Mars and Venus... according to Fanny by Gaslight

Although I did not give Michael Sadleir’s 1940 novel Fanny by Gaslight the most glowing review, it does have its moments. The following is one of my favourites. Step forward Fanny Hooper, woman of the world:

“This experience of males in the rough taught me an invaluable lesson, thanks to which I have always been able to make friends with any man I have wanted to be friends with. It taught me never to disapprove on principle, and to prefer a man to behave in my presence as he naturally behaves when he is happy. If that involves swearing and getting drunk, then let him swear and drink. You can always tell when a man is talking dirt and drinking too much in order to show off, or to nerve himself for something, or because he despises you and is purposely bad-mannered in order to underline his contempt. I have known that sort of thing only too often, and very disagreeable it is. But most men have some genuine and individual line of relaxation, and a woman, if she likes a man well enough, does well to let him follow it”.

(From Part 1 Chapter 3)

Fanny by Gaslight: enough said.

The booky detective in me has been on fire of late. It all started when I was re-reading Barbara Comyns’ almost completely forgotten memoir Out of the Red into the Blue and found the following passage about the author’s arrival in Ibiza in 1956:

“among them I saw something that I couldn’t believe was true. It was a little girl of about ten dressed like a woman, her face heavily made-up. She was walking with some respectable looking black-clad women. Then I distinctly saw a little boy of about the same age dressed as a woman. His cheeks were all rouged and he was holding a parasol over his head, while a stout pair of boots were showing below his flounced skirt. I wished I had never read Michael Dadler’s Forlorn Sunset, and turned to my companion in horror”.

I had never heard of Forlorn Sunset but that was nothing that a quick google could not cure and I soon discovered that the author was in fact called Michael Sadler. If there was some confusion about his name, he had only him self to blame, since he had apparently changed it from Sadler to Sadleir in order to distinguish himself from his father, who was also an author. As regular readers of this blog may remember, I sought out Forlorn Sunset and raved at length about it.

The preface to Forlorn Sunset mentioned another book by the same author, the amusingly titled Fanny by Gaslight and so my Michael Sadleir mission continued. A quick spot of research reveals that Fanny was first published in 1940, made into a film in 1944 and enjoyed a renaissance in 1981 when it was the subject of a TV miniseries starring Chloe Salaman in the title role.

The cannon of popular and remembered literature is a funny old thing. Both of these novels are now almost completely lost to the reading public but I think that of the two, it was Fanny by Gaslight rather than Forlorn Sunset which has enjoyed the most acclaim and publicity in the past. The reason that I think this odd is that Forlorn Sunset is a much better novel than Fanny.

Fanny by Gaslight is the tragic life story of a young girl born to two lovers and brought up in the seediest possible corner of Victorian London. Her early life as well as her adulthood is littered with pimps, prostitutes, drunkards and schemers but she herself stands apart from the degeneracy around her. She does not judge but she is very separate. Sadleir has set up a series of binary opposites which he explores in the story. Firstly, and most prominently, there is the opposition between honesty and hypocrisy. Fanny is an honest girl as are both of her parents and all of the various allies she picks up in her life. However “low” they may seem to the outside world, they are honest about themselves and to others. They contrast sharply and are oft injured by the battalion of hypocrites in the tale. The aristocratic drunkard who dabbles in paedophilia; the glamorous society lady who meets her lovers in a high class brothel; the list is endless.

In this polarised world “sex” is part of the “honest” section and “marriage” is presented as a deeply hypocritical state. As Fanny’s father comments: “I have some reason for not regarding marriage as the element of a love affair that is made in heaven. Heaven comes at an earlier stage if it comes at all”. Fanny herself identifies with this non conformity and refuses to marry the man that she loves, a steadfastness for which she pays in heavy coin. I understood her best when she says to her lover: “I am an outside person. I always have been, and I am too proud to come inside – at any rate at present”.

It is all very anti-Victorian to an extent which I find rather patronising and simplified and somehow imbued with snobbery. Fanny is dated without being charming and I think that maybe my Sadleir sojourn ends here.

And a Merry Christmas to all you book lovers

This post is exactly what it says on the tin. It is Christmas Eve and we are just preparing to head off to Norfolk for a few days of over indulgence. Wish me luck... I have a couple of books packed (War on the margins by Libby Cone and the splendidly titled Fanny by gaslight by Michael Sadleir) and would not be too surprised if I return a book or too richer after Santa has done his stuff.

Where ever you are in the world, thank you for reading my blog and (whether you are celebrating it or not) have a warm, safe and joyful Christmas/time.

The (bookish) pleasures of home

So there are some good things about coming back to England, and many of them are books. Here in particular are what has recently floated to the top of my TBR…

The Booker prize winning best seller Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, Iain Pears’ latest offering Stone’s Fall (I couldn’t help it, I loved An Instance of the Fingerpost) and the absurdly titled Fanny by Gaslight by Michael Sadleir. At the less well known end of the spectrum, I have Clare Cameron’s Rustle of Spring, Snakes and Ladders by Marjory Todd and the wonderfully titled Surplus Women by G. C. Pain….

Charles Dickens, Sarah Waters, Daniel Defoe and Dan Brown combined: Forlorn Sunset by Michael Sadleir: one of the best books you have never heard of

Readers may recall that Michael Sadleir’s Forlorn Sunset was the mystery read on my recent bloggy holiday. That is to say that I dragged it from London to Beirut and from Beirut to Paris, in a suitcase that was already dangerously close to its weight limit, despite not knowing one single thing about it. As you can see from the picture, it doesn’t even have a front cover to give a hint. Inside the cover, there sits a rather suggestive ink and wash drawing by John Piper. I say “suggestive” because John Piper was an eminent artist of the mid 20th century, and so I wonder whether this book was rather better known when it was first published in 1947. It certainly can hardy be less well known that it is today. I have searched far and wide and can find only the briefest of mentions in the most obscure of sources. There isn’t even a consensus on how to spell the guy’s name: some, including the excellent art historian and biographer Frances Spalding, go in for “Sadler”, but my copy of the book definitely says “Sadleir”.

Oh well. That’s enough wallowing in obscurity. Now for why it is probably one of the best books you have never heard of. This is a novel of the Victorian underworld. It is a gallop through London, but not a London that most Londoners would recognise. This is an organised-crime riddled, iniquitous den awash with the most awful examples of lives wasted and cruelly exploited.

The story knits together the fates of a group of disparate people, high and low, rich and poor, kind and wicked, who are connected by the chance rescue of a child from a mysterious house of abuse in the 1860s. That child is Lottie Heape and it is she, as much as anyone, who forms the centre of this novel. Tangled up in her life there are Vicars and pimps, journalists and soaks, industrialists and pornographers, social reformers and campaigning ladies, brave boys and more than enough nasty pieces of work.

I feel that I should explain the title of this post. Forlorn Sunset is like Charles Dickens because it is a “cast-of-thousands” “portrait-of-a-city” sort of novel. Every character has a history, and what a history that it. I was reminded also of Sarah Waters because Sadleir looks under the carpet of his chosen society – into areas neglected by history. Daniel Defoe gets a mention because there is more than a passing resemblance between his famous lady of the night Moll Flanders (as Nicola Lacey has written “my kind of heroine”) and Lottie Heape. I have mentioned Dan Brown, not because I want to put you off, but because here we have a fast paced muddle to work out with a cliff hanger at the end of every chapter.

This is a cracking story of sin and redemption. It addresses, in a story which never drags and never feels slow, the idea of social evil and individual evil. Sadleir shows in the panorama of his story how hard it is for a person to fight against the circumstances of their birth and how when a society is rotten to the core, it can pull all sorts of unlikely people within the ambit of its rot.

If you are thinking that it sounds a bit gloomy then fear not. For in this book is a clarion call for personal bravery in the face of social convention and what can I say but “hurrah” to that.

Michael Sadleir is also the author of a book entitled Fanny by Gaslight, but don’t let that put you off.