Hugo began writing The Hunchback of Notre-Dame in 1829 and published in 1831. The agreement with his original publisher, Gosselin, was that the book would be finished that same year, but Hugo was constantly delayed due to the demands of other projects. By the summer of 1830, Gosselin demanded  Victor Hugo to complete the book by February 1831. Beginning in September 1830, Hugo worked nonstop on the project thereafter. The book was finished six months later.

The original French title, Notre-Dame de Paris (the formal title of the Cathedral) indicates that the Cathedral itself is the most significant aspect of the novel, both the main setting and the focus of the story’s themes. With the notable exception of Phoebus and Esmerelda’s meeting, almost every major event in the novel takes place in the cathedral, atop the cathedral or can be witnessed by a character standing within or atop the cathedral. The Cathedral had fallen into disrepair at the time of writing, which Hugo wanted to point out. The book portrays the Gothic era as one of the extremes of architecture, passion, and religion. The theme of determinism (fate and destiny) is explored as well as revolution and social strife. The severe distinction of the social classes is shown by the relationships of Quasimodo and Esmeralda with higher-caste people in the book. One can also see a variety of modern themes emanating from the work including nuanced views on gender dynamics. For example, Phoebus objectifies Esmerelda as a sexual object. And, while Esmeralda is frequently cited as a paragon of purity- this is certainly how Quasimodo sees her- she nonetheless is seen to create her own objectification of the archer captain, Phoebus, that is at odds with reader’s informed view of the man.

PLOT:

[Alert: The contents below may contain spoilers]

The story begins on Epiphany (6 January), 1482, the day of the ‘Feast of Fools’ in Paris, France. Quasimodo, the deformed hunchback bell-ringer of Notre Dame, is introduced by his crowning as King of Fools.
Esmeralda, a beautiful Gypsy with a kind and generous heart, captures the hearts of many men, including those of a Captain Phoebus and a poor street poet, Pierre Gringoire, but especially those of Quasimodo and his adoptive father, Claude Frollo, the Archdeacon of Notre Dame. Frollo is torn between his obsessive love and the rules of the church. He orders Quasimodo to kidnap her, but the hunchback is suddenly captured by Phoebus and his guards who save Esmeralda. Quasimodo is sentenced to be flogged and turned on the pillory for one hour, followed by another hour’s public exposure. He calls for water. Esmeralda, seeing his thirst, offers him a drink. It saves him, and she captures his heart.

Esmeralda is later charged with the attempted murder of Phoebus, whom Frollo actually attempted to kill in jealousy, after seeing him about to have sex with Esmeralda, and is tortured and sentenced to death by hanging. As she is being led to the gallows, Quasimodo swings down by the bell rope of Notre Dame and carries her off to the cathedral under the law of sanctuary. Clopin, a street performer, rallies the Truands (criminals of Paris) to charge the cathedral and rescue Esmeralda. The King, seeing the chaos, vetoes the law of sanctuary and commands his troops to take Esmeralda out and kill her. When Quasimodo sees the Truands, he assumes they are there to hurt Esmeralda, so he drives them off. Likewise, he thinks the King’s men want to rescue her, and tries to help them find her. Fortunately, she is rescued by Frollo and her phony husband, Gringoire. But after yet another failed attempt to win her love, Frollo betrays Esmeralda by handing her to the troops and watches while she is hanged. Quasimodo pushes him from the heights of Notre Dame to his death. Quasimodo then goes to the vaults under the huge gibbet of Montfaucon, and lies next to Esmeralda’s corpse, where it had been unceremoniously thrown after the execution. He stays at Montfaucon, and eventually dies of starvation. About eighteen months later, the tomb is opened, and the skeletons are found. As someone tries to separate them, Quasimodo’s bones turn to dust.

Oscar Wilde was born at 21 Westland Row, Dublin (now home of the Oscar Wilde Centre, Trinity College, Dublin) the second of three children born to Sir William Wilde and Jane Francesca Wilde, two years behind William (“Willie”). Jane Wilde, under the pseudonym “Speranza” (the Italian word for ‘Hope’), wrote poetry for the revolutionary Young Irelanders in 1848 and was a life-long Irish nationalist. She read the Young Irelanders’ poetry to Oscar and Willie, inculcating a love of these poets in her sons. Lady Wilde’s interest in the neo-classical revival showed in the paintings and busts of ancient Greece and Rome in her home. William Wilde was Ireland’s leading oto-ophthalmologic (ear and eye) surgeon and was knighted in 1864 for his services as medical adviser and assistant commissioner to the censuses of Ireland. He also wrote books about Irish archaeology and peasant folklore. A renowned philanthropist, his dispensary for the care of the city’s poor at the rear of Trinity College, Dublin, was the forerunner of the Dublin Eye and Ear Hospital, now located at Adelaide Road.

Wilde’s parents were successful Dublin intellectuals. Their son became fluent in French and German early in life. At university Wilde read Greats; he proved himself to be an outstanding classicist, first at Dublin, then at Oxford. He became known for his involvement in the rising philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. He also profoundly explored Roman Catholicism, to which he would later convert on his deathbed. After university, Wilde moved to London into fashionable cultural and social circles. As a spokesman for aestheticism, he tried his hand at various literary activities: he published a book of poems, lectured in the United States of America and Canada on the new “English Renaissance in Art“, and then returned to London where he worked prolifically as a journalist. Known for his biting wit, flamboyant dress, and glittering conversation, Wilde had become one of the most well-known personalities of his day.

At the turn of the 1890s, he refined his ideas about the supremacy of art in a series of dialogues and essays, and incorporated themes of decadence, duplicity, and beauty into his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). The opportunity to construct aesthetic details precisely, and combine them with larger social themes, drew Wilde to write drama. He wrote Salome (1891) in French in Paris but it was refused a licence. Unperturbed, Wilde produced four society comedies in the early 1890s, which made him one of the most successful playwrights of late Victorian London.

At the height of his fame and success, whilst his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), was still on stage in London, Wilde sued the Marquess of Queensberry the father of his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, for libel. The trial unearthed evidence that caused Wilde to drop his charges and led to his own arrest, tried for gross indecency with other men. After two more trials he was convicted and imprisoned for two years’ hard labour. In prison he wrote De Profundis (written in 1897 & published in 1905), a long letter which discusses his spiritual journey through his trials, forming a dark counterpoint to his earlier philosophy of pleasure. Upon his release he left immediately for France, never to return to Ireland or Britain. There he wrote his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), a long poem commemorating the harsh rhythms of prison life. He died destitute in Paris at the age of forty-six.

London life and marriage

His earnings, plus expected income from The Duchess of Padua, allowed him to move to Paris between February and mid-May 1883; there he met Robert Sherard, whom he entertained constantly. “We are dining on the Duchess tonight”, Wilde would declare before taking him to a fancy restaurant. In August he briefly returned to New York for the production of Vera, his first play, after it was turned down in London. He reportedly entertained the other passengers with “Ave Imperatrix!, A Poem On England”, about the rise and fall of empires. E.C. Stedman, in Victorian Poets describes this “lyric to England” as “manly verse – a poetic and eloquent invocation”. Wilde’s presence was again notable, the play was initially well received by the audience, but when the critics returned lukewarm reviews attendance fell sharply and the play closed a week after it had opened.

He was left to return to England and lecturing: Personal Impressions of America, The Value of Art in Modern Life, and Dress were among his topics.

In London, he had been introduced to Constance Lloyd (January 2, 1859 – April 7, 1898) in 1881, daughter of Horace Lloyd, a wealthy Queen’s Counsel. She happened to be visiting Dublin in 1884, when Wilde was lecturing at the Gaiety Theatre (W. B. Yeats, then aged eighteen, was also among the audience). He proposed to her, and they married on the 29 May 1884 at the Anglican St. James Church in Paddington in London. Constance’s annual allowance of £250 was generous for a young woman (it would be equivalent to about £19,300 in current value), but the Wildes’ tastes were relatively luxurious and, after preaching to others for so long, their home was expected to set new standards of design. No. 16, Tite Street was duly renovated in seven months at considerable expense. The couple had two sons, Cyril (1885) and Vyvyan (1886).

Wilde was the sole literary signatory of George Bernard Shaw’s petition for a pardon of the anarchists arrested (and later executed) after the Haymarket massacre in Chicago in 1886. In 1888 she published a book based on children’s stories she had heard from her grandmother, called There Was Once.

Robert Ross had read Wilde’s poems before they met, and he was unrestrained by the Victorian prohibition against homosexuality, even to the extent of estranging himself from his family. A precocious seventeen year old, by Richard Ellmann’s account, he was “…so young and yet so knowing, was determined to seduce Wilde”. Wilde, who had long alluded to Greek love, and – though an adoring father – was put off by the carnality of his wife’s second pregnancy, succumbed to Ross in Oxford in 1886.

It is unknown at what point Constance became aware of her husband’s homosexual relationships. It was around this time that Wilde was living more in hotels than at their home in Tite Street and since the birth of their second son they had become sexually estranged. It is claimed that on one occasion, when warning his sons about naughty boys who made their mamas cry, Wilde’s sons asked him what happened to absent papas who made mamas cry. Nevertheless, by all accounts, they still remained on good terms.

In 1891 she met his lover Lord Alfred Douglas when Wilde brought Douglas to their home for a visit. It was around this time that Wilde was living more in hotels than at their home in Tite Street.

By 1895 she was incapable of ignorance on the subject, as Oscar was tried and imprisoned for “gross indecency”, or homosexual acts. After Wilde’s imprisonment, Constance changed her and her sons’ last name to Holland to disassociate themselves from Wilde’s scandal.

A fall down the stairs in the Tite Street home caused Constance to have a form of paralysis, and she died on April 7, 1898, after spinal surgery.

Relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas & Queensberry family

In mid-1891 Lionel Johnson introduced Wilde to Alfred Douglas, an undergraduate at Oxford at the time; although Wilde was married with two sons, they soon began an affair.
In 1894, the Robert Hichens novel The Green Carnation was published. Said to be a roman a clef based on the relationship of Wilde and Douglas, it would be one of the texts used against Wilde during his trials in 1895.

Douglas, known to his friends as ‘Bosie’, has been described as spoiled, reckless, insolent and extravagant. He would spend money on boys and gambling and expected Wilde to contribute to his tastes. They often argued and broke up, but would also always reconcile.

Douglas had praised Wilde’s play Salome in the Oxford magazine, The Spirit Lamp, of which he was editor (and used as a covert means of gaining acceptance for homosexuality). Wilde had originally written Salomé in French, and in 1893 he commissioned Douglas to translate it into English. Douglas’s French was very poor and his translation was highly criticised: a passage that goes “On ne doit regarder que dans les miroirs” (French for “One should only look in mirrors”) was translated as “One must not look at mirrors”. Douglas’s temper would not accept Wilde’s criticism and he claimed that the errors were really in Wilde’s original play. This led to a hiatus in the relationship and a row between the two men, with angry messages being exchanged and even the involvement of the publisher John Lane and the illustrator Aubrey Beardsley when they themselves objected to Douglas’s work. Beardsley complained to Robbie Ross: “For one week the numbers of telegraph and messenger boys who came to the door was simply scandalous”. Wilde redid much of the translation himself, but, in a gesture of reconciliation, suggested that Douglas be dedicated as the translator rather than them sharing their names on the title-page. Accepting this, Douglas, in his vanity, compared a dedication to sharing the title-page as “the difference between a tribute of admiration from an artist and a receipt from a tradesman.”

On another occasion, while staying together in Brighton, Douglas fell ill with influenza and was nursed back to health by Wilde, but failed to return the favour when Wilde fell ill as well. Instead Douglas moved to the Grand Hotel and, on Wilde’s 40th birthday, sent him a letter saying that he had charged him the bill. Douglas also gave his old clothes to male prostitutes, but failed to remove incriminating letters exchanged between him and Wilde, which were then used for blackmail.

Lord Alfred’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, was known for his outspoken atheism, brutish manner and creation of the modern rules of boxing. Queensberry, who feuded regularly with his son, confronted Wilde and Lord Alfred about the nature of their relationship several times, but Wilde was able to mollify him. In June 1894, he called on Wilde at 16 Tite Street, without an appointment, and clarified his stance: “I do not say that you are it, but you look it, and pose at it, which is just as bad. And if I catch you and my son again in any public restaurant I will thrash you” to which Wilde responded: “I don’t know what the Queensberry rules are, but the Oscar Wilde rule is to shoot on sight”. His account in De Profundis was less triumphant: “It was when, in my library at Tite Street, waving his small hands in the air in epileptic fury, your father… stood uttering every foul word his foul mind could think of, and screaming the loathsome threats he afterwords with such cunning carried out”. Queensberry only described the scene once, saying Wilde had “shown him the white feather”, meaning he had acted in a cowardly way. Though trying to remain calm, Wilde saw that he was becoming ensnared in a brutal family quarrel. He did not wish to bear Queensberry’s insults, but he knew to confront him could lead to disaster were his liaisons disclosed publicly.

Death

Wilde died of cerebral meningitis on 30 November 1900. Different opinions are given as to the cause of the meningitis: Richard Ellmann claimed it was syphilitic; Merlin Holland, Wilde’s grandson, thought this to be a misconception, noting that Wilde’s meningitis followed a surgical intervention, perhaps a mastoidectomy; Wilde’s physicians, Dr. Paul Cleiss and A’Court Tucker, reported that the condition stemmed from an old suppuration of the right ear (une ancienne suppuration de l’oreille droite d’ailleurs en traitement depuis plusieurs années) and did not allude to syphilis.

Wilde was initially buried in the Cimetière de Bagneux outside Paris; in 1909 his remains were disinterred to Père Lachaise Cemetery, inside the city. His tomb was designed by Sir Jacob Epstein, commissioned by Robert Ross, who asked for a small compartment to be made for his own ashes which were duly transferred in 1950. The modernist angel depicted as a relief on the tomb was originally complete with male genitalia which have since been vandalised; their current whereabouts are unknown. In 2000, Leon Johnson, a multimedia artist, installed a silver prosthesis to replace them.

Background:

In the summer of 1893, Oscar Wilde began writing An Ideal Husband, and he completed it later that winter. At this point in his career he was accustomed to success, and in writing An Ideal Husband he wanted to ensure himself public fame. His work began at Goring-on-Thames, after which he named the character Lord Goring, and concluded at St. James Place. He initially sent the completed play to the Garrick Theatre, where the manager rejected it, but it was soon accepted by the Haymarket Theatre, where Lewis Waller had temporarily taken control. Waller was an excellent actor and cast himself as Sir Robert Chiltern.

The play gave the Haymarket the success it desperately needed. After opening on 3 January 1895, it continued for 124 performances. In April of that year, Wilde was arrested for ‘gross indecency’ and his name was publicly taken off the play. On 6 April, soon after Wilde’s arrest, the play moved to the Criterion Theatre where it ran from 13-27 April. The play was published in 1899, although Wilde was not listed as the author. This published version differs slightly from the performed play, for Wilde added many passages and cut others. Prominent additions included written stage directions and character descriptions. Wilde was a leader in the effort to make plays accessible to the reading public.

PLOT:

[Alert: The contents below may contain spoilers]

An Ideal Husband opens during a dinner party at the home of Sir Robert Chiltern in London’s fashionable Grosvenor Square. Sir Robert, a prestigious member of the House of Commons, and his wife, Lady Chiltern, are hosting a gathering that includes his friend Lord Goring, a dandified bachelor and close friend to the Chilterns, his sister Mabel Chiltern, and other genteel guests. During the party, Mrs. Cheveley, an enemy of Lady Chiltern’s from their school days, attempts to blackmail Sir Robert into supporting a fraudulent scheme to build a canal in Argentina. Apparently, Mrs. Cheveley’s dead mentor and lover, Baron Arnheim, convinced the young Sir Robert many years ago to sell him a Cabinet secret, a secret that suggested he buy stocks in the Suez Canal three days before the British government announced its purchase. Sir Robert made his fortune with that illicit money, and Mrs. Cheveley has the letter to prove his crime. Fearing the ruin of both career and marriage, Sir Robert submits to her demands.

When Mrs. Cheveley pointedly informs Lady Chiltern of Sir Robert’s change of heart regarding the canal scheme, the morally inflexible Lady, unaware of both her husband’s past and the blackmail plot, insists that Sir Robert renege on his promise. For Lady Chiltern, their marriage is predicated on her having an “ideal husband”—that is, a model spouse in both private and public life that she can worship: thus Sir Robert must remain unimpeachable in all his decisions. Sir Robert complies with the lady’s wishes and apparently seals his doom. Also toward the end of Act I, Mabel and Lord Goring come upon a diamond brooch that Lord Goring gave someone many years ago. Goring takes the brooch and asks that Mabel inform him if anyone comes to retrieve it.

In the second act, which also takes place at Sir Robert’s house, Lord Goring urges Sir Robert to fight Mrs. Cheveley and admit his guilt to his wife. He also reveals that he and Mrs. Cheveley were formerly engaged. After finishing his conversation with Sir Robert, Goring engages in flirtatious banter with Mabel. He also takes Lady Chiltern aside and obliquely urges her to be less morally inflexible and more forgiving. Once Goring leaves, Mrs. Cheveley appears, unexpected, in search of a brooch she lost the previous evening. Incensed at Sir Robert’s reneging on his promise, she ultimately exposes Sir Robert to his wife once they are both in the room. Unable to accept a Sir Robert now unmasked, Lady Chiltern then denounces her husband and refuses to forgive him.

In the third act, set in Lord Goring’s home, Goring receives a pink letter from Lady Chiltern asking for his help, a letter that might be read as a compromising love note. Just as Goring receives this note, however, his father, Lord Caversham, drops in and demands to know when his son will marry. A visit from Sir Robert, who seeks further counsel from Goring, follows. Meanwhile, Mrs. Cheveley arrives unexpectedly and, misrecognized by the butler as the woman Goring awaits, is ushered into Lord Goring’s drawing room. While she waits, she finds Lady Chiltern’s letter. Ultimately, Sir Robert discovers Mrs. Cheveley in the drawing room and, convinced of an affair between these two former loves, angrily storms out of the house.

When she and Lord Goring confront each other, Mrs. Cheveley makes a proposal. Claiming to still love Goring from their early days of courtship, she offers to exchange Sir Robert’s letter for her old beau’s hand in marriage. Lord Goring declines, accusing her of defiling love by reducing courtship to a vulgar transaction and ruining the Chilterns’ marriage. He then springs his trap. Removing the diamond brooch from his desk drawer, he binds it to Cheveley’s wrist with a hidden device. Goring then reveals how the item came into her possession. Apparently Mrs. Cheveley stole it from his cousin years ago. To avoid arrest, Cheveley must trade the incriminating letter for her release from the bejeweled handcuff. After Goring obtains and burns the letter, however, Mrs. Cheveley steals Lady Chiltern’s note from his desk. Vengefully she plans to send it to Sir Robert misconstrued as a love letter addressed to the dandified lord. Mrs. Cheveley exits the house in triumph.

The final act, which returns to Grosvenor Square, resolves the many plot complications sketched above with a decidedly happy ending. Lord Goring proposes to and is accepted by Mabel. Lord Caversham informs his son that Sir Robert has denounced the Argentine canal scheme before the House. Lady Chiltern then appears, and Lord Goring informs her that Sir Robert’s letter has been destroyed but that Mrs. Cheveley has stolen her letter and plans to use it to destroy her marriage. At that moment, Sir Robert enters while reading Lady Chiltern’s letter, but as the letter does not have the name of the addressee, he assumes it is meant for him, and reads it as a letter of forgiveness. The two reconcile. Lady Chiltern initially agrees to support Sir Robert’s decision to renounce his career in politics, but Lord Goring dissuades her from allowing her husband to resign. When Sir Robert refuses Lord Goring his sister’s hand in marriage, still believing he has taken up with Mrs. Cheveley, Lady Chiltern is forced to explain last night’s events and the true nature of the letter. Sir Robert relents, and Lord Goring and Mabel are permitted to wed.

LEAKED CHAPTER:

FIRST ACT

SCENE

The octagon room at Sir Robert Chiltern’s house in Grosvenor Square.

[The room is brilliantly lighted and full of guests.  At the top of the staircase stands lady chiltern, a woman of grave Greek beauty, about twenty-seven years of age.  She receives the guests as they come up.  Over the well of the staircase hangs a great chandelier with wax lights, which illumine a large eighteenth-century French tapestry—representing the Triumph of Love, from a design by Boucher—that is stretched on the staircase wall.  On the right is the entrance to the music-room.  The sound of a string quartette is faintly heard.  The entrance on the left leads to other reception-rooms.  mrs. marchmont andlady basildon, two very pretty women, are seated together on a Louis Seize sofa.  They are types of exquisite fragility.  Their affectation of manner has a delicate charm.  Watteau would have loved to paint them.]

Mrs. Marchmont:  Going on to the Hartlocks’ to-night, Margaret?

Lady Basildon:  I suppose so.  Are you?

Mrs. Marchmont:  Yes.  Horribly tedious parties they give, don’t they?

Lady Basildon:  Horribly tedious!  Never know why I go.  Never know why I go anywhere.

Mrs. Marchmont:  I come here to be educated.

Lady Basildon:  Ah! I hate being educated!

Mrs. Marchmont:  So do I.  It puts one almost on a level with the commercial classes, doesn’t it?  But dear Gertrude Chiltern is always telling me that I should have some serious purpose in life.  So I come here to try to find one.

Lady Basildon:  [Looking round through her lorgnette.]  I don’t see anybody here to-night whom one could possibly call a serious purpose.  The man who took me in to dinner talked to me about his wife the whole time.

Mrs. Marchmont:  How very trivial of him!

Lady Basildon:  Terribly trivial!  What did your man talk about?

Mrs. Marchmont:  About myself.

Lady Basildon:  [Languidly.]  And were you interested?

Mrs. Marchmont:  [Shaking her head.]  Not in the smallest degree.

Lady Basildon:  What martyrs we are, dear Margaret!

Mrs. Marchmont:  [Rising.]  And how well it becomes us, Olivia!

[They rise and go towards the music-room.  The vicomte de nanjac, a young attaché known for his neckties and his Anglomania, approaches with a low bow,and enters into conversation.]

Mason:  [Announcing guests from the top of the staircase.]  Mr. and Lady Jane Barford.  Lord Caversham.

[Enter lord caversham, an old gentleman of seventy, wearing the riband and star of the Garter.  A fine Whig type.  Rather like a portrait by Lawrence.]

Lord Caversham:  Good evening, Lady Chiltern!  Has my good-for-nothing young son been here?

Lady Chiltern:  [Smiling.]  I don’t think Lord Goring has arrived yet.

Mabel Chiltern:  [Coming up to Lord Caversham.]  Why do you call Lord Goring good-for-nothing?

[Mabel chiltern is a perfect example of the English type of prettiness, the apple-blossom type.  She has all the fragrance and freedom of a flower.  There is ripple after ripple of sunlight in her hair, and the little mouth, with its parted lips, is expectant, like the mouth of a child.  She has the fascinating tyranny of youth, and the astonishing courage of innocence.  To sane people she is not reminiscent of any work of art.  But she is really like a Tanagra statuette, and would be rather annoyed if she were told so.]

—-

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Galton had a prolific intellect, and produced over 340 papers and books throughout his lifetime. He also created the statistical concept of correlation and widely promoted regression toward the mean. He was the first to apply statistical methods to the study of human differences and inheritance of intelligence, and introduced the use of questionnaires and surveys for collecting data on human communities, which he needed for genealogical and biographical works and for his anthropometric studies.

He was a pioneer in eugenics, coining the term itself and the phrase “nature versus nurture”. His book, Hereditary Genius (1869), was the first social scientific attempt to study genius and greatness. As an investigator of the human mind, he founded psychometrics (the science of measuring mental faculties) and differential psychology and the lexical hypothesis of personality. He devised a method for classifying fingerprints that proved useful in forensic science. He also conducted research on the power of prayer, concluding it had none by its null effects on the longevity of those prayed for.

As the initiator of scientific meteorology, he devised the first weather map, proposed a theory of anticyclones, and was the first to establish a complete record of short-term climatic phenomena on a European scale. He also invented the Galton Whistle for testing differential hearing ability.

Fingerprints

In a Royal Institution paper in 1888 and three books (Fingerprints, 1892; Decipherment of Blurred Finger Prints, 1893; and Fingerprint Directories, 1895) Galton estimated the probability of two persons having the same fingerprint and studied the heritability and racial differences in fingerprints. He wrote about the technique (inadvertently sparking a controversy between Herschel and Faulds that was to last until 1917), identifying common pattern in fingerprints and devising a classification system that survives to this day.

The method of identifying criminals by their fingerprints had been introduced in the 1860s by Sir William James Herschel in India, and their potential use in forensic work was first proposed by Dr Henry Faulds in 1880, but Galton was the first to place the study on a scientific footing, which assisted its acceptance by the courts (Bulmer 2003, p. 35). Galton pointed out that there were specific types of fingerprint patterns. He described and classified them into eight broad categories. 1: plain arch, 2: tented arch, 3: simple loop, 4: central pocket loop, 5: double loop, 6: lateral pocket loop, 7: plain whorl, and 8: accidental.

Although Galton was not the first to propose the use of fingerprints for identification (Sir William Herschel had used them in India for this purpose) he was the first to place their study on a scientific basis and so lay the groundwork for their use in criminal cases. Sir Francis Galton discovered that fingerprints offered no firm clues to an individual’s intelligence or genetic history, he was able to scientifically prove that no two fingerprints are identical cause of the uniqueness, by minutiae, of individual prints.

Galton’s system was later modified by Sir Edward R Henry, who became chief of police in London. In 1901, Scotland Yard officially adopted the Galton-Henry system of fingerprinting. Today, it’s the most widely used system of fingerprint classification in the world.

Heredity, historiometry and eugenics

The publication by his cousin Charles Darwin of The Origin of Species in 1859 was an event that changed Galton’s life. He came to be gripped by the work, especially the first chapter on “Variation under Domestication” concerning the breeding of domestic animals. An interesting fact is that Galton was present to hear the famous 1860 Oxford evolution debate at the British Association.

Galton devoted much of the rest of his life to exploring variation in human populations and its implications, at which Darwin had only hinted. In doing so, he eventually established a research programme which embraced many aspects of human variation, from mental characteristics to height, from facial images to fingerprint patterns. This required inventing novel measures of traits, devising large-scale collection of data using those measures, and in the end, the discovery of new statistical techniques for describing and understanding the data.

Galton was interested at first in the question of whether human ability was hereditary, and proposed to count the number of the relatives of various degrees of eminent men. If the qualities were hereditary, he reasoned, there should be more eminent men among the relatives than among the general population. He obtained his data from various biographical sources and compared the results that he tabulated in various ways. This pioneering work was described in detail in his book in 1869. He showed, among other things, that the numbers of eminent relatives dropped off when going from the first degree to the second degree relatives, and from the second degree to the third. He took this as evidence of the inheritance of abilities. He also proposed adoption studies, including trans-racial adoption studies, to separate the effects of heredity and environment.

The method used in Hereditary Genius has been described as the first example of historiometry. To bolster these results, and to attempt to make a distinction between ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ (he was the first to apply this phrase to the topic), he devised a questionnaire that he sent out to 190 Fellows of the Royal Society. He tabulated characteristics of their families, such as birth order and the occupation and race of their parents. He attempted to discover whether their interest in science was ‘innate’ or due to the encouragements of others. The studies were published as a book, English men of science: their nature and nurture, in 1874. In the end, it promoted the nature versus nurture question, though it did not settle it, and provided some fascinating data on the sociology of scientists of the time.

Galton recognized the limitations of his methods in these two works, and believed the question could be better studied by comparisons of twins. His method was to see if twins who were similar at birth diverged in dissimilar environments, and whether twins dissimilar at birth converged when reared in similar environments. He again used the method of questionnaires to gather various sorts of data, which were tabulated and described in a paper The history of twins in 1875. In so doing he anticipated the modern field of behavior genetics, which relies heavily on twin studies. He concluded that the evidence favored nature rather than nurture.

Galton invented the term eugenics in 1883 and set down many of his observations and conclusions in a book, Inquiries into human faculty and its development. He believed that a scheme of ‘marks’ for family merit should be defined, and early marriage between families of high rank be encouraged by provision of monetary incentives. He pointed out some of the tendencies in British society, such as the late marriages of eminent people, and the paucity of their children, which he thought were dysgenic. He advocated encouraging eugenic marriages by supplying able couples with incentives to have children.

Galton’s study of human abilities ultimately led to the foundation of differential psychology and the formulation of the first mental tests.

LIST OF WORKS

• The Teletype: a printing Electric Telegraph, 1850;
• The Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa, 1853, in “Minerva Library of Famous Books,” 1889;
• Notes on Modern Geography (Cambridge Essays, 1855, etc.);
• Arts of Campaigning: an Inaugural Lecture delivered at Aldershot, 1855;
• The Art of Travel, or Shifts and Contrivances available in Wild Countries,
  1855, 1856, 1860 (1859); fourth edition, recast and enlarged, 1867, 1872;
•  Vacation Tourists and Notes on Travel, 1861, 1862, 1864;
•  Meteorographica, or Methods of Mapping the Weather, 1863;
•  Hereditary Genius: an Enquiry into its Laws and Consequences, 1869;
•  English Men of Science: their Nature and Nurture, 1874;
•  Address to the Anthropological Departments of the British Association (Plymouth, 1877);
•  Generic Images: with Autotype Illustrations (from the Proceedings of the Royal Institution), 1879;
•  Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development, 1883;
•  Record of Family Faculties, 1884; Natural Inheritance, 1889;
•  Finger-Prints, 1892;
•  Decipherments of Blurred Finger-Prints (supplementary chapters to former work), 1893;
•  Finger-Print Directories, 1895;
•  Introduction to Life of W. Cotton Oswell, 1900;
•  Index to Achievements of Near Kinsfolk of some of the Fellows of the Royal Society, 1904;
•  Eugenics: its Definition, Scope, and Aims (Sociological Society Papers, vols. I. and II.), 1905;
•  Noteworthy Families (Modern Science); And many papers in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, Journals of the Geographical Society and the Anthropological Institute, the Reports of the British Association, the Philosophical Magazine, and Nature.

Galton also edited:

• Hints to Travellers, 1878;
• Life-History Album (British Medical Association), 1884, second edition, 1902;
• Biometrika (edited in consultation with F.G. and W.F.R. Weldon), 1901, etc.; and under his direction was designed a
• Descriptive List of Anthropometric Apparatus, etc., 1887.

LIST OF MEMOIRS

The following Memoirs by the author have been freely made use of in the following pages:

• 1863: The First Steps towards the Domestication of Animals (Journal of Ethnological Society);
• 1871: Gregariousness in Cattle and in Men (Macmillan’s Magazine);
• 1872: Statistical Inquiries into the Efficacy of Prayer (Fortnightly Review);
• 1873: Relative Supplies from Town and Country Families to the Population of Future Generations (Journal of  Statistical Society);
• Hereditary Improvement (Fraser’s Magazine);
• Africa for the Chinese (Times, June 6);
• 1875: Statistics by Intercomparison (Philosophical Magazine);
• Twins, as a Criterion of the Relative Power of Nature and Nurture (Fraser’s Magazine, and Journal of Anthropological Institute);
• 1876: Whistles for Determining the Upper Limits of Audible Sound (S. Kensington Conferences, in connection with the Loan Exhibition of Scientific Instruments, p. 61);
• 1877: Presidential Address to the Anthropological Department of the British Association at Plymouth (Report of British Association);
• 1878: Composite Portraits (Nature, May 23, and Journal of Anthropological Institute);
• 1879: Psychometric Experiments (Nineteenth Century, and Brain, part vi.);
• Generic Images (Nineteenth Century; Proceedings of Royal Institution, with plates);
• Geometric Mean in Vital and Social Statistics (Proceedings of Royal Society);
• 1880: Visualised Numerals (Nature, Jan. 15 and March 25, and Journal of Anthropological Institute);
• Mental Imagery (Fortnightly Review; Mind);
• 1881: Visions of Sane Persons (Fortnightly Review, and Proceedings of Royal Institution);
• Composite Portraiture (Journal of Photographical Society of Great Britain, June 24);
• 1882: Physiognomy of Phthisis (Guy’s Hospital Reports, vol. xxv.);
• Photographic Chronicles from Childhood to Age (Fortnightly Review);
• The Anthropometric Laboratory (Fortnightly Review);
• 1883: Some Apparatus for Testing the Delicacy of the Muscular and other Senses (Journal of Anthropological Institute, 1883, etc.).

Memoirs in Eugenics.

• 1901: Huxley Lecture, Anthropological Institute (Nature, Nov. 1901); Smithsonian Report for 1901 (Washington, p. 523);
• 1904: Eugenics, its Definition, Scope and Aims (Sociological Paper, vol. i., Sociological Institute);
• 1905: Restrictions in Marriage, Studies in National Eugenics, Eugenics as a Factor in Religion (Sociological Papers, vol. ii.);
• 1907: Herbert Spencer Lecture, University of Oxford, on Probability the Foundation of Eugenics.

The following books by the author have been referred or alluded to in the following pages:

• 1853: Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South-Western Africa (Murray);
• 1854: Art of Travel (several subsequent editions, the last in 1872, Murray);
• 1869: Hereditary Genius, its Laws and Consequences (Macmillan);
• 1874: English Men of Science, their Nature and their Nurture (Macmillan).

The novel focuses on the struggles of ex-convict Jean Valjean and his experience of redemption. It examines the nature of law and grace, and expatiates upon the history of France, architecture of Paris, politics, moral philosophy, antimonarchism, justice, religion, and the types and nature of romantic and familial love. The story is historical fiction because it contains factual and historic events. Contrary to what some believe, it does not use the French Revolution as a backdrop. The French Revolution took place in the eighteenth century; Les Miserables takes place in the nineteenth. The only “revolution” depicted is the June Rebellion, a student uprising.

Les Misérables is known to many through its numerous stage and screen adaptations, most notably the stage musical of the same name. The music was composed by Schönberg, and the lyrics were written by Alain Boublil and Jean-Marc Natel, with an English-language libretto by Herbert Kretzmer. Set in early 19th-century France, the plot follows the stories of many characters as they struggle for redemption and revolution. An ensemble that includes prostitutes, student revolutionaries, factory workers, and others joins the lead characters.

The musical opened at the Barbican Centre in London, England on 8 October 1985. It is the longest-running musical in the world. It is also the third longest-running show in Broadway history. In January 2010, it played its ten-thousandth performance in London, at Queen’s Theatre in London’s West End. On 3 October 2010, the show celebrated its 25th anniversary with three productions running in the same city. The original show was running in London’s West End; the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary touring production was running at the original home of the show, London’s Barbican Centre; and the third version, the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary concert at London’s O2 Arena.

The Tony Award-winning score features the song “I Dreamed a Dream“, sung as a solo by the character Fantine during the first act. Numerous artists have covered this song, including Elaine Paige, Neil Diamond, Aretha Franklin, David Essex, Michael Ball, Michael Crawford, and Susan Boyle.

Download Top Albums by Susan Boyle

NOVEL

The Novel “Les Misérables” contains many plots, but the main thread is the story of ex-convict, Jean Valjean (known by his prison number, 24601), who becomes a force for good in the world, but cannot escape his dark past. The novel is divided into five volumes, each volume divided into books, and subdivided into chapters (for a total of three hundred sixty-five chapters). Each chapter is relatively short, usually no longer than a few pages. Nevertheless, the novel as a whole is quite lengthy by modern standards, exceeding 1400 hundred pages in unabridged editions (1900 pages in French).

It also contains what has many times, incorrectly, been considered the longest sentence in a published novel. Within the borders of the novel’s story, Hugo fills many pages with his thoughts on religion, politics, and society, including several lengthy digressions, one being a discussion on enclosed religious orders, one on the construction of the Paris sewers, another being on argot, and most famously, his retelling of the Battle of Waterloo.

The first two volumes of Les Misérables were published on 3 April 1862, heralded by a massive advertising campaign; the remainder of the novel appeared on 15 May 1862. At the time, Victor Hugo enjoyed a reputation as one of France’s foremost poets, and the appearance of the novel was a highly anticipated event. Critical reactions were wide-ranging and often negative; some critics found the subject matter immoral, others complained of its excessive sentimentality, and still others were disquieted by its apparent sympathy with the revolutionaries. The Goncourt brothers expressed their great dissatisfaction, judging the novel artificial and disappointing. Flaubert could find within it “neither truth nor greatness.” French poet Charles Baudelaire reviewed the work glowingly in newspapers, but in private castigated it as “tasteless and inept.”

The book was a great commercial success. The shortest correspondence in history is between Hugo and his publisher Hurst & Blackett in 1862. It is said Hugo was on vacation when Les Misérables (which is over 1200 pages) was published. He telegraphed the single-character message “?” to his publisher, who replied with a single “!”. First translated into foreign languages (including Italian, Greek, and Portuguese) the same year it originally appeared, it proved popular not only in France, but across Europe. It has been a popular book ever since it was published, and was a great favourite among the Confederate soldiers of the American Civil War, who occasionally called themselves “Lee’s Miserables” (a reference to their deteriorating conditions under General Robert E. Lee). Its popularity continues to this day, and many view it as one of the most important novels ever written.

PLOT
Volume I – Fantine

Fantine – A Beautiful Parisian grisette abandoned with a small child by her lover Félix Tholomyès. Fantine leaves her daughter Cosette in the care of the Thénardiers, innkeepers in a village called Montfermeil. Unfortunately, Mme. Thénardier spoils her own daughters and abuses Cosette. Fantine finds work at Monsieur Madeleine’s factory, and being illiterate, has other people write her letters to the Thénardiers. A female supervisor who discovers that she is an unwed mother fires her. To meet repeated demands for money from the Thénardiers, she sells her hair, then her two front teeth, and finally turns to prostitution. She becomes ill with a disease that may be tuberculosis. Valjean learns of her plight when Javert arrests her for attacking a man who called her insulting names and threw snow down her back, and sends her to a hospital. As Javert confronts Valjean in her hospital room, because her illness has made her so weak, she dies of shock after Javert reveals that Valjean is a convict and hasn’t brought her daughter Cosette to her (after the doctor encouraged that incorrect belief that Jean Valjean’s recent absence was because he was bringing her daughter to her).

[Alert: The contents below may contain spoilers]

The story starts in 1815 in Digne The peasant Jean Valjean has just been released from imprisonment in the Bagne of Toulon after nineteen years (five for stealing bread for his starving sister and her family, and fourteen more for numerous escape attempts). Upon being released, he is required to carry a yellow passport that marks him as a prisoner, despite having already paid his debt to society by serving his time in prison. Rejected by innkeepers, who do not want to take in a convict, Valjean sleeps on the street. This makes him even angrier and more bitter. However, the benevolent Bishop Myriel, the bishop of Digne, takes him in and gives him shelter. In the middle of the night, he steals Bishop Myriel’s silverware and runs away. He is caught and brought back by the police, but Bishop Myriel rescues him by claiming that the silverware was a gift and at that point gives him his two silver candlesticks as well, chastising him to the police for leaving in such a rush that he forgot these most valuable pieces. After the police leave, Bishop Myriel then “reminds” him of the promise, which Valjean has no memory of making, to use the silver candlesticks to make an honest man of himself. Valjean broods over the Bishop’s words. Purely out of habit, he steals a 40-sous coin from chimney-sweep Petit Gervais and chases the boy away. Soon afterwards, he repents and decides to follow Bishop Myriel’s advice. He searches the city in panic for the child whose money he stole. At the same time, his theft is reported to the authorities, who now look for him as a repeat offender. If Valjean is caught, he will be forced to spend the rest of his life in prison, so he hides from the police.

Six years pass and Valjean, having adopted the alias of Monsieur Madeleine to avoid capture, has become a wealthy factory owner and is appointed mayor of his adopted town of Montreuil-sur-Mer (referred to as “M— Sur M—” in the abridged version). While walking down the street one day, he sees a gentleman named “Fauchelevent” pinned under the wheels of his cart. When no one volunteers to lift the cart, even for pay, he decides to rescue Old Fauchelevent himself. He crawls underneath the cart and manages to lift it, freeing him. The town’s police inspector, Inspector Javert, who was an adjutant guard at the Bagne of Toulon during Valjean’s incarceration, becomes suspicious of the mayor after witnessing his heroics. He knows the ex-prisoner Jean Valjean is also capable of such strength.

Years earlier in Paris, a grisette named “Fantine” was very much in love with a gentleman named “Félix Tholomyès.” His friends, Listolier, Fameuil, and Blachevelle were also paired with Fantine’s friends Dahlia, Zéphine, and Favourite. The men later abandon the women as a joke, leaving Fantine to care for Tholomyès’ daughter, Cosette, by herself. When Fantine arrives at Montfermeil, she leaves Cosette in the care of the Thénardiers, a corrupt innkeeper and his selfish, cruel wife. Fantine is unaware that they abuse her daughter and use her as forced labor for their inn, and continues to try to pay their growing, extortionate and fictitious demands for Cosette’s “upkeep.” She is later fired from her job at Jean Valjean’s factory, due to the discovery of her daughter, who was born out of wedlock. Meanwhile, the Thénardiers’ letters and monetary demands continue to grow. In desperation, Fantine sells her hair, her two front teeth, and is forced to resort to prostitution to pay for her daughter’s “care.” Fantine is also slowly dying from an unnamed disease (probably tuberculosis). While roaming the streets, a dandy named “Bamatabois” harasses Fantine and puts snow down her back. She reacts by attacking him. Javert sees this and arrests Fantine. She begs to be released so that she can provide for her daughter, but Javert sentences her to six months in prison. Valjean, hearing her story, intervenes and orders Javert to release her.

Javert strongly refuses but Valjean persists and prevails. Valjean, feeling responsible because his factory turned her away, promises Fantine that he will bring Cosette to her. He takes her to a hospital.
Later, Javert comes to see Valjean again. Javert admits he had accused him of being Jean Valjean to the French authorities after Fantine was freed. However, he tells Valjean that he no longer suspects him because the authorities have announced that another man has been identified as the real Jean Valjean after being arrested and having noticeable similarities. This gentleman’s name is Champmathieu. He is not guilty, but is mistaken. His trial is set the next day. At first, Valjean is torn whether to reveal himself, but decides to do so to save the innocent gentleman. He goes to the trial and reveals his true identity, but Javert does not arrest him. Valjean then returns to Montreuil-sur-Mer to see Fantine, followed by Javert, who confronts him at her hospital room. After Javert grabs Valjean, Valjean asks for three days to bring Cosette to Fantine, but Javert refuses. Fantine discovers that Cosette is not at the hospital and fretfully asks where she is. Javert orders her to be quiet, and then reveals to her Valjean’s real identity. Shocked, and with the severity of her illness, she falls back in her bed and dies. Valjean goes to Fantine, speaks to her in an inaudible whisper, kisses her hand, and then leaves with Javert. Fantine’s body is later cruelly thrown in a public grave.

Volume II – Cosette

Cosette – The illegitimate daughter of Fantine and Tholomyès. From approximately the age of three to the age of eight, she is beaten and forced to be a drudge by the Thénardiers. After Fantine dies, Valjean ransoms her from the Thénardiers and she becomes his adopted daughter. Nuns in a convent in Paris educate her. She later grows up to become very beautiful. She falls in love with Marius Pontmercy, and marries him at the end of the novel.

Valjean manages to escape, only to be recaptured and sentenced to death. This was commuted by the king to penal servitude for life. While being sent to the prison at Toulon, a military port, Valjean saves a sailor about to fall from the ship’s rigging. The crowd begins to call “This man must be pardoned!” but when the authorities reject the crowd’s pleas, Valjean fakes a slip and falls into the ocean to escape, relying on the belief that he has drowned.

Valjean arrives at Montfermeil on Christmas Eve. He finds Cosette fetching water in the woods alone and walks with her to the inn. After ordering a meal, he observes the Thénardiers’ abusive treatment of her. He also witnesses their pampered daughters Éponine and Azelma treating Cosette badly as well when they tell on her to their mother for holding their abandoned doll. Upon seeing this, Valjean goes out and returns a moment later holding an expensive new doll. He offers it to Cosette. At first, she is unable to comprehend that the doll really is for her, but then happily takes it. This results in Mme. Thénardier becoming furious with Valjean, while Thénardier dismisses it, informing her that he can do as he wishes as long as he pays them. It also causes Éponine and Azelma to become envious of Cosette.

The next morning on Christmas Day, Valjean informs the Thénardiers that he wants to take Cosette with him. Mme. Thénardier immediately accepts, while Thénardier pretends to have love and concern for Cosette and how reluctant he is to give her up. Valjean pays 1,500 francs to them, and he and Cosette leave the inn. However, Thénardier, hoping to swindle more out of Valjean, runs after them, holding the 1,500 francs, and tells Valjean he wants Cosette back. He informs Valjean that he cannot release Cosette without a note from the mother. Valjean hands Thénardier a letter, which is signed by Fantine. Thénardier then orders Valjean to pay a thousand crowns, but Valjean and Cosette leave. Thénardier regrets to himself that he did not bring his gun, and turns back toward home.

Valjean and Cosette flee to Paris. Valjean rents new lodgings at Gorbeau House, and he and Cosette live there happily. However, Javert discovers Valjean’s lodgings there a few months later. Valjean takes Cosette and they try to escape from Javert. They soon successfully find shelter in the Petit-Picpus convent with the help of Fauchelevent, the man whom Valjean rescued and who is a gardener for the convent. Valjean also becomes a gardener and Cosette becomes a student.

=========================
Five Stars REVIEW & Tips
=========================

Having not read many literature books in my lifetime, undertaking to read one of the finest piece of work ever written is a challenge.

If you are like me and have read the reviews on Amazon before tackling this gigantic novel then I do not need to go on about how great this book is and what it is all about.

Also, if like me, you are a beginner in the world of fine literature, the following are a few tips I would give to those who haven’t read Les Miserables. Here goes:

1. Get the book and do not be intimidated by its size. It is huge but the chapters are not very long.

2. Make sure to buy the Signet Classic version translated by Lee Fahnestock and Norman MacAfee (ISBN 0-451-5256-4). One reviewer said that this was the best version available and I totally agree with that. This is the new version based on the 19th Century Charles E. Wilbour translation. I had another version of this book and this one is by far the only completely unabridged paperback and also more reader-friendly.

3. Have a dictionary handy as there are many words that need translation.

4. Knowing the French language/history is a bonus but not required.

5. Have patience – this book will require time to read and when I say read, I mean savor each word. Do not read hastily or skip over parts that you think are not important. Yes, Mr. Hugo is very meticulous and detail-oriented in his description of characters, things and places but by reading and in some cases (like me), re-reading you will realize that they were written because they are essential to the plot of this book. Also make sure that when you are reading the book, there are no distractions, i.e., tv, radio…as this book requires total concentration in order to fully appreciate it.

6. Do not be tempted to see the movie or show instead of reading the book. Read the book first and then go see the show or watch the movie if you want to. Be prepared to be disappointed with movie/musical as they cannot convey the, emotion, wisdom, love, etc… contained in the written version. Seeing the movie/musical instead or reading the book is like watching a Yankees game on TV instead of being at the stadium in NYC cheering along with the rest of the fans. Well you get my drift….

7. Be prepared to be changed by this book. No, it is not the Bible but it does deal with all aspect of human emotions and by reading it, you will want to be a better person. I know I do!!!

With that being said, enjoy the book as it is a reading experience that you will not soon forget.

——
This review is from: Les Misérables (Signet Classics) (Mass Market Paperback)
Useful Tips for Reading Les Miserables, August 9, 2005
By Mitzi “Ditsy Mitzi” (Bristol)

I. SMALL SOULS.
II. THE LATER LIFE.
III. THE TWILIGHT OF THE SOULS.
IV. DR. ADRIAAN

Translated by
ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS

This book is the series of four novels describing the fortunes of the Van Lowe family and known in Holland by the generic title The Books of the Small Souls. It was translated from the Dutch of Louis Couperus, the foremost novelist in a country which has lately had the good sense to join the Berne Convention by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos and published in 1914. Represents in digital format by a group of volunteers.

From The Translator in The Small Souls’s Preface:

Friends who have seen my version in manuscript suggest to me that certain details of the action and dialogue strike an exotic note to English ears and may therefore need some interpretation. But I could not bring myself to burden a work of fiction with an array of foot-notes nor to believe that it is really necessary to explain to readers of Couperus’ fellow-countryman, “Maarten Maartens,” that Dutch men and women of the upper classes still call their parents “Papa” and “Mamma,” as the English did in the sixties, and still drink tea after dinner, as the English did in the forties; that, in Holland, persons of quality are not addressed by their titles in conversation; that it is not quite correct, or that it is at least a departure from the aristocratic tradition, for a lady of family not to wash up her own breakfast-china at the table; that the Dutch speak of Java as India and sometimes marry native wives, who, nihilo obstante, are “received” by the “family” at home.

Small Souls is the first of a series of four novels describing the fortunes of the Van Lowe family and known in Holland by the generic title of The Books of the Small Souls. The remainder will be translated and published if and as the antecedent volumes find favour with English and American readers. They are called: The Later Life, The Twilight of the Souls and Dr. Adriaan.

Now you can read them all in this series:

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Review:
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From “NOVELS AND NOVELISTS” by KATHERINE MANSFIELD
——–
The books of the small souls:
The Later Life—The Twilight of the Souls—Doctor Adriaan. — By Louis Couperus.
Translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos

Those of us who are seriously interested in contemporary fiction cannot afford to disregard these admirably translated novels by the famous Dutch author. It is stated in an explanatory note that they can be read independently and separately, but that is, we think, to miss the peculiar interest of Mr. Couperus’ achievement. True, the first book, which was published some years ago and which bears the covering title of the series ‘Small Souls,’ may be considered as complete in itself, but it is also the key to these three that follow after; and although apart from them, it may and it does strike us as very brilliant, very sensitive and amazingly vivid and fresh, it is only when we look back upon it and see it in its rightful place in relation to the others that we recognize the full significance of the qualities we admire.

We do not know anything in English literature with which to compare this delicate and profound study of a passionately united and yet almost equally passionately divided family. Little by little, by delicate stages, yet without any preliminary explanations or reserves, we are taken into the very heart of the matter. The troubling question which would seem to lie so heavy upon the pen of many a modern writer: ‘How much can I afford to take for granted? How much dare I trust to the imagination of the reader?’ is answered here. We are too often inclined to think it may be solved by technical accomplishment, but that is not enough; the reason why Mr. Couperus can afford to dismiss the question, to wave PAGE 206it aside and to take everything for granted, is because of the strength of his imaginative vision. By that we mean it is impossible in considering these books not to be conscious of the deep breath the author has taken; he has had, as it were, a vision of the Van Lowe family, and he has seen them as souls—small souls—at the mercy of circumstance, life, fate. He has realized that that which keeps them together, the deep impulse which unites them through everything, is apprehension. The real head of the family, the grim, ghostly shadow whose authority they never question, is Fear. So, as we speak of the idea underlying a poem, we may say that fear is the idea underlying these novels. If we listen deeply enough we can hear this unquiet heart of the Van Lowe family throbbing quickly, and it is because it is never for a moment still that the author succeeds in keeping our interest passionately engaged. We are constantly aware of the vision, the idea; it is the secret that he permits us to share with him, and in the end it seems to give way to a deeper secret still.

In the first of these four great glimpses of the Van Lowe family the home is already empty. Some of the children are married with families of their own, and all are scattered, but the mother still has the power of calling them all under her wing every Sunday evening; and here it is that we meet them all quickened, all stirring because Mamma has asked them to take back Constance, a sister who disgraced them and who has just come back from abroad because her homesickness was worse than she could bear. She has come back because she cannot exist without family life, that precious exchange of tenderness and sympathy, intimacy and ease. Her sin was that years ago, in Rome, she betrayed her elderly husband with a young Dutch nobleman, and there was a divorce. But he has been her husband for years and their son is now a big boy: Constance imagines that all is long since forgotten and forgiven. Her own family, her own sisters and brothers, could not nourish a grudge against her. In their reaction PAGE 207to her presence among them we have the measure of the Van Lowe family, and we learn too that her real reason for returning was not her love of them all, but that she had failed to find happiness in her second marriage and was not strong enough to face unhappiness alone.

It is astonishing with what power and certainty the author gives us, in this book, the whole complicated Van Lowe family, how he suggests their weakness under their apparent strength, their wastefulness under their apparent reserve. Paul, the exquisite, with his mania for order, and his sense of the exquisite wasted upon ties and the arrangement of his wash-hand stand; Ernst, who lavishes his pity and sensitiveness upon ancient pots and books; Dorine, whom nobody wants, spending herself upon things that do not matter, and Constance, with her longing to be loved thwarted by her jealousy and pettiness. Apart from them all there is Addie, Constance’s little son, who looks at all that is happening with his grave, childish eyes and sees them as they are. This little boy, who is ten years old in the first book and is the Doctor Adriaan of the last of the series, is the hero, if hero he can be called. It is through him that Constance is received back into her family, and it is he who prevents his mother and father from making a tragedy of their lives. Until the last book he seems to be quite untouched by the terror of life and the weakness of the others. But in ‘Doctor Adriaan,’ just when we imagine that if the burden is to be lifted it will be lifted by Addie, the famous young doctor, the healer, it is quite wonderfully suggested that he too has not escaped. He feels at times a sense of dreadful insufficiency. He does not feel strong enough to stand alone, and turns to his foolish, charming father for support.

‘The Later Life’ is concerned almost entirely with the blossoming of a late love between Constance and a man as old as she, side by side with the very first early love of one of her nieces, Marienne. Under the spell of her feelings Constance becomes young again, but she does not become PAGE 208a girl again. Marienne, with her recklessness and her small laugh like a shake of silver bells, is cruel and violent. She must be happy; she will be happy. But Constance enters into a silent kingdom where everything is illusion and the air breathes peace. But the end, again, is like a question; it is a chord struck softly which does not close the phrase, but leaves us wondering.

In ‘The Twilight of the Soul’ the chief figure is of one of the brothers, Gerrit, a great bluff, burly, healthy brute of a fellow who is haunted by the feeling that there is a worm with legs eating up his marrow. He has a charming little wife, nine little children, and everyone knows him and loves and laughs at him, and there is that worm—confound it—burrowing away with its legs and licking up his marrow. This is an amazing, masterly study in pity and terror. It is the flaming intolerable core of the book, and round it, retreating into the same shadow as he, we have Ernst and Henri and old Mrs. Van Lowe. It is as though the menace that has threatened the family so long, the immense lukewarm family, is realized at last and the Lord spews them out of his mouth. Yet how lingeringly, with what an art are they spewed! It remains in ‘Doctor Adriaan’ to gather up all that are left and to put them in Constance’s care. But with them is Addie’s wife, a great insensitive young woman who has no patience with their tragedies and thinks them all half mad…. The Van Lowe family has fallen; Mathilda treads it under her heavy foot and it does not stir. Even Addie thinks it is time.

But space does not permit us to deal with these books at length. There is an angle from which we seem to see them as the strangest landscapes, small, low-lying country swept continually by immense storms of wind and rain, with dark menacing clouds for ever pulling over and casting a weighty shadow that lifts and drifts away only to fall again.

(June 18, 1920.)
———–
Source: THE NEW ZEALAND ELECTRONIC TEXT CENTRE

The name Colorado was named for the Colorado River, which early Spanish explorers named the Rio Colorado for the red colored (Spanish: Colorado) silt the river carried from the mountains. On August 1, 1876, U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant signed a proclamation admitting Colorado as the 38th state. Colorado is nicknamed the “Centennial State” because it was admitted to the Union as the 38th state in 1876, the centennial year of the United States Declaration of Independence.

Colorado is noted for its vivid landscape of mountains, forests, high plains, mesas, canyons, plateaus, rivers, and desert lands. The 2010 United States Census tallied the state population at 5,029,196 as of April 1, 2010, an increase of 16.92% since the 2000 United States Census. Denver is the capital and the most populous city of Colorado. Residents of the state are properly known as “Coloradans”, although the archaic term “Coloradoan” is still used.

Colorado is also known for its Southwest and Rocky Mountain cuisine. Mexican restaurants are throughout the state. Denver, Colorado is known for steak, but now has a diverse culinary scene with many top-tier restaurants.

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PREFACE

It is Emerson’s beautiful thought that all true history is biography, and that men are but the pages of history. In felicitous language the author has pictured a period that is indeed the bright romance of American history. It is the story of the discovery of a new Continent in the Western Seas; the story of a graceful and cultured people of a mighty world-power in the Fifteenth Century; the story of the dream of a great Western Empire to be founded in the New World, where would be revived all the pomps and chivalries of Castile’s ancient court; the story of the fading of that dream in the splendor of the great world-idea of the self-government of man carried by the Pilgrim Fathers to Plymouth Rock in 1620; the story that in the great drama of life man is ever changing from the old into the new, and from the bad into the better in unceasing, unchanging, inevitable evolution; the story of early Colorado, whose ancient Capital, Santa Fe,—in the sense that Colorado is a part of the old Spanish country—was the first white settlement west of the Floridas upon all this Western Continent within the present domain of the United States.

But more than all, it is a story of the human touch of those still living and of great empire builders not long since passed away, whose “hands bent the arch of the new heavens” over our beloved State of Colorado; whose eyes were filled with far-away visions and their hearts with sublime faith; pioneers and history makers of whom we would say as Cinneas said when asked by his master Pyrrhus after his return from his Embassy at Rome, “What did the Roman Senate look like?”

“An assembly of Kings!” replied Cinneas.

Wendell Phillips, in the greatest of all his lectures, pictures the “Muse of history dipping her pen in the sunlight and writing in the clear blue” above all other names the name of his hero “Toussaint l’Ouverture.” The author in these pages which so graphically portray the early history of our State would not write the name of Colorado above any sister state; but we can catch between his lines the deep undertones of the music of the Union, which overmaster all sectional notes in the thought, that Colorado is a glorious part of it all.

And so it is enough that we read in the title of this book these magic words, as if traced in the clear sunlight of our mountain skies, “Colorado—The Bright Romance of American History.”

J. F. Tuttle, Jr.

CHAPTER I

THE OLD, THE NEW, AND THE OCEAN BETWEEN.

1504, The great Queen Isabella was dead. She had died amidst the splendor of the richest and most powerful Court on earth, beloved by some for her noble qualities, and execrated by others for her tyrannical laws, for the heartlessness and cruelty she had practiced, for the wars she had kindled, and for the lives she had sacrificed. Because of the turbulence of the elements, the superstitious believed that her unconquerable spirit refused to be tranquilized even by death. Darkness lay upon the world, and the slowly moving funeral cortege made its way the three hundred miles to Granada, menaced by the lightning’s flash, and accompanied by the thunder’s roar, the rain and the hurricane, and the floods which swept men and horses to their death. At last, after thirty years of a masterful and memorable reign, Isabella lay at rest in the marvelously beautiful Alhambra, the burial place of her choice which she had wrested from the Moorish Kings. And Ferdinand ruled in her stead.

1506, Less than two years, and there was another notable death in Spain. The far-seeing eyes of a kingly man looked out upon the world for the last time. The active hands of a great navigator lay still, folded over the courageous heart that had long been broken; the heart that had been thrilled by the acclaim of the populace, and then chilled by the frowns of its sovereigns; the hands that had been bedecked with jewels by Ferdinand and Isabella, and later laden by them with chains. Columbus, the admiral of the ocean, who had joined two worlds by his genius and accomplished an event whose magnitude and grandeur history can never equal, and who had filled the center of a stage, brilliant with the famous actors of his time, had died; died in poverty and neglect; instead of chimes chanting a requiem in his praise, there was the rattle of the chains his hands had worn, as they went down into his sepulchre for burial with him according to his wish. Even his grave remained unmarked for ten years, until public opinion forced Ferdinand to a tardy recognition of his duty in the erection of a monument in honor of one of the greatest men of any age; a man great in thought and great in action; a man with such a mighty faith that we stand appalled at its mightiness!

Isabella left a united country; a country at the pinnacle of greatness. She left a highly organized army; an army wrought out of a fragment of incompetency. She raised the standard of science and the arts, and advanced the cause of morality. But the greatest and most enduring monument she erected was the result of the slight encouragement and scant help that she gave to the enthusiastic Italian mendicant, who became the founder of a New World and whose fame will continue undimmed to the end of time.

1516, “The King is dead” fell upon Ferdinand’s unhearing ears. “Long live the King” greeted the advent of Charles, his successor. Charles, who was the son of the unfortunate Joanna, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella; Charles I, King of Spain; Charles V, Emperor of Germany; Ruler over the kingdom of Naples; Monarch of the New World. Power, such as the world has seldom seen, centered in this man; an empire so vast that it encircled the globe, and upon whose domain military activities never ceased. The cruelties of Spain are proverbial, and they reached their climax under the rule of Ferdinand, Isabella and Charles; and under them the decadence of their nation began, which in four hundred years has never ceased. Now, shorn of every dependency, its power forever destroyed, it lies crushed, humiliated and broken by the greatness of its fall.

And here this sketch leaves Old Spain and we sail away across the ocean five thousand miles, to the New Spain of that period, in a ship whose sails flap lazily in the breeze, taking more weeks then than days now by the modern methods of this enlightened age.

1519, Hernando Cortez sprang from a noble but impoverished family. Educated for the law, he chose an adventurous life instead, and at the age of nineteen left Spain for San Domingo to try his fortunes in the New World, resulting in his brilliant conquest of Mexico; a country whose early history we can only imagine. The unknowable is there; for its secrets lie buried beneath the weight of centuries. Tragedy is there; for what derelict, never heard of more, dropped in from over the seas and cast its human wreckage on those unknown shores for the beginning of a nation? Who were those who may have been lost to home and friends and wandered in from Asia over that narrow strip of land long ago submerged? Whence they came, whatever their nation or color, they were human beings, with thoughts and affections like ours, whose beginnings we can never fathom. They grew in numbers, had flocks and herds, and gold and jewels. They had tribal governments, with differing customs and languages. They had the wandering habit. The streams, the mountains, and the plains beckoned them and they came and went, happy, care-free and prosperous. Some one among them said: “Let us all come together and unite as a people; establish a uniform government; build a city, and select some one of our number to rule over us.” And it was done. Mexico City was built and became the Capital. Montezuma was made the ruler. They had laws and Courts of Justice; they had well-constructed and highly-decorated buildings, with architectural features the equal of some European structures prized for their beauty and durability. Their streets were laid out symmetrically, and their parks and landscape gardening added to the city’s attractiveness. They had a system of canals and well-developed agriculture; an organized army and thoroughly equipped ships. Whence came this high civilization? We can never know. We only know that it existed. Two million people lived in and adjacent to Mexico City. They were rich, intelligent and contented, until the coming of Cortez; and when he reached the shores of Mexico in the Spring of 1519 it was a memorable day for them. He came in ten ships with six hundred Spanish soldiers. He disembarked, and when the last man was ashore and all the ammunition and guns and supplies were landed, he performed a feat of courage bordering on the sublime. He set his ships on fire, and he stood with his resolute men and saw them burn to the water’s edge, knowing that the flame and smoke and destruction meant for each that he must conquer or die. And they marched away, a handful against a host, and they won!

But the fall of Mexico, like the fate of most nations, came from within and not from without. What could six hundred do against a united two million. That was where Cortez shone. To create discord, distrust and jealousy; to make them fight each other; to unite the disaffected under his own banner, was the work of a diplomat and general, and he was both. To their everlasting disgrace, the dissatisfied of the native race accomplished for Cortez the downfall of their own nation. And when, two years after he began his destructive warfare, the City of Mexico had been utterly destroyed; when a race had been subjugated; had been stripped of its vast treasure of gold and jewels for the greater glorification of the luxurious Court of Spain; had lost thousands by slaughter; then, and not till then, did the insurgents know that they had encompassed their own ruin. They were enslaved by the Spaniards. The last chapter in their national life was written. The Aztecs, as a people, were no more. They were given the name of Mexicans by the Spaniards, for “Mexitl” the national War God of the native race. Mexicans they have continued to this day, and Cortez as Captain General ruled over the Mexican Territory which he called “New Spain.” He set four hundred thousand of the enslaved natives to rebuilding the City of Mexico, but their hearts were in the ruins of the old city, and not in the building of the new—for Cortez saw to it that there should be nothing in the new Spanish city that would remind them of the ancient grandeur of the old. Ten years after its completion there were not a thousand people in it. The old population was melting away, dying off from over-work in the mines to which they had been driven, and where they sickened from disease and hunger and heart yearning for the families from whom they had been forcibly separated, while nearly seven million dollars a year of their earnings were being sent to Spain, taken from the richest silver mines in all the world.

You were great Empire builders, oh Spain! But your wanton cruelty to mankind will forever cloud your glory as the eclipse darkens the sun! You permitted the Inquisition! You pitted strength against helplessness, burned thousands alive, and confiscated their property! You permitted the slaughter of twelve hundred thousand human beings in the West Indies, and never heard their pitiful cry, until the lack of earnings ceased to swell the income of the Crown, and then you carried captives from the mainland to take the place of the dead! You permitted the institution of the American slave trade, which only ended at Appomattox, with the destruction of hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, and millions of money!

The power and fame of Cortez had grown beyond the limit set by the Crown of Spain. Every forceful and successful man in the Dominion of Spain was a marked man; not marked for preferment and encouragement, but marked for humiliation and disgrace. The battles that Cortez had won for the King were forgotten; the treasure he had sent home counted for naught; and for the territory he had subjugated, there was no appreciation. His authority was ended. An officer and soldiers came from Spain to take him back, not with honor, but in ignominy. He arrested the officer, and induced the soldiers to join his army. He was so powerful that he thought he could be King of the New World. Finally, threats and promises secured his peaceable return to Spain, where all promises were broken, and his life was tempest-tossed until he died.

1528, Then Nuno de Guzman was named Governor General of New Spain. He started out to duplicate the successes of Cortez, whose ability he lacked, as well as the opportunity. He hunted in vain for another Mexico City to conquer and despoil. He pushed Northward hunting for riches, slaughtering the natives, burning their villages, and laying waste their country. He conquered a great territory on the western coast of Upper Mexico, along the Gulf of California, which he called “New Gallicia.” His rule was so ruthless, cruel and desolating, that even Spain, hardened as she was to suffering, was shocked with his barbarous persecution of the natives, and after seven years, a warrant was sent out from Spain for his arrest and trial, on charges of inhuman cruelty. He was deprived of his office, taken to Mexico City, held there a prisoner for several years, and was then returned to Spain.

1535, Don Antonio de Mendoza, known as the “Good Viceroy,” succeeded to the rule of Mexico, and put in practice a new policy, one not before tried in the New World, that of kindness. It had come too late for many, for the dead were everywhere, and the living had settled into a degree of hopelessness that a whole decade of kind treatment could do little toward counteracting. Three hundred and seventy-six years have passed since that day, and the scars of those sixteen years of Spanish murder and plunder have not yet been removed.

With which our narrative ends as to the mis-rule of New Spain.

1536, Pamfilo de Narvaez had been made Governor of Florida in 1527 by the Spanish Government, with a grant to explore and colonize a vast territory bordering on the Gulf of Mexico. He outfitted in Spain, sailed to Cuba where he repaired his vessels, thence into the Gulf of Mexico, meeting with storms that drove him out of his course, and so confused his mariners that they lost their reckoning. Consequently, he was left by his ships with his three hundred men and horses on the coast of Florida, instead of on the coast of Texas, as he thought. They rode away into the wilderness and nearly all to their death. Their wanderings, hardships and sufferings, the mind cannot conceive nor the pen describe. They worked to the West and North, crossing rivers and swamps, plains and mountains, through heat and cold, hungry and finally starving when their last horse had been used for food, mistreated by hostile Indians, lost and in despair. Beating their spurs into nails, they made boats, and using the hides from their horses for sails, they were borne down one of the Gulf Rivers, and out into the swift ocean current where they were carried to sea and drowned—all save four. Eight years after they had disembarked on the Florida Coast, these four were found by some slave catchers, away up on the Coast of California, whither they had wandered, and taken to Mexico City. Their sufferings had been so great, that when they reached civilization, they could no longer appreciate comforts. They continued to sleep on the ground, to eat unwholesome food, and to cling to the primitive habits they had formed. Slavery had in the meantime become so common, that Mendoza bought of the three Spaniards the negro, Estevanico, to act as guide to the far North, to which country Mendoza proposed to send an expedition.

1539, Fray Marcos, a Priest from Italy, had been a participant in the conquest of Peru, was a historian and theologian, picturesque in appearance and language, and was next to Mendoza in power. He was selected to go North on a visit preliminary to the proposed expedition, with the negro as guide. Rumors were in the air, and growing all the time, of wonderful cities and untold treasure in the North. Even the three returned Spaniards, rested from their wanderings, hinted at the fabulous wealth of which they persuaded themselves they had heard. The tales grew with the telling, so that Fray Marcos felt that he must be able to verify these reports, which he did, with the result that when the Coronado expedition found they did not exist, he had the great misfortune to ever after be called the “Lying Monk.”

CHAPTER II
CORONADO.

COLORADO – THE BRIGHT ROMANCE OF AMERICAN HISTORY

Although trained as a lawyer, Hugo wanted to be a writer and as well as producing poems and plays, he founded and edited a literary journal Conservateur Littéraire (1819-21). Hugo was a French poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist and exponent of the Romantic movement in France.

In France, Hugo’s literary fame comes first from his poetry but also rests upon his novels and his dramatic achievements. Among many volumes of poetry, Les Contemplations and La Légende des siècles stand particularly high in critical esteem, and Hugo is sometimes identified as the greatest French poet. Outside France, his best-known works are the novels Les Misérables and Notre-Dame de Paris(also known in English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame).

Though a committed royalist when he was young, Hugo’s views refined as the decades passed; he became a passionate supporter of republicanism, and his work touches upon most of the political and social issues and artistic trends of his time. He is buried in the Panthéon.

Hugo’s first book of poems, Odes et Ballades, was published in 1822. This was followed by Han d’Islande (1823), Nouvelles Odes (1824), Bug-Jagal (1824) and a second set of Odes et Ballades (1826).

Hugo political beliefs became increasingly more radical and in 1827 he published the verse drama, Cromwell. In the play’s long preface, Hugo argued that literature should deal with the contradictions of human existence. This was followed by Orientales (1828), The Last Days of a Condemned (1829), a protest novel about capital punishment, and Hernani (1830), a play about an outlaw in conflict with society.

In 1831 Hugo published his novel, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831). Set in medieval Paris, the book’s central character, Quasimodo, captured the public’s imagination and the book became a great success. Over the next few years Hugo wrote several plays including The King’s Fool (1832), Angelo, Tyrant of Padua (1835) and Ruy Blas (1838). He also published four books of poems: Autumn Leaves (1831), Songs of Twilight (1835), Inner Voices (1837) and Sunlight and Shadows (1840).

Hugo’s became increasingly involved in republican politics and after the 1848 Revolution he was elected a deputy for Paris in the Constituent Assembly. Hugo became interested in the philosophy of pacifism and in 1851 took part in the International Peace Congress in Paris where he called for the creation of a United States of Europe. Hugo was also a member of the Legislative Assembly but was forced to flee the country in 1852 after Emperor Napoleon III gained power.

Hugo lived in Brussels for a year before moving to the island of Jersey in the English Channel. Expelled from Jersey in 1855, Hugo went to live on the neighbouring island of Guernsey.

In exile Hugo produced Napoléon le Petit (1852), Les Châtiments (1853), Les Contemplations (1856) and the extremely popular novel, Les Misérables (1862), a story of a man who has been imprisoned for 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread.

Hugo’s later works included the essay, William Shakespeare (1864) and three novels, The Toilers of the Sea (1866), The Man Who Laughs (1869) and Ninety-Three (1874). Victor Hugo died in Paris on 22nd May, 1885.

——–

His Life

Hugo was the third, illegitimate, son of Joseph Léopold Sigisbert Hugo (1774–1828) and Sophie Trébuchet (1772–1821); his brothers were Abel Joseph Hugo (1798–1855) and Eugène Hugo (1800–1837). He was born in 1802 in Besançon (in the region of Franche-Comté) and lived in France for the majority of his life. However, he decided to live in exile as a result of Napoleon III’s Coup d’état at the end of 1851. Hugo lived briefly in Brussels (1851) then moved to the Channel Islands, firstly to Jersey (1852–55) and then to the smaller island of Guernsey (1855–1870). Although a general amnesty was proclaimed by Napoleon III in 1859; Hugo stayed in exile, only ending it when Napoleon III was forced from power as a result of the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. Hugo returned again to Guernsey (1872–73), after suffering through the Siege of Paris, before finally returning to France for the remainder of his life.

Biography

Pogany was born in Szeged, Hungary. He studied at Budapest Technical University and in Munich and Paris. Pogany came to America via Paris and London. While in London, he produced his four masterpieces, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1910), Richard Wagner’s Tannhauser (1911), Parsifal (1912) and Lohengrin (1913). In 1918 he illustrated a children’s retelling of Homer, The Adventures of Odysseus and the Tale of Troy written by Padraic Colum.

Pogany’s best known works consist of illustrations of classic myths and legends done in the Art Nouveau style. He also worked as an art director on several Hollywood films, including Fashions of 1934 and Dames.

Pogany authored three art instruction books: Willy Pogany’s Drawing Lessons, Willy Pogany’s Oil Painting Lessons, and Willy Pogany’s Water Color Lessons, Including Gouache. Asked how to say his name, he told the Literary Digest that in America it was po-GAH-ny. “However, in my native Hungary this name is pronounced with the accent on the first syllable with a slightly shorter o and the gany is as the French -gagne (the y is silent)”: PO-gahn.

In his 1952 autobiography Witness, Whittaker Chambers described “Willi Pogany” (“long a scene designer at the Metropolitan Opera House”) as the brother of Joseph Pogany.

Willy Pogany sued Chambers for $1 million but lost in court and appeals. According to Time magazine, “A lower court had found that Chambers, in his mistaken identification, had not maliciously implied that Willy was closely associated with ‘a Communist leader and spy’,” who had been “once (until Stalin liquidated him) Communist Hungary’s puppet Commissar of War.” Pogany’s public art can be seen on the walls of the Ringling Mansion in Sarasota, FL, the theatre of El Museo del Barrio at 1230 Fifth Ave., and the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre on 45th St in NYC. Pogany died in Manhattan, New York City.

Biography

Lang was born in Selkirk. He was the eldest of the eight children born to John Lang, the town clerk of Selkirk, and his wife Jane Plenderleath Sellar, who was the daughter of Patrick Sellar, factor to the first duke of Sutherland. On 17 April 1875 he married Leonora Blanche Alleyne, the youngest daughter of C. T. Alleyne of Clifton and Barbados.
He was educated at Selkirk grammar school, Loretto, and at the Edinburgh Academy, St Andrews University and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he took a first class in the final classical schools in 1868, becoming a fellow and subsequently honorary fellow of Merton College. As a journalist, poet, critic and historian, he soon made a reputation as one of the most able and versatile writers of the day. He died of angina pectoris at the Tor-na-Coille Hotel in Banchory, Banchory, survived by his wife. He was buried in the cathedral precincts at St Andrews.

Professions

Folklore and anthropology

“Rumpelstiltskin,” from Lang’s Fairy Tales.
Lang is now chiefly known for his publications on folklore, mythology, and religion. The earliest of his publications is Custom and Myth (1884). In Myth, Ritual and Religion (1887) he explained the “irrational” elements of mythology as survivals from more primitive forms. Lang’s Making of Religion was heavily influenced by the 18th century idea of the “noble savage”: in it, he maintained the existence of high spiritual ideas among so-called “savage” races, drawing parallels with the contemporary interest in occult phenomena in England. His Blue Fairy Book (1889) was a beautifully produced and illustrated edition of fairy tales that has become a classic. This was followed by many other collections of fairy tales, collectively known as Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books. Lang examined the origins of totemism in Social Origins (1903).

Psychical research

Lang was one of the founders of “psychical research” and his other writings on anthropology include The Book of Dreams and Ghosts (1897), Magic and Religion (1901) and The Secret of the Totem (1905). He served as President of the Society for Psychical Research in 1911.

Classical scholarship

See also: English translations of Homer#Lang
He collaborated with S.H. Butcher in a prose translation (1879) of Homer’s Odyssey, and with E. Myers and Walter Leaf in a prose version (1883) of the Iliad, both still noted for their archaic but attractive style. He was a Homeric scholar of conservative views. Other works include Homer And The Study Of Greek found in Essays In Little (1891), Homer and the Epic (1893); a prose translation of The Homeric Hymns (1899), with literary and mythological essays in which he draws parallels between Greek myths and other mythologies; and Homer and his Age (1906).

Historian

Lang’s writings on Scottish history are characterised by a scholarly care for detail, a piquant literary style, and a gift for disentangling complicated questions. The Mystery of Mary Stuart (1901) was a consideration of the fresh light thrown on Mary, Queen of Scots, by the Lennox manuscripts in the University Library, Cambridge, approving of her and criticising her accusers.
He also wrote monographs on The Portraits and Jewels of Mary Stuart (1906) and James VI and the Gowrie Mystery (1902). The somewhat unfavourable view of John Knox presented in his book John Knox and the Reformation (1905) aroused considerable controversy. He gave new information about the continental career of the Young Pretender in Pickle the Spy (1897), an account of Alestair Ruadh MacDonnell, whom he identified with Pickle, a notorious Hanoverian spy. This was followed by The Companions of Pickle (1898) and a monograph on Prince Charles Edward (1900). In 1900 he began a History of Scotland from the Roman Occupation (1900). The Valet’s Tragedy (1903), which takes its title from an essay on Dumas’s Man in the Iron Mask, collects twelve papers on historical mysteries, and A Monk of Fife (1896) is a fictitious narrative purporting to be written by a young Scot in France in 1429-1431.

Other writings

Lang’s earliest publication was a volume of metrical experiments, The Ballads and Lyrics of Old France (1872), and this was followed at intervals by other volumes of dainty verse, Ballades in Blue China (1880, enlarged edition, 1888), Ballads and Verses Vain (1884), selected by Mr Austin Dobson; Rhymes à la Mode (1884), Grass of Parnassus (1888), Ban and Arrière Ban (1894), New Collected Rhymes (1905).

Lang was active as a journalist in various ways, ranging from sparkling “leaders” for the Daily News to miscellaneous articles for the Morning Post, and for many years he was literary editor of Longman’s Magazine; no critic was in more request, whether for occasional articles and introductions to new editions or as editor of dainty reprints.

He edited The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns (1896), and was responsible for the Life and Letters (1897) of JG Lockhart, and The Life, Letters and Diaries (1890) of Sir Stafford Northcote, 1st Earl of Iddesleigh. Lang discussed literary subjects with the same humour and acidity that marked his criticism of fellow folklorists, in Books and Bookmen (1886), Letters to Dead Authors (1886), Letters on Literature (1889), etc.