Adam Roberts is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, as well as a science fiction novelist. He is the editor of Tennyson: the Major Works, which was recently published in the Oxford World’s Classics series. In the original post below, he reviews the Booker shortlisted novel The Quickening Maze, by Adam Foulds, which features Tennyson as a main character.

If you’d like to read more by Adam Roberts, he also writes for literary blog, The Valve.

I picked up Adam Foulds’ excellent new novel The Quickening Maze (it has, as I’m sure you know, been shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize) with more than an ordinary reader’s interest. You see, this scrupulously researched historical novel takes Alfred Tennyson as one of the main characters; and I, as the editor of Tennyson: the Major Works, was curious as to how Foulds treats him.

I was not disappointed. The Quickening Maze is, throughout, a beautifully written fiction: set in 1840 and centred on the lunatic asylum run by Dr Matthew Allen on the outskirts of Epping Forest, the novel evokes its world with a poet’s eye and skill at phrasing—indeed the book is as much about poetry, or poetic perception, as it is about a series of events. The point-of-view shifts deftly between all the main characters, including a number of the inmates at the asylum; although the peasant poet, John Clare, is the main focus. A patient in Allen’s asylum, his sanity is precarious at the beginning of the tale and becomes less stable as it goes on. Fould’s vivid, precise way with poetic image, and his exquisite control of language, brilliantly evoke the world through Clare’s hyper-sensitive eyes.

But Tennyson has a large part to play too. He comes into the story as he oversees the admittance of his brother Septimus (suffering from the melancholic ‘black blood’ of the Tennysons) to the asylum, living there for nearly three years. Dr Allen befriends Tennyson, and persuades him to invest in his idea for an automated wood-lathe—in fact Tennyson put almost all the money he had, £3000, into this scheme, only to lose it all. The doctor’s pale, bookish daughter Hannah falls hopelessly in love with Tennyson, although the emotion is not reciprocated.

Foulds has certainly done his research. He credits Robert Bernard Martin’s dependable biography Tennyson: the Unquiet Heart in his acknowledgments, but I take this to be modest understatement on his part; because one thing that emerges from this book is how well Foulds knows his pre-1840s Tennyson. I’ll give a few examples. Early in the book Tennyson talks philosophy with Allen, who believes in a ‘Grand Agent’ behind the phenomena of reality: ‘a common cause, a unitary force.’ Tennyson concurs.

“I see. A Spinozism, of sorts.” And Tennyson did see: a white fabric, candescent, pure, flowing through itself, surging, charged, unlimited. And in the world the flourishing of forms, their convulsions: upward thrive of trees, sea waves, the mathematical toy of sea shells, the flight of dragonflies. [25]

This is nicely done; and if the reader of Tennyson recognises the sea-shell from Maud, the dragonfly from ‘The Two Voices’ it only contributes to the effect. Fould’s Tennyson goes on more specifically:

“As a boy I could put myself into a trance by repeating my name over and over until my sense of identity was quite dissolved. What I was then was a being somehow merging, or sustained, with a greater thing, truly vast. It was abstract, warm, featureless and frightful.” [The Quickening Maze, p.26]

This speech has been lifted from a letter Tennyson wrote (late in his life—in 1874) to an American mystic and writer Benjamin Paul Flood. Flood, it seems, believed it was possible to enter a spiritual trance state via the newly discovered medical technologies of anasthesia. Tennyson wrote:

I have never had any revelations through anaesthetics: but “ a kind of waking trance” (this for lack of a better word) I have frequently had quite up from boyhood. When I have been all alone. This has often come upon me through repeating my own name to myself silently, till all at once as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being—and this not a confused state but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words—where Death was an almost laughable impossibility—the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction but the only true life. [Tennyson: the Major Works, p.520]

What interests me here is how Foulds have adapted this famous self-description for the purposes of his novel: Tennyson’s actual 1874 account is surprisingly reassuring about this strange fugue state, and wholly positive: ‘not a confused state but the clearest of the clearest … Death was an almost laughable impossibility … no extinction but the only true life’. In the novel, though, it becomes something rather more unnerving: ‘abstract, featureless and frightful’—because The Quickening Maze’s main focus is on madness, on that breakdown of coherent consciousness and its fearful consequences.

‘May I ask you, what is your opinion of Lord Byron’s poetry?’ Hannah, the doctor’s daughter enquires later on in the narrative Tennyson replies:

I remember when he died. I was a lad. I walked out into the woods full of distress at the news. It was the thought of all he hadn’t written, all bright inside him, being lost for ever, lowered into the darkness for eternity. I was most gloomy and despondent. I scratched his name onto a rock, a sandstone rock. It must still be there, I should think. [The Quickening Maze, pp.102-3]

The original for this is a conversation Tennyson had late in life with his son, Hallam.

We talked of Byron and Wordsworth. “Of course,” said Tennyson, “Byron’s merits are all on the surface. This is not the case with Wordsworth. You must love Wordsworth ere he will seem worthy of your love. As a boy I was an enormous admirer of Byron, so much so that I got a surfeit of him, and now I cannot read him as I should like to do. I was fourteen when I heard of his death. It seemed an awful calamity; I remember I rushed out of doors, sat down by myself, shouted aloud, and wrote on the sandstone: “Byron is dead!” [Tennyson: the Major Works, p.541]

Once again Foulds has done something interesting with his source material. The substance of the recollection is the same, but where Tennyson’s original account is a cathartic outpouring—he ‘rushed out of doors’ at the news, ‘shouted aloud’ and wrote on rock to express himself—Foulds internalises the grief. His Tennyson is filled, even glutted, with a grief that is inside: he goes ‘into the woods’; he is ‘full of distress’ at ‘the thought of all he hadn’t written, all bright inside him.’ This interiorisation of experience is one of the main thrusts of the novel. Foulds’ characters all inhabit their subjectivities much more than they live in the world, some to the point of monomaniac madness. The exception also proves the rule: Clare, whose perceptions of the natural world around him furnish the novel with some of its most beautiful moments, cannot escape his own imprisoning imagination. He sinks into a grief-filled interiority—even believing himself to be Lord Byron himself—for he has been unable to cope with the death of his childhood sweetheart Mary, and the fantasy of her being alive again overwhelms him.

The parallels with Tennyson are unobtrusively drawn: in 1840 he was also sunk in grief, at the premature death (in 1833) of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam. Foulds’ Tennyson reverts to memories of Hallam time and again, and across the course of the novel he is writing the elegiac lyrics that were later collected into Tennyson’s most famous poem, ‘In Memoriam A. H. H.’ Foulds quotes the ninth:

Fair ship, that from the Italian shore
Sailest the placid ocean-plains
With my lost Arthur’s loved remains,
Spread thy full wings, and waft him o’er.

So draw him home to those that mourn
In vain; a favourable speed
Ruffle thy mirror’d mast, and lead
Thro’ prosperous floods his holy urn.

All night no ruder air perplex
Thy sliding keel, till Phosphor, bright
As our pure love, thro’ early light
Shall glimmer on the dewy decks.

Sphere all your lights around, above;
Sleep, gentle heavens, before the prow;
Sleep, gentle winds, as he sleeps now,
My Friend, the brother of my love;

My Arthur, whom I shall not see
Till all my widow’d race be run;
Dear as the mother to the son,
More than my brothers are to me. [The Quickening Maze, pp. 107-8; Tennyson: the Major Works, p.209]

That Tennyson is sane, and Clare mad, has as much to do with the different emphases of their imaginative engagements with mourning. Tennyson styles himself, patiently, as Arthur’s ‘widow’, in the last stanza there; a feminisation that Foulds develops in his fictional recreation of the poet’s personality. Clare, on the other hand, chafes against his restrains. He believes himself a famous pugilist, and fights with the asylum’s warders and with local gypsies. He roams restlessly through Epping forest, and—in a superb passage at he novel’s end—walks all the way back to his home village, a journey of 80 miles or more, overcoming the obstacles placed in his way, landscape, hunger and weakness. By comparison Tennyson moves smoothly: Foulds captures well his stillness and inwardness, his silences, the way he draws things into himself—not least, tobacco smoke (Allen “watched Tennyson relight his pipe, hollowing his clean-shaven cheeks as he plucked the flame upside down into the bowl of scorched tobacco’ [23]”). In all, it’s very deftly and sensitively done. The novel is highly recommended.

What are you doing during lunch tomorrow?  If it involves sitting at your desk eating a sandwich consider joining us in Bryant Park.  Oxford University Press has teamed up with the Bryant Park Reading Room to host a FREE discussion of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer led by John R. MacArthur, publisher of Harper’s Magazine and author, most recently, of You Can’t be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America. In the blog post after the break MacArthur introduces us to the relationship between Harper’s and Mark Twain.

So be sure to come to the Bryant Park Reading Room (northern edge of the park), Tuesday, July 21st from 12:30 p.m. to 1:45 p.m. The rain venue (don’t worry we are doing our best no-rain dances) is The General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen Building, 20 West 44th Street. Sign up in advance and receive a FREE copy of the Oxford World’s Classic, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (offer is limited while supply lasts).

The histories of Mark Twain, William Dean Howells and Harper’s Magazine are so intimately linked, so important to the fabric of the magazine, that I talk about Twain and Howells around the office as if they were still alive. The other day I told a staff meeting that as long as I was running Harper’s, it would remain a literary magazine that also publishes journalism — not the other way around — because of Howells’s and Twain’s ever-present legacy.

Howells met Twain in 1869, three years after Twain had published his first long narrative in Harper’s, “43 Days in an Open Boat.” As the future literary editor of Harper’s recalled, “At the time of our first meeting…Clemens (as I must call him instead of Mark Twain, which seemed always somehow to mask him from my personal sense) was wearing a sealskin coat, with the fur out, in the satisfaction of a caprice, or the love of strong effect which he was apt to indulge through life.” It’s no coincidence that for our special 150th anniversary issue in 2000, we constructed a cover photo of Twain in his dandy suit facing Tom Wolfe in his dandy suit.

Clemens and Howells became good friends and in 1875 the genius from Hannibal asked Howells to read the manuscript of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. “I am glad to remember that I thoroughly liked The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” Howells wrote, “and said so with every possible amplification. Very likely, I also made my suggestions for its improvement; I could not have been a real critic without that; and I have no doubt they were gratefully accepted and, I hope, never acted upon.” Howells was underrating his influence on Twain, who penned over 80 pieces for Harper’s. As a critic and a fine novelist in his own right, Howells was correct — Tom Sawyer is a great American novel. Indeed, not everyone agrees that it’s any less of an achievement than the more widely acclaimed (at least in serious literary circles) Huckleberry Finn. I’m looking forward to talking about the book next week and finding out the answer to a number of questions: for example, precisely how old is Tom Sawyer? I assume the Twain scholars in the audience will enlighten me on this and other matters.

There are few things that evoke Christmas more successfully for me than Charles Dickens and his Christmas stories. Dickens published five ‘Christmas books’ – The Battle of Life, The Haunted Man, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Chimes, and of course A Christmas Carol – followed in subsequent years by annual Christmas stories which ran in the magazines he edited, Household Words and All the Year Round. Below is an excerpt from 1846’s The Battle of Life, which can be found along with the other Christmas books in the Oxford World’s Classic A Christmas Carol and other Christmas Books, edited by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst. He wrote for the OUPblog in 2006, and his post can be found here.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Once upon a time, it matters little when, and in stalwart England, it matters little where, a fierce battle was fought. It was fought upon a long summer day when the waving grass was green. Many a wild flower formed by the Almighty Hand to be a perfumed goblet for the dew, felt its enamelled cup filled high with blood that day, and shrinking dropped. Many an insect deriving its delicate colour from harmless leaves and herbs, was stained anew that day by dying men, and marked its frightened way with an unnatural track. The painted butterfly took blood into the air upon the edges of its wings. The stream ran red. The trodden ground became a quagmire, whence, from sullen pools collected in the prints of human feet and horses’ hoofs, the one prevailing hue still lowered and glimmered at the sun.

Heaven keep us from a knowledge of the sights the moon beheld upon that field, when, coming up above the black line of distant rising-ground, softened and blurred at the edge by trees, she rose into the sky and looked upon the plain, strewn with upturned faces that had once at mothers’ breasts sought mothers’ eyes, or slumbered happily. Heaven keep us from a knowledge of the secrets whispered afterwards upon the tainted wind that blew across the scene of that day’s work and that night’s death and suffering! Many a lonely moon was bright upon the battle-ground, and many a star kept mournful watch upon it, and many a wind from every quarter of the earth blew over it, before the traces of the fight were worn away.

They lurked and lingered for a long time, but survived in little things; for, Nature, far above the evil passions of men, soon recovered Her serenity, and smiled upon the guilty battle-ground as she had done before, when it was innocent. The larks sang high above it; the swallows skimmed and dipped and flitted to and fro; the shadows of the flying clouds pursued each other swiftly, over grass and corn and turnip-field and wood, and over roof and church-spire in the nestling town among the trees, away into the bright distance on the borders of the sky and earth, where the red sunsets faded. Crops were sown, and grew up, and were gathered in; the stream that had been crimsoned, turned a watermill; men whistled at the plough; gleaners and haymakers were seen in quiet groups at work; sheep and oxen pastured; boys whooped and called, in fields, to scare away the birds; smoke rose from cottage chimneys; Sabbath bells rang peacefully; old people lived and died; the timid creatures of the field, the simple flowers of the bush and garden, grew and withered in their destined terms: and all upon the fierce and bloody battle-ground, where thousands upon thousands had been killed in the great fight. But, there were deep green patches in the growing corn at first, that people looked at awfully. Year after year they re-appeared; and it was known that underneath those fertile spots, heaps of men and horses lay buried, indiscriminately, enriching the ground. The husbandmen who ploughed those places, shrunk from the great worms abounding there; and the sheaves they yielded, were, for many a long year, called the Battle Sheaves, and set apart; and no one ever knew a Battle Sheaf to be among the last load at a Harvest Home. For a long time, every furrow that was turned, revealed some fragments of the fight. For a long time, there were wounded trees upon the battle-ground; and scraps of hacked and broken fence and wall, where deadly struggles had been made; and trampled parts where not a leaf or blade would grow. For a long time, no village girl would dress her hair or bosom with the sweetest flower from that field of death: and after many a year had come and gone, the berries growing there, were still believed to leave too deep a stain upon the hand that plucked them.

The Seasons in their course, however, though they passed as lightly as the summer clouds themselves, obliterated, in the lapse of time, even these remains of the old conflict; and wore away such legendary traces of it as the neighbouring people carried in their minds, until they dwindled into old wives’ tales, dimly remembered round the winter fire, and waning every year. Where the wild flowers and berries had so long remained upon the stem untouched, gardens arose, and houses were built, and children played at battles on the turf. The wounded trees had long ago made Christmas logs, and blazed and roared away. The deep green patches were no greener now than the memory of those who lay in dust below. The ploughshare still turned up from time to time some rusty bits of metal, but it was hard to say what use they had ever served, and those who found them wondered and disputed. An old dinted corselet, and a helmet, had been hanging in the church so long, that the same weak half-blind old man who tried in vain to make them out above the whitewashed arch, had marvelled at them as a baby. If the host slain upon the field, could have been for a moment reanimated in the forms in which they fell, each upon the spot that was the bed of his untimely death, gashed and ghastly soldiers would have stared in, hundreds deep, at household door and window; and would have risen on the hearths of quiet homes; and would have been the garnered store of barns and granaries; and would have started up between the cradled infant and its nurse; and would have floated with the stream, and whirled round on the mill, and crowded the orchard, and burdened the meadow, and piled the rickyard high with dying men. So altered was the battle-ground, where thousands upon thousands had been killed in the great fight.

Nowhere more altered, perhaps, about a hundred years ago, than in one little orchard attached to an old stone house with a honeysuckle porch; where, on a bright autumn morning, there were sounds of music and laughter, and where two girls danced merrily together on the grass, while some half-dozen peasant women standing on ladders, gathering the apples from the trees, stopped in their work to look down, and share their enjoyment. It was a pleasant, lively, natural scene; a beautiful day, a retired spot; and the two girls, quite unconstrained and careless, danced in the freedom and gaiety of their hearts.

Recently published in the new-look Oxford World’s Classics series is an edition of The Federalist Papers, which has been edited by Lawrence Goldman. Lawrence is Tutorial Fellow of Modern History at St Peter’s College, Oxford, and has been the editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography since 2004. In the post below, Lawrence talks about how reading The Federalist Papers helps our understanding of present-day America.

The Federalist Papers comprise 85 essays published in the New York city press in the winter of 1787-88 and were written by three of the most eminent of the founding fathers of the republic: Alexander Hamilton, aide-de-camp to George Washington during the Revolutionary War and the first Secretary of the US Treasury; James Madison, the fourth president of the United States and the most influential figure in the drafting of the US Constitution in 1787; and John Jay, a leading American diplomat during the Revolution and the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. These three, all of them ‘federalists’, or supporters of the projected federal union of individual states to form the United States, came together to commend the Constitution to the people of New York in articles published every 2-3 days over several months.

During the War of Independence the thirteen former British colonies had been held together by a very weak form of national government. By the mid-1780s many Americans believed that this was no longer sufficient to meet the new challenges of nation and state formation. Through the summer of 1787 a federal Constitution was drafted at a convention of all the states in Philadelphia; it then had to be ratified by popularly-elected assemblies in each state. When 9 of 13 states had so ratified it, the Constitution would become operative and the United States created.

The state of New York – large, wealthy and populous – was crucial to the federalist design, but there was considerable opposition to joining the Union there, in a state which had fared well since independence from Britain in 1776 and in which many citizens wanted to ‘go it alone’. Hence the need to persuade the people by publishing these essays which explained and defended the draft Constitution and the need to form an American Union.

The Federalist Papers are thus a detailed account and analysis of the new Constitution, but are more than just an operational manual on how the projected federal government would work. They are also fluent philosophical discussions of the nature and purposes of government which have an important place in the development of western political thought and which may help us understand enduring American values and national character.

A first feature of the Federalist Papers is a sense of the vulnerability of the American experiment in self-government which the essays impart. The authors, reflecting their age, were critically aware of the threats to the republic they hoped to create. Some of those threats were internal, including social disorder on the one hand and the threat of tyranny on the other. Others were external, including the very real possibility that Great Britain or another of the European colonial powers might try to re-conquer the North American continent. Hence the need to form a ‘more perfect union’ with the internal strength and centralised control required to deter future aggression and defend the novelty of popular government. It could be argued that America’s peculiar sensitivity to threats of this nature, whether of internal subversion such as during the McCarthyite era, or of external aggression from nations and cultures hostile to the American way of life, as also during the Cold War, dates from the historical experience of the 1780s and is enshrined in the discussion in the Federalist Papers. In Europe it is now customary to think Americans rather too quick to imagine themselves beset by enemies and thus too ready to adopt aggressive or threatening policies. A reading of the Federalist Papers suggests that concern over the vulnerability of the American republic has been an aspect of an enduring national perspective.

A second enduring aspect of these essays is the counterpoint in the American mind between idealism and realism. The Federalist Papers display both of the American behavioural archetypes so beloved of modern commentaries on the United States and its people. On the one hand there is an element of the utopian about them as the authors commend to their readers an entirely innovative form of government unlike any elsewhere on the globe. They capture the optimism and enthusiasm of the American spirit. On the other hand, the psychological foundations of the essays are intensely realistic and pragmatic: the authors also adopt an unflattering view of human nature which is frequently presented as avaricious, factional, and selfish, and for that reason needs to be controlled and directed by a stronger central government than had existed hitherto among the newly-independent states. Men are sometimes angels but are more often not: for that reason they need the guiding hand of a central government.

What follows from this is another revealing tension between a republic of virtue and a republic of laws. Hitherto in human history, as the Federalist Papers make clear, it had been accepted that self-government in a republic required, above all, individual and public virtue: if men and women were morally good in themselves and careful for the civic good as well, they might be able to govern themselves; if not, republics must fall. But what happens to this traditional view of republicanism if, in reality, men and women are self-interested and lack moral sense? The answer provided in the Federalist Papers is to build a system of government on laws rather than on virtue; the enduring American faith in their constitution and constitutionalism in general is related to this fear that left to themselves the people would descend into disorder and conflict, and there seemed to be evidence of this in the states in the 1780s after independence had been secured. In the view of the Federalist Papers, if men and women are not naturally virtuous they can be constrained to be so by a shared obedience to laws – laws made by the people for their own welfare.

In line with the belief that republics depended on virtue, conventional theories of republicanism from the ancient Greek philosophers to Rousseau held that republics had to be homogeneous and also of small extent so that all the population shared the same basic interests. But in perhaps the most famous of the essays, number 10, written by James Madison, he overturned this classical view and made the case for a plurality of interests in a large and extensive republic, the kind of society the proposed United States was to become. As Madison argued his case, if the major threat to popular self-government came from the potential development of a tyranny, the antidote to this was a plethora of social interests in competition with each other. In such a situation no single interest could come to dominate the new United States; instead, there would be many different groups constantly jockeying for position and influence. And it followed that the larger the republic and the more diverse the population, the greater the range of interests and the smaller the threat from any single one of them.

In this way Madison famously defended the proposed United States from the attacks of so-called Antifederalists: their fear that the new government might become an authoritarian one could be countered by pointing to the benefits of pluralism. Thus the Federalist Papers point us beyond the age of the Revolution towards the modern liberalism of the United States in a society encompassing a plethora of groups and interests which compete freely for resources, influence, and prominence.

In conclusion, while we must treat the Federalist Papers as an expression of the values, ideas and psychology of the men who made the American Revolution, they give us clues towards an understanding of some of the pervasive attitudes and features of contemporary American life. In a society still governed by the Constitution of 1787 the assumptions of that age must inevitably shape the nature of the American present, and some of those enduring assumptions may be found in the Federalist Papers.

One of my personal favourite new releases this season in the UK is the paperback edition of The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes by John Gross. I could have chosen any one of hundreds of great anecdotes from and about authors I love, but in the end I decided to share with you this excerpt from the book about Jane Austen. In a series of letters, she deals with some uninvited ideas for her writing from a correspondent.

In the autumn of 1815 Jane Austen was in London, helping nurse her brother Henry through a dangerous illness. He was attended by one of the Prince Regent’s doctors, who told her ‘that the Prince was a great admirer of her novels; that he read them often, and kept a set in every one of his residences; that he himself had thought it right to inform his Royal Highness that Miss Austen was staying in London, and that the Prince had desired Mr Clarke, the librarian of Carlton House, to wait upon her’. The next day Clarke made his appearance and invited her to Carlton House, ‘saying that he had the Prince’s instructions to show her the library and other apartments’.

Accept my best thanks for the pleasure your volumes have given me. In the perusal of them I felt a great inclination to write and say so. And I also, dear Madam, wished to be allowed to ask you to delineate in some future work the habits of life, and character, and enthusiasm of a clergyman, who should pass his time between the metropolis and the country, who should be something like Beattie’s Minstrel––

Silent when glad, affectionate tho’ shy,
And in his looks was most demurely sad;
And now he laughed aloud, yet none knew why.

Neither Goldsmith, nor La Fontaine in his ‘Tableau de Famille,’ have in my mind quite delineated an English clergyman, at least of the present day, fond of and entirely engaged in literature, no man’s enemy but his own. Pray, dear Madam, think of these things. Believe me at all times with sincerity and respect,
your faithful and obliged servant,
J. S. Clarke, Librarian.

Jane Austen replied that she was honoured by his thinking her capable of drawing a clergyman such as the one he had sketched––‘but I assure you I am not’:

The comic part of the character I might be equal to, but not the good, the enthusiastic, the literary. Such a man’s conversation must at times be on subjects of science and philosophy, of which I know nothing; or at least be occasionally abundant in quotations and allusions which a woman who, like me, knows only her own mother tongue, and has read little in that, would be totally without the power of giving. A classical education, or at any rate a very extensive acquaintance with English literature, ancient and modern, appears to me quite indispensable for the person who would do any justice to your clergyman; and I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress.

Clarke was ready with another proposal, however. He had recently been appointed chaplain and English secretary to Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, who was about to marry Princess Charlotte, and when he wrote to Jane Austen conveying the Prince Regent’s thanks for the dedication to Emma, he added that ‘an historical romance illustrative of the august House of Cobourg would just now be very interesting’, and might very properly be dedicated to Prince Leopold. This time she replied to him with what her nephew, J. E. Austen Leigh, called ‘a grave civility’:

My dear sir,––I am honoured by the Prince’s thanks and very much obliged to yourself for the kind manner in which you mention the work. I have also to acknowledge a former letter forwarded to me from Hans Place. I assure you I felt very grateful for the friendly tenor of it, and hope my silence will have been considered, as it was truly meant, to proceed only from an unwillingness to tax your time with idle thanks. Under every interesting circumstance which your own talents and literary labours have placed you in, or the favour of the Regent bestowed, you have my best wishes. Your recent appointments I hope are a step to something still better. In my opinion, the service of a court can hardly be too well paid, for immense must be the sacrifice of time and feeling required by it.

You are very kind in your hints as to the sort of composition which might recommend me at present, and I am fully sensible that an historical romance, founded on the House of Saxe Cobourg, might be much more to the purpose of profit or popularity than such pictures of domestic life in country villages as I deal in. But I could no more write a romance than an epic poem. I could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or at other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No, I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other.

I remain, my dear Sir,
Your very much obliged, and sincere friend,
J. Austen.

J. E. Austen Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen, 1870

Publicity is hard work, you know. Occasionally, though, an event so glitzy and exciting comes along that it makes all those late nights more than worthwhile. Following our recent highly successful relaunch of the Oxford World’s Classics series we were shortlisted along with Blackwell Bookshops and marketing consultancy The One Off in the Nielsen Book Scan Marketing Campaign of the Year Award at the annual Bookseller Retail Awards. OWC Publicity Manager Coleen Hatrick donned her most glamorous clothes and went along. Here’s her report on the event, which was held at the Natural History Museum in London last week.

Outside, the fashionistas, vendors, designers, and models were packing up after six days’ worth of London Fashion Week shows. Inside at the annual Bookseller Retail Awards, the night stars shimmered and a dinosaur glowed blue and gold over our heads as we tucked into our three tasty courses and waited to hear the judging panel’s decision. We were there to hear whether Blackwell, OUP, and marketing design company The One Off had triumphed in the category for Marketing Campaign of the Year for the relaunch of the Oxford World’s Classics series.

Blackwell’s exclusive campaign with Oxford University Press for the relaunch of the series was different than most publisher/retailer promotions, and we were up against some stiff competition from Foyles, WH Smith, Waterstones, and Amazon.co.uk. Blackwell had worked with OUP from the start of its rebrand of the OWCs, with the two companies using the Blackwell Design Agency TOO to develop the new, fresh jacket designs. The collaboration eventually developed into the “More Than Words” campaign, which was a great success, and because of which we were now sitting in the magnificent Victorian Central Gallery of London’s Natural History Museum with bated breath.

We had a few distractions to keep our minds off the judging…

No panic though – it’s a plant eater. The Diplodocus lived 150 million years ago and, at 26 metres, was one of the longest land animals ever to live. This replica skeleton was presented to the Museum in 1905.

The room was heating up. A designer from The One Off agency leaned over and said ‘the classics campaign with OUP is one of my all time favourites’. The crowd of gregarious booksellers, and publishers roared, wine flowed throughout the announcements – 12 categories all with mini acceptance speeches. Our champagne glasses were at the ready. Finally at number 8, it was our category:

”And the award for The 2008 Nielsen Book Marketing Campaign of the Year goes to… Waterstones”.

We smiled meekly around the table. Our Sales Director grinned and said “Well – obviously… they… just did not understand!” And so, we drank a toast to book buyers of the world, and departed.

Yesterday I posted 15 questions from our literary quizbook So You Think You Know Thomas Hardy? by John Sutherland. How did you do? Now’s the time to find out… it’s the answers, taken from the book.

1. What is the name of the cow who is the occasion of Oak’s second meeting with Bathsheba? Daisy. She is calving at the beginning of the narrative and Bathsheba’s aunt keeps her for milk. A favourite (if troublesome) beast, Daisy is mentioned later in the narrative. Dogs, after they have proved their worth, like Oak’s George (who also returns later) are named, as are the horses at Upper Farm, but never sheep. There is a hierarchy of farm animals, as of farming folk, in Wessex.
2. What is Susan’s nickname among the children of the town? ‘The Ghost’, which in a sense she is. She is bodiless––wasting away––and has come back to haunt Henchard.
3. Of what does Grace dream, on her first night back at Hintock? ‘Kaleidoscopic dreams of a weird alchemist-surgeon, Grammer Oliver’s skeleton, and the face of Giles Winterborne.’ Not a happy conjunction for Giles.
4. Who, as best the reader can piece together, are the Durbeyfield children and what are their ages? Abraham is nine at the beginning of the narrative. He is the last male of the d’Urberville line and the oldest boy in the family. The other Durbeyfield children, as the action opens, are: Tess (something over sixteen), Liza-Lu (something over twelve), Hope (age unknown, but plausibly around seven), Modesty (five?), a three-year-old boy (unnamed), and a one-year-old baby. The early scenes in the novel should be played out in the reader’s mind against a background of ceaseless domestic clatter in the cramped Durbeyfield household. Given Tess’s age, the Durbeyfield parents can only have been married some seventeen years and must be comparatively young (in their late thirties or early forties) although the modern imagination may tend to picture them as much older.
5. What did Jude’s father die of? The shakings––possibly ‘ague’, or malaria, more likely delirium tremens (‘the shakes’). We only learn about Jude’s background when Arabella spitefully enlightens him as to his father’s domestic brutality and his mother’s consequent suicide. ‘The Fawleys were not made for wedlock’, as his great-aunt says. Jude’s thoroughgoing ignorance of his family background is one of the minor mysteries of the novel.

6. What is the great communal beer mug at Warren’s Malthouse called, and why? ‘God-forgive-me’ because, when its vast contents are drained, the drinker feels (momentarily) ashamed of his over-indulgence.
7. Why does Henchard go to Mrs Goodenough’s ill-fated furmity tent? Because, mistakenly, his wife wants to prevent him going to the beer tent––thinking that non-alcoholic furmity (a kind of fruity cordial) will keep him safe from indulging his weakness for strong liquor––something already known to her.
8. Why does Marty habitually call Giles (who calls her ‘Marty’) ‘Mr Winterborne’? Because he is her father’s employer and, when she fills her father’s working shoes, her employer too. Giles, apparently, acquiesces in her deference––unfeeling as we may consider it.
9. What colour are Tess’s eyes? Neither black, nor blue, nor gray, nor violet ‘but all those shades together’. It is not a hue which one can easily imagine.
10. Jude has given Arabella a framed lover’s photograph of himself. What happens to it? Arabella throws it out as junk to be auctioned. Jude buys it and burns it.

11. To what does Bathsheba attribute her lack of ‘capacity for love’? ‘An unprotected childhood in a cold world has beaten gentleness out of me.’ If it has frozen her capacity for tenderness, that unprotected childhood would seem to have also rendered her unusually independent in spirit. Bathsheba says very little about her childhood. One assumes she was brought up during her father’s religious-maniac, rather than erotomaniac, phase of life––possibly the grossly inappropriate name was given her, like ‘Magdalen’ in the nineteenth century, to remind a little girl of her sinful gender heritage.
12. ‘Casterbridge’, the narrator tells us, ‘announced old Rome in every street’. What can one read into this antiquarian observation, if anything? Rome brings with it associations of violence, of gladiatorial combat, of the fall of empires (even those as small as those based on the corn trade), and of paganism.
13. What do Mr and Mrs Melbury wear to Giles’s ‘randy-voo’, intended to welcome Grace back as his lover? Mrs Melbury wears her ‘best silk’. Mr Melbury, aware of the class difference between him and Giles, wears his ‘secondbest suit’ (his very best suit, reeking of camphor and not to be worn more than once or twice in a lifetime, is later taken out of the press for the visit to the House, in which he beseeches Mrs Charmond to stop coquetting with Fitzpiers).
14. What is ‘scroff’ and what part does it play in Tess’s downfall? Scroff is dust which, during the dance, rises and gets under skirts, and soils the sweating dancers. This is the prelude to Tess’s calamitous surrender to Alec in The Chase. Details such as this indicate how hard this novelist pressed against the censorious standards of ‘decency’ in Victorian fiction. As he says elsewhere, Hardy is writing for readers of ‘full age’.
15. Jude and Sue sleep together at the shepherd’s cottage, on their ill-fated day’s excursion. Do they do anything more than (literally) sleep? No, although it is presumed that they do. Courts of law would make the same cynical presumption.

Here in the UK it’s getting close to the time of year when school exam results start landing on doormats across the country (A-Level results are out on August 14th), which made me think back to the nail-biting morning waiting to see if I’d got the marks I needed for my university course (I did, phew). So, in the spirit of testing your knowledge to the maximum, today I bring you a handful of questions from our book So You Think You Know Thomas Hardy? by John Sutherland. I studied Hardy at high school, and while I have to confess that my 16-year-old self was less than enthusiastic about him, I have grown to appreciate his novels much more since.

Let’s get down to business. A few easy ones to start you off…

1. What is the name of the cow who is the occasion of Oak’s second meeting with Bathsheba in Far From The Madding Crowd?
2. What is Susan’s nickname among the children of the town in The Mayor of Casterbridge?
3. In The Woodlanders, of what does Grace dream, on her first night back at Hintock?
4. In Tess of the D’Urbervilles, who, as best the reader can piece together, are the Durbeyfield
children and what are their ages?
5. What did Jude’s father die of in Jude the Obscure?

OK. So you should be warmed up by now. Let’s get a little trickier.

6. In Far From The Madding Crowd, what is the great communal beer mug at Warren’s Malthouse
called, and why?
7. In The Mayor of Casterbridge, why does Henchard go to Mrs Goodenough’s ill-fated furmity tent?
8. Back to The Woodlanders. Why does Marty habitually call Giles (who calls her ‘Marty’) ‘Mr Winterborne’?
9. What colour are Tess’s eyes?
10. Jude (the Obscure) has given Arabella a framed lover’s photograph of himself. What happens to it?

Last set coming up – these are the hardest questions of all!

11. To what does Bathsheba attribute her lack of ‘capacity for love’?
12. ‘Casterbridge’, the narrator tells us, ‘announced old Rome in every street’. What can one read into this antiquarian observation, if anything?
13. What do Mr and Mrs Melbury wear to Giles’s ‘randy-voo’, intended to welcome Grace back as his lover?
14. What is ‘scroff’ and what part does it play in Tess’s downfall?
15. Jude and Sue sleep together at the old woman’s cottage, on their ill-fated day’s excursion. Do they do anything more than (literally) sleep?

Check back tomorrow for the answers!

It’s the moment of truth… how did you do? Below are the answers to the Oxford World’s Classics Quiz which we have been running for fun on OUPblog all this week. Congratulations if you got them all right, and if you didn’t, may I suggest you invest in a few of our new editions?

Section One: Their Daily Bread
1. The witch of the place presides over a rotten wedding feast.
ANSWER: Miss Haversham from Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.
2. His sweet tooth eats through a Wilkie Collins epic.
ANSWER: Count Fosco from The Woman in White.
3. He fried his kidney in Dublin town.
ANSWER: Bloom from Ulysses by James Joyce
4. She takes the credit for the boef en daube.
ANSWER: Mrs Ramsay from To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf.
5. Her cupboard was full of jam tarts, lemon tarts, Spanish tarts and cheese-cakes
ANSWER: Mrs Morel from Sons and Lovers by DH Lawrence.

Section Two: ‘It’s a hard-knock life’
1. Misselthwaite’s maid
ANSWER: Mary Lennox from The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
2. Raksha’s man-cub
ANSWER: Mowgli from The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling
3. Discovered in a handbag at Victoria Station
ANSWER: Ernest from The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
4. This clever orphan would rather sail the Mississippi than paint a fence
ANSWER: Tom Sawyer from The Adventures of Tom Saywer by Mark Twain
5. She left Kansas for emerald delights
ANSWER: Dorothy from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

Section Three: Black and White and Read All Over
1. A seductive Mother Superior and a naïve with no vocation
ANSWER: The Nun by Denis Diderot
2. This cloistered anti-hero’s downfall is akin to Legion’s end
ANSWER: The Monk by Matthew Lewis
3. This eighteenth-century reverend faces the trials of Job in Edenic England
ANSWER: The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith
4. This almost-saint journeyed from Huntingdon to St Albans
ANSWER: Christina of Markyate
5. His saucy epic satires spite his regal Roman name
ANSWER: Alexander Pope

Section Four: In the Wars
1. Russian epic retelling of the Napoleonic invasion
ANSWER: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
2. The Wretched man the barricades in grande Paris
ANSWER: Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
3. A story of young Henry at Chancellorsville
ANSWER: The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
4. He led the invasion of Gallia and wrote about it
ANSWER: Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
5. A Prussian intellectual’s military manifesto
ANSWER: On War by Carl von Clausewitz

Section Five: That’s Amore
1. Sanskrit text on life, love and spirituality
ANSWER: Kamasutra by Vatsyayana
2. Banned as obscene, this book revolutionised the understanding of female sexuality
ANSWER: Married Love by Marie Stopes
3. Roman poet banished for his subject of adultery
ANSWER: Ovid
4. This Parisian’s deviance gave his name to unconventional proclivities
ANSWER: The Marquis de Sade
5. This classic mother murdered the progeny as the ultimate revenge
ANSWER: Medea

Section Six: Neither Flesh, Fish, nor Fowl
1. An Italian puppet with greater ambitions
ANSWER: Pinocchio
2. This mad scientist’s creation begs for a female companion
ANSWER: Frankenstein
3. Has coffin, will travel
ANSWER: Dracula
4. This loch-dwelling mum seeks medieval revenge
ANSWER: Grendel’s mother from Beowulf
5. Gothic nocturnal female whose bloodlust stoked a later novel
ANSWER: Carmilla from JS Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly

Section Seven: Espionage
1. Spy for Walsingham and stabbed in a brawl, as legend has it
ANSWER: Christopher Marlowe
2. Pseudo-equine archetypal guise for malice
ANSWER: The Trojan Horse from Virgil’s Aeneid
3. The Prince’s schoolmates set against him by a usurping uncle
ANSWER: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from Shakespeare’s Hamlet
4. An anarchist plots to blow up the Greenwich Observatory
ANSWER: The Secret Agent by Jospeph Conrad
5. A holiday sailing trip cum plot to foil the Germans
ANSWER: The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers

Section Eight: Political Animals
1. A sea monster lends its name to his principle of a strong state
ANSWER: Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
2. Taking America as a model, it Pained the English government
ANSWER: The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine
3. Her vindication laid the foundations for modern feminism
ANSWER: Mary Wollstonecraft
4. For everyone and no-one, this book killed the deity
ANSWER: Thus Spake Zarathustra by Neitzsche
5. This tract takes its title from a head of state
ANSWER: The Prince by Macchiavelli

Section Nine: Explorations
1. He set out for Terra Nova and never made it back
ANSWER: Robert Falcon Scott
2. Journey into ‘The horror!’ of the Congo
ANSWER: The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
3. York castaway considered by some as the prototypical colonist
ANSWER: Robinson Crusoe
4. A ‘swift’ sailing satire
ANSWER: Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
5. The story of Everyman’s journey from this world to the next
ANSWER: The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan

Section Ten: Man’s Best Friend
1. Montmorency accompanied them from Kingston to Oxford
ANSWER: Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
2. Woolf’s four-legged subject
ANSWER: Flush
3. Hardship leads a domesticated canine to return to baser instincts
ANSWER: The Call of the Wild by Jack London
4. This fiendish incarnation haunts the Devonshire moors
ANSWER: The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
5. This ship bore the father of natural selection
ANSWER: The Beagle was Charles Darwin’s boat

Finally we got there! It’s the last ten questions of the Oxford World’s Classics quiz! Check back later today for the answers to all 50 questions

Section Nine: Explorations
1. He set out for Terra Nova and never made it back.
2. Journey into ‘The horror!’ of the Congo.
3. York castaway considered by some as the prototypical colonist.
4. A ‘swift’ sailing satire.
5. The story of Everyman’s journey from this world to the next.

Section Ten: Man’s Best Friend
1. Montmorency accompanied them from Kingston to Oxford.
2. Woolf’s four-legged subject.
3. Hardship leads a domesticated canine to return to baser instincts.
4. This fiendish incarnation haunts the Devonshire moors.
5. This ship bore the father of natural selection