bibliographing

Well, I was going to try to post this week, but I know I need a break and I know I wouldn’t get my done in the coming long weekend anyway. So we’ll go dark here for a nice Thanksgiving break. Make sure to get your pumpkin before it runs out.

After reading, ages ago now, Sunflower by Gyula Krúdy, I wanted to read some more Hungarian literature, and now I have. Embers is a very different novel, and Sándor Márai is clearly a very different novelist, but this too is an elegy for a disappearing time and place, and it’s quite lovely.

Here it is the Austro-Hungarian empire we are mourning, along with the General, who has been shut up in a castle in the Hungarian forest for forty years. The days of great hunting parties are gone, but the Sèvres is still there and ready to be taken out, the rooms aired out, the table set for a meeting with Konrad, the General’s best friend, back after all this time.

The story of the General and Konrad is excellent, Márai’s sense of tension perfect, and the telling of it just right. I didn’t jump up and down about this novel, but I have no complaints. The themes of family, friendship, duty, and the insurmountable barriers between people—excellent, excellent.

But I think what was even better than all the rest was the theme of nationalism and longing for a home that no longer exists. Konrad tells the General:

“Vienna,” he says. “To me it was the tuning fork for the entire world. Saying the word Vienna was like striking a tuning fork and then listening to find out what tone it called forth in the person I was talking to. It was how I tested people. If there was no response, this was not the kind of person I liked.”

It is a strange inversion. World War I, which would put an end to the empire, was sparked by nationalistic actions on behalf of an ethnic minority. But here we have Konrad, a true citizen of the empire as a whole: half Austrian, half Polish, growing up in Galicia. When he says his homeland no longer exists, it is true—“My homeland was Poland, Vienna, this house, the barracks in the city, Galicia, and Chopin.” The new world that has grown up around these two old men is meaningless for him.*

Strikingly, Embers was written and published in the midst of World War II. Just a few years after the General and Konrad reminisce over their lives as servants of the emperor and lovers of nineteenth-century Vienna, the General’s homeland will come under the rule of a Stalinist dictatorship.

*Very reminiscent, for me, of the film Underground: “Once, there was a country.”

Now here are some believable letters.

For all I say I don’t like Jane Austen, she is good, and really knows how to use even an unusual-for-her form. We dive right into the letters of Lady Susan—splash!—without any frame or explanation, and right away we must put together the pieces of this story bit by bit, comparing Lady Susan’s letters to Mrs. Vernon with her letters to Mrs. Johnson and Mrs. Vernon’s letters to her mother and on and on and on.

There is no question of why we should have letters to tell this story; it is a perfect way to reveal the machinations of Lady Susan, the skepticism of Mrs. Vernon, the shallowness of Mrs. Johnson, and on and on and on. And the letters themselves are of material consequence to the story, over and over: Lady Susan’s letter makes Frederica run away from school; Frederica’s letter begins to turn Reginald against Lady Susan; Lady Susan’s false correspondence with Mrs. Manwaring makes her seem virtuous, while her real correspondence, with Mr. Manwaring, has dire consequences for all her relationships. Lady Susan writes to Mrs. Johnson for gossip, but all the rest of her letters have a purpose in the world, to get someone to do something. And as her powers begin to wane, her letters turn against her: “That tormenting creature Reginald is here. My Letter, which was intended to keep him longer in the Country, has hastened him to Town.”

Yes, here we have some good letters.

And some good characters too. Frances Burney’s contemporaries seemed really impressed with her characters, and I won’t deny that some of them were pretty good. But Lady Susan herself is so deliciously wicked, and much more fun to read about.

In her introduction to the Oxford World Classics edition of Northanger Abbey, Lady Susan, The Watsons, Sanditon, Claudia L. Johnson makes an interesting claim about Austen’s one-time use of the epistolary form:

In part despite and in part because of the exuberance of its amorality, Lady Susan is an artistic cul-de-sac for Austen. The novel’s forte is blatancy, not nuance. In the late 1790s, Austen’s gifts were evolving towards the unprecedented mastery of a form of third-person narration able to represent subjective as well as objective experience by moving seamlessly from characters’ consciousnesses to detached and authoritative commentary on them. That achievement—the perfection of free indirect discourse—eclipsed the epistolary mode. Austen, significantly, throws aside the machinery of letter-writing and finishes Lady Susan by appending a ‘Conclusion’ (possibly composed later) written in the third person, announcing facetiously that ‘to the great detriment of the Post office Revenue’, the correspondences among Lady Susan and her victims had to be discontinued.

What’s sort of brilliant about the Conclusion, though, is that Austen has come to it organically. The house of cards built by Lady Susan has been so thoroughly destroyed that it’s quite necessary for a third person to tidy things up. The correspondence is actually, in the world of the novel, necessarily over, because of “a meeting between some of the Parties and a separation between the others.” The letters stop when they must stop, because people are no longer speaking or are living together.

There are also some interesting remarks after that passage in the introduction about how similar Austen’s later narrator will seem to Lady Susan, but that “she perched the irreverence typical of Lady Susan far more productively within depersonalized ironic narration rather than within characters coolly and consciously determined to capitalize on others’ stupidity.” I definitely see the similarity, and this makes me ask myself why I liked this so much better than I liked (or, remember liking) “real” Austen.

I want to start out this post by saying, “There is no reason for Evelina to be an epistolary novel.” But I know that’s not true. There are reasons. I just don’t think it should have been one, or, if it is, it should have been done better.

So, what role do the letters play? The vast majority of them are from Evelina, and the vast majority of those are to her guardian, Mr. Villars. There are also several letters from Mr. Villars, and a few from Lady Howard, a false one from Lord Orville (really from Sir Clement), a real one from Sir Clement, and even one from Evelina’s long-dead mother. The letters from Evelina to Villars recount in great detail the time she spends away from him, in London and later in Clifton. And I consider these letters absurd.

In many ways the letters in Pamela are similarly absurd, and the amount of time Pamela must have spent writing them a bit much. But I feel it goes even farther in Evelina, not so much because of time but because of what the letters say. Letters in an epistolary novel must be believable as letters, and these are not. While you can get away with relaying brief conversations in a letter, the discussions Evelina writes about to Mr. Villars make her correspondence incredible. An enormous portion of her letters is given over to recounting conversations between many parties and in great detail. You can pretty much flip to any part of the novel and it will be Evelina going on for at least a page of direct quotations. I think this is a real flaw in the letters as letters. Couple that with the fact that, over and over, each letter is from “Evelina, in continuation” and the form seems ill chosen.

Gina Campbell argues in “How to Read Like a Gentleman” that

The publication of private writing…is as much a test of virtue as is the confiding of private thoughts to a moral authority. Throughout the novel the publishability of Evelina’s private communication with men proves her innocence and worth just as the publishability of the epistolary, and therefore ostensibly private, contents of Evelina proves Burney’s innocence of the scandal attached both to novels and to the female authors of novels.

But what is gained here by the publishability of Evelina’s letters that would not be gained, say, by the publishability of her diary? She would not be, all the while, confiding to her moral authority (Mr. Villars), but it’s not completely clear to me that would make a difference in her conduct—except for when she stops speaking to Lord Orville, but talk about contrived! And in fact, Campbell gives other reasons the epistolary form causes trouble:

Given the inherent selfconsciousness of letter-writing, a character’s repeated reference to her own virtue does not in itself convince us of that virtue. Indeed it may have the opposite effect, as Fielding’s response to Pamela makes clear.

Bald self-advertisement will not do, then, but neither will the kind of good deeds within Evelina’s powers. …Paradoxically, Evelina proves her virtue by her nonconformity: her ignorance of the forms of etiquette testifies to her pastoral origin, and her tearful explanations of the motives behind her trespasses attest to her superior internalization of the morality on which the rules of etiquette are based. Her faux pas give her the opportunity to explain herself, while her embarrassment proves her to have been acting unselfconsciously.

Of course, this can lead instead to finding Evelina vapid, as I do. Or, from William Hazlitt (in “On the English Novelists”), a better hatchet man than I:

[Burney's] ladies ‘stand so upon the order of their going,’ that they do not go at all. They will not abate an ace of the punctilio in any circumstances, or on any emergency. They would consider it as quite indecorous to run down stairs though the house were in flames, or to move an inch off the pavement though a scaffolding was falling. She has formed to herself an abstract idea of perfection in common behaviour, which is quite as romantic and impracticable as any other idea of the sort: and the consequence has naturally been, that she makes her heroines commit the greatest improprieties and absurdities in order to avoid the smallest. In opposition to a maxim in philosophy, they constantly act from the weakest motive, or rather from pure contradiction.

Is he missing the point? I don’t know. Since I don’t think her technique was all that successful, perhaps he isn’t.

As I said, there is some point to the letters. We get to hear from Villars a few times, for example. And Evelina has her confidante. But precious few of them are of material consequence in the story, and with Evelina relating nearly all the action (and able to relate all the action) they don’t seem that important. A first-person narrative by Evelina, mentioning a few letters here and there, would not have lost much effect, and would have gained in verisimilitude by the elimination of her ridiculous correspondence. And even though we do get a few intimate glimpses of a couple more members of the cast, it doesn’t add up to much. There’s no second-guessing, no putting together a detail here and a detail there for a fuller picture, no comparison of one writer to another to triangulate the “right” position. No questioning of Evelina, the main narrator, at all—and it is Evelina that really gives us the portrait of all the other characters anyway. It all gave me the feeling that Burney was just writing in this form because it was a hip thing to do, and that’s not a great reason.

Reading Evelina, the epistolary first novel of Frances Burney that catapulted her into renown among the likes of Edmund Burke and Samuel Johnson, I passed from boredom through annoyance and on to boredom again. It left me cold. I was disappointed, and yet questioned that disappointment. After all, I’d heard Burney was a precursor to Jane Austen, who’d also always left me cold. Maybe somehow I thought a real and true eighteenth century Austen would be more fun than the Regency version, but it was not to be. It may even have been less fun.

But I am not a Hatchet Woman, sadly, and by the time I’d read the essays in my Norton Critical Edition I was warming up. Well, that’s a lie; I wasn’t warming up at all. I just felt it would be even harder to be a Hatchet Woman.

I mean, I could do it for a book I really hated. But this was just…so empty for me. Evelina herself felt ridiculous. I couldn’t get worked up about what a sop she was, or the awfulness of the conduct book advice that would mold such young ladies, because she was just too vapid for me to care. “Unable as I am to act for myself, or to judge what conduct I ought to pursue, how grateful do I feel myself, that I have such a guide and director to counsel and instruct me as yourself!” Like, gag me with a spoon. I mean, I guess she’s not really vapid; the appreciationist in me sees how she fights off those awful men with the only tools she has, or whatever.

But that’s sort of what’s weird about this novel for me. Evelina is a bit nasty, and Burney prefigures Austen here too, in her criticism of manners and the different ranks of society. It’s sort of good, and sometimes it’s funny. But it’s not, I think, as funny as Austen, and it wasn’t enough to make it for me.

This is one of those books that makes me feel like I might like it better if I had read it as a contemporary, or if I had somehow contrived to read literature only in chronological order. I’d be able to appreciate it in an authentic, visceral way, rather than the totally theoretical way I do now.

There are a few sort of interesting things, I suppose. The boorish Captain Mirvan is, as several critics note, practically something out of Tobias Smollett. And really a bit out of place—to me this is sort of the bridge between that kind of eighteenth century humor and early nineteenth century primness. (In a way, Evelina is a lot like Pamela without the titillating naughty bits.)

One of the most disappointing things for me was the letters themselves. I’ll get to that tomorrow. The appreciationism is creeping a bit there, but I am still not convinced this really takes good advantage of the form.

Today is one of those Sundays where I feel like I don’t properly wake up at all and just sort of wander around in a daze. So it’s an excellent day for some relaxing reading, and I’ve just finished up The Ghost Stories of Muriel Spark, which were lovely and perfect for a chilly November morning. I feel like I need to stop trying out new-to-me authors because I keep finding ones I like so much I want to read all their work, and who has time for that?

On Friday I finished up reading Granta 108, the Chicago issue, which I was interested in because of the focus but mostly because of the great cover art by Chris Ware:

There were definitely some hits and misses for me here. In the end the biggest hit had nothing to do with Chicago at all—an excerpt from a forthcoming Peter Carey novel, Parrot and Olivier in America. But the bit I read was all about Parrot’s childhood in Devon and a house built by Nicholas Owen, and didn’t get to the “in America” part at all, in which Olivier is a quasi-de Tocqueville. I’m not sure I’m as interested in that.

Coming up this week: I’m going to write about Evelina, which I feel is going to be difficult. I’ve been thinking about it for a week now and I’m not sure what I have to say about it. Also Lady Susan, which I think is my favorite Jane Austen thus far (don’t be so shocked!). And perhaps Embers, by Sándor Márai. And I will probably not write about it, but soon I will be tucked away with The Original of Laura, which I’ve already read a tidy little excerpt of in Playboy. (That fine publication also took the opportunity to shoot a spread of Sasha Grey as Lolita, for those of you so inclined.) Also VN-related, check out the full set of new specimen-box-style covers (hat tip to Frances of Nonsuch Book). I have been toying with the idea of (re)reading all of Nabokov, in order, next year, and I think these would really be an excellent reason/excuse…

I tried starting out by giving a brief summary of the plot of “The Runenberg,” but found that doesn’t quite work. Or at least, it’s very difficult to do properly, because of how wiggly the story is when you get right down to it. But here goes:

Christian, raised in the lowlands to be a gardener, leaves his family for the wild mountains where he lives as a huntsman. One day he’s feeling lonely and afraid, and thinks he’s uprooted a mandrake. A stranger appears; they talk; Christian feels drawn to the peak of the Runenberg, where he sees a beautiful woman disrobe and give him a tablet of gemstones.

Next thing he knows, he’s at the bottom of the Runenberg, the tablet is gone, and he walks down to the lowlands to a new town, where he goes to church, finds a job, and eventually marries and has a family. His farm is fertile and prosperous, and one day a stranger comes and stays a while. The stranger leaves behind some gold, at which point Christian becomes troubled, and eventually leaves his family to go back into the mountains, into the mines. His family presumes him dead, but years later he appears to his wife and eldest daughter.

So, where’s the wiggliness? Extreme intellectual uncertainty is a feature of “The Runenberg,” as it is of many of the Kunstmärchen (that’s part of what makes them so awesome). One reading: Christian is wrong to leave his family, leave the organic world of gardening, and go into the harsh, lifeless, inorganic mountains. At the Runenberg he comes into contact with daemonic nature, which continues to haunt him for the rest of his happy family life. After abandoning his family, he descends completely into madness, wandering the mountains with an ugly old woman whom he believes to be the beautiful creature he met on that fateful night.

But. Tieck doesn’t give us real evidence that this is what really happens. Certainly it is what Christian’s wife Elisabeth, and his father, believe has happened. But equally certain, Christian disagrees—at the end of the story he believes he has found true happiness, and there are plenty of indications that his real communion with the divine happens in the wild mountains, not in the fertile town with its Christian church.

Christian himself seems to vacillate as to which of his “lives” is the real one: the farm-life or the mountain-life. He is a man trying hard to find the truth (or, struggling with madness). Attempts to write off the tablet as part of a dream don’t really work—Christian’s father sees it later, and calls it evil. But you would call evil the artifacts of another religion, wouldn’t you? When the beautiful woman gives the tablet to Christian, what does she say, but “Take this to remember me by!” Communion with nature indeed. Later, when the stranger leaves his gold with Christian—also assumed by his father to be a source of evil—Christian notably describes the gold as “blood-red.” W.J. Lillyman points out in “Ludwig Tieck’s ‘Der Runenberg’: Dimensions of Reality”* that it is only after Christian has gotten both tablet and gold (body and blood) that his communion with the mountains is full and he abandons his family.

Also damning for the Christian-is-mad camp: after he leaves, his family loses all their money, their crops fail, their livestock falters, their debtors fail to pay them back. It is hard to see this as any sort of punishment on Christian for leaving them. Perhaps a punishment on his wife for remarrying when he was truly still alive? Or, as Lillyman puts it, a failure of the organic.

The problem with the intellectual uncertainty of these stories is that it’s very hard for a reader to accept them. I don’t mean accept them intellectually, but viscerally. Lillyman complains that so many critics have misunderstood “The Runenberg” by picking out one thread and ignoring the other, and it’s easy to do. We have a natural propensity in that direction. Even now, even though I can clearly see both sides—and I could when I was reading it, of course, it creates great tension, because things happen and you can’t understand why, they throw your interpretation on its head as it’s forming—I want to pick one, to remember the story one way. To get a “message” from the story, I suppose. It’s hard not to do that, but we must be strong.

*Lillyman, W.J. “Ludwig Tieck’s ‘Der Runenberg’: Dimensions of Reality.” Monatshefte, Vol. 62, No. 3 (Fall, 1970), pp. 231-244.

The Provost, the first political novel, is the autobiography of “a genuine Machiavellian”—a natural born one, at that. The chief pleasure here for me, as I noted over at Wuthering Expectations, is Galt’s technical virtuosity in producing this amazing narrator, Mr. Pawkie, and his exploits.

It’s hard to explain without just giving examples of the unmitigated gall of the man—but that’s not the right word. If you’ve ever wondered whether politicians were liars or merely blinded by a lifetime of self-serving…

“Since syne they have been trying every grip and wile o’ the law to punish me as they threatened; but the laws of England are a great protection to the people against arbitrary power….”

“Had I been a sordid and interested man, this news could never have given me the satisfaction it did, for Miss Lizy was very fond of my bairns, and it was thought that Peter would have been her heir; but so far from being concerned at what I heard, I rejoiced thereat, and resolved in secret thought, whenever a vacancy happened, Dr. Swapkirk being then fast wearing away, to exert the best of my ability to get the kirk for Mr. Pittle, not however unless he was previously married to Miss Lizy; for, to speak out, she was beginning to stand in need of a protector, and both me and Mrs. Pawkie had our fears that she might outlive her income, and in her old age become a cess upon us.”

“At first, I could not divine what interest my old friend, the Dean of Guild, had to be so earnest in the behalf of the offering contractor; in course of time, however, it spunkit out, that he was a sleeping partner in the business; by which he made a power of profit. But, saving two three carts of stones to big a dyke round the new steading which I had bought a short time before at the townend, I had no benefit whatever. Indeed, I may take it upon me to say, that should not say it, few Provosts, in so great a concern, could have acted more on a principle than I did in this; and if Thomas Shovel, of his free-will, did, at the instigation of the Dean of Guild, lay down the stones on my ground as aforesaid, the town was not wronged; for, no doubt, he paid me the compliment at some expense of his own profit.”

It’s almost…unbelievable. Not the way Pawkie acts, I mean, nor the way he justifies himself—those are some of the most believable things in the world. But the perceptiveness required of Galt to write it all this way, and the genius required to come up with so many set pieces to do it in, so many instances of petty corruption and pathetic skimming of any possible advantage from the public trust, I am still amazed at.

Yes, there is really something to these brief chapters that keep coming at you. It reminds one of our own hopelessly sped-up news cycle. For Mr. Pawkie, this is a lifetime’s political trajectory. But the way one issue follows another, somewhat organically and thus somewhat chaotically, but also somewhat prodded by the interests of the politicians, and there is always something the town’s narrative is converging on as important and needing Doing Something About, is perfectly like our whole political discourse.

Mr. Pawkie really is a great character. Even I could not hate him for his sins, he was so amusing. And what Amateur Reader describes as “the voice of a proud and successful but only lightly educated man who has never written a book before” not only revels in his own political wiles but also gives some memorable and colorful descriptions of the more tumultuous moments in the town. For one:

Gill-stoups, porter bottles, and penny pyes flew like balls and bomb-shells in battle. Mrs. Fenton, with her mutch off, and her hair loose, with wide and wild arms, like a witch in a whirlwind, was seen trying to sunder the challengers, and the champions.

You are a bad, bad man, Mr. Pawkie, but I was sorry to stop reading of your adventures when they were over.

Amid all the obvious nods in The Ayrshire Legatees to Humphry Clinker, it’s the differences that stand out most. Mrs. Pringle is almost too much like her counterpart Tabitha Bramble, but the difference between Mr. Pringle and Matt Bramble, and the resultant difference in attitude between Andrew Pringle (“my son”) and Jeremy Melford (Matt’s nephew), is most interesting to me.

We know from Humphry Clinker week that Matthew Bramble is a misanthrope, in fact, “the most risible misanthrope I ever met with.” But for all that Matt is smart, worldly-wise (though he prefers the country, he well knows how to act outside it), friendly and caring, to be made fun of for his quirks but not, at bottom, ridiculous. Mr. Pringle, on the contrary, is ridiculous. He is a real country mouse, who tries to pull medallions off hackneycoaches, is barely able to carry out his affairs with regards to the legacy, and generally looks a fool more often than not—while insisting on acting the most respectable person in the entire country on account of his superiority of religion, of course.

And where Jeremy Melford comes to really love and appreciate his uncle through acquaintance with his eccentricities and ultimate character, Andrew Pringle is genuinely embarrassed, as when he writes to his friend Mr. Snodgrass:

I know not how it is, that the little personal peculiarities, so amusing to strangers, should be painful when we see them in those whom we love and esteem; but I own to you, that there was a something in the demeanour of the old folks on this occasion, that would have been exceedingly diverting to me, had my filial reverence been less sincere for them.

The poor Pringles. They hardly know whom to look to for advice on the fashions, once finding they’ve been led astray. But they try so hard! Try so hard, that is, to be something they really and truly aren’t. Writes Rachel:

The Argents, who are our main instructors in the proprieties of London life, say that it would be very vulgar in me to go to look at her, which I am sorry for, as I wish above all things to see a personage so illustrious by birth, and renowned by misfortune. The Doctor and my mother, who are less scrupulous, and who, in consequence, somehow, by themselves, contrive to see, and get into places that are inaccessible to all gentility, have had a full view of her majesty.

And here, another great difference from the Brambles. These stodgy Calvinists do fall in love with vulgar London, and return to Garnock, amid much celebration, in finery. All the more reason to love Matthew Bramble and his retreat to the country with its tides of nectarious milk and cream. On the other hand, none the less reason to love John Galt.

I took great delight in a new and welcome epistolary style afforded by John Galt’s The Ayrshire Legatees, and shall this week add my own small part to the John Galt Clishmaclaver.

In this novel, we have letters much in the style of The Expedition of Humphry Clinker—four family members head off on a journey together and each writes mostly to a single correspondent. Again, we don’t have the benefit of any of the answering letters, but we have something much more interesting: a narrator who keeps the real action of the novel back in the Scottish village of Garnock, where the recipients of the letters read them aloud to each other and go to all the trouble normally reserved for myself.

That is, they judge whose letters are best—Mrs. Pringle is most informative about London by writing about the price of food and millinery, while Andrew Pringle bores them with describing the general atmosphere and attitudes of the place. They judge the wisdom of the Pringles’ actions in trying to secure their legacy, and often judge the righteousness of their minister, Mr. Pringle, who goes so far as to see a play in the metropolis!

Over and over the company are assembled, either in church, or for tea, or sneakily by inviting themselves over to each other’s houses at what they suspect is an opportune moment, so that the narrator can give us the real dirt:

We should ill perform the part of faithful historians, did we omit to record the sentiments expressed by the company on this occasion. Mrs. Glibbans, whose knowledge of the points of orthodoxy had not their equal in the three adjacent parishes, roundly declared, that Mr. Andrew Pringle’s letter was nothing but a peesemeal of clishmaclavers; that there was no sense in it; and that it was just like the writer, a canary idiot, a touch here and a touch there, without anything in the shape of cordiality or satisfaction.

Miss Isabella Tod answered this objection with that sweetness of manner and virgin diffidence, which so well becomes a youthful member of the establishment, controverting the dogmas of a stoop of the Relief persuasion, by saying, that she thought Mr. Andrew had shown a fine sensibility. ‘What is sensibility without judgment,’ cried her adversary, ‘but a thrashing in the water, and a raising of bells? Couldna the fallow, without a’ his parleyvoos, have said, that such and such was the case, and that the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away?—but his clouds, and his spectres, and his visions of Job!”

The listeners get a bit nasty when they feel Miss Rachel’s head has been turned by city finery, and even make fun of the way Mr. Pringle (their minister!) always refers to “Andrew, my son.” It’s wonderful. Instead of me just saying, so-and-so is generally reliable, so-and-so is emotional, putting the documents together and figuring out what is going on, I’ve got a bunch of Scottish villagers to do it for me (that is to say, another document to add to the list, of course).

Here’s a good example of the way the whole thing goes, with quite a fun illustration to boot if I do say so myself, as told by the Rev. Dr. Pringle to Mr. Micklewham, schoolmaster and session-clerk, Garnock. The Pringles, just arrived in London, hire a coach to take them to their lodgings, but being unspecific about which Norfolk Street they want, “now it was that we began to experience the sharpers of London.” Being taken to a disreputable address, they put the driver right.

But when we got to the door, the coachman was so extortionate, that another hobbleshaw arose. Mrs. Pringle had been told that, in such disputes, the best way of getting redress was to take the number of the coach; but, in trying to do so, we found it fastened on, and I thought the hackneyman would have gone by himself with laughter. Andrew, who had not observed what we were doing, when he saw us trying to take off the number, went like one demented, and paid the man….

Trying to take the number of the coach

At the public reading of this letter, “Mr. Snodgrass was seen to smile at the incident of taking the number off the coach, the meaning of which none but himself seemed to understand.” Wise Mr. Snodgrass!

One further note on reading the letters aloud: while some of the letters hold secrets so evident that they are suppressed from the general public (though not from a few choice friends), even more hold bits and pieces that the writer might probably have wished to keep private—at least, not have wished to tell the whole gossip circle. But I suppose Garnock has precious little entertainment of an evening to resist.