James-A-Day: Rats

By -
A gibbet stone
There is not a single rat in this story.  Still, it's a good creepy title, sitting there all by itself.  It's really a reference to the quotation from Dickens story "Tom Tiddler's Ground" used as an epigraph, but the description in the epigraph matches an event in the story.

Mr. Thomson, a typical Jamesian protagonist--that is, scholarly, too curious, and perhaps a bit rabbity--is staying at a quiet country inn for a month to get some reading done.  (Holy moley, who can do that?  I'm not sure if it sounds like paradise or too stultifying for words.  Paradise for a week, at least.)  Anyway, young Thomson is a bit too prone to poking his nose in where it doesn't belong.  He peeks into the inn's front-facing upper room and finds more than he bargained for.

I noticed that there's a mention of a stone base for a gibbet in this story, and those happen pretty frequently with MRJ.  Since they're nearly always described as a stone with a hole in the middle, it took me a while to figure out what they're supposed to be, but I suppose Edwardian readers would have known right away.  Evidently James mentions them in his book Suffolk and Norfolk.  He knew those counties very well indeed, and I'd quite like to read the book, but it's quite hard to get around here.  Maybe I'll hope that it will show up as an ebook one of these days.

Comments

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more