Index, a History of the by Dennis Duncan

Author:Dennis Duncan [Duncan, Dennis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241374245
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2021-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

There is something at once both useless and compelling about these indexes. Is ‘Dull Fellows’, listed under the ds, really a helpful headword? Of course not. But it catches our attention, makes us want to find out more. This is as much about performance as about quick reference. Each entry is a little advertisement for the essay it points to, a sample of the wit we will find there. The Tatler and Spectator indexes belong to the same moment as the satirical indexes we saw in the last chapter, but unlike William King’s work there is nothing cruel or pointed about them. Instead, they are zany, absurd, light. ‘Let anyone read [them],’ declares Leigh Hunt, ‘and then call an index a dry thing if he can.’ The index has made itself at home in the journals of the early eighteenth century, adapting to suit their manners, their tone. Moreover, it signals the elevation of these essays produced at a gallop for the daily coffee-house sheet to something more durable, to a format that connotes value, perhaps even status. At the midpoint of the second decade of the eighteenth century, the index is primed to offer the same sheen to other genres, to epic poetry, to drama, to the emerging form of the novel. And yet, we know how this story ends. In the twenty-first century novels do not have indexes. Nor do plays. Poetry books are indexed by first line, not by subject. Why, then, was the index to fiction a short-lived phenomenon? Why did it not take? To shed some light on this question, let us turn briefly to two literary figures from the late nineteenth century, both still indexing novels long after the embers had died down on that particular experiment. What can these latecomers tell us about the problems of indexing when it comes to works of the imagination?

‘It was a glorious victory, wasn’t it?’ With these words, in Through the Looking-Glass, the White Knight introduces himself to Alice. He has just rescued her from her captor, the Red Knight, and yet it is a curious introduction, since the victory has been anything but glorious. Both knights, bashing at each other with clubs – which they hold with their arms rather than their hands, like Punch and Judy dolls – have been tumbling again and again off their horses, landing without fail on their heads, then remounting, swinging and losing their balance once more. After a final double lunge sees both knights fall off together, they shake hands, and Red retires from the field. A victory for White, to be sure, but glorious is not the term that springs to mind. Words, as so often in the Alice stories, are slippery, problematic things; they don’t lead us where we expect.

As Alice walks on with her rescuer, he reveals himself, in his kindly, crackpot way, to be quite the renaissance man: an inventor – the portable beehive; shark-repelling anklets for horses – and with vast experience of falling off horses.

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