Speaker – Philip Waller OXFORD<\/p>\n
In \u2018Light Reading\u2019, Philip Waller will consider how various major figures, including Prime Ministers and Presidents, have chosen to relax by reading books, and whether their choices carry more significance than might appear. There are conflicts between what people feel they should read and what they do read. This tension is most acute between classics and best-sellers; yet these and other kinds of books are not without similarities. This talk\u2014it is hoped\u2014 may cause the audience to reflect on their own reading habits. Philip Waller is a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, where he has served as History Tutor from 1971 and has been Sub-Warden and Acting Warden. He is author of Writers, Readers, & Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870-1918 (2006; 2008), which, while heavyweight in scale (1181 pages!), and lauded as the \u2018defining literary history of the period\u2019, is consistently entertaining. Previously, he published books on urban history, religion and politics. He is a past editor of the English Historical Review.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Speaker – Philip Waller OXFORD In \u2018Light Reading\u2019, Philip Waller will consider how various major figures, including Prime Ministers and Presidents, have chosen to relax by reading books, and whether their choices carry more significance than might appear. There are conflicts between what people feel they should read and what they do read. This tension […]","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2018\/11\/18-10-12-BSLS.mp3","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"59.56M","filesize_raw":"62457728","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":""},"tags":[50,53,40,46,66,68,67,69],"categories":[],"series":[2],"class_list":{"0":"post-72","1":"podcast","2":"type-podcast","3":"status-publish","5":"tag-british-lecture-series","6":"tag-british-studies","7":"tag-british-studies-lecture-series","8":"tag-dr-roger-louis","9":"tag-laits","10":"tag-light-reading","11":"tag-philip-waler","12":"tag-reading","13":"series-bsls","14":"entry"},"acf":{"related_episodes":"","hosts":[{"ID":949,"post_author":"10","post_date":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_date_gmt":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_content":"\n
Wm. Roger Louis is head of the British Studies Lecture Series. He is an American historian and a professor at the University of Texas at Austin<\/a>. Louis is the editor-in-chief of The Oxford History of the British Empire<\/a><\/em>, a former president of the American Historical Association<\/a> (AHA), a former chairman of the U.S. Department of State's Historical Advisory Committee, and a founding director of the AHA's National History Center in Washington, D. C.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Wm. Roger Louis","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"wm-roger-louis","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_modified_gmt":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=speaker&p=949","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"guests":[{"ID":820,"post_author":"40","post_date":"2020-06-23 19:37:10","post_date_gmt":"2020-06-23 19:37:10","post_content":"\n Philip Waller is a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, where he has served as History Tutor from 1971 and has been Sub-Warden and Acting Warden. He is author of Writers, Readers, & Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870-1918 (2006; 2008), which, while heavyweight in scale (1181 pages!), and lauded as the \u2018defining literary history of the period\u2019, is consistently entertaining. Previously, he published books on urban history, religion and politics. He is a past editor of the English Historical Review.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Philip Waller","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"philip-waller","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-06-23 19:37:10","post_modified_gmt":"2020-06-23 19:37:10","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=speaker&p=820","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"transcript":" Well, we’d like to welcome several people who usually are
\n\ue5d4
\nfrequently not here. Custis Right. Tells me that she’s just passed her 90
\nfourth birthday
\nand we’re very glad to have other people than Jack Peril. Tom Tom Staley
\nand Joanna Hitchcock, our speaker is Philip Water. And as you
\nwill know, he is a fellow of Merton College. And his book
\nis called Light Weight Reading Thousand
\nFive Hundred and Fifty Three Pages Writers, Readers and Reputation’s
\nLiterary Life in Britain. Eighteen seventy two, 1918.
\nPhilip and I have a connection in different ways. He’s a former editor
\nof the English Historical Review, and he has a connection
\nalso with the history of Oxford University Press. This
\nis a volume that we edited some six, seven years ago.
\nAnd when it went to the press in its final stage, the
\nOxford University Press, like all university presses, requires a final
\nformal reading set out to two readers who sent in critical responses and lets the
\ndelegates know where the book is. A good book, a bad book, whether it should be published or not. So we’ve
\ngot a very, very critical review. And I identified
\nthe author, Philip Lawlor. So we recruited
\nhim and he now has a chapter in the book as a result of having written
\nthe readers report. I wanted to say one of the thing that in the book itself,
\nthe history of Oxford University Press, there is a quotation on lightweight
\nreading and it’s from Harold Nicholson. And he says that nothing but the
\nserious but overworked person is not always very intelligent
\nin the matter of light reading. And so he recommends two categories of
\nbooks, detective novels and scholarly study of a subject
\nunconnected with the readers ordinary profession. So with that, let’s welcome
\nPhilip Lawlor.
\nThat’s extremely generous of you. Did recollecting my part
\nin the yeah, the university presses self-regarding history
\nof SFI. I’ve crossed disemboweled myself with my own pen.
\nAs a consequence of having to do that chapter. But
\nI think you might find it amusing. I appreciate the
\ngenerosity of your welcome. You were far too
\ngenerous. Therefore, I also feel an impostor. But to
\nbusiness, an analysis of unsparing Greger
\nof a major turning point of history is the ideal choice for a seminar
\nsuch as this. That was certainly my intent until I remembered
\nthat historians are spoilsports. And the whole purpose of historical
\nresearch is to prove that turning points turned less than people suppose
\nor actually never turn at all. So instead of a great drama,
\nI’m going to present you a little diversion.
\nLet me begin by inviting you to exercise your imaginations
\nand picture an identikit mid-Victorian bearded bloke
\nlooking much like an Old Testament prophet who, after his morning’s
\nintellectual exertions and a spot of lunch, likes nothing
\nbetter than to stretch out on a chaise long in the conservatory,
\na cigaret in hand, eyes half closed while his
\nwife reads to him from Dinham, Muller breaks Agatha’s husband
\nlibrary. In which the eponymous
\nheroine is an orphan and an heiress, courtship
\noccupies most of the first volume in the second.
\nThe plot thickens when her husband Nathaniel discovers
\nthat his brother, a characteristically villainous major, has
\nembezzled most of Agatha’s fortune. And if there
\nare any villainous majors here this afternoon, please welcome your mustaches.
\nNathaniel determines to keep his dastardly brother’s misdeeds from
\nAgatha while he sorts things out and his secretiveness
\nand further misunderstandings. Cool’s husband and wife to suspect each
\nother of infidelity, whereupon Nathaniel starts acting coldly towards
\nher, and Agatha ends volume two crying uncontrollably
\nin Volume 3. The truth is eventually revealed, and Nathaniel and Dagga
\nfall into each other’s arms, this time amid tears of
\njoy. So who was the bearded bloke and what’s the moral
\nof all this? Well, his name was until September 2017,
\nquite literally a common currency, the face of the British \u00a310
\nnote because he was Charles Darwin, and during the morning he’d been
\nscribbling away on the Origin of Species. As for the moral of my tale,
\nit may seem slightly to be stretching the evidence to rank Agatha’s
\nhusband alongside von Humboldt treatises as a seminal
\ninfluence on evolutionary theory. Still, it doesn’t seem to have done the great man
\nany harm. And who knows? This relaxation may even have
\nprovided him with affirmation of his philosophy, of life, of progress
\nand harmony, not in spite of, but because of the apparent
\nsetbacks and conflicts. Darwin’s favorite reading
\nwas always family sagas of the Agatha’s husband kind,
\nin which he could fret about the fate of the heroine quite as much as if she
\nwere his own daughter. His son, George, took a dim view of this and was
\nhorrified at the amount of romantic trash his dad consume.
\nDarwin himself was unrepentant and told friends that he couldn’t abide the
\nloftiest sort of novelists because, quote, they cheated him of
\na happy ending. Now, George Darwin’s embarrassment
\nabout his father’s literary taste leads us naturally to Sue’s
\ncorner, that hallowed burial ground for pretentiousness, which
\nthis year celebrates its golden jubilee in the satirical magazine Private Eye
\nIntellectual Affectation, is inseparable from the reading
\nhabit. One question that always seems calculated to
\nincite this is what book Who’s Most Influenced You?
\nWhen the novelist Vincent MacDonell was asked about this, he immediately started
\nto rummage around in his mental attic to come up with a suitable immortal
\nfrom the Irish literary pantheon, as would most flatter him as a fellow
\nIrish scribe. Was it to be James Joyce portrait of an artist
\nor that tough and not Ulysses tricky? This. But at least MacDonell
\nrecognised he couldn’t get away with saying Finnegans Wake because no one
\nwould believe him, it being completely unreadable. You’ll recall
\nAJP Taylor observing even the words with gibberish.
\nModernist writers like Joyce disintegrated. The traditions of English literature
\nin the same way that the artillery blasted the landscape in the Great War.
\nJoyce went right through literature and came out somewhere on the other side.
\nPoets, of course, have always been allowed to drift off into dreamy intelligibility.
\nThat’s how we expect such unworldly creatures to behave. That is
\nnot to make any sense and to starve accordingly. The whole point
\nof prose is that it must be understood. During the first
\nhalf of the 20th century, the standard of living for the generality of British people
\nwas higher than throughout their entire previous history. It was unforgivable,
\ntherefore, that they were let down by a literary elite producing
\nincomprehensible or unappetizing stuff just at the point
\nwhen books had never been cheaper. It wasn’t a matter of waiting for
\nordinary people to catch up with the literary fashion. Most people never
\ngot there because having values of their own, they didn’t want to get there
\nanyway. Why should the common reader take to modernist authors who showed such
\nclear contempt for them? Back to Vincent MacDonell. When he
\ngot home and thought again about the question, he realized he’d
\nbeen a fraud. It wasn’t an esoteric classic, but
\ncreate a cheap, dog eared paperback by Tex Burns
\nthat had most influenced him. Tex Burns was the pseudonym of Louis L’Amour.
\nYou may never have heard of Louis, but perhaps you should, because no less an authority
\nthan John Wayne considered him the world’s most interesting man.
\nCan you have any finer praise than that? Actually, you
\ncan. Still, still, you might think that Louis L’Amour, such a perfect name for fiction
\nwriting that it was beyond improvement. Yet he twice gave himself
\na makeover. A North Dakota vet, animal vet, son
\nLewis started out with the surname Lammermoor. He then Frenchified
\nit in to l’amour. The better to weave his magic. By the 1950s,
\nLouis was churning out not bodice rippers, but Westerns 250
\nmillion worldwide. And when you’re hitching up your chaps and buckling
\non your Colt 45 hard bitten Tex Burns rather than heart
\nrending, Louis L’Amour was the man you wanted to ride out with.
\nVincent MacDonell was age 7 when he chanced on the
\nrustlers of West Fork. His household contained no
\nbooks and he didn’t know what a library was. But 40 years on, he
\ncould, quote, still recall the thrill, the excitement and the suspense
\nof the story. One scene in which Hopalong CASSIDY escaped
\nover the mountains with a crippled man and his daughter during a blizzard is
\nstill vivid today. It made him want to be a writer.
\nThe craze for asking what books most influenced people
\nis likely as old as reading itself that it once had religious implications
\nis obvious because leisure time consumed by mere entertainment was suspect
\nthe devil having plenty of work for idle minds as well as idle hands.
\nRecreation, in its purest sense meant just that re-creation
\na renaissance. The rebirth, the refreshment of the spirit. By God’s grace,
\npurged of iniquities, the modern age goes in for secular
\nreligions. Of which the foremost cult is socialism.
\nHence the interest aroused in nineteen six when the twenty nine
\nM PS, who comprise the first Labor Party in Westminster, were asked
\nwhat books had most influence them. Socialists have their own sacred
\ntexts. Therefore, you might assume that Marx’s gothic thriller
\nDas Kapital or his Reader’s Digest version, The Communist Manifesto
\nwould top their list. He didn’t. Marx got two mentions,
\neven devotees such as the clerk and, well, compositor Tommy Jackson, who
\nbecame a founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920,
\nreckoned that fewer than 50 people in all Britain had read
\nDas Capital through to the end. George Bernard Shaw boasted
\nof being one and declared it, quote, the only book that ever
\nturned me upside down. He remained in that position, according
\nto Max, B had been for the rest of his life. Rather than marks
\nthe decisive influences on the 29 labor m.p.’s were Ruskin
\nwith 17 nominations. Dickens with 16. Carlisle. 13.
\nWalter Scott. Eleven. Shakespeare. Nine. Robbie Burns. A Tennyson
\nthe basis of British socialism was ethical, not
\neconomic. This was confirmed by 14 nominations for the
\nBible, eight for bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and four
\nfor the Free Church Minister and Edinborough Professor Henry Drummond,
\nwhose natural law in the spiritual world 1883 is now virtually
\nforgotten that Methodism shaped the emerging Labor Party more
\nthan Marx did is a familiar thesis. You
\nmight object that the first Labor MP is indeed politicians generally
\nhardly qualified. The intellect for the intellectual heavyweights of my title.
\nMost pioneering Labor MP has lacked formal education beyond the board’s
\nschool. Instead, they personified a working class autodidact
\nculture that gathered strength as the Victorian age progressed.
\nThen it was that countless ordinary people exhibited unquenchable
\nappetite for knowledge and read voraciously. Importantly,
\norto di DACs were and are unconfined by specialism
\nand da keen to acquaint themselves with the classics of every field.
\nNow, it’s a short step from asking what books most influenced people,
\ntelling them what books should most influence them.
\nThe Victorians did not hold back in the finger wagging department.
\nIts departmental head was Sir John Lubbock, Polly Matic, brain box
\nand versatile man of action remembered. Now, if at all, is the
\noriginator of bank holidays, the promoter of legislation to preserve
\nancient monuments, and does an experimental biologist who played his
\nviolin to be’s to prove their deafness
\nas president of the Working Men’s College? He lectured there in 1885
\nabout the hundred best books. This was published
\nin his slim volume, The Pleasures of Life 1887, which
\nin various guises sold a quarter a million copies and appeared in over
\nwere organized by category religion. Science. Philosophy, ethics.
\nLogic. History. Political. Economy. Trample. Natural History. Biography.
\nThe Epic Essays. Poetry. Drama. And the novel.
\nIt was a stiff test. By any measure. And Lubbock cheated by smuggling
\nin as one item. The entire works of his own favorite star.
\nAuthors such as Homer and Walter Scott were as elders. Aristotle
\nand Plato included were limited to individual tax. Still,
\nLubbock’s shunned insularity of any sort. While British
\nauthors predominated and the adequacy of translations was problematic,
\nhe took in not just old Europe headed out east, incorporating
\na large slice of the Koran and Persian and Hindu epics
\nbefore reaching Confucius. Is Analects this last? He
\nremarked, magisterial. He didn’t particularly rate, but he included
\nit because, quote, it was held in the most profound veneration by
\nthe Chinese race containing four hundred thousand million
\nof our fellow men. Moreover, he added sweetly. It’s quite short.
\nLubbock did not otherwise measure up to today’s P.C. standards.
\nHe was emphatic that books, quote, must be read for improvement
\nrather than for amusement. He conceded that, quote, light
\nand entertaining books are valuable, just as sugar is an important
\narticle of food, especially for children. But we cannot live
\nupon it. Furthermore, there are books which are no books
\nand to read, which is a waste of time. Well, there are others so bad
\nthat we cannot read them without pollution. If they were men, we should
\nkick them into the street. These hundred therefore comprise only
\nbooks that quote no one can read without being the better for them.
\nBut don’t think Lubbock was a Thomas Grant grind dude. Utilitarian.
\nLiterature that made better workers was, he wrote, useful, no
\ndoubt, but by no means the highest use of books, the best books
\nelevate cells into a region of disinterested thought where
\nthe troubles and anxieties of the world are almost forgotten.
\nLubbock had many an imitator. Indeed, pretty well. Every busybody, boor
\nand humbug in the land tumbled over themselves to issue rival lists
\nof the best hundred books, and not just the nation’s ordained ministers
\nof God assumed the mission repossession. So did a religious professor of
\nhistory at Cambridge. This was Lord Acton, whose own hundred was,
\nas you’d expect, even more forbidding than a Lubbock’s. But
\nto suppose that every Victorian was fitted with a humor bypasses
\npreposterous. On the contrary, earnest homily inspired
\niconoclastic comedy The Hundred Best soporific
\nX was hailed as a truer depiction of the exercise
\nand quickest out of the blocks. To poke fun at it all was the author of
\nThe Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow in 1886,
\na railway clerk trying to scratch a living as a writer. He dedicated
\nhis book to his pipe before pronouncing in a preface.
\nWhat readers ask nowadays in a book is that it should improve, instruct and elevate.
\nThis book wouldn’t elevate a cow. I cannot. I cannot conscientiously
\nrecommend it for any useful purpose, whatever. All I can suggest is
\nthat when you get tired of reading the best hundred books, you may take this
\nup for an hour. It will be a change. Three years later, the same
\nwriter, Jerome Kay Jerome, penned his masterpiece Three Men in a Boat,
\nin which the Victorian work ethic was dished once and for all.
\nI love the work. It fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.
\nDid Lubbock’s best hundred have no takers then? It
\nmight seem a chronic exercise in futility and operation
\nomniscience designed for some priggish model well, citizen of the future.
\nExcept that Routledge is the publisher, brought out all the titles in a series.
\nAnd there is evidence if people like Police Sergeant Hewitt,
\nthe Finsbury Park, who considered himself a cut above the artisan class,
\nregularly ponderings Lubbock’s list. His son noted
\nwryly that it included nearly all the books one didn’t want to read
\nor gave up. If one tried books, you’d expect to find in every intelligent
\ngentlemen’s private library with their leave some cut.
\nHe then disclose the reading his father most relished. These were the best
\nsellers. Rider Haggard. Mary Carelli, Stanley Weyman, Anthony
\nHope, Prisoner UPS, Endor and so forth. And the rising star of the Edwardian period,
\nEdgar Wallace. This sort of thing was right up J.M.
\nBarrie’s Quality Street, after all. Barry himself wasn’t
\nso different, except that he was that most aware of authors
\nin What Every Woman Knows. 1988, he famously declared There
\nare few more impressive sites in the world than a Scotsman on the make.
\nBut it was in Alice Sit by the Fire, a three act play of nineteen
\nfive that he took aim at literary namedropping in this delicious
\ndialog. Alice, are you very studious? Cosmo.
\nCosmo My favorite authors are William Shakespeare and William Milton.
\nThey aren’t grand, don’t you think, Alice? I mean, they’re woman. I’m
\nafraid they sometimes bore me, especially William Milverton.
\nCosmo with relief to date. Me too. This brings us back
\nto our labor m.p.’s. It’s not to impugn the truthfulness
\nof their responses to the question which books most influence them.
\nIf we suppose they read other things too and enjoyed these other
\nthings are all the more knowing their answers would be published and striving
\nto make a serious impression. They put on the equivalent of their Sunday suit,
\nif I may up the language of working class respectability, but it would
\ntransgress the bounds of credulity if they were never entranced by
\nthe bestsellers of their day, such as Whole Kane, who penned the first million
\nselling novel in Britain, or Nat Gould, who at his death in 1919
\nhad turned out a hundred and thirteen novels all about horse racing
\nat the rate of five a year, and two clocked up sales of 24 million
\nor choa. Charles Galvis Arnold Bennett identified him as
\nthe most successful novelist in England who in 1912 13 alone
\nsold one and three quarter million copies to aren’t the six million
\nhe’d already he’d already sold.
\nHis literary agent said of the sixpenny Galvis
\nis that they were as plentiful as the leaves of fellow ambrosia,
\na delightful simile deployed originally in paradise lost about
\nthe vast number of fallen angels will know whether the author of Paradise
\nLost was William or John Milton. I really can never quite remember.
\nIt’s obligatory that every tale must have a twist.
\nSo let me introduce mine by describing two quite similar
\nscenes. The first is a reception in
\nthe early eighteen seventies at the swanky Regent’s Park, a dress of a
\ncelebrity, a literary couple who were living in sin as
\nliberal intellectuals are still, I believe, required by law to do
\ntheir party. The male host confidentially disclosed to
\neach check cited guest Celia is going to have a baby.
\nMy second scene takes place 50 years later just after
\nthe Great War, and it’s a packed political meeting of 2000 newly
\nenfranchised women in Paisley at which a note was
\npassed up to the platform speaker. This read Will Mrs.
\nBurnett Smith tell us whether Captain Hannay is going to marry Jean
\nAdair? Here I’ve given the game away, or perhaps
\nnot, because who now knows that Mrs. Burnett Smith was once a prolific
\nwriter of romances under the pen name Annie Swan.
\nWhile the audience was keen to find out was the next episode of her serial story
\nrunning in the magazine The People’s Friend. This still leaves UNIDENTIFIED
\nthe celebrity literary couple of Regent’s Park.
\nHe was George Henry Lewes. The positiveness critic, biographer of Gatta
\nand paramour of Mary Ann Evans, better known as George Eliot,
\nand the Celia who was going to have a baby was the sister of Dorothea Brooke,
\nthe heroine of Middlemarch, which was then being serialized. Now,
\nno one will want to argue that George Eliot and Annie Swan
\nare authors of equal philosophical weight and permanent literary
\nvalue. Yet we need to allow that a good story gripped to like
\nthe solutes cerebral select of a literary salon and the humble
\nhousewife at her local newsagents united them too, with fuddy
\nduddy gossip. Had it that the Dean of King’s College and the
\nCambridge University Registrar cut chapel to be the first to discover the denouement
\nof the hand of the Baskervilles as the last installment of its serialisation
\nappeared. We should therefore guard against literary snobbery.
\nAnd resist the temptation to divide works into high brow and
\nlow brow as a phrenology was an exact science too.
\nTo assume that only the best people read the best books is a literary is
\na fantasy. Similarly, we should acknowledge that bestsellers were read by
\nall. Reading gives an altogether mysterious business.
\nNo two people read the same book in the same way. Likewise, no one
\nperson reads the same book for a second time in the same way when evaluating
\nthe impact of books for far too long literary scholars. Poor Dave the text
\nand ignored the audience. Reception history is obviously aimed to reverse
\nthat imbalance. Yet it remains true that we can’t easily know
\nhow books are read. What holds or loses a reader’s attention
\nand what sensations they experience? Readers of George Eliot
\nmight not have been drawn to her for her profound reflections about religion and
\ndevolution, and may well have skipped such passages as the as
\nthere were many. A so-called classic has this in common with
\na best seller, a story well told containing a cast of characters
\nwhose deeds and relationships make readers care and whose
\nrites of passage they follow as closely as if they were members of their own family
\nby convention and by preference. A good read will contain a roller
\ncoaster ride of emotions and for us quite as much as the Victorians.
\nThis must involve moral tests and struggles before
\nideally virtuous, rewarded and vise confounded.
\nWe must also take into account how stories come to us in different forms,
\nsuch as through serialisation and abridgment. The journalist
\nwho quizzed the first Labor MP is in 5:41 about the books
\nthat influence them was W.T. Stead, who learned his
\ntrade as a publicist during Gladstone’s Bulgarian Attrocities campaign
\nin 1876. Ten years later, he courted imprisonment
\nfor exposing child prostitution and white slavery, and he eventually
\nsank with the Titanic in 1912. His belief that
\nthe dead communicate with the living means that we cannot rule out him one
\nday sensationally reporting his own drowning. Until
\nthen, I should inform you that Stead had been quick to exploit
\nthe new printing technology and expiry of copyright protection
\nfor many classic authors. In May 1895,
\nhe launched Penny Poets, followed in January 1896
\nby Penny Novels by October 1897.
\nHis 60 volumes of Penny poets had cleared five and a quarter million
\ncopies and the 90 penny novels about nine million.
\nThese last were condensation of classics cut down to 30
\nto 40 thousand words. Ditching a huge amount of verbiage and
\nin the process, bringing the George Eliot’s literature closer
\nto the any s Swann’s as we reel away in horror
\nthat the philistinism and brutality involved. Let’s remember
\nthat we do the same and worse in adaptations for radio,
\ntelevision and cinema and theater. Refutations are regularly made
\nby amputating Shakespeare and dressing what’s left in a frenzy
\nmodern wardrobe. Also, remember that many a classic author
\nwrote hurriedly and carelessly. The notion that readers should dwell on their
\nevery word is a ridiculous superstition. Sir Walter Scott, scribbling
\naway furiously to pay off debts himself, recommended, quote, The laudable
\npractice of skipping exceptional people
\nin virtually every respect behave like unexceptional
\npeople. Lloyd George When Prime Minister liked to unwind
\nwith what he called shilling shockers, cliff hanging thrillers
\nand pulsating romance. Is his predecessor Asquith enjoyed thrillers,
\ntoo. Otherwise he could be found sitting up in bed translating
\nKipling into Greek. Surely that was an effort? Queried
\nhis wife, Margo. Not at all. It’s relaxation, he purred, with all
\nthe effortless superiority of a Balliol grapes man.
\nThe following evening, their last in Downing Street, he read the Bible.
\nAnd what part? Inevitably it was the crucifixion. There would be no
\npolitical resurrection for Asquith three days later, or any other time yet.
\nThat was after a point he retired to bed. And in whatever condition,
\nhis nickname was Perry ASUU. He never broke the habit of reading
\nfor two hours every night. There’s no space here to pursue
\noff duty prime ministerial reading, although though it would be neglectful
\nto disregard Harold Macmillan, who is always keen to go to bed
\nwith a trollop. Recent recent prime
\nministers seem more interested in the photo shoot opportunity as
\nthey set off on a holiday with the title of some improving greeting just
\naccidentally peeping out from under their arm. In this,
\nthey are allies of the chattering classes who are mortified if they
\nare not seen with the book of the moment. How else to explain? Stephen
\nHawking’s A Brief History of Time occupying the bestseller list for a record
\nbusting. Two hundred and thirty seven weeks after publication
\nin 1988. Similarly, to take this quest abroad
\nhere for a moment, consider the impact of a speech in 2006
\nby President Hugo Chavez in which he denounced
\nGeorge W. Bush as the devil and waved in the air. Known
\nChomsky’s hegemony or survival? That
\nwas the right or nor should it be the left on Prof’s polemic, of course, against American
\nforeign policy. Chavez nominated Chomsky as essential reading
\nfor every member of the Venezuelan assembly and for all Americans.
\nOriginally published in 2, 2003 and languishing
\nget one hundred and sixty thousand seven hundred and seventy second
\nin the Amazon book charts on the Wednesday. Chavez gave his speech
\nby the Thursday afternoon. It had been catapulted into the top 10.
\nDoubtless the coffee tables of Islington and Notting Hill, as well as of Manhattan
\nand Brentwood. Bel Air groaned under the weight of its radical shake, too.
\nBut if I may tender a little advice to anyone here who is seeking to impress
\nby leaving lying around in the family drawing room a hardback copy
\nof the latest hefty nonfiction prize winner.
\nI suggest it prominently displays a bookmark towards the end
\nto which you can point and nonchalantly pronounce. The critics loved
\nit. But it hasn’t done that much for me.
\nI’ve now strayed into my froufrou. I’ve now strayed from my theme
\nof light reading for intellectual heavyweights into heavy reading for well,
\nI won’t press that point, but instead commend to you and Nobita dictum
\nof Oliver Edwards. So Wiltshire gentlemen son who was up at Oxford
\nin the late seventeen twenties with Sam Johnson. Dr. Johnson, when they met
\nby chance some 50 years later, it’s Clemans stains on
\nthe Strand near the law courts, Edwards remarked at the end of their chat.
\nYou are a philosopher, Dr. Johnson. I’ve tried in my time to be a philosopher,
\nbut I don’t know how cheerfulness was always breaking through.
\nI only hope that the same occurred to Hilary Benn, who, while still
\nat primary school, was given for a Christmas present in the 1970s by his
\nfather, Tony. The Labor Cabinet Minister,
\nIsaac Deutsch’s three-volume biography of Trotsky.
\nIf you’re not completely stunned by that, then let me administer the knockout blow
\nby reciting. The Prime Minister Tony Blair’s carefully calibrated
\nadmission in 2006 that torture’s trilogy, quote, quote,
\nmade a very deep impression on me. In 2017,
\nhe embellished this further, revealing in an interview that as an undergraduate
\nat St. John’s, Oxford, it transformed him into a bit of a trot.
\nI picked it up and I literally didn’t stop reading it at all, not all night.
\nI suddenly thought the world is full of these extraordinary causes and injustices.
\nAnd here’s this guy. Trotsky, who was so inspired by all this that
\nhe went out to create a Russian revolution and change the world. It was like a light going
\non. Blair, as we know, is a one off novel and beyond caricature.
\nTherefore, it is not at all contradictory that 20 years before,
\nin 1996, when he was only the leader of the opposition
\nand didn’t want to spook Middle England, he forgot all about his one night stand
\nwith Trotsky and instead chose Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe to take
\nto his desert island on the popular radio program Desert Island
\nDiscs to return to Lloyd George. He
\nonce told a friend, I can’t read novels that end badly.
\nThis is essential when you finish a story. You shouldn’t be left downcast
\nbut uplifted, your fiber strengthens so as to return refreshed
\nto the serious cares of life. If there is to be a shootout between
\nrealist misery and gossamer romance, my money will be on Mills
\nand Boon winning gold most every time. Would the American equivalent be Kensington
\nBooks and the Canadian Harlequin? No matter. A couple of final
\nexamples. One involves the Nobel Prize winning poet
\nW.B. Yates, who used to lap up Dorothy L. Sayers, detective
\nstories and Zane Gray Westin’s. One can read them while the
\nmind sleeps. He airily tells Sean O’Casey,
\nNow this was really being superior and dismissive, and I don’t believe
\nhim. OKC and Yates had had more than one spat about the
\nplays the Abbey Theater should be putting on, including OKC saying what
\nhappened here was that Yates became flustered when OKC
\nvisiting his Lancaster Gate apartment Espied, saying Gray
\nand Dorothy Sayers when he lifted up the thick green cloth covering
\nthem. This exposure was damaging to the great man’s self-image
\nthat he should be discovered devouring them rather than, say, toying
\nwith an 800 page philosophical novel by Dostoyevsky or some
\nother depressed and depressing Russian, all patiently translated by
\nconstant Constance Garlett instead of his mind being switched
\noff. It’s more believable to suppose it was wide awake with excitement.
\nA doctoral thesis about the influence on Yates of six shooting gunslingers
\nand suave Lord Peter Wimsey awaits the aspiring scholar in this
\nroom. I want Lasley to consider the peculiar
\ncase of Isyour Berlin and Jules Verne.
\nQuite possibly. There are here this afternoon some distinguished veterans.
\nWhy am I looking at Roger, who came across the philosopher Ayssir?
\nBerlin in Oxford, certainly once encountered,
\nnever forgotten, with his booming imperitive voice and torrential talk
\ntimed at almost 400 words a minute. He was a stenographer’s nightmare
\nmade flesh. It’s almost done in tell. It only mentionable
\nnow. But once upon a time, an Oxford Don was considered a prize catch
\nfor smart social gatherings in the capital. Not just any performing
\nOxford done the ISI, Berlin in particular. He
\nsported all the right credentials, an exotic provenance from
\na Russian Latvian emigre family schooled at St. Paul’s, followed
\nby a double first Oxford and all sales prize fellowship and onwards and upwards
\nto the presidency of the British Academy, a knighthood and the order of merit.
\nHe gained Churchill’s attention by brilliant dispatches from wartime Washington
\non the strength of this. Churchill in 1944 got his secretary to invite
\nBerlin to lunch. He swiftly grew disenchanted as Berlin
\ngave dim witted answers to his probing questions about how long
\nthe war would last and whether FDR would be reelected. Churchill
\nfumed to an aide that Berlin was just a typical civil servant after
\nall, impressive on paper, but useless face to face.
\nIt turned out he’d been cross examining the petrified songsmith Irving
\nBerlin, composer of a white Christmas
\nAyssir. By contrast, was always dependably scintillating.
\nWe can easily imagine a hostess on the phone to a friend postwar
\nsaying Darling, darling, goom simply must come to supper because we’ve got Ayssir.
\nHe’s frightfully intellectual, of course, but you’re not going to believe it. He can recite
\nthe plot cevo for 50 shoos novels. It’s terribly amusing.
\nNo, this was actually true. So my question is, was this
\naccomplishment simply a show off party?
\nOr did Jules Verne mean more to him? Undoubtedly.
\nBerlin had a capacious and retentive mind, but to rattle off over
\nand put him in the train spotter collector maniac category.
\nAnd yet and yet we learned from mightly name Sheff’s biography
\nthat Berlin first read 20000 Leagues Under the sea. In
\nRussian translation and later in life, when asked what he had wanted
\nto be as a boy, replied that crate he used to dream
\nof being a scientist in a Jules Verne novel undersea watching
\nthe world of nature through a porthole. No chef explains.
\nThis is a philosophical fantasy, quote, exploring the depths
\nyet remaining immune from their dangers, which is clever stuff, but
\nI prefer Berlin’s own interpretation. In an essay of his on education,
\ntalking about the importance of popularizes, however imperfect
\ntheir rendering, he instanced Voltaire 1738
\nelements of their philosophy of Newton, and a century and a half later,
\nhow quote those other great vulgar arises. Shuls then
\nand H.G. Wells, in their own highly imaginative way,
\nhad had, quote, an immensely liberating effect. He
\nwent on to argue that while the academic value of the subject varies according
\nto the ratio and interplay of ideas to facts, quote,
\na gifted expositor can put life into virtually any topic.
\nOne incidental curiosity to note about that
\nis that while in the English speaking world, an admiration for him will at
\nbest be thought amiably eccentric, in continental
\nEurope, it’s altogether different. Intellectuals are an endangered
\nspecies across most of the globe, but not in Vann’s native Paris,
\nwhich remains their natural habitat, Paris says did
\nParis, especially where they can sound off and procreate with happy abandon
\ntheir families. Still esteemed as a towering figure for
\nhis enduring impact on literary have on guardsman’s Zeman
\nsurrealism in 2017, after President
\nMacron assumed office and before he became Jupiter,
\nthe elite say palace. Let it be known that Macron, Mr. Shuls, friend,
\nfan and that the presidential pad or as you would call it, the first dog
\nwas named Nimo in that same essay on
\neducation. Berlin roundly berated academic abstruse HNIs
\njargon and windy theorizing quaked pretentious
\nrhetoric, deliberate or compulsory. It was deliberate or compulsive
\nobscurity or vagueness, metaphysical patter
\nstudded with irrelevant or misleading allusions to at best half understood
\nscientific or philosophical theories or to famous names. There’s an old
\nbut at present particularly prevalent device for concealing
\npoverty of thought or muddle, and sometimes perilously near to a confidence
\ntrick. That was in 1975. In the intervening
\nBut that’s another story anyway. Jane Austen got there first.
\nShe has Katherine Moreland delightfully declare in Northanger Abbey.
\nI cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible
\nto conclude. Great men and women do not inhabit a different
\nplanet from the rest of us. And there’s no embarrassment in putting your feet
\nup. We all do have to slog through academic tomes
\nand articles that are not exactly riveting. Hard labor of this kind
\nis not just character building in a Victorian manner, but rewarding Gougne
\nin unexpected ways. Still, it’s seldom you must read every
\nword, and it’s a part of the intelligent person’s armory to become adept
\nat gutting such works to establish what’s important and what’s not.
\nThe late nineteenth early twentieth century scholar George S. Spray,
\nwho is a wine connoisseur as well as an omnivorous reader, called it the art of skimming
\ncome skipping. Everyone benefits from time off.
\nParadoxically, you may well find yourself reading every word
\nof light literature because it’s so gripping. This then triggers
\nall sorts of connections, cross-pollination and constructive ideas which
\nhelp in tackling other problems. No need, therefore, to scold yourself or
\nrepeller joys for indulging in a little light entertainment.
\nThe essential thing is to be intellectually honest. But
\nevery sermon should finish with a benediction, mine is simply this. Go
\nforth and enjoy yourselves. The essential thing
\nis to be intellectually honest, also to remain fresh and put that another
\nway. Avoid cliches like the plague.<\/p>\n"},"episode_featured_image":false,"episode_player_image":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2017\/09\/british-studies.png","download_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast-download\/72\/light-reading-for-intellectual-heavyweights.mp3","player_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast-player\/72\/light-reading-for-intellectual-heavyweights.mp3","audio_player":"