A Drama in Muslin by George Moore

Realistic critique of the Victorian marriage market

The Irish author George Moore (1852–1933) was an open admirer of the writings of French novelist Emile Zola. Influenced by Zola’s school of Naturalism, Moore argued for more realism in Irish and British literature, and he practiced what he preached. His novel A Drama in Muslin was published in 1886. In later editions, Moore changed the title to simply Muslin. A type of cotton fabric, muslin is meant to symbolize the white dresses traditionally worn by young women at balls and parties as they “come out” into society. When actually describing women’s garments in the novel, however, Moore more frequently references silk and satin.

The Bartons are a well-to-do family of Galway. Mr. Barton is an absent-minded painter preoccupied by his own little artistic dream world, presumably living off of inherited wealth. His wife, Mrs. Barton, as they say, wears the pants in the family. The Bartons have two daughters. The eldest, Alice, is a very intelligent young woman, somewhat plain in appearance, who exhibits characteristics of what we today might call a feminist or at least an independent woman. Her younger sister Olive is a beautiful young girly-girl who embraces the traditional doll-like Victorian gender role of the feminine sex. Like all aristocratic young women of their time, the two young ladies’ primary goal in life is to find a suitable husband. Fortunately or not, Ireland had an established and regimented system for accomplishing this. For part of each winter, the girls and their mothers would relocate to Dublin where they would take part in a series of dances, dinners, and parties in which the prospective would associate with eligible prospective grooms. This was known as the “castle season” because some lucky ladies would be invited to balls at Dublin Castle. When the Barton women venture to Dublin for their coming out, the beautiful Olive is hailed as the belle of the season, with a possible royal title in her married future, while Alice is less enthusiastic about the whole process.

Meanwhile, back home in Galway, the Bartons and their set of land-owning aristocrats are having trouble with the Land League. The tenant farmers of Ireland have essentially unionized in an attempt to combat exorbitant rents charged by abusive landlords. Much mention is made of Griffith’s Valuation. This was a survey of land appraisal values in Ireland, in this case serving a purpose similar to today’s Blue Book of automotive values. The tenants demand to pay only the rent appropriate to Griffith’s Valuation, while of course the landlords want more. This class struggle has become violent, leading to murders and destruction of property.

While the inclusion of this social issue is in keeping with the naturalist ethos, the material on the Land League is really just background context in this novel. The main issue under consideration here is the commodification of young women in the marriage market. Moore’s coverage of the social maneuverings involved includes a fair amount of satirical humor. Mrs. Barton is depicted as a calculated schemer trying to pimp her daughters out to the highest bidder. There are, however, more serious aspects to Moore’s consideration of women’s roles. One of the young women is an atheist, another is a lesbian, and another undergoes an unwed pregnancy. While Emile Zola’s novels were more overtly scandalous, Moore does push the envelope of Victorian literature into a realm of realism that was no doubt controversial for its time. Unlike most of his British contemporaries, Moore writes women well. Alice is a commendably well-drawn and intelligent modern woman, but even Olive and her more traditionally feminine cronies come across as quite realistic in this novel. With A Drama in Muslin, Moore manages to deliver a story in which drama and suspense are generated by the question of who will marry whom, while also calling into question and satirizing the restrictively sexist emphasis that Irish society placed upon that very question.

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

Latin American Balzac

Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014), winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature, is probably the biggest name in Latin American literature. Intellectuals might argue for Jorge Luis Borges, and general readers might cite Isabel Allende, but people in both camps have probably read a García Márquez novel. His 1961 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude is his best-known work, but Love in the Time of Cholera, published in 1985, is a close second. Both books have sold tens of millions of copies and have been translated into at least 30 languages.

Love in the Time of Cholera is set in an unnamed Colombian town on the coast of the Caribbean Sea. The story takes place from about the 1880s to the 1930s. Dr. Juvenal Urbino, an aged physician, is one of the town’s most distinguished citizens. He and his beautiful wife, Fermina Daza, lead a wealthy and cultured life. A cholera epidemic has recently raged through the region, killing thousands, and still lingers on in some villages. As a medical man, Dr. Urbino is ever on the watch for this deadly disease, but his own untimely demise comes about as the result of an unfortunate accident. At his funeral, an eminent crowd of mourners gathers in the Urbino mansion to offer their convalescences to his wife. One attendee, however, uses this inappropriate moment to declare his undying love to the widow Urbino before her husband’s body is even in the ground.

This lovestruck man, by the name of Florentino Ariza, did not just pop up out of the blue, however. It turns out that he and Fermina Daza have a history that goes back almost a half century. The story then flashes back to their first meeting in their teen years and follows their relationship through the intervening decades. Dr. Urbino obviously has an important part to play in that story as well, and the three form one of the most memorable and moving love triangles in all of literature.

I had mixed feelings towards One Hundred Years of Solitude, but I was immediately captivated by Love in the Time of Cholera. In One Hundred Years, the story revolves around this confusingly byzantine family tree that the reader has to decipher. Love in the Time of Cholera, on the other hand, focuses on three, maybe four people. García Márquez describes these characters in intimate and intricate detail that brings them vividly to life. Along the way, you get some glimpses of life in Colombia during this period in history. The Latin American atmosphere is palpable, but this is still a universal story of love and longing. García Márquez’s prose (judging by the English translation) is rich and artful. Every sentence is full of meaning, and few words are wasted. It’s really a joy to read. The one reservation I have about this novel is some pervy sexual content. One character’s relationship with a much-younger girl would not fly in today’s cancel culture.

Love in the Time of Cholera doesn’t seem to be set in the same fictional universe as One Hundred Years of Solitude. García Márquez is noted as a writer in the style of “magic realism,” but this book is decidedly less magic in character than One Hundred Years. No supernatural events occur in Love in the Time of Cholera, and I prefer it that way. The story is at times quirky and fanciful, and the characters lead exaggerated, larger-than-life lives, but everything that occurs is within the realm of reality. If this novel is considered magic realism, then Balzac invented magic realism, because this is basically a Balzac novel set in Colombia. I wish García Márquez had been as prolific as Balzac because I would gladly read many more novels like this.

In Indian Mexico by Frederick Starr

Pushy American studies the Natives

I’ve traveled around Mexico quite a bit and developed an avid interest in that country’s history, art, and natural beauty. I don’t get down there much anymore, but I do frequently read books on Mexico. Unfortunately, there isn’t a whole lot of Mexican literature available in English translation, not old books by dead guys anyway. There are, however, plenty of old travel narratives by Europeans and Americans who visited that country, beginning with the early reports of Spanish colonists and continuing up through the Mexican Revolution. In Indian Mexico, by Frederick Starr, is one such travel memoir. Starr was an anthropologist and ethnologist with the American Museum of Natural History. He made five or six trips to Mexico between 1896 and 1901 to gather data on the Indigenous inhabitants of the country. He published his findings in several scientific volumes aimed at an audience of scholars. In Indian Mexico, published in 1908, is the so-called popular narrative of his travels aimed at the general reading public.

The goal of Starr’s expeditions was to take measurements, photographs, and plaster casts of Natives of the “pure blood Indians” in different parts of the country in order to compile an ethnographic physiological profile of the various tribes or nations in Mexico. He travelled all over the country with a small team that included an interpreter, a photographer, a plaster worker, and usually one or two Indian laborers as assistants. Starr’s studies brought him to many small and remote villages, although all of the Indians were familiar with Whites and assimilated into the Spanish colonial culture to varying degrees. In hindsight, the ethnographic techniques of Starr’s party seem rather amateurish, but their documentation was well-intentioned and at least served as a forerunner for later, more extensive research. Many pictures taken by Starr’s photographer are included in the book. The quality of printed photographs wasn’t so great in 1908, so it’s hard to make out much detail, but you get a basic feel for the scenery, the dress of the native inhabitants, and their religious festivals.

In a typical chapter, Starr and his crew arrive in a predominantly Indian town. His first comment is that everyone is drunk. Armed with letters of introduction from provincial governors and other “jefes,” Starr expects the locals to treat him like a visiting dignitary, and he becomes petulant when they don’t. He then sets about measuring and photographing the inhabitants. If anyone decides they don’t want to be measured, Starr threatens to tattle to the governor and have them imprisoned. Eventually, Starr always gets his way, as he smugly relates. Almost every chapter has one of these chest-thumping episodes. Starr clearly wants the reader to think he’s a cool tough guy, but it just comes across as pathetic. Aren’t these people’s lives hard enough without him ordering them around like some Great White Lord? The whole book is a self-aggrandizing manual on how to coerce poor Indians into doing what you want.

Starr does, on the other hand, provide decent descriptions of the scenery he encountered in his travels. He explains the different handicrafts, folk arts, and agricultural productions of each Indian group he visits, and also describes in detail the typical garments worn in each village. The first half of the book is mostly the gripes of a bitchy traveler, as mentioned above, but the second half of the book is an improvement and provides more information on local customs and culture. This isn’t one of the best Mexican travel narratives I’ve read, but I still did experience some vicarious wanderlust from Starr’s tour through old pre-Revolution Mexico. For alternatives, I would suggest Alexander von Humboldt’s Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain (1811), the brief Travels to Oaxaca by Nicolas-Joseph Thiéry de Menonville (1812), and The Ancient Cities of the New World by Désiré Charnay (1887).

One thing about Starr that I admire is that he edited and published an anthology of 19th-century Mexican literature entitled Readings from Modern Mexican Authors (1904). English-language readers get hardly any opportunities to learn about Mexico’s pre-Revolution writers, and Starr’s anthology may be the best and perhaps the only on-ramp to that subject. 

The Inner House by Walter Besant

A love letter to class inequality

The English author Walter Besant (1836–1901), though generally not known as a pioneer in the science fiction genre, did publish two novels set in dystopian futures. The Inner House, published in 1888, is one; the other being The Revolt of Man (1882). The Inner House opens with a German scientist calling a press conference in London. He announces that he has discovered a process to stop aging. This means immortality for mankind, at least as far as natural causes are concerned. Those undergoing this process will be frozen at their present age and able to survive for centuries, excepting any fatal accidents.

Flash forward to hundreds of years later. Most of the same characters are still alive. Society (the whole Earth or just England? it’s unclear) is now ruled by a socialist regime governed by an authoritarian intellectual elite, the Holy College. All individualism has been stamped out, all problems have been solved, and a tremendous apathy has settled over mankind. Humans have little interest in doing anything except eating, working, and sleeping. The past has been forgotten, until one young woman starts researching the 19th century. This sparks a small rebellion of disgruntled citizens who want what the past had to offer: individuality, capitalism, and love.

Besant’s intention with The Inner House seems to be a heavy-handed critique of socialism. In that regard, it reads like a precursor to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, but without the sense of humor. It’s never convincingly explained how the discovery of immortality would lead to such a bizarre and extreme system of socialism, nor does the apathy and inactivity of the citizens ever seem logical. If they have so much time on their hands, and so little work to do, why wouldn’t they spend that time learning and amusing themselves, or striving for achievements in the arts and sciences? Instead, Besant depicts a very unintentionally cartoony caricature of a socialist society.

These rebels who idolize the past—what do they miss the most? For the women, it’s fancy clothes and shiny jewels. And hey, remember when men used to go off to war and kill each other? That was really cool! The men, of course, miss beautiful women in fancy clothes. What both genders long for more than anything, however, is the beloved British system of inequality. What I hate most about English literature is its relentless reinforcement of an oppressive class system in which one person is born with better “blood” than another. No nation buys into the trickle-down effect of the divine right of kings more than England. Wealthy people are born good and noble. Poor people are born evil. Hard work and education won't save you. Born a servant, always a servant. All Victorian literature endorses this genetic feudalism to some extent, but few authors or novels are as blatant about it as Besant and The Inner House. All of the rebels who so idolize the past are former “gentlefolk” who would no doubt prefer the way things used to be. One of the rebels defiantly scolds the Holy College with “You have made us all equal who were born unequal,” as if that were such a bad thing. (It’s not the “unequal” to which I object, but rather the “born.”) The villain of the novel is a former servant born in poverty, so naturally wicked. The hero is a former gentleman, so naturally virtuous.

Maybe The Inner House was the first novel to show a dystopian future in which individuality was prohibited. Since then, however, there’s been plenty more, and all of them better: Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1921), Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Ayn Rand’s Anthem (1938), and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), to name but a few. Therefore, there’s no reason to read The Inner House. I read it so you don’t have to.

The Copernicus of Antiquity: Aristarchus of Samos by Sir Thomas Heath

Very brief and awfully arcane

In his popular book and television series of 1980, Cosmos, astronomer and author Carl Sagan includes a chapter/episode on Aristarchus of Samos, an ancient Greek scientist. In the 3rd century BC, Aristarchus conceived the heliocentric model of our solar system, meaning the Earth and other planets revolve around the sun. We know this because Archimedes informs us of Aristarchus’s accomplishment in one of his scientific publications written about a century later. Aristarchus was not able to convince many of his contemporaries, however, and, like much of ancient Greek scholarship, his work was forgotten for centuries, only to be rediscovered in the Renaissance. In 1543, the Polish astronomer Nicolas Copernicus established and mathematically proved the heliocentric model in his publication On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, and the rest, as they say, is history. In Sagan’s summary of Aristarchus’s career, his heliocentric theory was only one of the ancient Greek’s precocious discoveries. In many ways he was a scientist way ahead of his time.

A desire to learn more about this interesting character led me to The Copernicus of Antiquity, published in 1920, a brief biography of Aristarchus of Samos by Sir Thomas Heath. This book is only about 60 pages long, and the biography is further shortened by the fact that only the second half of the book is actually about Aristarchus. The first half of the book is a brief recap of earlier Greek astronomers and their discoveries, including such ancient cosmographers as Thales, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, and roughly a dozen others.

The Copernicus of Antiquity was published in a series of books entitled Pioneers of Progress: Men of Science, published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge in London. It was likely adapted from an earlier, more extensive book by Heath from 1913. I would assume the Men of Science series was intended for a general non-academic reading audience, but this book certainly isn’t written that way. A great deal of prior knowledge is assumed on the part of the reader. Heath writes as if he expects his audience to have read much ancient scientific literature in the original Greek. He also expects the reader to have memorized all of the mathematical operations in The Elements, Euclid’s classic book on geometry. Granted, many college students of 1920 would have studied Greek, but most were neither professional classicists nor mathematicians. While it’s a well-known fact these days that the Earth is 93 million miles from the Sun, few, if asked, could conjure up the angle at which the Sun subtends the zodiac circle, but Heath writes as if this and many similar astronomical measurements were common knowledge. The book is full of complex mathematical computations that will be over the head of curious casual readers.

Of course, the fault is probably not with Heath but rather with whoever edited the Pioneers of Progress series. They took a full-length scholarly monograph intended for classical philologists and mathematicians and condensed it down to a pamphlet size, but they didn’t adjust the content for a pamphlet audience. I learned much more about Aristarchus from Sagan’s chapter in Cosmos than I did from this book by Heath. With the exception of a few facts here and there, I found it a waste of time. If an overview of ancient Greek astronomy is what you’re looking for, undoubtedly better texts exist than this.

Crashing Suns by Edmond Hamilton

Typical star wars fare

American science fiction writer Edmond Hamilton’s career spanned from the late 1920s through the 1960s. His novella Crashing Suns was published in the August and September 1928 issues of the pulp magazine Weird Tales. This is one of Hamilton’s first handful of published writings. He was a prolific contributor to Weird Tales, making his debut in 1926 and eventually publishing 79 stories and novellas in that magazine.

Crashing Suns takes place about a hundred thousand years in the future. Mankind has colonized all the planets of the solar system. (No mention is made of Martians or other alien races.) The narrator, Jan Tor, is a captain in the Interplanetary Patrol, the law enforcement agency for the solar system. He gets summoned by the Supreme Council, the governing body of the League of Planets, to return to Earth for an emergency meeting. In this council meeting, it is revealed that a nearby star system, that of the red giant Alto, has changed its course and is heading towards our sun. In a few months, Alto will collide with our solar system, wiping out all human life.

Much like Bruce Willis in Armageddon, Jan Tor is tasked with leading a mission to stop this catastrophe. Engineers on Earth have created the first-ever interstellar spaceship, in which Jan Tor will lead a small team to Alto to investigate the cause of the red giant’s wandering trajectory. After literally five minutes of preparation, Jan Tor and his crew load into the new spacecraft and take off for Alto, a voyage that will take a few weeks. What they find when they get there will be no surprise to anyone, but in the interest of avoiding spoilers, I won’t say. For the most part, the story proceeds as expected from that point forward. Crashing Suns is the first in a series of seven stories featuring the Interstellar Patrol, presumably the successor to this story’s Interplanetary Patrol.

I had read a couple of Hamilton’s stories in the past and found them to be quite original and innovative. Crashing Suns, however, is very familiar fare. That’s likely due to the fact that it was so early in Hamilton’s career that he was still finding his way, as was the science fiction genre in general. Much of the sci-fi published in the pulp magazines of the 1920s all reads alike. One can tell from Crashing Suns, however, that Hamilton is a good writer in terms of characterization and suspense, but the general plot is common to many science fiction stories and every sci-fi movie since Star Wars. I will continue to look into Hamilton’s work, since what little I’ve read indicates a promising talent, but next time I’m choosing a story I’ll aim closer to the 1960s than the 1920s.

The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century by Peter Watson

A quarter millennium of rich intellectual history reassessed

British historian, novelist, and journalist Peter Watson has published over two dozen books over the past 50 years. He is best known for his nonfiction books on intellectual history or the history of ideas. Rather than tell the history of the world through its wars, dynasties, and diplomacy, Watson examines world history through the arts, sciences, literature, and social sciences. In his 2010 book The German Genius, Watson explores the prodigious intellectual achievements of Germanic Europe, a realm that includes not just Germany but other German-speaking lands, including Prussia, Austria, and parts of Switzerland, Poland, the Czech Republic, Denmark, and more. The book covers a time span from 1750 to the present. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Germany (collectively speaking) led the world in a vast assortment of scholarly disciplines: philosophy, physics, biology, medicine, mathematics, chemistry, engineering, literature, history, sociology, psychology, and music to name a few. Germany’s intellectual profile took the ultimate turn for the worst in the 20th century, however, with the Nazi atrocities of World War II and the persecution of academics under that authoritarian regime. Watson examines how this nation stacked with geniuses fell from the zenith to the nadir of intellectualism, and how that fall has affected Germany’s intellectual legacy.

I had previously read Watson’s 2022 book The French Mind, in which he gives a similarly comprehensive, centuries-spanning overview of French thought and culture. I would assume his latest book, The British Imagination, does the same for the UK, but I haven’t yet read it. The German Genius is a better book than The French Mind, which tried too hard to advance a specific thesis and was only partially successful. The German Genius mostly just lets the Germans’ achievements speak for themselves. While The French Mind pushed a very feminist argument, feminists will not be happy at all with The German Genius, where maybe five women are mentioned for every thousand males. In both his French and German studies, Watson makes the convincing case that Britain and the United States could learn a thing or two from the way these cultures view the world.

Of course, the elephant in the room is the Third Reich. Watson doesn’t excuse or deny in any way the evils perpetrated by the Nazis or the horrors of the Holocaust. He calls out many scholars and intellectuals who supported the Nazis. The question Watson grapples with in this book is to what extent should the Nazis’ wrongs negate German achievements before and after the Third Reich. He traces a continuum of intellectual cause and effect from Immanuel Kant to the present day. Romanticism led to inwardness, which led to cultural pessimism. Social Darwinism led to nationalism and antiSemitism. The horrors of the Nazi years are a part of this continuum, not removed from it, but how much of this spectrum of thought should be darkened by that black mark, and where exactly is the line of demarcation? Friedrich Nietzsche’s work had philosophical value, for example, but was co-opted and misconstrued by the Nazis, thus tainting his name. Martin Heidigger, on the other hand, was a willing collaborator with the Nazis. Does that render his philosophy totally invalid?

Watson asserts that, because of animosity generated by the World Wars, many Germans who made important contributions to knowledge and society have undeservedly fallen into obscurity. He even includes an appendix on 35 semi-forgotten Germans we should all know better. Watson also points out the important contributions to American and British science, arts, and culture made by German immigrants who fled the Nazi regime.

Watson is really great at writing these sweeping historical syntheses. He summarizes vast quantities of information and explains complex concepts in engaging and accessible prose, all the while pointing out interesting connections and drawing insightful conclusions. I come away from each of his books with a long list of interesting people, ideas, and books to explore further. I enjoy Watson’s books so much, I purposefully read them slowly too make them last longer. I would suggest starting with his worldwide histories Ideas and The Modern Mind before venturing into his regional studies like The German Genius and The French Mind.