Why No New Book Reviews?

I'm working on a book, an anthology of letters written in the  period 1800 - 1840, and nearly all my reading right now is devoted to background research for the introductions which accompany each letter. I have over fifty, none of them in archives and many written by "ordinary people".  The Word doc is approaching 80 000 words (plus pictures!) and thus long enough to allow me to remove weaker chapters. 

I've had no luck so far in interesting agents or publishers. Below I introduce a letter from an author who had much more success than I am having; he doesn't take up many words  so here he is with my rueful introduction:

  

Reverend John Platts 1825

Eccentric Characters     Impostors           Extraordinary Females

Some readers will be aware of a thriving industry which in articles and books, on-line and in person, advises authors on the procedures to follow and articles of faith to which they must subscribe should they wish to transition from being writers to being published writers. All agree that you should be able to complete an inordinately long one-size-fits-all questionnaire without becoming facetious; Miss Austen’s epistolary novel Lady Susan is not a competing work to your anthology of Regency letters.

But how was one advised two hundred years ago? Seeking patronage was one recommended route; paying the publisher another. The Reverend John Platts has a different strategy comprising four easy to follow steps:  Step One: Provide a Title and Table of Contents in Your Best Handwriting; Step Two: Puff Your Work (this takes an entire sentence); Step Three: Flatter the Publisher (three words); Step Four: Name Your Price. He makes no reference to his under-represented and marginalised position: he is a Unitarian Minister, not a Trinitarian one, and he preaches in Doncaster.

 

Did it work?  Well, not with the publisher he is addressing, Messrs Harding, Leopard & Co who appear to have had a very small list. But it worked with another London publisher, Sherwood, Jones & Co, which brought out the work in 1825 and thus at most ten months after this letter was written. They must have been keen. It may have been their idea to re-title it; the author imagined it as The Wonders of Human Nature as Exemplified … but it was published as A New Universal Biography, Containing Interesting Accounts ….

The work is a main reason why Platts (1775-1837) has a Wikipedia page. And the book is currently available in a choice of Print on Demand hardback or paperback. Shall I buy and reproduce one of the Interesting Accounts? It’s not necessary; the Reverend Platts’ letter can stand alone as the book’s teaser:

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Transcription

Addressed to: Messrs Harding Leopard & Co Booksellers Finsbury Square   London

Datelined: Doncaster Feb. 22, 1825

Gentlemen I have a work, nearly completed, to dispose of, of which the above is the table; I think it calculated to be a very popular work. Is it at all suitable for your respectable house? If so, you shall have a sight of it, if you desire it. It will form 2 vols. 8 vo.[octavo], the price £150 Rev J Platts Doncaster

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Catherine Nixey Heresy

 

It's a long time since I posted a review of a new book but this one is so good that it prompts me to put aside preoccupation with finishing my current project. Nearly everything in this book was new to me. Catherine Nixey has found the right style and tone to write about the early Church of Rome as it established itself as "the greatest organized persecuting force in human history" - a phrase she takes from Geoffrey de Ste. Croix. She does this by narrating the histories and often violent fates, as far as we can know them, of those early versions of Christianity which found themselves defined as "heresies" by that Roman version which focussed itself on alliance with secular power, wealth accumulation, and the pleasures of ostentation, pomp and the flesh - a set of choices far from dead not only in Rome but in Canterbury too. 

Despite a lifelong sideline interest in religion, both as histories and as theologies, I knew almost nothing of what Nixey writes about and that, as she might be the first to point out, is just as my English state schooling intended. Watered down to not much more than prayers, hymns, carols and nativity plays it never suggested alternatives, that there might be other stories. It's true, however, that so successful was the dominant church's  suppression of alternative pasts, including as recorded in books which were burnt,  that it is only in my lifetime that some of those other histories have been at least partially recovered, notably from the 1945 discovery in Egypt of the Gnostic Gospels. But what are traditionally called the Apocrypha, excluded from canonical Bibles, had been around for a very long time before that.

Nixey establishes her case with lively, caustic, and well-crafted short histories and striking examples. Her display of alternative versions of the Nativity scene is perhaps the most striking as is the fact that some of those scenes pre-date the Christian version. Virgins having babies with remarkable powers was not a new idea. There are other things too: the "Three Wise Men" of school nativity plays are the creation of a dubious translation; they are Magi and if you want to translate that, then magicians or sorcerers would be obvious choices. But in this 1840s folk art version of De Tre Wise Man  from Dalarna in Sweden - I bought the postcard there in 1964 -  they are local notables who ride horses not camels; they are the local go-to people for the seal of approval; but the ox and the ass are there, as in the best English versions:

Catherine Nixey is a classicist by training and may wish to stay close to the period she is most  familiar with. But if she ventured into the more recent past, the early history of the Church of England (and of Scotland) is also that of an organised persecuting force busily rooting out heretics and  heresies. The last person to be executed for Blasphemy in Britain was the twenty-year old Edinburgh student Thomas Aikenhead, hanged in 1697. The indictment against him (which can be found at his Wikipedia page) shows he was familiar with early criticisms of Christianity and, in particular, its associations with magic.  

Today it is only continued state support for the Established Church with its Bench of Bishops, accumulated  wealth, and continuing hold on the universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Durham which lifts it above the status of not much more than a middle-class hobby prone to the usual jealousies and in-fighting. The Roman Catholic church is another matter and will remain so until Italy repudiates the Lateran treaty and incorporates the Vatican City State into its national territory. It would then be able to order the archives opened.