After some intense days last week, I wanted words to flow past my eyes. That often means Project Gutenberg, because if I’m going to be undiscriminating about what I read, it’s best if I don’t also pay money for it.

One category on the Project Gutenberg website is the latest uploads. In January, 2024, that was a lot of fun because books by Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers both came out of copyright, and were uploaded quite promptly. 

This time I found a book called Ready, Aye, Ready. It’s from 1888 so it must have been someone’s labor of love to upload. It features a poor, but intensely respectable, and kind family who must move to a new town and new job and new house. They run into a widow who has sacrificed everything to help her son get a good start in life; she does not want him to fall in love with the poor, but intensely respectable, and kind, lovely daughter of the other family. So, now you know how the story ends. 

But you don’t know how it gets there. Early on, rabies, herein known as hydrophobia, enters the story. In fact the widow’s son meets Miss Poor but Intensely Respectable, as he saves her from a mad dog. The clergyman in this story then saves three small children further up the street, by grabbing the dog and holding it up till someone comes up and gives it the mercy stroke. In the process he gets a tiny scratch which he then goes and gets burned out. (The author admits that there is a new process to save people from hydrophobia but says her story is from the before time.)

Aha, you think. The clergyman will die of the scratch. Well, no. Instead, he has a heart attack, because his weak heart can’t stand the strain of waiting for the disease to maybe, possibly, manifest itself over the course of the summer, and the stress kills him. Everyone goes to his funeral because he was a really good and kind and gentle parson.

Meanwhile, just before he dies he visits the widow, who has set her face against her son being married. He asks her to reconsider her position, so she does because, if she changes her mind because of a request from this good man, that’s not like changing her mind under any other circumstances, a thing which she is determined, at all costs, not to do. Mind-changing leads to bad stuff!

If you want to know the author, I feel sorry for you.

I suspect that the over the top fear of mad dogs was pretty accurate. I feel as if I remember stories about how dangerous mad dogs were in my own childhood, which is a long time ago, but still seventy or eighty years after this book, which was written just as Louis Pasteur was discovering how to treat rabies.

The other thing I found interesting was the rigid class division in the book. It’s never quite specified what these people all do, or perhaps I skidded over it, as the words flowed past. But the Poor BIR dad is just as skilled as the widow’s son, except that he doesn’t have the credential to prove it. That puts him into the socially lower laboring class, as opposed to the artisan class. And I think that, technically, there are certain tools that he’s not allowed to touch except in an emergency. It’s made clear that everyone is pretty certain he possesses the actual skill. The widow practically beggared herself making sure that her son spent the six years necessary to get that credential, and thus stay in the slightly higher social class. Unfortunately, the dad simply didn’t have enough money to keep doing whatever you had to do to meet the requirements for the credential, after he had a family. It feels like social gate-keeping for no good reason.

Then I read several P. G. Wodehouse stories, including A Damsel in Distress and The Adventures of Sally. I note in passing that I bought the Ultimate Wodehouse on Amazon for about 10 cents, and that is a good thing, because the third to last story, and the last one, are exactly the same. However, A Damsel in Distress does a remarkably good job of steadily upping the stakes of the (entirely silly) story. Trying to figure out how Wodehouse did this is an excellent exercise for the aspiring writer, who doesn’t want to depend on hydrophobia for his or her effects. 

The Adventures of Sally is a bit different from most Wodehouse I have read. It’s not really written for laughs, but Sally is a very nice person to have met in a book, and she does have a happy ending that arises organically from within the book, just as you think everything is hopeless. I wonder if it’s an early effort by Wodehouse, but you certainly can’t tell in this 10 cent edition. 

The rest of my reading has titles like Adventures with a Chasuble, Deacon Stoles are Really Different, How to Avoid Discussing the Real Difficulties with Sewing Liturgical Vestments, and such-like. Plus some serious essays about thinking, that I will discourse upon later. Have a Happy Tuesday!