C.M. Rosens's Blog, page 53

The Punch & Judy Man of Hangman’s Walk

Sh! What’s That?

Sh, what’s that, the wooden slap, the swazzle-voiced cry and the short sharp crack?

Sh, what’s that, the glazed-eyed clap, the hollow applause and the rat-a-tat-tat?

Passing by, you pause and try to catch a glimpse of – sh! What’s that?

Where the shadows and lamp-oil meet, pooling gold in the midnight street, behind the windows thick with grime, behind the door where the horseshoes shine, take good care if you stop and stare, for the hour is late and the moon is fat, and the sounds continue: sh! What’s that?

Peering out as you peer in, Mr Punch puppets sit and swing around the window frame inside, red as wrath and stiff as pride, tangled strings and broken things obscure the view but not of you – why do they stare beneath their hats? Why are they watching? Sh! What’s that?

~ The Punch and Judy Man, Anon., first printed in the Pagham-on-Sea Community Newsletter 4 March 1984

[image error]Punch and Judy Show at Swanage, Dorset, by ALoan at English Wikipedia – Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2748303

The Punch & Judy Man, as he came to be known, had a shop in Hangman’s Walk selling antique sets, props, marionettes & puppets, mainly but not limited to Punch & Judy shows. There were 15 Mr Punches in his window alone, and hundreds more in the shop.

To cross the threshold of the lair of the Punch & Judy Man, that devoted patron of these seaside shows, one must duck below the iron horseshoes framing the door, and the strange traps of woven strings suspended around the shop itself. Most puppets live in glass-fronted cabinets or are posed inside the sets, which mimic theatre stages. At night, they say you can hear the Punch & Judy Man performing the same sequence of variations of the play, sometimes w/ innovations of his own, voice masked by the swazzle.

(Audio: demonstration of the swazzle where the actor says, “That’s the way to do it!” a catchphrase of Mr Punch)

We speak about the Punch & Judy Man in both the past and present tense because, for the last 15 years, no one has seen him leave the shop. There are still deliveries, but few customers. Only those dedicated to this art ever venture to knock the shop door.

They say he is the last of a family of Punchmen descended from the first English disciple of Signor Bologna himself.

It is said that you can still hear the plays performed by the Punch & Judy Man at night, the shop lit by three antique oil lamps on stands. The lamps are set around a cleared space on the shop floor, where the set (from 1812) is positioned dead centre. Like Signor Bologna, the Punch & Judy Man uses marionettes in some of his midnight performances, particularly for the ‘older’ material, as well as the glove puppets now associated with the show. If you stop to watch, you will see the play being performed, the puppets going through the variants of the stories from midnight through to 3am with short breaks in between. You will not see the Punch & Judy Man, but you may see 1 or 2 seated people, customers, perhaps, paying rapt attention. You may recognise them from the train station or bus stop earlier that day – who knows how long they plan on staying? Or if they will leave? They come to learn, to watch.

Hurry by. You will not see them again.

Links 

What is a Punch and Judy Show?

That’s the Way to Do it! – A History of Punch & Judy, article from the Victoria and Albert Museum, London

An illustrated Punch & Judy Play [2nd edn, London, 1828]

From British Pathé, some Australian amateur Punch and Judy, traumatising children in the 1950s – adorable.

#AmReading: Cambria Gothica II: Welsh Ghostlore & Folklore before 1830

Introduction

In the previous post we looked at texts featured in Chapter 1 of Jane Aaron’s Welsh Gothic, and very briefly at the postcolonial framing of some of these narratives. This post looks at the ghost stories and dark tales that were associated with different parts of Wales, used as inspiration for the Gothic tales of the 1780s-1820s, and which were so alluring to early tourists. The previous post was not exhaustive, and you can buy the book to read the complete chapter: https://www.uwp.co.uk/book/welsh-gothic-ebook-pdf/

Some of these ghost stories and folkloric tales are briefly listed in one paragraph of Welsh Gothic Chapter 1, others are additional and attested prior to 1780. You might also want to pick up a copy of Mark Rees’s Ghosts of Wales: Accounts from Victorian Archives (2017), and/or Richard Holland’s Haunted Wales: A Guide to Welsh Ghostlore (2011). If ghost walks and tours are your thing, then there are plenty of these to choose from across the country, and Haunted Wales has a handy list by location. Happy reading, spooky people!

Dark Tales of Wales

More ghosts and goblins I think were prevalent in Wales than in England or any other country ~ William Howells (1831)

 

Southerndown & Dunraven Castle

Southerndown, Glamorgan, once a notorious ‘wrecking village’, was/is home to the Blue Lady of Dunraven and the ghost of the insatiable ‘wrecker lord’, Thomas Wyndham, who appears at midnight on the anniversary of his death. Not much is known of the Blue Lady, but Thomas Wyndham’s tale is a variant of one told up and down Wales where such practices took place.

‘Wrecking’, or luring ships onto rocks on purpose in order to plunder their cargo, was lucrative. Survivors were killed so they couldn’t report back to the authorities, or identify any of the men who set lights for the ships and plundered them. Wyndham was miserly and obsessed with amassing treasure, although he was also devoted to his only surviving son and heir, who (of course) went to sea. You can guess where this is going… and indeed, of course, it goes there in style. Gothic style.

After some time, a rich galleon appears, probably on a dark and stormy night. Wyndham orders it to be wrecked, the survivors are killed, and among them is… obviously… his beloved son. Wyndham (naturally) goes mad, hence his becoming an unhappy ghost. Some sources claim Wyndham’s ghost can be heard screaming and wailing along the beach on the anniversary of his death.

This tale is also told of the unlucky Vaughan family who also lived in Dunraven Castle at one time, except in this version the lord got a nasty gang to do his wrecking, led by Mat of the Iron Hand. Mat brings back the severed hand of Vaughan’s son, still wearing his identifying signet ring, to Vaughan as a ‘special gift’. It is also told of an unnamed old couple, who have a much-loved sea-faring only son that the father discovers half dead in the shallows after wrecking the boat he happens to be on, and, not recognising him in the dark, the father takes a rock and bashes his beloved son’s head in.

It is interesting that both the Wyndhams and the Vaughans had this tale told about them, and both families lived in the same place. It would appear that this is a formulaic cautionary tale that can be applied to either of these lords of Dunraven, and one that perhaps had political overtones, considering their status and political offices.

Not mentioned in Aaron’s brief notes but also in Glamorgan, not far from Southerndown, the White Lady, a twelfth-century spectre falsely accused of adultery and starved to death by her husband, haunts the ruins of Ogmore Castle. (When he realized she was innocent, he, of course, also went mad).

St Donat’s Castle

The Stradling family of St Donat’s Castle, Llantwit Major, also had their share of family spectres, including, apparently, a ghostly panther. The (murdered?) Lady Anne Stradling, whose husband died on Crusade, was a death omen for the family akin to the Irish banshee (for the Welsh, this spectre was the cyhyraeth, sometimes conflated with the Gwrach-y-rhibyn), and appeared with a pack of cŵn Annwn, the hunting dogs of the Underworld.

Also connected with the Stradlings is the witch, Mallt-y-nos (Matilda of the night). She is meant to be the ‘witch’ or ‘crone’ apparition that has been seen in the castle’s armoury, an apt place for her considering her hunting obsession, but there is a lot of folklore about Mallt-y-nos which predates her Norman origin story.

Welsh Witches of the North and South

I’ll be doing a separate series of posts on Witches, Druids, Hellhounds and Sin-Eaters, the four main figures that populate Welsh Gothic, set out in Part II of Aaron’s book. Here, however, are a few select tales of witchcraft.

Matilda-of-the-Night, whether Norman noblewoman or Hag of the Wild Hunt, was not the only witch around. Brandy Cove, another smuggling hotspot this time on the Gower Peninsula, is reputedly haunted by the ghost of ‘Old Moll‘.

Old Moll made a home for herself in one of the caves at Brandy Cove, and was reputedly both a witch and cursed. Wherever she went, bad luck followed. Children were beset with night terrors, animals went lame, crops failed. A vigilante group melted down silver coins and turned them into bullets, but they failed to kill her – she escaped, but was shot in the leg. Old Moll left the Gower and went further inland, spreading her curse wherever she went.

In a similar tale of warning about letting (cursed) strangers into your tight-knit community, but this time with strong anti-Irish and anti-Catholic overtones, is the tale of a ‘tribe’ of witches (both men and women) of Llanddona, Anglesey. The Tales of the Llanddona Witches are not some of Wales’ best-known, but there are two potential origins for it. First, if it’s a post-Civil War-era tale (1640s) then this accounts for the boatload of supernaturally gifted (Catholic) Irish turning up in a boat and causing trouble for the locals – the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland was bloody and genocidal, demonizing the population. Second, if it’s post-1736 when the repeal of the Witch Laws meant people took things into their own hands, usually by putting “witches” in an open boat without oars, food or water and setting them off out to sea, this could also account for the particulars of this fable.

There are dozens of tales about the Llanddona Witches. While most versions say they were Irish, others say they were Spanish.

You can find some versions and re-tellings online, here (Angelfire); here (myths & legends of Wales), and here (Llanddona Village Hall).

 

If ever there was a country made for Gothic fiction, Wales is probably it. Check out some Landscape Photography if you don’t believe me. Anything can happen in a place like this…

More Spooky Tales of Wales

14 Welsh Ghost Stories – WalesOnline

Ghosts in the Land of Legends – Wales Land of Legends

The Ghosts and Legends of Wales – Haunted Wales

Not mentioned by Aaron but one of the most [in]famous haunted buildings in Wales is the Skirrid Mountain Inn, Crucorney, which claims to be a 900-year-old inn that during the Middle Ages was both courtroom and place of execution (by hanging the convicted from the rafters). There is no evidence for this, but local legend has it that 180 criminals were hanged here and that you can see the rope marks on the wood. It is apparently first mentioned in this context, with the hanging of a man in 1110, but it’s unclear whether there was actually an inn on this exact site at this time. It is also associated with Owain Glyndwr’s fifteenth-century rebellion against Henry IV, but this is a later story. The inn itself is a mid-seventeenth-century building, Grade II Listed.

#AmReading: Stoker’s Wilde Review [Spoilers]

Stoker’s Wilde by Steven Hopstaken & Melissa Prusi

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

**This review contains major spoilers**

I really wanted to give it 4-5*s and claim I loved it or really liked it, as it started out hysterically funny and really promising.

Firstly: writing about real people and fictionalising their lives is a brave choice. Writing about real people who have left behind a large corpus of their own writings, with authorial voices uniquely theirs, is braver.

[When a Brit says “that’s a brave choice” or “that’s an interesting choice” it means, don’t do it. That’s a terrible idea. Stop. But, in this case, I also mean it literally – and so an extra star it is].

I absolutely loved the beginning of the book. I loved the stab at early Wildean wit, the epistolary format, the interweaving of real events with fictional ones. I thought the werewolf hunt was really, really, REALLY funny, engaging, dramatic, atmospheric, and exactly what I’d hoped for when I picked this up.

By the time we got into the middle, however, the authors had lost that sparkle that had sold me on Act One. The middle section leaned fairly heavily on the source material of Dracula and the Portrait of Dorian Grey, and in the latter case the threads worked really well, but in the former it felt like they were relying too heavily on references to the novel and its scenes and dialogue to make Bram’s scenes memorable and stand up by themselves. Lucy Mayhew, bless her, is an entirely flat throwaway character who, like all her namesakes in all the adaptations, exists to be doomed. The American (whoever he was) is related to Teddy Roosevelt and I can’t even remember his name. Then again, Quincey P. Morris was arguably also one of Stoker’s flattest creations too, so that’s about fair.

The heavy reliance on “Dracula” to construct the middle act of Bram & Florrie’s scenes may be because of the perception that Stoker is not as engaging as Wilde, but this seems unfair to Stoker. I started to prefer his scenes, although some of the episodes could have been edited out to streamline the action a little more. Actually, Bram is very well drawn as a character, and the decision to make him (and Henry Irving!) supernatural worked incredibly well.

What really got me was that the authors stopped making the Irish and British characters *funny* in the middle, because things take a Dark Turn. The lack of gallows humour really stood out to me, because that’s 90% of the culture here. It made me think that what to me were the funniest lines in the werewolf hunt at the beginning were funny by accident, not design, and that the authors hadn’t quite understood the inherent humour in irony (I know Americans stereotypically don’t get either British and Irish deadpan humour or irony, and I also appreciate the subtle differences in British and Irish humour, but I’m not convinced that the American authors understood this as well as they could have to make the most out of their characters).

For me, because of the Serious Turn in the middle, the book started to flag around the 55-65% mark.

The plot itself was solid and had a lot of things to like in it. Wilde in the book is enthusiastically bisexual or at least bi-romantic, even though his sexual liaisons are all with men [that is, with consenting adults], so whatever you consider Wilde the real man’s sexuality to have been (gay, bi, pederast, more here: https://lgbt.wikia.org/wiki/Oscar_Wilde) the authors here claim him as a bi-icon, which I quite liked for personal reasons, though his self-described “Socratic” tendencies are still potentially problematic in real-life considerations of him as a man, and by extension a re-imagined character.

I enjoyed the twist on the vampire genre, but here, Literalism (something I’ve noticed in a lot of American-written paranormal novels, but is not limited to American writing) undermined my enjoyment.

Just because Dracula means “Son of the Dragon” doesn’t mean there literally actually needs to be a dragon. Dragon blood – or rather, the parasites that live in dragon blood – are the cause of vampirism in humans in this book, which on one level is pretty cool and reminiscent of Guillermo Del Toro’s The Strain, but on the other level… nooooo what are you doing?? Why do you need to take a figurative title literally? It felt a bit like dumbing down, or spelling something out that didn’t need to be spelt out.

I was hoping we were going to play with religion and explore Bram/Wilde’s takes on this, especially as Stoker uses his novel Dracula and other stories to defend Roman Catholicism, but instead we had a twist that saw the “portal to hell” (at Stonehenge) becoming a portal into another realm, another dimension, where dragons live and strange powers originate, and, it was hinted, Jesus may have come from.

Ingenious twist, yes, but I did eye-roll a bit at that too. it just felt a bit like the authors wanted to avoid Stoker’s own faith issues (not to mention Wilde’s complicated relationship with faith and religion, culminating in his deathbed conversion to Roman Catholicism) by erasing it via an atheist soft Sci-Fi insertion, which was a shame, because they had really tried to write in the voices of these men and worked to weave most of their real-life elements into the plot. That they didn’t take up this challenge – although perhaps they do in the sequel – was a bit of a let-down.

[I’m not Roman Catholic and don’t really have a dog in this fight, it’s just something I thought would be fairly important to tackle… rather than just suggest “oh, yeah, everything probably comes from another world á la Stargate”.]

Those were my biggest gripes, because they threw me out of the book somewhat.

HOWEVER – the conclusion was satisfying (I felt the novel could have ended a bit sooner after the climax, it got a bit Peter Jackson LotR Part 3 for a while), the characters and the originality of the plot line have stayed with me, and I appreciated the amount of research the authors did. The odd-couple dynamic of Stoker and Wilde is rightly praised by other reviewers and is the driving force of the book, although as I said previously the dip in (especially) the Wildean humour in the middle detracts from the book’s verve somewhat.

I’m not quite invested enough to read the sequel, which takes Stoker & Wilde to America (of course), but I wouldn’t rule it out.

View all my reviews

#AmReading: Cambria Gothica I (1780s-1820s)

Introduction

This post is a list of Welsh Gothic fiction (the Cambria Gothica of the title) as featured in Chapter 1 of Jane Aaron’s Welsh Gothic (UWP, 2013) from 1780-1830.

Andrew Davies’ [not exhaustive] list of such fiction, also compiled in 2013 and only from the texts available in Cardiff libraries, is also a good starting point: see, “‘The Gothic Novel in Wales’ Revisited”. It’s also worth noting that, since Jane Aaron’s Welsh Gothic was published in 2013, a number of texts classed as Welsh Gothic fiction have been included in The Encyclopaedia of the Gothic, (2016), some of which is in the Welsh language.

My next post based on Chapter 1 – posted on Thursday – is a list of Welsh hauntings, related myths and dark tales that are referenced in this chapter, that readers of Gothic tales in the 1780s-1820s would have been interested in. The Gothic settings attracted rather than repelled eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tourists, and as more and more people visited Wales on this basis, the more familiar and therefore the less alien Wales became.

Welsh Gothic 1780s-1820s

CW// This includes references to the slave trade, British imperialism and sexual assault.

Aaron discusses the texts, Romantic tourists, the political narratives [predominantly internal to the Union, but also with some references to Welsh perceptions of the Empire] and Historical Fiction written in the Gothic style. I won’t cover all that in this shorter summary post, but I’ll pick out a few points to set the texts in context. Some of these texts were written by Welsh authors, others are part of the tradition of using Wales as an alien, dangerous/primitive setting.

It’s worth noting that of those novels written by Welsh authors, certain anti-colonial

[image error]Signature of Anna Maria Bennett, Welsh novelist (d. 1808)

themes are repeated. In both Anna Maria Bennett’s novels, for example, British imperial soldiers return from pillaging abroad to do the same thing in Wales, and are presented as the sexually rapacious antagonists. In Anna: or Memoirs of a Welch Heiress: interspersed with anecdotes of a Nabob (1785), Colonel Gorget, the nabob of the subtitle, returns from India where he made his fortune and tries to rape Anna when she refuses to respond to his advances. According to Bennett, among the colonialists, ‘cruelty and carnage were called bravery and justice, and an unbounded greediness … bore the respectable name of prudence’. This reflects attitudes towards colonialists in general, but positions Wales and its people as colonised. While historians still debate the extent to which postcolonial theory can be applied to Wales, in literary circles the definition applies to the literature of all countries that have been invaded, and so its application to Welsh literature is less contentious.

Ann of Swansea’s Cambrian Pictures (1810) goes even further by drawing a deliberate parallel with the slave trade (the abolitionists had succeeded in ending Britain’s involvement in 1807, after a well-publicized campaign). The protagonist of Cambrian Pictures, Rosa Percival, is villainous Lord Clavering’s passion – but she resists him, and her uncle Gabriel Jenkins is delighted by this, as he claims her father would have sold her to the titled Englishman, ‘as if [she was a] … slave on a West-Indies plantation’. The intention of this emotive, deliberate parallel, as far as Ann of Swansea was concerned, was to underline the moral rightness of resisting the buying up of people and land by English wealth and influence. (Jane Aaron, Welsh Gothic, pp. 34-5).

It is unsurprising, after a brief look at some of the lament poems and fragmentary sagas in the previous post, that Gothic visions of Wales’ history were also in vogue during this period, drawing specifically upon Wales’ colonized and conquered past. The ‘buying up’ of people and land in Wales may have been a contemporary concern, but it was underpinned by a nostalgia for the imagined pre-Conquest past, and a Welsh-speaking identity that had been (and was being, albeit via the education system rather than an actual army) violently disrupted and dismembered.

[image error]Tintern Abbey, a famed ruin popular with the Romantics, photo credit: Saffron Blaze – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15358619

A London-Welsh author and bookseller, William Earle (1781-c.1830s) set his novel, The Welshman, A Romance (1801) at the time of the thirteenth-century conquest of Wales, delineating Edward I’s atrocities that left behind a devastated countryside, manic widows on hopeless quests for their lost husbands, and dispossessed rebels plotting revenge in caves. It does not end well for the protagonist, Madoc; although assisted by an anachronisitic Druid who attempts to exorcise him of the spirits that haunt him, he succumbs to the fear of excommunication (in the novel, Edward I has influenced the Pope to excommunicate all Welshmen who resist his rule), and attempts suicide. The attempt is bungled, and he dies after two days of agony, impaled on a rock ‘while the surrounding hollows echoed with his groans’. (Jane Aaron, Welsh Gothic, p. 39)

But such fictions and histories should still be considered in the light of White European privilege and hegemony, and just because the authors drew parallels with colonial atrocities and the slave trade does not mean that these parallels were accurately applied, or applied outside of a racist and misogynistic framework. The year before (1800), Earle had written an abolitionist epistolary novella for which he is better known, Obi, or the History of Three-Fingered Jack, an obeah fiction that demonizes Black femininity and uses the execution of the titular character’s mother as a means of severing cultural and ancestral African ties, while focusing on the development of ‘a “proper” abolitionist Black (male) subject’. (J. Cottrell, ‘At the end of the trade: obeah and Black women in the colonial imaginary‘, Atlantic Studies 12:2 (2015), 200-218, p. 214.)

Such demonisation of the Black feminine, no doubt influenced by such fiction, is illustrated by the [racist] Welsh folk-tale collected in 1968, in which an interracial marriage ends with the (Black) wife revealing her cannibal nature, which she has passed to her children. In another, potentially older, version of the tale, it is a Turkish woman the Welshman marries, who is demonised as a cannibal. In one account, her son, who inherits his mother’s taste for the flesh of his relations, even has horns. There are some parallels with the propaganda from the Crusades here, and the existence of these tales illustrate the racist stereotypes embedded in Welsh society despite the texts that also paint the White (English) colonials as Gothic Horror Monsters. On a personal note, even today, especially in the older generations, I find attitudes change towards me when they discover my father is Turkish. “But you don’t look it,” is something I’ve had said a few times, and sometimes I wonder if they still expect to see the small horns of the folktales growing out of my head.

With this context in mind, here’s a list of some examples which are featured in Aaron’s chapter and discussed to varying degrees within this context. [Note that in this chapter of Welsh Gothic, Aaron doesn’t talk much about the interdisciplinary or intersectional frameworks of the texts themselves, but focuses more tightly on what the texts show about Wales and the Welsh, as set out in the introduction].

[image error]Ann Julia Hatton, or Ann of Swansea, by William John Watkeys (1800–1873)
Cambria Gothica: Some Examples

A short list of texts dealt with in Chapter 1 of Jane Aaron’s Welsh Gothic study is as follows:

Ellen, Countess of Castle Howel (1794), by Anna Maria Bennett, the daughter of a Merthyr Tydfil grocer. As she lived in England, wrote in English, and died in Brighton, she is sometimes assumed to have been and referred to as an ‘English’ novelist.

The Abbey of St Asaph (1795), by Isabella Kelly, an Anglo-Scottish writer. You can read Tenille Nowak’s assessment of this novel in her open access article, ‘Isabella Kelly’s Twist on the Standard Radcliffean Romance‘, Studies in Gothic Fiction 2:2 (2012), 4-13.

Angelina (1796) by Mary Robinson, who claimed Welsh descent from her mother’s side but is generally considered an English celebrity and poet, and who was the wife of the illegitimate son of Thomas Harris, whose brother was the Welsh Methodist leader Howel Harris.

Anzoletta Zadoski (1796), with a Polish protagonist, by Ann Howell.

The Castle Spectre (1797), a play by M. G. Lewis (author of The Monk, first published the previous year).

The Stranger or Llewellyn Family: A Cambrian Tale (1798) by Robert Evans, of whom little is known but it is presumed that he was a Welsh author.

The Tower; or the Romance of Ruthyne (1798), a three-volume work by Sarah Lansdell (an English author from Kent).

The History of Jack Smith, or the Castle of St Donats (1798), a mock-Gothic novel by Charles Lucas, again in three volumes.

Ianthé, or the Flower of Caernarvon (1798), a two-volume novel by Emily Clark, another English novelist who set many of her Gothic novels in Wales.

The Welshman, A Romance (1801), in three volumes, by William Earle

The Dream, or Noble Cambrians, (1801), a lost text by Robert Evans, author of The Stranger.

Cambrian Pictures (1810), by Ann of Swansea, the pen-name of Ann Julia Hatton, who now has a blue plaque on Swansea Civic Centre.

‘The Prediction’ (1827), which appears in Tales of Welsh Society and Scenery by Thomas Richards, in which the Doomed Maiden (Lucy) unwisely pays no attention to a bad omen and falls for a Byronic antihero and English outsider, Sydney Conyngham. In a Jane Eyre twist at the altar, it is revealed in the usual doors-bursting-open-at-the-last-minute dramatic fashion that he is a cad and morally repugnant not to mention already married, resulting in Lucy going mad and her father being struck with paralysis from which he dies.

Dark Tales for Early Tourists: Cambria Gothica Part II

The next part is coming on Thursday this week!

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