Every Valley: Handel's Messiah

George Frideric Handel by Philip Mercier, c. 1730. Image credit: Händel-Haus, Halle. Image source: All About Handel

Today is the 283rd anniversary of the première of Handel's Messiah in Dublin on 13 April 1742. The story of Messiah's composition in just three weeks, the notorious adulteress who sang in its first performance, which took place during Holy Week, and the circumstances that brought her together with Handel in Dublin, are vividly retold in Charles King's Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times that Made Handel's Messiah (Doubleday, 2024).

In 1741 Handel was facing a crisis. In the winter season he had witnessed the failure of his Italian opera, Deidamia, which had received only three performances before being ignominiously pulled from the stage. Handel had composed opera seria in London for 30 years; indeed, it had been the reason he had relocated there. But Deidamia would be his final Italian opera.

At this low point, two serendipitous events provided Handel with an opportunity to change his fortunes. First, he received a new libretto from his cantankerous collaborator Charles Jennens, who had previously provided the word books for the English-language oratorios Saul (1739) and L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato (The Active Man, the Pensive Man, and the Moderate Man, 1740). Jennens wrote to his friend Edward Holdsworth on 10 July 1741 about the new work, "I hope he will lay out his whole Genius & Skill upon it, that the Composition will excell all his former Compositions, as the Subject excells every other Subject. The Subject is Messiah." [1]

Charles Jennens by Thomas Hudson, c. 1740s. Image credit: Handel Hendrix House. Image source: ArtFund.org

The second serendipitous event was an invitation to put on a season of music in Dublin, at a concert hall newly established in Fishamble Street by William Neale and the Charitable Musick Society. The invitation was probably extended and negotiated by William Cavendish, the 3rd Duke of Devonshire and the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Handel began composing Messiah on 22 August, suggesting that he had received the Dublin invitation shortly before. He worked rapidly, drafting all the music by 12 September, just three weeks later, and then finishing the "filled-in" score by 14 September. Jennens later complained to Holdsworth that Handel had composed the music "in great hast[e], tho' he said he would be a year about it." [2]

The finished score of Messiah was clearly intended to suit whatever musical forces might be available in Dublin, a city only one-fifth the size of London. The score called only for strings, trumpets and tympani, a chorus, and for as few as four solo singers: soprano, alto, tenor, and bass.

Handel's autograph score of the final measures of the Hallelujah Chorus, dated "September 6, 1741." Image credit: British Library R.M.20.f.2. Image source: The Handel Institute

After spending the late summer and early fall composing Messiah and, to a libretto by Newburgh Hamilton, the oratorio Samson, Handel left for Dublin, arriving on 18 November. Jennens wrote to Holdsworth, "I heard with great pleasure. . .that Handel had set the Oratorio of Messiah; but it was some mortification to me to hear that instead of performing it here he was gone into Ireland with it." [3]

On 29 December Handel wrote to Jennens from Dublin,

I am emboldened, Sir, by the generous Concern You please to take in relation to my affairs, to give You an Account of the Success I have met here. The Nobility did me the Honour to make amongst themselves a Subscription for 6 Nights, which did fill a Room of 600 Persons, so that I needed not sell one single Ticket at the Door, and without Vanity the Performance was received with a general Approbation. Sig[no]ra [Christina] Avo[g]lio, which I brought with me from London pleases extraordinary. . .as for the Instruments they are really excellent, Mr. [Matthew] Dubourgh [Master of the King's Musick in Ireland] being at the head of them, and the Musick sounds delightfully in this charming Room. . .They propose already to have some more Performances, when the 6 Nights of the Subscription are over. . .so that I shall be oblig'd to make my Stay longer than I thought. [4]

The first concert in the subscription series, a performance of L'Allegro, had taken place on 23 December. The series continued over the next month with a repeat performance of L'Allegro, followed by two performances of Acis and Galatea with Ode for St. Cecilia's Day, and it concluded with two performances of the oratorio Esther on 3 and 10 February. By then a second six-concert subscription series had been organized, with Alexander's Feast following on 17 February and repeated on 2 March, with weekly concerts continuing through the end of the month and an extra one added on 7 April. [5]

The second performance of Alexander's Feast had originally been scheduled for 24 February, but had to be postponed due to the illness of one of the singers, Susannah Cibber.

Susannah Cibber, by Thomas Hudson, c. 1740s. Image credit: National Portrait Gallery NPG 4526. Image source: Wikimedia Commons

In the winter of 1742 Mrs. Cibber had turned 28. For a decade she had been one of the leading actresses in London, and had come to Dublin in part to escape harassment by her husband, the actor Theophilus Cibber.

She had married Theophilus, who was a decade older than she was, in 1734. It was not a love-match, but one arranged by her father for her professional advancement: Theophilus was the son of Colley Cibber, the actor, playwright, and poet laureate, and had taken over the management of his company. In 1737 the abusive and spendthrift Theophilus had borrowed money from a rich gentleman, William Sloper, and in lieu of paying him back had coerced Susannah into sleeping with him. The three were soon living in a ménage à trois in a series of houses rented by Sloper.

The arrangement backfired on Theophilus when Susannah fell in love with Sloper. Soon afterwards she became pregnant by him, and tried to leave Theophilus. He abducted her, but after her rescue by her brother Thomas Arne, Theophilus sued Sloper. He accused him of "Assaulting, Ravishing, and Carnally knowing" his wife and demanded £5000 in damages. A jury, hearing testimony about how Theophilus had connived in the situation for his own gain, awarded him a nominal £10. After Susannah gave birth to a daughter in 1739, Theophilus sued Sloper again, this time for £10,000; he was awarded £500. Still, Susannah was generally seen as her husband's victim; she and Sloper would remain together for the rest of her life.

Theophilus Cibber, Comedian, In the Character of a Fine Gentleman (date unknown). Image source: Folger Shakespeare Library ART File C567.7 no.1

In 1741 these events were still fresh in the public mind, and by travelling to Dublin Mrs. Cibber, like Handel, was looking for a break from the London scene. She was appearing in plays at the Aungier Street Theater when Handel asked her to join his group of singers for the second subscription series. Although she had performed before in Handel works, she could not read music and did not have a powerful voice. But as Charles Burney, who knew Mrs. Cibber personally, later wrote in his General History of Music, "by a natural pathos, and perfect conception of the words, she often penetrated the heart, when others, with infinitely greater voice and skill, could only reach the ear. . .[She] captivated every hearer of sensibility by her native sweetness of voice and powers of expression." [6]

Including the extra concert on 7 April, Handel's second subscription series ended just four days before Palm Sunday. He must have begun planning for the first public performance of Messiah shortly after Mrs. Cibber joined his company. Rehearsals would have had to begin well in advance, since she needed to learn her part by ear. 

Her presence among the performers also raised another issue. The dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin was Jonathan Swift. In January he had forbidden church singers and musicians "to assist at a Club of Fiddlers in Fishamble Street," and ordered the punishment of "such vicars as shall ever appear there, as Songsters, Fidlers, Pipers, Trumpeters, Drummers, Drummajors, or in any Sonal Quality, according to the Flagitious aggravations of their respective Disobedience, Rebellion, Perfidy & Ingratitude." [7]

Jonathan Swift by Francis Bindon, c. 1735. Image credit: National Portrait Gallery NPG 5319. Image source: Wikimedia Commons

If Swift was outraged by the church musicians performing in Handel's concert series, what would he think of Mrs. Cibber's participation, particularly in a performance of Messiah during Holy Week? The word book of the new oratorio was Jennens' compilation of excerpts from the King James Bible and Apocrypha about the life, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus. It would be shocking enough to have an actress, even a married one, sing those words from the stage; Mrs. Cibber's eyebrow-raising sexual history would make it even more scandalous.

However, Handel was used to managing difficult personalities. He recruited allies, likely including Swift's Irish publisher George Faulkner, to plead with the dean. He also appealed to Swift's conscience by arranging that the performance of Messiah would benefit charitable causes. Dean Swift relented: on 27 March an announcement was printed in Faulkner's Dublin Journal that the performance would be held "for the relief of the Prisoners in the several Gaols, and for the Support of Mercer's Hospital in Stephen's Green, and of the Charitable Infirmary on the Inns Quay," and that it would involve "the Gentlemen of the Choirs of both Cathedrals," St. Patrick's and Christ Church. [8]

A public rehearsal on the Friday before Palm Sunday stoked excitement for the première on Tuesday 13 April. So many tickets were sold, more than 700 for a room deigned to hold 600, that a notice was published in Faulkner's Dublin Journal: "The Stewards of the Charitable Musical Society request the Favour of the ladies not to come with Hoops this day to the Musick Hall in Fishamble Street. The Gentlemen are desired to come without their swords." [9] The performance started around noon.

Word book of Messiah, Dublin 1742. Image source: Foundling Museum

The first aria after the opening chorus in Part 2 had been given to Mrs. Cibber. The text of "He was despisèd" comes from the Book of Isaiah in the Old Testament, but it has been read in the Christian tradition as a prophecy of the experience of Jesus during his arrest, trials, condemnation, and the Stations of the Cross, events that would be commemorated in just a few days' time. Clearly Handel was relying on Mrs. Cibber's expressiveness and her ability to move her listeners through her "natural pathos." Here is my favorite version, performed by Anne Sofie von Otter accompanied by the English Concert conducted by Trevor Pinnock:

https://youtu.be/1iAb5pyEQi0

Dr. Patrick Delany, rector of St Werburgh’s Church and chancellor of both St. Patrick's and Christ Church, was so profoundly moved by Mrs. Cibber's performance of this aria that at its conclusion he called out to the stage, "Woman, for this be all thy sins forgiven!" [10]

In Faulkner's Dublin Journal an anonymous reviewer wrote, "On Tuesday last Mr. Handel's Sacred Grand Oratorio, the MESSIAH, was performed in the New Musick-Hall in Fishamble-street; the best Judges allowed it to be the most finished piece of Musick. Words are wanting to express the exquisite Delight it afforded to the admiring crouded Audience. The Sublime, the Grand, and the Tender, adapted to the most elevated, majestick and moving Words, conspired to transport and charm the ravished Heart and Ear." [11]

And Edward Synge, Bishop of Elphin, wrote, "As Mr. Handel in his oratorio's greatly excells all other Composers I am acquainted with, so in the famous one, called the Messiah, he seems to have excell'd himself. The whole is beyond any thing I had a notion of till I Read and heard it. It seems to be a Species of Musick different from any other, and this is particularly remarkable of it, That tho' the Composition is very Masterly & artificial [in the sense of "displaying special art or skill"], yet the Harmony is so great and open, as to please all who have Ears & will hear, learned & unlearn'd." [12]

Handel went on to write a dozen more oratorios, and to cement his place as the most beloved English-language composer of all time. It was as an oratorio composer that he was remembered for another two and a half centuries, until his operas began to be revived and their musical riches rediscovered in the 20th century. But nearly three centuries after its première, Messiah remains Handel's most-performed composition.

King's Every Valley (small quibble: Handel set these words as "Ev'ry Valley," although I can see why that was not chosen as the title) covers the slow establishment of Messiah as an annual tradition, something that took another decade, and the fates of many of the participants in the première. It also connects the wealth of Handel's patrons and of Handel himself to the slave trade carried on by the South Sea Company. It's thoroughly researched and compellingly written, although readers unfamiliar with Handel and Messiah may not immediately understand each time King introduces and discusses at length persons whose connection to Messiah is only made fully apparent later on.

There are many books about Messiah; those by Donald Burrows (Cambridge, 1991) and Richard Luckett (Harcourt Brace, 1992) are especially recommendable, and Winton Dean's magisterial Handel's Dramatic Oratorios and Masques (Oxford, 1959) remains an essential source for researchers. But King's account, clearly originating in his deep affection for the work, is well-deserving of a place next to them on the shelf.

Image source: Bookshop.org

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1. Quoted in Donald Burrows, Handel, in Stanley Sadie, ed., The Master Musicians, Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 259.
2. Quoted in David Vickers, Messiah (HWV 56) "A Sacred Oratorio." GFHandel.org
3. Quoted in Burrows, Handel, p. 260.
4. Quoted in Burrows, Handel, pp. 262–263.
5. Dates of the subscription series concerts taken from W. H. Grattan Flood, "Fishamble St. Music Hall, Dublin, from 1741 to 1777." Sammelbände Der Internationalen Musikgesellschaft, vol. 14, no. 1, 1912, pp. 51–57. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/929446.
6. Charles Burney, A General History of Music, Volume the Second, Dover Publications, 1957, pp. 899, 1003. Reprint of 1935 edition edited by Frank Mercer and published by G.T. Foulis & Co., 1935, prepared from the second edition, 1789.
7. Quoted in Charles King, Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times that Made Handel's Messiah, Doubleday, 2024, p. 199.
8. Quoted in King, Every Valley, pp. 201–202. The involvement of the church choirmen meant that the date of the première had to be shifted from 12 April, Holy Monday, to the next day.
9. Stanford University. Handel Reference Database: 1742.
10. Jonathan Bardon, "The Singer Saved by Handel's Messiah," Irish Daily Mail, 21 December 2015. https://www.pressreader.com/ireland/irish-daily-mail/20151221/281698318705097
11. Stanford University. Handel Reference Database: 1742.
12. Stanford University. Handel Reference Database: 1742.
    

Suggested reading: The first ten weeks edition

Protestors march in New York City on 5 April 2025. Image source: Associated Press

Yesterday hundreds of thousands of protestors gathered across the country to oppose the actions of the new administration. Its first ten weeks have been a spectacle of cruelty, crudity, corruption and mendacity that have exceeded, if that's the word, even my abysmal expectations. The attempted destruction of government services and vital data relating to health, education, social benefit programs, scientific research, environmental protection, worker and consumer safety, and financial fraud; the suppression of free speech, the arrest and deportation of legal immigrants for constitutionally-protected activities, and attacks on schools and academic freedom; the rampant self-dealing and conflicts of interest; the exposure of highly sensitive personal data; the defiance of court orders; the list could go on, and on.

This edition of "Suggested reading" takes a look at the current administration, our historical amnesia, and the state of our politics:

1. "From comedy to brutality," Fintan O'Toole, New York Review of Books, 13 March 2025.

   In the days surrounding his inauguration, He Who Shall Not Be Named offered to buy Greenland from Denmark (and told reporters that he would not rule out seizing it by military force), suggested that he would annex Canada as "the 51st state," threatened to invade Panama to reassert U.S. control of the Canal, and proclaimed that the U.S. would "own" Gaza and resettle its population.

   You might think that these ideas were unique to the considerable idiosyncrasies of the current occupier of the White House. However, as Fintan O'Toole reveals in the New York Review of Books, all of these schemes have long and often ignoble histories:

• Greenland: After the U.S. Civil War, Secretary of State William Seward requested "A Report on the Resources of Greenland and Iceland," which was issued in 1868. The U.S. had just purchased Alaska from Russia, and Seward was contemplating a similar deal with Denmark for Greenland and Iceland (but nothing came of it).

  

  Arctic Boundary as defined by the Arctic Research and Policy Act (modified by geographic labels). Map author: Allison Gaylord. Image source: US Arctic Research Commission

  And after World War II, during which the U.S. military occupied Greenland to deny its use to Germany, President Harry Truman approached Denmark with an offer to buy it (but nothing came of it). Eighty years later the U.S. still operates a major military base there, now called Pituffik Space Base.

  Greenland is actually closer to Moscow (2390 miles) than to Washington, DC (2620 miles), and closer to Copenhagen (1860 miles) than to the nearest location in the U.S.: Madawaska, a town at the northernmost tip of Maine just across the St. John River from Edmundston, New Brunswick, Canada (1930 miles). [1]

  In short, whoever should have sovereignty over Greenland, geography would suggest that it isn't the U.S. A wild idea: perhaps the people who live there should govern themselves, and control Greenland's mineral and other resources? But as we know from many contexts, some discussed below, when you are occupying increasingly desirable real estate it is money, power, and violence that usually decide the outcome.

• Canada: From its very inception as a nation, the U.S. has had territorial designs on its northern neighbor. In the 1783 Treaty of Paris that ended the War of American Independence, the U.S. demanded and received all of the territory of the British Province of Quebec south of the Great Lakes; today, that territory comprises the states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin, as well as eastern Minnesota, western Pennsylvania, and about half of New York. In 1787, the Articles of Confederation contained a clause admitting the rest of British Canada as a state if it voted to join the former colonies (it didn't).

  

  The thirteen original colonies in 1774 (detail), McConnell Map Co., 1919. Image source: Library of Congress

  During the War of 1812 the U.S. invaded Canada in a campaign to capture Montreal, the key to the rest of Quebec; the invading forces were defeated almost as soon as they crossed the border. But the dream didn't die; in the late 19th century William Seward, Henry Adams, and the poet Walt Whitman, among many others, envisaged a United States that encompassed Canada. HWSNBN's annexation plan is just the latest irruption of this idea—probably one of the very few ideas he shares with Walt Whitman.

• Panama owes its existence to U.S. intervention. In 1903, the U.S. encouraged Panama, then a province of Colombia, to declare independence, and then immediately bought the rights to the land through which the Panama Canal would be carved. By happy coincidence, the Panamanian representative in the negotiations also worked for the French company that had been given a concession to build the canal across the isthmus. The deal included a $10 million payment to the Panamanian government plus annual rent of $250,000; $40 million went to the French company for the land rights.

  

  "The Coup d'Etat," by Charles G. Bush, New York World, 8 November 1903. Image source: The Age of Revolutions

  As historian Justin J. Masucci writes on the website The Age of Revolutions, "Panama granted the U.S. the right to build and operate an inter-ocean canal and also gave the U.S. de facto sovereignty over a ten mile-wide territory around the canal in perpetuity — in effect creating a U.S. colony in Panama." Panama remained a client state of the U.S. until the 1960s. It didn't gain jurisdiction over the Canal Zone until 1979, or control of the canal itself until 31 December 1999.

  

  Panama Canal and Canal Zone. Image source: Project Gutenberg

  Under the 1977 Carter-Torrijos Treaty that eventually turned control of the canal over to Panama, the U.S. retained the right to militarily defend the neutrality of the canal. However, it pledged to "abstain. . .from any intervention in the internal affairs of the Republic of Panama." [2] But just a dozen years after the signing of the treaty, U.S. armed forces invaded Panama to depose and take prisoner its leader Manuel Noriega and re-establish a U.S.-friendly government.
  
  Panama City is conveniently located next to the Pacific entrance of the canal. Any U.S. military invasion of the Canal Zone would inevitably involve its capture and the replacement of Panama's leaders, extending a long legacy of U.S. dominance of the country.

• Gaza: While rhetorically disapproving of Israeli settlement on Palestinian lands as an impediment to a two-state solution, the U.S. government has continued to provide an uninterrupted flow of weapons to Israeli governments. [3] According to the Council on Foreign Relations, since the end of World War II, Israel has been the single largest recipient of U.S. military aid by a factor of two. [4]
  
  Aid has continued to flow since the Oslo Accords in 1993 as the number of Israeli settlements and "outposts" has more than doubled, as the number of West Bank settlers has increased by more than four times to nearly half a million, and as the number of settlers in East Jerusalem has grown to nearly a quarter of a million. [5]

  

  Settler population growth in the West Bank, 1993–2023. Image source: Peace Now

  U.S. aid has provided direct and indirect support for this expansion.

  

  U.S. military and economic aid to Israel since 1970. Source: Council on Foreign Relations

  And during the Israeli government's assault on Gaza in 2024 U.S. military aid more than quadrupled from 2023 levels, to $12.5 billion. That assault has resulted in an estimated death toll to date of over 50,000 men, women and children. The weapons and munitions that resulted in this death and destruction are largely supplied by the U.S. [6] 

  And not only munitions: the Israeli military uses AI and cloud computing services supplied by Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, and Amazon. According to an article by the Associated Press, "An Israeli intelligence officer told the AP that AI has been used to help pinpoint all targets in the past three years." These, then, must include the "pinpointing" of a car being driven by Hoda Hijazi. Her mother and her three daughters, Rimas, 14, Taline, 12, and Liane, 10, were killed, and later falsely claimed by the Israeli military to have been "Hamas targets." [7] Medical facilities and personnel and aid workers have also been targeted.

  

  Gaza in March 2024. Image source: United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East

  So HWSNBN's open endorsement of the forcible relocation of the Palestinian population of Gaza does not seem to many Palestinians to be a radical departure from decades of implicit U.S. policy. The mildest term for such an action is "ethnic cleansing" (implying that the existing population is filth that needs to be swept away), which came into use during the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The UN Commission of Experts stated that such actions "constitute crimes against humanity and can be assimilated to specific war crimes. Furthermore, such acts could also fall within the meaning of the Genocide Convention." [8]

  

  Palestinians walk amid the rubble of destroyed homes and buildings in Jabaliya, northern Gaza Strip, 14 March 2025. Image credit: Jehad Alshrafi/AP. Image source: NPR

  On 26 February, The Guardian reported that HWSNBN had posted a "bizarre AI-generated video" on his social media site depicting Gaza as a luxury seaside resort, or as he called it in a 4 February press conference, "the Riviera of the Middle East":

  Words fail.

2. "An Expanding Vision of America," Nicole Eustace, New York Review of Books, 27 March 2025.

   Of course, dispossession and genocide were foundational acts of the U.S. itself. As Nicole Eustace writes in her NYRB article,

   . . .at each point in the development of the political economy of the British colonies and the United States, exploitation of Native peoples, expropriation of Native land, and extraction of Native resources fueled Euro-American advancement.

   I have some disagreement with the way this statement is framed. First, it seems to anachronistically attribute to Native peoples a capitalistic ownership model of land and natural resources. Second, the phrase "exploitation of Native peoples" obfuscates how deadly the encounters between settlers and Native peoples were.

   

   California's indigenous history: Native people of this place. Image source: Digital Humanities at Santa Clara University

   Taking the state I live in as an example, in 1849 it's estimated that there were 150,000 Native people living in California. Drawing on Benjamin Madley's An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873 (Yale University Press, 2016), Eustace points out that this population had already been decimated: these were "survivors of the first waves of colonialism in the area, tens of thousands of Native people having died in and around Spanish mission towns after their first establishment in 1769." By 1870, after two decades of murder, starvation, disease, and the seizure and privatization of the land, the estimated Native population was reduced by 80%, to 30,000. Over that same period the settler population grew from around 95,000 to over half a million. [9]
   
   Today, people who claim at least some continental American or Alaskan native ancestry make up 3.6% of the California population, a lower percentage than the estimated 5.4% of 1870. The three California counties with the lowest percentage of people with native ancestry are in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live. [10] The Native peoples of California, as with others discussed in this post, had the misfortune to occupy land that other, more powerful people wanted.

3. "A Self Divided," Laura Marsh, New York Review of Books, 27 March 2025.

   The appalling spectacle of our current politics may be partially understood through reference to a study conducted at the University of Virginia in 2014. As Laura Marsh explains in the NYRB, the researchers

   asked participants to spend six to fifteen minutes alone in a room without cell phones, laptops, or books. All they had to do was think. Sixty percent reported difficulty, and nearly half found the experience unenjoyable.
   
   In a follow-up study, the researchers added a twist: participants were given the chance to experience a negative sensation—a mild electric shock—during the quiet time. Sixty-seven percent of the men and 25 percent of the women in the study decided to take it. "Simply being alone with their own thoughts" was a deeply unappealing prospect for many people, the researchers found; they would "rather do an unpleasant activity than no activity at all."

   Two-thirds of the college-age American men in this study would rather give themselves an electric shock than be "alone with their own thoughts" for as little as six minutes.

   In The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource (Penguin Press, 2025), journalist Chris Hayes points to this study as a way to explain why many people spend a majority of their free time scrolling on their phones. As Marsh writes,

   The smartphone offers distraction so readily and abundantly that it's possible to spend hours every day skipping from tab to tab [app to app?], or from video to video, without enjoying a moment of it—often, in fact, feeling somewhat drained and diminished.

   For social media addicts, "the idea of facing the normal flow of time is unbearably depressing," the journalist Richard Seymour wrote in The Twittering Machine (2019). Or as the tech critic Max Read has put it, "The actual point of 'screen time' is the time part—the hours it allows you to numbly burn up."

   

   Image source: OpenAccessGovernment.org

   Hayes contrasts the social media model with the old television model. Decades ago TV producers needed to create programming that would hold your attention for 30 to 60 minutes at a time, or longer: I remember in the early 1970s regularly watching, along with my whole family, the entire three-hour Saturday night CBS lineup of All in the Family, M*A*S*H, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, and The Carol Burnett Show. A little later on I would follow this with the local 11 o'clock news and then switch to NBC for two new shows, Saturday Night Live (three Saturdays a month) or Weekend (one Saturday a month). The idea was to root you to the spot to provide a reliable audience for advertisers.

   The social media model is compared to playing a slot machine, "where the experience of a new stimulus every few seconds feels more important than the outcome of the bet." Hayes writes,

   What will hold people's attention? [Social media companies] don't have to have an answer. They can simply throw a million little interruptions at us, track which ones grab our attention, and then repeat those.

   HWSNBN is a master of using repeated distraction to grab attention. As Marsh notes,

   He has often drawn attention in ways that make him look reckless or cruel or untrustworthy. . .[but] the next day (or the next hour) brings a new story, another wave of attention, and another, and another. The news cycle becomes a blur in which individual incidents are hazy and only the unifying theme—wall-to-wall coverage of [HWSNBN]—sticks out.

   As Antonia Hitchens writes in the London Review of Books ("At CPAC," 20 March), in 2018 former HWSNBN strategist Steve Bannon called this technique "flooding the zone." As he put it, "If you're always consumed by the next outrage, you can't look closely at the last one."
   
   Of course, HWSNBN also has the advantage of almost universal name recognition from his "decades as a fixture of the tabloid press and a television personality"—combining the advantages of old and new media. HWSNBN is the first social media president; others must inexorably follow.
   
   Our 21st-century technological innovations are ironically returning us to the late 19th century, when the main features of our politics were cynical and corrupt party loyalty and grotesque smear campaigns, and when our economy was dominated by exploitative robber barons such as John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and Leland Stanford. It was a time of extreme anti-labor violence, inequality, anti-immigrant actions, and ideological conformity. Marx wrote that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. Only this time around no one other than the crew of billionaires, ideologues, enablers and toadies surrounding HWSNBN is laughing.

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1. Air distances calculated from Greenland's geographical center on the Distance.to website.
2. "Treaty Concerning the Permanent Neutrality and Operation of the Panama Canal," U.S. Department of State Archive.
3. The only exceptions I've found: in 1982 the Reagan Administration refused to provide cluster bombs to Israel after they were used against civilians; in 1991 the Bush Administration delayed a $10 billion loan package for four months when Israel's government would not pledge not to use the aid to build more settlements; and in 2024 the Biden Administration paused a shipment of 2,000-lb bombs because similar munitions had been dropped on Gaza, causing many civilian deaths.
4. Jonathan Masters and Will Merrow, U.S. Aid to Israel in Four Charts. Council on Foreign Relations, 13 November 2024.
5. Peace Now Settlement Watch, 30 Years After Oslo – The data that shows how the settlements proliferated following the Oslo Accords, September 2023.
6. Hadeel Al-Shalchi, Anas Baba, and Daniel Estrin, Palestinian deaths in Gaza rise above 50,000 as Israel expands its military campaign, NPR, 25 March 2025.
7. Michael Biesecker, Sam Mednick and Garance Burke, "As Israel uses US-made AI models in war, concerns arise about tech’s role in who lives and who dies," Associated Press, 18 February 2025.
   
8. Ethnic Cleansing, Definitions of Genocide and Related Crimes, United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect. Note to idiots and trolls: my reportage of these facts does not imply support of Hamas.
9. Oakland Museum of California. Resource 6-1a: California Population by Ethnic Groups, 1790-1880.
10. U.S. Census Bureau. California 2020 census.

Lise Davidsen in recital

Lise Davidsen accompanied by Malcolm Martineau at Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley, Tuesday 4 February 2025.
Presented by Cal Performances. Photo credit: Katie Ravas for Drew Alitzer Photography. Image source: KQED.org

In July 2015, at age 28, the Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen was catapulted into opera-world fame by winning the first prize, the Birgit Nilsson prize for singing Strauss or Wagner, and an audience award at Plácido Domingo's Operalia vocal competition at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden. A month later she went on to win first prize and two other prizes in the Queen Sonja International Music Competition in Oslo.

Peter Katona, who at the time had been the casting director of the Royal Opera House for 30 years, was quoted in Opera magazine as saying, "She could be the next Kirsten Flagstad." [1] By almost universal consensus, Flagstad is considered to be the greatest dramatic soprano in history. Dramatic sopranos require the vocal power to sing over a 100-piece orchestra playing fortissimo, the stamina to perform at a high emotional pitch throughout a four-hour-long opera, and the musicality to sing the heavier roles of Strauss and especially Wagner while retaining accuracy of intonation and beauty of tone, without straining or screaming to be heard. No pressure, then.

Here is Davidsen's prize-winning performance of Elisabeth's "Dich, teure Halle, grüss ich wieder" (Dear hall, I greet you once again) from Wagner's Tannhäuser in the finals of the Queen Sonja competition on 21 August 2015:

https://youtu.be/U9TofuLQOuk?t=4

Impressive as this video is, in the intervening decade Davidsen's low- and mid-range have taken on a fuller, darker timbre. Her voice in that range is now even richer and more opulent, while her high notes can ring out with an almost shocking power. Her Cal Performances recital with the great accompanist Malcolm Martineau displayed all of these vocal strengths, as well as her ability to mesmerize an audience with her soft singing, attentiveness to words, and communicative artistry.

The recital opened with a group of three songs to German texts by Davidsen's countryman Edvard Grieg. From the first song, "Dereinst, Gedanke mein," it was clear that we were in for a very special evening indeed. Here is her 2021 recording of this song, accompanied by Leif Ove Andsnes. No recording, of course, can capture the full resonance and sheer lusciousness of a voice like hers heard in person:

https://youtu.be/3TonfA2SsKY

Dereinst, Gedanke mein (Emanuel Geibel)	One day, my thoughts
Dereinst, Gedanke mein, Wirst ruhig sein. Läßt Liebesglut Dich still nicht werden, In kühler Erden, Da schläfst du gut, Dort ohne Lieb' Und ohne Pein Wirst ruhig sein. Was du im Leben Nicht hast gefunden, Wenn es entschwunden, Wird's dir gegeben, Dann ohne Wunden Und ohne Pein Wirst ruhig sein.	One day, my thoughts, You will find peace. If love's passion disturbs your repose, In the cool earth You will sleep deeply: Without love And without pain You will find peace. What in life You have not found When it is ended Will be given to you; Then without wounds And without pain You will find peace.

This song also introduced a somber mood of love's suffering and anguish which threaded through Davidsen's selections, twinned with the theme of love's joys.

Following the Grieg set were arias from three operas, all expressing a longing for death: Dido's lament "Thy hand, Belinda, darkness shades me" from Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, Elisabeth's "Tu che le vanità conoscesti del mondo" (You who knew the vanities of the world) from Verdi's Don Carlo, and Ariadne's "Es gibt ein Reich" (There is a kingdom) from Strauss's Ariadne aux Naxos. Together they displayed Davidsen's vocal and dramatic range as the characters pass through sorrow, grief, regret, remembered joy, resignation, and resolve. As well as having a gorgeous voice, Davidsen showed herself to be a magnificent vocal actor. The Purcell in particular was immensely moving, and at the climax her "Remember me!" rang out powerfully.

It may be heresy, but in these arias, as well as those from Wagner operas in the second half of the program, I missed the accompaniment of an orchestra. No piano transcription can capture the full sweep of the emotions conveyed in this music. This was not the fault of Davidsen's accompanist Malcolm Martineau, who supported her throughout the evening with playing both beautiful and (that rarest of gifts among accompanists) subtle.

The final song of the first half was a glowing account of Richard Strauss's "Befreit" (Released). Searching for a Davidsen performance of this song to share, I discovered that she has not yet recorded it in either its original piano version or its later orchestral version, oversights that I hope there are plans to remedy soon.

The second half of the program began with a group of four Schubert songs, beginning with "Der Tod und das Mädchen" and "Der Zwerg." Davidsen sang both songs effectively, but they are Schubert in the hyper-dramatic mode that I confess I do not favor. Even her artistry could not make the latter song, about a murderous dwarf (!), seem anything but excessively histrionic. These were followed by lovely renditions of two of Schubert's most deceptively simple melodies, "Du bist die Ruh" (You are my peace) and "Ellens Gesang III (Ave Maria)," which suspended time.

The final section of the recital was devoted to Wagner, starting with Elisabeth's death-prayer from Tannhäuser, "Allmächt'ge Jungfrau" (Almighty Virgin). Following after Schubert's "Ave Maria," it showed the careful thought Davidsen had put into the sequencing of her selections. This was followed by a ravishing "Der Engel" from the Wesendonck Lieder. Here is Davidsen's 2021 recording of the orchestral version with the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Mark Elder:

https://youtu.be/VpqD-aFdcGI

Der Engel (Mathilde Wesendonck)

The Angel

In der Kindheit frühen Tagen Hört ich oft von Engeln sagen, Die des Himmels hehre Wonne Tauschen mit der Erdensonne, Daß, wo bang ein Herz in Sorgen Schmachtet vor der Welt verborgen, Daß, wo still es will verbluten, Und vergehn in Tränenfluten, Daß, wo brünstig sein Gebet Einzig um Erlösung fleht, Da der Engel niederschwebt, Und es sanft gen Himmel hebt. Ja, es stieg auch mir ein Engel nieder, Und auf leuchtendem Gefieder Führt er, ferne jedem Schmerz, Meinen Geist nun himmelwärts!

In childhood's early days I often heard talk of angels, Who would exchange Heaven's bliss For the Earth's sunlight, So that, when a heart in sorrow Languishes hidden from the world, So that, when it wishes quietly to grieve, And melt away in a flood of tears, So that, when it prays fervently Only for release from life, Then the angel descends And gently raises it to Heaven. Yes, an angel has also descended to me, And on shining wings Bears aloft, far from every pain, My soul now heavenward!

Periodically throughout the recital Davidsen spoke directly and disarmingly to the audience, making the cavernous Zellerbach Hall seem like an intimate room. She announced that the final work in the program would be her first public performance of the Liebestod from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. Although it was the end of a long recital and, with just the piano as accompaniment, her voice was completely exposed, she showed no fatigue. Over the seven minutes of the aria she deftly employed both the richness of her lower range and her gleaming top notes to slowly build to a powerful emotional peak. Her interpretation will no doubt continue to develop, but hearing her essay this aria for the first time was a privilege I won't soon forget; with the full power of  a Wagnerian orchestra buoying her up on this flight of ecstasy, it would have been overwhelming. Davidsen has cancelled all of her engagements after mid-March because she is pregnant (with twins!), and so we will likely not see her Isolde on stage for another couple of years. We can only hope that it will not be that long before she is able to return to the recording studio.

After the final notes of Wagner's great aria faded into silence, the audience roared its appreciation in a lengthy ovation. Amazingly, after the marathon of the Liebestod, Davidsen and Martineau generously offered us an "extra": Wagner's "Schmerzen" (Anguish) from the Wesendonck Lieder, which brought the audience to its feet again.

In this memorable recital Lise Davidsen showed that she is not the next Kirsten Flagstad. She is herself, and that is quite enough.

"Schmerzen," with Mark Elder and the London Philharmonic:

https://youtu.be/MRru3QruKPQ

Schmerzen (Mathilde Wesendonck)

Anguish

Sonne, weinest jeden Abend Dir die schönen Augen rot, Wenn im Meeresspiegel badend Dich erreicht der frühe Tod; Doch erstehst in alter Pracht, Glorie der düstren Welt, Du am Morgen neu erwacht, Wie ein stolzer Siegesheld! Ach, wie sollte ich da klagen, Wie, mein Herz, so schwer dich sehn, Muß die Sonne selbst verzagen, Muß die Sonne untergehn? Und gebieret Tod nur Leben, Geben Schmerzen Wonne nur: O wie dank ich, daß gegeben Solche Schmerzen mir Natur!

Sun, every evening you weep Until your beautiful eyes turn red, When sinking into the sea's mirror You are touched by early death; Yet you rise again in your former splendor, Glory of the gloomy world, Each morning you reawaken, Like a proud victor! Ah, how can I lament, Why, my heart, do you ache so, When the sun itself must despair, When the sun itself must sink down? And if Death always gives birth to Life, And anguish always to bliss: I am thankful that Nature Has given me so much pain!

Update 16 February 2025: After publishing this post I learned that just four days before her Berkeley recital Davidsen had appeared as Ariadne in the final performance (of four) of Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos at the Staatsoper in Vienna. At short notice she had replaced Anna Netrebko, who withdrew because of illness. On Bachtrack, Mark Pullinger wrote of her "triumphant" performance on 28 January, "Lise Davidsen and Richard Strauss are a match made in heaven. Hers is a Rolls Royce soprano, luxuriously rich and powerful, filling the house. She rode the long gleaming lines of 'Es gibt ein Reich' with ease, a molten glow that I can still feel now. The final duet with [Michael] Spyres [as Bacchus] was sublime. . .An outstanding portrayal." For more on the production, please see "Lise auf Naxos: Davidsen makes a triumphant return to Vienna's Ariadne" on Bachtrack.

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1. Henrietta Bredin, "Competitive Instincts," Opera Vol. 66 No. 10, October 2015, p. 1387.

Mad, bad, and dangerous to know: Three historical novels

Emma Donoghue. Image source: The Idle Woman

Jorge Luis Borges' 1939 story "Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote" brilliantly illustrates the impossibility of writing historical fiction without anachronism. After a vast number of rough drafts and "thousands of manuscript pages" Pierre Menard produces a fraction of Cervantes' Don Quixote: "the ninth and thirty-eighth chapters of Part One, and a fragment of the twenty-second chapter." In the translation of Anthony Bonner,

He did not want to compose another Don Quixote—which would be so easy—but the Don Quixote. It is unnecessary to add that his aim was never to produce a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable ambition was to produce pages which would coincide—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes. . .

'To compose Don Quixote at the beginning of the seventeenth century was a reasonable, necessary and perhaps inevitable undertaking; at the beginning of the twentieth century it is almost impossible. It is not in vain that three hundred years have passed, charged with the most complex happenings—among them, to mention only one, that same Don Quixote'. . .The text of Cervantes and that of Menard are verbally identical, but the second is infinitely richer. [1]

As Borges' droll thought-experiment demonstrates, a present-day novel set in the past, even if it is impeccably accurate, is inflected anachronistically with both the author's and reader's knowledge of the intervening history, and with our experience of vastly different cultures (both material and non-material), sensibilities and conventions. When such a novel introduces inaccuracies of diction or fact, the sense of falsity is heightened.

So with the understanding that anachronism in the genre is unavoidable (but also has degrees), below I comment on three historical novels. Each of the three novels has a female protagonist, who could be described respectively by the three adjectives in Lady Caroline Lamb's description of Lord Byron: "mad, bad, and dangerous to know."

Mad: Margaret Cavendish of Margaret the First

Cover of Margaret the First by Danielle Dutton, Catapult, 2016. Image source: Catapult Books

. . .I am not covetous, but as ambitious as ever any of my sex was, is, or can be; which is the cause, that though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second; yet, I will endeavour to be, Margaret the First: and, though I have neither power, time nor occasion, to conquer the world as Alexander and Caesar did; yet, rather than not to be mistress of one, since Fortune and the Fates would give me none, I have made a world of my own. . .

—Margaret Cavendish, "To The Reader," in The Description of a New World,
called The Blazing World (1666) [2]

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, lived during a time of cataclysmic social upheaval. As Margaret Lucas, a maid of honor to Queen Henrietta Maria during the English Civil War, at age 21 in 1644 she went with the queen into French exile. There Margaret met and married William Cavendish, Marquess (later Duke) of Newcastle-on-Tyne; he was a recently widowed Royalist general and 30 years her senior.  

Seven years into their marriage Margaret began to write and publish books under her own name, which was highly unusual for the time. What was also quite unusual was that her writing had the full support and financial backing of her husband. In his prefatory poem to The Blazing World, after comparing her to Columbus, who "only discovered" a new world, he wrote of his wife, "But your creating Fancy, thought it fit / To make your World of Nothing, but pure Wit." Ultimately Margaret produced a dozen volumes of poetry, plays, romances, utopian fantasies, philosophical essays, biography and autobiography.

After the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 Margaret became a well-known figure in London, and was the first woman to attend a meeting of the Royal Society. Crowds would gather at her public appearances; she was nicknamed "Mad Madge" for her eccentricities in dress, behavior, and thought. Samuel Pepys described her in his diary as "a mad, conceited, ridiculous woman," and Dorothy Osborne wrote in a letter to Sir William Temple that "there are many soberer people in Bedlam." In the 20th century, Virginia Woolf wrote of her that "there is something noble and Quixotic and high-spirited, as well as crack-brained and bird-witted, about her." [3] 

Of course, women have always been under greater pressure to conform to social expectations, with contempt and ridicule among the milder punishments for overstepping their bounds. As Kate Lilley writes in her introduction to The Blazing World and Other Writings, "the number of substantial, elaborately produced books she wrote and published under her own name and at considerable expense, in a career spanning twenty years, constituted her most radical and deliberate infringement of contemporary proprieties." [4]

"Margaret Daughter to Thos. Lucas Esqr. of Essex 2d. wife to Wm. Duke of Newcastle," portrait by Peter Lely, 1665. Image source: Wikimedia Commons

Danielle Dutton's slim novel Margaret the First recounts Margaret's story from her own perspective. She is portrayed as prefiguring our time in multiple ways: a proto-feminist writer of fantasy fiction unconstrained by traditional gender expectations (Cavendish described The Blazing World as "hermaphroditic" and on occasion wore men's clothes, like the disguised character "Travellia" in her novella "Assaulted and Pursued Chastity" (1656)). The novel does not attempt to delve deeply into Margaret's psychology, but portrays her largely through her extravagant self-presentation.

To give the flavor of the book, here is Margaret relating her reception among the Dutch (she and her husband moved to Antwerp in 1648):

To my growing delight, I was a hit, my mind, I wrote, a "swarm of bees." That August I cast off my years of mourning, sent maids scurrying down the halls with stacks of black gowns in their arms. To the final parties of the season I wore a rainbow of new dresses I'd had made—one bright as a fiery beam, one as green as leaves. "After all," I told my husband, "dressing is the poetry of women." He heartily agreed. Had I heard it somewhere? I couldn't say. I took to wearing feathered hats like ladies in the streets. (p. 56)

This scene occurs in August 1649. However, Margaret would have been unlikely to don colorful, festive dresses little more than six months after the trial and execution of Charles I, and only five months after her husband's estates had been confiscated. 

By the way, the word "hit" employed to mean "a popular success" dates from the early 19th century, not the mid-17th. Danielle Dutton, doubtless, does not care. Her project is to bring Margaret into our time, rather than transport the reader into hers—to recuperate "Mad Madge" as a genderqueer literary pioneer. But I confess that I find Margaret's voice and thoughts as expressed in her writing to be far more strange and wonderful than Dutton's imagined version of her.

Bad: Mary Saunders of Slammerkin

Cover of Slammerkin by Emma Donoghue, Virago, 2000. Image source: Delphine Woods

In her 2001 New York Times review of Slammerkin, Laura Jamison wrote that it was "a heady, colorful romp of a novel." Um, no. A "colorful romp" makes it sound like a female version of Tom Jones; instead Slammerkin is more like a version of William Hogarth's "The Harlot's Progress" from the perspective of its doomed heroine Moll Hackabout.

Donoghue, a scholar of literature and sexuality, knows her historical setting (her Passions Between Women and Inseparable were two of my favorite books of 2022), and the novel is based on an actual 1764 trial. The title is an 18th-century term with a double meaning, both "a loose gown" and "a slovenly [with the additional implication of unchaste] woman." But Donoghue wears her learning lightly. She writes with all the fierce energy of her 14-year-old protagonist's yearnings, and brings both 18th-century London and her flawed heroine to vivid, visceral life.

Was it any wonder, then, that she preferred to dawdle away the last of the afternoon at the Dials, where seven streets thrust away in seven different directions, and there were stalls heaped with silks, and live carp butting in barrels, and gulls cackling overhead, and the peddler with his coats lined with laces and ribbons of colours Mary could taste on her tongue: yellow like butter, ink black, and the blue of fire? Where boys half her size smoked long pipes and spat black on the cobbles, and sparrows bickered over fragments of piecrust? Where Mary couldn't hear her own breath over the thump of feet and the clatter of carts and the church bells, postmen's bells, fiddles and tambourines, and the rival bawls of vendors and mongers of lavender and watercress and curds-and-whey and all the things there were in the world? What d'ye lack, what d'ye lack? (p.8)

It's the allurements of the Seven Dials that are Mary's downfall: as she tries to purchase a red ribbon so that she can have something pretty in her life, the seller demands a kiss in exchange, and then backs her against a wall and rapes her. She becomes pregnant, and is thrown out of her house by her mother. She returns to the Seven Dials, but this time to become one of the girls walking the streets and luring cullies to survive. An (only slightly) older and (much) more experienced prostitute, Doll Higgins, shows her the ropes, and a fierce friendship develops.

Expelled from her family, Mary rejects them in turn:

Was that hard-hearted? Well, so what if it was. She'd been through enough to harden anyone. It was none of her choosing; all she'd done was clung on to her life like a spar from a shipwreck. Better to be hardened than crushed to nothing. (p. 84)

The simile of the shipwreck is perhaps a touch literary for the unspoken thought of the now 15-year-old Mary, but Donoghue makes few such missteps.

Although Doll and Mary watch out for each other, appalling things befall the pair, and soon Mary is forced to flee London and a murderous pimp. Although she reinvents herself in a remote town, finding work as a maid and seamstress, her past inevitably catches up with her.

The novel depicts the crushing social and economic forces and sexual double standards that ruled women's lives in the Georgian era. As a maid or a seamstress, Mary Saunders faces a life of unremitting toil. The 19th-century sociologist and reformer Harriet Martineau wrote that "prostitution is fed by constant accession from starved or overwearied dressmakers"; in seeking a better life Mary is trapped by her class and her gender. [5] 

Donoghue portrays Mary in all her complexity. She shows us that Mary is not only a victim; she has agency and makes choices, even if many of them are unwise, or bring harm to herself or others. Be forewarned: Mary's world, and her fate, are hard and grim.

Dangerous to know: Elizabeth Cree of The Trial of Elizabeth Cree

Cover of The Trial of Elizabeth Cree by Peter Ackroyd. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 1995. Image source: Internet Archive

Alfred Hitchcock's Stage Fright (1950) notoriously includes a flashback, narrated by one of the characters, that turns out to be false. Some viewers feel that the sequence violates an unwritten law of cinema: if we see something onscreen, it must actually happen in the world of the characters. However, Hitchcock signals from the opening credits, in which a stage curtain rises on a view of modern-day London, that the distinction between role-playing and real life is itself illusory. The film is also set in the world of the theater, and the two main characters are a famous actress (played by the famous actress Marlene Dietrich) and a drama student (Jane Wyman). As critic Robin Wood describes the film, "Acting is a leading motif: both women act parts continually and habitually, so that there is constant doubt about the real nature of each." [6] Or, I would say, the film suggests that our "real nature" is often malleable, unstable, and shaped by circumstances. Actors just visibly embody this truth that the rest of us strive to conceal.

Literature has a much longer tradition of unreliable narrators, of course. And particularly when a narrator (or even a character) is an actor—a professional dissembler—the reader must be on guard: disguises, false identities, and falsehoods are sure to follow.

Peter Ackroyd is a biographer (Dickens, 1990) and historian (London: The Biography, 2000) as well as a novelist. The Trial of Elizabeth Cree (to give the novel its U.S. title [7]) mixes real figures from 19th century London, such as Karl Marx, George Gissing, and the cross-dressing music-hall star Dan Leno, with Ackroyd's inventions. These include the title character, who in 1881 is hanged for killing her husband Jack by poisoning him with arsenic—not a spoiler, as the hanging occurs in the novel's first sentence—and a Jack-the-Ripper-like serial killer who mutilates his victims and creates gruesome tableaux with their body parts. There is a dual mystery in The Trial of Elizabeth Cree: who is the serial killer stalking the Limehouse district, and why does Elizabeth Cree murder her husband?

Be forewarned that Ackroyd describes the serial killer's murders, narrated in the first person, in grisly detail. There's a reason for the repellent relish with which the killings are described, as it obscures the identity of the murderer. But should you be tempted to read The Trial of Elizabeth Cree, I recommend skipping these sections unless you find entertainment in descriptions of torture and dismemberment.

For a historian, Ackroyd makes a number of surprising errors. Early in the novel, Jack Cree records in his diary a visit to the attic room of a prostitute:

There was a soiled mattress upon the floor, while on the walls she had pasted photographs of Walter Butt, George Byron and other idols of the stage. (p. 28)

This is an odd detail for Ackroyd to include. The entry is dated "September 6, 1880," but in 1880 it would be highly unlikely for an impoverished prostitute to own photographic prints. The photographs on the walls would had to have been cheap reproductions cut from newspapers or flyers. However, the mass reproduction of photographs on paper using the half-tone or rotogravure processes only became widespread after 1880; the first rotogravure newspaper supplements were published in the 1910s. [8]

It's possible that these could be photographic cartes de visite or cabinet cards bought at a photographer's or stationer's, which could feature actors or other public figures; in the Victorian era middle-class families collected these cards and preserved them in albums.

Dan Leno in female costume by William Davey, early 1900s, published by J. Beagles & Co. Image source: National Portrait Gallery London NPG Ax160245

However, such cards would seem to be beyond the means of a street prostitute: a Victorian advertisement lists the price of a cabinet card (about the size of a modern postcard) as three shillings, nearly a week's wage for a factory worker, while the smaller carte de visite cost a shilling and sixpence. It's very doubtful that an alcoholic prostitute barely surviving in a dismal garret and drinking her gin out of a chamberpot (!) would have such costly items pasted to the walls.

More egregious errors: "Dan Leno. . .was no longer the anxious young comic whom Lambeth Marsh Lizzie first met in 1864; now, sixteen years later, he was the established star of the halls who was billed as 'The Funniest Man on Earth'" (p. 168). Dan Leno might well have been anxious when onstage in 1864, as he was then only 3 years old; the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography gives his birth date as 20 December 1860. Elsewhere Lizzie describes him during their first rehearsals together as "only fifteen" (p. 108), but this is off by a dozen years. It's strange that Ackroyd, the author of histories of drag (Dressing Up, 1979) and the theater (The English Actor, 2023) should make such an easily-checked mistake.

Speaking of errors of chronology, in his diary entry for "September 26, 1880" Jack Cree records that "I went back to New Cross and listened to my wife playing a new tune by Charles Dibdin on the piano" (p. 192). A new tune by the prolific Dibdin would be remarkable indeed in 1880, since (according to the ODNB) he died in 1814; he was one of the favorite songwriters of Jane Austen.

"Let Bucks & let bloods to praise London a-gree / Oh the joys of the country my Jewel for me / Where sweet is the flow'r that the May bush adorns / And how charming to gather it but for the thorns. . ." Charles Dibdin's "The joys of the Country," from a manuscript of vocal music in Jane Austen's hand, copied c.1790–c.1805. Jane Austen House Museum CHWJA/19/3. Image source: Internet Archive

But my main objection to The Trial of Elizabeth Cree isn't the sloppiness of Ackroyd's evocation of its period. It's that Ackroyd exchanges the slow building of suspense (about how the lives of the serial killer and the other characters will intersect) for a surprise twist at the end (the killer isn't the character whom we've been led to believe). Perhaps this is Ackroyd's homage to Victorian melodramas and sensation novels, but I found it to be the final miscalculation in a disappointing book.

Ackroyd's novel has been adapted as a feature film, The Limehouse Golem (2016), starring no less an actor than Bill Nighy as the police inspector pursuing the murderer. It's also been adapted as an opera, Elizabeth Cree (2017), composed by Pulitzer-Prize-winning composer Kevin Puts with a libretto by Pulitzer- and Grammy-winning librettist Mark Campbell. Clearly, then, my negative reaction to the novel is not shared by everyone.

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1. Jorge Luis Borges. Fictions. Edited and with an Introduction by Anthony Kerrigan. Calder & Boyars, 1974, pp. 42–51. UK edition of Ficciones, Grove Press, 1962.
2. Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World and Other Writings, Penguin, 2004, p. 124.
   
3. Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Wednesday 18 March 1667 [Old Style] / 1668 [New Style]; https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1668/03/18/; Dorothy Osborne, in Kingsley Hart, ed, Letters from Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, Folio Society, n.d., p. 58; Virginia Woolf, "The Duchess of Newcastle" in The Common Reader: First Series, Harcourt, Brace & World, p. 78. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.31822010374056&seq=92
4. Kate Lilley, "Introduction," in Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World and Other Writings, p. xi.
   
5. Harriet Martineau quoted in Samantha B. Vance, Revisiting Dickens, "Prostitution in Victorian Britain - Presentation Page." https://revisitingdickens.wordpress.com/prostitution-victorian/
6. Robin Wood, Hitchcock's Films Revisited. Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 80.
7. The U.K. title is Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem. The U.S. title seems a distinct improvement.
8. Rachel A. Mustalish, "The development of photomechanical printing processes in the late 19th Century," Topics in Photographic Preservation, Volume 7, Article 10, 1997, pp. 73-87. https://resources.culturalheritage.org/pmgtopics/1997-volume-seven/07_10_Mustalish.html; Library of Congress, "The Rotogravure Process," in Newspaper Pictorials: World War I Rotogravures, 1914 to 1919. https://www.loc.gov/collections/world-war-i-rotogravures/articles-and-essays/the-rotogravure-process/. By the way, "Walter Butt" and "George Byron" seem to be Ackroyd's inventions; I've been unable to trace any performers of those names in the 1870s.