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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN
ADAPTATION AND VISUAL CULTURE
Anthony Burgess,
Stanley Kubrick
and A Clockwork
Orange
Edited by
Matthew Melia
Georgina Orgill
Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture
Series Editors
Julie Grossman, Le Moyne College, Syracuse, NY, USA
R. Barton Palmer, Atlanta, GA, USA
This series addresses how adaptation functions as a principal mode of text
production in visual culture. What makes the series distinctive is its focus
on visual culture as both targets and sources for adaptations, and a vision
to include media forms beyond film and television such as videogames,
mobile applications, interactive fiction and film, print and nonprint media,
and the avant-garde. As such, the series will contribute to an expan-
sive understanding of adaptation as a central, but only one, form of a
larger phenomenon within visual culture. Adaptations are texts that are
not singular but complexly multiple, connecting them to other pervasive
plural forms: sequels, series, genres, trilogies, authorial oeuvres, appro-
priations, remakes, reboots, cycles and franchises. This series especially
welcomes studies that, in some form, treat the connection between adap-
tation and these other forms of multiplicity. We also welcome proposals
that focus on aspects of theory that are relevant to the importance of
adaptation as connected to various forms of visual culture.
Matthew Melia · Georgina Orgill
Editors
Anthony Burgess,
Stanley Kubrick
and A Clockwork
Orange
Editors
Matthew Melia Georgina Orgill
Arts, Culture and Communication University Archives and Special
Kingston University Collections Centre
Kingston-Upon-Thames, UK University of the Arts London
London, UK
ISSN 2634-629X ISSN 2634-6303 (electronic)

Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture
ISBN 978-3-031-05598-0 ISBN 978-3-031-05599-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05599-7
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
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Acknowledgements
The editors of this book would like to thank the following for their
support: the staff of the University of Arts London: London College
of Communication, Special Collections and Archives, Stanley Kubrick
Archive especially manager Sarah Mahurter; the staff of the International
Anthony Burgess Archive especially director Professor Andrew Biswell and
archivist Anna Edwards; Professor Julian Rodriguez at Kingston Univer-
sity; the Higher Educational Funding Council for England (HEFKE)
whose funding allowed the conference out of which this book emerges to
take place; Mr. Jan Harlan; James Fenwick for being a sounding board;
and our families Jamie, Nikki and Charlotte for the time given to put
this book together. We would especially like to thank all those who have
contributed to the book for the timeliness, cooperation and especially
their chapter contributions!
v
Contents
Introduction 1
Matthew Melia and Georgina Orgill
Anthony Burgess and Stanley Kubrick

Dangerous Arts: The Clash Between Anthony Burgess,
Stanley Kubrick, A Clockwork Orange, and the World 25
Filippo Ulivieri
“A Major Statement on the Contemporary Human
Condition”: Anthony Burgess and the Aftermath
of A Clockwork Orange 47
Andrew Biswell
Language and Adaptation

Scripting A Clockwork Orange 69
Matthew Melia
‘The Colours of the Real World Only Seem Really Real
When You Viddy Them on the Screen’: The Adaptation
of Nadsat in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange 95
Benet Vincent and Jim Clarke
vii
viii CONTENTS
“Language, Language”: The Social Politics of ‘Goloss’

in Time for a Tiger and A Clockwork Orange 117
Julian Preece
20th Century Contexts: Architectural, Art Historical and

Theoretical Approaches
Art and Violence: The Legacy of Avant-Garde Art
in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange 133
Dijana Metlić
Architecture and Freedom in A Clockwork Orange 155
Joseph Darlington
Glazzies Wide Open: Spectral Torture, Kubrick,
and A Clockwork Orange (A Brainie by Fifteen Thinks) 183
Murray Pomerance
20th Century Contexts: A Clockwork Orange and the Cold

War
When Burgess Met the Stilyagi on a White Night:
Subcultures, Hegemony and Resistance in the Soviet Roots
of A Clockwork Orange’s Droogs 205
Cristian Pasotti
Alex’s Voice in A Clockwork Orange: Nadsat, Sinny
and Cold War Brainwashing Scares 221
Joy McEntee
A Clockwork Orange in 21st Century

A Thing Living, and Not Growing 245
Ajay Hothi
A Clockwork Orange and its Representations of Sexual
Violence as Torture: Stanley Kubrick and Francis Bacon 265
Karen A. Ritzenhoff
CONTENTS ix
Music and A Clockwork Orange

Transforming Variations: Music in the Novel, Film,
and Play A Clockwork Orange 285
Christine Lee Gengaro
David Bowie and A Clockwork Orange: Two Sides
of the Same Golly 303
Sean Redmond
Afterword 319
Index 323
Notes on Contributors
Biswell Andrew is a professor of Modern Literature at Manchester

Metropolitan University and director of the International Anthony
Burgess Foundation. Publications include The Real Life of Anthony
Burgess (Picador), A Clockwork Orange: The Restored Edition (Penguin
Modern Classics), Obscenity and the Arts (Pariah Press) and No End
to Enderby (Lux). He has edited Burgess’s first novel, A Vision of Battle-
ments, for the Irwell Edition, published by Manchester University Press.
He is currently editing the letters and short stories of Anthony Burgess.
Clarke Jim is an assistant professor of English Literature at the
University of Cappadocia, and has previously taught at universities in
Ireland, Britain and Belarus. He is the author of three monographs,
including The Aesthetics of Anthony Burgess (2017), Science Fiction and
Catholicism (2018) and the forthcoming Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork
Orange. He is also the co-director of the Ponying the Slovos project,
which examines invented languages, especially in translation.
Darlington Joseph is a programme leader for B.A.(Hons) Digital
Animation with Illustration at Futureworks Media School. His most
recent academic books are Christine Brooke-Rose and Post-War Litera-
ture (Palgrave, 2020) and The Experimentalists (Bloomsbury, 2021). He
is the co-editor of The Manchester Review of Books and is on Twitter at
@Joe_Darlo.
xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Dr. Gengaro Christine Lee has taught in the music department at

Los Angeles City College for nearly twenty years. An avid writer and
researcher, she often gravitates towards topics that address music and
popular media or music and literature. She has published two books:
Listening to Stanley Kubrick: The Music in His Films (Scarecrow Press,
2013) and Experiencing: Chopin (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), and
has recently edited the Irwell Edition of Anthony Burgess’s This Man and
Music (Manchester University Press, 2020). She has presented papers in
the United States, Europe, and Southeast Asia, and her published work
appears in numerous journals and books, including The Encyclopedia
of Hip Hop and The Worlds of Back to the Future. She has been the
program annotator for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra since 2007.
Hothi Ajay is a writer and film-maker. He is a senior lecturer in Crit-
ical Studies at Kingston University and London Metropolitan University.
His writing appears in publications including Artfoum, Art in America,
Frieze and Art Monthly; he has made documentaries for broadcast and
exhibition, including for Serpentine Gallery, e-flux and BBC Radio 2 and
Radio 4. He is the author of THIS IS ART WRITING (2018), editor of
A CUT A SCRATCH A SCORE (2015).
McEntee Joy SFHEA is a senior lecturer in the Department of English,
Creative Writing and Film at the University of Adelaide. Her work focuses
on American film, especially Stanley Kubrick, and literature-to-film adap-
tation. It has appeared in The Bloomsbury Companion to Stanley Kubrick,
Camera Obscura, Screening the Past, Senses of Cinema, Film Criticism,
Adaptation, Literature/Film Quarterly and the Journal of Adaptation in
Film and Performance.
Melia Matthew is a senior lecturer in Literature, Film and Media at
Kingston University. His doctorate was on The Theatre of the Absurd,
Architecture and Cruelty and his current research interest includes the
work of both Ken Russell and Stanley Kubrick. He is the co-editor of The
Jaws Book (Bloomsbury, 2020). He is an editor of the forthcoming The
Films of Ken Russell (EUP, 2021) and is working on a monograph on
Russell’s Gothic (LUP/Auteur, 2023). Matt has contributed to a variety
of publications including Shadow Cinema: The Historical and Production
Contexts of Unmade Films (Fenwick, Foster and Eldridge, eds. 2021), The
Bloomsbury Companion to Stanley Kubrick (Hunter and Abrams, eds.
2021) and Reframing Cult Westerns (Broughton, ed. 2020). In 2017,
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii
he convened the conference Ken Russell: Perspectives, Reception and

Legacy (Kingston University) and in 2018, he co-convened the confer-
ence A Clockwork Symposium: A Clockwork Orange—New Perspectives.
Metlić Dijana is an associate professor of Art History at the Academy
of Arts, University of Novi Sad. As of 2021, she has written four books in
which she explored connections between fine arts, photography and film,
and among them Stanley Kubrick between Painting and Film (Belgrade:
Film Centre Serbia, 2013). Her papers have been published in many
Serbian and international academic journals and companions. Among
others, she has authored the following papers: “Unmasking the Society:
Use of Masks in Kubrick’s Films” (Cinergie: Il Cinema e le altre Arti,
no. 12, 2017), “Stanley Kubrick and Hieronymus Bosch: In the Garden
of Earthly Delights” (Essais, Hors-série 4, 2018), “Zenitist Cinema:
Influences of Marinetti and Mayakovsky” (In: Gunter Berghaus, Oleh
S. Ilnytzkyj, Gabriella Elina Imposti and Christina Lodder. Interna-
tional Yearbook of Futurism Studies, vol. 9, De Gruyter, 2019) and
“Stanley Kubrick and Art” (In: Nathan Abrams and IQ Hunter. Blooms-
bury Companion to Stanley Kubrick, Bloomsbury Academic, 2021).
She took part in a number of national and international conferences.
Her primary areas of research are modern art and historical avant-gardes,
with a particular focus on the interrelations between film, photography
and painting.
Orgill Georgina is the Stanley Kubrick Archivist at University of the
Arts London. She has appeared in radio and television documentaries
on Stanley Kubrick and his archive. She is a series editor for the
Stanley Kubrick series at Liverpool University Press and has contributed
to the Bloomsbury Companion to Stanley Kubrick (Bloomsbury, 2021).
Pasotti Cristian graduated in English literature, Italian Languages and
Film Studies. He works for the SRG-SSr (the public Swiss radio-
television) and he is currently completing his PhD at the University of
Luzern about the representation of youth rebellion between the 1950s
and the 1960s, and the roles of music and style in both literature and
films.
Pomerance Murray is an independent scholar living in Toronto
and adjunct professor in the School of Media and Communications
at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is the author of A Voyage with
Hitchcock (SUNY, 2021), The Film Cheat: Film Artifice and Viewing
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Pleasure (Bloomsbury, 2020), Grammatical Dreams (Green Integer,

2020), Virtuoso: Film Performance and the Actor’s Magic (Bloomsbury,
2019), A Dream of Hitchcock (SUNY, 2019), and other volumes. Color It
True: Impressions of Cinema is forthcoming from Bloomsbury in 2022.
Preece Julian is a professor of German at Swansea University.
He has published mainly on twentieth-century authors such as Elias
and Veza Canetti, Günter Grass and Kafka. His contribution to the BFI
Classics series on the film The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (dirs. von
Trotta and Schlöndorff) is forthcoming in 2022. The current chapter
belongs to an AHRC funded project entitled “Bilingual British Novel-
ists: Language Ambassadors or Mental Migrants?” which was carried out
through the Open World Research Initiative.
Redmond Sean is a professor of Screen and Design at Deakin University.
He is the author of Celebrity (Routledge, 2019), Liquid Space: Science
Fiction Film and Television in the Digital Age (I.B. Taurus, 2017) and The
Cinema of Takeshi Kitano: Flowering Blood (Columbia, 2013). He is the
founding editor of Celebrity Studies, short-listed for best new academic
journal in 2011.
Dr. Ritzenhoff Karen A. is a professor in the Department of
Communication at Central Connecticut State University where she is
also affiliated with the cinema studies and honours programmes. She
teaches classes in visual communication, film, documentary and media
studies, as well as women and film. Ritzenhoff is co-Chair of the
Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Programme. She has published
several co-edited volumes on war films and is collaborating on a new
anthology on Gender, Power and Identity in The Films of Stanley Kubrick
with Jeremi Szaniawski and Dijana Metlić. Ritzenhoff’s most recent publi-
cations are Mediated Terrorism in the 21st Century (Palgrave, 2021)
with Elena Caoduro and Karen Randell as well as Afrofuturism in Black
Panther: Gender, Identity, and the Re-Making of Blackness (Rowman and
Littlefield, 2021) with Renée T. White.
Ulivieri Filippo is an independent scholar and writer. The leading
expert in Kubrick’s cinema in Italy, he is the author of Stanley Kubrick
And Me: Thirty Years at His Side (2016), a biography of Kubrick’s
personal assistant Emilio D’Alessandro and 2001 Between Kubrick and
Clarke: The Genesis, Making and Authorship of a Masterpiece (2019). His
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv
research on Kubrick has been presented in several international confer-

ences and published in books, journals, magazines and newspapers. He is
co-scenarist of the documentary S Is For Stanley (2015), winner of the
David di Donatello award for best documentary feature.
Vincent Benet works at Coventry University where he lectures in applied
linguistics. His research interests revolve around applications of corpus
linguistics in a range of areas including English for academic purposes,
stylistics, pragmatics and translation. He is the co-founder of A Clockwork
Orange Parallel Translation Corpus Project.
List of Figures
Scripting A Clockwork Orange

Fig. 1 Alex attacks his Droogs (I) 79
Fig. 2 Alex attacks his Droogs (II) 80
Fig. 3 Alex attacks his Droogs (III): ‘Russian dancing’ 80
Fig. 4 Alex and the Droogs by the Thamesmead Boating Lake,
still from A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick 1971 81
Fig. 5 Location photography (Stanley Kubrick Archive).
With thanks to SK Film Archive LLC, Warner Bros,
and University of the Arts London 84
Fig. 6 Kubrick’s Gothic Imagery (1) Alex and his Droogs enter
the Underpass 85
Fig. 7 Kubrick’s Gothic Imagery (II): Alex as Gothic Monster 85
Fig. 8 Kubrick’s Gothic Imagery (III): Entering F. Alexander’s
‘Home’ 86
‘The Colours of the Real World Only Seem Really Real

When You Viddy Them on the Screen’: The Adaptation of
Nadsat in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange
Fig. 1 Number of words (types) per category in book and film 106
Fig. 2 Frequencies (per 10,000 words) of categories of Nadsat 106
Fig. 3 Comparison of relative frequencies (per 10,000 words)
of Core Nadsat vs. all other categories of Nadsat in book
and film 109
xvii
xviii LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 4 Instances of droog(ie) taken from the film in order

of appearance 110
Art and Violence: The Legacy of Avant-Garde Art in

Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange
Fig. 1 Alex’s room, still from A Clockwork Orange, Stanley
Kubrick, 1971 136
Fig. 2 The Cat lady’s phallic sculpture, still from A Clockwork
Orange, Stanley Kubrick, 1971 140
Fig. 3 The Korova Milk-Bar set, still from A Clockwork Orange,
Stanley Kubrick, 1971 143
Architecture and Freedom in A Clockwork Orange

Fig. 1 Illustration from Newman’s study demonstrating
the concept of “natural surveillance” 158
Fig. 2 Establishing shot from the gang-fight scene, still
from A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick 1971 159
Fig. 3 Interior of Flatblock 18A featuring Alex and Droogs.
Mural visible on the right. Stills from A Clockwork Orange,
Stanley Kubrick, 1971 160
Fig. 4 Close-up of Dim with vandalised mural in background, still
from A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick, 1971 161
Fig. 5 The Ludovico treatment centre with approaching guards,
still from A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick, 1971 162
Fig. 6 Exterior establishing shot of HOME. Still from A Clockwork
Orange, Stanley Kubrick, 1971 163
Fig. 7 Interior shot of HOME with occupants relaxing as doorbell
rings. Still from A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick, 1971 163
Fig. 8 Interior shot of HOME, the writer’s wife approaching
the front door. Still from A Clockwork Orange, Stanley
Kubrick, 1971 164
Fig. 9 Hume Crescents as shown on World in Action (1978),
Moss Side redevelopments to the top and top-left. Still
from still from ITV show The World in Action, episode
“There’s No Place Like Hulme” 1978 166
Fig. 10 Norton US paperback edition 1963, featuring Teddy Boys 167
Fig. 11 Ballantine paperback edition 1965, featuring Beatniks 168
Fig. 12 Ballantine paperback edition 1969, featuring a hippy 169
LIST OF FIGURES xix
Fig. 13 Location research slides from A Clockwork Orange, Stanley

Kubrick Archive. With thanks to SK Film Archive LLC,
Warner Bros. And University of the Arts London 175
Fig. 14 Location research slides, Stanley Kubrick Archive.
With thanks to SK Film Archive LLC, Warner Bros.
And University of the Arts London 175
A Clockwork Orange and its Representations of Sexual

Violence as Torture: Stanley Kubrick and Francis Bacon
Fig. 1 The Catlady scream, still from A Clockwork Orange, Stanley
Kubrick, 1971 276
Fig. 2 Alex’s scream, still from A Clockwork Orange, Stanley
Kubrick, 1971 278
David Bowie and A Clockwork Orange: Two Sides of the

Same Golly
Fig. 1 It’s in his Icy Hands: Valentine’s Day meets A Clockwork
Orange (A still from Valentine’s Day, dir. Indrani
Pal-Chaudhuri and Markus Klinko) 311
Introduction
Matthew Melia and Georgina Orgill
1 This Book
At the time of writing, it is nearly sixty years since the publication of
Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange (1962), and it is fifty years
since Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation was released in the US (1971). By
the time of publication and by the time you read this, it will be 50 years
since the film’s release in the UK in 1972, hence this is a landmark period.
Burgess’s book stands as a key moment of change in the landscape of
post-war English literature. It’s the dystopian tale of young Alex (played
memorably by Malcolm McDowell in the film adaptation), an intelligent
teenage thug and leader of a gang of “Droogs” who spend their evenings
M. Melia (B)
Department of Humanities; Department of Journalism, Publishing and Media,
Kingston School of Art School of Creative and Cultural Industries, Kingston
University, Kingston-Upon-Thames, UK
e-mail: m.melia@kingston.ac.uk
G. Orgill
University Archives and Special Collections Centre, University of the Arts
London, London, UK
e-mail: g.orgill@arts.ac.uk
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2023
M. Melia and G. Orgill (eds.), Anthony Burgess, Stanley Kubrick and A
Clockwork Orange, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05599-7_1
2 M. MELIA AND G. ORGILL
indulging in mindless, opportunistic “Ultraviolence”. Written in a fabri-

cated teen language, “Nadsat,” a mix of Russian, Malayan, army and
working-class slang and other linguistic components, A Clockwork Orange
was radical and experimental and its impact (whatever its author’s inten-
tions) would ricochet through the post-war youth culture of the early
1960s and beyond to the present day. Its themes of violence, choice, free
will and the rights of the individual, as Alex is forced to undergo the
tortuous “Ludovico Technique” by the state to alter his behaviour, are
as resonant today as they were in 1962. As the International Anthony
Burgess Foundation reminds us:
Its impact on literary, musical, and visual culture has been extensive. The
novel is concerned with the conflict between the individual and the state,
the punishment of young criminals and the possibility or otherwise of
redemption. The linguistic originality of the book and the moral questions
it raises are as relevant now as they everywhere.1
The anniversaries of Stanley Kubrick’s film also form part of a cele-

bratory moment in Kubrick studies. They follow hard on the heels of
the fiftieth anniversary of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) in 2018 and
the twentieth anniversary of Kubrick’s death and his final film Eyes Wide
Shut (1999) in 2019. Furthermore, fifty years of A Clockwork Orange
also serves as a reminder that is half a century since a dramatic shift
took place in the landscape, tone and style of British cinema: from the
counter-cultural pop stylings of the 1960s to the nihilism and dystopian
sensibilities and aesthetics of the early 1970s. As Peter Kramer also
reminds us:
In the late 1960s, the dramatic liberalisation of film-industry self-regulation

and official censorship of films in the US and Britain led to the production
of a large number of films featuring previously unseen levels of sexual
explicitness and graphically depicted violence. In the UK, the release of
such films gave rise to dire warnings about their likely Impact on British
society.2
Alongside Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971), A Clockwork Orange

embodies more than any other film, this moment. It is, one might argue
(somewhat contentiously given Burgess’s increasingly complex attitude to
both his own novel and Kubrick’s film) a text that has two authors, and
while both film and novel have been the subject of various and many
INTRODUCTION 3
independent studies, up to now there has been no single study or collec-

tion in print form dedicated to looking at both together and how they
intersect. This book aims to bring together a body of contemporary
critical writing which considers such issues as their shared history; ques-
tions of authorship and adaptation; the Burgess/Kubrick relationship;
the extended afterlife of book and film and their cultural impact; their
position in relation to the cold war and cold war fiction; art historical
influences and contexts; theoretical and philosophical investigation; and
their position in relation to contemporary movements such as #MeToo.
Other publications dedicated to either Burgess or Kubrick have necessarily
drawn one up on the other, however it is the intention of this collection
to provide equal weight to both, to consider A Clockwork Orange not
simply as a Burgess text or a Kubrick text but as a cultural phenomenon
and artefact whose authorship is simultaneously complex, contested and
shared.
2 A Clockwork Symposium:
A Clockwork Orange---New Perspectives
In November 2018, more than 50 academics, scholars and practitioners
from across a variety of disciplines (film and filmmaking, literature, fine
art and design, etc.) gathered for a major international conference, A
Clockwork Symposium: A Clockwork Orange—New Perspectives, at Univer-
sity of the Arts London (UAL), home of the Stanley Kubrick Archive.
This was the third time such a gathering had occurred. In 2017, the
International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester held a similar
event marking Burgess’s centenary which engaged more broadly with the
author’s canon of work. Earlier, in 2012, the Burgess foundation hosted
the event Fifty Years of A Clockwork Orange dedicated to the novel’s
half century. The 2018 event was the second major international event to
deal specifically with A Clockwork Orange and the relationship between
Burgess and Kubrick, film, and novel. Several of the chapters included
in this collection are developed from papers given at this conference.
However, this book should not be classed as ‘conference proceedings’;
the writing within has been evolved and developed and is augmented
with a variety of chapters which were not presented at the event. The
book does, however, also offer a few “firsts” including a study by leading
Burgess scholar, author and director of the International Anthony Burgess
Foundation, Andrew Biswell. At the 2018 conference, Biswell discussed
Burgess’s lost “sequel” to A Clockwork Orange: The Clockwork Condition.

In the intervening three years, the full manuscript (although, as Biswell
indicates, it exists in fragments and in note form) has been uncovered in
the archive of the Burgess Foundation. Biswell’s chapter is the first major
study to deal in depth with it, and to consider it as part of the strange
“afterlife” of the novel (which not only included the film but also a “play
with music” written by Burgess in 1987).
Much of the research for the book has been carried out, where
possible, across two key sites: the Stanley Kubrick Archive at University of
the Arts London and the Archive of the International Anthony Burgess
Foundation, Manchester, which opened in 2007 and 2003, respectively.
These two repositories have been crucial in the advancement of both
Burgess and Kubrick studies and are the first ports of call for anyone
with a professional or personal interest in both writer and director. Both
archives are an invaluable resource for researchers and have provided
primary source material for a range of existing cutting-edge, contempo-
rary, critical studies of both author and film maker, not least Jim Clarke’s
The Aesthetics of Anthony Burgess—Fire of Words 3 and more recently James
Fenwick’s Stanley Kubrick Produces.4 Peter Kramer’s book: A Clockwork
Orange (part of the ongoing Palgrave “Controversies” series) makes full
use of the Stanley Kubrick archive in detailing the film’s marketing, recep-
tion, mythologies, position within the changing culture of British cinema
and the British film industry, censorship issues and Kubrick’s withdrawal
of it. Kramer’s book is the most comprehensive text on this aspect of the
film, and while across its chapters, this book recognises and draws upon
these issues, it recognises also that they have been covered extensively
elsewhere.
Despite the increasingly ambivalent feelings of both Burgess and
Kubrick towards A Clockwork Orange and its position within the canon
of their works, it became a lasting legacy for both. And in the year 2018–
2019, A Clockwork Orange was the most requested film at the Stanley
Kubrick Archives as well as being in the top three most requested sections
for other years prior and since. Here, in this volume, many of the authors
have drawn across both archives to offer critical studies of A Clockwork
Orange, through its two authors. In Matt Melia’s chapter for instance, the
author draws in detail upon a range of archived script material and Filippo
Ulivieri in his chapter offers a detailed analysis of the Kubrick/Burgess
relationship drawing across material housed at both sites.
INTRODUCTION 5
3 Novel and Film

Anthony Burgess wrote A Clockwork Orange on his return to the UK
in 1959 from Malaya where he had lived since 1954 (with a year in
Brunei from 1958). He had worked as a teacher with the British colo-
nial service, at a privileged private school in Kuala Kangsar. Here he was
exposed to a diversity of cultures and languages (which would contribute
to patchwork composition of the novel’s teen slang, “Nadsat”). In Malaya
he witnessed, first-hand, the British retreat from Empire, the Commu-
nist Guerrilla uprisings, and the transition to an independent government
in 1957 (a period dramatised in his three novels which comprise The
Malayan Trilogy, also published as The Long Day Wanes, between 1956
and 1959—later discussed in this book by Julian Preece). A Clockwork
Orange was, in part a reaction to the unfamiliar and culturally changed
Britain he returned to and which both appalled and fascinated him. The
Britain suffering the privations of war and rationing was gone, replaced
by a Britain of youth tribes (an era of Teddy Boys, Mods and Rockers),
new forms of popular culture and consumerism. This was, as he saw it, “A
place on the edge of cultural annihilation, where even literature seemed
powerless to halt the rising tide of vulgarity and degeneration”.5
Certain mythologies have also developed over the years surrounding
the genesis of the novel—perpetuated to some extent by the author
himself. Firstly, that it was, in parts, influenced by the assault on Burgess’s
first wife Llewella “Lynne” Wilson in 1944 by a group of American
soldiers during the London black-out. This is perhaps most evident
in Alex and the Droogs’ assault on the writer F. Alexander’s wife (in
Burgess’s own 1969 unmade film script, the writer is even renamed
“Burgess”). He would later qualify the assumption that he had used his
wife’s trauma, and challenge what he saw as assumptions in the media
over the relationship between art and life and the responsibility of the
artist:
In 1971 Stanley Kubrick made a film of this book. The title, admittedly
a fascinating one, made two appearances in Evening news headlines last
week: “Clockwork Oranges and Ticking Bombs” and “Clockwork Orange
gang killed my wife”. The second was an alleged statement of my own,
which I here and now refute. My first wife was indeed assaulted in blacked
out London by a group of American deserters, and it is conceivable that
the shock and injury she suffered led to her death 24 years later. The subtle
implication of the headline seems to be that by inventing certain characters
and a certain book title, I in a sense willed her injury and death and those
of victims assaulted as she was. In other words, the artist has a sort of
mystical responsibility for those events of the real world which he merely
transcribes in his art.6
Much has also been made regarding Burgess’s alleged misdiagnosis

with a brain tumour on his return to the UK and that the book was
written amid a flurry of work to provide for his family in the case of the
worst. As John Banville has pointed out however, Burgess gave several
different accounts of this but there is no hard medical evidence for it.7
Andrew Biswell told Banville that:
In the years after 1959, the events which he referred to as his "medical
death-sentence" and "terminal year" became part of the performance that
he could be relied on to deploy for the benefit of interviewers - but the
details of what he said on these subjects are far from consistent. The
disappearing tumour was simply absorbed into Burgess’s extensive series
of half-reliable anecdotes, and the process of its fictionalization would bear
comparison with the wildly conflicting accounts that he gave of his family
history.8
Filippo Ulivieri discusses this further in the second chapter of this

book (as well as Burgess’s changing relationship with the film) and as
he notes, Burgess was not averse to misdirection in interviews, deliberate
obfuscation and sometimes dramatic self-contradiction.
Initially, Kubrick rejected adapting the novel in the 1960s when it was
optioned to him (from a script by writer Terry Southern and photogra-
pher Michael Cooper), but he would later return to it after completing
his science fiction epic 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and after the aban-
donment of his pet project and labour of love Napoleon in 1970. Perhaps,
more than Napoleon (which would have rivalled 2001 in terms of scale and
vision), his choice to engage with this much smaller production was all
the more appropriate. There are numerous continuities with 2001: from
its design led mise-en-scene to its science fiction aesthetic and narrative
framework. Numerous scholars have commented upon the intertextuality
and continuity between the two texts. Peter Kramer has suggested that
the Starchild’s final gaze into the camera of a hope for humanity at the
end of 2001 is challenged by Alex’s malevolent star into the camera at the
beginning of A Clockwork Orange. Rod Munday has noted the restaging
INTRODUCTION 7
of 2001’s opening hominid fight in the fight between the Droogs and
Billy Boy’s gang (on a floor which resembles a lunar landscape).9
A Clockwork Orange stands out in both the Burgess and Kubrick
canons for a variety of reasons. It is somewhat atypical of Burgess’s
writing. In over 30 novels, he only wrote two other outwardly dystopian
novels, The Wanting Seed (1962) and 1985 (1978) of which half is an
extended rumination on George Orwell’s 1984 and the other is a short
dystopian novella. If one buys the Burgess misdiagnosis story, one might
argue even that both novel and film were made as stopgaps in their author
and director’s body of work. Burgess would later say he wrote the novel
for the money, as well as calling it a “Christian sermon” (an example of
his habit of contradicting himself). Of all Kubrick’s films, it’s the one that
took him the least time to film (made in a year) and the only one not to
use the studio to film in.
Peter Kramer writes in detail about the events leading to its produc-
tion, reminding us that on 3rd February 1970, the New York Times had
reported that Kubrick would begin shooting in London in the summer
of that year and was “writing the screenplay himself” and that this film
was a “stop-gap measure caused by the delay of a much weightier film
project: Once A Clockwork Orange is completed, Mr Kubrick plans to
return to Napoleon, an epic scale treatment on which he had been working
since July 1968”.10 Kramer contends that rather than being a “stop-
gap” project, A Clockwork Orange was a project that had run parallel
to Napoleon and had been in the back of his mind since Terry Southern
had given him a version of the script during the filming of 2001: A Space
Odyssey. If it were not for the horde of pre-production research mate-
rial in the Stanley Kubrick Archive which services the finest detail in the
film, it would be tempting also to consider Kubrick’s film also as some-
thing of a stopgap, an in-between project, a film he had initially passed on
making in the 1960s and which he only returned to post 2001: A Space
Odyssey, and after the failure of his Napoleon project. Kubrick produced
the film in about a year from start to finish. The wealth of detailed pre-
production material at the Stanley Kubrick Archive dates from 1970 the
phenomenal rate at which both pre-productions, shooting and postpro-
duction was carried out—between 1970 and 1971. Reviewing the detail
and minutiae of the production, location, costume and design research
material at the Stanley Kubrick archive, the breadth of this achievement,
of getting the film together in such a small time, becomes clear—but it
also gives credence to the possibility that Kubrick was researching it at

the same time as he was working on Napoleon.
It is interesting to note from the very start how both film and novel,
despite their notoriety, fame and popularity, occupy something of a liminal
position within the respective canon of works of their creators: Burgess
would go on to have a complex relationship with his novel (as Ulivieri
discusses in the chapter “Dangerous arts: The clash between Anthony
Burgess, Stanley Kubrick, A Clockwork Orange and the World” of this
collection) and would latterly dismiss it. Correspondences housed in the
archive of the Burgess Foundation indicate an irascible author who, over
time, fell dramatically out of love with both his own text, its film adapta-
tion and its director. Burgess’s reasons for his changing attitude towards
his book are many and varied (and form part of the content of this study)
and in one letter he complains (blaming Kubrick’s films!) that all anyone
wants to talk about is A Clockwork Orange—and that he had written 30
other books since then!
However, an article for the New Yorker in 1973 in which Burgess
offers insight into the development of the novel, provides some useful
initial insight. The title, he claimed, derives from pub slang overheard in
a London drinking establishment.
I first heard the expression “as queer as a clockwork orange” in a London

pub before the Second World War. It is an old Cockney slang phrase,
implying a queerness or madness so extreme as to subvert nature, since
could any notion be more bizarre than that of a clockwork orange? The
image appealed to me as something not just fantastic but obscurely mean-
ingful, surrealistic but also obscenely real. The forced marriage of an
organism to a mechanism, of a thing living, growing, sweet, juicy, to a
cold dead artifact—is that solely a concept of nightmare?11
The name of the central character, Alex was a comic derivation, so he

claimed of Alexander the Great.
The hero of both the book and the film is a young thug called Alex. I
gave him that name because of its international character (you could not
have a British or Russian boy called Chuck or Butch), and also because
of its ironic connotations. Alex is a comic reduction of Alexander the
Great, slashing his way through the world and conquering it. But he is
changed into the conquered—impotent, wordless. He was a law (a lex)
unto himself; he becomes a creature without a lex or lexicon. The hidden
INTRODUCTION 9
puns, of course, have nothing to do with the real meaning of the name
Alexander, which is “defender of men.”12
Kubrick displayed if not the same, then a similar disenchantment with

his film. While the controversy surrounding the withdrawal of A Clock-
work Orange has been covered in detail elsewhere especially in Peter
Kramer’s book (which is unparalleled in its forensic study of the situation),
it’s worth noting here that in the recent (as yet uncatalogued) deposit
of new material in the Kubrick archive, correspondence with Warner
Brothers show that a European re-release of the film was being consid-
ered in 1977, everywhere except the UK (see below). While Kubrick had
legitimate concerns regarding the safety of his family (see below), it is
interesting to note that in 1977, he was also locked in a dispute over the
Labour Finance Act of 1974 which was coming into effect and would
ensure the removal of tax breaks for workers from outside of the UK who
had been in the country longer than 9 years. Archived material shows
that he lobbied Chancellor of the exchequer Dennis Healey and (more
politely) conservative shadow chancellor Geoffrey Howe and made threats
that he and his US ex pats working in the British Film industry would
take their money and talent and move to Europe.13 It’s hard not to see
his refusal to re-release A Clockwork Orange as a bargaining chip in this
debacle. If Kubrick saw the opportunity to use his film as an asset, despite
his feelings about its media coverage, as Andrew Biswell indicates later
in this book, Burgess, despite later trying to distance himself from his
novel and Kubrick’s film, also saw several opportunities to capitalise on
it (and its notoriety), with both a philosophical non-fiction “sequel” and
the musical stage version.
4 Novel and Film: Reception

One of the other myths that has developed around the film is that Kubrick
suddenly withdrew his film from release. This is both true and untrue. He
did not pull it from general release during its initial run but did block its
re-release in 1976. As Kramer reminds us, it ran in cinemas until 1974
when it was eventually pulled by Kubrick, allegedly on account of threats
to his family. In fact, it had a longer than usual theatrical run, and as
Kramer notes:
Under the headline ‘Clockwork Orange, London Perennial, now in its third
year’ an article in the American trade press reported in January 1974 that
the film was still playing in the capital, having generated ‘phenomenal box
office revenues during its extraordinarily long run’ (Daily Variety, 1974)14
He also notes that by 1974, it had played out, but its after-effects rico-
cheted across the British Press with reports of copycat violence, “about
young criminals, the BBFC and censorship, about the state of cinema, and
indeed about the state of the nation”. 15 Warner Brothers had planned a
re-release in 1976, but this was scotched by Kubrick himself. As Kramer
indicates, there was no archival evidence as to why this was, it was widely
assumed that:
In the wake of the controversy surrounding the film in the UK, in partic-
ular accusations that it – and thus its maker – was responsible for a series
of copycat crimes, Kubrick and his family received death threats and that
Kubrick had therefore ‘banned’ the film in this country.16
The film, like the novel before it, had gathered several very favourable
reviews as well as some that were less than favourable (it famously drew
the ire in the press of Christian conservative media campaigner Mary
Whitehouse). However (as Filippo Ulivieri covers in his chapter), one of
the reasons for Burgess’s turning against the film was that his novel from
10 years earlier was drawn into the slipstream of the film’s controversy.
The film drew a range of positive critical reviews, especially from Evening
Standard film critic Alexander Walker, a staunch defender of Kubrick’s
who the director had courted and invited onto the set of 2001: A Space
Odyssey, and A Clockwork Orange. Walker would later write an open letter
to the director in the press in support of the film, begging him to re-
release it and praising its urgency and contemporaneity.17 Walker also
wrote in support of Kubrick and begging him and his fellow American
directors not to leave the country (with their money) on account of the
then Labour government’s proposal to withdraw their tax exemptions.18
The film dominated public conversation. Peter Kramer has noted,
“I would be surprised to find any other film in recent decades which
managed to become as central to public discourse as A Clockwork Orange
did in the UK in 1972 and 1973”. Kramer notes that the increase in
press articles during this time were linked to an already existing growing
anxiety over youth violence and new youth subcultures, with these already
INTRODUCTION 11
present anxieties and growing conservative concerns over the film and its
effect on impressionable youth feeding into each other. Among the head-
lines praising the film where others which condemned it, implicating it
as a cause of copycat crimes.19 The Kubrick archive holds a wide variety
of press cuttings relating to the polarised reaction to the film. The more
reactionary and antagonistic reviews emerged from the more conserva-
tive provinces areas of North Wales20 or Doncaster for instance.21 In one
notable article, Mrs Cripps writes in the Evening News “The Last Film I
saw was Love Story: It couldn’t have been more different than this one”.
Given the tabloid media concerns surrounding the film, we must argue
that A Clockwork Orange not only pre-dates but also anticipates the
“Video Nasties” scare of the early 1980s—with media campaigner Mary
Whitehouse a catalyst in the fervour surrounding both. Kramer writes,
“That concerns about the negative impact A Clockwork Orange might
have on its audience gained prominence in the UK had a lot to do with
the perception that the film held up a mirror to British society”.22 In the
UK, it was released uncut with an “X” rating, however in the US Kubrick
conceded to minor cuts for an “R” release, leading to criticisms of him
compromising his vision. After Kubrick’s withdrawal of the film in the
UK, it would not see an official re-release until 2000, the year after his
death when it played again in cinemas with an “18” certificate. That is not
to say, of course, that it did not enjoy the occasional, secretive midnight
screening—especially at the Scala cinema, in London, which helped to
ensure its cult identity.
On its initial release however, the film did find a large audience among
young people on both sides of the Atlantic. The Stanley Kubrick Archive
contains an abundance of fan letters from the US regarding the film,23
as we well as press cuttings kept by Kubrick detailing its effect on youth
style and the emergence of Clockwork Orange Clubs—evidence of the way
the film became almost immediately part of the fabric of youth culture.24
The cultural legacy of both film and novel is explored later in this book
by Sean Redmond as he discusses its impact on the created personas of
singer David Bowie.
When the novel was released in 1962, Time Magazine wrote of it:
Anthony Burgess has written what looks like a nasty shocker but is really
that rare thing in English letters-a philosophical novel. The point may be
overlooked because the teenage monster, tells all about things in Nadsat,
a weird argot that seems to be all his own. Nadsat is neither gibberish nor
a Joycean exercise. It serves to put Alex where he belongs, half in and half
out of the human race25
Writing in The Observer in 1962, novelist Kingsley Amis also praised

the novel, saying:
I acclaim Anthony Burgess’s new novel as the curiosity of the day […] Mr
Burgess has written a fine farrago of outrageousness one which incidentally
suggest a view of juvenile violence I have never met before: that its greatest
appeal is that it’s a big laugh in which what we ordinarily think of sadism
plays little part […] There’s a science fiction interest here too, to do with
a machine that makes you good.26
However, John Garrett’s review in the Times Literary Supplement, was

less favourable, writing that:
The publishers promise an “easily digestible feats of picaresque villainy

and social satire, but satire implies hatred and of any viewpoint this book
appears to be sadly lacking. “What sort of a world is it at all? Men on
the Moon and Men spinning round the earth…” is a question legitimately
asked of our times, but it gets no clear answer here. The author seems
content to use a serious social challenge for frivolous purposes, but himself
to stay neutral.27
In the second part of his biography, You’ve Had Your Time, Burgess
notes that in fact “No British reviewer liked it, but the producers of
the BBC television programme Tonight were interested enough to invite
me to be interviewed by Dennis Hart. They did more. The dramatized
much of the first chapter of my book very effectively and made more
of the language than the theme”.28 In response to the Times Literary
Supplement review which had criticised the use of “Nadsat” in the novel,
Burgess reflected somewhat hubristically (and pioneering the modern
art of the humblebrag), “I was considered an accomplished writer who
had set out deliberately to murder the language. It was comforting to
remember that the same thing had been said about Joyce”.29
5 This Book: Structure and Organisation

In recent years, there has been a wave of scholarly interest in Kubrick
and his collaborators; how Kubrick used and capitalised on collaborative
INTRODUCTION 13
relationship; and his relationships with the (living) authors he adapted.

Scholar and filmmaker Manca Perko’s recent doctoral research30 has
broken new ground in understanding the director’s collaborative relation-
ships especially with below the line workers. Filippo Ulivieri and Simone
Odino’s 2019 book 2001: Between Kubrick and Clarke: The Genesis,
Making and Authorship of a Masterpiece considered the complex rela-
tionship between Kubrick and science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke and
the creation of 2001 A Space Odyssey. Recent work by James Fenwick has
dealt not only with Kubrick as a producer but also with the relationship
with his former business partner James Harris. Fenwick’s work has led
him to open up debates around Kubrick’s working practices and issues
around casting women within the context of #MeToo.31
This book hopes to contribute to these ongoing critical inquiries by
offering a range of chapters that foreground and consider the complex
and increasingly difficult relationship between Burgess and Kubrick, as
well as the historical, aesthetic, philosophical and theoretical intersections
between novel and film. The book is conceptualised around 5 main inter-
secting sections covering a broad range of the key crucial aspects of film
and novel: authorship; language and adaptation; twentieth century art
historical, architectural, theoretical and design contexts; twentieth century
Cold War contexts; reading A Clockwork Orange in the twenty-first
century; and music and A Clockwork Orange.
5.1 Part 1: Anthony Burgess and Stanley Kubrick

The book opens with two chapters which deal historically and theoreti-
cally with the Burgess/Kubrick relationship and between Burgess, the film
and his novel. In “Dangerous Arts: The Clash Between Anthony Burgess,
Stanley Kubrick, A Clockwork Orange and the World”, Filippo Ulivieri
gives a historical account of the disintegrating relationship between
Anthony Burgess, Kubrick and his film, and ultimately his own novel.
Ulivieri paints Burgess as a man of (often deliberate) self-contradictions
and explores the reasons Burgess gradually turned against his own work.
The chapter deals with the media fall-out from the film, and how this
impacted on the author. The chapter draws heavily on a range of archival
materials, press interviews and other critical material to understand the
authorial complexities of A Clockwork Orange.
In ““A Major Statement on the Contemporary Human Condition”:
Anthony Burgess and the Aftermath of A Clockwork Orange”, Andrew
Biswell, Burgess’s biographer and director of the International Anthony

Burgess Foundation, opens out the novel’s philosophical inquiries and
discusses in detail the recently discovered draft of Burgess’s non-fiction
sequel to the novel, The Clockwork Condition written between 1972 and
1973. Existing in fragments, this non-fiction manuscript is a philosophical
response to both the original novel and the film. With recourse to other
archival materials, Biswell “reconstructs” the manuscript. Through this
“speculative reconstruction”, Biswell sheds light on the ways it connects
with Kubrick’s film making and the culture of the 1970s as well as
Burgess’s engagement with writers and theorists such as B.F Skinner,
Aldous Huxley and Marshall McLuhan. This is the first time that an
investigation into The Clockwork Condition has been carried out in print.
5.2 Part 2: Language and Adaptation

Part 2 of this book turns its focus to the issues of adaptation and
language. In “Scripting A Clockwork Orange”, Matthew Melia considers
the scripting of A Clockwork Orange, drawing on a body of archived
script material by Kubrick, author Terry Southern and photographer
Michael Cooper and Anthony Burgess himself. Melia offers a detailed
critical survey of the variances and intersections between these scripted
approaches to the same novel. Taken together, they are independently
authored texts, but they offer a set of variations on a theme. The chapter
deals with the issues of authorship and adaptation, and it offers an inter-
rogation of some of the mythologies which have developed around the
various (supposed) attempts to bring the text to the screen. Popularly
held wisdom is that Kubrick ignored Burgess’s own scripted approach to
the novel and went straight to the source novel in developing his film. In
this chapter, Melia shows that Burgess (and the Southern/Cooper) script
may have, in fact, influenced the visual and cinematographic choices made
by Kubrick in the final film.
Jim Clarke, Benet Vincent and Julian Preece turn to an exploration of
“Nadsat” Burgess’s created teen language across both film and novel. In
the jointly written chapter ““The Colours of the Real World Only Seem
Really Real When You Viddy them on the Screen”: The Adaptation of
Nadsat in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange”, linguists and Burgess
scholars Clarke and Vincent take a comparative look at the use of Nadsat
across both novel and film. They consider the adaptation process of novel
to film and discuss how Kubrick approached Burgess’s created language,
INTRODUCTION 15
and the omissions and changes that ensued. Again, issues of authorship
as well as language and adaptation are central here, and the authors take
a forensically scientific and linguistic approach in their investigation.
In ““Language, Language”: The Social Politics of ‘Goloss’ in Time
for a Tiger and A Clockwork Orange” Julian Preece, focusing predomi-
nantly on Burgess’s text, contextualises the novel and its modes of speech
against the earlier Malayan Trilogy. Preece connects the “language poli-
tics” of A Clockwork Orange to these three novels and more broadly to
Burgess’s knowledge and understanding of other languages. He sets out
to discuss how Alex’s uses of Nadsat are dictated by, and establish, a set
of power relations. Suggesting that the novel belongs to the picaresque
tradition, Preece argues that Alex adjusts his modes of speech and voice,
his “goloss” in order to place himself in a position of power and control.
He notes how Kubrick’s film gives Alex a Lancashire accent and, again
through voice, intonation and speech patterns, emphasises the story’s
class-based British setting, thus in some instances undermining the novel’s
“reactionary agenda”.
5.3 Part 3: Twentieth-Century Contexts: Architectural, Art

Historical and Theoretical Approaches.
A Clockwork Orange is a text that is situated firmly with a twentieth-
century historical context. This is dealt with directly on the chapters which
make up Parts 3 and 4 of this book. They consider novel and film together
through a range of historical and theoretical approaches.
In, “Art and Violence: The Legacy of Avant-Garde Art in Stanley
Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange”, Dijana Metlić, applying a theoretical
approach, considers how Stanley Kubrick visualised and adapted Anthony
Burgess’s novel, and his central character Alex, through an art historical
lens. Drawing from across a range of archived materials, Metlić argues that
while contemporary art has little relevance to Burgess’s novel, Kubrick
applies an understanding of twentieth-century art theory and modes
(including Dadaism, Surrealism and Pop Art) within the film’s design and
mise-en-scene, as a framework for relating art, violence, propaganda and
pornography. In doing so, he “upgrades” the novel, conferring upon it a
set of visual entrance points to its central themes of violence, power and
free will. Drawing critically and comparatively on Burgess’s novel, Metlić
engages with another aspect of the adaptation process: design and staging.
“Architecture and Freedom in A Clockwork Orange”, sees Joe

Darlington turn to the constructed world of A Clockwork Orange
and considers it against the backdrop of real-life post-war architectural
design. Drawing from materials across both Burgess and Kubrick archives,
Darlington considers the role of architectural space in both novel and film
as a metonym for contemporary social structures: the novel depicting
a world of crumbling slums where overcrowding and decay reflect a
corresponding degeneration of the social fabric and the film employing
a vandalised brutalist landscape to show a society living in the shadow
of failed social engineering. The chapter reads both novel and film
against a corresponding set of real-life historical, social and architec-
tural changes, drawing on and applying theoretically Bruce Neumann’s
Defensible Space (1971). Drawing comparatively across novel and film,
Darlington considers the world of the novel against the decaying world
of Burgess’s childhood home of Moss Side, Manchester, the post-war
slum clearances and social engineering. He also proposes (with recourse to
the wealth of pre-production materials at the Kubrick Archive) that film’s
futurist design and “inorganic” shapes and “inhuman” brutalist aesthetic
reflects Neumann’s theories and further embodies wider notions of social
engineering.
Murray Pomerance turns to a theoretical and philosophical consid-
eration of the “Ludovico Technique” in “Glazzies Wide Open: Spec-
tral Torture, Kubrick, and A Clockwork Orange (A Brainie by Fifteen
Thinks)”. Pomerance considers the position of the Eye, in A Clockwork
Orange, as a receptor for pain. He asks, is looking for itself a form
of torture? Is the eye a portal from trauma and torment? Pomerance’s
investigation is purely theoretical and draws on a range of philosophical,
psychoanalytic and literary theories, referencing among others, Georges
Bataille and Antonin Artaud.
5.4 Part 4: Twentieth-Century Contexts: A Clockwork Orange

and the Cold War
Both “When Burgess Met the Stilyagi on a White Night: Subcultures,
Hegemony and Resistance in the Soviet Roots of A Clockwork Orange’s
Droogs” and “Alex’s Voice in A Clockwork Orange: Nadsat, Sinny and
Cold War Brainwashing Scares” turn to a reading of both film and novel
against the backdrop of the Cold War. In Chapter 10 “When Burgess Met
the Stilyagi on a White Night: Subcultures, Hegemony and Resistance
in the Soviet Roots of A Clockwork Orange’s Droogs” Cristian Pasotti
INTRODUCTION 17
considers Anthony Burgess’s formative trip to Leningrad in 1961 and

the previously undocumented influence of the Russian subculture of the
“Stilyagi” (a rebel youth subculture preoccupied with Western fashion)
on the composition and stylisation of Burgess’s Droogs. In this chapter,
Pasotti considers the Soviet roots of A Clockwork Orange (novel and
film) and considers affinities between the world of the Droogs and the
Cold War world of the “Stilyagi”. The chapter draws on a range of mate-
rial across both archives as well as including Juliane Furste’s Stalin’s Last
Generation: Soviet Post War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism;
Burgess’s 1963 novel Honey for The Bears, and his 1961 article for The
Listener, “The Human Russians”.
In “Alex’s Voice in A Clockwork Orange: Nadsat, Sinny and Cold War
Brainwashing Scares” Joy McEntee turns to a reading of A Clockwork
Orange against the context of the “brainwashing” scares of the early Cold
War, noting affinities between Burgess novel and John Frankenheimer’s
1962 film The Manchurian Candidate. It explores Burgess’s A Clockwork
Orange in the light of trans-Atlantic brainwashing scares that emerged in
the 1950s and 1960 and considers in detail Kubrick’s adaptation of the
novel noting how the film also delivers a meta-cinematic commentary on
the mind-altering powers of cinema itself. McEntee considers how Alex
is both a victim of brainwashing and a perpetrator of it via his judicious
employment of “Nadsat”. The chapter challenges Burgess’s claim that
Soviet modes of mind control did not feature in his novel and considers
the potential contemporary impact of the repatriation of Korean POWs
from Communist re-education camps.
5.5 Part 5: A Clockwork Orange in Twenty-First Century

With the passing of more than fifty years, this book aims to also engage
with the twenty-first-century perspectives on A Clockwork Orange. Ajay
Hothi returns to the “Ludovico Treatment” in “A Thing Living, and
Not Growing”. Using the Ludovico Technique as a way of understanding
contemporary anxieties over “behaviour-altering technologies writ real”
this chapter proposes that the technique, as depicted in both novel and
film, anticipates a twenty-first-century global phenomenon: the applica-
tion of artificial intelligence into biotechnology, the transition from the
Anthropocene to the Technocene. Hothi proposes that, like Alex, we
are increasingly subject to technologies the primary aim of which is to
adapt and condition habitual behavior and curb our free will. Drawing on
such writers as Freeman Dyson and Francis Fukuyama, Hothi asks what
we can learn in the twenty-first century from A Clockwork Orange as a
“cautionary tale in a moment of crisis”.
In Chapter 13, “A Clockwork Orange and its Representations of Sexual
Violence as Torture: Stanley Kubrick and Francis Bacon”, Karen Ritzen-
hoff, like Dijana Metlić, takes an art historical as well as a feminist
approach, considering the presence of the scream in the film. She not only
draws parallels with the twentieth-century British artist Francis Bacon but
considers the prescient contemporary issue of violence against women
and how we might view the film against the context of the #MeToo
movement. The chapter focuses on the Catlady sequence and considers
the representation of sexual violence, the use of artwork within the film
and the representation of the ageing and violated female body. The
chapter considers the strategies Kubrick uses to adapt the treatment of
sexual violence in Burgess’s novel, considering such representations from
a contemporary twenty-first-century perspective.
5.6 Part 6: Music and a Clockwork Orange

Music is central to A Clockwork Orange and it plays a dominant role in
both novel and film. Both Burgess and Kubrick, like Alex in the novel
and film, were keen aficionados of music, Burgess also working as a
composer (he had little time for the fripperies of pop music) and even-
tually readapting the source novel as a “play with music” 15 years after
Kubrick’s film.
In “Transforming Variations: Music in the Novel, Film, and Play A
Clockwork Orange”, Christine Lee Gengaro considers Burgess’s novel, his
stage adaptation and Kubrick’s film. She analyses how music functions
differently within each: symbolically as part of the narrative in the novel;
how the use of music in the film engages “conventions of film music”; and
the music of the play “transcends” these “traditional roles” by allowing all
characters to take part in the music-making therefore diffusing the power
of the music. Gengaro discusses the “genre-specific” functions of music
within A Clockwork Orange and within the contexts of both Burgess and
Kubrick’s wider work and more broadly within the use of classical music
in film and literature.
In “David Bowie and A Clockwork Orange: Two Sides of the Same
Golly”, Sean Redmond looks to the wider cultural influence and legacy
of A Clockwork Orange, drawing an extended analysis of the influence of
INTRODUCTION 19
novel and film across the work of singer, musician and actor David Bowie.
Few musical artists can claim to have been as influenced by A Clockwork
Orange as Bowie (by both film and novel which finds a place along with
Earthly Powers in his posthumously published list of top 100 books).
Redmond offers a detailed discussion of Bowie’s extensive (inter) textual
referencing and quotation (in lyrics, style and performance) of A Clock-
work Orange between 1972’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the
Spiders from Mars and his final album, Blackstar, released days prior to
his death in 2016. Drawing upon a wide range of media interviews, song
lyrics, music videos, commentaries and performances, Redmond considers
the importance of A Clockwork Orange to the construction and composi-
tion of the many Bowie personas and suggest that “A Clockwork Orange
provides Bowie with the fashion and behaviour codes to be a rebel poseur,
resistant to heteronormativity”.
5.7 Afterword
Finally, renowned and leading Kubrick scholar Nathan Abrams, author
of Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual; co-author of Eyes Wide
Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of his Final Film and co-editor of
The Bloomsbury Companion to Stanley Kubrick, has contributed a reflec-
tive afterword to conclude the book. He draws together the strands of
inquiry and contemplates how Kubrick adapted Burgess’s novel as a film
musical. Abrams locates the film within the lineage of studio film musicals,
adopting the visual language of the form.
Notes
1. International Anthony Burgess Foundation Website, https://www.anthon
yburgess.org/a-clockwork-orange/, Last viewed: 30/08/2021.
2. Kramer, P. (2011) Controversies: A Clockwork Orange, London: Palgrave
MacMillan, 102.
3. Clarke, J. (2017) The Aesthetics of Anthony Burgess: Fire of Words, London:
Palgrave MacMillan.
4. Fenwick, J. (2021) Stanley Kubrick Produces, New Jersey: Rutgers Univer-
sity Press.
5. Biswell, A. (2006) The Real Life of Anthony Burgess, London: Palgrave
MacMillan, 226.
6. Burgess, A (1972) Copy-typed script by Burgess on the relationship

between art and anti-social behaviour for an article in the Evening news.
Stanley Kubrick Archive. Archive Ref: SK/13/8/3/7.
7. Banville, J. (2005) ‘The Clockwork Author Anthony”, The Irish Times,
December 24. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/the-clockwork-author-
anthony-1.1288243. Last Viewed: 30/08/2021.
8. Ibid.
9. Rod Munday, The Kubrick Cinematic UniverseMethod, Essais [Online],
Hors-série 4 | 2018, Online since 01 December 2019, connection on 16
December 2019. http://journals.openedition.org/essais/728; https://
doi.org/10.4000/essais.728
10. Kramer, P. (2011) 76–77.
11. Burgess, A. (1973) “The Clockwork Condition”, The New Yorker,
republished June 2012. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/
06/04/the-clockwork-condition. Last viewed: 30/08/2021.
12. Ibid.
13. Stanley Kubrick Archive, “Future of the British film Industry File”. As yet
uncatalogued.
14. Kramer P. (2011), 117.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Walker, A. (1976) “Why We Must See This Terrifying Vision Again,”
Evening Standard, March 19.
18. Walker, A. (1975) “Who Gains if the Moguls Go?”, Evening Standard,
March 13.
19. Laxton, E. (1973) “The Copycat Killer: Horror Story of Teenager who
Battered Old Tramp” Daily Mirror, July 4.
20. Anon. (1974) “Attack Followed Showing of A Clockwork Orange—
Vicar”, North Wales Weekly News, March 1.
21. Southworth, J (1972) “Cinema Violence Renews Yon’s Faith in Bovver
Power” Doncaster Gazette and Chronicle, January 27.
22. Kramer, p. (2011) 102.
23. Stanley Kubrick Archive, A Clockwork Orange Fan Letters, Archive Ref:
Sk/13/8/6.
24. Stanley Kubrick Archive, ‘Articles on Bowie and Teenage Culture’ Archive
Ref: Sk/13/6/29/64.
25. Anon. (1963) “The Ultimate beatnik” Time Magazine.
26. Amis, K. (1962) “Out of your Depth” The Observer, May 13.
27. Garret, J. (1962) “Other New Novels” Times Literary Supplement, May
25.
28. Burgess, A. (1991) You’ve Had Your Time, Being the Second Part of the
Confessions of Anthony Burgess, London: Penguin Books, 99.
29. Ibid.
INTRODUCTION 21
30. Perko, M. (2019) Voices and Noises: Collaborative Authorship in Stanley

Kubrick’s Films, Doctoral Thesis, University of East Anglia, UK.
31. Fenwick, J. (2021) “Stanley Kubrick and #MeToo” New Review of
Film and Television Stories, https://nrftsjournal.org/stanley-kubrick-and-
metoo/ Last viewed 16/12/2021.
Anthony Burgess and Stanley Kubrick
Dangerous Arts: The Clash Between
Anthony Burgess, Stanley Kubrick,
A Clockwork Orange, and the World
Filippo Ulivieri
1 Introduction
A Clockwork Orange is the ninth novel by Anthony Burgess. Upon its
publication in 1962, it didn’t enjoy particular success: it sold poorly and
met with mixed reviews in England, though it was received better in the
United States.1 Things would change dramatically in 1970, when Kubrick
selected it as the basis for the follow-up to his grand opus 2001: A Space
Odyssey. When the news reached Burgess, he took it with a mixture of
indifference, because other film-makers had tried (and failed) to bring
the book to the screen; mild satisfaction, because Kubrick was a better
choice than Ken Russell, whom Burgess detested; and mild dissatisfaction,
because he knew he wouldn’t get any money from the affair—he had sold
the rights a few years earlier for a few hundred dollars and, when they
changed hands to Warner Bros., his share was not considered.2
The writer left for Australia, where he was expected for a lecture tour
that would eventually take him to New Zealand. There, he was told
F. Ulivieri (B)
Independent, Plymouth, UK
e-mail: filippo.ulivieri@gmail.com
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 25

Switzerland AG 2023
M. Melia and G. Orgill (eds.), Anthony Burgess, Stanley Kubrick and A
Clockwork Orange, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05599-7_2
26 F. ULIVIERI
that Kubrick had been sending him urgent cables to arrange a meeting
in London over some scriptwriting issue. Burgess embarked on his trip
back home, flying to Fiji, Hawaii, San Francisco, New York, and London,
where he dutifully appeared at Kubrick’s restaurant of choice. Kubrick,
however, did not turn up.3 He phoned Burgess a few days later—not to
apologise, but to ask him about the lyrics of a song that is used in the
book. Being the complete opposite of Kubrick in his relationship with
the media, Burgess vented his anger to a reporter and said the director
was “a terrible man. Just shocking.”4
Whatever the reason for the failed rendezvous, when the two finally
met for a preview screening of the film a year later, Burgess discov-
ered that Kubrick was in fact quite cordial. At the director’s home for
an ensuing dinner invitation, they discussed literature, music, and the
possibility of collaborating on a new project: a film about Napoleon
Bonaparte.5
The film of A Clockwork Orange was set to open in the United States
in December 1971. Since Kubrick had no desire to travel, Warner Bros.
asked Burgess to join Malcolm McDowell for a promotional round of
interviews on both coasts. Burgess, who enjoyed attention and exposure
very much, gladly accepted.
2 Here Beginneth Twenty Years of Tribulations

Meeting hordes of reporters, Burgess spoke highly of Kubrick’s work: “I
am very pleased with the way Kubrick handled my book,”6 he said; “I
have nothing but praise for the way he’s found cinematic equivalents for
my literary conceptions.”7 Actually, he felt “that it was no impertinence
to blazon [the film] ‘Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange’.”8 Burgess
acknowledged it had “a classic quality” and “remarkable integrity.”9 He
said:
I had fears about anyone filming the novel. I didn’t want it transformed
so radically that I became ‘known’ by the film rather than the book […]
But I needn’t have worried. Kubrick has hit the whole theological tone
exactly – very rare to find theology in a film – and kept 75 per cent of
Nadsat.10
Naturally, some journalists asked him about the violence in the film.
“The point of the film is not the violence,” Burgess retorted, “the
DANGEROUS ARTS: THE CLASH BETWEEN ANTHONY BURGESS … 27
violence is secondary. The point is that man must have the power to
choose or he ceases to be a man.”11 “The book is a kind of religious
sermon,”12 he explained, and Kubrick’s film worked on the same level.
“It is the best adaptation of a book we’ve ever had,”13 Burgess concluded,
deeming Kubrick “a truly European director, more in the mould of
Antonioni or Truffaut than any of his fellow Americans.”14
The promotional activities kept Burgess busy for almost two months,
and he had a great time in the spotlight, delighting audiences as the
consummate raconteur that he was. Besides, by no means among those
artists who think their works should speak for themselves, Burgess happily
clarified the allegoric nature of his novel and engaged in philosoph-
ical discussions about good and evil, free will, morality, religion, and
contemporary society. The best example is given by a one-hour long
round table on A Clockwork Orange which Burgess attended, together
with McDowell, Robert Hughes, an art critic of Time magazine, Nat
Hentoff, a Village Voice columnist, and Norman Kagan, author of a
Kubrick monograph. Burgess explained to them:
Alex is potentially a human being. He is violent, which human beings are.

He is concerned with language, which human beings are, […] and he is
concerned with beauty, as is shown by his devotion to Beethoven. But he
is not quite a human being, because he lives on milk, and he has to fall
before he can become fully human.15
Such an “odyssey of an embryonic human being” was perfectly

captured by Kubrick on the screen, Burgess said:
One has to be thankful that an intelligent director took it over. It might

have been someone […] who merely would have gone to town on the
pornographic possibilities of the film. [With] Kubrick’s interpretation […]
the message does come through.16
Following a widespread view on Kubrick’s cinema, one of the critics

objected that the film was too cold and intellectual. Burgess countered
that this was precisely the right approach to the subject matter, the film
is:
Meant to appeal to the ratiocinative part of us. It’s meant to make shine-
out in big letters a very simplistic and obvious moral maxim, and to
associate this with strong emotions aroused by particular incidents, I think,
28 F. ULIVIERI
would have been out of place. I’m delighted, and I think that it is a
mark of great genius on Kubrick’s part, that he managed to achieve a film
which dealt with large moral issues without involving the viewer. […] The
whole point of art is to achieve an image which shall inspire a purely static
emotion. I think that art is diminished when one becomes moved to such
an extent that one wants to do something about it, [when] you’re inspired
to a kind-of kinetic emotion which makes you want to act in the real world.
You should begin and end in the aesthetic world. And Kubrick’s film strikes
me as the nearest approach we’ve yet had in the world of cinema […] to
a purely static work of art. This is quite an astonishing achievement.17
It was precisely in this sense that he was convinced that “the film
version is preferable to the book,” which Burgess didn’t particularly like,
he admitted, because he felt it was:
Too didactic, it thrusts home the lesson too hard, [while] it is the aim
of the artist to be as amoral… as static… as unmoved, as it were, as
possible. […] I’m glad in a sense that Kubrick has made the film,” Burgess
concluded, “because I needn’t worry about the book anymore.18
Anything but.
Upon his return home, Burgess found an unwelcoming climate. The
United Kingdom was in a period of extreme social tensions, with the
I.R.A. bombing campaign on the mainland Britain and the Miners’ strikes
causing severe power cuts. There were concerns of violent youth subcul-
tures and alleged crime waves were being reported in the media. Visual
culture was under attack, too: in 1971, Ken Russell’s The Devils and Sam
Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs had shocked audiences and challenged the British
Board of Film Censors (BBFC) with their depictions of sex, violence, and
alleged blasphemy (in the case of The Devils ).19 With the U.K. release
date of A Clockwork Orange approaching, incendiary articles began to
appear in the press, particularly in tabloids which ran special issues on the
“rising violence in Britain.” One piece in The Sun for example was rhetor-
ically directed towards the same audience they believed to have been the
target of Kubrick’s “obscene parable.”
That is – to the skinhead heroes of ultra violence; those kids with steel
toecaps who are denied a hero. If you are young, regularly put the boot in
and run with rape gangs, this film is your meat. […] the acting is so true
that it will convince you that you can do your own thing. Psychologists
DANGEROUS ARTS: THE CLASH BETWEEN ANTHONY BURGESS … 29
disagree. Films, they say, cannot influence people and have no effect on the
moral fibre. Oh yeah! They can tell that to Dr. Goebbels’s old propaganda
machine – can’t they, kids?20
Maurice Edelman, a Labour MP who proudly coined the catchy phrase

“pornography of violence,” thought likewise and wrote an editorial to
alert people to the dangers of screening Kubrick’s film, headlined “Clock-
work Oranges are ticking bombs.” Edelman conceded that the story of
A Clockwork Orange was “a masterly fable of a vicious and violent soci-
ety” with the aim of curing our world, but once screened it “will lead to
a clockwork cult which will magnify teenage violence.” The “glamoriza-
tion of violence on the screen,” Edelman maintained, will “encourage the
sadistic impulses” of the teenagers, who “will, no doubt” dress like the
droogies and, therefore, soon act like them.21
Burgess called this line of reasoning “Rubbish”22 and “nonsense.”23
He questioned Edelman’s air of fatalism which equated man to a naked
ape who can’t help but copy what it sees: “If it were so,” Burgess
observed, “it would be impossible to show Hamlet […] for fear that
youthful watchers would kill their own uncles.”24 “Man is basically evil,”
he concluded:
and if anybody is so perverted as to take away a wrong sentiment it’s not

my fault. […] I don’t think anyone will go out and beat up little old ladies
after seeing [the film] unless they are going to do so, anyway.25
Appearing on the BBC, Burgess further elaborated:
If you write a book, if you make a film […] you are merely copying what
is already there. […] if I see violence in the world around me […] then
it was my job in writing this particular kind of book […] and Kubrick, in
making the film, has done the same thing in his terms that I did in my
terms.26
The public debate was so heated that even Kubrick, who usually never
replied to anything written about his films, felt the need to speak up. He
said:
By directing a lot of media attention to whether films and television

contribute to violence, politicians conveniently escape looking at the real
causes of violence in society which could be listed as: 1. Original sin: the
30 F. ULIVIERI
theological view; 2. Unjust economic exploitation: the Marxist view; 3.

Emotional frustrations and pressures: the psychological view; 4. Genetic
factors based on the Y chromosome theory: the biological view.27
Kubrick added,
Furthermore, to attribute powerful suggestive qualities to a film is at odds

with the scientifically accepted view that, even after deep hypnosis, in a
posthypnotic state, people cannot be made to do things which are at odds
with their natures.28
Burgess expressed a more elaborate view in a lengthy piece for the Los
Angeles Times. “What my, and Kubrick’s, parable tries to state,” he wrote,
“is that it is preferable to have a world of violence undertaken in full
awareness—violence chosen as an act of will—than a world conditioned
to be good or harmless.” As proof, he offered an origin story for his
novel: “my own wife was the subject of vicious and mindless violence
in blacked-out London in 1942, when she was robbed and beaten by
three GI deserters.”29 She was carrying a child at the time, and miscarried
as a result of the attack; she fell ill shortly thereafter, and Burgess was
convinced that the incident contributed to her eventual death.30 “Books
stem out of some great personal agony,” he revealed, and A Clockwork
Orange was “an attempt to exorcize” such feelings.31 He stated:
What hurts me, as also Kubrick, is the allegation made by some viewers
and readers of A Clockwork Orange that there is a gratuitous indulgence
in violence […] the depiction of violence was intended as both an act of
catharsis and an act of charity […] if we are going to love mankind, we
will have to love Alex as a not unrepresentative member of it.32
Following that dreadful incident, Burgess wrote, “I had to re-learn

charity even towards the most debased of human beings, I had to show
that revenge does not pay.”33 And that “If Orange, like 1984, takes its
place as one of the salutary literary warnings—or cinematic warnings—
against flabbiness, sloppy thinking, and overmuch trust in the state, then
it will have done something of value.”34
The article was also intended as a refutation of Pauline Kael’s scathing
review of the film,35 which according to Burgess greatly upset Kubrick.
“After all,” Burgess said, “it was a question of defending myself.”36
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IV.
“I have won me a youth,” the Elf-queen said,

“The fairest that earth may see;
This night I have won young Elph Irving,
My cupbearer to be.
His service lasts but for seven sweet years,
And his wage is a kiss of me.”
And merrily, merrily laughed the wild elves,
Round Corrie’s greenwood tree.—
But oh! the fire it glows in my brain,
And the hour is gone, and comes not again.
V.
The Queen she has whispered a secret word,

“Come hither, my Elphin sweet,
And bring that cup of the charmèd wine,
Thy lips and mine to weet.”
But a brown elf shouted a loud, loud shout,
“Come, leap on your coursers fleet,
For here comes the smell of some baptized flesh,
And the sounding of baptized feet.”—
But oh! the fire that burns, and maun burn;
For the time that is gone will never return.
VI.
On a steed as white as the new-milked milk,

The Elf-queen leaped with a bound,
And young Elphin a steed like December snow
’Neath him at the word he found.
But a maiden came, and her christened arms
She linked her brother around,
And called on God, and the steed with a snort
Sank into the gaping ground.—
But the fire maun burn, and I maun quake,
And the time that is gone will no more come back.
VII.
And she held her brother, and lo! he grew

A wild bull waked in ire;
And she held her brother, and lo! he changed
To a river roaring higher;
And she held her brother, and he became
A flood of the raging fire;
She shrieked and sank, and the wild elves laughed,
Till mountain rang and mire.—
But oh! the fire yet burns in my brain,
And the hour is gone, and comes not again.
VIII.
“Oh, maiden, why waxed thy faith so faint,

Thy spirit so slack and slaw?
Thy courage kept good till the flame waxed wud,
Then thy might began to thaw,
Had ye kissed him with thy christened lip,
Ye had won him frae ’mang us a’.
Now bless the fire, the elfin fire,
That made thee faint and fa’;
Now bless the fire, the elfin fire,
The longer it burns it blazes the higher.”
At the close of this unusual strain, the figure sat down on the grass,
and proceeded to bind up her long and disordered tresses, gazing
along the old and unfrequented road.
“Now God be my helper,” said the traveller, who happened to be
the Laird of Johnstonebank, “can this be a trick of the fiend, or can it
be bonnie Phemie Irving, who chants this dolorous song? Something
sad has befallen, that makes her seek her seat in this eerie nook amid
the darkness and tempest: through might from abune, I will go on
and see.”
And the horse, feeling something of the owner’s reviving spirit in
the application of the spur-steel, bore him at once to the foot of the
tree. The poor delirious maiden uttered a piercing yell of joy as she
beheld him, and, with the swiftness of a creature winged, linked her
arms round the rider’s waist, and shrieked till the woods rang.
“Oh, I have ye now, Elphin, I have ye now!” and she strained him
to her bosom with a convulsive grasp.
“What ails ye, my bonnie lass?” said the Laird of Johnstonebank,
his fears of the supernatural vanishing when he beheld her sad and
bewildered look.
She raised her eyes at the sound, and, seeing a strange face, her
arms slipped their hold, and she dropped with a groan on the
ground.
The morning had now fairly broken: the flocks shook the rain from
their sides, the shepherds hastened to inspect their charges, and a
thin blue smoke began to stream from the cottages of the valley into
the brightening air. The laird carried Phemie Irving in his arms, till
he observed two shepherds ascending from one of the loops of
Corriewater, bearing the lifeless body of her brother. They had found
him whirling round and round in one of the numerous eddies, and
his hands, clutched and filled with wool, showed that he had lost his
life in attempting to save the flock of his sister.
A plaid was laid over the body, which, along with the unhappy
maiden in a half lifeless state, was carried into a cottage, and laid in
that apartment distinguished among the peasantry by the name of
“the chamber.” While the peasant’s wife was left to take care of
Phemie, old man, and matron, and maid had collected around the
drowned youth, and each began to relate the circumstances of his
death, when the door suddenly opened, and his sister, advancing to
the corpse with a look of delirious serenity, broke out into a wild
laugh, and said,—
“O, it is wonderful, it’s truly wonderful! that bare and death-cold
body, dragged from the darkest pool of Corrie, with its hands filled
with fine wool, wears the perfect similitude of my own Elphin! I’ll tell
ye—the spiritual dwellers of the earth, the fairyfolk of our evening
tale, have stolen the living body, and fashioned this cold and
inanimate clod to mislead your pursuit. In common eyes, this seems
all that Elphin Irving would be, had he sunk in Corriewater; but so it
seems not to me. Ye have sought the living soul, and ye have found
only its garment. But oh, if ye had beheld him, as I beheld him to-
night, riding among the elfin troop, the fairest of them all; had you
clasped him in your arms, and wrestled for him with spirits and
terrible shapes from the other world, till your heart quailed and your
flesh was subdued, then would ye yield no credit to the semblance
which this cold and apparent flesh bears to my brother. But hearken
—on Hallowe’en, when the spiritual people are let loose on earth for
a season, I will take my stand in the burial-ground of Corrie; and
when my Elphin and his unchristened troop come past with the
sound of all their minstrelsy, I will leap on him and win him, or
perish for ever.”
All gazed aghast on the delirious maiden, and many of her auditors
gave more credence to her distempered speech than to the visible
evidence before them. As she turned to depart, she looked round,
and suddenly sunk upon the body, with tears streaming from her
eyes, and sobbed out, “My brother! oh, my brother!” She was carried
out insensible, and again recovered; but relapsed into her ordinary
delirium, in which she continued till the Hallow-eve after her
brother’s burial.
She was found seated in the ancient burial-ground, her back
against a broken grave-stone, her locks white with frost-rime,
watching with intensity of look the road to the kirk-yard; but the
spirit which gave life to the fairest form of all the maids of Annandale
was fled for ever.
Such is the singular story which the peasants know by the name of
Elphin Irving, the Fairies’ Cupbearer; and the title, in its fullest and
most supernatural sense, still obtains credence among the
industrious and virtuous dames of the romantic vale of Corrie.
CHOOSING A MINISTER.
By John Galt.
The Rev. Dr Swapkirk having had an apoplexy, the magistrates

were obligated to get Mr Pittle to be his helper. Whether it was that,
by our being used to Mr Pittle, we had ceased to have a right respect
for his parts and talents, or that in reality he was but a weak brother,
I cannot in conscience take it on me to say; but the certainty is, that
when the Doctor departed this life, there was hardly one of the
hearers who thought Mr Pittle would ever be their placed minister,
and it was as far at first from the unanimous mind of the magistrates,
who are the patrons of the parish, as anything could well be, for he
was a man of no smeddum in discourse. In verity, as Mrs Pawkie, my
wife, said, his sermons in the warm summer afternoons were just a
perfect hushabaa, that no mortal could hearken to without sleeping.
Moreover, he had a sorning way with him, that the genteeler sort
couldna abide, for he was for ever going from house to house about
tea-time, to save his ain canister. As for the young ladies, they
couldna endure him at all, for he had aye the sough and sound of
love in his mouth, and a round-about ceremonial of joking
concerning the same, that was just a fasherie to them to hear. The
commonality, however, were his greatest adversaries; for he was,
notwithstanding the spareness of his abilities, a prideful creature,
taking no interest in their hamely affairs, and seldom visiting the
aged or the sick among them.
Shortly, however, before the death of the Doctor, Mr Pittle had
been very attentive to my wife’s full cousin, Miss Lizzie Pinkie,—I’ll
no say on account of the legacy of seven hundred pounds left her by
an uncle, that made his money in foreign parts, and died at
Portsmouth of the liver complaint, when he was coming home to
enjoy himself; and Mrs Pawkie told me, that as soon as Mr Pittle
could get a kirk, I needna be surprised if I heard o’ a marriage
between him and Miss Lizzie.
Had I been a sordid and interested man, this news could never
have given me the satisfaction it did, for Miss Lizzie was very fond of
my bairns, and it was thought that Peter would have been her heir;
but so far from being concerned at what I heard, I rejoiced thereat,
and resolved in secret thought, whenever a vacancy happened (Dr
Swapkirk being then fast wearing away), to exert the best of my
ability to get the kirk for Mr Pittle,—not, however, unless he was
previously married to Miss Lizzie; for, to speak out, she was
beginning to stand in need of a protector, and both me and Mrs
Pawkie had our fears that she might outlive her income, and in her
old age become a cess upon us. And it couldna be said that this was
any groundless fear; for Miss Lizzie, living a lonely maiden life by
herself, with only a bit lassie to run her errands, and no being
naturally of an active or eydent turn, aften wearied, and to keep up
her spirits, gaed, maybe, now and then, oftener to the gardevin than
was just necessar, by which, as we thought, she had a tavert look.
Howsoever, as Mr Pittle had taken a notion of her, and she pleased
his fancy, it was far from our hand to misliken one that was sib to us;
on the contrary, it was a duty laid on me by the ties of blood and
relationship to do all in my power to further their mutual affection
into matrimonial fruition; and what I did towards that end is the
burden of this narrative.
Dr Swapkirk, in whom the spark of life was long fading, closed his
eyes, and it went utterly out, as to this world, on a Saturday night,
between the hours of eleven and twelve. We had that afternoon got
an inkling that he was drawing near to his end. At the latest, Mrs
Pawkie herself went over to the manse, and stayed till she saw him
die. “It was a pleasant end,” she said, for he was a godly, patient
man; and we were both sorely grieved, though it was a thing for
which we had been long prepared, and, indeed, to his family and
connections, except for the loss of the stipend, it was a very gentle
dispensation, for he had been long a heavy handful, having been for
years but, as it were, a breathing lump of mortality, groosy and oozy,
and doozy, his faculties being shut up and locked in by a dumb palsy.
Having had this early intimation of the Doctor’s removal to a
better world, on the Sabbath morning when I went to join the
magistrates in the council-chamber, as the usage is, to go to the laft,
with the town-officers carrying their halberts before us, according to
the ancient custom of all royal burghs, my mind was in a degree
prepared to speak to them anent the successor. Little, however,
passed at that time, and it so happened that, by some wonder of
inspiration (there were, however, folk that said it was taken out of a
book of sermons, by one Barrow, an English divine), Mr Pittle that
forenoon preached a discourse that made an impression, insomuch
that, on our way back to the council-chamber, I said to Provost
Vintner that then was—
“Really, Mr Pittle seems, if he would exert himself, to have a nerve.
I could not have thought it was in the power of his capacity to have
given us such a sermon.”
The provost thought as I did; so I replied—
“We canna, I think, do better than keep him among us. It would,
indeed, provost, no be doing justice to the young man to pass
another over his head.”
I could see that the provost wasna quite sure of what I had been
saying; for he replied, that it was a matter that needed consideration.
When we separated at the council-chamber, I threw myself in the
way of Bailie Weezle, and walked home with him, our talk being on
the subject of the vacancy; and I rehearsed to him what had passed
between me and the provost, saying, that the provost had made no
objection to prefer Mr Pittle, which was the truth.
Bailie Weezle was a man no overladen with worldly wisdom, and
had been chosen into the council principally on account of being
easily managed. In his business, he was originally by trade a baker in
Glasgow, where he made a little money, and came to settle among us
with his wife, who was a native of the town, and had her relations
here. Being, therefore, an idle man, living on his money, and of a soft
and quiet nature, he was, for the reason aforesaid, chosen into the
council, where he always voted on the provost’s side; for in
controverted questions every one is beholden to take a part, and he
thought it his duty to side with the chief magistrate.
Having convinced the bailie that Mr Pittle had already, as it were, a
sort of infeoffment in the kirk, I called in the evening on my old
predecessor in the guildry, Bailie M‘Lucre, who was not a hand to be
so easily dealt with; but I knew his inclinations, and therefore I
resolved to go roundly to work with him. So I asked him out to take a
walk, and I led him towards the town-moor, conversing loosely about
one thing and another, and touching softly here and there on the
vacancy.
When we were well on into the middle of the moor, I stopped, and,
looking round me, said,—
“Bailie, surely it’s a great neglec’ of the magistrates and council to
let this braw broad piece of land, so near the town, lie in a state o’
nature, and giving pasturage to only twa-three of the poor folks’
cows. I wonder you, that’s now a rich man, and with een worth pearls
and diamonds,—that ye dinna think of asking a tack of this land; ye
might make a great thing o’t.”
The fish nibbled, and told me that he had for some time
entertained a thought on the subject; but he was afraid that I would
be over extortionate.
“I wonder to hear you, bailie,” said I; “I trust and hope no one will
ever find me out of the way of justice; and to convince you that I can
do a friendly turn, I’ll no objec’ to gie you a’ my influence free gratis,
if ye’ll gie Mr Pittle a lift into the kirk; for, to be plain with you, the
worthy young man, who, as ye heard to-day, is no without an ability,
has long been fond of Mrs Pawkie’s cousin, Miss Lizzie Pinkie; and I
would fain do all that lies in my power to help on the match.”
The bailie was well pleased with my frankness, and before
returning home, we came to a satisfactory understanding; so that the
next thing I had to do was to see Mr Pittle himself on the subject.
Accordingly, in the gloaming, I went over to where he stayed: it was
with Miss Jenny Killfuddy, an elderly maiden lady, whose father was
the minister of Braehill, and the same that is spoken of in the
chronicle of Dalmailing, as having had his eye almost put out by a
clash of glaur, at the stormy placing of Mr Balwhidder.
“Mr Pittle,” said I, as soon as I was in, and the door closed, “I’m
come to you as a friend. Both Mrs Pawkie and me have long
discerned that ye have had a look more than common towards our
friend Miss Lizzie, and we think it our duty to inquire your intents,
before matters gang to greater length.”
He looked a little dumfoundered at this salutation, and was at a
loss for an answer; so I continued—
“If your designs be honourable, and no doubt they are, now’s your
time;—strike while the iron’s hot. By the death of the Doctor, the
kirk’s vacant, the town-council have the patronage; and if ye marry
Miss Lizzie, my interest and influence shall not be slack in helping
you into the poopit.”
In short, out of what passed that night, on the Monday following,
Mr Pittle and Miss Lizzie were married; and by my dexterity,
together with the able help I had in Bailie M‘Lucre, he was in due
season placed and settled in the parish; and the next year, more than
fifty acres of the town-moor were inclosed, on a nine hundred and
ninety-nine years’ tack, at an easy rate, between me and the bailie, he
paying the half of the expense of the ditching and rooting out of the
whins; and it was acknowledged, by every one that saw it, that there
had not been a greater improvement for many years in all the
country-side. But to the best actions there will be adverse and
discontented spirits; and, on this occasion, there were not wanting
persons naturally of a disloyal opposition temper, who complained of
the inclosure as a usurpation of the rights and property of the poorer
burghers. Such revilings, however, are what all persons in authority
must suffer; and they had only the effect of making me button my
coat, and look out the crooser to the blast.—“The Provost.”
THE MEAL MOB.
During the winter of 18—, there was a great scarcity of grain in the
western districts of Scotland. The expediency of the corn laws was
then hotly discussed, but the keen hunger of wives and children went
further to embitter the spirits of the lower orders. The abstract
question was grasped at as a vent for ill-humour, or despairingly, as a
last chance for preservation. As usual, exaggerated reports were
caught up and circulated by the hungry operatives, of immense
prices demanded by grain-merchants and farmers, and of great
stores of grain garnered up for exportation. As a natural consequence
of all these circumstances, serious disturbances took place in more
than one burgh.
The town of ——, in which I then resided, had hitherto been
spared, but a riot was, in the temper of the poor, daily to be expected.
Numbers of special constables were sworn in. The commander of the
military party then in the barracks was warned to hold himself in
readiness. Such members of the county yeomanry corps as resided in
or near the town were requested to lend their aid, if need should be.
I was sitting comfortably by my fireside, one dark, cold evening,
conversing with a friend over a tumbler of toddy, when we were both
summoned to officiate in our capacity of constables. The poor fellows
who fell at Waterloo sprang from their hard, curtainless beds with
less reluctance. We lingered rather longer than decency allowed of,
buttoning our greatcoats and adjusting our comforters. At last,
casting a piteous look at the fire, which was just beginning to burn up
gloriously, we pressed our hats deeper over our eyes, grasped our
batons, and sallied forth.
The mischief had begun in the mills at the town-head, and as the
parties employed in the mob went to work with less reluctance than
we had done, the premises were fairly gutted, and the plunderers,
(or, more properly speaking, devastators) on their way to another
scene of action, before a sufficient posse of our body could be
mustered. We encountered the horde coming down the main street.
The advanced guard consisted of an immense swarm of little ragged
boys, running scatteredly with stones in their hands and bonnets.
These were flanked and followed by a number of dirty, draggle-tailed
drabs, most of them with children in their arms. Upon them followed
a dense mass of men of all ages, many of them in the garb of sailors,
for the tars had learned that the soldiery were likely to be employed
against the people, and there is a standing feud between the “salt-
waters” and the “lobsters.” There was also a vague and ill-regulated
sympathy for the suffering they saw around them, working at the
bottom. All this array we half saw, half conjectured, by the dim light
of the dirty street lamps. The body was silent, but for the incessant
pattering of their feet as they moved along.
The word was given to clear the street, and we advanced with right
ill-will upon them. The first ranks gave back, but there arose
immediately a universal and deafening hooting, groaning, yelling,
and whistling. The shrill and angry voices of women were heard
above all, mingled with the wailing of their terrified babes. “We
maun hae meat;” “Fell the gentle boutchers;” “Belay there! spank
him with your pole;” resounded on every side, in the screaming tones
of women, and the deep voices of sailors, garnished and enforced
with oaths too dreadful to mention. Nor was this all: a shower of
stones came whizzing past our ears from the boy-tirailleurs
mentioned above, levelling some of our companions, jingling among
the windows, and extinguishing the lamps. Some of the boldest of the
men next attempted to wrest the batons from the constables who
stood near them. In this they were assisted by the women, who
crushed into our ranks, and prevented us giving our cudgels free
play. The stones continued to fly in all directions, hitting the rioters
as often as the preservers of the peace. The parties tugged and pulled
at each other most stubbornly, while the screams of pain and anger,
the yell of triumph, and hoarse execrations, waxed momentarily
louder and more terrific.
At last the constables were driven back, with the loss of all their
batons and most of their best men. The mob rushed onward with a
triumphant hurrah, and turned down a side street leading to a
granary, in which they believed a great quantity of grain was stored
up. The proprietor’s house stood beside it. A volley of stones was
discharged against the latter, which shattered every window in the
house, and the missiles were followed by a thunder-growl of
maledictions, which made the hair of the innocent inmates stand on
their heads, and their hearts die within them. The crowd stood
irresolute for a moment. A tall athletic sailor advanced to the door of
the granary. “Have you never a marlin-spike to bouse open the
hatchway here?” A crowbar was handed to him. “A glim! a glim!”
cried voices from different parts of the crowd. It was now for the first
time discovered that some of the party had provided themselves with
torches, for after a few minutes’ fumbling a light was struck, and
immediately the pitch brands cast a lurid light over the scene. The
state of the corn merchant’s family must now have been dreadful.
The multitude stood hushed as death, or as the coming
thunderstorm. All this time the sailor of whom I have spoken had
been prising away with his bar at the granary door.
At this moment a heavy-measured tread was heard indistinctly in
the distance. It drew nearer, and became more distinct. Some
respectable burghers, who had assembled, and stood aloof gazing on
the scene, now edged closer to the crowd, and addressed the nearest
women in a low voice: “Yon’s the sodgers.” The hint was taken, for,
one by one, the women gathered their infants closer in their arms,
and dropped off. First one and then another pale-faced,
consumptive-looking weaver followed their example in silence. The
trampling now sounded close at hand, and its measured note was
awful in the hush of the dark night. The panic now spread to the
boys, who flew asunder on all sides—like a parcel of carrion flies
when disturbed by a passenger—squalling, “Yon’s the sodgers!” So
effectual was the dispersion that ensued, that when the soldiers
defiled into the wider space before the granary, no one remained
except the door-breaker, and one or two of the torch-holders.
The latter threw down their brands and scampered. The lights
were snatched up before they were extinguished, by some of the
boldest constables. Of all the rioters only one remained—the tall
sailor, who may be termed their ringleader. The foremost rank of the
soldiers was nearly up to him, and others were defiling from behind
to intercept him should he attempt to reach the side streets. He stood
still, watchful as a wild beast when surrounded by hunters, but with
an easy roll of his body, and a good-humoured smile upon his face.
“Yield, Robert Jones,” cried the provost, who feared he might
meditate a desperate and unavailing resistance. But instead of
answering, Robert sprung upon a soldier who was forming into line
at his right side, struck up the man’s musket, twisted off the bayonet,
and making it shine through the air in the torchlight like a rocket,
tripped up his heels. “Not yet, lobster!” he exclaimed, as the bayonet
of the fallen hero’s left-hand man glanced innocuously past him, so
saying, the sailor rapidly disappeared down a dark lane.—Edinburgh
Literary Journal.
THE FLITTING.
It was on the day before the flitting, or removal, that John

Armour’s farm-stock, and indeed everything he had, excepting as
much as might furnish a small cottage, was to be rouped to meet his
debts. No doubt it was a heart-rending scene to all the family, though
his wife considered all their losses light, when compared with her
husband’s peace of mind. The great bustle of the sale, however,
denied him the leisure which a just view of his condition made most
to be dreaded; so that it was not till late in the evening, when all was
quiet again,—his cherished possessions removed, and time allowed
him to brood over his state,—that the deep feelings of vexation and
despair laid hold of his spirit.
The evening was one of remarkable beauty; the birds never more
rapturous, the grass never greener around the farm-house. The turf
seat on which old Hugh was wont to rest, in the corner of the little
garden, was white with gowans; the willows and honeysuckles that
overarched it all full of life; the air was bland, the cushat’s distant
cooing very plaintive;—all but the inhabitants of the humble dwelling
was tranquil and delighted. But they were downcast; each one
pursued some necessary preparation for tomorrow’s great change,
saying little, but deeply occupied with sad thoughts. Once the wife
ejaculated—
“Oh, that the morn was ower!”
“Yes,” said her husband, “the morn, and every morn o’ them!—but
I wish this gloaming had been stormy.”
He could not settle—he could not eat—he avoided conversation;
and, with his hat drawn over his brow, he traversed wearily the same
paths, and did over and over again the same things. It was near
bedtime, when one of the children said to her mother—
“My faither’s stan’in’ at the corner o’ the stable, and didna speak to
me when I spak to him;—gang out, mother, and bring him in.”
“If he wad but speak to me!” was the mother’s answer. She went
out,—the case had become extreme,—and she ventured to argue with
and reprove him.
“Ye do wrang, John—this is no like yoursel;—the world’s fu’ of
affliction—ithers ken that as weel as you—ye maunna hae a’ things
your ain way: there’s Ane abune us wha has said, ‘In sorrow shalt
thou eat thy bread all the days of thy life.’ Ye canna expect to gang
free; and I maun say it wadna be gude for ony o’ us. Maybe greater
ills are yet to befa’ ye, and then ye’ll rue sair that ye hae gien way at
this time; come in, John, wi’ me; time will wear a’ this out o’ mind.”
He struck his hand against his brow—he grasped at his neckcloth—
and after choking on a few syllables which he could not utter, tears
gushed from his eyes, and he melted in a long heartrending fit of
weeping. Oh, it is a sorrowful thing to see a strong hard-featured
man shedding tears! His sobs are so heavy, his wail so full-toned!
John Armour, perhaps for twenty years a stranger to weeping, had
now to burst the sealed sluices of manhood’s grief, which nothing but
the resistless struggle of agony could accomplish, ere relief could
reach his labouring breast. Now it was he sought the dearest
sanctuary on earth—he leaned upon his wife’s bosom, and she
lavished on him the riches of a woman’s love. At length he went to
rest, gentler in spirit, and borne down by a less frightful woe than
what had lately oppressed him.
Next morning brought round the bustle of flitting. There is a deep
interest attending a scene of this kind, altogether separate from the
feelings of those who have to leave a favourite abode. Circumstances
of antiquity—of mystery—belong to it. The demolition even of an old
house has something melancholy; the dismantling it of furniture is
not less affecting. Some of the servants that had been at one time
about the farm assisted on this occasion, and entered fully into the
sentiments now described.
“That press has been there, I’ll warran’, this fifty years; it was his
mother’s, and cam on her blithe marriage-day; the like o’t ye’ll no see
now-a-days—it’s fresh yet. Few hae seen the back o’ thee, I trow,
these twa days, but the wabsters and sclaters; they winna ken what to
mak o’ this wark; let me look into the back o’t.”
“I wad be a wee eerie,” said another, feeling the gloomy
appearance of the old empty dwelling suggest thoughts allied to
superstition, “about ganging into that toom house at night; I wad aye
be thinkin’ o’ meeting wi’ auld Hugh, honest man.”
The flitting set off to a cottage about two miles distant; two cart
loads of furniture, one milk cow, and the old watch-dog, were its
amount. John Armour lingered a little behind, as did his wife, for she
was unwilling to leave him there alone. He then proceeded to every
part of the premises. The barn and stable kept him a few moments;
the rest he hurried over, excepting the kitchen and spence. When he
came to the kitchen (for it was the apartment he visited last), he leant
his head for an instant against the mantelpiece, and fixed his eyes on
the hearthstone. A deep sigh escaped him, and his wife then took him
by the hand to lead him away, which he resisted not, only saying,—
“I hae mind o’ mony a thing that happened here;”—then casting
his eyes hastily round the desolate apartment,—“but fareweel to thee
for ever!” In a few minutes they overtook the flitting, nor did he once
turn again his head towards the desolate place which had so firm a
hold of his heart.—“My Grandfather’s Farm.”
EWEN OF THE LITTLE HEAD:
A LEGEND OF THE WESTERN ISLES.
About three hundred years ago, Ewen Maclean of Lochbuy, in the

island of Mull, having been engaged in a quarrel with a neighbouring
chief, a day was fixed for determining the affair by the sword.
Lochbuy, before the day arrived, consulted a celebrated witch as to
the result of the feud. The witch declared, that if Lochbuy’s wife
should on the morning of that day give him and his men food
unasked, he would be victorious; but if not, the result would be the
reverse. This was a disheartening response for the unhappy votary,
his wife being a noted shrew.
The fatal morning arrived, and the hour for meeting the enemy
approached; but there appeared no symptoms of refreshment for
Lochbuy and his men. At length the unfortunate man was compelled
to ask his wife to supply them with food. She set down before them
curds, but without spoons. The men ate the curds as well as they
could with their hands; but Lochbuy himself ate none. After
behaving with the greatest bravery in the bloody conflict which
ensued, he fell covered with wounds, leaving his wife to the
execration of his people.
But the miseries brought on the luckless chief by his sordid and
shrewish spouse did not end with his life, for he died fasting; and his
ghost is frequently seen to this day riding the very horse on which he
was mounted when he was killed. It was a small, but very neat and
active pony, dun or mouse coloured, to which Lochbuy was much
attached, and on which he had ridden for many years before his
death. His appearance is as accurately described in the island of Mull
as any steed is in Newmarket. The prints of his shoes are discerned
by connoisseurs, and the rattling of his curb is recognized in the
darkest night. He is not particular in regard to roads, for he goes up
hill and down dale with equal velocity. His hard-fated rider still
wears the same green cloak which covered him in his last battle; and
he is particularly distinguished by the small size of his head.
It is now above three hundred years since Ewen-a-Chin-Vig
(Anglice, “Hugh of the Little Head”) fell in the field of honour; but
neither the vigour of the horse nor of the rider is yet diminished. His
mournful duty has always been to attend the dying moments of every
member of his own numerous tribe, and to escort the departed spirit
on its long and arduous journey.
Some years ago, he accosted one of his own people (indeed, he has
never been known to notice any other), and shaking him cordially by
the hand, he attempted to place him on the saddle behind himself,
but the uncourteous dog declined the honour. Ewen struggled hard,
but the clown was a great strong, clumsy fellow, and stuck to the
earth with all his might. He candidly acknowledged, however, that
his chief would have prevailed, had it not been for a birch tree which
stood by, and which he got within the fold of his left arm. The contest
became then very warm indeed. At length, however, Ewen lost his
seat for the first time; and the instant the pony found he was his own
master, he set off with the fleetness of lightning. Ewen immediately
pursued his steed, and the wearied rustic sped his way homeward.—
Lit. Gazette.
BASIL ROLLAND.
Chapter I.
In May, quhen men yied everichone
With Robene Hoid and Littil John,
To bring in bowis and birken bobynis,
Now all sic game is fastlings gone,
Bot gif if be amangs clowin Robbynis.—A. Scott.
The period at which the circumstances recorded in the following

narrative happened was in the troubled year of 1639. At that time the
points in dispute betwixt Charles and his subjects were most
violently contested, and the partizans of each were in arms all over
the country, endeavouring, by partial and solitary operations, to gain
the ascendancy for their faction. The first cause of these disturbances
was the attempt of the monarch to establish Episcopacy over
Scotland—a form of worship which had always been disliked by the
Scotch, as they considered it but a single step removed from Popery.
The intemperate zeal with which Charles prosecuted his views
(occasioned by a misconception of the national character of his
subjects), and his averseness to compromise or conciliation, first
gave rise to the combination called the Covenanters; weak at first,
but in a short time too powerful to be shaken by the exertions of the
High Churchmen.
One of the first and most politic steps taken by the Council of the
Covenant, denominated “the Tables,” was the framing of the
celebrated Bond or Covenant; the subscribers of which bound
themselves to resist the introduction of Popery and Prelacy, and to
stand by each other in case of innovations on the established
worship. Charles seeing, at last, the strength of this association,
uttered, in his turn, a covenant renouncing Popery; he also dispensed
with the use of the Prayer Book, the Five Articles of Perth, and other
things connected with public worship which were obnoxious to the
Covenanters.
During this contention, the citizens of Aberdeen remained firmly
attached to the royal interest, and appear to have come in with every
resolution that was adopted by the government. In 1638, a
deputation from “the Tables,” among whom was the celebrated
Andrew Cant (from whom the mission was denominated “Cant’s
Visitation”), arrived in the town, for the purpose of inducing the
inhabitants to subscribe the Covenant; but as their representations
entirely failed of success, they were obliged to desist. The Earl of
Montrose arrived in Aberdeen in the spring of 1639, and, partly by
the terror of his arms, partly by the representations of the clergy that
accompanied him, succeeded in imposing the Covenant on the
townsmen. After his departure, a body of the royalists, commanded
by the Laird of Banff, having routed the forces of Frazer and Forbes,
took possession of the town, and wreaked their vengeance on all who
had subscribed the Covenant. They only remained five days in the
town, and, on their departure, it was occupied by the Earl of
Marischal, who in turn harassed the royalists. As soon as Montrose
heard of these occurrences, being doubtful of the fidelity of the
inhabitants, he marched to Aberdeen again, disarmed the citizens,
and imposed a heavy fine upon them. The citizens, who had been
impoverished by these unjust exactions, were somewhat relieved,
when Montrose, their greatest scourge, after another short visit,
marched into Angus and disbanded his army.
It was in the month of June that the citizens began to feel
themselves elated by the prospect, if not of peace, of the seat of the
war being removed from their dwellings, on the disbanding of
Montrose’s forces, and at liberty to say anything about the Covenant
that might seem good unto them. Those who had subscribed it under
the influence of fear (and they were not a small number) veered
round to the king’s party, and sounded the praises of the Viscount of
Aboyne, who had landed at Aberdeen on the part of his Majesty.
Their former losses and sufferings were all forgotten, and a general
disposition for rejoicing was to be seen among them. Provost Leslie
and his colleagues were inclined to encourage this, as it might lead

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Anthony Burgess, Stanley Kubrick and

A Clockwork Orange Matthew Melia

ISSN 2634-629X ISSN 2634-6303 (electronic)

Cover illustration: Sharon Cooper/Getty Images

Anthony Burgess and Stanley Kubrick

Language and Adaptation

“Language, Language”: The Social Politics of ‘Goloss’

20th Century Contexts: Architectural, Art Historical and

20th Century Contexts: A Clockwork Orange and the Cold

A Clockwork Orange in 21st Century

Music and A Clockwork Orange

Biswell Andrew is a professor of Modern Literature at Manchester

Dr. Gengaro Christine Lee has taught in the music department at

he convened the conference Ken Russell: Perspectives, Reception and

Pleasure (Bloomsbury, 2020), Grammatical Dreams (Green Integer,

research on Kubrick has been presented in several international confer-

Scripting A Clockwork Orange

‘The Colours of the Real World Only Seem Really Real

Fig. 4 Instances of droog(ie) taken from the film in order

Art and Violence: The Legacy of Avant-Garde Art in

Architecture and Freedom in A Clockwork Orange

Fig. 13 Location research slides from A Clockwork Orange, Stanley

A Clockwork Orange and its Representations of Sexual

David Bowie and A Clockwork Orange: Two Sides of the

Matthew Melia and Georgina Orgill

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

indulging in mindless, opportunistic “Ultraviolence”. Written in a fabri-

The anniversaries of Stanley Kubrick’s film also form part of a cele-

In the late 1960s, the dramatic liberalisation of film-industry self-regulation

Alongside Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971), A Clockwork Orange

independent studies, up to now there has been no single study or collec-

Burgess’s lost “sequel” to A Clockwork Orange: The Clockwork Condition.

3 Novel and Film

Much has also been made regarding Burgess’s alleged misdiagnosis

Filippo Ulivieri discusses this further in the second chapter of this

also gives credence to the possibility that Kubrick was researching it at

I first heard the expression “as queer as a clockwork orange” in a London

The name of the central character, Alex was a comic derivation, so he

Kubrick displayed if not the same, then a similar disenchantment with

4 Novel and Film: Reception

Writing in The Observer in 1962, novelist Kingsley Amis also praised

However, John Garrett’s review in the Times Literary Supplement, was

The publishers promise an “easily digestible feats of picaresque villainy

5 This Book: Structure and Organisation

relationship; and his relationships with the (living) authors he adapted.

5.1 Part 1: Anthony Burgess and Stanley Kubrick

Biswell, Burgess’s biographer and director of the International Anthony

5.2 Part 2: Language and Adaptation

5.3 Part 3: Twentieth-Century Contexts: Architectural, Art

“Architecture and Freedom in A Clockwork Orange”, sees Joe

5.4 Part 4: Twentieth-Century Contexts: A Clockwork Orange

considers Anthony Burgess’s formative trip to Leningrad in 1961 and

5.5 Part 5: A Clockwork Orange in Twenty-First Century

5.6 Part 6: Music and a Clockwork Orange

6. Burgess, A (1972) Copy-typed script by Burgess on the relationship

30. Perko, M. (2019) Voices and Noises: Collaborative Authorship in Stanley

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 25

2 Here Beginneth Twenty Years of Tribulations

Alex is potentially a human being. He is violent, which human beings are.

Such an “odyssey of an embryonic human being” was perfectly

One has to be thankful that an intelligent director took it over. It might

Following a widespread view on Kubrick’s cinema, one of the critics

Maurice Edelman, a Labour MP who proudly coined the catchy phrase