilary dabble any longer in fake art dealing, or to take bribes from the art fakers of Venice. Hilary’s feckless but heroic wife Peggy has too much to do in bringing up their too many children, and she tries to run boarding houses to make a living. Her family spends the entire novel slithering slowly but inexorably into poverty, to Hilary’s fury, because it is never his fault. And Peter, naturally, goes down too, despite the hopes he has, and the good deeds he does, and the social credit and goodwill he still has with his rich friends and the Urquhart family.

The free indirect voice narration, because it brings us so close to Peter’s thoughts but still keeps us at a distance, produces a powerful impression of fragility. Peter’s decent acts and honourable behaviour seem to bring him nothing but trouble, and the worst thing he does, as well as one of the best, is to marry Rhoda, a stray girl who finds herself abandoned in Peggy’s boarding house, to protect her from inevitable degradation at the hands of the villainous dandy Vivian. Rhoda is not of Peter’s class, though she tries hard to keep up with his talk and his standards, and he tries very hard to make her happy and give her security. They have a baby boy, lovely baby Thomas who is the delight of Peter’s heart, and who gives him something to live for when the worst happens and Peter thinks that nothing else can possibly make his world any more awful. He tries for happiness again with his cousin Lucy, whom he has always loved, but who has – inexplicably – married Denis Urquhart.

At the last minute they change their minds, and Peter runs away without Lucy, taking Thomas with him, and finds happiness in a simple vagabond life in a cart pulled by a donkey wandering around the coast of Italy in the summer sunshine. Peter earns money by selling his embroidery – this was a period when embroidery by an artistic young man was considered a little odd but quite reasonable as an aesthetic choice of activity – and they find rest and safety on the lee shore of life, sheltered from the rough winds of the world.

Peter turns into a modernised version of the Victorian scholar-gypsy, though he must take responsibility for feeding his child and the donkey. More Victorian elements poke through the Edwardian setting with the incessant sermonising. Those rich and well-off Urquharts and related peers keep summoning Peter to interviews and offer to lend him money, asked or unasked, and he always refuses. The novel seems to act out a strange, warped version of the code of honourable conduct derived from public schools which we are expected to admire, since Peter sticks to it so assiduously, even though he is made to suffer almost all the way through the plot. In that respect he’s very like Hugh Walpole’s Peter Westcott from Fortitude. He too has his life bound up tightly with the friends he made at school, both the faithful and the cads.

Macaulay, who had grown up in Italy, was perfectly conversant with how English gentlemen could live there without losing caste. Her earlier novels The Furnace (1907) and Views and Vagabonds (1912) have a good look at the danger to the English character that will ensue if certain standards are not upheld when living abroad, though she is generally, though not always, on the side of the vagabonds. She always depicted the freedom of Italian living as a beautiful, desirable, perfect existence, but also an impossible one if an English gentleman was to fulfil his national and class destiny. Living like an Italian would be like going native, and a gentleman must never do that. Somehow, Macaulay does try to get around this for Peter, to find a way he can retain his integrity while still living in freedom, and in a rather unrealistic way, she does manage this. But I can’t help thinking, what was going to happen to baby Thomas when he caught cold in the winter, and there were no more tourists to buy his father’s embroideries, and they needed a doctor, and new boots, and so on? And what about school? Would Peter have been content to send his son to an Italian village school? How would he bridge the gap between the public school of an English gentleman’s son, and the total lack of income or savings that his life of freedom brought him?

The Lee Shore is about the essential question of choices in living, and how to live with them. An excellent novel, very good for a long train ride.

Alchemy or witchcraft? Una L Silberrad’s Keren of Lowbole

The Historical Fictions Research Network is holding its second conference this weekend in Greenwich, home of the Meridian and steeped in English history. I will be there, celebrating the launch of the first issue of the Network’s scholarly journal, the Journal of Historical Fictions, which I edit, and giving a talk on the relationship between counter-factual fiction and science fiction. So this is a good time to wheel out another Really Like This Book podcast script, on a highly satisfying historical novel about alchemy and witchcraft, set in the seventeenth century, by Una L Silberrad. It’s called Keren of Lowbole, from 1913, and as far as I know only a handful of people now living have ever read it. These are either the handful of Silberrad scholars (me and my German colleagues), or Una Silberrad’s great-nephews and nieces who revere their Aunt Una with affection. Una L Silberrad is such a good novelist, yet totally forgotten, so I’ve been working on her for years.

You can find her novels in print-on-demand editions, and sometimes the genuine second-hand article, and in older public libraries that haven’t yet thrown their less borrowed books into the bin to make room for more computers. Her first novel was published in 1899, and her last in 1944. She was prolific, producing forty novels and short story collections in just over forty years, of the type that would be asked for in libraries between the war as ‘a nice book’. But they’re rare: she was never a top of the range best-seller, and in the Second World War, the bombing raid on London in 1940 that destroyed Paternoster Row and the heart of the book trade also burned all her publisher’s stock. Because of that her books are simply very hard to get hold of. I managed to republish one, The Affairs of John Bolsover, in a scholarly edition because it’s a great unknown example of the Edwardian feminist future novel. I’ve also shepherded her best novel, The Good Comrade, into publication with the independent publisher Victorian Secrets. But Keren of Lowbole is unlikely to be republished in paper form any time soon: its best hope is to be published in an e-version when Silberrad comes out of copyright, and that won’t be until 2026.

Una Silberrad wrote romance with adventurous happenings. Her novels usually involve someone escaping or running away from danger or another kind of trouble, and there are always tremendous independent heroines. Silberrad was an early feminist writing very conventional fiction with a twist. Her female characters are repressed scientists, or illegitimate aristocratic book-keepers, or antiques experts, or mining financiers, or detectives: they are never just nice girls who just want to get married and have a better life. They do, of course, want the better life, and their romances are realistic, believable and highly satisfying. Silberrad was more interested in writing about women with minds of their own, and brains to help them on their way in life. She wrote about women and science, or women and business. She set her novels in two periods: the present day and the late seventeenth century. Her late seventeenth-century novels have the additional unusual dimension of being populated by Quakers and Dissenters, because she was interested in throwing theology into her plots, to reinforce the importance of religious law and morality as part of everyday life.

In Keren of Lowbole, there is a wandering Dissenter called Tobiah. He’s a lively character, very willing to have an argument about Scripture that might last for days, and has a strong sense of responsibility towards anyone who appears to be behaving in ungodly ways. In effect he’s a freelance spiritual policeman, and is a moral signpost for good and righteousness. In the seventeenth century it’s no bad thing to have a person like that on your side, especially if he isn’t afraid of anything, which Tobiah is not. Una Silberrad’s nephew John said that apparently Aunt Una referred to Keren of Lowbole as the First Book of Tobiah: a pun on the names of Biblical books, because several of her short story collections and at least one other novel, have Tobiah stalking throughout the pages, laying down the spiritual law and getting people out of trouble.

But he is a relatively minor character in this novel, which is about a girl called Keren Ashe, who lives with her father, Dr Ashe the alchemist, in the Forest, south of Colchester in Essex. He is a descendant of Dr Dee, Queen Elizabeth’s alchemist, and Keren’s mother was a gypsy from Bohemia, so Keren has a strange and distinguished bloodline. She works as her father’s lab assistant, and seems perfectly content to do this for the rest of her life, until well-meaning Tobiah mentions to Betsy Shipp in Colchester one day that there is a 17-year old girl growing up wild in the Forest, with no older woman to instruct her on household duties or to see that she does not stray into temptation. Betsy is Dr Ashe’s distant cousin, so she takes Keren to live with her in the town, which seems to be a good plan for all. Dr Ashe disappears shortly afterwards on a secret journey.

Colchester in the later 1600s is a fun place to live. Keren makes friends with her girl cousins, she is praised for her impeccable housewifery (only a man could think that a girl growing up running her father’s house would need extra lessons), she goes to weddings, and she can shop. She’s already fallen in love, and fallen out of it again when she realises that the man is simply unworthy, and also that he loves a married lady. She put a stop to this unworthy man’s designs on the beautiful but long-suffering Lady Belton, who has been kind to Keren, by switching the love potion that her father would have supplied for a harmless bottle of coloured water. She has an easy friendship with Zachary Ward, a highly skilled glass-blower and lab technician whom her father values, but she doesn’t realise that Zachary is the prodigal son of Wythes Hall, with a wicked stepmother determined to do him out of his legal rights to the estate. Keren has a suspicion about her father’s long absences, and wonders where he has sent the last glass phial of the mysterious Ultio, which is usually kept out of danger and harm’s way on a high shelf. Dr Ashe had been very concerned when the other Ultio bottles fell off the shelf in an explosion. He wouldn’t let Keren or Zachary touch any of the glass except with tongs, and made them burn everything that had come into contact with it. Keren doesn’t know the terrible death of her mother in far-off Flanders, nor does she realise how long her father has waited to take his revenge. When Sir James Belton returns in a bad temper from his mission to Flanders, he reports that his opportunity to gain glory by taking the town for King Charles by force was thwarted by an unexpected outbreak of the plague, just after he got there. It’s probably much safer for Keren if she stays in Colchester, but in Colchester there are religious rivalries breeding trouble too.

Tobiah seems to be the head preacher for all the Dissenting sects, those troublesome Protestants who broke with the Church of England and insist on splitting theological hairs in defining their own religious beliefs, until there are almost more sects than believers. When Tobiah is out of town, Samuel Calderbeck sneaks back in, an ignorant man with a mania about demonic possession and witchcraft. When Betsy goes to London to see her married daughter and the new grandchild, her fussy husband installs his sister, Rachel Shipp, in the house to keep an eye on the maids. Rachel is a Calderbeck enthusiast, and very strong on the girls attending all possible religious services. At one, Keren forgets to kneel down for prayers, because her mind is elsewhere, so after a stern interrogation by Calderbeck and Rachel, it is suspected that she must be possessed. This is not a good time for Keren to be under suspicion of witchcraft, because her sneaky cousin Kate already has a downer on her. Keren can see easily through Kate’s hypochondrical ways, and Kate is very good at being devout when it will do her good. Keren has also been making lapis lazuli, a straightforward alchemical experiment that she has never managed to work accurately before, so when this too is discovered (it was a present for her nice cousin Betty) she is sent straight to her room and locked in, awaiting judgement in the morning.

Naturally, she gets out. What happens to her, and to Zachery’s claim on his father’s estate, and to Tobiah when he is miscalled a drunken vagabond, and to Dr Ashe’s secret journey, and the discovery of the missing will, will all be yours to discover when you read the book. I do hope you can find a copy.

Keren of Lowbole is a fine example of a historical novel untainted by modern preoccupations, language or style. I don’t think Silberrad uses any words that would not have been used in the seventeenth century, no do her characters do things that are out of period: that’s something that many modern historical novelists would do well to learn from. The narration is calm and restrained, the plot is meticulously structured, and the main characters are instantly memorable, and are consistent to the end. Keren is not an anachronistic feminist but she is a gypsy in her independence and cleverness with objects and natural creatures. It’s a timeless novel that could have been written at any time in the past hundred years, and deserves to be much better known.

Category: Edwardian

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