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Winston Churchill Retells the World’s Great Stories, Part 3
- By RICHARD M. LANGWORTH
- | August 21, 2023
- Category: Explore The Literary Churchill
In early 1933, Winston Churchill retold twelve of “The World’s Great Stories” for Lord Riddell’s News of the World. Six were reprinted by Robert McCormick’s Chicago Sunday Tribune. Their fictional quality is accompanied by Churchill’s perspective as soldier, statesman and historian. The first part of this article covered the origins of the project and the title selections. Part 2 covered the first four titles and Eddie Marsh’s contribution to their retelling. Herein we consider the final eight. Concluded from Part 2. For Part 1, click here.
Classics Illustrated
As a boy I encountered the “World’s Great Stories” through Albert Lewis Kanter’s famous Classics Illustrated. Eight of his twelve World’s Great tales were also published by Kanter, most of them early on.38 An ocean apart, they shared a fine judgment of great reading. How much faster I’d have advanced had I read Churchill’s versions! He added a more sophisticated appreciation, steeped in history and his vast experience.
So enthusiastic was Churchill about the project that he submitted the first four stories before the end of November 1932. He then had to restrain Lord Riddell to delay their release in News of the World until his American newspaper, Robert McCormick’s Chicago Sunday Tribune, was ready. In the event, only the first title appeared in both papers on the same date. Riddell had published all twelve by March 26th, but the Tribune issued only one per month, and ultimately settled for six. Possibly because he thought it too religious, McCormick replaced Lewis Wallace’s Ben-Hur with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Herein we consider the last eight World’s Great Stories, in order of their appearance in News of the World.
5. Tess of the d’Urbervilles, 5 February 1933
The first four stories had been a sombre lot, and Thomas Hardy’s novel bid fair to continue the tradition. News of the World deftly summarized the plot: “The Classic of ‘The Woman Always Pays’ / Black Flag Flies Over Immortal Nobility.” The narration is unremarkable, and was probably mostly the work of Eddie Marsh. But the introduction sounds Churchillian:
Here is tragedy, sublime, inexorable, annihilating. It is tragedy on the grandest scale; but also presented in its most pitiful guise. The author has known how to combine the forces of fate and passion with the weary pressures of humble, frugal, stinted existence. Thomas Hardy’s art has drawn together in these pages all the promptings of proud and ancient blood and all the simplicities and embarrassments of poverty. Not only does he slowly close the shears of doom; he tortures with all the pincers of commonplace need. Yet it is only from so complex and disproportionate a foundation that the character of Tess could have arisen immortal in all its womanhood and nobility.39
6. A Tale of Two Cities, 15 February 1933
This story also exceeded the 5000-word target. Churchill had read Dickens as a boy, though he promised to read this novel again before writing about it. It is not Dickens’ most popular work. It fails to reach the “sentimental pathos” of the English, like, say Oliver Twist. Also, it is the only Dickens novel set mainly outside England.
France was much on Churchill’s mind at the time, since he was writing Marlborough. The opening lines are surely his. Marlborough dealt with Louis XIV, not the Louis XVI of the novel. Nevertheless, Churchill tied them together, contrasting the happier democratic evolution in England with France’s grim eruption. Of course, his ancestor John Churchill gets a mention:
[Dickens’] views upon the France of Louis XVI and of the Revolution are crudely true. The British nation, expressed by the House of Commons and a proud aristocracy, and defended by the statecraft of William III, and the invincible swords of Oliver Cromwell and John, Duke of Marlborough, evolved that structure of Parliamentary and popular government which is still, with some misgivings, the model throughout the civilized world…. But after the wars of Marlborough, the economic and financial structure of the French monarchy was fatally weakened, and meanwhile the march of human reason proceeded, and the tremendous explosion of the French Revolution broke on the world.40
Yet Churchill qualified the deeds of Robespierre, and ipso facto Dickens’ Madame Defarge: We are all, he wrote, “ungrateful children of the French Revolution.” Like the American Civil War, it established new laws “to which all enlightened men must conform.” The French upheaval “cleared the path for the onward development of the human race.”41
7. Jane Eyre, 19 February 1933
The seventh World’s Great Story finally produced a happy ending, though one wouldn’t know it from Riddell’s lurid subtitles: “A Secret Bared at the Alter / The Man Who Married a Maniac.” But unlike Dickens, Charlotte Brontë offered little opportunity for historical observations. The wording suggests it was probably mostly by Marsh.
Still, Winston Churchill appreciated Jane, including the concurrent screen adaptation starring Virginia Bruce and Colin Clive (famed for his title role in Dr. Frankenstein). Grace Hamblin, WSC’s secretary in the early 1930s, remembered seeing Jane Eyre with him: “The next day he gave me one of those long, long stares and said, ‘Just like Jane Eyre.’ I wasn’t at all flattered. I never really knew what he meant, whether it was looks or demeanor or what.”42
The answer to her question is at hand. In the World’s Great Stories, Churchill writes that Jane
is a character of such natural harmony and finish that every trait which experience develops in her was present in little from the first. Very small, very pale, with marked, irregular features; in her person as neat and clean as a cat; outwardly conventional, and…nothing incompatible with a sovereign independence of spirit. The core of her nature is self-respect and a burning pride. She has no vanity, no self-assertion for its own sake. Indeed it is a luxury for her to yield herself to the dominance of a strong nature, but only up to a point. Sooner or later the influence reaches a hard kernel of resistance from which it falls powerless away.43
That was Grace Hamblin precisely; the boss was giving her a compliment. It would have been gratuitous to offer her this explanation in her lifetime. But as so often, Churchill found the right words.
8. Adam Bede, 26 February 1933
Another pleasant ending attends the hero of this posthumous novel by George Eliot (Mary Ann Evers). Churchill dwells fondly on the fictional county of Loamshire. It is, like his favored Kent, “an early paradise…with its rich and rewarding farmlands, its flowery gardens, fruitful orchards and spotless dairies, its people secure and contented in their own traditions.” (Three years earlier he had written: “Kent was the place…and all round Maidstone there grew strawberries, cherries, raspberries and plums. Lovely! I always wanted to live in Kent.”)44
This was the England he would invoke so effectively a few years later, when the terror of imminent extinction flickered. Perhaps too, during the sorry march to Munich in 1938, he would ponder George Eliot’s wise maxim: “Consequences are determined not by excuses but by actions.”45
As Home Secretary, Churchill strove to diminish prison sentences for trivial offenses, an experience reflected in his discussion of Adam Bede’s tragic figure of Hetty Sorrel. Condemned to the gallows for abandoning her illegitimate baby, Hetty faces what Churchill calls “A forfeit no civilized State would now claim.” She is reprieved at the last moment, and transported to Australia: “We are left under the impression of those stern days that she was lucky to escape so cheaply from the consequences of her wickedness.”46
In the end, Adam Bede marries Dinah Morris, the preacher’s daughter, and lives happily ever after. News of the World provides the summary: “Tragedy Springs from a Village Idyll / Girl Who was Snatched from the Gallows.”
9. Vice Versa, 5 March 1933
An odd selection was Antsey Guthrie’s comic Victorian novel, which lacks the drama and pathos of the other World’s Great Stories. Yet it was fifty years in print, and reminded Churchill of his own experiences. So much so that he produced 6400 words, one of the longest texts in the series.
In Vice Versa a London merchant, Paul Bultitude, is transformed into a public schoolboy—the very image of his young son Dicky. The son, rubbing the same mysterious amulet, is transformed into his father. Off they go, to school and to work, respectively. Paul quickly realizes Dicky’s life is not so idyllic—something young Winston learned at Harrow. After considerable hazing and punishment, he escapes, and swaps bodies again with Dicky—who has never much liked business and has often quit his office in search of games and toys. Back in their own skins, they have better understanding of each other. Paul’s escape, hidden aboard a train, was of course right up Churchill’s alley:
[I]f you have never escaped from bondage and been pursued and hunted, you do not know what excitement is. When I escaped from Pretoria thirty-two years ago, I had read this book, and my plan was the same as Mr. Bultitude’s. I thought I would board a train and hide under the seat of a railway carriage, and at the right moment emerge and make terms with some friendly passenger, or perhaps attack a foe. Events turned out somewhat differently.47
The Churchill version of Vice Versa was a joy to its author. Guthrie thanked him “for the great honour and distinction,” and “all the kind things you say about the story, and for the understanding with which you have re-told it.”48
10. Ivanhoe, 12 March 1933
Churchill had recommended this classic stemwinder along with Faust and Treasure Island, but only Ivanhoe made the cut. The history was proximate: he was pondering a History of the English Speaking-Peoples to follow his life of Marlborough. Yet he and Marsh appreciated that Scott’s purpose was a good yarn, not reality. Richard II was less the paladin he appears in Churchill’s rendition. (Scott was more critical in his book.) The King’s half-brother John, in life loyal to Richard, was not such a villain But why criticize a good story.
“Crusades fascinated the chivalry,” Churchill and Marsh wrote:
Tournaments amused all classes…the Holy Church ruled the minds of men…. Saxon England lay prostrate under the Norman foot; Robin Hood kept an outlaw state in Sherwood Forest. Where was the King of England? Somewhere in Europe, on his way back from Palestine; but for months there had been no news of Richard Coeur de Lion. His brother, the cruel, crafty and unstable John, abetted by the Elder Statesman Fitzurse and a faction of Norman nobles, was plotting to dethrone him, and the country was unsettled and distracted. The two races, Norman and Saxon, had not yet fused into a nation, and though the Saxons were oppressed and despoiled there were those, among the few that had kept the remnants of wealth and position, who saw in the divisions of their rulers new hope for a Saxon Restoration.49
Unlike A Tale of Two Cities or even Vice Versa, this World’s Great Story contains nothing related to Churchill’s own experience or the history he was about to write. He and Marsh seem content to focus on the high points of Ivanhoe. They do so expeditiously, almost within their word limit.
11. Westward Ho!, 19 March 1933
Charles Kingsley’s epic adventure was more historically congenial than Ivanhoe. Here are parallels between the introduction to this World’s Great and Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples. Westward Ho!, he writes,
…describes and explains the hatreds of England and Spain in the reign of Queen Elizabeth…. Hatreds of foes upon the sea; hatreds of rival adventurers; hatreds of nations, struggling to live; hatreds of religions, persecuting with fire and sword; and hatreds of individuals, tortured in their dearest loves, and physically tortured in writhing bodies. We cannot withhold our sympathies after these centuries from the valiant English sea-dogs, who harried the Spaniard in the New World and sunk his Armada round the coasts of Britain.50
In The New World, a quarter century later, Churchill is more evenhanded, but on the same course. Elizabeth I, he writes,
resisted the weight of the mightiest empire that had been seen since Roman times. Her people awoke to a consciousness of their greatness, and the last years of Elizabeth’s reign saw a welling up of national energy and enthusiasm focusing upon the person of the Queen…winning wealth and fame in daring expeditions.
In 1589 Richard Hakluyt first published his magnificent book, The Principal Navigations, Traffics and Discoveries of the English Nation. Here in their own words the audacious navigators tell their story. Hakluyt speaks for the thrusting spirit of the age when he proclaims that the English nation, “in searching the most opposite corners and quarters of the world, and, to speak plainly, in compassing the vast globe of the earth more than once, have excelled all the nations and peoples of the earth.”51
12. Don Quixote, 26 March 1933
“Rise and Fall of a Bold Knight Errant / Satire That Smiled Spain’s Chivalry Away,” proclaimed the News of the World of the last of the World’s Great Stories. Cervantes’ fantasy was the perfect finale. It certainly deserves the praise Churchill gave it. He loved the author, “whose career was perhaps more romantic than that of any other man of letters.”
Born 1547, the son of a prosperous lawyer, Cervantes joined the navy. Captured from a Spanish warship in 1575, he was sold into slavery in Algiers. Ransomed in 1580, he returned home and took up literature. His ups and downs—apart from the slavery bit—paralleled some of Churchill’s early career. (WSC too was captured but only briefly imprisoned.) In the event, Churchill loved his book:
Don Quixote, which appeared in 1605 and was an instant success. Ten years elapsed before [Cervantes] completed the second part of the same work, which he prophesied would be “either the worst or the best book ever written in our tongue.” Cervantes’ death in Madrid, 23 April 1616, at the age of 69, occurred before he could realize the extent of his triumph, which entitles him to rank with the greatest writers of all time.
Don Quixote has outlived all changes in literary taste, and is even more popular than it was three centuries ago. It is a brilliant panorama of Spanish society in the sixteenth century. All classes are faithfully portrayed, and it is a tragedy that this great Spaniard died in poverty and was buried in an unknown grave.52
Bouquets
As the World’s Great Stories were drafted, Riddell sent Churchill a proof of his Great War memoir, Lord Riddell’s War Diary. It was published on 1 January 1933, but Churchill was busy and took four months to digest it. “Thank you so much for writing so many charming things about me,” he wrote in April: “far more than I deserve.”53
A few weeks later, the News of the World offered a fresh assignment:
Would you be disposed to contribute an article of 1000-1500 words on the subject “My Most Interesting Experience.” It should be of a non-political character, and might deal, perhaps, with your early campaigning days or your capture and escape in South Africa in November and December 1899. Your recent literary series was exceptionally popular, and Sir Emsley [Carr, Editor] would welcome this further contribution from you…. The honorarium suggested is Fifty Guineas.”54
WSC’s secretary, Violet Pearman, replied that he’d already written on those subjects. What about something on the outbreak of war? Certainly, said the News of the World. Ever the salesman, Churchill intervened, asking for £150 (roughly $48,000 in today’s money). It was accepted.55 After all, a writer has to live.
Endnotes
38 Classics Illustrated in Wikipedia, accessed 7 June 2023. The eight shared titles were Ivanhoe (#2), The Count of Monte Cristo (#3), A Tale of Two Cities (#6), Don Quixote (#11), Westward Ho! (#14), The Moonstone (#30), Jane Eyre (#39) and Ben-Hur (#147).
39 Winston S. Churchill (hereinafter WSC), Tess of the d’Urbervilles, in Michael Wolff, ed., Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, 4 vols. (London: Library of Imperial History, 1975), II: 166.
40 WSC, A Tale of Two Cities, Essays II: 177.
41 Ibid.
42 Grace Hamblin, 1987 Churchill Conference, Dallas, in Richard M. Langworth, ed., Proceedings of the International Churchill Society 1987 (Hopkinton, N.H., 1989), 45.
43 WSC, Jane Eyre, Essays II: 190.
44 WSC, Adam Bede, Essays II: 201
45 Ibid., 206; WSC, My Early Life (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1930), 19.
46 WSC, Adam Bede, Essays II: 210.
47 WSC, Vice Versa, Essays II: 221. Young Winston was ignominiously hidden in a coal mine, then secreted aboard a freight car and hidden among bales of wool.
48 T. Antsey Guthrie to WSC, 6 March 1931, in Martin Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 12, The Wilderness Years 1929-1935 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2009), 539.
49 WSC, Ivanhoe, Essays II: 224.
50 WSC, Westward Ho!, Essays II: 235.
51 WSC, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, vol. 2, The New World (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1956), 133.
52 WSC, Don Quixote, Essays II: 255-56.
53 WSC to Lord Riddell, 29 April 1933, Churchill Archives Centre, Chartwell Papers, CHAR 8/332/82.
54 Trevor Alle (News of the World) to WSC, 11 July 1933, CHAR 8/332/84. Fifty guineas is about $17,000 in today’s money.
55 Correspondence: Trevor Alle, Violet Pearman and WSC, July-October 1933, CHAR 8/332/85-91. Somewhat annoyingly, we have found no trace of “My Most Interesting Experience,” although News of the World accepted the manuscript. The previous articles Mrs. Pearman alluded to were “My Escape from the Boers” (The Strand, December-January 1924) and “Some Election Memories” (The Strand, September 1931).