Good writing I get bored with

I wrote this last Saturday and have now just tidied it up and decided to post it for what it’s worth.

17:30
Reading Owen Hatherley (A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain -- architecture in cities post-1970) I think how good the writing is and how there’s plenty of good British writing around that requires -- i imagine -- no knowledge of the Authorised Version or Shakespeare or Milton to be enjoyed, so do we really have to read Eng Lit classics at school and uni? (a question that I'm aware deserves closer attention).

Though personally I wouldn’t look for it, good British writing, in fiction. Perhaps Martin Amis is good now, though he wasn’t when I tried to read Money. Just irritating. And I suppose I only say that because I don’t read much fiction -- tends to irritate me like theatre.

19:42
That was after reading the intro -- autobiog, survey, rant, most enjoyable and lively. Then I read a big chunk of the first chapter, on Southampton. Intrigued at first and held by the lively and witty writing, then after a while I'd had enough. I thought this was because I didn’t know Southampton (and the photographs are too small and grey to do the job -- a problem that I suppose reading it on an iPad might solve, I suppose, one argument for such devices that don’t much tempt me).

And then I thought that one advantage of the novel is that one doesn’t have to know its places and people in advance. It tells you all you need to know. But now again I think I don’t need to if I read a good history, either, even if it’s on a topic I've no knowledge of ... so I don’t know where this leaves me.

Except, come to think of it, I do. My education and all has meant I've spent a lot of time with history, one way and another, and that makes reading about it meaningful, not because I know the places and people but because I've become a sort of minimal connoisseur of how history goes so that new cases come to me as relevant, as fitting themselves -- in ways I have to decide and perhaps can’t help trying to decide -- in a tissue of memories of other works.

So, by analogy, if I'd been an assiduous observer of and reader about architecture and urban planning, and still more if I'd myself grappled with the confusion of post-1970 British urban scenes and groped for ways of making sense of them, then Hatherley’s efforts would interest me for the categories and characterisations he comes up with, for the light he throws on what appeared meaningless and for the insightfulness of his metaphors.

Later again
Then I have my tea, over a newspaper which has an extract from the unpublished (unfinished, reconstructed, I think) novel Pale King by David Foster Wallace who the papers insist was exceptionally good. Well, yes, it’s good -- very nice description of an unusual and interesting situation, the narrator’s father being caught in the closing doors of a Chicago subway train and hurtling to his death at the opening of the tunnel -- as are thousands of parallel passages in novels. But so it should be if he’s devoted his life to writing -- he’s a writer, dammit. In short, so what, nothing special, and no particular reason to read yet another new novel out of the impossible pile of good novels.

In any case I think I've always preferred non-fiction, mainly -- fiction once in a while, certainly, a periodic fix, as with poetry, but a little goes a long way.

This ends up a rambling as Montaigne. Does that make me a true essayist?

Who should determine the curriculum?

I mentioned that I was enjoying De Tocqueville’s Ancien Régime -- so elegantly scientific in the manner of Marx and Weber, and so freshly written and modern-seeming. Lately (last few years) I'm reading more history, which I’d always told myself I was interested in but had rarely chosen to read. I like the argument in it, like De Tocqueville asking why, toward the end of the Middle Ages, was the native Germanic law of the northern peoples decisively if gradually supplanted by Roman law. He argues that since the states were very different and yet all changed in this way, there must have been a common cause, and he identifies it.

Reading De T gave me to the following line of thought. He enumerates the functions of the state: administrative, financial, judicial, military etc. Nothing here that isn’t fairly obvious but I would have had to think for a while to come up with them. I.e. I’d never been taught them, though probably most American kids would be as the Americans are hot on their constitution. I think I should have been, perhaps in my school history course. De T’s understanding of the functions is essential to his explanation of the significance of the Revolution (namely, quite different from what was usually supposed), and the UK equivalent would seem equally important to British citizens today.

I'm regularly aware, though, that my history course has nevertheless paid off for me in all sorts of ways that wouldn’t have been specifiable in advance, except in very general terms. I often find myself understanding or being interested in things and realising that it’s because of my school history, of which only the last two years (10 and 11) were well taught, that they have meaning for me. My bit of history is a widow’s cruse, continually delivering significance to my experience. (The pay-offs from my endless and all-consuming classical education, in contrast, were thin indeed.)

It’s a problem, no doubt of it, deciding what should be in a curriculum. Someone has to decide what it is a person needs in order to understand the world and find it meaningful. Who’s in the best position to know that? I would say, those people -- experts, let’s call them -- who are both knowledgeable about the world and culture and reflective about the nature of that knowledge. That sounds like people who combine philosophy and some broad area of knowledge, students both of knowledge itself and of some discipline; there aren’t many such around and we need more. It doesn’t sound like teachers -- with some exceptions -- but when it comes to pedagogy (how can the curriculum actually be taught, if it can -- Michael Gove and Dryden [Gove: UK Sec of State for Education]-- they have to be the deciders. The last person it should be is a politician.

Also, it goes without saying: education isn’t just a curriculum of knowledge as organised in the disciplines. It’s also experience and activity and has an important moral aspect. A crucial contribution of good comprehensive schools, for instance, has been to take diverse groups of children and young people and teach them to sit and talk to each other in a purposeful and respectful way.

Update

No ideas in this one but have decided that to keep my few followers I need to post regularly. Being too busy (which I have been) shouldn’t be an excuse; I could always post at least a one-liner once a week. Keep me to it.

I'm at the ‘writing up’ stage of my bit of the research (English in three London schools, 1945-65 -- Walworth School is my part, with Pat Kingwell). The task is somewhat tedious: you look at 30 bits of information and can write one sentence as a result. As a result it doesn’t flow, and the text is pedestrian -- I end up saying what happened but not what it means, why significant. That, I suppose, will be the next stage. And I imagine much of what I've written will be discarded as too trivial, too nitpicking or just too much. But I don’t think I can shortcut the process.

By Eurostar to Brussels last week - my first time except to change trains. (Return journey tedious -- 3 hours delay when train broke down, towed back to Brussels, check-in and security all over again, replacement train not ready. But the compensation made it all worth it: another return ticket to Brussels.)

I enjoyed Brussels of course, but one highlights was meeting two of my ex-PGCE students, John and Amy, now married and with a son and teaching at a British international school. On the train and in cafes etc read Camus L’Etranger in French - surprised how easy since I'm not very good. Fantastic novel -- hadn’t realised how good. (Read it English years ago -- can’t remember when). Inspired by that I found a great second-hand shop and bought some more Camus and also de Tocqueville’s L’Ancien Régime et la Revolution, which I also found I could manage. Great book, terrific writing. What made me get that was two things: (1) an interest in the French Revolution, arising from reading Burke and Carlyle (see label); (2) reading Peter Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America, which is about de T and his earlier book, Democracy in America, which I’d also looked at. Ancien Régime is a terrific read: intellectual force and lively, spirited writing. It has an argument that holds it together beautifully, and some polemical points for contemporary France (1850s).

There’s more but that will do for now.

The crucial discovery

Reflecting on the post-war history of English teaching (my current research project) I've come up with this brief formulation of perhaps the most important thing that happened:

The content of English had been stuff and a skill: texts and grammar, writing well. Suddenly the discovery was made in the 1950s that the stuff didn’t all have to be imported and introduced from outside the pupils’ world; it could be what they already had, what they could bring in from their worlds. A minority of teachers learned how to work with this (the pupils' ‘experience’) through a newly intensified and protracted way of talking together (‘discussion’) so as to elicit spoken utterances from the pupils that had, at moments, the poetic intensity of the English and Scottish Ballads; and that this generativity in speech could in turn be redirected into the production of poetic written texts.

Two further points:

(1) The discovery was made not in one leap but gradually and in two or three stages. The elicitation of talk in a newly determined spirit and in a new direction--towards the pupils' experience--was developed first as a means of making the ‘stuff’--literature: class readers, literary extracts, poems--more accessible, and then (or perhaps at the same time in some classrooms) of provoking more thoughtful and more deeply felt writing. But it was ‘realised’ (imagined?) finally by some teachers that the pupil experience that was capable of being dealt with in this new way was itself ‘stuff’, a second stuff alongside literature that was potentially of equal value and importance.
Thus a new, more inventive way of pursuing the traditional elements of English--the literature side of the ‘stuff’ and the ‘skill’ of writing well--led to a transformation of the structure of English in two ways: a new stuff was added (in fact displacing the time that had been spent on grammar) and also a new ‘skill’ alongside writing well: talking well, orality, spoken production.

(2) What excited teachers was in part their sense of glimpsing the survival of something thought long lost, the voice of the people, the folk, in that least promising quarter, the ‘degraded’ urban working class--‘mass-media-corrupted’, ‘remote from their roots in the land’. Here in the run-down classrooms of shabby city schools it was as if there was an echo of the world as it had been before ‘disenchantment’ (the effect of print, Reformation and science), even though rationally, as De Certeau says (1984: 131), ‘We no longer believe, as Grundtvig (or Michelet) did, that, behind the doors of our cities, in the nearby distance of the countryside, there are vast poetic and “pagan” pastures where one can still hear songs, myths, and the spreading murmur of the folkelighed (a Danish word that cannot be translated: it means “what belongs to the people”). The poetry was still there, lying dormant in ‘ordinary people’ and waiting to be brought into the open, into speech and then writing, by primary school teachers and English teachers. It was what Charles Parker realised on listening carefully to the field recordings that he made in the 1960s and displayed to the public (not without some manipulation to remove ‘corruptions’) in his Radio Ballads of the 1960s.

London, Berlin, Mexico

What a week for treats I could have had in very few other places than London.

Sometimes I fantasise about a move to the country (where I've never lived), partly in preparation for the coming breakdown of environment and society, which may or may not happen, in my lifetime or for years after, but more because I love views of landscape and having birds around other than the magpies, gulls and pigeons that are all we get in Surbiton apart from the occasional parakeet. (I've saw a single swift on a couple of occasions, and distant swallow once or twice.)

But then I think about the stuff I've been able to do this week by virtue of living in London (on the outer edge but with fast, frequent and free trains to the centre).

Here are the highlights.

Monday evening: a conversation between six writers, historians, journalists and other experts on Berlin, the Wall and the division of Germany. Memorable readings from two autobiographical pieces about the East, comments out of long experience by Misha Glenny with a passionate appeal to make the EU work for the sake of the peace and security of Eastern Europe including the Balkans which should eventually be brought in, and a quite different account, quiet and thoughtful, by David Chipperfield the architect on his restoration -- or reconstitution -- of the Neues Museum, with slides.

Tuesday morning in the British Library, looking at stuff I've had on a list for a year or two. Lovely place to work and the system seems to work beautifully. Because I'd got something wrong in my ordering one item hadn’t been delivered so I'll be back today to get it -- they’re faxing it from Boston Spa, their depository outside Leeds (a talk by the LCC Chief Inspector of Schools in 1948 about the London School Plan.)

Tuesday evening: Bartok’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle at the ENO (English National Opera) -- the production got a bit silly but the singing and music were ravishing. I first discovered this opera (1908 0r 1911 as I remember -- that terrific exuberant, inventive, iconoclastic first phase of Modernism) in a tv series on 20th century music, Leaving Home, by Simon Rattle and his Birmingham Philharmonic on Channel 4. I taped it and later bought the DVDs and have replayed them several times. When does C4 do anything like that now?

Yesterday evening: the South Bank again for another conversations: Robert Service and Tristran Hunt on their biographies of Trotsky and Engels. This calls for a separate post. It was as terrific as all those ‘conversations’ on the South Bank are. I've been to loads and never a dud one.

What, in the country, I ask myself, would I be doing at the times when in London I have experiences like these? going for walks? enjoyable once in a while but when the weather’s dull they can be really boring. Gardening? I used to do that and a large part is mindless drudgery.

Could see myself rapidly declining into Marx’s (and Hazlitt’s) state of rural idiocy: fitter and healthier but bored and stupid. So here I stay for the next little while.

Remembering Harold Rosen

An event at the Institute of Education took place last night to celebrate the memory of Harold Rosen. 170 people, there were 11 speakers and many reunions. It was a moving and memorable event. As one of Harold's students who knew him a long time I was asked to say something, in six minutes! The following is what I said.

I first knew Harold in 1963, when I found myself in his PGCE tutor group here at the Institute. But by then Harold already had half a career behind him, in schools and in Borough Road Training College, and for that part I’ll have to draw on other people’s memories. Fortunately these include Harold’s own, because in 2004 and 05 he talked to John Hardcastle and me in a couple of interviews.

In 1956, after teaching in grammar schools for at least ten years, Harold went as head of English to Walworth School in Southwark, a co-called interim or experimental working-class comprehensive school set up by the LCC in 1946.

We should start by remembering Harold’s voice, so here he is talking about learning again to teach literature in Walworth:

[PLAY RECORDING]

Well, I suppose, if I take one example, Great Expectations, I discovered that, used with discretion, Dickens is their author, you know, in spite of those long you know posh bits. And I remember we'd got to start off this opening, so with this opening, you know, the encounter with Magwitch, the convict, which is a fantastic piece, I've always thought it was quite incredible. And we read the big chunk of where he gets him to promise he'll bring a file and something
to eat. And so we read it, I read it once, and then I had them read it as a drama, skipping the intervening bits, just, it's full of dialogue. And then we explored the idea of being frightened, and being frightened of certain kinds of adults. Well I can remember being fantastically chuffed because I had chosen something [] because they couldn't stop talking about frightening adults, quite different kinds of course, and I was surprised at how often they were people encountered in the markets, and who grabbed hold of them, and so on, tried to get money from them. And then, of course, they could, if they wanted to, write about that, and they did, and there were a lot of good pieces, shall we say about a third of them.

So much there and no time to expand – but note that “surprised”. In Harold’s account of Walworth it’s striking how often he was being surprised by the kids – what they thought, what they chose, what they could do. That frequent sense of surprise came from the alert expectation with which that post-war generation of teachers, with Harold as pioneer, approached their teaching as they moved from grammar schools to comprehensives out of a determination to make them work and with a thirst to find out how. Between them, over the space of about seven years, working in an inquiring, improvisatory, feeling-their way spirit they created a new English, one that -- at last -- would be good enough for the working class children about whom Harold said, ‘They are the hope’.

So what was Harold like in the classroom? Accounts do exist. There’s a lovely recognisable description by his Walworth pupil Valerie Avery, in her novel London Spring which, with London Morning, he inspired her to write. And Bob Thornbury, his student at Borough Road training college, has told us of a demonstration lesson with cat poems –

‘– have any of you got a cat? Have you? Oh you’ve got a cat? What’s your cat like?’ And the kids started to talk to him… and they started to kind of move forward and by the end of the lesson… there were eleven kids out the front in one way or another, sat at Harold’s feet, and the others all rushed at the end of the lesson to tell him more about their cats. It was just spell binding.

Betty Rosen has written (in Changing English) about a lesson of Harold’s she saw while on teaching practice at Walworth. Unlike many heads of department, Harold chose to teach the lowest streams. The door was flung open and this smiling, eager figure came in, looking as if he couldn’t wait to be with his wild 4th years again. In no time he had them telling stories about their neighbours, and then writing about them. What stayed with Betty was the visible conviction Harold conveyed of the worth of what those students had to say. Harold, of course, thought the world of kids and was constantly being amused, amazed and delighted by them, and it no doubt helped that, as he told us, ‘I was a naughty boy at school…. So I couldn’t be sanctimoniously disciplinarian with kids.’

Well, he couldn’t be sanctimoniously anything.

I've known other teachers with generous personalities who were magic with kids. The difference with Harold is that he knew what he was doing on an intellectual level too – which was partly what made him such a superb teacher educator. His thinking was as exciting as his practice. His ideas and his knowledge, manifested in a thousand remarks and comments in our tutorials, seemed to come from some deep well of wisdom that I
always wanted to get at. But of course, articulate though he was, he never laid it all out. What Harold knew he knew in his bones. It wasn’t a system but a rich culture of connections, best expressed, as Tony Burgess indicates (in Changing English), in the detail of his memorable formulations, which of course came also from his other great ability, as a superb talker and artful, vigorous writer.

For me, coming from my lower middle class grammar school background in Bradford, Harold was a quite new and unfamiliar sort of person, deep, fascinating, clever, warm and funny, nothing short of an inspiration. He was more interesting and more intellectually exacting than anyone in four years at Oxford, and the first really intelligent person of the Left that I'd encountered. For me and many others he made all the difference.

But I think my final word, when I think of this warm, clever, amusing, sometimes difficult, often pontificating, always story-telling man, would be quite simply: What fun he was!

Carlyle: we’re not done yet

Last year I did a number of postings that presented extracts from Carlyle’s The French Revolution. Other matters overtook me, the project was incomplete and I asked if anyone was actually reading the stuff and wanted to see the rest of my selections.

I take the ensuing silence as a resounding Yes and now propose (slowly) to resume. The point is mainly for myself, to see if I can produce a set of passages from a difficult book, well outside the range of what normally gets studied in English, that might actually be enjoyed by some school students. If someone else enjoys the extracts, good.

Since the last posting on Carlyle I read a review of a new book that was pronounced to have a good section on his history:

Burrow, J. (2007) A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the 20th Century. London: Allen Lane.

I got it out and indeed it does. The sections are about many different histories and types of history, a series of them dealing with histories of the French Revolution, as a result of which I want (some time in the next 30 or 40 years) to look also at Michelet and Taine, who take opposite positions: for Michelet the People was the hero of the tale, for Taine it was smitten with madness. (Taine wrote a book on crowd psychology and anticipated what in the 20th century became known as totalitarianism.)

It occurs to be that although I did history at school for O Level, we read not a single word by any historian. All they gave us was the textbook. But it would be a great thing in school to read passages on the same episode by Carlyle, Michelet and Taine, either in History (I don’t really know what they do there now) or English (and why not? In the 19th century writings by historians were considered part of Literature.)

(Burrow also describes earlier English and Scottish histories of England/Britain: Clarendon on the Civil War period (he was a close associate of Charles I), Hume (better known as an 18th century Scottish Enlightenment philosopher), and Macaulay (Victorian: celebrating the achievement of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, that gave us, he says, a century and a half of internal peace, in contrast with two periods of violent disorder in France, from 1789 and 1848). Of those I’d like most to read Macaulay, who, like Carlyle, was greatly influenced by Sir Walter Scott and writes colourfully and pictorially.)

Burrow indicates some of the passages that might be read together. For instance, on Carlyle and Michelet. This is nice because the bit of Carlyle he refers to is one I've reproduced in this blog (21 September 2008; click on Carlyle in the labels down the right hand margin. I haven't discovered how to link to a previous posting.). Burrow writes:

“The differences appear most sharply, however, in Michelet's treatment of the first 'Festival of the Federation', on the anniversary of the
fall of the Bastille, 14 July 1790. Carlyle's version is above all ironic:
the professions of universal goodwill are shortly to give way to massacre and the guillotine. But, in any case, humankind cannot sustain
very much fraternity. Though he acknowledges that the Federation
movement began spontaneously in the provinces and aroused popular enthusiasm all over France, he treats it as a kind of contagious intoxication and the greatest of the festivals, on the Champs de Mars in
Paris, as manifestly artificial and stage-managed, which of course it
was. To Carlyle its gospel was merely sentimental: he had, as we have
seen, a Presbyterian sourness towards ritual, though he could be
indulgent to spontaneous violence (as in the Scottish Reformation).
But for Michelet the Federation is the high point of his history and in
French national consciousness, pointing the way to a better future.
He said that writing about it marked one of the great moments of
his life. His description has an ominous element: at the sacramental
moment, the swearing of the oath of fraternity, the surly demeanour
of the royal family strikes a jarring note. But irony is almost absent,
though he goes on to mourn over the contrasting future. The moment
of the Federation was 'the holy epoch in which the entire nation
marched under one fraternal banner'. He compares the marches to
Paris by the participants from all over France to the Crusades: 'What
Jerusalem attracts thus a whole nation? ... the Jerusalem of hearts,
the holy unity of Fraternity, the great living city made of men . . .'; its
name is patrie. At the oath-swearing in the Champs de Mars

The plain is suddenly shaken by the report of forty pieces of cannon. At that clap of thunder, all rise and stretch forth their hands to heaven ... 0 King! 0 People! pause ... Heaven is listening and the sun is breaking expressly through the cloud ... Attend to your oaths! Oh! how heartily the people swear! How credulous they still are! ... But why does the King not grant them the happiness of seeing him swear at the altar? Why does he swear under cover, in the shade, and half-concealed from the people? ... For God's sake, sire, raise your hand so that all may see it. (III.xii)”
(pp 395-6)


Burrow sums up as well as anyone Carlyle’s approach and style:

“One has to accept Carlyle as a historian, if at all, for what he is; it
is no use expecting what he did not attempt to be, a lucid purveyor
of linear narrative and careful analyses of cause and effect. These
things can be found in the midst of Carlyle's accounts, but his stranger
effects were entirely deliberate, made largely out of epic precedent,
an Old Testament style of vision, a fierce pulpit manner, and an
idiosyncratic cosmic view: a metaphysics made concrete through
symbolism. The effect on narrative is a rapid cutting from individuals, often humble and seen only momentarily, and highly particular situations, rendered in full concrete circumstantiality, to cosmic
and world-historical perspectives, with many intermediary points
between….

Carlyle's devices for bringing this about are essentially two: the
selection of certain events, characters and actions as symbolic of larger
realities, and extraordinarily innovative experiments in what may
be called multi-voiced narrative, where the authorial voice, so often
peremptory, intrusive and bullying, sometimes seems temporarily suspended in favour of a cacophony of other voices, of which he is the
impresario, making a babble of catchphrases out of quotations from
the newspapers, pamphlets, placards and memoirs he has consulted.
This imagined babble in the midst of the revolutionary crowd, where
Carlyle alms to place the reader - always, of course, in the present
tense - is, to use his own term, combustible. A particular word or
incident can ignite it into action and almost randomly determine its
direction: to the Bastille, to Versailles, to the palace of the Tuileries,
and hence to some of the central events of the Revolution. The combustibility is made up of hunger and hatred, suspicion and rumour.
Suspicion, for example, of a royalist military coup, which leads to the
storming of the Bastille.”

Burrow himself is worth reading as a writer.

Walworth School / Mina Road School

I'm hoping some people will find this by Googling the school’s name. (Its official name from 1946 was Walworth School, but it was often known by its older name of Mina Road School, dating from at least 1882.) Mina Road is off the Old Kent Road in the Walworth district of Southwark, in South London.

Walworth School no longer exists, having been replaced in 2007 by Walworth Academy. It was established in 1946 as an ‘experimental’ or ‘interim’ comprehensive school, in the buildings and with many of the staff of what had been a ‘central’ school. The school was regarded as highly successful and was important and interesting in a number of ways, one of which was its leading role in reforming English teaching in London.

Briefly, the point of this is that I'm involved in producing a history of the teaching of English in this school and two others. We’re going from after the war – 1945 – to about 1965, and we’re collecting memories from people who remember their experience of English lessons at Walworth.

We’d especially like to hear from people who were taught English by:-
Mr Arthur Harvey
Miss Judith Wild
Mr Hall
Mr Gus Greely
Mr Harold Rosen
Miss Pip Porchetta
Miss Valerie Avery/Noakes
Mr John Dixon
Mr Leslie Stratta
Mr Simon Clements
Mr Charlie Stuart-Jervis
Mr Andrew Salkey
Mr Alec or Alex McLeod.

If anyone out there has kept any of their English work, we’d love to see it. Or if you know anyone who may have.

To get in touch, add a Comment to this blog posting (click on the link at the end of this). It won’t automatically be posted on the blog but will first be emailed to me for my approval. If you want your message to be just a private communication to me, say so: I won’t publish it and I'll send you my email address so we can communicate in confidence. But I'm also pleased to publish anything appropriate if that’s your wish.

I'm involved in this history project as one of my jobs (privileges!) as Senior Visiting Research Fellow (i.e. retired lecturer) at King's College London. I taught at Walworth myself from 1964 to 1971.

I'm working most closely with Patrick Kingwell, an ex-pupil of Walworth, formerly a senior officer of Southwark Council and an active local historian. Also with three colleagues at the University of London Institute of Education: Dr John Hardcastle, Professor Richard Andrews and Dr David Crook. Between us we’ve just been awarded a generous research grant by the Leverhulme Trust to continue the work for three years and produce a book.

Personal and positional authority

In interviewing former teachers about what English teaching was like in schools in the period from the end of the war to 1965 we’ve heard that in the 60s, if not earlier, there was a divide in approaches to teaching working class children.

This isn’t news, of course; it’s the divide to which the terms ‘traditional[ist]’ and ‘progressive’ have often been applied. It seems to have been real: while the first group favoured strict control over classroom behaviour, silence from pupils except when answering questions or reading aloud, the explicit teaching of grammar and, perhaps above all, an emphasis on correctness in written English (grammar, punctuation, spelling), the second believed that above all pupils should be encouraged to put their thoughts, observations and experiences into words, and thus become confident and articulate in speaking and writing; the best way to get language working in a motivated way (self-motivation -- i.e. interest -- was crucial) was to encourage discussion and writing about topics that engaged them; that often indicated topics from their own real lives.

The latter is the line that was promoted to graduate trainees on PGCE courses, first at the London Institute of Education (Britton, Rosen, Martin) and eventually nearly everywhere. But the argument put to us in some interviews is that it was middle class Institute graduates who as English teachers carried their respect for the language and culture of their working class pupils to the point where it placed in jeopardy the pupils’ chances of passing O Level and meeting employers’ expectations. Those who made this argument were non-graduate teachers of working class origin who had won their education and qualification the hard way and who wanted to give their own pupils what they needed to get on.

I was one of the Institute-trained graduate teachers to whom such criticisms might have applied. There is truth in them in that we did believe that an ability to express oneself in language -- to generate discourse, written and spoken, that used linguistic resources to good effect -- was more important initially than Standard English grammar and correct orthography. And if ‘initially’ meant ‘until they could express themselves effectively in language apart from the written conventions, that period might well not end until after the age (16) at which the public exams were sat.

According to linguistics, we maintained, no variety (dialect) of English is inherently better than another but only looks that way because of what it is used for and by whom -- for the communications of those who run things. We therefore regarded the imposition of standard grammar on non-standard-speaking working class pupils as, ultimately, class oppression, and O Level’s stress on grammar and spelling as an unjustified barrier to working class advancement into higher education and professional careers. (Hence we championed the proposed CSE -- Certificate of Secondary Education – which we saw as both more permissive in respect of conventional requirements and more reliable in terms of sampling candidates’ general written abilities.) Maintaining these beliefs was, I still think, more or less right in principle: if English teachers weren’t going to oppose the stupidity of the old O Level -- which had to be seen to be believed -- who would? We may, though, have put them into practice without enough thought for the consequences.

Some brilliant English teaching was achieved by both camps, and teachers from both retain to this day the respect and gratitude of former pupils, as we’re also finding in our study. The practices of each were sometimes caricatured by the others; good teachers from both sides got good exam results. The traditionalists made reluctant and lazy kids work; the progressives sometimes got them interested enough to choose to work under their own steam; both sides failed with many kids who just didn’t want any of it. It’s also true, though, that students who were engaged by each type of teaching got a different education out of it – but that’s a story for another time.

Was it caricature when they said we were experimenting with working class kids, in a way we couldn’t have got away with in middle class grammar schools? Perhaps; but experiment was badly needed. The men and women who trained us at the Institute had themselves been pioneers in drawing attention to the resources and often the poetic beauty of working class speech and the qualities of children’s writing, and, a bit later (Rosen in particular) the way that it often fulfils functions of abstracting and theorising within its familiar frames of narrative and enactment. English teaching had never hitherto attempted to treat the qualities of vernacular language as a resource on which to build, and we needed to work out how to. Our experiments were about creating new possibilities for students to put their native intelligence and linguistic capacity to productive use, to the end of getting into both more analytic and more literary forms of discourse, and of coming to grips with school knowledge. We were pioneering forms of learning that were viable alternatives to just ‘being told’, and made to work, by a strict – if sometimes charismatic -- teacher.

But if we ask how many of our pupils in a working class school with hardly any ‘grammar school’ intake we got into that ‘more analytic and more literary forms of discourse’, we have to say, not many. But did the others do any better?

We Institute graduates, I believe, knew more about language. We saw more in the children’s language than those without that training, who often missed the qualities on which one could build, seeing only correctness or its absence, and perhaps a good word (‘Nice adjective!) or turn of phrase here or there. We got excited about what the kids were able to achieve in relatively informal genres of writing and in discussion -- perhaps so excited that we were apt to forget the huge gap that remained to be bridged between those achievements and the level and type of linguistic virtuosity, as well as conventional competence, that were demanded for higher education and professional employment.

But there was something else behind this split, and it went deeper. At some point on the PGCE I learned (from a Bernstein lecture?) a distinction between two types of authority, positional and personal. Positional authority derived from a person’s position, such as mother, grandmother, teacher, police officer – or, in relation to children, adult. Personal authority was accorded to a person on the basis of personal qualities. The working class non-graduate traditionalists I've been referring to tended to exercise positional authority: they may have cared for the students and liked them, but they expected the outward forms of respect and formal modes of address, and maintained a distance. This form of authority was held to be consistent with that found in typical working class families.

Some teachers like me had come from homes where authority was often more personal and, as we saw it, more humane and less demeaning. For my university-educated generation it went against the grain to make demands by right rather than negotiate and reason; we wanted pupils to go along with our regime because it was clearly reasonable. In our own grammar schools we’d experienced plenty of traditional authority exercised in a curriculum and pedagogy that often made little sense, and we’d had enough of it. We weren’t going to treat kids like that and didn’t want positional adult authority, though of course we often had to fall back on it. Culturally, too, we often felt closer to the kids than to our older colleagues – and in those days a high proportion of the teachers was a lot older.

To the argument of the traditionalists that working class children needed positional authority (showing respect etc) because that was what they were used to at home, our answer would have been that our duty was to liberate young people from unthinking obedience and teach them to make their own minds up. If they were to become rational, autonomous learners they had to be treated as such. That implied our starting from a position of initial respect for what they brought to school with them by way of language and values, though we knew that in the end it wasn’t enough. Better to begin that way than to tell them theirs was not to reason why but only to get on with learning what they were told, the reasons for which they’d appreciate later.

Our intellectual position seemed and seems quite strong, though what lay behind it was as much a generation’s sense of itself and its role in progress as a rationally worked-out principle. But I think, too, of Mr Twelves’s teaching (see my earlier posting, 5 January 2008 ), and of all those European biographies of poor boys who got into gymnasium or lycée and thrived on the beauty of abstract disciplines and of language far removed from that normally experienced.

Carlyle's French Revolution: 3 Champ-de-Mars

Whistler painted Carlyle, I find:

So now we know Carlyle had a beard and didn’t shave his head. The fact is, painted portraits don't often tell us much.

To our real business. In his set-piece scenes Carlyle’s history is as gripping as a Scott novel -- as he explicitly intended. Here’s one. (As my intention here is mainly to give the flavour of the book with a few selected passages, in the hope of convincing somebody that it’s worth reading, and even reading out in school, I'll print the extract below without comment.) It's from Part II Book I Chapter 12 (p298 in The Modern Library); Chapter 2.1.XII in Gutenberg online.

The background: In an uprush of patriotic fervour, all France is to swear a universal oath of brotherhood on the anniversary of the Fall of the Bastille, on 14th July 1790, in Paris on the Champ-de-Mars, which superhuman efforts by an enthusiastic populace have prepared for the great event, converting the Field of Mars into an amphitheatre. On the morning of what became known as the Feast of Pikes, cold for July though it is,…

***
Two hundred thousand Patriotic Men; and, twice as good, one hundred thousand Patriotic Women, all decked and glorified as one can fancy, sit waiting in this Champ-de-Mars.

….On the heights of Chaillot are many-coloured undulating groups; round and far on, over all the circling heights that embosom Paris, it is as one more or less peopled Amphitheatre; which the eye grows dim with measuring. Nay heights, as was before hinted, have cannon; and a floating-battery of cannon is on the Seine. When eye fails, ear shall serve; and all France properly is but one Amphitheatre: for in paved town and unpaved hamlet, men walk listening; till the muffled thunder sound audible on their horizon, that they too may begin swearing and firing! (Deux Amis, v. 168.) But now, to streams of music, come Federates enough,—for they have assembled on the Boulevard Saint-Antoine or thereby, and come marching through the City, with their Eighty-three Department Banners, and blessings not loud but deep; comes National Assembly, and takes seat under its Canopy; comes Royalty, and takes seat on a throne beside it. And Lafayette, on white charger, is here, and all the civic Functionaries; and the Federates form dances, till their strictly military evolutions and manoeuvres can begin.

Evolutions and manoeuvres? Task not the pen of mortal to describe them: truant imagination droops;—declares that it is not worth while. There is wheeling and sweeping, to slow, to quick, and double quick-time: Sieur Motier, or Generalissimo Lafayette, for they are one and the same, and he is General of France, in the King's stead, for four-and-twenty hours; Sieur Motier must step forth, with that sublime chivalrous gait of his; solemnly ascend the steps of the Fatherland's Altar, in sight of Heaven and of the scarcely breathing Earth; and, under the creak of those swinging Cassolettes, 'pressing his sword's point firmly there,' pronounce the Oath, To King, to Law, and Nation (not to mention 'grains' with their circulating), in his own name and that of armed France. Whereat there is waving of banners and acclaim sufficient. The National Assembly must swear, standing in its place; the King himself audibly. The King swears; and now be the welkin split with vivats; let citizens enfranchised embrace, each smiting heartily his palm into his fellow's; and armed Federates clang their arms; above all, that floating battery speak! It has spoken,—to the four corners of France. From eminence to eminence, bursts the thunder; faint-heard, loud-repeated. What a stone, cast into what a lake; in circles that do not grow fainter. From Arras to Avignon; from Metz to Bayonne! Over Orleans and Blois it rolls, in cannon-recitative; Puy bellows of it amid his granite mountains; Pau where is the shell-cradle of Great Henri. At far Marseilles, one can think, the ruddy evening witnesses it; over the deep-blue Mediterranean waters, the Castle of If ruddy-tinted darts forth, from every cannon's mouth, its tongue of fire; and all the people shout: Yes, France is free. O glorious France that has burst out so; into universal sound and smoke; and attained—the Phrygian Cap of Liberty! In all Towns, Trees of Liberty also may be planted; with or without advantage. Said we not, it is the highest stretch attained by the Thespian Art on this Planet, or perhaps attainable?

The Thespian Art, unfortunately, one must still call it; for behold there, on this Field of Mars, the National Banners, before there could be any swearing, were to be all blessed. A most proper operation; since surely without Heaven's blessing bestowed, say even, audibly or inaudibly sought, no Earthly banner or contrivance can prove victorious: but now the means of doing it? By what thrice-divine Franklin thunder-rod shall miraculous fire be drawn out of Heaven; and descend gently, life-giving, with health to the souls of men? Alas, by the simplest: by Two Hundred shaven-crowned Individuals, 'in snow-white albs, with tricolor girdles,' arranged on the steps of Fatherland's Altar; and, at their head for spokesman, Soul's Overseer Talleyrand-Perigord! These shall act as miraculous thunder-rod,—to such length as they can. O ye deep azure Heavens, and thou green all-nursing Earth; ye Streams ever-flowing; deciduous Forests that die and are born again, continually, like the sons of men; stone Mountains that die daily with every rain-shower, yet are not dead and levelled for ages of ages, nor born again (it seems) but with new world-explosions, and such tumultuous seething and tumbling, steam half way to the Moon; O thou unfathomable mystic All, garment and dwellingplace of the UNNAMED; O spirit, lastly, of Man, who mouldest and modellest that Unfathomable Unnameable even as we see,—is not there a miracle: That some French mortal should, we say not have believed, but pretended to imagine that he believed that Talleyrand and Two Hundred pieces of white Calico could do it!

Here, however, we are to remark with the sorrowing Historians of that day, that suddenly, while Episcopus Talleyrand, long-stoled, with mitre and tricolor belt, was yet but hitching up the Altar-steps, to do his miracle, the material Heaven grew black; a north-wind, moaning cold moisture, began to sing; and there descended a very deluge of rain. Sad to see! The thirty-staired Seats, all round our Amphitheatre, get instantaneously slated with mere umbrellas, fallacious when so thick set: our antique Cassolettes become Water-pots; their incense-smoke gone hissing, in a whiff of muddy vapour. Alas, instead of vivats, there is nothing now but the furious peppering and rattling. From three to four hundred thousand human individuals feel that they have a skin; happily impervious. The General's sash runs water: how all military banners droop; and will not wave, but lazily flap, as if metamorphosed into painted tin-banners! Worse, far worse, these hundred thousand, such is the Historian's testimony, of the fairest of France! Their snowy muslins all splashed and draggled; the ostrich feather shrunk shamefully to the backbone of a feather: all caps are ruined; innermost pasteboard molten into its original pap: Beauty no longer swims decorated in her garniture, like Love-goddess hidden-revealed in her Paphian clouds, but struggles in disastrous imprisonment in it, for 'the shape was noticeable;' and now only sympathetic interjections, titterings, teeheeings, and resolute good-humour will avail. A deluge; an incessant sheet or fluid-column of rain;—such that our Overseer's very mitre must be filled; not a mitre, but a filled and leaky fire-bucket on his reverend head!—Regardless of which, Overseer Talleyrand performs his miracle: the Blessing of Talleyrand, another than that of Jacob, is on all the Eighty-three departmental flags of France; which wave or flap, with such thankfulness as needs. Towards three o'clock, the sun beams out again: the remaining evolutions can be transacted under bright heavens, though with decorations much damaged. (Deux Amis, v. 143-179.)….


In this way, and in such ways, however, has the Feast of Pikes danced itself off; gallant Federates wending homewards, towards every point of the compass, with feverish nerves, heart and head much heated; some of them, indeed, as Dampmartin's elderly respectable friend, from Strasbourg, quite 'burnt out with liquors,' and flickering towards extinction. (Dampmartin, Evénemens, i. 144-184.) The Feast of Pikes has danced itself off, and become defunct, and the ghost of a Feast;—nothing of it now remaining but this vision in men's memory; and the place that knew it (for the slope of that Champ-de-Mars is crumbled to half the original height (Dulaure, Histoire de Paris, viii. 25).) now knowing it no more. Undoubtedly one of the memorablest National Hightides. Never or hardly ever, as we said, was Oath sworn with such heart-effusion, emphasis and expenditure of joyance; and then it was broken irremediably within year and day. Ah, why? When the swearing of it was so heavenly-joyful, bosom clasped to bosom, and Five-and-twenty million hearts all burning together: O ye inexorable Destinies, why?—Partly because it was sworn with such over-joyance; but chiefly, indeed, for an older reason: that Sin had come into the world and Misery by Sin! These Five-and-twenty millions, if we will consider it, have now henceforth, with that Phrygian Cap of theirs, no force over them, to bind and guide; neither in them, more than heretofore, is guiding force, or rule of just living: how then, while they all go rushing at such a pace, on unknown ways, with no bridle, towards no aim, can hurlyburly unutterable fail? For verily not Federation-rosepink is the colour of this Earth and her work: not by outbursts of noble-sentiment, but with far other ammunition, shall a man front the world.

But how wise, in all cases, to 'husband your fire;' to keep it deep down, rather, as genial radical-heat! Explosions, the forciblest, and never so well directed, are questionable; far oftenest futile, always frightfully wasteful: but think of a man, of a Nation of men, spending its whole stock of fire in one artificial Firework! So have we seen fond weddings (for individuals, like Nations, have their Hightides) celebrated with an outburst of triumph and deray, at which the elderly shook their heads. Better had a serious cheerfulness been; for the enterprise was great. Fond pair! the more triumphant ye feel, and victorious over terrestrial evil, which seems all abolished, the wider-eyed will your disappointment be to find terrestrial evil still extant. "And why extant?" will each of you cry: "Because my false mate has played the traitor: evil was abolished; I meant faithfully, and did, or would have done." Whereby the oversweet moon of honey changes itself into long years of vinegar; perhaps divulsive vinegar, like Hannibal's.

Shall we say then, the French Nation has led Royalty, or wooed and teased poor Royalty to lead her, to the hymeneal Fatherland's Altar, in such oversweet manner; and has, most thoughtlessly, to celebrate the nuptials with due shine and demonstration,—burnt her bed?

Carlyle’s comment on all this: It was nothing but empty theatre, ‘the highest stretch attained by the Thespian Art on this Planet, or perhaps attainable?’

‘How true also… is it that no man or Nation of men, conscious of doing a great thing, was ever, in that thing, doing other than a small one!’ (286-Chapter 2.1.IX)

He contrasts the meaninglessness of such national theatricals with real historical movements such as the earlier uprising of the women of Paris who had marched to Versailles demanding bread:

‘Pardonable are human theatricalities; nay perhaps touching, like the passionate utterance of a tongue which with sincerity stammers; of a head which with insincerity babbles,—having gone distracted. Yet, in comparison with unpremeditated outbursts of Nature, such as an Insurrection of Women, how foisonless, unedifying, undelightful; like small ale palled, like an effervescence that has effervesced! Such scenes, coming of forethought, were they world-great, and never so cunningly devised, are at bottom mainly pasteboard and paint. But the others are original; emitted from the great everliving heart of Nature herself: what figure they will assume is unspeakably significant. To us, therefore, let the French National Solemn League, and Federation, be the highest recorded triumph of the Thespian Art; triumphant surely, since the whole Pit, which was of Twenty-five Millions, not only claps hands, but does itself spring on the boards and passionately set to playing there. And being such, be it treated as such: with sincere cursory admiration; with wonder from afar. A whole Nation gone mumming deserves so much; but deserves not that loving minuteness a Menadic Insurrection did.’

Unlike real historical developments, the Feast of Pikes, colossal spectacle though it was, meant nothing and had no consequences. Anarchy took its course: 'These Five-and-twenty millions, if we will consider it, have now henceforth, with that Phrygian Cap of theirs, no force over them, to bind and guide' -- the immensity and unprecedented nature of this historical upsurge is one of his great themes.

Carlyle’s other observation worth noting: the fatuity of the artificial religious ritual -- he will have more to say of that later, when the Revolution sets up the Goddess of Reason.

Carlyle’s characters

Carlyle believed that the historian should be an artist. According to Hadva Ben-Israel (English historians on the French Revolution, Cambridge University Press, 1968 -- my quotes here are from him), unlike the scholar who was frightened by the vastness of the canvass and retreats into detail, Carlyle was excited by the scope of the topic and conveyed its immensity in his writing. At the same time, unlike conventional accounts of the time that were concerned to tell the reader what to think about the French Revolution, Carlyle presents ‘a pure narrative, a story told by the traditional omniscient observer’ -- and urges us to think about what it all means, not assume we know. Where the general British reaction was horror at the carnage, Carlyle points out that, for instance, during the Terror bread was affordable to ordinary people as it not been ever before in human memory and would not be afterwards.

He ‘presents both situations and questions of judgment in the confused, uncertain way in which they appear to the people concerned,’ and one of the most immediately striking features of his history is that he writes for the most part in the present tense as if he were indeed an observer at the time (though he sometimes reveals when he writes of what will happen that he in fact knows how things subsequently turned out). Most of all, the narrator's role makes me think of the Chorus of a Greek play, mostly narrating but often also addressing us directly as if we were contemporaries, and addressing the characters with rhetorical questions and exclamations.

Carlyle was influenced by recent German historians (and corresponded with Goethe) but also by Romantic literature: Scott and Byron. Like them he was interested in the use of the ‘dramatic genius’ outside theatre and sought to write a story as vivid and dramatic as a Scott novel, but true: he cared only about what ‘really happened’, the ‘human facts’.

Consequently, I feel having read the book not only that it’s been a gripping story but that for the first time I know about the French Revolution, never having read anything except summaries before.

If I keep to my plan, in future postings I'll say more about what Carlyle makes of the Revolution (and specifically of the Terror); and will also reproduce some passages to give a flavour of his treatment of key events and developments. For now, though, something about his people. I've said that reading The French Revolution is not easy. One of the main reasons is its complexity: the cast of characters, for instance, is huge, and I found myself frequently using the index to look up where a particular name had cropped up before. With the main characters, however, we have no problem because Carlyle has made them distinct and memorable in the manner of Scott. Here are two of them, Mirabeau and Robespierre. (Text taken from Gutenberg online, page numbers refer to the edition I'm using, Modern Library (New York), 2002).

Count Gabriel Honoré Mirabeau:

Towards such work, in such manner, marches he, this singular Riquetti Mirabeau. In fiery rough figure, with black Samson-locks under the slouch-hat, he steps along there. A fiery fuliginous mass, which could not be choked and smothered, but would fill all France with smoke. And now it has got air; it will burn its whole substance, its whole smoke-atmosphere too, and fill all France with flame. Strange lot! Forty years of that smouldering, with foul fire-damp and vapour enough, then victory over that;—and like a burning mountain he blazes heaven-high; and, for twenty-three resplendent months, pours out, in flame and molten fire-torrents, all that is in him, the Pharos and Wonder-sign of an amazed Europe;—and then lies hollow, cold forever! Pass on, thou questionable Gabriel Honore, the greatest of them all: in the whole National Deputies, in the whole Nation, there is none like and none second to thee. (Chapter 1.4 IV p.119)

The National Assembly, in one of its stormiest moods, is debating a Law against Emigration; Mirabeau declaring aloud, "I swear beforehand that I will not obey it." Mirabeau is often at the Tribune this day; with endless impediments from without; with the old unabated energy from within. What can murmurs and clamours, from Left or from Right, do to this man; like Teneriffe or Atlas unremoved? With clear thought; with strong bass-voice, though at first low, uncertain, he claims audience, sways the storm of men: anon the sound of him waxes, softens; he rises into far-sounding melody of strength, triumphant, which subdues all hearts; his rude-seamed face, desolate fire-scathed, becomes fire-lit, and radiates: once again men feel, in these beggarly ages, what is the potency and omnipotency of man's word on the souls of men. "I will triumph or be torn in fragments," he was once heard to say. "Silence," he cries now, in strong word of command, in imperial consciousness of strength, "Silence, the thirty voices, Silence aux trente voix!"—and Robespierre and the Thirty Voices die into mutterings; and the Law is once more as Mirabeau would have it. (Chapter 2.3 VI p.355)

But whoever will, with sympathy, which is the first essential towards insight, look at this questionable Mirabeau, may find that there lay verily in him, as the basis of all, a Sincerity, a great free Earnestness; nay call it Honesty, for the man did before all things see, with that clear flashing vision, into what was, into what existed as fact; and did, with his wild heart, follow that and no other. Whereby on what ways soever he travels and struggles, often enough falling, he is still a brother man. Hate him not; thou canst not hate him! Shining through such soil and tarnish, and now victorious effulgent, and oftenest struggling eclipsed, the light of genius itself is in this man; which was never yet base and hateful: but at worst was lamentable, loveable with pity. They say that he was ambitious, that he wanted to be Minister. It is most true; and was he not simply the one man in France who could have done any good as Minister? Not vanity alone, not pride alone; far from that! Wild burstings of affection were in this great heart; of fierce lightning, and soft dew of pity. So sunk, bemired in wretchedest defacements, it may be said of him, like the Magdalen of old, that he loved much: his Father the harshest of old crabbed men he loved with warmth, with veneration. (Chapter 2.3.VII p.368)

Maximilien Robespierre:

But the Chief Priest and Speaker of this place [the Jacobin assembly], as we said, is Robespierre, the long-winded incorruptible man. What spirit of Patriotism dwelt in men in those times, this one fact, it seems to us, will evince: that fifteen hundred human creatures, not bound to it, sat quiet under the oratory of Robespierre; nay, listened nightly, hour after hour, applausive; and gaped as for the word of life. More insupportable individual, one would say, seldom opened his mouth in any Tribune. Acrid, implacable-impotent; dull-drawling, barren as the Harmattan-wind! He pleads, in endless earnest-shallow speech, against immediate War, against Woollen Caps or Bonnets Rouges, against many things; and is the Trismegistus and Dalai-Lama of Patriot men. Whom nevertheless a shrill-voiced little man, yet with fine eyes, and a broad beautifully sloping brow, rises respectfully to controvert: he is, say the Newspaper Reporters, 'M. Louvet, Author of the charming Romance of Faublas.' Steady, ye Patriots! Pull not yet two ways; with a France rushing panic-stricken in the rural districts, and a Cimmerian Europe storming in on you! (Chapter 2.5.IX, p.452)

Carlyle’s French Revolution

The French Revolution: A History, Thomas Carlyle, 1834-7: I’d never read it and kept hearing and reading about it. I asked a colleague whose judgment I trusted whether he’d read it; when he replied, ‘Oh, yes,’ as if that went without saying, I decided the time had come, so (being retired) I read it, twice.

But it took some doing. What I found on opening the book was profoundly discouraging and it took will-power to keep reading. The first chapter seems to assume that the reader already knows a great deal about the reign of Louis XV: names are mentioned without explanation and mysterious incidents alluded to. (In the end I was able to understand all this, but only by re-reading carefully and looking things up.) A more seriously impediment, though, because it pervaded the whole book, was Carlyle’s style, which seemed overblown and ham-rhetorical in the worst Victorian manner (the book was written between 1834 and 1837 -- and there’s quite a story about the writing, involving John Stuart Mill).

Here, as an example, is a passage from the sixth page of my edition (Chapter 1.1.II: what I'm giving here is taken from the free Gutenberg Project download version):

Sovereigns die and Sovereignties: how all dies, and is for a Time only; is a 'Time-phantasm, yet reckons itself real!' The Merovingian Kings, slowly wending on their bullock-carts through the streets of Paris, with their long hair flowing, have all wended slowly on,—into Eternity. Charlemagne sleeps at Salzburg, with truncheon grounded; only Fable expecting that he will awaken. Charles the Hammer, Pepin Bow-legged, where now is their eye of menace, their voice of command? Rollo and his shaggy Northmen cover not the Seine with ships; but have sailed off on a longer voyage. The hair of Towhead (Tête d'étoupes) now needs no combing; Iron-cutter (Taillefer) cannot cut a cobweb; shrill Fredegonda, shrill Brunhilda have had out their hot life-scold, and lie silent, their hot life-frenzy cooled. Neither from that black Tower de Nesle descends now darkling the doomed gallant, in his sack, to the Seine waters; plunging into Night: for Dame de Nesle now cares not for this world's gallantry, heeds not this world's scandal; Dame de Nesle is herself gone into Night. They are all gone; sunk,—down, down, with the tumult they made; and the rolling and the trampling of ever new generations passes over them, and they hear it not any more forever.

And yet withal has there not been realised somewhat? Consider (to go no further) these strong Stone-edifices, and what they hold! Mud-Town of the Borderers (Lutetia Parisiorum or Barisiorum) has paved itself, has spread over all the Seine Islands, and far and wide on each bank, and become City of Paris, sometimes boasting to be 'Athens of Europe,' and even 'Capital of the Universe.' Stone towers frown aloft; long-lasting, grim with a thousand years. Cathedrals are there, and a Creed (or memory of a Creed) in them; Palaces, and a State and Law. Thou seest the Smoke-vapour; unextinguished Breath as of a thing living. Labour's thousand hammers ring on her anvils: also a more miraculous Labour works noiselessly, not with the Hand but with the Thought. How have cunning workmen in all crafts, with their cunning head and right-hand, tamed the Four Elements to be their ministers; yoking the winds to their Sea-chariot, making the very Stars their Nautical Timepiece;—and written and collected a Bibliotheque du Roi; among whose Books is the Hebrew Book! A wondrous race of creatures: these have been realised, and what of Skill is in these: call not the Past Time, with all its confused wretchednesses, a lost one.

“And yet withal has there not been realised somewhat?” -- what sort of English was that? It wasn’t, I was sure, the normal English of the 1830s. (I had one answer: it was the sort of English into which our pompous grammar school headmaster would translate the Greek texts we were studying: ‘Yet would she not brook it’ etc.)

How had my colleague managed to plough through this stuff and come away from it with, evidently, respect? Consider: the trite generalisation that ‘all dies’ (really?), all passes on -- dramatic dash: ‘--into Eternity’ (capitalised); semi-colons where we would have commas, separating main and subordinate clauses; inversions -- ‘cover not the Seine with ships’; rhetorical questions: ‘where now is their eye of menace…?’. And what of: ‘…have had out their hot life-scold, and lie silent, their hot life-frenzy cooled’? those strange hyphenated double nouns (elsewhere double adjectives), some of them seeming to belong more to Anglo-Saxon than to 19th century English, or at least to the liberties that Milton took with the language. ‘Neither’ for ‘nor’ at the beginning of that strange sentence, ‘Neither from that black Tower de Nesle descends now darkling the doomed gallant’, with inversion and over-the-top alliteration. ‘They are all gone; sunk,—down, down’: it could be a Kenneth Williams line from a Carry On film. And so it goes on: ‘Thou seest…; the strange italics; the exclamation marks. Excessive to the point of self-parody, it all seems.

Well, I can report that one gets used to the style and before long takes it for granted, as one does the conventions of opera; in time Carlyle’s neologisms, syntactic contortions and rhetorical figures come to seem appropriate for the scale and ambition of the work. In his review, Mill said The French Revolution was ‘an epic poem’, as well as being ‘the truest of histories’: he seems right on the first point and scholarship appears to have concluded that he was on the second too: Carlyle can be faulted for missing some sources he might have consulted but his use of what he had was sound and accurate.

As time allows I’m thinking I'll post a number of entries with extracts that show the characteristics of the book that make it worth reading -- twice, in my case: what I got out of it was vastly increased the second time. Behind this intention is in part a general conviction that what English (in schools) counts as ‘literature’ ought to broadened to include--as it once did--books like this one. If I were teaching now (a phrase I'm aware I've used before) I'd try bits of Carlyle on them.

But mainly I want to persuade you is that Carlyle is worth our reading.

I'll reserve for another posting some of the reasons why I'm glad I read the book--apart from the huge influence he is said to have had on later 19th century writers, including novelists. Meanwhile, here’s another opinion. George Saintsbury (I've written about him before--consult the ‘labels’) in his History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1896) describes Carlyle’s overall opus as ‘thirty volumes of the most brilliant, the most stimulating, the most varied, the most original work in English literature’ (p.238):

Carlyle's style is not seldom spoken of as compact of tricks and manners; and no doubt these are present in it. Yet a narrow inspection will show that its effect is by no means due so much in reality as in appearance to the retaining of capital letters, the violent breaches and aposiopeses, the omission of pronouns and colourless parts of speech generally, the coining of new words, and the introduction of unusual forms. These things are often there, but they are not always ; and even when they are, there is something else much more important, much more characteristic, but also much harder to put the finger on. There is in Carlyle's fiercer and more serious passages a fiery glow of enthusiasm or indignation, in his lighter ones a quaint felicity of unexpected humour, in his expositions a vividness of presentment, in his arguments a sledge-hammer force, all of which are not to be found together anywhere else, and none of which are to be found anywhere in quite the same form. And despite the savagery both of his indignation and his laughter, there is no greater master of tenderness. Wherever he is at home, and he seldom wanders far from it, the weapon of Carlyle is like none other--it is the very sword of Goliath.

The French Revolution has to be considered as a work of Romantic literature: there was such a thing as Romantic history, about which good stuff has been written. More of that, and of what Carlyle thought he was doing, another time.