The Regency Years

My regional JASNA group has an book club, and our January book was The Regency Years, by Robert Morrison. It was absolutely terrific--essential reading for those of us who love Austen and Keats and history and Britain.

The book was comprehensive, explaining in easy to read, non-pedantic prose the politics and issues of the day, the social issues for all of the classes, slavery and the insidious way it infiltrated everyday life then and into the future. It had a wonderful section on the Napoleonic Wars and the part on Waterloo actually made sense having read Georgette Heyer's An Infamous Army twice. And, of course, it covered the writers and artists, celebrities, actors, and wannabes in extensive detail. I loved the section on the allure of the exotic, which finally helped me understand why the Regent's Brighton Pavilion was built and furnished as it was.

And, I absolutely loved the section on art, especially the Scottish painter David Wilkie and how his paintings are not unlike Sir Walter Scott's historical novels, and the contrast between John Constable's paintings and those of J.M.W. Turner. Now I want to get books on all three of these painters, and I might even finally read Waverly!

Below are David Wilkie's The Penny Wedding, John Constable's Wivenhoe Park, and J.M.W. Turner's Modern Rome - Campo Vaccino.

Despite exploring far-ranging topics, Morrison pulled all of the threads together to support his premise that the Regency was the bridge to modern Britain. He not only explores the impact of industrialization and how it fostered the romantic rural ideal and the tug-of-war between science and faith, but he uses Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to represent how technology and scientific advancements can be a two-edged sword, requiring society to figure out how to manage technology and not be destroyed by it.

Here are some passages that I marked as I read:

With regards to Pride and Prejudice:

When she [Elizabeth] tells him [Darcy] that she might have felt more concern in refusing him had he "behaved in a more gentleman-like manner," those words literally stagger him. They signal a powerful collision between his elitist assumptions and her bourgeois aspirations. Darcy believes that he was born a gentleman. Elizabeth hopes that someday he might become one...she ushers in the modern world, for she believes in meritocracy over aristocracy, individual preferences over dynastic alliances, and female desire over male presumption.

With regards to the Prince Regent's Brighton Pavilion:

The Pavilion is his shrine to the expertise, the originality, and the sheer bravado of his Regency, and it reveals the Oriental fantasies at the crux of the decade. Part homage and part pastiche, it is, remarkably, an Eastern structure that most spectacularly represents the British Regency.

 Lord Byron 

When Byron rated the "three great men of the nineteenth century," he placed "himself third, Napoleon second, and [Beau] Brummell first."

The picturesque

The Industrial Revolution left deep scars on rural England, but one of the most remarkable features of Regency Britain is how many areas of the countryside were virtually unaffected by it...Humphrey Repton was the premier landscape gardener of the age and an enthusiastic exponent of the picturesque, which he defined as a middle ground between the unruliness of nature and the rigidity of art.

Frankenstein

More than any other work in English literature, Frankenstein is a prophecy about the modern world. In addition to launching an entirely new genre of science fiction, it has had an incalculable impact on the way we imagine science...Frankenstein unnervingly reveals that scientific research has the potential to improve our lives in countless ways, but that if we deny or ignore our responsibilities, new discoveries have also the potential to pass dangerously far beyond the control of their makers and assume hideous and unpredictable forms that may betray or even destroy us.

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

I've long been a fan of Robert Louis Stevenson's novels and poems, and have long wanted to read his horror story The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, published in 1886.  I picked up an audio version at the library, and was surprised it was only 2 discs and 2.5 hours long.  So much shorter than I expected that I doubled-checked that it was, in fact, an unabridged version.

While it was a short book, a novella really, I found it plenty long actually.  The first part dragged a bit.  It is a framed story, in which Dr Jekyll's lawyer and friend tells of his suspicions regarding his friend's protege, a Mr. Hyde, who is Dr Jekyll's sole beneficiary in his will and who strikes everyone who encounters him as evil incarnate.

I found the dancing around in this first half of the book to be tedious--I was eager to get to who Jekyll and Hyde were and found the lawyer's musings to be a trifle dull and a bit coy.  However, once I got to the part where the lawyer read the letter Jekyll left to be read should something happen to him, the story got much more interesting.

While listening to Jekyll's story of his descent into hell, I couldn't help but think of both Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.  The former was published 4 years after Jekyll and Hyde in 1890, and the latter was published near the beginning of the 19th century, in 1818.

Jekyll/Hyde explores the idea of a person having two natures--one good and one evil (or the ego and the id, in Freudian terms).  Jekyll, the doctor, experiments with drugs that enable the evil nature within him to come to the forefront of his personality, and when this happens his body undergoes a physical transformation as well.  What this means is that when Jekyll takes the drug, he becomes Mr Hyde is personality as well as physical appearance.  This means Jekyll can enjoy doing evil things because no ones knows that Jekyll has become Hyde.  By taking the drug, he can put on a mask and let loose the dogs of war with no consequences to his reputation.  His conscience, however, still functions, and as Hyde's devilry increases, Jekyll feels remorse and responsibility.

In a similar manner, Dorian Gray's beauty hides his true evil nature, which the portrait accurately reflects.  Jekyll becomes Hyde when he lets his evil nature reign; Dorian's body masks his evil nature, which no one can see unless they view his portrait.  

With regards to Frankenstein, both Dr Frankenstein and Dr Jekyll are talented scientists whose major character flaw is unbridled ambition, and their pursuit of glory leads to their downfall.  Not only that, but their downfalls are very similar.  The monster gets out of hand, assumes control of the situation, and will not be bridled.

I think it's so interesting the Frankenstein and Jekyll/Hyde and Dorian Gray bookend the 19th century--Mary Shelley really did anticipate many of the themes that increasing industrialization and scientific reliance that writers and other artists explored 80 years later.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

I have wanted to read Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, for years.  I was pleasantly surprised awhile ago when I finally read Dracula--I don't read horror, except on rare occasions--but I really liked the book and could see how it captured an audience and never let it go.  I've been anticipating a similar experience with Frankenstein.  Furthermore, I think Mary Shelley is an interesting person--her position as daughter, wife, and friend to pillars of English literature and philosophy as well as her authorship of a book that sparked a legend and an industry makes her fascinating to learn about.  As someone interested in the evolution of the novel, it was simply a matter of time before I got around to this seminal work.

Now that I've read it, I confess that I was a bit disappointed, primarily because I found the character of Dr. Victor Frankenstein, the creator of the monster and the purported hero of the story, to be insufferable.  As a parent, I simply cannot forgive his abandonment of the creature he created.  I found the middle volume of the book, in which the monster tells his own story, to be the most interesting part of the novel and I felt far more sympathy for the monster than I could summon for his creator. 

The story of Frankenstein is told as a story within a story, and I also found the initial narrator, Robert Walton, to be as irritating as Dr. Frankenstein.  Their egotism and recklessness in the name of scientific ambition was hard to swallow, and I'm struggling to figure out whether Shelley intended for them to be seen as heroic or whether the point of her story was to show how tragically genius can be squandered when the aim is solely fame.  

The reason that I have mixed feelings about Frankenstein is that I really think that Shelley saw Frankenstein's decision to not create a mate for his monster as a noble one.  In her story, he consciously sacrificed the safety of his family for the good of mankind--without a mate, the monster can't procreate.  However, Frankenstein made a bargain with his monster that I don't think the monster would have reneged on.  While the creature thought that Dr. F. was making him a mate, he refrained from killing. Without hope for ever having love or companionship, the monster snapped and returned to killing everyone beloved by Dr. Frankenstein.  Dr. F. kept on saying how persuasive and eloquent his monster could be--he was right, he convinced me that he would have kept his promise to be good.

By assembling body parts and applying electricity to them, Dr. Frankenstein created a living being.  By denying him access to society and failing to teach him how to live productively, Dr. Frankenstein made that living being into a monster.  On Mother's Day, it seems fitting to point out the Dr. Frankenstein was a very bad parent. 

I think the idea behind the story of Frankenstein is brilliant--it is a thought-provoking book and provides incredible insight into the anguish of marginalized people, as well as society dealing with technological capabilities that outstrip the moral code.  It has some good writing, particularly the middle section in which the monster waxes as eloquently as Milton's Satan in Paradise Lost, one of the first books he taught himself to read!  

It's certainly not one of the best books I've ever read, but it definitely is one of the most interesting.

Frankenstein is part of my Back to the Classics challenge.