Random Jottings

Another FH Burnett - the Lost Prince

I find January a dreary month and always glad when it is over. I am not a lover of the false jollity of New Year’s Eve and normally stay at home and grumble and this year was no different.  I also find it hard to get going on my heap of books waiting my attention and cannot get my mind into gear.

So I re-read. I always do this when I cannot settle to anything and I turned to my old love, Frances Hodgson Burnett. I have already posted about T Tembarom and have had lots of replied from those of you who also love it which is very encouraging.

Today I am writing about The Lost Prince. This is, ostensibly, a children’s book but I feel it can be read by adults with great enjoyment. I love it so was very happy to open it up and start all over again:

He was the kind of boy people look at a second time when they have looked at him once.......he was thinking of the long, hurried journey he and his father and their old soldier servant, Lazarus, had made during the last few days, the journey from Russia. Cramped in a close third class railway carriage, they had dashed across the Continent as if something important or terrible were driving them...."

These are the opening lines of The Lost Prince. I do wish it  were better known. As with all good book discoveries, I stumbled across this by accident in a bookshop some thirty years ago when I found a battered paperback and bought it for the princely sum of 50p if I remember rightly.

Frances Hodgson Burnett had to work hard all her life, supporting her husband, family, friends and hangers-on and wrote furiously with no respite until she brought herself to the verge of a nervous breakdown (Lucy Maud Montgomery, also the family's main breadwinner, suffered a similar fate) and when reading her books, the plethora of missing heirs, Cinderella  transformations, happy endings that are the outcome in most of her books (not all, Through one Administration has a rather downbeat ending), one cannot help but feel that in writing these stories, the romantic side of Frances is allowed full rein.  Just imagine being surrounded by financial worries, indigenous relatives, and being able to lose oneself in such a glorious flight of fancy as in the Lost Prince.

Marco, his father and Lazarus are refugees from Samavia, a tiny kingdom somewhere in Europe, a formerly happy country which has been riven by factions for hundreds of years.  The king assassinated, the heir murdered, the Iarovitch and the Maranovitch parties fight and squabble for power and the country is brought to its knees.  But there is a legend that the heir to the throne, Prince Ivor, was discovered left for dead and spirited away and grew up, married and produced his own son and the line has remained unbroken.  A secret party has spent all this time waiting and preparing for the day the true King can be restored to the throne and as this story opens, the situation in Samavia is worsening and European leaders are beginning to believe that it is time to intervene and restore order.

Part of Marco's training from his father is that he explores and gets to know the place where he happens to be living at that time, so one day he sets off on one of his rambles  through London and in a dark, dirty little square he finds Jem Ratcliffe, nicknamed the Rat, as he is suffering from some unspecified disease (probably Rickets) which means he spends his time on a little wheeled platform, scurrying backwards and forwards.  He has a troop of young street boys who he has trained as a squad and he is obsessed with Samavia and the fighting, as he has little else in his poverty stricken life.   He and Marco become friends, each of them lonely and yearning for companionship and when the Rat's drunken father dies, he is taken in by Stefan, Marco's father, and becomes a fierce and loyal supporter.

To while away the time they are together they concoct The Game.  Supposing the time came for the uprising, but the Secret Party needed to be told, two boys drifting across Europe, one of them a cripple, would not be noticed.  This plan is discussed with Stefan and Lazarus and as the weeks tg by they are drilled and practiced until they know the names, places and faces of all the contacts who are friendly to Samavia.  Then one night:

"Loristan put his arm round his shoulders.  'The Game is about to give you work - both of you - in two days time you will be in Paris as you' he turned to the Rat' planned in the game' ....when the train which was to meet the boat that crossed from Dover to Calais steamed out of Charing Cross Station, it carried in a third class carriage two shabby boys....there was nothing remarkable or picturesque enough about them to attract attention. They sat in the corner of the carriage and neither talked much ... when they were on board the steamer, they were soon lost among the commoner passengers and found for themselves a secluded place which was not wanted by anyone else"

So the dangerous journey begins and they journey from Paris to Munich to Vienna and then across the border into Samavia and there meet the Secret Party and are taken to their undergrounds caves and headquarters.

"Son of Stefan Loristan" said the old man in a shaken voice.... every man in the room fell to his knees"

The Rat notes the way Marco is treated and viewed by the people who they meet and he, as with the reader, can easily guess his true identity, but this is kept back until the uplifting happy ending when Marco goes to meet the King, after his coronation "he could picture it now - the shattered, roofless cathedral, the ruins of the ancient and magnificent high altar, the multitude of kneeling, famine scourged people, the battle-worn and bandaged soldiery".

He is taken to the palace, through the corridors and "he realised vaguely that the King himself was standing waiting his approach - he drew himself together and lifted his eyes and knelt and kissed the hands held out to him -kissed them both with a passion of boy love and worship. The King had the eyes he longed to see - the King’s hand were those he had longed to feel upon his shoulder. The King was his father!

Now, I am sorry who can resist this?  It is Anthony Hope, the Prisoner of Zenda, Ruritania, Rupert of Hentzau, Rudolf Rassendyl all thrown together in one gloriously romantic farrago, which is sheer escapsim and fun, but in the middle of all this is the real story - the story of a friendship between two lonely boys.

Lost count of the number of times I have read the Lost Prince, but yesterday afternoon found me on the sofa and not moving until I read this once more and let this marvellous story beguile me all over again.  

Do try it...

Anne Bronte at 200

Anne Bronte was born two hundred years ago. It was her birthday yesterday so I am a tad late but I am sure she would have forgiven me.

There is something about the Bronte family that has always fascinated me ever since I read A Man of Sorrow, a biography of Patrick Bronte way back in the 60s when I was a mini-skirted library assistant in Highgate and one of our readers, a Bronte fan, recommended it to me and started my lifelong fascination with the inmates of Haworth Parsonage.

I know readers may wince, but I have to confess that I would rather have needles stuck in my eyes than read Wuthering Heights again (and yes, I know - extreme).  I agree it is powerful and stunning and all the adjectives and descriptions that scholars and more esteemed readers than I have given it, but I really dislike it intensely.   Out of Charlotte's works Jane Eyre is the one that pinned me to the wall when I first read it and I have lost count of the number of re-reads of this marvellous novel I have undertaken in my lifetime; Shirley I find a bit boring and rather uneven, a novel of three parts and none of them seem to flow. This is hardly surprising as she had to finish it while suffering the deaths of Branwell, Emily and Anne.   Villette is not a lovable book or as accessible as Jane but shows Charlotte at the height of her powers and though it is bleak and full of suffering and sorrow, and largely autobiographical, it is a magnificent work.  The Professor is very much Villette in embryo and suffers from being written from a man's viewpoint which was not totally convincing. It was turned down over and over again by various publishers until she put it to one side and it was reissued when she was famous.  Nothing new under the sun!

And so we come to Anne, the quiet sister, the self effacing sister, the one who is regarded as not being such a great writer as Emily and Charlotte, who seems to lurk in the shadow of her two elder siblings.  I have always felt that Anne was totally underestimated and unappreciated by the public who have based their viewpoint of her on Charlotte's own letters and portrayal of her as 'gentle Anne'.  Charlotte was a passionate creature, her emotions seething and her frustrations tearing her apart under that governessy exterior. Just read the Gondal sagas and her heroes and heroines of the the juvenilia to see what feelings she was repressing for which her only outlet was in her writing.  She let her imagination go off the scale when she created Rochester, just the sort of man she wanted who would sweep her off her feet and to hell with convention.  She may have criticised Jane Austen and not understood her but Darcy comes from the same cloth as her creation and I am surprised she did not realise this.  Jane Eyre was regarded as a 'naughty' book and mothers kept it from their daughters; Wuthering Heights was deemed 'coarse and brutal' so it was good to have a 'good' sister to counterbalance this criticism.  But while all this was going on, Anne was quietly and with great determination getting on with her life.

Against the wishes of the entire family she decided to take a post as a governess.  Her experiences form the basis of Agnes Grey a small book in length but searing in its portrayal of the family she went to live with and the dreadful behaviour of her charges.   She stuck it out for some time despite her father and sisters pleading with her to come home.  Later she took up another post with the Robinson family at Thorpe Green where she stayed for several years, to be joined later by Branwell who  was engaged as tutor to the sons of the family and then, allegedly, had an affair with his employer's wife resulting in scandal and disgrace.

Anne was stoic. She suffered as much as Charlotte and Emily when away from Haworth and working in uncongenial surroundings and with people she disliked, but unlike her two sisters she kept quiet and got on with it. Emily never lasted long away from her beloved moors and every time she tried she became ill and had to return.  When she and Charlotte went to Brussels the pattern repeated itself. A book has been written about Emily suggesting she could have been anorexic as she sickened and pined until she came home, but I think that she used this as a weapon to get her own way as she immediately recovered back safe in the Parsonage.  Charlotte raged against her pupils, particularly in Villette which is, as I have said, largely autobiographical and she had the added pain of falling in love with her teacher Paul Heger.  She stayed on in Belgium long after she should have returned and suffered the most appalling depression while she was there.

Charlotte and Emily tend to take centre stage and we know of their pain, anguish and misery from letters and writing. Not so with Anne and I do wonder sometimes if Charlotte spoke of Anne and her literary works in a somewhat slighting way because deep down she realised that her younger sister was, in fact, the strongest of them all.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, about is the story of an abusive marriage to a drunken husband and Anne used Branwell's behaviour and appalling end as her model for Arthur Huntingdon.  Her family were not happy about this book and did not want it published but, as always, Anne stuck to her guns and Tenant was issued.   Critics have said it is clumsy and uneven but I disagree.  I know that the first and last sections are in the first person of Gilbert, a young farmer who persists in his attentions to Helen Huntingdown when she moves to Wildfell Hall with her young son and refuses to be rejected until she hands him her diary to explain her situation.  The majority of the novel is then Helen's narrative and it does come as a bit of a bump when we jump back to Gilbert towards the denouement. However, I think it is a wonderful book and the more I have read it the more I have appreciated it and I now have a huge admiration for Anne. 

Even in death Anne was strong, full of fortitude, secure in her faith and determined to die without fuss and the least possible trouble to her family.  She went to Scarborough with Charlotte, knowing she would not return and not wanting her father to witness yet another death in the Parsonage.  Compare this with Emily who, quite frankly,  I sometimes want to shake for her so called bravery when dying when I think she was being plain selfish and an exhibitionist.  Others may weep at the thought of this strong woman staggering around the rooms clutching the furniture and refusing to see a doctor, thus ensuring the maximum amount of suffering for those who had to witness it all. Then the final collapse on the sofa and Charlotte rushing in with a piece of gorse from her beloved moors so she could smell it before she died.  Yes and call me cynical if you like, I don't mind.

Anne's death is so poignant.  She lay on a sofa in a room at the hotel and quietly passed away while a lunch party was taking place in the next room.  I find the contrast between these two events deeply sad and can never read of it without a lump in the throat. 

A letter from Charlotte: "A year ago - how a prophet warned me how I should stand in in June 1849, how stripped and bereaved - had he foretold the autumn, the winter, the spring of sickness and the suffering to be gone through, I should have thought this can never be endured. It is over, Branwell, Emily, Anne are gone like dreams, gone as Maria and Elilzabeth went twenty years ago. One by one I have watched them fall asleep  on my arm and closed their glazed eyes, I have seen them buried one by one and thus far, God has upheld me"

Charlotte then returned home and had to spend the winter alone in the front room at Haworth, with her father in his study, the grandfather clock ticking on the staircase and the endless silence.  If you read her letter describing her return and how she got through the first night, I defy you not to weep.   Charlotte revered Emily and almost ennobled her, but I do sometimes wonder if she did not realise the sure and certain strength emanating from her sober and seemingly serene younger sister until it had gone.

'I felt that the house was all silent, the rooms were all empty -I remembered where the three were laid, in what narrow dark dwellings, never were they to reappear on earth.  So the sense of desolation and bitterness took possession of me, that agony that was to be undergone and was not to be avoided came on.  The great trial is when night approaches - at that hour we used to assemble in the dining room ...now I sit by myself.  I cannot help thinking of their last days and their suffering - perhaps all this will become less poignant in time.   I dream of them and cannot recall them as they were in health. My nights were worse after the first shock of Branwell's death, they were terrible then and the impressions experienced on waking were at that time such as we do not put into language.  Worse seemed at hand than was yet endured - in truth worst awaited us'

After Anne’s death Charlotte tried to stop Tenant of Wildfell Hall being republished as she disapproved of the subject matter.  A bit rich from somebody who wrote about a heroine who fell in love with a man who had a mad wife in the attic.

As the years have gone by and I have re-read both Jane Eyre and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall many times, I have re-evaluated them both and I have come to the conclusion that Tenant is the greater book.  I sometimes wonder if Charlotte maintained the “quiet Anne” the “meek Anne” idea because, deep down, she realised that her younger sister was perhaps the greatest writer of them all.....

T Tembarom by Frances Hodgson Burnett. A re-read

I am finding it hard to get going with my reading so far. After Christmas I find I go into a slump/hibernation when I feel like doing nothing at all. And these days, being retired, I can do precisely that if I wish to.  So I do what I always do when I cannot settle to a new book - I pull down an old loved one from my shelves and do a re-read.

And I chose T Tembarom by Frances Hodgson Burnett. My copy is a lovely old battered one with speckled edges and black and white line drawings. It was published by A L Burt Company whose address is given as 114120 East Twenty Third Street and this edition is dated 1913. I wonder how many people have read this copy? A nice thought to hold when reading.

Having read a biography or two about the author and knowing that her marriages and life was not totally satisfactory, I feel that she created stories with a Cinderella like quality and a happy ending to fulfil a need for happiness that she never achieved.   The Making of a Marchioness is another one these lines, poor, lonely and poverty stricken woman achieves a rich and wealthy marriage as well as love; A Little Princess where Sarah Crewe goes from wealth to poverty to wealth and happiness again; The Shuttle, an abused and unhappy wife is saved by her strong sister who also finds love in the doing; The Lost Prince in which the hero comes into his own kingdom and, of course, Little Lord Fauntleroy where a young child redeems the miserable and unhappy life of his grandfather, alone and lonely in his great house.

T Temberom is an orphan in New York. Left alone by the death of his mother who was married to a feckless Englishman, he has nobody to care for him and has to live by his wits.   This he does and gradually achieves a second hand society column in a local paper and a room in a boarding house. Here he meets Mr Hutchison, a Lancashire man who has come to the USA with an invention which will make his fortune, only it doesn't and he and his daughter Ann are on their uppers and soon to go back to England.    Ann or Little Ann as everyone calls her, is a wonder of virtue, wise advice and motherly instincts who could be a rather irritating character but she isn't, she escapes it somehow.  Burnett has the knack of knowing how far she can go with a 'good' person and stops short of making them totally insupportable and nauseating. 

T Tembarom falls in love with her and she with him but then the unexpected happens. An English solicitor calls at the boarding house to inform him that he is the last surviving relative of Temple Temple Barholm and the heir to a mighty estate in England.   He has to go there to claim his inheritance and Ann refuses to marry him until he has been there a year, seen and met with the cream of society before she will allow him to think of making her his wife.

So off he goes and with him goes a man who he rescued in New York when he discovered him homeless and ill with memory loss and not knowing who he was or where he came from.   He was an Englishman so T Tembarom thinks that being at home in his country might help him recover his health and strength and restore his memory.

Then we find out that the heir to the title and estate vanished in disgrace years before, accused of cheating at cards and fled to America and went gold prospecting and his death was reported after a mine explosion in which many perished.   He left behind the woman he loved, Joan, now bitter and unhappy and locked into a dreadful hateful relationship with her mother as they both clung to the edges of society, the only way out being a marriage for either of them. 

The scene is set:  a rough New Yorker inheriting the title, a missing heir, a man who has no recollection who he is, a bitter unhappy woman mourning her lost love, her scheming and malicious mother and the possibility that the missing heir might just be alive after all............

I love this book.   T Tembarom is an immensely likeable young man who takes everything thrown at him with cheerfulness and steadfastness, he sticks to his love Ann through thick and thin and the story of his rags to riches career is delightful.  While some of the servants despise him for an upstart, those he takes into his confidence and who help him with the everyday etiquette and dress and manners that he knows he lacks, become his devoted admirers and supporters. His easy way with the villagers and his care of their needs endear him to them as well and he is a character very easy to like and love.

This book is sentimental and warm and, of course, you know what is going to happen and what the ending will be but though I have read this many times and am familiar with the outcome, I find myself breathlessly reading the last few chapters and waiting for the denouement with great excitement.  I never tire of it and I never tire of reading and re-reading books by this author. I think Frances Hodgson Burnett is a wonderful writer and though she is known and rightly so, for her children's books, I maintain that her adult books are her best.   She was writing them long before Little Lord Fauntleroy sent her into JK Rowling territory and popularity.

As I said, sentimental and warm but at the heart of all of her books there are characters who are good and true and who are determined to do the right thing come what may.

I loved it all over again...

Mike Walmer - Publisher, eclectic and interesting list

A few years ago my name was given to Mike as somebody who might be interested in the kind of books he publishes, ie - out of print, forgotten or unknown titles that are deserving of a second chance.  There are many publisher out there now doing this and it is such a joy to leave the best seller lists and seek out something new waiting to be discovered.

Mike is based in South Australia and he publishes books lost to current readers from recent times a well as long ago, plus those which have a special meaning for him. The website is here so do please check it out.

At the moment I have awaiting my attention two titles by Ada Leverson - The Twelfth Hour and The Limit. About ten years ago I came across a title by this writer, The Little Otleys. This is a trilogy and I found one of those fantastic Virago editions with the Green covers which I love, in a jumble sale. I could not let it go even though I knew nothing about the author.

I soon discovered that Ada Leverson was a very close friend of Oscar Wilde.  He called her his 'Sphinx' and introduced her to all his fashionable friends, the equivalent of today's A list no doubt:  Aubrey Beardsley, Walter Sickert, John Singer Sargent, Mrs Patrick Campbell and Max Beerbohm.  What a glittering array that must have been....

She sounds a wonderfully warm hearted woman when you read more about her and discover that during Wilde's trial she and her husband took him in and sheltered him.  On his release from prison two years later, when he was shunned and ignored by all his previous friends, Ada was the first to visit him and apparently was greeted by Oscar with the words 'Sphinx how marvelous of you to know exactly the right hat to wear at seven o'clock in the morning to meet a friend who has been away'.

I admire those who stick by their friends in the face of rejection and disgrace and I felt my heart warm towards her even before I had read the Little Otleys and when I had finished it and LOVED it, I began to check for more by Ada Leverson. Two have recently been published by Mike Walmer.

The Twelfth Hour is set in one of those long golden Edwardian seasons in London and tells the story of Felicity and Sylvie Crofton and their brother Savile and their marriage and love life. 

The Limit tells us about Valentina and Romer Wyburn - happily married, or so it seems but Valentina is fining her solid and devoted husband somewhat dull and starts an affair with an elegant but poor artist.

This is just a brief sketch of the outline as I have yet to read these two titles but they are on the top of my to Be read pile and I am looking forward to them.

Among other authors published by Mike are Saki (I read the Chronicles of Clovis and enjoyed. Sperb witty writing) Ronald Firbank and Max Beerbohm.

Mike is based in Australia but his books are distributed in the UK so there is no fear of heavy postage. I warmly recommend his website http://michaelwalmer.com and do urge you to take a look at his titles and authors.  I think the word eclectic is the correct one to descrie the selection.

You will not be disappointed.

2019 - Random Reading Thoughts

When I first started this blog some thirteen years ago now, I had such good intentions. I was going to read Serious Books. Books which were Good for Me by writers who were lauded as being the best. I looked at the Booker long lists, I chose, I read, I ploughed on.   I took up Reading Challenges. I made copious lists. I look back and think WHY? It was exhausting and the realisation crept up on me that I was reading in order to Keep up with the Joneses and to make people think of me as a serious reviewer.

Well I wasn’t and I am not. I am a book blogger who loves reading and wants to share that with my loyal readers. I don’t wish to write thoughtful dissertations on the Booker list, the Costa List, the Asda List or any other list (ok I made the last one up). I want to read because I enjoy what I am reading not because I want to appear an intellectual.   Mind you, it took a few years before this realisation dawned on me but I got there eventually.

So what have I read in 2019. Over 240 books and I can honestly say that the Litterati would turn up their noses but I really don’t care. I have found over the last few years that I have returned with a vengeance to my first love - Crime. When I was a teenager I discovered Agatha Christie and I have never looked back. But what has made this genre so enjoyable is the discovery of new Golden Age crime writers of whom I have never heard.  

The main reason for this rediscovery is the wonderful British Library Crime Classics library about which I have rhapsodised for the past five years or so and will continue to do so. Through them I have discovered Freeman Wills Croft, E R Lorac (which led me on to books written by this author under another name Carol Carnac), Alan Melville, George Bellairs, Miles Burton to name but a few. I am not saying that all that I have read I have enjoyed, some of them I have found a trifle ponderous and feel there was a reason why they languished in obscurity for years, but the main thing is that we are being given a chance to discover them again and it is wonderful.

Then an email one day from Dean Street Press - would I like to try some books by Moray Dalton a long forgotten crime writer? Well silly question. Yes please I say and off I go and I loved them.  There are more to come in March and please do check them out.

I have also read all the Peter Diamond books of Peter Lovesey set in Bath. Now I have already apologised to Peter as I first read his books years ago and I honestly had not read any more and thought he was dead....

Yes I know. Well Peter got in touch with me to say he was alive and well and the 19th Diamond book is due out next year. I wish Peter continued health and a long life so he can continue writing.....

I am also going to revisit his Inspector Lovesey books which I have not read for years. 

This year we saw the death of Andrea Camilleri author of the Inspector Montalbano books which I love dearly and I collect them all in hardback as they come out. I saw a delightful programme about him a few years ago and he said that he already written the last in the series, but there were a few more to come and he had written them well in advance so there would be plenty after he had gone. Now that is what I call forward thinking and I am very grateful to him.

In between I have read AN Wilson’s biography of Prince Albert which I freely admit I found a bit of a curate’s egg, Kenneth Rose diaries, deliciously gossipy and lighthearted and, naturally, when all else fails I have turned to my beloved Victorian literature. This year I have re-read David Copperfield and Great Expectations and loved them all over again. I am determined to read Dombey and Son next year - I keep starting it and giving up. I am not sure why.

And I have also read Jane Austen who soothes the soul like nobody else.

So no Book of the Year, just a hugely enjoyable twelve months of reading. I have given up on a lot of crappy books, I no longer waste my time with them. And I can tell you now I know within a page if I can carry on with a book - when a book is crap then it is crap and that is that.

And I hope UK readers have noticed that I have refrained from writing about the BBC new “darker” version of a Christmas Carol which they showed at Christmas. I wish to end the year on a nice happy joyous note and if I get started on this, well, it ain’t gonna happen.

Just take my word for it - it was AWFUL (to be fair quite a few people did like it but the majority did not).

I may save it up for a rant in 2020.