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. 

Thoughts on Luke Jerram's Helios in Grimsby Minster (With other thoughts on Samuel and Samuel 'Magotty' Johnson)

Luke Jerram’s Helios art piece recently went to Grimsby Minster and I went along to have a look.

It consists of a large inflatable sun, positioned in the crosspiece of the church, just down from the high altar. It glows with light, has moving sunspots and textures projected on it and a soundtrack. The image of the Sun is made from photographs, put together to create a realistic image of how the Sun actually is. The promotional material claims that it will leave the visitor ‘completely speechless’… and it, sort of, did.

I’m a sucker for seeing something I’ve never seen before, especially if it is free and a short stroll from my house. I went through the doors of the minster and did indeed see something I have never seen before, a large, orange beachball suspended in the middle of a dim church. I read the little spiel and sat down and tried to think or feel.. something.

The first thing I thought was, ‘well, it’s something I’ve never seen before - and now I have’. Then I was confronted by my own lack of reaction. I tried to feel something about it. I was struck that the symbol for the project has a sun symbol in the word ‘helios’, and that the sun symbol has a crown of rays, the way we usually depict the Sun. It’s odd, to see the Sun as a ball. 

I went back to the spiel to see what I was missing. There was a painting of a previous Luke Jerram installation in the minster, this was a large inflatable moon. He’s also done one of the Earth and Mars. The dude really likes making inflatable celestial objects and putting them in unusual places.

Now, I love the Sun. It’s my favourite source of heat and light. I live in a country where it doesn’t (usually) scorch everything into dust and is a somewhat rare and welcome occurrence. This month has been a very sunny month and it’s been glorious (except for the fact I have to water my new turf for ages). I couldn’t connect the beachball with the Sun. Either as the metaphorical giver of light and life represented by its crown of rays, or as the literal thing my world revolves around. I just saw a beachball tethered to a ceiling. Perhaps I wasn’t in an imaginative mood, I’d painted a shed green that morning, a job which doesn’t really encourage celestial thoughts. 

So I took a silly photo of myself looking like a saint and went home.

Later on, I thought I’d turn to an old favourite, Johnson’s Dictionary to get his view on the Sun. Here’s what he had to say. 

1. The luminary that makes the day.

Doth beauty keep which never sun can burn,

Nor storms do turn?

Sidney. 

Bid her steal into the pleached bow’r,

Where honeysuckles, ripen’d by the sun,

Forbid the sun to enter.

Shakespeare. 

Though there be but one sun existing in the world, yet the idea of it being abstracted, so that more substances might each agree in it, it is as much a sort as if there were as many suns as there are stars.

Locke. 

By night, by day, from pole to pole they run;

Or from the setting seek the rising sun.

Harte. 

Perhaps the lack of heat was the source of the problem. As ‘the luminary that makes the day’, Helios glows softly in the dim, old church - it doesn’t flood it with light and heat. It’s a realistic depiction of the Sun without the Sun’s raw power. It is a sun which doesn’t burn, which will never ripen a honeysuckle and which will neither rise nor set. I’m not really sure what Locke is saying in his quote, I feel he’s saying that the Sun can be abstracted and imagined, as every star is a sun. All I can say is that Helios abstracts the Sun till it becomes a sun, lowercase, not the impressive, named thing.

Weirdly, I was ultimately brought back to a piece of writing by a different Samuel Johnson, Samuel ‘Maggoty’ Johnson, the dancing master and household fool who wrote the play, Hurlothrumbo.

I’ve looked at the script before on this blog, but to recap, it had one of the most successful runs of the eighteenth century. Maggoty Johnson was an official fool and the published play was sold on the ridiculousness of the thing. That was what made it a success, with accounts of the truly peculiar way it was staged, but I always saw a glimpse of something else in it.

The story is about a king called Soaretherial, who is so carried away by his flights of imagination that he doesn’t notice the revolution stirring in his country and aided by the very earthy Dutch king, Lomperhomock. Hurlothrumbo is the defender of the realm and he’s torn between his duty to the impractical Soaretherial and a bribe to let the Lomperhomock in. There’s also Lord Flame, a character in love with love who often plays a scene on stilts.

How much Maggoty intended a serious reading of his play, I have no idea, but there is an unrestrained pleasure and joy in the writing that, while often reading as goofy, seems to try and reach something nebulous and wonderful through it’s sheer exuberance. The king, Soaretherial is described as this by Hurlothrumbo;

   “His high-born Soul is above the Sublunary World, he reigns, he rides in the Clouds, and keeps his Court in the Horizon; He’s Emperor of the superlative Heights, and lives in Pleasure among the Gods; he plays at Bowls with the Stars, and makes a Foot-ball of the Globe; he makes that to fly far, far out of the reach of Thought.” 

There are times when the play is trying to do exactly that, fly far beyond the reach of thought (and sense). The very plot pits the abstracted celestial characters against the earthy, with both the nation and Hurlothrumbo as the battlegrounds. 

The Sun is a constant presence in the play. It’s a metaphor, but not a very controlled one, sometimes referring to Soaretherial, sometimes to God, sometimes to Lord Flame - but there is one tension about the Sun that is consistent, its life-giving and life destroying properties. Two courtiers are talking about the nature of their king and have the following exchange;

Dar. A poor King is arrived at Court, and Dologodelmo Oratorys high Encomiums upon the mighty Soarethereal, declares he’s like the glorious Sun, extends his Beams to all and every part of the World; and as he rides along the Meridian Course, every feeble Plant beneath him is cherished, and rises up revived.

Urlan. The Simile is not good: The Sun gives Life to the Plants that reside far off, but those that grow under him are burn’d, and scorch’d to Ashes.

The very abstracted, high nature of King Soaretherial means that he’s damaging to those closest to him. At another point of the play, he gathers the power of the Sun to inspire his troops to life, vigour and victory. A place where the Sun has the power of good.

One plot point has Soaretherial’s ally, the Spanish Prince Theorbeo, taken to a dreadful execution facility, ‘the house of burning glass’. There, he is to be stifled in a greenhouse and die, or possibly be physically burnt up by the refracted light. The Sun is potentially a killer, the tension mounts (sort of) until a cloud covers the Sun and Theorbeo is saved. Here, the Sun has great power which is easily mitigated.

In Hurlothrumbo, a character says, “When I gaze upon the Sun, I sink into myself, full of Humility”, while this is questionable, gazing at the Sun is more likely to cause blindness than humility, it touches something about how unimaginable the Sun is and how it takes a leap to even try to imagine it. Samuel ‘Maggoty’ Johnson, for all his faults and idiosyncrasies, really seems to engage with the Sun as something incredibly powerful, both actually and mythically. This was something Helios didn’t do, only reducing it to a beachball tethered to a roof.