her dress so antic

Margaret Cavendish dressed inappropriately, says Pepys, she put doves' eyes in a poem inappropriately, says me, she hewed to her own metaphysics when that kind of imagination was least appropriate, say the scientists of the Royal Society, and she was shy and miserable as a lady-in-waiting until she met William Cavendish, who put her two favourite qualities in her epitaph, wise and witty, for she was appropriate in his opinion and she stayed by him in his exile while he trained horses, and he would rather have sold anything else he owned, said someone, before he would have sold his Barbary horses.

Katie Whitaker amends us, she moderates the vision of Margaret Cavendish, she writes a biography, she is an amending agent, saying so or suggesting herself so in the introduction; explaining that she was “studying the meetings of the early Royal Society as part of the research for my doctoral thesis in the history of science” when she found Pepys' description of the writer, “her dress so antic,” then other descriptions by contemporaries contradicting Pepys, “an heroine,” “the prince of all wit,” “Majestic Quill,” wearing a velvet cap or trimming her nipples with scarlet (and though Whitaker describes the method that other women used when they wanted to make their nipples red she doesn't tell us that Margaret Cavendish used the same method so I am unsure how it was achieved in her case but she visited the theatre like that if I'm recalling that page correctly, not able to find it now and no nipples in the index when they should come after Sir Edward Nicholas and before Dr Nodin but go on) and exchanging letters with philosophers and scientists, good friends with some, Glanville one of those close scientist-friends in spite of their differences (they used to send refutations of one another through the mail), until she, Whitaker, came across an introduction to an 1872 edition of Cavendish's Life of her husband, this introduction written by someone named Mark Antony Lower, and Lower claims that Cavendish had a nickname among her contemporaries, “Mad Madge of Newcastle!'”

Whitaker says that “When I first encountered the story I assumed, as others had done, that he must have had access to some historical record that no one else has seen.” But when she searched for the record she couldn't find it, when she read the letters that people had written to one another about Cavendish she couldn't find it, even in the hostile letters of Mary Evelyn she couldn't find it, not in Pepys could she find it, and not in the writings of any enemy could she find it, nowhere could she find it, and concluded that it was nowhere to be found, and Mark Antony Lower had invented it in 1872 when he was writing his introduction, this antiquarian by profession who liked his own coinage so much that he never bothered to notice that the only extant shortened pet name for Margaret Cavendish during her lifetime was not Madge but Peg.

“It was her early nineteenth-century admirer, the essayist Charles Lamb, who seems first to have named her “Madge Newcastle” as a mark of his affection,” says Whitaker. She guesses that Lower found “Madge” in Lamb. And “Mad” had been Cavendish's reputation since John Evelyn's diaries were published in 1818, containing his wife's description of her, which led to Walter Scott introducing her as “that old mad-woman” in Peveril of the Peak (1823). Pepys' diaries were published in 1825. So her name during the Victorian age was linked to eccentric lunacy, though the lunacy hinged completely on two bits of writing in printed diaries, one of them by a woman who held a grudge against Margaret Cavendish for a reason that had nothing to do with madness or sanity but was due to the fact that Cavendish had promised her a thousand pounds as a wedding present, and then not seen her again for many years, and forgotten to give her the money.

“The early twentieth century represented the nadir of Margaret's reputation, both as a person and as a writer. And the most influential figure in her demolition was the essayist, novelist, and literary critic, Virginia Woolf,” Whitaker writes (then taking Woolf's description apart), and I think, look, here is my villain then, here is the one who gave me a vision that didn't jibe with the prose that I was reading; and Woolf's essay is not a source of information, it is a trapper's pit or distracting sideways arrow.

to the beautiful obliquities

Woolf and Firth: Charles Lamb would have had to forgive both of them. “I can pardon her [his sister, disguised as “Bridget”] blindness to the beautiful obliquities of the Religio Medici; but she must apologise to me for certain disrespectful insinuations, which she has been pleased to throw out latterly, touching the intellectuals of a dear favourite of mine, of the last century but one—the thrice noble, chaste, and virtuous,—but again somewhat fantastical, and original-brain'd, generous Margaret Newcastle” (Mackery End, in Hertfordshire). Firth acknowledges Lamb's intelligence; Firth praises him.

Certainly his larger sympathy, and keener insight, enabled him to perceive in the style and in the writer those finer qualities which the more conventional judgment of Pepys had refused to recognise.

Lamb is loving, Lamb loves; he inserts her into a discussion of bookbinding where she did not have to be but he will mention her, “thrice noble” again in the Two Races of Men: “the Letters of that princely woman, the thrice noble Margaret Newcastle.” Horace Walpole had an opinion of her: “pedant.” Pepys, as already mentioned, had his opinion, “I do not like her at all.” Walpole had read her works but Pepys had seen her and listened to her speak. Her clothes annoyed him. He thought he had watched one of her plays but it was her husband's play instead. On Wednesday the 18th of March in the year 1668 he looked through one of her books and disliked it, “the ridiculous History of My Lord Newcastle.” Lamb venerated that same book in the early 1800s: “no casket is rich enough, no casing sufficiently durable, to honour and keep safe such a jewel.” “[I]t may be taken for granted that his [Pepys'] recollections of the authoress influenced his judgment of her book,” writes Firth, pointing out, also, that the diarist had been suffering from bad eyes that night. “So to bed, my eyes being very bad.”

Fitzmaurice opens his Introduction to the Garland Sociable Letters with these words: “Over the last three hundred and fifty years, Margaret Cavendish and her writing have elicited a variety of reactions.” There are so many reactions that Firth won't decide between them. He says, “To decide between these conflicting sentences [Pepys', Lamb's, those of “learned bodies” at the University of Cambridge], and expound the precise amount of truth contained in each, would be a tedious and ungrateful task.”

Fitzmaurice lists some of the people I've mentioned as well as a couple of others, Frederic Rowton, for example, who wrote The Female Poets of Great Britain (1853), and Mary Evelyn, Pepys' contemporary, whose word for Cavendish is “rambling,” although it's curious of Fitzmaurice to refer to Evelyn's husband John as “the famous diarist” without quoting him on Cavendish as well. He described her as he saw her on the day when she visited a meeting at the Royal Society, “a mighty pretender to learning.”

John Evelyn is writing on May 30th, 1667, and Pepys, writing on the same day, describes the same event. “I find much company, indeed very much company, in expectation of the Duchesse of Newcastle who had desired to be invited to the Society.” Evelyn says that they showed her experiments and Pepys says so too. Pepys chooses to describe the experiments and Evelyn does not. “Several fine experiments were shown her of colours, loadstones, microscopes, and of liquors among others, of one that did, while she was there, turn a piece of roasted mutton into pure blood, which was very rare.” The Society's minutes for that meeting have the experiments like this: “Dutchess of newcastle intertaynd wth. 1 weighing the air in a glasse Recr. of 9 gallons & 3 pints. which exhausted weighed & opend to let in air weighed 1 ounce & 71 caratts more than when exhausted. Expt. of mixing colours. 3 cold liquors by mixture made hott. 4 water boyle in Rarifying engine . and making a bladder swell 5 bodys floating in medio aquae. 2 marbles separated by 47ll.“

it is the play of itself

We saw Alice in Wonderland with friends a few nights ago. Tim Burton, who has never shown the tiniest desire to attempt Carroll's logical extremism in any other film, doesn't attempt it here. Helena Bonham Carter's Red Queen was so much like Miranda Richardson in the second series of Blackadder that even M., who was unfamiliar with the show until he migrated, picked up on it. Anne Hathaway floated through the role of the White Queen with gestures that M. (who adored them) described as "camp," holding her elbows cocked and her fingers wafting, like a woman waiting for nail polish to dry.

Hamish, the glossy young lord who proposes to adult Alice in the real world before she goes down the rabbit hole, was played beautifully by someone I'd never seen before. Leo Bill? He filled his minor role with the pantomime roundedness that Alan Rickman brought to the Sheriff of Nottingham, and the alertness and glee of this, the private fun he was having, made him seem awake while everyone else on screen was sleeping upright, tucking his jaw down chinlessly, and pootering on about his digestive tract. The other real-world actors played it straight, which was a mistake, because 'it,' that is, the script they were given, did them no favours. Clump, thud, plop, went the script, both story and dialogue dull.

So. And writing like this reminds me of Pepys criticising performances of Shakespeare, which he does several times in the Diary. The Tempest, he says, has "no great wit; but [is] yet good, above ordinary plays." At the Opera he "saw Romeo and Juliet, the first time it was ever acted [after the theatres were re-opened following the fall of Oliver Cromwell's Puritan government].

But it is the play of itself the worst that ever I saw in my life, and the worst acted that ever I saw these people do"

At the King's Theatre he watched A Midsummer Night's Dream

which I have never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life.

The decision to turn Alice into a fantasy adventure seems to have been born of cowardice and nothing else; the script makes modest gestures at a kind of rote feminism -- Alice is sometimes forthright and sometimes not, to suit the plot, and she doesn't want to wear a corset -- but there is no other justification for it, other than the fear that audiences might be bored by Lewis Carroll. So, given that they've eviscerated the Nonsense and turned the Jabberwock into a standard fantasy movie dragon it's funny to hear the characters pop out lines about the importance of the imagination and the majesty of doing something new. In fact I'll go further: it's hypocrisy.

I've never loved the Alice books, or hated them either, but I remember, when I think back to reading them at the age of somewhere-under-ten, believing that Wonderland was a chilly and oppressive place. Alice goes to a world where everyone is smarter than she is, or, at least, more powerful, more knowing, more commanding, and these other people understand the way society works while she doesn't -- which is what life is like for a little child overall, if you think about it. You're ruled by adults who lay down laws in accordance with a logic that you are not privy to, logic which goes mostly unexplained, or explained in words that seem beside the point. "You have to go to bed now," they say, and, "No I don't," you reply, and "If you don't you'll be tired tomorrow," they tell you, but how, how, is that relevant to now? "No I won't be tired," you explain, and you're sure that this is true; why shouldn't it be true, and why should their guess about the future be more accurate than yours? How could they know? There is some mechanism back there, some knowledge, that they seem absolutely sure about. There's nothing you can do to penetrate their certainty. You will be tired tomorrow, they tell you. They're certain of it. When you're six this might as well be Nonsense-logic.

so quaint and mouthy

It's a funny thing, reading Don Juan after hundreds of pages of Lowes' calling Coleridge a genius. Byron scorns Coleridge, scorns Wordsworth, scorns the contemporary Poet Laureate Robert Southey even more, and thinks that everyone associated with the Lake Poets is a waste of his time.

Thou shalt believe in Milton, Dryden, Pope;
Thou shalt not set up Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey;
Because the first is crazed beyond all hope,
The second drunk, the third so quaint and mouthy

I found Don Juan at a new branch of our local library system, walking there last Saturday -- I think it opened on Thursday. The book was on a set of shelves labelled Classics. "I see you've found the Classics section," said the librarian when I took my books to the counter. He went on to say that he thought the books in Classics might have been donated by the publisher, which would explain why they were almost all black-spined Penguins, and perhaps also why no one had thought to buy the first two parts of Dante. (I should write them an email. Dear Sir and or Madame. Your library is lovely. Stocking the last part of a trilogy is cruel. Would you treat Tolkien this way? Yours, etc. (A fact sheet about librarians on the wall of our local branch suggests that most of them are High Fantasy enthusiasts. One likes Patrick White's The Tree of Man, which, as I once said on Whispering Gums' blog, is the White for people who don't read White. I believe this in the way that I believe Tale of Two Cities is the Dickens for people who don't read Dickens. Tale is a parched, dead Dickens, compared to the splurge that he wrings out of himself when he's at his most noticing. Some readers object to the splurge -- he writes too much, they say --

he has very very long and boring sentences that keep going on and on

-- complains a poster at LibraryThing. But that splurge is Dickens, it's the bubble that rises in his genius-alembic. And Tree is White coming as close as he ever did to a nice, normal Australian novelist.))

They had three or four shelves of brand-new Lonely Planets, probably donated too. I waved my hands around and yammered at the desk librarian about their new Les Murray Collected Poems. I've been wondering if you would buy this! I said, or something like that. You've had another Murray collection for ages --

Ah -- he named one.

No, I said, a different one, a little Selected, years old, with a white cover --

So. This new Classics section has given me The Diary of Samuel Pepys: a Selection as well as a few other things. And in Poetry they had Seamus Heaney's Beowulf translation, and a collected Phillip Larkin. "I am most pleased," as Pepys says. I decanted myself from the library "leaving all things there very gallant and joyful" and stuck my nose into a car boot sale on the way home.

Pepys keeps up a running commentary on the subjects of profit and food, which prompted me to think of Christina Stead, who brings the same two topics into her fiction with the same naturalness. This is one of the things that makes her work seem so lifelike, this realisation that people are interested in money and food, and interested in them in an ongoing and passionate way -- I mean, as if they were the stuff of life, which, in both writers, they very much are. "I'd fight for money to my last drop of blood," says the Man Who Loved Children's Henny to Old Ellen. "Can you live on air?" In 1664 Pepys looks through old papers and discovers "a romance which (under the title of Love a Cheate) I begun ten years ago at Cambridge" but when he's writing for himself he's less interested in romantic Love than in barrels of oysters and bottles of wine and whether his kidney stones have come back or not, and his profit margin. "I bless God with great joy to me; not only from my having made so good a year of profit, as having spent 420l and laid up 540l and upward. But I bless God, I have never been in so good a plight as to my health." This comes before the praise for his "pretty and loving quiet family," which is not storybook love, or Love a Cheate, but closer to steady pleasure, assurance, and comfort.

There are no adventures in the Diary, not in the sense that characters in romance novels have adventures (the ghost in the castle, the battle, the rescued lover) but things happen, things are constantly happening, and the whole book mutters like thick liquid boiling over heat, always moving, not in the sharp forward direction of the romance-adventure, but with an all-over engagement: events appearing, submerging, then coming back again. Pepys is told that his brother is ill, then he is more ill -- this goes on for a little, along with other concerns, then the brother dies, and what, in a planned novel, might be known as the sick brother plotline becomes so important that it takes up nearly all of the diarist's attention. Then there are inheritance problems, some family feuding, and Pepys discovers that his brother had an illegitimate child, who has been sent away to live with another family under a different name. In the planned novel (the one in which this is the sick brother plotline) the discovery of this child would likely lead to the illegitimate daughter plotline -- something would be made of her. Here she vanishes quickly, she is only another fact of life, dealt with, and less interesting than the oysters. And even this sickness and death is tied up with money. After discussing his dying brother's finances with his uncle, who believes the brother "owes a great deal of money," Pepys concludes

And what with that and what he owes my father and me, I doubt he is in a very sad condition; that if he lives he will not be able to show his head -- which will be a very great shame to me.

In the foreground we have Pepys, always, and his concerns, his food, his money, his family, while in the middle ground there are those things a little further away from him, his ties to his Lord, the enmity of a colleague, mentioned a little less often, but always present behind the first lot of things. Beyond that there are those things that history notices, the Restoration of Charles II, which occurred in the first year of the diary, 1660, a war between England and Holland, the Great Fire of London, and the Plague. Pepys in his thoroughness inhabits all of them. His description of London on fire takes in a large view in longshot --

... we saw the fire as only one entire arch of fire from this to the other side the bridge, and in a bow up the hill for an arch of above a mile long

-- the historical spectacle of it (with the inclusion of that "about half a mile long" it's Marquez's numbered elephants again) -- and the very close details --

And among other things, the poor pigeons, I perceive, were loth to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconys till they were, some of them burned, their wings, and fell down.

His intimate life, his life at work, and the greater life of the city and the court, are always with us in the Diary, and here I am going to wind this back to Stead again because The Man Who Loved Children has those same layers in play: the intimate life of the family, the middle ground of Sam's work and Louie's school, and somewhere beyond that, the wider society that keeps women married to husbands who won't let them escape, and the fairyland of Sam's ambitions, his radio show, his tribe of multi-ethnic children, the President he trusts, the whole strange outer foreign world, which is represented by Malaya. Both books bubble.