Well, whatever one may say of the rest of them, with the Gardiners they were always on the most intimate terms – and when I say they I mean both of them mind, not just Miss Lizzie, with her natural calls of gratitude and family propinquity, but Mr Darcy too ‑ even though it could not for a moment be denied that Mr Gardiner earned his money in the city. That slight taint notwithstanding, they were really quite welcome at Pemberley, for as Miss Austen emphasised, the happy couple “were both ever sensible of the warmest gratitude towards the persons who, by bringing her into Derbyshire, had been the means of uniting them”.

On January 29^th, 1813 Jane Austen wrote from Chawton to her sister, Cassandra:

I want to tell you that I have got my own darling Child from London [Pride and Prejudice, published anonymously in three volumes on the previous day].

In the evening the book was read aloud to the Austens’ neighbour Harriet Benn, who had come to dinner.

… she really does seem to admire Elizabeth. I must confess that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print, & how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like her at least, I do not know.

In the following week Jane wrote again to Cassandra. A further reading had been performed but had not gone so well as the first, something perhaps, Jane thought, to do with her mother’s deficient skills in reading aloud.

… I believe must be attributed to my Mother’s too rapid way of getting on – and tho’ she perfectly understands the characters herself, she cannot speak as they ought. – Upon the whole, however, I am quite vain enough & well satisfied enough. – The work is rather too light & bright & sparkling; it wants shade; ‑ it wants to be stretched out here & there with a long Chapter – of sense if it could be had, if not of solemn, specious nonsense – about something unconnected with the story; an Essay on Writing, a critique on Walter Scott, or the history of Buonaparte – or anything that could form a contrast & bring the reader with increased delight to the playfulness & Epigrammatism of the general stile. I doubt your quite agreeing with me here – I know your starched Notions.

The Reader will, I pray, forgive me for beginning this short memorandum with the last, rather than the first, sentence of Miss Austen’s comedy. It is indeed well known to be the case that the hack writer in want of a snappy opening line will grab at the most obvious and gimcrack device to hand, be they never so many who have travelled the same path before before him. A universally acknowledged practice indeed, but not universally observed.

http://drb.ie/essays/naughty-but-nice

Liam Kennedy, emeritus professor of economic history at Queen’s University Belfast has sent us this transcript of a debate, which took place on BBC Northern Ireland’s Sunday Sequence radio programme on December 10^th, last year, between himself and Tim Pat Coogan and was moderated by William Crawley. The debate is also on Youtube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YTOXoyhXvY

Crawley: In his new book, The Famine Plot, Tim Pat Coogan has gone where others fear to tread. The Famine, he says, was an early example of ethnic cleansing and one of the first acts of genocide.

Crawley (to Tim Pat Coogan): What’s the evidence that this was an act of genocide?

Tim Pat Coogan: A large number of graves for one thing, and an awful lot more people living in another country than should have been through forced emigration.

William Crawley: A million dead and a million more …

Coogan: Probably more, because modern scholarship points out to averted births and the [the fact that] families died and there was no one left to record the deaths. And anyway census-taking in the deserts of Mayo and people lived in bog caves and so on, it was nearly impossible to map how many people lived there in the first place. But probably it’s something nearer nine million than eight when the Famine broke out, and it came down to somewhere nearer six when the Famine was over in’51, and the Hunger continued, so probably a far greater impact. And you have to remember the impact on society was about nine million. Whereas you get these awful famines we see on television in Africa and it’s probably something in the order of 250,000 that die, a quarter of a million, and it’s a terrible loss but it comes from a population of 19 million.

Crawley: There’s widespread agreement this was just an appalling tragedy, of course Tim Pat. Let’s go further than this, how we explain this tragedy.

Coogan: Well it was the detritus of centuries – the land situation had three million peasants living in mud cabins mostly to the left of the Shannon. If you took a line from Dingle to the Foyle, to the left of that line. But they lived everywhere, tens of thousands of people died of famine and diseases in Dublin as well. Though people tend to say the Famine didn’t touch the East. And they lived on tiny plots which they rented out from what’s known as middle men, bigger landlords, many of whom were absentee landlords. The Act of Union had transferred the buzz and the government and the power to London and everyone of consequence had got out, the artist, the plumber, the politician, the poet, the publisher. There wasn’t a government. And there they were, on these tiny plots, living on potatoes, propagating, everything getting worse. When the blight came first, Peel, the conservative prime minister, tried to alleviate it and he actually, sub rosa, smuggled in grain, on ships, and symbolically the very first act of the Whigs who supplanted them was to turn the ships round, and Trevelyan, secretary of the Treasury and [who] became the architect of relief and had the ear of the cabinet, Charles Wood: he turned them round, and that was his attitude throughout. Famine relief, any kind of relief, had to have a repulsive element in it, as he called it. And they went from feeding them on soup and so on to shutting the food depots, to confining the relief to be paid on task work on roads, some of which would be under four foot of snow. You couldn’t work under those temperatures today, and people died before the work started. And the constant refrain, he coined a phrase, about natural causes, natural events, which became the mantra, and when, say, a humanitarian landlord like Lord Monteagle would complain about the effects of their policies they would say “We must leave it to natural events.” Well natural events are if you say evict a grandmother with her children, bare-footed, in rags, no rain gear in a January gale, natural events would take care of the surplus problem of population very quickly.

William Crawley to Liam Kennedy: Does this add up to a deliberate policy of genocide in your mind?

Kennedy: Well, I waited in this book to hear some great revelation and it just isn’t there. It’s anticlimactic. I could not see the great plot, and indeed there is no serious historian who …

Coogan: None so blind as those who will not see.

Kennedy: I can’t think of a single historian who has researched the Famine in depth – and Tim Pat has not researched it in depth. One of the striking things about this book is the narrowness of the evidential sources he uses and indeed they’re presented so badly. Titles are misquoted. You might even say the title of his own book, The Plot, is itself misleading, and indeed the subtitle, England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy. Well it was Britain, not the United Kingdom. That’s an old nationalist trope: England the neverending source of Ireland’s ills. I find it terribly difficult, and I’m not being unkind, to find any redeeming feature in this book. That’s its only point of originality. It’s outdated, outmoded, and could I say, I was pleased to see that at moments you did engage with some modern scholarship, like Joel Mokyr, the great Dutch historian … of the Great Famine. I don’t think you understood what he was saying. You have a phrase at one point – excess mortality – numbers per cent per thousand – that phrase means nothing. You clearly didn’t understand what he was saying. And when you talk about coffin ships, one of the searing images of the Famine – appalling – and of course I accept that the Great Famine was a vast catastrophe, that’s the title of one of my publications on this, but even when talking about coffin ships, surely you need to set that in context. The Grosse Isle experience was appalling, I’ve been to Grosse Isle, I’ve seen those graves, but that was not typical of transatlantic shipping during the Famine. If you had read Joel Mokyr and others, as your references seem to suggest, you would see quite clearly that Mokyr says that that first year of shipping particularly to the mouth of Saint Lawrence was untypical and that mortality on ships across the Atlantic was less than 5 per cent. Less actually than German emigrants migrating to North America in the same time period. So either you’re guilty of incredibly selective reading or, I just wonder, have you lost the plot? Did you really understand what you were reading at times?

Coogan: Well I think what Mr Kennedy should have pointed out, by the way, from the start, was that one of my targets was the Irish academic historians, whom I say again, were guilty of colonial cringe, were largely trained in English universities, as Joe Lee has pointed out – Professor Joe Lee – and put this sort of emollient gloss on it that you’ve just heard. An even more eminent historian if there is such a thing possible, than Comrade Kennedy, was the late AJP Taylor, the English historian, who said that the Famine made Ireland a Belsen, a fairly strong term, and could not be termed other than a genocidal term in its import. I don’t know what he’s talking about new evidence. I have reproduced, I think, one of the most significant documents of the Famine, which is the article that caused Peel to fall out with Trevelyan. They had a very bad relationship for three years between 1843, when Trevelyan had visited Ireland for some six weeks, and came back, briefed to Peel, secretly, and then went out and published his findings in a quite hate-filled document, anonymously signed which showed a dreadful anti-Catholic, anti-Irish, anti-Celt bias. The last man you would have wanted to be in charge of Irish relief. But he was …

Crawley: I don’t … time.

Coogan: May I finish my point?

Crawley: All right go ahead.

The second point I make, which I haven’t seen our contestant advert to was that one of the most powerful men, Palmerston for example, in the English Cabinet, at the table, were huge Irish landlords, and Palmerston said flatly one day, to his colleagues, when there was some perturbation about what was happening. He said “Look, don’t we all agree that the solution to the land problem is to get the surplus population off the land?” and it is recorded that “with a shudder” they went back to other business. These were the people who imposed the Opium Laws on the Chinese at the same time in Hong Kong. They were imperialists, they wanted to clear the land, to get rid of the people off the land, to bring on high farming and they wanted to instal cattle farming instead of the Irish pauper and peasant, and he hasn’t adverted at all to the publicity campaign they ran largely with the aid of the London Times to get public opinion round to that state of mind where they backed a policy which said – they welcomed the Famine – “We look forward to the day when a Celt will be as rare on the banks of the Shannon as a red man on the banks of the Hudson.”  Are you trying to tell me that that is an indication of benignity and trying to populate the land?

Crawley: Well it sounds like bias, it sounds like an appalling anti-Irish perspective for sure and you had within that period a Malthusian sense of natural justice. And we also had mismanagement. There were also a lot of other factors going on. How does this tend to make an argument for genocide? A deliberate policy to remove by death Irish people from Ireland, Tim Pat?

Coogan: Because he flatly said, I’m talking about Trevelyan now, he said this to Monteagle, I believe, how can you complain about our policies when we are actually achieving what we really want (and he talks about improving the land situation)? And he talks about how much it’s getting better, while people are dying in their thousands. We’re getting rid of the middlemen. The real thing was to cure the land situation, not to fix the appalling situation in the workhouses.

Crawley: Liam Kennedy, is that the smoking gun then?

Kennedy: Well that’s the problem with Tim Pat’s book, there is no smoking gun. It’s largely a misrepresentation of Trevelyan and because the argument is so weak, Tim Pat needs to go back again and again to the seventeenth century, to Oliver Cromwell, so Trevelyan becomes the Cromwell of the mid-nineteenth century. And that kind of demonisation runs right through the book. And, again I don’t mean it unkindly, there is so little evidence. And the crucial issue is of course, intentionality. If you look at the UN convention on genocide, the vital element is intentionality.

Crawley: You can’t have an accidental genocide – there has to be a deliberate policy?

Coogan: Either way … I quote the [protocol?] …

Kennedy: Tim Pat, if I could finish the point …

Coogan: If you can

Kennedy: If you look at other aspects or other comments by Trevelyan during the course of the great Famine it’s quite clear that he was mistaken in many of the policies, too interventionist, but he was a workaholic, he was genuinely, according to his own lights (we need to see it in those terms in the context of his own time) he was trying to save as many Irish people from starvation as possible. Let me give one seasonal example. Trevelyan – and indeed it’s in your book, in fairness – censured one of his officials for taking Christmas holidays because, as he said, “When the lives of multitudes of people depend on your exertions.” And there is no case for genocide when you think of as part of British policy in Ireland, three-quarters of a million people were working on public relief schemes. That puts modern youth employment schemes in the halfpenny place – when you have three million people at one stage receiving soup from soup kitchens right across Ireland in their localities.

Coogan: But they wanted to close them down. You’re talking absolute rubbish with all due respect. You do realise the British prime minister apologised for the policies that you are defending.

Crawley: Tony Blair.

Kennedy: Yeah, I’m not defending the policies at the time. We do need to bear in mind – it wasn’t actually obvious – what kinds of policies would initially work effectively to handle a crisis on this scale.

Crawley: But why would you shut down soup kitchens?

Kennedy: That goes back to economic constraints, it goes back to issues of economic ideology. It’s very difficult for us to understand now …

Coogan: Even more difficult for the people who were dying.

Kennedy: Sure, I would accept that point. But you had, in the early 2000s, neo-conservatives in the United States, absolutely believing in an unregulated market system – that was laissez faire economics.

Coogan: That doesn’t justify it. They used those policies to clear the land and I have quoted in full in the appendix, you can read the UN protocol on genocide – on every ground it ticks the boxes.

Kennedy: It doesn’t …

Coogan: I know I did criticise academic historians for this bumbling attitude, obfuscating nomenclature, you couldn’t really blame them… it wasn’t really Malthusian, what they were really trying to do was create a nineteenth century version of the Scarsdale diet. In fact they presided from the year 1946 to ’51 over a continuous process of the elimination of the Irish peasant from the land.

Kennedy: 1846, I think you mean.

Crawley: A comment from Mary – she’s texted us – she says a British government document was discovered a few years ago that stated that the plan was to let the Irish starve, send the rest to America, leaving Ireland free to be planted by the English. Does such a document exist?

Kennedy: No.

Crawley: Part to the mythology then?

Kennedy: One of the great problems of this whole area is that it generates all kinds of conspiracy theories, websites – I’ve found myself misquoted on some of these websites – there is a kind of Famine commemoration industry out there and Tim Pat has made an extremely undistinguished addition to this …

Coogan: Could I put one point to you …

Crawley: Let’s hear Liam’s point.

Kennedy: The issue of intentionality is central to the whole discussion of genocide. In this book you have failed utterly to establish that there was intentionalilty and indeed the facts fly in the face of that. Misguided policy, certainly, but having three-quarters of a million people on public work schemes, having three million people receiving food rations, that is not consistent with a policy of genocide. And as an Irish revolutionary once put it, Ernie O’Malley, it’s easy to travel on another man’s wound. And that’s what you’re doing. You’re providing junk food for the wilder reaches of Irish America. What we need is real scholarship, not these outdated, outmoded, and frankly misleading commentaries.

Crawley: A final point to Tim Pat Coogan.

Coogan: I want to make a point about the Victorian Cromwell. That wasn’t my description. That was the description of a very renowned American scholar. The facts are as I’ve set them out, they can’t be denied, I suppose our friend is saying they didn’t really die, they were hidden some place. They knew in England for several years, long before the Famine, that the land was overpopulated. They had these distress committees set up in the House of Commons. People as far back as O’Connell said what had to be done. When the Famine broke out they should have closed the ports. You haven’t talked about the way food was exported all the way through it. He wanted grain distilling stopped, grain retained in the country – the soup kitchens you boast about – they had them for one year, and then cancelled it and put them back on the roads.

Crawley: All that adds up to evidence that they didn’t do enough to stop … It’s not evidence that …

Coogan: They wanted once and for all to grapple with the overcrowding on the Irish land and behind the cloak. The records of the London Times are there that I quoted. And I think it ill behoves an Irishman, which Mr Kennedy presumably is, to be going on with that sort of rubbish. To this day, to show you the position that the Irish Famine has left and a lot of Protestants thought it was providential to clear the Irish off the land. To this day it wouldn’t be possible for the National Irish Famine Committee of which I was a member, the government commission, to hold the commemoration for the Famine north of the border, because of the feelings there. And we had an example of those feelings from Comrade Kennedy’s corner this morning.

Greetings, on St David’s Day, from Llareggub, where Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard is dreaming of nagging her two late husbands.

First Voice
Now, in her iceberg-white, holily laundered crinoline nightgown, under virtuous polar sheets, in her spruced and scoured dust-defying bedroom in trig and trim Bay View, a house for paying guests, at the top of the town, Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard widow, twice, of Mr Ogmore, linoleum, retired, and Mr Pritchard, failed bookmaker, who maddened by besoming, swabbing and scrubbing, the voice of the vacuum-cleaner and the fume of polish, ironically swallowed disinfectant, fidgets in her rinsed sleep, wakes in a dream, and nudges in the ribs dead Mr Ogmore, dead Mr Pritchard, ghostly on either side.

Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard
Mr Ogmore!
Mr Pritchard!
It is time to inhale your balsam.

Mr Ogmore
Oh, Mrs Ogmore!

Mr Pritchard
Oh, Mrs Pritchard!

Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard
Soon it will be time to get up.
Tell me your tasks in order.

Mr Ogmore
I must put my pyjamas in the drawer marked pyjamas.

Mr Pritchard
I must take my cold bath which is good for me.

Mr Ogmore
I must wear my flannel band to ward off sciatica.

Mr Pritchard
I must dress behind the curtain and put on my apron.

Mr Ogmore
I must blow my nose.

Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard
In the garden, if you please.

Mr Ogmore
In a piece of tissue-paper which I afterwards burn.

Mr Pritchard
I must take my salts which are nature’s friend.

Mr Ogmore
I must boil the drinking water because of germs.

Mr Pritchard
I must make my herb tea which is free from tannin.

Mr Ogmore
And have a charcoal biscuit which is good for me.

Mr Pritchard
I may smoke one pipe of asthma mixture.

Mrs Ogmore Pritchard
In the woodshed, if you please.

Mr Pritchard
And dust the parlour and spray the canary.

Mr Ogmore
I must put on rubber gloves and search the peke for fleas.

Mr Pritchard
I must dust the blinds and then I must raise them.

Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard
And before you let the sun in, mind it wipes its shoes.

http://blog.waterstones.com/2013/02/cheat-sheet-dylan-thomas/#more-4568

01/03/13

Karl Schlögel’s Moscow 1937 (Polity Press, £25) is a dazzling 650-page feat of historical reconstruction, writes Benjamin Schwarz in The Atlantic, and a portrait of a great city “as it consumed itself in an orgy of fear, paranoia, denunciations, mass arrests, suicides, and executions”. The book in fact covers the period from summer 1936 to the end of 1938 when Russia’s Bolshevik regime purged, in waves, “all levels of society, from the nomenklatura, the highest echelons of administrative, cultural, and scientific life, through the high command of the Red Army, to the engineers and apparatchiks, down to the factory workers and peasants”. Schlögel has produced, Schwarz writes, an almost impossibly rich masterpiece.

In Moscow 1937, Schlögel uses as a leitmotif the themes and settings of Mikhail Bulgakov’s great allegorical 1937 novel of the city under the Terror, The Master and Margarita. He opens with an exegesis of Margarita’s fantastical flight over the city in the 1930s, which allows him to establish the scene and dissect Moscow’s cultural and social geography. For the remainder of the book, he continues to take the reader on a tour of the urban center ‑ the late the late-19th-century townhouses built by the nobility and later appropriated by the party; the hundreds of theaters that littered the still-drama-mad city; the communal apartments crammed with recent migrants from the countryside; the fancy shops selling sturgeon and czarist antiques to the Soviet elite and the endless flow of visiting progressives from the West; the just-completed marvel of Soviet engineering that brought the five seas to Moscow, the Moscow-Volga Canal (whose opening celebration coincided with the arrest, persecution, and execution of the overseers of its construction); Spaso House, the American ambassador’s residence, site of incongruously clinquant balls and receptions; the spacious, refined apartments where the new Soviet upper class held glittering salons, at which the likes of Shostakovich and Isaac Babel mixed with the high officials of the NKVD, the secret police (a group that deeply prized its literary and artistic connections); the NKVD’s immense network of offices, garages, shooting ranges, isolation cells, interrogation chambers, and execution cellars, metastasizing from the citadel-like headquarters at the Lubyanka and devoted to the investigation, arrest, incarceration, deportation, and slaughter of enemies of the people.

Schlögel mines an array of sources, analysing the occupancy records of the most exclusive apartment block of the party elite, the fortress-like House on the Embankment ‑ made famous by Yuri Trifonov’s eponymous novel ‑ to disclose the terrible history of a building almost entirely depopulated in the space of a year as its nearly 2,500 occupants were imprisoned, executed, or driven to kill themselves. He analyses the 1936 Moscow Directory, which listed 280 “Clubs and Houses of Culture”, 540 magazines, and at least three jazz bands, and reveals the dense web of libraries that covered the city. The directory, however, is brimming with the names of people destined for the abattoir; the 1936 edition was the final one: “No editorial board could have kept pace with the frantic rate at which people were driven from their posts and destroyed while their places were taken by others.” Completed on the eve of the Terror, this last directory “encapsulates a moment in time in which the accusers and the accused, the perpetrators and the victims, the executioners and the executed of the morrow, still sit side by side”.

Read the whole review here

04/03/11

On March 23^rd, 1944 Evelyn Waugh wrote to his friend Lady Dorothy Lygon (pronounced Liggen), almost certainly the model for Lady Cordelia Flyte in Brideshead Revisited. Her father, the 7th Earl Beauchamp (pronounced Beecham), KG, was obliged to leave the country and settled on the Continent “after acts unpardonable”, in the Daily Telegraph’s airy words (like Lady Cordelia’s father, Lord Marchmain, in the novel). In fact the circumstances of this forced exile were decidedly unpleasant. Beauchamp was a political progressive and leader of the Liberals in the Lords. He was outed as a homosexual by his appalling brother-in-law, the Tory, pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic, wife-beating Duke of Westminster, Hugh Grosvenor (pronounced shit). Grosvenor’s motives were personal dislike and a desire to ruin the Liberals. Waugh writes:

Darling Poll,
It was a delight to hear from you. I hope you will get this letter. I will try and make it suitable for the censor but my views nowadays are so different from what Brendan [Bracken] tries to make them that I may find myself in prison at any minute. It would be a pity if I got you into prison too.
At the moment I am in Chagford having a little rest between military duties and in consequence working harder than I have done for nearly five years. I am writing a very beautiful book, to bring tears, about very beautiful, rich, high born people who live in palaces and have no troubles except what they make themselves and those are mainly the demons sex and drink which after all are easy to bear as troubles go nowadays.
I have suffered terribly from the latter demon lately. In fact in London it is not unfair to say I never draw a sober breath. I was beginning to lose my memory which for a man who lives entirely in the past, is to lose life itself. In fact I got a little anxious about it but I found all I needed was congenial work. I have been here six weeks, the nut has cleared and I am writing better than ever I did. Little Laura [Mrs Waugh] comes to see me sometimes. She is living a life of startling heroism and is having another baby in a few weeks.
Since I saw you my military life has rather gone into the shadows. I drove a General mad, literally, and both he and I were expelled from that headquarters together. Then I became a parachutist. For one who values privacy there is no keener pleasure than the feeling of isolation as you float down, but it is all too shortlived, the ground is very hard and the doctors decided – as I could have told them – that I was too old to hope for many such pleasures …
After my leg healed I was sent to be ADC to another General. That lasted 24 hours. I had the misfortune to upset a glass of claret in his lap at dinner. It is extraordinary how much wine there is in a glass & how far it spreads if it is thrown with gusto …