by Paul Morley
‘Weighted with significance though this action was,’ he wrote, ‘it would have felt more conclusive had the ribbon been heavier. As it was, the poor little thing fell weakly on to the water and floated away as though aware of its own futility . . . Watching a big boat which was steaming along the horizon, I realised that protesting against the prolongation of the war was about as much use as shouting at the people on board that ship.’
At the Liverpool end, opened up to the world, the river opens up the world, for better or worse bringing out there into the north, and letting the north reach out there. It puts on a hell of a performance, bringing rhythm in, sending rhythm out. The Mersey, which has risen in the east, blinking into drizzly daylight at the sodden edges of the gloomily beautiful Pennines, hastening or pacing itself across the milds of Cheshire and underneath looming Lancashire, viewed by British Hindus as the British version of the Ganges, drifts free of land and responsibility in the west, kissing the spirited Irish Sea, which has so much it wants to show the liberated river – a river that has ceased to be, fresh water mixing with salt – but now has the most extraordinary afterlife to enjoy and which inspired the most extraordinary city to make itself up and make history.
84.1
1770
When Arthur Young toured northern England in 1770, he travelled on horseback. Because so few boats were available for hire, he had trouble using canals. He complained at the state of the road from Wigan to Lancaster via Preston, writing: ‘Let me seriously caution all travellers to avoid it as they would the devil – they will have met with ruts four feet deep and floating with mud. The only mending it receives is the tumbling in of loose stones which serve no other purpose than jolting a carriage in the most objectionable manner.’
In 1770 the town of Bolton was described as ‘a district almost rural, an idyll made up of bleaching crofts, orchards and garden cottages’ – a very quaint-sounding place, but within thirty years water-powered textile mills and engineering works had drastically altered the landscape.
1769
The deeply delicate pre-Romantic poet and classical scholar Thomas Gray (1716–71), coiner of ‘Where ignorance is bliss . . .’, visited the Lake District and was one of the first major literary figures to write about it, positively marvelling at the mountains’ ‘dreadful bulk’. His prose about the Lakes, which he described as ‘charmed,’ was published posthumously in 1775 and influenced William Wordsworth.
‘On one side a towering crag, that spired up to equal, if not overtop, the neighbouring cliffs (this lay all in shade & darkness), on the other hand a rounder broader projecting hill shagged with wood & illumined by the sun, which glanced sideways on the upper part of the cataract. The force of the water wearing a deep channel in the ground hurries away to join the lake. We descended again, & passed the stream over a rude bridge. Soon after we came under Gowder crag, a hill more formidable to the eye & to the apprehension than that of Lodoor; the rocks atop, deep-cloven perpendicularly by the rains, hanging loose & nodding forwards, seem just starting from their base in shivers: the whole way down & the road on both sides is strewed with piles of the fragments strangely thrown across each other . . .’
The breakthrough came in 1769, when Richard Arkwright, a Preston barber and wig maker, patented a machine for roller spinning – drawing the thread through pairs of rollers. He had heard about attempts to produce new machines for the textile industry and in 1762 met John Kay, a clockmaker from Warrington, who had been busy for some time trying to perfect a new spinning machine with Thomas Highs. Kay and Highs had run out of money and been forced to abandon the project. Arkwright was impressed by Kay and offered to employ him to build the machine. He also recruited other local craftsmen to help, and it was not long before the team produced the spinning frame. Arkwright’s machine involved three sets of paired rollers which turned at different speeds. While these rollers produced yarn of the correct thickness, a set of spindles twisted the fibres firmly together. The machine was able to produce a thread far stronger than that made by the jenny. The invention of Arkwright’s water frame in 1769 transformed spinning, enabling ninety-six threads to be spun at once. Mass production of cotton cloth in Lancashire made it available to the masses in Britain and then around the world.
. . . a large and handsome town occupying three hills and three valleys which are so serpentine as to form many pleasing prospects of churches, pieces of water, with the large silk mills belonging to the chief tradesmen of the place . . .
Description of Stockport in the 1769 edition of Defoe’s Tour
1766
An accident is said to have given a Lancashire spinner, James Hargreaves, the idea for the first mechanical improvement of the spinning process. In about 1764 he noticed an overturned spinning wheel which continued to turn with the spindle vertical rather than horizontal. This gave him the idea that several spindles could be worked simultaneously from a wheel in this position. In 1766 he invented the spinning jenny, which, by fixing a handle to the spinning wheel, enabled a single workman to turn six or eight threads simultaneously and still work at home. This should have rendered the spinning wheel obsolete, but he lacked the market awareness to capitalise on his invention. In 1768 domestic spinners wrecked his home. To escape trouble he moved to Nottingham and opened a jenny workshop there, but he soon went bankrupt.
Tenterhooks were used as far back as the fourteenth century in the process of making woollen cloth. After the cloth had been woven it still contained oil from the fleece and some dirt. It was cleaned in a fulling mill and then had to be dried carefully as wool shrinks. To prevent this shrinkage, the wet cloth would be placed on a large wooden frame, a ‘tenter’, and left to dry outside. The lengths of wet cloth were stretched on the tenter (from the Latin tendere, to stretch) using hooks (nails driven through the wood) all around the perimeter of the frame to which the cloth’s edges (selvages) were fixed so that as it dried the cloth would retain its shape and size. The wool was hung on tenterhooks. So if you were very tense, like stretched cloth, you were on tenterhooks.
Part Six
A leap forward through the past
I didn’t think – I experimented.
Anthony Burgess
Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine, the life, the soul of reading! Take them out and one cold eternal winter would reign in every page. Restore them to the writer – he steps forth like a bridegroom, bids them all-hail, brings in variety and forbids the appetite to fail.
Laurence Sterne
84.2
The seventy-second Archbishop of York (1664–83) and master of Jesus College, Cambridge, Richard Sterne is one candidate among many for the author of The Whole Duty of Man, often considered the most influential work of Restoration pastoral theology. The subtitle is worth noting: laid down in a plain and familiar way for the use of all, but especially the meanest reader. Divided into XVII. chapters; one whereof being read every Lord’s Day, the whole may be read over thrice in the year. Necessary for all families. With private devotions for several occasions.
Richard Sterne was the great-grandfather of Laurence Sterne, born in 1713 in Ireland, who spent the first twenty-five years of his adult life in obscurity as a Yorkshire clergyman, became a prebendary of York Minster and preached throughout the Vale of York and the East Riding. A squabble concerning Church preferments inspired Sterne to compose a short satirical pamphlet, A Political Romance, published in December 1758. It was immediately suppressed by Sterne’s superiors: only six copies are said to have survived.
Between 1759 and 1767 Sterne wrote in eight instalments one of those books often claimed to be the first modern – indeed, by mocking and remaking the then quiveringly new conventions of the novel, the first postmodern – novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. For the sake of argument, modernism can be defined as that period of enlightenment that continued until the mid-twentieth century, and postmodernism as what followed, but here is a book that anticipates a post-nuclear renaissan
ce, a deviation in man’s thinking, a leap forward through the past into the future that was not to occur for nearly two centuries. For the sake of more argument, let’s say that the postmodern relies on the fragmentary, paradox, ambiguity, questionable narrators, black humour, multiple realities, a nostalgia for the impossible, in which nothing is framed within a certain existing universal truth, the world is a place where things happen randomly, interruptions are a constant, truth is an illusion manipulated by those wanting to gain control over others, and everything is brought into question. Postmodern literature tends to feature narratives borrowing techniques and possibilities from film and television, flashing back, flashing forward, frequently interrupted and repeated – and here was Sterne doing it hundreds of years before. He adopted a position of openness, and was especially receptive to the unpredictable, the contingent and the difficult. Clear prose can sometimes indicate the absence of thought. Sometimes careful disorderliness can be a true method of composition.
Shandy can be seen as the alter ego of his fellow Yorkist, Robinson Crusoe, and a book that contains life and intensely introverted opinions supplants a story about a life and open-air adventures. And whereas in Daniel Defoe’s book the hero is the sole unifying force, in Sterne’s novel the hero is based on digression. Digression is a strategy for putting off the ending, a multiplying of time within a work, a perpetual flight. A flight, in fact, from death. Endless wandering can ensue using simply the word, and the next word, and the next page, which is the first page, and the last, followed again by the last page, and the first.
The Sex Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall, 4 June 1976
Sterne wrote and completed Tristram Shandy in the serene surroundings of ramshackle medieval Shandy Hall, set among two acres of gardens – sometimes between writing Sterne would step out ‘to weed, hack up old roots or wheel away rubbish’ – in Coxwold, to where he moved in 1760, living alone after becoming vicar of the parish. Coxwold is about fifteen miles north of York close to the market towns of Easingwold and Thirsk on the most southerly edge of the vast heather-covered North Yorkshire Moors, scattered with abbeys, valleys and waterfalls. Oliver Cromwell is reputed to be buried in Coxwold’s Newburgh Priory, where his daughter brought his headless remains. After the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660 his body was exhumed from Westminster Abbey and he was posthumously hanged and beheaded.
This whole area, local events and some of the characters who lived there found their way into Sterne’s novel. John Burton was a York doctor, the first physician at the newly founded York Hospital. He had published a history of the Church in Yorkshire, Monasticon Eboracense, in 1758, and was the inventor of obstetric forceps. Sensitive to criticism and not a little paranoid, he suffered the most by being viciously and possibly unfairly satirised in Tristram Shandy as Dr Slop. Burton was well known as a Jacobite and Tory, while Sterne had allied himself with the Whig interests dominant at York Minster.
Sterne incorporated into Tristram Shandy many passages taken almost word for word from Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, Francis Bacon’s Of Death, Rabelais and many more, and rearranged them to serve the meaning he intended in his own book. Some accused him of artistically dishonest and mindless plagiarism, and Sterne seems to condemn it: ‘Shall we forever make new books, as apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into another?’ he asks. ‘Are we forever to be twisting and untwisting the same rope?’ It was not noticed until some time after his death in 1768 that this passage was itself plagiarised from Robert Burton’s attack on literary imitators in his introduction to The Anatomy of Melancholy. ‘As apothecaries,’ Burton observed, ‘we make new mixtures every day, pour out of one vessel into another . . . Again, we weave the same web still, twist the same rope again and again.’ In his existential search for origins (parentage, character, identity), Tristram is for ever causing them to recede. At the ontological level, the book itself, published at the dawn of the age of mechanical reproduction, is a studied attempt to confront issues of originality, using the very physical form of the book to question the technology which produces identical copies of an ‘original’.
Appropriation of previously existing material may be the central aesthetic of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century, animated by the Internet, sampling and the availability of information and reference material which can be taken and redeployed. However, Sterne was already exploiting the process, testing how crude the technique might seem, how it might fight the poetic unity of a piece of writing, or how successful it could be at generating text containing its own originality while absorbing the thinking and invention of other minds and activating various themes, motifs and symbols and a myriad of enriching associations. He was reflecting how the quote, the stolen or lifted phrase, demonstrates that there are at once repetitions in history and at the same time moments of originality, as material quoted in a different context, embedded in a different story, leading to and from a different place, is never the same as where and when it first appeared. Or perhaps he was indulging in what the writer E. E. Kellett noticed: ‘A quotation may be adopted as a subterfuge; you may shelter yourself under the authority of another author when you do not wish to face entire responsibility in your own person.’
Sterne was perhaps suggesting how the writer is not an originator, but an accumulator and editor. He would have been at home with the Internet, which would have allowed him to pursue to topsy-turvy extremes his way of binding fact and fiction, identity and history, quotes and speculations together. Many forms of writing now involve not using a pen or a typewriter and total isolation from the outside world, apart from that which has collected in books, the memory and the imagination, but a machine – the computer – which allows access to knowledge, interpretation and texts, and indeed a whole separate reality absorbing other realities by the day.
A writer can still resist consulting this expanding source of information, presumption and judgement, this warping, or encouraging, or damned unwanted temptation, and exist as though it is of no use in their writing, indeed is a rotten, warping distraction. A writer can on the other hand use this strange new tool to instantly slip into another dimension, to check, uncover and confirm prejudices, to discover evidence, to support hunches, to in fact find pieces and areas of knowledge to reproduce as part of an overall compilation of ideas that emerges into tentative originality not because of what is said but because of how the montage or labyrinth of facts and observations is positioned and ordered.
As I wrote this book about the north, darting into another dimension to check a fact or make a connection, to support a theory, entering this new venue of content that it seems has no edge and no ending, resembling the idea that history itself is an ‘argument without end’, it became more and more obvious that in fact I was writing a personal history of the north, and at the same time a history of the north as it is emerging on the Internet. Using and compiling the fragments found on the World Wide Web, strolling through time and text, stumbling across new views, can convey a sense of disrupted time. Each comment or quotation can appear in a list of thoughts and influences, only to tumble back into an unfinished book, an incomplete, interrupted action. Time, and cause and effect, can be mixed up, move from the past to the present, and the present into the past, fused in a multiple series of historical events, and all these events can be seen as interconnected, implicated with each other. The past can explode in the present.
This Internet history – all the problems and dangers of forming history by filtering something that has essentially disappeared through the shape-shifting prejudices, pressures and problems of the present – is a distillation, or a replenishment, of the very idea of history as a creation of different stories using the same facts. Internet history emphasises, on the other side of the screen, out there in some emerging space that might yet stretch on for ever, on the edge of disappearing for ever once the power is turned off, the idea expressed by Arnold Toynbee that history is just one dam
ned thing after another. And the type of history being told depends on just who is deciding what damned thing followed what, and from what point of view.
The Internet might not be the early embryo of God – God, of course, coming after his creation has attained enough intelligence to create himself for real not merely in myth and story. God, of course, coming after enough time for humanity to prove it deserves a god, by developing enough intelligence to make one, and give it a memory of all human events and experience, as decided upon by a committee that made itself up as it went along. The Internet might be merely the latest stage after the prayer, ballad, hymn, play, printing press, theatre, cinema, radio, television enabling the human mind to reflect and nurture itself. It supplements those things, not replaces them, at its best renews them, and nurtures whatever new medium may emerge because of it.
This still means that a creative way of exploiting the material that has been placed on the Internet is an important stage in the sort of thinking that led to the song, novel, the poem, the symphony, the album, the film. Perhaps there is something beyond the novel – which itself as A. S. Byatt of Sheffield has said rises up out of the shortcomings of history – which emerges out of the active exploitation of the Internet not as a convenience for consumers but as a complex representation of experience. The novel is a map of a mind. A new map of the mind, taking into account the way it now has the Internet to deal with, to control, to assimilate, could be this individually directed assortment of received ideas collated from the Internet – viewed as a cosmic library – blended with thoughts, assumptions and feelings that can only appear from the experiences of one person.