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| Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) |
In an
article published in January 1898, in Munsey’s
Magazine, Arthur Conan Doyle was the latest in a series of contemporary big
names to write about his favourite writers and books. The novel he talks about
as his particular favourite – containing more ‘accurate knowledge and ripe
wisdom and passionate human emotion’ than any other – was Charles Reade’s 1861
historical romance The Cloister and the
Hearth.
Over
the last couple of weeks, I read Reade’s classic to discover why it garnered so
much praise in the nineteenth century, from Doyle and others, and to spot any
clues as to why, since then, it has fallen into relative obscurity.
The Cloister and the Hearth is a mediaeval
drama, set around 1450. The story begins in Holland, not far from Rotterdam,
but deals with a journey that takes its hero through France and eventually to
Rome. Much of Doyle’s praise is given to the research that went into Reade’s
writing of the novel and the vividness with which a far-flung period of history
is made real to us. He writes: ‘it is a
human medievalism, neither stiff nor conventional nor unnatural, but
palpitating with rude life and with primitive emotions.’
The
immediacy of the world Reade writes about certainly still holds true today. The
novel is packed with excitement and incident (think bear attacks, sieges,
prison escapes, bandits) and populated with characters so recognisable in their
humanity that you can connect despite the archaic dialogue, and distinctly
period vocabulary. Here, for instance, a mother-in-law forces advice and money
on her daughter-in-law:
‘She then recapitulated her experiences of
infants, and instructed Margaret what to do in each coming emergency, and pressed
money upon her, Margaret declined it with thanks, Catherine insisted, and
turned angry. Margaret made excuses all so reasonable that Catherine rejected
them with calm contempt; to her mind they lacked femininity.’
Sometimes
the characters, or at least their living conditions, do indeed seem ‘rude’ or
‘primitive’. This is how an inn that Gerard, our hero, must sleep in is
described:
‘He had peeped into a large but low
room, the middle of which was filled by a huge round stove, or clay oven, that
reached to the ceiling; round this, wet clothes were drying-some on lines, and
some more compendiously, on rustics. These latter habiliments, impregnated with
the wet of the day, but the dirt of a life, and lined with what another foot
traveller in these parts call "rammish clowns," evolved rank vapours
and compound odours inexpressible, in steaming clouds. In one corner was a
travelling family, a large one: thence flowed into the common stock the
peculiar sickly smell of neglected brats. Garlic filled up the interstices of
the air. And all this with closed window, and intense heat of the central
furnace, and the breath of at least forty persons.’
But Reade is careful not to let
his Victorian readers sit back too secure in their superiority:
‘When men drive a bargain, they strive to get the sunny side of it; it
matters not one straw whether it is with man or Heaven they are bargaining. In
this respect we are the same now, at bottom, as we were four hundred years ago:
only in those days we did it a grain or two more naively, and that naivete
shone out more palpably, because, in that rude age, body prevailing over mind,
all sentiments took material forms.’
Less palatable to a modern reader
than this mantra of shared humanity, however, is the moral assumptions that
lead to the novel’s conclusion. Doyle writes of the novel that ‘such an indictment against celibacy of the clergy
has never yet been penned’, yet, for a modern reader, Gerard’s
prioritisation of the priesthood over his wedding vows is more difficult to understand
– prompting not, as presumably intended, critical feelings towards the Catholic
Church, but rather extreme irritation with the novel’s apparently admirable
characters.
This in turn has a negative
effect on the novel’s ability to evoke pathos. Doyle writes of one deathbed
scene ‘the man who can read that chapter
with dry eyes is a man whom I do not wish to know’, but a reader today
might be inclined to dash his or her head at a brick wall, rather than to cry,
so frustrating is the religiosity. It’s all a question of degree. A Victorian
reader might sympathise with Margaret’s helpless and ambiguous position, and
think she would be well suited to the role of clergyman’s wife. Yet a reader
now might take exception to the very assumption of her inferiority (the phrase
‘I am but a woman’ appears in the
novel 11 times).
Doyle writes about the particular
appeal of this historical period for fictionalisation, explaining:
‘Printing was coming, the Reformation was coming, the revival of
learning was just at hand, but the greater part of Europe still lay in that
blackest night which precedes the dawn.’
What’s interesting in this is the
parallels I find in how writers now approach the nineteenth century. In my Neo-Victorian Voices series, I’ve seen
how twenty-first century writers respond to the late 1800s as a period just on
the cusp, focusing on the advent of evolutionary theory, women’s education and suffrage
movements, and questions of race and colonialism. Victorianism is a period of
relative darkness for us – a dangerous world in which are own social concerns can
be played out by novelists – just as the Middle Ages fulfils that role for Reade.
The Cloister and the Hearth is probably only a handful of people’s ‘favourite’ novel today,
but it’s a well-written book, that reveals as much about the period in which it
was conceived as it does about the time in which it was set.
What
novel would you like to see the Secret Victorianist read next? Let me know –
here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.
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