Calderonia

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 21

Posted on February 6, 2023 by Patrick Miles

Katherine Mansfield

7 January
Almost themed, one could say, in Calderonia, Cambridge academic Ruth Scurr has written a meaty review in today’s Spectator of Claire Harman’s experiment in biography All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything. Anyone who writes short stories should know Mansfield’s work intimately. But I am not sure that I agree with this Scurr/Harman statement: ‘In our age of pandemics, loneliness and an overwhelming number of texts online, Harman suggests, appreciation of short stories — which ask “the biggest questions in the smallest spaces” — is burgeoning.’ I can’t say I have noticed such a burgeoning. The problem, surely, is that word ‘overwhelming’. I have posted a few of my old ‘piffle’ stories on Calderonia, and admit it’s a terribly convenient way of putting short stories ‘out there’. But given the ‘overwhelming’ nature of the Web, can many, if any, short stories get noticed? Are that many writers bothering, then? The days when many more writers than Chekhov could publish a story a week in a newspaper, or Mansfield regularly publish in literary magazines, and get paid a living wage for it, are gone forever.

My publishing project this year is a book of twenty of my short stories, old and new, 60% of which are written. Maybe Harman’s words have encouraged me to preview some new ones online fresh from the oven… It needs thinking about.

14 January
Paranoia apart, it’s my considered view that Calderonia was shut down yesterday by a Russian hacker. The Russian end of Sam&Sam had committed himself to a much longer and franker thread than usual — which I diminuendoed back to silence as fast as I could. Shortly afterwards, a view from Russia popped up on ‘Statistics’, despite the fact that the people I know in Russia can’t access Calderonia. By the evening, Calderonia was ‘unavailable’ worldwide, although of course I did not notice this immediately. My guess is that someone in Russia was researching (not for the first time?) who I am, and discovered my take on Ukraine. Ostensibly, the problem was that the server security certificates of some strands of patrickmileswriter.co.uk had expired. We have never had this problem in nine years, however. Why it should have happened now and triggered unavailability was not really clear. My own theory is that disabling or ‘enforcing’ some of these security certificates was the only way a hacker could shoot us down, given that WordPress’s cyber defences seem state of the art. Fortunately, Calderonia’s own IT expert (aka Jim Miles) was able to restore us to the Web within half an hour of my emailing him.

26 January
A very generous and discriminating friend gave me for Christmas Ronald Blythe’s 2022 book, Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside. It was a pleasant shock to discover that Blythe was still alive, as the only other book of his I knew, Akenfield, was published in 1969. Then came the news that he died, aged 100, at his beloved Bottengoms Farm in Suffolk, on 14th of this month.

I started reading the book on Boxing Day and for peculiar reasons that I will attempt to analyse later, I finished it only yesterday, despite the fact that I had been reading it every day. As I immediately let my friend know, the book is a fantastic delight. It is an extremely skilful 456-page compilation, arranged by month but each month divided into subjects (‘Snowfall’…‘How to Paint Towers’…‘The Reverend Francis Kilvert’…‘On the Way to School’…‘Dwindling Landworkers’…‘To Console’…), from the weekly column ‘Word from Wormingford’ that Blythe wrote for the Church Times between 1993 and 2017.

Its style is all, and doubtless the man. The best description of it that I have seen is ‘a philosophical prose style as light as air’. A newspaper has described Blythe as ‘England’s greatest living country writer’ and the blurb calls him ‘one of the UK’s greatest living writers’ full stop. I could agree with both of those statements. Each section within a month is a fresh surprise, although there is a core of common themes — the church’s year (Blythe was a Reader at three country churches), his cats, the wildlife where he lives, village life and death, the farming year and ghostly past, John Constable, certain English poets and prose writers, hornets, and others. Here is a fairly typical short extract from page 128:

‘It was not always like this,’ I admonish the white cat: ‘tinned breakfast regularly at six, gorgeous radiators, blackbirds through the window, devoted old chap.’ Sometimes I hear them, the skinny labourers clumping down from the bothy to feed the stock, the girls singing in the dairy, the barefoot children falling over the dogs, the mother shouting, the pot bubbling. All gone into the dark, says the poet [T.S. Eliot]. Or into the light, says somebody else [Henry Vaughan].

It is all so fresh and unstrained, so effortless-looking, but actually the very pitch of linguistic skill and literary art. Nor, surely, can there be a more authentic portrait of country life in the very recent past, and presumably somewhere even now. I doubt whether Blythe chose or approved of the book’s title, which is rather obviously cashing in on the post-pandemic vogue for ‘Nature’ as mental therapy, but the book does produce a very strong feeling of an unstressed life ‘in harmony’ with something (perhaps ‘God’, rather than ‘Nature’), and Blythe isn’t ill in it once. I believe everyone should read the book and will enjoy it. It is beautifully produced, by the way, by Calderonia’s own Clays of Bungay, and Blythe’s is the first hardback of theirs with both bookmark and bellyband that I have seen since George Calderon: Edwardian Genius!

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

The Times, in a leader on 17 January sub-titled ‘Ronald Blythe’s bucolic writing appealed to a certain idea of England’, wrote that ‘For many, the real England is a Norman churchyard, a half-timbered pub and the tinkling of the doorbell in the village shop’. Blythe, the leader-writer claimed, ‘did more than most to promote this Elysian ideal of the countryside’, referring to his ‘ intimate study of village life from the 1880s to the 1960s’, Akenfield. This criticism is quite wrong, in my opinion. It was shot down next day by a reader who wrote that ‘In fact much of Blythe’s writing about provincial English life was thoroughly unsentimental and was marked by an acceptance of the need for change’ (evidence supplied). Blythe himself addresses the question in a section of this book entitled ‘Brutal Realities’ (p. 141): ‘The great quandary of those who write about the countryside, or who paint it, is how to keep the euphoric vision, if not out of the general picture entirely, in its proper place.’ In any case, the image that remains with one from Akenfield, I would have said, is of how unremittingly hard and un-euphoric life in the country was — hence Private Eye’s merciless parodying of the book as Akenballs.

The problem for me with Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside is rather different. I enjoyed the book so much when I started that I could hardly put it down. Around page 200, however, I began to feel funny, but couldn’t rationalise it. I decided to read at the rate of three or four sections at a time. That didn’t diminish my enjoyment; after all, it is written in entirely separate sections of a page or two, so it lends itself to a segmented reading. But gradually I came to think that the reason I was reading it slowly was that it was subtly but inexorably depressing me. If you look more closely, at least 65% of it is about the past. Events of long ago are constantly being re-evoked, Blythe sees ‘ghosts’ of the past in his mind’s eye, most of the writers he lovingly revisits are long dead, he officiates at many funerals, death and dead friends often feature. Moreover, time in the book is cyclical: the cycle of the seasons, of the Church of England’s services and saints, of an individual’s own life. The cumulative effect, for me at least, was a feeling of entrapment, of rising claustrophobia. In a strange way, then — strange because the writing is so good — I was relieved to finish the book and escape back into the fresh air of the present.

28 January
The death has been announced of the actor Sylvia Syms, at the age of 89. I am moved by what I read about her, because I previously did not know much about her film career (starting with Ice Cold in Alex, 1958, when she was twenty-four), everyone speaks so tenderly of her, and I can see that she was indeed beautiful as a young woman. I only knew her during the rehearsals and tour of Cambridge Theatre Company’s 1987 production of Last Summer in Chulimsk by Alexander Vampilov, for which I was the translator and Russian consultant. She would come and talk to me, but was so modest I never realised what a great star she had already been.

But I certainly realised that she was an exponent of real acting, with both enormous talent and sharp empathetic intelligence; which is why I prefer to use the generic word ‘actor’ of her. Her range was far greater than that of some of the grandes dames of our theatre today. In Chulimsk she played Anna Khoroshikh, the long-suffering manageress of a Soviet cafeteria in the depths of the Siberian taiga. Although literally never centre or front of stage, because the bar and kitchen were always upstage, the part of Anna has more truly tragic depth than any other, and Syms conveyed it with supreme restraint and power. She was completely ‘inside the head’ of this middle-aged woman who has an illegitimate son from being raped during the War and is still in love with her drunkard husband Dergachev, who was wounded, captured, sent to Siberia on his return, yet eventually married her. Without exaggeration, her acting of the part was so natural that she simply was this Russian woman. In this short scene she was unforgettable:

KHOROSHIKH (Sardonically): If you catch any sables, you will save one for me, won’t you? (Seriously) You will, won’t you?.. You used to give me things.

DERGACHEV: Used to, but those days are over. (Goes into back of cafeteria)

Khoroshikh wipes her eyes with her shawl.

Front left: Roy Marsden as Shamanov, centre: Sylvia Syms as Khoroshikh, back: Aidan Gillett as Pashka

Sylvia Syms as Khoroshikh at her ‘bar’ in Last Summer in Chulimsk, 1987

When the production came to Cambridge for a week, Sylvia very skilfully conveyed to me that she would like me to invite her into my college as a guest at high table. This was impossible, as I was not a Fellow of the college, only its Russian Lector. I always regret it, because she would have had the Fellows who remembered her in Ice Cold in Alex and Victim at her feet, and would undoubtedly have said something forthright to them (she was well to the Left) that would have been recounted over the port for years to come.

1 February
The words ‘Spring offensive’ are apt to strike fear. In March 1918 Ludendorff had stealthily brought up 750,000 new troops and three quarters of his entire artillery to concentrate on what he judged to be the weakest point of the British line; the Germans broke through, and within a week had advanced forty miles on a fifty mile front. Putin plans to draft 300,000 new conscripts into occupied Ukraine by the end of February and mount a similar attempt, some say at a weak point like Bakhmut, others say he has instructed his generals to throw this numerically superior force all along the eastern front and make a general advance.

I recently met a British career diplomat who specialises in War. He told me that at the moment, the ‘war of attrition’ on the Ukrainian eastern front is ‘just like the First World War, the only new element is the attacking drones’. I said I thought we had to be ready for the Russians to make considerable advances during their spring offensive, as we had not given the Ukrainians state-of-the-art tanks and other systems soon enough. Therefore, I added, it will all come down to the Ukrainian counter-offensive: would the West make sure the Ukrainians had the weapons to win that, and go on to drive the Russians out completely? As diplomats are skilled in doing, he simply did not react to that.

Are we, in fact, giving the Ukrainians just enough to prevent them from being defeated this year, but not enough to enable them to win? If we gave them all the materiel they need NOW, we would save thousands and thousands of Ukrainian — and Russian — lives, because the war would be shortened. On the other hand, after the Germans broke through in March 1918, the allies, especially Foch and Haig, learnt fast from their mistakes, evolved a different strategy, counter attacked, broke through the Siegfried Line, and by November had won. The Ukrainians, with their superior morale and creative imagination, are quite capable of doing the same even if the Russians break through in places.

3 February

From left to right: the Speckled Wood, Ringlet and Marbled White, of the Family Satyridae. The first two have colonised Cambridge gardens since 2000, the Marbled White was sighted in one last year.

I have received communications from Cambridge City Council officers that they have commissioned wildlife ‘surveys’ this year of the 0.4 hectare Tree Belt that the Council owns behind our houses. The history is that for thirty years this wildlife haven and corridor was kept closed to the public, the Council treated it as ‘a kind of nature reserve’ (their words), but they recently transferred it with no public consultation from Property Services to Open Spaces, thereby surreptitiously changing its use. Since then, it has been invaded by ‘educational’ groups who took in dogs, lit fires, trampled on undergrowth, picked wild flowers, screamed and rang bells. A majority (63%) of local residents adjoining the Tree Belt are against the change of use and have been fighting it tooth and nail for the past year.

To give you an idea of the Council’s competence, it had promised residents a Management Plan before any group was allowed in, but forgot about it (and facts such as fires being banned on Council property). The Council ought also to have commissioned a ‘baseline study’ of the haven’s wildlife before permitting public use, but they did not. A councillor assured me that access would be restricted during the birds’ nesting season (February-June/August), but it has not been. Since the Tree Belt has been unmolested for thirty years, a surprising range of birds has been observed (from gardens) to nest in there, from Tawny Owls and Spotted Flycatchers to Blackcaps and Sparrowhawks. Armed with the opinions of the RSPB and British Trust for Ornithology, I sought to persuade Council officers that the only ‘baseline study’ of nesting that would be fit for purpose would be one of the status quo ante, i.e. of the TB closed to public access for the duration of the study. Alas, no, they have dropped the idea of a ‘baseline study’ and gone for ‘surveys’ carried out this year whilst up to 80 people a week are traipsing in and out. An ornithologist friend who was once Head of Science at English Nature, describes this as ‘ridiculous’.

The particular reason I’ve got involved is that, although I have entered the Tree Belt only twice in thirty years (1991 with the Council’s Conservation Officer and 2022 with the Biodiversity Officer), my family seem to have been the only locals who have kept lists of wildlife observed in their gardens abutting the Tree Belt, and these records are now useful. They suggest a decline in biodiversity of 20-25% since 1991. The reasons could include a big increase in human activity; noise pollution and traffic (the only Tawny Owls I have actually seen in the neighbourhood recently were squashed flat on roads); species epidemics; global warming. The weird thing is, though, that some species are more common than ever (e.g. Goldfinches) and some entirely new species have appeared, for instance the Speckled Wood butterfly, Ringlet, and (last year) the Marbled White. Of course, I greatly regret the loss of Greenfinches and Small Tortoiseshell butterflies due to epidemics, or the disappearance from our garden (despite wilding) of the Wall butterfly, Large Skipper and Essex Skipper. The vitality of the new Satyridae species, however, is astounding. Evidently there are ‘winners and losers’… But the cause is fundamentally the same: human impact on ecosystems, whether global or a mere 0.4 hectares.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian literature, Personal commentary | Tagged Alexander Vampilov, Anton Chekhov, armaments, baseline studies, biodiversity, biographies, biography, birds, Bottengoms Fram, butterflies, Calderonia, Cambridge, Cambridge City Council, Cambridge Theatre Company, Church of England, Church Times, Claire Harman, claustrophobia, Clays of Bungay, comments, conservation, cyber warfare, death, ecosystems, entrapment, Erich Ludendorff, Francis Kilvert, funerals, General Douglas Haig, General Foch, ghosts, hackers, Henry Vaughan, Ice Cold in Alex, James Miles, John Constable, Katherine Mansfield, last, Last Summer in Chulimsk, Next to Nature, paranoia, Peter Hall, Ronald Blythe, Russia, Ruth Scurr, Sam&Sam, security certificates, servers, short stories, Siberia, Spring Offensive 1918, Suffolk, Sylvia Syms, T.S. Eliot, The Great War, The Spectator, The Times, The Web, Tree Belt, Ukraine, Victim, wildlife, wildlife corridors, wildlife havens, World War I | Leave a comment

Guest post by Damian Grant: ‘Radio Scotland’

Posted on January 23, 2023 by Patrick Miles

We live in France. In Lille, where the language is French. About a year ago — not knowing anything about the animal — I bought a HomePod online. I had thought it was just a superior (and very stylish) kind of loudspeaker, which I could plug into my i-phone and get it to do my mainly musical bidding. How surprised was I, and how unsurprised my wife Madeleine, to find that this was a much more sophisticated device than either of us could handle, which was not to be tamely plugged in like a dog on a lead (except to the power supply) but required talking to, and being treated with respect if not deference, whereupon it might perform one of the functions it was being asked to do. Like switch on the radio; preferably, BBC Radio 3, the beating heart of classical music.

I betray myself immediately by saying ‘it’. Because the moving spirit of the HomePod is not an ‘it’, but a she; and she is Siri. Nothing gets done unless Siri is asked politely; and unless the formula Dis, Siri is used, she won’t even listen. Dis, Siri, mets BBC Radio 3. But Siri for all her multiconnectedness cannot find the station in my library, in i-tunes, or anywhere else. She has many suggestions for other kinds of music I might like to listen to; or services to which I might like to subscribe. But one does not subscribe to BBC Radio 3, one simply switches it on. This is beyond Siri’s capacity.

Eventually, by means which I neither did nor do understand, Madeleine found a way of getting under Siri’s guard, and forcing her to acknowledge that there was indeed such a radio station, and that its offering might legitimately be accessed by the device over which she presided. Which I was then grateful to do; the fact being that you only had to tap Siri on the shoulder in the morning for her to put you in touch with Petroc Trelawney and his team. Sitting at breakfast, you could even ask Siri to increase the volume, or turn it down, depending on one’s interest in the piece then being broadcast. Turn it up always for the news. (Not that this is always a wise decision.)

One problem that we soon became aware of was that Siri seemed to have a mind or a will of her own. Sometimes she refused point-blank to connect with Radio 3, and regaled us instead with some charming nursery rhymes and songs for children which Madeleine had stored on one of her other devices. (How Siri found these I can’t imagine.) On one surreal occasion, she even interrupted our dinner with the spontaneous question: did we intend to buy a new car? Sometimes she resorted to her old trick of saying that Radio 3 didn’t exist, and that we should be listening to something else. And quite recently she has stumbled on another subterfuge: when asked, strictly according to the formula, for Radio 3, she connects us instead to BBC Radio Scotland. Now I have nothing against the Scots; I even support their desire to be independent of Brexit-touting Westminster. And it’s true that Mendelssohn wrote some fine music up there, around Fingal’s Cave. But this is not the point.

Another hazard of the system is that our grandchildren, two adventurous boys, soon learned the abracadabra that would open Siri’s cave, and developed a relationship with her that involved exchanging jokes, demanding translations into remote languages, and setting her conundrums to which she was forced to confess she did not know the answer. There were also less polite interpellations to which she disdained any response. It was during one of these sessions, recently, that I (returning home with some complicated bad news) became extremely irritated, and seized the HomePod off the shelf, disconnected Siri from her electric soul, and — not knowing where to put this package for the moment –dropped it into the waste paper basket by my desk. It could be put back, and she disciplined, later. Which of course it wasn’t.

This happened on a Wednesday. Thursday is the day our long-time cleaning lady comes for the morning, to do various jobs such as washing the tiled floor, emptying the grate, ironing, etcetera. Normally we would be around, to oversee what was going on and to answer any questions she might have. But this morning Madeleine and I were attending the funeral of a friend, and so Sylviane was left to her own devices. (Devices!) The rest of the day being busy (we went to the theatre that night, to see what turned out to be a long and not very good play), it was not until I lay awake early next morning — I often enjoy a few moments’ quiet reflection, before the alarm rings around seven — that I realized I had never removed the irritating HomePod from the waste paper basket; and that unimaginable things might have happened to it at Sylviane’s most innocent hands.

Go downstairs in my dressing gown. Unlock the front door, out into the cold December morning. Look into the paper bin; nothing to be seen. Look into the general waste bin: two neatly tied bags of household rubbish. Resolve to research into this more fully after breakfast, with Madeleine. (Whose slumber I had punctured with this absurdity.) After breakfast, alerted by a tell-tale yellow cable just visible, we open one of the bags, and indeed find the disgraced HomePod, its stylish orange mesh covered in ash from the fire-grate. Madeleine interrupted my expostulations, and we took the thing inside. With a mixture of brushing and hoovering, it looked again a bit like the device I had once most inadvisedly purchased. But did it still work? Would Siri speak to us again, after this humiliation? We plugged it in, there was a glow from the disc on top, and Madeleine asked, tentatively, for BBC Radio 3. To which Siri, in her usual cheerful tones: Voici BBC Radio Scotland.

© Damian Grant, 2023

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio Scotland, Brexit, chaos theory, classical music, cleaning ladies, comments, Damian Grant, Felix Mendelssohn, Fingal's Cave, France, grandchildren, HomePod, IT, Lille, Madeleine Grant, nursery rhymes, Petroc Trelawney, Scottish Independence, Siri, technology, waste paper baskets | 2 Comments

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 20

Posted on January 9, 2023 by Patrick Miles

16 December 2022
The Times has a long piece today entitled ‘Putin’s absence fuels rumours of Noah’s Ark plot’. It reports Putin cancelling his annual ice hockey match on Red Square, his annual press conference, and his annual ‘conversation with the people’ (the latter two are broadcast live by state television). This has led to speculation that he is not going to give his ‘state of the nation’ address to the lower and upper houses either, even though he is obliged to by his own constitution. He is said to have had a fall, to be suffering from thyroid cancer, and to have been tipsy and rambling when filmed on a recent visit to Kyrgyzstan (I saw this video on Twitter and reckoned it a fake). Is there any credibility, then, to the rumour that his cronies have set up a plan, codenamed ‘Noah’s Ark’, for him to escape to Argentina or Venezuela if he loses his war with Ukraine and is toppled?

I doubt it; he’s more the Hitler type. On the other hand, I have felt from the very beginning that the Russian military’s heart is not in this war, partly because Putin never gave them enough advance notice to prepare professionally for it. He has made them look fools. Now he is trying to shift the blame for its failure to them, staging events with generals both on their own and with him ‘listening’ to their reports/advice. If the Russian military continue to fail, and conclude that Putin is not going to go quietly, things could change. Rommel joined the plot to kill Hitler after it was obvious that they had lost the war but Hitler said the German people could ‘rot’ — i.e. that he did not care a damn about the German people — rather than him stop the war. My personal view is that if Putin died in office before this war was over, as Nicholas I did during the Crimean War that he brought on himself, it would lead in the short or medium term to a complete upheaval in Russian society comparable to that produced by Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War.

27 December
By chance, but most serendipitously, Jim Miles (Sam2) and I (Sam1) have given each other Christmas presents that commemorate our work with the late John Polkinghorne: I gave Jim a framed print of Opus 9 by Naum Gabo which we used for the cover of What Can We Hope For?, and Jim gave me this book:

No, I cannot read Japanese! But I guessed pretty quickly what it is the Japanese version of — John Polkinghorne’s book The Quantum World (1985) — because John had talked about it with some amusement. He could not read it either, but he was struck by the portraits in it of famous quantum physicists, for example this one of Paul Dirac, who taught him:

What amused him was the rays that seem to be emanating from the great physicists’ heads: were they a form of halo? He seriously wondered what they were intended to convey. Was it a Japanese convention? Are they a feature of the Japanese iconographic tradition and would be instantly understandable to the Japanese reader?

Sam2 was quick to explain: ‘I think in the first place that the portraits are there to bring the physicists to life for the reader — to put faces to names, especially for Japanese readers who could be intensely curious what these people looked like — and then the shapes, or ‘rays’, coming out of them are a bit mysterious, but I think they could represent light, as some of the portraits appear to ‘bend’ the rays. The subtle perspective changes applied to the portraits (and the rays) could be a very clever physics reference that is going over our heads (or certainly mine)…’

3 January 2023
Every year at this time I read in Russian some of Joseph Brodsky’s Christmas (or ‘Nativity’) poems. Whenever possible, he wrote a poem at Christmas, believing that, as he said in an interview, ‘Christmas is the birthday of the God-Man, and it’s as natural for people to celebrate that as their own birthday’.

Nevertheless, there was little specifically religious about his early, longer Christmas poems (1962-71), which I read at the time in blurry carbon samizdat. Gradually he focussed on ‘the cave’, as he called it, with Mary, Joseph and the Child, the star and the magi. To those who knew him in the 1970s and 80s, it comes as a shock to see him referred to now as a Christian poet. In retrospect, though, perhaps it should have been obvious. When I spent part of an evening with Brodsky in Leningrad on 11 January 1970 and asked him why he was so attracted to John Donne, he said it was because Donne ‘represents a vital period in the development of Western Christianity since the Greeks’; I was amazed he didn’t refer to Donne’s poetics. He admired and recommended Kierkegaard’s Either/Or.

Joseph Brodsky, c. 1969. Photographer unknown, Patrick Miles archive

Brodsky’s untitled 1989 Christmas poem begins ‘Imagine, by striking a match, that night in the cave’. Every year I start translating it in my head, but I can’t replicate his tone (expressed in rhymed couplets of amphibrach tetrameter), or the compression that the highly inflected Russian language allows him, so shake my head over its impossibility. Seamus Heaney, using presumably a literal translation by his Russianist son, makes a very good English poem out of it. Heaney’s ear is faultless, so he certainly catches the amphibrach tone, but it entails more English words and a much longer line. Also, he rhymes only once and that rhyme is badly strained. Not having the Russian ringing in his head, Heaney can paraphrase in English as he sees fit (or perhaps in the direction of what he assumes Brodsky meant). To know the source language intimately may not be an advantage for the translator of poetry…au contraire!

7 January
I’m relieved to receive a Christmas card from a couple who support Putin’s war on Ukraine. She is Russian, he English. On their card last Christmas they told me that I shouldn’t believe everything I read in the British press about Russia and Ukraine, so I thought that this year, knowing my stance on the issue, they would cast me off altogether. She believes Ukraine has no legitimacy, she ignores the facts of its history since 1945, she protests that Crimea, Odessa, Luhansk and Donetsk ‘are Russian’, and is exasperated by Ukraine’s criminal corruption after 1991, as though Putin were shining white. She believes Russia is doing the right thing, because she ‘loves’ Russia. I was once at a gathering where the Russian wife of eminent British Slavist X, referring to X’s dislike of Putin, also exclaimed: ‘The trouble is, X doesn’t l-o-o-o-ve Russia!’ (and there was a suggestion that if he loved her, he should love her country). It is difficult to know what to say when political discourse is at such an irrational level. Essentially, these women are possessed by the ‘my country right or wrong’ attitude, which can never be ethical. I am relieved, though, that the card-senders have not terminated a forty-year friendship that saw better times.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged 20 July 1944 Plot, Adolf Hitler, Alexander II, Argentina, Christmas, Crimea, Crimean War, Donetsk, Erwin Rommel, Field Marshal Rommel, iconography, James Miles, Japan, Jim Miles, John Polkinghorne, Joseph Brodsky, Luhansk, Nativity, Nicholas I, Noah's Ark Plot, Odessa, Paul Dirac, professors, Russian Army, Russian language, Russian poetry, Sam1, Sam2, Seamus Heaney, The Quantum World, The Times, translation, translations, Ukraine, Venezuela, verse translation, Vladimir Putin, What Can We Hope For? | Leave a comment

A year of hope

Posted on January 1, 2023 by Patrick Miles

A happy new year to subscribers and viewers, and thank you sincerely for following us through our ninth year of existence. The question of Calderonia’s future is always in my mind, but I can assure you we shall continue at least to 2024, when the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies conference will next be in Cambridge and Sam&Sam MUST appear. After that, perhaps I should take an Elon Musk-style poll?

I entitled my New Year post last year ‘A Year of Promise’. That may now seem to have been ill-advised. In fact I was referring to the prospect of the pandemic ending in 2022 and Sam&Sam making their first public appearance in the U.K. — as a stall at the Cambridge BASEES Conference — which would have sold quite a few books. I was convinced in December 2021 that Russia was going to invade Ukraine, and thought that on the Soviet precedent they would do it over Christmas. Before 24 February I believed Russia’s aim was to pin down the Ukrainian army north of Kyiv, invade from the east, and stop at the Dnepro River, partitioning the country. I never expected it to become a total war about liberty and democracy that affects every one of us and, inevitably, led to the cancellation of the Cambridge conference in protest.

You may feel I am equally ill-advised to call this post one of hope. The amazing Ukrainians have retaken this year almost half of the 25% of their country that Russia seized, but driving the Russians out of the rest will be hell. Meanwhile, Russia is inexorably destroying Ukraine’s infrastructure, and there is every sign that Putin is planning another direct assault on Kyiv. The unity of western nations is formidable. Who would have expected Justin Welby, on a visit to Ukraine, to say that Boris Johnson was ‘stunningly right’ in his response to the invasion? Who would have expected Johnson to pay fulsome tribute to the EU for its support of Ukraine? Personally, I don’t think Joe Biden has put a foot wrong on the issue. Yet the West could run perilously low on ammunition and money.

Nevertheless, we must make this a year of hope. Not the kind as in ‘I hope for an award’, meaning ‘I’m in with a chance and it would be nice if I got one’, but an ‘absurd’ hope, the hope that begins the other side of despair (at what happened in Bucha, for instance). This is the hope that never falters in desiring something, willing something, believing it must happen. A hope that never, never surrenders. This hope comes very close indeed to courage. And you will certainly find that hope and courage here:

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged A Message from Ukraine, BASEES, BASEES Conference, Boris Johnson, Bucha, Cambridge, comments, courage, despair, Dnepro, Elon Musk, hope, Joe Biden, Justin Welby, Kiev, Kyiv, New Year messages, pandemics, Russia, Sam&Sam, the pandemic, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin, Volodymyr Zelensky | Leave a comment

Christmas in Moscow, 1969

Posted on December 21, 2022 by Patrick Miles

Leningrad, 3rd January 1970

I had an excellent Christmas in Moscow. We couldn’t get a turkey unfortunately (the French girls thought it a bit ambitious, anyway), so we had really tasty coq au vin. To go with it: best Brussels sprouts and fried bacon from the Embassy, potatoes and sausage, not to mention the caviar (red and black) beforehand, champagne, and fruit to follow. The sprouts had been kept between the inner and outer window panes of my room and were so hard (it had been -30 outside) that you could bounce them off the floor like golf balls. Since I had got back late from trying to ring you up at the International Post Office in town, and the cooks had overslept anyway, and the Russian guests came late, we were somewhat behind on our timetable, but that made the rest of the day all the more fun. After a lot of black coffee, we went off to the Gorki Park of Culture, which is completely flooded along its paths to make one big skating rink. You can hire skates here but they are all of the type we use for figure skating, I think, with low uppers, so it’s rather like being thrown in at the deep end. Still, I was taken in hand by a little master-skater of about nine, who taught me the first steps, and although I didn’t get very far before going bow-legged or knock-kneed, I only fell once. Then it was straight by taxi to the Bolshoi. As it happened, this was the first night of their new production of Swan Lake, so it was something of a gala. We were very lucky to get tickets. I presume it was the prima ballerina dancing. This performance was the best I’ve seen at the Bolshoi. When we came out of the Metro at the University, all the trees were twinkling with ‘rime’, a special kind of hoarfrost.

I couldn’t find any more in George’s letters home about his 1895 Christmas in Russia, so decided to post an excerpt from a letter I wrote my parents from Russia in 1970 (I was based in Moscow, but spent New Year in Leningrad). I hadn’t read this letter since writing it! Although it’s not been been possible to verify whether Odette was danced on Christmas Day by Maya Plisetskaya, the Bolshoi’s prima ballerina assoluta, I think it was her. I saw her dance in Moscow many times and can visualise her arm movements even now.

A VERY HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO YOU ALL!

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged ballet, biographies, biography, Bolshoi Theatre, British Embassy, Brussels sprouts, caviar, Christmas, Christmas Day, comments, coq au vin, George Calderon, Gorki Park, hoarfrost, Leningrad, Maya Plisetskaya, Moscow, Moscow University, Odette, Patrick Miles, prima ballerina assoluta, rime, Russia, skating, Swan Lake | 1 Comment

Mending into…

Posted on December 7, 2022 by Patrick Miles

Click the cover to buy this book.

In my mind’s eye, I can see George Calderon opening this book and chuckling with delight — not just because it was written (and gorgeously illustrated) by a great-granddaughter of his close friend ‘Evey’ Pym, but because it exemplifies something George believed himself.

Celia Pym is a highly skilled mender of garments, particularly woollen ones, but she does not set out to mend invisibly, quite the contrary:

I like to mend so that you can see what’s missing and what has been lost. To mend with a contrasting colour to highlight the hole is a distinctly confident move. It makes visible the change in the garment, its aging and its life. It makes the thing different and new with a fresh colour. And then when mended again, in the future, with another colour, this will add an additional layer to the story of the garment.

Similarly, George knew that in many cultures, including parts of our own, to wear pin-new clothes was to attract the ‘evil eye’. So he believed you should always distress new clothes in some way first, perhaps even adding a visible patch to them.

Celia Pym explains that her interest in damaged garments began with her great-uncle Roly’s sweater, ‘which I inherited after his death and is the first story in this book’. Roland Pym and his sister Elizabeth (George’s god-daughter) are familiar friends to followers of this blog! Note, however, Celia’s phrase ‘the first story in this book’. For the book is ‘not a guide to mending techniques’, its stories ‘describe the ways in which clothes and cloth become holed, why a damaged sweater or backpack can be emotionally affecting and how mending a garment can unstick a stuck feeling’. Thus, although she was not particularly interested in mending when she inherited Roly’s sweater,

two things moved me about the garment. That the holes and damage were a trace of Roly’s body, evocative of how he moved and wore his sweater, and that the darning marks were evidence of Elizabeth’s care. These two ideas about care and the body written into worn garments have kept me curious for the past fifteen years.

And here are the results of this particular mending:

Left: Roly’s sweater, Right: Elizabeth’s cardigan (photographs by Michele Panzeri)

‘Dear me, what a mess!’ may be your unfiltered reaction, ‘How bizarre! How counter-intuitive! How to ruin the fine work of the original knitters!’ But the more you look at the fresh shapes on these clothes, the more you will change your mind, I guarantee you. I will return to this subject in a moment, because the bulk of this book (pages 19-87) is self-effacingly entitled by Celia ‘Stories’, and these will deeply engage you and move you first.

She briefly relates the lives of Roland and Elizabeth; the life of her grandmother who bought her mother a Fair Isle sweater in 1951 which she has mended; the story of a Norwegian friend’s ‘shoddy factory’ and mind-boggling collection ‘Treasures from a Ragpile’; that of a retired GP who with his pullover mended yellow on deep gold became the star at a V&A exhibition; of a century-old cape from the Monte Carlo Opera House due to be binned, but which set out on an active life round the world once mended with Celia’s participation; of Lara and Lolu’s backpacks, how mending them was important to both, and how Lara, who suffered from cancer, ‘believed in embracing repair’. ‘Mending-language works on the body as well as on garments’, the author has remarked earlier.

So this is above all a book about our humanity, and how our clothes relate to that, the stories that our lives and bodies leave on them for us and others. It is philosophical, in fact — though I would much prefer to say ‘it makes you think’! It will challenge and stimulate you to meditate on areas of life, as the author herself evidently does. In this connection, it is revealing that Celia Pym is a qualified nurse, took part as a garment mender in a project with anatomy students in the dissecting room of a London teaching hospital, and ‘came to see an overlap in the way we use our hands and use observation to understand mending and anatomy’. The book is an act of great physical and psychological sensitivity.

But to come to the finished works themselves. Here is a woollen dress made by the Women’s Home Industries, worn by Vivien Leigh, and resurrected by Celia Pym after it had lain disintegrating from moth in the film director Jim Ivory’s attic for fifty years:

Vivien Leigh’s 1965 dress mended now (photograph by Michele Panzeri)

The dress was once a slinky, homogenous deep purple creation, but now that ‘the moth holes have been mended with warm, white cashmere wool from Japan’ it evokes a constellation in outer space with perhaps a rocket moving down through it. In other words, it is now not just a garment that ‘was’, it is simultaneously a new garment that ‘is’ — it has extension through time, it lives into our present and beyond. Then look more closely at the darning and finely woven-in mends on Roly’s, Elizabeth’s and others’ sweaters. They have an abstract life of their own, and a very detailed one. They remind me of Malevich’s Suprematist shapes, or Piet Mondrian’s compositions, but also of the beautiful ‘chaotic systems’ of the natural world, for instance murmurations of birds, or fields of teazles. I know that I am risking an appearance in Pseuds Corner here, but I think it is time to complete the title of this blog: Celia Pym’s form of mending is mending into art.

A wonderfully warm book for Christmas!

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged anatomy, Bill Smith, biographies, Celia Pym, chaotic systems, Charles Evelyn Pym, comments, Elizabeth Pym, Evey Pym, evil eye, Fair Isle, George Calderon, Hope Pym, Jim Ivory, Judy Auerbach, jumpers, Kazimir Malevich, knitting, Lara Veitch, Lolu Oluwole-Ojo, mending, Monte Carlo Opera House, moth infestations, murmurations, Piet Mondrian, Pseuds Corner, pullovers, Roland Pym, silk, snowflakes, Suprematism, sweaters, teazles, Treasures from a Ragpile, Victoria & Albert Museum, Vivien Leigh, Women's Home Industries, Wool | 1 Comment

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 19

Posted on November 28, 2022 by Patrick Miles

4 November
On its back page, the voluminous weekly DIE ZEIT, which I still think is the best newspaper in Europe, always carries a large photograph of an animal looking at the camera with a distinctive expression, and the caption above Du siehst aus, wie ich mich fühle (You look how I feel). I might say the same of this creature:

No-one left a Comment on my previous diary post suggesting what the mystery object there might be…and because I berated people for emailing me in such circumstances rather than leaving a Comment, no-one emailed me either! I now reveal that the object was a soapstone ink and brush holder brought back by my great-grandfather from China. But, as you can tell from the wear across the front and the blue mark extreme right, it was used for holding and striking matches.

The above has been variously described as ‘a crocodile’, ‘a toy horse trough’, and ‘something Aztec for a Mexico project’. It was made by Sam2 at the age of seven. It is invaluable for holding and drying out those slivers of soap you’re left with from a bar.

12 November
Returning from buying my morning paper, I pass the professor at his five-bar gate. He initiates a conversation: ‘Patrick, I disagree with your position on Ukraine.’ (How he knew my ‘position’, I don’t know.) ‘I have come to the conclusion that what is needed is a peace conference.’ Subduing a tidal splutter, I reply: ‘I entirely agree with you, Philip. How are you going to get Putin to the conference table?’ The professor believes that Zelensky’s position, e.g. that all Russian forces have to be withdrawn and he will never negotiate as long as Putin is in power, is ‘not helpful’ and the war requires United Nations arbitration. In order not to raise the temperature too quickly, I suggest that Hitler would not have agreed to ‘international arbitration’ over the Sudetenland. What I wanted to do was quote Winston Churchill’s ‘You cannot reason with a tiger when your head is in its mouth’, but the prof. is probably not a Churchill fan. I actually said that I thought Russia had a case about Crimea and this should be evaluated by an independent body, but neither side would ever accept that; otherwise why would Putin have annexed it in 2014? Then I put the wind up the prof. by explaining my theory that the Russians want to evacuate Kherson of their troops and ‘subjects’, entice the Ukrainians in, and detonate a tactical nuclear weapon over them. Needless to say, I hope I am wrong. But anything mad is possible.

13 November
If you want to know what the war is like for a flesh and blood Ukrainian, a poet of international standing who knows his native country and his people, read this book:

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

Soon after 24 February, Alexander Korotko started writing ‘in complete prostration’ two or three poems a night. There are 88 in all, numbered and mostly without titles. They are printed in their original Russian, with Ukrainian and English translations.

At first, they are short, conventional and declarative (‘we pay/the West/for help/with blood,/but the West/makes no haste/to deliver’ (13)). Then Korotko finds his form in quite long poems of only two or three words a line, rhymed at various intervals. The effect is zerfetzt, finely torn up, and jagged down the right hand side like the bricks of a wall that a missile has passed through. There are anapaestic overtones of Mandel’shtam (e.g. 48), which is utterly to the good, and the verse is never without musical concentration.

But the body of the book presents a world that has flown apart — literally. Like a figure in a Chagall painting, a dead soldier finds himself ‘flying/in a wooden envelope/with friends./I am the moon,/born early/in the sky’ (34). Angels fly, souls fly, dreams, a steamer, houses, stars; the commonest tropes are blood, death, sun, sky, moon, night, life, dawns; the commonest word is ‘pain’ (in at least fifteen poems, and it becomes the central obsession of the latter half of the book); the commonest phrase, ‘eyes charred with tears’.

This is a sequence that conveys unbearably powerfully the trauma of a nation; but it enacts also the terrible trauma of a poet. Korotko reminds one of no-one so much as Georg Trakl. Certainly he often slips into incoherence (which the English translator faithfully conveys), but what else would one expect? The truth of the Ukrainian war demands straining the rationality of language and imagination beyond breaking point. For all its unevennesses, Korotko’s War Poems is a masterpiece that will be read and pondered to futurity.

20 November
We have been on the Inner Hebridean island of Islay (pronounced Eye-la) for the best part of a week. It was a wonderful visit from every point of view. The island is a complete world of its own, with an astonishing range of natural habitats (and weathers). Stars of the show were the very old Iona-style crosses, the malt whiskies, the great friendliness of the inhabitants, and this Learesque corvid, which I had never seen before:

A Chough on Islay, photographed by Will Miles

Returning from far,
we find the chrysanthemums
got sick of waiting.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged Adolf Hitler, Alexander Korotko, China, choughs, chrysanthemums, comments, Die Zeit, Edward Lear, emeritus professors, Georg Trakl, haiku, images, Iona, Islay, Kherson, malt whisky, Mexico, Osip Mandel'shtam, peace conferences, professors, Russo-Ukrainian War, soap, soapstone, Sudetenland, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin, Volodymyr Zelensky, war poems, war poetry, whiskies, Winston Churchill | 3 Comments

Was there an ‘Edwardian Age’, and was it ‘great’?

Posted on November 14, 2022 by Patrick Miles

William Page (1888-1962) and Maria Page, née Beck (1891-1982)

When I began to read George and Kittie Calderon’s archive for my biography of them both, I little thought I would be drawn deeper and deeper into the question of ‘Edwardianism’. Yet I instantly felt as I read George’s letters of the 1890s, that he was not Victorian. My knowledge of him, his times and contemporaries broadened (after some years) to the point where I even decided that he exemplified a special Edwardian form of genius — and the adjective entered the subtitle of my book.

It has been really stimulating to revisit this subject in the series of eight posts since 4 June 2022 — of which this is the last — devoted to a fan of aspects of the Edwardian Age. I’m immensely grateful to Alison Miles, John Pym, Laurence Brockliss and Damian Grant for their painstaking guest posts that have shed fresh and fascinating light on this beguiling, often contentious period of British life.

My own living link with the Edwardians was my maternal grandparents (photographed above in about 1914). I knew them well as I spent long holidays between 1953 and 1958 living with them in a thatched cottage adjoining the 1.5 acre smallholding in the Kent countryside that was their livelihood. Edward VII reigned only from 1901 to 1910, so my grandfather was an Edwardian in the strict historical sense between the ages of thirteen and twenty-two, and my grandmother from ten to nineteen. But I sense deeply now that the pre-1914 era was when their whole outlook was formed, and they remained Edwardians in their outlook till they died, although they doubtless did not think of themselves as ‘Edwardians’.

They both spoke with affection of the King, calling him ‘Teddy’. The only other king I ever heard my grandfather mention was George VI, and that was to tell me sotto voce that he had had ‘a stammer’. My grandfather’s hero was Robert Baden-Powell. He adored cricket, golf, the wireless, flowers, and birds. When I received a copy of Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy at a school Speech Day, my grandmother remonstrated with my mother that it was by ‘Bertie Russell — he’ll turn the boy into a Bolshie!’ My grandparents’ favourite modern writer was H.G. Wells (not Henry James, whose house in Rye my grandmother visited as a junior tailoress, and never D.H. Lawrence). They were far more accepting of modern technology, and far more interested in travel, than my parents. In fact they were far better read, more independent-minded and more enterprising. They were charitable and saw poverty as everyone’s problem. My grandmother was as anti cruelty to animals as Kittie Calderon. My grandfather, I surmise, thought the First World War destroyed the Edwardian world (in which they knew the King as ‘The Peacemaker’ for his attempts to contain Germany), and was the worst thing that had happened to him. He served at Gallipoli, in Mesopotamia and at Ypres, suffered from PTSD, and raved on his death bed about a dead Turk beneath it. My childhood spent in their loving care and free to wander the smallholding was idyllic.

However, as Adrian Gregory has written in his brilliant 2014 book The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War (p. 278):

Any discussion of the world before the war, the world we have lost, must start from the realisation that Edwardian Britain contained not one, but several worlds within it.

My grandfather was gentle, soft, passive (many thought), and when my mother was leaving him in his hospital bed for the last time and turned to look at him from a distance, he simply opened wide his emaciated arms to her in a gesture of love. So why was he so pro-hanging (he even told me the name of the public hangman), why did he say seriously ‘the only good German is a dead German’, tell me that in Moslem countries they cut a thief’s hand off, or inform me as I was about to go to the local grammar school, ‘Mr Oakes [the headmaster] beats boys’? All these things were terrifying to a child… As I wrote on this blog long ago with reference to George Calderon and others, the Edwardians seem to have believed they had a right to be nasty. That side of them, in both male and female, is undeniable. In The Edwardians (1972) Peter Brent insisted that ‘for the pre-1914 British chauvinism was the cement that held the social fabric together’ (p. 10); was that the source, then, of the cruel and regressive side of Edwardian life? This acceptance of violence as normal is what for me disqualifies the Edwardian Age from being ‘great’.

And was it an ‘Edwardian Age’? On the death of Queen Victoria, Wells famously said that she was ‘like a great paperweight that for half a century sat upon men’s minds and when she was removed, their ideas began to blow’. A 2017 ‘culturonomic’ computer analysis of local newspapers confirmed that ‘the years around Queen Victoria’s death were a fulcrum when the country changed abruptly in almost every way imaginable’ (Oliver Moody, The Times, 10 January 2017, p. 3). Yet I sensed immediately that George Calderon and his Trinity College friends of the 1890s were ‘post-Victorian’, and as Professor Brockliss has pointed out, ‘there can be no doubt that all the chief characteristics of the new age date from the early 1880s’ in the aftermath of the 1870s economic depression. Similarly, when did the ‘Edwardian Age’ end? In the 1920s it was commonly thought to have ended in 1914 (during the reign of George V), but of course it was the process of the war, not its commencement, that struck much of Edwardianism dead — in the course of writing my biography, I felt that the Edwardian ethos/syndrome succumbed in 1916 after the Somme, and was gratified to discover later that D.H. Lawrence thought the same. Yet Professor Brockliss makes a very convincing case for the end-date of the Edwardian Age being ‘the early 1930s in the midst of another and greater economic depression’.

Whatever dates one chooses, the ‘Edwardian Age’ was a far longer period than the reign of Edward VII. I would be tempted to rename it ‘the Post-Victorian Age’ (preceding the new Georgian Age), except that Queen Victoria was still alive when it started! If the Edwardian Age began in the early 1880s, she still had nearly twenty more years to reign. Is there an analogy here with our late Queen’s long reign? In the 1950s to 1980s Elizabeth II’s reign was widely perceived as the ‘New Elizabethan Age’ (the theatrical renaissance, for instance, was often compared to that of the first Elizabeth). But in my experience people ceased doing that in the 1990s, when Elizabeth II still had another thirty years to reign. Did the present Carolean Age begin with, say, the premiership of Tony Blair and the death of Diana Princess of Wales — twenty-five years before Charles III became King?

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Adrian Gregory, Alison Miles, Bertrand Russell, Carolean Age, Charles III, chauvinism, comments, culturonomics, D.H. Lawrence, Damian Grant, Dardanelles, Diana Princess of Wales, Edward VII, Edwardianism, Elizabeth I, Elizabeth II, Ephraim Parker Oakes, Gallipoli, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, George VI, Georgian Age, H.G. Wells, Henry James, John Pym, Kittie Calderon, Laurence Brockliss, Maria Page, Mesopotamia, New Elizabethan Age, Oliver Moody, Peter Brent, PTSD, Queen Victoria, Robert Baden-Powell, The Great War, Tony Blair, Trinity College Oxford, William Page, World War I, Ypres | 2 Comments

Guest post by Damian Grant: D.H. Lawrence’s ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’

Posted on October 31, 2022 by Patrick Miles

‘All feelings belong to the body, and are only recognized by the mind.’ This statement by Lawrence can be taken as a categorical refutation of another manner of presenting human beings in fiction, one which was touched on by Patrick Miles in his post about two late novels by Henry James last week (‘the presence of the living and breathing human body [in these novels] is negligible’). Lawrence’s statement explodes a landmine under Edwardian consciousness and convention. True, it comes late on in Lawrence, in his essay on Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1929; but this fundamental belief informs all Lawrence’s writing, from the very beginning. It certainly motivates a very early story, written in 1909 when he was only 24, ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’. First published in The English Review in 1911, the final version of the story appeared in The Prussian Officer and Other Stories in 1914; quotation here is made from the text edited by Brian Finney for Penguin (Harmondsworth, 1982, pp. 88-105). It should be noted at the outset that during this process Lawrence made significant alterations.

The subject of this story is an incident which would have been not uncommon within the author’s experience: the death of a miner in a pit accident. What makes the story slightly different is that the man here, Walter Bates, is killed while working alone down the mine, after his colleagues have ended their shift. But what makes it entirely different from such a story conceived merely as a material event, is the fact that Lawrence’s real subject is Walter Bates’s wife Elizabeth, and the flux of her feelings as she waits that evening for her husband. First she waits angrily, supposing that he has gone drinking before coming home; then fearfully, as she conceives of other possibilities for his non-appearance; and ultimately with the full realization of what his death means to her. In these concluding pages the young writer announces his full ambition, and proves he is equal to it, sounding the depth of the woman’s feeling and laying out for the reader, as on an extraordinary scroll, the lucid and bewildering awareness which she is brought to.

The opening paragraph itself has been justly praised, as Lawrence provides the physical context of the colliery and atmosphere with startling concreteness and economy. The engine providing the ‘slow inevitable movement’ of the black coal trucks is contrasted with the energy of a startled colt, that ‘outdistanced it at a canter’; but the natural world here is far from energetic. ‘The fields were dreary and forsaken […] oak leaves dropped noiselessly’. We then focus on a ‘low cottage,’ whose brickyard boasts ‘some ‘dishevelled pink chrysanthemums’, which serve to introduce Elizabeth Bates, the miner’s wife, ‘her mouth […] closed with disillusionment’. We meet her five-year-old son, whom she reproves for tearing at the chrysanthemums (a sprig of which she puts in her apron), and her father, who drives the engine. She is clearly unhappy that her widowed father is remarrying.

Lawrence praised George Eliot for showing later novelists the way ‘by putting all the action inside’. This is exactly what he himself proceeds to do, but in a more modern idiom, in line with his own developing theory of how feelings operate, how they may be understood and described. It is when the woman goes inside the house, superficially engaged in attending to her children (there is also a daughter), that Lawrence goes inside her, and explores what is happening beyond her own volition or control – while time advances (as it does throughout the story) mechanically, like the coal trucks…half past four, quarter to five, and so on. We also learn that not the least of what goes on inside her is that she is pregnant.

Meanwhile, the daughter Annie notices the chrysanthemums, and enthuses about them; which only prompts a derisive summary from the mother:

It was chrysanthemums when I married him, and chrysanthemums when you were born, and the first time they ever brought him home drunk, he’d got brown chrysanthemums in his button-hole.

But immediately after this, the pointed symbolism of the chrysanthemums is shouldered aside by the dramatic irony of the wife’s angry exclamation: ‘He needn’t come rolling in here in his pit-dirt, for I won’t wash him. He can lie on the floor.’ And this feeling then assumes a physical reality, via an extraordinary animal metaphor: ‘Her anger wearied itself, lay down to rest, opening its eyes from time to time and steadily watching, its ears raised to listen. Sometimes even her anger quailed and shrank.’ As the evening wears on, and the children fret, ‘her anger was tinged with fear’.

This fear is soon justified as she perceives her neighbours’ concern: ‘At this, suddenly all the blood in her body seemed to switch away from her heart.’ Undercutting convention, the body and the blood insist on speaking their own language. When Elizabeth Bates hears ‘the rapid chuff of the winding-engine at the pit […] Again she felt the painful sweep of her blood’. When her husband’s mother appears, ominously in her black shawl, the wife begins to admit to herself the worst possibility: ‘“Is he dead?” she asked, and at the words her heart swung violently’; and her emotions are again rendered with surprising precision, as ‘The tears offered to come to her eyes’. The old woman laments, self-pityingly (her emotions by contrast are quite conventional); and eventually, ‘at half past ten’ a group of miners bring the body. ‘“They’re bringin’ ‘im, Missis,” he said. Elizabeth’s heart halted a moment. Then it surged on again, almost suffocating her.’ Her husband, we are told, has been suffocated — ‘smothered’ — by a fall of rock; Lawrence uses this parallel, once again, to establish the literal link, the balancing of physical realities. As they leave, stepping over the body, one of the men knocks over a vase of chrysanthemums (the symbolism is not forgotten).

It is at this point, where the ‘plot’ ends — and where many a short story would also terminate — that Lawrence begins his burrowing into the woman’s deeper and unacknowledged self, to reveal the awareness that will assert itself at moments like this from her traumatized body: arrested as it is beside the dead body of her husband. Elizabeth Bates is looking at death still from the outside. Her social self, with its irritations and anxieties, is here ‘countermanded. She saw him, how utterly inviolable he lay in himself. She had nothing to do with him’. But she must wash the body. ‘She was afraid, with a bottomless fear, so she ministered to him.’ The mother and the wife work together at this task:

They never forgot it was death, and the touch of the man’s dead body gave them strange emotions, different in each of the women; a great dread possessed them both, the mother felt the lie was given to her womb, she was denied; the wife felt the utter isolation of the human soul, the child within her was a weight apart from her.

Lawrence now explores and illustrates this extreme of isolation, channelling through the woman his own highly-charged and powerfully imaged perceptions: ‘Life with its smoky burning gone from him, had left him apart and utterly alien to her. […] Was this what it all meant—utter, intact separateness, obscured by heat of living?’ She feels it is the ‘false’ intimacy of marriage, and the marriage bed, which has obscured this the most:

There had been nothing between them, and yet they had come together, exchanging their nakedness repeatedly. Each time he had taken her, they had been two isolated beings, far apart as now.

This chilling idea is followed up with an image which would recur, curiously, in another context, in writing about intimate combat (in and under the trenches) in the First World War : ‘They had met in the dark and had fought in the dark, not knowing whom they met nor whom they fought.’ As her anger, earlier, was animal, now her fear becomes concrete, mineral: ‘In her womb was ice of fear […] The child was like ice in her womb.’ And the pregnancy provides part of her realization:

He and she were only channels through which life had flowed to issue in the children. She was a mother — but how awful she knew it now to have been a wife.

She can even project herself into the dead man’s consciousness, in sympathy: ‘He, dead now, how awful he must have felt it to be a husband. […] He had been her husband. But how little!’ This imaginative dilation complicates the action: ‘She was almost ashamed to handle him; what right had she or anyone to lay hands on him; but her touch was humble on his body.’ The body exacts its due, to the end.

We know that it was partly the experience of Lawrence’s aunt Polly, who had lost her husband in a mining accident, that provided the frame for this story; but the depth of perception here derives more from his highly sensitive reaction to his parents’ marriage, to be presented more fully and with more complexity in Sons and Lovers. And in addition I would like to quote the point made (in a personal email) by my learned Lawrentian friend Michael Bell, concerning the significance of the changes made through successive versions of the story, which have not been my main focus here:

The point about ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ is that in the first version the wife remains hostile to the husband even in death, but by the final version she undergoes a reversal of attitude and sees herself as having failed to accept and love him: she adopts the critique of herself that Lawrence makes of Mrs Morel in Sons and Lovers to some degree and more distinctly in The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd, which is a dramatic version of the ‘Odour’ story.

Penetrating and unsparing as is Elizabeth Bates’s perception, this fundamentally post-Edwardian story is not, of course, the author’s last word on the possibilities of human relationship. As much of Lawrence’s writing, early and late, makes plain, it is relationships formed in the context of modern industrialism that typically lead to such a bleak conclusion. In other, saner, contexts, the marriage of true minds — and bodies — is still possible. Tom and Lydia Brangwen plumb other, richer depths in their life together on Marsh Farm in The Rainbow: Tom’s view is that his whole life had ‘amounted to the long marital embrace with his wife’. Their grand-daughter Ursula finds her fulfilment likewise with Birkin in Women in Love, their coming together being described by Lawrence as ‘wordless, and utterly previous to words’.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage | Tagged 'Odour of Chrysanthemums', A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', chrysanthemums, coal mines, D.H. Lawrence, Elizabeth Bates, George Eliot, Henry James, Michael Bell, miners, mining disasters, Patrick Miles, psychology, the body, The Engolish Novel, The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, The Rainbow, The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd, Walter Bates, Women in Love, World War I | 6 Comments

Henry James: Edwardian writer par excellence?

Posted on October 17, 2022 by Patrick Miles

No series of posts about the ‘Edwardian Era’ would be complete without a reference to Henry James, often regarded as its greatest novelist. I have always admired his short stories. I have read ‘Daisy Miller’ every few years since 1974 (I note from the inside cover) and for sheer profundity would rate it close to Chekhov’s ‘Lady with a Little Dog’. I have also read James’s riveting but over-long story ‘What Maisie Knew’ more times than I can say. In my twenties, however, I could never get into his novels. For these Edwardian posts I decided I must, so I chose the two novels above from Kittie Calderon’s library.

The date and signature beneath the top image come from her copy of The Ambassadors. The Wings of the Dove (which seems not to have been returned to Mudie’s borrowing library!) is dated in her hand ‘1905’.

May 1906 is when George was on his way to Tahiti, returning in October, and Kittie was staying with Lady Corbet at Acton Reynald. We also know that 1905 was for both Calderons a year replete with holidays at country houses. And this is the first thing that strikes me as Edwardian about these novels: you have to have a superfluity of leisure in which to read them (Ambassadors is 458 pages, Wings 576), and you have to want to sink into all that time — to be moved along that slowly. The characters themselves live lives of affluence, comfort and leisure, they ‘flaunt their wealth and mobility more extravagantly than ever’, in Professor Brockliss’s words. (Let us recall George’s comment of 1912: ‘The richer we have got the higher we have put our standard of luxury.’)

I have to confess as well that in these two novels I find it infuriating that not one of the upper class women characters who are prone to present themselves as victims ever hits on the idea of getting a job (despite Brockliss’s observation that, historically, ‘unmarried women of the respectable classes no longer considered paid work beneath them’).

Another feature that strikes me as quintessentially Edwardian about The Ambassadors and The Wings of the Dove is conveyed by Joseph Conrad’s comment of 1904 that the ‘fine consciences’ of James’s novels ‘ultimately triumph, in their emergence from the circle, through an energetic act of renunciation’. Renunciation was an Edwardian reflex. ‘Every time you violate self by forcing it to do that which it dislikes and which you know to be right, you strengthen your character all round’, wrote Lady Corbet (GC: EG, p. 55). I sometimes feel the Edwardian military even regarded the Somme and Gallipoli as not so much defeats as ‘renounced victories’.

But for me what is most Edwardian about Henry James is his loquacity, or perhaps we should say loquaciousness-ness. I am quite an experienced and determined reader, but to turn over one page in these novels that is a solid wall of words only to discover another wall facing one, is terrifying. Moreover, they are all too often mega-paragraphs of telling — telling us why or what characters think — not showing. It is too ponderous, I think, for the modern sense of time to have patience with, not to mention the sometimes unintelligible ganglia of James’s sentences. Yet James can write superb dialogue. What is really bizarre is the alternation of pages and pages of telling with pages and pages of speech (showing). It’s an unannealed wound in the text; a breakdown of novelistic dialogue in the deeper sense; it seems narratorial incompetence. But the Edwardian era witnessed not only an ‘explosion of middle-class democracy and pluralism’ (GC:EG, p. 319), it experienced an explosion of dialogue and verbiage, particularly on the pages of newspapers. I have only to think of the acres of small print in the Cambridge Daily News reproducing George’s and others’ contributions to a debate about the Coal Strike of 1912. The Edwardians were intoxicated by printed words. They couldn’t get enough of them.

Finally, the presence of the living and breathing human body in these two novels is almost negligible. So little bodily physical detail is given — although plenty about clothes and adornment — that it is nearly impossible to visualise characters. We are told that Merton Densher and Kate Croy, in The Wings of the Dove, are in love, indeed feel passion for each other, and become secretly engaged, but on the page they never even kiss. Outrageously, as the price for his agreeing to fall in with Croy’s plan for fleecing a dying American heiress, Densher insists that she ‘come to him’, i.e. secretly, once, probably in daylight, in his own rooms. Astonishingly, we are told that she did this. But we haven’t a clue what happened. Croy, who is surely intacta, has previously been portrayed as a rigid (James’s word), calculating Edwardian tease and Densher as a vacuous dimwit, so it is hilariously impossible to imagine any sexual intercourse between them. This lacuna, however, is also essentially Edwardian: neither Forster’s A Room with a View (1908), nor Wells’s Ann Veronica (1909), which seemingly celebrate women breaking out of Victorian marriage conventions, contains any presentiment of climactic lovemaking.

As Professor Brockliss very wisely says, ‘the Edwardian age was full of contradictions’. James’s fineness of psychology and conscience seems unsurpassable. Leavis even wrote that James’s art ‘has a moral fineness so far beyond the perception of his critics that they can accuse him of the opposite’ — something that also happened to Chekhov. Yet, in these two late novels at least, the lack of human physical existence leaves James looking woefully cerebral and etiolated. He is unquestionably a great writer, but the Edwardian contradictions are there.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Personal commentary | Tagged A Room with a View, Acton Reynald, affluence, Ann Veronica, Anton Chekhov, Battle of the Somme, Cambridge Daily News, Coal Strike 1912, comments, conscience, Daisy Miller, Dardanelles, dialogue, E.M. Forster, ethics, F.R. Leavis, Gallipoli, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, H.G. Wells, Henry James, human body, Joseph Conrad, journalism, Kittie Calderon, Lady Corbet, Lady with a Little Dog, Laurence Brockliss, loquaciousness, mobility, morality, Mudie's Library, Nina Corbet, novels, psychology, renunciation, sex life, short stories, Tahiti, The Ambassadors, The Edwardian Era, The Edwardians, The Great War, The Lady with the Little Dog, The Wings of the Dove, travel, What Maisie Knew, World War I | 2 Comments

Guest post by Laurence Brockliss: In Search of the Edwardians

Posted on September 26, 2022 by Patrick Miles

Since the beginning of recorded time, chroniclers and historians have used the reigns of princely houses and individual monarchs, and later the periods of office of presidents and political leaders, as a framing device to bring a semblance of order to the congeries of past events, artefacts and attitudes that they are endeavouring with greater or less success to recover, assess and generally lick into shape. But as our knowledge of the past in all its many aspects has greatly increased with the emergence of history as an academic profession, so labels such as the Age of the Tudors or the Henrician or Elizabethan Age have lost much of their chronological precision. The labels are still used as a convenient shorthand but in the fields of economic, social and cultural history, and even sometimes political history, the distinctive features that the use of the term is intended to conjure up are seldom defined temporally by a dynastic era or an individual reign. Either the feature in question spreads far beyond the parameters of the reign to which it is attributed, or when the reign is long the feature is only in evidence for a part of the time. It is also the case, too, that what has been defined as distinctive and thus historically noteworthy may be true only of one particular social class or a specific group within an occupation.

Tomb of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert at Frogmore (royal.uk)

These opening remarks are particularly pertinent in the case of the use of the term ‘Edwardian Age’. Compared with his predecessor’s reign, Edward VII’s was very short – less than ten years. It would be ridiculous to suppose that in the relatively fast moving world of the turn of the twentieth century the population of the United Kingdom suddenly changed its spots overnight in February 1901 as Victoria was buried at Frogmore, and then as suddenly changed them again in May 1910 when Edward gave way to George V, however different the personality and style of the three monarchs. On the other hand, there definitely was an Edwardian Age, if we mean by that a period of time embracing the reign of Edward VII in which Britain looked very different from the profile it presented in the classic Victorian era.

The state in this new age was characterised by a much larger governmental apparatus brought into being initially to mitigate the worst effects of poverty in a country where wealth was extremely unevenly distributed. The economy was dominated by big corporations; women of the respectable classes sought the vote and the unmarried among them no longer considered paid work beneath them; the working classes had their own political party in the form of Labour; Ireland was on the move; and novelists now took the whole world (even the universe in the case of H.G. Wells) for their canvas, showed a new interest in non-anglophone literature, and were as ready to take seriously the lives and loves of little men as the squabbles, struggles and moral dilemmas of the propertied classes. The list of differences is endless. And beneath all the obvious ones that historians have long picked up on, there were deeper changes to the rhythm of life, particularly among the affluent middle classes, which were much more significant for the long term.

Three points will suffice in the way of illustration. In the first place, the Edwardian middle-class family was much smaller than its Victorian counterpart. I have talked in previous posts about my ongoing study of professional families in the Victorian and Edwardian era, which takes as its starting point 758 professional men in active practice in 1851. The decrease in size of these families between the two eras was huge. In the mid-nineteenth century middle-class families were seldom as large as working-class ones because both men and women married in their mid- to late twenties. Nonetheless, professional families who had children usually had five or six. In contrast, the grandchildren of these families, whose married lives mainly either spanned or began in Edward’s reign, now only had one or two. One set of the families I have studied – 150 of the total — had a progenitor based in Leeds in the mid-nineteenth century. Seventy-four of the grandchildren of these mid-Victorian Loiners (Leeds inhabitants) are known to have been married and living in England and Wales in 1911. Of these, forty-seven had been married for four years or more. The twenty-nine married for between four and ten years had on average 1.8 children; the eighteen married between eleven and twenty-two years had 2.5; and only six out of the forty-seven had four children or more. Family limitation was now the name of the game.

The grandchildren, moreover, seem to have been much more domestically rooted than their predecessors. The mid-nineteenth century professional was very active outside the home. Among the 150 living in Leeds, a third were either a member of a political party, a member of a national or local pressure group, a national or local government officeholder, a freemason, or a member of a learned society or select club, such as the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society. The editor of the Leeds Mercury Edward Baines (1800-1890), who as a young man had stood on the hustings at Peterloo, had his finger in every associational pie except freemasonry. He also collected paintings.

Percival Tookey Leigh, by Edwin Reeve Crosse (Leeds Civic Collection)

Their grandsons in comparison showed little interest in the arts and sciences or in being a good citizen. With the notable exception of the dentist Percival Tookey Leigh (1865-1938), Chairman of the Leeds Borough Council Libraries and Arts Committee and eventual Lord Mayor, none entered local government. The pattern was repeated among all the 758 professional families in the different British towns I have concentrated on. Among the grandsons, nearly all adults or on the edge of adulthood when Edward came to the throne, a minority took an interest in the Volunteers or the Territorials, but they were five times less likely than their grandfathers to hold any sort of civic office during their lives. Apart from the handful who were university dons or industrial engineers, such as Barnes Wallis (1887-1979), they certainly made no contribution to the development of the natural and historical sciences, unlike many of their forebears. As a group they seem to have been much more interested in sport than service or knowledge.

Barnes Wallis (Barnes Wallis Foundation)

With so few of these Edwardians trying to advance science or improve the world, the affluent had much more leisure time than their ancestors. If they had means, they did not spend it quietly reading or playing cards in the family nest à la Pooter but went out in the evening en famille to the theatre and concerts or dined out with friends. Long before the First World War, the richest amongst them took advantage of the safer and faster steamships to travel the world. The most egregious example of an international traveller among them was the Reverend Harold Ayde Prichard (1882-1944), a scion of a dynasty of Bristol physicians, married to the daughter of an American diplomat related to Whistler, who emigrated to the United States in 1906 and became the rector of an affluent Episcopalian parish outside New York. In a letter in 1924, written for the benefit of his extended family, Harold claimed to have crossed the Atlantic twenty-one times on many different ships, including the Lusitania. He had also traversed the United States six times by rail. Harold throughout his life was a man on the move, either on behalf of the church or for simple pleasure. He appears to have visited most parts of Europe at one time or another and even travelled to Norway’s North Cape, today the most northerly part of the continent accessible by road. In other words, at the moment when women, the working classes, and the Irish were beginning to organise effectively in pursuit of a new deal, many of the propertied were flaunting their wealth and mobility more extravagantly than ever.

Revd Harold Ayde Prichard (1922 passport photograph)

Hedonism, albeit of a kind that the Church establishment would have found acceptable, was alive and well among the Edwardian middle classes and was not just a characteristic of ‘Bertie’ and his entourage. But it could be an expensive lifestyle. Most grandsons at the end of their lives were much poorer in real terms than their grandfathers, even though they had had much smaller families to raise. Admittedly their generation had had to pay higher taxes, but they do not appear to have embraced financial prudence as robustly as their Victorian forebears. Gladstone, the epitome of Victorian rectitude, left an estate valued at £255,000 (£160,000 in land). Two of his grandsons, William Gladstone Wickham (1877-1939) and Edward Stephen Gladstone Wickham (1882-1960), members of one of my professional families originally based in Winchester, were much less wealthy when they died. The first, a businessman and British trade commissioner to South Africa, was worth £8,970; the second, a clergyman, £28,301. In comparison with the ‘Grand Old Man’s’ fortune, both were paltry sums in real terms.

Seated: E.S. Gladstone Wickham (North Ormesby History Group)

But if there was definitely an Edwardian Age or an age distinct from the Victorian era, when did it begin and end? A plausible starting-point would be around 1880 in the aftermath of the 1870s economic depression which followed two decades of growth that had benefitted the whole population. It would be wrong to attribute the change in mentalités simply to the experience of the depression, for historians continue to debate its extent and long-term effect. But there can be no doubt that all the chief characteristics of the new age date from the early 1880s. In the world of the arts and sciences, 1880 saw the publication of the first of Gissing’s ‘misery’ novels, Workers in the Dawn; two years later Charles Darwin, the last great amateur scientist, died.

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

Dating the end of the Edwardian Age is much more difficult. The obvious year to choose would be 1914, but many historians today are loath to see the First World War as a turning-point. Although its horrors and the effect on the men who served and the families who were bereaved can never be exaggerated, the war in important respects — the expansion of state power; women’s emancipation; the distrust of amateurism; the rise of the Labour Party; the pursuit of pleasure — consolidated rather than undermined the hallmarks of the Edwardian era. Far fewer men between fifteen and forty-nine saw active service than is popularly assumed: 46.3 per cent. Those who survived, and most did – the average death-rate (officers and men) was 12 per cent — appear to have slotted back easily into the lives they had lived before they volunteered or were conscripted. Eighty-six of the grandsons of my mid-Victorian professionals who came home from the war were still alive in 1939 and appear in the ration-book census of that year. Of those still in work, three-quarters were plying the same craft or profession as in the 1911 census, if usually on a higher grade. The married among the returnees seem to have had no difficulty, either, in fitting back into pre-war family life. Divorces in the 1920s and 1930s among the descendants of my professional cohort were extremely rare and cannot easily be attributed to the war.

John Baines and Elisabeth Wicksteed, 1914 (Dearest Mother: First World War Letters Home from a Young Sapper Officer in France and Salonika, Solihull, Helion & Company, 2015, p. 28)

John Stanhope Baines (1894-1951), great-grandson of Edward, and Elisabeth Wicksteed (1893-1972), granddaughter of the Leeds Unitarian minister Charles Wicksteed (1810-85), married in 1916 while John, a regular officer in the Royal Engineers, was on leave. They were a classic Edwardian couple with means and, according to their letters, made ‘carpe diem’ their motto. They divorced on the eve of the Second World War but the breakdown of their marriage was precipitated by the unexpected death of their second son, killed in an accident in the south of France.

Perhaps a better end-date for the Edwardian Age would be the early 1930s in the midst of another and greater economic depression. Arguably, it was only then that a significant section of the well-to-do began to wonder whether Britain’s imperial, political and social political system needed completely restructuring, sometimes in alarming ways, and started advocating a more sober and serious style of life. One of the grandsons in my study, the Catholic solicitor and writer Joseph Kentigern Heydon (1884-1947), became an ardent supporter of the authoritarian right: his books included Fascism and Providence (1937). A great-granddaughter, Aileen Alison Furse (1910-57), a member of the Wickham clan, married ‘Kim’ Philby (1912-88). This was a new Georgian Age personified at either end of the spectrum of mainstream politics by George VI and George Orwell, which only failed to become recognised as a historical period because of the former’s early death. The Edwardian Age was full of contradictions and was arguably the one period when Britain was threatened by internecine class conflict, epitomised by the large scale strikes in the years before the First World War and in the mid-1920s. The new Georgian/Elizabethan Age was characterised by a less volatile social and industrial landscape stabilised by the construction of the Welfare State and the political consensus of the 1950s and 1960s known as Butskellism.

© Laurence Brockliss, 2022

Laurence Brockliss is an Emeritus Professor of History of the University of Oxford and an Emeritus Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. He is a Fellow of the British Academy. He works on the history of education, science and medicine in Britain and France between 1500 and the present day. His books include French Universities in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: A Cultural History (Oxford, 1986); [with Colin Jones] The Medical World of Early Modern France (Oxford, 1997); Calvet’s Web: Enlightenment and the Republic of Letters in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford, 2002); and The University of Oxford: A History (Oxford, 2016). He has recently written up an ESRC-funded study of the professions in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, which will be published by Oxford University Press.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Personal commentary | Tagged affluence, Aileen Alison Furse, Barnes Wallis, Butskellism, Charles Darwin, Edward Baines, edward Stephen Gladstone Wickham, Edward VII, Edwardian Age, Edwardian Era, Elisabeth Wicksteed, Elizabeth II, Frogmore, George Gissing, George Orwell, George V, George VI, Great Depression, H.G. Wells, Harold Ayde Prichard, Ireland, John Stanhope Baines, Joseph Kentigern Haydon, Kim Philby, Labour Party, Leeds, Leeds Mercury, Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, Percival Tookey Leigh, Peterloo, poverty, Queen Victoria, The Edwardians, The Lusitania, Victorian Era, Welfare State, William Ewart Gladstone, World War I | 1 Comment

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 18

Posted on September 12, 2022 by Patrick Miles

8 August
I introduced this summer’s ‘Edwardian Return’ series of posts on 4 June, but it really kicked in with Alison’s guest post ‘Edwardian grandmothers’, which as I write has been up for a week and has another to go. It’s culled many emails from followers who have similar memories, raising the perennial question of why people won’t commit to a Comment on the blog, and what one could do to encourage them! Well, here is an attempt at the latter. The object imaged below is an example, from my own family, of the kind of thing our Edwardian forebears brought back from their ‘colonial’ travels and that have decorated family homes ever since, as Alison describes. My question to followers is: what is it? Contemplating it on my grandparents’ mantelpiece when I was a small boy, I thought it was a model crib (but it isn’t). Offers, please, via Comments. Clue: it is four inches across and the writing just visible on the front is Chinese.

By the time you read this, John Pym’s guest post ‘Games Ancient and Modern’ will have come, but not ‘gone’ as a post is always there, of course, even when it is not in pole position. ‘Games Ancient and Modern’ is the most poetic of all Johnnie’s posts for us, blending Foxwold’s Edwardian past with recent memories of that blessed home. It will be followed by a guest post from our resident prosopographer (look it up), Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, and one about D.H. Lawrence’s story ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ (1909) by our resident Lawrentian Damian Grant.

15 August
It is impossible to say what is about to happen in the Ukrainian war. We are led to believe, by both the Ukrainians and western sources, that a decisive Ukrainian counter-offensive is going to be unleashed. The central Russian offensive, we are told, has run out of steam, a large Russian force made the mistake of pushing on westwards over the Dnepro and is potentially trapped there, and the Ukrainians are poised to retake Kherson… But a decisive Ukrainian attack along the whole front has to be very, very carefully timed. The Russian forces’ capability and morale must reach a critical nadir first, and presumably western weapons, particularly missiles and howitzers, have to exceed a critical tipping point.

Meanwhile, Gary Kasparov asks why the Ukrainians don’t destroy the Russian Black Sea Fleet, since they were able spectacularly to sink its flagship, the Moskva. It’s a good question. The Black Sea Fleet seems to have played very little part in the war since that sinking and the unpersoning of the Fleet’s admiral. We know that the Moskva was sunk by the Ukrainians but with precision assistance from the U.S., so perhaps Putin threatened to escalate the conflict nuclearly if that continued, and an agreement was made over the Ukrainians’ heads not to destroy more Russian ships in return for the latter ceasing hostilities. Snake Island was retaken, after all, and a grain corridor has been opened. Meanwhile, Russia is waging nuclear warfare by shelling the nuclear power station at Zaporizhzhia and threatening another Chernobyl.

22 August
Oh dear. I’ve done it. After pulling the postcard below out of my drawer or card rack for nearly fifty years, poising to address and send it, then putting it back with a sigh, but content with the cathartic effect of my threat, I have finally despatched it — to Bloodaxe Books, the Northumberland publishers of poetry collections, and most notably Basil Bunting’s masterpiece Briggflatts.

One does not, of course, send a collection of poems (The New Dark Blue Cowboys: Verse and Poems of Russia) to respected publishers without weeks of researching them, drafting the letter, and engraving their terms of submission on one’s brain (even though I have known Bloodaxe’s publications for thirty years). A slip of paper a week or so later bearing the immaculately printed words ‘We are sorry we cannot help you publish your collection’, is just not good enough. It’s hopelessly unliterary and rude. Of course I know how many collections they (claim they) receive a week, I know that, but my covering letter was nothing if not informative and carefully crafted, and the terms of their submissions were impeccably observed, including the fact that well over half of my book’s contents have been published in magazines. Working part time, a script reader in the 1970s at the National Theatre under John Russell Brown could read up to forty plays a week, write a report on each one, and John would write the playwright a proper letter. If the best publishers of poetry in the country, Faber & Faber, can run to a civilised, handwritten letter, Bloodaxe (not the most friendly of names) can too. Even if Bloodaxe thought my collection bloody awful, they still had no excuse for their inane rejection slip. Out came the card, on went their address and a single line, ‘With all best wishes, [signature]’, on went the First Class stamp, and…I sent it. Yes yes yes, ‘Don’t let rip, get a grip’, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, but sometimes you owe it to yourself — and others.

30 August
Mikhail Gorbachev has died. I am sure he was gagged by Putin, or self-gagged, in recent years. Having operated under Communist censorship, he always was given to indirect statement and euphemism anyway. I thought it salutary in about 1991 to show my students a fresh copy of Nezavisimaia gazeta (the Independent Newspaper) in which Gorbachev said emphatically that ‘there will never be multi-party democracy in Russia’. At the time, since he was still General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, we interpreted what he said as meaning ‘over my dead body will there be’. Now I tend to regard the words as simply a wise prophecy that came true.

3 September
Decades ago, I acquired a bad ante-cruciate ligament injury in my right knee. If it gets wrenched the wrong way, it flares up again (I call it my ex-cruciate ligament injury). I treat it with a Comfrey imbrocation made up from the recipe in this book, and find that much more effective than bought products. Nevertheless, it always takes a few months to sort it out, during which I tend to limp. The other day, I heard a little boy with a very clear voice call across the road to his father, about thirty yards behind me: ‘Daddy, that man is walking slightly like a penguin.’ It was the word ‘slightly’ that I thought was so good!

10 September
Without exaggeration, within days of the result of the EU referendum it was difficult to find European newspapers in Cambridge, especially German ones. In W.H. Smith recently I bought a copy of Die Zeit for 7 July 2022 and was stunned by this picture on p. 62:

The full-page article accompanying it explains that it has been painted by Michael Triegel to replace the centre panel of an altarpiece painted by Lucas Cranach in 1519 for Naumburg Cathedral and destroyed by Reformation fanatics in 1541. All that is known of Cranach’s panel is that it was of the Virgin Mary with child and saints.

Triegel saw Mary as ‘a simple girl of perhaps sixteen who has become pregnant but not by her husband’, and his own daughter sat for the picture. The black person at extreme left represents St Mauritius and was modelled on someone he spotted in a religious procession in Italy. The man with glasses is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ‘a Protestant saint if ever there was one’. The woman to the right of Mary’s head, representing her mother Anna, is Triegel’s wife. The bearded man in a red baseball cap represents St Peter and was modelled on a man begging on church steps in Rome. The figure extreme right is St Paul, drawn from a rabbi Triegel met at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. There is a long European tradition of doing this sort of thing, of course. Triegel says in his interview: ‘I portrayed them like this because for me the saints are of this world; the divine and the human spheres, the eternal and the earthly, should interpenetrate in the picture’. Formally, the picture isn’t an icon, but Triegel’s last statement isn’t a bad definition of one.

Speaking personally, almost the last figure I noticed was the baby Christ. But when you do, you are amazed and held still. This is Christ as a completely naked and vulnerable child. His expression at first strikes you as a Child of Sorrows. Moreover, Triegel says ‘the way Mary is holding him so that he is spreading his arms out, is almost the pose of the crucifixion’. Yet the eyes of this baby look right at you and into you. They, I think, are the eyes in this picture that you can’t forget once you have seen them. As Bakhtin wrote somewhere, ‘Christ is pure subjectivity directed outwards to all others’. Christ, then, is utter empathy for all others, the whole world; basically, that is what christianity is. ‘I wanted to paint a picture that is alive and gives hope’, Triegel says.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Alison Miles, ante-cruciate ligament, Basil Bunting, Bloodaxe Books, British Empire, Chernobyl, chinoiserie, Comfrey, counter offensives, D.H. Lawrence, Damian Grant, Die Zeit, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dnepro, Faber & Faber, floral messages, foreign travel, Foxwold, Gary Kasparov, guest posts, herbal remedies, howitzers, icons, Jesus Christ, John Pym, John Russell Brown, Kherson, knee injuries, Laurence Brockliss, Lucas Cranach, Michael Triegel, Mikhail Bakhtin, Mikhail Gorbachev, missiles, mystery object, National Theatre, Naumburg, Nezavisimaia gazeta, penguins, prosopography, rudeness, Snake Island, soapstone, St Mauritius, St Paul, St Peter, subjectivity, The Edwardians, The Moskva, The New Dark Blue Cowboys, The Virgin Mary, The Wailing Wall, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin, Zaporozhzhia | Leave a comment

George Calderon’s New Drama

Posted on September 5, 2022 by Patrick Miles

Naturally, my foray into short videos had to end with one about George. I suddenly thought that although the contribution of his own plays to Edwardian ‘New Drama’ is now largely forgotten, one could claim that Chekhov’s plays, which he was the key figure in introducing to Edwardian Britain, were the newest drama of all…

Given the importance, to me at least, of this statement about George, I decided to learn it by heart. I was fluent and word-perfect on the afternoon of the day it was to be recorded. Unfortunately, my post-flu fatigue struck again by evening and I couldn’t get through it without the script! I’ll give videos a break now, and polish my technique.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged Anton Chekhov, biographies, biography, comments, Constance Garnett, Dardanelles, Gallipoli, George Bernard Shaw, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, Glasgow Repertory Theatre, Granville Barker, John Galsworthy, Khodynka Disaster, Khodynka Field, Kittie Calderon, New Drama, Oxford, Oxford Playhouse, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, politics, Russia, St John Hankin, Tahiti, The Cherry Orchard, The Fountain, The Great War, The Seagull, Third Battle of Krithia, William Shakespeare, World War I | Leave a comment

Guest post by John Pym: Games Ancient and Modern

Posted on August 22, 2022 by Patrick Miles

Mr Beebe (Simon Callow) fights with an Edwardian tricycle at Foxwold in the 1985 film of A Room with a View. (Merchant Ivory Productions; Sarah Quill photographer)

An eight-minute video, La Roue, No. 29, in the series ‘Children’s Games’ by the artist Francis Alÿs: A barefoot boy in a green and yellow football shirt and red shorts – the colours of the Congo national football team – rolls an empty tyre up a huge slagheap. The heap, among the highest in the world, is composed of the fine waste from the Etoile copper mine on the outskirts of Lubumbashi in the Katanga region of southern Congo.

The boy fits himself inside the tyre and bowls down the slagheap. We see his calm smiling face from inside the tyre. At the bottom of the slagheap the tyre gently topples over and the boy stands up to be greeted by his friends who sing ‘The Mampala Etoile mine has been defeated. But Mampala, our great black mountain – we are pushing to find a solution!’ An internet search reveals that ‘Mampala’ is a Congolese football star, and that the great black mountain of waste contains sufficient cobalt to make that valuable material worth extracting – a heroic nickname and a possible solution.

I saw this remarkable video in the Belgian pavilion of the 2022 Venice Biennale.

Among the pencil-written letters my paternal grandfather Evey Pym sent to his wife Violet from France during the First World War was one that concerned a bicycle that Violet had recently acquired. Was the bicycle safe? She must take the greatest care. Violet – a close friend of the Calderons, Kittie in particular – no doubt simply intended to ride down the half-mile drive of Foxwold, the family home in Kent, and then along a peaceful country lane into the village of Brasted where almost all daily domestic needs could at that date be satisfied. The world was changing; women were asserting their independence.

What, I wondered sitting in the shade outside the Belgian pavilion, would Evey have made of that little African boy inside his tyre fearlessly descending the great back mountain?

Edwardian middle-class men may have worried about the safety of their wives riding bicycles – indeed we still worry today about everyone on bicycles – but they loved games and they would all, I’m sure, have raised their hats, my grandfather included, to that little boy and his tyre.

Foxwold in the 1880s/early 1890s, probably from a painting by Jane Hannah Backhouse Pym

Foxwold, in its heyday in the years before the First World War and up to 1927, the year when Violet died and Evey’s long widowhood began, was a home to games-playing. The Calderons undoubtedly played croquet on the fifth and most spacious of Foxwold’s six terraced lawns, as George was very keen on the game. The sides of the exacting croquet hoops were parallel, not wide angled and easy to pass through, and the house rules did not allow a player to place her foot on her ball and send an opponent’s ball decisively into the rhododendron bushes.

When I was a boy in the 1950s, and first knew Foxwold, we played croquet all the time from spring to autumn, as my own grandchildren do today with the same set of hoops and three of the same four chipped balls. I remember one of my grandmother Violet’s younger brothers, Roy Lubbock (b. 1892), a Cambridge don who taught engineering and had a hand in aircraft design during the First World War, smoking a cigarette in an amber holder and from his great height meticulously calculating through smoke and round spectacles the precise angle of strike.

Foxwold’s croquet set today

From the 1890s on, women and men, boys and girls, all played croquet together in mixed teams – with dogs sometimes contributing. Just as they shot arrows at straw targets and played field hockey, lacrosse, shuttlecock, bowls (each mahogany sphere identifiable by its countersunk dots, and impressively unmanageable to a small boy), deck quoits and clock golf – the ‘l’ was silent to the Edwardians, and indeed to my parents, both born in 1908.

The twelve-hole golf ‘course’ began on one of the lawns Kittie Calderon had laid out for Evey and Violet and then continued through the gap in a yew hedge, down steep banks and stone steps, and across rough chertstone paths. Each hole had a white-painted sunken iron circle and an appropriate Roman numeral, also white and made of iron, which was set in the grass nearby. When we played in the 50s and 60s the twine on the handles of the Edwardian (or perhaps Victorian) putters often came away in your hands.

Indoors we played Mahjong, again following our own rules, with a beautiful ivory-and-bamboo set perhaps brought back from China by one Sir Edmund Backhouse (b. 1873), a distant and enigmatic relative known as ‘The Hermit of Peking’. Card games were de rigueur in the evening, sometimes those forgotten French games of Bezique and Piquet (guidance available in a modern edition of Hoyle’s Rules), but more often Racing Demon and Hearts, and on quiet nights Clock Patience. I have my maternal grandmother’s fold-up card table with its dark brown velvet surface worn away in four patches where the ladies laid their cards – and I can see her now carefully playing Patience after tea with a small elegant pack of continental cards with some regal figure such as Marie Antoinette or Louis XVI decorating the back of the cards.

We played Up Jenkins – a sort of seated hide-and-seek – with a concealed 6d coin and hoots of hilarity as the hands of the lead player went ‘creepy-crawly’ across the table. There was also an exciting Edwardian horse-racing game with a huge green-baize cloth marked with all the jumps of the Grand National. This was a household in which, before the First World War, everyone rode and – before the advent of bicycles – most could drive a dog-cart to the village and to church services.

I remember the satisfying heaviness of the lead horses-and-riders going round the pretend Aintree course and the perils of all the jumps being expertly explained. My father Jack and his brother Roly rode their ponies to school through the woods and across a stream, unaccompanied, when they were quite small children. And my sister Carol has an oil painting by George’s brother Frank Calderon of ‘Master John Pym’ on one of his mounts. ‘It didn’t look like me or my horse,’ Jack said.

‘Master John Pym’ and his horse, by W. Frank Calderon, 1916 (Courtesy of Mrs Carol Taylor)

Hunting, on horseback and on foot, following the Beagles, was also a huge part of country middle-class Edwardian life. Rabbits existed to be shot (and eaten). The glass-fronted Foxwold gun cabinet, against which was stacked the games equipment, was locked, but a key was always left in the door. It was a source of fascination to me as a child. I unlocked the doors of the cabinet, examined the two double-barrelled shotguns and a hammer gun dating from the 19th century judged too old to be used.

Beneath the guns were two drawers full of loose cartridges of various weights of shot, rag pulls to clean the guns, tins of oil and several boxes of bullets – these were for a bolt-action .22 rifle which, after much pestering, I was eventually allowed to use for target practice on the croquet lawn. My mother, whose father had been killed by a ricochet bullet in 1915, instructed me in the rudiments of gun safety – and then, as I remember it, I was just sent down the garden with a lethal weapon and box of bullets, aged – what? – twelve or thirteen. Was this attitude a legacy of the Edwardians? Of an era when ‘health and safety’ was an issue not yet invented?

In the summer of 1985, the American director James Ivory arrived in London to film the English portion of Ruth Jhabvala’s adaptation of E.M. Forster’s novel A Room with a View, first published in 1908. He needed an Edwardian house set in the Surrey hills. This would be transformed into ‘Windy Corner’, the home of the widowed Mrs Honeychurch and her daughter Lucy, for whom at the end of the film the whole world will open up – and the riding of bicycles would, along with much else, no longer be an issue.

Foxwold, situated a few miles from Surrey, on a ridge of green sandstone, fitted the bill. Those who have seen the film will certainly remember the woodland scene in which Lucy’s irrepressible brother Freddy, the deceptively somnolent George Emerson and the wonderfully encouraging clergyman Mr Beebe throw off their clothes – and every vestige of Victorian propriety – and leap into ‘The Sacred Lake’, and behave like exuberant boys in a paddling pool on an endless summer afternoon.

Watercolour by Roland Pym of the ‘Sacred Lake’ scene in A Room with a View, made during the shooting of the film at Foxwold, 1985. The names underneath refer (left to right) to the actors playing Freddy, George Emerson, Cecil, Lucy, and Mrs Honeychurch, with soundman Ray Beckett. (Courtesy of the Estate of Roland Pym)

On the old Foxwold croquet lawn, with its narrow approach steps on which George Emerson takes Lucy in his arms and bestows on her a second passionate kiss, the director recreated another moment of Edwardian playfulness – a game of ‘bumble puppy’ in which two players bat a tennis ball, attached by string to a post, back and forth and round and round. Bumble puppy was not in fact, as far as I can recall, one of the games I discovered beside the gun cabinet. But there it is, in a classic movie representing the Edwardian age and standing in for all those other games that George and Kittie and their friends and family so happily played in the years before Europe erupted in August 1914.

Minnie Beebe (Mia Fothergill) playing bumble puppy in the film of A Room with a View (Merchant Ivory Productions, 1985)

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged 'Children's Games', A Room with a View, bicycles, Brasted, Brigadier-General Sir John Gough V.C., bumble puppy, card games, Carol Taylor, croquet, E.M. Forster, Etoile copper mine, Evey Pym, Foxwold, Francis Alÿs, Frank Calderon, games, George Calderon, golf, gun cabinet, guns, horses, Hoyle's Rules, Jack Pym, James Ivory, John Pym, Kittie Calderon, La Roue, Lubumbashi, Mahjong, Mampala, Merchant Ivory Productions, Mia Fothergill, Minnie Beebe, play, riding, Roland Pym, Roya Lubbock, Ruth Jhabvala, shooting, Simon Callow, Sir Edmund Backhouse, The Congo, The Great War, The Sacred Lake, tricycle, Up Jenkins, Venice Biennale, Violet Pym, Windy Corner, World War I | 1 Comment

Mayakovsky’s pancake

Posted on August 15, 2022 by Patrick Miles

It may seem surprising that I can bring myself to say anything positive about Russians at a time when their country has become, to quote Joseph Conrad again, ‘the negation of everything worth living for’. But, of course, these four short videos are inspired by one of the most positive Russians who ever lived, Anton Chekhov, who happened also to believe deeply in democracy. Russians’ love of creating and telling anecdotes is a very engaging trait, but in the Soviet era the endless production of so-called political anecdotes became for many merely a way of avoiding real political belief, integrity and engagement.

I fluffed this video at the end of the quotation from pages 1-2 of my Chekhov biography because I suddenly thought I should change ‘Suvorin’, who most listeners would not have heard of, to ‘his [Chekhov’s] publisher’. One should never make these snap decisions! For your interest, here is the whole passage as it appears in the book:

Once, when he was still a schoolboy, […] somewhere in the steppe, Anton Pavlovich was standing by a deserted well, looking down at his reflection in the water, when a girl of about fifteen came up to draw water, and so charmed the future writer that there, in the steppe, he began to embrace her and kiss her, and then they stood together at the well a long time, in silence, staring down at their two reflections. He did not want to leave her, and she had forgotten all about her water. He told Suvorin this once, when they were talking about lives being like parallel lines, whether they can ever meet, and love at first sight.

Aleksei Sergeevich Suvorin (1834-1912) was a journalist, newspaper owner and book publisher who was a close friend of Chekhov’s until their differences in 1898 over the Dreyfus Affair (see chapter 11 of Anton Chekhov: A Short Life).

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged Aleksei Suvorin, Alfred Dreyfus, anecdotes, Anton Chekhov, Anton Chekhov: A Short Life, biographies, comments, Dreyfus Affair, Lev Trotsky, literary anecdotes, Literature and Revolution, love, love at first sight, Mikhail Pavlovich Chekhov, Narkom, pancakes, parallel lines, People's Commissar, proverbs, Shrove Tuesday, Shrovetide, steppe, Vladimir Mayakovsky | Leave a comment

Guest post by Alison Miles: Edwardian grandmothers?

Posted on August 1, 2022 by Patrick Miles

Both my grandmothers were children during the reign of Edward VII. My paternal grandmother Dorothy Mabel Angus (Granny Thomas) was born on 2 December 1897 and my maternal grandmother Eleanor Frances Ashton (Granny Goodfield) on 7 April 1898. Granny Thomas was the youngest of six and Granny Goodfield was the second of five.

We have many photos from immediate family to large gatherings. This small family group is the Angus family with Granny Thomas front right leaning against her father’s knee.

The photo below is the Ashtons with Granny Goodfield in the second row from the back, fourth from the left, with long wavy hair tied with bows.

I think both photos were probably taken in the first 10 years of the twentieth century. At the time younger boys wore Eton collars for these formal occasions while little girls and very small boys wore dresses, often white. The older girls and women wore long skirts and high necked blouses with loose fitting bodices.

The big question is, were my grandmothers Edwardians in their outlook and values? Both grandmothers had experienced Edwardian childhood and many of their aspirations and expectations reflected that time.

They both came from families that valued education. John Mortimer Angus had an academic/university career and David Ashton was a schoolmaster/headmaster. My grandmothers went to school until their late teens, where they won prizes, and then on to university. By that stage they both lived in Cardiff and were undergraduates at Cardiff University; Granny Thomas was a modern linguist and Granny Goodfield a scientist. They vaguely remembered each other and I recall Granny Thomas (who was conscious of her more robust figure) saying how glamorous Granny Goodfield was, as a very slim, almost elfin, young woman.

They both suffered the loss of a brother. Granny Thomas’s brother Norman Angus was killed at the Battle of Arras in 1917 aged 27, which apparently contributed to her leaving university before graduating and in 1920 marrying my grandfather, David Arnold Thomas. Granny Goodfield’s young brother David Ashton died aged 10 or so soon after the end of WW1; we thought it was Spanish Flu but later discovered he died of meningitis.

Did ‘Edwardian’ mean anything to me as a child? Not really, but I remember what my grandmothers had in their houses and talked about, as well as their social expectations.

Granny Thomas’s style of home was strongly influenced by Edwardian traditions as well as the architectural movements of the time. Her furniture was oak and mahogany, including tallboys, wardrobes and chests of drawers. There were glass fronted bookcases and my grandfather had a roll top desk, all Edwardian in style.

Overall the feel was substantial and heavy, ideal for their relatively large house.

The house that I remember most clearly was 1 Llandennis Avenue that my Thomas grandparents had built for them in the 1930s, to a design of my grandmother’s, with features reflecting the impact of the Arts and Crafts movement. As you approached the front door there was a solid porch — a very Edwardian feature — and you stepped into a spacious hall with a well-proportioned staircase that took you up to a landing/balcony.

As a very small child I remember visiting Great-Granny Ashton (seated front left in the Ashton family photo above), my Granny Goodfield’s mother, an old lady in a long black dress sitting in a room fairly full of traditional dark furniture, probably more Victorian than Edwardian. I sat on a child’s chair that we now have, shown below (only 25 inches from floor to the top of the back and rather the worse for wear – not surprisingly as it is over 100 years old).

Granny Goodfield’s houses were also full of furniture but they seemed light and airy by comparison. She had gate-legged tables that could fold up easily, comfortable chairs, and plenty of things such as old plates on display (often riveted together where they had broken) and books everywhere.

This table is one that I have inherited.

She also liked cushions, rugs and shawls, so there was a ‘draped’ feel to the soft furnishings. In retrospect she was on the ‘Arts and Crafts’ side, informal and creative.

At the time that my grandmothers were children the British Empire was in full swing. With present-day awareness of outcomes of occupation by a foreign power, it is easy to forget how people thought at the time about the empire. There was pride in the economic, political and administrative changes the British achieved overseas as well as employment opportunities and infrastructure, education and health improvements for the local populations. It was normal to have family and friends working abroad as part of the British establishment. Granny Thomas had family in administrative and teaching jobs in countries in Africa, and two generations (great-great-aunts born in the mid-19^th century and great-uncles and cousins born 30 or so years later) were Baptist missionaries in India. A large number of British households had souvenirs, ornaments and furniture from ‘the colonies’ as they were known at the time. I remember a resonant elephant bell that was fun to ring and an Indian brass table/tray that stood on a folding stand. We also have several inherited small ebony elephants as well as a slightly wobbly bedside table of Indian origin.

My educated grandmothers would have thought of themselves as middle class. The social strata of their childhoods were fairly rigid and although everyone knew education was a way to achieve what you wanted (social mobility), it was not always available. My grandfather Goodfield, however, was an excellent example of someone who achieved great things through education after a rural childhood and a spell as a miner in South Wales, studying in the evenings before WW1, then being sponsored to go to theological college.

Both my grandmothers had ingrained views about people’s place in society. By today’s standards they made inappropriate comments about people, e.g. always wanting to know ‘what his/her father does’, and ‘how they made their money’. Those were the days when RP (Received Pronunciation) was an indicator of status; speaking with a regional accent doomed you to the lower classes. They both expected to have help in the house, as would have been the norm for Edwardian households with working class servants. Although Granny Thomas was relatively ‘hands on’ (I remember her cooking, and ‘bustling about’ as she called it, when we stayed), she had a nanny for her children as well as domestic help and a gardener. From the 1940s until she died in the early 80s it was clear that Granny Goodfield was very keen on someone else doing housework etc for her, mainly her children when they were young and later.

Continuing the social theme, an aspect of the middle classes in the early years of the twentieth century was that they always aimed to ‘keep standards up’ and do things that ensured everyone realised you ‘knew what’s what’ and associated with the right people. What now seem totally unnecessary rules were part of keeping society ‘as it should be’ and woe betide anyone who made even the smallest mistake. This was the background to many of the values and expected behaviours that my grandmothers adhered to. Granny Goodfield refused to visit me in my first property, a late nineteenth-century improved two-up, two-down terraced house in Cambridge, because she said it was where families with children who had no shoes lived!

Both grandmothers demonstrated the cultural background of their Edwardian childhoods when it was normal to learn musical instruments and to draw and paint. Granny Goodfield was a very good pianist but she preferred to play Beethoven and Schubert sonatas, so we did not spend much time round the piano singing children’s songs with her in the authentic Edwardian manner. In Granny Thomas’s house there were always books, paper and crayons, and games and toys, from croquet and clock golf to card games and bagatelle, which were good fun for all ages.

So were my grandmothers Edwardians? Do these reminiscences answer the question?

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.