After Mayhew’s catalogue of London characters and crooks last time, I’m staying with London and crime for this week’s First Folio. It’s a selection of John Mortimer’s short stories featuring his beloved character, the barrister Horace Rumpole.

John Mortimer was himself a barrister as well as a novelist and screenwriter. His father, also a barrister, was suddenly struck blind in an accident, but continued to practise. He is remembered in Mortimer’s A Voyage Around My Father, played in the West End by Alec Guiness, and on film by Laurence Olivier. Rumpole is at least partly based on him. The character was originally conceived for a television play, whose success led to a series. Mortimer says in his introduction that he wanted a detective character like Maigret or Sherlock Holmes to sustain him in his old age. Mortimer recalls the genesis in his introduction to the Folio edition.

So, when I looked for a character to be my detective I found him very near at hand. I thought of all the old defenders in criminal trials I had known - rumpled, untidy men, fond of claret and steak and kidney pie, who often called the most unattractive judges and the most hardened bank robbers ‘old darling’ but never called their wives ‘old darling’. I thought of my father, who was also a barrister, and his costume which was rather like that which Mr Churchill used to wear in the war: a black jacket and waistcoat across which stretched a gold watch-chain, often smothered in cigar ash, a stand-up collar and a bow-tie. My father also had Rumpole’s habit of quoting poetry at very inapposite moments. When I was about four when he saw me he would say, ‘Is execution done on Cawdor?’ which, when you’re four, is a pretty tough question to have to answer. Barristers are meant to be polite to solicitors, who bring them work, but when he was displeased with one of them my father often said, ‘The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon’ thinking they’d be glad of another quotation from Macbeth.

Other barristers have been suggested for the ur-Rumpole. This obituary of Lord Hutinchson of Lullington suggests very firmly that he was the inspiration. Another barrister, James Burge, famous for his work on the Profumo case, has also been identified as the original of the character. Indeed, according to Mortimer’s obituary in the Daily Telegraph:

In the early 1970s Mortimer was appearing for some football hooligans when James Burge, with whom he was sharing the defence, told him: “I’m really an anarchist at heart, but I don’t think even my darling old Prince Peter Kropotkin would have approved of this lot.” “And there,” Mortimer realised, “I had Rumpole.”

This seems to be a reference to the first incarnation of Rumpole, in the television play originally entitled “My Darling Prince Peter Kropotkin”, which was to feature a barrister called Horace Rumbold, who was a secret anarchist. The name was subtly changed when it was discovered there was a real barrister of that name. The play was eventually broadcast as Rumpole of the Bailey. It starred Leo McKern as Rumpole, an actor who I first encountered as Number Two in Patrick McGoohan’s cult show The Prisoner.

McKern had played Thomas Cromwell in the acclaimed 1966 film A Man For All Seasons, and had even appeared in the Beatles film Help! as well as stints in the Royal Shakespeare and Old Vic companies. In McKern, Mortimer found the perfect Rumpole, and Paul Cox’s illustrations are quite clearly representations of McKern in the rôle. Mortimer had, however, envisaged Alistair Sim as the lead, but

…Mr Sim was dead and unable to take on the part. In a happy moment Leo McKern was approached and in an even happier moment he agreed to play the role. He is a superb actor of endless invention and instinctive taste. He brought Rumpole wholly and wonderfully to life, and it would now be impossible to think of anyone else playing the part.

The stories are prose versions of the scripts for the television series. Rather marvellously, it seems that all, or virtually all of the TV versions are available on YouTube, beginning with that first Play for Today. In the series, Mortimer used voice-overs by Rumpole, and the opening of the first story in the Folio edition is a kind of written voiceover, providing a quick overview of the character, and swiftly establishing the tone of the stories:

I, Horace Rumpole, barrister at law, sixty-eight next birthday. Old Bailey hack, husband to Mrs Hilda Rumpole (known to me only as She Who Must Be Obeyed) and father to Nicholas Rumpole (lecturer in social studies at the University of Baltimore, I have always been extremely proud of Nick); I, who have a mind full of old murders, legal anecdotes and memorable fragments of the Oxford Book of English Verse (Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s edition) together with a dependable knowledge of bloodstains, blood groups, fingerprints, and forgery by typewriter; I, who am now the oldest member of my Chambers, take up my pen at this advanced age during a lull in business (there’s not much crime about - all the best villains seem to be off on holiday in the Costa Brava), in order to write my reconstructions of some of my recent triumphs (including a number of recent disasters) in the Courts of Law, hoping thereby to turn a bob or two which won’t be immediately grabbed by the taxman, or my clerk Henry, or by She Who Must Be Obeyed, and perhaps give some sort of entertainment to those who, like myself, have found in British justice a life-long subject of harmless fun.

That introduction pretty much sets the tone for the entire oeuvre, which is more extensive than I had thought. Rumpole, like Sherlock Holmes, attracts obsessives, and one fan has listed every appearance in print, TV and radio here. The Folio selection, by the author, is meant to show the range of Rumpole’s cases. They all, of course, revolve around Rumpole for the defence at the Old Bailey, but Mortimer shrewdly varies the circumstances and the milieu, managing to present a broad portrait of Britain in the seventies and eighties. Mortimer continued to write Rumpole stories until 2007, two years before his death. This Folio selection, though, might be said to be the classic Rumpole.

The book is undeniably enhanced by the presence of the delightful illustrations by Paul Cox, whose Instagram account offers a collection of his distinctive images. In this Rumpole volume, as well as full-page and double-page spread illustrations, there are many little vignettes, making this one of the most heavily decorated Folios in the collection. Cox is an ideal artist for this commission. His distinctive style is warm and whimsical, and the only downside to his work here is that there is none of his usual vibrant colour. All the paintings are black-and-white. Some of the colourful style Cox brought to his illustrations for PG Wodehouse stories, also in Folio, would have been welcome here. Here is one of Cox’s cover illustrations for the Folio Wodehouse.

Evidently, Cox did make at least one colour illustration featuring Rumpole. This image, “Rumpole’s Christmas Party” pops up as an item sold at auction. I don’t know if this ever featured in a Rumpole book. There is a very late collection of stories, Rumpole at Christmas, which has a cover illustration by Tony Healey. The US version of this book, entitled A Rumpole Christmas, has a cover illustration by yet another artist.

Despite their monochromicity (is that a word?) these line and wash pictures are a delight. Cox’s fluid, lively method seems ideally suited to these very British stories. Here is Rumpole on his way to the Old Bailey in the first story.

And here is Rumpole in his natural habitat, an Old Bailey court room in a double page spread:

These full-page and double-page images are complemented by smaller paintings which appear in profusion throughout the text. These are close interpretations of the action of the stories, and work brilliantly alongside Mortimer’s prose.

I notice that Rumpole has now appeared as a Penguin Modern Classic, which is, I suppose, the ultimate accolade for a twenty-first century work of fiction. They have gone with one of the classic HM Bateman cartoons for the cover, which I can’t help but feel is a missed opportunity.

Bateman’s heyday was in the 1920s, and he died well before the time in which the Rumpole stories are set. They could have asked Paul Cox….

John Mortimer, Rumpole, selected and introduced by the author. Illustrations by Paul Cox. Folio Society, 1994. Printed on Hamilton Wove paper at The Bath Press, Avon. Bound at The Bach Press in full cloth printed and blocked with a design by the artist

Sherlock Holmes relied on Dr Watson as a trusty partner when the game was afoot. But he also was able to call upon the Baker Street Irregulars, that band of street urchins who could be his ears and eyes on some of London’s more disreputable streets. And of course Holmes himself, the master of disguise, often appears as a tradesman or a ne’er-do-well in an opium den as part of his investigations. So the streets of the capital and the people who frequent them are indelibly associated with Sherlock Holmes. There’s a kind of London imaginary in which Holmes, many characters of Dickens and Collins, and maybe some of Trollope and Thackeray co-exist on these streets as London expanded during the nineteenth century.

That connection to the grimmer bits of the metropolis is enough for me to move from Sherlock Holmes in my last post to the real lives of mid-Victorian Londoners in this Folio volume which brings together selections from the three books Henry Mayhew published in 1851 entitled London Labour and the London Poor, together with a fourth volume which appeared in 1861, just sixteen years before Conan Doyle introduced Sherlock Holmes to the world in A Study in Scarlet. 1851 was, of course, the year of the Great Exhibition, which aimed to project Britain’s imperial power to the world. London was a showcase for the Empire, but the image was often a long way from the reality. 1851 was also the year that Dickens began to write Bleak House, with its fantastic opening paragraph:

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

This is the London inhabited by the men and women Mayhew encountered in his mammoth piece of social research, which sought to present a comprehensive portrait of the lower orders of the Empire’s capital city. Mayhew lays out his approach in succinct terms: “I shall consider the whole of the metropolitan poor under three separate phases, according as they will work, they can’t work, and they won’t work.” Mayhew scoured the city streets, interviewing hundreds of poor people, noting their trades, their clothes, their speech, their habits, their income: his books comprise the most comprehensive account of the Victorian lower class city-dwellers, a vital resource for historians and novelists since then.

Mayhew himself had a Dickensian sort of life: the thirteenth of seventeen children, he ran away to sea, served in the East India Company, and on his return to England became so indebted that he fled to Paris to escape his creditors. He was the founding editor of Punch and contributed to the Illustrated London News. But it’s for London Labour and the London Poor that he is most remembered.

The Folio volume, entitled London Characters and Crooks, is selected, edited and introduced by Christopher Hibbert, a popular historian with dozens of books to his name, several of them published in Folio Society editions. The single Folio edition, though of over 500 pages, represents perhaps a third of the material that Mayhew produced, originally as separate articles for the Morning Chronicle, then as self-published weekly instalments, and finally collected in book form.

Hibbert explains Mayhew’s method in his introduction:

The wonderfully evocative effect that Mayhew succeeds in creating is due not so much to his skill as a journalist, novelist, and playwright, as to the warmth and attractiveness of his coaxing personality, his ability to get his subjects to talk frankly and naturally. The engraver Ebenezer Landells recorded that he once saw Mayhew at work talking to a coster-monger, drawing his story out of him, leaving Augustus and his brother-in-law, William Jerrold, to put in a word or comment so that it seemed more like a conversation than an interview, and meanwhile relying on another brother, Horace, to take down everything that was said.

As Hibbert says, the volumes Mayhew produced “are written with such understanding, such fascination, so refreshing a lack of either condescension or humbug, such vivid immediacy that they are unique: the very colours and smells of the East End come rising out of the pages.”

Mayhew’s original publications contained “numerous illustrations from photographs.” These were drawings based on daguerrotypes attributed to Richard Beard, who had acquired a monopoly on the daguerrotype process, and opened England’s first professional photography studio. The prints may well have been made by someone associated with Beard’s studio. An example of one the original illustrations is this one of a mudlark.

Mayhew describes the life of one such mudlark, a boy nine years old:

The lad of whom I speak next was discovered by me now nearly two years ago ‘mud-larking’ on the banks of the river near the docks. He was a quick intelligent little fellow, and had been at the business, he told me, about three years. He had taken to mud-larking, he said, because his clothes were too bad for him to look for anything better. He worked every day, with twenty or thirty boys, who might all be seen at daybreak with their trousers tucked up, groping about, and picking out the pieces of coal from the mud on the banks of the Thames. He went into the river up to his knees, and in searching the mud he often ran pieces of glass and long nails into his feet. When this was the case, he went home and dressed the wounds, but returned to the river-side directly, for “should the tide come up”, he added, “without my having found something, why I must starve till next low tide".” In the very cold weather he and his other shoeless companions used to stand in the hot water that ran down the river-side from some of the steam factories, to warm their frozen feet.

Mudlarking is one of many professions that Mayhew covers, and which, thankfully, no longer exist, such as the collection of what Mayhew calls dog dung for use in the tanneries. Those engaged in the trade were called “pure finders”, since the dung was used to purify the leather. A related trade was that of the dustmen. I don’t think I ever reflected on why the refuse collectors of my childhood days were called “dustmen” as in Lonnie Donegan’s comic song. In Mayhew’s world, though, dust is a valuable commodity:

A visit to any of the large metropolitan dust-yards is far from uninteresting. Near the centre of the yard rises the highest heap, composed of what is called the ‘soil’, or finer portion of the dust used for manure. Around this heap are numerous lesser heaps, consisting of the mixed dust. and rubbish carted in and shot down previous to sifting. Among these heaps are many women and old men with sieves made of iron, all busily engaged in separating the ‘brieze’ from the ‘soil’. There is likewise another large heap in some other part of the yard, composed of the cinders or ‘brieze’ waiting to be shipped off to the brickfields. The whole yard seems alive, some sifting and others shovelling the sifted soil on to the heap, while every now and then the dust-carts return to discharge their loads, and proceed again on their rounds for a fresh supply. Cocks and hens keep up a continual scratching and cackling among the heaps, and numerous pigs seem to find great delight in rooting incessantly about after garbage and offal collected from the houses and markets.

Some of the now lost street trades would be welcomed back, at least by me. Who wouldn’t want to see muffin and crumpet sellers on the street? Mayhew encountered this lively fourteen-year-old lad:

I turns out with muffins and crumpets, sir, in October, and continues until it gets well into the spring, according to the weather. I carries a fust-rate article; werry much so. If you was to taste ‘em, sir, you’d say the same. If I sells three dozen muffins at 3d. each, and twice that in crumpets, it’s a werry fair day, werry fair; all beyond that is a good day. The profit on the three dozen and the others is 1s., but that’s a great help, really a wonderful help, to mother, for I should be only mindin’ the shop at home. Perhaps I clears 4s. a week, perhaps more, perhaps less; but that’s about it, sir. Some does far better than that, and some can’t hold a candle to it.

If I has a hextra day’s sale, mother’ll give me 3d. to go to the play, and that hencourages a young man, you know, sir. If there’s any unsold, a coffee-shop gets them cheap, and puts ‘em off cheap again next morning. My best shop gets them cheap, and puts’em off cheap again next morning. My best customers is genteel houses, 'cause I sells a genteel thing. I likes wet days best, cause there’s werry respectable ladies what don’t keep a servant, and they buys to save themselves going out. We’re a great conwenience to the ladies, sir—a great conwenience to them as likes a slap-up tea. I have made 1s. 8d. in a day; that was my best. I once took only 2½d.-I don’t know why— that was my worst. The shops don’t love me— I puts their noses out. Sunday is no better day than others, or werry little. I can read, but wish I could read easier?

The Folio edition does not use the Beard illustrations. Instead, we are presented with photographs by John Thomson, from a book called Street Life in London, published in monthly parts in 1877 and 1888, so more contemporary with Holmes’s London than Mayhew’s. Thomson wrote of his images: “The precision and accuracy of photography enables us to present true types of the London poor and shield us from the accusation of either underrating or exaggerating individual peculiarities of appearance.” Certainly, these images are striking, and beautifully rendered in the pages of the Folio edition, each given a whole page, and printed on glossy paper The Dustmen pictured above are from that section of the Folio book.

Some other images:

These people from 180 years ago come alive again in Mayhew’s portrayal, and the photos enhance the text, allowing the reader to engage more deeply with those forgotten souls. As social history, it’s difficult to imagine a better piece of work than this pioneering compendium, or “cyclopedia” as Mayhew called it. Anyone reading mid-Victorian fiction - Oliver Twist, say - and thinking that maybe the author exaggerates the conditions in which people live, should refer to Mayhew for eye-opening confirmation. The modern reader will learn so much from this meticulously detailed survey, especially of the long-gone and mysteriously-named professions. Discover sponge dolls and swag-shops, penny gaffs and Ethiopian serenaders, master sweepers and climbing boys, ballast heavers and purl-men. It’s an entire world, mapped in minute detail.

Henry Mayhew, London Characters and Crooks, selected, edited and introduced by Christopher Hibbert, Folio Society, 1996

Typeset in Monotype Bulmer by Gloucester Typesetting Services, Stonehouse, Gloucestershire. Printed at the Bath Press, Avon, on Balmoral Wove paper, and bound by them in full buckram, printed and blocked with a design by David Eccles, who also designed the Sherlock Holmes cover in the previous post.

Now that I am actively seeking to link each of these posts together, I wondered what would follow on naturally from Keith Thomas’s magisterial Religion and the Decline of Magic. And the answer, of course, is Sherlock Holmes. To elaborate: Thomas’s book concerns astrologers, cunning men, fortune tellers, and so on. Charlatans all, naturally, but giving the impression of supernatural powers. Holmes does not, needless to say, possess supernatural powers, but those who witness his deductions often ascribe his insights to something beyond human comprehension. A couple of exchanges illustrate the way in which his powers are perceived. In “The Beryl Coronet”, Mary Holder, who is no better than she should be, is startled when Holmes deduces that the greengrocer who delivers to the house has a wooden leg:

Something like fear sprang up in the young lady’s expressive black eyes. “Why, you are like a magician,” said she. “How do you know that?” She smiled, but there was no answering smile in Holmes’ thin, eager face.

In “The Sussex Vampire”, which does not concern actual vampires, the innocent Dolores is relieved to be cleared of demonic activity by Holmes:

“When this gentleman, who seems to have powers of magic, wrote that he knew all, I was glad.”

So that was easily enough excuse for me to write about one of my favourite fictional characters in this series on Folio editions. Of course, Conan Doyle himself was a believer in the supernatural. He attended séances, and was taken in by the Cottingley fairy hoax, a stunt committed by two young girls that would not have fooled Holmes or even Watson for a second.

My first encounter with Sherlock Holmes came in book form through the John Murray editions I could borrow from the local library. I was about 10 at the time. These were in series, with covers like this:

Round about the same time, the BBC were broadcasting adaptations starring Douglas Wilmer as Holmes, with Nigel Stock as Watson. I think Wilmer and Stock were excellent in the roles, only surpassed by the 80s Granada adaptations starring Jeremy Brett and Edward Hardwicke. I remember also Peter Cushing as Holmes in 1968, replacing Wilmer, with Stock continuing as Watson. And of course, there were frequent reruns of Basil Rathbone’s cinematic Holmes on TV. I was thus delighted when, probably in 1966, Father Christmas gave me these two omnibus volumes, which I kept until I acquired the Folio set.

The image on the cover (artist unknown) evokes Basil Rathbone, reasonably enough. But the illustrations that I always associate with Holmes were those by Sidney Paget, produced for the original publication of the stories in the Strand magazine. It was Paget who gave Holmes the deerstalker hat. Conan Doyle never describes Holmes as wearing one. I might well have learned that nugget from Michael and Mollie Hardwick’s Sherlock Holmes Companion, which I borrowed repeatedly from the library. One of Paget’s best-known illustrations adorns the cover.

The Folio edition of the complete Holmes comes in two multi-volume sets, one for the short stories and one for the novels. The spines are ingeniously designed to produce silhouettes of the instantly recognisable Holmes and Watson across the expanse of the volumes. Even more cleverly, each cover illustration formed part of the spine illustration, but stands complete in its own right, as you can see in this example:

Holmes is in his iconic, but non-canonical deerstalker of course. The cover design is by David Eccles, who has designed covers and produced in text illustrations for many Folio books. He talks very interestingly about his art in this Slightly Foxed podcast. The illustrations inside these volumes are by Francis Mosley, about whom I can find very little. He is, I think, the artist based in Bath, and the half-brother of the late James Mosley, who was an expert on typography. Francis Mosley is a prolific Folio artist: his work appears in the 17-volume Joseph Conrad set, Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, and many others. The illustrations for the Folio Holmes depict the detective perhaps less as a superhuman, more as a man at the top of his game, methodically pursuing the truth. Here he is, in deerstalker again, searching for clues in “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” while Watson and Lestrade look on in bafflement:

Mosley’s illustrations really come into their own, I think, when he is depicting London in the typical Holmesian setting: dark, or foggy, or both. Here is the illustration for “The Bruce-Partington Plans” in which the villain, who has killed the innocent Foreign Office clerk Arthur Cadogan West, disposes of the body by dropping it onto the roof of a passing tube train.

In the final desperate chase at the end of The Sign of Four, Holmes and Watson are in a police launch, pursuing Jonathan Small, the villain, in his boat the Aurora, down the Thames:

Watson describes the scene:

At Greenwich we were about three hundred paces behind them. At Blackwall we could not have been more than two hundred and fifty. I have coursed many creatures in many countries during my checkered career, but never did sport give me such a wild thrill as this mad, flying man-hunt down the Thames. Steadily we drew in upon them, yard by yard. In the silence of the night we could hear the panting and clanking of their machinery. The man in the stern still crouched upon the deck, and his arms were moving as though he were busy, while every now and then he would look up and measure with a glance the distance which still separated us.

Mosley’s illustration seems to capture the scene well. These editions benefit, obviously, from his vision. I still prefer Paget, though…

Each set of volumes has an introduction. For the novels, the introduction is by Michael Cox, who seems to have led an extraordinary life. For the short stories, it’s, appropriately enough, Peter Cushing, who provides an idiosyncratic and chatty piece, that conveys his enthusiasm for Conan Doyle’s creation very clearly. I’ll leave the last word to him:

And now, as a final tribute to our heroes and their creator, perhaps I may be permitted to leave the last words of this preamble to a great ‘Sherlockian’, Vincent Starrett. They are so evocative, and they never fail to send a tingle of emotion and grateful memory up and down my spine:

There can be no grave for Sherlock Holmes or Watson...

Shall they not always live in Baker Street? Are they not there this instant as one writes? ... Outside, the hansoms rattle through the rain, and Moriarty plans his latest devilry. Within, the sea-coal flames upon the hearth, and Holmes and Watson take their well-won ease... So they still live for all that love them well: in a romantic chamber of the heart: in a nostalgic country of the mind: where it is always 1895.

Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes: Complete Stories, 9 vols. Illustrated by Francis Mosley. Folio Society, 1993-94.

Set in Baskerville (of course!) by Fakenham Photosetting Ltd and printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner Ltd, Frome on Coronet Wove paper.

Binding design by David Eccles.

Doctor Faustus, the subject of the last Folio book we encountered, would have been very interested in the research of Sir Keith Thomas, whose book Religion and the Decline of Magic we come to now. Faustian figures feature prominently in Thomas’s ground-breaking study from 1971, in which he demonstrates how the idea of magic permeates the way in which the people of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance viewed the world. Thomas was, and is, an old-fashioned sort of scholar, as he revealed in this wonderful article in which he discusses his research methods. The results of that idiosyncratic research are showcased in this exhilarating and learned tour around the wilder fringes of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England.

The book, issued in the two-volume Folio edition in 2012, is a hybrid of history and anthropology, and uses both disciplines to illuminate the numerous threads of his argument. As Hilary Mantel says in her introduction,

Keith Thomas sees that magic and magical thinking were not quaint deviations from mainstream thought; they were not marginal to the early modern world, but intrinsic to it. Closely allied to religious sentiment and ritual expression, magic survived the Reformation, adapting its form. Magic was not just the province of ‘Hob, Dick and Hick’ the simple villagers, but also of the erudite and sophisticated; kings had their astrologers to guide them, and the politically astute could manipulate popular belief in prophecies and miracles so that they impacted on the affairs of nations. But our ancestors were not emptily credulous. They didn’t believe in just anything. Their world view was diverse but coherent; it had its own pedigree, and left its own descendants. Their society, which seems to us static, traditional and hierarchical, proves on closer inspection to be constantly shifting, renewing itself. When Thomas’s book was published in 1971, it drew together two disciplines, history and anthropology, which early in the twentieth century had grown apart. But the author has no grand thesis to sell us. The joy of his dry and witty book is in its accumulation of fine detail, and also in its broad humanity. Emerging from most studies of the past, the reader feels a leaden ache, a sense of pity and waste and dread. From this book, the reader emerges exhilarated, provoked, amused, with an insight into the ingenuity and potential of human beings and a sense that the past was not a place of insensate ignorance and darkness, but a place we are privileged to revisit through the craft of such an original, painstaking and erudite historian.

That description really encapsulates the impact of this book on the reader. Mantel is writing over forty years after publication, but she still feels the thrill of encountering such an intellectual titan on the pages of this work. The contemporary reception was no less approving. Reviews at the time heralded it as one of the most important historical works of the century, and its reputation has not dimmed. Thomas Rabb, writing a review of a later edition, had this to say about the vast scope of Thomas’s work:

First and foremost, Thomas demonstrated how completely the sense of magic pervaded the society of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The range of reference in this enormous book is staggering, and it documents the many arenas in which belief in the supernatural was central. Much of the religious faith and activity of the time centered on assumptions that, in other settings, might be considered magical: the practical effects of prayer, for example, and the force of prophecy were simply taken for granted. Moreover, outside the church magic reigned: in the prac-tice of healing, in the consultations with cunning men and women, in the devotion to astrology and alchemy, in the attention paid to ghosts, fairies, omens, and above all in the obsession with witchcraft.

Witchcraft is a major area of investigation, and the second volume is entirely devoted to it. I say entirely: in fact, well over 200 pages of this volume consist of references, demonstrating the staggering range of Thomas’s research.

The importance of the book, and its influence on later historians, cannot really be overstated. As Alan Macfarlane, one of Thomas’s graduate students, wrote in a piece celebrating ten years of the book’s existence:

There can be little doubt that our whole idea of the early modern period in England has been transformed by this work. Furthermore, it made it plain that anthropological work on other non-industrial societies was of great value in understanding the past in England. The central theme of the book, Weber’s ‘disenchantment of the world’ is a familiar one. Yet the virtuosity and erudition with which the central concern is pursued is dazzling.

That virtuosity is apparent on every page, and in this Folio version, the reader’s engagement is enhanced by the physical presentation. The blue buckram binding is blocked in gold by a design by Grady McFerrin, which echoes some of the contemporary illustrations inside. McFerrin is an American, and has illustrated a wide variety of books, as well as rock concert posters. Here are the two covers:

Inside the books, the illustrations are not newly commissioned, as is often the case with Folio volumes, but consist of items drawn from contemporary documents. They maintain the power to startle after hundreds of years, dealing with accounts of supernatural events, witchcraft, fairies, astrologers, cunning men, apparitions and the like. This one caught my eye, as I lived for a long time not far from Kirkham. I never saw a native like this though:

And Shakespeare would have known this representation of Robin Goodfellow, or Puck:

This is an absolutely fascinating study, and required reading for anyone interested in the social history of the English Renaissance.

Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic. Introduced by Hilary Mantel. Folio Society, 2012.

Typeset at The Folio Society in Minion. Printed on Abbey Wove paper at Memminger MedienCentrum AG, Memmingen, Germany. Bound at Lachenmaier, Reutlingen, Germany, in buckram, blocked with a design by Grady McFerrin.

As the Luftwaffe blitzed Manchester in 1940, a student called John Wilson was writing his undergraduate dissertation on the theatre of Christopher Marlowe. Half a century later, Marlowe was the subject of that undergraduate’s final published novel before his death. Wilson had, of course, long since metamorphosed into Anthony Burgess, and his A Dead Man in Deptford distilled a lifetime’s interest into a lively, complex and entertaining narrative, culminating in the principal character’s sordid demise as a victim of a pub brawl at the age of 29.

This Folio edition of Marlowe’s best-known play, Doctor Faustus, is an obvious choice to follow Katherine Duncan-Jones’s book on Shakespeare in this series. The two playwrights were contemporaries in the Elizabethan theatre, and possibly collaborated. Marlowe’s reputation rests on a small handful of plays, his career and his life being ended in that inn in Deptford. Despite this, the Marlowe Society managed, in 2002, to have a question mark inserted against the date of Marlowe’s death on his memorial window in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey. What evidence there is suggests that Marlowe died by stabbing in Deptford in 1593, but, rather like the Shakespeare authorship conspiracists, a faction of the Marlovians believe some sort of Harry Lime Third Man trick was pulled, and Kit Marlowe lived on in secret, and possibly was responsible for Shakespeare’s later plays. It’s no surprise to discover that the president of the society is Sir Mark Rylance.

In his brief career, his most significant achievement, certainly the play that has been most produced, is Doctor Faustus. It’s his version of the old German legend, probably based on the life of a real figure, the alchemist astrologer and general all round con-man, Johannes Faust, who practised his dark arts in the early sixteenth century. The name has since produced a metaphor for a deal with the devil. The Faustian pact in the play is literally that: Faust sells his soul to the devil, in the shape of Mephistophilis, in order to enjoy a mortal life of unlimited wealth, luxury and indulgence. Now, of course, a Faustian bargain might describe a football transfer, or an influencer’s decision to choose one brand over another. Times have changed.

The Folio edition is introduced by Charles Nicholl, whose book The Reckoning places Marlowe’s murder in the context of the world of Elizabethan espionage, in which Marlowe was certainly involved. Nicholl’s book appeared in 1992, and it’s apparent that Burgess had read it as he was writing A Dead Man in Deptford. Nicholl’s book, which won both the James Tait Memorial Prize, and the Crime Writers’ Association Golden Dagger for non-fiction, is a masterly account of the death, and the events leading to it. It’s that rare thing: a book with full academic authority and references, but which reads like a page-turning thriller.

So Nicholl was a great choice to introduce this edition. At the symposium on Burgess Marlowe and Shakespeare in Angers in 2010 (was it really that long ago?) Charles Nicholl was the keynote speaker, and his talk was reproduced in the volume of proceedings, as was my paper on Burgess’s portrayal of espionage in his fiction. In his introduction, he sketches the details of Marlowe’s life and works, and outlines the rather tortuous history of the text. One significant point he makes is the pivotal nature of the themes explored in the play. Faustus is, of course, carried off to hell at the climax, but as Nicholl points out:

Historically, one might say that it is Faustus, rather than the Church and its hell-fires, who has won the day. He is a sacrificial hero on the frontiers of the ‘new philosophy’. The fall of the magician, as here depicted by Christopher Marlowe, is also the rise of the scientist, the magician freed (for better or worse) from the metaphysical trappings of occultism. Shakespeare’s Hamlet treads the same ground, the same dangerous frontier between the medieval and the modern, some ten years later.

Like Faustus, Hamlet was a student at Wittenberg, a great centre for the new learning. One of Faustus’s historical prototypes, the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno, was a teacher there in the late 1580s. There is a disturbing and prophetic footnote here: in Rome in 1600, the year Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, Bruno was burned at the stake by the Catholic Inquisition, Not quite hell-fire, but the distinction is rather academic.

The illustrations for this edition are in the form of some extraordinarily striking wood engravings by George Tute. They are suitably mysterious and disturbing. Tute, still active at the age of 92, has also illustrated a number of other Folio volumes, including editions of Shakespeare and Chaucer. Wood engravings, seem particularly suited to dark themes, and here Tute really gives full value to the mysterious world conjured up, literally, by Faustus in the play. Here, for example, is the moment when Faustus and Mephistophilis behold the orbs of heaven:

The cover of the book (at the top of the post) features Tate’s version of the supposed portrait of Marlowe, only discovered in the early 1950s, and which might very well not be Marlowe at all. Tute’s engraving, washed over with a layer of blood red is suitably ominous, but that’s as nothing to the complementary engraving on the back cover, a grisly memento mori:

This Folio edition, then, does justice both to the text and to Marlowe, and is a delight visually. The illustrations are startling, and add an extra visceral element to the reader’s response.

Christopher Marlowe, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. Edited by A.H. Bullen. Introduced by Charles Nicholl. Wood Engravings by George Tute. Folio Society, 1993.

Set in ‘Monotype’ Centaur by Gloucester Typesetting Services. Printed on Brunswick Wove paper at The Bath Press, Avon.

Somewhere -- I need to dig it out -- I have an audio cassette recording of Anthony Burgess’s radio play A Meeting in Valladolid, broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 1991. It was part of a European Broadcasting Union initiative, European Radio Week. The play was transmitted simultaneously across Europe in ten languages. I see that the German version, though none of the others, has been uploaded to YouTube. Burgess based the play on his short story of the same name, which made an appearance in The Devil’s Mode. In the story, and the play, Shakespeare, played by Robert Glenister, is in Spain with the King’s Men in 1606, as adjuncts to an Anglo-Spanish peace conference. The players perform a shortened version of the bloodthirsty Titus Andronicus, which fails to please the Spaniards, amongst whom is Cervantes. It’s a typically Burgessian flight of fancy, replete with some knotty seventeenth-century word play.

So, in the game of connections that I now seem to be playing, I’m moving from my last post about arguably Spain’s most significant literary figure to his contemporary, arguably England’s most significant literary figure. Burgess was obviously intrigued by the fact that Cervantes and Shakespeare were active around the same time, and that it’s not totally inconceivable they may have met. At least, it’s less inconceivable than the latest batshit theory that the plays were written by a black Jewish woman. Shakespeare is a central figure in Burgess’s work, as the star of Nothing Like The Sun, and the subject of the 1964 biography, which was republished in a Folio edition in 2015. I wrote about Burgess’s portrayal of Shakespeare in a book chapter available here, in which I compare his approach to that of another late twentieth-century novelist, Robert Nye.

None of this has anything to do with Katherine Duncan-Jones’s book, beyond making the point that, rather like Cervantes in Spain, Shakespeare continues to be a dominant figure in English literature, four centuries after his death. The tedious ongoing “debate” about authorship is one of the factors that keep his name much more prominent than those of his contemporaries. As far as I know, nobody has suggested that, say, John Webster’s plays were written by some obscure member of the nobility, or that Thomas Middleton was really a scullery maid -- though the more extreme fans of Marlowe have claimed that he didn’t really die in that tavern brawl, and went on to write the plays of, you’ve guessed it, Shakespeare...

One of the factors that gave birth to the whole authorship conspiracy theory nonsense was the idea that we don’t know that much about Shakespeare. Of course, we don’t know that much about most of the playwrights whose work first graced the boards of the Globe, the Rose, the Curtain or the Swan, but that lack of knowledge hasn’t been an issue. And actually, we know quite a bit about Shakespeare, from contemporary legal documents, from dedications such as Jonson’s, and of course from the First Folio, in effect a Festschrift put together by his friends and colleagues at the Globe. His life is quite well documented, in fact, so the Shakespeare authorship fanatics fall at the first hurdle. They are in the same category as the moon-landing denialists, in that, if what they claim is true, then hundreds, if not thousands of people must have been in on the conspiracy.

Thankfully, Katherine Duncan-Jones does not even deign to address that debate. This very handsome volume sets out to present Shakespeare’s life in the context of the cultural and societal developments of his time - and they are considerable, when one considers the major political upheavals of Elizabeth’s and James’s reigns. As Duncan-Jones suggests in her introduction,

Throughout this book, by mingling passages from Shakespeare’s own works with a wide variety of other material, I have attempted to suggest the richness and diversity of Shakespeare’s worlds, worlds which were full of exuberance and mirth, yet also fragile and hazardous. Lightly woven in with such contextual material are the main outlines of Shakespeare’s biography.

Katherine Duncan-Jones was the perfect choice for this volume. At the time of its publication, 2004, she had recently retired from her position of Professor of English at Somerville College, Oxford. She had produced the definitive edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets for the Arden edition, and the work for this volume doubtless fed into the production of her two later Shakespeare books, Shakespeare. An Ungentle Life (2010) and Shakespeare: Upstart Crow to Sweet Swan 1592–1623 (2011). As a scholar of Shakespeare and his times, she was peerless, and this tribute by Emma Smith demonstrates the high regard in which she was held.

The Folio volume, which is, as the cliché goes, profusely illustrated, moves through Shakespeare’s life in ten chapters. In each chapter, the author presents the stages of Shakespeare’s life against a tapestry of contextual detail about the world, or worlds, in which he was moving. She adopts a typographical convention to distinguish her comments from the quotations she uses, so that a typical page will have some text of the time, a striking illustration or two, and then Duncan-Jones’s always acute comments in a different typeface. Here’s an example from an early chapter, dealing with the convention of the annual monarchical progress undertaken by Elizabeth I and her court. Shakespeare might well have witnessed the queen on one of these occasions.

So, as well as providing a compact and well-referenced account of Shakespeare’s life, the book leads the reader down all sorts of byways into the society of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. One chapter, for instance, deals with the prevalence of infectious disease, and the effects it had on the career of the playwright. An intriguing “What if?” scenario might have played out if the authorities had closed the theatres for longer:

The effects of plague on Shakespeare’s career as a writer for the theatre were a good deal more serious than is generally realised. Major infections in London in 1592-3 and 1594 almost caused Shakespeare’s career as a playwright to be brought to an end when it had only just begun. If these periods of theatre closure had been even longer, or if any of the ensuing attempts by city authorities to close down the playhouses permanently had been implemented, Shakespeare might well have developed as a non-dramatic poet who had written only halt a dozen plays in his youth. During both of the periods of plague and prolonged theatre closure in the early 1590s he resourcefully turned his hand to something different, a long poem dedicated to a wealthy and generous young patron, Henry Wriothesley. third Earl of Southampton.

Another chapter deals with the education system, and Shakespeare’s interactions with the Inns of Court. Shakespeare’s friend John Marston was a member of the Middle Temple, and he appears alongside Shakespeare in a book called Love’s Martyr, which Duncan-Jones describes as a “strange rambling collection of verse” by one Robert Chester, in which a female phoenix is given a visionary overview of Britain, her plants, trees, minerals and birds by Nature, who then introduces the phoenix to her destined mate, a turtle dove. Appended to that are the “Poeticall Essayes” of Shakespeare, Marston, Chapman and Jonson. This is of course the source of Shakespeare’s rather weird poem The Phoenix and the Turtle. Here is a sample spread from that section:

What strikes the reader — or at least, this reader — again and again as I moved through this book, is the complete command of her subject that Duncan-Jones has, and the lightness of touch she shows as she weaves her commentary through the copious “contextual material” that is presented here. It’s really a fantastic primer for anyone wishing to understand Shakespeare’s world in all its richness and complexity. And of course, it sends you back to the plays, to marvel again at the gifts Shakespeare left for all of us.

I started with the Spanish connection to Shakespeare, so to finish, here’s another page, which reproduces the painting of the Somerset House conference, convened by the new king after the death of Elizabeth in order to end the conflict between England and Spain. It was painted by Juan Pantoja de La Cruz, who was a native of Valladolid.

What’s next? Something that is connected to one of the elements of this post, I think. Shakespearean, Spanish, Burgessian… or something else.

Katherine Duncan-Jones, Shakespeare’s Life and World, Folio Society, 2004. Typeset at The Folio Society in Baskerville with Helvetica display. Printed at Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, on Fineblade Smooth paper and quarter bound by them in buckram with printed paper sides designed by Chris Wadden.

William Egginton’s book on Cervantes is called The Man Who Invented Fiction. This is a big claim, of course, but it’s one that he supports vigorously in his excellent analysis. He delves into the idea of representation in literature, and how Cervantes creates a new space for presenting competing perspectives on characters and events, opening up new modes of discourse. Whatever one might think about Egginton’s claims, it’s indisputable that Don Quixote has been hugely influential in the way the novel as a form has developed in the four centuries since it appeared.

Certainly, the eighteenth-century pioneers of the novel in English obviously owed much to Cervantes. Fielding in Tom Jones and Defoe in Moll Flanders, for example, adopt the picaresque mode employed by Cervantes, and Sterne in Tristram Shandy delights in interpolations and digressions reminiscent of those in Don Quixote. But the novelist most obviously indebted to Cervantes must be Tobias Smollett, particularly in Sir Launcelot Greaves, in which the eponymous knight rides around the country fighting for justice and chivalry, accompanied by his squire, the Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote. So it is no surprise that Smollett published his translation of Cervantes’s novel in 1755, five years before introducing the public to Sir Launcelot. In this series on Folio editions, I had intended originally to choose books at random, but in that subconscious desire for order, I followed Venice: the Most Triumphant City, which made me think of the Grand Tour, with Smollett’s Humphry Clinker, which is a domestic tour of Britain, and that led to this volume, translated by Smollett and illustrated by Quentin Blake.

According to Robin Chapman in his introduction, Smollett’s translation is “accurate enough” and probably derived from previous translations. The standard modern translation is that of Edith Grossman and her version will doubtless more accurately reflect the tone of the author’s original. Smollett’s translation has much to commend it, though. As Chapman suggests, it has “the energy of the true novelist” and so the reader unfamiliar with the original will be carried along by the narrative. Chapman was a natural for the introduction, as his own writing career showed an abiding interest in Cervantes and his creations. His The Spanish Trilogy imagines further adventures for the characters in Don Quixote. E.C. Riley’s review of the first novel in the trilogy, The Duchess's Diary opined that it showed “a truer understanding of Cervantes than twenty books of criticism.” Chapman also wrote a well-received novel, Shakespeare’s Don Quixote, composed entirely of dialogue in which the characters are Shakespeare, Cervantes and Shakespeare’s contemporary John Fletcher. They are discussing a production of the lost play Cardenio, based on one of the tales told in Don Quixote.

The Folio edition features, unusually, a title inscription on the slipcase, presumably lettered by Quentin Blake.

Blake, a knight himself now, and still working at the age of 93, made his reputation as an illustrator of children’s books, and the energetic, fluid style which characterises his work is ideal for this book. The whimsical nature of the central character, and of Cervantes’s prose style, is perfectly captured in the images Blake produced for the Folio edition. Here is the illustration of the knight and his squire opposite the title page.

The book’s binding, in a bright yellow cloth, also features Blake’s work.

As for Smollett’s translation, it might be instructive to compare it to Grossman. Smollett’s version of the opening preface, or prologue goes like this:

Idle reader, without an oath thou mayest believe, that I wish this book, as the child of my understanding, were the most beautiful, sprightly and discreet production that ever was conceived. But it was not in my power to contravene the order of nature, in consequence of which, every creature procreates its own resemblance: what therefore could be engendered in my barren, ill-cultivated genius, but a dry, meagre offspring, wayward, capricious and full of whimsical notions peculiar to his own imagination, as if produced in a prison, which is the seat of inconvenience, and the habitation of every dismal sound.

Grossman renders it thus:

IDLE READER: Without my swearing to it, you can believe that I ald like this book, the child of my understanding, to be the most beautiful, the most brilliant, and the most discreet that anyone could imagine. But I have not been able to contravene the natural order; in it, like begets like. And so what could my barren and poorly cultivated wits beget but the history of a child who is dry, withered, capricious, and filled with inconstant thoughts never imagined by anyone else, which is just what one would expect of a person begotten in a prison, where every discomfort has its place and every mournful sound makes its home?

Both seem to me to convey appropriately the customary apologetic tone of the humble author submitting his work to the public. Grossman’s certainly reads better to a modern eye - “like begets like” is preferable to “every creature procreates its own resemblance” I think. But anyone who has read much eighteenth century prose will feel completely at home with Smollett’s version. Both Smollett and Grossman point out that the reference to a prison is likely a reflection of the fact that Cervantes was imprisoned around the time he was working on the novel.

If the Folio Society’s founding aim was to present significant literature in elegant editions, it certainly fulfils that objective here. Reading Don Quixote was one of the most stimulating and enjoyable encounters with a book that I have experienced. And anyone with pretensions to an understanding of the novel has to read it. This edition is a beautiful way to fulfil that obligation. I think Milan Kundera expressed the significance of this book very succinctly:

“Cervantes is the founder of the Modern Era. ... The novelist need answer to no one but Cervantes. Don Ouixote is practically unthinkable as a living being, and yet, in our memory, what character is more alive?”

Miguel de Cervantes, The History and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote, translated by Tobias Smollett, with an introduction by Robin Chapman. Folio Society, 1995. Illustrations by Quentin Blake. Printed on Hamilton Wove paper by Cambridge University Press and bound by them in cloth printed with a drawing by the artist.

My Folio edition is the one pictured here, illustrated by Derrick Harris. It’s an edition published in 2018, with an introduction by John Sutherland, using Harris’s original illustrations from a previous Folio edition published in 1955. I really like the use of wood engravings to illustrate eighteenth-century texts: there’s something about the angularity and roughness that seems appropriate for picaresque, rollicking adventures. Derrick Harris also illustrated the Folio editions of Fielding’s Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews. A comprehensive account of his life and work is available here. Harris’s work reminds me of the Lino cuts of Edward Bawden. Back in the seventies, the Oxford English Novels series, in paperback, featured covers with linocuts by Bawden, and my student copy of Humphry Clinker was in that series. This is Bawden’s cover illustration, much reduced for the house style of the Oxford paperbacks.

(from Edward Bawden, A Book of Cuts (Scolar Press, 1979)

Tobias Smollett, memorably lampooned in Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey as “Smelfungus” was a Scottish physician, who turned to writing early in life, and earned his living by his pen ever after. He did spend a brief period as a naval surgeon, and his experiences at sea gave him material for his fiction, especially in Roderick Random. As well as his novels, including Peregrine Pickle and Ferdinand, Count Fathom, he was a prolific journalist, travel writer and translator. His translation of Don Quixote is still in print. Humphry Clinker was his final work, written when he was ill, and residing in Livorno where he had travelled in search of a better climate for his chronic lung condition.

The full title of the novel is The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. The expedition in question is a journey around various locales in England and Scotland, undertaken by the valetudinarian Matthew Bramble, like Smollett travelling for his health. He is accompanied by his sister Tabitha, nephew Jeremy, niece Lydia, and maid Winifred. The character after whom the novel is named does not appear until about a quarter of the way through the text. He is an ostler at an inn, taken on by Bramble on his travels around the spa towns of Britain.

The novel is a gentle picaresque journey, in which the family encounter a series of comic misfortunes. The tale is told in epistolary fashion, with Bramble writing to his doctor, Jeremy writing to his university friend, and Lydia writing to her schoolfriend. Winifred contributes some epistles to the rest of the servants back at the family seat in Wales, Brambleton Hall. Along the way, they encounter a series of comic eccentrics, including the eponymous Clinker, the Scottish veteran Obadiah Lismahago, and various minor characters, whose main function seems to be to give Tabitha a fit of the vapours or to exacerbate Bramble’s ailments. Smollett is excellent at the set piece comic scene, and has plenty of opportunities to display his skill during the course of the narrative. Of course, in the end, all misunderstandings and conflicts are resolved, and couples paired off in traditional comedic fashion.

It’s not difficult to see Matthew Bramble as a version of Smollett himself: both troubled by ailments, rather cantankerous, and fiercely grumpy about the new-fangled customs they encounter. Smollett’s Travels Through France and Italy chronicles the small-scale Grand Tour he undertook a few years earlier, and it’s a long diatribe against what he sees as the deliberate obstacles put in his way by the citizens of those countries. Like Bramble, he writes to his doctor, among other correspondents. He fulminates, Bramble-like, against innkeepers, merchants, janitors, postmasters, guides and virtually everyone else who crosses his path. There’s a Folio edition of the Travels, of course, with an introduction by the prolific Christopher Hibbert, illustrated with contemporary engravings. Here’s Smollett, getting into his regular mood before even setting foot on the continent, by describing the conditions on the boat he has hired, for six guineas, to transport him and his party from Dover to Boulogne:

We embarked between six and seven in the evening, and found ourselves in a most wretched hovel, on board what is called a Folkstone cutter. The cabin was so small that a dog could hardly turn in it, and the beds put me in mind of the holes described in some catacombs, in which the bodies of the dead were deposited, being thrust in with the feet foremost; there was no getting into them but endways, and indeed they seemed so dirty, that nothing but extreme necessity could have obliged me to use them. We sat up all night in a most uncomfortable situation, tossed about by the sea, cold, and cramped and weary, and languishing for want of sleep.

Bramble is of a similar frame of mind. Here he is at the start of the journey, complaining to Dr Lewis about the sad decline of Bath:

You must know, I find nothing but disappointment at Bath; which is so altered, that I can scarce believe it is the same place that I frequented about thirty years ago. Methinks I hear you say, ‘Altered it is, without all doubt: but then it is altered for the better; a truth which, perhaps, you would own without hesitation, if you yourself was not altered for the worse.’ The reflection may, for aught I know, be just. The inconveniences which I overlooked in the high-day of health, will naturally strike with exaggerated impression on the irritable nerves of an invalid, surprised by premature old age, and shattered with long-suffering—But, I believe, you will not deny, that this place, which Nature and Providence seem to have intended as a resource from distemper and disquiet, is become the very centre of racket and dissipation. Instead of that peace, tranquillity, and ease, so necessary to those who labour under bad health, weak nerves, and irregular spirits; here we have nothing but noise, tumult, and hurry; with the fatigue and slavery of maintaining a ceremonial, more stiff, formal, and oppressive, than the etiquette of a German elector. A national hospital it may be, but one would imagine that none but lunatics are admitted; and truly, I will give you leave to call me so, if I stay much longer at Bath.

The various mishaps and calamities experienced by Bramble and his family are played out against the backdrop of pump rooms, inns, ballrooms and country houses in a succession of genteel spa towns. In the course of the novel, the Bramble party begin at Bath and visit, among other places, London, Harrogate, York, Scarborough, a series of Scottish towns, highlands and islands, and even my home city, Manchester, which Bramble is impressed with: “I am much pleased with Manchester, which is one of the most agreeable and flourishing towns in Great-Britain; and I perceive that this is the place which hath animated the spirit, and suggested the chief manufactures of Glasgow.” As John Sutherland says in his introduction, “In its entirety, Humphry Clinker offers a snapshot of Britain at the moment when commerce, empire, urbanisation and industrialisation were beginning to change everything.” As much as the picturesque travelogues of the time, this novel stands as an entertaining ‘state of the nation’ piece, given renewed life in this very handsome Folio edition.

Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, introduced by John Sutherland, with wood engravings by Derrick Harris, Folio Society 2018.

Printed on You Long Pure paper at C&C Offset Printing Co Ltd, China, and bound by them in cloth printed and blocked with a design by the artist.

If you are of a certain age, you’ll remember mail-order book clubs. Every month, you received through the post a little catalogue, and you had to choose at least one book from it, by filling in a form which you sent back. If you forgot to fill it in, you’d receive that month’s featured title, which was often a current blockbusting fiction title - Wilbur Smith, Desmond Bagley, Alistair Maclean. The books were specially printed for the club, but were pretty much identical to the ones on sale in the bookshops. My parents were members of World Books, and we had an eclectic shelf of books chosen and not quite chosen from there. I don’t know when I became aware of a rather more exclusive book club, The Folio Society, but I know I joined in 1979. The Folio Society produced original, illustrated, fine editions of classic novels, histories, biographies and poetry, which were sold via their annual catalogue. When you received the catalogue, you would find a new publication for each month, plus the backlist. You were obliged to choose at least four books in the year to maintain membership. Once your choices were in, you were sent whatever books were already published, plus a free presentation volume, with other books to come on publication. There was also a quarterly journal with articles relating more or less to the books being published at the time. It was entertaining, intelligent but not stuffy: it had rather the approach of Slightly Foxed. I became an enthusiastic member, and have been acquiring Folio editions in the forty-seven years since. Nowadays, Folio operates as a boutique publisher, and there’s no membership requirement, nor journal. Over the years, I have filled my bookcases with Folio books, and it’s become clear that there is an enthusiastic band of collectors out there, and a thriving second-hand trade, working through antiquarian bookshops and online dealers such as The Folio Vault.

My purpose in starting this Substack is to offer a journey through my collection, reflecting on the books as objects, and also, of course, on their contents. To my shame, there are more than a few of these volumes that have been sitting on my shelves for years and have not been read. So I hope that I will be obliged to catch up on those I haven’t read in order to say something pertinent about each one. And there will be some interaction with my other project, Fifty Classics.

I think there might be an audience out there for this kind of thing: book lovers who enjoy not just the act of reading, but cherish the physical book itself, especially when produced to the high standards of The Folio Society.

I won’t be going through my collection chronologically, nor randomly. But I will start with a very early acquisition, the presentation volume from 1981: Venice: The Most Triumphant City by George Bull. The author, with that splendidly English name, had a varied career as translator, journalist and administrator. His translation work included Machiavelli’s The Prince and Vasari’s Lives of the Artists for Penguin Classics, so he was well-placed to write this gorgeously illustrated history of La Serenissima

.

The book sets out to give a concise account of the spirit and essence of the city, with a special emphasis on the way in which it has inspired artists and writers from the Renaissance to the present day. Bull says in his first chapter that “the form of this book is an anthology strung along a thread of historical narrative, interspersed by personal impressions and experiences.” For me, reading this years before I had the opportunity to visit Venice myself, Bull was an excellent guide to the significance of the city. I think my late-flowering love of Italy was maybe seeded here. Certainly, one striking impression that stayed with me was of the sheer variety that Venice encompassed. Its art and architecture are its outward display, and the object of the observer’s admiration, but there’s a psychological pull too, an indefinable mystery that draws the traveller back. Bull skilfully examines the visual delights, but also considers the way in which Venice, perhaps more than any other city, exerts its influence on all who experience her charms.

Here’s Bull on Venice’s attractiveness in the late sixteenth century:

For important impressionable visitors such as the Gonzagas, when their alliance was sought or their friendly service secured, the Venetians paid heavily and put forward the smiling face of their beautiful city. Venice’s display of wealth and prosperity was unfeigned. In the sixteenth century, after the convulsions of Cambrai, until the 1570s, Venice increased trade and production; enjoyed long periods of peace and kept secure against attack; stabilised and entrenched the political power of its patrician class; provided the soil for a brilliant flowering of literature, architecture and painting; reinforced its independence as other Italian states succumbed to French and then Spanish domination, and in a Europe dominated by autocratic nation states and bloodied by religious persecution, earned a reputation for holding liberty, legitimacy, order, tolerance, privilege and the general welfare in steady balance.

Later, in the eighteenth century when Venice becomes associated with the excesses of Il Carnevale, Bull notes:

The Venetians themselves, in the days of the Grand Tour, laughed with some self-satisfaction at their own life-style; kept their pride in the Venetian state; but generally, when they dared, lambasted their rulers. The preposterous Casanova is a witness for the prosecution whom Montesquieu would have felt it a defilement to call. I have the twelve volumes of Arthur Machen’s translation from the French of the 1922 Casanova Society edition (’privately printed for subscribers only’) in front of me as I write. “The chief business of my life has always been to indulge my senses; I never knew anything of greater importance,” wrote the most notorious of all Venetians. But as well as turning up the sodden underside of the pleasures of Venetian life, he paints unforgettable pictures of ordinary public and private life that have become extraordinarily exotic at this distance of time. His ‘audacious hand’ can charm as well as shock us as much as it did the women he seduced.

Bull sees some parallels between the Venice of the eighteenth century, and England of the late twentieth century. I suppose he was writing this as the Callaghan government was stumbling towards its demise in the late seventies:

Future historians may criticise the twentieth-century English for not building new institutions. They may ask whether the English were really showing the rest of the world how to live. They will analyse the reasons for their declining share of world trade and their slack response to the loss of empire. They will ponder the continuance in several areas (fiction, the performing arts, aerospace) of technical and creative excellence; the decay of dogmatic religion; the exile of talent; the ill-repute abroad for treachery and dissoluteness; the closed system of government; the co-existence of social tolerance and civic ruthlessness; the passion and aptitude for ceremony; and the pursuit of easy pleasure.

The decay of Venice in the nineteenth century is presented through the melancholy reflections of some of the artists and writers who visited it. Bull comments on how Henry James presents Venice in Italian Hours:

The several pieces on Venice brood over the past, with mournful intensity. ‘Venetian life,’ he writes in The Grand Canal ‘in the large, old sense, has long since come to an end, and the essential present character of the most melancholy of cities resides simply in its being the most beautiful of tombs.’

There’s also this reflection on the Venice James knew in the late nineteenth century:

Two Old Houses and Three Young Women, published in Italian Hours and written in 1899, is brimful of echoes and allusions to George Sand and de Musset, to Browning and Ruskin and Wordsworth, strung along a serpentine thread of narrative and historical philosophising, wound round a sentimental idea of Venice as lover, full of favours. ‘Dear old Venice has lost her complexion, her figure, her reputation, her self-respect; and yet, with it all, has so puzzlingly not lost a shred of her distinction.’ There was an element of the history of Venice, he said, ‘which represents all Europe as having at one time and another revelled or rested, asked for pleasure or for patience there; which gives you the place supremely as the refuge of endless strange secrets, broken fortunes and wounded hearts.’

The end of the book brings the history up to date, and speculates on its future. When Bull was writing the book, the prospect of Venice subsiding at the beginning of the coming millennium was a serious one, with the floods of 1966 a recent memory. Now, when Venice is more overcrowded with tourists than ever before, and you have to pay just to enter the city, the concern seems almost quaint:

In The Death of Venice (André Deutsch 1976) Stephen Fay and Phillip Knightley create a ‘scenario for the last days’, my last image of Venice, an anticipation of what may have happened by the year 2000. Housing crumbles first, because of delays and restrictions and deteriorating services. Mestre expands; Venice shrinks. The deep canals are allowed to silt up as they did in Torcelo. The poor working class areas disappear. The palazzi are boarded up as the rich huddle together in smaller areas. Churches are closed. Even the best hotels, such as the Danieli, open for a shorter season as the tourists tend to patronise the modern hotels on the mainland.’

Thankfully, the development of the flood defence system known as the MOSE (Modulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico) has proved at least partially succesful, and so Venice continues to exert its spell today.

Bull’s book is a triumph of popular history. It’s learned, but never stuffy, and in its relatively brief span, the reader can grasp the essential magic of the place. And the Folio treatment means that the book is a feast for the eye as well as the mind. I’ve posted a few sample pages to give you a feel of the book.

As a historical introduction, I think Venice: The Most Triumphant City could scarcely be bettered, and even today, 45 years after publication, it stands up well against its numerous competitors. It’s a fine example of the Folio Society’s approach to publishing: high quality in every aspect, from the text to the illustrations, the typeface, the paper, the binding. I’m happy for it to take its place on my Folio shelves.

George Bull, Venice: The Most Triumphant City, Folio Society 1981.

Photoset in eleven point VIP Bembo spaced two points and printed by W&J Mackay Limited, Chatham on fineblade cartridge paper. Bound by W&J Mackay Limited in Scholco Dublina cloth.

Blocked with a fifteenth century Venetian design of Erhard Ratdolt.

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