The Roland novel is Roland Oliver, by JUSTIN McCARTHY, M.P., author of “Dear Lady Disdain,” “A Fair Saxon,” “Maid of Athens,” “Carniola,” etc. Written in… [mumble] I don’t know when, the pages themselves don’t print the year. I’ll have to rummage about in notes and/or library catalogues for it. (It may be in the notebook I lost some months ago — I’m not actually sure which pieces of information were stored in that notebook. Isn’t it great? Research with variables. I may have the information, or I may not. If I ever did write it down, it may or may not still be in my possession.)
The plot so far: Roland Oliver is so named by his romantically minded mother, for reasons which will remain unclear until the Bodleian kindly photocopies the two most crucial for me pages they seem to have skipped over, when I asked them to copy the whole book. (Getting the additional copy will be a pain, I am sure. Grah.) He was wronged by his love, who in his absence lost faith and went with another guy. He returns to London from various travels and eventually finds his friend Laurence, who is poor and sickly. Roland undertakes to save Laurence and his wife Mary from ruin and uses some of his inheritance to help Laurence get better – except now Laurence has gotten accustomed to being taken care of by Roland, and is in no hurry to get a job. Meanwhile Mary, purity itself at heart, feels useless and unimportant in her husband’s life and also doesn’t like being financially dependent on Roland. She finally decides to get a job on her own, an idea her husband of course detests, having turned into a rather disagreeable, small-minded misogynist grump.
Meanwhile, Rosaline, Roland’s erstwhile (?) love, whom he doesn’t really care to see, has been widowed and is bored, and wants a man with an inheritance. She finds out that Roland’s back in town and spies on him for a bit, eventually renting rooms in the same house on Agar Street [that’s in the Strand; I wonder if that street really exists!] in which Laurence and Mary live. She rather crudely attempts to get close to them; well, more so Laurence than Mary; and, ooh, the plot thickens. She’s trying to set Laurence’s mind against Roland by sowing the seeds of (completely unjustified!) jealousy! We’ll see how this turns out.
I’m not sure that this work will ultimately have a lot to do with Roland, but it is already certainly part of the corpus. First, of course, for the names; but also for interesting bits of ardent nationalism, as well as Roland’s interesting and surprisingly simple (so far) relationships with women. But oh, Victorian prose. Well, at least it isn’t boring.
I’ve been writing for over an hour now, and so will end for today. But I’d like to write up more about what I’m trying to do with Roland – a multimedia corpus if there ever was one – and the impact of the digital upon the study of his character. These thoughts have been inspired by some posts by Matt and Kari, both of whom I’m admiring a lot these days. Next post (tomorrow or the next day) will be about Roland. Unless, of course, days are full of eventful as today was. Something tells me, though, that today was exceptional.
