Novelists From England

"Paddington had a very persistent stare when he cared to use it. It was a very powerful stare. One which his Aunt Lucy had taught him and which he kept for special occasions."

"Hope Mirrlees's 1926 novel Lud-in-the-Mist, about the scandalous banishment of the Faerie folk by law-abiding conventional inhabitants of the town Lud-in-the-Mist, is sometimes characterized as "" in the manner of J.R.R. Tolkien's later, but more celebrated, work, The Hobbit (1937), for its "hobbit-ish" sounding names and settings. .... Perhaps, too, it is often assumed to lean that way because Mirrlees also coincidentally penned another obscure-but-brilliant text, Paris: A Poem (1919), published by Virginia Woolf's , written in what scholars consider a "" style. ... But, "high" can sometimes be too easy a critical reach, and, in the case of Lud-in-the-Mist, it's decidedly misleading."

"Paddington…has become a part of the folk-lore of childhood, not because he appears in a great or even a particularly good book, but because there is something in his personality which lodges permanently in the imagination."

"There aren't many of us left where I come from." "And where is that?" asked Mrs. Brown. The bear looked round carefully before replying. "Darkest Peru."

"The bear bent down to do up its case again. As he did so, Mrs. Brown caught a glimpse of the writing on the label. It said, simply, PLEASE LOOK AFTER THIS BEAR. THANK YOU."

"On the one hand, Surtees was a man of the eighteenth century—hence Thackeray's understanding of him; on the other, he was an amateur who dealt almost entirely with background figures, the great Jorrocks excepted. He was deeply knowing about English sporting life, the squirearchy and the law, but he did not construct the melodramas and elaborate plots of the other Victorian novelists, nor did he issue their moralisings. He often excelled them in the recording of ordinary speech and day-to-day incident. He is fresher than the masters, but he is artless. A good deal of his humour is the humour of shrewd sayings which, later on, we find in Kipling. His original contribution is in the field of invective. Surtees has a truly Elizabethan power of denunciation."

"Mr. Surtees, a well-known country gentleman, who was passionately devoted to the healthy sport of fox-hunting, and gifted with a keen spirit of manly humour of a Rabelaisian tinge."

"What is remarkable is the portrait not only of Sponge, but of the whole society in which he moves. It is an extraordinarily tough society, without any of that self-consciousness which belongs to Hemingway's heroes. The men are tough as a matter of course... Probably Surtees owes this success to that observant eye and candour of speech which is his chief force as a writer. He has no cant of any kind; he is sucking up to nobody and no class. He has his moral standards, but he is not trying to preach them; there is none of that sense that we have, even in Trollope, of the moralizer... He writes of what he sees and knows, with a reckless sincerity especially refreshing in these self-conscious times."

"Surtees was himself a country squire from the deep North... He had all the prejudices of his kind. He hated the fashionable places and people and smart society, he was suspicious of any kind of cleverness. He was prickly and hard, he had little compassion except for dogs and horses... Surtees prefers crooks to fools, because they are hard, because, as he thinks, they have no illusions... He has no self-consciousness, as man or writer. He is not afraid of anybody and rolls no logs. To read him is to escape for an hour or two from eye-wash and cant into an atmosphere as brisk as one of his hunting mornings, sharp and raw, highly unflattering to everything in sight, faces, hedges, trees, nibbled pasture and greasy plough, but thoroughly bracing."

"When at length they rose to go to bed, it struck each man as he followed his neighbour upstairs that the one before him walked very crookedly."

"How often those of us for whom Surtees, in blue or in red, is an old and often visited friend have seen a film of obstinate resistance cross the faces of people to whom we sought to introduce him! "Hm, Facey Romford and all that interminably tedious ‘huntin’' stuff"—so, in their wicked innocence, they say. Here and there, brave, curious spirits among them have been persuaded to go picknicking on the seaside downs in the sweltering summer of the year of the Comet and to attend Mr. O'Dicey's little dinner in Plain or Ringlets. They have travelled in a real coach (with no Dickensian romantic nonsense about it) through the opening chapter of Ask Mamma. With Mr. Sponge they have watched now vanished sights from the Jermyn Street of the cigar divans to Lord Scamperdale's lair. And they have been amused, in the company of Mr. Jorrocks, by more things than fox-hunting."

"He was a gentleman who was generally spoken of as having nothing a-year, paid quarterly."

"It is best to let the horse go his way, and pretend it is yours. There is no secret so close as that between a rider and his horse."

"No man rides harder than my Lord Scamperdale – always goes as if he had a spare neck in his pocket."

"At last he was driven to paw over a few score books in a panelled room called the library... He opened and thrust them back, one after another, till crude coloured illustrations of men on horses held his eye. He began at random and read a little, moved into the drawing-room with the volume, and settled down by the fire still reading. It was a foul world into which he peeped for the first time—a heavy-eating, hard-drinking hell of horse-copers, swindlers, matchmaking mothers, economically dependent virgins selling themselves blushingly for cash and lands: Jews, tradesmen, and an ill-considered spawn of Dickens-and-horsedung characters (I give Midmore's own criticism), but he read on, fascinated."

"'Untin' fills my thoughts by day, and many a good run I have in my sleep. Many a dig in the ribs I gives Mrs. J. when I think they're runnin' into the warmint…No man is fit to be called a sportsman wot doesn't kick his wife out of bed on a haverage once in three weeks!"

"It is an inwariable rule with the dealers to praise the bad points and let the good 'uns speak for themselves."

"I am a sportsman all over, and to the back-bone – 'Unting is all that's worth living for – all time is lost wot is not spent in 'unting – it is like the hair we breathe – if we have it not we die – it's the sport of kings, the image of war without its guilt, and only five-and-twenty per cent of its danger."

"Thus attired, with smiles assumed at the door, the young ladies entered the drawing-room in the full fervour of sisterly animosity."

"I am reading Ask Mamma by Surtees... Despite my hatred of blood sports, I find him highly amusing (and he always lets the hares escape, have you noticed?)."

"Better be killed than frightened to death."

"Life would be very pleasant if it were not for its enjoyments."

"Women never look so well as when one comes in wet and dirty from hunting."

"Mr. Jorrocks then called upon the company in succession for a toast, a song, or a sentiment. Nimrod gave, "The Royal Staghounds"; Crane gave, "Champagne to our real friends, and real pain to our sham friends.""

"More people are flattered into virtue than bullied out of vice."

"[He] went as consul to Smyrna, where, perhaps, he first imbibed those loose principles which, in a subsequent publication, too infamous to be particularised, tarnished his reputation as an author…. In this situation [debtors’ prison], one of the booksellers who disgrace the profession, offered him a temporary relief for writing the work above alluded to, which brought a stigma on his name, which time has not obliterated, and which will be consigned to his memory whilst its poisonous contents are in circulation…. In conversation he was very pleasant and anecdotal, understanding most of the living languages, and speaking them all very fluently. As a writer, he shewed himself best in novels, song-writing, and the lighter species of authorship; but when he touched politics, he touched it like a torpedo, he was cold, benumbing, and soporific."

"The only infallible rule we know is, that the man who is always talking about being a gentleman never is one."

"Cleland, curious figure. Thought how ’twould have struck you some years ago…"

"[T]hat most licentious and inflaming book"

"There may be said to be three sorts of lawyers, able, unable, and lamentable."

"Found him in an old house in the Savoy, just by the waterside. A coarse, ugly old man for his servant. His room, filled with books in confusion and dust was like Dupont’s and old Lady Eglinton’s, at least old ideas were suggested to me as if I were in a castle. He was drinking tea and eating biscuits. I joined him. He had a rough cap like Rousseau, and his eyes were black and piercing.... He had resolutely persisted. There was something genteel in his manner amidst this oddity."

"All my foundation in virtue was no other than a total ignorance of vice."

"I imagined, indeed, that you would have been cloyed and tired with the uniformity of adventures and expressions, inseparable from a subject of this sort, whose bottom or groundwork being, in the nature of things, eternally one and the same, whatever variety of forms and modes the situations are susceptible of, there is no escaping a repetition of near the same images, the same figures, the same expressions."

"I feeling pretty sensibly that it was not going by the right door and knocking desperately at the wrong one, I told him of it: "Pooh," says he "my dear, any port in a storm.""

"The recent volume of Siegfried Sassoon's Diaries finds him making a doomed effort to convert his fellow-guests at Garsington: but he tells us elsewhere how ‘when I mentioned him to Arnold Bennett, he merely enquired “Can he ... really be perused?” Whereupon I went straight to a bookseller's near the Reform Club and ordered Sponge and Romford to be sent to him. A few days later I received a postcard. “Many thanks for putting me right on Surtees. Romford is the real thing.”’"

"Your Grace ordered a prosecution against the Printer and publisher of The Memoires of a Lady of Pleasure, the same Bookseller, on Griffiths (as I apprehend) has published within a few Days a book called Memoires of Fanny Hill, the Lewdest thing I ever saw.... I beg of your Grace to give proper orders to stop the progress of this vile Book which is an open insult upon Religion and good manners, and a reproach to the Honour of the Government and the Law of the Country."

"The supply of good fellows is by no means in excess of the demand. A man has only to hoist the flag of hospitality to insure a very considerable amount of custom."

"I wrote it [Fanny Hill: or, the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure] to prove that one could write so freely about a woman of the town without resorting to the the coarseness the School of Venus [L'Ecole des Filles], which had quite plain words. My printer and publisher certainly were deceived by my avoiding those rank words in the work, which are all that they judge obscenity by."

"I now wonder that my book could so long, escape the Vigilance of the Guardians of the Public Manners since nothing is truer than that more Clergymen bought it in proportion than any other distinction of men…. The Bishops can take no step to punishing the author that will not powerfully contribute to the notoriety of the book.... a Book I disdain to defend, and wish, from my Soul, buried and forgot."

"Truth! stark naked truth, is the word, and I will not so much as take the pains to bestow the strip of a gauze-wrapper on it."

"Our reputation has obviously preceded us. Don't worry shaking hands with a lesbian is perfectly safe. I have nothing against dykes Miss Cattrell, just wouldn't put my finger in one. The only disabilities that idiot has are both in his trousers. He's a prick and an arsehole."

"Did you know where the ice house was? No Well, what did you think the hillock was? A hillock probably."

"You've lived here for eight years, surely you must have explored the grounds. Do I look like someone who takes exercise? You're very slim. Well, I eat very little, drink neat spirits and smoke like a chimney. It does wonders for the figure, but leaves me gasping for breath halfway up the stairs."

"John Brunner, who writes one extraordinary book to ten into-one-end-of-the-typewriter-and-out-the-other, adventure by the yard commodities"

"The writers who influenced me most tended to be those who were the most prolific. John Brunner was very prolific-my favorites are Polymath, The Whole Man, and The Long Result..."

"If there is a hell, perhaps it consists in living up to all one’s promises."

"No faith can possibly suffice. It’s always undermined by ignorance."

"“I see what Gene is driving at. To dream of changing the whole universe in accordance with a set of local preconceptions!...Oh, it’s ridiculous!” “A missionary,” Gene repeated with a solemn nod. “By definition: a person who does without intending it more harm than good.”"

"One might as well claim that the tide which rubs pebbles smooth on a beach is doing the pebbles a service because being round is prettier than being jagged. It's of no concern to a pebble what shape it is. But it's very important to a person."

"If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing."