the greycat blog

Very occasionally the World Wide Web throws up a jewel of a site; even more rarely, a jewel of a blog. I came upon one such today, the genuine sparkling precious article: JSBlog, ‘The weblog of Joel Segal Books - on varied topics inspired by working in a secondhand bookshop’.

The secondhand bookshop concerned is Joel Segal Books in Topsham, Devon, and it looks to be a wonderful place (I speak as someone for whom an hour in a good secondhand bookshop is nothing less than an anticipation of paradise). What drew me to JSBlog was a fascinating article on ‘Trains in literature’ which discusses an extraordinary range of rail-related topics from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries including my old favourite, ‘Railway Spine’. Everything’s fully referenced and linked to aid further exploration - start following the links from this article, or any other on this blog, and you’ll be engrossed for hours.

There’s much, much more at JSBlog: to list just a few articles which caught my eye, ‘Further beyond the woodshed’ (on Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm), ‘Encyclopaedic thoughts’ (very good on Wikipedia), ‘Predictions’ (on c19th views of the future, and has interesting things to say about Anthony Burgess’s 1985), and ‘Bizarre historical affectations’ (from the Alexandra Limp to the Bush/Blair Power Walk).

Blog Of The Year.

Anthony Burgess (1917-93) is a writer who’s rather neglected today, but who (in addition to being very readable) always has interesting things to say. Some of the most interesting, and often prescient, are about Islam and its relationship with the West. I’ve written a new essay exploring this theme which is available at greycat.org: ‘”The old enemy”: Anthony Burgess and Islam’.

Most-read article on greycat.org over the last week: ‘The shadow of Stonehenge: paganism, fate and redemption in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles’. For more, see the post from the last time it reached most-read status.

Here’s a web-based scholarly resource that had somehow evaded my notice until now: the Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Index, neatly abbreviated (with obligatory capital letter in the middle) as the SciPer index. Here’s what it is and what it does, in its own words:

The Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical (SciPer) Index provides a scholarly synopsis of the material relating to science, technology, and medicine appearing in sixteen general periodicals published in Britain between 1800 and 1900. With entries describing over 14,000 articles and references to more than 6000 individuals and 2500 publications, it provides an invaluable research tool for those interested in the representation of science and in the interpenetration of science and literature in nineteenth-century Britain, as well as for students of the period more generally. […]

Constructed by systematically reading runs of sixteen non-scientific titles, [the index] provides details of the scientific references occurring throughout the periodicals, whether in fiction, poetry, illustrations, or dedicated scientific articles. The index has been compiled by experienced nineteenth-century researchers, whose judgement in identifying non-trivial references, and in identifying the people, publications, and institutions to whom reference is made, makes the finished product both more inclusive than conventional indexes, and more incisive than full-text searching. Although the index inevitably represents only a small proportion of the material available, a wide range of periodical formats and genres is represented. The indexing is very detailed, including not only the authors, titles, and bibliographical details of articles with relevant references, but also references to people, institutions, and publications mentioned, and in many cases a more extended description.

The SciPer index is very easy to use, with a sound basic search facility and an advanced search feature that provides almost every option you could wish for (although it would be nice to be able to exclude specific periodicals from the results; one can have too much of Punch). The periodicals indexed are listed here and include Blackwood’s, Cornhill, Edinburgh Review and the European Harper’s.

The recent expansion in the availability of full-text electronic resources has, if anything, increased the need for this kind of detailed and focused scholarly indexing, as the creators of SciPer observe: ‘full-text searching threatens to overwhelm the student with unwanted hits. Furthermore, both conventional indexing and digital full-texts have tended to leave illustrative material difficult to locate’. SciPer fills that gap and for anyone working on Victorian STM constitutes an invaluable resource.

‘Most-read’ may not be strictly accurate; ‘most-visited’ is perhaps closer to the mark. The statistics for greycat.org show that ‘Representing the Victorian railway: the aesthetics of ambivalence’ has received far more visitors than any other essay over the last week, almost all of them over the last 24 hours. This essay always receives a good number of visitors but the recent surge is solely down to the fact that the page has just been ’stumbled’ - i.e. recommended and shared within the StumbleUpon community.

StumbleUpon brings in a lot of visitors, but, at least for a site like this, most of them aren’t worth having. It’s like a hose that soaks your site in visitors, most of whom rapidly drain away. In the case of this page, only 12% of Stumblers stayed for more than 30 seconds, and 41% stayed less than 5 seconds. Lots of traffic, not much real interest. Still, every visitor is welcome and if even one person who comes here via StumbleUpon takes the time to read the essay and finds it interesting and/or useful then it’s worthwhile.

‘Representing the Victorian railway’ is derived from my doctoral research and was originally written for an academic conference in 1998. It has been much updated and revised since.

The railways constituted one of the most significant technological phenomena of the nineteenth century and, contrary to what some historians have argued, it took many years for the emotions they stirred up to become submerged in a general indifference; as Jack Simmons has noted, expressions of fear and alarm did not come to an end in the 1840s, but continued to be felt far into the Victorian age. As a presence in the nineteenth-century landscape, the railway was a source of a highly significant collective experience of technology, and of a powerful, liberating and disturbing vision of what technology could symbolize, offer, and threaten. Railways could be seen as a symbol of progress, promising economic and social betterment, freedom from old restrictions, democracy, energy, all the benefits and opportunities of modern mechanized civilization. Yet they were also associated with pollution, destruction, disaster and danger, bringing about the destabilization and corruption of social order, the vulgarization of culture, the defilement of natural beauty.

The essay uses two case studies to illuminate the ambiguities of nineteenth-century attitudes to the railway: J. M. W. Turner’s painting Rain Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway (1843-4) and Michael Reynolds’s book Engine Driving Life: Stirring Adventures and Incidents in the Lives of Locomotive Engine-Drivers (1889). To read more, visit ‘Representing the Victorian railway: the aesthetics of ambivalence’.

Picture: Great Western Railway locomotive, c.1880 [Source]

Rachel Toor, a US professor of creative writing, has written a column in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the difficulties (a rather tame word) of writing. It’s a great piece of writing in its own right, and it rings very true, at least for this reader and writer. This paragraph caught my eye:

It’s a daunting thing - to believe that you have something to say (that others will want to hear); to convey information in a way that is pellucid and intriguing; to find the mot juste, to avoid the tired and the clichéd; to create scaffolding to support the ideas you are juggling; and then to have the confidence to put it out there in the world, where it will surely be picked apart, kicked around, and perhaps even trampled.

It is very daunting, which I suppose is one of the reasons blogs were invented. For most bloggers only the last point applies.

This train of thought leads me to wonder which great writers of the past would have relished the blog as a form of expression, even of literary art. I’m sure Charles Dickens would have loved to blog. Anthony Burgess would have filled pages every day with every topic under the sun. Perhaps Jane Austen would have run hers as a society gossip column. I can see Virginia Woolf, her blog an elegant exemplar of minimalist design, tapping away each day at a new stream-of-consciousness entry. Émile Zola would have run several angry political blogs, I suspect. And Henry James, dictating to a drooping keyboard amanuensis, would have gone tirelessly on, and on, and on…

The most popular article on greycat.org during the last week has been ‘The shadow of Stonehenge: paganism, fate and redemption in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles‘. This essay seems to have a particularly strong following in the Indian subcontinent, for some reason.

Fundamentally, Stonehenge for Hardy stands for ‘the natural’, and – as Hardy himself made clear – Tess Durbeyfield, described in the subtitle of Tess as ‘a pure woman’, is pure in the sense of being natural, in her femininity, her beauty, and her motivations. It is therefore fitting that it is at Stonehenge that the climax of the story, the arrest of Tess, takes place, but this significance is prefigured in the early part of the book with the description in chapter II of the ritual of ‘Club-walking Day’, a pagan festival celebrating spring and fertility, in which Tess takes part. The story can thus be said to begin with moving circle of girls and women in white (among them is Tess, marked out by her red ribbon), performing a pagan ritual; it ends within the immobile circle of grey stones, a heathen temple of nature. The rough primitiveness of both these circles expresses the role that primal, instinctive drives take in this highly sensual and tragic story, and embodies one of the chief oppositional pairings that Hardy used as a fundamental structure of the novel: that between ‘nature’ and ’society’.

For much more on the interweaving of paganism and primitiveness, fertility and fate in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, have a look at ‘The Shadow of Stonehenge’.

Picture: ‘Something seemed to move on the verge of the dip eastward’, illustration by D. A. Wehrschmidt for chapter LVIII of Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891). Scanned by Philip V. Allingham (image above resized) for the Victorian Web. [Source]

The most popular paper on greycat.org for this week, say the site statistics, is ‘Taste, sense and vanity: Alexander Pope’s “Epistle to Burlington”‘.

Burlington stands as the epitome of good taste but, Pope warns, there is a danger that those who do not have his innate judgment and aesthetic sense will misinterpret the lessons he has to teach. Pope thus seems to be suggesting that even the efforts of men of taste such as Lord Burlington are doomed to failure if the undiscriminating and vulgar are free to misinterpret and pervert the values they have to impart:

Yet shall (my Lord), your just, your noble rules
Fill half the land with imitating fools;
Who random drawings from your sheets shall take,
And of one beauty many blunders make … (lines 25-28)

If that is the case, the reader may ask, what hope is there for the progress of taste in art, architecture and landscape gardening? Pope places his faith in men of innate sense such as Burlington, appearing to argue that although many will ignore or distort their precepts of taste and elegance, their practice of those ideas will nevertheless stand as inspiration to those who are capable of understanding true aesthetic and moral values.

For more, see ‘Taste, sense and vanity: Alexander Pope’s “Epistle to Burlington”‘. I have more to say about Pope in chapter II of my essay on William Shenstone; in particular, I take issue with the notion that Pope can be credited with the invention of the English landscape garden, or ever conceived of garden design as being ‘landscape-painting … Just like a landscape hung up’.

Picture: Engraving of Alexander Pope by George Vertue (1726). [Source]