Review: Moll by Siân Rees

 

I was a little unsure about what Siân Rees’s Moll was. At first it appeared to be a biography of the fictional protagonist of Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, then it seemed to be a group biography of women who inspired her story. In the end, it’s a book that uses Defoe’s novel to structure a wide-ranging look at life in the late seventeenth century, especially looking at the lives of women.

It starts off by saying how all adaptations of Moll Flanders (even my favourite Alex Kingston adaptation) have misunderstood it. Moll Flanders is a historical novel, narrated by a 70 year old Moll in 1683. She’s a seventeenth century gal, not an eighteenth one - she’s not swigging it up amongst the prostitutes of Covent Garden, she’s living through the civil war, the puritan commonwealth and the restoration. What’s more, our vision of her as a happy-go-lucky prostitute is definitely against her desires in the book, in that, all that she wants is a happy, stable life but it takes a long time for events to go her way for long.

We start off with Moll being born in Newgate. When a woman was convicted of a capital crime, she could buy time by claiming to be pregnant. The state gave itself the right to kill a convicted criminal but not an innocent foetus, so making that claim could stretch out the sentencing. When this claim was made a council of ’12 matrons’ had to be assembled, usually by pulling them out of the courtroom and off the street, to verify the claim. They’d invasively prod and poke the woman, looking for ‘quickening’, the foetus moving inside the womb, which was regarded as when a soul entered a child. It could be possible to stack this council with friends to vouch for you, and there was a whole underhand service of turnkeys and inmates providing women prisoners with babies.

Moll is born one of these babies and, after she has weaned, her mother is transported. When Moll is born, transportation is only beginning to be an option and Moll’s fictional mother would have been one of the first people to be given it. However, transportation wasn’t far off a death sentence, there was only a 50% chance of living a few years in the colony, especially as an indentured servant - essentially a slave with a time limit.

Moll is taken in by a family in the puritan town of Colchester, where she becomes a companion to the daughters of a wealthy mercantile household. In many ways she is lucky, most children taken out of Newgate were put into backbreaking jobs as general maids. There was also a growing industry in kidnapping street children and sending them to the colonies.

The next few chapters deal with the thorny issue of respectability in the seventeenth century. While a man (especially one with means) can happily sow his wild oats, a young woman has to remain chaste, or at least seen as chaste, until she marries. The teenage Moll has to be very careful with her dalliances with the ogling older brother and actually is quite lucky in marrying the blander older one. When he dies, she leaves the children behind and sets off for another husband. I think it’s Moll’s habit of just leaving her children behind which strikes the modern reader so strangely.

Her second marriage is to a merchant who lives beyond his means. As a woman, she has no real control over the family finances. What’s more, if she wants to follow convention, and the guidebooks on how to be a good wife, she has to follow the head of the family and allow him to make all the decisions. Because of this, he is bankrupt and feels to France, while she flees to and area called The Mint, south of the river Thames. 

The Mint sounds like a wild place. There’s a brothel called Holland’s Leaguer, which is situated in an old moated mansion and even pulled up the drawbridge when it was raided by the authorities. The Mint is skint city, a place where bankrupts gather together and beat up any encroaching debt collectors until they are forced to call themselves rogues. It’s not a place to find a rich husband though and she moves down river to snag a ship’s captain.

The man she ends up with is an American and this allows Rees to talk a little more of how the colonies have been developing. They’ve been growing, fighting wars with the natives and enforcing different religious and moral laws in the territories run by different groups. They’ve discovered the wealth in tobacco, but the intensity of its production has started to create a black, slave underclass. Where there had been black workers who had become landowners, the distinction is becoming racialised, with the children of black slaves also becoming slaves. Of course, things don’t work out for Moll, because she’s inadvertently married her half-brother and so she hops back to England.

As Moll Flanders becomes darker, so does Moll. There’s a grim chapter about baby farming, the profession of being paid to take babies off the parish or secretly from mothers. This children were often starved, worked to death or sold to be shipped off to the colonies, though the colonies are even less welcome to these poor children than they had been. Moll arranges an unwanted child to be looked after, but pays a premium to make sure it is.

There’s a fantastic chapter on Mary Frith, better known as Moll Cutpurse, a woman who set up a service to return stolen goods to their owners. Like the later Jonathan Wilde, she also built up the information needed to direct thieves, though she wasn’t one to impeach those who got in her way. In her youth, she’d dressed up like a man  and won a bet by riding in men’s clothes through London. To make herself even more noticeable she did it whilst blowing a trumpet and riding a famous performing horse called Marocco. 

In modelling this book on Moll Flanders’s fictional life, Rees manages to make a broad and entertaining history that often reads like a novel, yet also ground the novel in properly researched aspects of history. However, I don’t think the casual reader should be blamed for not realising Moll Flanders is set fifty or so years before it was written, Moll’s life is untouched by any of the historical events she witnessed. She doesn’t mention the Civil War or restoration, nor is the story affected by the great plague of 1665 or the great fire of 1666, Defoe didn’t provide the historical context but focussed purely on Moll’s ups and downs. Having read Siân Rees’s Moll, I will approach Defoe’s novel differently when I come to re-read it, and it actually prompted me to read another Defoe novel - though that is a story for another day. 

In which I meet the Great Flabber Dabber Flat Clapping Fish with hands

In the last weekend of November, I had the great pleasure of going to see a colony of seals. These animals have their pups in a place called Donna Nook on the Lincolnshire coast and, for the few weeks they are there, are a popular tourist attraction in the area.

It was a rainy day. An extremely rainy day. A so-rainy-it-soaked-through-my-boots-and-leather-jacket day but it was also quite a magical one. The car sloshed into the field used as a car park and we squelched up to the sand bank. As we climbed it, we heard this peculiar noise - was it seals, birds or people? It was hard to tell. I’d brought binoculars in case they were hard to see. These were not needed.

We came over the sand bank and they were there. Hundreds of seals, all slumped over the beach, some sleeping, some suckling little white pups and some groaning and hissing. There’s a fence to stop the people wandering around the seals (as they formally did) and some seals were right up to it, scratching themselves on the wire. They are the most wonderfully ridiculous animals, belching out their strange calls and flopping around like someone stuck in a sleeping bag. 

There was something magical about seeing these strange creatures, patting each other on the back with their flippers, seeming to have belly-flop races and hissing at another seal who tried to take their spot. I’d always thought of them as cute, but the way their faces seemed stuck on the top of their bodies reminded me of blemmyes, the mythical people with heads in their stomachs. 

As I stood there, soaked to the bone, it was also quite clear to me how ridiculous we humans are. We’d all schlepped out to the middle of nowhere, paid parking charges for a field of mud and shivered out in the pouring rain to see these other creatures who were fine and comfortable as they were. The fact is, seeing seals during birthing season is seeing them at their worst - they aren’t good on land but they are amazing at sea. They sleep upright in the water like buoys, with self closing nostrils if they dip down. They can dive for 200 metres and stay under water for half an hour. They swim hundreds of miles between colony sites. Laying on the beach, half-starved, worn out from childbirth, they still managed to be captivating and interesting creatures.

As usual, when I have a little animal adventure, I like to go to Goldsmith’s History of the Natural World. I was surprised to find the seal listed amongst the mammals, whales, dolphins and turtles are lumped in with fish. It’s a long entry, and it feels like Goldsmith may actually have seen seals because he sounds like he knows what he’s talking about, not just copying from an encyclopaedia.

His description conveys how odd a seal looks, with some elements like a quadruped and some like a fish. He describes them having a round head like a man, broad nose like an otter and teeth like a dog. He describes their skeletal structure, like other mammals but covered in fur and membranes to create a fish-like shape.

He also feels that, while seals are not more cunning than many land animals, they are more cunning than fish - which gives them an advantage. He describes how they hunt in groups, gathering on large shoals of fish, and how they are largely social. He talks about their different calls (and we could tell different calls in the seals we met) but he didn’t know how much of their communication involves slapping their fin-arms. 

My favourite section of any Goldsmith animal entry is the one about whether they are tasty, or useful to humans in any respect… it’s such a self-interested thing to have in a natural history book. He says the skin is good for making waterproof waistcoats and that they have been regarded as a good meal, with Edward IV eating one at Archbishop Nevil’s house.

He finishes by describing their migration habits, the reason why we had to go to Donna Nook to see them when we did, rather than wait for better weather.

However, Goldsmith is not the only one of my favourites to mention seals in his writing. Christopher Smart did as well.

The first time I read Jubilate Agno, one of the things that stuck into my head was the phrase, “the Great Flabber Dabber Flat Clapping Fish with hands”. It turns out these were seals.

Yes, he’s done what I was expecting Goldsmith to do, lumping them in with fish, but he’s done so with such brio that I have to praise him for it. In the poem, Smart lumps the seals in with Psalm 98;

“Let the sea resound, and everything in it,
    the world, and all who live in it.

Let the rivers clap their hands,
    let the mountains sing together for joy”

So, for Smart, it’s the seals who will be the sea’s chief clappers of hands and I think it’s worth applauding the seal.

Looking at 'Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without' (Part Two)

 Last week I looked at the book Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without by Brigid Brophy, Michael Levey and Charles Osbourne. This is a book where a iconoclastic trio propose works that don’t need to be in the British and American canon… some of which no longer are. They also take some pot shots at eighteenth century works. 

In the first part I looked at the novels, now I am looking at plays - and it starts with a biggie.

She Stoops to Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith.

They start by referencing how Goldsmith himself was good with children. Then they say that this play is to facile for even the “most naive  adults” who would not even find it “tolerable”. They then laugh at a professor in Leeds who called it timeless, which suggests to them, “how slowly things must move in Leeds”. They concur with Walpole that the play is stiff and contrived, clumsy and graceless. 

The gruesome gang then go on to pick on Goldsmith himself. They say that at his heart there’s “an uncertainty about how to harness the creative power to any distinct purpose”. They say he dithers over whether to pick up a “scalpel or powderpuff”, never finding the right tool for the job, being torn between being Voltaire and Rousseau and so not really being anything. 

They then talk about how likeable Goldsmith is as a person, that the play is as likeable, which is what makes it a poor work of art. They propose that while they want to keep him as a man-of-letters, it’s more generous to keep him and his life and to ditch his work.

I think they fundamentally misunderstand Goldsmith’s writing. It’s not that he dithers between his sharper Voltaire instincts and his softer Rousseau, it’s that he does manage to blend both within his writing. He was widely read in contemporary French literature (and often lifted parts wholesale) and I think was aware of mixing the biting and the stroking, often hiding one behind the other. His ability to write hurried Grub Street compilations that became standard works for centuries is a prime example of how well he could shape material for an audience. He’s more readable and likeable than many of his peers yet is able to slip in real jabs and ideas as well.

I think She Stoops to Conquer has rather dated though. He set out to write, and succeeded in writing a ‘laughing comedy’, there are funny bits in it but having seen a recent-ish production, it is a little creaky now. However, most comedy ages badly, and for it still to more-or-less work three-hundred years later is a sign of quality.

Yet, it’s not my favourite Goldsmith. I think he should definitely remain a standard man-of-letters but his reputation could stand on The Vicar of Wakefield and his essays, particularly The Citizen of the World. Perhaps this is just a me thing, I’m not sure how well those works would go down now, but I really think Citizen of the World is funny, representative of the time and even tells a pretty decent little story as well. She Stoops to Conquer may seem like a slight work, and Goldsmith a slight author, but we’d lose much without him.

The School for Scandal by Richard Brinsley Sheridan 

Another writer they prefer for his personality than his writing, they say that the existence of The Rivals and School for Scandal would have been better as lost works. If they hadn’t survived, the writers argue, Sheridan could be hailed as the continuation of Congreve and the pointer to Wilde but as they stand, one is “clumsy and unconvincing” and the other is “neat and unconvincing”. 

His big problem is that he aspired for jeux d’esprit but “tamed his jeux” until all that was left were “limp artefacts utterly lacking in esprit”. They say he was too timid and unwilling to offend that his “always tiny talent” was minimised into even less. They suggest that modern audiences are now robust enough for Congreve and Vanbrugh and no longer need this watered down version. 

I can’t speak too much for Sheridan, I have read and seen both The Rivals and The School for Scandal and I like them both reasonably enough. Although I’ve read Congreve’s little novel, I’ve not read and seen his or Vanbrugh’s plays, so I couldn’t tell if Sheridan is simply a watered down version. What I do know, is that Sheridan borrowed many of his comic situations from his mother’s novel, and I plan to read that at some point.

It’s not that I take the remarks of Brophy, Levey and Osbourne too seriously, there’s is a fun game to play and I’ll have to think of fifty ‘classic’ works that I’d be happy to bin and why. I’m sure they had a great time writing this book and can imagine them in a pub, arguing over the choices and trying to top each other over who can say the rudest things. It is also funny how few of the books mentioned are still central pillars of literature, oddly I’ve put some things on my reading list because of the trashing they got in this. 

Looking at 'Fifty Works of English and American Literature we could do without' (Part One)

 Fifty Works of English and American Literature we could do without presents itself as the work of three enfant terribles, taking a sledgehammer to the self-satisfied corpus of English Literature. It caused a stir in 1969 but is mostly forgotten now. 

Written by three authors, the best known at the time was Brigid Brophy, which is how I came to this text. I remembered the quote “To my mind, the two most fascinating subjects in the universe are sex and the eighteenth century” and I looked up who said it. This led me to Brophy and her own fascinating body of work, which put her on my list of authors to keep my eye out for. This book was one of the most eye-catching titles on that list and I found a copy on the internet archive.

Skimming the contents, it’s interesting how many of the works poked at aren’t great beasts of the canon any more. I’d not even heard of The Dream of Gerontius, or The Essays of Elia, even as I am aware of the authors. Oliver Wendell Holmes is not a name I’ve ever heard of, nor his book The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table. Some of the other ‘great works’ in this book have rather lessened in stature. Of the big books in here that are still big, some are prodded just to show gutsiness. The pages on Hamlet can’t declare the play to be worthless, only to overshadow some of Shakespeare’s other work. 

The book is arranged chronologically, with a few pages being given to each dedicated work, arguing why the book can be done without, the flaws in it and (sometimes) some worthy alternatives. It’s a book I’ve mostly skimmed through, but I think it may be fun to go through the eighteenth century books mentioned and see what I think of the conclusions. I’ll start with the two novels picked out and, next week, I’ll look at the two plays.

Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe

The first eighteenth century work given the Fifty-Works etc treatment, it starts off by comparing Defoe-Fielding-Smollett as a housing estate of red brick, solid buildings, something unexceptional but functional. Then it argues that Moll Flanders is not particularly functional, containing the “thinnest trickle of narrative”. It says that although the novel catalogues the events with nothing left out, nor does it “put anything in” with a sense of morality and characterisation that is “stunted”. It describes his prose as “clean” but “inept to novels, since it swallows all the vividness of what it recounts into itself”. The section on the book I sonly a page and a half long, given poor old Defoe short shrift.

To be honest, I’d agree with the criticisms of Moll Flanders and of Defoe in general. I’ve said myself that his journalistic training and journalist’s prose are very good at reporting processes (like Robinson Crusoe’s house, or Moll’s own stealing) but less successful at conveying emotion. In my video on the ITV drama of Moll Flanders, starring Alex Kingston, I said that the real benefit of the screen adaptation was to dramatise the emotion that a reader of the book has to imply. However, there is a case that Defoe’s emotional flatness gives space to the reader to ask what they would do in the circumstances. It also has to be remembered that one of Defoe’s big aims in his novels was verisimilitude, the flat, reporting style of them make them seem true - to such an extent that it can be hard to forget that Moll Flanders was not a real person. (I’ll be reading a very intriguing book about Moll Flanders soon).

Tom Jones by Henry Fielding

Now the iconoclastic thrupple go after my favourite novel. It starts off with a very long-winded paragraph describing a Kipling novel called Stalky & Co, in which a boy feels like something less because he isn’t sporty like the titular Stalky. It suggests that Tom Jones has been popular for years because it stands as the one example of a book that isn’t wet and weedy, “Tom Jones has become the accepted epitome of red-bloodedness.” 

They agree that the book Tom Jones is vigorous, but that Tom himself isn’t. He’s a “tom cat of remarkable passivity”, who is more flirted with than flirting. But that’s okay, his blankness is typical picaresque stuff, it must be the adventures that are vigorous. The gang argue that the adventures aren’t, just a series of bed-hopping and bonks on the head. They also say that the other characters aren’t all that interesting, that they all have their one thing, something it calls a “sandwich-flag system”, presumably that the flag allows you to know exactly what the sandwich is.

Brophy and co claim the vigour of the book all comes in the narrator, a narrator who they say doesn’t really want to narrate, writing introductory material right up to the end. They say Fielding isn’t all that bothered telling the story, presenting the actual events in a “clerk of the court way”, that is might not be “quite as dull” as Moll Flanders, but goes on twice as long. They say the book doesn’t convey the sights and smells of eighteenth century Britain, and that Fielding as narrator spends the whole time convivially slapping you on the back, leaving the reader, “as aching and bruised as they would have been had they spent the time playing rugby.”

As much as I love Tom Jones, I have to agree that he is a weaker element of the book. He does the job fine, but he is a little bit of a blank slate for the reader. I whole-heartedly disagree that the side-characters aren’t brilliant though. Squire Western might not be a complicated man, but he is a fun one to be with, enlivening any scene he is in. As is his sister, as is Honore the maid, or Partridge, or any number of the folk in the book. I think Sophia is a character that a reader can genuinely fall in love with, possessing a fascinating range of emotions and ending the book on her own terms. If they are a little simplistic, they are in the way that Dickens would later make his characters, and they are vigorous and memorable for that simplicity. 

What’s more, I think the characterisation of Fielding’s narration completely wrong. How could they describe it as “clerk of the court”? There are whole chapters written purely ironically, there’s an arch play in every part of the book and the voice is what makes it truly compelling. Even the part they quote, which is intending to show Fielding’s bloodlessness is a beautiful play of mock heroic classical allusion and quotidian truth. I’m afraid the gleesome threesome are utterly off here.

Next week I'll look at how they rate Goldsmith and Sheridan.

Review: Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock

 Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey was published the same year as Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and is similarly a satire against the heightened emotions of the romantic era and the gothic novel. While both are still in print and read, I can see why the Austen book is the greater read.

Northanger Abbey is a brilliantly done romance that skews gothic tropes and features fully fleshed out characters and a genuinely interesting storyline, Nightmare Abbey is a series of in-jokes played out in scenes that are strung along from each other. If it’s inspired anything, it’s more like the Wodehouse Blandings series, a group of eccentrics hang out in an old building.

Mr Glowry married a woman who wanted him for his money. Having received it, she shrank away from all other sources of pleasure and became a very cruel woman whose death makes him a “very consolate” widower. He retreated into his Lincolnshire hall where he surrounds himself with servants with long faces and miserable names. His son, Scythrop is a self-proclaimed genius (based on Shelley) whose book of deep philosophy was only bought by seven people, who he regards as the people most likely to start a new revolution.

Mr Glowry’s brother-in-law, Mr Hilary, is the only cheerful person in the house. He’s staying there with the hopes he can get his daughter, Celestina to marry Scythrop. She loves to torment her would-be lover, alternately spurning him and luring him on.

Mr Toobad is a guest, a nutty priest who shouts about the devil owning the world, it’s a hobby-horse that he won’t get off of. He wants to wed his daughter Celinda to Scythrop, but she’s gone missing on being told what to do. (It turns out the place she hides is Nightmare Abbey, because she was one of Scythrop’s seven readers and doesn’t know he was the person intended for her…Scythrop flits between these too loves.)

Then there’s Mr Flosky, a visitor based on Coleridge, who loves gloomy things, declaring that the world isn’t as good as it used to be and refuses to have any thoughts or ideas that make sense. He prefers his philosophies to be mysterious and murky and at one point stops talking because, he finds himself “unintentionally trespassing within the limits of common sense”. That’s the only time he stops talking. There’s also Mr Listless, a man too posh and lazy to do anything, he even uses his servant as many people use AI, to do tasks and remember things he could probably remember himself.

For a brief time there’s a Byron analogue, Mr Cypress and there’s Mr Asterias, my favourite character, a scientist on fish who is obsessed by mer-people and determined to catch one.

These strange characters bumble about and have conversations which reveal their various idiosyncrasies and ridiculousness. There’s a slight plot about Scythrop hiding his loves from each other which has a good comic pay-off at the end.

The main pleasure of the book is the way the characters rub up against Rach other and the way the book is told. It has a prissy, self-satisfied tine with long pseudo-philosophical sentences filled with unusual turns of phrase. I love the “consolate widower”, a character’s “atrabilarian temperament” and some one else who is “jerremitaylorically pathetic”. My spell check hates this review.

Essentially the author is having fun. He’s having fun with poking at people he knows and likes, at exaggerating their fondness for melancholy and mystery and he’s also having fun with words. That fun does come across still, but it is dulled over time as the immediate objects of ridicule are thoughts and people of the (increasingly distant) past. Because the book pokes fun at universal human frailties, such as taking confusing for deep, it is still funny - but because those frailties are expressed in extremely time-specific ways, the fun is blunted. 

It’s not for everybody, and I’m glad it was short but it was an enjoyable little nugget and I shall read some more Thomas Love Peacock at some point.