I planned to have a fully eighteenth century December, gulping great quantities of works from my favourite century till I was a fat, satisfied lump. It started well, and when I got to The Canterbury Tales by Harriet and Sophia Lee, I felt truly on a roll. Then I hit a brick wall.
My copy of The Canterbury Tales is a selection from the full set, published by Pandora as part of their ‘Mothers of the Novel’ project. It contains one by Sophia (‘The Clergyman’s Tale. Pembroke’) and the rest by Harriet, taken from the four volumes given.
Although the introduction doesn’t make it explicit, it seems that the first two books had a different frame story to the second. The first involves a group of travellers stranded in Canterbury by the weather, forced into telling each other stories to pass the time - hence, Canterbury Tales. The second frame story has a landlady telling a gentleman about the stories of the house’s residents, as he tries to wheedle out of her the story of one in particular. Both these frame stories were fun (I preferred the second, as it added extra intrigue on the stories themselves).
The first tale was Sophia’s ‘The Clergyman’s Tale.vPembroke’. This was a fun, free-wheeling story with a fondness for twists and coincidences, like a more developed version on early amatory tales. It begins with a man called Pembroke who found jolliness to be a “mode of felicity he had never the pleasure to partake”. Pembroke does something completely inexplicable, he goes for a walk in Wales and rescues a young boy who is drowning in a pool. Instead of bringing the boy back and telling the story of how he found him, he lets everyone think that he’s a bastard son. I never could understand the logic of this action, perhaps it was from fear the real parents would turn up and take him back.
This boy, Henry, grows up with a chip on his shoulder and a (seemingly illicit) fondness for his (supposed) half-sister. He becomes a soldier, fighting in Wolfe’s campaign in Canada, a setting I’ve not read before. There he meets the most interesting character, Carey, a misanthrope who had previously lived with brahmin in India and become a vegetarian. Unlike the other soldiers, who’d rather eat Bacon than read him, he’s cultured and peculiar. He, of course, has a tragic backstory.
After some war shenanigans, Henry is ill and Carey saves him. The two go back to England, where Henry introduces his friend to everyone else. Coincidences ensue, threads are tied up and everyone is left rich and happy - it’s a fun story that enjoys the convolutions of its plot and has a satisfying ending.
It was the second tale, ‘The German’s Tale: Kruitzner’ that slammed the breaks on my reading experience. Although I don’t judge the effectiveness of a piece of writing by how long it takes me to read it, I do find it an indication. This 150 page short story took me longer to read than the 15,000 page The Count of Monte Cristo.
It has a decent set-up, a husband and wife travel into a town with their child. They have no money whatsoever but it seems clear from their deportment that they did once, and that there are secrets in their past. The woman is astonishingly pretty and the town big-wigs plot ways to get the husband out the way so they can seduce her. This is made even more complicated when a rich gent rolls into town looking for the disinherited son of the Duke of Bohemia. Of course the man (Kruitzner) is he, and he knows the rich gent wants to kill or imprison him to secure the Duchy for himself.
The couple had previously given their first son to Kruitzner’s father, the Duke of Bohemia, to be raised as his heir. This son turns up suddenly, followed by a shady tag-along. He arranges a plan to sneak the family out the town and towards their inheritance in Prague. Things go wrong and the rich gent, who was tracking them down, is murdered. He says that the shady tag-along did it but everyone will suspect Kruitzner, so he’d better flit quickly.
Kruitzner reaches Prague, where his father has died and he has become the new Duke. He works to redeem his previously profligate ways and to connect with that older son he gave away, but the relationship never coheres. During a celebration, he sees the shady tag-along in the crowd and has him arrested. Shady tag-along says that it’s actually his son who’s the murderer, and that he’d led a band of brigands, murdering many. What’s more, he may be plotting to murder Kruitzner and take the Duchy. Kruitzner kicks the older son out, who dies leading a brigand raid, and then dies of heartbreak himself. It’s a downer ending.
This story was one of Byron’s favourite, and there was a lot in the plotting and conception of character to recommend it. The claustrophobia of the hunted family in the little town, preyed upon by the town’s elders, was really intriguing. The twist of the elder son being a villain, and the heartache on Kruitzner, was a genuine surprise. But the writing was so difficult to read. The sentences could be half a page long and with so many clauses and sub-clauses and parenthesis that the beginning of it seemed lost in the annals of time and the meaning of it gone completely. I’m a Samuel Johnson fan, he loves a long sentence but his contain these elaborate weighing of ideas, these sentences just wiggled all over the map. I was worried that the rest of the book would be a fearful slog. It wasn’t.
‘The Scotsman’s Tale. Claudine’ was a pleasant love story about a Scotsman in Denmark doing business for his father and falling in love with a formally aristocratic woman who has escaped the French Revolution. He pledges his love to her, but then his Father goes bankrupt and he has to work his way up to enough money to secure a life for them both. He doesn’t, he inherits it from a rich uncle, but everything goes nicely for them anyway.
‘The Landlady’s Tale. Mary Lawson’ was a fun, tricky little beast. Mary is seduced by an army captain and, pregnant and alone, decides to go to his family seat to worm her way back into his affections. There she discover’s he’s married and loses her own baby. The captain’s wife has a baby and is too sick to nurse her, so Mary becomes the wet-nurse to him, falling deeply in love with the child. She falls so in love with him that she steals him and spends the next ten years raising him and moving about.
She’s staying and a boarding house when she gets a message from her family that they are sick. Leaving the now young man behind, she goes to tend to them. During this time, the Captain, now a politician with gout, stays at the boarding house. His servants are a rough lot and one talks the son into stealing something. The Captain is furious and manipulates the law to get him sent to Botany Bay, with the boy dying on the way. Informed that the boy he transported was his son, the Captain spirals into depression and death, and Mary goes mad. It’s another jolly one. I probably enjoyed this story the most, the emotions were strong and the sense of inevitable tragedy heightened it.
The next story was the flimsier ‘The Friend’s Tale. Stanhope’. This was about an optimist and a cynic who but heads over whether life and people are anything worth knowing. The optimist wins and it’s all very nice.
The last, ‘The Wive’s Tale. Julia’, was my second favourite in the collection. It starts the funniest, with a man congratulating himself on starting in life, at the age of fifty, when he marries a sixteen-year-old girl he can show off at parties. There’s a lot of fun poked at the age gap, the marriage market, and the way he only wants a wife he can display. The story gets darker and darker, as the relationship founders, as new attractions come along, and as the rich man’s money fritters away. It actually turns out that a boy/young man he has been generously providing for is not his bastard son, but a stronger claimant of the one bit of wealth he hasn’t spent yet - this boy/man also holds quite the torch for the rich man’s wife. Very peculiarly, it has a happy ending for the boy/man and the young wife, who marry and become wealthy - but only because of the fortuitous death of a small baby. Something that’s painted in the story as inevitable and ultimately, a stroke of luck.
Ultimately, I enjoyed this collection. Even ‘The German’s Tale’ had an interesting story, and only ‘The German’s Tale’ was a struggle to read. I won’t rush to read another Harriet Lee book soon.
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