Film Review: Savage House

 I was compelled to see Savage House at the cinema because I think The Favourite was the last time a proper eighteenth-century ‘thing’ was on the big screen. The trailer was certainly very striking, all grime, bad make-up and Richard E Grant in a seriously big wig. It’s an accurate trailer, it sets up pretty much the whole plot (the Devonshires plan to visit a low-scramble noble family) and it conveyed the tone well.

Savage House is clearly in dialogue with Downtown Abbey and The Crown, especially by hiring Claire Foy. As Lady Savage, she’s a sharp, witty and peculiarly layered character, someone who chose the unsettled and uncertain marriage to Chauncey because it seemed more fun than being “a rug on the drawing room floor.” She also gets her bum licked - I’ve never actually seen The Crown but I don’t think her Maj was depicted doing that. 

Richard E Grant is having a ball as Sir Chauncey Savage, a poor Welshman who has conned, tricked and married his way into the nobility but is always aware that he can never carry the air of nobility, no matter how tall his wig. Chauncey starts off the film with hideous bleeding gums and degenerates from there; his gout flairs up, he fights a duel and gets a gangrenous arm that needs removing. He’s clearly a piece of work, but he’d oddly sympathetic in his desperation, seeing hallucinatory pigs wandering the corridors, reminding him of his past.

They have three servants at first, a cook, a maid and a valet. The maid, played by Bel Powling, lends Sir Chauncey a sympathetic ear and willing thighs, but is secretly plotting with the valet to steal as much as possible. She also has a vendetta against the Savage’s daughter’s pet mice. The valet, called Reginald Halifax, is played by Jack Farthing - a pretty great name for an eighteenth century character in itself. He’s a highwayman, a skilled duelist and Sir Chauncey’s best friend. So, of course they find themselves in a duel - with all the characters bribing him to either kill or spare Sir Chauncey.

There are a number of other characters, emergency servants, nosy neighbours (of course called the Bennetts) and bilked business partners. They are all broadly drawn, and exists to pull the Savages further down into the abyss as they try and keep up appearances.

One of the interesting elements of the film is how it uses historical fiction cliches. There are the beauty shots of the great house, which is falling to pieces and tracking shots down long galleries with missing pictures. The film starts with some obligatory harpsichord and occasional bursts of familiar classic opera themes, but for much of the middle of the film the soundtrack consists of anxious drones and hums. As the film progresses, the tension about the oncoming visit of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire grows, until it becomes a source of tension for the audience. Even the dramatic events in the film pale in comparison to this possible dinner party.

The film shows a nobility as ungracious and disgusting as we suspect they probably are, this is no heritage depiction of the ‘stately homes of England’. However, it does fall into many anti-cliches, with people treading in animal dung, gout and leeches, full chamberpots - it’s a very Horrible Histories take on ‘Gorgeous Georgians”. 

As for the history itself, there are great mentions of pox, Jacobites and an eclipse. The pox is treated like covid, with people self isolating. I think they probably meant plague more than pox, as pox is generally meant to represent venereal disease, definitely a problem but not something with a season. There really was an eclipse in 1715 and there were pamphlets about its cosmological and prognostic effects, but there were also detailed predictions by former astronomer royal, Edmund Halley, which the Savage’s daughter, Fanny, recites. 

As for Jacobites, the ’15 rebellion had been a pretty damp squib (especially compared to the later ’45). Sir Chauncey is a whig, supportive of the new German King, as opposed to his neighbours, the Bennett, who declare their support for the Stuarts. Their reasons are because they don’t want a German and find his name to be weak, definitely a comment on the weaksauce political discussions we have nowadays. Jacobites themselves are represented as a different breed, an illness like the pox, which sneaks into the house.

I think the most interesting element of the film is the narration. Despite the very filmic shots and lighting (actual lighting! Real locations!) the cinematic nature of Savage House is undermined by the narration, but its eighteenth-century-ness is bumped up by it. The narration is a little too obvious, we are frequently told about things we can see, it has a slight whiff of ‘second screen viewing’ to it. We can see there are pictures missing and that they are buying replacements, we can see that Lady Savage is selling her jewels, we can see that the family are walking a risky tightrope. The moral of the piece is as blatant as obvious as much of the narration, it turns out that sacrificing everything to the possibility of social clout is a bad idea. However, this is not a “Rake’s Progress” or a moral tale, it’s doing what much Grub Street stuff did, pretending to hold a moral tale so the reader/audience can enjoy the humiliation of the main characters. This makes Savage House very eighteenth century and very Grub Street. I can’t imagine the audience for this film though.  

The Guardian 100 Best Novels of all Time

 The Guardian recently(ish) published a list of ‘The 100 Best Novels’. The way they compiled it was quite interesting, they asked 170 writers and literary types to list their top ten novels and then assigned the ranking by how many times they appeared on these authors lists, weighted by how high the person had listed them.

Of course these lists aren’t worth taking seriously, but they are fun for a bit of a chat.. which I will now do.
The eighteenth century is not highly represented. Poor ol’ Defoe, sometimes called ‘father of the novel’ doesn’t get a mention. Nor did Eliza Haywood or Samuel Richardson. My personal favourite novel, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones doesn’t make the list either. Jane Austen has four, but she’s more long-eighteenth century. The only actual eighteenth century book represented is The Lives and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, which got into the top twenty, with seventeen of the writers putting it on their list.

One of the things most fascinating about the list is to look at who voted for a book, and also to look at their lists to see what else they picked. Jennifer Egan, writer of Visit from the Goon Squad puts Tristram Shandy as her 9th pick and actually has Clarissa as her third, I presume not many others picked it. Nina Stibb put it 5th (and put Ducks, Newburyport as her first, she’s obviously a bit of a masochist). Sandra Newman, the author of Julia, a retelling of 1984, puts Tristram Shandy as her first, many of the other authors had it between 5th and 8th. The editor of The Scotsman put it at 2. 

The overall winner is Middlemarch, and it seems by quite a high margin, with a third of the people asked putting it on their list, many in the top 5. There’s been a mini outcry about it, with some people claiming to have not even heard of it. To be honest, it makes sense to me, and it also makes sense why Tristram Shandy does so well against its eighteenth century brothers and sisters - this is a list created by writers.

Middlemarch is not quite the page-turner, but it is truly experimental, telling the reader off for becoming too invested in any particular character over an investment in the general network of people. Although Middlemarch’s writing is not as experimental and flashy as Tristram Shandy, its purpose is far more daring. The books on this list are ones enjoyed by people who have read many books and written a few, they want things that go off the beaten path and succeed - they are after something a bit odder, possibly less satisfying but more challenging than the average. 

I enjoyed the list, I’ve read 39 of them, and all but 1 of the top 20. Of course I’d have loved Tom Jones to have got in, had Catch 22 do much better and In Search of Lost Time do much worse, but I like the idiosyncrasies of this list, 3 Sebalds, 4 Austens, reams of Woolf. It’s a strange list. 

Mini-Review: Meet the Georgians by Robert Peal

 (A Mini-Review because I can't think of enough to say to warrant a full-sized one)

Meet the Georgians by Robert Peal is very attractive. The cover features very striking linocut images by Christopher Brown. These images are also found in the book, with each chapter proceeded by a linocut of the subject of the chapter and they are lovely, but they are simplified, and this is the case with the text.

Robert Peal starts by pointing out how history in schools jumps from Stuarts to Victorians without the Georgians being represented at all. As someone who works in a primary school, I can definitely attest to this - I remember a children’s non-fiction book about toys that made this jump, thus skipping the first mass-produced toys and the first specialised toy shop, Noah’s Ark. Peal seeks to redress this imbalance a little and introduce the reader to the (long) eighteenth century, one which he promises the reader is ‘wild’. 

The people selected are both interesting and diverse and includes some of my favourites like the ladies of Llangollen and Olaudah Equianio. Lady Hamilton gets a chapter inspired by the exhibition about her, as are pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read, who Peal first found about in the 1992 exhibition that got me into pirates as a child. I enjoyed the chapter about Hester Stanhope, even if it smoothed some of her rough edges. The choices were good, the telling brisk and entertaining, it does what it wants to very well, it provides a space to meet the Georgians.

As someone who has wallowed with them for a while, it was pretty superficial, all the efforts to make them seem cool and hip do grate and I could enjoy an introduction to Emma Hamilton without being told she was a ‘superbabe’. There’s also a sense that, in trying to make the people and times appealing, the distinctly unappealing elements are softened. It’s hard to be told that the Georgians were fun, free, sexy, individual people who colonised and enslaved.. it doesn’t quite mesh. There’s also the fact that all the people chosen in book are intended to be representative of the age in some way but were all exceptions, and exceptional.

I wonder which twelve people I’d choose to sum up Britain’s long eighteenth century? I’d certainly pick some of these. I wouldn’t chose Byron though - give me a potted Erasmus Darwin biography instead where he’s described as a super-genius mega-whale’.

Review: Life in London by Pierce Egan

 Pierce Egan’s Life in London is not where the cat and mouse got the names Tom and Jerry from. I was devastated when I found that out, the names for the cartoon frenemies came from a poll of employees. It might be that those employees felt the names went will together because of a cocktail called a Tom and Jerry which was named after the characters in Life in London. Hopefully a gin cocktail - a daffy one as Egan would have written… hang on Daffy Duck…. No, not him either.

Life in London is sort for fascinating because it’s old, was very successful in its time, was a key part of the genre that birthed Dickens’s Pickwick Papers - and yet is still not a classic. My copy is from a Cambridge University print on demand service for books that serve as useful historical sources, not as classics in themselves. There’s something about Life in London that just isn’t quite ‘it’, it fails to be the ne-plus-ultra, it’s not quite Corinthian. 

The book is about a man known as ‘Corinthian’ Tom, because he’s at the top of the pillar. He’s rich, handsome, sufficiently refined but still masculine, and his big desire is to “see life”, especially “Life in London”. The title of the book is used as something of a catch-phrase, with the characters reminding each other that “Life in London” is its own special joy and they are out to sample as much of it as possible.

The Corinthian (as he’s often called) has a best friend, Bob Logic, nominally an Oxford student but he’s far more often seen in London, doing Londony things. He’s more goofy than Tom, we are reminded that he has a funny face quite often. He wears green spectacles, presumably to sooth his eyes from all the reading he doesn’t do. He’s a punster, a prankster and the less refined of the two.

After a while, the late nights of London wear on Tom so he goes into the country. There he meets his cousin Jerry, who he agrees to bring back to London and show him “Life in London”, both the high and the low. The book then follows the pair of cousins, often joined by Logic as they go cockfighting, dog-fighting, to masquerades and high society events, to cheapo coffee houses and gin joints, to Newgate and the Fleet - usually drunk.

The book was written by Egan, but was designed to be a joint production with the Cruickshank brothers illustrations. There are many parts of the book which simply describe one of the prints and the people in it. This is similar to the Doctor Syntax books, which started with the pictures, and was also what The Pickwick Papers was intended to be until Dickens made it his own.

However, it’s also something of a throwback to Ned Ward’s London Spy and Tom Brown’s Amusements, a slang-heavy romp through London in its different lights - and this book is slang heavy, it’s a great wall of slang. Some of the slang surprised me because it’s still pretty relevant. The word ‘snooze’ is presented as slang, as is going on a spree. They eat scran like people in the North-West, one person pulls out a ‘shiv’ and a couple are described as being like ‘Darby and Joan’. I was also pleased to see “a man cannot eat his cake and have it,” a far more sensible version of the phrase.

There was also a lot of slang which has dropped out. The ‘Peep-o-day-boys’ love their ‘daffy’ and ‘blue ruin’, they toddle. Then they may have to give the ‘hambone stop’ with their ‘Morleys’ when they get in a ruckus. Then they may go with a beautiful ‘Cyprian’ or a ‘draggle-tailed Sal’.. and so on, and so on. Egan does write good slang, it feels like insider language the way a group would use it, which makes it less tiresome than it could be, but it’s still fairly tiresome.

As this is from the very furthest stretch of any possible long-eighteenth century (1821), though still ‘Georgian’, it feels like a last hurrah (huzzah?) before the Victorian era dawns. There’s a fascinating attitude towards women, especially prostitutes. Their presence is open and acknowledged, the more well to-do ones are in the all the high places, dressed up fine and wearing jewellery but there is always a reminder that the owner of that jewellery lurks nearby to make sure they don’t abscond with it. There’s an acknowledgement that a prostitute’s life is not a happy one and that those without punters will be beaten when they return home, but there’s also a gleeful pick-and-mix description of them. It’s a pretty common compartmentalisation of an issue, but the compartments seem very flimsy.

I also wondered about Corinthian Kate, Tom’s fancy-bit who is given the name because she’s the only woman who can match him. She’s chosen him because he’s could prove a useful match but it’s never clear whether this is as wife, mistress or fun time girl. What are they to each other? What will they be?

There’s a great comparison in the book between a trip to Allmax, a lowdown gin joint near the docks, and Almack’s, a famous high society club with strict social rules. Allmax seems far more fun, a cosmopilitan crowd drink, dance and chat as they like. In Almack’s, even the preternaturally classy Tom must be reminded to guard everything he says. It’s a little like the two social gatherings in the film Titanic. Another stand-out is a report of Jacco Maccaco, a monkey that is put in a dog-fighting ring where it rips various dogs apart. Animal cruelty is very much seen as sport, with horse-racing, cock-fighting and fox hunting all included - in the hunt party, Tom drinks a beer with the dead fox’s brush in it to add savour. It does seem incredible that such things were seen as sport. Egan started off as a sports writer with a particular speciality in boxing, so there are a few boxes littered throughout the pages.

The book is dedicated to George IV, quite a ‘get’. That such a blokey, slangy book could be dedicated to a monarch seems incongruous, even one such as George IV. The dedication says that although the book is about drunken reprobates, it’s not dedicated to him because he is one, but because he is such a wise king, he knows his people (especially the drunken reprobates).

The book begins with an essay about how great London is. There’s a footnote about Grub Street, how the term is nearly obsolete and there are no writers there any more. It makes all the usual claims of London, that its size and population means that there is a place to be happy for everyone. It’s still the story London tells itself and it’s still sort of true, kind of. The London presented is one where it’s great to have money, which is still definitely true. Life in London does seem to capture something about the place, and feels like a realistic snapshot of life for a certain group of people at a certain time, recorded in their own language.

I suppose for the book to have become a classic, to have stood the test of time and be relevant today, it needed more a narrative hook. Some of the characters are quite engaging, I liked the carefree Bob Logic and was intrigued by Corinthian Kate, and many of the settings and milieus have fed into high and low literature from Dickens to Bridgerton. If there had been a more involved narrative, it might have elevated these strengths into something lasting, but the loose, wandering about structure of it has left it stranded in the time it was written, more useful to be plundered for setting and slang for future writers. 

What Makes a Classic?

 I was hoping today’s blog entry would be a review of Pierce Egan’s Life in London, a work really at the cusp of even the long eighteenth century, being published in 1821. Unfortunately, I just haven’t finished it yet. Life has got in the way and, while it’s not un-entertaining, it’s not something that grips. As I’ve been reading it, I’ve been struck with the distinct notion that it’s not a classic and I’ve been wondering why. What makes ‘a classic’?

My sister is a keen reader, but prefers modern books and so forces herself to read ‘a classic’ every few months. It’s funny how she uses the word, as if it’s a genre in itself. As someone who prefers something a little long in the tooth, works labelled classics come in all sorts and can’t be homogenised so easily, but to many they can.

Is it age that makes a classic? Despite the term ‘modern classic’, a classic is usually regarded as an old book but it’s not the age alone that gives the book its classic status. Life in London is just over two hundred years old, so it passes the age test, but the edition I’m reading is a (pretty classy) print on demand scan by the Cambridge University, scandalously retailing at over forty pound new. Time has withered its initial freshness and it being so of the moment when it was released, its of only scholarly interest now - the edition being aimed at students of the 1820s as a source, not as an enjoyable book in itself.

Is a classic a book of cultural relevance and high sales? It’s true, many classics are the bestselling books of all times but very few bestselling books become classics. I read Anthony Adverse, a bold, ambitious story that was a publishing phenomenon the year it came out, but is nowhere now. Martin Tupper was the most read poet of his day and he’s never read and barely heard of. Life in London was the inspiration behind the first play to break a hundred night run on the West End, but is unknown today. 

It would seem that a classic is one whose cultural relevance and public popularity is stress-tested by time. Yet that’s hardly a fair way to winnow out great works. I’m making my way through the Mothers of the Novel series of classic reprints consisting of works by women which were engineered out of popular and critical consciousness. My recent reading of Fifty Books We Could Do Without showed a number of books the writers were arguing need not be classics, which are very little thought of today.

Then there’s the authors who have some works regarded as classic and the others ignored. Daniel Defoe wrote great reams of stuff, but his reputation as a classic author really only stands on Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, and, to a lesser extent, Roxanna and Journal of the Plague Year. Yet I found Colonel Jack to be just as good as those works and The Life and Adventures of Captain Singleton to be better.

Perhaps ‘classic’ is nothing more than a marketing trick. My eyes will always be drawn to the black and white of a Penguin Classic, or the white and red tip of an Oxford. And who really reads them all anyway? I’m a fond devourer of the beasts but there are oodles of them I’ve never read, some I may never read. 

All I can say for definite is that you know it when you see it and there’s something about Life in London that is not quite it. I think it’s how faddy it is, how specific to its own time and place, but many books are classic because there specificity somehow becomes universal. Yet that’s not to say that there’s nothing to enjoy in it, but I’ll talk about that next week.

Oh - and how did Morrissey get his autobiography into the official Penguin classics range?

Review: Leon Garfield by Roni Natov

 I can’t believe it’s over ten years since I read my first Leon Garfield book. I was thirty at the time, a little older than his marketed age-range (usually 12-16 or so, I’d say) but there was an exuberance in the narration, a pleasure in the melodrama and a general sense of good storytelling that I spent the next few years collecting and reading all his published books.

One of the things that began to fascinate me, was who the man Leon Garfield might actually be. Internet sources were pretty sparse and I found myself in the position of actually having the art without the artist. As such, I drew certain conclusions from what I read without knowing anything about the author. I supposed him to be a big Dickens and Stevenson fan and I supposed him to be a Quaker or Unitarian - as there was definitely some sort of religious element to much of the work, but without a formal religionism. Turns our Leon Garfield was a secular jew, was brought up in my birth-town of Brighton and lived up in Highgate, near where I first settled in London.

Roni Natov’s books on his, as part of the ‘Twayne’s English authors series’ is pretty much the only book I’ve found about Garfield. It’s principally a literary view of his work but does begin with an interview with him, which I found fascinating.

I learnt that Jack Holborn was his fifth written book, but his first published. It had originally been more than twice as long and intended as an adult adventure novel but his publisher had suggested he strip it right down and market it to children as an adventure story in the style of Treasure Island. Interestingly, it was Stevenson’s Master of Ballantrae that served as a more direct inspiration. Having his first book sold as a children’s book led him to be known as a children’s author, even as he showed no real interest in writing books aimed at children. As Natov says, “Garfield’s status as a youth author has more to do with the way he has been packaged by publishers than in his suitability or dedication for children.” I wish I’d discovered him about the age of 12, he’d have really bridged the gap between adult and children’s books better than what I had around me then.

I learnt a little about the man himself. He’d been drafted in the medical corps out of art school because it was assumed he would have studied a little anatomy. He went to Belsen shortly after it was liberated and served as a translator even though he knew no German. He lied about knowing some to avoid being sent to the still ongoing Eastern Front. That his wife gave him the ideas for some of his novels and that he initially wrote in first person because he thought the limitations of it would disguise any lapses in history. His publisher actually begged him to write in third person sometimes, something that’s a little surprising now that first person is so commercial. As he wrote more, he became less worried about the historical details.

There’s a real sense of him as a workaday writer, aware of the poverty of his earlier failures and taking jobs to keep the money coming in. Both of his ostensibly ‘adult’ books were commissions. One being a continuation of Dickens’s Edwin Drood, the solution he found pretty obvious from the text itself. Despite his comparisons to Dickens, he doesn’t seem to have been a huge fan and hadn’t read Drood before. His other adult book House of Cards he admits as business as usual, just longer. Presumably it didn’t do gangbusters, as he was back to being marketed at children.

The work he is most proud of is Apprentices, his sequence of novellas. Originally the first story about ‘Possul, the lamplighter’s apprentice was commissioned for the ‘Long Ago Children’ series of books but he saw more in it to develop and so wrote the Monkey and Boy series for them instead. He enjoyed the hints of mysticism in the lamplighter’s story and wanted to write them all about aspects of light, running out of ideas for that in his second story about a mirror-maker’s apprentice. Each one of the stories takes place on a feast day and form a year between them, they all have Bible verses in them, as well as the character of the link-boy. Most of the characters have bird names also (something I picked up he does a lot, though there’s no explanation in this book why).

There was a little in there about his Shakespeare retellings, another commission. How he grew more comfortable with the task as he went on, and how it helped him put of a writing hole. He remarks on how another commission his House of Hanover, took the form of a trip to the National Portrait Gallery because he didn’t know much of the actual history of the eighteenth century, and that the book had been very definitely not a success. I was also charmed that The Wedding Ghost stemmed from his habit of telling his daughter Sleeping Beauty backwards, because he felt it had more mystery that way, (I noted this because I thing the story of Goldilocks would be better if the bears were a surprise at the end, not set up at the beginning.)

The rest of the book consists of Natov’s analyses of Garfield’s works. She places them in periods; the early eighteenth-century adventure period of searching for a father figure, ghost stories, comic works, stories grounded in a specific historical moment, myths and legends, then a return to searches for the father but in an earlier nineteenth-century context and with more social exploration.

There were some interesting discussions in this essays. Although I was definitely aware of Garfield’s fondness for a morally ambiguous father figure (probably inspired by his own extravagant father), I hadn’t picked on how often his characters resolve by being settled into lower than higher status. Nor had I picked up on how much doubling there is in Garfield’s work, how many twins and reflections. I was also amused by the note that Bostock and Harris is a prequel to Wuthering Heights. 

A lot of the discussion comes from the psychological lenses of Freud and Jung. There’s a lot of anima, animus, dark fathers and mothers, oedipal desires and such. Bakhtin is mentioned a lot. I, however am not very up on these lenses and theories, not only did I not take English Literature at university, I didn’t even take it at A-level, because I always enjoyed a book more if I came across it myself. As such, while I could grasp the points Natov was making, I’m not really all that alive to the structures Natov was appealing to. (A cursory glance at Bakhtin’s wiki-page does reveal how apt a lens his is to look at Garfield’s work though). As such, this book was primarily enjoyable to me for the interview at the beginning than the bulk of the rest of it. It’s also made me think I should re-read John Diamond at some point, I didn’t much like it at the time but the discussion in this book certainly makes me feel I missed something. 

 

Review: The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

 I knew I wanted to read The Canterbury Tales and I knew that April was the right time to read it (as that’s when it’s set) but when the time came, I was indecisive and nervous. Did I want to read it in the original Middle English, or did I want to read it in the very respected Nevil Coghill translation? I went back and forth, even googled it and watched videos about it, and decided - sod it, I’ll go for the Middle English. 

I’m glad I did. It’s not that a see the poetry and writing to be stronger in the Middle English than the translation, I’m simply not attuned enough to know, but the quirky spellings and unusual words forced me to take it slowly and carefully. What’s more, entering in a slightly different language helped suggest a different head-space, like I was entering into a slightly different world and would have to take it as it came. There was also something thrilling about reading something 726 years old in the language it was written.

You could say about the tales themselves what people say about sketch comedy, they were hit and miss. There’d be the pretty well structured tale of courtly love that is the Knight’s Tale, or a romping farce like the Miller’s, some genuinely funny parody from the Nun’s Priest - but then there’d be the Monk pulling out his favourite 20-odd wikipedia articles, or the life of St Cecilia.. or the Parson. 

The dirty ones were genuinely dirty, there were people with pokers up their bums, a young wife and her lover groping each other in a tree, or a friar having to work out how to share a fart twelve ways. There were melodramas, like the poor woman in The Man of Law’s Tale who simply can’t get a break, or the alarming tale of the Franklin about a man who tests his wife by pretending to murder her babies. Then a man turns up near the end to talk about what a difficult and stupid life alchemists lead. I particularly enjoyed The Wife of Bath’s Arthurian Tale and The Nun’s Priest’s Tale of very learned chickens. The Nun herself tells a tale that is supposed to show her piety and good-breeding, but consists of anti-semitic blood libel. And the Parson.. oh, the Parson.

Some tales don’t even finish, the Cook is too drunk and Chaucer himself is interrupted because his Tale of Sir Thopas is so very bad. He then follows this up with the incredibly dull Tale of Melibee, where a husband and wife eruditely argue about the rightness of revenge. It’s not a fun bit of reading, but there’s something wonderful about Chaucer framing himself as someone who can’t tell a tale to save his life. 

Because, while many of the tales are good, it’s the framing that makes the book great. The prologue gives the background, a group of pilgrims setting off from Southwark to worship at the shrine of Thomas Beckett, who was, incidentally, a man killed by the power of some ill-chosen words. In this prologue, Chaucer gives us a panoply of different characters who manage to be both representatives of their ‘type’ but also individuals. The nun is called Eglantine, she is well brought up and speaks a kind of French that is unknown in France, but all the rage in Stratford. The knight is the peak of chivalry and has his curly-haired, fashionable son as his squire. The monk is more into hunting than monking, the chef makes a great blancmange and the miller can knock doors through with his head. 

The prologue is enough to give the collection some character, but the way Chaucer intersperses (and sometimes interrupts) the tales with the social dynamics of the group add so much. What’s more, the way Chaucer chooses the tale for the teller, and adapts how it is told to the character telling it, makes it so much more. 

That the Wife of Bath’s story is one about female empowerment and sovereignty is interesting enough, but that it’s being told by a woman with five previous husbands, who says her favourite was the strictest with her, makes it all so much more. It’s brilliant that the Squire’s (foreshortened) tale is an attempt at the same kind of courtly romance as his father but it gets away from him. The Reeve, a carpenter, is so enraged by the Miller’s Tale about a stupid carpenter that he tells one about a stupid miller (in Trumpington, no less) to one-up him. This sense of the characters trying to one up, correct or contrast each other’s tales is one of the joys of the book. I love that the Friar and the Summoner hate each other, so the Friar’s Tale is about a summoner who meets a devil and the two get on wonderfully, while the Summoner’s Tale is about a friar who has to work out how to share a fart (and yes, Chaucer does love a fart). The tale brings character to the teller, and the character gives depth to the tale.

Even the duller tales are more interesting because of this. The Monk’s Tale stems from his love of tragedy, he says he has several hundred back in the monastery, and he does go through them like a collector showing off a collection. The Pardoner’s Tale is all about the downfalls of greed, just after his prologue, where he goes through all the ways he tricks the faithful for money. The tales of both nuns are supposed to show their piety and innocence, but Eglantine, the well-to-do nun tells one that is a little more sentimental and zietgeisty (even as the depiction of evil murderous jews is rather not a-la-mode now).

Then there’s the Parson’s Tale. Oh the Parson. He is a religious figure who is depicted in the prologue as a perfect example of his profession. He sticks with his country parish, he ministers to them well and is all ways a good man. He says that he finds telling stories too frivolous and so gives a lecture about the seven deadly sins. It’s long, it’s dull and it’s in prose. It also does seem to be Chaucer’s decided end to the book, with the epilogue being a summary of his achievements as a writer and a fond wish for salvation. It’s almost as if he is laying down his skills as a poet at the end, and putting his faith in his God over his own cleverness. It’s interesting that these pilgrims never reach their destination, they are always travelling to Canterbury.

It’s a fascinating mental world to try and get into. Clearly one where there is a hierarchy, but that hierarchy is being shaken up, the pilgrims both hold their place in the social order, but are equal as pilgrims. Chaucer was clearly well read - and doesn’t he like to share that sometimes - he quotes Seneca and Boethius just as much as he does the Bible. I did love Chanticleer and the chickens using Solomon and Seneca in their debates about the prognostication of dreams - I also found it interesting that Chanticleer has the same name as the Reynard the Fox stories but is not the same character. It’s also fascinating in how Chaucer mixes the Greek, Roman and Christian traditions in peculiar ways, with Greek Gods holding Roman names acting in the way the Christian God would.

There were a few places where I needed to google a word. I was never going to get archdeacon from ‘ecerdekene’ and it took me a minute to realise that ‘Nobogodnosor’ was Nebuchadnezzar. There was also a point when I wondered why a story set in Surrey had sultans and viziers, something that is going to happen if you spell Syria, ‘Surreyé’. I love the word ‘eek’ instead of also, and ‘seely’ for frail. If I ever have a sweetheart, I want to call them my Lemman - it’s a lot better than Samuel Johnson’s term of endearment ‘kicksie-wicksie’.

I’m extremely pleased I chose to read The Canterbury Tales, I had a great time and shall hopefully be visiting Chaucer again at some point.