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Biblical Refigurations
The Prodigal Son in English

and American Literature
BIBLICAL REFIGURATIONS
General Editors: James Crossley and Francesca Stavrakopoulou
This innovative series offers new perspectives on the textual, cultural, and
interpretative contexts of particular biblical characters, inviting readers to take
a fresh look at the methodologies of Biblical Studies. Individual volumes
employ different critical methods including social-scientific criticism, critical
theory, historical criticism, reception history, postcolonialism, and gender
studies, while subjects include both prominent and lesser-known figures
from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.
Published Titles Include:

Jeremy Schipper Disability and Isaiah’s Suffering Servant
Keith Bodner Jeroboam’s Royal Drama
Mark Leuchter Samuel and the Shaping of Tradition
Louise J. Lawrence Sense and Stigma in the Gospels: Depictions of
Sensory-Disabled Characters
William John Lyons Joseph of Arimathea: A Study in Reception History
James Crossley Jesus and the Chaos of History: Redirecting the Life
of the Historical Jesus
Nyasha Junior Reimagining Hagar: Blackness and Bible
Biblical Refigurations
GENERAL EDITORS: JAMES CROSSLEY AND FRANCESCA STAVRAKOPOULOU
The Prodigal Son

in English and
American Literature
Five Hundred Years
of Literary Homecomings
ALISON M. JACK
1
3
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Acknowledgements
This book has had a long gestation, and I have been encouraged
along the way by many people. Colleagues at the School of Divinity,
University of Edinburgh, have been supportive and interested, full of
suggestions and ideas. Church groups who have heard me talk about
the parables and the Prodigal Son in particular have been keen to share
their insights with me, and I have appreciated this very much.
The book was finished during a period of research leave, and I am
grateful to the University of Edinburgh for the opportunity to be free
of other responsibilities and to focus on drawing the material together.
Two short periods of study at Westminster College, Cambridge, helped
to consolidate ideas and fill in research gaps, and were of great benefit in
the final year of writing.
The editorial team at Oxford University Press has been supportive
and understanding throughout the process, and I would like to thank
them for the guidance they have given me.
The title of the book was the subject of some discussion. ‘Literature
in English’ seemed to raise unmet expectations, and so ‘English and
American Literature’ was agreed. This should not be taken to down-
play the texts from the field of Scottish literature which are so import-
ant throughout the book, and I hope my friends and colleagues
working in that field will understand the balancing act that had to be
struck between full description and a workable title.
My children, Iain and Fiona, have been patient and uncomplaining
when I have felt the need to point out a Prodigal Son reference in every
film, television programme, or book we have experienced together. As
always, I owe them my thanks for their unfailing resilience and sense
of fun. Drew Brown was an encouraging and supportive presence as
the book neared its completion.
Finally, I dedicate this book to Ian Campbell, Emeritus Professor of
Scottish and Victorian Literature at the University of Edinburgh, who
has been a teacher, mentor, and friend for thirty years now, and who
continues to be a supportive advocate of my work.
vi Acknowledgements
Excerpts from ‘Crusoe in England’, ‘Over , Illustrations and a
Complete Concordance’, ‘The Prodigal’, and ‘Questions of Travel’
from Poems by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright ©  by The Alice
H. Methfessel Trust. Publisher’s Note and compilation copyright
©  by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Reprinted by permission of
Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Also published in The Complete Poems
– volume. In the UK, these poems are found in Poems by
Elizabeth Bishop published by Chatto and Windus. Reproduced by
permission of the Random House Group Ltd. © .
Permission to quote from the poetry of Iain Crichton Smith has
been granted by Carcanet Press (<http://www.carcanet.co.uk>), and is
acknowledged with gratitude. The lines quoted are all from Iain
Crichton Smith, New Collected Poems, edited and introduced by
Matt McGuire (Manchester: Carcanet Press Ltd, ).
‘Never Go Back’ by Felix Dennis, taken from A Glass Half Full
(Hutchinson, ), © Felix Dennis, is reproduced by kind permis-
sion of the Felix Dennis Literary Estate.
A short section of Chapter  is adapted from my article ‘Henry
James’s “The Jolly Corner”: Revisiting the Parable of the Prodigal Son
(Luke .–)’ in Journal of the Bible and its Reception, vol. .
(): pp. –, and is used with permission.
Contents
. Reading the Prodigal Son 

. The Prodigal Son in Elizabethan Literature 
. The Prodigal Son and Shakespeare 
. Female Victorian Novelists and the Prodigal Son 
. The American Short Story and the Prodigal Son 
. Prodigal Ministers in Fiction 
. The Prodigal Son in Poetry: Elizabeth Bishop
and Iain Crichton Smith 
. Conclusion 
Bibliography 
Index 
1
Reading the Prodigal Son
‘Prodigal’ is an adjective with a chequered past. Its Latin root is prodigus,

which denotes a lavishness which is morally neutral. In general English
usage, strongly negative connotations attend its sense of wasteful squan-
dering. However, more recently, ‘prodigal’ has cut loose from such
negativity to take on a much more positive understanding which
includes waywardness, perhaps, but more strongly still, a willingness
to seek out adventure, even self-fulfilment, and a certain generosity of
spirit. Today, the word is most often used in the context of Jesus’ parable
about a father and two sons (Luke :–), the younger of whom is
given star billing in the title: it is ‘The Parable of the Prodigal Son’ in
common English usage.1 This son is often simply referred to as ‘the
Prodigal’, and a negative judgement is certainly implied by Jerome’s
reference in the fourth century CE to the parable as a story about the
contrast between ‘the prudent and prodigal sons’.2 When I have intro-
duced the parable to students in my Bible and Literature classes,
1
The most significant early association of ‘prodigal’ with this character in an
English translation of the Bible is to be found in the Geneva Bible, which was first
published with both the Old and New Testaments in . Here the parable is
introduced in the text as the parable ‘of the Prodigal Sonne’, and the page heading
repeats this, although the word is not found in the story itself. The same page
heading was used in the King James Version of the Bible published in , sealing
the ongoing connection between the parable and the prodigality of the younger
son. The history of the word’s association with the parable is charted in detail in
Ezra Horbury, ‘Aristotelian Ethics and Luke :– in Early Modern England’,
Journal of Religious History . ( June ): pp. –.
2
Jerome, Lives of Illustrious Men, ch. , quoted in Amy-Jill Levine, Short
Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi (New York:
HarperCollins, ), p. .
 The Prodigal Son

however, ‘prodigal’ is often a puzzle to them and they are drawn to the
positive rather than negative connotations of the word. Later commen-
tators have sought to retitle the parable to refocus attention on the other
characters in the story,3 but the parable remains associated with the
younger son and this particular, ‘prodigal’, aspect of his character.
This character, the Prodigal Son, and his story, have fascinated
Christian preachers, biblical commentators and theologians, novelists,
poets and playwrights, as well as those interested in the human
condition from a therapeutic perspective. The Orcadian writer George
Mackay Brown speaks for many in the literary community when he
has a character assert, ‘I’m telling you this as a writer of stories: there’s
no story I know of so perfectly shaped and phrased as The Prodigal
Son.’4 One of the longest and most narratively complex of all of the
parables attributed to Jesus in the Gospels, it deals with universal
themes of family, home, rebellion, and return. This study will explore
the significance of the influence of the parable on selected texts
from the fields of English, Scottish, and American literature. Meaning
will be sought in the reciprocal relationship between biblical and
literary studies, and in the culture in which the reinterpretations of
the parable take place. We will see that different aspects of the parable
are emphasized in each of the periods and genres discussed, and that
the Prodigal Son and his family are endlessly and creatively engaging
characters who continue to beguile. In their appeal to this archetypal
story of homecoming, authors seem to find multiple ways to connect
with their readers at a deep and affective level.
What this study does not offer is a survey of every appearance of the
Prodigal Son in English, Scottish, or American literature.5 Instead,
3
The Waiting Father is the title of the English translation of Helmut Thielicke’s
work on the parables (trans. John W. Doberstein (New York: Harper & Row,
)). Klyne Snodgrass prefers ‘The Compassionate Father and his Two Lost
Sons’, although he admits that brevity is not on the side of this suggestion, and the
parable of ‘the Prodigal or of the Two Lost Sons’ will probably hold sway. See Stories
with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus, nd edn (Grand Rapids,
Mich.: Eerdmans, ), p. .
4
George Mackay Brown, ‘The Tarn and the Rosary’, in Hawkfall (London:
The Hogarth Press, ; repr. Edinburgh: Polygon, ), pp. –, p. .
5
Manfred Siebald and Leland Ryken attempt such a survey in ‘Prodigal Son’ in
A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature, ed. David L. Jeffrey (Grand
Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, ), pp. –. The entry would have to be
Reading the Prodigal Son 

each chapter is an in-depth exploration of a particular period,
geographical place, and/or genre in which the parable or at least the
character of the Prodigal Son is particularly significant, with a focus on
the theme of homecoming. Some of these are widely recognized in
literary studies, such as the Prodigal Son fiction of the sixteenth century,
and the work of Shakespeare which followed and reworked that
established intertextual relationship. The American short story trad-
ition covers a wide period, but its use of the Prodigal Son paradigm is
well attested, and is developed here. The novels of female Victorian
writers such as George Eliot, Mrs Gaskell, and Margaret Oliphant
have not been extensively discussed in terms of their relationship with
the Prodigal Son, but this book will argue that there is a common thread
of interest in these novels in the competing themes of responsibility and
innovation which the parable explores. Similarly, ‘ministers in literature’
is not a well-established literary category, but this book will suggest that
the appearance of clerical characters in nineteenth- to twenty-first-
century fiction highlights the contrast between lostness and foundness
which is central to the parable. Finally, there is a tradition in poetry of
appealing directly to the parable, and reworking it from a variety of
perspectives. The work of two twentieth-century poets, Elizabeth
Bishop and Iain Crichton Smith, is considered here, including both
their poems which explicitly refer to the parable, and those which appeal
more obliquely to its theme of homecoming. Of course there are other
periods and genres which might have been included,6 but those chosen
considerably expanded to cover the literature of the past twenty-five years. Mikeal
C. Parsons offers an overview of the appearances of the parable’s older brother in
art and literature, in ‘The Prodigal’s Elder Brother: The History and Ethics of
Reading Luke :–’, Perspectives in Religious Studies  (): pp. –.
Manfred Siebald, in Der verlorene Sohn in der amerikanischen Literatur (Heidelberg:
Universitätsverlag Winter, ), focuses on the influence of the parable in
American literature.
6
Such as American drama from the s to the s, which Geoffrey
S. Proehl considers in illuminating depth in his Coming Home Again: American
Family Drama and the Figure of the Prodigal (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University
Presses, Inc., ), and which Leah Hadomi explores in The Homecoming Theme
in Modern Drama: The Return of the Prodigal (Lewiston: The Edward Mellen
Press, ). While the plays will not be considered in detail here, these literary
critical approaches will be contrasted with more traditional reception history from
within the field of biblical studies.
 The Prodigal Son

here highlight something of the range of possibilities opened up by
literary engagement with the parable, particularly around the general
theme of the possibility of return to the past.
In this introductory chapter, some of the readings of the parable
from the perspective of biblical studies will be explored, taking into
account the reconstructed historical context of the parable in the life
of Jesus, and its literary context within the Gospel of Luke, as well
as readings from a reception-history point of view. Little or no
background in biblical studies will be presumed. Readings from the
perspective of literary studies will also be offered, and the contrast
between the two discussed. The aim will be to assess the value to both
fields of an engaged dialogue between the approaches. It is on this
foundation that the significance of specific reconfigurations of the
Prodigal Son and his story in literature in English may be assessed.
For Klyne Snodgrass, whose magisterial volume on the parables of
Jesus deals in minute detail with every aspect of these biblical stories,
the parable of the Prodigal Son is a ‘two-stage, double indirect narra-
tive parable’. He goes on that ‘the parable itself is relatively straight-
forward [although w]hat scholars often do to the parable is not’.7 The
story is found only in the Gospel of Luke, and is the third of three
parables in the same chapter connected by the theme of things that are
lost and then found: first the sheep (Luke :–); then the coin
(:–); and finally the son (:–). In terms of the wider
story of the Gospel, all three are apparently told by Jesus in response
to the Pharisees and scribes, who are ‘grumbling’ at his acceptance of
‘sinners’ and ‘tax collectors’ (:–).8
The parable itself involves three main, but unnamed, characters.
A father’s younger son asks for his inheritance, so the father splits his
property between his two sons. The younger son takes his share to a
faraway place, where he squanders it. When famine hits the land, he is
reduced to taking a job feeding a local man’s pigs, and to longing for
7
Snodgrass, Stories with Intent, p. .
8
Unless otherwise stated, in this chapter all biblical quotations are from the
New Revised Standard Version. In later chapters, it is the King James Version of
the Bible which is quoted, unless otherwise stated. It is the KJV which has had the
most influence on the literary texts under discussion.
Reading the Prodigal Son 

the food they are given. In dire need, he has a change of heart and
hatches a plan to return home and ask to be given a position as a
servant of his father. He sets off to carry out his plan, but his father
runs to greet him before he can declare his intentions. His father
embraces him and calls for a robe, sandals, and a ring to be brought,
and a feast to be prepared, to celebrate his son’s return.
The action then moves to a nearby field, where the older son has
been working. He hears the party, and asks a servant what is the
occasion for the celebration. When it is explained to him, he is angry
and refuses to join in. His father comes out to speak to him, and they
exchange heated words. The older son expresses his frustration and
jealousy at the treatment given to his brother, who, in his view, does
not deserve to be rewarded, while his hard work has gone unremarked.
The father offers him reassurance about his ongoing status, but asserts
that there had to be a party, because his brother ‘was dead and has
come to life; he was lost and has been found’ (v. ).
As with most parables, the action and the characterization is
uncomplicated. The scenes are focused on dialogues between two of
the main characters: there is no interaction between all three at any one
time. The characters are identified only in terms of their relationships
to one another, and they inhabit a resolutely masculine world in which
mothers and sisters are either absent or silent. The parable is unusual
in that it offers an extended perspective on the inner life of one of the
characters: in this case, of the younger brother as he assesses his dire
situation and mentally prepares a way to return home.9 The ‘compas-
sion’ of the father and the ‘anger’ of the older brother are also men-
tioned although not elaborated upon in terms of their thoughts, only
in terms of their actions and what they say. The response of either son
to the action of the father is not revealed in the narrative, and this
open-endedness has perhaps contributed to the parable’s attraction to
exegetes, preachers, and artists of all kinds.
9
Levine, in Short Stories by Jesus, p. , notes that this internal debate is found
in three other Lukan parables (the Rich Fool (:); the Dishonest Manager
(:) and the Unjust Judge (:–)), and in each case, the resulting action is
‘morally ambiguous’. However, the parable’s insistence that the Prodigal Son ‘came
to himself ’ (v. ) offers a more positive perspective on his internal struggle.
 The Prodigal Son
The Prodigal Son in biblical studies

Turning now to the interpretation of the parable in the field of biblical
studies, we should note that the focus of much concern in modern
biblical studies and its reading of the parables is to establish meaning
in context. That context may be the reconstructed historical ministry
of Jesus, or the parable’s setting in the Gospel narrative(s) in which it is
retold. In contrast, in the pre-modern period, the search for meaning
generally took the form of allegorical readings which assigned signifi-
cance for the Church or for personal faith to each element of the story.
The context of the parable was of little interest in this endeavour. The
parable of the Prodigal Son is such a well-known story that it is often
used as a test case in histories of parable interpretation, and I will draw
on one, which deals explicitly with receptions of the parables, to flesh
out something of the range of readings from this perspective: David
Gowler’s The Parables of Jesus.10
As Gowler and others have noted, in early Christian interpretations
of the parable of the Prodigal Son, the father in the narrative is
universally identified with God, and the differences of interpretation
focus on the allegorical significance of the two brothers. Gowler,
following Tissot,11 separates these different interpretations into four
categories. In ethical readings, the older brother acts as a symbol of the
righteous, and the younger brother is a symbol of all sinners: Jerome
and Clement of Alexandria offer readings which follow this pattern. In
ethnic readings, the older brother is associated with Israel, and the
younger with the Gentiles, who might also be considered ethically
sinners because they worship idols. Tertullian and Augustine are asso-
ciated with such readings. In penitential readings, the older brother
10
David B. Gowler, The Parables of Jesus: Their Imaginative Receptions across
Two Millennia (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic Press, ), pp. –.
I have used the parable of the Prodigal Son as a similar test case in my ‘ “For those
outside, everything comes in parables”: Recent Readings of the Parables from the
Inside’, The Expository Times (October ): pp. –.
11
Yves Tissot, ‘Patristic Allegories of the Lukan Parable of the Two Sons, Luke
.–’, in Exegetical Problems of Method and Exercises in Reading (Genesis  and
Luke ), ed. François Bovon and Grégoire Rouiller (Pittsburgh: Pickwick, ),
pp. –.
Reading the Prodigal Son 

represents unmerciful Christians who cannot be reconciled with
baptized believers who thereafter sin and then repent. John Chrysostom
is one such reader. Finally, in a very different and specialized category,
gnosticizing readings take the older brother as a symbol of angels, and
the younger as a symbol of humanity. An example of such a reading is
found in the work of Pseudo-Jerome.
In each case, the dominant hermeneutical concern is with issues
contemporary to the interpreter. The parable is read for its meaning in
the setting of the Church of the time, struggling to understand its
relationship to Judaism, or to those outside the Church who might
repent, or to those within the Church who have fallen away and seek
to return. Alternatively it illuminated a cosmic world view within a
gnosticizing tradition. Such allegorical readings had begun as early as
the time of the Gospel writers, who offered interpretations of some of
the parables on which the church Fathers’ readings built (e.g. the parable
of the Sower in Mark :– and parallels). While these readings came
to be downplayed by later biblical scholars, even ridiculed for their lack
of historical sophistication or for their imaginative excess, the process of
allegorization is an understandable response to the sort of literature the
parables are, and the figural language they employ.
It might be argued that a similar allegorizing process continues in
much modern preaching of the parable. Marsha G. Witten studied the
actual sermons of forty-seven ministers in the Presbyterian Church of
the USA and in the Southern Baptist Convention, who took the
parable of the Prodigal Son as their key text.12 As in the readings of
the early church Fathers and beyond, the father in the parable is almost
exclusively identified with God in these sermons, with the characteristics
of this father-God as the focal point in two-thirds of the sermons.
Witten assesses that the God-figure here is very far from the Reformed
view of the transcendent God which might have been expected from
these pulpits. Instead, from within the narrative of the parable, God
has the very human traits of the ‘daddy’ who offers the individual safety
and security in his arms, and celebrates without judgement. As one
preacher puts it, ‘That’s what God is saying to you. It’s not “Go to your
12
Marsha G. Witten, All is Forgiven: The Secular Message in American Protest-
antism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ).
 The Prodigal Son

room”. It’s “Come to the party.” ’13 God may be presented as suffering
the loss of the son very deeply, and loving the son beyond human
comprehension. Even when he is presented as the judge, the purpose
of the trope is to motivate an individual’s response, rather than to
condemn. God here is the instrument of relief for the believer, rather
than a transcendent figure from whom humanity is separated by their
own sin.
The allegorical readings of the sons in the parable offer further
insight into the way contemporary concerns influence these preacherly
interpretations. Witten concludes that the preachers from the Southern
Baptist tradition tended to focus on the negative example of the younger
son, and on the visible effect of his time in the far country, which is
identified as a place of separation from the presence of God. The
Prodigal Son as the ‘Lost Child’, who has innocently wandered off
the correct path, is a common characterization. Presbyterian preachers,
on the other hand, tended to emphasize the negative example of the
older brother and the internal, psychological effect of his refusal to join
the celebration. The older brother is often identified as having a closed
personality, and as being a figure for whom empathy is deserved. For
both, Witten argues, there is what she calls ‘therapeutic tolerance’ in the
generalized portrayal of sin:
This stance attempts both to account for the brothers’ conduct in terms that
are relatively value-free, and to understand, and empathise with, the hurts the
brothers are said to cause themselves through their misguided actions. In
doing so, the sermons position the listeners (who are invited to identify with
the brothers’ actions, especially with those of the older brother) as vicarious
clients in a mass session of Rogerian therapy, as the talk displays a style of
therapeutic warmth, acceptance, and tolerance.14
For Witten, this represents a turning away from traditional Reformed
theological assumptions about the depravity of human nature, and is a
sign of cultural pluralism, accepting rather than judging the differences
of others. The emphasis is on human agency reaching for self-realization
rather than on the grace of God to bring about transformation.
‘Conversion is portrayed far less as the need to grapple with sin-nature
than as a reorientation of one’s psychology toward the creation of a close
13
Witten, All is Forgiven, p. . 14
Witten, All is Forgiven, p. .
Reading the Prodigal Son 

15
interpersonal relationship with God,’ using the psychological
strengths with which each individual is endowed. In many of the
sermons surveyed in this study, at least, the main characters in the
parable are firmly allegorized in terms of the contrasting psychological
natures of modern humanity and their specific need for a very thera-
peutic, understanding God.
Witten’s work is a product of reflection on preaching in two church
contexts in the late s, and current preaching practices might be
expected to be different today. The allegorization of the parable in
these sermons focuses on the three main characters, and does not
extend to include other details in the story which the interpretation
of the church Fathers tended towards. However, her conclusions
highlight the openness of the parable to reconfiguration in ways
which might be identified as defying theological and historical expect-
ation, but which speak to current concerns.
As we have established, interpretations from the church Fathers,
and those from a homiletic perspective, have tended towards allegor-
ization, which attempts to discover the universal, divine meanings of a
parable, although rooted in contemporary concerns. However, more
recent, scholarly readings of parables have focused on their meanings
in their historical settings, either in the reconstructed ministry of Jesus,
or in the early Church as represented by the Gospels. Here, the work
of Stephen I. Wright offers a measured and concise summary of some
of the historical options.16
For Wright, nineteenth-century interpreters such as Adolf Jülicher
pursued a historical quest to read the parables as similes rather than
allegories which express one universal reality about the relationship
between God and humanity.17 Each element of the story did not need
to be explained theologically. Commentators such as Jülicher assumed
Jesus was a man of particular insight about eternal and divine truths,
which even the Gospel writers did not understand. In terms of the
15
Witten, All is Forgiven, pp. –.
16
Stephen I. Wright, The Voice of Jesus: Studies in the Interpretation of Six Gospel
Parables (Eugene, Ore.: Wipf & Stock, ).
17
Adolf Jülicher, Die Gleichnisreden Jesu,  vols (Freiburg i.B.: J. C. Mohr,
, ); reprint in one vol. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft,
).
 The Prodigal Son

Prodigal Son, such a reading disregards the positioning of the parable
in Luke, and explores the parable as a narrative rendering of the
readiness of a merciful God to welcome the sinner who returns, in a
way which does not neglect justice. It assumes that the older son accepts
the argument of the father, that he has not been treated unjustly, and
that God’s willingness to forgive extends to all who repent.
Later readings in this tradition have been more open to the elasticity
of the parables as metaphors rather than similes, but have continued to
attempt to work out what Jesus meant when he told parables such as
the parable of the Prodigal Son. Wright offers the work of Bernard
Brandon Scott as one representative of such an attempt.18 Scott’s
interest is in the way Jesus might have been heard by his first readers,
but of course this involves lifting the parable out of its context in
Luke’s Gospel, and into something approaching the consciousness of
Jesus himself. For Scott, the parable is a metaphor offering new insight
into the kingdom of God. And where the metaphor engages most
deeply is in the father’s coming out to meet the two sons. Scott
assumes that there is an appeal to the wider context of the Hebrew
Bible here, in which there is a tradition of God favouring the younger
son: as he does with Cain and Abel, Ishmael and Isaac, and Esau and
Jacob. However, the unexpected twist is that the father in the parable
also reaches out to the older brother. All are drawn in to the kingdom
of God which Jesus proclaims, although the action required of either
son (and the reader) to receive this acceptance is not clearly articulated.
The parable reverses expectations and leaves its original reader in a
state of surprise, open to new possibilities about what the kingdom of
God might mean for them, and about the nature of Jesus’ ministry.
Most importantly, such a reading assumes that the father is pre-
sented, and understood, as a positive figure in the narrative. In con-
trast, Richard L. Rohrbaugh also takes the original context of the
telling of the parable seriously, but suggests there is an identifiable
critique of the father implicit in the story.19 For him, in the context of
18
See, for example, Bernard Brandon Scott, Reimagine the World: An Introduc-
tion to the Parables of Jesus (Santa Rosa, Calif.: Polebridge Press, ).
19
Richard L. Rohrbaugh, ‘A Dysfunctional Family and its Neighbours (Luke
:b–)’, in Jesus and his Parables, ed. V. George Shillington (Edinburgh: T&T
Clark, ), pp. –.
Reading the Prodigal Son 

the time, the father’s agreeing to split up the family’s land represents
gross weakness and stupidity which would have provoked the outrage
of the village: as would the son’s request. The father is forced publicly
to receive the Prodigal home, and to offer a feast to the villagers, to
prevent a community uprising against his son’s attempt to return. The
father then has to plead with his older son to join the party, and to
demonstrate reconciliation, as the villagers have done by taking part.
The parable portrays a dysfunctional family struggling with issues of
propriety and shame. For Rohrbaugh, the parable promotes a message
of reconciliation, perhaps originally directed towards Jesus’ quarrel-
some disciples. If there is a religious message, it is that the kingdom’s
priorities are not prudence and propriety, but community-building
which goes beyond duty and expectation. As many critics of this
sociological approach have commented, however, the extent of the
role of the villagers in this reading is strained beyond the narrative of
the parable. Moreover, the ‘pay-off ’ in terms of the significance of the
parable in the ministry of Jesus and beyond is somewhat understated.
Rohrbaugh is not alone in questioning the actions of the father and
the easy identification of him with God. As Amy-Jill Levine com-
ments, ‘The younger son’s actions may reflect negatively on his father;
by failing to discipline his son and acquiescing to his dishonourable
request, the father may be seen as complicit in his son’s debauchery.’20
She goes on to compare the expectations for those who are to be
appointed elders in Titus : with the character represented here: the
children of such elders should be ‘believers, not accused of debauchery,
and not rebellious’. She parts company with Rohrbaugh, however, in
his depiction of the family’s Jewish neighbours who cannot wait to
exact revenge on the shame-bringing son, suggesting this is ‘exegesis
giv[ing] way to stereotype at best’.21 She also emphasizes the range of
Jewish texts which suggest that the father’s response to the return of his
son is far from atypical, and questions a reading of the parable which
credits the narrator Jesus with presenting a new religion. For her, the
father’s ‘fault’ is in losing sight of the blameless but alienated older son,
whom he has to go and search out, as the shepherd and the woman had
in the parables earlier in the chapter. In the parable, the father seeks to
20
Levine, Short Stories by Jesus, p. .
21
Levine, Short Stories by Jesus, p. .
 The Prodigal Son

rectify this, with no promise of response (from either son, as a close
reading confirms): and the story sits comfortably within a Jewish
rabbinic tradition. This movement towards reconciliation is implicitly
condoned, but there need be no easy or revelatory identification of the
father with the God of Jesus and his first hearers, or of Rohrbaugh’s
invisible villagers with the Jewish agricultural society of the day.
Wright discusses several more readings from the context in which
the parable was first told, and Snodgrass is even more comprehensive.22
Most attempt to explain the key narrative interest in the parable, which
is in the contradiction between expectations of justice and the force of
family ties which, for most, naturally tend towards reconciliation. For
Wright, both the father and the older brother are presented as having
valid points, one on each side of the debate between justice and com-
passion. However, by giving the father the last word, the parable
indicates that the reader should be affirmed if they choose to applaud
his actions. Wright argues that the parable embodies God’s compassion
for his wayward children. As the Jesus Seminar, in its Red Letter
Edition of the parables of Jesus, had noted, the parable demonstrates
the exaggerations and hyperbole which are a regular feature of Jesus’
parables, and few commentators suggest that this parable did not
originate in Jesus’ ministry.23 Wright’s conclusion represents a critical
consensus about the original meaning of the parable, but he also wants
to protect the generative power of the parable to mean more than this in
different contexts. This process is underpinned by the history of the
parable’s reception, which exerts its own hermeneutical pull on later
readings. The writer of the Gospel of Luke is one such influential
interpreter of the parable, and Wright’s reading of the role of the parable
in that wider setting is instructive.
Wright argues that Luke’s larger story about Jesus sheds light on
the shorter stories his Jesus is presented as telling, and vice versa:
‘the gospel story causes the parables, while the parables bring the gospel
to expression.’24 There is a metonymic relationship between the parable
and the Gospel. In its widest and most general setting, the parable of
22
See Snodgrass, Stories with Intent, pp. –.
23
Robert W. Funk, Bernard Brandon Scott, and James R. Butts, The Parables of
Jesus: Red Letter Edition (Sonoma, Calif.: Polebridge Press, ), p. .
24
Wright, The Voice of Jesus, p. .
Reading the Prodigal Son 

the Prodigal Son dramatizes the reversals and the demand for an
obedient response which runs through the Gospel, beginning with
Mary’s song in Luke . The hungry are fed, humility is rewarded,
and the rich are turned away empty: the reader is invited in the Gospel,
as in the parable, to identify with one of these categories. With exe-
getical care, Wright then explores five themes which interact in both
the Gospel and the parable: wealth and poverty; celebration and
friendship; compassion and mercy; humiliation and exaltation. Some
of these themes are picked up by the readings of the parable from a
literary perspective, and will be returned to then. Two, wealth and
poverty, and life and death, will be considered here.
Wright notes that the word ‘life’, repeated in verses  and , has an
economic connotation: it is the father’s ‘living’ which has been divided,
and it is the Prodigal Son’s means of life which has been eaten up by
harlots, according to his older brother. The Prodigal’s sin may be read
as his abuse of the family’s presumably considerable assets. He is
motivated to return from a place of economic despair by the knowledge
that the servants have more than enough to eat at home. Such abun-
dance is not a sin in Luke’s Gospel, but to abuse such resources most
certainly is, as suggested in the parable of the Rich Fool in Luke
:– and, arguably, in the parable of the Unjust Steward in
Luke :–. Wright associates the Prodigal Son’s abuse of his
resources with the greed and oppression of the Pharisees, who, in
:, are described as loving money. Usually it is the older brother
in this parable who is associated with the Pharisees, but Wright
suggests that the economic undercurrent here, in the wider context of
the Gospel, might indicate that the father’s response to the Prodigal
Son’s profligacy represents an appeal to the greedy. Such an appeal
includes offering a way to return to economic and theological equilib-
rium which is based on compassion and forgiveness.
Under the theme of life and death, Wright focuses on the repetition
of the word in : and :,  to refer to death as ‘perishing’: the
Prodigal Son asserts to himself that he is starving to death (‘perishing’)
in the far country; and the father twice rejoices that his son was lost
(‘perished’) and is now found. The same word is found in the parable
of the lost sheep, and twice in the passage in Luke :–, in which
the need for imminent repentance is asserted, if ‘perishing’ is to be
avoided. At the end of the story about Zacchaeus, Jesus makes a
 The Prodigal Son

claim about his ministry, which is to ‘seek and to save what is lost
(“perishing”)’ (Luke :). The fate to which the Prodigal Son nearly
succumbs is connected with the wider lack of penitence amongst Jesus’
hearers. The stakes are high and concern their eternal fate. The
urgency this injects into the parable reflects the preaching of Jesus
which demands a response both from his original hearers and from
later readers of the Gospel. There is an eschatological edge to this
reading of the parable within its Gospel context.
Not all commentators would read the parable of the Prodigal Son as
a presentation of the Gospel in miniature.25 However, Wright has
argued effectively that themes prominent within Luke’s Gospel, such
as reversal of fortunes initiated by God’s grace, and the insistence of
Jesus’ call to repentance, are reflected in the parable. And in that
reflection, the themes are developed in the exemplary but fluid way
the characters embody the wider ministry and teaching of Luke’s Jesus.
Such a reading involves connotation and allusion rather than allegory,
and leaves open the possibility of multiple associations. The Prodigal
Son may be identified metonymically with the Pharisees in their
misuse of money, but also with Jesus’ general hearers in the Gospel
who recognize their imminent need to repent or perish. It is left open
for later readers to find more associations with the larger Gospel story
than Luke may have intended, depending on the way they have been
influenced by the history of the parable’s reception, among other
factors. However, Wright begins from the premise that Luke offers a
reconfiguration of the parable within his narrative which adds layers of
significance beyond that which is on the surface.
A final area of interest in the parable within biblical studies lies in its
reception history. David Gowler has published most recently on this
aspect of parable research, motivated by the belief that finding analo-
gies between texts leads to deeper reflection on their hermeneutical
possibilities, and a reduction in the limiting biases of individual
interpretations. He finds a quotation from Bakhtin a useful guide:
25
See, for example, Snodgrass, Stories with Intent, pp. –. Geraint Vaughn
Jones (The Art and Truth of the Parables: A Study in their Literary Form and Modern
Interpretation (London: SPCK, ), p. ) is equally adamant that there is no
need to introduce notions of vicarious atonement into the parable.
Reading the Prodigal Son 

Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person,
it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their
dialogic interaction.26
Such a perspective reads parables as riddles with an answer to be
discovered, and reads works of literature which allude to parables as
rewarding the reader with new insights into the earlier text. For
Gowler, ‘truth’ has a fixed quality, and it is important for him to assert
that not every interpretation is of equal value or significance: ‘even
dialogic narratives like parables provide buoys in the channel of inter-
pretation that encourage interpreters to navigate within certain bound-
aries of readings.’27 He affirms, among others, Calvin’s concern about
the double-edged nature of parabolic discourse. For Calvin, parables
derive their rhetorical effect and power from their indirection, particu-
larly for the elect, but their obscurity may also lead fallible, and reprobate,
humanity into dark and obscure places.28 Nevertheless, for Gowler,
engaging in the interpretation of others, in various media, is a worthwhile
exercise as it ‘can make one’s own interpretations more cogent and more
comprehensive’.29
There is a functional aspect to this foray into the reception history of
the parables which approaches both the parables and the later works as
means to getting closer to an undefined ‘truth’. This truth is hidden
within or behind the parable, and the later text offers additional clues
to the parable interpreter-as-detective. In practice, this involves setting
the later text in its religious and cultural context and then identifying
and briefly analysing the elements of the parable which are reflected
there, looking for ways in which the later text adds to an understand-
ing of the parable. These later texts will have an explicit connection
with the parable, rather than an implicit one. Gowler uses the Prodigal
Son as an example in his introduction and attempts to categorize some
26
Mikhail Bakhtin, The Problem of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), p. , quoted in Gowler,
The Parables after Jesus, p. .
27
Gowler, The Parables after Jesus, p. .
28
Gowler, The Parables after Jesus, pp. , , quoting John Calvin, A Harmony
of the Gospels Matthew, Mark and Luke, trans. A. W. Morrison and
T. H. L. Parker, vol. : Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries: A New Translation
(Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, ), pp. , .
29
Gowler, The Parables after Jesus, p. .
 The Prodigal Son

of the responses he discusses in texts such as the musical Godspell and
James Weldon Johnson’s poem ‘The Prodigal Son’: it is noted, for
example, that the older brother tends to be either ignored, or identified
with the Jews, or with self-righteous Christians in contrast to the
repentant sinners who return. A further categorization is made within
the third strand, noting there are some texts which offer a reconcili-
ation scene between the brothers, going beyond the confines of the
parable;30 and there are others in which the writer/artist self-identifies
with the younger son.31 Generally, such drawing together or surveying
of trends in the interpretation of other, individual parables is not
possible given the diachronic rather than thematic arrangement of
Gowler’s book. However, in his conclusion, Gowler emphasizes fur-
ther his motivation for exploring the reception of the parables: it is to
increase understanding that leads to action on the part of the reader.
Gowler’s approach to the reception history of parables highlights
something distinctive and relatively common about the status of the
parables in the field of biblical studies, and perhaps about the Prodigal
Son in particular.32 They are read for what they can reveal about truths
beyond themselves. That might be about the ministry of the historical
Jesus; or the theology of the Gospel writers; or about the ongoing force
of scripture as revelation. The Prodigal Son has little purpose beyond
serving the narrow world of biblical history and theology. His existence
in the world of literary studies, however, is much less constrained than it
is in biblical studies. Two monographs were written in the s which
extensively explore the relationship between the parable and twentieth-
century American drama: Leah Hadomi’s The Homecoming Theme in
Modern Drama and Geoffrey S. Proehl’s Coming Home Again. Neither
is mentioned in Snodgrass’s comprehensive study of the parable, or in
30
The example of the play/film Godspell is offered as portraying the older
brother joining the party, in response to the father’s pleas (Gowler, The Parables
after Jesus, p. ).
31
Rembrandt’s multiple paintings of the parable, it is suggested, represent
his identification with the Prodigal Son at various points in his life (Gowler,
The Parables after Jesus, p. ).
32
That Gowler’s approach sits firmly within the wider field of biblical studies is
suggested by the way Snodgrass praises Gowler’s book for encouraging readers to
‘wrestle with hermeneutical issues relative to the parables’ and for emphasizing that
‘parables demand that hearers respond’ (Stories with Intent, p. ).
Reading the Prodigal Son 

Gowler’s work on its reception history. The monographs themselves
refer only to a narrow range of interpretations in biblical studies, such as
J. D. Crossan in Hadomi’s book,33 and J. Duncan M. Derrett’s article
on Law in the parable in Proehl’s.34 Hadomi and Proehl’s insights into
the reconfiguration of the Prodigal Son, however, offer an illuminating
contrast with the preoccupations of biblical studies.
The Prodigal Son in literary studies

Both Hadomi and Proehl lift the parable out of the world of its original
setting and focus on its archetypal, analogical power. Rather than
pointing to the benevolence of God, for Hadomi, the parable may be
read as ‘an analogy for man’s eternal strife, his fight against sin and his
attempt to return to innocence’.35 For Proehl, the parable is an ‘instance
of a narrative structure that predates its appearance in the biblical text, a
structure [Abrams] describes as “one of the most persistent of the
ordering designs by which men have tried to come to terms with their
nature and destiny”’.36 Emphasizing the openness of the structure of the
parable of the Prodigal Son to substitutions, and its circular journey
from unity, separation, and back to unity, Abrams reads it as:
that type of the journey of all mankind out of and back toward its original
home; . . . frequently conflated with the apocalyptic marriage that signalized the
restoration of Eden in the Book of Revelation. Accordingly, the yearning for
fulfilment is sometimes expressed as Heimweh, the homesickness for the father
or mother and for the lost sheltered place; or else as the desire for a female figure
who turns out to be the beloved we have left behind; or sometimes, disconcert-
ingly, the desire for father, mother, home, and bride all in one.37
33
Hadomi refers briefly to Crossan’s exploration of the polyvalent paradox of
the welcome given to the Prodigal and the lack of concern about the dutiful son in
‘A Metamodel for Polyvalent Narration’, Semeia  (): pp. –.
34
J. Duncan M. Derrett, ‘Law in the New Testament: The Parable of the
Prodigal Son’, New Testament Studies  (): pp. –.
35
Hadomi, The Homecoming Theme in Modern Drama, p. .
36
Proehl, Coming Home Again, p. , quoting M. H. Abrams, Natural Super-
naturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton,
), p. .
37
Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, p. , quoted in Proehl, Coming Home
Again, p. .
 The Prodigal Son

In these literary readings, the parable of the Prodigal Son offers a
shared vocabulary with which to explore universal themes. Both high-
light the critical way in which literary texts, particularly American
dramas from the twentieth century, bring questions to the parable
which have no easy answers, so that, as Hadomi comments, ‘[t]he
comfortable myth has become the alienating literary reality’.38 Ironical
reinterpretation of the intergenerational conflict and the oppositions
of fragmentation and wholeness, rupture and potential, life and death
which are at the dramatic heart of the parable, are explored by both, so
that themes common to these dramas are understood better in context.
Some examples from each book will be offered to highlight the
reconfigurings of the Prodigal Son and his family each promotes.
In both, reflections on the history of interpretation of the parable in
English and American literature are offered, and some of these will be
returned to in later chapters in this book. By the twentieth century,
Hadomi argues, the focus is firmly on the moment and possibility of
return home, often identified as a return to the self. In place of the value
system implied in the parable, in American domestic dramas it is memory
which keeps alive the possibility of reintegration into the space under-
stood as home. These dramas are heavily influenced by relativism and
subjectivity rather than the detached objectivity of the parable. Sin is not
the issue to be overcome, but material or biological weakness or instabil-
ity. Crucially, the return is not associated with the positives of life and
being found, and the focus shifts from the figure of the Prodigal to the
experience of the family who waits for him, often uneasily.
In plays such as Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night
(written in –, but published in ), with its multitude of
characters who might be described as ‘prodigal’ and in need of a return
to a place of familial wholeness, there remains a code of normative
behaviour which may be relied upon although it is challenged. ‘Sin’ is
closely identified with addiction, and the guilt it brings with it is passed
down through the generations. There is an absence of a forgiving father-
figure: instead, the father is as guilty and addicted as the other members
of the family, in need of forgiveness. Nevertheless, mitigating circum-
stances are presented which provoke sympathy in the audience.
38
Hadomi, The Homecoming Theme in Modern Drama, p. .
Reading the Prodigal Son 

In more recent, modernist plays such as Edward Albee’s Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (), in the place of guilt there is a fear
of existential nothingness, and an unsatisfied need for communication,
love, and connection. The secret, guilt-inducing, and fictitious son of
George and Martha, who will never come home, may be compared
with the secret of marital infidelity in Arthur Miller’s Death of
a Salesman (): both are misinterpretations of the past, and
not causes of the current, much more serious situation. In the Albee
play, the pretend son is a refuge by which George and Martha avoid
confronting the emptiness of their marriage; while, in the Miller play,
the infidelity is a cover for a much more significant issue of betrayal
between father and son. In all of these plays, value judgements take the
place of the parable’s religious framework and, instead of a search for
mercy, it is a search for an elusive truth which drives the narrative.
In the world of these plays, coming home and leaving maintain links
with the parable of the Prodigal Son through their suggested meto-
nymic connection with life and death. However, the lack of resolution
despite the desire for it, in the face of the lack of interest of the
universe, leads to deeply unsettling fear at an existential level. Memory
may drive the homecoming, but it is shown to be unreliable; when
there is no authority represented by a father-figure, the plot structure
of the parable breaks down; the quest for identity when there is no
religious underpinning to the plays casts doubt on the authenticity of
the characters’ self-understanding. The reality of homecoming is
continually disappointing, but the yearning remains. For Hadomi,
the transformation of the myth of the parable of the Prodigal Son in
these dramas highlights the tragedy of the modern condition, alien-
ated from all that the parable asserts. As she concludes:
There is no escape. The relationship to the family and its expression in

literature is so powerful that it continues to assert itself even if there is no
‘father’, no ‘mother’, no family to return to . . . Modern drama deconstructs the
archi-pattern of the prodigal son only to restate the eternal truth of the desire
of man to return.39
39
Hadomi, The Homecoming Theme in Modern Drama, pp. –.
 The Prodigal Son

The focus is no longer on the prodigality of the parable’s son, or on his
particular need for forgiveness, but on his longed-for home as a place
of contention rather than sanctuary.
Proehl shares Hadomi’s interest in the deconstruction of the arche-
type of the parable in a similar range of plays, but he also, critically,
sets the dramas in their wider context, not least in the biographies
of their authors. Furthermore, he offers a study of the complexity of
the relationship between the paradigm and this literature by tracing
the fluid characterization of each member of the Prodigal Son’s family.
Proehl highlights the ways in which conventional readings of the
parable in the history of the dramatic tradition are manipulated in
American plays written after the end of the Second World War.
Compared to the Prodigal Son plays of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, these dramas question the assumption that the son ought to
return, and they extend the process of self-realization to include not
just the youthful, Prodigal Son characters, but also their parents and
siblings. The father–son relationship, and the strand in the earlier plays
which focused on the choice between the faithful wife and the mistress,
are continued in the later fiction, in an extension of the parable’s plot.
Proehl also discusses the rise in popularity of the temperance plays of
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which he argues are a
bridge between the comedies of the Renaissance, with their stock
Prodigal Son figures, and the dramas under consideration. For him,
the use of the paradigm in the temperance plays leaves open the
possibility that the Prodigal Son will not reform, and will instead
drink himself to death; and there is a shift in focus from the son and
father to the prodigal husband and his wife. This is developed into an
understanding of home which is ambivalent at best, and conflicted at
worst. The desire for freedom and independence is pitted against
the warmth, nurture, and security of home. Proehl grounds his discus-
sion not so much in Hadomi’s existential angst, but in the tension
between fragmentation and unity which energizes the structure of the
parable. He explores the ways in which modern drama interrogates this
tension between the family as a limiting or foundational institution in
American life.
Proehl effectively elucidates the dramatic functions of the parable of
the Prodigal Son, and maps these onto the later dramas. He notes
that the simple but clear structure is open to variation and allows
Reading the Prodigal Son 

exploration of issues in contrasting pairs in terms reminiscent of
Stephen Wright’s analysis:
youth and age, authority and rebellion, wealth and poverty, earthiness and
spirituality, famine and feasting, suffering and exaltation, rags and robes, the
everyday and the foreign, and finally the faithful son and the errant one.40
The loss of a member of the family is the basis of the structure’s

emotional appeal, evoking grief at the departure and joy at the return,
a symbolic victory over death. He notes that while the departing figure
is a child in the parable, when he is a husband or father in the plays,
another child may take the place of the parable’s child and offer the
emotional power lost by the maturity of the figure in the play. This
child may actually die: Proehl offers the death of Eugene in O’Neill’s
Long Day’s Journey into Night as an example; and notes that the
imagined child in Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf represents
all the hopeful potential and all the ruptured loss in the play, long
awaited but never to appear. The structure of the parable is both
conducive to mirroring in later drama, and open to development and
divergence from the conventional. While, in the biblical text, the
domestic resolution is a means to an end in terms of religious signifi-
cance, in these later dramas, the domestic is an end in itself and
allegory gives way to dramatic realism, although spiritual resonances
may hover at the edges. For Proehl, the dramatic and reassuring power
of the parable guarantees its significance in the psyche of twentieth-
century Americans:
In other words, more than any parable, this one—in part, because of its
domestic setting—has captured the imagination and emotions of readers
apart from its figural functions, especially middle-class readers who come to
it with a strong investment in family cohesiveness.41
From this foundation, Proehl explores the significance of the figure of
the Prodigal character in modern American family dramas, whether he
is a son or a husband, under the rubric of two characteristics: rupture
and potential. The rupture is embodied in the presence of one who
waits at home, and the lure of a place which is the opposite of home,
40
Proehl, Coming Home Again, p. .
41
Proehl, Coming Home Again, p. .
 The Prodigal Son

peopled with strangers. The place which is not home may be the
tavern (and drinking conventionally represents the cause or the effect
of the rupture, in the tradition of the temperance play), or a place of
sexual liberation, or it may be related to the poverty-stricken depriv-
ation of the swineherd in the parable. The dynamic of the plays lies in
the movement between the two places, across the open space or
highway which is traversed by the one who escapes the confines of
home. While this movement is viewed conservatively by the parable, as
an essentially radical move, the plays question such an assumption. By
portraying damaging relationships between fathers and sons, and the
unsatisfying elements of marriage, as well as celebrating the more
positive aspects of the Prodigal’s initiative and ‘good buddiness’, the
eventual return is not wholly to be celebrated. Proehl asserts:
My argument is that American domestic drama traditionally wants to find a
way to end with some version of ‘Home, Sweet Home’, but that this music
cannot quite drown out what has gone before. Although we try to fix the
family, something is not quite working in the way it should: even though the
prodigal son comes home, life in that household will never quite be the same.42
Nevertheless, for Proehl, the second characteristic of potential for

reform is a key indicator of connection with the parable: although it
may be twisted in the plays away from the conventional to happen
many times or ultimately be thwarted. While, in the parable, the sins
of the Prodigal Son appear to be of such gravity that he believes set
space, add he has no claim to return to the life he had before,
emphasized by the older brother’s objection that it appears he can, in
the plays the audience is conventionally not asked to forgive a sin
beyond such a pale. The potential for reform must be protected by
limiting the range of sins committed, rather than depending on the
limitlessness of the parable’s divine grace:
One of the ways in which we identify these figures as prodigal is their
participation in actions that conventionally cause a sense of rupture within
the family but that can also be readily forgiven, especially if, within the terms of
the convention, the prodigal experiences a sincere change of heart.43
42
Proehl, Coming Home Again, p. .
43
Proehl, Coming Home Again, p. .
Reading the Prodigal Son 

Proehl categorizes such sins as rarely going beyond the middle-class
and perfectible ‘whisky, womanising and waste’, and offers the three
prodigal characters in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman as repre-
sentative of this trend: for Willy, his fault is women; for Biff, it is
wasted talent; and for Happy, it is the squandering of money on empty
pleasures. A category of unconventional plays remains, exemplified by
Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh (, published in ), in the
earlier temperance tradition, in which the prodigality leads perman-
ently away from the potential for return (although even here there may
be the intervention of surprising grace), but for Proehl this is a
variation on the more usual pattern. We might note that Hadomi
emphasized rupture more than potential in these plays, and focused
more on the destabilizing effect of the return even when it happens.
Finally, Proehl comments on the portrayal of female characters in
these plays, exploring ways in which they might be categorized as
prodigal rather than the more fundamentally flawed fallen woman or
failed wife or mother. He suggests that while female characters may
have prodigal characteristics, they are rarely offered the possibility of
return or redemption. In Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named
Desire (), Blanche Dubois is as conventionally prodigal as other
characters from this period, drinking and wasting her inheritance, but
while her brother-in-law Stanley may return to his wife Stella, despite
his violence, Blanche may not return, suffering further assault rather
than redemption. Her suitor, Mitch, cannot overcome his humiliation
and anger towards her, even when she confesses and explains herself
to him. Proehl suggests that Martha, in Albee’s Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf ?, may be the closest female character to the conven-
tional Prodigal Son, but he concludes that in general female Prodigals
in these plays suffer a ‘stunning foreclosure of potential’.44
Proehl goes on to explore the function of the brother and the one
who stays at home in American family dramas, assessing the interplay
between the conventional, the parable, the paradigmatic, and the plays
themselves. A final, illuminating example is his reading of Stanley’s
return to the forgiving Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire. The presence
of someone left behind and to come home to is identified as an
44
Proehl, Coming Home Again, p. .
 The Prodigal Son

essential for the Prodigal Son paradigm to work. While the figure is
the father in the parable, in these dramas it is often the patient and
salvific wife: Proehl describes these figures as mingling together ‘in
some part of the American imagination’.45 The scene in which Stanley
returns to Stella portrays him as laying his head against her pregnant
stomach. In that moment, he is both son and husband, and there is an
undeniably sexual element to the scene. Proehl comments that this is
not a perversion or a deviation from the paradigm of the prodigal’s return, but
a metaphor for it, an extension of what it always implies: an end, if even for a
moment, to fragmentation and division, a return to a certain unity, the
discovery of one where there were two. This unbroken circularity after all is
the meaning of the ring that the Lukan father gives his son.46
This is a perceptive and revealing reading of the scene and its rela-
tionship to the parable, drawing the spectator of the play into partici-
pating in the metaphor. Like Stella, the audience operates as a grace
figure, waiting in an enclosed space for the return, listening to and
processing the confession, and asked to respond to the Prodigal not
rationally but emotionally. The parable in this reading is not a fixed
form demanding an uncritical acceptance, but an open-ended arche-
type with a historical tradition and its own set of conventions to be
followed or broken. A concluding, if lengthy, quotation from Proehl
highlights the breadth of perspective he offers to anyone who seeks to
interpret the significance of the parable of the Prodigal Son in litera-
ture, not least those from the tradition of biblical studies:
To my mind the fundamental need is to see the paradigm as such, to see it
moving in and about domestic drama in a number of ways; to appreciate, when
appropriate, the complexity of forms it takes along with its more or less naïve
persistence; to use an awareness of conventionality to read against the natur-
alizing, self-affirming, truth claims of realism and autobiography so central to
American theatre; to understand that our narratives have a history, that in
some degree O’Neill’s late plays (to take one set of examples) find their
foreshadowings not only in the author’s life experiences but also in certain
nineteenth-century temperance melodramas, some Renaissance comedies, the
stained glass windows of Chartres Cathedral, and Augustine’s Confessions.47
45
Proehl, Coming Home Again, p. .
46
Proehl, Coming Home Again, p. .
47
Proehl, Coming Home Again, p. .
Reading the Prodigal Son 

Such a reading of the paradigm lifts it from a focus on the extent of
intertextual overlap or historical usefulness, and credits it with a
timeless literary value and inheritance. Its nimble acceptance of com-
plex positive and negative receptions is a worthwhile exemplar to
which we shall return.
Conclusion
The parable of the Prodigal Son has been described by a notable
parables scholar as ‘straightforward’, and the same scholar has sug-
gested that there is a prodigality in the multitude of interpretations of
it which have been offered through the centuries.48 For this scholar,
Klyne Snodgrass, this is prodigality in its original, negative sense
rather than its more recent, extravagantly positive if misguided sense.
The simplicity of the structure of the parable, however, should not
be mistaken for straightforwardness, if that means lacking in his-
torical depth, narrative power, or metaphorical reach. Readings of
the parable, and of the figure of the Prodigal Son in particular,
which take an instrumental view of the text suggest it may reveal
much about the ministry of Jesus and the teaching of the early
Church. Moving into later literature, such readings may highlight
the theological and ecclesiastical influence of the parable, and the
way it provokes action and changes beliefs. When the parable is read
as a literary paradigm rather than a theological or historical docu-
ment, new possibilities are opened up and the Prodigal Son becomes
an archetype with his own metaphorical imprint in a variety of
literary contexts. His contribution is then to an understanding of
the artistic whole or to the contrast between texts which share a
genre, period, or audience, particularly those with an interest in
homecoming in its broadest sense.
The cutting loose of the younger son’s prodigality from its negative
connotation is an apt figure for the parable’s resistance to limits and
constraints. Literature, theology, and history are insufficient in them-
selves to close down the parable’s dance through time. The hermen-
eutical resources of all these disciplines bring worthwhile perspectives
48
Snodgrass, Stories with Intent, p. .
 The Prodigal Son

and all are employed here.49 Only then will we begin to do justice to
the parable and its insight into an essential truth:
something arises in the world which all men have glimpsed in childhood, a
place and a state in which no-one has yet been. And the name of this
something is home.50
49
The indebtedness of disciplines to one another in this intertextual world is
stressed in monographs such as Hannibal Hamlin’s The Bible in Shakespeare
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), pp. –, in which it is argued that
the basis of the study of literary allusion is to be found in biblical exegesis.
50
Ernst Bloch, On Karl Marx (New York: Herder and Herder, ),
pp. –, quoted in Hadomi, The Homecoming Theme in Modern Drama, p. .
2
The Prodigal Son in
Elizabethan Literature
In his influential article ‘Terence Improved: The Paradigm of the

Prodigal Son in English Renaissance Comedy’, Ervin Beck asserts
that ‘[t]he story of the Prodigal Son is the most ubiquitous one in
comedy of the English Renaissance (–)’.1 The parable of the
Prodigal Son, however, had proved a popular source for preaching,
morality tales, and iconography since well before the sixteenth century.
It is offered by Chaucer’s Parson’s Tale, apparently without irony, as an
antidote to a sense of despair about the mercy of God, that most
heinous of sins against the Holy Spirit. The Parson portrays the joyful
feast laid on by the father, whose son had been lost and then returned
penitent, as an image of the needlessness of despair and the readiness
of God in his mercy to forgive.2 However, it was in the Elizabethan
period that the parable became particularly prevalent in literature:
‘ubiquitous’ even, in the comedy of the time, in the view of Ervin
Beck. Shakespeare was writing at the end of this period, and continued
into the Jacobean era. The appearance of the Prodigal Son in his work
will be considered in Chapter . Here we will trace the rise of what
have been called the ‘Elizabethan Prodigals’, those writers from the
latter half of the century who took the parable as their inspiration and
who, for some commentators at least, sometimes understood it as the
1
Ervin Beck, ‘Terence Improved: The Paradigm of the Prodigal Son in English
Renaissance Comedy’, Renaissance Drama NS  (): pp. –, p. .
2
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Parson’s Tale, in The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer,
ed. F. N. Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), pp. – (.),
p. .
 The Prodigal Son

narrative of their own lives. We will see, if proof were needed, that
their appropriation of the parable strongly challenges any notion of a
straightforward reading of the Prodigal Son’s homecoming.
After the separation of the Church in England from the Church of
Rome in , Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s chief minister, com-
missioned John Bale to write and organize the performance of plays in
support of the reform as it continued into the late s. As Happé has
commented, ‘[i]t was perceived . . . that the drama was an effective means
of persuasion’.3 Such a policy also carried with it the possibility of
subversion, of course, and this was acknowledged by the increase of
censorship in the later years of Henry’s reign, and the decline, through
the s and s, of the mystery plays which had been such a feature
of pre-Reformation society. As a result, most of the surviving plays from
the second half of the sixteenth century have a strongly Protestant
flavour, with biblically based notions of personal justification and salva-
tion at their heart. Erasmus (?–), although a Catholic, also had
a deep effect on the theatre of the later sixteenth century. His approach
encouraged the dramatic reappraisal of biblical texts, often in the light of
newly disseminated texts from the classical period. It was a fertile time
for those who had religious or moral objectives for their secular narra-
tives. Within this variety, many have noted that across a wide range of
texts a common pattern emerges in Elizabethan literature: a young man
is offered moral admonition by an older, father-figure; the young
man goes off and does exactly what he was told not to do; he suffers as
a result and repents and/or is imprisoned; in some texts he returns to a
happy ending and a reward for his disobedience, while in others he
remains disillusioned and suffering, although repentant. In some, the
parable of the Prodigal Son is explicitly alluded to; in others, it remains a
silent echo. In much Elizabethan literature, however, the Prodigal Son is
an implicit metanarrative.
The influence of Roman comedies

It was John Dover Wilson in his key article on ‘Euphues and the
Prodigal Son’, published in , who first traced a common path of
3
Peter Happé, English Drama before Shakespeare (London and New York:
Longman, ), p. .
Elizabethan Literature 
influence along which the parable often travelled in the Elizabethan
period. Wilson noted that texts by classical writers, particularly com-
edies, had been read and acted out in schools throughout the fifteenth
century. The advent of printing made these texts more accessible
than in the past although, by the sixteenth century, it was felt to be
particularly unfortunate that these texts were not Christian, and often
not particularly moral. Erasmus was especially keen on the works of
Terence, a Roman playwright from the second century BCE, probably
from North Africa. Erasmus praised his purity of language and
diction, his drawing of characters, and the way he encouraged
rational thought. And so, in order to retain the verve and vigour of
these classical plays, and yet bring them within the sphere of the
religious feelings of the day, new dramas were written which were a
cross between these Latin comedies and more acceptable morality
plays. Wilson argued that the plays of Terence were particularly
popular and amenable to this treatment, and that the parable of the
Prodigal Son was particularly useful as the basis for the plot of these
hybrid works:
The parable of the Prodigal Son contained a moral lesson which was admirably
adapted for the consideration of the youthful mind, and incidentally admitted
of an interpretation that gave strong support to the Protestant doctrine of
justification by faith; while, on the other hand, a loop-hole was found for the
introduction of the whole Terential machinery of parasites, slaves, and meretrices
in the half-dozen words ‘wasted his substance with riotous living’, which were
expanded [in Acolastus] into more than twice that number of scenes.4
Wilson highlighted the importance of one of these reworked Latin

dramas, Acolastus, which was published in Antwerp in  by a
schoolmaster, Willem de Volder, better known as Gnapheus. Because
of his Reforming leanings, Gnapheus was forced to flee his home and
died in exile. However, although it was not the first text of its kind, his
play became extremely popular in the Netherlands, Germany, and
many other places where the scholastic setting was similar. The plot
of Acolastus falls into four parts: the son departs with his share of his
father’s money; he spends the money on riotous living; endures a
4
John Dover Wilson, ‘Euphues and the Prodigal Son’, The Library  ():
pp. –, pp. –.
 The Prodigal Son

period of degradation; and returns home to a joyful welcome. The
older brother of the parable has no place here, and, as Wilson notes,
the influence of the plays of Terence is to be found most strongly in the
half of the play which is taken up with the second section dealing with
the son’s period of freedom. Two characters in the play are introduced
from the morality play tradition, representing two opposing faces of
wisdom: Eubolus, the old man who advises the father to let his son
leave and to trust in divine providence; and Philautus, the young man
full of self-love who encourages Acolastus to leave by endorsing his
desire for travel and promoting an attitude of arrogance towards his
father. After receiving much good advice and a Bible from his father,
the son leaves and throws away the Bible as he does so. He is taken by
two ‘hangers-on’, who note the money bulging in his purse, to a
brothel, where he meets and is entertained for the night by the
beautiful Lais. These scenes are described in some detail. The follow-
ing day he loses his money in a game of dice, his clothes are stolen by
Lais and others, and he ends up homeless, naked, and in a far-off land
in the midst of a famine. Taken in by a farmer to feed his pigs,
Acolastus laments his situation in a series of soliloquies, expresses his
sorrow, and moves from despair to hopeful repentance. Finally he
returns home, uttering the words from the parable as he throws
himself at his father’s feet, and is received with great rejoicing.
The play proved extremely popular and was widely translated.
The influence of Acolastus on English literature that century, and on
John Lyly’s influential Euphues texts in particular, has not been ser-
iously challenged by literary critics of the period. Our interest in it lies
in its deep dependence on the parable of the Prodigal Son, which
brought a powerful interpretation of the parable into the literary world
of sixteenth-century England. We will return to Euphues presently.
First we must consider why the parable, and this reading of it in
particular, proved so arresting for writers in this context.
The Prodigal as rebellious son

For most commentators, it is the motif of filial rebellion which defines
the use of the parable in this period, which Acolastus highlights by its
introduction of debating partners in the characters of Eubolus and
Philautus, and in its emphasis on the ultimate emptiness of the
Elizabethan Literature 
exquisitely described ‘riotous living’ section. For Beck, in the texts
influenced by Acolastus and the Prodigal Son tradition, ‘the most
important fact about the hero . . . is not that he is a prodigal, but that
he is a son who denies or misvalues his heritage and has to learn
through experience to value it’.5 While Beck does not assume that
any author necessarily had the parable in mind when he wrote, the
essential element of these plays is that a young man departs from the
values of his elders, to which the play crucially assumes he ought to
return. An implicit connection is made with the youthful and repent-
ant figure of the parable, which is in stark contrast to the understand-
ing of youth in Roman comedies such as those of Terence. In the
Roman plays, the young man’s desire for a girl is thwarted by external
opposition, usually emanating from his parents or a parent-substitute.
However, the young hero and the fresh start he embodies is usually
vindicated and the older generation is shown to be corrupted by tired
strictures and irrational laws. The society inaugurated by the hero
recalls a purer, golden age ruled by natural law, prior to the setting
of the play. In contrast, the Prodigal Son comedies of the sixteenth
century begin with the aged yet desirable society in control, they
experiment with the new and chaotic society initiated by the young
hero, but then signal and approve of a return to the original society and
all its stable characteristics. They are inherently conservative, seeing
deviation as a violation of natural law. Instead of harking back to a
golden age, they recognize a social order for a fallen world which
involves the ‘reforming of the internal desires of the young hero’6
through the conscious rejection of the old creation and the internaliz-
ing of the ‘new creation’ of Ephesians :–, represented by social
reconciliation. This is an intensely theological insight into the human
experience of repentant return achieved by the imitation of the parable
of the Prodigal Son, with no endorsement of rebellion.
In this world where society is to be reaffirmed rather than remade
by the next generation, as dramatized in the texts under discussion,
there is no guarantee of merciful redemption, even if the son shows
repentance for his transgressive behaviour. In Thomas Ingelend’s
The Disobedient Child (c.), the son is sent back to the nagging
5
Beck, ‘Terence Improved’, p. .
6
Beck, ‘Terence Improved’, p. .
 The Prodigal Son

wife whom he had chosen against his father’s advice. In the anonymous
Nice Wanton (–), the sons both die. Even where there is a
happy ending, as in Acolastus, the disregarded precepts must be fully
conformed to. The resolution often involves punishment rather than
forgiveness for those who dare to rebel.
In addition to being a son, the Prodigal hero in these plays may have
other roles which encourage the reader/audience to consider the wider
implication of the hero’s falling away from responsibility in these areas.
In the early play Nice Wanton, he is a student; in Shakespeare’s Henry IV
Parts  and  (c.–), he is a prince; in Chapman, Jonson, and
Marston’s Eastward Ho (), he is an apprentice; and in Heywood’s
The Wise Woman of Hogsdon (c.?) he is a lover. The themes of
education, politics, economics, and romance are all invoked by these
additions to the parable’s stark characterization of the hero, and the
return to the status quo in each is emphasized.
The variable nature of the intrigue into which the hero descends
also affects the tone of the play, and the way in which the parable is
adapted. Beck offers various categories of plays defined by the nature
of the rebellions and their consequences. In some plays, those most
closely identified with the morality play tradition, conventional vice
figures lure the hero into ruinous situations, with the play’s goal being
to demonstrate the ultimate purification of the hero’s soul. There tends
to be no involvement of a romantic nature in these plays, but the
culmination of the process of recognition is the return to the father-
figure. For Beck, the earliest English Prodigal Son comedy, the
anonymous Interlude of Youth (–), is a good example of this
type of play, as are Henry IV and Eastward Ho.
Complementing these moral plays are those which bring a censori-
ous element into their portrayal of the hero’s fate. Here there is evil
intrigue but no restoration to the position from which the hero has
fallen. Instead, he is censured for his failure to reform, or for getting
into a position from which he cannot escape, despite his repentance.
The anonymous Pater, Filius and Uxor, or The Prodigal Son () is
such a play, as is Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (c.–).
Romantic comedies celebrate the affection of the hero for a virtuous
woman. While he may dally with other women during his riotous period,
he returns to his original lover and marries her. This return demonstrates
his spiritual regeneration and provides the excuse for a celebration to end
Elizabethan Literature 
the play. Often in this category of Prodigal Son play, the intrigue is
managed by virtuous characters who have the good outcome for the hero
in view. The original lover is often behind the intrigue, usually helped
by the father-figure and always with his endorsement. Examples of
such plays would be The London Prodigal (Anonymous, –) and
Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c.–).
The final category Beck identifies is the satiric. These usually begin
in the middle of the parable, with the hero in a repentant state, fallen
from grace and status, but seeking to recover his lost inheritance and
social status. The hero is the prime mover and the common outcome
is the removal of the old guard who has or have tried to prevent the
rebellion in the first place. Closest in structure and intention to the
Roman plays discussed earlier, these satiric plays still lie within their
Christian heritage by taking for granted the fallen nature of the hero
and the need for change arising from repentance. There may be a
marriage at the end, but this romantic element is not the driving force
of the drama. Examples of such plays include Middleton’s A Trick to
Catch an Old One and A Mad World (both –).
While these categories are not mutually exclusive or exhaustive, they
offer us a starting point for understanding the variety of ways in which
the parable of the Prodigal Son echoes through this strand of literature
in the period and just beyond. The parable proved to be remarkably
adaptable for writers attempting to make a theological stand, in
dialogue with the Roman comedies which offer a rather different
perspective. Beck’s analysis will not have the last word when it comes
to interpreting the significance of the parable to such writers, but his
conclusion is incontrovertible:
the entire tradition of prodigal-son comedy is properly emphasized as one of
the earliest, most persistent, and most important strains in drama of the
English Renaissance.7
We have begun to chart the variety of ways in which the parable of the
Prodigal Son was used in the literature of this period, and to assert
its prevalence. Further explanation for that remarkable prevalence, in
terms of the wider events of the period, has been offered by critics such
7
Beck, ‘Terence Improved’, p. .
 The Prodigal Son

as Richard Helgerson.8 Helgerson concurs with Beck’s analysis that
the crux of these texts’ use of the parable of the Prodigal Son is the act
of rebellion by a younger man against an older father-figure, which is
implicitly or explicitly condemned within the text. So, in the texts
considered by Helgerson by writers such as George Gascoigne, John
Lyly (of Euphues fame), and Robert Greene, it is not the prodigality of
the son, nor the dramatic and joyful resolution symbolized by the
killing of the fatted calf, which is so important in the parable, but
the motif of rejection of authority which is key. Although pictorial
representations and sermonizing treatments of the parable up until
now had focused on that happy reception of the repentant son, in the
Elizabethan texts this faded in significance, even when a happy ending
was allowed. As Helgerson comments, ‘not the Parable of the Prodigal
Son, with its benign vision of paternal forgiveness, but rather the
paradigm of prodigal rebellion interested the Elizabethans’.9
Of course, an observant reader of the parable will be aware that the
killing of the fatted calf in preparation for the homecoming party is not
the actual resolution of the story in Luke’s Gospel, and the positioning
of the father’s later interaction with the older son may lay claim to
being the key moment in the narrative. However, rarely is this aspect
of the parable commented upon, either within the Elizabethan texts,
or in the later discussions of their use of the parable. Why this might
be remains to be discussed.
Maintaining the status quo

Meanwhile, we return to evaluate Helgerson’s assertion that the Prod-
igal Son paradigm of youthful rebellion was so potent in Elizabethan
England. As he points out, the period before the births of these writers
had been particularly unsettled. The parents of these writers had
experienced four changes in the official state religion; a shifting redis-
tribution of wealth caused by economic and religious movements;
Renaissance thinking and the rise of courtiership leading to a revolu-
tion in education and manners; and political upheaval following the
8
Richard Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley: University of
California Press, ).
9
Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals, p. .
Elizabethan Literature 
death of Edward and the fear of more, should Elizabeth’s reign prove
short. They had ‘reason to feel the peril of disorder’,10 and to wish to
impress upon their children the prudent advice that conventional
behaviour might protect them from the changes over which they had
no control. Gentility was linked to a life of public service, with learning
based on gaining skills that would lead to rational virtue. A practice of
passing on printed advice from father to son arose, based on the
literature of the ancients and more modern writers, mingled with
experience. Alongside the Christianized plays of Roman writers such
as Terence which were so important in the schooling of these young
men, these pamphlets warned that wastefulness, travel, love, would
necessarily lead to repentance. Inheritance depended on maintaining
the values of the father. All were vehicles for the ‘conservative fears of
men who had lived through the period of dangerously rapid change
brought on by the Reformation, men to whom the world necessarily
seemed beset with perilous temptations’.11
One of the worrying temptations for the sons of these conservative
forebears was the pursuit of worthless writing. In the later decades of
the sixteenth century, literature and youthful folly were clearly linked.
This led to the writers under discussion being placed in a very difficult
position, and Helgerson argues that many of them assert, or at least
imply, that they themselves were represented by the Prodigal Son
character they used so frequently as a paradigm. Influenced by the
teaching that literature was potentially morally harmful, while unwill-
ing or unable to give up the writing of it, such writers had to prove over
and over that their texts might be construed in a positive, even
beneficial way:
They were thus forced to argue their work, rightly understood, warns against
the very wantoness it portrays, but such arguments only involved them in a
maze of self-contradiction, revealing their dilemma—the dilemma of their
generation—without resolving it.12
By invoking the character of the Prodigal Son, they were able to

dramatize their dilemma. The pattern of admonition by an authority
10
Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals, p. .
11
Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals, p. .
12
Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals, p. .
 The Prodigal Son

figure, rebellion against it and them, followed by repentance, which is
found in much of the work by the writers under discussion, suggests
they were ‘trying to reconcile their humanistic education and their
often rebellious tastes and aspirations; and that . . . they found in the
figure of the repentant prodigal a role that would do just that’.13
The struggle inherent in this position is also portrayed in the
literature of the time. These writers were exposed not just to the
re-written, Christianized plays of Terence, but also other classical texts,
medieval, courtly romance, and the literature of Chaucer. Humanism
and Christianity could be in tension in the struggle to define the self in
relation not just to parental figures of authority, but also to the opposite
sex, who are routinely portrayed at this time as shrews, harlots, or overly
indulgent maternal figures. In a world which conventionally viewed
poetry as soft and effeminate, there was a hostility towards beauty,
poetry, and forgiveness. But these might be seen as the very means of
repentance. Writers of this generation may well have struggled to
define themselves between the identity assigned them by their fathers
and their own rebellious desire to experience life in its fullness. By
making themselves interested parties in their own fictions, particularly
by identifying themselves with the Prodigal Son figure who perhaps
not surprisingly featured so frequently, they could express some of this
struggle, if not resolve it.
Helgerson offers the writing of George Whetstone as an example.
Justifying his writing of what he calls his ‘vain, wanton, and worthless
sonnets’, in his work The Rocke of Regard (), Whetstone writes:
In plucking off the vizard of self-conceit under which I sometimes proudly
masked with vain desires, other young gentlemen may reform their wanton
lives in seeing the fond and fruitless success of my fantastical imaginations,
which be no other than poems of honest love, and yet, for that the exercise we
use in reading loving discourses seldom, in my conceit, acquiteth our pains
with anything beneficial unto the commonweal or very profitable to ourselves,
I thought the ‘Garden of Unthriftiness’ the meetest title I could give them.14
13
Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals, p. .
14
George Whetstone, The Rocke of Regard (), sig. ¶iiᵛ. (UMEES, Reel
), quoted in Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals, p. .
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roots of the conscience and the will. Teufelsdröckh’s mental progress
out of the mood of the “Everlasting No” is a succession of practical
determinations as to the conduct of his own spirit, each
determination coming as an inspired effort of the will, altering his
demeanour from that moment, and the last bringing him into a final
condition of freedom and self-mastery. The effort of the will does
indeed diffuse a corresponding change through the intellect; but it is
as if on the principle, “Henceforth such and such a view of things
shall be my view,”—which is but a variation of the Scriptural
principle that it is by doing the law that one comes to know the
gospel.
The Leith Walk incident, accordingly, is to be taken as the
equivalent in Carlyle’s case to that first step out of the “Everlasting
No” of which he makes so much in the biography of Teufelsdröckh. It
was not by any means his complete conversion or emancipation, but
it was a beginning. It was, to use his own words, a change at least “in
the temper of his misery,” and a change for the better, inasmuch as it
substituted indignation and defiance for what had been mere fear
and whimpering. His mood thenceforth, though still miserable
enough, was to be less abject and more stern. On the whole, if this
construction of the Leith Walk incident of June 1821 does not make
so much of it as Mr. Froude’s does, it leaves enough of reason for any
Edinburgh youth, when he next chances to be in that straggling
thoroughfare between Edinburgh and Leith, to pause near the
middle of it, and look about him. The spot must have been just below
Pilrig Street, which was Carlyle’s starting-point from his lodgings in
Moray Street (now Spey Street) on his way to Leith.
There was, at all events, no very obvious change in Carlyle’s
mood and demeanour in Edinburgh in the latter part of 1821. His
own report in the Reminiscences is still of the dreariness of his life,
his gruff humours, and gloomy prognostications. But, corroborated
though this report is in the main by contemporary letters, it would be
a mistake, I believe, to accept it absolutely, or without such
abatements as mere reflection on the circumstances will easily
suggest. It is impossible to suppose that Carlyle, at this period of his
life or at any other, can have been all unhappy, even when he thought
himself most unhappy. There must have been ardours and glows of
soul, great joys and exhilarations, corresponding to the complexity of
nervous endowment that could descend to such depths of sadness.
From himself we learn, in particular, how the society of Irving,
whether in their Annandale meetings, or in Irving’s visits to
Edinburgh, had always an effect upon his spirits like that of sunrising
upon night or fog. Irving’s letters must have had a similar effect:
such a letter, for example, as that from Glasgow in which Irving had
written, “I am beginning to see the dawn of the day when you shall be
plucked by the literary world from my solitary, and therefore more
clear, admiration,” and had added this interesting note respecting
Dr. Chalmers: “Our honest Demosthenes, or shall I call him
Chrysostom?—Boanerges would fit him better!—seems to have
caught some glimpse of your inner man, though he had few
opportunities; for he never ceases to be inquiring after you.”[37]
Whether such letters brought Carlyle exhilaration or not, there
must have been exhilaration for him, or at least roused interest, on
Irving’s own account, in the news, which came late in 1821, that
Irving was not to be tied much longer to the great Glasgow
Demosthenes and his very difficult congregation. After two years and
a half of the Glasgow assistantship to Dr. Chalmers, there had come
that invitation to the pastorship of the Scotch Church, Hatton
Garden, London, which Irving received as exultingly, as he
afterwards said, as if it had been a call to the Archbishopric of
Canterbury. He passed through Edinburgh on his way to London to
offer himself on probation to the little colony of London Scots that
thought he might suit them for their minister; and Carlyle was the
last person he saw before leaving Scotland. The scene of their parting
was the coffee-room of the old Black Bull Hotel in Leith Street, then
the great starting-place for the Edinburgh coaches. It was “a dim
night, November or December, between nine and ten,” Carlyle tells
us; but Mrs. Oliphant’s Life of Irving helps us to the more precise
dating of December 1821, a day or two before Christmas. They had
their talk in the coffee-room; and Carlyle, on going, gave Irving a
bundle of cigars, that he might try one or two of them in the tedium
of his journey next day on the top of the coach. Who smoked the
cigars no one ever knew; for Irving, in the hurry of starting next
morning, forgot to take them with him, and left them lying in a stall
in the coffee-room.
That meeting at the Black Bull in Leith Street, however, was to
be remembered by both. Irving had gone to London to set the
Thames on fire; Carlyle remained in Edinburgh for his mathematical
teaching, his private German readings, his hackwork for Brewster’s
Edinburgh Encyclopædia, and the chances of continued
contributorship to the New Edinburgh Review. Thus the year 1821
ended, and the year 1822 began.
PART III.—1822–1828
By Carlyle’s own account, and still more distinctly by the
evidence of other records, the beginning of the year 1822 was marked
by a break in his hitherto cloudy sky. How much of this is to be
attributed to the continuance of the change of mental mood which
has to be dated from June 1821, and associated with the Leith Walk
revelation of that month, one can hardly say. One finds causes of an
external kind that must have contributed to the result.
One was the Charles Buller engagement. Carlyle’s dating of this
very important event in his life is rather hazy. In his Reminiscences
he gives us to understand that, after his parting with Irving at the
Black Bull in Edinburgh, just before the Christmas of 1821, he lost
sight of Irving altogether for a while, and was chagrined by Irving’s
silence. He thought their correspondence had come to an end;
accounted for the fact as well as he could by remembering in what a
turmoil of new occupation Irving was then involved in London; and
only came to know how faithful his friend had been to him all the
while when the Buller tutorship at £200 a year emerged, “in the
spring and summer of 1822,” as the product of Irving’s London
exertions in his behalf. In reading this account, one fancies Irving
already established in London, In fact, however, as Mrs. Oliphant’s
Life of Irving makes clear, Irving’s journey from the Black Bull to
London in December 1821 had been on a trial visit only. He was back
in Glasgow early in February 1822,—whence, on the 9th of that
month, he wrote a long letter to his “dear and lovely pupil,” Miss
Jane Welsh, sending it under cover to his friend “T. C.” in Edinburgh,
because he was not sure but she might be then in Edinburgh too; and
it was not till July 1822, and after some difficult negotiation, that
Irving, ordained by his native Presbytery of Annan, took his farewell
of Glasgow and the West of Scotland, and settled in London
definitely. The good turn he had done Carlyle in the matter of the
Buller tutorship must have been done, therefore, in his preliminary
London visit of January 1822, within a month after his parting from
Carlyle at the Black Bull, and before Carlyle’s cigars, if Irving had
taken them with him, could have been smoked out. It must have
been in those January weeks of his probationary preachings before
the Hatton Garden people that Irving, moving about as a new
Scottish lion in the drawing-room of the English Stracheys of the
India House, was introduced to Mrs. Strachey’s sister, Mrs. Buller,
and, after some meetings with that lady, helped her in a “domestic
intricacy.” This was that her eldest son, Charles Buller, a very clever
and high-spirited boy, of about fifteen years of age, “fresh from
Harrow,” but too young to go to Cambridge, was somewhat
troublesome, and she and her husband were at a loss what to do with
him. Irving’s advice had been to send the boy for a session or two to
the University of Edinburgh, and to secure for him there the private
tutorship of a certain young literary man, Mr. Thomas Carlyle, whom
Irving knew thoroughly and could highly recommend. Mrs. Buller
must have been a rapid lady, for the thing was arranged almost at
once. Carlyle had been communicated with; and he had accepted the
tutorship on the terms stipulated by Irving. It must have been on an
early day in the spring of 1822 that he made that call at the house of
the Rev. Dr. Fleming in George Square, to receive his new pupil,
Charles Buller, with Charles’s younger brother Arthur, on their
arrival in Edinburgh, and had that first walk with them by the foot of
Salisbury Crags, and up the High Street from Holyrood, of which
there is such pleasant mention in the Reminiscences. Dr. Fleming, a
fellow-contributor with Carlyle to Brewster’s Encyclopædia, and a
much respected clergyman of Edinburgh, had interested himself
greatly in Irving’s London prospects, and had tried to smooth the
way for him by letters to London friends; and it was in his house in
George Square that the two English boys were to board,—Carlyle
coming to them daily from his lodgings in Moray Street. He had
already, before the arrival of the boys, he tells us, entered Charles
Buller in Dunbar’s “third Greek class” in the University. The
information agrees with the University records; for in the
matriculation-book of the session 1821–22 I find one of the very
latest matriculations to have been that of “Charles Buller, Cornwall,”
and I find him to have been all but the last student enrolled for that
session in Dunbar’s senior class. This of itself would imply that
Carlyle’s tutorship of the boys must have begun in February 1822;
for, as the University session ends in the beginning of April, it would
have hardly been worth while to enroll the young Buller in a class
after February. The tutorship was a settled thing, therefore, while
Irving was still in Glasgow, and it had been going on for some
months before Irving’s permanent removal to London. Carlyle
himself seems to have become aware of the haziness of his dating of
the transaction; for he inserts, by way of afterthought, a dim
recollection of one or two sights of Irving somewhere shortly after
the Black Bull parting, and of talks with him about the Buller family
while the tutorship was in its infancy. Anyhow, the Buller tutorship,
with its £200 a year, was “a most important thing” to Carlyle in “the
economies and practical departments” of his life at the time; and he
owed it “wholly to Irving.” The two boys, Charles Buller especially,
took to their new tutor cordially at once, and he cordially to them;
and there were no difficulties. In the classics, indeed, and especially
in Greek, Charles Buller, fresh from his Harrow training, was
Carlyle’s superior; but Carlyle could do his duty for both the boys by
getting up their Latin and Greek lessons along with them, teaching
them as much mathematics as they would learn, and guiding them
generally into solid reading, inquiry, and reflection.
Another gleam of sunshine in Carlyle’s life early in 1822, or what
ought to have been such, was the correspondence with Haddington.
Since the visit of the previous June that had gradually established
itself, till it had become constant, in the form of “weekly or oftener
sending books, etc., etc.,” with occasional runs down to Haddington
in person, or sights of Miss Welsh, with her mother, in Edinburgh.
How far matters had gone by this time does not distinctly appear;
but there is some significance in the fact that Irving, writing from
Glasgow to Miss Welsh immediately after his return from the trial-
preachings before the Hatton Garden congregation in London, had
sent the letter through “T. C.” The impression made by that letter, as
it may be read in Mrs. Oliphant’s Life of Irving, certainly is that
Irving’s own feelings in the Haddington quarter were still of so
tender a kind that the advancing relations of “T. C.” to the “dear and
lovely pupil” were not indifferent to him. Doubtless there were
obstacles yet in the way of any definite engagement between Carlyle
and the young lady who was heiress of Craigenputtock,—criticisms of
relatives and others who “saw only the outside of the thing”; but the
young lady “had faith in her own insight,” as she afterwards told Miss
Jewsbury, and was likely to act for herself. Meanwhile, to be “aiding
and directing her studies,” and have a kind of home at Haddington
when he chose to go there on a Saturday, was surely a tinge of gold
upon the silver of the Buller tutorship.
Moreover, Carlyle’s occupations of a literary kind were
becoming more numerous and congenial. “I was already getting my
head a little up,” he says, “translating Legendre’s Geometry for
Brewster; my outlook somewhat cheerfuller.” All through the
preceding year, it appears from private letters, he had been exerting
himself indefatigably to find literary work. Thus, in a letter of date
March 1821 to an old college friend: “I have had about twenty plans
this winter in the way of authorship: they have all failed. I have about
twenty more to try; and, if it does but please the Director of all things
to continue the moderate share of health now restored to me, I will
make the doors of human society fly open before me yet,
notwithstanding. My petards will not burst, or make only noise when
they do. I must mix them better, plant them more judiciously; they
shall burst, and do execution too.”[38] Again, in a letter of the very
next month: “I am moving on, weary and heavy-laden, with very
fickle health, and many discomforts,—still looking forward to the
future (brave future!) for all the accommodation and enjoyment that
render life an object of desire. Then shall I no longer play a candle-
snuffer’s part in the great drama; or, if I do, my salary will be
raised.”[39] From Mr. Froude we learn that one of the burst petards of
1821 had been the proposal to a London publishing firm of a
complete translation of Schiller’s Works. That offer having been
declined, with the twenty others of which Carlyle speaks, the only
obvious increase of his literary engagements at the time of the
beginning of the Buller tutorship in 1822 consisted, it would appear,
in that connection with the New Edinburgh Review of which
mention has been already made, and in the translation of Legendre
which he had undertaken for Brewster. But there was more in the
background. There is significance in the fact that his second
contribution to the New Edinburgh, published in April 1822, when
the Buller tutorship had just begun, was an article on Goethe’s Faust.
The German readings which had been going on since 1819 had
influenced him greatly; and he was now absorbed in a passion for
German Literature. Schiller, Goethe, and Jean Paul were the
demigods of his intellectual worship, the authors in whose works,
rather than in those of any of the same century in France or Britain,
he found suitable nutriment for his own spirit. He had proposed, we
see, to translate the whole of Schiller. Of his studies in Goethe and
their effects we have a striking commemoration in the passage of his
Reminiscences where he tells of that “windless, Scotch-misty,
Saturday night,” apparently just about our present date, when,
having finished the reading of Wilhelm Meister, he walked through
the deserted streets of Edinburgh in a state of agitation over the
wonders he had found in that book. Henceforth, accordingly, he had
a portion of his literary career definitely marked out for him.
Whatever else he was to be, there was work enough before him for a
while in translation from the German and in commentary on the
great German writers for the behoof of the British public. There were
but three or four men in Britain competent for that business, and he
was one of them.
The translation of Legendre’s Geometry for Brewster deserves a
passing notice. Though not published till 1824,—when it appeared,
from the press of Oliver and Boyd of Edinburgh, as an octavo of
nearly 400 pages, with the title Elements of Geometry and
Trigonometry; with Notes. Translated from the French of A. M.
Legendre, Member of the Institute, etc. Edited by David Brewster,
LL.D., etc. With Notes and Additions, and an Introductory Essay on
Proportion,—it was begun by Carlyle in 1822, and continued to
occupy him through the whole of that year. His authorship of this
Translation remained such a secret, or had been so forgotten, that
the late Professor De Morgan, specially learned though he was in the
bibliography of mathematics, did not know the fact, and would
hardly believe it, till I procured him the evidence. It was one day in
or about 1860, if I remember rightly, and in the common room of
University College, London, that De Morgan, in the course of the
chats on all things and sundry which I used to have with him there,
adverted to the Legendre book. He knew, he said, that Brewster
himself could not have done the translation; but he had always been
under the impression that the person employed by Brewster had
been a certain Galbraith, a noted teacher of mathematics in
Edinburgh. Recently, however, he had heard Carlyle named as the
man; and, being very doubtful on the point, he wanted very much to
be certain. To back my own statement, I undertook to obtain an
affidavit from head-quarters. “Tell De Morgan,” said Carlyle, when I
next saw him, “that every word of the book is mine, and that I got
£50 for the job from Brewster; which was then of some consideration
to me.” He went on to speak, very much as he does in the
Reminiscences, of the prefixed little Essay on Proportion, retaining a
fond recollection of that section of the book,—begun and finished, he
says, on “a happy forenoon (Sunday, I fear)” in his Edinburgh
lodgings, and never seen again since he had revised the proof. De
Morgan, who had some correspondence on the subject with Carlyle
after I had conveyed Carlyle’s message, paid it a compliment
afterwards in his Budget of Paradoxes, by calling it “as good a
substitute for the Fifth Book of Euclid as could be given in speech”;
and a glance at the Essay in the volume itself will confirm the
opinion. It fills but eight printed pages, and consists of but four
definitions and three theorems, wound up with these concluding
sentences:—“By means of these theorems, and their corollaries, it is
easy to demonstrate, or even to discover, all the most important facts
connected with the Doctrine of Proportion. The facts given here will
enable the student to go through these Elements [Legendre’s]
without any obstruction on that head.”
The Translation of Legendre, with this Essay on Proportion, was
Carlyle’s farewell to Mathematics. To the end of his life, however, he
would talk with great relish of mathematical matters. Once, in the
vicinity of Sloane Street, when I mentioned to him a geometrical
theorem which Dr. Chalmers had confided to me, with the
information that he had been working at it all his life and had never
accomplished the solution, Carlyle became so eager that he made me
stop and draw a diagram of the theorem for him on the pavement.
Having thus picked up the notion of it, he branched out, in the most
interesting manner, as we walked on, into talk and anecdote about
mathematics and mathematicians, with references especially to
Leslie, West, Robert Simson, and Pappus. A marked similarity of
character between Carlyle and Chalmers was discernible in the fact
that they both avowed a strong personal preference for the old pure
geometry over the more potent modern analytics. “In geometry, sir,
you are dealing with the ipsissima corpora,” Chalmers used to say;
and Carlyle’s feeling seems to have been something of the same kind.
There was a variation of Carlyle’s Edinburgh existence, not
altogether disagreeable, when the seniors of the Buller family
followed the two boys, and made Edinburgh for some time their
residence. They took up house in India Street, giving dinners and
seeing a good deal of company; and Carlyle, while continuing his
lessons to young Charles and Arthur, was thus a good deal in India
Street, observing new society, and becoming acquainted with Mr.
Buller senior, the sprightly Mrs. Buller, and their third and youngest
child, Reginald. As he makes this advent of the Bullers to Edinburgh
to have been “towards the autumn” in 1822, we are able to connect it
with another advent.
It was on the 15th of August 1822, after several weeks of
enormous expectation, that George IV. arrived in Edinburgh,
welcomed so memorably on board his yacht before landing by Sir
Walter Scott; and thence to the 29th, when his Majesty took his
departure, all Edinburgh was in that paroxysm of loyal excitement
and Celtic heraldry and hubbub of which Sir Walter was the soul and
manager, and a full account of which is to be found in his Life by
Lockhart. It is hardly a surprise to know that what the veteran Scott,
with his great jovial heart, his Toryism, and his love of symbols, thus
plunged into and enjoyed with such passionate avidity, tasking all his
energies for a fortnight to make the business a triumphant success,
the moody young Carlyle, then a Radical to the core, fled from in
unmitigated disgust. He tells us in his Reminiscences how, on seeing
the placard by the magistrates of Edinburgh, a day or two before the
King’s arrival, requesting all the citizens to appear in the streets well-
dressed on the day of his Majesty’s entry, the men in “black coats and
white duck trousers,” he could stand it no longer, and resolved to be
absent from the approaching “efflorescence of the flunkeyisms.” The
tutorial duties with the Bullers being naturally in abeyance at such a
time, and rooms in Edinburgh being so scarce that the use of
Carlyle’s in Moray Street was a welcome gift to his merchant friends,
Graham and Hope, who were to arrive from Glasgow for the
spectacle, he himself was off for a run in Annandale and Galloway
before his Majesty made his appearance; and he did not return till all
the hubbub of the fortnight was “comfortably rolled away.” I have
heard him describe this flight of his from George IV., and from the
horrors of that fortnight of feastings, processionings, huzzaings, and
bagpipings, round his Majesty in Edinburgh, at more length and in
greater detail than in the passage incidentally given to the subject in
the Reminiscences; and one of the details may be worth relating:—
On the first stage out of Edinburgh he put up for the night at some
village inn. Even at that distance the “efflorescence of the
flunkeyisms” from which he had fled seemed to pursue him; for the
talk of the people at the inn, and the very papers that were lying
about, were of nothing but George IV. and the Royal Visit. Taking
refuge at last in his bedroom, he was fighting there with his habitual
enemy, sleeplessness, when, as if to make sleep absolutely impossible
for that night, there came upon his ear from the next room, from
which he was separated only by a thin partition, the moanings and
groanings of a woman, in distress with toothache or some other pain.
The “oh! oh!” from the next room had become louder and louder,
and threatened to be incessant through the whole night, so that each
repetition of it became more and more insufferable. At last, having
knocked to solicit attention, he addressed the invisible sufferer
through the partition thus: “For God’s sake, woman, be articulate. If
anything can be done for you, be it even to ride ten miles in the dark
for a doctor, tell me, and I’ll do it; if not, endeavour to compose
yourself.” There ensued a dead silence, and he was troubled no more.
The Edinburgh University records show that “Charles Buller,
Cornwall,” matriculated again for the session 1822–3 (one of the very
earliest students to matriculate that year, for he stands as No. 8 in a
total of 2071 matriculations), and that he attended the 2nd Latin
class, under Professor James Pillans, who had succeeded Christison
as Humanity Professor in 1820. A later name in the matriculation list
(No. 836) is that of “Arthur Buller,” who had not attended the
University with his brother in the previous year, but now joined him
in the 2nd Latin class, and also took out Dunbar’s 2nd Greek class. In
the same matriculation list of 1823–3 (No. 21), as entering the
University for the first time, and attending Pillans’s 2nd Latin class
with the two Bullers, appears “John Carlyle, Dumfriesshire.” This
was Carlyle’s younger brother, the future Dr. John Carlyle, translator
of Dante, and the only other of the family who received a University
education. He had been for some time a teacher in Annan School, in
succession to his brother; and, as he was to choose the medical
profession, his present attendance in the Arts classes was but
preliminary to attendance in the medical classes in the sessions
immediately to follow. He lodged, as the Reminiscences tell us, with
his brother, in the rooms in Moray Street, Pilrig Street.
The winter of 1822–3 was passed by Carlyle in the Edinburgh
routine of his daily walks from those rooms to the house of the
Bullers in India Street, his tutorship of the two young Bullers and
other intercourse with the Buller family and their guests, and his
own German and other readings and literary efforts and schemings.
It was in that winter, and not at the earlier date hazily assigned in the
Reminiscences, that the cessation of correspondence with Irving
became a matter of secret vexation to him. The good Irving, now in
the full whirl of his activity with the Hatton Garden congregation and
of the London notoriety to which that led, was too busy to write; and
it was only by rumour, or by letters from others, that Carlyle heard of
Irving’s extraordinary doings and extraordinary successes in the
metropolis, of the crowds that were flocking to hear him in the little
Scotch chapel, and of the stir he and his preachings were making in
the London fashionable world. “People have their envies, their pitiful
self-comparisons,” says Carlyle, admitting that the real joy he felt at
the vast and sudden effulgence of his friend into a fame
commensurate with his powers was tempered by a sense of the
contrast between himself, still toiling obscurely in Edinburgh, a
“poor, suffering, handcuffed wretch,” and the other Annandale
fellow, now so free and glorious among the grandees on the Thames.
There was, he adds, just a speck of another feeling. Would Irving be
able to keep his head in the blaze of such enormous London
popularity? Had he strength enough to guide and manage himself in
that huge element with anything like the steadiness that had
characterised the behaviour of the more massive and more simple-
hearted Chalmers in Glasgow? This feeling, he seems to hint, was
increased rather than lessened when Irving’s first publication came
into his hands,—the famous Orations and Arguments for Judgment
to Come, by which, early in 1823, the cooler and more critical world
was enabled to judge of the real substance of those pulpit-discourses
which were so amazing the Londoners. Meanwhile, as Irving himself
was still silent, Carlyle could only plod on at his own work. It seems
to have been late in 1822, or early in 1823, that, having closed his
contributions to Brewster’s Encyclopædia, and got the Legendre
translation off his hands, he set himself to his Life of Schiller.
If, however, the Life of Schiller was begun in Edinburgh, it was
not finished there. The University session of 1822–3 over, and the
spring and summer of 1823 having come, the Bullers, with that
aptitude for change of residence which characterises retired Indians
and people with plenty of money, had removed to the mansion of
Kinnaird in Perthshire, situated on the river Tay, some miles to the
north of Dunkeld. Carlyle and his tutorship of young Charles and
Arthur Buller had, accordingly, been transferred thither. He must
have been there early in June 1823; for a letter of his is extant, dated
from Kinnaird House on the 17th of that month, in which he
describes his first sight of Dunkeld and its old cathedral, with
Dunsinane Hill, and the position of old Birnam Wood in the
neighbourhood, and his thoughts in those spots of “the immortal
link-boy” that had made them famous. The same letter gives an
interesting glimpse of his own mood in the first month of his Tayside
residence with the Bullers. “Some time hence,” he says to his
correspondent, Thomas Mitchell, “when you are seated in your
peaceful manse,—you at one side of the parlour fire, Mrs. M. at the
other, and two or three little M.’s, fine chubby urchins, hopping
about the carpet,—you will suddenly observe the door fly open, and a
tall, meagre, careworn figure stalk forward, his grave countenance
lightened by unusual smiles in the certainty of meeting a cordial
welcome. This knight of the rueful visage will, in fact, mingle with the
group for a season, and be merry as the merriest, though his looks
are sinister. I warn you to make provision for such emergencies. In
process of time I too must have my own peculiar hearth; wayward as
my destiny has hitherto been, perplexed and solitary as my path of
life still is, I never cease to reckon on yet paying scot and lot on my
own footing.”[40] From the Reminiscences, where we learn that he
was at this time persevering with his Life of Schiller, we have his
later recollection of those summer and autumn months, and on into
late autumn, in Kinnaird House:—
“I was nightly working at the thing in a serious, sad, and totally solitary, way.
My two rooms were in the old mansion of Kinnaird, some three or four hundred
yards from the new, and on a lower level, overshadowed with wood. Thither I
always retired directly after tea, and for most part had the edifice all to myself,—
good candles, good wood fire, place dry enough, tolerably clean, and such silence
and total absence of company, good or bad, as I never experienced before or since.
I remember still the grand sough of those woods, or, perhaps, in the stillest times,
the distant ripple of the Tay. Nothing else to converse with but this and my own
thoughts, which never for a moment pretended to be joyful, and were sometimes
pathetically sad. I was in the miserablest dyspeptic health, uncertain whether I
ought not to quit on that account, and at times almost resolving to do it; dumb, far
away from all my loved ones. My poor Schiller, nothing considerable of a work
even to my own judgment, had to be steadily persisted in, as the only protection
and resource in this inarticulate huge wilderness, actual and symbolical.”[41]
It was in October 1823 that the first part of Schiller’s Life and
Writings appeared, without the author’s name, in the then
celebrated London Magazine of Messrs. Taylor and Hessey. It was
the most important of the metropolitan magazines of that time,
counting among its contributors, since its foundation in 1820, such
writers as Charles Lamb, Hazlitt, Allan Cunningham, the Rev. Henry
Francis Cary, Hamilton Reynolds, Bryan Waller Procter, Thomas
Noon Talfourd, young Thomas Hood, and De Quincey. The
admission of Carlyle into such company, the opening of such a
London connection at last, ought to have been some gratification to
him in his recluse life at Kinnaird; and, doubtless, it was, to a far
greater extent than he could remember when he wrote the
Reminiscences. He does vaguely mention there that, though his own
judgment of the merits of his performance was not very high, he had
compliments from the editor of the magazine,—i.e., we must
suppose, from Messrs. Taylor and Hessey, who were their own
editors, unless indeed young Thomas Hood, who was a kind of
assistant editor, was the medium of the communication. What is
more important is that the Life of Schiller, if not all in the editor’s
hands complete when the first part appeared, must have been
reported as complete, or as approaching completeness, in Carlyle’s
own hands at Kinnaird. This, accordingly, fixes October 1823, or
thereabouts, as the date of his passing on from Schiller to the new
work which he had prescribed for himself as a sequel, viz. the
Translation of the Wilhelm Meister. It must have been in one of
those nocturnal sittings in the late autumn of 1823 in the old
mansion of Kinnaird, amid “the grand sough of those woods”
outside, when his Schiller manuscript lay finished beside him, and he
had Goethe before him, that there happened that “Tragedy of the
Night-Moth” which he has commemorated in one of his metrical
fragments—
“’Tis placid midnight; stars are keeping
Their meek and silent course in heaven;
Save pale recluse, for knowledge seeking,
All mortal things to sleep are given.
But see! a wandering night-moth enters,

Allured by taper gleaming bright;
A while keeps hovering round, then ventures
On Goethe’s mystic page to light.
With awe she views the candle blazing

A universe of fire it seems
To moth-savante with rapture gazing,
Or fount whence life and motion streams.
What passions in her small heart whirling,

Hopes boundless, adoration, dread?
At length, her tiny pinions twirling,
She darts, and,—puff!—the moth is dead.”
Carlyle’s own distinct statement in the Reminiscences is that

Irving had encouraged him in the Life of Schiller, and had “prepared
the way” for it in the London Magazine. How is this to be reconciled
with his repeated references to the total cessation of correspondence
between himself and Irving from the date of Irving’s definite
settlement in London to that week, “late in autumn 1823,” when
Irving, having married Miss Martin of Kirkcaldy, was on his
marriage-jaunt with her in Scotland, and generously determined to
pass near Kinnaird, so as to pick up his old friend and have a day or
two of his society? One might have thought that it was in this
renewed meeting of the two friends in Irving’s honeymoon jaunt that
there came from Irving the suggestion of the London Magazine as a
place for the Schiller, or the intimation that he had already arranged
for it and knew it would be welcome there. This supposition,
however, will not cohere with the date of Irving’s marriage. It took
place at Kirkcaldy on the 13th of October 1823, after the number of
the London Magazine containing the first part of the Schiller had
been out for a fortnight; and Irving’s marriage-tour in Scotland
lasted through the rest of that month and the whole of November.
There must, therefore, have been renewed correspondence between
Irving and Carlyle, with arrangements about the Schiller, some while
before October 1823, though Carlyle’s memory had become hazy
about that matter too. It is pleasant to be sure of the main fact,—
which is that it was to the ever-friendly Irving that Carlyle owed this
second great service of his introduction to the London Magazine,
just as he had already owed him the Buller tutorship.
The winter of 1823–4 seems to have been passed wholly at
Kinnaird. At least, there was no re-appearance of the Bullers in
Edinburgh that winter, and no re-attendance that winter of Charles
Buller or his brother Arthur in any of the classes of Edinburgh
University. What we gather from the Reminiscences is that, towards
the end of the winter, the Bullers had begun to weary of Kinnaird life,
and indeed of life in Scotland, and were meditating a return to
England, possibly for ultimate settlement in Cornwall, but certainly
with a view to London as their intermediate head-quarters. He hints
also that they had by this time been a good deal exercised by the
moodiness and miserable bad health of the strange tutor they had
with them, and whom they respected and admired so much. Might it
not be the best arrangement that he should go for a month or two to
his native Annandale to recruit his health, and then rejoin them in
London, there again to take charge of his pupils?
Taking leave of Kinnaird with that understanding, Carlyle, it
appears, rode, either directly thence or very soon afterwards from his
father’s house at Mainhill, all the way to Edinburgh, to consult a
doctor about his dyspepsia. Was it chronic, and incurable except by
regimen? or could it be removed by medical treatment? “It is all
tobacco, sir; give up tobacco,” was the physician’s answer; on which
Carlyle’s comment is that, having instantly and absolutely followed
the advice, and persevered for “long months” in total abstinence
from tobacco, without the slightest sign of improvement, he came to
the conclusion that he might as well have ridden sixty miles in the
opposite direction, and poured his sorrows into the “long hairy ear of
the first jackass” he met, as have made that ride to Edinburgh to
consult the great authority. This story of the tobacco consultation
was a favourite one with Carlyle in later days. I have heard it from
him several times, with two additions to what appears in the
Reminiscences. One was that, the doctor having asked him whether
he could give up tobacco, “Give it up, sir?” he replied; “I can cut off
my left hand with an axe, if that should be necessary!” The other was
an account of his months of probation of the new no-tobacco
regimen. The account took the form of a recollection of himself as
staggering for months from tree-trunk to tree-trunk in a
metaphorical wood, tobaccoless and dreary, without one symptom of
benefit from his self-denial, till at last, sinking at the foot of one of
the tree-trunks, and seeing a long clay and a tobacco-pouch
providentially lying on the turf, he exclaimed “I will endure this
diabolical farce and delusion no longer,” and had a good smoke then
and there once more, in signal of reverting for ever to his old
comfort. Tobacco and a very little good brandy, he used to say to the
end of his life, were the only two drugs in the whole pharmacopœia
that he had found of any real utility to the distressed human
organism.[42]
It was during the two or three spring months of 1824, spent at
Mainhill in Dumfriesshire, under the care of that “best of nurses and
of hostesses,” his mother, that the Translation of Wilhelm Meister
was finished. It was in the June of the same year that, having revised
the proofs of the three volumes of that book for Messrs. Oliver and
Boyd of Edinburgh, who had agreed to be the publishers, as they
were also of his translation of Legendre’s Geometry, and having run
up to Edinburgh himself with the last proofs and the preface, and
received from Messrs. Oliver and Boyd £180 for the labour, and
having taken a farewell at Haddington the purport of which may be
guessed, he embarked in the Leith smack that was to carry him to
London. He was then in his twenty-ninth year, and it was his first
visit to the Great Babylon. The second part of his Life of Schiller had
appeared in the number of the London Magazine for January 1824;
but the rest had still to be published, and would probably appear in
the magazine when he was himself in London and had formed
personal acquaintance with the editorial powers. Copies of the
Wilhelm Meister from the press of Messrs. Oliver and Boyd would
follow him from Edinburgh; and it would thus be as the anonymous
author of the Life of Schiller and of the Translation of Wilhelm
Meister that he would first step into London literary society. For the
rest, his prospects were utterly undefined. Whether he should
remain in London permanently, or return to Scotland, depended on
events not yet calculable. All that was certain was that the Buller
tutorship would still be his anchorage for a time in London, as it had
been for the last two years in Scotland, and that he had Irving’s
house for his London home so long as he might choose. It was, in
fact, to Irving’s house in Myddelton Terrace, Islington, where Irving
and his wife were living as a newly-married couple, that Carlyle was
to steer himself after the Leith smack had landed him in London
river.
From this point there is a break of two years and four months in
Carlyle’s life, during which he had nothing to do with Edinburgh. The
incidents of that interval may be filled in briefly thus:—
Nine Months in London and Birmingham (June 1824–March
1825).—Residing with the Irvings at Islington, or in lodgings near
them, Carlyle in those months made his first acquaintance with
London, and with various persons in it of greater or less note.
Introduced at once to the Stracheys, and to the then celebrated Mr.
and Mrs. Basil Montagu of Bedford Square, it was through them, or
otherwise directly or indirectly through Irving, that he saw
something of Coleridge, Charles Lamb, Allan Cunningham, Bryan
Waller Procter, Crabb Robinson, and others of literary name, besides
such commercial London Scots of Irving’s congregation as Sir Peter
Laurie, Mr. William Hamilton, and Mr. Dinwiddie, and the young
English manufacturing chemist, Mr. Badams of Birmingham. After
Mrs. Strachey and the queenly Mrs. Basil Montagu, his most valued
new friends in this list, he tells us, were Procter, Allan Cunningham,
and Badams. This last, indeed, under pretext of putting him on a
regimen that would cure his dyspepsia, lured him away to
Birmingham for three months; which three months of residence with
Badams in Birmingham, and of rambles with Badams hither and
thither in Warwickshire and sights of Joe Parkes and other
Birmingham notabilities, have to be interpolated therefore in the
general bulk of the London visit. There was also a trip to Dover, in
the company of the Stracheys and the Irvings, with a run of some of
the party, Carlyle one of them, to Paris, for ten days of Parisian sight-
seeing. Altogether, the London visit had been so successful that,
when the tutorial engagement with the Bullers came to an end in the
course of it,—which it did from the impossibility of an adjustment of
Carlyle’s views with Mrs. Buller’s ever-changing plans,—the notion
among his friends was that he could not do better than remain in
London and take his chances as a London man of letters. The
concluding portions of his Schiller had appeared in the London
Magazine during the first months of his visit; and before the end of
1825 the five portions into which the work had been cut up for
magazine purposes had been gathered together, and published by
Messrs. Taylor and Hessey in the form of an octavo volume, with the
title The Life of Friedrich Schiller, bringing the author £100. It was
during his stay in London also that he received his first
communication from Goethe, in the form of a brief letter of thanks
for a copy of the Translation of Wilhelm Meister which had been
sent to Weimar some months before. But, though things seemed thus
to conspire in favour of the detention of Carlyle in London, he had
made up his mind to the contrary; and in March 1825 he turned his
back upon the great city, and was on his way once more to his native
Dumfriesshire.
Nineteen Months of Dumfriesshire Farm-life (March 1825–
October 1826):—For about two months Carlyle was at his father’s
farmhouse of Mainhill, near Ecclefechan, resting from his return-
tour through England, and preparing for the adventure which he had
planned. This was an attempt at tenant-farming on his own account
in that neighbourhood. A letter of his to Mrs. Basil Montagu, of date
May 20, 1825, is still from Mainhill; but on the 26th of that month he
entered on the possession of the adjacent little farm of Hoddam Hill,
which he had taken on lease from his father’s landlord, General
Sharpe,—“a neat, compact little farm, rent £100,” with “a
prettyishlooking cottage.” Here for a whole year he lived, nominally a
tenant-farmer, as his father was, and close to his father, but in reality
entrusting the practical farm-work to his brother Alick, while he
himself, with his mother or one of his sisters for his housekeeper,
delved a little for amusement, rode about for health, and pursued his
studies and literary tasks,—chiefly his projected translation of
Specimens of German Romance for the bookseller Tait of
Edinburgh. There were letters to and from his London friends; there
was once a sight in Annan of poor Irving, whose London troubles and
aberrations were by this time matters of public notoriety; there were
visits to and from neighbours; but, on the whole, the year was one of
industrious loneliness. Though he tells us but little of it, what he does
tell us enables us to see that it was a most important and memorable
year in his recollection. Perhaps in all Carlyle’s life no other year is so
important intrinsically. “I call that year idyllic,” he tells us, “in spite
of its russet coat.” This is general; but he gives us vital particulars. It
was the time, he distinctly says, of his complete spiritual triumph, his
attainment once and for ever to that state of clear and high serenity,
as to all the essentials of religion and moral belief, which enabled
him to understand in his own case “what the old Christian people
meant by conversion,” and which he described afterwards, in the
Teufelsdröckh manner, as the reaching of the harbour of the
“Everlasting Yes” at last. The word happiness was no favourite one in
Carlyle’s vocabulary, with reference to himself at least; but he does
not refuse even this word in describing his new mental condition
through the year at Hoddam Hill. What he felt, he says, was the
attainment of “a constant inward happiness that was quite royal and
supreme, in which all temporal evil was transient and insignificant.”
Even his bodily health seemed to be improving; and the effect
extended itself most manifestly to his temper and disposition
towards others. “My thoughts were very peaceable,” he says, “full of
pity and humanity as they had never been before.” In short, he was
no longer the moody, defiant, mainly despondent and sarcastic
Carlyle he had been, or had seemed to be to superficial observers,
through the past Edinburgh days, but a calmer, wiser, and more self-
possessed Carlyle, with depths of tenderness under all his strength
and fearlessness,—the Carlyle that he was to be recognised as being
by all who knew him through the next twenty years of his life, and
that indeed he continued to be essentially to the very end. To what
agency does he attribute this “immense victory,” as he calls it, which
he had thus permanently gained over his own spirit in this thirtieth
year of his age, passed at Hoddam Hill? “Pious musings,
communings silent and spontaneous with Fact and Nature in those
poor Annandale localities,”—these, including the sound on Sundays
of the Hoddam kirk-bell coming to him touchingly from the plain
below, “like the departing voice of eighteen centuries,” are
mentioned as accounting for much, but not for all. “I then felt, and
still feel, endlessly indebted to Goethe in the business. He, in his
fashion, I perceived, had travelled the steep rocky road before me,
the first of the moderns.” Not to be forgotten either, as that which
tinged the year to perfection in its “idyllic” character, was the flitting
across the scene of the presence that was dearest to him. His pledged
bride, no longer at Haddington, but residing with her relatives in
Nithsdale, made her first visit to his family in this year; they rode

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The Prodigal Son in English and

American Literature: Five Hundred

The Prodigal Son in English

Published Titles Include:

The Prodigal Son

. Reading the Prodigal Son 

‘Prodigal’ is an adjective with a chequered past. Its Latin root is prodigus,

 The Prodigal Son

Reading the Prodigal Son 

 The Prodigal Son

Reading the Prodigal Son 

 The Prodigal Son

The Prodigal Son in biblical studies

Reading the Prodigal Son 

 The Prodigal Son

Reading the Prodigal Son 

 The Prodigal Son

Reading the Prodigal Son 

 The Prodigal Son

Reading the Prodigal Son 

 The Prodigal Son

Reading the Prodigal Son 

 The Prodigal Son

Reading the Prodigal Son 

The Prodigal Son in literary studies

 The Prodigal Son

Reading the Prodigal Son 

There is no escape. The relationship to the family and its expression in

 The Prodigal Son

Reading the Prodigal Son 

The loss of a member of the family is the basis of the structure’s

 The Prodigal Son

Nevertheless, for Proehl, the second characteristic of potential for

Reading the Prodigal Son 

 The Prodigal Son

Reading the Prodigal Son 

 The Prodigal Son

In his inﬂuential article ‘Terence Improved: The Paradigm of the

 The Prodigal Son

The inﬂuence of Roman comedies

Wilson highlighted the importance of one of these reworked Latin

 The Prodigal Son

The Prodigal as rebellious son

 The Prodigal Son

 The Prodigal Son

Maintaining the status quo

By invoking the character of the Prodigal Son, they were able to

 The Prodigal Son

But see! a wandering night-moth enters,

With awe she views the candle blazing

What passions in her small heart whirling,

Carlyle’s own distinct statement in the Reminiscences is that

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