Group Psychology And The Ukraine

Group Psychology And The Ukraine by R.E. Prindle Let us ask ourselves a single question about the situation in the Ukraine. That question is, who is the central player in this enormous critical game? Who is the motive force? Which nation is directing the action and to what goal? It is an easy answer, but one that will still surprise you and which you will immediately deny. Yes, you guessed it, the Jews. This issue is not specifically the Ukraine but includes it; nor is it Russia; nor the US; nor Europe. This issue is all of them streaming out of Germany in the eighteenth century of the Affaire Jud Suss. Of a people that cherishes grievances, this issue in the Ukraine represents Ultima Judaica. Nor is this the first time in the last hundred years that the Jews have tried to destroy all. They almost succeeded with the one-two punch, WWI and WWII. Totally shattered by the results of the latter of those two wars the Jews needed a few decades to regroup. If this is intended to be WWIII it may succeed where the first two wars failed. The whole of Europe West from England, East to the Soviet Union the continent then lay in ruins. The unexpected collateral damage was that both Hitler and Stalin nearly terminated the Jewish career. Amid the holocaust of Europe there was the Jewish holocaust. The result was that they played a revived Germany, Europe and the US to finance their own recovery. Then they had to figure out a way to continue the destruction of Europe, Russia, the US and perhaps Western Civilization. Jewish civilization must not only reign supreme but alone. Events transpired in their favor. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1980s and disintegrated, a window was opened. Israel, established in 1948 was now a mature State, over populated to the gills. The State had to move people to other shores, they had to populate another country. The US, Russia and Western Europe were out. That left the Ukraine, an old haunt of theirs going back hundreds of years. Jews began migrating to the Ukraine. Accordingly if accounts are correct they have created the largest and most vibrant Jewish colony in Europe. Europe had, or has, a loose confederation of States under the government of the EU combined with that of NATO, both heavily infiltrated by Jews. NATO then was used as an irritant against Russia. Jews hatred of Russia prevented the new Russian State, now that the USSR had disappeared, from prospering so that NATO and Europe were their enemies. The Ukraine was then a Jewish colony, historically a Russian province i.e. Ukraine was placed within historically Russian borders. The Ukraine under Jewish domination then cultivated a relationship with the US and NATO to install missiles essentially within Russia around the perimeter of the Ukraine facing Russia. I don’t know whether the missiles were only planned or actually installed but I suspect the latter. If one looks at Russian war plans they seem very odd. Russia attacked Ukraine along the entire perimeter within Russia and then bombed the entire perimeter at once. Why? Very probably to destroy those very missiles before they could be fired. As Ukraine was not supposed to have the missiles they would naturally be disguised in public buildings, perhaps hospitals. It appears that Russia has destroyed them so that that game is up. But now, using a different tactic that dates back to the Semite, Cadmus and Grecian Thebes in ancient Boeotia about 1700 BC, used again in Sarajevo in WWI, that is, as a third party getting two other parties fight each other to extinction then picking up the pieces, the Jews have or are setting up a fratricidal war between NATO and Russia that will, at the very least, flatten the entire continent from England to Russia leaving only the US to be finished later if it wasn’t lost as collateral damage. Israel will remain standing. Thus a project dating back a millennium will have been achieved. Remember the Amalekites.

Note #13 Goerge W. M. Reynolds, A Curious Reference

Note #13: George W. M. Reynolds A Curious Reference by R.E. Prindle The following quotation is taken from Alexander Charles Ewart’s ‘The Right Hon. Benjamin Disraeli, Earl Of Beaconsfield, K.G. And His Times, Div. 3 of 5. Vol. II. P.25. I have no dates for Ewald, but since he died in his nineties in the 1890s it must have been c. 1800. He was born in Jerusalem and like Disraeli, possibly in emulation of him, he also accepted Jesus of Nazareth as completing the Jewish ethos. He makes no point of being Jewish and/or Christian. He is, however, a near worshipper of Disraeli. If he had been born c. 1800 he was forty-eight in ’48 and a witness to the Trafalgar Square demonstrations. In 1883 he was still indignant. Quote: Mr. Disraeli had, as we have seen, expressed himself with equal caution upon the subject, though in more encouraging tones; but the masses, turbulent, ignorant, and out of work, and completely under the influence of their unscrupulous agents, had made up their minds that the Conservative party was hostile to the cause of reform, and that their object could only be attained by assuming a threatening attitude. Meetings were held at Primrose Hill and at Trafalgar Square, where speakers who could obtain notoriety after no other fashion than a base and disloyal agitation, vehemently denounced the policy of the government, of which they knew nothing, to a rabble composed of the scum and outcasts of London, who no more represented the sober, intelligent working classes desirous of the franchise than our convicts represent the honesty and industry of the country. It was arranged that a monster meeting should be held in Hyde Park, when certain conclusions, based upon spite and inspired by ignorance, which were termed “resolutions,” were to be passed condemnatory of all opposition to the cause of reform. The government, however, fully alive to the dangers which might ensue from the assembling in our chief public park of all that was vile and disorderly, promptly forbade the meeting. A notice to that effect was delivered to Sir Richard Mayne, the chief commissioner of police. “There is nothing,’ said Mr. Walpole the home secretary, in defence of the instructions he had issued, ‘there is nothing in the notice signed by Sir Richard Mayne to imply that processions, orderly conducted, are illegal--to prevent persons from holding meetings in the usual way for the purpose of discussing politics or ;any other subject but I think that any one holding the office which I have the honour I hold is bound to attend to the public peace of this metropolis; and if he believes that the parks, which are open by the permission of Her Majesty for benefit of all Her Majesty’s subjects, are little to be devoted to any purpose that would interfere with the quiet recreation of the people, and might lead to riot and disorderly demonstrations, he would be most blamable if he did not issue an order similar to that which I have given.” Unquote. You will notice that there was no reference to the ’48 revolution going on in Europe. Nor did he mention any names, although George W.M. Reynolds’ name must have been on his mind. Reynolds as the key speaker who was carried home on the shoulders of the Demonstrators must have called attention to himself as a key agitator ‘having no other way to call attention to himself.’ Likely that Ewald couldn’t force himself to eighter speak or write the name Anyway, there is an official account of the demonstrations. A small point of interest.

Note #12: George W. M. Reynolds, Passing Through Time

Note #12: George W.M. Reynolds: Passing Through Time. by R.E. Prindle Texts: Ewald, Alexander Charles, The Right Hon. Benjamin Disraeli, EARL OF BEACONSFIELD, K.G. And His Times, William MacKenzie, 1883 Reynolds, George W.M., Works 1844-1860 .1. In order to understand an author correctly one must have some idea of his cultural milieu. I am offering some here, I am not being comprehensive. I am going to take a longish quote from Alexander Charles Ewald’s ‘The Right Hon. Benjamin Disraeli, First Earl of Beaconsfield, K.G., And His Times to begin. Ewald was especially suited to interpret Disraeli in great detail and length. The work is divided into five divisions, two volumes in a beautifully designed book designed to honor Ewald’s great man. Each page is a wonderfully detailed, almost day by day, hour by hour, account of Disraeli’s political career. The social, cultural and historical context is amazing. Ewald was especially suited to interpret Disraeli as he too was a converted, or in Disreali’s term, ‘completed Jew’, observing both the new and old testament. His understanding is that Jesus came to fulfill the law. Ewald was born in Jerusalem, converting to, or assuming a complementary, Christianity. Something like the contemporary Jews for Jesus. I’m just guessing but I’m going to put his assumption at about the age twenty after he had time to recognize Disraeli and imitate him. In his book her he assumes the role of Disraeli’s Boswell. He provides magnificent detail, worshipping every word the Disraeli spoke in Parliament. Below he is setting the stage, discussing electoral matters. Division 1, p. 47 Quote: During the present generation the House of Commons, owing to the development of the reforms that have been effected in its constitution, has lost many of the characteristics which it formerly possessed. It is now a practical, business-like, but, it must be confessed, a somewhat dull assembly. The elements of youth and wit are conspicuous by their absence, while municipal eloquence and vestry-like personalities reign in their stead. Before the abolition of nomination boroughs, a young man of great ability—like the second Pitt, Canning, Macauly and others—was taken by the hand by some powerful minister, and launched upon a parliamentary career in the easiest and most inexpensive fashion. The leaders of the great parties, who swayed the opinions of parliament were always on the watch for talent that might serve their political ends. Many a young man by his clever speeches at the debating-club of his university, by a happy pamphlet, or by a bitter and opportune squib, found himself safely seated on the green benches of the House of Commons as a representative of a borough in the hands of a powerful lord, or of a large-acred squire without his election having cost him more than the issue of his address or the delivery of a few speeches before a sympathetic audience. Commerce had not then assumed the high position it now occupies, nor had the banker’s book usurped the influence of the pedigree chart. The lower house was in a large measure, filled by the representatives of the landed gentry, who knew little of science of the laws of political economy, but who shuddered if they heard a false quantity, and piqued themselves that they were as familiar with the classics as a priest is with his breviary. A few merchants of the highest class, a few successful lawyers, a few Irish, then as now not held in much esteem, and several clever young men who were the little deities of their university, completed the list. The constitution of such an assembly, though it might not offer the same scope as now exists for the exercise of those talents which especially appeal to what Mr. Disraeli called the “parochial mind,” yet afforded every opportunity for the display of culture. A classical and a literary flavour penetrated the parliamentary eloquence of those days. A speech delivered in the House was a solemn undertaking, and not to be lightly entered upon; its periods were carefully dismissed in stately terms worthy of the occasion; the gestures and attitudes of the speaker were studied with a Chatham-like view of effect; whilst his words were listened to by an assembly which never forgot, even in the most feverish times of party heat, that it represented the gentry of England. Then on the following day the details brought forward were fully reported and discussed in the leading journals. Eloquence was thus the most powerful weapon that could be wielded in parliamentary warfare, and it consequently became the favorite and most cultivated of all studies. To be a showy speaker or a ready debater, no matter how incorrect or superficial the sentiments expressed, was to be on the high road to the cabinet; whilst the erudite and the thinker, who could never address a few words to the Speaker without confusion, were completely ignored. The Reform Bills and the development of a newspaper press have, however, ushered in a new state of things. The abolition of pocket boroughs has rendered it impossible for clever but impecunious youth to obtain a seat in parliament. The competition that arises upon every vacancy in the House of Commons, and the rigid measures now most properly dealt out of those guilty of bribery and corruption, make it a matter of necessity at the present day for the candidate for parliamentary honours to be not only a rich man, but one who has long been courting the favours of a constituency. Those who derive their wealth from industry seldom have attained to fortune till past middle age and consequently the House of Commons will become more and more the assembly of elderly men; in other words, more grave, more practical, more dull. Unquote. .2. What Ewart describes is the grey ease of the transition point between a change of scale, the changing of the guard. As Greg Allman lyricist for the Allman Bros. Band described it: ‘See that clock upon the wall? Time can make it fall.’ Time flows it doesn’t run. One era was ending, another beginning. Disraeli’s career can be divided into two parts, 1837 to 1860 and from 1860 to his death. The first period ended in success as in 1858 he and Lionel Rothschild breached the British square to allow Jews to seated in Parliament as Jews and not English thus creating the real Two Nations contending for mastery. The Rothschilds succeeded in extending their power over all Europe while operating in the US initially through their agent August Belmont, who proved to independent and after with the full cooperation of the J.P. Morgan organization and Kuhn-Loeb on the Jewish side. By then Disraeli had established himself as the leader of the Conservative Party. He was then instrumental in managing English political affairs until his death. Reynolds’ destiny seems to have been written out of both literature and history. The deeper I get into his study the more convinced I am that he was much more influential in promoting his agenda than he has been accredited for even by his literary admirers. His entire political agenda was effected by the time he died. The Chartist program which I am sure he must have had a hand in forming and which in his utopianism he thought was going to produce the perfect world had been realized. Disraeli seemed aware, as he was promoting the change was able to transition from one period to the other with some success. Ewart in his political biography quotes from a Disraeli speech: Division II, p.423: Quote: But I think that the reform of the House of Commons in 1832 greatly added to the energy and public spirit in which we had then become somewhat deficient. But, sir, it must be remembered that the labours of the statesmen who took part in the transactions of 1832 were eminently experimental. In many respects they had to treat their subject empirically, and it is not to be wondered at if in the course of time it was found that some errors were committed in that settlement; and if, as time rolled on, some, if not many deficiencies, were discovered. I beg the House to consider well those effects of time, and what has been the character of the twenty-five years that have elapsed since 1832. They form no ordinary period. In a progressive country and a progressive age, progress has been not only rapid, but perhaps precipitate. There is no instance in the history of Europe of such an increase of population as has taken place in this country during this period. There is no example in the history of Europe or of America, of a creation and accumulation of capital so vast as has occurred in this country in those twenty-five years. And I believe the general diffusion of intelligence has kept pace with that increase of population and wealth. In that period you have brought science to bear on social life in a manner no philosopher in his dreams could ever have anticipated; in that space of time you have, in a manner, annihilated both time and space. The influence of the discovery of printing is really only beginning to work on the multitude. It is, therefore, not surprising that in a measure passed twenty-five years ago, in a spirit necessarily experimental, however distinguished were its authors, and however remarkable their ability, some omissions have been found that ought to be supplied, and some defects that ought to be remedied. In such a state of things a question in England becomes what is called a public question. Unquote. Disraeli seems to handle space and time well is that excerpt. Satisfied me anyway. Reynolds on the other hand was fairly rooted in the departing era that he examined in great detail handling time and space well for the period 1826 to 1848 . When the break point came in 1859-60 he knew he couldn’t adapt to the new era. Gave it up, handed his pen and ink to the younger generation to drift off ostensibly to do newspaper work on his newspaper, involving himself in political affairs anywhere he was welcome, wandering in the wilderness for nearly twenty years, while the new generation of novelists such as Anthony Trollope took his place as political and social commentators. His earthly travails ended at seventy-nine. His time had been well spent. Disraeli died a couple years later, if I’m not mistaken, a bitter vengeful old man nursing his delusions of being a ‘great man.’ Lionel Rothschild also died in 1980 thus topping off the period.

George W.M. Reynolds And The Two Nations

Time Traveling 18: George W. M. Reynolds And The Two Nations by R.E. Prindle The Forties were a momentous period in nineteenth century England. It was one of their transition points from one societal organization to another. The people of England were stumbling out of the eighteenth century into the nineteenth with all its technological and scientific revelations. The Napoleonic wars had put a period to the eighteenth and the nineteenth blossomed. Perhaps unnoticed for what it was the emancipation of the Jews begun by Napoleon was about to transform the face of Europe and England. Nowhere was this more clearly evident than in the country of England. By the 1840s it was clear to the perceptive that there was a coming cultural clash between the Jews and English. As is usual with great changes, artists and writers were the first to grasp that there was a culture war in progress. Pre-eminent among the writers concerned with the two nations was the great novelist George W. M. Reynolds, the author of Mysteries of London. From the Jewish side the most overt writers were the future Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli and his father Isaac D’Israeli. Both writers blazed across the decade of the Forties. In this essay we will be concerned with Reynolds’ four series of Mysteries of London. I follow the Valancourt two series, two volumes edition. The first two series or volumes have current publication while the latter two series have been eclipsed by the passage of time. Reynolds himself had been eclipsed by the passage of time but English scholar Louis James’ effort seems headed for a revival of interest. Valancourt Press has released : The Mysteries of London Series I&II, Wagner the Wehrwolf and The Necromancer. In 1919 a San Bernardino firm with no name published a printing of III and IV, which I have, but the edition has sold through and is no longer available at this time. Several different volumes published by the British Library can still be had, they are discontinued, the Library seems to have lost interest in Reynolds and remaindered the lot. Some are still readily available at Ebay and possibly Amazon. A problem might be that the end of second series seems to indicate the end of the Mysteries but such is not the case for while Series Three doesn’t pick up where Series Two ended is nevertheless a long continuation along with Series Four bringing the total number of pages of the four series to nearly five thousand. The volumes of Benjamin Disraeli to figure prominently in this essay will be his trilogy Coningsby, Sybil and Tancred. Benjamin Disraeli was of course the most prominent politician of the English nineteenth century. Being in Parliament in the forties he published these three political novels then ended his writing career until 1870 when Lothair appeared followed in 1980 by his Endymion. Of stellar importance will be his father Isaac D’ Israeli’s, Genius of the Jews, whose teaching formed his son’s understanding of the Jewish Nation. The book was also meant a manual for non-Jews as to how they were to perceive the Jewish Nation. At this time in England little was known of the Jewish Nation. .2. From the year 1290 to 1660 Jews were banned from England. Allowed re-entry in 1660, immigration to England began slowly, by the end of the eighteenth century there was a small colony of perhaps several thousand who, staying within their colony in the East End were not disrupting English society. That situation had changed dramatically by the 1840s when the culture clash arrived with a bang. By the 1840s the Rothschild banking family of the Nation was the richest family in England eclipsing preeminent families of the English Nation by far. The modern palace of Mentmore Towers built in 1854 excelled all English manors in splendor. Built in the Vale of Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, the Vale became the location of many Rothschild mansions. Isaac D’ Israeli establish himself at Bradenham in Bucks. while his son would establish himself at neighboring Hughenden. Thus the Vale became a Jewish principality. The Vale would figure prominently in the writings of Reynolds. The rise of the English Jewish Nation began in 1806 when the dynasties founder, Nathan Rothschild, made his first coup by smuggling English gold across France and Spain to General Wellington’s army on the Spanish Peninsula. Nathan’s next coup, that established the family fortune, came with the success of British arms against Napoleon at Waterloo. When Nathan died in 1836 he turned the dynasty over to his son Lionel who was a worthy successor. Lionel would rule the roost from 1836 to 1880 paralleling the career of Benjamin Disraeli in the heart of the nineteenth century. It was he who broke the British square. Shortly after Nathan’s death Disraeli was given a safe seat in Parliament in 1837, after having placed last in balloting four consecutive elections. The Rothchild/Disraeli link would last until Lionel died. Now linked with the Rothschilds and in Parliament Disraeli quickly wrote the trilogy that outlined the Jewish Nation’s position- Coningsby, Sybil and Tancred. These novels lauded his Nation while in Tancred he proposed a New Crusade leading from Palestine across Europe to England. Every member of Parliament had to take an oath as a Christian, while Disraeli, as a Jew, took Jesus’ view that he came to fulfil the law of the Old Testament. Thus, while accepting Jesus as a Jewish savior becoming a nominal Christian he could take the oath in good conscience while maintaining a dual religiosity. There were already Jewish members of Parliament but they had falsely taken the oath. Lionel ran for Parliament, was elected to one of the six City seats, but refused the oath desiring to be admitted as member of the Jewish Nation only. He was refused but repeatedly ran and was reelected as one of the six City members. Finally in the mid fifties he was able to corrupt the procedures of the English Nation seating himself as a member of the Jewish Nation, but not the English Nation. The Jews at this point had parity as the Jewish Nation functioning within the English Nation. The two nations had come into existence. .3. George W.M. Reynolds was also a revolutionary but an English national. Born in 1814 to an English Navy Captain, he spent the years between two and eight on the island of Guernsey where his father was stationed. The family returned to England in 1822 in which year his father died. The next five years he was under the guardianship of his father’s best friend, Duncan McArthur, who was a Naval physician stationed at Walmer, Kent. At the end of the period McArthur placed the thirteen year old boy as a cadet at the Sandhurst Military Academy. George had apparently been at odds with his father, but hated Duncan McArthur, who, as his father and mother’s executor, probably defrauded him of a large part of his inheritance. No longer able to stand military discipline, after his mother died in March of 1830, Reynolds removed himself from Sandhurst. He exiled himself to France at the end of 1830. Eighteen-thirty was the year of the second French revolution, called the July Revolution, with its three glorious days. In France, Reynolds became a thorough revolutionary favoring violent revolution. In 1836 he was asked to leave France under a criminal cloud. Returning to England he began his literary career as the editor of the Monthly Magazine. In 1832 the first Reform Act was made law in England. As a consequence of the Reform Act a worker’s party called the Chartists emerged in which Reynolds served a prominent role. Having written several creditable novels between 1835 and 1842 but which failed to establish him as a successful author he was invited by the publisher George Stiff to serialize a novel for his magazine the London Journal. The novel was to be patterned on The Mysteries of Paris by the French author Eugene Sue. Reynolds accepted the offer and began the serialized Mysteries of London. The series lasted for four years, 1844-48. Probably to the wonderment of Reynolds, and maybe all, his writing was a runaway success. Mysteries of London sold as many as forty thousand copies per weekly installment. Made his eyes sparkle. He now had a platform to promulgate his social ideas and political platform. By 1844, when the series began, the Jews were pushing off English social mores seeking to create a counter Jewish Nation within the English Nation. The significance of the Jewish Nation within England was recognized in 1809 by the reformer William Wilberforce. While Wilberforce was battling to end slavery he also helped found the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews. Thus the presence of the Jews has become conspicuous. By the 1840s their presence had been duly noted. While the Jews received scant notice in the first two series of Mysteries of London, in the third and fourth the Jewish issue quite emphatically took Reynolds attention. Disraeli’s trilogy was published in 1844, ’45 and ’47 so that Reynolds obviously read them but doesn’t reference Disraeli by name although he does reference Lionel Rothschild. .4. The years 1830 through 1848 were years of revolution and revolutionary schemes in Europe and England. In Europe the revolutions were violent indeed with perhaps a hundred thousand or more meeting their deaths until the revolutionary period from1789 through 1848 was vanquished, until 1903 and the first Russian Revolution. In England the violence was minimized while the revolution was compelled to accept limited success. Both the crown and the aristocracy were stripped of most of their privileges while the Commons became the most important of the three estates. Reynolds remained a dedicated violent revolutionary believing that only a revolution such as France’s 1793 episode in which the past was swept away in one fell swoop. Reynolds admired and approved of this most violent revolution as it swept away the past allowing for an attempt to build back better. Thus when the Chartist movement after 1839 was formed Reynolds was a charter member of the extremist sort. While every effort has been employed to reduce his importance in the movement the rumbles are that he was positively disliked for his extremism, while the main body favored fabian tactics. Disraeli, now a member of Parliament was content to bore from within. I quote from Monypenny and Buckle’s The Life of Disreali, six volumes in two p.141: Quote: The quintessential issue was between an aristocratic government in its proper sense of the term—that is a government of the best men in all classes—and a democracy. The English were a peculiar people. Disraeli wrote: ‘You have an ancient, powerful, richly endowed Church and perfect religious liberty. You have unbroken order and complete freedom. You have landed estates as large as the Romans, combined with commercial enterprise such as Carthage and Venice united never equalled. And you must remember that this peculiar country, with these strong contrasts, is not governed by force; it is not governed by standing armies; it is governed by a most singular series of traditionary influences, which generation after generation cherishes because it knows they embalm custom, represent law. And with these, what have you else? You have created the greatest empire of modern time. You have amassed a capital of fabulous amount. You have devised and sustained a system of credit still more marvelous. And abroad, you have established and maintained a scheme so vast and complicated of labor and industry that the history of the world affords no parallel to it. And all these mighty creations are out of all proportion to the essential and indigenous elements and resources of the country. If you destroy that state of society, remember this—England cannot begin again. Unquote, unquote. Disraeli might as well have been describing the United State of the twentieth century. Disraeli would then set about to dismantle what he had just described as his fellow Jews have done to the United States. It must be remembered that the Old Testament of the Bible predicts that the Jews will inhabit houses that they didn’t build. That means that they will move country to country (The House of Egypt, The House of England, France, Germany, the US etc.) and trash each moving on to the next. Next in line is China. Reynolds, on the other hand, favored a utopian fantasy of Chartist democracy. A vision as absurd an any democratic fantasy as all democracies must ultimately fail as they dumb down the population to the lowest level. Thus, the Jews while demanding an aristocracy of Judaism promotes democracy for everyone else. The elite of a Nation and the Jewish Nation within the Nation ultimately work toward the same end with different results. As of 2020 both England and the US have been trashed, Reynolds then, ignorant of the inevitable results of democracy, and the tendencies of Judaism, wrestles with the problems in Series III and IV of the Mysteries of London. .5. Perhaps the trigger that led to the content of Series III & IV was the publication of Coningsby in 1844 at the same time that Reynolds was beginning Mysteries of London. Coningsby was subtitled the New Generation, probably meaning the arrival of the Jews, while the meaning of Coningsby is that of the king’s manor or village, two significant names. Compare the terms with Nathan Rothschilds, New Court. Coningsby, the hero, then means a natural king. The story line of the two volumes must have begun germinating after that book’s, publication. The second of Disraeli’s trilogy, Sybil was published in 1845 adding its impetus. Thus Reynolds; mind masticated the stories when he began the third series in 1846. Coningsby must have been a startling book for England as Disraeli raved about the natural superiority of the Jews. His portrait of Sidonia was based on Lionel Rothschild. Sidonia was so outrageous as to be unbelievable. Sidonia was characterized as a real superman; while Disraeli’s description of Jewish infiltration of all European governments must have been as shocking as Reynolds’ reaction indicates. Indeed, those Jews were so many spies collecting information to be sent to the Rothschilds as the new messiahs of Europe. The Rothschild story is so fabulous that they might well be considered the Jewish redeemers. With those means of collecting information it is no wonder that the Jews were informed of political developments almost before they were put into execution. Inside information was a major source of their financial wizardry. This Jewish seeming prescience was considered wonderful and baffling to Europeans. The reasons are quite obvious today. Only in the matters of the Dreyfus case in France was anyone caught. The French correspondingly accused Dreyfus of passing info to the Germans which he certainly was not doing; he was passing info to the synagogue which used it for their own ends. The cultural conflict in England more or less began when Charles Dickens published his novel Oliver Twist which featured the Jewish criminal character, Fagin. It was not the portrayal of a Jew as a thief that directly set the Jews off as we all believe. No, it was the fact that Fagin suffered the shame of being executed on the scaffold. This was taken as an insult for all Jewry. As Disraeli expressed it, all nations had criminals, Jews were to be seen everywhere with the exception of never, never being seen on the scaffold. This was a crucial matter. In twentieth century US when New York DA Thomas Dewey finally managed to arrest the originator of Murder Inc., the master criminal Lepke Buchalter, his fellow Jews worked like demons to prevent his conviction. Once convicted on Federal offense and sentenced to be electrocuted, in a frenzy Jewish operative worked to their utmost to prevent the execution. One can only imagine the machinations behind the scenes to send Buchalter to the chair. Resistance failed and Buchalter was burned. The indignity of a public execution as a common criminal was too much for them to endure. That very likely explains what was the supreme insult when the aristocratic Jewish criminal Joseph ‘Jud Suss’ Oppenheimer not only was hanged but the authorities used a thirty foot high scaffold and an iron cage that could be seen for miles and remained up for years that was a constant shaming not to be endured without revenge. Dicken’s was compelled, that is ordered, to remove the passage describing Fagin’s exposure from all future editions. Undoubtedly word was put out to the literary community to not offend again. The culture war was on. The Jewish right to censorship was quietly established. While Dickens either buckled, or his publishers did, Reynolds was made of sterner stuff. The only question was what course to take. In Series III then, He tried to show the Jews how to integrate into English society. This they couldn’t take as they saw themselves as superior to the English. Both father and son published books demanding English submission. At the same time Isaac D’Israeli explained that they wished to remain exclusive in his book, The Genius of Judaism. While the Frankfort ghetto, from when the Rothschild came, was certainly exclusive it was also demeaning. Now, in England, with their already enormous wealth the Rothchilds began creating dozens of palaces that outrivaled the English estates putting them far above the English aristocrats to maintain obvious exclusivity. Reynolds then laid out an example of how to integrate with the English. As his Mysteries was selling tens of thousands of copies weekly his message was noticed by the Jewish community. He was well read there and noted in the Jewish newspapers. From their side, it is suspect that they resented this attempted indoctrination as much as they did the hanging of Fagin. After all Reynolds was essentially telling them to integrate, that is, to abandon Jewish mores for English. This was probably too close to the Catholic Church’s age old attempt to convert them. Whether pressure was put on Reynolds I can’t say, nevertheless as the novel approached its end in a petulant outbreak Reynolds drew an extremely deprecating portrait of the meanest Jewish usurer that he could imagine. Quite shocking really. Devastating. .6. In the first and second series Reynolds was heavily under the influence of De Sade’s Justine and Juliette. Virtue and vice. Richard Markham then, was the male counterpart of Justine, or virtue, while Eugene Markham represented vice, or Juliette. As the second series closes Eugene in assassinated as the result of his vice while Richard is exalted by his virtuous activities in Italian Castelcicala. Thus Reynolds reversed De Sade’ notion of the superiority of vice. For the story to be plausible it must be remembered that Italy was not yet united into a single State. The ending of Series two implies the end of the story so that there is no reason to expect more hence a complete surprise when a reader discovers two more series or volumes. Volumes that history had more or less swept under the rug. In Reynolds’ terms he is redeeming himself for his youthful criminality as recorded in The Youthful Impostor, or a Youths Career In Crime. In 1847 he rewrote that book, first written when he was eighteen, as The Parricide, a much darker version. Richard Markham’s redemption at the end of Series Two was imperfect and not completely satisfying to him so that Series Three begins with a complete mystery and surprise. The new series built around the continuation of Richard Markham in Castelcicala and Reynolds’ fantasy of a complete and perfect triumph of democracy. The main character amid a host of very strong characters Serie three is a criminal by the name of Thomas Rainford, the last of the highwaymen. As the story opens Thomas Rainford, known as Tom Rain, stops a coach that contains Lady Georgiana Hatfield and her friend. Rain gallantly relieves Lady Hatfield of her cash but allows her to keep her jewellery. As he disguises his voice while robbing the women we are left with the impression that he knows Lady Hatfield, she too thinks there is something familiar about the man. Thus the story begins with a mystery that will take some time to resolve. There may be some dark humor here that one will only get if one can connect the resolution of the mystery with this beginning. Remember that Rain left the Lady with her jewels. As we will learn Rain had robbed the Lady Georgiana once before. At that time her beauty was so great that he lost control of himself and forced himself on her, raped her, that left her pregnant. She bore the child but gave it way to conceal the fact that the greatest treasure of a women, her must valuable jewel, is her virginity, her purity. Rain smirkingly telling her that he will leave her her jewels is a naughty reference to the fact that he had taken her most valuable jewel from her earlier. While the joke is definitely in the text, if Reynolds planned that, he was a first rate genius. Rain proceeds to London where he links up with the international criminal, Old Death—hideous looking fellow. Old Death, perhaps the least impressive of Reynolds, great criminals—Tony Tidkins, the Resurrection Man, Old Death, Chiffen the Cannibal of the Lady Saxondale volume, and the Burker of the Fortunes of the Ashtons. The Burker is closest in evil to the best, The Resurrection Man. These criminals will leave you gasping for breath. Through Old Death we learn that Rain has a mistress, the beauteous Jewess, Tamar. A little alarm goes off when we learn she is a Jewess, that this isgoing to be a Jewish story in the heart of the forties and in the middle of Disraeli’s trilogy. Subsequently we are introduced to her sister Ester de Medina and her fine old Jewish parents Mr. and Mrs. de Medina. Tamar and Ester are not twins but as the two were born nine months apart, perhaps they were almost twins because they were so close to each other in birth that they didn’t completely differentiate as Reynolds amusingly speculates. So Ester and Tamar only appear to be twins to the careless eye. So, now that we can connect the rest of the family to Tamar it looks like a full fledged Jewish story, and they do occupy three or four hundred pages of the mammoth novel. So, Reynolds engages the Jews. I speculate that Reynolds had read Isaac D’Israeli’s ‘The Genius Of Judaism’, and his son’s Coningsby and possibly Sybil, Tancred not have been issued at the time of writing, and that he is in reaction to those writings. Jews will occupy his attentions in III and IV as well as in The Wehrwolf also of 1847 and The Necromancer of 1851. While he characterizes different types of Jews in his volumes, at this point, perhaps in reaction to The Genius of Judaism he appears to be showing the Jews how to integrate into English society rather than maintaining the complete separation described by Isaac in The Genius of Judaism. His son’s version of Jews and English is a reflection of Isaac’s vision. According to Isaac in his The Genius of Judaism a whole set of procedures were put in place to guarantee separation of Jews and Gentiles. Actually, since Jews inhabit Houses they don’t build, that is other nations, a rigid set of regulations is necessary. Yet, every year a large percentage falls away else the Jewish population would be much larger. Only the dedicated remain; those who recognize the fatuousness of the belief system move on. The Rothschilds themselves were considered messiahs, with some justification, by the faithful. Thus, Reynolds attempting to show his set of Jews how to assimilate perfectly is committing the Catholic crime of proselytizing. His attitude seems somewhat ambiguous. The greatest challenge to Mr. de Menil, who by the way, appears to be Sephardic not Ashkenazi. The difference is important since non—Jews considered the Sephardics much more respectable than the Ashkenazi, as did Jews themselves. The de Menils may have lived in England for four hundred years, living in disguise. The D’Israelis themselves according to Benjamin must have been Sephardics because their ancestors were expelled from Spain in 1492, exiled to Venice, while arriving in England about 1740 where the picking were better, I mean, for a better life. The Rothschilds were Ashkenazi so that Isaac’s ancestry was superior to the Rothschild’s riches. Reynolds was a Liberal and he exhibited all the faults that Liberals do today. For instance he had some very strange notions of criminal reformation. In a critical situation he had imprisoned his adversary, Old Death in one of Old Death’s subterranean cells completely denied light. Apparently Reynolds’ sincere belief was that that if a criminal was imprisoned in darkness for a period he would ponder the error of his ways and hence reform when the blessed light was restored. Then he could be guided to complete restoration of honesty if treated decently. Old Death had been imprisoned with a few of his gang. According to Reynolds, his scheme of reformation worked perfectly, except for Old Death. The rest were completely reformed and released into society ever thankful to Rain. So, Rains scheme worked well for those former criminals. Old Death however was an inveterate, hardened criminal. He knew well how to dissimulate and fool Rain. The next part is so nutty that one would have to question Reynolds’ intelligence. Believing that the tender attention of the female sex might jolly Old Death along he employed the beautiful and sympathetic Ester de Menil to lead Old Death on. Ester speaks to Old Death through a grate in the door. Old Death is laughing up his sleeve as he deludes Ester and Rain that the plan to convert him is succeeding. The great prize of having the door opened is obtained by Old Death. However before this circumstances call Rain and Ester away so that he substitutes his wife Tamara for Ester Remember she looks like a twin. Tamara without instructions is naïve. Old Death persuades her to open the door and actually come inside. He then pounces on her and beats her to death, smashing her beautiful face in on vengeance to Rain. Because the two women look so alike he believes he is killing Ester not Tamar. What is going on in Reynolds’ mind here? In a few months Rain and Georgiana Hatfield will become reconciled and marry. It is necessary then for Tamara to be put aside some how and murdering her was the solution. Old Death’s hatred of Rain would explain the brutal murder of Tamar and her defacement as Old Death believed Esther was Rain’s wife but still the murder is so repulsive that one is led to believe that Reynolds had an ulterior motive. The irony of Old Death thinking that Ester was Rain’s wife and then killing his actual wife by mistake is one of those little twists that Reynolds employs continually that keeps the reader on his toes. .7. After having turned the grateful De Menils into English people Reynolds goes on into a longish diatribe on Judaism. While Reynolds is supposed to have been read mainly by the working class or read to illiterates by professional readers that may been exaggerated. Consider this passage: Quote: We have been much gratified in observing that our attempts to vindicate the Jews against most of the unjust charges that it seems to be a traditionary fashion to level against them, haven’t passed unnoticed. All the Jewish papers have quoted the passage at page 172 of the series of “The Mysteries of London”. Many provincial journals have transferred it to their columns; and in No. 173 pf Chambers Edinburgh Journal (New Series) it was printed with the following record of approval on the part of the editors of that well considered periodical: We cordially agree in the openly defense of a cruelly misrepresented people. Unquote. Obviously his readers included a fair number of Jews including Jewish newspaper editors which may indicate that he was being monitored to detect anti-Jewish tendencies. In the Shires he also must have had a readership among those following literature. If editors of the Two Nations snipped excerpts out of the installments he was taken quite seriously. Indeed, in these two series he frequently appears to preach and in quite elevated language and concepts. It is difficult to believe that installments that professional readers read to illiterate listeners could be understood by them. Or perhaps they ended up like Richard Markham’s butler who admired and humourously mispronounced big words but little understood them. I, myself, have dealt with illiterates who quite cleverly listened closely to what I was saying and then cleverly paraphrased my words and contents back seeming to further the conversation. Remarkable to myself, while if they heard me and repeated me I was quite impressed with my own original delivery. Having then done the honors to the Jews, he later in the volume presents the Jews that were not righteous and apparently not misrepresented. He turns to a usurer, which type he seems to be very familiar with, who grinds his debtors into the dust with great pleasure and no remorse. A quite savage attack compared to his adulation of the de Menils. One wonders how Jewish editors reacted to this version of the Jew. The Jewish usurer is represented many times in the corpus, each of a different type. But English society was evolving. Coningsby was published in 1844 while his Tancred was published in 1847 that cast the Jewish situation in an updated light just before the revolution of 1848. One must believe that Disraeli was aware of the machinations set to occur in 1848. The coming of that revolution seems to have been an open secret. In ‘Tancred or the New Crusade’ the new crusade was to originate in the Middle East and roll over Europe reversing the old crusade. While, to my knowledge the 1848 revolution didn’t originate in the Middle East it was certainly difficult to suppress. Disraeli says the ’48 was originated and executed wholly by the Jews, for what that’s worth. Floods of defeated revolutionaries fled for the safety of the United States. That was the first really large number of Jews to emigrate to the US. As fortune would have it the US was in the midst of an unparalleled industrial, technological and territorial expansion that provided unheard of opportunities. The ’48 Jews prospered accordingly so that when the Eastern Jews of the Pale began to be transferred from Europe to America in the 70s and 80s they were rapidly absorbed in what become Jewish industries, among them the needle trades and movies. With the failure of ’48 hope seemed to vanish from Reynold’s breast. Terminating his Mysteries of London in 1848 he began his next great work, moving back from a disappointing present to the days of George III and the Regency of George IV. His fantastic vision of Richard Markham’s successes in Castelcicala and utopian views of the perfect democracy freed from hereditary aristocracy and monarchy by Richard take up a fair portion of Series III and IV. While his mind was occupied by those visions, the Jewish situation was reaching crisis proportions. His novel was apparently read, discussed and pondered by the Jewish population but they disregarded his assimilationist advice. He became disillusioned and an alarmist when he realized that the Jewish desire was, for the nonce anyway, a dual monarchy. Remember that Nathan Rothschild’s establishment was titled The New Court. Lionel bullied his way into Parliament as a Jew on his own terms in the mid-fifties. The probability was noted as early as 1851 when George published his novel The Necromancer. Using an allegorical approach, placing the novel in the time of Henry VIII he warned of the arrival of the dual kingship. Perhaps warned away, one can’t confirm it as yet, George turned more to historical romances and his ‘biographical’ novels. By 1860 England had entered into a more mature or post phase of the Industrial Revolution moving into the Scientific Revolution heralded by Darwin’s Origin of Species published in 1859. Reynolds was no futurist, he left that to men like Jules Vern, his specialty was the past. George ended his career as a novelist to concentrate on his famous newspaper that survived until 19, that’s nineteen, 67. Disraeli prospered through the period realizing his life’s dream to become Prime Minister. Reynolds died in 1879 having realized his dream of becoming a Man of the World. Disraeli died in 1881, Lionel Rothschild in 1880, closing the era.

Note #11: George W.M. Reynolds and George Stiff

Note #11 George W. M. Reynolds And George Stiff by R.E. Prindle When I first suggested that Reynolds’ inspiration for The Mysteries of London was a commission by George Stiff who published The London magazine I thought I was making a mere speculation. I can now confirm that speculation to be fact. At the end of the fourth series Stiff posts an ad for the coming fifth series to be written by Thomas Miller to be subtitled Lights and Shadows of London Life. The ad quoted in full following: Quote: The Proprietor of ‘Mysteries of London’ having at present, his opportunity of carrying out his original design –viz. that of presenting the public with faithful and unexaggerated sketches of every class of society forming the “world of London” has determined on submitting to his readers a new series of “Mysteries of London” and which will be from the pen of a writer of the eminent reputation. THOMAS MILLER, Esq., [A list of Miller’s titles] The new series will be entitled “Mysteries of London, or Lights and Shadows of London Life.” Unquote. Sriff’s ad says a great deal. First off, he calls the readers his, rather than Reynolds. A cardinal mistake. Then he wears the mask ‘Proprietor’ rather then announcing himself as George Stiff, the proprietor. Then he quietly castigates Reynolds for perverting his original design of a genteel survey of London along the lines, one supposes, of Charles Wright, Henry Mayhew or even, Charles Dickens. Instead of a polite portrayal of ‘every class’ he got a writer who pretty much dealt realistically with the criminal class and sordid stories. It seems pretty clear that his and Reynolds’ relationship was rather stormy as he considered Reynolds’ work ‘unfaithful and exaggerated.’ Thus he is offering ‘his’ readers a new story from the pen of ‘a ‘writer of the most eminent reputation.’ Thus, he implies that Reynold’s was a disreputable writer with a terrible reputation, one with which he didn’t care to be associated. Stiff then, owns the title Mysteries of London and Reynolds was writing for him on hire hence unentitled to the copyright. Reynolds wrote his masterpiece for five pounds a week payable on delivery of his copy every Friday night. While Reynolds undoubtedly did read Eugene Sue’s Mysteries of Paris perhaps basing his version of London on it, he only began on Stiff’s employment of him as is evident from the wobbly beginning. It appears that no matter how successful, and Reynold’s work was, and he was very successful, Stiff detested it as too racy; he desired something respectable along the lines of Dickens’ Household Words. As with most ‘proprietor’s he thought that now that he had a successful proprietor which, he, after all, suggested to ‘his’ writer he could dispense with the disreputable Renolds, also a violent revolutionist and probably under surveillance with the Secret Police who, may indeed have questioned him. If Reynolds submissions were expurgated, who expurgated them? Why Stiff himself. One would like to see the racy passages eliminated by the Editor to see how they matched up today’s ieas. That meant that there were many unpleasant encounters when Reynolds checked each issue to see the editing. Reynolds was apparently too true to life. Stiff suffered I imagine when his more polite friends bothered him with questions like: Why are you publishing this pornography? One might note that Susannah Reynolds, George’s wife, published her novel, Gretna Green, which was denounced as pornography and she no lady. George became quite indignant at these attacks on is wife. I have only a current OCR edition of the novel and that is unreadable due to printing errors of magnitude. One gathers from the last sentence that Stiff was saying goodbye to Reynolds and good riddance. George had made up his mind to leave Stiff at the completion of Series IV in 1848 having already begun publishing his own magazine, Reynolds’ Miscellany in 1846. If Stiff believed Reynolds was a pornographic disreputable writer one can’t blame him for discontinuing his services however he did give up a winner who was to begin The Mysteries of the Court of London but then he would have, at least, had to make Reynolds his partner. Each went their way.

Note #10: George W.M. Reynolds And The Norwood Builder

Note #10 George W.M. Reynolds And The Norwood Builder by R.E. Prindle In Vols. III & IV of the Mysteries of London George Reynolds included his version of The Norwood Builder. Writing at the same time James Malcomb Rymer, included the same story in his Varney The Vampire. Reynolds and Rymer were friends so they either worked the story up between them, were reacting to a true incident in Norwood at the time, or may have been aware of some sort of legendary Norwood Builder. Rymer’s and Reynolds’ stories are quite similar while Reymer’s is a short story but Reynold’s saga is strung over seventeen hundred pages. One wonders what could have inspired these two men. Brainstorming, or a real incident? Forty some years later Arthur Conan Doyle retrieved the story publishing it in his Sherlock Holmes story, The Case of the Northwood Builder. The story must have tickled Doyle’s funny bone too. As his story closely follows that of Rymer I imagine that it was the source for Doyle. It is possible that he was also familiar with Reynold’s version but except for the core story they aren’t even close. I suppose Vols. III and IV of Reynolds might even be titled The Norwood Builder as the same characters carry the story throughout the whole work of 1700 pages of my copy published by the House in San Bernadino, Cal. That provides no other information about publication except the exact date of printing, 14 July 2019. I suppose Vols. III & IV might even be titled The Norwood Builder as the same characters carry the story through the whole work. The two volumes are deceptive. I didn’t think much of it the first time as the novel takes a long time to build while integrating the characters, while their individual stories don’t connect until integration time. Then the mustard seed of the highway robbery becomes important. Our highwayman Tom Rainford or Rain as he is known, stops a coach that carries Lady Georgiana Hatfield. I let that silly incident throw me. That seeming frivolous incident was the mustard seed from which the tremendous story developed. I’m not going to give a full review here. I’m going to let the story sink in a littler further first. It is quite a study. If you don’t have a copy pick up one if you can find it. This is as fine a novel as you will ever see.

In The Pursuit Of Youth: Edgar Rice Burroughs And Samuel Hopkins Adams.

In Pursuit Of Youth: Edgar Rice Burroughs And Samuel Hopkins Adams by R.E. Prindle Sources: Warner Fabian (Samuel Hopkins Adams): Flaming Youth 1923. Macintyre, F. Gwynplaine: Personal interview. As the 1920s dawned Edgar Rice Burroughs, the author of Tarzan, was becoming increasingly restless in his marriage to Emma. That he wished out and was looking around is evidenced by 1918’s Tarzan The Untamed in which he had Jane (Emma) murdered and burnt beyond recognition, identifiable only by her jewelery. Late in the novel he has Tarzan eyeing another woman. Perhaps his constant moving contained a notion of losing Emma. While societal changes had been brewing for a few decades it seemed that they all matured under cover of the Great War emerging like a phoenix in its aftermath. Most importantly sexual attitudes had changed most dramatically. Representatives of the changes was the appearance of the Flapper. Thought of as a devil-may-care anything goes girl they were enough to excite any man in his mid-life crisis. In 1920, ERB at forty-five would have been in the midst of his. Life was passing while he was evidently in an unsatisfactory marriage. Perhaps it had been unsatisfactory since 1903-04 when he had committed the faux pas which shattered his wife’s confidence in him. He was never to regain her confidence during their marriage although her love for him never did cease. While he was in this state of mind a book was published followed by its movie which lustfully inflamed ERB’s imagination. In 1923 Samuel Hopkins Adams, himself in a mid-life crisis, Samuel Hopkins Adams, using the pseudonym, Warner Fabian, perhaps wisely, published his very successful novel Flaming Youth. While the book doesn’t show up on the best seller lists of either 1923 or ’24, from January to June it had gone through nine printings of which my copy is of the ninth, for the year perhaps fifteen or more. Still couldn’t reach the top ten of the charts, must have been a couple good literary years. Before the year was out the movie had been made and was in the theatres. ERB had a copy of the book in his library and had seen the movie at least once, possibly even several times. If his search for a hot number had been latent before it certainly flamed after he saw the movie. In 1927 he found his flapper ideal in Florence Gilbert Dearholt. While ‘Flaming Youth’ was a major success in 1923-’24 reading it today makes understanding why difficult. It is not a particularly good book nor, really, very well written. Adams appears to have dashed it off taking no pains with it. Thus rather than being a literary novel it is more of a pulp romance of the type Bernarr Macfadden would make famous in his pulp magazines like True Romance, a genre he invented at this time. Samuel Hopkins Adams had an interesting career. Four years older than ERB he lived eight years longer. He began his career as a journalist writing several articles in 1906 about the patent medicine business which were instrumental in the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of that year. The articles were later issued in book form as The Great American Fraud. Burroughs’ own life would be seriously affected by the Pure Food and Drug Act through his relationship with Dr. Stace. Adams career prospered as he was very proficient in writing for the movies. In ‘Flaming youth’ he had a double barreled hit. While his title ‘Flaming Youth’ has entered the vocabulary even as modern youth attempt to ‘flame’, I found the title somewhat misleading and far better than the story. Perhaps Adams proves the adage of H.L. Mencken who flourished at this time when he said ‘No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.’ Actually the story reminded me a great deal of Grace Metolius’ 1954 novel ‘Peyton Place.’ Adams book was definitely aimed at the erotic zone of America. In a rather clever framing device worthy of ERB’s best efforts Adams palms Warner Fabian off as a family physician. I’ll quote the frame in its entirety. Quote: A WORD FROM THE WRITER TO THE READER “Those who know will not tell; those who tell do not know.” The old saying applies to woman in today’s literature. Women writers when they write of women, evade and conceal and palliate. Ancestral references, sexual loyalties dissuade the pen. Men writers when they write of women do so without comprehension. Men understand women only as men choose to have them, with one exception, the family physician. He knows. He sees through the body and soul. But he may not tell what he sees. Professional honour binds him. Only through the unaccustomed medium of fiction and out of the vatic incense-cloud of pseudonymity may he speak the truth. Being a physician, I must conceal my identity, and not less securely the identity of those whom I picture. There is no such suburb as Dorisdale…and there are a score of Dorisdales. There is no such family as the Fentrisses…and there are a thousand Fentriss families. For the delineation which I have striven to present, honestly and unreservedly, of the twentieth century woman of the luxury-class I beg only the indulgence permissible to the neophyte’s pen. I have no other apologia to offer. To the woman of the period thus set forth, restless, seductive, greedy, discontented, craving sensation, unrestrained, a little morbid, more than a little selfish, intelligent, uneducated, sybaritic, following blind instincts and perverse fancies, slack of mind as she is trim of body, neurotic and vigorous, a worshipper of tinsel gods at perfumed altars, fit mate for the hurried, reckless and cynical man of the age, predestined mother of-what manner of being?: To her I dedicate this study of herself. W.F. Whether ERB got sucked in by such persiflage is open to question. A writer using such flim-flam himself he certainly should have seen through it. Having been a victim of Samuel Hopkins Adams once when the Pure Food and Drug Act drove he and Stace out of the patent medicine business it is kind of a joke that Adams got him a second time with such drivel under the pseudonym of Dr. Warner Fabian. It is mind-boggling that Adams did it posing as a medical quack. Adams must have learned something about snake oil lines by investigating the patent medicine business. His ‘Word to the Reader’ is certainly a lesson in promising much and delivering little. It appears to be a conscious attempt too. One must ask if the term Writer in his headline is meant to refer to him or his alter ego Warner Fabian. I rather think Fabian as a ‘neophyte’ would refer to himself as an author while Adams considered himself a professional writer so that Adams may be speaking in his own persona to the reader when he says ‘Those who know will not tell…’ so that if he does know he won’t tell it alerts the perceptive reader to the fact that what he is about to read is a fraud or a put on, ‘those who tell do not know.’ Or alternatively he doesn’t know so what you are about to read is pure fiction. Further along he says that there is one exception to the rule, as why not? there’s always an exception to the rule. That one exception is the family physician. He knows. The only problem with that is that Adams is lying- he is neither the Dr. Warner Fabian he purports to be nor is he a family physician. This book is a total medical fraud no less than the patent medicine dealers Adams shut down. Adams carries the fraud further using the purple prose he employs through out the work: ‘…only through the unaccustomed medium of fiction and out of the vatic-incense cloud of pseudonymity may he (the doctor) speak the truth.’ Anybody here know what vatic means? Our old friend Mr. Webster says that it relates to the seer and prophecy. So much for the concept of medical science. I haven’t figured out what the phrase ‘vatic-incense cloud of pseudonymity’ means yet or maybe we weren’t supposed to. If anyone knows drop a line. However, it sounds not only good but spectacular. Fabian is only pseudonymous, whatever that means, still he must conceal his identity. A careful reader understands the pseudonymous doctor is not really Warner Fabian so one wonders why he stresses the point so. Adams does tell that he is not telling the truth as he frankly admits that there is no Dorrisdale but in the metaphoric sense that are twenty of them. Only twenty in the whole US? Or twenty in the immediate vicinity? Anyway we are to imagine twenty is an infinitude, something like the stars in a clear cold night sky. Adams tells us these are very decadent times. He doesn’t compare them to any former times like pre-war Dorrisdales but the times are definitely more decadent than they ever have been before. There is no actual Fentriss family, closer to the truth, but there are an allegorical thousand Fentriss families (and while he doesn’t say it, he implies that allegorically that might include the reader whatever his name. Figure it out, do the math. Twenty goes into a thousand fifty times. There are fifty such families in each of these small Dorrisdales, the population of which is what? Two thousand? Fifty times six family members is three hundred. We now have twenty decadent Dorrisdales. The whole universe as it were. Since all these families are apparently having nude parties by their swimming pools as in the novel so where’s the news? Who is there to be shocked? The book went through nine printings in six months so somebody didn’t get an invitation to these orgies. I don’t know who. Oh well, not everyone can be in the luxury-class. Proto Jet Set. Andy Warhol’s Factory. People need orgies for mental health, don’t they? Or, do they? Let’s just say the vatic-incense cloud must have been the devil weed itself burning which sent Adams off on this flight of fancy that captures the imagination of a nation. Poor old prurient America. Oh, Dr. Freud, turn off the sex spigot. I found the masterful title a misnomer. The title purports to reveal the antics of flaming youth but the only flaming youth in the story is in the imagination of fourteen year old Patricia Fentriss-she’s a fast one in her imagination but she doesn’t go all the way. Adams is good at setting things up then not delivering. Robert Heinlein must have sat at his feet. In perhaps the book’s most famous quote on page thirteen—13? Adams dips his pen into his purple ink well to write: “That’s the measure they dance to, the new generation. Doesn’t it get into your torpid blood, Bob? Don’t you wish you were young again! To be a desperado of twenty? They’re all desperadoes, these kids, all of them with any life in their veins; the girls as well as the boys; maybe even more than the boys. Even Connie with her eyes of a vestal. Ah!” Ah, indeed! So who’s Adams writing this tripe for? The title may be Flaming Youth but the story is about Sputtering Age. This is a May-September romance. Burroughs was forty-eight in 1923 and Adams was fifty-two. What yearning for a younger woman occurs in those ages. Anything to stave off the march of time. Both men had been raised essentially in the nineteenth century; they must then have been thoroughly aroused by the short-skirted flapper of the post-war era. What lusts did these girls call forth? Sam may as well have been standing next to ERB at the dance asking: “Doesn’t it get into your torpid blood, Ed? Don’t you wish you were young again?” Darn right Ed wished that he was young again, but as that wasn’t about to happen the next best thing for an old timer to do to revive that torpid blood is to get next to one of those red hot young flappers. That is what Adams does for himself in Flaming Youth. The book is not so much about flaming youth as to return to the flame of youth. Adams acquaints Pat Fentriss with a forty-or-so year old ultra sophisticate, hyper intelligent man of the world named Cary Scott. Obviously a simulacrum of himself. As Scott carefully explains to Pat, a good looking body may be enough for the ‘the First Dreaming’ but she will soon tire of that, as her mind in the ‘Second Dreaming’, this is the family physician talking, will require something more stimulating like himself. The story then actually concerns the trials and tribulations of this romance until it come to happy fruition in the end. ERB as he was entering the ‘Second Dreaming’ reached out to a hot young firebrand which he found a short three years later in 1927. That was the book. Hardly a great or even a very good novel but successful enough to cement Adams’ reputation. The movie which was rushed out by year’s end was apparently somewhat different from the book. The movie made the career of the actress Colleen Moore with whom ERB was to have contact a decade later when he wrote the miniature book Tarzan Jr. for her miniature library of her doll house. In researching the movie the consensus was that no copy had survived. Then I read that one reel survived. And then I came across a review at www.imbd.com/title/tt00145045/usercomments by F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre, seemingly a London based journalist who seemed to have viewed the movie. I contacted him and he advised me that a print did indeed exist. He advised me by email that: ‘I have viewed a partially deteriorated nitrate print of Flaming Youth in Europe, in the private collection of an individual who does not wish to be publicly identified. The partly deteriorated film includes a few frames of a faded image that appears to be a British exhibition certificate.’ As an example of what ERB saw Mr. Macintyre describes the action: Quote: “Moore plays Pat Fentriss, the spoilt daughter of well-to-do (luxury class in the book) parents who are the 1920s equivalent of “swingers”. Pat’s parents are always throwing wild parties, with jazz band and (illegal) Prohibition booze and orgies. Pat wants to join in on the fun, even though she’s just barely at the age of sexual consent. One young man at the parent’s pool party shows a sexual interest in Pat until he finds out her age, then he curtly tells her: ‘Baby must go back to her cradle.’ Unquote. The high point of the movie is a scene at the pool party which shows the male and female party guests undressing together for the nude swimming. The film makers probably wanted to show the guests in full nudity, but didn’t dare. So we get a lot indirect lighting and camera angles, with everybody dressing in half-shadow.” That part more or less follows the book. The movie apparently doesn’t concentrate on the May-September romance between Cary Scott and Pat. The nudity would be enough to get one’s torpid blood flowing like Niagara. According to Mr. MacIntyre in the movie Pat runs away with a fiddler, hopping a yacht for Europe. When the violinist, to be culturally correct, makes his move young Pat leaps overboard to escape his advances. Pretty flaming, huh? With a rare good fortune a sailor passing by fishes her out. In the book Pat meets a violin player or ‘artiste’, Leo Stenay. Adams shows his distaste for the Bohemian style by having Pat reject him because she feared he wore dirty socks. As with most writers of the period Adams shows his respect for the Diversity by including and referring to many different types. Thus the stimulating part of the movie for a revivifying ERB would have been the nude swimming party. One would think they would have been much easier to find in Hollywood than in the score of Dorrisdales with their fifty luxury-class families but not for Ed, even though he had just written The Girl From Hollywood dealing with just such licentiousness. Combining the movie version with Cary Scott of the book ERB became a lonely hunter until he met Florence Gilbert Dearholt, a married woman with two kids, when he discovered the perils of the Second Dreaming. One wonders what course his life would have taken if there had been no Samuel Hopkin Adams, no Great American Fraud and no Flaming Youth. It is strange indeed that a man we have no reason to believe that he had ever met could have had such a profound effect on his life. First with his articles condemning the patent medicine manufacturers which may have introduced ERB to the police and secondly with Flaming Youth that undoubtedly completed ERB’s dissatisfaction with his marriage. I wonder if ERB ever gave Samuel Hopkins Adams a second thought. F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre., An Afterthought Gwynplaine and I were continuing to correspond about Flaming Youth when the line went dead so to speak. Strangely we were both using London email addresses. So each of us believed the emails were crossing London. He finally admitted that he was in Brooklyn. I stunned him by confessing that I was writing from Portland, Oregon. I was trying to reach him when I received an email from his friend advising me that Gwynplaine was no more. He had apparently set his apartment in flames burning wall to wall. Fortunately for other tenants the building was insulated well. I knew that Gwynplaine was eccentric by his assumed name. Gwynplaine was a character in Victor Hugo’s novel The Man Who Laughs. The man who laughed was a man who was kidnapped as an infant. When he became old enough his captors slit his cheeks from the corners of his mouth ear to ear thus when healed he gave the impression of man with a huge grin. The captors could then exhibit him. The assumed character indicated that Gwynplaine masked a world of sorrow. From the internet, Wikipedia, I read that he adopted many costumes in an effort to get away from himself. He claimed to have viewed many impossible to find films thus creating a furor among silent movie buffs who challenged him. A major brou ha ha was in progress when I contacted him. His detractors claimed that the story about the European collector was false and that Gwynplaine merely copied out movie reviews of the time. I don’t know, but I hope that Gwynplaine did know collectors who had rooted out some impossible to find copies. Perhaps being rudely attacked threw Gwynplaine into a severe depression and he decided to free his soul and translate himself to an alternate universe where things were ordered better. His body was not found in the ashes so possibly he just ran away from himself. God bless you Gwynplaine wherever you are and may your sorrows turn into a real smile.

Noodling Around In The Eighteen Forties

Noodling Around The Eighteen Forties: George W.M. Reynolds And The Literary World A Survey Of Sorts. by R.E. Prindle This is one of those essays where I don’t know where to begin. Incongruously let us begin with the nineteen sixties. My generation (1960s) doesn’t have a literary history. Supplanting that, our interest was focused on stereo phonograph records. Song writing. Electric guitars and such. Rather than seeking a solitary literary reputation everything was put into being in a musical group, one or two electric guitars, electric bass, possibly a Farfisa or other type of keyboard and most importantly a charismatic singer. This also resulted in a massive array of speakers. Also a major attraction was the singer-songwriter, usually a guitar player. To show how obsessed with songwriters was Bob Dylan, the very epitome of sixties songwriting, was awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature. Many of us shook our head in wonder. However this whole very large body of ‘artists’ embraced the musical ethic. The artists preferred variations of the same few themes thus the whole generation nodding in agreement was entranced. Looking backward to the eighteen forties I believe the same thing happened involving literature. The musical sixties were magnificent as so the literary eighteen-forties. The literary phenomenon was worldwide (the world at this time being Europe with an assist from the US. France and Germany were stellar also but I’m going to concentrate on England and the US. Just as the musical phenomenon of the sixties was done by performers born from 1935 to 1945 so the literary scene of the forties depended on writers born between 1800 and eighteen-eighteen. As the sixties were thematic so were the 1840s, like thinking individuals produce like thinking results in their output. I am no literary snob so I include all forms of literature in my valuation, from the pulp literature of that time, styled Penny Dreadful, to so-called literary fiction, the latter the peak of literary snobbery. If anything the general tenor of the time was represented by the Penny Dreadful style. Another name for the style is ‘popular.’ Popular being the direct opposite and inferior to Literary fiction. Just as Bob Dylan and Paul Simon epitomized the singer songwriter faction of the Sixties so Charles Dickens and Geoge Reynolds epitomized the literary period of the eighteen-forties. The authors played off each other while they all had similar literary backgrounds. English literature from Daniel Defoe was essentially a continuum to the forties period. After the forties writers were more affected by technological advances, rising population and a better educated more prosperous workforce. Therefore those of the changing times could not see and feel in the same way as the forties generation. By the 1860s a new ethic was forming. Times had changed. By the 1890s that ethic was replaced. In many ways a new England came into existence much as is happening in the world of the twenty-first century. Dickens gives us some idea of how his generation learned their craft, who were their great influences. Quote: On the other hand, if I looked for examples, and for precedents, I find them in the noblest range of English literature: Fielding, De Foe, Goldsmith, Smollett, Richardson, MacKenzie—all these for wise purposes, and especially the two first, brought upon the scene the very scum and refuse of the land. Hogarth, the moralist and censor of his age… I embrace the present opportunity of saying a few words in explanation of my aim and object in its production. It is with some sort of duty to do so in gratitude to those who sympathized with me, and divined my purpose at the time, and who, perhaps will not be sorry to have their impression confirmed under my own hand. It is, it seems, a very coarse and shocking circumstance, that some of the characters in these pages are chosen from the most criminal and degraded of London’s population; Sikes is a thief, and Fagin a receiver of stolen goods; that the boys are pickpockets and the girl is a prostitute. Unquote. Quoted from the preface to the third edition as bound in the 2021 Easton Press edition in parts from the 1843 printing of Oliver Twist. You can imagine the critics handling of George Reynolds novels that took Dickens characters a few steps further. Another writer who one hears frequently alluded to is Charles Maturin whose most famous work is Melmoth the Wanderer. In the same vein is George Croly’s Salathiel, a story of the Wandering Jew. And for another, the greatest novelist who ever lived, Walter Scott, with perhaps the lesser known G.P.R. James who also wrote through this period but reflects the eighteenth century in style more. Unless I am mistaken George Reynolds pays homage to James in his character from the third series of The Mysteries of London, the highwayman Thomas Rainford. The R in GPR James is Rainsford, shortened most frequently by Reynolds to Tom Rain. The founder of the idiom was the very famous at the time, Pierce Egan. He was essentially a sports writer. Loved British games and pastimes. He especially covered boxing writing a multi-volume set detailing the careers of what was called the fancy, or boxing. He had a very successful sporting magazine so that it was a natural to publish his most famous book, Life in London in parts thus establishing that method of publishing novels. Life in London took the country by storm much as Dickens’ Pickwick Papers would sixteen years later. As with Dickens other writers purloined his characters for their books and especially for theatrical performances that were smashes irritating Egan who rightly felt he should have had a share in profits. He created the characters of Tom and Jerry. I’m sure very few people lifting a Tom and Jerry cocktail understand where the name came from. Even in the twentieth century the characters were being used without credit in the Tom and Jerry cartoons. Then in 1826 came the early novelists Edgar Bulwer Lytton and W. Harrison Ainsworth; both extremely popular and prolific. Bulwer Lytton is famous still for his novel The Last Days Of Pompeii, a nearly perfect novel. And Rienzi, the Last of the Tribunes. Thus the way was paved for the emergence of Charles Dickens and the literary blossoming of the generation reaching perfection in the forties. The ethic played out in the fifties and the early sixties when the evolution of civilization made room for the next generation of authors. Having mentioned Bulwer-Lytton, Ainsworth and Dickens let us now introduce the rest of the group. I deal here only with the most prominent and influential writers; the period is rich in authorship including Anthomy Trollope’s mother Frances who was a Liberal voice and a very interesting woman, somewhat of an embarrassment for her son. Edward Lloyd was a publisher not a writer but his writers epitomize the pulp, or Penny Dreadful, faction. He began a couple years before the forties. Like many people beginning from nothing he sponged off successful authors publishing derivative novels under similar names such as Oliver Twiss instead of Dickens’ Oliver Twist. Finding his groove he became what we today would describe as an industry powerhouse. Others had watched Dickens success and probably Lloyds and determined to succeed in a like manner. The key being episodic publication whereby a penny a week over twenty weeks became a pound book. So, the savings were nil but the installment plan worked. One of these publishers was George Stiff who published the London Magazine. It was he who recruited the author that gave the genre credibility. A similar situation was occurring in France. In 1943 a French writer, Eugene Sue began a serial publication of his novel The Mysteries Of Paris that quickly became a sensation, excellent novel then, excellent today. Not slow on the uptake Stiff immediately thought of a counterpart, The Mysteries of London. All he needed was the right author while he already had a printer named George Vickers. Kicking around London since 1836 was a fellow by the name of George Reynolds. George William McArthur Reynolds in full, alternately going by G.W.M. Reynolds. Reynolds a young 22 year old, had been in Paris for a few years, returning to London in 1836 where he began circulating ln literary circles. He edited the Monthly Magazine for a year or so on his return. Reynolds is an interesting character. He was apparently devoid of literary ideas himself but could adapt any else’s into an original sounding story. Dickens popularity had turned him into an industry as other writers rushed to emulate him or plagiarize him. Edward Lloyd led the way. Without an idea, Reynolds bethought himself to write a continuation of Dicken’s smash hit The Pickwick Papers and so as Dickens had left his characters at the end of his novel, Reynolds decided to lift his cast of characters and place them in the Paris he had just left. The result was Pickwick Abroad. The result was an entertaining book, relatively successful, and might have stood on its own with similar but different characters. Reynolds apparently wanting a four bagger elected to purloin Pickwick and his Club. Reynolds followed that with a series of titles that were not particularly successful but were well written. In 1843 then, Stiff looking around for an author settled on Reynolds and offered him the job that Reynolds accepted. Following his first attempt with Dickens he now had Sue’s Mysteries of Paris as a matrix to embrace his skill. Now thirty-one he set to work turning out a weekly installment for four straight years. He was a sensational success. Paid at the rate of five pounds a week, his annual salary of two hundred and sixty pounds was enough for he and his growing family to live fairly comfortably plus he could freelance on the side so he could easily have added fifty or more pounds a year. If so three hundred pounds was doing alright in a small way. In the early forties Ainsworth was at the apex of his career turning out two or three titles a year, all of an excellent quality. Dickens was continuing his success while Bulwer-Lytton was rolling along. Lloyd was getting along while he had a couple first rate writers in James Malcom Rymer and Thomas Prescott Press. Between the two of them they would turn out two monster successes that may be the best known Penny Dreadfulls today: Varney the Vampire and Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street. More on them later. As I mentioned earlier all these writers read each other and were influenced by each other. Reynolds matured overnight creating a superb style and method that resulted in a monster hit. While he began by emulating Dickens he began to turn the table on Dickens so that Dickens began to be influenced by his style. Dickens was not all that prolific while Reynolds was a non-stop writer who worked in several genres. As popular as Dickens was he was very limited in style. Thus his Our Mutual Friend was almost as emulative of Reynolds as Pickwick Abroad by Reynolds. Another writer who was publishing his major works in the forties that I hesitate to include except for the fact that his last two novels, 1870 and 1880, indicate that he was heavily influenced by the forties ambience and may have also in a clumsy imitation have shown reading acquaintance in his 1848 novel, Tancred. I am also going to have to add a man thought of as a literary author but who was well aware of the Penny Dreadful genre. That would be William Makepeace Thackaray, and his novel Vanity Fair also published in 1848 that was an outstanding success then and is still read today. But more on that later, in fact, I intend a full review. By the end of the First Series of Mysteries of London in 1846 then, George Reynolds was the reigning Penny Dreadful author although he was at such an apex that he almost created another genre. Ainsworth was in eclipse after 1843 when his essential creative burst played out. Dickens was having problems coming up with story lines, and Bulwer Lytton, despite the brilliant Last Days of Pompeii was having quality problems. Rymer began Varney the Vampire about this time. Varney went on forever. Rymer was not the sole author being assisted by Prest while once the story got rolling other authors, some speculate up to eight, contributed story lines. The last story, about the best of the lot, seems to have come from a different hand. Sweeney Todd also had a good long run of the nature of Varney. During the forties then Lloyd and Reynolds were the major stays of the genre with the incredible prolificity of Reynolds making him the equal of Lloyd. Reynolds had a powerful mind that could keep two or three novels separate in his mind. This prolificity was noticed and he was accused of having a staff of writers. Not so. In a postscript to the The Mysteries of the Court of London he explains: Quote: For every week, without a single intermission during a period of eight years has a Number under this title been issued to the public. Its precursor “THE MYSTERIES OF LONDON” ranged over a period of four years. For twelve years, therefore, have I hebdomadally issued to the world a fragmentary portion of that which, as one vast whole, may be termed an Encyclopedia of Tales. This Encyclopedia consists of twelve volumes composing six hundred and twenty-four weekly numbers. Each Number has occupied me upon an average seven hours in the composition; and therefore no less an amount than four thousand three hundred sixty-eight hours have been bestowed on this Encyclopedia of Tales, comprising the four volumes of “The Mysteries of London,” and the eight volumes of “The Mysteries Of The Court Of London.” Yet if that amount of hours be reduced to days, it will be found that only a hundred eighty-two complete days have been absorbed for those publications which have ranged with weekly regularity over a period of twelve years! This circumstance will account to the public for the facility with which I have been enabled to write so many other works during the same period, and yet to allow myself ample leisure for recreation and healthful exercise. Unquote. It may be mentioned that the other works he mentioned amounted to at least double the words of his two Mysteries. All these books are of an even high quality. At the same time he was married and rearing a brood of kids. Just as with the exciting sixties of the twentieth century the period of the eighteen forties in England must have been the greatest period in English history. They called them Penny Dreadfulls but with all the exciting reading available each week it would have taken shillings to keep up. The forties themselves must have been an exciting period for those with eyes to see. After the July Revolution in France and the Reform Act of 1832 in England a slow but quickening drum roll was leading up to the 1848 revolution when by coincidence several of these books were published. While the Reform Act wasn’t properly understood as Benjamin Disraeli, the author and politician believed; it was an actual revolution with repercussions leading up to the Really Big One in 1848. Reynolds himself believed in violent revolution and promoted it in his books. Let us turn now to William Makepeace Thackery’s Vanity Fair, as mentioned, published in 1848 while being influenced by both Dickens and Reynolds. At this point I have to introduce two trends that influenced many of these people. One was the immense popularity of Rabalais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel with its famous motto: Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law from the sixteenth century and the works of another Frenchman the notorious Marquis de Sade: Justine and Juliette, or Virtue and Vice of the eighteenth century. De Sade thought that the happier and more fulfilled life was enjoyed by Vice, or his heroine Julliette while Virtue was its own reward, that is, a life of misery as epitomized by Justine. Reynolds in his Mysteries of Paris in which two brothers Richard and Eugene Markham took the place of De Sade’s sisters and virtue won out over vice. Thackaray weighed in with the attitude that the consequences of ‘do what wilt’ led to different consequences with more or less equal results whether vice or virtue. Thackaray was a year older than Reynolds born in 1811 to Reynolds 1812. Thackaray was born in India but was sent back to England by his mother when he was four. His mother ignored him when she returned later thus perhaps provided one role model for his heroine, Becky Sharp. Both he and Reynolds left England for France in 1830, returning in 1836. A rare coincidence. Both pursued literary vocations in France. After Reynolds became prominent Thackaray was asked what he thought of Reynolds. Thackaray laughingly said that if he was the same George Reynolds that was in Paris he was the only that ever paid him for an article, Reynolds was OK with himself. A literary incident worthy of Isaac D’Israeli himself. So, if you know how to look at both Reynolds’ Mysteries of London and Thackeray’s Vanity Fair the two themes, Rabelais and De Sade course through both works. A Review of Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray Benjamin Disraeli attempted to write a novel in the style of the forties with his last novel, Endymion. In it he passingly discusses Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray. He calls Dickens Gushy and Thackery Sainte Barbe.. While not the best selling author of the period Dickens style penetrated the heart of the period on down to the time of this writing. It is futile to argue against success but Thackeray, Reynolds and any serious litterateur would follow Disraeli and call him Gushy. Some writer comparing Dickens and Smollet said that Dickens wrote like a boy and Smollett wrote like a man. That about sums it up and Thackeray and Reynolds wrote like a man also. That doesn’t mean that Thackeray wasn’t impressed by Dickens’ succuss that he doesn’t do a little ‘gushy’ himself in Vanity Fair but it the weakest part of the novel. There may also be a smidgen of Bulwer-Lytton and an attempt to wear Reynolds’ hat. Thackeray does succeed to a certain extent in interweaving his story strands much as Reynold did. So that, over all the story is interesting and affecting but not in Dicken warm hearted way. The Bohemian in Thackery comes out in a gentle mockery. As he said, he didn’t like any of his characters and he passes that message onto his perceptive readers. Thackeray, underlain by his reading of De Sade and Rabelais had a leaning toward the Bohemian so there is a smear of the snide and mockingly sarcastic. We, or I, don’ laugh with his characters but laugh at them. Emmy, after all is a ridiculous character and Thackeray thought so. My thirteen volume set of Thackeray is what is called the Biographical Edition because Thackeray’s daughter, Anne Ritchie provides biographical notes to each volume. She quotes her father as saying that he didn’t like any of his characters in Vanity Fair with the exception of Dobbin which means he must have based that character on himself. I think an attentive reading indicates it is so. None of the leading characters are ‘nice’ excepting Dobbin and he’s a sap. Really, what an approach. Thackeray follows the format of the typical forties novel. A couple Rakes, Osborne and Crawley botch their lives and the lives of those around them. The female lead, Becky Crawley, nee Sharp is meant to be the most offensive character in the novel but it seems that Thackeray has a sneaking admiration for her. As with De Sade’s Juliette she is the soul of vice while doing as she wilt. Thackeray ends on a happy note and while giving Juliette/Becky all her wishes. His detestation of his counter-heroin, Emmy/Justine is apparent at the end. He saddles Dobbin with her as a wife. While Thackeray doesn’t say so I imagine that ‘Dob’ lived to regret it. There are two high points to the novel. In the first half the novel climaxes with the battle of Waterloo. The protagonist of this half was George Osborne, your typical rich ne’er do well of the time. Osborne’s father was a merchant so Thackeray is directed his story at the commercial middle class. George dies at Waterloo shot through his ‘rotten’ heart as Thackeray is quoted by his daughter in the preface. He was an arrogant, undisciplined, rotten guy too. One catches hints of Smollett and Reynolds in his portrayal. Very Count Fathomish. The portrayal of the gay, party atmosphere of Brussels before the battle of Waterloo is marvelously done. The partying went on until the very bugles called the troops to battle. The English left wing was already engaged. Osborne rode off to war staggeringly drunk. Of course, the character that readers remember is the female lead, Becky Sharp, or Crawley as she was. Apparently there was discussion at the time as to whom Becky was based on. I think Thackeray told us when he mentioned Marianne Clarke. Marianne who? perhaps you say. Marianne Clarke. Now there’s a story. As it turns out, Mary Anne, who was a sensation of her time was the great-great grandmother of Daphne Du Maurier. Daphne was the daughter of Gerald Du Maurier and the grand daughter of the famous novelist George Du Maurier, Peter Ibbetson, Trilby, and The Martian. Apparently Marianne was a family embarrassment so that Daphne wrote a novel about Mary Anne to expiate the shame. An excellent novel too. But to relate Mary Anne Clarke to Becky Sharp. Marianne was of the courtesan class. Her grea-greatt-grandaughter’s quasi-history titled simply Mary Anne fictionalizes that history. If not true on all points the story line is accurate. During the ‘teens then there were men, entrepreneurs one might say, who recruited women to be mistresses of the Lords. The girls had to be accustomed to the manners of the upper class, and these men trained them. Mary Anne then was taken up by George III’s second son, Frederick, the Duke of York. Mary Anne blew it of course when she abused her relationship with the Duke. She then exposed him which was a major scandal ending with her having to move to the continent, a ruined woman. A sensation of the time was Harriette Wilson’s Memoirs. Harriette was as successful as Mary Anne but in a different way. Her memoirs give a general picture of this interesting social custom. She was the mistress of several men so that when the bloom left her rose and men just passed her by she decided to write a tell all exposing the ‘life.’ In order to make more money she after to delete the name of anyone who paid he price. Many did. When she approached the hero of Waterloo, General Arthur Wellesley, the Duke made the famous comment ‘Publish and be damned.’ Becky will follow the same general course, like Mary Anne Clarke she was a married woman. She aspired to move in the haute monde which she wheedled her way into having seduced the notorious libertine Duke Steyne. Always duplicitous she betrays her husband Rawdon Crawley. Even though Becky has accumulated a substantial amount of money from Steyn she conceals the money from Rawdon. Rawdon has accumulated debts so that he is subject to arrest. In order to be able to spend a night or two carousing Becky and Steyn arrange to have Rawdon arrested for his debts which he was. She could have had Rawdon released by paying the debt for which he was arrested before her caper or capers with Steyne but preferred to have her husband locked away intending to release him after the fling. Getting no response from Becky Rawdon appealed to his sister-in-law who took pity on him and advanced the money. Returning home the poor guy walked into the raucous party. The tale is told to elicit the most sympathetic response for Rawdon which is done admirably well. From then on it’s all downhill for Becky until the end of the book when we learn in the recap that she has recaptured a degree of respectability actually becoming rich, per Juliette. Our Virtuous Justine is a woman called Amelia, a real dishrag, Thackeray actually has nothing but contempt for her but as a counterpart to Becky she is a plausible counter-heroine. Amelia was the wife of the dashing army officer George Osborne, a rake and man about town. He and Amelie had been betrothed from birth as her father, a successful businessman was friends with George’s father, another successful businessman at the time who helped George’s fatjer to become rich. Adverse circumstances ruined him. Now broke and dishonored Osborne scorns him while rejecting the union of George and Amelia. The various stories develop against the background of Napoleon’s hundred days. The first climax of the story. George is killed at Waterloo and the second half of the story begins that leads up to Becky’s betrayal and Rawdon’s disgrace. Apart from the two climaxes the story drags along inviting the reader to put down the book. That may have been the initial response in 1848. As a serial the book started slow and remained slow for a while until it gradually caught on and made a respectable showing. The book too needed a kick start. I can understand it; however as I am reading a ‘classic’ I persist to the end. I don’t what excuse people of the time made. We do have a good snapshot of the moment however. And that is worth something. Still, there is something in Thackeray’s attitude that carries weight. Thackery unites his story with the metaphor of Vanity Fair. Life is a tragicomedy. A ship of fools. He begins the novel in his own persona as a stage manager looking in at life, or Vanity Fair, as a manager of a puppet show pointing out the characters, or actors, or figments of his imagination, before setting them in action. He is then free to comment on all aspects of his story as a disinterested viewer. While I was not overawed during the reading, the lingering effect and reexamination reveals a profundity not obvious in the reading. In Vanity Fair Thackeray, then, combined elements of Dickens and Reynolds with varying success and perhaps a smattering of Smollett. There was also something new, almost a change of direction. In 1841 Punch magazine had been established. It called itself The London Charivari after the French magazine Le Charivari established in 1832. A charivari is a loud raucous parade so that the puppet master satirized politics and the passing social scene. Thus, the title Vanity Fair was suggested to Thackeray whether he realized it or not. He then cast himself, the author, as the ring master of essentially the circus of life. Thus in the preface he portrays himself as a sort of god looking down into his world, Vanity Fair, moving the pieces around to compose his story or stories a la Reynolds. The novel having run for a couple years a magazine appeared to compete with Punch, the London Charivari, titled The Puppet Show, undoubtedly partially inspired by Vanity Fair. In 1848 Reynolds ended The Mysteries of London and began The Mysteries of the Court of London that run through four series into 1856. These Forties writers looked back fondly on the post-Waterloo years, the twenties and thirties technological changes, such as the railroad, being new the writers, if they didn’t reject the changing times, clung to the sentimental period of the stagecoach. Their period ended or began to end about 1860 as newer authors pushed to the front. Perhaps the epitaph to the period was provided in 1880 when Disraeli who died the year after published his Endymion. Disraeli published his absurd novels from 1826 to 1848 then taking a hiatus until his 1870 novel Lothair then ten years later his last which is a tribute to the forties novel. He closely follows the methods of Gushy, Dickens and Thackeray, St. Barbe while not mentioning the disreputable Reynolds. Endymion is a pleasant sentimental novel approaching to the quality of the Big Three but ending a faint imitation. Englishmen looked back nostalgically on the 1840s much as we do today at the 1960s. Both were periods of great change.