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Tag Archives: Henry Fielding

A Serious Yarn: The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock

21 Monday Jan 2019

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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book review, courtesans, eighteenth century, England, feminism, Henry Fielding, historical fiction, Imogen Hermes Gowar, literary fiction, London, unlikely romance, women as prisoners

Review: The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock, by Imogen Hermes Gowar
HarperCollins, 2018. 484 pp. $29

It’s 1785, and Jonah Hancock, a Deptford shipping merchant of some means, receives unwelcome news: The captain of one of three ships he owns has sold it and its cargo to bring back a dead, preserved mermaid. Hancock doesn’t know what to do with his new treasure, and the likely financial loss terrifies him, even though he’s solvent. Playing to his fears, his controlling, self-absorbed sister accuses him of squandering the fortune their extended family (read: her children) depends on and will make their name a laughingstock. As a childless widower, you see, he’s got no one else to support, but, more to the point, Jonah has always tried to appease his sister, a thankless, impossible task. He’s sorely in want of backbone or spirit of adventure, but he doesn’t know where to find them—or even whether it’s advisable to look.

This illustration of P.T. Barnum’s alleged “Feejee Mermaid” first appeared in the New York Herald in 1842 (courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Nevertheless, to recoup his expenses, he puts the mermaid on display and creates a sensation. The money he receives from gawkers willing to pay for the privilege helps soothe his worries. More importantly, the exposure widens his social world, for the bawdy house that he’s licensed to show his mermaid is frequented by the rich and famous — and those who sell themselves to them. Crucial to the proceedings, the good Mr. Hancock, though scandalized at what he sees, meets the beautiful, accomplished courtesan Angelica Neal. Since the title tells you that Jonah will marry, she’s the likeliest candidate, if only because he meets nobody else.

What a risky authorial gambit, yielding up a crucial plot point, daring the reader to put the book down. But Gowar is more than equal to the challenge she sets herself, for how the two characters overcome first impressions makes for quite a story, with much “no — and furthermore” to block their way. Angelica, accustomed to baubles, flash, and excitement, shouldn’t be interested in Jonah for anything other than his money, and yet there’s more at work than that. Likewise, though Jonah has never met an obstacle he can’t run away from, he has nevertheless mourned his late wife and infant son for fifteen years, and you sense courage and will gathering under his scraggly powdered wig.

Reading The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock reminds me of a modern-day Henry Fielding, complete with intricate plot, ribaldry, and social commentary. So it is that Hancock observes titled members of Parliament at the bawdy house, who speak in “baby-talk and garbled vowels as the signallers of good breeding”:

Since he has spent two score years outside the society of genteel Whigs, he must be forgiven for hearing their speech as a cacophony of pantomime sneezes; they pronounce the first syllable with great energy, and trail off into a drawl as if between a word’s first letter and its last they have lost all conviction in what they are saying. He is aware — and ashamed of — his dislike for them; he is a Tory through and through, as his father was before him. It is the logical, the patriotic, the honest choice. He has never until this moment felt in any means awkward about it.

But the comic moments aside, there’s much serious matter here. Gowar talks about the way men imprison women for their own use — literally or figuratively — so she brings you inside the brothel, showing the courtesan’s (and madam’s) training and mindset, commercial cruelty, and their hirelings’ poignant sacrifice. In this novel, it seems that every woman in London is for sale, in one way or another, and the mermaid symbolizes this painful fact. The unlikely romance between the straight-laced Jonah and the calculating, brittle Angelica works beautifully, I think; the two characters complement one another in ways they could never have imagined. I also note the choice of names: Jonah, the unwilling prophet who has more to teach than he knows, and Angelica, who discovers, to her surprise, that she possesses goodness and simplicity.

The jacket flap mentions the theme of race, but Gowar spends little time on it, and her attempt to extend the imprisonment metaphor in that direction, though literally apt—enslavement, after all—feels like a letdown because she doesn’t develop it enough. Did a previous, doubtless longer, version of the manuscript dwell on it more deeply? As it is, the theme seems more a point of philosophy than essential to the story, rather like a room to a large house that has been closed off. But that’s a minor complaint about a very fine book — a debut novel, in fact.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

For a Thousand Pounds: Golden Hill

02 Monday Oct 2017

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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book review, colonies, double standards, eighteenth century, England, Francis Spufford, freedom, Henry Fielding, historical fiction, hypocrisy, literary fiction, lower Manhattan, New York, no and furthermore, picaresque, Tobias Smollett

Review: Golden Hill, by Francis Spufford
Scribner, 2016. 302 pp. $26

“There is something maddeningly predictable about the way you procure disaster, Richard,” a friend tells the protagonist of this bold, extraordinary novel. “It is like someone winding a clock, as methodical as that. . . .”

That, at least, is the sympathetic view of Richard from within the insular community (population: seven thousand) of New-York in 1746, which is to say, lower Manhattan. The less sympathetic, more common, view of Richard Smith is that he’s a bounder, a fraud, a swindler. But the fault lies largely with New-York and less with Smith, despite the man’s willingness to admit mistakes; society’s indictments reflect more on the accusers than the accused. That’s the brilliance of Golden Hill, in which the central character is more reliable than the rest, and the disasters that accrue have more to do with society’s wrong-headed suppositions and cruel, inequitable laws.

Thomas Davies’s drawing of New York City, ca. 1770, perhaps from the perspective of Long Island. The steeple of Trinity Church is visible in the background (courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

The premise is elegantly simple, the sort I admire. Richard Smith, twenty-three, lands in New-York fresh from England and immediately proceeds to Lovell & Company, on Golden Hill Street, where he presents a draft for a thousand pounds. Lovell doesn’t have such an enormous sum in hard money, though Mr. Lovell could procure it in goods, over time. But Smith wants cash. He won’t say why, what business he has, or why he came to the colonies to pursue it. Both self-interest and a merchant’s natural skepticism for the abstract prompt Lovell to imagine that Smith is playing an elaborate and potentially expensive hoax. Yet the newcomer presents a document that appears genuine, from a London concern with which Lovell has done business for years. Moreover, Smith argues a credible case, and his charm, good looks, and quick wit make a strong impression. Even so, Smith will have to wait until London confirms the draft. This is only fair.

All New-York waits with him and watches his every move. To possess such a large fortune, even theoretically, makes Smith an object of intense curiosity, no less the means by which he claims it and his polite, repeated refusals to explain his intentions. Opinions and motives are freely imputed to him, and every misstep becomes a reason for laughter, condemnation, or, conversely, temporary alliance with a political faction hoping to use him for its own advantage. But, on the chance that he’s who he says he is, no one can afford to reject him categorically. Rather, Smith is swept up into the highest circles right away, starting with Lovell’s household, which includes two marriageable daughters.

The elder, Tabitha, intrigues Smith. To onlookers, that in itself causes laughter and amazement, for Tabitha Lovell has a misanthropically sharp tongue and seems to enjoy making herself unpleasant. But Golden Hill is about freedom, real and imaginary. Smith has astutely deduced that Tabitha is a prisoner of her fears as much as she indulges the freedom to taunt everyone else, and he attempts to draw her out and show her he empathizes.

However, empathy is a commodity in short supply, even scarcer than self-knowledge. The friend who tells Smith that he “procures disaster” lays out the situation this way:

This is a place where things can get out of hand very quick: and often do. You would think, talking to the habitants, that all the vices and crimes of humanity had been left behind on the other shore. Take ’em as they take themselves, and they are the innocentest shopkeepers, placid and earnest, plucked by a lucky fortune out from corruption. But the truth is that they are wild, suspicious, combustible–and the devil to govern. . . . In all their relations they are prompt to peer and gaze for the hidden motive, the worm in the apple, the serpent in the garden they insist their New World to be.

Spufford is tweaking the American pretense of virtue–someone should, especially these days–but there’s much more to this passage than that. Smith’s friend is warning him that nothing will happen in a straight line, and indeed, it doesn’t. Twists and turns abound; if ever there was proof that “no–and furthermore” belongs in literary novels, not just suspense, Golden Hill is Exhibit A. But Spufford is also framing his themes: the hypocrisy concerning sexual standards, social class, wealth, race, and rule of law that emerge between the lines of this mesmerizing narrative and force the reader to ask what freedom means.

Finally, the passage suggests the tone of Golden Hill, whose vocabulary, cadences, and attitudes lovingly reflect and re-create an eighteenth-century picaresque. Spufford has wisely refrained from slavishly imitating Tobias Smollett (whom he quotes in an epigraph) or Henry Fielding, but he’s written in a form recognizably similar, and he adopts their style and form in pitch-perfect fashion.

Golden Hill is a masterpiece. That’s all there is to it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Homage to Tom Jones: The Foundling Boy

29 Monday Jun 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1920s, 1930s, coming-of-age novel, France, Henry Fielding, historical fiction, Michel Déon, Normandy, picaresque, Provence, Stendhal

With this post, I’m starting a summer schedule, in which I’ll review one book a week.

Review: The Foundling Boy, by Michel Déon
Translated from the French by Julian Evans
Gallic, 2013 [Gallimard, 1975] 415 pp. $16

Halfway through this poignant, often hilarious tale, the protagonist, Jean Arnaud, comes across a truth I wish I’d taken to heart at age seventeen, as he does:


There was, then, no shame in being young, not the way adults wanted to make you believe, saying every time you advanced the slightest opinion, ‘Wait till you’ve grown up a little. . . . When you’ve done what we did, then you can speak.’ . . . [I]t was no crime to make mistakes, to give in to your enthusiasms, to be happy or unhappy because a girl made you suffer.


Jean imbibes this lesson after reading Stendhal, who’d have enjoyed the young man’s amorous adventures and the gentle irony with which Déon tells of his growing up. But this picaresque novel also harks back to Henry Fielding’s rollicking eighteenth-century masterpiece, Tom Jones. Both begin with a foundling child of mysterious origins who fits no societal niche and will have to make his fortune through his gifts of character, which turn out to be considerable.

However, The Foundling Boy takes place in France between the world wars, not eighteenth-century England, and the particular atmosphere in which people try to recover from old wounds offers a perfect forum in which to observe how people enjoy life (or don’t). In this, the novel has a distinctly French sensibility, by which I mean that the characters who succeed are those who know better than to take themselves too seriously. I think this notion is what the French, at their best, have given Western civilization.

Once the basket bearing a newborn infant is left on a doorstep belonging to a childless couple, caretakers of a Norman estate, there’s little plot to speak of. But don’t worry. Episode quickly follows episode, and Jean gets into scrape after scrape, portrayed with wit, charm, and keen observation. Most of the story takes place in Normandy and Provence, so if you like France, or can imagine or have experienced the pleasures of either place–cider and ancient greenery in one; warm colors and aromatic herbs in the other–you’ll like this book.

Postcard of Marseilles, 1920s (Courtesy Travel and Tourism Provence).

Postcard of Marseilles, 1920s (Courtesy Travel and Tourism Provence).

Sometimes, the omniscient narrator takes time out to tell you who’s important to remember, and who isn’t, as if Déon were your mentor. The role fits, for practically everybody wants to mold Jean to his or her own purposes–for his own good, of course. His adoptive father wants him to be a gardener, like himself, and to stay close to home; a con man tries to teach him to be a con man, and roam the world; and Ernst, a German youth he meets on a bicycle trip to Italy, insists that fascism offers the only useful, honest path in life.

All this is ripe for satire, and Déon doesn’t miss a trick. Especially as a young boy, Jean has no experience with which to filter out the useful advice from noise or what, to the reader, appears the counselor’s self-interest. Jean’s not weak–far from it–just green, but that constantly gets him into trouble. And as he navigates through his difficulties, what’s personal to Jean is also political and social commentary about 1930s Europe, though he doesn’t always know that. For instance, he can’t figure out why Ernst, who seems to laugh a lot and be good-natured, should take himself and his country so seriously, especially to spout hateful, vaguely frightening ideas from a book called Mein Kampf. Jean’s puzzlement reflects a common attitude of the time, one explanation for why so many Europeans underestimated Hitler.

Originally published in 1975, The Foundling Boy is a classic in France, though only recently translated into English, as with its sequel, The Foundling’s War. Déon belongs to the Academie Française, but he’s now also part of my personal pantheon: a great writer I’d never heard of.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

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