I've taught a reasonable amount of Victorian and some Regency literature and have casually read a decent amount of non academic history of the Victorian and Regency eras. A common trope I've seen is of a rakish character or a spendthrift couple running up huge debts with various vendors (especially tailors) and basically just not paying. Sometimes the character is shown as dying in penury but at other times they just seem to carry on in the same style as always, just ignoring or stringing along the vendors who provide their goods and services. What's more this seems to be seen as if not typical at least not unusual.
Was this sort of casual attitude toward payment for goods and services on the part of the upper classes an actual thing?
I've read "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" and "Far from the Madding Crowd". I think that Thomas Hardy was a very clever and creative writer, but not as refined as the book jackets and movies make him out to be. Out of the two, I prefer Tess because I generally think tragedy is more poignant. To me, the suffering of the characters makes them seem more nobel and realistic. On the other hand, Madding Crowd is much more positive, and I think, more self-indulgent on the author's part. He was very clever, and it showed up in the sort of unique turn of phrase, and liveliness of dialogue that sum up that book. My problem with that is that He seems like kind of a try hard, and that he sacrificed the use of concise language for what, to me, seems like overly demonstrative and almost florid prose. I can of course be wrong because these things are a matter of taste more than anything else, so if anybody likes one more than the other, or niether, I applaud their taste regardless.
Hi, it's me again.
Just started the second book of The Once and Future King; The Queen of Air and Darkness. Grummursum and Palomides are ridiculous. These two and Pellinore make up the Arthurian Three Stooges. Is this story of them impersonating the Questing Beast played for laughs in earlier/other Arthur texts? I don't see how it could be portrayed any other way. What a silly idea. For some reason I had assumed that the whole story would be played as a serious drama. I'm pleasantly surprised.
Every branch big with it,
Bent every twig with it;
Every fork like a white web-foot;
Every street and pavement mute:
Some flakes have lost their way, and grope back upward when
Meeting those meandering down they turn and descend again.
The palings are glued together like a wall,
And there is no waft of wind with the fleecy fall.
A sparrow enters the tree,
Whereon immediately
A snow-lump thrice his own slight size
Descends on him and showers his head and eye
And overturns him,
And near inurns him,
And lights on a nether twig, when its brush
Starts off a volley of other lodging lumps with a rush.
The steps are a blanched slope,
Up which, with feeble hope,
A black cat comes, wide-eyed and thin;
And we take him in.
Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock. “Now they are all on their knees,” An elder said as we sat in a flock By the embers in hearthside ease.
We pictured the meek mild creatures where They dwelt in their strawy pen, Nor did it occur to one of us there To doubt they were kneeling then.
So fair a fancy few would weave In these years! Yet, I feel, If someone said on Christmas Eve, “Come; see the oxen kneel,
“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb Our childhood used to know,” I should go with him in the gloom, Hoping it might be so.
