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.

The Collected Shorter Plays by Samuel Beckett

Experiments to test the human attention span

Samuel Beckett, winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature, was Irish by birth but lived much of his adult life in Paris. He wrote and published works in both English and French (and maybe a few in German?). Though Beckett wrote novels, poetry, and short stories, he is probably best remembered as a playwright and most often identified by his best-known play Waiting for Godot. In the United States, most if not all of Beckett’s works were published by Grove Press in New York. In 1984, Grove published The Collected Shorter Plays, a volume containing 29 of Beckett’s one-act dramas for the theater, radio, and television.

As evidenced by Waiting for Godot, Beckett is known for scorning convention and pushing the envelope of what theatrical drama could be. Beckett explores existential ideas through minimalist imagery and absurdist humor. In his works, he rethinks the art form of the theater, stripping sets and costumes down to the bare essentials and writing dialogue and actions with little or no coherent linear narrative. Several of the works in this volume are not so much plays but rather choreography for pantomime, calling to mind the kinds of “happenings” that John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg used to put together in the 1960s. Many of the works included here were written for radio and television rather than the stage, and even his stage productions sometimes include an evocation of radio in the use of recorded voices. Apparently Beckett was such a big name that anything he wrote, no matter how dark, stark, or bizarre, would be broadcast by the BBC or some TV or radio studio in France or Germany. Some of these pieces are so off-puttingly dull or nonsensical, however, that you’ve got to wonder who would actually sit by their radio and listen to this stuff.

Beckett’s works weren’t so much written to be enjoyed, however, but rather to be admired for their thought-provoking innovation. Reading through these works, one certainly does develop an admiration for his creativity and his audacity, even though many of these works feel like failed experiments. Although it is often difficult to read these texts because of the constant “. . .”s and “[Pause]”s, one can imagine the effect of sitting in a theater and experiencing these works in person. The visual aspects of Beckett’s staging, lighting, and costuming are often quite interesting (although of course that doesn’t apply to the radio works). There is a also a certain pleasure derived from the somewhat mathematical beauty of the movements described. What is hard to stand, however, is the human speech in Beckett’s plays (you can’t even call it dialogue) which is often one lone figure reciting a monologue of sentence fragments that don’t add up to much of anything. Another recurring element is a sort of godlike narrator, often unseen, who barks out instructions that the human figures act out, like an avant-garde session of Simon Says.

Beckett’s works are challenging. That’s the reason he is so admired. Only Beckett could get away with a play called “Play” and a film called “Film.” Of course, most people who pick up this volume are going to know that ahead of time and expect a certain level of discomfort and tedium to these proceedings. The Collected Shorter Plays is often not a pleasurable read, but it does give the reader a broad understanding of what Beckett was about and how he irrevocably transformed the art of the theater. These writings were quite groundbreaking for their time, and even now their modernist aesthetic comes across as more intelligent and fascinating than much of what’s considered groundbreaking nowadays.

Works in this collection

All That Fall

Act Without Words I 

Act Without Words II

Krapp’s Last Tape 

Rough for Theatre I 

Rough for Theatre II 

Embers 

Rough for Radio I 

Rough for Radio II 

Words and Music 

Cascando 

Play 

Film 

The Old Tune 

Come and Go 

Eh Joe

Breath 

Not I

That Time 

Footfalls 

Ghost Trio 

. . . but the clouds . . . 

A Piece of Monologue 

Rockaby 

Ohio Impromptu 

Quad 

Catastrophe 

Nacht und Träume 

What Where

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My Travels by Maria Hackett

An Irishwoman’s uncommon anecdotes of exotic lands

Maria Hackett, the author of My Travels, was neither a famous nor professional writer. She was merely a grandmother with some interesting stories to tell of her past. As happens in many families, her children encouraged her to write her memories down for the benefit of her descendants. Unlike the stories of your average grandmother, however, Hackett’s recollections were deemed worthy of publication in her local newspaper, the Sunday Press of Albany, New York. Her writings were then published in book form in 1912 and now exist for perpetuity in the public domain.

What is unusual about Hackett’s life is her extensive travels. She was born and raised in County Cork, Ireland, but shortly after her marriage she and her husband, a distiller of whiskey, emigrated to Tasmania (then called Van Diemen’s Land) where they settled for 13 years before returning to their homeland. This round-trip voyage amounted to 36,000 miles on sailing ships, and they made the return journey with eight children in tow. After the death of her husband, Mrs. Hackett then emigrated to America and settled in Albany with some of her adult children.

The fascinating aspect of Hackett’s peregrinations is that they took place between 1828 to 1854, when traveling involved a great deal more hardship than we can even dream of today. For example, passengers on these early sailing voyages had to provide their own food for the trip, which included livestock of several species that had to be fed and slaughtered along the way. Shipwrecks and pirates were dangers faced by seafarers of the era, and Hackett had thrilling encounters with both perils. One shocking episode of her journey involves a bizarre nautical custom. When a ship crossed the equator, sailors were traditionally granted a day of license to participate in all manner of mayhem without repercussions, even to such extreme lengths as physical torture of the passengers. On the bright side, Hackett describes life in the town of Hobart, Tasmania, as a veritable paradise. The Hacketts eventually were forced to leave for business reasons, but while there they enjoyed impeccable weather, glamorous balls at the governor’s mansion, and a friendship with Sir John Franklin, the arctic explorer who would ultimately disappear while searching for the North Pole.

Not surprisingly, this 19th-century narrative isn’t exactly “woke” by today’s standards. Though she expresses disgust at witnessing a slave market in Rio de Janeiro, Hackett does make derogatory comments about a Jewish passenger and reveals some nasty views on Australian Aborigines. Antiquated prejudices aside, Hackett’s travelogues are quite fascinating glimpses of her time. The main problem with the book is that it’s so brief, only 80 pages in print, that each anecdote barely scratches the surface of its potential interest. The last 11 pages of the book don’t even relate to Maria’s adventures at all, but are occupied by a summary of the military career of one of her grandsons.

My Travels is what it is: a brief personal memoir written for family members. The book’s biggest fault my be its brevity, but that brevity also means it will only occupy an hour of your time. For those who derive vicarious enjoyment from tales of historic journeys to exotic lands, it is certainly worth the hour spent.
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International Short Stories: English, edited by William Patten

More clunkers than classics

W. Clark Russell

International Short Stories: English is the second volume in a trilogy of books edited by William Patten and published by P. F. Collier & Son in 1910. The first volume of the series featured American stories, and the third book French. This English volume features stories by English authors, of course, but as is often the case with these sorts of literary anthologies (as seen in Scribner’s Stories by English Authors series), the word “English” as used here is take to be synonymous with “British” as the book includes Scottish authors (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, J. M. Barrie), at least one Irish author (Samuel Lover), and perhaps a Welshman or two for all I know. Though Patten dipped back into the 19th century when editing the volume, it doesn’t appear to be intended as a Greatest British Literature of All Time anthology, but rather just a collection of what might be pleasing to a 1910 audience. With a few exceptions, most of the selections tend to be lighthearted fare that might be expected to inspire relaxing fireside chuckles.

To the 21st-century reader, the authors listed in the table of contents represent a mixture of famous immortals and obscure unknowns. In general, not surprisingly, the household names turn in the best selections. Conan Doyle is represented by a non-Sherlock Holmes piece, “The Secret of Goresthorpe Grange,” a comic tale about a recent purchaser of a medieval fortress who tries to find a ghost to haunt to place. “The Stolen Body” by H. G. Wells also deals with the paranormal, but from a more serious perspective. J. M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan, provides a pair of humorous tales, “My Brother Henry” and “Gilray’s Flower Pot,” the latter of which is a hilarious yarn told by a narrator who regrets having promised to water his friend’s plants. Sir Walter Scott’s “The Two Drovers,” about two cattlemen fighting over a patch of grass, escalates into a moving drama. Charles Dickens’s “Dr. Manette’s Manuscript” is like a cross between an Edgar Allen Poe story and The Count of Monte Cristo, with a lot of Les Misérables-style invective against the nobility. Robert Louis Stevenson, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Wilkie Collins are represented by mediocre entries that are far from their best work. Rudyard Kipling’s story “The Courting of Dinah Shadd” is just plain bad, dull, and annoying, though I must confess I’ve never been a fan of his work, which always seems low on plot and loaded with tedious “atmosphere.”

Among the second-tier authors of English lit, Charles Reade’s novella-length crime story “The Knightsbridge Mystery” is admirable for its legal and psychological authenticity. “Three Thimbles and a Pea” by George Borrow is a fun look into the profession of a shell-game con man. W. Clark Russell, known for his sea stories, offers up what he knows best with “The Lazarette of the ‘Huntress,’” an engaging tale about a stowaway. It may be adventure genre fiction, but it’s probably the best selection in the book.

Though I’ve tried to point out what’s good about the collection, the fact is there’s more bad than good here. The jokes fall flat in two of S. R. Crockett’s seemingly pointless tales of country priests. Samuel Lover’s “The Burial of the Tithe” is an interminable slog through phonetically rendered Irish dialect, with little payoff. Too many of the stories settle for quaintness and cheeky laughs. There’s too few serious entries like those of Scott, Dickens, or Wells. There’s also a tendency by many of these authors to wallow in medievalism while their counterparts in France were moving on to realistic depictions of the modern world. As a whole, neither the American nor the English volumes of International Short Stories really impressed me much. A glance at the table of contents for the French volume leads me to believe it will be far superior to this one.

Stories in this collection

The Two Drovers by Sir Walter Scott

Mr. Deuceace by William Makepeace Thackeray 

The Brothers by Edward Bulmer Lytton 

Doctor Manette’s Manuscript by Charles Dickens 

The Caldron of Oil by Wilkie Collins 

The Burial of the Tithe by Samuel Lover 

The Knightsbridge Mystery by Charles Reade 

The Courting of Dina Shadd by Rudyard Kipling 

The Sire de Maletroit’s Door by Robert Louis Stevenson 

The Secret of Goresthorpe Grange by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 

A Change of Treatment by W. W. Jacobs

The Stickit Minister by S. R. Crockett 

The Lammas Preaching by S. R. Crockett 

An Undergraduate’s Aunty by F. Anstey 

The Sillhouettes by A. T. Quiller-Couch 

My Brother Henry by J. M. Barrie 

Gilray’s Flower Pot by J. M. Barrie 

Mr. O’Leary’s Second Love by Charles Lever 

The Indifference of the Miller of Hofbau by Anthony Hope Hawkins 

The Stolen Body by H. G. Wells

The Lazarette of the ‘Huntress’” by W. Clark Russell

The Great Triangular Duel by Captain Frederick Marryat 

Three Thimbles and a Pea by George Borrow


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