Dominic Edwardes interviewed @katehowereads

From the campaign to place a plaque in Westminster Abbey for Anthony Trollope

Friends and readers,

A briefer blog than usual (as to space): October 21, 2022, Kate Howe interviewed, the present Chairman of the London Trollope Society

Dominic Edwardes very perceptive on Trollope’s long fiction; he tells of Trollope’s place among his peers, his reputation then and now, his life, the mission of the Trollope Society to keep his books in print and read by as many people as the Society and internet can reach; Dominic also confides how he (DE) he came to read and love Victorian novels, then as among the best of them, Anthony Trollope, Dominic’s first introduction to the Society (he went to an event which he thought would be in costume and it turned out no such thing, so he was the only one there in costume) & what the Society is doing now: yearly dinner, lectures, trips, and a vast growing website where you find recorded information on Trollope’s fiction, on the illustrations to them, on editions, from many talks given at the every-other-week online general reading group, and information about other more local reading groups and lectures.

As prelude or preface to the interview, she includes a cornucopia of beautiful and effective illustrations from the fiction of the era — the sort of thing you find in the original illustrations to Trollope’s novels.

“Oh, George, if you knew all … ” (Francis Arthur Fraser, illustration for Trollope’s Golden Lion of Granpere, not included in Howe’s set, but the same sort of thing)

Posted by Ellen

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Summer into Autumn Reading: Travel & Regional, To Renew Your Spirit: read David Downie, see Cherry Blossoms

Cherry Blossoms (Elmar Wepper as Rudi Angermeier, and Aya Irizuki [de] as Yu)

“What I love most about this book, as about all of Downie’s nonfiction works about France, is the way the reader is brought intimately into the adventure of his discoveries as he performs his intrepid research. We are spared, of course, the many hours of reading in dusty libraries he has done for us. But when he sets out into the Paris of today in search of its ghosts of yesteryear, he takes us along with him. We are there with him as he interviews the archivist at the Victor Hugo Museum, and the director of the Arsenal Library–a gathering place for such Romantic age luminaries as Dumas, Liszt, de Musset, Delacroix, Balzac, and Gautier—a place which, Downie tells us, “hasn’t changed much since the 1820s.” We are there with him as he sneaks up back stairways and into private courtyards in his furtive attempts to connect with Romantic heroes of the past, to look out the same windows they looked out of, gaze upon the same courtyards they would have seen. We are there with him in those rare moments when he is able to commune with those spirits of the past” (Janet Hulstrand)

The impermanence of life is at the core of Cherry Blossoms, an exquisite German film directed by Doris Dorrie (How to Cook Your Life). A wonderful sequence in the story takes place during the cherry blossom season at the beginning of spring in Japan. Hanami is celebrated for about ten days as families, friends, and visitors gather under trees while their pink and white flowers are in full bloom. The cherry blossom is seen as a symbol of beauty, awakening, and the transience of life … (Frederick and Mary Ann Brussat)

Dear friends and readers,

Summer is slowly turning into autumn, and I’ve written only once of this year’s summer reading and movies: David Nicholls’s Us, book & film, probably because I’ve only read and seen one I’d so characterize, and now as the days begin to shorten more quickly, I feel I’ve been remiss, partly because my spirits have been again rejuvenated by a movie and a book.

The audio book

First, the book, which will require my speaking first of David Downie as I encountered him in his earlier Paris to the Pyrenees last spring, and providing contexts with other books, and French movies. I took a course at Politics and Prose (the DC bookstore) called A Literary Tour of France, it was somewhat disappointing as the teacher refused to discuss any serious topics (!), and seemed to live in dread of offending people in the classroom, but she did offer two books, with real merit, the equivalent of Steve Coogan and Bill Brydon’s first and second Trip movies, the one where they drive around Derbyshire, into the Lake District ending at Bolton Abbey before returning to London, and the second a journey through Italy, from Rome past Pompeii to Naples.

Somewhere in the West Riding — an idyllic dream vision of what I remember of the rare walks Jim and I took out into the Yorkshire moors

Travel books encompass books about people making a home usually in what is to me a “foreign” country; they can be the encyclopedia type Trollope favored in Australia and New Zealand, the let’s analyze this country, his North America, or his jolly When the Mastiffs Went to Iceland (the nearest he got to popular travel books). I think the genre is invented in the 18th century where the idea of truly telling the truth of what you are seeing, of cultures being different, of trying to discover history this way began with Johnson and Bowell’s twin tours; a second variant is Susannah Moodie’s 30 Years in the Bush, a classic first Canadian book, about how she settled into the countryside to become Canadian.

Jeffrey Greene’s French Spirits: A House, A Village, and A Love Affair in Burgundy, was assigned first, and begins well, but David Downie’s Paris to the Pyrenees sustains the type. Greene’s French Spirits is similarly replete with intelligent insight into places, objects, people. He and his partner are marrying and decide to buy and renovate as a place to live an ancient church: they have plenty of money, live upper class educated lives (whose values Greene never questions, the source of the money never told): Greene is trying to capture his sense of what life against history is, French culture in history, and uses these “odd people” in the countryside to bring this out. Greene’s book is light and half-way through falls off when he goes into these chapters (to me tasteless) on his wedding but it is picturesque and evocative of middle France. He and his wife renovated a presbytery to make it into a home: the history of the building and the real problems of trying to renovate such a structure are absorbing, teach one about buildings.

Downie’s Paris to the Pyrenees is a sort of sceptic’s pilgrimage across that part France and down to the Pyrenees. He’s more somber in spirit, and the character he comes across made less eccentric at the same time more locally embodied. He has rejected much that Greene is content to accept: the materialism, hierarchies, fashion-laden admiration for what reeks of rank, monetary success. Downie is exploring his own mind (quietly, not that openly), his past, and the past of the countryside he and his wife are walking through. One needs courage and a partner to do what they are doing — — just walking following an old route and not sure whether they will find an inn in a given place, or the kind of food and drink they might require. They are doing their journey in an entirely non-commercial way.

Gradually his book turns into a more political polemic attached to French history (eons back) and the recent political events (1871 and the French occupation in WW2, Algeria, modern emergence of fascism). An emerging theme is how much is left across the French countryside of WW2. We saw that in Calais and Brittany. Downie describes so much left of the Resistance (and Nazis’ atrocities) and so criss–crosses for me A French Village (and Come What May). It’s a pilgrimage, in which the French landscape seems to contain almost no one, they have to find taverns and even once stay in someone’s home, take chances, depend on themselves and other people. It put me in mind of Anne Radcliffe’s gothics at their spiritual landscape best. Colleen’s Paris (a blog reviewer) captures the book very well, telling you the details of the story too. Downie’s book is more genuinely worked out than Greene’s.

Both are a long distance from VS Naipaul’s masterpiece, The Enigma of Arrival (Salmon Rushdie finds it too sad), but they move in this direction of deep meditation in a landscape about the history of the place through what’s physically left there and what we can know (and in Naipaul’s case) dream deeply and re-create to make of himself (to the person) embedded in this foreign landscape — through his memories too. For Naipaul it’s the landscape around Stonehenge, as a strong antidote to the culture he was born in and has rejected. Karen Langley in her Kaggsy’s Ramblings writes of a lighter gay variant, Hugo Charteris’s Marching with April (introduced beautifully by Frederic Raphael), the writer and his family determine to leave London and takes root in an ancient place, the Highlands (out of his background) and attempt to build a new life: this time the Highlands. It will come after Downie’s Paris Paris, is lower on onw my night-table’a pile.

To be honest, I’m only half-way through Paris, Paris but I’m just loving it. One problem with many travel books is they fail to convey a deep sense of what it feels like to be in the place — Downie has this ability. Each area of Paris the reader is taken to, is fitted into a larger coherent picture of the city, and then itself explored visually, physically, and mentally. The photographs are beautifully done (black-and-white) and epitomize a mood, the kinds of history that occurred in the place and/or what is there now, the people he sees. I’ve been to Paris three times now, once long ago for 6 weeks on my own in a cold winter, and twice with Jim and Izzy, 2 weeks around Christmas time and the New Year (2000), and the following summer. I am learning more, getting a better feel of the place than I’ve ever done and think if I could go back how much more I’d benefit. Each chapter is a little Eleanor Clarke, Rome and a Villa. Each one forms a walking tour; you are exploring with him. A shorter review by Kirkus. Janet Hulstrand says rightly there is so much here of history, literature, art, that it’s almost impossible to capture in a couple of paragraphs, but I believe she comes near and regales us with the details evocatively.

Downie himself, talking in France, about the book. He begins slowly, and has trouble getting into contact with the audience but as he goes on he’s extraordinary: the romanticism of Paris is the result of its negativity, that it make each visitor invisible, and conveys amid its austere life suffering, time past, darker passions contained.

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Hannelore Elsner as Nadja Uhi, with either one of the film’s younger actresses or perhaps the director? or costume maker?

I had confided in a friend how much I was again missing Jim this summer, and my friend recommended to me a 2008 German film, Cherry Blossoms, about an older man whose wife dies suddenly. I looked up the reviews and found most reviews to be vitriolically hostile or indifferent. For the record, I watched The Toyko Story and found it to be frozen, creepy, too long, too still, absurdly over-rated. The only parallels are the angry children and the deaths.

Cherry Blossoms opens with Nadja, the wife (a wonderful German actress, Hannelore Elsner) listening to doctor’s tell her that Rudi, her husband has not got long to live. She cries silently; they tell her to take him on a trip and she says he hates adventures. He follows the same narrow routine everyday of his life, including the sandwich she makes him for lunch. It would seem despite her staying home, being there for him all the time as he forges forth in the world, he stays within her sphere.

So no surprise when he follows her advice as she proposes a trip to visit their grown children in Berlin or some other German city (they live in a country town or suburb) and to the beach by a hotel. We see how much they do love one another, are dependent on one another, also glimpse the hostility to them of their grown children who slowly it’s revealed find their presence even so briefly an encumbrance, annoyance. Her favorite son lives far away in Tokyo — later we learn he moved there, that far to escape the domination of her quiet presence.

Quiet mood on a boardwalk; they move to the beach, by the shore, and suddenly she dies.

The film is half an hour in. The rest is Rudi’s very hard adjustment, then a chosen trip to Tokyo to see the son who fled them. At first he is bewildered and this son also hostile; they adjust to one another; he gets lost early on, but soon he is finding his way. Tokyo seemed to me as inhumane as I’ve thought it. The son says everyone works weekends, long days, all the time. They live in small boxes in high look-alike buildings, where everything looks the same. Their talk reveals that indeed the wife had always had this inexplicable desire to visit Japan, had wanted to be a Japanese stylized dancer. We have seen photos of her when young so dancing.

He has brought with him his wife’s clothes, at first he puts them on the bed beside him to sleep (what he started at home) but then he puts them on under his coat. He sees and then introduces himself to a street performer, Yu, an 18 year old girl who turns out to be homeless. She does a dance where she appears to get into contact with the dead; she says she is with her mother this way. She wears white make-up on her face — as the aborigine did in Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith as a sign he was willing to die, to let the whites murder him rather than flee them some more. He and she bond, form a friendship, she says she is an orphan and he suddenly cuts loose from this son (who has said he moved to Tokyo to get away from his mother who he loved so much but was overwhelming).

He takes the girl to Mount Fuji which his wife dreamed of going to. She dreamed of being a dancer, of going to Japan. He feels very badly that he stood in her way. We do see how middle class people in Japan take holidays: in a vast hotel-like structure where they live semi-communally — all eat in the same vast room. He and Yu are failing to see the Mount as each day it is so cloudy; and one morning he gets up very early and sees the mount: a vision. He hurries back, dresses in a Japanese dancing costume for a man that he has brought, and returns to the shore. As he dances, we see a hand reach his, and his wife is there, visible, similarly dressed. They dance intensely together. The camera moves away to Yu, just waking up. She discovers Rudi is gone, a couple of hours go by and he does not return. Now she too goes to the shore and finds him dead, laying by the shore. There follows a Japanese style funeral with his son and Yu presiding over his ashes in an urn, and then another funeral in Germany. The film ends quietly with the camera returning to the girl who has returned to the park to dance for money and to reach her mother. There is a dedication at the movie’s close, apparently by Dorrie remembering someone who perhaps died.

I use the phrase very moving so often, so let me say very very touching. Here is a review by Frederick and MaryAnn Brussat which begins to do the film justice. It’s beautifully tastefully filmed, written, the music just perfect, everything, tactful, controlled. I found it uplifting.

I do have one (many) regrets from my marriage: I never went to the shore or the beach with Jim enough. I knew how he burnt, and I’d get bored. Now I wish I had gone every summer with him — we’d go when we went to England to the Chitterings beach, once we went to Brighton. This summer I didn’t get to the shore at all. It is a three hour drive from my house to reach a public beach.

So these are the summer books and movies I have experienced this season of 2021; Nicolls at mid-summer and these at journey’s end.

Ellen

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I give a third on-line talk: Trollope’s Malachi’s Cove, An Edge Tale: On Behalf of Trollope’s Short Stories

Mally (Veronica Quilligan) and Jess, her donkey (1973 Malachi’s Cove, Penrith Film)

Dear friends and readers,

I am delighted to be able to say I gave a third successful on-line talk about an Anthony Trollope story to a group of people who have been meeting every two weeks since March 2020 online to discuss Anthony Trollope and his writings (sponsored by the London Trollope Society); that is, since self-quarantining for the COVID pandemic began. In June as a way of transitioning from Framley Parsonage (the fourth Barsetshire novel), I introduced Trollope’s Last Chronicle of Barset by comparing it to Joanna Trollope’s The Rector’s Wife (the first written 1866, the second 1991). Then about five months ago (March 2021) I gave a talk on Dr Thorne as the book by Trollope I first read and one I remain especially fond of. This time, last Monday, I spoke about one of his short stories, “Malachi’s Cove.” The group is still enthusiastic — we are having fun — still going strong, with plans for a another of Trollope’s novels, The American Senator, to begin September 5th.

My paper talk on this story and a comparison of it to its film adaptation by Henry Herbert (1973, Penrith film company) is another paper that comes out of a blog I wrote. But it has a larger context as my subtitle suggests.

John Everett Millais, “Waiting at the Railway Station,” from Good Words

For a long time now I’ve known that Trollope’s short stories are not sufficiently appreciated, mostly because they remain unread even by his more devoted readership. I taught these as a group to college students way back in the early 1990s when I realized that they were a good length to assign students, were written in clear, entertaining, often comic but sometimes tragic ways, and could and did interest college-age students: among other things, they are travel stories (Trollope gathered them more than one as “Tales of All Countries”) and about colonialism. The students were more open-minded towards these old tales than I expected, at first more so than the people on a listserv I was moderating at the time, perhaps because they came to Trollope with no expectations whatsoever — most of them never having heard of Anthony Trollope before. Then a few years later (1997) to the other adults on a listserv I was moderating, I again proposed reading and discussing all the stories; after a while it went over so well that I was able to put on my website a record of what we said and thought. We liked them sufficiently that years later we went through a selection of the stories once again (“The Spotted Dog,” “Why Frau Frohman Raised her Prices,” “Journey to Panama” among these. Each Christmas we still read a couple of the Christmas tales (for example, “Christmas at Thompson Hall”).

John Everett Millais, “Christmas Story-Telling,” “Christmas Supplement,” London News, 20 December 1862

Malachi’s Cove represents one of masterpieces of the genre that Trollope wrote — which I name in my paper.

So, now Dominic Edwards, our fearless moderator and leader (and Chairman of the Trollope Society) this summer proposed for August we as a group read a few of the short stories — as a kind of break from the longer works. (We had just finished The Way We Live Now.) He chose “An Unprotected Female at the Pyramids” and “A Ride Across Palestine” (sometimes called “The Banks of the Jordan”). I know I showed a lot of enthusiasm about the stories, and he asked me would I present a talk on “Malachi’s Cove” to start us off. It emerged that in fact the place on the London Trollope Society website where you can find all sorts of information about “Malachi’s Cove” (story, characters, publication date) is one of the most popular spots on the site. I was happy to do a talk.

In brief, I first showed that Trollope’s tale is a violent mood piece presented as a parable: we experience a persuasive glimpse of two people surviving together through “a hard and perilous trade” (460) in Cornwall: the girl rakes seaweed from the cliffs and rocks on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean where it washes up on the shore, to sell it for fertilizer. She makes it seems just enough to stave off destitution for herself and her grandfather who appears to have custody of her. Then I take the reader through the film adaptation, which I also think superb, and demonstrate how the Penrith film (the name of the company) develops from Trollope’s matter a haunting coming-of-age film (a familiar movie subgenre), an atmospheric Cornish story of intense loss, grief, anger and providential renewal.

So, here as before, is a link to the video on the website, which Dominic kindly accompanied by setting forth talk itself beautifully, “Malachi’s Cove: An Edge Tale: On behalf of Trollope’s Short stories.”. And as before I transfer the video from the Trollope Society site here for your convenience and to have it as part of my blog site:

You can also read the text at academia.edu

Malachi’s Cove, the opening far shot: Mally and Jess as specks by the shore

There is, as any regular reader of this blog will know, another context: I am enormously interested in films, especially adaptations of books. I love them personally and have published papers on them professionally and here on my website and blogs. So my paper values the film as much as it does the story.

Malachi’s Cove, the Vicar (John Barrett) talking with Mally in the graveyard by her dead parents’ gravestone

Ellen

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Anthony Trollope’s John Caldigate: a group reading

The Last of England (1855) — Ford Madox Brown

Dear friends and readers,

This too is an unusual blog or has become unusual. I’ve not for a long time advertised (in effect) one of the many group reads I participate in: I used to do this for those I lead on my listservs. We’ve been reading non-Trollope books on Trollope and His Contemporaries @ groups.io lately, books relatively unknown by women, colonialist and post-colonialist novels (Mary Taylor, Miss Miles, Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration from the North) and have come to read one of these by Trollope, and I’m hoping this relatively unknown but strong book will provoke interesting conversation. We read it once before on the list, but twenty years is a long time and the world has changed so that I feel we would come away concentrating on very different things than we did the first time round. Then we talked a lot about the sexual promiscuity and bigamy stories:

From modern illustrations by Francis Moseley in the Folio Society edition: John Caldigate glimpses Mrs Euphemia Smith for the first time aboard the ship going to Australia

Now I surmise we’d be a lot more interested in the cultural and social conflicts undergone and conflicts arising from these.

On Trollope-l (at the time the name) we read after JC after Is He Popenjoy? and The American Senator as three relatively unknown novels by Trollope. N John Hall says it is nonetheless among his best (!) — I’m not sure about that. In said Folio Society edition, R. C. Terry gives the novel high praise: he connects its matter to The Way We Live Now with its “evolving world of money, greed, and materialism in which ethical issues are becoming more urgent and difficult; it has a romantic myth of a young man who disappoints his father but wins out through high adventure, court-room scenes and stints in jail. There is much autobiographical resonance in the depiction of the estrangement and then coming together of the father and son.

From N. John Hall — in my own words: It has a number of chapters set either on board a ship bound for Australia or in Australia itself. Trollope had twice (1871 and 1875) journeyed to Australia to see his son, Fred, and had completed a long travel book about his time there, Australia and New Zealand (published 1873). It is one of several fictions set in Australia or on the way “out” & back to a colony (Harry Heathcote, “The Journey to Panama”, “Catherine Carmichael”, “Returning Home”). The toughness of the life presented, the frankness which which life is lived connects John Caldigate to Trollope’s Irish books as well as to other novels with romantic and adventuresome locales. The intransigent (and anti-sex) mother of the heroine, Mrs Bolton, recalls a similar female in Linda Tressel; the intolerance of everyone Nina Balatka. Although many of the novels’ chapters are set in England and explores English provincial life, particularly the narrowness of a provincial community, its lack of choices, what happens on board and in Australia initiates everything else, and we return to Australia in order insofar as this may be done vindicate the eponymous hero in the end.

It did help Trollope’s reputation. After several novels which were strongly criticized or didn’t sell very well (including The Prime Minister), this one was liked and sold, and reviewed favorably. Trollope hadn’t placed it quickly but when he had he got £1,200 from Chapman and Hall for exclusive book rights, and £600 from Blackwood’s for serial rights. It was serialised in Blackwood’s Magazine from April 1878 to June 1879.

It connects back to Is He Popenjoy? (written October 1874 to May 1875) because it too is said to have been inspired by the Tichborne case: just about everyone who has written about it tells how Trollope wanted to call it Mrs John Caldigate or John Caldigate’s Wife because it focuses on bigamy, and has people turning up thousands of miles from where the hero thought he had left them forever in order to lay claim to an estate. The question is again legitimacy. It is also linked to Trollope’s Dr Wortle’s School (a novella written 8-9 April 1879) and to “sensation” novels like Ellen Wood’s East Lynne and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret. There’s a dramatic trial, a disreputable past (clandestine sex is what happens), and some harsh emotional violence between a mother and daughter over her sexual and emotional allegiance to the man she calls her husband.

To join click on the link; here is our schedule:

June 12, Chapters 1-8
June 19, Chapters 9-16
June 26, Chapters 17-24
July 3, Chapters 25-32
July 10, Chapters 33-40
July 17, Chapters 41-48
July 24, Chapters 49-54
July 31, Chapters 55-64

While there has been no film adaptation, there has been a graphic novel by Simon Grennan. It was announced, described, made available at the Leuven Trollope conference in 2015, and on one of my blog reports from the conference I reprinted one page of the pictures and one side of the endpapers — a beautiful depiction of a very gothic looking house, which I transfer here:

This could be either Caldigate’s father’s house or the Bolton’s — probably the Bolton’s, an imprisoning fearful emotionally violent place.

tt is a kind of unusual graphic novel because 1) the pictures are not close-ups; we are kept at a distance from the characters. And 2) there are few words — or far fewer than some of these graphic novels use when it comes to a serious “classic” 19th century novel. I don’t see a summary of the plot but I did read it and beyond omitting the comical post-office part of the novel at its ending), Grennan makes a couple of other modernizing changes. There are aborigines in the story

This is from my blog:

The team chose this novel as a less familiar one, one never adapted before. They cut the post office sections of the novel as they felt a graphic novel could not make these appealing Grennan decided he would try for pictures that projected what he thought were the aesthetic emphases of the novel. He wanted to visual equivocation, to keep readers and viewers at a distance from the characters in the way Trollope does: there would be no close-ups and even few middle distance shots and the point of view would be of a camera low-down. He was seeking a rhythmic roundtable of points of view; all the costumes reflect the way 19th century people of that decade dressed, the kinds of rooms they lived in. He did not want to use styles associated with classic comic; he wanted to capture this previous time as something strange. He developed a story of aborigines, practiced historical verisimilitude.

Grennan later told me he dressed Mrs Smith so she would have been recognizable in the era as a “Dolly Varden:” she is a character in Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge whose coy highly-sexualized self-presentation (Dickens just salivates over her) was taken up by music hall performers — after all Mrs Smith has been and returns to the stage (though the reader never see her do this). (I admit I prefer to imagine Mrs Smith in her more somber outfits as a mature woman who confronts life and men frankly as their equal.) Simon chose dark deep rich colors (purples and browns) where-ever appropriate, and reserved yellows and golden browns and greens for suggesting seasons and landscapes. There is an French edition if anyone is interested, but be warned there are very few words.

So, come one, come all, you are not likely to find this book read by a group of people anywhere else this summer.

Telegraph Depot, Ninety Miles up the Roper River, Northern Territory,” Illustrated Sydney News, 31 August 1872

To Trollope-l

Ellen

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Mary Beard’s Rome & Pompeii, naked bodies &c; SPQR, confrontings & Jane Harrison ….

Mary Beard

The truth is that ‘peeling away the encrusted myth’ of Cleopatra reveals there is very little underneath the ancient fictional surface, and certainly nothing that can be the stuff of a plausible life story — unless it is padded out with half-relevant background … the best we have is a possible ‘signature’ on a document authorising tax concessions and the report that in her final days she muttered again and again ‘I shall not be led in triumph — Mary Beard, “Cleopatra, The Myth,” Confronting the Classics

I don’t remember when I first heard the name, Mary Beard, nor how I came to acquire and read her Confronting the Classics (a short review), but since then I’ve followed her, nowadays on twitter, as well as off. I remember how I was bored silly by the to me inane Epic of Gilgamesh, and couldn’t understand how anyone could substitute this as an assignment in college as from the ancient world instead of Virgil’s profound, beautiful, intelligent Aeneid. And then I read Beard’s defense of Roman or Latin literature not as opposed to but as texts as interesting as these originally Greek ones. Beard was, is, also continually a fresh thinking original feminist. She is still the only writer I read, to talk about women in the ancient world in ways that make them living relevant presences.

Then years later, since my younger daughter, was a lover of Latin, minoring in it in college, and is a reader, I was actually anxious that she should want to read and enjoy Beard’s SPQR.  When I bought it for her for Christmas, was so relieved when I’d see her reading it — with avid interest. Tonight I was reading Beard’s The Invention of Jane Harrison, and am not surprised to find that she is writing about this woman and her peer, Eugenie Sellers, in ways no one hardly ever writes about admired people: telling the inward petty and crucially important personal politics that shaped their careers. It takes hard research to get to that sort of information. Were they and most of the people she is writing about not dead, Beard would now have as many enemies as the maligned journalist, Julian Assange, for this is how he began.

Don’t be satisfied with the tale of Harrison in Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting, for, good as Wade’s book is, she falls for the myth of Harrison as exposed by Beard; there is even more to Harrison’s achievement than is recorded by Wade

Then recently I opened up her Women and Power, two essays. The first is about how the public voice of women is treated: their sound is too high-pitched, so shrill, and not acceptable, their content emotional and when obviously knowledgeable school-mistress-y. She offers example after example of men silencing women, and several were close to my own experience. One happened the other day on Trollope&Peers! a male bully who hardly ever posts, suddenly got on to excoriate me for writing about Australia: how dare you? you are not Australia and show what an ignorant moron you are. No compunction whatsoever. She had the effect of validating my sense of this insult and revealed the pattern beneath it —

There are so many reviews of her books, that while I have needed her, I decided she does not need me or another blog or review to tell people what you are missing out on – for she is witty, idiosyncratic in her choices, personal, and I’m ever learning new information about another place, another figure, another work, or some unexpected insight. I also thought to do justice to her would take a book. All I could do is cite the books and urge you not to miss any. But about a year ago I started to feel compelled to write something when I came across an excoriating attack on one of her TV entertaining documentaries. Women as well as men castigating her for exposing the fallacy that when we look at naked bodies of women in art, we react to them viscerally as bodies, even when they are ever so tastefully done, and given learned names to obscure that they have most often functioned as pin-ups. The idea of the pompous Kenneth Clark unclothed (so to speak) was gratifying.

She allowed a drawing of her naked: this Guardian article brings out the Berger-take of the program

But when I started to watch her Shock of the Nude, I found she was misrepresented: far from dwelling on this (as it is so obvious) the programs were about how a single type of European woman has filled the space of what is reproduced when there are so many types of bodies, not to omit gene pools and ways of depicting bodies. It’s an elaboration on the specific topic from the perspective John Berger developed in his Ways of Seeing. We glimpse the actual motives of the people who made the object, the politics projected at an audience by an establishment “voice.” But to be as frank as she, what the men especially hated most of all is the way she looks. They cannot stand that she refuses to turn herself into as close a version of the Barbie Doll or socially comely academic woman in interview outfit for her shows. Her hair is unstyled (would be the word), her body lumpy, she wears only what make-up the film-makers must put on her to withstand film lighting. Those are her real long and discolored teeth. Of course it’s a pose, and she now has a trademark with her bike, but it’s a pose in another cause for candor as the only humane wisdom: this time what aging and other women actually look like.

Now I’ve just watched (and re-watched — a habit of mine) her early series, Meet the Romans, her contributions to Civilisations, and her [Ultimate?] Rome: Empire without Limit, and feel I ought to say something relevant to this dangerous and destructive era the Republicans, their Trump mascot, and all the wealthy and powerful people increasing a stranglehold of immiseration and downright murder on not only the US but people around the world variously connected to us: the theses of her two Roman series, which she makes convincing is that this ordinary village on this boot-like peninsula in the Mediterranean became a successful society, and extended out to become prosperous, educated, and (dare I say) a comfortable people because they were inclusive.

It was their original idea to make everyone who came within the purview of their power and ever extending land-mass Roman, to welcome into their civilisation all sorts of people, and thus circulate the knowledge, skill, and yes labor and natural products of lands across the globe. Indeed much that the vicious regimes of the world today are doing (except the step-by-step process in the US, and jump elsewhere into terrifying dictatorship) is what what the Romans didn’t do: race hatred especially. I took down my daughter’s book for the first time and found that in SPQR are the theses for these documentaries (read Emily Wilson’s more detailed review). They were flexible when it came to changing laws; they went in for people power. It was a genuinely mixed society because in the province power was given to local elites. Join with Rome, and you too can have this salary, these benefits. Everyone above say the working class level and the enslaved gets a percentage of the take. And the enslaved can buy themselves back.

The book and these series are not about its decline and fall (which it did) but about why it succeeded for so long — besides ruthless fearful military brutality — she does not mince words over the cruelties and harshnesses of this empire. In one episode (Part 3 of Ultimate Rome) we see a frieze of a fierce Roman soldier subduing and about to rape a supplicant woman, an image of Rome triumphing over Britain. One episode of Meet the Romans she seeks out how the average Roman who lived in the city survived & shows them in tiny dark flats in apartment houses, where just about nothing was in the space except room to sleep: all other functions, including drinking water, bathing (defecating), eating had to be done outside this space which was heavily peopled. To her credit, she does bring out what life was like for the average person.

Perhaps the Roman story is still too upbeat. Unlike the books, she does omit women. She doesn’t lie. She warns that stories about the fun adulteresses might have had are masculine bad dreams; stories of fiercely violent Amazons are probably glamorized fantasies based on what the Romans saw in the violent tribalism of Scythian groups. (Anyway who wants to idolize violence?) It was not the brutality of the Romans that made for their ultimate success, just a first step (bad joke alert). In her Pompeii, she takes us into excavated homes of the victims; she tries to realize what a family life might have been. The figures chance immortalized at moments of terror do convey what people are up against in nature (as well as what is often missing in other episodes from one another)

Pompeii people

These programs have our present era very much in mind.

From Ultimate Rome, Episode 3

They are also wondrously enjoyable because they are travelogues to places you, I, or your package tour company is not going to think of going to. I did not feel as if I was looking at fake pictures of landscapes, but genuine filming of out-of-the-way places where Roman buildings, forums, monuments, roads, these circular stadiums (levels upon levels), acqueducts, left over remnants of households are still extant. She films in Northern England, along the Hadrian wall where archeaologists have been very busy, in Algeria, southern Spain, Turkey, western Germany. Even if I had the money and the profound unhealthiness of airplane and modern boat travel had not been exposed, as an ordinary person I could not see what she shows in museums, factories, not to omit Pompeii and Herculaneum. She is invited to go where the rest of us who are not in the profession can’t. You see people in the marketplaces and in Rome today too — in France, in London.

In Bath — where I have been

I admit I sometimes enjoy her straight lectures on YouTube more than I do her documentaries, which are meant for a much wider audience than my taste. Her patter to me can be contentless; if there is a line of argument, sometimes it is obscured by gnomic suggestiveness. She is unwilling to criticize where I think she should. One of her assignments on Civilizations was to showcase (would be the word) religious buildings around the world once Roman (Europe and the middle east as it’s called mostly), but had it been Simon Schama (he is the main presenter) he would have managed to include sharp observations on what religious practices can mesmerize people into accepting. Her books provide more honest scrutiny. She is inclined to be optimistic, altogether too cheery — during this pandemic, she has had BBC shows in her kitchen. That sort of thing …

But she is always intelligent. During the Brexit controversies when there was still time, to put a stop to this lunacy of some segments of the British upper classes and the ignorant deluded nationalist solutions to economic distress in working class people, her TLS columns were ever on point and I wished she was in Parliament. I still do. Probably my favorite book is also still Confronting the Classics.

Filming in Rome

The Englishwoman poured tea, informing us
that the Duchess was going to have a baby.
And in the brothels of Marrakesh
the little pockmarked prostitutes
balanced their tea-trays on their heads
and did their belly-dances; flung themselves
naked and giggling against our knees
asking for cigarettes. It was somewhere near there
I saw what frightened me most of all — Elizabeth Bishop
“Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance”

Ellen

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Cornwall in May

Chyauster — remains of a third century settlement where people mined and farmed not far from the sea; in the 18th century it was used as an outdoor temple by the methodists; now it’s a study and tourist site

Dear friends and readers,

For my trip to the UK this year, to Cornwall a few weeks ago, I wrote my travelogues on my other two blogs as most of what I was writing was not seriously informative the way my trip to the Lake District and Border country of England and Scotland was last year, or to Inverness, Scotland and environs (one we drove all round the countryside by the sea across the way from the Hebrides!) the year before. But I’ve a hope that even life-writing of the travel memoir sort and some connections of Jane Austen to Cornwall will be of interest, find favor here too.

Another time away: again Cornwall

The Falmouth Hotel where I stayed

Jane Austen and Cornwall

Cassandra’s depiction of Jane Austen, said to be by the seaside, southwest England, 1804

Return to Cornwall: Kensington, Exeter; Falmouth, two castles & ferries; a neolithic world, Land’s End & Levant Mine (1)

I am pretending to hold up a neolithic stone monument said to be 6000 years old (Bodmin Moor)

China Clay, Lost Gardens; Bodmin Moor: Jamaica Inn, Port Isaac, Fowey; Charlestown & shipwreck museum; Wells

Mevagissey

Vedova parlando: what I was told while away

What I cannot convey with a photo is the intense relief I feel when on these trips I go into a large church or cathedral, which is cool and quiet. I feel this strongest in the central nave, and it’s most common in Anglican churches — some large formal beauty but not overdone — sitting by one of the columns not far from the usual row of high windows. I like the absolute quiet, away from sun and noise and movement. It is broken (sometimes ruined altogether) when a guide comes by and starts to talk and a crowd forms, or worse yet, people begin taking these endless photos. It’s at first just getting in to a sense of deep escape. I am not communing with any god. It’s solitude in these places of stone. Remember Quasimodo:  Charles Laughton’s crying crying crying at the end of the 1930s film — but I do not cry; I sit trying to take the quiet and stillness in; I can never have enough.

And, so as I enter here from day to day
And leave my burden …
The tumult of the time disconsolate
To inarticulate murmurs dies away
— from Longfellow’s sonnets on translating Dante …

I first conceived my desire to go to Cornwall in the 1990s when I read for the first time Winston Graham’s Poldark novels and watched the 1970s serial drama, Poldark. See my Poldark at the Smithsonian this year as part of this series.

1970s Poldark, the second year, first episode — the coming of Sam and Drake Poldark

On the beach: Demelza among the rocks and ancient fish with Hugh Armitage — Angharad Rees 1970

Again on the beach: Demelza after a emotionally painful night at another party — Eleanor Tomlinson 2017

This is my blog from 2015, my first visit where I tell of how I came to know and love the Poldark series and books. 

Ellen

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English Lake District & Borders tour: Wallington Hall, Vindolanda & Hadrian’s Wall, Durham Cathedral & home again (6)

One of the excavation sites at Vindolanda where digging was going on

Friends and readers,

We are tonight come to the end of our tour to northern England. You’ve heard enough of moors, great lakes and mountains; poet lairs, towns and libraries, museums;  towers and, castles.  So just the central three places left: Wallington House, the “seat” of the Trevelyan family, otherwise known for their activities in Cornwall and the English court; Vindolanda, surely one of the richest sites for excavation still on-going, the name translates into white or wintry field, with Hadrian’s Wall nearby; and Durham Cathedral, our last stop before driving back to Manchester, the airport hotel, and taking that long trip home.

The reader may notice I indulge my penchant for pictures by women artists in this last blog and end on a poem in a volume put together by a poet whose work I have elsewhere much recommended, Carol Ann Duffy.

Wallington House

Thursday our penultimate day. I will remember Wallington house for its picturesque gardens, the tasteful art objects in the house, the rooms themselves got up for us as living spaces (where people played this game, or read that), paintings by family members of themselves doing things (like painting a sketch of a chapel by a mid-century female Trevelyan),

Molly Trevelyan — a self-portrait I felt touched by

the doll house room (large ones there), a vast hall downstairs with tapestries, and another with murals:

The hall itself

Three plangent scenes

The one on the far right reminds us of the human enslaved labor which made Hadrian’s Wall.

I only understood the significance of these pictures as by three Pre-Raphaelites under the direction of Pauline Lady Trevelyan and who she was when I received a reply to this blog by Jacqueline Bannerjee: see Jacqueline Bannerjee’s review of John Batchelor’s Lady Trevelyan and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

Most of all the stories told about the last Trevelyan to own the place and live here affirm that he was a committed labor socialist and left this house and its treasures to the National Trust. Little sayings attributed to him were everywhere: generous, egalitarian, humane thoughts.

A dollhouse so large I’m sure a three year old would try to step in

The guides were unusually friendly, and one gardener made me feel I was back in Secret Garden when he took me into his confidence over how he needs more staff with him, and tales of upkeep, a little about the family. I felt closer here because of the Cornwall connection (foolish me): I knew more about the Trevelyans than our Road Scholar guides.

Wallington Greenhouse with flowers all around

The old stables at Wallington were now a cafe, the old servants’ headquarters now an extension to look at artefacts; there is another another walk by a rivulet, and a large grassy square for tents for people to visit and children to play upon

That day we were in a town where we were in an indoor farmers’, butchers’ and all sorts of objects sold marketplace; in the square a street performer. But I did not take down the names.

Vindolanda on Friday might be referred to as chef d’oeuvre of the whole tour. It’s an excavation site, living museum, once the enormous center piece or showcase of Roman Britain from the 2nd to the 7th century AD.

The standing building, once the home of Robin Birley’s family, is now a cultural and science center, restaurant and meditation (if you can find a good spot)..

While I enjoyed the film with Robin Birley as narrator telling of his life of excavation on this site, and the thrill of finding the many plaques buried deep, which turned out to (with the help of super-technologically expert machines of all sorts) to be letters from various people who lived on this site (invitations to dine, instructions, personal commentaries, lists of all sorts),

Online photo of a famous birthday invitation

and liked looking at all the artefacts (one statue looked like a cat, until I saw it was a dog) for me the most enjoyable rooms were about the earliest excavations by the family who developed the site: this was at the end of the 18th century, a clerical scholar named Eric Birley, began it: here was this man’s desk, that woman’s find. One could follow the Birleys into WW1; there was a period of neglect but in the 1960s, new interest was kindled and now the place is crawling with archeaologists, geologists, students seeking degrees, to say nothing of tourists and sometimes local people.

Online photo of the imagined fort at Vindolanda, from a western angle

I listened to two different tour guides about the life of the people and disposition of structures out on the open plain; also just watching a large crew of people.

We didn’t have that good a lecture, but I stopped and listened to a lecturer for another group. He talked of how the Romans coopted the local people: the men were offered Roman citizenship if they worked for so many years as soldiers and as soldiers they did many tasks beyond sheer military control. We were shown where people probably slept; the refectory; where when the Roman emperor came, he stayed. The Romans remained in Britain for several hundred years, mining mostly.

So it was like learning of several layers of civilization, a palimpsest you stripped piece after piece off.

Watching a group of people dig: I did this too, on another part of the middle level of the sites.

I just loved the bookstore, which was unusually rich in types of books relating to Roman Britain, the area of Northumberland, Latin itself. I bought as a present for Izzy the second volume of the Harry Potter books translated into Latin. She had the first translated into Latin! For myself a slender book with many pictures on Vindolanda. I can’t share these as my scanner no longer permits me to put anything on the glass but a single sheet, and I don’t want to cut up my books. I have succumbed to only one from Wallington (Molly Trevelyan because it touched my heart)

We drove from there to Hadrian’s Wall in two different places. At one we could look up to the top of the wall about the height of a fifth floor apartment building along one side was a stairway with no banister, nothing to hold onto and I decided I might not be up to that without a panic attack and I didn’t want to be a burden on anyone. So I went with the careful people to a second site where we came upon the wall from the back, gently up slope to its top. So I stood there with another woman and we looked down and into the distance where we could see a body of water.

These were the days that on the way back to Otterburn we took a chance, left the itinerary of Road Scholar and stopped at churches nearby. One an ancient 12th century building, still in use — it seemed to me it would be very cold in winter.

Another was built-up, looking quite comfortable within (plushy seats, heaters, handsome decors for chapels

Late Romanesque

The last two evenings at Otterburn Castle were also especially enjoyable, pleasant for me. I knew everyone by that time, was comfortable with most, could sit by the roaring fire in the stone reception room and read my email from my cell phone. One night we gathered in a front room. People had been asked to write a poem, or tell what was the most remarkable experience of the trip. Most people did one or the other, and there were some comic and revealing verses. I fell back on quotations from travel books by poetic authors I had found in one of the bookstores we visited. There was more drinking together as there had been the first night at Lindeth Howe Hotel.

Otterburn castle in the morning

When we said goodbye to the hotel and the very friendly staff (a family) on Saturday morning, there was one more place left for us to see: Durham Cathedral. It’s not on the way to Manchester, but we had all day so we took the detour to Durham. We did walk through a major mall in the city where we saw a good opera house, playhouse with modern plays, theater for movies, shopping, cafes and the like. Then a walk to some older buildings and onto the cathedral square.

Durham cathedral combines the function of commemorative local community place (the center of economic life in the 19th century was mining), with history museum, not only of the religious history of the church (beginning with St Cuthbert as usual), but fast forward to the World Wars of the 20th century as they affected the cathedral close and Durham,. It’s a religious site, with relics, tombs; it’s a tourist attraction and restaurant with garden, and art objects: the building encloses in it different centuries of styles, of figurines. There are tours twice a day and people hired to stop vistors photo-taking as well as answer questions about what visitors are seeing.

I was not surprised to see modern sculptures of Mary, a replica of the four monks carrying the corpse of St Cuthbert round about Northumberland until his body rested in this very cathedral, but I was surprised to see a couple of modern women artists. Even here the attempt to bring women out of obscurity continues. So there was a Paula Rego (whose work I like) imagining (from her Portuguese Catholic background) an old woman, aristocrat, with a young boy at her feet.

This time I was startled — though the images fit the grave and desperate ones of people all dressed up in other pictures by Rego. Here the faces are of skeletons, ghostly.

We stopped for tea somewhere, and then we sped down the vast highway at 70 miles an hour, reached the comfortable, but anonymous soulless hotel where we to dine one last time and then sleep. I had to get up by 6:00 am to make a plane at 9:00 am. I had made a friend of a man slightly younger than me to the point we agreed to try to travel together inside a larger Road Scholar tour group next May to Cornwall. So I’ll see more of it than I did two summers ago with a friend and her partner. After that I may stay to do research in the Royal Cornwall Museum on Winston Graham, and to London for the British library and (if I can get in) BBC archives for the scripts of the 1970s Poldark. Perhaps a dream, but my friend met me at that early hour, we had breakfast, coffee, bid one another adieu and off I went.

Adieu to Cumbria

Gentle reader, I cannot get myself to take pictures as I move through these trips, and don’t have many original informed thoughts to share, only the lectures to tell and my stenography is not what it was.  I wish I had more patience to describe, but such as I am and what I have been able to do is sincerely represented here.

I did unexpectedly have many Trollope sightings: he sets numerous scenes in Can You Forgive Her? and Lady Anna in Cumbria where his sister, Cecilia lived for a time with a husband and he and his mother visited. Langdale Pikes is mentioned more than once as a place to (he must’ve) wander[ed]:

And so another set of travel blogs comes to an end. I close with a poem by Patrick Henry (found in Carol Ann Duffy, Answering Back):

The Waiting Room

An empty coatstand in a public building, in August.
Even this is draped with your absence.
The rags of a seagull’s cry hang from it now.

Nothing is devoid of love.
How many years did I waste, listening out
for your voice?

…………… The park through a window,
swollen with leaves, smothers its coatstands well.

Thin veils of clouds, a city’s prayers,
fall away to the west. For a split second
I can see your eyes.

………………… But if I break my gaze
the gull has slipped its hook, the sea
is a long way away.

Lady Mary Lowther, A Waterfall (one of the watercolor artists whose work I saw in a library and then read about in a book I brought home with me: In the Line of Beauty: Early Views of the Lake District by Amateur Artists texts and choices by Stephen Hebron)

Ellen

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English Lake District and borders tour: Carlisle & Tullie Museum; Lannercost & Hermitage; Scotland & Lindisfarne (5)

Lindisfarne priory

Dear friends and readers,

I am slowly becoming startled at all the material I have to write about, all the pictures! The Road Scholar guides took us to see and experience a remarkable variety and number of places over the two weeks. I had intended at most 5 blogs and now it seems to me I have matter (could this be?) for 6! I also intended to rearrange my travelogue so as to group thematically similar places together (Roman Britain, the violent Reivers at the borders) but the experience I want to convey would be lost. It’s the intertwining of the disparate in the same landscape that makes for variety and therefore fun. I had come to see the Lake District and if I could have chosen would have gone home after the first week, but I admit that this second week was more riveting, the buildings more moving and the whole ambiance of the place redolent with deep past history

Cumbria lake

We have reached the remarkable 8th day, the Monday during the day when we traveled to Otterburn Castle, and went through a scenic Troutbeck around Ullswater lake, visited Carlisle, saw the castle, cathedral, spent a couple of hours in its Tullie Museum (just stuffed with treasures and art) and we will move through to the 10th day when we drove across the Northumberland coast and crossed into what’s left of Lindisfarne priory, its castle, lighthouse and church (not just a ruin but an active place).

This middle twentieth century statue of four monks carrying St Cuthbert in his tomb around Northumberland and Cumbria is also found in Durham Cathedral — one must be a replica or facsimile

We might make a central theme out of the stories told of St Cuthbert, first a reclusive monk, then a hermit, then a corpse fought over by warring factions of ethnic tribes (Romans versus celts, Romans versus saxons), whose relics were scattered as sacred sites around Cumbria. In many of the churches or museums we visited were monuments to him, his history re-told, a relic on display. Or Mary Queen of Scots, whose name came up now and again as this fleeing romantic figure (forgetting she meant to be a politician, was a writer, a poet of considerable ability, a failed intriguer and queen), someone who a particular site is “sacred” to (or built around to lure tourists). The Percys were mentioned again and again — a powerful family.

But I’d like to mention two writers: Walter Scott who was mentioned unobtrusively now and again as saying writing border ballads about the Reivers, visiting and writing poems or novels situated in this or that place or around this or that event. He unites lowlands with highlands, Hanover Protestant capitalism with nostalgic Scots customs. He collects folk verse as the “minstrelsy of the Scottish borders.” Marmion is “a tale of Flodden Fields.” And Basil Bunting, one of Jim’s favorite poets (I have a volume of his work and a slender literary study of him), from Northumberland. A poem he would recite:

A thrush in the syringa sings.

Hunger ruffles my wings, fear,
lust, familiar things

Death thrusts hard. My sons
by hawk’s beak, by stones,
trusting weak wings
by cat and weasel, die.

Thunder smothers the sky.
From a shaken bush I
list familiar things
fear, hunger, lust.

O gay thrush!

Winding all about the coast (Toutbeck, Lowther Castle, the ruins of one of Anne Clifford’s fortresses), we began to find ourselves in the 20th century as the large city of Carlisle came into view. We stayed in the center where one of the castles used to protect the place during the seige still looms over the highway

Carlisle Castle — it reminded of the Sforza castle in Milan without the relics and museum art

Walk in a circle away from the castle and you come upon the vast large cathedral, still going strong as a center of that part of the city’s community: a huge place very proud of its stained glass windows which survived many a war, some directed at them too. It goes back to the 12th century and probably took several centuries to reach its present form:

Walked through streets, small shops, bookstores, empty places too (parts of Carlisle are suffering economically), and we saw very ordinary kinds of attached houses that I remember in Leeds — and lived in myself. With bow windows, green sills, all red brick. Then the fabulous museum. It has several floors and different corridors. The exhibits ranged from burial grounds and relics from neolithic times, to the vikings, to several rooms of Roman life (one rebuilt piece of wall with a tape of life on Hadrian’s wall); one moved through the 15th to 17th century, with pictures of battles, people captured, time capsules of villages, and paintings from the wars between England and Scotland (stolen church bells). Skip past the 18th century to the 19th, with insides of trains replicated where one could sit. Sculpture and pictures of 19th century industrial areas, fishermen areas.

The 20th century was treated as history too, with costume and furniture areas. High art like the Pre-Raphaelites, romantic painters, and pictures going up into the 21st century of the local landscape. Everything chosen with care, taste; there was too much to see before it was time to have the best lecture of the tour: by a young lecturer-curate of the museum on the Reiver culture of the area.

A Peel tower we visited where one of our group got stuck up on top —

Brief summary: from the 14th to the 17th century the area south and north of the borders was dominated by local violent family groups who stole and murdered from one another for a living — the farming land was very poor. It’s a history of successive gov’ts attempting to repress these people by arrest, execution, and finally negotiations and treaties and extradiction, forced emigration, clearances. He told of famous battles whose names I had heard of. I had not realized that the Percys in Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays were part of these Reiver clans, and Hotspur one of them. Cattle raids are not romantic as a way of life. He claimed there was a code whereby the women were not raped but I don’t believe that for a moment. Imagine giving birth in such a culture? Women led a hard life. Few people could be long lived: kidnapping, ransom, with fierce uses of symbolic weaponry. I suddenly understood better those parts of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall where Cromwell threatens nobility who are not doing their “job” of pacifying the local population. The specifics of these local wars are found in Alistair Moffat’s The Reivers, and John Sadler and Rosie Serdiville’s The Battle of Flodden (1513), which place we later visited.

A memorial on Piper’s Hill overlooking Flodden field, near Branxton church — the day we walked it was very windy and cold even if sunny

The lecturer used phrases like “semi-idiocy” of the way many of these encounters were conducted, in several cases just like Culloden, a huge slaughter which could easily have been avoided (1542 Battle of Solway Marsh hundreds faced one another and proceeded to kill). Flodden was an absurdity brought on by Henry VIII having gone to fight in France (at great expense to no real purpose), so the Scottish king thought he could just take over without planning, care, or sustaining his army. He named names and told of historical figures and legends. The ascension of Mary Queen of Scot’s son, James VI who became James I of England began the end of the era as he proceeded methodically and consistently to abolish flexible border “laws,” execute, arrest, transport people, also take down the Peel towers (thick narrow castles for protection and from which people attacked one another, and where there were dungeons photographed above). The landscape and ancient buildings we were about to see were the remnants of these peoples.

I remember eating in a lovely cafeteria (with that comical statue of someone riding a bike high up) after which we drove to Lannercost Priory, without doubt the loveliest of all the churches I saw during the trip: it is high Anglican done in quiet good taste, late Romanesque. The windows were paid for by a patron of the Tullie Museum and were done by various Pre-Raphaelite painters:

This might be Edward Burne-Jones

The church is still in use, and inside is recorded recent history, but behind it are ruins where we saw a touching burial monument for a young child

All around outside a garden with flowering trees leading to a graveyard and back to the church. It was a quiet place, hardly any tourists (but us), and one could hear Gregorian chanting in the central nave.

We then drove onto Otterburn, the renovated 10th century castle we spent the next five nights in. In the common areas was a fire in the reception area, a small library like bar, a large common room, and the dining room. All around back, meadows and a small lake or pond. In the first blog I included a photo of my magnificently sized room with the tapestry over my bed

Kieder Forest —

On Tuesday we drove through Kieder Forest (huge old forest, with moors, meadows of flowers, also burnt woods, and sheep), saw the Keider castle once used as a Percy hunting lodge, now a place to have lunch and walk by the water,

and then onto the 13th century Hermitage castle, an astonishing building in Liddesdale, a guardhouse whose form was actuated by the felt terror of those inside against those outside and those in their dungeons. The most famous story is of Mary Queen of Scots visiting a wounded Bothwell here; there is a painting of Walter Scott sitting on some stone stairs and contemplating the place.

The hermitage looking up from one of the dirt floors

I surmize the picture of Scott at the Hermitage is an image of him superimposed onto one of the building stairs, so it seems to me just as appropriate to put here one of the 19th century illustrations to his novel The Black Dwarf where the Hermitage plays a role:

The building dates from the 1200s and was in active use until the late 16th century. It could never have been very comfortable, though an official guide fills the Douglas tower with imagined rooms of people going about daily ordinary activities of eating, sleeping, reading, entertaining themselves.

We drove on into Scotland the abbey town of Jedburgh where we visited a Norman abbey (ruined), a Victorian house said to be in which Mary Queen of Scots had stayed for an afternoon (numinous person), a grim jail (no longer in use) set up so you can see some of the desperate nature of the condition people were kept in, with their pathetic crimes life histories, and egregious punishments put down in different cells. The town seemed in good economic shape

We walked all around the abbey

We had quite a way to drive back from Scotland into Cumbria and Otterburn and broke the journey by stopping at a church which the guides took us inside. This below is not that church but another we spontaneously explored another day, similar in age and surprisingly also still in use

A twelfth century church — inside it is unheated, very plain

Dinner, rest, read, and now it was Day 10. Lindisfarne had been built up as truly special place and it took some trouble to get into — you had to plan to go through when the causeway was not flooded and to return before the waters rose again. Nonetheless we meandered through the landscape, driving by Bamburgh castle and looking at people bathing on the shore of the north sea it might have been.

Lots of tourists all around

Lunch in a small town and then onto Lindisfarne, which one of our guides persisted in calling “the holy island,” in honor of St Cuthbert, a central nowadays mythical figure

Lindisfarne estuary or causeway — crossing over into the island

The central story of Lindisfarne is of St Cuthbert told in a museum:

Lindisfarne became the base for Christian evangelism in the North of England and also sent a successful mission to Mercia. Monks from the Irish community of Iona settled on the island. Northumbria’s patron saint, Saint Cuthbert, was a monk and later abbot of the monastery, and his miracles and life are recorded by the Venerable Bede. Cuthbert later became Bishop of Lindisfarne. An anonymous life of Cuthbert written at Lindisfarne is the oldest extant piece of English historical writing. From its reference to “Aldfrith, who now reigns peacefully” it must date to between 685 and 704.[30] Cuthbert was buried here, his remains later translated[c] to Durham Cathedral (along with the relics of Saint Eadfrith of Lindisfarne). Eadberht of Lindisfarne, the next bishop (and saint) was buried in the place from which Cuthbert’s body was exhumed earlier the same year when the priory was abandoned in the late 9th century. Cuthbert’s body was carried with the monks, eventually settling in Chester-le-Street before a final move to Durham Cathedral

It was very crowded, worse than an amusement park, with children everywhere. At first I was put off, but after a while wandering about the shore I could try to imagine what the place might have been like with only a very few quiet people living here under rules of silent and ordered activity. The island has been inhabited for centuries

You walk up to the castle and then wander inside

The church windows from within

Our day was not ended. Late afternoon still around the borders of Scotland, we visited Etal castle (placed in a once strategic position), another heavily built this time 14th century dungeon like structure — though it had more of a feel of a place one could imagine people living in because of the wider floors — Flodden field is however nearby. In all these places there was a museum and a corridor of objects, history, maps and art objects one could look at. We learned of a rich woman who was responsible for single-handedly (with her money) lifting the impoverished abysmal lives of the people in the area to modest prosperity in the middle of the 19th century

The afternoon had turned sunny

I end with Bunting:

Weeping oaks grieve, chestnuts raise
mournful candles. Sad is spring
to perpetuate, sad to trace
immortalities never changing

Weary on the sea
for sight of land
gazing at the coming wave we
see the same wave;

drift on merciless reiteration of years;
descry no death; but spring
is everlasting
resurrection.
— Basil Bunting

One of several bookstores we passed by, one I did walk into …. Very good, lots of well-chosen books, a room for reading them ….

Ellen

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English Lake District and the border tour: Roman, ancient Celtic and Reivers Britain; more castles, houses, churches and mines (4)

Vindolanda

John Millais’s loving portrait of a young John Ruskin

Friends and readers,

Though I had heard of Hadrian’s Wall, I had never thought there must have been a world of people inside this wall the Romans were seeking to protect and control. During the two weeks, our group visited a number of sites revealing Roman settlements all around the north west and western parts of today’s Great Britain. They came to extract the minerals in the ground and take it back to Italy to be hammered into thousands of objects. On different days over the two weeks we rode and walked over included the mountain top Hardknott Roman Fort, smaller forts, and finally near and by Scotland the vast excavation site of Vindolanda, and Hadrian’s Wall.

The areas we covered in the two weeks further north have also known incessant violence from continual internecine warfare by groups of maraunders (gangs of tribes and family groups) who came to be called the Borders Reivers: they are recorded from medieval history as living by stealing and killing and we visited and went pass their forts, Peel towers (places of refuge), heavily built castle-like dungeons. Carlisle, the city is found amid what once were these scenes and it has a marvelous museum remembering its history from the Vikings, through the Romans onto feudal and Victorian-Edwardian times: Tullie House and Museum, and there we were treated to the best lecture we heard: on the Reivers and this area in the 15th through early 18th century. Here too we came into contact with earlier Celtic and early Christian worlds at Lindisfarne island.

Throughout we often took the equivalent of or actual old Roman roads newly fixed, once important arteries for transportation.  (We stayed off main highways.)  One of the guides maintained the first language written down in the British Isles which we can find is Latin. Art works, and celebrity souvenirs, guide books support this remembering of history which gives meaning and a long-term identity to Northumberland and Cumbria and their specific localities.

This basic outline of local particular history that we traveled through was varied with visits to family estates thrown open to the public and (if they had one) castles or manor houses. One day we visited another poet’s house, from which he drew and wrote, supported artists and working people’s causes: education for all, better housing, civil rights: John Ruskin’s Brantwood. There were Roman and early gothic churches and vast cathedrals, more museums, more mines still being worked or open to the public for display and sales. Art objects at all these places and guidebooks could help you remember what you saw — as well as use of your cell phone or ipad or fancier camera.

I have summed up what is to come so we can have perspective and move through the  rest of the two weeks more quickly.

Hardnott Pass – the picture is not large enough to show the ribbons of road or their steepness

Friday morning dubbed “a day of high adventure” we drove up a terrifying Hardknott Pass: a zizgag of a narrow path going ever higher but at corners demanding that the bus turn narrowly on its wheels in a new diagonal one way and then that, often at the edge of a steep incline, where the bus was really at risk of toppling over — except for intrepid guide drivers, excellent brakes and super-sturdy mini-buses.

Remains of Roman Fort

Once we got to the top, everyone had to have thick shoes, and we walked around an vast open space to look at the remains of Baths, forts, and living quarters for Roman soldiers and all those living with them (household, women, horses).

Here’s a piece of this place:

You’re right: it’s a stone wall.

We then drove to Muncaster Castle where we were treated very well.

Muncaster Castle

The present owner, married into the Penningtons (a family who go back to Elizabethan Britain) gave a lecture as he took us around the bottom part of the castle now set up for tourists and also groups coming in for occasions (weddings, barmitzvahs, parties) and then showed us where we could walk in the garden. Meant to amuse us, show the whirligig of time has not favored the aristocrats of England, the owner told us the present family lives in the basement. I’ll bet that’s a word that covers a suite of beautiful rooms below, complete with glass windows and window doors.

A sixteenth century bedroom on the top floor

I liked how simply and obviously the rooms were got up to display different functions. Inside the house were many genuinely fine works of art from the 16th through 18th century. There was a rich library of sets of books and rare books, which he said was undergoing digital cataloguing.

The Muncaster library

Then it was time to go to lunch. We ate in the castle in a room from which we could see the gardens. After lunch we could walk about (the grounds reminded me of Bignor Park which I saw during the Charlotte Smith conference) and we did and then at 2 a falconry show (every Tuesday and Friday afternoon). Basically three young adults, and the owner too, with three birds attached to each of the three falconers flew and played around him or her. It felt like more than a show because the birds were made to fly low and fly quite far in the sky. This part reminded me of Longleate where the public was supplied with entertainment (a zoo, a ferry, picnic grounds), only again something more select, unusual was done. I have read one of the Pennington’s diaries, and thought about how hard it was to run this house now as a business.

It was now later Friday afternoon we drove back over Corney Fell, where we made frequent stops, and I began to be aware of how many sheep we were continually seeing:

The scenery was spectacular: I felt like I was in a picture postcard:

Saturday’s big event was our visit to Brantwood house, John Ruskin’s home and we were led to dwell for a few hours on this man’s life, his friends, his work. First we saw a half hour film which emphasized his social and political activities (his schemes adumbrated the national health, public housing, pensions) and then plenty of time to explore his wonderfully appointed large house (a museum as private dwelling) and extensive gardens overlooking a lake.

A detail from John Millais’s portrait of Ruskin with a backdrop of the natural world — it is not sufficiently appreciated how often the Pre-Raphaelites painted the natural world in great careful detail

We were told Ruskin bought Brantwood sight unseen for £1500 (or was it £15,000?)

Brantwood house — 1862; he lived there the rest of his life with a small band of family, friends, servants

In each of the rooms there were albums with writing and pictures commemorating eras in Ruskin’s life, drawings and paintings, many by him, many by friends, often of nature using primitive cameras to become more exact.

Brantwood room: note the Pre-Raphaelite like pictures

We saw the furniture he used, the musical instruments everyone played, his desk.

All round the house were smaller buildings with exhibits (on birds, an ice house, young artists today). It really took a couple of hours to explore. The effect was to reveal how much richer he was than anyone else around him. But he also was much beloved and befriended: I felt all the people living around him were not faking. He really was a deeply kind and decent man who made accurate pictures of nature.

The next phase was lunch on a garden terrace where room was found for a restaurant overlooking the lake:

From there we caught a Victorian looking steam boat and rode across the lake.

The lake we crossed seen from on high …

We looked at the Coniston Falls, said to be the inspiration for his famous poem of daffodils; click here to read Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere journal on Ullswater. This time the later afternoon stop was Langdale, where we stopped to take pictures and look out at the valley:

I learned what was meant by a pike (a word Trollope often uses in his descriptions of Cumberland in Can You Forgive Her? and Lady Anna — his sister had a house there when she was married where his mother visited and presumably he too):

Langdale pikes

Sunday was dubbed a free day. The guides had a day off and got some needed rest.  The group was invited to take ourselves to the different ferries crossing different parts of Lake Windermere and going to different towns — we were given maps and tickets to a fery.  I had had enough of company, 6 and more hours a day on the mini-bus, staring at lakes, and it looked like it would rain (it often did) so chickened out. I sat by a warm and pretty (though faked) fire (it looked like wood burning but was a gas fire) in one of the common rooms and read Voltaire’s Lettres Philosophiques. In the afternoon I took a walk by myself. I discovered I couldn’t get far and how much we did need those mini-buses and shuttles to reach any where near for a town.

The next day, Monday, we all rose early, packed, and with an extra bus for luggage, drove a number of hours to get to our second hotel, a converted 10th century castle, Otterburn in Cumbria, whose picture of which I supplied in my first blog, but here is a publicity shot, meant to allure people to come to the place as a hotel — inside it is much renovated and much of it rooms rebuilt during the later 19th and 20th centuries, though a central block is 13th century and has a large still working fireplace (renovated 18th century) where I would sit in the later afternoon:

It’s worth noting that most of the castle ruins we saw were in Cumbria, further north near the border, most of the ancient small churches, all of the dungeons

A castle ruin we passed by at some point during the following week

Otterburn church near the castle:

Another publicity shot

We had entered the area historically once of high violence and more primitive conditions, about which I’ll be writing next time. I bring out this perspective to distinguish the Lake District from the border country.  In the lake district we were shown trains and how today too a privately run one is kept up to unite small towns. We went to libraries and sites “sacred” to writers, poets, artists. The landscapes were the epitome of beauty.  In the border lands one finds many ugly bleak places, dungeons, towers, mostly ruined or uninhabited castles, castles whose function is utterly changed. Among the rare ones still a family, Alnwick Castle, now known for housing Harry Potter at school on films, one episode in Downton Abbey, and three in the older TV farce, Blackadder. For me the context is still the great 18th century painter, Canaletto whose painting makes it so idyllic, so appealingly picturesque:

Antonio Canaletto, Alnwick Castle, 1747

But it took the real form it did because its origins and its present place, however peaceful today, and just in Northumberland, are in these more northern border places:

Alnwick Castle photographed by a Road Scholar pilgrim from a bus stop

We didn’t go into Alnwick because you did have to make an appointment and to see each part of the castle was separate fee on top of the parking fee. Nota bene, gentle reader.

I will be attending a course on the poetry of Robert Frost in a couple of weeks. Now thinking about how I became an English major, and how my choice to become an English major was clinched when I read Wordsworth and yes the other Romantic poets (also Lamb, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley), and how I’ve ended up where I am, in solitude, going on a holiday to these sites with a group of pilgrim-strangers as friends, I’ll end on Frost’s great poem,

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

But my choice was not so free. I chose the road less traveled by because out of my class origins, my gender, my character I was not able even to conceive of following the one most people chuse (18th century spelling).

Ellen

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English Lake District & the borders tour: more Wordsworth sites; Beatrix Potter (3)

Famous Photo of Beatrix Potter at Hill Top House

Me in the same porch at Hill Top House

Dear friends,

Another day of remarkable site-seeing and experiences to report, this time with many more photos sent me by one of our Canterbury pilgrims. This day was another partly devoted to places Wordsworth lived in, was schooled, visited, made a garden, and partly devoted to Beatrix Potter. We visited castles and ruins. Everything was nearby everything else, including her house where we were staying, the (much enlarged), Lindeth Howe Country Hotel near Bowness, Lake Windermere:

Lindeth Howe Hotel, seen from the side

Bowness, Windermere, 6 in the morning

We started out early in the morning (after breakfast) by driving to and going into the fantasy-built Wray Castle, never a fortress, but made by a man imagining one: sort of something drawn from his movie-going, and impressive in thickness of stones, size and nowadays cared for by the National Trust, gardens, and places for tourists to picnic and play summer games:

A short ride and we were at Potter’s house and her lovely garden, a real place: here she did much of her artistic children’s books, and her serious botany drawings, and landscapes. One could see it was a summer home, open, surrounded by nature.

As you are going in

Potter’s odd piano

I had read much of Linda Lane’s book, went to a lecture by her on Potter, wrote a foremother poet blog for her, and of course seen the excellent biopic, Miss Potter with Renee Zellweger. The guides in the rooms (as in Dove Cottage) told us as much as they could, quickly. I felt it was a comfortable house.

Potter’s front room

There was a landscape by her on one wall, her children’s books, and I instance these found on the Internet as like what I saw:

“The place is changed now, and many familiar faces are gone, but the greatest change is myself. I was a child then, I had no idea what the world would be like. I wished to trust myself on the waters and the sea. Everything was romantic in my imagination. The woods were peopled by the mysterious good folk. The Lords and Ladies of the last century walked with me along the overgrown paths, and picked the old fashioned flowers among the box and rose hedges of the garden — Beatrix Potter

New Sidmouth

“Thank God I have the seeing eye, that is to say, as I lie in bed I can walk step by step on the fells and rough land seeing every stone and flower and patch of bog and cotton pass where my old legs will never take me again — Beatrix Potter

Sidmouth beach, with memories of herself drawing

Not far from Hill Top is the town of Hawkshead where Wordsworth went to a famous once-respected boys’ school, where he lived with Ann Tyson, and which is today a place tourists come to hear a lecture about education in this building, and to the town for summer holidays, and shopping. Outside the school is a church (part of it converted):

There were two floors, one for the lower boys, and the other the boys about to go to college, two rooms for tutors. Here the huge one room downstairs from one angle:

A quick resume of an entertaining lecture: the school lasted from the later 16th to later 19th century; it went from 6 am to 5 pm, 6 days a week, with a 2 hour lunch in the center of the day. Compulsory church on Sunday; the 99-100 boys on 6 different levels recited in different parts of the room; during lunch they drank beer, participated in ritual terrorizing, torturing and murder of birds (cock-fighting). Birch was used, 10 and 12 strokes depending on the infraction; it was a noisy, busy, smokey place, with tallow candles it stunk (they went outside the building to relieve themselves). Originally funded by Edwin Sandys, there was a strong low church bias, and it was attached to St John’s Cambridge. We were shown the lists of headmasters (some remarkable scholars of their eras). It was finally closed for good in 1909. It was clear to me from what the lecturer was saying that there would have been no room for sensitivities; they were educating gentlemen trained in and by violence as well as social conformities and expectations of the upper class. As I left I spoke briefly to the lecturer and told him of my husband at a public school and how he was caned at his public school 5 times and in his forties still had welts on his hands. I was impressed positively by the lecturer suddenly dropping the comic wry stance and looking grave at the realities of such places

Following Peter, the group then walked about Hawkshead, saw Ann Tyson’s cottage, and then we all drove to Grassmere (in 2 mini-buses) for lunch and some brief walking about.

There were beautiful baskets of hanging flowers in both towns

I did not take many photos of walking about, Grasmere or Hawkshead, but today have some photos from my friend from yesterday afternoon at Keswick where we stopped for lunch the day before and wandered about town, and place them here:

Keswick restaurant

The Keswick church where I saw drawings and photos from the time mining was central to the village

The Slate museum we also saw yesterday which has replaced the mining trade once vital to the area

It was a very different world when mining and such schools and churches were central to the economic structure of the towns. Now it’s the town landscapes and lakes: tourism, agriculture and sheep (I’ll have photos of sheep next time):

Our next stop was the Armitt Museum, associated with Beatrix Potter because she donated much money and many of her books; it is now maintained as a research and reference library and museum for exhibits for local paintings (watercolors): that day there was much on (as in the other places women were emphasized) Anne Clough, Harriet Martineau, early suffragettes and an exhibit of watercolors by Kurt Schwitters (1847-1948) and William Heelis (1870-1940). They had a book (some well-chosen books to be bought) and tourist shop.

Graham Kilmer’s lecture was on the history of the library and cultures of the surrounding town in the 19th century and until today:

The history begins with the Armitt sisters who were learned women (Louisa a historian, polymath, musicologist). It was at first a circulating library. Wordsworth belonged; it attracted antiquarians, county families; Ruskin was a significant influence (he lived not far off), a superstar for his writing, art and art criticism and social and political activism on behalf of working people. Claudian glasses were not forgotten, and the picturesque part of the aesthetic. The library has sets of old volumes (e.g., Gentleman’s Magazine). Mr Kilmer took off the shelves a book on volcanic greenstone, what has been found from pre-history (weapons, pots, symbolic objects); another about a Roman fort’s excavation. He told the story of Ruskin’s conflict with Whistler as indicative of the culture. Photography became an important part of the collection starting in 1865 (a fundamental change), he said 17,000 unnamed plates. In 1997 it was re-organized into a reference library, with 2 part time librarians and a dozen volunteers. The library’s focus is the lakes, their geology, geography, history, local writers.

Rydal Mount house seen from the gardens

The piece de resistance of the day came nextL: we drove to Rydal Mount, which Wordsworth rented by 1809, and where he, Dorothy, Mary and their children and the friends lived and worked for the rest of their lives. The live-in caretaker, a curator, and now expert in Wordsworth took us round the beautiful gardens telling of the stages the garden went through. Wordsworth and his gardener (there was a photo of the man) aimed for a variety of perspectives, to have space to see the lake below, and that day the sun as streaming in. There is a mound, a greenhouse, a walk in the shrubberies.

In the house he told us of Wordsworth’s later life as reflected in the house, and that he felt the life lived in this house has been neglected in biographies. Rydal Mount was lived in for far far more time, where Wordsworth wrote original first drafts but also revised and revised.

We were permitted to go round the main rooms of the house where the Wordsworths lived: we saw beautifully kept dining room, library, drawing rooms, Wordsworth and Mary’s bedroom, Dora’s bedroom. Much of the furniture is suggestively left so you can imagine (if you think to) what the people were doing here and there; often reading, writing, meditating on memory. There was a very somber room at the top of the stairs where we saw a bed for a very sick person and all sorts of 19th century medical paraphernalia: this was to remember that in her last years Dorothy suffered from senile dementia and was taken care of (waited on hand and foot) by the Wordsworths and servants in that room. The top of the house or attic.

The meadows around Hawkshead close to where Wordsworth was located

We had dinner there as a group and one of us got up and read Wordsworth’s famous daffodil poem (“I wandered lonely as a cloud”). At the end of the two weeks some of the people said this evening was finest we had. For myself I don’t find this famous lyric what I value Wordsworth for, but rather his other early narratives about broken soldiers, people ejected from their houses, beggars; some of the sonnets; his meditative poetry, the visionary sequences in “Tintern Abbey,” the Prelude, and some of his later sterner verse.

I once wrote a paper on these ekphrastic stanzas, written after his brother John’s death in 1805, probably while Wordsworth lived in Rydal Mount brought to their present state:

George Beaumont (1753-1827), Peele Castle in a Storm

Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm, Painted by Sir George Beaumont

I was thy neighbour once, thou rugged Pile!
Four summer weeks I dwelt in sight of thee:
I saw thee every day; and all the while
Thy Form was sleeping on a glassy sea.

So pure the sky, so quiet was the air!
So like, so very like, was day to day!
Whene’er I looked, thy Image still was there;
It trembled, but it never passed away.

How perfect was the calm! it seemed no sleep;
No mood, which season takes away, or brings:
I could have fancied that the mighty Deep
Was even the gentlest of all gentle things.

Ah! then , if mine had been the Painter’s hand,
To express what then I saw; and add the gleam,
The light that never was, on sea or land,
The consecration, and the Poet’s dream;

I would have planted thee, thou hoary Pile
Amid a world how different from this!
Beside a sea that could not cease to smile;
On tranquil land, beneath a sky of bliss.

Thou shouldst have seemed a treasure-house divine
Of peaceful years; a chronicle of heaven;—
Of all the sunbeams that did ever shine
The very sweetest had to thee been given.

A Picture had it been of lasting ease,
Elysian quiet, without toil or strife;
No motion but the moving tide, a breeze,
Or merely silent Nature’s breathing life.

Such, in the fond illusion of my heart,
Such Picture would I at that time have made:
And seen the soul of truth in every part,
A steadfast peace that might not be betrayed.

So once it would have been,—’tis so no more;
I have submitted to a new control:
A power is gone, which nothing can restore;
A deep distress hath humanised my Soul.

Not for a moment could I now behold
A smiling sea, and be what I have been:
The feeling of my loss will ne’er be old;
This, which I know, I speak with mind serene.

Then, Beaumont, Friend! who would have been the Friend,
If he had lived, of Him whom I deplore,
This work of thine I blame not, but commend;
This sea in anger, and that dismal shore.

O ’tis a passionate Work!—yet wise and well,
Well chosen is the spirit that is here;
That Hulk which labours in the deadly swell,
This rueful sky, this pageantry of fear!

And this huge Castle, standing here sublime,
I love to see the look with which it braves,
Cased in the unfeeling armour of old time,
The lightning, the fierce wind, the trampling waves.

Farewell, farewell the heart that lives alone,
Housed in a dream, at distance from the Kind!
Such happiness, wherever it be known,
Is to be pitied; for ’tis surely blind.

But welcome fortitude, and patient cheer,
And frequent sights of what is to be borne!
Such sights, or worse, as are before me here.—
Not without hope we suffer and we mourn.

One should perhaps remember that none of this needs to be there; all of it takes people rescuing it, maintaining and preserving it. Not just money but organizations of people who understand what they are doing and why and are funded and backed up by laws and customs. So just about every place we were taken to as our goal was either a National Trust site or partly supported by them and other like local foundations. We were seeing history, or the remnant of what once was plucked out of its context and made a tourist experience. We were in places on the margins, places “left behind” the modern cities most of us (the customers of Road Scholar) live in, places with cultural status. One should think about why these places have this status, how they relate to the vast “bottom” part of our deeply unequal society, and are part of a fantasy life, pieces of a “shared imaginary repertoire of the dominant culture” (Rob Shields, Places on the Margin).

Shop either in Grasmere or Hawkshead and not far from the parking lot — to catch tourists

Another on the bus route — the sign in glittering gold and blue says Peter Rabbit and Friends and the window is filled with glowing figurines of the small animals in the tales

Ellen

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