Victorianitas

(Andrew Lang, Letters to Dead Authors, 1892)

As heroines, for example, you chose ladies like Emma, and Elizabeth, and Catherine: women remarkable neither for the brilliance nor for the degradation of their birth; women wrapped up in their own and the parish's concerns, ignorant of evil, as it seems, and unacquainted with vain yearnings and interesting doubts. Who can engage his fancy with their match-makings and the conduct of their affections, when so many daring and dazzling heroines approach and solicit his regard?

Here are princesses dressed in white velvet stamped with golden fleurs-de-lys –ladies with hearts of ice and lips of fire, who count their roubles by the million, their lovers by the score, and even their husbands, very often, in figures of some arithmetical importance. With these are the immaculate daughters of itinerant Italian musicians – maids whose souls are unsoiled amidst the contaminations of our streets, and whose acquaintance with the art of Phidias and Praxiteles, of Daedalus and Scopas, is the more admirable, because entirely derived from loving study of the inexpensive collections vended by the plaster-of-Paris man round the corner. When such heroines are wooed by the nephews of Dukes, where are your Emmas and Elizabeths? Your volumes neither excite nor satisfy the curiosities provoked by that modern and scientific fiction, which is greatly admired, I learn, in the United States as well as in France and at home.

You erred, it cannot be denied, with your eyes open. Knowing Lydia and Kitty so intimately as you did, why did you make of them almost insignificant characters? With Lydia for a heroine you might have gone far; and, had you devoted three volumes, and the chief of your time, to the passions of Kitty, you might have held your own, even now, in the circulating library. How Lyddy, perched on a corner of the roof, first beheld her Wickham; how, on her challenge, he climbed up a ladder to her side; how they kissed, caressed, swung on gates together, met at odd seasons, in strange places, and finally eloped; all this might have been put in the mouth of a jealous older sister, say Elizabeth, and you would not have been less popular than several favourites of our time. Had you cast the whole narrative into the present tense, and lingered lovingly over the thickness of Mary's legs and the softness of Kitty's cheeks, and the blond fluffiness of Wickham's whiskers, you would have left a romance still dear to young ladies.

Over to you, Mr Firth.

Dickens, to his co-editor W. H. Wills, on one issue of his magazine All The Year Round:

In the first place the No. is an awfully and solemnly heavy one, and if you have any kind of means to that end by you, must really be lightened. I read it last night, and had a nightmare. I doubt if anything so heavy (except stewed lead) could possibly be taken before going to bed.

Wading through stewed lead of my own, in the form of a thesis chapter last touched eighteen months ago, is why I'm still at the computer in the early hours of the morning again and why there are 204 unread blog items in my Google reader. On one hand, I'm sort of impressed by how much better my work has got over the past eighteen months, judging by the clear evidence of the paper sitting in front of me now; on the other hand, it's the academic version of reading all the poetry you wrote when you were sixteen and Knew The Pain Of Life, except here I Knew The Pain of footnotes, which I think is why all of them are half-finished and say things like '[ooh, might this deserve a chapter of its own?]', and that is not what I want to read right now. And my writing gets so dense and boring when I'm not having fun with it that I'm tempted to lighten things up by turning all the footnotes into knock-knock jokes. Which maybe deserve a chapter of their own as well.

(Chambers's Journal, Jan. 12, 1895.)

Fifty years ago, Sir Walter Scott still lived in the memory of his personal friends, and fresh anecdotes were constantly being told of him by those who had known him well. Not so well known, however, is one trait of his character: no man was more careful than he of his personal dignity. That he was 'hail, fellow, well met' with the players in the stage adaptations of his works is apocryphal. On one occasion a well-known Scottish actor, of whom Sir Walter had taken friendly notice, asked him for a few letters of introduction on the occasion of his going to London. Sir Walter Scott declined to give them, only softening the refusal by saying, 'I have written to my friends about you.' At a dinner party where the great man was a guest, a young gentleman called out: 'Pleasure of wine with you, Scott!' Sir Walter looked fixedly at him, but took no further notice. Unless Sir Walter condescended to be familiar first, it was not safe to be familiar with him.