Victorian Plums

The three poems Bertie reads in Victorian Plums are: The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll, which was published in 1876; The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám by Edward Fitzgerald, published in 1856 (although it languished in obscurity until the 1880s), and The Ballad of Reading Gaol by Oscar Wilde, published in 1898.

They are all masterpieces. More than that, they all show how the Victorians could revel in the individual, the exotic and the curiously profound. We hope they seem to others as they do to us: somehow to add up to something more than the sum of their parts, like the three movements of a classical concerto.

A proof of their enduring quality is that, taken together, they supply a good two pages – in double columns – of successive editions of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations; although the selection of quotations varies widely between editions. They say different things to different people.

This is not the place for scholarly maundering on. Let those who want to know more find printed editions and discover for themselves. Or – of course – Google them. All are available online, and have Wikipedia entries. None of them has ever been out of print.

They are all poems that almost demand to be read aloud, and are actually a joy to listen to. But anyone who has ever read them aloud to themselves will have discovered that they are not quite as easy to read as they are familiar. Their language is not our language. Contemporary actors often struggle with the language of Oscar Wilde or Arthur Wing Pinero or George Bernard Shaw because we don’t talk like that any more, and perhaps we don’t think like that any more either, so that our efforts to tackle that language end up sounding like pastiche, or parody. It is a matter of leisure, in a way: of length of line, of cadence, of rhythm; of a longer attention span, perhaps. Like remembering and appreciating a long political speech that is not built around a succession of sound bites.

Bertie is of course not an actor. He does not perform these poems as an actor might. He reads them. All three poems come from a time when people read aloud to each other. People also made their own music, which we hope justifies our musical punctuation chosen from Elgar’s work and manner of the 1880s and 1890s, when he wrote salon pieces. This was, of course, the ‘making our own entertainment’ that we laugh about in the age of radio and TV. Do we laugh because we cannot do it? Or perhaps it is because we do not dare to? There is actually more to performing to friends and family than one might think if one has not tried it.

There is something a bit addictive about all these poems. And let’s be elitist. Let’s admit it is better to know them than not to know them. Not that the problem of people failing to recognise quotations from them is new. Theodore Roosevelt once remarked to his Secretary for the Navy that, “what I say three times is true.” He received an aggrieved response. “Mr President, it would never have occurred to me for a moment to have impugned your veracity.” Edith Wharton – who had known TR since she was a child – came to lunch. “Well! I am glad to welcome to the White House someone to whom I can quote The Hunting of the Snark without being asked what I mean!”

An extract from The Hunting of the Snark

In 1856 Edward Fitzgerald was told of some Persian verses in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. They were by Omar Khayyám: a poet, mathematician and astronomer of the eleventh century. In eleventh-century Persia education clearly meant something. Fitzgerald rendered Khayyám’s verses into the story of a single day: a dawn-to-dusk meditation on mutability. The volume did not sell, and the last copies were dumped in the ‘penny box’ outside the publisher’s shop. Dante Gabriel Rossetti picked up a copy. He handed it round his friends. A copy arrived in America, where they rather liked it. After Fitzgerald’s death in 1883 it became greatly admired, helped by the good opinion of Alfred Lord Tennyson. It became in fact a cult classic. Progressive educationists probably frown on it today, since it could be read as an incitement to binge drinking: Omar’s answer to the eternal questions he muses upon is always to have another drink.

An extract from The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

After he got out of gaol Oscar Wilde certainly had a drink problem. Or was it a drink solution? Anyway, it is one of those disturbing questions-about-art that one might debate: is the life of the 9th Marquess of Queensberry (and, one might add, his son Bosie) justified by the existence of The Ballad of Reading Gaol? Discuss. It is hard to believe that either of them would be remembered today except in relation to Oscar Wilde: an irony Wilde was fully alive to. It was extraordinary that he found the energy to write The Ballad of Reading Gaol: it was his one substantial work written after he was released, and his one last literary success before he died. One is glad to know he had that success.

An extract from The Ballad of Reading Gaol

I know I produced these recordings, and I have listened to them countless times; but I have to say that, whenever I have had to check a section, I’ve carried on to the end. Try it.


	Victorian Plums The three poems Bertie reads in Victorian Plums are: The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll, which was published in 1876; The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám by Edward Fitzgerald, published in 1856 (although it languished in obscurity until the 1880s), and The Ballad of Reading Gaol by Oscar Wilde, published in 1898. They are all masterpieces. More than that, they all show how the Victorians could revel in the individual, the exotic and the curiously profound. We hope they seem to others as they do to us: somehow to add up to something more than the sum of their parts, like the three movements of a classical concerto. A proof of their enduring quality is that, taken together, they supply a good two pages – in double columns – of successive editions of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations; although the selection of quotations varies widely between editions. They say different things to different people. This is not the place for scholarly maundering on. Let those who want to know more find printed editions and discover for themselves. Or – of course – Google them. All are available online, and have Wikipedia entries. None of them has ever been out of print. They are all poems that almost demand to be read aloud, and are actually a joy to listen to. But anyone who has ever read them aloud to themselves will have discovered that they are not quite as easy to read as they are familiar. Their language is not our language. Contemporary actors often struggle with the language of Oscar Wilde or Arthur Wing Pinero or George Bernard Shaw because we don’t talk like that any more, and perhaps we don’t think like that any more either, so that our efforts to tackle that language end up sounding like pastiche, or parody. It is a matter of leisure, in a way: of length of line, of cadence, of rhythm; of a longer attention span, perhaps. Like remembering and appreciating a long political speech that is not built around a succession of sound bites. Bertie is of course not an actor. He does not perform these poems as an actor might. He reads them. All three poems come from a time when people read aloud to each other. People also made their own music, which we hope justifies our musical punctuation chosen from Elgar’s work and manner of the 1880s and 1890s, when he wrote salon pieces. This was, of course, the ‘making our own entertainment’ that we laugh about in the age of radio and TV. Do we laugh because we cannot do it? Or perhaps it is because we do not dare to? There is actually more to performing to friends and family than one might think if one has not tried it. There is something a bit addictive about all these poems. And let’s be elitist. Let’s admit it is better to know them than not to know them. Not that the problem of people failing to recognise quotations from them is new. Theodore Roosevelt once remarked to his Secretary for the Navy that, “what I say three times is true.” He received an aggrieved response. “Mr President, it would never have occurred to me for a moment to have impugned your veracity.” Edith Wharton – who had known TR since she was a child – came to lunch. “Well! I am glad to welcome to the White House someone to whom I can quote The Hunting of the Snark without being asked what I mean!” An extract from The Hunting of the Snark In 1856 Edward Fitzgerald was told of some Persian verses in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. They were by Omar Khayyám: a poet, mathematician and astronomer of the eleventh century. In eleventh-century Persia education clearly meant something. Fitzgerald rendered Khayyám’s verses into the story of a single day: a dawn-to-dusk meditation on mutability. The volume did not sell, and the last copies were dumped in the ‘penny box’ outside the publisher’s shop. Dante Gabriel Rossetti picked up a copy. He handed it round his friends. A copy arrived in America, where they rather liked it. After Fitzgerald’s death in 1883 it became greatly admired, helped by the good opinion of Alfred Lord Tennyson. It became in fact a cult classic. Progressive educationists probably frown on it today, since it could be read as an incitement to binge drinking: Omar’s answer to the eternal questions he muses upon is always to have another drink. An extract from The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám After he got out of gaol Oscar Wilde certainly had a drink problem. Or was it a drink solution? Anyway, it is one of those disturbing questions-about-art that one might debate: is the life of the 9th Marquess of Queensberry (and, one might add, his son Bosie) justified by the existence of The Ballad of Reading Gaol? Discuss. It is hard to believe that either of them would be remembered today except in relation to Oscar Wilde: an irony Wilde was fully alive to. It was extraordinary that he found the energy to write The Ballad of Reading Gaol: it was his one substantial work written after he was released, and his one last literary success before he died. One is glad to know he had that success. An extract from The Ballad of Reading Gaol I know I produced these recordings, and I have listened to them countless times; but I have to say that, whenever I have had to check a section, I’ve carried on to the end. Try it.