Tuesday 13 February 2024

The Fraud, by Zadie Smith


  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin; Heruitgave edition (6 Jun. 2024)
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 400 pages
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0241983096
  • RRP : £9.99

Along with William Harrison Ainsworth, the other major character in this fascinating story is Eliza Touchet, who is described by Ainsworth's first biographer, S. M. Ellis, as 'Mrs James Touchet, ... widow of Ainsworth's cousin. She was formerly Mrs Eliza Buckley, of Manchester, her family being merchants of that city.' (Ellis, vol 1, p. 229, and note)  

She is introduced by Ellis when the twenty-six-year-old would-be novelist was pursuing desultory legal studies and writing the occasional article for Fraser's Magazine. En route from London he paused to visit his cousin at Chesterfield, where she was then living. Ellis continues the story in parenthesis:

(However, there was a delay, Mrs Touchet, his hostess, was a talented woman, of brilliant conversational powers, and, although fifteen years older than Ainsworth, had a very considerable influence over him to the end of her life.)

Ainsworth's feelings were hinted at in a letter to James Crossley:
You must excuse me a day or two longer ... I will not fix a day, therefore don't expect me till you receive a positive letter to say so. You are a man of feeling - a man of philosophy, and will overlook my errors, I am sure. Chesterfield has charms for me; that you know, and therefore I throw myself upon your mercy. (Ellis, vol. 1, p. 230)

'Ainsworth found Chesterfield so attractive, and full of imagination for his embryonic romance, that, after visiting Manchester, he returned to the Derbyshire town for several weeks, and there he commenced writing Rookwood [his first successful novel].'

So what was this relationship with Eliza Touchet?  Well, your guess is as good as mine. There are hints and innuendo in the letters to Crossley and Zadie picks them up (of course). We are not sure how Eliza came to be in Chesterfield in the first place, but in 1835, she and her unmarried sister were at Kensal Lodge in the Harrow Road, famous as Ainsworth's residence for the next six years, where he hosted literary soirees with the great and good, including Dickens and Thackeray, but Ellis suggests that the sisters were already there when Ainsworth joined them, after separating from his wife: 'he [Ainsworth] went to reside with his connections, Mrs James Touchet and her sister, Miss Buckley.' (Ellis, vol. 1, p.270).

Zadie Smith really has fun with Eliza though, making her a Scottish Catholic, lover of Ainsworth; a bisexual dominatrix who eventually became his housekeeper, adviser and muse, as well as a passionate abolitionist and impartial observer of the Tichborne trials. This is truly a virtuoso performance of the author's imagination. 

But where is James Crossley in all of this? Sadly, he is relegated to a minor role; an extra, without a speaking part. He is imaginatively described in Book 1, chapter 17 as follows:

 For the next few years, whenever he returned to Manchester, William made a secret detour to see Mrs Touchet in Chesterfield. His Manchester alibi, always partially true, was that of his visits to an old schoolfriend, James Crossley, he of the ‘finest library in England.’ This Crossley person was in Eliza’s view as responsible for William's graphomania as distilleries are for the drunkards, as sweet tooths for the continued existence of the slaves. Crossley it was who supplied William with his research materials: Defoe’s accounts of the old city, the original transcripts of the Lancaster Witches trial, the architectural layout of the Tower of London, the Newgate Calendar. He found all the old letters and old books of costume re-enarmor as suggested topics, prompting and pushing until William took them up. Much later in life, Mrs Touchet seriously considered the possibility that her cousin was a fraud, and James Crossley the true author of all those thousands upon thousands of words. The reality was less exciting. Crossley was a big man, with gout, a terrific collection of books, and only one friend: William. He was the kind of fellow who always promised to come to London, but never actually did, nor did he trust the mail coach with his rare editions,  so William was obliged to go to Crossley, and on the way, though it was not really on the way, he stopped at Chesterfield. He transcribed his notes naked in bed in the morning; in the afternoon sat across from her, and wrote. She saw for herself how much pleasure writing brought him. He dipped his nib with a smile on his face …


It seems almost churlish to add that:

1) There is no evidence that Crossley ever suffered from gout.

2) Crossley was an extremely sociable and even clubbable person with many friends and in fact was a well-known figure about Manchester.

3) He frequently went to London, and in fact he died, at the age of 83, shortly after a fall sustained when alighting from the train at Euston Station. 

But why spoil a good story? 

Here's the Guardian review of the hardback version of the book, which published last year:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/aug/27/the-by-zadie-smith-review-a-trial-and-no-errors



 


  


 

Saturday 18 February 2023

William Harrison Ainsworth: The Author Who Outsold Dickens

 


Stephen Carver, The Author who outsold Dickens The Life and Works of W. H. Ainsworth (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2020), ISBN 9781526720696, pp. 255, hardback, £25.

 

‘In the history of English literature, William Harrison Ainsworth is the national treasure that most people haven’t heard of’. So states Stephen Carver in the prologue to this fascinating book. The reader can gather from the first sentence that the style is somewhat informal, and none the worse for that, as it is aimed at a broad readership, rather than an academic library, which was also true of his subject’s writings. 

The eye-catching title is true and refers particularly to Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard, published in 1839, which for a time was more popular than Dickens’s Oliver Twist. The eponymous hero is portrayed as a colourful rogue who effected some notorious escapes from confinement in Newgate Prison. Indeed, the real Sheppard became an early celebrity, with distinguished artists being admitted to his cell to capture his likeness. Ainsworth’s novel was also adapted for stage performance with the addition of song and dance numbers. The success of Jack Sheppard provoked a feeding frenzy among the critical fraternity, who, led by Dickens’s friend and biographer, John Forster, were queuing up to take the moral high ground and heap opprobrium upon the author. Dickens himself escaped comparatively unscathed, distancing himself, at least publicly, from the controversy. As carver puts it, Boz ‘meanwhile kept his head down and his powder dry’, eventually emerging, not to castigate Ainsworth but to defend his own work as social realism, rather than criminal romance. Carver compares and contrasts the two rival authors throughout the book, but is particularly effective in the early chapters, covering the Manchester author at the height of his popularity.

There have been two major biographies of Ainsworth, almost a century apart, one By S. M. Ellis (1911) and the other in 2003, by the author of the present book. Carver does draw quite heavily upon his earlier work, but with a number of significant differences. One thing the two works have in common, though, is a persistent reference to R. H. Horne, a fairly insignificant literary character and adventurer, who produced a pocket-sized squib in 1844, in which he characterised Ainsworth’s novels as ‘generally dull, except when they are revolting’, which Carver quotes, among others in the same vein, to support his argument. Ellis, Ainsworth’s original biographer, Edwardian gentleman that he was, declined to comment, merely to say that Ainsworth’s work was ‘most unfairly criticized’ (William Harrison Ainsworth and his Friends vol. ii, p. 69) The central thesis of the present book can be taken from a blog written by the author in February, 2020 entitled ‘How the “Newgate Controversy” destroyed Dickens’ Greatest Rival’, which argues the point very concisely.

Ainsworth’s enormous early popularity was due in large measure to two memorable characters: Dick Turpin who appears in the earlier Rookwood, with the section on Turpin’s (fictitious) ride to York being so popular it was also published separately, and Jack Sheppard. In between these two, the more scholarly and thoroughly-researched Crichton was published to a lukewarm reception. Carver opines; ‘Crichton himself was too remote, clean-cut, perfect and invulnerable to appeal to fans of Dick Turpin. The novel therefore ultimately failed to achieve the popular appeal of its predecessor, largely by being too clever for its own good’

When Ainsworth was working on Jack Sheppard, his (by then estranged) wife Fanny died, aged only 34, after 12 years of marriage. In an astute piece of literary observation, Carver points out that the passage Ainsworth was working on when he received the news, could be read as a rueful piece of autobiography: he begins Epoch 2 of Jack Sheppard, which is set twelve years after the first, as follows:

Twelve years ago! It is an awful retrospect. Dare we look back upon the darkened vista and in imagination, retrace the path we have trod … has not the loved one been estranged by doubt, or snatched from us by the cold hand of death?

He continues in this vein for several paragraphs. The point is well made.

In Chapter 9, we meet the bold statement, that  Jack Sheppard showed its author at the top of his game: The scholarship of Crichton was still there, in the vivid evocation of Georgian London, but now in balance with a crisply paced and tightly plotted adventure; more realistic and emotionally deep than Rookwood, while retaining some sensational Gothic features.’ Carver’s style is similarly fast moving and he is not afraid of using down-to-earth language to make his points. This is fine, except they can sometimes be confusing or ambiguous. For example, the use of the word ‘flogging’, in its modern sense of selling, crops up here and there, though in its original meaning it would not be out of place in the grisly world of Ainsworth’s imagination. This style can occasionally be confusing, for example: ‘Ainsworth loved her back’, but the book is immaculately researched beneath this sometimes-casual throwaway style.

Carver correctly classifies the Negate novels as ‘popular as opposed to literary culture … dandy highwaymen rode on in penny magazines and cheap theatres until revived by other means as pirates in Stevenson’s Treasure Island, suggesting, perhaps, that if only Jack Sheppard had been written earlier or later than it was, then it would not have attracted the high Victorian moral censure.’ This dichotomy between popular culture and the ‘serious’ social commentary which Dickens claimed as his moral high ground surely is the nub of the problem, and the critics of the time created a lot of heat by failing to recognise a harmless piece of entertainment for what it undoubtedly was. His place in literary history is as the creator of popular Picaresque heroes, as had Fielding and Smollett before him, and countless others after. He was eventually hailed as the English Victor Hugo, which Carver explains as ‘an indication of the vacuum left by Scott’.

 

However, the extent to which Ainsworth’s career suffered from the critical onslaught is debatable. Carver notes that work continued at a blistering pace:

… despite the Jack Sheppard furore, Ainsworth was now at his creative zenith. January 1840 saw the commencement of two original serials. Guy Fawkes and the Tower of London, which were to be written and run concurrently throughout the year while he continued to edit Bentley’s Miscellany.

 The following year Ainsworth resigned from the Miscellany, after a dispute with the publisher over fees and writing commitments, and began his own journal, Ainsworth’s Magazine in 1842. Ainsworth’s restraint in the face of the public lambasting of his work was admirable. His reaction was muted to say the least, except for a deserved take-down of Horne in Ainsworth’s Magazine. Carver notes that ‘Ainsworth had by now learned the hard way that the best way to profit by his writing was to sell it himself’. It is important to consider Ainsworth’s activity as a writer and editor of magazines, in addition to his work as a novelist, because often the two were inextricably linked, the one serialising the other. Dickens of course did something similar in his Household Words and All the Year Round journals. We get a good account here of Ainsworth’s speculation in the magazine publishing business, for example, his rather careless acquisition of Bentley’s Miscellany, which he ran alongside his New Monthly Magazine, quietly seeing off his eponymous publication.

 

Following the trajectory of Ainsworth’s career, Carver notes that The Lancashire Witches (1849, a full 10 years after Jack Sheppard) was ‘his last major national success and marks the end of his literary celebrity’. In a short but well-argued chapter, this novel is analysed and seeds of ‘Victorian feminism’, and, surprisingly, modernism are found, alongside the more familiar gothic and historical traits. Furthermore: ‘his own position as a literary outsider might also be read allegorically in the pages of this book’. But towards the end of this chapter, the real reason for Ainsworth’s fall from favour and eventual decline, rather than critical excoriation, becomes apparent.

Ainsworth, like his beloved highwaymen, seems suddenly out of time and place; the last of a line, a fantasist in an age of fact and the last of the original English Gothic novelists, soon to be pensioned off by Palmerston … The Lancashire Witches was to be Ainsworth’s last major national success and marks the end of his literary celebrity, at least in the south of England.

The reference to Palmerston was to the fact that in 1856, the prime minister awarded a Civil List Pension of £100 per annum to the struggling novelist.

 

The chapter entitled ‘The End of an Era’ charts Ainsworth’s decline in popularity, in the face of changing tastes. The later novels by the indefatigable author are romped through at a brisk pace, taking in that group of ‘Lancashire novels’ set in that county, including the semi-autobiographical Mervyn Clitheroe, (described here as ‘Ainsworth’s David Copperfield’) which in 1851, failed to excite the public. This was, as Carver puts it: ‘in commercial if not critical terms, his first real flop’, which ‘pulled Ainsworth back into the clutches of the historical romance, at a time when he appeared, along with his contemporaries, to be breaking into a new creative area’. The final chapter, The Lancashire Novelist, covers the time when Ainsworth had fallen into relative obscurity and was honoured by his native city in the form of  a civic dinner, hosted by Thomas Baker, the Mayor of Manchester. This took place in 1881, at the Town Hall, with ‘the great and good of Manchester, old friends, writers and journalists’, most importantly including James Crossley, his lifelong friend and provider of source material for many if not most of the novels. As Carver succinctly states, ‘Crossley did the history, Ainsworth the creative writing’

 

The following year, the novelist died. The concluding chapter: ‘L’envoi’ opens thus: ‘Failure is, of course always more interesting than success’, though Ainsworth had a good share of both. He was not a wealthy man when he died, but there were a number of factors involved in his decline. He was a victim of changes in literary fashion, ‘as public tastes moved on’ and many other novelists have suffered the same fate: who now reads G.P.R. James, or Edward Bulwer-Lytton? However, Carver tends to emphasise the Newgate Controversy over all other factors in Ainsworth’s declining career. He summarises his argument as follows:

Throughout his life, the memory of the Newgate Controversy allowed increasingly stiff Victorian Critics to exclude Ainsworth from a literary history that he helped to build. True, his novels were not great literature, but they commanded a massive influence on popular and literary narratives, both in fiction and more importantly in legend. And at his best, Ainsworth’s storytelling could be magical; at his worst, he was usually fun to read.   

This is a fitting epitaph and a good summary of Ainsworth’s literary and historical value. Many critics, both contemporary and more recent have fallen into the trap of over-estimating the author’s seriousness and moral intent. Ainsworth himself pointed out this misunderstanding when he said in his Town Hall speech: ‘I will freely confess [I] had, throughout, an eye rather to the reader’s amusement than to his edification.’

The publishers (Pen & Sword) have done their author proud in the quality of production, with a fine set of illustrations taking up 14 pages in the centre of the book. A selection of portraits (many by Ainsworth’s friend Daniel Maclise), plates from some of the novels (mostly by Cruikshank) plus photographs, portraits and line drawings of Ainsworth and his associates. There is no doubt that the book is academically sound, and there is no doubt that Stephen Carver, like Ainsworth, has one eye on a wider readership. And why not? Carver is to be thanked for keeping his author in the public consciousness, and pointing out that William Harrison Ainsworth despite the vicissitudes of his career, played a singular role in the development of English literature in the nineteenth century.

 

STEVE COLLINS

 

This review was first published in the Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, Vol. 114, 2021.

Tuesday 9 February 2021

 

         The Lancashire Witches (1848) - Ainsworth




One of Ainsworth's best-known novels, set in the North of England, is based on Potts's Discovery of Witches in the County of Lancaster (1613), which was loaned to the author by Crossley, and it's one of the fundamental texts which began the still-thriving 'witch industry' in the Pendle area. The novelist transformed Potts’s factual and rather dry account into a gothic tale of huge proportions, with chilling accounts of  midnight meetings in desolate ruins of Whalley Abbey and Hoghton Tower There are curses, spells, charms and diabolical incantations to be found, and Potts himself puts in an appearance as a scheming and self-serving lawyer of  a type which might have been familiar to both Crossley and Ainsworth.  The historical background is outlined at the beginning of the book, recalling the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536-7 when there arose ‘a formidable rebellion in the Northern counties of England’ in protest against the dissolution of the monasteries, and subsequent land enclosures. The Lancashire Witches is the only one of Ainsworth’s novels still in print, and copies can be obtained at various points on the ‘witch trail’, which tourists can take across Pendle to Lancaster.





                              The Lancashire Witches - Crossley


Potts’s Discovery of Witches in the County of Lancaster (Old Series, 6, 1845), proved to be one of the most important and influential publications of the Chetham Society, transcending purely local interest to become source material for many subsequent works (both fiction and non-fiction) on the subject of witchcraft.

 Thomas Potts was a London court clerk, who was sent to Lancaster, charged with the task of making a record of the witchcraft trials, to serve as a guide to others who might prosecute such cases. The resulting report, originally published in 1613, was chosen by Crossley as his first editorial project for the Chetham Society. When introducing the book to the members, Crossley modestly added: ‘such notes and preliminary observations as seemed to be required, without overstepping the bounds of just and necessary illustration have been appended by the editor.’ In fact, the editorial work comprises an introductory essay of seventy-six pages, plus fifty-one pages of notes at the end of the volume. The scrupulous and painstaking scholarship not only reveals the extent of Crossley's knowledge of the subject, but gives a glimpse of the magnitude of his personal collection of manuscripts and early editions of relevant material. The footnotes to the introduction demonstrate the editor's extraordinarily wide reading in the fields of witchcraft and demonology, and at the same time make it clear that the sources referred to are rare editions and manuscripts in his possession. In one instance, Crossley even provides the name of the previous owner, and the lot number in the sale at which he bought the item, which is described as 'perhaps the rarest of the English tracts relating to witchcraft.' This may seem strange to the present-day reader, but it must be remembered that Crossley was addressing the nineteenth-century antiquarian community, many of whom would be extremely interested in the provenance of his source material.  In an age when many valuable manuscripts were in private hands, one of the functions of the publishing society was to provide information on the whereabouts of interesting and unusual works.

Monday 4 January 2021

William Harrison Ainsworth

William Harrison Ainsworth – The Lancashire Novelist

 


Most of the readers who enjoy nineteenth century literature today, are not familiar with the novels of William Harrison Ainsworth.  Yet Ainsworth enjoyed a spectacular success in his own time. The son of a Manchester solicitor, he found the glittering prizes of fame and fortune in the Capital at the age of only thirty. But when fashionable London’s ardour cooled, it was his native city that provided him with the ultimate honour and recognition.  Since his death in 1882, his works have fallen almost completely from the favour of the critical and publishing establishment, and from the reading public. 

He was a great friend of Crossley's, and many of the stories for his historical romances were sourced either from Crossley's personal collection or from Chetham Society volumes. 

Saturday 13 April 2019

'An Eminent Bibliophile and Man of Letters'

This is a paper given at a Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society event in 2001, about Crossley's habits as a reader and book collector. Formerly published as a chapter in the book Printing and the Book Trade in Manchester, 1700-1850, it's 15 pages of text plus a photograph, as shown below. The Antiquarian Society are giving away their collection of past papers at a mere £2 each, which just about covers postage costs. They can be found on www.landcas.org.uk under 'Offprints'. There's a Paypal link for those interested. Worth a visit, I think.


Saturday 21 July 2018

Comments after the Chetham Society AGM, 1876

Crossley to Raines, March 28 1876


'The report of our Annual Meeting in the Courier bristled with blunders as usual. The Guardian was briefer but more cruel. How different were the reports in the time of friend Harland [John Harland (1806-68), Guardian reporter and Chetham Society editor], but now there are so many societies and such an inundation of Antiquarians and other intelligentsia that we have no longer the field to ourselves.'