Mary and Marriageability: Mary Barton, by Elizabeth Gaskell
"If my child lies dying (as poor Tom lay, with his white wan lips quivering, for want of better food than I could give him), does the rich man bring the wine or broth that might save his life? If I am out of work for weeks in the bad times, and winter comes, with black frost, and keen east wind, and there is no coal for the grate, and no clothes for the bes, and the thin bones are seen through the ragged clothes, does the rich man share his plenty with me, as he ought to do, if his religion wasn't a humbug? When I lie on my death-bed, and Mary (bless her) stands fretting, as I know she will fret, will a rich lady come and take her to her own home, if need be, till she can look round and see what best to do? No, I tell you, it's the poor, and the poor only, as does such things for the poor. Don't think to come over me with the old tale, that the rich know nothing of the trials of the poor. I say, if they don't know, they ought to know. We're their slaves as long as we can work, we pile up their fortunes with the sweat of our brows, and yet we are to live as separate as if we were in two worlds; ay, as separate as Dives and Lazarus, with a great gulf between us, but I know who was best off then."
Gaskell was a contemporary of Charlotte Bronte, and their friendship shows. Compare and contrast Bronte's novel Shirley (last month's bookpost) with the more melodramatic Mary Barton. Both deal with industrial strife and the degradation of the working class by manufacturers. Mary Barton is both more preachy--she said she wrote it to teach one social class about another--and more personal, as it is more or less a love story.
Mary, the sole living relative of a father, the rest of whose family died of preventable conditions that privileged people encouraged, is sought after by both a poor worker and the son of the local mill boss, who wants to flog workers like animals and blacklist laborers for union activity. Much of the second half of the book consists of Mary's efforts to get the worker acquitted of a murder he did not commit, but that everyone assumes him guilty of because "those people".. It's about as subtle as a brick between the eyes, but suspenseful and moving nonetheless. High recommendations.
And Yet More Voyages: Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana
When he was made fast, he turned to the captain, who stood turning up his sleeves and getting ready for the blow, and asked him what he was to be flogged for. “Have I ever refused my duty, sir? Have you ever known me to hang back, or to be insolent, or not to know my work?”
“No,” said the captain, “it is not that I flog you for; I flog you for your interference—for asking questions.”
“Can’t a man ask a question here without being flogged?”
“No,” shouted the captain; “nobody shall open his mouth aboard this vessel, but myself;” and began laying the blows upon his back, swinging half round between each blow, to give it full effect. As he went on, his passion increased, and he danced about the deck, calling out as he swung the rope;—“If you want to know what I flog you for, I’ll tell you. It’s because I like to do it!—because I like to do it!—It suits me! That’s what I do it for!”
The man writhed under the pain, until he could endure it no longer, when he called out, with an exclamation more common among foreigners than with us-”Oh, Jesus Christ! Oh, Jesus Christ!”
“Don’t call on Jesus Christ,” shouted the captain; “he can’t help you. Call on Captain T——, he’s the man! He can help you! Jesus Christ can’t help you now!”
Poor RH Dana! An attorney and abolitionist who defended those who defied the abominable Fugitive Slave Act (a document that tells you all you need to know about what southern slave holders thought of 'States' rights") and who resigned from practice rather than put up with the coddling of the South under Reconstruction, he is today best known for his account of a period when, his eyes too weak to study law as he recovered from an illness, hey journeyed to the North American Pacific as a common sailor, at a time when the west coast was still Mexican.
The result is a historically interesting account--one of the earliest--of life in pre-California California, and some Pacific islands. It is probably best read while NOT saturated (as I was) in the fanciful sea voyage tales of Melville, Patrick O'Brian and George MacDonald Fraser. Dana seems like weak tea next to white whales, Napoleonic battles, and fictionalizations of Skrang Pirates and African female Caligulas---unless you make the effort to remember that Dana's experiences actually happened.
Two Years Before The Mast was yet another odd choice for Dr. Elliott's "Harvard Classics" collection. It joins Homer, Virgil, Dante, Cervantes, Adam Smith, Darwin and Allesandro Manzoni (another odd choice) as being the only authors to get a full volume of the five foot shelf to themselves for a single work. I mean, it's good, but it's not what I would have called the best of the best. Recommended as a light and salty read anyway.
The Conclusion of Aubrey/Maturin: The Hundred Days; Blue at the Mizzen; 21, by Patrick O'Brian
"Listen, Amos: did you ever read an author who said, 'Never underestimate a woman's capacity for jealousy, however illogical or inconsistent or indeed self-defeating'?"
"I do not think so, but the notion is fairly wide spread among those who think of men and women as belonging to two different nations, and who wish to be profound."
--from The Hundred Days
And here I say farewell to another long series that gave me comfort during much of this long and dreadful year.
Patrick O'Brian reportedly planned a series of 21 novels (I have some doubts as to how early he may have set forth this plan, as some of the later books had to introduce brand new villains, at least one wonderful new supporting character, and situations as other matters were resolved); he died after the 20th was published. Honestly, Blue at the Mizzen has a decent enough sense of an ending; the chapter fragments for the intended final book, that O'Brian's estate gathered from his notes and published as 21, depressed me.
Nevertheless, as I've said all year, the series has my very highest recommendations. Most of my extended family, including the ones who normally don't read, went through this in the 1990s as new volumes were coming out, and it helped a little as a family bonding series of moments. Start with Master and Commander if you haven't read it already, and you'll know why I gush so about it.
Putz in the Punjab: Flashman and the Mountain of Light (Flashman #9), by George MacDonald Fraser
Broadfoot had the conscience of his time, you see, Bible-reared and shunning sin, and the thought that my success in Lahore might depend on fornication set him a fine ethical problem. He couldn't solve it--I doubt if Dr. Arnold and Cardinal Newman could, either ("I say, your eminence, what price Flashy's salvation if he breaks the seventh commandment for his country's sake?""That depends, doctor, on whether the randy young pig enjoyed it."). Of course, if it had been slaughter, not adultery, that was necessary, none of my pious generation would have even blinked--soldier's duty, and all that.
I'm getting used to the idea that Fraser's entire point was that his great revolting antihero Flashman was, from Fraser's view, typical of his generation rather than a significant secret disgrace to it. They ALL rode unearned reputations for virtue straight through their racist, misogynist, imperialist, colonialist, hypocritical do-as-I-say cesspools of moral failure and came to be held up to later generations as the pride of the British Empire as either a massive cover up or because people in those days actually believed the bullshit of Victorian codes.
Flashy here, in the ninth book in the series but the third chronological episode in his career, has a rare self-contained adventure (They usually go all over the globe, as in from England to India to Afghanistan, or England to Africa to Louisiana) under cover in identity and bedclothes during the first Sikh uprising of 1845, in which a well-trained army of overwhelming force really did manage to get wiped out by apparent ineptitude. Fraser presents a thesis that attempts to explain the historical facts; believe it or don't.
the usual CN about toxic privileged rich white guy behavior presented comically in a "jolly villain" sort of way applies, and will apply throughout the series. It is likely to be a lot more amusing to the descendents of the white rotten scoundrels of the era than to those descended from their victims.
Solving for X: Laws of Thought, by George Boole
It will not be necessary to enter into the discussion of that famous question of the schools, whether Language is to be regarded as an essential instrument of reasoning, or whether on the other hand, it is possible for us to reason without its aid. I suppose the question to be beside the design of the present treatise, for the following reason: that it is the business of science to investigate laws and that, whether we regard signs as the representatives of things and their relations, or as the representatives of the conceptions and operations of the human intellect, in studying the laws of signs, we are in effect studying the manifested laws of reasoning.
Mathematical logic was my favorite part of high school math; I could grasp it just the way i could not with trigonometry and calculus. Various propositions were represented by letters, and their relations by symbols such as an arrow for "If...then" or an arch for "and'. As with a whole lot of other math, i never encountered it afterwards, except in my own independent general study, where there was no teacher to help me when, say, the page in Descartes' logic looked like absolute gibberish to me.
Boolean logic (this book was on yet another Mortimer Adler list of great books that teach one how to think) was an early attempt to take Aristoteleain syllogisms to the next level through the use of symbols. Unfortunately, his symbols weren't the ones I was used to, and transmogrified sentences into what looked like algebraic equations to the point where it gave me headaches and I found myself wondering why they didn't just use the sentences to avoid so much confusion. I'm more verbal than mathematical, and it seems to me Boole was speaking to people whose minds worked differently from mine, and who would be happy reading poetry in the form of equations. I was proud that, with concentration, I was able to get through the logical chapters without giving up, though the later parts about probability took my understanding to the edge. Recommended, but not as light reading.
Odd Juxtapositions: Eugenie Grandet and A Woman of Thirty, by Honore de Balzac
La Grande Nanon was perhaps the only human being capable of accepting willingly the despotism of her master. The whole town envied Monsieur and Madame Grandet the possession of her. La Grande Nanon, so called on account of her height, which was five feet eight inches, had lived with Monsieur Grandet for thirty-five years. Though she received only sixty francs a year in wages, she was supposed to be one of the richest serving-women in Saumur. Those sixty francs, accumulating through thirty-five years, had recently enabled her to invest four thousand francs in an annuity with Maitre Cruchot. This result of her long and persistent economy seemed gigantic. Every servant in the town, seeing that the poor sexagenarian was sure of bread for her old age, was jealous of her, and never thought of the hard slavery through which it had been won.
At twenty-two years of age the poor girl had been unable to find a situation, so repulsive was her face to almost every one. Yet the feeling was certainly unjust: the face would have been much admired on the shoulders of a grenadier of the guard; but all things, so they say, should be in keeping. Forced to leave a farm where she kept the cows, because the dwelling-house was burned down, she came to Saumur to find a place, full of the robust courage that shrinks from no labor. Le Pere Grandet was at that time thinking of marriage and about to set up his household. He espied the girl, rejected as she was from door to door. A good judge of corporeal strength in his trade as a cooper, he guessed the work that might be got out of a female creature shaped like a Hercules, as firm on her feet as an oak sixty years old on its roots, strong in the hips, square in the back, with the hands of a cartman and an honesty as sound as her unblemished virtue. Neither the warts which adorned her martial visage, nor the red-brick tints of her skin, nor the sinewy arms, nor the ragged garments of la Grande Nanon, dismayed the cooper, who was at that time still of an age when the heart shudders. He fed, shod, and clothed the poor girl, gave her wages, and put her to work without treating her too roughly. Seeing herself thus welcomed, la Grande Nanon wept secretly tears of joy, and attached herself in all sincerity to her master, who from that day ruled her and worked her with feudal authority. Nanon did everything. She cooked, she made the lye, she washed the linen in the Loire and brought it home on her shoulders; she got up early, she went to bed late; she prepared the food of the vine-dressers during the harvest, kept watch upon the market-people, protected the property of her master like a faithful dog, and even, full of blind confidence, obeyed without a murmur his most absurd exactions.
The set of Balzac I've been grazing in included in one volume one of Balzac's best stories and one of his worst. No figuring out why.
Eugenie Grandet, an achingly emotional short novel that shows rather than telling, is usually on the top five Balzac lists. The long-suffering daughter of a miser has been happily and dutifully doing without until she falls in love at first sight with a young distant relation who comes to visit, wants to do nice things for him, and runs afoul of her father's monstrous and dishonest "spend nothing; keep acquiring" obsession, with gut-wrenchingly emotional results. Very highest recommendations.
A Woman of Thirty, on the other hand, is utterly disjointed and can't seem to make up its mind whether the heroine is good or bad, loving to her children or not, etc. It begins with a foolish marriage against her good father's wishes, continues with a lot of regret, the clinging to the firstborn child as her reason for existence, the rejection of the same child; the rejection of a truly worthy suitor because adultery, the acceptance of a poor choice of adulterous suitor later on; a shocking death out of the blue, a plot from thin air regarding the daughter running away with a scoundrel; more melodramatic deaths; and preventable heartbreak from a whole new plot direction. I was like....okay, but why? diamonds are to be found, but in a lot of dirt.
The 19th Century Murders: Execution Dock; Acceptable Loss; Sunless Sea, by Anne Perry; Ran Away; Good Man Friday, by Barbara Hambly
Until last month, Scruff had come and gone as he'd pleased, spending only the occasional night at Monk's house in Paradise Place. However, since his kidnapping and the atrocity on the boat at Execution Dock, he had come to live with them, going out only for short periods during the day, and tossing and turning at night, plagued by nightmares. He would not talk about them, and his pride would not let him admit to Hester that he was frightened of the dark, of closed doors, and above all, of sleep.
--from Acceptable Loss
They stood in silence, hidden, as the wagon creaked by. In his years in New orleans, January had several times gone to voodoo dances, seen the gods take the bodies of the celebrants, speak in their voices, handle fire in their bare hands or summon the dead...
And nothing he had seen raised the hair on the back of his neck as did the sight of that half-glimpsed wagon in the fog, the sound of creaking harnesses. There could be a man in the hollow beneath the wagon bed, thought January. A free man, drugged, beaten, tied, gagged, and maybe awake enough to know what is happening to him.
--from Good Man Friday
Anne Perry's William Monk series took a sharp turn away from stand-alone whodunnits and surprise reveals with these next books. they're closer to police procedurals where the culprit is known early or at least mid-book, and the suspenseful part is how they prove it. These ones in particular need content notes because they center around Monk's efforts to break up a crime operation in which certain wealthy, powerful people induce other wealthy powerful people to participate in pornographic activities...on Thames river boats, and involving children...and then blackmail the rich participants. The books raise excellent criminal justice issues contrasting the relative treatment of the slum-dwelling sleazy criminals who operate the boats, the privileged pedophiles who are blackmailed, and the very high socially-ranked "gentleman" who does the blackmailing, who is able to threaten Monk and the entire division of River Police with ruin in retaliation for having even been implied to be guilty. It also, as is the case with most of Perry, does not pull punches in the description of the effects the crimes have on the victims. Take heed.
Barbara Hambly's series about Benjamin January, the free man of color solving crimes in 1830s Dixie keeps getting better and looking into new territory. Ran Away, which involves a Turkish merchant accused of murdering some of his harem girls and assumed to be guilty because "that's what those heathen Arabs do", has interesting moments of affinity between two different "exotic" cultures (three if you count the French), juxtaposed with the utterly xenophobic shittiness of Southern white people. Good Man Friday, even better, sends January on a mission to Washington DC, in search of a missing white man, who is missed, while POC are disappeared by human traffickers into the cotton fields without anybody so much as shrugging. Cameos by the likes of Edgar Allen Poe, John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay add to the historical enrichment. High recommendations.
Unfinished Progress: The Philosophy of the Unconscious, by Eduard von Hartmann
Nature and history, or the origin of organisms and the development of the human race, are two parallel problems. In both cases the question runs: particular contingency or universal necessity, dead causality or living conformity to an end; mere sport of atoms and individuals or a single plan and general superintendence? He who has decided the question with respect to nature in favor of design will have no difficulty in doing the same in regard to history. The only thing likely to mislead in the latter case is the semblance of personal freedom.
Hartmann was listed as the last of the 19th century German idealists, the culmination of a trend that began with Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, and so I skipped ahead a little--he wrote in the last half of the century--with the goal of getting a disagreeable task over with. I admired Kant when I could understand him, but the trends seemed to get progressively gloomier and more dense until I came at last to Hartmann, staring with wild hair and wilder eyes and an enormous Rasputinish beard from the frontsipiece as if warning me that exposure to his ideas would drive a man mad--MAD, I TELL YOU!!! HAHAHA! Read on, if you dare!
Hartmann begins with the less-than-refutable or provable concept that most things that happen are willed unconsciously, thereby predating Freud and "The Secret". He says that atoms are invisible particles of will (force), not matter, and that most of history was caused deterministically by random atom configurations.
Further, that philosophy (or directed consciousness) is the enemy (antithesis) of will, which would explain why many philosophers are known for sitting there philosplaining things while the world goes on around them.
Unlike Hegel, who asserted that the world had culminated with the German-Barbarian conquest of the Roman Empire and was as great as society could be ever since, Hartmann's theory was that his day was only the second of three great periods of history, of which the Unconscious was the first and immaturity (Christian-based obsession with an afterlife, followed by a secular focus on making a better future for generations yet to come) the second. Maturity will be when we actually live in "Heaven" or "Nirvana" or whatever perfection of our own making is possible.
Such are the secrets Humankind was evidently not meant to know. I am always cautious of maps of thought that present philosophers as gatekeepers to actual knowledge, but this was entertaining to read, at least. Good thing, too. It is longer than fuck.
Here's to You, Mrs. Robinson: In Praise of Older Women, by Stephen Vizinczey
In all likelihood, the boy had gone to considerable trouble and expense to bring his little friend to the theatre. He didn't necessarily expect gratitude, but he must have hoped that taking her to see a famous star, in the company of an elegant theatre audience, would make him more impressive in her eyes. Now, since he couldn't disappear, he attempted to laugh off the incident with a foolish grin, with a nervous twist of his shoulders, looking around at us with an expression which said, "Isn't she silly, but isn't she cute?" As he turned his head in my direction, I caught his eyes for a second. They were the eyes of a maimed dog.
I found this one highly problematic. It is presented as the fictional memoirs of a Canadian professor who spent part of his youth in Eastern Europe. Vizinczey is a Canadian professor who spent part of his youth in Eastern Europe. (see, also, Stephen King novels in which the protagonist is a horror novel writer). His pronounced "wisdom" about what all men are supposedly like, and what younger women are supposedly like, and what older women are supposedly like, either fail or (speaking only for myself), when they strike a familiar chord that relates to my own experience, poke at something about myself that makes me ashamed, that I would rather not admit to even thinking of as part of what I want out of love or life.
"Andras Vajda", the unreliable narrator, relates his youth, and his initiation into sexuality at the skilled hands of experienced women, with all the single-mindedness of a goal-directed sperm competing with all other males to get at the treasure, absorb himself into his successes, and then die and get reborn to do it all over again, as many times as possible. He has one sexual-emotional adventure after another, each one of which takes on cosmic importance at the time, and fades into nothing upon completion. all people, including himself, are fickle and without meaning. I felt like an unwilling voyeur at times, wanting to ask "Vadja" why he insists on sharing this information about himself that I find vaguely and not-so-vaguely creepy.
Sparky McWirepants: Experimental Researches in Electricity, by Michael Faraday
An atom by itself might be conceived of as spherical, or spheroidical, or where many were touching in all directions, the form might be thought of as a dodecahedron, for any one would be surrounded by and bear against twelve others, on different sides. But if an atom be conceived to be a centre of power, that which is ordinarily referred to under the term 'shape' would now be referred to the disposition and relative intensity of the forces. The power arranged in and around a centre might be uniform in arrangement and intensity in every direction outwards from that centre, and then a section of equal intensity of force through the radii would be a sphere; or the law of decrease of force from the centre outwards might vary in different directions, and then the section of equal intensity might be an oblate or oblong spheroid, or have other forms; or the forces might be disposed so as to make the atom polar; or they might circulate around it equatorially or otherwise, after the manner of imagined magnetic atoms.
Long time followers of my Great Books reading project are familiar with my angst at being humbled by the likes of Newton and other scientists whose works are included in their complete form in the Great Books set with the admonition that "Anyone can read and understand this." I have failed frequently, and been comforted by scientist friends who assure me that no one is expected to learn physics by reading the original Newton.
Experimental Researches in Electricity was the single major science work I read this year, beginning in February and grazing through the short chapters gradually until late October. I was grateful for Faraday. This book is much harder than his lecture on "The Chemical History of a Candle", but it is not impossible, and for the first time, it had me making connections between various concepts that I had been taught separately such as magnetism, atomic structure, and electrical force itself--bridging the gap between electricity formulas from high school chemistry and what actually goes on inside a battery. Highly recommended. And also, Faraday was quite easy on the eyes.
Shake it down, Shake it down now: Bleak....House, by Charles Dickens
Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least, but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit. The little plaintiff or defendant who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world. Fair wards of court have faded into mothers and grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and gone out; the legion of bills in the suit have been transformed into mere bills of mortality; there are not three Jarndyces left upon the earth perhaps since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the court, perennially hopeless.
"M'lud," says Mr. Tangle. Mr. Tangle knows more of Jarndyce and Jarndyce than anybody. He is famous for it—supposed never to have read anything else since he left school.
"Have you nearly concluded your argument?"
"M'lud, no—variety of points—feel it me duty to submit—ludship," is the reply that slides out of Mr. Tangle.
"Several members of the bar are still to be heard, I believe?" says the Chancellor with a slight smile.
Eighteen of Mr. Tangle's learned friends, each armed with a little summary of eighteen hundred sheets, bob up like eighteen hammers in a pianoforte, make eighteen bows, and drop into their eighteen places of obscurity.
"We will proceed with the hearing on Wednesday fortnight," says the Chancellor. For the question at issue is only a question of costs, a mere bud on the forest tree of the parent suit, and really will come to a settlement one of these days.
Dickens wrote a number of novels attacking the debtors' prisons that existed in his day (and that, thanks to people voting Republican, are on their way to being established in America as I write this); Bleak House is centrally an attack on the British legal system, and chancery court in particular, as a mass of sludge clogging the arteries of society. At its center is a will contest that has been dragging on for decades, ruining lives and bankrupting participants so that the solicitors may provide for their families, until ultimately the entire estate is consumed in legal fees. The other plot, revolving around the narrator Esther Summerson's parentage, is secondary.
As is usual in Dickens, charactarization is the meat of the book. The noble, long-suffering Esther and her even more noble and long-suffering guardian Jarndyce are models of generosity, while the male ward Richard, who ruins himself through litigation, is the central warning. Surrounding them are Jo the plucky street urchin, Mr. George the hearty shooting gallery owner, Krook the mysterious victim of spontaneous combustion, Guppy the eager law clerk, Vholes the lawyer who matter-of-factly justifies his practice as a means to provide for his family, the Dedlocks whose devotion to one another is shadowed by the secrets they keep from one another.
By far the character who made the greatest impression on me, however, is the human leech Skimpole, who has almost no connection with the main plot, and who exists as a dark flip side to the jolly, helpless Micawber from David Copperfield Skimpole is a delightfully charming and radiant companion who takes no pains to understand worldly concerns nor any responsibility for his own upkeep. He proudly self-identifies as a man-boy who needs looking after, and graciously accepts the support of others as his due; a "heartless" bailiff who duns him for his extravagant debts, and who is denounced as a monster seizing from the poor, is shown as the sole support of a needy family, doing the only job he can get.
Skimpole makes me grateful that conservative Republicans consider any books more imaginative than Who Moved My Cheese as wasteful; otherwise the character of Skimpole would be as universally held up in conservative circles as Scrooge and Tiny Tim are in the rest of society; Dickens did what Ayn Rand failed to do and breathed life into an unforgettable straw man ; the parasite and taker who styles himself an "altruist."
Begorrah, the Girl is Mine! Castle Richmond, by Anthony Trollope
"They will be beggars!" she said to herself--"Beggars!"--when the door of her own room closed upon her. And there are few people in the whole world who held such beggary in less esteem than did the Countess of Desmond. It may almost be said that she hated herself on account of her own poverty.
A 400-page short story about two Irishmen competing over the affections of a woman, and all three parties subjecting themselves to unnecessary unhappiness out of misguided notions of honor. There are families with titles and no money, and families with money and no title, posturing as better than one another, while around them people with neither money nor title fall victim to the Irish famine and die. True love is thwarted by considerations of the relative stations of the lovers making matches "impossible", and parents who forbid worthy matches live to regret their folly.
A major plot twist arises about a quarter of the way into the book and is resolved, negating itself, about a quarter of the way from the end. Seems to me, everything between could have been eliminated while subtracting nothing of value from the story. Drink whenever someone refuses to do the sensible thing because nobility of self-sacrifice.