An amusing claim

Two updates in one day! I make this one largely because it amuses me. I went into university today to use the library and I decided to browse the shelves. I intended to take out another "flavour of the times" book, to read just as I'm reading Locke now, and I ended up holding a copy of The Pilgrim's Progress. I'm also reading a book on the religious dissenters of the seventeenth century and Bunyan's name has come up, hence my interest.

I think what convinced me to borrow it was the first sentence of the introduction to the OWC 1984 edition:

The Pilgrim's Progress holds a unique place in the history of our literature. No other seventeenth-century text save the King James Bible...has enjoyed such an extensive readership. (IX)

What a claim! Of course, some seventeenth-century works, such as those by Aphra Behn, have only risen to mass-popularity in recent years, and other highly influential works, such as Hobbes' Leviathan and Newton's Principia, aren't really widely-read. It's also true that The Pilgrim's Progress has fallen very much out of fashion in these times whereas a cursory glance at its Wikipedia page suggests that it was staple reading during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Still, has Bunyan's work enjoyed a more extensive readership than Paradise Lost? The Book of Common Prayer? Or - dare I say it? - Othello, The Tempest, Hamlet, Macbeth, Twelfth Night, and King Lear?

What a book it must be. Could this serve as a warning to academics everywhere to restrain their enthusiasm for their subject?

Locke / The origins of duelling

My last entry had a very cross tone to it, which can attributed in equal parts to stress and Dryden himself. I wasn't making very good progress with anything he had written so I switched to reading John Locke. I am reading his Essay concerning Human Understanding and it is still challenging yet more enjoyable than Dryden. It's only partly a thesis-related text: it isn't directly related to my subject but his discussion of personal identity may yield some material that can be of use. At the very least, it will provide some perspective on the sort of things that people in the late seventeenth century were thinking about. I haven't read very far into the Essay yet; the abridged version is over four hundred pages long and I started right from the beginning by reading the OWC introduction by Pauline Phemister. I shall report anything of relevance to my research when I come to it.

I'm currently writing about the origins of duelling. Many critics seem to take it for granted that the duel was a direct descendant of the medieval joust, the idea being that young men of the late sixteenth century longed for the days of romance and chivalry, and that they incorporated the fashionable new rapier into semi-ludic displays of battles. I'm not so sure. It would be very odd indeed if a nostalgia for the joust persisted into the seventeenth century, simply because almost nothing else from the middle ages was remembered fondly during this period. It was only later, during the late eighteenth century, that we begin to see a renewed interest in medieval culture and romance - and, significantly, it is during this period that we can observe a decline in the popularity of the duel. While Tennyson was writing his Idylls of the King, while Macready was reviving King Lear, while the Camden and Early English Texts societies were being founded, duelling had fallen entirely out of fashion. One would think that if duelling were the relic, or at least a direct relative, of the middle ages, the Victorians would have embraced it and it would have a strong presence in the later nineteenth century. Instead, they turned to attempts at historical reenactment.


If anything, many seventeenth-century cultural fashions were deliberate steps away from the middle ages, back to the classical world. The heroes of plays and poems were classical, or came from the Old Testament; little is written of King Arthur or the Virgin Mary, both major characters in medieval writing.

We might also add that the joust was a formal, mercenary event, held in public and considered entirely acceptable during its time. It has more in common with the Roman gladiatorial combat, or even the modern football match. Duelling, however, was controversial from the outset. It was illegal, which meant that it had to be held in secret, and it was fought to settle a question of honour. If you found yourself being challenged to duel, it would mean that you had grievously offended someone (perhaps by calling them a liar or seducing their sister) and the only way to settle things was with a duel. There was also an extralegal element to duelling that is entirely absent in jousting; one fought a duel to provide retribution for a personal injury that the official law would not pursue.

My concern which follows this is why this method of settling things became so popular. To be continued!

Dryden

Allied with Milton eventually but am now hopelessly struggling with Dryden. His Conquest of Granada is impossible, but again, I should read it as it was one of the crucial heroic plays that were so frequently parodied later on. It has a vaguely Achilles-like main character and starred Nell Gwyn and I hate it; that is about all I have to say about it. However, Dryden also provides an introduction on the subject of heroic plays which I've tried to read. He writes of the classical authors:

They made their heroes men of honour; but so, as not to divest them quite of human passions and frailties: they content themselves to shew you, what men of great spirits would certainly do when they were provoked, not what they were obliged to do by the strict rules of moral virtue.

Is he agreeing with Aristotle, that heroes should be flawed but still inherently right? I think he is, although perhaps not as emphatically. Lord, he's exasperating.

Samson Agonistes II

I took a break from Samson Agonistes for a few days as I'd felt discouraged after struggling with the first five hundred lines (it's 1,578 lines altogether). However, I picked it up again today and it came much more easily, in part because I used a basic trick I used to learn poetry when I was younger: I read it aloud. SA is a closet drama, which means that it was written to be read rather than performed: it's for the closet (or as we might say study or private sitting room) rather than the stage. Nevertheless, I think that most poetry and drama becomes much easier to understand when you the words are actually said aloud.

SA was no exception and I'm finding that I'm rather enjoying it now. Samson has an initial scene wherein he bewails his fate to his father: blind, betrayed, and a prisoner of the Philistines. Then in comes Delilah (Dalila in the play) all dolled up and says, rather sassily, "It was your fault you ended up like this; you should know that women love to know secrets but can never keep them." She offers to speak to the Philistine lords on his behalf, provided that Sansom agrees to return to her as her husband and allows her to nurse him; naturally he refuses. She exhibits little regret, and gives him the following speech before leaving:

I will be named among the famousest
Of women, sung at solemn festivals,
Living and dead recorded, who to save
Her country from a fierce destroyer, chose
Above the faith of wedlock bands... (982-986)

This is doubly (perhaps even triply) interesting. First, it positions Samson as a "fierce destroyer"; here and elsewhere in the play it is made clear that to the Philistines, Samson is a dishonest thug who quite deserves to be taken down. Second, Dalila's speech (which is a great deal longer than the excerpt I quoted) stands as an unusual example at this time of a woman eloquently defending her controversial actions and, furthermore, describing how she will be treated as a hero. Her actions won't be seen as excusable in her country- they'll be laudable, and the public will treat her as they treat their male heroes.


After she leaves, the Philistine warrior Harapha visits Samson to taunt him (again, he describes Samson as "A murderer, a revolter, and a robber" (1180)) and Samson's response, in spite of his blindness, is to challenge him to a duel. Harapha replies:

With thee a man condemned, a slave enrolled,
Due by the law to capital punishment?
To fight with thee no man of arms will deign. (1224-1226)

This is the principle rule of the seventeenth-century duel in a nutshell. Harapha could have quite easily agreed to fight with Samson, and he certainly believes that he would win if they did fight. However, even though Harapha is officially a man of the Old Testament, he is for all other purposes a thoroughly modern post-Renaissance gentleman whom convention prevents duelling with someone of a lower social status. It is not even that he feels compassion for Samson's impoverished condition; rather, Samson is beneath his notice, and to duel with him would be to indicate to the rest of society that they could interact as equals, thus compromising Harapha's own social standing.


Anyway, I haven't finished reading the play yet but I'm very pleased with what I've got out of it so far. Looking forward to reading the rest tomorrow.

Poetics

I took Aristotle's Poetics to work today, another relic from my time as an undergraduate that I didn't recall very well, and I ended up hitting upon several interesting passages. Poetics is of course a deconstruction of epic and tragedy in classical literature and has exerted a powerful influence over western dramatic criticism that cannot be overstated; I could hardly not read it.

What I found most interesting is Aristotle's assertion that tragedy reflects the lives of people better than those around us. To simplify his argument, the tragic model depends on disaster befalling good people. He goes on to write:

Since tragedy is an imitation of people better than we are, one should imitate good portrait-painters. In rendering the individual form, they paint people as they are, but make them better-looking. In the same way the poet who is imitating people who are irascible or lazy or who have other traits of character of that sort should portray them as having these characteristics, but also as decent people. (Poetics, 8.1, trans. Malcolm Heath, Penguin 1996, p.25)

It occurred to me that this description of the ideal tragedy was in fact what irked critics of both epic and tragedy during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Aristotle's proposal that the tragic subject should be innately better than real people in spite of any flaws they possess cannot be reconciled with the principals of Commonwealth and post-Restoration societies, which were partly acting in response to Christian idealism. For many critics, Milton and Dryden among them, a perfect (or even superior) hero could not be synonymous with a flawed hero; the flaws provided an insurmountable obstacle to achieving perfection or superiority. Why should an irascible, lazy character be superior to those surrounding him?

I think to most modern readers this sounds a reasonable complaint so perhaps it is surprising how relatively recently it arose. This objection had seen some light in earlier centuries - Odysseus appears in Dante's purgatory undergoing punishment for crimes of fraudulence during the Trojan war - but it was during the seventeenth century that it first appeared with frequency. Reaction then was variously Miltonian, as I began to discuss in my previous entry, or comic (Behn, Dryden, and later Fielding). Note also that it was here that the lines between epic and tragic began to blur.

I couldn't comment conclusively on how the dilemma was resolved in nineteenth-century literature but it seems to me that the later twentieth century saw a revival of the classical model of the hero who is flawed yet still superior to his fellow men. For example, the action-men heroes of the late 1970s through to the early 1990s (Rocky Balboa, Max Rockatansky, John McClane, Costner's Robin Hood, Martin Riggs) are don't respect authority, are anti-intellectual, lack conventional manners, and perhaps use a native slyness to win the day; nevertheless they are invariably innately better than the characters who surround them and it is they that the audience cheers for. There are of course variants (Indiana Jones is an obvious example of the intellectual action hero) but the formula is generally the same. Like Aristotle's description of the tragic subject, these epic heroes are painted as they are, as everymen, but made better-looking - given, in short, a kind of intrinsic nobility that real everymen don't possess.

But I'm getting side-tracked. I don't believe that Aristotle addresses the conflict between superior and flawed heroes later on in his Poetics - I'd be very surprised if he does, in fact - but I'm interested to see what else he has to say. So far it has been an enlightening read.

Samson Agonistes

Just a quick one to excuse the gap in entries. In part it's due to a very bad case of 'flu that left me unable to do much in the way of anything. However, I did manage to meet with my supervisor last week and she told me that I'm going to have to read what I've always feared reading: Milton.

I read Samson Agonistes and sections of Paradise Lost during my undergraduate days but it never stuck with me and consequently much of what I'm reading now feels as though I'm reading it with fresh eyes. How does one read Milton for the first time? What's striking me most of all is Milton's devotion to the classical in his discussion of Biblical figures, which nicely reflects contemporary debates about classical vs. Biblical education. After all, could a Christian country rightly heroify classical figures? Even leaving aside issues regarding the non-Christian's soul, classical culture simply, and necessarily, had a different set of morals to seventeenth-century Christan culture.


Bearing this in mind, I think that Milton's framing of the Biblical story of Samson as a Greek tragedy is highly interesting. One is left with a feeling that Samson's life has been wasted, rather than filled with admiration for his defeat of the Philistines. His destruction of the temple is not a glorious victory but rather the last act of a man on the brink of defeat.


Reading Milton has also made me consider the inevitable "fatal flaw" of all heroes, the thing about them that makes them imperfect in some way and often leads to their downfall. Achilles had his heel; Lancelot had his love for Guinevere; Othello had his jealousy; Hamlet had his procrastinationary nature. Leading on from this, I was reminded of Charles I's conviction of the divine right of king's in the following lines from SA:

I might begin Israel's deliverance,
The work to which I was divinely called. (225-6)

I am not sure how intentional this was on Milton's part. Traditionally Samson's Achilles heel has been his inability to see the treachery of Delilah. In SA Samson's physical blindness has a direct parallel with his emotional blindness. However, less obviously, the theme of Samson's pride also runs throughout the play. God gave Samson his strength in his hair, he tells us, to remind him of the "lightness" of his power, and he is punished when he takes it for granted - but perhaps he is still not entirely cured of his vanity.

Katherine Briggs

I immediately broke the resolution in my last entry because no sooner had I mentioned Katherine Briggs, I was left wanting to read my favourite book of hers, The Fairies in Tradition and Literature, a thorough, but not over-long, survey of fairy lore, poetry, and literature of the British Isles. It's a book that I'm very fond of, having come across it in a library sale at school when I was sixteen and I realised that it was the book that I'd always wanted to read but didn't realise existed. (My edition has the word "English" in the title before "Tradition", but it seems customary to eliminate it - perhaps because at least three-quarters of the book investigates Scottish, Welsh, and Irish fairies.)

Anyway, it's a wonderful, wonderful book which I usually end up reading about once every ten months (imagine Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell without everything except the footnotes; I realise that this is some readers' idea of hell). Although it was first published in 1967, there is still an academic freshness to it, and it makes a wonderful change from the prettified Edwardian fairies, the Disneyesque inventions, the new-age faeries, and the self-consciously grotesque fairies and goblins that have become so popular in recent fantasy literature. Reading it this time, I came across two interesting things in Briggs' chapter "Giants, Hags and Monsters". The first refers directly to the representation of heroes:

Giant-like qualities cling even to the Arthurian heroes. The early Lancelot poem dwells with particularity on the distortion of Lancelot's appearance when he was in a rage. Arthur and Guinevere are supposed to have sat on the two great rocks at Sewing Shields, and Guinevere said something that annoyed her husband so that he threw a stone at her, which she caught on her comb. The stone can still be seen and weighs several tons...In fact, in folk tradition the characters are like those in the Bayeux Tapestry - the important ones are large and the unimportant ones are little. Often monstrous traits are attached to heroes, who sometimes seem to have changed from gods to heroes and from heroes to giants. (Briggs 65-6)

I'm not sure if I will use this in my own thesis as Briggs' research focuses on the popular or folk whereas at this stage mine is primarily on the official literature. It's an interesting point to encounter in her discussion, however, and has made me think about the physical "largeness" of heroes; I will certainly be encountering that idea again in my study of Fielding's Tom Thumb and The Tragedy of Tragedies. The idea of attaching monstrous traits - one assumes physical traits only - to heroes is particularly intriguing.

Second, in her review of British dragons (or worms - it seems that the cryptozoological difference is slight) in folklore, she retells the story of the Lambton Worm, wherein the Heir of Lambton rides off to fight the dragon "wearing spiked armour, so that it wounded itself when it bit him" (68). Of course, this brings us back to The Dragon of Wantley and Moore's own spiked armour, which I discussed on Sunday. I was fond of my pet theory - that the spikes on Moore's armour, as in the Aphra Behn play, represented the horns of a cuckold - but the occurrence of spiked armour in both stories which otherwise only have the most superficial details in common suggests that it was a standard or recognised characteristic of dragon stories. However, perhaps there is room for both interpretations to exist in the play alongside each other. At times like this, one longs to be able to go back in time and see the play originally performed.

The British Library

Updates have been a little slow over the past few days. I submitted 5,000 words for my supervisor to read at the beginning of the week and we were meant to meet on Thursday at the British Library, but unfortunately, owing to an emergency on her end, she couldn't be there. However, I took advantage of the time and applied for a reader's pass, which means that now I can go in and actually look at and handle some of the manuscripts I'll be discussing in later chapters! I'm very excited.

Incidentally, the British Library has a fantastic exhibition on at the moment called Evolving English, which is well worth a look. Also of interest is the Sir John Ritblat gallery, which, among other curiosities, has a display of Alice in Wonderland books from the past century and a half, Jane Austen's writing desk, and a separate Magna Carta room. Most thrillingly of all, however, were the collection of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century play manuscripts, positioned right at the entrance. My favourite was a copy of Thomas Middleton's A Game at Chess, opened to the title page.


Anyway. Since my meeting has been rescheduled for next week, this has meant that for the first time since mid-January I have a stretch of time where I don't have a pressing deadline to produce words. Consequently I have been quite bad over the past few days and have thrown myself into non-research books, and so from now until Wednesday I'm going to concern myself with primary material. I began this morning by rereading The Dragon of Wantley (1737) by Henry Carey, a funny little burlesque play that I'm inordinately fond of. The story is fairly simple. It's based on a seventeenth-century comic ballad which reads like a ruder Lewis Carroll poem and tells of a dragon attacking the village of Wantley, to the villagers' dismay. They plea to the bibulous local nobleman, Moore of Moore Hall, to defend them and he eventually agrees - on the condition that the beautiful Margery agrees to dress him and kiss him the morning before he goes into battle. She agrees and they prepare him, dressing him in a suit of spiked armour. They engage in some mild flirting, although it's unclear how knowing or innocent it is:

MARGERY: Put your Hand here, and feel my Heart how't thumps.
MOORE: Good lack a day! how great a Palpitation! (II:I, 11-12)

(Consider what it is exactly that Moore is feeling.) Moore then sets off and arrives at the dragon's den. He hides in a well and when the dragon comes to drink from it, he leaps out and kicks it in the backside. The dragon then, in the words of the ballad, "groan'd, kick'd, sh-t, and died", while Moore emerges victorious to marry Margery. Incidentally, the ballad indicates, rather wryly, that this is an example of cunning defeating strength, while the play does no such thing.

 

Woodcutting of Moore kicking the dragon in the
backside. Note the spikes on Moore's armour.

The love story between Moore and Margery is of Carey's own invention (along with a second female character who creates a love triangle), although otherwise the play follows the ballad's story fairly exactly. Incidentally, the play did very well and the first run outperformed even that of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera. To me, the appeal comes from two places. First of all, I just like the story: it's a quaint, exaggerated version of typical English ballads. It reminds me of the sort of folk stories Katherine Briggs has discussed in her unsurpassable books on the subject.

That on its own wouldn't make it particularly special, however, which brings me to my second point. The play is one of those that becomes more interesting the more you find out about its production. Carey used the ballad as a source, but his focus was actually on parodying a failed Handel opera, Giustino, of a few months previously; consequently much of the play is performed as opera which music in an exaggeratedly Italian style to contrast with the rural English setting. I haven't seen a contemporary picture of either performance, although literature seems to indicate that the dragon costume in Wantley parodied the ridiculous monster costume of Giustino.

Satirising an opera requires able singers. Thomas Reinhold, a bass singer, was cast as the dragon while Thomas Salway played Moore dressed as and mimicking the voice of Farinelli, the famous castrato. In other words, the villain of the piece sounded strong and macho to emphasise the voice of the high and girlish voice of the hero - a decision that is absolutely inspired and designed to counter all presuppositions about heroic behaviour. To be blunt, which one has balls? Moore also goes into battle without a weapon, preferring to drink "six Quarts of Ale, and one of Aqua Vitae" (II:I, 81) to steady his nerve. Contrast this with the ridiculously long sword of Tom Thumb in the portrait of Miss Rose (shown on this post), a woman playing the part of a hero. I don't entirely agree with phallic interpretations of heroic weaponry in "straight" drama, largely because the primary purpose of weapon design has always been practicality in combat, but I think that they certainly have merit when discussing parody.

On the subject of heroes and weaponry, what has always interested me is the seemingly-inexplicable detail of Moore's spiked armour. It was only a few months ago when I read Aphra Behn's The Rover that I came across the following stage direction, and with it a possible explanation for the spiked armour:

Advances, from the father end of the scenes, two men dressed all over with horns [the sign of the cuckold] of several sorts, making grimaces at one another, with papers pinned on their backs. (I:II)

So (if we're taking Behn as a precedent), the spikes on Moore's armour could represent cuckoldry. This may not necessarily be correct, but within the context of the play I think that it's a valid explanation.

This post is long enough already so I will end it here, although the play certainly bears much further discussion. I hesitate to blindly recommend reading it because my love for it is based on several unrelated aspects that appeal to me - and honestly, it simply doesn't make for as pleasurable reading as many other eighteenth-century plays because so much is reliant on visual humour. Still, I think it's an interesting play, and one of the more important ones of its contemporaries. I'm very glad to know of it.

REVIEW: The Sun and the Moon by Matthew Goodman

It has been on my mind for the past few days to begin to regularly review books that I have recently read that aren't related to my degree. This was initially a shallow decision (my love of books is roughly equal to Louis Spence's love of dancing), but I think that summarising and discussing books that I read for pleasure will be good practice for doing the same thing for my work. Furthermore, thinking about books not related to my degree has in the past yielded insight into my research. Therefore at the beginning of each month I will endeavour to select the book I have read in the past month that I feel best able to respond to.

It is my happy fortune to enjoy the vast majority of books that I choose to read, but at this stage my reviews will primarily be of academic and literary fiction titles. These titles, if not new, will at least be new to me. Of course this is subject to change and I may end up falling back on an old favourite I have reread, but my initial purpose is to challenge myself to reflect on fresh books rather than to ruminate on old ones.

*

In 1794, Samuel and William Ireland discovered, in the trunk of a friend, a most remarkable collection of documents relating to the life of Shakespeare. Among the bills and receipts that provided choice insights into what the bard enjoyed for his breakfast, there was a poem and a letter he had written to his future wife Anne Hathaway, an article that conclusively declared him to be a Protestant, several annotated books from his private library, an autographed (self?)-portrait, and, most thrillingly of all, two of his lost plays. Understandably the public interest upon receiving these discoveries was phenomenal. The documents were displayed, examined, and found to be legitimate. James Boswell got down on his knees and kissed the documents when he saw them. A production of one of the plays, Vortigern and Rowena, was set into motion - to be produced by the great Richard Sheridan, the Spielberg of the eighteenth century. The manuscripts were published in a single volume. Altogether, these discoveries were, it seemed, set to change Shakespeare scholarship forever.

Ireland's Shakespeare

But the documents were a hoax - of course they were a hoax. The Irelands' story about finding the documents in the first place was suspect: who was this mysterious, publicity-shy benefactor who just happened to have a trunk filled with unique Shakespeare documents in his possession? And, as Edward Malone demonstrated in a 1796 critique of the documents, they did not have consistency with other, verified sixteenth-century documents: signatures were different, word usage was different, historical inaccuracies were rife. There was not one manuscript in the entire Ireland collection that could be deemed authentic. Just after this revelation came the crushing failure of Vortigern and Rowena, which reduced the audience to laughter and closed after its first night: this was not Shakespeare.

The Irelands were subject to much ridicule after their exposure, but one has to admire the dedication of men and women in the long nineteenth century to dedicate the time, expenses, and risk of reputation to pulling off these hoaxes. Even children weren't amiss to playing elaborate tricks which fooled masses: the Cottingley fairies, anyone?

Fascinating as it is, the Ireland Shakespeare hoax is not the focus of this review (although an excellent account of it is provided in the first chapter of James Shapiro's Contested Will), yet I believe that it provides an interesting introduction to the world of hoaxes, which have surfaced with regularity ever since the end of the eighteenth century. Rather, I am going to consider Matthew Goodman's The Sun and the Moon (Basic Books, 2008), a fascinating history of the moon hoax that gripped New York for several months in 1834. The story of this hoax was new to me but a lot of the key figures were familiar: the author Edgar Allan Poe, the showman P.T. Barnum, and the notorious newspaperman James Gordon Bennett. Perhaps ironically, it is the original perpetrator of the hoax, John Adams Locke, who has been forgotten.

Simply put, in 1834 the Sun newspaper in New York published a series of articles purporting to be an account of the famous astronomer Sir John Herschel who had recently invented a telescope capable of observing life on the moon. Not only were there lakes and forests in the sky above, but unicorns and man-bats too. Naturally, this news caused a sensation - not just in New York but many other countries, and sales of the Sun soared so that it became the most widely-read paper in the world. (Apparently in remote regions of Germany, the story was still being reported as true thirty years later.) Of course, these reports were wholly fictitious, having been written by the newspaper's editor, John Adams Locke. Goodman's book chronicles the backgrounds of the Sun and Locke, the origin of the hoax, critical and popular reactions to it, and its aftermath, as well as discussing why it was so successful in capturing the imaginations of people all over the world.

Goodman rather leaps about in his history: Sir John Herschel, to name just one name, is discussed early on in the book but the reader doesn't find out much about him until the second half. However, this has a strangely satisfying result of allowing the reader to feel caught up in the flurry of the time. It was an effective move on Goodman's part to begin the book with a focus on the newspaper boys who sold the papers to the public before moving up and down the social scale to present an exciting panorama of old New York.

Easily the best character (for the book reads as fluidly as a novel) is the villain of the piece, James Gordon Bennett, who cut a swathe through New York readership with his own newspaper, the Morning Herald. Wildly offensive and relishing lifelong grudges, Bennett appears almost cartoonish in his all-consuming hatred of almost everyone and his lack of regard for what the rest of society considered good-taste, running an advertisement for a notorious abortionist in his paper for many years. The contempt was not one-sided, either. Goodman writes:

In the course of his long career at the Herald, he suffered numerous public beatings, many of them administered by rival editors...Once for a full year the city's other papers set aside their differences to join in a campaign intended to put the Herald out of business forever; over time this struggle became known as the Moral War... (Goodman, 83)

What a man!

He alone among newspapermen refused a bribe to review the exhibition of Joice Heth, and he was one of the few public figures to refuse to accept the moon articles as truth from the outset. Strangely, Goodman notes, and in spite of his campaign against the Sun, Bennett seems to have had a modicum of respect for Locke, whom he always addressed as "Mr. Locke" or "John"; for everyone else he reserved the marvellous epithets of the nineteenth century: "fastidious fools", "the garbage of society".

Interestingly, Bennett would have been a pivotal force in newspaper history for his innovations alone: among other firsts, he was the first editor to devote the front page to news (rather than stories or adverts) and the first editor to conduct interviews with newsworthy persons. It wouldn't be too excessive to describe him as the father of the modern newspaper, and is all the more impressive when you consider that he ran it alone for many years, which was fairly standard practice for most new newspapers. In fact, reading a list of Bennett's responsibilities (publisher, editor, reporter, manager, sole defender against detractors), one is filled with a new-found respect for past editors. Not surprisingly, these innovations quickly increased his paper's popularity and several months after its founding it was the Sun's biggest rival.

I could sing my admiration for Bennett as one of the great entertaining baddies of history all day long, but of course his involvement only makes up a small part of the book. Much of it is taken up with discussion of why the moon hoax became so widely accepted as fact. Goodman's main argument is that rather than the success of the moon hoax indicating a naivety or superstitiousness of the general public, it actually points to a society governed by logic in an age of baffling new scientific discoveries. After all, the discovery of the planet Uranus was literally within living memory, by Sir John Herschel's father, no less. Goodman writes:

Thanks to the recent invention of hot-air balloons, human beings were now able to fly. Ships and trains - and even newspaper presses - were powered by the force of an immaterial substance: steam...No more than six months earlier, the Sun had carried on its front page a large drawing of the creatures - "animalcules," they were called - that could be seen in a single drop of water by means of the hydro-oxygen microscope then on exhibit at the American museum...[W]hy should it not also be possible that the hydro-oxygen microscope, in combination with a powerful new telescope, might discover equally astonishing creatures on the earth's closest neighbor? (Goodman, 182-3)

Leaving aside the philosophical implications of life on the moon (although Goodman writes a compelling chapter on Christian reactions to and explanations of the idea, including, amusingly, a story of an American clergyman informing his congregation that one day they would be called upon to buy Bibles for the moon's inhabitants), one can very well see how readers were so easily hoaxed. Living in an age where scientists were producing more and more marvellous discoveries about the natural world each day, there was nothing obviously illogical about the discovery of life on the moon, particularly to the layman not versed in science.

Interestingly, however, what Goodman doesn't really consider is the authority the press must have held in nineteenth-century society that simply doesn't exist now. I mean, sensationalist papers such as the (now defunct) Weekly World News and the National Enquirer surely have their credulous readers, but they are more of a subset of society than an easy majority. In my mind there is more cynicism that is consciously directed towards journalism - possibly in part thanks to a long history of made-up news reports.

Although the prose of the book is exceptional, I would criticise the impreciseness of its objective. From the title one would assume that the sole focus is on the moon hoax, and indeed this hoax is used as a framing narrative. However, the subtitle of the book informs us that this is "The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York," suggesting that more than the moon hoax is at hand. Furthermore the way that the chapters are divided is uneven. By my count, there are eleven moon and five non-moon chapters, an uneven split that seems curious at best and badly thought out at worst.

Ultimately, I found myself questioning a number of editorial decisions. Was such a lengthy biography of Edgar Allan Poe necessarily? Did we need a two-page summary of an elaborate childhood prank played on P.T. Barnum? Were the trials Barnum went through to exhibit Joice Heth a truly integral part of the story? Once again, my argument isn't with the telling of the history, which is done in an extremely entertaining way, but rather the relevance of some chapters to the subject at hand. I ended up feeling that the book either needed to be much slimmer, and focus more exclusively on the moon hoaxes, or much bulkier, and have a greater number of chapters on other hoaxes of the time.

Obviously, as it was so well-written, I'd favour a longer book, and perhaps one that dwells more upon the motivation behind hoaxing - something Goodman touches on, but ultimately doesn't discuss in any great extent. Locke claimed later in life that in the hoax his intention was to satirise popular scientific reporting, although as Goodman notes, this wasn't necessarily true. But there are other reasons for hoaxing to be considered: money, fame, self-advancement, love of mayhem, revenge, to win a bet, an accidental hoax...The list seems to go on. By Goodman's estimation and his own, P.T. Barnum's motivation was simply the love of a good joke.

Aside from my fussy objections to aspects of its execution, this was an astonishingly well-written book and one that I would eagerly recommend. A fascinating book about a fascinating period in history.