Recently Discovered Victorian Literature, Or “Cuidado! Llamas!”
I’ve been on a Victorian literature kick lately. It started with Drood, which led me to Wilkie Collins‘ The Woman in White and The Moonstone, which took me to Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England, which somehow took me into the village of Cranford.
It’s a slender volume that “recounts the events and activities in the lives of a group of spinsters and widows who struggle in genteel poverty to maintain their standards of propriety, decency, and kindness.”1 It’s much more entertaining than that sounds.
I had not heard of Elizabeth Gaskell until now, and I have to say I admire her writing style a great deal. Here’s a bit I particularly enjoyed:
[E]very lady took the subject uppermost in her mind and talked about it to her own great contentment, but not much to the advancement of the subject they had met to discuss….I asked Miss Pole what was the very last thing they had ever heard about [Peter], and then she named the absurd report to which I have alluded, about his having been elected Great Lama of Thibet; and this was a signal for each lady to go off on her separate idea.
Mrs. Forrester’s start was made on the veiled prophet in Lalla Rookh – whether I thought he was meant for the Great Lama, though Peter was not so ugly, indeed rather handsome, if he had not been freckled…. [I]n a moment, the delusive lady was off upon Rowlands’ Kalydor, and the merits of cosmetics and hair oils in general, and holding forth so fluently that I turned to listen to Miss Pole, who (through the llamas, the beasts of burden) had got to Peruvian bonds, and the share market, and her poor opinion of joint-stock banks in general….
In vain I put in “When was it – in what year was it that you heard that Mr. Peter was the Great Lama?” They only joined issue to dispute whether llamas were carnivorous animals or not; in which dispute they were not quite on fair grounds, as Mrs. Forrester…acknowledged that she always confused carnivorous and graminivorous together, just as she did horizontal and perpendicular; but then she apologized for it very prettily, by saying that in her day the only use people made of four-syllabled words was to teach how they should be spelt.
I was never aware that llamas were carnivorous (and I had to look up graminivorous). Perhaps the Monty Python troupe was correct.
- From the blurb on the back cover. [↩]
