The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte

Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a much-reviewed and well-known classic novel. So can a novel that is a hundred and fiftyyears old still have anything to say about life that is relevant, let alone original? The answer to this obviously rhetorical question is obviously ‘yes’, hence this review.

Though it bears the same initials as her sister’s Wuthering Heights, Wildfell Hall is certainly a very different territory, albeit in a similar landscape. If you are the kind of reader that gets tired of nineteenth century matchmaking parading as literature then you share my impatience. How many times must we live through the apparent mental torment of a heroine wondering incessantly whether this gentleman or that might or might not be the right moral or social class, might or might not possess sufficient property, might or might not be acceptable to one’s family? The process, surely, is memorable. Whether it is worth recording repeatedly is open to question.

Some of the suitors, it has to be acknowledged, might turn out to be rather caddish, but too often this might imply he whips his horse rather too ferociously, or treats the lower classes too harshly. All too often, the family concerned lives in middle-class comfort as a result of their investments in the colonies. That means slavery, or the profits thereof. And it is usually the case that no one ever admits they are on the side of the abolitionists. Usually, the moral dilemma is not even recognised, let alone considered. As readers, and even film-goers, we have all been there and probably wished that an occasional non-matrimonial issue might have arisen.

None of this analysis applies to the Wildfell Hall of Anne Brontë‘s novel, however. In her book, this particular Brontë sister offers a tale in which no holds are barred. Her style often seems rather detached, perhaps taking even an alienated view of the society with which she is familiar. She mentions some things that mid-nineteenth century England regarded as unmentionable, especially amongst the middle classes. She also, for much of the book, convincingly presents a narrative from a male perspective that confronts and reacts to, for its time, the unlikely and novel image of female independence. In doing so, she confronts male attitudes that still today may block these concerns from a man’s understanding.

Gilbert Markham becomes infatuated with Helen Graham, the young widow who has moved in with her son into Wildfell Hall. She seems to be a propertied, but also determined to make her own way in life by selling her artworks to achieve financial independence.

In the second section, we learned of Helen Graham’s background. She had been married to an alcoholic and abusive husband and had stood up to him. Her demands that her rights be respected were not commonly expressed in the society, let alone observed. They are still to be fully realize the century and a half later. Drug abuse, alcoholism and extramarital sex, not to mention conspiratorial behaviour among a masculine clique are all addressed. The hypocrisy of middle-class male attitudes is drawn with considerable skill, rather than overstatement.

In the final section, Gilbert appears to absorb these issues and accommodate them. The scarring is permanent, however, and thus this is no simple happy-ever-after tale.

So what might The Tenant of Wildfell Hall have to say to contemporary audiences? Well, these issues of women’s rights, drug abuse, alcoholism and sexual exploitation are still being discussed a century and a half later. These issues were being discussed a century and a half ago. They are still in some places contentious. Need one say more? Read the book.

Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf

Between The Acts by Virginia Woolf is the author’s last novel. It is often described as a difficult read. And indeed, difficult it is, not because it is full of shocking scenes, tough language or improbable plot, but because it attempts to present what people think, as they think it, jumbled, processed only by passing experience, often random and disjointed.

The style might be called ‘stream of consciousness’ or ‘internal narrative’, but no stock phrase can sum up or adequately describe the abrupt changes in point of view, the disjointed time, the juxtaposition of sometimes unrelated material, the real with the invented, all imagined and suffused within the feared. One thing that does become clear as the book progresses is that this process is much more akin to poetry than narrative. Its images often flash past in opposite directions, apparently unrelated but thought by the same person, often in contradiction to what we have come to assume is the professed intent of the character.

Ostensibly, this is just a group of people coming together to see a play. They assemble in the open air, in the bucolic landscape of the English shires, on a long light summer evening to witness the performance of a drama conceived by one of their number and acted by their acquaintances. We learn that the proceeds from ticket sales and donations will go towards the installation of electric light in the parish church, probably to replace the now extinguished Light of The World which has now proved to be defunct. Thus, at least on its surface, Between The Acts seems to be a rural English, middle class comedy, where society folk gossip about one another while view while they remain baffled by amateur dramatics. After all, what might one expect from artists?

But that surface is mere illusion. Written in 1939 to 1941, Between The Acts senses war close at hand. There is potential for destruction, for disquiet, for foreboding. In addition, the characters who almost anonymously populate the book, relate their own histories, fears, hopes, prejudices and confusion, any of which might change by the moment. They are all complex in an ordinary and perhaps predictable way and, like all of us, they often think and act tangentially, with one person‘s utterance provoking perhaps unrelated responses in others.

Between The Acts is not a long book. Neither, on its surface, is its language difficult. But its myriad of associations, random shifts and passing associations make it impossible to follow for any reader intend on finding a one-dimensional narrative. It was obviously never Virginia Woolf’s intention to facilitate such an experience.

But any conventional route is not an appropriate way to approach this book. It is a work to be absorbed word by word, phrase by phrase, and then again, with the reader’s own imagination stimulated by the images supplied. In these pages we are presented with the play itself, with all of its non sequiturs and all of its deliberate imitation of well-known drama. But overall, we are amongst people who are as confused about their own identity as anyone, and we live through that confusion apparently as they live at themselves.

A rewarding activity for anyone interested is to read the book and then to work through the free course on the book available via a The Open University’s Open Learn website. What the course admirably achieves is a promotion of reflection on the text, and insistence that writing as dense as this needs a reader’s reflection and an imagination’s participation.

It has to be noted also, however, that the author herself was not in the best of mental health when the book was written. This surely is reflected in the text and, as such, Between The Acts probably offers at least some insight into what it must be like to suffer mental illness. The dividing line between coping with experience and being overwhelmed by it is a fine one, it seems, so narrow that any of these characters and indeed any reader may cross that boundary without really knowing it.

 

Day by A. L. Kennedy is a complex at times perhaps over a complex novel about an individual’s experience of and response to war. It is set in the Second World War and crucially, its aftermath. It is a novel where the reader is presented with time shifts, changes in point of view and altered conscious states so quickly that only a slow, almost forensic progress seems possible. Though there is much to praise about the book’s non-heroic, matter-of-fact but at the same time respectful approach to its subject matter, it occasionally obfuscates rather than clarifies.

Alfred Day is the book’s eponymous principal character. He hails from Staffordshire, in the English Midlands, a place where coal mining meets ceramics factories, all within a recognizable older rural England. Alfred’s accent is working class and is often expressed phonetically, a practice that intends to preserve the sound of his voice, but often hides his complexity of meaning.

Alfred joins the Royal Air Force and becomes a gunner on a Lancaster bomber, the kind of airman who would sit alone in his glass cage trying to shoot down the fighters that came to attack the lumbering bomber. It was not a role that was often pensionable, and the regular deaths of Day’s colleagues are catalogued in all their gruesome reality.

But what is interesting about Alfred Day’s experience of war is his detachment from it. High up in the sky, his job is to defend a payload of bombs which, if the mission is to be a success, will be dumped anonymously by his aimer colleague on Hamburg, or whatever city might be the target today. The bombs are effectively dumped at random, despite their professed aim., all hitting targets that might or might not have been intended. In today’s jargon, this is where collateral damage becomes the objective. It is interesting in our language how carpet bombing is not the bombing of carpets.

Meanwhile, the airmen themselves must find ways of working together. They also must find ways of talking about what they do without ever really recognizing how gruesome or risky it will be. This often leads to a variety of euphemistic language, where expletives reign, but where expression is often lacking. The relationships made were often short-lived of necessity and, though they also had to form a team that could work together, it is generally the distance between the men that defines their fraternity. This aspect of Day is handled sensitively, even vividly throughout.

Alfred Day does find Joyce, a devoted and sincere partner. The presence of the ‘now’ in wartime seems to heighten their relationship. Neither partner seems to dream of life beyond the moment, whilst apparently constantly referring to it. War takes the relationship, as it does many others. It even seems to take the present, because when they were together it was war that dominated their thoughts, though their actions were timeless.

Alfred is eventually shot down but survives and spends time and the prisoner of war camp, where surprisingly he is quite well treated. But after the war, after his own liberation, he takes a position as an extra in a film about wartime prisoner of war experience. This later reconstruction of a reality he has in fact lived is interleaved with real experience, and for this reader, it was this juxtaposition that was the least convincing part of the novel. These different scenarios, before the war with its abusive family life, during the war flying missions and visiting Joyce, after the war on a film set, are often mixed together in a heady brew of complex flavours. Training the sense to discern location and time can be challenging. In one way, this is the book’s charm, but for many readers the experience may prove merely confusing.

Day is a moving book, but a book that does not give up in sensations easily. It is always challenging for the reader and is, nevertheless, fulfilling, though apparently never in a direct, uncomplicated way.

Anglo Saxon Attitudes by Angus Wilson

This particular reviewer rarely writes a negative review. If it didn’t communicate with me, there’s no need to assume that it will not communicate to you. A positive review has to concentrate on what was communicated, whereas a negative review must live in what was not felt, and that list is infinitely long, so where to start? “I liked it” or indeed “I didn’t like it” say nothing about the work in question, only about the reviewer, and this unknown person, often hiding behind an alias, should never be at the centre of the review.

So when it comes to Anglo-Saxon Attitudes by Angus Wilson, why should I begin with “I didn’t like it”? Well at least it gets the opinion out of the way, because in the case of this particular book, it needs to be said. Anglo Saxon Attitudes felt like the longest book I have ever read. It wasn’t, but it did feel that way for most of its duration. But the reason for my opinion is complex and, I suggested earlier, has more to do with me than the work.

Details of the book’s plot are available elsewhere. Suffice it to say that the important element is the fraudulent planting of a pagan erotic sculpture into the grave of a Dark Ages Anglo-Saxon bishop that was excavated decades ago. The apparent authenticity of the find had to be catalogued, described, interpreted. For half a century this practical joke at least influenced thinking, at least amongst interested academics, on the cultural and religious origins of the race that now inhabits the country we now call England. Hence the book’s title, rooted both in the historical relics of the Anglo-Saxons, for whom “England” would have been an unknown label, and for the modern British for whom both the concept of “Anglo-Saxon” and “England” are both reconstructed myths.

Amid the need to keep alive the myth of national identity and culture, a certain person who was involved in the original discovery finds he hast to continue to perpetuate the lie. He has personal and professional reasons. He also might even believe it was true. To some extent he has built his career on the existence of the find and, equally, he built half of his life by shacking up with the girlfriend of the person who played the original practical joke on his father by planting the object in the tomb and then claiming its authenticity. Decades have come and gone. Lives have been lived. Relationships have been severed, remade and broken by death and estrangement. Gerald, who knows the truth about several things, has lived with the deception, but dismissed it as possibly false, gives given the character of the person who admitted carrying it out. Gerald now has decided it is time to come clean and tell the story.

But to whom should he tell it? And how? Reputations are at stake. Water under the bridge won’t flow back the other way. People have moved on. Or have they? Anglo Saxon Attitudes thus inhabits a society with what could be described as a rarefied atmosphere. These people are of a certain social class, attend gentlemen’s clubs, regularly drift into French, for some reason, when English is just not good enough. A single paragraph of the thoughts might refer explicitly but opaquely to five or six of the book’s characters, any of whom might have been encountered during the fifty-year span of these memories. For anyone living outside donnish society of the public school, Oxbridge or academe, these people are barely recognizable as English, as archaeological, perhaps, as something dug up from long, long ago. And yet they are the mouthpieces via which the concepts of contemporary identity and culture are lengthily examined.

A strand that figures vividly in every character’s mind, if not explicitly in the English culture being examined, is sex. The erotic nature of the apparently pagan idol in the Anglo-Saxon tomb places a large ellipsis after every mention of the word sex in the book. We have characters who are openly homosexual in a society that has laws against the practice. We encounter respectable men who put themselves around a bit, and women who express their desires via euphemism. And also some who do not. And there’s a lot more besides. Perhaps too much. Perhaps… For this reader…

Anglo Saxon Attitudes is a complex and ambitious novel. For this reviewer it falls short of all its implied goals because it concentrates too heavily on a narrow, unrepresentative section of the nation, was consistently patronizing to working class attitudes and featured characters who spent most of the time living myths. Perhaps that was the point… Perhaps… Why not read it and see what you think?

Middlemarch by George Eliot

 

Having never read it before, I decided that this must be the time. It is impressive, but it comes across like a middle-class Brookside. The writing style is convoluted, verbose and forever playing God. It did have its moments, but as Rossini said of Wagner, it’s the hours in between that are the problem. I’d read it again, however.

Crown of Blood, The Deadly Inheritance of Lady Jane Grey by Nicola Tallis

When they advance, pawns become queens. But to advance, they usually need support from a bishop or a knight from behind the walls of a castle, assuming, of course, that the king, as usual, remains capable of relatively little, but also assuming that he, himself, survives. Without that living male, promotion to queen cannot happen. But by what rules and in which game does a pawn become advanced by such castles, knights and bishops to find herself still a pawn, a queen in name only, and only for long enough to arrange her own decapitation? The King, of course, had not survived, and a queen without a King breaks the rules. Young women called Jane Grey seem to have been particularly vulnerable to this fate.

Crown of Blood by Nicola Tallis is, effectively, a political biography of Queen Jane, the first woman to be named as the occupant of the English throne and the only occupant never to have been crowned. Born of the Tudor line, Jane's claim to the English throne was significant. Her grandmother had been Mary Tudor, youngest daughter of Henry VII and she was thus a full cousin to the King, Edward VI.

In the mid-16th century, England was riven by political difference driven by religious and ideological conflict and was further plunged into confusion by the untimely death of Edward VI, the only son of Henry VIII. But Henry's two daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, had by some, including at one stage their own father, been branded as illegitimate, and therefore ineligible to inherit the throne. Confusion still surrounds exactly what Henry VIII, himself, thought of their individual succession rights. After the birth of a son, Edward, the matter was irrelevant, in any case.

Edward, a staunch Protestant, above all else wanted his own version of the Christian faith to prevail. He was a teenager when he started to ail, and his thoughts were turned reluctantly towards his succession and the continuance of the religious revolution he had furthered was uppermost in his prioritied. Thus he nominated Jane Grey as his successor, the move calculated both to promote his Protestantism and to discredit his half-sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, one because she was a Catholic and the other because her mother had, it was alleged, humiliated his father through acts of infidelity. In his eyes neither was worthy of the crown. Lady Jane Grey, on the other hand, was a pious Protestant, from a good family, of Royal Blood and of serious, even learned disposition. Ostensibly, she even had the support of several nights and even a bishop, plus that of her ambitious family in their castle. These could have been the perfect circumstances to promote her advancement to queen. Amongst her backers, however, it was ambition and self-interest that unfortunately underpinned support for the teenage Lady Jane and, as a woman, she was powerless either to influence or counteract that scheming.

Thus, she was married to one Guildford to make a friendly alliance between powerful families, declared queen and admitted to the tower of London for her own safety. Mary, however, had popular support by virtue of her having been King Henry's first daughter and a military skirmish confirmed her greater and now pragmatic claim to the throne. Jane Grey’s protection in the tower thus became imprisonment under the influence of a victorious Mary. Jane’s supporters largely disowned her, while those who didn't lost their heads and their innards. Jane herself was tried, found guilty of treason and beheaded. Mary showed clemency in deciding not to burn her cousin.

What is so upsetting about this story is its apparent inevitability. Jane's major problem, it seemed, was that she was a woman. She had no rights. She was a mere pawn, moved at will by others and advanced for their own gain. Her story is this is not a tragedy, but a conspiracy. She was party to that conspiracy, but she was also trapped and probably could not have extricated herself from its vice, even if she had tried harder to do so. Like women of her age, she was chattel, so much meat to be haggled over by a bunch of property-owning, self-promoting barrow-boys looking for a profit.

The raw and calculated callousness exhibited by anyone in the position of power or influence over the life or status of Lady Jane Grey is more than merely shocking. Its consequences are genuinely upsetting. Here was a young woman used and then discarded when her attributes did not profit those who backed her. The example this presents reminds us that there were many others, who were not royal, who suffered similar but unrecorded fates.

Crown of Blood by Nicola Tallis examines this history in fine and accurate detail. This is a serious study of the political and legal dimensions of the case. But is also a biography, and the delves as deeply as sources allow into the background, development and character of Lady Jane Grey. The author offers a truly historical account, researching sources and judging their veracity or otherwise. Even in history, it is always easier to make it up, to deliver what current values assume. But that is fiction, not history, and Nicola Tallis’s book always inhabits what can be justified.

Perhaps we should remind ourselves that Lady Jane Grey was also known as Jane Dudley, because that would remind us of the family’s status just a few years later when Robert Dudley became the favourite of Elizabeth I. Indeed, part of the case that was eventually levelled against Robert Dudley referred back to the treasonous activities of the family in relation to Lady Jane’s advancement to queen.

As is often the case in history, the rich and powerful can bathe their hands in blood, knowing that the consequences will never come their way. Reading details of the callous intrigue, the self-promotion and sheer selfishness that surrounded the elevation and then decapitation of this young woman reminds us of how much, or indeed how little, has changed since the sixteenth century.

Scott-King's Modern Europe by Evelyn Waugh

Scott-King's Modern Europe is a short, perhaps over-short novella by Evelyn Waugh. Written in 1946, it visits a fictitious part of Europe largely unknown to its determinedly English protagonist. In 1946 Scott-King had been classical master at Grantchester for twenty-five years, we are told in the tale's first sentence. This locks the book's principal character firmly in his place within the English class system, sketches his likely character, with its staid dedication to what has always been and remains "right", and posits him without doubt in the apolitical conservatism of an ultimately submissive establishment. It's the kind of England that used to believe that fog at Dover meant that Europe was cut off. Thus Waugh presents him to his undoubtedly sympathetic readers.

Out of a non-political blue comes a request from the little-known and less understood and now independent state of Neutralia that Scott-King attend a national celebration of a long-forgotten national poet called Bellorius. The writer died in 1646 and left a fifteen-hundred-line tract, written in Latin hexameters, of unrelenting tedium. It described a journey to an unknown new world island, where there subsisted a virtuous, chaste and reasonable community, Waugh tells us. This utopia was left forgotten and unread, until it appeared in a German edition in the twentieth century, a copy of which Scott-King picked up while on holiday some years ago. Thus the teacher of classics began a relationship with this European obscurity that led to this invitation to visit his homeland.

Scott-King's Modern Europe is so short that any more detail of its plot would undermine its reading. Suffice it to say that the international delegation is not what it seems. Things do not go to plan, or perhaps do, depending on your perspective on Neutralian politics, whose internecine struggles could not be further from anything associated with aloof Britishness, let alone it's higher class relative, Englishness. Life becomes unbearably complicated for the scrupulously fair Scott-King. He may, perish the possibility, suffer such ignominy as not having enough traveller's cheques left to cover his hotel bill!

As the farce develops, the celebration of Bellorius morphs into something decidedly more contemporary, whose limits become ever more blurred. Most of those involved are revealed, in some form or another, as frauds, except of course for the stolid and enduring Englishman of the title, who throughout remains the epitome of the innocent victim. If there is fault in the world, then it's all the fault of foreigners, those who live over there, those who speak the unintelligible languages that aren't English and live in those unbearable climates that have sunshine. They do not play fair in politics, and confuse responsibility with gain, All unthinkable at home, of course...

It all works out in the end, after a fashion. Let it be recorded here only that, true to the values of the English Public School where Scott-King has taught, it is a former pupil, ever loyal, that eventually extracts his former teacher from his troubles. But what is enduringly interesting about this little book is the depth of the metaphor that classical education presents. It is a culture in decline. Its vales are destined not to endure. Inevitably, the values enshrined in the assumption of this enduringly educated state are set themselves to disappear. The English surely are going to become like the untrustworthy, squabbling, divided Neutralians, and all the other foreigners with their unacceptable strange ways, who previously had only ever lived "over there".

Written at the end of the second world war, when perhaps mythically the British had stood alone, the book is perhaps the author's reflection on events that saw the division of Europe into opposing camps. The territorial integrity of the United Kingdom, and essentially England within it, had been maintained. But those "over there" we're still foreign and thankfully they weren’t “over here”. Their values weren't our values, and yet their influence was all-pervading, or at least potentially so. Britain, and the English on the throne within it, we're still alone, still threatened. This is the culture that is suffused throughout Evelyn Waugh's little book and it is the assumption that makes its reading now at least poignant. It might even have been written a week ago, based on anyone's list of presumptions that surrounded the Brexit referendum. Everything that was not an English value is manifest in this non-culture of Neutralia, a nation that needs to invent heroes raised from within the mediocrity of its unrecognized and - even more reprehensible - unrecorded past. How non-English can one get?

Waugh's humour enlivens the story and his unapologetic Englishness almost renders himself as the principal character. It's is short enough to be read in an hour, but it's sentiment and message will resonate very strongly with contemporary readers. In Britain's current political context, Scott-King's Modern Europe is a little book with a big message.  

Gainsborough, A Portrait by James Hamilton

Gainsborough, A Portrait by James Hamilton is much, much more than a biography of a painter, though if it were only that it would still be a masterpiece of its genre. Thomas Gainsborough was born in Suffolk in 1727 and died in London in 1788. He spent his early years in Suffolk, was apprenticed in London as an engraver. He moved back to Suffolk and lived again in the family home. He was already painting. He seemed not perfectly suited to the messy, fiddly practices associated with engraving. He gradually amassed commissions, almost by increment from sitters of ever higher rank.

A lengthy stay in Bath was purely for professional reasons, but London and Suffolk were always a draw. By then he was a wealthy and successful painter of portraits, who dabbled in landscapes on the side. That last phrase, incidentally, is apposite since his wife, Margaret, used to pocket all of the fees he charged for portraits. What he received for landscapes he did not disclose to her, only to his own pocket.

If you have ever looked at Gainsborough’s portraits and saw that first, they were rather dark, or second, the forest looks altogether too round it to be true, or third, it seems rather that the feet emerging from the bottom of the dresses appear a tad too small, then you will find your explanations in James Hamilton‘s book. The light is problematic, perhaps, because these pictures were not painted en plein aire, but by candlelight in the studio. A sense of rounding in the trees might result from the fact that he often did not paint real trees, but miniature tabletop settings of coal, twigs and – yes – broccoli. Now that explains quite a lot. Observation number three results from his very businesslike procedures with his sitters. To minimize their discomfort, he concentrated on their faces and heads. After they had left his studio, he would then fill in the rest of the body, often using clothes he kept on dummies, the same dress sometimes appearing in portraits of different women. The mannequins obviously had no feet, so these were probably added with a little imagination, hence the sometimes awkward proportions.

But there is far more in Gainsborough, A Portrait than detail of the artist’s commissions, works and techniques. James Hamilton provide is nothing less than a rounded portrayal of English life in the mid-eighteenth century. In the artist’s letters we soon learn to recognize the euphemisms that are used to disguise the licentiousness that seems to occupy most of these men’s waking hours. In letters, d-mn is not a curse, and the word swords – or other obvious euphemisms - are often underlined, right up to the hilts. Not subtle, but socially acceptable according to the mores of the day, it seems.

The book has is a wonderful portrayal of small town life in Sudbury, Suffolk. We sense the nouveau riche pretensions of Bath and we can almost feel London expanding amid the stories of Gainsborough’s Pall Mall house and Richmond Hill getaway. But what is so wonderful about James Hamilton‘s book is that its erudition, which at times is breathtaking in its detail, is so beautifully embroidered into the narrative that all we received is a rounded, complete insight into the way Gainsborough lived, did business, and related to people, as well as seeing a detailed picture of what he painted and how he worked.

Of particular interest was his and his contemporaries’ touting of business from the rich and famous. Obviously, a commission from the Royals, especially the King, was what really put you on the map and, as ever in Britain, a social pecking order made the achievement of status easier for some than others. Gainsborough was from quite lowly origins and did not attend prestigious institutions to learn his trade, so he had to work for the elite status that eventually came his way. It is worth noting however that he was never knighted, unlike his rival Reynolds, being the journeyman of the trade in the celebrity likeness business. But he did make a good living, which he largely handed over to his wife, who stashed the money away, lest her husband blow it on wine, women or song, or even the expensive musical instruments he bought, but never learn to play.

Gainsborough rubbed shoulders with the elite. He was friends with other artists and with composers, such as Abel and J C Bach. But one feels his feet never really left the ground, even when parking his sword. And as such, he was not given to visionary statements in his art. He clearly liked to paint landscapes but found he could only sell them on the back of his portrait trade. Thus, he devoted his professional time to that which would be better his life, leaving intellectual challenge at least for later.

Interestingly, James Hamilton makes the point that Gainsborough the artist would have found work in any age. His approach would always have found a clientele and his style would have adapted, whilst more visionary artists, despite their massive achievements, could not have pursued their particular visions in a different age. Gainsborough thus becomes a kind of model modern artworld businessman, pragmatic, competent, in demand and commercially aware of the success he achieved. Well, at least his wife was.

Anglo-Saxon Britain by Grant Allen

Anglo-Saxon Britain by Grant Allen is a book that now comes free via Amazon Kindle, so there is absolutely no excuse for not reading it, especially when such editions can be downloaded to and read from an ordinary personal computer, at zero cost and complete convenience. This is not an advertisement, except, of course, for the book.

Anglo-Saxon Britain ought to compulsory reading for all narrow-minded nationalists, Little Englanders, British national types, English leaguers and any other set of racial purity head-bangers, plus absolutely anyone who might even suggest that isolationism is either beneficial for or a natural state of the English. Anglo-Saxon Britain is not a new book, and hence does not cover any aspects of ethnology that have been developed since the arrival of DNA analysis. Anglo-Saxon Britain is thus an old-fashioned review and analysis of available historical documents and sources. But, in a succinct and wonderfully readable form, it succeeds in summarising the issue’s complexity and communicating a beautifully rounded picture of a thoroughly complicated reality.

The English - and their Saxon and Jutish cousins – were, of course, invaders, originating in what we now call Germany, Denmark and Holland. What they brought to a Romanised, at least in part already Christian and largely unified land was barbarism, paganism and continual warfare. What they also brought with them – or at least the Angels did – was their language, a form of low German with gendered nouns that had case endings and verbs that declined into multiple forms But the general structure of that language endured, endured as its complexities of form gradually disappeared whilst its complexity of potential nuance grew. Its vocabulary welcomed successive waves of foreign invaders and its aesthetic adopted the more civilised ways of other foreigners from southern Europe.

The Danes also deserve a mention, of course, since they ruled most of what we now call England for much of the Anglo-Saxon period. And the Welsh and Celts, indigenous people, but only in a relative sense, were not only subjugated but contributed in their own way to the wholly complicated and, frankly mixed up, gene pool through inter-marriage. The point is made repeatedly that perhaps the most English – as far as the original form and sound of the language is concerned – is still spoken by the Lothians of modern-day Scotland, since the Angel settlers there were the least affected by subsequent waves of invasion.

What we do know about the English – very little, it has to be said, since they wrote down almost nothing about themselves – is that they rarely cooperated, except at the tribal or clan level, constantly bickered and argued, regularly fought one another and spent very little time on more civilised pursuits. At least some things have endured.

Anglo-Saxon Britain by Grant Allen does not trade any myths. It presents a learned, well researched and referenced account of the politics, the conflicts, the culture and language of the early English. It reminds us that the last English person to occupy the English throne was Harold in 1066 and he succumbed to an immigrant from continental Europe who moved in and made the place his own, perhaps improving it along the way. The book is superbly entertaining as well as informative, erudite and learned, but also lean, stimulating and succinct. Its sections on the language, alone, render it essential reading for anyone who is the least bit interested in English or the English.