Review: Eighteenth Century Vignettes (Third Series) by Austin Dobson

 Eighteenth Century Vignettes (Third Series) by Austin Dobson is right up my alley. It’s a miscellaneous collection of short essays dealing with various side roads of eighteenth century culture, often from a bookish angle. It’s told in an easy and readable manner and is generally full of charm and interest. As Dobson says in the introduction (in verse), he wishes to take a detailed peek at some obscure detail and to ‘arabesque’ with it. 

The first vignette is about David Garrick’s last performances, which roles he took and reports of the audiences who saw them. They all seem in agreement, that he gave his all in those last performances, reminding his audiences what had made him so celebrated in his profession. Elizabeth Carter was particularly rapturous, and all those who wrote about him remarked on the rapid changes of expressions and micro expressions in his face, and the way he delivered lines as if they’d come to him spontaneously. As Johnson remarked, it was no wonder his face seemed more worn than his years, he’d used it more than most people.

There are a number of vignettes about people’s libraries… Dobson seems to enjoy rooting through old auction papers and accounts to find out exactly what a person had got. I learned about Dr Mead, an extremely successful doctor whose house became the initial home of Great Ormond Street Hospital. He had over ten thousand books and was a rare collector, in that he was a generous lender as well as a hoarder. He was also known as a happy person, with Johnson saying he lived in “the broad sunshine of life more than any man”. I’d not heard of him but was very pleased to meet him. (Though I’ve just looked him up on wikipedia to confirm Johnson’s quote and he may have also been a sex pest, lampooned by Sterne as ‘Dr Kunastrokius’ - so maybe not a completely clean figure).

Another library Dobson explores is Henry Fielding’s. Fielding had almost no novels, not even his own. It’s very possible that a person who wrote one of my favourite novels read fewer in his life than I typically do in a month. What he did have was law books (he was a lawyer after all) and books in Latin. He’s been accused of faking his classicist credentials but his book collection heavily imply that he really did mostly read them.

There’s a vignette on Hogarth’s Peregrination, a little trip the feisty painter took with a group of friends, and of which I have a facsimile of the group’s memorial account. One about Walpole’s press at Strawberry Hill and the kind of thing he printed for himself (including his Hieroglyphic Tales), one about Matthew Arnold, a rather sniffy one about Ramsay - a painter who rivalled Reynolds in his day but is less regarded now. There were a number of intriguing lives, including one of Thomas Gent, an Irish man who became a printer in York but was eventually bankrupted.

My favourite vignette was one where Dobson goes through a publisher’s catalogue and digs up various authors and works that haven’t been remembered. There’s a novel called Polly Honeycombe, a female Quixote figure who is driven mad by circulating libraries and the novels of Fielding and Richardson. Talking of Fielding, someone wrote a sequel to Tom Jones, depicting his married state. Someone also wrote a Sterne offshoot, The Life and Opinions of Miss Sukey Shandy of Bow Street, Gentlewoman. Among these unknown writers are the works of Eliza Haywood, someone who’s getting far more recognition these days.

The copy of the book I read was printed in 1896 and had a similar list of mostly forgotten works from the turn of that century. It’s possible that we are truly missing out on such works as The Lady of the Iron Bracelets and Who Poisoned Hetty Layton?. It is also interesting that in the 130-odd years since my copy was printed, I was the first person to read the book through, as I had to cut some of the pages open. Even a previous owner, George Stevenson, who fixed a lovely ship-themed ex-libris to the front, had not finished it. This is a shame, Eighteenth Century Vignettes (Third Series) is an easy and enjoyable read that poked into many odds and ends of eighteenth century stuff. 

Review: The Sultan’s Istanbul on 5 Kurush a Day by Charles FitzRoy

 The Sultan’s Istanbul on 5 Kurush a Day is part of a series of books which purport to be travel-guides for visiting various cities in various time periods. Ancient Athens and Rome have one, as does Shakespeare’s London. This one deals with Istanbul I 1750.

Istanbul is still a fascinating city, and the Ottoman capital at this time is a place of luxury, grandeur, mystery and strict social control. It’s not the Baghdad of Arabian Nights full of pickpockets, and while there are beggars, they are mostly helped by the various mosques and the principal of zakat.

The first piece of advice FitzRoy gives the traveller is to hire a dragoman, this is more than an interpreter, this is someone who can interpret the laws and customs of Islam and the Ottomans, and a good dragoman seems to be someone who leads their charge around safely, without being thrown into prison. He is also in charge of the bakshish, a mandatory tip/bribe that ensures anything happens.

As a Christian, you will be staying in the Foreigner/Christian area of Pera, which is also known as Beyoglu (something I found interesting because it’s also the name of the most popular Turkish restaurant in the area, a place everyone knows as ‘the Turkish on the corner’ and nobody knows as Beyoglu.) You will probably want to explore the local mosques, perhaps even the grand old cathedral of Byzantium, the ‘Ayasofya’, but you will need to do it carefully and respectfully, these are functional places of worship. 

Even harder to enter is the Topkapi Sarayi, the Imperial Palace of ‘the shadow of God on Earth’, the Great Turk. If you get into the first two courts, probably through some sort of diplomatic contact, there’s no way you will enter the seraglio, the most guarded places in the palace, a place totally haram. There’s a lot in the book about the separation of men and women in Istanbul, the headscarves and cover-alls, how even the most basic houses divide between a men’s area and a women’s area. 

It’s in subjects like this the book falls into some difficulties in point of view. An eighteenth (and nineteenth) century traveller to Istanbul would have been fascinated by this area of things, a secret world filled with erotic charge that was probably quite dull in reality. This book wants to honour the eroticism a reader from the 1750s would have implicitly carried to Istanbul but is clearly concerned about very legitimate modern concerns about orientalism and the ‘sexy foreigner’ notion. 

Elements such as this, an awareness of anti-islamic prejudice and also an awareness that (many) Europeans have more of an idea about Islam than people in the eighteenth century, means that the book never fully grasps who its audience is. While the book is a guide to 1750s Istanbul, it’s never clear whether the audience is supposed to be a European in the 1750s or a European from today who would like to travel to 1750s Istanbul. This makes the book a little muddled, with lots of fascinating information but a shilly-shallying tone.

The book has chapters about the layout, the bazaars, how to shop and explore, where to go - where not to go, Christians are very unwelcome in the holy area of Eyup. There are descriptions of public holidays and celebrations, particularly the yearly departure of the hajj pilgrims and the circumcision of the princes. There’s a fair bit about the social order, the Grand Turk himself, his sultanas and other sexual partners, the always present janissaries, who may overturn their soup tureens and riot at any moment. There’s information about the truly peculiar system of handing on power, where Sultan’s sons used to murder each other till there was one left, but now are locked in a gilded cage until one is selected.

There’s also a lot about how the law and religion are intertwined, and how the people believe that the state exists to enforce Allah’s law. It’s a place where religion colours every moment of every day, with the muezzins ringing out for the prayers. If the book is to be believed, 1750s Istanbul is a very ordered place and very safe from unrest (if the janissaries aren’t on one) but this order is based on strict control.

I’d love to visit Istanbul today, much of the beauty described in the book still stands, but the book does make me wish I could hop in a Tardis and visit it then, provided I had a good dragoman with me (and not the Doctor, he’s terrible at keeping his head down).

Review: Henry Winstanley and the Eddystone Lighthouse by Adam Hart-Davis and Emily Troscianko

 

Do you remember Adam Hart Davis? He was that jolly, teacherish fellow who made documentaries about Victorians, old engineering and Victorian engineering. Here he goes a little further back, to the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to talk about Stuart engineering, and it’s a fascinating story.

All I had previously known about Henry Winstanley was from Daniel Defoe’s The Storm, that he was the builder of a lighthouse who was washed away with it during the great storm of 1703. It turns out that he did a few other things, and those things show him to be the forerunner of a very eighteenth century figure, the man of projects.

Born in Saffron Walden to a steward of Audley End, he became a porter at that royal palace and rose to become a clerk of works, where he made improvements to the building. He also moonlighted, creating additions to his family church (including a lantern and clock). He taught himself engraving and created a series of pictures of Audley End and his house on the road between it and London, a place called ‘The House of Wonders’, where he showcased automata and other engineering marvels. He also took a show to London, his water theatre, which included a trick barrel that could pour multiple different drinks. This water theatre was a going concern right into the eighteenth century. He also sold merchandise at his House of Wonders, including a set of cards he’d designed with educational facts about different countries round the world. (I don’t know if he sold this there, but I was delighted that his uncle was the original creator of Poor Robin’s Almanac, one of the targets of The Grub Street Journal. 

Getting into shipping, he was devastated when a number of his ships were wrecked on the Eddystone, a slightly submerged, jutting group of rocks just outside Plymouth. This vicious obstacle had sunk many ships in the past and a petition to build a lighthouse had long been granted. It was up to Trinity House (a governor if which was Samuel Pepys) to get this lighthouse built but they couldn’t find anyone to do it. Unlike past lighthouses, the Eddystone lighthouse would have to be built onto one of the jutting rocks, 6 hours rowing from the port, with barely any land to tether it. It would take a very self-confident (possible foolish) person to build it. Winstanley was that man.

It took four years to build. In the first year, all Winstanley and his team managed to do was dig twelve holes in the rock and insert metal rods. The problem was, that even after the 6 hours row, there’d be no way of getting onto the rock or offloading equipment if the sea was even slightly choppy.

A further complication was that Britain was at war with France. The workers were guarded by The Terror, until it went to chase some Frenchies, leaving them exposed. The rock was invaded by a French privateer, the workers stripped naked and Winstanley taken prisoner. He was later returned by Louis XIV who said that he was “at war with the English, not humanity”. Work continued.

In 1698 the lamps were lit. There were definitely some frightening times for the family maintaining the light during the first winter but it stayed up. Winstanley went to check on it, beefing the building up, making it stouter and more comfortable. Despite being a rather overdecorated, whimsical-looking building, it performed its task well and not a single ship was lost to the rocks. There was a sea-shanty written about the keeper of the Eddystone Light marrying a mermaid, and Winstanley was celebrated for his ingenuousness and tenacity.

Winstanley would check it every now and then, patching up weathered parts and making little modifications. He decided to go and do that on the eve of the Great Storm of 1703. It really was a big storm, felling trees, blowing down spires and chimney stacks, rolling the lead of church roofs like icing and - in the morning - there was no trace of Winstanley or his lighthouse.

It’s a great story and Hart-Davis (and co-writer Emily Toscianko, who now has a very interesting-looking body of work about philosophy of exercise) tell it well. What is clear, is that there wasn’t enough detail about Winstanley or his lighthouse for a very long book. This is a generously spaced 200 pages and it frequently goes on little detours which don’t necessarily add to the story. A potted history of Captain Morgan’s privateering adventures didn’t have much to do with the story, nor the details of the private lives of Charles II or William of Orange. Even the discussion of lighthouses themselves, going back to the Pharos of Alexandria, was little but filler, if interesting filler. 

Given the sparse nature of the information, the hints of Winstanley as an interesting and engaging character, and the sheer drama of him swept away with his most famous creation, this would make a fun film. I can picture him cackling and taunting the storm as it batters the lighthouse before pulling him away into the murky waters. Someone get on that. 

Film Review: The Fall of Sir Douglas Weatherford

 Having been seven years between The Favourite and Savage House, I wasn’t expecting my next eighteenth-century tinged cinema trip to be the next week. Although The Fall of Sir Douglas Weatherford is not set in the eighteenth-century it does deal with how it is memorialised and if it even needs to be.

Confusingly, the main character is called Kenneth, he’s a descendent of Sir Douglas Weatherby, a polymath and a (fictional) figure in the Scottish enlightenment. At various points of the film, Sir Douglas narrates. He opens the film telling of how his importance in the enlightenment has been forgotten and how even “that pervert, Benjamin Franklin” is remembered better than he is. Only Kenneth really holds the flame, dressing as his hero, giving lectures and working in the shonky village visitors centre dedicated to him. In a lovely detail, the shonky museum has a feature beloved of many shonky museums, the off-the-shelf waxwork in poor reproduction clothing and an audio played over it.

Kenneth’s life is turned upside down when a sub-Game of Thrones production called The White Stag of Emberfell comes to film in the village and surrounding countryside. The programme has dragons, war, jewelled swords and a theme tune that cribs very directly off carol of the bells. At first Kenneth plays along, but he’s dismayed by the village museum being filled with fantasy nonsense, dressing up as the ill-fated King Ergon and taking tourists around the filming locations. He snaps when one of the tourists puts chewing gum on one of Weatherford’s relics and some local hoodlums desecrate his grave, deciding to make a documentary to rival the programme. He decides to enlist the lead actor of the programme to be in his documentary, hoping to piggyback on his fame and get the right filming permits. This desire leads him to darker and darker places as he leaves his own enlightenment notions behind and leans into the morality of sword and sorcery. 

While not as much an out-and-out comedy as I was expecting, the film is a surprisingly moving story of loss and holding on to the past. Kenneth has lost his wife the year before the story starts and is clearly not coping as well as he puts on. While he clearly had a Weatherford obsession while she was alive, her humanising and anchoring presence stopped him from descending into the madness he starts to here. 

However, for my purposes on this blog, I’m more interested in the issues surrounding Weatherford, his memory and the telling of history. Kenneth sees him as a combination of “Adam Smith, David Hume, David Livingstone and Walter Scott”, a figure of enormous importance. He reads some of Weatherford’s fourth treatise, which sounds very Mandeville in its celebration of self-interest as a motive. He extoll’s Weatherford’s philosophical legacy, his record as a benevolent landlord and his breakthroughs in medicine. It’s pretty clear to see that he wasn’t as benevolent a figure as he’s being painted as.

The first hint (except the irritable dismissive way his ghost introduces the story) are the boulders dotted around the landscape. Weatherford is often depicted sitting on one of these boulders and meditating, they seem like the ideal image of a natural philosopher but these rocks have brass plaques on them explaining how Weatherford had them moved to different locations, how many people it took to move them and how many days. His seemingly natural seats were the result of the backbreaking work of anonymous people. His epitaph also recalls him as an ‘absent father’.

His shonky mannequin recalls how he loved nature, as can be seen by how many animals he’s shot and stuffed - a claim that can be laid at Thomas Bewick and his birds. There’s a part where Kenneth denies the rumours that Weatherford created his landscape Deserted Village style, by turfing out the inhabitants and burning it down. Kenneth also tells of the story about how Weatherford’s eloquence quelled a strike and brought the strikers back to work. The pub used to be Weatherford’s lab, and Kenneth admits that the experiment to transplant the brain of a lunatic inmate and a goat were not successful. After admitting this, he sees a ghostly apparition of the horrific experiment, as well as the village being burnt down to clear it and redcoats shooting at the strikers. 

It’s clear that Kenneth knows the hidden side of the history he’s been telling, even if he’s hidden it from himself. He says at one point that people such as Weatherford created modern society and that “you might not like it, but you should know where it came from”. Interestingly, Kenneth seems to be one of the people who doesn’t like the modern world, even as he celebrates the people who made it - there’s also the fact that Weatherford seems to have not nearly been as important to it as all that, a petty laird playing science with his tenants.

The resolution to this part of the plot (though not the film entire) is when Kenneth sees the documentary. He’s enlisted the help of an ornithologically obsessed young man to film and edit it for him. There’s a running joke about how he keeps getting distracted by birds, especially geese. His edit is all about the geese, who were introduced as a breeding pair by Weatherford and have become a unique feature of the local ecosystem. As such, these living, breathing, breeding creatures are the real legacy when the dead words and dodgy deeds are forgotten. It feels a satisfying conclusion to this aspect of the film, even as Kenneth’s redemption seems a little less secure.

One of the jokes in the beginning is about how few people come to celebrate Douglas Weatherford, Kenneth’s reading of the fourth treatise only has nine people in it, that is three more than were sitting in the cinema with me. It’s a good film and worth a watch, and I’d probably recommend it over last week’s Savage House. Write down the title though, it is peculiarly unmemorable. 

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’.