29 May 2014
'That is an amazing horrid book, is it not?'
With its sex-crazed monks, dissolute noblemen, mad scientists, shambling monsters and blood-sucking vampires - not to mention its apparently endless fascination with innocent young ladies in diaphanous gowns being pursued around crumbling castles - it is easy to see why Gothic literature has often been regarded as somewhat disreputable. Gothic fiction lurks in the shadows. It may be devilishly handsome and charismatic but it is not the sort of literary genre you would wish to bring home to meet your mother. On the other hand, and for the very same reasons, it is easy to understand why it has always been extremely popular. Morally-improving literature certainly has its place but, let's be honest, mad scientists and shape-changing vampires are considerably more interesting. Even better, in the hands of a genuinely great author such as Ann Radcliffe or Robert Louis Stevenson, you get the best of both worlds. You get the rattling good yarn and you get a fascinating insight into contemporary fears as well.
On the British Library's new Discovering Literature website there is a whole swathe of Gothic to enjoy, not only in terms of the novels themselves but also in terms of the inspirations and ideas lying behind them. Beginning with Horace walpole's deliciously strange The Castle of Otranto (1764) Gothic set out to put imagination and emotion at the forefront of literature. Authors such as Ann Radcliffe added a fascination with landscape: the sublime wonders of mountains and lakes, ruins and abbeys. Matthew Lewis wrote his brilliantly lurid (and yes, admittedly rather disreputable) novel The Monk (1796) in response to the horrors of the French Revolution while Mary Shelley was partly inspired to write Frankenstein (1818) as a result of discussions into the power of galvanism to cause corpses to twitch with a ghastly semblance of life.
(Above: an early 19th-century edition of The Monk, complete with a full plot outline - ending in 'Most Ignominious Death' - on the right-hand page)
Gothic fiction has always possessed the ability to adapt itself in order to reflect the latest ideas and concerns of society. Early Gothic novels were set in exotic European Catholic landscapes and in distant, seemingly unenlightened times. Later the Victorians brought Gothic imagery into the urban landscapes of the present day - Oliver Twist, for example is, on one level, a Gothic tale of an innocent pursued by menacing figures through a terrifying urban landscape of slums and criminal enclaves. Sensation fiction meanwhile, which reached its peak in the 1860s, used Gothic plot elements such as mistaken identities, secret wills, doubles and locked rooms and wove them into labyrinthine plots set in the drawing-rooms and parlours of apparently respectable society.
With the Victorian fin de siècle Gothic mutated again. This time it was the human mind and body which provided the landscape for horror. Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) played upon the nightmarish implications of evolutionary theory while Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) used vampirism as a parallel for syphilis and moral degeneracy.
(Above: The cover to a 1919 edition of Dracula)
Gothic fiction, for all its seeming playfulness, provides brilliant and imaginitive insights into the fears of the times in which it was produced. By its very nature Gothic literature makes imaginative leaps denied to its more sober counterparts. And yes, as a bonus, it also frequently features sex-crazed monks, mad scientists, vampires and Pre-Raphaelite beauties with an eye on the main chance. I mean, seriously, what's not to like?
28 November 2013
Fifty Glorious Years! Doctor Who and the Invasion of Dusty Victorians
Doctor Who and Henry James are rarely mentioned in the same sentence. Now, admittedly there are many excellent reasons as to why that should be the case. The author of The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove tended to move in rather different circles to those occupied by the splendid chap (all of them) who to this day travels through time and space in something that, on the outside at least, resembles a police box. I can't imagine, somehow, that James would have had too much time for alien invasions, time travel and mad scientists (let alone K9, the talking computer designed to look like a dog - a most un-Jamesian idea if ever there was one) but all the same, there is a link between the two and as Doctor Who celebrates its fiftieth anniversary perhaps now is as good a time as any to explore the debt the Doctor owes to Henry James, and indeed to a whole array of 19th- and 20th-century novelists.
The TARDIS. There are probably dozens of Victorian novelists hiding behind it right now
Mary Whitehouse famously disagreed but the golden age of Doctor Who was often at its best when it doffed a cap to the great works of Gothic fiction. The Tom Baker era for example, when the programme's ratings were at their highest, rummaged cheerfully through assorted dark cupboards positively stuffed with literary Gothic horrors. The Brain of Morbius (1976) for instance was a variation on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, complete with a brilliant but wayward scientist and a monster cobbled together from spare parts. The Talons of Weng-Chiang (1977) cheerfully mixed Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera with Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu books while adding a dash of Sherlock Holmes. Tom Baker even wore a deerstalker in the story and the programme featured a giant rat (which, for all we know, may have had links with Sumatra - and if that means nothing to you then please read Arthur Conan Doyle's 'The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire' immediately). The Masque of Mandragora (1976) gave a cheery wink to Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Masque of the Red Death', even down to the macabre dance at the end while Planet of Evil (1975) reworked Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and added a dash of antimatter misbehaviour for good measure. The Hand of Fear (1976) meanwhile borrowed from W.F. Harvey's story 'The Beast with Five Fingers'. It was all brilliantly Gothic stuff and to their credit the show's producers, directors, cast and script-writers took their ideas from the original novels and ran with them in dazzling and inventive new directions. Mary Whitehouse, rest her soul, may not have been punching the air with enthusiasm but the rest of the country lapped it up.
So where, you may ask, does Henry James fit into all this? Well, since its reboot in 2005 Doctor Who has continued to borrow from and reinvent classic tales of the supernatural. The Crimson Horror (2013), with its setting in Victorian Yorkshire and its weird, creepy red parasite comes across like the bizarre literary lovechild of Elizabeth Gaskell and Bram Stoker. Charles Dickens himself (well, sort of ...) appeared in The Unquiet Dead (2005) and the great man's A Christmas Carol loomed large behind the 2010 Christmas special titled ... umm ... A Christmas Carol (the literary heritage of that one was, admittedly, not obscure). The following year witnessed a bit of borrowing from C.S. Lewis for The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe and then, best of all to my mind, we had the 2012 Christmas special - The Snowmen. Ah yes, now that's the one that owes a great deal to Henry James.
Henry James, perhaps pondering whether to introduce killer snowmen with sharp teeth into 'The Turn of the Screw'
Henry James's 1898 novella 'The Turn of the Screw' tells of a governess; her two wards - Flora and Miles - and the ghosts of her predecessors Peter Quint and Miss Jessel who, while they certainly exist within the governess's mind may not exist anywhere else. The parents of the children are both dead and their uncle, around whom the governess weaves romantic fancies, is remote and distant. In The Snowmen we have a governess (definitely one with a bit of mystery about her), looking after two children haunted by nightmares in which her predecessor returns from the dead. The children's mother is also dead and their father, in a neat 21st-century twist, weaves romantic notions around the governess ('Such wisdom in one so very, very pretty ... I mean young ...'). All of this, as with the Henry James novella, takes place in Victorian England in an isolated mansion. Then there are the murderous snowmen ... Okay, so these do not appear in the Henry James version but the nods and winks to the past continue. Matt Smith's Doctor even claims to be Sherlock Holmes at one point while the investigative trio of Madam Vastra, Jenny Flint and Strax owe more to Arthur Conan Doyle (as Richard E. Grant's character actually observes) than to Henry James. All of which goes to show how the influence of Victorian literature, and Gothic Victorian literature in particular, is frequently present throughout Doctor Who. To my mind the show is all the better for it so long may it last. Indeed, here's to the next 50 Gothic-flavoured glorious years.
20 September 2013
Scientists Behaving Badly
In his current television series, Science Britannica, Professor Brian Cox argues that real-life scientists receive something of a bad press. They are, he argues, regarded with undue suspicion by the public, frequently seen as either dabblers meddling with forces they don't understand or else as out-and-out madmen trying to play God. He does, undeniably, have a point although I fear it will ever be thus. Cox cites the example of the Italian physicist Giovanni Aldini whose work on galvanism and its medical applications stands in a direct line with the development of today's defibrillator devices. Aldini, however, is now best remembered (and even that possibly erroneously) as the inspiration for a much more famous scientist - the less than ethically rigorous Victor Frankenstein. Aldini may have made dead limbs twitch under the application of an electric current but Mary Shelley's Victor Frankenstein made an entire stitched-together body come to life only to somewhat irresponsibly abandon his creation at the first sign of trouble, allowing it to engage in a murderous rampage across the countryside. Here, perhaps, is the beginning of a whole new level of scientist-bashing. Scientists may receive a bad press at the hands of the general public who misunderstand their aims and methods but in the hands of the literary establishment they quite frequently receive nothing less than a glossy makeover into the realms of nightmare. The trouble is, as a literary device, when it comes to providing a potential for villany and chaos on an epic scale the mad scientist is terrifically hard to beat.
Of course Science and the Humanities do have previous. Like two children squabbling over the same toy they rarely manage to play nicely together. C.P. Snow's famous 1959 lecture 'The Two Cultures' argued that science teaching had been unfairly and dangerously neglected due to an exaggerated emphasis on the arts and humanities. Ideally the two disciplines would be granted an equal weight but somehow an air of distrust always lurks between the two as though they are on opposite sides, rather than two components of a balanced whole. Nowhere was this more obvious than during the Victorian fin de siècle. Scientists such as T.H. Huxley were hugely respected in real life but in the pages of fiction readers were presented with one misbehaving lunatic in a laboratory after another. Famous examples include Dr Moreau, conducting experiments into accelerated evolution on his island via means of vivisection; Dr Jekyll, unleashing the beast within as he explores the darker implications of evolutionary theory; Dr Griffin, conducting a murderous spree as his experiments into invisibility leave him isolated and insane and Dr Ledsmar from Harold Frederic's brilliant The Damnation of Theron Ware, living in his isolated house up on the hill, experimenting upon his collection of lizards and dosing his Chinese manservant with vast doses of opium merely to observe the effects. Amoral, arrogant and brilliantly twisted Dr Ledsmar is a horror. He is also terrifically good fun to read about. The well-behaved considerate scientist acting responsibly under an impeccable moral and ethical code would, on the other hand, be something of a bore.
(Above: A scientist - if he's late-Victorian and in a novel chances are that whatever he's up to it isn't going to end well).
The 1880s and 1890s witnessed the conclusions - both good and ill - of Darwinism being thought through together with their possible implications for religion, humankind's place in Nature, evolution and degeneration. Fears about the heat death of the universe haunted the final pages of H.G. Wells's The Time Machine while up and down the county debate raged about the need and usefulness of animal vivisection experiments. Science was achieving brilliant things in medicine, communications and engineering but it was also unveiling some depressing possibilities for humankind. Respect for the scientist, and fear of what may be unleashed as a result of scientific research went hand in hand. Literature held a mirror to the potentially dark side of scientific endeavour. I suspect, for better or worse, it will always be so. Misbehaving scientists simply make for brilliant and cautionary stories .
10 July 2013
Robert Louis Stevenson and the Strange Case of the Spanish Vampire
The Victorian fin de siècle was an era noted for its decadents, aesthetes, dandies and New Women. Viewed from a sunny perspective all could be seen as positive signs of a new age of liberation and freedom dawning within society. Viewed from a gloomier aspect however all could be seen as signs of transgression, perversity and moral and physical degeneration. Perhaps the latter view had something to do with the prevalence of another popular figure during the Victorian fin de siècle, albeit one mercifully confined to the pages of novels and short stories, namely the vampire. As a metaphor for vile transgression, disease and decay few literary tropes served quite so well as a pale undead figure with a taste for human blood. Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula sits at the summit of late-Victorian vampire fiction but the Transylvanian Count had plenty of company. Mary Elizabeth Braddon's short story 'Good Lady Ducayne' deals with the attempts of an elderly woman to remain ever youthful by surreptitiously draining the blood from her chloroformed servants while Florence Marryat's The Blood of the Vampire from 1897 tells of a young girl - the daughter of a mad scientist and a voodoo priestess no less which as a basis for a potentially difficult childhood takes some beating - who drains the life-force from those around her. One slightly earlier tale sits strangely neglected however, which is a shame as it is arguably the most elegantly written and haunting vampire tale of them all - a tale featuring a Spanish woman with beautiful but strangely empty eyes who gazes from her crumbling mansion over a sun-drenched landscape of ravines, mountain-passes and woodland.
(Above: A copy of Philip Burne-Jones's painting The Vampire, first displayed in 1897 - you couldn't move for vampires in the 1880s and 1890s, in art and literature at least)
Robert Louis Stevenson's enigmatic short story 'Olalla', published in the Christmas of 1885, sits in the shadow of the more illustrious Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). Stevenson was writing the former at the same time as he was going through the proofs for the latter but while Jekyll and Hyde opened a Pandora's Box of new urban, scientific and psychological horrors 'Olalla' acts as something of a loving farewell to the golden age of Gothic fiction. Taken together they serve as a staging post between old and new nightmares.
(Above: Robert Louis Stevenson, pondering both past and future horrors)
'Olalla' tells the tale of an unnamed English soldier wounded during the Peninsular Wars of the early nineteenth century and sent to recuperate in an isolated Spanish mansion. While there he meets Felipe, a simple-minded youth, and his sister the enigmatic Olalla together with their mother who sits staring out endlessly at the sun-baked hills and valleys. The mother remains languid in the heat until the soldier accidentally cuts his hand at which point, when she sees the strong flow of blood, she becomes notably more wide-eyed and animated - indeed she leaps from her chair and bites him.
'Olalla' has the air of a feverish dream throughout and contains several typically Gothic elements. It is set in the past and takes place in an exotic Southern European Catholic country. The landscape, in the tradition of Ann Radcliffe, is beautifully described. There is even a portrait on a wall which depicts a long-dead ancestor who bears an uncanny resemblance to someone still living - an echo of both Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables (and a device later used by Arthur Conan Doyle in The Hound of the Baskervilles). The decayed Spanish house and the strangely lifeless figure of the mother mirror each other in the same fashion as the unravelling once grand Ushers mirror their literally collapsing mansion in Edgar Allan Poe's famous tale. Ancestral secrets and physical decay were staples of early Gothic fiction and Stevenson gathers together the traditional themes and adds a twist of post-Darwinian theory in the idea of physical and mental flaws being inherited, rather than ancestral sins. As a late summation of all that was wonderful about the first flowering of Gothic fiction 'Olalla' could hardly be bettered, something which renders its neglected status all the more baffling. Having completed the tale Stevenson returned to the proofs of Jekyll and Hyde, a narrative in which he held up a mirror to the very different dawning nightmares of the future - nightmares being played out not in a foreign land of long ago but in the here and now of London. Sweet dreams .....
30 April 2013
In Praise of the Unloved
There is something intriguing about forgotten novels by famous authors. Why, for example, do general readers and academics alike adore Middlemarch and Adam Bede and yet leave Romola to gather dust like a neglected maiden aunt slumped in a chair? While many novels are ignored because they are simply rather dull and some because they are just too peculiar (we love Bram Stoker's Dracula while refusing to have anything to do with the bafflingly odd Lair of the White Worm) a few fall into obscurity when they deserve a better fate. A recent enquiry reminded me of one such title - a neglected novel by a famous author that among its many fascinations includes a heroine who works out in her private gymnasium while wearing a pair of pink pyjamas. I shall explain ....
Which novel by Thomas Hardy features, in addition to the heroine with the pink pyjamas, a pistol-packing tattooed illegitimate son of a dashing army officer; an amateur production of a Shakespeare play hastily re-written by the leading man so as to include an unscheduled love-scene with the leading lady and a hero who unfortunately finds himself in a railway tunnel as a steam train approaches? The answer is A Laodicean and while Mary Elizabeth Braddon, the Queen of the Sensation Novel, would have wept with pleasure at any one of these plot elements somehow A Laodicean missed its audience and tumbled from view.
Even the illustrations didn't help .... A remarkably undramatic depiction by the usually excellent George du Maurier of a scene from A Laodicean. George Somerset, the hero, and Paula Power remain curiously unruffled after a close encounter with a steam train.
A Laodicean; or, The Castle of the De Stancys. A Story of To-Day, to give the book its full title, was published in 1881 and has by and large sat undisturbed on bookshelves ever since. Hardy categorized the work among his 'Novels of Ingenuity'; a category shared by the similarly ill-starred Desperate Remedies and The Hand of Ethelberta. The book was written while Hardy was seriously ill and perhaps the combination of looming deadlines and ill-health resulted in a more feverish and uneven imaginative process than usual. The sombre drama of The Return of the Native had gone before and the brilliant gloom of Jude was to come but A Laodicean lurks like an unexpected 'Mr Bun the Baker' card in the middle of a conventional pack. For all of its peculiarities, however, the book is not without interest and certainly deserves better than its generally forlorn status.
While undoubtedly sensational in nature - for example most of the drama actually takes place in a Gothic crumbling castle - A Laodicean highlights, in embryonic form, one of the major changes taking place within society during the 1880s and 1890s, namely the emergence of the independent, educated and free-spirited New Woman. Paula Power, the heroine of the novel, is highly intelligent and for a Victorian mainstream novel really rather racy. During the course of the book she vacillates - hence the title of the novel, a Laodicean being someone lukewarm or half-hearted - between various religions, various plans for the future of her dilapidated castle and various suitors while always remaining ultimately independent of outside influence and true to her own desires. She has charm and character and considerably more spirit than the wet and shabby array of men who make a play for her hand. One somehow always thinks of Hardy as looking back to a rural and romantic past but he was, as his love of the bicycle and the motor car would show, more often than not looking ahead. His sympathetic portrayal of Paula as a woman in advance of her time and a forerunner of more complex characters such as Grace Melbury from The Woodlanders and Sue Bridehead from Jude puts him at odds with many of his contemporaries, male and female, who regarded the New Woman as a mannish, pipe-smoking, child-neglecting monster prepared to put her own unnatural desires before the sturdy duties of marriage and motherhood.
The New Woman as seen in an unsympathetic Punch cartoon - cigarette-smoking, mannish and frankly a bit unnatural. Punch (Vol 108 page 282).
Hardy, I would argue, saw the other side of the coin and in A Laodicean sympathetically portrayed a woman who, though swayed by outside opinion, ultimately decides her own path in life and refuses to follow the conventions set out for her. So, we have challenging social comment, drama, a Gothic castle prone to shedding a turret or two during violent storms, dashing army captains and dopey heros wandering about in railway tunnels. And all this from a largely forgotten book. One never knows just what lies between the pages of those dusty, neglected and unjustly unloved novels.
01 August 2012
Happy Yorkshire Day
1 August is Yorkshire Day, and as an honorary Yorkshirewoman (married to a genuine Yorkshireman, who greets people with ‘howdo?’) I thought I’d point out that this is a county with a rich literary heritage. It features in four of the six sections of Writing Britain, in around 10 literary works (plus a couple more slightly questionable mentions).
The exhibition opens with Michael Drayton’s enormously long poem Poly-olbion, published in the early 17th century – an attempt to describe the whole of the landscape of England and Wales in a single poem, getting in a lot of local folklore as he went.
Michael Drayton, Poly-olbion. British Library shelfmark 79.h.3
It’s such a beautiful book that we have two copies of it on display in the exhibition so you can see different pages – the engraved title page featuring Britannia, and the illustration for Yorkshire. The poem itself isn’t great but the engravings are amazing, with rivers and hills being identified by cavorting personifications. I picked Yorkshire to display because I loved the fact that York is demonstrated by a lady in a flowing dress wearing York Minster on her head like a hat (sadly I don’t have a picture, so you’ll have to come and see it in person!).
York Minster. Definitely unsuitable for use as a hat.By Andy Barrett (User:Big Smooth) (Own work) [CC-BY-2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons
Also in the Rural Dreams section of the exhibition is one of my favourite books of all time, Winifred Holtby’s South Riding. I will say this: you’d never guess that a 500-odd page novel about a county council could be so gripping – which will be an interesting test when JK Rowling’s new book, The Casual Vacancy, also about a county council, comes out in September. South Riding is set in the 1930s at a time of great change in agriculture and social policy, and features an enormous cast of characters across all society. It’s set in fictional South Riding, based on the East Riding of Yorkshire where Holtby’s mother was a councillor. (Yorkshire fact: Riding means ‘third’ and the three ridings of Yorkshire are North, East and West – so a South Riding couldn’t exist.) We have the first edition on show, with a really beautiful 1930s dust jacket, and were lucky enough to be able to borrow from the Hull History Centre Holtby’s own hand-drawn map of South Riding, mapped over the real places.
Also from the Hull History Centre we have borrowed Philip Larkin’s notebook containing his drafts for his poem ‘To the Sea’. This poem perfectly epitomised a lot of the British literature about seaside towns in the Waterlands section of Writing Britain – Larkin celebrates ‘the miniature gaity of seasides’ and says that to many people, the concept of the seaside holiday was ‘half an annual pleasure, half a rite’ with many people returning to the same nostalgic spot year after year. It’s an evocative and somehow incredibly British vision.
In contrast to this rose-tinted view of seaside towns, there's Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a novel which might not exist if it wasn’t for Whitby in North Yorkshire. Stoker was on holiday in the town when it’s believed he read a history book which inspired him to write the novel, and which had the reference number "Whitby Library 0.1097." Later he set one of the most key scenes in the book in Whitby, when Dracula enters England during a storm, in the body of a black dog, swimming from an eerie shipwreck which had a corpse lashed to the helm and some mysterious boxes of earth in the hold. It’s a scene that today inspires Goths to visit Whitby for a semi-annual festival, Whitby Goth Weekend.
And finally, one of the more tenuous mentions: most people think of Robin Hood as a Nottingham man, but some early ballads about him record his origins as being in Barnsley in South Yorkshire. On show in Writing Britain is a short pamphlet A true tale of Robin Hood, printed in 1787 in Nottingham (after popular history had situated him firmly there) and made to be sold cheaply on the street.
Other Yorkshire literature in Writing Britain includes: manuscripts of Jane Eyre and Shirley by Charlotte Bronte; Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (and a magnificent photo by Fay Godwin of Top Withens, the farm thought to be Emily’s inspiration); Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies; and even an illustration of Castle Howard which for many is the perfect embodiment of Brideshead in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (although Waugh didn’t use Castle Howard as his model).
Fay Godwin, Top Withens © British Library Board
And, I almost forgot to add, if you think we missed the best novel, poem, play or song lyric about Yorkshire, please add it to our literary map Pin-A-Tale.
23 July 2012
A monstrous creature of the beetle tribe...
A horrific shape-shifting Egyptian Beetle; blackmail; mesmeric powers; blurred gender boundaries; weapons of mass destruction; the challenge of the New Woman; a gentleman detective; and a train crash…
One of the great joys of curating Writing Britain has been the discovery and rediscovery of books either long forgotten, or never previously encountered.
And one of the strangest – and by far the most enjoyable - of these has been Richard Marsh’s The Beetle.
As the list above suggests, the book is one of the strangest to feature in our exhibition; and when it comes to a check-list of fin de siècle fears, The Beetle really does have it all.
In the novel, Robert Holt is a clerk who discovers the awful realities of being ‘out of a situation’- a risk that lurks close to the surface of the precarious existence of the many other ‘clerk’ texts that we feature in Writing Britain (from the foolish Mr Pooter, to the honourable – if put-upon- Robert Thorne in Shan Bullock’s eponymous novel).
Losing even the meagre comforts of his class, Holt is transformed into a ‘penniless, homeless tramp’. Ejected from a doss-house, he heads towards the west London suburbs where endlessly repeated rows of housing herald disorientating effects. In one anonymous villa, Holt discovers the horrific shape-shifting Egyptian Beetle, who penetrates the suburban security of the English middle classes with mesmeric powers. The Beetle represents the threat of the foreign ‘other’. The independent Miss Lindon, who attempts to overcome the creature, personifies the challenge of the New Woman for late Victorian gender relations.
The Beetle was first published in volume form in 1897, the same year as another Gothic horror novel featured in Writing Britain: Bram Stoker’s Dracula. As Minna Vuohelainen shows, reviewers praised The Beetle over Stoker’s (now) more famous work (‘Mr. Bram Stoker’s effort of the imagination was not easy to beat, but Mr. Marsh has, so to speak, out-Heroded Herod’), and for many years, The Beetle outsold Stoker’s classic.
Although neglected for many years since, The Beetle is reappearing on Undergraduate syllabi as a new generation of lecturers discovers the work, and succumbs to its mesmeric powers. The Beetle has been republished in recent years, and is available as part of the British Library’s digitized 19th Century books. Last Friday, Dr Victoria Margree of the University of Brighton organized a one day symposium on Marsh’s oeuvre- which is also, slowly, coming back into print. For a full check list of Marsh’s works, see the extremely helpful Research guide prepared by Minna Vuohelainen; and if you only read one tale of shape-shifting, gender-bending, fin de siècle Gothic horror this summer…make sure it’s The Beetle.
17 April 2012
I became in secret the slave of certain appetites
…Not me, this time, but Robert Louis Stevenson’s creation, Henry (Dr) Jekyll. Or at least the first creation of the character in a draft he later censored.
We announced in a piece by Dalya Alberge in the Observer on Sunday that we’re borrowing the original manuscript of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (no definite article, PLEASE - somehow it matters, though I know it shouldn’t) from the Pierpont Morgan in New York.
The story of Dr J is complex- and uncertain. It was written in 1885 while RLS was living in Bournemouth, and under financial pressure to come up with a story - a ‘shilling shocker’ (or, - homophonically better - as the subs on the Observer had it, a ‘chilling shocker’).
The first version apparently came to Stevenson in a dream, but was burnt on his wife’s suggestion, and the two more versions were quickly produced. The version we’re displaying - from the most complete extant draft - has a number of sentences absent from the published version, which seems to hint at a more explicit explanation behind Jekyll’s background and what he calls his ‘Full Statement’: you can see RLS deleting the reference to ‘certain appetites’ on the draft we’re showing, as well as cancelling a confession of being ‘plunged… again into the mire of my vices’.
I’ve added an image at the top – with thanks to our good friends at the Morgan - and closer examination of these hidden appetites and vices will be possible when the exhibition opens on 11 May.
Credit: Manuscript for Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde © The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. MA 1202. Photography, Graham S. Haber, 2012
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