Oxford University Press recently partnered with The Poetry Archive to support Poetry by Heart, a new national poetry competition in England which saw thousands of students aged 14 to 18 competing to become national champion for their skill in memorising and reciting poems by heart. OUP provided free content from OED Online, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and the American National Biography Online to support students participating in the competition. Here, 18 year old winning contestant Kaiti Soultana writes about the experience.

By Kaiti Soultana

What impelled me to participate in Poetry by Heart? Like many of the other contestants, I wanted both to galvanize others and to be inspired myself. It seems that poets strive to enhance the minds of those reading and listening, and I find this so philanthropic. Though a cliché, it is true to say that although I won the competition, I would have won even if I had not gained first place; the experience was invaluable and truly irreplaceable.

What Poetry by Heart offered was an opportunity to deliver a poem aloud and consequently for me to retain it. What I think makes the spoken word superior to reading a poem silently is that delivering a poem aloud allows for both the poet’s and the speaker’s voices to truly be heard. Quite often you find that it is not only the words of the poem but also the sound of it that attracts us to it, even before fully understanding the message it is giving.  That is something I experienced when exploring the part of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that I chose to recite. As competitors, we were provided with an anthology of poems of two categories to choose from and recite: a pre-1914 and a post-1914 list. It was the work of that anonymous 14th century poet that aroused within me such delight, though amusingly I initially understood very little of what I was reading.

It was that yearning to learn, and to explore what would otherwise go unexplored, which I found so inviting about Sir Gawain. I took up the challenge to inspire others through this astonishing, demanding, and somewhat alien ‘old’ English language. The alliterative threads that bound the poem made it easier to immerse both myself and the audience in such an unfamiliar realm, and it was this, I believe, that made my recitation successful.

My choice of post-1914 poetry developed from a somewhat different quality that poetry as a medium triumphs in: the ability to reveal the extraordinary within the ordinary. Elizabeth Bishop seemed to express such perplexed beauty in her poem The Fish, so much so that it established an abnormal yet completely natural and loving bond between myself as a reader and a mere fish.

I began preparing my recitations by acquiring as much basic contextual knowledge about both poem and author, attempting to understand what message each one was trying to convey, yet interpreting it personally and intimately. My progression in understanding each of my poems grew from a minimal surface reading to one where my own interpretation and ideas worked alongside that of the poet’s. I seemed to gain companionship with a person I had never met or talked with. I began to gain an insight into their minds, into the worlds they had constructed. It wasn’t just a poem by rote I had gained, but the appreciation and understanding of a poet’s imagination.

The competition itself seemed far more like a humble gathering of young literary enthusiasts. Through the stages – from school heats to county contests and finally the regional and national finals weekend – the rounds seemed more like a programme of complementary performances. They allowed for initial introductions to mature into lasting friendships – I have experienced the development of such friendships with people across the country thanks to Poetry by Heart.

Though enjoyable, I was unsuccessful in casting away the nerves I am often plagued with. However, it was participating in a competition that I sincerely valued and appreciated, that motivated and inspired me, and allowed me to at least control those nerves.

In addition to viewing others’ regional heats, Poetry by Heart’s organisers scheduled excursions for participants to the London Eye, the British Library and tours of the National Portrait Gallery, none of which I had been privileged to visit before. I was stimulated to explore a small part of London, an opportunity that was exciting, fun, and invaluable.

The weekend itself was nothing shy of extraordinary. It seems unanimous that what we had gained by offering ourselves as orators of the poems was more than just the memory of the poem itself. What I gained was far more remarkable; I discovered the importance of poetry to human beings, and how this importance has spanned generations. It continues to grow as a form of universal expression, and with great thanks to Poetry by Heart I have truly understood its often unacknowledged value.

Kaiti Soultana is 18 and studying A levels at Bilborough College, Nottingham.

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Image credits:  Courtesy of Poetry by Heart; do not reproduce without permission.

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Spring 2013 marks two significant anniversaries for Alexander Pope, perhaps the most representative and alien English poet of the 18th century. Pope is memorialized both for the 325th anniversary of his birth, on 21 May 1688, and for the 300th anniversary of two significant literary acts: one a publication, the other a proposal to publish.

On the 7 March 1713, Pope published one of his most important poems. Windsor Forest was published the same month as the signing of the multi-stage Treaty of Utrecht, with which, in part, the poem deals: “Hail, sacred Peace! hail long-expected days” (Windsor Forest, line 353). The redistribution of territories determined by that treaty created various, continuing friction points between Protestant Britain and its Catholic adversaries: France ceded vast North American territories to Great Britain leaving French Canada surrounded by English lands, while Spain ceded Gibraltar to Britain and acquired the Falkland islands (Islas Malvinas). It was a period of global, territorial conflicts, but passions were inflamed by the Protestant/Catholic schism.

Later that same year, Pope made public, and sought subscriptions for, a proposal for the first major English translation of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey since that of Shakespeare’s contemporary George Chapman (1559–1634). Pope’s Homeric effort became one of the major cultural accomplishments of the period. In a letter of 4 October 1726, Voltaire praised Pope’s fingers, “which have dressed Homer so becomingly in an english coat”.

As a man, Pope himself has at least two claims on our attention, though his anniversary will undoubtedly rank lower in public attention than would that of many other poets of these Isles. A Google search on English poets by forename and surname lets us plot a rough graph of Internet popularity:

However, there are other digital measures of a poet’s popularity. Pope’s epigrammatic style and his rhyming couplets, which suffered critically at the hands of the Romantics and later generations, now proves to be remarkably popular among the choruses of Twitter, where there are a number of “Pope” persona:

— and endless Pope Tweets, quoting (or misquoting) lines from his verse. Pope’s epigrammatic couplets were crafted to place a succinct thought within a limited number of words:

One of the things that continues to intrigue about Pope, is his extraordinary confidence and ability to focus on his vision of what he should do and be in life. Two years before the date marked by this anniversary, Pope published one of his two great “epigrammatic essays” — An Essay on Criticism (first published anonymously, 15 May 1711). Pope was only 23, and the work does more than mark him out as a singular and singularly memorable essayist on the human condition. It presents us with the noteworthy instance of a young man, still at the beginning of his literary career, publicly admonishing and correcting the established critical community. It reminds me of the equally confident, if often less accessible, manifestoes of the Modernist movement.

For Pope was no social or cultural insider, but what might be thought of as a “corporeal and incorporeal outsider.” Pope was twice marginalized in his world. Marginalized once for his beliefs — as a Catholic, then barred from teaching, attending university, voting, or holding public office on pain of imprisonment. The anti-Catholic sentiment was aggravated by the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), which led to a statute preventing Catholics from living within 10 miles (16 km) of either London or Westminster.

These constraints would have pinched especially hard on the ambitions of Pope’s essentially middle class family. They were prosperous enough, however, to be able to escape to the country, moving to a small estate in Binfield (or Bynfield), Berkshire, when Alexander was twelve. Binfield was only a dozen kilometres west of Great Windsor Park, though remains of the ancient royal hunting grounds of Windsor Forest undoubtedly “crown’d with tufted trees” (Windsor Forest, line 27) various plots between the two. On the verges of these forests, you could pretend to be anyone, and one’s beliefs could be recast in the poetic imagery of patriotism and Classical analogy we find in Windsor Forest.

Estates at Windsor, Berkshire — British Library, “The unveiling of Britain”. © The British Library Board Royal Ms. 18.D.III, f.32

Pope could never escape his second marginalization, however, for he literally carried it with him on his back. From the age of twelve, exactly at the time of the family move from London, Pope suffered from a form of tuberculosis that affected the bone, deforming his body, stunting his growth. Pope grew to a height of only 4 feet 6 inches (1.37 m), and was left with a severe hunchback.

The disease received its formal medical description in Pope’s lifetime, though too late to help the poet. A decade before Pope’s death in 1744, a Liverpool surgeon, H. Park, wrote an epistolary volume in which characteristics and (painful) treatments of the disease were described: An Account of a new method of treating diseases of the joints of the knee and elbow, in a letter to Mr. Percival Pott. (London: J. Johnson, 1733). The recipient of the “letter”, the remarkable English surgeon Sir Percivall Pott (1714–1788) was one of the founders of orthopedy, and the first scientist to demonstrate that cancer may be caused by an environmental carcinogen. He published a volume on Some few general remarks on fractures and dislocations (London: Hawes, Clarke and Collins, 1768), providing the first clinical description of extrapulmonary tuberculosis (tuberculous spondylitis), the disease with which Pope suffered, subsequently known as Pott’s disease.

I recommend a re-reading of Windsor Forest with some sense of the twice-excluded author in mind. All good poems can be read in many ways, but one of the things this re-reading proposes is the struggle of an outsider to create a re-vision of the world that contains and excludes him.

Dr. Robert V. McNamee is the Director of the Electronic Enlightenment Project, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

Electronic Enlightenment is a scholarly research project of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, and is available exclusively from Oxford University Press. It is the most wide-ranging online collection of edited correspondence of the early modern period, linking people across Europe, the Americas, and Asia from the early 17th to the mid-19th century — reconstructing one of the world’s great historical “conversations”.

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Image credits: (1) Alexander Pope portrait. NYPL Digital Gallery. (2) Google searches for poets. Copyright Dr. Robert V. McNamee. Used with permission. (3) Screengrab from Twitter by Dr. Robert V. McNamee. (4) Screengrab from Twitter by Dr. Robert V. McNamee. (5) Estates at Windsor, Berkshire — British Library, “The unveiling of Britain.” © The British Library Board Royal Ms. 18.D.III, f.32. Used with permission. (6) From a mid-19th century text book. Out of copyright.

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By Pat Rogers

There’s never been a shortage of readers to love and admire Alexander Pope. But if you think you don’t, or wouldn’t, like his poetry, you’re in good company there too. Ever since his own day, detractors have stuck their oar in, some blasting the work and some determined to write off the writer.  A noted poet and anthologist, James Reeves, wrote an entire book in 1976 to assail Pope’s achievement and influence. But it has never succeeded; Pope, a combative as well as a marvellously skilled author, keeps coming back for more. He produced more first-rate poems than anyone else in the eighteenth century, as we might guess from his fame across Europe and his huge appeal in America before and after the Revolution.

In truth, much of the hostility he faced in his lifetime had to with fear of his scathing wit. “Yes, I am proud; I must be proud to see / Men not afraid of God, afraid of me,” he wrote late in his career. The stark clarity with which he states the idea must have made quite a few contemporaries shuffle another step backwards.

It doesn’t take much more to enjoy Pope than a reasonably good ear and a feeling for language. To read his works carefully will give anyone a grounding in how lines sing, how to make words bend and let meanings fold into each other. It will spare you a whole module on the creative writing course. Sound and sense are delicately adjusted, rhyme and rhythm subtly integrated, wit and wisdom dispersed with the utmost economy.

The most single brilliant item is The Rape of the Lock, completed in 1714 when he was only twenty-five. On the surface this relates how a brutal upper-class twit attacks an airhead socialite. You can find the tale amusingly retold by Sophie Gee in her novel The Scandal of the Season (2007). Actually the ravishing of a beauty in this ravishingly beautiful poem amounts to cutting off just one of her curls, but the text constantly insists that a more serious violation has gone on.

Queen Anne, whose court is satirized in Pope’s ‘The Rape of the Lock’.

The main trick is to build up this critique from a phrase, a verse, a couplet, a paragraph, and a canto, all serving as fractals which contain within themselves the central paradox announced in the first two lines: “What dire offence from am’rous causes springs, / What mighty contests rise from trivial things.” The contrasting terms here form what we call antithesis, borrowing an expression originally used in classical rhetoric. Pope extends antithesis to his grammar, his versification, his metaphors, and his narrative.

A single bit of wordplay encapsulates this process. It comes in the famous pun that describes the queen’s routine at Hampton Court, where she “sometimes counsel take[s] — and sometimes tea.” In the previous couplet, British statesmen plot the fall of “foreign tyrants,” but also of “nymphs at home.” Everything from the tiniest unit up to the overall shape of the work is designed to enforce the same balanced oppositions between the grand and the slight. And none of it ever ceases to be funny.

Pope’s supreme technique meant he could excel in almost every genre available to him. His powerful satire The Dunciad makes mincemeat of the vapid scribblers in Grub Street. You don’t have to know who they were to get most of the jokes. An Epistle to a Lady might have been written as a set text for modern feminists, so provocatively does it raise issues on the gender front for debate and appraisal. An Epistle to Bathurst provides a telling picture of the repercussions of the South Sea Bubble in 1720. While Pope doesn’t forget the investors who lost everything, he bothers less about perpetrators in the financial industry than about the hypocrisy of a corrupt crew in government and parliament whose regulatory touch was so light as to be invisible.

For a long time An Essay on Man was about the most cited treatise worldwide on morals and metaphysics, while An Essay on Criticism wittily expounds – well, criticism. Pope’s version of Homer remains among the few translations of a masterpiece to constitute a major work in its own right when converted to the host language. He also wrote superb prose, for example in his good humoured but damning retorts to the scandalous publisher Edmund Curll.

In case you thought Pope sounds a bit remote, you might recall when you last heard someone use phrases like these: “To err is human, to forgive divine” ; “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread” ; “Hope springs eternal in the human breast” ; “Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?” ; “A little learning is a dangerous thing” ; “Damn with faint praise.” We owe them all to one man. These and many more have entered the stock of colloquial language, an idiom Pope learnt to utilize in sparkling poems that explore the full range of the human comedy.

Pat Rogers, Distinguished University Professor, University of South Florida, editor of The Major Works of Alexander Pope for the Oxford World’s Classics, and author of works on Swift, Defoe, Fielding, Johnson, Boswell, and Austen among others.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.

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Image credit: Portrait of Queen Anne by John Smith (1652–1742) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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The failures of leadership… the destructive power of beauty… the quest for fame… the plight of women… the brutality of war… Such themes have endured for over 2,700 years in Homer’s classic The Iliad — from the flight of Helen and Paris, to the fury of Menelaus and Agamemnon, to the fight between Hector and Achilles. We sat down with Barbara Graziosi and Anthony Verity, the writer of the introduction and translator respectively, to discuss the new Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Iliad.

How did the Ancient Greek performance tradition inform the text of The Iliad?

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What can you tell us about the writer of The Iliad?

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How is the anger of Achilles portrayed in the poem?

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How is war, violence, and death portrayed in the poem?

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Describe the translation process.

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Barbara Graziosi is Professor of Classics at Durham University. She has written extensively on Homer.

Anthony Verity taught Classics in several schools in England, his last job being Master of Dulwich College. He has translated Theocritus and Pindar for Oxford World’s Classics, his OWC edition of The Illiad was published in September, and he is currently working on a version of Homer’s Odyssey. Read his previous blog post: “Who needs another translation of Homer’s Iliad?”

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics onTwitter and Facebook.

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The Trojan War may be well known thanks to movies, books, and plays around the world, but did the war that spurred so much fascination even occur? The excerpt below from The Trojan War: A Very Short Introduction helps answer some of the many questions about the infamous war Homer helped immortalize.

By Eric Cline

The story of the Trojan War has fascinated humans for centuries and has given rise to countless scholarly articles and books, extensive archaeological excavations, epic movies, television documentaries, stage plays, art and sculpture, souvenirs and collectibles. In the United States there are thirty-three states with cities or towns named Troy and ten four-year colleges and universities, besides the University of Southern California, whose sports teams are called the Trojans. Particularly captivating is the account of the Trojan Horse, the daring plan that brought the Trojan War to an end and that has also entered modern parlance by giving rise to the saying “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts” and serving as a metaphor for hackers intent on wreaking havoc by inserting a “Trojan horse” into computer systems.

But, is Homer’s story convincing? Certainly the heroes, from Achilles to Hector, are portrayed so credibly that it is easy to believe the story. But is it truly an account based on real events, and were the main characters actually real people? Would the ancient world’s equivalent of the entire nation of Greece really have gone to war over a single woman, however beautiful, and for ten long years at that? Could Agamemnon really have been a king of kings able to muster so many men for such an expedition? And, even if one believes that there once was an actual Trojan War, does that mean that the specific events, actions, and descriptions in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, supplemented by additional fragments and commentary in the Epic Cycle, are historically accurate and can be taken at face value? Is it plausible that what Homer describes actually took place and in the way that he says it did?

In fact, the problem in providing definitive answers to all of these questions is not that we have too little data, but that we have too much. The Greek epics, Hittite records, Luwian poetry, and archaeological remains provide evidence not of a single Trojan war but rather of multiple wars that were fought in the area that we identify as Troy and the Troad. As a result, the evidence for the Trojan War of Homer is tantalizing but equivocal. There is no single “smoking gun.”

According to the Greek literary evidence, there were at least two Trojan Wars (Heracles’ and Agamemnon’s), not simply one; in fact, there were three wars, if one counts Agamemnon’s earlier abortive attack on Teuthrania. Similarly, according to the Hittite literary evidence, there were at least four Trojan Wars, ranging from the Assuwa Rebellion in the late 15th century BCE to the overthrow of Walmu, king of Wilusa in the late 13th century BCE. And, according to the archaeological evidence, Troy/Hisarlik was destroyed twice, if not three times, between 1300 and 1000 BCE. Some of this has long been known; the rest has come to light more recently. Thus, although we cannot definitively point to a specific “Trojan War,” at least not as Homer has described it in the Iliad and the Odyssey, we have instead found several such Trojan wars and several cities at Troy, enough that we can conclude there is a historical kernel of truth — of some sort — underlying all the stories.

But would the Trojan War have been fought because of love for a woman? Could a ten-year war have been instigated by the kidnapping of a single person? The answer, of course, is yes, just as an Egypto-Hittite war in the 13th century BCE was touched off by the death of a Hittite prince and the outbreak of World War I was sparked by the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. But just as one could argue that World War I would have taken place anyway, perhaps triggered by some other event, so one can argue that the Trojan War would inevitably have taken place, with or without Helen. The presumptive kidnapping of Helen can be seen merely an excuse to launch a pre-ordained war for control of land, trade, profit, and access to the Black Sea.

In 1964, the eminent historian Moses Finley suggested that we should move the narrative of the Trojan War from the realm of history into the realm of myth and poetry until we have more evidence. Many would argue that we now have that additional evidence, particularly in the form of the Hittite texts discussing Ahhiyawa and Wilusa and the new archaeological data from Troy. The lines between reality and fantasy might be blurred, particularly when Zeus, Hera, and other gods become involved in the war, and we might quibble about some of the details, but overall, Troy and the Trojan War are right where they should be, in northwestern Anatolia and firmly ensconced in the world of the Late Bronze Age, as we now know from archaeology and Hittite records, in addition to the Greek literary evidence from both Homer and the Epic Cycle. Moreover, the enduring themes of love, honor, war, kinship, and obligations, which so resonated with the later Greeks and then the Romans, have continued to reverberate through the ages from Aeschylus and Euripides to Virgil and thence to Chaucer, Shakespeare, and beyond, so that the story still holds broad appeal even today, more than three thousand years after the original events, or some variation thereof, took place.

Eric H. Cline is Professor of Classics and Anthropology and chair of the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, as well as director of the Capitol Archaeological Institute at George Washington University. He is Co-Director of the ongoing excavations at Megiddo (biblical Armageddon) in Israel and the author of Biblical Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction, winner of the 2011 Biblical Archaeology Society Publication Award for the Best Popular Book on Archaeology. His recent addition to the Very Short Introductions series is The Trojan War: A Very Short Introduction.

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with Very Short Introductions on Facebook, and OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday!

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Image Credit: The Procession of the Trojan Horse in Troy 1773. Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo. Via Web Gallery of Art. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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I’ve been working on the ‘lived experience’ of early modern religion: what it was actually like to be a Protestant in 16^th or 17^th century Britain. And I’ve become more and more convinced there’s a crucial element of the story almost completely missing from the standard accounts: children.

Read most histories of early modern religion and you could be forgiven for concluding that there were no children in this period. But we are dealing with huge numbers of people: perhaps a third of the population of early modern England was under 12. And while every adult had of course been a child at some point, large numbers of children never became adults.

The sources are very thin. Most early modern Protestants saw childhood as a period of mere depravity, needing only correction. The period’s most popular devotional work, Lewis Bayly’s The Practice of Piety, asked, “what is youth but an vntamed Beast? … Ape-like, delighting in nothing but in toyes and baubles?” But a few patterns do emerge. Saying grace at table was, almost routinely, a child’s role in a family. Children’s patterns of prayer can be glimpsed sometimes – learning prayers by rote, or making vows. And we do have occasional testimonies of children’s actual religious experience – a seven year old finding “unexpressible joys” in reading and prayer, a four year old stargazing and meditating on God’s power.

A unique image of a Protestant family at prayer, from Auckland Castle, County Durham. As usual, the children are there only as an afterthought.

But we would be stuck with these glimpses if it not for two extraordinary accounts written in the 1630s. Richard Norwood and Elizabeth Isham had both read Augustine’s Confessions, newly translated into English, and had learned from it that it was worth paying close attention to how God had worked in their lives before their actual conversions. So Norwood described his schoolboy psalm-singing, and how, aged seven or eight, he was “taken with great admiration of some places” in the Bible. He remembered (and counted as a sin) “at several times reasoning … about whether there were a God”. Adults assured him that God loved him, but he was not sure “how they could know it was so”. And when he tried to share his enthusiasm for Scripture with his parents, “they made me little answer (so far as I remember) but seemed rather to smile at my childishness”. This made him wonder whether what the preachers taught was true, “or whether elder people did not know them to be otherwise, only they were willing that we children should be so persuaded of them, that we might follow our books the better and be kept in from play.” Norwood was that rare thing: an adult who could remember what it was really like to be a child.

Or again, the Northamptonshire gentlewoman Elizabeth Isham described how her religion took shape in counterpoint to her mother. She was taught to pray from infancy, but when she was eight years old, “I came to a fuller knowledge of thee”, through praying earnestly “to avoyde my mothers displeasure”. Her mother’s wrath was no joke: in her rages, Judith Isham had a servant hold her daughter down, the better to beat her. Elizabeth recalled that “in these dayes feareing my parents I had no other refuge but to flie unto thee”.

It was her grandmother who showed her another way. When the old lady was ill, and the nine year old Elizabeth was caring for her, she was struck by the delight her grandmother took in her devotional reading. For Elizabeth, as for so many other children before and since, books were her liberation. As her reading accelerated from her tenth year, her religion blossomed. It also brought greater peace with her mother, who took advice from a clergyman friend and developed a new way of dealing with her daughter. When she saw Elizabeth misbehave, instead of flying into a rage, she would “holde her fan afore her face”, praying for patience and judgement. This gave Elizabeth time to reflect on her error, so that as soon as the fan was lowered she would go and ask forgiveness, and would be set a penitential task, “which I performed with the more dilligence she having delt so well with mee”. We rarely come so close to a happy ending.

These are very individual stories, and that is part of the point: children are individuals, and neither happy nor unhappy families all resemble one another. But they do remind us that children take their own lives, including their religion, immensely seriously, and can be very finely attuned to managing the loving, unpredictable, condescending, inattentive and sometimes incomprehensibly punitive adult world.

They also suggest to me that there is much more to be done here. We have long learned the importance of gender to any serious historical analysis. It is time to pay attention to this equally pervasive division, and to this even more forgotten slice of humanity.

Alec Ryrie studied History and Theology at the universities of Cambridge, St Andrews, and Oxford. He is now Head of Theology and Religion and Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University. His most recent book, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain, published in April 2013. His previous books include The Age of Reformation (2009), The Sorcerer’s Tale (2008), The Origins of the Scottish Reformation (2006) and The Gospel and Henry VIII (2003).

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Image credit: Courtesy of Alec Ryrie. Do not use without permission.

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The build-up to the release of Baz Luhrmann’s frenetic, chromatic interpretation of The Great Gatsby was a wild ride for several of us who live and breathe F. Scott Fitzgerald daily. One minute you’re grading end-of-the semester papers, fighting the losing battle against the extinction of the apostrophe, the next you’re fielding phone calls from NPR or the Associated Press. The experience has been a whirlwind introduction to media relations. I’ve learned, for example, never to declare, “I’m a homer!” when asked my feelings about Fitzgerald over a static-crackling phone line. Mishearing will confuse even the best of reporters.

I’ll say unabashedly that the movie delighted me, as it did many scholars I admire, including such leading Fitzgerald folks as Jackson R. Bryer, James L. W. West III, and Anne Margaret Daniel, as well as my writer pal Therese Anne Fowler, author of the current bestseller Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald. Frankly, any flick that can make Rex Reed’s pacemaker misfire is aces by me. And while I appreciate the objections of The New Yorker and Salon, I honestly think a razzle-dazzle, Adderall-induced Gatsby is what we need at this moment in time—or maybe what I need after so many years now of struggling to persuade students and other resisting readers that Fitzgerald’s lapidary prose isn’t “boring.” For whatever credibility it might cost me, I’m genuinely less interested in what David Denby or Peter Travers think than in watching general audiences dress up as flappers, slip on 3D glasses, and “fangirl” on Tumblr and Facebook. After all, I’ve been “fanboying” since long before I ever presumed to understand the novel.

Elizabeth Debicki as Jordan Baker and Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby.

That said, I was struck that, for all the familiar lines and symbols incorporated into Luhrmann and Craig Pearce’s screenplay, how many of my personal moments didn’t end up on the screen. After returning from a late-night sneak preview, I sat out by my pool (which, unlike Gatsby’s, has no monogram at the bottom) and reread the book for the zillionth time. If nothing else, the resulting list shows how inexhaustibly intricate The Great Gatsby is.

10. The Dedication. By 1925, Fitzgerald had already dedicated his first short-story collection, Flappers and Philosophers (1920), to his wife/muse, Zelda Sayre. Rather than simply repeat himself he crafted an elegantly metrical acknowledgment of her inspiration that has since become a poignant proclamation of how all roads in life led back to her: “Once Again to Zelda.” Gertrude Stein famously complimented the melody of the phrase, telling Fitzgerald, “[I]t shows that you have a background of beauty and tenderness and that is a comfort.” It’s since become one of the most quoted dedications in literature, providing Marlene Wagman-Geller a wonderful title for her 2008 study of “The Stories Behind Literature’s Most Intriguing Dedications.” I even borrowed the line for a recent reminiscence in The Southern Review on reading Nancy Milford’s biography Zelda in college.

9.  The “frosted wedding cake of the ceiling.” When we first see Carey Mulligan as Daisy it’s amid the whip-cracking flutter of curtains at the Buchanans’ East Egg estate. These “pale flags” nearly suffocate Nick Carraway and viewers alike for a few seconds, giving us a sense of what it’s like to be swathed suddenly in opulence. Yet I’ve always been struck more by Fitzgerald’s clever description of the trim and plaster in this “rosy-colored room” as a decorated cake, a metaphor that glides by as smoothly and effortlessly as a spatula stroke of icing. It’s indicative of how finely detailed and sculpted even passing details are. Weirdly enough, Ernest Hemingway would rip off this line in his least graceful novel, To Have and Have Not (1937).

8. Myrtle Wilson’s change, in a single chapter, from crêpe-de-chine to muslin to chiffon. In a book in which stacks of custom-made shirts can bring a woman to tears, every mention of fabric is a significant index of character texture. In Chapter II, Tom Buchanan’s mistress changes clothes three times in rapid succession as Fitzgerald dramatizes her hopelessly vulgar pretensions to style. From what I remember, Isla Fisher only sports two different outfits in her initial sequence with the adulterous Tom Buchanan, but the clothes are emphasized less than her Cupid’s bow lips and boop-boop-de-doop delivery (a slightly anachronistic nod to Betty Boop, who wasn’t born until 1930).

Isla Fisher as Myrtle Wilson, Joel Edgerton as Tom Buchanan, Adelaide Clemens as Catherine, Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway and Kate Mulvany as Mrs. McKee in The Great Gatsby.

7. Mr. McKee’s underwear. I burst out laughing when Eden Falk came on-screen with the silliest mustache this side of Matt Damon in True Grit. But the parvenu photographer Chester McKee is barely more than an extra in the movie and his most famous scene in the book is nowhere to be found. At the end of Chapter II, after an inebriated ellipsis, Nick discovers himself next to a bed where McKee is described as “sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands.” And while “great portfolio” is not a euphemism, the sudden appearance of underoos has launched a thousand seminar and book-club debates about Nick’s sexual leanings.

6. That tear. The first Gatsby party Nick attends is a stylistic tour-de-force of style and technique, with Fitzgerald employing synesthesia and tense shifts to dramatize the sensory dissociation of a wild time. My absolute favorite passage in the “blue gardens” interlude concerns the drunken chorus girl who sings as the revelry gives way to sleepy exhaustion. The singer brings herself to tears, causing her mascara run in rivulets. “A humorous suggestion was made that she sing the notes on her face,” Nick reports. Going into the movie, I was sure that staves and staffs would float off the 3D screen at me and that I would bathe in that tear. Alas.…

5. Gatsby’s guest list. Whole academic careers have been spent chasing down potential Long Island analogues for the social register Nick recites of “those who accepted Gatsby’s hospitality and paid him the subtle tribute of knowing nothing whatever about him.” Luhrmann does give us a Clarence Endive, but I missed Dr. Webster Civet, Willie Voltaire, the Smirkes, the Scullys, and Edgar Beaver, for whom I’ve always felt a pang of empathy: “[His] hair, they say, turned cotton-white one winter afternoon for no reason at all.”

4. The bad driver motif/Myrtle’s “left breast … swinging loose like a flap.” Cars abound in the movie; the driving-into-Manhattan scenes are so fast and furious I kept expecting Vin Diesel to squeal into the frame. But while Luhrmann includes the drunken fender bender at the end of Gatsby’s first party, we don’t get the motif of bad driving as a symbol for moral irresponsibility. This is largely because in the book it’s staged between Nick and Jordan Baker, whose romance is excised from the movie. (As Jordan says, “It takes two to make an accident,” so as long as she sticks around careful people her own carelessness isn’t dangerous.)

Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway and Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby.

Myrtle Wilson’s hit-and-run demise, meanwhile, has always posed a potential tonal turn into Pure Corn. Neither Shelly Winters in 1949 nor Karen Black in 1974 pulled it off. (Winters mainly because of a risible special effect). While in recent years YouTube has hosted a bizarre string of dangerous reenactment videos—made, one assumes as high-school English class projects—no director is likely to visualize the most gruesome image in Gatsby. Myrtle’s nearly severed breast, which dangles like the amputated car wheel in the fender bender scene. The disfigurement is indicative of the Jazz Age’s morbid fascination with the damage automobiles and new machine technologies in general could inflict on a human body.

3. Wolfsheim (or Wolfshiem, depending on your preference) skipping Gatsby’s funeral. Among the most inventive of Luhrmann’s decisions is his casting of Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan as the man who fixed the 1919 World Series, a gangster based on Arnold Rothstein (newly rediscovered thanks to Boardwalk Empire). The casting is a clever way to sidestep the charges of anti-Semitism that dog the character. But the new Gatsby leaves out the gangster’s weaselly explanation for missing his protégé/front’s funeral (“When a man gets killed I never like to get mixed up in it”). The movie also avoids one of the strangest literary coincidences ever by not showing the name of Wolfsheim’s business, “The Swastika Holding Company.” Fitzgerald apparently chose this ancient symbol without knowing Adolf Hitler had adopted it for the Nazi Party in 1920.

2. The unnamed obscenity. In the final two pages, as Fitzgerald builds up to his “boats against the current” climax, he shows Nick erasing a dirty word scrawled by a trespasser on Gatsby’s immaculate white steps. Had Hemingway written Gatsby we’d have known exactly what that word was. At the very least, we’d have had the f—ks and c—s—rs he was forced to put in their place. (And Scribner’s wouldn’t even let him get away with c—s—r.) In his worst alcoholic stupors Fitzgerald reportedly rained down F- and C-bombs like artillery shells. Part of his charm, however, is that in his writing he was averse even to “violent innuendo,” much less the “obstetrical conversation” of the meretricious young men at Gatsby’s parties. Erasing the word is Nick’s way of keeping even the detritus of Gatsby’s dream in the polished state of his naiveté.

1. Taking Ravenously, Taking Unscrupulously. In the novel, Fitzgerald breaks up the backstory of Daisy Fay and Jay Gatsby’s 1917 romance into at least three separate flashbacks. The middle one concerns the apotheosizing kiss by which the penniless soldier “wed[s] his unutterable visions to her perishable breath”—a long, intricate passage full of stars and flowers that I’ve seen grown men weep over when read aloud. Later, however, we discover a description of Gatsby first “taking” Daisy out of less noble intentions (“He took what he could get, ravenously and unscrupulously—eventually he took Daisy one still October night, took her because he had no real right to touch her hand”), implying the intriguing possibility that the transformative kiss occurs after their first sexual encounter.

“I wish we could just run away…” – Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan)

The chronology is vague, but the ambiguity reinforces a critical truism: The Great Gatsby isn’t a love story—it’s the story of American self-making. Yet Luhrmann depicts Gatsby as such a romantic naïf in his flashback scenes that true love seems his compelling motivation. Instead, for Fitzgerald, the romance merely validates his hero’s “Platonic conception of himself,” with Daisy a means to an end.

Luhrmann’s insistence that Gatsby is a “great, tragic love story”—a melodrama on the order of Gone With the Wind—is partly why he’s taking such a critical drubbing. But the paradoxes of Gatsby’s “colossal” delusion are probably too complex for a splashy movie, and I found the love story surprisingly affecting, especially the added moment when Daisy attempts to telephone Gatsby just as Wilson arrives to avenge Myrtle’s death. The scene made me empathize with Daisy emotionally rather than intellectualizing her predicament as the book leaves me to do. Maybe that’s the greatest benefit of pushing the romance angle: if a reinterpretation spares me from having to explain one more time why Jay Gatsby would fall for a ditzy “bitch goddess,” I’m down.

In the end, I’m glad we have a version that is controversial and divisive as opposed to the suffocating reverence of the 1974 Robert Redford/Mia Farrow snoozefest, which makes the Jazz Age seems about as fun and dangerous as a dinner with one’s parents. Perhaps I have low expectations for literature and reading at this point, but any version that stops audiences from using “dull” and The Great Gatsby in the same sentence is performing a public service for me. On my way out of the sneak preview I overheard an excited teenage girl declare, “I didn’t cry this much at the end of Titanic.”

Mission accomplished, Luhrmann. Mission accomplished.

Kirk Curnutt is professor and chair of English at Troy University’s Montgomery, Alabama, campus, where Scott Fitzgerald met Zelda Sayre in 1918. His publications include A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald (2004), the novels Breathing Out the Ghost (2008) and Dixie Noir (2009), and Brian Wilson (2012). He is currently at work on a reader’s guide to Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not.

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Image credit: All images from thegreatgatsby.warnerbros.com. © 2013 Warner Bros. Ent. Used for the purposes of illustration.

The post 10 moments I love in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby that aren’t in Baz Luhrmann’s film appeared first on OUPblog.

By Kirsty Doole

In this month’s Oxford World’s Classics reading list, we decided to celebrate National Short Story Month by selecting some of favourite story collections. We have everything here from Gaskell to Cervantes, Fitzgerald to Kafka. But have we missed your favourite? Let us know.

Exemplary Stories by Miguel de Cervantes

While Cervantes is best known for Don Quixote, he also wrote stories, which were actually much more popular in his day than the larger work. The Exemplary Stories range from the picaresque to the satirical, and skilfully draw on colloquial language and farce to create a tension between the everyday and the literary. While Cervantes wants his readers to reach their own moral conclusions, he also paints vivid pictures of the coincidental and the incredible, such as a young nobleman undergoing a change of identity at the behest of a gipsy girl, and two young boys indulging in a life of crime. There are also talking dogs philosophizing in a ward full of syphilitics… and who doesn’t want to read that?

Tales of the Jazz Age by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Everyone knows that Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby (especially after the release of Baz Luhrmann’s film) but he was also a short story writer. Tales of the Jazz Age was his second short story collection, and it contains some of the best examples of his talent as a writer of short fiction. These stories demonstrate the same originality and inventive range as his great novels, as he chronicles the hedonistic 1920s. This collection contains two of his greatest stories, ‘May Day’ and ‘The Diamond as Big as the Ritz’.

Cousin Phillis and Other Stories by Elizabeth Gaskell

Elizabeth Gaskell has long been one of the most popular of Victorian novelists, yet in her lifetime her shorter fictions were just as admired as North and South or Wives and Daughters. This edition’s title story, Cousin Phillis, is a lyrical depiction of a vanishing way of life and a girl’s disappointment in love. The other five stories were all written during the 1850s for Dickens’s periodical Household Words. They range from a quietly original tale of urban poverty and a fallen woman in ‘Lizzie Leigh’ to an historical tale of a great family in ‘Morton Hall’; echoes of the French Revolution, the bleakness of winter in Westmorland, and a tragic secret are brought vividly to life.

A Hunger Artist and Other Stories by Franz Kafka

Enigmatic, satirical, often bleakly humorous, these stories approach human experience at a tangent: a singing mouse, an ape, an inquisitive dog, and a paranoid burrowing creature are among the protagonists, as well as the professional starvation artist. A patient seems to be dying from a metaphysical wound; the war-horse of Alexander the Great steps aside from history and adopts a quiet profession as a lawyer. Fictional meditations on art and artists, and a series of aphorisms that come close to expressing Kafka’s philosophy of life, further explore themes that recur in his major novels.

A portrait of Katherine Mansfield in 1918, by Anne Estelle Rice [public domain]

Selected Stories by Katherine Mansfield

Virginia Woolf was a keen admirer of Katherine Mansfield’s work, saying it was “the only writing I have ever been jealous of”. Other admirers included Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, and Elizabeth Bowen.

Our edition of her Selected Stories covers the full range of Mansfield’s fiction, from her early satirical stories to the nuanced comedy of ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ and the macabre and ominous ‘A Married Man’s Story’. Ranging between Europe and her native New Zealand, disruption is a constant theme, whether the tone is comic, tragic, nostalgic, or domestic, echoing Mansfield’s disrupted life and the fractured expressions of Modernism.

The Complete Short Stories by Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde was already famous as a wit and raconteur when he first began to publish his short stories in the late 1880s. The stories are full to the brim with Wilde’s originality, literary skill, and sophistication. They include poignant fairy-tales such as ‘The Happy Prince’ and ‘The Selfish Giant’, and the extravagant comedy and social observation of ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’ and ‘The Canterville Ghost’. They also encompass the daring narrative experiments of ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’, Wilde’s fictional investigation into the identity of the dedicatee of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and the ‘Poems in Prose’, based on the Gospels.

French Decadent Tales

While ‘Decadence’ was a movement that swept most of Europe, its epicentre was Paris.  On the eve of Freud’s early discoveries, writers such as Gourmont, Lorrain, Maupassant, Mirbeau, Richepin, Schwob, and Villiers engaged in a species of wild analysis of their own, perfecting the art of short fiction as they did so. Their stories teem with addicts, maniacs, and murderers as they strive to outdo each other. This selection of tales includes well-known writers such as those mentioned above, as well as lesser known figures such as Léon Bloy, Jean Richepin, and the Belgian Georges Rodenbach.

Kirsty Doole is Publicity Manager for Oxford World’s Classics, amongst other things.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.

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Image credit: Portrait of Katherine Mansfield (1918). By Anne Estelle Rice [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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There is a very specific language of Gothic and horror literature that has its roots buried deep in the history of English: doom has been around since Old English; dread carries over from Middle English; eerie, that sense of vague superstitious uneasiness, enters Middle English through Scottish. The adjectives are harsh and guttural: moons are always gibbous, the trees eldritch. Rather famously, Sigmund Freud begins his essay on ‘The Uncanny’ by exploring for several pages the etymology of the German term unheimlich (literally the ‘unhomely’, but cleverly translated using the ancient Scots word ‘uncanny’). Freud rests his entire argument about this elusive, uneasy emotion which is often said to be typical of Gothic fiction on the strange instability of this word. Heimlich and unheimlich are not always opposites, but can come to mean the same thing. What is the most alien, weird, and foreign – the uncanny – produces its effect precisely because it erupts in the most domestic, familiar, and ‘canny’ spaces of the home.

A name to be remembered

It is no surprise that the Gothic, a literature that emerged from the heart of northern Protestant Europe in the eighteenth century, uses an insistently harsh and ancient Northern tongue for its disordered and fantastical imaginings of murky deeds in the Dark Ages centuries before Enlightenment. The Gothic avoids the erudition of suspicious southern Latin sophisticates for a harsher Anglo-Saxon tongue. And if we still associate the modern Gothic with this language of the north it is largely down to the influence of one writer: H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937). In the 1920s and 30s Lovecraft wrote pulp horror fictions about men undone by nasty tentacled gods in the backwoods of New England or at the ends of Earth amongst the savage races of Pacific islands or the keening penguins of the Antarctic. Horrible things slithered and slimed, invading human bodies and threatening all human values. He published in amateur journals with tiny print runs and then in pulp magazines like Weird Tales and Astounding Science Fiction. He published only one novella in book form during his life, yet his influence on modern horror has been huge. There is no Stephen King without Lovecraft, no Ridley Scott Alien series, no body-horror, no X Files, no Guillermo del Toro films. Thousands of writers continue to use Lovecraft’s cosmogony of alien gods. He has influenced contemporary philosophy, Goth and Black Metal music, Japanese manga, and there are even religions that worship Lovecraft’s fictional god ‘Cthulhu’.

‘Weird literature’ and Lovecraft’s style

Lovecraft was responsible for fixing down a particular form of ‘weird literature’, a mode of writing slithering somewhere queasily between Gothic and science fiction. ‘Weird’, of course, is another ancient Northern word, found in Saxon, Old German, and Old English. In 2003, young genre writers like China Miéville were associated with a movement christened ‘The New Weird’, further attesting to Lovecraft’s continuing influence into the new century.

The most striking thing about Lovecraft’s prose is his extraordinary, mannered style. His stories are often static mood pieces, building their effect through dense descriptive passages that achieve an almost hypnotic rhythm. He over-eggs every description with tottering towers of adjectives, breaking every decorous rule of ‘good writing’. Adjectives move in packs, flanked by italics and exclamation marks that tell rather than show. He always exhaustively describes what is repeatedly said to be indescribable. He wrote passages like this, from his most famous tale, ‘The Call of Cthulhu’:

That tenebrousness was indeed a positive quality; for it obscured such parts of the inner walls as ought to have been revealed, and actually burst forth like smoke from its aeon-like imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping membranous wings … It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway… The Thing cannot be described – there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order.

The risk of such a style is that it always teeters on collapse, tipping over to become funny rather than frightening. There are many readers who find Lovecraft inept and comical, and this style is certainly very easy to parody. Rather disarmingly, though, Lovecraft tended to agree, berating his own style and failures in letters to friends. He abandoned writing for a long time after the initial rejection of At the Mountains of Madness, feeling there was no point in continuing. But there is a kind of logic to his stylistic awkwardness – it’s as if he needs to make language clatter and break open in order to get at the weird effect. The weird, I always think, is a pulp sublime that slithers out of the carcase of Lovecraft’s broken sentences.

Lovecraft on language and race

Lovecraft was rigorous in imagining his aliens – why would the English language be able to express absolute otherness? His god ‘Cthulhu’ is named with the barest approximation of the horrible sound his debased and savage followers utter. There is even a ritual chant that Lovecraft’s narrator transcribes: Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn (which means, obviously, ‘In the house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming’). Yet even this alien language perhaps distantly echoes the hard consonantal sounds and alliterative rhythms of Old English.

There is a darker reason for Lovecraft’s heavy investment in the old languages of the Gothic. Lovecraft was a deeply reactionary man, the last representative of two decaying New England families, deeply afraid of the whirlwind of change in modern America. He lived two years in New York in the 1920s, the huge influx of immigrants terrifying him and feeding his fantasies of invasion and dethronement. He feared that those of Nordic origin (the descendants of the first American white settlers, the Puritans of the Mayflower escaping Popish decadence in Europe) were being threatened by an influx of the Asiatic and other lesser races. He approvingly quoted from the very popular racist books of Madison Grant, who published works with titles like The Passing of the Great Race. It was after Lovecraft escaped from New York in 1926 and returned to Providence in Rhode Island that he wrote his greatest horror masterpieces. ‘The Horror at Red Hook’ is explicitly about the degenerate world of Brooklyn’s port district (then the largest port in the world), but soon these fantasies of racial in-breeding were transfigured into a register of cosmic threat.

For Lovecraft, the Gothic was deeply tied to questions of inheritance, race and language. He spoke explicitly of the Gothic as a literature of the Nordic tribes, best written by those heralding from the Goths and the Teutons. ‘Wherever the mystic Northern blood was strongest, the atmosphere of the popular tales became most intense,’ he wrote in his essay ‘The Supernatural Horror in Literature’. He spoke of his favourite Gothic authors Edgar Allan Poe, Lord Dunsany and Arthur Machen as possessing ‘a purely Teutonick quality’ in which ‘you ought to find plain evidences of Nordick superiority; and derive therefrom a proper appreciation of your natural as distinguisht from your adopted race-stock.’ Language is never neutral, and in Lovecraft’s extraordinary fiction it is always a question of race and identity, produced in an era of great anxiety about the alleged ‘race suicide’ of the Western world in the aftermath of the Great War.

Always tread carefully: Cthulhu waits dreaming.

This article originally appeared on the OxfordWords blog.

Roger Luckhurst is Professor of Modern Literature at Birkbeck College, University of London. An expert on science fiction and Gothic literature, he is the author of The Invention of Telepathy, Science Fiction, The Trauma Question, and The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy. He is the editor of H. P. Lovecraft’s Classic Horror Stories published by OUP in May 2013.

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When did you first read Jekyll & Hyde?
Well, being Scottish I was brought up with an innate respect for Robert Louis Stevenson, but really fell in love with his books when I was about 17; Kidnapped and Catriona were my first reads. I was becoming really attracted to the romantic and gothic novels — The Mysteries of Udolpho for example — and so turned to Jekyll and Hyde feeling pretty confident of what to expect. It left me shocked. Being a novella it has the ability to really absorb you but with an economy of style and a necessity to get to the essence of the action that leaves you feeling slightly stunned. You are thoroughly immersed in the world and then spat out feeling dazed and, without sounding too melodramatic, grief-struck. I went straight back to the start and read it all again, desperate to re-visit the people and places, and seek to understand more of the hows and whys of Jekyll’s downfall.

Do you think gothic fiction translates naturally to stage adaptations?
There are definitely elements of gothic writing which lend themselves to a theatrical context; strong characterisations and the hugely atmospheric settings for a start. There is always a latent sense of danger too, whether that is danger from an outside source, or an inner conflict within our hero or heroine leading them into nail-biting situations. The fact that Jekyll and Hyde is a gripping thriller, full of suspense, certainly helps to keep an audience on the edge of their seats.

Do you think it is possible to be completely good or evil? Is it as simple as Jekyll is the hero and Hyde is the villain?
No — is the simple answer! Stevenson puts man’s evil nature centre stage (excuse the pun) and not only that, he makes it flesh; gives that evil a face, a name, and even feelings. It is Hyde who weeps in fear of the gallows in his last few days, Poole the butler even feels pity, so is Stevenson asking us to feel pity for a murderer and abuser? It is a complex interpretation of the baser elements of man’s character — shocking even now. In making Jekyll such a flawed hero, Stevenson forces the reader to question the pillars of society. The letters after Jekyll’s name signal him as a man of the highest achievement and learning in British society and if those at the top can court their evil nature, encourage it, and let it loose on society, then whom can we trust? Stevenson digs deep into the most pressing fears of Victorian Britain and strips it of the facade of gentility. In many ways Jekyll is the villain for giving Hyde life and then shielding his deeds, Hyde is just being Hyde.

What do you think is Stevenson’s conclusion on the concept of good and evil?
Well I reckon Stevenson was a canny Scot and knew that a book too overtly controversial would end up banned and he wanted a bestseller. Of course there is the moral at the end, that man trying to play God and dabbling with evil can only lead to doom and great unhappiness. But he raises so many questions within the book that it is impossible to suggest where his sympathies lay. It would take a thesis to break down these arguments fully but I would tentatively suggest that Stevenson was trying to raise the lid on repressed feelings in a society where people cannot be self-expressed leading to internalisation, festering desires, and therefore greater moral depravity. Early on in Jekyll’s confession he states that his desire to be respected amongst his peers led him to hide his true nature; in essence and quite by accident he became innately a liar and a fraud in all his relations. Stevenson lays the blame at the feet of a society rigid in its conformity. I think it’s a call for change and a call to re-evaluate the nature of man and desire.

What are your thoughts on the physical representation of Hyde written by Stevenson, and how will it be portrayed in your adaptation?
Well, it is a tricky one as there have been so many interpretations of the story over the years. Particularly successful are the film adaptations as the outward transformation is a make-up artist’s and designer’s dream. But I think the challenge in production is to capture the inner essence of Hyde. Stevenson mentions physical traits such as ‘troglodytic’ and ‘deformed’ — although no-one can say quite what the physical deformity is — but what is more important to Stevenson is the feeling Hyde evokes in people. It is almost as if buried deep in our human nature we can sense evil, like a dog can smell fear. Also, Hyde walks the streets of London, he takes hansom-cabs, goes to the bank. (In today’s banking establishments one could argue he would fit right in!) The point is he is not so physically repugnant that he can’t function on a day-to day basis. Utterson summarises that it is the ‘radiance of a foul soul that thus transpires through and transfigures its clay continent’ — so not too much of a challenge for the actor!

The novel is very descriptive of the Victorian era. How is this incorporated in your adaptation?
It is a brave picture of London that Stevenson paints: brave in that it is very unflattering. It is an isolated, overcrowded, seedy heart of the Empire; the great and the good living cheek-by-jowl with the lowest of the low. It is a dangerous London where a young man can lose himself in the dead of night; absently wandering abandoned streets. It is also a London that is a playground for Hyde to act out all his debased, violent impulses and as Jekyll describes, ‘Pleasures which…soon began to turn towards the monstrous’. So it is that dangerous London, a London that undercuts the Victorian image of middle-class pleasantry that I want to evoke. In a way London becomes a metaphor for Jekyll’s problem, how he wants to appear, and how he really is.

Creation Theatre’s new production of Jekyll and Hyde will be held in Blackwell’s Bookshop from 8 June-6 July 2013.

Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, essayist, poet, and traveler. The Oxford World’s Classics edition of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales is edited by Roger Luckhurst, Senior Lecturer in English, Birkbeck College, University of London. Stevenson’s short novel, published in 1886, became an instant classic. It was a Gothic horror that originated in a feverish nightmare, whose hallucinatory setting in the murky back streets of London gripped a nation mesmerized by crime and violence.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics onTwitter and Facebook.

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Image credit: Official poster for ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ provided by Creation Theatre.

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The Great Gatsby is one of the best-known American novels, but weirdly, and strangely reflective of Gatsby himself, one of the least understood. The much-awaited Baz Lurhmann version of The Great Gatsby opens in the United States tomorrow, and like Gatsby himself — as a new trailer reminds us — the novel is “guarding secrets.”

In the course of the novel, and no doubt the new film version, we find out what Gatsby is hiding: not only his criminal bootlegging, but also his family name, Gatz, and his poor, ethnic-American roots, which in the end exclude him from the upper-class Anglo-American social circles he hoped to enter. We understand his frustrated American dream, and we understand too why he felt the need to fabricate for himself the pedigree of a patrician family with the Anglo-sounding surname Gatsby.

We’ve all been taught the novel is about the disappearing American dream, but that’s only part of the story, the postwar part. The other part, the “back story” set during World War I, is about the American dream suddenly and dramatically on the rise: how Gatsby, this “Nobody from Nowhere,” as Daisy’s husband Tom calls him, gets to meet Anglo-American princess Daisy on equal terms, so she can fall in love with him. Tom will be “damned” if he sees how Gatsby “got within a mile of [Daisy] unless [he] brought groceries to the back door.”

Of course, what got Gatsby in the front door of her house during the war was his officer status: “he went to her house, at first with other officers from Camp Taylor.” The novel makes clear how the war gave Gatsby a new social status when it made him an officer. He crossed the “indiscernible barbed wire” between classes when he put on the “invisible cloak of his uniform.”

What the novel doesn’t answer is how Gatsby, a poor farm boy from North Dakota and apparently a German-American to boot, got to be an officer in the US Army when Germany was the enemy. The novel definitely “guards secrets” on this point. Did Gatsby fool the army the way he fools most of the people in the novel about himself, with his polished manner, his false name, and his invented family background? The novel’s narrator Nick Carraway naturally comes to doubt Gatsby’s account of a military commission that was supposed to have been issued out of a made-up upper-class background.

Then how does Gatsby make officer? The novel gives two hints on the subject, which most critics have ignored and most readers, informed by the criticism, read right past. In fact, as a college professor, I’ve taught many students who think they remember the novel pretty well from high school but have forgotten that Gatsby was even a soldier.

Nick eventually corrects Gatsby’s romantic saga of his promotion in the American Army, from lieutenant to major at the front as a result of his combat heroics, and notes, “He was a captain before he went to the front.” That’s the first hint. The second is that Fitzgerald put Gatsby at Camp Taylor though it was at Camp Sheridan near Montgomery, Alabama that he met his future wife Zelda — for many critics, the obvious inspiration for Daisy.

Photograph of F. Scott Fitzgerald c. 1921, appearing in “The World’s Work” (June 1921 issue)

Take these tiny, seemingly meaningless hints to the library and the archive, and here’s what you discover. The World War I American army, which had to build an officers’ corps of 200,000 rapidly and almost from scratch, needed some quick methods for identifying men who might be officer material, and specifically those who might make good captains. It developed a couple of unprecedented programs to do so: a rating system for identifying captains, and an intelligence test that identified potential officers and superior officers. The even more radical move that the army made — shocking to privileged young men, such as Fitzgerald, who expected traditional class and ethnic discrimination — was not to exclude immigrants and ethnic Americans from consideration for officer. (Indeed, the army’s initial plan was to have no racial prejudice and to open up such promotions to blacks as well, but the government under pressure from Southern civilian officials nixed the original idea of a complete meritocracy.) The army designated four training camps at which to pioneer the intelligence tests in late 1917 and Camp Taylor was one of them.

Fitzgerald would have known about this because he was at Camp Taylor in 1917, which is when, in the novel, he has Gatsby pass through. Someone like Gatsby — that is, someone born in America and a high-school graduate in an era when the average white man completed less than seven years of schooling — would have aced the intelligence tests, which, as we know, tested for education and cultural literacy, not native intelligence.

The other thing to know about Camp Taylor is that there were a large number of men of German descent there; by end of the war, they numbered nearly 1500. There is no doubt that the American army, though it was fighting Germany, had plenty of German-American officers. A French soldier reported with shock in 1917: “You could not imagine a more extraordinary gathering than this american [sic] army, there is a bit of everything, Greeks, Italians, Turks, Indians, Spanish, also a sizable number of boches [Germans]. Truthfully, almost half of the officers have German origins.”

Why would Fitzgerald have cared about how Gatsby made captain — and more to the point — why would he have been secretive about this information? Here it helps to know that Fitzgerald was frustrated in his own military ambitions and his army record was an embarrassment to him. Though he made it into officer training by taking an entrance exam open to college students, he never got sent to Europe, and captain was precisely the rank he desired and had fantasies about, but never achieved. He stalled at first lieutenant, the rank below. And this was at a charged wartime moment when masculinity was being equated with combat service and army rank. To make matters worse for him, he watched men who he considered his social inferiors make that rank of captain and pass him by.

It is unlikely that Fitzgerald imagined Gatsby making it into officers’ training on the basis of fabrications because fabrications were irrelevant to the army’s personnel processes. One of the reasons the army liked the intelligence tests so much, flawed though they were, was because they got around the problem of relying on soldiers’ possibly false accounts of their own education and skills. As the wartime Committee on Psychology put it in a memorandum, they eliminated “the danger of charletans” (sic).

In short, the particular American mobilization for the World War I, with its new and very particular methods for selecting officers meant that a nobody like Gatsby could be chosen for officer training and specifically promoted to captain while still at camp. The novel reflects this moment — the moment Gatsby wants to recover, in his desperate effort to “repeat the past.” 

It also reflects the backlash of the WASP establishment against upstart “war heroes” like Gatsby after the war. And, unfamiliar with obscure US Army history and taking our current world of meritocratic promotion for granted, that’s all that strikes us about the novel.

Will the new movie reveal Gatsby’s secret? Probably not. But I was happy at least to see that one of the official trailers put emphasis on the mystery of Gatsby’s rise as well as his soldiering in World War I.

Keith Gandal is the author of the 2010 Oxford paperback, The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and the Fiction of Mobilization. He is currently working on a comic memoir on the subject of researching Fitzgerald and the other Lost Generation writers, titled Moments of Clarity, Years of Delusion: A Scholarly Detective Story.

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Image credit: Images one and three from The Great Gatsby movie copyright Warner Brothers Entertainment. Used for purposes of illustration. Image two from The World’s Work (The World’s Work (June 1921), p. 192) Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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By Hal Gladfelder

The opening-night audience at John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera—first performed on 29 January 1728 at the Theatre Royal, Lincoln’s Inn Fields—can’t fully have known what sort of theatrical experience awaited them. The play’s title, for a start, must have struck them as nonsensical. What could a beggar have to do with an opera? To London audiences of the time, opera was a form of entertainment for the elite: prohibitively expensive to attend; composed and performed by foreign artists in a language, Italian, which few understood; musically and dramatically over-sophisticated and abstruse. Meanwhile, far from the heroic and mythic realms in which operas of the time were set, beggars belonged to the squalid realm of the modern city—especially, the megalopolis of London, with its poverty, violence, hubbub, and filth. To bring those realms together was absurd. Even Gay’s close friends Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and William Congreve were unsure what he was up to, and uneasy as to how this “odd thing” The Beggar’s Opera would be received.

As things turned out, they needn’t have worried: Gay’s odd, hybrid work was to prove the hit not just of the year but of the century, running for a record-breaking sixty-two performances in its first season, and revived countless times since, including performances by a troupe of child actors, “The Lilliputians,” in season two. What drew audiences may at first have been the mere novelty of the piece, its incongruous mix of elements from disparate pre-existing forms, which is reflected in the name of the genre Gay had invented: the ballad opera. As Gay conceived it, the ballad opera alternates spoken dialogue with songs set to familiar tunes, chiefly folk tunes or street ballads, but also songs stolen or parodied from other, current plays and operas. In formal terms, the ballad opera was the model for all those later works that combined spoken and sung elements: the German Singspiel, the Savoy operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan, and the Broadway musical. But one of Gay’s cheekiest, and most commercially astute, moves was to use melodies his audience already knew and loved. Doing so not only saved him the expense of hiring a new composer but allowed playgoers the pleasures of the familiar. The music offset the harshness of the play’s satirical equation of high and low life, whereby the underworld of thieves and whores is just a mirror image of the elite world of politicians and courtiers, both of them run according to a system of mercenary betrayal. Building his story around some of the most popular tunes of the day, Gay created not only the first musical but the first jukebox musical: precursor, unlikely as it may seem, to such theatrical hits as Mamma Mia! and Jersey Boys, and such television and film works as Dennis Potter’s Pennies from Heaven and the Gene Kelly-Stanley Donen classic, Singin’ in the Rain, all of which reused songs that were already well known in other contexts.

A scene from The Beggar’s Opera painted by William Hogarth [public domain]

In such moments of cynicism and disquiet, The Beggar’s Opera exhibits affinities not only with the satire of Gay’s cronies Pope and Swift, but with the seeming misanthropic darkness of such later musicals as Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera (unsurprising, as this is an update of Gay’s work to reflect the social conditions of 1920s Berlin) and Stephen Sondheim’s bloody horror show Sweeney Todd. Sondheim’s musical might seem an extreme case of late twentieth-century angst, with its homicidal mayhem and cannibalism, and its vision of London as a hellish city of night. As he puts it in one number, “There’s a hole in the world / Like a great black pit / And the vermin of the world / Inhabit it, / And its morals aren’t worth / What a pig could spit, / And it goes by the name of London.” But these darker elements were already vividly present in The Beggar’s Opera, set in the shadow of Newgate Prison. Gay, too, sees cannibalistic predation as integral to modern urban life: in the words of Lockit, Newgate’s jailor, “Lions, Wolves, and Vulturs don’t live together in Herds, Droves or Flocks. —Of all Animals of Prey, Man is the only sociable one. Every one of us preys upon his Neighbour, and yet we herd together.” But it is not all darkness: in both plays, humor and especially music are sources of pleasure, by turns touching and exuberant. Sondheim has called Sweeney Todd a “love letter to London,” and Gay could have said the same of The Beggar’s Opera, with its comic vitality and anarchic spirit of fun.

Hal Gladfelder is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Culture at the University of Manchester. His books include Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England: Beyond the Law (2001) and Fanny Hill in Bombay: The Making and Unmaking of John Cleland (2012), as well as the Broadview edition of Cleland’s Memoirs of a Coxcomb (2005) and the Oxford World’s Classics edition of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera and Polly (2013).

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics onTwitter and Facebook.

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Image credit: A scene from The Beggar’s Opera, by William Hogarth [public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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There is a saying in ethics: you can’t get an “ought” from an “is.” Descriptions of the world as it is do not reveal truths about the world as it ought to be. Even when descriptions of real-world conditions suggest that something is seriously wrong — that our actions are causing unintended and avoidable harms to ourselves, to others, to our common environment — reaching agreement on how we ought to change our thinking and our behavior, and then putting these changes into practice, is hard. Efforts at reform may fail again and again, but we need “is” to understand how to get to “ought.” In health care work, describing and reflecting on current conditions can shed light on persistent ethical challenges. Palliative care workers who focus on the relief of suffering and other goals central to the care of the sick observe and experience many such challenges daily.

In the United States each year, 2.5 million people die. Because cause of death is often a condition typically associated with age, Medicare billing-code data offers a reliable way to understand where older people were, day by day, as they approached the end of their lives. A recent article by Joan M. Teno, health services researcher at Brown University, and her team, published in JAMA in February 2013 and subsequently picked up by the media, compared samples of Medicare patients who died in 2000, 2005, and 2009. Each sample included nearly 300,000 patients, all of whom had a medical diagnosis of cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or dementia for the final six months prior to death. This data suggests that these patients were hospice-eligible and their deaths were not unexpected.

Digging into the data, the researchers found that over the course of this nine-year period the percentage of patients who died in hospice increased. However, these hospice referrals tended to come only after dying patients had spent time in the intensive care unit. That is, the intensity of treatment near the very end of life first spiked sharply upward. As Teno and her co-authors explain, “Site of death, as noted on a death certificate, only provides information on where a person was at the moment of death,” while understanding the end of life as an “experience” involves looking at all places of care, the transitions between these places, and when and why these transitions occurred. They conclude that, even with more frequent referrals to hospice and the expansion of palliative care programs in hospitals over the period they studied, “the notion that there is a trend toward less aggressive care” may be unfounded.

Reading Joan Teno’s careful research and analysis in this article and others, I am reminded of the technique of Jan van Eyck, the 15th century northern European painter who was the first master of the new medium of oil painting. Analysis of van Eyck’s works reveal that he applied layer upon layer of translucent paint to create the impression of light that shapes space and reveals surface and texture. (The Getty Museum has created this public website of images from its recent documentation of van Eyck’s “Ghent Altarpiece.”) It was not a quick or simple way to work, but it built up the light. So, too, does the science that describes, day by day, layer by layer, the complexity of the end of life in our society, and that suggests the complexity of the work needed to change this experience. If the picture that emerges from this study — of the ICU as the route to hospice — troubles us, are we willing to think and act differently? And how much earlier in the journey?

Nancy Berlinger is a research scholar at The Hastings Center. With Bruce Jennings and Susan M. Wolf, she is the author of The Hastings Center Guidelines for Decisions on Life-Sustaining Treatment and Care Near the End of Life: Revised and Expanded Second Edition (Oxford University Press, 2013). Learn more at HastingsCenterGuidelines.org.

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Image credit: Nursing home corridor by Thomas Bjørkan (Own work). Creative commons licensce via Wikimedia Commons.

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Some time ago I read Sidney P. Moss’s 1984 book Charles Dickens’ Quarrel with America. Those who remember Martin Cuzzlewit and the last chapter of American Notes must have a good idea of the “quarrel.” However, this post is, naturally, not on the book or on Dickens’s nice statement: “I have to go to America—on my way to the Devil” (this statement is used as an epigraph to Moss’s work). In Chapter 10, titled “The Reading Tour,” Moss recounts the impressions of the listeners who had the good luck to hear Dickens in 1867-1868, during his second and last trip to the United States. He was a splendid actor (it is not for nothing that he enjoyed describing theaters and circuses), and newspapers followed his tour at every step.

Two places aroused my curiosity. The Boston Daily Journal (3 December 1867) described Dickens’s appearance, his suit of faultless black, a profusion of gold chains festooned across his vest, and so forth. The description ended so: “A cashy, good-natured, shrewd English face it is, one that would be associated with the out-door life of a smart man of business, not particularly troubled with the sentiments, and most unmindful of good cheer, brusque, not beautiful, wide-awake and honest” (p. 271). The florid style of the description does not appeal to me, but this is beyond the point. I stumbled at the phrase cashy face. Judging by the general tenor of the article and the situation (a performance by a worldwide celebrity), the word could not be too conversational, and indeed, cashy did not turn up in slang dictionaries with the sense that might fit the context. It is also absent from Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles and A Dictionary of American Regional English. I finally hunted it down in John Jamieson’s Dictionary of the Scottish Language, from which it made its way into Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary. Wright rearranged the senses, but the information remained intact.

Cashy, recorded in the form cashie, means “delicate, not able to endure fatigue; soft, flabby, not of good quality (said about vegetables); luxuriant, succulent (said about plants).” Most senses seem to carry negative overtones. Obviously, Dickens’s face was “delicate.” But why should the reporter have used a word that in his days had restricted currency even in Scotland? Cashy could not be an over-subtle allusion to Dickens’s fondness for the word. We may be certain that it does not occur in Dickens, for otherwise James Murray would have included it in the OED, but he did not. I assume that in 1867 the readers of the Boston Daily Journal were expected to understand what was written in their newspaper. It would be interesting to know whether our correspondents from Boston and Scotland still know this adjective.

Charles Dickens: A cashy face and rising inflection.

From an etymological point of view cashy looks like cash-y (expensive? involving great care?). All the modern senses of this adjective go back to cash. A cashy job is one performed “under the table,” usually by individuals who are not qualified or by persons avoiding taxes. A finished (“cashed”) box of marijuana is called cashy, and the simplest sense of cashy is “wealthy.” But it is most doubtful that the adjective meaning “delicate, flabby, succulent, luxuriant” can be traced to cash. Nor does it seem likely that cashy is an Anglicized form of French caché “secret, hidden.” Once again I would like to appeal to our readers. Someone may know something about the derivation of this troublesome adjective.

The New York Tribune (14 December) was equally laudatory. However, it criticized Dickens’s “partiality for rising inflection and some Cockneyisms of pronunciation” (p. 282 of Moss’s book). Since the “Cockneyisms of pronunciation” were not cited (did Dickens say toime instead of time?), we will let them be. It is the rising inflection that merits a moment’s attention. Rather long ago, I discussed the rising intonation in American English but would like to return to it in connection with Dickens’s speech habits. I remember my embarrassment when I came to Minnesota and could not interpret statements, all of which sounded like questions to my ear. “Where is that building?” “It is two blocks away from here…” (with a strong rise). The dean informed us (among many other things): “We cannot expect a decision before the end of the year…” (again with a strong rise). Someone told me that this intonation is peculiarly Midwestern: people are shy here and raise their voice to leave room for retreat (“That building is two blocks away from here, but, if you miss it, don’t blame me…”; “We cannot expect a decision before the end of the year; yet, it may come earlier, who knows? I am really not sure”). The explanation struck me as fanciful and unconvincing. Later, much to my satisfaction, I discovered that the timidity of the allegedly self-effacing Midwesterners is a myth. They are people like everybody else. Some are timid, while others are not.

Then, I think about ten years ago or so, everybody suddenly began to speak about young women in California using exactly this rise. It was discussed in the media, and journalists ascribed the phenomenon to the emancipatory trend among the female segment of the population, as though a rise were a challenge (“This is what I say. Will you dare to disagree?”). I was amused by a theory opposite to the one I had heard in my semi-native Minnesota. It should be noted that the history of intonation does not exist. English vowels and consonants have been described by schoolmasters and other interested people since the seventeenth century, and old spelling tells its own story, but we have no record of intonation predating the late eighteen-hundreds. Remarks like people in this area “sing” abound, but such remarks are not informative. They only tell us that the outsider did not “sing” in the same way. Also, those observations usually refer to tone languages and dialects rather than intonation. Some conclusions about pauses in the uninhibited speech of the past can be drawn from the division of an old text into words, lines, and paragraphs, and poetry provides us with clues about sentence stress. Other than that, the “singing” of our ancestors is lost.

It is hard to account for some rules. In principle, one expects a rise in a question. But in English only questions beginning with a verb have a rise (“Is he your friend? Do you know him well? Have you ever lived together?”), while so-called special questions end like statements in a dip (“When was he born? Where does he live? Who is he?”). This also holds for the second part of disjunctive questions (“Do they call him Bob [a rise] or Rob [a fall]?”). One and the same intonation can have different functions. I have read several descriptions of Cockney, but I don’t remember whether anyone mentioned a rising intonation as a special feature of that dialect. What will Londoners say? There is no certainty that the correspondent of the New York Tribune was a trustworthy judge of Cockney speech. But seemingly, Dickens did raise his voice the way they do in Minnesota and California (only in Minnesota this intonation is not “gender-specific”). The three identical patterns need not have a common origin, and it would be interesting to hear the opinion of people from the Midwest, California, London, and elsewhere.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

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Image credit: Charles Dickens – Scenes in his life. Source: NYPL Digital Gallery.

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Justin Welby recently used his first Easter sermon as Archbishop of Canterbury to warn of the dangers of investing too much faith in frail and fallible human leaders, be they politicians or priests. Blind belief in the power of any single individual to bring about true change in any sphere, he argued, was simplistic and wrong, and led inevitably to disillusionment and disappointment. Surely this was the point in the sermon when a member of his flock was duty-bound to heckle ‘But what about that bloke called Jesus!’ Unfortunately, good manners triumphed and the leader of the world’s 77 million Anglicans was able to continue his sermon. ‘Put not your trust in new leaders, better systems, new organisations or regulatory reorganisation’ he told the congregation at Canterbury cathedral. ‘They may well be good and necessary, but will to some degree fail. Human sin means pinning hopes on individuals is always a mistake, and assuming that any organisation is able to have such good systems that human failure will be eliminated is naïve’.

Bishop Welby’s sermon reminded me of Max Weber’s famous essay of 1919 ‘Politics as a Vocation’ with its warnings against ‘infantile’ understandings of politics and its emphasis on the complexities of governing and the need to hold realistic expectations of what politics – and therefore politicians – can deliver. ‘Politics is’ as Weber maintained ‘a strong and slow boring of hard woods’ and one might argue that almost a century later the challenges of governing have, if anything, become far greater and more complex. And yet there was a nagging part of Bishop Welby’s sermon that left me disheartened, frustrated, and possibly even angry. It was, for me, as if the new Bishop had accepted the advice of Bernard Baruch to ‘vote for the man [or woman] who promises the least as they’ll be least disappointing’. Surely one of the key social roles of politicians and priests is to inspire, to promote hope, to make their communities believe they can deliver positive social change. Might it therefore be that in warning against ‘the hero leader culture’, Bishop Welby revealed his own weakness? In the sense that he seemingly does not understand exactly why certain social groups seem so willing to grasp ‘quick, easy and gratifying solutions’ to even the most intractable problems.

Bishop Welby suggests that people could only escape ‘cynical despair’ by acknowledging God and trusting in his power but if you’re living in poverty, and face a multitude of social challenges that conspire to limit your life chances from birth, then I can understand why individuals fall for the cheap tricks and empty promises of rogue politicians. Put slightly differently, instead of arguing that too many people look to politicians for simple and pain free solutions to complex and painful problems that simply do not exist, might it not be equally true to suggest that encouraging people to accept human fallibility and to trust on God is just a different form of expectation inflation that is almost guaranteed to fail – a ‘mere cruelty’ of a different kind?

Canterbury Cathedral, and the Portal Nave Cross-spire

I for one am actually quite glad that Barack Obama did not turn out to be Superman and Bishop Welby is surely correct that we should not set people or institutions up to the heights where they cannot do anything but fail. But it would be quite wrong to suggest that individuals cannot make a positive difference, or to deny that some politicians have in fact delivered on their promises, or that – when all is said and done – democratic politics generally delivers far more than most people seem to recognise. Welby concluded his sermon by quoting the Welsh poet and Anglican priest R. S. Thomas, from his poem Threshold, on the human need for communication with God,

‘I am alone on the surface / of a turning planet. What / to do but, like Michelangelo’s / Adam, put my hand / out into unknown space, / hoping for the reciprocating touch?

And yet once again my moral soul was irked by such platitudes; I could not help but think that what most humans crave is not so much communication with God but communication with each other. It is the increased social fragmentation that threatens humanity not some form of existential angst or theological breakdown. My concern is therefore not so much that the public demands too much of politics and politicians but that at many levels the public’s expectations are actually too low. Local elections, for example, are due to take place in the UK in a matter of days but have so far been met with a deafening silence in terms of public debate or interest. There seems little evidence of the blind faith or hero leader culture that Bishop Welby warns against in any of the 36 English and Welsh Councils that will be contested on 2 May. I’m not suggesting that one sermon by the Archbishop of Canterbury has single-handedly dampened expectations that would otherwise have had the local election campaign buzzing across the country, but I am suggesting that the Bishop’s position is too simplistic. We actually need more trust in political leaders and more active community engagement at the local level alongside a measured dose of healthy scepticism about what our local political leaders can realistically deliver.

Matthew Flinders is Professor of Parliamentary Government & Governance at the University of Sheffield. He was educated at a succession of Catholic schools and is still recovering from this experience. Author of Defending Politics (2012), you can find Matthew Flinders on Twitter @PoliticalSpike and read more of Matthew Flinders’s blog posts here.

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Image credit: Canterbury Cathedral and the Portal Nave Cross-spire. Photo by Hans Musil. Creative Commons License via Wikimedia Commons.

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The fifth of May 2013 marks the bicentenary of the birth of the Danish philosopher, theologian, and man of literature Søren Kierkegaard. He will be celebrated in Copenhagen and around the world. What estimate should we form of him today?

Kierkegaard did not doubt his mission: ‘I know what Christianity is. And to get this properly recognized must be . . . to every person’s interest, whether he be a Christian or not’. Christianity, he contended, entailed belief in an interruptive event (an Incarnation of God) which does not fit the normal flow of history. The Enlightenment had been a blow to the Christian claim. Politely suggesting that any such ‘historical’ religion was the business of theologians, Kant treated the biblical saga of Fall and redemption as but a mythical expression of human self-understanding. In his wake, Hegel reduced Christianity simply to ‘concepts’ and thought these concepts a mere stage in human development, while Feuerbach pronounced Christian doctrine a projection. As a student, Kierkegaard witnessed the advance of scholarship that sought to explain biblical texts in terms of their setting of origin.

Cognisant that the notion of an Incarnation, a God/man, is to reason paradoxical (a contradiction in terms), Kierkegaard advocated relating to it out of the passion of subjective inwardness that is ‘faith’. We should recognise, however, that he held to pre-modern suppositions that made such a notion, if not rational, at least conceivable. Living a century and a half after Newton, Kierkegaard had little sense that nature and history form an inter-related causal nexus; that events are one of a kind, predictable and repeatable, there being no one-off occurrences. He was, in the parlance of the day, a ‘supernaturalist’ not a ‘naturalist’, believing in miracles. God is conceived to be directly behind each and every happening, such that just about anything can transpire.

For Kierkegaard, pressing directly on our world, the eternal is bound into each moment in time. It is within such a context that the human being is held to be a synthesis of body and spirit, through his very nature made for divinity. Thus Kierkegaard commented that, while it is true that (as Aristotle had said) a plant gives rise to a plant, a man to a man, ‘by this nothing is explained, thought is not satisfied … for an eternal being cannot be born’. Within such a context, once more the idea of Incarnation acquires plausibility. Was it the subsequent Darwinian revolution that led humanity to conceive of their nature otherwise?

Kierkegaard’s outlook had social implications. Far from uncaring, his former professor remarked: ‘It was typical of him to want to look after precisely those people whom the public did not value’. Nevertheless, in view of eternity, our present existence becomes for him a ‘meanwhile’. Thus he considered it of more importance that a beggar behave beautifully, mindful that, disturbed by his presence, others may be led to question God’s goodness, than whether the man live or die. He advises that a charwoman should not aspire to be called ‘Madame’, given that the world is but a stage on which we act our roles, while before God she is anyone’s equal. No wonder Hegel had averred that ‘the eye of the Spirit had to be forcibly turned and held fast to the things of this world’. His disciple Marx was five years Kierkegaard’s junior.

In his Works of Love, a spiritual classic, Kierkegaard entreats us to love and respect each ‘other’ as God loves us, never assimilating that other person to self. Horrified by the advent of democracy, ‘government by the numerical’ as he quips derisively, he was nonetheless quick to take advantage of freedom of the press to attack a complacent establishment in both church and state. He writes sarcastically of the ‘distinguished corruption’ of those who flee from one distinguished circle to another, taking care lest in the poor they should meet another human being. If today in celebration of their famous son the Queen of Denmark will parade from church to university, it was not ever thus. Rather, it was a motley crew of students and the poor who accompanied his funeral cortège from that same church to grave. These things are far from simple.

Fearing in his blacker moods that his authorship, penned in a minor European tongue, might lie undiscovered, Kierkegaard remarked of his fellow countrymen: ‘I am regarded as a kind of Englishman, a half-mad eccentric; my literary activity… a sort of hobby [like] fishing and such’. Would he could but know of the affection and respect in which in our day he is held by those who will gather to celebrate his bicentennial. His work is translated into languages from Korean to Hungarian. An eclectic and imaginative author, Kierkegaard is considered the Ur-father of existentialism, the originator of dialectical theology and (on account of his style) the progenitor of post-modernism. Regarded by many Danes as the greatest prose writer of their language, his provocative authorship in equal measure engages and delights.

Confronted with one who in terms of the span of history lived so recently yet whose thought-world is so foreign, we are brought to recognise the remarkable revolutions that we in Europe have undergone. Fascinated by steam engines and hot air balloons, Kierkegaard (inconsistently) did not much like the march of history, thinking scientific progress to distract man from his true ends. To step into his shoes is a startling revelation as to differences in presuppositions. What, however, would seem to make little sense is to contend that Christians have always proclaimed ‘faith’ in the face of ‘reason’, failing to consider the context that made the object of such a faith thinkable. From this it does not follow that we should not think out how today we had best conceive of that dimension of reality that is ‘God’.

Daphne Hampson holds doctorates in history from Oxford, in theology from Harvard, and a master’s in Continental Philosophy from Warwick. The author of Christian Contradictions: The Structures of Lutheran and Catholic Thought, she has for many years engaged with the Lutheran tradition, in particular the work of Kierkegaard. Author of Kierkegaard: Exposition & Critique, you can find more about Daphne Hampson by visiting her website.

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Image credit: Kierkegaard statue. Photo by Arne List. Creative commons license via Wikimedia Commons.

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There’s a lot we still don’t know about the Vikings who raided and then settled in England. The main documentary source for the period, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, simply tells us that Viking armies raided Britain’s coastline from the late eighth century. Raiding was followed by settlement, and by the 870s, the Vikings had established a territory in the north and east of the country which later became known as the ‘Danelaw’. Here, the Chronicle famously records, Scandinavian armies ‘shared out the land… and proceeded to plough and to support themselves’.

Despite over 50 years of research, many fundamental questions about the Scandinavian settlements remain unanswered: which areas of England saw the greatest settlement? How many settlers were there? Did they get on with the locals? Were they all men? Until recently, there was little in the physical record to provide answers. Archaeological traces of Scandinavian settlement were notably few: just a handful of Scandinavian-style burials and rural settlements have been found in England, for instance, while the Scandinavian contribution to urban development and certain strands of material culture, such as stone sculpture, remains elusive.

Within the last 20-25 years, this picture has changed dramatically. Thanks largely to metal-detecting, there has been an explosion of new finds of Viking-Age metalwork recovered from areas of known Scandinavian settlement. Surprisingly prominent within the new finds is female jewellery in Scandinavian styles: brooches and pendants worn by women in everyday dress. To date, over 500 such items have been found, scattered across large swathes of rural England.

The date of the jewellery chimes exactly with written accounts of the settlement (c. 870-950). Its careful study reveals that while some items were made locally after a Scandinavian fashion, others are likely to have been imported from the Scandinavian homelands, probably on the clothing of female settlers. Although Anglo-Saxon women also wore brooches, they were of a very different style to those favoured by Scandinavian women, so it’s clear that the new jewellery finds represent a distinctly ‘foreign’ dress element. The jewellery being unearthed in England is strikingly similar to that found in Scandinavia, particularly its southern regions: there are disc, trefoil, lozenge, oval, and bird shaped brooches decorated with animals and plants from the Scandinavian art styles of Borre, Jellinge, Mammen and Urnes. Encountering women on a walk around tenth-century Norfolk, you could be forgiven for thinking that you were in Denmark.

Viking-Age Scandinavian-style brooches from England

The discovery of such artefacts is unexpected, not only because such jewellery was unknown in England a generation ago, but also because it helps to elucidate a population group with has, until now, been largely invisible. Faced with a dearth of both archaeological and written evidence for Scandinavian women in England, historians have tended to assume that settlement was carried out entirely by men, who took wives among the local population. The jewellery offers the first tangible archaeological evidence for a significant female Scandinavian population in Viking-Age England, potentially numbering in the thousands. In this way, it is revealing the presence of women we never expected to see.

Women were not merely participants in the settlement process; they were active agents in negotiating relationships with the existing, Anglo-Saxon population. Their jewellery became a platform for the expression of cultural values, usually in a way that maintained Scandinavian traditions. One observable trend is that female dress in the Danelaw preserved Scandinavian preferences for particular brooches long after they had fallen out of fashion in the homelands. This deliberately archaising suggests that articulating historical ties via jewellery was important in a new settlement context, when cultural memories were likely to be challenged. The fact that it was done through women’s dress highlights a role for women as bearers of cultural tradition in Danelaw society.

The jewellery also provides a fresh perspective on one of the most elusive of topics regarding the Viking settlements, namely, their location. We tend to think of Yorkshire and the north-east Midlands as Viking hotspots, due in part to the areas’ Scandinavian-style place-names and stone-sculpture (as well as the success of the Jorvik Viking centre). Yet female jewellery here is rare, being concentrated instead in rural Norfolk and Lincolnshire. These areas are not commonly associated with Viking activity, but it is clear that they were exposed to strong Scandinavian cultural influence, at least in terms of female dress. Of course, the distribution pattern has to be interpreted with care: jewellery is eminently portable, and levels of metal-detecting can vary from county to county. Nonetheless, it does seem that East Anglia and Lincolnshire were vibrant centres of Scandinavian culture in ninth- and tenth-century England, to an extent not previously recognised. Once again, the jewellery shines new light on this historically dark period of British history, revealing the presence of peoples in areas we never knew were there.

Jane Kershaw is a British Academy Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at University College London. Jane Kershaw is the author of Viking Identities: Scandinavian Jewellery in England (OUP, 2013).

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By Gary Kelly

A recent book on the essayist William Hazlitt calls him the ‘first modern man’. If he was, perhaps Mary Wollstonecraft was the first modern woman. By ‘modern’ I mean someone with ideas on how to cope with what sociologist Anthony Giddens calls ‘the consequences of modernity’. These include frighteningly accelerated, seemingly uncontrollable change; heightened risk of all kinds, from food supply through epidemics to weapons of mass destruction and ecological catastrophe; increased dependence on ‘abstract systems’ of unknowable complexity, from banking to government, medical science to the economy; greater migration, voluntary and involuntary, across countries and continents, classes and cultures; and, in meeting these challenges, increased dependence on ‘pure’, supposedly unselfish relationships in private and social life and on a flexible yet stable, self-reflexive and adaptable personal identity.

Wollstonecraft lived through the onset of modernity as Giddens defines it. She observed personally, analyzed incisively, and looked beyond one of modernity’s major initial crises, what many then saw as the greatest social and political cataclysm in history. She saw the blood of the guillotine on the Paris pavements and protested, at her peril. More, she understood this cataclysm from the situation of her sex, what she called ‘the wrongs of woman’, and protested, despite the peril.

Wollstonecraft certainly opposed unmodernity — the ‘Old Order’, the ancien régime — and promoted modernisation, but like her daughter Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, she understood its costs, especially to the marginalized and powerless. Among other things, Frankenstein gave powerful mythic form to a vision of modernity as human catastrophe. Wollstonecraft tried to envisage a modernity that would benefit all, from which women and other marginalized groups would not be excluded and by which they would not be victimized.

To this end, as a self-educated, militantly independent young woman, she set out to become what she called the ‘first of a new genus’, a ‘female philosopher’. Many at the time would have derided this phrase as an oxymoron, but by it she meant a comprehensive social, cultural, and political critic, what we now call a public intellectual, representing women in particular and thereby all of the exploited and oppressed.

As a ‘female philosopher’ Wollstonecraft communicated her vision of modernity, responding to the prolonged crisis of her time, in a wide range of writing including education manuals, novels, criticism and essays, political and social polemic, historiography of the present, and political travelogue. Part of this political and cultural work required both modernizing these forms, reinventing them better to serve her vision of modernity, and inventing a new form of discourse, that of the ‘female philosopher’ rather than of the intellectual woman as some kind of ‘honorary man’. So radical was her invention, so modern, that still today many find it confused and confusing rather than ahead of its time, and perhaps ahead of ours.

Hazlitt knew Wollstonecraft’s circle of radical reformers, intellectuals, artists, writers, and publishers and what they tried to achieve. He circulated among such a circle of his own, one that included Byron, Keats, Leigh Hunt, and Percy and Mary Shelley, as well as artists and intellectuals, modernizers of all kinds, in contending interests. Hazlitt’s liberal views, increasingly celebrated in recent years, owed much to those of Wollstonecraft’s circle, with their zeal for social justice, modernization of institutions, political reform, democratic access to the arts, and concern for human value in all aspects of life, of all forms of life.

Notoriously, however, Hazlitt did not attend to Wollstonecraft’s feminism; in fact, many today see him as a misogynist. Yet I think Hazlitt’s distinctive, celebrated, and modern-seeming style, with its sharp declarations, vivid illustrations, sudden turns, personal tone and reference, lyrical passages, sarcasm and satire, owed much to Wollstonecraft’s. At the least, it was a later correlative to hers.

Wollstonecraft, much more than Hazlitt, was relegated after her death to the margins of literature and public discourse, perhaps for similar reasons; perhaps the first modern woman and man were too ‘strong’ for what became an influential Victorian and early twentieth-century consensus. Wollstonecraft was rediscovered by successive feminist movements, most recently in the 1970s; Hazlitt has received renewed attention in the past decade as a public intellectual for what Giddens calls ‘late’ modernity, and others ‘post-modernity’, our age of crisis, of ‘recession’, and ‘austerity’, and worse. In this we need all the help we can get. We could do worse than renew a conversation with the first modern woman.

Gary Kelly is Distinguished University Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. He has edited Mary Wollstonecraft’s Mary and The Wrongs of Woman for Oxford World’s Classics, and published a book on her radically innovative style of thinking and writing, Revolutionary Feminism. He is General Editor of the ongoing multi-volume Oxford History of Popular Print Culture.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.

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Image credit: Portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft by John Opie [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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If I have learned anything as a lifelong student of the world’s multitude of religious traditions, it is that reality for humans is malleable and quite varied — nothing is essential in human experience. Almost everything gets filtered through and shaped by a particular cultural lens. Something as simple as a tree is not so simple after all. From a biological perspective trees have much in common worldwide, but from a cultural perspective there exists an immense difference between them. Human perception and understanding of any aspect of the world seems to be determined largely by the particular interpretive lens through which it is viewed. Importantly, different cultural perspectives result in different experiences and behavior. What is a tree when seen from another cultural viewpoint? What range of interactive experiences is possible with it?

Historically tree worship has been a vital feature of much religious activity worldwide, and trees are still commonly found at the center of religious shrines in India. In this context they are typically regarded as powerful sentient divine beings with whom humans can have mutually beneficial relationships.

A religious shrine in India.

The personhood of trees is taken seriously as people interact with them in a variety of ways. The pipal or bodhi tree is often considered to be the most sacred tree in India. Buddha is said to have achieved enlightenment under this tree and many Hindus consider it to be an embodied form of the mighty god Vishnu.

The bodhi tree

Because of its highly beneficial medicinal qualities, the neem tree is frequently called the village pharmacy. It is commonly regarded as the body of the goddess Shitala. In some parts of India this tree is dressed with colorful cloth and a metal facemask is attached to the trunk of the tree as a way of honoring it and facilitating a more intimate connection with it.

The neem tree with a metal facemask attached

Banyan trees are often identified with the god Shiva and are associated with longevity and immortality, since they have the ability to live indefinitely. They send down aerial roots, which over the course of time become massive trunks that in turn send out aerial roots of their own, creating an ever-expanding and self-perpetuating forest. They too are the recipients of a wide range of religious offerings and worship.

A banyan tree

Trees are clearly amazing forms of life that have captured the human imagination in a number of ways. A question we might ask on this Arbor Day is: what possibilities would be available to us in our relationships with trees if we were to expand our understanding of them, inspired by the perceptions of our own ancestors or those of people living in different cultures today, such as the many tree worshipers of India?

David Haberman is Professor of  Religious Studies at Indiana University-Bloomington. He is the author of People Trees: Worship of Trees in Northern India.

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By David Roberts

It’s one of the great misunderstandings in English fiction:

It happen’d one Day about Noon going towards my Boat, I was exceedingly surpriz’d with the Print of a Man’s naked Foot on the Shore, which was very plain to be seen in the Sand: I stood like one Thunder-struck, or as if I had seen an Apparition; I listen’d, I look’d round me, I could hear nothing, nor see any Thing.

A swift retreat to the ‘castle’ follows. With sleep come the nightmares: fantasies of pursuit by ‘savages,’ dreams of the devil himself setting foot out there on the sand. The Bible provides some comfort: Wait on the Lord, and be of cheer, he reads. Then, days later, the truth dawns. It was his own footprint.

This celebrated moment in the life of the runaway, castaway sailor of York called Robinson Crusoe is the more surprising and powerful because it was written by a man who spent most of his life in — and in one way or another writing about — a sprawling metropolis. What more paradoxical subject for the lifelong Londoner, Daniel Defoe, than the horror of thinking that the island you’d thought deserted might harbour another life, or the satisfaction of knowing that it didn’t?

Defoe is often described as a realist. Ian Watt’s seminal book, The Rise of the Novel, went so far as make his ‘realism’ a pre-condition for the development of the novel. But when it came to cities, and to London in particular, Defoe was often drawn to ghosts and shadows: to dreams of emptiness as much as crowds and the great business of daily life. As Edward Hopper found the essence of New York in stray people hunched over night-time drinks amid darkened streets, so the London of Defoe’s writing often turns out to be an inversion of the place his readers knew, perhaps because he knew it better than anyone else.

Daniel Defoe was born in the parish of St Giles, Cripplegate, the son of a butcher, and grew up listening to the preachings of Samuel Annesley, a non-conformist pastor in Bishopsgate. Schooled at Newington Green by another non-conformist, Charles Morton, he went into business in 1685, dealing in hosiery. By 1688 he was a proud liveryman of the City of London. Future ventures would take him to France and Spain, to Hertfordshire and Essex, but he always returned to London and died there in 1731.

More than any other writer, his knowledge came from the bottom up. His taste for political diatribe landed him in Newgate prison; for his defence of religious dissenters he stood in the pillory during three July days in 1703 (people stood around with flowers, forming a guard of honour). Businessman, low-church militant, and journalist, his nose for the instincts and interest of ordinary people was a shock to writers who thought literature should imitate the noble forms of classical Greece and Rome. To read his prose is to experience not the choreography of a turn round St James’s Park, but the tumbling bustle of a walk through Cheapside.

Yet his greatest tribute to his home city is not the magnificent chapter on London in A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, published in 1726, which celebrates the capital’s resources of money, trade, history and people. It is the book he had brought out four years earlier, in which he imagined what had happened when the city had been brought to the edge of oblivion during the Great Plague of 1665. A Journal of the Plague Year builds on a fascination with disaster that had gripped Defoe at least since 1708, when he published The Storm. Using old maps, mortality bills, government edicts, oral history and a host of other documents he pieced together a narrative that recreated the past in order to send out a dire warning about the future: if Londoners did not heed the threat of plague from Southern Europe, it could face extinction.

The result is an extraordinary hybrid of historical fiction and dystopian dreaming, the work of a man who could stand in the middle of a busy street and imagine himself, like Robinson Crusoe, perfectly alone.

Professor David Roberts teaches English Literature at Birmingham City University. He has taught at the universities of Bristol, Oxford, Kyoto, Osaka, and Worcester, and in 2008/09 he was the inaugural holder of the John Henry Newman Chair at Newman University College, Birmingham. He has published extensively in the fields of seventeenth and eighteenth century drama and literature, and is the editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. He has previously written about disaster writing for OUPblog.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.

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Image credit: Daniel Defoe. By Michael Van der Gucht (Flemish, 1660-1725) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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When I was invited to review the second volume of Odd Arne Westad’s and Melvyn Leffler’s The Cambridge History of the Cold War in 2010, I compared the enterprise to Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie — which I intended both as a compliment and as a criticism.

Sweeping in its coverage, the Encyclopédie aimed to capture the main currents of Enlightenment thinking. Diderot’s intention in editing the volume was “to change the way people think,” yet it didn’t achieve that grand aim. The collection contains an important introduction by D’Alembert, and carries essays by Rousseau, Voltaire, and Montesquieu. But contemporary scholars don’t spend much time poring over its volumes. Rather, they focus on the seminal single-authored books: Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. These books are alive, but the Encyclopédie is locked in a particular place in time. Over the past three years I have served as an editor on the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History. Before accepting the commission, I queried its purpose on similar lines.

Of course, today’s editors face a challenge that did not confront Diderot: how to retain scholarly authority in a Wikified world, to paraphrase the title of William Cronon’s thought-provoking essay in Perspectives published in 2012. Cronon compares the supple and constantly evolving Wikipedia to the ossified Encyclopedia Brittanica, registering a strong conclusion: “I don’t believe there’s much doubt that Wikipedia is the largest, most comprehensive, copiously detailed, stunningly useful encyclopedia in all of human history.”

Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. Bookshelves in the president’s office, École Nationale des Chartes, Paris. Photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen. Creative Commons License via Wikimedia Commons.

Perhaps Britannica’s board of directors read Perspectives for they closed the print edition of the Encyclopedia the following month. The Los Angeles Times described it as perhaps the “single most powerful symbol to date of our rapidly changing media world, a world in which hard copies of books could become a quaint thing of the past.” Print aficionados of a conservative disposition, like Jonathan Franzen, were stunned. On this lamentable trend toward digitization, Franzen wrote “Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around.”

In light of the foregoing, then, is there any benefit in having a named, credentialed scholar write an entry for a hardcopy Encyclopedia — that most old fashioned of enterprises? I’d say yes, and I have a few examples to justify my optimism. Some of the most interesting articles that I commissioned were written by major scholars, forced to condense a huge body of work into two or three thousand words. So to give just a few examples, Thomas Schwartz wrote on LBJ, Richard Immerman on Eisenhower, Jussi Hanhimaki on Kissinger, Geoffrey Stone on Civil Liberties, Andrew Preston on Religion, and Paul Boyer on “War and Peace in Popular Culture.”

What these scholars chose to omit and include was utterly fascinating. Thomas Schwartz’s monograph, Lyndon Johnson and Europe, is a wonderful study. But upon finishing that book, part of me yearned for more reflection on how LBJ’s success in managing relations with Europe slotted into a broader assessment of his foreign policy record. This is exactly what Tom’s succinct and perceptive entry provides.

To refer back to the Enlightenment, if Adam Smith wrote three thousand words on the taproots of economic growth — combining insight from the entirety of his career — the emphasis might be rather different to that presented in The Wealth of Nations. And it is certain that such a hypothetical essay would be read and studied closely today. Brevity can sometimes deepen the profundity of a particular conclusion. Each contributor has been remarkably successful in distilling the essence of their chosen subjects. It is for this reason, and others, that the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History will stay close to my desk.

Dr. David Milne is a Senior Lecturer in American Political History at the University of East Anglia. A historian and analyst of US foreign policy, he is a senior editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History. View the Melbourne launch of the Encyclopedia, or attend the American Military and Diplomatic History conference at Oregon State University on 7 May 2013.

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Answers can be found by using a combination of the following resources:
(1) The Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (OSEO) “10 interesting facts about Shakespeare” post
(2) The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article on Shakespeare – free to view until 20 May 2013

Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (OSEO) is a major new publishing initiative from Oxford University Press. The launch content (as at September 2012) includes the complete text of more than 170 scholarly editions of material written between 1485 and 1660, including all of Shakespeare’s plays and the poetry of John Donne, opening up exciting new possibilities for research and comparison. The collection is set to grow into a massive virtual library, ultimately including the entirety of Oxford’s distinguished list of authoritative scholarly editions.

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In 1967, the historian Lynn White, Jr., published a ground-breaking essay proposing that values embedded in Christianity had helped to legitimize the despoliation of the earth. Writing three years before the first Earth Day, White argued in “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis” that Biblical cosmologies granted moral sanction to our unrestrained exploitation of natural resources by advancing the view that humans exist apart from and above all the rest of creation, whose sole purpose it is to meet the needs of humanity.

As a scholar of the emergence of science and technology in medieval Europe, White’s primary interest was to show how Christian views of humanity’s relation to nature gave rise to Baconian science and technology, which treated nature as an object to be investigated and mastered for human benefit. With a quick dig at Ronald Reagan’s alleged anti-environmentalist quip, “If you’ve seen one redwood tree, you’ve seen them all,” White wrote:

To a Christian a tree can be no more than a physical fact. The whole concept of the sacred grove is alien to Christianity and to the ethos of the West. For nearly 2 millennia Christian missionaries have been chopping down sacred groves, which are idolatrous because they assume spirit in nature.

At a time when many assumed that technological solutions could be found for the mounting problems caused by industrialization, White argued that more technology would not solve anything. What was needed was a fundamental shift in worldview and values.

Sacred grove near Sikupati, courtesy of author.

White’s controversial essay inspired a flurry of response. Some scholars argued against his damning critique of Christianity and described the many expressions of Christianity that foster a less exploitative approach to the environment. Others pursued the hints scattered throughout his essay that non-Western religions might promote more sustainable values in relation to natural resource use.  My own research on the sacred groves of India was initially inspired by the hope that these diminutive islands of biodiversity might teach us something about how Hindu values put deliberate limits on consumption, even in a context of enormously pressing material need.

In the forty years since White’s essay was first published, we have learned that the deep values undergirding our actions are remarkably impervious to change. It’s even doubtful that our minds harbor any single, coherent foundation for our actions. Rather, our deeds are more likely motivated by a welter of thoughts, needs, desires, and impulses, many of which are not even under our conscious control.

Consider the discouraging fact that even those of us who espouse values of sustainability live lives of flagrant contradiction. We jet off to far flung lands, wearing clothes from China and eating food from Mexico, quietly oblivious of our carbon footprints ballooning out like the shoes of some perverse circus clown. Once made aware of the effects of our choices, we are able to rationalize them away with ease. If White argued that greater scientific understanding and more sophisticated technological fixes would not reverse the damage of industrialization, our inability to change even the most egregiously destructive behaviors—transcontinental airline travel, eating strawberries in January—suggests that consciousness-raising exercises alone aren’t going to do much either.

Yet, with it’s punchy prose and sweeping argument, White’s article not only inspired the creation of an academic subfield—religion and environmentalism—it also inspired the religious environmentalism movement, a more pragmatic if equally fragmented effort to enlist religion in the service of ecology. Organizations of people of faith such as the Alliance of Religions and Conservation based in the UK, Eco-Friends in India, and the US-based National Religious Partnership for the Environment and Interfaith Power and Light (IPL), among many others, bring people together to educate, advocate, and implement concrete changes in their communities.

These movements demonstrate several crucial aspects about religion that make it a potent force for catalyzing the kind of radical changes that White anticipated, and that we so desperately need today. First, religion is more than just beliefs or ideas. Beyond equipping people with cosmologies that orient them to each other, to the divine, and to the non-human world, religions offer a way for people to act in groups. Privatized responses to the dire environmental threats we face today are largely ineffective. But when they are multiplied by thousands, and by millions, they can have a profound effect.  Love it or hate it, religion has an excellent track-record for motivating this kind of collective action.

Second, religious people are motivated by many things besides what we might define as religion. Rural residents of India who preserve (and sometimes cut down) sacred groves are driven by many things: needs for agricultural land, fodder and fuel-wood, aspirations for a better life, desires to conform to new or transformed identities. The same could be said for religious urban dwellers in the United States faced with competing interests, like whether to expand the church’s parking lot or preserve 75-year old maple trees that give shade to a picnic area.

This is not to say that religion acts as a mere ideological cover for materialistic motivations, as when the felling of a sacred grove to build a modern concrete temple, or a maple tree to build a parking lot, is seen as a way to bring in more people and more revenue. Or that people are being simply pious when they enforce the sanctions that protect sacred groves from overuse, or put solar panels on the roof of their churches. Rather, more truthful understandings of how faith, religious practice, community, and natural resource use are intertwined are only possible when we recognize that religious people are also workers, family members, citizens, and residents of places that are precious in manifold ways.

Eliza F. Kent is Associate Professor of Religion at Colgate University and the author of Converting Women: Gender and Protestant Christianity in Colonial South India and Sacred Groves and Local Gods: Religion and Environmentalism in South India.

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The twenty-third of April 1564, or a day or two earlier, saw the birth of William Shakespeare, and on that same day fifty-two years later, also in Stratford, he died. This congruence of dates lends some credibility to the account given by the local vicar many years later of the way the playwright spent his final hours:

Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting and it seems drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted.

These fellow poet-playwrights were close members of Shakespeare’s social circle. Drayton is recorded receiving treatment in the medical diaries of Shakespeare’s son in law, Dr. Hall, and it was Ben Jonson who composed the leading epitaph on the ‘sweet swan of Avon’ for the complete edition of his plays. There is good reason, then, to imagine this company toasting Shakespeare’s fifty-second birthday on or around 23 April 1616.

Shakespeare and His Contemporaries by John Faed

Pure talent will only take us so far as an explanation for this special position. Jonson was a great poet, but grumbled that ‘of all his plays he never gained two hundred pounds’. Professional writers of the age, popular or otherwise, suffered continually from a lack of money. Almost all had acute financial troubles and even successful playwrights such as Drayton or Jonson left no substantial wealth at the time of their death. The reason that Shakespeare would have been able to celebrate his fifty-second birthday in style (and leave a very substantial inheritance afterwards) can be traced to a decision that he had made twenty-four years earlier.

Unlike any of his contemporaries, Shakespeare had invested in London’s public theatre. In an age before copyright, this was arguably the smartest financial decision that an artist had ever made. In the summer of 1594 (already established as a famous poet) he had bought a one-eighth share in a company of actors, becoming a Fellow in the newly formed Lord Chamberlain’s Men. He became a joint decision maker at their meetings and a joint owner of their costumes, performance properties, and plays. Before this time Shakespeare (like Drayton or Jonson) had pitched his plays to multiple acting companies, getting a fixed fee when he made a sale. Afterwards, as a shareholder, he had a continuing income from the performance receipts of his plays and those of others. No literary playwright had ever been in this position. Though Shakespeare must have laid down the equivalent of around a year’s income to make this investment (probably through borrowing), it very quickly made him very rich.

Prior to 1594 there are indications that Shakespeare’s family were suffering from financial problems; there are certainly no signs of growing wealth. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, however, proved a successful venture, growing with speed into the nation’s dominant acting company. The profits from gate receipts and court payments were distributed among the eight sharers, performers who employed hired actors and hired playwrights at fixed rates. All of the founding sharers became wealthy and the great house at which the playwright died in 1616 was one early reward of the decision that Shakespeare made. This mansion (with ten fireplaces, the second largest house in Stratford) was bought for cash in 1597. Shakespeare carried out substantial renovations and had resources enough to extend the garden, buying extra land and demolishing a cottage to get this done. The year after he still had spare money for other investments, including a stock of malt. From 1594 onwards there is a steady record of Shakespeare’s ever-growing prosperity.  Indeed, within two years of becoming a sharer, he had begun the expensive business of procuring a gentleman’s coat of arms.

The contrast between Shakespeare’s wealth and that of those who might have joined him for his birthday party remains oddly under-reported. In 1600—as Shakespeare continued to acquire land, tithes, and additional property (including a 10% stake in the Globe)—Jonson was imprisoned for debt. Debtor’s jail was a common abode for the playwrighting profession: Chapman, Dekker, and Middleton, to name but some, suffered the same fate. While it’s tempting to conclude that Shakespeare’s financial pre-eminence is simply justice (reflecting his superior talent) there is case for thinking of matters the other way round. His position as a shareholder also brought special artistic privileges. After 1594 (unlike his contemporaries) Shakespeare wrote for one company and without immediate financial pressure; he could specify the actors who would perform the roles he created; and he had a long-term stake in the life of his plays on the stage.

If Shakespeare did toast his birthday with Jonson and Drayton on 23 April 1616 he did so from a privileged position. Above all else, he had the year 1594 to thank for that. He could look out over what was now known as ‘the Great Garden’ of New Place, the owner of other property, including a residence in the exclusive Blackfriars district of London. Reason enough to hold a ‘merry meeting’ and ‘drink deep’.

Bart van Es is Lecturer in English at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Catherine’s College. He has previously written books on Edmund Spenser and has a special interest in the writing of history in the Renaissance. Shakespeare in Company is his first work on drama and was supported by the award of an AHRC Fellowship.

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Image credit: Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, John Faed [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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