Diane Simmons, "William Prichard & Co"

Diane Simmons is a writer, editor and Co-Director of National Flash Fiction Day (UK). She has been widely published in magazines such as New Flash Fiction Review, Mslexia, Splonk and FlashBack Fiction and placed in numerous flash fiction and short story competitions. She is the author of four published novellas-in-flash: Finding a Way (Ad Hoc Fiction), An Inheritance (V. Press), A Tricky Dance (Alien Buddha Press) & William Prichard & Co (Arroyo Seco Press). You can read more about Diane on her website here, and connect with her on X/Twitter @scooterwriter.

About William Prichard & Co
William Prichard & Co is a novella-in-flash. The novella starts in 1886, and in 33 flash fictions, it follows 65 years of the Prichard family and its perambulator business, holding up a mirror to society and the changes in attitudes, industrial practices and politics, as the family move from the Victorian era to the 1950s.

You can read more about William Prichard & Co on Diane's website here. Below, you can read one of the flashes from the book. 

From William Prichard & Co, by Diane Simmons

Perfectly Put  

1891

‘You look magnificent, Bertram,’ William says when his son walks into the breakfast room.

Bertram bows, removes his cap and examines it. ‘That’s the school crest,’ he says, pointing to the badge on the front. He runs his fingers over the four blue ribbons that criss-cross over the cap. ‘I like these too.’

‘You’re a lucky boy – it’s a marvellous school. You must make sure you work hard – I will be relying on your brains when you’re old enough to join me in the perambulator factory.’

Bertram giggles and sits down at the table. He displays no signs of nerves for a boy about to start his first day at prep school and tucks into toast and scrambled egg with enthusiasm. He is an impressive child – so clever and self-assured. 

As William eats, he allows himself a momentary day dream and imagines an adult Bertram at the helm of the factory. Such a move would enable William to have more free time to pursue other interests such as politics. William Prichard M.P. would sound rather fine and it would be satisfying to help halt the rise of the blasted Liberals; factory owners like himself should not have to put up with constant government interference. His employees are paid well and have excellent working conditions; he hears no complaints.

His younger son calls out to him and William looks across at him and smiles. Hugh is an exceptionally good-natured child, a pleasure to be around. But he doesn’t have Bertram’s confidence or academic promise. It’s surprising – the operations he endured as a young child meant that he’s always received plenty of attention from the family.

‘When I’m big will I work in the factory?’ Hugh asks. 

‘No, no. It will be Bertram. It is always the eldest who follows their father into the family business.’

Hugh screws up his forehead. ‘But Clara is the biggest. It should be her.’

Bertram laughs and digs his little brother in the ribs. ‘Girls can’t do things like that, silly. They need to stay at home to look after the men and children.’

William lifts his son’s cap and ruffles his hair. For a seven-year-old, Bertram has such a grasp of things – William really couldn’t have put it better himself.  

Laughter, Literature, Violence

By Jonathan Taylor

             Violence is of the essence of laughter.

- Wyndham Lewis, The Wild Body

I've recently had an academic book published by Palgrave-Macmillan, called Laughter, Literature, Violence, 1840-1930. The idea for the book originally grew out of my own creative work: as others have pointed out, my writing style is often marked by a dark humour, even grotesque comedy. Initially, I was hardly conscious of this: the mixture of comedy and tragedy in my memoir, Take Me Home (2007), arose naturally, almost unawares, because they were intertwined in reality - in elements of my father's illness, and our experience of caring for him. It seems to me that in so-called 'reality' (whatever that is), comedy and tragedy are rarely monolithic. People laugh at funerals, cry at parties. Death, tragedy, horror, violence can be funny - or horrifically funny. That's why so many literary memoirs mingle laughter and tears, even when they're ostensibly concerned with the most serious, or distressing of subjects. I wanted to write reflectively about this strange emotional hybridity, particularly in relation to memoirs and short fiction - and, in that sense, the academic book makes conscious what I've been doing, over many years, in my own creative writing. It does so, for the most part, in a displaced form, in relation to literary texts by other memoirists and short-story writers; but, as Oscar Wilde famously claimed, all criticism is a kind of autobiography. In writing the book, I have learned a huge amount about the historical periods, about theories of laughter, about the writers - and also about myself, my own style, and my (sometimes dark) sense of humour. Here's the book's blurb: 

Laughter, Literature, Violence, 1840-1930 investigates the strange, complex, even paradoxical relationship between laughter, on the one hand, and violence, war, horror, death, on the other. It does so in relation to philosophy, politics, and key nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary texts, by Edgar Allan Poe, Edmund Gosse, Wyndham Lewis and Katherine Mansfield – texts which explore the far reaches of Schadenfreude, and so-called ‘superiority theories’ of laughter, pushing these theories to breaking point. In these literary texts, the violent superiority often ascribed to laughter is seen as radically unstable, co-existing with its opposite: an anarchic sense of equality. Laughter, humour and comedy are slippery, duplicitous, ambivalent, self-contradictory hybrids, fusing apparently discordant elements. Now and then, though, literary and philosophical texts also dream of a different kind of laughter, one which reaches beyond its alloys – a transcendent, ‘perfect’ laughter which exists only in and for itself.