Tea at Trianon: Graham Greene and Victorian Detective Fiction

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, January 25, 2020

Graham Greene and Victorian Detective Fiction

From Crime Reads:

And so in 1962 Greene and Glover, who managed to stay on good terms and still swapping and collecting Victorian detective fiction, decided to issue a catalogue of their joint collection in a limited edition of just five hundred copies published by The Bodley Head. The book, simply entitled Victorian Detective Fiction, eventually became available in 1966 and featured a preface by Greene, an introduction by the bibliophile John Carter, and was bibliographically arranged by Eric Osborne—both Carter and Osborne were friends of Greene’s and Victorian book specialists at Sotheby’s Auction House. Each copy was individually numbered and signed by Greene, Glover, and Carter. Greene hoped that the bibliography of approximately five hundred books would be a useful aid to both second-hand and antiquarian book dealers, as well as crime fiction lovers. It is indeed a comprehensive list of Victorian crime fiction. But how did Greene and Glover, engaged in their affair amidst Blitz-torn London, come to their mutual love of early crime novels and amass the collection?

Greene claims that their shared interest in Victorian writing and a desire to build a collection came during the war, where he spent most evenings at Glover’s small flat on Bloomsbury’s Gower Mews. The couple had spent an evening rereading Wilkie Collins’s 1868 novel The Moonstone. They began to think about the origins of the detective story and who, before Collins and Poe, may have been writing detective fiction. They decided to try and build a collection of detective fiction written and published in the Victorian-era from the cheap shelves of London’s used bookstores. The British capital was home to numerous second-hand bookstores in the 1930s. Paper rationing during the war meant new titles were few and far between and so hungry and deprived readers especially sought out used books to feed their literary habits. Living in Bloomsbury, London’s literary centre, and working at nights watching for fires during the Blitz, the couple were largely free to roam the city’s book districts during the day. (Read more.)