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’.

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?