The Devils and Canon Barham: Ten Essays On Poets, Novelists and Monsters

By Edmund Wilson

Edmund Wilson's last collection of criticism, The Devils & Canon Barham, contains ten essays on Poets, Novelists, and Monsters

Previously published in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, Wilson's writing featured in this volume sees the critic returning to his roots and youth, with essays on his childhood love for The Ingoldsby Legends, the works of Hemingway, Eliot's The Waste Land, and ends with a piece on The Monsters of Bomarzo and by taking the Modern Language Association (MLA) to task.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Nov 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9780374600037

Edmund Wilson

Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) was a novelist, memoirist, playwright, journalist, poet, and editor but it is as a literary critic that he is most highly regarded. His more than twenty books include Axel’s Castle, Patriotic Gore, To the Finland Station, and Memoirs of Hecate County.

Book preview

THE DEVILS AND CANON BARHAM

There is one book that I read in my childhood for which I still have a kind of fetishistic feeling: Richard Harris Barham’s The Ingoldsby Legends. I keep copies in both my winter and my summer houses, and in the former have a small collection of books by and about Barham. When I recently became aware that the Legends was missing from my summer place, in which I had had only one copy, and that I did not know what had happened to it, I was uneasy until, in the following year, it was returned by a friend to whom I had lent it. It had been my grandfather’s edition (New York, 1884), from which he had read to his children. The Legends was once immensely popular. Of an English People’s Edition of a hundred thousand copies that sold in 1881 for sixpence, more than sixty thousand went off on the day of publication. Between 1857 and 1864, it had run through twenty-three editions; the secondhand bookstores of London and Edinburgh, of New York and Boston, are full of old discarded copies. Yet one hardly ever hears of it nowadays. Compton Mackenzie and Anthony Powell have mentioned it in their novels, and Ronald Knox wrote a very short tribute, which is included in his Literary Distractions. But the only at all adequate account of Barham’s writings that I have ever seen is in the second of George Saintsbury’s three volumes of Essays in English Literature. Saintsbury says that he can recite half the legends by heart, and if one is exposed to them early in life, one is likely to find it hard to forget them. Richard Barham was a genuine poet, who exerts a peculiar spell. A man of some property in Kent, a minor canon of St. Paul’s Cathedral, an amateur but learned antiquary, he wrote mainly to amuse himself, and his verse has a spontaneity of unexpected rhyming and reckless imagination that makes it different from anybody else’s. (It is possible that the legends were partly derived from the versified Tales of Praed, which also season the romantic with the comic, and have also, to a lesser extent, their interfering devils, but Praed is more polite, less boisterous, and usually much less effective.)

The Legends was also fortunate in its illustrators. The illustrations are one of the features which once made it so attractive to young people. I especially recommend the three-volume Bentley edition of 1894 (the eighty-eighth), edited by Barham’s daughter and annotated by his son-in-law, with all the steel engravings and woodcuts of Leech, Cruikshank, Thackeray, Tenniel, and du Maurier. Any drawings later than these seem to me quite inappropriate. I had, nevertheless, on the wall of my room at prep school the colored pictures from a contemporary Ingoldsby calendar—which shows that a familiarity with the legends must still in 1912 have persisted in England—but these never appeared to me authentic, and when I later saw the fairytale drawings by Arthur Rackham (of 1907), I rejected them with indignation. One of the beauties of the edition mentioned above is the frontispiece to the first volume, in George Cruikshank’s very best vein: the smooth-faced and apparently eupeptic Reverend Barham tranquilly writing at his table with something like a smile of ironic enjoyment, while his publisher, Richard Bentley, evidently kneeling at his elbow, spies anxiously on his work through what used to be called a quizzing-glass, one hand raised as if in shocked alarm, while the best known of Barham’s characters, the Jackdaw of Rheims, disheveled and scrawny from the Cardinal’s curse, stands on the table before him, and behind, above, and all about him rises a tapestry of demons and bugaboos, the tumult of bristling and phantasmal beings which this pleasant-humored cleric has evoked—the witches with their spitting black cat and their broomstick turned into a weapon, the hysterical Mousquetaire guarded on either side by his real and his phantom nurse, the goggle-eyed skeleton drummer, the florid and terrified monks, the vision of St. Ermengarde with her scowl and her menacing palm branch, and, crouching in the lower right-hand corner, at the base of all this fearsome phantasmagoria, the key spirit, the black, brutish Devil, with his trap of ferocious white teeth and his writhing, impatient tail.

I was therefore extremely eager, when I saw a biography of Barham announced—Richard Harris Barham, by William G. Lane, the first since a memoir by Barham’s son—to read it and use it as a pretext for writing about this now forgotten favorite of the English-speaking world. What a dampening disappointment it has proved to be! Mr. Lane is a conventional professor at the University of Colorado, and his biography is a typical product of the American academic mill. It reads as though it had been undertaken, with no genuine interest in its subject and no feeling for the period in which Barham lived, as the performance of an available academic job, not hitherto performed by anyone else, which would earn academic credit. Mr. Lane has done the proper research, he has had access to unpublished material. I am indebted to him for figures and dates, but the value of his study stops there. His pages are almost always ankle-deep, and sometimes up to their necks, in footnotes, but these notes, as well as much of the text, record facts of no interest whatever. We get a good deal more information about the history of the periodicals in which Barham’s writings appeared, and other uninteresting matters, than about the writer’s personal life or his contribution to English literature. One chapter of thirty-six pages—called The Primitive Muse of Thomas Ingoldsby—in a book of 260 pages is all the attention Lane gives to Barham’s only claim to remembrance. One questions the usefulness, for example, of a footnote explaining that Lord Albert Conyngham, the leader of a schism in the British Archaeological Association—(1805–1860): See D N B—whose side Richard Barham supported, was created Lord Londesborough in 1849. In that year, also, he led a faction that severed connection with the Archaeological Association. Later he became vice-president of the Archaeological Institute and president of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society in 1855. This person has no relevance at all to the career of Richard Barham, and if anyone is curious about him he can always, as Mr. Lane suggests, consult the British Dictionary of National Biography—which the non-scholarly reader may not be able to recognize from Mr. Lane’s abbreviation. There are many inches and pages of this sort of thing. For whom, one asks, is such a book written? For what market has it been produced? The answers are that it seems to have been written exclusively in order to fill the requirements—among the chief of which are heavy layers of footnotes and authentic original research—of the American Ph.D. thesis, and that no identifiable public is supposed to read it: it is simply to stand as a block in the building of an academic reputation.

It is so much, in fact, a book for nobody that we cannot always be sure whether the author really knows what he is talking about or whether he assumes his readers are so much at home in the period that they do not have to have things explained. He mentions Titmarsh, for instance, without explaining that it is a pseudonym of Thackeray’s, and he may take it for granted that the reader will know. But is he himself aware that the verses of Barham’s quoted at length on pages 64–6 are a parody of a once well-known poem by George Canning about the University of Göttingen? Does he know that Barham’s reference in some verses on page 98 to Aristophanes’s theory of the origin of the sexes is to what was propounded not in one of Aristophanes’s plays but in the Symposium of Plato by his character of Aristophanes? Mr. Lane does not take the trouble to explain why he thinks it is necessary to view with suspicion whatever [John Payne] Collier offers in the way of ‘newly discovered’ or ‘hitherto unpublished’ manuscripts. Is it simply because he is sure that the professor who reads his thesis will know that John Collier was a forger of manuscripts and that he does not expect that anyone else will ever read what he is writing? If there are to be so many footnotes, some of them might well be used to elucidate these matters. It is certain that Mr. Lane does not know very well his period or his author—that is, know them in the sense that he has been able imaginatively to enter into the life of the one or to appreciate the work of the other. Barham was so much a part of a certain London milieu, with its thick and riotous atmosphere of semi-bohemian clubs, the Beefsteak and the Garrick, of smoke and wine and outrageous jokes and gossip, that he ought to be shown in this atmosphere. But Lane’s biography can only dispel it. He does include a bleak enough chapter called The Livelier London Days, and he has earlier made some effort to explain the peculiar prestige of Barham’s special friend Theodore Hook, but he does not succeed in giving any real impression of this more or less professional entertainer who set the tone of the humor of the period by a series of popular novels and whose comic improvisations of operas were a great feature of uproarious evenings. He does not seem to understand exactly who and what were such other characteristic figures as Father Prout and William Maginn and John Forster: learned, convivial men, eccentric or underbred or careless of their literary gifts, the first an expelled Jesuit, best known for his poem The Bells of Shandon, who amused himself by translating English poems into Greek and Latin, French and Italian, and pretending that the originals were plagiarisms; the second, also a classicist, the perfect type of the drunken Irish journalist who displays intermittent brilliance; and the third called by Barham a low scribbler and without an atom of talent and totally unused to the society of gentlemen, but the friend and biographer of Dickens, who is said to have used him in the creation of Podsnap, in Our Mutual Friend—the perfect pompous Victorian father, always fearful of the possibility of bringing a blush into the cheek of the young person.

All this world, so much stripped and chilled and robbed of its peculiar flavors in Mr. Lane’s academic exercise, is brought to life in the diaries and letters of Dalton Barham’s memoir of his father—The Life and Letters of the Rev. Richard Harris Barham, with its humorous rhymes and anecdotes, its practical jokes and conundrums, its ghost stories and stag dinners. (I have used the two-volume version published in 1870.) If anyone at this date should doubt that the London of Dickens once existed, this book, the record of a writer of quite different opinions and interests from Dickens’s, will confirm the picture left by the novelist. Though Richard Barham was on good terms with Dickens, his politics were entirely conservative, and he evidently did not approve of the tendencies of Dickens’s novels; he complains of "a sort of Radicalish tone about Oliver Twist which I don’t altogether like. (Mr. Lane seems to second the suggestion of another scholar that the irreverent clergyman in Chapter V of Oliver Twist may have originated in [an] underlying resentment." But in this chapter the only reference to a clergyman is in a single brief paragraph, which mentions an unnamed cleric as skimping the burial service of a pauper. Does some other text exist?)

Yet in the younger Barham’s chronicle of his father’s life, all the horrors of the London of the period are present: the epidemics of scarlatina, influenza, and cholera; the lives of destitution and crime which Dickens brought before his readers. Canon Barham did the best he could for the miserable people of his parish: he got money for a distressed author whom he found in a badly furnished, unheated room, with his wife sitting on a tub as she tried to nurse a dying child. This woman was afraid that her child would die without being baptized, and Barham administered the sacrament. In the case of the wife and children of a resurrection man, when the husband had been hanged for the murder of an Italian boy whose body he had sold to doctors for dissection, Barham furnished them with recommendations—the wife had worked for one of Barham’s parishioners—at a time when women and children mistaken for the family had been attacked in the streets. He and his wife had suffered many afflictions. His right arm had been shattered at the age of thirteen when a Dover mail coach turned over; and the Barhams had lost five of their children—one boy, who had given promise of brilliance, had died in his thirteenth year, and his death remained a lasting grief. Another son died of cholera in twenty-four hours. Mrs. Barham, who had survived a lifetime of constant childbearing and child-rearing, died, her son tells us, after six years of unceasing and at times almost unendurable suffering caused by some ailment of the eye. One feels all through The Ingoldsby Legends, for all the rattling jollity of the verse, an uneasiness of danger and pain. It is partly this undercurrent that gives the book its power. The compensation for the hardships of the time was the life of conviviality on which the Canon’s letters and journals so constantly dwell: the dinners of port wine and punch that ended in topical songs, in burlesque impersonations and conundrums, the charades and the tableaux vivants, the inexhaustible humorous anecdotes about Lord M_____and the Duke of Sussex, about popular writers and actors and the amusing Scotch and Irish peasantry. As in Dickens, the rude jokes and the cheerful glass drown the Marshalsea and Newgate in the background. This elasticity of spirit, writes Barham in a letter, which, in spite of nature herself, as it were, will rebound under pressure is one, and not the least, of God’s blessings. That I do not encourage, but fight up against gloomy thoughts, you will see in the ‘Mousquetaire,’ a legend I am finishing for Bentley. The fact is I find work my best solace, and I do work incessantly, though I fear not to the same purpose as I think I could have done had my poor boy lived for me to have worked for—though this Black Mousquetaire which is keeping him busy is itself a tale of morbid obsession. The note of the period is sounded in Barham’s account of the funeral of Dicky Suett, a popular low comedian, who was famous for playing clowns, at which one of the mourners provoked laughter from tears by imitating the voice of the dead man: "Aha! Jemmy—O la! I’m going to be buried! O la! O lawk! O