Pink Lupine, from Eileen’s garden to mine. We’d have both enjoyed the dragonfly.
It’s unusual in everyday life to meet a person who feels like someone you’ve known for many years. In July 2004, I met Eileen M. Curran, and felt that I knew her well immediately. I was a new development director and was making the rounds, meeting the donors who would become my responsibilities (and in nearly all cases, my friends), and Eileen was near the top of the list. I rang her doorbell, ready to smile and introduce myself, and while I waited, I noticed the garden surrounding the front steps. It was a mix of flowering oregano, white violets, and enormous yellow Gloriosa Daisies, as well as a few tall blue flowers I didn’t recognize. But it was in a format that I knew well: mixed, weeded, and flowing out of the bed, an English cottage garden if I ever saw one.
As soon as I had a chance to talk with Eileen, who brought me inside with a welcoming smile, plied me with tea (loose leaf Assam from a real China pot with matching cups), I learned that it was indeed an English cottage garden, and that she had put much work into it. The garden extended around her house, joining raised beds for more herbs and vegetables in the back, facing a lawn marked by an English walnut tree, pear and apple trees, and a huge hedge of lilacs.
A proclivity for English cottage gardening was not the only thing Eileen and I had in common, nor our love for fine English teas; we both were Victoriana nuts, only she was far more along than I was. Eileen Curran was the author of The Curran Index: Additions to and Corrections of The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, a detective who parsed through birth, death, and marriage records in small parishes, online, by phone, through microfiche and through mail, to find the little people (and some of the big ones) who wrote for newspapers and journals during the Victorian period. Her reach extended throughout Great Britain. Out of common sense, really, she had mapped out her own genealogy—easy work, Ireland on her father’s side, German on her mother’s—as well as that of hundreds of other families. In my many visits to her house, sitting near framed illustrations from these periodicals, by William Morris curtains and wallpaper, I heard the stories of her “obscures”. I don’t recall all the stories, but I remember some of the names; Alexander Blair was one of the latest, and I heard about his family and his aliases and who he might have been but really was (as far as she knew; she was always open to corrections that might come up in future research, and never made assumptions without being clear that they were just that).
We’ve begun a bit of spring cleaning in the house today. The tea kettle, polished with a simple baking soda rub of my own concoction, is shining beautifully. One can buy a commercial mixture for this kind of thing, and I’ve done it before, but I’ve since discovered that the homemade is a very gentle and powerful cleanser, and does a finer job.
My facsimile of the 1861 text
That, of course, makes me think of the days when homemade cleansers were far more ordinary, and of Beeton’sBook of Household Management. It’s commonly known as a cookery book, but is really so much more. Isabella Beeton (who died in 1865 at the age of 28) published articles on cookery, handling money, and handling the management of a household in Beeton’sBook of Household Management, a supplement to “The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine” (one of her husband’s publications) between 1859 and 1861. In 1861, it was published in its own volume, designed for middle class consumption, as The Book of Household Management, comprising information for the Mistress, Housekeeper, Cook, Kitchen-Maid, Butler, Footman, Coachman, Valet, Upper and Under House-Maids, Lady’s-Maid, Maid-of-all-Work, Laundry-Maid, Nurse and Nurse-Maid, Monthly Wet and Sick Nurses, etc. etc.—also Sanitary, Medical, & Legal Memoranda: with a History of the Origin, Properties, and Uses of all Things Connected with Home Life and Comfort. While most of the volume boasts recipes, paying attention to both elegance and thrift, it also has a goodly section at the end that spells out quite clearly what the duties are for male and female domestics, as described.
It’s in this later section of the text that I find the ways things were cleaned. I haven’t had a chance to honestly put this in a novel; I refuse to write such a thing if there’s no reason to do so than to show off my erudition (I was dismayed reading a passage in a novel by an author I much admire in which she described a male domestic was watering gravel to keep down the dust, all of which she spelled out including to keep down the dust). So here’s my chance—not to show off (the book is open before me so I can quote)—to share some of my favorites.
In a 2012 article, The Guardian attributes to Hilary Mantel the rank of “the woman who made historical fiction respectable again, who had freed it from the (often immensely pleasurable) bodice-ripping romps of Philippa Gregory et al, making a derided genre safe again for those readers who consider themselves properly literary and serious.” Several of my favorite authors easily join Mantel in giving historical fiction a special literary identity, showing she was neither the first nor the last in this tradition.
Take Julian Barnes and Arthur and George, Barnes’s exploration of an early 20th century crime and Arthur Conan Doyle’s role in exonerating the accused (indeed, convicted) George Edalji. We writers can be a bit jealous of Barnes’s ability to take a crime story and turn in into a lyrical tale of identity. Even the prison scenes are sensitive and profound.
David Mitchell goes for more popular appeal in his linear The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, a story of a Dutch clerk in turn-of-the-17th-century Nagasaki and the Japanese midwife he falls in love with. We have samurai attacks, a secret monastic society, and a villain of incomprehensible evil, but also a bildungsroman that depicts the age and the psychology of different cultures within the age masterfully.
And finally, Andrew Miller in Pure takes a little-known event—the excavation of a Paris cemetery just before the French Revolution—and follows a young man attempting to complete the one big job that will direct his life. This novel seems strangely modern in that aspect, yet it’s fascinating how the backdrop of pre-Revolution foment surrounds all actions.
I’ve listed just three, and if you include either Wolf Hall or Bringing Up the Bodies, you’ll notice an interesting trend: not one of these novels brings the literary aspect powerfully upon a story revolving around women. Even the midwife in Mitchell’s work, around whom much action revolves, is a minor character compared to all else.
There certainly are excellent novels about female characters with a literary bent to them—Jane Harris’s Gillespie and I and Emma Donoghue’s The Sealed Letter are two obvious examples—but I’d love to see more novels with female protagonists that go deep into literary waters. How can we writers write such works when women of our historical periods lived mostly in domestic worlds? Can a primarily psychological and domestic novel, say, match up with those listed above?
And how much can writers bend what’s called “literary?” I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Many historical writers find inspiration within a historical event. Often these are significant: a war, a queen’s execution, a plague that grips a village. Sometimes authors choose something lesser known but still historically important, such as the destruction of an important cemetery. And some, like Emma Donoghue, choose something rather small in the great whirl of history—Slammerkin shows the life of a young girl and her path toward the rope in a little-known case—and through full research into the period and a profound understanding of the people involved turn the something small into something grand indeed. Codrington v. Codrington was a celebrated divorce case in 1864, but in today’s world is a spec. Yet The Sealed Letter makes it quite a story once again.
The annals of London divorces in the years shortly following the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act—which gave a husband the right to divorce his spouse with proof of her adultery—are not few. Codrington v. Codrington, however, is of particular interest: not only was it brought about by an admiral in the Royal Navy—Henry Codrington, son to the hero Admiral Sir Edward Codrington—but that it also involved an early women’s rights activist, Emily “Fido” Faithfull.
Nearly halfway through Andrew Miller’s Pure, Jean-Baptiste Baratte, the novel’s protagonist, suffers an attack by an insane young woman, which leaves him wounded but not dead. One of the effects is a loss of words from his vocabulary, including simple nouns such as “bat” and “hat.” He is humiliated by this loss and mentions it to no one until late in the novel, where his admittance earns him both help and tenderness.
This is an example of one vulnerability—that ends up leading to a strangely safe place—in this compelling novel of France just before the Reign of Terror. Baratte, a young engineer from Normandy whose only work experience has been the creation of a bridge over “the corner of a lake” for a wealthy patron, is hired by a minister in Versailles to destroy the cemetery and church of Les Innocents, which has created a stink of decomposition so great that it permeates everything—including food and the breath of the cemetery’s neighbors. Early in the novel, Baratte unwittingly shows himself to be a bumpkin and, while drunk, exchanges the well-made suit his dead father left him for a monstrosity of pistachio green that he becomes ashamed to wear. He is clearly uncomfortable in his own skin, reading lofty texts in his hole of a room and feeling no authority in anything, even after he tells his hosts what he is there for—shocking them—and hires a group of miners to dig up the cemetery (the human remains will be transferred to a consecrated space elsewhere). His capacity for authority is something he must force, his coat buttoned tight over his absurd pistachio suit. He seems most vulnerable when standing before the group of toughened foreign miners giving orders.
A Twitter friend (@idlehistorian) who is a fellow Anglophile remarked in a blog post some months ago on “the Englishness of longing and nostalgia.” Consider John Major’s famous description, also from her post: “a country of long shadows on county cricket grounds, warm beer, green suburbs, dog lovers, and old maids cycling to holy communion through the morning mist.”
These are a few of the basic tenements of Anglophilia, and more in the world are aware of their own tendencies, perhaps latent, given the Olympics and Paralympics in London this summer. My own Anglophilia developed at a young age as I practiced the art of an English tea on a card table in my bedroom with bags of Twinings and Scottish boxed shortbread.
These days, my Anglophilia comes out in full force in my novel writing, as well as in most posts on this blog. In a previous post, I considered works of literature that exude a certain Englishness, and was reminded by @perednia of this perfect description of Englishness:
Margaret Hale’s love of Helstone and her father’s parsonage in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South speak to me of how beautiful the homely can be. Here’s Mrs. Gaskell’s heroine describing her home in Chapter 1:
“Oh, only a hamlet; I don’t think I could call it a village at all. There is the church and a few houses near it on the green — cottages, rather — with roses growing all over them. … All the other places in England that I have seen seem so hard and prosaic-looking, after the New Forest. Helstone is like a village in a poem — in one of Tennyson’s poems.”
Do we contemporary Anglophiles want our world to look like one out of poems? Such a desire is part of the pleasure of an Anglophile’s sense of nostalgia.
Many Anglophiles delight in the most English of English writers from the 19th century—Austen, Dickens, Hardy, Trollope, and Gaskell are just a handful—and many, too, in English poems of the same period. To my mind, none satisfy this longing for English Englishness than A.E. Housman and A Shropshire Lad. More on that in a bit.
But when is severe Anglophilia more than just, as @idlehistorian calls it tongue-in-cheek, a bad habit?
On a listserv where I learn so much from Victorian scholars for my novel research, a point was under discussion several months ago about what soldiers read during WWI in the trenches. Were Mrs. Gaskell’s works tucked away in uniform pockets? The idea of soldiers reading such quiet domestic novels between bouts of gunfire is fascinating, but according to scholars, it wasn’t just a rumor and, what’s more, British soldiers also read Trollope and Jane Austen.
They also carried A Shropshire Lad (published first in 1896). It’s small, its poems can be read in a few minutes, and it’s plump with the kind of nostalgia that some need in times when life seems too much.
Alfred Edward Housman
Housman isn’t pure nostalgia, though; there is a good dose of death and mourning in his idyllic prose. Take this, for example:
Number VII from A Shropshire Lad
When smoke stood up from Ludlow,
And mist blew off from Teme,
And blithe afield to ploughing
Against the morning beam
I strode beside my team,
The blackbird in the coppice
Looked out to see me stride,
And hearkened as I whistled
The tramping team beside,
And fluted and replied:
“Lie down, lie down, young yeoman;
What use to rise and rise?
Rise man a thousand mornings
Yet down at last he lies,
And then the man is wise.”
I heard the tune he sang me,
And spied his yellow bill;
I picked a stone and aimed it
And threw it with a will:
Then the bird was still.
Then my soul within me
Took up the blackbird’s strain,
And still beside the horses
Along the dewy lane,
It Sang the song again:
“Lie down, lie down, young yeoman;
The sun moves always west;
The road tone treads to labour
Will lead one home to rest,
And that will be the best.”
Recall that as British soldiers were reading it, they were experiencing things like this:
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.
GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!– An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.–
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Was Housman’s gloom an antidote to the horrors of war? Or was it the Englishness of his work, death included? Perhaps soldiers longed at the thought of lying beneath those green pastures, and it gave them comfort as they prepared for the rushes into battle that so often proved fatal.
George Butterworth
I’ll end this post with “The Lads in Their Hundreds” (1911), a setting of the Shropshire Lad poem by George Butterworth—to satisfy Anglophilia at its most acute. Butterworth was best known for his settings of these works. He was also a member of the British Army during WWI, and was awarded the Military Cross. On August 5, 1916, at the Battle of the Somme, George Butterworth was killed by a sniper. His body was not found. May he, Wilfred Owen, and the other brilliant young artists, as well as the many whose names were not famous from this and so many other wars, be remembered for their sacrifices and incredible courage.
In a rank London graveyard, Charles Maddox looks upon a series of dead infants, buried one upon the other with peculiar tenderness despite the haste of their internment, and refuses to accept the obvious explanation: that these are cases of infanticide common for this criminal section of London. This scene occurs early in Lynn Shepherd’s TheSolitary House (its U.S. title; Toms-All-Alone is its original U.K. title). It’s a scene that matters later in the novel, but also shows what the reader can expect: a young detective whose mind delves by instinct into diverse possibilities using logic as his tool—through cases as well as through matters of culture, anthropology, and the like; a sense of place, including the slimy feeling of ground, walls, and the air, and a plethora 19th century urban stenches (sewage and decaying flesh predominating); and a mystery of many threads and much action.
Maddox runs, walks, and rushes through much of the novel, which is to reason: he is an impoverished young detective recently dismissed from his police force having disagreed publicly, and insultingly (he is unable to disagree civilly), with his chief. And he is young man with two important cases: one, to discover the whereabouts of a missing woman and her child, hired by the woman’s father in regret after sending his disgraced daughter away; and two, to find the man sending threatening notes to one of the most powerful bankers in London, hired by the banker’s lawyer, Edward Tulkinghorn. The latter case dominates Maddox’s world, especially when the man he seeks ends up murdered violently. In his quest to discover the motive and the murderer, Maddox becomes entwined in a greater mystery with a greater evil at its core, and finds himself hunted by a mysterious and dangerous foe.
Historical writers delve into many different texts for research. Primary source material and contemporary histories give us the details we need to depict a period and to understand fully what our characters’ lives were like. These texts are fascinating for the writer, but often too dense with information for the casual reader. For that reason, readers of this blog won’t usually find my research texts described in their own posts. But I’m making an exception, as Mary Wilson Carpenter’s Health, Medicine, and Society in Victorian England was meant for a more general readership. It’s extremely useful for a historical writer, but also fascinating for anyone who wants to know the story of medicine during the 19th century in Britain. My review will be from the latter perspective, as best as I can do it given the original reason that I picked up this book.
Carpenter gives a broad picture of medicine in the 19th century, beginning with a portrait of early practitioners. Readers will be interested in knowing the differences between surgeons (classed with barbers), apothecaries (tradesmen who sold medication), and practitioners (university-trained yet without direct experience with patients). Carpenter notes that most of these medical professionals were general practitioners—all three did not uncommonly practice midwifery as well as physic and sell their own medicines.
“Evening After Rain, Worchesestershire” by Benjamin Williams Leader, 1886—fancy the cottage for your holiday?
Now that many of us are back at work after our summer holidays, we can think where we’d like to take our next one. I believe in planning in advance, so I offer you a few options. Be warned: they’re from Victorian literature. But they’re prime sites, as you shall see.
Are you dreaming of an exotic location? If so, consider Casalunga, Louis Trevelyan’s house near Siena, Italy, in Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right. While Trevelyan retired here to escape his failed marriage and to practice masochism by fostering a burgeoning insanity, perhaps we lovers of Victoriana might find it a perfect place for escaping our technology-filled lives and fostering pure artistic genius—not to mention sampling local Vernaccias. Let us see Casalunga from Hugh Stanbury’s eyes as he makes his way up to his old friend:
“Trevelyan at Casalunga,” Marcus Stone, 1869
Before ten in the morning, Stanbury was walking up the hill to the house, and wondering at the dreary, hot, hopeless desolation of the spot. It seemed to him that no one could live alone in such a place, in such weather, without being driven to madness. The soil was parched and dusty, as though no drop of rain had fallen there for months. The lizards, glancing in and out of the broken walls, added to the appearance of heat. The vegetation itself was of a faded yellowish green, as though the glare of the sun had taken the fresh colour out of it. There was a noise of grasshoppers and a hum of flies in the air, hardly audible, but all giving evidence of the heat. Not a human voice was to be heard, nor the sound of a human foot, and there was no shelter; but the sun blazed down full upon everything.
In Victorian literature, a holiday depended often on whom one knew, and, like today, on one’s financial resources. We find many visits made to friends’ families (Felix Graham travels to Noningsby in Trollope’s Orley Farm, where he falls in love with his best friend’s sister Madeline, and has an extended visit thanks to an injury suffered while hunting). The more affluent go to distant places—take Amy Dorrit’s Italian travels once her father inherits his fortune as a classic example—but for others, a holiday can be a regular occurrence, every weekend taken with dear friends, as does Harry Norman in The Three Clerks.
I’ve been reflecting on holidays in my favorite world of 19th century England because I’ve been enjoying my own, a much-needed week of respite. My husband, son, and I debated emerging from our idyllic New England home amongst woods and fields to pursue high culture—art, primarily, but also a good science museum for our lad, who appreciates both. As our holiday’s start grew nearer, we grew not exactly slothful but mindful, shall I say, of what’s important. For us, that was enjoying what we often have scant time to enjoy.
Our holiday, then, was one of walks—breaking a path through new woods, exploring a dried riverbed up to the trickling waterfall that marked its start, visiting a trail that we had not hiked for a year and seeing the differences made in the pattern of the landscape by recently fallen trees. We played croquet on our lawn beneath the eyes of chickadees and goldfinches, read a huge number of books (grown-up books and children’s ones), engineered complicated structures (spaceships, fire rescue trucks, and pumps) from a mass of mixed Legos in a manner that would have made Brunel proud, and cooked grand meals and ate them with good wines (local apple cider for the lad). During a year when we’ve often rushed to put a meal on the table and forgotten, later not bothered with, music, we made a conscious decision to have music on all the time. Benjamin Britten, Peteris Vasks, Igor Stravinsky, Chen Yi, Charles-Valentin Alkan, among others, were our companions on this holiday. Our family threesome were constant companions, too; an unusual occurrence for a family of two writers who regularly trade off writing and parent-child activity time. I admit I snuck in some research during my own reading time (medical history of the 18th and 19th centuries is my current topic, yes, for a novel), but it was a task I could perform without taking too much away from my family.
A writer should get in the habit, once in a great while, of not writing, of instead simply observing, enjoying, and being. It has been a pleasure this week replicating Harry Norman’s feeling of release at Surbiton Cottage, and our concentration on simple yet important things have made a holiday worth treasuring.
