Review: Strange Tales of a Chinese Studio by Pu Songling

 Pu Songling’s stories were my favourite in 100 Chinese Myths and Fantasies so I picked up Penguin’s edition which contains 104 of them as well as Pu’s preface with plenty of (useful!) notes to them all.

Pu Songling wrote his Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio throughout his life in the late 17th and early 18th century as an outlet for his frustrations in achieving the second degree in the incredibly strict Chinese bureaucracy. He took stories from friends, from letters, from local myth and his own imagination but they weren’t published until 1766. It’s a fascinating collection which apparently moves between two genres, chaunqui - a sort of ‘strange-but-true’ account of something unusual, be it supernatural or an oddity of nature or human behaviour; and zhiguai, a more shaped ‘fairytale-ish’ story. It means that this collection, despite the length and repetition of some situations (ghosts, fox spirits, magical taoist priests) it remains lively and varied. 

The experience, for this modern reader, is like scrolling through a rabbit hole of ‘you wouldn’t believe this’ type articles but you do it by turning pages, so it’s clearly much better for you. This experience bridges the gap between time, distance and culture, making the whole book an engaging read. Cultural oddities, like footbinding, almost fade into obscurity - before leaping back when you realise that all the most attractive women in the book have a ‘hobbling’ or ‘shuffling’ gait and that a tiny slipper is regarded as the most erotic object in the world.

It’s very much the sexual politics of an unmarried man reading literature in its study - women are often this peculiar and intoxicating figures, beautiful, human-like and unknown. It’s no surprise they often end up being ghosts or fox-spirits. There’s also a pervading insecurity when it comes to performing manhood which comes out in stories like ‘The Silkworm’, where a man’s penis is the same size of a silkworm chrysalis, which scuppers all his life chances. There’s also the fox spirit with a massive penis, or the man who hit his with a hammer to show it’s strength (and the other man who put a wheel on his and wheeled it around to show it off).

Although a structured study of these stories could tell a reader an awful lot about the society Pu Songling was part of, the chief experience of reading it is one of novelty and surprise. Even the titles are catching, I would find myself ready to go to bed and see the next story has the title ‘Duck Trouble’ and think, one more.. then see the next is called ‘Big Sneeze’ and decide another little one can’t hurt. (Incidentally, ‘Duck Trouble’ is about a man who is cursed to grow eiderdown until he forces someone to insult him and ‘Big Sneeze’ is about someone who sneezes out monsters.)

There’s a story about a man blinded by mud, whose pupils go on little jaunts out of his nose before deciding to settle in one eye, leaving the man two-pupiled like Liu Chung. There’s a story about a man who marries a bee, a woman having an affair with her dog, a man literally laughing his head off and another who is decapitated with his severed head remarking on the sharpness of the sword. I’m not sure how this edition was put together, but there’s one very sweet story about snakes being friends and another about a nasty snake who eats people. Robert Burton would have had a field day with this book.

Mixed in with all this is an eye-witness account of an earthquake, which Pu Songling experienced as a child and the first recorded description of the Indian rope trick. This trick is performed by a Daoist monk, who often appear as trickster beings, gifted with special powers which they mainly use to troll those around them. A number of stories contain homunculi but there are very few giants. I was surprised how few religious elements there were, there’s this unusual mix of Buddhist, Daoist and Confucian elements in the book, a few river gods and a whole panoply of ghosts and spirits but Buddhas don’t pop up like they do in Journey to the West or King Gesar. 

I found ghosts the most interesting. Some of them are malevolent, like the old ghost lady who spat water at people and killed them but most are more pensive and looking for love. Apparently sex with a ghost is incredible but it can kill - because the ghost takes the life force. Many of the ghost genuinely fall in love with mortals but fear the destructive powers of their copulating. High level fox spirits can also do this, but tend to do it for fun, being more mischievous. Yet there were a number of noble fox spirits and cultured ones as well. My favourite story ‘Lotus Fragrance’ ended with a fox, a ghost and a mortal in a very happy thrupple.

I very much enjoyed Strange Tales From a Chinese Studio as a book which was consistently entertaining and surprising. Somehow it managed to not fall into tale fatigue, helped in part by the concision of the tales themselves. I’m not sure who I’d recommend the book to exactly, but I would recommend it.

 

Review: Tales of Hoffman

 For the second in my short story summer, I decided to read a collection of stories written by someone born in the eighteenth century, who published until a death from syphilis in 1822. ETA Hoffman was a German writer, probably best known for a story which was turned into The Nutcracker. He was also a musician who worked around operas and the stories in this collection have an operatic bigness, but a strangeness all his own.

The collections kicks off with a banger, ‘Mademoiselle de Scudery’, which is about the historic author of Amadis the Gaul, who is embroiled in a murder mystery where she must determine a man’s guilt and plumb the depths of madness - just add The Doctor and some aliens and it’d fit Doctor Who perfectly. Scudery is not much of a detective, she actually makes things worse in her attempts to help. The beginning is wonderfully striking, a desperate man banging on the door but being turned away because his desperation makes him terrifying. As a reader, I knew a huge mistake was happening but could do nothing to change it. The city of Paris has been recovering from a well-connected poison gang and is now reeling from a gang of people murdering young men bringing jewellery to their lovers. 

The solution to the mystery is really interesting. Scudery had been introduced to Rene Cardillac, an eccentric goldsmith who has trouble letting go of his magnificent creations. It’s revealed that Cardillac is the lone killer. His passion for gold and jewels so strong that he can’t let anyone else have them, so kills his customers and steals back the goods. It’s an explanation that is both extreme in its psychological darkness and vaguely plausible. The collection is started with one of the strongest stories.

The next, ‘The Sandman’ is about a man who has childhood nightmares of a figure that comes to his house when he is asleep and makes his parents upset and nervous. He calls this figure the sandman and, one day, peeps in to see him. It’s then described that the Sandman tears of his limbs and boils out his eyeballs - but this can’t be true in the more grounded reality of the book. Certainly his level-headed fiancee, Clara, doesn’t believe it.

Then the plot moves the man to a city where he falls in love with a strange woman, beautiful and precise, short of words but oddly stiff. It turns out she is an automaton, essentially a clockwork robot, and it’s connected to the Sandman somehow. It’s a weird, brooding story, full of odd mentions of eyes. It would seem the story as a connected series of events only lives in the protagonist’s head, that he’s strung together odd moments of his life and created a whole nightmarish concoction.

‘The Entail’ started off as a full on gothic, with more flowery writing than the other stories. A castle stands in a wasteland near the sea, surrounded by ‘storm-proclaiming seagulls’ where the owner only visits once a year. It’s a place of dark secrets and ghostly re-enactments of them. The cause of the whole problem is an entail, a legal contract about who the castle goes to, and the story gets snarled up by the ins and outs of it, leaving it weaker than it started.

‘Doge and Dogeressa’ is a story I knew a little about. I’ve been to the Doge’s Palace and seen where Martin Faliero’s portrait has been covered up. Hoffman weaves this story with hints of witchcraft and almost fairytale like elements, where a penniless rower with a mysterious past is weaved into it. It’s a little less intense than the best stories in the collection but entertaining. 

‘Mines of Falun’ is a sort of reverse Ancient Mariner, with hallucinatory descriptions of a mine being like the sea, haunted by the Queen of the underground and piling on the dread. It’s based on the true story of finding a man buried by a mine collapse 50 years ago and his body being preserved by the airlessness but Hoffman adds levels of folklore and madness all his own.

‘Arthurhof’ and ‘The Choosing of a Bride’ were probably the weakest stories in the collection. The first doesn’t have the intensity of the others and without ‘Doge and Dogeressa’s’ interesting history. I found ‘The Choosing of a Bride’ to be a random collection of events with very little causation. It was a shame it was the last story in the book because it left me feeling lukewarm about the collection, a feeling that faded as I remembered all the brilliant stories.

My favourite story is ‘Councillor Krespel’. It’s not the most satisfyingly constructed of them, it’s essentially half build-up and then half explanation, but something about it gripped me. I loved Krespe; with his sing-song voice, strangely constructed house (apparently something the real Krespel did) and habit of taking violins apart. There was also something brilliant about the secret at the heart of the book not being a villainous one, but one drawn from love and care (if a little smothering). I found it so fascinating that his daughter’s genetic condition leaves her with the most beautiful voice in the world, but also leads to her death if she sings - and that he dissected the violins to find similar flaws. The images and ideas really linger.

I very much enjoyed this collection of stories, most of them being perfect drops of story that conveyed the full satisfaction of a novel. It wasn’t like some short story collections which seem like auditions for future novels, or ones where they seemed to be just moments, but were fully constructed and decent stories. I don’t know much about Hoffman, but if the stories are anything to go by, he must have been an interesting person, these stories are so full of madness, romance and feelings too big to contain. Strange his other works are about a nutcracker and a tomcat. 

Review: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories by Washington Irving

 I think it’s a shame the title of this book was changed from The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent to The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories. The old title is more arresting, it suggests Tristram Shandy It’s also a far better descriptor of the text. This isn’t a short story collection, it’s a scrapbook of all sorts, from travel writing to ethnography, bits of history, sentimental vignettes and a few short stories.

I’d have liked more character work on Geoffrey himself, made him a more interesting person like Irving’s previous narrator, Knickerbocker. The introduction said that Washington Irving softened his style for this book, cutting out some of the sarcasm and silliness, adding in little Tristram Shandy-esque moments of sentimentality and sentiment. I’d have liked something a bit spikier, more of a George Mikes take on visiting Britain in the 1810s but I suppose the flattery worked, this book made Irving’s career on both sides of the pond.

I read this to kick off my ‘short story summer’ but it’s clearly an autumn/winter book. Not only is there the staple of Halloweeny things, the headless horseman, and a set of depictions of an English country Christmas that influenced Dickens’s portrayal of the holiday, it’s just generally an autumnal/wintery book. There’s a marked antiquarianism in the book, from wandering London side streets to find the Charterhouse, an institution out of time; or vainly looking for The Boar’s Head Tavern, where Falstaff and co drank. Irving’s choices of poets to quote (especially at the headings of his chapters) are full of rather creaky names like Robert Herrick. I don’t know if there was a big taste for seventeenth century poets in America at the time but there is always a backwards looking element in the book. 

The chapters on Christmas are all about the lost traditions. He stays in the country with Bracebridge a man who has “that most enviable of all blessings to an Englishman, an opportunity of indulging the bent of his own humour without molestation.” All his ways are bent towards the past, keeping the idea of the wassail, of Waites playing music in the big hall, of old games and manorial hospitality. They are warm, comforting chapters, full of Christmas cheer - if just because the literary depiction of Christmas cheer stems from these chapters.

Irving’s backward gaze is in evidence in his pieces of Shakespeare. In one he looks for Falstaff’s tavern, very much fails to find it but has a nice time talking with a bunch of Cockneys who play up for him as a tourist. In another he goes to Stratford and tries to commune with the Bard in his birth and burial places, again talking to some colourful locals. They are pleasant pieces of travel writing, following the pattern of a cosy failed quest that many books have emulated since.

One of the most striking pieces is, again, antiquary, when Irving/Crayon find themselves in an unused library in Westminster Abbey. This is a place where books go to die and he hears them croakily argue for their relevance. In another reverie, he goes to the British Library where he sees authors cut up old books to patch or ornament their clothes - something he does with his frequent quotations of poetry. Washington Irving does a good line in daydreams.

He also does a good line in melancholy. The piece where he goes into the church of Westminster Abbey and reflects on the inevitability of death, decay and irrelevance is very sobering. As is the description of a sunk ship he saw on his journey over to Britain, where a mast is covered with the handkerchiefs sailors tied to it to try and cling on. Lots of handkerchiefs, no sailors.

A lot of the sentimental stuff is pretty standard. I’ve read quite a number of books from the age of sensibility and beyond, and I find it works if overloaded with ridiculous coincidences (like the best parts of the Lee sisters’s The Canterbury Tales), contrasted with knockabout humour (like Sterne’s Sentimental Journey and Shandy) or cut with gothic (like Ann Radcliffe). There’s not enough vivacity to the rest of the book to set the sentimental stuff in the right light. The most successful of these pieces is probably ‘rural funerals’ which mixes the sentimental with his antiquarian/folklorist tendencies, collecting fading funerary traditions.

The two most famous entries in the sketchbook are Rip Van Winkle and Sleepy Hollow. They are both more full-bodied than many of the others, essentially shaggy dog jokes or Twain-esque tall tales. Rip Van Winkle tells the story of a man who falls asleep for twenty years, ostensibly to hide from his wife. Sleepy Hollow is about a truly peculiar schoolmaster who is getting a little too close to an eligible bachelorette and is spooked out of town by pranksters playing on his superstitious nature. While they both have a certain rambunctiousness that is missing in much the rest of the book, they are also very backwards looking, playing with the Dutch past of New York State and the legends and stories connected with them. I found it interesting that British productions from this same period like Life in London were all about the now, The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent is always looking to the past. 

While I found him very lively in his biography of Goldsmith, here he is very much a watercolour writer, he creates a delicate wash and sketches in enough details to make out the picture. They are all very pleasant pictures but it’s not a truly eye-popping sketchbook and I found myself a little disappointed. 

Review: Grub Street: The Origins of the British Press by Ruth Herman

 Grub Street: The Origins of the British Press is a book more concerned with its subtitle than title. The notion of Grub Street, the name given to the ranks of poor writers who formed the first generation of people writing for money, is only mentioned in the introduction. The rest of the book is far more interested in how newsgatherers and newspapers developed during the factionalism running up to the English Civil War and beyond. It’s far more about these broader patterns and the struggle between speech and censorship than it is about that peculiar explosion of invention in the streets of London in the early eighteenth century.

The first 100 pages of this 250 page book are about how news was gathered and disseminated in the years prior to the eighteenth century. Rich people in the country could sign up to a newsletter, a service providing a private, handwritten letter containing news and views. There were attempts to create a more public facing service, with a number of papers calling themselves Merculius, giving information pro or anti King Charles, depending on their political leanings. Herman writes a lot about how governments censored the proto-press, whether that was through the Star Chamber, or through various licensing bodies. She shows how these bodies could be extremely heavy handed, putting people in pillories, branding them or slitting ears and noses, but these acts of aggression ultimately didn’t work, people wanted news. 

 The era after James II was deposed were ones of great political factions that cohered into two parties over the course of the century, even if those parties were frequently split amongst themselves. This, of course, led to great outpourings of print, especially on hot-button topics like the sermon of Sacheverell. These were fought in election, in pamphlet and in ballad, with a population, mostly unenfranchised, who were nonetheless desperately interested in news. It was a peculiarity of the British people that many visitors noticed, that the people were news junkies and all had opinions on topics that people of their class would not in other places.

There’s a section about women’s periodicals, many of them written by men. It’s interesting that she cites The Female Tatler as written by a man, where my copy confidently attributes some of its run to Delarivier Manley, a woman that Herman writes a lot about as one of the political players along with Swift and Defoe. It’s interesting that she deals mainly with these writers, rather than the lesser known or less comfortable writers. She talks about John Dunton’s Athenaeum as being one of the sources of notes and queries content without mentioning that the whole learned committee who answered the questions was just John Dunton in various imaginary wigs.

One of the best chapters was about advertising. She remarks how much of the advertising space was dedicated to very dubious medicines, obviously showing how uncertain people were about their health - it reminds me of when I went to America and discovered their television is 20% pill adverts. As well as medicine, there were adverts for clothes, theatre and new books. (I was hoping there’d be a discussion of ‘Orator’ Henley’s Hype Doctor adverts which seem to pioneer a kind of confusion/ragebait/clickbait, but he wasn’t mentioned).

The very best chapter was about local news outlets. She traces how early local papers, like the Stamford Mercury, simply stole things from the London newspapers and then had a local advertising section. Even as these papers were more established, they didn’t particularly deal much with the local area, unless it was election time, then there were often two or more newspapers backing different candidates. It reminded me of fighting newspapers in the Eatenswill elections in Pickwick Papers. The Ludlow Postman seemed like a great rag though, pity it only lasted a year.

There’s a chapter about the South Sea Bubble, how it was initially boosted by the papers before being lambasted by them. They fed the flames of speculation and then tried to feed the flames of revenge. Certainly, a number of Grub Street figures did poorly in the speculation, I know Defoe did, but that’s not mentioned much.

This book is a veery good history of the combative history of the early British press, of how they fought for their right to opinion and then blasted that opinion in every direction. It’s an interesting way of looking at the papers we have now, who all have their own political slant but many are too cowed to express it. It’s a great book about the origins of Fleet Street, I’m not so convinced in it as a book about Grub Street. 

Grub Street was about more than news, it was also the nascent novel, the literary review, the dictionary, the pop-history, pop-economics, pop-theology. It was the alive, slightly slimy soup that fostered (and festered) talents like Johnson and nutters like Henley. It brought forth all kinds of stuff, cookbooks, school stories, self-help and improvement. With this book focusing on news and newspapers it seems to miss some of the sheer multitude of stuff that Grub Street was. It’s also irritatingly general at times, informing us of ‘harsh punishments’ or ‘cruel invective’ without giving us much of it, that’s why the best chapters were the advertisement and local news ones, they gave us glimpses of that genuine Grub Street voice. 

The most Grub Street-y sounding part of the book comes in the introduction, where a man called talks about setting himself up as a writer for hire with a sign on his door reading, ‘Here Liveth Humphry Scribblewit, Who writeth all sorts of Pamphlets, Letters of Controversies, Answers and Replies, Poems, Satires, Libels, Lampoons, Songs, Ballads, Essays, Travels, Voyages, Novels and Romances and reasonable rated: Enquire Within’. Now that’s the sheer range of Grub Street. Unfortunately she simply describes it as a 1720s work and there are no footnotes so I had to google it and it comes from A Letter from a Student in Grub-Street, to a Reverend High-Priest and Head of a College in Oxford by Nicholas Amhurst.

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.