Little Jack Horner: a nursery rhyme explained

Little Jack Horner

Sat in a corner

Eating a Christmas pie.

He put in a thumb

And pulled out a plum

And said “What a good boy am I!”

This familiar nursery rhyme has its origins in the 16^th century and the Dissolution of the Monasteries during the reign of King Henry VIII.

The Abbot of Glastonbury in Somerset, Richard Whyting, was determined to resist the dissolution of his own monastery, which was an extremely wealthy one. He thought that he could get round King Henry by offering him a bribe, in the shape of twelve manor houses that were owned by the abbey.

Whyting therefore sent his steward, Thomas Horner, to Hampton Court Palace with the deeds of the manor houses. The law at the time stipulated that the holder of a deed was the owner of the property, so it was essential that the deeds did not fall into the wrong hands. They were therefore hidden in a large pie.

However, Thomas Horner was not as trustworthy as the abbot had imagined. During the journey Thomas Horner lifted the crust of the pie and removed one of the deeds, namely that of Mells Manor. King Henry was therefore offered eleven deeds, not twelve.

Whether the full bribe would have worked is a matter for conjecture, because the slightly reduced one did not. Glastonbury Abbey was dissolved, along with the rest, and Abbot Whyting was put on trial for having dared to set himself against the will of King Henry. One of the jurors at the trial was Thomas Horner, now the master of Mells Manor. Richard Whyting was found guilty and sentenced to death, being hanged, drawn and quartered at the top of Glastonbury Tor.

Interestingly, the slang word for £1000 in the 16^th century was “plum”, although any sum of money that an ordinary person would regard as being way beyond their reach could also be called a plum. We still use the term “plum job” to describe one that seems to offer a good return for doing very little. Thomas Horner’s plum was the large house that he now occupied.

The Horner family still owns Mells Manor, although they dispute the story of how it came into their possession, preferring to state that Thomas Horner acquired the deeds by purchase or as a gift from the king. However, the story of the pie clearly went the rounds at the time, in the form of the famous rhyme, and everyone prefers a tale of skulduggery to one of honesty, every time!

© John Welford

Darkness and light in A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens’s “A Tale of Two Cities” is a story about contrasts, as is evident from the very title. We are shown the two cities, namely London and Paris, in very different lights, with Paris being the city of revolution and danger and London as the place of peace and sanctuary. Along with this contrast are the themes of night and day, darkness and light, running through the book.

The tale begins at night, with Mr Lorry making his journey to Dover to catch the ferry to France, where he is to rescue Dr Manette. It ends in daylight, with the death by guillotine of the hero, Sydney Carton. However, to equate darkness with evil and light with good is to make too facile a judgment, and Dickens is far too clever a writer to make so obvious a distinction. In the examples given above, a good deed is performed at night and an evil one in daylight.

That said, Dickens is happy to make use of the conventional approach when it suits him. At the end of Chapter 16, darkness falls in Paris just before the Revolution starts. He writes:

“Darkness closed around, and then came the ringing of church bells and the distant beating of the military drums in the Palace Courtyard, as the women sat knitting, knitting. Darkness encompassed them. Another darkness was closing in as surely, when the church bells, then ringing pleasantly in many an airy steeple over France, should be melted into thunder cannon …”

The chapter that follows is entitled “One Night”, but it describes a peaceful moonlit evening in London, with Lucy Manette receiving reassurance from her father on the eve of her wedding day. Here, darkness and light are intermingled, as the full moon reminds Dr Manette of the sad times spent looking out of his former prison cell and thinking of the wife and daughter he believed he had lost forever.

The cover of darkness is used to perform deeds that are secret, sometimes they are evil, sometimes not. Jerry Cruncher robs graves at night, but Jerry is on the “good” side in the story, and his activities lead to the unravelling of one of the mysteries.

Sydney Carton is dissolute by day but works hard at night, producing brilliant legal defences that make the reputation of his employer, including the acquittal of the man who will become Lucy’s husband and for whom Sydney will sacrifice his life.

Charles Darney’s evil uncle, the Marquis St Evremonde, is murdered at night. However, the destruction of a cynical aristocrat who cares nothing for the peasants is a deed that we regard as good, although it also has evil consequences.

The focus of much of the action in Paris is the Bastille prison, which is a place of darkness at all times. When it is stormed by the revolutionaries, Dickens gives us the following:

“Through gloomy vaults where the light of day had never shone, past hideous doors of dark dens and cages …”

The mob is described as a “sea of black and threatening waters”, and light is only supplied by the fires of burning chateaux and other property seized from the aristocrats.

The metaphor of darkness and light also appears in the creation of shadows, which are of course the result of light that is prevented from shining by obstacles placed in its way. The dark figures of the mob, particularly Madame Defarge, are often described in terms of shadow, and as being the creators of shadow. Lucy remarks at one point that “that dreadful woman seems to throw a shadow on me and on all my hopes”.

As the story approaches its close, the reason for Dr Manette’s imprisonment is recounted in a chapter entitled “The Substance of the Shadow”, with the next two chapters entitled “Dusk” and “Darkness”. In the second of these, the darkness of Madame Defarge’s cruelty is contrasted with the light of Carton’s resolve to save his rival in love, Charles Darnay, and thus, through self-sacrifice, to end his life in service to Lucy Manette.

The interplay of darkness, light and shadow are therefore constant, and Dickens’s choice of chapter titles shows that this is no accident. However, the chaos of revolution is reflected in the uncertainties introduced by Dickens as good and evil deeds are associated sometimes with light and sometimes with darkness.

A Tale of Two Cities is not regarded by most critics as being one of Dickens’s greatest novels, but we know that he was very pleased with it. Perhaps later readers have misjudged it by not being aware of many of the subtleties that the author introduced, with darkness and light being one of the mechanisms used to great effect.

© John Welford

Pip in Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Pip is the central character of “Great Expectations”, to the extent that all the events of the novel are seen through his eyes, he being the narrator throughout.

“Great Expectations” was Dickens’s 13^th novel, published in serial form between November 1860 and August 1861. Parallels can be drawn between this novel and his 8^th, “David Copperfield”, which appeared in 1849-50.  Both novels are first-person retrospective narratives that follow the main character from childhood to adulthood, but whereas David’s life can be matched to some of the actual events of that of Dickens, Pip’s progress can be regarded more in the light of an intimate spiritual autobiography.

Although both novels are among Dickens’s greatest achievements, the portrayal of Pip is more psychologically complex than that of David, with Pip being forced to deal with a wider-ranging set of moral dilemmas than David.

Pip is Dickens’s first working-class hero (even Oliver Twist had middle-class roots), which is central to the plot involving the “great expectations” of the title. The theme that runs through the novel is Pip’s consideration of self-worth at being raised up the social ladder, and whether the reader shares his opinion.

Pip consistently misunderstands his situation throughout the novel, not out of lack of intelligence but because the circumstances in which he finds himself are confusing and difficult to set in their proper context, mainly because Pip, and the reader, do not know what that context is.

The dramatic opening scene, in which Pip is accosted in a churchyard by Magwitch, the escaped convict, is a mixture of horror and comedy in which the young boy has little idea of what is going on, other than that a rough man is making demands of him and, at one point, holding him upside down by the ankles. However, Pip’s abiding memory is of how the church steeple suddenly points at the ground rather than the sky.

A vivid imagination

The verbal misunderstandings of childhood, which begin in the churchyard and which Dickens introduces as comic touches, set the scene for Pip’s much more serious miscalculations later in the book. Coupled with this theme is Pip’s vivid imagination, which takes every situation a stage beyond that which is initially presented. For example, he has no idea what the source of his “great expectations” might be, so he imagines that his benefactor must be the reclusive and eccentric Miss Havisham, who has befriended him and invited him to her house on many occasions, but with a very different motive.

Dreams

The portrayal of Pip, as a character of recurrent low self-esteem and guilt, is well presented by Dickens who at this stage of his writing career was a master in exploring the psychology of a character. It is interesting to note how Dickens uses Pip’s dreams to reveal aspects of his developing character, albeit in a different manner to that used, some 40 years later, by Sigmund Freud. Pip’s dreams bring his guilt home to him, and also multiply his fears, such as when he is harbouring Magwitch in London and the burden is becoming too much for him.

There is an interesting contrast between Pip’s daydreams of what being a gentleman will be like and his nightmares, some of which relate to his guilt at having turned his back on the honest people who brought him up but are now “beneath” him in his new snobbish persona.

Pip’s “doubles”

The psychological complexities of the book are partly worked through by Dickens’s use of “doubles” to draw attention to aspects of Pip’s character. Pip’s personality consists of conflicting elements, and these doubles often appear in pairs that contrast with each other. They also interact with Pip and thus provide symbolic representations of what is going on within the central character.

Several such pairs have been indicated by critics and analysts, but the most striking must surely be Orlick and Herbert Pocket. Orlick is the rough apprentice blacksmith whose response to Pip is always hostile and who eventually gives way to his violent nature by attacking (and essentially causing the death of) Pip’s sister and carer, Mrs Joe. As she had always been very stern in her treatment of Pip, Orlick’s attack on her could be seen as something that Pip might have been driven to, had the evil side of his personality been allowed to dominate.

On the other hand, Herbert can be seen as the “good angel” aspect of Pip who never allows himself to be turned aside from following the right course. Unlike Pip, Herbert appreciates the need for hard work in order to succeed, and also knows how to treat people of all classes with respect. He therefore gains the happiness that eludes Pip. However, he also stands by Pip in the latter’s lowest moments and, at the end of the book, provides the security that Pip had been unable to find for himself.

  

The fact that Herbert can be seen as a reflection of Pip is hinted at when they first meet, with the two looking at each other from either side of a window pane at Satis House (Miss Havisham’s home). The final realization of this joint nature is indicated at the end of the book when Pip says:

“… I often wondered how I had conceived that old idea of his [Herbert’s] inaptitude, until I was one day enlightened by the reflection that perhaps the inaptitude had never been in him at all, but had been in me.”

Pip’s earlier miscalculations and selfishness must, however, have long-term consequences, and these manifest themselves in the contrast between Herbert’s happy marriage and Pip’s failure to find a wife. Having treated his true benefactors so badly, he cannot expect to be rewarded with true happiness and the novel ends with Pip realising that his life is still a work in progress.

“Great Expectations” is a flawed masterpiece in several respects, but it is also one of Dickens’s most interesting works from the psychological aspect, especially as it concerns the central character. Dickens had achieved a “great expectation” of his own shortly before writing this novel, by moving into his house at Gad’s Hill, a fairly large mansion which, since his childhood in north Kent where that of Pip is also set, he had dreamt would one day be his.

However, it was also not long since he had abandoned his wife Catherine, preferring the society of an actress, Ellen Ternan. Catherine had borne him ten children and stood by him throughout their marriage of 22 years, so he might have had some lingering feelings of guilt for how he had treated her, although he would have denied this at the time. One wonders if Dickens preferred to let his character Pip deal with these emotions when he was unable to express them himself.

© John Welford

See also

Estella in Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Chairman Mao's Little Red Book

“Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong” can claim to be the world’s second top best-seller of all time (after the Bible) with more than 900 million copies having been printed since its publication in 1964. However, it is a matter of debate as to how many copies would have been printed had it not been compulsory for all Chinese citizens to have a copy on their person at all times when in public.


The Little Red Book

Strictly speaking, the “Little Red Book” was the pocket edition of “Quotations”, but both editions had the same purpose, namely to convey the thoughts of China’s Communist leader Mao Zedong (1893-1976).

All citizens were expected to read and learn the contents of the Little Red Book, even if they did not fully understand all the practical implications of the slogans contained in it. Time was set aside in schools and factories for people to study and recite passages from the book.

The Little Red Book became a symbol of oppression during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-69 when armies of “red guards” held their copies aloft as they marched in support of Chairman Mao and were instrumental in ruthlessly crushing any signs of dissent.


The purpose and effect of the book

The book was a revolutionary idea in its own right, because the traditional way in which the Chinese people learned about what their leaders were thinking and doing was through a complex network of bureaucracy. By means of this book the supreme leader could speak directly to every one of his people and tell them what was expected of them as loyal followers of the Communist regime.

The quotations were a set of extracts from Mao’s many speeches and writings in which he outlined his interpretation of Marxist-Leninist thought as it applied to a Chinese context. As well as political slogans and dogmas, the book also contained Mao’s ideas on how Communism applied to the everyday lives of ordinary people.

It was important for the Communist leadership to gain the trust of the people, and one way of doing this was, as mentioned above, to tell them what the rules were. It was also, therefore, a tool for keeping everyone in line. If people knew where the limits were, in terms of what they were allowed to believe and say in public, then anyone who stepped beyond those limits could be spotted and singled out for “re-education”.

However, the symbolic power of the book as a direct link between the leader and his people was probably what had the greatest effect. It is therefore surprising that the idea has not caught on among the world’s other dictatorial regimes – the “Thoughts of Supreme Leader Kim Jong-Un”, for example (perhaps he doesn’t have any?). There have been plenty of examples of personality cults being copied and continued, but this particular feature does not seem to have caught anyone’s imagination – yet.

© John Welford

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales: an overall view

Any attempt to provide a complete literary analysis of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in 1,000 words or so is doomed to failure. The book runs to some 17,000 lines of (mostly) verse, comprising 24 tales, a long introductory General Prologue and a number of other prologues to tales and other linking material. The analysis therefore has to be at a more general level, with examples brought in to illustrate the important points.

The first thing to be said is that the Canterbury Tales are incomplete. If we are to believe the original plan as described in the General Prologue, each of the 29 pilgrims was to tell two tales on the way to Canterbury and two on the way back, making 116 tales in all. As it happens, only 22 of the pilgrims get to tell a tale, with Chaucer himself being the only one to tell two. One of the tales, that of the Canon’s Yeoman, is told by somebody who turns up when the pilgrimage is well on its way and is therefore an “extra”.

Even then, a number of the tales we have are incomplete. On two occasions this is because the tales are interrupted by other pilgrims. Chaucer’s first tale, a piece of doggerel that is clearly a joke told against himself, is too much for “mine host” and he insists on Chaucer starting again with something else. The Monk is also interrupted. Other tales would appear to have fallen victim either to lost manuscripts or the poet running out of inspiration. Thus the Squire’s Tale is unfinished, and the Cook’s Tale, at only 58 lines, barely gets started.

However, even though the Canterbury Tales as we have them are only a fraction of what might have been expected, what we have is a remarkable and highly varied collection of medieval stories. There is everything here from classical romance (e.g. The Knight’s Tale) to bawdy romp (e.g. The Miller’s Tale) to fable (e.g. The Manciple’s Tale) to a long, involved sermon in prose (The Parson’s Tale).

Several of the tales are clearly re-tellings of those of other writers, such as Boccaccio and Petrarch. What Chaucer was doing was therefore taking some of the works of great European writers and making them available to an English-speaking audience. This was before the days of printing, so the audience would have been a small one, hearing the stories read to them by, for example, Chaucer himself. It is, however, notable that the Canterbury Tales was the first book printed at Westminster by William Caxton, in the 15^th century.

Some of the tales would appear to be original to Chaucer, or only very loosely based on others. The Miller’s Tale may be one of these, likewise the tales of the Friar and the Summoner.

What sets the Canterbury Tales on a different plane from being just a collection of stories is the “frame tale” within which they are set. The tales belong to their tellers, to whom we are introduced in detail before the first tale is told. The General Prologue is itself a masterpiece of 14^th century English poetry which can be read and enjoyed in its own right. After the opening scene-setting lines that explain the idea of the pilgrimage to the tomb of St Thomas A’Beckett at Canterbury, each pilgrim is described in turn. We get the impression that Chaucer has had a chat with each of them over a drink in the Tabard Inn on the night before they set off, and he has captured their characters from what they have told him.

Nearly all of them have a dark side, or a secret that is revealed thanks to a few pints of ale having been consumed. Chaucer is something of a Sherlock Holmes, spotting seemingly inconsequential details that go together to reveal the pilgrims’ true characters. We, the readers, are invited to read between the lines and appreciate that the apparent praise being heaped on these people by the poet has a very different purpose.

For example, the Prioress is a young lady who takes great pride in her appearance. She has smooth skin, is well-dressed, has excellent table manners, speaks French, and is clearly well used to polite society. But she is supposed to be in charge of a priory, having taken vows of poverty and chastity and responsible for the moral and spiritual welfare of her nuns. Clearly she is far more worldly than she should be, and presumably she is on this pilgrimage to flirt with whoever she may come across. Chaucer makes mention of how pained she is if she sees a mouse in a trap, and how she feeds her pet dogs with the choicest morsels. It is up to us to note that nothing is said about how she might react to a person in need, because clearly she stays as far away from the poor and needy as she can.

It is notable from the General Prologue just how many of the pilgrims make a living from the Church and how all of them, except the Parson, are thoroughly disreputable in their own way. The Pardoner is a conman, selling worthless pieces of paper to gullible people who believe that they will be saved from Hell by so doing. The Friar is similarly out for what he can get, and the Summoner’s job is to haul people before the Church courts unless they can buy him off instead.

As the pilgrimage proceeds, the characters interact with each other, notably the Friar and the Summoner who clearly loathe each other deeply. There is plenty of interplay in between their tales, and the tales they tell are aimed at each other, with the Friar telling a tale about a wicked Summoner and the Summoner returning the “compliment”.

Other pilgrims also tell tales that are in tune with their characters. The Knight’s Tale, although it has a classical background, is based on the medieval concept of “courtly love” which would have been familiar to its teller. This is followed by a parody of the courtly love story in the Miller’s Tale, a bawdy story in which a lively young woman gets the better of her husband and an unwelcome lover in a story that is very rude but also very funny. This is entirely in keeping with the character of the Miller as presented to us in the General Prologue.

There is a theme running through several of the tales that concerns the relative positions that husbands and wives should have in a marriage. Indeed, a sequence of the tales, beginning with that of the Wife of Bath, has been designated by critics as the “Marriage Group”. The feisty and much-married Wife (who is the only pilgrim not to follow a trade or profession) is an early exponent of “women’s lib” who believes that the woman should be the dominant partner in a marriage. She gives a long speech, saying just as much, before she even starts to tell a tale. This serves to make her the most complex and interesting of Chaucer’s characters, and the best-drawn female character in any work of literature before Shakespeare. Her Tale, which is a re-telling of the “loathly lady” fable in which a hag offers to be “fair or foul”, backs up her prologue by showing the wisdom of leaving the choice to the lady.

The Clerk tells a tale in which a husband has complete domination over an obedient wife, although the teller does not advocate such behaviour, and the Merchant then tells the story of January and May, which parallels the earlier Miller’s Tale with its story of a young wife cuckolding an older husband, but on this occasion not getting away with it. The Franklin’s Tale brings the group to a close by showing that dominance either way in a marriage is not to be recommended, but forgiveness and tolerance are the keys to married bliss.

As stated earlier, it is impossible to do justice to the whole of the Canterbury Tales in a short article. Suffice it to say that there is a whole wealth of humour, wisdom, adventure and morality in this collection, as well as a host of characters, both inside the tales and without, who serve to give the modern reader a very vivid picture of life in England more than 600 years ago.

© John Welford

See also:

The background to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales 
Sources used by Chaucer for his Canterbury Tales 

The background to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

In his Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1340-1400) explains that April is the month when people get the idea of making a pilgrimage to Canterbury to pay homage at the shrine of St Thomas Becket. The tales are those supposedly told by a motley set of pilgrims bound on just such a venture.

Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury during the reign of Henry II, had been murdered in 1170, and the practice of making a pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral, where the murder took place, had started almost from that date. Indeed, it was Henry himself who made the first pilgrimage, as penance for his angry words that had led to the murder of a man who had once been his best friend.

By the time of the pilgrimage of the Tales, some two hundred years later, undertaking a pilgrimage had become less of a religious rite and more of a vacation. As we read the General Prologue it becomes clear that only a few of these pilgrims have religious devotion as their motive. Most of these people are determined to enjoy themselves.

It is perhaps no coincidence that none of the pilgrims is accompanied by a wife or husband, so there is plenty of opportunity for flirting and bawdiness. Indeed, we learn later that the Wife of Bath is using the trip to find herself a new husband.

Whether Chaucer ever made such a pilgrimage is not known, but it is quite possible, given that we know that his wife was ill in the Spring of 1387, that he was probably not otherwise occupied on state business at the time, and that making a pilgrimage to Canterbury under such circumstances was a natural thing to do; he states explicitly that many of the more devout pilgrims (not necessarily among his current colleagues!) made the journey to pray for cures for illness.

The pilgrims gather at an inn, The Tabard in Southwark (the area south of the Thames opposite the City of London). They will stay the night there and start out on their pilgrimage the following morning. We can imagine Chaucer chatting with everybody over a drink and making many mental notes about each of them.

It has been suggested that some of Chaucer’s pilgrims were based on real people, and much energy has been expended on trying to find matches for them. There was a real innkeeper in Southwark called Henricus Bailly, who was also a Member of Parliament, and the knight, the shipman and the man of law have also been mentioned as having possible real models. However, it is extremely unlikely that most of the cast of characters that gathered at the Tabard Inn were anything other than the fruit of Chaucer’s imagination.

In the Prologue to the Tales Chaucer provides pen-portraits of most of the tale-tellers, who are a cross-section of English society at the time. It is noticeable that many of them earn their living from the Church, in one way or another, but only one of them (the parson) could be described as a sincere Christian. Chaucer is thus able to make a social commentary about English life in the 14^th century, warts and all.

The Canterbury Tales are therefore not just a masterpiece from the point of the tales themselves but they open a window on an age long gone.

 © John Welford

See also: 

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales: an overall view
Sources used by Chaucer for his Canterbury Tales 

The General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales

Prologues and introductions to works of literature are often paid very little attention, frequently being skipped so that the reader can get to the good bits as quickly as possible. However, in the case of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales that would be a grave mistake. The General Prologue is a wonderful piece of work in its own right, as well as being the scene-setter for what is to follow.

It opens with some of the most famous lines in all of English Literature:

“Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote

The droghte of March hath perced to the rote,

And bathed every veyne in swich licour

Of which vertu engendred is the flour;…”

(When April with his sweet showers

Has pierced the drought of March to the root,

And bathed every vein in such moisture

Of which virtue is the flower engendered;…)

(which admittedly sounds a lot better in Middle English!)

This is the prologue to the prologue, setting the time and the place of the pilgrimage that is due to make its way from Southwark (on the south bank of the Thames near London) to Canterbury. The first 18 lines explain why “longen folk to goon on pilgrimages”, and the next 24 lines set the scene of this pilgrimage in particular.

After the introductory lines, the other 29 pilgrims are described in turn, in varying amounts of detail, after which the host of the Inn, Harry Bailly, announces that he will ride with the pilgrims and, in order to pass the time, each of them will tell two stories on the way there and two on the way back. The Prologue ends with the Knight being asked to tell the first tale, based on the drawing of lots.

It should be noted that not all the pilgrims get to tell even one tale, although Chaucer himself tells two, and that one of the tales, that of the canon’s yeoman, is told by a latecomer who is not mentioned in the Prologue.

The main reason why the Prologue has been accorded such a high place in English literature is that Chaucer’s pen portraits give us a snapshot of English society at the time, with many of the trades and occupations of 14th century England being represented. However, these are not dry descriptions but well-honed observations that expose the many hypocrisies and idiosyncrasies of the characters. As Chaucer explains, he has spoken to all of them during the previous evening, and we can imagine him making many mental notes during these conversations.

Chaucer was England’s first great humourist, and he had a wonderful knack of getting a character to condemn him or herself out of his/her own mouth. The reader is often invited to put two and two together and get five.

All that is missing from the social spectrum is high nobility and royalty, which is hardly surprising. Apart from that we have minor nobility in the person of the knight, the squire, and even the prioress, professional people such as the man of law and the physician, tradesmen such as the miller and the merchant, people at various levels of the agricultural hierarchy, such as the franklin, yeoman and ploughman, and a large number who make their living, either directly or otherwise, from the Church.

This latter point is particularly interesting, because Chaucer uses the Prologue to point to many of the shortcomings of the Church at the time. The power of the Church can be seen from the sheer number of “religious” pilgrims, which was indeed a fair representation of the state of English society at the time. In all, eleven of the pilgrims fall into this category.

The first religious character we meet is the prioress, the head of a religious house, but she is clearly very interested in cultivating good manners and taking care of her appearance. She should not have had pet dogs, which are fed with the choicest cuts of meat, nor even have been taking part in a pilgrimage. She is well aware of her femininity, although she stops short of actual flirting.

The monk is clearly way out of order, as he has no interest in religion but spends his entire time hunting and feasting. In his view, the religious rules are “old and somewhat strict”, and thus best forgotten. Likewise, the friar is utterly corrupt, hearing confessions for payment, frequenting ale-houses and consorting with women. We can assume that his practice of paying for the marriages of young women must be because he was responsible for their pregnancies!

The summoner and the pardoner are described one after the other. These both make their living on the fringes of the Church, the summoner calling people to appear before the ecclesiastical court, unless they can bribe him well enough to be excused, and the pardoner selling fake religious relics and bogus pardons that have supposedly been signed by the Pope. Chaucer lets them have his satire with both barrels.

Nearly all the characters can be regarded as “types”, but they also have individual personalities, many of which are developed as the tales are told. However, one character strikes us as being less typical than the rest, and this is the “wife of Bath”. There is a sense in which she might have been typical, in that life expectancy was much lower than it is today and it would not have been unknown for a woman to outlive five husbands.

That said, this particular lady is a character in her own right, and is drawn as such rather than representing a trade or occupation, although it could be said that, for her, “wife” counts as a profession. Strangely enough, the Prologue says less about her than about some of the other pilgrims, but we learn that she is no longer young, or slim, or possessing all her own teeth, and is hard of hearing. She is however very aware of her personal appearance, even to being vain about it, and she is assertive to the point of aggression when it comes to her position in the local community. She is well-travelled, having made pilgrimages to Rome and three times to Jerusalem, and must therefore be fairly well-to-do, presumably from having married and been widowed by five rich husbands.

Chaucer clearly has much more to say about this interesting lady, and he drops a hint to this effect in his description of her. That she is Chaucer’s favourite character is evident from the fact that the prologue to her own tale is the same length as the whole of General Prologue, and we discover there that she is the first exponent of “women’s lib” in English Literature.

So the scene is set, the characters assembled, and we can sit back and enjoy what is to follow. We can expect interesting tales from this motley crew of heroes and degenerates, and possibly a few fireworks along the way as these people mingle with each other and discover where their personalities clash. Let the fun begin!

© John Welford

See also:

Sources used by Geoffrey Chaucer for his Canterbury Tales

Nancy in Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

“Oliver Twist” is the most melodramatic of Charles Dickens’s novels and is peopled by stock characters who would have been familiar to those acquainted with the popular theatre of the day, Dickens being a lifelong enthusiast of drama and the theatre.

These characters include the innocent child (Oliver), the two-dimensional villain (Sikes and Monks), the wily avaricious Jew (Fagin) and the whore with the heart of gold (Nancy).

However, Dickens’s treatment of Nancy, who repents her past life but sacrifices her future one by seeking to do good in saving Oliver, also reveals his wider interest in trying to do something to address a social evil, namely the prevalence of prostitution in 19^th century London.

In 1847, some eight years after the completion of “Oliver Twist”, Dickens opened Urania Cottage, a home for rescued and reformed prostitutes that aimed to set them on a new path, including emigration to Australia where they could make a fresh start. It is interesting to note that this was a proposition that was made to Nancy in his novel.

Many people will know about Nancy from having seen either the stage or film version of Lionel Bart’s musical “Oliver!” (1960/1968), but this should not be relied upon as a faithful representation of the original novel. Although there are many features in common, there are also many differences, and it is important to stick to the book for a true account of the author’s intentions for his character.

Nancy’s age is not mentioned in the novel, but it can be assumed that she would be something close to 17, as Dickens has her tell Oliver that she has been part of Fagin’s gang for twelve years, ever since she was half Oliver’s age. The reader knows that she has been successful as a thief, because she is not known to the local magistrates and can therefore go to the court, when Oliver is arrested, without being recognised and linked back to the gang.

The fact that Nancy is a prostitute, with Sikes as her pimp, is not stated explicitly by Dickens, but the implication is a strong one. She is only introduced gradually to the reader, appearing at first alongside her female companion Bet, who can be taken to be a fellow prostitute. They are both described as “not exactly pretty, perhaps; but they had a great deal of colour in their faces, and looked quite stout and hearty." Nancy therefore has no individual characteristics of her own but is seen as one of a pair, and as typifying a low-class woman of the streets.

Nancy comes into her own as a character when she acts on her own accord to protect Oliver. She had previously been instrumental in kidnapping Oliver after he had been taken into Mr Brownlow’s care following the trial mentioned above, and in recruiting him to take part in a house burglary organised by Bill Sikes, which goes wrong when Oliver is wounded and taken into the care of Rose Maylie.

Having promised Oliver that she would look after him, Nancy now feels guilty that she has let him down and resolves to warn Rose and Mr Brownlow that the gang are going to try to kidnap Oliver a second time. Although she also does her best to protect Sikes from being caught, Fagin, who has found out about Nancy’s secret activities, informs on her to Sikes in such a way that Sikes believes that she has betrayed him. This leads to her being brutally beaten to death by Sikes.

When Dickens was writing “Oliver Twist”, which he did in serial parts between 1837 and 1839, he reached a dilemma as to how to conclude the story, for which he did not have a fixed plan at the outset. It would appear that he had originally intended to write a story of redemption, in which the woman who had sinned would turn the corner and become righteous, thus enabling him to draw a moral lesson in typically evangelical terms. This plot was being worked through, with Nancy recognizing the evil of her past and expressing contrition, then performing an act of atonement in risking her life by making contact with Rose and Mr Brownlow. 

However, Dickens realised that he could not follow the plot through without producing some unworkable contradictions. He could have made Nancy repent of her past life as a thief and a prostitute and “go straight” under Rose’s guidance and Mr Brownlow’s protection. However, that would also have meant her abandoning Bill Sikes, whom she clearly loves, which would have been one conversion too far. For Dickens, womanly virtues consisted of service, compassion, love and loyalty, and for Nancy to cut all ties with Sikes she would have had to deny her nature as a woman.

Fortunately for Dickens, fate intervened in the shape of a horrific murder that took place in London in May 1838, when Eliza Grimwood, a young prostitute, had her throat cut by William Hubbard, who was her pimp and her lover. This therefore suggested itself as the fate for Nancy, as not only did it solve the moral question referred to above, but it also had the backing of a real event to give the fictional action due plausibility.

Dickens used a number of the features of the Grimwood murder in his description of that of Nancy, including the final position of the body on the floor having fallen backwards from a kneeling posture. In Nancy’s case:

“'Raising herself, with difficulty, on her knees, she breathed one prayer for mercy to her Maker.”

Sikes then rains further blows on her with her lifeless eyes staring up at him, which continue to haunt him afterwards.

Dickens went to town in his description of Nancy’s murder and was accused of sensationalism as a result. However, he also made full use of this passage later in his career when he gave public readings of his works, with “Sikes and Nancy” being a particular favourite with his audiences.

By ending Nancy’s life in this way, Dickens achieved his aim of securing her redemption, although this has to be in the next life rather than this. Having been the perpetrator of sin, and having indicated her wish to mend her ways, she is now the victim of an even worse sin and, by reaching heavenwards with Rose Maylie’s bloodstained handkerchief in her hand, she achieves a form of martyrdom which Dickens’s readers would have recognized and applauded.

In terms both of drama and of solving the problem of making Nancy’s conversion convincing, Dickens pulled a rabbit out of the hat with her murder. He also rescued a novel that might otherwise have been somewhat insipid, given the fact that very few of his characters display much in the way of development. Oliver remains innocent throughout, whereas Fagin, Sikes and Monks begin and end as villains. Only Nancy makes the move from guilt towards innocence, with the awkward question of the believability of her conversion, at least in 19^th century eyes, being answered by her death.


© John Welford

Social class in Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Of all Charles Dickens’s treatments of social class in his novels, that presented in “Great Expectations” is the most radical and thorough. Indeed, many commentators have seen this book as the supreme exploration of the topic in Victorian literature.

Social class, and the allied topics of social upheaval and mobility, reached its peak as a matter of artistic concern in the Victorian era. The Industrial Revolution had created a vast new underclass of urban factory workers and another new class of “nouveau riche” social climbers who owned the factories and profited from the labours of their employees. These social distinctions ran in parallel with the old social class system of landed gentry and rural poor, which in turn derived from the medieval feudal system.

Dickens himself was something of a social climber. He was personally ashamed of certain aspects of his past, such as his time as a child worker in a blacking factory, and had always dreamed of bettering himself. In 1856 he had bought a country house in Kent (Gad’s Hill) which he had seen many times in his childhood when taken on walks by his father, and he had often fantasised about living in it one day. His writing of “Great Expectations” (1860-1) coincided with his taking up permanent residence at Gad’s Hill, thus realising a “great expectation” of his own.

“Great Expectations” was written the year after Samuel Smiles published his highly influential “Self-Help”, which encouraged people from the lower middle class to practice thrift and self-improvement and thus give themselves a social boost. The monthly parts of Dickens’s new novel would therefore have been read by many people who had expectations of their own, great or otherwise.

The central character of “Great Expectations” is Pip (his own childhood attempt to pronounce his name, Philip Pirrip). He lives with his elder sister who is married to a village blacksmith, to whom Pip becomes apprenticed. These are honest, hard-working people with no social aspirations of their own and who do not deserve the misfortunes that befall them later in the novel.

Pip’s first encounter with people from a higher social class is when he is invited to visit an eccentric old lady, Miss Havisham, who lives in the grand Satis House, which she keeps in exactly the same state as it was on the day she was jilted at the altar many years before. Living with her is her ward, Estelle, whom Miss Havisham is bringing up to despise all men. It soon becomes clear that Pip’s function is to be enchanted by Estelle (which he is) and then rejected. Our view of the upper class, as seen through these women, is therefore a highly prejudiced one, as it comprises people for whom the lower class are there to be used as tools for their own ends.

However, Pip is then told that he has “great expectations” of his own, thanks to an unknown benefactor, whom he naturally believes to be Miss Havisham. In this he is wrong, because the sudden promotion in wealth and class status comes to him courtesy of a convict, Magwitch, whom Pip had helped as a child and who has made his fortune in Australia, to which he had been transported.

By giving Pip the chance to raise his social status, albeit anonymously, Magwitch seeks to do, through Pip, what he could never do for himself, namely become a gentleman. However, gentility is not so easy to acquire simply through the gaining of wealth, and this is the central message of the book. Pip’s response to his change of status is to think himself better than those people on whom he has depended for his whole life to date, and he becomes a snob who is lucky to hold on to the few true friends he has.

Magwitch, who has escaped from his sentence and returned to England to find Pip, gets a very different reception from the one he had expected. Far from being welcomed with open arms by the gentleman he has created, he finds that Pip’s overriding concern is that Magwitch should leave as soon as possible. Neither Pip not Magwitch have understood what being a gentleman entails.

What we have in “Great Expectations”, therefore, is a set of “dos and don’ts” relating to the class system. Dickens was a man of his time in that he believed that social distinctions mattered. He did not take the line of his contemporary (and fellow Londoner) Karl Marx, who wished to give political power to the underclass. Instead, Dickens pointed to the morality of what was right and wrong in terms of social expectations.

For one thing, the behaviour of Miss Havisham and Estelle is unacceptable, and Estelle is brought to realise this. Being socially superior does not give one the right to play games with the feelings and emotions of those less fortunate.

On the other hand, social class is not something that can be bought and sold, which is the mistake made by Magwitch. In the last analysis, morality is more important than class. Pip’s aspirations are noble, in that education, social refinement and material advancement are desirable goals, in the “Self-Help” tradition, but he goes about achieving these things in the wrong way. Ultimately, it is the people in one’s life who matter, whatever their social class, and it is always wrong to forget those people when one’s own aspirations are met.

In “Great Expectations”, by showing that Pip’s expectations are founded on self-deception, Dickens was able to present an incisive assessment of the Victorian achievement. No novel of the Victorian era, by any writer who tackled the question of social class, did a better job of portraying the subtle interplay of class, character and morality than “Great Expectations”.

© John Welford

84 Charing Cross Road: a review

A review of a short book that is a joy to read, and which was made into a highly successful stage play and film.

84 Charing Cross Road

“84 Charing Cross Road” was published in 1971 by Helene Hanff (1916-97), an American writer of TV scripts and magazine articles whose reputation depends almost solely on this one short book of fewer than 100 pages. However, the gentle humour of the book, depending in part on an American and a Brit getting to learn about each other’s preoccupations and customs, has had a lasting appeal on both sides of the Atlantic.

The address in question was that of Marks and Co, a small bookshop in central London that specialised in out-of-print titles. The “Co” was short for “Cohen”, one of the joint owners, and not “Company”. Helene Hanff wrote a letter from New York in October 1949 to the bookshop, inspired by an advertisement in the “Saturday Review of Literature”, to ask if they could supply any of the books she wanted on an enclosed list. The bookshop replied, Helene replied to the bookshop’s letter, and so began a correspondence that was to last for twenty years. It is the letters from Helene and the replies she received that comprise the book.

Most of the letters from Marks and Co were written by their chief buyer, Frank Doel, whose death in 1969 brought the correspondence to an end and gave Helene the inspiration to collect all the letters together as a book. Some of the letters were presumably lost, because there are some long gaps in the chronology at places, and mention is sometimes made of events that have clearly been referred to in letters that are not part of the collection.

As time passes, the formality of the earliest letters breaks down and they become much more friendly in tone, with mention made of more personal matters than just the buying and selling of books. The ice is cracked quite early on when Helene, in only her second letter, adds as a PS: “I hope Madam doesn’t mean over there what it does here”.

Before the end of 1949 Helene has offered to send a gift of food to the staff at Marks and Co, as Britain was still suffering from post-war rationing. These gifts continued into the 1950s and were very well received by the bookshop staff, some of whom wrote their own letters back to Helene, these being generally more chatty than those written by Frank Doel.

However, even Frank’s letters gradually turn more personal, although he never loses his professionalism when it comes to discussing books that he is able to offer Helene or which he regrets he has not been able to find.

The discussion of books is, not surprisingly, a recurrent theme in the letters, and Helene is clearly a true book-lover in that she enjoys the look, feel and smell of old books as well as the words they contain. She sometimes gets annoyed when the wrong edition of a book is sent, but also waxes lyrical with joy when she finds evidence that a previous owner has enjoyed a book just as much as she is doing. She would have hated to own a Kindle!

A theme that soon enters the correspondence is Helene’s desire to visit London, and the bookshop, as soon she can afford to do so. Letters are exchanged between Helene and Frank’s wife Nora, discussing how she might be accommodated when she arrives, but something always crops up that prevents this from happening.

The tragedy of the book is that, with no warning of any health issues on the horizon, Helene receives a letter in 1969 to announce that Frank Doel has died from a ruptured appendix. The final letters are between Helene, Nora and Frank’s daughter (from his first marriage) Sheila.

The beauty of this book is the development of the friendship between Helene and Frank, his family and colleagues. There is real warmth in these pages, and the reader knows that, had they ever been able to meet, Helene and Frank would have been very good friends. The reader also feels that all the people encountered in the book are well-rounded characters whom it would have been a real pleasure to know.

Helene Hanff wrote a sequel to the book which is a diary of her eventual visit to London in 1971, after “84 Charing Cross Road” had been published and she became a minor celebrity on the strength of it. By this time the bookshop had closed and Helene could only visit the empty shell and imagine how it would have looked when her letters were being delivered to it. The second book was entitled “The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street” and was published in 1974.

84 Charing Cross Road was made into a stage play (in 1981) and a film starring Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins in 1987.

Incidentally, Charing Cross Road is still a good place to shop for books, both new and second-hand, although the site of “84”, as pictured, is now part of a fast-food restaurant.

© John Welford

Barnaby Rudge (by Charles Dickens) and autism

Barnaby Rudge was the fifth novel published by Charles Dickens (1812-70). It appeared in weekly parts in his short-lived journal Master Humphrey’s Clock, the final episode being printed in November 1841.

It cannot be denied that Barnaby Rudge is far from being one of Charles Dickens’s best known novels. It has never had the popular adulation of his other early novels, such as Oliver Twist or Nicholas Nickleby, and even Dickens would have admitted that it was not one of his better works. For one thing, a novel in which the title character is absent from the action for 19 consecutive chapters has surely got a serious flaw in terms of its structure.

Despite the book’s problems as a novel, the title character is a figure of considerable interest. Barnaby is put forward as a naïve character who is easily led astray, which is why he gets caught up in the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780 and is nearly hanged as a result. However, when one looks closely at the actions and demeanour of Barnaby, it soon becomes clear that Dickens is describing someone who is autistic, at a time when the condition was unknown and its sufferers were likely to be classed as “idiots” or mentally unsound, and therefore not worth taking seriously.


Autism

Autistic behaviour relates to an inability to abstract concepts from experiences and thus to link cause and effect or to plan for the future. The basic building blocks are present in the brain but they are not put together correctly. The comedian Eric Morecambe once famously remarked that he was “playing all the right notes but not necessarily in the right order”, and autism is something like that.

When one examines the typical characteristics of autism, and compares them with the text of Barnaby Rudge, one can see that Dickens must have known, at first hand, one or more people with the condition in order for him to be able to depict his character so convincingly.

It has to be remembered that there is a spectrum of autistic behaviour, such that individuals may be slightly or severely affected, or fall anywhere in between the extremes. This means that sufferers may exhibit some of the typical symptoms but not others, or they may display most of the recognised autistic behaviours but only to a mild degree. However, Barnaby Rudge does seem to tick most of the boxes when his behaviour is measured against the common definitions of autism.

It is clear that Dickens does not think that Barnaby is mentally defective. In chapter 25, for example, he mentions how Barnaby’s mother regards him, describing his actions when a child as deriving from something “not of dullness but of something infinitely worse, so ghastly and unchildlike in its cunning”.


Typical symptoms of autism as displayed by Barnaby Rudge

Autistic people often find it difficult to sustain personal relationships at an emotional level. Barnaby does not appear to be particularly close to his mother (who believes that she has long been widowed and therefore lives alone with Barnaby) and is perfectly happy to abandon her to join the rioters. He treats individual rioters alike as friends, whether he has known them for years or only five minutes. The one creature to whom he shows true affection is not human at all, namely his pet raven Grip whom Barnaby regards as his brother and from whom he is never parted (incidentally, it was this raven that inspired Edgar Allan Poe to write his famous poem “The Raven”).

A symptom of autism is sticking rigidly to a routine, even when circumstances change such that the action in question makes little sense. This tendency in Barnaby is noticed by the rioters, one of whom remarks that he “can be got to do anything, if you take him the right way”. Tasked with guarding a stable, and armed only with a flag, Barnaby continues to march up and down until overcome by a band of soldiers. The idea of running away from danger never crosses his mind.

Another indication is being unaware of the behaviour that is expected of one’s age and situation. This can be revealed as childish behaviour that continues into later life, such as a delight in toys and hobbies such as collecting car numbers, or, as in Barnaby’s case, an inability to make a distinction between humans and non-humans in terms of social status. His devotion to Grip the raven has been mentioned above, but this also takes the form of Grip being elevated above him in the pecking order: “He’s the master and I’m the man”.

Autistic people often show unusual degrees of sensitivity to sights and sounds. Barnaby is described at one point as “shutting out the light with his hands”, and at another as being able to recognise the sound of the footsteps of a dog as well of as its master.

Although being susceptible to panic attacks is not confined to those on the autistic spectrum, it is a regularly found symptom in such people. Barnaby’s mother recalls his “strange imaginings” and “terror of certain senseless things” in childhood. At one point he is anxious about the plotting and hatching that he imagines being done by clothes blowing about on a washing line, and at another he wonders about the motives of sparks from the fire as they ascend the chimney. This display of anxiety is therefore coupled with the typical autistic inability to distinguish between animate and inanimate objects and to anthropomorphise the latter.

Hyperactivity and abnormal movements are sometimes a symptom of autism. Barnaby’s mother remarks on his restlessness, and he thinks nothing of walking the twelve miles from Southwark to Chigwell, or of spending the whole day wandering through the countryside.

Speech abnormalities are common in autism. Barnaby sometimes loses the power of speech when excited, or he finds it difficult to express complex meanings. As with a number of the symptoms of autism, this is by no means unique to the condition and it is a common cause of confusion between autism and other forms of mental disability. Many autistic people have suffered discrimination because they have been labelled as “idiots” due to being unable to speak clearly, but it is noticeable that Barnaby’s friends know full well that this is not the case and that Barnaby understands situations as well as they do, if not better.

As should be clear from the above, autism is not synonymous with lack of intelligence, and many autistic people have been known to be extremely gifted in terms of abilities in limited areas. For example, the current writer has a relative who is severely autistic but has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the London Underground system. Barnaby’s special gifts include the ability to train his pet raven and to remember the faces and names of people whom he has not seen for many years.


Charles Dickens and autism

Charles Dickens conveys all of this knowledge of autism in his character of Barnaby Rudge, so the question remains of how he was able to do so when the condition was a hundred years or more from being recognised as such by the medical establishment. He may well have come across autistic people in his life and made careful mental notes of their behaviour. Some of his previously written characters might also be thought of as autistic to a greater of lesser degree. For example, Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist is never seen without his dog Bullseye, who appears to be the only creature to whom he shows any affection. A better case might be made for Smike in Nicholas Nickeby, who has suffered years of abuse from Wackford Squeers for being similar to Barnaby Rudge in a number of respects, but who is quite capable of being a close friend to Nicholas.

An even more fascinating thought is that Charles Dickens recognised many of these symptoms in himself, and that Barnaby is, to some extent, a self-portrait. It is known, for example, that Dickens would spend many hours wandering the streets of London at night, in a mirror image of Barnaby wandering the countryside during the day. Dickens did not find it easy to sustain personal relationships, with his marriage ending eventually in separation. Above all, perhaps, his single-minded pursuit of his craft, involving countless hours in the activity of writing to a punishing schedule as he completed each weekly or monthly part of his latest novel, might be construed as an autistic activity.

Indeed, it might be said that had Dickens not been so obsessively meticulous in observing his fellow human beings, he might not have been able to create characters such as Barnaby Rudge. Such accuracy and attention to detail perhaps require one to be somewhere on the autistic spectrum oneself.

© John Welford