Sheenagh Pugh's Blog, page 7

Review of An Illustrated Introduction to the Georgians, by Mike Rendell, Amberley Publishing, 2014

This is one of a series of introductions to various periods of history, and who better to write the Georgian volume than Mike Rendell, he of the “Georgian Gentleman” blog? He deals with the period under various headings: politics, culture, the armed forces, industry, leisure etc, in his usual readable style and with copious colour illustrations.

One does not open an “introduction” expecting an exhaustive survey; there are suggestions at the back of the book for further reading, relevant museums and places to visit for those who wish to study the period in more depth.  But this is more than a superficial overview. When space to describe a whole era is limited, the choice of detail becomes crucial, and this is where Rendell scores.  He is good at finding the kind of details that not only stick in a reader’s mind (what could more succinctly convey the degree to which George I was despised than the fact that his heir’s refusal to attend the funeral earned him instant popularity?) but which add up to something beyond themselves, forming a bigger picture.

 With the Georgians, as often as not, this involves fashion and invention. An explosion in the quantity of affordable printed material, like newspapers, magazines and dress and furniture catalogues, enabled ordinary folk to know what was going on in the upper echelons of society; what Duchess A was wearing and how Lord B had redecorated his mansion. This led to a desire to imitate them, which in turn was facilitated by the inventiveness of the time and the advent of means of mass production. Few could afford silver tableware, but Thomas Boulsover’s Sheffield plate made a handsome substitute, while the alloy resembling gold and named for its inventor, jeweller Christopher Pinchbeck, started a craze for costume jewellery. Even the lawns of the great mansions could be imitated in little, thanks to Edward Budding’s lawnmower – “home owners no longer needed sheep, or an army of labourers with scythes to cut the grass, and even humble abodes could have their patch of green. Few men have done more to change the immediate environment in which we live.”

And this craze for fashion had its own influence on other areas. When, in a bid to finance its wars, the government taxed powder for wigs, the public response was simple and swift: wearing one’s own hair, cropped and curled, suddenly became the new fashion. Those campaigning for the abolition of the slave trade found that they could have a real effect on policy by making it unfashionable to take sugar in tea – an early instance of boycotting a product for moral reasons. They could also, thanks to Josiah Wedgwood, advertise their allegiance by wearing one of the tens of thousands of pottery medallions he produced, with the inscription “Am I not a man and a brother?” To quote Thomas Clarkson; “Ladies wore them in bracelets […] at length the taste for wearing them became general and thus fashion, which usually confines itself to worthless things, was seen for once in the honourable office of promoting the cause of justice, humanity and freedom.”

The central and all-pervading role of fashion for the Georgians could have made an apt summary to end the book, which actually ends rather abruptly at the close of a chapter on food and drink, but this may be less the choice of the author than the house style of the series; not having read any others, I can’t say.

The illustrations are many and fascinating, as ever with this author. One oddity I noticed was how often the credits for them reference the Yale Center for British Art (where among much else there may apparently be found Katherine Read’s satirical “Grand Tour” painting and Reynolds’s great portrait of Frances Abington in a pose not entirely unlike a famous photograph of Christine Keeler), the Lewis Walpole Library in Connecticut, which boasts many a cartoon, including Gillray’s, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which supplied several of the fashion plates, and the Library of Congress. Never mind the Elgin Marbles; it would have been something if we could have exerted ourselves to keep our own history at home instead of snaffling other people’s.

This is a very readable introduction to a fascinating period that resembles our own in many ways, notably in the central role it accorded to fashion and means of communication.

Review of Trailblazing Women of the Georgian Era, by Mike Rendell, pub. Pen & Sword History 2018

“By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage […] a man cannot grant any thing to his wife, or enter into covenant with her, for the grant would be to suppose her separate existence.”

Blackstone’s Commentaries, explaining succinctly the nature of legal “coverture” and why the best, in fact almost the only plan for a woman in the Georgian era who wanted to make a success in life was to be unmarried or a widow. Many of those here discussed were one or the other, and those who were married often had husbands who left them, drank their profits or were otherwise more of a hindrance than a help. Women like Anna and Elizabeth Fry, belonging to the Society of Friends, were fortunate in that the Friends were far less apt to see women as adjuncts of men.

The other huge disadvantage women faced was their relative lack of education.  By a deft if immoral circular argument, men dismissed the importance of education for women on the ground that they had no role in affairs, while denying them such a role on the ground that they were not educated for it. As the anonymous “Sophia” wrote, “The Men, by thinking us incapable of improving our intellects, have entirely thrown us out of all the advantages of education, and thereby contributed as much as possible to make us the senseless creatures they imagine.” Most, though not all, of the successful women here discussed had a better education than was usual for their time.

One of the most admirable, indeed, was Jane Marcet, with the advantage of a Swiss father of progressive ideas who had her educated alongside her brothers. When she married a physician and chemist, she developed an interest of her own in science, absorbing knowledge by attending scientific lectures. But her real innovation was to hit on the idea of writing a basic science textbook aimed at children, girls in particular, in the form of a conversation between two girls and their teacher, Mrs Bryan. “Not only was it intended to be read by girls, but it introduced to those girls the idea that the person imparting the scientific knowledge could be female.” It was not only girls who read it, though, as that most generous-natured of scientists, Michael Faraday, acknowledged; “Mrs. Marcet’s ‘Conversations on Chemistry’ ... gave me my foundation in that science […] hence my deep veneration for Mrs Marcet.”

Widows often took over their late husband’s business and there showed their aptitude for another field supposedly outwith their capabilities. Hester Bateman became a noted silversmith and established a long-lasting family business; this happened quite often in silversmithing families. Mrs Clements, another widow, developed a new and highly profitable method of milling mustard. Anna Fry, after the death of her husband Joseph, carried on the family chocolate business. Many wives, like printer and printshop owner Mary Darly, must have been equal partners in business with their husbands, but because of coverture we do not know of most of them, whose husbands were not as honest as Josiah Wedgwood in admitting their debt: “I never had a great plan that I did not submit to my wife”.

However, one of the most outstanding female successes of the Georgian business world stayed single. Eleanor Coade tapped into the growing market for an artificial stone that could be used to mass-produce architectural details like scrolls and carvings and which would withstand weather. Previous attempts had failed. Eleanor was a keen clay modeller (she had exhibited at the RSA) and may have experimented with her own mixes. At any rate, she came up with a product she named “lithodipyra” – twice-fired stone. It wasn’t the most catchy name, but architects like Adam and Nash could not get enough of it. It was light, easy to work and extremely durable, so much so that it can still be seen in features on Buckingham Palace and the Brighton Pavilion. It was also exported, going as far as the USA, the West Indies and St Petersburg. It became known as Coade stone, which seems only fair, and though over 650 items in it have been identified, thousands more exist; they simply have never had occasion to be repaired. She was also a good businesswoman and died wealthy: “Eleanor left much of her money to various charities, and to specific female friends on condition that the gifts were not to be controlled by their husbands. It revealed the feminist beliefs held by Eleanor – she regarded coverture as iniquitous.” No wonder she never married.

There are more famous examples recounted here – Hannah More, Mary Wortley Montagu, Elizabeth Fry, Mary Wollstonecraft – but in some ways the less well-known, like those above and others, are the most fascinating. But I’ll let you meet them for yourself.

Review of Weavers, Scribes & Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East, by Amanda H Podany

(Pub. OUP 2022)

The people whose names appear on the proto-cuneiform tablets from Uruk are a little like the everyday people who posed for some of the earliest photographs, thousands of years later. Suddenly there they are, fellow humans, named.

I have a weakness for histories that zoom in on named individuals (like Michael Wood’s The Story of China). This is another such, about the areas – Mesopotamia, Syria, Anatolia, the Levant and parts of Iran – where cuneiform writing was used. The method, “we will travel through 3,000 years of history knocking on doors and settling in for a while with individuals whose lives tell us something about the time in which they lived” suits me very well. Tablets in cuneiform script are the bedrock of most of the book, together with cylinder seals.

Most really ancient tablets contain, not poems, legends or histories, but statistics – how much wool was sent from A to B and what did it cost; how many weavers worked in the queen’s palace and what did they earn. It is a great mistake to think of this as tedious information; it is crucial to how people actually lived and can tell us much more than appears on the surface. At Garshana in Umma (present-day Iraq), for instance, a major construction project took place around 2030 BC. Without the records that were kept regarding the brickmakers, their organisation and pay, we should not know, nor I think would we guess, that not only were many of the brickies female, three of the 10-person work teams were supervised by women rather than men. And though we may be aware that families in poverty sometimes had to sell their children into slavery, that mere knowledge can never strike home like this contract drawn up during a famine in Emar, on the Euphrates, in the 13th century BC:

" Zadamma and Ku’e, his wife, have sold their two sons and their two daughters–Ba’la-bia, Ba’la-belu, Ishma’- Dagan, and Ba’la-ummi, a daughter at the breast—into slavery for 60 shekels of silver, the entire price, to Ba’lumalik, the diviner. If anyone sues to reclaim the four children of Zadamma, they must give ten other persons as compensation to Ba’lu-malik. And now Zadamma, their father, and Ku’e, their mother, have pressed their feet into clay."

The last laconic sentence was not metaphorical; the small clay footprints of three children (the baby was too young), duly signed by witnesses to the contract, survive in the National Museum, Aleppo.

Trade and law were the main reasons for recording and keeping information; if you agreed a price with a merchant or owned some land, you needed to be able to produce written proof if necessary. And these records can tell us much about social organisation at the time. It may come as a surprise, for instance, that some of Queen Baranamtara’s weaving women seem to have been paid more, not because they were better at their job, but because they had small children to support. And a sliding scale of doctor’s fees shows that while an awilum (gentleman) was charged 5 shekels to have a broken bone set, a commoner paid only 3 shekels for the same procedure. Record-keeping was also essential to taxation, and knowing who was where, doing what and worth how much was a useful means of control.

But kings and other powerful people soon also became enchanted with the permanence of records, particularly those carved in stone. In this way a king’s name and (alleged) deeds could be immortal. Reading one of King Ashurnasipal’s litanies of self-praise; “I am king, I am lord, I am praiseworthy, I am exalted, I am important, I am magnificent, I am foremost, I am a hero, I am a warrior, I am a lion, and I am virile”, one is forced to conclude that boastful leaders have not changed a whole lot over several millennia…

Indeed human nature does not alter much, which is why so many people here provide moments of rueful recognition, like Kushim, a high-ranking administrator whose job was to keep track of deliveries of malt and barley, but whose recorded totals show that he was apt to make mistakes in his arithmetic. Or the scholars, learning to be scribes by copying ancient texts, who irreverently paired in their exercises a hymn to the goddess of beer, Ninkasi, with a rather less ancient drinking song about a woman innkeeper. Or the pharaoh who, when the king of Babylon wrote to inquire after the health of his sister, one of the pharaoh’s innumerable wives, was forced to admit in veritable “Carry On” style that he could not recall which one she was and couldn’t even be sure she was still alive.

There is a procession of these folk, but the other thing that attracts me to this history is its focus on methods and development of written language. There is a great story from the time of proto-cuneiform, before letters had replaced pictograms. In pictograms, one could very easily represent concrete nouns and numbers, but other parts of speech, particularly verbs and abstracts, were harder:

“There were a few words that they needed to record, though, that were not nouns. One was the verb ‘to return’, but there’s no obvious way to draw ‘return’. For this, the administrators ingeniously began to use the sign that meant “reed.” And once they did this, we can detect the language hiding behind the script. This tiny detail tells us that they were thinking and speaking in the language known as Sumerian, because the word for “reed” in Sumerian was “gi,” and that was also the word for ‘to return.’”

If, like me, you find that solving this sort of mystery excites you more than Agatha Christie ever could, you should enjoy this book. I will admit I’d prefer more weavers and fewer kings, but that’s just me being bolshie.

One Word

That slight, sweet surprise a poem can give you sometimes, by choosing a word that just isn't quite what you were expecting. Seán Rafferty in the poem beginning "I would be Adam" (he tended not to title them). It ends with his proposed improvement on the Almighty's plan:

    He should have held his breath.
    Five days was plenty.
    Earth, sea, beasts, fowl, then feet up.

    Make feathers fly and finish.

    Peacocks.
    Full stop.

    Peacocks was really great.

That last line; that verb. Not "peacocks were", because it's the idea of peacocks that was really great. Once read, never forgotten...

Then the opening of the first poem in Peter Riley's pamphlet Pennine Tales:

    Red flicker through the trees. The last minibus
    leaves from the station.

This one works by misleading the reader as to grammar: if we read "red" as a noun and "flicker" as a verb, as is fairly natural in readers used to sentences with verbs in, we at once find that their number does not agree. We read "red flicker" expecting "red flickers" and must then go back and see adjective-noun rather than noun-verb. And hardly have we got our head round that, when the innocent-looking real verb "leaves", in the next sentence, returns our minds inevitably to the trees and turns verb into noun, singular into plural, the red flicker of the bus into autumn leaves falling…

Or another opening; Paul Henry in "Ring", from Boy Running (Seren):

    I can't get the ring out of my finger.

You read, think no, I must have misread that; must be "off", not "out of", go back and realise you didn't. Then the next lines make all clear: it's the indentation the ring's absence leaves:

    How long till it disappears,
    this ghost ring, twenty years deep?

All these have in common not just the surprise element but the requirement for the reader to do a bit of extra work, to think harder. I think it is what makes them memorable; it's what we find out for ourselves that sticks in the mind.

Review of Black Ops & Beaver Bombing, by Fiona Mathews & Tim Kendall, pub. Oneworld 2023

We know that different kinds of privilege – class, ethnicity, and so on – can determine the destinies of individuals and entire communities. Yet these are mere details compared with
the privilege of being human. Other species exist only with our permission, and if the extensive list of man-made extinctions is anything to go by, that permission can be withdrawn at any time. By the same measure, we have it in our gift to rescue our fellow creatures and allow them space to flourish.

It seems a good time for this book to come out, not long after Attenborough’s TV series Wild Isles highlighted the diversity of wildlife in these islands and the way in which we are systematically reducing it.

Fiona Mathew helped to draw up A Review of the Population and Conservation Status of British Mammals and the first ever Red List of endangered British terrestrial mammals. The Red List, accepted by government agencies (though that doesn’t stop them obstructing its work) tells us that a quarter of Britain’s forty-six native land mammal species are currently threatened with extinction, and that a still larger proportion of our species – forty-four percent – is officially ‘at risk’. Mathew and her husband, the poet and critic Tim Kendall, have now produced a readable account of species and habitat loss that should both inform and alarm.

Working on Brecht’s shrewd principle that if you want to educate your audience you must first entertain it, their writing style is lively and humorous (“The size of a humbug and crammed with juicy innards, cockchafers are the Big Mac of the insect world, but probably tastier and certainly better for the environment”). But there is a great deal of controlled anger and frustration, mainly caused by the attitudes of authority to the problem, which range from indifference to outright hostility. Even bodies you’d think would be on the side of conservation were not always – the first director-general of Nature Conservancy referred to grey seals as “tiresome organisms” and when the National Trust found wild boar on its land it “hired marksmen to exterminate them forthwith, camouflaging the news with dollops of euphemism in case their more squeamish members couldn’t bear very much reality: ‘we have taken the difficult decision to remove the animals from the estate’”.

But these pale beside the determination of central governments to stand in the way of environmental progress. Beaver reintroduction is a win for everyone.  “Water quality improves, flood risk is reduced, and a whole host of species increase in number: invertebrates, fish, amphibians, even other mammals such as water voles. Beavers are what ecologists call a keystone species, shaping the environment around themselves to almost everyone’s advantage.” Yet government continues doing all it can to entangle such projects in expense and red tape: In the case of wild boar, governments in both England and Scotland simply refuse to admit such animals exist; they are feral pigs, and therefore not entitled to protection. Nor is there a Red List for marine mammals, like the grey seal.

The book focuses on a series of endangered mammals from various habitats, showing how they are threatened, what has caused decline and what measures can be, or are being, taken to help them. One result of government inaction is activists conducting maverick reintroductions, which is where the book’s title comes from. But while the activists’ frustration is understandable, their actions can have dire consequences, like the spread of disease. Nevertheless it becomes clear that harnessing public opinion in support is the only effective way to change things. “One couple running a bed-and-breakfast had set up hides along the river that flowed through their land, and made a very good supplementary income out of their beaver tours. When officials suggested to them that the beavers should be captured and removed, they calmly replied that their 11,000 Twitter followers would be fascinated to hear about those plans. The officials went away and didn’t come back.”

More people might take such a stand if they understood that economic and environmental priorities do not always have to be at odds, though it seems hopeless to get UK governments to see this. When it comes to forest animals, as the authors bitterly observe, “every victory has to be won against a default policy of intensive monoculture timber production.”. Yet this monoculture is not even good for income: “Only about seven percent of our woodland cover comprises mixed-aged stands, compared with twenty-five percent in Croatia. You’d reasonably expect that, having prioritised efficiency over biodiversity, the forestry sector would be crucial to our Gross Domestic Product; in fact, it contributes less than 0.5% of national GDP, which puts us almost at the bottom of the European league tables. Croatia outperforms us more than threefold, and Sweden fivefold.”

Croatia is also doing very nicely for income with the national park of Plitvice, boasting wolves, bears, lynx, wildcats, beavers, boar and “more biodiversity than the whole of the UK put together.” But the benefits are not purely ecological: “Plitvice employs a thousand people, and its 1.5 million annual visitors pay up to forty euros each, per day, towards the maintenance and improvement of the park. With an ambitious vision, you can save your corner of the planet and make a living. Without it, you can eke out a profit from commercial logging, antagonise the locals, and shoot wild boar on the side to cover the wages of a couple of rangers.”

There is some good news – who knew offshore windfarms could help seals, by providing artificial reefs where fish can spawn unimpeded by trawling? “It may be that the sudden spike in grey seal numbers at Horsey was prompted by the building of an off shore wind farm in the North Sea.” There are also helpful hints for small things we can all do without waiting for government to get off its backside – light at night disorientates both bats and hedgehogs, so closing curtains and turning off outside lights can help. We should also avoid too much gardening – “The obsession with tidiness, the paving of driveways, the wretched proclivity for plastic grass (with which the ninth circle of the Inferno is probably carpeted), and the human intolerance of overgrown land where beetles and bugs can breed” all hinder the cause of wildlife (beetles and bugs may not be everyone’s thing but without them there are no hedgehogs or songbirds).

But the facts are stark and should horrify. By 2050, plastic in the oceans is predicted to outweigh the fish. The Environment Agency’s 2020 report under the Water Framework Directive showed that only fourteen percent of rivers in England are of a ‘good ecological standard’, and not a single river or lake in the entire country is of ‘good chemical standard’. In 2014, 460,000 tonnes of wild-caught fish was used to yield 179,000 tonnes of Scottish farmed salmon.

The message is that we should all be making nuisances of ourselves to our elected representatives about “the indirect ways in which we destroy animals’ lives”. These include the ripping out of hedges, the facing of canal banks with metal in which voles cannot dig burrows, the use of harmful chemicals and much else. And we should be alert to what goes on in our neighbourhood, as this grim anecdote shows:

“In the week of the COP26 summit in Glasgow, when the world’s attention was focused on climate change and biodiversity loss, our parish council sent in contractors under cover of darkness to clear a brambly field that provided habitat for three protected species: hedgehogs, slow-worms and dormice. Despite having been warned about the law, they didn’t bother to carry out any ecological surveys. The rules are barely policed, after all. This is how biodiversity loss happens under our noses – field by field, hedge by hedge.”

Review of The Confession of Hilary Durwood, by Euron Griffith, pub. Seren 2023

Our eponymous narrator (male, by the way) is adrift in a small boat off Singapore in a rough sea:

“One petulant and mighty gust was enough to dislodge the cage of the hapless macaw and send him hurtling into an oncoming wave. The same gust which erased this ill-starred animal from all earthly records was kinder to the giant centipede for that individual’s basket was merely tipped onto its side therefore allowing the slinky beast to pour himself onto my lap. I had never before been host to such a gargantuan insect and the peculiarity of the situation was not lost on the giant centipede either because he immediately sought a more secluded sanctuary within my breeches. As the spindly limbs of the fiend felt their way along the naked flesh of my inner thigh I followed the course of the moving bulge with trepidation for I had heard Mr Eustace Skate recounting on many occasions how a single bite from this scoundrel could reduce a man to pitiful paroxysms of agony. Intent on evicting the noxious arthropod I once more rose to my feet and – struggling to maintain my balance – I undid the buttons of my breeches and unpeeled them as delicately as was possible over my boots. I gathered the breeches in my arms and sacrificed them to the insolent snatch of the gale. They kicked and flapped their empty legs in protest but were swiftly sucked into the bottomless pit of the ocean. Any discomfort I may have felt at my indecorous state was tempered by the knowledge that I had at least exorcised the giant centipede.
 But, upon sitting down again, I discovered that the cunning beast had not, after all, been consigned to the murky depths of the sea but had, instead, curled itself around my groin like a chain and was now tightening its grip by the second! He appeared to find my groin a rather agreeable spot to rest for, although both strands of his antennae would occasionally wave eerily to taste the salt air, the main body of the segmented monster resisted the urge to scuttle off into some caliginous region of the boat and he merely contracted his anatomy even further to consolidate his occupancy.”

Clearly our narrator is from an earlier century (the nineteenth in fact) and the Victorian idiom is nearly always convincing, though lemon drizzle cake looked dubious for the period, and indeed the internet assures me it was invented in 1967. He has a prim, scholarly way of expressing himself, even in extremis, that promises much humour, unintended on his part but very much intended on the author’s. Indeed Durwood sometimes approaches Pooter in his intense consciousness of his own dignity and supreme unconsciousness of the ridiculous:

“Bowing graciously I turned on my heels and walked away in the direction of the forest. I proceeded with as much dignity as I could muster. I continued to do so even after the dead crab had struck me forcefully on the back of the head.”

He is also very naïve; the reader will be well ahead of him in surmising why the friendly villagers who rescue him are so concerned for his nourishment, and at several other points in the novel.

As for the macaw and the centipede, they are only the first in a remarkable series of animal characters we shall meet, including Mr Delphus of Clare, the lion, and Maximilian the Second, the porcupine. Whether this zoological aspect is an intentional reference to Life of Pi I don’t know, but it is handled a lot more entertainingly here.

It will also be clear that the novel, or at least this part of it, is a picaresque, with a strong element of what I hesitate to call fantasy, since no elves or goblins are involved, rather a certain zaniness and a deadpan acceptance of what is not physically possible, let alone plausible. In the first half of the novel, the humour lies in incongruity and preposterousness, like the amazing presence of mind shown by a man carried aloft by an albatross:

“Mamar had the ingenuity to take advantage of his situation by reaching for a piece of charcoal from his pocket and drawing a relatively detailed outline of the harbour and coastline. Forever ingenious and practical, the little fellow tied it up with some ribbon, weighed it down with a coin and dropped it. Fortuitously, it happened to land directly into the hand of Admiral Stuart Kelsey who was about to take command of his frigate HMS Solent. This map proved to be the basis for all further studies of that treacherous piece of coast and was invaluable in the war against France.”

In the second half, back in London, the humour becomes considerably more satirical. I shall long remember Mr Colebridge the editor and his zeal to improve the public:

“There’s a whole new world out there Hilary! A world of opportunities for men with vision and ideas. Literacy! It’s a most wonderful gift and now, thanks to our advances in education, we have an enormous amount of literate and modestly prosperous people out there desperate for something to transport them out of the dullness of their everyday drudgery. Why, even the neediest of the London poor are now able to at least read a page of an average newspaper if it’s presented to them simply and clearly.”
He came back to the desk, sat down heavily and lowered his voice. It trembled with excitement.
 “Murder, rape, burglary, kidnapping! That is what this new readership wants and craves and, by God sir, that is what I aim to give them in the pages of The Extraordinary London Gazette!”

 In this half too, the novel’s main theme (at least as I see it) becomes clearer; it is very much about guilt and justice. Early on, Durwood’s momentary pity for the centipede results in a nasty bite (no good deed goes unpunished), and throughout the novel people who have been ill-used themselves ill-use others, “perpetuating this cycle of cruelty and self-preservation”. Durwood at one point has a key revelation: “I arrived at the inevitable – and it must be conceded – astoundingly unoriginal conclusion that the world was not fair and that the evil, deceptive actions of unscrupulous individuals were not always punished. Looking up at the night sky and at the stars which glinted coldly out of the blackness I wondered if there was, in fact, a benevolent God, framed, naturally, in the shape of a fair-minded English gentleman, looking down upon his creation and ensuring that a fundamental sense of justice would always prevail, or if the sky merely stretched away into chaos and anarchy – a smattering of whirling rocks and stones untroubled by morality, ethics or law.”  

The other truth that becomes evident to Durwood is how alienated different classes in society are from each other, and how little they know about each other. Though in this conversation he disagrees with his colleague, he comes to see that Harry Bunch is right. If this review is longer than most, it’s because I have quoted a lot, and who wouldn’t when the language is so crisp and memorable?

“We live in enlightened times Mr Bunch. The doors of our great institutions are open to all who have the requisite gifts, regardless of class or financial considerations.”
 “Spoken like a true gentleman if I may say so,” said Harry Bunch. “Because only a true gentleman could believe for a minute that any of that was true.”

Review of Never Still, Nivver Still, by Joan Lennon, Anne Sinclair & Lucy Wheeler, pub. Hansel 2023

This is a narrative poem in three parts by Joan Lennon, presented both in English and in a  Fair Isle dialect translation by Anne Sinclair, and illustrated by Jenny Wheeler. It concerns life on Fair Isle, seen from three viewpoints: coming, going and staying, ie someone coming to live there, an emigrant leaving, and someone becoming acclimatised to the island, plus three short “interleaves” which separate the longer sections. To quote the author; “three narrative poems, telling the stories of three women’s experiences of Fair Isle in three distinctly different time periods, interleaved with descriptive poems about the way the natural world was constantly changing. In geological time, Fair Isle has travelled from the South Pole, been part of and then split away from North America, been engulfed and scoured by glaciers, and surrounded by sea. Now it is midway between the Orkney and Shetland archipelagos, where the Atlantic and the North Sea meet. But physical change has not stopped. The wind and the water continue to carve and shape the Isle.”

It may be necessary to explain to non-Shetlanders that even within a remote island group, Fair Isle is quite particularly isolated, almost as close to Orkney as to Shetland and far enough from anywhere that, for instance, children at high school on the mainland have to board away from home during the week. Even its dialect varies noticeably, particularly in pronunciation, from Shetlandic dialect elsewhere.

To speak first of the original poem, the voice in the “coming” section is very much that of someone who has immigrated, as the isle’s first settlers probably did, from Scandinavia and is temporarily traumatised by the huge difference in the landscape, especially the total lack of trees:

    At home, she could see the other side of the fjord
    and the deep green pines clinging to the mountain.

    Here there was no other side

    only a heaving grey line
    where the grey of the water reared up to meet
    the grey of the sky.

 The second voice, which to me was the strongest, is that of a woman leaving the isle for the New World and apprehensive about her reception. This gives rise to a fascinating moment in the dialect translation; the lines

    Their sister had written to warn them
    “It’s only the English they speak here”

become in dialect

    Der sister haed writtin te warn dem
    “Dey oanly knap whaur we bide.”

That second line may not look much like the original, but to “knap”, in Shetlandic, means to speak affectedly, used in particular of a dialect speaker attempting more standard language. Here the translation arguably adds something to the original, and it isn’t the only time. When “stitching sky to sea” becomes “shooin lift te løybrak”, the care with which the alliteration is preserved by using “løybrak” (surf) instead of “haaf” (sea) is notable. When reading this section, it may help to know that the emigrating family could not have gone direct from Fair Isle to the Scottish mainland to embark for America. They would first have had to take ship north to Lerwick, then go south from there to the mainland, which means their ship would actually pass Fair Isle on the way south. This moment of keen nostalgia is skilfully conveyed:

    the bog cotton flying their flags of fluff -
    pinks, snugged down tight amongst the grasses -
    the way the sheep tracks rayed out
    beige through the brittle heather
    […]
    She couldn’t see them
    but she knew they were there.

The shorter “interleave” poems relate to the isle itself and its geography rather than to people. This is also true of the powerful illustrations by Lucy Wheeler; I don’t know enough to judge them as art, but they convey both the beauty and austerity of the landscape.

I’ve complained before in reviews about forewords detailing the author’s reasons for writing the book – the dreaded “journey” that is generally of interest to nobody else. In this case I would concede that some background is necessary, both on the place, which will be unfamiliar to many, and on the translation process. I do think the intro could be shorter; leave out all the chatty stuff about PhD proposals, funding applications, covid etc. All that matters is that she wanted to write about Fair Isle, went there to do so and that what developed was a project about three women on an island at different times, by three women on an island, working in different media. It is very readable both as an original English poem and in the dialect translation. There is also much interest, for anyone fascinated by languages, in how the translation process worked, and the illustrations are most pleasing.

Review of Never Still, Nivver Still, by Joan Lennon, Anne Sinclair and Lucy Wheeler, pub. Hansel

This is a narrative poem in three parts by Joan Lennon, presented both in English and in a  Fair Isle dialect translation by Anne Sinclair, and illustrated by Jenny Wheeler. It concerns life on Fair Isle, seen from three viewpoints: coming, going and staying, ie someone coming to live there, an emigrant leaving, and someone becoming acclimatised to the island, plus three short “interleaves” which separate the longer sections. To quote the author; “three narrative poems, telling the stories of three women’s experiences of Fair Isle in three distinctly different time periods, interleaved with descriptive poems about the way the natural world was constantly changing. In geological time, Fair Isle has travelled from the South Pole, been part of and then split away from North America, been engulfed and scoured by glaciers, and surrounded by sea. Now it is midway between the Orkney and Shetland archipelagos, where the Atlantic and the North Sea meet. But physical change has not stopped. The wind and the water continue to carve and shape the Isle.”

It may be necessary to explain to non-Shetlanders that even within a remote island group, Fair Isle is quite particularly isolated, almost as close to Orkney as to Shetland and far enough from anywhere that, for instance, children at high school on the mainland have to board away from home during the week. Even its dialect varies noticeably, particularly in pronunciation, from Shetlandic dialect elsewhere.

To speak first of the original poem, the voice in the “coming” section is very much that of someone who has immigrated, as the isle’s first settlers probably did, from Scandinavia and is temporarily traumatised by the huge difference in the landscape, especially the total lack of trees:

    At home, she could see the other side of the fjord
    and the deep green pines clinging to the mountain.

    Here there was no other side

    only a heaving grey line
    where the grey of the water reared up to meet
    the grey of the sky.

 The second voice, which to me was the strongest, is that of a woman leaving the isle for the New World and apprehensive about her reception. This gives rise to a fascinating moment in the dialect translation; the lines

    Their sister had written to warn them
    “It’s only the English they speak here”

become in dialect

    Der sister haed writtin te warn dem
    “Dey oanly knap whaur we bide.”

That second line may not look much like the original, but to “knap”, in Shetlandic, means to speak affectedly, used in particular of a dialect speaker attempting more standard language. Here the translation arguably adds something to the original, and it isn’t the only time. When “stitching sky to sea” becomes “shooin lift te løybrak”, the care with which the alliteration is preserved by using “løybrak” (surf) instead of “haaf” (sea) is notable. When reading this section, it may help to know that the emigrating family could not have gone direct from Fair Isle to the Scottish mainland to embark for America. They would first have had to take ship north to Lerwick, then go south from there to the mainland, which means their ship would actually pass Fair Isle on the way south. This moment of keen nostalgia is skilfully conveyed:

    the bog cotton flying their flags of fluff -
    pinks, snugged down tight amongst the grasses -
    the way the sheep tracks rayed out
    beige through the brittle heather
    […]
    She couldn’t see them
    but she knew they were there.

The shorter “interleave” poems relate to the isle itself and its geography rather than to people. This is also true of the powerful illustrations by Lucy Wheeler; I don’t know enough to judge them as art, but they convey both the beauty and austerity of the landscape.

I’ve complained before in reviews about forewords detailing the author’s reasons for writing the book – the dreaded “journey” that is generally of interest to nobody else. In this case I would concede that some background is necessary, both on the place, which will be unfamiliar to many, and on the translation process. I do think the intro could be shorter; leave out all the chatty stuff about PhD proposals, funding applications, covid etc. All that matters is that she wanted to write about Fair Isle, went there to do so and that what developed was a project about three women on an island at different times, by three women on an island, working in different media. It is very readable both as an original English poem and in the dialect translation. There is also much interest, for anyone fascinated by languages, in how the translation process worked, and the illustrations are most pleasing.

Review of Goldhawk Road by Kate Noakes, pub. Two Rivers Press 2023

Kate Noakes is a much travelled poet who has lived on several continents, and this collection is arranged in sections labelled “Home”, “Away” and “London Tree”.  Since quite a lot of “home” also concerns London, the collection is by way of an exotica sandwich.

Sense of place is obviously important to her poetry, and London in particular strikes me as sharply evoked, eg in “Samaritans are waiting for our call”:

   Hammersmith Bridge is an old athlete, tired and struggling to hoist
   her barbells; her belt’s gold and green can’t hold her twisting spine.
   Her span is tensed between thick limbs and near breaking point

Australia too comes over as lived experience rather than a visitor passing through:

   She wants the kind of sun that draws tar
   from telegraph poles, closes heavy curtains
   and prises windows open
   (“Collected in 1968”)

The voice in these poems often has a touch of humour, as when she is musing on her mother’s tendency to imagine disasters in any region her daughter travelled to, or recalling buying a teenage bra:

   The Balcony, a tough construction
   of white and steel underwiring
   a fine proportioned vista over Verona,
   where my twin Juliets can run out
   just so far under sun and stars
   (“Growing Up for Boys”)

The environment is a preoccupation of several poems, and works best when combined with this sense of humour, as in “Waiting for Ikebana, Mayfair”

   Early November, and already
   Christmas decorations bling
   the street. The restaurant’s standard bay trees are baubled
   in tasteful oranges and pinks.
   Outdoor heaters release
   pyramids of fire.

   A preened young man
   shows off his grooming
   on video chat. Sunday morning,
   sunny, and I am about to do
   precise things with flowers.
 
   I know we are living in the end
   of days. Still, there is art.

The touch of self-deprecating humour helps stop poems on this theme sounding preachy. What also works is obliquity, notably in one of the Australian poems, “The Firebox”. On the surface, this account of family preparations for possible wildfires is a purely foreign experience; only gradually do we come to realise that it is valid for environmental catastrophes worldwide:

   In the hall cupboard we keep the firebox: toiletries,
   changes of clothes laundered monthly, our precious
   things – photos, jewellery, insurance certificates.
   We’ve never had to haul it into the Ute.

   It’s a comfort, assuming we are at home at the time
   and have some kind of warning.

Not all the poems on this theme are quite that subtle, and now and then I did feel preached at, particularly at the end of “Crows are misdirection”, where I think it was the phrase “what we should fret about” that was fatal to the tone.

One thing that continually puzzled me was her choice of titles. You could call them quirky, but inexplicable would describe some better. Sometimes they are decipherable with work; I think the clue to “Spring weddings, save the date” is that “save” is being used to mean “except for”, rather than “reserve for later” – though if so, “save for” would have been clearer. But others, like “Samaritans are waiting for our call”, “It’s the scene of night sweats”, “Earth surface sediment transport” and many others, still defeat me; I can’t see how they relate to their poems, or what they are aiming to say about them.

I also think “Heritage 2020”, otherwise a strong poem, would be better without its last two lines, which articulate a thought that would surely occur independently to any alert reader, and the constantly repeated phrase in “Flat holm/Steep holm” similarly hammers the point a bit too much.

However, the temptation to say too much only occurs when a poet does at least have something to say. The strengths of this collection lie in the fact that it does, and also has a sharp, interesting voice to say it in. And the sense of place, and of people in a place, is very strong. In “As the muddy Mississippi”, one of the poems set in the US, two writers meet at a café. They

    buy morning coffee,
   and write. I journaled.
   You edited a play

That “I journaled” could jar horribly, did not one realise how economically and naturally it conveys the milieu: in London one writes a diary, there, no doubt, one journals. It is a piece of observation, and assimilation, typical of the chameleon-like nature of a writer at home in many different places.

Review of The Grand Tour by Mike Rendell, pub. Shire Publications 2022

book cover

“The people completing their Grand Tour frequently did so in a sort of itinerant herd, often sticking together, conversing solely in English and reducing encounters with the locals to an absolute minimum.”

Somehow one is not surprised, and this kind of early package tourism may account for how even Englishmen as intelligent as Shelley came back remarking of the entire Italian nation, “I do not think I have seen a gleam of intelligence in the countenance of man since I passed the Alps”. Good old progressive, liberal-minded Shelley, eh?

Of course, for most of the well-to-do young men who made the Tour, the point was not to meet people from different cultures, except insofar as those out to sow their wild oats were anxious to meet as many of the female inhabitants of Paris and Venice as possible, generally bringing back interesting diseases as souvenirs. Those whose tastes ran the other way were apparently well catered for in Florence, where the great chemist Robert Boyle disapprovingly called the local monks “gowned sodomites” when he encountered them in a brothel (what he himself was doing there is not specified).

Another attraction for the more frivolous traveller was fashion. However much they might despise Paris as a city (“the ugliest, beastliest town in the universe”, according to Horace Walpole), it was still the centre of fashion, and it was the custom for English travellers to order a whole new suit of clothes as soon as they arrived. This of course cut no ice with folks back home who could not afford such luxuries, and the Georgian cartoonists had endless fun portraying the “macaronis” with their ludicrous hairstyles and outfits.

Some Lord Littlebrains braved pirates and the hair-raising Alpine crossing simply to say they had been; for some it was a career move during which they networked and cemented relationships. Others, the magpie collectors, went to hoover up artefacts from the past for their personal collections. In many ways the Grand Tour was the genesis of the British Museum, for its nucleus was the collection of the traveller Hans Sloane, and other collectors like Charles Towneley left their swag to it in their wills. Some collectors were genuine connoisseurs; most were more on the level of souvenir hunters, and a flourishing industry of fakery and tourist tat soon sprang up to part them from their money. One collector, Sir Richard Worsley, was “determined to amass the most important collection of sculpture in the country”. Meanwhile his young wife, presumably at a loose end, decided to amass the finest collection of lovers, and had notched up an impressive 27 before the divorce came to court.

One group with rather more elevated reasons for travelling was the artists, who mostly could not afford to make the Tour independently and instead went as governors or paid companions to young aristocrats. But they had really gone to study and absorb new influences, often with dramatic results as in the case of Turner and Reynolds. Scottish artists particularly favoured Rome, where there was a small Scottish community centred on the exiled Stuarts. Allan Ramsay, not put off by being robbed and almost drowned on his first visit, came back to Italy often, and Katherine Read spent three years in Venice.

The numerous illustrations include Read’s “British Gentlemen in Rome”, a rather pleasingly satirical depiction of half a dozen young dandies completely ignoring the awesome ruins around them while immersed in conversation with each other – possibly a neat symbolic description of how the Tour was for many. It is typical of Rendell to take care to include a female artist, for in all his Georgian histories he is scrupulous about not forgetting the women. He also devotes a chapter to women who made the Grand Tour. They did so far less often than men, for obvious reasons of safety, but he credits those who did with rather better motives than most of the men. Though a few (like Lady Worsley) were fleeing scandal, the women usually went, not to sow wild oats or denude Italy and Greece of statuary for their country houses, but to broaden their minds. “In Italy they could hear about the physicist Laura Bassi who, in 1732, became the world’s first female professor. In France they could be inspired by Émilie du Châtelet, a brilliant mathematician who translated Newton’s Principia from Latin into French in 1749. Grand Tourists could attend salons in Paris and hear other women debate issues of the day. When these intrepid women returned to Britain they were able to become salonnieres themselves, arranging meetings for anyone interested in stimulating conversation.”

This is a slim volume which doesn’t pretend to be more than an introduction to all the fascinating people and works it mentions – for those inspired to pursue the subject, there are appendices listing further reading, online resources and places to visit. It is well and entertainingly written and the illustrations, almost all in colour, are well chosen and magnificently lavish. It will broaden your horizons in a way the Grand Tour itself didn’t always manage to do for those who made it.