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Zombie Classics
When I was a kid there were a lot of fusty old 19th century novels that were still being sold to us as classics. I don't mean Middlemarch. I mean Ivanhoe and Westward Ho!- books that built the Empire. They had warrior heroes, they were stuffed with racial pride and they weren't very good. When the Empire fell apart they went out of print. We didn't need- or esteem- their teachings any more. Tony Blair once- revealingly- named Ivanhoe as his favourite book. It was a choice that no-one who loves books- and has actually read Ivanhoe- could possibly have made.
Westward Ho! is about the colonisation of America and the defeat of the Armada. Its hero- a blond sea-dog called Amyas Leigh- is chivalrous, pious and chaste. It is, I'm told, full of historical inaccuracy. Charles Kingsley, its author, was an exemplar of that weird mode of being known as "muscular Christianity" and an admirable public intellectual of the sort who if he were alive today would never be off the telly. His best known book is The Water Babies.
Books like Westward Ho! don't exactly die. No-one reads them for pleasure any more- or even- as I did- out of a sense of duty- but their one-time popularity has made a mark in the collective unconscious that is never going to be erased- and they continue to enjoy a cultural half-life. They are known to the compilers of crossword puzzles and pub quizzes- and historians of their era are bound to take them into account. They have become zombie classics. You want to take the temperature of mid-Victorian England? Westward Ho! will give you as accurate a reading as Bleak House- and without the distracting flourishes of genius.
Good news then for Dan Brown: his work will never die. He may not have the respect of posterity (actually, who knows?) but there'll always be someone who'll need to read him for the light his enormous sales undoubtedly cast on the taste and obsessions of our time.
Westward Ho! is about the colonisation of America and the defeat of the Armada. Its hero- a blond sea-dog called Amyas Leigh- is chivalrous, pious and chaste. It is, I'm told, full of historical inaccuracy. Charles Kingsley, its author, was an exemplar of that weird mode of being known as "muscular Christianity" and an admirable public intellectual of the sort who if he were alive today would never be off the telly. His best known book is The Water Babies.
Books like Westward Ho! don't exactly die. No-one reads them for pleasure any more- or even- as I did- out of a sense of duty- but their one-time popularity has made a mark in the collective unconscious that is never going to be erased- and they continue to enjoy a cultural half-life. They are known to the compilers of crossword puzzles and pub quizzes- and historians of their era are bound to take them into account. They have become zombie classics. You want to take the temperature of mid-Victorian England? Westward Ho! will give you as accurate a reading as Bleak House- and without the distracting flourishes of genius.
Good news then for Dan Brown: his work will never die. He may not have the respect of posterity (actually, who knows?) but there'll always be someone who'll need to read him for the light his enormous sales undoubtedly cast on the taste and obsessions of our time.
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It's interesting you bring up novels being touted as Classics that are no longer relevant. I was just talking about that recently with someone else, in regards to the recent news that American schools are "trying out" a new technique to get kids to read -- they're having the kids choose the books they want to read. I'm trying to find an objective opinion about this. On one hand, kids will elevate to whatever level they're allowed or encouraged to, and we shouldn't fear [for] them. Kids can and will read whatever you give them and even though many Classics are outdated, they still have cultural relevance. On the other hand, maybe having kids engaged and choosing their own reading material, no matter how trite, is a good gateway to get them to read more and better, and then maybe they can choose Classics for themselves (both good and bad). Or, maybe the Classics we give kids to read needs to change and be updated. I haven't decided how I feel.
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It's tricky. Teach a book badly and you can turn kids off it for life. I think Shakespeare is ruined for a lot of people because of how they first encountered him in school. I suspect there isn't a policy that can be guaranteed to work in every situation.
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I have very mixed feelings about The Water Babies. I read it as a small child and noticed only the fantasy; re-read it about two years ago and had whiplash. There are some strange and powerful images in it—Mother Carey, ancient and white-haired as time, sits at the ice-walled edge of the world and all the creatures of the sea come into being from the green water that boils and churns at her feet. There is also a lot of didacticism, moralizing, casual bigotry, and the simultaneous assumption of a superior intellectual position and a scathing contempt for science, to name a few impediments. It's as though Kingsley didn't trust his own imagination. He invents a world behind the world, where a mother's tears can fall as spring rain onto a man whose heart is so cold that they harden into hail as they touch him, and then he has to cloak it in sopped-up Christianity and patronizing diminutives. In some ways, I think the best chapter is the first; before anything fanciful happens and Tom is merely a Dickensian sort of chimney sweep in a recognizable, if slightly off-kilter nineteenth century. After that, it may be a classic, but I'm not sure how much of it I'd actually want a child to read.
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I recently tried to read Kingsley's Hypatia and gave up half way through. He's an intermittently powerful writer, but very much of his time. I think you're right about him not trusting his imagination.
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It is from The Water Babies that I learned that storm-petrels are called Mother Carey's chickens, which enabled me to appreciate both Kipling's "Anchor Song" and a throwaway exclamation in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest.
I recently tried to read Kingsley's Hypatia
As in Alexandria? Yikes.
On the other hand, he is also responsible for "The Three Fishers," which I have as a very good song by Stan Rogers. That's got to count for something.
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It's not an unremittingly bad book, but I think you can imagine what a lifeless paragon he makes of Hypatia.
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As far as Kingsley goes, give me George MacDonald every time.
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I agree about MacDonald.
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