The original Mad Hatter

 

One of the best-known characters in Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” is the Mad Hatter, with whom Alice takes tea together with his companions the March Hare and the Dormouse.

By the time that Alice in Wonderland was published in 1865 it was well known that people who made hats often fell victim to an illness that displayed early symptoms of what could be termed madness, such as irritability, a lack of patience, difficulty in thinking or concentrating, and changes in movement, which could become coarse or jerky.

These symptoms resulted from long-term mercury poisoning, which was an occupational hazard for hat makers who used a form of mercury to treat felt. When used in an enclosed space, the mercury gave off vapours that were then inhaled. The expression “mad as a hatter” became commonly used in Victorian England and would have been well known to readers of “Alice”.

However, it seems highly likely that Carroll had a real person in mind – not a hatter – as his model for the Mad Hatter character.

This was Theophilus Carter, a well-known furniture dealer who lived near Oxford and, like the Mad Hatter in Tenniel’s illustrations for “Alice”, always wore a top hat.

Carter was renowned for his eccentric ideas and inventions. At the 1851 Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace built in London’s Hyde Park, he exhibited his ‘alarm clock bed’, a contraption that woke the sleeper by literally throwing him out of bed at a pre-determined time – an idea that, very much later, also occurred to Nick Park, the creator of the stop-motion characters Wallace and Gromit.

Not only would Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) have seen Carter’s invention at the exhibition, he would also have been familiar with the latter’s presence around the streets of Oxford, which was where he lived.

The prevalence of furniture in the Tea Party episode – the table, the writing-desk and the armchair, as well the fascination with time, also point to a strong connection with Theophilus Carter.

© John Welford

The Adventure of the Empty House: a Sherlock Holmes story

 

The Adventure of the Empty House was first published in the Strand Magazine in October 1903 and later collected in The Return of Sherlock Holmes, published in 1905. Arthur Conan Doyle had “killed off” his famous detective Sherlock Holmes in The Final Problem, published in 1893, and finally gave way to public pressure to bring him back from the dead, which he did in this story.

Conan Doyle had been genuine enough in his desire to put an end to the Sherlock Holmes stories, due to his exhaustion in thinking up new adventures for his hero and wishing to have more time for other work, but he was perhaps fortunate that his method of dispatching Holmes was one that allowed for an escape, which he was therefore able to bring to fruition when the “resurrection” took place. It has sometimes been suggested that this was always Conan Doyle’s intention, but that does sound unlikely given his comments at the time.

The Story

The Adventure of the Empty House begins with Dr John Watson relating the strange murder of the Honourable Ronald Adair. The young aristocrat was a pleasant young man whose only vice was that of playing cards, sometimes for money, although he never gambled more than he could afford to lose.

On the evening of his murder, Adair had returned at 10 pm to his home on Park Lane, London, where he lived with his mother and sister. He had gone to his room on an upper floor and locked the door. When his mother came home she found that he would not answer a knock at the door and eventually had the door forced open, where Adair is found to be dead having had part of his head blown off by an expanding bullet.

There were no weapons in the room, and no indication that anyone but Adair had been in the room. The window was open, but the drop to the flowerbed below was at least 20 feet and there was no sign of any disturbance on the ground outside. If anyone fired a gun from the street it would surely have been heard by people on busy Park Lane, but this was not the case.

Adair had been sitting at a table where it appears that he had been totting up his winnings and losses at cards, but all the sums were modest and did not suggest that anyone in his social circle would have a motive to murder him.

The case was one that puzzled many people, including Dr Watson, who clearly took the view that this would have been one that Sherlock Holmes would have been intrigued by. As the story opens, Watson is standing outside the house, looking up at the window of the room where the crime took place, and trying to think as he knew Holmes would have done.

As he turns away he bumps into an old man who is standing nearby and knocks some books out of his hands. Watson picks up the books and attempts to apologise as he hands them back, but the old man hurries away.

When Watson gets home, he is visited soon afterwards by the same old man, who apologises for his earlier brusqueness. The man suggests he might be able to offer him some books to fill a gap on Watson’s shelves, which Watson promptly turns to look at. When he turns back, he is amazed to see that the old man is in fact Sherlock Holmes who has just removed his disguise.

When Watson recovers his senses, having fainted with the shock, Holmes tells him how he had survived the incident that had apparently caused his death three years previously. As related in The Final Problem, Holmes had encountered his arch-enemy Moriarty on a narrow path above the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. The two fought and Moriarty slipped and fell to his death. Holmes had other enemies and he decided that it would help him to catch them if everyone thought he had died as well. He therefore climbed up a steep rock-face and hid in a crevice while Watson and the local police searched for him in vain, concluding that Holmes and Moriarty must have fallen together and their bodies been washed down the river.

Just as Holmes thought he was out of danger a huge rock tumbled past him. He looked up to see one of Moriarty’s associates, Colonel Sebastian Moran, who clearly knew that Holmes was still alive.

There now followed a period of three years in which Holmes adopted a variety of aliases and disguises as he toured the world acting as a secret agent for the British government. The only person, apart from Moran, who knew that Holmes was not dead was his brother Mycroft who was instructed to keep paying the rent for Holmes’s lodgings in Baker Street.

Holmes only returned to London when he heard about the murder of Ronald Adair, as it sounded to him like the work of Sebastian Moran. He can see a way of flushing out his old enemy and bringing him to justice. He has set up a scheme to achieve his goal, and he is now going to put it into action, taking Watson with him.

He leads Watson through some obscure back streets to the rear of an empty house which, to Watson’s surprise, fronts on to the opposite side of Baker Street from the old lodgings at 221B. From the front window Watson can see what appears to be Holmes himself, silhouetted in an upstairs window. Holmes explains that this is actually a wax decoy that their former landlady, Mrs Hudson, is moving around at intervals so that it appears to be more lifelike.

After several hours waiting in darkness they hear someone entering the house and approaching the room. They hide themselves away and watch as a man converts a cane into a rifle, takes careful aim across the street and fires it, hitting the wax dummy. Holmes and Watson tackle the man to the floor, Holmes blows a whistle, and Inspector Lestrade and two policemen arrive to arrest the gunman who is, of course, Colonel Sebastian Moran.

Holmes explains that the rifle used by Moran was made for him by a German mechanic such that it would fire expanding bullets with almost no sound. This was therefore the weapon used to kill Ronald Adair, and Moran can thus be prosecuted for his murder.

But what could have been Moran’s motive for killing Adair? Holmes explains that the two of them had been gambling partners and that they had been winning at cards because Moran had been cheating, which Adair had only recently realised. Adair must have threatened to expose Moran, but because Moran’s livelihood depended on gambling, he had killed Adair to keep him quiet. At the time of his death, Holmes supposes, Adair had been working out the sums of money he needed to repay the players who had been cheated.

Does the story hold water?

The point of the story is to re-introduce Sherlock Holmes to Conan Doyle’s demanding readers, by providing both an adventure story and an explanation of how Holmes survived the encounter with Moriarty and what he had been doing in the interim. There is therefore not all that much in the way of Holmesian detection in the story. The clever part is the setting of the trap into which Moran falls.

But there would seem to be some elements that do not work particularly well. It is clear that Holmes has taken his brother into his confidence, due to having absolute trust in Mycroft’s ability to keep a secret. Mycroft has presumably agreed to keep paying the rent on 221B Baker St in the expectation that Holmes would return at some stage, but everyone else who knew Holmes, such as Inspector Lestrade, would be convinced that the former tenant was dead, so would it not seem odd for the rooms to remain empty for a whole three years? What possible reason could there be if the original tenant was not expected to return?

A more troubling aspect of the story, surely, is the instruction given to Mrs Hudson to keep moving the wax dummy to give the impression that it is Holmes himself. Clearly Mrs Hudson has been told that Holmes is alive, but what explanation could there possibly be for this strange instruction other than that it is intended to be shot at instead of the real thing? Would you really want, as a landlady, to be expected to handle an object that somebody might fire a gun at at any minute? Would Holmes really have put Mrs Hudson into a position of such danger?

And is it not remarkable that Colonel Moran should decide to try his luck and see if there happened to be an empty house immediately opposite his target from which he could fire his rifle? Why not fire from the street, as he had done to murder Ronald Adair?

And how did Colonel Moran know that Sherlock Holmes was back in London when Holmes had kept the secret from absolutely everybody? Had Moran spent time wandering up and down Baker Street on the off-chance of spotting Holmes’s profile in the window?

Why would Holmes know that Moran would choose this precise moment to make his attack? There must be a reason, because otherwise Holmes could not have arranged for Lestrade and the two policemen to be on hand to make the arrest.

There are certainly a few things that do not seem to add up in this story!

© John Welford

The Well of Loneliness: a novel by Radclyffe Hall

 

Radclyffe Hall (1880-1943) was a British poet and novelist who is best remembered for her fifth novel “The Well of Loneliness”, published in 1928. This was the first English novel to openly describe lesbian relationships. It led to an obscenity trial and a 20-year ban in Great Britain. It was also banned in the United States, but for a much shorter period.

The novel is the story of Stephen – a girl whose aristocratic father wanted a son and whose mother is frightened by her boyishness. She hates wearing dresses, has a series of passionate crushes on older women, and declares herself an “invert”, which was the term used by the sexologist Havelock Ellis to describe homosexuality.

Stephen drives an ambulance during World War I and finds love with Mary Llewellyn. When the war is over, the two women move to Paris and throw themselves into what would now be called gay and lesbian culture. However, happiness is impossible for them and their lifestyle is described by the novelist as being tragic and self-destructive.

The book was prosecuted by the British Home Office under the 1857 Obscene Publications Act. During the trial, Hall received support from several noted writers including Virginia Woolf, George Bernard Shaw, Rebecca West, Arnold Bennett and EM Forster. Despite the book describing no behaviour more explicit than kissing, the mention of the protagonists “not being divided” when spending the night together was probably enough to lose the case for the author.

Copies of the novel were sold in Paris and smuggled back to Britain, so it got a fairly wide readership. Reviews were generally positive and Hall received a large number of letters and telegrams of support. It was a bestseller in the United States and was selling around 100,000 copies a year internationally by the time of Hall’s death from cancer in 1943.

The Well of Loneliness was, for many years, the best known lesbian novel in the world. The attempts to ban it only increased its visibility and created greater awareness of female homosexuality. Even today – when the book’s attitudes and language seem dated and its message depressing – it still provokes discussion and academic debate and features in accounts of coming out.

© John Welford

Matthew Lewis: author of "The Monk"

 

Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775-1818) was a writer known to the literary world solely for one novel, The Monk, which appeared in 1796. This novel made such a dramatic impression that Lewis is often referred to simply as “Monk Lewis”.

The fashion for what became known as Gothic horror was born at the end of the 18^th century thanks mainly to the work of Ann Radcliffe, whose novels included The Mysteries of Udolfo (1797) which was satirised by Jane Austen in her early novel Northanger Abbey.

Lewis was undoubtedly the most skilful of Radcliffe’s imitators, although the Monk is very different in tone to her novels. He incorporated elements of Shakespearean and Jacobean drama, German Romanticism, folklore, the writings of the Marquis de Sade and Samuel Richardson’s “Clarissa”. He abandoned all restraint in his violent tale of ambition, murder and incest, set in a Spanish Monastery.

The protagonist, Ambrosio, struggles to balance monastic vows with his personal ambitions, giving way to temptation and committing sexual crimes which he covers up with murder. He falls victim to the Inquisition and is sentenced to death. He finally makes a pact with the Devil and ends up being hurled to damnation.

This sensational mixture of the supernatural and the carnal, so daring in its treatment of sexual fantasy and violence, was, unsurprisingly, extremely popular when it was published, although it attracted accusations of obscenity. Lewis was forced to tone it down when the third edition was published.

The Monk could scarcely be regarded as great literature, but it was powerfully written and contained powerful insights into criminal psychology and erotic neurosis. By going so extravagantly over the top with the carnage and horror, Lewis made it perfectly clear that his novel belonged firmly in the realms of fantasy.

Monk Lewis earned his place in literary history for his originality, but he will never be regarded as anything more than an entertainer.

© John Welford

Alexander Pushkin

 

Alexander Pushkin was, by common consent, Russia’s greatest poet. He was also the heroic ideal of the Romantic poet.

He was born in 1799 into a noble Russian family. Brilliant and precocious, his first poetry was published at the age of 14. His romantic narrative “Ruslan and Ludmila”, written six years later, was a runaway success and was recognised as breaking every literary convention of its day.

He displayed huge energy and drive that had the effect of transforming Russian literature. He did this by rejecting the traditional constraints of religion and censorship to create highly original works.

He revolutionised the way Russians thought about their history and drama, and especially the way they thought about their writers.

Among his best-known works was “Eugene Onegin”, written between 1825 and 1832, this being a verse novel that is regarded by some as the finest Russian novel ever written. It was a decisive move away from the allegorical tradition and towards the realism later displayed by writers such as Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Nabokov.

Pushkin was a radical in political as well as literary terms. He sympathised with the aims of the aristocratic set known as the Decembrists, who conspired to reform the oppressive autocracy of the Tsars. These sympathies attracted the attention of the autocrats and led to Pushkin’s exile from St Petersburg to some of the more remote parts of Western Russia. In 1825 he had to look on from the outside as a Decembrist uprising was put down and his generation’s dreams of liberty were smashed.

However, Pushkin was allowed back into imperial favour when Tsar Nicholas I made promises of reform that turned out to be less than promised. His radicalism was still very much to the fore, which meant that he fell increasingly out of favour at court. He wanted to retire to a life of literary seclusion, but this escape was denied him. The result was that he gave way to drinking and gambling.

One reason why Pushkin was not allowed to leave the court was that he had married an extremely beautiful woman named Natalya. By flirting with several of the men about the court, including the Tsar himself, she had unwittingly encouraged lustful ambitions that she had no intention of satisfying.

One of these would-be suitors was a French social climber named George d’Anthes. After insulting her in public he challenged Pushkin to a duel, and his challenge was accepted. Pushkin was fatally wounded, dying two days after the event at the age of 38.

The nature of Pushkin’s death, at such a young age, only served to cement his reputation as a Romantic icon. He has therefore gone down in literary history as the epitome of creativity triumphing over the dead hand of bureaucracy and philistinism.

© John Welford

Northanger Abbey, a novel by Jane Austen

 

The bulk of Jane Austen’s novels were revised for publication a considerable time after they were first written, and it is often impossible to tell how much rewriting was involved in the revision.

‘Northanger Abbey’ was originally written in 1797 and 1798, finally being finished in 1803. It was only published posthumously in 1818 (along with ‘Persuasion’), and it was therefore the first complete novel to have been written despite the appearance of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and ‘Sense and Sensibility’ several years previously.

‘Northanger Abbey’ is the story of Catherine Morland, a somewhat ordinary girl, goodhearted and rather simple, who spends some weeks in Bath with friends of her family and makes various friends and acquaintances while there.

She meets Henry Tilney and his sister. Catherine falls in love with Henry and is invited to the Tilney’s family home under Henry’s father’s impression that she is a wealthy heiress who would make a good match for his son. The house – Northanger Abbey – is an old abbey building that Catherine expects to be just like the ancient ghost-ridden buildings that she has read about in the Gothic horror novels - particularly those of Ann Radcliffe – that were very popular at the time.

Things go wrong for Catherine when Henry’s father discovers that she is not a rich heiress after all and throws her out. However, everything works out all right eventually and the hero and heroine end up happily married.

The plot might sound dull enough, but the novel is far from dull, despite Jane Austen’s refusal to use any of the more violent contemporary novelistic devices in order to enliven it. The life of the novel comes from the combination of wit and profound sense of the meaning and interest of the events of daily life in the social world that Jane Austen knew so well.

Although the irony is somewhat cruder than that produced by Jane Austen in her later novels, it is always carefully poised and well directed. The tone is not burlesque or mock-heroic, and a note of affectionate understanding runs together with the irony.

It is noticeable that although Jane Austen pokes affectionate fun at Catherine’s ridiculous romantic expectations of a haunted house, this is only done to emphasise that real life can be every bit as interesting and enjoyable.

Catherine’s actual romance with Henry is not expressed in the passionate tones of later romantic novelists, but it is nonetheless sensitive and true.

One thing we can learn from this novel is that Jane Austen truly understood how young people come to fall in love, realising exactly the degree to which Nature imitates Art and the varying parts played by admiration, gratitude and vanity.

‘Northanger Abbey’ is rarely regarded as one of Jane Austen’s best novels, and it is only fully appreciated by those who have a basic knowledge of the Gothic horror tradition at which she pokes gentle fun, but it is certainly worth a read.

© John Welford

Jack and Jill: a nursery rhyme explained

 

Jack and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water;
Jack fell down and broke his crown,
And Jill came tumbling after.

Up Jack got and down he trot,
As fast as he could caper;
He went to bed and covered his head
With vinegar and brown paper.

 

There have been several proposed explanations of this familiar nursery rhyme, and everyone is free to choose which one they consider most likely.

One suggestion is that Jack and Jill are King Louis XVI of France and his Queen, Marie Antoinette. Louis certainly ‘broke his crown’ by being executed in 1793, and Marie Antoinette’s head did indeed come tumbling after thanks to the guillotine. The poem was first published in 1795, so in this respect at least the dates do match.

The villagers of Kilmersdon in Somerset think that they have the answer, due to a tragedy that occurred in 1697. A young couple did their courting up a hill, away from the prying eyes of the local gossips. Jill became pregnant, but just before the baby was born Jack was killed when a rock fell off the hill and landed on his head. Jill died in childbirth only a few days later.

Another possibility is that it has to do with the attempt by King Charles I to reform taxation on alcohol. Having been prevented by Parliament from raising the duty, he reduced the measures by which alcohol could be served. One of these measures was the half pint, known as a Jack, and the quarter point, known as a Gill. Charles reduced both the Jack and the Gill, while keeping the prices exactly the same, thus gaining his duty increase by the back door.

But perhaps the true explanation is even older, namely an ancient Norse tale concerning a young brother and sister named Hjuki (pronounced Juk-ee) and Bil. The moon god caught them on a dark night as they were stealing a pail of water from the Bygrir Well. They were promptly spirited away to the moon, where Scandinavians have long supposed that they can be seen carrying a bucket of water attached to a long pole.

So which one of these theories – if any – do you think is most likely to be the true origin?

© John Welford

The writing method of Edgar Allan Poe

 

Edgar Allan Poe had a huge influence on American and European literature as one of the pioneers of science fiction. Also, through a relatively small number of short stories, he invented many of the principles which writers of crime fiction have used ever since.

By profession, Poe was a journalist, being the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger (and later the owner of the Broadway Chronicle), and he did some of his writing in newspaper offices.

He was therefore used to working to deadlines and this accounts for why no drafts or worksheets exist of his work – his planning was minimal and his working method was largely inspirational. An excitable man, he wrote quickly and in a disordered way. It is thought that he was incapable of sustained creative effort, which explains why he never wrote any fiction of great length.

Poe was sometimes a heavy drinker and he also suffered from poor health and periodic episodes of depression. These meant that there were times when he wrote very little and others when he wrote at a frenetic pace. Towards the end of his short life (he died in 1849 at the age of 40) his drinking was so heavy that he wrote hardly anything.

In his writing he made use of conventional notions of “horror” rather than relying on personal experience. However, the process of exploring these ideas led him to delve into his own subconscious. He began by parodying the work of other writers in the horror genre, having read widely in every available literary source. The addition he made was to add the awareness conferred by sensitivity.

© John Welford

Humpty Dumpty: egg or cannon?

Everybody knows the “Humpty Dumpty” nursery rhyme, and some people will tell you that they know its origin, but are they right?

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

Most people, on hearing this nursery rhyme, immediately think of Humpty Dumpty as being an egg that fell and broke and was therefore unable to be repaired. This image is largely due to the work of John Tenniel in illustrating Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass”, in which he pictured Humpty Dumpty as an egg, as indeed the text implies.

One theory is that the original Humpty Dumpty was not an egg, or even a person, but a large cannon that was used during the siege of Colchester in 1648, during the English Civil War. The royalists were besieged by the parliamentarians, commanded by Thomas Fairfax, and were able to keep them at bay largely due to expert use of the cannon by a gunner named “One-Eyed Thompson”, who defended the town in this way for about ten weeks.

Humpty Dumpty, it is said, was positioned on top of the tower of St Mary’s Church, which was hard by the town walls. When the tower was eventually hit by enough cannonballs from the besiegers, the cannon fell over the wall into a boggy area from where it was found to be too heavy to raise.

However, many objections have been raised to this explanation of Humpty Dumpty, mainly on the grounds of lack of historical evidence, and it is not now generally accepted. Other originals have been proposed, including King Richard III with his hunched back (according to Shakespeare), but there is no reason to accept these explanations either.

It looks as though one has to take this nursery rhyme more or less at face value, namely as a riddle for children to guess at what Humpty Dumpty could be – and an egg would be an excellent answer! It might also be a “cautionary verse” - a warning to children not to sit on high walls for fear of the consequences should they fall off.

© John Welford

Who wrote the Pentateuch?

The Pentateuch is the name given to the first five books of the Old Testament – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. They are also referred to as the “Books of Moses”. But who actually wrote them? One thing we can be absolutely sure about is that it wasn’t Moses!

Leaving aside the distinct possibility that Moses is a figure from myth rather than history, there are many reasons why the books could not have been the work of a single person. Knowledge gained over the centuries that has been gleaned from intense textual analysis and investigation of source material makes it abundantly clear that the books were written over a period of time that was vastly greater than the lifetime of a single writer, even if we accept the absurdly long lifespans accorded to many figures in the Old Testament.

The actual dates of composition of the various parts of each book are matters of controversy, but it certainly appears that the earliest elements, in their written form, are no older than 930 BC and the youngest are as late as the 6^th century BC. The final assembly of the five books almost certainly took place in the 5^th century BC.

The obvious conclusion is that the books had multiple authors, and that applies within each book as opposed to stating that each book was separately authored.

It does not take much reading of Genesis – to take one example – to make one appreciate that different stories are being told that are in some respects in contradiction to each other. They are also stylistically different, which is an even stronger clue to the fact that more than one author was involved. The two accounts of Creation are a case in point – it is impossible for the hand that wrote Genesis Chapter 1 to have also written Chapter 2.

Scholars have identified five different sources for the Pentateuch, four of them being authors and the fifth an editor. The names of three of the authors are unknown, but the identities of one of them, and of the editor, are far less uncertain. 

The authors are generally referred to J, E, P and D. J is so-called because God is consistently referred to as Jahweh, whereas the E author uses the name Elohim. P is the “Priestly author” and D “the Deuteronomist”, who is quite likely to have been the prophet Jeremiah.

It does not take long to appreciate the different emphases of the various authors when it is known who wrote what. For example, the Priestly author was a stern authoritarian who was interested in laying down the law and stressing the need for implacable justice. Unlike the other authors he never uses the words “grace”, “mercy” or “repentance”.

By contrast, the J author is much more “human” and loves to tell stories. J was responsible for telling us about the Garden of Eden, Cain and Abel, the Tower of Babel and Moses in the bulrushes. There is a fascinating possibility that J might have been a woman, whereas the other authors definitely were not. If that is so, then it is to her that we owe the story in Genesis 38 of Judah and Tamar in which a woman takes the initiative and forces a man to admit that he is in the wrong.

And what about the mysterious fifth character, the editor? This was quite possibly Ezra, also responsible for the Book of that name, who in about 460 BC decided to take all the material to hand and compile a continuous narrative.

He would have been a Hebrew who was living in Babylon as one of the thousands of descendants of the exiles from Judah who had been captured after the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem in 587 BC. He wanted to revive the religion of his forbears, and the best way of so doing was to give all the people a document to which they could refer and which told their common story and gave them a blueprint for how they would live once they returned to their ancestral home.

Many Hebrews had returned to Jerusalem prior to 458 BC, when Ezra made the journey, but the early returnees had found life difficult and were often unable to agree among themselves on matters of doctrine and belief. When Ezra arrived, bearing his five books, he undertook a complete public reading of them, and it can be said that that was the moment when the Jewish religion was really born.

However, there was something very strange about the work that Ezra did. This is that his editing did not consist of making judicious cuts of passages that did not fit the general narrative. As far as we can tell, Ezra included absolutely everything of the four documents he had to hand.

In order to unite the Jewish diaspora – some of whom had fled to Egypt – he could not afford to antagonise any particular element among them. Each faction had its own favoured version of its texts - J, E, P or D - and they would expect to find that version in the completed work. 

So Ezra simply wove all the pieces together as best he could, while including very little writing of his own save for a few linking passages. That is not to say that he did not have a message of his own. He came from the Priestly tradition, and every one of the five books opens with a “P” passage.

So that is why the “books of Moses” had nothing at all to do with Moses, apart from telling the stories in which he was involved. That also accounts for why there are so many repetitions, some of them contradicting each other. This also means that it is unwise to try to make all the pieces agree with each other and pretend that they are a unified whole in which there are no contradictions. The fact is that Ezra’s intention was to unite the people by allowing them to disagree with the details but agree on the basics. It is only when texts such as these are seen in their true context that they can be properly understood.

© John Welford

The Brothers Grimm, tellers of tales

4^th January 1785 saw the birth of one of one of world’s greatest story-tellers, Jacob Grimm. Together with his younger brother Wilhelm (born in 1786) he collected and retold a large number of folktales that would almost certainly have been lost without their efforts.

The Grimms and their fairy tales

The first collection was published in 1812 as “Childrens and Household Tales”, which makes the point that they were not solely intended to be read by or to children. This is sometimes forgotten when it is complained that the tales are “Grimm by name and grim by nature”.

The collection was originally intended as an academic exercise looking into some of the more obscure aspects of the German language and its history, which was Jacob Grimm’s main interest in life. However, the collection simply grew and took on a life of its own. The original volume contained 86 stories, but a second volume published in 1815 added another 70. The seventh collected edition, published in 1857, comprised 211 tales.

The stories collected by the Grimms included many that have become familiar to generations of children ever since, including Cinderella, Rapunzel, Snow White and Hansel and Gretel. Without the Brothers Grimm it is unlikely that Walt Disney would have had much material to work on! Unfortunately, a number of the stories have also been held to embody the ideals of Germanic racial purity, which is why Adolf Hitler was particularly attracted to them – and the same might also have applied to Walt Disney.

An unfinished dictionary

Jacob Grimm would not have regarded himself simply as a storyteller. His most important work, as he saw it, was in the fields of philology and linguistics. He was a professor of philology and the creator of a massive dictionary of the German language, on which he worked alongside his brother. Wilhelm died in 1859 when they were still working on words beginning with “D” and Jacob had only got as far as “F” by the time he died in 1863. The work was eventually completed by others but did not finally appear until 1960!

© John Welford

Charles Dickens, arguably Britain's greatest novelist

7^th February is a special day for the worldwide community of people who are proud to call themselves “Dickensians” (myself included) because this was the day in 1812 when Charles John Huffam Dickens was born in Portsmouth.

His father, John Dickens, was a naval pay clerk whose duties included taking wages to the crews of ships moored in the harbour. The Dickens family moved with the job, firstly to Chatham in Kent and then to London. Charles Dickens is therefore regarded as a “London novelist” because that is where he spent most of his life and all but one of his novels is set wholly or in part in London (the exception is Hard Times which is set in an imaginary northern industrial town).

Charles Dickens had some hard times of his own as he was growing up, mainly due to his father’s inability to manage money and support his growing family, but he discovered an ability to write amusing and incisive stories that were soon to prove immensely popular. By the end of his life (he died in 1870 at the age of 58) he was a wealthy man who was able to buy a substantial property (Gad’s Hill House) that he had admired while talking walks as a boy when living in Chatham.

Dickens is renowned for bringing the public’s attention to many of the evils of his time, particularly those associated with poverty. Although he sometimes lapsed into sentimentality, his general tone is a hard-headed one that recognises that good and evil deeds can be committed by members of all classes of society. Although many of the social problems mentioned in his novels and stories are only of historical interest today, Charles Dickens was a master at creating colourful and complex characters (not just caricatures, which is an accusation often levelled at him) whose failings and foibles are still very much with us. That is why Charles Dickens was a writer for all times and not just his own.

There are many fascinating aspects to the life of Charles Dickens, which I came to appreciate a few years ago when I was asked by the Dickens Fellowship to compile an index to 31 annual volumes of their journal “The Dickensian”. This involved me in reading and analysing some 6,000 pages of text devoted to the life and works of Dickens, so I ended up acquiring quite an encyclopaedic knowledge!

© John Welford

Miguel de Cervantes, author of "Don Quixote"

It is more usual to celebrate the birth dates of famous people than their baptism dates, but sometimes this is not possible. It is not known exactly when Miguel de Cervantes was born, but we do know that he was baptised on 9^th October 1547 in a small town about 20 miles from Madrid, Spain.

His claim to fame is that he penned the first prose work in Europe to which the name “novel” can reliably be assigned, namely “Don Quixote”. This is a tale that pokes fun at the traditional “knightly romance” in that its hero, a gentleman of mature years who reads too much, sets off on adventures that turn out to have consequences other than those intended. It is a “modern” novel in the sense that it contrasts the world of imagination with that of reality, a theme that has been a familiar one in literature ever since.

Although Don Quixote is not an autobiography, there is surely quite a lot of the creator in his hero. Unfortunately, the details of Cervantes’ early life are very sketchy. It is, however, known that he came from a very poor background and that he was a soldier at the age of 24, because this was when he fought in the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 and was seriously injured.

During the battle, which was fought at sea between the Christian nations of Europe and the Ottoman Turks, Cervantes received three bullet wounds, one of which disabled his left arm. Despite this handicap he continued his military career after he left hospital and, in 1575, was captured by Algerian pirates and held as a slave in north Africa for five years until his parents could raise the ransom that was demanded for his release.

On his return to Spain, Cervantes decided to use his functioning right hand as his means of earning a living and switched from soldiering to writing. His early works were mainly plays and poems, before he hit on the idea of Don Quixote.

The first part of his magnum opus appeared in 1605, when Cervantes was already 58 years old. It was a success from the start, which caused problems for Cervantes because pirated editions soon appeared (there being no copyright laws at the time), as did a spurious “second part”. This inspired Cervantes to continue Quixote’s adventures in an official Part Two, which was published in 1615, shortly before Cervantes died in 1616.

Don Quixote was soon translated into other languages, with the first English edition of Part One appearing in 1612. It became very popular across Europe and the wider world, and is widely regarded as one of the “all time greats” of world literature.

© John Welford

Anzia Yezierska, a writer who stayed true to her roots

Anzia Yezierska is probably a name unknown to most people, but there was a time when her novels and stories were extremely popular, and Anzia was all the rage not only in her home city of New York but Hollywood as well.

Anzia Yezierska was born in Poland in 1885, to a Jewish family that moved to New York when she was about ten years old. She grew up in one of the poorest districts of the city, Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and earned a living in one of the many sweatshops that swallowed up the huge population of Jewish and other immigrants and spat them out more dead than alive.

Anzia wanted to follow the example of her brothers, who were being supported by her parents to get an education. She therefore studied at night and discovered that she had a talent as a writer.

However, before she could put those talents to good use she went through a tangled series of relationships that left her with a daughter after two failed marriages, and then with no daughter after she surrendered her parental rights. Left on her own, she turned to writing as a way of supporting herself, and she spent the rest of her life (she died in 1970) writing stories and novels.

The theme of her work was the struggle of immigrant women to find a voice for themselves and be able to make decisions independently of others. Her writings, based on her own experiences and those of the many women she knew and remembered from her sweatshop days, could be said to be about realising the “American Dream”, but this was expressed not just in terms of making oneself rich, but of using freedom from poverty as a stepping stone to a more fulfilled life in which real choices could be made, such as a woman being able to choose where she lived and who she should live with.

Anzia Yezierska made her name with her first collection of stories, “Hungry Hearts” (1920), although there was plenty more to come. The stories are about actual hunger and also the hunger for self-expression. This could take the form of the struggle of immigrant girls to get an education, or to escape the attentions of matchmakers who sought to control the futures of women who were without the means to resist.

The movie mogul Sam Goldwyn came across “Hungry Hearts” and paid Anzia $10,000 for the film rights. The movie was duly made (in 1922), being filmed on location in the Lower East Side, and Anzia became what appeared to be an overnight success. She was hailed as the “Queen of the Ghetto” and Goldwyn saw an opportunity to exploit this “rags to riches” American Dream story by offering her a hugely generous contract to become a Hollywood scriptwriter.

However, what Sam Goldwyn was doing was precisely what Anzia Yezierska had warned about in her stories. She realised that to accept Goldwyn’s offer would be to place herself back under the control of a wealthy man and limit her field of choice. She also appreciated the irony of growing rich by writing about women who would always be poor. She therefore left Hollywood behind and went back to her roots in New York.

One of her “Hungry Hearts” stories (entitled “The Fat of the Land”) seemed to sum up her own situation rather well, despite being written before Sam Goldwyn entered her life. In the story, a poor woman from the tenements finds wealth and is then dripping with diamonds in a big house, but is also desperately lonely and unable to communicate with her children. Her greatest joy is to leave the silks and diamonds at home and go down into the busy Lower East Side streets where she can haggle with traders over the price of vegetables, just as she used to in the old days.

© John Welford

Robert Browning, 19th-century British poet

On 12^th December 1889 the poet Robert Browning died in Venice at the age of 77.

It has to be admitted that Browning’s poetry is not read by many people today, and most people would be hard pressed to name any of his poems. Perhaps one that might come to mind is “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”, and others that deserve to be remembered are “My Last Duchess” and “Home Thoughts from Abroad”, but most modern readers have little patience with very long poems, which was the format in which Browning specialised.

It must also be admitted that some of Browning’s poetry is not easy to understand, and people today, if they read poetry at all, do not want the intellectual challenge that Browning sometimes poses.

Indeed, there is a story to the effect that Browning himself had problems with Browning’s poetry! In later life he was asked for the meaning of a particularly obscure passage in an early work, “Sordello”. He read the lines aloud and then said: “When I wrote that, God and Robert Browning knew what it meant – now only God does”.

Robert Browning is probably best known for the romantic story of how he wooed and won the poet Elizabeth Barrett. She was an invalid who was fiercely protected by her father, who refused to allow the love affair, deeply felt on both sides, to proceed. Eventually the lovers married in secret and escaped to Italy, where they stayed for 16 years until Elizabeth died and Robert returned to England.

On his return Browning wrote what is probably his best work, a dramatic monologue entitled “The Ring and the Book” that tells the story of a 17^th century murder and trial in Rome. Sadly, it has few readers today. It prompted the 20^th century writer Anthony Burgess to say: “We all want to like Browning, but we find it very hard”.

© John Welford

Sylvia Plath: American poet

Her early life

Sylvia Plath was born on 27^th October 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts. Her father, Otto Plath, was an expert on bees who had emigrated from what is now northern Germany at a young age. Her mother, Aurelia, was Austrian by ancestry. Otto’s death when Sylvia was only eight had a great effect on her.

She started writing poems and stories when very young, and was aged eight when her first poem appeared in print, although she was eighteen before she achieved success with a story. Early influences included Virginia Woolf, Dylan Thomas and Wallace Stevens. 

She left Bradford Senior High School in 1950 to enter Smith College as a scholarship student. While at Smith she wrote and published a huge amount of material and edited the Smith Review. 

In her third year at Smith she was offered a guest editorship at Mademoiselle magazine, which meant spending time in New York, but began to find the pressure of all her commitments becoming more than she could cope with. She first talked about being in a “bell jar” at this time.

Her first setback was being refused a place at the Harvard writing seminar in 1953, and this was a contributing factor to her mental breakdown that led to a suicide attempt (a sleeping pill overdose) in August of that year. She was lucky to survive, as she was not found for three days.

Cambridge and Ted Hughes

After treatments that included ECT (electro-convulsive therapy) she returned to Smith and graduated in 1955. She then became a Fulbright scholar and spent two years at Cambridge University where she met the British poet Ted Hughes. Their courtship was intense and rapid, and they were married in London in June 1956.

Poetically they were worlds apart, in that Hughes’s poetry was earthy and often violent, taking nature as his subject matter, whereas Plath wrote from feelings deep within herself.  

Following a honeymoon in Spain they returned to Cambridge, and for a short time were very happy together. However, tensions were soon apparent in both her marriage and her poetry, the latter of which was undergoing changes as she began to write with greater passion and a more conversational tone.

America and depression

In 1957 she was appointed to a teaching post at Smith College, but she found this to be very hard and unfulfilling work that made it difficult for her to write. She became severely depressed and underwent psychoanalysis. Her poems at this period reveal her confused state of mind, especially over her feelings towards her husband, mother, and dead father. 

Early in 1969 she attended a seminar at Boston University headed by Robert Lowell, and at which she also met Anne Sexton. Both poets proved to be very influential for her, although she wrote more fiction than poetry at this time.

After Plath and Hughes drove across America and back that summer, she found a new creative urge and completed her first published collection, “The Colossus”. This proved to be one of the most productive periods of her poetic career, coinciding with her first pregnancy.

Back to Britain

They moved back to the UK early in 1960, and Sylvia gave birth to Frieda in April while they were living in a small London flat. Both Sylvia and Ted enjoyed success with their work, although Sylvia suffered a miscarriage in February 1961. In August they moved to the Devon countryside, where their second child, Nicholas, was born in January 1962.

Sylvia began again to be haunted by the memory of the father she had only known as a child, and this was reinforced when they started to keep bees, which had been the expertise of her father. Her poetry at this stage had become darker, with images of drowning and violence becoming more prominent.

Their marriage broke down later in 1962, after Ted had begun an affair, and they agreed to separate in September. The poems she wrote at this time are full of pain and a sense of betrayal.

She stayed in Devon with the two children, finishing “The Bell Jar”, which was in effect her autobiography, as well as a fluent outpouring of intensely felt poems that would later be collected as “Ariel”. 

Suicide

This fluency continued when she moved back to London in December, with her output sometimes reaching three completed poems a day, despite her increasing depression. Her mood was not improved by this being one of the coldest winters on record in England, and both the children were ill with flu, as she was herself. Some of her poems reflect the bleakness of the weather and her mood, but others appear to look forward to Spring and better things.

However, early on 11^th February she took biscuits and milk to her sleeping children, sealed the door of their bedroom carefully behind her, and gassed herself in the kitchen. 

“Ariel” was published in 1965, but the volume was edited by Ted Hughes in ways that would certainly not have been to Sylvia’s liking, including the omission of some poems that were critical of him. 

Her legacy

The appearance of later collections and appreciations of Plath’s work have led to many conflicting views as to her poetic legacy and the motivations behind her life and work. Had she been able to present her work to the world in the way that she would have wanted, the “Sylvia Plath myth” might well have been different. It is not fair to her reputation, for example, to see her whole output as one long slide towards depression and suicide. 

Sylvia Plath has also been seen by some as a feminist icon, and Ted Hughes was roundly condemned in some quarters as being largely responsible for her death. It is certainly true that she was hugely influential as a woman poet, and her appeal is probably greatest amongst young women readers. However, it is a distortion to regard her as a warrior in the war of woman against man. Her work as a poet must stand up for itself, and this it does as the testament of a woman with a deeply complex psyche who had a true poetic gift in expressing her being in words.

© John Welford