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The Canning Wonder
Выдающийся исследователь запредельного и любимый автор "отца Ктулху", Артур Мейчен (1863-1947) всегда интересовался удивительными происшествиями и загадками прошлого. Громкое дело о пропаже девушки из Лондона, взволновавшее в XVIII веке всю Англию, заинтересовало писателя своей противоречивостью, неожиданными поворотами и колоритностью персонажей. В этом документальном детективе Мейчен вспоминает все этапы судебного процесса и исследует странности человеческого поведения, которые во все времена формировали общественное мнение и влияли на портрет эпохи…
277 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1926
18 people want to read
About the author
Arthur Machen
1,121 books1,011 followersArthur Machen was a leading Welsh author of the 1890s. He is best known for his influential supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction. His long story The Great God Pan made him famous and controversial in his lifetime, but The Hill of Dreams is generally considered his masterpiece. He also is well known for his leading role in creating the legend of the Angels of Mons.
At the age of eleven, Machen boarded at Hereford Cathedral School, where he received an excellent classical education. Family poverty ruled out attendance at university, and Machen was sent to London, where he sat exams to attend medical school but failed to get in. Machen, however, showed literary promise, publishing in 1881 a long poem "Eleusinia" on the subject of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Returning to London, he lived in relative poverty, attempting to work as a journalist, as a publisher's clerk, and as a children's tutor while writing in the evening and going on long rambling walks across London.
In 1884 he published his second work, the pastiche The Anatomy of Tobacco, and secured work with the publisher and bookseller George Redway as a cataloguer and magazine editor. This led to further work as a translator from French, translating the Heptameron of Marguerite de Navarre, Le Moyen de Parvenir (Fantastic Tales) of Béroalde de Verville, and the Memoirs of Casanova. Machen's translations in a spirited English style became standard ones for many years.
Around 1890 Machen began to publish in literary magazines, writing stories influenced by the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, some of which used gothic or fantastic themes. This led to his first major success, The Great God Pan. It was published in 1894 by John Lane in the noted Keynotes Series, which was part of the growing aesthetic movement of the time. Machen's story was widely denounced for its sexual and horrific content and subsequently sold well, going into a second edition.
Machen next produced The Three Impostors, a novel composed of a number of interwoven tales, in 1895. The novel and the stories within it were eventually to be regarded as among Machen's best works. However, following the scandal surrounding Oscar Wilde later that year, Machen's association with works of decadent horror made it difficult for him to find a publisher for new works. Thus, though he would write some of his greatest works over the next few years, some were published much later. These included The Hill of Dreams, Hieroglyphics, A Fragment of Life, the story The White People, and the stories which make up Ornaments in Jade.
At the age of eleven, Machen boarded at Hereford Cathedral School, where he received an excellent classical education. Family poverty ruled out attendance at university, and Machen was sent to London, where he sat exams to attend medical school but failed to get in. Machen, however, showed literary promise, publishing in 1881 a long poem "Eleusinia" on the subject of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Returning to London, he lived in relative poverty, attempting to work as a journalist, as a publisher's clerk, and as a children's tutor while writing in the evening and going on long rambling walks across London.
In 1884 he published his second work, the pastiche The Anatomy of Tobacco, and secured work with the publisher and bookseller George Redway as a cataloguer and magazine editor. This led to further work as a translator from French, translating the Heptameron of Marguerite de Navarre, Le Moyen de Parvenir (Fantastic Tales) of Béroalde de Verville, and the Memoirs of Casanova. Machen's translations in a spirited English style became standard ones for many years.
Around 1890 Machen began to publish in literary magazines, writing stories influenced by the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, some of which used gothic or fantastic themes. This led to his first major success, The Great God Pan. It was published in 1894 by John Lane in the noted Keynotes Series, which was part of the growing aesthetic movement of the time. Machen's story was widely denounced for its sexual and horrific content and subsequently sold well, going into a second edition.
Machen next produced The Three Impostors, a novel composed of a number of interwoven tales, in 1895. The novel and the stories within it were eventually to be regarded as among Machen's best works. However, following the scandal surrounding Oscar Wilde later that year, Machen's association with works of decadent horror made it difficult for him to find a publisher for new works. Thus, though he would write some of his greatest works over the next few years, some were published much later. These included The Hill of Dreams, Hieroglyphics, A Fragment of Life, the story The White People, and the stories which make up Ornaments in Jade.
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February 17, 2018
Picked this up as it didn't look like the something one expects from Arthur Machen, and indeed it is quite different: a look at the case of Elizabeth Canning, whose alleged kidnap and imprisonment in a house in Enfield Wash was a cause celebre in the mid 18th century. After the first trial, at which an old gipsy woman was sentenced to death (for stealing Elizabeth's corset) enough questions were asked for the case to be revisited. At the second trial Elizabeth was found guilty of perjury, sentenced to transportation, and the gipsy pardoned. Apparently many authors have looked at this case and most agree that Elizabeth did not spend the missing month as she said, but nobody has ever worked out where she really was and what had happened. Arthur Machen seems to think that she was set up in an attempt to blame the woman in whose house she was said to have been, but misidentified the woman because they had changed places. He does not offer a solution to the "missing month" mystery. He does have a few observations about public interest in cases before the popular press (i.e. a phenomenon which already existed in the English psyche, as he sees it) which are interesting in view of the fact that certain events produce the same sort of mass hysteria today. He offers, more or less, a transcript of the trials, with his own interpretations as he goes along. What is also really interesting, as with many court cases, is all the incidental social information thrown up by the snapshot of the lives of the protagonists - how people travelled around (quite long distances in some cases), moved house frequently, the details of their daily lives, how people got around north London. Very readable, but presumably out of print now. This is nicely printed (it even has signatures), and is illustrated.
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