Tag: History

Past presents, present pasts


Reading Daisy Hay’s Dinner With Joseph Johnson: Books & Friendship in a Revolutionary Age, I came to the pages dealing with the contortions of William Pitt’s increasingly repressive administration in its attempts to shut down protest in the 1790s, particularly the recasting of the 1351 Act, which had made it a crime to ‘compass and imagine’ the death of the King, that is, to intend the death of the king, as it was commonly understood. ‘Pitt’s lawyers redefined it, so that an act of imagining alone became a crime. To commit treason one needed merely to have imagined the King’s death, not to have acted to advance it. Writing and speaking thus became treasonable.’ Since the government was appointed in the King’s name, any action which threatened ‘the security and stability of government legally constituted an attempt to “levy war” on the King himself. Political protest thus became treasonable by its very nature.’[1]

I was reminded, unsurprisingly, of a very much more recent decline and fall—but reminded  also of the first undergraduate essay I wrote on my History course, about the French Revolution or, rather, the domestic effects in this country of the dramatic events in France. The marker’s comments included the suggestion, I recall, that I try to refrain from running before I could walk (but also queried my use of the word ‘climactic’, about which I was right and they were wrong, not that I ever dwell on that at all). I’d read fairly widely, and, I suspect not unusually, the book I found most stimulating—and exciting—was E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. I didn’t make a habit of reading 900-page history books but made an exception for this one. At that time, Margaret Thatcher’s government tended to behave as though anything that couldn’t be measured, weighed and, ideally, made a profit from, didn’t exist, so I was strongly drawn to such sentiments as followed Thompson’s assertion that definitive answers to such a controversy as that over the effect on standards of living of the Industrial Revolution still evaded us. ‘For beneath the word “standard” we must always find judgements of value as well as questions of fact. Values, we hope to have shown, are not “imponderables” which the historian may safely dismiss with the reflection that, since they are not amenable to measurement, anyone’s opinion is as good as anyone else’s. They are, on the contrary, those questions of human satisfaction, and of the direction of social change, which the historian ought to ponder if history is to claim a position among the significant humanities.’

Still, the quotation most familiar to readers of the book, certainly the last few words of it, is the intention stated in the ‘Preface’: ‘I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity.’ That last phrase is often quoted and recalled but sometimes as if it simply refers to the assumption that, coming later, we simply know and understand more. As Thompson notes further on, though, ‘for those who live through it, history is neither “early” nor “late”. “Forerunners” are also the inheritors of another past.’[2]


(James Longenbach, poet, teacher and fine scholar, died 29 July this year)

Tricky business, the past. That familiar quotation briefly conjured up another, William Faulkner’s ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past’, which he puts into the mouth of one of his recurring characters, the lawyer (and occasional amateur sleuth), Gavin Stevens, in Requiem for a Nun. I noticed a few days ago how many literary anniversaries cropped up on 19 December: Constance Garnett’s ‘heroic life’ began at 11 a.m. on that day in 1861;[3] the French writer Colette was married to Henry de Jouvenel in 1912, a simple civil ceremony in the mairie of the sixteenth arrondissement: ‘Madame Colette Willy, woman of letters, notorious lesbian, bare-breasted music-hall star, and social pariah, was now the baroness de Jouvenel des Ursins, and the wife of one of Paris’s most influential political journalists.’[4] From Coleman’s Hatch the following year, Ezra Pound wrote to William Carlos Williams, in a letter that reads with great poignancy now: ‘I am very placid and happy and busy. Dorothy is learning Chinese. I’ve all old Fenollosa’s treasures in mss.’ And: ‘Have just bought two statuettes from the coming sculptor, Gaudier-Brzeska. I like him very much [ . . . ] We are getting our little gang together after five years of waiting.’[5] A little over seven months before German forces cross the Belgian frontier near a place called Gemmenich. . .

But I was thinking, particularly, of David Jones: poet, painter and, for a while, soldier, enlisted in the 15th (London Welsh) Battalion of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. For two weeks, his battalion was billeted in farm outbuildings in Warne, a mile south of Rocquetoire, ‘all this time the cold rain continuing, more rain than in any December for 39 years.’ On 19 December they boarded ‘grey-painted London buses for La Gorgue, near Estaires.’ They were headed for the front line at Neuve Chapelle.


(David Jones via The Spectator)

‘In the trenches’, Thomas Dilworth wrote of Jones, ‘he became convinced that any distinction between past and present was superficial, accidental, largely unreal. History had not ended; it continued.’[6] In his  ‘Autobiographical Talk’ (1954), Jones said: ‘You see by what close shaves some of us are what we are, and you see how accidents of long past history can be of importance to us in the most intimate sense, and can determine integral things about us.’[7] Like other literary soldiers—Blunden, Sassoon, Ford, Graves among them—the war haunted his later life and writing, perhaps to a greater extent than most of the others. ‘Decades afterwards, a door slamming or a car backfiring would startle him back to the trenches. In distant thunder, he heard artillery.’[8]

Close shaves and roads not taken. Year’s end, year’s turning: there’s a strong tendency to look both forward and back, reviewing what’s past and anticipating, hoping or—increasingly, these days—dreading what’s to come. For some, such reviews have a tendency to ripple outwards, to include peripheral as well as central figures, the gone as well as the present, not only the dead but the lost, the ghosts of those still living, somewhere, but in places either no longer known to us or just inaccessible, for varied reasons: neglect, forgetfulness, estrangement – or those unexceptional divergences in the trajectories of all individuals’ lives. There in their hundreds, perhaps thousands: friends, colleagues, acquaintances, fellow students, fellow teachers, lovers, almost-lovers, antagonists, the watchers and the watched, the lives that touched us, held us, struck us, changed us, missed us by inches—or by a country mile. ‘If I thought I was not thinking about the past’, Deborah Levy wrote, ‘the past was thinking about me.’[9]


Yes. We are not only subjects but objects, not only observers but observed. That’s the sort of thing that can easily slip a person’s mind as they look about themselves, so much to see, so much to learn, so much to talk about, read about, write about, think about. Recounting his work on an illustrated history of exploration, an impossibly huge task, the contributions sent to his publishers routinely thousands of words too long, Eric Newby comments: ‘I had, and still have, the conviction that I must let the reader know if I discover anything interesting, and unfortunately so many things are interesting. At least they are to me.’[10]

Things certainly look grim just now – and have done this past year, three years, decade, steadily worsening. And not only individuals get lost. The things we—some of us—care about are under threat and under attack, some are already gone and we won’t be getting them back. But after all it isn’t after all, not yet all, anyway. We are still here, still there, the more energetic actively resisting while others, on occasion, discover something interesting, at least to us – and let others know.

So: a wave from the bunker to any passer-by. And, to various friends who, in Auden’s phrase, ‘show an affirming flame’: Joyeux Noël, Buon Natale, Feliz Navidad, Nadolig Llawen – and Happy Holidays.

Notes

[1] Daisy Hay, Dinner With Joseph Johnson: Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary Age (London: Chatto & Windus, 2022),

[2] E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963; revised edition with new preface, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1980), 485, 12, 648.

[3] Richard Garnett, Constance Garnett: A Heroic Life (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1991), 11.

[4] Judith Thurman, Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2000), 247.

[5] Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907-1941, edited by D. D. Paige (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 65.

[6] Thomas Dilworth, David Jones in the Great War (London: Enitharmon Press, 2012), 62, 63, 93.

[7] In Epoch and Artist (London: Faber and Faber, 1973), 25.

[8] Thomas Dilworth, David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet (London: Jonathan Cape, 2017), 54

[9] Deborah Levy, Things I Don’t Want to Know (London: Penguin Books, 2018), 162.

[10] Eric Newby, ‘Walking the Plank’, in Departures and Arrivals (London: Harper Collins, 1999), 39.

On a postcard, please


Blackberrying again: working our way down bushes on the slopes of the park, filling plastic containers, taking them home, rinsing the fruit in a colander, transferring them to compostable bags and sticking them in the freezer. It seems, oddly, like a blow on behalf of the ordinary universe. As are the hot air balloons, going over so early some mornings, as they have done for years. And, as I have done for years, I step outside and stare up at the sky and feel a strange sense of reassurance, of confirmation, of a fitness in the world.

We have stepped, or been forced, outside of all that. Our recent pleasures have included quite ridiculous weather and quite ridiculous politics. Or, more soberly, terrifying weather and terrifying politics, two areas intimately linked, of course. There have been hot summers before, 1976, 1911, and droughts, such as 1921, 1911 again – and 1976, again. But in recent years, it is no longer in a metaphorical sense, or even a hyperbolic one, that we say: the world is on fire. Set against this, of course, is the continuing failure of governments to meet the urgency of need with priority of response. If major heart surgery is needed, sticking a plaster on the patient’s thumb strikes some of us as less than adequate. But there is also the massive disconnect, the stolid denial that individual actions can make any difference – while the careful sorting of paper, cardboard and plastics for the weekly collection somehow co-exists in the same single life with a steely determination, and a conviction of entitlement, to fly to three holiday destinations every year.


Walking on one of the quieter paths in the Victorian cemetery, we pass a wedding reception at the Underwood Centre, several dozen guests in a woodland setting. In the midst of death we are in life. It is odd, to say the least, to know, or at least to suspect, that after so many centuries of progress, if you can call it that, of achievement, if that’s what it is, we are living in an age of extinction, an age in which things will not simply slow down or even go backwards but will just stop and die. We don’t want to think of such things… and the vast majority of us  – manage not to

 04:28 – and the cat feels it’s time to begin discussing breakfast. The workmen won’t be here to plague us for another three and a half hours. But there’s the light – and the birdsong. ‘All winter long’, William Maxwell wrote to Eudora Welty in June 1979, ‘I worried because there were no birds, and now there is such a racket you can’t hear yourself think.’[1] (Not long before this, he’d written: ‘In some ways the most beautiful journeys are the ones you don’t take’, which are the journeys I’ve been enjoying for a while now, liking them more and more.)

‘In this weather’—Maxwell again, this time in the summer of 1953, ‘one needs astonishment in the head to keep the heat out.’[2] That afternoon, listening to the rain on the windows, I was struck by the consciousness of what I was doing and the moment in which I was doing it: listening to the rain. It was late in the hottest day ever recorded in this country, the bulletins said, the hottest anyway since the day before. Fires were reported all over the United Kingdom, in London, South Yorkshire, Leicestershire. Our temperate northern climate, forsooth.

All those weary years, those decades, in which the warnings were given, the recommendations made, the figures presented – and nothing done and nothing done and nothing done. It would have been so much cheaper then, more manageable then, the future infinitely strengthened and sweetened then. But we had no influential figures equal to the task. Nor have we had any since. And, looking at the poor creatures now, with their paucity of ideas and their disgusting gestures at policy, it’s painfully evident why we have declined so fast and so far.

‘It does no good to regret history’, Samuel Hynes remarked, ‘all we can do is to try to understand it.’[3] That seems reasonable enough, though forces here, there and everywhere want something quite other. Why understand it? Here’s the version we like – why not go with that?


As Sarah Churchwell recently remarked, ‘The past has consequences in the present regardless of whether we know what happened in it; learning the history makes those consequences intelligible.’[4]

The other day, in an attempt to prevent the Librarian’s determined misquoting of a couple of lines in Dirty Harry, I played her the clip: at the end, the wounded man, maddened by the uncertainty about whether Harry has fired five shots or six, says: ‘I gots to know! I gots to know!’

Yes, I think I suffer a little from that compulsion. Is there one left – or is it already empty?

Answers on a postcard, please – but then you may as well recycle them.

Notes

[1] Suzanne Marrs, editor, What There Is to Say, We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), 348.

[2] What There Is to Say, We Have Said, 35.

[3] Samuel Hynes, ‘Introduction: A Note on “Edwardian”, in Edwardian Occasions: Essays on English Writing in the Early Twentieth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 11.

[4] Sarah Churchwell, The Wrath to Come: Gone With the Wind and the Lies America Tells (London: Head of Zeus, 2022), 11.

Cake, justice and other helpings

(Harmen van Steenwyck, Still Life: An Allegory of the Vanities of Human Life: National Gallery, London)

The name on the local builder’s van parked just outside our window recalls a nineteenth-century book title. ‘“Socially and politically mean one thing in the end,” said Beauchamp. “If you have a nation politically corrupt you won’t have a good state of morals in it, and the laws that keep society together bear upon the politics of the country.”’ I’ve not actually read George Meredith’s novel, Beauchamp’s Career, but was happy to lean on Roy Foster, clearly familiar not only with Meredith but also Trollope, Disraeli, George Eliot, Dickens, Mrs Humphrey Ward and others, together with a raft or, rather, flotilla of critics, biographers, diarists and historians that had any bearing on his subject.[1]

1871 was the date of the Meredith novel. A long way back—Victoria, Gladstone, the opening of the Royal Albert Hall, trade unions legalised, Stanley bumping into Livingstone, a UK census total (2 April) of 26,072,036—in some ways, at least.

In the early eighteenth century, E. P. Thompson remarked, ‘High politics was a predatory game, with recognized spoils, and [Robert] Walpole is to be distinguished chiefly by his systematizing of the means of corruption, with unusual blatancy.’[2] Through much of the nineteenth century, with England seen as primarily an industrial nation, foreign visitors went North to visit the ‘real seat of English power’, while London was regarded a place of idleness and corruption.

As economic power failed, the perc­eived centre of the economy shifted south. The last years of the nineteenth century brought ‘a new urban world to the fore, the world of inner London.’ Imperial designs increased as manufacturing aspirations declined – and London was the heart of the Empire.’[3]

‘Unusual blatancy’ then: impunity now, with little attempt to hide the corruption, lying and hypocrisy that characterises the current English government. And Emerson’s 1836 remark that ‘The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language’[4] is still germane.

My younger daughter comes over from Barcelona: the first sighting for eight months. While she’s here, my elder daughter comes for dinner; the four of us together, first time in a long time.

How are you?
I’m all right, I say. Apart from my eyes, ears, teeth, leg and back.
(Leave it there, man, leave it there.
I leave it there.)

All too soon, politics edge in. Then and now, sitting at a dinner table, sitting down to a keyboard, I think, though briefly: don’t just rant about bloody Tories. Surely everyone in this country with a half-decent view of the world now rants about bloody Tories. Or is that too sweeping? I’m old enough to remember when the Conservative party was a serious and respectable political organisation. I knew reasonable, intelligent people who voted for them. They were the law and order party, the party of economic moderation and stability, the party of patriotism and national pride. Not my party but – respectable. All that’s gone, of course. They’re well on the way to becoming like the Republican Party in the United States, a cult, utterly divorced from truth, honesty, justice, fairness, the national interest, democratic principles and the rest. All those Conservative MPs had their chance, they had several chances – but chose not to take them. Any claim to moral authority or ethical standards is now long gone.

I think of Elizabeth Bishop writing to her friend Pearl Kazin in 1953, mentioning a piece in Darwin’s Beagle journal about a Brazilian complaining that English Law gave the rich and respectable no advantage over the poor. ‘It reminds me of Lota’s story about a relative, a judge, who used to say, “For my friends, cake! For my enemies, Justice!”’[5]

(Mabel Frances Layng, The Tea Table: West Park Museum, Macclesfield)

Cake, yes. Having it, eating it. Could we say ‘no advantage’ now? Hardly, when rich men frequently bring libel actions against investigative journalists who have looked into their dealings with offshore accounts, tax havens, foreign agents, cyber hackers, purveyors of fake news and the like, in an attempt to shut down those journalists’ researches.

The day descends. Russian forces continue their genocidal campaign in Ukraine. In India, Jignesh Mevani, a prominent campaigner for the Dalit community, is arrested for tweeting criticism of Prime Minister Modi. Police clash with Palestinian protesters in Jerusalem. In the US, car crashes have been overtaken by guns as the main cause of death among children and teenagers. In France, the far right are in serious contention for the Presidency, while Leave and Tory voters in this country apparently favour Le Pen by a margin of some 13 points. In Singapore—which currently ranks 160th out of 180 territories in the Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index (behind Belarus and Russia – yes, really)—Terry Xu, the former editor of the Online Citizen, has been jailed for three weeks for defamation over a letter published on the site that alleged corruption among government ministers. And here – we read the headlines, watch members of parliament defend the indefensible (not least the latest vicious and absurd proposal to traffic refugees to Rwanda) and wonder how we ended up here.

No, of course we don’t really wonder, because we already know. We know. But the knowledge hurts.

Notes

[1] R. F. Foster, ‘“Fatal Drollery”: Parliamentary Novels, Outsiders and Victorian Political History’, in Paddy & Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History (London: Penguin Books, 1995), 139-170.

[2] E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 214.

[3] Alan Howkins, ‘The Discovery of Rural England’, in Robert Colls and Philip Dodd, editors, Englishness: Politics and Culture, 1880-1920 (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 65.

[4] Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Nature’, in Selected Essays, edited by Larzer Ziff (London: Penguin Books, 1982), 51.

[5] Elizabeth Bishop, One Art: The Selected Letters, edited by Robert Giroux (London: Pimlico, 1996), 255. ‘Lota’ is Lota de Macedo Soares, with whom Bishop lived in Brazil for fifteen years.

Devilish Warnings


‘For years of our lives the days pass waywardly, featureless, without meaning, without particular happiness or unhappiness’, says the narrator of Jane Gardam’s 1985 novel, Crusoe’s Daughter. There are, of course, exceptions – yesterday, for one instance, when I received both Covid booster and flu jab, emerging, as they say, fully armed.

‘‘Hello, good-looking’, the Librarian says—addressing neither me nor, a little more surprisingly, Harry the Cat, the usual object of her admiration—but my new computer. After several years of engaging with a Desktop that felt no sense of obligation—‘Would you please open this file?’ ‘Nah.’ ‘How about that website?’ ‘Not now!’—I’ve invested (interest-free deal!) in new hardware: a MacBook Pro, which is now set up with most basic necessities, thanks to my 5% input and the Librarian’s 95%. There have been very few problems, apart from her tendency to stroke the MacBook—and to murmur compliments in its direction—‘So shiny, so new’. I presume, perhaps unwisely, that this is a passing phase, together with her veiled threats—‘You should watch it very closely: these things have a habit of disappearing.’

(Not a MacBook)

Also disappearing is the summer, since the weather is turning – again, yes, but with serious intent this time. Still trying to wean myself off my appalled fascination with the daily totals of new cases—probably significantly underestimated now—hospitalisations and deaths, I sit listening to ambulance sirens on the distant main roads. Are they more or less frequent now than six months or twelve months ago? Did we just get so used to them then that they all but vanished into a familiar aural background?

In the park and the cemetery, the blackberries are mostly shrivelled or gone. There has long been a widespread belief in this country that they shouldn’t be picked after a certain date, usually Michaelmas but with some regional variations, up to about 10 October, which, as Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud point out, ‘allowing for the eleven-day calendar shift of 1752, is the same thing.’[1] The berries are said to be bad because the Devil has spat on them, stamped on them or, alas, pissed on them. On a walk a few days ago, I noticed a bush in the park still boasting several plump and very black berries and pointed them out. In defiance of devilish warnings, the Librarian’s mother picked one off, popped it into her mouth and pronounced it ‘delicious’.


‘I like to remind myself of the Dorset proverb’, Patrick White wrote, ‘“God gave us meat, we have to go to the Devil for sauce”.’[2] An astonishing number of people now not only want but apparently require sauce.

The Gardam quote I began with continues: ‘Then, like turning over a tapestry when you have only known the back of it, there is spread the pattern.’[3] Some of us are uncommonly fond of patterns. Also in 1985, Anthony Burgess published a piece called, ‘The Anachronist Strikes Back’, in which he remarked: ‘The point is, I think, that the past is made by the present. The pattern we call history is not in history: it’s made by us.’[4] This will not sit well with those for whom ‘history’ is fixed, unchanging and manifesting no need whatsoever for questioning or examination. But still, but still – in the individual life, as in the collective, the past is constantly reappraised, revised, reconfigured. How could it not be?

Notes

[1] Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud, A Dictionary of English Folklore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 24.

[2] Patrick White, ‘The Reading Sickness’ (1980), in Patrick White Speaks, edited by Paul Brennan and Christine Flynn (London: Jonathan Cape, 1990), 75.

[3] Jane Gardam, Crusoe’s Daughter (London: Abacus, 2012), 270.

[4] Anthony Burgess, The Ink Trade, edited by Will Carr (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2018), 157.

Going in circles

After a year or more of travelling no further than a couple of miles from home, whatever the shape and length of the walks, on closer nodding terms with the tulips than with other human animals, we broke out of the circle a few days ago and into. . . a circle. It was, though, a stone circle, more than that since Stanton Drew offers the third largest complex of standing stones in England, three circles, ‘the central “Great Circle” consisting almost entirely of fallen stones’, solid blocks of the local dolomitic conglomerate. As with the Rollright Stones in the Cotswolds, near Long Compton, a village on the borders of Oxfordshire and Warwickshire, ‘folklore decrees that the stones are uncountable.’[1]

The Bath antiquary John Wood claimed that he had counted the stones, ‘though the cloudburst that followed was attributed to his folly by the villagers.’[2]


Wood had added that those who did make the attempt ‘proceeded till they were either struck dead upon the spot, or with such an illness as soon carried them off.’ Quoting this, Janet and Colin Bord enlarge a little upon the ‘wedding legend’, the story traditionally associated with the stones, that they were a wedding party turned to stone for dancing on the Sabbath. The wedding, on a Saturday, went on until the fiddler stopped at midnight, saying that he couldn’t play on the Sabbath. ‘But then a dark stranger appeared and continued the music, and the merry-makers danced faster and faster and could not stop. At dawn, the music ceased, and they saw that the fiddler was none other than the Devil. They could not run away from him, and he said that one day he would return and play to them again. Until that day comes, they stand, as still as stone, in a field at Stanton Drew.’[3]

The details vary in several versions, as Kingsley Palmer points out, noting that an alternative name for the stones is ‘The Fiddlers and the Maids’. ‘All however agree that it was punishment for breaking the sabbath which caused the tragedy, that it was the bride who insisted on continuing beyond the midnight hour and that the devil himself led the dance in the form of a fiddler. The legend obviously has strong moralistic overtones, and the role of the bride suggests its masculine origin’.[4]


When the famous antiquarian and biographer John Aubrey stayed with his grandmother in Compton Dando, he would visit Stanton Drew, which he referred to as ‘bigger than Stonehenge’. He claimed not to believe the story ‘that on her way to be married, a bride and the company she was with were all turned into these stones, which are grouped together, hard as marble and nine or ten feet high. One is called the bride’s stone, another the parson’s stone, another the cook’s. The stones are a dirty reddish colour and take a good polish. I cannot help wondering how they really came to be there, and why.’

Thirty years later, Aubrey went back ‘to see the stone monument there that I knew as a child. The stones stand in plough land.’ The corn was ready for harvest so his attempts to measure the stones were hampered. He recorded that the villagers broke the stones ‘with sledges because they encumber their fertile land. The stones have been diminishing fast these past few years. I must stop this if I can.’[5]

On a brisk and bright and breezy day, one pound per person entrance fee slipped into the honesty box, and we’re through the gate and into the field, with the River Chew beyond. It’s very atmospheric, or was when we were there, wind fanning through the grass, stones standing, leaning or fallen, some with small pools of rainwater in the shallow depressions, stone weathered into wildly varied colours, shades and textures.


The Great Circle, at 113 metres in diameter, is the second largest after Avebury, and has 26 surviving upright stones. Recent research, outlined on the English Heritage site, states that there were nine concentric rings of wooden posts inside the great circle, each standing several metres tall. Similar timber circles such as Woodhenge are known elsewhere, but this is apparently the largest and most complex timber monument known in the British Isles. There would have been a large, deep circular ditch around the stones, 6 or 7 metres wide and about 135 metres in diameter. The site may date back around 4500 years.

https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/stanton-drew-circles-and-cove/history/

Hardly the ends of the earth for us, but a few miles—and a few thousand years—beyond our own recent circle. Modest progress but progress, after all.


Notes

[1] Images of Prehistory, text by Peter Fowler, photographs by Mick Sharp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 124.

[2] Julian Cope, The Modern Antiquarian: A Pre-Millennial Odyssey through Megalithic Britain (London: Thorson 1998), 222.

[3] Janet & Colin Bord, Mysterious Britain (London: Paladin Books, 1975), 29.

[4] Kingsley Palmer, The Folklore of Somerset (London: Batsford, 1976), 74, 75. The story is also retold in Sybil Marshall, Everyman’s Book of English Folk Tales (London: Dent, 1981).

[5] Ruth Scurr, John Aubrey: My Own Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 2015), 26, 155.

End fact, try – fiction?

Jane-Seymour

(Hans Holbein, Jane Seymour, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna)

Reading of a world nearly five hundred years back in Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror & the Light, you still trip over occasional reminders of the current one: Henry VIII’s new queen, Jane Seymour, has not yet been crowned and the king has talked of a midsummer ceremony. ‘But now there are rumours of plague and sweating sickness. It is not wise to allow crowds in the street, or pack bodies into indoor spaces.’ Even so, ‘The Seymours, of course, urge the king to take the risk.’

Nearly five hundred pages into Mantel’s novel, the name of Thomas Culpeper first occurs: ‘A young man’, ‘The young fellow’.[1] This Culpeper—and the historical one, his age, appearance, character, the stage at which he first encountered Catherine (or Katharine) Howard—who sashays in a little later—sits a little askew with a recent reading of Ford Madox Ford’s Fifth Queen trilogy.

FMF-Fifth-Queen

There, Culpeper—spelt ‘Culpepper’—is introduced early, in conversation between Nicholas Udal and one of the King’s guards and is seen shortly afterwards, leading the mule on which Katharine Howard rides. This Culpeper is cousin to Katharine, rich, aggressive, a braggart, a roaring, swaggering, drunken fellow.[2]

In the first place, I often need to remind myself just how young some of these people were. Culpeper was around twenty-seven when he was executed at Tyburn; Catherine Howard, her birthdate also a little uncertain, was in her late teens, probably eighteen, when she was put to death. Christina of Denmark, subject of Holbein’s marvellous portrait, was widowed at the age of thirteen and was still only sixteen when Henry VIII, after the death of Jane Seymour, tried to secure Christina in marriage.

christina

(Hans Holbein, Christina of Denmark, National Portrait Gallery)

In the second place, wonderfully irresolvable, those relations between history and fiction. Noting that Henry James ‘claims for the novelist the standing of the historian’, Joseph Conrad writes of his belief that ‘the claim cannot be contested, and that the position is unassailable. Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing. But it is also more than that; it stands on firmer ground, being based on the reality of forms and the observations of social phenomena, whereas history is based on documents, and the reading of print and handwriting—on second-hand impressions. Thus fiction is nearer truth [ . . . ] A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.’[3]

Making-History-New

I was reminded of this by Seamus O’Malley’s discussion of it in his excellent Making History New. He adds that Conrad ‘here desires to defend fiction by comparing it with history, first equating the two, then drawing them apart, then finally bringing them back together’. [4]

In a collection published in 1922, year of Ulysses and The Waste Land, the philosopher George Santayana wrote of ‘those more studious daylight fictions which we call history or philosophy’.[5] Writing more recently of – again – Joseph Conrad, Maya Jasanoff remarked that: ‘Historians don’t go where sources don’t lead, which means they usually stop at the door to somebody’s mind. Even when diaries or letters seem to “tell all,” historians typically treat what happened as one thing, and what somebody made of it as another. Novelists walk right in and roam freely through a person’s feelings, perceptions and thoughts. What happened is what you make of it. That, Conrad argued, could make fiction the truer record of human experience.’[6] And it is not only novelists who ‘walk right in’, as Laura Cummings observes, writing that ‘paintings are fictions, and self-portraits too; there is not a novelist alive who does not believe it possible to enter the mind and voice of someone else, real or imaginary, and the same is true of painters.’[7]

Conrad-via-New-Statesman

(Joseph Conrad via The New Statesman)

I doubt whether there’s wholesale agreement about what ‘fiction’ is – or, perhaps more pertinently, what it isn’t. It certainly doesn’t always stay within its supposed boundaries. In the 1995 ‘Introduction’ to a reissue of his novel Crash, J. G. Ballard wrote: ‘We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind — mass-merchandizing, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. It is now less and less necessary for the writer to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.’[8] Twenty-five years on and such fictions have become more widespread, more insidious, more inseparable from, and indistinguishable in, the fabric of the nation, this nation, all nations.

‘Unlike history,’ Penelope Fitzgerald wrote, ‘fiction can proceed with confidence.’[9]  It can – but often it doesn’t. Innumerable writers have seized on the battlefield aspects of their art, entering the field always on the qui vive, the poem as a field of action, entering enemy territory, looking for cover. Yet the writer, if not in control, has some measure of control, and perhaps the loss of that is sometimes, often, the writer’s choice. Life is not, Penelope Lively observes, like fiction in that ‘[t]here is no shrewd navigator, just a person’s own haphazard lurching from one decision to another. Which is why life so often seems to lack the authenticity of fiction.’[10]

Bertran_de_Born

‘But there is’, William Maxwell wrote, ‘always a kind of truth in those fictions which people create in order to describe something too complicated and too subtle to fit into any conventional pattern.’[11] In Ezra Pound’s ‘Near Perigord’, faced with conflicting evidence and the warring interpretations of Bertrans de Born’s motives and priorities in the canzone he wrote for Maent of Montaignac (‘Is it a love poem? Did he sing of war?’), the Poundian voice counsels: ‘End fact, try fiction.’ And he does:

Let us say we see
En Bertrans, a tower room at Hautefort,
Sunset, the ribbon-like road lies, in cross-light,
South towards Montaignac, and he bends at a table
Scribbling, swearing between his teeth; by his left hand
Lie little strips of parchment covered over,
Scratched and erased with al and ochaisos.
testing his list of rhymes, a lean man. Bilious?
With a red straggling beard?
And the green cat’s eye lifts towards Montaignac.[12]

The poem ends, though, with Bertrans’ own voice, perhaps ‘designed’, as David Moody writes, ‘to show how the dramatic monologue outdoes both “fact” and “fiction”.’[13] As with any first-person narrator, the speaker of the dramatic monologue encloses the reader or listener. There is no outside information to help us with the gauging of truthfulness or reliability. We can only look for clues, slippages, gaps and contradictions – and perhaps assume that the narrator is always claiming, for himself or herself, the benefit of the doubt.

Notes

[1] Hilary Mantel, The Mirror & the Light (London: Fourth Estate, 2020), 192, 486.

[2] Ford Madox Ford, The Fifth Queen (London: Penguin Books, 1999), 23-24, 36ff.

[3] Joseph Conrad, ‘Henry James’, Notes on Life and Letters (London: j. M. Dent, 1921), 20-21.

[4] Seamus O’Malley, Making History New: Modernism and Historical Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 24.

[5] George Santayana, Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies ([1922] Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967), 1.

[6] Maya Jasanoff, The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World (London: William Collins, 2017), 10-11.

[7] Laura Cumming, A Face to the World: On Self-Portraits (London: Harper Press, 2010), 93.

[8] J. G. Ballard, Crash (1973; London: Fourth Estate, 2011).

[9] Penelope Fitzgerald, ‘Why I Write’, in A House of Air: Selected Writings, edited by Terence Dooley with Mandy Kirkby and Chris Carduff (London: Harper Perennial, 2005), 508.

[10] Penelope Lively, Making It Up (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2006), 136.

[11] William Maxwell, Time Will Darken It (1948; in Early Novels and Stories, New York: Library of America, 2008), 771.

[12] ‘Near Perigord’, in Ezra Pound: Poems and Translations, edited by Richard Sieburth (New York: Library of America, 2003), 302-308.

[13] A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: A Portrait of the Man and His Work: Volume I: The Young Genius 1885–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 306.

Plague, fire, war – and bark

Cowper

(George Romney, William Cowper (1792): © National Portrait Gallery)

On another 19 March (1788), the poet William Cowper wrote to his friend the Reverend Walter Bagot, ‘The Spring is come, but not I suppose that Spring which our poets have celebrated. So I judge at least by the extreme severity of the Season, sunless skies and freezing blasts, surpassing all that we experienced in the depth of winter. How do you dispose of yourself in this howling month of March? As for me, I walk daily be the weather what it may, take Bark, and write verses.’[1]

Cinchona

https://botanical.com/botanical/mgmh/p/perbar29.html

Similarly, I walk with the Librarian daily (‘be the weather what it may’) – the park is noticeably busier but the cemetery is still pretty quiet – though I tend to write prose more often these days – and I’ve never knowingly taken ‘Bark’. Nor was I even sure what it meant. My dictionary offered ‘cinchona’ and I gather that this was Peruvian bark, the source of quinine. Roy Porter notes that it was brought to Europe between 1630 and 1640 or thereabouts, possibly by Jesuit missionaries, the reason for its being known as ‘Jesuits’ Bark’ – and also the reason why ‘staunch Protestants like Oliver Cromwell’ refused to take it. Porter adds that cinchona, demonstrably effective against fevers, was introduced into the London Pharmacopoeia in 1677.[2]

In August 1685, the diarist (among much else) John Evelyn visited Mr Watts, ‘keeper of the Apothecaries Garden of simples at Chelsea where there is a collection of innumerable rarieties of that sort, particularly beside many rare annuals the tree bearing the Jesuit’s bark, which had done such cures in quartans’.[3]

[‘Quartans’ refers to a form of malaria resulting in a fever which recurs every third day – by inclusive reckoning, the fourth day, so Latin quartanus, of the fourth]

Samuel_Pepys

(Samuel Pepys)

Recalling that Evelyn’s famous contemporary, Samuel Pepys, also lived through a period of war, plague and fire, I looked up his 19 March 1665 entry, though the Great Plague broke out in earnest a little later than that, so the record of that particular ‘Lords Day’, begins: ‘Mr Povy and I in his coach to Hide parke, being the first day of the Tour there – where many brave ladies. Among others Castlemayne lay impudently upon her back in her coach, asleep with her mouth open. There was also my Lady Kerneeguy, once my Lady Anne Hambleton, that is said to have given the Duke a clap upon his first coming over.’[4]

No reference to applause there, I suspect.

Plague, fire and war: that’s to say the second Anglo-Dutch War (1665-1667, when the peace treaty gave the Dutch a monopoly on nutmeg); it was a period thickly populated with conflicts. In another, later time of war (c. 19 March 1915), D. H. Lawrence wrote enthusiastically to Ottoline Morrell of his novel The Rainbow, having had the first 71 pages typed: ‘It really puts a new thing in the world, almost a new vision of life.’[5]

Lady_Ottoline_Morrell

(Ottoline Morrell)

A positive, anyway, a blow on behalf of the ordinary universe. A new thing in the world. Happy birthday, then, to Philip Roth, born on this day in 1933: ‘But back in bed he thought, The burden isn’t that everything has to be a book. It’s that everything can be a book. And doesn’t count as life until it is.’[6]

Yes. One more 19 March. 1941 this time, when Penelope Fitzgerald (by then a producer in the BBC Features Department) kept her friend Hugh Lee (‘Ham’) up to date: ‘The BBC is not exactly tedious, in fact it is rent with scandals and there are dreadful quarrels in the canteen, about liberty, the peoples’ convention, &c, and the air is dark with flying spoons and dishes. Miss Stevens poured some tea down Mr Fletcher’s neck the other day. He knew Freud who told him the term inferiority complex was a mistranslation and there was really no such thing. I have to eat all the time to keep my spirits up so I am getting quite fat.’[7]

Whatever it takes to keep your spirits up at the moment, I’d say, is just fine.

 
Notes

[1] William Cowper, Letters and Prose Writings, Volume III: 1787-1791, edited by James King and Charles Ryskamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 128.

[2] Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present (London: Harper Collins, 1997), 233.

[3] John Evelyn’s Diary, quoted by Miles Hadfield, A History of British Gardening (London: Penguin Books, 1985), 143.

[4] Samuel Pepys, The Shorter Pepys, selected and edited by Robert Latham (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1993), 446-447.

[5] Letters of D. H. Lawrence II, June 1913-October 1916, edited by George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 308.

[6] Philip Roth, The Anatomy Lesson (1984), in Zuckerman Bound: A Trilogy and Epilogue 1979-1985 (New York: Library of America, 2007), 443.

[7] So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald, edited by Terence Dooley (London: Fourth Estate, 2008), 22.

 

Bloody Sundays

morris.portrait Cunninghame_Graham

(William Morris; Robert Cunninghame Graham)

Bloody Sunday. Most often—before the film buffs’ recall of the 1971 John Schlesinger film Sunday Bloody Sunday, starring Glenda Jackson, Peter Finch and Murray Head—the phrase triggers memories of the Bogside area of Derry, 30 January 1972, when thirteen unarmed demonstrators were killed by British troops (a fourteenth died later), an event whose aftereffects are still very much with us.

But there was an earlier ‘Bloody Sunday’, 13 November 1887, when tens of thousands of protesters, in and around Trafalgar Square, were blocked—and columns of demonstrators broken up—by police, and troops. The politician John Burns and the writer and radical MP Robert Cunninghame Graham were among those beaten and imprisoned. It was, Fiona MacCarthy remarks, ‘the scene of the most ruthless display of establishment power that London has ever seen.’ There were more than 400 arrests and more than 200 marchers were treated in hospital, ‘only a fraction of the many people injured.’ A law copyist, Alfred Linnell, was killed, probably beneath the hooves of a police horse. William Morris, who had been present at ‘Bloody Sunday’, quickly produced a pamphlet, its cover by Walter Crane, sales of which went to the Linnell family. The funeral, another occasion for mass demonstration, was held on 18 December, the pall-bearers including Morris, Cunninghame Graham, the crusading journalist W. T. Stead and Annie Besant.[1]

alfred-linnell_300x384

(Working Class Movement Library:
https://www.wcml.org.uk/contents/creativity-and-culture/art/walter-crane/)

Here’s another socialist, half a century later, Naomi Mitchison, on a research trip to Edinburgh, 13 November 1941:

Going along Princes Street and up the Mount to St Giles, felt a queer kind of pride and anger; the lion flag was flying on some building, I could have kissed it. Walked into Parliament Hall, with its bloody awful stained glass—all the pictures are put away—and thought of James VI’s remark when young “There is ane hole in this Parliament” and suddenly felt the most passionate and disconcerting longing to be a member of the first Scots Parliament under the New Order, or maybe the Supreme Soviet of Scotland, working with the others all over Europe.’[2]

Mitchison

(Naomi Mitchison)

A hole in this Parliament rather than this Parliament in a hole. Those were the days, eh?

On one more 13 November, this one exactly one hundred years ago, an essay by a certain Ezra Pound: ‘Capital v. Labour is not the only conflict; there is also the endless conflict between the furnished and the half-furnished mind.’[3]

 

Notes

[1] Fiona MacCarthy, William Morris: A Life for Our Time (London: Faber & Faber, 1994), 567-572.

[2] Naomi Mitchison, Among You Taking Notes . . . The Wartime Diary of Naomi Mitchison, 1939-1945, edited by Dorothy Sheridan (London: Victor Gollancz, 1985), 169.

[3] Ezra Pound, ‘The Revolt of Intelligence. I’, New Age, XXVI, 2 (13 November, 1919), 22.

 

The chosen destination

Lyme130919

The first strikingly cold day—when the heating takes an executive decision to fire itself up—renders the summer immediately distant. Complaints about humidity, the constant swallowing of water to ward off dehydration, the absurdity of pocketless clothes—all fled away. As for our last escape to the sea, that final foray in convincing summer weather, was it a week ago, two, more?

Lyme Regis is the chosen destination these days when we retreat to the sea. Retreat or advance? Katabasis or Anabasis? There are the odd days to recover from, or seek to outdistance, the mental breakdown currently being undergone by the United Kingdom. Otherwise, the more durable points are November, for the Librarian’s birthday, and sometimes, in early June, for the birthday, not of Thomas Hardy (nor that of Edward Elgar, Barbara Pym, John Lehmann or the Marquis de Sade) but of the Librarian’s mother. This involves a good deal of driving, or being driven, through Mr Hardy’s county although, as far as I’m aware, he never mentions Lyme in his writings, despite having visited the town twice, possibly three times.

Stretching eyes west
Over the sea,
Wind foul or fair
Always stood she
Prospect-impressed;
Solely out there
Did her gaze rest
Never elsewhere
Seemed charm to be.[1]

 

Fowles--french-lieutenants-pb    French_lieutenants_woman-film

The town’s more familiar literary associations now are with John Fowles’ long residence in the town and his 1969 novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman, filmed by Karel Reisz in 1981 with a script by Harold Pinter, starring Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons. In Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Louisa Musgrove falls from the Cobb and suffers a serious concussion. There is also, on a wall in Church Street, a plaque commemorating the occasion, on 11 November 1725, when the novelist Henry Fielding, with the assistance of his servant, tried to abduct Sarah Andrew (a distant cousin of whom he was enamoured), as she was walking to church with Andrew Tucker and his family. That is also, of course, the Henry Fielding who eventually became London’s chief magistrate and, with his half-brother John, founded the Bow Street Runners, the first police force in London.

We walk to the Cobb, sit or lean against the wall, watch the waves, boats, kayaks, swimmers, dogs, walkers and all those people busily engaged with fish and chips. Some places become uncomfortable very quickly when crowded – but somehow Lyme seems not to, perhaps because of the several beaches. And there is not only the sweeping sea view, the harbour, the Cobb itself, but also the public gardens, the beach huts, the sense of cohesion and singleness deriving in part from the steep roads down into Lyme so there’s never the feeling of its merely being on the way to somewhere else.

Lyme has spectacular scenery all around it and a nice spot from which you’re directed to view Charmouth, West Bay, Golden Cap, Portland. The Cobb is Lyme’s famous curving harbour wall, originally dating back to the thirteenth century, and is where the French Lieutenant’s woman stood; it’s certainly where we take our fish and chips—from Herbie’s, among the best you’ll taste but one portion will cater for two people unless their appetites are matters of record with local or national newspapers.

Lyme is first mentioned in 774, in connection with a manor granted to Sherborne Abbey and received a Royal Charter in 1284 from Edward I (6 feet 2 inches and thus ‘Longshanks’). Edward was also known as the ‘Hammer of the Scots’—and was the conqueror of Wales, which caused the poet and artist David Jones, aged twelve and ‘careful that no one was looking’, to spit on his tomb in Westminster Abbey.[2]

William_Hogarth_Coram

(William Hogarth, Thomas Coram: Foundling Museum)

It was the birthplace of Thomas Coram, whose portrait by William Hogarth was presented by the artist in 1740 to the Foundling Hospital which the retired shipwright Coram began , appalled by the numbers of abandoned children in the streets of London. Sir George Somers, discoverer of the Bermudas was also born here: when he died, he was Admiral of the West Virginia Company fleet ‘and accidental inspirer of Shakespeare’s last play, The Tempest.’[3] One of his shipmates, Silvester Jourdain, wrote the first published account of the voyage and the shipwreck, Discovery of the Barmudas: The Isle of Devils, one of the three publications cited by Frank Kermode as being ‘directly relevant to The Tempest.’[4]

The remarkable fossil hunter and palaeontologist Mary Anning is another celebrated Lyme native. Born in 1799 into a poor family, she would operate with marked success in a field dominated by men, at a time when science ‘was still largely the province of the leisured gentleman amateur.’ An increasing numbers of visitors to Lyme, to meet Mary Anning and see her collections included Louis Agassiz and the King of Saxony. Fossil-hunting on the shore there was a hard and often dangerous affair but she had ‘the sharpest eyes in the business’, patience, persistence, courage and physical strength. She discovered Ichthyosaurs, Plesiosaurs, a Pterodactyl, fossil fish and coprolites. She died at the age of 47 and is buried in the churchyard of St Michael the Archangel, which has memorial windows for her and for Thomas Coram.[5]

Mary-Anning-via-BBC

(Mary Anning and her dog Tray via BBC)

On this last visit of the season, Lyme was looking its best, the air clear, the views long, the sea literally dazzling, even distant Portland standing out sharply. On the debit side, the Librarian was the victim of two attacks by Lyme’s already infamous seagulls: bombed once and raided once, the first occasion best not talked about, the second seeing the abrupt and violent theft of her ice-cream, the cornet whittled down to the perfect size and state—then gone, one swoop, one beak.

We already knew that the latest advice was to stare seagulls out – can this really work? But the Lyme seagulls have heard all that stuff in any case: they come from behind or from the side. Try staring me out now, sucker.

Next year: helmets and umbrellas.

 

 
Notes

[1] Thomas Hardy, ‘The Riddle’, The Complete Poems, edited by James Gibson (London: Macmillan, 1976), 448. John Fowles uses this stanza as epigraph to the opening chapter of The French Lieutenant’s Woman.

[2] Thomas Dilworth, David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet (London: Jonathan Cape, 2017), 15.

[3] John Fowles, A Short History of Lyme Regis (Stanbridge: The Dovecote Press, 2004), 18; also his ‘Islands’, in Wormholes: Essays and Occasional Writings, edited by Jan Relf (London: Jonathan Cape, 1998), 304-309.

[4] The Arden edition of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, edited by Frank Kermode (London: Methuen, 1987), xxvii.

[5] Information from Crispin Tickell, Mary Anning of Lyme Regis, with a foreword by John Fowles (Lyme Regis Philpot Museum, 1996), 11, 18.

Cooking, cleaning, washing the pig

; Chinese People Washing Three Large, White Elephants

(Unknown artist, ‘Chinese people washing three large, white elephants’: Wellcome Collection)

07:30 and my Spelt loaf is underway. But I actually enjoy bread making so can this count as housework? Cooking, fine, washing up and vacuuming, okay; ironing, less so; cleaning, much less so.

When Rudyard Kipling moved into Bateman’s in September in 1902, the house and thirty-three acres costing £9300, he was, Andrew Lycett notes, looking forward to washing his 335 apple trees ‘with oil, limewash, salt and soap’ as recommended in the agricultural textbooks.[1] Would that count as housework? Probably not. Gardening or perhaps, on that scale, farming—‘We began with tenants – two or three small farmers on our very few acres – from whom we learned that farming was a mixture of farce, fraud, and philanthropy that stole the heart out of the land’—and would Kipling have done that work himself? He certainly had views on domestic service – of some of the people he met on his return from India to England: ‘They derided my poor little Gods of the East, and asserted that the British in India spent violent lives “oppressing” the Native. (This in a land where white girls of sixteen, at twelve or fourteen pounds per annum, hauled thirty and forty pounds weight of bath-water at a time up four flights of stairs!)’[2]

Batemans

http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/batemans.htm

D. H. Lawrence might turn his hand to sweeping floors and baking bread—and the Skeptic philosopher Pyrrhon of Elis was, apparently, ‘known to dust the house and sweep the floors for his sister, and was once seen washing the pig’[3]—but the real (male) literary demon when it comes to housework is Patrick White, whose letters are littered with references to the daily tasks. ‘I seem to spend all my time washing up and preparing for the next meal’, he wrote to Frederick Glover and, on the eve of a long trip to Europe, remarked to Mollie McKie: ‘Still, it will be a change not to do the washing up for a few months. I did go away for a few days recently. but found myself washing up in self-defence as my hosts were so bad at the sink.’ To Geoffrey Dutton, he confided that: ‘My rheumatics only left after house-cleaning days: I suppose all the stooping and stretching drove them out; so you can tell Max [Harris] that is another good reason not to keep a “char”.’ Later, furious at a review of one of his plays which asked what Patrick White knew about suburbia since he was brought up ‘in a mansion’, he told Mary Benson: ‘I had lived in suburbia for twelve years, between sink and stove, and scrubbing my own floors, before writing that play.’ Again to Dutton, describing a call from a friend, he noted in passing that ‘I was labouring at the house-cleaning when the telephone went’.[4]

White-Letters

When White and Manoly Lascaris moved to the house in Martin Road in October 1964, White’s biographer records, they had a cleaning woman for a short time but White stated that, ‘after doing everything in the way of house-cleaning ourselves over the last fifteen years, I find it a great strain having somebody else about, and I am always relieved when those mornings are over.’ She didn’t last and, ‘Once again, he took up the broom and Hoover himself.’[5]

How long does all this stuff take? How long should it take? Judith Flanders writes that most Victorian houses (above a certain social level, of course) ‘operated a system that ran more or less as follows:

Monday: laundry

Tuesday: servant’s room [if time was allowed for it at all, her note adds], one bedroom

Wednesday: remaining bedrooms

Thursday: drawing room, breakfast room, morning room

Friday: dining room and polishing the silver

Saturday: hall, stairs, kitchen, passageways

Sunday: collect, sort and soak laundry ready for Monday’[6]

Edwardian-maids

http://www.edwardianpromenade.com/occupations/general-servants-time-table/

Lucy Lethbridge, writing of the Edwardian period, notes that ‘Cotton, woven in the great textile factories of the industrial Midlands, needed mangling, starching, bleaching and pressing to keep its appearance. For the working-class housewife, washing her own family’s clothes took up two full days of the week.’ Midway through the twentieth century, ‘In 1950 a survey of full-time housewives showed that they spent an average of seventy hours a week on housework; in a survey in 1970 that average had risen to seventy-seven hours.’[7]

Leaving aside the fact that ‘labour-saving devices’ are assumed to do precisely that—and surely they became more widely available in those twenty years—seventy-seven hours? Really? Eleven hours a day every day of the week? Madness. I shall continue to cook, wash up, hoover and sweep a bit – and make bread. As for the bathroom and shower. . . the Librarian and I will draw lots.

 
References

[1] Harry Ricketts, The Unforgiving Minute: A Life of Rudyard Kipling (London: Chatto and Windus, 1999), 278; Andrew Lycett, Rudyard Kipling (London: Weidenfeld, 1999), 347.

[2] Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself: For My Friends Known and Unknown, (1936; edited by Robert Hampson, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 146, 87.

[3] ‘Pyrrhon of Elis’, in The Jules Verne Steam Balloon: Nine Stories by Guy Davenport (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1987), 25.

[4] Patrick White, Letters, edited by David Marr (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994), 123, 125, 352, 436-437, 493.

[5] David Marr, Patrick White: A Life (London: Vintage, 1992), 447.

[6] Judith Flanders, The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbed to Deathbed (London: Harper Collins, 2003), 106-107.

[7] Lucy Lethbridge, Servants: A Downstairs View of Twentieth-century Britain (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 76, 308.