p u l p i t j ohn s u t h e r l a n d
Alms for Oblivion
The hoo-ha whipped up for literary anniversaries is a recent phenomenon. It began, as I recall, about the same time as the odious commercialisation of Mothering Sunday into Mother’s Day. The first such celebration I remember was that for the four-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, in 1964. There were commemorative volumes, conferences, leaders in The Times and, longer lasting than the tub-thumping, the establishment of a dubiously handsome centre in Stratford – itself the object of semi-centennial celebration last year.
The Shakespeare high jinks were nothing compared to the Dickens bicentennial orgy in 2012. The BBC invested in months-long Dickens-consciousness-raising events, including a no-expense-spared Great Expectations. There was a bestselling biography by Claire Tomalin. New monuments were raised. Crowning it all were the celebrations for the birthday itself (7 February) at Westminster Abbey.
There had been nothing like that day since the quasi-state funeral of Tennyson 120 years earlier. It was an event of such pomp and circumstance that one felt it needed Dickens himself to return from beneath the abbey flags and satirise it.
Present – among others of the mitred great – was the Archbishop of Canterbury. He was not the loftiest dignitary. An organ fanfare was sounded. Enter, through the Great West Door (‘all stand’), their Royal Highnesses the Prince of Wales and spouse. After many readings from Dickens the prince was humbly invited to lay ‘the wreath’ on the Inimitable’s resting place. He graciously consented. The Almighty was then thanked for having given the prince’s grateful country Charles Dickens.
No one, oddly, cared to deposit so much as a daisy chain, or thank the Almighty, for Robert Browning, who was born the same year as Dickens. Most Victorians, in their benightedness, would have seen him as an equivalently memorable writer. So too did Thackeray’s bicentenary pass, without ceremony or notice, in 2011. With the publication of Vanity Fair he had crowed to his mother that he was ‘at the top of the tree’, fighting it out with Dickens. Two hundred years on and it was no contest.
One of the topmost branches of the posthumous tree of fame is commemoration on a postage stamp, an honour given to Charlotte Brontë – with a fine portrait by Paula Rego – in the sesquicentennial of her death in 2005. Even better than the stamp is the banknote: Dickens made the tenner in 1992 and Jane Austen – after a troll-bespattering battle waged by Caroline Criado-Perez – will do the same on the two-hundredth anniversary of her death in 2017. Coins, with their atavistic heritage, are reserved for royalty.
This year sees the anniversary of the birth of Trollope, who is two hundred on 24 April. But the Chronicler of Barsetshire’s reputation is depressed at the moment. I speak feelingly. Seven of the Trollopes I produced editions of for OUP’s World’s Classics series have dropped out of their catalogue.
Trollope’s commemorative stone in the abbey was laid belatedly. He had not been deemed worthy by successive deans and chapters, those stern literary critics. But a hundred or so years after his death Trollope was, for a while at least, riding high. His sagas were televised brilliantly and there were four authoritative biographies in virtually the same year. And, most influentially, John Major went in to bat for him. Neither man had been to university and The Way We Live Now (a Trollopian satire on bankers) was, the prime minister said, his favourite work of fiction. Major himself unveiled the stone on 25 March 1993.
George Eliot did not go to university either, or, on her death in 1880, to the abbey. The flagstones of the abbey were not to be desecrated by Miss Evans’s remains because of her marital immorality. The situation was put right, after American-originated pressure, in June 1980, with a memorial stone set between two commemorating those great moralists, Dylan Thomas and W H Auden.
Other literary anniversaries coming up in 2015 include those of Rudyard Kipling, Saul Bellow and Rupert Brooke, though it ’s hard to see them receiving a great deal of fanfare. One can, however, expect something on the Dickensian scale for Charlotte Brontë next year and another feu de joie for Emily, who was born in 1818. Anne, born in 1820, will probably be a damp squib. It was always her fate to be the lesser Brontë.
These anniversaries make one think about lifespans. Of the authors mentioned above, Austen died aged forty-one, Thackeray aged fifty-two, Dickens aged fifty-eight and Eliot aged sixty-one, while the three Brontës went to their reward with not a hundred years between them. Charlotte survived longest but failed to make forty. Trollope soldiered on to sixty-seven, having published, in the year of his death, a wry fable, The Fixed Period. Set in the 20th century in the fictional former colony of Britannula, it depicts a dystopian society overseen by young, energetic state-builders in which, pro bono publico, everyone is expected to volunteer for euthanasia aged sixty-eight.
We’re all living longer, novelists included. What is striking is the willingness with which our literary ‘long-livers’ (as George Bernard Shaw called them, in Back to Methuselah) look the grim reaper in his grisly mug as he comes ever closer to them. In 2011 it was noted that all the thirteen longlisted items in that year’s Booker Prize were centrally preoccupied with death. Julian Barnes (currently an active sixty-nine) won with The Sense of an Ending. Also in that year appeared A S Byatt’s similarly terminally titled Ragnarok: The End of the Gods. She is currently seventy-eight. We can confidently expect more from her, as she goes into her ninth decade. David Harsent has won this year’s T S Eliot Prize, aged seventy-two. What, one wonders, might Dickens have given us with an extra ten years, or Austen with three more decades? Old age rather than death, to adapt Gore Vidal, is a good career move. r a p r i l 2 0 1 5 | Literary Review 1
