World Book Night

April 23rd is now not only St George’s Day and Shakespeare’s birthday, it has also been, for the last 2 years, World Book Night. The idea behind World Book Night is basically to encourage those who love books and reading to inspire others around them with that love. Consequently, one can apply to be a ‘giver’, and is then given a box of books (you can choose a book you love from a list of 20) to give out. I like the idea of inspiring others about literature (after all, that is my job), and I have relished the opportunity to give out copies of books I have enjoyed (for me, this was The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in the first WBN year; I Capture the Castle last year, and The Eyre Affair this year).

The Eyre Affair seems to me to be the ideal book for WBN. Jasper Fforde’s books are sort-of sci-fi, but set in a world where literature is taken very seriously indeed, as it should be. The book blurb says : ‘There is another 1985, somewhere in the could-have-been, where the Crimean war still rages, dodos are regenerated in home-cloning kits and everyone is deeply disappointed by the ending of ‘Jane Eyre’. In this world there are no jet-liners or computers, but there are policemen who can travel across time, a Welsh republic, a great interest in all things literary – and a woman called Thursday Next.’  In this alternative world, then, there is a detective called Thursday, who features in several of Fforde’s books, and so in theory this is a detective novel. But in fact, Fforde’s marvellous and infectious style of writing covers a huge range of ideas, genres, characters and concepts: he plays with the text, with intertextuality, with the idea of reading and how we react to it (for example, getting lost inside a poem – literally, and characters who can jump from one book to another). What I like most about Fforde’s books, however, is the idea that literature is the most important thing in the world: it drives everything – politics, relationships, technology, even war. The unquestioning acceptance that books are so important that they touch every aspect of our lives is very appealing to me, and I am looking forward to giving out my copies of the book (though not until tomorrow, sadly, as I’m sick today).

Like last year, I’m planning to give my books out mostly to mothers of young children. It can be difficult to make time to read with babies or toddlers around, but the right book demands to be read and draws the reader in, so I hope that this one will do just that and give some new mums a break from childcare. This is important not only because reading as escapism is often a very healthy thing, but also because children of reading parents are more likely to become keen readers themselves. So World Book Night is not just about giving out some books: it’s about encouraging present and future readers, celebrating our reading culture, and also supporting our libraries and bookshops. Go and read a book now!

Victorian Masquerade

A very small exhibition, ‘Victorian Masquerade’,  in the National Portrait Gallery explores the Victorian middle- and upper-class interest in fancy dress. Dressing up was popular for balls and parties among the well-to-do, particularly on a historical theme (thus perhaps offering people the chance to show off their knowledge as well as their wealth), and, as this exhibition shows, alongside this interest in  masquerades grew the concept of the ‘fancy portrait’, paintings or photographs which show the sitter in costume, perhaps with suitable props and against an appropriate backdrop. After all, if you’re going to go to all that trouble, one might as well record it for posterity. For example, the image on the left, from the NPG collection, shows Queen Victoria (yes, it really is) in the 1840s, in the dress of the eighteenth-century French court.

The display discusses the case of Victoria and Albert first, looking at the way they used fancy dress to ‘adopt an alternative persona’ and ‘experiment with their royal identity’ when dressed as Queen Philippa of Hainault and Edward III. (I love that these costumes were modelled on tomb effigies, but include a nod to Victorian corsetry!) The medievalism so beloved of the Victorians is here, as well as the sense of continuity in the royal line. It all makes sense and is, if a little staid, quite appealing. The craziness comes later: I really want to understand and appreciate, seriously, the portraits by David Wilkie Wynfield of John Everett Millais as Dante, and Holman Hunt in medieval dress, likewise Emery Walker’s photograph of Walter Crane as Cimabue. These medieval, idealised, literary characters are bound to appeal to such eminent Victorians, and yet I find it hard to take them seriously, all the more because the expressions on their faces suggest that they take it very seriously indeed. And in my mind, fancy dress is not something to be done with a straight face, but perhaps it was different then.

Sir John Soane’s Museum and Gothic

If you have never been to the Sir John Soane Museum in London, do go. It’s free, full of fascinating objects, and well worth a visit. Soane (1753-1837) was an architect whose life was devoted to collecting objets for his house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and this house is open to the public so that his collection of antiquities, from pieces of statuary to paintings via many, many other objects, can be seen. Of course, there is so much there that it is difficult to take it all in during one visit, so initially I focused on Soane’s collection of pictures, including a Turner, several Hogarths, and a very Gothic Fuseli, as well as many architectural images. The Fuseli gives a hint of the interest in Gothic which Soane’s house shows: I was fascinated by the ‘Monk’s  Parlour’ and the ‘Monk’s Cell’. It seems that Soane created an imaginary Monk, ‘Padre Giovanni’ (presumably a pun on his own name, John), and designed his gloomy, mock-Gothic parlour for this imaginary creature. The Monk’s tomb is supposedly outside in the Yard, though with the words ‘Alas, poor Fanny’ over it: Mrs Soane’s lapdog is buried there.

The guidebook suggests that this character was partly due to Soane’s desire to parody Gothic, but also a reflection of his own sense of isolation. Significantly, the guidebook says that:

‘His design was intended to stimulate a sense of melancholy by its use of a restricted space, dark colours and the “cathedral-like effect” of stained glass. Soane believed the Gothic style could teach a modern architect how to create atmospheric effects of light and space but he disliked the “irregular whimsicality of form and capricious disposition” of Gothic ornamentation.’

One wonders how much he knew about Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill.  Though Walpole was earlier (1717-1797), they might even have met or known each other (I am looking out for information on this), but it seems highly unlikely that Soane was not influenced in some way by Walpole (and, indeed, he owned Robert Walpole’s desk, c. 1725). The parallels are remarkable, of course: the house, the collection, the obsessive hunting down of objects, and the interest in Gothic. But Soane is more knowing about it, I think; he wants to pick and choose his Gothic, knowing what he is interested in and what doesn’t suit him. I like the idea of an architectural parody of Gothic, the invention of a Gothic persona, the satirising of a Gothic tradition. Yet perhaps later in life he did begin to develop a Gothic temperament, though, as he sat alone in the Monk’s Parlour after his wife’s death.

Man Ray Portraits

Man Ray is perhaps one of the most accessible Surrealists, because his work is so broad and so versatile that there is something to which everyone can relate. The ‘Man Ray Portraits’ exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery certainly emphasises this; Ray’s work is shown chronologically over a period of several decades, and it is possible to trace developments in his work and to see changes of style and subject, but for the most part, he is flexible, versatile and changeable from the start. Probably his most famous portrait today is the marvellous solarised Portrait of Lee Miller (left), but this exhibition shows just how many collaborations he had, and how they influenced his work.

The exhibition opens by examining his early work, from 1916 onwards. It’s remarkable to note that Ray was a self-taught photographer, whose interest in the art was initially for the purpose of recording his own paintings for posterity. We see one such painting (or rather, a photograph of it), and it is indeed deeply Surrealist. But then, as his portraits show, he was close to Surrealists including Marcel Duchamp, Mina Loy and Dali, among others, whose work clearly influenced his ideas. His photography is more than experimental Surrealism, however; most of the exhibits here have amazing, grainy depths with striking contrasts between light and shadow, which are ‘vintage’ in many ways but manifest a modern, honest clarity. Yet alongside his artistic photographic experiments were fashion shots for Vanity Fair and Vogue, and portraits of a huge range of celebrities.

In the early twentieth century there seem to have been people who knew everyone (the Mitfords, for instance, or the Kennedys). Ray was nearly one of those, I think: his portraits include Ernest Hemingway, whose stare is inescapable; James Joyce, who seems to be posing pretentiously but turns out to be shielding his eyes following an operation on them; Arthur Schoenburg, Mary Butts, Picasso, Matisse, Jean Cocteau, Peggy Guggenheim (looking rather like Tracy Emin), and Stravinsky (who appears to be scratching his ankle whilst gazing on a vision), Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli, to name but a few. These aren’t just successive portraits of familiar names, though: there is something in his portraiture which makes you look closely, as though we can really see the person in the picture. From the soft-focus Lady Diana Cooper to the sharp, crisp outlines of his image of Lee Miller, Ray treats all his subjects differently, and this is what is so fascinating about this exhibition. From his surreal Le Violon D’Ingres to his almost erotic portraits of Suzy Solidar, to his serious portraits of Virginia Woolf and Aldous Huxley, there is a huge range here, and while Surrealism is rarely central to his work, it lingers on the sidelines in almost every piece.

Pre-Raphaelite Poetry in the Snow

Last Saturday I went, along with some intrepid members of the Pre-Raphaelite Society, to hear poet Sarah Doyle, the PRS’s poet-in-residence, read her poems inspired by Pre-Raphaelite painters. As you will know if you have ever attended one, poetry readings can be quite intense events, and also very exciting. Even if you already know a poem, hearing it read aloud can be a very different experience (I mean this in a good way, although under some circumstances it can also be an excruciating experience!) This was, I’m pleased to say, a very good experience indeed. Sarah is an excellent and experienced reader of her poems, as is her husband Allen Ashley, who also read.
This was, for me at least, a very special event, as I spend so much time researching and writing that I find it very exciting to see that there are other, creative ways of responding to art and literature. Sarah’s poems respond in very different ways to Pre-Raphaelitism, not only to paintings but also to poetry and the lives of the artists. She began with ‘Reflections of Ophelia’, with which she won the inaugural PRS Poetry prize, and which I still find a remarkable poem (and you can read it at the bottom of this page). Sarah went on to read other poems, some of which had been commissioned by the PRS (you can read more of them here), and others which belong to a collection of poems inspired by the paintings of Waterhouse.
What I find so engaging about Sarah’s poetry is that what she is offering in these poems is a genuine reaction to the paintings, some which seem spontaneous and others which have probably developed after careful reflection. Sarah talked about the research that she does for her poetry, and also the way in which she looks for an ‘angle’ to write about. The result is a surprising range of poems, encompassing different poetic forms, styles, voices and concepts. Some are funny, such as ‘The Ballad of Echo and Narcissus’, a traditional rollicking ballad which retells the story of the myth with delightful rhyming humour; some are sadder, such as ‘John Ruskin: Body and Soul’. And some are shaped like pots, such as the concrete poem ‘Isabella: A Bitter Harvest’.
In response to the big Pre-Raphaelite exhibition last year, Sarah wrote ‘On Seeing Rossetti’s Self-Portrait, Tate Britain, October 2012′. This offers her personal reaction to the portraits, particularly of Rossetti, which appeared near the beginning of the exhibition. There is something very intimate about this poem, which communicates the spell that a painting can cast, and the connection that can be formed whilst one looks at an image, a concept familiar to all art lovers. The poem contains the line ‘the viewer and the viewed’, offering us the idea that, for once, we may look at Rossetti, just as he looked at his models. Poetry offers us the chance to see things differently, more clearly, then, even if sometimes that means back-to-front. The poems we heard on Saturday (not literally in the snow, by the way – we were in the Cathedral) encouraged me to look at very familiar works differently, and to think again about what I thought I knew.

Reflections of Ophelia

I’m drawn towards the water’s edge

as one who teeters on a ledge,

regarding on the water’s skin

my strange, distorted, rippled twin

who, beckoning to me, bids me Come in.

I falter at the reedy lip,

persuaded, yet afraid to slip.

And so, to slip, perchance to drown -

to cast aside my weed-spun crown

and let the water’s fingers bear me down.

Entwined within my hands, like jewels,

dear Columbine, the bloom for fools,

like bitter-yellow buttered Sun,

makes sport of mornings fresh begun –

though new-born days before me?  I have none.

For I was foolish, as a child

who, wide-eyed, finds herself beguiled

by clownish jests, but can’t discern

the wise man’s words from jester’s turn,

and such a fool as I will never learn.

For flatterers, a fennel stalk,

a silver stem for golden talk,

whose cruel and pungent spikes will weave

a heady spell of make-believe,

its base intention solely to deceive.

Yes, I was prey to flattery,

a victim of my vanity,

believing every honeyed word

he spoke, no matter how absurd;

I swallowed all and never once demurred.

My daisies, white for innocence,

pale, fragile, pink-tipped recompense

for injuries that I have borne,

for purity, their petals torn

and, one by one, replaced with vicious thorn.

My reputation robbed from me,

in payment for naivety.

My value as a daughter, nil,

and even if I had the will,

a flower, once it’s plucked, won’t flower still.

For thought, behold the pansy’s face;

it ponders on my fall from grace

and, nodding like a judging sage,

finds no excuse in tender age,

and thinks that I deserve my actions’ wage.

I must confess, I had no thought

that I’d be, like a minnow, caught

within a filigree of lies,

a plaything, dangled like a prize

by one whose thoughts wore layers of disguise.

Remembrance? Here is Rosemary,

in faint hope that my memory

remains an icon, true and strong,

a symbol lasting ever-long

of one who, wronged against, still did no wrong.

Though I remember, sharp and clear,

the vows of those that I held dear,

who promised me they’d keep me well

and vowed they would ensure I’d dwell,

cocooned, within a safe, protective shell.

My poppies, red with blackened eyes,

foretell my imminent demise.

Their paper petals represent

fragility, a brief lament

for life, though few in years, now fully spent.

For what is death but welcome sleep,

descent into the unknown deep?

Release at last from earthly pain,

a freedom from life’s bitter bane,

no consciousness or feeling to remain.

The chill meniscus bears my weight

but briefly, and I contemplate

that human life is but a loan,

an interlude, a meadow sown

with flowers that, cut down, can’t be re-grown.

Relinquishing my lifeblood’s hold,

submitting to seductive cold,

my life’s bouquet in death now wreathed,

like petals on the breeze, bequeathed

then gone; as though I’d never lived, nor breathed.

The Churchill War Rooms

On a short break in London last week, we visited the Cabinet War Rooms for the first time. These are the underground rooms where Winston Churchill and his Cabinet met during the war and where much of the crucial planning and decision-making of the war was carried out. Originally the basement of a building in Whitehall, the War Rooms were created in 1938 as war began to look inevitable. At the end of the war, the rooms were abandoned, some left intact and some restored to their former use as storage rooms. Tours were available, however, and the interest in them was so great that eventually the Imperial War Museum took over and in 1984 they opened to the public in the form we now see.
I am particularly interested in the social history of the Second World War, and this provides a remarkable insight into the political and social history of the time. What wasn’t preserved has been restored, and so one can see the small room where the Cabinet met, complete with maps, ashtrays and blotters, and imagine the heated debates that must have gone on there, debates which determined the course of the war. There are a lot of corridors, long, narrow passages with doors off to staff bedrooms, stairs down to an underground bunker where some staff would have slept (apparently plagued with rats), and original signs and warnings on the walls. One can see the map room, where for six years the lights were never turned off and work must have been incessant and frantic; and even Churchill’s bedroom, in which he rarely slept but where he did his radio broadcasts.
There is also a Churchill museum, which aims to bring the man himself to life, since, as the audio tour admits, he has become an icon but also a rather two-dimensional figure, and it is interesting to see behind the bowler hat and cigar. We see a rather sad little boy who wanted more visits from his parents while he was at Eton, and a young man determined to impress his father, Sir Randolph Churchill, who had thought his son would never amount to much. We get a glimpse of Churchill’s relationship with his wife, Clementine, as well as insight into his interests outside politics, including writing and painting. The museum is filled with quotations; Churchill must be one of the most quoted, and quotable, men of the twentieth century. I particularly liked ‘We are all worms. But I do believe that I am a glow-worm’.
Whatever one’s feelings about Churchill and about the war, I think it is difficult not to be somehow moved by the vision the museum clearly gives of the many, many staff who worked and often slept in these rooms, trying to ensure the safety of Britain and its allies. Photographs and recordings as well as original objects and furnishings recreate the atmosphere of the War Rooms very well, and although entrance is quite expensive, it is an excellent museum which shows a different and very important aspect of the history of the war.

Reading and Reacting: The Heir of Redclyffe

This post was first published in the Journal of Victorian Culture Online [http://myblogs.informa.com/jvc/2013/02/22/reading-and-reacting-the-heir-of-redclyffe-rfe/]. I am very grateful to the Editors for permission to re-publish it here.

 

Charlotte M. Yonge: Engraving of a painting by George Richmond (1809-1896 – Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Recently I re-read The Heir of Redclyffe (1853), Charlotte M. Yonge’s most famous novel. This is the romantic novel over which Jo March cried in Little Women, a book described as ‘genius’ by Henry James, and which provided an ideal of chivalry to the young William Morris and Burne-Jones. It enjoyed enormous popularity in the nineteenth century, though this has faded over the years, but recent work on Yonge examines her as a professional writer and editor, particularly looking at the significance of her religion and her gendered, anti-feminist approach. Yet she rarely appears on undergraduate modules, and one wonders how often she is read outside academe (though there is strong support for her work, both academic and from enthusiastic readers, in the Charlotte M. Yonge Fellowship).

As a singularly literary religious movement, the High Church Oxford Movement, or Tractarianism, inspired enormous amounts of literature, not only Tracts for the Times but also the poems of Isaac Williams, the works of John Henry Newman, John Keble’s very popular Christian Year and the poetry of Christina Rossetti and G.M. Hopkins.  In her book Womankind (1888), Yonge wrote that a woman should always be ‘writing as a Christian, with the glory of God in view’, rather than as amateurs simply in need of money.[1] Yet unlike Christina Rossetti, for example, also a Tractarian, Yonge is hardly self-effacing about her literary work; she wrote books and edited magazines professionally and supported many charitable causes in this way. But, like Rossetti, for Yonge the concept that influence, for good or evil, could be spread through what one read was strong in Tractarian thought, and there is no doubt that her novels provided an edifying Christian experience. She wrote in Womankind that:

Surely if for every idle word we speak we shall have to give account, it must be more serious still to write what will go forth to hundreds. Have we any right to write what people are to read, and which will, in a measure, leave a mark on their minds, merely for our own pleasure or gain, without pains or consideration whether we do good or mischief?[2]

She then goes on to elucidate, suggesting areas that the writing woman might wish to treat with caution, adding, ‘Something of wit and pathos may have to be sacrificed, but better so by far than leave a mischievous impression.’

With this background in mind, I (re)embarked on The Heir of Redclyffe, and found myself experiencing Tractarian literature at first hand. The novel offers a romantic plot in which Sir Guy Morville, the eponymous heir, stays with his distant family, the Edmonstones, and falls in love with the young Amy. Meanwhile, Philip Morville, a cousin, becomes secretly engaged to Amy’s sister Laura, and causes conflict in the family with his suspicion and jealousy of Guy. Without wishing to spoil the plot, there is young love, early death, and much self-examination in the book, and the ways in which Yonge manipulates the plot to fit Tractarian ideals has been examined by June Sturrock, for example.[3] As Gavin Budge has pointed out, the treatment of Laura in the novel may cause some problems for modern readers:[4] her deception in hiding her engagement from her family results in life-long suffering, only slightly alleviated by her marriage. And Yonge’s supposed anti-feminism (which Budge suggests is largely due to her approach in instructing young women in Womankind) manifests itself here as the depiction of young women as entirely dependent upon men for moral guidance; Laura’s reason for hiding her engagement is because Philip thinks they should. However, the plot shows the fallacy of this. Tractarian thought indicates that each individual should take responsibility for their own actions, and be guided by Christian precepts, regardless of gender. While this does not negate the requirement for women to submit to their husbands, and children to their parents, the novel makes it clear that everyone is responsible for their own soul and eventual salvation (or otherwise), and it is this spiritual responsibility and self-examination which marks out Yonge’s novel as Tractarian.

The question I asked myself as I read the book was; how might we, as modern readers, react to a novel which presents such scrupulous moral precedents, in which a character who has tried to do the right thing suffers for being misguided, for example? When reading Yonge and Rossetti, I am conscious that in providing literary critical responses concerning technique and style, or considering influences, we as readers are in some way failing these authors who intended a very different response to their works. While this may seem naïve, to dispassionately analyse their motives without permitting our emotions to be involved is to ignore their stated intentions: that of doing good (in a Christian, evangelizing sense) among their readers. The ways in which Tractarian authors intended readers to engage actively with their work, to lead them to reflection and deeper understanding, is not something we can, or should, ignore.

Yonge’s techniques of characterization, her descriptions, her plot structures, and most of all her use of reserve, make it difficult not to get drawn in to working out how she creates the effects she does. Most of all, she draws on the idea of reserve, which Keble describes in his Lectures:

Let us test whether a writer overshoots the mark, whether his imagination runs riot without any reserve, whether he unworthily intermingles sacred with secular themes…. He cannot bring himself to confess all to all men, but like a harp lightly touched, he needs but very few notes to convey his real meaning to sympathetic hearts.[5]

The Christian restraint to which Keble refers is where Yonge (and indeed Rossetti) excels. In The Heir of Redclyffe, emotion is often reined in (for example, by Amy after her bereavement, for a while at least), and Yonge’s reserve even extends to (mostly) an absence of obviously didactic material. There is sentiment, certainly, but Yonge cleverly uses the emotion she invokes in her readers to bring them to a new understanding of love, death and marriage. In many ways, then, this is a very Victorian novel; its ideas and plots are all of its time, from its culturally specific faith to the issues of inheritance. But somehow, it is also timeless, as all the best novels are. Modern readers may have fewer scruples concerning their behaviour, and are less likely to scrutinize their behaviour for signs of pride or lack of faith, but Yonge’s conversational tone and appealing characters offer a kind of realism which draws the reader in and recreates the mindset of the Tractarians. It is the kind of novel in which you are able to inhabit the world of the characters, and therefore appreciate their motivation, despite the reserve of Yonge’s writing. Consequently, the perhaps rather harsh judgments that fall on some characters do not seem excessive, and the framework of faith in which the characters act begins to seem natural. By the end of the book, one feels like a better person: Yonge’s influence, combined with her novelistic skills, have done their work, and it is difficult not to feel somehow slightly exalted by one’s association with the Edmonstone family.

Related JVC Articles

‘Charlotte M. Yonge and the ‘historic harem’ of Edward Augustus Freeman’, JVC 11.2, 2006

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[1]Charlotte Mary Yonge, Womankind (London: Richard Clay, 1876; repr. 1889), p. 228.

[2] Ibid., p. 227.

[3] June Sturrock,  ‘Heaven and Home’: Charlotte M. Yonge’s Domestic Fiction and the Victorian Debate over Women (Victoria: University of Victoria, 1995).

[4] Gavin Budge, Charlotte M. Yonge: Religion, Feminism and Realism in the Victorian Novel (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 169-170.

[5] John Keble, Lectures on Poetry 1832-1841, trans. by E. Francis and ed. by Gavin Budge, 2 vols (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2003), I, p. 73.