Summerscale Sorts Through our Exquisite Clutter

The recently published true crime novel “The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher” very accurately captured much of what is at the core of our Victorian era. In this non-fiction narrative the author exposed some of the dirty secrets of our seemingly prim lives and also drew from much of the social and scientific atmosphere in which we are living.
In the novel a young boy is kidnapped and brutally murdered in one of the idyllic country homes of our country. Immediately our new forms of journalism covered this sensational tale and created a national stir. In response Scotland Yard sent one of their finest officers from their new detective branch to investigate and solve this heinous crime. The approaches he used had basis in the scientific revolution we have been experiencing. Mr. Whicher used the burgeoning field of forensics to come to the disturbing conclusion that it was the half-sister of the victim, Constance Kent, who committed this vicious crime. It was unfortunately this revelation that was to be the downfall of this brilliant man. His accusation was anathema to the ideal of the Victorian family. He transgressed the private life and revealed not only this terrible deed but also the dirty secrets of what seemed like a perfect family. In the end the suspicions of Mr. Whicher served to indict him more than the girl who murdered her brother.
Detective fiction is in many ways the culmination of what it is to be Victorian. The exposure to other cultures and the necessary worldliness that was occurring during this second age of exploration is evidenced in books like “The Jungle Book” and in the voyages of the naturalist Charles Darwin. This led to a curiosity of the things of the world that we have read in Lewis Carroll and Charles Kingsley. We have become curious about our world and fantasy worlds and have begun speculations into their nature. This curiosity has brought us to a point where we are now interested in the nature of our natural world as well. We have combined our penchant for science with our new frontiers and horizons with the result being a sort of speculative fiction. In novels like “The Time Machine,” “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” and “The Invisible Man” we Victorians have looked into the looking glass and examined ourselves. All of these investigations have culminated in this detective fiction we are given in “The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher” and the fiction of Poe and Conan Doyle. The men in these stories are the amalgam of all that has been our current era. The concepts and concerns of Victorian England, the exquisite clutter of our current state, have brought us to a pivotal point in our lives. We have created for ourselves a world full of exceedingly new and peculiar things. We have more potential and more knowledge than any time in human history. It is only natural that at some point we became introspective and examined the transgressions of our society.
Kate Summerscale has captured much of what it is to be Victorian. In this case study of a ghastly event she not only does an excellent job of presenting detective fiction as a literary genre, but also shows the hidden life of the Victorian; the scientific advances of our time; and the affects this period has cultivated.

Jekyll

From what I have been able to cull from various sources on the interwebs there seems to be no chance of a second season of Jekyll. IMDB lists no information under the series or the actor James Nesbitt in regards to filming, and the BBC's website on Jekyll has not been updated since July of 2007. Bummer. However, if you have Netflix instantly streaming you can stream it to your television. I have done that and hope to watch it over the weekend.

The (de?) Evolution of Literature

It is strange that Darwin considers novels “works of the imagination, though not of a very high order.” Unfortunately, he does not clarify for the reader what exactly he means by this so we are forced to make assumptions about his intention. I think Darwin liked novels because of the escapism they provided. Novels allow the reader a break from reality and an escape to fantasy. It is far less likely, for me at least, that I will be so engrossed in a poem that I am whisked away to and absorbed in the world it describes. Darwin’s theory of “literary natural selection” so to speak denigrates novels to a lower and more vulgar place in culture, yet he appreciates novelists and the works they produce. It seems to me that for Darwin novels serve the same purpose that television and websites about cats with bad grammar serve for us today; they are mindless entertainment. He mentions that he has had many novels read to him and I imagine Darwin laying on a couch with his eyes closed imagining all of the things that are happening in the novel. For Darwin novels are passive entertainment they work their qualities on him while he passively consumes.
His theory does not entirely hold up however if we apply it to “The Time Machine” by H.G. Wells. Darwin’s theory holds that in order for a novel to be moderately good must end happily. In order for it to “come into the first class” it must have a character that one can “thoroughly love.” “The Time Machine” has neither of these qualities nor, in the case of the latter, a pretty woman. The novel presents a future world in which the descendants of man have divergently evolved into two distinct races. The two live in a sort of corrupted utopia in which the weaker and prettier eloi exist to feed the subterranean morlocks. The book also contains a visit to the end of the world in which man has been destroyed and the world is overrun with giant crustaceans and squid-creatures. The book hardly ends on a positive note as we are returned to the present and left to march slowly on towards the apocalypse. It is worth pondering whether or not there is anything that one can do to prevent the eventual split in man and the society of 802,701. The paradox of time travel leaves the reader with no clear answer.
This book makes me wonder where Darwin would classify it in his hierarchy of literature. There are no characters to which I felt, or I could imagine Darwin might have felt, an affinity for. Perhaps the narrator of the book is a relatable of the character but he serves little other purpose than to frame the novel. The eloi certainly are “attractive” but they are simpletons and virtually indistinguishable from each other. The morlocks are grotesque and feed on the eloi and so I hardly see them as relatable characters. Although I think that in many ways the morlocks are the most “human” of the creatures the time traveler encounters. I certainly don’t think that the controlling and cocky time traveler is a character to be loved. He has an incredible amount of hubris to think that he can go to the future and consider himself the superior being. He seems to somehow forget that the people he encounters are the descendants of him. Given our propensity for thinking that evolution just further and distills and clarifies the better attributes of creatures it can be assumed that they should be superior to us. But they aren’t. They devolved into simpler and baser creatures. They have lost touch with the art and the beauty they once enjoyed and now live in the dilapidated ruins of their golden age. As Darwin says the parts of their brain that appreciate higher aesthetic taste have atrophied. They exist in a world full of beauty but devoid of appreciation for it. The passage from Darwin’s autobiography ends with him saying that “The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.” The eloi with their disregard for their own lives and the lives of others, and the morlocks with their diet of eloi embody this problem beautifully.
It is odd then that H.G. Wells’ book does not fit the criteria of Darwin’s first class novels, yet the characters in it exemplify the dangers in losing the higher arts.

It was a dark and stormy night...

When Edward Bulwer-Lytton died in 1873 he was one of the most revered and respected writers in England with several best selling novels and a considerable fortune. History, however, has not been kind to Lord Bulwer-Lytton. By the turn of the century his overly romantic style, called “Bulwerese” was regarded as overly florid and thought to detract from his novels. Bulwer-Lytton was regarded as little more than an opportunist preying on the desires of the public by feeding them a precursor to pulp fiction. Today, unfortunately, much of the same holds true. It seems that the most enduring legacy of Edward Bulwer-Lytton is a writing contest parodying the famous opening of his novel, “Paul Clifford,” which begins “It was a dark and stormy night”. The point of the contest is to write the most terrible opening sentence to an imaginary novel. Past winners have tapped in to Bulwer-Lytton’s use of rapid changes in point of view, diffuse language and false sentimentality. Here are the winners from the past. Besides this one sentence Bulwer-Lytton also is credited with having coined the phrases “the pen is mightier than the sword”; “the unwashed mass”; and “pursuit of the almighty dollar”.
To limit our knowledge of Edward Bulwer-Lytton to a handful of quotations would be to gravely error in recognizing one of the most popular and certainly most prolific writers of the Victorian era.
Bulwer was born the 25 May 1803 the youngest of three sons to Elizabeth Barbara Lytton and General William Earle Bulwer. His father passed away in 1807 and his mother moved him and his brothers to London. Edward was a sickly child and so rather than follow his brothers he remained at home with his mother who educated him from an early age. In 1819 after a distinguished childhood of education Edward attended Trinity College at Cambridge but shortly transferred to Trinity Hall in order to avoid attending lectures. Although Bulwer-Lytton had published several volumes of poetry it wasn’t until he met and married Rosina Doyle Wheeler that his work lost its Byronic and derivative qualities. With the marriage of Rosina, Edward’s mother retracted his allowance and he was forced for the first time to work for a living. Edward worked tirelessly and turned out a prodigious amount of works between 1827 and 1837. He published thirteen novels, two long poems, one political pamphlet, four plays, a social history of England, a three-volume history of Athens, and all the tales collected in “The Student” as well as writing for the Edinburgh Review, the Westminster Review, the Monthly Chronicle, the Examiner, and the Literary Gazette. He also edited the New Monthly Magazine for two years. One beneficial result of all this work is that it allowed the young couple to engage in the fashionable world of high living, masquerades and glamour, prestige and politics, fops and dandies that his wife was accustomed to. This world that he moved in was a source for some of Bulwer-Lytton’s early fiction. Unfortunately, given how hard Edward worked there was no room in his life for Rosina and their marriage fell apart and in 1836 they officially separated. To fill the void left by the loss of his wife and children Bulwer-Lytton embarked on a career in Parliament which he continued off and on throughout the rest of his life. When Bulwer-Lytton died he had written some 32 novels and countless other plays, pamphlets, poems, and anonymous treatises. He was one of the most read authors of his time probably second only to Dickens.

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind

“Better he should be bruised from head to foot by me who love him than that he should come to harm through ignorance.”

Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books all are heavily moralistic and ripe for scrutiny and close reading, but I feel that the most universal moral that can be taken from the Jungle Books is that knowledge is power. Throughout these short stories it is shown that the animals that have the most knowledge are the ones who survive the jungle.
There are at work in the Mowgli stories two types of knowledge that work to protect the young man-cub. The first and most important is knowledge of nature and its creatures. The second is the knowledge of man and by that I mean technology. Throughout the Mowgli stories the animals embody various qualities. The wolf pack is loyal, Bandar-log monkeys are stupid, Kaa is sly, and Shere Khan is wrathful. But it is from the wisdom and knowledge of Baloo, the bear, that Mowgli learns the lessons he needs to survive not only in the jungle, but also among men. In “Kaa’s Hunting” it is only because Mowgli has learned the Stranger’s Call from Baloo that he is able to communicate with the kite and send for help. Later, in the story it is this Stranger’s Call that protects him in the cobra’s den. Throughout this story knowledge of the Law of the Jungle saves Mowgli’s life.

Later, in “Tiger! Tiger!” Mowgli is “saved” from the jungle by the villagers. They bring him into and introduce him to the comfort and advantages of the village. Because of Mowgli’s knowledge of the language of pigs and bucks he easily imitated and assimilated the words of the villagers. Soon it is clear he has adopted some of the technology of the people when we discover he wears a small knife around his neck. This knowledge is also presented in “Mowgli’s Brothers” when he wields mans oldest and most important technology, fire, to overthrow the wolves and Shere Khan.
When Mowgli traps Shere Khan it is because of his merging of these two knowledges. He uses the nature-knowledge of the jungle and its creatures to know when to attack the tiger and he uses the man-knowledge of domestication and control over beasts to spring a trap on Shere Khan. In a final act of man over beast he uses his knife to cut open and skin the tiger.
The idea of knowledge as power is not limited to Mowgli’s stories, though. There is in the story of “Toomai of the Elephants” great power in having knowledge of the elephant dance. In the tale a young boy is made a forester because of his knowledge of the secrets of the elephants. This knowledge not only elevates him among the ranks of the other natives who make him Toomai of the Elephants, but also the white men promote Little Toomai to a forester. Both groups of men recognize that the knowledge gained from the elephants has the power to help control them.

The message that knowledge is power pervades Kipling’s Jungle Books in order to establish the right of Britain to colonize under an empire. The stories pit the characters against each other in many veiled roles as colonizer and colonized. It is difficult to pick up upon casual reading because of the fact that these roles are not static throughout the stories or even in the course of one story but upon close reading it is clear what different situations are meant to represent. I see Kipling utilizing the varying roles to show that using knowledge to control or help others has the highest value in people. Naturally extended this means that the “savages” that colonizers come upon are in need of the knowledge (and by extension power) that they bring with them. These tales establish not just the right but also the obligation to provide the colonized with the knowledge that the colonizer has. However, I think that Kipling realizes that part of “knowledge is power” is knowing when to use the stick and when to use the carrot. He opens the short story “Toomai of the Elephants” with a poem that reminds the colonizers to allow the colonized some modicum of their old lives in order to keep them loyal. Essentially, if you let them dance at night they will work tirelessly during the day.
I will remember what I was, I am sick of rope and chain – I will remember my old strength and all my forest affairs.
I will not sell my back to man for a bundle of sugar-cane: I will go out to my own kind, and the wood-folk in their lairs.
I will go out until the day, until the morning break – Out to the wind's untainted kiss, the water's clean caress;
I will forget my ankle-ring and snap my picket stake. I will revisit my lost loves, and playmates masterless!