Spoiled by a Publisher

Philistia
Grant Allen
London: Chatto & Windus, 1901
317 pages

Roughly one-third of the way though Philistia, Herbert Le Breton prepares to ascend the Piz Margatsch

I was hoping he'd be killed in the attempt.

The death would be hard on his mother, of course, but then Lady Le Breton is accustomed to loss. Some years before, her husband, Sir Owen, perished in the Indian Mutiny, leaving her with three young boys and an unexceptional military pension. The widow soldiered on, raising her sons in a modest townhouse in an exclusive neighbourhood. Its address had everything to do with keeping up appearances.

Herbert, the eldest son, holds a fellowship at Oxford; younger brother Ernest has set his sights on same. The third Le Breton boy, sickly sensitive Rupert, still lives at home. He has dedicated his life to Christ's teachings, helping the less fortunate in a manner that offends his mother's High Church Anglicanism. And yet it is Ernest, a dedicated socialist, who is the true black sheep of the family. Herbert is the most pragmatic of the three. Content to be blown about by prevailing winds, he's looking to land in whichever area of the political spectrum might bring the greatest advantage.

Oxford men, together Herbert and Ernest form one half of a clique that includes mathematician Henry Oswald, a Fellow and Lecturer at Oriel College. The last in their group, the Reverend Arthur Berkley, curate of St Fredegond's, has first-floor rooms in the front quad of Magdalen. 

All four men are close, but not nearly so that they know much about one another. No one is aware that Arthur is the son a poor shoemaker. Lady Le Breton's sons have some idea that Henry Oswald's parents are grocers in "the decayed and disfranchised borough of Calcombe Pomeroy."

It goes without saying that class distinction and geography mean nothing to Ernest, whose heart is won by Edith Oswald, Henry's lone sibling.

Can you blame him? Edie is as intelligent and personable as she is pretty. And, though low on the social scale she's dedicated to the betterment of the less fortunate.

The socialist proposes. The grocers' daughter accepts.

Ernest and Edith are a great match, but Herbert looks down on the couple. That he does has everything to do with my wish for his death on Piz Margatsch. You see, Henry too shares a relationship with a grocers' daughter: Selah Briggs. She knows him as "Herbert Walters." He's promised marriage, but has no intention of watching her walk down the aisle. In short, he's stringing her along.

Grant Allen's first novel, Philistia followed seven volumes of non-fiction, the earliest being Physiological Æsthetics (London: Henry S. King, 1877). In My First Book (London: Chatto & Windus, 1897),  Allen writes:

I wasn't born a novelist, I was only made one. Philosophy and science were the first loves of my youth. I dropped into romance as many men drop into drink, or opium-eating, or other bad practices, not of native perversity, but by pure force of circumstances. And this is how fate (or an enterprising publisher) turned me from an innocent and impecunious naturalist into a devotee of the muse of shilling shockers.

The author is being far too hard on himself. Philistia is no shilling shocker; it contains neither crime nor violence. One life is lost, but this is the result of an unfortunate accident. It's clear that Allen had no interest in writing an entertainment, rather he saw Philistia as an opportunity to employ fiction as a means of sharing his thoughts on science, evolution, religion, politics, and the distribution of wealth. If this sounds in any way dry, I assure you that it is not. Allen comes up with a clever story about hypocrisy, injustice, and privilege in Victorian society. Its characters are very much alive. 

I really did want Herbert Le Breton to die.

As a first time novelist, Allen's greatest fault lies in his reliance on introspection... needless introspection... pages of needless introspection.

Pages.

The novel's greatest fault belongs to publisher Andrew Chatto, the same man who encouraged Allen to try his hand at writing fiction. This 1883 letter gives some indication of the pressure Allen experienced (I've blacked out a few bits so as not to spoil):

Dear Mr. Chatto,

Many thanks for your letter of hints about my unfinished novel. "Philistia" is certainly a very taking title, and I shall be very glad to adopt it. If you want to announce the novel in your programme for the "Gentleman's" (as I suppose you will), I think it had better be under that name.
As to not killing Ernest le Breton, I hardly see how one is to get out of it. To me, it seems almost the only possible end. If you feel very strongly that readers won't allow him to be killed, I will try to find some other alternative, but it will be difficult to manage. If one made him recover or get on well in the world, then there would be no dénouement, and, as a matter of character, I doubt whether such a person ever "would" get on well. However, I shall be guided by you in the matter; and if you think it indispensable that Ernest should live, I will try to work out another conclusion. I intended from the first that Ronald should marry Selah; and if Ernest doesn't die, there is no reason why Lady Hilda shouldn't marry Berkely.
Yours very faithfully,
Grant Allen.

Not since reading Ronald Cocking's Die With Me, Lady have I seen a novel of such promise fall apart so completely. A great shift begins in 'A Gleam of Sunshine,' the thirty-third of the novel's thirty-eight chapters. Here the realistic turns fantastic. The dying character referred to in Allen's letter to Chatto is made healthy, and achieves great fame and wealth; his wife is saved from widowhood. The final chapter brings news of two impending marriages.

As a result, I came away from Philistia feeling so very, very sad. 

Trivia I: Righty or wrongly, Allen has been credited or blamed for having come up with "he looked deeply into her eyes." Unsurprisingly, the line occurs in the novel's final chapters:

Bending over towards where Hilda sat, he took her hand in his dreamily: and Hilda let him take it without a movement. Then he looked deeply into her eyes, and felt a curious speechlessness coming over him, deep down in the ball of his throat. 

Trivia II: The novel's working title was 'Born out of Due Time.' It was Andrew Chatto who suggested Philistia.

I think we can all agree that it is the better title.

Object: "A NEW EDITION" published two years after the author's death, my copy was once part of Boots Booklovers Library. I'm not sure how to read this label, pasted to the rear endpaper.

Someone may be able to enlighten.

I purchased the book in 2018 from a British Columbia bookseller. Price: US$35.00.

Access: Philistia first appeared in 1884 numbers of The Gentleman's Magazine under the pseudonym "Cecil Power." Later that same year, it was published by Chatto & Windus in a three-volume edition.

The 1888 Chatto & Windus "cheap edition" can be read online here thanks to the Internet Archive and Emory University. The cover illustration is interesting in that it depicts a scene featuring Rupert and Selah, two minor characters:

As I write this, no copies of Philistia, in any edition, are being offered online.

Remarkably, Allen's 1883 letter to Andrew Chatto may be purchased as part of a small collection that also includes a copy of The Woman Who Did inscribed by the author to Andrew Lang.

My birthday is in August.

Related post:

Dope Rings in Canada! Oh, My!

Getting to Know the Woman Who Did

A Ninteenth-Century What's Bred in the Bone

What's Bred in the Bone

Grant Allen

London: Tit-Bits, 1891

Two Canadian writers, both with strong ties to Kingston, Grant Allen and Robertson Davies each wrote novels entitled What's Bred in the Bone. I remarked on this in Character Parts, but don't see that anyone else has thought it worth the ink. Not even Judith Skelton Grant's massive biography, the 787-page Robertson Davies: Man of Myth, mentions the curious connection.

Perhaps I make too much of this. Davies was attracted by the neglected past, and had an appreciation of the peculiar, but he never exactly dwelled on Allen in his own writing. In fact, the Kingstonian's name appears only once in Davies' published work. The mention – fleeting – is found in "Canadian Literature: 1964", an essay that was written when Fifth Business was no more than a gleam in author's eye: "...if a Canadian novel is not a novel written in Canada by a resident of the country, what is it? There were a few, like Sara Jeannette Duncan, who wrote of the land they knew, and achieved reputation; others, like Grant Allen and Gilbert Parker, were Canadians by birth but Englishmen by choice."

Allen's What's Bred in the Bone is very much an English novel. At its core are Cyril and Guy Waring, identical twins of uncertain parentage and independent, if modest means. Cyril, a landscape painter, is our hero; he shows his stuff very early in the novel by saving the life of beautiful Elma Clifford after a railway tunnel collapse. Guy, much the weaker figure, is under the influence of Montague Nevitt, a London bank clerk. Nevitt uses his position to bet on sure things in the stock market, pressuring his friend to likewise. When one investment goes sour, the clerk exercises a near hypnotic influence over Guy, getting him to commit forgery in "borrowing" £6000 from his brother's account.

How handsome Cyril came to have such a large sum, though believable, is very complicated. The same might be said for much of What's Bred in the Bone; hidden marriages, mistaken identities and multiple misunderstandings carry the plot. It says much about Allen's talent that no matter how tangled the web, the reader is never confused. This particular reader was caught up in it all, curious as to how everything would unfold, racing toward what was ultimately an overly melodramatic conclusion.

What's Bred in the Bone was written was an eye on a prize; that being £1000 offered by the English weekly Tit-Bits for the best serial story. If the magazine's hype is to be believed, the novel won out over 20,000 entries. However, the strive for the commercial was not nearly enough to hold Allen's quirkiness in check. No surprise here – we are, after all, considering the work of a man who would one day write a novel about an elderly civil servant who believes himself to be the archangel Michael. I focussed at first on the twin brothers; they were so much alike, had both experienced a toothache "in the self-same tooth on the self-same night" and each had dealt with the problem in the very same way. But Guy put an end to this early on: "There's nothing of the Corsican Brothers sort of hocus-pocus about us in any way. The whole thing is a simple caste of natural causation."

The freaky comes out of left field when prim, proper and virginal Elma retires to her bedroom after her escape from the tunnel. Her bosom heaves, her heart beats violently and she feels "a new sense aroused within her." She begins dancing wildly, rhythmically, and yet this release does not satisfy. "She hadn't everything she required for this solitary orgy", Grant tells us. "Her hands were empty. She must have something to fill them. Something alive, lithe, curling, sensuous... Cyril Waring! Cyril Waring! It was all Cyril Waring. And what on earth would Cyril Waring think of her?"

The cause of Elma's behaviour is not so obvious; the reader soon learns that a "Roumanian ancestress" has passed on an attraction to snakes, and Cyril has a pet snake, and... well, maybe it is obvious.

Trivia: In 1916, the novel was adapted for the silent screen as What's Bred in the Bone Comes Out in the Flesh.

More Trivia: What's Bred in the Bone was published in England, the United States and Denmark (Hvad i Kodet er baaret, 1893), but only once in Canada, when in 1911 Winnipeg publisher Heimskringlu issued Ættareinkennið, an Icelandic translation. A century later, it remains the only Canadian edition.

Object: An odd-looking, yet attractive hardcover, the slightly fragile first edition disappoints only in that it, like all subsequent editions, features no illustrations.

Access: Print-on-demand monstrosities all but overwhelm online listings. Seek and ye shall find a few copies of the first edition going for about $100. The Toronto Public Library and just four of our universities have copies – of any edition – in their collections. Three copies of Ættareinkennið, all offered by the same Winnipeg bookseller, are currently listed online at an even US$300 each. No Canadian libraries hold copies.

Carry On, Brith'ish Business Men!

This second part of my review of W.G. MacKendrick's The Destiny of the British empire and The U.S.A. now appears, revised and rewritten, in my new book:

The Dusty Bookcase:

A Journey Through Canada's

Forgotten, Neglected, and Suppressed Writing

Available at the very best bookstores and through

Biblioasis, Amazon, Chapters/Indigo, and McNally-Robinson.

Related post:

Onward, Brith'ish Business Men!

Pierre Berton as Casey's Scary Uncle

Adventures of a Columnist

Pierre Berton

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1967

Richler Retitled

Another deadline approacheth. Tradition dictates that things here become a little less wordy and a bit more visual. There'll be no great theme this time – just a few uncommon covers that I find odd, silly or terribly amusant.

Popular Library's 1955 edition of The Acrobats, retitled Wicked We Love, leads the parade. The sexy substitution will come as no surprise to those familiar with the paperback publisher. Mordecai Richler received no special treatment – look what they did with Casino Royale.

I can't think of any other Canadian writer who experienced so many title changes at the hands of American publishers. In 1963, The Incomparable Atuk was fine with André Deutsch and McClelland & Stewart, but not Simon & Schuster.

The New York publisher not only replaced the title, but got rid of Len Deighton's wonderfully whimsical cover.

Yes, Len Deighton.

Canadian and British publishers seem to have been happy with Shovelling Trouble, as a title for Richler's 1972 collection of essays, but not the folks at Knopf down in New York.

Here, I cheat a bit. Shovelling Trouble and Notes on an Endangered Species and Others aren't exactly one and the same. Published in 1974, the latter scrambles the contents, and drops nine essays while adding nine others.

And finally, from 1983, this reflection of a great cultural divide. The Knopf cover – need I point to the right? – is by Lawrence Ratzkin, the very same man who twenty years earlier designed Stick Your Neck Out.

My thanks to John W. MacDonald for the image of Wicked We Love. His entertaining and informative essay on this surprisingly rare edition is highly recommended.