Category Archives: Edwardian literature

D.H. Lawrence’s ‘christology’

This post is dedicated to the memory of JOHN POLKINGHORNE scientist-theologian 16 October 1930 – 9 March 2021 My thanks know no end to John Pym, Damian Grant and Laurence Brockliss for their superb posts on Lawrence’s Women in Love, … Continue reading

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Guest post by Laurence Brockliss: The Historian, Middle-Class Marriage, and ‘Women in Love’

I have always been puzzled by Tolstoy’s apodictic statement about happy and unhappy marriages at the beginning of Anna Karenina. How on earth did he know? Even today when the state and the media have penetrated deeply into our private … Continue reading

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Guest post by Damian Grant: ‘Women in Love’ — the novel as prophetic book

Lawrence always reminded the novel of its promise to offer something new. In his essays, where he insists that the novel ‘has got to present us with new, really new feelings, a whole line of new emotion, which will get … Continue reading

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Guest post by John Pym: ‘Women in Love’ and Glenda Jackson’s Oscar

In London in the 1970s and 80s I used to review movies for the British Film Institute’s Monthly Film Bulletin. That serious, no-frills journal, founded in 1934, aimed to cover every feature film released in UK cinemas. Some of the … Continue reading

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‘Hurtler’ Brangwen, woman in love

Let me explain what lies behind the next three instalments of Calderonia, which are distinguished guest posts taking us up to 8 March and beyond. As part of our lockdown season of old films, Alison and I watched a DVD … Continue reading

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From the diary of a writer-publisher: 13

18 December It feels like a new record: a week has passed since our, in their own words, ‘very striking’ advertisement of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius appeared in the TLS, and it hasn’t brought us a single sale! The line between self-justification … Continue reading

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A Christmas Story by George Calderon

THE ACADEMY OF HUMOUR. BY GEORGE CALDERON. Woodham Daintry, Essex: October 15. MY DEAR UNCLE, – I do not wonder at your surprise on hearing that I have again entered at an educational establishment, and I believe you will be … Continue reading

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Guest Post: Laurence Brockliss, ‘George Calderon and the Demographic Revolution’

George Calderon married Kittie shortly before his thirty-second birthday. For a professional man at the turn of the twentieth century, this was not an uncommon age to wed. For the last ten years I have been leading a cross-generational study … Continue reading

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Guest Post: John Pym, ‘The Soldier, the Professor and the Portrait Photographer’

(A reminiscence with Calderonian associations) Once, when I was a boy in the 1950s, my mother led me to a large mansion block in Kensington, West London, so she could introduce me to her last surviving uncle, Hubert Gough, a … Continue reading

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‘Spectator’

SAVE IT FOR THE (AMERICAN) NATION! How British archives fail us Patrick Miles It was a biographer’s dream. For decades Russianists had searched in vain for the archive of George Calderon, top Edwardian Slavist and the man who brought Chekhov’s … Continue reading

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Explanatory notes to ‘Thunderer’

I give here some of the facts from my and my team’s experience that lie behind statements I made in the preceding post, whilst preserving the anonymity of most of the offending institutions because I think to name them would … Continue reading

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‘Thunderer’

Curate your own stuff – British archives can’t cope PATRICK MILES Thinking of depositing your family papers in a public archive? Be prepared for nobody to answer your emails, promises to be broken, cataloguing never to happen, and to discover … Continue reading

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‘People are reading an awful lot…

…and many booksellers are doing mail order,’ writes Susan Hill in The Spectator. I should say they are! Click the prompt at the bottom of this post to buy my blockbuster biography from Sam&Sam while stocks last! Obsessed with self-image, … Continue reading

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Weighty Calderonian matters

The above is described in an auction catalogue of 2001 as ‘A Victorian set of jockey scales by Youngs of Bear Street, London WC on oak stand with spiral-turned supports. Width 3ft’. The auction in question was of ‘The Residual Contents … Continue reading

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Christmas in St Petersburg, 1895

St Petersburg, 27 December 1895 (N.S.) English Christmas Evening I spent at the Wildings: of the guests were Mr and Mrs Alfred Whishaw, Dick Whishaw (18) and Miss blank Whishaw (say 19); James Whishaw (V.C., not the cross but Vice … Continue reading

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From the diary of a writer-publisher: 5

2 October I arrived in St Andrews as the guest of the best owner of a private archive in Britain, who had unfailingly facilitated and nurtured my work on George’s biography over a period of twenty years, and without whom … Continue reading

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