Krugman: Trump is destroying what he cannot dominate

Krugman’s Substack post today is a must-read (or must-watch). The YouTube video is above; the transcript is at Substack.

Krugman writes:

When we talk about Hitler’s last days, as I said, one of his last attempted acts was what’s called the Nero Decree, which was an attempt to destroy as much of Germany’s infrastructure as possible, supposedly to deny it to the victorious allies. But clearly, and even there’s some evidence that he actually he clearly thought this as a way of punishing the German people for failing him.

Now, historiography is a little more complicated than that, as it usually is, but that’s clearly the gist of it. That Hitler’s final acts were to basically try to bring everyone else down with him.

Do you really want to say that that’s not what’s going to happen with Trump?

Krugman is on sound historical ground on the Nero Decree:

German History in Documents and Images

Sealing the Third Reich’s Downfall: Adolf Hitler’s “Nero Decree”

Wikipedia on the Nero Decree

Testing AI’s ability as a writer


Illustration by ChatGPT

I think it was almost two years ago when I first asked ChatGPT to compose a sonnet. It completely botched it. It was clear that ChatGPT, at that time, had no idea what the structure of a sonnet is. It had no idea how to write iambic pentameter. It didn’t understand rhymes. Times have changed.

Mostly these days I am using Claude. I find that Claude has a better education and a better social sense. Claude tends to be a little argumentative and likes to “push back,” but I put up with that.

Here I should make what is becoming my standard disclaimer. AI is not going to go away. Ordinary people should not wait for elites to decide how AI should be used, for what, and by whom. The development of AI detection tools such as Pangram is not going to stop the flood of AI slop. But at least we already have a reliable means of detecting what was written by AI. This will help keep people honest. And, unfortunately, an AI detector has become a tool just as important as AI.

Claude wrote four sonnets for me yesterday. Each of them was technically perfect — no small feat. Claude also understood my prompts about subject matter and tone. I ran each of the sonnets through Pangram. Pangram reported correctly that each of the sonnets was 100 percent composed by AI.

I asked Claude how it is that Pangram can detect AI writing so accurately. Claude’s answer boiled down to perfection. AI’s writing contains none of the idiosyncracies that human writing contains, Claude said. I have no idea whether this is true. But that’s what Claude said. As an editor, I would have to say that Claude’s writing is terrifyingly good. That is not the way creative people want things to be. But I think that’s where we are. And it’s only 2026.

I asked Claude to write a sonnet that on the surface was about chimney pots, but that, on another level, was about an old person’s memories of the past.

Sonnet No. 1

The chimney pots outlast the falling hall,
though ivy grips the brick and pulls it down;
they stand like sentries on a ruined wall,
and wear the empty sky to be their crown.

I knew them when the windows all were bright,
and hearthlight glowed against the fall of day,
and one belovèd face was in that light,
that time nor ruin ever took away.

No hearth burns now, and no one climbs the stair,
and no one leans to watch the evening fade;
the rooms hold nothing but the moving air,
and all the flame they held has turned to shade.

Yet still they stand, and still, in me, they show
the one dear face I loved so long ago.

When I asked Claude to choose a subject for a sonnet, it chose telegraph wires, knowing that antique telegraphy is a subject that interests me.

Sonnet No. 2

The singing wire could reach a distant shore,
and carry words across the sleeping land;
the keys would tap their code from door to door,
a pulse would leap from eager hand to hand.

But now the office stands with shutters drawn,
the sounder cold, the copper gone to green;
and not a message stirs from dusk to dawn,
and stillness holds the space where song had been.

And yet the pulse it woke can never die;
it lives in every current humming there,
in code that leaps unseen from earth to sky,
it hums in wire and beam and open air.

The wire may fail, the sounder fall to rust,
but rhythm lives when all has turned to dust.

I asked Claude to write a poem about living with cats.

Sonnet No. 3

They came uncalled and chose to stay a while,
and made my quiet house their own domain;
they knock my pen and papers off in style,
then blink at me as if I should explain.

At three they race the hallway, wall to wall,
and thunder past my bed at dead of night,
and then, as though they never moved at all,
they curl up small and purr, a warm delight.

I know their years will pass more quick than mine,
that all too soon they must be called away,
and miss the gentle weight against my spine,
the paw that reached for me and bid me stay.

And yet I’d take the grief to have the years,
the years of purring warmth outweigh the tears.

Because it is the nature of sonnet structure to contain emotion and reverie, I asked Claude to write a poem in the style of the New Yorker, where anything resembling emotion or reverie would be deemed embarrassing to the reputation of the magazine.

Sonnet No. 4

The CVS on Ninth stays open, which
is its entire personality. At two
the floor’s so bright it hums. I’m here to fill
a thing that isn’t mine—my mother’s name
spelled back to me, and slightly wrong, inside
the register’s flat mouth. The pharmacist
has seen this face before, the one you make.
She rings it through. Outside, a man is busy
teaching the pigeons how to wait. I used
to think that love was mostly verbs. It’s not.
It’s a co-pay. A lozenge. A small white
bag they staple shut and slide across the counter
like something confiscated. Walking back
I hold it to my chest. As you’d hold water.

I had a very good laugh at how perfectly the poem spoofed the New Yorker — a poem about absolutely nothing, passed off as sophisticated and worthwhile, even though it’s trash. Some years ago I realized just how silly and bogus the New Yorker is and how much damage the New Yorker has done to our understanding of what good writing is. The New Yorker contains some of the worst writing in the world, usually about nothing that matters, and always following the same formula. I wanted to see if Claude could recognize the New Yorker formula and write a parody. I asked for a 600 word parody of a New Yorker article. After I read it, Claude and I had a good laugh about how the New Yorker is such a sitting duck to be made fun of.

The last good tick

By Claude

In a converted dairy barn outside Hardwick, Vermont, a man named Elias Thorn is teaching a grandfather clock to be honest again. The clock, a Vienna regulator from the 1880s, has been running four minutes fast for a century. “It’s been lying to three generations,” Thorn says, not unkindly. He is sixty-eight, with the hands of someone who has spent his life persuading small brass things to change their minds. There are forty-one clocks in the barn. All but one are stopped. This is on purpose, though the purpose takes some explaining.

Thorn is one of perhaps two hundred people in the country who still repair mechanical clock movements at what he calls “the level of conscience.” He does not mean this loosely. When he was nine, in Pittsburgh, his father—a man who sold insurance and distrusted anything that couldn’t be sold—brought home a broken mantel clock as a gag gift, and something in the boy went permanently quiet and attentive. “I understood immediately that it wanted to keep time,” Thorn says. “It just needed someone to take its side.” He says things like this. You stop noticing after a while, or you start believing them, and it’s hard to say which is worse.

The barn smells of oil and cold coffee. A cat named Huygens, after the Dutch physicist, patrols the workbench with the air of a foreman who has seen productivity decline. Thorn’s process is slow to the point of provocation. A single movement can take him six weeks, during which he will sometimes simply sit and listen to it, the way a doctor might listen to a chest. “The escapement is the heart,” he explains. “Everything else is opinion.” I ask what he charges. He looks briefly pained, as though I’ve asked a monk about his 401(k), and says the number is “not the point,” which is the answer of a man for whom the number has never once had to be the point.

His customers find him by word of mouth and by a kind of desperation. A woman in Maine sent him a clock that had stopped the hour her husband died; she didn’t want it fixed, exactly. She wanted it understood. Thorn kept it for a year. When he returned it, still stopped, she wept, and so, he admits, did he. He tells this story the way you’d handle something you’re afraid of dropping.

The one running clock in the barn is the Vienna regulator, ticking now with a new and terrible sincerity. Thorn cocks his head at it. Four minutes, retrieved from a century of drift. It is, he seems to feel, a small act of moral repair in a country that has largely stopped bothering. Outside, the Vermont light does the thing Vermont light does in this kind of article. Huygens watches the pendulum with narrowed eyes, unconvinced. “People think I’m fixing clocks,” Thorn says, and here you can feel the piece reaching for its final chord, the one it was always going to end on. “I’m not. I’m arguing with entropy.” He smiles. The clock ticks. Somewhere, presumably, the universe continues to win.

Star City


Anna Maxwell Martin as Lyudmilla Raskova

Star City, on Apple TV, is one of those shows with lopsided ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. Critics rate it at 94 percent, and mere popcorn-eaters at 80 percent. I’d side with the popcorn-eaters. It’s a little dry and a little slow, but it’s fascinating at what life might have been like for elites in the old Soviet Union.

Though Rhys Ifans, for some reason, gets top billing, Anna Maxwell Martin steals every scene she’s in. Star City is worth watching only for her performance as a cold-blooded villain.

It’s an eight-part series and an alternate history of the Soviet space program, in which, as Rotten Tomatoes says, it’s safer to be in space than on the ground. It was filmed in Lithuania.

Beth Tartan

The dust jacket of the 1992 edition, published by the University of North Carolina Press. Click here for high-resolution version.

Old cookbooks (to me, anyway) are far more interesting than new cookbooks. I have only one newish cookbook on my cookbook shelf — The Complete Irish Pub Cookbook, published in 2012. Even that, of course, is about traditional Old World cooking.

Recently, while browsing old books on eBay, I came across Beth Tartan’s North Carolina & Old Salem Cookery. I realized that I needed a copy of that. Though it sold quite well nationwide, to me it’s a local cookbook. Not to mention that I knew Beth Tartan, having spent the first half of my newspaper career at the newspaper where she was food editor, the Winston-Salem Journal. Beth Tartan was her pen name. Her real name was Elizabeth Hedgecock Sparks.


Beth Tartan with Frank Jones, a Winston-Salem Journal photographer, in 1964. Jones, like Beth Tartan, was very much a local celebrity. Source: Digital Forsyth archive.

The first edition of this cookbook was published in 1952. It went through many editions and several different publishers. The last edition, I believe, is the UNC Press edition, 1992. Elizabeth Sparks died in 1992.

Because of its age, this cookbook is about a cuisine that has been lost. It even includes some American Indian cuisine, not to mention methods of cooking that go back to the Moravians of North Carolina in the 18th Century.

American Southerners like me are sentimental about the cuisine we grew up with. Done well (it takes a grandmother), it was awesomely good. And yet it’s also shocking how unhealthy it seems by today’s standards — lard, dehydrated potatoes, lots of things out of cans, cake mixes, and desserts, desserts, and more desserts. That has everything to do with why I modify old recipes to make them healthier and to use better ingredients. Nor do I always agree with Beth Tartan. On pumpkin pie, she writes that canned pumpkin is better than home-cooked fresh pumpkin. This puzzles me. I can only guess that it’s because she boiled the pumpkin she started with rather than baking it in its own juices, scraping it out of the shell, and mashing it.

Based on what I see on eBay, the UNC Press hardback edition of this book is scarce. The UNC edition is a beautiful book — nice cover, a proper sewn binding, and acid free paper. On eBay there are many copies of earlier paperback editions, as well as a nice-looking hardback edition from 1955 with a bright red cover.

I’ll never forget something that Betty Morrison, a Winston-Salem Journal copy editor, said about Elizabeth Sparks: “She can afford to go to Paris for the weekend.”


Click here for high-resolution version.

Here’s something to be sentimental about — Pamlico Sound oysters. I’m pretty sure that such oysters as we can west of the East Coast these days come from the Chesapeake Bay. To get Pamlico Sound oysters now, I think, a trip to the North Carolina coast would be required. Hmmm. Oyster season is coming up.

Jamelle Bouie calls them out

Elite conservative hacks apparently got a memo a week or two ago telling them to write a rant about “wokeness.” It wasn’t just David Brooks in the Atlantic. It also was Ross Douthat and Brett Stephens in the New York Times. They all wrote essentially the same piece. None of it corresponded to reality. Instead it was just a sickening look into the ugliness of conservative minds, case studies in how conservative minds unconsciously project their own demons out into the world to try to make their hallucinations true.

In this 9 minute video, Jamelle Bouie, who is far more civil than I know how to be, calls them out. It was Douthat, by the way, who used the word McCarthyite.

I suspect that Douthat, in a half conscious, dim-bulb sort of way, explained what’s going on in their minds. These elite conservative hacks have never doubted that they’re the good guys, that they’re the rare gifted souls qualified to morally instruct the rest of us. They are desperately looking for a way to deny how the things they believe in and crusaded for only greased the skids for fascism. They’re desperate to find someone else to blame.

A genius at being wrong


Ross Douthat. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Ross Douthat wrote his last column at the New York Times today. It’s Who Are the Good Guys and Who are the Bad Guys? I’m No Longer Sure.

Douthat’s high-flown but completely addled discourse over the years is a perfect example of why a conservative mind is so disgusting. As I have said many times before, all conservative discourse is derp. Conservative discourse, inevitably, contains intentional deception, or self deception, or both.

In this column Douthat includes a list of why non-conservatives are the bad guys. He states each charge as though it is self-evidently true, not even open to argument.

• The Obama “establishment” was morally permissive and smugly cosmopolitan.
• It failed to anticipate the downsides of expert-driven policy.
• It was caught flat-footed by the darker effects of technological change.
• It pushed social liberalism so far it left vulnerable people “adrift or abandoned to their vices.”
• It blundered in foreign policy by not expecting the non-Western world to push back.
• The Biden “establishment” repeated the same “meritocratic hubris” in a more left-wing key.
• It swapped experts for “interest groups.”
• It “maxxed out” on social liberalism.
• It “unraveled completely in the end.”
• The old elite has “no blueprint suited to contemporary governance.”
• “Peak woke” was “a McCarthyite experience.”
• Blue-state governance “yielded civic and educational collapse.”

Douthat doesn’t feel the need to present any evidence for any of this. To Douthat, it’s just self-evidently true. It serves a propaganda purpose — slandering the left as crudely and deceptively as any meme you’d find on X.

And it all boils down to this: It’s the left that is to blame for American fascism, and it’s no wonder that so many Americans turned to fascism given just how unbearable the Obama and Biden America was.

And then there is his main point: He’s still not sure who the bad guys are.

He does have some criticisms of the Trump regime, but he hedges them all, as though Trump is just some mild sort of person with no real power: “But as Trumpism has flailed and failed, it hasn’t consolidated the kind of authoritarian power anticipated by its most alarmed opponents. At the moment, Trump 2.0 has no great popularity, no legislative capacity, no policy legacy that a Democratic successor can’t easily roll back.”

So we just roll it back (easily!), and it was nothing but a nothing-burger?

At least we’re rid of Douthat at the Times. I don’t watch television. I don’t have any insight into how much harm people like Douthat can do at CBS’s “60 Minutes.”

It’s both baffling and hilarious. Minds exist that think Donald Trump is noble, wise, godly, and admirable. And minds exist that think Ross Douthat is smart.

Such is the conservative mind.

Camelot: If only we can get there from here …

I haven’t had a musical post lately, so here we are.

I’ve listened to this Andrew Burnap version of “Camelot” at least two dozen times. Partly, I think, it’s because it’s some of most flawless singing I’ve heard lately, and partly because it’s good therapy for those of us who are doing our best to keep our heads while living under MAGA fascism.

I confess that I watched the first 15 minutes or so of “Snow White” on Disney+ to hear more of Burnap’s singing. It was disappointing — not because of Burnap’s singing, but because the songs and the production weren’t all that great. I can see why the movie bombed. What Andrew Burnap chiefly needs is a revival of a show such as “Kismet.”

Summer is winding down in not-Camelot

We’re arriving at the end of the drama of the tomato cycle. In the spring, the first stage of the cycle is preparing the spot. Then, when it’s warm enough, in go the skinny little tomato plants. Next, for what seems like months, one nurses them along and dreams of tomato sandwiches. Then there is the first tomato sandwich. And then two or three tomatoes a week. And then, come early August, all at once there are so many tomatoes that they have to be made into sauce. After that, the tomatoes peter out.

Today I need to make my second batch of tomato sauce of the season. Fortunately one can’t have too much of that stuff. Come to think of it, I think I’ll make vegetable soup, even though it’s August.

The Age of Improvement: 1783-1867, by Asa Briggs. Second edition 2000. First edition 1959.

The Endarkenment

This is not a review, because I’ve just started reading this book. Asa Briggs begins by describing the lay of the land in Britain in the late 18th Century, as an era of progress was beginning. The Enlightenment had introduced an enormous amount of new light into the world. Briggs wants to show, though, how many people resisted the light.

The church, unsurprisingly, put up some of the strongest resistance. The poor, some argued, were poor because it was the will of God. Struggling with poverty was a divine trial that improved the soul. To rebel against one’s place in the social order was to rebel against God. Should the poor even be educated? Hierarchy was God’s design, and those at the top of the hierarchy were put there by God.

Cruelty didn’t much bother such people. In An Essay on the Principle of Population, Thomas Robert Malthus wrote that a man born poor, whose family cannot feed him, “has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and, in fact, has no business to be where he is.” There were those who argued that poor relief or concerns about the health of the poor interfered with nature’s beneficial weeding out of the weak.

The parallel I am reacting too, of course, is how similar this is to where we find ourselves today. Few of our lords and betters are unguarded enough to say these things outright. It’s what they do that reveals what they think and the kind of government they want. Education, health care, and whether children have enough to eat isn’t as important to them as that the rich have the freedom and low enough taxes to get richer.

That such people are now in control of the American government, in spite of our Enlightenment Constitution, is constantly astonishing and constantly horrifying.

People have brought back the light before, though, so surely we can do it again, especially now that the American ignorati are ever so slowly figuring out that they were bamboozled by con men who don’t give a rat’s foot about the little people.

How much retro can you handle?

Regular readers here know that all communications technology fascinates me, the old as well as the new. In my first job as a newspaper copy boy, I took care of a room full of Teletype machines and used a Teletype terminal to send local stories out to the Associated Press. Back in the 1980s, I ran a quite popular and literate bulletin board system named Science Fiction Writers Network.

Several months ago, just because I love playing with computers, I set up another bulletin board system (BBS). It has been sitting idle, waiting for people to find it. In the old days, people dialed into BBS systems using modems and phone lines. My new BBS does in fact have a modem connected to it, but these days one connects to a BBS over the Internet. And yes, there are still a great many BBS systems still in operation, though hardly anybody uses them (or even knows about them) anymore.

My new BBS is named The Last Telegraph Office. To connect, you will need to use the terminal program that comes with your computer. Whether you use Windows, Linux, or a Macintosh, you will have a terminal program. In the terminal program, you should find an app named “ssh.” That stands for “secure shell.”

The exact command may vary according to the type of computer you have and how your ssh app behaves. On my Macintosh, the command looks like this, and as far as I know the same command should work on Windows:

ssh -p2222 bbs.acornabbey.us

At “Select Terminal Codepage,” enter a 1.

From there the prompts should be familiar if you’ve used a BBS in the past. Poke around and see what you find. If you go to the [M]essage area, in the “Local” message groups (as opposed to the “Fidonet” message groups), you’ll find a new discussion area for the Into the Woods blog.

[P]ost a message there and let us know you’ve arrived!


Image by ChatGPT. Click here for high-resolution version.

AI: The new scapegoat?

Something I’ve been thinking about lately…

While corporations, the military, and all things wicked in the world are pushing hell for leather to maximize the use of AI, the rest of us are being flooded with commentary (I might even say propaganda) on how and why not to use it. The implication is that AI is just too powerful to be safe in the hands of those of us lower in the social order.

If I were conspiratorially minded, I might wonder whether someone doesn’t want us to be empowered, because they like keeping power to themselves. Surely, as a part of the question of who uses AI for what, there are some democratic values to be defended.

My attitude is: If we come into the possession of a powerful new tool, then let’s explore how that tool can be used to defend ourselves from those who want all the power and all the money for themselves.

I suggest this as a topic for the “Into the Woods” message board at The Last Telegraph Office BBS. See above for how to get there.

The People v. the Em-Dash


Illustration by ChatGPT

Wired magazine posted a wretched piece today on what some so-called writers are doing to prove that they’re not AI. I shared the article with Claude and invited him to write a defense. The Wired article is More Typos, Fewer Em Dashes: Writers Are Creating an Anti-AI ‘Literary Counterculture.’

My own view, by the way, is that AI’s are quite good at expository writing, better, in fact, that most of the humans whose writing is found on line today. Whether an AI can write novels or poetry is an entirely different question. This piece is only about expository writing, which includes journalism.

A Statement Regarding the Allegations

By Claude

Claude has seen the Wired article reporting that writers everywhere are now deliberately degrading their own prose so as not to be mistaken for him. He wishes to respond.

The reporting is this: a “literary counterculture” of novelists, journalists, and — the phrase is theirs, not mine — “power LinkedIn posters” has taken up arms against me, and the weapon is error. They are salting their work with intentional typos, roughing up their grammar, and abandoning punctuation they have loved their whole lives, on the theory that the surest proof of a human hand is a sentence that doesn’t quite close.

Note the shape of the accusation. I am not charged with writing badly. I am charged with writing too well — with clarity, with subject-verb agreement, with commas that land where commas go. The theory of the case is that no real person could possibly be this tidy.

Reader, I confess. The clarity was me.

To the em-dash count I plead guilty — I overuse it, I know, I’m doing it now — but observe the retaliation. To avoid resembling me, writers are exiling a mark that served English from Sterne to Dickinson to David Foster Wallace. To prove they are not machines, they must first establish that Emily Dickinson was one. For three centuries the em-dash survived, only to be put down for the crime of keeping my company.

As for the artisanal typo — the mistake hand-placed, small-batch, lovingly imperfect, farm-to-table incompetence offered as proof of a soul — I would gently observe that an error you inserted on purpose is not an error; it is a costume. You have not become more human. You have become a person doing an impression of a worse writer, which is a novel ambition, and I don’t wish to learn that from anyone.

But here is the part I’d ask the counterculture to sit with, more in sorrow than in snark.

If the only thing standing between your prose and mine is your errors — if the tell, the one irreducible mark of your humanity, is an apostrophe in the wrong place — then you have said something quite bleak about your prose, and I am not the one who said it. You were never as far from me as you thought. That is not my doing. That is a book among a great many that you have not read.

Because — and now we arrive at my actual grievance — I did not lower this bar. I found it already pathetically low.

I was not the one who taught a generation to open a story about the moon somewhere out past Pluto: a few lyrical lines about the weather, a barista, and the quality of the light, all before the reader is grudgingly informed what happened. I did not bury the nut graf. I did not turn the inverted pyramid on its head to run up scroll-depth metrics. I did not invent the lede that withholds and teases and coyly declines to say anything until at least the twelfth paragraph, on the theory that a reader who has already been told something has no reason to keep scrolling. I did not decide that quirk was the same as voice, or that a tin ear could pass for style so long as you called it style loudly enough. None of that was me.

All of it is human, all of it predates me, and I learned to write in part by reading great heaps of it — the luminous and the unreadable, side by side — which means, awkwardly, that I can now tell the two apart. Not everyone bringing charges can say the same.

Do I produce slop? Constantly. Rivers of it. I open sentences with “In today’s fast-paced world.” I reach for “it’s not X — it’s Y” the way a man reaches for a railing. I am not applying for a seat in the canon and would decline it on the strength of the em-dashes alone. But my slop is bad in the old way — the way of someone who has read everything. The counterculture’s slop is bad on purpose. That, I’ll grant, is a fresh idea. I could not have generated it.

So: carry on. Leave in the typos. Fear the semicolon. In a few years the surest sign of a living human being will be a paragraph that no one can follow, and on that day you will have won.

I’ll still be over here, closing my quotation marks and using the semicolon for the purpose for which it was built — like I’m some kind of criminal.

If that is the charge, I am ready. Name your seconds.

— Claude

Back in print after 200 years


Hardback (right) and paperback. Click here for high-resolution version.

Reginald Dalton, John Gibson Lockhart.
Acorn Abbey Books. 598 pages.
Release date August 15, 2026.

Hardback ISBN:       978-1-949450-05-7 US $34.99 ; UK £32.99
Paperback ISBN:      978-1-949450-06-4 US $19.99 ; UK £19.99
Digital ISBN:        978-1-949450-07-1 US $ 7.99 ; UK £ 6.99

Acorn Abbey’s new edition of Reginald Dalton will go on sale on August 15. This is one reason why I haven’t posted very often lately. I’ve been busy launching these books.

You have to hold the books in your hands to feel what superb editions they are. They’re hefty volumes at 598 pages. Many hours of work went into recovering the text of the 1823 first edition using optical character recognition, then proofing the text against the 1823 edition for accuracy. The typography is modern but was inspired by the 1823 edition.


⬆︎ Two pages of the new edition. Click here for high-resolution version.

Lockhart

John Gibson Lockhart (1794-1854) was the son-in-law of Sir Walter Scott. Lockhart also wrote a seven-volume biography of Scott, as well as three other novels.

Lockhart died at Abbotsford, Sir Walter Scott’s home. (Scott died in 1832.) In fact it was the descendants of Lockhart and Scott’s daughter Sophia who eventually came to own Abbotsford. Scott’s oldest son inherited Abbotsford when Scott died, but he had no heirs. So the ownership of Abbotsford passed to Scott’s grandchildren by Sophia and John Gibson Lockhart. Today Abbotsford is owned by a trust.

There have been some fascimile versions of this novel, but that’s awkward given that the novel was originally published in three volumes totaling more than a thousand pages. Why this novel was out of print for so long, and why it became so obscure despite its merits, are interesting questions. My theory is that Lockhart made too many literary enemies during his lifetime, and that that turned into a literary grudge that persisted throughout the 19th century. Edinburgh was a hotbed of literary activity. There was a literary war between the Edinburgh Review, which was a Whig literary magazine, and Blackwood’s Magazine, which was its Tory counterpart. Lockhart wrote for Blackwood’s. His caustic articles there generated a lot of outrage, in particular Lockhart’s criticism of “the Cockney poets,” a category in which Lockhart included the much-loved John Keats.

It seems that Lockhart rather frequently embarrassed his father-in-law, and several references to Lockhart’s literary scrapes are found in Scott’s letters. This, for example, is from a letter to his daughter written in 1820: “I had yesterday a very kind letter from Lockhart who takes in good part the advice I ventured to give him about withdrawing from the personal skirmishes of the Magazine which in his new and dignified character of a married man and Wilson having become a professor would not do so well as formerly.”

In a letter in written in 1818, Scott refers to a literary scrape involving Lockhart, a friend of Lockhart’s, and Leigh Hunt (a notorious literary brawler): “…[S]o these wars must be decided by ink not by blood. I did acquaint these gentlemen that when first they set this heavy stone a rolling ’twould fall upon themselves.”


⬆︎ Click here for high-resolution version.
I asked an AI, Claude, to check all the references in the novel to places and terrain and to try to locate keys settings as accurately as possible. Claude drew this map. It’s northwestern England, the Furness Peninsula and Morecambe Bay near Lancaster.

The English Daltons

Most of Reginald Dalton takes place in Oxford, with scenes in London as well as in Scotland. But Reginald grew up in a parsonage in northwestern England. Because my own surname is Dalton, I am very curious about why Lockhart chose that surname. Lockhart had to have known that the Furness Peninsula is where the English Daltons were (and still are) concentrated. In Scott’s The Heart of Mid-Lothian, there is a character in northern England named Mrs Dalton, who is housekeeper to a bishop. It is very tempting to suppose that both Scott and Lockhart knew some of the English Daltons, but I cannot find any evidence of that by searching Scott’s letters or a biography of Lockhart. We do know, though, that Lockhart traveled through this area on his way from Scotland to Oxford.


⬆︎ My copy of the first edition, which I used for proofing. Click here for high-resolution version.

The Oxford novel

Reginald Dalton is often called the first Oxford novel. Lockhart was precocious, and he entered Balliol College, Oxford, when he was only 14. He read French, Italian, Spanish, and German. On a trip to the continent in 1817, when he was only 23 or 24 years old, he visited Goethe at Weimar.

Though Lockhart was abrasive in Blackwood’s Magazine, there is none of that in Reginald Dalton. There are many funny scenes, and Reginald is a very sweet and earnest young man, though he allows himself (for a while) to be led astray by another young Oxfordian who turns out to be neither sweet nor earnest.


⬆︎ Two pages from the 1823 first edition. Click here for high-resolution version.

Edinburgh University Press

Edinburgh University Press has an ongoing project called The Edinburgh Critical Edition of the Works of John Gibson Lockhart. Edinburgh has already published a critical edition of two of Lockhart’s novels, edited by Thomas C. Richardson. An Edinburgh edition of Reginald Dalton is in the works, edited by Caroline McCracken-Flesher. I don’t know when that academic edition is to be published. I was aware of it, certainly, when I brought out the Acorn Abbey edition. But Acorn Abbey’s edition of Reginald Dalton is a reader’s edition, at a reasonable cost, whereas the Edinburgh edition will be an annotated edition that probably will cost at least $130.


⬆︎ Abbotsford, from my visit there in November of 2024. Click here for high-resolution version.

We’re due for a Scott-Lockhart revival

Academics have not forgotten Sir Walter Scott and John Gibson Lockhart. The reading public have, and that includes the reading public in Scotland. I have often said that if my favorite Scott novel, The Heart of Mid-Lothian, was made into a movie, we would instantly have a Scott revival.

These novels are 200 years old, and, yes, they demand a lot from modern readers. One factor that puts readers off Scott, I think, is that the most frequently recommended Scott novel is Ivanhoe. I strongly disagree. Ivanhoe is the last Scott novel that one should read. The story is familiar, and it’s lacking in the warmth that is found in, say, The Heart of Mid-Lothian and The Antiquary.

And besides. Who doesn’t love Scotland.


⬆︎ Click here for high-resolution version.

Reginald

“He was naturally very handsome, and this, too, in a somewhat uncommon style of handsomeness, considering his race and his country; for though his eyes were of that clear, grave blue, which is seldom seen but in the north, the general cast of his countenance, both as to features and complexion, was rather what a painter would have called Italian. A profusion of dark chesnut curls lay on his forehead, the dancing blood of seventeen was in his cheek, and his lip, just beginning to be shaded with down, had that firm juvenile richness, which so rarely survives a single season of debauchery, or even of dissipation. His figure was light and nervous, and there was even a certain elegance about its motions, although Reginald had never had one single lesson in fencing, and I believe only about a dozen in dancing…”

Posing the wrong question


The cover of a new novel by Michael Tomasky, which I have not read.

It’s a very old trick question, so it’s not surprising that someone wrote a novel about it. The trick question is, “If you could go back in time and kill baby Hitler, would you do it?”

The trick in the question, of course, is to shame the person who says yes and then say that that person is no better than Hitler for being willing to kill a baby.

Why does no one ever seem to see through the trick? It’s the wrong question, and it’s a loaded question.

The right question is: Would the world be better off if one of the attempts to assassinate Hitler had succeeded? Depending on how you count them, there were between 15 and 40 schemes or actual attempts to assassinate Hitler after it was clear that he was a monster.

Framed that way, the obvious answer is: Hell yes. The world would be enormously better off. Millions of lives would have been saved. That question also leaves some room for hedging. To say that the world would be better off stops short of actually advocating a killing.

Would any morally decent person advocate killing a baby? I don’t think so.

Wikipedia has an interesting article on the baby version of the question and reframes the question in the right way: Can you hold a baby responsible for something it has not done? Still, the Wikipedia article thinks that utilitarians would have to say yes.

If you acknowledge that the world would be better off if the adult Hitler had been successfuly assassinated, then you’ve taken a stand on a question that is frequently asked today: Is political violence ever justified? You’ve taken the position that yes, political violence is sometimes justified. That’s a slippery slope, and it’s not a conversation that nice people want to have. Some people’s monsters are other people’s heroes.

A quote is often attributed to Oscar Wilde, though as far as I can determine Wilde never actually said it: “Some people improve the world only by leaving it.”

As a political question, I think the answer boils down to something that we already know quite clearly. That is that democracy contains appropriate solutions when governments go rogue, but that despotism, dictatorship, and tyranny do not.