Blame Dorothy

In Which I Read: Cranford

I picked up this book after getting through Bleak House and The Way We Live Now, expecting more dark Victorian  dramatics, maybe some more star-crossed couples and biting social commentary.

What I got was little old ladies.

Sweet little  old ladies who at first glance have nothing more to worry about than what hat to wear to  tea.

It's a fairly episodic book, almost like Anne of Green Gables, with everyone getting into largely harmless hijinks until some little tragedy appears in the last chapters. Then, everyone comes together in a heart-warming manner and it all ends happily.

In Which I Read: The English Church in the Eighteenth Century

Because I know everyone was waiting breathlessly for the next installment on 18th Century Religious Politics. Right?

This chapter focuses on some guy named Nelson who was apparently like the Kevin Bacon of the 17th century English church: he knew everybody.

Nelson was what was called a "Nonjuror," meaning that he refused to swear allegiance to William and Mary when the English ditched King James and invited in a new King and Queen. A lot of people were relieved. A lot of people didn't care. A lot of people pointed out that it just isn't done to kick your King out of your country.

This stance had the unfortunate result of leaving Nelson and his pals in a bind regarding the church. As the Monarch is Head of the Church, and they had a problem with the Monarch, did that mean they had a problem with the church, too? Well, yes. But a little, discreet, polite sort of problem. As the author describes it, they were rendered "as if by accident" unsuitable to hold a variety of high office. Seems pretty deliberate to me, however nice the man might have been. If the prerequisite for the job is loyalty to the Monarch and you believe that your monarch is some chump over in France trying to raise an army, I would think it fairly clear why you're not getting a callback.

After William and Mary were succeeded, however, by Anne, and Anne was succeeded by George, Nelson realized that the chances of James and James Jr getting their collective foot back in the door were fairly slim. So, he decided to return to the fold. Village bells, we are told, rang out as they walk into church for the first time in years.

Whether that was because of the Grand Return of Nelson and his pals - or if they just timed their entrance right - isn't mentioned.

In Which I Read Project Gutenberg

Starting The English Church in the Eighteenth Century,  by Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton. This is a book written in 1896, looking back at the 1700s and what was going on in ecclesiastical matters two hundred years before the authors' lifetimes.

I'm only through the first essay, in which the author Mr. Abbey suggests that the English (National) Church during the eighteenth century suffered from being full of well-meaning but not terribly excited or exciting people.

I can see how that might be possible.

Goodness is this guy long-winded. I'm put in mind of Jane Eyre's failed suitor St. John (pronounced, apparently, as "Sinjin"). He was a very religious sort who proposed to her not because he was in love with her, but because he needed someone to come with him to India as a missionary. He thought - and actually told her this - that she was sufficiently docile and easily led, hard-working, and self-sacrificing to keep up with him among the heathens.

He was more than a little passive-aggressive and Jane was right to boot his sorry butt. He also went on and on and on. Never said something in three word when he could spend thirty. And yes, he had a point worth making when you got to the end... if you got to the end.

Mr. Abbey's larger point seems to be that the church leaders were more interested in pleasant uncomplicated lives devoted to abstract religious theories than in going out and drumming up the population and bringing them to God. And the ones who did were taking things in too radical a direction.

Which may well be valid, but I doubt that God would have been upset if Mr. Abbey had used a few more paragraph breaks. Just saying.

In Which I Read Project Gutenberg

With the Turks in Palestine, by Alexander Aaronsohn, is the personal narrative of a Jew living in Palestine (what is now Isreal, with detours into Syria) in the early years of World War I, as he falls afoul of the ruling Turks. At first, he's drafted into the army, but then it's decided that the Turks will fight with the Germans instead of against them, so anyone who wasn't Arabic was put on hard labor duty instead of being given a gun. After buying his way out of the "army," Mr. Aaronsohn made his way home, where he was arrested and tortured for information about his community.

Set free again, he then got a job with his brother and was sent here and there on various missions relating to an infestation of locusts. Finally, he managed to upset the local thug (not named "Thad") and was forced to flee the country by buying a fake passport and disguising himself and his sister as refugees.

It's an interesting read, well written, and certainly a lot happens. The writing is crisp and he doesn't dwell in exaggerated whining about all the crap things that happens to him. I mean, if you're already feeling persecuted and then the locusts show up?

I did, however, detect that 19th / early 20th century pattern of casual bias. Everyone who is like me is great and wonderful. Everyone who is "other" is beneath me and therefore dirty, ignorant and lazy. (Lazy is big with this. Always look for lazy on the list of complaints.)

It might have been nice to be able to put this story into a larger context, even though I know that's not the point of Project Gutenberg. World War I kinda gets overshadowed in popular culture by World War II, so I would have benefited from some historical annotation.

In Which I Read Project Gutenberg

The next Project Gutenberg book is Radio Boys Cronies, by Samuel Francis Aaron. I'm a little fuzzy on when this one was written, but I'm guessing early 1900's. So from an early girls book, we get an early boys book, wherein Brave Bill Brown and his pal Gus are devotees of the weekly radio broadcast of the lives of great scientists and inventors.

After listening - spellbound - to the early years of Thomas Edison's life for half the book, they are offered the opportunity to build a power plant on the land of a local businessman. (Yup. More child labor.) A pair of "boys" are set to work by their professor building a dam, water wheel, electrical plant, and wiring this contraption to someone's house.

That part actually goes pretty well, until they make an enemy of the local thug. The nephew of their boss, Thad (yes, Thad) feels threatened by their grasp of higher mathematics and is moved to violence by their achievements in demonstrating trigonometry to measure distance. Thad is so embarrassed, in fact, by their superior engineering that he turns to a life of crime and must eventually be turned over to the local police.

I know. It's a tragedy.

I did not read the sequel, "Radio Boys Loyalty Bill Brown Listens In". To what he was listening? I'm not sure I want to know.

In Which I Read Project Gutenberg

So, I found Stanza, an ereader for my iTouch. And I found Project Gutenberg, an online source for free books forever. Being rather overwhelmed at the choices and having no firm criteria beyond the book I'd just found, I decided to start at the beginning and see what they had.

Going alphabetically by author, we have Lisbeth Longfrock, by Hans Aanrud, written in 1907.

"Longfrock," by the way, refers to the nickname Lisbeth's brother gives her after a new dress is discovered to be far too long for the child, reaching all the way down to her toes.

This is your typical cute plucky orphan girl rises above her tragedies to achieve success story. I imagine it's very Heidi-esque, but I somehow never read Heidi, and avoided all the movies, so I don't exactly know if the plots match or if there are just a lot of mountains in both books.

Little Lisbeth is orphaned, after which she moves in with a kind neighbor woman who puts her to work, but treats her well. It's well written and has lots of interesting detail about the farming life in Norway (move the cows here, move the goats there), but doesn't exactly rise to the level of timeless literature.  The amount of work required is more reflective of the nature of farming at that time and place than any desire to put Lisbeth through some sort of formative cruelty.

Another reflection of time and place may be found in the way the book ends. It seems taken for granted that Lisbeth's story will climax as she a) gets kind-of sort-of engaged to a local boy, b) is confirmed in the local church, and c) becomes head milkmaid at the farm where she was taken in.

Head milkmaid? Yeah. That's all you got. That's literally the last words of the book. She gets to be head milkmaid. I mean it's great that she's gotten past her mother's tragic death, survived childhood, and found her place in the world, but milkmaid?

Although, when I think about it, a book ending today with, "Guess what? You were totally elected prom queen!" would have a similar ending, structure-wise. So, it really does come down to time and place again. Who knows? Maybe the little Norweigan girls who read the story got to the end and closed the book with a happy little sigh.