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The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore

Wednesday, 18th June 2008

Charles Moore's reflections on the week

The Mayor of Casterbridge was one of the many great books on my conscience because I had never read it, and so I am reading it now. Here is Hardy’s description of the landlady of the Three Mariners: ‘The latter, who remained as fixed in the arm-chair as if she had been melted into it when in a liquid state, and could not now be unstuck, looked the girl up and down inquiringly, with her hands on the chair-arms’. This reminded me of something. Eventually I remembered what. In Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest, Bertie Wooster is called on without notice by Lady Malvern, an ‘overpowering’ friend of his aunt Agatha: ‘She fitted into my biggest arm-chair as if it had been built round her by someone who knew they were wearing arm-chairs tight about the hips that season.’ Presumably, P.G. Wodehouse had read The Mayor of Casterbridge, and it had echoed in his mind. It is interesting that a professionally funny writer and a professionally non-funny one should have toyed with similar ideas. Hardy often has images of great comic potential, but usually prefers not to play them for laughs. He seems to take this attitude on principle. Young Elizabeth-Jane, who is staying at the Three Mariners, believed that ‘though one could be gay on occasion, moments of gaiety were interludes, and no part of the actual drama’. That was Hardy’s own view. It is a pleasing thought that he could have been an absolute scream if he chose, but had the courage to choose not to be.

Neighbours told me of a walk they took last weekend through a pretty piece of country near us. As their footpath approached a carefully tarmac’d drive, they were confronted by a large notice. ‘Please wipe your boots before walking across the drive’, it said. For some reason, this small piece of information made me feel more depressed than news of flood, famine or war.

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David Short

June 20th, 2008 6:00am

Would Charles Moore be so pious if he had to attend a Mass in a poor, run-down part of Liverpool, or a strife-torn village in Africa, rather than instead be surrounded by socialites and 'royalty' in a fashionable London church?

What a sickening, brown-nosing, name-dropping, snobbish paragraph or two.

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The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore

In his speech announcing his Pre-Budget Report, Alistair Darling said that he was going to put up the top rate of income tax to 45 per cent from 2011, because he wanted the burden to be borne by ‘those who have done best out of the growth of the past decade’.