6 thoughts on “From the Daily Express to the Evening News”

  1. Thanks for this – and its link and your introduction: Ralph Nevill does sound interesting!

    Things I had to look up, and did with some sort of success:

    “Meminisse juvat” seems to be indebted (especially as Machen uses it) to Virgil’s Aeneid, Book I, line 203 (where the future tense is used: “juvabit”);

    the Wikipedia article about Dickens’s novel, Bleak House, tells us “Sir Leicester Dedlock is a crusty baronet, much older than his wife. Dedlock is an unthinking conservative who regards the Jarndyce and Jarndyce lawsuit as a mark of distinction worthy of a man of his family lineage. On the other hand, he is shown as a loving and devoted husband towards Lady Dedlock, even after he learns about her secret.”

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  2. Context is far from everything, but it is probably always of interest – such as concerning what Machen quotes from page 3 of Nevill’s book about “arrogance on the part of men or women of Semitic extraction”. The page starts with “Money” followed by “millionaires” and by the bottom of page 4 gets on to “More breezy and irresponsible are the wealthy Americans who make England their playground.” In between – for what it is worth – he writes “no sensible individual can approve of attempts to arouse racial hatred or view Anti-Semitism with anything but disgust”. On page 19 (still in chapter 1 on “Society”) “Jew millionaires and American snobs” appear together.

    The third result of my word-search for ‘Jew’ occurs (p. 158) in a discussion in chapter five (“Paris”) on the Dreyfus affair, in which one sentence begins “The whole ‘affaire’ arose through racial hatred” (p. 157). Of course, many a word search – which I have not (yet?) attempted – for ‘related terms’ is possible… and the results might be in keeping with Nevill’s attention in these to the opportunism of “racial hatred”.

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    1. Very helpful! Thank you for reporting these important facts. Also, I must apologize… I had forgotten to activate the comment section for this Weekly article. I have now corrected that oversight. Thank you for persevering in posting your comments!

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  3. By the way, assuming the title is Machen’s own, is it a playful reference to Edward Bellamy’s 1888 novel? A word-search for Bellamy in Nevill’s book finds nothing. Do ‘we’ know if Machen knew it, and what he thought of it, if he did?

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    1. I think that we can safely assume that Machen probably read Bellamy. However, I have not noted any direct comment by AM on this writer or his novel.

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      1. Thanks! For better or worse, I associate Looking Backward and Butler’s Erewhon (1872) in my mind, and know that both Tolkien and Lewis knew the latter, but have never yet got round to reading either, myself! I see Anna Simon has done a LibriVox audiobook of Looking Backward, and probably ought to give that a try (I am currently enjoying her reading of F. Anstey’s In Brief Authority (1915)!).

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