25/8/15. If you haven’t seen the latest cracker of a Comment from Clare Hopkins, I recommend that you do (top right)…and contribute to the discussion!
A special part of my in-depth research of Kittie’s life 1915-22, for the next chapter, has been tracing how her ideas for a ‘memoir’ about George transmogrified into Percy Lubbock’s book about him (George Calderon: A Sketch from Memory, 1921). There is a quite continuous trail of their correspondence during the collaboration. It has vastly changed my own perception of Percy’s book. Basically, I think that in important ways it was a dry run for his most famous book, Earlham, which he wrote next. Both of them present views of the past and in an essentially static form.
The book was going to be published by Grant Richards, but Kittie had a big say in its design, which was to be the same as the four volumes of George’s works that followed. She went to one of the few women bookbinders of the day, Sybil Pye, who was an Arts and Crafts disciple like herself but also a friend of Kittie’s neighbour Tom Sturge Moore and lived not far from Emmetts, the Lubbocks’ home in Kent. Pye made the following motif for the cover, to Kittie’s instructions:
If anyone would like to suggest what it means, do leave a Comment.
My own interpretation is based on George and Kittie’s use of the Edwardian dot-within-a-circle emoticon in their letters. The two circles may stand for George and Kittie. The dots at the bottom and top could be their ‘selves’, as well as just abbreviation dots going with their initials (Kittie’s baptismal name was Catherine). The ‘selves’ are separate but the two circles intersect. The barley ear (we know from Percy’ s letters that that is what it is) perhaps refers to St John chapter 12, verse 24: ‘except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.’ These words are the epigraph to The Karamazov Brothers, of which I think Kittie was an admirer (George seems to have preferred Tolstoi). Ingeniously, the combination of the barley ear and the intersecting circles itself creates a dot — the ‘corn’ (grain), or a single self?
As always, I will end by saying that if you have any ideas about plausible publishers of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, please email them me through my website http://patrickmiles.co.uk. Thank you for reading!
Related
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
George Calderon, 1912
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Captain of the 11
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
George Calderon c.1901
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Watch this Space
25/8/15. If you haven’t seen the latest cracker of a Comment from Clare Hopkins, I recommend that you do (top right)…and contribute to the discussion!
A special part of my in-depth research of Kittie’s life 1915-22, for the next chapter, has been tracing how her ideas for a ‘memoir’ about George transmogrified into Percy Lubbock’s book about him (George Calderon: A Sketch from Memory, 1921). There is a quite continuous trail of their correspondence during the collaboration. It has vastly changed my own perception of Percy’s book. Basically, I think that in important ways it was a dry run for his most famous book, Earlham, which he wrote next. Both of them present views of the past and in an essentially static form.
The book was going to be published by Grant Richards, but Kittie had a big say in its design, which was to be the same as the four volumes of George’s works that followed. She went to one of the few women bookbinders of the day, Sybil Pye, who was an Arts and Crafts disciple like herself but also a friend of Kittie’s neighbour Tom Sturge Moore and lived not far from Emmetts, the Lubbocks’ home in Kent. Pye made the following motif for the cover, to Kittie’s instructions:
If anyone would like to suggest what it means, do leave a Comment.
My own interpretation is based on George and Kittie’s use of the Edwardian dot-within-a-circle emoticon in their letters. The two circles may stand for George and Kittie. The dots at the bottom and top could be their ‘selves’, as well as just abbreviation dots going with their initials (Kittie’s baptismal name was Catherine). The ‘selves’ are separate but the two circles intersect. The barley ear (we know from Percy’ s letters that that is what it is) perhaps refers to St John chapter 12, verse 24: ‘except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.’ These words are the epigraph to The Karamazov Brothers, of which I think Kittie was an admirer (George seems to have preferred Tolstoi). Ingeniously, the combination of the barley ear and the intersecting circles itself creates a dot — the ‘corn’ (grain), or a single self?
As always, I will end by saying that if you have any ideas about plausible publishers of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, please email them me through my website http://patrickmiles.co.uk. Thank you for reading!
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