Misc Reading/Writing Passages

Charlotte Yonge, The Clever Woman of the Family (1865)

From Ellen Jordan on VICTORIA 5 March 2017:

Towards the end of Charlotte Yonge's The Clever Woman of the Family (1865) the main characters go to stay with a blind High Church clergyman. This is how they spend their evening:

“Is there anything to be read aloud?” presently asked

“You have not by chance got ‘Framley Parsonage?’”

“I wish I had. I did pick up ‘Silas Marner,’ at a station, thinking you might like it,” and he glanced at Rachel, who had, he suspected, thought his purchase an act of weakness. “Have you met with it?”

“I have met with nothing of the sort since you were here last;” then turning to Rachel, “Alick indulges me with novels, for my good curate had rather read the catalogue of a sale any day than meddle with one, and I can’t set on my pupil teacher in a book where I don’t know what is coming.”

“We will get ‘Framley,’” said Alick.

“Bessie has it. She read me a very clever scene about a weak young parson bent on pleasing himself; and offered to lend me the book, but I thought it would not edify Will Walker. But, no doubt, you have read it long ago.”

"No,” said Rachel; and something withheld her from disclaiming such empty employments. Indeed, she was presently much interested in the admirable portraiture of “Silas Marner,” and still more by the keen, vivid enjoyment, critical, droll, and moralizing, displayed by a man who heard works of fiction so rarely that they were always fresh to him, and who looked on them as studies of life. His hands were busy all the time carving a boss for the roof of one of the side aisles of his church—the last step in its gradual restoration.

Juliet Barker, The Brontës

Those who were in the first class in both the annual examinations were entitled to prize books. It is surprising, therefore, that only two of Patrick’s are still extant, especially as he clearly regarded them with great pride. They were both standard works: Richard Bentley’s 1728 edition of the works of Horace and Samuel Clarke’s 1729 edition of Homer’s Iliad in a dual Greek and Latin text. 46 Though both were nearly eighty years old, they had been rebound in stout leather and, as he pointed out in his inscriptions at the beginning, each bore the college arms on the front cover. On the title page of the Iliad, Patrick carefully noted: ‘My Prize Book, for having always kept in the first Class, at St John’s College –Cambridge –P. Brontê, A.B. To be retained –semper—’. A similar statement was inscribed in the Horace. The odd phrase ‘To be retained

George Dodd, "Spitalfields," London (Charles Knight, 1842)

"In very many of the houses, the windows numbered more sheets of paper than panes of glass and no considerable number of houses were shut up altogether. We would willingly present a brighter picture, but ours is a copy from the life." Via Spitalfields Life

M.R. James, "A School Story" (1911, More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary)

Two men in a smoking-room were talking of their private-school days. ‘At our school,’ said A., ‘we had a ghost’s footmark on the staircase. What was it like? Oh, very unconvincing. Just the shape of a shoe, with a square toe, if I remember right. The staircase was a stone one. I never heard any story about the thing. That seems odd, when you come to think of it. Why didn’t somebody invent one, I wonder?’ ‘You never can tell with little boys. They have a mythology of their own. There’s a subject for you, by the way —“The Folklore of Private Schools”.’ ‘Yes; the crop is rather scanty, though. I imagine, if you were to investigate the cycle of ghost stories, for instance, which the boys at private schools tell each other, they would all turn out to be highly-compressed versions of stories out of books.’ ‘Nowadays the Strand and Pearson’s , and so on, would be extensively drawn upon.’ ‘No doubt: they weren’t born or thought of in my time. Let’s see. I wonder if I can remember the staple ones that I was told. First, there was the house with a room in which a series of people insisted on passing a night; and each of them in the morning was found kneeling in a corner, and had just time to say, “I’ve seen it,” and died.’ ‘Wasn’t that the house in Berkeley Square?’ ‘I dare say it was. Then there was the man who heard a noise in the passage at night, opened his door, and saw someone crawling towards him on all fours with his eye hanging out on his cheek. There was besides, let me think — Yes! the room where a man was found dead in bed with a horseshoe mark on his forehead, and the floor under the bed was covered with marks of horseshoes also; I don’t know why. Also there was the lady who, on locking her bedroom door in a strange house, heard a thin voice among the bed-curtains say, “Now we’re shut in for the night.” None of those had any explanation or sequel. I wonder if they go on still, those stories.’ ‘Oh, likely enough — with additions from the magazines, as I said.

• • The bookish world of print culture overtaking the oral

The Recipe for Sensation Fiction (Moonshine, 1884)

From Ruth Richardson, VICTORIA 3-9-18 I found it an obscure Victorian periodical, called "Moonshine' which had a relatively brief life. It was published on the 27th December 1884, given its own typographic box, and set around an illustration by Dewar of a careworn, dishevelled and distracted writer whose wastepaper basket appears to be full of earlier drafts. VICTORIAlisters will be delighted to know that he is male!

Here's the recipe:

RECIPE FOR A NOVELIST’S PLUM-PUDDING.

(To be eaten before writing the next new Sensational Story.)

By Worence Flarden.

Take of powdered extract of the late Charles Peace, Gentleman, 12lbs., of “Syrup of Paul Clifford” (Lytton and Co.) 1 quart, of candied or uncandid peelings of Miss Braddon, Helen Mather, and Rhoda Broughton, each about 15 ounces.

Mix and bray discreetly in a mortar with a few choice specimens of sweet simplicity (called “Violet”), crushed wives, naughty young aristocrats, mysterious lovers, odious housemaids, Byronic babies, drugged detectives, and burglarious minstrels, spread it thickly over a marsh, fen, bog, quicksand or any other foundation equally as safe and salubrious, cover it with a Norfolk in order to add to the mystery, then wrap the whole up carefully in a cover or two of the Family Herald, cook it six months in a periodical oven, at the end of which time take it out and let it cool for a day or two. Then serve on a shilling dish, garnished with advertisements and Cadbury’s cocoa, and if you don’t write a thrilling and sensational story after partaking thereof and shortly realise e-norm-ous profits after an e-norm-ous sale, why, then, you had better not try again !

Kerr, "The Gentleman's House" (1864)

Robert Kerr, The Gentleman’s House; How to plan English residences from the parsonage to the palace. London: John Murray, 1864.

“The simplest form of Study exists in a small house built for a studious man, for instance a Parsonage. It is generally the Library also for his own purposes.”

(Kerr notes that the Study differs from a “larger Library” only in size; in either case it is “a place of reading and writing for one person alone.”) (Ed Levin, Victoria 3-26-18)

De Quincey, "Letters" (1823)

Thomas De Quincey. "Letters to a Youn Man Whose Education has been Neglected." The Works of TDQ Vol. 3. Ed. Frederick Burwick. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000.

• 41 [consulative but silent reading] What then is it, that you would seek in a university? Lectures? These, whether public or private, are surely the very worst modes of acquiring any sort of accurate knowledge; and are just as much inferior to a good book on the same subject, as that book hastily read aloud, and then immediately withdrawn, would be inferior to the same book left in your possession, and open at any hour to be consulted, retraced, collated, and in the fullest sense studied.