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The Pocket Lawyer for Comic Book Creators A Legal Toolkit for Comic Book Artists and Writers Thomas A. Crowell
Symbolic Capital and the Field of American Comic Books
Bart Beaty and Benjamin Woo
Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels
Series Editor Roger Sabin
University of the Arts London
London, United Kingdom
This series concerns Comics Studies – with a capital “c” and a capital “s”. It feels good to write it that way. From emerging as a fringe interest within Literature and Media/Cultural Studies departments, to becoming a minor field, to maturing into the fastest growing field in the Humanities, to becoming a nascent discipline, the journey has been a hard but spectacular one. Those capital letters have been earned.
Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels covers all aspects of the comic strip, comic book and graphic novel, explored through clear and informative texts offering expansive coverage and theoretical sophistication. It is international in scope and provides a space in which scholars from all backgrounds can present new thinking about politics, history, aesthetics, production, distribution, and reception, as well as the digital realm. Books appear in one of two forms: traditional monographs of 60-90,000 words and shorter works, part of Palgrave Pivot, of 20-50,000 words. All are rigorously peer-reviewed. Palgrave Pivots include new takes on theory, concise histories, and – not least – considered provocations. After all, Comics Studies may have come a long way, but it can’t progress without a little prodding.
Series Editor Roger Sabin is Professor of Popular Culture at the University of the Arts London, UK. His books include Adult Comics: An Introduction, and Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels, and his recent research into 19th century comics is award-winning. He serves on the boards of the main academic journals in the field, and reviews graphic novels for the international media.
Also in the series:
Documentary Comics: Graphic Truth-telling in a Skeptical Age by Nina Mickwitz
The Greatest Comic Book of All Time: Symbolic Capital and the Field of American Comic Books by Bart Beaty and Benjamin Woo
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14643
Bart Beaty • Benjamin Woo
The Greatest Comic Book of All Time
Symbolic Capital and the Field of American Comic Books
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.
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A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
We began work on this project during the 2013–2014 academic year when Benjamin Woo was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of English at the University of Calgary. During that time, we co-taught a graduate seminar on “the comics canon” that led us to consider the various ways that comics studies has been shaped by ideological and methodological assumptions that remain unstated. We are thankful to the students involved in that seminar (Garrett Beatty, Samantha Massey, Tom Miller, Liam Nolan, and Eli Wilkinson) for their insights during the early stages of this project. We would also like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for funding the postdoctoral fellowship that initiated this project, as well as the Insight Grant that supported its completion.
L IST OF F IGURES
Fig. 1.1 Visualizing the comics canon
Fig. 1.2 The structure of fields of cultural production
Fig. 8.1 Comic book sales, 1960–1970
Fig. 8.2 Archie Comics sales, 2007–2013
Table
L IST OF T ABLES
CHAPTER 1
What If the Greatest Comic Book of All Time Were…
Abstract Starting from a sociology of culture approach developed by Pierre Bourdieu, the chapter argues that, relative to other art forms, the comics world is relatively underdeveloped in terms of prestige-making institutions. This chapter suggests some of the ways that comics studies in particular has been influenced by traditions in literary studies.
There seems to be something about fan cultures, or at least heavily masculinized ones, that drives them to compile lists. Lists of the fastest, the newest, and the most. Lists of the greatest and the best. Comic book culture in the USA has frequently embodied these impulses, and the professional fans who write for comics industry publications are no exception. Entire companies have been built around listing and ranking every aspect of comic book collecting.
In 1994, the short-lived Hero Illustrated magazine released a special issue that sought to define “The 100 Most Important Comics of All Time.” It ranged from New Fun Comics #1 in 1934, through Pep Comics #22, Zap Comix #0, and Cerebus #1, and culminating in Rob Liefeld’s Youngblood #1 (which had been published only 2 years earlier). Hero’s
list foregrounded “importance”—the inauguration of a genre, the first appearance of a significant character, or the debut of a renowned artist. Their longer-lived and more highbrow rival, The Comics Journal, on the other hand, dove headlong into an effort to define the “best” comics of the twentieth century. In 1999, anticipating the new millennium, they called for an “uncompromising re-examination of [comics’] best works,” resulting in one hundred comic strips, comic books, graphic novels, editorial cartoons, and individual stories, both short and long, ranked in order of quality.1 Since that time, many others have sought to improve on these efforts, always ratcheting up the stakes: in 2005, there were The 101 Best Graphic Novels; by 2008, it had become 500 Essential Graphic Novels; and in 2011, we had 1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die. 2 Simply put, there is no shortage of voices eager to point readers to the “best” works of the comic book medium. This is not one of them. We have no intention of lecturing you about the comics that we think you should read. Rather, we want to examine the very processes of list making and curating. We are not interested in what makes great works so great but how any work comes to be seen as great.
If you were asked to select The Greatest Comic Book of All Time, how would you choose? You could start with the works you personally like best, though the question itself seemingly demands a more distanced perspective than one based solely on personal preference. Maybe, like Hero, you could organize your selections on the basis of significance, although this proves challenging if there isn’t an obvious conclusion toward which the arc of comics history bends. You could look at popularity, which would suggest a list of the most widely read or best-selling comics. Or perhaps you could stake your claim on something like quality or excellence. However natural they may seem, these nebulous concepts actually represent the most fraught of all possible options, for they usually involve some combination of all the aforementioned factors. Nonetheless, the idea that there is something that we can term “quality” is widely accepted. While individuals might quibble as to what constitutes artistic excellence and which works best embody it, we generally act as if something called
1 Tom Spurgeon, “The Top 100 (English-Language) Comics of the Century”, The Comics Journal #210 (February 1999), 34. It should be noted that, as a columnist at that time, Bart Beaty was one of the writers who contributed votes to this list.
2 Stephen Weiner, The 101 Best Graphic Novels (New York: NBM, 2005); Gene Kannenberg Jr., 500 Essential Graphic Novels: The Ultimate Guide (New York: Collins Design, 2008); Paul Gravett, 1001 Comic Books You Must Read Before You Die (New York: Universe, 2011).
excellence exists—it is the necessary assumption behind every review, best-of list, and word-of-mouth recommendation—but that assumption is wrong. While an entire history of critics from Matthew Arnold to Harold Bloom have sought to identify excellence as an intrinsic and objective element, we contend that excellence is not a property of works but a judgment asserted on their behalf. Comics are not self-evidently great; rather, they are claimed to be great by powerful actors within the field, and these judgments may be accepted—and consequently reinforced—by certain reading communities. For many readers, the presence of Youngblood #1 on the Hero Illustrated list and its absence from The Comics Journal’s list means that one of them is wrong. We do not regard the question as one of veracity; rather, we see the both lists as competitors in a struggle to define the way excellence is perceived in comics. Each uses differing assumptions and seeks to impose them by swaying readers to their point of view. Thus, the very idea of excellence obscures the real processes at work that permit something to be selected as excellent. “This is the Greatest Comic Book of All Time” really means, “Based on my personal reading experiences and cultural habits, I am comfortable asserting that ‘This is the Greatest Comic Book of All Time’ because it exemplifies what I have come to value in comic books.”
If excellence does not exist, the same cannot be said of value. Whenever someone says something is good or bad, they are making a value judgment about it, and over time, the sum total of these judgments may cohere into a critical consensus. Although judgments of taste can seem natural and reflexive, we want to stress that value is socially produced and performative. When people treat something as if it were valuable (even or especially when they disagree with that evaluation), they are generating and maintaining its value. This is, moreover, a multidirectional process: from the top down, high-status individuals and institutions confer value on a work (e.g., by reviewing it favorably or awarding it prizes); from the bottom up, a larger number of lower-status individuals and institutions defer to the work’s status (e.g., by talking about it, paying to access it, or recommending it to others).3 We use the term “value” here as a rough equivalent to Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic capital. While the “three fundamental species” of capital (namely, economic, social, and cultural) are perhaps more easily and intuitively grasped, symbolic capital “is the form that one
3 Cf. Leonard Diepeveen and Timothy Van Laar, Artworld Prestige: Arguing Cultural Value (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 22.
or other of these species takes when it is grasped through categories of perception that recognize its specific logic.”4 Any given work or creator will have differing levels of economic (i.e., sales), social (i.e., buzz and connections), and cultural (i.e., prestige) capital, but symbolic capital represents an overall index of social status. However, qualities may be valued differently in different places, historical periods, or social milieux. For example, economic capital is always economic capital—you can always buy things with it—but it may also function as symbolic capital among people who believe that being wealthy is distinguishing rather than vulgar and defer to its possessor. The more or less shared context for individual value judgments is a regime of value.5 In other words, symbolic capital, or value, is a function of the regime of value that teaches us to esteem certain qualities rather than others.
Our goal with this book is to examine the logics by which the canon of American comic books has been constructed—and, more properly, how it is currently being constructed. The question of canonicity, which suggests enduring popularity or significance and a quality that transcends local or personal judgments of excellence, lies at a further remove from mere value. It is the step from “good” to “greatest,” from best of this year to best of all time. Works enter the canon when it is impossible to imagine their absence from any list of “great works,” when their omission would render the entire list absurd. They have been culturally coded as important, influential, or excellent for so long that their inclusion becomes quasiautomatic. Each of us probably has our own sense of what are the best or most important comics, but the canon is the one backed by institutional power: by reviewers and critics, by museums and galleries, and by scholars and educational institutions. While academics may have questionable influence in determining a work’s reputation, they have an unparalleled ability to cement it by the choices they make of what works to study and to teach. As a result, this book is also in many ways about the practice of comics studies, about how and why scholars choose their objects of study and the implications of these choices for the field of comics generally.
4 Pierre Bourdieu, “The Purpose of Reflexive Sociology (The Chicago Workshop),” interview by Loïc J.D. Wacquant, in An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 119.
5 Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3–63.
Perhaps all of this begs the question—is there a canon of American comic books? Many would balk at this idea, but it is our view that a canon plainly exists at this point in time. Much has been made of comics’ recent, almost meteoric rise in estimation, but this newfound legitimacy is not evenly distributed. In the introduction to 500 Essential Graphic Novels, Gene Kannenberg Jr. ventriloquizes a casual comics reader: “Five hundred? Well, I know about Maus and Persepolis, but… Are there really even more than five hundred graphic novels in total?”6 There are indeed more—vastly more, if one includes the broader category of comic books—but in another sense, there are far fewer. In theory, all texts are equally available for critical commentary. In reality, only an extremely small smattering of them is chosen for academic study. In comics studies, there are relatively few texts that are available for and “self-evidently” worthy of close consideration—generally because they intersect with contemporary social debates (e.g., representations of x in comics) or provide examples of certain theoretical paradigms (e.g., comics and the thought of philosopher y). It helps if a work is already well known or esteemed outside the academy. The plausible text, to borrow a term from David Bordwell, is one that can be read in a scholarly fashion: it is well known enough, important enough, or “good” enough to merit being the subject of an interpretive essay or article.7 In this volume, we are concerned with how and why some comic books have become more plausible than others.
Because comics is a historically marginal art form with a poorly developed critical infrastructure, comics studies has taken its cues from other arts-based disciplines. For example, comic book stories are frequently compared to novels in terms of their complexity of plot, characterization, and theme. Indeed, the very term “graphic novel” is intended to ennoble the comic book by stealing fire from the better-established art form. More rarely, comic book artists may be compared to masters of painterly composition in terms of expressivity, design sensibility, and rendering. Comics and comics studies—like film and film studies before them—have attempted (with mixed success) to imitate the values and discourses of literature and painting in order to legitimate their field. As Bordwell has demonstrated, the “normal science” of literary studies is the interpretation
6 Kannenberg, 500 Essential Graphic Novels, 6.
7 David Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
of atypical or exceptional works.8 In so doing, literary scholars create the thing they purport merely to discover the “great” work of art.
Asking people whom they think is important, what they think is in the canon, will likely result in a great deal of prevarication. But we don’t have to ask. Following the example of D.G. Myers, who charted the twenty-five most studied American writers between 1987 and 2012 (a list that ranged from Henry James, with 3188 scholarly articles in that quarter century, to Robert Frost at 661),9 we can simply count.
Searching the MLA International Bibliography produces a snapshot of the peer-refereed literature on major comic book authors. Several objections to this approach immediately suggest themselves: not all comics scholarship is produced by scholars of literature, and as a result, many articles will be missed by the MLA database; in any case, the MLA database is not completely thorough even in its own domains; and, as a young discipline, a great deal of scholarly work on comics is to be found in areas that the MLA does not consider “peer-refereed,” such as conference papers and book chapters from certain nonuniversity presses. These objections are all fair, and the MLA citation count, while suggestive, represents only the minimum amount of scholarship on these authors. To correct for these biases, we examine a second source of data, the Bonner Online-Bibliographie zur Comicforschung (http://www.comicforschung. uni-bonn.de/), which incorporates a wider range of scholarship, including many non-peer-refereed sources (such as The Comics Journal) that are widely considered to be quasi-scholarly. Running the same names through this bibliography produces a slightly different ranking. If the MLA list under-samples scholarship on comics artists, the Bonn database may oversample it because it uses a higher level of inclusivity (Table 1.1).
If we plot the results of these least and most inclusive approximations of comics scholarship on a single graph (Fig. 1.1), two notable features quickly emerge. First, a very few creators—Art Spiegelman, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and, to a lesser extent, Chris Ware—have pulled away from the pack. Charting atop the MLA list and second on the Bonn list, Spiegelman is an extreme outlier on the graph. His citations in each database vastly outstrip every potential rival with the exception of Alan Moore, who is the most cited creator in the Bonn database and thus occupies his
8 Bordwell, Making Meaning
9 D.G. Myers, “MLA Rankings of American Writers,” Commentary, March 26, 2012, https://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/03/26/mla-rankings/
Table 1.1 The contemporary comics canon?
Scholars writing about comics actually write about an extremely limited number of cartoonists, while others considered important by the comics world are largely ignored even among academic specialists in comics and graphic narrative
aSource: Peer-refereed contributions in MLA International Bibliography (searched using cartoonist name in the Person—About field), accurate as of October 29, 2015
bSource: Entries tagged with cartoonist name keyword in the Bonner Online-Bibliographie zur Comicforschung, accurate as of October 29, 2015
own space in the upper third of the graph. Conversely, there is a tremendous amount of clustering in the bottom left of the chart. Even among a selection that includes well-known and successful cartoonists like Jack Kirby, Jaime Hernandez, Lynda Barry, and Raina Telgemeier, most are not discussed very much, if at all, by the scholars and critics indexed in these databases where the bulk of cartoonists reside. Adding additional names to our queries would simply add to this cluster, for the reality is that the vast majority of authors have never been the subject of any scholarly investigations. Each new name is likely to be another dot in the lower
Fig. 1.1 Visualizing the comics canon. (A) Most cartoonists are clustered in the lower left, representing little scholarly or critical interest. (B) Using a logarithmic scale, the relative position of different cartoonists can be examined; a trend line (R2 = 0.74673) divides the field
left; all scores are set to zero. Second, the trend line divides the graph in a telling manner, as can be seen in the second panel of the graph, which employs a logarithmic scale in order to allow closer examination of the creators’ relative positions (the logarithmic scale necessarily drops those with citation counts of zero). Figures like Spiegelman, Frank Miller, Barry, and Dylan Horrocks are positioned very close to the line, suggesting that they are roughly equally prominent in the more literary-academic database and the more comics world–oriented one. Others drift farther away. Gaiman, Marjane Satrapi, and Alison Bechdel, for instance, are clustered on the right-hand side of the chart, indicating a relatively high number of citations, but fall below the line. They, like Gene Luen Yang, Martin Vaughn-James, and Jillian Tamaki are discussed more by literary scholars than by comics critics more broadly. On the other hand, Moore, Ware, Hernandez, and Grant Morrison fall above the line, suggesting that they are taken up more by the comics world than by academics writing peerrefereed contributions in MLA disciplines. We further note that creators who are known for exploiting the specificity of the comics form, whether as writers (Moore and Morrison) or as visual stylists (Ware, Hernandez, Kirby, and Crumb), tend to be on the upper half of the graph, while those who are constructed more as “literary” producers, such as Bechdel and Gaiman (notably, his score includes studies of his prose fiction that refer to his comics only secondarily), are found on the bottom half.
Examining this data provides a snapshot of how comics are valued in the academy today. Certain creators clearly emerge from the pack as wellstudied figures around whom comics scholars have built what Hillary Chute has termed “today’s contemporary canon.”10 That canon may be loosely defined and fluid, but it is palpably real. Throughout the remainder of the book, we want to interrogate this phenomenon. We hope to address how the canon emerged, its biases and exclusions, and what might be accomplished by conceptualizing the field of comics—and comics studies—differently. But before proceeding further, we must note three important caveats.
First, with the exception of Chap. 10, we are writing almost exclusively about comic books produced in the English-language market (primarily the USA), whether by American or foreign creators. While distinct comics traditions have developed in different countries or regions, each of
10 Hillary L. Chute, Outside the Box: Interviews with Contemporary Cartoonists (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 14.
these worlds, broadly speaking, reproduces the same structural dynamics we have described. So, while it is fair to say that the comics world of the USA is considerably larger and more variegated than that of, say, Iceland, the field of Icelandic comics production can, mutatis mutandis, be mapped in the same way. The actors change, but the roles stay much the same.
Second, the concept of the “field” is only a model of existing social relations. Fields, as we are using the term, are somewhat arbitrary slices of a complex social totality, and their borders can always be drawn differently. For instance, the field of “cinema” could refer to Hollywood, to other national cinema industries, or to a transnational production system; it might be restricted to a particular time period or embrace the whole history of filmmaking; it could conceivably include government propaganda and hygiene films, corporate films, and home movies; and, at a greater level of abstraction, it might include the manufacture of lenses or the silver mining required to make film stock. The more actors and activities a field embraces, the more complicated are the social relations that need to be mapped. We use “field” to mean all of the social, economic, and cultural relations that define the interaction of persons with comic books, although given our concern with processes of valuation, we will end up devoting more attention to cultural intermediaries like critics, journalists, and prize committees.
Third, we are interested in this volume exclusively in comic books, including the subcategory of graphic novels but excluding comic strips and editorial cartoons. We have also excluded proto-comic books from prior to the 1930s, restricting ourselves to those works that are most commonly designated as part of the comic book field. This restriction is not based on nor is it intended to impose a definition of what is and isn’t comics, and it certainly isn’t meant to imply that American comics are more worthy of examination. Despite its many obvious areas of overlap with other forms of comics around the world, we address ourselves to American comic books as a distinct field of cultural activity in order to focus our analysis and simplify the dynamics—and the sources of evidence—under consideration.
While canons are sometimes conceived as a box (you’re either in or you’re out) or a one-dimensional scale running from least to most worthy, we need to explode the traditional list into something more complex and multidimensional if we want to explain how and why particular works develop the reputations that they do. Here again we follow the work of
Pierre Bourdieu.11 We begin by defining a space with two axes—economic capital (sales) on the horizontal and cultural capital (prestige) on the vertical. On the horizontal axis, one could arrange all of the comic books ever published. At the right would be the best-selling titles of all time, while on the left would be a collection of flops. Similarly, at the top of the vertical axis are the works that are the most widely reviewed and most widely taught, the award-winners that everyone is expected to have an opinion on. At the bottom of the vertical axis are those comics that disappear without notice, unreviewed, uncollected, unremembered. These two axes produce a modified version of Bourdieu’s model of cultural fields. We have tilted the resulting diagram by forty-five degrees so as to reorient it around the total volume of symbolic capital or value, which is now the vertical dimension (Fig. 1.2). This map is divided into four quadrants, and we devote the majority of this book to a survey of the major positions within them.
Our first quadrant is defined by both economic and critical success. Works in this quadrant, and the creators who produce them, are among the most esteemed in the field and, thus, the strongest candidates for inclusion in the canon. This is the place to be. Whether critical success leads to longterm sales (as in the case of Spiegelman’s Maus [Chap. 2]), or whether long-term popularity drives critical reception (as is, arguably, the case with Jack Kirby [Chap. 4] and the writers affiliated with British Invasion of the 1990s [Chap. 5]), the creators in this quadrant are well known, well read, and well studied; their names are widely familiar across the field and even to people outside of it. While actors on the left-hand side of the chart are defined by an orientation to cultural capital and prestige and those on the right-hand side are oriented to economic success, this division of the field does not neatly align with the traditional split between “mainstream” and “alternative” comics. In some ways, the field of comics is the economic world reversed and reversed again—its more heteronomous subfield (socalled mainstream comics, produced according to an industrial mode of production) is so oriented to a subcultural public of fans and collectors that it resembles Bourdieu’s field of restricted production, while the works described as “alternative” are both more autonomous (being produced in an auteurist or “artisanal” mode) and more oriented to wider reader-
11 See, for example, Pierre Bourdieu, “The Field of Cultural Production, Or: The Economic World Reversed,” Poetics 12, no. 4–5 (1983): 311–56.
Fig. 1.2 The structure of fields of cultural production. Fields are organized by combinations of economic and cultural capital, which are perceived as symbolic capital or value. Icons adapted for use in this figure were designed by Freepik
ships.12 We have reoriented Bourdieu’s field in this way because comics of all types may be successful, but not all popular comics are esteemed. Within this quadrant, those works or authors closer to the center have accomplished the difficult feat of converting cultural capital into economic capital, or, more rarely, vice versa.
12 Bourdieu, “Field of Cultural Production,” 320; on “artisanal” and “industrial” modes, see Mark C. Rogers, “Understanding Production: The Stylistic Impact of Artisan and Industrial Methods,” International Journal of Comic Art 8, no. 1 (April 15, 2006): 509–17.
The second quadrant belongs to the consecrated avant-garde, those works and creators with a lot of prestige but with relatively little commercial success. Compared with other artistic fields, this corner of the comics world has relatively few occupants: In the worlds of literature, cinema, and visual art, many prestigious, award-winning creators are, nonetheless, virtually unknown to the general public. But comics, which has only recently become competitive for grants from arts councils and is still developing an infrastructure of teaching positions, has not been conducive to the types of career trajectories that enable people to keep making comics that don’t sell. While the field is replete with young avant-gardists, only a very few can stick it out long enough to ascend to the consecrated avant-garde. This quadrant is explored in greater depth in Chap. 3 with respect to the career of Robert Crumb, the most successful of the (economically) unsuccessful creators.
The third quadrant of our chart probably contains the vast bulk of comic book production over the past eight decades: commercially successful work that is not critically esteemed. In the most brutal of terms, this quadrant is filled with what many critics derisively term “hackwork”—comic books produced to sell to particular audiences at specific historical moments; their creators never intended to pursue prestige and so they have none. In academic terms, these comics are the most implausible subjects of study. We explore this quadrant in two chapters. The first of these, Chap. 7, uses the example of Rob Liefeld to discuss comic books that, while exceptionally popular in the near-term relative to their production, were never critically acclaimed in any way. Here we examine comics that are the product of a well-oiled promotional machine but which were unable to maintain their hype over time and faded faster than the Macarena. Chapter 8 examines the legacy of formerly popular comics through the lens of Archie Comics. At one point in history a market leader, Archie Comics today exists mostly as nostalgia. Each of these chapters examines why it is that certain comics fail to find critical or scholarly favor and tries to imagine a world in which these comic books would be esteemed.
The fourth quadrant deals with those works poorest in symbolic capital, which have enjoyed neither commercial success nor the esteem of influential cultural intermediaries. This is where unappreciated and unloved comic books go to die, but, at the same time, it is also where new creators and works typically enter the field for the first time. It is the space of “alternative comics” as it is most traditionally perceived,
artists and publishers whose work does not (or, at least, not yet) have either significant sales or prestige, as well as of limit cases that risk falling outside of dominant regimes of value. The subject of Chap. 6, Martin Vaughn-James’s The Cage would likely be placed here. Despite its centrality in certain debates among European comics theorists, it is virtually invisible to the field of comics in the USA. Significantly, neither that book nor its author has a Wikipedia entry—a sure sign of lack of popular attention.
Again, and despite our cheeky title, let us underscore that we are not nominating a list of the best comic books of all time. Rather, we are trying to understand how the structure of the field of comics influences the development of the canon, making some works more “plausible” than others. Individual authors and works are discussed as the incumbents of particular positions in the field, and we could easily have chosen other examples. What is most important for us is not the particularity of our case studies, but the larger structures that they incarnate. We have chosen paradigmatic examples of certain archetypes within the field: the most important cartoonist (Art Spiegelman, but we could have used Alison Bechdel, Marjane Satrapi, or Joe Sacco); the critically ignored best seller (Rob Liefeld, but also George Perez, Michael Golden, or Curt Swan); the cartoonist beloved by academic specialists who is very little read (Martin Vaughn-James, but also Phoebe Gloeckner, Julie Doucet, or, outside of Europe, Joann Sfar); and so on. Similarly, we understand that the field is always in flux: works will move across the quadrants we have described, and new ones will take up the positions they have vacated. For examples of how these analyses could be transposed to other case studies, visit our website, http://greatestcomicbook.com.
Having completed a tour of the field of comics, the remaining chapters of the book attempt to identify some counter-logics that trouble our categories. Chapters 9, 10, and 11 introduce important variables that have traditionally complicated issues involving prestige. First, what impact do gendered and racialized identities have on the drivers of cultural prestige? What critical obstacles have these creators had to overcome, and how have they begun to enter into the comics canon? Second, we examine how “foreignness,” especially when associated with one of the other major world comics traditions (Japanese manga and Franco-Belgian bandes dessinées), affects a work’s reception within the American comics world. Third and finally, while we may have created the impression that a work’s natural
movement is upwards, unless arrested by a gatekeeper, it is also possible for comics and their creators to fall from grace. Chapter 12 addresses Dave Sim’s Cerebus as an example of a once canonical work that is increasingly marginal to the discussion of great comics.
Finally, we conclude the book with an analysis of Dylan Horrocks’s Hicksville. A fictional account of a comics journalist attempting to consecrate a best-selling cartoonist, Horrocks’s story plays knowingly with virtually every aspect of the field. It is a work that understands the dynamics of comics thoroughly, and which permits us to tie the threads of our argument together. In offering an interpretation of this work, we ironically step outside of our meta-analysis in order to position it as the most plausible text with which to study the social operations of the comics world as a whole.
In outlining the operations of comics as a field, we hope to emphasize that the comics world is both distinct from and similar to other fields.
Following Bourdieu’s analyses, we might note that criteria of value are both specific to a given field and essentially the same across them all. There are different signifiers of quality in literature (depth of characterization, facility with language) and painting (compositional balance, control of line), but the two domains nevertheless share fundamental assumptions about value that are rooted in nebulous terms like “beauty” and “seriousness.” Comics and comics studies are no different in this regard. Recently reimagined as a kind of literature rather than a distinct medium or form, comics has borrowed so much from the literary field as to replicate it in miniature. (Though it will ever remain the junior partner: recall Myers’s previously cited survey of the MLA database and compare the 3188 contributions on Henry James to Spiegelman’s eighty-five to show the scope of the disparity.) Yet, we contend that looking at comics through the lens of literature will inevitably produce a distorted picture.
Fredric Jameson once quipped, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.”13 For some of our colleagues, it is easier by far to envision the end of capitalism than the end of the canon. Despite the form’s dubious and marginal origins, notions of quality, greatness, and exemplarity have become so entrenched in the standard
13 Fredric Jameson, “Future City,” New Left Review, II, no. 21 (June 2003): 65–79; see also “Easier to Imagine the End of the World…,” Qlipoth (blog), November 11, 2009, http://qlipoth.blogspot.ca/2009/11/easier-to-imagine-end-of-world.html
operating procedure of comics scholarship that they—and the biases they introduce—disappear into the background. This is the very definition of ideology, and the ideologies of literary studies make it almost impossible to conceive of comics studies as anything other than a traditional—indeed, deeply conservative—humanities discipline. With this volume, we want to give the comics world a good shake. By asking what it would take for The Cage or Youngblood or Smile to be considered the greatest comic book of all time, we are trying to imagine the end of this comics world and the beginning of another.
CHAPTER 2
Maus by Art Spiegelman?
Abstract This chapter outlines the various factors that have contributed to Art Spiegelman’s Maus becoming, indisputably, the “greatest comic book of all time.” That is to say, Spiegelman’s work is the most celebrated comic book in the field, the most widely taught, and the most commonly written about (particularly by scholars). The distorting influence that Spiegelman has had on the field is also considered.
Keywords Art Spiegelman • Maus • Graphic novel
If by force or compulsion we were required to erect a single, definitive canon of American comic books and graphic novels, then there is no doubt that Art Spiegelman’s Maus would occupy its top spot. Moreover, its nearest rivals would be cut from the same cloth: serious, long-form comics that depict the turmoiled inner lives of their protagonists. With large quantities of symbolic capital derived roughly equally from cultural and economic sources, Maus and comics like it (by Alison Bechdel, Joe Sacco, Marjane Satrapi, Seth, and Chris Ware, to name only a few leading lights) are the “one-percenters” of the comics world. Yet even among this select group, Spiegelman’s Maus stands head and shoulders above its peers in terms of both notoriety and prestige.
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Israel Rank
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Israel Rank
The autobiography of a criminal
Author: Roy Horniman
Release date: March 5, 2024 [eBook #73104]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Chatto & Windus, 1907
Credits: Brian Raiter
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ISRAEL RANK ***
ISRAEL RANK
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A CRIMINAL
by ROY HORNIMAN
Contents
A P N
C I
C II
C III
C IV
C V
C VI
C VII
C VIII
C IX
C X
C XI
C XII
C XIII
C XIV
C XV
C XVI
C XVII
C XVIII
C XIX
C XX
C XXI
C XXII
C XXIII
C XXIV
C XXV
C XXVI
C XXVII
C XXVIII
C XXIX
A Preliminary Note
There is an old saying, ‘Murder will out.’ I am really unable to see why this should be so. At any rate, it is a statement impossible of proof, and one which must always remain a matter of opinion. Because certain clumsy criminals have placed themselves in full view of that dull dog, the Law, we are asked to believe that crime is invariably awkward. The logic is not very obvious. I am convinced that many a delightful member of society has found it necessary at some time or other to remove a human obstacle, and has done so undetected and undisturbed by those pangs of conscience which Society, afraid of itself, would have us believe wait upon the sinner. I R .
Chapter I
It was the close of a bleak, autumnal afternoon. All day long in the chill and windy atmosphere the dust had been driven helterskelter along the shabbier streets of Clapham, whirling with it the leaves which had fallen from the depressed trees in the gardens of the innumerable semi-detached villas. Here and there, fragments of torn paper rustled spasmodically along the gutter as the driving gust caught them, or—now that the dusk had fallen—floated spectrally for a few moments in mid-air, like disembodied spirits, essaying an upward flight, only to be baulked by a lull in the wind and to come suddenly to earth again, where they lay until the next gust of wind caught them.
Among the dismal streets not one was more depressing than Ursula Grove. As if to deprive it of the least trace of individuality it was but a connecting link between two more important residential roads running parallel with each other, and even these were not very important; hence it is obvious that Ursula Grove was humble indeed. Each house had a yard or two of front garden entered through cheaply varnished wooden gate-lets, which announced in faded gold lettering that should anyone enter he would find himself in Seaview, or on The Riviera, as the case might be. Provided the name was inappropriate there appeared to have been no initial objection to its being anything. In fact, those responsible for the christening of these desirable residences appeared to have acted on the same principle as the small builder, who, erecting houses at too great a rate to be able to waste time in seeking appropriate names, was accustomed to choose them haphazard out of the newspapers, and thus christened two small stucco atrocities joined together in semidetached matrimony, the Vatican and the Quirinal, because these two names appeared in the course of the same leading article.
Each house had a little bow window which belonged to the drawing-room. If these bow windows could have been removed and all the little drawing-rooms placed, as it were, on exhibition they would have presented an extraordinary likeness. There were the same three or four saddle-bag chairs, the same saddle-bag sofa, the same little bamboo occasional table, and the same little gilt mirror; all luxuries that were rewarded, apparently, by their own virtue and a sense of their own unique beauty, for it was seldom that their owners enjoyed them. In the summer the blinds were kept down for fear the sun should spoil the carpet, which it certainly would have done if it had been allowed a fair field and no favour with the gaudy little stiff squares of cheap Kidderminster. These front rooms, although infinitely the largest and most convenient in the house, were never degraded to the level of living rooms, however large the family. Sometimes in the winter a fire was lighted on Sundays and the inhabitants sat round it, but by Monday morning at breakfast time all traces of this revel had disappeared, and the fire ornaments were back again, trailing their gilded and tawdry finery over a highly polished grate, glittering out on the darkened, frosty room, that suggested nothing so much as the laying out of a corpse.
These chilly arcadias were the pride of their owners’ hearts, and if, when about their household work, they heard the door of the sacred apartment open they were immediately on the alert.
“Willie, what are you doing in the drawing-room?”
“Nuffin’, mama, I was only havin’ a look.”
“Then come out and shut the door immediately.”
Willie, old enough to be troublesome, but not old enough to go to school, would do as he was bid, at the same time impressed by his mother’s admonition with a sense of the splendour of the mansion in which it was his privilege to dwell.
The family always lived in the smaller sitting-room—an apartment rendered oblong by the exigencies of the staircase. These rooms were invariably furnished, as were the drawing-rooms, with a depressing similarity: two horse-hair arm chairs with the springs in a state of collapse; six ordinary dining-room chairs to match; some framed Graphic Christmas numbers on the wall, an untidy bookcase,
and the flooring a waste of linoleum with a little oasis of moth-eaten rug before the fire.
I mention these facts because the atmosphere of my childhood is important in view of my after development.
It was on such an evening as I have described—at least, I am credibly informed that it was so—that my father descended from his ’bus two or three streets off, and, after threading his way through the intervening maze of semi-detached villadom, entered the depressing length of Ursula Grove.
An unusual though not astonishing sight met his eyes. The blinds of the first-floor-front of his own house were drawn down and a bright light from within glowed against them and streamed from under them. It could not be his wife dressing for dinner, for they did not have dinner, and had they been in the habit of dining neither of them would have thought of dressing. Their evening meal was tea; it might be with an egg or it might be with ham, but it was certainly tea.
My father hastened his footsteps. The cause of this phenomenon had suddenly dawned on him. He opened the wooden gate-let with unwonted gentleness and without letting it swing to, which was the usual signal that he had come home. Then he went round to the back and softly let himself in.
He walked along the passage and paused at the foot of the stairs. There was borne down to him from above the wail of an infant. He was obliged to catch hold of the bannisters, for his heart leapt into his mouth and nearly suffocated him.
He sat down on the stairs to recover himself, while the tears of joy and pride welled into his tired eyes and flowed down his faded cheeks.
The doctor on his way downstairs nearly fell over him.
“Come, come, Mr. Rank, you must bear up. ‘In the midst of life we are in death.’ ”
Apparently the doctor was condoling from force of habit. The speech was certainly alarming, and my father whitened.
“But my wife?”
“Mother and child, Mr. Rank, both doing well. It’s a boy.”
The alarm disappeared from his face. He was a father at last. “An Isaac was born unto him.”
“May I go up?” he asked timidly
“Most certainly, but be careful not to excite the patient.”
My father went upstairs and knocked nervously. The nurse opened the door holding me in her arms. It is to my father’s credit, however, that he hardly cast a look at the desire of their married life, but crossed at once to the bed.
My poor mother looked up tenderly and lovingly at the dowdy little figure bending over her, and smiled.
“It’s a boy,” she whispered, and then added: “We wanted a boy.”
My father pressed her hand gently, but remembering the doctor’s instructions not to excite the patient kissed her lips and stole gently out to look at his first, though somewhat late, born. A puckered face, to which the blood rushed spasmodically, clouding it almost to the suggestion of apoplexy, was all he could see. My father looked down at me and saw that I was dark. I could not well have been otherwise if he were to believe himself my father, for he was Jewish from the crown of his well-shaped head to the soles of his rather large feet.
If my mother is to be credited, he was when she fell in love with him a singularly handsome little man, but at the time of my birth the physical blight which falls on nearly all men of our race towards middle age was upon him.
She possessed a small cabinet photograph of him, taken when such things were a novelty. In early years I was accustomed—misled by the out-of-date clothes—to regard it as a very frumpish affair indeed. When I grew up I came to think otherwise: for one day, placing my hand over the offending clothes, there looked out at me a face which, granting the wonderful complexion which my mother always insisted he possessed, was singularly handsome and very like my own.
I only remember him as a faded little creature, who had run to stomach to an extent which was absurd, especially when it was contrasted with the extreme thinness of the rest of his body. He was a commercial traveller, and always attributed this inharmonious excrescence on an otherwise slim form to the amount of aerated waters he was obliged to mix with those drinks the taking of which was indispensable to his calling.
My mother was dark too, so it was little wonder that such hair as I had when I was born was of the blackest imaginable hue, as likewise were my eyes.
“He’s a beautiful baby; a bit small, but beautiful,” said the nurse.
My father, who could not at the moment dissociate my appearance from Mr. Darwin’s theory of the origin of species, tried to believe her, and stole downstairs, where he made his own tea and boiled himself a couple of eggs. A meat pie with the unbaked crust lying beside it suggested that I had arrived quite unexpectedly, as indeed had been the case. This perhaps accounted for the fact that as a baby I was weakly.
Before the first year of my life was over, my doting parents had gone through many an agony of suspense, and my father had more than once slackened his steps on returning home after his day’s work, fearing to enter the house lest my mother should meet him and weeping inform him that the tiny thread of life, by which I was alone prevented from flying away and becoming a little angel, had snapped.
But by dint of the greatest care from a mother, who, whatever may have been her coldness to the outside world, possessed a burning affection for her husband and child, I was brought safely to my first birthday.
Sitting here during the last few unpleasant days with nothing to entertain me but the faces of ever-changing warders—whose personalities seem all to have been supplied from one pattern—I have had time to think over many things, and I have more than once reflected whether I would not rather my mother had been less careful and had allowed the before mentioned tiny thread to snap.
My present nervousness, which even my worst enemy will find excusable, tempts me to regret that her extreme care was so well rewarded. My intellect, however, which has always shone brightly through the murk of my emotions, tells me—and supports the information with irrefutable logic—that I am an ignoble fool to think anything of the kind. I question whether Napoleon would have foregone his triumphant career to escape St. Helena. The principle involved in his case and my own is the same. I have had a great career; I am paying for it—only fortunately the public are asking an
absurdly low price. It is only when I have smoked too many cigarettes that I feel nervous about Monday’s ceremony.
One thing I trust, however, and that is that my mother will not in any way be made unhappy, for should her spirit have the power of seeing my present condition, and of suffering by reason of it, it would give me the greatest concern.
But to resume. My arrival must have been an immense comfort to my mother even more than to my father. His business frequently took him away from home for a week at a time, and although he rarely failed to be with us from Saturday till Monday the shabby little Clapham house had been very dull till my shrill baby cries broke the silence of his absence.
Until I arrived to keep her company my mother had been thrown almost entirely on her own resources, and the reason of this loneliness is also the reason of my strange career. They are inseparable one from the other.
My mother had married beneath her. Her father had been a solicitor in a fair way of business, blessed with one son and one daughter. They were not rich but they were gentlefolk, and by descent something more. In fact, only nine lives stood between my mother’s brother and one of the most ancient peerages in the United Kingdom.
My mother’s maiden name was Gascoyne, and her father was the great-grandson of a younger son. Her father’s family had for the last two generations drifted away from, and ceased to have any acquaintance with, the main and aristocratic branch of the family. Beyond a couple of ancestral portraits, the one of Lord George Gascoyne, my mother’s great-grandfather, and the other of that spendthrift’s wife, there was no visible evidence that they were in any way of superior social extraction to their well-to-do but suburban surroundings.
My father and mother were brought together in this way. My mother’s brother belonged to a cricket club of which my father was also a member. The two struck up a friendship, although at a first glance there could appear to be very little in common between the successful solicitor’s heir and the junior clerk in a wholesale city house. My father, however, had a gift of music which recommended
him strongly to his new friend, and, as my mother always said, a natural refinement of manner which made him a quite possible guest at the quasi-aristocratic house of the Gascoynes.
“Perhaps I was sentimental and foolish,” my mother would say, with that quiet, unemotional voice of hers which caused strangers to doubt whether she could ever be either, “but he had such beautiful eyes and played in such an unaffected, dreamy way. And he was so good,” she would add, as if this were the quality which in the end had impressed her most. “He might have been much better off than he was, only he never could do anything underhand or mean. I don’t think such things ever even tempted him. He was simply above them.”
My father became a great favourite with the household till he committed the intolerable impertinence of falling in love with Miss Gascoyne. From the position of an ever welcome guest he descended to that of a “presuming little Jewish quill-driver,” as my uncle—whose friendship for him had always been of a somewhat patronising order—described him.
In fact, my uncle was considerably more bitter in denouncing his presumption than my grandfather, who, his first irritation over, went so far as to suggest that the best should be made of a bad job, and that they should turn him into a lawyer, urging his nationality as a plea that his admission into the firm was not likely to do any harm.
But my uncle was certainly right in receiving such a proposal with derision.
“He hasn’t even got the qualities of his race,” he said—although this very fact had been, till their quarrel, a constantly reiterated argument in my father’s favour.
My father and mother were forbidden to meet, and so one Sunday morning—Sunday being the only day on which my father could devote the whole day to so important an event—my mother stole out of the house and they were married before morning service, on a prospective income of a hundred a year As mad a piece of sentimental folly as was ever perpetrated by a pair of foolish lovers.
The strange thing was that they were happy. They loved one another devotedly, and my grandfather—though quite under the thumb of my uncle—surreptitiously paid the rent of the small house
where they spent the whole of their married life, and which after a time, still unknown to my uncle, he bought for them. My uncle, whom even when I was a child I thought a singularly interesting man—and the estrangement was certainly one of the griefs of my mother’s life —had a great opinion of himself on account of the family from which he was derived.
He made a point of having in readiness all proofs of his claim to the title in case the extraordinary event should happen of the intervening lives going out one after the other like a row of candles. His researches on the subject enabled him to show a respectable number of instances in which an heir even as distant as himself had succeeded.
My mother’s unequal marriage caused him to make all haste in choosing a wife. He might not have betrayed nearly so much antipathy to my father as a brother-in-law had not the Gascoyne earldom been one of the few peerages capable of descending through the female line. Thus, till he should have an heir of his own, his sister and any child of hers stood next in succession.
He chose his wife with circumspection. She was the daughter of a baronet, not so reduced as to have ceased to be respectable; and the main point was that the match would look well on the family tree.
To his infinite chagrin his first child died an hour after birth, and Mrs. Gascoyne suffered so severely that a consolation was impossible. It thus became inevitable that should the unexpected happen the title would pass after himself to his sister and her children.
He drew some comfort from the fact that so far my father and mother had no child.
Whether it was the disappointment of his own childlessness, or a natural disposition to ostentation, I do not know, but from this time my uncle’s mode of living grew more extravagant.
Through the death of my grandfather he became the head of the firm. He left the suburbs where he had been born, and he and his wife set up house in the West End, where they moved in a very expensive set, so expensive, in fact, that in less than five years my uncle, to avoid criminal proceedings—which must have ensued as the result of a protracted juggling with clients’ money—put a bullet through his brains.
He was much mourned by my father and mother, who had both loved him. He was a fine, handsome fellow, good-natured at heart, and they had always deemed it certain that one day a reconciliation would take place.
Inasmuch as my parents had never met my aunt she could not become less to them than she had been, but evidently to show how little she desired to have anything to do with them, she allowed their letter of condolence to remain unanswered. Those who were responsible for winding up my uncle’s affairs forwarded to my mother, in accordance with his wishes, the portrait of my ancestor, Lord George Gascoyne, together with an envelope containing a full statement of her claim to the Gascoyne peerage. My father, who was certainly more interested than ever my mother was in the documents that constituted this claim, took charge of them, and I believe that at my birth not a little of his elation was due to the fact that he was the parent of a being so exalted as to be only nine removes from an earldom. In time he came to regard himself as a sort of Prince Consort whose claims as father of the heir-apparent could not fail to be substantial.
I don’t think there ever was a child more devotedly tended than I was. Arriving late, and being the only one, my parents were able to afford positive extravagances in the way of extra-quality perambulators and superfine toys, and in my earliest years it would have been quite impossible for me to guess that I was other than the child of affluence.
I was christened Israel Gascoyne Rank. From my earliest years, however, I cannot remember being called anything but Israel, and in my childhood if I were asked my name I was sure to answer “Israel Rank,” and equally sure to supplement the information by adding, “and my other name is Gascoyne—Israel Gascoyne Rank.”
I suppose that it is due to my sense of humour—which has never deserted me and which I trust will not do so even at the last trying moment—that I cannot help feeling just a trifle amused at the idea of my saintly mother and my dear, lovable little father carefully bringing up—with all the love and affection which was in them—me. It must be admitted to have its humorous side.
I played about the dingy house at Clapham during my happy childhood and was strangely contented without other companionship than my mother’s. I certainly betrayed no morbid symptoms, but was, on the contrary, noted for a particularly sunny disposition. My mother declared that my laugh was most infectious, so full was it of real enjoyment and gaiety.
I have always attributed my psychological development along the line it afterwards took to a remark made to my mother by a woman who used to come in and sew for her.
I was playing just outside the room with a wooden horse, when Mrs. Ives remarked as she threaded the needle preparatory to driving the machine: “Lord, mum, I do believe that boy of yours gets handsomer every time I come. I never see such a picture, never.”
I was quite old enough to grasp the remark, and for it to sink deep into my soul, planting there the seeds of a superb selfconsciousness. From that moment I was vain. I grew quite used to people turning to look at me in the streets, and saying: “What a lovely child!” and in time felt positively injured if the passers-by did not testify openly to their admiration. My mother discouraged my being flattered—I suppose from the point of view of strict morality, with which I cannot claim acquaintance. Flattery is bad, and yet at the same time it always seems an absurd thing to talk to and bring up a child of exceptional personal attractions as if he or she were quite ordinary. If he be a boy, he is told that personal attractions are of no consequence, things not to be thought of and which can on no account make him better or worse, and then, whether girl or boy, the child finds on going out into the world that it is as valuable a weapon as can be given to anybody, that to beauty many obstacles are made easy which to the plain are often insuperable, and that above all his moral direction and his looks stand in very definite relation.
It was of no use telling me that I was not exceptionally goodlooking; I grasped the fact from the moment of Mrs. Ives’ flattering little outburst.
My father was immensely proud of my appearance; I suppose the more so because he could claim that I was like him and that I did not resemble the Gascoynes in any way.
I was dark and Jewish, with an amazingly well-cut face and an instinctive grace of which I was quite conscious. I have never known from my childhood what it was to be ill at ease, and I have certainly never been shy. I inherited my father’s gift of music. With him it had never developed into more than what might give him a slight social advantage; with myself I was early determined it should be something more, and was quick to see the use it might be in introducing me into good society.
Chapter II
When I was about seven years of age my father died. I think the cause was aerated waters, although I remember that on being shown his body after death it looked so small that my mind hardly established any very definite relation between it and the weary, kindly little man with the abnormal waist whom I had known as my father
My mother must, I am sure, have sorrowed greatly, but she spared my tender years any harrowing spectacle of grief and set herself courageously to the task of keeping our home together. My father had been insured for some five hundred pounds, which brought my mother in a tiny income. The house fortunately was her own. She immediately dismissed her one servant and let the front rooms, so that we were not so badly off after all. My mother, who had hitherto superintended my education, was now no longer able to do so, as the house took up most of her time. Certainly, the school I was sent to was a very much better one than a boy circumstanced as I was could have expected to attend. It was patronised by a great many sons of the comparatively wealthy in the neighbourhood, and was by no means inexpensive. I went right through it from the lowest form to the highest.
My masters pronounced me quick, but not studious. Personally, I don’t think highly imaginative people are ever very studious in childhood or early youth. How is it possible? The imaginative temperament sets one dreaming of wonderful results achieved at a remarkably small outlay of effort. It is only the dull who receive any demonstration of the value of application.
My mother was careful that I should not be dressed so as to compare unfavourably in any way with my schoolfellows, and managed that I should always have a sufficiency of pocket-money, advantages which I hardly appreciated at the time. How she
