True Tilda, Private Eye and rendering dialect in print

When I was quoting from Arthur Quiller-Couch's True Tilda on this blog, I harvested them from the Project Gutenberg plain text version.

There you will find this introductory note:

This was one of the most enjoyable e-texts that I have prepared but also one of the most difficult. Many of the characters use the working class slang and dialect of 100 years ago and the author sticks to this consistently throughout the book. At times there seems to be as many apostrophes as characters!

This attempt to render dialect phonetically was still going strong in the 1950s and is wearing to the modern reader. I'm told the approved technique in fiction these days is to do with the odd phrase early on and then trust your readers to remember how that character speaks.

But it's still a live issue, as a letter in the current Private Eye shows:

May I be the 94th reader from "oop" north to take issue with your WhatsApp group writer's irritating phonetical spelling of the f-word in Lee Anderson MP's recent posts? It follows the trend of, presumably, RP-speaking writers to needlessly illustrate literally someone's accent.

Many northeners will read "fook" with the long "oo", obviously, so it's a bit weird for us.

The other thing with those posts, of course, is that WhatsApp posts are generally typed, so the delightful Mr Anderson would hardly with the the word phonetically, would he?

English is not a phonetic language, whatever your accent, so the idea that we assume a character has an RP accent unless otherwise indicated tells us something about our society.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: "A drop of What-killed-Aunty"

You see? They don't call the Wise Woman of Wing 'wise' for nothing.

And I am indebted to Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch for the expression 'What-killed-Aunty'. (For some reason I omitted the hyphens and capital letters in the version I sent to Liberator.) It occurs in the opening chapter of True Tilda.

So thank you, Q.

Tuesday

To the village, where I find the queue for Mr Patel’s shop wrapped three times round the green before it disappears into the churchyard of St Asquith’s and the fields beyond. Who should I find surveying the scene with satisfaction but my old friend the Wise Woman of Wing? 

“It’s this new energy drink I’ve produced with the Elves of Rockingham Forest,” she explains. “It’s an old recipe of mine, and they’ve added some of their secret herbs – and a drop of What-killed-Aunty, I shouldn’t wonder. Whatever they’ve done, it keeps the punters coming back for more.” 

When I inquire into the business side of the project, she becomes animated. “I’ve had my solicitor go through the contract with a nit comb, dearie. There isn’t going to be any nonsense about High Elven Law meaning they’re entitled to an extra twenty per cent this time. It’s strictly fifty-fifty all the way.”

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

Previously in Lord Bonkers' Diary

• Keep the flag of freedom burning
• I set off with the Well-Informed Orphan
• The Rest is Under the Table

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch: "Murder your darlings"

'Murder your darlings.' It's the writing advice you hear everywhere, but who first said it?

The answer is this blog's new hero, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch.

In his The Art of Writing, published in 1916, he said:

Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it — wholeheartedly — and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.

And it's good advice. It's the overall effect of a piece of writing, whether it's a poem or a work memorandum, that matters.

In the days when I wrote lots of columns, when I hit upon a subject I would often think at once of a joke, quotation or anecdote I could include. And I would start the writing of the column by setting it down.

Often, I would find I was short of room to make my arguments. And I would sadly conclude that the way to make more of it was to sacrifice the couple of paragraphs that had got me going.

Further into Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and True Tilda

Today's rabbit hole is Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, and True Tilda in particular, because I've made two discoveries about the book.

The first is that it was published in 1909 as, and favourably reviewed as, an adult novel. The second is that a silent film was made of it in 1920.

Here, for instance, is the review in the Thursday 2 September 1909 edition of the Morning Post:

It is a charming book, this Iliad of the rough girl with the heart of a mother and the sagacity of the guttersnipe, and the frail little boy, nearly broken by his treatment at the orphanage, with his innate sense of refinement and hit poetical instinct - to say nothing of the wonderful mongrel, Adolphus, that prince of dogs. 

It will be read with rippling of clean laughter and an excitement that is none the less keen for being evoked by nothing more lurid then the triumph of Innocence over evil circumstances.

And here is the Liverpool Daily Post from the day before:

Mr. Quiller-Couch writes with such charm at all times, with such a true appreciation of the Stevenson manner, that it will seem to be an exaggeration if we sav that in this great book he has has excelled himself. For all that., such is our opinion. 

Let us give an instance. At the end, when the young boy is sleeping in his father’s house, there is a perfect scene. Most writers would have brought the father along the corridor see his sleeping son. So does Mr, Quiller-Couch. Here is the scene, however, as handles it: - 

Noiselessly though Sir Miles had come, the boy was awake. Nor was it in his nature, being awake, to feign sleep. He looked up. blinking a little, but with no fear in his gentle eyes. 

His father had not counted on this. He felt an absurd bashfulness tying his tongue. At length he struggled to say - 

"Thought I’d make sure you wore comfortable. That's all." 

"Oh, yes - thank you. Comfortable and and - only just thinking a bit." 

Surely that precisely what would have happened on the first night of the son’s restoration, yet how many would have given us a sloppy, sentimental scene. 

The film was well reviewed too, though there were doubts over the casting of the 28-year-old Edna Flugarth to play the nine-year-old Tilda caused some adverse comment.

Arthur was played by Teddy Gordon Craig, who as Edward Carrick had an adult career in films as an art director. It lasted all the way to British films about the early Sixties pop scene: What a Crazy World (1963) and Every Day's a Holiday (1964).

And the film of True Tilda may still exist. Wikipedia has pages listing lost British films for 1915-19 and 1920-24, and it's not listed on either of them.

Kenneth Griffith's film Emily Hobhouse: The Englishwoman

I'm not bringing you a contemporary newspaper account of the 1899 meeting to oppose the Boer War that Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch chaired in Liskeard: I'm bringing you a dramatic reconstruction of it.

Kenneth Griffith was an actor and maker of documentaries whose strongly held political views regularly brought him into conflict with television bosses and the broadcasting authorities.

His Independent obituary from 2006 was candid:

He could exasperate colleagues by his cantankerous manner and stout refusal to compromise his artistic and professional integrity, especially when offered work by those whom he called the "priggish cuckoos" of the BBC's middle management. Even those who were kind to him found he would insist on marching to a different drum.

For someone normally seen as on the left, Griffith had a surprising sympathy for the Afrikaners. From it flowed his 1984 documentary Emily Hobhouse: The Englishwoman, which dealt with her humanitarian and political efforts to help the inmates of the concentration camps the British had established in the Boer republics.

This tactic of removing the civil population from areas of conflict so guerrilla forces cannot use it as cover had already been used by Spain in Cuba and was recently used by the Sri Lankan government in Tamil areas of the island.

In Cuba and South Africa at least, the conditions in which these civilians were held were appalling and resulted in many deaths. 

I have chosen the section of Griffiths's film that deals with the Liskeard meeting, but the whole of it is worth watching if you do not know the story. All the parts are played by Griffith or the South African actress Hermien Dommisse.

Six years later, a film called That Englishwoman: An Account of the Life of Emily Hobhouse was made in South Africa, with Veronica Lang in the title role. Lang enjoyed a long but not stellar career in British television.

Emily's father, the Rev. Reginald Hobhouse, was played by Terence Alexander, in the era when he was Charlie Hungerford in Bergcrac. 

You can see a fragment of the film below. 

Emily Hobhouse: A Cornish humanitarian

Looking for an account of the meeting against the Boer War that Arthur Quiller-Couch chaired at Liskeard in 1899, I came across this tribute to one of the speakers, Emily Hobhouse.

It comes from the Western Morning News for Friday 11 June 1926, when she had just died at the age of 66. It's more about her male relatives than Emily, but it's a start as an introduction to someone I want to know much more about. (John Hall's book, whose cover I've used as an illustration here, looks the place to go for that.)

A Cornish Humanitarian

Opinions differ still as to whether the humanitarian zeal of Miss Emily Hobhouse always found the wisest outlet, but the noble motives this distinguished Cornish woman there are, so tar as I know, no two opinions. A great many people in London and elsewhere think of her as the Florence Nightingale of South Africa, and they will probably be present at Kensington Cemetery to-morrow when Miss Hobhouse's remains are laid to rest. 

Among them I should not be surprised to see Mr. Lloyd George, with whom many Cornishmen may remember Miss Houhouse spoke from the same platform at Liskeard in the 'nineties in connection with the South African War. The district was familiar to her, for it was at St. Ive near Liskeard that Miss Hobhouse was born. Her father, the Venerable Reginald Hobhouse, was then rector. He became afterwards Archdeacon of Bodmin. 

As the niece of Lord Hobhouse on her father's side and of Sir William Trelawney, for some time Radical member for East Cornwall, on her mother's, Miss Hobhouse was related to two Lord Byron's most intimate friends. Her work in the concentration camps South Africa was followed with sympathetic attention nobody more than her famous fellow-Cornishman, Leonard Courtney, then a commoner. 

Cornish settlers in Minnesota still remember gratefully, no doubt, the two years Miss Hobhouse spent in their settlement after the loss of her venerable father. Her brother, Professor Leonard Hobhocse, is probably Cornwall's most distinguished son the sphere of philosophical and sociological research. He is, of course, the author of the little book "Liberalism" the Home University Library.

Leonard Courtney, incidentally, became the 1st Baron Courtney of Penwith. He is described by Wikipedia as "an advocate of proportional representation in Parliament and acting as an opponent of imperialism and militarism".

He was MP for Liskeard between 1876 and 1885 as a Liberal, and then for Bodmin between 1885 and 1900. There, from 1886, he sat as a Liberal Unionist, but his radical views became an increasingly uncomfortable fit with that party.

He did not stand in Bodmin in 1900, and when he did stand for again in 1906 it was as a Liberal.in Edinburgh West. There he was defeated by a Liberal Unionist.

I'll look out for an account of that Liskeard meeting and for more on Emily Hobhouse. The more you know, the more there is to find out.

Later. A bit of googling has turned up a dramatic reconstruction of the Liskeard meeting and a South African film biography of Emily.

Later again. Despite what the contemporary report here says, Emily Hobhouse was cremated and her ashes were ensconced in a niche in the National Women's Monument at Bloemfontein.

He was a good Cornish Liberal and a Radical: Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and True Tilda

I once imagined that Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (rhymes with Gooch), who signed himself Q and edited Horace Rumpole's beloved Oxford Book of English Verse, was an austere and distant figure.

Not a bit of it. When he was knighted by Asquith's government in 1910, it was for literary, educational and political services. He was a good Cornish Liberal and a Radical with it.

In 1899 he chaired a Liskeard meeting against the Boer War. The speakers were David  Lloyd George and the remarkable Emily Hobhouse, sister of L.T. 

As so often at these meetings, there were ugly scenes and Lloyd George had to be smuggled out of the building.

And in the academic world Quiller-Couch defended Liberalism against the Modernist High Toryism of T.S. Eliot.

He also wrote fiction, including at least one book for children, True Tilda.

This is a sort of feminist reworking of Oliver Twist, in which Tilda, a resourceful female Artful Dodger on the side of good, helps a traumatised younger boy find his fortune.

In hospital after an accident in the circus ring, Tilda hears a tale of injustice from a woman dying in the next bed. As soon as she is discharged she springs the boy, Arthur, from the evil Dr Glasson's orphanage and, travelling by canal boat and other means, the two of them evade his pursuit.

Eventually they arrive at Holmness in the Bristol Channel where Arthur finds his fortune. He turns out, inevitably, to be the lost son of an aristocratic family.

True Tilda was adapted by the BBC in the 1990s, an era when I didn't own a television. The other day - and this is my reason for writing all this - a fragment of the series turned up on YouTube.

I'd normally skip to the start of the episode, but the trailers here are of period interest - Chesterfield in an FA Cup semi-final and the great Stephen Lewis.

Later. This video disappeared soon after I posted this, but now it's back.