Talk:Cold Comfort Farm

==Broken link== Love the movie; anyway seems like the biographer's web site is down (re-directs to ad site). A quick google search did not turn up anything useful as replacement. I noted the broken link in the first reference (1-3 are broken), but wasn't sure what format was best so please correct as I did not see a standard format in the help pages. Thanks. Pthorson 02:45, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

Futurisim
I wonder why there's no mention of the futuristic aspects of life as depicted in the novel (although not in the movies or other adaptions), used as a deliberite and extreme contrast to the backwardness and primitivness of Cold Comfort farm. Things like TV telephones, and air-taxies. Flora is not just introducing these people to the 20th C, she's dragging them into the future! If I remember corectly the novel was actually set in the mid 40's or 50's (Stella Gibbon's idea of the mid 40's), there'd just been a second world war and many young men (Flora's boyfriend included), had served in it and been affected by it. That is definitly a novel and highly interesting aspect of the story, it should be worth a mention. OzoneO 16:21, 14 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Good idea, it was something I was intrigued about when I read it but it was not alluded to at all in the adaptations. I have inserted a paragraph about this! Tony Corsini 10:00, 17 August 2006 (UTC)
 * I have removed the reference to aircraft postal services as being futuristic. Letters were carried by aircraft long before 1932.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.122.40.104 (talk) 19:24, 2 August 2011 (UTC)

But not into rural England ! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.96.58.212 (talk) 18:32, 10 March 2015 (UTC)


 * It seems to me that the line Some of the book's attitudes to class and Jews are archaic does not belong in a paragraph about Futurism. Perhaps that line should be elsewhere or even deleted if it contravenes the Wikipedia's NPOV rule. Ant501UK (talk) 23:49, 31 January 2012 (UTC)

I was puzzled over the reference to the television in the phone dial, until I came across this wiki page and saw that there are other details that reveal the setting to be in the future. Here's another: Earl Neck talks about famous Hollywood actors, Clark Gable and Gary Cooper, saying of each that his heyday was "twenty years ago." He also mentions an actor who endured a public scandal "back in '42." Now that I think back on it, the futuristic setting is also fostered by mention of Claud Hart-Harris's war experience in the "Anglo-Nicaraguan war," as well. This is mentioned during the scene at the birthday party for Dick Hawke-Monitor.--Mooncaine (talk) 23:26, 19 July 2008 (UTC)


 * Gibbons says in the dedication that the novel is set in the future. It's at the beginning of her book. I believe it's part of her point about fighting backwardness.  I've added a couple of science fiction categories to the main page, since the novel is technically -- if subtly -- science fiction.  Artemis-Arethusa (talk) 00:31, 5 February 2011 (UTC)
 * Science fiction and futuristic fiction are different genres. I also think that Cold Comfort Farm is neither: neither science, nor the future setting, are relevant to the story.

deepest darkest Sussex
The idea of Sussex (one of the home counties between London and Brighton) as a remote place of widespread festering rural ignorance cut off from the modern world is almost certainly itself a joke (running against more ordinary expectations of Cumbria or northern Wales etc.), though I don't really know how to best phrase an explanation. AnonMoos (talk) 08:33, 8 December 2009 (UTC)
 * But remember it was written in the 1930s. before the Yuppification of Sussex: the South Downs and Weald had patches that were pretty isolated. Gordonofcartoon (talk) 10:15, 8 December 2009 (UTC)
 * I think the point is that Gibbons is parodying novels which characterize places like Sussex as like that (out of strange ignorance or uncaring), when so far as I know even in the 'thirties they weren't. It's supposed to be ridiculous.Artemis-Arethusa (talk) 00:33, 5 February 2011 (UTC)
 * I have lived in Sussex for most of my life, and let me tell you that parts of it are still mired in dark medieval superstition such as "applied kinesiology", "muscle testing", "homeopathy", "Bach flower remedies", "Reiki" etc. etc. Oddly, perhaps, these are to be found more often in the major urban centres such as the "city" of "Brighton 'n' Hove". Hundovir (talk) 20:11, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Flora's solutions and Character Listing
I think the Solutions section needs a proper work over. Some things are inaccurate and others aren't solutions or not purposefully done by Flora at all. She didn't plan for Urk to marry Mariam, that was just a natural byproduct of Elfine's engagement. And She didn't plan on Mr. Mybug marrying Rennet, that was just a byproduct of his character traits and his own pursuit of Flora allowing the chance meeting. It's possible the whole section should be scrapped, doesn't this constitute as spoilers? Anyway, it should have a different heading and preface. It could also be broken up into something like "Flora's Solutions" and "What Happened to Everyone Else," because "Urk: forgets his desire for Elfine and marries Meriam." is not a solution. And Adam going to live at Hautcouture Hall was Adam's idea.

Also, none of the gentry are listened under characters. You'd need Richard Hawk-Monitor, Mrs. Hawk-Monitor and Joan Hawk-Monitor. And poor Claud Hart-Harris isn't listed anywhere. If you're going to list all the cows then you should list a character who speaks and is mentioned more than once when not present (on the telephone and through telegrams). And considering a lot of Flora's efforts go into getting Richard to propose to Elfine, not listing his character is silly.

A better way to list characters is by their natural location (London, Cold Comfort Farm, Howling, Hautcouture Hall, etc.) and within that list, if people cared to, they could be listed by order of appearance. 74.71.120.162 (talk) 13:10, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

Adam Bede
I've just started reading George Eliot's Adam Bede and the first thing that has struck me is that it must have been a strong influence on Cold Comfort Farm (rural setting, modernisation of traditional agricuture, characters called "Adam" and "Seth," Methodist preachers, etc.). I don't have time at the moment to look for published sources, but I'm sure that I'm not the first to notice this connection, so maybe someone would like to add some sourced content about this to this article? Phil Bridger (talk) 21:23, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

T S Elliot
Is it just me or are there several striking parodies of J Alfred Prufrock ? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.96.58.212 (talk) 18:36, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

Mr Mybug
I've deleted (1) the thing about Gibbons' description of Mr Mybug being seen by some people as anti-semitic and (2) her attitudes to Jews being archaic. I was puzzled by both these points when I read the WP article and I don't think either of them stands up to scrutiny.

(1) The reference given was to The Feminine Middlebrow Novel by Nicola Humble, specifically to a footnote on p.30 which relates to Flora's discovery that My Mybug's name is actually Meyerburg. It reads, 'A fact, we are told with slyly subtle anti-Semitism, not calculated to raise [Flora's] spirits.' Given that CCF was written in the 1930s, isn't it rather more likely that Flora's spirits were in fact depressed by the thought that Mr Mybug may be German?

(2) The only specific mention I can recall of Jews being mentioned is early in the book where Mrs Smiling buys a bra from a "Jew-shop". This had no negative connotations in the 1930s - if anything the opposite.

There's an interesting discussion of both points here: http://whileaway.livejournal.com/83975.html. I feel that the assertions of anti-semitism create a false picture both of CCF as a book and Stella Gibbons as a person. Or is there some more persuasive evidence to contradict this opinion? OldSpot61 (talk) 23:47, 28 October 2016 (UTC)

---

As much as I enjoy Cold Comfort Farm, as a Jew living in Britain, my antennae for 1930s racism immediately picked up when I came across the stingingly disappointing Mybug passage. There is much evidence that Gibbons is, at the very least, poking fun at herself for holding anti-Semitic views. Is there some better language the Wikipedia article could use to reflect this?

While it is true that Meyerburg functions in the book primarily as a (very funny) parody of North London intellectuals with pretentious theories about sex, he's absolutely a Jewish rather than a German type. He has an Ashkenazi "Meyer" surname, and the revulsion Flora feels for him seems to stem from a Jewish quality that she views as bug-like. Thus the "physiognomy" in the original Wikipedia esit. And the UK in the pre-Blitz 1930s was much, much fonder of Germans than the above comment suggests. The upper crust and the Oxbridge class that Florida belongs to were rich in sympathy for Hitler as remarked on in works like "Remains of the Day." Edward VIII had alleged Nazi affinities. The Daily Mail was out there making the case for the Third Reich. And even to this day British culture looks upon Germans more warmly than the French despite the bomb craters littering England. I'd also dispute the suggestion that "Jew-shop" was fond rather than nasty. It is similar to common British English terms for shops run by other ethnic minorities, e.g. slurs for Pakistani-run local businesses. If a gentile were to tell my Jewish-British friends that they were gonna "pop on down to the Jew-shop to pick up a Cornetto and a packet of crisps," I doubt the comment would be looked upon as very nice.

Anti-Semitism was common enough in these British comic novels of the early 20th century that even the wonderful Alec Guinness film "Kind Hearts and Coronets" was based on the explicitly anti-Semitic book "Israel Rank," about a British Jew who poisons a child to win a royal title. (https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2009/nov/12/kind-hearts-and-coronets). That movie, like the 1995 Cold Comfort Farm adaptation, snipped out the prejudice in its source material.

Though the Wikipedia passage was deleted in 2016, many other documented instances of the book as lightly anti-Semitic have become available online. See Prof. Clive Bloom's 2022 book which calls the Mybug stuff an expression of "gratuitious" prejudice, here:

https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Bestsellers_Popular_Fiction_Since_1900/aptXEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=gratuitous+%22cold+comfort+farm%22&pg=PA42&printsec=frontcover

And Prof. Jonathan Greenberg mentions the Mybug issues here in a book that identifies problematic undercurrents in pre-WW2 satire:

https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Modernism_Satire_and_the_Novel/QdkeBsrohPIC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=mybug+%22anti-semitic%22&pg=PA100&printsec=frontcover

As he observes elsewhere in the book (in a passage I found in Google Books search), "I freely concede that some of my favorite writers held views or made jokes that were fascist, racist, sexist, homophobic, or simply obnoxious" and singles out Gibbons in Cold Comfort Farm as "giggling" at anti-Semitic stereotypes.

I'm on the fence myself about whether the anti-Semitism here is egregious or just one of those "outdated cultural representations" that Disney Plus warns us about, but it's definitely been seen by academics as anti-Semitism. So I think i'm gonna go ahead and restore the passage. I'll leave it to Sussex experts to judge the fate of the accompanying passage about sukebinds. The sukebinds were one of the first things I wanted to look up.Mertonfeld (talk) 11:00, 14 May 2022 (UTC)


 * I just read the book a few weeks ago. The "Jew-shop" line really puzzled me, and I haven't been able to find many other contemporary examples, though Gibbons uses it again in Nightingale Wood (which has a couple other antisemitic lines besides). But the ones I did find were definitely intended to be insulting, applied to non-Jewish shops that were suspiciously successful. One of her other books features "Arnold Levinsky," a very rude Jew with an enormous nose, and there's a line in Miss Linsey and Pa about the son not liking Jews. On the Meyerbug thing -- I think people miss it out of lack of familiarity with this particular stereotype, which has fallen out of fashion. But compare Svengali and other contemporaries -- Ashkenazi Jews were portrayed as sexually voracious and immoral in their pursuits, especially toward gentiles (their ritual law was said to permit endless sexual and fiscal advantage of non-Jews), and as rich and intellectually dominant. Meyerbug is more complicated, though -- his particular (sexist) nonsense is funny and effective satire. GordonGlottal (talk) 02:29, 19 June 2022 (UTC)

Family tree
This section is useless, but more than useless: it adds to the reader's confusion instead of relieving it. The diagram is totally indecipherable, with no clue as to what the red and blue lines mean—although that is by no means its most serious defect. ALL the diagram does is confirm the assertion that "The interrelations of the characters are complex", but it only compounds the complexity, not in any way clarifying it.

I think this section should be removed until someone can come up with a diagram that helps rather than hinders understanding the complex relationships. —104.244.192.86 (talk) 01:15, 2 November 2017 (UTC)

Response: "This form of family tree is known as a "genogram" and is in common use in the Family Systems psychology of Dr. Murray Bowen. An explanation of its symbols can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genogram. The purpose of a genogram is to diagram relationships between family members but also tell the story of major family events and dysfunction through the use of distinctive symbols, providing a single graphic insight to the history of a family and the plot of the novel." The original provider of the "family tree" should have provided this link to a reference to decipher what is actually much more than a "family tree." I feel that the original critique is warranted but that the casual reader will not be interested in the section, and a curious reader will consult the link within Wikipedia. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Davidkueker (talk • contribs) 17:27, 5 January 2021 (UTC)

Is the name of the psycho-analyst Adolf Müdel in Chapter XIX a pun on the words 'A Muddle"? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.31.65.236 (talk) 13:44, 26 June 2022 (UTC)

Adam Lambsbreath's age
He's specifically given as singing a song learnt for the wedding of George IV. Assuming this to be the legitimate marriage of 1795 and novel being post 1946 (Anglo-Ashanti war)he is over 150 years old even if he learnt the song in his infancy which is, perhaps, less likely given the bawdy nature of the song. 82.4.241.172 (talk) 14:06, 22 September 2023 (UTC)