The Five Conventions

There has been significant controversy over whether or not Clarence embodies the five great conventions of LARP (cited here from the Instruction to the Academy for the 1998 "Golden Penguin" award in the "Unlimited International Full Length Class" as:  Wedding, Vampire, Space Alien, Time Traveler, and the Character of Fu Manchu disguised as someone else. 

The Wedding:

There can be little doubt about the Wedding.  Marsden says "Henrietta's interest in making sure that there was a wedding bordered on some sort of psychotic compulsion.  Her initial intention was that everyone in the game should end up married, in a sort of sexless orgy reminiscent of an obscene Shakespeare Comedy.  There were of course several issues with this.  Thus the original advertisement that the game was to be for "six to twelve couples"

First, it quickly became clear that an even pairing of couples would be unlikely, and that we should in fact be quite lucky to have even our minimal six couples, nevermind twelve.  Beyond that, the further coupling of our players would have to range into the unnatural.  Walker put this rather bluntly to Henrietta, saying "if you wish the rest of them to be married this shall become 'a light entertainment for six to twelve queer couples,'" which remark Henrietta simply pretended not to hear.

Her obsession with weddings led to a number of unlikely suggestions, such as that the characters who had no partner should "pretend" to have partners for purposes of marriage.  Eventually through long nights we disobliged Henrietta of the notion that each and every player had to be married.

She was nevertheless relentless in her pursuit of marriage, and it is chiefly that, and the humiliation of players such as Katherine Gillespie (The Lunatic Carrie Nation, Trilby) that was her primary motivation.  Often marriage was her weapon of choice.  For example, Henrietta was shamed into giving Trilby to Katherine Gillespie in Pittsburgh.  While Trilby has been roundly condemned as a "hopeless and unplayable" character with "no plots or volition," She was actually a favorite of Henrietta, who simply did not understand that her internal tragedy made for little real story.  However, Henrietta fabricated, out of whole cloth, reasons to keep Trilby even from the glum satisfaction of a coupling with her Svengali, the evil Dr. Nikola, preferring instead to allow Nikola to join in matrimony with Peedee Boyd, despite her usual matrimonial obsessions regarding that character.

The Vampire

In this area, one can actually give Clarence a mild round of applause.  Of course the Vampire was immensely popular in the years after Stoker's Dracula, however the GMs chose to be just a trifle evasive in this case, and hearkened back to steal Sheridan Le Fanu's "Camilla." 

Walker was charged with the Character, and aside from being more literate than King (who read only dime novels, though he claimed great literacy), or Bucher (whose reading seemed to include Von Clausewitz, and various authors on the Napoleonic and Civil Wars), Walker found the idea of a female vampire "rather delicious."  The character was originally slated to be Dracula, however Marsden says that Walker had "an intense dream about the character while smoking hashish, and decided to write the character as a woman."

Apparently his argument, which was enough to convince King and Bucher, is that the plot called for the vampire to be out during the day, which Dracula could not do, but Camilla could.  Therefore 'logic' prevailed and Camilla became a "she."

The Space Alien

Of course the penchant for aliens was at a fever pitch by 1903.  Aliens were well known before H.G. Wells "War of the Worlds," in 1897, but various unofficial sequels and their increasing inclusion in dime novels drove a public interest, and also tended to make them more seriously presented as characters.

The Alien plots of Clarence are drawn from a number of sources.

In fact, Clarence has some legitimacy in the sequence of historic science fiction.  Washington D.C. Medical doctor Gustavus W. Pope, had written two such stories Romances of the Planets No. 1: Journey to Mars, 1894, and Romances of the Planets, No. 2: Journey to Venus (1895) - they are chiefly known as potential influences on Edgar Rice Burroughs A Princess of Mars.  Initially one of Horatio King's "claims to fame" was that he actually knew Pope, and would of course prevail upon him to come and play the game.  While he had in fact known Pope, the author was merely one in a long line of people who had found Horatio King impossible (apparently Horatio had proposed further "Romances" sequels, with the proposition that he, King, would plot and outline them, and Pope do the "simple work" of writing them out at length - a system King initially proposed for character writing, until he saw Walker's draft of one of his characters.

The "Captain Mors" series of German "Luftpirate" stories which was adored by Bucher, was certainly one source.  And the Martians and Venusians are ultimately a blend of a dozen different authors, and constitute a hash no more or less original than the other work of the day. 

Oddly a very obvious influence is  the character of "Aleriel," a Venusian who disguised himself as a human in A Voice from Another World (1882) by Reverend Wladyslaw Somerville Lach-Szyrma, an expatriate Polish nobleman with labor sympathies.   The problem is that it's unclear how or why the GMs had ever seen the work, as it is nowhere referred to by any of them.  King and Bucher were the fans of dime novel aliens, and certainly Aleriel was far too effete for them, lacking any disintegrating Ray or other godlike weapon.  The most likely case is that Bucher read one of the Aleriel novels when he was stationed in London, (undoubtedly a used copy as it was long out of print), and disliked it, but recalled the plot device of an alien disguised as a human.  It is quite conceivable that Bucher pursued the work for it's references to the Siege of Paris, though he must have despised the fact that Aleriel rescued the narrator from Prussians. 

Full of fairly enlightened and non-militant aliens, Lach-Szyrma's work is an obvious influence on C.S. Lewis' much later "Perelandra" trilogy. 

A longstanding resentment against Aleriel would explain a great deal about the rather poor position the sympathetic alien is placed in.  Dr. Pekoe (another tea pun - the name given by Aleriel is Dr. Posela) Few characters are screwed as thoroughly as he!

The Time Traveler

One may be rather surprised that Clarence included the last of the Four Conventions.  We of course tend to think of the Fourth Convention as the "Time Traveling Nazi," however that convention has only existed since 1939 when Dawn Roz' parody "Hitler on Ice" presented the barbarous dictator dealing with a perfect world in which there were no inequalities for him to exploit.  Like Chaplin's "The Great Dictator," Roz' work is foresightful and funny, but seldom reproduced in the wake of the Nazi tragedy.  Nevertheless, the image of the gleefully Ice-Skating Furher (who is preserved for posterity when the first bomb of a war he has launched traps him in ice in the Berchtesgaden) left its mark on future generations.

Later LARPers following Roz' tradition of high-budget musical LARPs would sing:

References for real "Time Travel" were rather sparse in the time of Clarence.  Obviouosly there were examples of "one way" time travel, or "dream travel" such the 1889 "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" or the 1888 "Looking Backward." 

As early as 1881 author Edward Page Mitchell suggested a mechanical device to travel in time in "Clock that Went Backward."  And of course the seminal time travel story was that of H.G. Wells, published in several different venues - as "The Chronic Argonauts" in 1888, as "The Rediscovery of the Unique" for "The Fortnightly Journal" in 1892, as "The Time Travellers Story" in 1894 in the "National Observer," and as "The Time Machine" in "The New Review" in 1895. It has been suggested that the next time travel story was Raymond Cummings "The Man Who Mastered Time" (Argosy, 1924).

However, it seems fairly certain that it was not Wells novel directly that brought the idea of time travel to the minds of the authors.  King, Bucher, and Marsden all read Argosy, which had moved the "boyhood" stories of the authors into the realm of the "adult," so that grown men could read them without feeling quite so silly.  In 1902 and 1903, during the very months that Clarence was being written, the pages of Argosy were splashed with

William Wallace Cook's " A Round Trip To The Year 2000; Or A Flight Through Time," a story which also was one of the earlier examples of "robots" though the name would wait until "R.U.R."

Thus the "Time Travel" story of Clarence was inspired.  A quick look at the story indicates that it was clumsily grafted on, though the story in itself is good.  The general consensus is that King demanded it, and Marsden did the actual writing - in fact it is speculated that many of King's apparently adequate characters were in fact outlined by King and handed off to Marsden to finish.  Since Cooke was the copyist for both, it is not always clear which author actually finished the character, unless the original sheet survives and preserves the typographical errors not caught by Cooke.  Since Marsden's sheets as edited by Cooke tend to be cleaner than King's, it is also possible that Cooke corrected Marsden's spelling, but refused to alter King's simply because she did not particularly like him. 

Fu Manchu

This last of the five conventions is probably the most debated, especially since the Academy dropped it in 1999 (affecting Golden Penguin eligibility for LARPs that premiered on or before January 1, 1998) - some would strike it entirely, while some would insist that the formal convention is "I'm Fu Manchu - So What!" - that the evil Manchu must not be revealed until game wrap, that there must be no plausible method of discovery, and that the character's identity has little or no real impact on the game.

The last is certainly not the case.  William Jenner Bryant drives a lot of chaos.  There is no plausible method of exposing him though oddly in at least one run he was exposed. 

We tend to feel the essential element of the Fu Manchu plot is that Fu Manchu must be disguised as someone absolutely implausible. While the mastermind often took on disguises in literature, his disguises tended to be plausible - he once passes as a westerner, but under favorable circumstances - in LARP, the converse is true - the archfiend must be disguised as someone of an improbable complexion, build and height, who has speech mannerisms that would be almost impossible to imitate, and a background that could not reasonable be faked.

The character is dealt with at greater length elsewhere, and so doesn't warrant a lot of additional discussion here, however though Fu Manchu is years in the future, in the form of one of his Villainous Asiatic Predecessors, Bryant fulfills the convention as well as could be hoped.