On Writing and Reading: Two Excellent Book Recommendations

One of the pleasures of not dashing all over the place giving concerts in recent months is that I have spent much more time at home cooking, reading, and pretending to be useful. I promise to write something with recipes in it very soon, but this little piece will be all about reading. And by reading, I mean holding real, sometimes quite heavy books rather than whisking through crime novels on my Kindle. Although this part of my website carries the heading Roving and Recipes, for the purposes of this piece, here “R&R” refers to the first two of the Three R’s: Reading, (R)Writing, and (A)Rithmatic. Even if there were a book called Principia Mathematica for Dummies, I very much doubt that I would get beyond the title page before my eyes glazed over.

In the last few weeks, I have read two wonderful books: one about writing, and the other about reading.

Mark Forsyth is a British author whose subject is language and how to use it well. He has written three books that I highly recommend which form a sort of trilogy:

The Etymologicon

The Horologicon

The Elements of Eloquence.

He writes with great wit even on what might seem rather dry or abstruse topics. So witty in fact that he joins that small club of authors, who include P. G. Wodehouse, Douglas Adams, and Bill Bryson, whose works should not be taken on planes, unless you want seriously to annoy your neighbours. The dial on one’s ‘chuckleometer’ reaches the danger zone at least once a page.

The one I tackled first was The Horologicon, which describes itself as “A Day's Jaunt Through the Lost Words of the English Language”. The book does indeed start at dawn and continues through the day until bedtime. Along the way, we are introduced to amazing words for daily activities at home and the office, mealtimes, sessions in the pub, dating and mating, and finally sleep. Here are just a few quotes to give you the tenor of it:

“The standard modern measurement of inebriation is the Ose system. This has been considerably developed over the years, but the common medical consensus currently has jocose, verbose, morose, bellicose, lachrymose, comatose, adios.”

“As five o’clock strikes you may well think wistfully of how you are missing out on your cinqasept. This French term may usefully be pondered (if only from a distance) for the light it throws on the French nation and their working practices as a whole. A cinqasept is literally a ‘five till seven’, but in French reality it means: A visit to a mistress or a brothel, traditionally made between five and seven p.m.”

“All of the best rumours are false. The more that you yearn to believe a good yarn, the more likely it is that that yarn is mere flim-flam, flumadiddle, fribble-frabble, effutiation, flitter-tripe, rhubarb, spinach, toffee, waffle, balductum and bollocks.”

“The technical term for a dishonest politician is a snollygoster. Well, all right, it may not be the technical term, but it is the best one. The OED defines snollygoster as ‘A shrewd, unprincipled person, esp. a politician’, although an American journalist of the 1890s defined it more precisely (if less clearly) as ‘a fellow who wants office, regardless of party, platform or principles, and who, whenever he wins, gets there by the sheer force of monumental talknophical assumnacy.’”

I am not at all sure what ‘Talknophical Assumnacy’ really means but it does sound rather impressive.

It seems to me the snollygoster is a word ripe for immediate revival. Mr. Forsyth actually gave a TEDX talk on it in 2012. I could of course go on quoting, but I (and no doubt Mr. Forsyth) would much rather you simply bought the book. You can also look for his blog Inky Fool.

The other book is The Social Life of Books by Prof. Abigail Williams. A copy was given to me last Christmas by my father-in-law and I have been fascinated by it. The subject is books, printing, and the reading public in the 18th century, but she ventures much more widely and deeply than that. For example, reading was not always a solitary activity. It was quite customary for a member of a family to read to the rest after dinner. Often it was the father but sometimes simply the one with the best eyesight.

Photo: A Father Reading to His Family by Candlelight. Engraving by Thomas Cook after Daniel Dodd 1782.

Many people complained of the eyestrain that reading under poor light caused them. Others, such as Mrs. Delany, Handel’s friend, noted how important it was to choose ‘good prints for candlelight’. As a result, popular works were for the first time printed with larger type. One edition was advertised as ‘printed on a large Letter, for the Use of antient Ladies.’ At the other end of the scale, books were also made very small to fit them in a pocket.

If one had to read to one’s family, then there arose a set of books teaching people how to read aloud, how to read dramatically. One of the most interesting is Joshua Steele’s Prosodia Rationalis which sets out in adapted musical notation how one can read aloud effectively. Here is an example:

Steele even notates Shakespeare’s speeches as delivered by the greatest actor of the day, David Garrick. In the early 19th Century, Gilbert Austin in his Chironomia goes several stages further by adding foot positions and hand gestures.

He needs several pages of explanation for the notation above and below the lines.

Learning declamation at home like this is only one stage away from putting on dramas in one’s own house as the Bertrams do in Mansfield Park. Of course, one had to have a fairly large house to be able to do this, but it was by no means uncommon all over Europe. An out of the way room in the house was converted into a little theatre. Children could build their own puppet theatres.

Reading to a group of all ages meant that sometimes one had to censor the parts that might give offense to maiden aunts and the young, resulting in Bowdler’s The Family Shakespeare (1818) but not everyone was so squeamish. Some miscellanies were a little more risqué than one might imagine and had titles such as Fun for the Parlour and Hilaria or the Festive Board. Here is a decidedly naughty poem from the latter about Madame Mara, the singer:

Of Handel’s fam’d Commemoration,

And what was let loose there, I sing,

When the Flats and the Sharps of our Nation

Assembled along with their King,

Madam Mara (now mark what will follow)

Here ravishing sounds was imparting;

Momus play’d off a trick on Apollo

And set the sweet lady a f-t-g.

Photo: Madame Mara gives a concert.

So, this is a terrific book full of insights into the social and domestic life of the period.

Prof. Williams has done her research exceedingly well and shone a light, or perhaps I should say a candle, on a fascinating area of 18th-century life.

The Social Life of Books. Reading together in the Eighteenth-Century Home. Yale (2017)