bloodygranuaile | Entries tagged with victorians

The first book I finished this year (I started it a few days ago but it counts for 2025!) was Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, one of the great works of nineteenth century medievalism, a time period I unabashedly love because it feels like the first real modern invention of fantasy nerds. Except it took itself with typical Victorian dead moral seriousness (the morals were sometimes bad, but they were for sure serious) and is even now taken with dead artistic seriousness.

The copy of the Idylls that I own was acquired for a mere $5 at Brimfield, probably because the spine and slipcover are so faded. Inside, it is a really very lovely edition, with thick linen paper and deeply stamped print, and fanciful full-page line drawings of what appear to be not just the characters but specifically statues of the characters, on pedestals in little alcoves like you’d find in an old cathedral. This is one of the factors that made it a good winter break book, since I didn’t need to take it anywhere and could just go full sitting-by-the-fire cozy and be generally picturesque about it. I feel like the kinds of people who did Victorian medievalism would appreciate that.

Anyway. The Idylls are several narrative poems about different characters in and around King Arthur and his Round Table, some of whom I was already familiar with and some of them, apparently, I was not. Some of the key moments of Arthuriana are in there, such as the Quest for the Holy Grail, and the Fall of Arthur, and the winning of Guenevere. There are also a number of tales of essentially random knights of the Table, which are fun. There are a few tales of basically the tragic glories of heterosexuality, some of which are better than others. The tale of Lancelot and Elaine is effective in presaging the ruin that Lancelot and Guenevere’s adulterous love for each other will wreak on Camelot, although I am probably not the right audience to be fully bought into a story about how noble it is for a teenage girl to die of heartbreak over a guy three times her age. (Snap out of it, Elaine!) The most painful poem was the one between the heathen sorceress Vivien and famous old guy Merlin, in which Vivien tries to seduce Merlin into telling her a charm that will let her essentially bury Merlin alive but magically. Because Merlin is supposed to be wise and old and not a complete fucking idiot man who will do any fool thing the instant a pretty girl asks him to, this poem is really fucking long, as it takes an interminable time for Vivien to wear Merlin down into doing the transparently idiotic thing, so we are treated to pages and pages of painfully gender essentialist pseudo-medieval-but-actually-Victorian moral speechifying. This is the one poem that I will denounce as just straight up bad. In the rest of them, the general Victorian gender nonsense is certainly there, but also they are good poems and good stories, full of evocative imagery and daring deeds and all that good stuff, and it would be silly to expect a Victorian story about early medieval times to be about exploring today’s moral dilemmas, anyway. So all the stuff about Christianity and bloodlines and whatever is just part of the worldbuilding, and I can roll with it, even up to and including basically blaming Guenevere personally for the entire realm falling apart. But the Vivien one is just too much.

While the first couple Idylls are fun and even lighthearted (“Gareth and Lynette” is very funny and cute), as the story progresses the sense of melancholy and foreboding grow, and Tennyson’s overall take on the glories of Arthur’s rule seems to be that it was ultimately a failure. This is done very well and further makes the book an excellent choice for gloomy midwinter reading. It’s all very tragic and sad, and Tennyson never once fucks up his scansion or any of that other stuff that’s important to the actual craft of lyrical poetry, which is very impressive. It definitely makes me want to immediately run and read more Arthuriana rather than feeling like I’ve had my fill of it for now.

Being ill during spooky season with only my red velvet couch for company, I decided to go the whole hog and, in between catching up on my correspondence and staring in the general direction of the water asking “When will my love be home from the war(hammer tournament)” I read through Selected Poems of Christina Rossetti, which I got in college but had only read bits and pieces from. I am very out of practice reading volumes of poetry from cover to cover; I found myself forgetting to pause between poems and then being confused when they were all running together in my head. I also really don’t know how to review poetry; it’s been decades since I had to try to write anything coherent about poetry of any kind.

Anyway. The most famous poem in this selection is probably The Goblin Market, and it was the line “We must not look at goblin men” getting stuck in my head (who knows why) that prompted me to read this volume. The Goblin Market is an eerie little fairy story that is clearly about any number of things but resists obvious allegory; the imagery in it has become classic for a reason, though. While a lot of the poems are full of the kind of subjects beloved of the pre-Raphaelites–pseudo-Medieval romantic stuff, and natural beauty, and sentiments of love and loss–there’s also quite a lot of range: there’s at least one poem about a story Rossetti read in a newspaper; there’s quite a lot of religious poetry; some tell little stories about people being petty and mean to each other. The funniest poem in the whole lot is probably No, Thank You, John, a mildly brutal rejection of a suitor that contains such gems as “I have no heart?--Perhaps I’ve not/But then you’re mad to take offence/That I don’t give you what I have not got/Use your common sense.” Oh, that Christina Rossetti, what a little shit she can be.

Most of the poems are not funny; most of them are sad and beautiful and generally very good for sitting around in a long robe feeling moody with. Because I never read poetry I also feel like I have gotten additionally Cultured and ought to be rewarded with a copy of the fancypants clothbound edition of The Goblin Market and Other Poems (https://www.abebooks.com/9780241303061/Goblin-Market-Poems-Penguin-Pocket-0241303060/plp).

At the last Readercon—which was, sadly, not last year, but the one before—I largely gravitated toward buying little pretty witchy books, including Ami McKay’s The Witches of New York. It seemed a vaguely atmospheric choice to read through another long, rainy summer week, so that’s what I did.

The story follows one Beatrice Dunn, a seventeen-year-old orphan who was raised by her eminently sensible aunt in upstate New York, as she goes into Manhattan to work as an assistant in an occult shop. This being New York in 1880, there’s quite a lot going on—spiritualism is in vogue, exciting new scientific technologies are reshaping fields from medicine to communications, suffragists are agitating for the right to vote, and of course a load of religious zealots are skulking about being quite horrified of all of this. In short, it is a perfect time for Beatrice to develop the ability to see ghosts.

Under the tutelage of the two women who run the occult shop--Eleanor St. Clair, a quiet, botanically inclined lesbian, and Adelaide Thom, a former street urchin and sideshow seer with one eye missing from an acid attack--Beatrice begins training as a witch, and gets involved in ghost-seeing for the benefit of a few other people in her employers’ circle, including a woman who owns the ghost-riddled Fifth Avenue Hotel and a doctor and “alienist” who lost his arm in the war. Everything’s going well except for the church lady trying to get Anthony Comstock to shut the shop down, and some minor nasty business with one of Eleanor’s exes, and the fact that someone in town is kidnapping girls who are witches or who he thinks are witches and murdering them. Because this is a tidy little story that does basically what you expect it to, the someone is a fire-and-brimstone priest who is being tempted by demons to get real arrogant about his ability to tell who else is being tempted by demons, and takes famed Puritan douchebag Cotton Mather as his hero and role model (except he’s not as smart and considerably murdery-er).

The book doesn’t really delve too deeply into the politics of the time except as set dressing, which… is basically fine, that’s just the type of book it is. Overall it’s pretty enjoyable, a tasty little addition to the canon of feminist-witchy fiction--some fun historical tidbits, a gloss of girl power, good triumphing over evil, ghoulies and ghosties and wee wicked beasties (i.e. cute animal companions), and some convenient light romance to tie the end up all neatly (though fortunately not involving Beatrice).

Hey, I managed to get a hold of this book before the book club it's for actually met! AND I read it!

L. P. Hartley's The Go-Between is an English countryside drama, not as moor-y as Thomas Hardy—more of a Jane Austen-y setting but less comedic. It follows the childlike musings and wanderings of 12-year-old public school boy Leo Colston as he spends his summer holiday at the grand old house of his classmate Marcus. Leo gets recruited as "postman" to run messages between various adult members of the estate, most notably running top-secret messages between Marcus' beautiful older sister Marian and a local farmer named Ted. Leo, with a child's love of secrets and drama and no idea what the hell is actually going on, at first enjoys the responsibility of his secret missions, but obviously everything eventually goes to hell. You can probably guess what the messages were actually about.

Considering the inside jacket flap gave away 90% of the plot, the book was still engaging and held some surprises, which I guess is what makes it Literature. The framing device is simple but executed well—old Leo finds his diary from that year; the diary has the signs of the Zodiac on it and is responsible for two motifs that carry throughout the story: Leo's obsession with the Zodiac, and his reputation—among both himself and his schoolmates—as a magician. There is also some excellent use of foreshadowing regarding the belladonna plant in the outhouse. I had guessed someone would be literally poisoned, but I suppose that would have been too melodramatic for this story.

As a coming-of-age/loss of innocence story it's about as awkward as it gets, and really paints a vivid picture of how simultaneously cynical and sheltered well-bred Victorian children were (the main story takes place in the summer of 1900, which young Leo thinks is very significant. As someone who was about 12 when 2000 happened, I can relate). Leo and his schoolmates bully the everloving shit out of each other, to the point that Leo is not only pleased with himself, but the whole frickin' school is pleased with him when it is believed he gave two other boys concussion (via black magic rather than pummelling them, but still). On the other hand, witnessing what the letters were really about gave him a monthslong illness complete with amnesia.

Leo is likable enough as a protagonist but only because he is 12 so you can't really blame him for being ignorant or making dumb choices; that is, after all, what the whole "innocence" theme really is about. And the long detailed looks into the thought processes of a clueless, slightly romantically-minded 12-year-old should be fairly relatable to anyone who was at all of a self-conscious or romantic turn of mind when they were young and clueless themselves.

The book is not long, but it does, like many Victorian novels, take something of a leisurely approach to pacing.

A whole bunch of people told me that Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus would be right up my alley. They have been telling me this for a good couple of years now. I have finally gotten around to reading it and am pleased to report that my friends know me very well. Or perhaps I should be less pleased to report that I am apparently very, very predictable?

The Night Circus is a lush, vaguely steampunky-Gothic, dark-romantic Victorian fantasy. It is ostensibly about two young magicians forced into a bizarre competition of skill by their teachers—both entirely dislikeable characters in their own ways—in the arena of a mysterious, magical black-and-white circus. Mostly it is about the circus, really, and although obviously the challenge that started it is quite important and provides the plot, the circus becomes a lot more than that—which I think is the point. There are many people involved in the circus besides the two magicians and their insufferable teachers, and the circus is very, very important to them. There are, therefore, a lot of vignettes and subplots and backstories and whatnot. A lot of readers, even ones who like that it takes place in the Victorian era and is full of pretty Victorian things, may not be as OK with the structure and pacing of the novel, which also tends to resemble a lot of Victorian lit in that it begins quite at the beginning and rolls along slowly and descriptively like a big sluggish river of words until it washes gently up upon the plot. The regular parts of the story are interspersed with little second-person interludes simply exploring the circus, which will probably strike some readers as pretentious and bore them, but which I enjoyed as pure one-thousand percent escapism, probably because the Night Circus is the type of place that I would love to attend. (Its fans, the rêveurs, have a dress code that just so happens to be what I wear half the time anyway. Like, it is my kinda place.)

I think my biggest complaint is that some of the magical stuff was a bit vague—I don’t know if actually explaining the mechanics of it any more would have made it better (actually, I’m 99% sure it would have ruined the atmosphere) but sometimes it didn’t have enough emotional force to really keep it all together—there’s a number of mentions at the end of how much effort it is for Celia to keep the circus running but I think if that’s the case—and if it’s been a longstanding case—the Celia POV parts of the book needed a bigger infusion of sensation-novel-ness, a stronger sense of the weight and strain of maintaining control.

This book does, however, go firmly on my “I want a movie/miniseries” list, even though it is not particularly action-packed, because it is so hugely visual and I want to see all these illusions animated! I also want an excuse for a more social experience of it, like going to a midnight showing in full rêveur wear or having a premiere party with all black-and-white food. Please tell me I can get this! Marketing to Goths is like, so hot right now, right?

Current Mood: tired

In the few moments I have had over the past six weeks to read for pleasure, I have been (finally!) entertaining myself with Lee Jackson’s wonderfully disgusting work of weird history, Dirty Old London: The Victorian Fight Against Filth. The subject of the book is pretty much exactly what it says on the tin: the disgustingly dirty state of London through the nineteenth century and the attempts by various “sanitarians” and social reformers to find a way to clean it up.

This book has all the best thing one looks for in a book about Victorians (at least if one is me)—petty political dramas, bizarre personalities, lots of excerpts from primary sources with all the weird spelling and punctuation intact, some people dying horribly, overblown moralizing, old cartoons, racist garbage about the Irish that I can get insulted at, and old photographs of people with majestic moustaches. We get to meet such quintessentially Victorian personalities as Edwin Chadwick, who, in addition to being a prominent sanitarian and mid-level politician, had a name like “Edwin Chadwick.” I mean, seriously, Victorians.

The book is quite sensibly organized into categories of filth rather than straight chronological order, making it essentially a series of smaller, more tightly-focused history explorations, rather than one big sprawling narrative on London filth. Chapter subjects include garbage collection, human sewage, soot, slum housing, street mud, public toilets, and—my favorite, unsurprisingly to anyone who knows me and my tastes in weird history reading—cemeteries and corpse disposal. Some personalities show up in multiple subjects, and later chapters are well fitted into the pictures painted by the previous ones, so it’s fairly easy to follow how it all comes together, even if you’re me and your ability to remember the different decades is more or less limited to “1840s—Irish Famine. 1860s—Sensation novels. 1890s—Oscar Wilde.”

Jackson is also a very entertaining narrator, in an understated, unobtrusively funny way that consists partly of his own commentary but in greater part of being able to find and juxtapose just the right examples of Victorian absurdity, hypocrisy, silliness, and just plain WTF-ery.

This book is also just super British, especially because Yale University Press doesn’t seem to have done an American copyedit and just printed the exact same book they have for sale in the U.K., logical punctuation and single quotation marks and British spellings and all. This is a choice I approve of one hundred thousand percent; I honestly think something would be lost if the style were Americanized at all. I do think that the most adorably British moment is right at the end of the “public convenience” chapter where Jackson gives a brief update on the modern state of the public toilet and warns that it is “under threat” and “falling prey to twenty-first century ‘austerity’.” This is because, as a youngish American, the closest thing to a “public” toilet I am familiar with is the one at the nearest Starbucks. British people and their quaint notions of public infrastructure! They’ll be talking about “public health insurance” next oh wait.

Honestly, this book was right up my alley—I’d recommend it to anyone not too easily grossed out as a really interesting history book, but for me, this was straight-up comfort reading: it was exactly what I expected it to be, it hit every “genre trope” I like of books in this “genre” (if “Victorian weird nonfiction” is a genre), I learned a lot of the sort of stuff I like learning. Does this make me a huge nerd? Probably. I’m probably also a big nerd who will be checking out Jackson’s other work pretty soon.