Witch Child at the American Museum, Bath - Celia Rees

December 3, 2014, 4:30 pm

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Witch Child - illustrator: Nola Edwards

This year, I received an early Christmas present in the form of an e mail that came through my web site www.celiarees.com. It was from Kate Hebert at the American Museum, Bath http://americanmuseum.org 

Inquiry: Dear Celia, I am the Collections Manager at the American Museum in Britain. One of my jobs here is to install the Christmas displays. This year's displays are inspired by books and poems set in America. Our earliest room - a C17th keeping room - will be redisplayed to represent the scene from Witch Child where Mary is hiding her diary in the quilt.

One of the very best things about being a writer is getting something like this right out of the blue. I was, of course, delighted and honoured that the museum would think of using my book as part of their Christmas Display, but my happiness went deeper than that because a visit to the American Museum had been central to the writing of Witch Child. 

I first had the idea for the book quite a while before I actually got to write it. The idea came all of a piece. I knew straight away that the book would be about a girl who was a witch (or so some would call her), she would be caught up in the last great flaring of witch persecution brought on by the English Civil War and she would escape and find refuge with a group of settlers sailing for New England but she would not be safe, even there, perhaps especially not there...

The ideas came, thick and fast, but I was immediately presented with a dilemma: how to tell the story when at the time (late 1990s) historical fiction was not seen as a popular genre for young adults. To get round this, I decided to write the book as a diary, beginning I am Mary, I am a witch. The diary form would bind the modern reader in and (I hoped) answer publishers' concerns about 'historical fiction speaking to a modern reader' etc. etc. 

Once I'd thought of that, other doubts began to set in, as they frequently do. This was obviously going to be a historical novel, mostly set in America but:

a) I hadn't written in this genre.

b) I had only been to America once, ten years before. The trip had been to New England but I hadn't even started writing then let alone thought of writing a book set there in the 17th Century.

c) I couldn't afford to go now. 

Behind these concerns was another, deeper, problem. If I wrote the book as a diary, beginning the way it did, what if someone found it? I wasn't prepared to change the first line, or what followed, so  I'd have to find some place to hide the diary. 

I decided to worry about that later. How hard could it be to write a historical novel? There were books. I had studied History at Warwick University. I realised that the very first spark of the story I now wanted to tell had started in a seminar there. I was working as a part time tutor, so I had lending rights and Warwick has an excellent American collection. I went to the library there, to begin my research, to find out if the story I want to tell was possible. But you can only get so much from books. I needed to get some sense of the physical world I was trying to create. The nearest I could get to going to America was to visit the American Museum outside Bath. So that's what I did next.

I walked through the Period Rooms, lingering in the first one in particular, the 17th Century Keeping Room, making notes, hoping it would speak to me. I took what I could, then I went to look at the rest of the museum. I was wandering through the Textile Room. I was interested in quilts anyway, for their beauty and ingenuity and as examples of women's art, women's creativity. One of the boards caught my attention. I read that quilts from the earliest period were often stuffed with rags and PAPER! I stood, transfixed. That was it. Mary would hide her diary inside a quilt! It was one of those rare moments, of serendipity, synchronicity, it's hard to find the right word, but it brings up the hairs on the back of your neck, it's the moment you know that the book is meant to be. 

I bought the book in the bookshop. I did my research. It could work! So that is what Mary did. She hid her diary inside a quilt. The book was written and published in 2000. It was an important book for me. It went on to do very well, to be translated into many different languages, to be read in schools, but I owe its life and therefore its success to that visit to the American Museum.

American Museum, Bath

So it is very special to see, all those years later, Witch Child actually there in the museum, in that 17th Century Room. The scene chosen was the point where Mary is stitching her diary into the quilt that she is making as a wedding gift to her friend Rebekah. The room has been re-created in painstaking detail with the flair and creativity of a 17th Century interior designer. The collections searched for just the right items: an indigo lindsey woolsy quilt, just like the one Mary makes; a book of herbal recipes,  like the one that Mary's friend and protector, Martha is writing with the apothecary, Jonah. More serendipity, if any more were needed.

Herbal Remedies - American Museum, Bath

Herbal Remedies - American Museum, Bath

Stitch and Write - American Museum, Bath

Keeping Room - American Museum, Bath

Keeping Room - American Museum, Bath

    

All the Period Rooms in the museum have been lovingly and painstakingly re-created with scenes from popular fiction set in America. Witch Child is in the most wonderful company: James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans, Longfellow's Paul Revere's Ride, Washington Irving's Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, Tracy Chevalier's The Last Runaway, Ralph Waldo Emerson's The Snow-Storm and Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind all have a particular room. The tableaux make the rooms come alive and give life to the books. The contents of each room, the clothes, the quilts, the furniture, the weapons, the books feel as though they are there not just as artifacts from the collection but ready to be used by a character just about to come into the room. Tracy Chevalier said that this made her feel the luckiest writer ever. That makes two of us. 

 

Scarlett's room at Tara, green velvet dress in the ribboned box - American Museum, Bath.

Christmas 2014 – A Winter’s Tale is on at the American Museum, Bath.

22nd November - 14th December 

http://americanmuseum.org

Sleepy Hollow - illust. Nola Edwards

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

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Slip Sliding Away - Joan Lennon

December 4, 2014, 4:30 pm

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I have a cow's shin bone at the back of my freezer.  (I thought of it today* because I slipped on my first patch of ice crossing over the bridge to the train station.  Winter's getting real!)  I mention this old bone whenever I do a school event on my medieval series, The Wickit Chronicles, because someday I mean to make medieval skates with it.

This is what skating has looked like for a long time -

Henry Raeburn's Skating Minister

- with a blade that cuts into the ice.  But the kind of skates my character Pip has made for him don't cut, but glide.

To get a really good idea of the process, have a look at Hurstwic's wonderful site here - but basically, what you do is, you split your bone lengthwise, dig out the yuck, roughen up the flat side to get a better grip with your shoe, tie them on with leather thongs and, over time, polish up the curved side for smooth sliding.  THEN, get hold of one or two sticks with metal points to help shove you along and figure out what way of combining bones and pole(s) works best for you.

"There was a lot of shouted advice, and enthusiastic disagreement among the spectators, and different monks miming different skating styles up and down the foreshore.  It was impossible to follow everyone's advice (and besides, whenever Pip stopped to watch them they were so funny he would fall over with laughter), so he just cobbled together his own technique by trial and error.  At the cost of innumerable tumbles and a sore backside, he ended up with something halfway between punting and a strange walk."

An image of hunters skating from Olaus Magnus'Historia 

(a book which looks like it's full of excellent blogging fodder) 

courtesy of the excellent Hurstwic site

Viking bone skates

Image courtesy of the Jorvik Centre, York

I doubt my cow bone will ever look as sleek as the ones above, but someday I really will give it a go.  Meantime, I'll just do my best not to fall flat in the street!


* When I say today, I don't mean actually today - i.e. Friday 5 December - because I'm not home today and that's because some of the History Girls are meeting up for High Tea and General Frolics in London as we speak and I'm joining them!  3 huzzahs and pass the cake!

P.S.  Oh, and if anyone wants to relive a little more recent history, you can listen to Slip Slidin' Away here ... Ah, nostalgia.

Joan Lennon's website.

Joan Lennon's blog.

Can I get there by candlelight? by Lydia Syson

December 5, 2014, 4:05 pm

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In the spirit of advent, I’ve been having some (very secular) thoughts about candles.

These thoughts have come in the middle of a big edit. Being of a disgustingly pedantic disposition, I find it hard to write the word ‘candles’ in a manuscript without wanting to know exactly what kind of candles they might have been – surely not tallow or beeswax, in a church in Montmartre in 1871?  Paraffin wax?  Sperm whale oil? And since this is a church that has become a radical political club by night, would the votive candles have been left burning through all that revolutionary oratory? 

Simon Eliot’s investigation of reading by artificial light in The Nineteenth Century Novel: Realisms (edited by Delia da Sousa Correa) answered some of my questions. A century earlier, the vast bulk of night-time readers had faced more difficulties than choice.  The most basic form of illumination was firelight. Then there were simple oil lamps, not that different from the Roman variety, which smelled fishy or meaty, and were, like rushlights, fairly dim and smoky. Tallow candles, another option, usually made of solidified mutton fat were also unpleasantly smoky, smelly and greasy.  But at least these could be eaten in extremis, as the Trinity House lighthousekeepers apparently did when their feeble rations ran low. 

The beeswax candle had been the most effective as well as the most expensive means of lighting in Europe since the Middle Ages – and smelled divine. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the booming whaling industry transformed artificial lighting with spermaceti wax, which was clean, nearly odourless, and much better able to withstand hot rooms and burning summers without drooping than any of its competition.  (Spermaceti wax candles quickly became so ubiquitous that they provided the original measure for standardised units of ‘candlepower’.) 

In the nineteenth century, everything changed.  Never mind the introduction of gas, then paraffin oil, and finally the electric light bulb, invented in 1879.  Or even the mechanisation of candlemaking, or the developments in chemistry leading to paraffin wax, soon to be improved by the addition of stearic acid, which would have been used to make the kind of candles burning in my Montmartre church.  Until I started reading it up this week, I’d never appreciated quite what an improvement the new tightly-braided ‘self-consuming’ wick turned out to be in the 1820s.  

Before this wicks were simply made of twisted strands of cotton, and they were troublesome things which demanded frequent ‘snuffing’.  This actually used to mean trimming the wick, rather than putting a candle flame out, as I’d always assumed.  Hence the confusing sentence in Northanger Abbey when Catherine is trying to read the laundry list.  Alarmed at the dimness of her candle, she hastily snuffs it:  ‘Alas! It was snuffed and extinguished in one.’   If you’re stuck in a Gothic novel, the last thing you want is a unsnuffed ‘guttering candle’ (or perhaps it's the first?)  Unattended, those pesky old-fashioned wicks – so useful in novel-plotting – simply grew longer and longer until they curved right over and melted the retaining solid wall: all that precious molten wax flowed uselessly away down the gutter thus created, and the candle went out too quickly.

 

Last Sunday evening, I went to see a play at the new, candlelit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse for the first time – an exciting, funny and moving production of ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore.  For more about this beautiful theatre built on Jacobean plans, do read Mary Hoffman’s February post. It was a completely new theatrical experience for me and I loved every minute.  At one point, the lights 'began to dim' - two ruffed stagehands came on and flame by flame, extinguished every candle in each hanging candelabra.  And then the stage really was pitch black.  The murder that followed –  a case of mistaken identity – became utterly convincing. Since I’d just heard Mal Peet bemoaning the plot difficulties caused by mobile phones, it also made me wonder if there was a time when novelists complained about the infuriating awkwardness of electric light bulbs.  So much harder to start a house fire (e.g. Jane Eyre) or engineer an encounter with a potential new lover  (e.g. La Bohème).

We’d managed to get the last seated tickets left in the house – ‘a very restricted view’, I was told – in the Musicians’ Gallery.  Actually, these were magical seats, which I thoroughly recommend trying. At only £15, they weren’t quite as much of a bargain as the amazing £5 groundling tickets at the Globe itself (best view in the house, by far) but they give you the same mesmerising proximity to the action.  You have to go backstage to get to them, escorted by an usher – carefully avoiding tripping over empty instrument cases and a musician lying on his back with his feet in the air – and then you sit at the top of the Frons Scenae, (see Mary’s post) looking right down on the actors, and sometimes across, drumbeats vibrating through you, seeing most of the play through a mass of candles. 

The effects of lowering and raising the main candelabra were reversed from our viewpoint, for it grew brighter for us when it got darker for the audience in the pit.  But, so close to the actors, we were all the more aware of the ways in which individual actors were responsible for spotlighting themselves, and often their fellow players, with single, double and triple candlesticks, crude lanterns, torches and sconces on walls or bedposts.  White ruffs and pearlescent make-up help reflect the light onto faces. 

Each performance apparently uses up to £500 worth of pure beeswax candles.  The smell is heavenly, and with their wonderful modern wicks they don’t need all that snuffing.  Jacobean performances had to be interrupted frequently for this to take place.  An experiment carried out in 1838 calculated that a tallow candle only gave off 23% of its original light within 19 minutes of being lit if its wick wasn't trimmed. 

Since encountering the ‘How many miles to Babylon?’ rhyme in my childhood in Kipling’s Rewards and Fairies and Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses, I’ve always found its second question ‘can I get there by candlelight?’ extraordinarily evocative.  Now I know that the answer depends entirely on the candle.

(Images of 'Tis Pity She's a Whore are by photographer Simon Kane and reproduced with thanks to the Globe Theatre Image Archive)

THE PIERCED HEART by Lynn Shepherd . A review by Adèle Geras

December 6, 2014, 11:00 pm

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I've written about Lynn Shepherd's novels before on this blog and here is a link to my post about her book A Treacherous Likeness.

I am a big fan of her work, because what she does seems to be something especially designed to appeal both to fans of existing works of literature and also to lovers of a good thriller. She's created a detective called Charles Maddox (who will, I hope,  be played by Benedict Cumberbatch in any future screen adaptations) and Charles winds his way in and out of the world created by other works of literature. In Tom-all-alone's, he wound his way in and out of the events and characters of Bleak House. In A Treacherous Likeness, Shepherd wrote of  the comings and goings of the Shelley circle and especially the events surrounding the famous night when Frankenstein was conceived. 

It was obviously only a matter of time before she turned her attention to Dracula.  In The Pierced Heart, though, she goes one better. Not only is this a novel which addresses the matter of vampires, (very popular in the 19th century, as witness the illustration below)  it's also one that deals with many other interesting topics in a way which ups the entertainment value no end. 

Perhaps because vampires in various guises are now so popular, Shepherd adds something that's equally spooky and unsettling while being the antithesis of the supernatural: the scientific.  There's an author's note at the back of the book (which I urge you to read as I did at the very end so as not to spoil any of the fun you're going to have along the way, shivering and shaking...) in which she explains very thoroughly how scientific advances in the late 19th century fed into this story of  serial murder, bloodsucking, illusion, phantasmagoria and so forth.  

              (19th century vampire killing kit) 


The story starts with Charles, our hero, going to look at manuscripts on behalf of the Bodleian Library in a castle belonging to Baron Von Reisenberg. Even though we think we know precisely the kind of place we're going to see, and exactly what Von Reisenberg will be like,   Shepherd manages to make all she writes about seem both new and thrilling. Events, atmosphere, character are all conveyed so well that even the most jaded reader of Gothic will be excited. There are shocks, revelations, discoveries of a most gruesome sort and we are left reeling at the end of Part One.

Events then pass to the Journal of a young woman called Lucy.  The novel moves from her account of matters to what is happening to Charles.  His narrative takes place in London.  The Great Exhibition is on and is currently attracting thousands to look at the newest examples of scientific discovery. Meanwhile, the police are baffled by a  serial killer who rips the throat out of poor prostitutes....the stage is set for a non stop action packed eventful and thoroughly gory and sensational story of love, manipulation, sinister experiments, waxworks, graveyards, sea mists, darkness, illusion and of course, the folklore of vampires.

I do urge anyone who is interested in any aspect at all of magic, illusion,  mesmerism and of course the original Dracula, to read The Pierced Heart.  It's not published in this country (why on earth not, publishers? Beats me!) but you can get the US edition from Amazon. 

'Think More Dog' by Karen Maitland

December 7, 2014, 4:30 pm

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St Christopher with a dog's head

You have to feel sorry for Étienne de Bourbon, a medieval Churches Inquisitor, who was sent to a remote part of Lyon in France to try to stamp out pagan customs there. He became so encouraged when women earnestly assured him that they were not praying to the old gods, but to a beloved local saint, St. Guinefort, who had wrought miraculous cures for their children. Étienne really thought he was making great progress until he started asking questions about this unknown saint and discovered the saint was a dog.

Locals told him that a knight had ridden off one day leaving his faithful hound, Guinefort, to guard his infant son, and in common with similar legends from all over Europe from Saxon times, the knight had returned to find the cradle overturned, baby missing and blood on the teeth of his dog. In horror, believing the dog had devoured his son, the knight drew his sword slew the animal. Moments later, he heard the child crying and found him unharmed, with a dead viper lying close by, bearing the teeth-marks of the faithful hound. In grief, the knight buried the dog down a well and planted a grove of sacred trees around it.

Miracles began to be associated with the dog and locals declared the dog a saint, whose feast day was celebrated on 22nd August. Women brought ailing infants to St Guinefort’s resting place and made offerings of salt and items of their infants’ clothes. They then passed the child between two tree trunks 3x3 times - the magic number. Though, according to the disgruntled Étienne, the mothers didn’t gently ‘pass’ the child, but threw the baby to a woman on the other side of the trees who would then toss it back.

Ailing infants were often thought to be changelings, the healthy babies having been stolen by the devil, faery

Devil replacing a human baby with a changeling

folk or in this case forest fauns. So in Lyon, after the mothers had prayed for the return of their child, the changeling would be left alone in the sacred grove beneath burning candles, to await the exchange with the real baby. This, Étienne claimed, often resulted in infants being burned. But it was a widely held belief across Europe that if a mother whipped the changeling baby or threatened to toss it in the fire, the faery folk would hear its screams and rush to rescue it, returning the stolen child. So if the mothers really were doing this at St Guinefort’s well, perhaps it was because they were trying to make changeling babies cry or appear to be in danger in order to force the fauns to return the kidnapped child.

Whatever the truth, Étienne declared that a dog couldn’t be a saint, so it must be a heretic. He had the dog’s bones dug up and burned on a pyre made from the trees he felled from the sacred grove. But this only fuelled the flames of the local women’s devotion and many still remained faithful to St Guinefort right up until the early twentieth century.

With its sacred grove and holy well, the customs surrounding the dog-saint are probably a direct survival of ancient pre-Christian worship on this site, which later acquired a veneer of Christian elements. But it proved remarkably enduring in spite of the Church’s opposition.

Another doggy saint was the better-known St Christopher or the cynocephalus (dog-headed) saint.

St Christopher

According to the English martyrologies, St Christopher came from a race of people who were all half-hounds. He was described as having the head of a hound, long hair, bright eyes and teeth as sharp and strong as a boar’s tusks. They fail to mention a wet nose, but otherwise he sounds remarkably healthy in dog terms. Obviously his diet of ‘human flesh’ suited him. There are numerous different legends about his conversion, one saying that having discovering ‘the devils’ he served were afraid of Christ, he decided to serve the stronger master. On his conversion, his head was transformed and he was so handsome that two women tried to seduce him in prison. The bestial pagan man becoming fully human was a useful allegory for the Church.

Interestingly though, the Eastern Orthodox Church reverses the dog-head legend of St Christopher. In their version he was a remarkably good-looking youth and women were forever throwing themselves at him, so he prayed that he might be made less attractive to women and God answered his prayers by giving him a dog’s head.

Curiously, neither St Christopher nor St Guinefort is the patron saint of dogs, as you might expect. That

St Sithney Church, Cornwall. Photographer: Tony Atkin

honour goes to St Hubert, also the patron saints of hunters, who protects healthy dogs and St Sithney who cures mad dogs. Legend goes that it was revealed to St Sithney that he was to be made patron saint of girls. He begged to be excused on the grounds that he would never get any peace, because girls would be praying to him night and day for handsome lovers and pretty clothes. Sithney declared that ‘mad dogs’ would be less trouble. So from then on, sick and mad dogs were taken to drink from his well, known as the well of St Sezni.

But sadly neither St Sithney nor St Hubert was able to protect one poor dog that lived in Hanley Castle,

Worcestershire. At the time of the civil war, the castle was in the hands of an ardent royalist, Thomas Holroyd who own a one-eyed bulldog called Charlie, named after the king. In 1651, the Roundheads seized the castle and, discovering the dog’s royalist name, hanged the poor bulldog from an oak-tree. Holroyd, though arrested and charged with treason, managed to survive and afterwards regain much of his property, but it is said the ghost of the bulldog forever haunts the village searching for his master.

Leighton House is a Box of Chocolates

December 8, 2014, 4:11 pm

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by Caroline Lawrence 

One of the most maddening museums in London is Leighton House. The former mansion of Victorian artist Frederick, Lord Leighton, it is an exotic hidden gem in the leafy streets near Holland Park in Kensington but they won't let you take photos inside. Yes, there is an amusing  YouTube tour of the house, but it focuses on actors playing the part of Leighton and his staff and does a poor job of showing the extraordinary interior of the house itself. Leighton House is one of London's best-kept secrets and this is wrong; it should be better-known.

There are a thousand details there that should be captured in high-resolution for the millions who will never come to London: sandalwood screens, glazed tiles from Damascus, a bubbling fountain in the famous Arab Hall, a hidden alcove, a trick fireplace, a skylight, a dome, a secret door for posting oversized paintings from inside to outside, secret entrances for the models to use, stained glass windows, silk divans, chandeliers, Turkish carpets, velvet drapes, sculptures, statues, plaster casts and peacock feathers galore. 

Actor playing Lord Leighton for the YouTube tour

Oh, and there are some paintings, too: quasi-historical compositions depicting Greek myths, Old Testament stories and the world of imperial Rome. The paintings are great fun, but only a few are by Leighton himself and they are a bit thin on the walls. I am always left wanting more of them. It is the house itself that never fails to satisfy me.  

Cover of the exhibition guide

However, for the next few months – until 29 March 2015 – the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea have beefed up the wall decoration with fifty paintings generously loaned by wealthy art-lover Juan Antonio Pérez Simón. The exhibition is called A Victorian Obsession. Victorian because the artists represented are Victorian, like Lord Leighton. Obsession because (and I’m guessing here) the painters seem obsessed with beautiful women in erotic poses and exotic settings.  

Godward Study 1913

Critics and academics like to sneer at Victorian artists like Alma-Tadema, Godward and Leighton himself for being purveyors of soft-pornish Roman confections. They are partly right. Buttocks strain against diaphanous silks and nipples can be glimpsed through filmy drapery. Women are usually nymphs, maenads or bathing. In a couple of instances, the artist drapes a little gauze on the model for the study, but then whips it off for a totally nude finished product. It put me in mind of the hilarious bit about 6 minutes into the Peter Cook and Dudley Moore comedy sketch set in the National Gallery. 

Pete: ‘There was a lot of gauze in the air in those days… a tiny little wisp of gauze that always lands on the appropriate place. Always the wind blows a little bit of gauze over you-know-where…’ 

Dud: ‘Course it must be a million to once chance that the gauze lands in the right place at the right time. I'll bet there's thousands of paintings that we're not allowed to see because the gauze hadn't landed on the right place.’ 

Well, Pete and Dud, A Victorian Obsession at Leighton House is the place to go if you want to see some of the paintings sans gauze. In fact, according to the audio guide the first actual public glimpse of female pubic hair in British art is flaunted by Poynter’s Andromeda writhing on her rock in 1869. 

The Roses of Heliogabalus by Lawrence Alma-Tadema 1888

The centrepiece of the exhibition is a giant chocolate box lid of a painting called The Roses of Heliogabalus. It shows a depraved Roman Emperor (the best kind) about to smother his dinner guests with rose petals. Far from looking terrified, the diners look like they are having a Herbal Essence flowergasm. This effect is heightened by the room being scented with Jo Malone rose essence, a nice touch that they could have taken further. I’m thinking some Ylang Ylang in the upstairs ‘zenana’ (harem area) and frankincense in the Arab Hall downstairs. 

I'd love to know who this guy is...

In fairness to Alma-Tadema, he was meticulous in his research. Around the walls of the Roses Room are a dozen research photos of landscapes and artefacts that he used to give the painting authenticity: a tripod from Pompeii; a bronze sculpture of Bacchus and one of his pals; a photographic view of the mountains of Albano as they would be seen from Rome; details of Roman couches; a bunch of grapes and various roses & peonies. Apparently he had a collection of over 5000 photographs of real Roman artefacts, not to mention the real works of art he acquired on his travels. This is the sort of attention to detail that thrills the heart of an historian or author of historical fiction. 

Confession: I love Lawrence Alma-Tadema. 

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema

Born in Holland in 1836, Lourens Alma Tadema was passionate about drawing from the time he could hold a pencil. He spent every free moment sketching, used his pocket money to buy art books and got his mother to wake him at five in the morning so he could draw before school. His family wanted him to be a lawyer, but when he was diagnosed with tuberculosis aged fifteen and given two years to live, they said he could spend those last years doing whatever he liked. He took up painting, conquered his affliction and lived to the ripe old age of 76. For a while he made Merovingian Gaul (don’t ask) his specialist subject but a visit to the ruins of Pompeii in 1863 changed everything. He was there at the perfect moment just when Fiorelli was electrifying the world with his world-famous plaster casts made from the cavities left by dead and decayed Pompeians. 

Returning Home from Market by Alma-Tadema 1865

Later the artist moved to London, anglicised his first name Lourens to Lawrence and made his middle name the first part of a new double-barreled surname to ensure he would be at the front of all the catalogues. He knew and admired Leighton and his fabulous house and bought a mansion of his own in St John’s Wood. When a hazelnut barge exploded on Regent canal and a rain of nut shrapnel blew out the windows of his children’s bedroom, he commissioned Leighton’s architect to rebuild parts of his house in an equally exotic fashion. 

When I was writing my Roman Mysteries series I would pore over reproductions of Alma-Tadema’s densely detailed paintings in a beautifully written and illustrated book by Rosemary J. Barrow, (from which I got the facts of his upbringing and the hazelnut explosion.)

Two paintings by Alma-Tadema not usually seen

So I was thrilled to see two of his paintings not known to me. The first, Agrippina Visiting the Ashes of Germanicus, shows a scene inspired by Tacitus Annals. The second, Returning Home from Market, was painted soon after his return from Pompeii. It shows a Roman matron returning home flanked by her son and daughter, with a slave following behind, laden with her purchases. A monkish looking door slave stands with key, humbly looking down. He has just opened the double doors of the entryway and we catch a glimpse of the bright atrium inside. Best of all is the mosaic on the threshold combining two real Roman mosaics from Pompeii: SALVE and CAVE CANEM. 

An Exedra by Lawrence Alma-Tadema 1871

Another small painting by Alma-Tadema, An Exedra, is clearly set on the outskirts of Pompeii and shows several Roman citizens enjoying a view while a shaven-headed slave, his one-shouldered tunic labeled property of Holconius, sits resignedly with a parasol on his lap and his bare feet in the gutter. 

A Victorian Obsession is like a gorgeous box of chocolate liqueurs. Some of the bon-bons are overpowering, a few cloying, and one is a giant chocolate covered piece of rose-flavoured Turkish Delight, but plenty are truly delicious and will make a visit worth your while. Don’t gulp them down. Stand in front of the ones you like and nibble at them, letting them dissolve on your tongue. And if you really don’t like Victorian chocolates, I can guarantee you will love the box they come in. 

A Victorian Obsession is on until 29 March. Open every day from 10.00am - 5.30pm except Tuesdays; the cost is about £10 unless you can claim concessions.

Caroline Lawrence writes history-mystery books for kids. 

Naming the cat - Michelle Lovric

December 9, 2014, 4:30 pm

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Title page to Emily M. Madddon's sketchbook containing numerous pencil and ink drawings concerning the adventures of Mouton the Cat and other animals, 1859

‘The star of the cat,’ wrote H.P. Lovecraft, ‘is just now in the ascendant.’Among historical writers and writers of historical fiction, ‘twas ever thus. How many History Girls enjoy the society of a cat or three?

Every time a new cat comes into a writer’s house there follows an agony of naming, because the title of one’s cat refracts one’s creativity with an undeniable shine.

Anyone with a cat to name may find inspiration in the following illustrious choices. Every cat owner faces this problem. On the subject of literary prowess, Samuel Butler declared, ‘They say the test of this is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, “Can he name a kitten?”’

T.S. Eliot observed that cats should have three names: an everyday one, something rather more grand and then the name that the cat has for himself. Michael Joseph concurred, adding that ‘there are times when nothing less than full ceremonial titles will serve’. His own cats were called Minna Minna Mowbray and Charles O’Malley. And the kind mistress of Pussy Meow, the eponymous heroine of a feline autobiography ghostwritten by S. Louise Patteson in 1901, was also emphatic on that point: ‘A cat should have a name, because it adds to her dignity, and commands respect for her.’ Pussy Meow herself confirmed it: ‘Let me tell you, a cat with a respectable name feels a sense of dignity and self-respect that is impossible to one only known by the general name of “kitty”.’

Mark Twain perhaps took the process a little too far, giving his cats titles like ‘Blatherskite’ and ‘Apollinaris’. He facetiously claimed that some of these cats died early ‘on account of being so overweighted with their names’.

Here’s a highly edited list of historical cat devotees and the names they chose for their muses.

Matthew Arnold: his imperious cat was called Atossa and appeared in his poem ‘Matthias’.

Jules Barbey D’Aurevilly: Démonette, ‘eyes of gold on black velvet’, her son Spirito, and Grifette.

Oswald Barron: James (‘that sort of cat to whom adventure calls’) and Pippa.

A funeral procession of elderly women with cats in their arms, following the coffin of a dead cat, in a churchyard. Coloured stipple engraving by J. Pettit after E.G. Byron, 1789.

Joachim du Bellay: Bélaud. When the cat died in 1558 the poet wrote a beautiful and comprehensive tribute in verse.

Jeremy Bentham: Sir John Langborn, who in his early days was something of a rake. But he reformed. Over time the cat’s increased dignity was reflected in his name, which became The Reverend Sir John Langborn, D.D. (Doctor of Divinity). The cat dined at table and was eventually buried in John Milton’s garden.

The Duchess of Béthune: Dom Gris, who exchanged much flirtatious correspondence with Grisette, belonging to Antoinette Deshoulières (see below).

Alexander Borodin’s dinner table was always overrun with cats, particularly Dlinyenki (‘Longy’), a tabby, and Rybolov (‘fisherman’).

Joseph Boulmier: Gaspard and Coquette, to each of whom the poet dedicated villanelles.

Frances Hodgson Burnett: Dora, who warmed her mistress while she wrote her first stories, and Dick, who was exhibited at the first New Yorkcat show.

 

George Gordon, Lord Byron: Beppo, one of five cats who travelled with the poet.

Monsignore Capecelatro, Archbishop of Taranto: Pantalone, Desdemona, Otello, among others, who were accustomed to join him at the dinner table, where they had their own chairs.

Karel Čapek, author of some of the finest essays on cats’ soul-dominance over man: Pudlenka I, II and III. Pudlenka I appeared on the author’s doorstep the day his tomcat died and had 26 kittens in her lifetime. Pudlenka II had 21.



Cats in human dress playing a variety of games, including arm wrestling and tug of war. Colour woodcut by Kunimasa IV, 1870s.

Chang T’uan: Eastern Guard, White Phoenix, Purple Flower, Expelling Vexation, Brocade Belt, Picture of Clouds and Myriad Strings.

François René Chateaubriand: Micetto, once the cat of Pope Leo XII. Chateaubriand said of him, ‘I endeavour to soften his exile, and help him to forget the Sistine Chapel, and the vast dome of Saint Angelo, where far from earth, he was wont to take his daily promenade.’



A sleeping cat, from 18th century Japanese album.

Emperor Chu Hou-Tsung of China: Frost-Eyebrows, a cat of ‘faintly blue’ colour but with snowy fur above her eyes.

Winston Churchill: Blackie, Bob, Jock, Margate, Mr Cat aka Tango and Nelson, a black cat who sat in a chair next to Churchill in both the Cabinet and dining room. Churchill once offended one of his cats by shouting at it. The cat disappeared. Churchill had a sign put in his window that read ‘Cat, come home, all is forgiven’. The returning cat was rewarded with a luxurious supper.

Colette: Franchette, Kapok, Kiki-la-Doucette, Kro, La Chatte, La Chatte Dernière, La Touteu, Mini-mini, Minionne, Muscat, One and Only, Petiteu, Pinichette and Zwerg.

François Edouard Joachim Coppée: Bourget (‘Zézé’), a huge cat who lived to be more than 20 years old,  Loulou, a Portuguese angora, and Mistigris, a cat remarkable for his epic appetite.

Georges Courteline (G. Moineaux): Le Purotin de la rue du Ruisseau, Charles Scherer, alias l’Infâme, also alias la Terreur de Clignancourt, la Mère dissipée, le Petit Turbulent, and Le Rouquin de Montmartre. The satirical playwright was a cat lover from babyhood.

Erasmus Darwin: Persian Snow, who enjoyed a correspondence with Po Felina, the cat of his friend and biographer Anna Seward.



A cat's face. Etching by W Hollar, 1646.

 

 

W.H. Davies : Venus, his ‘self-conscious’ black cat, who was, the poet wrote, one of the three golden loves of his life (the other two were his wife and his dog Beauty Boy).

Antoinette Deshoulières: Grisette, Mimy, Marmuse. Deshoulières wrote more than a dozen poems to her cats. She also ‘helped’ Grisette to conduct a poetic correspondence with Cochon, the Duke of Vivonne’s dog; Tata, the cat of the Marquis of Montgras, Dom Gris, the cat of the Duchess of Béthune, and Mittin, the cat of Rosalie Bocquet. Madame Deshoulières also wrote a play, La Mort de Cochon, about the immortal love of Grisette for her deceased canine lover. In the play Grisette refuses to be consoled by an army of feline suitors.

Charles Dickens: Williamina, called William until she bore kittens, which she insisted on moving into Dickens’ study. One was kept and known respectfully as ‘The Master’s Cat’. She would snuff out his reading candle with her paw in order to obtain his attention.

Alexandre Dumas: Mysouff I and II, Le Docteur. The first Mysouff, according to his adoring owner, was a clairvoyant and could tell the time. The second one broke into the writer’s aviary and consumed 500 francs’ worth of tropical birds.

Anatole France: Hamilcar, immortalized in his story Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard. Also Pascal, a stray who retained his wandering habits.

Théophile Gautier: Childebrand, Madame Théophile, Don Pierrot de Navarre, Séraphita, Eponine, Zuleika, Zulema, Zobeide, Gavroche, Enjolras, Zizi, Cléopatre. Gautier’s adoring essays about his cats are endlessly anthologized. Less known is the fact that he liked to pose in Turkish robes, lolling on cushions and surrounded by his cats.

A group of cats giving a concert. Reproduction, ca 1817, of an etching after P Breughel.

Edmund Gosse: the domineering Caruso and Buchanan. According to Osbert Sitwell, ‘Buchanan was … a proud cat, and would never consent to come up to tea unless called or carried by his master in person. Moreover, to secure his continued attendance, he had to be bribed with a saucer of milk, first poured out by Mrs Gosse, and then served to him by her in a kneeling position …’

Thomas Hardy: Cobby, his second cat. It is rumoured that this cat devoured Hardy’s heart, when it was about to be buried, as the writer had requested, in a grave with his wife. It was to his first cat that he dedicated his heart-rending poem ‘Last Words to a Dumb Friend’.

Lafcadio Hearn: Tama, a tortoiseshell.

Ernest Hemingway owned at least 30 cats, including Boise, Crazy Christian, Dillinger, Ecstasy, Fats, Friendless Brother, Furhouse, Pilar, Skunk and Thruster. The Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum in Key West, Florida, boasts a population of more than 60 cats. The Hemingway cats have an unusual gene which gives them an extra toe. It is said that they are all descended from a six-toed cat presented to Hemingway by a ship’s captain.

Augustus Hare: Selma. A cruel aunt ordered the writer’s beloved childhood pet to be hung.

Ernst Hoffmann: Murr, to whom the German writer and composer attributed authorship of the book Murr the Cat and his Views on Life. Murr modestly prefaces the volume as follows: ‘With the quiet confidence that naturally belongs to true genius, I entrust my Biography to the world; that it may learn how a Great Cat is bred and educated.’

Mary Hoffman: Fluffy (don't judge her; she was only five. He later became P. Flower Esq.); Rasselas (he was an Abyssinian of course); Ferrex and Porrex (Gorbaduc); Kulfi, Kichri; Lorenzo, Lonza (Dante) and Lila (from Messaien's Turangalila symphony). Kulfi's kittens were: Kofta, Korma, Kishmish, Kaju and Kichri.

Thomas Hood: Scratchaway, Sootikins and Pepperpot, offspring of Tabitha Longclaws Tiddleywink.

Victor Hugo: Gavroche, also called Chanoine.

Joris Karl Huysmans: Barre-de-Rouille, Mouche.

Gertrude Jekyll: Pinkieboy, Tittlebat, Toozle, Octavius and many others. The famous garden designer always had up to eight cats at a time.

Gwen John: Edgar Quinet, a tortoiseshell often painted by the artist. When he disappeared she went to quite extraordinary lengths to try to find him.

Samuel Johnson: Lily and Hodge. In his finicky old age Hodge regularly dined on oysters. Johnson would go out to purchase these delicacies himself in case the servants, encumbered with this chore, took against his beloved cat. His biographer James Boswell was afraid of cats and suffered greatly from Hodge’s presence when he interviewed Johnson. Hodge is immortalized in a statue outside Johnson’s house in

Gough Square, London

. Next to the sculpted cat are a few empty oyster shells.

Paul de Kock: Frontin – the kind of cat, the novelist declared, ‘he would not give up for his weight in gold’. De Kock was well known as a great cat lover. Whenever his neighbours found a stray cat they just tossed the animal over the garden wall to join the huge family already living there. He is described by Carl Van Vechten as ‘a true félinophile enragé’.

Andrew Lang: Mr Toby, a black cat, Gyp, a notorious thief, and Master of Gray, a Persian.

Edward Lear: Foss. Lear’s tabby cat was immortalized in poems, limericks and drawings. It was said that when Lear built a new villa in San Remo, Italy, he commissioned the architect to replicate his last home so as to cause Foss the minimum of distress in his new surroundings. Foss was honoured with a full burial in Lear’s Italian garden when he died in 1887. Edward Strachey, who visited Lear at the villa, recorded: ‘At breakfast the morning after I arrived, this much-thought-of, though semi-tailed, cat jumped in at the window and ate a piece of toast from my hand. This, I found, was considered an event … his recognition of me was a sort of “guinea stamp”, which seemed to please Mr Lear greatly, and assured him of my fitness to receive the constant acts of kindness he was showing me.’

Pierre Loti: Moumoutte Blanche, a black and white angora, and Moumoutte Chinoise, a stowaway kitten from China both appeared in Vies de Deux Chattes. Loti also wrote Un Bête Galeuse about a mortally ill cat to whom he administered euthanasia.Other Loti pets were called Le Chat, Ratonne and Berlaud. Loti printed visiting cards for his esteemed felines: ‘Madame Moumoutte, white, the foremost cat of Monsieur PierreLoti, 141 Rue Chanzy, Rochefort-sur-Mer’.

Stéphane Mallarmé: Lilith, a black cat; Neige, a white angora and her son Frimas.

Catulle Mendès: Mime, Fafner, Fasolt. According to the French poet, after Mime was neutered, he became depressed and committed suicide by jumping off the roof. Mendès took his own life some time later. 

Gottfried Mind, Swiss artist, known as the ‘Raphael of cats’: Minette, whom he saved from a cull of cats during a rabies epidemic in his native Bernin 1809. He not only painted cats but sculpted them out of chestnuts.

William Nicholson: Frou-frou, Black, Castlerosse and The Girl. The versatile artist also made portraits of Winston Churchill’s marmalade tom.

Florence Nightingale: Bismarck, a large Persian; Disraeli and Gladstone. Nightingale owned more than 60 cats during her lifetime.

Edgar Allan Poe: Catarina, a tortoiseshell. She often sat on his shoulders while he wrote.

Agnes Repplier: Agrippina. The author dedicated The Fireside Sphinx(1901) to her. Other cats included Lux, Banquo, Banshee, Carl and Nero.

Cardinal Armand Jean Duplessis Richelieu: Racan, Perruque, Rubis sur l’Ongle, Gazette, Félimare, who was striped like a tiger, Lucifer, a jet black cat, Ludovic le Cruel, a savage rat-catcher, Ludoviska, a Polish cat, Mimie-Paillon, an angora, Mounard le Fougueux, described as ‘quarrelsome, capricious and worldly’, Pyrame and Thisbe, named after the mythological lovers because they slept together with their paws entwined, Serpolet, who was fond of sunning himself in the window, and Soumise, Richelieu’s favourite. Richelieuwas a great cat lover and enjoyed playing with them. He even had one of the rooms in his house made into a cattery for them. He entrusted their care to specially employed servants, Abel and Teyssandier, who came to feed them twice a day with pâtés made from the best chicken meat. In his will, he left a pension for his 14 surviving cats, so that the servants could continue to look after them.

Theodore Roosevelt: Slippers, Tom Quartz. The American president doted on Slippers and once obliged a group of VIPS visiting the White House to make a detour around the sleeping animal.

Christina Rossetti: Grimalkin, the subject of her moving poem ‘On the Death of a Cat’, written when she was only 16 years old.

George Sand: Minou. Sand ate her breakfast from the same bowl as Minou.

Domenico Scarlatti: Pulcinella – she inspired ‘The Cat’s Fugue’ as she liked to walk up and down on the composer’s keyboard.

Albert Schweitzer: Sizi. The German doctor taught himself to write with his right hand, because Sizi preferred to fall asleep on his left arm, thereby preventing the doctor from writing prescriptions for his patients.

Walter Scott: Hinse – he terrorized the author’s dogs, but was eventually killed by one of them.

Robert Southey: His Serene Highness, the Most Noble the Archduke Rumpelstilzchen, Marquis Macbum, Earl Tomlemange, Baron Raticide, Waowlher and Skaratch (a single cat!), Hurlyburlypuss, Lord Nelson (later Baron, Viscount and Earl), Sir Thomas Dido, Madame Catalini, Bona Marietta, Bona Fidelia, Madame Bianchi, Pulcheria, Ovid, Virgil, Othello, the Zombi, Prester John (who had to be rechristened Pope Joan), William Rufus and Danayr le Roux. Southey chronicled their lives in a charming memoir. His son observed: ‘It was not a little amusing to see a kitten answer to the name of some Italian singer or Indian chief, or hero of a German fairy tale, and often names and titles were heaped one upon another, till the possessor, unconscious of the honour conveyed, used to “set up his eyes and look” in wonderment.’

Carmen Sylva (Queen Elizabeth of Rumania): Misikatz, Diddelchen, Müffchen, Püffchen, Vulpi, Lilliput, Frätzibutzi (official name Freiherr Fratz von dem Katzenbuckel).

Mary Eleanor Bowes, later Countess of Strathmore: Jacintha, Angelica, Pasiphae, Bambino. Her cats were always referred to as her ‘blessed angels’.

Hippolyte Taine: Puss, Ebène and Mitonne, to whom he wrote 12 sonnets.

Booth Tarkington: Gypsy (‘half broncho and half Malay pirate’).

William Makepeace Thackeray: Louisa.

Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens): Sour Mash, Apollinaris, Zoroaster, Sin, Buffalo Bill, Beezelbub, Tammany and Blatherskite (‘names given them, not in an unfriendly spirit, but merely to practise the children in large and difficult styles of pronunciation’). Twain could not live without a cat for company. When he went to spend a summer in New Hampshirehe decided that rather than adopt a stray that would be left to its own devices after he returned home, he would ‘rent’ a cat. In fact he rented two, Sackcloth and Ashes.

Carl Van Vechten, author of The Tiger in the House (1922): Feathers, Ariel.

Horace Walpole: Selima – a tortoiseshell tabby whose sad end inspired Thomas Gray’s poem ‘Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes’ (1748); Zara, Patapan, Harold and Fatima.

Charles Dudley Warner: Calvin, originally Harriet Beecher Stowe’s cat. She gave him to the Warner family when she moved to Florida. The cat, named for his ‘gravity, morality, and uprightness’, was the subject of an exquisitely written essay by Warner: ‘Calvin, A Study of Character’.

H.G. Wells: Mr Peter Wells

Michelle Lovric's website
Michelle Lovric's latest novel, The True & Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters, is published by Bloomsbury. It features one cat.

Some of the cats in her other books: Sofonisba, Bestard-Belou, Albicocco, Brolo and Talina, a part-time cat.

Michelle Lovric's most recent cats are Gamoush, Possum, Rose La Touche of Harristown, Mu and Caramella, otherwise known as Unholy Sausage.

History Girls with cats are invited to share their naming skills below.

The Day the Sun Stands Still, by Laurie Graham

December 10, 2014, 5:30 pm

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Do you know where you are? At your kitchen sink, or as you wait at the bus stop, can you say without hesitation where the sun will rise?

One of the most interesting books I read this year was Graham Robb’s account of the sun-centred world of Celtic civilisation, The Ancient Paths. It was a world in which awareness of the sun and its path was embedded even in the language. In the Gaulish language that was spoken by the Celts between 600 BC and 600AD words like ‘left’, ‘right’ and ‘behind’ carried far more meaning than they do for us today.  Dexsuo, for instance meant ‘behind’ but more specifically it signified ‘Where the sun sets.’ Dheas meant ‘to the right’ but more specifically ‘to the south.’  In other words all of Celtic life and language were ‘oriented’ to face the rising sun.

Which brings me to my theme today: the winter solstice.  A few days when sol stit, the sun stands still.

To people who were so conscious of the sun, its annual, predictable path was of practical use. Towns and buildings were laid out in alignment with the cardinal points and the solstices were the best time to take accurate bearings. Newgrange is aligned to sunrise on the winter solstice, Stonehenge to the solstice sunset.
 

But the winter solstice was more than a surveyor’s tool. It must also have been a source of anxiety.  As people watched the sun rising further and further to the south-east and setting further and further to the south-west there must have been a few doom-mongers who said, ‘What if it gets stuck? What if it never comes back to us? Is it any wonder that in so many cultures mid-December became a time of anticipation and preparedness (what women’s magazines now call The Countdown to Christmas) followed by celebration and relief. The heavens are on the move again. The sun is reborn. A Son is born.

From the old winter festivals it's possible to detect fragments that have adhered to our Christmas customs.

The Romans celebrated Saturnalia, at which the season’s greeting sounded something like ‘i-Yo!’ Familiar? Ding dong merrily on high, let steeple bells be swung-en. And io-io-io, by priest and people sung-en.

The Germanic and Nordic peoples celebrated Yule, a feast that continued as long as the ale and the meat lasted and the Yule log (probably more a tree trunk than a log) burned.  Light, warmth, the rare treat of eating one's fill. We can still hear echoes of the ancient fears and joys of the winter solstice, even in these days of electric candles and festive filo parcels.

I always like to add a sound file to my December post, and what more appropriate than the macaronic Boar’s Head Carol. Its words have only a glancing connection with the Nativity and even though it is sung every year in the privileged splendour of the Boar’s Head Feast at Queen’s College, Oxford, to me it seems to belong firmly to a pre-Christian time, to a forested world of wild beasts and long dark winters. Here it is, performed very beautifully by Magpie Lane.  

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Terrifying Teachers by Tanya Landman

December 11, 2014, 4:30 pm

≫ Next: HISTORICAL FICTION PICKS FOR 2014 – by Elizabeth Fremantle

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Things were different in my day.  Teachers were seriously scary creatures. They shouted, turned purple, threw chalk, whacked rulers over your knuckles.  It was a common occurrence for disruptive students to be sent to the headmaster for the cane or the slipper.  Corporal punishment was a perfectly acceptable way to maintain discipline.  (Of course, they weren’t all like that, but it’s the shouty violent ones I remember most clearly.)

When I was in what’s now called Year 6 I had a truly terrifying teacher.  She had a vast, jutting bosom, a towering beehive that tapered into a point and Catwoman style spiky glasses  (think Mrs.Ribble in Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants series). Her wardrobe consisted of nylon blouses and crimplene tunics so she crackled with static when she walked. She exuded hostility to children.  I remember one occasion when she literally washed a boy’s mouth out with soap and water because she’d heard him swearing. The sight of this tough, streetwise lad reduced to tears, foaming at the mouth and retching was something I’ll never forget.

I was petrified of her – so petrified that one day I ran away, out of the classroom, out of the school all the way home where I had to climb in through an open window because no one was at home.

Things have changed.  My own children have lovely teachers:  caring, nurturing, creative professionals who want their pupils to achieve their full potential and who go to enormous lengths to see it happen, but who also want the students in their care to be happy.

Yet when my youngest child started at the local secondary I realised with something of a jolt that both my boys had passed through the whole of primary school without ever once reading a whole book in class.  The focus of reading was on extracts and comprehension exercises. They rarely – if ever -  wrote a story or a poem.  If they did any ‘creative’ writing it was all recounts of things they’d done or seen.  I had two bright, articulate children who loved stories and yet Literacy was their least favourite subject.

And it wasn’t just them.  I recently did a talk at a primary school and mentioned Charlotte’sWeb (as I often do).  To my delight, the children knew it.  But when I asked if the teacher had been able to read THAT bit aloud without choking or crying they cheerfully said, ‘Oh, we didn’t finish it.’  They’d just had an extract read to them. And then had to answer a list of comprehension questions.

Now it’s not the teachers’ fault of course – I’m well aware of that.  Yet I’m sad that this state of affairs exists because when I was a child every teacher I ever had read to us.  It was part of the school routine that – at the end of the day - for ten or twenty minutes a teacher would read aloud.  And, surprisingly, that seriously scary teacher read very well.  It was the one time of day when you could guarantee that the whole class was engaged and focussed.  Through her I  first encountered Emil and the Detectives, Elidor, Tom’s Midnight Garden  and other  wonderful classics.  The real world dissolved and the class was carried away to another time and place.

It was magical, and what’s more it made me realise that no one is all bad – that even the scariest of grown-ups could have redeeming features.  I still can’t forgive her for the soap and water incident, but I will always be grateful for those stories.

HISTORICAL FICTION PICKS FOR 2014 – by Elizabeth Fremantle

December 12, 2014, 10:00 pm

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As the end of 2014 is approaching I felt it was time for a round-up, so here are some of the historical novels that have made an impression on me this year.

I'm a die-hard fan of Sarah Waters, but with THE PAYING GUESTS (Virago)
she surpassed all my expectations. The novel is set in the 1920s in a genteel suburb of South London where the socially awkward Frances Wray lives with her difficult mother. All the men of the family are gone and the two women strive to maintain appearances in their straightened circumstances. Frances feels their money worries may be resolved with the arrival of Len and Lil Barber who are the paying guests of the title. But the couple burst into the Wray's quiet world with their late-night drinking sessions, loud music and flirtatious behaviour. Inevitably Frances is drawn into this world with devastating consequences.

This begins as a story of love, told with intensity, passion and meticulous writing, but, as so often with Waters's narratives, it is not what it first seems and becomes increasingly dark as a central violent event takes hold of the story. Though it is long and meanders at times, I was completely gripped from start to finish.

I discovered Richard Skinner at a literary festival this summer and was intrigued to hear him talk about his novella, THE VELVET GENTLEMAN based on the life of Erik Satie, whose piano music has always captivated me. It is published in an anthology called THE MIRROR (Faber).

Skinner's approach to historical fiction is highly imaginative – when a novella begins with, 'I died yesterday,' you know your disbelief will be stretched in interesting ways. Satie tells his own story  from a kind of limbo presided over by a Mr Takahashi who is in charge of filtering arrivals through to the afterlife. But in order to move on Satie must choose a single memory to take with him, leaving all the others behind and this provides the opportunity for him to recollect the events of his life. He is characterised as a rather unpleasant individual, plodding miserably through life, but because of the originality of the setting this only serves to make the story more interesting, as does the portrait of a Paris populated by characters such as Cocteau, Picasso and Debussy. An intriguing and memorable read.

Imogen Robertson's latest novel THEFT OF LIFE (Headline), the fifth in her Westerman and Crowther series deals with the slave trade in Georgian London. Robertson draws on the lives of Oludah Equiano and Frances Glass for inspiration for her narrative which highlights the atrocities of the slave trade allowing the reader to understand the extent to which the drawing rooms of England were stained with the blood of slavery. When a slave trader is found dead, spreadeagled in a London cemetery, in what appears to be a case of straightforward revenge murder Robertson's doughty pair of proto-detectives discover that things are far more complex than they first appear. And so begins a gripping story of brutality and evil that uncovers dark revelations about the slave trade.

Elizabeth Buchan has changed direction with I CAN'T BEGIN TO TELL YOU (Penguin), a novel set in rural Denmark in the Second World War. Kay Eberstern is married into a well-to-do Danish family and finds world turned upside down with the Nazi occupation of her adopted country. Her husband Bror is determined to preserve his estate and family legacy by cooperating with the Germans but for Kay this is morally impossible and she becomes embroiled in resistance and espionage for British Intelligence, risking everything for what she believes to be right. This is a well researched and beautifully pitched novel that is full of revelations.

Suzannah Dunn has a way of getting to the heart of any story by exploring the edges of the action. In THE MAY BRIDE (Little Brown) it is the intriguing story of Katherine Filliol, wife of the ambitious courtier Edward Seymour, who was rumoured to have cuckolded him with his father. Fascinating enough on its own, this story is as much about its narrator as it is about its protagonist. She is the quiet observer at Wolf Hall, a woman who will become queen, Jane Seymour. Told with the benefit of her hindsight, allowing the silent narrative of her queenship and her ultimate tragedy to hover at the margins. Dunn is a master of the ordinary, making the mundane seem extraordinary with her attention to detail.

I don't normally read fiction which inhabits the same historical space as my own whilst writing but I read this in preparation for the Harrogate History Festival where we appeared together and I'm very glad I did.

What I will be reading over Christmas: I can't wait to hunker down with a hot water bottle and these two highly praised novels over the holidays.

I always look forward to Vanora Bennett's fiction, for the depth of her research and the deftness of her storytelling. Her latest novel THE WHITE RUSSIAN (Century), set in the Russian emigre community in Paris, tells of Evie a rebellious young American who leaves New York in search of art and adventure in Europe, finding herself embroiled in murder plots, conspiracies and illicit love affairs.




Antonia Hodgson's debut novel THE DEVIL IN THE MARCHALSEA (Hodder) has been recommended to me by so many people that I simply have to read it. Set in London in 1727 the wayward Tom Hawkins finds himself in the Marchalsea prison, a place gripped by fear and suspicion in the wake of the brutal murder of one of the inmates and Tom is sharing a cell with the prime suspect. He must risk everything to uncover the truth, or be the next to die. It sounds un-put-downable.



My own novel SISTERS OF TREASON sequel to QUEEN'S GAMBIT is out in hardback and will be out in paperback on January 29th. For more about me and my books, go to elizabethfremantle.com

Fabulous Fair Isle Catherine Johnson

December 14, 2014, 12:48 am

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Girl in a Fair Isle Jumper by Stanley Curbister, City of Edinburgh collection

I am opening my blog with this stunning portrait painted at the height of the Fair Isle craze in 1923. I love her outfit. I hadn't intended to open with this painting, this was a moan about my lack of Christmas preparedness and began, initially like this;

I have not started my Christmas shopping. I have bought three books - for me - and begun two knitting projects for close family. Only ten days to finish one double moss stitch jacket and a pair of fair isle mittens.... (excuse me for sounding like Ruby Ferguson's Jill).

But what really got me fired up was this;  Keira Knightley in The Imitation Game. I haven't seen it yet, but check that cardigan!

Keira in The Imitation Game

Anyone who knows me is aware of my knitting fixation. I have practically bought my ticket just on the stills for that film. Authentic pattern and colour! Beautiful.

I have been a fan of Fair Isle and other 20th century knitting patterns since college. I used to knit up for a designer called Patricia Roberts and sold Fair Isle patterned tams at Portobello Market.  

I love war time set telly almost exclusively for the knitwear as the shows themselves are often disappointing. For example,  The Bletchley Circle, which should have been marvellous if judged solely on the quality of the cardigans, let itself down badly.

Anna Maxwell Martin in The Bletchley Circle

Fair Isle was popularised by Prince Edward, when he was Prince of Wales. He was given a jumper by the world famous Lerwick wool merchants, Jamesons in 1921. He was soon photographed in them on and off the golf course and as one of the most fashionable people of his generation started a massive trend. This trend for handcrafts - now only affordable by the elite - took off at the same time as mass produced ready to wear clothing and the end of a horrific war seems to signify a yearning for a kind of British nostalgia that still exists, Laura Ashley, cycling spinsters, cricket for tea....

Prince Edward Prince of Wales in 1921

Traditional Fair Isle patterning is actually much easier to do than it looks.  Although colourful and heavily patterned, most never have any more than two colours in a row and can be knitted on two needles rather than the usual four if desired. The patterns are generally variations on an X O theme. Crosses and circles, large and small. Each island family had it's own recognisable patterns, and each knitter made sure to include at least one imperfection. This was vital to stop the Devil admiring the knitting and snatching the wearer, and his precious jumper, down to hell. It is said the patterns were handed down from the Spanish sailors, part of the Armada in 1588, whose ship ran aground on the island, but there's so much attributed to those Spanish sailors they must have been terribly busy.

Jeremy Irons in the BBC production of Brideshead Revisited

Fair Isle sweaters were originally designed as fisherman's jumpers. Knitted seamlessly, like a gansey, from bottom to top and arms from the shoulder down with double thickness welts, the pattern rendered a double thickness fabric, twice as warm as that of a 5 ply gansey.  

Of course the sweaters were first knitted in natural undyed wool, but the as soon as mass dyed wool became available they went psychedelic. I do think that during those long dark winters a beautiful brightly patterned jumper must have been a hugely welcome injection of colour.

From the Shetland Museum 1920s Fair Isle

Anyway if anyone out there does need a knitting consultant, I'm your woman. Happy Christmas.

Here's some I made earlier

Catheirne Johnson's last novel was SAWBONES, winner of the 2014 Young Quills award for historical fiction. In 2015 her story The Liar's Girl (recently included as one of the most boring stories ever) is part of LOVE HURTS an anthology of love stories out in February.

Changing Language

December 14, 2014, 4:30 pm

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by Marie-Louise Jensen

When I'm researching and reading old books, I love to find and note all the ways language has altered over the centuries. Writing my first Georgian book, The Girl in the Mask, I had to write down a note for myself:

1) You keep your clothes in a closet.
2) Your wardrobe is your collection of clothing
3) Skirts are the part of a man's coat below the waist
4) Ladies skirts were referred to as petticoats or 'coats
5) A dress was a gown.



There were others, but those were the frequently used ones I was concerned about getting right (I did make one mistake in Smuggler's Kiss which slipped through).


When I ask school children today what ladies in the 1700s called their dresses, they struggle to get the right answer, instead guessing robe, frock, tunic etc. The word gown has been pretty much lost.

Incidentally, I remember my grandmother always talking about 'frocks'. With the arrogance of youth, we'd roll our eyes and sigh, but in fact the word has come back into fashion now in the phrase 'posh frock'. I secretly always rather liked it.

I had fun in Runaway with a few Georgian phrases. For example, I used the expression 'sick as a cushion'. I'd come across it in Georgette Heyer novels and always found it amusing, so I put it into some dialogue. But the copy-editor queried it. When I hunted for it in the OED, I couldn't find it, but I did find 'sick as a parrot', which I thought was equally amusing, if not more so - given that parrots can be green. In the end, lovely assistant editor tracked down 'sick as a cushion', so although I kept parrot, I've notched it up as a phrase to use in future. I have quite a store of them and I always love coming across them when I'm reading too.

Knitting with Mary Quant

December 15, 2014, 7:00 pm

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Catherine Johnson's recent post about Fair Isle knitting really opened a window into the past for me. I don't knit complicated patterns, like Catherine; my guiding principle has always been that for most of the time, I want to be able to knit without looking at what I'm doing. Obviously, you can't do this when you're shaping, and I'm prepared to make the occasional exception for a baby's jumper or the odd cable - but in general, I want to be able to read or watch television while I knit. It makes me feel peaceful to have my hands at work while my head's somewhere else. Once, many years ago, I even took some knitting into the cinema - but my friends did think this was a step too far and I only did it the once.

My mother was a great knitter and dressmaker. My sister and I were children in the fifties, and it was much cheaper then to make clothes than to buy them - it's not so now. So every year, we had a new dress each at the beginning of summer and another for winter, and cardigans for school and for best. There was one pattern with a multi-coloured crocheted edging, and embroidered flowers, and pompoms - mine was royal blue and Maggie's was cream. Then there was a dark green double breasted style - oh, and there was always a 'fawn' cardigan; no-one talks about 'fawn' any more, do they? I can't even think what you'd call it now - it was a sort of pale milky coffee colour, and its virtue was that it went with anything. And for summer, a white cardigan, to match your white shoes.

I don't remember the dress, but I do remember the boleros - white and fluffy!

Someone gave her a length of green linen, and we had square necked dresses trimmed with green and white seersucker. And there was a glazed cotton dress with a self-fabric covered belt and a flared skirt - but by that time I was heading into my teens and my beautifully made dresses were beginning to feel old-fashioned - it was the sixties, and things were changing. I started to make my own clothes. The library in Ilkeston had masses of pattern books, and I would pore over them, looking at the latest fashions from Paris as well as these interesting new designers from London, like Mary Quant, whose minimally packaged make up - black and white, with a daisy logo - we all bought from Redvers Smith in the market place.

She designed knitting patterns too. For this one, I learnt to crochet. I got the stitches, but I had trouble getting the tension right - I've a feeling I had to ask Maggie or Mum to do the collar and cuffs. (I didn't knit the socks. That would have been too ridiculous.) The jumper looked great, but I hardly ever wore it because it was too hot.

When I was looking for a picture of this pattern, I also found pictures of Mary Quant clothes I made. (Who would have thought? Isn't the internet marvellous? And notice the sizing - a 14 then was much smaller than a 14 now.) I remember deliberating long and hard over the colours for this dress. I chose chocolate cord, with the stripes in turquoise and, I think, a sort of ochre colour. And the suit! Now, that was a step too far. Mum had gone to tailoring classes and made each of us a beautiful suit. Maggie's was brown and white tweed with a curvy little jacket. Mine was an orangey tweed. The material was really beautiful, but orange? With my rosy cheeks? A match made in sartorial hell. So I decided to make my own. How hard could it be?

Well, very. Especially with contrasting trims, and a hipster skirt with a curved waistband. I made it, but it never looked right. Nice material, though - green tweed with a windowpane check, and a plain trim.

I did recently get out my sewing machine again, but it's so much cheaper to buy clothes and there's so much choice that it doesn't really seem worth the upheaval. But I still knit. Lots of friends' children are having babies now, so I knit hats for them. And I'm trying to create the perfect snood - or is it a cowl? You know, a joined-up scarf. The first was too stiff, the second not long enough. I'm on my third now, and getting closer.

I have an odd little memory. We were on holiday at Scarborough, and I was walking along the beach by myself. I suppose I was about ten. It was a cool, cloudy day. There was nothing special about it, but I thought: This is a moment, here and now, that I will always remember. Why? I've no idea, but I always have. And I was wearing a shawl-collared jumper made of tweedy wool, royal blue, flecked with primary colours. That's as much a part of the memory as the dark clouds and the wet pebbles.

Apologies - it's very self-indulgent to go galloping off down Memory Lane like this. But blame Catherine - she started it!

THE MERCHANT OF VENICE, AND ME by Penny Dolan

December 16, 2014, 3:58 pm

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Just over a week ago, at a secret venue close by the Globe in London, the History Girls had a Famous High Tea. The setting was beautiful, the cakes delicious and the company delightfully chatty.  What with that, and meeting up with two writer friends earlier, I’d had an enjoyable day.

More was to come. I had a ticket for The Merchant of Venice that evening, not at The Globe nearby, but away past Angel at the Almeida Theatre, Islington.

Now, The Merchant and I have an odd history. Years ago, it was the play upon which my schoolgirl hopes were dashed. I was not chosen to play Portia, but cast as the clown Lancelot Gobbo, which may have damaged my dreams of allure ever since.

 

However, as this was the very first night, I truly wasn’t sure what kind of production I’d be seeing but “very different” was what I’d been told. 

Yes, this was certainly not the traditional Shakespeare performance. Presented Las Vegas style, the show blazed with colour, music and energy.

The stage was a glamorous blue and gold casino, and the cast, already on stage, were a whirl of gambling and gaming. Yet Antonio’s opening line – his melancholy sigh – perfectly caught the gambler's sense of ennui.

 

Played by Susannah Fielding, Portia was seemingly a drawling Southern heiress, much given to pouting and tossing her huge cascade of blonde curls, while those casket scenes were rounds of “Destiny”, a game of televised chance and "romance". The suitors were clearly there for the celebrity and the money: Morocco as a loud-mouthed boxer in gold pants, and Aragon as an ageing Latin lover with flounced sleeves, caring only for their own persona "on screen" - and the money.

The overblown, flashy glamour was, bit by bit, pierced by the asides and cruelties within this problematic play. Portia’s father had bound his daughter – and her most attractive fortune - to a game of chance that could be lost as well as won. Ian McDiarmid acted Shylock as a suave, ageing business man, his dull daughter only important as his stolen flesh, the injustice to be balanced against Antonio’s flesh. 

Slowly, the familiar plot of the Merchant unfolds – and the pound of flesh scene is chilling - but this version has no fairy tale ending. Despite the glitz, nobody comes out well. What does the play talk about but marriage as a way of making money? Of private feelings subsumed into an acceptable public face? Of gambling that is so foolish it could almost be a death wish? Of vanity, celebrity and self-importance? Of the relationship between men and men, and men and women? Or of cruel desperate vengeance and Christianity’s taunting hatred of the Jews?  

This raucous, sometime carnival of a play managed to carry every bitter theme from the past of history into present feelings. None of the players are noble and nobody reaches happy endings, not even the lovers. This Merchant of Venice was a production that I’m still thinking about and will for some time.

 

Originally produced by Rupert Goold at Stratford four years ago, this interpretation held two sweet surprises for me. One was how well Shakespeare’s lines fitted the South American rhetoric, especially in the vindictive trial scenes. When one thinks of the journey that the English language travelled, how could it otherwise?

And second was this casting of Lancelot Gobbo. He had become an overblown Elvis impersonator, singing his way through the show. The only one largely unharmed..  

Ah, maybe that was how I should have played him?

 

King Arthur the Voyager - by Katherine Langrish

December 17, 2014, 9:30 pm

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Perhaps you don't tend to think of Arthur as a voyager? Let me explain.

Some of the earliest mentions of Arthur come from ninth or tenth century Welsh literature– just glancing references, as if to someone already well-known. The earliest of all seems to be a couple of lines from the poem Y Gododdin, in which another warrior is compared with Arthur:

He fed black ravens on the ramparts of a fortress,
Though he was no Arthur.

This makes sense if the historical Arthur really was a fourth or fifth century British war leader fighting the Saxon invaders, his name perhaps a nickname or pseudonym: ‘the Bear’, suitable for a fighter who may have wished to maintain an air of terrifying mystery. Whoever the historical Arthur may have been, his name soon became associated with all kinds of older legends connected with supernatural figures from Celtic mythology, and such stories continued to be told about him in all parts of Celtic – that is British – Britain, and in Brittany, the region of France to which many British Celts migrated after the fall of Roman Britain.

Even in Sir Thomas Malory’s late 15th century ‘Le Morte D’Arthur’ with its many courtly French additions and sources, plenty of Welsh and Celtic personages and motifs remain: the most obvious is Merlin himself, along with the Lady of the Lake who gives Arthur his sword Excalibur: and then there's Arthur’s shadowy relationship with his half-sisters, Morgause the mother of their son Mordred, and Morgan le Fay – Morgan the enchantress, whose name chimes with that of the Morrigan (‘great queen’ or ‘phantom queen’), the Irish Celtic goddess of battle and fertility. At any rate, Morgan is one of the queens who carry the wounded king away to the Isle of Avalon after the battle of Camlann.

And when they were at the water side, even fast by the bank hoved a little barge with many fair ladies in it, and among them all was a queen, and all they had black hoods, and all they wept and shrieked when they saw King Arthur.


…‘Comfort thyself,’ said the king, ‘…for in me is no trust for to trust in, for I will into the vale of Avilion to heal me of my grievous wound, and if thou hear never more of me, pray for my soul.’

But ever the queen and ladies shrieked, that it was pity to hear.

The keening women, companions of a powerful sorceress, the ship that carries the heroic king away to the island of the dead, the island of apples – it all seems familiar, doesn’t it?  It recalls stories from classical mythology: the golden apples of the Hesperides, and Jason's voyage to the land of the Golden Fleece and his meeting with Medea, Circe’s niece, a priestess of Hecate - who was the goddess of childbirth, death and necromancy, doorways and crossroads, magic, torches and dogs. Medea is an often ruthless figure of great power, who near the end of the Argonautika calls on the spirits of death, the hounds of Hades, to slay the bronze giant Talos. In other versions of her legend, she is the owner of a magical cauldron which can restore life to the dead. Jason's voyage, too, is clearly an Otherworld journey.

And it happens that there is an early, and highly cryptic, account of a voyage by Arthur to the Underworld. It’s the marvellous Welsh poem Prieddeu Annwfn, preserved in the single 14th century manuscript of The Book of Taliesin, but dated (cautiously) by internal linguistic evidence to around 900 AD. Here’s a link to the poem, with notes. It's an account of a raid led by Arthur, in his ship Prydwen, on Annwn, the Welsh underworld. But why?  What was he going there for? What prize did he hope to bring back?

In the poem Annwn is described by a number of different epithets. No one has a clue if these are simply varying descriptions/manifestations of the same place, or intended for different locations which Arthur and his men encounter along their way. It may not matter much, but the latter would fit in well with the island-hopping itinerary of Greek and Celtic heroes in ships - Jason, Ulysses,  Maelduin, even Saint Brendan - gradually approaching their Otherworld destination through a transformed and numinous sea-scape.

The Prieddeu Annwfn tells how Arthur and his men travel to Caer Sidi, ‘The Mound Fortress’; Caer Pedryuan, ‘the Four-Peaked Fortress’ – also described as Ynis Pybyrdor, ‘isle of the strong door’. They travel to Caer Vedwit, ‘the Fortress of Mead-Drunkenness’, Caer Rigor, ‘Fortress of Hardness’, Caer Wydyr, ‘Glass Fortress’, Caer Golud, ‘Fortress in the Bowels [of the Earth?]’, Caer Vandwy, ‘Fortress of God’s Peak’, and Caer Ochren, ‘Enclosed Fortress’. 

The aim of the expedition was to bring back a cauldron from the lord of Annwn.  We're not thinking blackened kitchen pots here: we're thinking inspirational, magical, perhaps sacred items like the 1st century BC Gundestrop cauldron, above.  One of the many scenes on its sides depicts a pony-tailed warrior dipping a man into another such cauldron headfirst, probably to restore him to life:

In my personal favourite among Alan Garner's children's books, 'Elidor', the children bring four treasures out of the Mound of Vandwy. corresponding to the Four Treasures of the Tuatha de Danaan:  a spear, a sword, a stone and a bowl: 'a cauldron, with pearls above the rim.  And as she walked, light splashed and ran through her fingers like water'. Taken into the workaday world of 1960's Manchester, the objects change appearance, and Helen finds she is carrying only 'an old cracked cup, with a beaded pattern moulded on the rim.' Once these treasures have been buried in the garden for safekeeping, however, all kinds of strange disturbances begin to occur, culminating in the eruption of the unicorn Findhorn onto the city streets.

Here’s the second stanza of the Prieddeu Annwfn:

I am honoured in praise. Song was heard
In the Four-Peaked Fortress, four times revolving.
My poetry, from the cauldron it was uttered.
By the breath of nine maidens it was kindled.
The cauldron of the chief of Annwfn: what its fashion?
A dark ridge around its border, and pearls.
It does not boil the food of a coward...

And before the door of hell lamps burned.
And when we went with Arthur in his splendid labour,
Except seven, none rose up from Caer Vedwit.

Most of the poem's eight stanzas end with a variation on the recurrent line: ‘Except seven, none returned’: by ordinary standards the expedition appears to have been disastrous, but this is no ordinary poem. Fateful and gloomy, mysterious as Arthur himself, all we can gather from it is some sense of a venture, by ship, by sea, into the Otherworld, and - perhaps – a description of a mound or island where a youth, Gweir, is imprisoned, lapped with a heavy blue-grey chain. Of a four-peaked fortress with a strong door, guarding a cauldron full of the magical life-giving mead of poetry, warmed by the breath of ‘nine maidens’.

In the medieval story of Culhwch and Olwen in the Mabinogion, Arthur sails to Ireland in his ship Prydwen to steal the cauldron of Diwwnach Wyddel: not just any old cauldron either, for it’s also listed in ‘The Thirteen Treasures of the Island of Britain’ as the cauldron of Dyrnwich the Giant, which will not boil the food of a coward. Clearly the same cauldron as that which Arthur went to find in Annwn, and doubtless the same also as the Irish Cauldron of the Dagda, from which 'no man ever went away unsatisfied'.  Lastly, also in the Mabinogion, the Welsh hero Bran is the keeper of yet another magical cauldron which restores the dead to life. And he too is the hero of a mystical voyage.

It seems as though the courtly queens who carry the medieval Arthur away to the Island of Apples are latest in a long line of goddesses who like Hecate presided over the doorways into death, and who could restore the dead to life. How old is this legend of magical, life-giving cauldrons?  As old as Medea's?  Older? Is hers the ultimate origin of the witches' cauldron that we find in 'Macbeth'? 

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'Up in the Air' - the joys of research by Christina Koning

December 19, 2014, 1:00 am

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Already several chapters into the third book in a series set in the late 1920s and early 1930s - the first, Line of Sight, was published earlier this year, and the second is with the publishers - I’m struck by the thought that, where writing’s concerned, I like to make things difficult for myself. Or perhaps it’s the same for all writers of historical fiction? (Fellow History Girls please advise.) Not content with having to deal with the - surely challenging enough - business of character, dialogue, and setting, we like to complicate things still further, by setting our stories in the distant or relatively distant past; by having to deal with the complexities of language as regards our chosen period; and by choosing for our central characters, not contemporaries, but people whose lives and experience are far-removed from our own. 

It’s this which makes reading historical fiction so interesting, of course - the chance to immerse oneself in a time and place about which one knows little, or nothing; it’s also what makes researching a work such a pleasure for the writer. With the exception of my first novel, A Mild Suicide, which had a roughly contemporary setting, all my books have dealt with the past, in some shape of form - from the relatively recent 1950s, the background to my second novel, Undiscovered Country, to the undeniably distant 1780s, which provides the setting for my fifth book, Variable Stars.

As if this wasn’t enough to be getting on with, I seem compelled to set myself challenges above and beyond the obvious ones of familiarising myself with the language and behavioural traits of a given time (to say nothing of the clothes, houses, food and all the other essential details); I like to find out about something I didn't know about before. This might sound as if it should go without saying - after all, what else is research, if not that? - but in my case, the areas of ignorance are vast, encompassing, for example, almost the whole of science, mechanical engineering, aviation, the motor car, anything mathematical, sport, economics… anything, in fact, which failed to grab my interest when, at the tender age of eighteen or so, I decided that Art, and Literature were my ‘things’, and the rest wasn’t worth bothering about.

Well, I’m certainly making up for it now. In the past few years, I’ve had to familiarise myself with an eclectic range of topics, including ballistics, astro-physics, forensics, the workings of the telephone, card playing (I’ve never played cards) and, most recently, aviation. None of the aforementioned are subjects about which I had the slightest knowledge when I set out to write about them. I sometimes wonder if, for me, writing isn’t - at least in part- a way of compensating for my earlier indifference to Science and Maths, subjects I now find as thrilling as I once found the poetry of Keats, and the novels of Jane Austen (both of which I still find thrilling, I hasten to add).

In the New Year, I hope to put my new-found interest in aviation to the test by - literally - going up in the air. A friend who owns a vintage plane has offered to show me the rudiments of flying. For someone like myself, who can barely drive a car, this will be a challenge, to put it mildly. But one I hope I can rise to. Happy Christmas!

Turn Again, Whittington by Ann Swinfen

December 19, 2014, 4:30 pm

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Now we have reached the pantomime season, Dick Whittington will be striding the stage once again in the form of a girl in tights, but there was a great deal more to the real man than a cat and the sound of Bow Bells.

Derel Elroy and Summer Strallan in Dick Whittington and His Cat. Photograph by Manuel Harlan

Richard Whittington was born around 1354 in the village of Pauntley, Gloucestershire, in the Forest of Dean, although his family originally came from Kinver in Staffordshire. His birth thus fell very soon after the massive tragedy of the Great Pestilence or Black Death, when Englandwas still reeling from the after-effects of that disaster. He would have been regarded at the time as belonging to the lesser gentry, for although his grandfather, Sir William de Whittington, held the rank of knight-at-arms, Richard was a younger son and so would not inherit his father’s estate.

"Sir" Richard Whittington and his Cat. Printed in New Wonderful Museum, Vol. III (1805). "from the original painting at Mercers’ Hall".

Professional Career

Like many a younger son at the time, he was despatched by his family to London, where a promising, hard-working young man would have the opportunity to learn a trade or go into business and thus make his own way in the world. Coming from a fairly well-off family, he was apprenticed to one of the more prosperous callings as a mercer, or cloth merchant. At this time, from the late fourteenth into the early fifteenth century, fine English woollen cloth, particularly broadcloth, was becoming highly valued throughout Europe. Broadcloth is so called because it is woven wider than its finished width and then goes through a milling process which beats the cloth until the fibres matt together, creating a dense, felt-like fabric which is warm and quite weatherproof. 

As well as exporting English cloth, the mercers also imported luxury cloth – silks, damask and velvet – which Whittington is known to have sold to the royal court and to King Richard II himself. It is recorded that in a short period Whittington sold cloth to the king to the value of £3,500, which corresponds to about £1.5 million in today’s money, the foundation of his great wealth. He continued to be an active and prosperous Londonmerchant until his death. In addition, he loaned money to three kings – Richard II, Henry IV and Henry V.

Richard II

Political Career

In 1384 Whittington became a member of the Common Council of London, and from then until the end of his life he was one of the most senior and active political figures in London. Eight years later, in 1392, he was part of a delegation sent by the City of Londonto meet Richard II at Nottingham, when the king seized land belonging to the City. The delegation was unsuccessful in its negotiations with the king, but Whittington seems to have retained the king’s favour nonetheless.

The next year, 1393, marked a significant rise in Whittington’s fortunes. He became a full Member of the Mercers’ Company and also an alderman. The Lord Mayor, William Staundone, a grocer, appointed him as one of his two Sheriffs (or deputies) and he continued to hold this office under the next Mayor, John Hadley. In 1394, the Worshipful Company of Mercers was incorporated under a royal charter, with Whittington as one of its founders. (To this day it retains its position as the highest ranking of the Livery Companies of London.)

The Lord Mayor's Modern Regalia

In 1397, four years after Whittington’s appointment as Sheriff, Lord Mayor Adam Bamme, a goldsmith, died during his second term in office and King Richard immediately appointed Whittington in his place. His first action as Lord Mayor was to negotiate successfully with the king for the return of London’s lands and liberties seized illegally five years before, on payment to the king of £10,000. In recognition of this success, he was elected Lord Mayor for the following year. The mayoral elections took place at Michaelmas (29 September), but the new mayor only took up office halfway through November.

Henry V

Whittington was elected Lord Mayor again in 1406 and 1419, while during part of the former period in office he was also mayor of Calais, which then belonged to England. In 1416 he was elected a Member of Parliament. Perhaps his most eminent position was under King Henry V, who reigned from 1413 to 1422. During this period Whittington served on a number of Royal Commissions, collected import duties, sat as a judge, and was in charge of expenditure in completing the work on Westminster Abbey.

Benefactions

Although Whittington married in 1402, his wife died nine years later and the couple had no children. Instead, it could be said that the people of London, especially the poor, were his children and heirs. He undertook and paid for a great many public works during his lifetime, and left £7,000 in his will (about £3 million in today’s money) for charitable works after his death.

London was growing rapidly at the time, as the nation recovered from the Great Pestilence, and this led to problems with the city’s water supply and hygiene. Although the Great Conduit in Cheapsideprovided a major supply of water accessible to all Londoners, Whittington’s money provided new conduits at St Giles Cripplegate and Billingsgate. He also improved the sewers and drainage at Cripplegate and Billingsgate, and built public lavatories, the so-called ‘Long House’ with accommodation for 64, in the parish of St Martins Vintry, on the riverside between Billingsgate and Queenhithe. He even laid on a water supply to the prisons of Ludgate and Newgate.

The Guildhall of London

He financed the rebuilding of the Guildhall, created the Guildhall and Greyfriars libraries, and provided for the rebuilding of his own parish church, St Michael Paternoster Royal, where he was buried after his death in 1423. Other building works included the rebuilding of the great gate at Newgate, to provide accommodation for the Sheriffs and Recorder of London, and the adjacent Newgate Prison, a complex of buildings which was the forerunner of the modern Old Bailey.

Concerned about the dangerous working conditions of young apprentices, he passed laws to protect them from unhealthy practices which had frequently led to death. He was also interested in the welfare of the poor, providing a set of almshouses for the elderly and carrying out repairs to St Bartholomew’s Hospital, which cared for the poor and needy of London. Across the river in Southwark was another hospital, St Thomas’s. Here Whittington established what must have been unique in the world – a lying-in ward for unmarried mothers. Southwark contained the recognised red-light district of Mediaeval and Tudor London, where the ‘Winchestergeese’ plied their trade (so called because the Bishop of Winchester owned much of the land and a palace there). The need for such a ward was probably considerable, but its establishment is a timely reminder of what a generous and warm-hearted man Richard Whittington was. There the babies of such mothers could be born in safety for both mother and child, instead of the more common bungled and often fatal abortions practised in the district.

Vera Effigies or "True Portaicture" of Richard Whittington, engraving by Reginald Elstrack (1570 – after 1625). Original engraving depicted a skull under his palm, but printseller Peter Stent requested it changed to a cat, to meet popular expectations.

So – was there a cat? Perhaps. Perhaps not. It makes a good story. Pictures of Whittington were often doctored at a later date to include a cat. But whether or not Richard Whittington nearly went home until Bow Bells called him back again, Londoners then and now owe him an enormous debt. Even today there is the Charity of Sir Richard Whittington which provides help for those in need, year round, but especially at this Christmas tide.

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I'm also to be found today (20th Dec. 2014) as part of a Christmas Party blog hop here . Lots of fascinating posts on historical festivities for the winter solstice.

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Ann Swinfen's historical novels for adults have been set in the first and seventeenth centuries, and she is currently working on a series set in the late sixteenth century, The Chronicles of Christoval Alvarez.

Ann Swinfen's website . 

My book of the year by Imogen Robertson

December 20, 2014, 4:30 pm

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Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas

Anyone still looking for Christmas gifts? Of course not, you are all far too well organised, but perhaps you still need something to read in front of the fire until the sun comes back. Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas was first published in 1971, so I know this is cheating, but I only read it this year and if any you, dear readers, haven’t read it yet, may I suggest you do so as soon as possible?  It is an absolutely stunning work rich and insightful and makes most other history books seems a little thin by comparison. 

Its subtitle is 'Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-century England' and that is as good a summary of the content as anything I could come up with. If you are interested in how people thought and felt four hundred years ago, you will be utterly transported. Every page is filled with the voices of people, anecdotes and story fragments that both intrigue a reader and come together to construct a portrait of the period that is both complex and comprehensible. 

It is a wise and human account of a time that I’ve found difficult to come to grips with in the past. The people of the 18th century feel familiar to me in their outlooks and beliefs - not completely perhaps, but I felt I was adapting my own attitudes when writing from over their shoulders as I do in the Westerman and Crowther series, not transforming them. When I read about the Civil War however and the religious maelstrom under the Tudors, I was rather at a loss. There was clearly such a profoundly different way of understanding life there, and I couldn’t get a grip on it. It felt slippery, impossible. Then I read Keith Thomas it was as if someone had broken a window and let the light in. I gained an understanding of how magic and the medieval church were intertwined, and how the unravelling of folk and establishment beliefs were uneasily accommodated within communities. 

I think I shall read it again over Christmas, by the fire and with a large glass of wine while the dark presses at the window and the witches and spirits have the lanes to themselves. 

Have a wonderful Christmas all.

Time and Tide and Buttered Eggs by Kate Lord Brown

December 21, 2014, 4:30 pm

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It is thirty years this year since the BBC adaptation of John Masefield's 'The Box of Delights' entranced a generation of school children. I remember racing home through the snow to sit beside the fire after school, completely bewitched by the magical special effects which brought paintings to life and turned boys into wild stags, fish and birds. 

The sequel to 'The Midnight Folk' was published in 1935, and tells the tale of school boy Kay Harker returning to his aunt's house for the Christmas holidays. As discussed last month, this is another classic children's tale where the care of a maiden aunt and absent parents opens the door to freedom and adventure. Aided by 'those blessed Jones'', Kay helps Punch and Judy man Cole Hawlings protect a magic box from Abner Brown and his band of scoundrels. It is a tale that sweeps back to Pagan times, populated by magical characters like Herne the Hunter, and creatures including a talking rat with a penchant for green cheese and a phoenix conjured from the fire in the Drop of Dew pub. Sleighs are drawn not by cutesy reindeers but fleets of lions and unicorns.

At its heart, it is a tale of good versus evil, and Masefield (then the poet laureate), wrote in dreamy poetic prose of snow-bound adventures which have spoken to generation after generation of children. Radio adaptations in the forties and fifties led on to the 1984 TV series, starring Patrick Troughton, a gloriously evil Robert Stephens and Patricia Quinn. Add a mesmerising theme by Victor Hely Hutchinson, and the spell was cast:

A recent Folio edition is on my wish list, although my original battered paperback is as much a loved memento of schooldays as the falling apart at the spine pink Puffin Book of Verse. I just discovered that the forward to this new edition is by HG's own Adele Geras, so I'd love to read her thoughts on this most favourite of tales. Each year, it is as much a part of our celebrations as new pyjamas on Christmas Eve, and Nativity services when home. 

Growing up in an isolated village between the Devon moors, the countryside scenes shot in Herefordshire and the surroundings seemed familiar. The 1930s slang and costumes were not too far off from our sheltered experience, and living in a landscape populated by stone circles and tales of magical creatures, the idea of bumping into Herne the Hunter was not beyond the realms of possibility. It now seems beyond dated to my children - they humour me for half an hour each Christmas then slink away as I indulge in a time 'when the wolves were running'. It seems impossible that it is thirty years old - do any of the HGs remember this, or earlier versions? There are rumblings of a big screen Hollywood adaptation, but I rather hope they'll let this jewel alone.

Wishing you all a wonderful Festive Season, and a peaceful New Year - which books are essential reading for you at this time of the year?

CHRISTMAS TRUCE 1914 - IMAGINE.. by Leslie Wilson

December 22, 2014, 4:30 pm

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Imagine if they had all laid down their arms,
not just for hours, or days on some parts of the Front,
though that was astonishing -
 


The snowy silent night, after months of explosions;
German trenches glowing with Christmas trees,
carols crossing No Man's Land uninjured.

Then the shouts: We not shoot, you not shoot! and:
Happy Christmas, English!
Chilled, fumbling hands passed chocolate cake to Engländer,
and they gave their Christmas puddings to the Hun,
exchanging food instead of bullets and shells.
 

 Imagine, though, dare you? And do not say:
It never happens like that -
Which is as bad as saying: We will not
permit it to happen, even inside our heads.

If when the last candle had burned down,
the last pudding was digested -

If they had looked in horror at their guns,
the wire, and the trenches - shaken
their heads, and shouted:

We have chosen to be
a different kind of hero.

If, on every front,
they had buried the weapons in the trenches;
metal skeletons left to rust and decay,
so that peace broke out infectiously,
so afterwards they stayed alive to say;
We were there, we were part of it.

We came home.

Dare we imagine that;
believe it might ever be true?

Leslie Wilson December 2014

The story of the Christmas truce will be in Carol Drinkwater's blog on Boxing Day
There were outbreaks of peace along the Eastern Front too.

Photo of the candle (Eine Kerze) by Bangin, Wikimedia Commons