The Expedition of Humphry Clinker - Tobias Smollett (1771)

 

The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker

“The Expedition of Humphry Clinker” is the second book by Tobias Smollett on the List and, oh boy, is this a step up, both from his first entry and from the mediocre stuff I have been reading lately.

Tobias Smollett was a man of comedy and satire, but what he did with “The Expedition of Humphry Clinker” was to tone down the sarcasm and wittiness and instead embrace a concept to the extent that it truly comes alive. We follow a group of people as they travel around Britain, consisting of the bachelor squire Matthew Bramble, his sister, aging spinster Tabitha, his niece and nephew, Liddy and Jerry and an assortment of servants, particularly Tabitha’s maid Winifred Jenkins. The story is their journey and experiences, both with each other and with the places they pass through. As an interesting and elegant stylistic touch, the story is written as letters these people are sending back to people they left at home. In this way we get different viewpoints, often on the same events, as first (and sometimes second) hand accounts as these people are experiencing them.

Mr. Bramble is an excitable and hypochondriac patriarch with a good heart but very opinionated. Likely a cover for the author himself. His viewpoints are rather settled, there are those things he despise, dirt, stink, hypocritic coxcombs and insensible management, and there are those he love, which are decent, honest people, cleanliness and common sense. His letters are often counterpointed by Jeremy’s letters. His young age allows for a more unprejudiced viewpoint, especially where Mr. Bramble gets agitated, and he is the progressive one pointing out absurdities both in his travelling party and in the environment, they are travelling through.

Tabhita is described comically is a nightmare of a woman, past her prime and desperately looking for a husband, she jumps at everything male until refused, at which point she despise them with a vengeance. She is petty and cheap and very impressed with herself and therefore an easy mark for hilarity. Liddy is almost the opposite, a timid young girl who offers a romantic element to the story as she is wooed by the mysterious Mr. Wilson. Finally, Winifred offers the servant point of view in letters of poor spelling, misunderstandings but also common sense.

The story follows two tracks, one of character development and the second of a travelogue through 18^th century Britain. The character development side to the story holds some elements of romance and mistaken identity, both favorites of the era,  but it is in the interaction of these characters that we see the real progression of the characters. Mr. Bramble learning to appreciate the active life, Jerry to control his temper and Tabitha finds her match from the most unlikely corner. This is all fun and interesting, but the satire never crosses the line and become unbelievable. As original as these characters are, they remain absolutely believable and even today they are recognizable.

Yet, in my opinion the travelogue is the greatest asset of the novel. I am not one for long descriptive parts, but this portrait of 18^th century England and Scotland, as seen from different angles is fascinating stuff. The spa life in Bath, high society hypocrisy in London, a seaside escape on the Yorkshire coast, the curious habits of the Scotch such as eating haggis, drinking Whiskey and playing that weird game they call golf… To sit here in the 21^st century and read an excited description of these well known institutions, written with a wonder and curiosity of a novel experience is infectious. I could not get enough of it.

What impressed be much was how Smollett went from his rambling and inconsistent style of “Peregrine Pickle” to this super tight and consistent masterpiece and without losing the astute and humorous perception. I am so used to these “almost-right” novels of the 18^th century that I am frankly surprised at finding one so well-rounded and polished. There is never too much, the editing is sharp, but still, it has room for a wealth of detail. He is also able to go through with his concept down to the details. Each character writes, and writes consistently, in his particular style with consistent wordings, mistakes and penchants. You believe Smollett actually visited the places or met people like those he describes. There is no sloppiness here.

I thoroughly liked “The Expedition of Humphry Clinker”, one of the best books so far on the list, and this is certainly a recommendation from me.

And Humphry Clinker? He is just some dude the party picks up on the way.

  

The Man of Feeling - Henry Mackenzie (1771)

 

The Man of Feeling

In my last review, on “A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy”, I introduced to theme of the sentimental novel. Well, we are there again, this time condensed to the exclusion of anything else.

“The Man of Feeling” has a single purpose, to present several tableaux to move the reader. We are supposed to cry a little, feel sorry for the unfortunate, a bit of weltsmertz and then on to the next. Apparently back in its day this really worked. Henry Mackenzie’s “The Man of Feeling” was an instant bestseller and remained so for a long time. The individual tableaux were singled out and used whenever people needed to be moved and in the world of sentimental literature Mackenzie was legend.

Here is the thing though: There is literally nothing else in this novel. No progressive narrative, no character study, no morale, except that for many people life stinks. Therefore, all depends on that these small bits of emotional porn work their magic.

Structurally, this is a story within a story within a story. The outermost shell of this literary babushka doll is Mackenzie himself. He is writing about some curate who accidentally come by a fragmented text. The text is written by an observer (likely a fellow called Sedley) who is telling the story of a gentleman called Harley. The fragmentation of this manuscript allows the author to skip in the narrative so what we get are a number of incidents were Harley is the observer to somebody else’s story. Harley rarely interacts with the unfortunate any further than listening to them and offer a bit of assistance or sympathy. He is the sentimental person who is moved by the story and obviously it is hoped that this translates to the reader.

There are stories about fallen women, old people sent to the army, a father to a prostitute, the mental ill and so on. These stories are naturally sad stories, and as such they are milked to the max. The major problem, at least my issue with them, is that they are tableaux. We are presented to people who then disappear, we have no deeper relationship to them and therefore I do not feel as much impact from their stories as I would had I known them better. The characters easily become non-entities or types rather than actual people and that significantly reduces the emotional impact. For this reason, “The Man of Feeling” does not carry anywhere close to the impact today as it apparently did back then.

This is a real problem, when the only leg the book has to stand on turns out to be weak and this is why I am rather indifferent to the book. It is a lot easier to read than Sterne, but as a sentimental novel I much preferred “A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy” as we here at least had a focus in Yorick and the book became a character study on him. I know practically nothing of Harley except he was a passive and easily moved fellow.

The value of “The Man of Feeling” is mostly its significance in the development of the sentimental and romantic genre. In itself I found it less than impressive and I do not think there is much to recommend it.

   

A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy - Laurence Sterne (1768)

 

A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy

After the menace which was “Tristram Shandy” I was apprehensive going into another book by Laurence Sterne. I feared it would be a repeat of the chaotic, well, lack of, narrative, but I was pleasantly surprised that “A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy” is a quite different piece of literature.

Most notably there is a coherent narrative and Sterne is much less inclined to tease the reader with narrative sabotage. There are digressions, yes, but of a different kind that meshes far better with the story. This is also, as hinted by the title, a venture into the “Sentimental” genre which was very much in vogue when the novel was released.

The sentimental genre, I am learning, tried to perceive the world emotionally rather than rationally. For example, rather than writing that something is red, the sentimental writer would describe how the color made him feel. This makes for a very impressionistic style of writing, which I can mostly compare to that of Marcel Proust.

Sterne’s character, Yorick (whom we met as a minor character in “Tristram Shandy”) is travelling through France and describes his experiences and encounters, not so much factually, but by referring the thoughts and the emotions going through him. This makes it at times a bit difficult to follow and he does, characteristically for the sentimental writer, skip quickly over the boring parts. Practical things of little sentimental value are often ignored, while he seems immensely touched by the various people he encounters.

Yorick, supposedly a priest of sorts, have a fond eye for the girls. He falls in love with practically every girl he meets, be they nobility or servants and is quite unapologetic about it. One such encounter hints that the romantic idea gets a bit further than that, confirmed by the fact that he gets kicked out of the hotel for having brought a girl to his room for over two hours.

Beside being a sentimental story, it is also a travel novel, describing a journey through a foreign country, something which was apparently another fashionable thing at the time and perhaps founded by this novel. As such the journey is an integral part of the story, maybe even the point of the story. There does not seem to be a particular personal journey for Yorick, this is more a matter of describing encounters of sentiment Yorick has, travelling through the country.

Eventually, this is an unfinished novel. Laurence Sterne died before it could be finished and so Yorick only just manages to cross into Italy, stuck at an inn with another lovely lady, before the book abruptly ends. It is difficult to say where the novel eventually would have gone, statically describing encounters or toward some sort of end for Yorick, making it a personal journey. I could hope so, but alas we will never know.

I am not certain I would call “A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy” a great book, but it was so much easier and more satisfying a read than “Tristram Shandy” that I am probably overrating it.  I definitely got a lot more out of these few pages than the many times larger “Tristram Shandy”.

 

 

Tristram Shandy - Laurence Sterne (1767)

 

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

“Tristram Shandy” by Laurence Sterne is another of those novels I have known by name, but never read, not even known why it was famous. Having read it now I understand why it is considered special, though I feel incapable of appreciating it.

The point to “Tristram Shandy” is… that there is no point. It is a fairly long book that goes nowhere. While it is supposed to be an autobiography of the author, going by the fictional name of Tristram Shandy, it is merely occupied with vignettes on his close relations, particularly his father and his uncle Toby. These vignettes are in turn constantly interrupted and digressed from, sometimes to make a remote point and sometimes simply through sabotage. The narrative is broken up to a point that you never understand the chronology and how anything ties together. This anti-structure has been praised as proto post modernistic, but to me it merely comes across as a childish and indolent practical joke.

The vignettes themselves has a comedic aim. The father and the uncle are both odd characters, the father having far-fetched theories for anything and a combative way of promoting them and the uncle, kind, gentle and naïve has an obsession with warfare. They are interesting types with a lot of potential for ridicule, but I must be too far removed culturally and perhaps also language-wise to pick up on the humor because I missed most of the punchlines in as far as there were punchlines and those I did get hardly made me smile. The father’s obsession with noses and names is sweet and ludicrous and so is uncle Toby’s obsession with the campaigns he is reenacting in his backyard, but ever so often will Sterne’s attempt at bringing a story to a head be derailed by his own interruptions or be masked to a degree where I simply missed what was going on.

Sterne is best in the few cases where he allows a story to go uninterrupted over a few pages, such as with the big-nosed Diego who causes an uproar when people start obsessing over his nose, or the love affair of uncle Toby. Those moments hold some promise to what this book could have been if Sterne had gone for a more conventional style. This would of course have made it less special but so much more accessible to the reader.

As it is, I found it very hard to stay attentive. Without a narrative and with digressions even within the sentences I often lost track and found my mind drifting. Looking back over the section I had just been through I could not for money or fame recall anything of what I had just read, and I suspect that was largely the point. To tow the reader around by the nose without taking him anywhere.

I did learn a new word, though. From now on “hobby-horse” will be a new expression of mine. A hobby-horse is a passion, doctrine or interest (obsession, perhaps?) that would color everything you do. This is most notably used to describe uncle Toby’s all-consuming interest in warfare. Curiously, the Danish word for it, “Kæphest”, means exactly the same and I cannot help thinking that this may in fact be the origin of the word. Nice, another piece of useless trivia…

Although I understand why “Tristram Shandy” is famous, I hesitate to recommend it. I got far too little out of it and found it an ordeal to get through it. There is the potential for something amusing here but it rarely becomes more than a promise.

     

The Vicar of Wakefield - Oliver Goldsmith (1766)

 

The Vicar of Wakefield

Another short novel on the List, no complaints from me. At this size I am quickly progressing, and this will be my 10^th book this year and number 40 on the List.

“The Vicar of Wakefield” by Oliver Goldsmith is one of those novels I have heard of as something everybody are supposed to know, but I never read it or even knew what it is about. Apparently, it is a famous classic and in my research I found that it was already made into a movie in 1910!

It is a about a vicar (a priest of sorts) who start out comfortably wealthy with a pleasant parish and a nice, big family. Then, right away misfortune strikes leading into what becomes a continuous deroute. His fortune is gone as the merchant with whom he placed his fortune disappears. He enters into a silly debate about clergy remarrying which estranges him from his friend Wilmott, whose daughter was supposed to marry the vicar’s eldest son and eventually the vicar with family is forced to remove to a remote parish and make a new beginning, this time much poorer.

They are befriended by the friendly, but poor has-been gentleman Mr. Burchell, and the local squire Mr. Thornhill, an infamous libertine. Burchell likes the vicar’s second daughter, Sophie, while Thornhill woos the elder Olivia. Blissful poverty does not last long. The vicar is ripped off by frauds, Olivia is kidnapped by Thornhill info a fake marriage and George, the eldest son, is adrift on the continent with no money. Accidents stack up until the vicar is in debt prison with half his family dead or dying.

All through this the vicar is sanguine and praise himself for having the best treasure, his family, around him, so things are not so bad.

“The Vicar of Wakefield” is at face value a simple story about misfortune and recovery for all the good guys. Nothing terribly special there. As far as I can tell its fame is due to two elements:

1.       Oliver Goldsmith makes a lot out the homeliness of domestic life at the vicar’s. This was apparently new at the time and had so charming effect that it got loved for this alone

2.       Hidden beneath the simplistic surface “The Vicar of Wakefield” is a satire on many contemporary institutions and issues. Legal, politic, religious and moral themes are all commented on in the many digressions of the story and always innocently by the naïve vicar who has no clue what a hornets nest he is stirring.

More importantly, there is a satire in the very structure of the novel. By being a good and moral person, the vicar gets cheated, injured and persecuted by all the evils his lifestyle is supposed to protect him from. A defunct legal system consistently lets him down. A nepotistic nobility can get away with anything, debauchery, violence, theft and fraud, with impunity. A reader unhappy with contemporary conditions in Britain could in all the vicar’s trouble find plenty of ammunition. Even the conclusion has so many coincidences happening all at once that the incredulity of it becomes an attack in itself. With the cards stacked against him there is no way the vicar can get out of this mess by himself and it takes a massive amount of intervention to set things right. Essentially saying that as things are, trouble comes easy, recovery takes magic.

It was a pleasant read and I was quite entertained. Despite his many digressions, Goldsmith did not waste time but drove the story forward and so it remained interesting throughout. Only one thing puzzles me: In the conclusion it is discovered (spoiler!) that Olivia’s marriage contract is not fake after all, so she is still married the vile Mr. Thornhill. This she is congratulated upon as she is no longer a fallen woman… ehhh, why is it a good thing that she is married to a terrible man instead of being free of him? Having lost everything what sort of bitter revenge will she have to endure from his hand and why is this good? Maybe the times are simply different, but if anybody can help me understand, I would be much obliged.

A recommendation from me.

 

The Castle of Otranto - Horace Walpole (1764)

 

The Castle of Otranto

“The Castle of Otranto” is known as the first gothic novel, predating “Frankenstein” by half a century. It is also one of the shortest novels on the List, at least so far, so it did not take me long to get through it.

The book was published under pseudonym and claimed to be a long lost Italian manuscript from the age of the crusades. Only in the second edition did Horace Walpole admit to having cooked it up himself. An early example of what in cinema is called Found Footage?

Back in those medieval days Manfred, the ruler of Otranto, losses his sickly son, Conrad, to a giant helmet that fell out of nowhere and crushed him on his wedding day. Bereft of his only male heir Manfred decides to marry the bride instead as he is convinced his wife, Hippolita, is now barren. Isabella, the bride, flees in horror, helped in her escape by a gallant peasant.

Manfred is pissed at the girl and pissed at the peasant and starts hunting for her. When he learns she is hiding in a nearby convent he gets pissed at the friar protecting her. The peasant must die for his insolence at which point the friar learns that the peasant is actually his son, Theodore, and no peasant but noble as the friar used to be a count. Theodore is helped escape by Manfred’s daughter, Mathilda, both of whom fall in love with each other. In his escape Theodore finds the lost Isabella and protects her from a mysterious knight. Theodore almost kills him only to discover this is Prince Frederic, Isabella’s long lost father, who claims rightful ownership to Otranto.

Confused?

Walpole took the old medieval romance setting and populated it with Shakespearean characters with “modern” (18^th century) sentiments. It is actually quite a bit of an exercise. You think you are reading an ancient tale, but all these characters are a lot more complex and detailed and in a way human than you would expect. Did you ever in an old romance find the Lord rolling his eyes and rage with impatience at a domestic who cannot get to the point? Or characters confusing each other pursuing their own agenda? I am no expert on Shakespeare, but I believe this contrary agenda element is borrowed there. These characters certainly make the story a lot more interesting and fleshed out than you would expect over hardly a hundred pages.

The gothic sense of doom at this castle is enhanced by frequent visitations of ghosts. First by the strange helmet that kills Conrad, but soon a giant is sighted, a statue cries blood and the ghost of a hermit appears to bring a message to Frederic. The function of these ghostly affairs is unclear at first and I had Walpole suspected of adding them simply for ambience, but along the way they work to promote the downfall of Manfred, whose grandfather apparently usurped the title from its rightful owner.

I found “The Castle of Otranto” very entertaining to read and got a lot more out of it than the diminutive length led me to expect. There were even funny element straight out of Monty Python. This playfulness is supported by the background of the novel. Horace Walpole, son of famed Robert Walpole, on of the longest sitting prime ministers of Britain, was a collector type who loved anything novel and unique and never did anything twice. He wrote many things, but all over the place and never another novel like “The Castle of Otranto”. As I understood it, he may even have written it as a jest.

“The Castle of Otranto” is fun and messy and very much alive and never overstays its welcome. That can only be a recommendation.

 

Emile, or On Education - Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762)

Emile, or On Education

The second book by Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the List is not really a novel but a treatise on education. For a list of novels including this book is a bit of an odd choice.

Anyway, “Emile, or On Education” is a tough book to get through and not just because it is long.

I know that we are talking about a 260 year old treatise, but it is difficult not judge such a text with modern eyes. Half the time his ideas are monstrous and I feel like shouting: “KEEP THAT MAN AWAY FROM MY CHILD!!!”, while on the other half Rousseau are remarkable modern for his time and some of the ideas are not alien today. Whether you focus on the first or the later I suppose is a matter of temper, but it makes for a weird experience reading the book.

Rousseau takes us through the raising of a boy from infancy until marriage in that order and Rousseau has a lot to say for each stage. His main idea is that nature does things right so as closer you keep things to nature the better things are. Human civilization is the opposite of nature and that is the source of everything wrong. Therefore, a boy must be raised in the countryside spending his time in as natural activities as possible. Towns, books and science however, not to mention theater and other sophistry, is to be avoided at all cost.

A consequence of this is that Rousseau wants to avoid stuffing knowledge into the young boy’s head, claiming that knowledge the boy does not understand is useless and actually counterproductive. Instead Rousseau prepares the boy to learn. He encourages curiosity and train the child to search and deduce the answers himself by observing nature. In all things he refuses to provide the answers, and rather nudge the boy in the right direction.

To a modern ear that sounds about right. Certainly, the Danish education system has now for many years abolished root learning in preference of teaching the children the learning process. To the extend that I am sometimes shocked at how little young student actually know. Instead they are superfast at acquiring knowledge.

This principle extents to religion where Rousseau wants the boy to work out for himself what he believes in and then join the denomination that fits him the best. Again, fairly modern, but this position caused, rather predictably, quite a scandal in its time. For somebody to say that no religion can monopolize the truth and that one should stay away from dogma would, in a world where every  sect believes that they and only they know the truth, be considered the worst kind of heresy. Rousseau’s book was accordingly banned and burned in many places.

Considering how big a fan of nature Rousseau was, it is surprising how antagonistic he was towards science. Doctors he considers as frauds and books are simply not worth reading. Scientific research in any form that goes beyond observing nature he considers a was of time.

On the other hand, he chooses to include a part of his own treatise on the Social Contract, a very complex, and highly regarded, piece of political science. Talk about being inconsistent.

By today’s standard the most controversial part concerns the education of girls. Rousseau was of the opinion that it is a waste of time to send girls to school. They only need to look pretty, be adept at domestic work and be submissive to their husband. I found many paragraphs that were so outrageous I had to read them aloud and laugh. Even thinking such thoughts today would get you crucified. Seriously. Though at the time, this part went down with the general public much better than the sections on religion and politics.  We have, thankfully, come a long way.

Rousseau has a meandering style. Although there is a general structure to the book, the individual chapters run all over the place with segments tangential to the main themes. He was probably having a lot of fun imagining how he would like to raise children and got carried away. It was a lot less fun being the reader of this.

I cannot with a clear consciousness recommend “Emile, or On Education”. I suppose it is a good window into Rousseau’s ideas, but as casual reading this is very much uphill and any feminist would be in risk of an apoplectic stroke.