Richards' reply raises perennial questions about child-rearing: how do you weigh giving children a sense of security against preparing them for bad things that will eventually happen? At what ages do you expose them to what unpleasant realities?
For example, my wife was raised by Greatest Generation parents who were careful to never argue in front of the kids, so the kids wouldn't worry that their home and family were falling apart. I was raised by not-quite-Hippie parents who argued openly (at least about some topics) in front of the kids, but usually made up afterwards, demonstrating that adults can disagree and still love one another. Early in our marriage, it seemed to me as though my wife saw every argument as an existential threat to the relationship, while I saw arguments as normal, perhaps unpleasant but necessary, parts of adult conversation. (She will point out, correctly, that my parents separated when I was 8, while hers stayed married for fifty years.)
My casual impression is that my parents argued in front of us. Certainly I argued with my father. And my parents were married for sixty or seventy years.
One could perhaps interpret that as indicating how well their differing communication styles worked for preserving their own marriages, but the original question was how they affect child-rearing, as evidenced perhaps in the children's marriages. My wife and her three siblings have had eight spouses in all (an average of 2), while my brother and I have had three spouses (an average of 1.5).
Wow. I've never seen an exchange where Orwell clearly lost. And Richards is too genteel to make the obvious point that Noel Coward's ideal 14 year old boy was crazed with sexual passion for Noel Coward. Richards just sticks with 'If Mr Orwell imagines the average sixth-form boy cuddles a chambermaid as often as he grips a cricket bat, Mr Orwell is in error.'
Makes you wish Richards was right about a revival of men who did not speak muck and women with clean faces. And I've always thought 'Nay, Artifice must queen it once more' by Max Beebohm was right and girls should paint.
I was too young to read any of Mr. Richards' originals, but in the 1960s the British comics still had occasional stories that might well have been drawn from the _Gem_ and _Magnet_ orginal text.
GMF's work is an almost painless introduction to British imperial history of the Victorian age. It's also scandalously non-PC. Full agreement with you on that.
Orwell was a very great writer of fiction and in other ways a bit of a dork. It's instructive to read about how he very nearly killed himself and his son in the Corrievreckan whirlpool after 3 years living on, and keeping a boat on, Jura. It's very hard to think of an analogy for how clueless this is. You don't (unless you are George Orwell) boat in tidal waters without permanent awareness of the tides, and the Corrievreckan is one of the top five bad tidal things that can happen to you anywhere in the world, and it's on your doorstep. It's like moving to a foreign country and coming to grief because you don't realize that they drive on the right over there.
His attack on Richards sits very badly with his adulation of Kipling. The snobbery in Stalky and Co is creepy beyond belief: in one story the upper class schoolboys align themselves with a local upper class landowner by reporting his working class gamekeeper to him for shooting at a pregnant vixen which should have been left in peace to give birth to cubs for the foxhounds to hunt, the end result being the discomfiture of a middle class school master, and serve him right. In other stories they act as bullies, thieves and saboteurs, but in an upper class sort of way. The children in Puck of Pooks Hill are, unnecessarily from the pov of the story, markedly upper middle class. And if we are talking about unrealistic portrayals of childhood just look at Kim; one of the half dozen very creepy and almost invariably unmarried middle aged men who pass him around between them during his childhood and adolescence would in practice have raped and murdered him by page 100 of the novel, but this doesn't happen because, as far as I can see, the men are posh and Kim is really white despite looking Indian, hurrah.
I wouldn't describe his article on Kipling as adulation. He badly underestimated Kipling as a writer, apparently having read only one of three novels and that the weakest of the three, and only one of what I would consider his best poems. What struck me was that Orwell overestimated himself. He took it for granted that his guess about the authorship of the Richardson stories was correct, did not even consider the possibility that they were almost all written by one person, let along that they were only a fraction of his output. He took it for granted that his view of the economics of empire was correct. And he took it for granted that he could evaluate a very effective writer on the basis of a small sample of his writing, almost all of it from his early years.
I don't actually view Orwell as a great writer of fiction. As I said, my favorite of his writing is the letters and essays. The same overconfidence had the virtue of letting him stand by views unpopular with the left wing intellectuals around him without being on the other side.
Incidentally, another mistake of his was his view of the relevance of the Spanish Civil War to Britain. He thought the Tories were shooting themselves in the foot by being pro-Franco, since when the war came Franco would ally with Hitler and Mussolini. He didn't.
I disagree with you about Kim. Of the men he interacts with the only plausible homosexual rapist is Mahbub Ali, who is an Afghan, and he wouldn't, since he regards Kim as a useful ally/recruit. None of them have any reason to kill him. I think you are letting your ideological concerns get in the way of appreciating the novel.
Another example of Orwell's overconfidence occurs to me. He is quite confident that his picture of the British soldiers in India is more accurate than Kipling's. Yet his experience is of British soldiers in Burma after WWI and he tells us that Kipling is the only picture we have of the old professional army that was destroyed in WWI. He might be right but he cannot have the basis to know he is right.
In Kim there's Lurgan Sahib and his young male servant who wants to kill Kim out of jealousy. I agree that the characters *as presented by Kipling* are all innocent, but in the real world the odds are against all of them being. And this is my problem with the book, that it can't decide whether it's adult or Young Adult, so it is vulnerable to the same criticism of fantastic unreality that Orwell makes against Richards.
The fiction doesn't necessarily work overall for me but bits of it are astonishing; for example Winston's note of his visit to the cinema and the film of the refugees being machine gunned.
I don't think _Kim_ is trying to be young adult. And I don't think "the odds are against all of them being innocent" is a legitimate criticism of a work of fiction. Neither a work of fiction nor the real world is a place where unlikely things never happen.
Kim encountering his father's regiment is much more unlikely. But it isn't impossible and it works for the story.
Kipling may very well have intended the interaction between Lurgan Sahib and his servant to have given rise to sexual jealousy. He was quite capable of conveying such matters indirectly, as in "Love-o'-Women," where Mulvaney's fellow soldier has acquired a peculiar dysfunction of his legs, and the regimental surgeon comments, "That's what happens to a man that's called 'Love-o'-Women,'" or as in "His Wedded Wife," where a young subaltern wins a bet by disguising himself as a woman and attributes his skill to amateur theatricals with his sisters, but the narrator disbelieves that anyone could have played a woman that convincingly with no more experience than that—but the reader has to infer what Kipling is not quite saying. On the other hand, I don't think there is any suggestion of anything sexual between Lurgan and Kim. Compare Kipling's encounter with Lispeth, from the earlier story of that title, though here he gives her a happier ending: There's no doubt of her attraction to Kim. I wouldn't call the characters "innocent"; I'd say rather that Kipling is expressing matters in code.
"Love-o'-Women" can't walk properly, and the surgeon comments about something that Mulvaney, an uneducated man, repeats as "locomotive attacks us." It's actually "locomotor ataxia," a fairly recently described paralytic condition caused by tertiary syphilis. When Love-o'-Women says to the woman he corrupted, "I am dying, Egypt, dying" (Antony's last words to Cleopatra in Shakespeare), he's saying the literal truth—and in a sense it's a mercy; he was looking ahead to months or years as a hospitalized paralytic or madman, but he got a quick death.
The whole story is about sexually transmitted disease and its human impact. And it's very Kiplingesque that though Ellis has been wicked (not simply sexually active, but being so by way of lies and undue influence), you see the horror of his suffering.
Richards' reply raises perennial questions about child-rearing: how do you weigh giving children a sense of security against preparing them for bad things that will eventually happen? At what ages do you expose them to what unpleasant realities?
For example, my wife was raised by Greatest Generation parents who were careful to never argue in front of the kids, so the kids wouldn't worry that their home and family were falling apart. I was raised by not-quite-Hippie parents who argued openly (at least about some topics) in front of the kids, but usually made up afterwards, demonstrating that adults can disagree and still love one another. Early in our marriage, it seemed to me as though my wife saw every argument as an existential threat to the relationship, while I saw arguments as normal, perhaps unpleasant but necessary, parts of adult conversation. (She will point out, correctly, that my parents separated when I was 8, while hers stayed married for fifty years.)
> She will point out, correctly, that my parents separated when I was 8, while hers stayed married for fifty years.
Well, there's your answer.
Small sample.
My casual impression is that my parents argued in front of us. Certainly I argued with my father. And my parents were married for sixty or seventy years.
One could perhaps interpret that as indicating how well their differing communication styles worked for preserving their own marriages, but the original question was how they affect child-rearing, as evidenced perhaps in the children's marriages. My wife and her three siblings have had eight spouses in all (an average of 2), while my brother and I have had three spouses (an average of 1.5).
Wow. I've never seen an exchange where Orwell clearly lost. And Richards is too genteel to make the obvious point that Noel Coward's ideal 14 year old boy was crazed with sexual passion for Noel Coward. Richards just sticks with 'If Mr Orwell imagines the average sixth-form boy cuddles a chambermaid as often as he grips a cricket bat, Mr Orwell is in error.'
Makes you wish Richards was right about a revival of men who did not speak muck and women with clean faces. And I've always thought 'Nay, Artifice must queen it once more' by Max Beebohm was right and girls should paint.
I'm rather shocked and disappointed to discover Charles Hamilton doesn't even have a tvtropes entry.
I was too young to read any of Mr. Richards' originals, but in the 1960s the British comics still had occasional stories that might well have been drawn from the _Gem_ and _Magnet_ orginal text.
Check out the Flashman Papers novels, a lot of fun.
GMF's work is an almost painless introduction to British imperial history of the Victorian age. It's also scandalously non-PC. Full agreement with you on that.
Post of the week, most edifying.
Orwell was a very great writer of fiction and in other ways a bit of a dork. It's instructive to read about how he very nearly killed himself and his son in the Corrievreckan whirlpool after 3 years living on, and keeping a boat on, Jura. It's very hard to think of an analogy for how clueless this is. You don't (unless you are George Orwell) boat in tidal waters without permanent awareness of the tides, and the Corrievreckan is one of the top five bad tidal things that can happen to you anywhere in the world, and it's on your doorstep. It's like moving to a foreign country and coming to grief because you don't realize that they drive on the right over there.
His attack on Richards sits very badly with his adulation of Kipling. The snobbery in Stalky and Co is creepy beyond belief: in one story the upper class schoolboys align themselves with a local upper class landowner by reporting his working class gamekeeper to him for shooting at a pregnant vixen which should have been left in peace to give birth to cubs for the foxhounds to hunt, the end result being the discomfiture of a middle class school master, and serve him right. In other stories they act as bullies, thieves and saboteurs, but in an upper class sort of way. The children in Puck of Pooks Hill are, unnecessarily from the pov of the story, markedly upper middle class. And if we are talking about unrealistic portrayals of childhood just look at Kim; one of the half dozen very creepy and almost invariably unmarried middle aged men who pass him around between them during his childhood and adolescence would in practice have raped and murdered him by page 100 of the novel, but this doesn't happen because, as far as I can see, the men are posh and Kim is really white despite looking Indian, hurrah.
I wouldn't describe his article on Kipling as adulation. He badly underestimated Kipling as a writer, apparently having read only one of three novels and that the weakest of the three, and only one of what I would consider his best poems. What struck me was that Orwell overestimated himself. He took it for granted that his guess about the authorship of the Richardson stories was correct, did not even consider the possibility that they were almost all written by one person, let along that they were only a fraction of his output. He took it for granted that his view of the economics of empire was correct. And he took it for granted that he could evaluate a very effective writer on the basis of a small sample of his writing, almost all of it from his early years.
I don't actually view Orwell as a great writer of fiction. As I said, my favorite of his writing is the letters and essays. The same overconfidence had the virtue of letting him stand by views unpopular with the left wing intellectuals around him without being on the other side.
Incidentally, another mistake of his was his view of the relevance of the Spanish Civil War to Britain. He thought the Tories were shooting themselves in the foot by being pro-Franco, since when the war came Franco would ally with Hitler and Mussolini. He didn't.
I disagree with you about Kim. Of the men he interacts with the only plausible homosexual rapist is Mahbub Ali, who is an Afghan, and he wouldn't, since he regards Kim as a useful ally/recruit. None of them have any reason to kill him. I think you are letting your ideological concerns get in the way of appreciating the novel.
Another example of Orwell's overconfidence occurs to me. He is quite confident that his picture of the British soldiers in India is more accurate than Kipling's. Yet his experience is of British soldiers in Burma after WWI and he tells us that Kipling is the only picture we have of the old professional army that was destroyed in WWI. He might be right but he cannot have the basis to know he is right.
Yes, adulation is wrong.
In Kim there's Lurgan Sahib and his young male servant who wants to kill Kim out of jealousy. I agree that the characters *as presented by Kipling* are all innocent, but in the real world the odds are against all of them being. And this is my problem with the book, that it can't decide whether it's adult or Young Adult, so it is vulnerable to the same criticism of fantastic unreality that Orwell makes against Richards.
The fiction doesn't necessarily work overall for me but bits of it are astonishing; for example Winston's note of his visit to the cinema and the film of the refugees being machine gunned.
I don't think _Kim_ is trying to be young adult. And I don't think "the odds are against all of them being innocent" is a legitimate criticism of a work of fiction. Neither a work of fiction nor the real world is a place where unlikely things never happen.
Kim encountering his father's regiment is much more unlikely. But it isn't impossible and it works for the story.
Kipling may very well have intended the interaction between Lurgan Sahib and his servant to have given rise to sexual jealousy. He was quite capable of conveying such matters indirectly, as in "Love-o'-Women," where Mulvaney's fellow soldier has acquired a peculiar dysfunction of his legs, and the regimental surgeon comments, "That's what happens to a man that's called 'Love-o'-Women,'" or as in "His Wedded Wife," where a young subaltern wins a bet by disguising himself as a woman and attributes his skill to amateur theatricals with his sisters, but the narrator disbelieves that anyone could have played a woman that convincingly with no more experience than that—but the reader has to infer what Kipling is not quite saying. On the other hand, I don't think there is any suggestion of anything sexual between Lurgan and Kim. Compare Kipling's encounter with Lispeth, from the earlier story of that title, though here he gives her a happier ending: There's no doubt of her attraction to Kim. I wouldn't call the characters "innocent"; I'd say rather that Kipling is expressing matters in code.
I have never understood Love-o-Women. There's the odd coded reference to "beastliness" in Stalky & Co.
"Love-o'-Women" can't walk properly, and the surgeon comments about something that Mulvaney, an uneducated man, repeats as "locomotive attacks us." It's actually "locomotor ataxia," a fairly recently described paralytic condition caused by tertiary syphilis. When Love-o'-Women says to the woman he corrupted, "I am dying, Egypt, dying" (Antony's last words to Cleopatra in Shakespeare), he's saying the literal truth—and in a sense it's a mercy; he was looking ahead to months or years as a hospitalized paralytic or madman, but he got a quick death.
The whole story is about sexually transmitted disease and its human impact. And it's very Kiplingesque that though Ellis has been wicked (not simply sexually active, but being so by way of lies and undue influence), you see the horror of his suffering.