Well, now that the National Book Awards winners have been announced, and congratulations to all the winners, it’s time to share which lucky OUPblog readers will be getting free books in the mail!

In first place with five points was Shawn Miklaucic who gets the big prize, the Historical Thesaurus of the OED.

In second place with two points was Jilly Dybka who will receive a Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus.

In third place with one point was Christopher Elias who will get a copy of Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd edition).

A great big thank you to everyone who participated and to all the fabulous authors who wrote books we enjoyed this year.  2009 was chock-full of great literature and we can’t wait to read what you publish next year!

J.R.R. Tolkien’s first job was as an assistant on the staff of the OED, and he later said that he had ‘learned more in those two years than in any other equal period of [his] life.’ In The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary, three senior OED editors – Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall, and Edmund Weiner – explore more than 100 words found in Tolkien’s fiction, such as ‘hobbit’, ‘attercop’, and ‘precious’. Edmund Weiner has written this original post for OUPblog on Winterfilth (October) and Blotmath (November).

As I write this blog Winterfilth is coming to an end and Blotmath is about to begin. What on earth am I talking about? Well, as the Tolkien enthusiasts out there will know, these are the names that the hobbits used for October and November.

As it happens, although the action of The Lord of the Rings spans October and November (avid readers will remember that a lot of action happens in the one and the other is spent by the hobbits resting in Rivendell), these month names are not used in the story. They are given in an appendix in which Tolkien explains the calendar of the Shire (the land of the hobbits) and the hobbits’ names for the days of the week and the months.

Did Tolkien make these names up? No. Some people will be surprised to learn that he made up none of his ‘English’ words, as opposed to the words of the elvish, dwarvish, and orkish languages. (The one exception, funnily enough, may be the word ‘hobbit’—but the jury on that is still out.) The other strange and archaic-looking words, such as mathom, Arkenstone, eleventy, flet, and barrow-wight, are all based on earlier usage and generally go back either to Anglo-Saxon (Old English, English before the Norman Conquest) or to Old Norse (the language of the Vikings and Sagas).

So what about the months? Tolkien borrowed them for the hobbits from Anglo-Saxon texts that give both the Latin names of the months (the names we use now) and their Old English equivalents. None of the latter seem to have survived the Conquest except (in a different meaning) Yule, and Lide, a now obsolete dialect word for March, which may have meant ‘loud’ (referring to its windiness). Blotmath, or rather Blotmonath or Blodmonath, was the time when in pagan times cattle were sacrificed (blotan ‘sacrifice’ or blod ‘blood’).

And Winterfilth? In Old English this was Winterfylleth, in which fylleth means ‘fulness’, or perhaps ‘full moon’. The word for ‘filth’ was spelt and pronounced differently, but in modern English they would have come to sound the same, and this gave Tolkien an opportunity for one of the scholarly etymological puns to which he was very partial.

Welcome to Historical Thesaurus Week on the OUPblog! Every day this week we will be looking at the first historical thesaurus to be written for any of the world’s languages, the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. Conceived and complied by the English Language Department of the University of Glasgow, and based on the Oxford English Dictionary, it is the result of over 40 years of scholarly labor. Today we have an article by Ammon Shea, a good friend of this blog, which looks at how the HTOED could be used to rewrite the Gettysburg Address. Be sure to check back all week to learn more about the HTOED.

Mark Twain once famously remarked that the difference between the almost-right word and the right word was the same as “the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning”. Choosing words based on incomplete information can easily lead to writing that may range from the simply unclear to the laughably wrong. Below is an illustrative example of how the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary might be of use when faced with the need to find the right word, as opposed to the almost-right one.

Imagine you are a student who has been asked to re-write the beginning of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. As an example of how you might do this, we’ve posted the opening line with four words bolded. What options would you have to replace these words with synonyms if you were using the HTOED, as opposed to if you were using an online thesaurus?

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Fathers – Looking in the HTOED, there are 26 different words listed as synonyms of father (ancestor). Every one of these words is provided with dates for the first recorded instance of its use in English. In a number of cases there is also a date provided for a word’s last recorded use as well. Given that the Gettysburg Address was written in 1863, the user of this thesaurus would be informed of the fact that fore-runner, antecestre, and eldfather were no longer in use at that time, but that grandsire, ancestor, and progenitor were.

In the event that one wished to be more specific, there are another 47 words and phrases that are related to the concept of ancestors, all of which are listed under a specific subcategory. For instance, the HTOED differentiates between ancestors in general and female ancestors. It provides separate categories for ancestors in direct line and ancestors collectively.

Furthermore, many of the words found here are assigned usage labels that can inform the user of when it might be appropriate or inappropriate to use them. Progenitrix is listed as figurative, collateral ancestor is specified as being a law term, and kin is listed as being dialectical.

Looking at Thesaurus.com, the first entry that comes up when one searches for ‘father’ exhibits the following range of words, all listed as synonyms: ancestor, begetter, dad, daddy, forebearer, origin, pa, padre, papa, parent, pop, predecessor, procreator, progenitor, sire, source.

The entries from Thesaurus.com are listed in alphabetical order, and do not have any indication of when they might have been current. There is no immediate indication that begetter or sire might be of older vintage than dad. Of the sixteen words, one (pop) is listed as being informal – none of the other entries are labeled in any way.

Nation – When looking at the entry for nation in the HTOED, the historical value of this work is immediately apparent. It shows how recently most of our words that deal with nationality came into existence. There is only one word listed under the category of ‘the state or fact of being a nation’, and that is nationhood, first recorded in 1850. The concept of ‘having a national quality or characteristic’ is first attested to by a single word in 1691 with nationality. And the term nation-building, so common in political speech of late, does not make its appearance in English until 1913.

In addition to providing a wealth of historical data that is not found anywhere else outside of the Oxford English Dictionary itself, the HTOED also gives a list of synonyms that were definitely in use in 1863, and which would be acceptable substitutes, including country, state, and nationality.

Turning again to the first entries in Thesaurus.com we find the following: commonwealth, community, democracy, domain, dominion, empire, land, monarchy, people, populace, population, principality, public, race, realm, republic, society, sovereignty, state, tribe, union. Again, there is no indication of whether any of these words are archaic, or when they entered the language. There are no usage labels for any of them. For some of these words, such as race, it is difficult to truly say that they are in fact synonyms.

Liberty – As was the case with nation, the word liberty has had strikingly few synonyms over the years. In fact, of the nine nouns listed for the concept of liberty (freols, freot, freedom, freeship, freelage, franchise, liberty, and largess) only freedom and liberty were in current usage when Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address. Your choices are suddenly much clearer.

As user of the HTOED would also have a far easier time in finding similar and related words to liberty, not only in the semantic subcategories, but also in the other parts of speech that have to do with liberty and freedom. Nouns that relate to ‘liberty and freedom’ are listed first. The next entry in the thesaurus deals with adjectives that pertain to ‘freedom’. This is followed by adverbs meaning ‘freely’, which is in turn followed by phrases meaning ‘free’ or ‘at liberty’. Once the subjects of freedom and liberty have been exhaustively treated, they are followed by concepts such as independence, liberation, and permission. This logical organizational structure of the HTOED makes it considerably easier to find the right word.

When one looks up liberty in Thesaurus.com one finds an impressive array of synonyms (autarchy, authorization, autonomy, birthright, carte blanche, choice, convenience, decision, deliverance, delivery, dispensation, emancipation, enfranchisement, enlightenment, exemption, franchise, free speech, immunity, independence, leave, leisure, liberation, license, opportunity, permission, power of choice, prerogative, privilege, relaxation, release, rest, right, sanction, self-determination, self-government, sovereignty, suffrage, unconstraint), but as before, it is difficult to say whether many of them share the actual whole meaning of liberty, or if they merely share some of the meaning. Free speech and power of choice may well have something to do with liberty, but it is perhaps not a workable substitute. Perhaps you would choose autarchy, since it is an impressive looking word. It may look good, but unfortunately autarchy carries a fairly specific meaning that refers to economic independence, and so would not be appropriate to use in this case.

Equal – The HTOED is based on the Oxford English Dictionary, and so can boast of having been mined from a resource that is unparalleled and unavailable to any other thesaurus. It is the reason why, when looking at the entry for equal, you will find 129 different words and phrases, divided amongst the main entry and 28 subcategories. It is why you will see categories as finely differentiated as ‘equal in effect’ and ‘equally powerful’ each of which has specific entries that are slightly different. It is why you have access to the full range of words from efen (which means ‘equal’ and dates back to Old English) to the expression toe-to-toe (which means ‘equal or well matched’ and was first recorded in 1942).

The user who is looking for a synonym for equal not only will find such choices as tantamount, even, and equipollent; they will also have all the necessary information to ensure that the choice that they make is guided by decades of scholarship, provided by a team of researchers that is unequalled in the history of the study of the English language.

The National Book Award nominees were announced earlier this week. Kudos to all nominees, especially to our friends & compatriots at the nominated University Presses. I am glad to see the great good wisdom of the nominating committee at the NBAs. Congratulations aside, it is tradition here in the OUP publicity dept to host a little friendly contest to see who can pick the most NBA winners. This year I am inviting our blog readers to join the fray and send me your picks.  Details below.

Please note there is a point system in this contest. Correct picks in Fiction and Non-fiction will each receive 1 point each, 2 points for a correct pick in YA literature, and 3 points for a correct pick in the Poetry category. Please, only one submission per person. Send your entry to publicity.us@oup.com.

In the event of a tie, all entrants with the highest score will be placed in a raffle for prizes. Prizes include a copy of Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd edition), the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, and the Historical Thesaurus of the OED. One prize per player. I reserve the right to disqualify anyone I feel is trying to game this friendly competition. Awards are announced on November 18th. Winners here will be announced on November 20, 2009. Good luck.

FICTION (1 point)
Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage (Wayne State University Press)
Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin (Random House)
Daniyal Mueenuddin, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (Norton)
Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite (Alfred A. Knopf)
Marcel Theroux, Far North (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

NONFICTION (1 point)
David M. Carroll, Following the Water: A Hydromancer’s Notebook (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Sean B. Carroll, Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt)
Adrienne Mayor, The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy (Princeton University Press)
T. J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (Alfred A. Knopf)

YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE (2 points)
Deborah Heiligman, Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith (Henry Holt)
Phillip Hoose, Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
David Small, Stitches (W. W. Norton & Co.)
Laini Taylor, Lips Touch: Three Times (Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic)
Rita Williams-Garcia, Jumped (HarperTeen/HarperCollins)

POETRY (3 points)
Rae Armantrout, Versed (Wesleyan University Press)
Ann Lauterbach, Or to Begin Again (Viking Penguin)
Carl Phillips, Speak Low (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Open Interval (University of Pittsburgh Press)
Keith Waldrop, Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy (University of California Press)

Stephen T. Asma is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia College Chicago, where he holds the title of Distinguished Scholar.  His newest book, On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears, is a wide-ranging cultural and conceptual history of monsters-how they have evolved over time, what functions they serve, and what shapes they are likely to take in the future.  It is with this monstrous perspective (sorry I know it is an awful pun) that Asma looks at Where the Wild Things Are in honor of its release this weekend.

With hindsight it seems fitting that Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963) first appeared in cultural space somewhere between Elvis Presley and the Beatles. Where the Wild Things Are is a rock’n’roll story, about being misunderstood, rebelling against authority, letting your hair down, and generally indulging in the Dionysian rumpus. It’s not surprising, then, that the new film version (Warner Brothers) is brought to us by skateboarding music-video director Spike Jonze and literary mega-hipster Dave Eggers.

As the movie’s trailer reminds us, “Inside all of us is a wild thing.” And in our therapeutic era, we generally accept that it is good and healthy to visit our wild things –to let them off their chains, let them howl at the moon. You can also taste some of this Romanticism in the recent relish of the Woodstock anniversary, with its celebration of noble primitivism. But the hippy view of “the wild” is quite sunny, whereas Sendak (who lost family during the Holocaust) wanted to acknowledge some of the darker aspects of uncivilized life (even, or especially, through the eyes of a child). Despite these darker notes, however, Where the Wild Things Are still affirms the idea that danger, at least in small doses, is good for you. And this latest fascination with beasties, together with the approach of Halloween, reminds us that we have a love/hate relationship with monsters generally. We are simultaneously attracted and repulsed by them.

Sendak’s monsters are just repulsive enough to be alien, foreign, and mysterious, but they’re also vaguely cute and familiar enough for us to identify with them and recognize our emotional selves in them. Sendak claimed in later interviews that the monsters were based loosely on his boyhood perceptions of his frightening aunts and uncles. Like a distant relation, our uncanny monsters are alien aspects of our own identity –they are parts of who we are, unfamiliar aspects of our psyches. This common way to read monsters –as primitive, uncivilized versions of ourselves –is obvious in Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or the forthcoming Universal Pictures remake The Wolfman, starring Anthony Hopkins and Benicio del Toro. Monster stories have a cathartic function, in the sense that they give our tamed, repressed impulses a brief holiday of Bacchanalian revelry. And after these virtual trips to our own hearts of darkness, we can better return to our everyday social world of compromise, accommodation, and compliance. On this account, the monster story is the favorite genre of our reptilian brains (the real home where the wild things are).

However, every era has its own uses and abuses of monsters. The lesson of Shelley’s Frankenstein, for example, is often taken as a liberal lesson in tolerance: we as a society must not create outcasts, or persecute those who are different. Or consider that the medieval mind was obsessed with giants and mythical creatures as God’s punishments for the sin of pride. And the medieval period also began the Church’s long fascination with demon possession. For the Greeks and Romans, monsters were prodigies –warnings of impending disaster.

Besides the cuddly monsters of Where the Wild Things Are, our present day fascination seems dominated by zombies, vampires, and serial killers. Why are we so entranced by these specific creatures –why do we love to hate them?

Not only are there more zombies around these days, but they seem to be getting faster and more aggressive. Gone are the slow lumbering goons of the George Romero-era zombies, and in their stead we have lightning fast undead predators. Zombies, just like vampires, serial killers and most other monsters are terrifying because you cannot really reason with them. Unlike your other enemies, you cannot appeal to monsters to recognize that you’re a good hearted person, or you’ve got kids, or you really understand their pain, or you only want to understand them in the name of science. They’ll pummel you and eat you anyway. There’s not much common ground, in terms of rationality or emotional solidarity. One suspects there is a link between a decade of American fear of terrorists, and a rise in zombie monsters that do not respond to negotiation.

But zombies also have unique qualities that trigger the dynamic of love/hate, attraction/repulsion. Everybody wants to live forever. That’s a given. If you can’t remember wanting to live forever, then you’re probably a successful and functional adult. But the inner narcissist –the one that thinks he’s God and wants to live forever –is still in you somewhere, buried deep. The zombie, like the vampire, is a kind of immortal: chop his leg off, he’s still coming; blow a hole in his chest, he’s still coming. His life span is indefinite and he’s indestructible. So the little narcissist inside us really likes the immortal aspect of the zombie and the vampire. We unconsciously crave that kind of staying power and durability, but our narcissistic desire to cheat death is impossible to sustain in the face of mature experience. Reality regularly reminds us, as we are growing up, that we will not cheat death. No one actually cheats death. To carry on in the fantasy world of the narcissistic inner-child is impossible given the brute facts of our animal mortality. So the universal urge to live forever must be repressed, as we grow up. This repression means that the desire must be transformed from positive to negative –from something we like, to something disgusting (just like in potty training).

We love to hate zombies because they simultaneously manifest our craving for immortality, and our more mature realization that the flesh always decays. As “living dead,” all zombies elicit those conflicting impulses in our psyche. The more disgusting they are, the more we are reminded of our inevitable decomposition, but the more they keep getting up and chasing, the more we are delighted by the promise of immortality. The psyche seems to carry out an unconscious vacillation: the zombies live on forever, those lucky sods, but wait…they’re disgusting and repellent and…and…run!

Vampires are a much more glamorized and sexualized version of the attraction/repulsion dynamic. From Polidori’s original Vampyre, to Stoker’s Dracula, to today’s teen vampires of Twilight, the blood drinkers are, generally speaking, totally hot. The play of sexual taboos in vampire stories is well appreciated. But in addition to the always titillating presence of neck-kissing and the exchange of bodily fluids, we have to recognize that vampires are romantic monsters. They are incarnations of the irresistible but damaging femme fatal for boys, and the “bad boy” or cad for girls. A vampire is frequently an archetype of the charismatic, handsome, man, who seduces women by his very indifference toward them. Women find him alluring and seek chase, only to discover too late that they are broken upon his heartless unmovable nature. The vampire holds out the promise of love, but alas lacks even humanity.

Vampires and zombies share another well-spring of horror: you could easily become one. You or your loved one is just a little bite away from contracting the disease. In the age of AIDS, swine flu, SARS, and myriad pandemic anxieties, it’s easy to see why monsters who transmit their monstrosity through bites (both sexual and gustatory) are especially frightening. In the medieval mind, monsters and demons were metaphysically different from you and I, and in the unlikely event that you were transformed into one you could be sure it was the result of serious sin. Nowadays, however, casual, accidental contact can make you “one of them.”

One suspects that losing one’s humanity, or becoming one of them, is also at play in our dread fascination with serial killers –real and imagined monsters. We have extensive media coverage, and corresponding public appetite, for real serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, Ed Gein, as well as the popular fictional characters Norman Bates, Sweeney Todd, Hannibal Lecter, Freddy Krueger, Leatherface, Michael Myers, and so on. Why are so many of us repelled, disgusted, and morally outraged, but also willing to lay out cash to see psychotic murderers hang people on meat hooks, sever limbs, and of course eat their innocent victims?

Before the 1950s, very few people would have suggested that a serial killer was anything like you, or I, or churchgoing folks. And yet, now it is commonplace for people to think of psychopaths as just slight (albeit horrifying) deviations on the otherwise normal brain or psyche. A murdering psychopath is not a demon-possessed creature or an offspring of Cain, but a guy who failed to develop normal levels of human compassion. Most of us believe that the exact causes of monstrous serial killing will be found eventually in brain science or developmental psychology or some combination, but we don’t think that Gacy, Dahmer, Hannibal Lecter, or Leatherface, are metaphysically different from us. We have secularized the evil of such psychopaths only recently, and maybe this is one reason why we love to hate them.

Just as Sendak’s monsters give us a kind of Rousseauian view of going “back to the wild” (wherein the authentic self is discovered, uncorrupted by society), so too Leatherface and similar monsters of “torture porn” give us a kind of Freudian view of going native. We’re attracted to serial killers because they lack conscience, hurt their enemies with impunity, and feel very little. They do the stuff we might do, if we had not been socialized properly. We’re attracted to their animalistic primitive powers. But we’re simultaneously repulsed by them because they lack the precise qualities that make us human.

If Rousseau and the hippies are right, then our inner primitive monsters will be more like Sendak’s beasties; weird, a little dangerous, but ultimately helpful. If, however, Freud is right about the kinds of monsters inside us, then we shouldn’t go too often or too long to where the wild things are.

Like rock’n’roll, the wild primitivism of monsters is tempered by bourgeois (and simply human) needs for security, safety and stability. Howlin’ Wolf is sanitized into Elvis, the “long haired” Beatles have to wear suits, the mud-soaked Woodstock kids are ready to go home after the weekend, and Sendak’s little “Max” misses his mom and leaves his monsters to return to “his very own room where he found his supper waiting for him, and it was still hot.”

Bryan A. Garner is an award-winning author and editor of more than 20 books, including Garner’s Modern American Usage: The Authority on Grammar, Usage, And Style 3rd edition. Below we have posted one of his daily usage tips about the phrase “nouveau riche”. To subscribe to his daily tips click here.

nouveau riche (1).

Today: Generally.

“Nouveau riche” (= [1] a newly rich person; or [2] newly rich people collectively) is sometimes misspelled *”nouveau rich” — e.g.: “It will be for Deng’s heirs to deal with problems such as the widening gap between China’s nouveau rich [read 'nouveau riche'] and rural poor.” James Cox, “Deng Xiaoping: 1904-1997,” USA Today, 20 Feb. 1997, at A1.

The phrase keeps the French plural “nouveaux riches.” But some mistakenly write *”nouveau riches” or even (as a pl.) *”nouveau rich” — e.g.: “Even for those nouveau rich [read 'nouveaux riches'] with the spare change and audacity to have their own personal guard posted at the entrance, it still takes a moment.” “Back Porch,” S.F. Examiner, 22 Dec. 1996, at E3.

Some writers seem to believe that the phrase refers not to people but to newfound wealth — e.g.: “The Victorians couldn’t blow their bucks on big-screen TVs. Instead, their nouveau riches [read 'newfound wealth,' or merely 'wealth'] went toward embellishing their houses.” M.J. McAteer, “A Touch of Class,” Wash. Post, 16 Apr. 1997, at D9.

The singular and plural forms are pronounced /noo-voh REESH/.

Language-Change Index
1. *”nouveau rich” for “nouveau riche”: Stage 1.
2. *”nouveau riches” as a plural for “nouveaux riches”: Stage 1.
3. “nouveau riche” in reference to newfound wealth: Stage 1

*Invariably inferior forms.

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.

I’m having a rough day so I thought it might help my mood to browse through the Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations edited by Ned Sherrin.  Below are some quotes the restored the smile to my face.

Mistakes and Misfortunes

“My only solution for the problem of habitual accidents…is to stay in bed all day.  Even then, there is always the chance that you will fall out.” – Robert Benchley 1889-1945: Chips off the old Benchley (1949) ‘Safety Second’

on premature calls of a win in Florida in the presidential election of 20oo:
“We don’t just have egg on our face.  We have omelette all over our suits.” – Tom Brokaw 1940-: in Atlanta Constitution-Journal 9 November 2000.

“I was mistaken for a prostitute once in the last war.  When a GI asked me what I charged, I said, “Well, dear, what do your mothers and sisters normally ask for?” – Thora Hird 1911-2003: in Independent 27 February 1999

“If we had had more time for discussion we should probably have made a great many more mistakes.” – Leon Trotsky 1878-1940: My Life (1930).

Technology

“No man can hear his telephone ring without wishing heartily that Alexander Graham Bell had been run over by an ice wagon at the age o four.” – H. L. Mehken 1880-1956: Marion Elizabeth Rodgers Mencken: The American Iconoclast (2005)

“Inanimate objects are classified scientifically into three major categories – those that don’t work,those that break down, and those that get lost.” – Russel Baker 1925- : In New York Times 18 June 1968.

“The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts.” – Paul Ralph Ehrlich 1932- : in Saturday Review 5 June 1971.

“The thing with high-tech is that you always end up using scissors.” – David Hockney 1937- : in Observer 10 July 1994 ‘Sayings of the Week’

Andrew Robinson was literary editor of The Times Higher Education Supplement from 1994-2006 and is now a visiting fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He is the author of The Story of Writing, The Man Who Deciphered Linear B and Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World’s Undeciphered Scripts. His latest book is Writing and Script: A Very Short Introduction. Below is an original post by Andrew asking whether the internet will create a universal writing system.

The internet appears to suggest that the dream of universal communication across the barriers of language, nation, and culture by means of writing is within reach. Three centuries ago, the philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz wrote: “As regards signs, I see … clearly that it is to the interest of the Republic of Letters and especially of students, that learned men should reach agreement on signs.” But the nature of writing systems means that Leibniz’s vision remains an impossible illusion. There is no such thing as a universal writing system, and there never will be.

In the mid-1970s, with increasing international travel, the American Institute of Graphic Arts cooperated with the United States Department of Transportation to design a set of symbols for airports and other travel facilities that would be clear both to travellers in a hurry and those without a command of English. They invented 34 iconic symbols. The design committee made a significant observation: “We are convinced that the effectiveness of symbols is strictly limited. They are most effective when they represent a service or concession that can be represented by an object, such a bus or bar glass. They are much less effective when used to represent a process or activity, such as Ticket Purchase…”.

Pictographic and logographic signs at airports and beside highways are a limited language of universal communication, which belongs to proto-writing, not full writing. Mathematics, too, is a universal language, but it is no use for most purposes of written communication. Painting and music communicate powerfully across cultures, but their meaning is diffuse and ambiguous. To communicate any and all thought always requires phonetic symbols. Wikipedia may have started in English, but it subsequently evolved versions written in over two dozen languages, including Esperanto. Full writing and reading depend on knowing a spoken language. This fact has not been altered by the internet—however many computer icons (and emoticons) we may encounter online.

Until the last few decades, it was generally agreed that over the centuries western civilisation had tried to make writing a closer and closer representation of speech. The alphabet was naturally regarded as the pinnacle of this conscious search; the Chinese script, conversely, was widely thought of as hopelessly defective. The corollary was the belief that as the alphabet spread through the world, so eventually would mass literacy and democracy. Surely, one might think, if a script is easy to learn, then more people will grasp it; and if they come to understand public affairs better, they will be more likely to take part in them and indeed demand a part in them. Scholars thus had a clear conception of writing progressing from cumbersome ancient scripts with multiple signs to simple and superior modern alphabets.

Few are now quite as confident. The superiority of alphabets is no longer taken for granted. The ancient Egyptians, for example, had an ‘alphabet’ of 24 signs nearly 5000 years ago, but apparently chose not to use it alone, and instead developed a logo-consonantal system with over 700 signs in regular use. The Japanese, rather than using their simple syllabic kana more and more frequently, chose to import more and more kanji from the Chinese script, creating a writing system of unrivalled complexity. Mayan glyphs show that the Maya could have used far more purely syllabic spellings, if they had wished, instead of their elaborate logographic and logo-syllabic equivalents.

We might also mention the notorious irregularity of modern English spelling, which is by no means a logical and straightforward representation of speech. George Bernard Shaw left money in his will to invent a rational alphabet for spelling English. But the Shaw alphabet, though ingenious and simple to write, has never been used. It is almost impossible to imagine public acceptance of a wholesale change in English orthography of the kind that was introduced in Turkey in 1928, when the country changed from writing in the Arabic script to writing in the Roman alphabet, or in Korea, with the less abrupt changeover from Chinese characters to Hangul.

The reason why scripts flourish or vanish has more to do with political and cultural considerations than purely linguistic ones. Literacy concerns far more than merely learning how to read and write. A Japanese physics student once outlined for me the genuine linguistic disadvantages of writing only in kana, without kanji, and then added: ‘After all, a long tradition cannot change like that. It will NEVER happen!!’ In other words, writing Japanese in kanji is a key part of Japanese identity.

Many scholars of writing today have an increasing respect for the intelligence behind ancient scripts. Down with the monolithic ‘triumph of the alphabet’, they say, and up with Chinese characters, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Mayan glyphs, with their hybrid mixtures of pictographic, logographic and phonetic signs. Their conviction has in turn nurtured a new awareness of writing systems as being enmeshed within societies, rather than viewing them somewhat aridly as different kinds of technical solution to the problem of efficient visual representation of a particular language.

While I personally remain sceptical about the expressive virtues of pictograms and logograms, this growing holistic view of writing systems strikes me as a healthy development that reflects the real relationship between writing and society in all its subtlety and complexity. The transmission of my intimate thoughts to the minds of others in many cultures via intricate marks on a piece of paper or a computer screen, continues to amaze me as a kind of barely explicable magic.

Hermione Lee is a well-known biographer, having written major Lives of Virginia Woolf (1996) and Edith Wharton (2007). She has also written critical studies of Elizabeth Bowen, Willa Cather, and Philip Roth. She is a Fellow of the British Academy, of the Royal Society for Literature, and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2003 she was made a CBE for services to literature, and in 2008 she was elected President of Wolfson College, Oxford. She has recently written Biography: A Very Short Introduction, and below is another wonderful video by our friends Meet the Author in which Professor Lee explains the motivation behind writing this book.

Click here to view the embedded video.