Bowdler

 Born on this day in 1754 was one of those rare men whose name has survived as a verb (and, by extension, noun and adjective) – Thomas Bowdler, whose cleaned-up edition of Shakespeare was the original 'bowdlerised' text. His work, The Family Shakespeare: in which nothing is added to the original Text; but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a Family, was first published in 1807, with a more complete edition following in 1818. The first edition was apparently the work of Bowdler's sister Harriet, but both editions were presented as the work of Thomas alone, presumably because it would have been unseemly for a lady to have immersed herself so studiously in Shakespeare's bawdy. The Family Shakespeare was a great commercial success, running into eleven editions by 1850. 
  Bowdler has long been a byword for Victorian prudery (overlooking the fact that his Shakespeare was first published long before Victoria's reign, and Bowdler himself was 12 years dead when she ascended the throne). In fact the damage he did to Shakespeare's text was slight compared to earlier editors such as Nahum Tate, who took it upon himself to give King Lear a happy ending, and The Family Shakespeare was certainly useful at a time when the plays were commonly read aloud in the family circle – hence the public appetite for it.  One man who vigorously defended Bowdler was the famously degenerate Algernon Charles Swinburne: 'More nauseous and more foolish cant was never chattered than that which would deride the memory or depreciate the merits of Bowdler. No man ever did better service to Shakespeare than the man who made it possible to put him into the hands of intelligent and imaginative children.' He had a point. 

Two Survivors

 Well, I have finally managed to unpack and shelve all my books (yes, I know it's been a long time – I shan't bore you with an account of the various delays, obstructions and diversions that have slowed everything down). Along the way, I've had some happy reunions and surprises of various kinds, and I achieved another drastic cull: seven boxes stuffed with books are destined for whatever charity will accept them.
   I was pleased to find that I still own two 18th-century leather-bound books, humble products of a period that was surely the golden age of book-making. The paper in both – being made of rag rather than wood pulp – is in remarkably good condition, and the bindings still tight. The less interesting of the two was, I think, inherited via my grandmother, and is Volume III (of VII) of The History of Sir Charles Grandison, in a Series of Letters published from the Originals, By the Editor of Pamela and Clarissa, i.e. written by Samuel Richardson, who had a bigger success with Grandison than with either Pamela or Clarissa. My copy of this stray volume is from the library of Isabella Powlett, whose name is beautifully inscribed on the flyleaf, with the date 1754 and the number 216 (she must have had an impressive library for a 17-year-old). Isabella was the only daughter of Lord Nassau Powlett, and she became, by marriage, Countess of Egmont. Her armorial bearings – three downward-pointing swords – are on the front board.
Here is how the first letter of Volume III begins: 
'SELF, my dear Lucy, is a very wicked thing; a sanctifier, if one would give way to its partialities, of actions, which, in others, we should have no doubt to condemn. DELICACY, too, is often a misleader; an idol, at whose shrine we sometimes offer up our Sincerity; but, in that case, it should be called Indelicacy.'
Well, quite... I did not read on.
   Much more interesting is my other 18th-century survivor – Miscellanies, the Sixth Volume, by Dr Swift (London, 1751). This is a collection of Swift's minor essays and what we would now call open letters (and by pure coincidence 'the more obscure regions of Swift's work' are also Patrick Kurp's subject today). Here are, for example, A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture, Some Arguments Against Enlarging the Power of the Bishops, A Short View of the State of Ireland, etc. What caught my eye immediately was A Letter from Captain Gulliver to His Cousin Sympson, written in the Year 1727. In this Lemuel Gulliver takes his cousin to task for prevailing upon him to 'publish a very loose and uncorrect Account of my Travels', relying on 'some young Gentleman of either University' to put it in order. 'But I do not remember,' Gulliver continues, 'I gave you Power to consent, that any thing should be omitted, and much less that any thing should be inserted: Therefore, as to the latter, I do here renounce every thing of that kind; particularly, a Paragraph about Her Majesty Queen Anne, of most glorious and pious Memory; although I did reverence and esteem her more than any of human Species.' This is Swift with tongue very firmly in cheek: Queen Anne disliked and distrusted him, and the feeling was mutual. 
   Later in the letter, Gulliver laments, without surprise, the failure of his published Travels to reform the morals of the Yahoos (i.e. the common run of humanity). Rather, the Yahoos have turned on the author, finding fault and condemning his work. 'If the Censure of the Yahoos could any way affect me,' writes Gulliver, 'I should have great Reason to complain, that some of them are so bold as to think my Book of Travels a mere Fiction out of mine own Brain; and have gone so far as to drop Hints, that the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos have no more existence than the Inhabitants of Utopia.' (Oddly, he also complains that the name Brobdingnag is an erroneous transcription, and it should correctly be Brobdingrag – why?).
   Gulliver concludes that he 'should never have attempted so absurd a Project as that of reforming the Yahoo race in this Kingdom: But, I have now done with all such visionary Schemes for ever.'

  

Great at the Time

 Not Only... But Also, the Peter Cook and Dudley Moore sketch series, is one of those shows that has entered the realm of myth and legend, shining forth in retrospect as an all-time comedy great, an imperishable classic. The myth has been burnished by the passage of time, and, crucially, by the fact that so many episodes were lost, 'wiped', as was then customary, by the BBC. But was Not Only... But Also that good? On the evidence of last night's compilation show (and others shown some while back), the answer is No. The sketches are lame and painfully overstretched, mostly consisting of a potentially good idea hammered slowly to death. It's a shame, as both men were very talented, and Cook, with the right material, was one of the funniest men who ever drew breath – but even he could make nothing of most of these scripts. It seemed brilliantly funny at the time – and strikingly ambitious in its set-ups (it must have had a huge budget) – but that time is long gone, The Fast Show having put the final nail in the coffin of the overstretched sketch show. The only parts of Not Only... But Also that still shine are of course the Dagenham Dialogues, where a large part of the fun is in watching Pete and especially Dud desperately struggling not to laugh. The rest is, alas, history, of only historical interest. Nothing unusual about that: most TV comedy is of its time, and doesn't outlast that time. And even at the time it was rarely as funny as we remember it being. 

Lunched and Refurbed

 Despite my recent comments on the state of the metropolis, I must report that today I thoroughly enjoyed  a day – well, an afternoon – in London. I was lunching with an old friend whom I hadn't seen face to face in way too long – and it was a very good lunch, which always helps – then after it we strolled off to have a look at the newly refurbished and reopened National Portrait Gallery. The refurb seemed to both of us to be a great success, making the place feel much more open and spacious and less difficult to get around  – and get into, come to that: the new main entrance on the North side of the building works brilliantly. The rehang of the portraits, which now include many new items and a higher proportion of photographs (some brilliant, some very ordinary), also works well, managing to be at once chronologically structured and unpredictable, so that you never know quite what you'll happen upon next. And – wonder of wonders – there didn't seem to be any of those tiresome 'interpretative' captions pointing out the deplorable failure of  people from the past to conform to the moral postures of the 21st century. 
  In an earlier life, I spent quite a lot of time at launches and other jollies at the NPG, and I remember on one occasion getting trapped for what seemed like an eternity in front of a double portrait of Neil and Glenys Kinnock, a picture that at first looks pretty ordinary, but becomes weirder and weirder, and more and more disturbing, the longer you look at it. On this visit, happily, I didn't spot it: I hope it has been consigned to the stores, and that it will remain there.

The Island

 An interesting piece in The Critic by Jaspreet Singh Bopari rightly deplores the sad fact that Paradise Lost, the greatest epic poem in English, 'seems to be fading slowly from public view', seldom even being taught in schools, let alone read. He also laments the failure of subsequent English poets to come up with any kind of satisfactory national epic: even Tennyson and Browning, perhaps the two best equipped to do it, only managed the sonorous 'private fantasies' of Idylls of the King, and the magnificent but undeniably Italian The Ring and the Book. With the coming of modernism, all hope was of course lost.
   However, there was one wholehearted attempt at an English national epic – The Island by Francis Brett Young, a work now so completely forgotten that Bopari doesn't mention it. I only know it because it was a great favourite of my father, who read it repeatedly. The Island is a rousingly patriotic verse history of Britain, from the Bronze Age to the Battle of Britain – just the kind of thing to appeal to my history-loving, deeply patriotic father. Published in 1944, it was a huge success, the first edition (of 23,500) selling out immediately – an extraordinary feat in wartime conditions – and numerous reprints following. Up until then, Francis Brett Young had been a successful middle-brow novelist, author of, among other things, a string of 'Mercian novels', set in and celebrating the West Midlands. Sadly, soon after the publication of The Island, his frail health deteriorated and his writing career was effectively over. He died in 1954 in Cape Town, and his ashes are buried in Worcester cathedral.
  Here is an Arthurian passage from The Island –

…. And all that coloured tale a tapestry
Woven by poets. As the spider’s skeins
Are spun of its own substance, so have they
Embroidered empty legend – What remains?

This: That when Rome fell, like a writhen oak
That age had sapped and cankered at the root,
Resistant, from her topmost bough there broke
The miracle of one unwithering shoot.

Which was the spirit of Britain – that certain men
Uncouth, untutored, of our island brood
Loved freedom better than their lives; and when
The tempest crashed around them, rose and stood

And charged into the storm’s black heart, with sword
Lifted, or lance in rest, and rode there, helmed
With a strange majesty that the heathen horde
Remembered when all were overwhelmed;

And made of them a legend, to their chief,
Arthur, Ambrosius – no man knows his name –
Granting a gallantry beyond belief,
And to his knights imperishable fame.

They were so few . . . We know not in what manner
Or where they fell – whether they went
Riding into the dark under Christ’s banner
Or died beneath the blood-red dragon of Gwent.

Well, it's not Milton, or even Miltonic – but epic it surely is, and absolutely English. 

Two Slim Volumes

 Well, I have finished Helena, and an interesting reading experience it was. It felt to me like a novel of two halves, the earlier chapters, in which Waugh was pretty much free to make it up as he went along (the facts being so few), seeming much more like fully realised fiction, while the later chapters, as the more nearly historical Helena comes into focus, are more synoptic, seen, as it were, from a greater distance and in a broader perspective. Compared to the first half of the book, they also proceed at a much faster pace, telling the big story briskly and effectively – but in a very different manner from the presentation of Helena's early years. Helena remains a convincing portrait of the Roman world at the time of Constantine's conversion (if that is what it was) and confirmed what I have often thought about the astonishing success of Christianity in so easily overturning classical paganism – that it was little short of miraculous. 
  And now I've moved on to another slim volume, purchased from the same excellent charity bookshop – The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West (of whom I have only read The Fountain Overflows, which I greatly enjoyed). The Return of the Soldier has an intriguing premise: a soldier returns from the (Great War) front with a form of shell shock that has obliterated his memory of the previous 15 years. He has entirely forgotten his beautiful, if somewhat chilly wife Kitty, and he remembers his devoted cousin Jenny, who lives with Kitty, only as a childhood playmate. The love he does remember and yearns for is one of which neither wife nor cousin had an inkling – an inn-keeper's daughter, now a dowdy lower-class housewife, with whom he was briefly but idyllically in love as a young man. And now, thanks to his strange fugue, he still is.  What will happen when they meet? What will the women who love him do about it? Cleverly, West tells the story through the eyes of the cousin who adores our shellshocked hero, which gives an extra dimension to the narrative. It has certainly been a gripping read so far.

There and Back

 Yesterday I was obliged to go down to the sprawling megalopolis that is modern London, and out again to Heathrow to see Mrs N onto a flight for (ultimately) New Zealand. Although on the face of it all went smoothly, it was a grim experience. London seems to get noisier, more crowded, more alien and confusing every time I see it – such hordes of people ('So many, I had not thought death had undone so many'), all seemingly hurrying about some urgent private mission ('The creature has a purpose and his eyes are bright with it,' wrote Keats of a very much less populous city), so much noise and hustle, everything so hard to make sense of: what is the business of London? What are these people doing? Where does the money come from? It used to at least seem to make sense to me; now I find more and more things about London quite incomprehensible.
The view from the Heathrow Express was of acre after acre of mysterious box-like warehouses and 'hubs' of unidentifiable purpose, interspersed with vast construction sites building who knows what. Not so long ago much of this was Middlesex countryside; now it could be the outer sprawl of any city in the developed world.  London, a city I once loved, seems to have become foreign to me, a kind of Abroad but without the excitement or the pleasure. Perhaps I have become provincial? Am I a Mercian now? All I know is that coming back to Lichfield from London last night felt like a return to civilisation. And this morning I was cheered to see my first Ringlet of the butterfly year, on a scruffy grass bank in front of someone's house. That wouldn't happen in London.