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landofnowhereCharles Auchester(Gutenberg Volume 1, Gutenberg Volume 2) was a popular Victorian novel, blurbed by Disraeli, which Louisa May Alcott described in her diary as "charming, - a sort of fairy tale for grown people. First published in 1853, it was still in print as late as 1928, but these days is remembered, if at all, as a historical curiosity -- it has 0 reviews and only one rating on Goodreads, though it does a bit better on LibraryThing, where it has 2 reviews.
And I can see how this happened -- because, what Charles Auchester is, more or less literally, is teenage Victorian idfic for the Felix Mendelssohn fandom. [ETA: having done further biographical research, I now have some doubts as to the "teenage" aspect, see here]
Now I should be clear here, that when I'm talking the Felix Mendelssohn fandom, I don't mean Felix Mendelssohn the well-biographed historical figure, who we now know through the many letters of his preserved by friends and family. No, I mean Felix Mendelssohn the Victorian celebrity, the royals' favorite composer and darling of high society, playing concerts to devoted crowds, idolized only more after his death in 1847 at the age of 38. I want to say "what if Leonard Bernstein was a Beatle", but those two are too far in the past -- I think that of cultural phenomena I've lived through that feels closest is the enthusiasm about Barack Obama leading up to his becoming president.
So yeah, this book is celebrity RPF, and the Chevalier Seraphael (yes, that is his name), while clearly based on the historical Felix Mendelssohn, is different enough (for instance, this is a version of Felix without Fanny) had no trouble thinking of him as his own character. Those who knew Mendelssohn during his life understandably found the Seraphael rather cringe, such as the reviewer in The Athenaeum, who "could not escape the thought of what would be Mendelssohn's own hilarity and astonishment could he have seen this alleged portrait of himself". The publisher tried to sell it as a roman à clef, and encourage people to speculate on which personage wrote it, but in fact, the pseudonymous "E. Berger" was Elizabeth Sara Sheppard (translating her last name into French), an imaginative clergyman's daughter who taught school after her father's death, and wrote this novel in a fury of inspiration as a teenager in the years surrounding Mendelssohn's death, though it was not published until a few years after that.
Which makes sense to me -- there is, apparently, a certain type of lonely gifted young person, enthusiastic about music, who takes herself very seriously, who, on learning what Felix Mendelssohn was like as a young man, wishes they could be friends -- and uses that wish to fuel her creativity and try to write her wishes true. I know, because I was one such, and when I was 13 wrote a time-slip story where a character went back in time to take the place of Fanny Mendelssohn. (As an adult who knows much more about Fanny I am embarrassed by having overwritten her with my boring OC, but that is not the point I'm making here...) So, on learning of the existence of this book, I immediately went "oh, a kindred spirit, I *must* read this!"
Which I did, and it was worth it. I admit there are many ways in which this is not a good book -- it is quite Victorian, leans on some problematic tropes about genius, the pacing is odd, and the prose sometimes lacks lucidity -- but I can see the appeal and charm of this glorious mess, which is the sort of story, and setting, and characters, that could inspire a fandom -- and I would almost sort of like to see this fandom happen.
The book tells the story of the titular Charles Auchester, a young musician, whose life is changed by meetings with his idol the Chevalier Seraphael, the idealized version of Felix Mendelssohn. Charles' loves for music and for Seraphael, closely intertwined, are at the heart of the book. For most of the book Charles is 11 or 12, and Seraphael is 19 or 20, so this love is a child's hero-worship -- but three-quarters of the way through there's a time-skip to when Charles is in his late teens, at which point he's clearly gay for Seraphael. He tells a young woman who is also suffering from Seraphael feels: "Nor is it for you to say that because I am a man I can have exactly what I please. Very possibly, precisely because I am a man, I cannot. But anyhow, I shall not betray myself, nor is it ever safe to betray ourselves, unless we cannot help it."
I found a lot of delightful wish-fulfillment in this book -- Sheppard is giving her protagonist, not just an idealized hero-friend in Seraphael, but also the sort of musical education and career that she could only have dreamed of (due to limitations of gender, class, and finances), with lovingly described musical performances, including a masque that is a sequel to both A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest (and keep in mind that, this is before the time of records and CDs, when even the elites had less access to high-quality musical performance than we do now, so any writing about music is essentially wish-fulfillment.) Charles's time in an analogue of the Leipzig Conservatory gives one all the fun of the boarding-school setting (the book feels a bit like a forerunner of Thursday's Children by Rumer Godden, though lacking the maturity of its perspective). However, in the second volume particularly, Sheppard also steadily piles on the angst, as everyone confides in Charles, who himself confides in no one. The tragic boarding-school story moves toward a conclusion that genuinely brought out the feels in me while also making me angry at the stupid Victorian beliefs about genius, gender, and health that drove it.
One of the strengths of this novel is its cast of female supporting characters, starting with Charles's three older sisters, and going on through a range of young women musicians, all of them serious artists, from the opera singer loosely based on Jenny Lind, to the student born into a family of musicians who aspires to be a composer, to the lower-class chorus girl with a beautiful voice and a true gift for dancing, to the wealthy patroness of music who is also a potrait painter. The amount of attention paid to women's lives and artistic aspirations reminds me of Louisa May Alcott (who, as I mentioned above, enjoyed this book).
The take on women composers is more interesting than I expected, but also kind of infuriating. We do have one woman character who is interested in composing -- Maria Cerinthia, who is kind of Maria Malibran, and kind of Fanny Mendelssohn, and like both of them deserved a longer life and for her compositions to be better known. Sheppard's take on gender and genius is that composing great music drains the life-force, and thus although women can compose works as great as a man's, doing so is too dangerous to their frail health. And so while I cheered when Maria composed her symphony, and when Seraphael approved of it and arranged for her to conduct, I was also dreading the increasingly foreshadowed trainwreck. And indeed, at the end of the thrilling first movement of the symphony, Maria (echoing Fanny Mendelssohn) passes out with a cerebral hemorrhage. She dies a few days later, and in the bit that makes me really angry, her symphony is buried with her.
(On the other hand, I thought the book might be foreshadowing the death of Laura, the lower-class dancer girl, but she at least got to live. I thought there was a possibility of Charles/Laura endgame, but the ending suggests that they are both terminally single due to being Seraphael-sexual. Though now that I think of it, this could just be Charles being an unreliable narrator.)
I was curious what the Jewish representation would be like in this book: Charles Auchester, like Elizabeth Sara Sheppard, has some Jewish ancestry, and there are various ambiguously Jewish characters in the book, most prominently Seraphael. However, Sheppard, as an English clerygman's daughter, does not seem to have met any practicing Jews or known anything about Judaism as it was practiced in her time, and so her philosemitism comes across as vague ethnic pride, which admittedly I still greatly prefer to the antisemitic stereotyping you get even in Ivanhoe. (I mean, if you want the Victorian novel about Jews and music, you should still read Daniel Deronda, though Charles Auchester does provide insight into the cultural context that Eliot wrote in.) In the first volume, young Charles expresses his belief that Jews are naturally gifted at music to any adult who will listen to him, which leads to some extremely awkward reactions from adults trying to change the subject -- in the second half this is dropped, which may be just as well.
Anyway, I found this book fun and interesting to read with the protocols of "this is teenage fanfic and I'm going to bring my inner 13-year-old", though I suspect that people more knowledgeable about music might find it more frustrating. This was also an experiment in writing a long in-depth book review rather than quick Wednesday reactions, and it was more time-consuming so I probably won't do it as much, but if you enjoyed it and would like more reviews of this sort let me know! (Also I could totally see myself writing fic for this fandom -- it has some advantage over writing actual 19th century classical composer RPF.)
And I can see how this happened -- because, what Charles Auchester is, more or less literally, is teenage Victorian idfic for the Felix Mendelssohn fandom. [ETA: having done further biographical research, I now have some doubts as to the "teenage" aspect, see here]
Now I should be clear here, that when I'm talking the Felix Mendelssohn fandom, I don't mean Felix Mendelssohn the well-biographed historical figure, who we now know through the many letters of his preserved by friends and family. No, I mean Felix Mendelssohn the Victorian celebrity, the royals' favorite composer and darling of high society, playing concerts to devoted crowds, idolized only more after his death in 1847 at the age of 38. I want to say "what if Leonard Bernstein was a Beatle", but those two are too far in the past -- I think that of cultural phenomena I've lived through that feels closest is the enthusiasm about Barack Obama leading up to his becoming president.
So yeah, this book is celebrity RPF, and the Chevalier Seraphael (yes, that is his name), while clearly based on the historical Felix Mendelssohn, is different enough (for instance, this is a version of Felix without Fanny) had no trouble thinking of him as his own character. Those who knew Mendelssohn during his life understandably found the Seraphael rather cringe, such as the reviewer in The Athenaeum, who "could not escape the thought of what would be Mendelssohn's own hilarity and astonishment could he have seen this alleged portrait of himself". The publisher tried to sell it as a roman à clef, and encourage people to speculate on which personage wrote it, but in fact, the pseudonymous "E. Berger" was Elizabeth Sara Sheppard (translating her last name into French), an imaginative clergyman's daughter who taught school after her father's death, and wrote this novel in a fury of inspiration as a teenager in the years surrounding Mendelssohn's death, though it was not published until a few years after that.
Which makes sense to me -- there is, apparently, a certain type of lonely gifted young person, enthusiastic about music, who takes herself very seriously, who, on learning what Felix Mendelssohn was like as a young man, wishes they could be friends -- and uses that wish to fuel her creativity and try to write her wishes true. I know, because I was one such, and when I was 13 wrote a time-slip story where a character went back in time to take the place of Fanny Mendelssohn. (As an adult who knows much more about Fanny I am embarrassed by having overwritten her with my boring OC, but that is not the point I'm making here...) So, on learning of the existence of this book, I immediately went "oh, a kindred spirit, I *must* read this!"
Which I did, and it was worth it. I admit there are many ways in which this is not a good book -- it is quite Victorian, leans on some problematic tropes about genius, the pacing is odd, and the prose sometimes lacks lucidity -- but I can see the appeal and charm of this glorious mess, which is the sort of story, and setting, and characters, that could inspire a fandom -- and I would almost sort of like to see this fandom happen.
The book tells the story of the titular Charles Auchester, a young musician, whose life is changed by meetings with his idol the Chevalier Seraphael, the idealized version of Felix Mendelssohn. Charles' loves for music and for Seraphael, closely intertwined, are at the heart of the book. For most of the book Charles is 11 or 12, and Seraphael is 19 or 20, so this love is a child's hero-worship -- but three-quarters of the way through there's a time-skip to when Charles is in his late teens, at which point he's clearly gay for Seraphael. He tells a young woman who is also suffering from Seraphael feels: "Nor is it for you to say that because I am a man I can have exactly what I please. Very possibly, precisely because I am a man, I cannot. But anyhow, I shall not betray myself, nor is it ever safe to betray ourselves, unless we cannot help it."
I found a lot of delightful wish-fulfillment in this book -- Sheppard is giving her protagonist, not just an idealized hero-friend in Seraphael, but also the sort of musical education and career that she could only have dreamed of (due to limitations of gender, class, and finances), with lovingly described musical performances, including a masque that is a sequel to both A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest (and keep in mind that, this is before the time of records and CDs, when even the elites had less access to high-quality musical performance than we do now, so any writing about music is essentially wish-fulfillment.) Charles's time in an analogue of the Leipzig Conservatory gives one all the fun of the boarding-school setting (the book feels a bit like a forerunner of Thursday's Children by Rumer Godden, though lacking the maturity of its perspective). However, in the second volume particularly, Sheppard also steadily piles on the angst, as everyone confides in Charles, who himself confides in no one. The tragic boarding-school story moves toward a conclusion that genuinely brought out the feels in me while also making me angry at the stupid Victorian beliefs about genius, gender, and health that drove it.
One of the strengths of this novel is its cast of female supporting characters, starting with Charles's three older sisters, and going on through a range of young women musicians, all of them serious artists, from the opera singer loosely based on Jenny Lind, to the student born into a family of musicians who aspires to be a composer, to the lower-class chorus girl with a beautiful voice and a true gift for dancing, to the wealthy patroness of music who is also a potrait painter. The amount of attention paid to women's lives and artistic aspirations reminds me of Louisa May Alcott (who, as I mentioned above, enjoyed this book).
The take on women composers is more interesting than I expected, but also kind of infuriating. We do have one woman character who is interested in composing -- Maria Cerinthia, who is kind of Maria Malibran, and kind of Fanny Mendelssohn, and like both of them deserved a longer life and for her compositions to be better known. Sheppard's take on gender and genius is that composing great music drains the life-force, and thus although women can compose works as great as a man's, doing so is too dangerous to their frail health. And so while I cheered when Maria composed her symphony, and when Seraphael approved of it and arranged for her to conduct, I was also dreading the increasingly foreshadowed trainwreck. And indeed, at the end of the thrilling first movement of the symphony, Maria (echoing Fanny Mendelssohn) passes out with a cerebral hemorrhage. She dies a few days later, and in the bit that makes me really angry, her symphony is buried with her.
(On the other hand, I thought the book might be foreshadowing the death of Laura, the lower-class dancer girl, but she at least got to live. I thought there was a possibility of Charles/Laura endgame, but the ending suggests that they are both terminally single due to being Seraphael-sexual. Though now that I think of it, this could just be Charles being an unreliable narrator.)
I was curious what the Jewish representation would be like in this book: Charles Auchester, like Elizabeth Sara Sheppard, has some Jewish ancestry, and there are various ambiguously Jewish characters in the book, most prominently Seraphael. However, Sheppard, as an English clerygman's daughter, does not seem to have met any practicing Jews or known anything about Judaism as it was practiced in her time, and so her philosemitism comes across as vague ethnic pride, which admittedly I still greatly prefer to the antisemitic stereotyping you get even in Ivanhoe. (I mean, if you want the Victorian novel about Jews and music, you should still read Daniel Deronda, though Charles Auchester does provide insight into the cultural context that Eliot wrote in.) In the first volume, young Charles expresses his belief that Jews are naturally gifted at music to any adult who will listen to him, which leads to some extremely awkward reactions from adults trying to change the subject -- in the second half this is dropped, which may be just as well.
Anyway, I found this book fun and interesting to read with the protocols of "this is teenage fanfic and I'm going to bring my inner 13-year-old", though I suspect that people more knowledgeable about music might find it more frustrating. This was also an experiment in writing a long in-depth book review rather than quick Wednesday reactions, and it was more time-consuming so I probably won't do it as much, but if you enjoyed it and would like more reviews of this sort let me know! (Also I could totally see myself writing fic for this fandom -- it has some advantage over writing actual 19th century classical composer RPF.)
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Date: 10 Mar 2024 01:13 (UTC)no subject
Date: 10 Mar 2024 01:40 (UTC)(Oh, yes, and the character with frail health was being treated with *leeches*, aaaaah.)
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Date: 10 Mar 2024 02:20 (UTC)It occurs to me that Daniel Deronda also has an interesting discursion into genius and talent and what they require, vis a vis the heroine's piano playing.
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Date: 10 Mar 2024 02:16 (UTC)no subject
Date: 10 Mar 2024 15:10 (UTC)no subject
Date: 10 Mar 2024 15:39 (UTC)no subject
Date: 10 Mar 2024 19:00 (UTC)no subject
Date: 10 Mar 2024 06:06 (UTC)no subject
Date: 10 Mar 2024 15:10 (UTC)no subject
Date: 10 Mar 2024 13:44 (UTC)This sounds fascinating. Though on women being composers in C19th, some while ago I heard a symphony by Louise Farrenc:
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Date: 10 Mar 2024 14:53 (UTC)Louise Farrenc is great! Emilie Mayer is another 19th century composer of symphonies, and they both missed the memo that they were supposed to die young!
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Date: 10 Mar 2024 14:43 (UTC)no subject
Date: 10 Mar 2024 15:08 (UTC)no subject
Date: 10 Mar 2024 16:11 (UTC)Also it sounds like all persons of culture and refinement ought to be at least a little bit in love with Seraphael, which is also such a teenage id-fic attitude.
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Date: 10 Mar 2024 15:12 (UTC)Nooooo!!!!
It does sound fascinating as an exercise in teenage fanfic.
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Date: 10 Mar 2024 15:31 (UTC)no subject
Date: 11 Mar 2024 01:18 (UTC)no subject
Date: 11 Mar 2024 02:28 (UTC)no subject
Date: 11 Mar 2024 01:40 (UTC)(Amused at the "writing great music drains the life force"; how did she account for Bach's one zillion cantatas and one zillion children, I wonder... .)
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Date: 11 Mar 2024 02:28 (UTC)no subject
Date: 15 Mar 2024 05:26 (UTC)AHAHAHA omg Bach is clearly some sort of mutant... :D
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Date: 15 Mar 2024 05:26 (UTC)no subject
Date: 15 Mar 2024 12:36 (UTC)(Or, for that matter, exactly when she wrote Charles Auchester -- she reportedly started it when she was 16, before Mendelssohn's death, and she was 23 when it was published -- some sources say she wrote it as a teenager, but also there's one academic paper I saw which suggested a book published in 1850, when she was 20, as the main biographical source she was drawing on.)
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Date: 17 Mar 2024 01:39 (UTC)no subject
Date: 21 Mar 2024 03:26 (UTC)no subject
Date: 17 Mar 2024 01:40 (UTC)