A late entry

We have been accustomed to considering the late 17th century as the pinnacle of the run-on sentence – helped, of course, by its pre-dating of most of the formal rules of punctuation – but it appears that this peculiar art-form died very hard.

I highlighted previously the opening of Catherine Cuthbertson’s 1817 novel, Rosabella, bemoaning the mere 108 words she managed to string together and mourning the apparent death of this particular skill.

But perhaps the eulogy was delivered a little prematurely. I have been re-reading Sydney Owenson’s defiantly nationalistic novel, The Wild Irish Girl, from 1806, which unexpectedly challenges the best that the 17th century could produce. This epistolary work ends with a letter from the hero’s father laying out his son’s new duties and the attitude he should adopt towards his tenants, a lecture which concludes with the following exhortation—one running a full 308 words, and built upon a framework of three colons and six semi-colons:

Cherish by kindness into renovating life those national virtues, which though so often blighted in the full luxuriance of their vigorous blow by the fatality of circumstances, have still been ever found vital at the root, which only want the nutritive beam of encouragement, the genial glow of confiding affection, and the refreshing dew of tender commiseration, to restore them to their pristine bloom and vigour: place the standard of support within their sphere; and like the tender vine which has been suffered by neglect to waste its treasures on the sterile earth, you will behold them naturally turning and gratefully twining round the fostering stem, which rescues them from a cheerless and grovelling destiny: and when by justly and adequately rewarding the laborious exertions of that life devoted to your service, the source of their poverty shall be dried up, and the miseries that flowed from it shall be forgotten; when the warm hand of benevolence shall have wiped away the cold dew of despondency from their brow; when reiterated acts of tenderness and humanity shall have thawed the ice which chills the native flow of their ardent feelings; and when the light of instruction shall have dispelled the gloom of ignorance and prejudice from their neglected minds, and their lightened hearts shall again throb with the cheery pulse of national exility;—then, then, and not till then, will you behold the day-star of national virtue rising brightly over the horizon of their happy existence; while the felicity which has awakened to the touch of reason and humanity, shall return back to, and increase the source from which it originally flowed: as the elements, which in gradual progress brighten into flame, terminate in a liquid light, which, reverberating in sympathy to its former kindred, genially warms and gratefully cheers the whole order of universal nature.

 

And the rest

I’m pleased with the way this year has gone so far – so far – in that I’ve stuck to my resolution of regular postings, and got several of my subsections moving again: Chronobibliography, the Gothic novel, and Authors In Depth; as well as keeping my struggle through the pre-history of the silver-fork novel ticking along.

And after an absurdly long delay, I have at least read the book that represents the point at which Reading Roulette got stuck: Pique by Sarah Stickney Ellis.

Of course all this progress has had its usual consequence, in that I’m letting myself get carried away: I’m currently eyeing my list of “side-project” books, those which have come up in discussion and noted as worthy of consideration for one reason or another; namely—

– Gains And Losses: Novels Of Faith And Doubt In Victorian England by Robert Lee Wolff: the third of the important studies of the 19th century religious novel, along with Joseph Ellis Baker’s The Novel And The Oxford Movement and Margaret Maison’s Search Your Soul, Eustace. I have actually read this with intention to blog; but it turned out to be another instance of pondering how to attack a book so long, I forgot what I wanted to say in the first place. The problem is that this lengthy work goes off on tangents from the main issue, so it’s a case of picking the eyes out of it. That said, it does do one insanely clever thing in its handling of the proliferating 19th century religious factions, which on its own makes it worthy of review.

– The Man Of Feeling by Henry Mackenzie: this one came up apropos of Julia de Roubigné, which we agreed was a deconstruction of the sentimental novel, rather than a sentimental novel itself—raising the question of whether Mackenzie’s earlier work, too, had been so intended. There are certainly some novels (for example, John Robinson’s Sydney St. Aubyn) where it is difficult to tell whether or not we’re supposed to take the narrative at face value; but as I confessed at the time, I’ve never had any sense that The Man Of Feeling wasn’t written with a straight face, and the thought that Mackenzie had intended it as a criticism of the overwrought sentimentalism that infected English novels during the second half of the 18th century was intriguing.

– Le Loup Blanc by Paul Féval: we touched upon this one in the lead-up to Féval’s Les Mystères de Londres, at which time I remarked of it, “The hero…is a Zorro-esque figure who fights against injustice—and may be the earliest example of the crime-fighter with a double life and a secret identity. (He’s also an albino, because if there’s one thing Paul Féval believed in, it was piling it on.)” ‘Nuff said.

– Theresa Marchmont; or, The Maid Of Honour by Catherine Gore: this is also about the pre-history of the silver-fork novel, though in a different way. Gore was that genre’s leading exponent, and a clever and entertaining writer; but she got her start writing “proper” novels, and this was her first.

I think all four of those are worth tackling…sigh…though beforehand, I’d really like to get through both Pique and Mary Leman Grimstone’s Louisa Egerton; or, Castle Herbert—the latter with a view to re-starting that subsection conspicuous by its ongoing absence, Australian fiction.

Having finished reading Pique, I allowed myself a spin of the wheel for Reading Roulette—and ended up making a decision that, astonishingly enough, should make things a little easier around here rather than (as usual) exponentially harder.

The book I landed on was Octavus Roy Cohen’s Midnight, from 1922. A little research determined that this is one of Cohen’s mysteries, featuring series detective, David Carroll.

I have, in the past, simply carried on upon hitting a book like that; but I’ve decided I’m not going to any more. Since that time my mystery and series reading has multiplied exponentially into a major project (albeit one dealt with elsewhere); and on that basis, I’m going to eliminate such works from Reading Roulette. I will still read Midnight (at least, I won’t: I’ll be reading The Crimson Alibi, the first in the David Carroll series), but it won’t be written up here.

A second spin of the wheel then landed me on Sinclair Lewis’s Our Mr Wrenn: The Romantic Adventures Of A Gentle Man, from 1914; and that’s what I’ll be blogging.