Coping with Victorian prose

You can find Well's entire book online where I found it, at Project Gutenberg. A warning, though. Wells was a Victorian, so he wrote Victorian prose.  It can be daunting, especially if you strike something like this in the opening sentence:

"The author of the following letters is aware that his publication would have possessed greater utility, had the architectural descriptions been more minute. He ventures to hope, however, that this imperfection may be in some measure balanced by the more extended sphere opened to whatever information it may contain."

All he means is, he knows he hasn't written the Ultimate Guide to Spanish Architecture, because though that might have been very, very useful for a few architecture fans, this way at least his book will reach a wider audience.

Don't be intimidated by his prose. It's only English.

He warns us that, while not a primer on Spanish architecture, his book is also not some titillating account drooling over 'exotic' Spain. It does not contain Men In Pointy Hoods Doing Weird Catholic Stuff. Instead he claims to stick to honest facts:"...it was his wish to paint what he saw as he saw it."  But without being dull, because even though avoiding deliberate romantic invention he hopes "to enliven it by the introduction of any incidents worthy of notice which came under his observation".

He explains his book is based on letters he sent during two separate journeys to Spain made three years apart, and admits to a change made in the chronological sequence to shape his volume better.

The explanatory Preface is over, and we're into Letter I.

This is addressed to a lady, 'Mrs C-----r', and he is writing to her from the Rue de Richelieu, the most fashionable street in Paris (I told you the Wells family was rich).  From his remarks to her we can build up a picture of what sort of lady Mrs C-----r is.  She attends balls: between quadrilles she makes sparkling conversation with her partners, who have all been to smart places like Biarritz: and she is certainly no blue-stocking, as she blithely admits she knows nothing at all about Spain :  "You professed also, with a modesty always becoming to talent and worth, a complete ignorance respecting Spain...Indeed, the ignorance you profess with some exaggeration, is more or less general in our country."

- So Mrs C----r too is British?

"Spain has been unnoticed and unknown—laid on the shelf with the Arabian Nights—considered a sort of fabulous country, which it would be charming to know, but with which there would never be a chance of forming an acquaintance; and you have contented yourself with a sort of general information respecting it, derived from a few romances and poems...with the addition of some confused visions, in which autos-da-fé and dungeons contrast in a rather gloomy background with laughing majas, whirling their castagnettes to the soft cadences of guitars..."  

(Bullseye, Nathaniel. Women in frilly frocks doing stampy dancing, and the Inquisition lurking in the background. This remained the basic British idea of Spain until the day of the cheap package holiday arrived.)

He reflects with mock-solemnity on how wrong it would be for him to deliberately fool her about this unknown country, because there is absolutely no chance she will ever go there herself to check.  Spain is hot.  Mrs C-----r doesn't do heat.  She nearly had a meltdown recently during a brief spell of warmish weather in Normandy, remember? The time when she was staying in that old wood-panelled chateau, and insisted he shout his conversation to her from a different room entirely because it was so hot she couldn't bear to have any other living being in the same chamber. She even banned her pet dog: "...your favourite of favourites, Caliph, repulsed and uncaressed, hung his silken ears, as he solemnly retreated to coil himself on a distant rug..."

At this point it crosses my suspicious mind that 'Mrs C-----r' may be a literary fiction.  Is Nathaniel just inventing her to provide an excuse for his decision to publish a book about Spain?  To impress us that he is not writing for cash, god forbid, or for personal prestige because, oh no no, he is an English Gentleman Amateur! he wouldn't care about such things.  He is writing to amuse this charming, bored lady stretched on her chaise-longue amid the fatiguing Parisian heat.  He is her Knight Errant, adventuring to Spain for the pleasure of his capricious dame. So he would not dream of boring her (or us) with long, confusing lists of kings called Juan. Instead he is giving her a virtual tour of Spain c. 1842. He can do the same for us.

No, actually I do believe she exists, with her draughty chateau, her shared enthusiasm for Gothic monuments and aversion to heat.  So: he has recently been keeping company with a quadrille-loving but languorous British lady who can afford the rent of a Louis XIV house in or near Caen; she has at least one upmarket pet, the adored Caliph (probably a spaniel - the silken ears give it away); and apparently she and Nathaniel have been enjoying not only the summer "season of insects and al-fresco suppers" together, but "the autumnal equinox" too, complete with its roaring fires and roaring draughts. Cosy.

I notice there doesn't seem to be any Mr C-----r  mentioned.

Not Mrs C-----r, but from the same period.

NATHANIEL ARMSTRONG WELLS (1806 -1846)

Travel writer. Gentleman. Aesthete.  

Son and heir to the High Sheriff of Monmouthshire. 

- And, unusually for a wealthy Victorian gentleman, also black.
 

Nathaniel Armstrong Wells had the great good luck to be born to wealth and privilege - born into the heart of the English Regency.  He was luckier still in having a cultivated and intelligent mind, and in adult life brought it to bear on the societies of at least three European nations – his own, and those of France and Spain. Some of what he thought and felt he put into a book, The Picturesque Antiquities of Spain. This blog is an exploration of that book.

 

I call him black, but Wells would have been known in his own time as a 'quadroon': somebody with three-quarters European and a quarter African heritage.  In the binary world of racism however percentages tend not to matter.  Wells was visibly not 'white', and what was not white could only therefore be black.  So: black, clever, and privileged, but growing up in a 19th century Britain wedded to the idea of hierarchy - of rich over poor, of white over black, British over foreign.  This message, even when it wasn't being flatly stated out loud, was always in the background hum of the culture.  Was Wells deaf to it?  Most of his countrymen absorbed it untroubled: it was not in their interest to question it.  Did he? Or did he choose to be selectively deaf, to revel in his privileges of rank while pretending not to apply to himself the frequent slights against people of colour?

Let's find out.  Join me as, armed only with the entire internet, we explore this dead man's mind. 

THE WELLS FAMILY OF PIERCEFIELD

First, something of his background. Nathaniel Armstrong Wells was born in 1806, the year the slave trade was outlawed, but was over thirty when slavery itself was finally banned throughout the empire (1838).  Black people in Britain were never slaves in the same way as those in the colonies, but tended to be at least in service. Very much against the run of the odds, how did a black man get to be a wealthy gentleman? How did Nathaniel's father come to own the most splendid estate in Monmouthshire?

Slavery was at the root of both their privilege and colour.  Nathaniel's grandfather, a Welsh gentleman called William Wells, made a fortune in the West Indies: but his grandmother was an enslaved woman called Juggy.  When William Wells died he had several living children (by different mothers) to provide for, and he did: but all the others were girls. And if you remember your Austen, girls tended to be granted modest bequests, while the lion's share of a family fortune invariably went to the eldest son. 

William's only surviving son was Juggy's boy, our Nathaniel's father, who though island-born was despatched to England for his education.  After he completed that, and spent an elegantly idle season or two in London and Bath, he married Miss Harriet Este, daughter of one of the King's Chaplains. Time to begin a family, and also put his great fortune to work by buying an estate. He chose Piercefield, in his father's native Wales, in a land where he had ancestral ties.  Simply by being Piercefield's owner he went straight to the top of the county's hierarchy, eventually becoming a magistrate, High Sheriff, then Deputy Lieutenant.  It was all a very predictable path for a man of his wealth, but always there was the unexpected twist of his colour:  

"Mr Wells is a West Indian of large fortune, a man of very gentlemanly manners, but so much a man of colour as to be little removed from a Negro."  

That was the surprised diary entry made by the landscape artist Joseph Farington, after he had sought and got permission from the owner to visit Piercefield's famously-beautiful grounds. Despite their position and their riches, the Wells family were always liable to be dogged by that kind of response.