Following the phenomenal popularity of Sketches by Boz and The Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens produced two short volumes of Sketches of Young Gentlemen and Young Couples, in response to the appearance of Sketches of Young Ladies by “Quiz.”

Each volume purports to dissect the characteristics of familiar types such as “The Bashful Young Gentleman,” “The Literary Young Lady,” and “The Couple who Coddle themselves.” Whimsical, satirical, witty and exuberant, the sketches ridicule the behaviour of their subjects with perfect comic effect, rendering Mr Whiffler, Mrs Chopper and their companions instantly recognizable. They offer intriguing glimpses of courtship rituals and relations between the sexes at the outset of the Victorian era, and fascinating evidence of a writer learning his craft and refining his style. Here, we’ve excerpted two of our favourite extracts: “The Loving Couple” and “The Formal Couple.”

The Loving Couple

Let all couples, present or to come, therefore profit by the example of Mr. and Mrs. Leaver, themselves a loving couple in the first degree.

“Augusta, my soul,” says Mr. Leaver. “Augutus, my life,” replies Mrs. Leaver. “Sing some little ballad, darling,” quoth Mr. Leaver. “I couldn’t, indeed, dearest,” returns Mrs. Leaver. “Do, my dove,” says Mr. Leaver. “I couldn’t possibly, my love,” replies Mrs. Leaver; “and it’s very naughty of you to ask me.” “Naughty, darling!” cries Mr. Leaver. “Yes, very naughty, and very cruel,” returns Mrs. Leaver, “for you know I have a sore throat, and that to sing would give me a great pain. You’re a monster and I hate you. Go away!” Mrs. Leaver has said “Go away,” because Mr. Leaver has tapped her under the chin: Mr. Leaver not doing as he is bid, but on the contrary, sitting down beside her, Mrs. Leaver slaps Mr. Leaver; and Mr. Leaver in returns slaps Mrs. Leaver, and it being now time for all persons present to look the other way, they look the other way, and hear a still small sound as of kissing.

The Formal Couple

Everything with the formal couple resolves itself into a matter of form. They don’t call upon you on your account, but their own; not to see how you are, but to show you how they are: it is not a ceremony to do honour to you, but to themselves, – not sue to your position, but to theirs. If one of a friend’s children die, the formal couple are as sure and punctual in sending to the house as the undertaker … If the formal couple have a family (which they sometimes have), they are not children, but little, pale, sour, sharp-nosed men and women; and so exquisitely brought up, that they might be very old dwarfs for anything that appeareth to the contrary. Indeed, they are so acquainted with forms and conventionalities, and conduct themselves with such strict decorum, that to see the little girl break a looking-glass in some wild outbreak, or the little boy kick his parents, would be to any visitor an unspeakable relief and consolation.

These extracts are taken from Charles Dickens’ Sketches of Young Gentlemen and Young Couples, edited by Paul Schlicke. Paul Schlicke is Honorary Senior Lecturer at University of Aberdeen. For Oxford World’s Classics he has introduced and annotated Hard Times and Nicholas Nickleby. He was President of the Dickens Society of America in 1994, President of the Dickens Fellowship 2003-5, and Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Charles Dickens Museum, 2005-9.

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With the bicentenary of Charles Dickens‘ birth on the 7th February, here is an excerpt from one of his most popular novels, Oliver Twist, part of our Oxford World Classics series. The story of Oliver, who suffers a miserable existence in a workhouse and later escapes to London, is an unromantic portrayal of criminals, gangs, and the cruel treatment of orphans in Victorian London. Here we see Oliver in a vulnerable state in the workhouse before he is made aware of what his future holds. This month, OUP also publishes Dickens and the Workhouse: Oliver Twist and the London Poor which gives an historical insight into the real lives of people who Dickens based his characters on. And now on to Oliver. –Alice

Oliver had not been within the walls of the workhouse a quarter of an hour; and had scarcely completed the demolition of a second slice of bread; when Mr. Bumble, who had handed him over to the care of an old woman, returned; and, telling him it was a board night, informed him that the board had said he was to appear before it forthwith.

Not having a very clearly defined notion of what a live board was, Oliver was rather astounded by this intelligence, and was not quite certain whether he ought to laugh or cry. He had no time to think about the matter, however; for Mr. Bumble gave him a tap on the head, with his cane, to wake him up: and another on the back to make him lively: and bidding him to follow, conducted him into a large whitewashed room, where eight or ten fat gentlemen were sitting round a table. At the top of the table, seated in an arm-chair rather higher than the rest, was a particularly fat gentleman with a very round, red face.

‘Bow to the board,’ said Bumble. Oliver brushed away two or three tears that were lingering in his eyes; and seeing no board but the table, fortunately bowed to that.

‘What’s your name, boy?’ said the gentleman in the high chair.

Oliver was frightened at the sight of so many gentlemen, which made him tremble; and the beadle gave him another tap behind, which made him cry; and these two causes made him answer in a very low and hesitating voice; whereupon a gentleman in a white waistcoat said he was a fool. Which was a capital way of raising his spirits, and putting him quite at his ease.

‘Boy,’ said the gentleman in the high chair, ‘listen to me. You know you’re an orphan, I suppose?’

‘What’s that, sir?’ inquired poor Oliver.

‘The boy is a fool – I thought he was,’ said the gentleman in the white waistcoat.

‘Hush!’ said the gentleman who had spoken first. ‘You know you’ve got no father or mother, and that you were brought up by the parish don’t you?’

‘Yes, sir,’ replied Oliver, weeping bitterly.

‘What are you crying for?’ inquired the gentleman in the white waistcoat. And to be sure it was very extraordinary. What could the boy be crying for?

‘I hope you say your prayers every night,’ said another gentleman in a gruff voice; ‘and pray for the people who feed you, and take care of you – like a Christian.’

‘Yes, sir,’ stammered the boy. The gentleman who spoke last was unconsciously right. It would have been very like a Christian, and a marvellously good Christian, too, if Oliver had prayed for the people who fed and took care of him. But he hadn’t, because nobody had taught him.

‘Well! You have come here to be educated, and taught a useful trade,’ said the red-faced gentleman in the high chair.

‘So you’ll begin to pick oakum to-morrow morning at six o’clock,’ added the surly one in the white waistcoat.

For the combination of both these blessings in the one simple process of picking oakum, Oliver bowed low by the direction of the beadle, and was then hurried away to a large ward: where, on a rough hard bed, he sobbed himself to sleep. What a noble illustration of the tender laws of England. They let paupers go to sleep!

Poor Oliver! He little thought, as he lay sleeping in happy unconsciousness of all around him, that the board had that very day arrived at a decision which would exercise the most material influence over all his future fortunes. But they had.

Charles John Huffam Dickens (1812–1870), novelist, was born on 7 February 1812 at 13 Mile End Terrace, Portsea, Portsmouth, the second child and first son of John Dickens, an assistant clerk in the navy pay office, stationed since 1808 in Portsmouth as an ‘outport’ worker, and his wife, Elizabeth, née Barrow. There can be few other English writers — apart, of course, from Shakespeare — with such widespread influence as Dickens, not only on their successors in the national literature, but also on major foreign writers, and few have been the subject of so many outstanding treatises by foreign critics. Oliver Twist, is one of his most popular and personal works. Dickens and the Workhouse: Oliver Twist and the London Poor presents the story of the discovery that as a young man Charles Dickens lived only a few doors from a major London workhouse for the first time, and shows that the two periods Dickens lived in that part of London – before and after his father’s imprisonment in a debtors’ prison – were profoundly important to his subsequent writing career. Happy 200th Charlie!

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Charles Dickens loved birthdays and always celebrated his own in style. So, in the face of those who are complaining about being Dickensed-out already, my view is that we can’t party enough.

One of the earliest letters we have in Dickens’s hand is an invitation to his friend and fellow journalist Thomas Beard to his twentieth birthday party – a “chosen few” friends and family are summoned to “join in a friendly quadrille.” I wish I’d been there, or at one of the outings he would devise later in life: his thirty-second birthday, say, when “unless it should rain cats, dogs, pitchforks, and Cochin China poultry,” he is rounding up half a dozen of his friends to go walking with him in Kent (his old childhood beat). They ended up with dinner at Wates Hotel in Gravesend; Dickens wrote ahead to order iced champagne and a good fire ready to greet them.

Family birthdays also got the Dickens treatment, with all stops being pulled out for his eldest son Charley, who had helpfully arrived on Twelfth Night (6^th January). Charley’s sixth birthday was a real show-stopper. Not content with merely laying on the Magic Lantern show currently fashionable at parties for privileged under-tens, Dickens jacked up the excitement to fever pitch by buying up the stock of Hamley’s toy shop and coming out as a conjuror.  He had practised for hours on his own and was a great hit, with his tricks of flying money and burning handkerchiefs, although I imagine the patter must have been the best part of the show. As late as 1857 he was devising a birthday treat for his wife Catherine: the occasion of their first stay at Gad’s Hill, the country house he had bought in Kent. A year later, almost to the day, he was ejecting her from the family home.

Dickens felt birthdays intensely. He feels for his childhood self who works at the blacking factory and celebrates his birthday by screwing up his courage to go into a pub in Parliament Street and enquire, “‘What is your very best – the VERY best – ale, a glass?’”  In Bleak House we see him feeling for those who do not know when their birthdays are, like illiterate Jo the crossing sweeper, or who have unbirthdays, like illegitimate Esther Summerson. “‘Far better, little Esther,’” her godmother tells her, “‘that you had had no birthday; that you had never been born!’”

So it’s good to see the world stepping into its global glitter gear for him this year, with a myriad of festivities, including a dinner at the Mansion House in the City of London, and a reception at Buckingham Palace. Plenty of exhibitions too, radio and TV shows galore, theatrical performances and shelf-fulls of pleasant kitsch. I warm to tributes with an accent on the collective. On publication day, Dickens’s novels arrived into a sphere of sociable merchandizing. While you were reading the novel in its nineteen monthly parts you could also be dancing along – to even the darkest novels, with the Little Dorrit Polka and the Little Dorrit Schottische (think polka but slower). So I’m enjoying the Dickens board game which my son gave me for Christmas. And I like the sound of the British Council’s “Sketching the City” initiative, a world-wide invitation to us all to document our own city, as Dickens did London with his Sketches by Boz. The BBC TV’s Arena programme “Dickens on Film” took us on a journey which had both communal and individual resonance. We could sit beside our childhood selves drinking in those formative earlier film and TV adaptations, that very particular Sunday teatime moment for those of a certain age.

Sunday teatimes aside, it’s urban and night-time Dickens which is coming out strongest in the festivities. Less of the plum pudding and jokes; more darkness, grit, and mystery. The Dickens and London exhibition at the Museum of London ends with a brilliant film essay by William Raban, entitled “The Houseless Shadow”. Inspired by Dickens’s 1860 essay “Night Walks”, Raban filmed night-time London over five months, blending into his surroundings with his equipment in a supermarket bag, his tripod strapped to a luggage trolley. Catch it if you can; the exhibition is on until June 10^th .

Jenny Hartley is Professor of English Literature at Roehampton University. Her most recent book, The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens, published this month. She is also the author of Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women, two books on British women’s writing from the Second World War, and The Reading Groups Book, a pioneering survey of reading groups. For the last ten years she has been a leading member of the Prison Reading Groups project.

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On this day in 1922, James Joyce’s Ulysses was first published in its entirety, although the publication history of the book is nearly as complex as the novel itself. Initially serialised in The Little Review from 1918, publication of Nausicaä episode led to a prosecution for obscenity and no English-speaking country dared to publish more, and risk further prosecution. However, shortly after arriving in Paris in July 1920, Joyce met Sylvia Beach, proprietor of the Shakespeare and Company bookshop and friend to modern writers. On hearing of the collapse of Joyce’s hopes of US or English publication, Sylvia Beach offered to publish the book under the auspices of Shakespeare and Company, to have it printed in Dijon by Maurice Darantiere, and to finance it by advance subscription. Joyce agreed at once. Here, we’ve picked one of our favourite extracts from the Oxford World’s Classics edition (pp.226-227).

Mr Bloom turned over idly pages of The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, then of Aristotle’s Masterpiece. Crooked botched print. Plates : infants cuddled in a ball in bloodred wombs like livers of slaughtered cows. Lots of them like that at this moment all over the world. All butting with their skulls to get out of it. Child born every minute somewhere.  Mrs Purefoy.

He laid both books aside and glanced at the third : Tales of the Ghetto by Leopold von Sacher Masoch.

–  That I had, he said, pushing it by.

The shopman let two volumes fall on the counter.

–  Them are two good ones, he said.

Onions of his breath came across the counter out of his ruined mouth. He bent to make a bundle of other books, hugged them against his unbuttoned waistcoat and bore them off behind the dingy curtain.

On O’Connell bridge many persons observed the grave deportment and gay apparel of Mr Denis J. Maginni, professor of dancing &c.

Mr Bloom, alone, looked at the titles. Fair Tyrants by James Lovebirch. Know the kind that is. Had it? Yes.

He opened it. Thought so.

A woman’s voice behind the dingy curtain. Listen : The man.

No: she wouldn’t like that much. Got her it once.

He read the other title : Sweets of Sin. More in her line. Let us see.

He read where his finger opened.

— All the dollarbills her husband gave her were spent in the stores on wondrous gowns and costliest fillies. For him ! For Raoul !

Yes. This. Here. Try.

–  Her mouth glued on his in a voluptuous kiss while his hands felt for the opulent curves inside her deshabillé.

Yes. Take this. The end.

—  You are late, he spoke hoarsely, eying her with a suspicious glare.

The beautiful woman threw off her sabletrimmed wrap, displaying her queenly shoulders and heaving embonpoint. An imperceptible smile played round her perfect lips as she turned to him calmly.

Mr Bloom read again : The beautiful woman.

Warmth showered gently over him, cowing his flesh. Flesh yielded amid rumpled clothes. Whites of eyes swooning up. His nostrils arched themselves for prey. Melting breast ointments (for him ! For Raoul !) Armpits’ oniony sweat. Fishgluey slime (her heaving embonpoint !). Feel ! Press ! Crished ! Sulphur dung of lions !

Young ! Young !

An elderly female, no more young, left the building of the courts of chancery, king’s bench, exchequer and common pleas having heard in the lord chancellor’s court the case in lunacy of Potterton, in the admiralty division the summons, exparte motion, of the owners of the Lady Cairns versus the owners of the barque Mona, in the court of appeal reservation of judgment in the case of Harvey versus the Ocean Accident and Guarantee Corporation.

Phlegmy coughs shook the air of the bookshop, bulging out the dingy curtains. The shopman’s uncombed grey head came out and his unshaven reddened face, coughing. He raked his throat rudely, spat phlegm on the floor. He put his boot on what he had spat, wiping his sole along it and bent, showing a rawskinned crown, scantily haired.

Mr Bloom beheld it.

Mastering his troubled breath, he said :

–  I’ll take this one.

The shopman lifted eyes bleared with old rheum.

—  Sweets of Sin, he said, tapping on it. That’s a good one.

This excerpt is taken from Ulysses: The 1922 text by James Joyce. It is edited with an introduction by Jeri Johnson, Senior Tutor at Exeter College, Oxford and appears in the Oxford World’s Classics series.

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Sherlock Holmes could figure out almost anything, and had he bothered to discover a longevity pill he would have turned 158 years old on January 6, 2012. Or sometime during this year: Arthur Conan Doyle indicated that Holmes was born in 1854, but never divulged an exact birthday. That feat of deduction was carried out by one of the detective’s innumerable fans, Christopher Morley. Like many of them, he obsessively mined the Holmesian Canon of sixty narratives to establish both the known and unknown facts of this fictional character’s existence.

Perhaps Holmes didn’t bother to seek the grail of immortality because his creator had already discovered it. Conan Doyle’s sleuth has become one of the most famous fictional characters in literature’s history, and his popularity shows every sign of increasing, Robert Downey, Jr. notwithstanding. Holmes was the first to be the subject of “objective” biographies, complete with footnotes and other scholarly devices, as well as magazines dedicated to establishing that he was factual and Conan Doyle largely irrelevant. (For many years one fan group, the Baker Street Irregulars, identified Conan Doyle as Watson’s literary agent.) Indeed, Holmes was the first “virtual reality” character in Western literature, the model for innumerable other fictional beings and worlds that have transcended the printed page to assume an autonomous life, from The Lord of the Rings to Harry Potter.

But why Holmes? There have been many other fictional characters that have caught the public’s fancy over the course of centuries. None of them, however, commanded such a sustained and growing devotion. Falstaff, Don Quixote, Pamela, Werther, Little Nell, and others have populated the collective memory, but sober biographies of them, and societies devoted to them, are thin on the ground now and were unthinkable before Holmes’s fandom pioneered the phenomenon in the early twentieth century.

It’s a mystery, but a solvable one. We need only follow Holmes’s sage injunction to “eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the truth.” Here are the relevant factors to consider in the Case of the Cerebral Celebrity:

(1) Holmes and Watson are marvelous characters, and their intimate interactions have made them the ultimate “Buddy” team.

Yes, the two are an interesting spin on the “Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup” approach to literature, which includes such opposing and delectable pairs as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Falstaff and Prince Hal, Boswell and Johnson, Pickwick and Sam Weller. But are Holmes and Watson demonstrably superior to their predecessors? Arguably not: all of these pairs are wonderfully unique, and it would be hard to choose among them. The “Hope & Crosby” hypothesis is a necessary but not sufficient cause to explain the Holmes phenomenon.

(2) Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories combine wit, imagination and narrative drive in irresistible short packages; cumulatively, they created a rare series that delights adults and children alike.

Ah, the “nobody-can-eat-just one” hypothesis. Certainly Conan Doyle was a gifted writer, whose creations have outlasted that of many of his contemporaries. But he didn’t pull his punches when he wrote other series characters, such as Brigadier Gerard and Professor Challenger – and few read their tales now. Despite the application of his considerable skills, Conan Doyle’s other works have not captured the popular imagination. His talents as a writer are a necessary but not sufficient explanation the Holmes phenomenon.

(3) The Holmes stories are wonderfully nostalgic evocations of London at the turn of the century, to which we long to return; as T.S. Eliot argued, “Sherlock Holmes reminds us always of the pleasant externals of nineteenth century London.”

Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock (BBC). Photo by Fat Les (bellaphon) from London, UK. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Eliminating these accounts, what remains is Holmes himself: the singularity of his character. And in what does this consist, aside from such memorable but superficial traits as his occasional recourse to drugs, his talent at disguise, his unexpected athletic ability, his chivalry, and the mystery of his sexuality? What is the core component to Holmes, the alchemical element that has transformed him from magazine hero to global archetype?

The solution to the case is one that is neither impossible nor even improbable: Holmes made reason enchanting. In the modern age, reason is often seen to be the panacea for our ills, but it can also be the source of them. Rationality seems to “disenchant” the world, removing the elements of wonder, surprise, and purpose that allegedly characterized the “premodern” world. “The disenchantment of the world” was a much-discussed issue in the late nineteenth century, one that vexed Conan Doyle. His detective, however, re-enchanted modernity through the distinctive use of reason.

Unlike many contemporary scientists and logicians who disdained the imagination, Holmes brought reason and the imagination, logic and intuition, together in a new synthesis that he called “the scientific use of the imagination.” He made critical thinking into a romantic adventure. Through his discerning eye, every detail of modern life, from newspaper advertisements to the footsteps of a giant hound, became charged with meaning, possibility, and wonder.

This is why Holmes has become an icon for an age that enshrines science yet yearns for magic. As far as Holmes was concerned, “the world is big enough for us. No Ghosts need apply.” That’s a sentiment to celebrate, along with its source. Not knowing his exact birthdate lets us do it every day of the year.

Michael Saler is Professor of History at the University of California, Davis and is the author of As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality, which was recently reviewed in the Wall Street Journal.

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Belinda Webb’s futuristic, dystopian novel, A Clockwork Apple (2008), follows Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange (1962) closely in many details: the first-person narrator’s name is Alex; the male Alex in A Clockwork Orange has “droogs” named George, Pete, and Dim (‘Dim being really dim’), while Webb’s female Alex has “grrrlz” named Georgia, Petra, and Mid (‘Mid being really mid’ — that is, middle class or brow, part of what Alex later calls the ‘unheard herd’). And so it goes, a Mancunian homage, but with an unexpected feminist agenda.

Webb could easily appropriate much of Burgess’ story, but not Nadsat, the infamous argot Burgess invented for Alex and his droogs, fashioned from Russian loanwords and various elements of English slang: ‘He looked a malenky bit poogly when he viddied the four of us, coming up so quiet and polite and smiling, but he said: “Yes? What is it?” in a very loud teacher-type goloss, as if he was trying to show us he wasn’t poogly.’ It is inimitable language, and beyond replacing Orange Alex’s characteristic ‘O my brothers’ with Apple Alex’s ‘sistaz’, Webb needed a new linguistic modus operandi.

In order to establish a distinctive voice for Apple Alex, Webb mashes up language of ‘the Street’, grrrl-powered slang, Joycean wordplay, and erudite vocabulary. So, ‘Petra is flicking paint from a thick brush against a wall. It is, however, a wall set aside for such endeavours. It means nish. It gets white-washed every evening. This feeble, fucking futile attempt at a pocket of self-expression. Widdershins and mumpsimus, my dear sistaz, sheer widdershins and mumpsimus’. Or, ‘She stares at her, trying to determine whether this ex-Blyton is capable of being a tregateur. Theyz don’t want to believe it, you see, not of Mid! … They also don’t see that there is another part of her that will never forgive her own for the dissing of her illusionment upon which she had been brought up before Moss-side’. Or, ‘Muvva is sat in the kitchen, twiddlin’ her grey hair. The box is left to blair, on and on, anon. The might of King Anon. An on an’ on an’ on’. Webb indulges the High Vernacular, in other words, complete with anachronistic puns.

Webb’s Alex fights against anything ‘mid’, anything ‘Blyton’ (the putative false consciousness of  Enid Blyton’s Sunny Days), especially against ‘impression management’ as practiced in polite conversation or the tabloids, different though these may seem to some. She and her grrrlz fight

with graceful ballet moves and,

more importantly,

with

WORDS.

Boustrophedon. Yep, both ways.

To write is to fight.

In Alex’s style, the learned weaves seamlessly with the lewd: boustrophedon ‘writing left to right, then right to left’, tregateur ‘trickster’, abnormis ‘irregular, unconventional’, and especially phrontistery ‘thinking place’, the seat of empowerment for one intent on locating the H.P. ‘higher power’ in herself. Alex knows these words because she is a reader, though reading and knowing make her a delinquent in the ‘PAFFETIK’ future world of ‘Madchester’. At home, she pulls ‘the canvas rug up off the floor and then prise up one of the old rotten floorboards and there, my dear sistaz, is my stash of mind power — that is, Books! I is in the fullness of haecceity now, my dear sistaz’. If your Latin fails you, look it up in the Dictionary.

In Webb’s novel, we are, significantly, on Alex’s side. This is a sharp turn from A Clockwork Orange. As Burgess wrote in The Listener (17 February 1972), ‘My hero or anti-hero, Alex, is very vicious, perhaps even impossibly so, but his viciousness is not the product of genetic or social conditioning: it is his own thing, embarked on in full awareness. Alex is evil, not merely misguided, and in a properly run society such evil as he enacts must be checked and punished’. No morally well-adjusted person can be on Orange Alex’s side.

Apple Alex is violent. She even kills representatives of the system. But she is a rebel, not a predator, delinquent, not evil. She rightly resists the world of Blytons and everything mid. As she puts it, ‘Belligerancy is Queen!’ And, ‘despite having spent some of our Grrrl power from the land of Angria, there is still plenty in the bank, so to speak — everything to fight against’. A properly run society ought to be run according to Alex’s values, not for the comfort of Blytons. If she goes too far to preserve her freedom, she is certainly misguided, but evil? As she switches styles from Street to Dictionary, she is a canny narrator, engaged, like any narrator, in a sort of impression management — but is she evil?

Apple Alex’s argot is no mere decoration but the full expression of her character, its private and public parts. And, as Burgess insisted in The Listener, Nadsat ‘is no mere decoration’ either. ‘It was meant to turn A Clockwork Orange into, among other things, a brainwashing primer. You read the book or see the film, and at the end you should find yourself in possession of a minimal Russian vocabulary — without effort, with surprise. This is the way brainwashing works’. Apple Alex’s style forces us to think like her, in all of her haecceity. While we resist such narrative coercion, our resistance merely recapitulates hers, rousing our sympathy, perhaps even our approval, much of the time.

Nadsat is shiny language that distracts us from Orange Alex’s horrible crimes. Readers need the distraction and they also need to confront the moral consequences of that distraction, their tenuous grasp of moral priorities. Orange Alex needs the distraction, too — the language show he puts on is a form of dissociation. In the end, though, it exposes not only a moral but a linguistic vacuum. This is the fundamental difference between Nadsat and Apple Alex’s style: Nadsat is thematically significant, but its relationship to the theme is oblique and (if the reader is not completely brainwashed) profoundly ironic. In contrast, Apple Alex’s language is motivated immediately by the novel’s feminist themes and expresses them directly, with an (albeit unacknowledged) earnestness inconceivable in Nadsat and opposed to its value in Burgess’ novel.

Brandon Robshaw’s review of A Clockwork Apple in The Independent (13 April 2008) begins with a two paragraph pastiche of the novel’s challenging style and ends swiftly with the judgement, ‘Are you tiring of this? Me too’. It illustrates the problem of what the linguist Michael Halliday calls anti-language, from teenage slang to the literary idiosyncrasy of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake — it could be that the invented language is tiring, that the author has erred in the saying, but it might just as easily be a case of bad listening, as when adults can’t hear the slang teens speak all around them, and the teens quite accurately complain that the adults aren’t listening to them — they refuse to listen on the terms set by teens as surely as teens refuse to conform to adult expectations. But, after all, do the teens really want the adults to listen? When the style of A Clockwork Apple rubs us the wrong way, when we reject its terms, we re-enact a fundamental sort of linguistic disconnection, after which we may find an occasional connection.

Michael P. Adams is Associate Professor of English and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of English Language and Literature at Indiana University. He currently edits quarterly journal American Speech and is President Elect of the Dictionary Society of North America. His published work includes Slayer Slang: A Buffy the Vampire Slayer Lexicon (2003) and Slang: The People’s Poetry (2009). His most recent book, From Elvish to Klingon, published in November 2011. You can read more by Michael Adams on OUPblog here.

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Tibullus was one of a group of poets known as the Latin elegists, whose number included Ovid and Propertius. Living in the age of Augustus, his poems reflect Augustan ideals, but they are above all notable for their emphasis on the personal, and for their subject-matter, love. Tibullus’ elegies are addressed to two different mistresses, Delia and Nemesis, and a boy, Marathus. Anguish and betrayal characterize Tibullus’ depiction of love’s changing fortunes, in poetry that is passionate, vivid, and sometimes haunting. Here, we’ve picked one of our favourite extracts from the Oxford World’s Classics edition. Enjoy… – Nicola

Book 1, Elegy 1 – line 45 to the end.
How sweet it is while lying down to hear fierce winds
and hold a mistress with a tender grasp!
Or when cold Austral winds are spreading sleet, what joy
to slumber safely with a fire’s help!
Let this befall me: may wealth be earned by one
who bears grim rain and seas that froth and foam.
O how much better that our gold and gems be lost
than any girl be crying as we roam!
Messalla, it is right you fight on land and sea
so spoils of war may decorate your home!
Chains of a gorgeous girl restrain me, and I linger
like a doorman at her stubborn door.
I want no praise, my Delia, if I am with you,
I’m asking to be labelled weak and dull.
May I behold when my final hour comes;
as I die, let me hold you as hands fail.
Delia, when flames engulf my bier you’ll weep for me,
and then you’ll mix your kisses with sad tears.
You’ll weep, for stubborn iron doesn’t wrap your breast,
nor is there flint inside your tender heart.
Nobody, neither man nor maiden, could return
home from that funeral and be dry-eyed.
Do not do damage to my spirit! Delia, spare
your unbound hair and spare your tender cheeks.
Meanwhile, as long as fate allows, let’s join in love!
First Death will come his features cloaked in gloom,
then age will sneak up, and it won’t be right to love
or speak seductive words with snowy hair.
Lighthearted love must be indulged while there’s no shame
in breaking doors and brawling gives us pleasure.
I’m a good soldier and good leader here. You troops
and trumpets, move it! Bring harm to the greedy,
and bring their lucre! Made secure by stacks I stored,
I’ll hate starvation and I’ll hate great wealth.

This excerpt is taken from Tibullus’ Elegies: With Parallel Latin Text, with a new translation by poet and translator A. M. Juster. The edition features an introduction and notes by Robert Maltby, Emeritus Professor of Latin Philology at the University of Leeds, and was published this month in the Oxford World’s Classics series.

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James Boswell was talking here about his friend Samuel Johnson’s melancholia, a condition we now consider to be similar to, if not the same as, modern-day depression. Boswell’s Life of Johnson in 1791 set the modern trend for biographies to reveal the realities of their subjects’ lives, warts and all: Johnson’s mental and physical maladies provided plenty of grist to the biographer’s mill, not least because Boswell himself was a sufferer of Johnson’s illness. The general nature of depression, and the question of whether its causes are physical or psychological, still “eludes minute enquiry” today despite the medical and psychological advances made since the eighteenth century. Yet that “general sensation of gloomy wretchedness” is unmistakable as a marker of something, whether it be termed depression, melancholy, spleen, vapours, acedia, neurasthenia or one of the plethora of other names given to depressive conditions through the ages.

But how can authors, literary or medical, imagine something as unimaginable, or represent something as unrepresentable, as depression? Is there a common thread that links the way we think about depression over time, or are the images we conjure for depression conditioned by our own particular historical moment?

The answer, perhaps annoyingly, is yes and no. Throughout all periods, images of darkness, fog, and gloom seem to feature consistently. Johnson referred, as Winston Churchill did later, to his “black dog” of melancholy. In ancient times, melancholia was a “black sun”, while the melancholy poet and priest John Donne complained: “But what have I done, either to breed, or to breathe these vapors? They tell me it is my Melancholy”. (John Donne: The Major Works). Even in the fashionable melancholy of the Renaissance, both on stage and in real life, the Hamlet-esque young men would wander around dressed in black, gazing downwards like the Goths and Emos of present-day pop culture. Romantic poet John Keats described “Veil’d Melancholy” in his Ode on Melancholy (Major Works). And even in the East, the early modern Japanese character for depression (‘utsusho’) resembles a dense, dark and seemingly impenetrable thicket of strokes that symbolise the barrier between depressives and their grasp of hope and happiness: 鬱.

Beyond the commonalities in representations of depression over the centuries, there are also key cultural shifts which intervene to frame a very different basic understanding of depression. Take Elizabeth’s Wurtzel’s period-defining memoir of depression, Prozac Nation (1994). Wurtzel is intelligent enough to see beyond the ‘magic bullet’ solution to mental illness and its complexities, and instead uses the computer age as a metaphor for depression: “Slowly, over the years, the data will accumulate in your heart and mind, a computer program for total negativity will build into your system, making life feel more and more unbearable.” Only secondary to this, later in the same paragraph, does Wurtzel invoke the older imagery of darkness: “one day you realize that your entire life is just awful, not worth living, a horror and a black blot on the white terrain of human existence.”

Wurtzel’s modern metaphor juxtaposes strongly with the rationale and imagery of times past: Galen’s classical explanation (AD 30-90) of the malfunctioning humour of the black bile, burning in the spleen and sending black vapours up to the brain, persisted in the popular imagination for a very long time indeed. As late as the increasingly mechanistic eighteenth century, Dr Johnson recommended distraction to dispel “the black fumes which rise in your mind”. In his poem Know Yourself, written just after he had completed the monumental Dictionary, he described how “Care grows on care, and o’er my aching brain / Black melancholy pours her morbid train” (Samuel Johnson: The Major Works). Yet again we have the imagery of darkness, but an entirely different understanding of how depression is caused. In fact, Johnson was using imagery based on outdated humoural theories as, by the age of the Enlightenment, depression had come to be thought of as a disease of the mechanical body which could be seen as a system of pipes through which blood circulated. By this time, it was thought that if the necessary blood flows were blocked for some reason, then stagnant blood could affect the brain and bring on depression, or the “English Malady”, as society doctor George Cheyne called it. Popular images of the body (or old wives’ tales as we might call them) have a tendency to persist for a long time after the demise of the theories which underpin them.

As we can glean from the myriad of fluid depictions of depression in literature throughout the ages, depression is not the stable entity we might conjure up from the contemporary image projected by the drug companies peddling Prozac as an instant cure – not that I am saying drugs are useless, of course. But history shows us how different societies generate diseases in their own image: especially psychological maladies, and especially depression.

Clark Lawlor is Reader in English Literature at Northumbria University, and is especially interested in the cultural history of disease. He has been publishing work on the history and representation of depression recently, partly as a result of his co-Directorship of Before Depression, a Leverhulme Trust-funded project on the nature of depression in the eighteenth century. His latest work, From Melancholia to Prozac: a history of depression, which publishes next month. He previously published Consumption and Literature: The Making of the Romantic Disease (2006).

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When acclaimed essayist Arthur Krystal was 24 and living in New York in 1972, he thought he was going to be a novelist. For inspiration–and a little cash–he took a job as a night watchman at the haggard Hayden Hall, a hotel on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. In this excerpt from his latest book, Except When I Write: Reflections of a Recovering Critic, Krystal recounts how this experience had just the opposite effect of inspiring: it lead him to realize that writing novels was not the kind of writing he was destined to do.  — Lana Goldsmith, associate publicist, OUP USA.

I didn’t know I wasn’t cut out to be a novelist until I began to write a novella in the late Seventies about a writer who lived in a seedy hotel on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. It was only then I realized that I knew practically nothing about the people who lived there.

Let me amend that: I did know something about one of the tenants, although it was not information I went out of my way to find. It was handed to me on a small china plate with, if I recall correctly, pale blue filigree. And since it’s the only story that I took away from the hotel, I have never forgotten it. The woman who handed me the plate—let’s call her Mrs. Hawthorne—was probably closer to eighty than seventy. She was a soft-spoken, diminutive woman, always neatly attired in jacket and skirt, with a string of pearls. Her perfect manners, her perfectly coiffed, perfectly white hair, and her faint Midwestern accent made her an oddity among the hotel’s dispirited residents. She was also, as it happened, a theater buff. Two or three times a week, after returning from a show, she would stop by the front desk and run through the highlights with me. Broadway even then was expensive, and what I knew about Sondheim’s Follies or The Sunshine Boys, I learned from Mrs. Hawthorne.

That was the extent of our relationship, until one afternoon when she asked me—as I was walking out of the hotel—if I could change a light bulb in her room. Of course I agreed, but with a certain reluctance. I tried to steer clear of the occupied rooms if I could help it, because it was too sad to enter them. It was one thing for a twenty-four-year-old writer to live in a poorly furnished room; it was quite another for someone over fifty to do so. But when Mrs. Hawthorne opened her door, I saw I had nothing to worry about. True, the room was small and spiked by the inevitable sink and medicine cabinet, but there were also delicately colored lampshades, a small oriental rug, two red-cushioned chairs, a cherrywood table, and a tall armoire. Lace curtains covered the windows; glass and ivory knickknacks rested on the table and dresser; and fine lithographs jostled each other on pale cream walls.

Apologizing for putting me to so much trouble, Mrs. Hawthorne needlessly steadied a chair as I climbed up and changed the bulb. She prepared tea, and afterward we sat facing each other, our knees almost touching. I sipped the tea and looked around—at the elegant surroundings—and realized with a small shock that Mrs. Hawthorne could live anywhere she chose to, and the strangeness of it made me ask why she remained in the hotel.

Mrs. Hawthorne fluttered her hands without replying. She picked up her cup, drank delicately, put it down—then said softly: “I fell in love here.”

I don’t know what I said to this, but I must have asked or looked a question. Anyway, this is the story she told me:

Mrs. Hawthorne had come to New York from Michigan during the Depression with the idea of becoming a graphic designer. She knew no one and had little money, so she moved into the hotel, which at the time was a perfectly suitable residence for a single woman. The people who lived in Hayden Hall were more or less respectable men and women who held down jobs and took care of their appearance. Mrs. Hawthorne’s room was the same one that I was now sitting in, and when she had first moved in, there had lived down the hall, in one of the two-room “suites,” a professional gambler by the name of Alfred Bendel (not his real name).  Alfred was probably around fifty when he began to court the twenty-something Mrs. Hawthorne, but she didn’t mind because Alfred was every inch a gentleman: polite, considerate, well dressed. He was quite stylish, in fact, and Mrs. Hawthorne, like a certain Daisy Buchanan, was taken by the sight of a man’s beautiful clothes.

Mrs. Hawthorne was a small-town girl, and Alfred was a New Yorker, a man welcomed by name in many of the better restaurants and night clubs. He took her to the track, to speakeasies, and jazz clubs. It was all very exciting and prompted her infatuation with Broadway. She liked Alfred and thought he liked her as well. She also thought, at first, that she would have to ward off his advances, but Alfred maintained his distance, giving her nothing more than a chaste kiss goodnight when they got off the elevator. Mrs. Hawthorne attributed this to the difference in their ages and thought it was charming that Albert was so formal, so polite. But after they had been seeing each other for some months, Mrs. Hawthorne decided to speak up. One evening, she announced that she liked him and “didn’t care a fig” for how old he was and that he shouldn’t think about it either. Her openness, however, did not have the desired effect. It wasn’t the difference in their ages, he told her, and then he changed the subject. Surprised and somewhat worried, she insisted that he tell her what was bothering him. Was it her fault? Was it something about her that kept him from becoming, as she put it, “more intimate”? Finally he caved in. With some embarrassment, Alfred confessed that he had peculiar tastes. Truth was he liked to be beaten, to be hit with a knotted rope, to have women walk on his back with spiked heels. He kept a whip in his closet and also a broomstick that could be used to whack the back of his legs.

Well, this, of course, put matters in another light. She considered ending things—but then, on reflection, decided that that would be unfair. What had Alfred done that warranted her disapproval? He had only been good to her, had never asked for anything in return, and, in fact, wasn’t asking anything from her now. She decided not to hurt his feelings. She decided to make him happy. Of course, she wasn’t adept at it, not in the beginning, but with practice she learned to whip him and beat him and walk across his back in high heels just as he liked. Sometimes his back would be such an awful mass of cuts and welts that they would have to wait a week before starting up again. They continued this way for six or seven years and then one day his heart gave out.

I believe I now interjected: “You mean during the . . . uh . . .the . . . ”

Mrs. Hawthorne shook her head. Alfred, she said, had suffered a heart attack while cutting into a steak at Sardi’s. He was dead by the time the ambulance arrived. A few weeks later, Mrs. Hawthorne learned that she was his sole beneficiary: he had left her more than two hundred thousand dollars, which was a great deal of money back then. “I see,” I said, glancing at the lithographs and bric-a-brac. But I didn’t. Patting her perfectly white hair, Mrs. Hawthorne looked me in the eye and said softly: “You see, dear, it pays to be nice to people.”

That, after ten months, was what I learned at Hayden Hall. I also learned that I didn’t want to live there anymore. After so much time, I wasn’t a writer or former graduate student; I was a night watchman in a seedy hotel. The pose of urban anthropologist I had affected had worn thin, and the hotel was beginning to get me down. Sartre was wrong (he was wrong about a lot): hell isn’t other people. Other people may be hell, but hell itself must be solitary to be perfect torment. It’s purgatory that is other people, a waiting room occupied by men and women whose shoulders create no emotional friction, where familiarity never turns into concern or affection. The hotel’s floating population now seemed normal to me. I didn’t identify with them, but it did occur to me that if luck took a hand and smacked me with it, I might also end up a middle-aged man living alone in a furnished room, eating Thanksgiving dinner in a Greek coffee shop along upper Broadway. How hard could it be to fall into my own solitary half-mad groove of life?

In late December, I gave notice. Sas shrugged. “Don’t come back,” he told me, not unkindly. The first day of the New Year, I took my savings and headed south to finish my novel, and when the money ran out I got a job on a construction crew outside Charleston, South Carolina. I continued to drift and to take a number of jobs, though none that ever kept me up past midnight. But after a while I lost my patience for physical labor and for writing uneven novels. Actually, I came to realize that the fiction I wrote didn’t measure up to the fiction I was reading; and why would I want to be a cut-rate John Cheever or a dullish Peter Taylor?

This, of course, doesn’t stop people from writing fiction (or poetry), but it did me. Not only could I not comprehend the emotional lives of other people—at least not to the extent of envisioning what their feelings might lead them to do—I couldn’t rid myself of the sound and sense of the novelists I admired. In effect, my inability to free myself from the Great Books prevented me from acquiring a voice that, for better or worse, was my own. By the same token, this feeling for literary prose still made me want to write sentences. So I suppose you could say that my weakness as a novelist became my strength as an essayist. This is, of course, both too shapely and reductive a statement; and yet a day arrived when it seemed more natural to write about books than to write one myself.

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January 13, 1898

Zola publishes J’Accuse, exposing Dreyfus affair

On January 13, 1898, the French newspaper L’Aurore (The Dawn) published a sensational open letter addressed to French president Félix Faure. The article—titled J’Accuse (I Accuse) was written by famed novelist Emile Zola, and his charges—perjury, conspiracy, and injustice in the court-martial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus—rocked France and gave renewed vigor to the efforts to clear Dreyfus’s name.

Dreyfus had been wrongly convicted in late 1894 of handing military secrets to Germany—but the Jewish officer had been fingered largely on circumstantial evidence and deep-seated anti-Semitism, and his conviction was based largely on a forged document. Stripped of his military rank, Dreyfus became the focus of national outrage.

Then, in late 1896, new and real evidence pointed to the actual culprit, Commandant Ferdinand Esterhazy. The French army ordered a new court-martial but rather than admitting its mistake and convicting the real spy, acquitted Esterhazy of all charges. This verdict, delivered in January 1898, provoked Zola’s letter of outrage.

Zola laid out the facts in the Dreyfus case in meticulous detail, spicing his presentation with ringing words. “My duty,” he declared, “is to speak out, not to become an accomplice in this travesty.” Later in the letter, he proclaimed “Truth is on the march and nothing can stop it.”

As he suspected would happen, Zola was accused of libel. In yet another unfair trial, he was found guilty and sentenced to a year in prison. The novelist fled to England to escape the sentence. But his words had succeeded in swinging public opinion in Dreyfus’s favor. Dreyfus’s conviction was overturned in 1899. He was retried that same year and once again found guilty, though he was pardoned. Not until 1906 was that conviction finally reversed and his innocence unequivocally declared. By that time, Zola had died. He remains honored, though, for his courageous stand for truth and justice.

“This Day in World History” is brought to you by USA Higher Education.
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Ruth Richardson is Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Affiliated Scholar in the History & Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, and Hon. Professor of Humanities and Medicine at Hong Kong University. Ruth Richardson is also the author of a number of books, including The Making of Mr. Gray’s Anatomy, Death, Dissection and the Destitute , and Dickens and the Workhouse: Oliver Twist and the London Poor which is scheduled for release in early 2012.

As the year draws to a close, we’ve been reflecting on all the wonderful books we’ve read in 2011, and in doing so, we’ve also realized there are some classics worth revisiting. The authors and friends of Oxford University Press are proud to present this series of essays, which will appear regularly until the New Year, drawing our attention to books both new and old. Here, the Oxford Etymologist Anatoly Liberman writes about David Copperfield by Charles Dickens and Pendennis by William Makepeace Thackeray.

2012 is round the corner, and an important event will soon happen: in February the world will celebrate Charles Dickens’s bicentennial (bicentenary).  In 1850 Dickens brought out David Copperfield.  Since that time, Mr. Micawber, Mrs. Gummidge, Spenlow and Jorkins, and all, all, all have been our perennial companions.  Uriah Heep survived the many wars and revolutions, learned nothing, and remained as ‘umble as ever.  Mr. Dick keeps flying kites and wondering how the thoughts from the head of King Charles I ended up in his own poor head.  Although even those who do not read thick nineteenth-century novels (the majority of mankind) must have heard the name David Copperfield, few of them will recall that also in 1850 William Makepeace Thackeray’s Pendennis was published.

The two novels describe more or less the same milieu, including even a debtors’ prison, and are approximately of the same length.  Both are “novels of education.”  Their protagonists (David and Arthur) are introduced as little boys, and we watch them grow up, go to school, yield to and resist temptations, mature, and in the finale marry the charming, patient, and almost morbidly selfless women whom they should have married at least four hundred pages earlier, but they were too silly to understand what was good for them, and also the time had not yet come for the authors to finish the story.  Yet no two books are more unlike than David Copperfield and Pendennis.

Nearly all great writers have favorite “motifs,” of whose existence they are probably unconscious.  Thackeray explored the theme of a youth in love with an older woman.  This theme dominates Henry Esmond, his gentlest and perhaps his best book, but Arthur Pendennis’s first love is also ten years his senior. A different bee buzzed in Dickens’s bonnet: he could not shake off the image of a feeble or weak-willed old man dependent on his daughter or granddaughter.  Strange that the name of Agnes’s father (in David Copperfield) is Wickfield, rather than Weakfield.  He would have contrasted beautifully with Dr. Strong, David’s benevolent schoolmaster forever searching for Greek roots, a man past his prime but married happily to a young woman.  To everybody’s surprise (perhaps also to Dickens’s), the doctor made a good husband.

Both authors had a firsthand knowledge of English snobs.  After all, the word snob owes its popularity to Thackeray.  But what a world of difference!  Dickens’s snobs are sometimes ridiculous, but more often disgusting.  Such are Mr. Dombey, a rich merchant, fawning upon an impoverished aristocrat and asking only one question about his son’s prospective school (“Is it expensive?”; if so, he will be satisfied), and Littimer, James Steerforth’s despicable servant, who tolerated blows from his master but left him after he was offered a meal of cold meat (David Copperfield).  Thackeray also satirized snobs but, contrary to Dickens, had a soft spot for them; he even admitted, perhaps tongue in cheek, to being “one of themselves.”  Major Pendennis, Arthur’s uncle, a classical snob, is by far the most memorable character in the novel.  A pretentious old man, tyrannizing his servant (and, in the finale, almost getting his comeuppance), he is patronized by the amused and condescending greats, but emerges as a man of honor; on closing the book, we feel that that the old fogy, despite his affectations and cynicism, is after all a dear.

Dickens’s titular heroes exist for the single purpose of dramatic events happening to and around them.  David is interesting only while he is a child.  Nicholas Nickleby is handsome and noble, and there is nothing else one can say about him.  Dirt does not stick to them.  In a way, all of them belong with Oliver Twist, who leaves the thieves’ den untainted and speaks flawless English, including the polite forms of the subjunctive; the Artful Dodgers of his surroundings had no influence on his morals or speech habits.  (Curious, that Dickens, always attuned to street slang and local dialect, especially Cockney, did not notice the inconsistency.)  It is Mrs. Nickleby, a champion of silliness, and Miss Betsey Trotwood, fighting donkeys venturing on her lawn, who are unforgettable.  (Trot means “child.” Is this the reason Dickens gave her the name Trotwood, alluding to a “wood” in which David thrived?)  Thackeray led his characters to a safe haven, but along the way he allowed them to fall low.  Both Becky Sharp and Arthur Pendennis did many things of which in retrospect they could not have been proud (though Becky never had such thoughts).  True, David once drank too much and said silly things at the banquet (there is a chapter devoted to his “first dissipation”), but he repented, and profligacy, Pendennis-style, was alien to him.  Both Dickens and Thackeray were masters of inept denouements.  Arthur’s marriage (as well as Henry Esmond’s) comes as a surprise.  To let David and Agnes marry, Dickens had to kill poor Dora, but he frequently got rid of superfluous characters in the same embarrassing way (a duel, a stroke, a novel-long travel to far-off lands).

Thackeray is remembered mainly for his Vanity Fair, while Dickens’s star is shining brighter and brighter as time goes on.  Why did it happen?  Why do we forgive him his treacly sentimental maidens, fairytale-like villains, “Gothic” secrets, and incredible plots?  Thackeray is often called a realist.  This label has proved useful, because the word realist means so many things.  Dickens too was supposedly a realist.  But he, along with Gogol, showed that literature need not “reflect” anything.  It survives insofar as it succeeds in creating its own parallel universe.  Dickens’s immortal characters (like Gogol’s) are larger than life.  They show a distorting mirror to humanity, and, surprisingly, the caricatures are immediately recognizable.  Moreover, life attempts to imitate literature.  Mr. Pickwick, not an obese (because obese, we are told, is an ignoble word), just a corpulent man; Mrs. Jellyby, the “telescopic philanthropist” (Bleak House); Miss Tox (Dombey and Son), living beyond her means (“but what a situation!”), the totally improbable Scrooge, and a host of others were brought to life by their great puppet master.  The curtain fell, but the actors refused to leave the stage.  They are now among us, as are the bizarre characters of Gogol’s Dead Souls.  Real people are compared to them.  Is this what realism means?

It often seems that Thackeray’s main purpose in life was to be unlike Dickens.  Dickens was unpardonably sentimental.  Nor did Thackeray mind shedding a tear, but he seldom indulged himself.  He could not afford the luxury, because Dickens’s unmarried young women never stop wiping their eyes.  So he chose a different mold; his narrative is much more reserved.  However, he could not outdo Dickens when it came to satire, and despite his talent for drawing cartoons, he seldom tried to create verbal images matching the products of his pencil.  His language is rich, but Dickens’s language is even richer (both had a typically Victorian predilection for hard words).  Dickens can be beaten only on his own field.  So far no one has succeeded.  We do not know whether he would have been able to continue long in the same vein; there are signs of exhaustion in Our Mutual Friend.  But he died at the age of fifty-eight.

Thus, for a hundred and sixty-two years two young men—David Copperfield and Arthur Pendennis—have been walking hand in hand.  The first of them has done better, for there has been no one like Dickens before and especially after him, but let us remember both, for both are great, and greatness is a commodity in short supply.

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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As the year draws to a close, we’ve been reflecting on all the wonderful books published in 2011, and in doing so, we’ve also realized there are some classics worth revisiting. The authors and friends of Oxford University Press are proud to present this series of essays, which will appear regularly until the New Year, drawing our attention to books both new and old. Here, Thomas Weber, author of Hitler’s First War, writes about the classic Anne of Green Gables.

Canada’s almost complete absence of the drama, disasters, and revolutions that have been the hallmark of much of European and Asian history makes Canadian history a tough sell. And yet one of the greatest and most successful reads of the last century was a Canadian story, the one of young freckled Anne Shirley, immortalized by Lucy Maud Montgomery in her Anne of Green Gables, published in 1908.

Why have tens of millions of readers from around the globe, most of whom would frown at the thought of having to pick up a book about Canadian history, been attracted to the late nineteenth-century adventures of a pale and talkative young girl in the Canadian backwaters? Why did the wives of my two best friends as well as my wife take their husbands to Prince Edward Island to wander in the footsteps of a fictional orphan girl, as do scores of Japanese tourists every year?

Like J.K. Rowling in her Harry Potter books, Montgomery created a world in Anne of Green Gables that is set up so perfectly and in so much loving and vivid detail that any reader of Montgomery’s timeless book quickly finds himself (or herself) transported onto the farmhouse on which Anne grew up, forgetting the small and great worries of life. For young girls – the book’s prime readership – Anne is a kindred spirit with whom they can identify, be it when she cracks a slate over young Gilbert Blythe’s head after he dared to poke fun of her hair, calling her ‘carrots’; or be it when they encounter the innocent beginnings of their love for each other in one of the sequels to Anne of Green Gables. For grown-ups of either sex, Anne’s overblown dramatic demeanor, her spirited and mischievous character, and her ability to get herself into a myriad of scrapes and then overcome them is the source of endless smiles. In short, Anne of Green Gables is the perfect read for the festive period of girls and boys from the ago of 6 to 106.

And once the festive period is over, Montgomery’s masterpiece will provide an inspiration about why the history of Canada – the country in which I spend part of the year – does not need to be boring but indeed sheds light on so much of the history of Western Civilization.

The world of Anne of Green Gables reminds us that British North America, despite of its rejection of the American revolution of 1776, developed into as successful a polity as its neighbour to the south of the 49th parallel. As Harvard historian Maya Jasanoff recently brilliantly proposed in her Liberty’s Exiles, the ‘Spirit of 1783’ – the spirit of the American loyalists, of Britain, and of her Empire, equals ‘The Spirit of 1776’ in generating and inspiring liberty and the rule of law both home and abroad.

Ostensibly, Anne’s world and the ‘Spirit of 1783’ is as far removed from the world that I normally write about, i.e. Hitler’s one, as is humanly possible. Here, to borrow from Bernard Wasserstein’s magnificent history of modern Europe (another great read), the epitome of ‘civilization’, there the heart of ‘barbarism’. Indeed in the eighth of the Anne books, Anne’s two sons go to fight the Germans in the trenches of World War One. Yet as I showed in Hitler’s First War, most of the men of Hitler’s World War One unit had far more in common with the Canadian soldiers whom they encountered across the trenches than they did with Hitler.

Indeed when in late 1916, in the aftermath of the Battle of the Somme, both Canadian troops and Hitler’s regiment and its sister units arrived at the same stretch of the Western Front on the slopes of Vimy Ridge, German soldiers held up a sign from their trenches reading: ‘Welcome Canadians’. Another German sign told the Canadian soldiers: ‘Cut out your damned artillery. We, too, were at the Somme.’ In the run-up to Christmas 1916, many cases occurred in which Canadian and German soldiers waved at each other. As a young Canadian soldier from Toronto, Private Ronald MacKinnon, wrote home in the aftermath of Christmas 1916, even more than two years into the war, German and Canadian servicemen still felt the urge to walk across the no-man’s land that separated them and celebrate Christmas together: ‘Here we are again as the song says. I had quite a good Christmas considering I was in the front line. Christmas eve was pretty stiff, sentry-go up to the hips in mud of course. … We had a truce on Christmas Day and our German friends were quite friendly. They came over to see us and we traded bully beef for cigars. Christmas was ‘tray bon’ which means very good.’

Why the world of the men of Hitler’s World War One unit was perfectly compatible with the world of Anne of Green Gables, but why nevertheless the sons of Anne went to fight (and in the case of one son to die) against the Germans in the mud of the Western Front and why one generation later Germany went into the abyss, while Canada did not, remain among the toughest questions to answer.

Thomas Weber teaches European and International History at the University of Aberdeen. His award-winning book The Lodz Ghetto Album examined the notorious photographic record of the Polish ghetto. His latest book is Hitler’s First War, which overturns the received wisdom about Hitler and the List Regiment. You can read his previous post for OUPblog here.

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As the year draws to a close, we’ve been reflecting on all the wonderful books published in 2011, and in doing so, we’ve also realized there are some classics worth revisiting. The authors and friends of Oxford University Press are proud to present this series of essays, which will appear regularly until the New Year, drawing our attention to books both new and old. Here regular OUPblog columnist Edward Zelinsky writes about My Antonia by Willa Cather.

The first time I read My Antonia, I hated it. That was to be expected: It was required reading in my sophomore English course at Omaha Central High. This was during the Sixties. In the Age of Aquarius, no one was supposed to like assigned reading. That’s why it had to be assigned.

I next confronted My Antonia in college. Like Jim Burden, Willa Cather’s narrator, I had left Nebraska to go to east to continue my education. During those years, some feminists were arguing for Cather’s place in the women’s canon. Thus, Antonia, the Nebraska icon, was to be transformed into Antonia, the feminist icon.

This didn’t seem quite right to me. As I reread My Antonia in college half a continent away from Nebraska, Cather’s portrayal of Nebraska seemed more appealing than it had when I had grown up there. And Antonia was too rich a character to serve anyone’s political agenda.

It was when my eleven year old daughter discovered My Antonia that I came full circle. Jacoba was blessed with a wonderful English teacher who guided her to read challenging novels. My Antonia became Jacoba’s favorite book. This prompted me to confront Cather’s most famous Nebraska novel once again.

This time, I was really hooked as I read of Antonia, her family’s travails and her ultimate triumph on the plains of Nebraska. This book, I declared, was good; it deserved to be taken off the required reading list.

The following year, when we visited my mother in Omaha, Jacoba asked if we could go to Red Cloud, Willa Cather’s hometown which she fictionalized in My Antonia as Black Hawk. I told my mother we were going to Red Cloud because Jacoba wanted to. That was partially true.

Our day in Red Cloud remains one of the best memories of raising my daughter. The citizens of Red Cloud are understandably proud as they guide visitors through the many Cather-related structures still standing.

At the end of the day, our guide gently walked us toward the cemetery where Antonia is buried. The small, picturesque graveyard was dotted with Nebraska sunflowers. Standing at Antonia’s grave was one of the genuinely peaceful moments of my life.

As I stood by Antonia’s grave, I realized that, like Jim Burden, I had gone east to be educated and live my life as a lawyer, but that I had forever left behind an important part of me in Nebraska.

A few years later, when Jacoba’s twin brothers reached Bar Mitzvah age, the synagogue in Connecticut was decorated with Nebraska sunflowers.

Edward A. Zelinsky is the Morris and Annie Trachman Professor of Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University. He is the author of The Origins of the Ownership Society: How The Defined Contribution Paradigm Changed America. His monthly column appears here.

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December 19, 1843

Dickens publishes A Christmas Carol

“Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it.” So begins a staple of Christmas celebrations, Charles Dickens’s novella A Christmas Carol.

Dickens’s book, of course, relates the conversion of the crabbed miser Ebenezer Scrooge to a warm-hearted man who embraces Christmas after a night of visits from the ghost of his old partner, Jacob Marley, and three time-traveling spirits, those of Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Yet to Come. Dickens’s work became an instant classic. All 6,000 copies of the first printing were sold by Christmas, and the 2,000 copy second printing that quickly followed was also quickly sold out. Its lasting charm is evidenced by countless plays, radio dramatizations, television specials, and movie adaptations that have followed, a new one, seemingly, each generation.

While A Christmas Carol is probably Dickens’s most beloved work, it did little to alleviate the financial trouble in which he labored in 1843. At the time, Martin Chuzzlewhit was being serialized, but sales were slow. With his wife expecting the couple’s fifth child, Dickens penned the Christmas story in the hopes of a financial boost. Despite the brisk sales, his income did not rise as desired. The cost of producing the book—all resulting from Dickens’s own decisions, as he supervised the printing and hired the illustrator—was so high that the author saw few profits. Dickens lamented that “I shall be ruined past all mortal hope of redemption”—ironic, given that A Christmas Carol demonstrates that redemption has nothing to do with one’s financial condition.

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December 17, 1273

Persian Sufi poet Rumi dies

As the poet and mystic Jalal al-Din Rumi lay on his deathbed, his wife pleaded with him not to die. “Am I a thief?” he replied. “Have I stolen someone’s goods? Is this why you would confine me here and keep me from being rejoined with my Love?” The love that Rumi sought was for Allah; the poet, a Sufi, or mystic, yearned to achieve union with Allah.

Rumi was born in 1207 in what is now Afghanistan to a scholar and teacher. When the boy was in his early teens, the family moved west, perhaps to seek safety from oncoming Mongols. They eventually settled in the city of Konya in what is now Turkey. His name Rumi reflects settling here: “Rum” was the name for the region. Rumi was instructed by his father and others in mystical ideas, and he himself became a mystical teacher. In his thirties, he met a holy man called Shams al-Din who had a profound influence on his life and ideas. Rumi’s family and followers resented the other mystic’s hold on Rumi’s mind, however, and apparently had Shams killed. Soon after, Rumi began writing wrenching poetry of longing for his departed mentor; these poems are collected in the Divan-e Shams. A second collection, the Masnavi was composed at the promptings of a disciple and reflects Rumi’s theology, views of life, and desire for union with God. When he died, tradition says that his coffin was followed by men of several different faiths. The night of his death is called Seb-i Arus, the “Night of Union.” He is buried in a magnificent tomb in Konya called the Green Tomb, where his father and son are also buried.

Rumi’s son organized the Mawlawiyah, an order of mystics sometimes called the Whirling Dervishes because of the swirling dance they do. Each year on December 17, they celebrate Seb-I Arus in Konya with song, dance, and Rumi’s verses.

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‘Of all styles he loved most to be named honest, and hath of that an hundred letters so naming him’, wrote Ben Jonson’s Scottish friend, William Drummond, after Jonson had visited him at his castle at Hawthornden on the River Esk, seven miles south of Edinburgh, in 1618.  ‘Honest’ seems a reasonable word to use in relation to Jonson’s character.   Those closest to him complained at times that he was vain, egotistical, boastful, a bit of a bully, and that he drank too much, but never accused him of deceit.  But it’s possible none the less to sense a certain strain within this reported self-description.  If you’re an honest man, why would you need a hundred letters testifying to this fact?  Why would you want not merely to be honest, but to be named as honest?

One possible explanation could be that you were required to appear in a court of law or before some other tribunal where your integrity, challenged by others, needed to be formally vouched for.  Throughout his career Jonson was indeed in constant trouble with the authorities, and obliged repeatedly to assert that his satirical writings weren’t seditious, that they weren’t aimed at particular persons, and weren’t likely to endanger the security of the state.  One of his first theatrical ventures, a now-lost comedy called The Isle of Dogs, written in collaboration with Thomas Nashe and performed at the Swan theatre in 1597, landed him and two fellow-players in Marshalsea prison on charges of sedition and ‘lewd and mutinous behaviour’, and provoked an edict from the Privy Council declaring that all theatrical activity in London should be henceforth suspended — as for several months it was — and that all London playhouses be ‘plucked down’: as happily, in the end, they were not.  Had the edict been fully carried out, the world would never have seen such works as Hamlet and King Lear and Macbeth and The Tempest, Volpone and The Alchemist, The Changeling and The Revenger’s Tragedy: plays from the richest theatrical period England has ever known.

A year later Jonson was back in jail again on a charge of manslaughter, having killed in a sword-fight one of the players with whom he’d been imprisoned the previous summer. Expecting soon to be hanged, he rashly converted to Catholicism, but was released after pleading benefit of clergy: an archaic legal device which allowed for a stay of execution if you could prove you were literate by reading the first verse of Psalm 51 (or if you were cunning, by committing that verse to memory).  In the years that followed, Jonson was in renewed trouble with the authorities.  He was hauled before the Privy Council on charges of ‘popery and treason’ for his tragedy of Sejanus; summoned to the Consistory Courts for recusancy (failing to receive the Anglican communion); and clapped in jail once more for his comedy Eastward Ho!, written in collaboration with his friends George Chapman and John Marston, that contained some glancing satire on the powerful Scottish members of James’s court.  ‘The report was they should then had their ears cut and noses’, Jonson later told his friend William Drummond, but once again he and his collaborators managed to escape the expected punishment.  Throughout the latter part of his career, Jonson – now England’s most celebrated writer — was quizzed by the civil and religious authorities about a number of his plays, and brought before the Attorney-General on suspicion of having written verses in praise of John Felton, the assassin of Charles I’s favourite courtier, the deeply unpopular George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham.  All of these charges Jonson managed successfully to deflect and to deny.

The Gunpowder Plot

Never was Jonson’s reputation more endangered than in relation to a business in which he was to become curiously entangled soon after his release from prison following the Eastward Ho! affair.  On or about 9 October 1605 Jonson attended a supper party at a hostelry in The Strand known as The Irish Boy, in the company of a number of discontented fellow-Catholics, who were deeply concerned about James’s failure to meet the high expectations with which members of their community had welcomed him to England in 1603.  These men were now planning an extreme act of terror, plotting to blow up the House of Lords on 5 November – less than a month away – on the occasion of the state opening of Parliament, thus destroying King James, Prince Henry, and leading ministers of the crown.  Jonson’s companions at this supper included Robert Catesby, Francis Tresham, Thomas Winter, John Ashfield, Sir Josceline Percy, and Lord Mordaunt: all ring-leaders in the Gunpowder conspiracy.  What was Jonson doing in their midst?

Could he have been trying to dissuade the conspirators from their desperate act?   Or could he (some have less generously asked) have been acting as a spy for Sir Robert Cecil, who was soon to lead the commission of enquiry into the Plot, and to recruit Jonson’s services in another capacity?  How ‘honest’ were his dealings at this delicate moment?  After reading the anonymous letter left at the house of the Catholic peer William Parker, Lord Monteagle, warning of an impending coup, King James had the Parliament building searched.  Thirty-six barrels of gunpowder were discovered, stacked behind the firewood in the cellars.  A tall man loitering nearby was immediately arrested.  He gave his name as John Johnson, saying that he was a Catholic from Netherdale in Yorkshire.  He freely confessed that it had been his intention to blow the building sky-high and the royal family and their counsellors ‘back to Scotland’, but refused to say any more, or give the names of any of his co-conspirators.

James was impressed by the courage of John Johnson – whose true identity, as Guido Faux or Guy Fawkes was soon to be revealed – but determined to break his resolve.  He ordered that Fawkes be sent to the Tower of London, where ‘the gentler tortures are to be first used unto him, et sic per gradus ad ima tenditur, [‘and so by degrees moving up to the worst’], ‘and so God speed your good work’.  Meanwhile a suitably compliant Catholic priest would need to be recruited to persuade the suspect that it was his moral duty now to disclose to his interrogators further details relating to the Plot. To help with this task the services of Ben Jonson were recruited.  On 7 November Jonson received a warrant from the Privy Council instructing him ‘to let a certain priest know (that offered to do good service to the state) that he should securely come and go to their Lordships, which they promise in the said warrant upon their honours’.  The following day Jonson wrote to Robert Cecil, reporting that he’d been unable to locate the priest in question, who may have been one Father Thomas Wright, a former Jesuit who is thought to have been the priest who originally had converted Jonson to Catholicism, or another Catholic priest with whom Jonson and the leading conspirator, Robert Catesby, were well acquainted, a certain Father Thomas Strange.  Wright did eventually turn up to testify, perhaps as a result of Jonson’s efforts, but his presence was no longer needed, for Guy Fawkes’s resolution by this stage had broken, thanks to the tortures (gentle or otherwise) that had been administered by his interrogators in the Tower of London, and had freely made his confessions.

I believe it is unlikely that Jonson was acting as a spy for Robert Cecil.  Jonson was deeply contemptuous of the whole system of espionage that Elizabeth had put in place under Francis Walsingham, which he hoped had been banished by James (though it had not been).   He had a personal loathing of particular spies, such as Robert Poley and Henry Parrot who are mentioned by name in one of Jonson’s best-known poems, ‘Inviting a Friend to Supper’, as not being present at the table to which he is inviting his unknown guest.  None of Jonson’s contemporaries ever hinted at the possibility of his acting for Cecil, a man whom Jonson privately despised, or of his betrayal of members of the faith to which he continued loyally to belong for another seven years.  It’s more likely that Jonson, in common with many other English Catholics at this time, was deeply shaken by the proposed events of 5 November, the nearest equivalent in the early modern world to the actual events in recent times of 9/11.  He was a patriot in the modern sense of the term (as one who loves his country), a sense of which incidentally he’s the first known English user.  He was a supporter of the Stuart dynasty, no lover of Catholic Spain (against whose armies he’d fought as a young man) and had no wish to see King James or the young Prince Henry blown sky-high or back to Scotland with Fawkes’s gunpowder. He was eager after the discovery to assert his loyalty to the King, which he did in a number of epigrams and other writings as well as in his efforts to assist the commission of enquiry.  His very survival, professionally and literally, depended on his ability in these perilous times to parlay, to negotiate between parties holding sharply conflicting beliefs, to protect himself though the arts of silence and accommodation; to project an image of himself as a man who never changed and never wavered, who ’of all styles loved most to be named honest’.

Ian Donaldson is Honorary Professorial Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of Ben Jonson: A Life.

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November 14, 1889

Nellie Bly begins record round-the-world trip

At 9:40:30 in the morning of November 14, 1889, an American woman began a trip abroad. It was not just any trip, though: journalist Nellie Bly was out to best the legendary journey of Phileas Fogg, the British gentleman who was the hero of  Jules Verne’s bestselling novel, Around the World in Eighty Days. Bly’s whirlwind world trip was heavily promoted by Joseph Pulitzer’s newspaper the New York World.

Born Elizabeth Cochran, the writer who became Nellie Bly became a journalist at 21 when she wrote a letter to the editor of a Pittsburgh paper complaining about his dismissive statements about women in the workplace. Impressed by her writing, he hired her. She gained fame from a series of articles describing corruption and poverty in Mexico, leading the outraged Mexican government to force her to leave the country. Working for Pulitzer’s World, she had herself committed to an insane asylum and then wrote a searing exposé of horrible conditions there. The articles prompted a government investigation.

Bly proposed the round-the-world trip in 1888, but the World demurred initially at having a woman make the journey. Once she left, though, the paper covered the story to the hilt, even running a contest to have viewers guess her return date. Almost a million entries were received. Using steamships and sampans, trains and rickshaws, horses and burros, Bly made rapid time—although she did stop in Paris to meet Verne and his wife. She finished her journey 72 days, 6 hours, and some minutes after her departure. She described the scene: “The station was packed with thousands of people, and the moment I landed on the platform, one yell went up from them, and the cannons at the Battery and Fort Greene boomed out the news of my arrival.”

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James Murdoch will today be hauled over the coals once more, by a House of Commons select committee determined to find out exactly what lay at the bottom of the phone-hacking affair. It has all the best ingredients of a modern political story – a too close relationship of politicians and press; a secret world of networking and influence now dragged, kicking and screaming, into the light; secret payments, cover-ups, and public outrage; and a strong whiff, not to say stench, of corruption in the air. The story of the ex-policeman, now a private investigator, detailed to pursue the lawyers of Milly Dowler in the hope of unearthing something discreditable or scandalous, is only the latest twist in what seems a peculiarly modern spiral of press misbehaviour and political greed.

The Murdoch affair seems the most contemporary of stories, chock-full of hacked mobile phones, high-tech surveillance equipment and secret video-recordings. But although the technology might have changed, it is a world that would have been only too familiar to nineteenth-century author Anthony Trollope. He was as fascinated as we are by what lies behind the public face of politics: the personal passions, rivalries and love affairs, the ins and outs of office, the spectacular rises and equally rapid falls.

It’s been a strange and revealing business, editing and living with Anthony Trollope’s 1873 Palliser novel, Phineas Redux, over the past couple of years. In one way, the Palliser novels seem to come from a world immeasurably distant from our own – aristocrat-run, high-imperial Britain before universal suffrage, motor cars and telephones, let alone the 24-hour news cycle that today’s politicians have learned to live with. But then again, the Palliser world very often seems strangely familiar, and not simply because the parliamentary rituals and furniture seem to have changed so little over the past century and a half. Almost daily throughout the editing process I would turn from thinking about Phineas’s complex love life, or Mr Daubeny’s machinations to stay in office, to the day’s news stories with a wry smile of recognition.

Trollope is sometimes wrongly thought to be a rather soothing or comforting writer, an old pair of slippers or the kind of Trollope a male politician could admit to cuddling up with in perfect safety. If that’s your view, Phineas Redux will make you think again. Not long before, Trollope, who had always wanted a parliamentary career, had stood as a Liberal candidate for Beverley in East Yorkshire. He came bottom in the poll and the corruption and inanity of electioneering disgusted him. The insight and disillusionment that followed fuels the novel, a story about a young politician in the making, who finds himself entangled in a nasty political quarrel that turns even nastier when his hated rival, with whom he has just very publicly quarrelled, is found dead, stabbed in a back alley. It’s not the first bit of violence in the book; a little earlier Phineas himself has been shot at by the enraged and half-mad husband of his intimate (but not too intimate) friend Lady Laura Kennedy (the bullet missed, or the book would have had to end there). By the time we get our hero safely to the end of the book and into the loving arms of the mysterious heiress Madame Max, he and we have also survived a corrupt election, accusations of bribery and electoral malpractice, alleged adultery and a secret investigation into bigamy in Poland. These adventures climax in a legal and political battle fought out over the publication of a private letter in the press, which claims to reveal the truth of Phineas’s adultery. Only through some very fast legal footwork and a last-minute injunction can Phineas prevent its publication, and his own and Lady Laura’s ruin.

It is at times like this that Trollope seems the most contemporary and prescient of novelists. He is a brilliantly perceptive observer of the power of newspaper reporting, and what we now call ‘the media’, in the making and breaking of political careers, and of the complex and often dirty tangles that politicians, editors and journalist find themselves in. The epicentre of these intrigues in the novel is Quintus Slide, the ‘indefatigable, unscrupulous’ editor of The People’s Banner. Formerly a radical, Slide now supports the Conservatives ‘with great zeal and with an assumption of consistency and infallibility’. Trollope gives us plenty to hate in Slide, whose populist Toryism is a mix of high-minded moralising and vitriolic personal attacks. A press quick to condemn others but utterly immoral in its own behaviour: seems a familiar mix?

Political hatreds, sexual scandals, unscrupulous editors, and last-minute injunctions: it is no wonder that Trollope has remained such a favourite, and so perennially topical, for so long. For his are the most clear-sighted and capacious of all novels about what we call, genteelly enough, the modern political process. But it is far from genteel in Trollope. Perhaps the Victorian equivalent of Silvio Berlusconi’s bunga-bunga parties might not have found a home in his work – the Victorian public would hardly have tolerated it – but the politician, his wife, his mistress, and the kidnapped cat almost certainly would have done.

John Bowen is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature at University of York. Most recently he has edited the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Phineas Redux, and is also the author of Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit (2000).

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Happy Hallowe’en!

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Roger Luckhurst is Professor of Modern Literature at Birkbeck College, University of London. He has most recently edited our edition of Dracula, but has also edited Late Victorian Gothic Tales, also for Oxford World’s Classics.

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My respect for Mark Twain has soared lately. I started looking seriously at his political side in 2003, when I taught his anti-imperialist essay “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” the week the U.S. invaded Iraq.  For the first time, Twain’s anger resonated with me, but I didn’t know what drove it. I’d always accepted the prevailing biographical narrative that personal disasters fueled Twain’s temper tantrums in his last decade.  That didn’t really work for “Person,” however; the essay indicts the U.S. for complicity in imperialist aggressions throughout the world. Twain’s anger is political, not personal, and it’s based on a definition of American citizenship that, though rife with contradictions, still provides the touchstones for American identity—and for the American political rhetoric that addresses it.

Mark Twain shared a common understanding of U.S. identity and world mission. The  national narrative originated in nineteenth-century history texts, which fuse Protestant-Christian and Enlightenment values.  According to the textbooks, the Puritans came to the New World to establish religious freedom, and American civil liberties are a uniquely Protestant idea.  The doctrine of Free Trade became part of the narrative, semantically shifting words like “freedom” to connote the marketplace rather than the social arena. By the end of the century the energies of 19^th-century evangelical outreach crossed over into U.S. national self-fashioning, and history texts positioned the Founding Fathers as directors of a divinely mandated mission to spread American civilization around the globe. The contradiction lay in the fact that although the narrative indicated that it was America’s duty to help other nations gain freedom from oppressive colonial powers, it also suggested that only people of Anglo-Saxon descent were capable of fully enacting modern civilization.

Twain supported American intervention in Cuba because he believed that we had practiced our values by helping Cubans free themselves from Spain.  At first he also supported intervention in the Philippines, but when he realized our intent was “to subjugate, not to redeem,” the Filipinos, he changed his mind. He thought President McKinley’s claim that it was America’s duty to “civilize and Christianize” the Filipinos was “hogwash” and “pious hypocrisy,” and he was keenly aware of the racism that drove the debates—exemplified by Pennsylvania’s Representative Henry Dickinson Green’s declaration that  he opposed a citizenship for Filipinos because “We cannot make them white.  We cannot make them like our citizens.”

Twain also recognized the damage annexation could do to our national reputation. By 1899 Mark Twain was very much a citizen of the world, and he knew that all eyes were on the U.S. as it pondered whether or not to annex. Opinions varied. Rudyard Kipling, speaking for the imperialists, urged the U.S. to “take up the white man’s burden” and help Britain spread western civilization around the world, while Europeans sneered that the Americans, who had berated them for dividing Africa and Asia among themselves, had fallen at the first temptation to get a colony of their own. Rubén Darío, speaking for Latin Americans, accused Teddy Roosevelt of believing “that progress is just eruption,/ that wherever you put bullets,/ you put the future, too.” And Apolinario Mabini, crafter of the Philippine constitution, warned the U.S. that “force … cannot annihilate the aspirations of eight million souls who are conscious of their own power, honor, and rights; blood will not drown them, it will only nourish their great ideas, the eternal principles.”

Clearly, Mark Twain was not alone in thinking that the Americans had betrayed their founding values for what he labeled a “backseat” in the community of imperialist nations.

That narrative still drives Americans’ understanding of national identity. We still believe we are a nation of white Protestants, despite massive evidence to the contrary, and our politicians have to avow their Christianity to be creditable.  Our leaders invoke divine guidance when they dispatch troops, and we quarrel endlessly over the contents of American history texts.  Moreover the rest of the world continues to fling our values back at us: in 2006 Iranian President Mahmound Ahmadinejad asked President Bush how it was possible to bomb Afghanistan and still profess “to be a follower of Jesus Christ…feel obliged to respect human rights, [and] present liberalism as a civilization model.”

Twain called the Philippine-American War “a quagmire from which each fresh step renders the difficulty of extrication immensely greater,“ adding, “I wish I could see what we are getting out of it, and all it means to us as a nation.”  We’ve been stuck in a lot of quagmires since 1900. We’ve rarely benefited from them, and each time, policy decisions have eroded civil liberties at home and pummeled our reputation abroad.  Now the fusions of marketplace, foreign policy, and religious ideologies have driven us into a world crisis, but our national narrative has not changed, and we are unable to break through to a clearer understanding of who we are and how we should be conducting ourselves on the world stage.

Susan K. Harris is the Joyce and Elizabeth Hall Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Kansas. She is the author of God’s Arbiters: Americans and the Philippines, 1898-1902.

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It is often difficult to remember exactly the initial seed, the faint stirrings of an idea that sets off the beginning of writing a long story. The root of the idea for The Hidden Kingdom is certainly muddled but it must surely begin with my long interest in Oriental art; in particular, Japanese woodblock prints and the anime films of Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli. Whilst the book is not specifically set in Japan or any other country in particular, I have certainly borrowed freely from the mythologies and landscape of that country as I have come to understand it through many prints and films.

As a precocious and would-be aesthetic art student in the 1960s, I was obsessed with the world of Paris in the late nineteenth century. In my desultory student reading I chanced upon the Goncourt Brothers. In their famous journals they claimed to have introduced the cult of the Japanese wood block print to Europe. They had discovered the prints used as protective wrapping around the export cargoes of oriental blue and white china. The Goncourts, ever alert to artistic innovation, hailed the prints as great art and collected them, identifying such artists of genius as Hokusai, Hiroshige and Utamaro. Through their influential standing they in turn had an effect on the work of various painters in their own time, from Whistler and Monet to Bonnard and Van Gogh. So I, in turn, was influenced as it were, and these wood block prints by the Japanese masters remained a core part of my visual imagination. They influenced much of my illustration work over a forty year period, and as my confidence in writing grew I was keen to make something which had the flavour of those prints, especially the snowbound landscapes of Hiroshige.

Sometime in the late 1990s, I discovered Japanese illustration in a second form. I discovered a trailer on the internet for an animated film that had been a huge success in Japan, called Princess Mononoke, and shortly afterwards by coincidence I went on a teaching trip to Minneapolis where, through the kindness of my host, I was able to watch the whole film just released there on VHS.

I was stunned; here was the Japanese woodblock print tradition in all its subtlety but now, crucially, in motion. Here too was a new kind of animated story telling, epic and serious, with an astonishing level of attention to nature and to intense moments of natural detail. I recall the aesthetic shock caused by one scene which was just a simple observation of the way that raindrops fall and gradually darken a flat stone in a landscape. Such moments in Japanese cinema are known I believe as ‘pillow scenes’, where the director dwells on a beautiful moment for the sake of it, as a transition or cushion between scenes and not just for the simple propulsion of the story. I had never noticed anything like that before in animation.

So the prints and film images were one strand in the making of The Hidden Kingdom. The other was a simple opening sentence.

I was asked to contribute such a sentence to an educational text book, as a spur to encourage children in their own writing. The idea was for the child to continue from the point where the sentence left off and build a story from it. The sentence I came up with would not go away. It stayed in my head and occasionally nagged at me to continue it myself, just to find out what happened next. The sentence ran along the lines of, ‘The prince woke suddenly to the howling of wolves.’ I finally gave in to the need to continue it and worked deliberately at random, improvising, just to see where it would lead me, enjoying not knowing what would happen. I would have to find out what happened by actually writing it.

So I had two separate stories going on independently. One: a Japanese mythological tale set in a snowbound landscape; the other: the story of a Prince waking to the sound of wolves. They were in two separate folders on my computer along with a stored set of inspirational images. I worked on the two stories independently, nurturing and developing them in the usual way for some time but they stubbornly remained as discrete stories, each in their own world.

I enjoyed working on the Prince story because the main character had little idea of what was happening around him. In a way he was not unlike the amnesiac hero of the Jason Bourne films, where the audience are put in the same position as the protagonist and discover the story only as the hero does. So with the Prince, the reader would find out as the hero did.

I finally discussed the idea of the Prince story with Liz Cross, my editor at OUP, just after I had finished the third of the Tom Trueheart books. I described my idea in only the vaguest terms and Liz was trusting and patient enough to let me get on with it. It was only a month or two later that I realised, in a Eureka moment, that the two stories were in fact one and the same story. The two folders were happily blended together, the texts were married together seamlessly, and my characters met each other and their various destinies in their imagined landscapes and became one. The snowbound story of The Hidden Kingdom finally and slowly unfurled like a military banner on the saddle of a warrior’s horse, caught and opened by the wind.

Watch the trailer for The Hidden Kingdom here:

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Author, illustrator and designer, Ian Beck was born in Hove on the Sussex coast in 1947. Encouraged by an inspirational art teacher and head master at his local secondary modern school and after seeing an exhibition of drawings for the Radio Times, Ian was fired with enthusiasm about illustration and becoming an illustrator. He attended the Brighton College of Art where he was taught by both Raymond Briggs and John Vernon Lloyd.

Ian has published and illustrated over sixty books for children, including The Hidden Kingdom, Chicken Licken, and a picture book with Philip Pullman entitled Puss in Boots, or the Ogre, the Ghouls and the Windmill.

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By returning to the rich seed-bed of nineteenth-century Irish writing, Foster charts some of the influences, including romantic ‘national tales’ in post-Union Ireland, the poetry and polemic of the Young Ireland movement, the occult and supernatural novels of Sheridan LeFanu, William Carleton’s ‘peasant fictions’, and fairy-lore and folktale collectors that created the unique and powerful Yeatsian voice of the decade from 1885 to 1895.

In the video below, R. F. Foster talks more about Yeats, faeries, and the Irish occult tradition.

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R. F. Foster was born in Waterford and educated in both Ireland and the United States. A graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, he subsequently became Professor of Modern British History at Birkbeck College, University of London and in 1991 the first Carroll Professor of Irish History at Oxford and a Fellow of Hertford College. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1989, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 1986, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1992, an honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2010. His books include W.B. Yeats, A Life. I: The Apprentice Mage 1865-1914 (1997) which won the 1998 James Tait Black Prize for biography, and Volume II: The Arch-Poet, 1915-1939 (2003). He is also a well-known critic and broadcaster.

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