clew's reviews: a book log

Maid Marian and Crotchet Castle, Thomas Love Peacock

Some of the ladies screamed, but none of them fainted; for fainting was not so much the fashion in those days, when the ladies breakfasted on brawn and ale at sunrise, as in our more refined age of green tea and muffins at noon.

The prose is varied and light, especially in Crotchet Castle; reminds me of light George Meredith. Thomas Love Peacock was a satirist of his day, which probably makes his stuff more readable than otherwise; some of his targets still exist, and others are innately funny to the modern taste.

Robin Hood is king of the forest both by dignity of birth and by virtue of his standing army: to say nothing of the free choice of his people, which he has indeed, but I pass it by as an illegitimate basis of power.

I didn't need so much humor about friars falling down; they are not infrequent in the story and wildly overrepresented in the illustrations.

Maid Marian is only nice if you really like Maid Marian stories; I was more than a little charmed by the energy and martial skill attributed to Marian;

'She can fence,' said the little friar, 'and draw the longbow, and play at single-stick and quarter-staff.'

'Yet, mark you,' said Brother Michael, 'not like a virago or a hoyden, or one that would crack a serving-man's head for spilling gravy on her ruff, but with such womanly grace and temperate self-command as if those manly exercises belonged to her only, and were become for her sake feminine.'

Which sounds as though she's going to be a little dainty and useless, but actually she holds off Richard Lionheart when he meets her standing guard in the woods. She would have lost eventually, but that seems more than fair. Also, there is a valorous cottage-wife with no training but Amazonian strength wielding a spit as a spear. (That same scene uses the phrase 'beaten into mummy'; anachronistic, probably; very odd thing, the Victorian view of mummy.) Also, a remarkably simple explanation of why Maid Marian; not even Robin and Marian think outlawry in the forest is a safe condition for maternity, and there's some theological question about how married they are.

Crotchet Castle is both a satire of country-house romances and finally a straight-up example of the genre. The romances get the field in the end; until then the stock characters make fools of themselves like street-show puppets.

...he could not become, like a true-born English squire, part and parcel of the barley-giving earth; he could not find in game-bagging, poacher-shooting, trespasser-pounding, footpath-stopping, common-enclosing, rack-renting, and all the other liberal pursuits and pastimes which make a country gentleman an ornament to the world, and a blessing to the poor...

I wonder who was expected to be reading this. Jokes regularly appear that are based on puns in the Greek transliteration of some name; they are usually translated in the footnotes, though. Perhaps for the better-educated clerkly class of what they thought of as small means and we think of as liberal tendencies?

Illustrations by one F. H. Townsend in the 1890s.