Barnabystichs

 

Home itself

was but another bead

in the long rosary

of his regrets.

-- Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge, (1841)

 

The sun went down,

and night came on,

and he was still

quite tranquil.

-- ibid

 

He looked back, once, before he left the street:

a sight    not     easily  to be   erased,

even from his remembrance,

so long as he had life.

-- ibid

 

every light shadow

thrown by the passing clouds

upon the daisied ground.

-- ibid

 

the cat sat moping

on the ashy forge

-- ibid

 

as day   deepened into evening,

and darkness   crept into the nooks.

-- ibid

 

Epistolary epiphanies

The anglophone literary world is aflutter  over the newly-unsealed cache of intimate Dickensian correspondence:

Unseen Charles Dickens letters open window into the life of a genius

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-51403625

All of Dickens previously published works  have been amply studied, from every standpoint;  that ground has been tilled  this way and that, for over a century.    These new revelations  will therefore  principally interest scholars, for any light they may shed on the only recently discovered, and still mysterious fragment, tentatively titled “The Dinner at the Veneerings”,  whose byways and undertunnels  we examined here:

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/12/a-lost-fragment-of-our-mutual-friend.html

Mutual-friend Mini-monostich

Lightwood   laughed

and passed  the wine

[ -- Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (1864-5), ch. 12

The Mystery of the Analytical Chemist (further updated)

Among the unpublished manuscripts of my late friend Dr. Watson … no, just kidding.

Our Mutual Friend, the last finished novel of Charles Dickens, does not lie at the center of most readers’ affections;  yet connoisseurs there are, who wóuld award the palm to that late work.   And one of the most memorable minor characters therein -- as minor as might be, since (if memory serves) he utters not a word at any time -- is the discreetly appearing and vanishing figure of the Analytical Chemist.  His denomination is never explained, and he is given no other name.  His ostensible function is to wait on the Veneering’s table, at that elegant or elegantesque or simili-elegant supper party which is to seal the coming-out of these arrivistes or nouvel-arrivés; his deeper purpose is … well, it must be guessed-at.   But whatever it was, Dickens was evidently quite satisfied with the results.

What does he mean, then -- and especially, why ever is he called that?

The proper approach, I now believe, is not to be overly … analytical about it (as I tried to be, upon first encountering the character, with wonder).  The phrase simply wandered into Dickens’ mind,  without any nicety of correspondence to the Dalton or Lavoisier theory of the day, and serves perfectly to suggest what needs suggesting:  neither fawning nor class resentment  on the part of the table-attendent, but cool detachment, and unwavering observation.  In this he is a forerunner of that other supranatural butler, Jeeves.

(There are differences, but these are subtle, and must await another time  for treatment, when Jeeves himself shall consent to appear at the center of our lens.  -- Compare further another Wodehouse character, Lord Emsworth's secretary, The Efficient Baxter.)

Compare:

If Hawthorne had not been a story-teller, he might have been a famous chemist, for he was a mental chemist in his method of handling emotions and passions.

-- Van Wyck Brooks,  New England:  Indian Summer (1940), p. 297

This what-if re Hawthorne is implausible;  but the citation has merit in displaying the contemporary connotations of chemist.

Bonus quote:

Hungarian goulash, always a dish to be avoided unless you had had the forethought to have it analysed by a competent analytical chemist.

-- P.G. Wodehouse, Ice in the Bedroom (1961)

Note: in a British context, the modifier analytical is necessary to distinguish what Americans call a chemist from what Americans call a pharmacist.


For further Dickensiana:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/Charles%20Dickens

[Postscript May 2016] A foretaste of the denomination may be found in chapter 8 of Barnaby Rudge (1841).  Describing the farcical Tubby’s-Clubhouse-style subterranean meeting of the ‘Prentice Knights:

One of the conductors of this novice held a rusty blunderbuss pointed towards his ear, and the other, a very ancient sabre, with which he carved imaginary offenders as he came along  in a sanguinary and anatomical manner.

Savor the semantics of that “anatomical manner”, and you will be well on the way towards the Analytical Chemist.

Monostichs: Magical and Mournful

Magical Monostich (at seaside) :

The range of marshes lay clear before us,

with the sails of the ships on the river   growing out of it.

Mournful Monostich (walking a London streetscape) :

while To Let  To Let  To Let,  glared at me from empty rooms.

[Source:  Ch. Dickens, Great Expectations (1861).]

A lost fragment of “Edwin Drood”

The literary world is thrilling to the latest discovery of a work by a major figure -- in this case, the American poet Walt Whitman -- previously unknown (in the present case, published, but not under the poet’s name):

http://www.chron.com/life/books/article/University-of-Houston-student-uncovers-an-unknown-7384053.php

Since the work in question -- mere newspaper fare, and appearing as its lead article -- was “hiding in plain sight”, one cannot say that the world of letters has been particularly enriched by its (re)discovery -- or rather, re-ascription.  It consists of diet advice and whatnot.  Still, it is rejoicing to learn, once again, that forgotten treasure may be found for the ferreting.

As our own, far more modest contribution to Whitmaniana, we offer this seldom-seen photograph, not of the poet, but of his elder brother Phineas:

Walt Whitman's smarter brother

In actual, actuarial fact, Walt had upwards of a dozen brothers, all of them smarter than himself, but none of them poets;  and since they all went into banking, or barbering, or bagel-making, or bootblacking, their tales are lost to literary history.

~

Quite on another plane  from that of Whitman (who struggled  his entire life to become a poet, without ever discovering the principle of the rhyme) is that of the brilliant Dickens, whose final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (posthum.  1870), a masterpiece of clockwork plotting and stylistic concision, was left tragically unfinished by the author’s untimely, more than lamented death.  No work in history has more sharply whetted the thirst of cognoscenti, for more; in attics throughout England, dusty trunks have long been feverishly ransacked, in hopes that some further chapter, or even the bare outline of the plot (along with the key to the murder), might turn up.  So far, all in vain.

Until now.  Using methods which, both for reasons of methodological proprietorship and of possible legal liability in case some corners might have been cut (quite without my knowledge), we shall not disclose,  we at last have managed to acquire -- against a sum which, again, I shall not reveal; consider it my humble financial contribution to world scholarship -- an actual fragment, on a torn bit of manuscript and in the author's own hand, of the final chapter of that work.

For its genuineness I have the solemn testimony of my employee Mr Thomas Chatterton, Gentleman, Director of Chemical Analysis for the WDJ  Department of Incunabula:  the fragment was printed on the very same rare make of paper that bore that priceless manuscript “A Dinner at Veneerings”, which it was our good fortune to expose to the marveling world, a photo-image of which manuscript may be inspected here.

Here then, follows the fragment.

Vide infra;  right … there.

not but that, had he

…  Umm, that’s it.  That’s all he wrote.  That’s what you get.  Something of an anticlimax, perhaps, to such as are hard to please.

It might have been nice to have an actual verb, at least.   Or a noun;  or a name.  Still, as the first authenticated posthumous addition to that classic of suspense and detection, our find must mark an epoch  in Dickens scholarship.

We ourselves are far too rigorous in our adherence to the methodological exigencies of diplomatic editions, to venture a guess as to the context;  although, examing the fragile fragment with a magnifier, we do perceive, off at the right edge, a curve which might be a part of an o;  in which case  the passage may confidently be emended to “had he only” -- or, what is almost the same, “had he only known”.   Or yet further, with more than moral certainty,

… not but that, had he only known what effect these words would have upon his stunned interlocutor, he might have …

~

A night of intense reflection, not unaccompanied by ardent spirits, has revealed to me the following astonishing completion:

… he might have plunged his hand into the hidden inner pocket of his blouse of Indian silk, and extracted the gem-encrusted dagger which he had secreted for so long against this very possibility -- sinking the instrument repeatedly into the half-averted visage of the crone --

“SO!  You thought you could do away with him, and frame me for the deed, and make me to imagine that I had done it myself, while in an amnesiac haze  the fruit of the treble-strength opium which you, on that accursed night, administered with your traitor’s hand!”

Ex pede, Herculem!  The mystery is solved at last !!

-- Mm; hmm.  Of course, that is all a bit speculative.

~

~  Posthumous Endorsement ~

"If I were alive today, and in the mood for a mystery,

this is what I'd be reading: "

I Don't Do Divorce Cases

Murphy on the Mount.

(My name is Charles “Chuck” Dickens,

and I approved this message.)

~         ~

~

[Lit. Crit. footnote (all satire aside):

 Such a dénoument would resemble that of Wilkie Collins’ pioneering whodunit, The Moonstone (1868), in which the protagonist, having been slipped some laudanum, unconsciously commits an act which is key to a crime, and which frames him for the crime itself.   Dickens and Collins were longtime friends and emulous colleagues;  moreover, Dickens was certainly well aware of The Moonstone, having been its actual publisher!

I wrote all this simply as a hoot; yet there are several indications within the published portion of the book, which make such a hypothetical ending plausible.  For:

(1)  The crone who runs the opium den  has been meddling with the dosages;  Jasper remarks upon this.

(2)  You would think that the crone would be favorably disposed towards Jasper, since he’s a regular customer and pays his bills;  yet she absolutely has it in for him, with a deadly hatred, as we see towards the end of the published book when she visits the cathedral and sees him sing.

(3) … TBC

]

]

.

Does Trump wear a toupet ?

In Dickens’ final, unfinished, prophetic novel (The Mystery of Edwin Drood, 1870), he describes Mr Grewgious:

He had a scanty flat crop of hair, in colour and consistency like some very mangy yellow fur tippet;  it was so unlike hair, that it must have been a wig, but for the stupendous improbability of anybody’s voluntarily sporting such a head.

Separated at birth!

Like a duck in thunder (II)

Recently I had occasion to seek the origin and meaning of the phrase (in full) “like a dying duck in a thunderstorm”.   If you google that phrase, you’ll find plenty -- mostly pages and pages of ill-informed and inconclusive forum-discussion;  even if an authoritative answer lies buried there somewhere, it is not worth one’s while to sift through the debris.

So here is the entry from a standard reference-work, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, by Eric Partridge (first edition 1937; many subsequent updates), in its entirety:

To have a ludicrously forlorn, hopeless, and helpless appearance :  coll., orig. rural:  from ca. 1850 (Ware).

Now, as it happens, we can antedate that date;  and this, in a lexicographically most interesting way:  not with a simple antecedent Erstbeleg, but something more powerful though more roundabout.

~

Back when I was an editor at Merriam-Webster dictionaries, I had full responsibility for the two technical disciplines of Etymology and of Pronunciation, but none at all for the company’s meat and drink, which was defining;  let alone for deciding which new words were to be entered in the flagship Collegiate ™ dictionary, which was lightly revised each year, and wholly reedited each decade.  That privilege fell to the Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Mish -- an intelligent and well-educated man, and not without a certain wry humor;  but as regards the humors, he rather took after his atrabilious and phlegmatic predecessor, Doctor Johnson, whose sour frowning portrait hung over his desk, exactly matching the successor’s habitual mood.  I used to despair at the chef-rédacteur’s obstinate sluggishness against admitting culturally key new words -- they’d make it in eventually, but only after the kairos had long passed -- and occasionally would champion some one particular word for inclusion, loading the files with attestations for the definer to refer to next time around.

One such, at the height of Gorbachev, was glasnost.   Many were the citations I supplied, to no avail.  However (one might argue) you can always pile up stats for some particular term, no matter how specialized, by drawing from specialized sources:  which would prove nothing.  The Collegiate is not for the specialist, but for the general educated public;  and glasnost is, after all, in origin  Russian:  the Collegiate is quite rightly chary of letting in too many foreign terms (like Erstbeleg -- common in the lexicographic literature, but unknown outside it).  So, how to show that the word had passed into English common currency?

In support of the suggestion that glasnost be included, I submitted slips attesting such derivata as glasnostic, with fully English morphology (and phonology:  the stress shifts to another vowel, which additionally is detensed).  Now, that was a nonce form, unworthy of inclusion on its own;  but it did witness the fact that, by then, glasnost had already passed into the everyday Wortschatz of American English, for a confection like “glasnostic” presupposes the antecedent currency of the base.

~

And so, back to our duck.

Consider the following passage from Dickens’ novel Martin Chuzzlewit:

‘What,’ he asked of Mr Pecksniff, happening to catch his eye in its descent;  for until now  it had been piously upraised, with something of that expression which the poetry of ages has attributed to a domestic bird, when breathing its last amid the ravages of an electric storm …

Now,  this circumlocuitous, scarcely lapidary, obscure expression, is (as the annotator notes, in the Penguin edition) nothing more nor less than a winking allusion to the set expression (alliterative, assonant, and striking in its imagery) a dying duck in a thunderstorm.  Moreover, the allusion could not possibly work unless that expression were antecedently quite familiar to the reader, since -- much more than the morphological presupposition of glasnost by glasnostic-- there is a significant gap (lexical, though not semantic) between the original and the pastiche.   The case is often to be met with in literature -- more usually in a droll setting, as here, though we do find  “like the cat in the adage” in MacBeth, an allusion  (one requiring rather a lot of the groundlings, one should have thought) to the Latin catus amat piscis, sed non vult tingere plantas (a cat likes fish, but doesn’t like to get its paws wet).

The key point here is that the first half of Martin Chuzzlewit  (where our passage appears) was initially serialized  in 1843,  thus antedating the Ware/Partridge date.  And if the proverb had occurred literatim, it would antedate matters no further.  But as it stands, we can deduce that the adage was already in wide circulation among Dickens’ anticipated readership, well before 1843:  else he could not have counted on them to get the reference:  and without that, the passage falls flat.

[Psychostylistic footnote]  It is the very paradoxical absurdity of the original adage, that tempts Dickens to toy with it.  For after all, ducks do just fine in thunderstorms, much better than do squirrels (or the proverbial “drowned rat”) -- rain being, as the expression has it, “nice weather for ducks”.   In just such a fashion does Wodehouse (through his character Bertie Wooster) play, in novel after novel, with the speech in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, that ends “like quills upon the fretful porpentine”.  Or, at a humbler level, such dimestore wit as hasta la pasta (for hasta la vista).

(For our own discourse upon said porpentine, click here.)

For final proof, if proof be needed, this witness from Washington Irving’s fine finger-exercise of a story of 1824, “The Stout Gentleman”:

Rain pattered against the casements.  … There were several half-drowned fowls crowded together under a cart, among which was a miserable cristfallen cock … Everything was comfortless and forlorn, excepting a crew of hardened ducks, assembled like boon companions round a puddle, and making a riotous noise over their liquor.

-- Washington Irving, from Tales of a Traveller

.

P.G. Wodehouse in memoriam (expanded)

I have just finished reading the prolific master’s comparatively little-known but quite wonderful comic novel, Money for Nothing (1928).

Someday  I may have something intelligent to say about this wordsmith magician who pulls rabbit after rabbit out of his fathomless hat,

but for now, the following observation must suffice:

He is both unfailingly wholesome, and (to a degree you do not fully appreciate  till you have lived a while, and beheld the alternative, and seen how, decade after decade, he soldiered on  through it all)  deep-seatedly humane.

Usually he is jolly and joshing, by choice;  but when he wishes, he can conjure up effects out of Wind in the Willows.   As here, describing a pair of young lovers drifting the river:

The Skirme rippled about the boat, chuckling softly to itself.  It was a kindly, thoughtful river, given to chuckling to itself like an old gentleman who likes seeing young people happy.

Many of his characters are -- designedly -- stock figures, recycled from story to story with slight variations.   (Cf. the Commedia dell'arte -- there is no blame in this.)  But Wodehouse can capture the mind’s movements exactly, when so inclined.   A disappointed lover:

‘I hear you’re engaged to Hugo,’ he said, speaking carefully  and spacing the syllables so that they did not run into each other as they showed an inclination to do.

 (A simple-seeming sentence, yet with much art.  A while after reading it, I tried to recall it from memory, but could not fetch up such perfect wording.  All I could think of was “as they seemed inclined to do”, which is not nearly as good.)

Yet later, as she accepts his proposal and offer her hand, the pan-psychism of a benevolent world  springs up anew, now with a touch, not of Willows, but of Mary Poppins:

The garden had learned that dance now.  It was simple once you got the hang of it.  All you had to do, if you were a tree, was to jump up and down, while, if you were a lawn, you just went round and round.   So the trees jumped up and down  and the lawn went round and round, and John stood still in the middle of it all, admiring it.

If a Heaven there be, which I am bound to believe, then I likewise confide, that old P.G. is up there, chuckling with contentment, and playing golf atop the clouds.

Pleased as Plum

[Update]

When considering writers like Petrarch, a primary consideration is his influence on later authors:  he lives on abundantly, in the works of those unblushing borrowers the Petrarchians.   For Wodehouse, the case is otherwise.  He wrote in a century when, unlike in olden times, great premium was set upon originality.  Furthermore, once he found his voice, he kept doing the same thing over and over -- but so devilishly well, that he formed a sui-generis genre, which none dare ape upon pain of being dismissed as derivative.   So, there is no-one, certainly no prominent writer, who can be called a “Wodehousian”, in anything like the sense that whole passels of poets are Petrarchians.

The thing, then, for those who relish parallels, is to keep an eye out for antedatings of the Wodehousian manner.  After all, he must have derived his distinctive manner from somewhere, unless it were dictated to him directly by Comus (in lieu of the Spiritus Sanctus).   Thus, herewith  some attestations from our own random readings -- foreshadowings of the droll style on which Wodehouse later took out a patent.

~

Travellers gathered in an inn:

“And was there anything remarkable in her history?”

Never was question more unlucky.  The little Marquis immediately threw himself into the attitude of a man about to tell a long story.  In fact, my uncle had pulled upon himself the whole history of the civil war of the Fronde, in which the beautiful Duchess had played so distinguished a part.  …

[some time later]

“… I’ll tell you how it was.  Her father, Henry de Bourbon …”

“But did the Duchess pass the night in the chateau?” said my uncle rather abruptly, terrified at the idea of getting involved in one of the Marquis’s genealogical discussions.

-- Washington Irving ,“The Adventure of my Uncle”, in Tales of a Traveller (1824)

Compare Wodehouse’s recurring character, “The Oldest Member”.

~

And, from the pen of an American:

A cook she certainly was, in the very bone and centre of her soul.  Not a chicken, or turkey, or duck  in the barnyard, but looked grave when they saw her approaching, and seemed to be reflecting on their latter end.

-- Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)

Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a serious book;  it is said that Lincoln, upon meeting Mrs Stowe, said, “So you’re the little lady that started a war!”  But here we have a passage that might have wafted over from Castle Blandings.

~

The first place you’d look, for PGW-parallels, might be Dickens -- the early Dickens of The Pickwick Papers.   Therefore, we shall not fish in so shallow a pond.  But the masterpiece Our Mutual Friend is another mostly rather somber novel; yet even there, one finds snippets that, did they follow the Wodehousian oeuvre, rather than precede it, one might have deemed echos:

When R. Wilfer returned, candlestick in hand, to the bosom of his family, he found the bosom agitated.

-- Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (1864-5), ch. 4

Pure Wodehouse:  deniching a word from an idiom wherein it figures in a special sense,  to comic effect.  Even the name, “R. Wilfer”, sounds somehow Wodehousian.

“Inasmuch as every man … appears to be under a fatal spell  which obliges him, sooner or later, to mention the Rocky Mountains  in a tone of extreme familiarity  to some other man, I hope you’ll excuse my pressing you into the service of that gigantic range of geographical bores.”

-- Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (1864-5), ch. 6

That passage is not so close to PGW as the other; moreover, is at least as close to any number of other English humorists, some of them from the Dickens era or earlier, others quite modern (Kingsley Amis, Aldous Huxley).   I cite it merely to show how difficult it is   truly to unearth such correspondences.

We ourselves noted a possible (though problematic) Dickens/Wodehouse parallel, in our notes to the previously unpublished fragment:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/12/a-lost-fragment-of-our-mutual-friend.html

There we remarked, in a footnote to the recovered text:

(²) boil his head:  Connoisseurs of both authors will here instantly recognize a favorite phrase of Mr P.G. Wodehouse, so strongly influenced by Dickens in point of style.  Yet he cannot actually have read this particular passus, since, as mentioned previously, it was never published before this very day.  Consequently a direct le-style-c’est-l’homme influence of the earlier upon that later novelist, cannot in this instance  be established.

Whether the contavenient influence, of Wodehouse upon Dickens, might be surmised in this case, mediated perhaps by signal-bearing tachyons traveling backwards in time, we must leave to the physicists.

Scholars are divided as to the proper interpretation of this suggested influence -- indeed, as to the status of the resurrected fragment  as a whole.

~

Earlier than Dickens, indeed:

“The good wine  did its good office.” The frost of etiquette … began to give way … and the formal appellatives with which the dignitaries had hitherto addressed each other, were now familiarly abbreviated in Tully, Bally, and Killie.

-- Sir Walter Scott, Waverley (1814)

History of the Miranda Warning

Many Americans (particularly in the ornery mood that the country is in now) probably imagine that the right against self-incrimination as currently enshrined in the Miranda Warning was some kind of new-fangled liberalistic criminal-coddling innovation  dreamed up by the Warren Court, sparked by the case of some perp who was probably guilty as hell.   Of course, it is basically a pretty straightforward application of the Fifth Amendment to that Communist tract known as the Constitution of the United States.   But let all that lie.  Our purpose here is more along the lines of the literary.

Wikipedia, that invaluable über-solon, notes English precedent, citing evidence from, of all things, some classic novels (and two of my favorite, in fact):

Warnings regarding the right against self-incrimination may have originated in England and Wales. In 1912, the judges of the King's Bench issued the Judges' Rules. These provided that, when a police member had admissible evidence to suspect a person of an offence and wished to question that suspect about an offence, the officer should first caution the person that he was entitled to remain silent. However, the warning about the possibility of anything the suspect said being potentially used against him predates even that: it appears for example in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's novel The Sign of the Four, published in 1890 (Chapter 6: Sherlock Holmes Gives a Demonstration"):

    "Mr. Sholto, it is my duty to inform you that anything which you may say will be used against you. I arrest you in the Queen’s name as being concerned in the death of your brother.”

as well as G. K. Chesterton's novel The Ball and the Cross, published in 1909 (Chapter X: "The Swords Rejoined"):

    "No, sir," said the sergeant; "though most of the people talk French. This is the island called St. Loup, sir, an island in the Channel. We've been sent down specially from London, as you were such specially distinguished criminals, if you'll allow me to say so. Which reminds me to warn you that anything you say may be used against you at your trial."

It is rare indeed that I can bring forward anything to correct or complement Wikipedia;  but in the spirit of an etymologist (which for a time was my day-job) bringing forward an Earliest Attestation,  let me present this one, from Bleak House, published in 1853:

“Now, George: duty, as you know very well, is one thing, and conversation is another.  It’s my duty to inform you that any observations you may make  will be liable to be used against you.  Therefore, George, be careful what you say.  You don’t happen to have heard of a murder?”

“Murder!”

“Now, George, bear in mind what I’ve said to you.  I ask you nothing.  I say, you don’t happen to have heard of a murder?”

The highlighted passage sounds as though it might be echoing some formal written text.  But a few chapters later, when the inspector gets his hands upon the actual murderess -- a Frenchwoman -- he addresses her in less formal terms:

“I’ll give you a piece of advice, and it’s this.  Don’t you talk too much.  You’re not expected to say anything here, and you can’t keep too quiet a tongue in your head.  In short, the less you Parlay, the better, you know.”

The limb of the law who utters these sterling words, is none other than Inspector Bucket, whom duty compels  to arrest a friend.  And here in Bleak House, we have another precedent as well, since Inspector Bucket is regularly cited as a forerunner of the fictional detective, thus helping to launch the whole illustrious genre of the whodunit, in which the island of England long outstripped every other race.  Indeed, the success of that stream of fiction, and the subtlety and decency of English criminal code, are not unrelated.  You would never have an Hercule Poirot in a dictatorship.

Mind what you say, now ...

~

Literary post-note:

The accused in this case, the old trooper George, himself takes a stoic, manly stance towards the warning he has been given:

“I must come off clear and full  or not at all.  Therefore, when I hear stated against me  what is true, I say it’s true;  and when they tell me, ‘whatever you say will be used,’ I tell them I don’t mind that;  I mean it to be used.  If they can’t make me innocent out of the whole truth, they are not likely to do it out of anything less, or anything else.  And if they are, it’s worth nothing to me.”

-- Bleak House, chapter LII

Moreover, he refuses a lawyer:  “I don’t take kindly to the breed.”

Altogether, the old trooper George is one of Dickens’ most admirable creations (or evocations).  And he is brought stunningly to life in the audiobook reading by David Case (a.k.a. Frederick Davidson), who likewise did a memorable job with the related (but still distinct) character of Major Bagstock in in audiobook of Dombey and Son.

~

 For more on Bleak House:

      A scholium ad "A Lost Fragment of 'Our Mutual Friend'"

.

 

A Scholium ad “The Fragment”

[The extraordinary level of public interest, and the unwonted acerbity of critical debate, occasioned by our recent publication of A Lost Fragment of “Our Mutual Friend”,  has led me, on the counsel of colleagues -- not to mention the advice of counsel --  to append a bit of evaluative background.   The following passage is to be appended to our original essay.]

~

Albeit, on the evidence of the handwritten superscription, we may assume that the passage contained in the manuscript  had been intended to figure in a dinner-party scene Our Mutual Friend -- either one of the scenes extant, or one yet to be added -- there exists, in point of style and content, an even more striking resemblance to the subtly charged verbal sparring between Sir Leicester Dedlock and Volumnia, in Chapter 40 of Bleak House.   For it is the kind of fraught, enigmatic depiction à demi-mot, which Dickens rather seldom essayed, but excelled at when he did.  Too, though old Boz, by way of ratcheting up the tension, seldom or never resorted to that classic advice of Raymond Chandler, to the effect that, should the narrative flag, “Have a guy come through the door with a gun” -- still, in that same fortieth chapter of that cool, bleak work, we do suddenly read, against all expectation:

Everybody starts.  For a gun is fired close by.

This odd and otherwise uncharacteristic interruption does then provide a point of comparison with the implied dénouement of the dinner-table rivalry in our new fragment.    These further resemblances should be enough, if any more were needed, to assure all impartial jurors  that the fragment is indeed from the hand of the London master.

This new passage, which it was our happiness and our privilege to discover, and to purchase for a not inconsiderable sum (and whose revelation led to our being offered a chair at Balliol, which we were  however  obliged to decline, owing to advancing age  and declining health), while not so polished as it presumably should have become had it been shepherded along for actual publication, still reveals, in the rough, the outlines of that eristic technician’s steely craft -- he who is  too often  unfairly charged with being a mere sentimentalist.

The consensus of those critics to whom I privately showed-round the manuscript, prior to its revelation on this site, is that, while it certainly does not alter the standing of the author in general, or even of Our Mutual Friend in particular, is still a welcome afterpiece, like a bit of fruit after brandy:  comparable to the recently unearthed new passage in Huckleberry Finn.

http://www.nytimes.com/1991/02/26/books/twain-manuscript-resolves-huck-finn-mysteries.html

A variant and challenging opinion, which we have not the skill to evaluate, was recently put forward by Professor Isaac “Ike” Bickerstaff, of Harvard Yard, to the effect that the passage in question, being actually the purest example of Dickens’ late, flinty, disillusioned style, may have failed to figure in the published version of Our Mutual Friend  for the very good reason that it was penned posterior to that work:  that it may actually have been written  more or less on his deathbed;  certain similarities to the unpublished passages of Edwin Drood are said to strengthen this remarkable conjecture, but since I do not have access to those passages (I have contacted Anton in Geneva, to see what he can do), I cannot comment.

A recent conference, held in Milan,

at which scholars debated the Dickensian “Lost Fragment”

Complicating the picture considerably  is the recent suggestion by a well-known European scholar (who has requested anonymity while his monograph on the matter is at the printer’s), claiming to have discovered (mirabile dictu) a Latin version of this new dinner-party scene.  The guests are in togas instead of evening wear, but otherwise the similarity of content is too close to be coincidental.

Naturally, this raises questions as to the stemmatological authenticity of the purported “Latin original”.  Cognoscenti will be immediately reminded of the controversy, not long ago, which attended our discovery of the manuscript of a Lost Sonnet of Saint Augustine (in the original Latin), whose genuineness was soon established beyond reproof, though it continues to be doubted by blackguards, knaves, vivisectionists, and cranks.

There exist but two possibilities.

(1)  The Latin version is posterior to the Dickens fragment -- and therefore pointless.  Of course, other pointless translations have been attested, and on a much larger scale -- witness the rendering of the entire Bible, Old Testament and New, into LOLcats language!  But more importantly, if the alleged Latin precursor is not genuine, why would a scholar with the international reputation of Professor N.  devote an entire monograph to the subject, risking ridicule if he is wrong?

(2)  The Latin version is anterior to the Dickens fragment -- and therefore authentic.  But in that case, criticism must confess itself at a loss.  That the mature, inimitable Dickens style, seen to such brilliant advantage in the “Veneering” fragment, could by any means have been anticipated by some medieval clerk, beggars credulity.  But again, stranger things have happened, many of them in Las Vegas.

~

~  Posthumous Endorsement ~

"Alas, I never lived to finish 'Edwin Drood';

but if I were alive today, and in the mood for a mystery,

this is what I'd be reading: "

I Don't Do Divorce Cases

Murphy on the Mount.

(My name is Charles Dickens, and I approved this message.)

~         ~

~

For a complete list of our unique discoveries  in the matter of incunabula,
click  here.

Update to the “Lost Fragment”

It has come to our attention that certain unsavory elements, as deficient in judgment as in personal hygiene, have dared cast aspersions upon the otherwise universally acknowledged authenticity of the “Lost Fragment of ‘Our Mutual Friend’”,  which it was our good fortune to have had the privilege of revealing  to an expectant world.  Certain so-called “graphological experts” -- well, we shall not weary you with the details.

In trenchant refutation of all such criticasters, herewith attested samples of (on the left) an undoubted Dickensian manuscript;  and, on the right, that of the fragment in question, which came into our possession (d’une manière  un tant soit peut  rocambolesque)  in one of the back-streets of Geneva:

No sane man could doubt  that these are from the same hand

.

“The Powers Problem”

Jim Holt has a review today of the latest Richard Powers novel:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/12/books/review/orfeo-by-richard-powers.html?ref=books

Back in Princeton, back in the day, I read one of the earlier works by that author, who had a reputation for braininess.   A brainy novel is not necessarily any good, but I had greatly enjoyed The Mind-Body Problem, by the philosopher Rebecca Goldstein, and wrote to our local municipal reference librarian thus:

> I just finished reading Richard Powers' "Gold Bug Variations", which you

> would like -- its heroine is a reference librarian!  And its hero is a

> biochemist.  Now, novels that have science front-and-center (and I mean real

> science, not science fictions) are comparatively rare.  "Arrowsmith" comes to

> mind, but... can you give me the names of any other novels that are

> fundamentally about the practice of science?  Thanks.

She replied, delightfully, by return of post:

Here are a few titles that I have unearthed thus far... I will pass this question

on to other staff members next week and see what other suggestions turn up. Hope

one or two of these titles will suit your needs -- a * indicates that we own the

title:

*"Mendel's Dwarf" by Simon Mawer

*"The Calcutta Chromosome" by Amitav Ghosh

*"Darwin's Shooter" by Roger McDonald

Books from a series by novelist/scientist Carl Djerassi (we have only the first

in the series):

   *The Cantor's Dilemma

     The Bourbaki Gambit

     Menachem's Seed

     No

You may also want to have a look at "Darwin's Ghost" by Steve Jones... it is not

a novel, but it has had great reviews. It is a reworking and update of "The

Origins of Species" that is by all accounts infinitely more readable than

Darwin's original.

Oh, and Thanks for the recommendation of "Gold Bug Variations" -- it sounds like

a great

and I shall add it to my "to read" list.

Regards,

Janie

After that, I read a couple more by Powers, then gave up.  Something was just missing.  (The Ghosh thing proved also not worth the effort.)   I never was inspired to write even something as long as thoughtful as the Holt review;  but here are a couple of notes from back then, FWIW:

"Fielding followed Swift and Pope in deflating the pride of scientists." (Jones, The Rhetoric of Science, 76.)

     For some reason, science has fared better in poetry – of all places! -- from the time of Lucretius onwards.

Powers himself brings in Dickens, referring rather slightingly to "a cheery little Dickens book about the criminally destitute" (Wandering Soul 272).  Dickens never wrote a cheery little book about anything, let alone the "criminally destitute" (whatever that is exactly).  He wrote one mostly cheery big book, whose animal spirits skillfully distract the reader from quite taking in the sharpness of the underlying satire; but after Pickwick Papers he really wrote no book that could be called either cheery or little.  His reputation for superficial joviality must be based largely on half-remembered inexpert or sugared stagings (in school auditoria, isn't junior adorable) of "A Christmas Carol", which  even in its written form  is the least of his works.