Sunday, March 14, 2021

Classic Ghost Story Writers: Margaret Irwin



Lafayette: Margaret Irwin (1928)


I suppose that this one is a bit of a stretch. While two of the finest ghost stories I've ever read - "The Book" and "The Earlier Service" - were written by Margaret Irwin, there's no denying that her real fame stems (not unreasonably) from her work as an historical novelist.



Dorothy Sayers, ed.: Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery, and Horror (3 vols: 1928-34)


I first encountered these two stories in the multi-volume anthology above. As for her novels, I collected those gradually from various secondhand bookshops.

The four set in the seventeenth century, around about the time of what we used to refer to as the English Civil War (and would now have to call the British Wars), are probably my favourites. I've read each of them a number of times, and they've been a great help to me in disentangling many of the political complexities of the era.

They are, in order of publication (though not chronology):



Margaret Irwin: Royal Flush (1932)


  • Royal Flush: The Story of Minette. 1932. London: Chatto & Windus, 1947.
  • The Proud Servant: The Story of Montrose. 1934. London: Pan Books, Ltd., 1966.
  • The Stranger Prince: The Story of Rupert of the Rhine. 1937. London: Chatto & Windus, 1947.
  • The Bride: The Story of Louise and Montrose. London: Chatto & Windus, 1939.



Margaret Irwin: The Proud Servant (1934)


The best of these, I suppose, is The Proud Servant - about that super-romantic figure the Marquis of Montrose, and his one-man war against the Covenanters in Scotland. But all of them are interesting. In particular, the portrait given of the Dutch household of the 'Winter Queen,' the exiled Queen of Bohemia, daughter of the British monarch James 1st and mother of Prince Rupert, in both The Stranger Prince and The Bride, retains a certain fascination.



Margaret Irwin: The Stranger Prince (1937)


She followed up these triumphs with another group of novels set in the sixteenth century: one rather disappointing one about Mary Queen of Scots, followed by a brilliant trilogy about Queen Elizabeth the First:



Margaret Irwin: The Gay Galliard (1941)


  • The Gay Galliard: The Love Story of Mary Queen of Scots. London: Chatto & Windus, 1941.
  • The Queen Elizabeth Trilogy:
    1. Young Bess. 1944. Grey Arrow. London: Arrow Books, Ltd., 1960.
    2. Elizabeth, Captive Princess. 1948. London: The Reprint Society, 1950.
    3. Elizabeth and the Prince of Spain. London: Chatto & Windus, 1953.



George Sidney, dir.: Young Bess (1953)


The most famous of these is undoubtedly Young Bess. It was even used as the basis of a film starring Jean Simmons and Deborah Kerr (not to mention Charles Laughton as Henry the Eighth!).

Besides that, there are a number of other novels. She started off in the fantasy genre, in the gentler, pre-Tolkien, early twentieth century mode of Stella Benson and Robin Hyde:



Margaret Irwin: Still She Wished for Company (1924)


  • Still She Wished for Company. 1924. A Peacock Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979.
  • These Mortals. 1925. Uniform Edition. 1952. London: Chatto & Windus, 1968.
  • Knock Four Times. 1927. Uniform Edition. London: Chatto & Windus, 1951.
  • Fire Down Below. London: Chatto & Windus, 1928.
  • None So Pretty. 1930. London: Chatto & Windus, 1935.




Margaret Irwin: None So Pretty (1930)


Still She Wished for Company is an intricately told ghost story, and None So Pretty a tautly written period piece. Both show her already developing the skills which would lead to her mature historical novels a few years later.

The middle three are rather twee fantasy novels, which don't quite work for me, but which were certainly very popular at the time - hence the need for a 'uniform edition' of her works in the 1950s. I should note, though, that Rob Maslen mounts a spirited defence of These Mortals in the third of three posts about "Margaret Irwin between the wars" on his City of Lost Books blog.

A number of the online bibliographies for Irwin list another couple of late novels which I can't find available for sale anywhere, on Amazon or elsewhere, and whose existence I've therefore begun to doubt.

  • The Heart's Memory (1951)
  • Hidden Splendour (1952)

The fact that those same bibliographies (on Wikipedia, the Fiction Database, Fantastic Fiction and Agora Books) significantly misdate a number of her books, and - what's more - repeat the same errors from list to list, suggests to me that they're based on a comparison with each other, rather than independent library research.

The dates in my own listings are based on my own copies of each of the books in question (with the exception of Fire Down Below and her two, fabulously rare, early volumes of short stories, Madame Fears the Dark and Mrs. Oliver Cromwell, all of which I'm still searching for).



Margaret Irwin: That Great Lucifer (1960)


Irwin also published one work of non-fiction - a spirited biography of Sir Walter Ralegh.
[NB: The Featherstones and Halls: Gleanings from Old Family Matters, Letters and Manuscripts (1890, reprinted 2018), is not hers, though it's listed under her name in several bibliographies]
My main interest here, however, is in her short stories. Here are her three collections (with the stories I don't have access to marked in italics):



Margaret Irwin: Madame Fears the Dark (1935)


  • Madame Fears the Dark: Seven Stories and a Play. London: Chatto & Windus, 1935:

    1. The Book
    2. Mr Cork
    3. The Earlier Service
    4. Madame Fears the Dark
    5. Monsieur Seeks a Wife
    6. Time Will Tell
    7. The Curate and the Rake
    8. "Where Beauty Lies"



  • Margaret Irwin: Mrs. Oliver Cromwell (1940)


  • Mrs. Oliver Cromwell and Other Stories. London: Chatto & Windus, 1940:

    1. Courage
    2. Breaking-Point
    3. The Doctor
    4. Mayfly
    5. Mrs. Oliver Cromwell
    6. The Country Gentleman
    7. Bloodstock
    8. 'I See You'
    9. The Collar
    10. The Cocktail Bar



  • Margaret Irwin: Bloodstock (1953)


  • Bloodstock and Other Stories. 1935 & 1940. Uniform Edition. London: Chatto & Windus, 1953:

      Stories from Ireland
    1. Courage
    2. The Country Gentleman
    3. The Doctor
    4. Bloodstock
    5. The Collar
    6. Uncanny Stories
    7. The Book
    8. Monsieur Seeks a Wife
    9. Mistletoe
    10. The Earlier Service
    11. Mrs. Oliver Cromwell and Where Beauty Lies
    12. Mrs. Oliver Cromwell
    13. Where Beauty Lies

  • So, after all that preamble, what are the two ghost stories I mentioned above actually about? [Warning: plot spoilers ahead ...]



    Margaret Irwin: The Book (1930)


    The first one, "The Book," is concerned with that favourite theme of the ghost story writer, the haunted book. In this case the early, sound financial advice given by the book to the hapless Mr. Corbett becomes rapidly more sinister as he becomes more and more dependent upon it.

    I guess what's really stuck in my mind about this story are the 'tainted' literary opinions - presumably conveyed by the book itself - which gradually poison his favourite authors for Corbett. Having taken out The Old Curiosity Shop and Marius the Epicurean from his shelves for some late night reading, since "Reading was the best thing to calm the nerves, and Dickens a pleasant, wholesome and robust author."
    Tonight, however, Dickens struck him in a different light. Beneath the author's sentimental pity for the weak and helpless, he sensed a revolting pleasure in cruelty and suffering, while the grotesque figures of the people in Cruikshank's illustrations revealed too clearly the hideous distortions of their souls.


    George Cruikshank: Illustration for Oliver Twist (1838)


    "What had seemed humorous now appeared diabolic, and in disgust at these two old favourites, he turned to Walter Pater for the repose and dignity of a classic spirit."
    But presently he wondered if this spirit was not in itself of a marble quality, frigid and lifeless, contrary to the purpose of nature. "I have often thought," he said to himself, "that there is something evil in the austere worship of beauty for its own sake.” He had never thought so before, but he liked to think that this impulse of fancy was the result of mature consideration, and with this satisfaction he composed himself for sleep.
    However, his sleep is plagued with dreams "of these blameless Victorian works."
    Sprightly devils in whiskers and peg-top trouses tortured a lovely maiden and leered in delight at her anguish; the gods and heroes of classic fable acted deeds whose naked crime and shame Mr. Corbett had never appreciated in Latin and Greek Unseens. When he had woken in a cold sweat from the spectacle of the ravished Philomel’s torn and bleeding tongue, he decided there was nothing for it but to go down and get another book that would turn his thoughts in some more pleasant direction.
    He can't quite nerve himself up to do so, though. Instead, in the days that follow, he finds that, like his children, who have started to detect cruelty and cynicism in such works as Thackeray's The Rose and the Ring, and even an expurgated Boy's Gulliver's Travels, he is "off reading":
    Authors must all be filthy-minded; they probably wrote what they dared not express in their lives. Stevenson had said that literature was a morbid secretion; he read Stevenson again to discover his particular morbidity, and detected in his essays a self-pity masquerading as courage, and in Treasure Island an invalid's sickly attraction to brutality.
    "This gave him a zest to find out what he disliked so much, and ... he explored with relish the hidden infirmities of minds that had been valued by fools as great and noble."
    He saw Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë as two unpleasant examples of spinsterhood; the one as a prying, sub-acid busybody in everyone else's flirtations, the other as a raving, craving maenad seeking self-immolation on the altar of her frustrated passions. He compared Wordsworth's love of nature to the monstrous egotism of an ancient bell-wether, isolated from the flock.
    Well might Mr. Corbett conclude that "with a mind so acute and original he should have achieved greatness".

    The interesting thing about these opinions is that they are extremely cogent. Commentators on the story find it difficult to explain just why we should reject these "jejune" or "prematurely cynical" conclusions on their own merits, and are forced to fall back on the fact that - in the context of the story, at least - they are portrayed as the emanations of a deceiving, unholy spirit.

    That description of Wordsworth, in particular, is worthy of an F. R. Leavis or a Leslie Fiedler - but the "possessed" Corbett is pretty close to the mark on Dickens and Stevenson, also. Or so a Bloomsbury-inspired critic might well have thought. The date of the story, 1930, was, after all, the heyday of Lytton Strachey's influence.



    J. C. Squire (1884-1958)


    The London Mercury, where the story first appeared, was a notoriously reactionary literary monthly edited by the anti-modernist, "wholesome and hearty" J. C. Squire. The true cunning of "The Book," then, is to smuggle in such opinions in the guise of satire, leaving them to germinate secretly in unsuspecting readers.

    Margaret Irwin's story is a masterpiece. It continues to provoke and nag at us to this day. Whether she shared any of these against-the-grain opinions of canonical British authors is impossible to say. Certainly she was capable of formulating them, which is proof that they must have existed somewhere within her.

    She hasn't stopped me reading (and enjoying) any of the five authors she skewers - or, rather, whom her character challenges under the influence of an evil monk-turned-book - but she has made me think harder about each of them. The bleatings of Wordsworth, turned from love of the French Revolution to fulsome praise of his worthless patron Lord Lonsdale - the hypocritical sympathy of Dickens for oppressed young ladies while living under an assumed name with the powerless young Ellen Ternan - the gloating tone of Stevenson as he describes deaths and summary executions in The Black Arrow - the sheer weirdness of Charlotte Brontë's universe - the glaring omissions in Jane Austen's - all of these lend some weight to the insidious power of the story and of its ideas.

    Who can say what it's really about? It enters the ranks of supernatural classics because it continues to tease and irritate us, like the very finest of the works of Poe or Hoffmann.



    Margaret Irwin: The Earlier Service (1935)


    The second of the two, "The Earlier Service," transfers the basic conceit of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" - a witch cult concealed under a facade of piety - to an English country church, with a time-shift element built in for good measure.

    The extra turn of the screw this time comes from the presence of a crusader tomb in the church, which gives comfort to Jane, the young girl at the centre of the plot, as she finds herself increasingly drawn under the influence of these sinister past events. She finds herself repeatedly reciting - or rather, misquoting - Coleridge's lines:
    The knight is dust.
    His good sword rust.
    His soul is with the saints we trust.
    The young man York, an enthusiastic antiquarian, and the only one who takes her premonitions seriously, eventually unearths the reason for this shadowy presence hovering over the parish:
    In the reports of certain trials for sorcery in the year 1474, one Giraldus atte Welle, priest of the parish of Cloud Martin in Somerset, confessed under torture to having held the Black Mass in his church at midnight on the very altar where he administered the Blessed Sacrament on Sundays. This was generally done on Wednesday or Thursday, the chief days of the Witches’ Sabbath when they happened to fall on the night of the full moon. The priest would then enter the church by the little side door, and from the darkness in the body of the church those villagers who had followed his example and sworn themselves to Satan, would come up and join him, one by one, hooded and masked, that none might recognize the other. He was charged with having secretly decoyed young children in order to kill them on the altar as a sacrifice to Satan, and he was finally charged with attempting to murder a young virgin for that purpose.
    Jane, it seems, has been chosen to fill in for the young virgin, since Giraldus never succeeded in completing his ritual:
    All the accused made free confessions towards the end of their trial, especially in as far as they implicated other people. All however were agreed on a certain strange incident. That just as the priest was about to cut the throat of the girl on the altar, the tomb of the Crusader opened, and the knight who had lain there for two centuries arose and came upon them with drawn sword, so that they scattered and fled through the church, leaving the girl unharmed on the altar.
    York is too late to prevent Jane's abduction by the hungry ghosts.
    He walked up to the little gate into the churchyard. There was a faint light from the chancel windows, and he thought he heard voices chanting. He paused to listen, and then he was certain of it, for he could hear the silence when they stopped. It might have been a minute or five minutes later that he heard the most terrible shriek he had ever imagined, though faint, coming as it did from the closed church; and knew it for Jane’s voice. He ran up to the little door and heard that scream again and again. As he broke through the door he heard it cry “Crusader! Crusader!” The church was in utter darkness, there was no light in the chancel, he had to fumble in his pockets for his electric torch. The screams had stopped and the whole place was silent. He flashed his torch right and left, and saw a figure lying huddled against the altar. He knew that it was Jane; in an instant he had reached her. Her eyes were open, looking at him, but they did not know him, and she did not seem to understand him when he spoke. In a strange, rough accent of broad Somerset that he could scarcely distinguish, she said, “It was my body on the altar.”
    I guess one reason I like this story so much is the careful detailing of the backdrop - the shy attraction of Jane to York, and his own growing fascination with this intelligent but troubled young girl.

    But I do have to admit that I also like that moment of what Tolkien would call Eucatastrophe (the opposite of catastrophe: the sudden lucky turn that saves everything) when the Crusader comes to life and hunts the devil worshippers from the church.

    So much did I like it that I wrote a long poem about it when I was in my teens (now, luckily, long burnt to ashes). It completely failed to reproduce the atmosphere of Irwin's story. That may have been the first moment when I really started to understand how much skill and careful artifice went into the creation of such effects.

    I don't have much to say about the rest of Irwin's short stories. Some of them are quite good of their kind, such as the one about Cromwell's nominee attempting to take over his new estate in Ireland, but none of them rise to the heights of the two discussed above. Irwin clearly had a fascination with the supernatural, but it was the deep romanticism of her nature which brought the historical novels so vividly to life.



    J. R. R. Tolkien: Moments of Eucatastrophe (The Return of the King: 1955)






    Bassano Ltd.: Margaret Irwin (1939)

    Margaret Emma Faith Irwin
    (1889–1967)


      Novels:

    1. Still She Wished for Company. 1924. A Peacock Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979.
    2. These Mortals. 1925. Uniform Edition. 1952. London: Chatto & Windus, 1968.
    3. Knock Four Times. 1927. Uniform Edition. London: Chatto & Windus, 1951.
    4. Fire Down Below. London: Chatto & Windus, 1928.
    5. None So Pretty. 1930. London: Chatto & Windus, 1935.
    6. Royal Flush: The Story of Minette. 1932. London: Chatto & Windus, 1947.
    7. The Proud Servant: The Story of Montrose. 1934. London: Pan Books, Ltd., 1966.
    8. The Stranger Prince: The Story of Rupert of the Rhine. 1937. London: Chatto & Windus, 1947.
    9. The Bride: The Story of Louise and Montrose. London: Chatto & Windus, 1939.
    10. The Gay Galliard: The Love Story of Mary Queen of Scots. London: Chatto & Windus, 1941.
    11. The Queen Elizabeth Trilogy:
      1. Young Bess. 1944. Grey Arrow. London: Arrow Books, Ltd., 1960.
      2. Elizabeth, Captive Princess. 1948. London: The Reprint Society, 1950.
      3. Elizabeth and the Prince of Spain. London: Chatto & Windus, 1953.
    12. The Heart's Memory (1951) [?]
    13. Hidden Splendour (1952) [?]

    14. Short stories:

    15. Madame Fears the Dark: Seven Stories and a Play. London: Chatto & Windus, 1935.
    16. Mrs. Oliver Cromwell and Other Stories. London: Chatto & Windus, 1940.
    17. Bloodstock and Other Stories. 1935 & 1940. Uniform Edition. London: Chatto & Windus, 1953.

    18. Biography:

    19. That Great Lucifer: A Portrait of Sir Walter Ralegh. 1960. London: The Reprint Society, 1961.



    Margaret Irwin: These Mortals (1925)


    Tuesday, March 09, 2021

    Classic Ghost Story Writers: Arthur Conan Doyle



    Towards the end of his life, the vogue of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was still such that it made good commercial sense to collect his works in convenient omnibus form. First of all (of course) came Sherlock Holmes, with one volume (1928) for the five volumes of short stories and another (1929) for the four novels.

    Next came the collected short stories (1929), then two volumes of 'historical romances' (1931 & 1932). Long after that, in the 1950s, came the Professor Challenger stories (The Lost World and its successors) and even an omnibus of Napoleonic Stories (though the latter overlaps considerably with the second volume of historical romances) - seven books in all, then, containing 16 novels and at least 11 volumes of short stories.



    Arthur Conan Doyle: The Sherlock Holmes Short Stories (1928)


    Sherlock Holmes was a rationalist, concerned only with what could be scientifically proven and deduced from the evidence. His creator was anything but. I've written elsewhere (here and here) about Charles Sturridge's wonderful film Fairy Tale (1997), which retells the strange story of the Cottingley Fairies.



    Peter O'Toole does an excellent job of impersonating the distinctly credulous but still (paradoxically) occasionally astute Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It becomes clear in the course of the action that it was the loss of his son Kingsley in the First World War - he died of influenza caught at the front two weeks before the armistice - that compels Doyle to continue his quest for communication beyond the veil.

    This monstrous pall of loss hanging over the whole western world does explain, to some extent, the post-war growth of interest in spiritualism. The hitherto widely respected physicist Sir Oliver Lodge's book Raymond, or Life and Death (1916), about the séances he held to contact his own dead son, had an immense influence over other grieving parents, and Doyle gradually became their spokesman and standard-bearer.



    Arthur Conan Doyle: The Land of Mist (1925-26)


    Even the hard-headed Professor Challenger, the dinosaur hunter of The Lost World (1912), was pressed into service as a psychic investigator in Doyle's late novel The Land of Mist (1926). Sherlock Holmes must be said to have had a narrow escape in not being conscripted similarly - even in The Hound of Baskervilles, where all the spectral appearances turn out to have a distinctly rational explanation.



    Arthur Conan Doyle: "The Story of the Brown Hand" (1899)


    It's not really those stories I want to discuss here, though. It's the ones collected in those two sections of The Conan Doyle Stories entitled "Tales of Terror & Mystery" and "Tales of Twilight & the Unseen." These include such frequently anthologised classics as "The Brown Hand" and "The Brazilian Cat."



    Arthur Conan Doyle: "The Story of the Brazilian Cat" (1898)


    A great many of the others are equally memorable, though. For the most part they predate the period of his full-fledged involvement with Spiritualism, but it was already plain that he already had a strong affinity with the supernatural and mystical. Two stories that made a particular impression on me when I first read them as a boy were "The Terror of Blue John Gap" and "The Leather Funnel."



    Arthur Conan Doyle: "The Terror of Blue John Gap" (1910)


    The first of these is somewhat reminiscent of H. P. Lovecraft's early story "The Beast in the Cave," written in 1904 (though not published until 1918). The fourteen-year-old Lovecraft could certainly not yet match the storytelling prowess of the immensely experienced Conan Doyle, but a comparison of the stories does offer some interesting reflections on what two different writers can do with not dissimilar material.



    Arthur Conan Doyle: "The Leather Funnel" (1902)


    "The Leather Funnel," by contrast, with its interest in psychometry and the sadistic excesses of the Inquisition, has an atmosphere of sadistic sexuality quite alien to Lovecraft but clearly quite attractive to Doyle.

    [NB: It's worth stressing here the availability of these and other works by Doyle on the wonderfully comprehensive Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia website. You can find there both the texts and contemporary illustrations for all of the stories mentioned in this post.]



    Arthur Conan Doyle: "Lot No. 249" (1892)


    What else? There's a wonderfully vivid Egyptian-mummy-coming-to-life story in "Lot No. 249" - which predates by a decade Bram Stoker's classic Jewel of Seven Stars (1903). Nor did Doyle avoid conventional 'occultism' in his earlier stories. There's also a striking account of a séance going terribly wrong in "Playing with Fire," and a nice piece of automatic writing in "How It Happened" (1913).



    Need I go on? Doyle is, I think, at his best as a ghost story writer when he can combine aspects of his fascination with historical detail with nasty doings in the present. This is certainly the case in "The Leather Funnel," and also in "The New Catacomb" (1898), a neat variation on Poe's "Cask of Amontillado."

    Not all of his work in this genre is included in the 1200 pages of The Conan Doyle Stories, however. A useful round-up of his unknown and uncollected pieces is provided by the late Richard Lancelyn Green's excellent The Unknown Conan Doyle: Uncollected Stories.



    Uncollected Stories. Ed. John Michael Gibson & Richard Lancelyn Green (1982)


    If it's Doyle's occultism that really interests you, though, you could do worse than try to find the recent (2013) Hesperus Press volume On the Unexplained, a selection from his late collection The Edge of the Unknown.



    Arthur Conan Doyle: The Edge of the Unknown (1930)






    Arthur Conan Doyle (1914)

    Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
    (1859-1930)


      Fiction:

    1. The Complete Sherlock Holmes Long Stories. 1929. London: John Murray, 1949.
      1. A Study in Scarlet (1887)
      2. The Sign of the Four (1890)
      3. The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902)
      4. The Valley of Fear (1915)

    2. The Conan Doyle Historical Romances. Volume 1 of 2. London: John Murray, 1931.
      1. Micah Clarke (1889)
      2. The White Company (1891)
      3. The Refugees (1893)
      4. Sir Nigel (1906)

    3. The Mystery of Cloomber (1889)

    4. The Firm of Girdlestone (1890)

    5. Mysteries and Adventures (1890) [short stories]

    6. The Captain of the Polestar and Other Tales. 1890. London & New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1893. [short stories]

    7. The Doings of Raffles Haw (1891)

    8. The Complete Sherlock Holmes Short Stories. 1928. London: John Murray, 1949.
      1. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892)
      2. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894)
      3. The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1905)
      4. His Last Bow (1917)
      5. The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (1927)

    9. The Complete Napoleonic Stories. London: John Murray, 1956.
      1. The Great Shadow (1892)
      2. The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard (1896)
      3. Uncle Bernac (1897)
      4. The Adventures of Gerard (1903)

    10. The Gully of Bluemansdyke (1893) [short stories]

    11. The Parasite (1894)

    12. Round the Red Lamp: Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life (1894) [short stories]

    13. The Stark Munro Letters (1895)

    14. The Conan Doyle Historical Romances. Volume 2 of 2. London: John Murray, 1932.
      1. The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard (1896)
      2. Rodney Stone (1896)
      3. Uncle Bernac (1897)
      4. The Adventures of Gerard (1903)

    15. The Original Illustrated Arthur Conan Doyle. Castle Books. Secausus, New Jersey: Book Sales, Inc., 1980.
      1. The Tragedy of the Korosko (1898)

    16. A Duet, with an Occasional Chorus (1899)

    17. The Green Flag and Other Stories of War and Sport (1900) [short stories]

    18. Round the Fire Stories (1908) [short stories]

    19. The Last Galley (1911) [short stories]

    20. The Complete Professor Challenger Stories. 1952. London: John Murray, 1963.
      1. The Lost World (1912)
      2. The Poison Belt (1913)
      3. The Land of Mist (1926)
      4. "The Disintegration Machine" (1928)
      5. "When the World Screamed" (1929)

    21. Danger! and Other Stories (1918) [short stories]

    22. Three of Them (1923) [short stories]

    23. The Conan Doyle Stories. 1929. London: John Murray, 1951.
      1. Tales of the Ring & the Camp
      2. Tales of Pirates & Blue Water
      3. Tales of Terror & Mystery
      4. Tales of Twilight & the Unseen
      5. Tales of Adventure & Medical Life
      6. Tales of Long Ago

    24. The Maracot Deep. 1929. London: John Murray, 1961.

    25. The Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Four Novels and the Fifty-Six Short Stories Complete, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Ed. William S. Baring-Gould. 2 vols. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1967.

    26. The Unknown Conan Doyle: Uncollected Stories. Ed. John Michael Gibson and Richard Lancelyn Green. 1982. London: Secker & Warburg, 1983.

    27. The Uncollected Sherlock Holmes. Ed. Richard Lancelyn Green. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983.

    28. A Study in Scarlet: Based on the Story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. A Sherlock Holmes Murder Mystery. 1887. Webb & Bower (Publishers) Limited. 1983. London: Peerage Books, 1985.

    29. The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: After Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Ed. Richard Lancelyn Green. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.

    30. The Original Illustrated 'Strand' Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Facsimile Edition. 1989. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 1990.

    31. The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes. Vol. 1: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes & The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. Ed. Leslie S. Klinger. New York & London: W. W. Norton, 2005.

    32. The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes. Vol. 2: The Return of Sherlock Holmes, His Last Bow & The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes. Ed. Leslie S. Klinger. New York & London: W. W. Norton, 2005.

    33. The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes. Vol. 3: A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, The Hound of the Baskervilles & The Valley of Fear. Ed. Leslie S. Klinger. New York & London: W. W. Norton, 2006.


    34. Poetry:

    35. Songs of Action (1898)

    36. Songs of the Road (1911)

    37. The Guards Came Through, and Other Poems (1919)

    38. The Poems: Collected Edition. 1922. London: John Murray, 1928.


    39. Non-fiction:

    40. The Great Boer War (1900)

    41. The War in South Africa – Its Cause and Conduct (1902)

    42. Through the Magic Door (1907)

    43. The Crime of the Congo (1909)

    44. The Case of Oscar Slater (1912)

    45. The German War: Some Sidelights and Reflections (1914)

    46. A Visit to Three Fronts (1916)

    47. The British Campaign in France and Flanders. 6 vols (1916–20)

    48. Memories and Adventures (1924)

    49. Dangerous Work: Diary of an Arctic Adventure (2012)


    50. Spiritualism:

    51. The New Revelation (1918)

    52. A Full Report of a Lecture on Spiritualism Delivered by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at the Connaught Hall, Worthing on Friday July 11th 1919 (1919)

    53. The Vital Message (1919)

    54. Our reply to the Cleric: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Lecture in Leicester, October 19th 1919 (1920)

    55. Spiritualism and Rationalism (1920)

    56. Verbatim Report of a Public Debate on 'The Truth of Spiritualism' between Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Joseph McCabe (1920)

    57. The Wanderings of a Spiritualist (1921)

    58. The Coming of the Fairies (1922)

    59. The Case for Spirit Photography (1922)

    60. Our American Adventure (1923)

    61. Our Second American Adventure (1924)

    62. The Spiritualist's Reader (1924)

    63. The Early Christian Church and Modern Spiritualism (1925)

    64. Psychic Experiences (1925)

    65. The History of Spiritualism (1926)

    66. Pheneas Speaks (1927)

    67. A Word of Warning (1928)

    68. What Does Spiritualism Actually Teach and Stand For? (1928)

    69. The Roman Catholic Church: A Rejoinder (1929)

    70. An Open Letter to Those of My Generation (1929)

    71. Our African Winter (1929)

    72. The Edge of the Unknown (1930)
      • On the Unexplained. London: Hesperus Press Limited, 2013.

    73. The New Revelation (1997)


    74. Secondary:

    75. Baker, Michael. The Doyle Diary: The Last Great Conan Doyle Mystery. With a Holmesian Investigation into the Strange and Curious Case of Charles Altamont Doyle. London: Book Club Associates, 1978.

    76. Baring-Gould, William S. Sherlock Holmes: A Life of the World’s First Consulting Detective. 1962. London: Panther, 1975.

    77. Carr, John Dickson. The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. 1949. London: Pan Books, 1953.

    78. Edwards, Owen Dudley. The Quest for Sherlock Holmes: A Biographical Study of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. 1983. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.

    79. Meyer, Nicholas. The Seven Per Cent Solution: Being a Reprint from the Reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D.. 1974. Coronet Books. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1975.

    80. Nordon, Pierre. Conan Doyle. 1964. Trans. Frances Partridge. London: John Murray, 1966.

    81. Pearson, Hesketh. Conan Doyle: His Life and Art. 1943. Guild Books, 224. London: The British Publishers Guild, 1946.

    82. Starrett, Vincent. The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. 1960. Introduction by Michael Murphy. New York: Pinnacle Books, 1975.

    83. Tracy, Jack. The Encyclopaedia Sherlockiana or, A Universal Dictionary of the State of Knowledge of Sherlock Holmes and His Biographer, John H. Watson, M.D. 1977. New York: Avon, 1979.



    Leslie S. Klinger, ed. The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes (3 vols: 2005-6)


    Thursday, February 25, 2021

    Risorgimento!



    My Sixth Form history teacher at Rangitoto College in 1978 was called Mr. Dalton. He was an excellent teacher, I think, relaxed and approachable, and treating our overall theme - European history in the 19th century - with gusto and enthusiasm.

    The topic that interested me most that year was the Unification of Italy - aka 'il Risorgimento' [the Resurgence / the Uprising]. I knew nothing whatever about it (though I already had some grasp of the main events of the Napoleonic wars through assiduous reading of C. S. Forester's Hornblower books). Cavour, Mazzini, Garibaldi - I might have heard their names, but I had no idea who they actually were.

    I had, of course, encountered the last of them in that celebrated passage in Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (1908) where Mole's tastes in ornamental statuary are itemised:
    ... Garibaldi, and the infant Samuel, and Queen Victoria, and other heroes of modern Italy.


    Chris Dunn: Carol-singing mice


    Presumably those 'other heroes' would have included Cavour and Mazzini, and possibly even King Vittorio Emanuele himself. If you look at the picture at the top of this page, you can see an idealised version of the famous meeting between the King and Garibaldi at which the latter handed over to the former dominion over the whole of Southern Italy.

    G. M. Trevelyn. Garibaldi and the Thousand (May 1860). 1909. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1948.

    I think, at the time, I already owned a copy of G. M. Trevelyan's Garibaldi and the Thousand (1909), his classic account of the liberation of Sicily during a single month of that year of destiny, 1860.

    I owned it but I hadn't read it. In fact I didn't finally read it till last week, more than forty years after buying it for a buck or so from a pile of other remaindered stock at Allphee books in Auckland. It wasn't so much laziness as the fact that I knew that it was the middle part of a trilogy, and - being of a somewhat obsessive temperament where such things are concerned - I had to get the other two parts before I could finally open its pages.

    G. M. Trevelyan. Garibaldi's Defence of the Roman Republic, 1848-9. 1907. A Phoenix Press Paperback. London: The Orion Publishing Group Ltd., 2001.

    I found volume one, Garibaldi's Defence of the Roman Republic, in Albany in 2011. I'm not quite sure when I acquired volume three, Garibaldi and the Making of Italy, but it's an ex-library book, so it was probably in Palmerston North in the 1990s.

    G. M. Trevelyan. Garibaldi and the Making of Italy (June-November 1860). 1911. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1948.

    I guess the point I'm making is that it was quite a protracted process.

    In many ways I'm glad that I waited so long, though. I think I'm in a better position now to appreciate it without being put off by the almost hysterical tone of adulation that pervades its pages.



    William Hope: George Macaulay Trevelyan (1876-1962)


    The young Trevelyan, great-nephew of the classic Whig historian Thomas Babington Macaulay and son of his biographer George Otto Trevelyan, was in his late twenties when he began his researches, and had only reached his mid-thirties when he completed the last volume. Perhaps as a result of youthful enthusiasm, he seems to have found it nearly impossible to maintain any distance from his subject.

    The mere fact that he'd found time to tramp over every obscure goat track frequented by the great one gives testimony to that. He was even able to talk to many of Garibaldi's principal lieutenants (and accomplices) before time overtook them.

    All of this gives his trilogy an atmosphere of intimate absorption in the career of a larger-than-life hero. Nor does he apologise for this in any of the prefaces to its many reprints. There is, he admits, room for alternative approaches - but this is his, and it does have the effect of making it feel more like an elaborately researched work of creative non-fiction than your more typical dry-as-dust history.



    I suppose, in retrospect, that sixth-form history course might have had something to do with my decision to take Italian as one of the majoring subjects in my BA. I've certainly never regretted that choice. It's true that we spent more time studying the literature of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries than that of the nineteenth - in fact, so much Ariosto, Dante, Poliziano and Tasso did we read that our young Neapolitan Italian conversation teacher, Francesca, accused us of speaking "una specie d'italiano Dantesco": a distinctly Dante-esque Italian - but at the time that suited my medievalist inclinations very well.

    But the theme of the unification of Italy dominates not just the writers of its own era, the mid to late nineteenth century, but also many of their precursors. Reading Trevelyan, with his copious quotations from contemporary English and Italian poets, got me to thinking about the literature of the Risorgimento: those books which can give us some sense of what it felt like to be alive in those times.

    Trevelyan puts it best in the preface to a 1920 popular edition of Garibaldi's Defence of the Roman Republic:
    The events of the Risorgimento, a large portion of which are covered in this Garibaldian trilogy, are ... to the Italian of to-day more than any single epoch of English history can be to us. They are to him all that the story of Washington and Lincoln together are to the American. To be friends with Italy, we must begin by understanding and sympathising with the movement that gave her birth. [6]
    Any attempt to chronicle the history of English culture in the nineteenth century has to run up continually against Italy: the Romantic poets were obsessed with its language and literature; Keats and Shelley both died there, and Byron spent many years there before his final Greek adventure. Matthew Arnold, Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Ruskin, all travelled there, and all had a singular relationship with it.

    I've tried to confine myself to those writers who had a direct connection with the actual events of the Risorgimento or who significantly influenced it. If you look at the list of books below, though, you'll see that that still amounts to quite a few names:





    Vittorio Alfieri (1749-1803)

    Precursors:



      Vittorio Alfieri: Vita Scritta da Esso (1804)


      Count Vittorio Alfieri (1749-1803)

    1. Alfieri, Vittorio. Vita Scritta da Esso. 1804. Ed. Luigi Galeazzo Tenconi. Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, 1563-1566. Milano: Rizzoli Editore, 1960.
    2. Vittorio Alfieri's posthumously published autobiography gives a good account of the life of this turbulent, quarrelsome poet and tragedian. His liberal inclinations, expressed in his various political writings ("Against Tyranny" and "The Prince and Literature"), had a considerable influence on the beginnings of the movement for Italian freedom.


      Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-1872)

    3. Mazzini, Joseph. The Duty of Man and Other Essays. 1907. Everyman’s Library, 224. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1924.
    4. Giuseppe Mazzini was the heart and soul of the ideological struggle for a unified Italy. While his own desires for a republic rather than a monarchy were not fulfilled, his lifelong devotion to the cause inspired Garibaldi and the other architects of the eventual, compromised Kingdom of Italy. His brief stint as one of the three triumvirs at the head of the Roman Republic was a failure in practical terms, but a symbolic triumph, which helped establish the idea of Rome as the capital of the new nation.






    Ugo Foscolo (1778-1827)

    Poets:



      Giosuè Alessandro Michele Carducci (1835–1907)

    1. Carducci, Giosuè. Selected Verse. Ed. & trans. David H. Higgins. Warminster, England: Aris & Phillips Ltd., 1994.
    2. Giosuè Carducci, the first Italian to win the Nobel Prize for literature, has come to be seen as a kind of embodiment of intellectual liberty, both in his life and his works. His most famous poem, the "Hymn to Satan" (1863) was considered "by Italian leftists of the time as a metaphor of the rebellious and freethinking spirit." It was first published in a newspaper shortly before the 1870 march on Rome which finally reunited the country. Somewhat appropriately, the Museum of the Risorgimento (Bologna) is located in the house he died in, the Casa Carducci.


      Ugo Foscolo: Ultime Lettere di Jacopo Ortis (1802)


      Niccolò [Ugo] Foscolo (1778-1827)

    3. Foscolo, Ugo. Tutte le Poesie. Ed. Ludovico Magugliani. Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, 411-413. Milano: Rizzoli Editore, 1952.

    4. Foscolo, Ugo. Liriche Scelte: I Sepolcri e Le Grazie. Commento di Severino Ferrari. Ed. Oreste Antognoni & Sergio Romagnoli. Biblioteca Carducciana, 5. Firenze: Sansoni, 1964.

    5. Foscolo, Ugo. Ultime Lettere di Jacopo Ortis. Ed. Ludovico Magugliani. Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, 12-13. Milano: Rizzoli Editore, 1949.
    6. Ugo Foscolo's famous novel The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis (1798) depicts the state of mind of an Italian patriot forced to endure the destruction of the Venetian Republic by Napoleon's invading armies in 1797. His most famous poem, "Dei Sepolcri" [From the graves] (1807) suggests summoning up the spirits of the dead to help in the struggle from freedom in his country. He died in exile in London, like so many other Italian writers and thinkers. Long after his death he became a potent symbol of resistance for the new nation of Italy.


      Giacomo Leopardi: All'Italia (1819)


      Giacomo Taldegardo Francesco di Sales Saverio Pietro Leopardi (1798–1837)

    7. Leopardi, Giacomo. Canti. Ed. Franco Brioschi. 1974. Superbur Classici. Milan: BUR, 1999.

    8. Leopardi, Giacomo. Canti. Ed. John Humphreys Whitfield. 1967. Italian Texts. Ed. Kathleen Speight. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978.

    9. Leopardi, Giacomo. Canti. Trans. Jonathan Galassi. 2010. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin, 2010.

    10. Leopardi, Giacomo. Operette Morali. 1827. Ed. Saverio Orlando. Classici Italiani. Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli. 1976. Milano: Rizzoli Editore, 1982.

    11. Flora Francesco, ed. Tutte le Opere di Giacomo Leopardi: Le Poesie e le Prose. 1940. vols 1 & 2 of 5. I Classici Mondadori. Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1962.

    12. Leopardi, Giacomo. Poesie e Prose. Volume primo: Poesie. Ed. Mario Andrea Rigoni. Essay by Cesare Galimberti. 1987. Le Opere di Giacomo Leopardi. 4 vols. I Meridiani. Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1998.
    13. Giacomo Leopardi was unquestionably the greatest Italian poet of the nineteenth century. While he was not directly involved in the revolutionary movements which led eventually to the reunification, the strongly idealistic and even (at times) nationalistic tone of much of his poetic work had a huge influence on the generation which attempted to enact these abstractions in reality. Poems such as "Orazione agli Italiani in Occasione della Liberazione del Piceno" [Oration to the Italians on the liberation of Piceno] (1815) were read as more directly prophetic of Mazzini and Garibaldi's aspirations than they were probably meant to be by the poet himself.


      Anthologies & Secondary Literature

    14. Kay, George R., ed. The Penguin Book of Italian Verse: With Plain Prose Translations of Each Poem. 1958. The Penguin Poets. Ed. J. M. Cohen. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960.

    15. Sanguinetti, Edoardo, ed. Poesia Italiana del Novecento. Gli Struzzi, 3. 2 vols. Torino: Einaudi, 1969.
    16. Either of these anthologies can serve as a useful sampler from the immense body of patriotic Italian verse produced during the nineteenth century (alongside the usual reams of love poetry).






    Ippolito Nievo (1831-1861)

    Novelists:



      Umberto Eco: The Prague Cemetery (2010)


      Umberto Eco (1932-2016)

    1. Eco, Umberto. The Prague Cemetery. 2010. Trans. Richard Dixon. Harvill Secker. London: Random House, 2011.
    2. Umberto Eco's penultimate novel is set against the backdrop of the Italian Risorgimento. The main character, a cynical reactionary called Simone Simonini, encounters the patriotic Italian novelist Ippolito Nievo in Sicily, during Garibaldi's 1860 campaign to liberate of the island:
      Simonini is ordered to destroy some heavily guarded documents in Nievo's possession. He befriends Nievo to gain his confidence - but the papers are too closely guarded. The only way Simonini can think of is to blow up the ship on which Nievo is sailing - sending the papers, Nievo himself and dozens of others to the deeps. Simonini develops an elaborate scheme to smuggle aboard a deranged malcontent with a box of explosives, and bribes a sailor to take part in the scheme, knowing that they would both be killed along with everybody else on the boat. Simonini then stabs to death an accomplice on land who had provided the explosive, to silence him.
      Simonini goes on to engineer the forgery of the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion.


      Giuseppe de Lampedusa: The Leopard, with a Memory and Two Stories (1958 & 1961)


      Giuseppe Tomasi, 11th Prince of Lampedusa (1896-1957)

    3. Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi di. Il Gattopardo: Edizione conforme al manoscritto del 1957. 1958. Universale Economica Feltrinelli. Milano: Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, 1981.

    4. Lampedusa, Giuseppe di. The Leopard. 1958. Trans. Archibald Colquhoun. 1960. Fontana Modern Novels. London: William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1969.

    5. Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi di. I Racconti. 1961. Ed. Nicoletta Polo. Prefazione di Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi. 1988. Universale Economica Feltrinelli. Milano: Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, 1993.

    6. Lampedusa, Giuseppe di. Two Stories and a Memory. 1961. Trans. Archibald Colquhoun. 1962. Introduction by E. M. Forster. The Universal Library. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1968.

    7. Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi di. The Siren & Selected Writings. 1961 & 1990-91. Trans. Archibald Colquhoun, David Gilmour, & Guido Waldman. 1962 & 1993. Introductions by David Gilmour. London: The Harvill Press, 1995.

    8. Gilmour, David. The Last Leopard: A Life of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. 1988. The Harvill Press. London: Random House, 2003.
    9. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa is really known only for the one novel he wrote, Il Gattopardo [The Leopard] (1958), set in his native Sicily during Garibaldi's invasion of the island, and not published till after the author's death. Acclaimed as a masterpiece, the book was subsequently filmed by Luchino Visconti. Starring Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon, and Claudia Cardinale, The Leopard won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1963.


      Alessandro Manzoni: The Betrothed (1827)


      Alessandro Francesco Tommaso Manzoni (1785-1873)

    10. Manzoni, Alessandro. I Promessi sposi: Edizione Integrale Commentata. 1825-27. Ed. Lanfranco Caretti. Grande Universale Mursia testi, Nuova serie, 16. 1966. Milano: U. Mursia & C., 1972.

    11. Manzoni, Alessandro. The Betrothed: ‘I Promessi sposi.’ A Tale of XVII Century Milan. 1827. Trans. Archibald Colquhoun. 1951. London: The Reprint Society Ltd., 1952.
    12. While Alessandro Manzoni's famous novel I promessi sposi [The Betrothed] (1827) is set in the seventeenth century:
      The novel is also a symbol of the Italian Risorgimento, both for its patriotic message and because it was a fundamental milestone in the development of the modern, unified Italian language.
      Having published it, first, in his native Lombardy in the 1820s, he painstakingly rewrote it in Tuscan dialect - identified by him as the proper model for a modern literary Italian - for republication in 1842. His stanzas on the death of Napoleon, Il Cinque maggio [The Fifth of May] (1821), have become one of the most popular lyrics in the Italian language.


      Ippolito Nievo: The Castle of Fratta (1954)


      Ippolito Nievo (1831-1861)

    13. Nievo, Ippolito. The Castle of Fratta. Trans. Lovett F. Edwards. Illustrated by Eric Fraser. London: The Folio Society, 1954.
    14. Ippolito Nievo, who died young in the shipwreck described in Umberto Eco's The Prague Cemetery (mentioned above), shortly after taking part in the liberation of Sicily as one of Garibaldi's famous "thousand", is best known for his novel Le Confessioni d'un italiano [Confessions of an Italian], a portion of which was translated into English as The Castle of Fratta in 1954. A complete translation came out from Penguin Classics in 2014. It is widely considered the most important Italian novel of the Risorgimento era.






    Carlo Pellegrini: Algernon Swinburne (1837-1909)

    Foreigners:



      E. B. Browning: Casa Guidi Windows (1851)


      Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)

    1. Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. The Poetical Works. Introduction by Alice Meynell. London: Ward, Lock & Co., Limited, n.d.

    2. Kelley, Philip, & Ronald Hudson, ed. Diary by E. B. B.: The Unpublished Diary of Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, 1831-1832. Including Psychoanalytical Observations by Robert Coles, M. D. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1969.

    3. The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1845-46. With Portraits and Facsimiles. 2 vols. 1898. New York & London: Harper & Brothers., Publishers, 1926.
    4. Elizabeth Barrett Browning moved to Italy with her husband in 1846, and died in Florence in 1861. She took a passionate interest in the movement for Italian freedom, and wrote an account of her personal experience of the events of 1848-49 in her 1851 poem "Casa Guidi Windows." Shortly before her death she issued:
      a small volume of political poems titled Poems before Congress (1860) "most of which were written to express her sympathy with the Italian cause after the outbreak of fighting in 1859". They caused a furore in England, and the conservative magazines Blackwood's and the Saturday Review labelled her a fanatic.


      Robert Browning (1812-1889)

    5. Browning, Robert. The Poetical Works of Robert Browning. 2 vols in 1. Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1872.

    6. Browning, Robert. The Poetical Works, with Portraits. Ed. Augustine Birrell. 2 vols. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1900.

    7. Browning, Robert. Poetical Works, 1833-1864. Ed. Ian Jack. 1970. Oxford Standard Authors. London: Oxford University Press, 1975.

    8. Browning, Robert. The Poems. Ed. John Pettigrew & Thomas J. Collins. Penguin English Poets. 2 vols. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.

    9. Browning, Robert. The Ring and The Book. Ed. Richard D. Altick. 1971. Penguin English Poets. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.

    10. Hodell, Charles W., trans & ed. The Old Yellow Book: Source Book of Browning’s “The Ring and the Book”. 1911. Everyman’s Library, 503. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1927.

    11. Browning, Robert. Browning to His American Friends: Letters between the Brownings, the Storys and James Russell Lowell, 1841-1890. Ed. Gertrude Reese Hudson. 1970. London: Bowes and Bowes, 1965.
    12. Robert Browning was perhaps the most 'Italianised' English poet of the nineteenth century. From his first travels there in 1838, looking for material for his book-length poem Sordello to his epic poem The Ring and the Book (1868-69), it stood at the centre of his preoccupations. His poem "The Italian in England" (1845) shows an interestingly detached view of revolutionary politics, but there's no doubt that he sympathised greatly with the movement for Italian independence.


      George Gordon Noel, 6th Baron Byron (1788-1824)

    13. Byron, Lord. The Complete Poetical Works. Volume 1. Ed. Jerome J. McGann. Oxford English Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980.

    14. Byron, Lord. The Poetical Works. Ed. Frederick Page. 1904. Rev. ed. 1945. Oxford Standard Authors. London: Oxford University Press, 1959.

    15. Byron, Lord. Don Juan. Ed. T. G. Steffan, E. Steffan, & W. W. Pratt. Penguin English Poets. 1973. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996.

    16. Byron, George Gordon Noel, Lord. Selected Letters and Journals. Ed. Leslie A. Marchand. 1982. London: Picador Classics, 1988.

    17. Byron, George Gordon, Lord. Byron's Letters and Journals: The Complete and Unexpurgated Text of All the Letters Available in Manuscript and the Full Printed Version of All Others. 12 vols. Ed. Leslie A. Marchand. London: John Murray, 1973-82.

    18. Longford, Elizabeth. Byron. 1976. London: Arrow Books Limited, 1978.

    19. Origo, Iris. The Last Attachment: the Story of Byron and Teresa Guiccioli, as Told in Their Unpublished Letters and Other Family Papers. 1949. The Fontana Library. London: Collins Clear-Type Press, 1962.
    20. George Gordon, Lord Byron lived in Italy for seven years after the breakup of his marriage in 1816. He moved between the cities of Venice, Ravenna, and Pisa, where he maintained extensive contacts with radicals and revolutionaries from a number of nations, and participated in a lot of vague plotting before settling on the struggle for Greek Independence as his principal cause. This period is chronicled in Peter Quennell's Byron in Italy (1941), as well as the book by Iris Origo listed above. More of a precursor than a participant in the struggle for freedom in Italy. one can't underrate the lasting influence of Byron's example on future poets and writers devoted to the cause.


      A. H. Clough: Amours de Voyage (1858)


      Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861)

    21. Clough, Arthur Hugh. Poems. 1891. London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1903.

    22. Clough, Arthur Hugh. The Poems. Ed. A. L. P. Norrington. Oxford Standard Authors. 1967. London: Oxford University Press, 1968.

    23. Thorpe, Michael, ed. A Choice of Clough’s Verse. Faber Paper Covered Editions. London: Faber, 1969.
    24. Arthur Hugh Clough's most famous poem Amours de Voyage was written in Rome in 1849, though it wasn't published until 1858. Clough provides us with a surprisingly modern set of reactions to the revolutionary turmoil taking place around him, rather in the manner of Stendhal's account of the Battle of Waterloo in La Chartreuse de Parme (1839).


      Henry James (1843-1916)

    25. Collected Travel Writings. The Continent: A Little Tour in France; Italian Hours; Other Travels. Ed. Richard Howard. The Library of America, 65. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1993.

    26. Kaplan, Fred, ed. Travelling in Italy with Henry James: Essays. A John Curtis Book. London: Hodder and Stoughton Ltd., 1994.

    27. William Wetmore Story and His Friends: From Letters, Diaries, and Recollections. In Two Volumes (Combined). 1903. London: Thames & Hudson, n.d.

    28. Edel, Leon. Henry James. 5 vols. 1953-72. New York: Avon Books, 1978.
      1. The Untried Years: 1843-1870 (1953)
      2. The Conquest of London: 1870-1881 (1962)
      3. The Middle Years: 1882-1895 (1962)
      4. The Treacherous Years: 1895-1901 (1969)
      5. The Master: 1901-1916 (1972)

    29. Edel, Leon. The Life of Henry James. Vol. 1: 1843-89. 1953, 1962, 1963. Peregrine Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.

    30. Edel, Leon. The Life of Henry James. Vol. 2. 1963, 1969, 1972. Peregrine Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.

    31. Edel, Leon. Henry James: A Life. 1953, 1962, 1963, 1969, 1972 & 1977. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1985.

    32. Lewis, R. W. B. The Jameses: A Family Narrative. 1991. An Anchor Book. New York: Doubleday, 1993.
    33. Henry James's devotion to Italy was profound and life-long, though largely apolitical. His travel book Italian Hours (1909) chronicles forty years of impressions of the country. His contribution to the literature of the Risorgimento comes more from the one biography he wrote, William Wetmore Story and His Friends (1903), an account of the American sculptor's long stay in Rome from the late 1840s onward. There Story made friends with the Brownings, Walter Savage Landor, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Russell Lowell, and a host of other travellers and exiles.


      George Meredith: Vittoria (1867)


      George Meredith (1828-1909)

    34. Meredith, George. The Poetical Works. With Some Notes by G. M. Trevelyan. London: Constable and Company Ltd., 1912.
    35. George Meredith spent three months in Italy in 1866, which assisted him in composing Vittoria (a sequel to Emilia in England (1864) - later retitled Sandra Belloni). While not perhaps among his finest works, these two novels - along with many of his poems - show his lifelong love and devotion to Italy.


      Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882)

    36. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. Collected Works. Volume I: Poems, Prose-Tales and Literary Papers. Ed. William M. Rossetti. 2 vols. London: Ellis & Elvey, 1888.

    37. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. Collected Works. Volume II: Translations, Prose-Notices of Fine Art. Ed. William M. Rossetti. 2 vols. London: Ellis & Elvey, 1888.

    38. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. Poems and Translations: 1850-1870. Together with the Prose Story ‘Hand and Soul.’ Oxford Standard Authors. London: Humphrey Milford / Oxford University Press, 1913.

    39. Doughty, Oswald, ed. Rossetti’s Poems. 1961. Everyman’s Library, 627. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1968.
    40. Gabriele Rossetti, an Italian patriot and poet in exile, married Frances, the daughter of another prominent political exile, Gaetano Polidori, one of whose other sons, Dr John Polidori, was Byron's physician and companion during the famous 'haunted summer' of 1816. They had four children, including the painter-poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the critic and editor William Michael Rossetti, and the poet Christina Rossetti, all important figures in the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and vital to nineteenth century English literary and artistic culture in general.


      A. C. Swinburne: Songs Before Sunrise (1871)


      Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909)

    41. Swinburne, Algernon Charles. Collected Poetical Works. 2 vols. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1924.

    42. Swinburne, Algernon Charles. Poems. Ed. Bonamy Dobrée. The Penguin Poets. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961.

    43. Swinburne, Algernon Charles. Poems and Ballads / Atalanta in Calydon. 1866 & 1865. Ed. Morse Peckham. Indianapolis & New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970.

    44. Swinburne, Algernon Charles. A Choice of Swinburne’s Verse. Ed. Robert Nye. London: Faber, 1973.

    45. Thomas, Donald. Swinburne: The Poet in His World. 1979. London: Allison & Busby, 1999.
    46. The dissolute English poet Algernon Swinburne's most famous contribution to the struggle to free Italy was his poetry collection Songs Before Sunrise (1871), which continued the themes of his earlier "A Song of Italy". It was partly inspired by his meeting with Mazzini in 1867.


      Illustrated London News: Tennyson meets Garibaldi (1864)


      Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson (1809-1892)

    47. Tennyson, Alfred. Poems. London: Edward Moxon, 1853.

    48. Tennyson, Lord Alfred. The Works. 1884. London: Macmillan and Co., 1893.

    49. Tennyson, Alfred, Lord. Poems of Tennyson, 1830-1868: Including 'The Princess,' 'In Memoriam,' 'Maud,' Four 'Idylls of the King,' 'Enoch Arden' etc. Introduction by Sir Herbert Warren. Oxford Edition. London: Humphrey Milford / Oxford University Press, 1923.

    50. Tennyson, Alfred, Lord. Poetical Works, Including the Plays. 1953. Oxford Standard Authors. London: Oxford University Press, 1963.

    51. Ricks, Christopher, ed. The Poems of Tennyson. Longmans Annotated English Poets. London & Harlow: Longman, Green and Co, Ltd.. 1969.

    52. Tennyson, Alfred. Tennyson: A Selected Edition. Longmans Annotated English Poets. Ed. Christopher Ricks. 1969. Revised ed. 3 vols. 1987. Selected Edition. 1989. Pearson Longman. Edinburgh Gate: Pearson Education Limited, 2007.

    53. Tennyson, Alfred. Tennyson’s Poetry: Authoritative Texts; Juvenilia and Early Responses; Criticism. Ed. Robert W. Hill, Jr. A Norton Critical edition. New York: W. W. Norton, 1971.

    54. Lang, Cecil Y., & Edgar F. Shannon, ed. The Letters of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Volume 1: 1821-1850. 1981. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981.

    55. Hallam, Lord Tennyson. Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, by His Son. 1897. 2 vols in 1. London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1899.
    56. Alfred Tennyson's 1851 poem "The Daisy" gives a vivid account of his honeymoon in Italy. Though far less of an "Inglese Italianato" (è un diavolo incarnato) [An Italianised Englishman is a devil incarnate], as the proverb puts it, than many of his contemporaries, he did have a widely publicised meeting with Garibaldi on the Isle of Wight in 1864, and the latter planted a tree to commemorate the event.


      Geoffrey Trease: Follow My Black Plume (1963)


      Geoffrey Trease (1909-1998)

    57. Trease, Geoffrey. Follow My Black Plume. Illustrated by Brian Wildsmith. 1963. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.

    58. Trease, Geoffrey. A Thousand for Sicily. Illustrated by Brian Wildsmith. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1964.
    59. Geoffrey Trease's pair of historical novels give a lively and nuanced account of the dramatic events of 1849 and 1860 - meant for children, but based firmly on a reading of Trevelyan's trilogy among other works.


      Anthologies & Secondary Literature

    60. Baker, Carlos. Emerson among the Eccentrics: A Group Portrait. Ed. Elizabeth B. Carter. Introduction & Epilogue by James R. Mellow. New York: Viking Penguin, 1996.

    61. Morley, John. The Life of William Ewart Gladstone. 1903. Lloyd's Popular Edition. 2 vols. London: Edward Lloyd, Limited, 1908.
    62. The first of these books gives a lively account of Emerson's friend Margaret Fuller's involvement with Italian revolutionary politics over the 1848-49 period. She was a close friend of Mazzini, and had a child with Italian patriot Giovanni Ossoli. All three of them were drowned in a shipwreck in 1850.

      The second gives full details of the circumstances surrounding the composition of Gladstone's Letters to the Earl of Aberdeen (1851), a denunciation of the Bourbon regime in Naples based on a visit to some of the political prisoners in their jails. Gladstone famously described what he saw there as "the negation of God erected into a system of government." This had an immense effect on public opinion throughout Europe.







    G. M. Trevelyan with his Father and Son (1910)

    George Macaulay Trevelyan
    (1876-1962)


    1. England in the Age of Wycliffe, 1368–1520 (1899)

    2. England Under the Stuarts (1904)

    3. The Poetry and Philosophy of George Meredith (1906)

    4. The Garibaldi Trilogy. 3 vols (1907-1909)
      1. Garibaldi's Defence of the Roman Republic, 1848-9. 1907. A Phoenix Press Paperback. London: The Orion Publishing Group Ltd., 2001.
      2. Garibaldi and the Thousand (May 1860). 1909. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1948.
      3. Garibaldi and the Making of Italy (June-November 1860). 1911. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1948.

    5. [Ed.] The Poetical Works of George Meredith (1912)

    6. The Life of John Bright (1913)

    7. Clio, A Muse and Other Essays (1913)

    8. Scenes From Italy's War (1919)

    9. The Recreations of an Historian (1919)

    10. Lord Grey of the Reform Bill (1920)

    11. British History in the Nineteenth Century, 1782–1901 (1922)

    12. Manin and the Venetian Revolution of 1848 (1923)

    13. History of England (1926)

    14. [Ed.] Select Documents for Queen Anne's Reign, Down to the Union with Scotland 1702-7 (1929)

    15. England Under Queen Anne. 3 vols (1930-34):
      1. Blenheim. 1930. The Fontana Library. London: Collins, 1965.
      2. Ramillies and the Union with Scotland. 1932. The Fontana Library. London: Collins, 1965.
      3. The Peace and the Protestant Succession. 1934. The Fontana Library. London: Collins, 1965.

    16. Sir George Otto Trevelyan: A Memoir (1932)

    17. Grey of Fallodon (1937)

    18. The English Revolution, 1688–1698 (1938)

    19. A Shortened History of England. 1942. A Pelican Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964.

    20. Illustrated English Social History. 1942. 4 vols. Volume One: Chaucer’s England & The Early Tudors. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1949.

    21. English Social History. 1942. Illustrated Edition, ed. Ruth C. Wright. 4 vols. 1949-1952. Harmondsworth Penguin, 1964.
      1. Volume One: Chaucer’s England & The Early Tudors
      2. Volume Two: The Age of Shakespeare and the Stuart Period
      3. Volume Three: The Eighteenth Century
      4. Volume Four: The Nineteenth Century

    22. Trinity College: An Historical Sketch (1943)

    23. History and the Reader (1945)

    24. An Autobiography and Other Essays (1949)

    25. [Ed.] Carlyle: An Anthology (1953)

    26. A Layman's Love of Letters (1954)