Villains in the Novel: from Dickens, Hardy and Wilkie Collins to Hilary Mantel

- Welcome to this lecture, it's the sixth in a series I've given over the last couple of years on the powers of novels. And there's been an ingeniously connected attention across those lectures to the ways in which novels grab us, and that even the most literary novels depend on ways of seizing and compelling our attention, and that's what I'm going to talk about again today. And if you have ever seen, either in person or online, any of the previous lectures, you'll be rewarded for your loyalty because this will connect a bit with the previous ones, particularly one I gave a couple of months or so ago on plot. Let's start with a cameo of villainy, from one of its chief representatives for those of us here, and I sense that includes many of you in the audience who did watch imported TV drama in the 1980s. If you did, you don't have to admit it out loud, this will be familiar to you. If there are members of the audience here, those of you under the age of let's say 40 or so, this might all be new to you, in which case I'm opening up a world of entertainment. I don't know if you recognize that as the introductory still, don't shout it out, but it would be a classic introductory still from a series broadcast at a time when we in Britain found tall, modern buildings amazingly sexy, and in a second, you'll see why.- [Maitre d'Hotel] May I help you?- Yes, is Mr. And Mrs. Ewing here yet?- [Maitre d'Hotel] Yes, this way.- [J.R.] Well that's the kind of business I'm in, you get some, some you don't get, you know as well as I do about that. Hi Peter.- I'm sorry I'm late.- That's all right, we haven't been here long.- Would you like something from the bar?- No, no thanks.- Peter, I hate to say this, but you don't look too good.- I'm very worried, Mr. Ewing.- Yeah, I can understand that. The prospect of spending several years in prison is a chilling one, that's for sure. I'll tell you, drug dealing is a nasty business. You know, in my day, people used to think that only hardened criminals did something like that, but nowadays, it could be anybody, the kid next door, even a fine looking fellow like yourself.- Mr. Ewing, is there anything you can do to help? I don't want to go to prison, and Mrs. Ewing says you're my only hope.- Well I'm afraid Mrs. Ewing got that backwards, there's really nothing I can do to help you, but she can solve your problem.- [Peter] I don't know what you mean.- Well let me explain it to you

I know that you bedded my wife, and I also know that you felt that you were the father of the child she lost.- You knew?- Yeah, and I can understand the reason why it happened, but I don't like it any better than any other husband would.- J.R., no.- Sue Ellen, there's only one way he's going to stay out of jail, I want you back in my room, and I want you back in my bed. From now on, you're going to be where I want you, and when I want you.- You planned this whole thing.- Of course I did. It's up to you honey, either I send him to jail, or I see that all the charges are dropped against him. What's it going to be?- Don't do it, Sue Ellen.- So now it's Sue Ellen?- Peter, I have to.- No you don't! I'd rather go to jail.- How noble of you.- I love her.- Wonderful.- You lousy!- Get this kid off!- Do you want us to call the police, Mr. Ewing?- Just hold him a minute. I trust we all understand the terms of our little agreement here?- No, Sue Ellen!- It's no use, Peter, yes, I understand.- All right, throw him out, no police.- I swear I'll kill you, I swear I'll kill you!- Now, shall we toast to our new life together? No? I expect to find you in my bed tonight, I'll probably be late. Wait up for me.(dramatic brass music)(John laughs)- For those of you who are very young, or were on an Antarctic research station throughout the 1980s, that was three minutes of an episode from series three of "Dallas," which was the top-rated, American and in Britain as well, TV soap, really, because it ran for 357 episodes. And again, I think it's hardly necessary to say, there you saw an example of villainy from the most famous TV villain of the 1980s and 1990s, J.R. Ewing, played by Larry Hagman. Larry Hagman, incidentally, is the only actor, playing J.R., J.R. the only character who was in every single one of the 357 episodes. There was one episode, sorry, this is series seven, not series three, this is from series 7, 1983, a vintage year, I think, for "Dallas." He had been, in the most famous one of all, shot at the end of series three, do you remember "Who Shot J.R?" and they left you with a cliffhanger, and you had to wait for the whole new series to find out who it was. And as you waited, just to show how important J.R. the villain was, Larry Hagman went into renegotiation, and he wasn't offered a good enough deal, and he went on holiday to London with his Swedish wife, and said that he was incommunicado until the studio granted him the then vast sum of money he'd asked for. Eventually, they had a big think about writing him out of the series, but he won, and in the first episode of series four, it's the reason he appears, it's his briefest appearance in the whole of "Dallas," he appears for just a minute or two at the end,'cause they phoned him up and they said, yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll give you all the money, quickly, get back here because we need to stick a bit of you in the episode. J.R., Larry Hagman, was essential to "Dallas." And it may be, if you're not familiar with it, you could see from that brief clip, if you are familiar with it, it may have reminded you why he's essential, some great villains' lines, which actually give you an anatomy of some the literary effects in some slightly more complicated texts that I'm going to go on and look at. He says to Peter, the guy he's successfully already framed for possession of drugs,"Let me explain it to you so that even you can understand," the villain is cleverer than everybody else, the villain is sarcastically polite, infinitely condescending, smirkingly sadistic, and he's surrounded by idiots, of course, and Peter, you can see, is an idiot, you can see that, can't you. The villain's the one with a sense of humor. Two other crucial lines, the foolish Peter says,"You knew?" about his affair with Sue Ellen, the wonderful Linda Gray, the thing she does with that mouth, the famous Sue Ellen mouth, which was always twitching and emoting in every close-up of her,"You knew?" he says,"Yes," replied J.R., of course he knew. And then later on in the clip, Sue Ellen says,"You planned this whole thing.""Of course I did," of course I did. The whole plot, the whole plan has been concocted by J.R., the crucial power of the villain is to be in charge of the plot, so he's a kind of satirist, he's a humorist, and he's also the plotter, And actually, you can see why therefore, if it wasn't for J.R., first of all, "Dallas" would have been dead boring'cause there would have been no humor in it at all, and secondly, it would have been dead boring'cause there would have been almost no plot, everybody else is too stupid to plot. J.R. was essential, and catches, I think, some sense of why we find villains entertaining. We certainly haven't outlived villainy, at least in popular culture. It struck me recently, seeing how the president of Russia is frequently referred to in British newspapers, and likened to a particular literary character over and over again, and in the ghastliness of the present war, the only bearable jokes that have been going round have been, of course, at Vladimir Putin's expense, quite rightly, as we know that tyrants hate to be laughed at, and they've mostly been about his performance as a certain kind of villain. And these are just ones from some recent weeks, from three different newspapers, first of all, quoting an observer on Russian politics:"'There's Zelenskiy,' says Patrikarakos,"'and then there's this Botoxed Bond villain"'who won't sit at a table with other people."'All that's missing is a trapdoor and a pool of sharks.'" And then, from "The Daily Star, a bit more tabloid,"A body language expert has revealed"that Russian President Vladimir Putin"oozes the understated menace"you would see from watching a villain"in a James Bond movie." And then finally, from"The Daily Telegraph,""One might wonder why Vladimir Putin"has not yet appropriated an extinct volcano for himself"as his lair."After all, Monday's meeting with his security council"saw him in full Blofeld mode,"lacking only a white cat and a pool of piranhas"to channel his inner Bond villain." And of course, the first and the last of those reference the film and photos that we've all seen, first of all of him sitting at the end of that incredibly long table, with minions down the other end, and then the extraordinary thing broadcast to the Russian people of him at his security council, in the marble hall in the Kremlin, with each one of his supposedly powerful minions terrified as he summoned them to give their opinions on, as it turned out, his forthcoming invasion. Popular fiction has given us this frequently-used compound noun, which is up there in the top, Bond villain. Incidentally, inexplicably, the "Oxford English Dictionary" has yet to record it, Bond villain. And anybody here who can offer me, if I ever get round to publishing some of this stuff, who can offer me the first use of Bond villain. I'm pretty sure it's connected to the films rather than the books, and now it gets used all the time, but I suspect people have only been saying Bond villain for a relatively short time, maybe a decade or two, maybe even less, although we all know it now. And in fact, quite a lot of this stuff derives from the films rather than the Ian Fleming novels, the white cat. Where's the white cat? Oh yes, "full Blofeld mode,"lacking only a white cat and a pool of piranhas." The white cat, of course, isn't in any of the novels, the white cat, I'm sure there are experts here on the Bond films, the white cat first appears, it's a white Persian cat, in "From Russia with Love," the film, and in those days, Blofeld wasn't shown, except from the back, so that you didn't know what Blofeld looked like, but because the camera had to focus on something as Blofeld spoke,"So this man, Bond," and also it enabled, incidentally the actor who acted Blofeld and the one doing the voice to be different people, and while it focused on Blofeld saying something, it had to focus visually on something other than his face, because it wasn't going to show his face, and so the director of"From Russia with Love," I can't remember, an English director, had this brilliant idea of showing him stroking a white cat. And then Donald Pleasence,"You Only Live Twice," Blofeld has a white cat, Charles Gray, very memorably, has a white cat, he looks a bit like a white cat himself, actually. The white cat has sadly gone now, but it was only there in the films of James Bond novels, not in the novels themselves. And actually, also, the sharks and the piranhas also, as a comic trick of the villain, poof, presses the button, boom, not time, sadly, it would have been entertaining to include those sequences. But of course, they're essentially quite comic sequences when people plunge into pools of sharks in James Bond films because they haven't done the villain's bidding. The shark tank comes from the 1977 Bond film"The Spy Who Loved Me," in which the villain's played by Curt Jurgens, Karl Stromberg, he presses the switch that sends his glamorous assistant, who's betrayed him, into the shark tank, and the piranhas come from the 1967 film I've already mentioned,"You Only Live Twice," in which Donald Pleasence, as Blofeld, admonishes SPECTRE agent Helga Brandt for failing to assassinate Bond before, as she leaves his lair, activating the mechanism that, ahh, drops her into a pool of piranhas. And there's always another minion who isn't dropped into the pool to witness it, isn't there, because it's pour encourager les autres. So the Bond villain idea, of course, is more to do with the translation, if that's the right word, of Fleming's novels into film, than it is to do with the books themselves. But there is a bit of the books themselves, and definitely, when Putin's at that table, or when he's presiding at his funny desk in the marble hall, and his minions are sitting around, he's deriving something from Fleming's original novels. It's in Fleming's novel "Thunderball" that we first meet Ernst Stavro Blofeld, who presides at a table, at a SPECTRE high table, he's like the master of a satanic Oxbridge college, or something, and here he is, quite soon after we are introduced to him in "Thunderball," and he's got his main operatives round the table."Ernst Blofeld gazed slowly round the faces of his 20 men"and looked for eyes that didn't squarely meet his."Blofeld's own eyes were deep black pools"surrounded, totally surrounded,"as Mussolini's were,"by very clear whites."They stripped the guilty or the false,"and made him feel transparent,"as transparent as a fish bowl,"through whose sides Blofeld examined,"with only the most casual curiosity,"the few solid fish, the grains of truth"suspended in the void of deceit or attempted obscurity." The worst thing about working for Blofeld is not the bad stuff you have to do, it's the fact you have to sit around the table while Blofeld looks at you, dreading being called to speak, like that guy who's the head of Russia's equivalent of MI6 dreading being asked to speak. You also see, there's another lecture I could do on Ian Fleming, I have read pretty much the whole Fleming oeuvre, and he's a fascinating example of a writer who's at once brilliantly inventive and a terrible writer. I think you can see it's really terrible prose, in a way, the way he gets distracted by his fish bowl metaphor, and then he has to have fish, it's hopeless, really, but he distills all sorts of conventions that become important in film as well as in fiction. One is this idea that the villain controls through his gaze alone. So what is a villain? It's a very old word, dating back to the 13th century, maybe even further, but for most of its life, up until probably the 19th century, it just means a bad person, a scoundrel. According to the OED, the"Oxford English Dictionary," it takes a sharper meaning, and one that's important to me in this lecture, in the early 19th century, and I'll read you, I haven't put it up on the screen, I'll read you what it says is the first example of a use,"usually with the," the villain, says the dictionary,"The character in a play, novel, et cetera,"whose evil motives or actions"form an important element in the plot,"especially in the phrase villain of the piece." First example, 1822, Charles Lamb, "London Magazine," and here's the quote from Charles Lamb,"The fact is you do not believe"in such characters as Surface,"the villain of artificial comedy,"even while you read or see them," Surface is Charles Surface, who's the villain in Sheridan's play from 1777,"A School for Scandal." So there's three interesting things

first of all that, according to Lamb, there's something unbelievable about the villain, he's a kind of cardboard character, real people aren't like that, secondly, that he comes from the stage, I think this is very important, we're going to look at some examples next, that there's something maybe even rather stagey about the villain, and thirdly, in the definition that the OED offers,"The character in a play, novel, et cetera,"whose evil motives or actions"form an important element in the plot," and we're back with J.R. again, that the villain makes the plot. Where do they come from? I think in that example from Lamb is a clue because I think this is one place the villain comes from. This is the villain, but he's also, oddly, a sort of antihero, the protagonist of Christopher Marlowe's tragedy"The Jew of Malta," but a tragedy only in the sense that lots of people get killed in it, not in the sense that you're going to find your hearts much broken by it, for it is too gleeful a play for that. And here, Barabas is boasting to his servant, Ithamore:"As for myself,"I walk abroad at nights"and kill sick people groaning under walls."Sometimes I go about and poison wells," he does it just for the sheer joy of it."Being young, I studied physic," that means medicine,"and began to practice first upon the Italian," that means he studied medicine in order to learn how to poison people, that's why Italy was so advanced and renowned for medicine in the Renaissance, a great place for poisons."There I enriched the priests with burials"and always kept the sexton's arms in ure"with digging graves and ringing dead men's keels."And after that, I was an engineer,"and in the wars twixt France and Germany,"under presence of helping Charles V,"slew friend and enemy with my stratagems." It's a sort of Antisemitic play, "The Jew of Malta," in that the villain is Jewish, and his Judaism is important because he embarks on a scheme of revenge after the Christians who run Malta decide to take some of his ill-gotten gains off him. But also, the play is about the war between Christians and the Turks over Malta, and the Christians and the Turks are also equally appalling, everybody's terrible in this play. And actually, it's a play which is, I think, it's rarely played nowadays, but I did see it at the Almeida about 20 years ago, and indeed, it was a kind of gleeful tragicomedy, and seemed much less problematic as a play than something like, say,"The Merchant of Venice." So Barabas revels in his villainy, and he does lots of terrible things, he poisons a whole nunnery at one stage because his daughter's become a nun, and he's really cross about that, because obviously she's converted to Christianity, she's become a nun, so he poisons the whole nunnery, kills all the nuns, including of course his daughter. And this sort of thing owes something to the tradition in morality plays and so-called Tudor interludes, these were quite crude, moralistic dramas from the late 15th and early 16th centuries in which there was developed a character who was called the Vice, and the Vice was an embodiment of vicefulness, and in these little dramas, would often seek to, and in some cases successfully, corrupt various representatives of humanity. And the Vice got into the habit, in this genre, of addressing the audience directly, with a cynical boastfulness, and that cynical boastfulness comes all the way down from the Tudor interlude, the morality play, through Barabas to J.R., I think, the villain glories in his schemes. And villains often get soliloquies, don't they, on the stage. Here is what we would call a villain, I think, Shakespeare's Richard III, and this is from the famous opening soliloquy of the play,"Now is the winter of our discontent,"made glorious summer by this sun of York," and of course, Richard speaks, Richard Gloucester as he is at this stage, he speaks of how war is over, everybody's capering and dancing in the ladies' chamber, but he is not shaped for sportive tricks,"And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover"to entertain these fair, well-spoken days,"I am determined to prove a villain,"and hate the idle pleasures of these days."Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,"by drunken prophecies, libels, and dreams,"to set my brother Clarence and the king"in deadly hate, the one against the other." It's fun just to speak it. Villains know the plot because they make the plot, and we, in this kind of soliloquy, as whoever it is, Ian McKellen, or whoever, comes to the front of the stage or the screen and pulls us in, we are made knowing and complicit, maybe. However much we may officially disapprove of villainy, we're being offered a kind of entertainment, we're being let into the knowledge, even, I think, when the villain is as poisonous as this one. This is Iago, in "Othello." Right at the end of the first act, you might remember, he's already had a go at bringing Othello down by alerting Brabantio, Desdemona's father, to her marriage to Othello, causing an uproar, but in fact, Desdemona, in front of the duke, Desdemona declares her love for Othello, and then Othello makes his big speech about how he made her love him, and Iago's plan, at that stage, doesn't work, so he's got to come up with something else. And here, in soliloquy, at the end of the first act, he ponders how he can use Michael Cassio, a Florentine, a lieutenant of Othello's, how he can use him in a new scheme of villainy:"Cassio's a proper man."Let me see now,"to get his place and to plume up my will in double knavery,"how, how?"Let's see,"after some time to abuse Othello's ear"that he is too familiar with his wife."He hath a person and a smooth dispose to be suspected,"framed to make women false."The Moor is of a free and open nature"that thinks men honest that but seem to be so,"and will as tenderly be led by the nose as asses are."I have't, tis engendered,"hell and night must bring this monstrous birth"to the world's light." He's hatching it in front of us, we are present in the very development of the plot, a plot to which all the other characters in the play will be helplessly bound. It has some of the same J.R. scorn for people with open, free, and honest natures, they are particularly pawns, susceptible to being pawns in his game. As Iago shows us, villains are characteristically cynics and misanthropes. I think that we know that the villain must be defeated in the end. We, spectators or readers, are therefore permitted to think for a while in a cynical and misanthropic way ourselves, free to do so because we know that this will all eventually be defeated. We know what the villain's up to, and we can even enjoy his fraudulent performance. Children's fiction is full of villains too. Here's a book which was written for children, Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island" was published first in the weekly magazine "Young Folks." Interestingly, it wasn't very successful there, but when it was published in book form, and read largely by adults, it became very successful. This was a story which had some lessons about the accomplished charms of the accomplished villain. Our narrator, the teenage Jim Hawkins, has been warned by the now-dead pirate Captain Billy Bones, who stayed at the inn where Jim lives with his mother, warned about a seafaring man with one leg. But when he actually meets such a man, running the Spyglass Inn in Bristol, and is told that this man, Long John Silver, will be the cook on a voyage to find the Treasure Island in the West Indies, Jim chooses to put aside all those warnings."He," Long John Silver,"was very tall and strong,"with a face as big as a ham,"plain and pale, but intelligent and smiling."Indeed, he seemed in the most cheerful spirits,"whistling as he moved about among the tables,"with a merry word or a slap on the shoulder"for the more favored of his guests."Now, to tell the truth,"from the very first mention of Long John"in Squire Trelawney's letter,"I had taken a fear in my mind"that he might prove to be very one-legged sailor"whom I'd watched for so long at the old Benbow Inn."But one look at the man before me was enough."I had seen the captain, and Black Dog,"and the blind man, Pew,"and I thought I knew what a buccaneer was like,"a very different creature, according to me,"from this clean and pleasant-tempered landlord." Long John Silver, of course, is a big charmer. But later on, in the chapter called "What I Heard in the Apple Barrel," Jim hears what a villain really is. They are in the ship, they're halfway across the Atlantic, Jim's got into the barrel to get some apples, it's almost finished, so he has to get right into the bottom, and while he's eating an apple, he falls asleep in the barrel, and he's woken by a conversation between Long John Silver and the crew, whom he has himself helped to hire. One of the crew asks Long John Silver what they're going to do eventually with the ship's captain, with Jim's friends, Dr. Livesey and Squire Trelawney, and with Jim himself, and this is what Jim hears. It's impossible not to read this in a cod Devon accent, because Robert Newton, in the 1954 film, a famous Long John Silver, and he came from Devon, and he just randomly chose to do a Devon accent for it, and that's lodged as what pirates sound like."'Right you are,' said Silver,"'rough and ready."'But mark you here, I'm an easy man,"'I'm quite the gentleman, says you,"'but this time it's serious,"'dooty is dooty, mates."'I give my vote, death."'When I'm in Parliament and riding in my coach,"'I don't want none of these sea-lawyers in the cabin"'a-coming home,"'unlooked for like the devil at prayers."'Wait is what I say,"'but when the time comes,"'why let her rip.'"'John,' cries the coxswain,"'you're a man!'"'You'll say so, Israel, when you see,' said Silver."'Only one thing I claim,"'I claim Trelawney,"'I'll wring his calf's head off his body"'with these hands, Dick,'" so murder's a part of the plan. Long John Silver, for all his charm, is the chief planner, he is an embodiment of danger. Popular fiction, popular culture, children's fiction, full of villains, but they've had a rich life in English Literature, capital E, capital L. In the 18th century, one novel gave the character of the villain a whole new prominence. The novel, which I'm proud to have read in its entirety three times, and which I'm hoping nobody else in this room will have read even once, for it is the longest single novel in English literature, when you're doing a PhD, that's a kind of goad, is Samuel Richardson's "Clarissa." Here is a painting of the key moment, and the two main characters. The villain of "Clarissa" is called Robert Lovelace, he's a libertine, he lives to seduce women. He plots and plans, schemes and deceives in order to win over, to seduce, as he hopes, the beautiful and thrillingly virtuous Clarissa. And here's a painting from 1753, six years after the novel first appeared, by Francis Hayman, and its key moment, when, relatively early in the novel, and Lovelace has tricked Clarissa into eloping with him. This is the wall of her garden of her home, this is the carriage he's got ready, and he's persuaded her, he's got some minions to pretend to be ruffians about to rush out on her, and in her fear, he gets her into the carriage, and she's off. And he knows that once he can do that, then she is really vulnerable to his attentions. The novel, huge novel, is written entirely in letters, letters between Clarissa and her friend, Anna Howe, and letters between Lovelace and his fellow rake Jack Belford. Lovelace's letters are wonderful, lengthy, gloriously self-expressive, gloriously self-vaunting. He doesn't just reveal himself and his villainous schemes, he glories in his libertinism, he hugs himself for the ingenuity of his plotting. Here is a bit of a letter written to Belford after he's managed to trick her into eloping:"Until, by matrimonial or equal intimacies,"I have found her less than angel,"it is impossible to think of any other."Then there are so many stimulatives to such a spirit as mine in this affair, besides love," by love he means lust,"such a field of stratagem and contrivance,"which thou knowest to be the delight of my heart."Then the rewarding end of all,"to carry off such a girl as this"in spite of all her watchful and implacable friends,"and in spite of a prudence and reserve"that I never met with in any of her sex."What a triumph!""What a triumph over the whole sex!"And then such a revenge to gratify,"which is only, at present,"politically reigned in,"eventually to break forth with the greater fury."Is it possible, thinkest thou,"that there can be room for a thought that is not of her,"and devoted to her?" The revenge is because, as a very young man, presumably in his late teens, Lovelace was once jilted by an accomplished flirt, and now he spends the rest of his life revenging himself on the female sex. This is just before he's got her to do what we saw in the previous picture, and escape from her family home. At this stage, he hasn't yet done that, and he's staying in disguise at an inn near Clarissa's family home, Harlow Place,"sprung up from a dunghill"within every elderly person's remembrance," says Lovelace, who's doubly scornful of her family because they're nouveau-riche, he is an aristocrat. Lovelace witnesses, while he's staying at this inn, the awkward budding romance between the innkeeper's daughter and a local carpenter, and he just wishes, he says to Belford, that he had as good and innocent a heart as either of these two innocent characters."I have a confounded, mischievous one," that's his heart,"by nature too, I think."A good motion now and then rises from it,"but it dies away presently."A love of intrigue, an invention for mischief,"a triumph in subduing,"fortune encouraging and supporting,"and a constitution,"what signifies palliating?"But I believe I had been a rogue"had I been a plow-boy."But the devil's in this sex, eternal misguiders."Who that has once trespassed ever recovered his virtue?" He has this little flicker of goodness, but of course it's the fault of women that the flicker should die away presently. Richardson created this intriguing villain, Lovelace, but Richardson was first exasperated, and then appalled at the responses of readers to his creation. The novel appeared in three long parts, with gaps of several months in between, so three chunks, and in these gaps, lots of his readers, especially female readers, wrote to him, saying, oh, get them to marry each other, I know he's bad, but he could be reformed, you can't help but half admire him, he's got some good qualities, I'm sure they deserve each other really. And Richardson was so upset by this that he went through his huge novel twice more entirely rewriting it to try to make it more obvious that Lovelace was bad, and calculating, and he even added these footnotes. This is Lovelace when he finds, after the elopement, that he's got Clarissa considering marriage to him, because she's disgraced because she's run away, she hasn't done anything, and he thinks that if she's considered marriage, he's not going to marry her, of course not, of course not, but that's one step closer to what he wants."Charming creature, thought I,"but I charge thee"that thou not let any of the sex know my exultation."Is it so soon come to this?" And then you'll see below that, Richardson added this footnote to the third edition:"Mr. Lovelace might have spared this caution"on this occasion,"since many of the sex,"we mention it with regret,"who, on the first publication had read thus far,"and even to the lady's first escape,"had been readier to censure her for over-niceness,"as we have observed in a former note,"see volume 1, page 501,"than him for artifices and exultations"not less cruel and ungrateful"than ungenerous and unmanly." Please get it right, he says to the reader. But of course, the point of all this is that Richardson, especially using this letter device, this epistolary device, where there's no guiding author, but just the characters speaking for themselves, had created a villain who was, in every sense of the word, intriguing, all too intriguing. And that note of intrigue comes back over and over again in 19th century novels, where villains control the plot. Here's an example from Wilkie Collins' "The Woman in White," where Marian Halcombe is narrating having first me Count Fosco, of whom she's suspicious, and who indeed turns out to be entirely the villain of the novel."What of the count?" Counts, by the way, in English novels, are always villainous. Dukes and earls may be okay, possibly, but a count is a funny, foreign kind of aristocrat. Is not Dracula a count? I think so."What of the count?"

"he looks like a man who could tame anything."If he had married a tigress instead of a woman,"he would have tamed the tigress."If he had married me,"I should have made his cigarettes,"as his wife does,"I should have held my tongue when he looked at me,"as she holds hers."I'm almost afraid to confess it"even to these secret pages," because she's keeping a journal."The man has interested me, has attracted me,"has forced me to like him."In two short days,"he has made his way straight into my favorable estimation,"and how he has worked the miracle,"is more than I can tell you." And she finds an analogy which might ring a bell with you for what he looks like, she says, "He is a most remarkable likeness,"on a large scale,"of the great Napoleon."His features have Napoleon's magnificent regularity,"his expression recalls the grandly calm, immovable power"of the great soldier's face." Incidentally, Ian Fleming, in "Thunderball," when he describes Blofeld, likens him to Napoleon. And you will know, of course, the most famous of all likenesses to Napoleon. This is from Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes' story"The Final Solution," and this is Holmes explaining to Watson who Professor Moriarty is."He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson,"he is the organizer of half that is evil"and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city."He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker,"he has a brain of the first order,"he sits motionless like a spider in the center of its web,"but that web has 1,000 radiations,"and he knows well every quiver of each of them."He does little himself, he only plans,"but his agents are numerous and splendidly organized." In fact, as you might know, Holmes invented Moriarty, sorry, Arthur Conan Doyle invented Moriarty purely in order to kill off Holmes, and in this story, they have that fight at the Reichenbach Falls where they both die, but of course, later on, poor, old Doyle had to bring Holmes back to life by popular demand. In fact, Doyle wasn't at all interested in Moriarty at all, he only really features in this one story, and whose function there is purely to be engaged in mutually destructive single combat with Holmes. But of course, in popular culture, Professor Moriarty has been seized upon as the second most interesting character in the Holmes story, and in the TV series "Sherlock," Andrew Scott played Moriarty, and was given a major role in almost every episode. That's what "The Strand" magazine, incidentally, thought that Professor Moriarty should look like. And of course, he is a kind of genius,"he's a man of good birth and excellent education,"endowed by nature with a phenomenal mathematical faculty."At the age of 21,"he wrote a treatise upon the binomial theorem,"which has had a European vogue." Holmes is convinced that Moriarty's an antagonist who is his intellectual equal. Well these, maybe, are also examples from genre fiction, or the literary predecessors of genre fiction, and it's true that it's in genre fiction, thrillers, that we still go, and that filmmakers still go, indeed,

Hannibal Lecter in the Thomas Harris novels, Ian Rankin's Rebus novels have a villain called Big Ger Cafferty, who's behind every really interesting crime in the Edinburgh area. And it is also notable, isn't it, that all these villains that I've looked at so far are male, and indeed, I was struck by the fact that I hadn't realized it when I was doing it, this is the first of all the lectures I've given on the novel which has not just been preponderantly about male writers, but until here, entirely about male writers. I think there are reasons why women can't be villains in 19th century fiction, I don't have time, it's a different lecture, but it's striking that when novelists like Dickens, and Wilkie Collins, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon tried to find villainesses in the sensation novels of the mid 19th century, those villainesses always turn out to have really good and quite sympathetic reasons for being bad, and indeed, turn out not to be bad actually. The villain is largely missing from contemporary fiction, but there's one interesting case, isn't there, of a recent novel where the novelist had, and she's our representative of female novelists just this time, had a go at making a villain, and that is in "Wolf Hall," Hilary Mantel's Booker Prize-winning novel, 2009, where she does something surely mischievous, as well as inventive, which is not only to feature as her hero a character who's often treated, I think even in that Holbein painting of him, as a bit of a villain, but to make a villain out of literally a saint, Sir Thomas More. And in this little bit, Humphrey Monmouth, a draper, thought to have sheltered the Protestant William Tyndale, has been released for lack of evidence. In a search by the secret police arranged by Thomas More,"they have to let him go for lack of evidence."because you can't make anything"of a heap of ashes in the hearth," they find burnt bits of paper."Monmouth himself would be a heap of ashes"if Thomas More had his way."'Not come to see us yet, Master Cromwell?' he says,"'Still breaking dry bread in cellars?"'Come now, my tongue is sharper than you deserve,"'we must be friends, you know.'"It sounds like a threat."More moves away, shaking his head,"'We must be friends.'" That's the Thomas More, to the scandal of many historically knowledgeable readers, who is the villain of at least the first half of "Wolf Hall." But the great, and I think probably here we have to end, the great villain-monger of English fiction is Dickens, I think, and it's good to end with Dickens because we might ponder why it is that he is such a notable inventor of villains. And I think there are two reasons, essentially, the first is perhaps the one touched upon earlier in that quote from Charles Lamb, he is the most stagey and performative of writers, addicted to Shakespeare, but also to contemporary Victorian melodrama, a writer who thought of his novel as a kind of stage, and of course, in the last decade of his life, made an extra big living by performing highlights from his novels to a paying audience. But also, and here I guess connect with what I was trying to discuss in an earlier lecture, on plot, there is no other great English novelist so committed to plot. If you think of some of the great villains of Dickens, Fagin, Ralph Nickleby, Quilp in "The Old Curiosity Shop," Tulkinghorn in "Bleak House," John Jasper, the sex-addled opium fiend in "The Mystery of Edwin Drood," his last and incomplete novel, they're all controllers of the plot, and they're almost all great entertainers, incidentally. Think what a great entertainer Fagin is, he's so good at being villainous that even Oliver has to laugh. And it's perhaps appropriate to end with a couple of little examples of why it might be that however repellent the villain as a character, who, in great English novels of the 18th and 19th century, compels our attention and a weird sort of allegiance to. This is perhaps a lesser known villain, this is Mr. Carker in "Dombey and Son." He is Mr. Dombey's manager in his business, although we never find out what his business is. Here I've got two little passages to end with

"Mr. Carker was a gentleman, 38 or 40 years old,"of a florid complexion,"and with two unbroken rows of glistening teeth,"whose regularity and whiteness were quite distressing."It was impossible to escape the observation of them,"for he showed them whenever he spoke,"and bore so wide a smile upon his countenance,"a smile however very rarely indeed"extended beyond his mouth,"that there was something in it like the snarl of a cat." With his instinct for the theatrical, the performative, Dickens often lets his villain flaunt his villainy. Carker's very appearance, those teeth, mock those who can't see through his schemes. He works for the proud, immensely wealthy, utterly cold-hearted Mr. Dombey. He pretends to be his loyal servant, but of course, not only is he plotting against him, he is also, like the best villains, a kind of satirist too."He affected a stiff, white cravat,"after the example of his principal," Mr. Dombey,"and was always closely buttoned up and tightly dressed."His manner towards Mr. Dombey"was deeply conceived and perfectly expressed."He was familiar with him,"in the very extremity"of his sense of the distance between them."'Mr. Dombey, to a man in your position"'from a man in mine,"'there is no show of subservience"'compatible with the transaction of business between us"'that I should think sufficient."'I frankly tell you, sir,"'I give it up altogether."'I feel that I could not satisfy my own mind,"'and heaven knows, Mr. Dombey,"'you can afford to dispense with the endeavor.'"If he had carried these words about him"printed on a placard,"and had constantly offered it to Mr. Dombey's perusal"on the breast of his coat,"he could not have been more explicit than he was." The villain is a mocker, his demeanor towards his boss is as much ridicule as it is manipulation. Maybe it's the case that the serious novelist can no longer believe, or make us believe in villains, that we have to rely on TV drama, yet we'd be wrong, I think, to believe that novelists of the past were being simple-minded when they created these villains. They knew that villains dramatized some of their readers' most thrilling fears, and satisfied some of their deepest readerly wishes, to see the world cynically, to laugh at hypocrisy, to joke about virtuous people, and to take pleasure at a really good plot. Thanks for very much.(audience applauds)- Thank you, Professor Mullan, for another fascinating lecture. We have time for a couple of questions, so let me kick off with a few from our online audience, and then I'll open it up to our in-person audience. The first one is,"Did the villain evolve from the Gothic,"or earlier, such as fairy tales and myths?"- I don't think that the villain evolved from fairy tales or myths, although fairy tales and myths may touch upon the visceral fears and pleasures that villainy in Gothic novels also touched upon. I think, like I said, the villain developed from plays, first of all, and developed not as a bogey-man, but as the schemer. And if you look at Gothic novels, there are some in which the characters who threaten usually the heroines, it's usually heroines of these novels, are sort of monstrous, but the really successful ones, like the novels of Mrs. Radcliffe like "The Mysteries of Udolpho," the villain is a plotter. He's sexy, he's clever, he's threatening, but he's also plotting, and he's plotting, usually, sexual conquest and grand-scale financial larceny, just like a decent Bond villain.- "Why are some of Jane Austen's villains so attractive?" There's been a lot of discussion about villains being sexy.- Ah, I don't think she has villains really. I wonder who that questioner is thinking of as the villain.- She actually says Mr. Crawford, for instance,"surely Fanny could have reformed him a little,"and she, in turn,"would be encouraged to be little more frivolous."- Mr. Crawford's a bad, bad person, he's an utterly amoral and selfish person, and it's important that Fanny is the only one, really, who can see through him, but actually, I wouldn't say Mr. Crawford is a villain. Apart from anything else, he doesn't have the key to the plot of the novel at all. The key to the plot of "Mansfield Park" is that Fanny's in love with Edmund, which protects her from his attentions, and he never works that out, he never works her out, he never gets it at all. I would say Jane Austen is part of a tradition, which is one of the reasons why villains have a bad name amongst literary novelists, she's part of a tradition that goes through, say, George Eliot, and Henry James, and onward, where, in real life, there are no villains, in real life, people are too complicated, in real life, even Henry Crawford's capable of some acts of unselfishness, apparently, some time, and after all, in "Mansfield Park," at a certain stage, he even decides, yeah okay, I'll marry her, I'll marry her. Lovelace, in "Clarissa," talks about marriage, plans for marriage, tells Clarissa it's her only option, but he's not interested in it at all, he only wants to conquer her, that's what a villain is like. If there's a villain in "Mansfield Park" it's Mrs. Norris, anyway.(audience laughs)- [Questioner] Is Miss Havisham a villain?- That's a really good question, because I suppose she would be an example from what I was saying, in parentheses, about why it might be that, at least in novels of the 18th and 19th century, women can never be villains. In the end, Miss Havisham, in a way that would never happen to a male villain in a Victorian novel, is a figure of pathos, actually, and she asks, begging for forgiveness. Count Dracula's not going to beg for forgiveness, Lovelace is not going to beg for forgiveness, Iago's not going to beg for forgiveness, but Miss Havisham does. And it's therefore also important that, although there is a plot which she hatches, to ruin Pip's life by making him fall in love with Estella, it turns out to be not the main plot of the novel, the main plot of the novel is far more complicated, and it's something that she's involved in, but has no idea about. And I think Miss Havisham's a very good example of how, for Dickens, but I think for the Victorian novelist more generally, in the end, the woman can't be a villain, she must be a figure of either pathos, or sometimes admiration, and you find that over and over again in sensation novels of the 19th century by people like Wilkie Collins. There's a lady?- [Questioner] I just wanted to ask if it's possible to have a villain without melodrama, particularly in modern novels?- I think that novelists have decided it isn't. And melodrama, of course, has become an entirely pejorative term for us, it's never used except to condemn something. Of course, in the 19th century, melodramas were staged, and actually, lots of what they did was not so different from what makes people enjoy"EastEnders," or something, but anyway, melodramas were staged, you knew what you were getting, and Dickens, for one, was a great connoisseur of melodrama, and believed that some of the supposedly cheap effects of melodrama could be stitched into really ambitious and complicated novels, that some of the things about melodrama, like the extraordinary oscillations of sensational fear and farcical humor, he said, like streaky bacon, he says in "Oliver Twist," you could combine in ways that proper novelists, he thought, would never dare to do. So yeah, I think it's very difficult to imagine a novelist who wanted to be on the Booker long-list having villains, but maybe sometimes, in comic novels, Jonathan Coe novels sometimes have villains in, I think, because he writes in a farcical, comic tradition which permits that, but it seems a badge of unseriousness now, doesn't it, but I think slightly our loss, I suppose, is what I'm saying.- Thank you, that is all we've got time for I'm afraid, but thank you again, Professor Mullan, for a fantastic lecture.- Thank you(audience applauds)