Ticky: fine satirical fantasy

I mentioned a while back (see Westwood) about the Vintage Classics reprints of Stella Gibbons novels, and just very much enjoyed reading the 2011 Vintage edition of her 1943 Ticky, a satirical fantasy about English military institutions.

The tinkle of the accordion ... and the concertina's melancholy string

The Athenaeum comment on Thomas Duncan's silly translated phrase from Bruges-la-Morte, "the tinkle of the accordion" put me in mind of the above scene from the 1985 A Room with a View.

"Cabbages" and other parodies

Having been put off Thackeray at school, by being made to read Vanity Fair before I was able to appreciate its sharp social satire, I wish I'd read more of his works, which often go into outright parody. A reference in The Primrose Way brought me to a Thackeray piece I'd never encountered: Cabbages, a parody on Letitia Elizabeth Landon's Violets apparently written when he was 14.

I was coming to that ...

Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog just featured an interesting post, An Aberystwyth Mermaid, an account from the 1800s that strongly recalls the Robert Graves poem, as read above by Richard Burton. I love this poem: it manages to be simultaneously funny, surreal and sinister.

Welsh Incident

'But that was nothing to what things came out
From the sea-caves of Criccieth yonder.'
'What were they? Mermaids? dragons? ghosts?'
'Nothing at all of any things like that.'
'What were they, then?'
'All sorts of queer things,
Things never seen or heard or written about,
Very strange, un-Welsh, utterly peculiar
Things. Oh, solid enough they seemed to touch,
Had anyone dared it. Marvellous creation,
All various shapes and sizes, and no sizes,
All new, each perfectly unlike his neighbour,
Though all came moving slowly out together.'
'Describe just one of them.'
'I am unable.'
'What were their colours?'
'Mostly nameless colours,
Colours you'd like to see; but one was puce
Or perhaps more like crimson, but not purplish.
Some had no colour.'
'Tell me, had they legs?'
'Not a leg or foot among them that I saw.'
'But did these things come out in any order?'
What o'clock was it? What was the day of the week?
Who else was present? How was the weather?'
'I was coming to that. It was half-past three
On Easter Tuesday last. The sun was shining.
The Harlech Silver Band played Marchog Jesu
On thirty-seven shimmering instruments
Collecting for Caernarvon's (Fever) Hospital Fund.
The populations of Pwllheli, Criccieth,
Portmadoc, Borth, Tremadoc, Penrhyndeudraeth,
Were all assembled. Criccieth's mayor addressed them
First in good Welsh and then in fluent English,
Twisting his fingers in his chain of office,
Welcoming the things. They came out on the sand,
Not keeping time to the band, moving seaward
Silently at a snail's pace. But at last
The most odd, indescribable thing of all
Which hardly one man there could see for wonder
Did something recognizably a something.'
'Well, what?'
'It made a noise.'
'A frightening noise?'
'No, no.'
'A musical noise? A noise of scuffling?'
'No, but a very loud, respectable noise ---
Like groaning to oneself on Sunday morning
In Chapel, close before the second psalm.'
'What did the mayor do?'
'I was coming to that.'

- Robert Graves

Graves commented on the origins of the poem in The Listener of 28th May 1970: see Where the crakeberries grow - Robert Graves gives an account of himself to Leslie Norris.

Perhaps one of your best-known poems is 'Welsh Incident'. Could you tell us the story behind the writing of that poem?

The Irish used to say that you write one sort of poem with your right hand and another with your left, and I think it was the same with the Welsh bards. But the right hand is the constructive one and the left is the satiric one, and you can't be serious the whole time. Occasionally you have to have a satire, which is pleasant joking, and this is what 'Welsh Incident' was intended to be. It started when my father and I were in a train compartment of the old Cambrian Railway. The train was going round that curve from Barmouth, through Llan-bedr, round into Harlech where you see the sea stretched out; and there was a policeman aboard, a Welsh policeman. He got very excited and started telling my father how he had recently seen a mermaid. He wasn't joking either: it was in perfect seriousness and made a very powerful impression on us all. Mermaids come into that poem, you may remember. And, of course, I'd been to those sea caves-, I'd been taken there by Professor Lloyd Williams, a botanist by profession, who was also one of the great Welsh mythologists. You could go there only at low tide about once a year. The caves had a very great fascination for me. But about 'Welsh Incident' - I wrote it in a Welsh accent.

The satire is evidently directed at the Welsh, regarding both their reputed fondness for discursive storytelling and their religious conformism (the creatures being quite the opposite of conformist - "Very strange, un-Welsh ... each perfectly unlike his neighbour"). In the original version of the poem, called Railway Carriage, the sound the creature made was "a loud belch". As Douglas Day describes in his 1963 Swifter than reason: the poetry and criticism of Robert Graves:

Then, having issued this brief evaluation of Welsh stuffiness and religious fundamentalism, it fades into the sea.

The Robertgraves.org forum quotes the critical commentary from Michael Kirkham's 1969 The Poetry of Robert Graves.

- Ray

Comic Grammars

Frontispiece: The Comic English Grammar

I mentioned a few months back - see Henry Sweet - the phenomenon of 19th century grammar books, a huge market - Ian Michael, referenced below, counted 856 - driven by the continuing growth and social anxieties of the middle class that gave rise to English prescriptivism in the first place.

Most grammars of English published in Britain during the 19th century are dull ... There were a great many grammars, issued in very large numbers. They were repetitive; many were merely commercial ventures, scholastically naive ... The vast number of grammars contrasts with the uniformity of their contents. Of all the subjects in the school curriculum English grammar was the most rigid and unchanging ... Teachers had insisted, for two centuries, on writing grammars which added little or nothing to what had gone before.
- Michael, I. (1991), "More than enough English grammars", in G. Leitner, English Traditional Grammars. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 11-26.

One of the most influential - and most reprinted well into the 19th century - was the 1795 English Grammar by the American ex-patriot Lindley Murray.  As described in this review - Two Hundred Years of Lindley Murray - it was classically prescriptive, based on the practice of the best writers (in Murray's view), and appeals to logic, clarity of communication, and aesthetics (again in Murray's view). Much of it comes across as highly pompous and deeply subjective.

It's pleasing to find that even in the 19th century, some readers found Murray's approach ridiculous, and I just spotted David A Reibel's 1996 compilation, Lindley Murray's grammar in caricature: four parodies, which introduces a set of more or less barbed ripostes to Murray. They are: The Comic English Grammar: a new and facetious introduction to the English tongue (1840, Percival Leigh, illus. John Leech); The Illustrated English Grammar, or, Lindley Murray simplified (c. 1843, Anon.); The Comic Lindley Murray; or, The Grammar of Grammars (1871, Anon.); and The Pictorial Grammar (1842, "Alfred Crowquill").

I couldn't find The Illustrated English Grammar online, but the other three are. The Pictorial Grammar (Internet Archive pictorialgramma00crowgoog) is a nice little book, not exactly a parody. It's a perfectly straight grammar, written and illustrated by the Punch contributor Alfred Henry Forrester, but one given a pleasantly droll spin by the drawings - dignitaries, matrons, degenerates and eccentrics - accompanying each example. For instance, "Each of his brothers is in a pleasant situation" has a picture of two criminals in the stocks. The Comic Lindley Murray (Internet Archive comiclindleymurr00dubliala) I found a little laboured; Dublin-published, it's a self-mocking Irish take on English grammar.

The Pluperfect Tense represents a thing as doubly past; that is,
as past previously to some other point of time also past; as,
"I fell in love before I had arrived at years of discretion."
The Comic English Grammar.

But as Reibel's Introduction says, the highlight of the bunch, also written and drawn by veteran Punch contributors, has to be The Comic English Grammar (Internet Archive comicenglishgram00inleig). Part of the joke is that it closely emulates Murray's book, but with a Sellar & Yateman style mixing facts with pseudo-facts and jokes, and partly extends the analysis to a variety of social classes: Cockney, genteel, servants, rustics, and so on.  While it could be accused of classism in mostly holding up the language of the lower classes to ridicule, it's generally an affectionate ridicule, and doesn't omit the affectations and social mannerisms of middle and upper-class speakers. And the cartoons are great fun!

See the following post for More on Lindley Murray.

- Ray

Nelson by Gillray

The farthest removed of my memories carries me back to the period of the most glorious of Britannia's sea-fights—immortal Trafalgar. I remember it distinctly, partly because of the following incident : At Topsham, in Devonshire (where my father then resided) in common with all the cities, towns, and villages, of the United Kingdom, there was a general illumination. My father's house was, of course, lit up from cellar to attic ; in each pane of glass there was a candle—the holder being a potato, in which a hollow had been scooped, to supply the place of a candlestick. The universal joy was blended with mourning: Nelson was dead, and in losing him the nation had paid dearly for victory. My father had, therefore, twisted a binding of black crape round each candle—emblematic of the grief that had saddened the triumph. Few are now living who shared with me the sight of the rejoicings blended with mourning that commemorated the 21st of October, 1805.
- Retrospect of a long life: from 1815 to 1883, Samuel Carter Hall, 1883, D. Appleton and company.

This being Trafalgar Day, it's an excuse to unearth some bookmarks: the above recollection by the writer Samuel Carter Hall, and some links relating to the caricaturist James Gillray. Lord Nelson's heyday and death were within Gillray's working career. The sentimental The death of Admiral Lord Nelson - in the moment of victory! is well-known, and Gillray also drew Nelson as a national hero in Extirpation of the plagues of Egypt; - destruction of revolutionary crocodiles; - or - the British hero cleansing ye mouth of ye Nile (which showed Nelson, literally single-handed, fighting and capturing tricolour French crocodiles.

Nevertheless, these jingoistic prints weren't characteristic of Gillray's take on Nelson topics. The French crocodile appeared also in The Gallant Nellson bringing home two Uncommon fierce French Crocadiles from the Nile as a Present to the King; but the barb was pointed at the politicians Charles Fox and Richard Sheridan, shown as weeping crocodile tears as they celebrated Nelson's victory despite being pro-republican. Others took a dig at Nelson's personal life, including A Cognocenti contemplating ye Beauties of ye Antique ("An elderly Sir William Hamilton inspecting his antiquities, all of which refer to his wife, Lady Emma Hamilton and her lover, Lord Horatio Nelson") and Love-à-la-mode, or Two dear friends (depicting a rumoured lesbian affair between Emma, Lady Hamilton, and Queen Maria Carolina of Naples).

Possibly the sharpest of the lot was John Bull taking a Luncheon: – or – British Cooks, cramming Old Grumble-Gizzard, with Bonne-Chere, which took a dig at the British public or national ethos. It shows a gluttonous John Bull being served up victories by a long-suffering Nelson, who is depicted with the head wound incurred at the Battle of the Nile that cost him his sight in one eye. It's actually on the wrong side: his right eye was the blinded one. I'm not sure if the hook is authentic either. The characters behind Nelson are the distinguished Admirals Duncan, Howe and Warren (front row) and Gardner, Hood, 1st Viscount Bridport and Jervis, 1st Earl of St Vincent (back row).

- Ray

Brown, Jones and Robinson

An aside from an aside: if you didn't follow the link from the George Morland article, check out The Foreign Tour of Messrs. Brown, Jones and Robinson: being the history of what they saw, and did, in Belgium, Germany, Switzerland & Italy (Project Gutenberg E-Text No. 29463). This 1854 satire on the European Grand Tour (equally hostile to the Europeans and the trio of English travellers) is one of the many works of the artist Richard "Dickie" Doyle.

Doyle's art ranged through satire and parody (he worked for Punch for seven years) via mainstream illustration (he illustrated Dickens, Thomas Hughes, and Ruskin works) to fantastic and grotesque fairy art. He sounds a rather strange guy: despite his (untrained) talent, he didn't always produce work up to standard, and often gave deeply lame excuses for not meeting deadlines.

Doyle had a facile pencil when once fairly at work, but he was singularly deficient as to the value of time, which appears strange in one who produced so many elaborate drawings; but little reliance could be placed upon him even when working for periodical publications. On one occasion when illustrating a story by Thackeray, the number had to be issued short of certain pictures that had been arranged for. Thackeray was a good deal annoyed and asked Doyle if he could give any reason why he had not done the drawings. He replied in his cool, deliberate manner: "Eh—er— the fact is, I had not got any pencils."
- The brothers Dalziel: a record of fifty years' work in conjunction with many of the most distinguished artists of the period, 1840-1890, George Dalziel, Edward Dalziel, Methuen and Co., 1901

The Victorian Web has a good compendium of essays and samples of his work, under the heading The Illustrations of Richard Doyle, 1824-83. Most of the books he illustrated are also on the Internet Archive: I particularly like Manners and customs of ye Englyshe (1849); A journal kept by Richard Doyle in the year 1840 (1885); and the abovementioned The foreign tour of Messrs. Brown, Jones, and Robinson (1854).

Brown's first impression of the Rhine

- Ray

Westwood

The Guardian Books section had a good article recently: Westwood by Stella Gibbons (Lynne Truss, Guardian, 29 Jul 2011), an appreciation of Gibbons's 1946 novel, which is being reissued by Vintage in a few days' time.

Westwood has long been overshadowed by Stella Gibbons's much loved bestseller, Cold Comfort Farm, but this rich, mature novel deserves its reissue

Unlike Cold Comfort Farm (see previously Beyond the woodshed and Further beyond the woodshed) Westwood has the more or less realistic setting of wartime North London, and turns Gibbons's satirical spotlight on the awfulness of the Hampstead Heath literary set of the period. It looks good; there's an extended article on it, by Stella Gibbons' nephew and biographer Reggie Oliver, findable in the Internet Archive copy of the now-defunct official Stella Gibbons site: see WESTWOOD, or The Gentle Powers.

Westwood (Vintage, 4 Aug 2011, ISBN: 9780099528722) is available from GuardianBookshop.

It would be excellent if other Stella Gibbons novels were reissued; currently they're findable on the secondhand circuit, but (except for Cold Comfort Farm) scarce and expensive. One I'd especially like to see reprinted is the 1943 Ticky, a satirical fantasy about English military institutions.

Update, 21 March 2015
I just read the Vintage Books 2011 reprint of Ticky, and have moved the commentary on it to a newer post, Ticky: fine satirical fantasy.

- Ray

Squire Mushroom

This rather tickled me. While browsing Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century (John Nichols, Samuel Bentley, 1812, Internet Archive ID literaryanecdote05nichuoft) I ran into the intriguing title Strictures on the absurd Novelties introduced in Gardening, and a humorous Description of Squire Mushroom's Villa.  A satire written in 1753 by the young clergyman Francis Coventry, its text is findable in the 1910 An Eighteenth-Century Correspondence (Internet Archive ID eighteenthcentur00dickuoft); it's a still-pertinent dig at the architectural pretensions of those with more money than taste.

Squire Mushroom grew ambitious of introducing himself to the world as a man of taste and pleasure, for which purpose he ... resolved to have a villa.Full of this pleasing idea he purchased an old farm-house, not far distant from the place of his nativity, and fell to building and planting with all the rage of taste. The old mansion immediately shot up into Gothic spires, and was plastered over with stucco; the walls were notched into battlements ; uncouth animals were set grinning at one another over the gate-posts, and the hall was fortified with rusty swords and pistols, and a Medusa's head staring tremendous over the chimney. When he had proceeded thus far he discovered in good time that his house was not habitable; which obliged him to add two rooms entirely new, and entirely incoherent with the rest of the building. Thus while one-half is designed to present you an old Gothic building, the other half presents to your view Venetian windows, slices of pilaster, balustrades and other parts of Italian Architecture. . . . But the triumph of his genius was seen in the disposition of his gardens, which contain everything in less than two acres of ground. At your first entrance the eye is saluted by a yellow serpentine river, stagnating through a beautiful valley, which extends nearly twenty yards in length. Over the river is thrown a bridge partly in the Chinese manner, and a little ship with sails spread and streamers flying floats in the midst of it. When you have passed this bridge you enter into a grove perplexed with crooked walks ; where you are led into an old hermitage built with roots of trees, which the Squire is pleased to call St. Austin's cave. ... At length when you almost despair of ever visiting daylight any more, you emerge on a sudden in an open and circular area, richly chequered with beds of flowers, and embellished with a little fountain playing in the center of it. ... As every folly must have a name the squire informs you by way of whim he has christened this place Little Maribon ; at the other end of which you are conducted into a pompous, clumsy and gilded building, said to be a temple, and consecrated to Venus, . . . To conclude, if one wished to see a coxcomb expose himself in the most effectual manner, one would advise him to build a villa; which is the chef-d'oeuvre of modern impertinence, and the most conspicuous stage which Folly can possibly mount to display herself to the world.
- An Eighteenth-Century Correspondence, pp263-254, originally in The World, 15, April 12, 1753.

- Ray

King of the Badgers

Philip Hensher's King of the Badgers (Fourth Estate, March 2011, ISBN: 978-0-00-730133-1) looks worth watching out for.  I missed a reading by the author yesterday at the University of Exeter, but spoke today to a visitor who went. From the publisher's description:

After the success of The Northern Clemency, shortlisted for the 2008 Man Booker Prize, Philip Hensher brings us another slice of contemporary life, this time the peaceful civility and spiralling paranoia of a small English town.

Hanmouth, situated where the river Hand flows into the Bristol channel, is usually quiet and undisturbed. But it becomes the centre of national attention when an eight-year-old girl vanishes. This tragic event serves to expose the range of segregated existences in the town, as spectrums of class, wealth and lifestyle are blurred in the investigation. Behind Hanmouth's closed doors and pastoral façade, the extraordinary individual lives of the community are laid bare.

The reviews out so far describe Hanmouth - some of the blurbs call it Handsmouth - the setting for this barbed analysis of the underbelly of an English town, as:

... an imagined town in Devon ... Hanmouth, on an estuary, is now a town to which people retire. It has fine streets full of handsome houses and there are small specialist shops, like the cheese-shop kept by Sam. But on its fringes there are housing schemes inhabited by a very different class of people. So while there is comfort, there is also social tension.
- Book review: King of the Badgers by Philip Hensher, Allan Massie, The Scotsman, 18th March 2011

... and ...

There’s a class struggle of a very English kind going on in Hanmouth, a small Devon town near Barnstaple.

Residents are becoming increasingly resentful of the fact that, whenever Hanmouth is mentioned, the image that springs to people’s minds is not the lovely coastal village itself but rather the grim council estates up the road.

When a young girl disappears, in a plot-thread inspired by the Shannon Matthews case, suspicion falls on the mother, a hairdresser in her twenties with four kids by different fathers and a yobbish partner. The consensus among the more well-to-do residents is that they’re “both deplorable and beyond genealogical analysis”. This casual snobbery is our introduction to the people of Hanmouth, a group we get to know in great detail in this highly effective snapshot of contemporary Britain.

This village is no Brigadoon. In Hanmouth, preparations for a drug-fuelled gay orgy are as meticulous and tediously domestic as for a suburban dinner party. In fact, despite the largely ageing population, no-one has lived there for long enough to remember the death of another young girl 30 years earlier. The town is, in effect, populated by transients who are trying to make a community without the benefit of local roots or long acquaintance.
- In Middle England’s dark heart, Alastair Mabbott, Sunday Herald, 20 Mar 2011

This could describe any number of south-west estuary towns, and I'm sure Hanmouth is a portmanteau. But despite the nominal North Devon setting, the tale from my informant was that it was especially applicable to Topsham.

Addendum. By the way, Nick Curtis's Evening Standard review - King of the Badgers gives a Middlemarch-style overview of a community - says the title "refers to a character in JP Martin's children's books about an affable millionaire elephant, for no reason I can discern". I suspect that it's more subtle than that. Since the book explores secret lives, it may well connect with The mysterious case of Mr Davies and the badgers (Philip Hensher, The Independent, 11 March 2003). The term also appears to have criminal connotations, as it was an epithet of the Max Shinburn aka Max Shinborn, a notorious criminal mastermind of the late 19th century.

- Ray

Burglar Bill and F Anstey

I first ran into F Anstey's comic recitations Burglar Bill and The Conscience-Curst! out of context in A Century of Humorous Verse, so it was a pleasure to find the full set in the Internet Archive: Burglar Bill, and other pieces for the use of the young reciter. With introduction, remarks, and stage-directions (1888, London : Bradbury, Agnew, & Co. - burglarbillother00anst). Originally published in Punch, they are do-able as recitations, but are actually a satire on the whole recitation format.

The title recitation, Burglar Bill - annotated with helpful directions to the reader - tells the maudlin story of a hardened burglar whose heart is touched by a meeting with a twee child.

Can it be his guardian angel,
Sent to stay his hand from crime?
[In a tone of awe]
He could wish she had selected
Some more seasonable time!
[Touch of peevish discontent here]

"Go away!" he whispers hoarsely,
"Burglars hev their bread ter earn.
I don't need no Gordian angel
Givin' of me sech a turn!"
[Shudder here, and retreat, shielding eyes with hand]
[Now change your manner to a naive surprise; this, in spite of anything we may have said previously, is in this particular instance NOT best indicated by a shrill falsetto]

But the blue eyes open wider,
Ruby lips reveal their pearl:
[This must not be taken to refer to the Burglar]
"I is not a Garden anzel,
Only — dust a yickle dirl!"
[Be particularly artless here and through next stanza]

All turns out well, when he helps the yickle dirl, Bella, by using his burglaring tools to open the stuck door of her doll's house. Declining the offer of meeting her family, he returns home a sadder and wiser man.

In a garret, worn and weary,
Burglar Bill has sunk to rest,
Clasping tenderly a crumpled
Cheesecake to his burly breast.
[Dwell lovingly upon the word "cheesecake," which you should press home upon every one of your hearers, remembering to fold your hands lightly over your heart as you conclude. If you do not find that several susceptible and eligible bachelors have been knocked completely out of time by this little recitation, you will have made less progress in your Art than may be confidently anticipated]

The other recitation I'd seen before is comic horror: The Conscience-Curst! tells of a stranger who confesses to a village policeman to the serial murder of various uncles.

As before, you should devote special attention to your title, which may be announced after this fashion. Stalk into the middle of the room or platform, with one hand in your bosom and your eyes staring as in a trance. Then, in a hollow voice, hurl the name of the poem at the nearest old lady:

THE CONSCIENCE-CURST!
[And, if you do it properly, she will jump like anything]

The night-owl shrieked: a gibbous moon peered pallid o'er the yew;
The clammy tombstones each distilled a dank unwholesome dew;
[Shudder here with your shoulders]
As through the sleeping village passed a wight of aspect weird,
Whose haggard face was half obscured by a long neglected beard.
[In order that the audience should grasp this idea, you should pass your hand lightly over your chin]

His convex spectacles gave back the gleaming of the moon,
He wore a pair of overcoats, although the time was June.
[Give a dark significance to this piece of apparent eccentricity]
Two slippers wrought in faded wools hid his ungainly feet,
And he danced a grisly polka-step all down the silent street.
[You might just indicate this, if you think you can do so in a sufficiently ghastly and impressive manner; otherwise — don't]

...

"My Uncle Joseph sold ('purvey,' I think, he termed it) meat,
His veins with vital fluid were abnormally replete!
[Close your eyes, and shiver here, as if at some unpleasing reminiscence]
Who would have thought so old a man ——?... [with a dazed abruptness]
Enough! — Within the tank
I flung the still unconscious corpse of my favourite Uncle Frank!
[Here you should strike the attitude of a man who is hurling a favourite uncle to his doom]

Burglar Bill, and other pieces for the use of the young reciter satirises various styles: "Sympathetic Artless"; "Sporting Sensational"; "Tear-Laden Domestic"; "Melodramatic Weird"; "Low-Life Realistic"; "Transatlantic Familiar"; "Sensually Harrowing"; "Marine Emotional"; "Bucolic Buttonholing"; "Triumphant Tragic"; "Voluptuously Melancholic"; and "Homely Pathetic". They're very worth reading, taking a dig not only at recitation but at late-Victorian poetry genres in general. Gaslight (a nice resource of Victorian weirdness) has a sampler here; and as I said, the full batch is here.

F Anstey - Thomas Anstey Guthrie - isn't much remembered these days, but as a late-Victorian / early 20th century writer he left a surprising trail of adaptations. It seems likely - though I've not seen direct confirmation - that Janet and Allan Ahlberg's Burglar Bill is loosely based on the Anstey character; his novella The Tinted Venus as adapted into the Broadway musical and film One Touch of Venus; The Brass Bottle became a movie more than once (e.g. The Brass Bottle); and the story Vice Versa: A Lesson to Fathers (a comedy in which a father and son magically switch bodies - see Gutenberg EBook-No. 26853) has been multiply filmed - see Wikipedia).

Check out F Anstey works online: Project Gutenberg / Internet Archive; they're variable but interesting.  His Baboo Jabberjee and A Bayard from Bengal comes across as a bit racist by modern standards, but are nevertheless socially well-observed 'outsider commentary' comedies about an educated-but-naive Indian character struggling with the foibles of English society.  Ones particularly worth checking out those - commercially unsuccessful, which is a pity - are those where Guthrie broke away from his Punch typecasting as a comic writer. The Statement of Stella Mabberly, for instance, is a pretty good psychological horror novel; and the 1891 Tourmalin's Time Cheques (1891) is in SF/fantasy territory. It tells of Peter Tourmalin, bored on a long ship journey who makes a deal with a 'time bank' enabling him to draw 'time cheques' that revisit previously deposited hours if he wants to take a break from routine.  He deposits the rest of the journey, and instantly finds himself at home in the middle of planning arrangements for his marriage. When he draws the cheques, however, they drop him into increasingly fraught out-of-sequence segments of the timeline aboard the ship, and complications increase as the interest accrued on the time deposit adds extra time where he revisits segments already experienced.

See Brian M. Stableford Yesterday's bestsellers: a journey through literary history, pages 69-, for a good overview of Anstey and his works; it mention's Anstey's largely unexplored talent for darker fantasy. Despite his success as a humorist, he expressed in his autobiography, A Long Retrospect (sampled here at Gaslight), his regret at the lack of success of his serious works.
- Ray

Tamara Drewe movie

A brief update: I'm please to see the Exeter Picturehouse schedule for forthcoming films includes Tamara Drewe, Stephen Frears' adaptation (screenplay by Moira Buffini) of Posy Simmonds' graphic novel of the same name - a satirical comedy of English Yuppie country life. From the trailer, it looks as if it has been storyboarded very faithfully to its source. The UK premiere is on September 6th, and it'll be on general release from around the 10th.

There are plenty of preambles in various media sections - for instance, Peter Bradshaw's Guardian Film piece ("Stephen Frears's adaptation of the Posy Simmonds comic strip is like the filthiest possible episode of The Archers") - and comingsoon.net has an exclusive preview of the poster. But most of them miss the crucial detail that the graphic novel is, in turn, a loose adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd. It was filmed, appropriately, in Dorset (Salwayash and Yetminster) and it may be a casting in-joke or sheer coincidence that the lead actress is Gemma Arterton, who starred in the rather good 2008 BBC adaptation Tess of the D'Urbervilles.

See Tamara Drewe for further background.  See the Guardian for the full archive; on Saturday 28th August the paper also had a good interview with Posy Simmonds.

- Ray

On pseudohistories

I just made it into the local paper with the Express & Echo story "Town 'guide' has residents fuming" concerning my spoof town guide Secret Topsham. Quoting:

One critic, who asked not to be named: "The whole thing is extremely distasteful. It is not in the spirit of Topsham people—we are not like that.

"On Saturday there was a couple visiting Topsham complete with a Secret Topsham quiz they had downloaded from the internet.

"The couple were upset when they realised they had been tricked—disgusted, I think, was the expression used."

A spot of context for those who've come here in response to that story. I maintain the official Topsham website topsham.org as well as the unofficial "Topsham Ten" page. I also run the weblog for the Devon History Society and co-maintain the Topsham Museum website. From this it should be abundantly clear that I think Topsham's a brilliant place, and that I'm also keen on history.

My short response is exactly as I was quoted in the paper (though I don't recall saying exactly those words): "It is really just taking a friendly poke by someone who loves the town at some of the more formal guides you see."

But of course it's more complex than that. Amateur local history, as an activity and genre - and I'm talking about everywhere, not just Topsham - has a number of foibles. It tends to enshrine concrete anecdote over the often fuzzy reality, and accept personal testimony uncritically. It seizes on the most tenuous connections to famous persons. It likes its history airbrushed: local persons are always worthy, social unrest and the grittiness of the historical past ignored. Like all histories, it reflects the social biases of its compilers (in the case of local history, usually older middle-class people). And it takes itself far too seriously.

Some of these I had in mind as applicable to Topsham. The Vivien Leigh connection, for instance, is an example of the 'famous person' syndrome; she never lived in Topsham, and the only connection is that she was married for five years to someone from the town. But these are far more widespead foibles characteristic of local guide pamphlets, websites and advertorial articles for many towns and villages, and Secret Topsham is satirising the 'local anecdote' format in general.

Anyone who feels "disgusted" after falling for a hoax or satire they found on the Internet should look to the origin of that feeling. This is all about cognitive dissonance, the discomfort that comes from taking on an idea, then having to radically revise it. It's easier to blame the originator than accept responsibility for believing something uncritically - despite it being well-known that the Internet is full of misinformation - then realising your mistake.

Secret Topsham is full of impossibilities, tall stories, joke names, an unlikely concentration of famous connections, and even a link to the famously fictious Dunchideock Treacle Mines. It's hard to see how anyone could believe it for more than a moment.


Addendum: further to discussions in the comments, I just found Granite State of Mind, Christian Wisecarver's lovely parody that transplants Jay-Z's Empire State of Mind to portray New Hampshire as a seething metropolis.

- Ray

James Gillray

click to enlarge

The UK papers, such as the Guardian - James Gillray cartoons discovered in Ministry of Justice clearout - variously mention the discovery of a volume of the "Suppressed Plates" by the political satirist James Gillray, works seized as obscene in Victorian times, stowed in various offices, and now rescued from a bin liner by the astute policy adviser David Pearson.

Probably Gillray's best-known prints (pictured above) are The Plumb-pudding in danger, or, State epicures taking un petit souper ... (in which Pitt and Napoleon divide up the world) and The Cow-Pock—or—the Wonderful Effects of the New Inoculation!—vide. the Publications of ye Anti-Vaccine Society (which ridiculed an urban myth spread by anti-vaccinationists involving a "Cow-Poxed Ox-Faced Boy"). He's well-covered online, right from the full view of the 1851 Historical and descriptive account of the caricatures of James Gillray, which gives excellent contemporary commentary on what each print satirizes. Wikimedia Commons has a large collection of his prints.

Some of his prints are rather more personal: his The Gout is clearly drawn from the heart. I'm surprised he isn't in the Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database, a rather excellent collection of annotated references to medical conditions in art, literature and other media.
- Ray