Today, dear listener, we go down south, with a ramble around the Besant family, particularly the late Victorian writer Walter Besant, who wanders (just) into our Edwardian Arcane zone. Of his many books, we have a particular interest in his collection of supernatural stories with James Rice, The Case of Mr. Lucraft and other tales, and in his peculiar dystopias The Inner House and The Revolt of Man. However, we first have the pleasure of a much wider introduction to Walter Besant provided by author Matt Wingett, who has also republished Besant’s novel By Celia’s Arbour.
One of the other reasons we asked Matt for a proper opening piece is that he is a long-time scholar of all things Portsmouth-y, including its connections with many literary names (see further below). Our own knowledge of this fair city is limited to one visit, where we saw a warship the size of a small town (a US visitor?), and constant exposure during our youth to The Navy Lark, a BBC radio programme which ran from 1959 to 1977. We can still remember listening to it on a transistor radio in granny’s back garden.
A now dubious comedy with a lot of dodgy innuendo, many episodes of The Navy Lark were set in and around Her Majesty’s Naval Base, Portsmouth (aka Pompey), with slivers of local life included, especially the pubs and the dockyard police. Of its long-term cast, international listeners will probably be most familiar with Jon Pertwee (as CPO Pertwee), who played the third Doctor Who during the same period as the comedy was broadcast (Dr Who 1970 – 1974). This allowed for a number of sly in-jokes about the Doctor and the Master, often taking the piss out of Pertwee.
TRIVIA ALERT: The first series of The Navy Lark included actor Dennis Price, who late in his career performed in the horror films Twins of Evil (1971), Horror Hospital (1973) and Theatre of Blood (1973). There was also an unsuccessful film of the radio comedy, and Pertwee later suggested, in his autobiography, that Price was not included because he was known to be bisexual or homosexual. Pertwee, to his credit, was not happy about this situation, and was also replaced in the film. As Price had played, magnificently, the suave serial murderer Louis Mazzini in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), we doubt that a weak comedy film was any great loss to his overall career.
In addition, The Navy Lark introduced us to humgrummits and floggle-toggles, neither of which existed. The humble humgrummit could be anything from a farmed vegetable to a key electronic component, and was thus a nonsense word you could use anywhere, very useful at school. “Sir, sir, my humgrummit’s stuck in my satchel again!”
But enough of that. Have some proper larnin’…
Walter Besant, How To Unforget Him
by Matt Wingett
Sometimes, when you have obsessions, the easiest thing to do about it is harness them and try to earn your crust. Just so with the curiously matched pair of ponies dragging the brougham of my life along. They are: 1) writing, and 2) Portsmouth. They don’t go at high speed but they do have an impressive pedigree. And sometimes they take you to unexpected places.
I’m by no means the first literary type to live in Portsmouth. Although it’s generally considered the “home of the Royal Navy”, the town was also the home of four of the greatest writers of the Victorian era. Portsmouth was the birthplace of Charles Dickens; H G Wells worked here as a shop-boy in Hide’s Drapery Emporium; Rudyard Kipling discovered aching loneliness while growing up in the resort suburb of Southsea; and in 1886 Arthur Conan Doyle wrote A Study In Scarlet, the first Sherlock Holmes novel, just a few hundred metres from Hide’s, and it was published the following year.
These are the well-trodden thoroughfares of Portsmouth literature. My twin obsessions also take me down its literary side roads, too. George Meredith grew up on the High Street (a celebrated novelist, he gave Thomas Hardy advice on saleable writing after rejecting his first novel while working as a publisher’s reader). Captain Marryat drank in bars here dreaming up Peter Simple, Midshipman Easy and Masterman Ready. And another impressive Victorian, now largely forgotten, born by a fly-ridden mill pond that fed the town’s moats was none other than Sir Walter Besant.
To those last three words, I expect to hear a massive “who?”
And you are right to “who” like that, because Besant is largely forgotten. So, as a Portsmouth man keen to celebrate his literary roots, let me help you unforget him.
Walter Besant wrote over forty novels (I love that bibliographers aren’t sure exactly how many and vaguely write “over forty” or “nearly fifty”, as if there is a Schrodinger’s Novel or two in a box somewhere). In the 1890s he was considered one of the UK’s top literary names, one critic writing: “only Meredith and Hardy of the living novelists were ranked clearly above him.”
He also founded the Society of Authors, the organisation which still protects writers’ rights in the UK. Knighted for his literary and humanitarian contribution to Victorian society, he is today best known for his nine-volume History of London.
Long before all this, Besant was a Pompey lad growing up in the walled military town. He captures that childhood beautifully in his novel By Celia’s Arbour. Co-written with James Rice (an unsuccessful barrister who ran a literary magazine, Once A Week), the pair met when Rice published an unedited and uncredited draft of one of Besant’s articles. The two made up, and Rice suggested they write fiction together. Numerous short stories and nine novels ensured before Rice succumbed to an alleged early case of peanut allergy. Besant carried on, now “a novelist with a free hand” and was one of the first major writers to hire a literary agent.
None of this I knew when I first read By Celia’s Arbour (1884). Drawn by its subtitle, A Tale of Portsmouth Town, I downloaded it in a badly OCRed US library version, and despite many a “V V” instead of “W”, or “K” instead of “R” and other garbled words, the writing shone through.
The insights into life in the walled fortress of Victorian Portsmouth and the towns clustered around it are extraordinary. Besant has a lyrical style which draws a picture with an artist’s eye. The Arbour of the title is in fact a bastion overlooking the harbour “where the grass was longest and greenest, the wild convolvulus most abundant, and where the noblest of the great elms which stood upon the ramparts—’to catch the enemy’s shells,’ said Leonard—threw out a gracious arm laden with leafy foliage to give a shade.” Always, this pastoral idyll is accompanied by intimations of war:
It was after eight; suddenly the sun, which a moment before was a great disc of burnished gold, sank below the thin line of land between sky and sea.
Then the evening gun from the Duke of York’s bastion proclaimed the death of another day with a loud report, which made the branches in the trees above us to shake and tremble. And from the barracks in the town; from the Harbour Admiral’s flagship; from the Port Admiral’s flagship; from the flagship of the Admiral in command of the Mediterranean Fleet, then in harbour; from the tower of the old church, there came such a firing of muskets, such a beating of drums, playing of fifes, ringing of bells, and sounding of trumpets, that you would have thought the sun was setting once for all, and receiving his farewell salute from a world he was leaving for ever to roll about in darkness.
These themes of beauty and violence are echoed throughout the book. The narrator, Laddie, actually Ladislas, is a hunchbacked Polish refugee from Tsarist Russia. In reality, the sizeable Polish community arrived in a refugee ship headed for America that was blown into port by a violent storm. Seeing their plight, the Government gave them leave to settle and a stipend to live on. In the novel, the plotting and machinations of displaced, bitter old men is central to the story, as is Laddie’s secret birthright.
In fact, the book weaves together so much. At one level, it is a story of unrequited love – for both Laddie and his best friend Leonard love Celia – but it incorporates much more. Some of the story revolves around Herr Räumer, an older Prussian ex-army officer of utterly ruthless turn of mind who masks his deeply cruel dispassion behind a mask of culture. At some points, Räumer and Laddie share philosophical exchanges which reveal that Nietzsche wasn’t the only writer in the 19th Century thinking about the Will To Power. A wonderful reply from Räumer after Laddy decries the corruption of politicians ironically comments that without their wickedness there would be “very little in life worth having. No indignation, no sermons, no speakers at meetings, no societies. What a loss to Great Britain!”
Räumer goes on:
“A great deal more would go if political and other wickedness are to go. There would be no armies, no officers, no lawyers, no doctors, no clergymen. The newspapers would have nothing to say, because the course of the world could be safely predicted by any one. All your learned professions would be gone at a blow.”
I laughed.
“Music and painting would remain.”
“But what would the painters do for subjects? You can’t create any interest in the picture of a fat and happy family. There would be no materials for pathos. No one would die under a hundred; and, as he would be a good man, there would be no doubt about his after fate. No one would be ill. All alike would be virtuous, contented, happy—and dull.”
The book is in many ways extraordinarily wide ranging, with the writers skilfully shifting from the philosophical to the comic to the nostalgic. At times the vibrancy of the town is caught, at others the lonely beach where a body is washed up is described with a mixture of awe and comedy. A trip up the harbour to the place where the true-life arsonist Jack The Painter’s tarred body was hanged in chains supplies an eerie interlude, where “the ghost continued to roam about the spot where the body had hung so long” – as well as a moral test for Laddie and Celia.
All the while, Besant writes lovingly of the Portsmouth Town of his memories. Sometimes overly nostalgic, the book is a long, slow-moving, precisely described Victorian Bourgeois novel. Do not expect a white knuckle ride! But a steady unfolding of the story, and the insights into the lives of the protagonists is fascinating, and in the end, satisfying.
Sir Walter Besant is a multi-faceted author, and there is more I could write about his life and his beautifully written novel, By Celia’s Arbour. But I am aware of the word count here, so will draw this to a close by saying that, yes, as a local micro-publisher, I reprinted the book. It has an introduction by Portsmouth University’s Dr Alison Habens that really captures the passion we both feel for the town and for Besant’s writing.
Now, any self-respecting publisher couldn’t leave off without mentioning that if you’d like a copy, you can order it post-free in the UK from my website. My publishing company is called Life Is Amazing, because life is amazing, actually. All that’s left to say, then, is – get your copy here:
Thanks all!
We must point out that amongst other things, Matt is the author of The Snow Witch, a most excellent and evocative urban fantasy which we covered here: http://greydogtales.com/blog/the-snow-witch/
In a week or so, after various other articles which are over-due (as usual) we shall say more about Walter Besant’s speculative and supernatural works…