December: adventures in the 1860s
Ramsgate Sands by Arthur Boyd Hougton. Used under a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unported) license.
This month I mostly enjoyed:
A bunch of extremely dramatic 1860s novels crammed with bigamy, murder, betrayal, poison, and (most shocking of all) women pretending to be 5-10 years younger than they really are
The big-budget video game Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, set in 1868
So this month my thoughts are, I guess, about a very fictionalised version of the 1860s. I don’t know why December felt like the time for this. I suppose we can blame Dickens, and ghost stories, and the countryside, and the Victorian invention of the red-and-gold aesthetic of Christmas, and sitting in arm chairs. I might not have a fireplace, but I might as well spend December reading the sort of novels that I would read in front of it if I did.
Sensation Novels
Some spoilers for Behind A Mask, and a little bit but not much for Armadale.
This entire month I’ve been in the mood for melodrama, and mistaken identities, and blackmail, and pushing husbands into wells, and basically just a whole bunch of extremely exciting stories from the 1860s. I went for Wilkie Collins’ Armadale, Mrs Henry Wood’s East Lynne, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, and — an outlier — Louisa May Alcott’s Behind A Mask, Or, A Woman’s Power, a short novel she wrote before Little Women. They’re all extremely eventful.
This whole genre, the “sensation novel”, is full of amazing stuff. It’s basically a 150-year-old version of what we’d now perhaps call the “domestic thriller”; absurd secrets are revealed, disguises torn off, coldly malevolent women set out to destroy perfect families, you the reader are kind of on-board with the coldly malevolent women’s aims up to a point; sometimes, the point comes faster and harder than you expect.
Each of the four I picked had a deceptive governess, which makes sense, both in terms of allowing the writers to get their plot functioning and also in terms of “ahhhh but the genre’s a reflection of contemporary anxieties, do you see”: governesses are ambiguously situated with regards to social class so that makes them interesting; they’re single (at least purportedly — in the world of sensation novels, who doesn’t have a secret husband or two lying around?) but can act with a degree of independence; they’re in but not of the family. Plus this whole genre is largely about the wealthy but it was read by just a whole lot of people, Lady Audley’s Secret sold hundreds of thousands of copies, it was one of the best-selling books of its century, and a governess makes sense as a way in for readers to access this world of plenty. But besides this the books are also just about a bunch of stuff happening, about plot and what-happens-next and heightened characters embodying any cruel or charitable instinct you might ever have and taking them to ridiculous extremes, and about making you want to read the next chapter right away, and then the one after.
It was a great theme for December reading, anyway. Wilkie Collins is so good; I wouldn’t recommend Armadale before his big hits The Moonstone and The Woman in White but if you’ve read those and enjoyed them and want more, then Armadale is a long but worthy successor. It’s told through a mix of narration and letters and diaries, and it holds together amazingly, and there’s an annoyed heroine who I loved, who ponders murder thus:
If some women bring such men as this into the world, ought other women to allow them to live? It is a matter of opinion. I think not.
Her deep irritation at the world and at a particularly wholesome type of English man feels very contemporary. If I read her in a novel written now but set in the 1860s, I can imagine not entirely buying her, thinking she must be a little too inflected by 21st century modes of thought and speech. There is also an evil doctor, who runs a murder sanatorium, and who shares his opinions about contemporary novels and their suitability:
"Only such novels as I have selected and perused myself, in the first instance," said the doctor. "Nothing painful, ma'am! There may be plenty that is painful in real life; but for that very reason, we don't want it in books. The English novelist who enters my house (no foreign novelist will be admitted) must understand his art as the healthy-minded English reader understands it in our time. He must know that our purer modern taste, our higher modern morality, limits him to doing exactly two things for us, when he writes us a book. All we want of him is—occasionally to make us laugh; and invariably to make us comfortable.”
Of the four books, I also particularly liked the Alcott at least partly because — spoilers — the scheming governess wins, she gets what she wanted; she opens the book by walking among the estates of the town she has arrived to, and deciding which she would prefer to have for her own; and then she sets out to get it; and it works. Alcott of course is American and Behind a Mask, like the rest of its genre, is set in England, where I don’t think she had ever been at least at the time of writing this, but it works fine: from this distance, to a non-expert, the general air of nineteenth-century-ness hides any “wait, it wouldn’t have been like that in England” moments.
But all four were great. I mean, how’s this for an opening, from the very first page of Lady Audley’s Secret:
At the end of this avenue there was an old arch and a clock tower, with a stupid, bewildering clock, which had only one hand—and which jumped straight from one hour to the next—and was therefore always in extremes. Through this arch you walked straight into the gardens of Audley Court.
Making up a clock to get mad at! What a way to open one of the world’s most popular novels.
Assassin’s Creed Syndicate
I decided to play a nice splashy big-budget videogame over the holidays as well, and ended up with this one because it’s set in London and sometimes I want to see the city I live in but also, I guess, can’t be bothered to put on shoes; plus I was already reading about 1860s England so why not play a game set there as well? The game — the ninth in the Assassin’s Creed series — even starts out in Whitechapel, where I live, although I rarely embark upon missions to assassinate evil industrialists.
Throughout the time I spend with it, Assassin’s Creed Syndicate is glossy and perfect. I am generally terrible at games like this and it supports me in my incapacity; to parkour, you press the “do parkour” button and it figures out the best parkour for you to do; if you stand atop a tower and want to dive into a bale of hay, it pops up a message with the very slightly complicated combination of buttons that you need to use, every time. If you are chasing a bad industrialist and he slips away he will eventually start to circle a local block for five, ten, fifteen minutes, just riding his evil little carriage around in laps to ensure that you can catch up with him and bring him to justice.
This is, I suppose, good; it’s certainly better than making it impossible for me to play just because I’m no good at steering my own little carriage.
Throughout the game, you fight and kill evil people. There are very evil industrialists, from whom you rescue child labourers. There are medical millionaires who sell remedies that are not just useless but actively harmful. There are monopolist telecommunications entrepreneurs that physically sabotage and intermittently murder their competition. There are rival gang members who bully innocent passers-by and yell insults at you as you pass. Nobody could object to you fighting these enemies. The story gestures at feeling political — are you not taking a stance against these wrongdoers? do you not wave a flag in triumph? — but of course it is political in the way that fighting Bowser is political. The game invents enemies that nobody could seriously defend and then invites you to feel moral for your opposition to them.
Is this good? I suppose it’s good. Murdering people isn’t nice but it’s a pretty key part of a game that is, after all, called Assassin’s Creed and you’ve got to come up with some sort of reason why it’s okay to spend ten minutes trying to get your “assassinate two people simultaneously while dropping from a zipline” stat up past 25.
Florence Nightingale turns up; she is saintly and forgettable. Alexander Graham Bell offers to upgrade your poison dart gun. Some plot happens.
There is a female playable character in the game, Evie Frye, who is the first female playable character in the main Assassin’s Creed series. She shares top billing with her twin brother Jacob, and you can choose to play as either twin for most of the missions, so nobody is forced to play as a girl. This is good, as well, I guess? It is good to be able to play, sometimes, as a woman. It would be unreasonable to object to this on the grounds that people are also able to play as a man, if they prefer. It would be unreasonable to feel affronted that, looking for a screenshot on Steam to use in this post, I found only shots of Jacob. You get to pick your twin! It’s up to you! It all works very smoothly.
Smooth, smooth, nothing so polished in the world as this game; I press that “do parkour” button to do parkour up a building that is similar to, but is not quite, Liverpool Street Station; it is very pleasant. I play for perhaps 25 hours over the course of a week or two. Now that that week or two is over, I don’t remember much. I remember laughing when a man turned out to be Charles Dickens, and failing to complete enough missions for Karl Marx to unlock the red-green-and-gold assassination outfit that I was hoping to be able to wear for Christmas; I remember the way the Thames was packed with barges and felt busy and vital, a place, not just an obstruction, and how I liked that; I remember a big moon rising mid-afternoon in Lambeth; and I remember this one effect the game does when you climb up very high, where it pulls back and rotates and shows you, laid out on all sides, the city that has been so meticulously created for your pleasure.
Is this game good? It executes flawlessly all of the things that it sets out to do. It allows for virtuosity or for incompetence. There are so many items to collect or unlock — pressed flowers, music boxes, outfits — that it is difficult to imagine running out of incremental tasks to smoothly complete. It is absolutely impossible to take exception to this game. How beautiful its city is in the sunlight and how convincingly it almost resembles London. How textured the buildings and how absolutely frictionless the experience of navigating them.