Tag: Victorian

The Trumpet-Major by Thomas Hardy

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I love Thomas Hardy so was pleased when The Trumpet-Major was chosen for me in the recent Classics Club Spin. The deadline for finishing our Spin books was 3rd March, but I’m late as usual!

First published in 1880, The Trumpet-Major is set in Hardy’s fictional Wessex during the Napoleonic Wars (making it his only historical novel). Beginning in 1804, it follows the story of Anne Garland and her three suitors: miller’s son John Loveday, who is the Trumpet Major of the title; his brother Bob, a sailor whom Anne has secretly loved since she was a young girl; and Festus Derriman, nephew of the local squire. Anne’s mother, who marries Miller Loveday, would prefer Anne to pick Festus, but it quickly becomes obvious to the reader that he is spiteful and cowardly and that Anne’s choice will be between Bob and John.

With John being a soldier and Bob a sailor in the merchant navy, they each have to spend long periods of time away from home, allowing Anne to grow closer to the other in his absence. It’s difficult to know which, if either, she will eventually accept; John is a typical loyal, steadfast Hardy hero, but Bob, although more immature and less trustworthy, is clearly the one she has lost her heart to. There are lots of twists and turns along the way as the situation becomes complicated by misunderstandings, the arrival of another woman, and the scheming of Festus Derriman. There’s a subplot involving Squire Derriman – known as Uncle Benjy – who is looking for a place to hide his will, but otherwise the novel never really loses its focus on Anne and the three young men, which makes the story easy to follow and, for a Victorian novel, relatively short and quick to read.

The action all takes place in and around Budmouth, a fictional town based on Weymouth on the Dorset coast. This is not a military novel, despite the title and the occupations of two of the main characters, but it plays out against a backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars and the people of Budmouth live in fear of a French invasion at any minute. It’s quite a light story, in comparison with Hardy’s more famous tragedies like Jude the Obscure and Tess of the D’Urbervilles, but the constant threat of war gives it a more serious tone than it would otherwise have had, and there are some dramatic episodes such as a false alarm which causes Anne’s village to begin evacuating in panic and the arrival of a naval press gang.

The Trumpet-Major has a happier ending than many of Hardy’s other books, but I didn’t personally find it very satisfying and would have preferred it to end in a different way. Still, I enjoyed this book and although I would definitely describe it as one of his lesser novels, I can honestly say that I haven’t yet read anything by Hardy that I didn’t like! I only have two of his novels left to read and they are probably his most obscure ones – The Well-Beloved and The Hand of Ethelberta – so I’ll be curious to find out what I think of those two.

This is book 43/50 read from my second Classics Club list.

Book 11/50 for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2024

Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens

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Nicholas Nickleby was the book chosen for me to read in the Classics Club Spin back in October 2023. It has taken me until now to finish it, partly because it’s a book with over 800 pages and also because I started to find it a bit tedious halfway through and kept putting it aside to read something else. I’m sorry to have to say that, as I know a lot of people consider it a favourite and I really did want to love it, but I just couldn’t. However, I did still find a lot to like, so I certainly don’t feel that I wasted my time reading it!

Originally published as a serial from 1838 to 1839, this is one of Dickens’ earliest novels and is very episodic, lacking any real overarching plot, (which I think is probably one of the reasons I had problems staying engaged with it – and the reason I have so far been avoiding The Pickwick Papers!). Therefore it’s difficult to give a summary, but I think all you really need to know is that at the beginning of the book Nicholas Nickleby’s father dies, leaving Nicholas, his mother and his sister Kate penniless and dependent on Uncle Ralph for support. Ralph is a rich but cold, uncaring man who has little compassion for his late brother’s wife and children. He finds Nicholas a low-paid position as an assistant at Dotheboys Hall, a grim and unpleasant school in Yorkshire, while Kate remains under his own ‘protection’ in London…

The most compelling part of the novel, I thought, was the section set at Dotheboys Hall, where Nicholas finds himself working for the evil Wackford Squeers, who claims to be a ‘schoolmaster’, although it quickly becomes obvious that the establishment he is running is not so much a school as a home for unwanted, neglected boys and that Squeers treats them harshly, starving and beating them. Dickens always includes a lot of social commentary in his novels and here he is clearly drawing attention to the terrible conditions found in 19th century boarding schools; apparently he personally visited Yorkshire in early 1838 to do some background research. It’s interesting to compare his portrayal of Dotheboys to Charlotte Brontë’s Lowood School in Jane Eyre. I was sorry that this only formed a relatively small portion of the novel, although it’s important not only for the social history, but also because it introduces Smike, a frail, badly abused young man whom Nicholas rescues from the school and who becomes his loyal friend and the heart of the most emotional scenes in the book.

I also enjoyed the episode where Nicholas, having fled Yorkshire, travels to Portsmouth and joins an acting troupe, run by the actor-manager Vincent Crummles. A lot of time is devoted to introducing the other members of the company – including Crummles’ daughter, the ‘Infant Phenomenon’, who has been acting in child roles for so long she can’t possibly still be an infant! – and although none of this really has much relevance to the rest of the book, I always like theatrical settings so I found it entertaining. Unfortunately, there were other subplots and characters that didn’t interest me at all, such as the Kenwigs family, Mr Lillyvick and Miss Petowker, and the implausibly saintly Cheeryble brothers. This is a book where the good characters are very good and the bad ones are very bad – although Uncle Ralph at least does have some nuance. I liked both Kate and Nicholas (who definitely fall into the ‘good’ category) and while Dickens isn’t really known for writing strong female characters, Kate is more sensible than some of his others.

This hasn’t become a favourite Dickens, then, but I’m still pleased to have read it! Now I can move on to my next Classics Club Spin book, The Trumpet-Major by Thomas Hardy.

This is book 42/50 read from my second Classics Club list.

Once a Monster by Robert Dinsdale

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Novels inspired by Greek mythology seem to have become very popular in recent years, but Robert Dinsdale’s new book, Once a Monster, is something slightly different. More reimagining than retelling, it’s set in Victorian London and owes as much to Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist as it does to Greek myth.

Ten-year-old Nell Hart is a mudlark, one of a small group of children, orphaned or otherwise neglected and vulnerable, who spend their days searching through the mud of the River Thames for ‘treasures’ – pieces of coal or iron – to give to their master, Benjamin Murdstone. It’s a difficult life for a child, but Nell has a pair of satin ballet slippers hidden inside her straw mattress, a gift left to her by her seamstress mother, and she is sustained by dreams of one day becoming a ballerina.

One morning, Nell is the first down to the river to begin another day of mudlarking and so she is the first to discover a body washed up on the shore. At first she’s unmoved by the sight – it’s not the first dead body she’s seen – but on closer inspection she discovers that this is the body of no ordinary man. Unusually tall, with enormous hands and feet, there are strange growths on each side of the head, almost like the beginnings of horns. The other mudlarks have arrived and are urging Nell to steal the man’s boots, when she makes another shocking discovery – he is still alive.

His name is Minos and as he returns to consciousness, memories slowly begin to surface of a time long ago and another life as a Minotaur in a labyrinth. But is Minos really the Minotaur of Greek myth or is he just a man after all? What will Murdstone do when he sees what Nell has found for him – and will Nell ever break free of her mudlark existence and learn to dance?

This is the first book I’ve read by Robert Dinsdale so I didn’t know what to expect, but I found it beautifully written and atmospheric. As I’ve mentioned, there’s a strong Dickens influence, from the descriptions of the poorer parts of Victorian London to the portrayal of Mr Murdstone, who is obviously inspired by Fagin, the leader of the gang of pickpockets in Oliver Twist. As the villain of the novel, he’s a very human monster and it quickly becomes clear that a central theme of the story is that every one of us can have a monster inside us as well as a hero. Dinsdale uses the myth of the Minotaur to explore and develop this theory:

“The mythographers were a cowardly lot. Just storytellers, trying to make sense of a world too complex to be distilled in mere words…But when it came to chronicling these stories for the ages, the Minotaur presented them with the thorniest of problems. To look him in the eye and see him for anything other than a base beast must have been like peering into a looking glass. They would have had to acknowledge the monstrosity in all of us.”

I found the relationship between Nell and Minos slightly disturbing; it wasn’t really a romantic relationship but it felt like more than just a platonic friendship or a father/daughter relationship and I kept forgetting that while Minos was an adult (possibly many hundreds of years old), Nell was only a ten-year-old child. The interactions and conversations between the two of them felt more what I would have expected if Nell had been a teenager or young woman rather than a little girl. Apart from that, I did think both characters were interesting; I enjoyed following Nell as she took her first steps towards becoming a ballerina and although I found Minos harder to connect with, I was intrigued by his story and by his memories of his time as the Minotaur.

My main problem with this book was the length; there were too many long and repetitive sections where the pace slowed and nothing really happened to advance the plot. I read the ebook but the print version has over 500 pages and I think that could easily have been cut down to 400 without losing anything important. Still, I did find this an interesting novel overall and would consider trying one of Robert Dinsdale’s earlier books.

Thanks to Pan Macmillan for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

This is book 43/50 for the 2023 Historical Fiction Reading Challenge.

The New Magdalen by Wilkie Collins

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Wilkie Collins is one of my favourite Victorian authors, but I feel that I haven’t featured him very often on my blog – probably because I read so many of his books pre-blog, including all of his most famous ones (and I don’t re-read very often these days). Even so, there are still some that I haven’t read yet and I was intrigued when I noticed a few years ago that The New Magdalen was being reprinted by Persephone Books, as they’re a publisher associated more with women authors (although there are a small number of Persephones by male authors as well). It has taken me a while to get round to reading it, so I decided to put it on my 20 Books of Summer list to make sure it didn’t linger on my TBR any longer.

First published in 1873, the novel opens during the Franco-Prussian War in a small cottage in France where Mercy Merrick is working as a Red Cross nurse. As the Germany army draws closer, Mercy has taken shelter in the cottage to nurse some wounded French soldiers and has been joined by another young woman, Grace Roseberry. Grace is on her way to England following the death of her father in Rome; she has spent most of her life in Canada and doesn’t know anybody in England, but she is carrying a letter of introduction from her father to a Lady Janet Roy, a wealthy woman whom she hopes will employ her as a lady’s companion. Grace shares this information with Mercy, who in turn tells Grace her own story – that she is a ‘fallen woman’ who has had a difficult past, eventually ending up in a women’s refuge before volunteering as a nurse.

As the two women talk, the cottage suddenly comes under fire from the advancing army and receives a direct hit from a shell. Grace is badly wounded and is declared dead by a French surgeon. Finding herself alone with Grace’s lifeless body, it occurs to Mercy that she could take Grace’s papers, dress herself in Grace’s clothes and present herself to Lady Janet Roy under the name Grace Roseberry. Desperate to escape from her own troubled past and start a new life, Mercy is unable to resist the temptation and goes through with the plan. It proves to be a huge success and soon Mercy is living as Lady Janet’s adopted daughter and even receives a marriage proposal. Before the marriage can take place, however, Mercy makes a shocking discovery – it seems that the real Grace Roseberry may still be alive and looking for revenge!

Wilkie Collins was known for his sensation novels, a genre that takes elements of Gothic melodrama and places them in an ordinary, often domestic setting. His books typically feature family secrets, disputed inheritances, intercepted letters, stolen jewels, mistaken identities and amazing coincidences. The New Magdalen is less sensational than some of his others, but still falls firmly into the genre so you can expect a very entertaining novel. I’ve always found Collins’ writing to be the most readable of all the Victorians and that, in addition to this being a relatively short book for a 19th century classic, makes it a gripping and surprisingly quick read.

I can see why Persephone chose to add this book to their collection as Collins does write such strong and sympathetic female characters and with Mercy’s story he highlights some of the injustices women faced in Victorian society (and in some ways still do today). I think my favourite Collins novels will always be The Woman in White and Armadale, but this is still a great book and would probably be a good introduction to his work if you didn’t want to commit to a longer one.

This is book 2/20 of my 20 Books of Summer 2023 and book 40/50 from my second Classics Club list.

A Laodicean by Thomas Hardy

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First published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1880-81, A Laodicean; or, The Castle of the De Stancys: A Story of To-Day is one of Thomas Hardy’s lesser known novels and one that I very much enjoyed.

Architect George Somerset is exploring the countryside near the village of Sleeping-Green one evening when he stumbles upon a castle. He learns that this is Stancy Castle, the ancestral home of the De Stancy family which has recently been purchased by the wealthy railway contractor, John Power. Mr Power has since died, leaving the castle to his daughter, Paula, who is planning to carry out extensive renovations on the ancient building. When Paula is introduced to Somerset she considers commissioning him to do the work on the castle, but before the restoration even begins Somerset finds himself falling in love with her.

It seems that Somerset has a rival for Paula’s love, however – Captain De Stancy, an impoverished descendant of the aristocratic family who once owned the castle. The Captain’s son, William Dare, has seen a chance to get his hands on some of the Power fortune and is determined that his father must marry Paula, no matter what.

Paula herself is the Laodicean of the title, described by the local minister as ‘lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot’, like the people of the church of Laodicea in the Bible. Throughout the novel she vacillates between Somerset and De Stancy, attracted to both of them in different ways and unwilling to fully commit to one or the other. This reflects the way she feels about society in general. As an industrialist’s daughter who has installed a telegraph wire and a new clock at Stancy Castle, Paula represents science and progress but at the same time she likes the idea of marrying into an aristocratic family and becoming a De Stancy. The clash between tradition and a new way of life is one of the recurring themes that comes up again and again in Hardy’s novels.

Although Paula irritated me with her inability to make up her mind and give either man a definite answer, I found Somerset’s infatuation with her quite annoying as well – I wanted him to notice Paula’s friend, Charlotte, who I think would have been a much better choice for him! Irritating characters aside, I found the story very entertaining, mainly because of the machinations of William Dare, who will stop at nothing to ensure Paula chooses his father. He uses forged telegrams, fake photographs and all sorts of other devious tricks to try to get what he wants and this makes the book more of a pageturner than I’d expected at first.

A Laodicean doesn’t really have the pastoral feel of most of Hardy’s other novels; in fact, most of the second half is set in Europe where the various sets of characters wander around the casinos of Monte Carlo, the spas of Baden and the busy streets and squares of Strasbourg. Things do become a bit far-fetched in this section, with lots of coincidental meetings, but I enjoyed reading something different from Hardy after so many books set in his Wessex countryside.

Although this hasn’t become one of my favourite Hardy novels, it’s still a very good one. I think I only have three more of them to read, as well as some of his short story collections. Have you read this one? What did you think?

This is book 36/50 from my second Classics Club list.

Diary of a Pilgrimage by Jerome K. Jerome

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I ought, of course, to sit down in front of this diary at eleven o’clock at night, and write down all that has occurred to me during the day. But at eleven o’clock at night, I am in the middle of a long railway journey, or have just got up, or am just going to bed for a couple of hours. We go to bed at odd moments, when we happen to come across a bed, and have a few minutes to spare. We have been to bed this afternoon, and are now having another breakfast; and I am not quite sure whether it is yesterday or to-morrow, or what day it is.

Jerome K. Jerome’s hilarious Three Men in a Boat is one of my favourite novels from the late Victorian period. I have since tried several of his other books – Three Men on the Bummel, The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow and now this one, Diary of a Pilgrimage – hoping to find another one as good, and although I’ve found them slightly disappointing in comparison, they are still amusing and entertaining. His books also tend to be much shorter than the average Victorian classic and are perfect if you need something light and uplifting between longer, more challenging reads.

Diary of a Pilgrimage, first published in 1891, is very similar to the Three Men books in structure and style. Our narrator, J, is off on his travels again, this time on a ‘pilgrimage’ to Germany to see the famous Passion Play at Oberammergau, a performance which has been regularly taking place there since the 17th century. Accompanied by his friend, known only as B, J travels first from London to Dover, then across the English Channel to Ostend and on to their destination by train. Along the way they stay in several hotels, visit some places of interest including Cologne Cathedral and, of course, find themselves in plenty of ridiculous and embarrassing situations.

Only a short section of the book is devoted to the Passion Play itself because, as J tells us, it has already been written about many times before. He spends much more time describing the places they pass through on the journey, the funny things that happen to them and the people they meet – such as the very boring man who never stops talking:

After the dog story, we thought we were going to have a little quiet. But we were mistaken; for, with the same breath with which he finished the dog rigmarole, our talkative companion added:

“But I can tell you a funnier thing than that -”

We all felt we could believe that assertion. If he had boasted that he could tell a duller, more uninteresting story, we should have doubted him; but the possibility of his being able to relate something funnier, we could readily grasp.

But it was not a bit funnier, after all. It was only longer and more involved. It was the history of a man who grew his own celery; and then, later on, it turned out that his wife was the niece, by the mother’s side, of a man who had made an ottoman out of an old packing-case.

A lot of J’s anecdotes involve his struggles to make himself understood in various foreign languages (he finds it particularly difficult to order an omelette) and the cultural differences he notices between Germany and England. The train journey also poses lots of problems, such as buying the right tickets, finding that other passengers have taken the best seats, and trying to interpret confusing timetables:

“Drat this 1.45! It doesn’t seem to go anywhere. Munich depart 1.45, and that’s all. It must go somewhere!”

Apparently, however, it does not. It seems to be a train that starts out from Munich at 1.45 and goes off on the loose. Possibly, it is a young, romantic train, fond of mystery. It won’t say where it’s going to. It probably does not even know itself. It goes off in search of adventure.

“I shall start off,” it says to itself, “at 1.45 punctually, and just go on anyhow, without thinking about it, and see where I get to.”

Diary of a Pilgrimage is not what I would describe as a ‘must-read classic’ but it’s a bit of light-hearted fun, which I think we all need now and then!

The Lifted Veil and Silly Novels by Lady Novelists by George Eliot – #NovNov

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The second book I’ve read for this month’s Novellas in November is one of the Penguin Little Black Classics series. It contains a novella by one of my favourite Victorian authors, George Eliot – The Lifted Veil – as well as an essay, Silly Novels by Lady Novelists, also written by Eliot.

The Lifted Veil was written very early in Eliot’s career and published in 1859, the same year as her first novel Adam Bede. It’s a controversial story which seems to get very mixed reviews and now that I’ve read it, although I found it quite enjoyable, I can understand why. It’s not her usual sort of book at all; I’ve seen it described as science fiction, Gothic fiction and horror, none of which are genres you would normally associate with Eliot!

Our narrator, Latimer, is a young man who suffers from an illness which seems to leave him with an unusual and unwelcome gift – the ability to see into the future and into the minds of other people. It begins with a vision of Prague, a city he has never visited or seen in a picture, and it is so incredibly detailed – ‘right down to a patch of rainbow light on the pavement, transmitted through a coloured lamp in the shape of a star’ – that Latimer is both excited and alarmed. Other episodes of clairvoyance follow, including dreamlike sightings of a tall, blond-haired young woman dressed in green. This turns out to be Bertha, his brother Alfred’s fiancée…but Latimer has seen a future version of himself married to Bertha. Will this come true – and if so, will the marriage be as unhappy as the vision seems to suggest?

I can’t say much more about the plot without spoiling the story, but I found The Lifted Veil an interesting and intriguing read. For such a short piece of writing, it contains many different topics and themes: the contemporary scientific ideas of Eliot’s time, ranging from mesmerism and phrenology to blood transfusions; fate and whether it can be changed; the possibility of life after death; and the question of what we can see when the ‘veil is lifted’. I should warn you that there is a scene involving a dead body – as I said, this is not a typical Eliot book – although it’s quite tame if you’ve read a lot of Edgar Allan Poe, as I have!

The novella takes up just over half of this 110 page book. The essay from 1856 that follows, Silly Novels by Lady Novelists, is unrelated and seems to be a bit of a random choice to fill the remaining pages in the book. Still, I thought it was fascinating to read Eliot’s thoughts on her fellow female authors. In case you can’t tell from the title, Eliot has a very low opinion of books she describes as ‘the frothy, the prosy, the pious or the pedantic’, and an even lower opinion of the women who write them:

It is clear that they write in elegant boudoirs, with violet-coloured ink and a ruby pen; that they must be entirely indifferent to publishers’ accounts, and inexperienced in every form of poverty except poverty of brains. It is true that we are constantly struck with the want of verisimilitude in their representations of the high society in which they seem to live; but then they betray no closer acquaintance with any other form of life. If their peers and peeresses are improbable, their literary men, tradespeople, and cottagers are impossible; and their intellect seems to have the peculiar impartiality of reproducing both what they have seen and heard, and what they have not seen and heard, with equal unfaithfulness.

Although I did feel a bit sorry for the lady novelists mentioned in the essay, including the authors of Laura Gay, The Old Grey Church and Rank and Beauty (three of the novels which come in for particular criticism from Eliot), I can also see why Eliot would have felt frustrated by female writers who were perpetuating stereotypes of Victorian fiction such as the perfect, virtuous heroine, and making it difficult for more literary authors like herself to be taken seriously. Of course, her male pseudonym would help to distance her work from the type of novels she despised and I’m sure Eliot would be pleased to know that her own novels have stood the test of time while the ‘silly novels’ and their authors have largely been forgotten.

So, two very different short reads in one book! Have you read either of them? I would love to hear what you thought.