All posts tagged 1896

A Child of the Jago by Arthur Morrison (1896)

The H.G. Wells connection

H.G. Wells’s novella, A Story of The Days To Come, is set in a futuristic London of 2100. It features a hero and heroine who start out life as comfortably middle class, but bad luck and a scheming rival result in our hero losing his job and the girl losing her inheritance, forcing the couple to move into a smaller flat, sell their belongings. Eventually, bad luck pushes them right down into the underclass of the city of the future, into the ranks of the Underclass which is governed by the iron hand of The Labour Company.

In their new degradation, they are forced to wear the blue serge uniform of the Labour Corps, given free housing and food but in return have to do degrading manual labour down in the bowels of the city. Wells describes their fall thus:

In spite of their inclination towards the ancient fashion of living, neither Elizabeth nor Denton had been sufficiently original to escape the suggestion of their surroundings. In matters of common behaviour they had followed the ways of their class, and so when they fell at last to be Labour Serfs it seemed to them almost as though they were falling among offensive inferior animals; they felt as a nineteenth-century duke and duchess might have felt who were forced to take rooms in the Jago. (Chapter 4 – Underneath)

‘Take rooms in the Jago?’ What is this Jago which Wells refers to?

The Jago

‘The Jago’ was a fictional name which the social realist novelist Arthur Morrison had given to a grid of slum streets which were the focus of his best-selling novel of East End slum life, A Child of the Jago. This searing account of poverty and brutality was published in 1896, just three years before Wells’s story, so Wells’s reference was still very topical.

This is how Morrison describes his blighted slum.

From where, off Shoreditch High Street, a narrow passage, set across with posts, gave menacing entrance on one end of Old Jago Street, to where the other end lost itself in the black beyond Jago Row; from where Jago Row began south at Meakin Street, to where it ended north at Honey Lane – there the Jago, for one hundred years the blackest pit in London, lay and festered; and half-way along Old Jago Street a narrow archway gave upon Jago Court, the blackest hole in all that pit.

 The novel includes this hand-made sketch of the district.

Morrison’s Old Jago was in fact a lightly fictionalised version of the real-life network of slums around Old Nichol Street, just east of Shoreditch High Street, which Morrison had been introduced to by a vicar working in the area, the Reverend Osborne Jay of Holy Trinity Church.

Jay suggested to Morrison, who had already written short stories about life in the East End slums, that the little enclave would be the perfect setting for a longer work of fiction-cum-reportage.

Even as the book was being published and reviewed, the Old Nichol Rookery, as it was known, was being demolished and replaced by a tidy Victorian housing estate, buildings which look a lot like army barracks, much like the Peabody estates scattered all over London. The process is actually referred to in chapter 29. Eventually, the old street pattern was demolished, leaving only Old Nichol Street remaining. This is what it looks like nowadays.

In 2018, when I went to have a look, the tall forbidding Victorian barracks were still there, but the streets around them have become highly gentrified. There was a very expensive designer trainer shop, several cafés and an art gallery. Difficult to imagine that back in 1896 it was one of the ‘darkest holes’ in the East End .

Photo of Boundary Street, London, taken in 1890, part of the Old Nichol slum.

Boundary Street, London, part of the Old Nichol slum, in 1890

Arthur Morrison

Morrison had a fascinating career. Born in Poplar in 1863, the son of an engine-fitter in the docks, his parents were responsible enough to send him to school, where he learned to read and write and which led on to him getting a job, aged 17, as an office boy at the London School Board.

He worked his way up to third-class clerk at the so-called People’s Palace, an educational establishment set up to serve the East End slums, and which eventually became part of the modern Queen Mary, University of London.

By his early 20s Morrison was trying his hand at writing sketches of life in East London and by the late 1880s he was placing these sketches in local magazines. He worked these up into short stories about the area, and was able to sell these to prestigious literary magazines including the National Observer, whose influential editor, W. E. Henley, encouraged and supported him. The best ones were brought together in the collection Tales of Mean Streets, published in 1894.

At the same time Morrison cashed in on the success of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and invented a detective of his own, Martin Hewitt, who uses his uncanny deductive abilities to solve crimes, all witnessed and recorded by his faithful and rather bumbling amanuensis, the journalist Brett. You can read the stories online.

Morrison wrote an impressive 25 Hewitt stories, but also tried his hand with a different type of criminal investigator, Horace Dorrington, a deeply corrupt detective about whom he wrote seven stories. Morrison was by now writing for a living and turned out whatever seemed likely to sell.

In the middle of all this activity, encouraged and supplied with anecdotes and information by the Reverend Jay, Morrison wrote his first full-length novel, A Child of the Jago, which became an immediate best-seller, caused a storm of protest, and prompted Morrison to reply to the many attacks made on him in the press and via letters.

In 1899 he published To London Town, which he claimed concluded a loose trilogy of books about London begun by Mean Streets and Jago. In 1900 he published Cunning Murrell, a novel describing the exploits of a mid-Victorian magician and healer and in 1902 another story of the East End, The Hole in the Wall.

But the most fascinating thing about Morrison is the way he escaped his background. As soon as he had money, he began collecting Japanese woodcuts and became an expert on Japanese art, writing a number of monographs and books on the subject. (It is striking that the preface to A Child of the Jago, which he wrote to defend it from critical attacks, almost immediately goes off-subject to invoke the evolution of ‘realism’ in Japanese art – a subject few of even his best-educated readers can have been familiar with).

As his writing took off, Morrison moved out of the slums to rural Chingford, then to Epping Forest, then completely out of London to Chalfont St Peter, retired from journalism and wrote only occasional short stories. When he died, in 1945, he bequeathed his important collection of Japanese paintings, woodcuts, and ceremonial tea porcelain to the British Museum.

Poverty writing of the 1890s

In the 1880s and ’90s there was an explosion of interest in life in the slums of British cities. Articles and books were also written about Glasgow and Birmingham but, as by far the largest city in Britain, and the capital of the Largest Empire The World Had Ever Seen, most of this writing concentrated on the appalling conditions of life in parts of East London.

George Gissing wrote a stream of novels about the hard life in the slums, Conan Doyle made Sherlock Holmes venture out East for tales of shocking brutality. The Jack the Ripper murders of 1888 and 1889 solidified the area’s reputation among respectable Londoners as a sewer of vice, drunkenness, prostitution, and horrifying violence.

A trickle of books about the area in the 1880s turned into a flood in the 1890s by concerned observers, politicians, social commentators, bishops and radicals, all keen to propose their own solutions to the poverty, squalor, vice and violence.

  • In Darkest England and the Way Out by William Booth (1890)
  • Life in Darkest London by A.O. Jay (1891)
  • Life and Labour of the People of London in Nine Volumes (1892 to 1897)
  • The Social Problem and its Possible Solution (1893)
  • Neighbours of Ours: Slum Stories of London by Henry W Nevinson (1895)
  • A Child of the Jago by Arthur Morrison (1896)
  • A Story of Shoreditch by A.O. Jay (1896)
  • Liza of Lambeth by William Somerset Maugham (1897)
  • East London by Walter Besant (1899)
  • To London Town by Arthur Morrison (1899)

A Child of the Jago

It’s a relatively short novel, just 153 pages in the Oxford World Classic edition I have. In fact the lengthy introduction, chronology, bibliography, several prefaces, the extensive notes, a handy selection of contemporary reviews of the novel plus a glossary of lowlife vocabulary, all assembled by editor Peter Miles, themselves make up 89 pages, over half as much again as the text.

So what is A Child of the Jago about? Well, in the middle of this forest of annotations and historical explanations lies the story of young Dicky Perrott, living in an unheated, unwatered slum bedroom with his violent dad, Josh, and a mum, Hannah, so demoralised she can barely nurse the ten-month-old baby, Looey.

The doors have long ago been removed from the doorways. Many of the doorframes have been chopped up and used as firewood. There’s one cold tap in the backyard for the whole house, but it rarely works and periodically the tap itself is stolen. There’s no basin, soap or towel in the house. Everyone stinks.

The rotting slums are never quiet, because somewhere someone is always fighting or taunting, crying or wailing. The Jago as a whole is dominated by civil war between the Rann and Leary families and their respective auxiliaries. Low level fighting never ceases, and sometimes builds up to impressive crescendos.

Fighting began early, fast and furious. The Ranns got together soon, and hunted the Learys up and down, and attacked them in their houses: the Learys’ chances only coming when straggling Ranns were cut off from the main body. The weapons in use, as was customary, rose in effectiveness by a swiftly ascending scale. The Learys, assailed with sticks, replied with sticks torn from old packing-cases, with protruding nails. The two sides bethought them of coshes simultaneously, and such as had no coshes – very few – had pokers and iron railings. Ginger Stagg, at bay in his passage, laid open Pud Palmer’s cheek with a chisel; and, knives thus happily legitimised with the least possible preliminary form, everybody was free to lay hold of whatever came handy.

Bob the Bender was reported to have a smashed nose, and Sam Cash had his head bandaged at the hospital. At the Bag of Nails in Edge Lane, Snob Spicer was knocked out of knowledge with a quart pot, and Cocko Harnwell’s missis had a piece bitten off of one ear.

It is a world of relentless violence. Trying to escape across a yard, Dicky’s mum is cornered by the notorious Sally Green, who knocks her and the baby she’s holding, to the floor, pins her down and starts biting and ripping her neck. Sally’s enemy, Norah Walsh sees this happening and runs at Sally with a bottle. She smashes the bottom off against a kerb, pulls Sally off Dicky’s mum, and stabs Sally again and again with the shards of broken glass, in the face. Yes. It is really brutal.

In between all this mayhem, Dicky nips along to the opening of a philanthropical institute, the satirically named East End Elevation Mission and Pansophical Institute. While worthy middle-class folk congratulate themselves on their philanthropy, Dicky pinches the bishop’s pocket watch and runs home to give it to his dad. But instead of being please, his dad beats him with his belt till he bleeds in several places on his back and legs.

Morrison is satirical about the well-intentioned middle-class’s efforts to help the slum dwellers, channelling Dickens.

The good Bishop, amid clapping of hands and fluttering of handkerchiefs, piped cherubically of everything. He rejoiced to see that day, whereon the helping hand of the West was so unmistakably made apparent in the East. He rejoiced also to find himself in the midst of so admirably typical an assemblage – so representative, if he might say so, of that great East End of London, thirsting and crying out for – for Elevation: for that – ah – Elevation which the more fortunately circumstanced denizens of – of other places, had so munificently – laid on. The people of the East End had been sadly misrepresented – in popular periodicals and in – in other ways. The East End, he was convinced, was not so black as it was painted. (Applause.)

Morrison’s attitude towards the slum dwellers is harder to gauge. His basic approach is to tell it like it is, to simply record the fights, casual violence, poverty and filthiness, all dipped in a layer of biting irony. One reasonably attractive woman makes a profession of luring sailors back to her rooms, where her husband hits them on the head with a foot long iron bar with a knob at the end, then they rob the victim of all valuables and throw him out in the street, where the lesser vultures pick over the leavings, removing shoes and belts.

The cosh was a foot length of iron rod, with a knob at one end, and a hook (or a ring) at the other. The craftsman, carrying it in his coat sleeve, waited about dark staircase corners till his wife (married or not) brought in a well drunken stranger: when, with a sudden blow behind the head, the stranger was happily coshed, and whatever was found on him as he lay insensible was the profit on the transaction. In the hands of capable practitioners this industry yielded a comfortable subsistence for no great exertion.

Morrison deploys an ironic or sardonic tone throughout. The victim is ‘happily’ coshed, the event is referred to as a ‘transaction’, the muggers are ‘capable practitioners’. For the most part this knowing irony works well. I suppose it reflects the position of the author who had one leg in the area and its violent underclass, and the other on the ladder up into gainful employment and ‘respectability’. Irony helps him to manage the detachment of both him, and the presumed middle-class reader, from the appalling scenes he describes.

But it is an often angry irony, a kind of exasperated humour which resents both the violent chavs he’s describing, and the ignorance of the middle-class audience he’s writing for. He is as dismissive of middle-class do-gooders as he is of his violent proles.

Here he is sarcastically describing the reason the half-respectable Roper family are disliked i.e. for not behaving like the rest of the Jago.

The Ropers were disliked as strangers: because they furnished their own room, and in an obnoxiously complete style; because Roper did not drink, nor brawl, nor beat his wife, nor do anything all day but look for work; because all these things were a matter of scandalous arrogance, impudently subversive of Jago custom and precedent. Mrs Perrott was bad enough, but such people as these!

This facetiousness extends to the technique I pointed out in my review of Tales of Mean Streets, which is for Morrison to describe the outrageous behaviour and values of the Jagos – their amorality, thieving, violent, ignorant and careless behaviour – as if it was quite natural and universally accepted. It’s a technique which combines anger, bitterness and humour in a compelling way. For example, after Josh Perrott is arrested, Dicky gets home to find his mum distraught.

Hannah Perrott sat in her room, inert and lamenting. Dicky could not rouse her, and at last he went off by himself to reconnoitre about Commercial Street Police Station, and pick up what information he might; while a gossip or two came and took Mrs Perrott for consolation to Mother Gapp’s. Little Em, unwashed, tangled and weeping, could well take care of herself and the room, being more than two years old.

So the two-year-old is left completely by itself – and this is what I mean by Morrison ventriloquising the values of the Jago – everyone in the story considering that being more than two-years-old means she is well able to take care of herself ‘and the room’. Later, in an even more throwaway moment, when Hannah and Dicky go to visit Josh in gaol, they leave two-year-old Little Em ‘sprawling in the Jago gutters.’ As a middle-class reader I am duly horrified. And that is Morrison’s intention.

Archaic phraseology

A slightly irritating thing about the style is the use of archaic turns of phrase, medievalisms, Biblical terms. This is found in the prose of William Morris, who I’ve just reread, and who at least has the excuse that he was consciously trying to revive medieval crafts and mentality.

It’s much weirder to find it in the prose of the father of science fiction, H.G. Wells. Wells and Morrison both combine a permanent low-level facetiousness with odd medievalisms lifted from Sir Walter Scott or the Bible.

I wonder if describing the brutal modern world in turns of phrase lifted from medieval romance is intended to be satirical? Or is he mocking the heavy-handed prose of Times editorials and church sermons? Or was it just was the prose style of the day?

Dicky saw a new world of dazzling delights. Cake – limitless cake, coffee, and the like whenever he might feel moved thereunto.

A man pulled Norah off. On him she turned, and he was fain to run…

Without, the fight rallied once more.

He was near as eminent a fighter among the men as his sister among the women…

But he was ever indulgent…

Dicky, with his hands in his broken pockets, and thought in his small face, whereon still stood the muddy streaks of yesterday’s tears.

He had ventured into the Jago because the police were in possession, Dicky thought; and wondered in what plight he would leave, had he come at another time.

The hunchback weak, but infuriate, buffeting, biting and whimpering; Dicky infuriate too…

But Dicky and his bulge he saw ere they were well over the threshold.

Leaning back in his seat, swinging his feet, and looking about at the walls with the grocers’ almanacks hanging thereto.

Old Fisher came down from the top-floor back, wherein he dwelt with his son Bob, Bob’s wife and two sisters, and five children.

Scarce were they vanished above, however, when the little hunchback heard his father and mother on the lower stairs.

But a well-dressed stranger was so new a thing in the Jago, this one had dropped among them so suddenly, and he had withal so bold a confidence, that the Jagos stood irresolute.

‘Scarce’, ‘near’ – why don’t they have -ly on the end and so function as normal adjectives? Is dropping the ‘-ly’ meant to give them a more resonant Biblical flavour, and thereby somehow ennoble the style? Maybe it’s a tone or register we just don’t ‘get’ any more. Whatever the motive, I think it mars Morrison’s style.

That said, I did notice that the incidence of these ironic archaisms did lessen as the book progresses, Maybe Morrison got fed up of them himself.

By contrast, Morrison’s handling of dialogue feels to me much more confident and accurate. It’s often much more enjoyable, more authentic, to read the novel’s dialogue than the prose narrative.

‘I don’t s’pose father’s ‘avin’ a sleep outside, eh?’
The woman sat up with some show of energy. ‘Wot?’ she said sharply. ‘Sleep out in the street like them low Ranns an’ Learys? I should ‘ope not. It’s bad enough livin’ ‘ere at all, an’ me being used to different things once, an’ all. You ain’t seen ‘im outside, ‘ave ye?’
‘No, I ain’t seen ‘im: I jist looked in the court.’ Then, after a pause: ‘I ‘ope ‘e’s done a click,’ the boy said.
His mother winced. ‘I dunno wot you mean, Dicky,’ she said, but falteringly. ‘You—you’re gittin’ that low an’ an’—’
‘Wy, copped somethink, o’ course. Nicked somethink. You know.’

Many writers have tried to depict working class or dialect speech. Off-hand I think Morrison is the most successful at it I’ve ever read.

The plot

The plot breaks down into three parts.

Part one 

In the first half Dicky is nine years old and two types of thing happen. 1. We witness the casual violence, complete amorality, the thieving, mugging, pickpocketing, deceit and small-mindedness which characterise the Jagos, including his own mother and father. 2. Buried amid all the violent incidents, we witness certain strands of the plot which will go on to become important.

Chief among these strands is the way the inhabitants of the persecute the Roper family because they are a tiny bit more respectable than the surrounding crooks. Their son is the same age as Dicky, a hunchback, and sees Dicky sneaking into their rooms to steal a clock.

Later, Dicky feels guilty and slips a music box he’s nicked from a shop on Shoreditch High Street into the Roper family belongings which are all piled on a cart as they pack up and move out of the slum. But when it is discovered it is interpreted as being a trick, obviously stolen and planted there so the police can be tipped off and get the Ropers into trouble. The Ropers don’t move very far away, and the hunchback boy and Dicky grow up to be enemies, engaged in a permanent violent feud. Whenever he sees the hunchback, Dicky attacks him. But the cripple always gets his own back with the simple trick of telling bigger, harder boys that Dicky is boasting he could best them in a fight. With the result that Dicky is continually being attacked by surprise and apparently at random by bigger boys who thrash him.

Although everything is seen through Dicky’s eyes, the disruptive figure who sets bits of plot rolling is the new vicar, a savvy tough exponent of Muscular Christianity – the Reverend Henry Sturt – who sets up a church in a disused barn and takes no nonsense from the Jagos. The Jagos will happily beat up individual policemen, who will only venture into Jago Court, at the centre of the slum, in large numbers. But Father Sturt, as the Jagos come to call him, from the start won’t be intimidated, stands up to even the toughest hard men, and wins a grudging sort of respect. He is ‘the one man who could swim in a howling sea of human wreckage’ (Chapter 26)

(This Father Sturt figure is based on the Reverend Osborne Jay who had approached Morrison and given him a tour of the Jago, and then supplied him with eye-witness descriptions of specific characters and incidents. Since Jay had already set some of these incidents down in his own book, Life in Darkest London, published in 1891, this led to Morrison being accused of plagiarism, a criticism which stung him into writing a preface to the book, which he expanded into a detailed essay discussing ‘realism’ in contemporary literature. From our perspective, it means we can be confident that many of the characters and events described in A Child of the Jago actually took place.)

The plot, in the sense of a linked series of events, is fairly slight. Dicky grows up witnessing a whole series of, mostly violent incidents: in part one by far the most impressive is the prolonged fist fight between his father and Billy Leary, triggered by the attack on Dicky’s mum by a (female) member of the Leary clan.

Part two

In the second part we leap four years and Dicky is now 13 and expected to earn his keep by thieving. In part one we had seen how he was inveigled into nicking things and giving them to a slimy cunning Jewish fence, Mr Aaron Weech. Now, in part two, Father Sturt gets Dicky a job in a shop. The hunchback slopes past, then doubles back several times to check what he’s seeing is correct. Dicky affects to ignore him.

But Weech, upset at the loss of goods Dicky gives him and also nervous that if Dicky turns honest, he might peach on him, manages to get Dicky sacked. Completely innocent, aggrieved, mortified, Dicky goes home in tears where his Dad belts him as punishment for losing the income. At which, giving up on the straight life, Dicky returns to thieving and pick-pocketing with renewed energy.

The biggest scene in part two is when the Jagos invite their rivals from the nearby rookery Love Lane round to Mother Gapp’s pub, the Feathers, for a truce and reconciliation party. Unfortunately Mother Gapp’s pub wasn’t built to be packed to the rafters with shouting stomping toughs and, in an amazing moment, the entire floor gives way and a crowd of Jagos and Dove-Laners all fall five or six feet into the basement, landing amid breaking barrels, broken pint pots and shattered rafters. Immediately thinking the whole thing is a trap, the Dove-Laners turn on the Jagos and there is an almighty scrap.

Amid the fighting Dicky sees the Roper hunchback silhouetted and pushes him into the hole. He hits a barrel, then falls between two barrels and lies still. Is he dead? Dicky legs it.

Dicky’s dad, Josh, has a bit of heroic bad luck. He breaks into an up-market house and has already pocketed a handsome watch when a fat old lummox labours up the stairs and Josh punches him, sending him reeling back down the stairs. Unfortunately for Josh, this fat man is a member of the High Mob, the bejewelled, swanking crooks who have made such a success of a life of crime that they have risen out of the slums and dwell in handsome abodes, though they still sometimes return to the Jago, to flaunt their wealth and especially to view an organised fight, like the fist fight between Josh and Billy Leary which drew an enormous crowd and elaborate betting.

The High Mobsman puts the word out to be alert for his watch, which has his initials on the back. Josh tries a few fences who turn it down with a shudder but the egregious Aaron Weech spies an opportunity to win favour with the Mobsman, tells Josh to return in the morning, at which point there are two constables tipped off to arrest him.

Without Josh to support them, Hannah, Dicky and Little Em sink into real poverty and starve. Hannah has another baby, delivering it herself in their hovel. Kiddo Cook has taken to dropping round spare morsels form his job in the market. One day he pushes the door open to witness the sight of Hannah having just given birth. He hurries to fetch Father Sturt who fetches the surgeon.

Having cleaned Hannah and the baby up, they walk away and the surgeon gives vent to his despair.

Father Sturt met the surgeon as he came away in the later evening, and asked if all were well. The surgeon shrugged his shoulders. ‘People would call it so,’ he said. ‘The boy’s alive, and so is the mother. But you and I may say the truth. You know the Jago far better than I. Is there a child in all this place that wouldn’t be better dead – still better unborn? But does a day pass without bringing you just such a parishioner? Here lies the Jago, a nest of rats, breeding, breeding, as only rats can; and we say it is well. On high moral grounds we uphold the right of rats to multiply their thousands. Sometimes we catch a rat. And we keep it a little while, nourish it carefully, and put it back into the nest to propagate its kind.’

Father Sturt walked a little way in silence. Then he said: – ‘You are right, of course. But who’ll listen, if you shout it from the housetops? I might try to proclaim it myself, if I had time and energy to waste. But I have none – I must work, and so must you. The burden grows day by day, as you say. The thing’s hopeless, perhaps, but that is not for me to discuss. I have my duty.’

The surgeon was a young man, but Shoreditch had helped him over most of his enthusiasms. ‘That’s right,’ he said, ‘quite right. People are so very genteel, aren’t they?’ He laughed, as at a droll remembrance. ‘But, hang it all, men like ourselves needn’t talk as though the world was built of hardbake. It’s a mighty relief to speak truth with a man who knows – a man not rotted through with sentiment. Think how few men we trust with the power to give a fellow creature a year in gaol, and how carefully we pick them! Even damnation is out of fashion, I believe, among theologians. But any noxious wretch may damn human souls to the Jago, one after another, year in year out, and we respect his right: his sacred right.’ (Chapter 29)

If a society allows anyone at all to have children, then the problem of children brought into the world by drunk, addicted or irresponsible adults is eternal.

This appears to be Morrison’s own view because it is repeated in several of the letters which Miles includes in the OUP edition of the book. The infection can never be completely cured. Morrison followed his patron, the Reverend Jay, in thinking that only moving the population lock, stock and barrel to penal colonies in completely different environments might break the cycle of illiteracy, drunkenness, violence and crime. Almost nothing could be done if you just left them to breed in London.

Part three

Another four years pass. The County Council starts to demolish the Jago and replace the tenements with tall, yellow-brick barracks-like apartments. Dicky is a hardened crook, coming up to seventeen. Josh is released from prison. He drinks his way across London to a surly reunion with his long-suffering wife and his unseen child who howls and wails at the sight of him, to the amusement of all the Jagos crammed into the pub.

Bill Rann persuades Josh to take part in a job – ‘cut and dried as a topper’ – to rob Aaron Weech. This is a red rag to a bull since Josh has spent four years in prison mulling over how Weech turned him in and also how he never lifted a finger to help his starving wife and children.

Things go wrong from the start, with the window proving hard to open, and the downstairs rooms proving empty of loot. Climbing the stairs Josh becomes thick-minded with hate, ceasing to make any effort at furtive creeping, clumping, awaking Weech who comes to his door with a lamp in his hand.

In a grim, late-Victorian scene, Josh grips Weech by the neck and slashes at his face, roaring out his list of accusations and blame, until he hacks at Weech’s throat, then lets the bloody lump fall at his feet. But the commotion has drawn the police and when Josh, foolishly looks out the window, by lantern-light several coppers recognise him.

Rann had long since scarpered. Now Josh takes to the rooftops and flees the baying crowd in a scene which is identical to Bill Sykes’s rooftop flight in Oliver Twist, written 60 years earlier. He makes it to a strong iron downpipe, shimmies down it plans to make it to the maze of slums in Honey Lane but hasn’t reckoned on the way the north-east of the slum has been cleared to make room for the new council housing. In the dark he falls into a hole dug for foundations, twisting his ankle, unable to move.

In the next chapter, Morrison again borrows from Dickens in portraying Josh Perrott’s feverish frame of mind, seeing the entire rigmarole of his trial for murder from the perspective of a mind overwhelmed by feverish, fast-moving, inconsequential worries and perceptions, morbidly obsessed with the smell of the old fence’s squalid den, the pervasive smell of rotting pickles, and

when he turned to face the judge again he had forgotten the time, and crowded trivialities were racing through the narrow gates of his brain once more.

We see the lengthy, wordy, repetitive rigmarole of the trial through Josh’s fevered mind, then the guilty verdict, Hannah fainting. Then a few days later he is hustled out of his cell, meekly thanks his gaolers, through the exercise yard and into the execution shed, up the steps to the gallows and then…

Father Sturt tries to give Hannah some charring work, but she’s useless at it. Dicky swears vengeance on the world. He half thinks of suicide but that’s soft talk. He’s got his mum and the kids to look after. He’s walking back to the Jago, with a plan for a job tonight, with Tommy Rann, a builder’s yard in Kingsland, when he runs into a fight. A mob of Jago youth is roused and storming towards Dove Lane. A fight, a fight will clear his head, anything to take his mind off his dad and… So Dicky joins in, storms Dove Lane with the others, throws himself into the centre of the melee, laying about him with a big stick when he feels a sharp punch under the arm and stumbles forward.

There’s blood, the boys nearest cry out that he’s been stabbed. It was his old enemy, the hunchback. The fight breaks up and everyone flees, apart from a few lads who lay Dicky on his back while the blood gurgles into his lungs. The lads come with a loose wooden door, lay him on it and take him to the surgeon. Father Sturt arrives and takes Dicky’s hand. They ask him who did it and to the end Dicky keeps up Jago morality, refusing to snitch.

Life before sex and drugs and rock’n’roll

I’ve been watching the American TV series, The Wire, set in Baltimore and following a team of detectives as they bug and gather evidence on a powerful drug-dealing operation. Series three follows the rivalry and warfare between two leading drug gangs, complicated by the involvement of a wild card drug thief and assassin, Omar.

The point is that a modern depiction of really rough slums (as of 2003, when the TV series is set) features:

Drugs The underworld is dominated by a network of drug dealers – small-timers on the street, distributing for higher-up gang leaders, some of whom have made enough money to begin investing in property and even entering the city’s corrupt politics.

Gun crime Rival gang members freely shoot each other dead, either individually or in mass firefights.

Sex And their lifestyle overlaps with profits from prostitution. The series doesn’t hold back on scenes of dealers getting blow jobs up dark alleyways or shagging hookers doggy-fashion in cars or enjoying the services of high class escorts.

Music All this is set against a semi-permanent backdrop of hard core rap music, music which seems to both describe the violent amoral world of its origins, and encourage and propagate its values.

Looking back at A Child of the Jago requires a big effort to block all this – the contemporary world of music, drugs and violent crime – out of your imagination.

In 1896 there were no mass-produced drugs. Some of the characters – including Dicky’s dad – drink heavily but there are no alcoholics, as such, no people completely incapacitated by booze. They all need to stay sharp in order to thieve.

There were no cars, so people were much more limited, psychologically, to their home turf, in this case the grid of Jago streets which provide all kinds of back exits and short cuts which characters can use to escape from the police (on the rare occasions the police are brave enough to enter the Jago) or, more probably, from other characters after their blood.

There are no guns so, although there is a continual threat of violence, all of which is serious – being bottled in the face, hit on the head with a cosh, whacked on the arm with bits of metal fence or, occasionally, stabbed – in the end the actual homicide rate is relatively low.

There is no music. The baleful events of The Wire play out to a backdrop of music appropriate to the characters, mostly hard-core rap, the indiscriminate consumption of which somehow confirms the shallow amorality of the characters’ sub-human lifestyle.

But there was no recorded music in Victorian times and so music in the book is rare. Occasionally you might come across a drunk singing on a street corner. More often there’ll be a sing-song in the pub, especially if it has an old joanna which someone can play. Then there are the stern, four-square hymns which emanate from churches or are sung by the Sally Army. But otherwise, the only sounds are of horses and carts and people.

Lastly, there appears to be no sex. The Victorians must have had sex otherwise we wouldn’t be here, but you wouldn’t think so from most of their art or fiction. Right at the start it’s explained that wives are sent out onto the busier streets to lure unwary men back into the Jago, so waiting husbands can cosh and mug them. But if there is any actual sex or prostitution in A Child of the Jago I couldn’t detect it.

Robert Blatchford’s review

Peter Miles, the editor of the Oxford University Press edition which I read, includes a dozen or more contemporary reviews of the novel in  his notes. By far the most interesting is a piece by Robert Blatchford, socialist and editor, who was one of the first to point out this glaring absence of sex from the story.

According to Blatchford, both critics and defenders of A Child of the Jago waste their breath debating its realism, since it omits:

  • the actual swearwords all working men use but are forbidden in print
  • the prevalence of illness
  • the ubiquity of prostitution whereby most of the Jago children are prostitutes before they reach their teens

The social impact of disease and prostitution (and the combination of both in venereal disease) are not discussed because they are not allowed to be discussed under the cultural self-censorship and the actual legal censorship, of the times. Therefore, according to Blatchford, Morrison’s depiction may revel in violence and crime – but massively fails to give a full and accurate picture of life in the slums.

This censorship helps to explain the feeling that, upon reading a book like this, you enter a world of different concerns and issues from our present day.

In the absence of sex and drugs and rock’n’roll, what would have concerned a late-Victorian middle-class reader of the book? Well:

  1. The non-stop violence.
  2. The squalor and uncleanliness – this would have been linked to middle-class anxiety about cholera and other contagious diseases spreading to middle-class areas from sinks of filth like the Jago.
  3. The continual low-level thieving – everybody pinches any valuable they see. Though mainly carried out within the slum itself, the crooks do sometimes venture further afield to nick things from shops or pick pockets.
  4. The lack of Christian faith. None of the slum-dwellers knows or cares anything about religion, except as a way of wangling free food and drink out of naive missionaries. In his copious notes, Peter Miles quotes the 1886 census of the East End which declared that 92% of the population did not attend a service of any religious denomination.
  5. The immorality of living in sin. Even if they consider themselves ‘married’, very few of the couples in the book have actually been through a church service. Thus, in the eyes of any theologian, every time they have sex they are committing a cardinal sin which will send their souls to hell. They really did need to be saved, and soon. Hence the expense of money and effort opening Missions and building new churches.
  6. The lack of education. There is a free Board School close to the slum but none of the parents let their children go there because a) it’s a waste of time, they should be home helping their mum or, as soon as they’re able, going out to earn money thieving; b) if they attended school, their names would be taken down, and so the authorities would be able to identify them and their parents. No, no, the Jago parents prefer to stay off the grid, any grid.

Although the underlying principles – extremely poor, uneducated people living in filthy conditions, amid ceaseless violence and crime – are similar, it’s the differences between slum life of 1896 and slum life today which strike the modern reader.

Colourful names

Morrison has a sure way with names. Compare and contrast with his vastly more famous contemporary, Rudyard Kipling (Morrison born 1863, Kipling born 1865) all of whose names, in his hundreds of short stories, are arch and contrived, for example the names of the three soldiers in the British army who feature in some seventeen rather tiresome stories – Learoyd, Mulvaney and Ortheris.

By contrast, Morrison’s characters’ names – like his depiction of late Victorian street speech – feel entirely authentic and powerfully evocative of a lost underworld:

Mother Gapp, Cocko Harnwell, Kiddo Cook, Josh Perrott, Aaron Weech, Snuffy, Little Em, Jerry Gullen, Jerry Gullen’s canary (actually a knackered old cart horse), Bill Leary, Old Beveridge, Pigeony Poll, Tommy Rann, Pip Walsh, Sally Green, Old Fisher, Mr Grinder, Snob Spicer, Bob the Bender, Pud Palmer, Ginger Stagg.

Related links

Reviews of other fiction of the 1890s

Joseph Conrad

Rudyard Kipling

Henry Rider Haggard

Sherlock Holmes

Arthur Morrison

Robert Louis Stevenson

Bram Stoker

H.G. Wells

Oscar Wilde

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Posted by Simon on September 30, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/09/30/a-child-of-the-jago-arthur-morrison/

The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells (1896)

‘These creatures you have seen are animals carven and wrought into new shapes. To that, to the study of the plasticity of living forms, my life has been devoted.’
(The Island of Dr Moreau, chapter 14)

The main text is a ‘lost narrative’, in this case a written account of the adventures of Edward Prendick, which is found among his papers after his death by his nephew, Charles Edward Prendick, and is now being given to the public ‘for the first time’.

This is a time-honoured old literary convention but it always makes me perk up, as it promises a certain kind of text, an old-fashioned adventure narrative, much as Conan Doyle’s story The Horror of the Heights transcribes the ‘blood-stained notebook’ belonging to a Mr. Joyce-Armstrong, or the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is told through letters and diaries, the kind of textual fragments which also throng the Sherlock Holmes stories.

Shipwrecked

The story is simple enough in outline. Prendick describes how the schooner he’s a passenger on in the South Seas (The Lady Vain) hits a wreck and sinks. He scrambles into a dinghy with two others. After days without food or water, the two sailors he’s with attack each other and fall overboard. It is in this state, alone, half delirious and drifting in an open boat, that he is picked up by another schooner, the Ipecacuanha, and nursed back to health by a passenger on this boat, Montgomery, a former medical student.

The captain of the second boat is a disreputable drunk (John Davis) who argues incessantly with Montgomery and his strange, malformed manservant, not least about Montgomery’s cargo of wild animals – a pack of savage hounds, a caged puma and loads of rabbits.

When they reach their destination, a remote island, the drunken captain unloads Montgomery’s animals into a waiting launch steered by an aloof man who is obviously Montgomery’s boss – but then drunkenly insists that Prendick leave the ship, too. Montgomery refuses to take him, and so the drunk captain gets his men to manhandle Prendick into the boat’s dinghy which he sets adrift. Seeing all this, Montgomery and his boss reluctantly turn around their launch and come back for him.

The captain of the launch now introduces himself as Doctor Moreau. He is a big strong, grey-haired man who makes it quite plain to Prendick that he is an unintended and unwelcome guest, but that they couldn’t leave him to drift and die. Now he accompanies them in the boat which docks at a primitive quayside, where the animals are unloaded by yet more men who are strange and almost animal-like in appearance.

The island

And thus Prendick arrives on the island of Dr Moreau, and slowly realises that the good doctor is practicing vivisection – ‘performing operations on live animals for the purpose of experimentation or scientific research’ – before going on to make the horrific discovery – that he is operating on men, too.

I picked myself up and stood trembling, my mind a chaos of the most horrible misgivings. Could it be possible, I thought, that such a thing as the vivisection of men was carried on here? The question shot like lightning across a tumultuous sky; and suddenly the clouded horror of my mind condensed into a vivid realisation of my own danger. (Chapter 10)

Thus there is a secret at the heart of the island, which involves physical danger, and is potentially horrific – and Wells’s task as storyteller is to share Prendick’s slow unravelling of the secret, and to punctuate the narrative with scenes of jeopardy and horror.

Terror

For example, the day after he’s taken in and given a spare room in the ‘compound’, Prendick finds himself deeply disturbed by the sound of the screams of the puma. Moreau is clearly operating on it, with no anaesthetic, all day long. So Prendick goes for a wander around the island which, of course, is a bad idea, because, once he is in the forest, he becomes alert to strange sounds and snufflings, and realises that any number of horrible, misshapen half-men, are loping around it. In one shocking scene he glimpses one of these half-men go down on all fours to slurp water from a stream – just like an animal!

I read this scene late at night and, as I followed Prendick’s realisation that he is lost at night in a tropical jungle filled with half-human beasts – the hair literally stood up on the back of my neck. I read on in genuine fear as Prendick blunders through the darkness, realising he is being followed by something he can’t see, but whose inhuman gruntings and snufflings he can hear getting closer and closer.

A twig snapped behind me, and there was a rustle. I turned, and stood facing the dark trees. I could see nothing – or else I could see too much. Every dark form in the dimness had its ominous quality, its peculiar suggestion of alert watchfulness. So I stood for perhaps a minute, and then, with an eye to the trees still, turned westward to cross the headland; and as I moved, one among the lurking shadows moved to follow me.

My heart beat quickly. Presently the broad sweep of a bay to the westward became visible, and I halted again. The noiseless shadow halted a dozen yards from me. A little point of light shone on the further bend of the curve, and the grey sweep of the sandy beach lay faint under the starlight. Perhaps two miles away was that little point of light. To get to the beach I should have to go through the trees where the shadows lurked, and down a bushy slope.

I could see the Thing rather more distinctly now. It was no animal, for it stood erect. At that I opened my mouth to speak, and found a hoarse phlegm choked my voice. I tried again, and shouted, ‘Who is there?’ There was no answer. I advanced a step. The Thing did not move, only gathered itself together…

It was some time before I could summon resolution to go down through the trees and bushes upon the flank of the headland to the beach. At last I did it at a run; and as I emerged from the thicket upon the sand, I heard some other body come crashing after me. At that I completely lost my head with fear, and began running along the sand. Forthwith there came the swift patter of soft feet in pursuit. I gave a wild cry, and redoubled my pace. Some dim, black things about three or four times the size of rabbits went running or hopping up from the beach towards the bushes as I passed.

So long as I live, I shall remember the terror of that chase. I ran near the water’s edge, and heard every now and then the splash of the feet that gained upon me. Far away, hopelessly far, was the yellow light. All the night about us was black and still. Splash, splash, came the pursuing feet, nearer and nearer. I felt my breath going, for I was quite out of training; it whooped as I drew it, and I felt a pain like a knife at my side… (Chapter 9)

Exciting, eh? Note the (generally) short sentences. Aspects of Wells’s prose occasionally betray his Victorian background (‘forthwith’ and other such ornate phraseology) but for the most part you can see how the need to convey heightened sensations and terror force the prose into shorter, pithy sentences, like outbursts of panting.

Chapter titles

Even the titles of each chapter are designed – with their insistent use of ‘the’ to start each one – to convey a sense of primitive and elemental experience.

The Man Who Was Going Nowhere
The Strange Face
The Evil-Looking Boatmen
The Locked Door
The Crying Of The Puma
The Thing In The Forest
The Crying Of The Man
The Hunting Of The Man
The Sayers Of The Law

The wrecking outsider

There must be a generic name for the kind of story in which a stranger, an outsider, blunders into a fairly stable situation or society, misunderstands and disrupts it, and sets off a train of events which lead to its destruction. Happens in loads of science fiction and adventure stories.

This is a classic example. In chapter 10 of this 22-chapter text, Prendick, overcome with panic that Moreau and Montgomery might be about to experiment on him, breaks free of the compound, running away from Montgomery, and finds himself being befriended by the strange – the really strange – motley of vivisected half-humans and hybrids which Moreau has let run loose on the island.

Prendick discovers that there are far more of these mutants, these ‘beast men’, than he’d imagined, maybe hundreds (Moreau later tells him there are some 67, plus a fleet of 60 or so smaller half-animals). And is inducted into their strange religion, led by a deranged Beast-Man prophet, and reinforced by rhythmic chanting and swaying:

Not to go on all-fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
Not to suck up Drink; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
Not to eat Fish or Flesh; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
Not to claw the Bark of Trees; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
Not to chase other Men; that is the Law. Are we not Men?

Moreau and Montgomery track him down to the village of the beast-men, in order to rescue him but Prendick, in his ignorance and panic – still convinced that they mean to operate on him – yells out to the Beast Men that Moreau and Montgomery are just men like them, that they can be easily overcome and defeated, that they are not gods.

In other words – he plants the seeds of The Revolt of the Beast-Men.

Moreau’s justification

Moreau and Montgomery finally persuade Prendick they mean him no harm by handing over their revolvers to him and saying he can keep them. Reluctantly, he agrees to go back to the compound with them. It is here that Moreau makes his Big Statement, justifying  his work to Predick, mixing together contemporary knowledge about vivisection and evolution, into a horrifically amoral quest to mould and create new species.

‘I wanted – it was the one thing I wanted – to find out the extreme limit of plasticity in a living shape.’

He explains that none of the things Prendick saw in the village of the Beast-Men was human. All of them were animals who Moreau had extensively experimented on to give new craniums, larger brains and, above all, larynxes with which to utter sounds. His amorality, his unflinching heartless willingness to inflict unspeakable pain are meant to horrify us.

And Wells sense the mythic necessity for the story of describing Moreau’s anger and frustration at continually failing to create a man from a beast. No matter how subtle his knife and his anatomical knowledge, something is always lacking. The creatures always relapse, the bestial part reawakens.

Neither Moreau nor Wells names it, but Wells is gesturing towards the idea of a soul, as somehow separating man from the beasts, and therefore incapable of any surgical intervention.

This notion that the beast in the vivisected animals rises especially at nightfall, when they dare to do things they would never do during the day, reminded me of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a full-length novel devoted to describing creatures which can only live at night, which was published the year after Moreau, in 1897.

(Interestingly, Wells had already published the factual core of Moreau’s speech as a scientific article about the limits and possibilities of vivisection in the Saturday Review in January, 1895. An example of the close linkage between current scientific debate, and Wells’s scientific ‘fantasies’.)

Blood is spilt

The catastrophe is slow but remorseless in building up. A rabbit-like creature is discovered which has been killed and eaten. Now, eating meat and tasting blood are against ‘the Law’ which Moreau has been at such pains to instil into his monstrous creations.

He, Montgomery and Prendick go armed with revolvers, whip and a big hunting horn to the Valley of the Beast Men, where Moreau blows the horn and assembles the mutants. The Beast-Men listen while Moreau repeats the law about not tasting flesh, and then repeat it like surly retards. But as Moreau pushes his questioning about who has broken the Law and tasted blood, the Leopard-Man betrays his guilt by suddenly bounding at Moreau, pushing him over and fleeing.

This gives rise to a mass hunt, with the howling yowling beast-people chasing alongside the three men, until they corner the Leopard-Man in a thicket. Here Prendick is overcome by the horrible futility and pointlessness of all of it. If Moreau had some noble purpose in mind, was curing some disease, the pain he inflicts might be acceptable. Instead he creates one botched hybrid after another, releasing them onto the island to live lives of pain and fear, plagued by human thoughts, but without human traditions or feelings to contain them.

Prendick shoots the Leopard-Man to put it out of its misery, but this is just the latest in a long line of his mistakes, which are giving the Beast-Men ideas that the men are no the strong gods they have been whipped into believing.

Many had noticed that when Prendick had sought refuge in their camp, he was bleeding, he was hungry, he was weak. Then, when Moreau and Montgomery had him at bay in the sea, he deliberately shouted to the Beast Men that the white men were just men after all, vulnerable and exposed.

All these seeds which the outsider Prendick has sown now finally bear fruit in a Revolt of the Beast-Men.

The crisis

The actual spark is struck when the puma which Moreau has been operating on for six weeks suddenly breaks free. By now it is half-monster enough to be able to tear its fetters out of the wall, fling Prendick aside (breaking his left arm) and rush for the jungle.

Moreau pursues with a revolver. Montgomery and Prendick follow with Montgomery’s loyal servant, M’ling tagging along. They hear shots and crash through the jungle to find the puma shot dead – and Moreau’s dead body next to it!

Devastated, Montgomery lets slip the words, ‘He’s dead’, but the Beast-Men – who have quickly gathered round – ominously begin to repeat this. Prendick, seeing the danger, steps forward and says in his loudest voice that Moreau is not dead, he has merely cast off this body and gone to heaven to watch over them.

Still, the Beast Men fall to muttering among themselves. Only mindless repetition of the Law, combined with terror of ‘the House of Pain’ (Moreau’s laboratory) have kept them in line. With Moreau dead – what next?

Montgomery, Prendick, M’ling and some of the Beasts carry Moreau’s body back to the compound. The beasts leave. The white men burn Moreau’s corpse, and then lock themselves in.

The next thing is that Montgomery gets drunk and tells Prendick the story of his life. Because of some obscure scandal at medical school he was forced to pack in his career and leave London. He drifted around the South Seas. He was taken in by Moreau and has been living on the island for ten years. His only friend is the mutant M’ling.

Montgomery now gets really drunk, pushes Prendick out of the way and staggers across the beach to find M’ling to persuade him to join him in a drink. Prendick watches figures of some Beast-Men emerge from the forest around the stumbling man, apparently joining in with him, and they all go off together, Montgomery singing.

Prendick realises he has to escape the island. He goes back into the compound to search for things he can pack into the launch, planning to set sail the next day. But then he hears shouting. Looking out the windows he sees that someone has built a fire on the beach and the drinking has turned to violence.

Then he hears shots. He runs towards the fire only to discover that a hairy-grey Beast-Man has mortally wounded Montgomery. M’ling has been savaged and killed. Three of the beasts are dead. Montgomery just has time to say ‘Sorry’, before he dies. And, as the sun rises, Prendick looks round the beach and realises that Montgomery and M’ling, in their nihilistic drunkenness, had chopped up the dinghies and set them on fire. The stupid fool must have drunkenly thought that, if he couldn’t go back to ‘civilisation’, then no-one could.

Still dazed by this realisation, Prendick hears bangs and flares. Looking round, he sees the compound alight, flames climbing higher into the dawn sky. All his plans to flee are crushed.

Among the Beast-Men

There follows what is, in a way, the most enthralling part of the story. Prendick decides to take his courage in his hands and marches to the village of the remaining Beast People. With some of their more rebellious members hot dead, the remnant are, initially, cowed by Prendick. But it soon becomes clear that he is hungry, tired and thirsty. By slow degrees, over the course of days and weeks, he loses his rank as Ruling White Man and, step by step, declines until he is little better than one of them.

So in solitude I came round by the ravine of the Beast People, and hiding among the weeds and reeds that separated this crevice from the sea I watched such of them as appeared, trying to judge from their gestures and appearance how the death of Moreau and Montgomery and the destruction of the House of Pain had affected them. I know now the folly of my cowardice. Had I kept my courage up to the level of the dawn, had I not allowed it to ebb away in solitary thought, I might have grasped the vacant sceptre of Moreau and ruled over the Beast People. As it was I lost the opportunity, and sank to the position of a mere leader among my fellows. (Chapter 20)

Prendick is forced to spend the next ten months among the beasts and during this period, something awful and awe-inspiring happens. Slowly, one by one, he watches as they degrade and decay, reverting to their bestial origins. One by one they forget how to speak, forget how to walk upright, forget about fire, and revert to all the behaviour banned by Moreau’s ‘Laws’ – such as going on all fours and slurping water from streams.

None of them threaten him, but Prendick nonetheless lives in mounting terror.

He keeps a lookout on the horizon. A couple of times he sees what he thinks are sails and lights fires to attract their attention but nobody comes. He makes a series of half-cocked attempts to build a raft, but he is no engineer or handiman.

Finally, one day Prendick sees a dinghy drifting slowly towards the reef. When he swims out to inspect it he finds two well-rotten corpses in it. He tips them out and moors it, fills the empty kegs with fresh water, collects sacksful of fruit – and then pushes off, drifting with the waves, eating and drinking sparingly – in such an abandoned state of mind that he doesn’t really care whether he’s rescued or not. Just to be away from the Island of Beasts is enough.

Degeneration theory

To quote Wikipedia:

Towards the close of the 19th century, in the fin-de-siècle period, something of an obsession with decline, descent and degeneration invaded the European creative imagination, partly fuelled by widespread misconceptions of Darwinian evolutionary theory.

Only a few years before Moreau, in 1892, the German physician and social critic Max Nordau had written a sociological study, Degeneration, arguing the case that Western civilisation was in irreversible. It struck a nerve and become a surprise bestseller.

This cultural trend sprang to mind, particularly as I read the penultimate chapter of The Island of Dr Moreau – the description of Prendick’s ten months among the Beast-Men which is, in effect, an extended fantasia describing the decline and degeneration of Moreau’s half-men back into a state of complete bestiality.

It is horrible to read Prendick’s vivid descriptions of their slow loss of all mental powers and reversion to crude animal behaviour. It is Nordau’s notion of degeneration given fictional flesh.

But the point is really rammed home when Prendick finds himself eventually rescued by a passing ship, and then returned, eventually, back to England, and back to London.

Here he experiences a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder for, as he walks the streets, he cannot see the passersby as people, but only as beasts-in-waiting, each on the verge of that horrible degeneration, such as he saw on the island.

When I lived in London the horror was well-nigh insupportable. I could not get away from men: their voices came through windows; locked doors were flimsy safeguards. I would go out into the streets to fight with my delusion, and prowling women would mew after me; furtive, craving men glance jealously at me; weary, pale workers go coughing by me with tired eyes and eager paces, like wounded deer dripping blood; old people, bent and dull, pass murmuring to themselves; and, all unheeding, a ragged tail of gibing children. Then I would turn aside into some chapel – and even there, such was my disturbance, it seemed that the preacher gibbered ‘Big Thinks’, even as the Ape-man had done; or into some library, and there the intent faces over the books seemed but patient creatures waiting for prey. Particularly nauseous were the blank, expressionless faces of people in trains and omnibuses; they seemed no more my fellow-creatures than dead bodies would be, so that I did not dare to travel unless I was assured of being alone. And even it seemed that I too was not a reasonable creature, but only an animal tormented with some strange disorder in its brain which sent it to wander alone… (Chapter 22)

Politics

Wells was left-wing from the start, joining the Fabian Society in 1903 and going on to write numerous works promoting socialism.

As early as The Time Machine he gave his fable of the future a political slant by speculating that the two races of sylph-like Eloi and underground ape-like Morlocks might be the remote descendants of the increasingly differentiated classes of his day – a terrifying but logical extrapolation of England 1895, when the nation’s cities seemed to be ever-more starkly divided between a luxury-enjoying bourgeoisie and a degraded, half-bestial proletariat.

The same issue winks out at us from Dr Moreau, though not so centrally as in Time Machine. The first time he discovers the Beast Village, a crevice in volcanic rock into which the pitiful results of Moreau’s vivisection experiments have excavated sordid little alcoves, Predick finds himself comparing the skulking creatures who turn from his gaze, to inhabitants of the worst slums of London.

I say I became habituated to the Beast People, that a thousand things which had seemed unnatural and repulsive speedily became natural and ordinary to me. I suppose everything in existence takes its colour from the average hue of our surroundings. Montgomery and Moreau were too peculiar and individual to keep my general impressions of humanity well defined. I would see one of the clumsy bovine-creatures who worked the launch treading heavily through the undergrowth, and find myself asking, trying hard to recall, how he differed from some really human yokel trudging home from his mechanical labours; or I would meet the Fox-bear woman’s vulpine, shifty face, strangely human in its speculative cunning, and even imagine I had met it before in some city byway.

Yet every now and then the beast would flash out upon me beyond doubt or denial. An ugly-looking man, a hunch-backed human savage to all appearance, squatting in the aperture of one of the dens, would stretch his arms and yawn, showing with startling suddenness scissor-edged incisors and sabre-like canines, keen and brilliant as knives. Or in some narrow pathway, glancing with a transitory daring into the eyes of some lithe, white-swathed female figure, I would suddenly see (with a spasmodic revulsion) that she had slit-like pupils… (Chapter 15)

Predominantly The Island of Dr Moreau is a horror story. But it also invokes the great political issue of the day. By the 1890s the appalling state of the working classes was on everyone’s lips, in the form of ‘the labour problem’, ‘the employment problem’ or ‘the population problem’, which dominated the newspapers a bit like Brexit does today.

Either side of The Island of Dr Moreau were published countless novels, newspaper articles and factual studies exposing the poverty and squalor at the heart of Britain’s large cities and especially London. The Sherlock Holmes novels revel in it. An entire new genre of lowlife novels, by authors like George Gissing and Arthur Morrison, described it with bitter anger.

Underlying the political issues, though, is the deeper anxiety about individual and cultural degeneration. What if the wealthy, educated élite will, in time, be swamped by the wretched poor? What if we are all just animals lifted beyond out natural sphere and the entire race will, eventually, revert to bestial incomprehension and violence?

The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) is all about the moral degeneration of the privileged central character, a narrative which takes the hero to squalid opium dens in the East End and unmentionable depravities. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) is a really obvious expression of the theme, with the cultivated Dr Jeckyll reverting to the ape-like brute, Hyde. Charles Marlow, narrator of The Heart of Darkness, points out that London, too, was once one of the dark places of the world. And, by implication, it could become so, again.

The final chapter of the Island of Dr Moreau, describing Prendick alone among the decaying Beast-Men, really taps into this anxiety with a biting sense of horror and premonition.

Futility

When you’re a teenager, it’s a common temptation to feel that everything is pointless, futile and stupid. Much science fiction gives that feeling point and definition. If you adopt the Wellsian, materialist perspective, then human beings are just one among millions of life forms currently inhabiting the planet, themselves descended from countless billions of ancestor species, and our planet is itself one among unknown billions filling an infinitely large universe which is an inconceivable 15 billion years old.

The incorporation of these vast and thrilling perspectives into his stories gives Wells ample opportunity to have his narrators or protagonists reflect, at some point, on the pitiful triviality of their own – and by extension – all human lives.

Thus, at the height of the chase of the Leopard-Man, Prendick – watching Montgomery and Moreau lead their pack of mutants across the rocks towards the poor victim – is suddenly overwhelmed by the horrible arbitrary futility of it all.

The Beast People manifested a quite human curiosity about the dead body, and followed it in a thick knot, sniffing and growling at it as the Bull-men dragged it down the beach. I went to the headland and watched the bull-men, black against the evening sky as they carried the weighted dead body out to sea; and like a wave across my mind came the realisation of the unspeakable aimlessness of things upon the island. Upon the beach among the rocks beneath me were the Ape-man, the Hyena-swine, and several other of the Beast People, standing about Montgomery and Moreau. They were all still intensely excited, and all overflowing with noisy expressions of their loyalty to the Law; yet I felt an absolute assurance in my own mind that the Hyena-swine was implicated in the rabbit-killing. A strange persuasion came upon me, that, save for the grossness of the line, the grotesqueness of the forms, I had here before me the whole balance of human life in miniature, the whole interplay of instinct, reason, and fate in its simplest form. The Leopard-man had happened to go under: that was all the difference. Poor brute!

Poor brutes! I began to see the viler aspect of Moreau’s cruelty. I had not thought before of the pain and trouble that came to these poor victims after they had passed from Moreau’s hands. I had shivered only at the days of actual torment in the enclosure. But now that seemed to me the lesser part. Before, they had been beasts, their instincts fitly adapted to their surroundings, and happy as living things may be. Now they stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in a fear that never died, fretted by a law they could not understand; their mock-human existence, begun in an agony, was one long internal struggle, one long dread of Moreau – and for what? It was the wantonness of it that stirred me.

Had Moreau had any intelligible object, I could have sympathised at least a little with him. I am not so squeamish about pain as that. I could have forgiven him a little even, had his motive been only hate. But he was so irresponsible, so utterly careless! His curiosity, his mad, aimless investigations, drove him on; and the Things were thrown out to live a year or so, to struggle and blunder and suffer, and at last to die painfully. They were wretched in themselves; the old animal hate moved them to trouble one another; the Law held them back from a brief hot struggle and a decisive end to their natural animosities.

In those days my fear of the Beast People went the way of my personal fear for Moreau. I fell indeed into a morbid state, deep and enduring, and alien to fear, which has left permanent scars upon my mind. I must confess that I lost faith in the sanity of the world when I saw it suffering the painful disorder of this island. A blind Fate, a vast pitiless mechanism, seemed to cut and shape the fabric of existence and I, Moreau (by his passion for research), Montgomery (by his passion for drink), the Beast People with their instincts and mental restrictions, were torn and crushed, ruthlessly, inevitably, amid the infinite complexity of its incessant wheels.

‘I lost faith in the sanity of the world when I saw it suffering the painful disorder of this island…’

To a certain kind of mind, or to the mind in a certain mood, these ideas are really powerful, and Wells’ nihilism takes its place in a long line which stretches from Gulliver, revolted by humans at the very end of  his travels, through to the oppressive misanthropy of Wells’s contemporary, Joseph Conrad.

The way the tale ends with Prendick incapacitated by revulsion on the streets of London, really rams home the horror of what he has witnessed, and imprints his haunted vision of a universal human degeneration into bestial animality.

Related links

Other H.G. Wells reviews

1895 The Time Machine – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1898 The War of the Worlds – the Martians invade earth
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come – set in the same London of the future described in The Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth fall in love but descend into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps

1901 The First Men in the Moon – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth – two scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, leading to a giants’ rebellion against the ‘little people’
1906 In the Days of the Comet – a passing comet trails gasses through earth’s atmosphere which bring about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Bun Hill in Kent, manages by accident to be an eye-witness to the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end

1914 The World Set Free – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change

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Weir of Hermiston by Robert Louis Stevenson (1896)

Introduction

Stevenson left Weir of Hermiston unfinished at his death on 3 December 1894. It is a return to the Scottish setting of Kidnapped (1886) but now told in a more mature, subtle, ironic style. It is difficult to credit that he crafted this recreation of Scottish landscape, life and language while actually living in the blistering tropical heat of Samoa; and also while developing the tauter, leaner style he used in his powerfully realistic South Sea stories.

Weir is a lot lighter and daintier in tone than the South Seas stories, with their brutality and cynicism. There is something almost Jane Austenish about the opening with its broad confident sweeping description of the life and manners of the old Lord Justice-Clerk Adam Weir, and his wooing and marriage to the spinsterish Jean Rutherford, last descendant of the ‘riding Rutherfords of Hermiston’. There is a lovely rolling rhythm to Stevenson’s sentences.

The motives upon either side were much debated. Mr. Weir must have supposed his bride to be somehow suitable; perhaps he belonged to that class of men who think a weak head the ornament of women—an opinion invariably punished in this life. Her descent and her estate were beyond question. Her wayfaring ancestors and her litigious father had done well by Jean. There was ready money and there were broad acres, ready to fall wholly to the husband, to lend dignity to his descendants, and to himself a title, when he should be called upon the Bench. On the side of Jean, there was perhaps some fascination of curiosity as to this unknown male animal that approached her with the roughness of a ploughman and the aplomb of an advocate. Being so trenchantly opposed to all she knew, loved, or understood, he may well have seemed to her the extreme, if scarcely the ideal, of his sex. And besides, he was an ill man to refuse. A little over forty at the period of his marriage, he looked already older, and to the force of manhood added the senatorial dignity of years; it was, perhaps, with an unreverend awe, but he was awful. The Bench, the Bar, and the most experienced and reluctant witness, bowed to his authority—and why not Jeannie Rutherford? (Chapter I – The Life and Death of Mrs Weir)

The surviving portion of Weir of Hermiston consists of only nine chapters and fills just 100 pages of the 1987 OUP paperback edition, but it is full of light, gladsome descriptions. It feels like Stevenson can reel off sentences without effort or appeal, the prose dancing from his pen.

Kirstie was a woman in a thousand, clean, capable, notable; once a moorland Helen, and still comely as a blood horse and healthy as the hill wind.
(Chapter I – The Life and Death of Mrs Weir)

Part one – Edinburgh

Adam, the crusty old judge, and Jean, scion of the Rutherfords, marry and have a son, Archie. He is born in 1794 (100 years before the novel was being written). Archie is just seven years old when he begins to wonder whether his father, the harsh hanging judge, conforms to the milk- and-water piety his mother is always preaching – whether a harsh ranting hanging judge quite matches her description of the ideal Christian, who should be all forgiveness and the meekness of the lamb. Feeble Jean puts off Adam’s shrewd questions with Bible quotes and sayings but the sharp young lad notices the discrepancy in his parents’ beliefs.

And no doubt it is easy thus to circumvent a child with catchwords, but it may be questioned how far it is effectual. An instinct in his breast detects the quibble, and a voice condemns it. He will instantly submit, privately hold the same opinion. For even in this simple and antique relation of the mother and the child, hypocrisies are multiplied.
(Chapter I – The Life and Death of Mrs Weir)

It has been obvious to every reader of the novel that there is a lot of autobiography in Stevenson’s account of the rather weedy young boy growing up in the shadow of the forbiddingly confident, brash, booming father. Like Stevenson, young Archie Hermiston is sent through the conventional Edinburgh schools and starts to study law at the University when – The Big Incident happens.

Archie is 19 when he stops by the court where his father is hearing the case of a low vile murderer, a sorry apology of a wretch and his debased mistress. Archie watches his father condemn the man to death and finds every nerve in his body recoiling. Next day he goes along with the roaring crowd to watch the hanging and finds himself revolted and every instinct in his body rebelling. He cries out against it on the spot, overheard by only a few, but much compounds his sin by – that evening at the Edinburgh University debating society, of which he is a leading light – suggesting a debate condemning capital punishment as against God’s will.

This action causes a scandal, not only in its subversion of the existing laws which young Adam is supposed to be studying and supporting, but as a direct questioning of his father’s role and verdict in t his specific case.

Adam has acquired a mentor, a colleague of his father’s on the bench, a judge but a kindly and patient man, Lord Glenalmond. Archie calls round to see him that evening. Glenalmond has already got wind of the scandal but listens sympathetically to the young man’s objections, worries and doubts. And their conversation makes Archie guiltily realise just how profoundly he has insulted his father – in public – and brought scorn on the house.

This prepares us for the next scene where Archie steels himself to confront his father – who, predictably enough, storms against his son’s idiocy and foolishness. Archie is utterly repentant, head bowed. He offers to go as a soldier to ‘the Peninsular’ (the Peninsular War against Napoleon – if Adam is 19 this must be 1813). But his father points out that his rebellious streak unfits him for all dutiful professions. He will send him to the country estate at Hermiston to be the petty laird there, to run it on his (the Judge’s) behalf.

Part two – Hermiston

So begins the second part of the book, which begins with a lengthy description of the setting and personnel of the country house at Hermiston, descriptions of the house and country, the chief servant, 50-year-old Kirstie Elliott and her family.

Again, one can only marvel at Stevenson’s confident, thorough, sympathetic but measured and realistic evocation of a character.

Kirstie was now over fifty, and might have sat to a sculptor. Long of limb, and still light of foot, deep-breasted, robust-loined, her golden hair not yet mingled with any trace of silver, the years had but caressed and embellished her. By the lines of a rich and vigorous maternity, she seemed destined to be the bride of heroes and the mother of their children; and behold, by the iniquity of fate, she had passed through her youth alone, and drew near to the confines of age, a childless woman. The tender ambitions that she had received at birth had been, by time and disappointment, diverted into a certain barren zeal of industry and fury of interference. She carried her thwarted ardours into housework, she washed floors with her empty heart. If she could not win the love of one with love, she must dominate all by her temper. Hasty, wordy, and wrathful, she had a drawn quarrel with most of her neighbours, and with the others not much more than armed neutrality.
(Chapter V – Winter on the Moors)

Kirstie’s brother, twenty years her senior, fathered four boys (Robert, Gilbert, Clement, and Andrew) and, belatedly, a girl, Christina – all living in the neighbouring valley of Cauldstaneslap. A long, stand-alone section describes the famous incident of the death of the old brother, ambushed and assaulted by thieves as he made his way drunkenly back from the market – how he made it to the family house, expiring on the doorstep, how his four grown sons jumped on their horses and tracked the attackers across heath and moor, finally bringing them to justice. The incident became the stuff of legend (strongly reminding me of the bloody family revenges at the core of the Norse sagas). The brothers, as a result, become known as The Black Brothers.

Archie settles into the country estate at Hermiston where he quickly wins the affection of mature Kirstie, followed by the other servants. Although aloof and sad, he strikes all the more a Byronic and attractive figure for that.

And so the scene is set for young Archie one day to spy the young Christina at the local church, a 50-seater kirk attended mostly by the staff from Hermiston and the households of the four brothers. His and Christina’s eyes meet and they fall in love.

It is a striking thing and new in Stevenson’s fiction that so much of this scene is told from Christina’s point of view, with a thorough description of her elaborate Regency clothes, and her equally complicated feelings. This really feels like a little bit of Jane Austen dropped into the Highlands and may be the first time Stevenson had attempted to portray a woman, a woman’s point of view, a woman’s feelings.

Christina felt the shock of their encountering glances, and seemed to rise, clothed in smiles, into a region of the vague and bright. But the gratification was not more exquisite than it was brief. She looked away abruptly, and immediately began to blame herself for that abruptness. She knew what she should have done, too late—turned slowly with her nose in the air. And meantime his look was not removed, but continued to play upon her like a battery of cannon constantly aimed, and now seemed to isolate her alone with him, and now seemed to uplift her, as on a pillory, before the congregation. For Archie continued to drink her in with his eyes, even as a wayfarer comes to a well-head on a mountain, and stoops his face, and drinks with thirst unassuageable. In the cleft of her little breasts the fiery eye of the topaz and the pale florets of primrose fascinated him. He saw the breasts heave, and the flowers shake with the heaving, and marvelled what should so much discompose the girl. And Christina was conscious of his gaze—saw it, perhaps, with the dainty plaything of an ear that peeped among her ringlets; she was conscious of changing colour, conscious of her unsteady breath. Like a creature tracked, run down, surrounded, she sought in a dozen ways to give herself a countenance. She used her handkerchief—it was a really fine one—then she desisted in a panic: “He would only think I was too warm.” She took to reading in the metrical psalms, and then remembered it was sermon-time. Last she put a “sugar-bool” in her mouth, and the next moment repented of the step. It was such a homely-like thing! Mr. Archie would never be eating sweeties in kirk; and, with a palpable effort, she swallowed it whole, and her colour flamed high.
(Chapter VI – A Leaf from Christina’s Psalm-Book)

It has the sympathy for embarrassed youth of the mature man and the extremely confident writer.

Later the same evening Christina goes for a walk on the hills and there she spies young Archie rushing towards the pass into the valley of her family, coming looking for her. They meet amid the heather and have the earnest, embarrassed conversation of young lovers, sweet and innocent.

But Stevenson is not innocent. And for the first time begins to hint that this story will not end well. Some way into the conversation, Archie realises that they are talking not far from the tomb of  his mother who died when he was a lad. The thought moves the poetic soul in him.

Tears, in that hour of sensibility, came into his eyes indifferently at the thought of either; and the girl, from being something merely bright and shapely, was caught up into the zone of things serious as life and death and his dead mother. So that in all ways and on either side, Fate played his game artfully with this poor pair of children. The generations were prepared, the pangs were made ready, before the curtain rose on the dark drama.
(Chapter VI – A Leaf from Christina’s Psalm-Book)

Uh oh. Things move apace (as they do when Stevenson isn’t lumbered with his wordy collaborator, his step-son Lloyd Osbourne) and nemesis arrives promptly in the next chapter in the shape of a student Archie knew at Edinburgh. Like most of the students of the day he has gambled and drunk his money away, been forced to sell his law books and was on the verge of being sued by the bookseller when he fled his lodgings and took up the very vague invitation to visit him which Archie can’t actually remember ever having given. His name is Frank Innes.

Stevenson is a master at describing unease. From the start Archie and Frank don’t get along. Archie takes to disappearing immediately after breakfast, sometimes before, leaving his unwanted guest alone with the servants or to roam the grounds of the house or into the hills, bored and resentful. Frank falls in with the drinking clubs at the local village, Crossmichael, where he spitefully starts spreading rumours about aloof Archie and gives his host the catchy nickname of The Recluse.

Frank goes one, fatal, step further when he begins to wonder where Archie is disappearing off to so often and so early. Slowly he figures out that it is a woman. And when he next attends church he realises Archie is in love with the beautiful Christina. He proceeds to take his revenge by taunting Archie – mockingly advising him not to get involved with ‘a local milkmaid’, warning him of the likely fury of Christina’s brothers and the scorn of the neighbourhood once his secret is out; all the time assuming a hypocritical concern for Archie’s well-being when in fact he is deliberately, sadistically torturing and humiliating him.

That night they go their separate ways to bed, Archie to burn with humiliation at hearing his lady love so scorned and taken lightly, Frank to savour his revenge for what he takes to be Archie’s superiority and neglect of him. And Stevenson, in the character of the intrusive narrator, points the doomward direction of his tale.

Poor cork upon a torrent, he tasted that night the sweets of omnipotence, and brooded like a deity over the strands of that intrigue which was to shatter him before the summer waned.
(Chapter VII – Enter Mephistopheles)

The penultimate chapter (A Nocturnal Visit) consists entirely of old Kirstie – who has been missing Archie’s company and conversation now he is off visiting Christina all the time – coming to his rooms one evening and having a painful conversation in which she warns him against risking his own and Christina’s reputations with his dalliance.

Kirstie – in the earlier descriptions of her mastery of the household, and her fond feelings for the young laird when he first arrives, and now in her conflicted feelings about seeing her young hero fall in love – emerges as in some ways the most sympathetic character in the book. Certainly I feel warmer about her – and about the wicked old hanging judge – than I do about either of the naive young lovers.

So now Archie has been warned twice – once by the ill-intentioned Frank, once by well-intentioned Kirstie – to have a care.

The last completed chapter (Chapter IX – At The Weaver’s Stone) follows logically. At his due appointment with Christina next day, beside the stone tomb in the hills known locally as the weaver’s stone, Archie nerves himself to tell his beloved they must cool their love. But, being young and naive, Stevenson brilliantly describes how maladroit and clumsily he phrases a reasonable suggestion, particularly when he makes the fatal (and quite amusing) mistake of invoking the name of his father, the old Judge. Oh dear. Christina, nerved up to expect more lover’s sweet talk, is at first hurt and wounded, the tears springing to her eyes; but when Archie brings his father and the opinions of others into it – oops, she bridles and becomes angry. She says he is taunting her, she never realised he was so in thrall to convention etc. And then she bursts into hopeless sobbing tears and he rushes to embrace her.

And that is where the manuscript breaks off. Stevenson dictated this last scene to his step-daughter on the morning he died.

Doubling and division

The introduction to the 1987 Oxford University Press edition, by Emma Letley, goes long on the idea of doubles and dualities. This is because Weir is paired in this edition with Stevenson’s most famous fiction, Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde, which naturally suggests the notion of the double.

The trouble with this idea is that once you start looking for binary oppositions in almost any fiction, you can find them everywhere, in evermore feeble and unconvincing iterations. So, here:

  • Strong old Adam Weir is set against his son, the sensitive young Archie Weir. There’s a binary division right there.
  • Old Adam Weir, his fellow law lords and the students at Edinburgh Uni are bourgeois; the four Black Brothers are rough crude country folk.
  • The book contrasts English speakers with Scots speakers so that good honest Kirstie Elliott speaks broad Scots, sly scheming Frank speaks dandified English.
  • More peripherally, many of the folk heroes – legendary figures referred to throughout the text – are ambiguous figures, reverenced by country folk and yet law-breakers in their own time.

If you throw in the historic conflicts between the Puritan Covenanter movement and the broader Protestantism of the Scottish cities, and then start quoting the use of masks or personas in the work of Robert Burns or Douglas Hogg, you can fill many pages waxing lyrical about the centrality of doubles and divisions in Scots literature, and then confidently situate Stevenson in that tradition.

I am not persuaded. If you take two of the characters and contrast them – bingo! – binary opposites – as further examples, the Angry judge Weir and the Compassionate judge Glenalmond; the male Archie (and Frank) and female Christina (or Kirstie); the Father Adam and the Son Archie; the Old Adam and the Young Archie. Judge Adam is stern; his wife Jeannie is soft. And so on and on.

But the reality is that there are about a dozen fleshed-out characters in the novel and they are placed in multifarious relations with each other, relationships which jostle and hustle against each other and which also – as is kind of the point of the novel – change and develop.

And the interesting bit, the attractive bit of the text, isn’t the static categories (old, young, Scots-speaking, English-speaking, town, country blah blah blah) – it is the much more subtle growth and change and development of the characters which is caused by changing events, their changing perceptions, their changing relations to each other. the novel and its characters are far more rich and strange than the harping on doubles doubles doubles allows.

Style – dry comedy

Dry This richness is caught in the subtle flexibility of Stevenson’s style. I’ve already pointed out its dry, Austenish irony, his mature, deflating, amused familiarity with the types he is describing:

The old ‘riding Rutherfords of Hermiston,’ of whom she was the last descendant, had been famous men of yore, ill neighbours, ill subjects, and ill husbands to their wives though not their properties.

‘… though not their properties’ lol.

Bathetic punchlines Stevenson regularly uses classic antithesis, the balancing of two clauses, to make the second one end with a thumping comic bathos.

In the early stages I am persuaded there was no malice. He talked but for the pleasure of airing himself. He was essentially glib, as becomes the young advocate, and essentially careless of the truth, which is the mark of the young ass.

Comic misunderstanding There is a particularly laugh-out-loud moment when the harsh Judge is riding back from Edinburgh to Hermiston and is met by Kirstie keening by the side of the road, all geared up to tell him with maximum emotional distress that his wife, Jeannie, has died.

It was the lowering nightfall when my lord returned. He had the sunset in his back, all clouds and glory; and before him, by the wayside, spied Kirstie Elliott waiting. She was dissolved in tears, and addressed him in the high, false note of barbarous mourning, such as still lingers modified among Scots heather.
‘The Lord peety ye, Hermiston! the Lord prepare ye!’ she keened out. ‘Weary upon me, that I should have to tell it!’
He reined in his horse and looked upon her with the hanging face.
‘Has the French landit?’ cried he.

Style – adjectives

On a really local level, I began to notice Stevenson’s use of multiple adjectives or sets of adjectival phrasers, often with a surprise in the tail.

She withered in the growing, and (whether it was the sins of her sires or the sorrows of her mothers) came to her maturity depressed, and, as it were, defaced; no blood of life in her, no grasp or gaiety; pious, anxious, tender, tearful, and incompetent.

The house lasses were at the burnside washing, and saw her pass with her loose, weary, dowdy gait.

This atmosphere of his father’s sterling industry was the best of Archie’s education. Assuredly it did not attract him; assuredly it rather rebutted and depressed. Yet it was still present, unobserved like the ticking of a clock, an arid ideal, a tasteless stimulant in the boy’s life.

Above all, it is the articulacy – it is the ability to deploy his Scots prose to give expression to psychological insights into his characters and by extension into human nature more broadly, which illuminate the reader’s mind. Which make a deeper, richer perception possible. It is the often unexpected nature of the insights, their counter-intuitive placing, which makes them all the more powerful

Lord Hermiston was coarse and cruel; and yet the son was aware of a bloomless nobility, an ungracious abnegation of the man’s self in the man’s office.

I can see why ‘the Master’, Henry James, genuinely admired Stevenson. The way he was for so long perceived as a ‘children’s writer’ conceals the flexibility, fluency and psychological insights which abound in his work.

Related links

A Stevenson bibliography

1878
An Inland Voyage – An immensely entertaining, witty and thoughtful account of Stevenson’s trip by canoe, with a friend, along the canals of Belgium and south into France, observing rural life and types along the way.
1879
Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes – More gritty than the Voyage, the Travels record 12 days walking with a recalcitrant donkey through south-central France in a book which has moments of freewheeling nature worship but comes to be dominated by Stevenson’s interest in the bloody Protestant revolt which took place in the region a century earlier.
1881
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers – Essays including: Virginibus Puerisque i-iv including ‘On Falling in Love’, Crabbed Age and Youth, An Apology for Idlers, Ordered South, Aes Triplex, El Dorado, The English Admirals, Some Portraits by Raeburn, Child’s Play, Walking Tours, Pan’s Pipes, A Plea for Gas Lamp.
1882
The Old and New Pacific Capitals – Essays on the climate and history of Monterey and San Francisco.
Familiar Studies of Men and Books – Essays on: Victor Hugo’s Romances, Some Aspects of Robert Burns, The Gospel According to Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau: His Character and Opinions, Yoshida-Torajiro, François Villon, Student, Poet, Housebreaker, Charles of Orleans, Samuel Pepys, John Knox and his Relations to Women.
New Arabian Nights – A sequence of thinly-linked and not too impressive short stories.
1883
Treasure Island – One of the most famous adventure stories of all time. Andrew Lang says it single-handedly established the financial viability of a new type of short, action-packed story and inaugurated a golden age of adventure yarns from the likes of Arthur Conan Doyle and Henry Rider Haggard.
The Silverado Squatters – Another travel book, following immediately after the Atlantic crossing described in An Amateur Emigrant and the trans-America train journey described in The Open Plains, this one describes Stevenson and new wife Fanny’s honeymoon in an abandoned mining camp high on the flanks of Mount St Helena, north of San Francisco.
1885
Prince Otto – An action romance set in the imaginary Germanic state of Grünewald.
More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter – co-written with Fanny Van De Grift Stevenson
A Child’s Garden of Verses Classic volume of children’s poetry.
1886
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – One of the most famous fictions of all time about an Edinburgh scientist who devises a potion which releases his unconscious urges, his animal self, an alter ego which threatens to take over his personality.
Kidnapped – Gripping historical novel about young David Balfour plunged into a series of adventures in the aftermath of the Jacobite Rising of 1745.
1887
The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables – Six short stories: The Merry Men, Will O’ the Mill, Markheim, Thrawn Janet, Olalla, The Treasure of Franchard.
On the Choice of a Profession – An essay.
Underwoods (poetry)
Ticonderoga: A Legend of the West Highlands (poetry)
1888
The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses – Historical adventure novel set during the Wars of the Roses as young Master Richard Shelton escapes from his wicked ‘uncle’ and rescues the girl he loves, young Joanna Sedley.
1889
The Master of Ballantrae – Two brothers end up on opposite sides of Bonny Prince Charlie’s rebellion of 1745, the Master being the one who goes into exile and adventures in America and India before returning to haunt the stay-at-home brother, until both are driven to a macabre and gruesome fate in the New World.
The Wrong Box – Comic novel mostly written by his step-son Lloyd Osbourne, but revised by Stevenson.
1890
Father Damien: an Open Letter to the Rev. Dr. Hyde of Honolulu Stevenson’s angry defence of Father Damien, Catholic priest to the leper colony on the island of Molokai, against a detractor.
1891
The Bottle Imp – Short story (collected in Island Nights’ Entertainments) about a magic bottle and the love of two South Sea island natives.
Ballads – poems
1892
The Wrecker (co-written with Lloyd Osbourne) – An immensely long rambling narrative telling the life story of American Loudon Dodds, from his days as a failed art student in Paris, to his business ventures with brash Jim Pinkerton in San Francisco, to the long puzzling case of the shipwrecked Flying Scud whose mystery dominates the second half of the book and, in the final pages, reveals a gruesome and bloody tragedy at sea.
The Beach of Falesá – (collected in Island Nights’ Entertainments) A powerful short story about a rough white trader and the harsh revenge he takes on the fellow trader who tries to get him expelled from the island.
A Footnote to History, Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa – factual history
Across the Plains – Travelogue following straight on from The Amateur Emigrant (which describes RLS’s 1879 journey by steamship from Glasgow to New York) and describes his ongoing journey by train from New York to California.
1893
The Isle of Voices – Short story (collected in Island Nights’ Entertainments) about a lazy South Sea islander who falls foul of his father-in-law who is a warlock with magic powers.
Catriona, aka David Balfour – A sequel to Kidnapped.
Island Nights’ Entertainments (aka South Sea Tales) – Contains the three stories referred to above.
1894
The Ebb-Tide – A novella, the third collaboration with Lloyd Osbourne, describing the ill-fated trip of three beach bums at the ends of their tethers, who unexpectedly get the opportunity to crew a schooner, plan to steal and sell it, but then meet their nemesis in the shape of a supernaturally powerful white trader.
—-December 1894 Stevenson dies, aged 44, on the South Sea Island of Vailima—-
1895
Vailima Letters – 44 letters Stevenson wrote to his friend Sidney Colvin, who published them with a preface and epilogue.
The Amateur Emigrant – A short intense account of Stevenson’s journey across the Atlantic in 1879, with descriptions of the squalid conditions of ‘steerage’ class passengers and reflections on the condition and character of the British working classes.
1896
Weir of Hermiston – Unfinished at Stevenson’s death, this fragment of nine chapters describes the childhood and young manhood of Archie Weir, sensitive son of the hanging judge old Adam Weir, how his father removes him from Edinburgh University for his subversive views and exiles him to the country estate of Hermiston where he falls in love with a local beauty, Christina Elliott – at which point a student acquaintance comes to stay, who it is hinted will become Archie’s bitter love rival – and the manuscript breaks off. Contains much mature and insightful portrayal of its characters especially, for the first time in Stevenson’s fiction, of its women characters.
In the South Seas – A collection of articles and essays describing Stevenson’s travels in the Pacific islands.
Songs of Travel and Other Verses – Poetry.
Records of A Family of Engineers – A personal history of his own family of lighthouse-building engineers, unfinished at his death.
1897
St. Ives: being the Adventures of a French Prisoner in England – A long novel which Stevenson had almost completed and was finished after his death by Arthur Quiller-Couch.

2005
Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography by Claire Harman

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A Shropshire Lad by AE Housman(1896)

The Classics professor Alfred Edward Housman surprised his students and colleagues when, in 1896, he published a collection of 63 short lyric poems which his publisher persuaded him to title A Shropshire Lad. Tennyson was responsible for the view that poetry should be pure and lyrical, flying far above the sordid realities of Victorian England. His acolyte Francis Palgrave produced a Golden Treasury of English Verse (1861) which selected with care only the purest of thin, high, quavering lyrical poetry from the previous 450 years of hugely varied verse and poetry.

The poems in A Shropshire Lad continue down that narrowing avenue, producing short, rhyming verse which aspires to a purity untainted by real-life diction or attitudes or events or activities, instead creating a set of bloodless variations on half a dozen stock sentimental themes: the soldier going off to war; handsome young men doomed to die young because they are different, either through suicide or fighting or being hanged for crimes of passion: in short, the narcissistic mentality of an angsty 15-year old.

All this is set in a largely fictional Shropshire of the mind, an imaginary, a Platonic Form of an English rural county which, however, has been taken over by Thomas Hardy and is populated by lads (18-21) who woo lasses who are either reluctant or die young and are carried to the churchyard where they join the other restless souls underground, at which the lads leave their depressing lives to take the Queen’s shilling and go fight in one of the Empire’s countless little wars, or stay at home to become bad ‘uns, to murder or rob and swing for it (Housman is morbidly obsessed with hanging).

The extreme purity of the vocabulary, the idealised English landscape and the teenage sentimentality of the thoughts made it a surprise bestseller. I was interested to learn from the Wikipedia article that the Boer War had an impact on its sales and influence, that “Housman’s nostalgic depiction of rural life and young men’s early deaths struck a chord with English readers”. Of course this chord was to ring even louder during and after the vastly more terrible slaughter of the Great War, and established Housman’s thin pallid verse as a coffee-table favourite.

Poem XL

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

Why, the sceptical reader is tempted to ask, can you not go there again? Oh because I can’t, I am doomed, I am a lost soul, oh can’t you see, oh growing up is sooo hard. Surely it is not only the rural setting which represents an escape from the urban life most of us lead, but the essentially adolescent sentiments of the verse which represent a Hollyoaks-style escape from the complex problems of adult life, careers, money, wives and children, which underpin its enduring appeal.

Various of the 63 lyrics have been set by various composers, most notably George Butterworth, Vaughan Williams and Ivor Gurney. For my money the Butterworth settings are head and shoulders above the others; with his music these pallid lyrics achieve a depth and resonance the words alone lack made all the more poignant by the knowledge that Butterworth himself was killed in the Great War and so his songs about doomed young men have a horrible irony.

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by Simon on August 31, 2013  •  Permalink
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Conrad’s style (1) Decadence and foreignness

The narrow creek was like a ditch: tortuous, fabulously deep; filled with gloom under the thin strip of pure and shining blue of the heaven. Immense trees soared up, invisible behind the festooned draperies of creepers. Here and there, near the glistening blackness of the water, a twisted root of some tall tree showed amongst the tracery of small ferns, black and dull, writhing and motionless, like an arrested snake. The short words of the paddlers reverberated loudly between the thick and sombre walls of vegetation. Darkness oozed out from between the trees, through the tangled maze of the creepers, from behind the great fantastic and unstirring leaves; the darkness, mysterious and invincible; the darkness scented and poisonous of impenetrable forests.

This passage from Conrad’s first short story, The Lagoon (1896), demonstrates some key elements of his prose style:

Lush descriptions

Conrad is addicted to adjectives – tortuous, immense, festooned, glistening, writhing, sombre, arrested etc. The insistent use of adjectives at every opportunity creates a richness and sumptuousness of texture which reminds you that this is the 1890s, the yellow decade, the period when Oscar Wilde wore jackets made of green velvet and even Conan Doyle characters live in plush luxury.

it is noticeable that many of the adjectives or adverbs are vivid or extreme: fabulously, immense, pure, writhing, fantastic, poisonous, impenetrable. There’s a definite fin-de-siecle decadence, an aromatic heaviness of description, about Conrad’s lexicon.

Over and above the influence of the period, the lushness seems appropriate to the subject matter ie the steaming, hot, tropical jungle which is the setting for almost all Conrad’s early stories.

In the famous preface to the The Nigger of the “Narcissus” Conrad says his overwhelming task is to make the reader see.

My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see.

This has been taken as a manifesto of literary impressionism. I’ve never understood how this is particularly different from any other novelist who writes descriptive passages. What does single Conrad out is the length and repetitiveness of his descriptions. Over a long distance this creates a heavy, clotted atmosphere, and contributes to his Author’s Message of Doom and Abandonment. The claustrophobia of imagery and the hysteria of psychology makes me think much more of north European Expressionism than sunny southern Impressionism. More Munch Scream than Monet Waterlilies.

Similes

As his qualifiers tend to be extreme, so Conrad’s similes tend to make comparisons with grand, colourful and rich objects. It is part of the process of expansion or amplification. To be honest, he doesn’t use similes that often, but when he does they’re rich.

…a signal fire gleams like a jewel on the high brow of a sombre cliff. (Karain)

green islets scattered through the calm of noonday lie upon the level of a polished sea, like a handful of emeralds on a buckler of steel. (Karain)

The gold head flashed like a falling star… (Karain)

Dried palm-leaf roofs shone afar, like roofs of gold. (Karain)

His sentences complicated like arabesques… (Karain)

gaslights stretched far away in long lines, like strung-up beads of fire. (Return)

The very mist on the Essex marshes was like a gauzy and radiant fabric… (Heart)

The ships whose names are like jewels flashing in the night of time… (Heart)

The fact dazzling, like the foam on the depths of the sea, like a ripple on an unfathomable enigma… (Heart)

Long sentences

Though he can write short sentences where necessary, and for unexpected punchiness, the typical Conrad sentence is long, sometimes a paragraph long. They are built up from multiple clauses, often placed in apposition ie describing the same noun or noun phrase, approaching the same subject from different angles. Eg ‘tortuous, fabulously deep’ and ‘filled with gloom’ in the passage above both describe the ditch; ‘black and dull’ and ‘writhing and motionless’ both describe ‘a twisted root’. More about apposition in my post about Conrad and repetition.

Un-English phraseology

‘Under the thin strip of pure and shining blue of the heaven’ is not how a native English-speaker would phrase this. Conrad admits somewhere that he didn’t write in French because he knew it too well; he knew the rules and wouldn’t be able to break them. Whereas English is much more flexible and idiomatic than French and so allowed him to stretch rules, creating new phrases, denting existing ones. For example:

  • The house which seemed to float upon a restless and impalpable illusion of a sea. (Lagoon)
  • Each had a bedstead and a mosquito net for all furniture. (Outpost)
  • He had been, at home, an unsuccessful painter who, weary of pursuing fame on an empty stomach, had gone out there through high protections. (Outpost)
  • On his passage voices died out as though he had walked guarded by silence. Surely we’d say, As he passed… (Karain)
  • A puff of breeze made a flash of darkness on the smooth water. (Karain)
  • …one could not imagine what depth of horrible void such an elaborate front could be worthy to hide. (Karain)
  • This fit of hot anger was succeeded by a sudden sadness, by the darkening passage of a thought that ran over the scorched surface of his heart, like upon a barren plain, and after a fiercer assault of sunrays, the melancholy and cooling shadow of a cloud. (Return)
  • Often far away there I thought of these two.. (Heart)
  • ‘A simple formality,’ assured me the secretary… (Heart)
  • In exterior he resembled a butcher in a poor neighborhood… (Heart)
  • Ah! but it was something to have at least a choice of nightmares. (Heart)
  • …as if to devour all the earth with all its mankind. (Heart)

On every page of Conrad there are one or two phrases which aren’t quite correct, giving the sensitive reader a continual, slight feeling of disconnect and foreignness.

Backplacing adjectives

Adjectives in English generally come before the noun they describe. Only a handful specifically don’t. But a big aspect of Conrad’s unEnglish phraseology is the way he routinely puts adjectives after the noun. Why? it gives him the freedom to pile up two or three adjectives after a given noun or noun phrase, thus adding to the sumptuous repetitiveness which is key to his style.

…faces dark, truculent, and smiling… (Karain)

…men barefooted, well armed and noiseless… (Karain)

…a coast deceptive, pitiless and black… (Karain)

…the water slept invisible, unstirring and mute… (Lagoon)

…the glitter of stars streaming, ceaseless and vain… (Lagoon)

This tripling of adjectives placed after the noun is just one type of repetition, a technique I address more fully in the next post.

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by Simon on September 14, 2012  •  Permalink
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An Outcast of The Islands by Joseph Conrad (1896)

Joseph Conrad followed his 1895 debut, Almayer’s Folly, with a prequel, An Outcast of the Islands.

This longer, more substantial novel (295 pages to Almayer’s slender 167) is also set in an isolated backwater of the Malayan archipelago, and features largely the same characters, filling in a lot of Almayer’s backstory, but from a different perspective.

What is odd about the novel is the extent to which it almost replays the narrative arc of the previous one, with the central character another feeble white man abandoned up a distant tropical river among, outwitted by crafty Malays and Arabs, and slave to a mad passion for a native girl which brings him to ruin.

It’s the first novel all over again, but on twice the scale and much more obsessively despairing and nihilistic:

On Lingard’s departure solitude and silence closed round Willems; the cruel solitude of one abandoned by men; the reproachful silence which surrounds an outcast ejected by his kind, the silence unbroken by the slightest whisper of hope; an immense and impenetrable silence that swallows up without echo the murmur of regret and the cry of revolt.

Plot 

About 15 years before the climactic events of Almayer’s Folly, another Dutchman works in Hudig’s warehouse in Macassar, Peter Willems. He thinks he is a great successful man and has earned a big house and the hand of a beautiful Portuguese woman in marriage through his own abilities. But he steals and embezzles from his employer and his jealous rivals expose him. One fine morning he is sacked, ruined, and thrown out of his house.

He goes down to the jetty, distraught, contemplating suicide, but encounters the English buccaneer Tom Lingard who shatters his illusions by telling him old Hudig only set him up with the house because the Portuguese girl he’s married is in fact old Hudig’s illegitimate daughter. Far from being the swanky demigod he thought he was, Willems is only the patsy and tool of Hudig’s wishes.

Lingard offers to take him on, to take him to the new trading post in a new river on the east coast of Borneo where a colleague of his from Hudig’s, Kaspar Almayer, is setting up a trading station and expecting great things…. Weakly, Willems accepts and finds himself in Sambir, the same raddled trading post on the Panteir river as the disillusioned Almayer. Almayer’s daughter, Nina, is still small which helps us date it to 15 or so years prior to the first novel.

And now Willems is once again out of his depth in the small communities dotted along the river and run by a local ‘rajah’ and his wily, one-eyed Malay ex-pirate and fixer, Babalatchi. These conspire to make Willems fall ‘helplessly’ in love with the fetching daughter – Aissa – of another local potentate who has been brought there dying after a bloody fight with the Dutch authorities. Willems is meant to fall so totally under her spell that he is persuaded to help a mighty Muslim trader of the area, Syed Abdulla, navigate to Sambir, to land and establish his own trading post, in direct rivalry to Almayer and against the interests of his protector, Lingard. In his foolish exuberance Willems goes so far as to tie Almayer up and taunt him, waving a gun in his face.

Captain Lingard returns and there is a sequence of set-piece scenes: Almayer updates Lingard, Lingard canoes across the river to the native campong, Lingard is tempted by the wily Babalatchi who hands him a loaded rifle at dawn as Willems is set to appear at the door of his hut, hoping the white men will kill each other. Lingard does indeed confront Willems and punches him to the ground, but resists the temptation to do more, insisting that Willems will remain here, effectively a prisoner, as his punishment.

The Arabs and Malays have left the settlement, having gone to a new one upriver. Lingard also leaves. Willems is completely abandoned apart from the Malay girl, Aissa, who is genuinely but puzzledly in love with him.

But Almayer, goaded by Lingard’s failure to take revenge against Willems, takes his own: for unexplained reasons Lingard has brought and dumped at Almayer’s station the Portuguese wife Willems had abandoned in the opening chapters. Almayer now arranges for her to be paddled over to Willems’ isolated campong hoping that she will encourage Willems to get in the canoe and be paddled downstream to find ships at the sea some 15 miles away.

However, things don’t go to plan as Aissa confronts the newly reunited husband and wife, becomes hysterical with jealousy and, after Willems has hustled his wife back to the canoe and is returning, Aissa shoots Willems through the lung and kills him.

In the final few pages Conrad does what will become a habit with him and abruptly switches the point of view to some years later as the complacent Almayer retells the last few actions of the plot (burying Willems ‘body etc) to a passing explorer who has casually stopped at the station. Having the effect of distancing the action, and also making it seem trivial, just another yarn…

(In fact this mannerism will become standard operating procedure for the other great suicidal depressive of English literature, Graham Greene.)

Good

When he is good, Conrad is brilliant. I think he is best in:

Descriptions of the jungle, particularly the changing light of dawn or dusk.

Instinctively he glanced upwards with a seaman’s impulse. Above him, under the grey motionless waste of a stormy sky, drifted low black vapours, in stretching bars, in shapeless patches, in sinuous wisps and tormented spirals. Over the courtyard and the house floated a round, sombre, and lingering cloud, dragging behind a tail of tangled and filmy streamers—like the dishevelled hair of a mourning woman.

Non-white characters In painting the characters of the non-white characters: the esteemed Muslim trader Syed Abdulla, the local rajah Lakamba, his tricksy sidekick Babalatchi – they are painted with a foreignness or otherness which seems utterly plausible – the scenes in which they meet and conspire against the stupid white men are vivid and intricate.

Style In his not-quite-English style, his uneven way with English idioms regularly leads to odd but expressive forms, the askew angle of his prose adding to the exoticism of the subject matter.

In his unnervingly precise physical details, the way a man stumbles or hesitates or is distracted mid-sentence by a cloud or a fly, the way raindrops fall from wet hair or puddles form in mud, or cutlery clatters in a bowl:

The nose bled too. The blood ran down, made one moustache look like a dark rag stuck over the lip, and went on in a wet streak down the clipped beard on one side of the chin. A drop of blood hung on the end of some hairs that were glued together; it hung for a while and took a leap down on the ground. Many more followed, leaping one after another in close file. One alighted on the breast and glided down instantly with devious vivacity, like a small insect running away; it left a narrow dark track on the white skin.

Bad

But – twice the length of the first novel turns out to be just long enough for Conrad to reveal his weaknesses and for them to begin to really grate. These are:

Obscure plotting It is sometimes hard to understand what’s going on, since the events are often told from different people’s perspectives and new chapters leap back and forward in time. And when you do finally understand, it’s often disappointing. Weak white man is duped into falling for exotic siren who leads him to ruin. Hmmm.

Style Conrad’s rhetorical habits begin to grate. There’s a lot of repetition, a lot of drama and melodrama, a lot of passages which tip over from lush into overripe, into the frankly hysterical.

Psychology 300 pages is long enough to become a bit sick with Conrad’s worldview, which is one of overwhelming negativity, depression and despair. It would be one thing is one of the characters was rather depressive, but ALL the characters experience the same overwrought levels of fear, dread, despair, terror and existentialist angst, and all the time.

And the narrating voice, Conrad, is as depressed, disillusioned and defeated as the characters he describes:

They moved, patient, upright, slow and dark, in the gleam clear or fiery of the falling drops, under the roll of unceasing thunder, like two wandering ghosts of the drowned that, condemned to haunt the water for ever, had come up from the river to look at the world under a deluge.

How dark it was! It seemed to him that the light was dying prematurely out of the world and that the air was already dead.

He laughed. His laugh seemed to be torn out from him against his will, seemed to be brought violently on the surface from under his bitterness, his self-contempt, from under his despairing wonder at his own nature.

He felt a great emptiness in his heart. It seemed to him that there was within his breast a great space without any light, where his thoughts wandered forlornly, unable to escape, unable to rest, unable to die, to vanish—and to relieve him from the fearful oppression of their existence. Speech, action, anger, forgiveness, all appeared to him alike useless and vain, appeared to him unsatisfactory, not worth the effort of hand or brain that was needed to give them effect.

The anger of his outraged pride, the anger of his outraged heart, had gone out in the blow; and there remained nothing but the sense of some immense infamy—of something vague, disgusting and terrible, which seemed to surround him on all sides, hover about him with shadowy and stealthy movements, like a band of assassins in the darkness of vast and unsafe places.

It’s too much. Eventually a healthy reader reacts badly to being so continuously hectored by what are clearly Conrad’s own personal demons. He doesn’t just intrude his angsty worldview into the story, he soaks every sentence in negativity and slaps you in the face with it.

Is Conrad the most miserable novelist in English?

As he wrote in a letter to R. B. Cunninghame Graham in January 1898:

There is no morality, no knowledge and no hope; there is only the consciousness of ourselves which drives us about a world that whether seen in a convex or a concave mirror is always but a vain and floating appearance.

The epigraph of the book is a cheery quote from the Spanish playwright Calderon: Pues el delito mayor Del hombre es haber nacito, meaning: ‘Man’s greatest crime is to have been born’. Google tells me this quote is also referenced by Samuel Beckett, patron saint of depressives.

Maybe when I read this when I was 18 or 21 it had a powerful impact on me. Now it sounds silly and immature. Now that we are born, it makes sense to try and live with as much dignity and self respect as we can. In fact, you could try enjoying yourself, from time to time. Do some exercise. Go for a swim!

The relentlessness of Conrad’s despair also overloads his next novel, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus‘. That short tale was meant to be the story into which Conrad poured all his knowledge of the sea. If so, it is deeply disappointing since the barely detectable plot is overwhelmed by thousands of passages of Conradian despair and misery at the wretched fate of forlorn men abandoned in a heartless universe etc.

On the other hand, all the above helps explains the enduring appeal of Heart of Darkness which, in contrast to Outcast:

  1. Is short – so you don’t have a chance to get sick of Conrad’s ornate style and relentless negativity.
  2. Has a subject, the Belgians’ evil management of their Congo colony, which actually justifies the most extreme and witheringly misanthropist sentiments anybody could express. The subject, for once, matches the constant near-hysteria of his style.
  3. Conrad shapes a narrative arc, helped by the frame narrative of Marlow on the director’s yacht moored in the Thames, which gives an element of detachment and control to the horror. It makes the central narrative all the more aesthetically impactful, unlike the raw, unmediated emotions of the overwrought protagonists of Almayer and Outcast.

Movie 

The book was made into a movie in 1952, directed by Carol Reed, starring Trevor Howard, Ralph Richardson and Robert Morley. Sadly, the reviews on Amazon say it’s rubbish. The posters are great, though. They appear to have dropped the interminable moralising and gone for ‘the soft beautiful body of a woman’.

Related link

Reviews of other fiction of the 1880s and 1890s

Joseph Conrad

George du Maurier

Henry Rider Haggard

Sherlock Holmes

Anthony Hope

E.H. Hornung

Henry James

Rudyard Kipling

Arthur Morrison

Robert Louis Stevenson

Bram Stoker

H.G. Wells

Oscar Wilde

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by Simon on September 8, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on September 8, 2012

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2012/09/08/outcast-of-the-islands-joseph-conrad/

Jameson’s Ride by Alfred Austin (1896)

10 July 2012

When Alfred Lord Tennyson died in 1892 there was no obvious replacement for the post of Poet Laureate. Of the two leading poets, Swinburne was disqualified by the immorality of his earlier poems, William Morris was a trenchant socialist and rejected the post when offered. Kipling, the young star, also refused it, not wanting to shackle his ‘Daemon’ as he referred to his muse, preferring to stay free to speak his mind.

After a hiatus the literary world was surprised when, in 1896, the Tory journalist Alfred Austin was appointed Poet Laureate by the Tory Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, at least in part because of Austin’s journalistic record of supporting Tory causes. Austin held the post until his death in 1913.

Austin’s first poem as Laureate was an ode celebrating the Jameson Raid – the failed attempt to raise a British insurrection against the Boer government of the Transvaal, in South Africa. The uprising was to have been triggered by a raid into the territory by 600 or so British soldiers led by Cecil Rhodes’s fixer, Leander Starr Jameson.

Sir Alfred Austin, Poet Laureate 1896-1913

The planned insurrection in Johannesberg never materialised. Jameson and his men were easily surrounded and captured by the Boers. The Jameson Raid was a fiasco, an embarrassment to the British government, and marked the end of Cecil Rhodes’ political career as he was forced to step down as Prime Minister of the Cape Colony. Britain’s shame, however, was reversed when the Kaiser made the blunder of sending a telegram to the Boers congratulating them on repelling the raid, and hinting that Germany might have come to their aid. Public opinion was outraged and, in a very British manoeuvre, managed to turn an illegal incursion into a foreign country into a heroic rescue mission by plucky heroes. The flagrant untruth that British women and children in the Transvaal were somehow at risk from the beastly Boers was widely disseminated.

Austin’s poem successfully captures the devil-may-care illegality of much Imperial enterprise. It echoes the contempt felt by Kipling and other Imperialists for the lawyers and politicians back in Blighty who prattled on pointlessly while the pressing issues of Empire required urgent action, on the ground, now!

Austin is regularly cited as the being the worst Poet Laureate in our history. The poem’s point of view is certainly shallow and schoolboyish. The rhythm seems to falter regularly, and some rhyme words don’t work. But I don’t think it’s a complete disaster, and anyway it’s an interesting and vivid snapshot of the mindset of the day.

Jameson’s Ride

Wrong! Is it wrong? well, may be;
But I’m going, boys, all the same.
Do they think me a Burgher’s baby,
To be scared by a scolding name?
They may argue, and prate, and order;
Go, tell them to save their breath:
Then, over the Transvaal border,
And gallop for life or death!

Let lawyers and statesmen addle
Their pates over points of law:
If sound be our sword, and saddle,
And gun-gear, who cares one straw?
When men of our own blood pray us
To ride to their kinsfolk’s aid,
Not Heaven itself shall stay us
From the rescue they call a raid.

There are girls in the gold-reef city,
There are mothers and children too!
And they cry, “Hurry up! For pity!”
So what can a brave man do?
If even we win they’ll blame us:
If we fail, they will howl and hiss.
But there’s many a man lives famous
For daring a wrong like this!

So we forded and galloped forward
As hard as our beasts could pelt,
First eastward, then trending nor’ward.
Eight over the rolling veldt;
Till we came to the Burghers lying
In a hollow with hill behind,
And their bullets came hissing, flying,
Like hail on an Arctic wind.

Right sweet is the marksman’s rattle,
And sweeter the cannon’s roar;
But ’tis bitterly bad to battle,
Beleaguered, and one to four.
I can tell you it wasn’t a trifle
To swarm over Krugersdorp Glen,
As they plied us with round and rifle,
And ploughed us again — and again.

Then we made for the gold-reef city,
Retreating, but not in rout.
They had called to us, “Quick! For pity!”
And he said, “They will sally out —
They will hear us come. Who doubts it?”
But how if they don’t — what then?
“Well, worry no more about it,
But fight to the death like men.”

Not a soul had supped or slumbered
Since the Borderland stream was cleft;
But we fought, even more outnumbered,
Till we had not a cartridge left.
We’re not very soft or tender,
Or given to weep for woe,
But it breaks one to have to render
One’s sword to the strongest foe.

I suppose we were wrong, were madmen,
Still I think at the Judgment Day,
When God sifts the good from the bad men,
There’ll be something more to say.
We were wrong, but we aren’t half sorry;
And as one of the baffled band,
I would rather have had that foray
Than the crushing of all the Rand.

Swinford Old Manor, January 9, 1896

P.S. It was, apparently, the same incident, the Jameson Raid, which inspired Kipling’s most enduring poem, If-, regularly voted the nation’s favourite poem. ‘Jameson’s Ride’ is, if you fancy, the Other If-, what If- looks in the hands of a much smaller talent. And highlights the real depth of Kipling’s genius.

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by Simon on July 10, 2012  •  Permalink
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The Seven Seas by Rudyard Kipling (1896)

To enjoy Kipling’s poetry you have to accept the convention of the ballad. You have to accept that not all poetry has to be sensitive and spiritual. Not all poetry is about the poet’s soul, or superior perceptions or feelings.

Some poetry, and the ballad in particular, is designed to be objective, to tell stories about fictional characters, to have an immediate impact, to be closer in some ways to the short story; to tell a tale and impress moral messages, and is designed to the widest possible audience.

Kipling comes squarely out of this tradition, a tradition that goes back to the Border Ballads, to Percy’s Reliques, via the long, moralising narrative poems of the 18th century, which continued to be written in the Victorian period, but are little read today.

The Seven Seas was Kipling’s first poetry collection since the smash-hit Barrack Room Ballads of 1892. It’s divided into two sections:

  • numbers 26 to 43 are new Barrack Room Ballads, a continuation of the jaunty cockney style he had copied from the immensely popular music halls of his day, all dropped aitches and ave-a-banana rhythms
  • numbers 1 to 25 are freestanding poems, all linked by the ideas of the Sea and – more or less explicitly – the British Empire

‘A Song of the English’ is the longest poem, at around 20 pages – in fact a sequence of often quite short poems powerfully evoking the experience of Empire through a series of poems on English seafarers, the casualties of imperialist expansion, and the exotic and far-flung capitals of the British Empire. The overall effect is awe-inspiring. It is quite dazzling to realise just how large the Empire was, just how far its extent reached.

There are two long dramatic monologues in the style of Robert Browning:

  • McAndrews’ Hymn, where McAndrew is chief engineer on a merchant ship, in love with his gleaming engines and his Presbyterian work ethic
  • The Mary Gloster, a variation on the theme of the novel Captains Courageous where a successful businessman tells his story to his wayward and effete son – with a dramatic twist in the tail!

The final piece in the whole book, the Envoi, epitomises the ballad format, the brisk confidence, the lack of innerness, combined with lines and phrases of real poetic power, which comprise the Kipling effect.

L’Envoi

When Earth’s last picture is painted, and the tubes are twisted and dried,
When the oldest colours have faded, and the youngest critic has died,
We shall rest, and, faith, we shall need it — lie down for an æon or two,
Till the Master of All Good Workmen shall set us to work anew!

And those that were good shall be happy: they shall sit in a golden chair;
They shall splash at a ten-league canvas with brushes of comets’ hair;
They shall find real saints to draw from — Magdalene, Peter, and Paul;
They shall work for an age at a sitting and never be tired at all!

And only the Master shall praise us, and only the Master shall blame;
And no one shall work for money, and no one shall work for fame;
But each for the joy of the working, and each, in his separate star,
Shall draw the Thing as he sees It for the God of Things as They Are!

Related links

Other Kipling reviews

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by Simon on June 29, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Books, English literature, Poetry, Uncategorized
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Posted by Simon on June 29, 2012

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2012/06/29/the-seven-seas-rudyard-kipling/

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