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I’ve always thought that Middlemarch is the greatest novel in the English language just for its sheer humanity. Every character is brought to life and every character elicits our sympathy, even when we are given a clear steer as to their moral worth. Eliot can be rather hard on her wayward female characters but she is never preachy and generally can detach herself from Dorothea and let us see she is not the perfect woman. Personally, I prefer Mary Garth and find her romance with Fred Vincy the most affecting in the book. Lydgate is difficult to understand fully unless you know a lot about the Paris School of Medicine in the early 19th century and what most English doctors thought about it, especially the ideas of Lydgate’s teacher, Broussais. There is still a lot of debate as to whether Casaubon is Mark Pattison, the rector of Lincoln College Oxford. There is a very good recent biography by H.S. Jones which I can recommend.

As for other Eliots to read. The only other large novels I warm to are The Mill on the Floss and Adam Bede. Felix Holt is worthy but gets rather boring and Daniel Deronda suffers from Eliot’s refusal to grant her erring female characters much mercy and from, I think, Daniel’s improbable (at the time) spiritual journey. Eliot of course is just as harsh on Hetty in Adam Bede but at least Hetty is not executed and has a chance of a new life. I would also recommend Eliot’s Tales of Clerical Life, which nobody seems to read but are exquisite long short stories which really bring the trials and tribulations of being a rural incumbent on next to no stipend to life: she’s much better here than Trollope who takes pity from a lofty distance and never makes us live the hardship. But that’s one of Eliot’s great strengths: she has the ability to create real people from all social backgrounds; along with Wordsworth, she is one of the few 19th century writers who give working people dignity and intelligence and doesn’t sentimentalise them.

Now, surely, is the time for a blossoming of dialogue on Calderonia between self-isolated followers all across Britain, nay the World!

I have received many responses by email to my ‘discovery’ of George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Calderonia poet laureate Damian Grant writes: ‘Amazing you’re reading it for the first time! I almost envy you. I have my favourite bits too, but feel too lazy to dig them out right now.’ A lady who has definitely read all of Eliot usefully warns that Daniel Deronda would be ‘too sentimental for you’, but strongly recommends Adam Bede, as does another person. My favourite response, though, is: ‘I understand your love of Middlemarch. I have such a vivid memory of reading it – in a small Anglican mission in a Zairean forest, by kerosene lamp, lying on a small cot with a ferocious headache (they were treating me for malaria, but what I had was an infection on my scalp from a dirty motorcycle helmet). It was a wonderful book, and a magical escape from that place.’

John Pym, our living and liveliest link with George and Kittie, writes: ‘Let me modestly suggest Scenes from Clerical Life – laugh out loud at points!’ Well…it so happens that that is the other volume of Blackwood’s Eliot that I recently had repaired, so I shall start there. Does anyone feel strongly enough about George Eliot to tell us why in a Comment?

A Happy New Year to you Patrick, and to all Calderonia followers.

Your quotations from the Morning Star about the lack of employment rights at Amazon struck a loud and horrible chord with me because, as it happens, I am currently reading James Bloodworth’s Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain. The first section, ‘Rugeley’, describes the author’s experiences working as a ‘picker’ in one of Britain’s numerous Amazon ‘fulfilment centres’. I would recommend this book to anyone who uses Amazon – but please prepare yourselves for a deeply disturbing read. Without following Bloodworth’s example and taking a job in one of these chillingly 1984-esque warehouses, I cannot of course verify the accuracy of his account for myself, but, like you, I find the accusations credible, and I was appalled to read of the cynicism and sheer inhumanity with which Amazon exploits its staff. As a member of a multi-generational household which can take delivery of a dozen or more Amazon parcels every week, I am sickened by my new-found knowledge.

Something else to give up then, as well as single-use plastic? Or something else for our politicians to address?

Dear Mr Miles,
It seems I am one of those drop-in viewers you describe so well, but I will endeavour to opinionate gently if I may.
I am an admirer of the bindings of Sybil Pye, and stumbled across your very interesting website. According to Pye’s Notebooks, transcribed by Marianne Tidcombe in ‘Women Bookbinders 1880-1920’, she bound four copies of Calderon’s ‘The Fountain; The Little Stone House’, described thus: “Four copies, two brown goatskin, one black goatskin, one blue pigskin, blind- and gold tooling. Bound 1918-1919. Mrs Calderon”. Bloomsbury Book Auctions in November 1996 listed a copy bound by Pye in purple morocco, and describes the circles and wheat motif as its design. In a letter to Thomas Sturge Moore in 1925, Pye wrote that she had “only finished 9 out of the 13 little books I promised Mrs Calderon! However the end of that is in sight now, & I have learnt a good deal from it”. I have unfortunately not been able to track down these volumes.
Additionally, Pye first used the circles and wheat motif on a binding in 1913, for a copy of Michael Field’s ‘World at Auction’ – it is currently held at the Harry Ransom Centre, University of Texas, and was reproduced in Apollo Magazine in 1925. It is used three times as part of a larger design, and is identical to the one featured on the Calderon bindings published by Grant Richards, except for each of the initials – in their place is a larger dot. The wheat tool was originally designed & used by Charles Ricketts, and later given to Pye.
Apologies if any of this is already known to you. If you have any additional information on Sybil Pye, especially details of her leather bindings for Mrs Calderon (none of which I have seen), I would be most interested.
Very kind regards,
Paul

Dear Jules,

Very many thanks for these pointers and your appreciation.

A near-Edwardian polar expedition and a parish magazine editorial — what could be more authoritative than those?

I’ve also received a number of emails on the subject. The consensus is indeed that the meths were/was used as a brandy substitute. I had always assumed this would leave a nasty taste in the pudding and char it, but I am reliably informed otherwise: it’s the meths that’s burning, not the pudding.

One of Calderonia’s great ‘reticence of professors’ sums up snappily: ‘I would read this as a 100%-ish grain alcohol. Good for inflaming puddings as a brandy substitute but lethal otherwise!’ Another suggests that these Victorians were ‘meths drinkers’. Two commenters suggest that it was not really methylated spirits, but samogonka, i.e. Russian moonshine, straight alcohol, but that George hadn’t been in Russia long enough to know the stuff. Whichever, I think I will stay with the brandy.

You mention off-licence, I mention professors, and I am reminded of a Cambridge one of my acquaintance who did not go to the off-licence at Christmas, what he termed ‘the dray’ came to him.

A very ‘merry’ one, indeed, to you and yours!

Patrick

Patrick, a quick Google threw up the following – one from Antarctica and the other from Bedfordshire. You may draw your own conclusions.

http://www.antarctica.gov.au/news/2018/on-the-christmas-menu-in-antarctica

Click to access Shepherds_Return.pdf

And thanks to this timely reminder, I realise that yet another trip to the off-licence is required!

A very “merry” Christmas to you all and thank you for your most entertaining Calderonia this year.

Jules

I used to play in the garden with Joanie who was a young American relative, I think, of the de Selincourts. I loved the garden and we used to roll down the slopes.

Fascinating insight into how today’s technologies can lead to publication of today’s thinking and dialogue, taking it forward for posterity!

Polkinghorne and Miles:
alphabetical order
(who wants ‘MP?’) would
obscure the post-prandial
‘pm’ suggestion!

Wonderful! Thank you, Nick: I think you are right about a pact with the D….

I was similarly bemused by the merchandise on offer at the Royal Academy Antony Gormley exhibition a week or so ago. Inevitably you exit through the gift shop where you can replenish your supply of art books, fridge magnets, posters etc. But in this case also the Gormley-selected cycling jacket and, incredibly, the Gormley-created Eau de Parfum, both at £150 a pop. I sense that a Faustian pact has been entered into.

Here are some pictures I took of them:

I do agree with you, but John was constrained by rhyme and I feel his combination of ‘simple rites’, pause, then the long, feminine final rhyme ‘as fitting’ does convey a piety, though not as robust as the Russian words. It was presumably peasants who buried Evgenii and they might even have said to each other that they must bury him radi Boga (the scene has been illustrated with them removing their hats). Equally, though, radi Boga is a form of indirect speech so it is in effect Pushkin also saying it. The closest I can think of in English to the Russian religious notion is ‘for charity’, i.e. ‘out of charity’, but ‘charity’ seems such a cold word compared with the Russian… Perhaps one could go for ‘God have mercy’, but with no inverted commas.

‘Idyllic’ is indeed the word…

In the late 50s early 60s my Aunt and Uncle (he was in the RAF) were posted to Little Rissington.
They rented a beautiful cottage from the De Sélincourt family.

On the estate the family had a small herd of Jerseys and my cousin and I would help milk them and take the calves for walks through the village. I remember riding with the daughter of the family.
I rode one of her ponies called Nutty and he threw me off and they took me to recover in the main house because I was knocked out!!
I understand the family are no longer in Kingham.

This is a pic of my Aunt outside of what I believe to be ‘the range’, the cottage they rented:

I have the most wonderful memories of staying there, it was idyllic.

With reference to the closing lines of ‘The Bronze Horseman’, I think John Dewey’s translation is quite close in sense, but it does not get the religious aspect across. The literal meaning, ‘For God’s sake’, is now in English, and maybe always has been, a colloquial phrase with subtext of almost irritation and being fed up (‘For God’s sake shut up!’ etc). But in Russian it represents an ancient, almost peasant last resort beseeching God for mercy; here at the end of Pushkin’s poem it is a cry for the victim, the creature of God, the pauper’s grave… Some icons, or paintings of the great Venetian masters, capture this feeling. It does open several possibilities for the tone of voice, depending on the mood, knowledge and more of the reader. It is more of a cultural problem, than linguistic.

I am very happy to read this commentary on the readability of some Victorian poetry, as I had long thought that the problem lay with me. I too struggled with “They shall grow not old…” in the local church many years ago.

Being a fan of Robert Browning, the first stanza of his ‘Epilogue to Asolando’ also appears to present some challenges. I chose it to be read by a family friend at my mother’s funeral 23 years ago:

“At the midnight in the silence of the sleep-time,
When you set your fancies free,
Will they pass to where—by death, fools think, imprisoned—
Low he lies who once so loved you, whom you loved so,
—Pity me?”

Thankfully, the later stanzas are much easier, especially the last one, which is very clear:
“No, at noonday in the bustle of man’s work-time
Greet the unseen with a cheer!
Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be,
“Strive and thrive!” cry “Speed,—fight on, fare ever
There as here!””

I love your website, and you’re a very serious researcher! The reason I missed this story of George’s when I was searching for them in the literature 1895-1915 is that he wasn’t known to have written fiction for the PMG, only news and features from Russia until the summer of 1897; so when I searched the PMG I only looked at those pages, and found what I wanted. Thanks to you, I am certainly going back to the library to look for more stories published in the PMG.

George was, I am sure, a very good ballroom dancer himself. There are many references to society balls in his works and letters, but (as far as I can remember) no description of one in action.

In later life (1911-14) he worked closely with Michel Fokine during the visits to London by Ballets Russes and he even wrote five ballet libretti for them, but the outbreak of War disrupted all that and they were never performed.

Good luck with everything, and thank you again!

This is amazing! I assure you I consider ALL works of George worthy of inclusion — in the Bibliography of my book, that is; the one on Calderonia is highly selective. Can you tell us more about how you came across this story? Did you see it first in the New-York Tribune? It certainly looks authentic! I wonder whether he wrote it whilst he was still in Russia, or just after he got back. I don’t think it was known before that he had published non-fiction in the Pall Mall Gazette: all his correspondence from Russia for them was unsigned, and in a different part of the newspaper. This might even be his first signed publication as a professional writer. Anyway, thank you a million, and thank you for the link which will enable Calderonia’s followers to read a ‘new’ work of George Calderon!

I recently came across a work by Calderon which is not on your list, though perhaps you merely did not consider it worthy of inclusion! But if not, perhaps it will be of interest –

https://www.kickery.com/2019/10/basilisk-1897.html

It’s great to hear from you, Graeme! And thank you so much. Yes, it has been worth the wait, as I think this is a most understanding review and its writing worthy of those old TLS hands G. Calderon and P. Lubbock. I also savour your last sentence! I intend to hang in there like Jack Leach… Very best to you both, Patrick

Patrick, congratulations. All things come to those who wait, and I hope you consider that the wait has been worth it. It seems to me that the review is fully sympathetic to the difficulties you encountered in capturing George’s essence, and at the same time shows why his life and achievements merit a full-scale biography. Maybe you have a ‘slow-burner’ on your hands after all.

I completely agree with you, Damian, though I could never match your eloquence… The COO (Chief of Operations) has youth on his side… I think printing with Amazon is nothing less than the biggest upheaval in publishing since authors first received proofs. Forget the book being perfect when it’s published: with Amazon it’s perfectible only AFTER its published! (Though perfectible it certainly is — their infinite flexibility is the hallmark of the New Age.) My ‘browned-off-ness’, therefore, was simply the strain of gritting my teeth to ascend this portentous new learning curve in my eighth decade.

Sam 2! You talk of ‘learning curve;’
Only the young would have the nerve.
Some curve, indeed! The iceberg’s tip;
This is more like a Mobius strip,
Sliding between Libre/Open Off-
ice and a text-based PDF.
‘Tweaking parameters’ of what
Has been, already, quite a lot
Of work, sounds more like what it takes
To tightrope over pits of snakes.
I’d rather scratch clay tiles in Babylon
Than try to set a text for Amazon!

Patrick:

Naum Gabo’s ‘Opus 9’
Would clearly be the choice of mine–
Remember (if you don’t, just look
Back), I have ordered, booked the book;
Although I like the logo ‘Sam
& Sam,’ set squarely on the Cam.
(‘Cambridge Upstart Press’ might be
A licence to use CUP?)
Your idea’s good, but could one beat it?
Could one not have one’s cake, and eat it?
I mean, like Laurence Sterne, insert
The formal cover (from the QWERT
Y keyboard) somewhere in the text,
So no-one knows what’s coming next?
That’s what the Future’s all about–
Apologies. Over and Out.

Damian

Certainly, dear Damian! Take us on a flight of your own inimitable poetic carpet! And many thanks for this Comment, which is as entertaining and stimulating as ever. You ought, however, not to denigrate yourself for not dedicating a lifetime to ‘real research’, especially as your Smollett labours led to published scholarly results. I’ve always felt that as used by Academe ‘research’ suggests some activity like bowls, or embroidery, that is an end in itself. Since I can’t contemplate ‘doing research’ of that unteleological kind, I fear I am not a ‘real researcher’ myself. Even with a big project like George, I wouldn’t say I ‘researched’ it, I just ‘wanted to find out’! (For my own reasons.) And perhaps that ‘9 to 5’ conception of research explains why, unlike you and me, many academics fall victim to EPMOS (Ever-expanding Post-retirement Magnum Opus Syndrome)?

Patrick: Your two recent posts on the intricate, aleatory and occasionally exultant process of research fill me with wonder at the pertinacity of the human mind, and the fact that intellectual curiosity can be so unremitting. As a very undiligent researcher myself (see below), I can only imagine the satisfaction it must give to someone like yourself who has spent years labouring in the vineyard when a connection is suddenly revealed, a mystery solved — as you say, often through an unlikely concatenation of circumstance — and another piece of the giant jigsaw puzzle fits into place. Or when you can begin to see the figure in the carpet; the design that reveals itself out of the million knots and loops of the weave. Felicitations: and (to change the metaphor), keep that magic carpet flying!

I hope you and your readers will forgive a descent into the anecdotal, but I cannot help reflecting, by contrast, on my own minute contribution to ‘real’ research. As a callow postgraduate, newly admitted to the portals of the North Library in the old BM Reading Rooms, I discovered from consulting the first edition of Smollett’s Travels Through France and Italy (1766) that Smollett had here made many MS additions and revisions, which had never been included in any later edition of the work. This provided for my own first (exultant) research publication, in the redoubtable Notes and Queries, in 1967. And on the strength of this, I was invited by OUP to prepare a new edition of the work. But there my own research adventure ends (though I did later edit one of Smollett’s novels for OUP, inspired more by critical than textual motives). It fell to a more serious scholar, Frank Felsenstein, to follow this up. Indeed, he literally followed Smollett’s footsteps on his European journey, researching as he went — as I had neither the motivation nor the means to do — and eventually (in 1979) produced the now standard edition of the Travels, in which my own grain of mustard-seed appears in a footnote.

All of this is so remote now, and I have no regrets as I revisit the circumstances, since I know that I did not have the temperament to work in this way; as Frank did (I got to know him quite well later), and as you and your Russianist friends have. And as genealogists everywhere do, in the intriguing–and as you have found–intersecting exploration of family history.

One consequence of this train of thought is that I now have an idea for a poem on the North Library, and its use/abuse by one such as myself. I am back walking down that muffled corridor from the echoic dome, drawn by that seductive smell of old books in confined spaces…perhaps I may one day add this as a footnote on your blog?

Even had I not written about Rochelle Townsend, I would have found this fascinating. It is, after all, the first translation of Uncle Vanya into English. It also sheds light on Rochelle’s approach to translation. Did she have help with her Anna Karenina and Virgin Soil? Who were the helpers? I hope the full text can be published in due course.

I so enjoyed this post — especially as I am researching Julian Pym’s story. I’m using it as one of two case studies for a chapter on child-authored texts in a forthcoming Cambridge History of Children’s Literature. Unfortunately, I’m unable to see Julian’s original. I live in the US — I’m a professor in the English Department at the University of Connecticut — and cannot get to the British Library at the moment. If John Pym has any other scans or resources he is willing to share, I would be eternally grateful!

Patrick: thank you for this moving passage from Pasternak. I couldn’t read your translation without thinking of Hardy’s poem about how the simple certitudes and natural recurrences underlie and survive gross historical events (he was thinking evidently of the war):

Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties pass.

Yonder a maid and her wight
Came whispering by;
War’s annals will cloud into night
Ere their story die.

I can’t really imagine an ‘imaginary conversation’ between Hardy and Pasternak (don’t know enough about either of them to invent convincingly), but just from this evidence they would have certain simple things in common.

I guess the release of the journalist in Russia yesterday, after the concerted outcry in the media, will not alter much your pessimistic outlook…nor perhaps should it. But at least it shows that the centre is not stone deaf. What about the Chinese reaction to protests in Hong Kong?

Stick to the point, Grant!

It rather sounds like ‘the coming of the Kingdom’!

Yes, he is incredible. Irina Muravyova

I’m sure your tongue-in-cheek friend is right about the James Tait judges’ motives for not shortlisting your book. Such self-censorship has long been endemic in the world of publishing, as witnessed by Orwell’s (ironically still largely unpublished) preface to Animal Farm. Incidentally, how Orwell would have loved that adjective “woke”. It’s straight out of Newspeak, isn’t it?

I aways used Amazon-style cardboard book wraps when sending my books by post. These are available (surprise, surprise!) from Amazon, and purchased in packs of 25 or 50 are not too expensive if you shop around from different dealers (making sure to order the correct size for your book). They are sturdy and, with a computer-printed address label, lend a note of professionalism. Of course, you may have a supply of used Jiffy bags you want to use up. (End of advertising spiel!) On the other hand, I and I’m sure many other booklovers would find the idea of receiving a brown paper parcel lovingly secured with vintage string and sealing wax most appealing, reminiscent of those little specialist dealers such as Thornton’s.

As for cheeky (or stupid) purchasers clicking on the wrong postage, I was always quite ruthless, refunding their payment and asking them to reorder at the correct price.

Thank you very much for this, John: words of wisdom based on experience. No-one knows better than you what the work of marketing a self-published book involves! Yet (I think you would agree) it’s intensely satisfying because one is achieving those sales through one’s personal exertions and entirely for one’s own profit.

You will be interested to hear that the Society of Authors have emailed me to confirm that it is illegal for a publisher to extort PLR payments from an author. They are ‘concerned’ to hear of the practice.

Yes, I think ‘vanity publishing’ is used sniffily by mainstream publishers. What concerns me more, though, is when common readers — even one’s friends! — brand something ‘vanity publishing’ simply because one has published it oneself. It cuts no ice when one points out that Shakespeare, Swift or Proust, say, were self-published… There is a snobbery here, and a desire to ‘score’, that is akin to saying: ‘I haven’t seen your book in Heffers yet!’ I intend to return to this psychological phenomenon, but if you have something to say about it from your own experience, I shall, as ever, be pleased to hear from you.

A surprising number of Calderonia followers have emailed me to say that they were aware of Lafcadio Hearn already and had read a few of his books about Japan. Interestingly, they are all people who have lived for extended periods in other cultures (though not Japan). I am dying to ask them whether, like Hearn with the kimono in Japan and George with the pareu on Tahiti, they wore national dress whilst living in these countries. To some that may seem play-acting, an affectation, or a symptom of instability. But I would say it is a necessary part of acquiring a deeper understanding of a country’s culture. You have to ‘blend’. You have to be more accepted as ‘one of us’ and feel more ‘one of them’. I always laugh when I remember my father-in-law looking at a photograph of me with a Russian friend in Russia amongst the snow and birches etc in 1981, and saying that I, in my worn out Finnish fur coat, tartan scarf and battered Lenin cap, looked more Russian than my friend in his western puffer jacket and ski hat! On the other hand, one has to know when to stop. My father, working behind the counter of a post office, was unnerved when a local resident, who had retired to his home town after a lifetime in Nigeria, would enter in full flamboyant African male attire. Also, I once shared a house in rural England with an anthropologist who was given to weeding the garden in a ceremonial loincloth and headdress given to him by ‘his’ tribe. Are these just cases of, as it were, ‘going native’?

It was a lot of fun coming up with 2018’s image, in this case an animation!

There is a Calderonia tradition of light-hearted Christmas posts, beginning perhaps in 2014:

Cemented in 2016:

Followed by last year 2017’s:

And then 2018’s animated graphic in the post above.

It might be a tad early, but Merry Christmas one and all!

Your comment goes to the heart of the matter. Many many thanks. It illustrates what, with hindsight, I feel was the arc of the commemoration: moving from the big national events, such as the lighting of the lamps on 4 August 2014, the Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red installation, or official ceremonies at the foreign war memorials, to the increasingly local and personal acts of remembrance, the increasingly individual interest in the fallen as human beings, exemplified by Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old and above all Andrew Tatham’s project A Group Photograph. Inevitably the four years were conceived as a top-down memorial, but that has metamorphosed into a bottom-up act of commemoration. The people woke and the people spoke.

It is the local, unpolished commemorations that have been the most moving over the last few weeks. The national events, with the exception of Danny Boyle’s sand sculptures, have seemed to me predictable or over elaborate.

On Saturday I went to a small art exhibition in the Arts Centre at Didcot, a town hardly associated with artistic originality. A local artist, Anna Dillon, had painted a series of landscapes of the Western Front as it is now. The exhibition began with landscapes of her village, including the farm Masefield was living in in 1914, then moved to the battle-fields, took us around the most famous sites, and finally returned to the village. The paintings were strikingly bright and colourful with only the outlines of a crater or a cemetery in a far corner to remind us of what had occurred there a hundred years before. Each painting was dedicated to a local soldier who had died and between the paintings the artist had posted an explanatory text and a representation of Nash’s war-time engraving or painting of the location. The exhibition was poignant, creative and fresh, so different from the carefully curated, worthy but stale homages to the old masters that the National Gallery and Royal Academy continually mount.

I have taken two things therefore from the last few months. One is obviously the depth of feeling – the sincere desire among the adult population in all communities to commemorate the centenary. The other is the staggering burst of national creativity and energy the centenary has released at the local level. Every parish, village and town found its own original way of marking the event through drama, song and visual art. Most of the people organising the events knew next to nothing about modernism, let alone postmodernism, but they found non-commercial, simple, original and even daring ways of commemorating the end of the Great War which put the establishment icons of the British arts to shame. For this reason alone, we can be sure that the country has a future! Out of the darkness has come light.

I’ve always thought of the bugles calling them home but they cannot come. And yes it is unbearably sad in that reading.
I’m afraid it makes me angry when the way the history of war is taught is misrepresented as either ‘watching videos’ (Blackadder) or ‘tragic poetry’ or some other gross simplification. The way in which war is interpreted in each generation is a nuanced and complex business and needs to be multi-dimensional, with many voices.

Exactly two years on from this post, I notice that in next week’s Radio Times (3-9 November 2018) a correspondent, one Beryl Buggy from Tralee, gently takes Peter Jackson to task for misquoting Binyon in the title of his film. (Jane Hill, the Letters Editor, brushes it off.)

A COMMENT-REVIEW

With George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, Patrick Miles has written a remarkable work which takes biography into the sphere of critical archaeology. Piece by piece, this book patiently discovers a man, and delivers him to us in all his productivity and complexity. Years of diligent searching and sifting (the Acknowledgements take up nine pages, telling their own story) — motivated by the courageous conviction that here was an exemplary ‘life and works’ to be assembled from very disparate materials — and a deeply considered method of presentation, have resulted in this illuminating biography, which establishes George Calderon at the centre of Edwardian literary (and political) life.

Not the least of its virtues is the recognition and insistence that this Edwardian age, far from treading water between high Victorianism and modernism, was actually swimming vigorously against the Victorian tide, and preparing many of the attitudes and materials that would issue in modernism after the hiatus of the war — a war which cost Calderon his life, at Gallipoli, at the age of 45.

A theme that runs through the book is that of Calderon’s versatility as a writer; a versatility which, Miles insists, is also characteristic of the Edwardian age. George Calderon was a true polymath: accomplished linguist (he even set to work on a new universal language), translator, travel writer, novelist, essayist, and — best of all — dramatist, in the genre which brought together these complementary but centrifugal talents. One is struck by an anonymous critique published after his death (and retrieved with typical thoroughness by Miles from a provincial newspaper), which proposes that George’s plays were ‘not great plays. But they suggest, somehow, that their writer was a great man, whose talents were dissipated by the strength of his critical faculties’. This pertinent observation brings to mind Coleridge, who famously lamented in his ‘Dejection: An Ode’ what he saw as a negative tension in himself between ‘abstruse research’ (of which Calderon did plenty) and his ‘shaping spirit of Imagination’.

Patrick Miles argues at one point , apropos of Calderon’s short plays from 1910-13, that rather than treat them as ‘hybrids’, mixing cultures, ‘we should see them as examples of an expanded form of something that he had done all his life, namely translation’. This of course requires us to understand translation in the broadest and most creative sense; as does the author, describing the one-act play The Little Stone House as ‘a masterly translation not from one national language to another, but of one literary genre to another’. It is as if another universal language is at work here, drawing on energies that underlie all human self-representation: turning like a mobile through time.

This metamorphic quality applied not only to Calderon’s work, but to his life as well — which provides something of a headache for his biographer, struggling as he must to establish some kind of coherence. Calderon could appear a different person to different people; even his close friends felt they could not claim to know him ‘in the round’. Miles quotes Laurence Binyon’s observation: ‘I seemed always to be discovering something new in him.’ And this reflects his wife Kittie’s own opinion: ‘Did one human body ever hold quite so simple and quite so complex a soul?’ Patrick Miles has worked out a method which seems to me to cope admirably with this dilemma; a method which far from simplifying his subject, allows him to appear in all his energy and volatility. This consists in what one might call a ‘layering’ technique, whereby we are introduced to several George Calderons, from different perspectives, in different chapters (and we have to wait until page 95 to be told he ‘was born George Leslie Calderon at 9 Marlborough Place, St John’s Wood, London on the morning of 2 December 1868’; Sterne himself could not have managed it better). The colours are juxtaposed, but do not leak into each other; nowhere does Miles try to reduce Calderon by ‘understanding’ him; he does not pluck out the heart of his mystery, which is left for the reader to ponder. Because there are many mysteries in this life, full as it is of contradictions and sudden departures; not least the last, why Calderon found it incumbent on him to enlist at the age of 45, submit himself to rigorous training (including the indignities of learning to ride a horse), and venture unafraid into the killing fields of Gallipoli.

This monumental, 500-page biography is an act of homage, and a labour of love. Patrick Miles seems as reluctant as was his wife Kittie to accept the finality of George’s death, as is suggested by the last chapter, ‘White Raven’, which follows Kittie’s saddening story through her middle and declining years, from 1915 until her death thirty-five years later in 1950. The author is to be congratulated not only for the belief and perseverance which have brought this work to fruition, but for the further labour required for the expertly managed self-publication of such an impressive and attractive volume.

Hooray!

My own feeling is that there a much greater interest in commemorating the end of the Great War in some parts of the country than others. This may have something to do with the relative stability of local populations over the past century. In Oxfordshire, where only a minority of the inhabitants have a longstanding connection with the county, there is little visible sign that 11 November will be a significant moment.

On the other hand, where there has been little inward migration and most of the families living in a town or county are descendants of the First World War generation, then the wish to mark the end of the conflict is very strong. I have just spent a few days in Herefordshire and Shropshire and have been amazed at how visible the commemoration of the war is in the two counties. Virtually every village has a silhouette of a soldier in the parish churchyard and in many places a special effort has been made to honour the village’s dead. One village has painstakingly decorated the lych-gate with a thick garland of handwoven cloth poppies. The towns have also been active. On each house in Leominster where a dead soldier used to live a plaque has been set up with his name and details of his service record. Shrewsbury has been very imaginative. A group of townspeople are making a recording of the names and number (not rank) of every soldier who died from Shropshire. They are doing this by stopping at random shoppers in the town centre and asking them to read aloud a single name from a card. Each soldier’s name will thus be recorded with an individual and anonymous voice, which will bring them back to life again. My wife and I each recorded a name. It was very moving. I did not get to Oswestry but I understand, not surprisingly, that the commemoration of the end of the war there will be a major event. So this really is a bottom-up moment.

Patrick, your analysis of the national mood – ‘tremulous, fitful, liable to change’ as it may be – is extremely interesting. It makes me ponder on another topic that was barely even a word when you started Calderonia. Brexit! Do you think the ‘confusion’ and ‘loss of direction’ that you identify where commemoration is concerned might at least in part be a by-product of the nation’s general anxiety and uncertainty about our future place in Europe?

A hundred years ago, nobody in Britain knew when the War would end – but everybody knew who the enemy was, and the population was as one in ‘just wanting it to be over’. Today we know exactly when the guns will cease firing (as it were) – but, as a nation, we could hardly be less united in how we feel about France, Belgium, Germany, Turkey… I fear that the ‘proper, uplifting, cathartic, ritually endorsed closure’ that you describe might be impossible in the face of the unfinished European business hanging over us. Any national or international event on 11 November must surely be overshadowed by the looming deadline of 29 March, and coloured by a wearisome Brexit cocktail of frustration, annoyance, embarrassment, regret, disappointment, fear – most of which I would seem to have in common with leavers and remainers alike! I can see that family and ‘local level’ acts of remembrance offer a welcome opportunity to re-unite friends, relatives and communities where relationships have been strained and divided by the referendum vote; but will they be satisfying enough? On the other hand, perhaps a big fat anti-climax is actually the perfect and only appropriate way to end.

Thank you for this beautifully written and illustrated post. The sense of liberty described, and thirst for adventure during this period resonates with me too, remembering my father (although not the bohemian lifestyle, to my knowledge). How tragic that their generation then had to go through World War II. It’s very sad that Eric died in 1942; I love the photo of him in Paris!

I owe the phrase ‘and interest in Russian music’, completing a sentence on page 105 of my biography that begins ‘The early 1890s saw a sharp increase in articles about Russian literature’, entirely to pioneer writer on nineteenth-century Anglo-Russian contacts Harvey Pitcher, who suggested it whilst reading my first typescript of the chapter. Until then, I had regarded the occurrence of Russian music in the U.K. as entirely random and unorganised. A little digging about, e.g. in the publications of Philip Ross Bullock, soon persuaded me that, as with most appearances of foreign cultures in a given culture, the arrival of Russian music in British performance was anything but a matter of chance. The name Rosa Newmarch featured, but it is only this review by John Dewey of Lewis Stevens’s book that has really brought home to me what this transiently Edwardian woman achieved. I am really grateful to John for doing this for me and doubtless many others. An American professor of drama has emailed to say that he read John’s post and promptly ordered the book for his department library.

I mean this in the kindest, most admiring, most respectful sense: Rosa Newmarch was clearly an ‘enthusiast’ or ‘wonk’ for Slav music, but she was serious, dynamic, and got things done. There is something quintessentially Edwardian about both her obsession and her energy. If I may adapt what Pushkin said of translators, cultural wonks like Rosa Newmarch are the ‘post-horses of enlightenment’ (i.e. civilisation).

George owned a copy of her Tchaikovsky: His Life and Works (London, 1900). I can recall no mention of her name in his correspondence, but given the range of his London cultural network, his association with Ballets Russes, and his own love of contemporary Russian composers, one is tempted to say he ‘must’ have known her and approved.

Patrick: you must forgive a losel
For making this ill-timed proposal:
Your book George Calderon should be
Recalled, to have a new CD
Inserted, as the music track
Your early readers sadly lack;
George Calderon at last on show
In full, surround-sound stereo.

But wait. Did not Keats (in the Urn)
Give this debate another turn?
‘Heard sounds are sweet,’ he says, ‘but those
Unheard are sweeter’ (I suppose
Your title points to this, today;
Though you don’t give the game away.)
And so your readers, as they please,
Can summon silent harmonies;
And as when reading Thomas Mann
We do the very best we can
To listen through the words-on-page,
We can (with Kittie) now assuage
The loss, the absence books repair
By reading with the inner ear.

Congratulations to Sam2 on the highest viewing numbers for a single fortnight on Calderonia since April! And thanks to him for his superb posts that not only explain in clear readable English the problems of venturing into computer typesetting, but literally introduce some animation into the stuffy old Edwardian format of a standard Calderonian post…

We know that followers have appreciated these two posts, as they have emailed to say so. I would predict that the posts will continue for a long time to be picked up by surfers and bloggers who are taking their first steps into this territory.

Reading Sam2’s posts brings it all back to me.

The designing, experimentation, lateral thinking, problem solving, checking and deglitching were hard work. I remember saying at the time that we were on a very steep learning curve. At the back of it constantly was the fact that the delivery date of 15 May had been set by Clays on 28 November 2017!

So it would have been a miracle if we had got everything right ‘from a standing start’, as an experienced publisher’s editor has expressed it to me. But I think the only unsolved problem that irks me is that we couldn’t get the ‘finishing line’ of every page spread to be the same height above the bottom of the page. When you are looking at a given spread on screen, it is easy not to spot that variation, and for it never to enter your head that one could have crept in. However, in the published book the variation is as much as 1.3 to 2.45 cm. But you can see something similar in commercially published books and, I think, few readers notice it. Even if we had noticed it earlier, we would not have had time to rectify it: it seemed far more important to harmonise the vertical position of the bottom lines on a spread, which Sam2 admirably did. In doing the latter, incidentally, we did have to move forward or back some already indexed text, and adjust the Index accordingly. It seems, though, that there is only one of the classic indexing errors that I have bemoaned in some published books: the entry for ‘Speaker’s Corner’ should read ‘329’ and not ‘328’. Mind you, post-publication checking of the Index has so far identified fifteen other errors!

All these and other necessary improvements will be made in the paperback edition, with the benefit of Sam&Sam’s accumulated experience from producing the present hardback one. As Chekhov once said: ‘To learn, you have to make mistakes.’

The simple realisation that the whole process has brought me to is that if one wants a perfect book (but does one want anything perfect?), one has eventually to ‘handset’ every page. This sounds preposterous, given that we live in the age of ‘computer typesetting’, but in my mind’s eye I see a black-hatted medieval entrepreneur smiling at me wryly and nodding…

That is absolutely wonderful – thank you. I should so like to visit Ors – maybe one day. Thanks to Richard Webster on the War Poets Association Facebook Group for posting the link to your website.

What an accessible yet technical piece. It’s so good to see the process set out like an instruction manual combined with a conversation. I now know a bit more about what was going on during those afternoons in front of the computer during January and February.

Lots jumped out at me such as the meticulous use of carriage returns, tabs and spaces in the original word document that had to be converted into styles. I also smiled at the comment about the typeset document no longer looking like A-level coursework.

From what I gathered, solving the quirks and complications filled in the afternoons from March to May, so I’m looking forward to the next instalment.