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Julie Grossman
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This new series addresses how adaptation functions as a principal mode of text production in visual culture. What makes the series distinctive is its focus on visual culture as both targets and sources for adaptations, and a vision to include media forms beyond flm and television such as videogames, mobile applications, interactive fction and flm, print and nonprint media, and the avant-garde. As such, the series will contribute to an expansive understanding of adaptation as a central, but only one, form of a larger phenomenon within visual culture. Adaptations are texts that are not singular but complexly multiple, connecting them to other pervasive plural forms: sequels, series, genres, trilogies, authorial oeuvres, appropriations, remakes, reboots, cycles and franchises. This series especially welcomes studies that, in some form, treat the connection between adaptation and these other forms of multiplicity. We also welcome proposals that focus on aspects of theory that are relevant to the importance of adaptation as connected to various forms of visual culture.
Advisory Board:
Sarah Cardwell, University of Kent, UK
Deborah Cartmell, De Montfort University, UK
Timothy Corrigan, University of Pennsylvania, US
Lars Ellestrom, Linnaeus University, Sweden
Kamilla Elliott, Lancaster University, UK
Christine Geraghty, University of Glasgow, UK
Helen Hanson, University of Exeter, UK
Linda Hutcheon, University of Toronto, Canada
Glenn Jellenik, University of Central Arkansas, US
Thomas Leitch, University of Delaware, US
Brian McFarlane, Monash University, Australia
Simone Murray, Monash University, Australia
James Naremore, Indiana University, US
Kate Newell, Savannah College of Art and Design, US
Laurence Raw, Baskent University, Turkey
Robert Stam, New York University, US
Constantine Verevis, Monash University, Australia
Imelda Whelehan, University of Tasmania, Australia
Shannon Wells-Lassagne, Universite de Bretagne Sud, France
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14654
Julie Grossman · R. Barton Palmer Editors
Adaptation in Visual Culture
Images, Texts, and Their Multiple Worlds
Series Flagship Volume
Editors Julie Grossman
Le
Moyne College
Syracuse, NY, USA
R. Barton Palmer
Clemson University
Clemson, SC, USA
Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture
ISBN 978-3-319-58579-6 ISBN 978-3-319-58580-2 (eBook)
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifcally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microflms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifc statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affliations.
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P reface
Adaptation in Visual Culture: Images, Texts, and Their Multiple Worlds was conceived as a fagship volume for Palgrave Macmillan’s Adaptation and Visual Culture book series, a project begun in 2015 to provide a forum for exploring new ways of thinking about adaptation and visual cultures. In the two years since the series was launched, we have commissioned fourteen titles, all of which push textual boundaries beyond familiar lines. Along the way, we also edited a special double issue of the journal South Atlantic Review on new directions in adaptation studies, several of whose essays are reworked and included in this collection. Adaptation in Visual Culture showcases the thinking of various leading scholars who address key theoretical, historical, and contextual issues raised by the overall remit of the series.
All of the essays in this volume question conventional habits of reading adaptations in one sense or another, as in Kamilla Elliott’s contestation of the notion of “unflmable books.” Following the lead of adaptation scholars less interested these days in regulating judgments on discrete sources and texts, the chapters in Adaptation in Visual Culture eschew one-off analyses of well-trodden textual or flmic ground. They wish to spread the boundaries of how we approach textuality, adaptation, and visual culture, assuming a generative model of adaptation that seeks to understand how texts and images extend, fll in, reread, or reconceive other works in new ways. This book understands, along with Palmer (drawing on Genette), that “all texts are fragments in the sense that they await gestures of continuation that challenge the mirage
of self-containment in which they are mistakenly thought to naturally endure” (p. 76). Indeed, our own recent work has tried to articulate shifts in understanding the many intertextual and extratextual worlds of adaptations—in, for example, the notions of “elasTEXTity,” which imagines sources and adaptations as reaching beyond themselves as part of an expansive network of texts (Grossman 2015) and contexts, and “multiplicities,” how adaptations function within the larger textual mode of multiplicity, which is a key feature in its various forms for all visual media production (Klein and Palmer 2016).
In this volume, scholars explore multiple relations among texts and images in various contexts, including socio-economic histories in the repeated sequeling of Wall Street disasters (Boozer); the examination of multiple forms of modernism when we see the appropriation of Western avant-garde artistic practices into the Japanese moga (“modern girl”) (Pettey); or the mashup of sources in the television series Dickensian drawn not just from texts but from informing visual cultures (Cardwell). The essays unfx staid oppositions between texts and flms, or the verbal and the visual, as Christine Geraghty explores in her chapter on reworkings of Tender is the Night. Understanding textuality as unfxed and multidirectional, the essays in this book articulate some future paths for the feld, imagining adaptations themselves as proleptic rather than retrospective (“the task of the adaptation critic,” says Glenn Jellenik, is to “process adaptations forward, according to their contextual cultural engagements, not backward according to their source” [40]). With its lit doorway and a ladder leading out of the image, the shot from The Last Tycoon (discussed in Chap. 5) on the book’s cover may be said to represent these paths. If Mark Osteen’s essay discovers an adaptive thread that links Lewis Carroll’s Alice books to Hitchcock, Deborah Cartmell fnds a “curiouser” dynamic in play in the case of female Hollywood stars of the 1930s playing historical queens. Reordering teleologies, Cartmell shows how publicity surrounding Queen Christina (directed by Rouben Mamoulian 1933), The Scarlet Empress (Josef von Sternberg 1934), Mary of Scotland (John Ford 1936) and Marie Antoinette (Van Dyke 1938) “adapt the historical queens to the stars” (144). Constantine Verevis demonstrates the signifcance of novelizations as hybrid forms of adaptations and serialization that challenge conventional sequencing and ideas surrounding the origins of adaptations. Far from fxed entities, the texts and adaptations treated in this volume are dynamic adaptive worlds, such as the extra-televisual
reading and rewriting practices associated with Downton Abbey or, in the FX television series Fargo, a richly constructed sublimation of the works of the Coen brothers, mediated by urban legend and an art flm (Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter) that expands the fctional universe of “Fargo.”
It may seem to many scholars working in the felds of literature, flm, and cultural studies that everything these days is adaptation. Laurence Raw might offer that this is because “adaptation, c’est moi,” his own essay wishing to expand adaptation studies to include the “acadapter,” whose affect in producing fan fction becomes a crucial element of engaging textual worlds. Following the groundbreaking work done by Robert Stam, Linda Hutcheon, James Naremore and others, we see the possibilities for creative and critical engagement with the “gaps” Thomas Leitch identifes as characteristic of all texts. Drawing on Wolfgang Iser, Leitch argues in his essay that these gaps help us to understand why audiences are drawn to textual reworkings, since it is the omissions that audiences revel in, wonder about, and seek to fll or see flled. “[Minding]” such gaps, or, indeed, mining these gaps, is an activity that seems more and more to beckon not just scholars, but readers, viewers, audiences, and writers and artists generally, allowing us opportunities to take up multiple textual worlds with a rich and allusive understanding of their art, their contexts, and their continuities.
Syracuse, USA Clemson, USA
Julie Grossman
R. Barton Palmer
Dissolving Media Boundaries: The Interaction of Literature, Film, and Television in Tender
e ditors and c ontributors
About the Editors
Julie Grossman is professor of English and Communication and Film Studies at Le Moyne College. She has published numerous essays on flm and literature in scholarly journals and edited collections. Her books include Rethinking the Femme Fatale in Film Noir (Palgrave Macmillan 2009, 2012), Literature, Film, and Their Hideous Progeny (Palgrave Macmillan 2015), and Ida Lupino, Director: Her Art and Resilience in Times of Transition (co-authored with Therese Grisham, Rutgers University Press 2017). She is currently at work on a co-authored twovolume project (with R. Barton Palmer) on performance in Hollywood flm noir (forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press).
R. Barton Palmer is Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature and Director of the World Cinema program at Clemson University. Palmer is the author or editor of more than thirty books on various aspects of flm authorship, history, and theory. These include most recently: Shot on Location: Postwar Hollywood’s Exploration of Real Place; with Amanda Ann Klein, eds., Cycles, Sequels, Spin-Offs, Remakes, and Reboots: Multiplicities in Film and Television; and, with Marc Conner, eds., Screening Modern Irish Fiction and Drama.
Contributors
Jack Boozer has just retired as professor of flm studies and screenwriting from the Department of Communication at Georgia State University. He continues to publish many essays on flm, including two this year and the earlier one on the original “Wall Street: The Commodifcation of Perception” (Journal of Popular Film and Television, 17/3, 1989), and two books with the University of Texas Press: Career Movies: American Business and the Success Mystique (2002) and an edited collection: Authorship in Film Adaptation (2008).
Sarah Cardwell is Honorary Fellow in the School of Arts, University of Kent, England. She is the author of Adaptation Revisited (MUP 2002) and Andrew Davies (MUP 2005), as well as numerous articles and papers on flm and television aesthetics, literary adaptation, contemporary British literature, and British cinema and television. She is a founding co-editor of The Television Series (MUP), Book Reviews editor for Critical Studies in Television, and on the advisory board for the new series Adaptation and Visual Culture (Palgrave Macmillan).
Deborah Cartmell is Professor of English and Director of the Centre for Adaptations at De Montfort University. She is founding editor of Adaptation (Oxford University Press) and Shakespeare (Routledge). Her most recent monograph is Adaptations in the Sound Era: 1927–37 (Bloomsbury 2015).
Kamilla Elliott is Professor of Literature and Media in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University. Her principal teaching and research interests lie in British literature of the long nineteenth century and literature’s relations with other media generally. Author of Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (Cambridge University Press 2003) and Portraiture and British Gothic Fiction: The Rise of Picture Identifcation, 1764–1835 (Johns Hopkins University Press 2012), she is currently working on sequels to both, provisionally titled, Rethinking the Adaptation/Theorization Debate and British Literature and the Rise of Picture Identifcation, 1836–1918.
Christine Geraghty is Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Glasgow. Her work on adaptations includes Now a Major Motion Picture: Film Adaptations of Literature and Drama (Rowman & Littlefeld 2008) and Bleak House (Palgrave/BFI 2012) as well as essays on Atonement
(2007) and The Iron Lady (2011). She is on the editorial board of the Journal of British Cinema and Television and sits on the advisory boards of a number of journals, including Screen and Adaptation
Glenn Jellenik is an assistant professor in the English department at the University of Central Arkansas. His research explores adaptation, the productive intersections between mass culture and literature, and the cross pollination between texts and the cultures that produce and consume them. In addition to his essays on adaptation, he is the co-editor of Ten Years After Katrina: Critical Perspectives of the Storm’s Effect on American Culture and Identity (Lexington 2014), co-editor of the scholarly edition of Helen Maria Williams’s Peru and Peruvian Tales (Broadview 2014), and the volume advisor for the Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism cumulative index on George Colman the Younger (Gale 2015).
Thomas Leitch is Professor of English at the University of Delaware. His most recent books are Wikipedia U: Knowledge, Authority, and Liberal Education in the Digital Age and The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies. He is currently working on The History of American Literature on Film.
Mark Osteen is a professor of English and Director of the Center for the Humanities at Loyola University Maryland. In addition to his numerous articles on literature, flm, music, and disability, he is the author or editor of ten books, including, most recently, Nightmare Alley: Film Noir and the American Dream, and Hitchcock and Adaptation: On the Page and Screen. He is not, in fact, plagued by bad dreams.
Homer B. Pettey is Professor of Film and Comparative Literature at the University of Arizona. He serves as the General/Founding Editor for two book series with Edinburgh University Press, Global Film Studios and International Film Stars, and a new book series for Rutgers University Press, Global Film Directors. With R. Barton Palmer, he coedited two volumes on flm noir for Edinburgh University Press (2014): Film Noir and International Noir. Also with Palmer, he is co-editor of Hitchcock’s Moral Gaze for SUNY Press (2017) and another contracted volume, Rule Britannia!: British Biopics and National Identity, for SUNY Press (forthcoming 2017). He also has several chapters on cinema: Wyatt Earp biopics for Invented Lives, Imagined Communities: Biopics and American National Identity, co-edited by William Epstein
and R. Barton Palmer (SUNY Press 2016); on violence, the Production Code, and flm noir for David Schmidt’s Violence in American Popular Culture (Praeger 2015); and on class in Hitchcock’s American noirs for Jonathan Freedman’s Cambridge Companion to Alfred Hitchcock (2015). His current project concerns Emerging Film Genres in the Cold War Era for Edinburgh University Press (2017).
Laurence Raw teaches at the Department of English, Baskent University, Ankara, Turkey. His most recent book is Donald Wolft’s Shakespeare (2015). A frequent writer on adaptation issues, his blog (laurenceraw.blogspot.com) engages with recent debates.
Constantine Verevis is Associate Professor in Film and Television Studies at Monash University. He is author of Film Remakes (Edinburgh UP 2006), co-author of Australian Film Theory and Criticism, Vol. 1: Critical Positions (Intellect 2013), and co-editor of Second Takes: Critical Approaches to the Film Sequel (SUNY P 2010), Film Trilogies: New Critical Approaches (Palgrave-Macmillan 2012), Film Remakes, Adaptations and Fan Productions: Remake/Remodel (PalgraveMacmillan 2012), B Is for Bad Cinema (SUNY P 2014), US Independent Film after 1989: Possible Films (Edinburgh UP 2015), Transnational Television Remakes (Routledge 2016) and Transnational Film Remakes (Edinburgh UP 2017).
Nancy M. West is a Professor of English at The University of Missouri, where she specializes in Victorian Literature and Culture, Film Studies, Photographic History and Theory. She is the author of Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia (U of Virginia Press 2000) and Tabloid, Inc.: Crimes, News, Narratives (Ohio State UP 2010).
L ist of f igures
Film Novelization
Fig. 1 Richard Elman’s novelization of Paul Schrader’s screenplay for Taxi Driver (1976)
Star Adaptations: Queen Biopics of the 1930s
Fig. 1a, b Rankin, Ruth, ‘THEY’RE ALL QUEENING IT’ Photoplay, December, 1933, pp. 34–36. https://archive.org/stream/ photoplay4445chic#page/34/mode/2up/search/ queen+christina
Fig. 2 Baskette, Kirtley. ‘A Queen Comes Back.’ Photoplay, pp. 20–22, pp. 85–86. https://archive.org/stream/ photoplayvolume52chic#page/n25/mode/2up
Dissolving Media Boundaries: The Interaction of Literature, Film, and Television in Tender Is the Night (1985)
Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fargos
BBC/Showtime Tender is the Night (1985): Nicole looks down to Dick on the path. Frame enlargement
BBC/Showtime Tender is the Night (1985): Dick feels himself to be observed. Frame enlargement
Fig. 1 Kumiko and the snow. Frame enlargements
Fig. 2 True-story fctions at the beginning of Fargo, Season 2, Episode 9. Frame enlargements
11
140
150
183
183
198
203
Alfred in Wonderland: Hitchcock Through the Looking-Glass
Fig. 1 Alice in Wonderland illustration by John Tenniel: Alice and the Red Queen 220
Fig. 2 Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1040): The second Mrs. de Winter and her Red Queen. Frame Enlargement 221
Fig. 3 Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946): The giant cup seems to say “Drink Me.” Frame enlargement 223
Japanese Avant-garde and the Moga (“Modern Girl”)
Fig. 1 Two moga in day dresses
Fig. 2 Two moga in Chanel styles
Fig. 3 Moga in Chanel beach pajamas
246
247
248
PART I
Rethinking the Field
Film Novelization
Constantine Verevis
In A Theory of Adaptation, Linda Hutcheon writes that the most commonly discussed instances of flm adaptation continue to be those that move from the modes of “telling” to “showing”—usually, from print to performance—but goes on to add that the reverse movement, namely: that of the “the fourishing ‘novelization’ industry … cannot be ignored” (38). Despite this claim, and in face of the fact that flm audiences have been reading novelizations—that is, novels developed from flms, or more typically, from screenplays—since (at least) the earliest days of talking pictures, relatively little research has been conducted in this feld (for a notable exception, see Baetens). This is no doubt due to the fact that novelizations have typically been characterized as hybrid forms of literature—“the misshapen offspring of the cinema and the written word” (Allison)—but the ongoing volume and popularity of such novelizations—commercially successful titles, such as The Omen (1976/2006), and serial novels which expand franchise properties, like Star Wars and The X-Files—suggests a body of work that deserves a more detailed critical appreciation. This essay describes novelization as a mode of adaptation and serialization, attending to questions of intermediality, authorship and cultural value to open up some key issues in this widespread area of literary production. More particularly
C. Verevis (*)
Film and Screen Studies, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
J. Grossman and R.B. Palmer (eds.), Adaptation in Visual Culture, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-58580-2_1
it investigates the practice and poetics of flm novelization by attending to six novels—The Yakuza (Schrader 1975), Taxi Driver (Elman 1976), Blue Collar (Schrader 1978), Hardcore (Schrader 1979), American Gigolo (Harris 1979), and Cat People (Brander 1982)—each of which has been adapted from early works credited to writer-director Paul Schrader. Described in the late 1970s as a “true auteur-screenwriter” (Cook 60), Schrader built—upon the foundation of a Dutch Calvinist upbringing and his tenure as a flm critic and academic—a body of work (screenplays and flms) consistent in its treatment of theme, style and attitude. This essay examines the novelization of Schrader’s early “studio” works, at once acknowledging the multiple “constraints”—institutional, aesthetic, practical—imposed upon the genre, but also recognizing the diversity in novelization, or “the idea that constrained texts often contain unconstrained elements” (Baetens, “Expanding the Field” 77).
Film novelization has been described as a process of adaptation, a movement from flm to literature that includes elements of multimodality and corporate authorship (see Van Parys and Leuven). At its most inclusive, this type of defnition not only admits to the rewriting of flm as prose in the form of a novel but also to a process of novelization that adopts the form of verse or photo novellas. Taking up this approach, Thomas Van Parys tracks the origins of contemporary Hollywood novelizations through several cultural-historical practices that include: the catalogue description, the flm synopsis, the serialized novel and the play novelization (Van Parys 308). A further, related type is the short, movie story novelization, or movie fctionalization. Related to the flm synopsis, this form can be traced back to weekly trade papers, such as The Moving Picture World (1907–1922), that published sections devoted to the “stories of the flms.” This form was further developed through fan magazines, such as The Motion Picture Story Magazine and Photoplay (both frst published in 1911), that enabled audiences to either prepare themselves for flm viewings, or re-experience flms in story form, through the translation of movie melodramas to written form. Adrienne L. McLean writes that, although these magazines soon abandoned fctionalizations (to concentrate on the Hollywood star system), studio-era movie story magazines—such as Movie Digest, Romantic Movie Stories (later Movie Story), and Screen Romances (later Screen Stories)—which undertook
fctionalizations of narrative flms from both major and minor studios, emerged as “one of the most robust and hardy of classical Hollywood cinema’s ancillary products” (4). Combining photographs and text, the length of these fctionalizations varied “from four or fve (for B pictures and programmers) to twelve pages of varying column widths and numbers … with the number of digests in each issue running from eight to as many as sixteen between the 1930s and the 1950s and to as few as four in the 1960s and 1970s as circulations declined” (4). Although McLean argues that the impulse behind story digests was “somewhat different” from contemporary forms of flm tie-ins, there is a likeness insofar as the fctionalizations served a double purpose, at once promoting and preparing readers for the flm’s release but also capitalizing upon, and prolonging the experience of, the flm during and after its exhibition (McLean 6; see also Van Parys 312).
These various historical forms of flm writing—which in Jan Baetens’ expansive description of novelization would include high forms such as the cine-romans of Alain Robbe-Grillet and hybrid examples such as Richard J. Anobile’s Film Classics Library—are occluded by approaches which adopt a narrower view to focus upon the contemporary movie tie-in book as an industrial product, rather than as a process of adaptation. Van Parys writes that, in the frst decades of the twentieth century, movie tie-in editions—either a reprint of an adapted novel or a flm novelization—were typically known and advertised under the single term: “photoplay editions” (312). By mid-century, the rising paperback industry—typifed by the output of Pocket Books in the U.S.—had begun to reduce the market for cloth editions and developed—from the 1960s onward—into a more commercial and uniform format for novelization (312). Alongside the breakdown of the studio system and the movie industry’s assimilation by conglomerates and media corporations, the logic and economics of tie-ins compelled publishers (increasingly owned by the same media company as the flm studio) to exploit a successful adaptation through the promotion and/or redistribution of a book version (Corrigan 445–446). The Disney Corporation is often described as “the most notorious and successful company in spreading a movie through merchandise” and adopting strategies for “the ancillary marketing of a tie-in with a literary flm or a flm with literary potential” (446). In one high profle example from the 1960s, Walt Disney ordered that a (then) recently purchased property—Erich Kästner’s 1949 novel, Das doppelte Lottchen (published in English translation as Lottie
and Lisa, 1950)—be tailored as a vehicle for his new contract player, child star Hayley Mills. The resultant flm, The Parent Trap (1960), was supported by an exhaustive Disney advertising and marketing strategy which included various modes of fctionalization—for example, a thirteen-week Sunday color comic series and a ten-cent comic book version of the story—but also (on the occasion of the flm’s 1968 theatrical reissue) a mass-market, Scholastic paperback. In this instance, the tie-in was not a reprint of Kästner’s adapted novel, but rather a 112-page illustrated novelization: an “adaptation by Vic Crume … based on the screenplay and written for the screen by [director] David Swift” (Crume).
In Films into Books: An Analytical Bibliography of Film Novelizations, Movie, and TV Tie-Ins, Randall D. Larson focuses on hundreds of examples, like The Parent Trap, to describe flm novelization, or the “movie tie-in book … as a widespread commercial form … [one that] emerged out of the mass-market paperback phenomenon of the 1960s” (3–4). Larson’s industrially focused survey describes three types of movie tie-in book: (1) the reissue of a preexisting novel that has been adapted into a flm; (2) the novelization of a flm or television screenplay, specifcally adapting it to prose; and (3) the creation of new stories, or “original novels,” based on the “characters, concept, and setting” of existing flm/s or television series (3–11). Centered mainly on correspondence with writers of novelizations, Larson’s interest is in the latter two categories—that is, novelizations that either narrate or continue existing flm properties—but the distinction between each category is never so straightforward. This is evident not only from the example of The Parent Trap—a novelization of a screenplay adapted from an already existing novel—and examples of re-titled books (for instance, the recent case of Patricia Highsmith’s Carol/The Price of Salt 2015/1952), but also for the fact that the book market does not make a clear distinction, often promoting both re-issued novels and novelizations with the same tagline: “now a major motion picture.” Moreover, in his account of U.S. bestsellers, “blockbusterism” and tie-ins, John Sutherland argues that topselling novelists—such as Thomas Harris (author of Silence of the Lambs, 1988), Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park, 1990), and John Grisham (The Firm, 1991)—“multiplied their sales from the synergies of flm-andbook, book-and-flm reciprocity” to the extent that it was suspected that the books were written with the aim of being adapted to flm: that is, conceived in the frst instance as scenarios and screenplays (76). Indeed, Sutherland writes that “one of the threshold moments” for twentiethcentury American popular fction was the case of The Omen (1976), a
flm for which David Seltzer did both the flm screenplay and the (simultaneously released) novelization: “the one broke box-offce records, the other made #1 on the bestseller list” (77). In Sutherland’s estimation, Seltzer’s work on The Omen made the practice of novelization “critically respectable” (77), but novelizations are still typically marginalized as literary by-products, budget books prepared at the service of Hollywood’s advertising and marketing machine.
As in the case of flm remakes, the paucity of critical interest in novelizations over a long period can be attributed to the form’s anti-authorship and anti-originality quality (see Verevis). This is framed as an industrial and technical issue: that is, the perception that novelizations are commissioned—not creative—works and, as such, are limited by the interests and restrictions of copyright holders. The six books under consideration in this essay are immediately recognizable as novelizations, tie-ins based on original screenplays that are part of an institutionalized network of merchandise linked to studio-fnanced releases derived from Paul Schrader screenplays and flms. But in three instances—The Yakuza, Blue Collar and Hardcore—the relationship and collaboration between screenwriter-director Paul Schrader and novelizer, brother Leonard Schrader, reveals a more complex authorial network. Peter Biskind provides background to this relationship in his seminal (and decisively salacious) account of the New Hollywood, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. According to Biskind, the elder Schrader brother, Leonard, returned to the United States in the autumn of 1972 after spending several years in Japan, a time during which he became acquainted with the Japanese underworld of the yakuza. Meanwhile, Paul Schrader had attended UCLA flm school and worked as an editor for Cinema magazine and reader at Columbia University before deciding in the early 1970s to turn his attention to screenwriting. Around this time, Leonard told Schrader that he had an idea for a novel about Japanese gangsters, but Schrader— seeking to break into pictures and seeing the commercial potential of a flm—told him “novel, fne, frst we write the screenplay” (Biskind 291). Biskind reports that the brothers received an advance of $5000 from Schrader’s agent and were set up in a Los Angeles apartment from which the script was completed in around two months (early in 1973), before going on to be auctioned for an unprecedented $325,000 (292). Schrader claimed that, although the story idea had come from Leonard,
he had “dictated the terms” of the partnership: “I would break the story down, [Leonard] would rewrite the interim things, I would rewrite him” (292). Later, in a self-interested move to advance his own reputation, Schrader would insist upon taking sole screenwriting credit, an attempt that was ultimately frustrated when Robert Towne—who was brought in by director Sydney Pollack to revise and “heighten the international romantic element”—was afforded a shared screen credit on the fnished flm (Jackson 113; Thompson 9–10).
Despite the potential of the Schrader brothers’ story and screenplay, The Yakuza was a fnancial disaster, Schrader claiming that: “Pollack [had] directed against the grain of the script. I wrote a violent, underworld flm about blood, duty, obligation. He made a sort of rich, romantic, transcultural flm. Either of those flms would be interesting … [but] neither flm was made” (Thompson 10). As it transpired, Leonard was provided the opportunity to write his own version of The Yakuza: a 240page, tie-in novel for the Warner Paperback Library, published in April 1975 to coincide with the flm’s March 1975 U.S. release. From his side, Schrader had brought to the screenplay a theme of redemption through self-destructive action (a suicidal metaphor common to his contemporaneous script for Taxi Driver) and a compendium of Japanese gangster flm (yakuza-eiga) conventions gleaned from 2 months of watching yakuza flms at the Toei Studios-operated, Linda Lea theater in Los Angeles (see Schrader’s 1974 primer to yakuza-eiga). Leonard, on the other hand, had immersed himself in the local culture during his time in Japan, and while his novelization shows some evidence of Towne’s rewrite, it is his experience as a foreigner in Japan that evidently informs the work. For instance, upon arriving in Tokyo for the frst time, Harry Kilmer’s offsider, Dusty, is bewildered by the litany of questions from college students eager to practice their spoken English (L. Schrader, The Yakuza 39–40). Moreover, whereas Pollack’s mise-en-scène situates the action in a generalized Oriental space, the novelization provides a more specifc sense of place, not only singling out Tokyo landmarks—such as Almond Café in Roppongi (105, 112)—but also following Kilmer’s movements to do some rudimentary mapping of the city: “avoiding the subway, Kilmer … [walked] back to Shibuya Station by way of Aoyama Boulevard. Climbing up the northbound side of the elevated Yamanote line, he rode the bright green commuter train to Yoyogi Station and transferred to the eastbound Chuo Line” (112). More pointedly, Leonard’s description of Tokyo’s “chaotic gnarls” of unnamed, crooked streets and alleys with “addresses
[assigned] in chronological order of construction so that house number 156 stands between numbers 45 and 708” is offered as evidence of Japanese adherence to history and tradition rather than to the facilitation of outsider access, mobility and exploration (61). Insights such as these resist accusations that tie-ins are necessarily slight and inferior volumes, and Leonard’s contribution to the original story confounds suggestions that novelizations are secondary by-products: “pale shadows of the movies deemed to be their source” (Allison).
Leonard Schrader went on to write novelizations of the frst two feature flms directed by Schrader: Blue Collar, for which the brothers’ share a story credit, and Hardcore, which (like The Yakuza) is another of Schrader’s “bringing back lost sheep” stories, inspired by The Searchers (1956). In the latter instance, Leonard’s contribution to and understanding of the material is furthered by the fact that Hardcore is centered around a character, Jake VanDorn, modeled on their father, and the narrative has its origins in a story about a girl who disappeared from their local high school in Grand Rapids, Michigan, only to later turn up working as a prostitute in Chicago. Leonard’s novelization not only bears evidence of earlier iterations of the screenplay—for instance, in the book’s front matter, the title character is not (as in the flm) Jake VanDorn but Jake Zondervan—but more importantly Leonard brings to the work a deep understanding of the father fgure—a man of religion, a man of value—and of his Dutch Calvinist faith. Unlike the flm, which begins with establishing shots of Grand Rapids, the 176-page novelization from the outset focuses squarely on the father and his unshakable belief:
Jake VanDorn was seated frmly in the House of God, but he did not feel at home. Normally the dark-varnished pew made him peaceful. But today something caused his burly frame to twitch with prickly tension.
Fifty-two, fint-eyed and blunt, Jake was a hard-driving man who loved only three things: his factory, his family, and his faith. Nothing else mattered. He never drank liquor or chased women. He devoted his whole life to his Grand Rapids furniture company, his Dutch American relatives, and his Dutch Calvinist religion.
Everything else could go to hell, for all he cared. Straight to hell, in fact, was exactly where his faith said most people were headed anyway. His Calvinism was hardcore. (L. Schrader, Hardcore 7)
That fnal sentence demonstrates how the novelisation uses the flm (and book) title to play across two starkly different domains: one of a severe religion and the other of pornography and the sex industry. In addition, Jake’s personal journey into the pit of hell—the search for his daughter, Kristen, through the peep-shows, massage-parlors and porn-theaters of Los Angeles—is writ in his name—Jake (for Jacob’s wrestling with the Devil)/VanDorn (“thorn” for his prickly disposition)—and Jake’s values are literally spelled out to an unlikely companion, the sex-worker Niki, who ultimately leads him to his daughter. Calvinists, Jake explains,
believe in the “TULIP.” … It comes from the Canons of Dort. Every letter stands for a different belief. T-U-L-I-P. … The T stands for Total Depravity – that is, all men through original sin are totally evil and incapable of good. “All my works are like flthy rags in sight of the Lord.” … The U is for Unconditional Election. God has chosen a certain number of people to be saved, the Elect, and He has chosen them from the beginning of time. L is for Limited Atonement … The I stands for Irresistible Grace … And P is for Perseverance of the Saints. Once you are in Grace, you cannot fall from the number of the Elect. (L. Schrader, Hardcore 141–142)
In Baetens’ assessment, the legal-industrial constraints placed on novelizations typically lead to a situation in which the novelizer is forced to stay as close as possible to the movie source, reproducing only its manifest content: “novelization does not so much aspire to become the movie’s other as it wants to be its double … The imaginary regime novelization fosters for itself is that of a copy (calque), that is, an immediate transfer” (“Novelization” 50). This suggestion—that novelizations are reductions or literalizations of an “original” screenplay—is frustrated not only by the fact that examples—such as The Yakuza—depart substantially from the completed flm, but also because the source (screenplay, flm) is never singular and never a moment of pure origin. Richard Elman’s novelization of Schrader’s screenplay for Taxi Driver provides a case in point. The flm’s reputation (and Schrader’s as screenwriter) has generated (at least) two published versions of the screenplay. One is a limited edition paperback that in many respects bears all the hallmarks of a novelization, including a cover that features a still from the flm, an introduction in the form of an extended interview between Schrader and
1 Richard
Fig.
Elman’s novelization of Paul Schrader’s screenplay for Taxi Driver (1976)
Martin Scorsese, and dramatic jacket copy (which functions as a contracted form of novelization):
A loner, Travis Bickle takes up driving a taxi in search of an escape from his sleeplessness and his disgust with the corruption he fnds around him. His pent-up rage, fuelled by his doomed relationship with the political campaign worker Betsy, leads to an inevitable descent into psychosis and violence. (P. Schrader, Taxi Driver)
Schrader’s Taxi Driver screenplay is itself novelistic: it begins with an epigraph from Thomas Wolfe’s “God’s Lonely Man” and is unconventionally divided into 29 chapters, each with a title—“Travis gets a job,” “We meet Travis,” “We meet Betsy,” … “Old Friends”—and many of these with long and detailed descriptive passages (not unlike those associated with tie-in novels). Elman’s 148-page novelization (see Fig. 1) similarly exhibits features typical of its genre, including a cover that displays composite artwork and stills from the flm, and sensational tag lines: “The terrifying thriller of a night rider in New York,” “A reading experience you’ll never forget,” “Now a sensational motion picture from Columbia.” Inside, the novelization, at least formally, follows the screenplay with precision, reproducing Schrader’s epigraph and chapter titles (and departing from the script only toward the end, where three of Schrader’s chapters are condensed into one). Available copies of Elman’s typescript for the novel reveal multiple revisions of the opening and fnal pages and suggest “a labored, almost pained attempt to do justice to the Schrader screenplay” (Elman Taxi Driver Typescript). This evidence seems consistent with accounts of novelization that advance a principle of faithfulness, but the writing itself is no simple imitation of Schrader’s screenplay. As has often been noted (Thompson 11), Taxi Driver was inspired, in the frst instance, by two things: Harry Chapin’s 1972 song “Taxi,” about a cab driver who picks up a fare that turns out to be an old girlfriend, and (that same year) Arthur Bremer’s shooting of Governor George Wallace, an assassination attempt for which the gunman was given a 63-year prison sentence. Bremer’s diary—which covers the period leading up to the shooting—was not published until 1974, but it was heavily excerpted in the massive newspaper coverage of the event. Schrader says that he was tempted to take dialogue directly from the diary, but fearful of legal action absorbed instead Bremer’s inner voice—“its paranoid delusions of grandeur, its contradictory assessments of self and others, and its pathological narcissism”—and
grafted this onto the character of Travis (Taubin 38–40). It is this aspect of Schrader’s screenplay that Elman adapts and transforms, rendering Travis’ thoughts as a string of words, fractured and sometimes incoherent. The opening of the novelization is thus more Holden Caulfeld than Robert DeNiro, and seemingly indebted to Bremer’s poor spelling and rudimentary grasp of grammar:
This all started happening to me seems to me musta been a long time ago, in the winter, my frst in New York City, maybe two years ago. There was still a war.
It was cold and snowy. Filth everywhere. Just like now. I didn’t have any love in my life. To speak of. No love at all, and nobody to care for. Just very little self-respect. Whatsoever.
Worse than my Christmas year before with the dog. When Junior and I didn’t have any place to stay. (Elman, Taxi Driver 1)
Amy Taubin writes that Taxi Driver may be “forever indebted to Arthur Bremer” (38), but Schrader’s lead-time to the writing of the screenplay was spent as a flm critic and academic, and his work is loaded with its infuences, not just flms— The Searchers , Diary of a Country Priest (1951) and Pickpocket (1959)—but also European literature: Sartre’s Nausea and Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground . These multiple points of reference further complicate any suggestion that Elman’s novelization could be a direct or transparent translation of Schrader’s script. Moreover, generically speaking, Taxi Driver is informed by American flm noir (and Schrader’s contemporaneous essay, “Notes on Film Noir”). Even though Schrader once said that Taxi Driver was not a flm noir for the seventies (Kahan 8), the work has often been characterized as a key flm in the transition from classic to neo-noir. More than this, Taxi Driver is the frst in a trilogy of Schrader “man and his room stories” that includes American Gigolo and Light Sleeper (1992) (see P. Schrader, Collected Screenplays, Vol. 1 ). All three flms draw upon the flm work of Robert Bresson and share a number of qualities with flm noir, in particular the existential ethos and professional code of the noir protagonist (see Nichols). In the case of American Gigolo , the movement of the flm is toward Julian Kay’s realization
of his love for Michelle—a declaration expressed (in the script and flm) with the same words and gesture used by Michel in Pickpocket . But right up to its epilogue, the aesthetic of the flm owes more to Schrader’s collaboration with production designer Ferdinando Scarfotti and composer Giorgio Moroder than to the “transcendental style” that Schrader wrote of in his Ozu-Bresson-Dreyer book (1972).
In terms of texture, little of the high concept, “post-Bertolucci style” (Thomson 52) of American Gigolo translates to Timothy Harris’ 180page novelization. Harris instead picks up on the work’s generic pedigree, seizing upon the fnal words of Schrader’s screenplay, spoken in a prison visitor’s room—“it’s taken me so long to come to you” (Schrader, Collected 239)—to amplify the inevitability of the hero’s fate (and the irony of fnding “freedom” behind bars). More specifcally, Harris’ novelization adopts the frst person narration of hard-boiled fction, adding a frst chapter prologue (not in the script) in which the yet unnamed protagonist rues his fate and human frailty from behind prison bars:
My frst day in the Los Angeles County Jail they stuck me in a cell with a young guy from Texas … “Who’d a’ thought I’d end up inside with a famous Beverly Hills gigolo?” he kept saying. …
I made love to women for money, some of them old enough to be my mother … But that isn’t why I ended up in prison … I did something that I’d never done before. Something I’d always considered myself incapable of doing. Something a gigolo, of all people, is never expected or meant to do. I did the one thing which no one will believe possible of someone in my profession.
I fell in love. (Harris 1–3)
Pushing further, Harris’ second chapter follows not Julian Kay’s clipped dialogue (from the Schrader screenplay and flm), but rather the worldweary voice of LA noir:
It all started on a sweltering day in late August. Somewhere above the smog-enveloped city that afternoon, the sun was shining, but at street level, everything was swathed in a yellowish chemical haze. The huge billboards along the Sunset Strip seemed to swim in and out of focus; the pale buildings and shimmering pavements vibrated like mirages in the heat. …
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Memorials of Old Dorset
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Memorials of Old Dorset
Editor: Rev. Thomas Perkins
Herbert Pentin
Release date: May 19, 2022 [eBook #68128]
Language: English
Original publication: United Kingdom: Bemrose and Sons, 1907
Credits: Tim Lindell, Les Galloway and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
Transcriber’s Notes
Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. Variations in hyphenation and accents have been standardised but all other spelling and punctuation remains unchanged.
The repetition of the title immediately before the title page has been removed.
Ringstead and Holworth.
“Where one may walk along the undulating downs that skirt the Channel, held in place by parapets of cliff that break down straight into the sea; where one may walk mile after mile on natural lawn and not meet a soul—just one’s self, the birds, the glorious scenery, and God.” (See page 109.)
From a water-colour sketch by Mr. William Pye.
M C E
General Editor: R . P H. D , M.A., F.S.A.
MEMORIALS OF OLD DORSET
EDITED
BY
THOMAS PERKINS, M.A.
L R T , D
A
“Wimborne Minster and Christchurch Priory” “Bath and Malmesbury Abbeys” “Romsey Abbey” &c.
AND
HERBERT PENTIN, M.A.
V M A , D
V -P , H . S , E D N H A F C
W I
LONDON
BEMROSE & SONS LIMITED, 4 SNOW HILL, E C AND DERBY
1907
[All Rights Reserved] TO
THE RIGHT HONOURABLE LORD EUSTACE CECIL, F.R.G.S.
PAST PRESIDENT OF THE DORSET NATURAL
HISTORY AND ANTIQUARIAN FIELD CLUB THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED BY HIS LORDSHIP’S KIND PERMISSION
PREFACE
he editing of this Dorset volume was originally undertaken by the Rev. Thomas Perkins, the scholarly Rector of Turnworth. But he, having formulated its plan and written four papers therefor, besides gathering material for most of the other chapters, was laid aside by a very painful illness, which culminated in his unexpected death. This is a great loss to his many friends, to the present volume, and to the county of Dorset as a whole; for Mr. Perkins knew the county as few men know it, his literary ability was of no mean order, and his kindness to all with whom he was brought in contact was proverbial.
After the death of Mr. Perkins, the editing of the work was entrusted to the Rev. Herbert Pentin, Vicar of Milton Abbey, whose knowledge of the county and literary experience as Editor of the Dorset Natural History and Antiquarian Field Club enabled him to gather up the threads where his friend Mr. Perkins had been compelled to lay them down, and to complete the work and see it safely through the press. As General Editor of the series, I desire to express my most grateful thanks to him for his kind and gracious services in perfecting a work which had unfortunately been left incomplete; and all lovers of Old Dorset and readers of this book will greatly appreciate his good offices.
Few counties can rival Dorset either in natural beauty or historic interest, and it deserves an honoured place among the memorials of the counties of England. In preparing the work the Editors have endeavoured to make the volume comprehensive, although it is of course impossible in a single volume to exhaust all the rich store of historical treasures which the county affords. After a general sketch of the history of Dorset by the late Editor, the traces of the earliest races which inhabited this county are discussed by Mr. Prideaux, who tells of the ancient barrows in Dorset, and the details of the
Roman occupation are shown by Captain Acland. Dorset is rich in churches, and no one was more capable to describe their chief features than Mr. Perkins. His chapter is followed by others of more detail, dealing with the three great minsters still standing— Sherborne, Milton, and Wimborne, the monastic house at Ford, and the memorial brasses of Dorset. A series of chapters on some of the chief towns and “islands” of the county follows, supplemented by a description of two well-known manor-houses. The literary associations of the county and some of its witchcraft-superstitions form the subjects of the concluding chapters. The names of the able writers who have kindly contributed to this volume will commend themselves to our readers. The Lord Bishop of Durham, the Rev. R. Grosvenor Bartelot, Mr. Sidney Heath, Mr. Wildman, Mr. Prideaux, Mr. Gill, Mrs. King Warry, and our other contributors, are among the chief authorities upon the subjects of which they treat, and our thanks are due to them for their services; and also to Mr. William Pye for the beautiful coloured frontispiece, to Mr. Heath for his charming drawings, and to those who have supplied photographs for reproduction. We hope that this volume will find a welcome in the library of every Dorset book-lover, and meet with the approbation of all who revere the traditions and historical associations of the county.
P. H. D , General Editor.
INDEX TO ILLUSTRATIONS
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HISTORIC DORSET
B R . T P , M.A.
HE physical features due to the geological formation of the district now called Dorset have had such an influence on the inhabitants and their history that it seems necessary to point out briefly what series of stratified rocks may be seen in Dorset, and the lines of their outcrop.
There are no igneous rocks, nor any of those classed as primary, but, beginning with the Rhætic beds, we find every division of the secondary formations, with the possible exception of the Lower Greensand, represented, and in the south-eastern part of the district several of the tertiary beds may be met with on the surface.
The dip of the strata is generally towards the east; hence the earlier formations are found in the west. Nowhere else in England could a traveller in a journey of a little under fifty miles—which is about the distance from Lyme to the eastern boundary of Dorset— cross the outcrop of so many strata. A glance at a geological map of England will show that the Lias, starting from Lyme Regis, sweeps along a curve slightly concave towards the west, almost due north, until it reaches the sea again at Redcar, while the southern boundary of the chalk starting within about ten miles of Lyme runs out eastward to Beechy Head. Hence it is seen that the outcrops of the various strata are wider the further away they are from Lyme Regis.
Dorset has given names to three well-known formations and to one less well known: (1) The Portland beds, first quarried for building stone about 1660; (2) the Purbeck beds, which supplied the Early English church builders with marble for their ornamental shafts; (3) Kimmeridge clay; and (4) the Punfield beds.
The great variety of the formation coming to the surface in the area under consideration has given a striking variety to the character of the landscape: the chalk downs of the North and centre, with their rounded outlines; the abrupt escarpments of the greensand in the neighbourhood of Shaftesbury; the rich grazing land of Blackmore Vale on the Oxford clay; and the great Heath (Mr. Hardy’s Egdon) stretching from near Dorchester out to the east across Woolwich, Reading, and Bagshot beds, with their layers of gravel, sand, and clay. The chalk heights are destitute of water; the streams and rivers are those of the level valleys and plains of Oolitic clays—hence they are slow and shallow, and are not navigable, even by small craft, far from their mouths.
The only sides from which in early days invaders were likely to come were the south and east; and both of these boundaries were well protected by natural defences, the former by its wall of cliffs and the deadly line of the Chesil beach. The only opening in the wall was Poole Harbour, a land-locked bay, across which small craft might indeed be rowed, but whose shores were no doubt a swamp entangled by vegetation. Swanage Bay and Lulworth Cove could have been easily defended. Weymouth Bay was the most vulnerable point. Dense forests protected the eastern boundary. These natural defences had a marked effect, as we shall see, on the history of the people. Dorset for many centuries was an isolated district, and is so to a certain extent now, though great changes have taken place during the last fifty or sixty years, due to the two railways that carry passengers from the East to Weymouth and the one that brings them from the North to Poole and on to Bournemouth. This isolation has conduced to the survival not only of old modes of speech, but also of old customs, modes of thought, and superstitions.
It may be well, before speaking of this history, to state that the county with which this volume deals should always be spoken of as “Dorset,” never as “Dorsetshire”; for in no sense of the word is Dorset a shire, as will be explained further on.
We find within the boundaries of the district very few traces of Palæolithic man: the earliest inhabitants, who have left well-marked
memorials of themselves, were Iberians, a non-Aryan race, still represented by the Basques of the Pyrenees and by certain inhabitants of Wales. They were short of stature, swarthy of skin, dark of hair, long-skulled. Their characteristic weapon or implement was a stone axe, ground, not chipped, to a sharp edge; they buried their dead in a crouching attitude in the long barrows which are still to be seen in certain parts of Dorset, chiefly to the north-east of the Stour Valley. When and how they came into Britain we cannot tell for certain; it was undoubtedly after the glacial epoch, and probably at a time when the Straits of Dover had not come into being and the Thames was still a tributary of the Rhine. They were in what is known as the Neolithic stage of civilisation; but in course of time, after this country had become an island, invaders broke in upon them, Aryans of the Celtic race, probably (as Professor Rhys thinks, though he says he is not certain on this point) of the Goidelic branch. These men were tall, fair-haired, blue-eyed, round-skulled, and were in a more advanced stage of civilisation than the Iberians, using bronze weapons, and burying their dead, sometimes after cremation, in the round barrows that exist in such large numbers on the Dorset downs. Their better arms and greater strength told in the warfare that ensued: whether the earlier inhabitants were altogether destroyed, or expelled or lived on in diminished numbers in a state of slavery, we have no means of ascertaining. But certain it is that the Celts became masters of the land. These men were some of those who are called in school history books “Ancient Britons”; the Wessex folk in after days called them “Welsh”—that is, “foreigners”—the word that in their language answered to βάρβαροι and “barbari” of the Greeks and Romans. What they called themselves we do not know. Ptolemy speaks of them as “Durotriges,” the name by which they were known to the Romans. Despite various conjectures, the etymology of this word is uncertain. The land which they inhabited was, as already pointed out, much isolated. The lofty cliffs from the entrance to Poole Harbour to Portland formed a natural defence; beyond this, the long line of the Chesil beach, and further west, more cliffs right on to the mouth of the Axe. Most of the lowlands of the interior were occupied by impenetrable forests, and the slow-running rivers, which even now in rainy seasons overflow their banks, and
must then, when the rainfall was much heavier than now, have spread out into swamps, rendered unnavigable by their thick tangle of vegetation. The inhabitants dwelt on the sloping sides of the downs, getting the water they needed from the valleys, and retiring for safety to the almost innumerable encampments that crowned the crests of the hills, many of which remain easily to be distinguished to this day. Nowhere else in England in an equal area can so many Celtic earthworks be found as in Dorset. The Romans came in due course, landing we know not where, and established themselves in certain towns not far from the coasts.
The Celts were not slain or driven out of their land, but lived on together with the Romans, gradually advancing in civilisation under Roman influence. They had already adopted the Christian religion: they belonged to the old British Church, which lived on in the southwest of England even through that period when the Teutonic invaders—Jutes, Angles, Saxons—devastated the south-east, east, north, and central parts of the island, and utterly drove westward before them the Celtic Christians into Wales and the south-west of Scotland. Dorset remained for some time untouched, for though the Romans had cleared some of the forests before them, and had cut roads through others, establishing at intervals along them military stations, and strengthening and occupying many of the Celtic camps, yet the vast forest—“Selwood,” as the English called it—defended Dorset from any attack of the West Saxons, who had settled further to the east. Once, and once only, if we venture, with Professor Freeman, to identify Badbury Rings, near Wimborne, on the Roman Road, with the Mons Badonicus of Gildas, the Saxons, under Cerdic, in 516, invaded the land of the Durotriges, coming along the Roman Road which leads from Salisbury to Dorchester, through the gap in the forest at Woodyates, but found that mighty triple ramparted stronghold held by Celtic Arthur and his knights, round whom so much that is legendary has gathered, but who probably were not altogether mythical. In the fight that followed, the Christian Celt was victorious, and the Saxon invader was driven in flight back to his own territory beyond Selwood. Some place Mons Badonicus in the very north of England, or even in Scotland, and say that the battle was
fought between the Northumbrians and the North Welsh: if this view is correct, we may say that no serious attack was made on the Celts of Dorset from the east. According to Mr. Wildman’s theory, as stated in his Life of St. Ealdhelm—which theory has a great air of probability about it—the Wessex folk, under Cenwealh, son of Cynegils, the first Christian King of the West Saxons, won two victories: one at Bradford-on-Avon in 652, and one at the “Hills” in 658. Thus North Dorset was overcome, and gradually the West Saxons passed on westward through Somerset, until in 682 Centwine, according to the English Chronicle, drove the Welsh into the sea. William of Malmesbury calls them “Norht Walæs,” or North Welsh, but this is absurd: Mr. Wildman thinks “Norht” may be a mistake for “Dorn,” or “Thorn,” and that the Celts of Dorset are meant, and that the sea mentioned is the English Channel. From this time the fate of the Durotriges was sealed: their land became part of the great West Saxon kingdom. Well indeed was it for them that they had remained independent until after the time when their conquerors had ceased to worship Woden and Thunder and had given in their allegiance to the White Christ; for had these men still been worshippers of the old fierce gods, the Celts would have fared much worse. Now, instead of being exterminated, they were allowed to dwell among the West Saxon settlers, in an inferior position, but yet protected by the West Saxon laws, as we see from those of Ine who reigned over the West Saxons from 688 to 728. The Wessex settlers in Dorset were called by themselves “Dornsæte,” or “Dorsæte,” whence comes the name of Dorset. It will be seen then, that Dorset is what Professor Freeman calls a “ga”—the land in which a certain tribe settled—and differs entirely from those divisions made after the Mercian land had been won back from the Danes, when shires were formed by shearing up the newly recovered land, not into its former divisions which the Danish conquest had obliterated, but into convenient portions, each called after the name of the chief town within its borders, such as Oxfordshire from Oxford, Leicestershire from Leicester. The Danes did for a time get possession of the larger part of Wessex, but it was only for a time: the boundaries of Dorset were not wiped out, and there was no need to make any fresh division. So when we use the name Dorset for the county we use the very name
