Review: The King of the Schnorrers by Israel Zangwill

 I’d first read Israel Zangwill’s book The Big Bow Mystery, a locked room novel set in the London area of Bow, not one about a big bow. The mystery itself, though ingenious, is really a skeleton to introduce outsized, entertaining characters and dialogue, an impulse which is given full expression in King of the Schnorrers. 

The book is set in the Jewish communities of London at the end of the eighteenth century, a time Zangwill regards as “while the most picturesque period of Anglo-Jewish history, it has never before been exploited in fiction.” The time is introduced as one of great hostility to the Jewish people of London, with them being denied “every civil liberty but paying taxes” and the Gentleman’s Magazine having nothing but invective at the “infidel alien”. Yet the first character the reader is introduced to, Grobstock, is leaving a synagogue who had been patriotically praying for the return to health of King George and is carrying a large bag of money he has earned as a member of the East-India Trading Company. “There was no middle-class to speak of in the eighteenth century Jewry; the world was divided into the rich and poor, and the rich were very, very rich and the poor very, very, poor, so everyone knew his station.”

Grobstock is met by a crowd of schnorrers. These are beggars, but very particular ones. They don’t fein madness like the eighteenth century Abram men, nor do they fake illness or injury. Nor do they ask for alms as a favour but as a right, the Talmud instructs wealthy jews to give charitably to those who need it, so these beggars are claiming charity that is rightfully theirs. To add an element of a game to his giving, Grobstock has painstakingly wrapped differing sums of money in paper packets, giving them out to the schnorrers and delighting at their different reactions to the different sums.

Having done this, he walks towards his house, pleased at a good deal done in a fun way. He meets another schnorrer on his way back. This man is different to the others, while they have tried to dress as Londoners, this man is dressed in an outlandish garb, with a makeshift turban on his head, a bushy, black beard and layers of clothes and scarves - a little Faginish. Grobstock offers the stranger one of his packets and, to his terrible luck, it’s the one packet with nothing in it. Rather than taking it as a joke, the stranger launches into an invective, fluent in the language of the Talmud which rather sets him back.

This figure is the hero of the book, Manassah Bueno Barzillai Azevedo de Costa, the self-styled King of the Schnorrers. One of his lines of attack against Grobstock is that Manassah is a Sephardic Jew, descended from the Jews of Spain and Portugal, where Grobstock is an Ashkenazi, descended from the ghettos of Germany and Poland (as indeed, Zangwill was). This divide between the two branches of Judaism, with their different customs, histories and Hebrew pronunciation becomes one of the big themes of the book. The Sephardic Jews have the glamour and (self appointed) nobility of the grand old courts of Granada, they came to London first and regard the Ashkenazi as gutter scum pouring in from the continent. Even as Grobstock is far richer than Manassah, there is a sense he is lesser in inheritance.

One of the joys of the book is how Zangwill portrays the sheer unstoppable force of Manassah. He is relentless, able to twist any comment or action into an insult that needs repaying, or a gift that needs taking. He is able to twist the words of Moses into any form he needs and does so with an entitlement that very few of the other characters are able to combat. It’s this picture of an immense force of personality wedded with the ability to pivot in any direction at any time. His manner of entering a room is described as “always a search warrant”. What’s more, he’s not a Bus Bunny like trickster, he never smiles and winks and seems to fully believe each pivot, each twisting of law and convention, even as he contradicts himself. Zangwill says that if he “had more humour, he would have had less momentum” and it’s the momentum of this character on everyone around him that makes the book more entertaining.

Grobstock ends this encounter poorer and, worst of all, having extended a Friday night dinner offer to Manassah. When he turns up, he has an even poorer, Ashkenazi schnorrer in his train called Yankelé. This man is more a common trickster figure, seemingly more conscious of his tricks and elisions. Through the course of the book, he manages to win Manassah’s respect and the hand of his daughter in marriage.

This is an outrage for the Portuguese synagogue. No daughter of theirs is to marry an Ashkenazi, and Manassah’s next mission is to find ways of tricking, talking and bullying them into it. On the way he manages to secure his daughter a dowry far outside of his means and a permanent pension, securing himself forever, the title of King of the Schnorrers.

This book is a fascinating, comical glance at a side of eighteenth century London that I haven’t encountered before. A world where there are members of an oppressed and very close-knit community (or rather, two communities with a power imbalance built in), who include extremely wealthy bankers, even a fashionable ‘beau’ but also poor scholars and lay-preachers. There’s a sense of a world in itself, where all the other aspects of London life are of distant importance to synagogical politics. Also interesting were the locations. There were the City banking locations, but not so much of the East End, Cable Street kinds of places, and nothing of Golder’s Green. The main centres seem to be south of the river, or way out in Hackney.

It’s also the story of a wonderful wrecking ball of a character who smashes his way through all problems. I’m glad he had a happy ending. I’m also glad I don’t have to deal with him.

Playing with History: 3 (The Little Things)

 

It seems true, as Kitty Kallen said, that little things mean a lot. My experience these last few weeks have emphasised this. Living as a squatter in my own house, confined to a couple of rooms where everything else is mess and chaos, my recent reading of Hubbub about the small things that make life difficult, trying to get back into writing my novel about Samuel and Nathaniel Johnson - the all remind me of the difficulties of little things.

In the house, the difficulty of not having a proper place to sit and write has made it harder to do so. Not having a clean place to put my clothes where they don’t gather a thin layer of brick dust, or having to wear outdoor shoes to leave the little carpeted room I’m mostly holed up in, are all things that spins the sense of life off-kilter.

Similarly, the experiences read about in Hubbub, the neighbour who doesn’t empty their latrine pit often enough, the dubious freshness of meat and veg, the noise of pewterers hammering away on loud, empty vessels, all have an outsized impact on how lives are lead.

Then, with a new awareness of these things, I return to my novel and find those little details, the things that make life real are the hardest ones to know about. This is especially true because of the domestic nature of the book. What little jobs and bodges existed in the Johnson’s home at Breadstreet? Where were the draughty areas? What little jobs did the family mean to do but never got round to because ‘it wasn’t that bad really’? These little details are the elements that really shape a life. As Johnson said, “There is nothing too little for so little a creature as man”. 

I’m lucky that the Johnsons were so written about and recorded. I know where there house was, the layout of it. I know that the kitchen was the lowest room in the house, below street level and that the fire was kept lit, and many times the only fire lit. I know that the family, despite the size of their house, mainly decamped to this dingy, warm snuggery. I know that Samuel sat and read by the fire, because that’s where he was when he was spooked out reading Hamlet. 

I also know a little about how they ate and drank. Johnson was given coffee in the morning but Sarah was prohibited to keeping a tea-caddy and inviting friends over. Samuel loved boiled pork, rump steak and plumb pudding. He drowned his food with gravy. As a child, he’d snack on toasted oats, which he’d carry loose in his pockets much as he would later carry his snuff. He was inordinately fond of fruit and could eat dozens of plumbs when in season. We also know he found a book that he loved when he was rooting around the top shelves of the bookshop for apples Natty had left there to dry. Samuel never reports of going hungry.

The Johnson family seem lucky. When reading about the town’s infrastructure compared to the descriptions in Hubbub, Lichfield sounds like a well ordered town. The water supplies are well regulated, inspected and maintained. The industrial problems of towns like Birmingham don’t really affect the place and Lichfield doesn’t seem to have the outbreaks of cholera that other cities suffer. 

Yet, the family did live next to the main marketplace. How noisy was it? How dirty? How much did it impinge on the family in the house? There’d have been animals, litter, vegetable debris. What about the cries, calls and general noise of market days? Was the house an island from noise or a noisy place itself? It was a new build, organised in the modern way of many smaller rooms, but those rooms were filled with books, skins, paper and all the work and stock for the shop. John Wain points out how all the Johnson males were large and that “when they squeezed past each other on the stairs, or in narrow spaces, between bookshelves, they must have seemed like mastiffs in a terrier’s kennel.” Michael himself often found reasons to be away from the house for long periods, Samuel didn’t want to return after months of visiting a cousin and Natty seemed to have liked the company of a pub. Perhaps they were all trying to escape. Poor Sarah didn’t have that outlet.

Of course, this is where knowledge and imagination need to blend. It feels as much as I know (and posts like this are partly an exercise in recalling and organising the knowledge I have) I will never know enough to convey the texture, the rhythms of life for this one family, in this one time, at this one place. And with the disorder swirling round me at the moment, it’s hard to concentrate on what I know as it is.

Review: The Amazing Dr Darwin by Charles Sheffield

 When I first visited Lichfield, I gave myself too long in that small City. I’d spied all the Samuel Johnson things I’d come for, spent hours in the Birthplace Museum and hunted out the other places he knew so I went into the Erasmus Darwin House as something to do. I knew little about the man then and I was amazed at the scope of his interests, the depth of his scientific knowledge, the influence of his poetry and the sheer likability of the man. Then I read a biography of him, it was more hagiography than biography and it cooled me to him a little.

There’s a very fun series of books by Lillian de la Torre called Samuel Johnson: Detector. In them, Samuel Johnson is cast in a Holmesian role with Boswell as his Watson. They’re good fun even if the prose is a little wooden. Having read those, I was excited to see Charles Sheffield had done a similar thing with Erasmus Darwin, though Darwin’s cases have a more supernatural flavour, X-Files in the late 1700s. 

This book is a collection of stories where Darwin, flanked by Pole, loosely based on one of Darwin’s associates, find themselves amidst something strange or supernatural and Darwin, using his keen analytical eye find out the truth behind them. The first story in the collection even has a cryptozoological air, with a trip to Scottish Lochs where a seabeast awaits. The first story written, the last in the collection also includes an evolutionary left turn - but the rest of the stories were rooted in reality, to an extent.

The mysteries were pretty engaging. I guessed the twist of the ‘Lambeth Immortal’, because something similar happened to my Mum at a gig, so the little clues jumped out a bit at me but mostly I was left feeling like I’d seen a good trick without being tricked. My favourite story was ‘The Heart of Ahura Mazda’, which reminded me a little of the series Jonathan Creek. Indeed, Darwin and Pole would make for fun Sunday tea-time adventures, I’d watch that.

I found the most important element of the book to be Darwin’s detecting methods. Unlike Holmes, he mades iron clad deductions that always prove correct, Darwin makes adductive hypotheses that he then tests and rules out. As such, he doesn’t investigate from a position of certainty or authority, but one of openness an testing. He describes how he has many theories but needs a sieve to sort them out, or that he hasn’t added two and two and made twenty, but subtracted two and two and made zero. 

A lot is made of his skills as a diagnostician - rather like another Holmes-inspired character, House. While Darwin was a respected doctor and had a particular knack at knowing if a patient was going to die, I found his fame as a medical man was too emphasised. The plots of three of the stories partially existed because of this reputation and he seems to be a famous man because of it. As well as not squaring with my impression of Darwin, there was less emphasis on his poetry, engineering and other skills - though some Lunar Society members get mentions.

Because they were short stories publishes in different places, we get some of the same beats when it comes to setting up our characters. We are always informed of Darwin’s weight and his missing front teeth and of Pole’s malaria - it grows a little repetitive and might have been edited out a little when being put into a whole book. Reading them altogether, it also becomes an oddly repetitive motif that it’s always winter or autumn in the stories, I guess for atmosphere in each one, but it becomes a bit of a bingo card.

That said, I think the writing was better than the Samuel Johnson:  Detector series and I really enjoyed Darwin and Pole together. I also liked how Darwin was unlike other detective figures, he has his quirks but they were quirks of Erasmus Darwin, not detectivey ones. It’s nice to read a detective story where the protagonist is a fat, content, intellectually curious man who gets on with people and is always ready to eat a big meal. It was nice to have a decent man at the centre of things, not brooding or moody, figuring problems out with an intelligence that is motivated by curiosity and wonder. It’s a nifty little book and praises a praiseworthy man.

Review: Hubbub: Filth, Noise, and Stench in England, 1600-1770 by Emily Cockayne

I came across Hubbub at the right moment. It was a few days after I’d recieved the keys for the new house, wandered about and realised how much work there was to do and fatefully tugged on that first bit of anaglypta paper which unravelled half the room and revealed what a bad state it was all in. I was about to spend the rest of the month (and who knows how long) in the muck, dust, discomfort and noise of house renovation and here was a book about the inconveniences of the past.

Emily Cockayne (cool surname) even had her own uncomfortable housing in mind, structuring her acknowledging about all the rough-n-ready places she’d lived in through the development of the book and the people who had helped in her journey - it was one of the warmest and classiest acknowledgements pages I have read. The book started as a dissertation about noise, and the place irritating noises played in cities in the early modern period, but grew to a more general discussion of “how people were made to feel uncomfortable by other people”.

To help navigate her journey through the noisome, she assembled a council of ‘inperts’, not objective factual experts, but people who were deeply alive to the experiences around them. Many of them were people I’ve already read and enjoyed; they include Samuel Pepys, Anthony Wood, Ned Ward, Jonas Hanway, Margaret Cavendish and Tobias Smollett. There were also people I was looking forward to meet like Mary Chandler. The little potted biographies of these inperts were written wittily, with an eye on their quirks and sensitivities. 

Cockayne really enjoys Ned Ward, finding any occasion to mention him and even naming her son after him. Being fond of him myself, I knew I was in good company. More strange is her seeming affection for Jonas Hanway. Known as the most boring man in Britain, Hanway introduced the umbrella into the country and wrote a description of a journey from Portsmouth to London which Samuel Johnson reviewed by thanking God that the journey hadn’t been any further. In that same book, Hanway has a digression about the evils of tea drinking which led to a wonderful Johnsonian rant in the review. Hanway did have lots of ideas about how to lay out a street though, and a lot to say about nuisances, so I suppose the ol’ busybody was a useful find for the author.

One of the little joys of the book, apart from the use of words like ‘ugglesome’ were the names of people mentioned. There are many legal cases and official complaints mentioned in the book and they included people who rejoiced in names like Andrew Niblett, Abraham Shakemaple, Thomas Toopots and Sarah Smallwick.

The book focuses on four towns; London, Manchester, Oxford and Bath but Portsmouth, Nottingham, Coventry and many other places are mentioned as well. (It did help me to see the pride Johnson has in Lichfield, due to the Conduit Lands Trust, many of the problems of other towns were lessened in his hometown.) Indeed, focus is the problem of the book. It focuses on the towns, except when there’s an interesting titbit from somewhere else. It focuses on the testimony of the inperts, except when someone else has something relevant to say. Even the chapters, headed things like ‘Noise’ and ‘Gloom’ meander in and out of the subject. As such, the book was itself a hubbub, a cacophony of different voices, towns and time periods all mixing together and trying to shout over each other. It’s a little exhausting, and I read this book as I was spending three hours after work scraping decades of wallpaper off walls and so was pretty exhausted already.

There is a through story in the book which is reiterated in the last chapter. London was already a large city, Manchester growing from a small town into a metropolis, Bath a backwater into a fashionable spa and Oxford plodding along with its tensions between town and gown. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, they were dealing with mediaeval problems, like pigs rootling in the streets but as they grew, and as the modern world was born, had to keep up with increasing industrial process and expectations. 

One interesting development was about street furniture. The traditional expectation was that every house had to pave and maintain the front of their houses as well as providing lighting, sometimes on a rota basis. As the century moved on, councils took the job of paving for themselves, creating more uniform streets. People began to hire other people to take over their lighting duties, which was then a job organised by the council for a fee - which is essentially one of the things the council tax does. The first independent lamplighter essentially worked himself to death with the responsibility of patrolling a large area every night and maintaining the lights.

This book also answered something I wondered, why Mount Pleasant is called that. It was originally a sarcastic name given to a large rubbish heap outside the city walls. I wonder if the hundreds of other Mount Pleasants outside of London have similar origins.

There were also some texts that added to my personal theory about the a symbolic role cucumbers played in early modern writings (now that’d be a PHD dissertation). There’s a woman in one of Ned Ward’s articles complaining that she is pregnant but has nothing to eat but a crust of bread and a cucumber, and the doctor, Thomas Cogan saying that cucumbers are not suitable for “flegmatyke and delicate persons who do not labour.” Cucumbers, only suitable for the tough labourer.

There are so many little bits and pieces all crammed together in this book. Whether its a town ordinance that states that wives are not to be beaten after nine at night; a watchman’s wife complaining that when he isn’t at work, he still announces the hours at night by farting, or the huge pig farm in London which drove house prizes down and ‘discoloured silver.’ 

Because of the subject matter, I’m tempted to say this book is like dumpster-diving, seeking the treasures among the detritus but that’s not fair, this book is packed with interesting information, it is a bit higgledy piggledy though.