This week, we finally managed to install our new (not new ) item of furniture - a mid-18th Century grandfather clock. It's not bright and shiny like more modern ones, but a dark oak with a warm patina which the beeswax polish is drawing out. In order to set it up, we had to do a certain amount of research - how to hang the pendulum, where the weight went on the endless chain - and it got me thinking... where and when did certain divisions of time come from? The time periods which I have written either had household clocks or didn't, I have not written novels from the time of their invention. Clocks have been around for a long time, and the obsession with measuring time in an ordered fashion dates back to at least the ancient Sumerians. It was they who established a circular reading of time and, I imagine, the sixty seconds/minutes came about as much because it was an easy way to divide a circle as anything else. But it wasn't until much later that the precision of seconds ...
Of course, when I volunteered to write a blog for #HistFicThursdays, it was bound to be Gothic-based. All the pupils at school know now that, if they get me for English, they will be studying some Gothic Horror at some point!
I have just taught my first full year of National 5, and the text I selected for the pupils’ Critical Essay (worth 20% of the overall grade) was A Warning to the Curious by the great M. R. James. There are so many fascinating things which can be said about the text: Paxton as a tragic hero; the setting of the First World War and how that is woven in throughout the text; the themes of revenge and respect for beliefs; the many examples of foreshadowing throughout…
But teaching a group of teenagers to love (or, more realistically, to understand) M. R. James is not without its challenges. He writes in that wonderfully lyrical style which is key to the Gothic genre and, even for his time, he was using language which was perhaps slightly old-fashioned. Therefore, some of the language can be slightly challenging.
I knew I wanted the pupils to access the text as easily as possible, so I decided that the best way to do that was to read it to them, rather than expect them to read it themselves at the introduction. However, I do have a tendency to lose my voice during the day’s teaching, so I turned to audiobooks instead. Fortunately, there is a wonderful audiobook version of A Warning to the Curious, recorded by the eternally-lovely Michael Horden. His bumbling-English-gent voice makes sense of the complicated language in A Warning to the Curious, making it sound as though the language belongs to the everyday.
Another class studied The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe. I applied the same rule, and this time found a recording by one of my heroes: Sir Christopher Lee. What could be better than listening to one of Poe’s classic tales being told by another master of the horror genre?
In both instances, I found the pupils benefitted from the audiobooks. It may not be entirely accurate to say that every one of them enjoyed the stories (it is impossible to please everyone!) but their understanding was aided by hearing the story told aloud in a voice which they could believe belonged to the narrator.
And audiobooks are not just great for school. I spent a happy early-morning lying in bed one Saturday listening to the recordings of Rats and Wailing Well which were (quite recently) created for the BBC. Audiobooks are convenient and accessible, but they also help to create the characters themselves and bring the author’s vision to life. And there are some truly wonderful recordings of some of the most classic tales to have been part of English Literature.
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