Skip to main content
Read page text
page 2
T H I S W E E K No. 6343 October 25 2024 the-tls.co.uk UK £4.50 | USA $8.99 T H E T I M E S L I T E R A R Y S U P P L E M E N T Ana Alicia Garza The uncommercial Dickens | Daniel Johnson Goethe’s cruelty Johnjoe McFadden Richard Dawkins looks to the future | Paula Marantz Cohen Wall St women The real Greek golden age Peter Thonemann on John Ma’s radical reappraisal of ancient history Caryatid Porch of the Erechtheion, Athens © Reynold Mainse/ Design Pics/Gett y Images In this issue T he popular story of the glory that was Greece begins at the monumental Lion Gate of the Bronze Age citadel of Mycenae, attributed to the work of giant Cyclopes by the traveller Pausanias. After an intervening dark age, the narrative con- tinues with the rise of the Greek city-state, which reaches its apogee in the democratic Athens of Pericles, Plato and the Parthenon. A tale of woe follows. Despite the Athenian statesman Demos- thenes’ attempt to rally resistance against Alexander the Great’s father, Philip II, the Greek cities are crushed by the Macedonian tyrant. Two centuries later Rome’s legions deliver the coup de grace. Thereafter the Greek cities linger on in twilight and their ruling oligarchs become servile tax collectors for Caesar. John Ma will have none of it. In Polis, Ma argues that in the “classical” period celebrated by western poets and historians, the Greek cities reached their nadir, not their peak. Vicious class war and 100 years of violent intercity competition and empire-building disfigured this so-called “golden age”. According to Ma, however, the later, convergent model of the Greek polis was blessed with “stability, prosperity and egalitarian self-government” for seven centuries from 350BC. Under the Romans the polis was a partner in the empire, not its victim, and the People’s assembly continued to wield power. Oligarchs, writes Ma, “coexisted with the strong, unyielding constraints of the democratic institutions, instruments and ideology, inherited from the great convergence”. In his TLS review, Peter Thonemann finds himself “shaking my head in astonishment and admiration” while reading Ma’s counterintuitive narrative, and hails Polis as “history-writing at its very best”. In her review of the new Oxford editions of The Uncommercial Traveller, edited by J. H. Alexander, and Nicholas Nickleby, edited by Elizabeth James and Joel J. Brattin with Alexander, Ana Alicia Garza describes Charles Dickens’s defining purpose: “what he absolutely refused to do was to let his readers get away with being mindlessly naive or unaware of hard truths” about the ills of Victorian society. A. N. Wilson has hard truths to tell about Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In Goethe: His Faustian life, reviewed by Daniel Johnson, the man who emerges is “a callous colossus”. As a member of the privy council in Weimar, Goethe upheld a death sentence against an unmarried servant who had killed her baby in desperate circumstances, when even his Duke favoured life imprisonment. In Faust the fictional Gretchen is reprieved for the same crime. MARTIN IVENS Editor Find us on www.the-tls.co.uk Times Literary Supplement @the.tls @TheTLS To buy any book featured in this week’s TLS, go to timesbookshop.co.uk 2 3 LITERATURE 6 LETTERS TO THE EDITOR ANA ALICIA GARZA PIOTR GWIAZDA ELIZABETH BROGDEN The Uncommercial Traveller Charles Dickens; Edited by J. H. Alexander. The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby Charles Dickens; Edited by Elizabeth James and Joel J. Brattin, with J. H. Alexander The Homeless Stefan Żeromski; Translated by Stephanie Kraft Confessions of a Thug Philip Meadows Taylor; Edited by Kim A. Wagner National literatures, Gaia, The Fortsas Hoax, etc 7 ECONOMICS PAULA MARANTZ COHEN She-Wolves – The untold history of women on Wall Street Paulina Bren 8 CLASSICS PETER THONEMANN Polis – A new history of the ancient Greek city-state from the early Iron Age to the end of antiquity John Ma 10 GERMAN LITERATURE DANIEL JOHNSON MARCEL LEPPER 12 BIOGRAPHY TIM WHITMARSH Goethe – His Faustian life A. N. Wilson Goethe und die Juden W. Daniel Wilson Classics, Love, Revolution – The legacies of Luigi Settembrini Andrea Capra and Barbara Graziosi 13 MEMOIRS 13 POEM OONAGH DEVITT TREMBLAY My Good Bright Wolf – A memoir Sarah Moss OLUWASEUN OLAYIWOLA Coast 14 ARTS J. E. SMYTH ROD MENGHAM 16 FICTION MIRANDA FRANCE LILY HERD CHRISTOPHER SHRIMPTON NICHOLAS ROYLE 18 POLITICS & HISTORY LAWRENCE DOUGLAS KEITH M. BROWN Silent Sherlock – Three classic cases (London Film Festival, BFI Southbank) I Followed You to the End Tracey Emin (White Cube Bermondsey) The Last Dream Pedro Almodóvar; Translated by Frank Wynne Nobody’s Empire Stuart Murdoch Journeys and Flowers Mercè Rodoreda; Translated by Nick Caistor and Gala Sicart Olavide Panics Barbara Molinard; Translated by Emma Ramadan No Democracy Lasts Forever – How the Constitution threatens the United States Erwin Chemerinsky From Tudor to Stuart – The regime change from Elizabeth I to James I Susan Doran 20 SCIENCE 22 BIBLIOGRAPHY 23 MUSIC 24 IN BRIEF 26 FILM 27 AFTERTHOUGHTS 28 NB KEITH FRANKISH JOHNJOE MCFADDEN SIMON HOROBIN JOSHUA RICE FLORA WILLSON PHILIPPA SNOW GRAHAM DASELER IAN SANSOM M.C. An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence David W. Bates The Genetic Book of the Dead Richard Dawkins The Medieval Scriptorium – Making books in the Middle Ages Sara J. Charles History in Flames – The destruction and survival of medieval manuscripts Robert Bartlett The Shortest History of Music Andrew Ford Seated Woman Guillaume Apollinaire. Kalmann and the Sleeping Mountain Joachim B. Schmidt. Modern and Contemporary Yorkshire Poetry Kyra Piperides. John Berger Iona Heath. Duelo sin brújula Carme López Mercader. Black Arsenal Clive Chijioke Nwonka and Matthew Harle, editors. Nightshade Mother Gwyneth Lewis How Coppola Became Cage Zach Schonfeld Peerless – Rouben Mamoulian, Hollywood and Broadway Kurt Jensen Manual labour – The golden age of instruction books Fleur Adcock’s reviews, Byron (et al) in Cheltenham, RLS’s pubs Editor MARTIN IVENS (editor@the-tls.co.uk) Deputy Editor ROBERT POTTS (robert.potts@the-tls.co.uk) Associate Editor CATHARINE MORRIS (catharine.morris@the-tls.co.uk) Assistant to the Editor LISA TARLING (lisa.tarling@the-tls.co.uk) Editorial enquiries (queries@the-tls.co.uk) Managing Director JAMES MACMANUS (deborah.keegan@news.co.uk) Advertising Manager JONATHAN DRUMMOND (jonathan.drummond@the-tls.co.uk) Correspondence and deliveries: 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF Telephone for editorial enquiries: 020 7782 5000 Subscriptions: UK/ROW: feedback@the-tls.co.uk 0800 048 4236; US/Canada: custsvc_timesupl@fulcoinc.com 1-844 208 1515 Missing a copy of your TLS: USA/Canada: +1 844 208 1515; UK & other: +44 (0) 203 308 9146 Syndication: 020 7711 7888 enquiries@newssyndication.com The Times Literary Supplement (ISSN 0307661, USPS 021-626) is published weekly, except combined last two weeks of August and December, by The Times Literary Supplement Limited, London, UK, and distributed by FAL Enterprises 38-38 9th Street, Long Island City NY 11101. Periodical postage paid at Flushing NY and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: please send address corrections to TLS, PO Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834 USA. The TLS is a member of the Independent Press Standards Organisation and abides by the standards of journalism set out in the Editors’ Code of Practice. If you think that we have not met those standards, please contact IPSO on 0300 123 2220 or visit www.ipso.co.uk. For permission to copy articles or headlines for internal information purposes contact Newspaper Licensing Agency at PO Box 101, Tunbridge Wells, TN1 1WX, tel 01892 525274, e-mail copy@nla.co.uk. For all other reproduction and licensing inquiries contact Licensing Department, 1 London Bridge St, London, SE1 9GF, telephone 020 7711 7888, e-mail sales@newslicensing.co.uk TLS OCTOBER 25, 2024
page 3
L I T E R A T U R E In the know Hard truths in the essays and fiction of Charles Dickens A R T S / A L A M Y & M U S I C L E B R E C H T © ANA ALICIA GARZA THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER CHARLES DICKENS Edited by J. H. Alexander 560pp. Oxford University Press. £190 (US $245). THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF NICHOLAS NICKLEBY CHARLES DICKENS Edited by Elizabeth James and Joel J. Brattin, with J. H. Alexander 1,122pp. Oxford University Press. £190 (US $245). Tension between knowing and not knowing propels Charles Dickens’s fiction. There are characters who have a sound knowledge of the worst of human nature and use this to their advantage. These are the baddies. Murdstone, Fagin, Ralph Nickleby, Sikes and Quilp are good examples. The characters who do not possess the requisite knowledge of the ways of the world are extremely vulnerable to the manipulations and schemes of the first group: Nicholas (father and son) and Kate Nickleby, David Copperfield and Pip as young men, Joe Willet and Mr Wickfield are obvious cases; they have to walk through flames in order to earn the knowledge needed to live a safe and satisfactory life. Some don’t make it. As Newman Noggs writes to Nicholas at the start of his ill-fated journey to Dotheboys Hall: “I know the world. Your father did not, or he would not have done me a kindness when there was no hope of return. You do not, or you would not be bound on such a journey”. Not knowing enough of the world leads to bad scrapes, financial ruin and/or actual death, in the case of Nickleby senior. In the second group are also the children – Oliver Twist , David Copperfield, l i t t l e Paul Dombey, Wackford Squeers’s boys – and it is these innocents for whom Dickens demonstrates the greatest compassion in his writing. A third group can be made up of characters who also lack worldly knowledge, OCTOBER 25, 2024 but who pretend or falsely believe that they possess it. These are the fools who are used for comedic effect, and they contribute to the vulnerability of the innocent. Mrs Nickleby is a good example, but also Mr Bumble, Lillyvick Kenwigs, Noah Claypole and, of course, the Pickwickians. There is another vulnerable group of characters who are childlike and retain a dangerous innocence: Smike, Barnaby Rudge, Clara Copperfield. And we mustn’t forget the women who have knowledge, but who are trapped by their sex or through having made a critical error, such as Nancy, Florence Dombey, Betsey Trotwood, Estella, Miss Havisham and Rose Maylie. This attempt to categorize Dickens’s characters probably results in unforgivable oversimplification and is quite a, well, Victorian thing to do. It doesn’t work for all characters. Where, for example, are we to place Simon Tappertit, Edith Granger or Gabriel Varden? Wilkins Micawber, drawn from Dickens’s own father, is closest to H. E. Bates’s Pop Larkin. And what is to be done with the villain Uriah Heep, whom Dickens forces us to feel somehow guilty about, and who, along with Anthony Powell’s Kenneth Widmerpool, has to be one of literature’s most shockingly grotesque characters? But this tension between knowing and not knowing, or at the very least not knowing enough, is important, as so much of Dickens’s life and work revolved around it. In his fiction and his journalism he aimed to give his readers knowledge of things he believed were worth knowing so that they might look further themselves. He dedicated A Child’s History of England (1851) to his children, “whom I hope it may help, by-and-by, to read with interest larger and better books on the same subject”, and his essays published in All the Year Round under the title “The Uncommercial Traveller”, have something of a paternal tone about them as well. It all comes back to those world-weary children, Ignorance and Want, hidden under the spirit’s cloak in A Christmas Carol. J. H. Alexander is the editor of The Uncommercial Traveller, the first critical edition of these thirty-seven pieces from All the Year Round, in the new Oxford Edition of Charles Dickens; he explains that All the Year Round, the successor to Household Words, was meant to TLS An illustration by E. G. Dalziel, from The Uncommercial Traveller “Dickens found it impossible not to moralize and do something to combat Ignorance and Want Ana Alicia Garza writes about the Victorians and Dickens for The Year’s Work in English Studies move away from the political in favour of more fiction. But while Dickens had practical reasons for starting what he often called “The Uncommercial” (largely to do with William Makepeace Thackeray’s popular “Roundabout Papers” i n h i s Cornhill Magazine), it can also be said that Dickens found it impossible not to moralize and do something to combat Ignorance and Want. “The Great Tasmania’s Cargo” (April 21, 1860) gives a clear indication of Dickens’s purpose. In it he travels to the Liverpool workhouse to witness the state of 140 discharged soldiers recently returned from India. He begins this piece, as he does all of the pieces, with curiosity. “I was curious to note what our discharged soldiers looked like, when they were done with”, he writes, and he quickly shares his horror at the sight of these men, who by all accounts had behaved with “unblemished fidelity and bravery”. Such worthiness was a requirement of Victorian pity: O the sunken eyes that turned to me as I walked between the rows of beds, or – worse still – that glazedly looked at the white ceiling, and saw nothing and cared for nothing! Here, lay the skeleton of a man, so lightly covered with a thin unwholesome skin, that not a bone in the anatomy was clothed, and I could clasp the arm above the elbow, in my finger and thumb. Here, lay a man with black scurvy eating his legs away, his gums gone, and his teeth all gaunt and bare ... The awful thinness of the fallen cheeks, the awful brightness of the deep-set eyes, the lips of lead, the hands of ivory, the recumbent human images lying in the shadow of death with a kind of solemn twilight on them, like the sixty who had died aboard the ship and were lying at the bottom of the sea. Dickens the traveller is a cynic, feigning surprise at injustices he encounters, placing a hand on the reader’s shoulder and steering him towards another hospital bed and another interview. “I travel for the great house of Human Interest Brothers”, he explains in the introduction to the series, “His General Line of Business” ( January 28, 1860). He also sought to push his readers’ buttons until they felt compelled to act, or at least speak out, for the common good. “I find it very difficult”, he says, “to indicate what a shocking sight I saw in them [the discharged soldiers], without frightening the reader from the perusal of these lives and defeating my object of making it known.” And here’s the key. Dickens’s object in these pieces, as in so much of his writing, was to make things known, through entertainment, of course, but a lways confronting hi s readers with uncomfortable truths about any assumed knowledge they may hold dear. A reader should enjoy the caricatures, but also secretly fear finding elements of himself in Mr Bumble or any of the Kenwigs and their company. Dickens highlights the absurdities inherent in all institutions, and in these pieces, painstakingly analysed by Alexander, he tears them down one by one: empire, “on which the sun never sets and the light of reason never rises” (“The Great Tasmania’s Cargo”); British civilization, or “the public savagery of neglected children in the streets of its capital city” (“On an Amateur Beat”); education, “Take the square of five, multiply it by fifteen, divide it by three, deduct eight from it, add four dozen to it, give me the result in pence, and tell me how many eggs I could get for it at three farthings a piece” (“The Short-Timers”). Victorian ideas on charity and morality are also critiqued: “how often have I heard the unfortunate working man lectured, as if he were a little charity-child, humid as to his nasal development, strictly literal as to his Catechism, and called by Providence to walk all his days in a station of life represented on festive occasions by a mug of warm milk-and-water and a bun!” (“The Boiled Beef of New England”). London fashions are not spared either: “probably there are not more second hand clothes sold in London than in Paris, and yet the mass of the London population have a second-hand look which is not to be detected on the mass of the Parisian population” (“The Boiled Beef of New 3

Page Text

View plaintext

T H I S W E E K

No. 6343

October 25 2024

the-tls.co.uk

UK £4.50 | USA $8.99

T H E T I M E S L I T E R A R Y S U P P L E M E N T

Ana Alicia Garza The uncommercial Dickens | Daniel Johnson Goethe’s cruelty Johnjoe McFadden Richard Dawkins looks to the future | Paula Marantz Cohen Wall St women

The real Greek golden age Peter Thonemann on John Ma’s radical reappraisal of ancient history

Caryatid Porch of the Erechtheion, Athens © Reynold Mainse/ Design Pics/Gett y Images

In this issue

T he popular story of the glory that was Greece begins at the monumental Lion Gate of the Bronze Age citadel of Mycenae, attributed to the work of giant Cyclopes by the traveller Pausanias. After an intervening dark age, the narrative con- tinues with the rise of the Greek city-state, which reaches its apogee in the democratic Athens of Pericles, Plato and the Parthenon. A tale of woe follows. Despite the Athenian statesman Demos- thenes’ attempt to rally resistance against Alexander the Great’s father, Philip II, the Greek cities are crushed by the Macedonian tyrant. Two centuries later Rome’s legions deliver the coup de grace. Thereafter the Greek cities linger on in twilight and their ruling oligarchs become servile tax collectors for Caesar. John Ma will have none of it.

In Polis, Ma argues that in the “classical” period celebrated by western poets and historians, the Greek cities reached their nadir, not their peak. Vicious class war and 100 years of violent intercity competition and empire-building disfigured this so-called “golden age”. According to Ma, however, the later, convergent model of the Greek polis was blessed with “stability, prosperity and egalitarian self-government” for seven centuries from 350BC. Under the Romans the polis was a partner in the empire, not its victim, and the People’s assembly continued to wield power. Oligarchs, writes Ma, “coexisted with the strong, unyielding constraints of the democratic institutions, instruments and ideology, inherited from the great convergence”. In his TLS review, Peter Thonemann finds himself “shaking my head in astonishment and admiration” while reading Ma’s counterintuitive narrative, and hails Polis as “history-writing at its very best”.

In her review of the new Oxford editions of The Uncommercial Traveller, edited by J. H. Alexander, and Nicholas Nickleby, edited by Elizabeth James and Joel J. Brattin with Alexander, Ana Alicia Garza describes Charles Dickens’s defining purpose: “what he absolutely refused to do was to let his readers get away with being mindlessly naive or unaware of hard truths” about the ills of Victorian society. A. N. Wilson has hard truths to tell about Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In Goethe: His Faustian life, reviewed by Daniel Johnson, the man who emerges is “a callous colossus”. As a member of the privy council in Weimar, Goethe upheld a death sentence against an unmarried servant who had killed her baby in desperate circumstances, when even his Duke favoured life imprisonment. In Faust the fictional Gretchen is reprieved for the same crime.

MARTIN IVENS

Editor

Find us on www.the-tls.co.uk Times Literary Supplement

@the.tls @TheTLS

To buy any book featured in this week’s TLS,

go to timesbookshop.co.uk

2

3 LITERATURE

6 LETTERS TO THE

EDITOR

ANA ALICIA GARZA

PIOTR GWIAZDA ELIZABETH BROGDEN

The Uncommercial Traveller Charles Dickens; Edited by J. H. Alexander. The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby Charles Dickens; Edited by Elizabeth James and Joel J. Brattin, with J. H. Alexander The Homeless Stefan Żeromski; Translated by Stephanie Kraft Confessions of a Thug Philip Meadows Taylor; Edited by Kim A. Wagner

National literatures, Gaia, The Fortsas Hoax, etc

7 ECONOMICS

PAULA MARANTZ COHEN She-Wolves – The untold history of women on Wall Street

Paulina Bren

8 CLASSICS

PETER THONEMANN

Polis – A new history of the ancient Greek city-state from the early Iron Age to the end of antiquity John Ma

10 GERMAN LITERATURE DANIEL JOHNSON

MARCEL LEPPER

12 BIOGRAPHY

TIM WHITMARSH

Goethe – His Faustian life A. N. Wilson Goethe und die Juden W. Daniel Wilson

Classics, Love, Revolution – The legacies of Luigi Settembrini Andrea Capra and Barbara Graziosi

13 MEMOIRS

13 POEM

OONAGH DEVITT TREMBLAY My Good Bright Wolf – A memoir Sarah Moss

OLUWASEUN OLAYIWOLA Coast

14 ARTS

J. E. SMYTH ROD MENGHAM

16 FICTION

MIRANDA FRANCE LILY HERD CHRISTOPHER SHRIMPTON NICHOLAS ROYLE

18 POLITICS & HISTORY LAWRENCE DOUGLAS

KEITH M. BROWN

Silent Sherlock – Three classic cases (London Film Festival, BFI Southbank) I Followed You to the End Tracey Emin (White Cube Bermondsey)

The Last Dream Pedro Almodóvar; Translated by Frank Wynne Nobody’s Empire Stuart Murdoch Journeys and Flowers Mercè Rodoreda; Translated by Nick Caistor and Gala Sicart Olavide Panics Barbara Molinard; Translated by Emma Ramadan

No Democracy Lasts Forever – How the Constitution threatens the United States Erwin Chemerinsky From Tudor to Stuart – The regime change from Elizabeth I to James I Susan Doran

20 SCIENCE

22 BIBLIOGRAPHY

23 MUSIC

24 IN BRIEF

26 FILM

27 AFTERTHOUGHTS

28 NB

KEITH FRANKISH JOHNJOE MCFADDEN

SIMON HOROBIN JOSHUA RICE

FLORA WILLSON

PHILIPPA SNOW GRAHAM DASELER

IAN SANSOM

M.C.

An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence David W. Bates The Genetic Book of the Dead Richard Dawkins

The Medieval Scriptorium – Making books in the Middle Ages Sara J. Charles History in Flames – The destruction and survival of medieval manuscripts Robert Bartlett

The Shortest History of Music Andrew Ford

Seated Woman Guillaume Apollinaire. Kalmann and the Sleeping Mountain Joachim B. Schmidt. Modern and Contemporary Yorkshire Poetry Kyra Piperides. John Berger Iona Heath. Duelo sin brújula Carme López Mercader. Black Arsenal Clive Chijioke Nwonka and Matthew Harle, editors. Nightshade Mother Gwyneth Lewis

How Coppola Became Cage Zach Schonfeld Peerless – Rouben Mamoulian, Hollywood and Broadway Kurt Jensen

Manual labour – The golden age of instruction books

Fleur Adcock’s reviews, Byron (et al) in Cheltenham, RLS’s pubs

Editor MARTIN IVENS (editor@the-tls.co.uk) Deputy Editor ROBERT POTTS (robert.potts@the-tls.co.uk) Associate Editor CATHARINE MORRIS (catharine.morris@the-tls.co.uk) Assistant to the Editor LISA TARLING (lisa.tarling@the-tls.co.uk) Editorial enquiries (queries@the-tls.co.uk) Managing Director JAMES MACMANUS (deborah.keegan@news.co.uk) Advertising Manager JONATHAN DRUMMOND (jonathan.drummond@the-tls.co.uk)

Correspondence and deliveries: 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF Telephone for editorial enquiries: 020 7782 5000 Subscriptions: UK/ROW: feedback@the-tls.co.uk 0800 048 4236; US/Canada: custsvc_timesupl@fulcoinc.com 1-844 208 1515 Missing a copy of your TLS: USA/Canada: +1 844 208 1515; UK & other: +44 (0) 203 308 9146 Syndication: 020 7711 7888 enquiries@newssyndication.com

The Times Literary Supplement (ISSN 0307661, USPS 021-626) is published weekly, except combined last two weeks of August and December, by The Times Literary Supplement Limited, London, UK, and distributed by FAL Enterprises 38-38 9th Street, Long Island City NY 11101. Periodical postage paid at Flushing NY and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: please send address corrections to TLS, PO Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834 USA. The TLS is a member of the Independent Press Standards Organisation and abides by the standards of journalism set out in the Editors’ Code of Practice. If you think that we have not met those standards, please contact IPSO on 0300 123 2220 or visit www.ipso.co.uk. For permission to copy articles or headlines for internal information purposes contact Newspaper Licensing Agency at PO Box 101, Tunbridge Wells, TN1 1WX, tel 01892 525274, e-mail copy@nla.co.uk. For all other reproduction and licensing inquiries contact Licensing Department, 1 London Bridge St, London, SE1 9GF, telephone 020 7711 7888, e-mail sales@newslicensing.co.uk

TLS

OCTOBER 25, 2024

read next page

My Bookmarks

Buy this Book
Skip to main content