Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 07 Apr 2019

142 Strand by Rosemary Ashton

One of my favourite poems of all time is Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach. It’s a deeply moving and elegiac contemplation on the loss of faith and captures the sense of desolation felt by many in the mid-nineteenth century who were trying to come to terms with a world utterly changed by the growing secularism of an age that was coming to terms with Darwinism. The certainties of the philosophical and social order provided by Christianity were being swept away and for Arnold, as with so many intellectuals of the day, it left them looking into a future they couldn’t easily comprehend. The concluding stanza of the poem distils this sense of an uncertain world perfectly:

 

 

Ah, love, let us be true 

To one another! for the world, which seems 

To lie before us like a land of dreams, 

So various, so beautiful, so new, 

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, 

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; 

And we are here as on a darkling plain 

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, 

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

But, on the other side of the coin, there were radicals who positively embraced this paradigm shift in thinking. For them Arnold’s fear of a godless, amoral world held few concerns and plenty of opportunities. Progressive ideas of how a new social order could be forged were now looking for an audience – all it needed was a way of having those ideas disseminated.

Step forward John Chapman and his publishing house at 142 Strand. For eight years during the 1850’s Chapman provided what Philip Hoare in his Guardian review of this book called “a hotbed of peculiarly Victorian literary and philosophical subversion.” Characters as diverse as T.H. Huxley, Carlyle, Mazzini and Harriet Martineau circled around Chapman – who was himself a colourful philanderer and philosophical agent provocateur. Perhaps Chapman will be most remembered not for his mainstream publishing but for his reinvention of the Westminster Review, a periodical that had originally been founded by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill and which pioneered support for the women’s suffrage movement and for Chartism. Chapman’s master stroke was to put the periodical into the hands of Mary Ann Evans, who soon became Marian Evans and then George Eliot.

I have to say that on a personal note I rather took to George Combe, whose work Chapman championed. Combe was an enthusiastic advocate of phrenology – the ‘science’ of cranial shapes and the interpretation of personality through the bumps on your skull – and seemed to spend most of his time analysing all and sundry wherever he found himself. The fact that we now know his theory was utter nonsense is a good example of the way in which ideas, however eccentric, began to be given intellectual space that hadn’t previously been available.

As readable as it is, for me, Rosemary Ashton’s book is just a little too meticulous, a little too concerned with the detail. I would personally have welcomed a lot more of the bigger picture and the wider sweep of ideas – something she gives us but only in limited amounts. Her focus is more on the human stories and the personalities than the ideas, the politics or the political activists and I couldn't help but feel that the preoccupation with  relationships - domestic and sexual - rather got in the way of a bigger and more interesting story. 

But, to be fair, this isn't something that seems to bother Philip Hoare who makes a strong case for Ashton’s focus on the relationship between Chapman and Evans/Eliot:

“At the heart of Ashton's wonderfully researched and absorbing account, however, is the relationship between Chapman and Evans. Her love for Chapman unrequited, in 1853 she left England, scandalously, to live in Germany with another of Chapman's contributors, journalist and author George Henry Lewes.

Friends and colleagues were more than a little hypocritical in the way they judged her over the affair. Combe, the phrenologist, wondered if there was insanity in her family and even Chapman declared that she would be 'utterly lost' should Lewes abandon her. Yet relations with Evans only broke when she began to publish her first fictional attempts.”

So you'll need to make your own mind up about this. But ultimately I can't help thinking that for this book to be more than just 'fascinating' it needed to engage more with the ideas behind the people. This was a critical moment as thinking and culture was going through a shift of gears and an more rigorous examination of the big ideas and the impact of the big ideas and less domestic detail would have served me better in the long run.

 

Terry Potter

April 2019