Merryn Williams' 'A Preface to Hardy' 1993

 

Pearson Education paperback edition - 1993

Some while back - I haven't checked my Blogs, but it was around the time of the infamous 'lockdown' - I re-read a Thomas Hardy novel. At 'A' level, one of our set books for our English Literature paper entitled 'The Novel' was Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Encouraged to read other works by the chosen authors, I found The Woodlanders in the school library, and remember thinking 'I wish this had been the set book'! Hardy is much more to me than his books; I have had several holidays or short breaks in what is now termed 'Hardy Country' - Dorchester is one of my favourite small country towns; the trail from Stinsford, where his heart lies, to  Higher Bockhampton, where he was born, is still by-and-large timeless, with a reading of the author's Under the Greenwood Tree whisking you back nearly two hundred years. Fortuitously, several cinematic versions - of Tess, The Woodlanders, Far from the Madding Crowd and Under the Greenwood Tree - have been pretty faithful to their literary origins.

 

 

 

After purchasing Merryn Williams' little paperback last year in Derby's Oxfam bookshop, I finally got down to reading it. First published in 1976, she brought out this second edition seventeen years' later, as she felt she had originally given too much attention to Hardy's novels at the expense of the rest of his work. This time, Williams has written a new chapter on the short stories and The Dynasts and greatly expanded the one on the poetry. Notwithstanding this, I found the first Part - The Writer and His Setting - the most interesting; but I have always found biography and the 'context' of someone's life more nutritious. There are three chapters in this first Part. Hardy's Life inevitably trod familiar ground for me, but I did find the comments on his time in London (visiting, for instance, the Great Exhibition of 1862 and the Science Museum); his relationship with his cousin Tryphena Sparks; and the influence of Horace Moule, whom Hardy went to see in Cambridge in June 1873; all well worth recalling. I had forgotten that Hardy was struck off the list of the Architectural Association in 1872 for not having paid his subscription! Merryn Williams deals astutely with Hardy's 'middle years', quoting from The Life of Thomas Hardy (although published under his second wife's imprint, actually mainly written by Hardy himself) which got to the nub of a problem which would remain with him until he gave up novel writing - he perceived that he was 'up against' the position of having to carry on his life not as an emotion, but as a scientific game...that hence he would have to look for material [for his fiction] in manners - in ordinary social and fashionable life as other novelists did. Yet he took no interest in manners, but in the substance of life only.

 When The Mayor of Casterbridge came out, reviewers complained that it was gloomy. There were hostile reviews when Tess was published, but most critics were enthusiastic. However, Jude the Obscure was banned from public libraries, and a bishop said he had burned it. Review headlines included 'Jude the Obscene' and 'Hardy the Degenerate'. Although attitudes mellowed during the 20th century, Hardy retained a reputation for pessimism. Ironically, having endured the 2020s with its mindless and pernicious 'cancellation' of any literature that does not fit the ghastly mindset of a too-important and noisy section of the 'intelligentsia', one can have a certain empathy with Hardy's increasing disillusionment. 

I found the next two chapters on Hardy the Countryman and Hardy the Victorian particularly interesting. His deep respect for Dorset's traditions and culture (and language) infuses nearly all his work, particularly encapsulated in the delightful Under the Greenwood Tree. I think Williams is right to suggest that Hardy's use of dialect was considerably more subtle and varied than William Barnes', whom the much younger man often turned to for advice. Many of Hardy's greatest novels also reflect the social realities of Dorset in the 19th century - hiring fairs, child labour, the extension of the railway system and the abolition of the Corn Laws. He bitterly regretted the destruction of the class to which he and his parents had belonged. The skilled craftsmen, the shopkeepers and others were being gradually squeezed out by the landowners and larger farmers, who hated their independence. Hardy was not the typical Victorian (if there ever was such a person). He was an agnostic; in many ways a man of the left; and someone who hated war. Throughout his life he was haunted by the suffering of the innocent, particularly of animals. He was influenced by the ideas of Keats and Shelley, of John Stuart Mill and Swinburne. Hardy was in the central agnostic tradition when he denied that there was any such thing as Providence - a force which made everything in the world work towards good.

Part Two: Critical Survey, focused on the Hardy hero and his predicament, on The Mayor of Casterbridge, and the Short Stories and The Dynasts. From reading the extracts from the latter (I have never read the full poem), I tend to concur with Williams that it is generally agreed that its language, with a few exceptions, is commonplace and uninspiring and that it also looks as if he had no gift for blank verse. Williams calls it 'the great white elephant of Hardy studies', remarking that the author seemed to have thought it was his finest achievement, yet few people have read it, those who have agree that much of it is poor and it is unlikely ever to become popular. Another reason for Hardy's pessimism! I much prefer Prose to Poetry and often find it difficult to understand what the latter is going on about. The present Spectator's contributions usually leave me cold! I know it's my failing, not the poets'.

Halik Kochanski's 'Sir Garnet Wolseley. Victorian Hero'

The Hambleton Press first edition -

The long gap between this Blog and the last one can be explained under two headings:

• I was asked to read and produce a Review for the Richard III Society's Journal, The Ricardian Bulletin, on the latest Scott Mariani novel. Since the Review will not be published until June, I daren't use it as a Blog until then.
• I must admit I struggled with this Biography of Sir Garnet Wolseley. The first nine chapters, detailing his early life onwards, until the fiasco relating to the failure to rescue Gordon from Khartoum, were interesting and plain sailing. This took me up to page 176 out of 275; however, the last hundred or so pages were very heavy-going and I kept putting the book down. Well, I have finished just before the end of March. But to Blog on just two books must be one of my lowest monthly totals ever.

I am a great believer in heroes and heroines. From my teenage years, when I had photos of (usually nubile!) film actresses and tennis players (who now remembers the South Africans Sandra Reynolds, now 91!; Annette Van Zyl, just 81? - well, I do) pinned on my locker walls; and, later, the wonderful Argentinian Gabriela Sabatini - now a mere 54. My early interest in History at school was stimulated by my awe when reading about heroes such as Henry V, Prince Rupert and the Marquis of Montrose. Later, it became more nuanced, as I studied the careers of William Gladstone, Cavour and Garibaldi. History, to me, has always been about individuals. In Literature, it was Trollope, Scott, Stevenson, Susan Ferrier, Thomas Hardy; in Art, the Pre Raphaelites and most of the Impressionists. If I had grown up in the late 19th century, undoubtedly, Sir Garnet would have been a hero of mine.

The secrets to Wolseley's long career were threefold. He was undoubtedly talented; he was driven by ambition to reach the top; and he was lucky. He saw action in the Crimean War, then was plucked out of a group of staff officers during the Indian Mutiny and given a staff job; whilst in the relative backwater of Canada, he gained further advancement when the Red River expedition was decided upon. After a period in South Africa in 1879-80, the patronage of well-placed politicians made up for his lack of social connections. It meant administrative posts at the War Office - Quartermaster General, Adjutant General and, finally, Commander-in Chief.

However, it was his innate ability which brought him this career success. He was a master of small wars - in Canada, West Africa, South Africa, Egypt and the Sudan He excelled in administration and logistics; planning each campaign before arriving at the war front and always advancing with great care. He was certainly respected by his troops and most of his peers, but he seemingly was too cold and distant to win their affection. A vital ingredient in Wolseley's success was his ability to select able subordinates. His 'Ring' of officers may have been criticised for being too 'narrow', but they were usually effective. He also recognised the value of the improved education provided by the Staff College. In his later years, driven by a desire to improve the efficiency of the army, he proved to be an extremely talented and energetic administrator at the War Office. He was a major exponent and defender of the newly introduced short service system and the Army Reserve. Leo Amery praised him for having helped to awaken the national consciousness out of the self-satisfied full-bellied drowsiness in which it had so long rested. One of Wolseley's greatest achievements was the organisation of the British army into army corps ready for mobilisation for service at home or abroad. The 1914 British Expeditionary Force was organised on the system he had drawn up in the 1880s. As the author says at the very end of the biography, in such a way Wolseley was the father of the modern British army and fully merits the statue of him looking out over Horse Guards Parade.

Finally, I found his comments to the then Commander in Chief of the British Army, the Duke of Cambridge, when out in the Sudan (and having failed to rescue Gordon), very enlightening.

We cannot flatter ourselves that we are here to fight for an oppressed people, to help a population struggling to be free or to put down slavery. None of the spurious and clap trap pretexts under which we so often invade uncivilised countries will serve us here...

Glenda Youde's 'Beyond Ophelia. The True Legend of Elizabeth Eleanor Rossetti' 2025

Unicorn first edition - 2025

Glenda Youde certainly has a mission and it is praiseworthy - to pluck poor Lizzie from the muddy depths of Millais's painting and explore her true artistic legacy...her design ideas were inspirational and were 'borrowed' by her male counterparts. Without her ideas, Pre-Raphaelitism may have taken a very different course. If Youde is correct in her analysis, then she really has resurrected Lizzie from her cold bath, which the thoughtless Millais had submerged her in and then let the warming lamps go out. For if Lizzie is known at all to the general public, it is for three things: she posed for Millais as the dying/dead Ophelia in that bath; she died from an overdose of laudanum; and her grave was dug up some years later so that her grieving widower, Dante Rossetti, could retrieve the only copy of poems he had placed by her head in the coffin.

Over her eleven chapters, Youde skilfully builds her case. Her first chapter considers The Bathtub Incident, the result of which had a permanent injurious effect on Lizzie's health; her 'discovery' in The Bonnet Shop by Walter Deverell; her Death by Laudanum - suicide or not?; and Firelight Exhumation, when, seven and half years after Lizzie's burial, her coffin was raised, opened and the only copy of Rossetti's poetry with his wife was recovered. Youde then looks at Alternative Narratives for each incident, in particular that there is little evidence to substantiate any suicide claim. Chapter 2 assesses how Lizzie was portrayed after her death: in Fiction - by William Gaunt's The Pre-Raphaelite Tragedy (1942); Paula Batchelor's Angel with Bright Hair (1957);Elizabeth Savage's Willowood (1979); Fiona Mountain's Pale as the Dead (2002); and Rita Cameron's Ophelia's Muse (2015). Youde argues that in Elizabeth's case, biography and fiction have become almost indistinguishable. The author also describes how Lizzie has been portrayed in poetry, drama (particularly on television) and in exhibitions.

Youde now gets to the kernel of her argument. From Chapter 3 onwards she focuses on Elizabeth the Artist, pointing out that both Ruskin and Rossetti himself appreciated and extolled her skills. Youde builds a powerful case that, far from Lizzie simply being the passive sitter (and lier * in a bath!), she is an active member of the pre-Raphaelite circle - learning from, but also contributing and influencing, other members of the group. Her work was on display in Rossetti's home and other artists would have seen and seemingly copied her ideas. Her drawing and watercolours were subsequently put on show in mainstream galleries, such as the Tate (1923); Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery (1947); Maas Gallery (1960s); the Tate again (1984, 2012 and 2023 - the latter I attended); the Ruskin Gallery, Sheffield (1991); Wightwick Manor (2018); and the National Portrait Gallery (2019), which I also visited.

During her lifetime Lizzie made over 100 drawings and watercolours, but only a few are widely known and accessible in public galleries. Many are in private collections, whilst the location of over 30  are currently unknown. Luckily Rossetti not only retrieved as many of his late wife's work as he could, but had the pictures photographed and bound in an album and distributed to friends and associates. Several copies of these photographic portfolios survive in whole or part  - in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, Princeton Library, New Jersey and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. The portfolios contain 67 authenticated drawings by Lizzie's hand. It is strange that Rossetti is said to have destroyed every letter, photograph or memory of Lizzie he could find, yet he painstakingly preserved her drawings. The photographic portfolios that Gabriel created present Elizabeth as an artist who produced a body of work that is worthy of being recorded.    

Youde's further chapters not only document much of Lizzie's work, but also argues that she had a profound, yet by-and-large unacknowledged, influence on several male Pre-Raphaelite artists. She emphasises the close working relationship with Ford Madox Brown, particularly in Lizzie's art education and the possibility that she was aiming to produce work to be used as illustrations in books. Her chapters 7 to 10 aim to show, with several accompanying illustrations, the direct influence Lizzie's work  had on, for example, Edward Burne-Jones, William Holman Hunt, Frederic Leighton, Arthur Hughes, John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, Frederick James Shields and Rossetti himself.  I must admit I found these chapters rather hard going and couldn't always see the relationship between the 'compared' pictures! I tend to agree with Lucasta Miller, who reviewed Youde's book  in The Spectator (22 February 2025), when she writes, Youde's commitment to chasing up every minute lead in terms of possible artistic influence makes this book feel a little pedestrian and heavy on detail. But the build up of evidence she cites compels. The book's origin, as a PhD thesis, probably explains its 'heaviness'.  However, it is a welcome addition to our knowledge of Lizzie Siddal[l] and certainly make us view her in a much more positive and admiring light.                                                                                                        

* - yes, I checked there is such a word as 'lier' !

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I have a small Collection of books on the Pre-Raphaelites, including the ones listed below which are specifically on Lizzie Siddal[l] and Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists. I found it pertinent that a booklet published in 1965 (reprinted in 1970 and 1975), describing some of the most important works of the Pre-Raphaelites in the permanent collection of the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, lists Holman Hunt, Millais, Rossetti, as well as Ford Madox Brown and Arthur Hughes, but has no mention of Siddal[l] or any other Woman Artist. It is clear, as Youde and other writers have stated, that the Feminist Movement of the late 1970s onwards led to the rightful reappraisal of the latter and the publication of several important works, such as those by Jan Marsh, Pamela Gerrish Nunn, Lucinda Hawkesley and Serena Trowbridge. Youde has has built on, and developed, their trail blazing.

1906  Elbert Hubbard: Little Journeys to Homes of Great Lovers (Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal)

1981  Paddy Kitchen: The Golden Veil. A Novel based on the Life of Elizabeth Siddall

1985  Gillian Allnutt: Lizzie Siddall: Her Journal [1862]

1989  Jan Marsh: The Legend of Elizabeth Siddal

1991 Jan Marsh: Elizabeth Siddal 1829-1862: Pre-Raphaelite Artist

2004  Lucinda Hawksley: Lizzie Siddal. The Tragedy of a Pre-Raphaelite Supermodel

2018  ed. Serena Trowbridge: My Ladys Soul. The Poems of Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall

2025 Glenda Youde: Beyond Ophelia. The True Legacy of Elizabeth Eleanor Rossetti

1987  Jan Marsh: Pre-Raphaelite Women. Images of Femininity in Pre-Raphaelite Art

1989  Jan Marsh & Pamela Gerrish Nunn: Women Artists and the Pre-Raphaelite Movement

1997  Jan Marsh and Pamela Gerrish Nunn: Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists

David Kertzer's 'The Pope at War' 2022

 

Random House first edition - 2022

This is the third massive tome on the Papacy by David I. Kertzer that I have read. His The Pope and Mussolini (2014), about Pius XI, which won the Pulitzer Prize, my Blog discussed on 27 July 2022.  I had written another Blog on 21 September 2021 on The Pope Who Would Be King (2018), on Pius IX.  In 2020, Pius XII's archives were finally opened and the author has been mining this new material ever since, revealing how the pope came to set aside moral leadership in order to preserve his church's power. In 2005, Kertzer was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the combination of intense (and immense) archival work as well as an erudite approach and easy style suggests it was merited. 

The book is based largely on documents found in archives scattered across five countries as well as the Vatican City - in each case (German, Italian, British, American, French, Vatican) the author pays a heartfelt tribute to other archivists and historians. No one person could possibly assemble such a formidable and wide-ranging body of material. The Notes for each chapter run to 92 pages, whilst the References (or Bibliography) show just how much others' work have helped to build up a pretty damning case on Pius XII. As I slowly read the 484 pages (and it took several nights of intense concentration), time and time again any defence on behalf of the pope shook and, usually, crumbled. The man of rare courage, of great virtue, heroically standing up to the Nazis and their Italian Fascist allies, which Pius's defenders portray, simply will not stand up to scrutiny. There were always sceptics, throughout the actual war and up to modern times. The key date, though, was March 2020, when the present Pope Francis, decided to order the archives for Pius XII's papacy to be available to researchers. Kertzer's book is the first full account to take advantage of them. Here one reads of how Pius balanced his public stance of neutrality while presiding over an Italian church hierarchy that offered enthusiastic support for the Axis war. 

The author's father was a thirty-three years old Jewish chaplain with the Allied troops at Anzio beachhead in early 1944. He presided over funerals of Jewish soldiers. A few days after Rome was liberated, together with the chief rabbi of Rome, he conducted the first service held at Rome's Tempio Maggiore since German troops had occupied the city the previous September and began rounding up the city's Jews for deportation to Auschwitz. So, a personal vendetta? No, but an account with clearly personal feeling behind it. The fully documented story, backed up by specific and authenticated end notes, stands on its own feet. 

Pius XII

Pius was first and foremost an Italian and, more specifically, a Roman. Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli, was born in Rome into an upper-class family of intense piety, a member of the 'Black Nobility', or aristocracy, who had sided with Pius IX in the latter's opposition to the newly-formed Italian state. Secondly, he was leader and myopic defender of the smallest independent State - Vatican City; thirdly, he ruthlessly supported a Roman Catholic Italy, particularly in a hatred of Communism. Only once these priorities were addressed, did he look beyond to support Catholics in other countries. Tribal best sums him up. Protestants, other religions and, at the bottom, Jews and Communists, simply were not God's chosen ones, Was I surprised as I read Kertzer's damning account? - no. I had always suspected a cover-up. Was I shocked? - of course.  Equally shocking, was the push for canonization of Pius XII after his death in 1958.  He was made a servant of God by John Paul II (another fierce anti-Communist) in 1990 and Benedict XVI declared him Venerable in 2009.   Let Kertzer, in his pages, build up an alternative appraisal.   

If Pius XII is to be judged for his action in protecting the institutional interests of the Roman Catholic Church at a time of war, there is a good case to be made that his papacy was a success. Vatican City was never violated, and amid the ashes of Italy's Fascist regime the church came out of the war with all the privileges it had won under Fascism intact. However, as a moral leader, Pius XII must be judged a failure.

(p.34)  From the first days of his papacy, Pius XII decided it was best to tread a careful path. He was committed to maintaining the church's mutually beneficial collaboration with Italy's Fascist government and was eager to reach an understanding with Nazi Germany.

(p.88)  The Polish ambassador to the Holy See had repeatedly urged the pope to speak out, but to no avail. Britain's envoy to the Vatican complained that the pope "has carried caution and impartiality to a point approaching pusillanimity and condonation."

(p.139)  It is impossible to understand the pope's actions without recognizing he had good reason to think the church's future would likely lie in a Europe under the thumb of Hitler and his Italian partner.

(p.157)  From the moment Italy entered the war, Osborne [Britain's envoy] observed, "the moral prestige of the Papacy began to decline...Axis methods of blackmail were used to good effect."

(p.178)  "reality," wrote the French ambassador d'Ormesson, "Pius XI and Pius XII were very different men. In the place of a robust mountaineer from Milan came a more passive Roman bourgeois."

(p.201) While Pius XII carefully avoided any condemnation of Hitler or the Nazis, there was one evil he had no trouble in denouncing...Comparing the battle to be fought today with the "glorious" Crusades of old, the pope told member of the Girls' Catholic Action organization it was crucial for them to help government authorities "combat the dangers of immorality in the areas of women's fashion, sport, hygiene, social relations, and entertainment."

(p.231) On the text of Osborne's report [12 July 1942], a London Foreign Office official added a handwritten note: "timidity becomes ever more blatantly despicable."

(p.238) After dismissing the pope's generic words denouncing the crimes of war as of little use, Osborne warned, "A policy of silence in regard to such offences against the conscience of the world must necessarily involve a renunciation of moral leadership and a consequent atrophy of the influence and authority of the Vatican."

(p.258)  "Having been reliably assured that the Pope was going to speak out this Christmas, I am now equally reliably assured that he is not. The Vatican will be the only State which has not condemned the persecution of the Jews. (Osborne's Diary) 

(p.322) Now that Mussolini had fallen, the church faced the urgent task of denying it shared any responsibility for having promoted popular support for his regime.                                                  (p.333) "...the Holy Father speaks to tell us that...Christianity is threatened. Is that His true feeling about a German defeat, or is it that His horizon is bounded by the Alps and the Sicilian straits. The robbed and starving in Greece, in France, in Belgium, Holland, Austria, in concentration camps - religious, priests, seminarians, the enslaved workers - does their liberation mean nothing to the Vatican? Sad, sad." (Father Vincent McCormick, 7 August 1943)

(p.367) Lutz Klinkhammer, the foremost historian of Germany's military occupation of Italy, summed up the pope's reaction to the roundup of Rome's Jews: "It is more than clear that all their efforts were aimed above all at saving the baptized or the 'half-Jews' born from mixed marriages."

(p.382) "for a protest by the pope for the arrest of the Jews, it is not even being considered." (Ernst von Wizsacker, German ambassador to the Vatican to Berlin, mid-December 1943.)

(p.398) "Cardinal Secretary of State send for me today to say that the Pope hoped that no Allied coloured troops would be amongst the small number that might be garrisoned at Rome after the occupation." (British envoy to London)

(p.415) "The pope is working six days a week for Germany, on the seventh he prays for the Allies." (Weizsacker 29 March 1944)

(p.426) "People credit Pope for saving Rome, though he had nothing to do with it." (Osborne)

(p.460) Pius XII's speech for 2 June 1945 highlighted the suffering of Catholics and the Catholic Church during the war and represented Catholics in Germany as the Nazis' victims. He made not even the briefest mention, indeed no mention at all, of the Nazis' extermination of Europe's Jews. If any Jews had been in those concentration camps alongside the valorous Catholic priests and lay Catholics, one would not know it from the pope's speech. Nor did he make any mention of Italy's part in the Axis cause, much less suggest any Italian responsibility for the disasters that had befallen Europe.

I wonder if Pius XII has done his time in Purgatory yet?

Frances Pitt's 'Tommy White-Tag' 1912

 

Blackie and Son first edition - 1912

After I had read Frances Pitt's Scotty (see my Blog of 23 December 2024), I looked the author up online for further information about her. I read that she had published another book on a fox, exactly twenty years' earlier. She was then only 24 and it was her first book - Tommy White-Tag, clearly based around her own experiences of taking care of, and raising, wild animals..

The story starts with two rabbit catchers digging out an earth where they thought a dog fox was hiding. In fact, it contains five small cubs, three of which are mangled and torn almost out of recognition by one of the men's terrier. Two survive - two little things, like rather large, dark-brown kittens - blind too, like kittens before they reach the "nine-days-old" stage - lay there, kicking feebly and giving curious squeaky grunts. One of the men, Jim Rogers, wraps them  in a red-and-yellow handkerchief and puts them in one of the capacious pockets in his corduroy jacket. He takes the cubs to the local big farm house (the family have at least two servants) - on the way one of the cubs dies - and hands the surviving cub over to Master Tom Brown, whose parents allow him to keep the fox. The next chapters feel very much based on the author's own experiences. A mother cat, whose kittens have just been 'dealt with' , takes over the nurturing of the cub. Tom's father suggests a name for the fox cub - Tommy White-Tag...

The book is clearly written for youngsters, but it is no worse for that. We follow the simple story of the young cub growing up within a family setting, which includes not only the devoted cat but the house dog, Jim and, later, Jewel - a large fat puppy, marked on its round white back with patches of black, and on its head with black and tan. In fact, it is a foxhound puppy! Then the 'mother' cat goes missing - she had been shot at by the rabbit catcher - and goes to live with another family. Tommy White-Tag is bereft, but not downcast enough to stop him escaping one night from the outside farmyard area. There is an atmospheric description of his first moments in the great world:

White-Tag hurried forward: he knew not why nor whither he was going; but freedom, precious freedom, was his, and so onward, onward, away from prison, away from the house, from his friends and companions, from an easy life and abundance of food - forward along a fence side, through briers and mud, dirt that splashed on his white chest, under great trees, through more bushes, more briers, more mud, and onwards still to a life of hardships, of hunting and being hunted, of many dangers from many things, but also of liberty.

If I was a pre-teenager with even a modicum of imagination, I would have lapped that up! The last 50 pages of this short book describes how the young fox copes with his new environment; learning by his mistakes and well as his successes. He is warned off one earth by a much larger pale, sandy-coloured fox; he learns how to trap voles and rabbits; he raids hen houses; and, twice, he has to flee from the local Hunt. Chapter XI Great Hunt, is particularly well written - giving the mind-set and experience of both the hunters and the hunted. White-Tag, fortuitously, saves a small, dark vixen, when the Hunt alters its course to pursue him instead. Frances Pitt describes the change from the early galloping fox to the exhausted animal: He is a very different object now from the fox who started forth from the holly fence an hour and a half ago. His tongue hangs out, his brush drags on the ground, he is clogged and laden with mud, he quivers in every limb; but he is yet confident of defeating his pursuers...Which he does, of course. He successfully makes for the farmhouse where he was reared and hides in the very kennel he had escaped from. The boy Tom, just home from school, realising what was happening, closes the doors and Tommy White-Tag lives to fight another day.

Not only that, but in the last Chapter, headed Family Affairs, Tommy has linked up with the small vixen, Mrs Darkie, again and they are parents to two offspring: Never were two cubs so tenderly brought up in the way they should go...their mother was an exceptionally clever fox, while White-Tag, in addition to his natural talent, had valuable experience of human beings, acquired by living among them... So White-Tag and Darkie "lived happily ever after", and reared many litters of cubs, raiding the hen pens for many a mile round the old home. Hounds searched for them several times, but they were never found. They had learnt some way of making themselves scarce.

A youngster's tale? Yes, but enjoyable for all that.

William Kuhn's 'The Politics of Pleasure. A Portrait of Benjamin Disraeli 2006

The free Press first edition - 2006

Although one of my heroes is William Gladstone and I regard Benjamin Disraeli as a bounder, I must admit to a sneaking regard for the latter. I have read several biographies on Disraeli, but this was pitched quite differently. As the blurb on the dust jacket says, William Kuhn dusts off Benjamin Disraeli's reputation as an 'eminent Victorian' and reveals him to be Britain's most flamboyant Prime Minister yet. A dandy, an inveterate social climber, bon vivant and incorrigible myth-maker... In fact, the author's work is such a sustained effort to convince the reader that, above all, Disraeli's novels simply proved what the man in actual life was - a homosexual, whether latent or active - that I searched for what I could find about Kuhn on the Internet. The brief, seven line, write-up about him on the back fold of the dust wrapper gave little away. I found out he had also written about Lord Byron, saying that in his work he managed to make a queer love life thrilling... Guess what? In the same piece the author reveals himself to be 'gay'. Absolutely no problem; but it would have helped if he had put that fact on the dust wrapper. At every chance Kuhn has, he either states that Disraeli was gay, or he insinuates it. It becomes the leitmotif of the book. A favourite word of his, used throughout the book, is homoeroticism. To misquote Shakespeare - Methinks he doth protest too much?

Notwithstanding the above, the book was an enjoyable read. I found many of his chapters entertaining: The Boys Will  Laugh At Me, Chateau Desir, Quite a Love of Man, He Interests Me, Enamoured Sexagenarians. I think the best way to encapsulate Kuhn's argument - that Disraeli glorified in his Jewishness (even though baptised as a Christian), felt more at home in the Middle East, dressed like a dandy for the first half of his life; was a great fan of Lord Byron; felt closest to older women; and surrounded himself with attractive young men - is to copy some of his sentences below. 

When he did know [the truth], and altered it to suit his purposes, he became one of the great liars in British history: his art was in his lies...

Disraeli never ceased to think of himself as something like a cross between a rake and a fop of the era of Charles II.

Indebtedness is a major theme in Disraeli's biography until he was well into middle age.

Lord Blake said of these [early] years that Disraeli 'acquired a reputation for cynicism, double dealing, recklessness and insincerity which it took him years to live down'.

Drink could be a remedy for disappointment, but from an early age he also appreciated it for its sensual pleasure and the way it assisted social enjoyment.

His philosophy was based on cheerful hedonism for the few rather than improving government for the many.

There was, however, a good deal of ambiguity surrounding male effeminacy in Disraeli's day and he appears to be exploiting that ambiguity.

...the homosexual element in Disraeli's personality and his desire to know more about his own Jewishness both spurred him to travel to Constantinople, Jerusalem and Cairo...

for Disraeli his Jewishness and his sexuality were mixed together. They had a common eastern geography...

power brought Disraeli newly intensified relations with other men...there was something compulsive in Disraeli's relationships with these men that he was not able to stop.

Disraeli never liked the Irish and never went to Ireland.

Punch took the opportunity to depict him as a cross-dressing angel, a man with his hair in flowers, wearing a lady's gown admiring himself in a mirror as he prepares for a masked ball.

He could not underrate play or pleasure, they were the purpose of life, not secondary to it. This was the transcendent theme of his political just as much as of his literary life...the pleasure of food combined with the pleasure of good company: this was the ultimate enjoyment for Disraeli.

Certainly, it was slightly odd that Disraeli composed several lists in his 'Commonplace Book' for 1842. One of the lists was headed 'men who had romantic feelings for other men'. The list included  Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Hadrian, Socrates, Byron, Marlowe, Jesus, Napoleon, Leo X, Julius II, Julius III, Horace Walpole, William Beckford and George Canning (Lord Castlereagh). There were many more!

There were several references by Disraeli to Lord Castlereagh, who committed suicide possibly because of a homosexual affair becoming public; romantic fantasies about the author Edward Bulwer Lytton; the young Frenchman, Alfred, Count d'Orsay; George Smythe, a young M.P.; Lord Henry Lennox, third son of the Duke of Richmond; and his last Secretary, Montagu Corry.

The author is very perceptive about Disraeli's relationships with Queen Victoria (he regularly sent her political 'gossip') and his long feud with William Gladstone. I also found his comments on Disraeli's novels, which he had obviously read very carefully  (even if one felt he found what he wanted to find), quite enlightening.

A Collector's Cornucopia Part III

I read Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time in the Sixth Form, in the Penguin paperback edition. Like many others who join the Richard III Society, it was the book that started my interest in the monarch who only reigned for two years. Tey's real name was Elizabeth MacKintosh, but she wrote under the pseudonym of Gordon Daviot for her first books and her plays, changing to Tey for her later novels. Perhaps her most famous work was The Franchise Affair (made into a film), but her 1933 Richard of Bordeaux play - starring John Gielgud - was also very successful. I have all her books in first editions, with nearly all in dust wrappers, and three of them signed by 'Gordon Daviot' - her signature, apparently, is rare.

     

Apart from the very early, and very expensive!, works (The Loving Spirit, I'll Never Be Young Again, The Progress of Julius, Jamaica Inn and Rebecca), I have all of Daphne du Maurier's novels, her short stories, her few biographies, some biographies of her - around 50 books, all in first edition with dust wrappers. I read The King's General, then Frenchman's Creek and Jamaica Inn at school and never looked back! 

I read Arnold Bennett's The Old Wives' Tale a few years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. As a result, I have purchased six of his novels in first edition Penguins as well as The Journals and Literary Taste. They remain on my books to read list!

Other Interests and Collections

Prince Rupert

Marquis of Montrose

I have always been drawn to the 17th century Civil Wars, particularly after listening to C.V. Wedgwood describing its main battles on the BBC radio. I was given her The King's War for a Christmas present whilst in the Sixth Form. She wrote the kind of History I prefer - strong narrative, a concentration on characters and scenes; not the boring charts and graphs that bedevil so many earnest History books of the last 40 years. My two heroes are Prince Rupert of the Rhine (7 non fiction first editions and a few novels) and the first Marquis of Montrose (8 non fiction first editions and several novels).

Nunney Castle                                          Cleeve Abbey

 

I have been fascinated with both Castles and Monasteries ever since returning from the West Indies to go to an English school aged ten. Even before that, aged six, I had played around the battered Nunney Castle in Somerset. One never forgets! Holidays were spent meandering around Britain, visiting mainly Ministry of Works (now English Heritage) sites and purchasing the skimpy leaflets on abbeys such as Cleeve, also in Somerset. I have amassed nearly 50 books and scores of leaflets on castles and a similar amount on monasteries (including nunneries). 

I am a sucker for Series! I have several sets of Histories of England: 

Methuen (1904-1913); Oxford (1936-1986); Pelican (1950-1955); Longman's (1953-1980); Nelson's (1960-1969); Paladin (1976-1986); Arnold's (1977-1986); Longman Foundations (1983-1993); and The New Oxford (1995-2010 so far). In addition to the above, I have the six volumes of Peter Ackroyd's History of England and several volumes of the much-maligned Arthur Bryant's Histories, all first editions in pristine condition. in their dust wrappers

The Yale English Monarchs series, supplemented by other publishers (Yale has not featured Elizabeth I,  Charles I, Charles II, William & Mary, and any monarchs after George IV) take up two full bottom row shelves - some 51 substantial books, all first editions and with dust wrappers.  

Since 2015, Penguin have been issuing small hardbacks with semi-dust wrappers on the Monarchs. They are very difficult to track down in secondhand condition (I dislike the newer paperback versions), but I have so far managed to acquire 23 in the series and shall keep looking out for the others.

Two more 'sets':

The Kingfisher Library series published by Arnold. There were only 16, starting with 5 in 1931, continuing with 7 in 1932, a further three in 1933 and, in 1946, John Meade Falkner's Moonfleet. The latter is why I started to collect them. My 13 books are all in their flimsy dust wrappers and are first editions.

I don't normally collect paperbacks, apart from the thrillers of Scott Mariani and the Historical sleuths of Edward Marston, Sarah Hawkswood and Susanna Gregory. However, I was much attracted to the inter-war Jarrolds Jackdaws - 22 books in the general series (1936-1938) and 16 in the Crime series (1939-1940). I have 18 and 12 of them respectively. Fish hook like, this has made me turn this year to the similar Hutchinson Crime-Book Society paperbacks. I have only purchased the first ten, but anything could happen!

Finally, and most recently, I have begun collecting and reading novels on foxes. They are nearly all novels, dating from 1893 to 1984 - all, inevitably!, in first edition and with dust wrappers if they had them. Although there is only so much you can describe of a fox's life, I still find each tale very interesting - often due to the obvious love for and knowledge of the animal by the author. Moreover, there are usually superb illustrations to complement the text.

I have covered nearly all my Collections; I have left out a few areas - my books on the West Indies; Ludlow, Shropshire; Local History books; more esoteric subjects such as the Knights Templar, the Green Man etc. What is apparent - there are no Science books (a very few Naturalist books) and no 21st century novelists (bar a few thriller/Historical writers such as Ken Follett, Robyn Young. Nicola Upson) I have a few G.A. Henty and Charlotte Yonge novels in first edition, as well as a larger collection of Emily Holt and Evelyn Everett-Green's  - all 19th century history novels.