Political theory and practice

A novel of life among destitute Canadiens in Montréal of the Great Depression. Yet a book that brims with life, and ends with optimism.
The description of the snow driven before the wind as a dancer pursued by a cracking whip was marvellous, graphic, exciting, and accurate. Then there was the house party and the young and inexperienced Florentine measures herself against her rivals, parents, and beau. Her combination of defensive quips and throbbing hormones is certainly right. Emanuel’s unwilling love for Florentine and her gradual response, each with inner doubts, provides the unity of the story.
Gabrielle Roy is the novelist of a Montréal now gone, the Montréal of Maurice Duplessis, and even the egregious Jean Drapeau, long before Le révolution tranquil. The working class French of 1940 stay of their side of Rue St Laurence in a quietude that is born with a stubborn resignation. The Church offers spiritual comfort in a world where there are few material comforts after a decade of the Great Depression.

That endurance is personified in Rose-Anna Lacasse, the mother of a starving clan of ten, soon to be eleven, children with her earnest but eight-year unemployed husband Azarius. All of them go to bed hungry and get up hungry. The children dress in rags and share shoes. Yet they all persevere.
A sign in Montréal in 1939.
Roy enters into the lives of her characters, or maybe it is the other way around, they have entered into her life and she chronicles their determination, dignity, forbearance, and humiliations in a world they did not make, but in which theirs is to make the best of if that they can. The inner monologues of her cast of characters are compelling. Confused, determined, troubled, hesitant, defeated, defiant they may be inside, but outside each tries to maintain a façade. Rose-Anna is calm; Azarius is cheerful; Emanuel is self-contained; Florentine is scornful….
To a politically-minded person they are victims of an oppressive social order that could be changed. To Roy they are God’s children, each one precious, individual, and whole just as they are.
The novel, written by a Manitoba school teacher, provides a companion piece to The Canadian novel, ‘The Two Solitudes’ written at nearly the same time by a Nova Scotia school teacher. But the books differ. McLennan’s ‘Two Solitudes’ implies a political agenda and it looks to a changed and perhaps better future. Roy accepts eternal reality as the mystery of life in which we must trust in God and ourselves. That might sound passé, even retrograde, to some but in her hands it is a message of salvation.
By the way, in McLennan’s novel conscription into the Canadian army is feared by Canadiens, but in Roy’s novel three of the central Québecois characters voluntarily enlist, and a fourth throws himself into a war industry. The army represents a job, an income, after nearly a decade without either. (Yes, I know some of them ended their lives at Dièppe in 1942.)
Moreover, when I compare this book to so many contemporary prize-wining novels that I try, and fail, to read, I realise she has the one essential of a novelist, that so many published novelists lack, a story to tell about people. To which she adds a sympathy, an empathy for others that transcends the facile judgements that reviewers love.
I have read her ‘Alexandre Chenevert’ (1951) and ‘Where Nests the Waterhen’ (1955) and found much pleasure and occasion to reflect in each. There is a very informative biography of her on the Canadian Dictionary of Biography online web site. She wrote constantly and kept every word she wrote including letters sent (and received). The Amazon Canada web site has shown her for more than a year as ‘Roy Gabrielle,’ despite many complaints, mine among them. The Mechanical Turk has fallen asleep, it seems. I see in this mixup the fate of those with two first names, but others find a darker purpose to capture her work for the masculine!
Gabrielle Roy
The original title was ‘Bonheur d’occasion’ which is an idiom meaning, at its most basic, ‘Best wishes.’ The title ‘The Tin Flute’ refers to one incident in the novel. It was filmed in 1983, turning this compassionate study of grace under pressure into melodramatic drivel suitable for a mid-day movie.

Reading Nicholas Capaldi’s biography of John Stuart Mill put me in mind of Mill’s ‘Autobiography’ and I found I had it on Audible already, so the rest was easy, well not quite. See below for some comments on using the Audible app.

Although his voice was a clarion for social equality and personal responsibility, generations of students have since been taught to despise John Stuart Mill as a progenitor of evil liberalism.
Sounds odd I know, but since the 1960s jaded intellectuals have made careers biting the hand – liberalism – that feeds them, having insufficient imagination to do anything creative themselves. When these pygmies are long gone, John Stuart Mill’s books will still be read; that will be the judgement of history. It is little wonder that the feeding hand has gradually lost enthusiasm for subsidising intellectuals.
Mill started to write the ‘Autobiography’ when he had a nervous breakdown early in life and then went back to it later. In addition, Harriet Taylor had a hand in editing it. Many PhDs have been earned trying to figure out when Mill wrote portions of it, and what Taylor took out or put in. The Audible version I listened spared me this Pin-HeadeD detail.
The early chapters are a description of the childhood of this prodigy with an emphasis on his father’s method of educating him. It is exhausting to listen to the account, the more so knowing, as he must surely have himself known in retrospect, that most of it was meaningless. Prodigious, yes, but neither lasting or meaningful. He may have read in Greek Plato’s ‘Apology’ at five years of age, but he did not understand it. So, too, with much else in this force-fed education, which was all work and no play everyday for years on end.
James Mill
One unintended consequence of this gruelling education was that Mill was THE hyper-nerd. He grew up in a hot house that he seldom left until he was a late teenager when he went out of the house to go to work at the East India Company where he toiled for his father.
East India House
He was in his father’s shadow for much of his life everyday, socially, intellectually, and morally. It is painfully apparent to an auditor of the ‘Autobiography’ that Mill had no friends. He had peers; he had colleagues; he had associates; he had debaters and opponents. But he had no friends, which he as much as says more than once, though he uses the term ‘friend,’ it usually means someone he knew, and nothing more intimate. He had no interests but the unforgiving logical analysis of important matters learned from and constantly reinforced by his father. This is not the person to sit next to at dinner. He could debate the great issues of the day but he could not make small talk, or show any interest in pictures of a seat-mate’s children. A cold fish, I would guess. Ready to beat you to death in argument and inept in passing the butter, because he never played any boyhood games meant he had zero physical dexterity, something he himself notes twice in the ‘Autobiography.’
Chapter Five (5) is superb. In it Mill reflects on his many and varied experiences, and knocks off some bon mots as only he could. He paraphrases Thomas Hobbes’s remark that ‘When reason is against a man, he retaliates by being against reason’ which made me think of all those deniers (climate change, Catholic Church pedophilia, Holocaust, Greek debt, etc.). I listened to this while walking the dog, pushing pedals at the gym, or taking the train, so I could not take notes or mark-up the text.
HIs conclusion in this chapter is that political theory is best confined to a few principles which would allow inferences to be drawn in particular circumstances, rather than trying to lay down a single ideal institutions. Mill lost faith in a singularly unified theory and recognised the inescapable influence of context. Under the influence of Alexis de Tocqueville, Mill wanted the deductions to be based on facts, hence I referred above to inferences and not deductions.
Likewise, Mill concluded that perfect political institutions were of no value in themselves. The underlying social order was decisive. The most perfect political institutions would be hollow shells unless the society valued and embraced them for their purposes. To make a comparison, the church may be full, but do they really believe and act like Christians everyday in every way?
Mill once fancied himself ‘a reformer of the world,’ but during his depression, he asked himself this question: If all the material and moral ideals he espoused were realised in the world, would he then be happy? No, he answered. He concluded that happiness if not an end in itself, but rather a by-product of purposeful activity. Both trip and arrival are important.
In Chapter Six (6) Mill refers to Mr. Warren and the villages he set up. It was a passing reference but I want to see it in the printed text when the copy I ordered arrives. I found a reference to Warren and his villages in a history of anarchism. Mill’s praise for Warren villages is odd, since Mill knew nothing about them, not even if they existed. So much for Tocqueville’s influence.
Later in Chapter Seven (7) he refers to the Hare-Clarke voting system as the salvation of representative government over several pages. I have passed these passages on to Anthony Green. Likewise there is also in this chapter a reference to multiple votes for the educated, rather than the propertied, and I must get that and send it to Glyn Davis who once asked me about my comment, somewhere, on Mill and multiple votes. In the ‘Autobiography’ Mill says he proposed multiple votes in a submission; I have since tracked it down and will pass it on in due course.
There are some odd things about the ‘Autobiography’ to be sure. Mill never mentions his mother though there are many, many references to his father who died when Mill was thirty (30). It would seem his father had those nine (9) children all by himself. James Mill was a formidable fellow but he was no hermaphrodite. While there are only a few early references to Mill’s work for the East India Company. Yet Mill specialists have some strange stories about his habits at work.
This review affords an opportunity to correct some errors I made in the review of Capaldi’s biography. It was not Bentham that introduced Mill to poetry. Several peers led him to poetry. I also said he was called a Mechanical Man, not quite, but rather a Manufactured Man by some who found the analytical engine of his mind artificial and inhuman.
I found this Audible reading to be unsympathetic. It sounded almost mechanical, phrases of equal length and inflection followed one another without regard to the content. Perhaps that is partly a fault of Mill’s writing style, which is replete with dependent, relative, and embedded clauses with asides and comparisons which makes it precise but it does not flow.
Not quite easy I said, because Audible kept dropping out, asking me to log in again, resetting the book mark, and so on. None of that is easy when using the iPhone while dog walking. No doubt I brought this on myself, somehow. But it was annoying, and a lesser man might have quit.

Noah Webster (1758-1843) has shadowed me through life. In reading rooms, office desks, library shelves, legal offices, conference halls, spell-checkers, and seminar rooms, wherever I have gone there I found a direct line back to him on the spine of dictionaries. This Webster is that Webster, the dictionary man.

How and why he became that is a story I could no longer deny myself. He grew up in western Connecticut when it was the frontier. He was the bookish middle son. The family decided to see to his education, while the other children stayed and worked the farm. Off he went to a common (public) school where the emphasis was on discipline (secured by rod and whip). Not even the brutality he found there could quench the intellect within and at sixteen he entered the local church school, Yale.
At the time church and state were united in a Tea Party dreamworld. Taxes were paid at the local church which doubled as town hall and government offices. Yale was little more than a Calvinist secondary school for parsons, and it was funded by those taxes paid at churches. There was no religious toleration. Those who were not Congregationalists were, however, free to move west.
The taxes Great Britain imposed on the thirteen American colonies to pay for the expense of defending them in the French and Indian War of 1754-1763 were punitive, and precipitated the Revolutionary War 1775-1783 (in which the colonist reputiated their sovereign debt to England). Webster’s father had been a militiaman in the French war and during the Revolutionary War, Noah Webster joined a student brigade which marched around but found no English redcoats. However, the Revolution fired him with patriotism for the new world in the making.
He took up teaching children to read upon leaving Yale, and apprenticed to a lawyer for a career in law. That changed when in late 1783 his travel to a cousin’s wedding took him through an encampment of the recently victorious Continental Army of the United States. He, youthful idealist, was thrilled to see and meet the men who had created this New Jerusalem.
What he found was Babel. The men were at odds with each other over scarce provisions, ragged clothing, three-years of back-pay eroded discipline, and — what was worse — was the cacophony of languages. He heard Swedish from the men of Delaware, German from Pennsylvania, Dutch from New York, Welsh from Maryland, Irish from Massachusetts men, Scots from others, French from the forest men of Maine, Spanish from a few from the Caribbean, Italian was also to be found. All of these were further divided into dialects. If anything, English was just one of the plurality of languages.
The language barriers within Americans made prospects for productive cooperation unlikely, and it soon became his lifelong ambition to unite the States with an American language. He formed this ambition at twenty years of age, and stuck to it. The result is on the shelf, Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary. (‘Merriam’ because when he died the brothers Merriam, long-time friends, neighbours, and admirers of Noah, bought the copyright from Noah’s widow, as a way of insuring her financial security. Part of that agreement was keep the name ‘Webster’ on it.)
My copy.
The division, conflict, unproductive confrontations that he saw in the army camp were mirrored and enlarged among the victorious colonies which were held together by the so-called Articles of Confederation (1776-1789) which had only a congress meeting briefly twice a year. Each state was a law and nation unto itself. Pennsylvania and seven other states had a state army. At the borders of each state tariffs were levied. Since the British had not surveyed more than one hundred miles inland in most places, there were disputes about western borders that were settled by the gun. Each state issued its own coins and bank notes, ran a postal service of sorts. Some levied visa charges for visitors from other states. A murderer could flee across a state border and most likely escape pursuit or apprehension. I said fourteen states, and not thirteen, because Vermont seceded from New Hampshire.
For Webster to secure copyright for his first book meant that fourteen state legislatures had to enact copyright legislation and he then had to secure fourteen separate warrants, each with slightly different conditions. In this state of confusion, there were those who thought returning to British suzerainty would be preferable. Some of these were diehard Tories and others just wanted order and stability.
All of this division stimulated Webster to redouble his efforts. H travelled to nearly every state capitol, selling his book as he went, and lobbied first for a copyright law and then to secure copyright for his book(s). Doing so was hard, expensive, and took him away from home for months at a time. It also made him a national figure, with personal friends in every state.
He was innovator in every respect, As a teacher he thought school was to teach children to read and write, not simply to beat them into submission. He pitched his lessons at the level and world of his five and six year olds, striving to make learning fun, interesting, relevant, and easy. He was very successful at it. He set up his own school and parents who wanted their children, both girls and boys, to learn subscribed to it. He prepared his own teaching material and these became the three books: The Speller, The Grammar, and The Reader. Each was American in each and every way.
To make spelling easy and fun he simplified it, by dropping silent letters, like ‘u’ in most occurrence of ‘ou’ or the unpronounced double ‘l’ in traveller or the double ‘g’ in waggoner, and matching sound to letter by using the ‘z’ extensively. He dropped many, many other silent letters, so that ‘give’ became ‘giv’ and the same for all words with an unsounded terminal ‘e.’ He also tried to change existing spelling to match sound so that some instances of the letter ‘c’ became ‘s’ or ‘sh’ which certainly have made English easier to learn. English, in part because of its polyglot origins, has many silent letters and varieties of letter sound values. And he thought American English had to be learned, and it would be better for being distinct from British English and for being rational in the spirit of the Enlightenment. He was an admiring reader of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, Adam Smith, and their ilk.
He likewise inventive in grammar, dropping the Latin cases which had theretofore been used to teach English grammar. Reader, when was the last time the ablative was necessary?
The reader, aimed at young children, was entirely home grown. Gone were incomprehensible British essays about the Astronomer Royal, or legal disquisitions on the Welsh marches, and in came essays about the New England forests, thanksgiving with the native indians, and paeans of praise for the stalwarts of the Revolution. He made an exception for the poetry of William Wordsworth.
No publisher would touch his work. It was too novel, untried, and untested. He borrowed from his family and paid for the first edition of The Speller himself. Five hundred were printed, and by the end of the year 5,000 had been sold. He set the price low to make it accessible and he invested the income in The Grammar, and so it went. Throughout his life he made enough money to live and support his family, but nothing more.
He was a publisher’s dream author. He travelled the country for weeks and months at a time, selling the books in person to every churchmen, legislator, lawyer, judge, and school teacher he could find. During this period he also found time to argue for a stronger national government and that won him friends among the emerging Federalists (and enemies among others). Indeed in the Constitution of 1789 some of his ideas were embodied, and others he proposed were deleted. Chief among those embodied was a strong central executive, the President, and among those rejected were universal manhood suffrage, female equality, and emancipation the slaves.
Noah Webster.
Much of the middle of the book is a summary of American history in the turbulent period from 1789 to 1830. Reading it reminded me of how well educated I had been, there along the Platte, because I knew most of it in broad: Citizen Genet, the undeclared naval war with France, the Jay Treaty, Thomas Jefferson’s ascendence, and so on. Webster was constantly in the fray, opinionated, pompous, self-righteous, and often right. He saw unity as the only path to survival, and advocated a strong central government.
He moved to New York City to found first a magazine and then a newspaper, both of which failed at personal and professional expense. He then revised his school books and went on the road to sell them. Finally at about 40 he sold the rights to his books, rather than face another round of travel, and started on the dictionary that made him immortal. He also worked with his cousin Daniel Webster (he of the devil in the Ambrose Bierce story) to enact the first copyright legislation in the United States.
He worked on the dictionary singlehanded for 20+ years and compiled 70,000 entries, far in excess of its only rival, Dr Johnson’s (which I am proud to say adorns our shelves). To study the etymology of words Webster learned German, to go with the French and Latin he had. In time he traced words through dozens of languages. He travelled to London and Paris when he was 60 to research in libraries there. It was a Herculean labour. The result was pure Noah Webster. Definitions, examples, the etymology was slanted to reflect his Calvinism, American patriotism, and Anglo-Saxon heritage.
It was difficult to find a way to publish this whopper. He did finally manage to do so with financial support from John Jay (of the Federalist Papers), and it was an immediate commercial and critical success. He had long since modified his efforts to reform spelling on rational grounds and moderate his zeal for being a know-it-all. The two volume work that resulted was hailed far and wide.

Since the veneration for Dr. Johnson and his dictionary had prevented any new dictionary in England for two generations, Webster’s was taken up there with enthusiasm. For a time more copies of Webster’s Dictionary were sold in England than in the United States, despite the explicit American character of Webster’s from the title page on. In a 1917 court ruling the name Webster on a dictionary passed into the public domain and anyone may now use it. Only Merriam Webster dictionaries trace directly back to Noah.
Nearly all the men who led the Civil War had learned to read and write from Webster, the tireless advocate of unity. Jefferson Davis had once in the Senate explicitly praised Webster and his speller. Only those who were self-educated, like Abraham Lincoln, had escaped Webster’s influence. Even a century and a half later, I grew up in the world of words he created. In high school Webster’s Dictionary was on the shelf. In college, purchasing a copy of Webster’s Collegiate was required. In graduate school Webster’s Enlarged was necessary to write that dissertation. When I started teaching I acquired the current edition. Regrettably I cannot trace the genealogy of the spellchecker to be sure but I hope it goes back to the brothers Merriam and from them to Noah.
Remarkable, energetic, and a polymath, Webster was many things. He was also arrogant, a know-it-all, a man who loved the sound of his own voice, a micro-manager, someone who did not understand the word ‘no’ when applied to him. He must have been a very high-maintenance individual. He also ha[ed the Constitution, fathered the copyright laws, founded Amherst College, taught a nation to spell, and brought forth that dictionary (and its many imitators that use his name) that remains a gold standard today.
Harlow Unger
Harlow Unger is the author of twenty-three books, most on individuals and themes from this same period in American history. There is a considerable body of research behind the book. That said, I found it hard to read – the prose oscillates from inscrutable to leaden to transparent, with too much of the first and not enough of the last. The emphasis is on Webster the patriot, as in the subtitle, and not on his personality or his dictionary. There is little of the inner man to be found in these pages. Nor is there much about how he went about the process that created that lasting testament, the dictionary. Those years occupy a small part of the book. Of course, no book can do everything, and I learned a lot from it. My thanks to the author.

This book from a major New York City publisher has had a big push. It pops up on web sites, newspaper review pages, NPR programs, and more.

I took the bait, remembering how much fun reading ‘Eats, Shoots and Leaves’ (2003) by Lynn Truss was. Inspired by reading that I tried Jacques Barzun’s ‘Simple and Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers’ (2001), and it, too, was entertaining and enlightening, but much heavier going, and at about page 50 I cut Jack loose. It was too much! It was like getting an assignment back from Miss Moses in junior high school drenched in the Red Sea of ink flooding over each page. (The name has been changed to protect the guilty.) She did not know when to quit and neither did Jack.
In ‘Between you & me’ the usual suspects appeared in the lineup. Among them were the evil twins Who and Whom, the hyphen, and the serial comma.
Who is on first? That is the nominative case. To whom did I give the keys? That is the accusative case (aka dative case). Got it? The doer is nominative and the done to is accusative. With me? It gets more complicated with noun groups and compounds, but I left the train before that. Their cousin, possessive case, Whose is best left for the advanced course.
The hyphen is just too hard for me. Compound nouns seldom take it but the words rendered as a compound adjective must. The boarding house fell down. But the boarding-house fire was bad. See? Sort of, but not for long. It turns out Herman Melville’s whale was Moby Dick but his book about Moby Dick was Moby-Dick. Sit down and think about that. Then there is breaking words over lines with hyphens. Is it at the first syllable. the first pair of consonants, or at the first meaningful break? Eng-land or En-gland or Eng-land. Two out of three? Grammar does not accept such populist methods of decision-making (or is that ‘decision making’).
My favourite is the serial comma which I learned way back in Hastings on the Platte to call the Oxford comma; so called because it was prescribed by the Oxford University Press, which was regarded along the Platte as the highest court for punctuation, though patriotism required Noah Webster’s spelling. The Oxford comma is that one before ‘and’ at the end of series, as in ‘eats, shoots, and leaves.’ This by the way illustrates one of the features of John Stuart Mill’s rule-utilitarianism. That last comma is not always necessary but it is best to include it because it is too time-consuming to decide if it is needed in this or that instance and that decision may be mistaken. Just follow the rule, and include it.

I have enlivened many dinner parties by bringing up the Oxford comma, discovering that some people invest much of themselves in that little squiggle, the ‘,’ and their cool, detached, and cynical demeanour slips entirely when it is bruited. People who yawn at important topics like man’s inhumanity to man, spitting by baseball players, or coal-seam gas, roll-up their sleeves for Indian wrestling when the serial comma is mentioned. (I feel free to say ‘man’s’ inhumanity to ‘man’ in the masculine since men are the principle culprits.) Defending the serial comma, I have alienated some guests who went away muttering never to return!
Back to Norris, there was a very informative and amusing aside on Noah Webster’s several efforts to create an American language, stimulated in equal measure by his patriotism and rationality. No less a figure than George Washington encouraged him in that endeavour. He had successes and he had failures. The ‘ou’ passed out of most American use and he made the ‘z’ do a lot more work than it did across the Atlantic, and, animated by the egalitarian spirit, he called it by its right name ‘zee’ and not that snobbish ‘zed.’ If it looks like a zee, acts like a zee, sounds like a zee, then call is ‘zee.’
Webster’s failures may outnumber his successes. His multiple efforts to match sound values to sight did not always carry the day, e.g., ‘cloke’ for ‘cloak’ and many of the same ilk died in the pages of his lexicography. I have resolved to read a biography of this Webster (and maybe one day Daniel Webster, too).
It was also an eye-opener to learn that any dictionary can take the name of Webster, and several have. But an heir to Noah always bears the name Merriam because the brothers Merriam bought the rights from the widow Webster when Noah died, and that company has continued to publish it. A dictionary titled ‘Internationl Websters’ or ‘Websters New’ is unlikely to have anything to do with the founder, Noah. I turned to my reference shelf and was glad to see that mine is a Merriam. I am now armed against such infiltrators in the future.
There was also a poignant moment when Norris quoted from a hand-written letter Jacqueline Kennedy sent to Richard Nixon in reply to his note of condolence when Jack was murdered to show how emotion is conveyed by punctuation. More importantly, to this observer it confirmed once again that Jackie was a higher being.
Emily Dickinson haunts the pages. Her poems, written privately like a diary, have presented editors and analysts a lifetime of challenges since she relied almost exclusively on the dash (—) for terminal punctuation, sometimes straight and level, sometime upward ascending, and sometimes downward descending, and some times wiggly. That combines with her very poor penmanship has created the space for many learned seminars to interpret her intentions and how best to convey them. When I read her poems (Saturday mornings at 8:00) I was unaware of that (and much else). Signing up for a class that met on Saturday at 8:00 am seemed like a good idea when I registered one semester as an undergraduate, so I did. By 9:00 am I would have knocked off another credit and have the day ahead. That was the plan. The reality was that it never seemed like a good idea on Saturday morning at 7:00 am.
I was impressed by the many editorial stages through which a ‘New Yorker” manuscript, once accepted, passes en route to the glossy page. The effort is great; the division of labor is elaborate; and the care is microscopic. Yet the product is largely ephemeral compared to the hubris that creates it.The elephant brings forth the mouse, a phrase I learned in Thailand when visiting Chulalongkorn University, meaning a great effort for a small result.

The difference between copyediting non-fiction and fiction was most interesting. It presents many challenges that have never crossed my mind when reading William Faulkner or John Updike. The details are many but perhaps the best illustration is that difference between the spoken and written language. That difference is a tension in fiction, whereas in non-fiction it is a rule. The imperative in fiction is let the author’s voice sound. Updike must sound like the prissy perfectionist and Ivy-League graduate he is and Faulkner must sound like the uneducated backwoodsman he is. But, yes there is a ‘but’ coming and it is a sizeable one, another thing I never considered.
If it appears in the ‘New Yorker’ does that henceforth make it right? If the magazine publishes one of Faulkner’s malapropisms, e.g., ‘most all’ for ‘almost all,’ will that cause its lemming-like readers all use that neo-logism? That the responsibility the ‘New Yorker’ bears in its self-assigned role as arbiter of United States English. [Sound of fife and drum.] Believe it or not, Ripley, decisions over punctuation at the ‘New Yorker’ are made against that national standard, and authors like Richard Ford have been subjected to editorial correspondence of some volume arguing over commas, what else?
By the way, getting that hyphen in ‘neologism’ above was a head-on struggle with automatic correct. Norris comments more than once on the habit of autocorrect to change things it ought not to change and the struggles at the ‘New Yorker’ to devise an in-house system to let it be itself. Regrettably nowhere does she discuss how it is that autocorrect got like that. Is it nature or nurture? Would remediation help?
I found no discussion of the relationship of quotation marks to punctuation, an old pet peeve of mine. I solved years ago, inspired by Mr Lloyd in high school, by opting for what I now know to be a Millian (as in John Stuart) solution by putting the punctuation inside the quotation marks to keep it tidy. I see this is common in North American publications and seldom seen in British publications. The lucky ones will not know what I am talking about.
Like all pedants I have bones to pick. Norris uses direct address, ‘you,’ frequently. Ugh. She also goes to considerable lengths more than once to use the F-word. Most of all there is that title. No, the ‘me’ is right in the accusative, but what about that ampersand? She spares not a word for ‘&’ which I revile in anything but grocery lists. The dentist says I grind my teeth, well I know why! Really, I expected better of the ‘New Yorker!’
I have treated all this with amusement but inside, I am very glad that someone takes the language seriously enough to work that hard at it. Why? Because most people do not, and the people I have in mind are authors and editors, not just teenagers who cannot be bothered.
There was a time when even Disney films cared about the language. Who can forget that touching scene in ‘The Lady and the Tramp’ (1955) when the latter explains to the former that a ‘dog lover’ without a hyphen is a dog. I remember this vividly because Miss Moses was overjoyed after it opened at the Rivoli on Second Street. She positively glowed, unlike the glower that was the norm on Monday mornings, Tuesday mornings, Wednesday… [etc.] and that was so unusual there was much comment among we grammarians, mostly by stolen glances and wrinkled frontal lobes, and some pinching to see if this was reality or a dream.
Mary Norris
Like most books rooted in the ‘New Yorker,’ it is snappy, breezy, and a 60-page article puffed up into hardcovers. While the meandering introduction is easy to read, I did not see the point of the recollection of dairy work, nor was it clear to me from the start what the purpose of the book was, though Norris is an amusing and informative companion for trip, the destination was never named.
In the absence of a higher purpose I read it as a memoir of her life and times as a copyeditor for the slickest of the slick magazines. The lustre of the ‘New Yorker’ will never dim in my eyes because it published Hannah Arendt when no other magazine would. Credit William Shawn with that.

Francis Bacon (1561-1626) has many claims to fame, but this book is mainly and obsessively concerned with one of his claims to infamy as a betrayer of Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex, a favourite of Queen Elizabeth who overreached himself. Essex was patron to Bacon’s client. It is a study of the formation and transmission of Bacon’s reputation with periodic rehabilitations and denunciations.

Insofar as the book is a study of Bacon’s reputation, there are comparisons to Niccolò Machiavelli. Like Machiavelli’s contemporary Thomas More, Bacon was both a scholar and a politician, as was Machiavelli. For all three of these men the ease with which erroneous assertions become fact by repetition is remarkable and once realised causes me to wonder what else in received option is equally erroneous.
To blacken Bacon’s name takes only a few words. To rebut and refute that assertion takes many pages to detail context, to infer intention, to shift testimony of eye-witnesses and so on. Believe me, Nieves Mathews is just the woman for the job of filling pages, though she complains more than once that she has too few pages to do the material justice. I took these asides to be references to the publisher’s insistence that the book end … sometime. She complains that Ignatius Donnelly’s book on Francis Bacon was too short to do justice to the subject. Too short at 900+ pages! See what I mean?
Essex is well known to anyone with even a slight knowledge of Queen Elizabeth. He was an attractive young man who captured the Queen’s interest and held it, despite some appalling behaviour. His indiscipline combined with hubris of considerable proportions such that he put himself forward for all manner of things, and he got some of them. He was promoted several levels above his competence. Thus was he sent to Ireland as the head of an army to quell the fractious Irish. For most of that campaign, at great expense to the public purse, he disported, drank Ireland dry, left no wench go unmolested, wrote piteous letters to the Queen lying about his noble efforts on her behalf, and knighted seventy (70) of his drinking buddies. That escapade alone, and it was not unique, gave his enemies ammunition for a lifetime.
Bacon counselled moderation to this wastrel with a patience that bespeaks the lack of alternatives. Bacon was Essex’s man and he did his best to help him. Of course, Essex knew no bounds and when his plot against the Queen foundered Bacon was safely clear of the fallout. Like many others in politics, Essex contended that his plot of seize the Queen was to protect her from others with sinister designs on her. Perhaps because even the dim Essex realised Bacon would not play, Essex made no effort to involve him in the plot. Or, more likely, Essex regarded Bacon as unimportant. None of the copious correspondence produced as evidence against Essex named Bacon as conspirator. Nonetheless he was guilty by association in the minds of many then and since.

The story is not as clear-cut as summarised above. There have since been apologists and historians who see in Essex a victim of other forces. In that light, Bacon figures as a false friend who either betrayed Essex by revealing the plot, did too little to stop Essex’s mad scheme, or did too little to reconcile the Queen him. For the Essex-apologists Bacon’s treason to Essex is proven by fact that Bacon survived the drama and Essex did not.
Bacon’s reputation as a savant and public servant was sound for two hundred years until Baron Macaulay (1800-1859), wrote a hundred page essay on him, while resident in Calcutta during his tenure on the Indian Supreme Court. That got my attention because this same Macauley made a valiant attempt at about the same time to rescue Machiavelli’s reputation.
Back-and-forth through these 592 pages Mathews refutes every word Macaulay wrote and some he thought of writing but did not and still others he might have written. It is as thorough as a very expensive legal brief and just about as interesting to read. She is not one to summarise evidence when it can be paraphrased in full over pages and pages.
Macaulay started an anti-Bacon trend which she details from sources I never heard of but then I did not know his reputation had ever been blackened. She quotes letters to editors from literary magazines in 1891 to prove the point. Did I say ‘obsessive’ above? I did. It is. The thoroughness is that a PhD dissertation but it is not that, as I discovered when I tried to find out more about the author. For that see below.
Every card has been played against Bacon, she says, including the speculation that he was homosexual. My, my another comparison to Machiavelli who was accused of this practice by some plotting his downfall.
She also has a chapter on Bacon’s reputation in France, Germany, and Italy. No stone is left unturned. Among these enlightened Continental people he has long been recognised as a savant without equal.
‘I know of no other Renaissance writer who is so regularly vilified,’ said Brian Vickers (qv., p. 406). Brian should get out more. Try Machiavelli.
I did love her description of a Penguin edition of Bacon’s ‘Essays’ as aimed at discouraging students from ever reading them with the many derogatory things said of the man and his work in the editor’s preface. There is a student’s guide to Plato that is similar. Its editor, an Oxbridge don of high repute, is so plainly bored with Plato that he ends up making him boring. Penguin editions are cheap and available, but they are not always the best.
Overall this book is combative, sometimes polemical, but the subject matter saves it. Bacon was an interesting man and so were his times. Though it remains a mystery to me why Yale University Press published it. There are many mysteries out there, Scully. Another is the gentle review in the ‘American Historical Review,’ which went so far as to praise the writing style. Sometimes one suspects that reviews have not read all the way through a book.
Bacon’s claims to our attention are many. Along with several others he has been granted title to the plays and poems to which William Shakespeare put his name. Others have credited him with writing most of the works attributed to Michel de Montaigne, and still others say he wrote ‘Don Quixote’ in his spare time. True. He held two major public offices in the turbulent world of the Tudor and then Stuart courts: Attorney-General and Chancellor of the Exchequer. In addition, he served in parliament for many years. He articulated the scientific method, or at least, empiricism as a foundation for science, including particularly experimentation. His personal private secretary for some time was Thomas Hobbes, that giant of political theory. His personal physician was William Harvey. He knew a lot of big brains. Moreover, Bacon’s 40-page book the ‘New Atlantis,’ gave rise to cult of the Rosicrucians. However, some readers will be disappointed to know that he has nothing to do with the food of the same name.
The Child Bride gave me this book for Christmas some years ago. I tried to read it then and found it hard going. Feeling guilty after leaving it to ripen on shelf, when my eye fell on it recently I took it up to try again. Hard going. It is a specialist monograph based one extensive research into the time and place written without concession to an avocational reader (me), and the prose is leaden. Still it did get me thinking about Francis Bacon.

The author’s full name is Nieves Hayat de Madariaga Archibald, Mrs. Mathews (1917–2003). This from the Wikipedia stub: ‘She was also deeply influenced by the works of Immanuel Velikovsky. In her earlier years, 1956, she wrote a crime novel, ‘She Died Without Light’. She was inspired to do the Bacon book by Chandra Mohan Jain (1931-1990), also known as Acharya Rajneesh from the 1960s onwards, as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.’ Her guru told her to do it. If Velikovsky is unknown, my advice, is to leave it that way.