Localism

There always has been localist literature; plenty of topographic specificity in 18th-century poetry, or (more to my point, here) a great deal of Cincinnatus-style withdrawal from the national stage to the local focus of one's provincial life. Cincinnatus was a much more important figure to the neoClassical world than is something realised: and one of the aspects of that is the sense that national, or global, politics are inevitably corrupt and corrupting; such that a principled retreat from the larger stage to the local one is seen as a cleansing action. In the nineteenth-century too, the mainstream of Byronic international cosmopolitanism, or Tennysonian civic performance, existed alongside a more modest strand of provincial poetry, a la Clare or Barnes. But the question is whether the 19th-century as a whole sees a shift away from a mode characteristed by large-scale social engagement towards a Cincinnatian withdrawal; from an attempt to make art systematic and global to a valorisation of the local in art.

Such a shift would mark a shrinkage in ambition, it seems to me -- at least in one sense. The real question is whether this correlates to a kind of abdication of the larger social project to understand the world—to, indeed, change it. In Dickens we see various textual strategies that are designed to use the metropolis as a way of apprehending and comprehending the whole world: all of society, men and women, young and old. Something is amiss, the world is not as it could be, and Dickens wants to understand what, and to see what can be done about it. London, according to this reading, is the urbs mundi; the whole of the world—the English countryside, America (in Chuzzlewit), France (in Bleak House and Dorrit) is all positioned in terms of London, and almost always returns to London. London, in other words, is Dickens’s modular way of engaging with the largest questions. Compare this with Hardy, from the century’s end. Hardy’s Wessex is not a microcosm of the whole world; it is, quite specifically, Wessex. That's kind of its point. The stories Hardy tells are human stories, and like all human stories they scale more generally as commentaries upon human experience; but they are local stories. The extent that Hardy’s writing represents a withdrawal from the ambition of a write like Dickens—the ambition to find a way of apprehending the whole, of writing systemically about the system—is precisely the extent to which Hardy’s writing is elegiac in tone, tragic in mode, a literature of enclosure rather than disclosure.

A parallel case (it is, perhaps, not the parallel that would spring readily to most people’s minds) is the career of Alan Moore. By which I mean: is there a similar withdrawal in his body of work? -- from the larger, politically engaged narratives of texts such as V for Vendetta and Watchmen—works that use the melodrama of the graphic novel mode to interrogate questions of the largest social and political relevance—into the private realms of pornographic sexual fantasy (Lost Girls) and localism—Moore has increasingly committed himself artistically to his native Nottingham. The question, then, is: how fair would it be to describe this as a retreat from the very idea of the ability of writers to alter the larger political debate? In the case of Moore, his 1980s anti-Thatcher work was the product of a time (which I remember personally) when the left had a recognisable enemy, and were, broadly, fired-up and ready for the fight. Speaking (again) broadly, much of this energy was dissipated through the 90s and into the noughties, when the UK Labour Party was in power and instituting its nominally socialist practically Thatcherite programme. Some of the harder left did rail against this, of course (the most effective rallying call was the Gulf War); some were converted to New Labour; but many simply retreated from national political engagement altogther, to, as it were, plant cabbages in their back garden or become involved in local history. Or, for all I know, pursue elaborate pornographic fantasies or write mournful lyric poetry about dying.

Does something like this account for the drift towards localism in the later nineteenth-century? The fight seems to naught avail, so the fighter withdraws as gracefully as possible from the national ring, and focusses instead upon private pleasures (Lost Girls) or local history, topography and life (in, say, Nottingham).

Actually, now I'm starting to wonder if we might read Edwin Drood as about this: the (good) Cincinnatian remove to the countryside of Dickens's childhood and country residence, set against the (bad) abdication of social responsibility in favour of individual sensual pleasure represented by opium.

On This Day, 2002

Then look around, and choose thy ground,
And take thy rest. Byron.


It's usually a good idea that the heart be moved,
from time to time: it's for the best.
There's no call for self-pity, or the scarifying
of one's own clubfooted breast.

My days are now a bright banana yellow.
Kids' rooms decorated with a flowers-and-fruits motif;
golden Spongebob Squarepants duvet/pillow;
the warm and canny Charlie Brown's good grief.

What is the earliest use of the term "best-seller"?

According to the OED

'Bestseller' is a relatively recent term, first recorded in print in 1889 in the Kansas City newspaper The Kansas Times & Star.

But this doesn't seem likely to me. Certainly it's easy to find prior examples, although in most of the them the 'seller' is a person, not the object being sold:

Bradley himself was as quick as lightning, and if he liked his horse, and thought any one else liked him too, it must have been something terrific to have turned him from his point, and he was the best seller in his trade, where eloquence is always wanting. In fact he was once thus addressed by an ex-member of the Commons. "I sat in Parliament some time," said he, "for which I paid £10,000, but I never heard any one talk so much to his purpose as you do." [The New Sporting Magazine 6 (1833), 175]

But there are examples of the phrase being use with reference to books long before the century's end. For example--

One good publication gells another, and the more we print, the more we sell of each work. Some careful expences will be necessarily and prudently incurred, in this quarter, for advertisements. A regular prospectus printed as a circular will soon appear, and nothing shall be neglected to advance the interests of the company. Queen Mab and Good Sense are the best-selling books which the company has printed; but every copy of every other book will be sure to sell. [Richard Carlisle, 'Joint-Stock Book Company', The Republican 14 (1826), 96]

This leads me to believe that the term was in use even earlier, though I can't for the moment track an earlier citation down.

Landor's De Papavere Invento (1847)

Hora, ut mos mihi, pomeridiana
Flaventem volui videre messem,
Atque corpora magna rusticorum
Instaurata cibo, quiete, lusu,
Et laeta omnia carmine ac labore.
Ulmi tegmine sub patente sedi.
Permulti pueri, sense, puellae,
Matres, ut sua pensa contigerunt,
Compressam segetem ad latus secabant
Siccataeque prioribus diebus
Ponebant onus, aut gravem et recurvam
Torto stramine ne cadat ligabant.
Me prope advenit una, collocatque
Spicas glauca papavera exhibentes
Et rubras folio cadente florum.
Ut bellam alloquar, increpo otiosam
Quae culmo addita liquerit venena.
Mox altus sopor occupant jacentem,
Et mi diva Ceres adesse visa,
Subridensque, “Meis amice regnis,”
Inquit, “te mea dona sic latebant?”
Horum flava seges opima pars est,
Sed pars altera, nec minor, papaver,
Nec mortalibus accidit deorum
Aegris utilius pruisve munus.
At cave, moneo, cave regressus
Ne, si dixeris id domi forisve,
Te Bacchus male Maenadesque multent,
Queis felix nihil est furoris expers.
Cum natam sequerer negataque esset
Angoremque pati amplius nequirem,
Raptor immiserabilis spopondit
Herbam, qua levior foret, reversae;
Invenique papaver ante portas,
Aerumnisque gravissimis levamen
Sic large super arva seminavi.”


['The Discovery of the Poppy'

At that hour of the afternoon, as usual,
I felt the urge to see the yellow harvest,
and the sturdy bodies of the peasants
refreshed by food and drink, sedately playful,
and singing all their glad songs as they work.
I sat beneath a canopy of elm-trees.
You women watched your multitude of offspring,
Mothers! And now their enterprise is over;
the harvest cut and bound-up on the sideline
left to dry according to tradition,
carefully placed, those heavy, tied-back burdens
plaited straw arranged to stop it falling.
I thought of joining in myself, where I saw
poppies in amongst the green corn growing,
the scarlet petals falling in the harvest.
Like speech in wartime, warning against idleness,
the severed stalks still have their venom in them.
And later, as I lay flat out and sleeping
it seemed the goddess Ceres came to visit,
smiling. "And so my friend, it's now my kingdoms,"
she said to me, "where you seek out your refuge?
The yellow part of that crop's fine, don't doubt it;
but the other portion's just as good -- the poppy:
In fact the truth is neither gods nor mortals
have ever seen before such cure for sickness.
You'd be sad, believe me, sad to give it up
no, you might have said, at home and out of it,
Bacchus's wicked crowd of Maenads chasing you,
whose only joy is found in furious madness.
Let me attend the girl who is denied it
in agony almost beyond endurance
unpitied, a robber, and pledged to her
this plant, to overturn and smooth her anguish.
The poppy can be found before the gateways
to grant relief to the severest suffering,
so broadly sow it now upon your fields."]

Department of Predictions, 1950

I picked up a cheap 2nd-hand copy of Thomas Merton's Selected Poems (1950), with a foreword by Robert Speaight.  The poetry (which I didn't know at all, before) is very interesting, actually; but I particularly liked this prediction in Speaight's foreword:

The materialism of America is beginning to lose its self-confidence, [and] the continent is traversed by an intense desire for contemplation.

1950. How'd that work out, I wonder?

George Lamb on Catullus

The poems of Caius Valerius Catullus, tr. with notes by G. Lamb (2 vols, 1821), 1:xxxvi-xli:

It is remarkable that, in speaking of Catullus, even the learned often designate him as a mere poet of love and revelry, who, like Anacreon, devoted his genius to enrich and celebrate the pleasures of the passing hour. ... Pezay mentions as his characteristical effusions, " des vers echappes "au delire de l'Orgie ou de l'Amour, des vers "ecrits sur la table de Manlius;" and Laharpe, estimating his reputation, writes, " Une douzaine de morceaux d'un gout exquis, pleins de grace et de naturel, Font mis au rang des poetes les plus "aimable." In this manner even his admirers have denied to Catullus his due rank; and, while they dwelt with fondness on the madrigals of the classical voluptuary, have forgotten to dignify him as the heroic poet; whom Atys and the Nuptials of Peleus and Thetis would have placed next to Virgil in his own language, even if Virgil had been all original: but from whom, let us add, Virgil has copied more than from any one except Homer; has adopted not only ideas but whole lines; whom he has, in short, repeatedly imitated, and not always improved. Critical and panegyrical quotations on particular poems are more appropriate to the notes; and of these two, suffice it here to observe, that the latter is in Latin composition surpassed by the Eneid alone; the first has no rival in any tongue. If a poet has sung of love, it seems as of course to accredit him also with a fondness for wine. Thus Pezay in the passage already quoted mentions of Catullus the "delire de l'Orgie," and Noel, a later French translator, attributes to him "des pieces echappees dans la double ivresse de "l'amour et du vin." However, in all Catullus there is only one poem, to his Cupbearer, which can be considered of a convivial nature, or at all indicative of such excesses. The prior English translator observes, that "a clean, well-pointed satire was his forte;" it may however be thought, on the contrary, that his satirical poems, taken altogether, most of which may rather be termed invectives, are those that do him the least credit. Some, as those on an Ingrate, to Cominius, and to Himself on the Times, seem the ungoverned ebullitions of rage; some are directed against unworthy and unfitting objects, and even, as those to Vettius, to Rufus, and to Mamurra's mistress, descend to remark upon personal defects: but among them the attacks upon Cesar for his favour to his profligate minion Mamurra, and to other unworthy hangerson, indicate that boldness and spirit of freedom from which alone exalted genius can borrow additional dignity. The consequence was, we know, at least not injurious to the poet: "Cesar," Suetonius writes, "though he felt that the lines, "which Valerius Catullus had written upon his attachment to Mamurra, had fixed a lasting stigma upon him, yet asked Catullus to supper on the very day of their appearance, and con"tinued, as before, to be frequently his father's guest." Whatever was Cesar's feeling, whether apathy, whether contempt, whether respect for literary men, and a wish to conciliate rather than to irritate them; whether he was subdued by a conviction of the truth of the imputations; or whether he deemed the prosecution of such - offences less likely to deter others by the punishment inflicted, than to injure himself by exciting sympathy with the culprit; whatever was his motive, it detracts nothing from the boldness of the poet, who had no reason to anticipate such a result. The poems of this class, however, that deserve reprehension for their subjects are but few. Some, as those to Furius on his poverty, on the interview with Varus and his mistress, and on Calvus's oratory, are merely jocular, and were probably no offence to the persons named; some, as those to Calvus in return for poems, to Aurelius and Furius, to the Courtezan who kept his tablets, and to his own Farm, seem to have been fairly called forth in his own behalf or defence; while many, as those on Suffenus, to Asinius, on a stupid Husband, to Verannius and Fabullus, to the Annals of Volusius, to Porcius and Socration, to Gellius, to Silo, and to Cinna, seem to have been directed against objects well worthy of exposure. It has pleased some editors to class "together several poems, the last in order, under the title of Epigrams. Many of them, however, are more properly elegiac, and few answer to the description of epigram, either in its antient or modern acceptation. The poems were probably classed originally according to their metre; and therefore we here still find the same natural tone which Catullus rarely or rather never lost. Only once in all his poems does he approach to any thing like a pun; and the reader who shall expect in this part of his works conceits or far-fetched thoughts, will often feel a similar contempt to that of Partridge for the acting of Garrick, and find, like him, that Catullus says nothing but what any man might say in the same situation. There remain some poems to be spoken of, not usually erected into a distinct class, but which may well justify such an arrangement, namely, the poetry of friendship and affection. This is a strain in which only a genius originally pure, however polluted by the immorality of its era, could descant with appropriate sentiment; which speaks with all the kindly warmth of love, while it refrains from its unreasoning rage; that adopts all its delicacy, without any tinge of its grossness

It seems the Roman poet was almost never rude! Which rather begs the question: has Lamb actually read Catullus?

Thoughts on reviews, 1808

From the preface to Francis Hodgson, Lady Jane Grey: a tale, in two books: with miscellaneous poems, in English and Latin (1808), viii-ix:

But, after this due acknowledgment to the public, who can never be co'nfounded with the Reviewers, (notwithstanding the trouble they take to identify themselves with the majority), I must say a few words of the poem wherein I have addressed these gentlemen in the present collection. If it be urged that I should pay the critics nothing but compliments, when I have met with so much praise from them, I do fairly confess that I value their praise as little as I fear their censure. I know them; the solemn mockery of their trade is indeed no secret to many; it is a little developed in this volume; and, perhaps, they may be more fully detected hereafter, with their fellow impostors of sundry kinds and denominations. Not that they need expect the honour of individual execution; but they may enjoy a share, should they survive long enough, in some comprehensive sentence.

Let me not here be misunderstood as arrogantly presuming to condemn all periodical critics. I am aware of the benefit which their office, well-executed, confers upon literature. I only mean to assert that it is too generally prostituted to purposes of private interest. Nor am I singular in this opinion. It gains strength, for the fact increases in notoriety, every day. Reviews save trouble, and arm a man for conversation without much reading; their plan is consequently popular; but the encouragement given to every new publication of the kind shews the established censors to be unsatisfactory. Their great faults are garbled quotations; essays extracted from the work before them, and inserted in their critiques as original; imperfect representations of the plan as well as of the execution of works; and, what is very foolish, virulent and indiscriminate abuse. If it be further objected to me, that in this hint to the Reviewers- I use the very language which I blame in them, let it be remembered, that some of the leading dogs in the pack (though, as staunch hounds, they should have been silent at a fault) have opened violently upon me; that they began the attack; that their charges are general and unsubstantiated, mine specific, and supported by examples; that delicate satire is lost upon the vulgar; that Johnson justly ridicules striking soft blows in a battle, and Swift shooting arrows against a brick wall; and that Dryden in his Mac Flecknoe, and Pope in the Dunciad, found it necessary (however disagreeable) to descend from the dignified images and courtly language of poetry, to wrestle with their dirty adversaries on the dunghill from which they sprung. Not that these great names could sanction an equal offence in a humbler writer; particularly in modern times, which are laudably chaste in diction, whatever they may be in action; but, compared to the grossness of my betters, I have been quite refined in my dialogue with the critics, and surely may palliate a little liberty by appealing to authorities which defend much ampler license.