An Australian Classic: The Fortunes of Richard Mahony by Henry Handel Richardson

The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is a 943 page classic and an Australian one at that. It is also a tragedy. The author relentlessly follows the ‘fortunes’ of both Richard Mahony and his wife, Polly (known as Mary later in the book), the ups and downs of their rollercoaster-like lives, the inevitable sadness of their circumstances.

Mahony is an Irish immigrant whose restless nature will never allow him to settle anywhere for very long. Although he is proud and exceptionally thin-skinned, he is at heart a kind man. Mary is originally from England and puts down roots easily. She is loyal, tends to see the best in people and makes the most of circumstances. They are as different as chalk and cheese in many ways but they care for each other and life goes on reasonably well it becomes clear that Mahony will never settle anywhere. 

The Fortunes of Richard Mahony was written between 1917 and 1929 as a trilogy: Australia Felix, The Way Home, and Ultima Thule, but was re-published as one book in 1930. Henry Handel Richardson is the pen name of Ethel Florence Lindsay Richardson (1870-1946).

The book begins during the mid 1800’s gold rush in Ballarat where Mahony works in his store selling supplies to the miners. He had originally qualified as a medical doctor before emigrating to Australia but set that aside for the lure of the goldfields. He meets Mary on a trip to Melbourne when he is in his late twenties and she is only sixteen. They marry soon after meeting and she comes to live in Ballarat.

With his wife’s encouragement, Mahony takes up medical practice again and does very well but his restlessness makes him miserable.  He insists that life in England would be much more suitable for them, culturally and socially. So off they go only for Mahony to find that the grass is not as green as he had thought. Doctors were still not much higher in the social scale than barbers in this 'slow-thinking, slow moving country.' 

‘Long residence in a land where every honest man was the equal of his neighbour had unfitted him for the genuflexions of the English middle-classes before the footstools of the great.’

Although his pride was hurt by the attitude of the people to his profession, he was furious when he learnt that Mary was snubbed by some of the ladies of the town. Studying her objectively, he realised that she was different. Her manner was natural and spontaneous which contrasted to their restraint and it seemed to him that,

'...into all Mary did or said there had crept something large and free - a dash of the spaciousness belonging to the country that had become her true home.'

There are some interesting backdrops to this book: the Victorian goldfields and the Eureka Stockade, the Crimean War, Lister’s experiments in Glasgow, the English class system, and the fear of the Kelly Gang in country Victoria. It touches, too, on the treatment of the mentally ill - asylums were basically prisons and visits by relatives were discouraged. Mahony becomes intensely interested in Spiritualism for a time, attending seances and the like - apparently Ballarat had a small group of very devout believers in the 1800’s. 

There are also many philosophical tangents in the book as Mahony thinks about faith, science and eternity.

It’s interesting reading this in 2020 where the average lifespan is significantly longer than it was in the 1800’s. I kept reading jarring comments about someone being past their prime at 39 years of age ?! and a person was described as ‘very old’ when they were 61 or 62 years old.

The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is a very compassionate and in-depth exploration of a marriage. At different times the author allows the couple to share their individual thoughts. I thought this was very well done and helped me to understand both parties. Mahony's personality is so thoroughly explored that even though at times he appears to be a real jerk, one cannot help but feel some empathy. He tended to have flashes of inspiration that came too late:

'For such a touchy nature I'm certainly extraordinarily obtuse where the feelings of others are concerned.'

'To be perpetually in the company of other people irked him beyond belief. A certain amount of privacy was as vital to him as sleep.'

'His first impressions of people - he had had the occasion to deplore the fact before now - were apt to be either dead white or black as ink; the web of his mind took no half tints.'

As time passed, Mahony grew increasingly withdrawn. His work left no time for friendships, so he said, and although his wife was dear to him he missed the companionship an old friendship provided. The 'solid base of joint experience' was gone but his life had become too set to allow him to start building another.

'...the one person he had been intimate with passed out of his life. There was nobody to take the vacant place...He had no talent for friendship.'

Richardson was a gifted woman and an excellent writer. Obviously well-educated, her writing is peppered with allusions to mythology and Latin words. From what I've read of her life, this book has strong undercurrents of her own experiences.

Linking up with Brona for the 2020 AusReading Month.

Back to the Classics 2020 Challenge: Final Wrap Up

Well, this is the earliest I've ever posted my final wrap-up for the Back to the Classics Challenge! I've managed to fit in a lot of books so far this year, thanks mostly to Covid! I'm very happy to have finally read The Lord of the Rings...and to have enjoyed them so much. They were just the right books to read as we went into lockdown here. I also watched the movies, which I'd put off viewing until I'd read the books.

A pleasant surprise for me out of this list was Martin Chuzzlewit. I've read just about all of Dickens' novels, and wasn't busting to read any of his others but by chance I found this book, had no idea of its storyline, and had never seen it reviewed. I decided to read a chapter and if I found it too rambling I'd give it a miss, but I fell into it headlong and continued. A great read!

A book that made me cry (which doesn't happen very often) was The Death of Ivan Ilyich. A perfect (short) book to pick up for a first introduction to a Russian writer.

Saplings was very different to anything else I'd read by Noel Streatfeild - definitely not for children like many of her other books; a tragic tale of the impact of WW2 on a family.

Sadly, Miss Pym Disposes is the last of of Josephine Tey's crime/detective noels I had left to read. I've thoroughly enjoyed her books.

The only book I didn't really like was The Island of Doctor Moreau. There was a reason it was my abandoned classic!

19th century Classic: Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens (1843-5)

20th Century Classic: Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (1957-8)

Classic by a Woman: The Making of a Marchioness by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1901)

Classic in Translation: The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy (1886)

Classic by a Person of Colour: To Sir With Love by E.R. Braithwaite (1959)

Genre Classic: The Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie (1930)

Classic With a Name in the Title: Miss Pym Disposes by Joesphine Tey (1946)

Classic With a Place in the Title: Pilgrim's Inn by Elizabeth Goudge (1948)

Classic With Nature in the Title: The Scent of Water by Elizabeth Goudge (1963)

Classic About a Family: Saplings by Noel Streatfeild (1945)

An Abandoned Classic: The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells (1896)

Adapted Classic: The Lord of the Rings by J.R. Tolkien (1949)

Non-Fiction: Queen Victoria by Lucy Worsley (2018)

Victoria served as Queen of Great Britain and Ireland from 1837 until her death in 1901, making her the longest serving monarch up until Queen Elizabeth II’s reign.
Lucy Worsley’s book uses letters, diaries, and other material to explore twenty-four days in Victoria’s life with insights into the era which was named after her.
Naturally, there has been a plethora of books written about Victoria and her reign with a wide range of opinion, speculation & gossip - some of it sympathetic and some not.
This book looks at Victoria’s life from her birth & childhood up until her death and shows her growth and development as a woman and a leader, her relationship to her husband Albert and their nine children, (she outlived three of them) and her interactions with various members of her staff and the government of the day.
When Victoria was still a baby, her father died of a fever leaving his wife, Victoire, in sole charge of their child. Unfortunately, as he was dying, he advised his wife to put her trust in his friend and servant, John Conroy, a trust that would cause much trouble later on as Conroy exerted his control over Victoire and Victoria.
As the years passed it became more probable that Victoria would one day sit on the throne and so her life was carefully regulated and controlled under the ‘System’ that Conroy devised for her.
Victoria and Albert met when she was sixteen but even though their meeting had been clearly arranged, she was resolved not to marry until she was twenty.
Three weeks after she turned eighteen William IV died and Victoria became Queen. Conroy had hoped to exert his power through Victoire as Regent in the likely event that William died before she came of age, but the king had hung on and now Victoria could rule in her own right. And Victoria rose to the occasion.
Pressure had been put on the queen to marry and at last she posed the question to Albert, as was her prerogative, and he accepted.

Victoria often used the third person to describe her actions as queen:

‘Had she been engaged to the Prince a year sooner,’ Victoria explained in later life, ‘she would have escaped many trials.’

Nine children were born to them and Albert took on many duties Victoria would normally would have done had she not had the responsibilities of motherhood.
Worsley portrays Albert as a bit of a controller with a hardened attitude in areas of royal business as opposed to Victoria, who she considered was more conciliatory by nature.
After the birth of their first child Victoria said that Albert’s care for her, ‘was more like a mother...’
Worsley observed that, 
‘The words ring true, but they were perhaps strange ones to use of a husband: a ‘mother,’ a ‘judicious’ nurse. In fact, Albert was infantilising his wife.’

Albert was also portrayed as very moralistic, almost prudish - characteristics that are often associated with the Victorian Era. He was also said to have been very exacting of his children and expected them to be studious, which Bertie, especially, did not live up to.

Albert’s untimely death, supposedly from Typhoid Fever, at the age of only 42 years was devastating to Victoria. Since their marriage she had come to depend more and more upon her husband’s involvement in ministerial affairs.
A decade of mourning followed for Victoria during which she was absent bodily from public life but now her wayward eldest son, Bertie, on the eve of the tenth anniversary of his father’s death, was almost at death’s door himself.
When Bertie unexpectedly pulled through his illness, Victoria emerged from her more isolated existence and began to ‘re-possess her power...She returned to her best self, the self she had lost in Albert, had begun.’

This was a good introduction to the life of Queen Victoria and I liked the ‘twenty-four day’ approach as it helped to give an overview of her life in general. The author presents Queen Victoria as a complex person with faults and eccentricities but also as a person who was affectionate and sympathetic. Her unusual pressurised upbringing prepared her in many ways for her future role but it also disadvantaged her in other aspects, and certainly didn’t help her in her role as a mother.
Victoria came to the throne at a time when society was less comfortable with women in power than the Tudors and Stuarts were with their queens, but her strength was to rule through influence rather than power.
According to the author, on the one hand Victoria was very socially conservative but on the other she was ‘tearing up the rule book for how to be female.’ (I don’t know if this is just a modern take on Victoria or not.)
Reading this book filled in many gaps for me regarding Queen Victoria and it did so in an engaging way. Worsley presents Victoria as a multifaceted woman about whom you could feel both sympathy and dislike. I thought it was awful how she basically treated her unmarried daughters as ladies in waiting and her expectation that her youngest daughter, Beatrice, would not marry but stay with her as scribe and general dogsbody was appalling. (Beatrice did eventually marry but only after she’d promised her mother that she and her very good-natured husband would live with the queen!)

‘In this book I have questioned, sometimes undermined, the story of Albert and Victoria’s endlessly, superbly, unquestionably happy marriage. But for Victoria, his charm had never failed. For her, the bewitchment of the ‘angel’ to whom she had proposed marriage sixty-one years previously at Windsor Castle still geld strong.’

Besides being a writer of history books Lucy Worsley is Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces and a presenter at the BBC.
The lovely floral cover image on my copy of the book is from the William Morris Gallery.
It has 509 pages which includes 75 pages of sources and notes.
Age recommendation: I was thinking this might be a good book for my 15 yr old but there are some sections I’d definitely skip. There is mature content in quite a few of the chapters that I wouldn’t consider suitable for that age.



Linking to the 2020 Non Fiction Challenge: History

Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens: A Study of Selfishness

‘My main object in this story was, to exhibit in a variety of aspects the commonest of all the vices; to show how Selfishness propagates itself; and to what a grim giant it may grow, from small beginnings.’ 

This book isn’t one I’d planned to read & it’s not a Dickens’ title that had come to my attention at any time, but I saw it at a book sale and bought it because I hadn’t read anything by Dickens for a while.
It sat unread on my book shelves for some time until one night when I was considering which book I should start reading next but couldn’t make up my mind. I’d just finished The Lord of the Rings, which I’d put off for years (and found to my surprise that it was hard to put down) so when my eyes came upon Martin Chuzzlewit, I thought, ‘I’ll just read the first chapter and if I can’t get into it, I’ll choose something else.’
Well, I kept going and that was that. From memory, it usually takes me a few chapters to engage with Dickens so I was surprised at how quickly it happened with one of his books that doesn’t seem anywhere near as popular as many of his others.

Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-4) first came out in monthly installments but unlike Dickens’ previous books, The Old Curiosity Shop, and even Barnaby Rudge, sales were low for various reasons: he had abstained from novel-writing for a time and this caused him to lose ground with the public; when he did return to publishing he released the chapters monthly as opposed to weekly, which was his previous practice; his reputation declined after the public’s disappointment with Barnaby Rudge.
After the poor reception of the first instalments of Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens decided to change some aspects of the story and set parts of it in America where he had recently spent some time. (He wrote a record of that journey in American Notes.)

Dickens himself considered Martin Chuzzlewit his best work and when it was published in book-form it proved to be one of his greatest successes.
Not only is Martin Chuzzlewit a study in selfishness, it also concerns itself with how suffering shapes character. Oswald Chambers said that ‘Sorrow burns up a great deal of shallowness, but it does not always make a man better’ and Dickens’ demonstrates the effects the same circumstances may work for better or worse in different people. Chambers also observed that if you yield in childhood to selfishness, you will find it the most enchaining tyranny on earth. Some of the characters in Martin Chuzzlewit never broke free of those chains.

Dickens’ satire on the Chuzzlewit family portrays ‘the poison of selfishness as transmitted within a family,’ and the ‘false notions of family grandeur and the parasites which they breed.’

As usual, there is a large cast of characters in the story but I thought there were many more likeable persons here compared to some of his other books and more redemptive aspects in the characters’ lives.
I really enjoyed the developing friendships between some of the young men. The loyalty and unselfish regard they had toward one another stood out in comparison to the opportunistic relationships in the greater Chuzzlewit family.

Some Notable Characters:

Martin Chuzzlewit: the young protagonist of the story; he had fallen out with his Grandfather, of the same name, who had brought him up, and now struck him out of his will. Martin junior was frank and generous by nature but his upbringing had allowed him to grow selfish. Circumstances opened his eyes to see others he had taken for granted and used.

‘How was it that this man who had had so few advantages, was so much better than he who had had so many?’

'Martin - for once in his life, at all events - sacrificed his own will and pleasure to the wishes of another, and consented with a fair grace. So travelling had done him that much good, already.'

Mr Pecksniff: an absolute hypocrite and selfish to the core. 

'He was a most exemplary man: fuller of virtuous precepts than a copy-book. Some people likened him to a direction post, which is always telling the way to a place, and never goes there.

(His) detractors thought he bore a fanciful resemblance to his horse, not in his outward person but in his moral character - full of promise, but of no performance.
He was a kind of animal who infused into the breasts of strangers a lively sense of hope, and possessed all those who knew him better with a grim despair.’

His comment on seeing a beggar on the street: ‘If everyone were warm and well-fed, we should lose the satisfaction of admiring the fortitude with which certain conditions of men bear cold and hunger.'

Tom Pinch - unpretentious and noble-souled; his Grandmother had skimped and saved to allow him to enter Pecksniff’s service as a student of architecture after he had dazzled her with prospects of Tom’s happiness and advancement. ('Pecksniff’s genius lay in ensnaring parents and guardians, and pocketing premiums.') And poor Tom was completely take in by the man.

One of the characters who undergoes a transformation of character (but I won’t spoil the story by mentioning names):

‘I never thought at all; I had no thought, no heart, no care to find one; at that time. It has grown out of my trouble. I wouldn’t recall my trouble, such as it is and has been - and it is light in comparison with trials which hundreds of good people suffer every day, I know - I wouldn’t recall it tomorrow, if I could. It has been my friend, for without it no one could have changed me; nothing could have changed me.’

I agree with Dickens that Martin Chuzzlewit is one of his best stories and I highly recommend it.
Moozle, who is 15yrs of age and has never taken to Dickens (I think The Old Curiosity Shop turned her off!) was hunting for something to read and agreed to try MC after I said how I enjoyed it. I’m very happy to say that she actually liked it!!

Linking to the Back to the Classics Challenge 2020: 19th Century Classic