1876, 1966 Harper Colophon edition
George Eliot
Daniel Deronda
Original price unknown, bought used for $5.95
Somewhat tattered paperback
B-
Eliot's last novel is a denser, more pain-filled book than Silas Marner or Middlemarch. I used to own Mill on the Floss and Romola, but I enjoyed them less because they were Eliot at her most earnest. This is somewhere in between. I do agree with F. R. Leavis's introduction, that Gwendolyn is an achievement and the "Deronda" parts of the novel are weaker, although I disagree that Daniel himself is unbelievable. Like Rosamond Vincy, Gwendolyn is a spoiled young beauty with a swan-like, or perhaps serpent-like, neck. Yet, she's always a sympathetic character, even when we don't like her actions or thoughts. She is self-centred but capable of devotion to her mother and empathy for Grandcourt's mistress and children. Even when she thinks murderous thoughts of her husband, she does try to save him from drowning.
As for the "Deronda" thread, while it's interesting to see Zionism portrayed sympathetically by a Victorian Protestant turned Agnostic, I got tired of Mordecai and everything relating to him. The part about Daniel's search for his identity, including his parentage, intrigued me more. But his mother's frustration as a female artist makes it seem like there are no good options for women, Gwendolen and Mirah the singer included. Indeed, even though the story ends in a wedding, it's not at all a happy ending. On the other hand, there are points, in the first 100 or so pages in particular, that are closer to Eliot's Middlemarch tone of dryness and social observation.
Ironically, she mocks both Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë indirectly. On p. 65, she observes, "Some readers of this history will doubtless regard it as incredible that people should construct matrimonial prospects on the mere report that a bachelor of good fortune and possibilities was coming within reach, and will reject the statement as a mere outflow of gall: they will aver that neither they nor their first cousins have minds so unbridled; and that in fact this is not human nature, which would know that such speculations might turn out to be fallacious, and would therefore not entertain them." This reading I picked up that she was disagreeing that "it's a truth universally acknowledged." And about 50 pages later she comments on the portrayal of governesses in fiction, clearly invoking Jane Eyre among other works.
This edition has a faux-woodcut look to the front and back covers, so that the people, horses, and manor are filled with circles and straight lines. It looks very dated, in a 1960s way more than 1870s.
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
The Hunting of the Snark
1876
Lewis Carroll
The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in Eight Fits
B+
Although this contains some of the vocabulary of "Jabberwocky," I wouldn't call it a children's poem. Take this recurring stanza:
They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care
They pursued it with forks and hope
They threatened its life with a railway-share
They charmed it with smiles and soap.
It's much funnier to me at 43 than it would've been 35 years ago. The absurdism of the poem, including that several professions are on board the ship and then there's a beaver who knits, feels different than the absurdism of the "Alice" stories. And of course the modern use of "snark," which urbandictionary.com says is a combination of "snide" and "remark" (making it a Carrollian portmanteau), seems more adult or at least adolescent than childish. The Snark here is a mythical beast who's pursued in Moby Dick fashion but, alas, turns out to be the dreaded Boojum. As in Wonderland, there's a ridiculous trial, in this case of a pig who turns out to be dead.
The rhymes are delightful, my favorites being in this stanza:
"What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators,
Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?"
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply,
"They are merely conventional signs!"
The poem seems to be begging to be read aloud, and I'd love to hear recommendations of good readings on Youtube and elsewhere.
Lewis Carroll
The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in Eight Fits
B+
Although this contains some of the vocabulary of "Jabberwocky," I wouldn't call it a children's poem. Take this recurring stanza:
They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care
They pursued it with forks and hope
They threatened its life with a railway-share
They charmed it with smiles and soap.
It's much funnier to me at 43 than it would've been 35 years ago. The absurdism of the poem, including that several professions are on board the ship and then there's a beaver who knits, feels different than the absurdism of the "Alice" stories. And of course the modern use of "snark," which urbandictionary.com says is a combination of "snide" and "remark" (making it a Carrollian portmanteau), seems more adult or at least adolescent than childish. The Snark here is a mythical beast who's pursued in Moby Dick fashion but, alas, turns out to be the dreaded Boojum. As in Wonderland, there's a ridiculous trial, in this case of a pig who turns out to be dead.
The rhymes are delightful, my favorites being in this stanza:
"What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators,
Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?"
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply,
"They are merely conventional signs!"
The poem seems to be begging to be read aloud, and I'd love to hear recommendations of good readings on Youtube and elsewhere.
Eight Cousins
1875, 1976 Grosset & Dunlap edition
Louisa May Alcott
Eight Cousins, or The Aunt-Hill
Bought new for $3.95
A couple food stains (macaroni & cheese?) and tattered bookjacket, otherwise good condition hardcover
B-
I got this book from my aunt for Christmas 1976, as the note on the inside cover tells me. I remember getting The Wizard of Oz from her on another Christmas, maybe the previous year. I went on to become a huge Oz fan, but I never took to this book in the same way. I'm finding that the non-Little-Women children's books by Alcott are pleasant but not as memorable. For instance, I'd totally forgotten about the way Alcott plays with Chinese stereotypes in this book, so that I'm pretty sure she's mocking them and embracing them at the same time.
As for the main plot, 13-year-old orphan Rose has been living with her great-aunts for a year after the death of her father (her mother having died long ago), but now her Uncle Alec is coming to town to be her guardian. Meanwhile, she has seven boy cousins that she's somehow not seen much of, although they all live locally and are about to become ubiquitous. Lessons are learned, including that sensation stories are worse than cigars, and earrings and corsets are bad for health and vanity. Uncle Alec encourages her to learn both housework and physiology.
So how does this "Rose" compare to the "Rose" of A Long Fatal Love Chase? Well, Rosamond Vivian "sells her soul" for and gets a year of freedom but then the rest of her short life is spent running from her possessive "husband," until she dies in a boating accident he causes. Rose Campbell is the subject of Uncle Alec's bet that he can be a good guardian for a year. During that time, she agrees to trust his judgment but is allowed to tell him if his changes make her unhappy. She becomes not only happier but healthier and more outgoing. She also becomes a positive force in the lives of her cousins, and to a lesser degree her aunts. (She has four regular aunts as well as the two great-aunts.)
In Rose in Bloom (1876), which I've read once or twice but don't own, Rose comes out in society and as a beautiful, rich heiress is sought as a wife, including by two of her cousins.
Louisa May Alcott
Eight Cousins, or The Aunt-Hill
Bought new for $3.95
A couple food stains (macaroni & cheese?) and tattered bookjacket, otherwise good condition hardcover
B-
I got this book from my aunt for Christmas 1976, as the note on the inside cover tells me. I remember getting The Wizard of Oz from her on another Christmas, maybe the previous year. I went on to become a huge Oz fan, but I never took to this book in the same way. I'm finding that the non-Little-Women children's books by Alcott are pleasant but not as memorable. For instance, I'd totally forgotten about the way Alcott plays with Chinese stereotypes in this book, so that I'm pretty sure she's mocking them and embracing them at the same time.
As for the main plot, 13-year-old orphan Rose has been living with her great-aunts for a year after the death of her father (her mother having died long ago), but now her Uncle Alec is coming to town to be her guardian. Meanwhile, she has seven boy cousins that she's somehow not seen much of, although they all live locally and are about to become ubiquitous. Lessons are learned, including that sensation stories are worse than cigars, and earrings and corsets are bad for health and vanity. Uncle Alec encourages her to learn both housework and physiology.
So how does this "Rose" compare to the "Rose" of A Long Fatal Love Chase? Well, Rosamond Vivian "sells her soul" for and gets a year of freedom but then the rest of her short life is spent running from her possessive "husband," until she dies in a boating accident he causes. Rose Campbell is the subject of Uncle Alec's bet that he can be a good guardian for a year. During that time, she agrees to trust his judgment but is allowed to tell him if his changes make her unhappy. She becomes not only happier but healthier and more outgoing. She also becomes a positive force in the lives of her cousins, and to a lesser degree her aunts. (She has four regular aunts as well as the two great-aunts.)
In Rose in Bloom (1876), which I've read once or twice but don't own, Rose comes out in society and as a beautiful, rich heiress is sought as a wife, including by two of her cousins.
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Around the World in Eighty Days
1873, 1956 Great Illustrated Classics (Dodd, Mead & Company) edition
Jules Verne, translated by George M. Towle
Around the World in Eighty Days
Original and purchase price unknown
Slightly worn hardcover
B-
Not as good as Journey to the Centre of the Earth, although the second half, with its journey across the U.S. and its twist of an ending, is better than the first half, with the detour in India. As Anthony Boucher notes in the introduction, Verne is "less than accurate in depicting the Hindu or the Mormon religion." There's definitely a sense of colonialism in the novel, with its celebration of English imperialism and the depiction of both kinds of "Indians" as savages. (Sioux warriors attack the train and kidnap Passepartout.) Also, because of the rushed nature of the travels and the unemotional personality of Phileas (not Phineas) Fogg, I feel more removed from the journey than in JttCotE. I haven't seen a movie adaptation, not even the "major film version" that the introduction says is forthcoming (it would go on to win five Oscars), but I suspect that I would get more sense of the journey if there were a visual element.
As for that twist, it is ironic because Fogg is so precise, particularly about time, and yet he's forgotten that travelling east, the days are getting shorter and he "gains" a day by constantly resetting his watch. His servant Passepartout keeps his watch on London time (despite being French) and "it would have betrayed this fact, if it had marked the days as well as the hours and minutes."
This book is of course a celebration of then modern technology, although there are times when Fogg and his companions must get around by elephant, sledge, and their own feet. The journey could now be made in much less than eighty days, but it's still impressive.
This edition has a pleasant, smooth translation, with the charming footnote: "A somewhat remarkable eccentricity on the part of the London clocks!", when they all strike ten minutes before nine. There are "biographical illustrations and drawings reproduced from early editions," which add appeal, although it does annoy me that one of them spoils Aouda's fate. The love interest is India-Indian but fair-skinned and educated like an Englishwoman, so we know it's OK that (spoiler) Fogg marries her. Like I said, it's a very colonial book, although I guess Fogg and Passepartout are English and French stereotypes respectively.
Jules Verne, translated by George M. Towle
Around the World in Eighty Days
Original and purchase price unknown
Slightly worn hardcover
B-
Not as good as Journey to the Centre of the Earth, although the second half, with its journey across the U.S. and its twist of an ending, is better than the first half, with the detour in India. As Anthony Boucher notes in the introduction, Verne is "less than accurate in depicting the Hindu or the Mormon religion." There's definitely a sense of colonialism in the novel, with its celebration of English imperialism and the depiction of both kinds of "Indians" as savages. (Sioux warriors attack the train and kidnap Passepartout.) Also, because of the rushed nature of the travels and the unemotional personality of Phileas (not Phineas) Fogg, I feel more removed from the journey than in JttCotE. I haven't seen a movie adaptation, not even the "major film version" that the introduction says is forthcoming (it would go on to win five Oscars), but I suspect that I would get more sense of the journey if there were a visual element.
As for that twist, it is ironic because Fogg is so precise, particularly about time, and yet he's forgotten that travelling east, the days are getting shorter and he "gains" a day by constantly resetting his watch. His servant Passepartout keeps his watch on London time (despite being French) and "it would have betrayed this fact, if it had marked the days as well as the hours and minutes."
This book is of course a celebration of then modern technology, although there are times when Fogg and his companions must get around by elephant, sledge, and their own feet. The journey could now be made in much less than eighty days, but it's still impressive.
This edition has a pleasant, smooth translation, with the charming footnote: "A somewhat remarkable eccentricity on the part of the London clocks!", when they all strike ten minutes before nine. There are "biographical illustrations and drawings reproduced from early editions," which add appeal, although it does annoy me that one of them spoils Aouda's fate. The love interest is India-Indian but fair-skinned and educated like an Englishwoman, so we know it's OK that (spoiler) Fogg marries her. Like I said, it's a very colonial book, although I guess Fogg and Passepartout are English and French stereotypes respectively.
Middlemarch
1872, 1964 Signet Classics edition
George Eliot
Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life
Original and purchase price unknown
Falling apart paperback
B+
The whole time I was reading Shirley, I kept thinking, "Middlemarch did this so much better." By "this" I meant romance, friendship, family, community, and history of an era about 40 years previous to its time, including both the reaction of workers to the Industrial Revolution and the dilemma of young middle-class women. Middlemarch is like a very intelligent soap opera, with its interwoven tales of the lives in a slightly pre-Victorian (1829 to 1832) mid-sized Midlands town. After 800 pages, we know who many of the citizens are, what they think and feel, what they do for a living, who they love and hate, and in some cases what they eat and wear.
I described the two romances in Shirley as "icky." I can't say that all of the four romances in Middlemarch are appealing, but they're much more complex and believable. Eliot even musters sympathy for Mr. Casaubon, the dry-as-dust first husband of idealistic Dorothea. The young widow goes on to fall in love with and marry Will Ladislaw, whom Frank Kermode in his afterword sees as a "failure" by the author. I remember Kate Millett in Sexual Politics saying that Dorothea deserves a better fate than just being secretary to her husbands. The thing is, Dorothea doesn't have a lot of options, and she doesn't have the right personality to change the world as she wishes. She draws plans of housing for the poor, and yet she's never studied architecture. I'm not crazy about Will either-- it always annoys the heck out of me that he does "Hello, I must be going" for two or three hundred pages-- but he probably is the best option in town, particularly since Dr. Lydgate is taken.
Almost as soon as Lydgate is introduced, he makes a disclaimer to the reader that beautiful but earnest Dorothea isn't his type. He prefers and marries beautiful but shallow Rosamond. Since they both have champagne taste on a beer income (or maybe cider?), they get into debt. She only makes matters worse by trying to get help from the wrong people. The narrator/Eliot doesn't have much sympathy for her, partly because she has a swan-like neck (more about this when I get up to Daniel Deronda), and even blames her for her miscarriage. In the end, saintly Dorothea reconciles them, although they're never really a happy couple, as the "Finale" informs us.
On the other hand, Mary and Fred "may be seen in white-haired placidity," even now in 1872. She's so plain that her mother-in-law Mrs. Vincy is relieved that only one of the three grandsons "favors the Garths." Mary is also sharp-tongued, like her own mother, who ironically always speaks in favor of the submission of women to men, particularly husbands. Mary's father though is the easiest-going man in the novel, except for maybe Mr. Cadwallader, the rector. Even when Mr. Garth quits a job on moral grounds, he's incredibly nice about it.
He quits the job because of the great hypocrisy of Mr. Bulstrode. In the thread about Bulstrode, and how it affects Lydgate, we see the effect of rumours in a town. This isn't just the villagers chatting at the pub in Silas Marner. This is gossip by everyone everywhere, and it can ruin lives.
As for the historical aspect of the novel, Eliot convincingly recreates the world of her preteens. We see how common people reacted to the coming of the railway. We see how the upper class reacted to reform. And we see what law, medicine, and religion were like in rural England. Amusingly, auctioneers apparently haven't changed in the past two centuries, since Trumbull's patter is instantly recognizable.
I'm also amused that, like Little Women, there's a Mr. Brooks/Brooke and a "Dodo." While Mr. Brooks is a "poor" tutor turned hard-working businessman, Mr. Brooke is a talkative dilettante who thinks he's an intellectual and a wily politician. "Dodo" is the name that Jo March's niece and nephew call her by, while here it's Celia's nickname for her sister Dorothea. Does this imply that both Dodos are of extinct types? Dorothea's nickname for Celia is "Kitty," which doesn't even come close, like Catherine sort of does. I think it's more because of Celia's persona, since the narrator compares her to a kitten at one point and she has a "guttural" voice.
This being Signet Classics, there are of course typos, although not as bad as sometimes. I did notice two instances where a line of text is out of place.
George Eliot
Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life
Original and purchase price unknown
Falling apart paperback
B+
The whole time I was reading Shirley, I kept thinking, "Middlemarch did this so much better." By "this" I meant romance, friendship, family, community, and history of an era about 40 years previous to its time, including both the reaction of workers to the Industrial Revolution and the dilemma of young middle-class women. Middlemarch is like a very intelligent soap opera, with its interwoven tales of the lives in a slightly pre-Victorian (1829 to 1832) mid-sized Midlands town. After 800 pages, we know who many of the citizens are, what they think and feel, what they do for a living, who they love and hate, and in some cases what they eat and wear.
I described the two romances in Shirley as "icky." I can't say that all of the four romances in Middlemarch are appealing, but they're much more complex and believable. Eliot even musters sympathy for Mr. Casaubon, the dry-as-dust first husband of idealistic Dorothea. The young widow goes on to fall in love with and marry Will Ladislaw, whom Frank Kermode in his afterword sees as a "failure" by the author. I remember Kate Millett in Sexual Politics saying that Dorothea deserves a better fate than just being secretary to her husbands. The thing is, Dorothea doesn't have a lot of options, and she doesn't have the right personality to change the world as she wishes. She draws plans of housing for the poor, and yet she's never studied architecture. I'm not crazy about Will either-- it always annoys the heck out of me that he does "Hello, I must be going" for two or three hundred pages-- but he probably is the best option in town, particularly since Dr. Lydgate is taken.
Almost as soon as Lydgate is introduced, he makes a disclaimer to the reader that beautiful but earnest Dorothea isn't his type. He prefers and marries beautiful but shallow Rosamond. Since they both have champagne taste on a beer income (or maybe cider?), they get into debt. She only makes matters worse by trying to get help from the wrong people. The narrator/Eliot doesn't have much sympathy for her, partly because she has a swan-like neck (more about this when I get up to Daniel Deronda), and even blames her for her miscarriage. In the end, saintly Dorothea reconciles them, although they're never really a happy couple, as the "Finale" informs us.
On the other hand, Mary and Fred "may be seen in white-haired placidity," even now in 1872. She's so plain that her mother-in-law Mrs. Vincy is relieved that only one of the three grandsons "favors the Garths." Mary is also sharp-tongued, like her own mother, who ironically always speaks in favor of the submission of women to men, particularly husbands. Mary's father though is the easiest-going man in the novel, except for maybe Mr. Cadwallader, the rector. Even when Mr. Garth quits a job on moral grounds, he's incredibly nice about it.
He quits the job because of the great hypocrisy of Mr. Bulstrode. In the thread about Bulstrode, and how it affects Lydgate, we see the effect of rumours in a town. This isn't just the villagers chatting at the pub in Silas Marner. This is gossip by everyone everywhere, and it can ruin lives.
As for the historical aspect of the novel, Eliot convincingly recreates the world of her preteens. We see how common people reacted to the coming of the railway. We see how the upper class reacted to reform. And we see what law, medicine, and religion were like in rural England. Amusingly, auctioneers apparently haven't changed in the past two centuries, since Trumbull's patter is instantly recognizable.
I'm also amused that, like Little Women, there's a Mr. Brooks/Brooke and a "Dodo." While Mr. Brooks is a "poor" tutor turned hard-working businessman, Mr. Brooke is a talkative dilettante who thinks he's an intellectual and a wily politician. "Dodo" is the name that Jo March's niece and nephew call her by, while here it's Celia's nickname for her sister Dorothea. Does this imply that both Dodos are of extinct types? Dorothea's nickname for Celia is "Kitty," which doesn't even come close, like Catherine sort of does. I think it's more because of Celia's persona, since the narrator compares her to a kitten at one point and she has a "guttural" voice.
This being Signet Classics, there are of course typos, although not as bad as sometimes. I did notice two instances where a line of text is out of place.
Friday, February 10, 2012
Through the Looking Glass
1872
Lewis Carroll
Illustrated by John Tenniel
Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There
B
OK, so it turns out that I don't like this sequel as much as the original. Tenniel is as awesome as ever, and there's wordplay (like a pun on cutting food and cutting [snubbing] acquaintances) and absurdism, but it doesn't jell for me as much as the first "Alice" book. The chess game gives it more structure, but I've never really understood chess, so some of this may be lost on me. Some of the poetry is forgettable but I enjoy the multi-titled Knight's poem, the "Welcome Queen Alice" song, and of course "Jabberwocky" and "The Walrus and the Carpenter."
I like that Alice meets some comparatively nice people, like the Knight and the White Queen. And I've always loved that two-paragraph-long Chapter Ten is followed by a chapter that's one-sentence-long, with Tenniel changing the Red Queen to the black kitten. (This was before the inspired four-chapter sequence in New Moon where Stephenie Meyer lists months.) As a child, I pored over the back to back illustrations of Alice halfway through the looking glass. And yet, it's only on this reading that I realized that the "beamish boy" in the "Jabberwocky" picture looks like an adolescent girl (the figure and the long hair with a ribbon). Since the warrior has striped stockings, perhaps it's meant to be Alice in a few years.
By the way, it's always a shock that Alice is only 7 1/2, meaning she would've been about 7 in the first book, and she definitely doesn't sound like even the most precocious 7-year-olds I've heard. It makes me feel like Carroll didn't want us to take "the real world" much more seriously than Wonderland or Looking-Glass-Land.
In many adaptations, the two "Alice" stories are merged, so I sometimes have trouble remembering what happens in which. This is the one with Humpty Dumpty making words mean what he wants them to mean, an attitude that, like the "backwards" opinions in Erewhon, feels surprisingly contemporary. Perhaps the modern world is just a mirror image of the Victorian world.
I've now done more posts on the 1800s than any other century. The 1900s will of course break this record, but it's worth noting, especially as I'm not even done with 1872....
Lewis Carroll
Illustrated by John Tenniel
Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There
B
OK, so it turns out that I don't like this sequel as much as the original. Tenniel is as awesome as ever, and there's wordplay (like a pun on cutting food and cutting [snubbing] acquaintances) and absurdism, but it doesn't jell for me as much as the first "Alice" book. The chess game gives it more structure, but I've never really understood chess, so some of this may be lost on me. Some of the poetry is forgettable but I enjoy the multi-titled Knight's poem, the "Welcome Queen Alice" song, and of course "Jabberwocky" and "The Walrus and the Carpenter."
I like that Alice meets some comparatively nice people, like the Knight and the White Queen. And I've always loved that two-paragraph-long Chapter Ten is followed by a chapter that's one-sentence-long, with Tenniel changing the Red Queen to the black kitten. (This was before the inspired four-chapter sequence in New Moon where Stephenie Meyer lists months.) As a child, I pored over the back to back illustrations of Alice halfway through the looking glass. And yet, it's only on this reading that I realized that the "beamish boy" in the "Jabberwocky" picture looks like an adolescent girl (the figure and the long hair with a ribbon). Since the warrior has striped stockings, perhaps it's meant to be Alice in a few years.
By the way, it's always a shock that Alice is only 7 1/2, meaning she would've been about 7 in the first book, and she definitely doesn't sound like even the most precocious 7-year-olds I've heard. It makes me feel like Carroll didn't want us to take "the real world" much more seriously than Wonderland or Looking-Glass-Land.
In many adaptations, the two "Alice" stories are merged, so I sometimes have trouble remembering what happens in which. This is the one with Humpty Dumpty making words mean what he wants them to mean, an attitude that, like the "backwards" opinions in Erewhon, feels surprisingly contemporary. Perhaps the modern world is just a mirror image of the Victorian world.
I've now done more posts on the 1800s than any other century. The 1900s will of course break this record, but it's worth noting, especially as I'm not even done with 1872....
Erewhon
1872, 1927 Modern Library edition
Samuel Butler
Erewhon, or Over the Range
Original price unknown, bought used obviously for $4.00
Surprisingly good condition hardcover
B
The name of the novel and its land is almost "nowhere" backwards, and some of the other names are similarly reversed, like "Yram" and "Ydgrun." (The latter is for Mrs. Grundy, the symbol of stodgy, judgmental values.) Butler did the same thing to the Victorian English culture he knew so well as the son of a clergyman. He satirized it by sort of reversing its assumptions. What's odd for a modern reader is not knowing exactly how to take the satire. For instance, in Erewhon illness is criminal and crime is just a sickness. Nowadays, there are people who believe that criminals are victims of society, and there are people who believe it's your fault if you're sick, even if you have cancer. Were these attitudes coming into being as long ago as 140 years?
Lewis Mumford writes in the introduction, "Butler's wildest jokes are nearer to present-day truths than many sober Victorian platitudes. His straighteners are our psychoanalysts and psychiatrists...." If this was true in 1927, it's even more true in 2012. Butler's three chapters from The Book of the Machines, with the fearful discussion of machines becoming more sophisticated and conscious, definitely seems prescient.
The chapter on "the rights of animals," followed by "the rights of vegetables," takes vegetarianism and veganism to extremes, but the thing is, so do some modern diets. It's also clear that meat-eating is on one level symbolic of sex, with everyone sneaking some on the side, and "a young man of promising amiable disposition" being told by his doctor to "eat meat, law or no law," yet feeling guilty about it, till "he stole secretly on a dark night into one of those dens in which meat was surreptitiously sold." He takes it home and cooks it in his bedroom but is filled with "remorse and shame." He goes back many times, despite guilt, until he's caught by the authorities. In the end, the "poor boy" hangs himself.
Similarly, as Mumford notes, the Musical Banks are a satire on both modern religion and modern banking, and yet a more modern (post-modern?) reader than the original Modern Library reader is going to see religion and banking in a different way than in the 1920s.
Butler spends too much time explaining how he got to and about in Erewhon (Swift was much better at that sort of thing), but the actual substance of the satire is good. I remember preferring the sequel, but that wasn't published till 1901, so we've got a long wait till I can compare the two.
Samuel Butler
Erewhon, or Over the Range
Original price unknown, bought used obviously for $4.00
Surprisingly good condition hardcover
B
The name of the novel and its land is almost "nowhere" backwards, and some of the other names are similarly reversed, like "Yram" and "Ydgrun." (The latter is for Mrs. Grundy, the symbol of stodgy, judgmental values.) Butler did the same thing to the Victorian English culture he knew so well as the son of a clergyman. He satirized it by sort of reversing its assumptions. What's odd for a modern reader is not knowing exactly how to take the satire. For instance, in Erewhon illness is criminal and crime is just a sickness. Nowadays, there are people who believe that criminals are victims of society, and there are people who believe it's your fault if you're sick, even if you have cancer. Were these attitudes coming into being as long ago as 140 years?
Lewis Mumford writes in the introduction, "Butler's wildest jokes are nearer to present-day truths than many sober Victorian platitudes. His straighteners are our psychoanalysts and psychiatrists...." If this was true in 1927, it's even more true in 2012. Butler's three chapters from The Book of the Machines, with the fearful discussion of machines becoming more sophisticated and conscious, definitely seems prescient.
The chapter on "the rights of animals," followed by "the rights of vegetables," takes vegetarianism and veganism to extremes, but the thing is, so do some modern diets. It's also clear that meat-eating is on one level symbolic of sex, with everyone sneaking some on the side, and "a young man of promising amiable disposition" being told by his doctor to "eat meat, law or no law," yet feeling guilty about it, till "he stole secretly on a dark night into one of those dens in which meat was surreptitiously sold." He takes it home and cooks it in his bedroom but is filled with "remorse and shame." He goes back many times, despite guilt, until he's caught by the authorities. In the end, the "poor boy" hangs himself.
Similarly, as Mumford notes, the Musical Banks are a satire on both modern religion and modern banking, and yet a more modern (post-modern?) reader than the original Modern Library reader is going to see religion and banking in a different way than in the 1920s.
Butler spends too much time explaining how he got to and about in Erewhon (Swift was much better at that sort of thing), but the actual substance of the satire is good. I remember preferring the sequel, but that wasn't published till 1901, so we've got a long wait till I can compare the two.
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