Commonplace Book

'But Sapphira was inclined to argue. "Quite nice men eat walnuts," she said.

"Well, all I can say is, that if they do, they won't be nice for long; for there is nothing so upsetting to the digestion as walnuts, and nothing so upsetting to the temper as the digestion. It is not the slightest use telling a man to love his wife and not be bitter against her, as long as you allow him to eat walnuts: because it isn't in human nature that he can obey you."'

from Kate of Kate Hall by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler and Alfred Laurence Felkin (Chapter II)

Commonplace Book

'...Fortunately for herself - and still more fortunately for Lord Claverley - she was married before it became the fashion for a woman to regard her husband merely as an interesting and instructive social problem, requiring a purely intellectual solution; she belonged to that blessed generation of women who regarded their husbands in very much the same way as men of science regard the great forces of nature - as dimly comprehended powers, mighty and terrible when uncontrolled, but capable, under proper guidance and management, of being adapted to the most ordinary and domestic uses.'

from Kate of Kate Hall by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler and Alfred Laurence Felkin (Chapter I)

Baldwin by Richard Barham (1820)

This was published under a pseudonym, namely 'An Old Bachelor', and considerably anticipated Barham's great success with The Ingoldsby Legends. So much so, that it has generally been completely forgotten, as has his other novel, and he is regarded as a one-trick pony. On the basis of this, that verdict seems very unfair. This novel is an unusual amalgam, though less so given its era, of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It has not only the flavour of its own post-Napoleonic era, but also that of Smollett and Fielding. It begins with the discovery one morning in the snow of the body of a lonely man who'd left a coach near his home the night before. Then his lawyer discovers that his fortune is not as has been reputed; his young son and heir is nowhere near so well off as expected. These parts are marked with some ramshackle humour. Then the story progresses into one of love in the local village, where an almost Austenian tone prevails of gentle farce. There is also in this part a diversion to Oxford and the university, and some more rumbunctious wit. The endgame comes with an assignation in a summer-house, and a belatedly discovered murder in which young Baldwin, the heir, is almost uncounterably implicated. Barham takes the reader right up to the point of his hanging before a last minute reprieve in the form of the confession of an as yet unknown other. He then slowly relates a backstory to explain how the murder occurred, and to fully flavour young Baldwin's history and the reason for his diminution of fortune. Moments of wit and satire punctuate the good majority of all this, making a colourful feast of variety and event. The print-on-demand edition I read has the usual faults of very poor photocopying and so on; there are also a few missing pages. One can only hope that this book will get a proper republication, and Barham's reputation a boost which it thoroughly deserves, sooner rather than later.

Commonplace Book

'The two men composing most of us at the outset of actual life began their deadly wrestle within him, both having become awakened. If they wait for circumstance, that steady fire will fuse them into one, who is commonly a person of some strength; but throttling is the custom between them, and we are used to see men of murdered halves. These men have what they fought for: they are unaware of any guilt that may be charged against them, though they know that they do not embrace Life; and so it is that we have vague discontent too universal. Change, O Lawgiver! the length of our minority, and let it not end till this battle is thoroughly fought out in approving daylight. The period of our duality should be one as irresponsible in your eyes as that of our infancy. Is he we call a young man an individual - who is a pair of alternately kicking scales? Is he educated, when he dreams not that he is divided?..'

from Sandra Belloni by George Meredith (Chapter XXX)

Commonplace Book

'...the mistakes committed by ignorance in a virtuous disposition would never be of such fatal consequence to the public weal as the practices of a man whose inclinations led him to be corrupt, and had great abilities to manage and multiply and defend his corruptions.'

from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (Part One, Chapter 6)

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by M. Barnard Eldershaw (1983)

A slightly bowdlerised version of this was first published in 1947 as Tomorrow and Tomorrow, but the full version was only published in 1983, with the original title restored to it. It is one of a very small band. It comes from a time when Great National Novels were discussed, and that idea was current in terms of its achievability. This is definitely a contender for the title of the Great Australian Novel. It has an outer self set in the 2300s in a kind of super-controlled, super-fertile Australia, like the Ord region of Western Australia has spread around the outer part of the entire continent. At a 'Centre' a young man, Ren, his father, Knarf, and various other members of the local community think about this supercontrol in different ways. Ren is a bit revolutionary and wants, with a friend, to "suggest" a more liberty-driven agenda for the whole country, achieved by means of popular vote. His father is also concerned about it, but his bent is Art. He writes a novel, ostensibly about the period 400 years ago when the world went through its last big convulsions before the change which brought about this more placid, inert but peaceful society. That happens to be the period of the 1930s and 1940s. This work of Knarf's is Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow's inner self. It occupies the great majority of the space, with moments spent in the 2300s as Knarf reads it to an old friend and sparring partner, both of them commenting and thinking about it. The 1930s story is set around Harry Munster, a WWI veteran, and his family of wife, two older daughters and younger son. They survive a move to the city of Sydney from a farm Harry loved, endure the Depression, cope with failed love, struggle, want, disparate politics among friends and of the country. Then WWII arrives, and having lost a lot, gained a little, bewildered, they struggle on, and are subsumed into history in a variety of ways. Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw wrote this in 1940-1942, so there comes a point where the narrative must become prospective. Here it happens eerily, with a strange section reporting a kind of plague on board a US ship in the Pacific arena, which has picked up Japanese survivors of an attack. How frightening it must have been to be writing this mid-war, and trying to predict what might happen. The Barnard Eldershaw 'what if' takes us to Japanese surrender and realignment, to further realignment where Russia is recognised to be not an ally but the enemy, and to a revolt within Australia which is led by an anti-elitist element partnering up with socialist elements, all of whom are sick of war, know it not to be an answer, and know that Australia will be further bled dry by the renewed effort expected of it in the new war on Russia. Those elements win out with a tired people, and, incredibly, they destroy Sydney, causing a mass exodus and the beginnings of a completely revolutionised new system. That skeletonised plot is extraordinary enough, but what it doesn't take account of is the magnificence of Barnard's sweeping prose. This pulses in waves of astounding, visionary and yet supremely human strength. Exactly what Eldershaw's contribution was is not clear. Apparently she usually edited, strengthened where necessary, provided alternative plot options and so on. But they were living much further apart by the time this was written; I'm not sure if the to-and-fro of ideas was a little stymied and staled by distance - she is the one who was supposed to be the more tight and concentrated of the two, but she is also an elusive mystery, a little black hole in Australian literature. I'd like to know more. The fact that this book is currently out of print is an indicator I think of where Australia's at, in terms of its national literature. This is one of its great emanations, and Marjorie Barnard in particular needs celebrating as a top-notch wordsmith, and a great figure of her nation's artistic expression.

Commonplace Book

'...Lady Delaval, sooth to say, could as soon have constructed a cathedral as a syllogism, and it is a doubtful point if she had ever drawn an inference in her life; nevertheless nature had been so liberal, and had bestowed on her such a rare talent for argumentation, that the necessity for the assistance of art was in a great measure superceded: so great indeed was her unsophisticated genius in this respect, that it may be questioned whether the redoubtable Aldrich himself, with all his formidable battering train of majors, minors, and consequences, would have been able to force her to capitulate, and admit herself vanquished.'

from Baldwin by Richard Barham (Volume One, Chapter III)