Hart’s all-volunteer army (a genuine ‘point of light’) was dependent principally on graduate labour, which by the early 21st century had compiled an e-textual library of 120,000 titles, growing all the time.
In 2000, the project was institutionalised as a non-profit organisation and, as such, was able to attract tax-deductible charitable donations. The texts (almost all in the public domain) were offered, free of charge, to any reader with computer access to them.
Educationally, Project Gutenberg was a godsend. Prescribed reading for advanced courses (hitherto impeded by the high cost of printed textbooks) could expand hugely. Despite some rough edges, erroneous transcription, and imperfect bibliographical accompanying data, PG texts were adequate to most teaching purposes. The project remains true to Hart’s original belief that getting the material out takes precedence over scholarly punctilios and that free texts make for better learning.
Johannes Gutenberg launched his medieval project with the Bible. In as grand, and as democratic a gesture (‘let the people read’), Michael Hart chose, as his primal text, the American Declaration of Independence, released on 1 December 1971. 4 July might, perhaps, have been too neat.
2 December
Would Jane Bigg-Wither have written better, or worse, or not at all?
1802 Jane Austen went to the grave a virgin, leaving six full-length novels behind her. Would those novels have been better had Miss Austen had as lively a sex-life as, say, slutty Lydia Bennet? Does a writer’s carnal experience matter? D.H. Lawrence, the most unzipped of British novelists, believed it did. His chauvinist sneer at Austen as a ‘narrow gutted spinster’ indicates that some sexual intercourse would have improved her fiction no end.
One can only wonder, and focus that wonder on this day, in winter 1802, when the 20-year-old Harris Bigg-Wither proposed marriage to the 27-year-old Jane Austen. He did so in the impressive surroundings of his family home, Manydown Park in Hampshire. Harris was the heir to the estate and could expect to be very well provided-for. He was eminently eligible and a catch for a well brought-up, but not well-dowered, parson’s daughter who – like Anne Elliot at 27 – might be thought to have lost her youthful ‘bloom’. Harris was accepted. The fact was known to the families, who rejoiced. Then, after what one must suppose was a sleepless night, Jane rejected her young fiancé the following day. One of the shortest engagements in literature was at an end. The Austen company fled in a coach the same day.
It is not known why Miss Austen changed her mind. It might be that she was put off by Harris’s recorded clumsiness of person and manner. She may also have been put off by the prospect of children – something one can suspect from hints in Emma Woodhouse’s distaste for marriage, having seen her sister Isabella’s child-a-year ordeal after her marriage to John Knightley. Harris Bigg-Wither, on the rebound, married two years later. His wife bore him ten children.
Austen’s greatest fiction – at least in its final, canonical form – was still to come. The biographer Claire Tomalin has little doubt that the world has reason to be grateful for that doubt-tossed night in December 1802. ‘We would naturally rather have Mansfield Park and Emma than the Bigg-Wither baby Jane Austen might have given the world.’ Or ten Bigg-Wither babies, come to that.
3 December
A Streetcar Named Desire opens at the Ethel Barrymore Theater on Broadway, launching the career of 23-year-old Marlon Brando
1947 ‘They told me to take a streetcar named Desire, and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at – Elysian Fields.’ These are the first lines spoken by Blanche Dubois, ‘daintily dressed’, according to the stage directions, ‘in a white suit with a fluffy bodice, necklace and earrings of pearl, white gloves and a hat’, in Tennessee Williams’s classic melodrama, set in the working-class Faubourg Marigny of New Orleans.
Arriving to stay with her sister Stella, Blanche is perplexed. Can this slum with the L&M Railroad tracks running through it really be the ‘Elysian Fields’? Blanche commiserates with her sister, but has her own grief to tell, in a powerful speech about relatives seen through their dying moments, and their gracious southern mansion in ruins. When Stella’s husband Stanley Kowalski comes in from a night of bowling, the explosive triangle is complete: the faded beauty living in the past, the robust, rough-hewn working-class son of Polish immigrants, and his submissive wife.
Playing Stanley Kowalski, Marlon Brando method-acted his way to stardom, scowling, snarling, bullying, slamming doors, and finally drunkenly forcing himself on Blanche, saying: ‘We’ve had this date from the beginning.’ Elia Kazan, who directed the first production, later took him to the film version (1951), in which Vivien Leigh supplanted Jessica Tandy as Blanche, then on to Viva Zapata (1952) and On the Waterfront (1954).
Meanwhile, Brando brought the method to Mark Antony’s ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’ speech in Joseph Manciewicz’s film production of Julius Caesar (1953), before donning the gear and a menacing air as leader of a motorcycle gang in The Wild One (1953), directed by Laslo Benedek. The film started a world-wide craze for leathers and ‘cycle boots’ – not to mention widespread anxiety about where ‘the youth of today’ were heading.
All of these have lasted better than Streetcar, which now seems a little dated in posing the illusions of the past against the vibrant realities of the present, when the lively culture of the white working class itself now seems to belong to the past.
4 December
Currer Bell meets Michaelangelo Titmarsh
1849 The composition and publication of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is the stuff of book trade legend. The parson’s daughter in Yorkshire had sent an unsolicited manuscript, under androgynous pseudonym (‘Currer Bell’) to the eminent London publisher, Smith, Elder & Co., in early 1847. The work (later published as The Professor) was judged unpublishable, but Smith, Elder asked if he/she might like to think about submitting a longer, three-volume work for the circulating library market. Brontë set to and produced Jane Eyre in a few weeks. Published late in 1847, it was one of the literary sensations of the year (a year that also saw the publication of Vanity Fair, Dombey and Son, and Wuthering Heights – by ‘Ellis Bell’).
A second edition was called for, and was published in February 1848. To it Brontë (still pseudonymous) attached an extraordinarily eulogistic preface (dated 27 December 1847) dedicating her novel to Thackeray, whom she had never met:
There is a man in our own days whose words are not framed to tickle delicate ears: who, to my thinking, comes before the great ones of society, much as the son of Imlah came before the throned Kings of Judah and Israel; and who speaks truth as deep, with a power as prophet-like and as vital – a mien as dauntless and as daring. Is the satirist of Vanity Fair admired in high places? I cannot tell; but I think if some of those amongst whom he hurls the Greek fire of his sarcasm, and over whom he flashes the levin-brand of his denunciation, were to take his warnings in time – they or their seed might yet escape a fatal Rimoth-Gilead.
The ‘son of Imlah’ had, like the rest of literary London, devoured Jane Eyre in a single delighted sitting. Thackeray also perceived, as did everyone else, that the author must be a woman, and a remarkable one. As it happened, the dedication was profoundly embarrassing to him. Thackeray’s wife, Isabella, had lost her mind three years earlier and, after several suicide attempts, was currently in care. It was suspiciously like the situation of Rochester and Bertha Mason. Rumours swept around London, in the wake of Brontë’s preface, that ‘Currer Bell’ was a former governess (Thackeray had two young daughters) and lover of the author of Vanity Fair. It did not help that ‘Laura Bell’ (acoustically very similar) was the name of the most famous, and highly paid, courtesan in London (Thackeray mischievously used the name for the indomitably virtuous heroine of his next novel, Pendennis).
The two novelists did not meet in person until Brontë made a daring trip to London, at the invitation of Smith, Elder (who had recently recruited Thackeray to their l
ist) in December 1849. Charlotte described the encounter with Thackeray, on the fourth of the month, to her father, in a letter:
As to being happy, I am under scenes and circumstances of excitement; but I suffer acute pain sometimes, – mental pain, I mean. At the moment Mr Thackeray presented himself, I was thoroughly faint from inanition, having eaten nothing since a very slight breakfast, and it was then seven o’clock in the evening. Excitement and exhaustion made savage work of me that evening. What he thought of me I cannot tell.
He found her tiny and amusing. Charlotte confided other details to her friend, and biographer, Elizabeth Gaskell. Thackeray, she quickly apprehended, was not the Old Testament, lightning-bolt-bearing prophet she had pictured in her preface: ‘She told me how difficult she found it, this first time of meeting Mr Thackeray, to decide whether he was speaking in jest or in earnest.’
A few days later the novelists met for a second time. Thackeray had written for ten years disguised under pseudonyms, such as ‘Michaelangelo Titmarsh’, before, with Vanity Fair, actually putting his name on a title page. He advised ‘Currer Bell’ to drop the pseudonymous mask, and appear to her readers in her own person. If nothing else it would inhibit gossip and nasty rumours.
5 December
Burton concludes his great work (not for the only time)
1620 In the epilogue to the manuscript of his great work, Robert Burton inscribed, with a terseness atypical of his usual style: ‘From my Studie in Christ Church Oxon. Decemb. 5 1620.’ The work he had finished was: The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Historically, Opened and Cut up.
The contents are as sprawling and ambitiously wide-ranging as the title. Burton published a first version in 1621 that ran to 353,369 words. Three years later he published an enlarged version comprising 423,983 words. Four more editions followed. No classic text is more fluid and, until computer typesetting (as superintended by Thomas Faulkner – a scholarly life’s work), no complete Anatomy has been compiled.
The Anatomy has always posed insoluble problems for the Dewey Decimal Library Classification system. What exactly is it? It purports to be a work of psychology. But its contents are a compendium of learned knowledge and reference – an anatomy less of medicine than of the well-stored, not to say over-stuffed, Renaissance mind. Librarians usually shelve it in ‘English Literature’. Arguably it is itself the condensation of a whole library. It was, Samuel Johnson (a notorious slugabed) recorded, the only book which ever inspired him to get up early. The style – which modulates between the Ciceronian (expansive) and Senecan (epigrammatic) models – qualifies The Anatomy as a genuine, if eccentric, work of literature.
Burton describes his titular subject in the third paragraph of his first ‘Partition’, or section:
Great travail is created for all men, and an heavy yoke on the sons of Adam, from the day that they go out of their mother’s womb, unto that day they return to the mother of all things. Namely, their thoughts, and fear of their hearts, and their imagination of things they wait for, and the day of death. From him that sitteth in the glorious throne, to him that sitteth beneath in the earth and ashes; from him that is clothed in blue silk and weareth a crown, to him that is clothed in simple linen. Wrath, envy, trouble, and unquietness, and fear of death, and rigour, and strife, and such things come to both man and beast, but sevenfold to the ungodly. All this befalls him in this life, and peradventure eternal misery in the life to come.
A number of contemporary admirers have seen Burton’s world-weariness, and his fascination with what subsequent medicine labels ‘depression’, as psychotherapeutically perceptive and ahead of its time. It is not impossible to align The Anatomy with the arguments in Freud’s essay ‘Civilisation and its Discontents’. The more we know, the more comfortable our circumstances become (Burton’s condition of life as an Oxford vicar and ‘student’ – i.e. fellow – of Christ Church was eminently comfortable), the unhappier we become. There are virtually no events recorded in his long, scholarly life.
It is, however, the sheer eccentricity of The Anatomy that perennially beguiles. The prescription, for example, for the cure of ‘Love- Melancholy’ in ladies:
Those opposite meats which ought to be used are cucumbers, melons, purslane, water-lilies, rue, woodbine, ammi, lettuce, which Lemnius so much commends, lib. 2, cap. 42. and Mizaldus hort. med. to this purpose; vitex, or agnus castus before the rest, which, saith Magninus, hath a wonderful virtue in it. Those Athenian women, in their solemn feasts called Thesmopheries, were to abstain nine days from the company of men, during which time, saith Aelian, they laid a certain herb, named hanea, in their beds, which assuaged those ardent flames of love, and freed them from the torments of that violent passion. See more in Porta, Matthiolus, Crescentius lib. 5. &c., and what every herbalist almost and physician hath written, cap. de Satyriasi et Priapismo; Rhasis amongst the rest.
Preferable, perhaps, to the modern cold shower.
6 December
Hopkins’s ‘great dragon’
1875 Gerard Manley Hopkins is, with T.S. Eliot, the most influential poet of the 20th century. Had his career in literature been his primary vocation he might have been the most influential poet of the 19th century, in which he lived and died.
A Jesuit priest, Hopkins wrote quantities of verse, a small fragment of which was entrusted, by letter, to his friend Robert Bridges. That fragment is, alas, all that has survived. Hopkins, under instruction from his superiors and his own sense of religious duty, destroyed the bulk of his work. Ironically, Bridges – a Poet Laureate and immensely popular in his own day for bestselling works such as The Testament of Beauty – is remembered, today, for one thing only. He saved some of the poetry of Hopkins.
Hopkins died in 1889: wholly unknown to the reading public. Bridges belatedly published the surviving corpus of his friend’s poems in 1918. The opening poem in the collection, ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, Hopkins’s longest, was what Bridges called ‘a great dragon folded in the gate to forbid all entrance’. The opening stanza indicates clearly enough what Bridges meant:
THOU mastering me
God! giver of breath and bread;
World’s strand, sway of the sea;
Lord of living and dead;
Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh,
And after it almost unmade, what with dread,
Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh?
Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.
The dragonish difficulty of the poem lies principally in Hopkins’s innovative prosody (‘sprung rhythm’) and the complexity of his literary expression – something alien both to the norms of Victorian poetry (when it was written) and Georgian poetry (when it was published).
The poem has an explanatory dedication:
To the
happy memory of five Franciscan nuns
exiles by the Falk Laws
drowned between midnight and morning of
Dec. 7th, 1875
On 4 December 1875 the steamship Deutschland left Bremerhaven in Germany for New York, via Southampton. Among the passengers were five Franciscan nuns, fleeing Bismarck’s anti-Catholic Falk Laws, part of a programmatic campaign (the so-called Kulturkampf) to secularise – more specifically de-Catholicise – the country. They intended to resettle in a religious community in Illinois.
The vessel ran into a storm and ran aground on a shoal (the Kentish Knock). This was 5 December. Distress rockets attracted no attention from passing ships. The next day the order was given to abandon ship. The lifeboats were inadequate, and one sank. Of the 213 souls on board the Deutschland, only 135 made it to safety (embarrassingly, the captain was one of them – prompting a high-profile court of enquiry: which exonerated him).
Among those drowned were the five Franciscan nuns. Why, Hopkins’s poem ponders
, would God persecute the already persecuted in this way? They are, the poem concludes, martyrs. Their suffering is an extreme form of the discipline (‘mastering’) they had chosen as their life with their vows.
Hopkins was, unusually, encouraged to write the poem by his religious superior; but, in the event, it was deemed unpublishable. Bridges, normally sympathetic, concurred. He would not, he told his friend, read it again ‘for any money’. Then read it for love, Hopkins (good-naturedly) replied.
7 December
Harold Pinter hurls his stick of Nobel dynamite at America and Britain
2005 Harold Pinter was too weakened by the oesophageal cancer that would kill him three years later to accept in person his Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005. In a departure from tradition, he prepared a video to be shown at the ceremony at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm on 7 December.
The award was made eighteen months after the invasion of Iraq by coalition forces. The event had provoked the largest street protest ever witnessed in London, on 15 February 2003 (the event is commemorated in one of the novels of the period, Ian McEwan’s Saturday).
It was widely suspected that the award to Pinter was double-edged. He was Britain’s greatest living playwright. But he had also taken a public stance against the Iraq war and for the Palestinian people’s struggle – formally linked with Iraq in the 15 February demonstration.
If there were a political motive, Pinter rose to it in his video address. His theme was that current political administrations – notably those of Bush and Blair – used language ‘to keep thought at bay’. It was the responsibility of the writer to protect language from this political degradation, to keep words open as a channel for honest thought.
Love, Sex, Death and Words Page 55