The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Captain of the 11
George Calderon, 1912
George Calderon c.1901
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Frontis piece by Frank CalderonRecent Comments
- Patrick Miles on 4 June 1915: The Third Battle of Krithia Thank you for leaving this wonderful comment. I am so moved: you have brought the very spot almost unbearably close on this the 110th anniversary. Like George Calderon, your... (June 6, 2025 at 9:34 pm)
- Stuart Randall on 4 June 1915: The Third Battle of Krithia Thank you so much for putting this online. My great-uncle, Private William Pitt, served with the 4th Btn. Worcestershire Regiment. He was posthumously mentioned in despatches... (May 21, 2025 at 5:29 pm)
- Stephen Rust on Guest post by John Pym: Games Ancient and Modern A wonderful post. John, I've always adored your writings about Merchant Ivory and would love to chat more about them someday. I teach cinema at the University of Oregon,... (May 16, 2025 at 6:45 pm)
- Patrick Miles on Source? Dear Katy, it's lovely to hear from you again! I hope you are well down there in Kent. Would you believe it, I too typed in that first line, as I thought it was perhaps the... (May 12, 2025 at 11:45 am)
- Roger Pulvers on Source? Ah, it is simply a тайна ремесла. But, I assure you, I did not use AI. Please give the book to someone who has not read it and is in your neighbourhood. (May 12, 2025 at 9:57 am)
Category Archives: Edwardian literature
What is ‘The Lamp’ about? (1)
In 1915, today was Easter Saturday. For reasons I will give this coming Monday, I think George Calderon was at home over Easter on long weekend leave. This means he may have worked on the possibly four literary works that … Continue reading
Weekend work: ‘The Lamp’
If, as I have suggested, George used his long weekend leave to put his literary manuscripts in order, then as well as working on a detailed synopsis of Tahiti (see my posts of 14 and 21 March) he must have done something … Continue reading
A terrific find
Please read Katy George’s and my Comments for the background to this letter, which Katy discovered recently amongst some papers of Mrs Raikes in a charity shop in Deal, Kent. New letters of Kittie Calderon’s are as rare as new … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Personal commentary
Tagged Alexander Pushkin, Captain Charles Evelyn Pym, Downton Abbey, Evey Pym, Evgenii Onegin, Foxwold, George Calderon, Gladys Raikes, Highclere, Johnnie Pym, Katy George, Kittie Calderon, Oxford, Percy Lubbock, St Hilda's Hall, St Petersburg, Tom Raikes, Trinity College Oxford, Violet Pym, William Rothenstein
1 Comment
Tahiti: The book’s reception (1921)
Katy George’s discovery of Kittie’s letter to Gladys Raikes of 31 March 1923 (see Comments and my post this coming Monday), in which Kittie talks about Percy Lubbock’s ‘Life’ of George, has reminded me that Percy also played a vital … Continue reading
Tahiti: an imagined world?
It must have taken great self-control for George to concentrate on making a full synopsis of his book Tahiti when he was home on weekend leave, rather than simply keep writing it. But it was certainly the most rational approach. … Continue reading
The return to Tahiti
Calderon arrived in London from Tahiti on 30 October 1906 and started writing his book about the island in November 1907. However, he soon gave it up to concentrate on his plays The Fountain and Cromwell: Mall o’Monks. Meanwhile, as Kittie put … Continue reading
‘Black Pot’ and black holes
For the first two years that I was writing George Calderon’s biography, its working title was Black Pot: The Mysterious Life of George Calderon. The reason for this was not just that several people before me had failed to find significantly … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian literature, Personal commentary
Tagged biographies, biography, Brothers Grimm, Charles Frohman, comments, Gallipoli, George Calderon, Kum Kale, Mabel Dearmer, Martin Shaw, Percy Lubbock, Peter Pan, Sedd el Bahr, Tahiti, The Brave Little Tailor, The Great War, The Lamp, William Caine, World War I
Leave a comment
The Edwardian turn of language
If George’s translations are ‘quirky’ and Constance’s ‘bland’, what is it they have in common that qualifies them both as ‘Edwardian’? A certain kind of logorrhoea combined with loose sentence structure and genteelism. Garnett, it has to be said, is … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged Anton Chekhov, comments, Constance Garnett, George Calderon, Harold Pinter, Kittie Calderon, Michael Frayn, Michel St-Denis, Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, The Cherry Orchard, The Seagull, Theodore Komisarjevsky
Leave a comment
Mews, hues, and wonkers
So (see ‘Two anniversaries’, 29 January), save perhaps for a few lost manuscript versions of Chekhov’s one-act plays made throughout the British Empire for amateur performance, Constance Garnett was the first person to translate a Chekhov play into English (The … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged Anton Chekhov, comments, Constance Garentt, Elizaveta Fen, George Calderon, Glasgow Repertory Theatre, John Galsworthy, John Russell Brown, Larus ridibundus, Laurence Senelick, Lydia Yavorskaya, Ronald Hingley, Royal National Theatre, The Cherry Orchard, The Seagull, The Stage Society
Leave a comment
Two anniversaries
Today is Anton Chekhov’s birthday. It is also the anniversary of the publication of George Calderon’s translations of The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard on 29 January 1912. Was this a coincidence? Probably not. The publisher, Grant Richards, was making a risky investment … Continue reading
They have wonderful editors
Hilary Mantel is an excellent writer. But when it was announced in January 2013 that Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies were going to be adapted for the RSC and a media maelstrom broke out, I felt uneasy. It wasn’t as though Thomas … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian literature, Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged Bring Up the Bodies, Cromwell: Mall o'Monks, David Cameron, editors, George Calderon, George Osborne, Hilary Mantel, Lloyd George, Nick Clegg, Rachel Sylvester, RSC, The Times, Thomas Cromwell, Thomas More, Victor Hugo, Wolf Hall
Leave a comment
The next week
There is no documentary evidence for what George did between 17 and 23 December 1914, when he and Kittie left for what she described as ‘a delightful Christmas at Foxwold [Brasted, Kent] with the Pyms’. But we can be pretty … Continue reading
Polymaths, or dilettantes?
It is intriguing that in his memoir Sturge Moore should refer to George only as a ‘scholar’ (see yesterday’s post). They had both written plays, George rather more successfully than Moore, and they had both been active in 1910 in … Continue reading
Easter 1915
Today, 4 April 1915, was Easter Day. Kittie Calderon went to church, but we do not know if George did. At Steep, Hampshire, Edward Thomas wrote his poem ‘In Memoriam’: The flowers left thick at nightfall in the … Continue reading →