Robert Browning--A Blot in the 'Scutcheon (1843)

One of the recurring themes/patterns in the IWE list is that, in the place of recommending individual short poems, the most celebrated poets in the tradition, with a couple of notable exceptions--Shelley and Wordsworth come immediately to mind--are represented by one somewhat longer work. Unfortunately my attention span for focusing on and absorbing long form 19th century poetry, as I have noted here before, has not been good for the past several years (though it was a little better when the other people in my house had to go out to work/school for at least part of the day). In the course of this program already I found Swinburne and Elizabeth Barrett Browning to be fairly tough going; Arnold's Balder Dead was much better, some of which I attributed to that author's already being one of my favorite poets of that era anyway. The to my mind relatively obscure dramatic play A Blot in the 'Scutcheon is the selection they chose for Robert Browning. Like Arnold, I think of Browning as another of my favorite 19th century poets, and have even felt at times that I had attained something of a breakthrough with regard to how to read him properly. However, while this work was not particularly difficult, I nonetheless felt "off" and distracted each of the three times (once for each "act") that I set aside to read it.

For starters, I suspect that following up Bleak House, an enormous book that absorbed my attention for a couple of months, with a very short and somewhat mock opera-ish poem-play that I am at least trying to regard as a more or less equal literary undertaking, was bound to put the latter book at a disadvantage given my general reading habits, which have never been especially poetry-oriented, and have grown less so over the past twenty years. It is also not uncommon, especially in older poems, for an expression or grammatical sentence to carry on for a very long while, ten lines, or more, of pentameter, which length does seem to inflict more of a strain on my concentration than it used to. I could never get comfortable with the flow of the language from one speech or scene to the next,  and while I could follow the basic outline of what was going on, it was all happening at arm's length. I never became emotionally engaged with the writing, the sentiments, the ecstasy of creation, etc. Everyone's being at home on account of the pandemic doubtless effects me as well; while I can sometimes slip away for a half hour to try to read, anything beyond that someone will inevitably come and interrupt me. If I am ever going to get back into the mode of being able to read these kinds of poetic works--and there are plenty more of them to get through on this list--I am going to have to figure out how to adjust/slow down/expand the capacity of my mind to be able to take in the rhythms of the 19th century again.


Compared to its rather lackluster enthusiasm for Bleak House, the IWE was gushing over this. "As 'theater' at least, this was the most successful of Browning's plays and justly so. It has the best plot and the best dramatic structure and in it Browning best resisted the urge to divagate into poetical passages that do not advance the plot. All the characters are really wonderful. A modern version or an operatic version might be a great success.

Miriam Cooper. Later a silent film star, made her debut playing a scullery maid in a 1912 movie titled 'A Blot on the 'Scutcheon',


"The play is a tragedy, the principal characters dying at the end. It has been compared to the far greater tragedy Romeo and Juliet, but the only real similarity is in the fact that Browning's heroine Mildred was 14 years old, only a few months older than Shakespeare's Juliet.


"As for the title: The scutcheon or escutcheon was the coat of arms...By a blot in or on it is meant a disgrace in the family history, a skeleton in the closet."


There was at least one of the outrageous authors of the Restoration/early 18th century period, specifically which one I cannot recall, who pretty clearly used "escutcheon" as a slang term for the female pubic area. I don't recall seeing it used thus even indirectly after that period, but in this instance it would certainly fit, because even though Mildred is just fourteen she confesses that she has been getting plowed repeatedly by the gentleman seen climbing on her balcony and gaining entrance to her room every evening at midnight.

Even compared to Romeo and Juliet, which I always took as being one of the lightest of Shakespeare's non-comedies, this is awfully thin as drama. I suppose I should try to say something about why the poetry itself, aside from any consideration of characterization, etc, didn't pop for me, but nothing particular comes to mind, it's more one of those books that you read through waiting for some kind of payoff or a-ha! moment, and then it ends and you are like "that was it?" I probably should have read it a second time, especially as it has taken me several weeks to get to this report.


I read this in the Modern Library Giant edition of The Poems and Plays of Robert Browning. While I have often written, and believed, that Browning is among my favorite English poets, particularly of his era, totaling up what I have actually read of him, which is about eight poems (granted, they are his most famous ones) plus this play, comes to around 44 pages of the 1,223 that make up this book. If I ever have to read The Ring and the Book, which I might for one of my lists, that would get me about 250 more pages. Though I like owning volumes of collected poems, they strike me as likely being among the more unread books, certainly in anything approaching totality, that most people would have had even 70 years ago. I suppose I can leave the book out on my desk for a while and try once a day at least to read "Cristina" or "A Death in the Desert" or others of the hundreds of lesser-known poems in it.


The Challenge
1. Mary Ann Shaffer--Guernsey Literary & Potato Pie Society...…...5,792
2. Jane Austen--Sense and Sensibility...……………………………...2,155
3. Romeo & Juliet (movie-1968)……………………………………..1,218
4. John Grisham--The Chamber...……………………………………...719
5. Melanie Hudson--The Last Letter From Juliet...…………………….577
6. Susan Vreeland--Lisette's List...……………………………………...362
7. John Foxe--The Book of Martyrs: Pagan & Popish Persecution...….347
8. Agatha Christie--Poirot Investigates...……………………………….287
9. David Nicholls--Sweet Sorrow...……………………………………..263
10. Deanna Raybourn--A Murderous Relation...…………………………99
11. Adele Nozedar--Element Encyclopedia of Secret Signs & Symbols....97
12. Walter Scott--Rob Roy...……………………………………………...87
13. Frank Tallis--Vienna Secrets: A Max Liebermann Mystery...………..82
14. Laura Lee Guhrke--The Trouble With True Love...…………………..58
15. Ovidia Yu--The Frangipani Tree Mystery...………………………….52
16. Mary Balogh--More Than a Mistress & No Man's Mistress...……….46

Round of 16
#16 Balogh over #1 Shaffer
I probably would have had Shaffer win in a straight match-up but this was an upset game.
#2 Austen over #15 Yu
#14 Guhrke over #3 Romeo and Juliet
#4 Grisham over #13 Tallis
I don't if this is exactly a upset (though I don't want to read Grisham), but he has one to use.
#12 Scott over #5 Hudson
#6 Vreeland over #11 Nozedar
On length.
#10 Raybourn over #7 Foxe
Upset.
#9 Nicholls over #8 Christie
Another upset. I have never read Christie, and would definitely have advanced her here.


Round of 8
#2 Austen over #16 Balogh
#14 Guhrke over #4 Grisham
#12 Scott over #6 Vreeland
#10 Raybourn over #9 Nicholls


Final 4
#14 Guhrke over #2 Austen
Because Sense and Sensibility is pretty long, and I have also already read it.
#12 Scott over #10 Raybourn
The Heart of Midlothian just won the Challenge pretty recently, but Rob Roy is not very long, and it is not matched up against very appealing competition.


Championship
#12 Scott over #14 Guhrke
I think Sir Walter is the first two-time winner of the Challenge that we have had.

May 2020

A List: White--The Once and Future King...…………………….495/639
B List: Interlude
C List: Plutarch--The Age of Alexander...……………………….204/443


Nothing disruptive in this group, though in these uncer--well, nothing much is likely to disrupt my approach at this point in time, anyway. I am taking my time getting through the White. Hopefully this will be his last appearance in the monthly reckoning. It improved a little in the middle when the romances were at full throttle, but for the most part I just can't get into it. Honestly, I have never cared much for books about the Arthurian legends. The subject is not alive for me. For me Shakespeare has always filled that role of creating the mythical ur-England with its flowers and castles and troubadours and rivers and the Arthur stories do not add anything to that for me.

The Penguin Classics division broke up its publication of Plutarch's Lives into I believe 5 volumes, grouping the subjects by the historic periods they are primarily associated with (The Rise and Fall of Athens, The Makers of Rome, etc). This one contains 9 biographies spanning the period in Greek history from the end of the Peloponnesian War until the Pyrrhic war, approximately 405-270 B.C. I did read the whole book twenty or twenty-five years ago, and it was very great, though I am a bit dismayed at how many of the subjects I had forgotten, especially among those figures who have not been prominently characterized in poems and other classic literature. Of the nine lives in this book, I could only really remember who exactly Demosthenes, Alexander of course, and Pyrrhus were in any great detail. Epaminondas (whose own Life has been lost) and Dionysius the tyrant of Syracuse appear so much throughout this book that I have always remembered them as well. But Agesilaus, Pelopidas, Dion, Timoleon, Phocion, and Demetrius--I drew a complete blank on them. Hopefully after this I can retain some idea of who they are. Agesilaus was a longtime king of Sparta after the Peloponnesion War. Its power and fabled military culture were in decline by the end of his reign. Pelopidas was a Theban and associate of Epaminondas in the period of that city's brief ascension in the 370s and 60s B.C. Dion led the fight to liberate Syracuse from the tyranny of Dionysius II, but was murdered by other conspirators shortly after driving the tyrant from the city. Timoleon was a Corinthian who also became involved in the never ending turmoil in Sicily and eventually prevailed and established something of a democratic government in Syracuse, though this peace and prosperity only lasted about twenty years before the tyranny reasserted itself, though Timoleon had died by that time. I haven't gotten to Phocion and Demetrius yet.

I had to break quarantine a couple of weeks ago to go to Philadelphia, or at least the inner ring suburb of it from which my family hails, because my sister died. She did not have the virus, but suffered a stroke, which likely resulted from a number of long term health issues that she had and was never able to get control of. While it was a shock that she died suddenly and at this particular time, no one had really expected that she would live to an old age. Though she was my full sister, she was only six when I left home, and I never returned to live there again after that, so I did not really know her all that well. She had a troubled, even somewhat frightening life to a person like me who likes tranquility and avoiding the court system, etc, as much as possible. The family turmoil that I was more or less able to bail on as a teenager she had to grow up in, and she never was able to achieve any stability or regular mode of life as an adult. I do feel some guilt about not being able to have been more of a help to her in her life, though in my twenties I had plenty of my own issues, albeit milder ones than she had, to work through, and by the time she was in her twenties she was more or less incorrigible and could barely be kept in check by the power of the state itself, which was more than I, with a houseful of small children who was wondering what had become of my own life at the time, was able to take on in addition.

Anyway, on one of the days in Pennsylvania I took a walk around the old neighborhood and took some pictures. Note that the trees were already in flower, which they have still not quite managed to do here, though it is now May 10th.

These little brick box style apartments are found in quite a few places in the area where my family is from. I have been told that they were built quickly in the aftermath of World War II to house returning servicemen, especially those who were newly wed.

De rigueur coronavirus statement picture.

Since I was not in any terrific hurry to get back home after the small ceremony at the funeral home, I drove back to New Hampshire on U.S. route 202, which I picked up in Doylestown, about half an hour north of where I was staying, and which goes all the way to Main Street in Concord (actually it continues on I believe all the way to Bangor, Maine, which is probably about another 7-8 hours). It took me around 10 hours to get home. If it were not for my apprehensions about the virus I would have gotten a hotel room in Connecticut when it got dark and continued home the next day, because once the sun went down it was a dark and gloomy ride through Western New England, which is largely uninhabited, especially at night during a pandemic. This is a rather strange highway in that is a thousand miles long yet goes through very few towns of any size--Concord is one of the two or three biggest municipalities through which it passes--and is a two lane country highway for most of its length, and this despite passing through the periphery of the Philadelphia and New York metro areas. One highlight was going across the Hudson on the Bear Mountain Bridge near Peekskill, which is an old-fashioned bridge that even had an old-fashioned toll booth ($1.50) with an actual semi-old-fashioned youngish girl with a mask on sitting in it, the only living toll booth worker I saw on the entire trip. It has always been a wish of my to take some road trips on these older non-interstate highways, but I have to remind myself that the thrill only lasts for so many hours a day, and while the sun is up. For I was quite tired by the time I got to northern Connecticut and I still had several hours to go at that point.

I've written more about Plutarch and my ride home than I have about my sister, I know.  

Charles Dickens--Bleak House (1853)

With nine entries on the list pretty evenly spread out across the volumes, it is always going to be a major milestone to come upon a Dickens book, and especially when, within that group of nine, it is one of the five or so major ones, which I think Bleak House certainly is. Even though I read it once before (in 2000), as with Anna Karenina and a few of the other titles remarked on here, going through it this second time for this list felt like a bigger life event than the first occasion, even without the beginning of the pandemic shutdown, which began around halfway into the book. I actually started this in late February when I was on vacation in Florida and did not suspect what was coming, in terms of everything being closed and socialization, etc, being interrupted as it has been. But all that aside the book is, for all the flaws that can be, and often are, noted in it, a tour de force of energy and humanity and words and speech and the construction of a living world. It is really a tremendous production. It is my impression that nowadays it is considered by most people of intellectual, if not necessarily literary, stature to be on the whole the greatest Dickens book, and I can see where they would make that claim, as it is, in spite of having its share of Dickensian characteristics, the most modern in its overall approach, characterizations, and sensibility. If forced to offer a judgment I  would probably place it more or less co-equal with David Copperfield and Pickwick, and just ahead of Great Expectations. Which is to say that I think highly of it.

The IWE writers were not as enamored with Bleak House as even modern critics are (I don't have a good sense of how popular it was with the critics or the public comparative to the other books prior to World War II. "As is not unusual with Dickens" they say, "his novel Bleak House is notable chiefly for its minor characterizations. The heroine Esther is neither quite true nor quite sympathetic by modern tastes, and the admirable John Jarndyce leaves today's reader cold. Tulkinghorn the lawyer is a stereotype. But Mrs. Jellyby the overdevoted philanthropist and Mrs. Pardiggle the malevolent one, Miss Flite the fluttery maiden lady and the overproper Turverydrop, and at least half a dozen others, are drawn with consummate skill. The book was popular chiefly because Dickens wrote it. His 'message'--the need for reform in England's courts of chancery (equivalent to courts of equity in the United States)--meant little to the public because too few were affected."

I am not going to take great issue with a 50 year old anonymous account in a forgotten children's encyclopedia, but just to speak for myself, I disagree with most of this. I rather like Esther--while acknowledging the many obstacles that Dickens burdens her with, being overly virtuous and so on, he still manages to kind of write his way over them and bring a more fully realized character to life. While there are again admittedly many strange things about Mr. Jarndyce, some of which I will address later on, I do like him too. His reassuring good-naturedness rescues a lot of scenes and allows at least one side of the story to keep moving forward with some hopefulness. I thought the depiction of Tulkinghorn was impressively methodical and unwavering. He certainly struck me as one of the truer characters in the book. And the whole world of the chancery courts serving as the central reference point around which the story revolves provides an intensity and interest that is a lacking element in many novels, Victorian and otherwise. On the other hand Miss Flite and Turverydrop seemed to me two of the more obviously ridiculous minor characters, out of the many that were quite good, if not perhaps as absurdly memorable, some of which I will hopefully remember to have commented on in my notes.

p. 10. Because of the humor in Dickens I find my note-taking process starts earlier. Most of the first quotations will concern Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock, with whose lofty station and self-regard the author had great fun throughout the book. "Indeed, he married her for love. A whisper still goes about, that she had not even family; howbeit, Sir Leicester had so much family that perhaps he had enough, and could dispense with any more."

p. 11 Sir Leicester again--"He is of what is called the old school--a phrase generally meaning any school that seems never to have been young."

p. 13 "Sir Leicester has no objection to an interminable Chancery suit. It is a slow, expensive, British, constitutional kind of thing...And he is upon the whole of a fixed opinion, that to give the sanction of his countenance to any complaints respecting it, would be to encourage some person in the lower classes to rise up somewhere--like Wat Tyler."

p. 158 Mrs Rouncewell the old housekeeper of Chesney Wold, to her irreverent grandson: "Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock, my dear, are not fit subjects for joking." This might be the funniest line in the whole book.

p. 259 During the very good interlude about the area around the Courts during the long vacation. "All the middle-aged clerks think their family too large."

p. 275 The description of the younger Smallweed calls to mind the Boss Baby. "If he ever lay in a cradle, it seems as if he must have lain there in a tail-coat." The dinner with the three young men, Guppy, Weevle, and Smallweed, was another well-done minor scene that gave the book the density that makes it stand out.

p. 278 "That very popular trust in flat things coming round! Not in their being beaten round, or worked round, but in their 'coming' round!" This is me, but also in fact most people, to some extent.

p. 422 "A very contentious gentleman, who said it was his mission to be everybody's brother, but who appeared to be on terms of coolness with the whole of his large family, completed the party." The wedding party (of Caddy Jellyby, who was probably the girl character I would have been most interested in dating) of malcontented altruists was another pretty hilarious and well-conceived little scene.

p. 444 "It may be something in the air--there is plenty in it--or it may be something in himself, that is in fault; but Mr Weevle, otherwise Jobling, is very ill at ease." That "plenty in it"--so funny. Jobling is the guy who had the "Galaxy Gallery of British Beauty" set of pictures, including Lady Dedlock, hanging up in his room. Another touch that seems ahead of its time.

p. 532 (Skimpole describing one of the family portraits) "There was a Sir Somebody Dedlock, with a battle, a sprung-mine, volumes of smoke, flashes of lightning, a town on fire, and a stormed fort, all in full action between his horse's two hind legs: showing, he supposed, how little a Dedlock made of such trifles."

p. 552 "Mr Carstone, you are represented by--." "You said just now--a rock." "Yes sir,' says Mr Vholes, gently shaking his head and rapping the hollow desk, with a sound as if ashes were falling on ashes, and dust on dust. 'a rock. That's something." Mr. Vholes is my favorite lawyer in the book. He's like Mr. Brontosaurus Burger from the Flintstones. Great self-control on the part of the author to hold him back until page 500, assuming he did not come up with him until that point, which may have happened.

p. 567 Sir Leicester's superannuated spinster cousin Volumnia, another inspired creation, commenting on local political trends. "Volumnia hastens to express her opinion that the shocking people ought to be tried as traitors, and made to support the Party."

p. 571 "Volumnia thinks it is really high time, you know, for somebody in power to step in and do something strong...'It is worthy of remark,' says Mr. Tulkinghorn, 'however, that these people are, in their way, very proud.' 'Proud?' Sir Leicester doubts his hearing.'"

p. 595 Skimpole, before he is revealed to be less inoffensive than he is at first presented to be. "Time is no object here. We never know what o'clock it is, and we never care. Not the way to get on in life, you'll tell me? Certainly. But we don't get on in life."

I know I am doing a lot of quotes for this one, but it's too amusing, and I would forget most of these if I didn't write up these notes.

p. 628 "The day begins to break now; and in truth it might be better for the national glory even that the sun should sometimes set upon the British dominions, than that it should ever rise upon so vile a wonder as Tom." Tom being here a wretched alley in London in the legal neighborhood, not a singular person.

My thoughts on Jarndyce--Why is he single? Why his excessive benevolence? Not a bad, and maybe a necessary character. Better than Woodcourt, who is just too good, in a way that does not contribute anything valuable to the story.

p. 747 "'It won't do to have truth and justice on his side; he must have law and lawyers,' exclaims the old girl, apparently persuaded that the latter form a separate establishment, and have dissolved partnership with truth and justice for ever and a day." I was hoping I had remembered to put in something from the old girl here. And her daughters Quebec and Malta, which are great names for girls. I would have been tempted to give my own daughters these names if I had read this at that time.

p. 777 (Refer to the photo at the bottom of the page, of an amusing page heading. I added this from my phone after I had typed up the rest of this page, and I couldn't get it to show up in this spot).

The plot felt like it was starting to wrap up with about 200 pages to go. It's a long denouement.

p. 796 "Volumnia, in her room up a retired landing on the staircase...is a prey to horrors of many kinds. Not last nor least among them, possibly, is a horror of what may befall her little income, in the event, as she expresses it, 'of anything happening' to Sir Leicester." Volumnia kills me.

p. 822 "I cannot use the expression that he looked old. There is a ruin of youth which is not like age; and into such a ruin Richard's youth and youthful beauty had all fallen away." Is this passage famous? I have certainly seen the idea expressed elsewhere. I like the image however.

p. 864 I made a note about the farewell when Esther encounters Caddy in the street and how this is always a poignant way to wrap up a book, saying a sort of good-bye to youth and one's youthful friends who were once so important but fade out of one's life, etc, but then Caddy turned up again a few pages later and it was implied that they continued to see each other all the time for the foreseeable future anyway.

Tomorrow is the 6th of the month, which is the day when I usually do my monthly update. I'll give more of a personal pandemic update at that time. I feel like I should have written more about this book, but really, everybody I would hope to be reaching either knows all about it or has at least seen the movie, and there isn't anything I am going to have to tell them. So I will leave it here and move on with the list (and towards the seven other Dickens books still remaining on it).

The Bourgeois Surrender Challenge

1. Bryan Stevenson--Just Mercy...……………………………………5,534
2. Bleak House (TV--2005)…………………………………………..3,351
3. The Village (movie--2004)…………………………………………1,277
4. Andrew Pollack & Max Eden--Why Meadow Died...………………..753
5. Alison Weir--The Princes in the Tower...……………………………321
6. James Canton--The Literature Book (DK)…………………………...186
7. Daniel Pool--What Jane Austen Ate & Charles Dickens Knew...…….183
8. Charles Dickens--Dombey & Son...…………………………………..161
9. Larry Chambers--Death in the A Shan Valley...……………………….81
10. John Seymour--The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency...……………54
11. Vladimir Nabokov--Lectures on Literature...………………………..46
12. Sue Monk Kidd--The Book of Longings...…………………………...32
13. Madeleine L'Engle--The Moment of Tenderness.................................18
14. Jean Plaidy--A Favorite of the Queen..................................................13
15. Bleak House (TV--1985)......................................................................10
16. William Makepeace Thackeray--The Newcomes.................................10


Because the names (and consequently the keywords for the game) are so singular to Dickens, the searches in these contests land on a lot of books and movies related to him.


Round of 16
#16 Thackeray over #1 Stevenson
Invoking the rule that an IWE author always wins in the first round.

#15 Bleak House '85 over #2 Bleak House '05
Odd that these rival BBC productions, both of which are supposed to be pretty good, ended up battling in the first round. In such instances the tie traditionally goes to the older film.

#14 Plaidy over #3 The Village
#13 L'Engle over #4 Pollack & Eden
Why Meadow Died is about the Parkland School shooting, which I don't feel like reading a book about at present.

#5 Weir over #12 Kidd
These books seem fairly comparable to me. Weir has a little extra push in having an "upset" to use, though I don't know if this really counts as an upset.

#11 Nabokov over #6 Canton
#7 Pool over #10 Seymour
The losers in the last two rounds both present themselves as gimmick books, with a lot of boxed text, busy pages, and the like, which sort of thing I used to like but isn't what I am looking for at this point of my life.

#8 Dickens over #9 Chambers
I'm not really ready to take on another long Dickens book right away, but he's usually going to beat a Vietnam memoir in the first round.


Round of 8
#16 Thackeray over #5 Weir
#7 Pool over #15 Bleak House '85
#8 Dickens over #14 Plaidy
#13 L'Engle over #11 Nabokov
I would like to read the Nabokov lecture on Bleak House, at least. The book as a whole is rather long, however.


Final Four
#7 Pool over #16 Thackeray
I can't take on a (supposedly) 2nd tier Thackeray novel that is the same length as Bleak House.

#13 L'Engle over #8 Dickens
Same principle.


Championship
#13 L'Engle over #7 Pool
L'Engle wins by being the only attractive title in the competition that was also relatively short.