B List: Anthony Trollope--Barsetshire Chronicles (Barchester Towers)......273/746
C List: Lucy Lethbridge--Servants: A Downstairs View of 20th Cent, etc....216/325
The weather turned chilly early this year. My last real day of reading on the porch was October 10th, when it was 80 degrees. The next day it dropped down to the low 60s and poured rain. I tried to go out but gave it up after about 10 minutes and came back in. After that it dropped into the lower 50s and 40s and has stayed there ever since. I'll probably be inside now until May.
The James Russell Lowell work here is a bit of 19th century doggerel verse that I am reading online, because even the state library doesn't have a printed copy of it that circulates. It is something of a humorous overview of the American--really the New England literary and cultural scene, with a few New Yorkers such as Cooper included, circa 1850. I am reading it because some of the lines on Emerson were excerpted for one of the exam questions in the GRE book I get this list from.
Barchester Towers is the second volume of the Barsetshire Chronicles. I have already dusted off The Warden, which clocks in at a trim 199 pages. There are six novels in the series altogether, but the IWE list only features and summarizes the first two. These first two novels were also published together in a single Modern Library edition, with no accompanying books containing any of the other four. So I think I am only going to read the first two as well, especially seeing as these make for a long enough book anyway. They are very good though. I find myself often regretting that I have to stop for the day and can't go on because I want to see what happens next, which is something that rarely occurs with me anymore, even when I generally like what I'm reading. But this is my first time ever reading Trollope, so he is both new to me and the kind of writer I am inclined to like, which I guess is a combination I don't encounter that often anymore.
The Lucy Lethbridge book, a survey of the British servant experience and the decline of that way of life over the past century, feels a little padded at times but contains some matters of interest to me. I always like it when the time for some activity or social arrangement has passed, but there are still people trying to carry on the old forms onto the point of ridiculousness, such as the dowager in the late 1930s who requires a staff of 8 people to pull together a glass of Benger's (Ovaltine-like drink) and two slices of toast and bring it to her room on a silver tray. I had not been aware that many of the great country houses of England did not get electricity or in some cases even modern bathrooms until well into the 30s (the chamberpot long remained the outlet of choice, it seems). I also had not known about the extreme preference for height when footmen, serving maids and other visible help. There was one lord who required all the women on his staff to be at least five foot ten, and he employed around thirty of them. I would not have thought there would be so much height to go around.
The author, Lucy Lethbridge, indicates in the dedication that one of her grandmothers at least was in service. I've been digging around the internet for pictures of her when she was younger, even at age 40. The only ones I can find are from when her book came out, at which time she was around fifty, but she gives one the idea that she was probably a looker, to somebody like me anyway, in her younger years. The combination of lingering working class earthy sensuality with such evidences of a decent education as can be presumed would decidedly hit my sweet spots. But I suppose we'll never know.
Near the head of my long, long list of romantic regrets is never having had any kind of relations with a real English girl. I mean even a few words over a drink. I don't know that I've ever even talked to one. That's how elusive they are to the likes of me.
This is the actress who plays one of the Stanhope daughters in the BBC Adaptation of 'Barchester Towers'. I just left off today at the chapter where the Reverend Stanhope was recalled to his parish by the new bishop after spending 13 years in Italy so I have not encountered these characters yet. Apparently their role is not a minor one.
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