Mrs Dalloway, a novel by Virginia Woolf

 

Mrs Dalloway, a short novel written in 1925 by Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is an excellent treatment of the problem of loneliness and love, a theme which preoccupied the author.

The story opens as the heroine, society hostess Clarissa Dalloway, is making preparations for giving a party. Parties are designed to bring people together, but this novel raises the question of whether one can be even lonelier in a crowd.

As she moves about London doing her shopping, every encounter she has produces a response that is coloured by her earlier experiences, so that as we follow her stream of consciousness we learn everything that matters of her previous history. The events of her day are organised in a way that raises many questions about the possibilities of communication.

We also learn about the events in the day of Mr and Mrs Septimus Warren Smith, who never actually meet Mrs Dalloway, but there is a symbolic relationship between them, which is emphasised when one of the guests at her party, a specialist who has been treating Mr Smith, tells her about his suicide and produces in her a feeling of identification with the unfortunate man.

Septimus Warren Smith goes mad because, as a result of his experiences in World War I, he has lost all sense of contact with other people, is driven into the isolated emptiness of himself, and is dragged back by representatives of crude conventionality who imagine that by imposing their artificial social norms on him they can restore his sense of communication.

The pattern of the novel is woven with considerable delicacy, and the various elements from Mrs Dalloway’s past are brought into the present through a variety of persuasive devices. The prose is carefully cadenced and is, at times, almost poetic although never rhetorical. The individual sense of significance which provides the basis for the plot pattern is conveyed through style and imagery, through the suggestiveness and cunning of the language.

© John Welford

The original Mad Hatter

 

One of the best-known characters in Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” is the Mad Hatter, with whom Alice takes tea together with his companions the March Hare and the Dormouse.

By the time that Alice in Wonderland was published in 1865 it was well known that people who made hats often fell victim to an illness that displayed early symptoms of what could be termed madness, such as irritability, a lack of patience, difficulty in thinking or concentrating, and changes in movement, which could become coarse or jerky.

These symptoms resulted from long-term mercury poisoning, which was an occupational hazard for hat makers who used a form of mercury to treat felt. When used in an enclosed space, the mercury gave off vapours that were then inhaled. The expression “mad as a hatter” became commonly used in Victorian England and would have been well known to readers of “Alice”.

However, it seems highly likely that Carroll had a real person in mind – not a hatter – as his model for the Mad Hatter character.

This was Theophilus Carter, a well-known furniture dealer who lived near Oxford and, like the Mad Hatter in Tenniel’s illustrations for “Alice”, always wore a top hat.

Carter was renowned for his eccentric ideas and inventions. At the 1851 Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace built in London’s Hyde Park, he exhibited his ‘alarm clock bed’, a contraption that woke the sleeper by literally throwing him out of bed at a pre-determined time – an idea that, very much later, also occurred to Nick Park, the creator of the stop-motion characters Wallace and Gromit.

Not only would Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) have seen Carter’s invention at the exhibition, he would also have been familiar with the latter’s presence around the streets of Oxford, which was where he lived.

The prevalence of furniture in the Tea Party episode – the table, the writing-desk and the armchair, as well the fascination with time, also point to a strong connection with Theophilus Carter.

© John Welford

The Well of Loneliness: a novel by Radclyffe Hall

 

Radclyffe Hall (1880-1943) was a British poet and novelist who is best remembered for her fifth novel “The Well of Loneliness”, published in 1928. This was the first English novel to openly describe lesbian relationships. It led to an obscenity trial and a 20-year ban in Great Britain. It was also banned in the United States, but for a much shorter period.

The novel is the story of Stephen – a girl whose aristocratic father wanted a son and whose mother is frightened by her boyishness. She hates wearing dresses, has a series of passionate crushes on older women, and declares herself an “invert”, which was the term used by the sexologist Havelock Ellis to describe homosexuality.

Stephen drives an ambulance during World War I and finds love with Mary Llewellyn. When the war is over, the two women move to Paris and throw themselves into what would now be called gay and lesbian culture. However, happiness is impossible for them and their lifestyle is described by the novelist as being tragic and self-destructive.

The book was prosecuted by the British Home Office under the 1857 Obscene Publications Act. During the trial, Hall received support from several noted writers including Virginia Woolf, George Bernard Shaw, Rebecca West, Arnold Bennett and EM Forster. Despite the book describing no behaviour more explicit than kissing, the mention of the protagonists “not being divided” when spending the night together was probably enough to lose the case for the author.

Copies of the novel were sold in Paris and smuggled back to Britain, so it got a fairly wide readership. Reviews were generally positive and Hall received a large number of letters and telegrams of support. It was a bestseller in the United States and was selling around 100,000 copies a year internationally by the time of Hall’s death from cancer in 1943.

The Well of Loneliness was, for many years, the best known lesbian novel in the world. The attempts to ban it only increased its visibility and created greater awareness of female homosexuality. Even today – when the book’s attitudes and language seem dated and its message depressing – it still provokes discussion and academic debate and features in accounts of coming out.

© John Welford

Matthew Lewis: author of "The Monk"

 

Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775-1818) was a writer known to the literary world solely for one novel, The Monk, which appeared in 1796. This novel made such a dramatic impression that Lewis is often referred to simply as “Monk Lewis”.

The fashion for what became known as Gothic horror was born at the end of the 18^th century thanks mainly to the work of Ann Radcliffe, whose novels included The Mysteries of Udolfo (1797) which was satirised by Jane Austen in her early novel Northanger Abbey.

Lewis was undoubtedly the most skilful of Radcliffe’s imitators, although the Monk is very different in tone to her novels. He incorporated elements of Shakespearean and Jacobean drama, German Romanticism, folklore, the writings of the Marquis de Sade and Samuel Richardson’s “Clarissa”. He abandoned all restraint in his violent tale of ambition, murder and incest, set in a Spanish Monastery.

The protagonist, Ambrosio, struggles to balance monastic vows with his personal ambitions, giving way to temptation and committing sexual crimes which he covers up with murder. He falls victim to the Inquisition and is sentenced to death. He finally makes a pact with the Devil and ends up being hurled to damnation.

This sensational mixture of the supernatural and the carnal, so daring in its treatment of sexual fantasy and violence, was, unsurprisingly, extremely popular when it was published, although it attracted accusations of obscenity. Lewis was forced to tone it down when the third edition was published.

The Monk could scarcely be regarded as great literature, but it was powerfully written and contained powerful insights into criminal psychology and erotic neurosis. By going so extravagantly over the top with the carnage and horror, Lewis made it perfectly clear that his novel belonged firmly in the realms of fantasy.

Monk Lewis earned his place in literary history for his originality, but he will never be regarded as anything more than an entertainer.

© John Welford

Robert Browning, 19th-century British poet

On 12^th December 1889 the poet Robert Browning died in Venice at the age of 77.

It has to be admitted that Browning’s poetry is not read by many people today, and most people would be hard pressed to name any of his poems. Perhaps one that might come to mind is “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”, and others that deserve to be remembered are “My Last Duchess” and “Home Thoughts from Abroad”, but most modern readers have little patience with very long poems, which was the format in which Browning specialised.

It must also be admitted that some of Browning’s poetry is not easy to understand, and people today, if they read poetry at all, do not want the intellectual challenge that Browning sometimes poses.

Indeed, there is a story to the effect that Browning himself had problems with Browning’s poetry! In later life he was asked for the meaning of a particularly obscure passage in an early work, “Sordello”. He read the lines aloud and then said: “When I wrote that, God and Robert Browning knew what it meant – now only God does”.

Robert Browning is probably best known for the romantic story of how he wooed and won the poet Elizabeth Barrett. She was an invalid who was fiercely protected by her father, who refused to allow the love affair, deeply felt on both sides, to proceed. Eventually the lovers married in secret and escaped to Italy, where they stayed for 16 years until Elizabeth died and Robert returned to England.

On his return Browning wrote what is probably his best work, a dramatic monologue entitled “The Ring and the Book” that tells the story of a 17^th century murder and trial in Rome. Sadly, it has few readers today. It prompted the 20^th century writer Anthony Burgess to say: “We all want to like Browning, but we find it very hard”.

© John Welford

Samuel Johnson, compiler of the first English dictionary

Samuel Johnson, a self-confessed harmless drudge, died on 13^th December 1784 at the age of 75. He had been one of the outstanding literary figures of his age, renowned not only for his writing but his witty sayings and put-downs, most of which were recorded by his long-time friend and travelling companion James Boswell.

Johnson’s output as a writer was not all that great, mostly comprising essays and criticism in his journals “The Rambler” and “The Idler”. He wrote some notable poems, one novel (Rasselas – written in haste to raise money to pay for his mother’s funeral), and a travelogue describing the tour of Scotland that he undertook with Boswell.

However, Johnson’s major achievement was the composition of his “Dictionary of the English Language”, a monumental work that contained 40,000 entries, all of them produced by Johnson himself. Many of the entries contained comments and asides that would not be allowed in a modern dictionary and show evidence of humour. These include his definition of “lexicographer” as “a maker of dictionaries; a harmless drudge”.

Johnson is often referred to as “Doctor Johnson”, but his formal education was limited (he had had to abandon his studies at Oxford University due to lack of funds) and the doctorate was an honorary one from Trinity College Dublin.

Many of the sayings attributed to Samuel Johnson have reached us via James Boswell, who wrote a memorable “Life of Samuel Johnson” as well as his own “Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides”. These include “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money”, “When a man is tired of London he is tired of life” and “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel”.

© John Welford

Beatrix Potter, creator of Peter Rabbit

Beatrix Potter, who is best known as the creator of Peter Rabbit, was born on 28^th July 1866, in London. Her father was a lawyer who later inherited a large amount of money. Beatrix was christened Helen Beatrix, but, because Helen was her mother’s name, she used the name Beatrix throughout her life.

Beatrix had a lonely childhood, often visited by poor health. She filled much of her time with painting and drawing. During visits to Scotland and her grandfather’s house in Hertfordshire, Beatrix and her younger brother became fascinated with animals and birds, which Beatrix in particular learned to record on paper.

When she was 16 she paid her first visit to the Lake District of North-West England, and her interests extended to fossils and fungi. Indeed, she became something of an expert on the latter subject, having a paper read at the Linnean Society of London in 1897.

When in the Lakes, Beatrix wrote letters to the children of her former governess, illustrated with pictures of animals, and those animals became the subjects of simple little stories. It was in one of these letters, written in 1893, that Peter Rabbit made his first appearance. Beatrix made efforts to get the story published, but she eventually had to do this herself, producing an edition of 250 copies of The Tale of Peter Rabbit in December 1901, which had most of the illustrations printed in black and white. She did the same with The Tailor of Gloucester.

The breakthrough came when Frederick Warne and Co., and particularly Frederick’s son Norman, approached Beatrix with an offer to publish Peter Rabbit if she could produce colour illustrations. This was very much a speculative bid by Warne, but it proved to be spectacularly successful, with a total of nineteen stories being published by 1913 (there are 23 titles in the complete series). The Warne imprint (although the firm is now a part of Penguin Books) continues to publish the series to this day.

The close association between Beatrix and Norman Warne led eventually to an engagement in 1905, when she was 39, but Norman was already seriously ill with leukaemia and he died only four weeks later.

The royalties from the first few published stories were enough to allow Beatrix to buy a Lake District farm, Hill Top, where she spent as much time as she could, although she was still caring for her elderly parents in London.

In October 1913, at the age of 47, Beatrix married her solicitor, William Heelis, although she continued to write under the name Beatrix Potter.

In later life her main interest became farming, and she built a substantial landholding by acquiring farms as they came on to the market, always with a view to maintaining them as working ventures that preserved traditional ways of farming as much as possible. This included the preservation of breeds of sheep that might otherwise have disappeared, particularly the Herdwick strain.

She worked very closely with the National Trust, alerting them to properties and tracts of land that they might be interested in acquiring, and working tirelessly to raise the funds with which this could be done. For example, in 1930 she bought a 5000 acre estate on condition that the Trust bought half of it from her as soon as they had the funds. Much of the unspoilt beauty of the Lake District that tourists and walkers enjoy today is directly due to Beatrix Potter’s efforts.

Beatrix Potter died on 22^nd December 1943, of a heart attack, at the age of 77. Her substantial landholdings were left in her will to the National Trust, with the condition that only Herdwick sheep were to be allowed on the farms. However, it is the abiding charm of Peter Rabbit and his colleagues, whose exploits have been translated into thirteen languages, for which the name of Beatrix Potter will be best remembered.

© John Welford

T S Eliot, poet and playwright

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on 26^th September 1888 in St Louis, Missouri, USA, the seventh and easily the youngest child of Henry Ware Eliot, a businessman, and Charlotte Champe Stearns, a teacher and amateur poet.

After being schooled at Smith Academy he went to Harvard University in 1906, although he was only moderately successful as a student, despite discovering the world of poetry.

In 1910 he spent a postgraduate year in Paris at the Sorbonne, where he was introduced to European culture and the conflicting philosophical and political ideas of the age. He returned to Harvard in 1911 to undertake a doctoral level study of philosophy.

He had already started to write some of his best-known poems at this stage, including “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock”, “Portrait of a Lady” and “Rhapsody on a Windy Night”.

His philosophical studies were wide-ranging, but he became particularly interested in exploring states of consciousness. This led him to study Eastern thought as well as Western, and to be critical of the emerging subjects of psychology and sociology. Among those who influenced him at Harvard were William James, Bertrand Russell and George Santayana.

The influence of his studies on the poetry he wrote at that time can be seen from the themes of madness and unreality that pervade such works as “The Descent from the Cross”, but he found this work to be sterile and unsatisfying.

In 1914 Eliot travelled to Europe, firstly to Germany and then to Britain, his plans being somewhat changed by the outbreak of war. Ezra Pound was shown some of Eliot’s manuscript poems and was greatly impressed, visiting Eliot in London.

Eliot was also introduced to Vivien Haigh-Wood, and they were married in June 1915, which nearly caused a rift with his parents. This weakening of family ties, plus the separation caused by the war, led Eliot to see his future as belonging on the eastern side of the Atlantic. Despite finishing his doctoral thesis, he was unwilling to travel to Harvard to defend it, and so never became “Dr Eliot”.

Eliot needed to support himself in London, starting with teaching and moving on to reviewing and lecturing. He eventually obtained a more regular income by joining Lloyds Bank, which had a need for his foreign language skills. This in turn gave him the impetus to resume his career as a poet, and “Prufrock and Other Observations” was published in late 1917.

Eliot’s connections, particularly with Bertrand Russell who had offered the Eliots their first married home, enabled him to meet some of the brightest stars of the English intellectual firmament of the time. These included members of the Bloomsbury Group, as well as W B Yeats and Wyndham Lewis.

1920 saw the publication of “The Sacred Wood”, a volume of critical essays that proved to be highly influential in shifting the focus of English criticism for the 20^th century.

However, things now took a turn for the worse. Eliot’s father had died in 1919, thus removing the chance for father and son to be reconciled. Vivien’s health deteriorated, and Eliot found the strain too much for him. He therefore, in 1921, took three months out to recuperate, spending part of the time in Switzerland.

This gave him the opportunity he needed to finish a project that had been brewing since 1914 and had been taking shape for a couple of years. The was to be “The Waste Land”, an avant-garde work for the Jazz Age, using highly original rhythmic devices and countless literary, historical and mythological allusions to achieve deep emotional insights. It therefore had much in common with Joyce’s “Ulysses”, which was published in book form in the same year, 1922.

Eliot was invited to become the first editor of a new literary magazine, “The Criterion”, and in 1925 he joined the board, as literary editor, of publishers Faber and Faber, which was the chance he needed to turn his back on banking. From this position, Eliot was able to exert a considerable influence on the British poetry scene in the 20^th century.

Eliot now underwent two conversions. One was to the Church of England, into which he was baptised in 1927, and the other was to Great Britain, taking British citizenship in the same year.

His religion, like his politics, now took a distinctly conservative tone as he aligned himself with the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England. He took his religion very seriously, becoming a churchwarden and giving lectures at church events.

His poetry also turned more towards religious themes (although religion had always been present in much of his work to date). Notable poems from this time include “The Journey of the Magi”, “A Song for Simeon” and “Ash Wednesday”.

The writing of drama began to dominate Eliot’s literary output from about 1934, although “Sweeney Agonistes” had been started (it was never finished) as early as 1923.  His first completed dramas had overtly religious themes, namely “The Rock” in 1934 and “Murder in the Cathedral” in 1935, both commissioned by Anglican bishops.

His later plays were designed more for the commercial theatre, notable ones being “The Family Reunion” in 1939 and “The Cocktail Party” in 1949.

Just as “The Waste Land” had been precipitated by a crisis in Eliot’s personal life, the same could be said of his other “greatest work”, namely “Four Quartets”.  He found it impossible to maintain full marital relations with Vivien from about 1928, and in 1930 he decided to separate from her, although this was against her will. Vivien was eventually committed to a mental hospital in 1938. Thomas became very friendly with an old flame of his, Emily Hale, especially when she spent the summer of 1934 in the Cotswolds and they visited the abandoned manor house of Burnt Norton together. However, divorce was out of the question for the convinced high Anglican, and so Thomas and Emily never married.

“The Criterion” ceased publication on the outbreak of war in 1939, and Eliot’s war service consisted of being an air raid warden. His sombre mood at a sombre time led to his writing of the Quartets, “Burnt Norton” (finished back in 1935) being followed by “East Coker” (1940), “The Dry Salvages” (1941) and “Little Gidding” (1942).

The Quartets marked the virtual completion of Eliot’s poetical works, as he concentrated after the war on drama and criticism. The latter included the influential “Notes Toward a Definition of Culture” in 1948.

Eliot was recognised far and wide as a leading light of the literary scene both before and after the Second World War, accepting invitations to give prestigious lecture series on both sides of the Atlantic, and receiving a multitude of academic and other honours. These included the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize for Literature, both in 1948.

Vivien died in 1947, and Thomas married his secretary in 1957. He died of emphysema on 4^th January 1965, aged 76.  His ashes were buried at East Coker, the ancestral home of the Eliot family, and a memorial service was held for him in Westminster Abbey.

When one considers the life of T S Eliot, the impression is of a deeply philosophical, religious, conservative, and above all serious man. It is therefore a surprise to realise that he was also the author of a very unserious collection of poems, namely “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats”. These whimsical, light, funny and very “human” poems seem totally out of keeping with the author of “The Four Quartets”, especially when one appreciates that “Old Possum” was written at about the same time (1939 to be precise).

However, it is as the originator of the text for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s hit musical “Cats” that most people will know the work of one of the greatest poets and playwrights of the 20^th century.

© John Welford

Anna Sewell, author of "Black Beauty"

Anna Sewell was born on 30^th March 1820, at Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, the daughter of Isaac, a draper who later became a banker, and Mary, herself a writer of Sunday School stories and poems. Anna had a brother, Philip, who was two years her junior. Both her parents were from Norfolk Quaker families.

Soon after Anna’s birth, the family moved to London, although her father’s business was soon in trouble, leading to further moves. Anna’s education was firstly at home, given by her mother, and then at a day school between the ages of twelve and fourteen. While running home from school one day in the rain, she slipped and fell, injuring both ankles. The treatment she received was not good, and she never really recovered from the injury, suffering from permanent lameness that, at times, made it difficult for her to walk or to stand for long periods. She also suffered from general poor health for much of the rest of her life, and spent a great deal of time trying various “cures”, at Brighton and elsewhere.

It was while visiting relatives in Norfolk that she became acquainted with horses and learned to ride and drive. This gave her a freedom of mobility that she would not otherwise have had, and she grew to love and respect horses as a result.

Anna never lived apart from her parents, and became very close to her mother, working with her in charity ventures and also assisting her literary efforts as editor and critic. She shared her mother’s high moral convictions, and, although she had religious doubts at times, she retained her faith, although she abandoned Quakerism at the age of 18.

However, the driving force of her life (no pun intended) came to be her campaign against animal cruelty, particularly as inflicted on many horses by owners who were more concerned about the appearance of their horses in harness than the animals’ health and comfort.

As she drove the family carriage, particularly in later life in Norfolk when she took her father to the railway station, she saw many examples of horses which were forced to hold their heads unnaturally high by the use of a bearing rein (also known as a check rein). This rein runs from the bit, over the top of the horse’s head, and attaches to the surcingle or girth (the strap that runs around the horse’s body, just behind the front legs). The idea is to prevent the horse from nodding its head and to keep the neck as vertical as possible, but if the bearing rein is too tight, the horse’s breathing will be affected, it will be unbalanced, and extra strain will be placed on the neck and the spine. In Anna Sewell’s day, this was the case with many horses which, for the sake of fashion, were rendered unfit for work, and virtually crippled, long before they were ready to retire.

There were other practices that Anna saw as causing distress to horses, such as the wearing of blinkers, especially at night, the docking of tails, and the use of whips. She herself never used a whip when driving, and used voice commands rather than a tight rein.

On reading a pamphlet by an American writer, Horace Bushnell, on the abuse of animals, she conceived the idea of writing a story that would illustrate the effect of cruel practices on horses, seen from the horse’s point of view. This became “Black Beauty”, her only novel, composed between 1871 and 1877. Her stated aim was “to induce kindness, sympathy, and an understanding treatment of horses”.

The slow progress with the writing was largely caused by her increasing disability. At first she dictated the words to her mother, and later on she wrote in pencil on slips of paper, which her mother later transcribed. Eventually the book was published, in 1877, by her mother’s publisher, under the title: “Black Beauty: his grooms and companions; the autobiography of a horse ‘Translated from the Original Equine, by Anna Sewell’”. She was paid 40 pounds for it.

The story concerns a horse which receives both kindness and abuse during his life, and witnesses various cruelties inflicted on other horses. These include the use of bearing reins and whips, poor feeding and overwork. There is also an adventure story built into the narrative, with Black Beauty saving the life of his owner at one stage. The story works at several levels, one being as an allegory of how kindness between humans also has its rewards.

Anna did not live the see the full success of her book, as she died within five months of its publication, possibly from hepatitis, on 25^th April 1878 at the age of 58. Ironically, the horses that drew her funeral carriage were fitted with bearing reins until Anna’s mother insisted on their removal. She was buried in the Quaker burial ground at Lammas, near Norwich in Norfolk.

“Black Beauty” was not intended to be a children’s book, but that is the market that ensured its overwhelming success, particularly with girl readers. It is still a best seller, and has been reckoned as the sixth most popular book in the English language. There have been several movie versions, the most recent being in 1994, starring Sean Bean and Alan Cumming. However, the legacy that will have most pleased its author is that the use of bearing reins and tail docking have long been abolished in the United Kingdom, although the practices are still found in some other countries.

© John Welford

C S Lewis, creator of "Narnia"

Clive Staples Lewis was born on 29th November 1898, in Belfast, Northern Ireland. His father was a local solicitor. His mother died when he was nine and he was sent away to school immediately afterwards. After attending several preparatory schools he went to Malvern College where he became interested in Norse and Celtic literature. He also had private tuition that helped him to develop his critical skills to a high degree.

World War I interfered with his academic career and a period in the trenches, ending with convalescence from a war wound, preceded his arrival at Oxford, to read classics, in 1919. To honour a pledge made to a fellow soldier named Paddy Moore, who did not survive the war, Lewis offered to support his mother, which he did by moving into her Oxford house where he lived with the mother and her daughter. Lewis lived there, and in another house when the Moores moved in 1930, until his own death.

At Oxford University Lewis achieved first-class degrees in both classics and English language and literature, and was eventually (in 1925) offered a fellowship and tutorship in English at Magdalen College. He continued to teach at Oxford for 30 years.

His religious views developed from agnosticism to Christianity, especially after a mystical experience of some kind in 1929. His account of this conversion appeared as “The Pilgrim’s Regress” in 1933.

A group of friends met regularly in his rooms from 1936 to 1939. Calling themselves the “Inklings” they included J R R Tolkien, whom Lewis encouraged to complete “The Lord of the Rings”.

Lewis wrote at first for an academic readership, notable titles being “The Allegory of Love” (1936) which explored the medieval concept of courtly love, and “A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’” (1942). However, with “The Screwtape Letters” (1940) he appealed to a wider audience. This is a series of imaginary letters between a senior and a junior devil, with the former explaining the best ways to corrupt human beings and cause them to fall into sin. Lewis also broadcast regularly on the BBC, and these talks were highly popular.

“Out of the Silent Planet” (1938) was the first of a trilogy of allegorical science fiction novels which had a strong Christian flavour. The other two were “Perelandra” (1943) and “That Hideous Strength” (1945).

Lewis’s academic career took an unexpected turn in the 1940s and 50s. He had hoped for a chair (professorship) at Oxford, but his evangelical views were probably what held him back. However, in 1954 the chair in English medieval and Renaissance literature at Magdalene College, Cambridge, came up, and Lewis was persuaded to accept it. However, he still retained his Oxford links.

Lewis will always be best remembered for the series of seven children’s books that began with “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” in 1950 and culminated with “The Last Battle” in 1956. Lewis’s intention was to write the Christian story of sacrifice, resurrection, evangelism and final judgment in a way that children would accept, and he was clearly successful in this aim. The stories can be read simply as adventures, in the age-old tradition of good overcoming evil, without making any demands on a child’s religious susceptibilities. However, some writers, such as Philip Pullman, have found the Christian allegory to be too pervasive, and Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” is a deliberate counterblast, from an atheist perspective, to Lewis’s tales of Narnia.

C S Lewis’s name came to public notice for another reason many years after his death, namely the stage and film drama “Shadowlands”, the best-known version being the film starring Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger (1993). This concerns the relationship between Lewis and Joy Gresham, an American writer, that coincided with the “Narnia” years. Mrs Gresham came to England in 1950 to escape a failed marriage and an alcoholic husband, and she and Lewis became friends. On her divorce, Lewis was happy to arrange a marriage of convenience so that she and her children would not be deported.

However, Lewis fell genuinely in love with her and was devastated when she died of cancer in 1960. The affair, and his sense of loss, were chronicled in “A Grief Observed” (1961).

Lewis did not outlive Joy Gresham by many years. He died in Oxford on 22nd November 1963, a week short of what would have been his 65th birthday. 

© John Welford

Arthur Ransome, creator of "Swallows and Amazons"

Arthur Ransome is renowned for his series of children’s novels written between 1929 and 1947, probably the best known of which is his first, “Swallows and Amazons”. However, his life story was also something of a mystery adventure, but of a very different kind from that depicted in his novels.

His early life

Arthur Michell Ransome was born in Leeds on 18^th January 1884. His father, who died when Arthur was 13, was professor of history at the Yorkshire College, which would become Leeds University in 1904. Arthur was the eldest child of the family of two boys and two girls.

He was educated at Old College, Windermere (thus giving him an early acquaintance with the Lake District) and Rugby School, but he did not shine academically. He was determined to become a writer, and at the age of 17 headed for London where he got a job with a publishing firm.

For the next twelve years he gained a living of sorts from writing articles, reviews and stories and mixed with a number of literary figures including Lascelles Abercrombie and Edward Thomas. When he could afford the train fare he took himself off to the Lake District, which was where he felt most fulfilled. He got to know the Collingwood family and enjoyed camping and sailing with them. He hoped to marry one of the Collingwood daughters, but this was not to be.

Instead, he married Ivy Constance Walker on 13^th March 1909. This proved to be a mistake, and it was partly to escape from this unhappy marriage that he journeyed to Russia in 1913. Another reason was that he had become involved in a libel suit brought by Lord Alfred Douglas in respect of Ransome’s book “Oscar Wilde: A Critical Study” (Douglas had been the lover of Oscar Wilde and the cause of Wilde’s own trial and disgrace). Although Ransome won the case, the experience had disturbed him and he preferred to try his luck elsewhere.

In Russia

He had the idea that he could use Russian folk tales as the basis for stories of his own, and, once in Russia, he set about learning the language and collecting folklore. The result was “Old Peter’s Russian Tales”, published in 1915. In the meantime he accepted a post as correspondent in Petrograd (St Petersburg) for the Daily News, and he settled in Russia until 1919, only making occasional visits back to London.

These were tumultuous years for Russia as the Bolshevik Revolution overthrew the Tsar and Lenin established the world’s first Communist government. The view from London was that Ransome was becoming a Bolshevik himself, writing in complimentary terms about Lenin and opposing foreign interference. However, it has since emerged (as late as 2002) that Ransome was in fact being paid by MI6 to infiltrate the Russian government and send reports back to his London masters, who were seeking means to defeat the revolution.

While in Russia, Ransome met Yevgeniya Petrovna Shelepina, who had been Trotsky’s secretary, and he married her in 1924 when his first marriage was dissolved.

In 1919 he ended his connection with the Daily News but was recruited by the Manchester Guardian instead. Based in Estonia, he reported for ten years on events in Russia and also indulged his passions for fishing and sailing. C P Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian, later sent him to Egypt and China, but Ransome eventually tired of this work and returned to Britain with a desire to start writing on his own account.

The Lake District and writing

He bought a cottage near Lake Windermere and renewed his friendship with the Collingwood family, who had now produced a new generation with whom he spent much of the summer of 1928, teaching the four children of Dora Collingwood (now Altounyan) to sail in their dinghy, named “Swallow”. 

In March 1929 he started writing “Swallows and Amazons” which was published the following year. Sales were slow, as they were for his second book starring the same characters, “Swallowdale”. However, the third novel, “Peter Duck” (1932) was very well received and Ransome’s name was made. He illustrated this book himself, and did so for the remaining nine novels.

New characters and locations were introduced, such as the Norfolk Broads (“Coot Club”) and the Outer Hebrides (“Great Northern?”). His 1941 novel “Missee Lee” takes the original Swallows and Amazons (the two families named after their boats) to China.

The themes of sailing and birdwatching predominate in his books, but there is less mention of his third great passion, which was fishing. This was left mainly to his “Country Diary” column in the Guardian.

Although the final novel in the series (“Great Northern?”) was published in 1947, Arthur Ransome had planned another, which was left unfinished at his death in 1967.  It was published, as “Coots in the North” in 1988 in its incomplete state, together with some short stories that had also been found among his papers.

His last completed published work was “Mainly About Fishing”, produced in 1959. He died in Manchester on 3^rd June 1967, at the age of 83.

His legacy

Although Arthur Ransome will always be remembered as a friendly, easy-going man with a florid complexion and a huge handlebar moustache, who got on well with everyone especially children, there are still questions about what he was actually doing during those years before the “Swallows and Amazons” novels were written. There is a suggestion, for example, that he and his Russian wife were engaged in diamond smuggling between Russia and Paris, with the proceeds going to Stalin’s Soviet Union. Those sailing trips from Estonia may not just have been for recreational purposes.

Even if Arthur Ransome did lead a double life, the stories he left behind him cement his reputation as one of the great writers for children. The books tend to be lengthy for children’s novels, but they hold the attention well and are excellently crafted and written. Despite being up to 80 years old they have not dated as much as might be expected. After all, sailing dinghies still work the same way, birds still fly, and places like the Lake District and the Norfolk Broads are as beautiful and mysterious as they always were.

© John Welford

Aphra Behn, an early British female writer

When asked for the name of the first woman writer of note in English, many people would plump for Jane Austen and then be hard pressed to think of anyone earlier. However, a hundred years before Jane Austen was born, Restoration England flocked to see the plays of Aphra Behn, who was lauded in her time but has been largely forgotten about ever since.

Her early years are shrouded in some degree of mystery, but she was probably born around 1640 and was probably called Aphra (or Afra) Johnson at birth. She came from Kent, but there is no agreement on exactly where. There is a baptismal record of an Eaffrey Johnson, born on 14^th December 1640, the daughter of a Canterbury barber, and this could have been her. Aphra Behn preferred to think of herself as coming from a noble background, but her writings proved that she had a vivid imagination.

It is known that in 1663 she sailed to Surinam, then a new British colony, in South America. She was accompanied by her mother and siblings (an older sister and a younger brother), but it appears that her father had died by this time. Her reason for going to Surinam could have had something to do with espionage, as she would appear to have been a royalist agent shortly before Charles II regained the throne in 1660. It is entirely possible that her mission was to extract “pillow talk” from a suspected enemy of the King, as there was certainly mention in the colony of her loose morals.

The following year she was back in London, where she married Johann Behn, a Dutch merchant, who was dead within two years. Having acquired his name, she stuck with it.

England was at war with The Netherlands from 1665 to 1667 (one result of which was New Amsterdam becoming New York). Aphra Behn was sent to Antwerp as an agent to try to persuade her Surinam conquest to become a double agent. Whatever the result, she soon found herself in serious debt and had to borrow money in order to return to England. To pay off those debts she either had to continue her career as a spy, which clearly had its dangers, or find another source of income.

It is possible that she had already started to write when in Surinam, so writing for the London stage, at a time when demand was at an all-time peak, was an attractive option. The people had been starved of entertainment during the Cromwell years of the Commonwealth, when the theatres had been closed, so they more than made up for it after the Restoration of Charles II, the “merry monarch”. The theatres were re-opened, new ones were built, and plays were needed to fill them. The main genre was comedy, particularly with sexual intrigue as its theme. Aphra Behn was able to use her experience of exploiting sex as a political weapon to good advantage.

Her first London play was “The Forced Marriage”, staged in 1670 for the Duke’s Company, and this was followed by at least another 19, not counting a number of probable collaborations with other playwrights. She clearly had a talent for this trade and a command of the medium of the theatre. It is known that there were other female dramatists at the time, but none of them had the same staying power or popularity.

Her most popular play was “The Rover”, (published in two parts in 1677 and 1681) a comedy of sexual manners set in Naples and Madrid during the Stuart exile. It was twice performed before royalty but it attracted accusations of plagiarism (it was based on another playwright’s work but not copied from it) and bawdiness, a charge that had some measure of truth to it, but this was a bawdy age in any case.

As well as plays she also wrote poems, and may well have been the editor of “The Covent Garden Drolery”, an anthology printed in 1672 that contained four of her own poems.

Her private life seems to have been colourful, to say the least, with liaisons noted with people of both sexes. She was associated for at least ten years with John Hoyle, a lawyer who was known to be bisexual. Her close stage portrayals of libertines and amoral characters seem to have owed much to her personal knowledge of many such people. She was also in the circle of the Earl of Rochester, many of whose poems were later suppressed for their pornography, and some of Aphra Behn’s later poems were of a distinctly risqué nature.

In her later plays, Aphra Behn adopted a more political tone, allying herself with the Royalist party (who later developed into the Tories), and speaking out strongly against the ambitions of the Duke of Monmouth (who was later to lead an armed rebellion against Charles’s brother and successor James II). These plays led to accusations that she was using the stage for propaganda rather than entertainment.

However, her best-known work today is “Oroonoko, or The History of the Royal Slave” which is notable for being possibly the first novel to be written in English, or it is at least a close forerunner of the novel. It appeared in 1688, shortly before her death, but relies on her early experiences in Surinam. It is also remarkable for being an early protest against the slave trade.

The hero is an African prince who is sold into slavery in Surinam, where he incites a slave revolt, is betrayed and eventually executed, all in an effort to rescue a beautiful female slave. Another notable feature of the book is its portrayal of the moral superiority of native African and South American people when seen against the corruption of European slave owners and colonists. These concepts were far ahead of their time.

This was not Aphra Behn’s only work of prose fiction. When the demand for new plays started to wane, she wrote “Love-Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister”, the first part of which was published in 1684. This sounds like a scandalous title, and the plot was in fact based on an actual scandal, but for “sister” one should read “sister-in-law”, so this is not a story about an incestuous relationship. However, there is plenty of sexual intrigue here, although Behn’s female characters are much more complex and rounded than in most of her plays. “Love Letters” eventually ran to three volumes and 1,000 pages, and was extremely popular. It is interesting to compare it with the work, some 60 years later, of Samuel Richardson, who also used exchanges of letters as the medium of fiction, but was far more genteel with his subject matter. Indeed, Richardson was one of several writers who castigated Behn for being unfeminine in her portrayal of women as sexual beings.

In her later years Aphra Behn concentrated more on poetry, and produced several long poems and works that combined poetry and prose. The death of Charles in 1685 and the accession of James II, who was more openly Catholic, made her stock-in-trade of sexual comedy less commercial. There is evidence that she found herself in financial difficulties as well as increasingly poor health. She continued to write throughout James’s short reign, but viewed the coming accession of William III with some trepidation. As it happened, she died on 16^th April 1689, five days after the joint coronation of William III and Mary II. She was buried in Westminster Abbey, but not in Poets’ Corner.

Aphra Behn’s reputation suffered a nosedive after her death, as indeed did that of most of the playwrights of the Restoration period, for the simple reason that their age had passed and a new era of relative gentility and Augustan order was to follow, to be succeeded not long after by Victorian prurience. Twentieth century feminism was not impressed by female writers who wrote in a masculine style for a male audience, so there was no chance for Aphra Behn to become a feminist heroine.

Today we live in a more liberal age and are re-discovering some writers from the past whose talents were previously ignored out of embarrassment for their subject matter. Maybe Aphra Behn is one such writer who deserves a second look.

© John Welford