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Pax Britannica trilogy
Dec. 10th, 2012 06:50 pmCutting for very boring family stuff:( Read more... )
Went to a matinee of Pirates of Penzance on Sunday, and it was really good. Not fabulous, but good. Second act stronger than the first, I’d say. I’m not sure if it’s because the second act is written better, or if they just performed it better. Early on, during a very anaemic version of “I am a Pirate King” I was full of foreboding, but the show improved. And the baritone who played the Pirate King, Aaron St. Clair Nicholson, was very good in subsequent songs, just not in his own big number. Judith Forst as Ruth was distinctly underwhelming, but Mabel, Major General Stanley and Frederick were all excellent. Mystifyingly, Forst, a mezzo-soprano, had been cast in an alto role, so it’s hardly surprising that she underwhelmed.
In the program notes it said that George Grossmith, the first actor to ever play the role of Major General Stanley in the original D’Oyly Carte company, modelled his mannerisms on General Sir Garnet Wolesley and it was popularly supposed that Wolesley was the particular general W.S. Gilbert was spoofing when he wrote the role. Gilbert denied it, but everybody thought it anyway, and apparently Sir Garnet learned “I am the Very Model of a Modern Major General” by heart and used to perform it privately for his friends and family. Which would suggest that he had a sense of humour.
A while back I was in a used bookstore and picked up a trilogy of slightly battered history books about the British Empire, by Jan Morris. I only paid $10 for the three books, which is just as well. I’ve finished the first book, which was published in 1973, and it’s well-written, don’t get me wrong. But the casual and repeated use of words like “half-breed” and “half-caste” had me cringing as I read. There was even a use of “sodomite” (and not a quote from a Victorian source, either, just used as a descriptor), which had me blinking dumbfoundedly at the page. I know 1973 was a long time ago, but surely not THAT long. So, am I overestimating 1973, or was Morris just unusually old-fashioned in her vocabulary?
“Heaven’s Command: An Imperial Progress” (the first book in the Pax Britannica trilogy, and the only one I’ve read so far) is actually really, really excellent in parts. Morris knows how to spin a story in a compelling way, and she is charmingly acidic about some of the excesses of the imperialists. It’s primarily a history of imperialists and not those people subjected to imperialism, but she has her moments of self-awareness, and awareness that the subjects often had valid reasons to complain which were steadfastly ignored by their colonizers. Also, she has a keen sense of the absurd, and skewers absurdities wherever she finds them. She screws up royally in a chapter about the aboriginals of Tasmania, though.
In an otherwise very sympathetic account of the gradual extermination of the indigenous people, she says their spoken language is horribly primitive, and uses as evidence a translation of a Tasmanian song done by a missionary. One of the very missionaries who’s presiding over their extermination, and not one who’s been sympathetic to their plight. So it seems likely that the fragmentary nature of the song is because the missionary doing the translation didn’t speak Tasmanian well and his charges didn’t speak English well, rather than because the Tasmanians had virtually no spoken language, unlike every other group on Earth.
Matters are slightly complicated by the fact that Morris is a transgendered woman. My copies are early editions, and still have James Morris on the cover pages, the name she was using when she first began to publish. I find it easy to believe that a white LGBT woman born in 1926 might use words like “half-breed” and “half-caste” (though I think of those as words that went out a lot earlier than 1973) but I have a harder time believing she’d use the word “sodomite”. Maybe because to my mind, in 2012, it comes across exclusively as a slur.
It’s possible I’m being too precious about the wording issue. Or alternately, I'm not being shocked enough. I could always look up other history books published in 1973 and see if they also use this type of, at *best*, old-fashioned vocab. But that seems like a lot of work, so I’m going to attempt to crowdsource the answer instead. If crowdsourcing doesn't cut it, then I'll do the real work.
In the meantime I'm thinking of Pax Britannica as a period piece, a bit like an Agatha Christie, where there are attitudes that make you cringe, but you read it for the plot anyway. It's peculiar, though, because I have read history books from the early seventies before and never run into this problem.
Went to a matinee of Pirates of Penzance on Sunday, and it was really good. Not fabulous, but good. Second act stronger than the first, I’d say. I’m not sure if it’s because the second act is written better, or if they just performed it better. Early on, during a very anaemic version of “I am a Pirate King” I was full of foreboding, but the show improved. And the baritone who played the Pirate King, Aaron St. Clair Nicholson, was very good in subsequent songs, just not in his own big number. Judith Forst as Ruth was distinctly underwhelming, but Mabel, Major General Stanley and Frederick were all excellent. Mystifyingly, Forst, a mezzo-soprano, had been cast in an alto role, so it’s hardly surprising that she underwhelmed.
In the program notes it said that George Grossmith, the first actor to ever play the role of Major General Stanley in the original D’Oyly Carte company, modelled his mannerisms on General Sir Garnet Wolesley and it was popularly supposed that Wolesley was the particular general W.S. Gilbert was spoofing when he wrote the role. Gilbert denied it, but everybody thought it anyway, and apparently Sir Garnet learned “I am the Very Model of a Modern Major General” by heart and used to perform it privately for his friends and family. Which would suggest that he had a sense of humour.
A while back I was in a used bookstore and picked up a trilogy of slightly battered history books about the British Empire, by Jan Morris. I only paid $10 for the three books, which is just as well. I’ve finished the first book, which was published in 1973, and it’s well-written, don’t get me wrong. But the casual and repeated use of words like “half-breed” and “half-caste” had me cringing as I read. There was even a use of “sodomite” (and not a quote from a Victorian source, either, just used as a descriptor), which had me blinking dumbfoundedly at the page. I know 1973 was a long time ago, but surely not THAT long. So, am I overestimating 1973, or was Morris just unusually old-fashioned in her vocabulary?
“Heaven’s Command: An Imperial Progress” (the first book in the Pax Britannica trilogy, and the only one I’ve read so far) is actually really, really excellent in parts. Morris knows how to spin a story in a compelling way, and she is charmingly acidic about some of the excesses of the imperialists. It’s primarily a history of imperialists and not those people subjected to imperialism, but she has her moments of self-awareness, and awareness that the subjects often had valid reasons to complain which were steadfastly ignored by their colonizers. Also, she has a keen sense of the absurd, and skewers absurdities wherever she finds them. She screws up royally in a chapter about the aboriginals of Tasmania, though.
In an otherwise very sympathetic account of the gradual extermination of the indigenous people, she says their spoken language is horribly primitive, and uses as evidence a translation of a Tasmanian song done by a missionary. One of the very missionaries who’s presiding over their extermination, and not one who’s been sympathetic to their plight. So it seems likely that the fragmentary nature of the song is because the missionary doing the translation didn’t speak Tasmanian well and his charges didn’t speak English well, rather than because the Tasmanians had virtually no spoken language, unlike every other group on Earth.
Matters are slightly complicated by the fact that Morris is a transgendered woman. My copies are early editions, and still have James Morris on the cover pages, the name she was using when she first began to publish. I find it easy to believe that a white LGBT woman born in 1926 might use words like “half-breed” and “half-caste” (though I think of those as words that went out a lot earlier than 1973) but I have a harder time believing she’d use the word “sodomite”. Maybe because to my mind, in 2012, it comes across exclusively as a slur.
It’s possible I’m being too precious about the wording issue. Or alternately, I'm not being shocked enough. I could always look up other history books published in 1973 and see if they also use this type of, at *best*, old-fashioned vocab. But that seems like a lot of work, so I’m going to attempt to crowdsource the answer instead. If crowdsourcing doesn't cut it, then I'll do the real work.
In the meantime I'm thinking of Pax Britannica as a period piece, a bit like an Agatha Christie, where there are attitudes that make you cringe, but you read it for the plot anyway. It's peculiar, though, because I have read history books from the early seventies before and never run into this problem.
