Dickens, Thackeray, and a hanging

On the blog that she began as an accompaniment to The Magician's Book (2008), her well-regarded book on C. S. Lewis and the Narnia books, Laura Miller recently wrote about the "petrifying depiction of mob violence" and the "street lynching of a heartless aristo" in A Tale of Two Cities. After quoting Dickens's account--

Once, he went aloft, and the rope broke, and they caught him shrieking; twice, he went aloft, and the rope broke, and they caught him shrieking; then, the rope was merciful, and held him, and his head was soon upon a pike . . .

--Miller writes,

I don't know much about Dickens' background, but this has made me wonder what he'd seen before writing these passages.

Which, you'll not be surprised to learn, sent me to my bookshelves! I had a vague memory of Dickens having witnessed a hanging at Tyburn gallows (which was located where Marble Arch is today), and Peter Ackroyd's giant biography didn't disappoint, revealing that in July 1840 Dickens, essentially on a whim--"Just once, I should like to watch a scene like this, and see the end of the drama"--left a dinner with friends to attend the hanging of Francois Benjamin Courvoisier, a valet who had killed his employer by slitting his throat.

Ackroyd writes,

Dickens said later that there was "nothing but ribaldry, debauchery, levity, drunkenness and flaunting vice in fifty other shapes. I should have deemed it impossible that I could have felt any large assemblage of my fellow creatures so odious." It is like a scene out of Dore; the mob of the poor and the outcast, the ragged clothes, the swearing and the debauchery, the loud cries, the smell, and Dickens himself looking down from the upper room at the spectacle of these, his countrymen, the surging mob living in the shadows cast by his civilisation and inseparable from them.

If Dickens was troubled by the hanging itself, however, Ackroyd doesn't note it, which surprises me given how horrible is his depiction of the hanging in A Tale of Two Cities. Still, it's not hard to believe that he had these grotesque mob scenes in mind the next January when he began writing his long-stalled Barnaby Rudge in earnest.

An odd coincidence about that hanging seems worth noting: across the crowd, Dickens spotted Thackeray, who was in attendance with the aim of writing about the hanging. Thanks to the glories of the Internet, I can share Thackeray's letter offering the piece in advance to Alexander Blackwood (who was, I believe, at the time the head ofthe Blackwoods publishing firm), which is interesting if for no other reason than the way that it lumps the hanging in with other "fun" pieces "of a spicy nature" that Thackeray might write:

I should be glad to do something of like nature if you are disposed to accept my contributions. No politics, as much fun and satire as I can muster, literary talk and criticism of a spicy nature, and general gossip. I belong to a couple of clubs in this village and can get together plenty of rambling stuff. For instance, for next month Courvoisier's hanging (I'll go on purpose), strictures on C. Phillip's speech, the London Library, Tom Carlyle, the Times and account of Willis that may be racy enough.

Despite this pitch, Blackwood's Magazine never ran the piece, but it eventually saw the light of day in Fraser's Magazine later that year. Dickens, meanwhile, wouldn't write about Courvoisier for nearly six years, finally broaching the topic in the second of the Five Letters on Social Questions he published in the Daily News, a new daily political newspaper that he briefly edited at the start of 1846.

And I think that's surely enough time spent down this particular rabbit hole for tonight, no?

"Much has been said of its coarseness," or, Some notes on poets and reviews

Today's offerings from the ol' literary steam tray: a few somewhat connected notes on poets and reviews:

1 In the course of confirming the other day that Walt Whitman, for all his exuberance, was not the tipsy poetic champion of the American outdoors that I was looking for, I happened across a fascinating contemporary review of Leaves of Grass. Published anonymously in the June 8, 1867 issue of the London Review and Weekly Journal of Politics, Society, Literature, and Art, it is now available in the Whitman archive.

The passage that led the review to be delivered up as a result of my Google search for "Whitman drunk" was this one:

That there is genius in these poems is unquestionable; yet it is difficult to assign their author any place in literature, unless, indeed, one may assume the veracity of metempsychosis, and say that here is Hafiz again, only drunk now with Catawba wine instead of the Saoma, and worshipping the Mississippi river instead of the Saravati, which, having dried up in Persia, may be supposed to have also transmigrated westward.

Lots of references to clear up there: Hafiz is a classical Persian poet, the Catawba is a wine grape from the eastern United States (as well as a Native American tribe), Saoma appears to be a creek, often dry, in Vanuatu, and the Saravati is the Saraswati, a holy Hindu river. That's a fairly longwinded way for the reviewer to point out that Whitman had expanded his reach to draw on Eastern traditions, especially as the reviewer goes on to point out that Leaves of Grass

is really meant to be, and is, intensely American. It is but just, however, to say that the America it celebrates is a transcendental one, related to the world and the distant stars, and not "Uncle Sam's" fenced-in national farm.

{Side note: I love that Uncle Sam was still a new enough concept that it needed to be set off in quotes.}

Still, the reviewer deserves credit for clearly grasping the quality and originality of Whitman's vision. Though he acknowledges that Whitman "is not a poet for the family circle, nor is his book one which could be allowed into everybody's hands," he ultimately offers praise that seems to truly understand Whitman's poetic aims:

There is a wild, natural exuberance of animalism displayed by Whitman of a thoroughly original kind, an open-air abandonment, a weird and exalted receptivity embracing the good and the bad, the vice and the virtue of life, with a power and comprehensiveness as striking as it is novel. If he will but learn to tame a little, America will at last have a genuine American poet.

2 I've enjoyed reading contemporary reviews of established classics ever since a professor in college lent me a volume of contemporary reviews of Dickens's novels; remembering the clash of opinions and the virulence with which they were put forth is a help when I find myself too deep in the book review world of our own era. And speaking of drunk poets, I wonder whether any of Edgar Allan Poe's reviews of Dickens were in that volume--for, as Jill Lepore reminds us in her excellent article on Poe in last week's New Yorker, Poe wrote two reviews of Barnaby Rudge.

Strangely enough, while Lepore calls one of the reviews--in Graham's Magazine--unfavorable, The Poe Encyclopedia (1997) describes it, as well as Poe's review for Philadelphia's Saturday Evening Post, "extremely laudatory." The passages they cite, however, seem to lean more towards Lepore's position: they note that though Poe praised Dicken as a masterly "delineator of character," he faulted him for his ramshackle plots, and closed by writing,

He has done this thing well, to be sure--he would do anything well compared to the herd of his contemporaries--but he has not done it so thoroughly well as his high and just reputation would demand. We think that the whole book has been an effort to him--solely through the nature of its design.

Poe did, however, send Dickens the reviews, along with an invitation to meet, which Dickens took up--so perhaps Poe's assessment was more favorable it appears.

3 Poe, that "scarecrow figure" with his "half-lynched mind," as V. S. Pritchett described him, might be a contender for the mantle of tipsy poetic champion of American nature, except that he didn't write all that much about nature, and what he did write so often carries more than a whiff of death and decay. While "To the River ____" might fit the bill--

Fair river! in thy bright, clear flow
Of crystal, wandering water,
Thou art an emblem of the glow
Of beauty--the unhidden heart--
The playful maziness of art
In old Alberto's daughter;

But when within thy wave she looks--
Which glistens then, and trembles--
Why, then, the prettiest of brooks
Her worshipper resembles;
For in his heart, as in thy stream,
Her image deeply lies--
His heart which trembles at the beam
Of her soul-searching eyes.

--the essence of Poe seems to reside more in "The Lake--To ----":

In Spring of youth it was my lot
To haunt of the wide world a spot
The which I could not love the less –
So lovely was the loneliness
Of a wild lake, with black rock bound,
And the tall pines that towered around.

But when the night had thrown her pall
Upon that spot, as upon all,
And the mystic wind went by
Murmuring in melody
Then - ah, then, I would awake
To the terror of the lone lake.

Yet that terror was not fright,
But a tremulous delight –
A feeling not the jewelled mine
Could teach or bribe me to define –
Nor Love - although the love were thine.

Death was in that poisonous wave,
And in its gulf a fitting grave
For him who thence could solace bring
To his lone imagining –
Whose solitary soul could make
An Eden of that dim lake.

Which, you'll surely agree, offers a very different tone than the poems of Lu Yu that started me on this quest.


4 Finally, no post on Poe and reviews would be complete without the story of Poe's own high opinion of "The Raven." I've drawn on it before, so the only teaser I'll give is that in the hours after writing it he was adament that it was "the greatest poem ever written." Go read the whole account; you won't regret it.

On why, having read only 59 pages of Gore Vidal's Lincoln, I returned it to my local library

On the scale of Abraham Lincoln fandom, my interest in the man wouldn't even register. A search on "Abraham Lincoln" at Amazon, for example, returns 44,402 results, of which I've read maybe four. But I am a native Illinoisan, and Lincoln is an endlessly compelling subject: despite those 44,000 volumes, his interior life remains almost completely obscure, and his achievements as a leader are so profound as to almost demand that we keep attempting to plumb that obscurity. What made him the man he was?

That sense of Lincoln's of essential mystery was what drove me to Gore Vidal's Lincoln (1983). How better to get into Lincoln's head than to be freed from strict accountability to history? Good historical novels, after all, can succeed as both history and fiction, illuminating and giving character to the bare facts of history; the fictional depictions of the Battle of Borodino in War and Peace and the Gordon Riots in Barnaby Rudge, for example, have a human weight and immediacy that few historical accounts can match.

But after slogging through 59 pages of Vidal's Lincoln, I closed the book with a sigh and returned it to the library, defeated. I could no longer stomach clunky chunks of exposition-rich, history-laden dialogue like this one:

"But you ain't Union, Mr. Thompson. You're from Virginia, like us."

"What I may be in my heart of hearts, Davie"--Mr. Thompson was now solemn--"I keep to my self, and I suggest you do the same because of our numerous distinguished customers."

"Mr. Davis was one of your customers?"

"One of my best customers, poor man. I've never known anyone to suffer so much from that eye condition of his. He'll be blind by the summer, I said to Dr. Hardinge, if you don't change the prescription. But you can't tell Dr. Hardinge anything. On my own, I gave Mr. Davis belladonna to stop the pain--"

"So then he is your President."

"If I were in business in Montgomery, Alabama, yes, he would be. But I am here--with my loved ones--in a shop at Fifteenth and Pennsylvania Avenue, and I am the official unofficial pharmacist for the presidents of the United States and as I looked after Mr. Buchanan and Miss Lane--she'll never make old bones, I fear--I intend to look after the Lincoln family, a large one, for a change, and sickly, I should think, wonderfully sickly, from the glimpse I had of them yesterday."

Though a friend tells me that Vidal's Burr is actually very good, I think Lincoln has probably turned me off Vidal's fiction for the foreseeable future. If you're looking to get your Lincoln fix, I recommend Adam Gopnik's article in this week's New Yorker instead. Nothing new there for true Lincoln afficionados, I'm sure, but for us casual fans it's a nice, brief look at recent scholarship on Lincoln's language. As for me, if I'm still in a Lincoln mood come the family vacation this summer, I may finally tackle Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals (2005).

But on such a pleasant summer evening, it seems wrong to only criticize in this post, leaving you with nothing but another item for your unrecommended list. So instead, because I believe you can never remind people too many times or too loudly that, yes, the Civil War really was about slavery (and that those who try to say otherwise are usually pushing an unpleasant agenda)--and because I was inspired by the hilarious article on lolcats on Slate yesterday, I present to you an LOL Lincoln . . . the Lincloln:


(Original photo by chadh, used under Creative Commons license; Lincloln created by rocketlass.)