Drive-by Reading
I take breaks by grabbing certain books off the shelves and opening them anywhere. I have a number of old favorites who never fail to entertain me no matter what page I land on.
One of them is the four volume edition of George Selwyn’s letters as edited by a guy named John Heneage Jesse, probably around the mid-1830s. The drawback with stuff published at that time was of course the pussyfooting 19th C editors felt necessary with the more robust attitudes of earlier, especially in private letters. But the payoff is not only the immediacy of the notes (they often knew the principals themselves, or someone who knew them) but in their opinionated editorializing. Nowadays scholars at least pretend an objective stance (though one can usually pick out their party line fairly fast) but ol’ J.H.J. doesn’t even pretend.
Like this letter from Horace Walpole to Selwyn, wherein he gossips so charmingly about Madame du Deffand’s salon, including this bit: Madame du Deffand says I have le fou mocqueur, and I have not hurt myself a little by laughing at whisk and Mr. Richardson, though I have steered clear of the chapter of Mr. Hume; the only Trinity now in fashion here.
Hesse footnotes the mention of Richardson, explaining that in Germany and France at that time (1765) Richardson was extremely popular, foreign visitors wanting to come to Hampstead and ask for the Flask Walk (mentioned in Clarissa), and quotes Diderot predicting that he would be as famous as Homer, and saying “I never yet met with a person who shared my enthusiasm, that I was not tempted to embrace him, and press him in my arms.”
Well, J.H.J. simply cannot let that stand without pronouncing on the matter from the pinnacle of his modern tastes of the 1830s with these remarks: Such was the extraordinary sensation created by the dreary romances of Richardson in France, which, to use the words of Mr. D’Israeli, can be accounted for only by the presumption that “to a Frenchman the style of Richardson may not be so objectionable when translated, as to ourselves.”
This sort of sneak attack is even funnier when you consider that Disraeli, though New and Hot in the 1830s (his Wesley Sue The Young Duke came out I think in 1830, and his more well known Vivien Grey somewhat later), is just about unread now, mostly due to turgid swathes of preachy prose, whereas Clarissa at least in the first half is astonishingly witty and entertaining today, even if the second half is awash with maiden suffering and villainous snorting and turf-pawing.
This volume also causes a somewhat spooky echo in detailing, through various people’s letters, the failure of the marriage of Lady Diana Spencer, who had at a young age married Viscount Bolingbroke. Having not risked her life in marrying a prince, Lady Di, as her friends all called her, was able to survive the divorce and marry her own true love in 1768.
Then there’s this pair of tidbits from Carlisle to Selwyn, writing from Italy that same year:
I do not think you wanted old boars in your house, that such young pigs as Mr. Luttrel should begin to torment you. What an infamous copy of verses were in the papers upon Lady B. Stanhyole. Why do not the Macaronis exert themselves upon such occasions?
So the Macaronis really did have influence for a time! They were not always objects of scorn, the way Byron’s aging co-bucks and rakes were in the 1830s.
Of course one instantly wants to read the nasty verses offered up by this unknown Temple Luttrell, but J.H.J. stays strictly g-rated in his note, mentioning with proper reserve that they ‘were exceeded only in their indecency by their bitterness.’ Woo, are we talking on a level with Rochester, or what?
Carlisle then goes on to make affronted reference to a local war:
The King of Naples has taken Terracina, and the French Avignon. I hope they will let Rome alone; at least I hope they will not put anything hard in the guns, in case of a siege, lest they should hurt the antiquities. The Neapolitans are a very brutal set of people. I dare say they would not have the least respect for a face without a nose or chin, or to an illegible inscription. The more instructed part of their nobility would perhaps think the one was a reflection upon their amours, and the other upon their scholarship.
Does anyone else find that sort of ancient gossip as entertaining as I do? Or am I as hopelessly weird as the maligned Lady B. Stanhope?.
One of them is the four volume edition of George Selwyn’s letters as edited by a guy named John Heneage Jesse, probably around the mid-1830s. The drawback with stuff published at that time was of course the pussyfooting 19th C editors felt necessary with the more robust attitudes of earlier, especially in private letters. But the payoff is not only the immediacy of the notes (they often knew the principals themselves, or someone who knew them) but in their opinionated editorializing. Nowadays scholars at least pretend an objective stance (though one can usually pick out their party line fairly fast) but ol’ J.H.J. doesn’t even pretend.
Like this letter from Horace Walpole to Selwyn, wherein he gossips so charmingly about Madame du Deffand’s salon, including this bit: Madame du Deffand says I have le fou mocqueur, and I have not hurt myself a little by laughing at whisk and Mr. Richardson, though I have steered clear of the chapter of Mr. Hume; the only Trinity now in fashion here.
Hesse footnotes the mention of Richardson, explaining that in Germany and France at that time (1765) Richardson was extremely popular, foreign visitors wanting to come to Hampstead and ask for the Flask Walk (mentioned in Clarissa), and quotes Diderot predicting that he would be as famous as Homer, and saying “I never yet met with a person who shared my enthusiasm, that I was not tempted to embrace him, and press him in my arms.”
Well, J.H.J. simply cannot let that stand without pronouncing on the matter from the pinnacle of his modern tastes of the 1830s with these remarks: Such was the extraordinary sensation created by the dreary romances of Richardson in France, which, to use the words of Mr. D’Israeli, can be accounted for only by the presumption that “to a Frenchman the style of Richardson may not be so objectionable when translated, as to ourselves.”
This sort of sneak attack is even funnier when you consider that Disraeli, though New and Hot in the 1830s (his Wesley Sue The Young Duke came out I think in 1830, and his more well known Vivien Grey somewhat later), is just about unread now, mostly due to turgid swathes of preachy prose, whereas Clarissa at least in the first half is astonishingly witty and entertaining today, even if the second half is awash with maiden suffering and villainous snorting and turf-pawing.
This volume also causes a somewhat spooky echo in detailing, through various people’s letters, the failure of the marriage of Lady Diana Spencer, who had at a young age married Viscount Bolingbroke. Having not risked her life in marrying a prince, Lady Di, as her friends all called her, was able to survive the divorce and marry her own true love in 1768.
Then there’s this pair of tidbits from Carlisle to Selwyn, writing from Italy that same year:
I do not think you wanted old boars in your house, that such young pigs as Mr. Luttrel should begin to torment you. What an infamous copy of verses were in the papers upon Lady B. Stanhyole. Why do not the Macaronis exert themselves upon such occasions?
So the Macaronis really did have influence for a time! They were not always objects of scorn, the way Byron’s aging co-bucks and rakes were in the 1830s.
Of course one instantly wants to read the nasty verses offered up by this unknown Temple Luttrell, but J.H.J. stays strictly g-rated in his note, mentioning with proper reserve that they ‘were exceeded only in their indecency by their bitterness.’ Woo, are we talking on a level with Rochester, or what?
Carlisle then goes on to make affronted reference to a local war:
The King of Naples has taken Terracina, and the French Avignon. I hope they will let Rome alone; at least I hope they will not put anything hard in the guns, in case of a siege, lest they should hurt the antiquities. The Neapolitans are a very brutal set of people. I dare say they would not have the least respect for a face without a nose or chin, or to an illegible inscription. The more instructed part of their nobility would perhaps think the one was a reflection upon their amours, and the other upon their scholarship.
Does anyone else find that sort of ancient gossip as entertaining as I do? Or am I as hopelessly weird as the maligned Lady B. Stanhope?.