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Edward Said’s introduction to Kim

Kipling was one of the first novelists to portray the logical alliance between Western science and political power at work in the colonies.
(Norton Critical Edition, p.340)

Literary critic, author of the landmark study, Orientalism, and godfather of the modern disciplines of post-colonial and subaltern studies, Edward Said wrote an introduction for the 1987 Penguin paperback edition of Rudyard Kipling’s classic novel, Kim. Parts of it (pages 30 to 46, to be precise) are excerpted in the 2002 Norton Critical Edition of Kim, edited by Zohreh T. Sullivan.

Kipling’s vulgarity

Surprisingly, maybe, Said begins by repeating George Orwell’s criticism of Kipling’s work as being characterised by ‘vulgarity’. I wonder if he’s getting mixed up with Oscar Wilde, who wrote of Kipling, in his long essay The Critic as Artist, that:

As one turns over the pages of his Plain Tales from the Hills, one feels as if one were seated under a palm-tree reading life by superb flashes of vulgarity.

It’s not just a snappy one-liner. Wilde goes on to consider the rolee of vulgarity in literature at some length.

Orientalism

Anyway, as you would expect, within a few sentences Said climbs onto his hobby horse, his central theme, which is that:

all of Kipling’s work relied on the accumulated storehouse of ‘Orientalist’ stereotypes (the ‘Oriental’ is backward, unreliable, poor, badly educated etc etc)
which itself rested on the basic premise that Orientals are inferior to white men, and
the East has fixed, unchanging essence

Orientalism is an essentialist point of view, denying the reality of historical change and complexity, and if there’s one thing Said hates it’s essentialism.

Said then mentions his central work, Orientalism, and summarises its core findings, namely that 1) every single Western thinker and writer of note in the nineteenth century took for granted the fixed, unalterable inequality of the races and 2) this universally held ‘truth’ underpinned and justified European imperialism around the world.

Said shows how these partial, biased and made-up Orientalist opinions underpinned and permeated so-called ‘scholarly’ and ‘objective’ academic disciplines such as economics, anthropology, history, sociology, linguistics, philology, geography and many more.

In Said’s view, pretty much all European society, society and culture,throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, were flooded at every level with the basic presumption that the European white male was the pinnacle of human evolution and had the right and duty to take every other nation, race and creed (and gender) in hand in order to bring them up to his own high standards of ‘civilisation’. If this meant invading and conquering these ‘barbarous’ countries, killing lots of their citizens along with warriors, destroying native cultures, religions and practices, imposing utterly alien sets of laws, exploiting those countries and their inhabitants economically, well, you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.

Colonel Creighton as white alpha male

Said points out that the representative of The Ruling White Man in Kim is Colonel Creighton, head of the secretive ‘Department’ i.e. the British Secret Service in India. He points out (just as I did in my review) that Creighton doesn’t appear very often, and is not drawn in anything like the detail of actual Indians like Mahbub Ali or the Babu – but then, he doesn’t have to be.

The capableness of Creighton, the sense that he is a source of utterly correct decisions and judgements, in a sense underpins the entire narrative because we know that, whatever happens, at some level Creighton a) knows about it, b) has ordered it and c) will make it right. He is a God figure who makes all problems disappear and grants our wishes (i.e. Kim’s wish to become a spy). So he’s pretty easily taken as a symbol of the rightness of British rule over India.

(Western) knowledge is power

But Said is particularly interested in the notion of knowledge. The whole point of his epochal book of cultural criticism, Orientalism, is that he is above all interested in the way certain structures (tropes, stereotypes, clichés, assumptions) became embedded in academic disciplines and then reproduced themselves in each successive generation. For Said the very notions of ‘knowledge’ and ‘science’ and ‘reason’ and ‘competence’ are deeply Orientalist in that they were constructed and defined in opposition to the opposite series of attributes – lack of knowledge, lack of scientific detachment, the fact that Islam hadn’t had a Reformation to separate science from religion, incompetence, irrationality and so on – which generations of scholars attributed to ‘the Orient’, ‘the Arab mind, ‘Islam’ and so on.

Imperial knowledgeableness and Sherlock Holmes

Said, maybe a bit predictably, links Kipling’s obsession with a proper deep understanding of ‘India’ and the Indian mind, with the super omni-competence of a figure like Sherlock Holmes, creation of Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle had himself travelled widely in the British Empire (Australia and New Zealand, West Africa, South Africa).

The way so many of the Holmes stories turn out to derive from events which took place in faraway lands demonstrates the global reach of Holmes’s mind and this, for Said, is intimately linked with the explosion of so many academic specialisms in the last few decades of the nineteenth century.

Many of these new ‘sciences’, the ones Holmes is so often shown brushing up on and deploying in his detective work, such as ballistics, forensics, fingerprinting, knowledge of exotic poisons, theories of the criminal mind or of racial ‘types’ and so on, had their origins in the colonies, where they were developed in response to the problems of managing huge populations of natives.

Ethnology and studying the natives

Thus, for Said, it is more than a handy coincidence that Creighton uses as a cover for his espionage activities in India the official title of head of the British Ethnological Survey. ‘Ethnology’ means the study of different races and peoples, their languages, religions, customs and so on, so Creighton’s position perfectly epitomises the fundamental premise of Said’s book, which is that ‘knowledge’ is never pure and disinterested, but is created by human agents to further the deployment of power. Knowledge of a country and its people derives from, and in turn reinforces, power over that country and its people, especially if you are using advanced techniques which the peoples in question don’t even have access to. Then you can end up in the position of knowing more about a people and their country than they do. Which leads Said to summarise, that:

Kipling was one of the first novelists to portray the logical alliance between Western science and political power at work in the colonies. (p.340)

Hurree Chunder as a comic antitype of Creighton

Said then points out how, looked at in this perspective, the Indian Babu, Hurree Chunder, is consistently portrayed as a Creighton manqué. He is educated, he name-drops Western thinkers (especially Herbert Spencer), he has written some papers and he dreams of being taken seriously by the Royal Society. And yet he is played for laughs and the comedy is based on the Orientalist premise that a native can never rise to the level of a white man. the Babu’s aspirations are portrayed as comedic because he himself hasn’t grasped the principle, which Kipling makes the reader complicit in every time he laughs, which is that a coloured man can never reach the height of education and civilisation as a white man. There is an unalterable racial divide between them, almost as if they are two species. This is the core of what Said calls Orientalism, the European belief in the hopeless, unalterable inferiority of brown and black and yellow to that pinnacle of evolution, The White Man.

Annan and sociology

Said cites Noel Annan’s famous (apparently) 1959 essay which associated Kipling with the new (in late-Victorian times) schools of sociology (Durkheim, Weber, Pareto). This new interpretation of society moved away from considering society using dusty old notions like class or national traditions and instead used the notion of groups of people with common interests. The point is that knowledge of these groups gives the knower the ability to move and manipulate them. Said’s core premise that knowledge is power.

This sheds deeper light on Colonel Creighton’s character. He is the model of a modern imperial administrator in that he deals equally with Muslims, Bengalis, Pathans and so on, with perfect frankness, never once pulling rank or belittling their views, never tampering with ‘the hierarchies, the priorities and privileges of caste, religion, ethnicity and race’ (p.342). He is not a vulgar jingoist or rapacious exploiter like earlier administrators; he is more like a social scientist.

From this perspective, the text of Kim can be seen as precisely the kind of jostling of different, self- contained, self-defined socials groups theorised by the new sociology – and the way they’re each treated by Creighton and his creator with fascinated, sympathetic detachment, as embodying the new sociological approach.

Late Victorian miserabilism

Said then carries out a detailed comparison between the character Kim and Jude Fawley, the protagonist of Thomas Hardy’s novel Jude the Obscure (1896). The point of the comparison is to show how Jude, along with the protagonists of other serous fiction of the day, in Flaubert or James or Meredith or Gissing, was a miserable failure. Life, in so many of these late-Victorian novels, is presented as one disillusionment after another, as small, and petty, and disappointing, either in the tragic mode of these realist novels, or sometimes played for laughs as in the drab suburbia of The Diary of a Nobody (1889).

The novel as a disenchanted genre

In fact Said cites the opinion of the Hungarian Marxist critic György Lukács that the novel itself as a genre is condemned to incompleteness because its commitment to realism cuts it off from the heroic fullness of life expressed in the epic. The first European novel, Don Quixote, is about a pathetic old man who in his deluded way tries to live up to the high tone and heroic achievements of chivalric epic, condemned to continual failure.

For some reason this atmosphere of defeat, the collapse of our deepest dreams, was commonplace in serious late-Victorian literature (Henry James, George Meredith, George Gissing, George Moore, Samuel Butler). Worst of all are the depressive protagonists of Joseph Conrad’s stories, many of whose lives have led to such utter failure and disillusion that they commit suicide.

Kim’s optimism

Anyway, the obvious point is that Kim is the opposite. He is Puck, he is the spirit of energy and enthusiasm, and goes from success to success to success. He succeeds in stymying the foreign spies, he helps the lama fulfil his life’s dream, above all he grows into the image of his boyhood ambitions.

Why? At least in part because he has what you could call imperial freedom. He is an image of fulfilment and success because he enjoys an imperial privilege which all the Indians he meets never can. They are fixed in their roles (as merchant, bureaucrat etc) in a way Kim isn’t.

In fact Kim enjoys a level of freedom not only vis-a-vis the subjects of the Raj but also compared to the white officials of the Raj. Creighton has to play up to the role of senior British official but Kim can put on native clothes and disappear into the teeming alleys of Lahore or Lucknow. It’s as if he puts on a cloak of invisibility, disappears off the radar, goes ‘off grid’ as modern thrillers put it.

So he is free of both sets of constraints: those which bind the native people of India (who he can rise above due to his white privilege and imperial role as spy) and those which bind the white rulers who have to ‘keep up appearances’ because Kim slip off those white responsibilities whenever he likes.

Kim is twice free, free twice times over, enjoys a double measure of freedom. Hence the exuberance of the text and the wonderful sense of freedom and escape it gives its readers.

Identity

This sheds light on the modern academic’s favourite subject of identity. It’s true that on a handful of occasions Kipling describes Kim’s momentary confusion about his multiple identities (white boy, Indian street urchin, disciple of a wandering lama) but these don’t hold back Kim for long because, far from having an identity crisis, from experiencing his multiple identities as an oppression undermining his sense of self, he experiences them as freedom.

Indeed the novel is all about showing him growing into his multiple identities. The protagonists of the late-Victorian realistic novels Said mentions generally lose their sense of personal identity, certainly the Conrad ones do, or, like Jude, their identity becomes identical with failure and so, in the end, unbearable.

Whereas Kim becomes the master of his multiple identities. Like Creighton, he observes himself, studies his different roles and voices, traditions and languages – observes them in order to master and control them.

Kim the character has often been taken as a kind of epitome of India’s jostling identities – but he also embodies within himself White imperial rule over those many identities. Kim rules over the Raj of himself.

Optimism central to boys adventure stories

Said says the optimistic tone and can-do attitude of his hero comes from an earlier phase in the history of the novel, and compares him to protagonists of the French novelist, Stendhal. But surely he’s missing a more obvious point which is that…this is an adventure story for boys; and a pretty basic attribute of this kind of story is precisely the depiction of a resourceful, resilient young lad triumphing in a world of morally ambivalent adults. See boy heroes from Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island to Tintin. They win. They triumph.

Freedom of movement

Said goes on to observe that Kim’s exuberant joie de vivre is closely connected with his freedom of movement around (mostly north) India. Kim is constantly on the move, from Lahore, to Lucknow, Benares and Simla, from Bombay to Karachi to Umballa, with keynote descriptions of the Grand Trunk Road which traversed northern India thrown in.

Said makes the point that this wonderful freedom of movement is like a holiday. Reading the book gives the reader the same sense of the ability to move freely around a fantastically interesting colourful country, at will. Little or money required, no passport, no border police or paperwork, the book breathes freedom, in both time and space and the reader responds very positively.

You won’t be surprised to learn that Said thinks this freedom is the freedom granted to the imperial class. Although there’s enjoyable ambivalence about Kim’s identity, there’s no doubting that all of these colourful travels are paid for by Creighton, the embodiment of the White imperial ruling class. Kim’s wonderfully invigorating freedom is paid for by the existence of the British Empire and white dominion.

P.S.

1) Most of this is an attempt to accurately summarise the points Said makes in his introduction, but quite often I use these as starting ideas of my own. For example, it is Said who makes the point about Jude the Obscure, but it is my development of it to come to the conclusion that Kim ends up ruling the Raj of himself. I added in the (minor) point about there being a comedic side to late-Victorian miserabilism, as embodied inworks like Diary of a Nobody. I added the fairly obvious point that Kim is an adventure story for boys and that, therefore, of course the hero is brave and resourceful, possibly the fundamental premise of the entire genre. I expanded the idea of Sherlock Holmes’s knowledgeableness to be more explicit about the imperial basis for that knowledge.

2) Some of my points overlap, expand or possibly contradict points I’ve made in my other reviews of a) Kim and b) Orientalism. I’m relaxed about that. This isn’t philosophy or physics. There is no right answer. And the whole point of literature, for me, is that a ‘good’ literary work is complex and rich enough for the reader to take something different from it every time they read it – or even think about it.

I tell anybody who’ll listen, that the correct approach to literature (as to art in the broadest sense) is to be able to hold multiple opinions about it, some of which might even be polar opposites, with equal conviction. In this sense I’m about openness and multiplicity and diversity. As Walt Whitman says:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

I don’t think I contain multitudes. That would be preposterously grandiose. I think good literature contains multitudes, multitudinous complexities of language, theme, plot, imagery and character that make repeated readings worthwhile and new.

The only method is to enjoy.

Credit

Kim was serialised in Cassell’s Magazine from January to November 1901, and first published in book form by Macmillan & Co. Ltd in October 1901. All references are to the 2002 Norton Critical Edition edited by Zohreh T. Sullivan.

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by Simon on September 18, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in India, Literary criticism, Literature

Tagged alpha male, Arthur Conan Doyle, Australia, Benares, Bombay, boys adventure stories, British Empire, British Ethnological Survey, British Secret Service, Cassell's Magazine, Colonel Creighton, critical theory, cultural criticism, Don Quixote, Durkheim, Edward Said, espionage, essentialism, Ethnology, European imperialism, Flaubert, George Gissing, George Meredith, George Moore, George Orwell, Gissing, Grand Trunk Road, György Lukács, Henry James, Hurree Chunder, identity, imperialism, India, Islam, James, Jim Hawkins, Joseph Conrad, Jude Fawley, Jude the Obscure, Karachi, Kim, Kipling, Kipling's vulgarity, knowledge is power, Lahore, late-Victorian literature, literary criticism, Lucknow, Macmillan & Co. Ltd, Mahbub Ali, Meredith, New Zealand, nineteenth century, Noel Annan, Norton Critical Edition, novel, Orientalism, Oscar Wilde, Pareto, Penguin books, Plain Tales from the Hills, Puck, racial divide, Rudyard Kipling, Samuel Butler, Sherlock Holmes, Simla, social scientist, Sociology, South Africa, Spy Story, Stendhal, the Arab mind, the Babu, The Critic as Artist, the Department, The Diary of a Nobody, the Orient, the Raj, The White Man, Thomas Hardy, Tintin, Treasure Island, Umballa, Walt Whitman, Weber, West Africa, Western science, White imperial rule, Zohreh T. Sullivan

Posted by Simon on September 18, 2023

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The Master of Ballantrae by Robert Louis Stevenson (1889)

If the Nonesuch foundered, she would carry down with her into the deeps of that unsounded sea the creature whom we all so feared and hated; there would be no more Master of Ballantrae, the fish would sport among his ribs; his schemes all brought to nothing, his harmless enemies at peace. At first, I have said, it was but a ray of comfort; but it had soon grown to be broad sunshine. The thought of the man’s death, of his deletion from this world, which he embittered for so many, took possession of my mind. I hugged it, I found it sweet in my belly. I conceived the ship’s last plunge, the sea bursting upon all sides into the cabin, the brief mortal conflict there, all by myself, in that closed place; I numbered the horrors, I had almost said with satisfaction; I felt I could bear all and more, if the Nonesuch carried down with her, overtook by the same ruin, the enemy of my poor master’s house.
(Chapter 9. Mr Mackellar’s Journey with the Master)

Like Treasure Island and Kidnapped, The Master of Ballantrae is a gripping, fast-paced adventure story told in the first person, serious and foreboding and Gothic. It starts off in a gloomy old Scottish mansion and takes its protagonists, powerfully and vividly, to the immense forests of New World.

A mix of texts…

The narrative is presented as the written account of Ephraim Mackellar, steward of the Durrisdeer estate in Scotland. He writes as an old man, telling his story long after the events, lamenting the many misfortunes which befell the noble Durie family during his time of service. We know it is a written account because Stevenson himself intervenes at a few points, as the Editor of Mackellar’s manuscript, to make comments and explain how he has edited and is presenting it to us.

The text further foregrounds its own artifice when Mackellar’s account itself breaks off to include long chunks taken from the supposed autobiography of the Irish soldier of fortune ‘Colonel’ Francis Burke, and also to include the texts of letters from the various protagonists.

… and styles

The way the narrative is assembled from various sources means it deploys various prose styles. Whereas the old retainer Mackellar’s style is a kind of ‘honest old Scotsman’, Burke’s is completely different – foppish and Anglicised, while the letters of, for example, the Master himself, reveal his venom and cruel sarcasm.

The story is set in the 18th century and concerns two Scottish brothers who develop a life-long blood feud which spills over into blackmail, murder, madness and revenge – and their different attitudes to life, the way they hold themselves and speak, are also brought out through differences in manner, speech and style.

Heteroglossia

The net effect of all this is that the book is rich not only in straightforward adventures and melodramatic scenes, but in the range of voices and styles it uses. It is a good example of the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of ‘heteroglossia’ – meaning the novel’s distinctive ability to incorporate a host of voices and styles.

And these voices are often themselves in competition or are themselves compromised or questioned:

Mackellar considers Burke’s version of events to be unreliable, advising us to read between the lines
Mackellar uneasily says that many critics have questioned his role in the events he’s describing, so he is touchy about key moments where different interpretations are possible
and at the heart of the story is the radically different interpretations the two feuding bothers put on central events

So it is easy to show that this text is a virtual battlefield where numerous conflicting voices compete. And to attribute to this conflict and clash of voices and styles, much of the book’s energy and thrill.

The plot

We are in Scotland, in the mid-18th century, near the town of St. Bride’s, on the shore of the Solway firth. Here stands the house of Durrisdeer, home of the noble Durie family, built in the Continental style with fine gardens, and attended by numerous servants. The Durie family consists of:

the old Laird, who has relinquished control of the estate and likes to read classic books by the fire
his eldest son, the Master of Ballantrae, James Durie, not yet 24 in 1745, a determined, arrogant man, rumoured to have fathered a child by a wench in the village
the second son, Mr. Henry Durie, an honest, solid sort of young man
Miss Alison Graeme, a near kinswoman, an orphan and the heir to a fortune which her father acquired in trade, a spirited, independent-minded woman, much in love with the dashing Master

It is generally accepted that, in time, Miss Alison will become the Master’s wife, and her fortune will go a long way to paying off the big debts the Durrisdeer estate has acquired.

The toss of a coin

When Bonny Prince Charlie lands in Scotland in July 1745 and raises an army to march south and claim the throne that is rightfully his, families all across Scotland are placed in a quandary: whether to throw in their lot with the ‘rebels’ – backed as they are by a large number of Highland clans and appealing as Charles does to their patriotism as descendant of the last Stuart king of Scotland – or to remain loyal to the anointed king of Great Britain, George II, from the royal (German) house of Hanover, who have been rulers of Great Britain since 1714. The conflict between the brothers is real and psychological but also reflects the conflict at the heart of Britain’s seriously divided society and body politic.

At Durrisdeer, as at so many other gentry houses, the family is split by divided loyalties and decides to hedge their bets with a pragmatic solution: one son will go off to join the rebels, the other will stay at home with ostentatious loyalty. But which son should do which? There is a violent quarrel about whether James the Master or young Mr Henry should go to join the Prince and the Master, with his characteristic violent frivolity, suggests they toss a coin for it. The fateful toss decides that he, the Master, will ride to join the rebels while Mr Henry will stay at the estate, representing loyalist support for the established king.

With some bitterness the Master rides off, leaving Miss Alison in tears. In the following weeks the old Laird, Miss Alison and Henry follow, on tenterhooks, the progress of the prince’s invasion. They follow as the Bonny Prince succeeds in penetrating as far into England as Derby, before the Hanoverian English army stop his advance, and then pushes the combined Scottish, Irish and French forces all the way back into Scotland and, at the notorious battle of Culloden, slaughter the flower of the Scottish aristocracy. Many of the survivors are hanged in the subsequent reprisals and the Highlands are laid waste in a vengeful campaign which resonates with Scottish nationalists to the present day.

Nothing more is heard of the Master, for months, and then years, and the family dolefully conclude he must be dead. During this time Mr Henry grows into the role of the careful, responsible guardian of the Durrisdeer estate, taking all the burden and responsibility upon himself, and Miss Alison finds herself eventually, reluctantly, marrying him, and blessing the estate with her fortune.

News of the Master – and a second narrator

Then one day, out of the blue – on 7 April 1749 to be precise – a pompous preening Irish aristocrat, one Colonel Francis Burke, arrives at Durrisdeer, bearing the not-entirely-unexpected news that the Master survived Culloden after all. Burke is invited in for dinner and afterwards, by the fire in the big baronial hall, tells the most amazing account of his and the master’s adventures in the three years since the disastrous battle. (Mackellar elaborately explains that some time later the Colonel sent him a written version of his memoirs, and he now includes in his manuscript excerpts from that written account.)

The Master and Burke’s adventures

Briefly: the Master and Burke escaped pell-mell from the battlefield of Culloden, agreeing to co-operate even though they spend a lot of time arguing. They made their way with other survivors across country to one of the French ships which brought the rebel army, and now collects them off the coast. But in a disastrous turn of events, the ship is seized by pirates, led by the bizarre and manic Captain Teach. Sizing up the situation, the Master and Burke immediately throw their lot in with the pirates and so escape walking the plank, which is what happens to the rest of the crew and passengers.

The Master of Ballantrae illustration by Walter Paget

There then follow a gruelling 18 months as Burke and the Master assimilate with the pirates, taking part in various adventures and attacks. Early on the Master realises that ‘captain’ Teach is a hopeless strategist, often drunk and making bad decisions – and leads a rebellion against him, persuading the crew to name him quartermaster and effective leader. But with the kind of psychological realism which lifts Stevenson’s adventures a cut above the rest, the Master realises that he needs to keep Teach alive, as both a psychopathic mascot for the crew when they go into battle, and a useful lightning rod for ongoing disaffection among a group of man much given to drunken grumbling.

Eventually, after many adventures, the pirate ship makes the mistake of running up the jolly roger as it approaches a strange ship at sea, only to discover it is a Royal Navy warship. They turn tail and sail to an empty waste spot they know on the American coast, and are saved by a fast-descending fog from pursuit. The Master organises a party to celebrate their escape and gets the whole pirate crew legless, steals all their accumulated treasure, and then rows the ship’s skiff ashore, with Burke and the one pirate they slightly trust – a certain Dutton who claims to know his way about the marshes where they are planning to go ashore.

From the moment they land every step of Burke and the Master’s adventures are fraught with peril and excitement; they could almost have made a story on their own, as the lads make their way through up the beach in a thick fog, then into impenetrable wooded marsh, terrifyingly aware that there are Red Indians in the woods nearby, trying to avoid getting captured and scalped, and also falling into the treacherous quicksand which surrounds them. At last, when they think they are nearing habitation, the Master cold-bloodedly leaves Dutton to drown in a quicksand, stealing his portion of the treasure.

Eventually, after many days, they come across the crew from another anchored ship making a fire and food. It is a trader out of Albany, New York, with a cargo of slaves, and the Master and Burke cockily stroll up to them and offer to pay their way to Albany as legitimate passengers. Thus rendered respectable, they sail up the Hudson River and put up at the ‘King’s Arms’ in Albany to find the town up in arms against the French. Worried that they might be on a wanted list – as both pirates and rebels from the Uprising – they masquerade as loyal subjects of King George; but as soon as possible set off across country heading northwards to join the French (in what will eventually become Canada).

There follows a long sequence of travel through the wastes of unspoilt, untamed colonial America, paddling a native canoe they’ve got hold of with the help of a native guide, Chew. After some days of rough travel, Chew dies of some unknown ailment and then they drop and smash the precious canoe. Now they are lost in the middle of uncharted wilderness, with no means of transport and no guide.

Burke reports that, with the advent of these adversities, the Master became even more savage than usual and railed with particular bitterness against his brother. For the first time he tells Burke about the toss of the coin which sent the Master off on the ill-fated Culloden campaign, led him into a life of piracy and now has led him to certain death, without canoe or guide or food, lost in the barren wastes of America. He pledges to take revenge against the brother who ‘betrayed’ him.

Burke’s narrative takes the reader deep into the vast untamed forests of the East coast of America. It resonates powerfully of the ‘Leatherstocking’ series of novels by James Fenimore Cooper, the most famous of which is The Last of the Mohicans, which is set in almost exactly the same year (1757).

Back in Scotland

And that is where we leave Burke’s narrative – on something of a cliffhanger – to return to ‘the present’ in Scotland.

The three members of the family listen to all this with very different emotions, but its main effect is to create bitter division between Mr Henry and his wife, Alison, who only married him out of pity when she thought the dashing Master was dead. Now a great animosity grows between them. Burke has brought with him letters for the Master which are designed to sow and foment dissension between the three members of the family. The one to Mr Henry is full of accusations and recriminations about how he has ‘stolen’ that Master’s patrimony.

Burke leaves the Master’s contact details in Paris (where he and the Master both now safely live) and Mr Henry, with a misplaced sense of duty, decides to pay the Master a regular allowance.

More years go by and the narrator explains how conscientious Mr Henry gets a reputation for penny-pinching and miserliness, not only in the neighbourhood but within their little household, where his embittered wife treats him with more and more scorn – what no-one realises is that he is pinching the pennies to fund the lavish, spendthrift lifestyle of his distant brother. It is not a happy house.

The Master returns

After seven years the Master returns, set ashore by the local smugglers who have been periodically referred to throughout the book as a local feature.

‘The passenger standing alone upon a point of rock, a tall, slender figure of a gentleman, habited in black.’

He announces his return to a startled Mackellar, Henry, Alison and old Laird, and proceeds to re-establish himself in the manner to which he’s become accustomed. The narrative paints him as an unmitigated cad – hypocritically presenting himself as a kind and loving son to the old Laird and Miss Alison – but whenever he is alone with Henry, taking every opportunity to jeer and insult him, blaming him for everything that’s gone wrong in his life, completely heedless of the way Henry has bled the estate dry to fund his lifestyle.

Enraged by the treatment of his good honest master, Mackellar breaks into James’s correspondence and discovers letters which prove that the Master long ago sold out the Jacobite cause by becoming a spy for the Hanoverian government – all the time boasting to his father, to Alison, to the servants and peasants of the heroic risks he is running by returning to Scotland. What a bounder!

Eventually he goes too far by telling Henry to his face that his wife, Alison, has in fact always preferred him, James, and is still in love with him.

Taunted beyond measure, Henry punches the Master in the face and insists on a duel. A terrified Mackellar helps them get swords off the wall and walk out to a patch of flat lawn in the grounds. Here they fight and Henry’s steady controlled anger begins to tell over the Master’s flash flourishes. At the climax of the duel, the Master cheats, grabbing Henry’s sword, and making a lunge – but Henry pulls his sword free of his grip and plunges it right through the Master’s body.

Illustration for the 1911 edition of The Master of Ballantrae by Walter Paget.

Appalled, Mackellar establishes that there is no sign of life. The Master is dead! They stagger inside and tell first the old Laird and then Alison. But when they finally return to the duelling ground to remove the body… it has gone!

They follow a trail of blood and broken bushes down to the bay and realise that the smugglers must have removed the body – for the Master had timed his worst taunts and insults for the very night he had arranged to flee Durrisdeer and the pirates have kept their part of the bargain, carrying him off dead or alive.

The Master gone

The old Laird sickens and dies. Henry and Alison have a child, Alexander. Mackellar shows Alison the letters of the Master proving he is a spy and hypocrite but she appals him by burning them. On the upside the letters reveal to her what a cad the Master is and she is finally reconciled to her husband. But it is too late: Henry has changed drastically since he killed his brother. He is now a haunted man, sometimes almost unhinged. On the rare occasions when the subject is raised, Henry is almost demented, claiming his brother is a devil and that nothing can kill him. Years later Mackellar finds Henry showing his young son the patch of ground where the duel took place and explaining that it was here that a man fought a devil. Mackellar worries for his sanity.

In India

Mackellar’s text is then interrupted a second time by an excerpt from Colonel Burke’s memoirs. It is a much shorter snippet which describes how chance took him to India, where his path crossed James Duries’s once more. The Master is in company of a wiry Indian named Secundra Dass. I was hoping that the Indian adventures would be as long and convincing as the pirate and Leatherstocking escapades of the American section – but this episode is disappointingly brief – only really long enough to introduce Dass, who will turn out to be a key character in the story’s final scenes.

Slight return

In the spring of 1764 James returns once more to Durrisdeer, accompanied by his Indian familiar, Dass. Now the old Laird is dead, the Master is harsher and more abrupt than before. He swears he will be a vengeance on the house and a plague to the family. Goaded beyond endurance, Henry has his wife pack all their things and in the dead of night they flee the house. Next morning the Master is incensed to discover their flight and, in Mackellar’s presence, swears to track them down and destroy them.

It doesn’t take long for him to discover that Henry, Alison and Alexander have taken ship to New York. Remember Alison’s family inheritance? It included land in New York, thither they have now gone to build a house and live in peace. But the Master sets off after them, accompanied by Mackellar.

The crossing of the Atlantic is one of the most vivid things in the book. After Henry and family have fled, Mackellar is left alone with the Master and they develop a peculiar relationship, Mackellar hating and detesting the Master for his selfishness and wickedness, for the way he has persecuted his good brother – and yet part of him admires and warms to the Master’s indomitable refusal to be beaten, his genuine charisma.

This ambivalence feels very Stevensonian; although the plot moves from drama to melodrama and then into Gothic horror and a lot of the characterisation is hysterical and stagey – nonetheless, there is something very penetrating about the love/hate, or admiration/disgust, relationship which grows up between the honest retainer and the dastardly villain.

There is a particularly vivid moment on the ship over: Mackellar is recounting tales to the Master who is sitting on the bilges of the ship as it heaves and yaws in a big swell and at a particularly low plunge, Mackellar, obsessed with the Master’s evil determination to harm Henry and his family, lashes out with his foot, aiming to push the Master overboard and be done. The Master leaps cannily out of the way.

Illustration of The Master of Ballantrae by William Brassey Hole (1896)

The scene itself is dramatic but what raises it is the way Stevenson makes the Master thereafter respect Mackellar for taking positive action to defend his lord. And for his part Mackellar, though he tried to kill the man, cannot repress feelings of respect and attraction for his mastery. For me, this odd relationship between Mackellar and the Devil is one of the most interesting things in the book.

New York

When they arrive in New York the roles are reversed. The Master finds Mr Henry well established with a tidy house, servants, and having established good friendships with the governor and other authorities. All the Master’s barbs, taunts and attempts at public humiliation rebound on his own head.

Stymied in his attempt to pull rank, the Master adopts a different tack and sets out to humiliate the family. He secures a shabby shack and sets himself up as a tailor, sitting outside under a big sign which proclaims his parentage and asserts his degradation at the hands of his brother.

But Henry is now – in public – a much changed man, more confident, less feeling. He routinely strolls along to his brother’s shack and sits there quite comfortably, sunning himself, ignoring his brother’s remarks and even existence, but quietly enjoying his humiliation.

However – in private – Mackellar finds Henry liable to hysterical outbursts when his brother is mentioned. Part of his mind really does believe James is the Devil, an unkillable spirit sent to torment and pursue him to the grave.

And it is now that the Master reveals another plan, to journey back into the wilderness. Way back in Colonel Burke’s long account of their wanderings after escaping the pirates, it’s mentioned that the pair buried their treasure, the loot they stole from the pirate ship. Now James asks Henry for money to fund an expedition to find that treasure, buried out in the wilderness. Henry, now passed beyond normality into a realm of pure obsessive hatred, organises for the Master and Dass to set off accompanied by a gang of low cut-throats who he commissions to murder him.

In the wilderness

Having despatched his devilish brother into the wilderness with a pack of murderers, Henry discovers that an official expedition is setting off along much the same route, led by Sir William Johnson. Mackellar and Henry get themselves invited along.

Some days into the journey they encounter the only survivor of the Master’s expedition, an obvious cut-throat named John Mountain.

In a particularly egregious bit of test-stitching, Mackellar explains that the account of the expedition we are about to read has been pieced together from several sources:

A written statement by Mountain
Conversations with Mountain
Two conversations with the key player, Secundra Dass

Briefly, the Master quickly realises that he’s been despatched into the middle of nowhere with murderers commissioned to kill him. Mountain is impressed at his attempts to defuse the conspiracy by playing the crooks off against each other, planting suspicions that their leaders are planning to betray them etc. On one occasion the Master tries to run away, only to be caught and brought back, once more at their mercy.

Finally, the Master plays his last trick and falls ill, wasting away over many days and finally dying and being buried by the loyal Dass. On his deathbed the Master reveals the whereabouts of the treasure and off the murderers go to find it.

Mountain’s account now goes on to describe how one by one the members of the expedition are murdered, their bodies discovered each morning, horribly scalped. Maybe a solitary Indian brave is proving his manhood by picking them off. Maybe, it crosses the reader’s mind, the Master’s spirit is taking some kind of supernatural revenge. Certainly, the sequence of uncanny deaths in the fearful wastes takes the story across a border into the realm of Gothic horror – a kind of cross between Edgar Allen Poe and the Blair Witch Project.

Finally, only Mountain is left alive and he gives up the treasure hunt, turning tail and fleeing the wilderness, travelling day and night back towards civilisation in a blind panic. And this is the condition he’s found in by the well-armed and well-provisioned Johnson expedition, and by Mr Henry and Mackellar.

As John Mountain gives this detailed account to Mackellar, Johnson and Henry, Mackellar is horrified to see the impact it has on his good sweet master: the once-solid Mr Henry snaps, upon hearing of the Master’s death, he rolls his eyes and is almost gibbering. At the end of the tale Henry refuses to believe his brother is dead, convinced he is a supernatural spirit and that nothing can kill him.

Ignoring these outbursts, the solid Sir William Johnson orders Mountain to take them back along the trail, to the place where they buried the Master.

Dead and alive

And here in the Gothic horror climax of the whole tale, the expedition comes to the burial place only to find the Master’s loyal Indian servant, Secundra Dass, working feverishly with a spade, up to his knees in the grave, digging up his master’s body.

As they watch in horror, they see Dass uncover the Master’s body and pull it up to the surface. When our chaps enter the clearing and confront him, Dass ignores them in his frenzy and carries on trying to revive the Master. In his Indian accent he explains that this is an old Indian trick he and the Master agreed on (aha, the reader realises – the entire rather spindly excuses for Dass’s presence were all designed to build up to this artifice). The Master’s sickness was feigned and Dass taught him the Indian trick of swallowing his tongue and going into a state of suspended animation.

And as Dass chafes his hands and body the Master, sure enough, opens his eyes and his mouth begins to move.

And at that moment Henry, at the end of a long tormented life, driven beyond sanity by the jeers and bullying and haunting of his brother, gives up the ghost and drops dead on the spot. But the Master’s eyes moving was itself only some kind of reflex action, for he too expires despite all Dass’s efforts.

And it is left to Mackellar to bury both brothers there in the wilderness, leaving a wooden sign over their graves, and there the narrative comes abruptly to a full stop.

A key factor in the book’s success is the immediate establishment of Mackellar as the recognised authority for this tale and a brisk spinner of prose. Although other texts intervene, Mackellar’s is the main manuscript and the dominating voice for the majority of the story.

The full truth of this odd matter is what the world has long been looking for, and public curiosity is sure to welcome. It so befell that I was intimately mingled with the last years and history of the house; and there does not live one man so able as myself to make these matters plain, or so desirous to narrate them faithfully.

June the 1st, 1748, was the day of their marriage. It was December of the same year that first saw me alighting at the doors of the great house; and from there I take up the history of events as they befell under my own observation, like a witness in a court…

The narrative voice is four-square and candid, sharing with us all his impressions in an open, winning style with many vivid Scots expressions and turns of phrase thrown in:

My pen is clear enough to tell a plain tale; but to render the effect of an infinity of small things, not one great enough in itself to be narrated; and to translate the story of looks, and the message of voices when they are saying no great matter; and to put in half a page the essence of near eighteen months—this is what I despair to accomplish…

Such was the state of this family down to the 7th April, 1749, when there befell the first of that series of events which were to break so many hearts and lose so many lives…

This brings us to the use of –

Anticipation

The narrative is given added tension by frequent use of prolepsis or the anticipation of events, generally using variations on the ‘little did we know then…’, ‘if only things had been different…’ formula which give the reader an enjoyably thrilling sense of dread and expectation.

Such was the state of this family down to the 7th April, 1749, when there befell the first of that series of events which were to break so many hearts and lose so many lives…

… it is a strange thought, how many of us had been storing up the elements of this catastrophe, for how long a time, and with how blind an ignorance of what we did.

Doubles

So much has been written about the double or Doppelgänger in adventure fiction that I won’t add to the pile. Stevenson’s strict Calvinist upbringing is often blamed for giving him a starkly dualistic sense of the world, hordes of upright holy elders concealing a seedy world of sin and vice; and plenty of commentators have lined up to say that the Edinburgh of his day was a city divided between the clean, rational elegance of the New City and the filthy, vice-infested slums of the Old Town. With this upbringing some critics make it seem almost inevitable that he’d go on to write novels about the divided self, of which Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde is the classic example and this rambling Gothic yarn is the longest example.

Maybe. But:

A lot, probably most, of Stevenson’s fiction isn’t about doubles.
Two is the smallest number. Two is an easy number to manage. For example, a doubleist could argue that The Black Arrow is about two sides in a conflict and young Dick Shelton must decide which side he’s on. But civil wars tend to have two sides, there was no real psychological doubling involved. Similarly, in The Wrecker, the narrator, Loudon Dodds, becomes friends with the entrepreneur Jim Pinkerton, and their characters are fairly different. But this doesn’t mean they represent opposite aspects of something; just that a novel, a story, a narrative, tends to focus on a handful of characters, and two is the smallest possible number of characters, and so a preponderance of pairs is inevitable in all forms of narrative.

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by Simon on September 21, 2016 • Permalink

Posted in Adventure, History, Novel

Tagged 1889, 18th century, adventure, adventure story, Albany, Battle of Culloden, Bonny Prince Charlie, Canada, Captain Teach, Colonel Burke, Colonel Francis Burke, döppelgänger, Doubles, Durie family, Durrisdeer, Edgar Allen Poe, Edinburgh, Edinburgh New Town, Edinburgh Old Town, Ephraim Mackellar, first person narrative, George II, Gothic, Gothic horror, Gothic yarn, Great Britain, Heteroglossia, historical novel, house of Hanover, Hudson river, India, Jacobite rebellion, James Durie, James Fenimore Cooper, John Mountain, Kidnapped, Leatherstocking, Master of Ballantrae, Mikhail Bakhtin, Miss Alison Graeme, Mr Henry, Mr Mackellar, Mr. Henry Durie, narrative, New York, novel, pirates, Robert Louis Stevenson, Scotland, Secundra Dass, Sir William Johnson, Solway Firth, St. Bride’s, Stevenson, the Black Arrow, The Last of the Mohicans, The Master of Ballantrae, the New World, Treasure Island, walking the plank, Walter Paget, William Brassey Hole

Posted by Simon on September 21, 2016

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2016/09/21/the-master-of-ballantrae-robert-louis-stevenson/

The Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson (1888)

This is unashamedly a children’s book. It was published as a monthly serial in Young Folks: A Boys’ and Girls’ Paper of Instructive and Entertaining Literature from June to October 1883 under the pseudonym ‘Captain George North’ (the same pen name Stevenson used for Treasure Island). Still, I am reading and experiencing it as an adult.

Cover of The Black Arrow illustrated by N.C. Wyeth

The Wars of the Roses

The story is set against the backdrop of the Wars of the Roses, a confusing conflict when the weakness and mental illness of King Henry VI allowed a major civil war to develop between followers of two large noble families – York and Lancaster, each fighting for the crown – which dragged on for a generation, from 1455 to 1485. (Hence the novel’s sub-title, A Tale of the Two Roses.)

There is no high-level explanation of any of this in the novel, and no date given to help the reader orientate themself. We see the conflict not from the vantage of courts and kings, but reflected in the microcosm of what seems to be a small area of the Fenland i.e East Anglia, around the fictional village of Tunstall, with its Moat House and nearby Holyrood Abbey.

The novel opens with a confused throng of villagers, the publican, the local parson Sir Oliver Oates, the lord of the manor Sir Daniel Brackley, and his ward the young teenager Dick Shelton, as they get confused reports of a battle, or at least of another nobleman in some kind of warlike trouble, nearby.

Things are further confused when Brackley’s man, Bennet Hatch, takes Dick to go and talk to old Nick Appleyard, the oldest man in the village who saw service under Henry the Fifth. Hatch wants to ask him to form a small troop to defend the village while the other men ride off to the battle. But they’ve barely started talking before out of nowhere a big arrow whizzes past them, embeds itself between Appleyard’s shoulders and, after a few, shudders, he dies. There are enemies in the woods across the valley. But who? Why?

Brackley is rallying his men outside the village pub when some of them spot a figure fleeing from the churchyard across fields and into the nearby woods. Dick runs over to the church and finds a parchment nailed to the door which promises revenge against oppressors and is signed ‘Jon Amend-All of the Green Wood, And his jolly fellaweship’. It is in the form of doggerel verse:

I had four blak arrows under my belt,
Four for the greefs that I have felt,
Four for the nomber of ill menne
That have opressid me now and then.

it goes on to name four specific individuals who it threatens with death for their ‘crimes’.

One is gone; one is wele sped;
Old Apulyaird is ded.

One is for Maister Bennet Hatch,
That burned Grimstone, walls and thatch.

One for Sir Oliver Oates,
That cut Sir Harry Shelton’s throat.

Sir Daniel, ye shull have the fourt;
We shall think it fair sport.

It seems to be blaming all four for taking part in the murder of Harry Shelton (Dick’s father) and the burning down of his house. When, in the next scene, we see the slippery and corrupt Sir Daniel Brackley extracting money with menaces i.e. doubling his tenants’ rents to him or else promising to hang them, we quickly come to suspect the poetic accusation is correct. Brackley has brought Dick up, harsh but fair, but the poem seems to implicate him in the murder of Dick’s father when Dick was a small child, and the burning down of his family’s house, Grimstone. You don’t have to be a genius to suspect that young Dick will find himself falling out with his guardian and in with Jon and the romantic woodland ‘fellaweship’.

Adventure and excitement

Stevenson possesses in abundance the boys adventure skill of creating tense moments which set the pulses racing and inflame the teenage mind in all of us. When Brackley (not suspecting the boy’s growing suspicions) sends Dick on an errand to nearby Tunstall Moat House, he finds himself falling in with another young lad who was at the inn and is (for some reason) also going the same way. Once they’ve identified themselves to each other, they carry on through the snowy woods (the novel is set in the depths of winter).

In this scene, the boys have arrived at the ruins of the burnt-out mansion, only to realise there are other people around in the neighbourhood, then realising it is the ‘woodland fellaweship’. They climb warily through the debris and look out through a ruined windowframe:

Peering through this, they were struck stiff with terror at their predicament. To retreat was impossible; they scarce dared to breathe. Upon the very margin of the ditch, not thirty feet from where they crouched, an iron caldron bubbled and steamed above a glowing fire; and close by, in an attitude of listening, as though he had caught some sound of their clambering among the ruins, a tall, red-faced, battered-looking man stood poised, an iron spoon in his right hand, a horn and a formidable dagger at his belt.
(Chapter 4. A Greenwood Company)

The story is chock full of such moments of suspense, confrontation, escape, fights, battles, storms at sea – Stevenson threw everything he could think of and the kitchen sink into the plot.

Fast-moving plot

This other lad Dick has teamed up with is called John Matcham. They watch the outlaws interrupt their meal in the clearing to go off and attack a line of Brackley’s men who are wending through a different part of the woods. Continuing on their way, they encounter a strange leper slowly ringing a mournful hand bell, who reveals himself to be Brackley in a disguise he’s adopted to navigate the dangerous woods. All three finally make it to the safety of Tunstall Moat, Brackley’s base.

Book 2. The Moat House

Here, Dick confronts Brackley with his suspicions and makes him swear he had nothing to do with murdering his (Dick’s) father – which he does with easy fluency. But the parson also named in the doggerel accusation, Sir Oliver Oates, can’t bring himself to take an oath, stuttering and hesitating and turning red, pretty much incriminating himself.

Moreover, one of Brackley’s men brought wounded to the Moat House after the attack on them by the outlaws which Dick and John witnessed, and who is now dying – one John Carter – more or less confesses to the murder and implicates Brackley.

Right. So we have established that Sir Daniel Brackley is the man who helped or was responsible for murdering Dick Shelton’s father and burning down his ancestral home, years ago, but who then adopted and raised Dick. The scales fallen from his eyes, Dick and John decide to escape from the Moat House. But this proves easier said than done since it is a medieval fortress and full of Brackley’s men on high alert for an attack. There is a lot of creeping along spooky, dark castle corridors holding only a rushlight.

Illustration for The Black Arrow by the wonderful N.C. Wyeth

Illustration for The Black Arrow by N.C. Wyeth (1916)

Eventually they are discovered and flee into a vacant room, barricading themselves in against attackers. After repelling an attack through an unsuspected trap door – John Matcham finally reveals that ‘he’ is a maid in disguise. ‘He’ is Joanna Sedley, heir to a fine estate etc etc. whose family are all dead and so has spent her life being held hostage by a number of great lords, all planning marriage deals for her.

Now Brackley has possession of her and wants to marry her off to another lord who will pay a fine price. There is just time for Dick and Joanna to realise they are in love with each other! before the door is forced open by Brackley’s men who seize Joanna and almost grab Dick, who wriggles free, plunges out the window into the moat below, swims across it and scrambles to safety under cover of darkness. Phew!

Book 3. My Lord Foxham

Several months have gone by and the House of Lancaster is in the ascendant with the Yorkists defeated – the small port of Shoreby-on-the-Till is full of Lancastrian nobles including Brackley, sucking up to the new masters of the land. Now we learn that Dick has been hiding out all this time with the outlaws in the forest and that their leader is called Ellis Duckworth. He has loaned Dick some of his cut-throats, criminals and deserters to tail Brackley to Shoreby and now the chapter opens with them hiding out, drinking and grumbling, in a low pub.

One of their spies comes in to report that Brackley is going to a midnight assignation at a house by the sea – Dick and his men follow, Dick climbs over the wall and peers through the window and sees the house contains Joanna Sedley, now magically transformed from the ‘boy’ he shared adventures with in book one into a tall, stately, womanly figure – he is even more in love with her, though a little daunted by her fine womanhood.

Other figures are seen moving suspiciously around the walls and so Dick’s men attack them, leading to a scrappy fight. Dick kills one then tackles a good-sized man in a fight which spills into the sea – Dick manages to trip him, get him under the waves and forces him to yield. It turns out to be Lord Foxham, himself no friend of Brackley, himself come to spy on Joanna. Realising they’re on sort of the same side, Dick and Foxham arrange to meet next day at St Bride’s Cross, just outside Shoreby, ‘on the skirts of Tunstall Forest’. Here Lord Foxham confirms his identity and that he is the rightful protector of the fair Joanna Sedley. Dick’s passionate protestations about her safety persuade Foxham that Dick truly loves her, and he declares that Dick shall marry her. Only the slight problem that she is held captive by Brackly and betrothed to Lord Shoreby stands in the way.

So Dick resolves to rescue fair Joanna from the house by the sea. Since his fight with Foxham’s men the night before was pretty conspicuous, Brackley has doubled his guard, placing armed men round the house and knights on the approach roads, so Dick has the bright idea of approaching by sea. In a series of rather contorted events which are typical of the novel’s contrived storyline, Dick commissions his pack of criminals to steal a ship, which they do by hailing the master of a boat newly arrived in the port of Shoreby, as he comes ashore, then plying him with so much drink that he is easy to lure outside, mug and tie up. Then the gang row back out to the ship – the ironically named Good Hope – take command of it and sail it to a rough pier not far from the isolated house where Joanna is being held.

But when our men leave the ship and walk along the rough pier they find themselves instantly attacked, coming under bow and arrow fire, killing and injuring many, the whole crew panicking and rushing back to the ship, some falling into the water and drowning, others expiring on the deck. Quite a bloody scene.

Even Lord Foxham, who we only met ten pages earlier, is wounded, and carried to a cabin below decks. Here, once the ship has weighed anchor, he tells Dick that he was scheduled to meet the young Duke of Gloucester (the future King Richard III) of the house of York, with notes about the deployment of the Lancastrian forces around Shoreby. Dick must now undertake this mission. And Foxham names Dick the rightful husband of Lady Joanna in the letters he asks Dick to bear – but it is up to him to actually secure her.

In further melodrama the ship is now driven by heavy seas to shipwreck on the sand not far from Shoreby. Once the tide has gone out all the survivors of the vain attack on Brackley’s house struggle ashore and traipse inland, but not without – in yet more action – briefly coming under attack from a platoon of men apparently place there to defend the coast. But they escape without any more casualties.

All of this, by the way, takes place in the depth of winter, with darkening stormy skies, high seas, and snow storms. It is all very atmospheric and well described but the underlying scenario is too far-fetched for the reader to buy into.

Book 4. The Disguise

Dick pays off the motley crew, all too happy to leave their unlucky (and very young) leader, and elects to stick with Lawless. This outlaw has emerged with higher stature then the other cut-throats: it was he who Dick saw in the clearing cooking the outlaws’ meal; it was he who took control of the Good Hope‘s helm, steered it through the storm and ensured it survived the wreck. Now Lawless takes Dick through the snow-struck forest to his secret lair in the woods, a warren created when a tall beech tree was blown over, with the sides shored up with earth and turf and the entrance covered with brushwood.

Lawless leading young Dick to his den in the woods, illustration by N.C. Wyeth

It is, in other words, a fantasy version of a boy’s den in the woods. Inside it is surprisingly warm and snug, especially after Lawless lights a fire, they cook and eat some food and share some sweet wine, and Dick tells his story. ‘You want Lady Joan?’ Lawless asks Dick. ‘Let’s go and get her.’ So Lawless opens one of the several trunks stashed round his den and gets out several friar’s cassocks, complete with rope belts. And a tray of make-up pencils (a sort of indication of the theatrical origins or references of much of the language and plot of the novel). He gets Dick to put on the friar’s costume and then applies make-up to make him seem older, a wise old wandering friar. They head off through the snowy woods, back towards Sir Daniel Brackley’s residence in Shoreby.

Here, in the chaos of an over-packed lord’s house, Dick sees two fine ladies heading upstairs and follows them, till he encounters Lady Joan again, in the company of her serving lady. But oh alas and alack! Joanna reveals that she is to be married next day to Lord Shoreby. She and the lady must go back downstairs to the marriage feast while Dick stays hidden. Off they go but only a few minutes later a malevolent dwarf-jester comes snooping around and, as he discovers evidence of Dick hiding, Dick leaps out, they tussle, and Dick stabs him to death with his poniard. (For the hero of a children’s story Dick kills quite a few people – he killed one of Foxham’s men in the fight by the sea, he kills the dwarf – and all this pales next to the slaughter in book 5. It’s a surprisingly violent book.)

When the dwarf’s body is discovered by servants there is much alarm and shouting but Dick stays hidden in Lady J’s room, when she returns for a further clasping of hands and bosoms and protestations of love – all watched by the ironic lady-in-waiting, before Dick tries to make his escape.

Since he is still in his disguise as a friar, he tells the house guards that he is going to the nearby church to pray for the dwarf’s soul (his body having been laid in state there), but the guards take him at his word and frog-march him to the church. Here he is no sooner introduced to the parson, Sir Oliver Oates, who begins to recognise him through is disguise than Dick throws himself on his mercy. In an unguarded moment the parson, for his part, admits that he was used as a decoy to lure Dick’s father to his death all those years ago, but swears he didn’t know that was what was going to happen. The soldiers are sitting in the pews watching him suspiciously so there’s no way Dick can escape the church, and so he spends the night next to Sir Oliver, pretending to mutter prayers for the dead dwarf.

Next morning they are woken early by the grand procession for the wedding of Lord Shoreham to Lady Joanna. But barely has the fine lord entered the church, richly caparisoned and accompanied by his fragrant retinue than a brace of arrows ring out, shooting him dead on the spot, injuring Brackley, creating hysteria and panic among the attendants and ladies.

This is stilled by the imperious voice of Lord Risingham, the noblest man present. To Dick’s dismay the parson immediately betrays him and Lawless (his fellow fake friar) and they are dragged before Risingham and all kinds of accusations thrown at them of being in league with the fellowship of the Black Arrow and therefore involved in this sacrilegious outrage.

Brackley is incensed and wants to drag Dick off and torture him to death, but Lady Joanna intercedes to say she never wanted to marry Lord Shoreby and loves Dick, and her (cheeky) lady in waiting backs up the story and so Risingham, who has seniority, has Dick taken by soldiers to his own chambers to judge.

Here Dick saves the day by admitting that he guilty to some extent of falling in with the fellowship of forest crooks, but he only did so after learning that Brackley murdered his father. He clinches his case by handing over to Risingham a letter he had conveniently found on the murdered dwarf in which the villain Brackley plots to overthrow the Yorkist interest – which includes Risingham – and then hand over Risingham’s lands to Lord Shoreby. Risingham is incensed and instantly releases Dick, making him swear to mend his ways.

So Dick finally gets to escape the house and trouble and is walking free across Shoreby when, of all the bad luck, as he is passing one of the inns on the dockside, out of it stumble some very drunk sailors which include Arblaster, the unfortunate captain who Dick’s men got drunk, mugged and then whose ship they stole and wrecked. He doesn’t recognise him but his wretched dog does, coming barking up to him and lawless, still in their silly friar disguises. The drunks grow in suspicion and when he tries to bolt, grab him, tie him up and drag him back into the pub. Here Dick spins a long cock and bull story, admitting he is one of the outlaws but has grudges against them, and that the outlaws have a vast pile of treasure in the woods, and persuading Arblaster and his mates that he’ll lead them to it. In its way this is a curious and flavoursome scene. They are by this stage very drunk and Dick makes them show him the only possession of his which they found and therefore took off him – Lord Foxham’s signet ring with which he was to identify himself to Richard of Gloucester – when Dick snatches it, up ends the tables in their faces, and scarpers out the door and along the quayside into the night. Phew.

Book 5. Crookback

Though as convoluted in detail as the others, this is in some ways the simplest book. If you remember, Dick had promised Lord Foxham he would rendezvous with Richard Duke of Gloucester and give him Foxham’s writings on the disposition of enemy (Lancastrian) forces in Shoreby. Now, Dick hid those papers when he was at Lawless’s den in the woods, which is why Arblaster and his drunk shipmates didn’t find them when they searched Dick the night before.

Now, the next morning, Dick is on his way through the woods back to Lawless’s den to get them, when he comes across a man defending himself against several attackers. Dick throws himself into the fray, coming to his defence, and together they beat the men off. At which point the other blows his horn and a brace of horsemen arrive and quickly identify the man he’s saved as Richard Duke of Gloucester, known as Crookback and as every schoolboy in 1888 knew, the man who would become King Richard III, according to legend the most wicked monarch in England’s history.

At this point, if it hadn’t been obvious before, the reader realises that this is a novel not only about two roses but about two Richards. For immediately the duke of Gloucester reveals the manic glint in his eye and the intensity of his ambition.

Gloucester explains to Dick that he is about to attack Shoreby and Dick gives him an eye-witness description of the Lancastrian forces every bit as good as Foxham’s. Gloucester knights Dick on the spot, from this point onwards Sir Richard Shelton. But says now he must command a troop during the forthcoming battle of Shoreby.

The (fictional) Battle of Shoreby is described across two chapters in impressive detail. The reader feels this is what it must be like to attack a medieval town through narrows streets and, as Dick does, command his men to raise a barricade with furniture looted from the rickety houses and then withstand attacks from massed archers and from armoured knights on horseback. It is rip-roaring exciting stuff.

Eventually the battle is won and Richard asks permission to ride and rescue his lady love, and Gloucester gives him a troop of men. Off they go trailing Brackly and his forces through the forest. After various delays and losing of the tracks, Dick and his men creep up on Brackley’s party gathered round a fire which includes Lady Joanna. They gather and attack, but Brackley’s men were waiting for them and mount a a surprise counter-attack. Joanna runs to Dick in the confusion and they escape the confusion of battle into the dense forest.

(It’s worth noting that although the novel is made of clichés, there keep coming unexpected complications and rebuffs, which give it a sort of realistic but also quite a frustrating feel. When Dick and his gang stole the ship and sailed it round to attack Brackley’s house by the sea I thought it would be a storming triumph, so was very surprised when they are beaten back and many killed or injured by bowfire before they’ve barely got off the jetty.)

Briefly, Dick and Joanna make it back to the safety of Lord Foxham’s house. There is a further encounter with Gloucester where Dick displeases the great man with a notable request. Gloucester says he will give Dick anything he desires, and at that moment – as it happens – amid the chaos of post-battle Shoreby, some troops come past hustling some captives who Gloucester, barely bothering to look, orders to be hanged. And Dick recognises among them Arblaster, the wretched sea captain who Richard has twice wronged, stealing his ship and ruining his livelihood, then throwing a table at him in the quayside pub. Now Dick sees a way to atone for his past sins and asks Gloucester to spare this man’s life. Irritated at the triviality of the request, Gloucester agrees to do so – since he has given his word – but fiercely tells Dick that he can’t expect to rise in his army, in his cause, if he throws away favours on trifle. And so Gloucester gallops off.

Next morning Dick is up betimes, accoutred and arrayed in the finest regalia Foxham can provide, ready for his wedding to Lady Joanna. He strolls around the town, surveying the triumphant Yorkist troops, before straying further afield and ends up walking through the (by now very familiar) snowy woods.

And it is here that the psychological climax of the book comes, when Dick disturbs a figure lurking in the woods in disguise and it turns out to be none other than Sir Daniel Brackley. They argue. They nearly fight but Dick refuses to shed blood on his wedding day. In fact he admits – to Brackley, to the reader, to himself – that he has done too many bloody deeds recently, spilled too much blood. Although he has all the justification for it, he will not harm Brackley. He tells him to go before he calls the guards. And so Brackley shuffles off, suspiciously.

At which point there is the twang of a bow and from a nearby thicket an arrow is despatched which embeds itself in Brackley, who falls to the ground. Dick rushes to him and just has time to tell him that, yes, it is a Black Arrow, when Brackley expires. And Ellis Duckworth comes from the thicket holding his bow. He heard Dick forgive Brackley, but he can’t forgive. He asks Dick to pray for his soul. And Dick notes that vengeance hasn’t made Duckworth feel good, in fact he feels sick and guilty. Give it up, says Dick. Hatch died in the Battle of Shoreham. So three of the four mentioned in the original verse threat are now despatched. Dick asks forgiveness for the parson and Duckworth, reluctantly agrees.

‘Be at rest; the Black Arrow flieth nevermore—the fellowship is broken.’

‘But be at rest; the Black Arrow flieth nevermore’. Illustration by N. C. Wyeth

In the short conclusion to the book, Dick marries his Joan. Richard Crookback makes a last appearance riding by with the long train of his armed men, going towards the next battle, and parries banter with Foxham, Joan and Dick, offering Joan the husband of her choice. Of course she cleaves to honest Dick, and Gloucester pshaws, turns his horse and gallops off towards his destiny.

And in the last few sentences we learn that Dick and Joan lived out their lives in peace and happiness far from the wars and that two old men – Arblaster the shipman and Lawless the rogue – also live out their lives in peace. Dick has, in some measure, atoned for his youthful bloodthirstiness, by at key moments, interceding and saving both their lives. And with that thought, or moral, the book ends.

Reasons for The Black Arrow’s relative failure

The relative failure and comparative neglect of this novel makes you appreciate the elements which made the classics Treasure Island and Kidnapped such successes. I identify four reasons:

1. One hero

In those novels there is one boy hero (Jim Hawkins, David Balfour) – clearly identified in the first sentence – and you are thrown immediately into his plight – which is also described clearly and obviously. In The Black Arrow the picture is much more confused: it takes fifty pages or more to become really clear that the story is about a young lad, Master Richard (‘Dick’) Shelton, the ward of the wicked Sir Daniel Brackley, and this is because quite a few characters are introduced in the confused and busy opening scenes.

2. Third person narrator

The successful tales are first-person narratives, throwing you directly and immediately into the adventure at first hand. The Black Arrow has a third-person narrator who is not, for some reason, very believable, partly because of the confusion of plot which dogs a lot of the story.

3. Good guys and bad guys

In his classic works you know who the good guys and bad guys are – the pirates in Treasure Island, the ship’s crew and then the loyalist British army in Kidnapped. In this book it is much harder to tell for several reasons:

a) it’s a civil war so there’s no immediate way of knowing who’s on whose side, except by asking
b) characters change sides, including the hero who is not wholeheartedly for either side

4. A charismatic anti-hero

When Richard Crookback appears in the fifth act, the reader realises that this is the fourth reason why this novel isn’t as successful as Kidnapped or Treasure Island – the presence of a charismatic baddy.

Both those stories introduce fairly early on a hugely charismatic, charming, threatening, adult hero who enthrals the boy narrator and comes to dominate the story – namely Long John Silver and Alan Breck Stewart. Their presence, their charming rogueish amorality, lifts both books onto a completely different level.

In this book, the dangerous charismatic adult is Richard Crookback – he immediately captures our attention by his spirited self-defence against four or five attackers, and then with his arrogant nonchalance as soon as he starts talking to Dick. From now to the end of the novel the story lifts and sails whenever he is present – he is a pantomime villain like Alan Rickman’s Sheriff of Nottingham in the movie Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. But his arrival makes you realise that he is what the preceding four-fifths of the book have been missing.

Medieval vocabulary

Apparently Stevenson used the Paston Letters, a collection of authentic correspondence from the period, as his model, and – as someone who studied medieval literature at university – I did feel the text had some of the tang and hempen antiquity of the older language, albeit interlarded with what I thought were Shakespearian usages from 200 years later, and some speeches which had a Scots ring to me. You have to be prepared to enjoy exchanges like this:

She was groping for the bolt, when Dick at last comprehended.
‘By the mass!’ he cried, ‘y’ are no Jack; y’ are Joanna Sedley; y’ are the maid that would not marry me!’
The girl paused, and stood silent and motionless. Dick, too, was silent for a little; then he spoke again.
‘Joanna,’ he said, ‘y’ ’ave saved my life, and I have saved yours; and we have seen blood flow, and been friends and enemies—ay, and I took my belt to thrash you; and all that time I thought ye were a boy. But now death has me, and my time’s out, and before I die I must say this: Y’ are the best maid and the bravest under heaven, and, if only I could live, I would marry you blithely; and, live or die, I love you.’
She answered nothing.
‘Come,’ he said, ‘speak up, Jack. Come, be a good maid, and say ye love me!’
‘Why, Dick,’ she cried, ‘would I be here?’
‘Well, see ye here,’ continued Dick, ‘an we but escape whole we’ll marry; and an we’re to die, we die, and there’s an end on’t.’
(Chapter 3. The Room Over The Chapel)

On the other hand, one of the pleasures of reading old literature, especially something as conventional in its way as this ripping yarn, is the logical habits of mind of writers brought up in previous ages. There is a lovely logic to the deployment of the material in the opening of the chapter ‘In Mine Enemies’ House’ – the way the place is identified, then described, then the attitude behind its busy state, then a specific setting in time given, and then the weather: the whole impression being rounded up and summarised in the witty sentence about the eye of the modern.

Sir Daniel’s residence in Shoreby was a tall, commodious, plastered mansion, framed in carven oak, and covered by a low-pitched roof of thatch. To the back there stretched a garden, full of fruit-trees, alleys, and thick arbours, and overlooked from the far end by the tower of the abbey church.
The house might contain, upon a pinch, the retinue of a greater person than Sir Daniel; but even now it was filled with hubbub. The court rang with arms and horseshoe-iron; the kitchens roared with cookery like a bees’-hive; minstrels, and the players of instruments, and the cries of tumblers, sounded from the hall. Sir Daniel, in his profusion, in the gaiety and gallantry of his establishment, rivalled with Lord Shoreby, and eclipsed Lord Risingham.

All guests were made welcome. Minstrels, tumblers, players of chess, the sellers of relics, medicines, perfumes, and enchantments, and along with these every sort of priest, friar, or pilgrim, were made welcome to the lower table, and slept together in the ample lofts, or on the bare boards of the long dining-hall.

On the afternoon following the wreck of the Good Hope, the buttery, the kitchens, the stables, the covered cartshed that surrounded two sides of the court, were all crowded by idle people, partly belonging to Sir Daniel’s establishment, and attired in his livery of murrey and blue, partly nondescript strangers attracted to the town by greed, and received by the knight through policy, and because it was the fashion of the time.

The snow, which still fell without interruption, the extreme chill of the air, and the approach of night, combined to keep them under shelter. Wine, ale, and money were all plentiful; many sprawled gambling in the straw of the barn, many were still drunken from the noontide meal. To the eye of a modern it would have looked like the sack of a city; to the eye of a contemporary it was like any other rich and noble household at a festive season.

There is a pleasure and a seduction in the logical disposition of the material, a pleasing old-fashioned storytellingness. I made a note of sundry medieval words which, although I’ve often read before, I don’t actually fully understand.

arbalest – a crossbow with a special mechanism for drawing back and releasing the string
baldric – a belt worn over one shoulder to carry a weapon (usually a sword) or other implement such as a bugle or drum
brigandine – a cloth garment, generally canvas or leather, lined with small oblong steel plates riveted to the fabric
buckler – a small shield, up to 18 inches in diameter, held in the fist with a central handle behind the boss
cresset – a metal cup or basket, mounted to a pole, containing flammable substance like oil, pitch or a rope steeped in rosin, burned as a light or beacon
gyves – a shackle, especially for the leg
losels – a worthless person or scoundrel
lout – verb: to bow or stoop
murrain – a plague, epidemic, or crop blight
poniard – a small, slim dagger
pottage – a thick soup or stew made by boiling vegetables, grains, and, if available, meat or fish
sallet – a light medieval helmet, usually with a vision slit or a movable visor
shaw – a coppice or thicket of trees
tippet – a scarf-like narrow piece of clothing, worn over the shoulders
tucket – a flourish on a trumpet
windac – a piece of equipment to pull back the tight string of a crossbow

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by Simon on September 18, 2016 • Permalink

Posted in Adventure, History, Novel

Tagged 1888, A Chronology of The Crusades, adventure, Alan Breck Stewart, Alan Rickman, arbalest, baldric, Battle of Shoreby, Bennet Hatch, book, boys adventure story, brigandine, buckler, Captain Arblaster, Captain George North, children's book, chivalry, civil war, cresset, Crookback, crossbow, David Balfour, Dick Shelton, dwarf, East Anglia, Ellis Duckworth, Fenland, Grimstone, gyves, Henry the Fifth, Henry VI, historical novel, Holyrood Abbey, House of Lancaster, House of York, In Mine Enemies' House, Jim Hawkins, Joanna, Joanna Sedley, John Carter, John Matcham, Jon Amend-All, King Richard III, Lawless, leper, Long John Silver, Lord Risingham, losels, lout, medieval story, melodrama, Middle Ages, murrain, My Lord Foxham, N.C. Wyeth, Nick Appleyard, novel, outlaws, Paston Letters, piracy, pirates, poniard, pottage, Richard Crookback, Richard III, Richard of Gloucester, Risingham, Robert Louis Stevenson, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, sallet, shaw, Sheriff of Nottingham, Shoreby, Shoreby-on-the-Till, Sir Daniel Brackley, Sir Oliver Oates, St Bride's Cross, Stevenson, suspense, sword, the Black Arrow, The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses, The Moat House, The Wars of the Roses, tippet, Treasure Island, tucket, Tunstall, Tunstall Forest, Tunstall Moat House, Wars of the Roses, windac, Yorkists, Young Folks: A Boys' and Girls' Paper of Instructive and Entertaining Literature

Posted by Simon on September 18, 2016

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2016/09/18/the-black-arrow-robert-louis-stevenson/

The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables by Robert Louis Stevenson (1887)

The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables (1887) is a collection of memorably dark and haunting short stories by Robert Louis Stevenson, comprising:

The Merry Men (1882)
Will O’ the Mill (1878)
Markheim (1885)
Thrawn Janet (1881)
Olalla (1885)
The Treasure of Franchard (1883)

It is significantly darker and deeper than his previous collection, the More New Arabian Nights, with its shallow and contrived plots. These stories have much more psychological depth and reach. The Arabian Nights are cluttered with a pell-mell of incident, each as silly as the last. In these stories there is little incident, but a tremendous sense of brooding fear, horror and strange psychological states.

The Merry Men

The Merry Men of the title story are nothing to do with Robin Hood but is the nickname given to the clashing waves created by treacherous reefs off the small island of Aros in the western Highlands of Scotland. There’s a reference to Jacobites so it’s set in the first half of the 18th century. Here the narrator, Charles, a young man, his parents dead, returns to the wild island where his strict Calvinist uncle, Gordon Darnaway, offered him a home between his studies at university. The text is oddly packed with themes none of which quite predominate enough to comprise an actual story. Charles is in love with his uncle’s daughter, Mary Ellen, but she wishes to stay and look after her father. Charles has learned of a wreck from the Spanish Armada full of the gold which was going to pay for the invasion, and he sets off to find it, stripping and diving into the rough sea in the probably location of the wreck. Among the seaweed he finds first a shoe buckle and then, gruesomely, a human bone, and flees the sea. Meanwhile Charles’s uncle behaves more and more oddly until one wild night he is found drinking heavily and greedily watching a schooner just off the island which is being pushed by the tide onto the rocks. The narrator realises he has gone mad and neither he nor the family servant, Rorie, can catch him as he bounds cackling over the island away from them, until one final attempt ends in tragedy.

This is a mash-up of typical RLS themes, but none of them fully developed to a conclusion. The story very well conveys a sense of wild foreboding, but its ultimate failure is, I think, revealed by its overwrought style, closer to the wilful melodrama of the New Arabian Nights than to the lean, thrilling, dynamic style of Treasure Island and Kidnapped.

When at length I fell asleep, it was to be awakened shortly after by a dream of wrecks, black men, and submarine adventure; and I found myself so shaken and fevered that I arose, descended the stair, and stepped out before the house. Within, Rorie and the black were asleep together in the kitchen; outside was a wonderful clear night of stars, with here and there a cloud still hanging, last stragglers of the tempest. It was near the top of the flood, and the Merry Men were roaring in the windless quiet of the night. Never, not even in the height of the tempest, had I heard their song with greater awe. Now, when the winds were gathered home, when the deep was dandling itself back into its summer slumber, and when the stars rained their gentle light over land and sea, the voice of these tide-breakers was still raised for havoc. They seemed, indeed, to be a part of the world’s evil and the tragic side of life. Nor were their meaningless vociferations the only sounds that broke the silence of the night. For I could hear, now shrill and thrilling and now almost drowned, the note of a human voice that accompanied the uproar of the Roost. I knew it for my kinsman’s; and a great fear fell upon me of God’s judgments, and the evil in the world. I went back again into the darkness of the house as into a place of shelter, and lay long upon my bed, pondering these mysteries.’
(Part 5. A Man Out Of The Sea)

This seems to me good – it is clear powerful description – up until the sentence starting ‘They seemed…’ at which point the style becomes melodramatic indicating the willed nature of the plot and the forced horror which RLS, it seems to me, is imposing on the scene. It doesn’t arise naturally from events. The more RLS editorialises, the less powerful the impact.

Still, the climax when it comes is swift and genuinely terrifying.

Will O’ the Mill (1878)

A strange, dreamy, allegorical tale. It tells the story of young Will, brought up in a mill in a high valley somewhere in Germany, in some vague Middle Ages. Maybe it’s a spin-off from RLS’s medieval novel, Prince Otto. Its style is completely different from the Merry Men, being cast in an opulently romantic style which reminds me of Oscar Wilde’s fairy stories.

[Will] was like some one lying in twilit, formless preexistence, and stretching out his hands lovingly towards many-coloured, many-sounding life. It was no wonder he was unhappy, he would go and tell the fish: they were made for their life, wished for no more than worms and running water, and a hole below a falling bank; but he was differently designed, full of desires and aspirations, itching at the fingers, lusting with the eyes, whom the whole variegated world could not satisfy with aspects. The true life, the true bright sunshine, lay far out upon the plain. And O! to see this sunlight once before he died! to move with a jocund spirit in a golden land! to hear the trained singers and sweet church bells, and see the holiday gardens! ‘And O fish!’ he would cry, ‘if you would only turn your noses down stream, you could swim so easily into the fabled waters and see the vast ships passing over your head like clouds, and hear the great water-hills making music over you all day long!’ But the fish kept looking patiently in their own direction, until Will hardly knew whether to laugh or cry.

There is a surprisingly science fiction moment where a romantic traveller chats to young Will about his desire to leave the mill and go down to the big city:

‘Did you ever look at the stars?’ he asked, pointing upwards.
‘Often and often,’ answered Will.
‘And do you know what they are?’
‘I have fancied many things.’
‘They are worlds like ours,’ said the young man. ‘Some of them less; many of them a million times greater; and some of the least sparkles that you see are not only worlds, but whole clusters of worlds turning about each other in the midst of space. We do not know what there may be in any of them; perhaps the answer to all our difficulties or the cure of all our sufferings: and yet we can never reach them; not all the skill of the craftiest of men can fit out a ship for the nearest of these our neighbours, nor would the life of the most aged suffice for such a journey. When a great battle has been lost or a dear friend is dead, when we are hipped or in high spirits, there they are unweariedly shining overhead. We may stand down here, a whole army of us together, and shout until we break our hearts, and not a whisper reaches them. We may climb the highest mountain, and we are no nearer them. All we can do is to stand down here in the garden and take off our hats; the starshine lights upon our heads, and where mine is a little bald, I dare say you can see it glisten in the darkness. The mountain and the mouse. That is like to be all we shall ever have to do with Arcturus or Aldebaran.’

Will hung his head a little, and then raised it once more to heaven. The stars seemed to expand and emit a sharper brilliancy; and as he kept turning his eyes higher and higher, they seemed to increase in multitude under his gaze.

Will decides to stay at the mill and lives to a ripe old age, an odd, self-contained man, respected by tourists to the riverside inn he sets up, for his wisdom and solidity. The ending of the tale, when it comes, is beautiful and moving.

Markheim (1885)

Often paired with Jekyll and Hyde as a tale of a divided soul. On Christmas day a 35-year-old man, Markheim, visits a pawnbroker, for an episode which reads like late Dickens, intimate and fraught with undercurrents. He abruptly stabs the pawnbroker to death and sets off to ransack his office but full of a fear so intense it gives hallucinatory power to his senses.

Time had some score of small voices in that shop, some stately and slow as was becoming to their great age; others garrulous and hurried. All these told out the seconds in an intricate, chorus of tickings. Then the passage of a lad’s feet, heavily running on the pavement, broke in upon these smaller voices and startled Markheim into the consciousness of his surroundings. He looked about him awfully. The candle stood on the counter, its flame solemnly wagging in a draught; and by that inconsiderable movement, the whole room was filled with noiseless bustle and kept heaving like a sea: the tall shadows nodding, the gross blots of darkness swelling and dwindling as with respiration, the faces of the portraits and the China gods changing and wavering like images in water. The inner door stood ajar, and peered into that leaguer of shadows with a long slit of daylight like a pointing finger.

And then, exceeding the murderer’s fears, he does hear a real actual step on the stairs and a voice in the hallway and someone enters the room to find him. Is it real or a hallucination? Is it the devil? Or an avenging angel? What follows is a rather high-minded theological exchange, in a completely different register from the heavy Gothic tone which has preceded and which leads the murderer, hitherto depicted chillingly as if he had multiple personalities, to reveal a taste for high minded Calvinist sermons.

‘I will lay my heart open to you,’ answered Markheim. ‘This crime on which you find me is my last. On my way to it I have learned many lessons; itself is a lesson, a momentous lesson. Hitherto I have been driven with revolt to what I would not; I was a bond-slave to poverty, driven and scourged. There are robust virtues that can stand in these temptations; mine was not so: I had a thirst of pleasure. But to-day, and out of this deed, I pluck both warning and riches—both the power and a fresh resolve to be myself. I become in all things a free actor in the world; I begin to see myself all changed, these hands the agents of good, this heart at peace. Something comes over me out of the past; something of what I have dreamed on Sabbath evenings to the sound of the church organ, of what I forecast when I shed tears over noble books, or talked, an innocent child, with my mother. There lies my life; I have wandered a few years, but now I see once more my city of destination.’

As twitchily psychopathic as it began, as gruesomely hallucinatory as it proceeded, Markheim ends as a sweet tale or repentance almost as anodyne as another Christmas Carol, written 40 years earlier.

Thrawn Janet (1881)

A ghost story set in 1712. It is told mostly in Scots dialect, imagined as a local peasant telling a passerby who’s bought him a few drinks, why the minister of the village of Balweary is so lonesome and eccentric. It is because of a strange and terrifying haunting of the corpse of poor thrawn Janet. This poor possessed woman hangs herself only for a devil to bring her back to life and make the body stalk towards the terrified minister.

‘By this time the foot was comin’ through the passage for the door; he could hear a hand skirt alang the wa’, as if the fearsome thing was feelin’ for its way. The saughs tossed an’ maned thegether, a lang sigh cam’ ower the hills, the flame o’ the can’le was blawn aboot; an’ there stood the corp of Thrawn Janet, wi’ her grogram goun an’ her black mutch, wi’ the heid aye upon the shouther, an’ the girn still upon the face o’t—leevin’, ye wad hae said—deid, as Mr. Soulis weel kenned—upon the threshold o’ the manse.’

Olalla (1885)

This concerns an English army officer in Spain and quartered for his health with a faded Spanish family. The family have degenerated from their former glory but this is no metaphor. They really have become degenerate cretins, the son a simpleton, and the mother a placid cow. But when the officer meets the daughter, Olalla, he falls immediately and preposterously in love with her.

In my own room, I opened the window and looked out, and could not think what change had come upon that austere field of mountains that it should thus sing and shine under the lofty heaven. I had seen her—Olalla! And the stone crags answered, Olalla! and the dumb, unfathomable azure answered, Olalla!

He cuts himself on his window and goes to the placid mother for help who amazes him by leaping at his wrist and biting it to the bone! He is rescued by the son and spirited off to a nearby village to recover, where he hears more and worse things of the family. Olalla joins him by a roadside crucifix and persuades him, for everyone’s good, to leave. And so he tearfully leaves her there, praying to Our Lord

Like a lot of the minor Stevenson this story contains themes or ideas which somehow emerge more fully in other later works. The mother’s completely unexpected bite is vampirism, linked to the idea of degenerate families. Bram Stoker was to win immortality with the idea 12 years later. Hereditary decline, or degeneracy, was a real fear at the end of the 19th century, brought on by populist misunderstandings of Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Interesting themes apart, the story shows Stevenson’s power at describing natural scenery, his ability to create an atmosphere of suspense – but then degenerates into the romantic melodrama of the Arabian Nights.

The Treasure of Franchard (1883)

The longest and best humoured of the stories. Set in rural France it concerns a pompous failure of a country doctor who loves the sound of his own voice who takes in an 11 year old orphan he encounters whose frank dullness fascinate him. Over a number of ‘chapters’ Dr Desprez tries to educate young Jean-Marie but to no avail. The boy is particularly struck by the doctor’s repeated protestations that he is happy vegetating in rural idiocy and would never ever be dragged back to corrupt Paris – so that when the doctor accidentally discovers treasure – long-lost plate from a ruined abbey – Jean-Marie is driven to take desperate measures!

The story contains lovely descriptions of rural France.

Doctor Desprez always rose early. Before the smoke arose, before the first cart rattled over the bridge to the day’s labour in the fields, he was to be found wandering in his garden. Now he would pick a bunch of grapes; now he would eat a big pear under the trellice; now he would draw all sorts of fancies on the path with the end of his cane; now he would go down and watch the river running endlessly past the timber landing-place at which he moored his boat. There was no time, he used to say, for making theories like the early morning.

The story – and the collection – concludes with a Happy Ending completely unlike the troubled psychological melodramas of the all the previous tales.

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by Simon on October 21, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in Books, English literature, Short stories

Posted by Simon on October 21, 2012

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2012/10/21/the-merry-men-and-other-tales-and-fables/

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (1883)

‘Treasure Island or, the mutiny of the Hispaniola’ was serialised in 18 instalments in the children’s magazine Young Folks between 1881 and 1882, before being published in book form in 1883. Stevenson used the pseudonym Captain George North. It was the magazine’s editor, James Henderson, who suggested he change the title from The Sea Cook to Treasure Island.

Plot

Presumably most people know the story. What makes the text so gripping is the speed with which the sequence of sensational incidents unfolds, and the vividness of characterisation – the boy hero Jack Hawkins, Long John Silver, marooned Ben Gunn, sinister Blind Pew, sterling Dr Livesey, stout Squire Trelawney – what a cast! And matching speed, incidents and character, Stevenson’s style is intently focused on moving quickly and effectively from one node of action to the next, with a storyteller’s natural touch of suspense.

‘Every man on board seemed well content, and they must have been hard to please if they had been otherwise, for it is my belief there was never a ship’s company so spoiled since Noah put to sea. Double grog was going on the least excuse; there was duff on odd days, as, for instance, if the squire heard it was any man’s birthday, and always a barrel of apples standing broached in the waist for anyone to help himself that had a fancy.

‘Never knew good come of it yet,’ the captain said to Dr. Livesey. ‘Spoil forecastle hands, make devils. That’s my belief.’

‘But good did come of the apple barrel, as you shall hear, for if it had not been for that, we should have had no note of warning and might all have perished by the hand of treachery. This was how it came about. (Chapter 10)

Style

Stevenson’s sentences might be long, with numerous subordinate clauses but, unlike Conrad’s sentences, each clause adds new information and so the prose feels pacey. In Conrad the atmosphere is stagnant, impotent, smothered by tautologous repetition. In Stevenson you are continually learning new information at each step.

All that night we were in a great bustle getting things stowed in their place, and boatfuls of the squire’s friends, Mr. Blandly and the like, coming off to wish him a good voyage and a safe return. We never had a night at the Admiral Benbow when I had half the work; and I was dog-tired when, a little before dawn, the boatswain sounded his pipe and the crew began to man the capstan-bars. I might have been twice as weary, yet I would not have left the deck, all was so new and interesting to me – the brief commands, the shrill note of the whistle, the men bustling to their places in the glimmer of the ship’s lanterns. (Chapter 10)

The three clauses at the end of this last sentence amplify the ‘all’ of the previous phrase. But each one describes something new, something factual and something well-selected to give a panoramic overview of dockside activities. They are like cutaways in a film. In this purely syntactical respect, quite apart from the sensational storyline, Stevenson’s style is cinematic. Also cinematic is RLS’s brisk way with detail:

‘That?’ returned Silver, smiling away, but warier than ever, his eye a mere pin-point in his big face, but gleaming like a crumb of glass. (Chapter 14)

The rest of the arms and powder we dropped overboard in two fathoms and a half of water, so that we could see the bright steel shining far below us in the sun, on the clean, sandy bottom. (Chapter 16)

Just then, with a roar and a whistle, a round-shot passed high above the roof of the log-house and plumped far beyond us in the wood. (Chapter 18)

For Stevenson, poetry is in the lucid detail. The opposite of Conrad, with his murk of synonyms.

Dialogue

In Conrad there is often an unintentionally comic mismatch between the lurid, nihilistic thoughts of the angst-ridden protagonists, dwelt on at great length – and their stiff-upper-lip, stiffly English, and generally brief dialogue. By contrast Stevenson’s dialogue is of a piece with the characters; their speech reveals them in an almost Shakespearian way. He did, after all, write half a dozen plays. Stevenson’s dialogue is wonderfully salty and dramatic, ready to go straight into the screenplay:

‘I saw him dead with these here deadlights,’ said Morgan. ‘Billy took me in. There he laid, with penny-pieces on his eyes.’

‘Dead—aye, sure enough he’s dead and gone below,’ said the fellow with the bandage; ‘but if ever sperrit walked, it would be Flint’s. Dear heart, but he died bad, did Flint!’

‘Aye, that he did,’ observed another; ‘now he raged, and now he hollered for the rum, and now he sang. “Fifteen Men” were his only song, mates; and I tell you true, I never rightly liked to hear it since. It was main hot, and the windy was open, and I hear that old song comin’ out as clear as clear—and the death-haul on the man already.’

Origins

I came across this excellent account of the book’s origins on a website called Referautile:

—Stevenson was 30 years old when he started to write Treasure Island, and it would be his first success as a novelist. The first fifteen chapters were written at Braemar in the Scottish Highlands in 1881. It was a cold and rainy late-summer and Stevenson was with five family members on holiday in a cottage. Young Lloyd Osbourne, Stevenson’s stepson, passed the rainy days painting with watercolours. Remembering the time, Lloyd wrote:

‘… busy with a box of paints I happened to be tinting a map of an island I had drawn. Stevenson came in as I was finishing it, and with his affectionate interest in everything I was doing, leaned over my shoulder, and was soon elaborating the map and naming it. I shall never forget the thrill of Skeleton Island, Spyglass Hill, nor the heart-stirring climax of the three red crosses! And the greater climax still when he wrote down the words Treasure Island at the top right-hand corner! And he seemed to know so much about it too – the pirates, the buried treasure, the man who had been marooned on the island … “Oh, for a story about it”, I exclaimed, in a heaven of enchantment … ‘

Within three days of drawing the map for Lloyd, Stevenson had written the first three chapters, reading each aloud to his family who added suggestions: Lloyd insisted there be no women in the story; Stevenson’s father came up with the contents of Billy Bones’s sea-chest, and suggested the scene where Jim Hawkins hides in the apple barrel. Two weeks later a friend, Dr Alexander Japp, brought the early chapters to the editor of Young Folks magazine who agreed to publish each chapter weekly.

As autumn came to Scotland, the Stevensons left their summer holiday retreat for London, but Stevenson was troubled with a life-long chronic bronchial condition that put an end to his work on the novel at about chapter fifteen. Concerned about a deadline they travelled in October to Davos, Switzerland where the clean mountain air did him wonders and he was able to continue, and, at a chapter a day, soon finished the story.—

Adaptations

A chapter a day! The brisk pace, the focus on incident and the striking characterisation explain why over 50 movie and TV versions have been made of ‘Treasure Island’. The only one I’m familiar with is the great 1950 Disney version with the fabulous Robert Newton as Long John Silver.

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by Simon on September 26, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in Books, English literature

Posted by Simon on September 26, 2012

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2012/09/26/treasure-island-robert-louis-stevenson/

King Solomon’s Mines by Henry Rider Haggard (1885)

Henry Rider Haggard, age 29, was on a train journey with his brother. He was back in England after a five years’ sojourn in South Africa and the two were discussing the merits of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, still wildly popular after its publication in 1883. Henry says, “Oh there’s nothing special about the book, really.” His brother says, “Well I bet you five bob you can’t write something better.” So Henry sat down and wrote King Solomon’s Mines in 12 weeks, for a bet. It was published in 1887 by Cassels, the same firm who had published Treasure Island, and has gone on to become one of the great classics of adventure fiction, and one of the great bestsellers, of all time.

Reading King Solomon’s Mines in 2012 is rewarding on a number of levels:

Identifying with the hero

At the simplest level it’s a boy’s own adventure, full of thrills and spills designed to test and exercise and reassure the white adolescent male reader: the men are strong and heroic; they survive extreme physical tests; they triumph against overwhelming odds; some natives are trustworthy unto death; others are cruel savages who must be tamed; there are no white women (‘petticoats’ as Haggard calls them) to distract our heroes; though there are plenty of ‘preposessing’ and scantily clad African maidens! There is treasure beyond counting! Vicariously, the reader experiences all these excitements, and triumphs and lives.

It is fiction at its most primitive: total identification with the Hero Who Overcomes.

The gang

Except there isn’t just one hero; it is about a gang with attractive attributes distributed among them. Thus the (male) reader can choose whether to identify with Quatermain, experienced, self-deprecating; Henry Curtis, a lion of man, the pick of the white race, a heroic Englishman; Captain Good, a comedy figure, running to fat, wearing his comedy eyeglass, eternally fussing about his clothes and with a weakness for the fairer sex; or the brave and physically superb Zulu, Umbopa. For some reason the combination of the plucky with the comic, and the idea of a small group of heroes, reminds me of Tintin (and also because the plot hinges on our heroes impressing the natives by predicting a solar eclipse, as Tintin does in ‘Prisoners of the Sun‘).

The Plot

On board ship to Durban, South Africa, Quatermain, an ageing but hardy African hunter, is introduced to a giant of a man, Sir Henry Curtis and his ex-navy sidekick Captain Good, who are seeking Curtis’ brother who disappeared into the African interior two years previously in search of a legendary kingdom. Quatermain just happens to have come into possession of a map of the route, years earlier, from a dying Portuguese explorer. And so the three team up and set off, accompanied by some ill-fated Kaffir helpers and the striking Zulu, Umbopa, who is to play a key role in the plot.

Tone and humour

The text isn’t as dated as you’d expect. It is kept fresh by the rhythm and pacing of Haggard’s plot, moving confidently from one tense action scene to another. And it is written in an open, serviceable prose, very unlike the clotted Latinate phrasing of ‘literary’ authors of the time. The prose is frequently adorned with hilariously over-the-top poetic descriptions of the African scenery or 5th form thoughts about the meaning of Life. And Haggard’s good humour (English and self-deprecating and often schoolboyish) comes through in every line:

I shook my head and looked again at the sleeping men, and to my tired and yet excited imagination it seemed as though death had already touched them… All sorts of reflections of this sort passed through my mind – for as I get older I regret to say that a detestable habit of thinking seems to be getting a hold of me – while I stood and stared at those grim yet fantastic lines of warriors sleeping.

‘Curtis,’ I said to Sir Henry, ‘I am in a condition of pitiable funk.’

Not as racist as expected

Haggard’s attitude to Africans is noticeably sympathetic. Early on he says he’s met plenty of blacks who are true gentlemen and plenty of whites who are not – and many overtly heroic deeds are performed by Kaffirs and blacks. One black servant dies very nobly saving Good from a rampaging elephant. And Umbopa the Zulu grows in regal stature throughout the book. When the adventurers come among the lost people of Kikuana land the black natives are highly differentiated; the king Twala may be a sadistic tyrant, the crone Gagoola an uncanny witch, but the maidens who attend them are courteous and beautiful and other leading Kikuaners like Ignosi are honest and valiant. The point is Haggard depicts blacks as variegated individuals, nothing like the appalling racism found among, say, the Boers of the same time and place.

Imperialism of the imagination

Nonetheless, whatever Quatermain’s sympathy for and admiration of native Africans, it is crystal clear that the white Englishmen have an innate superiority over all natives, all women and indeed all other white men. White Englishmen just are naturally superior, why else would the British Empire be the greatest the world had ever seen? Reading this as a white Englishman it is hard to resist the repeated signals in the text as to my superiority. I can smile at its naivety but it still tugs at my imagination. The text flatters me. I can well imagine all women and non-white people finding this pretty tedious, if not offensive. The inscription to the sequel, Allan Quatermain, says it all:

I inscribe this book of adventure to my son ARTHUR JOHN RIDER
HAGGARD in the hope that in days to come he, and many other
boys whom I shall never know, may, in the acts and thoughts of
Allan Quatermain and his companions, as herein recorded,
find something to help him and them to reach to what, with Sir
Henry Curtis, I hold to be the highest rank whereto we can
attain – the state and dignity of English gentlemen.

Women

One stereotype which is conspicuous by its absence is there are no white women at all in the book. Scantily clad African women, yes, but no ‘petticoats’, as Haggard puts it. Presumably this reflected the physical reality of the time – reading Kipling’s frontier stories, there was continual warfare with native tribes and the Zulu Wars in South Africa had only just ended. It’s dangerous frontier territory.

But it’s striking how all the screen versions of KSM do include women, as love interest and as ‘terror-prompts’ ie woman cornered by fierce beast/dinosaur/native who has to be rescued by gallant white hero. What does the addition of the Woman In Peril cliché – not necessary in 1885 but indispensable from the 1920s onwards, up to and including ‘Romancing The Stone’ and Indiana Jones – tell us about the 20th century, and about us?

King Solomon’s Influence

The biggest obstacle to reading the text is the fact that I seemed to have read or seen so much of it before. This book has been copied in scores of other novels, films, TV dramas and comics. What must have been extraordinary incidents to its original audience have been worn smooth by over a century of assimilation. Just one example, the treasure chamber is entered by a massive rising & descending stone door; while our heroes are distracted by the chests full of treasure, the wicked crone Gagool triggers the lowering mechanism in order to trap them; she stabs the (prepossessing) serving maid who has accompanied them to the chamber and makes to escape but the dying maiden grabs her foot and so the crone tries desperately to wriggle free even as the vast doorway slowly descends until it gruesomely (and noisily) squashes her to a pulp.

In how many films and TV dramas have you seen a mechanical doorway inexorably descending as a protagonist tries to slip under it to safety? Was this the first time this trope, this meme, this cliché, was ever used?

Stereotypes

One of the great pleasures of reading ‘King Solomon’s Mines’ is in savouring the gorgeous tapestry of clichés and stereotypes. The whole text is built of clichés. Possibly the text could be represented visually as sets of overlapping boxes or diagrams, each containing a plot or character device. They’re like jigsaw pieces laid out at the start of the text, which are then dovetailed together as the plot unravels, with satisfying clicks. Everything about it seems familiar:

the brave band of adventurers
the Quest to an Unknown Land
the plucky native assistants who one by one are picked off in mishaps
our heroes almost dying in the desert ie pushed to the limits of human endurance
their sudden arrival in a land of plenty and marvels
the mysterious carvings on the mysterious road
the way they fool the tall, strong blacks who suddenly surround them that they are gods ‘come from the stars’
the cruel leader of the lost tribe (Twala) who suspects they are ordinary men after all

On and on it goes, every element seeming familiar as if from a dream, and in fact from hundreds of films, TV series, comics which I consumed avidly as a boy. If Haggard really is the source of these scores and scores of climactic scenes and sensational scenarios, then he’s one of the most influential writers of all time, his adventure memes a permanent part of the pulp imagination of all of us.

Conclusion

There are so many superficial reasons for objecting to King Solomon’s Mines (the casual racism, the sexism, the violence) that there is, ultimately, no point objecting. Either you buy into the conventions of a genre or you don’t. If you know you’re going to see an adventure movie, don’t be upset if it features strong heroes, cowardly baddies, damsels in distress in exotic foreign locations populated by unreliable locals. The interest is in feeling Haggard shape and develop the stories, stereotypes and clichés which were to help form the popular imagination of our culture. No Allan Quatermain – no Indiana Jones.

Henry Rider Haggard reviews

Henry Rider Haggard (1856 to 1925)
King Solomon’s Mines (1885)
She: A History of Adventure (1887)
Allan Quatermain (1887)
The Joy of Sets or, the Allan Quatermain stories
Maiwa’s revenge, or The War of The Little Hand (1888)
Allan’s Wife and Other Tales (1889)
Nada the Lily (1892)

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by Simon on July 20, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in Books, English literature, Novel

Tagged 1885, Africa, black, British Empire, cliche, Gagoola, Kaffir, King Solomon's Mines, novel, Quatermain, Rider Haggard, Sir Henry Curtis, stereotype, Treasure Island, Zulu

Posted by Simon on July 20, 2012

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2012/07/20/king-solomons-mines-henry-rider-haggard/

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Books & Boots

All posts tagged Treasure Island

Edward Said’s introduction to Kim

Kipling’s vulgarity

Orientalism

Colonel Creighton as white alpha male

(Western) knowledge is power

Imperial knowledgeableness and Sherlock Holmes

Ethnology and studying the natives

Hurree Chunder as a comic antitype of Creighton

Annan and sociology

Late Victorian miserabilism

The novel as a disenchanted genre

Kim’s optimism

Identity

Optimism central to boys adventure stories

Freedom of movement

P.S.

Credit

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The Master of Ballantrae by Robert Louis Stevenson (1889)

A mix of texts…

… and styles

Heteroglossia

The plot

The toss of a coin

News of the Master – and a second narrator

The Master and Burke’s adventures

Back in Scotland

The Master returns

The Master gone

In India

Slight return

New York

In the wilderness

Dead and alive

Anticipation

Doubles

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The Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson (1888)

The Wars of the Roses

Adventure and excitement

Fast-moving plot

Book 2. The Moat House

Book 3. My Lord Foxham

Book 4. The Disguise

Book 5. Crookback

Reasons for The Black Arrow’s relative failure

1. One hero

2. Third person narrator

3. Good guys and bad guys

4. A charismatic anti-hero

Medieval vocabulary

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The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables by Robert Louis Stevenson (1887)

The Merry Men

Will O’ the Mill (1878)

Markheim (1885)

Thrawn Janet (1881)

Olalla (1885)

The Treasure of Franchard (1883)

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Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (1883)

Plot

Style

Dialogue

Origins

Adaptations

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King Solomon’s Mines by Henry Rider Haggard (1885)