The 1700s, as a period, have inspired little in the way of fantasy. This was, after all, the Enlightenment, when reason ruled.
Popular culture lately has made some odd exceptions. The film “National Treasure” adapted the formula fromThe Da Vinci Code to the setting of the American Revolution. Series television remolded Washington Irving’s light-hearted tale of a post-Revolutionary hoax, “The Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow,” into a demon-driven spook opera.
One true fantasy classic of the 1700s, however, is Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and Then a Captain of Several Ships, by Jonathan Swift. Quick refresher:
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The Irish satirist sent his mariner through four adventures that served as social commentary, equally humorous and acerbic. In Lilliput, people stood six inches high, with all else to scale; nations fought disastrously over the proper method to break eggs. In Brobdingnag everything was grossly huge, twelve times the normal size; Gulliver found himself caught and caged. Next he saw Laputa, a flying island ruled by visionary intellectuals. The final voyage introduced a society of horses, rational, dignified, and morally exemplary, who ruled over a set of human-like beings with abysmal habits, low intelligence and no culture.
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Published in 1726, Swift’s tale created a sensation. More than two hundred years later, it inspired Terence Hanbury (T.H.) White to invent Mistress Masham’s Repose.
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Maria was ten years old.
Simple first sentence. Yet as with Gulliver’s Travels, this is not a children’s book. And like that volume, it is more than entertainment.
It may still appeal to certain children: smitten with word-lust from infancy, willing to struggle through odd words, foreign phrases, obsoletisms not in the dictionary, farragoes of detail, and glancing references best appreciated by historians.
Indeed, this is no tome for Twitter-lovers. It makes far denser going than the author’s famous Arthurian tetralogy, The Once and Future King (which engendered both the musical “Camelot” and a Disney animated feature).
That said, the tale has fascination. White’s prose – the swell and curve and rhythm – can satisfy like music. We may read right over the flourishes.
Unfortunately, she was an orphan, which made her difficulties more complicated than they were with other people. She lived in an enormous house in the wilds of Northamptonshire, which was about four times longer than Buckingham Palace, but was falling down….
...It had been built by one of her ducal ancestors who had been a friend of the poet Pope’s, and it was surrounded by Vistas, Obelisks, Pyramids, Columns, Temples, Rotundas, and Palladian Bridges, which had been built in honor of General Wolfe, Admiral Byng, the Princess Amelia, and others of the same kidney. Maria’s parents had made a desperate attempt to keep the grounds in order. They had been killed in an accident, however, and after that there had been no money left...and nobody could be persuaded to buy the place for a school nor for a hospital...It is literally true that [the] cook had a bicycle in the basement corridor, which she used to ride along the corridor, when she had to answer the bell....
The house had 365 windows, all broken but six, 52 state bedrooms, and 12 company rooms. It was called Malplaquet.
White based his Malplaquet, with great exactness, on Blenheim Palace, ancestral seat of the Churchills, near Oxford. This stately home (in fact meticulously kept) is open to the public.1
The Repose in the title refers to an island in a lake on the estate. At Blenheim today the lake exists, the island exists. White, on the island, placed an ornamental temple with a cupola.
One fine day in June, our heroine Maria, playing pirate, sets out in a leaky rowboat to explore it.
The island on which she found herself was about the size of a tennis court. It had been carried there on boats, when the first duke had been beautifying his park, and it had risen from the water two hundred years before, an artificial emerald of green grass, crowned by the white dome of its cupola. There, perhaps, the Mistress Hill who was to become Mistress Masham – or even Mistress Morley herself, had sat in silks and laces, in the summer weather, drinking tay. If Mistress Morley had been there, she probably enjoyed a dash of brandy in the smoaking Tyde.
“Tay”? That must be tea. But “smoaking Tyde?” Who are the ladies? Most of us can’t guess. We sense the atmosphere; that’s good enough.2
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“But now the island was tangled with every kind of briar...
As for what Maria finds there: what if Gulliver’s Travels was factual?
Suppose that one of his rescuers secretly sailed back to Lilliput. Imagine this individual captured several people, with a few sheep and cattle. Suppose he brought them back to England, where he traveled about exhibiting them for money. Imagine that as he crossed the Malplaquet grounds one evening, his captives escaped. Suppose for two hundred years, these six-inch people survived on the estate, keeping hidden, resourcefully adapting, preserving their language and all that they could of their 18th-Century traditions.
One June day, their peace and security shatters when, on the temple steps, Maria finds a baby – cradled in a walnut shell.
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The People, as they call themselves, face a terrible problem. So does Maria, after her first impulsive actions.
How should she treat her find of several hundred miniature people, living their lives in the ruined temple and surroundings? She must keep their secret, she concludes. But can the lonely child persuade these people to be friends? Can she help them in their difficult lives? Can she keep her pledge to protect them? Will she cause their undoing through her own ignorance, immaturity, or ill-luck?
Among the risks, she must evade two deliciously hate-able villains: her cruel, prying governess and a scheming vicar, who hold a secret of their own. In counterpoise, she enjoys two friends: one of them Cook, sole servant on the estate, the other a reclusive Professor in a cottage on the grounds.
He was a failure, but he did his best to hide it. One of his failings was that he could scarcely write, except in twelfth-century hand, in Latin, with abbreviations. Another was that, though his cottage was crammed with books, he seldom had anything to eat....
“[A]s he had been verifying quotations and things of that sort since the turn of the century, and he was one of those unfortunate people who leave the book open at the quotation in some accessible place, all the window-ledges, oven-shelves, mantelpieces and other flat surfaces were stocked with verified quotations, which had long been forgotten. He had left a narrow path to each door. But the steps of the stairs had proved to be tempting flat surfaces, so it was difficult for the poor fellow to climb to bed, and the bed itself would have been denied to him, except that it was fortunately a double one, and he was able to squeeze in somehow between Gesner and the eleven tomes of Aldovandrus, counting the extra one on Monsters.
The Professor daydreams, at one point, of purchasing an aircraft carrier with the profits from a translation of Solinus he is preparing. Wanting a penny fishhook, he briefly considers selling “one of his first-folio Shakespeares, to get the money.”
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All the same, the Professor is Maria’s best resource in any serious dilemma. During one painful scene, she brings him a captured Lilliputian woman, who she complains has spurned her early overtures.
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“She won’t eat.”
“No?”
“She won’t do anything....She isn’t any fun.”
He stuffed his beard in his mouth, rolled his eyes, and glared. Then he unrolled them, liberated the whiskers, and looked haughtily upon his visitor.
“‘Why should she be fun?
“‘Why should she do anything?
“Why should she eat?
“Is she yours?”
The Professor rightly guesses the origin of the People. He also owns a dictionary of their language. With his counsel Maria changes her attitude, releases the captive, and contrives to establish diplomatic relations.
The schoolmaster of the People becomes her second teacher. Maria learns the full story of their arrival, their “Oeconomy,” their methods for surviving in a world where a fox is “about as big as the National Gallery...and could easily pounce across Trafalgar Square,” their customs and their culture. The People live mostly at night. They preserve a set of 18th-Century relics from their captivity. They use rats for horses, breed their miniature sheep and cattle, and have built a miniature 18th-Century frigate, for lake fishing.
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This contact is delightful, but unsafe. Under a floorboard, the governess finds some gifts from the People to Maria. She thinks these come from a secret hoard that might contain more treasures. She and the vicar spy on Maria, follow her, and finally lock her up to make her talk.
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The People try to help. Alas, they are exposed. Miss Brown and the Vicar now only want to catch the “minikins” and sell them for personal profit.
Events unroll with alarms and excursions, nighttime journeys through the sprawling estate, explorations in the dilapidated mansion, ramblings through the minds of characters, captures, near misses, escapes, and attempted murder.
The Professor slips secretly into the palace to hunt for Maria:
He searched the Gothick Billiard Room....He searched the Orangery....He searched the Menagerie, where the Earl of Chesterfield had once been locked by mistake for two days as a monkey....
He...searched the State Room, in which Queen Victoria had held the only Drawing Room ever held outside a royal castle, and in it there was the very chair in which she had sat, with a glass lid over the seat, to preserve the royal imprint.
The Professor lifted the lid and sat down himself, for he was beginning to feel tired....
He tried the stables for 144 horses, the kennels for 144 hounds, the attics for 144 abigails or footmen, and the Card Room, where Charles James Fox had once lost £144,000 in a single night, wearing scarlet heels to his shoes and blue powder on his wig.
The People send the cavalry:
Meanwhile...Miss Brown suddenly shrieked with vexation, and clapped her hand to one ankle....She was still hopping when the Vicar put his feet in a trap made by tying two bunches of grass together, and fell on his nose.
...[T]hey blundered up the midnight avenue under the cobalt light of stars, wrangling about Maria. The miniature ratmen were charging unseen, and thrusting with their needles, which the villains mistook for thorns. The glint of small accoutrements flickered in the long grass. Every now and then the giants fell over a grass trap. Every now and then they hopped about. Sometimes they paused to upbraid each other....
Shortsighted badgers, at the din, faded their starlit streak of snout into a deeper darkness. Foxes, with concave eyelights, peered at them and pondered....
The six-inch schoolmaster struggles to the Malplaquet kitchen, where Cook dozes, seeking her help with 18th-Century politesse:
“Madam, if you will pray compose yourself so soon as may be Convenient, I have the Honor to present myself upon Business of a most pressing Urgency.”
...“A fairy!”...Cook took her scissors out of the workbox and lifted the tallow candle.
“I bid you begone,” said she, “by the Power of Iron and by the Might of Fire, forever and ever, by Christopher Columbus, and Whatsobe, Amen....Ladybird, Ladybird, fly away home. Your house is on fire….”
“What the devil,” screamed the Schoolmaster, who had, after all, been tried rather high..... “Z—ds! Damn the Ladybird! Plague on’t, Madam, can’t you understand plain English? We wish you to unbolt the Door!”
In fear for Maria’s life, the Professor turns to a local magistrate. This dignitary gives small credence to the learned man but — in a bravura scene that always cracks me up -- adheres to his own maxim, “Always believe a horse or a hound.”
Meanwhile all the parts of Gulliver’s Travels get woven into the narrative somehow.
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Six years after Mistress Masham’s Repose, Mary Beth Norton’s The Borrowers appeared, describing similar-scale miniature people and their struggles to survive in an outsize environment. Unlike White, Norton made her tiny men and women cohabitants in ordinary human lodgings, cobbling a living out of unconsidered trifles.
Disney Studios once started to plan an animated feature of Mistress Masham’s Repose. Sketches are online.
Doll-sized people, with a child, pitted against a pair of memorable villains might seem a natural for Disney. But the cartoonist’s whimsical versions of the Lilliputian characters in particular seem sorely out of key with the original, where the People may be small, but they are rarely silly.
Maria – rambunctious, bespectacled, clad in pauper’s outfits by her guardians – hardly fits the profile of a Disney princess. On the contrary, she is forced to wrestle with repeated impulses to play Queen.
Indeed, White’s central theme is the pervasive danger -- and simple wrongness -- of unchecked dictatorial power in any form.
The tacit commentary on racism and imperialism will be clear to adult readers.
That Disney dropped the idea may be just as well. A better thought for someone might be an annotated version: coffee-table format, spangled with glosses, packed with entertaining notes, and illuminated by useful pictures, alongside the pen-and-ink drawings of the original. Some such scholarly frame would suit the story to a T.
Terence Hanbury White (1906-1964) was a gifted and highly prolific writer, educated at Cheltenham College and at Queens College, Cambridge. Other works of his include memoirs, novels, a translation of a medieval bestiary, and a non-fiction celebration of the later 1700s titled The Age of Scandal. His personal life was evidently a troubled one. White’s current biographical entry in Wikipedia, IMO, scarcely does justice to him, and none at all to Mistress Masham’s Repose.
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Footnotes:
1Blenheim Palace was built between 1705 and 1722 by the First Duke of Marlborough, who named it for his best-known victory in the War of the Spanish Succession. The Battle of Malplaquet, another of the First Duke’s victories, was famously a Pyrrhic one.
(Having grown up with White’s book, and studied its end-paper maps without any clue to this, I was euphoric on visiting Blenheim to discover Malplaquet spread out before us in glorious reality.)
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2Thanks to the Net, a trifling effort now reveals that “Mistress Morley” was a pseudonym used by the Duchess of Marlborough in private correspondence with Queen Anne. Abigail Hill, later Mistress Masham, was a relative of hers who became another royal favorite. White scatters details like this everywhere. He rarely chooses to clarify, and never to patronize, with explanations.
Oh, “smoaking Tyde”? As a child I would stop to puzzle over that, supposing it meant something like the twilight. For “Tyde,” indeed, the OED sends us to “tide,” which could have the obsolete meaning of “hour,” while “smoaking” directs us to “smoking,” which can mean “steaming,” and so the phrase might suggest the evening hour when mist rises from the water. But behold, thank you Google, this is WRONG WRONG WRONG. The tide is liquid and the steam is hot. White borrowed his phrase directly from Alexander Pope’s mock-epic “The Rape of the Lock,” in a couplet where coffee is poured:
From silver spouts the grateful Liquors glide,
While China’s Earth receives the smoaking Tyde.
To translate, then, White means that the Duchess of Marlborough may have added a dash of brandy to her cup.
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