*ye olde penny dreadful -- The String of Pearls: The Original Sweeney Todd, by Thomas Preskett Prest

9780141192345
Penguin, 2010
originally printed/serialized 1846
378 pp

mass market paperback

Closing out my time in the 1840s I've come to the Penny Dreadful (aka "blood"), which started life in "eight-page, double-column installments," according to The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction.  This book, The String of Pearls, was, according to E.S. Turner in his  Boys Will Be Boys, originally serialized by Edward Lloyd in 1840, but others have placed its origins in 1846,  in Edward Lloyd's  The People's Periodical and Family Library, where it lasted for eighteen installments.  While authorship was attributed to Thomas Preskett Prest, there is some debate to who actually wrote it, which you can read about here in an article by Helen Smith or at the OUP Blog, in a post written by Robert Mack.  Whatever its provenance, this book gave me some of the finest hours of pure reading pleasure.

Penny Dreadfuls were immensely popular among boys, so much so that as author Kate Summerscale notes in her The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer, the press had labeled them as "the poison which is threatening to destroy the manhood of democracy."  In her study of Robert Coomes, the young 13 year-old boy who decided to kill his mother one bright sunny day before taking his little brother to a cricket match, the influence of the penny dreadfuls on young minds was cited as one possible reason he may have committed such a dastardly crime.   In fact, once again according to The Longman Companion, in the late 1880s,

"the depraved quality of juvenile reading matter sparked off a middle-class moral panic." 

and in a post by writer Mimi Matthews, she also notes that the suicide of a 14 year-old was also blamed on the penny dreadful, on which he spent "about a shilling a week."

from "Penny Dreadfuls, Juvenile Crime, and Late Victorian Moral Panic," at Mimi Matthews

This all makes for fascinating reading, as does the debate about the true authorship of this book, but it's the novel I need to get on with now.

The String of Pearls is, as I said earlier, just plain fun, if a story about murders, cannibalism, and a demented barber floats your boat.  It certainly did mine, not so much for those elements but more because there is an actual plot here in among the more gruesome parts. Set in London in the 1780s, the novel begins with a certain Captain Thornhill coming into Sweeney Todd's barber shop for a shave and never being seen again.  All that remains is his dog, who refuses to leave the outside of the shop, still waiting for his master. Thornhill had been on his way to tell young Johanna Oakley that Mark Ingestrie, the man she loved, had been lost at sea; his other mission was to hand Johanna the string of pearls entrusted to his care by her now missing lover. One of Thornhill's friends, Colonel Jeffrey, notices the dog there, making him suspicious enough to want to get to the bottom of Thornhill's disappearance. For this he will need help, and it is the faithful, broken-hearted Johanna who steps up to the plate.

However, as that particular plot is working itself out to its end, it's Sweeney Todd and what happens inside his barber shop that really takes center stage here. One particular storyline follows Tobias, his young shop assistant, who figures out what's going on after he gets the chance to search Todd's living quarters one day while his master was out.  He realizes that Todd is up to no good when he discovers and recognizes a number hats and walking sticks belonging to Todd's victims;   he would rat him out to the police except for the fact that Todd holds the threat of blackmail over him having to do with Tobias' mother.  When Todd finally cottons onto the fact that Tobias is a liability, he sends him to an asylum where he'll be shut away for good, or worse.  While all of this is going on and as Todd welcomes more customers to his lethal barber chair,  there is, of course, Mrs. Lovett and her pie shop.

Mrs. Lovett has a large number of "enthusiastic admirers" who find her pies so tasty that they eat them until they're "almost ready to burst."  Her reputation for "delicious pies" had "spread far and wide," and every day at noon "there was such a rush of the legal profession to obtain them."  As we're told,

"...there was about them a flavour never surpassed, and rarely equalled; the paste was of the most delicate construction, and impregnated with the aroma of a delicious gravy that defies description. Then the small portions of meat which they contained were so tender, and the fat and the lean so artistically mixed up, that to eat one of Lovett's pies was such a provocative to eat another..."  (36)

She has very low overhead in terms of the meat for these pies; she also has a cook for whom the phrase "chained to a stove all day" is an understatement.  The reader knows all, but it's going to be a shock for her customers when eventually the truth is made known.  I can just imagine this book playing out in installments, with readers beyond willing to fork out their pence or shillings to find out what could possibly happen next. I would love to have been around when the contents of Mrs. Lovett's pies were finally revealed ...

From the original The String of Pearls, my photo, taken from Penny Dreadfuls and Other Victorian Horrors,by Michael Anglo, p. 48

Here's the thing. I read this book primarily as an example of the penny dreadful, and I have to say that looking for any sort of literary merit here is pretty much a waste of time.  While it's a great example of what the working classes were reading, and while you can catch a lot of negativity among the poor for the upper classes and the use of mechanization throughout the story,  it should probably be read just for fun.  Storylines tend to be dropped as do a few characters here and there, and the major focus is actually on the bad guys in this book.  It's melodrama pure and simple, delightfully gruesome, and as I said, it is a book that gave me hours of pleasure while reading.

Just to be clear: I've seen the play, I've seen the 1936 film based on this book, and I've seen the BBC adaptation (which is also quite gruesome and should not be watched while eating lunch as I discovered), and this, the original,   is as different from all of its adaptations as it can possibly be. So when readers complain that the play is better and the book did nothing for them, well, they're comparing apples and oranges.

This book would be perfect for anyone looking for a good, old-fashioned escape read or a novel to relax with over the summer while at the beach or hanging out poolside.  It goes very quickly despite its hefty length, and it's great fun.

a Graham Greene double (well, triple really) play: The Ministry of Fear, The Third Man and The Fallen Idol

"But he didn't understand a thing; he was caught up in other people's darkness."

The Ministry of Fear was, according to Greene himself in his Ways of Escape (1980), written after he'd read a particular book by writer Michael Innes.   Greene was not a huge fan of  English detective stories but as he notes, Innes' book was a "surprise and welcome change...a detective story both fantastic and funny."  Greene decided he could do the same, and he chose his plot thinking that it would be "a funny one," but after having finished the book, he realized that it really wasn't funny at all.  The Ministry of Fear, he also notes in Ways of Escape, is his "favorite" among what he termed at the time his "entertainments," which he said "distinguished them from more serious novels."  

Since I've got three Greene stories to cover, these little synopses will all be brief.

The Ministry of Fear is an excellent spy novel with a number of truly remarkable twists and turns, but even more importantly, it is an excellent character study. Here his focus is on widower Arthur Rowe, who after some time away (I won't go into the details here) returns to the outside world. As we get to know this man, it seems that Arthur's inner turmoil is a reflection of the outer turmoil of the world he's come back into  -- for example, as the country  "has a war on," so too does Arthur in his head; there are "gaps between the Bloomsbury houses," which continuing the image, will also reflect Arthur's psyche, as  the "sound of glass being swept up" reflects his shattered self.  He is happy to find himself at a local fête on a "late summer Sunday afternoon" --  it "called him like innocence; it was entangled in childhood..."  -- where he is asked if he would like to guess the weight of a cake.  Guessing off the cuff, he later makes his way to the fortune-teller's tent where he learns that he should actually give the weight as "four pounds eight and a half ounces." He changes his guess, wins the cake and on leaving, is told that a mistake had been made, that someone else had actually guessed correctly.  Arthur refuses to hand it over, and it is this one decision that changes his life. Following an attempt on his life, he is framed for a crime in which his own knife is the weapon, and finds himself not only at odds with the people trying to get him out of the way, but also with his own mind and especially his past.  

The movie is a bit of a conundrum.  Greene's depictions of the blitz and the atmosphere surrounding it move nicely from page to screen, the spy vibe is definitely out in full force,  and the sense of dread is palpable throughout.  However,  Fritz Lang left out some pretty vital scenes from the novel to make his film, and like Greene, I was not happy about it   -- as he said, the omission of the scenes that find Rowe in a mental clinic made "the whole story meaningless," and I concur. The depth underscoring Ray Milland's character (who now becomes Stephen Neale) is not brought to life as fully in the movie as it is in the book, which sort of misses the entire point.  So read the book first, for sure -- it is so much better than the movie. 

Book number two is The Third Man and The Fallen Idol.  Both stories once again blew me away, especially The Third Man which is just genius storytelling.  Turning again to Greene's own words in Ways of Escape, the author states that this story "was never written to be read but only to be seen."  

However, he also says that

"For me it is impossible to write a film play without first writing a story...I must have the sense of more material than I need to draw on."

Luckily for me and for fans of Greene's work, he felt as though it had to start as a story first. And oh my god, what a story it is.  It is set in a divided, "smashed dreary city,"  postwar-Vienna,  which at the time was occupied by the four powers, and is a tale of black-market corruption and racketeering.  The book begins with the arrival of Rollo Martins, a hack writer of western novels, who has come there to work for his friend Harry Lime. Lime has offered him a job in a charity he supposedly runs, but when Martins arrives, he finds that Lime has been killed in an accident in which he was run down by a car.  Martins, who "worshipped Lime"  is resentful that Scotland Yard's Colonel Calloway has pinned "some petty racket" and murder on his now dead friend, and swears that he will make Calloway "look the biggest bloody fool in Vienna" for doing so.  What Martins doesn't know, and what Calloway doesn't explain until it's necessary, is that Harry was not involved in just a "petty racket going on with petrol," but rather something so heinous that it beggars belief. Martins knows that there were two witnesses to Harry's death, but as he continues his quest for the truth, he uncovers evidence of a "third man" who was there as well, making Lime's death a murder and not an accident. Who was this third man? And why did he not come forth to give evidence? As Martins tries to discover answers, he finds himself caught up in something so much bigger than he'd ever expected. All eyes on Martins here -- Greene once again gives us a character who has to come to terms with a reality that will test everything he's ever known or believed.

The film is just over-the-top excellent -- once again Greene fleshes out the characters in much more detail in written form than the film can convey, although the movie comes very close. Once again, I'd say if possible read the book first because you will get a lot more out of the film.

And now to the third story, "The Fallen Idol," which started life in 1935 as "The Basement Room." After having finished it, I understand the logic behind the original title, but even so, the story is just so damned good that it hardly matters.  Book and movie are quite different -- as Greene explains, what started as a story about "a small boy who unwittingly betrayed his best friend to the police" ended up as a tale about "a small boy who believed his friend was a murderer and nearly procured his arrest by telling lies in his defence."  I'll go further: reading carefully, we find that this is a story of a suppressed memory based on childhood events -- there are interjections throughout that reveal Philip in his sixties still traumatized and by then psychologically damaged.

In the story, young Philip both adores and pities his friend Baines, the family butler.  As we're told, it had "occurred to him how happily they could live together in the empty house if Mrs. Baines were called away," since she is always harping on her husband and making life just plain miserable in general. Philip stumbles onto a secret that Baines has been keeping regarding another woman, which pushes him into a world he doesn't quite understand and is not ready for;  he then unwittingly betrays Baines prompting a series of events that will trouble and color Philip's psyche for the remainder of his life.

I have to say that I love this movie. This is my second time viewing the film, and it was better this time around than the first.  Even though Philip stays a little boy here and there is no hint of the older Philip as in Greene's original story, it is so suspenseful that I was mesmerized. The casting of Bobby Henrey as Phillipe was so perfect that his is the face I saw while reading the story; the same is true in the case of Mrs. Baines, who in the book is described by Philip as being "so like the witches of his dreams."  The scene with MacGregor, the snake, the one that really sets Philip against her (not in the novel, by the way), says everything a person needs to know about this character.

Sadly, with two books/three stories at once under discussion here, there's really no time to dig deep, but careful readers will definitely find a LOT going on in these stories aside from plot. The quotation I began this post with is from "The Fallen Idol," and this one short sentence to me embodies much of the essence of all three of these stories. For me, it ties these diverse tales together in a way that makes complete sense.    In The Ministry of Fear the main character accidentally stumbles into a serious case of espionage, The Third Man focuses on a man who refuses to believe that his best friend in the world might possibly be guilty of  horrific deeds in postwar Austria, and in "The Fallen Idol" young Philip finds himself plunged headlong into the messy adult world with no understanding of how it works.  For me all three are also scenarios of a sort of lost innocence that can never be reclaimed, all have to do with secrets and lies, and all are frankly quite brilliant.  As I keep telling people, it's just a shame that this author is not read very widely any more.  He is a master storyteller as well as an author whose works go well beyond simple plot into deeper, darker places -- in short, my kind of writer.

I highly, highly recommend these two books as well as the movies -- I'll be revisiting Greene here shortly.