Castle Richmond by Anthony Trollope (1860)

Castle Richmond by Anthony Trollope
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Marked down severely for his complacency in the face of the totally avoidable Irish famine. Very disappointed that an author I really like and admire could have such a questionable response. Lots to say about this book, but I need to gather my thoughts.

Update 6/7/20

1) Famine
Trollope deserves credit as the only Victorian novelist to address this appalling catastrophe - the worst European famine since the middle ages and the only one in the modern era in Western Europe. The potato blight affected the whole of Europe but it was only Ireland that experienced starvation. Fully 25% of the population either died of starvation or disease, or left the country. Throughout this period Ireland remained a net food exporter. The British government refused to either waive import duty or ban exports, policies which had successfully been applied in the 1780s when the crops failed, and refused to feed the destitute without qualification on the grounds it would encourage idleness. Large "stupid work" projects were undertaken, which Trollope does satirize.

Trollope was stationed in Ireland for his work for the post office, and traveled extensively in the country, so he was writing from direct experience. He dramatizes the excruciating moral quandaries facing concerned wealthy individuals - direct alms-giving was officially discouraged; the wealthy were encouraged to donate via official channels only. He sympathizes with and praises individual good deeds. But he fails to understand that if the official response was adequate individual charity would not be necessary. Several times he explicitly claims the government was doing all it could in the face of an overwhelming natural disaster and could not be expected to do any better. This is untrue, however much the liberal Trollope clearly believed it. As a civil servant perhaps he was constrained to support official government policy. The Liberal Party, standard bearers for 'free market' thinking and policies, were in office at this time.

2) Writing
Trollope's first two novels had been set in Ireland and both had failed. Irish-themed novels were not commercial at this time. Trollope was aware of this (as he states at the beginning of the novel!) but says that as he was leaving Ireland this was his goodbye. The implication is that at some level he felt he had to address the famine and this was his last chance. The famine had occurred about 15 years earlier. Trollope was stationed in Ireland for about 20 years.

Suddenly, he was offered the chance to write the headline serial novel (his first) for the brand-new and heavily promoted Cornhill Magazine. Doctor Thorne had been Trollope's biggest success to date - it sold 700 copies. The Cornhill was to achieve a circulation of 120,000. This was the big time, placing Trollope on the same level as Dickens and Thackeray. However, the Cornhill refused the half-written Castle Richmond and instead wanted another Barsetshire novel. Their deadline for the opening installments was in 6 weeks. Trollope started writing Framley Parsonage immediately.

He juggled writing the two books, finishing Castle Richmond just a few days past his publisher's deadline, possibly the only time this notoriously conscientious writer missed a deadline.

Framley Parsonage is one of the jewels of the Barsetshire novels and made Trollope's name in Victorian Britain. Castle Richmond sank without trace; possibly his worst selling and least read book to this day.

3) Plot
Castle Richmond foregrounds the tangled and somewhat melodramatic romantic and economic affairs of an intertwined group of Ascendancy (ie Anglocentric and Protestant) aristocrats against the backdrop of the famine. Reading today, this juxtaposition jars; the aristo plot is just too obliviously isolated from the horror, as well as being creakily frivolous in itself.

But even on its own terms it fails. The romantic entanglements are really complicated, but Trollope makes the subsidiary characters far more charismatic and interesting than the hero Herbert and heroine Clara, both of whom are conventional and colourless. Herbert vies with his cousin Owen for Clara's hand - Owen is portrayed as handsome, super-masculine, honourable, impetuous and charismatic: in short, all the qualities of a traditional hero. Perhaps his bumptiousness needs a little correcting and this would form the basis of his character arc in a different novel. Not here. Owen is not the hero, no matter how much all the other characters (and Trollope) adore him, and he ends up unfulfilled (possibly), with the consolation prize of Clara's younger brother, Patrick Earl of Desmond.

Trollope is celebrated for his sensitive and psychologically penetrating depiction of unusual situations, relationships and characters, but in this novel these focuses overwhelm the core marriage plot. Clara's mother the Countess of Desmond is the villain of the piece, but she hankers after Owen for herself as well, which makes her situation compelling for the reader (and her struggles with Owen, oblivious to her devotion, much more interesting than anything Clara and Herbert get up to).

I won't discuss the inheritance plot at all, other than to say the melodrama lies largely here. Herbert's father dies very obviously only because the plot demands he does. As character, he is one of those Victorians who turn their face to the wall and decide to die - purely for the convenience of their authors.

4) Homosexuality
A queer academic has excitedly claimed Owen and Patrick as a gay couple. They end the novel travelling up to Norway on a fishing trip, and plan to visit Africa together to hunt big game (pleasingly, bringing to mind a later Irish writer's "feasting with panthers" line). Patrick is in his last year at Eton and Trollope clearly shows he has a schoolboy crush on Owen. Owen however only has eyes for Clara - whilst he is fond of Patrick my reading is he is as oblivious of Patrick's crush as he is of the countess's. The Patrick/Owen relationship seems to me a little plot-determined and functional. Trollope had been a schoolboy at Harrow and Winchester College so he would have been familiar with schoolboy homosexuality. To me Dickens is the Victorian novelist with an authentic queer sensibility.

5) Sectarianism
Trollope is free of conventional English anti-Catholicism to his credit, and satirizes religious sectarianism on both sides. But he presents sectarianism as comedy, which feels particularly hollow in the light of the subsequent history of Ireland. During the famine Irish nationalist struggles did continue, with British infrastructure subject to attack and British landlords killed. Some of the writings of the Anglo-Irish Ascendency from this time, as well as the British, have been cited by some historians as evidence of genocide.


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Vicky Pryce and Polly Toynbee in Omnibus Clapham

The economist Vicky Price and Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee are or were both long-term residents of Clapham, and appeared together last night at Omnibus to discuss their new books: It’s the Economy Stupid by Vicky Pryce, Peter Unwin and Andy Ross and Cameron’s Coup by Polly Toynbee and David Walker. The event was co-hosted by Clapham Books - it’s great to see collaboration of this sort between our local independent bookshop and Omnibus.

Polly started the evening by praising the successful launch of Omnibus in the old Clapham library, and indeed it is great to see this handsome old Victorian public building finding a new public role in the local community. It certainly adds greatly to the mix of amenities around the new Old Town piazza area.

Both speakers were critical of the Coalition government. Polly spoke of the rigidity and stealthy determination of its ideological purposes; Vicky more of the evidence-free economic policy. Although a liberal herself, she was a government economist under both New Labour and Coalition administrations, and had words of praise for New Labour at least attempting to follow the evidence. Far from having “a long herm economic plan”, the coalition choked off reviving growth and flatlined the economy for its first two years, before surreptitiously u-turning and quietly and half-heartedly loosening fiscal policy. Basically, the Tories are ideologically incapable of accepting that government investment can create growth in the wider economy.

Polly seemed more wholeheartedly to support Labour, but I liked the way she always backed up claims with independent  evidence and sources. She strongly feels this is a very important election, and people should vote tactically to keep the tories out.

It was a very interesting evening, and very well attended: practically a full house.

Clapham's New Library Opens

In these austere times it is pleasing to report some positive news: a new modern library building has just opened on Clapham High Street. I went along today to use the fax machine (they don't have one yet) and take some snaps - please forgive my arty hipstamatics. I reported before about the building itself while under construction - the flats above have helped to fund the new public library facilities. The building itself seems to have taken ages to construct - almost as long as the much higher Shard, if my memory serves correctly. Last June they were expecting to be completed in September last year.

The flats tower above the library and the high street.

Builders are still busy completing the streetscaping at ground level - the paving does not appear at this stage to match the superlative standards of the Venn Street development.

A huge mural above the librarians' station maps out the interior space - two spirals curve out from the entrance and the desk - one upwards and the other downwards - around a central atrium rising the full height of the library space. A spiral staircase and a lift link all the levels. Books and other media line the curving spirals; reading areas, computer stations and meeting rooms lead off the spiral. The atrium houses a play space for children. It's like a mini Clapham version of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum in New York

the ramp spiralling upwards

A view across the central atrium, with oculi allowing glimpses of the book stacks on the spiralling ramp

The spiral staircase

It all looks new and shiny, and the books have the feel of just having been arranged on their new shelves. Loads of users are already using the spaces - the reading and computer rooms look like they will be very popular.

Overall, the space feels modern and generous. I have some niggles with the finish, which lets the standard down - the exposed concrete ceilings look like they've been demanded by an accountant late in construction rather than originally envisaged by the architect. The librarians' space will probably need to be redesigned - it's way too small and encourages spiralling gaggles of users to besiege the poor duty librarian from all angles - while I was there fights were erupting amongst library clients (over where the queue was) and the librarians themselves appeared stressed.

Noise levels are quite high - the central atrium and hard surfaces throughout create an echoing acoustic, and the children's play area generates a large amount of noise to echo.

Quote London

“Once, she had thought she could conquer London. She had imagined a whirl of literary salons, political engagement, larky parties, bittersweet romances conducted on Thames embankments. She had intended to form a band, make short films, write novels, but two years on the slim volume of verse was no fatter, and nothing really good had happened to her since she’d been baton-charged at the Poll Tax Riots. The City had defeated her, just like they said it would. Like some overcrowded party, no-one had noticed her arrival, and no-one would notice if she left.”
David Nicholls, One Day

The Guardian mocked the trailer mercilessly, but I loved it! It inspired me to get the novel, which I am currently enjoying very much. The reviews of the film have been disappointing - The Guardian crucified it - and already there have been features on “the most disappointing novel adaptations” (possibly in The Guardian as well - I’m sensing a pattern forming here ) so I may vey well miss the movie.

Anne Hathaway’s charmless claim in a red-carpet interview the most difficult thing about her role was getting the bad British posture right put me off as well. What, Ms Hathaway, even more difficult than the accent?

Becket, or The Honour of God

Becket by Jean Anouilh

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I must confess my ignorance - although I do admire Anouilh I didn't know he had written a play about Becket, let alone quite a famous one. I'm currently fascinated my medieval culture and saints, so as soon as this play came to my attention I ordered it in and read it at one sitting. Like all Anouilh it is incredibly elegant, poetic, witty and worldly-wise. He doesn't interrogate his characters too much - he just exposes their actions and words: Becket retains a charismatic mystery to the end. I will definitely track the film down now too, and will keep watch for any theatrical productions.



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Quote

"It was at Balmoral that I learned my first lesson in the male anatomy. My mentor was the King’s younger brother, the Duke of Gloucester, who unfortunately never quite mastered the correct technique of adjusting the kilt when seated."

- The Honourable Margaret Rhodes, from her memoir "The Last Curtsey"

New in Clapham

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The new Library Building on Clapham High Street is shooting up and is due for completion in September this year. Very exciting, as we'll have a brand new library and swimming pool here in SW4. The developers get 136 new apartments to flog, to help pay for the public amenities.

You won't find any information on the website about the new civic facilities, just a rather crass commercial hard sell. However, the relentless, hysterical grip on its target demographic is rather amusing:

[Edit: video now removed as too annoying!}

No grannies need apply!

I suppose the target punters will be shocked to find such an archaic insitution as a library in the basement. They may enjoy the swimming pool, however. It will be interesting to see how public and private interact as the building comes to life.


'The New" is actually so old - such a watered-down, pale pastiche of Frank Gehry's oeurvre, an architect whose style, so amazing in the 90s, is already slipping into the past. Do we deserve better public buildings? I suppose the rather magnificent Battersea Library extension was also architecturally retrogressive when it was built in the 1920s. It was however proud to be a library.

Graham Greene lived here!

Graham Greene lived here!
Originally uploaded by hedgiecc

No. 14 Clapham Common North Side

The novelist received an official blue plaque from English Heritage last week.

"Graham Greene (1904-1991) lived at 14 Clapham Common North Side from 1935 until he was forced to leave the house due to war damage in 1940. His novel The End of the Affair is set in Clapham in 1945-6. The narrator lives in a bedsit 'at the wrong side of the Common' (South Side), drinks in the 'Pontefract Arms' (The Windmill) and visits 'the dark church at the corner of Park Road - a Roman Catholic church full of plaster statues' (St Mary's).
Writing to his mother, Greene describes Clapham thus: 'the whole appearance of Clapham Common is lovely, like a wide green plateau on a hilltop above Battersea with the Common stretching out in one direction and on three sides surrounded by little country-like shops and Queen Anne houses."

- from Clapham Past by Gillian Clegg

Greene lived here with his family from August 1935 to October 1940, when the house was bombed.

"The English Heritage blue plaque will be installed at 14 Clapham Common North Side, where Greene lived with his family from August 1935; at that time he described it as “a most beautiful Queen Anne house … done up absolutely like a museum piece”. It remained his home until October 1940 when it was hit in a bombing raid and became uninhabitable; the house was empty that night as Vivien and the children had been evacuated to Sussex and Graham was staying in Bloomsbury with his lover, Dorothy Glover. This devastating event later inspired the pivotal point in his novel, The End of the Affair. Despite the damage, the outer walls of the house remained intact, allowing the interior to be rebuilt after the war. The house is Grade II* listed and forms part of a terrace built by the architect John Hutt in 1714-20.

Greene’s daughter, Caroline Bourget, said of the house: ".... my father evacuated us to his parents' home in Sussex in August 1939 when I was only 5 yrs old......but I do remember the magnificent staircase. Some well-known writers and publishers visited the house such as John Betjeman and Evelyn Waugh. When I met them later, they recalled seeing me at the age of 3 or 4."

English Heritage blue plaque historian Dr Susan Skedd said: “Graham Greene is indisputably one of the great British writers of the twentieth century. He achieved the rare distinction of enjoying both critical and popular admiration throughout his career. Since the centenary of his birth in 2004 his literary reputation has been increasing and we hope this plaque will act as a focus for old and new fans of his work alike.”

A Cut Back

Carol Ann Duffy is definitely shaping up to be one of our most interesting Poet Laureates. I've quoted her amazing Last Post before, this one is her response to the Art Council's decision to cut all funding from the Poetry Book Society from April next year. It originally featured in the Guardian, and I'm quoting it from Belinda Hollyer's blog. Here's how you can help the Poetry Book Society.

A CUT BACK, by Carol Ann Duffy

It’s no go the LitFest, it’s no go up in Lancaster,
though they’ve built an auditorium (still quite wet, the plaster)
a bar, a bookshop, office space … well, they won’t need wheelchair
access.
All we want is a million quid and here’s to the Olympics.

London’s Enitharmon Press was founded in 1967,
but David Gascoyne and Kathleen Raine are writing now in heaven,
with UA Fanthorpe, John Heath-Stubbs; dead good dead poets all.
The only bloody writing now’s the writing on the wall.

It’s no go the national art, it’s no go cake with icing.
All we want are strategic cuts, it’s no go salami slicing.

It’s no go the Poetry Trust, it’s no go in East Suffolk;
Aldeburgh’s east of Stratford East. As Rooney says, oh f-fuck it –
because it’s no go First Collection Prize, it’s no go local writers.
We’ve been asked to pull the plug, the rug, by coalition shysters.

National Association of Writers in Education?
No way, NAWE, children and books, the train’s leaving the station.
It’s no go your poets in schools, it’s no go your cultures.
All we want is squeezed middles and stringent diets for vultures.

It’s no go the pamphlet, the gig in Newcastle no go.
All we want is a context for the National Portfolio.

Three little presses went to market, Flambard, Arc and Salt;
had their throats cut ear to ear and now it’s hard to talk.
They remember Thatcher’s Britain. Clegg-Cameron’s is worse.
Deathbyathousandcuts.co.uk, the least of which is verse.

It’s no go the avant-garde, it’s no go the mainstream.
All we want is a Review Group, chaired, including recommendations.

Stephen Spender thought continually of those who were truly great;
set up the Poetry Book Society with TS Eliot, genius mate.
But it’s no go two thousand strong in the Queen Elizabeth Hall.
Phone a cab for the Nobel laureates as they take their curtain call.

It’s no go, dear PBS. It’s no go, sweet poets.
Sat on your arses for fifty years and never turned a profit.
All we want are bureaucrats, the nods as good as winkers.
And if you’re strapped for cash, go fish, then try the pigging
bankers.

Shock

Watching Channel 4's Dispatches: Britain's Secret Fat Cats while blogging. I read and was very impressed by Naomi Klein's No Logo; however I missed out on her next book The Shock Doctrine when it came out. It seems to be cited more and more frequently these days though so I ordered it in from Amazon.

Basically, it appears to be Cameron and Clegg's playbook (with truly staggering amounts of Blairesque mendacity and spin of their own on top). Dispatches is showing, quite methodically and clearly, how government cuts will force privatisations which will enrich a very few at the expense of decent public services for all. One could perhaps argue that Reagan and Thatcher had genuine hopes of their "free-market" ideology actually working. However, 30 years later, after an economic apocalypse brought about by the very deregulation Thatcher and Reagan initiated, with middle and lower-class incomes over that time stagnating and even retreating while the top 1% soars exponentially ever higher, imposing the same policies without an explicit mandate is crassly stupid, if not criminal.

"A more accurate term for a system that erases the boundaries between Big Government and Big Business is not liberal, conservative or capitalist but corporatist. Its main characteristics are huge transfers of public wealth to private hands, often accompanied by exploding debt, an ever-widening chasm between the dazzling rich and the disposable poor and an aggressive nationalism that justifies bottomless spending on security. For those inside the bubble of extreme wealth created by such an arrangement, there can be no more profitable way to organize a society. But because of the obvious drawbacks for the vast majority of the population left outside the bubble, other features of the corporatist state tend to include aggressive surveillance (once again, with government and large corporations trading favors and contracts), mass incarceration, shrinking civil liberties and often, though not always, torture.

From Chile to China to Iraq, torture has been a silent partner in the global free-market crusade. But torture is more than a tool used to enforce unwanted policies on rebellious peoples; it is also a metaphor of the shock doctrine's underlying logic."

- Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine, 2007

New Year's Eve

CVI

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
        The flying cloud, the frosty light:
        The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
        Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
        The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
        For those that here we see no more;
        Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
        And ancient forms of party strife;
        Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
        The faithless coldness of the times;
        Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
        The civic slander and the spite;
        Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
        Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
        Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
        The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
        Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

        ~ from In Memoriam, Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)

Gent with flower

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Strictly speaking I wasn't supposed to take this pic so am keeping mum about where this is from ;-)

This is a portrait of the author of an 18th-century florilegium, or plant encyclopedia. He was German and the book was published in Amsterdam beginning around 1730 (it took 12 years to complete). It's in 8 volumes; each around 500 pages long and contains 1,000 etched and hand-coloured illustrations. Each illustration was waxed to preserve the colour (and presumably to prevent it rubbing off on the facing page).

Imagine the logistics of organising that in that time period. No phones, no email, no typewriters or computers - no reliable postal service even. If the print run was just 1,000 that would mean they had to have 1,000,000 illustrations hand-painted to a consistent quality and correctly interleaved in the books. The text refers to illustrations by numbers (and there is an index at the end of the last volume)

I was really charmed that he had his portrait done in his baroque frock coat and wig holding a flower - his life's work.

Last Post

Today is the funeral of Henry Allingham, one of the last British survivors of the World War I trenches. The other last soldier, Harry Patch, is buried next week. With them disappears living memory of the horrors that war generation lived and died through.

Of course, we have the magnificent poetry of the WWI poets. With that awesome legacy towering, our new Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy was brave indeed to accept the BBC’s commission to write a poem commemorating the passing of that generation, but has I feel succeeded quite magnificently - her poem Last Post is a very fine tribute, worthy of standing with Wilfred Owen et al.

LAST POST

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If poetry could tell it backwards, true, begin
that moment shrapnel scythed you to the stinking mud…
but you get up, amazed, watch bled bad blood
run upwards from the slime into its wounds;
see lines and lines of British boys rewind
back to their trenches, kiss the photographs from home-
mothers, sweethearts, sisters, younger brothers
not entering the story now
to die and die and die.
Dulce- No- Decorum- No- Pro patria mori.
You walk away.

You walk away; drop your gun (fixed bayonet)
like all your mates do too-
Harry, Tommy, Wilfred, Edward, Bert-
and light a cigarette.
There's coffee in the square,
warm French bread
and all those thousands dead
are shaking dried mud from their hair
and queuing up for home. Freshly alive,
a lad plays Tipperary to the crowd, released
from History; the glistening, healthy horses fit for heroes, kings.

You lean against a wall,
your several million lives still possible
and crammed with love, work, children, talent, English beer, good food.
You see the poet tuck away his pocket-book and smile.
If poetry could truly tell it backwards,
then it would.


It’s rather encouraging and pleasing that poetry today can still generate so much interest - Last Post has attracted quite favourable and extensive comment.

I'm back!

Back from the Xmas festivities in Cambridge, with my final deadline for 2008 looking quite daunting. Never mind, just get stuck in. Here goes . . .



I came back to find my poor tree in a very desiccated condition. Oh well.

Apart from humungous quantities of food, we had lots of wintry countryside walks in Cambridge - usually at sunset. That’s when my relatives usually come out to play.

I got Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight for Xmas - devoured it in hours; it’s highly readable and entertaining despite its many glaring faults. Funny to have socially acceptable, conservative “family values” vampires - my vampire frame of reference has always been the far more subversive Anne Rice version. Have to see the movie.

I’m very impressed with my mother. Fresh from her pre-Xmas “nervous breakdown” she scored a new boyfriend just before Christmas - in a target poor and competition rich environment. I’m impressed. And surely, if my 77-year old mother can do it, I can too?? The lucky 81-year old boy is showering her in flowers and meals. They had a date picnic with the Xmas hamper I sent.

That’s enough for one post - got another 9 to go!

Pullman on religion

"Religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good."

- Philip Pullman

The History of Tea

For such a comforting beverage with such a positive image Tea has certainly had an exciting history. It has paid an especially prominent and controversial role in British imperial history, both in America and China.

Tea became popular in Britain in the late 17th century, and rapidly spread to all classes. Tea was a net drain on the economy, as it had to imported from China and paid for in silver (the Chinese didn’t want or need anything else from anyone at that point). The British government therefore imposed tax on tea. This didn’t really bother the Brits (it is estimated that over 95% of tea drunk in Britain was smuggled in) but it really upset the colonial Americans. The Boston Tea Party set off the American Revolution and led to the Declaration of Independence. To this day, tea is less popular in the USA than coffee, which the revolutionaries promoted as the patriotic drink.

Meanwhile, back in the East, those canny British traders had worked out a clever scam. India was growing huge quantities of Opium, which was pretty useless in terms of trade to the UK or internally in India. However, Imperial China had a big opium addiction problem which the emperors were struggling to control.

Chinese drug traders were willing to pay in silver for opium.

So, British traders picked up opium in India for virtually nothing, traded it illegally in China for silver, then paid for Chinese tea with the silver and sailed back home, making huge profits at every point.

This obviously worked really well for the British; less so for the Chinese, who eventually managed to seize and destroy an opium shipment (despite the corruption of the port authorities).

This kicked off the Opium Wars, in which Britain seized control of Hong Kong. There were vociferous British voices raised in opposition to these wars in Parliament, so one can’t really excuse the wars as a reflection of the standards of their time: people knew how corrupt and awful they were then, too.

Eventually, the British introduced commercial tea growing to India and the African colonies too. Today, India produces the largest crop of tea and drinks most of it internally.

John Griffiths’ book Tea: The Drink That Changed the World is full of interesting historical facts about tea – interesting reading for tea maniacs like me!

colonial exploits

Busy reading Thomas Pakenham’s excellent The Scramble for Africa; quite a head trip. The colonial antics of France, England, Germany etc would be comic if their consequences weren’t so tragic. Especially intriguing was the France v England match in the Sudan, which culminated in a face-off in the malarial swamps of the Nile, in a place then called Fashoda.

The Sudan itself had been carried away on a tide of Islamic fundamentalism – it was the first modern Islamic fundamentalist state. Despite the headline demise of General Gordon at Khartoum at the hands of the Mahdi’s army, the British seemed quite happy with the status quo, and were in no immediate hurry to avenge Gordon’s death.

Then some academic read a paper at a geography conference which claimed that a dam on the Nile at Fashoda could literally stop the river and basically hold Egypt to ransom. This news electrified both the French and British colonial departments.

The French sent a secret expedition to Fashoda. Two hundred French forces traveled up the Congo, then dismantled their steamer and hauled it up over the Congo/Nile watershed. Then they reassembled it and sailed down the Nile to Fashoda, carrying with them crates and crates of champagne (how they kept it chilled is anyone’s guess).

Meanwhile, The British sent an army into Sudan under Kitchener – ostensibly to assist Italian forces who were escaping from their defeat in Ethiopia. When he arrived at Khartoum he opened further secret instructions to sail up the Nile with a fleet of gunboats and occupy Fashoda (and if the French were already there, to take it without firing a shot).

The French expedition refused to surrender and the whole thing kicked off, with the two countries coming to the brink of war. Eventually the French backed down. This was so humiliating for them the British changed the name of Fashoda, wiping it off the map. General de Gaulle regarded Fashoda as a massive setback for French prestige and honour, and apparently “the Fashoda Syndrome” still lurks in the depths of the French psyche.

Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957

(Matt Houlbrook, University of Chicago Press, 2006)

The beautiful image on the cover seduced me into buying this book (and I felt the need for some educational reading). It’s a fascinating read; most enjoyable and informative. I loved the way Houlbrook itemises the particular geography of queer London, and has even sourced photos of historic queer places (largely from police records, it would appear). Knowing where these old clubs, bath houses, urinals etc actually were will definitely add another dimension to my experience of London.

The book is (fairly obviously) based on his PhD thesis, so is written in full-on academic-speak. Houlbrook does manage to enliven this jargon-heavy discourse with some wit and flexibility; I just feel an opportunity to reach the general reader has been missed. There is certainly enormous human interest here, and loads of original research. As it was, I felt like a student at the back of queer-studies class.

My other issue is that he imposes an off-the-peg Marxist analysis on the history: not particularly convincingly, in my view. Slippery queer men evade the class categories he constructs for them at every turn. He nostalgically looks for a moment when the [queer] proletariat storms the gates of the Winter Palace – the closest incident he finds is a massive police raid on a proto queer club-night in a Holland Park Street Ballroom run by “Lady” Austin for her “Camp Boys”, in the 1930s. The police gained undercover entrance to this by dragging up and passing as queer. One policeman enthusiastically boasted about “trading twice” with “my boyfriend” – this part was subsequently suppressed at the trial.

Houlbrook clearly shows the camp boys had a vocal and articulate critique of their arrest and the laws which led to it. However I think he overemphasizes the differences between the camp boys and middle-class ‘respectable homosexuals’: the camp boys clearly were trying to keep their night as private as possible, given that the police had to go to extreme lengths to gain entry. Moreover, the camp boys clearly supported the abolition of the Act, following the call of the middle-class Oscar Wilde and prefiguring the middle-class 'respectable homosexual' lobbyists at the Wolfenden commission.

These lobbyists clearly did create a mythical ‘respectable homosexual’ – but surely as a deliberate ploy to counter the demonized stereotypes then prevailing in public discourse. They needed to speak the language of the law-makers in order to persuade them to change the laws.

In the end, the tragic Lady Austin saga had no effect on the liberation struggle one way or the other. By contrast, the arrest and trial for cottaging of the middle-class war-hero, sportsman and public schoolmaster Frank Champain (at midnight, in one of London’s most notorious urinals under the Adelphi arches just off the Strand) had a dramatic effect on police activity after Mr Champain was spectacularly acquitted on appeal.

It is quite clear that he must have been totally guilty, but his solicitor skillfully spun his arrest as police entrapment and this so enraged the appeal judge he berated the policeman involved. The police were so cowed by this that arrests for cottaging fell dramatically after this trial and stayed well down for years afterwards. So, by helping to minimize persecution during a lengthy period of oppression, this has to be counted a small tactical success.

In the final analysis, the Camp Boys protested but did not physically fight their arrest – very much unlike the New York Stonewall Bar gays of decades later. Stonewall became an iconic and liberating moment for gays all over the world. Why didn’t this happen at the Holland Park Ballroom? - are our police less brutal? are we too respectful of the law? Whatever the answers, it would seem that the European reformist strategy has overtaken the activist tradition in the States. Despite the explosive and psychologically liberating Stonewall moment, America today is massively behind Europe in awarding equal rights to its gay citizens – and even has a fundamentalist and activist right-wing trying to turn the clock back even more.

Revenge of the Books

I shared a very large house with Ivan and Liz for 9 years. I could happily buy as many books as I liked and they would be easily swallowed up in the vast spaces available everywhere. This house was actually in CLAPHAM for the benefit of those “friends” and “relatives” who I have subsequently to my horror learned always secretly thought we lived in St Ockwell.

NOT STOCKWELL. CLAPHAM CLAPHAM CLAPHAM !!!

However, these days I do indisputably live in the Clapham heartlands, albeit in a tiny little flat. Foolishly, I took all 19 meters of my books (I remember the number because I had to measure for the mover’s quote and he said he had to come round “to see what 19 meters of books looks like”.

Well, it fills my spare room.

Need to use the room now, so have been studiously de-accessioning to the Trinity Hospice Charity shop over the past several weeks. I reckon I’ve got rid of at least 4 meters. I spent the weekend moving the bookcases (and books) into the sitting room. I now measure 18 meters of books.

The mis-match is possibly because I am adding books almost as quickly as I am getting rid of them. Sheesh. I really haven’t bought a book for ages and ages. Except for the one I bought on Saturday.

Tamara Drewe

Joanathan Cape, 2007

This graphic novel was originally serialized in The Guardian from September 2005 to December 2006 – I hardly missed an issue; I loved it. However, it was only when I bought the book (published Oct 2007) that I realized the plot was an updated version of Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd.

Quite embarrassing as (a) the novel was one of my set texts at school and (b) Posy Simmonds doesn’t exactly disguise her intentions in any way! – “Far from the Madding Crowd” are the first words of her book - the headline of an advert for a writer’s retreat where the action is about to take place.

It goes to show though that one can enjoy Tamara Drewe on its own merits, without any knowledge of Hardy’s original text. But equally, it’s great fun to follow Simmond’s exceptionally imaginative and intelligent recreation of the novel’s plot, characters and even themes.

I particularly like the way she borrows and repeats the novel’s motifs and incidents in a reframed way – for example instead of the cheeky Valentine’s card inflaming Farmer Boldwood, Nicholas Hardiman gets an email (cc’d to Tamara’s two other suitors from her computer by a mischevious village teenager). But for me the most satisfying reuse of a motif is the mad dog herding livestock to destruction – to completely different ends.

While fairly dramatic, it is clear Simmonds restrains Hardy’s wild melodrama somewhat. Ben Sergeant isn’t nearly as wicked a character as Sergeant Troy, although his sulky sexiness does cause trouble for the female characters.

I have to quote Wikipedia’s marvelous line from their plot summary:

“Her [i.e. Bathsheba’s] initial dislike turns to infatuation after he excites her with a private display of expert swordsmanship.”



Quite so.