Stephen Lycett's Blog, page 5

The Victorian obsession with Ghosts

No collection of Victorian tales would be complete without a ghost story, hence the inclusion of The Diocesan Exorcist’s Tale.  Of course, there were ghost stories before and after the nineteenth century, but the Victorian period was the golden age. One obvious reason is the proliferation of magazines like Blackwoods and The Strand, all of them eager for tales of the supernatural. The short story is the perfect vehicle for ghosts. It is hard to sustain atmosphere and the willing suspension of disbelief over the length of an entire novel. (Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black is an obvious exception here.)

But the proliferation of magazines only explains why so many were written; it does not explain the taste for them in the first place. I think two things were in play. One is the slow decline in religious belief throughout the nineteenth century and, with it, belief in personal immortality. Along with spiritualism (also a mid- to late-Victorian phenomenon), the ghost story might be seen as an attempt to re-instate it or provide a substitute. A second factor is the Romantic view that no grief should go unremarked, unannounced, unmourned  or unavenged. That suffering might be futile was unthinkable.

What put an end to this, I suggest, was the mass slaughter of the First World War. Ghosts of a sort put in a brief appearance at the beginning of the war in the widely believed story of the Angel of Mons, which began life as a magazine story called The Bowmen of Mons by Arthur Machen. As the war progressed it became increasingly difficult to believe that supernatural agencies were involving themselves in the murderous clash of empires, where the dead were numbered in their hundreds of thousands. Compared with the reality of life at the front, the traditional ghost story with its hand-wringing spectres must have looked downright twee.

Mrs Voysey Has A Plan

The third story in Mr Blackwood’s Fabulorium, ‘Miss Biddlecombe’s Proprieties’, concerns a scandal in an academy for young ladies in Ramsgate.  When the headmistress is persuaded against her better judgement to allow sea bathing, all manner of moral depravity ensues, much of it connected to the circulation of a mysterious book. This story was suggested by the earliest surviving prospectus from the Godolphin School in Salisbury, which was issued by the Head, Mrs Voysey, in 1789. (They were having a lot more fun in Paris than in Salisbury that year.)The paragraphs most relevant to the Miss Biddlecombe story are as follows:

1st – As early rising hath, in every age, been esteemed by the most able writers to be highly necessary and conducive to health, Mrs. V. induces her Pupils to experience the charming effects thereof, by being in school at Six o’ Clock, in the Morning, during the summer Months; and is extremely happy to add, the result has exceeded her most sanguine expectation; Illness being almost a Stranger to the School.

2nd – As close Learning and Study ought ever to be accompanied with the alternate relief of innocent freedom, her Pupils are daily refreshed with intervals of cheerful recreation and agreeable exercise, so as to cause the ornamental acquirements to be pursued with fresh avidity, whereby the task of learning is blended sweetly with real pleasure and delight.

3rdly – As the whole welfare of the rising generation depends, in a great degree, upon the Seeds of Morality and Virtue which are sown in the tender Mind ere it expands to maturity, Mrs. V.’s unremitting attention is continually fixed on this GRAND POINT, so that no Books which are of the least dissipating tendency, are admitted in the school, or suffered to be read; nor shall any be found there, but such as enlarge the heart to Virtue and excellency of Sentiment.

Unfortunately, Mrs Voysey lived in the pre-camera age. By way of illustration I offer instead a photograph of one of her Victorian successors, Miss Andrews.

In Praise of Railway Modellers

This weekend I went to the annual model railway exhibition in Wilton.

It’s easy to dismiss railway modellers as anoraks. True, many of them are pedants, but many are genuine scholars.  (The fanaticism displayed in the opening page of Mr Blackwood‘s Fabularium is really not exaggerated.) Many modellers insert an imaginary railway between two actual lines or stations. In some cases, they exhume plans for branch lines that were submitted but never actually built.

What they do is not so very different from historical novelists, in that they borrow a context which somehow authenticates the imaginative addition contained within it. I had originally intended to define Mr Blackwood Fabularium’s context more sharply by borrowing all the characters’ names from Kelly’s Directory for Canterbury for 1851 and to time the stories according to Bradshaw, the Victorian railway timetable. Neither proved possible. There is no Kelly’s Directory for Canterbury in 1851, and in the earliest such directory I could find (from 1859) all the characters were called Smith or Jones, which, with respect to any Smiths and Joneses reading this post, are not striking enough for fiction. As for timing the stories according to Bradshaw, I couldn’t manage it. Few of the stations were more than ten or, at most, fifteen minutes apart. (Victorian trains were quicker than you think.) To make the timings believable I had to introduce lots of signal stops.

Lioness attacking a mail-coach? A true tale in ‘Mr Blackwood’s Fabularium’

In ‘The Devil’s Coachman‘, the first of the inventor’s two tales, there is an account of how a lioness attacked the Salisbury mail coach at what was then called the Winterslow Hut (until recently The Pheasant).

This is a true story, which occurred in October 1816. A travelling menagerie had pulled in for the night at the inn. A lioness escaped its travelling cage and attacked Pomegranate, the leading horse of the mail coach. All the passengers fled to the safety of the inn. One poor fellow was too slow, however, and found the door shut in his face. When the lioness was at last secured, he was let into the inn. He recovered sufficiently to write an account of his ordeal for the local paper, but later went mad and was incarcerated at the lunatic asylum at Laverstock, where he died twenty-seven years later.

Later in the same story the coach drives into the middle of the stones at Stonehenge. I’m not sure that this was ever possible, though there were nineteenth century illustrations of coaches drawn up close to the stones. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the road (now the A303, soon to be buried in a tunnel) is said to have been half a mile wide as it passed Stonehenge, the coachmen trying to by-pass each others’ wheel ruts during the winter months.

 

 

Travelling in open carriages

Waiting for a train at Waterloo last Saturday, I thought of the scene in Hardy’s short story The Fiddler of the Reels which gave me the idea for my new novel ‘Mr Blackwood’s Fabularium’ in the first place.

In it a Wessex man waits for his girlfriend to arrive at Waterloo on a Great Exhibition ‘special’ from Dorchester. “The seats for the humbler class of travellers,” he wrote, “were open trucks, without any protection whatever from the wind and the rain; and damp weather having set in with the afternoon, the unfortunate occupants of these vehicles were, on the train drawing up at the London terminus, found to be in a pitiable condition – blue-faced, stiff-necked, sneezing, rain-beaten and chilled to the marrow. The women had in some degree protected themselves by turning up the skirts of their gowns over their heads…”

Many real-life Exhibition excursionists must have had similar experiences, for the summer of 1851 was an unusually wet one!

The Great Western Railway

Top hats – a most impractical invention

I imagine most of the male characters in my new novel ‘Mr Blackwood’s Fabularium’ to be wearing top hats.

The fact that top hats retained their popularity for so long is odd. In the eighteenth century men wore tricorn hats, which are said to have been the most aerodynamically efficient hats ever designed. (The harder the wind blew, the more it jammed the hat down on the wearer’s head.) The top hat, by contrast, must have been a nuisance both on and off. A gust of wind would easily have dislodged it, so the wearer must have spent a lot of time clutching the brim.

And then there was the question of what to do with the hat when the wearer was indoors. There is a wonderful episode in Great Expectations where the blacksmith, Joe Gargery, visits his newly gentrified brother-in-law, Pip, and spends most of the visit trying to balance his new top hat on the mantelpiece and leaping up every time it threatens to fall off into the hearth.

The railway companies came up with an ingenious solution to the problem in the form of parallel ribbons tacked to carriage ceilings a little less than a hat brim’s width apart. Hats were inserted between the ribbons and hung down from the roof like bats from the rafters.

The most famous of all Victorian top hats: Brunel’s