James Prior (1851–1922) in Bingham

Finally, I located the grave of the novelist James Prior, most noted for Forest Folk^* (1901), in Bingham Cemetery, Nottinghamshire.

'IN LOVING MEMORY OF

JAMES PRIOR KIRK
 BETTER KNOWN AS JAMES PRIOR
DIED DEC 17^TH 1922 AGED 71
ALSO HIS WIFE LILY
DIED MAR 9^TH 1914 AGED 48
ALSO OF THEIR SONS
WALTER
DIED OF WOUNDS IN FRANCE
AUG 17^TH 1918 AGED 26

AND HAROLD

DIED APR 25^TH  1931 AGED 23'

2001 not only marked the centenary of Forest Folk, but also 150 years since the birth of James Prior. To my knowledge there was not a single mention of this from Nottinghamshire County Council, Bingham Town Council, or any local history societies. When I found Prior's grave yesterday I had to spend some time cleaning it up: I am as yet (29 November 2012) aware of no other photo of Prior's grave.

James Prior, with the exception of early D. H. Lawrence, is probably the only regional writer from Nottinghamshire in the early 20th century, and yet not even his adopted home of Bingham seems to appreciate his achievements. There is an organization called Bingham Heritage Trails Association, but virtually the only (extremely limited) information it gives on Prior on its website is from a Nottinghamshire County Council webpage.

Lushai Cottage in Fisher Lane is where the Kirk family lived at the beginning of their stay in Bingham in 1891. This photo is one I took for my book Hidden Nottinghamshire (Wilmslow: Sigma Leisure, 1998), an example of my, er, juvenilia.

My MA of 2000 contains a little previously unpublished biographical material on James Prior and is viewable in full on this blog: it was posted in consecutive chapters in October 2012 and is the only long study ever made of Prior's work, although almost all of it concentrates on Forest Folk. It may still contain a number of minor typos as I had to re-type it and remember a few lost pages.

(Walter Kirk was in fact buried in Huon Military Cemetery, Le Treport, Seine-Maritime (76), France.)

^* The pub The Forest Folk in Blidworth, named after the novel, was built in 1927 and was demolished some years ago. The entrance room had a small area (including a window) commemorating James Prior.

In August 2011, it was announced that a planter and plaque would be placed at 'Forest Folk Corner' to mark the site. Well, it's not exactly a plaque but it's at least something.

A commemorative plaque in Bingham (where James Prior lived for over 30 years) would be recognition of the important part that the man played in the county's literary history.

My James Prior posts:
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
James Prior's Forest Folk (dissertation): Introduction
James Prior's Forest Folk (dissertation): Chapter One
James Prior's Forest Folk (dissertation): Chapter Two
James Prior's Forest Folk (dissertation): Chapter Three
James Prior's Forest Folk (dissertation): Conclusion
James Prior (1851–1922) in Bingham
James Prior's Parents' Grave, Nottingham
James Prior: Three Shots from a Popgun (1880)
The Forest Folk memorial window
James Prior plaque, Blidworth

James Prior's Forest Folk: A Novel Construction of the New Woman and the New Man: Chapter Two

CHAPTER TWO
Prior's New Woman
'It is, perhaps, in the female characters that the author is most successful; so much so that we have found ourselves wondering at times if the name on the title-page is not a woman's disguise. Man or woman, the author is to be congratulated on a really clever novel.'¹

These words appear in the first review of Forest Folk, published in a 1901 issue of The Athenaeum. They are among the early encouraging criticisms of Prior's work, but they are also revealing in that they highlight the crucial issue of gender: in Prior's books, contrary to the conventional male discourse, women feature prominently and often in a far more favourable light than men. Six years after the review of Forest Folk a review of A Walking Gentleman appeared in the same journal, with this significant sentence about the male progagonist:

'All we see of [Lord Beiley] makes him out a weak, amiable, and rather colourless young man. His lady, on the other hand, is singularly strong-willed and generous, and so the couple reverse the traditional characteristics of the sexes.'²

So the stress was still on gender. J. M. Barrie later declared that if he had known Prior was living in Nottingham when he himself briefly worked there as a leader writer, 'I would have rung every bell to get at him. He is a fine writer whose work I cherish.'³ But Barrie's brief period in Nottingham was from 1883 to 1884: at that time Prior had yet to publish a novel, and hardly anyone would have been aware of his plays.

D. H. Lawrence was certainly aware of Prior's work, and shortly before he left Croydon to return to Nottinghamshire in 1912, he wrote two letters to Edward Garnett, the first (dated 13 December 1911) saying: 'What a curious man James Prior is! I did not know him, and he was so near home. I was very much interested. But what Curious, highly flavoured stuff!'⁴. His second letter, on 3 January 1912, states that 'the whole household [...] has devoured James Prior', and then adds: Why is he a failure? Wm. Heinemann said he was.' He goes on to quote Heinemann – Lawrence's first publisher, and also Prior's publisher of Forest Folk and the bizarre Hyssop – on Prior's work: 'Very good, I thought – but went quite dead, quite dead.'⁵ But Prior didn't appear to have devoured Lawrence: his comment on him is a blunt 'We deal in different realities.'⁶

J. M. Barrie, on the other hand, dealt in a similar reality to Lawrence, who in 1910 informed Jessie Chambers that he was in 'exactly the same [sexually indeterminate] predicament' as Barrie's Tommy Sandys.⁷ Tommy and Grizel shows Grizel looking after Tommy – who never grows up emotionally – as she might a young girl, and she too has gender concerns: 'Perhaps [...] I should have been a man.'⁸ Prior's characters cannot be described as sexually indeterminate, but in his novels there is a clear preoccupation with gender reversal which no doubt in part explains Barrie's enthusiasm for them. And these are the essential features of Prior's main characters – strong women and weak men. We are in New Woman territory, yet there is no specific mention of a New Woman in the whole of Prior's work.

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¹ Anonymous, Athenaeum, 'Forest Folk, By James Prior', 3840 (1901), 688.

² Anonymous, Athenaeum, 'A Walking Gentleman, By James Prior', 4168 (1907), 297.

³ Fisher, p. 8.

⁴ The Letters of D. H. Lawrence: September 1901–May 1913, ed. by James T. Boulton (London: Cambridge University Press, 1979), I, 334.

⁵Boulton, I, 344.

⁶ Ivory Buchan, 'James Prior: An Appreciation', Nottinghamshire Countryside, July 1941, pp. 8–9.

⁷ Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 'The Beast in the Closet: James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic', in Speaking of Gender, pp. 243–68 (p. 243).

⁸ J. M. Barrie, Tommy and Grizel (London: Cassell, 1900), p. 290.

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A clear conventional New Woman character nevertheless appears in Ripple and Flood, only to be unsympathetically portrayed. Mrs Orpet rides a bicycle, wears knickerbockers and talks enthusiastically about tennis, cricket and bimetallism. She has an aggressive manner, and the first person narrator, Edward, decribes her as 'something between a man and a woman'.⁸ One is reminded here of Prince Rimânez's alarming remark in Marie Corelli's anti-New Woman novel The Sorrows of Satan (1895): 'And as for the tomboy tennis-players and giantesses of the era, I do not consider them women at all – they are merely the unnatural and strutting embryos of a new sex which will be neither male nor female'.⁹ This is Punch with a kick.

It was not until 13 years later – in 1910 – that Prior (whose opinions Edward seems in part to be voicing) developed a more tolerant attitude towards extremes of the type. Fortuna Chance in Prior's eponymous and last published novel is clearly modelled on the conventional idea of the fin-de-siècle New Woman, although the book is set during the Jacobite rising of the first half of the eighteenth century. The narrator – whose views are again scarcely distinguishable from what appear to be Prior's own, says 'though tied at birth to narrow dogmas and formulas and by no means learned [Fortuna] might yet claim to be of the first of that new thing in the modern world, an emancipated woman.'¹⁰ But the above representations – favourable or otherwise – have a clear date, whereas Prior's Nell is far from age-specific. In fact his New Woman in Forest Folk is a variety of the Old Woman who has always existed, a person similar to Schreiner's New Woman, who 'is essentially [...] the old non-parasitic woman of the remote past, preparing to draw on her twentieth-century garb'.¹¹ But Prior's New Woman is working class and frequently shares characteristics with gipsies and witches: a very different person. I shall demonstrate that Prior's Nell in Forest Folk is in the New Woman mould, although dehistoricized.

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⁸ Ripple and Flood, p. 268.

⁹ Marie Corelli, The Sorrows of Satan (London: Methuen, 1895; repr. Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press, 1998), p. 66.

¹⁰ Fortuna Chance, p. 21.

¹¹ Woman and Labour, pp. 252–53.

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Forest Folk is set at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It depicts two farming communities near Blidworth village – the Rideouts, who farm a small area of land, and Arthur Skrene, who has moved nearby with his sister Lois after inheriting some expensive farming stock from his uncle, a major tenant farmer in the village. From the initial encounter between Nell Rideout and Arthur the gender reversal is evident. Arthur meets a tall, surly ploughboy who threatens to smash Arthur's gate and only later, when a gust of wind blows off the ploughboy's hat as Arthur is leaving, does he see that he has been addressing a young woman. Arthur himself, conversely, is 'rather slightly made' and afterwards described by Nell as 'a little un'.¹² The gender reversal pattern is repeated throughout the book, and the narrator says of Nell:

'Her amusements were those of the male farmer, she coursed hares with her greyhound bitch, she shot rabbits for the pot, as often as she might she rode to hounds on her old hunter Hasty' (p. 30).

Other actions of Nell's transgress the conventional 'feminine' behavioural patterns. In a fit of pique she throws a dead hare at Arthur. Later, when she is again disguised as a man, there is a violent dispute between them over property transgression – part of a long-standing argument involving the use of some of Arthur's gates as a thoroughfare to a main road, This could, of course, be seen as an example of the dominant discourse against the reverse discourse. The middle-class Arthur stands for authority, self-restraint and sobriety, and in opposition to this dominant discourse is the reverse discourse as seen in the working-class woman Nell. He is bent on preserving the status quo, having 'a fine sense of legality and property' (p. 51). He is a volunteer sergeant in the yeomanry, a cavalry force set up in the early eighteenth century for home defence, But in what sense is his sense 'fine'? He later looks at his smashed gate and trampled crops 'with the reckoning mien of a man taking an inventory'. (p. 62). When the narrator uses the word 'fine', it is not at all clear that it is meant in a positive sense. 'Fastidious' would perhaps be a good synonym, a suggestion borne out by the narrator's ensuing comment: 'Altogether it was a very pretty quarrel, which it is not my intention to spoil by settling' (p. 57). The narrator appears not to take sides in the dispute, although it will become clear through this chapter and the next that the narrator is in far greater sympathy with Nell than with any other character in the novel. Furthermore, it would be fair to add that the female working-class discourse, backed up by the narrative discourse, is in fact the principal one in the book and often subverts the middle-class discourse. Even as Arthur attempts the inventory of damage, his far from hostile thoughts are with Nell the perpetrator. As Ivory Buchan, in what is perhaps the only serious and unbiased critical assessment of Prior's work, notes: 'as in all [of Prior's] novels it is the lower classes who steal the thunder', and mentions Hardy as an 'obvious comparison'.¹³

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¹² Forest Folk, pp. 8, 18. Further references to page numbers in this book are given after quotations in the body of the dissertation.

¹³ Buchan, p. 9.

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There are at least four clearly detectable discourses in Forest Folk, although there is substantial interweaving, overlapping, changing of allegiances, and collisions. Tant, for instance, is Nell's brother and a half-hearted Luddite. To some extent he represents the male working-class discourse standing in opposition to Arthur and often to Nell, but Lois is indebted to him for probably saving her life and 'arrests' him in order to hide him from the police. Arthur not only neglects to do his duty as a sergeant in the yeomanry and surrender Tant to the police but even ignores the fact that Lois is harbouring Tant in one of Arthur's rooms at High Farm.

The narrative discourse supporting and supported by Nell frequently develops overtones from the temperance movement. The male working-class discourse often includes a certain mindlessness caused by drink and frequently says thing contrary to all conventional conceptions of reason. In his defence, Tant tells his sister Nell 'We're a band o' true honest-hearted mates. 'sociated together for our common weal', and Nell swiftly paries: 'At least yo get drunk together' (p. 27). But wastrel and drunkard though he is, Tant supports Nell in her fight over property access. And when sober he appears to align himself more with the female working-class discourse, once even helping with the household chores, although he sees his eventual redemption in being a soldier'hacking Frenchmen i'stead o' tunnips' –sentiments of which Arthur would surely approve (p. 70). However, his dominant sister Tish even taunts him by suggesting that he would be better in a dress, an idea of which Tant does not altogether seem to disapprove. These are the first tentative indications of the New Man whom I discuss in Chapter Three.

But the most important discourse to look at in Forest Folk is of course female and working-class, which the narrator presents as a formidable force that men recognize but often misunderstand and are afraid of. It pervades all other discourses, gaining converts and enemies in equal measure. To the narrator this discourse exists for example in gipsy culture. Fisher informs us that until about the age of 15 the only novel Prior had read was George Borrow's The Bible in Spain because it was the only one his austere father permitted –purely because it contained the word 'Bible'.¹⁴ With numerous readings of this book informing Prior's early literary education, it is hardly surprising that Borrow's romantic love of gipsies affected him so much. Out of six published novels two represent gipsies in a highly favourable light. Ivy Sivil in Ripple and Flood and Afla Lee in Fortuna Chance strongly resemble New Women in their independence and strength of character. Significantly, both of these women exhibit strong 'masculine' traits. Edward, for example, says:

'Ivy could swim – a rare accomplishment with us; she could run and climb and jump, and play at every boy's game; she often took command of the ferry-boat during her father's absences.'¹⁵

Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Haycraft suggest that Ivy is similar to Isopel Berners in Borrow's The Romany Rye, although Ivory Buchan sees in her a 'family resemblance' to George Eliot's Maggie Tulliver.¹⁶ Alfa also exhibits 'masculine' traits: she proposes to Roland, and feigning sickness, she takes the initiative by lying on top of him under a blanket to conceal him from his pursuers. In his Introduction to Trigg's Gypsy Demons and Divinities, E. E. Evans-Pritchard says that gipsies have a 'proud, independent character', and Trigg claims that their origin goes back too far to remember.¹⁷ Conventional New Woman literature also sees the gipsy as important, as in James's The Bostonians, where the nascent New Woman figure Verena Tarrant as a child 'seemed to belong to some queer gipsy-land or transcendental Bohemia', and:

'[W]hen in the country, once or twice [...] she had, with a chance companion, strayed far from home, spent hours in the woods and fields, looking for raspberries and playing she was a gipsy'.¹⁸

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¹⁴ Fisher, p. 3.

¹⁵ Ripple and Flood, p. 10.

¹⁶ Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Haycraft, eds, Twentieth Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Literature (New York: Wilson, 1942), p. 1131;

¹⁷ E. B. Trigg, Gypsy Demons and Divinities: The Magical and Supernatural Practices of the Gypsies (London: Sheldon Press, 1975), pp. xi, 6–7.

¹⁸ Henry James, The Bostonians (London: Macmillan, 1886; repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 74, 313.

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And George Egerton's New Woman – usually symbolically nameless – embraces the power of both the gipsy and the witch. The witch too has existed since before recorded histoy: according to Maria Leach, the belief in witches has existed 'from earliest times to present day'.¹⁹ In 'A Cross Line' the husband calls his wife 'Gipsy', while to the fisherman she is a 'witch woman'. The protagonist of 'The Regeneration of Two' begins a kind of transformation on reaching Bygdo: 'The witchery of the surroundings begins to affect her. The resinous smell of the pines does her head good.'²⁰ In her Introduction to the Virago Keynotes and Discords double volume, Vicinus states:

'Throughout her work the highest compliment Egerton could give a woman was to declare her a witch, in the sense of bewitching –someone who knew her sexual attractiveness and was willing to use it.'²¹

In 'A Cross Line', in an interesting allusion to the title of the book, Egerton's narrator says:

'They have all overlooked the eternal wildness, the untamed primitive savage temperament that lurks in the mildest, best woman. Deep in through ages of convention this primeval trait burns, an untamable quantity that may be concealed but is never eradicated by culture – the keynote of woman's witchcraft and woman's strength.'²²

The culture the narrator refers to is obviously male, imperialistic, prescriptive, and above all anti-libertarian. And she says that such writers as Strindberg and Nietzsche had seen through the various layers of falsehood enshrouding the conventional woman to discover the true woman within –and this is of course and area of consciousness that Foucault later investigated.²³ The quote is also significant in that Egerton's New Woman in many ways closely resembles Prior's Nell, albeit without the philosophical content. The same qualities that Egerton praised in her New Woman are those in Nell which captivate Arthur and Lois.

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¹⁹ Maria Leach, ed., Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend, 2 vols (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1949–50), II, p. 1179.

²⁰ George Edgerton, Keynotes and Discords (London: Mathews & Lane, 1893 (Keynotes), and Lane, 1894 (Discords); repr. London: Virago, 1983), Keynotes, pp. 14, 30; Discords, pp. 172–73. Further footnotes to the Virago edition are referred to as 'Egerton' with the addition (where applicable) of either 'Keynotes or Discords because of their separate pagination within the volume.

²¹ Egerton, p. x.

²² Egerton, Keynotes, p. 22.

²³ Egerton, Keynotes, p. 23.

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The not dissimilar worlds of witches and gipsies and their affinity with the natural world, with the exotic, with independence of action and spirit, with a certain enigmatic power, are important both to some New Woman writers and to Prior. This power is first seen in Forest Folk when Arthur is struck by the ploughboy's sudden transformation into a remarkable young woman with hair coloured with 'lustrous waves of that eloquent hue which is nearest to red but not red' (p. 7). She has undergone a 'miraculous alteration', and uses Arthur's entrancement to mock him: 'Yo mean to know me when yo see me again' (p. 10). The female working-class discourse is demoralizing the middle-class discourse, as it does later when Nell replies to Arthur, after his observation that she would 'make a gallant soldier's wife', 'I've no opinion o'sojers [...] nayther play-sojers nor workaday-sojers (pp. 129-30). Her caustic distinction of course belies her statement before the ellipsis.

The power Nell possesses affects and troubles other people, although for the middle-class Skrenes it exists as a benign, if somewhat disturbing, force. Both Lois and Arthur are amused by the sight of Nell returning from milking: 'the old blue smock-frock, the thick boots, the clumsy gaiters, the wooden piggin ledged on her hip'.²⁴ They both admire the woman, though, and Arthur, in an expression that combines images of the working class, androgyny, and an unsettling sexuality, sees a 'conglomerate milkmaid, ploughboy and nymph' (p. 52). Lois later sees 'a woman as tall as a man, and with a man's frankness of outlook, yet a woman all over' (p. 131). Not for the first time, the narrator appends a qualifying phrase to a statement that might show Nell in too 'masculine' a light, as if for some reason he is afraid of gender contamination. Lawrence uses a very similar technique when he describes his New Woman figure Winifred Inger in The Rainbow: 'She was proud and free as a man, yet exquisite as a woman.'²⁵ Masculine and gender constructs are joined in one person. Lois, of course, is also a representative of the middle-class discourse, but the insidious female working-class discourse is having a powerful effect on her. During her recovery from the attack on the farm she sees Nell as a kind of idol with curative powers:

'Arthur, if I were a Haroun-al-Rashid autocrat, I'd sit in a lighted saloon [...] and have her dash in and out on a wild Arab. I think the sight would shame my head into steadiness and my legs and back into strength (pp. 186-87).

Lois is of course associating Nell with the Arabian Nights, and imagining that she has the power of mental and physical healing. Significantly, Nell later saves Arthur's life by symbolically using her garter on his wounded leg as a tourniquet. Furthermore, Lois says of her first face to face encounter with Nell:

'When she came into the house on that night, wet, disorderly and great, a part and parcel of the elements, she made me dwindle into a rag-doll with ink-dots for eyes and saw-dust for soul' (p. 187).

Nell is part of the natural, disorderly order of Egerton's New Women, Lois the socially constructed, manufactured middle- class world. Nell is complete, Lois suffers from a lack. And she is only too willingly becoming a victim of subversion by Prior's New Woman.

But if Nell has the power to cure, she is also perceived by the male working-class discourse as having the power to kill She has red hair, a feature associated in folklore with evil and misfortune.²⁶ Her power embraces a timeless order and the male working-class is not entranced: it is terrified of her. Spettigrew first mentions a history of witchcraft in the Rideout family to Arthur, who calls him a fool (p. 87). Spettigrew says of Nell, 'I niver liked them fraunfreckles about 'er eyes; nor yit the colour of 'er 'air; there's a touch o' hell fire about it (p. 283). Much earlier, the narrator had remarked: 'In those days a rural community was as little complete without a witch as without a parson or a doctor' (p. 31). Superstition mixed with drink is a dangerous concoction. The drunken Spettigrew feels a 'superstitious hate' which with the 'up-push of opportunity' manifests itself in violence (p. 309). According to the temperance ideology of the narrator, pubs foster the environment for the hate which the madness of intoxication fuels. Jesses Limm had attributed his daughter's death to diphtheria, 'until he was helped to see a woman's devilry in it' (p.310). The narrator has in several previous passages shown how well acquainted he is with the taxonomy of drunkenness. Woman, in the shape of a witch called Nell, gradually –'nearer eleven than ten' – becomes the scapegoat for all the unsolved ills in Blidworth (p. 310). 'Blid'orth laws', 'a local name for the rough justice of Judge Lynch', is not timeless and seems to belong to a medieval past (p. 312).

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²⁴ One wonders of this vision is in any way inspired by Joan Southcott, who also used to be a milkmaid and was seen by some as a witch.

²⁵ D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (London: Methuen, 1915; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949), p. 337.

²⁶ Iona Opie and Moira Tatem, eds, A Dictionary of Superstitions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989; repr. 1992), pp. 325–26.

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We have already seen how Nell is associated with the age-old witch or gipsy, and the timeless dialect she speaks is firmly rooted in the land in which it is spoken. But if Prior is really trying to dehistoricize her, why does he have her so spellbound by the activities in the Methodist chapel she regularly attends, which surely anchors her to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?

This is where the narrator, barely distinguishable from Prior the Methodist, intervenes once more in a chapter entitled 'Hallelujah!', and allows his religious views to intrude on the narrative. There are two principal religious services in Forest Folk, the first of which is in a Methodist chapel and the other in the parish church.²⁷ The former has a staunchly working-class following with participation being of vital importance. Here, the congregation is on familiar terms with the preachers and make well-received interruptions. The atmosphere is convivial, whereas in the Anglican church the atmosphere is starchy and formal, and the mumbling preacher impersonally labelled 'the surpliced man' (p. 306). Prior makes it quite plain that the Methodist Church belongs to the natural order which he juxtaposes to it. As Brother Lightfoot roars to God, 'a ray of sunshine came through the chink between door and jamb; a row of children had settled on the bottom step and were chattering like sparrows' (p. 99). Evidently, the narrator is underlining how much the Methodist chapel transports the churchgoers to a more natural world that is part of a timeless unity.

In Ripple and Flood, it is significant that the androgynous gipsy Ivy –also one of Prior's New Woman figures – becomes a Salvation Army preacher. She is incidentally one of the very few fictional women preachers of the period, and someone whom the narrator Edward will later marry. Prior is again associating his New Women with Low Church sects. Although she never gives a formal religious speech herself, Nell does very informally preach her beliefs about class tolerance. The Methodist chapel is her natural home, and in Chapter Three I shall explain what role Nell subsequently performs in the scoffing Arthur's education towards becoming her partner, the New Man. Juxtaposed to the Methodist service is a far more restrained Anglican service, although this time it is not 'the surpliced man' who allows in the natural order, but the congregation singing and the church roof figuratively disappearing to allow Lois and Tant a view of the sky. Tant too, as I shall also make clear in the next chapter, has made great advances towards New Man status, although it would be an exaggeration to call Lois a fully fledged New Woman.

But it is Nell who is at the heart of the book and much of the action, and Prior's novel is a paean to the female working-class discourse as represented by her. The gender anarchy seen in so many middle-class representations is present in the book, as is the strong spirit of independence and will to work. But one difference is that most of the significant scenes take place outdoors as opposed to the often claustrophobic middle-class home of the fin-de-siecle New Woman figure. But a notable exception, which again highlights previously mentioned similarities between Prior's New Woman and the more conventional New Woman, is Egerton's 'The Regeneration of Two', which had important outdoor settings. Vicinus sees the oudoors as Egerton's 'freeing agent, providing the space and climate for personal growth'.²⁸ But unlike the conventional New Woman novel Nell's work is manual, and there is a positive lack of any direct comment in Forest Folk on woman's position in society. But Nell has an independence of spirit that makes her more than equal to any man, and her words will become more effective than the snobbish Arthur can imagine. Prior has reclaimed the New Woman from the middle class, saturating her in the exotic mystery of the gipsy, or in Nell's case the witch.

Ledger says that 'nineteenth-century novels quintessentially close with a marriage', but that most New Woman novels reject romance.²⁹ With the exception of his first novel Renie –which ends with a vicar's wife mentally destroying her husband after their illegitimately born daughter has effectively committed suicide – all of Prior's novels either end with a recent wedding or with the assumption of an imminent wedding. It would be accurate to describe Pior as a writer of very low-key romantic novels. As Leclaire, in a book published in the same year as his bibliography of the regional novel, says of Prior's books: 'Le theme ordinaire de l'amour n'est pas absent, mais il n'encombre pas le roman.'³⁰ Certainly, romantic love itself that is the central issue, but the dynamics of the man-woman relationship. Vicinus notes Egerton's prediction of an evolution in male-female relationships. This foreshadowed the writings of, for example, Schreider and Gilman: 'unlike other women of her times, she could imagine the creation of a more equal relationship between the New Woman at her strongest and freest and an evolving "New Man"'.

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²⁷ R. W. Ambler points out that Primitive Methodism was essentially a working-class phenomenon characterized by 'fervent prayer meetings held under shared leadership [...] and large-scale participation in worship'. This would suggest the kind of service depicted in Forest Folk, and the first church of this kind to be opened in Nottinghamshire – incidentally in Prior's home town of Bingham – was in 1818, when the congregation, far too large for the building, moved to the market place where 'hundreds joined in the grand chorus of hallelujah!'. See R. W. Ambler, Ranters, Revivalists and Rural Society South Lincolnshire 1817–1875 (Hull: Hull University Press, 1989), pp. 1, 30–33.

²⁸ Egerton, p. xi.

²⁹ Ledger, pp. 26, 54.

³⁰ Leclaire, Lucien, Le Roman régionaliste dans les Iles britanniques, 1800-1950 (Paris: Société d'édition les Belles lettres, 1954).

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The links below are to the posts I've made on James Prior:
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
James Prior's Forest Folk (dissertation): Introduction
James Prior's Forest Folk (dissertation): Chapter One
James Prior's Forest Folk (dissertation): Chapter Two
James Prior's Forest Folk (dissertation): Chapter Three
James Prior's Forest Folk (dissertation): Conclusion
The Grave of James Prior (1851–1922) in Bingham
James Prior's Parents' Grave, Nottingham
James Prior: Three Shots from a Popgun (1880)

James Prior's Forest Folk: A Novel Construction of the New Woman and the New Man: Chapter Three

CHAPTER THREE
Prior's New Man
In Daughters of Decadence Showalter states that 'on the whole, [...] New Women writers were pessimistic about their chances of finding New Men to share their lives'.¹ Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, New Woman literature is frequently filled with villains. This chapter, on the other hand, is in part designed to show how closely James Prior's New Man and New Woman share the views of the more optimistic New Woman writers. One of the key New Woman writers of the fin de siècle was Sarah Grand, whose particularly important earlier books are interesting in their depiction of villainous men. But Grand could be optimistic as well as pessimistic, and the views of her New Women often echo the co-operative ideas of Prior:

'That is the right new spirit! Let us help one another. Any attempt to separate the interests of the sexes [...] is fatal to the welfare of the whole race. The efforts of foolish people to divide men and women make me writhe – as if we were not utterly bound up in one another, and destined to rise or fall together!'²

These are the words of Angelica Gilroy, one of several New Women in Grand's loose trilogy, of which this – the largely autobiographical The Beth Book – is the final volume. Angelica is speaking about the future accomplishments of the Women's Movement, which she believes had an important role in the evolution of both women and men: 'It is an effort of the race to raise itself a step higher in the scale of being.'³ Where this language differs from the ideas expressed in Prior's novels is in the presence here of the historical and political context of the fin-de-siècle New Woman, but what makes it similar is its emphasis on the co-operative imperative: men and women have to work together on equal terms. This is the major defining characteristic of Prior's New Man, although it does not come naturally to him – he must be taught to develop it. A number of canonic New Woman novels which include the New Man share this idea of the necessity for teaching him.

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¹ Elaine Showalter, ed., Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin de siècle (London: Virago, 1993, p. xvi.

² Sarah Grand, The Beth Book: Being a Study from the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure: A Woman of Genius (London: Heinmann, 1898 [1897], p. 412.

³ The Beth Book, p. 413.

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The central character in The Beth Book is Beth Maclure, who walks out on her husband, a doctor who runs a Lock hospital and who once, without his wife's knowledge at the time, brought his mistress to live in the marital home. Grand also features New Men in her work, of whom Beth later meets an example. What amazes her, as she nurses her sick fellow tenant Arthur Brock in the cheap lodgings she had taken, is that Brock appears to be a different kind of man from those she had known in the past: 'She had never before realized that there could be such men, so heroic in suffering, so unselfish, and so good.'⁴

However, partly to buy medicine for the invalid, the destitute Beth is forced to sell her hair. When he discovers this, Brock, in an allusion to the androgynous New Woman stereotypes, exclaims '[a]re you going to join the unsexed crew that shriek on platforms?' This is an obvious reference to the 'shrieking sisterhood', another expression used by Linton of the 'wild women' briefly mentioned in Chapter One.⁵ Beth retorts that she is surprised that Brock is 'taking the tone of cheap journalism. There has been nothing in the woman movement to unsex women except the brutalities of the men who expose them'.⁶ Arthur shuts up and stares at the fire: he has been given a lesson in the dynamics of the New Woman and the developing New Man, as Arthur Skrene and Tant will be too. As Angelica has previously told Beth: 'Man [...] has his faults, you know, but he must be educated; that is all he wants.'⁷

No doubt, but initially, Arthur Brock's unthinking comment separates the couple, although in their later reunion he becomes a knight from Camelot in Beth's imagination: hardly fin-de-siècle sexual equality, but the transformation at least makes a point about the New Woman's power vis-à-vis the New Man. Prior's books also contain positive transformations of men, although perhaps not quite as dramatic as the one seen by Beth.

In Forest Folk, outside the ideal world of the New Woman and the New Man there is a great deal of general antagonism between the sexes. I have already dealt in Chapter Two with the domestication – even partial feminization – of Tant, but the first time he appears in the book is when he comes home drunk and Nell thrashes him with her hunting crop. Male and female working-class discourses are at loggerheads, and this is a common theme in Prior's work. In a belittling remark about Tant's Luddite activities and at the same time an allusion to the cheap broadsheets of the day, Nell says that his speech on the scaffold will be 'bought for a penny'. The befuddled Tant counters, 'I wain't mek no speech; I'll die like a man' (p. 28). Throughout the book, references such as this are made about the stereotypical garrulous woman and as in this instance are generally sympathetic to the female working-class discourse.

Occasionally, though, this is not the case at all and the narrative discourse appears to be subverted by the male working-class discourse. As Tant watches over the Foats before secretly terrorizing them again with eerie noises as they try to go to sleep, the narrator says 'on the rack men have been known to sleep, even under a wife's tongue' (p. 227). If this is an attempt to introduce humour into the narrative, it is a joke lost on twenty-first century sensibilities; if the reader is to understand that the thoughts of Ben Foat, representative of the male working class, are being voiced through the narrator, Prior is far from successful in conveying the idea. The narrative discourse seems to reveal conflicting loyalties, the kind of 'different and even contradictory discourses within the same strategy' of which Foucault speaks.⁸

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⁴ The Beth Book, p. 505.

⁵ Sexual Anarchy, p. 24.

⁶ The Beth Book, p. 509.

⁷ The Beth Book, pp. 411–12.

⁸ Foucault, p. 102.

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But although Forest Folk begins with male–female conflicts, there is a gradual movement away from antagonism and towards enlightenment, tolerance and mutual understanding. Soon after the fight between Nell and Arthur 'Arthur took up the swaling lantern and returned to the place where he and she – terrible pronouns! – had encountered', the narrator is expressing Arthur's horror at hitting a woman (p. 62). But there is perhaps also a hint that the words 'he' and 'she' are'terrible pronouns' because they represent two warring factions that for Prior should be a harmonious whole. This harmony is clearly seen in the two main couples who slowly come together towards the end of the novel.

There are two New Men as well as two New Women figures in Forest Folk and I begin with Tant and Lois, although Lois is rather less satisfactory as a New Woman figure, or at least she is certainly too middle class for a New Woman of Prior's. She is also too dependent on her brother, frightened of many things, including cows – and on the journey to Nottingham with the Rideout sisters she is almost treated as a child: hardly the stuff of which either the conventional, or even Prior's more off-beat, New Woman is made.

Nevertheless Lois is capable of moments of surprising boldness in relation to Tant and seems to possess the primordial force with which the New Woman is associated, and she deals the ox-like Tant, who has just beaten up Arthur, a hefty blow merely by looking at him:

'Tant trembled before [Lois's gaze] as he had not trembled before her brother's; he shrank again as at the touch of magic from the fighting man into the mere lout (p. 75).'

Tant's reaction to the power of woman is later echoed by Spettigrew, who says: 'I'd sooner be fisted by a man any day nor tongue-battled by a woman' (p. 86). This is of course yet another example of female stereotyping, but of interest in Tant's above sentence is the word 'magic', which again associates the New Woman with the supernatural world. Like Arthur, Tant is becoming bewitched: he may be a fearless fighter who has given Arthur a boxing lesson, but it is Lois who is giving Tant a moral education in New Manhood. Initially, though, Tant is frightened of the unknown power which Lois represents and attempts an alcoholic antidote. But in the following chapter – 'As Others See Us' – he staggers out of the last pub into Lois's gaze again. The female working- and middle-class discourses are for the moment mortified by each other, and then Tant flees. Bizarrely, Lois at the same time pleads for help from Josh Towers, one of the greatest drunkards in the village. His verdict on Tant is male and working class, although Josh seems to be a little starstruck by the middle-class discourse, and uses an unnecessary aitch for the occasion: 'It's Sunday, you see, an 'huz working-men had to mek the best on't' (p. 79). Tant, however, has made the worst of it, and he feels as though he is going insane. He is distressed that he should have such an effect on people, particularly Lois, and the questions pile up as he struggles to make sense of the situation:

'Surely he had not been born so? When had the changes come upon him? During his late drunkeness? or at the moment of his sudden awakening from it? [...] Could it be that yesterday he was a man among other men, negligent, manly, selfish, well enough liked? (p. 83).

These and other questions – involving madness, heredity and male stereotyping – continue until Tant is forced to question his very existence in the world. Living for a long time without parents, he has had few checks put upon his excesses: 'the early removal of a father's restraint had been detrimental' (p. 30). He has sought a retreat into the substitute womb of the public bar with its heady mix of easy cameraderie and alcoholic oblivion. But the time has come for him to sever the umbilical cord that links him to the irresponsible and destructive male working-class discourse. He is undergoing a variation of Jaques Lacan's 'mirror stage' and he rushes home to gaze at his likeness. He throws the mirror outside, his ego shattered. A young child might look into the glass and see itself as a unity, but for the drunken Tant there is not even an illusory unity – only the horror of a fractured self and Other too horrifying to be accepted as an image of himself. It is left to Lois to repair his self-image, serve as his superego, and work towards making him whole.

And she, or rather Tant's image of her, is very effective. When Nell is busy nursing her ailing great-grandmother, Tant had become a new man – although certainly not yet a New Man. He works tirelessly at the harvest now and is even considering renouncing his Luddite activities, although he 'could not do enough between dawn and dark to tire his remorse. The lady's face, disgusted, horrified, was always before him' (p. 110). He continues to go badger-baiting at the roughest pub in Blidworth, but as Nell remarks, is 'as sober as rent day' (p. 112). Tant tells a representation of the real Nottingham Luddite James Towle that he has not been drunk for months: 'It's wunnerful what a difference that meks to the colour o' things' (p. 118). But as Tant appears to have been drugged by Towle and cajoled into joining in with the destructive activities, the colour of things soon loose their difference. Tant's brute force is needed by the Luddites, although in a revenge attack on the Skrene farm the same night Tant meets Lois again and regains full consciousness. He turns from her and fights back against his former friends the attackers. At great risk to his own life Tant saves hers.

In an action that will find a parallel in the story of Arthur and Nell, just as Tant has saved Lois's life so Lois will save his. She testifies before the court in Nottingham that Tant fought against his own friends to save her. Furthermore, Lois again saves Tant, as mentioned in the previous chapter. When the treacherous Ben Foat accuses Tant of machine breaking some months previously, Lois makes a kind of citizen's arrest and hides him from the police in a locked room in Arthur's farmhouse. In performing this action she is of course switching discourse allegiances, and at the same time she is doing so with the complicity of Arthur, who has thrown away the warrant for Tant's arrest and pretends to ignore his sister's intrigues. For a moment here – and there seems to be a strong suggestion that this is a special moment – there appear to be only two discourses: the dominant (represented not only by the rather stupid and almost voiceless but ever-present police, but also the indifferent lawyers), and the reverse (now represented by Nell and Tant, but also Arthur and Lois, supported by the narrator and Prior).

Tant makes progress at Arthur's farm. The budding New Man must learn like a child, and the giant Tant soon adopts a subservient position in relation to the tiny Lois. His housework is improving, as shown when the couple are for a time alone together at High Farm house: 'they removed dish and platter together, he carrying not at all clumsily, like most men-folk, she doing little beyond directing where and how to place' (p. 235). Again we see the narrator siding with women against men, and again lapsing into gender stereotyping. If the female working-class discourse is preferred by the narrator, the middle-class discourse expressed by the woman seems to be superior to the male working-class discourse. Any female discourse civilizes the male of any class, Prior seems to be saying. Traditional gender roles have been reversed and Lois remarks that Tant's bedroom is in perfect order. She calls him a 'strangely unequal man' (p. 237).

But Tant decides that no matter how much progress he is making towards New Manhood, it is still not enough. Near the end of the book he opts for the discourse defended by the middle class and chooses to fight in the Peninsular War. The narrative discourse, on the other hand, does not seem completely convinced about the wisdom of his action, and nor does Tant: 'he showed no sign in partaking on the hop-hip-hurraing patriotism of the day, either before or after he had taken the King's shilling' (p. 297). Lois is distressed that Tant has enlisted and asks him why he has done so. He replies: 'It gies me a chance to come back sommat different. I ayther come back different or I stay there' (p. 303). So speaks the existential male, but what Tant fails to realize is that the change has already taken effect: he has already become a different person.

Enlisting at the same time as Tant are Jack Whitehead and Nommer Brooks, men whose behaviour can hardly be more different from that of the reformed Tant, and whose clear function is to show how far Tant has come in his education by Lois. The two men spend their time 'guzzling gratuitous beer and admiration by illustrating by turns each of the various valorous moods between half tipsy and dead drunk' (p. 298). Shortly before he leaves for the Iberian Peninsula, Tant does not even consider going into the pub but instead joins Lois in church. Both of them sing hymns in perfect harmony, a symbolic – though rather trite – manifestation of their short union.

Lois briefly experiences a kind of pantheistic mysticism, a brief surrender to the cosmos. In church with her New Man 'She saw through the window in the roof, she regarded neither the past nor the future; she was as God is, who has only a present' (pp. 306–07). In contrast to Tant's present self, Whitehead and Brooks have to be almost carried out of the pub and when Tant sees them as he leaves Blidworth he wishes he were back in church with Lois. And a little later he dies in combat, fighting for the dominant British discourse. Lois goes onto mourning. The relationship has come to an end due to the external political situation, and although Schreiner wrote the comment below about evolutionary sexual politics, it is nonetheless relevant to Tant and Lois:

'I know that the loveliest thing that has blossomed on the earth is the binding of man and woman in one body, one fellowship, and I know all the failures are only the broken steps which Humanity builds in stairs she is shaping for herself to climb by, which she will have to rebuild in the future'.⁹

Social Darwinists may have emphasized competition and violent struggle, but Joyce Berkman says Schreiner 'concluded that species evolution was contingent no less upon cooperative and mutually protective behaviour.¹⁰ Later, Berkman devotessic] was one of the most original and subversive features of her social thought'.¹¹

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⁹ From Man to man, p. 297.

¹⁰ Joyce Avrech Berkman, The Healing Imagination of Olive Schreiner: Beyond South African Colonialism (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts, 1989), p. 78.

¹¹ Berkman, pp. 140–49 (p. 142).

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I now move to the New Woman/New Man relationship that is Nell and Arthur. Arthur's confrontations with Nell are at first always the middle- against the working-class discourse, and perhaps in no clearer way does this manifest itself than in the conflict between the languages they use. The working-class characters present an undiluted Nottinghamshire dialect and seem completely at ease with it – after all, Prior made a great study of it. But Arthur is a southern snob and hates the way Nottinghamshire people speak. He admires Nell, but, for instance, 'at the same time [...] regret[s] that she should say 'yo' when she might have said "you" (p. 95). Prior (or the narrative discourse at least) is again taking sides, and it is clear that the reader should feel unsympathetic to Arthur's prejudices. The scene between Nell and Arthur standing outside the Methodist chapel marks the beginning of Arthur's journey towards becoming a New Man, a person of understanding and tolerance as opposed to one of petty prejudices. Most of this early nineteenth century congregation is illiterate, but it is clear where the narrator's – and Prior's – allegances lie:

'We may have better psalmody now-a-days, irreproachably unemotional and empty, from our Mus.B's and D.'s, [but] we have no such singers as those lusty enthusiasts who made the windows of that humble little meeting-house tremble' (p. 100).

The narrator seems to be looking bck with nostalgia to a no doubt illusory golden age, but he is certainly siding with the working class. Arthur, on the other hand, objects to a preacher attaching superfluous aitches to his words and hates the general anarchy of the service. He complains to Nell about the 'ignorant' preacher and wonders why 'anybody can prefer such minstration to that of an educated and properly ordained gentleman' (p. 106). Nell rebukes the priggish Arthur for criticizing the language of the service and for his generally supercilious manner: 'Yo're allus of hoss-back. Coom down a bit, do' (p. 107). She is affected by the service in a similar pantheistic way to Lois, and implores Arthur to calm himself into the world of nature, the hawthorn and the song of the blackbird. This encounter is significant in several ways. It reaffirms the relationship between the New Woman and the natural world, it is a direct confrontation between the female working-class discourse and the middle-clas discourse, and it shows Nell preaching class tolerance to a future New Man. Prior's New Woman has teeth, and the New Man is beginning to feel bitten: 'The sky was still luminous but the discoloration of the earth had begun. He felt a change too in the values of his judgment' (p. 107). The beginning of Arthur's conversion is not so much of the earth but spiritual. Enlightenment is on the horizon with a loss of materialistic middle-class values, or 'frippery' as Arthur will later call it.

Local dialect is seen by both Nell and Prior as part of the timeless existence of the working class, and any attack on it is important. Its significance as the voice of the working class is evident in Tant's long court case in which the narrator ridicules the lawyers. Here, the 'little King's Counsel' criticizes Nell for using dialect, and Nell retorts: 'Did yo mother my tongue? Did yo larn it to talk?' (p. 173) Nell is again defending her discourse as she defended it against Arthur's. And Prior is of course making a strong criticism of the pretensions of the middle-class discourse, represented here by members of the legal profession.

When the gang of Luddites are roaming the countryside, Nell urges Arthur the volunteer policeman not to be too eager with his rifle. With clumsy ambiguity, Arthur replies that he will be so if the priming of his rifle is damp – or because she has requested him to do so. Nell says: 'Do't for your own sake. 'Twill be a more human sort o' reason nor the one and a more accountable sort nor the tother' (p. 130). Teaching is vital to the relationship between the New Woman and the prospective New Man, only Nell's teaching comes more through working-class words (in dialect) than through the horrified middle-class looks of Lois. In Cholmondeley's middle-class world of Red Pottage, Lord Newhaven says of Rachel West and Hugh Scarlett: 'That woman loves him, and if she marries him she will reform him.'¹² Nell reforms Arthur before their marriage. It is evident that the female working-class discourse is having a mellowing effect on the middle-class one. There is less antagonism. Nell begins to eat into Arthur's consciousnes and the New Woman's words have a powerful humanizing and equalizing effect such as that experienced in Grand's 'The Undefinable: A Fantasia'. In this short story a male artist is overcome by the change brought about by the strange 'model' who has invited herself into his house, and significantly he quotes from Shelley's Prometheus Unbound in his comment:

'[E]ven my [...] manservant, to judge by his counternance, felt her effect. Her mere presence seemed to be making him, "the reptile equal" – for the moment in his estimation – "to the god", that is to say, to me. Under the strange, benign influence of her appearance as she stood there, I could see that he had suddenly ceased to be an impassive serving-machine, and had become an emotional human being'.¹³

One point of interest here is the fact that the woman is bringing the working class and the middle class together, as Prior will do in a sexual context. Grand's 'model' (of the New Woman?) later proudly proclaims: 'I am a woman with all the latest improvements. The creature the world wants. Nothing can now be done without me'.¹⁴ The tone seems over-dramatic and hardly sits well with equality, but the general message is plain: the New Woman is essential to the New Man.

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¹² Cholmondeley, p. 223.

¹³ Sarah Grand, 'The Undefinable: A romance', in Daughters of Decadence, pp. 262–87 (p. 277).

¹⁴Daughters of Decadence

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By the time he rescues Nell from the clutches of Spettigrew and his drunken drinking partners who want to murder her for being a witch, Arthur is already bewitched. He saves her life by intervening at the right time, and the voice of Prior's New Man in defence of the female working-class discourse resonates across the countryside: 'If you murder this woman [...] you will also murder me' (p. 324). A week later the couple walk together holding a milk container from which the milk has been spilt – a clear symbol of the new union, although for the present-day reader there is perhaps a little more symbolism than Prior ever intended.

Vicinus states that Egerton's outdoor scenes involve 'men and women who fish meet[ing] as comrade-in-arms, recognising and appreciating each other's skill'.¹⁵ The same of course applies to farmers. When Nell says that Arthur 'has summat to larn about the management of our light forest land', the now humble New Man meekly replies, 'You'll teach me, Nell' (p. 338). The couple now meet on equal ground. Nell even stands in the gutter so they can kiss more comfortably, and she is protective and conciliatory towards her 'little un'. She tells her family: 'Arthur's more nor my match a'ready. And he's a very good height-th, a very good height-th indeed; it's me that's a deal too lanky for a woman' (p. 339). But the most important change Nell has brought about to Arthur has been to make him recognize the unimportancce of external appearances, such as clothes. With Lois, Arthur had laughed at Nell's bizarre clothing, but he now says clothes are mere 'frippery, which anybody's money may buy, with something inside to walk them about'. He touches Nell's 'country-made bodice' and says: 'There's a woman in this [...] and that unpurchasable'. He goes on to say that Nell has taught him that, and adds that she must be an extrordinary teacher because all his years at school have taught him 'nothing in comparison' (p. 346). The match is complete, and so begins a partnership which Schreiner would have recognized, although she of course historicized it in terms of the Women's Movement. She says: '[N]ot only is it not a movement on the part of woman leading to severance and separation between the woman and the man, but [...] it is essentially a movement fo the woman towards the man, of the sexes towards closer union.' (Schreiner's italics.)¹⁶

Ignoring the context, the aim is exactly the same as the narrator is advocating in Forest Folk/ but what Schreiner constructs in Woman and Labour she sees differently. For her, both the New Woman and the New Man have always existed, but over time various factors have intervened to cause them to lose their way. Both must undergo a process of social evolution. Prior's New Woman, however, has never lost her way, but his new man is an existentialist who must create himself with her assistance. However, the goal is the same, according to a typical long sentence of Schreiner's:

'If anywhere on earth exists the perfect ideal of that which the modern woman desires to be – of a labouring and virile womanhood, free, strong, fearless and tender – it will probably be found imaged in the heart of the New Man; engendered there by his own highest needs and aspirations; and nowhere would the most highly developed modern male find an image of that which forms his idea of the most fully developed manhood, than in the ideal of man which haunts the heart of the New Woman.¹⁷

The sentence is bulky and clumsy but the message is clear and continues the theme of co-operation. Being a New Man, and a New Woman, is about breaking down barriers. For New Woman writers these barriers are largely concerned with sexual inequality. For Prior, there are also barriers between the classes, and not just the physical barriers such as the gates on Arthur's farm to which the working class has been excluded access. There are also, as between the sexes, deep psychological barriers between the classes. which are manifested by the intolerance of many things, an important one for Prior being dialect. Prior seems to want to heal the rift between working and middle class as well as man and woman, and he shows this above all in his New Men and New Women in Forest Folk.

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¹⁵ Egerton, p. xi.

¹⁶ Woman and Labour, p. 252.

¹⁷ Woman and Labour, p. 258.

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My James Prior posts:
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
James Prior's Forest Folk (dissertation): Introduction
James Prior's Forest Folk (dissertation): Chapter One
James Prior's Forest Folk (dissertation): Chapter Two
James Prior's Forest Folk (dissertation): Chapter Three
James Prior's Forest Folk (dissertation): Conclusion
James Prior (1851–1922) in Bingham
James Prior's Parents' Grave, Nottingham
James Prior: Three Shots from a Popgun (1880)
The Forest Folk memorial window
James Prior plaque, Blidworth

James Prior's Forest Folk: A Novel Construction of the New Woman and the New Man: Conclusion and Bibliography

CONCLUSION
The New Woman is written large across fin-de-siècle literature. Stereotypical images of the servile, decorative, and reluctantly inactive woman of the past were being overturned in an attempt to find a new voice for her which would reflect the new mood. Gender reversal was one of the characteristics of the New Woman novel, and she was exaggerated by some sources – notably in periodicals such as Punch – as being too 'masculine'. The bicycle, rational dress and the ubiquitous cigarette just some of the symbols used in these satires, but although the New Woman was a heterogeneous phenomenon, she nevertheless represented a generally concerted effort on the part of women to assert themselves. Of interest here is that in the process they gained not only sympathisers but also converts from the male camp, and in a sense James Prior was one of them. He seemed much more comfortable writing about women, and in an ahistorical way in general sympathy with their cause.

It is unknown which New Woman novels Prior had read, if any at all, although it seems certain that he was not only aware of the genre but also influenced by it. Nell Rideout is an evident New Woman type, although with significant differences. Prior dehistoricizes his New Woman, and therefore uses none of the contemporary allusions present in conventional New Woman fiction: not only is there no talk of social issues such as the Women's Movement, but there are no props such as the cigarette. In Forest Folk, Prior even sets the book outside the fin-de-siècle period as if to escape from contemporary trappings. And instead of the middle-class New Woman in the comfortable fin-de-siècle home, Prior's construction of her in Forest Folk involves converting her into a feisty working-class heroine confidently riding horses, almost always outdoors and speaking about farming or the countryside in general in a proudly expressed, broad Nottingham accent.

What clearly defines Nell as a New Woman and creates correspondences with Prior's ideas and New Woman literature – above all with Egerton's Keynotes and Discords and Schreiner's Woman and Labour – is the necessity for independence and equality. More than any other qualities, these can safely be said to be essential prerequisites of the conventional New Woman. But in a heterosexual context, which Prior's invariably is, there must be a New Man to mirror the New Woman's independence and equality. New Men are also prominent in Egerton's and Schreiner's work, but with an inevitable difference: unlike Prior's – and to a certain extent Egerton's and Schreiner's – New Woman, his New Man is not timeless, but must be taught how to become New. Particularly successful here is the New Woman Nell's Nottinghamshire dialect sparring with the budding New Man Arthur's Received Pronunciation. The conflict between these two discourses shows Prior at his most successful, and Forest Folk earned Prior some critical acclaim. His vision is one of equality, bringing together the sexes and the classes.

So to return to Lawrence's question about James Prior: 'Why is he a failure?' It is perhaps Prior's next book which would prove fatal to his continued success as a writer. Ivory Buchan simply call Hyssop Prior's worst book, and 'really so very bad that it needs no further comment'. ¹ Long before Buchan's article, and when Prior was still alive, his friend Stephen Fisher evidently came to the same conclusion, as it is the only one of the six Prior novels that he does not mention at all. Hyssop was Prior's all-important follow-up to Forest Folk, and concerns a young woman suffering from amnesia as a result of a train crash. She even loses all recall of her language and has to be taught how to speak by the middle-class family that adopts her. Only towards the end, where the book for a brief spell almost reaches the wilder excesses of a temperance novel, does the reader learn that Eva was in her former life an alcoholic prostitute in a London slum. Almost the whole book is set inside a middle-class house with dialogue far removed from the lively dialect of Forest Folk, and the language is tortured and artificial. Prior seems to have forgotten, or possibly not realized, his strengths. He has forced himself to be hidebound by the narrative convention he is writing in, and of course his perception of it. It is as though Prior is now writing in an alien language: his father's 'grave and exact way of expressing himself by his pen' is now subverting him, preventing him from expressing himself freely. Prior's characters do not travel well when transposed to exclusively middle-class surroundings: there is no inter-class tension in Hyssop as in Forest Folk in particular. Ivory Buchan sums it up quite well:

'Prior was indeed far more at home in the cottage than in the hall or the self-contained villa. He was not in a position to observe the habits of the high-born, and the middle-class milieu was singularly wanting in the liveliness, poetry and tradition which his nature demanded. And so his best characters are those that speak dialect: sturdy peasants with slow caustic tongues, beggars and wandering gypsies, beside whom the well-spoken seem a little thin. [...] He has a[n] odd stiltedness and slight unreality in "educated" dialogue, and then a sudden grip and ease when it comes to country speech'.

A Walking Gentleman, which followed Hyssop three years later in 1907, was considered by Fisher to be better than Forest Folk, and I'm almost certain that it had an influence on Lawrence's Aaron's Rod, but it was too late: it couldn't undo the damage, the public had not forgiven him for Hyssop, and Fortuna Chance in 1910 was Prior's last published work.

Three years after Prior's death, Rupert Hayra published his first and last book, Amidst Green Pastures. He dedicated it 'To the memory of my dear friend JAMES PRIOR [...] who opened my eyes and enlarged my heart, when together we wandered amidst green pastures.'² Prior's literary contribution should be remembered for its working-class New Woman and Man in the countryside, proclaiming their existence in a broad Nottinghamshire dialect and speaking out against general middle-class intolerance. They are original. As Prior said: 'I have put the best of myself into my books. They are me and nobody else.'

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¹Buchan, p. 8.

²Rupert Haywra, Amidst Green Pastures (London: Daniel, 1925), p. [5].

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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ambler, R. W. Ranters, Revivalists and Reformers: Primitive Methodism and Rural Society South Lincolnshire 1817–1875 (Hull: Hull University Press, 1989)

Anabel-Cooper, Jean, 'James Prior – An Appreciation',Nottinghamshire Countryside, Spring 1965

Anonymous, Athenaeum, 'Forest Folk, By James Prior', 3840 (1901)

–––––, Athenaeum, 'A Walking Gentleman, By James Prior', 4168 (1907)

Barrie, J. M., Tommy and Grizel (London: Cassell, 1900)

Berkman, Joyce Avrech, The Healing Imagination of Olive Schreiner: Beyond South Afican Colonialism (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts, 1989)

Brandon, Ruth, The New Woman and the Old Men: Love, Sex, and the Women Question (London: Secker & Warburg, 1990)

Buchan, Ivory, 'James Prior: An Appreciation', Nottinghamshire Countryside, July 1941

Buck, Claire, ed., Bloomsbury Guide to Women's Literature (London: Bloomsbury, 1992)

Calder, Jenni, Women and Marriage in Victorian Fiction (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976)

Cholmondeley, Mary, Red Pottage (London: Arnold, 1899; repr. London: Virago, 1985)

Chothia, Jean, ed, The New Woman and Other Emancipated Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)

Corelli, Marie, The Sorrows of Satan (London: Methuen, 1895; repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)

Dauzat, Albert, Dictionnaire étymologique des noms de famille et prénoms de France (Paris: larousse, 1951)

Dowie, Ménie Muriel, Gallia (London: Methuen, 1895; repr. London: Dent, 1995)

Findlater, Jane and Mary, Crossriggs (London: Smith, Elder, 1908; repr. London: Virago, 1986)

Egerton, George, Keynotes and Discords (London: Mathews & Lane, 1893 (Keynotes, and Lane, 1894 (Discords); repr. London: Virago, 1983)

First, Ruth, and Anne Scott, Olive Schreiner: A Biography (London: Deutsch, 1990; repr. The Women's Press, 1989)

Fisher, S., 'James Prior', Bookman, November 1917; repr. Nottingham: Nottingham James Prior Memorial Committee, [n.d.]

Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality: Volume I, An Introduction (London: Lane, 1979; repr. London: Penguin, 1998)

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar, No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, 3 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988–94), III: Letters from the Front

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, Herland (Forerunner, 1915; repr. London: The Women's Press, 1979)

Grand, Sarah, The Beth Book: Being a Study from the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure: A Woman of Genius (London Heinemann, 1998 [1897])

Haywra, Rupert, Amidst Green Pastures (London: Daniel, 1925)

Huxley, ed., The Letters of D. H. Lawrence (London: Heinemann, 1932)

James, Henry, The Bostonians (London: Macmillan, 1886; repr. Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1998)

Jordan, Ellen, 'The Christening of the New Woman: May 1894', Victorian Newsletter, 63 (1983)

Keating, Peter The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875–1914 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1989)

Kunitz, Stanley J., and Howard Haycraft, eds, Twentieth Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Literature (New York: Wilson, 1942)

Lane, Ann J., ed., The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader: The Yellow Wallpaper & Other Fictions (London: The Women's Press, 1981)

Lawrence, D. H., The Rainbow (London: Methuen, 1915; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949)

Leach, Maria, ed., Funk and Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore Mythology and Legend, 2 vols (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1949–1950), III

Leclaire, Lucien, Le Roman régionaliste dans les Iles britanniques 1800-1950 (Paris, Société d'édition les belles lettres, 1954)

Ledger, Sally, The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact: Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997)

Marks, Patricia, Bicycles, Bangs, and Bloomers: The New Woman in the Popular Press (Lexington: University of Kentucky, 1990)

Miller, James, The Passion of Michel Foucault (London: HarperCollins, 1993)

Nelson, Carolyn Christensen, British Women Fiction Writers of the 1890s (New York: Twaine, 1996)

Opie, Iona, and Moira Tatem, eds, A Dictionary of Superstitions (Oxford: Oxford Uiversity Press, 1989; repr. 1992)

Prior, James, Three Shots from a Popgun (London: Remington, 1880)

–––––, Don Pedro the Cruel: A Historical Tragedy (London: Hamilton, Adams, 1882)

–––––, John Smith of London: A Comedy in Five Acts and Live and Let Live: A Comedy in One Act (Nottingham: James Prior, 1883)

–––––, Renie (London: Hutchinson, 1895)

–––––, Ripple and Flood (London: Hutchinson, 1897)

–––––, Forest Folk (London: Heinemann, 1901; repr. Nottingham: The Bromley Press, 1946)

–––––, Hyssop (London: Heinemann, 1904)

–––––, A Walking Gentleman: A Novel (London: Constable, 1907)

–––––, Fortuna Chance (London: Constable, 1910)

–––––, 'Canticles by Vacuus', Nottinghamshire Archives Office, M16,206

–––––, Letter to W. A. Briscoe, Nottinghamshire Archives Office, M263, 17 November 1919.

Richardson, Angelique, and Chris Willis, The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact: Fin-de-siècle Feminisms (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001)

Schriener, Olive Woman and Labour (London: Unwin, 1911)

Showalter, Elaine, ed., Speaking of Gender (London: Routledge, 1989)

–––––, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (London: Bloomsbury, 1991)

–––––, Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin de Siècle (London: Virago, 1993)

–––––, 'Smoking Room', TLS, 16 March 1995

Trigg, E. B., Gypsy Demons and Divinities: The Magical and Supernatural Properties of the Gypsies (London: Sheldon Press, 1975)

Vicinus, Martha, ed., A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women (London: Century, 1990)

Wright, Gordon, and Brian J. Curtis, The Inns and Pubs of Nottinghamshire: The Stories Behind the Names (West Bridgford: Nottingham County Council), 1995)

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My James Prior posts:
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
James Prior's Forest Folk (dissertation): Introduction
James Prior's Forest Folk (dissertation): Chapter One
James Prior's Forest Folk (dissertation): Chapter Two
James Prior's Forest Folk (dissertation): Chapter Three
James Prior's Forest Folk (dissertation): Conclusion
James Prior (1851–1922) in Bingham
James Prior's Parents' Grave, Nottingham
James Prior: Three Shots from a Popgun (1880)
The Forest Folk memorial window
James Prior plaque, Blidworth

Pubs of Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Associated with Literature

The White Horse, Ilkeston Road, Nottingham, famous as the pub where a scene in the film of Alan Sillitoe's novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning took place, in which the character Arthur Seaton (played by Albert Finney) gets very drunk.

ADDENDUM: This is what has happened to the pub – it's now the white Horse Café:

The Chesterfield Arms in Bingham, Nottinghamshire, which remembers the Earls of Chesterfield, who owned much of the land in the area. The fourth Earl, Philip Stanhope, is noted for his Letters to his Son.

Byrons on North Sherwood Street, in the centre of Nottingham, showed the most famous Lord Byron - the poet - on its inn sign. The pub, once a Shipstone's tied house, has now been demolished. It stood very near to where the Dolphin Brewery was.


Gatsby's on the corner of Huntingdon Street and Convent Street, Nottingham, is now known as The New Gatsby's, which is a gay bar, and the title no doubt is intended to evoke the heady atmosphere of Long Island, New York, where much of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) is set. This was originally known as the Central Tavern after Nottingham's Central Market, which stood opposite the pub. Before Gatsby's, it was called Niche in another incarnation.

James Prior, Forest Folk and Blidworth

The Forest Folk, Blidworth

Lushai cottage in Bingham, Nottinghamshire, was for a time the home of the novelist James Prior Kirk, who just wrote under the name of James Prior. Prior was born in 1851, and has with some hyperbole been called the Thomas Hardy of the Midlands. But like Hardy, Prior set some of his novels in the area where he was born.

Prior was the son of a hat manufacturer, and like many sons in his position at the time, his father wanted him to join the legal profession. After a few years, though, he abandoned this in favour of teaching, farming, and then working for his father.

With the cousin he married in 1886, he moved to Radcliffe on Trent for a short time before settling down in the nearby town of Bingham, where he died. Whereas he had previously written plays and short stories, he now began to write novels. By 1910 he had written all six: Renie (1895), Ripple and Flood (1897), Forest Folk (1901), Hyssop (1904), A Walking Gentleman (1907), and Fortuna Chance (1910). Prior earned a minor reputation as a novelist, and the young teacher D. H. Lawrence read his works with some interest in Croydon. Prior, though, said that the two authors lived in different worlds.

James Prior is remembered for Forest Folk more than any other work, and although now long out of print, it went through several editions. It is set in the Luddite era, and is a working-class take on the late Victorian New Woman. Prior died in 1922, and in 1926 the Forest Folk pub was built in Blidworth to commemorate his achievement; it had a stained glass window and a small lobby area dedicated to the novelist. More significantly, it is a very rare example of a pub named after a book rather than a writer, although it was demolished a few years ago to make way for a shopping complex.

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Almost twenty years ago, my (ex-)wife and I began capturing many photos of the county's pubs in an attempt to record a heritage that we realized would soon fall to the bulldozer. When I sold my Carlton Road house a few months ago, I had little time to move things before I went on a research trip in southern Illinois for several weeks. Therefore I gave away many of the possessions of mine that had long been gathering dust, and I had intended to do this with the several hundred pub photos I had taken. Thinking that the Nottingham branch of the Campaign for Real Ale (Nottingham CAMRA) would appreciate these, I offered to donate them to them, writing an email to the secretary to their most recent address as given in the then latest version of their newsletter. I received no acknowledgement whatsoever of my email from Nottingham CAMRA: the degree of this rudeness is scarcely credible. However, I still have the photos, and in future I shall be posting some of them to this blog, beginning with more Nottingham and Nottinghamshire's literary pubs.

My James Prior posts:
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
James Prior's Forest Folk (dissertation): Introduction
James Prior's Forest Folk (dissertation): Chapter One
James Prior's Forest Folk (dissertation): Chapter Two
James Prior's Forest Folk (dissertation): Chapter Three
James Prior's Forest Folk (dissertation): Conclusion
James Prior (1851–1922) in Bingham
James Prior's Parents' Grave, Nottingham
James Prior: Three Shots from a Popgun (1880)
The Forest Folk memorial window
James Prior plaque, Blidworth