Penguin Little Black Classics

23 May, 201823 May, 2018

46 Great Opening Lines: 39

What was known of Captain Hagberd in the little seaport of Colebrook was not exactly in his favour.

First line of To-morrow, Joseph Conrad, 1902

The story of a man who is quietly going mad waiting for his son to return, convinced he will turn up tomorrow, has an opening line promising an unsavoury old English sea captain whose ship had never gone far from home.

Reading this little book I learnt a few things about writing well, surprising really, since Conrad was born in Ukraine, was educated in Poland, and learnt English as an adult. His words had me feeling a particular pity for the poor girl who lived next door to Captain Hagberd. The two of them talked over the fence each day:

“You wait till you get married, my dear,’ said her only friend, drawing closer to the fence. […]
But she only said in self-mockery, and speaking to him as though he had been sane, ‘Why, Captain Hagberd, your son may not even want to look at me.'”

To-morrow is no. 64 in the collection of little Penguin classics, but is available online at Gutenberg and is one of the freely available e-books produced by the University of Adelaide.

8 April, 20186 August, 2018

46 Great Opening Lines: 33

To rear a boy under what parents call the ‘sheltered life’ system is, if the boy must go into the world and fend for himself, not wise.

Opening line, Thrown Away, Rudyard Kipling, 1890

In this beginning there’s a hint about the ending.

The story comes in a little black Penguin book, The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows by Rudyard Kipling, a collection of six stories taken from a larger collection, Plain Tales from the Hills.

It’s a story of a Boy who “was beautifully taught in all that wins marks by a private tutor, and carried the extra weight of ‘never having given his parents an hour’s anxiety in his life’.”

Most Boys give their parents an hour’s anxiety, and countless hours of unspeakable joy.

31 March, 2018

46 Great Opening Lines: 32

Tuesday, July 23rd. – Am aroused by violent knocking at the door in the early gray dawn – so violent that two large centipedes and a scorpion drop on to the bed.

First line of A Hippo Banquet by Mary Kingsley, 1897

This is the first line of the first story in a small book, A Hippo Banquet, published by Penguin as no. 32 of 80 Little Black Classics. The line certainly drew me in, fearful as I am of bugs dropping down on me in my bed. Quite the contrast is this fearless English woman, Mary Kingsley, who lived in West Africa in the 1890s and wrote of her life there in Travels in West Africa from which this little black book was made.

The hippo banquet occurs at night when hippos graze on hippo grass. Mary has gone for a canoe ride alone in the middle of the night because she can’t sleep (mosquitoes and lice in the bed…), and it’s then she comes upon five hippos feasting.

Hippo and baby, photo courtesy Wikipedia

The first line of the whole work, Travels in West Africa, is much longer but equally compelling and worth quoting:

“The West Coast of Africa is like the Arctic regions in one particular, and that is that when you have once visited it you want to go back there again; and, now I come to think of it, there is another particular in which it is like them, and that is that the chances you have of returning from it at all are small, for it is a Belle Dame sans merci.”

La Belle Dame Sans Merci is a poem written by John Keats in 1819, in which the Belle Dame is at once a figure of love and fantasy, death and decay.