Category: Writers Page 1 of 4

Perdita, Mary Robinson, the Life of a Georgian Lady.

On March 30, 2025

The village of Chawton in Hampshire is best known today for its association with Jane Austen. Her brother inherited a sixteenth century manor house in the village. He stayed there only occasionally, but his mother and sisters became permanent residents in the former bailiff’s cottage and visited Chawton House whenever he was in residence.

Jane Austen’s mother, Cassandra, and her elder sister, Cassandra Elizabeth, are both buried in the churchyard of St. Nicholas in the village.

Graves of Jane Austen’s mother and sister, St. Nicholas churchyard, Chawton

But I did not visit Chawton in search of the Austens. In 1992 Chawton House, by then in poor condition, was sold to an American businesswoman, Sandra Lerner. She restored the house and established a research library and study centre with the rather cumbrous title The Centre for the Study of Early Women’s Writing 1600-1830.

The contents of the library include Sandra Lerner’s own extensive collection of early and rare editions of women’s writing. Regular exhibitions highlight different writers: the centre is currently presenting Mary Robinson, more commonly known as Perdita.

Mary was born to a well-heeled family in Bristol in 1758, but her father lost his money following an ill-advised investment in a whale fishery in Labrador. When he returned from Canada, he left his wife and children to live with the mistress whom he had brought back to England. Mary’s mother moved to London with her children and set up her own school. There, Mary, who had received a better education than most girls of her generation, started teaching at the age of fourteen. Her father, however, despite deserting his family, resented this public acknowledgement of their poverty and forced the closure of the school.

Mary had always been attracted by the theatre and through connections of her mother secured an introduction to David Garrick. Impressed by her abilities, he began to train her: she was to play Cordelia to his Lear. Meanwhile however she had met Thomas Robinson, an articled clerk purportedly expecting an inheritance. She agreed to marry him, possibly under pressure from her mother, who was acutely aware of the dangers of a stage career at a time when “actress” was often a euphemism for prostitute.

The marriage was not a success. The inheritance did not materialise. Married at fifteen, Mary had a child at sixteen, and at seventeen, along with her husband and child, was housed in the Fleet prison for debt.

The debts had piled up as both Thomas and Mary had pursued a recklessly extravagant lifestyle. There was an expensive address, an open top carriage, clothes, jewellery, evenings at Ranelagh and Vauxhall gardens, and for Thomas the races, gaming houses and brothels. Quintessential Georgians, in stark contrast to their gloomy Victorian successors, they had an infinite capacity for living in the moment, ever hopeful that their fortunes would turn tomorrow, combined with an unattractive habit of tapping other people for “loans.” Detention in a debtors’ prison was an experience so widespread that it often seems to have served as little more than a rite of passage for large numbers of Georgians.

When it came to survival in the Fleet, however, Mary proved herself to be of superior mettle to Thomas. She accepted work, which he had refused, copying legal documents, and she published her first volume of poetry.

After Thomas was discharged from the Fleet, the playwright and theatre manager Sheridan encouraged Mary to return to the theatre. With characteristic generosity Garrick came out of retirement to tutor her again, and Mary made her stage debut as Juliet at Sheridan’s Drury Lane theatre.

Her subsequent stage career was an enormous success; particularly popular were her performances in the “breeches roles,” cross dressing as Viola in Twelfth Night and Rosalind in As You Like It. At the same time, she published her second volume of poetry.

In 1779 Sheridan revived Florizel and Perdita. This was Garrick’s adaptation of the final two acts of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, the story of Prince Florizel and his love for the shepherd’s daughter Perdita, who of course turns out to be a princess.

The Prince of Wales, later George IV, came to see the play and promptly declared himself “head over heels in love” and “blinded by passion.”* One of his most unappealing characteristics was his capacity for self-deception. For the previous six months he had been declaring his love for his sisters’ governess, Mary Hamilton, threatening to commit suicide if she rejected him. Before he left for the theatre that night, he had sent her a letter declaring his undying love. When he returned, a second letter abruptly reduced Mary Hamilton to the status of a friend to whom he confided his new passion. In his letters to Mary Hamilton, he had called her Miranda and signed himself Palemon, now he began to write love letters to Mary Robinson calling her Perdita and signing them Florizel. Originality was alien to him.

Though Mary Robinson was flattered, she was not a fool. She held out against his blandishments and a welter of letters (her biographer notes that Palemon had penned a letter every three days to Mary Hamilton, “establishing a pattern he would far surpass when taking the name of Florizel.”**) reminding him that if they were to have a “public attachment” she would have to abandon her career and be financially dependent on him. After six months he sent a bond promising to pay her twenty thousand pounds when he came of age, and she retired from the stage to become his mistress.

As Perdita, Mary enjoyed her fame although it was tinged with notoriety, and she was frequently caricatured in the press. She spent lavishly and conducted a simultaneous affair with Lord Malden. When predictably the prince moved on, as he soon did, first to Elizabeth Armistead, then via Grace Dalrymple Eliot to Maria Fitzherbert, she was left seriously in debt. But she had held on to that slew of letters, which she now threatened to publish, and while denying that her motive was mercenary, negotiated a payment of five thousand pounds for their return. Moreover, she still held the bond.

It is hard to see her as a complete victim, though she did try to present herself as such, for in many respects she and the prince were cut from the same cloth, notwithstanding his greater advantages. Her capacity for self-dramatisation was congruent with his. Once she had secured the money, she sat for her portrait with Gainsborough who portrayed her as a pensive, abandoned beauty, clutching a miniature of the prince. Then she purchased a new carriage and headed for Paris.

In Paris she was welcomed as a celebrity, found new lovers, made the acquaintance of Marie-Antoinette, and returned to London bearing the latest fashions. Perdita introduced the white muslin shift dress, high-waisted and tied with a silk sash, which became known as the Perdita chemise, and which quickly replaced the paraphernalia of hoops and stays. All those Jane Austen heroines who appeared a few years later in their muslin frocks were, like everyone else, following the trend set by Perdita. No modern-day influencer can compare with Perdita as a leader of fashion: there were Perdita hats, gowns, handkerchiefs, stockings. Where Perdita led, society followed.

The prince may have wearied of her, but Perdita was at the height of her fame and popularity. She was painted by Hoppner, Reynolds, and Romney. There was an expensive new address, carriages, appearances at the theatre, opera, pleasure gardens and parks. Everywhere she met with admiration and emulation. Though there was always salacious gossip about her, she had learned to orchestrate the press to her advantage.

She continued her long running affair with Lord Malden and began new affairs with Banastre Tarleton, recently returned from fighting for the British in the American War of independence, and with Charles James Fox, the Whig MP. When the affair with Malden ended, she secured another annuity. Tarleton meanwhile ran up gambling debts and she “borrowed” money from Fox on his behalf.

But then things began to go badly for Perdita. Hearing a rumour that Tarleton had fled for the continent to escape his creditors, she set out in pursuit of him. While travelling she contracted rheumatic fever resulting in severe arthritis which gradually deprived her of the use of her legs. She was only twenty five years old. When the prince came of age Perdita should have been able to cash the twenty-thousand-pound bond, but Florizel prevaricated, eventually agreeing to an annuity of £500 in lieu – it was seldom paid. As she ran into financial difficulties, combined with lameness and some loss of her looks, the press increasingly pilloried and denigrated her.

With considerable fortitude, she reinvented herself as a poet, novelist, and playwright. Her early poems were influenced by the effusive, flowery, writings of the Della Cruscans and her early novels were gothic money spinners, but Mary was writing for money, and she was successful.

Later she moved to narrative poetry much admired by Coleridge, and the Monthly Review dubbed her “The English Sappho.” Her novels ridiculed the hypocrisy of fashionable society and incorporated political themes of inequality and discrimination. Mary Wollstonecraft reviewed them with enthusiasm.

By the time Tarleton left her, Mary had become an independent woman of letters. She corresponded with William Godwin discussing liberty and reason. Under Wollstonecraft’s influence she adopted feminist causes, critiquing women’s exclusion from parliament, double sexual standards, and prohibitions on physical exercise for women. She condemned domestic drudgery, advocating a university for women and their right to own their own property.

After her death Mary’s writing fell from fashion, yet while the early work was sentimental, the analysis of misogyny in her later work anticipates both the first and second waves of feminism. In “A Letter to the Women of England, on the injustice of mental insubordination” she elucidated the male disdain for intellectual women:

There are but three classes of women desirable associates in the eyes of men: handsome women: licentious women: and good sort of women. The first for his vanity; the second for his amusement; and the last for the arrangement of his domestic drudgery. A thinking woman does not entertain him; a learned woman does not flatter his self-love by confessing inferiority***

In her memoirs Mary presented herself as a victim of male deceit and contempt. There was some truth in this, but Garrick and Sheridan both recognised her talent, while Coleridge and Godwin accorded her respect and praise. Mary was far more than a victim: she was clever, talented, shrewd, and as capable of self-deluding sophistry as the more unattractive men in her life. And if she is remembered today more as an actress, fashion icon, and mistress, than for her writing, she herself played a key role in the spinning and promoting of her early celebrity.

Mary Robinson was only forty-three when she died of heart failure and was buried in the churchyard at Old Windsor. Only two people attended her funeral. Yet when I visited the tomb the flowers beside it indicated that, two hundred and twenty five years after her death, Perdita, Mary Robinson, still has her admirers.

Tomb of Perdita, Mary Robinson, Churchyard of SS Peter and Andrew, Old Windsor

The lettering here is clear but that on the sides of the tomb is very worn. One side bears a sonnet by her friend Samuel Jackson Pratt, and the other an epitaph which she wrote herself.

*Quoted in Paula Byrne, Perdita, the Life of Mary Robinson, Harper Collins, 2005, p.110, p.113.

**ibid. p.116

***ibid. p.170

For details of Chawton House and the exhibition on Mary Robinson see https://chawtonhouse.org

Hoppner portrait of Mary Robinson at Chawton House, the more famous Gainsborough is in the Wallace Collection.

William Cobbett and the Great Need for Parliamentary Reform

By Gravedigger

On September 29, 2024

In Politicians, Reformers, Radicals and Revolutionaries, Writers

Of course I did not have high expectations of the new government. Labour in name only now, the party has moved, save for brief anomalies under Michael Foot and Jeremy Corbyn, steadily further towards the right since the post war years of the Atlee government. Blair jettisoned the party’s socialist past when he rewrote Clause Four, ending the historic commitment to common ownership of industry, passively accepting the results of Margaret Thatcher’s contemptible sale of shares in privatised utilities. With equal passivity the Starmer government has accepted the results of the 2016 referendum on the EU despite the lies told by the Johnson administration to promote Brexit. There is little sign of any attempt to tackle inequalities of wealth and income, save a half-hearted commitment to end the use of offshore trusts to avoid inheritance tax. Blair lied in Parliament and to the public, claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, to justify his decision to invade. The current Labour government has been at best equivocal over Gaza: in an early interview Starmer argued that Israel had the right to cut off necessities of power and water in Gaza. 146 countries recognise the existence of Palestine – Britain is not one of them. 137 member states of the United Nations recognise Palestine – Britain is not one of them. Instead, Britain is the only permanent member of the UN Security Council apart from the USA not to support Palestinian membership of the UN. Starmer was even slow to join countries calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and will not suspend arms exports to Israel. Indeed, arms sales around the world continue to be a pivotal part of the British economy as much under Labour as under Conservatives. In relation to asylum seekers Starmer voices the same “stop the boats” rhetoric as his recent Tory predecessors, only choosing to send them to Albania instead of Rwanda for “processing.” It was not anyone’s enthusiasm which brought this government to power but antagonism to fourteen years of Tory rule, a low turnout, the collapse of the SNP in Scotland, and Farage’s Reform Party taking votes from the Conservatives.

But if all this is enough to drive the iron into anyone’s soul, it is sometimes the relatively trivial which leaves us spluttering with incoherent rage. Having pledged to run a government of high standards, and end cash for access scandals, the Prime Minister, his wife, the deputy prime minister and the chancellor have been accepting freebies from the Labour peer Waheed Ali (appointed a life peer by Blair in 1995). It began with “Passes for Glasses” when Waheed was revealed to have unrestricted access to Downing Street after buying the prime minister £2,485 worth of spectacles. Then followed revelations of £107,145 spent by Waheed on Starmer’s wife’s clothes, £40K on tickets for him to watch the Arsenal football team, and £4k for tickets to a Taylor Swift concert…Starmer declares all this to be perfectly legal since he declared the gifts, albeit belatedly, but even his own MPs have found it morally questionable. Nor did it help when he whined that the security issue meant that he would never be able to go to an Arsenal game again unless he accepted corporate hospitality in a private box. But the utterly risible last word (or probably not) came from Foreign Secretary David Lammy suggesting that the freebie clothes were justified because the Starmers sought to look their best when representing the UK on the world stage.

Anyone incensed by this level of hypocrisy and political idiocy, can do no better than to spend a little time in the empathetic company of the furious, irascible William Cobbett (1763-1835). For no one does splenetic fury like Cobbett, he is never rendered speechless with indignation. Cobbett had little interest in politics beyond England, he was no citizen of the world, but he more than made up for his narrowness of focus with the passion he brought to bear on the question of rural poverty. By the time he published his Rural Rides in 1830 he could not write a paragraph without a vitriolic outburst expressing his utter contempt for those responsible, most notably successive Whig and Tory governments, for the proletarianization of agricultural workers.

William Cobbett did not begin life as a radical. Indeed, as a young man he was conservative to the point of being reactionary, and his later views developed in an idiosyncratic, unsystematic way. The son of a farmer and publican, he received little formal education and began work as a ploughboy before, desiring to see the world, he joined the army and found himself between 1784-1791 in New Brunswick, Canada. He used the time to study English and French grammar. Seeing his senior officers appropriate some of the pay of the common soldiers, he began to question authority, and on his return to England published his first pamphlet exposing their peculations and charging the officers with corruption. In The Soldier’s Friend he described the low pay and harsh treatment of the enlisted men. Then, fearing that he was about to be indicted and imprisoned in retribution, he fled to the USA. And during this period the most unattractive side of Cobbett emerges. He became a rabid British loyalist, an anti-Jacobin critical of Jefferson’s support for the French revolutionary government, a supporter of war against the Franco-American alliance. He denounced democracy and reviled his radical compatriot, Tom Paine. Cobbett was unashamedly xenophobic and bigoted, critical of any country which rivalled Britain, outrageously antisemitic, with a deep-seated loathing of Irishmen and of abolitionists like Wilberforce. When his writing came to the attention of the Tory Prime Minister, William Pitt, he was welcomed back to England, and in 1800 Pitt offered to subsidise his writing as an apologist for the Tory government and a polemicist against radicalism. How then did this monster come to be admired by Karl Marx, Michael Foot, EP Thompson?

Well, he changed: while many people move politically to the right as they grow older, Cobbett moved the other way. At first supporting Pitt, he was nonetheless incorruptible, refusing Pitt’s offer, and publishing his own views in his one-man weekly paper, The Political Register*, produced from 1802 until his death in 1834. And those views became very antiestablishment as Cobbett looked around him at the state of England in the early nineteenth century and saw corruption, cruelty, venality, and injustice. The Register, dubbed Cobbett’s Twopenny Trash by his detractors, a designation which he enthusiastically embraced, became increasingly critical of the war with France, the military, the church, big landowners, rotten boroughs – the “Accursed Hill” as he refers to the notorious rotten borough of Old Sarum – and, the spawn of those rotten boroughs, the Parliament and government at Westminster.

For his pains Cobbett found himself in Newgate prison between 1810-12 after being convicted of sedition. Between 1817-19 he fled to the USA again to avoid a further incarceration as radicals like himself were rounded up. This was a very different Cobbett from the man who had vilified Tom Paine, and when he returned to England, he brought Paine’s bones with him. Paine, once a hero in the USA, had become an outcast on account of his negative views on organised religion. He died in poverty, and his grave had been neglected until Cobbett sought to make amends for the injustice, he had done him. Cobbett wanted to build a mausoleum and memorial for Paine with money raised by public subscription, but Paine’s bones met with the same lack of respect in England as in the USA and the appeal failed. Cobbett kept the bones until his death when they were lost.

Meanwhile Cobbett’s radical beliefs coalesced around the plight of agricultural workers and small farmers. Cobbett loved the rural England he had known in his childhood and youth. He yearned for a golden age when every farmer brewed his own beer and fattened his own hog; when farmers lived, worked, and ate alongside their labourers. But Cobbett was no mere nostalgic dreamer, for alongside his journalism he was a practising farmer. His knowledge of agriculture, crops and soil was encyclopaedic. And between 1821-1826, travelling on horseback round the counties of southern England, he built up a portrait of rural life. He studied the farms, the fields, the crops, the animals, he talked to the farmers and the farm labourers. He visited the markets and fairs. Cobbett published his findings in Rural Rides. He had an emotional link to the countryside and his vivid prose is lyrical and romantic, but it hard hitting too. For Cobbett did not like what he found.

Farm workers had sunk into poverty, their families were starving. Who was to blame? Cobbett was a good hater, a one-man protest movement, and he turned the full force of his anger on those whom he held responsible.

The Enclosures, begun by kings seeking to extend their hunting grounds, and completed following the 1801 General Enclosure Act, which enabled big landowners to enclose land without a Parliamentary Act, left agricultural workers deprived of common lands and grazing. Small farmers could no longer afford to pay their labourers properly.

Then came the “tax-eaters”: after the Napoleonic Wars, Parliament abolished income tax, replacing it with increases in indirect taxes to pay the interest on the national debt. These taxes fell on necessities for which there was an inelastic demand: salt, hops, malt, tobacco, sugar, beer, and tea, shifting the burden of taxation from the middle classes to the poor, with small farmers paying proportionally more tax than higher economic groups and unable now to pay their labourers at all. Their fields were neglected, and crops went ungathered. The decline in production caused higher prices for food. Small farmhouses and labourers’ cottages, whole hamlets, and villages, fell into disrepair. Big “bull-frog” farmers gradually swallowed up the smaller ones. Rapacious landlords evicted tenants. The “bullfrog” farmers, unlike those of old, no longer fed and lodged their workers, for it was cheaper to pay them wages: wages which were inadequate for their basic needs. And such former agricultural labourers who were now unable to find work on the land at all were employed by the parish at stone breaking to build new roads for the benefit of those big farmers and landlords.

Cobbett was not convinced of the need to service the national debt, and he loathed the stockbrokers and jobbers, bankers, financiers, and fundholders, parasites who took everything and produced nothing. Moreover, he noted that taxes were also being used to support the “deadweight”, the “half timers”, army officers on half pay but with no duties, and the standing army which in peace time was used, not against a foreign threat, but against impoverished people seeking redress as at Peterloo:

One single horseman with his horse costs 36s. a week…that is more than the parish allowance to five labourers’ families at five to a family…so the one horseman and his horse cost what would feed twenty five of the distressed creatures… take away the army which is to keep distressed people from committing acts of violence and you have, at once, ample means of removing all the distress and all the danger of acts of violence.

Adding to the “deadweight” were the tax gatherers themselves, the sinecurists with their government jobs, and Anglican parsons. Cobbett did not care for parsons, “sponging clergy”: they took the revenues of their livings, subsidised with tithes and the rent from glebes, but were absentee clergymen, not even living in the parish. Nor did he care for those who issued religious tracts “which would if they could make the labourer content with half starvation.”

And then there were the Corn Laws, restrictions on importing corn and other foodstuffs to protect landowners’ interests, raising the price of bread for an already impoverished population. Potatoes, cheaper than bread under the impact of the Corn Laws, were a particular anathema to Cobbett, as was tea, replacing beer as cottage brewing declined. Potatoes were in Cobbett’s view “debilitating fare” and “soul degrading.” Tea was “a destroyer of health, an enfeebler of the frame, an engenderer of effeminacy and laziness, a debaucher of youth and a maker of misery for old age.” His own preference was for the traditional three Bs – bread, beer, and bacon, and he would regularly set off on his rides with a bacon sandwich in his coat pocket for breakfast. Frequently the bread and meat would be handed over to a hungry soul whom he met along the way.

The Trespass Act and Game Laws, protecting the hunting rights of landowners, also raised Cobbett’s ire. For they forbade the “poaching” of wild animals, even rabbits, on the landowners’ estates thus depriving the local community of food they desperately needed. Moreover, mantraps were set to catch the “poachers” and punishments included imprisonment and transportation.

Cobbett hated the middlemen too, the dealers and shopkeepers who had replaced the old country fairs and markets, and who produced nothing but added to the cost of living.

He yearned for a return to cottage technology independent of wage labour and the capitalist market which saw the accumulation of capital in ever fewer hands. Big farmers and landlords were “conspirators against labour,” capitalist agriculture had proletarianized the farm workers,

Is a nation made rich by taking the food and clothing from those who create them and giving them to those who do nothing of any use? Why should the people work incessantly when they now raise food and clothing and fuel and every necessity to maintain five times their number?

While the poor creatures that raise the wheat and the barley and the cheese and the mutton and the beef are living upon potatoes, all the good food is conveyed to the tax- eaters in the Wen!

In Cobbett’s view London was a sebaceous cyst, a Great Wen, which along with lesser wens was encroaching onto the countryside, and he detested it.

But above all Cobbett hated the Establishment, “The Thing,” which presided over all this, the political, economic, military and church elites, taking the surplus value of the countryside and manipulating the markets to their own advantage. Misgovernment, the unreformed Parliament was the ultimate source of all evil. In the end he hated the Whigs even more than the Tories because their hypocrisy was the greater.

William Cobbett warned that rural poverty would lead to riots, and he defended agricultural labourers who organised public protests. He endorsed the rick burning and machine breaking of the Swing Riots in the 1830s. For why should the near starving labourers “live on Damned potatoes while the barns are full of corn, the downs covered with sheep, and the yards full of things created by their own labours.”

But whilst fully supportive of direct action, Cobbett worked for Parliamentary reform as the ultimate remedy for economic problems: he advocated the abolition of rotten boroughs and the extension of the franchise, so that radicals could be elected to Parliament where they could raise wages, repeal the Corn Laws, lower taxes, and reverse enclosures.

Following the Great Reform Act 1832, Cobbett was elected to a newly created seat in industrial Oldham. His support for the Reform Bill had been a compromise because it still left his beloved agricultural workers without the vote. In Parliament he sought to represent both his northern constituents and the southern agricultural workers. Sympathetic to the Luddites and deeply appalled by the Peterloo massacre, outraged by conditions in the factories, he nonetheless thought that the best recourse was a return to the land and self-sufficiency within an agricultural economy. And if this sounds a little odd today, we should remember that rural workers in 1835 were still the largest occupational group in England.

Cobbett, along with Hume and Wakley, maintained agitation in Parliament, first for the release and then for the pardon of the Tolpuddle Martyrs. He fought the brutal 1834 Poor Law Amendment which replaced outdoor payments with indoor relief: to save money all financial support for the poor was withdrawn and they were discouraged from seeking any help since their only recourse under the new system was to the workhouse, where children were separated from their parents and wives from their husbands.

But his time in Parliament was short lived; he died in 1835 and was buried in St. Andrew’s churchyard in Farnham, the Surrey town where he was born. The following year John Russell announced an official pardon for the Tolpuddle Martyrs. The Poor Law system was not officially abolished until 1948.

Located in St. Andrew’s Churchyard, Farnham, Surrey

It may be impossible not to smile at Cobbett’s dyspeptic outbursts against tea, potatoes, and the Great Wen. And he was no revolutionary, he had no problem with hierarchy so long as workers were fed, accommodated, had their fairs, sports, and harvest homes; his belief in noblesse oblige sits a little uncomfortably today. In the words of GDH Cole, “he was a conservative in everything except politics,” but what a magnificently angry, opinionated, choleric thorn in the side of the self-serving establishment he was.

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From 1803 Cobbett was also the first person to collect and publish all parliamentary debates in Cobbett’s Parliamentary Debates. His printers were Luke Hansard and his son Thomas, who also did work for the House of Commons. In 1812 Cobbett, overwhelmed with fines for seditious behaviour, sold the publication to the Hansards who renamed it. “Hansard” remains the title of the official record of parliamentary proceedings although the family connection ended in 1889.

Memorial to Luke Hansard, Many Years Printer to the House of Commons, St. Giles in the Fields, London

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William Cobbett, Rural Rides, Penguin Classics, 2001. First published 1830.

Dylan Thomas: Poems of Life, Death, and Mortality.

By Gravedigger

On September 15, 2024

In Writers

Last week I attended the memorial service of a dear friend and former colleague. A Welshman with a great love of literature, he had shared his passion with his children, and they read extracts from two of his favourite books: Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley and Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood.

During the summer holidays, some years ago, my friend and I had gone together one day to Laugharne, the small town where the river Taf flows into Carmarthen Bay, and where Dylan Thomas lived from 1949 until his death in 1953. It is believed to be the inspiration for Llaregub, the village in Under Milk Wood. We visited the Boathouse, with its views out over the estuary, where Dylan and his wife Caitlin had lived; the old garage near the house which he had turned into a writing shed; Browns Hotel, where he spent so much time drinking that he used the bar’s telephone number as his own; and the graveyard of St. Martin’s church where he is buried. And there my friend spoke from memory his favourite lines from the “play for voices,” Reverend Eli Jenkins’ morning verses:

Dear Gwalia! I know there are

Towns lovelier than ours,

And fairer hills and loftier far,

And groves more full of flowers,

And boskier woods more blithe with spring

And bright with birds’ adorning,

And sweeter bards than I to sing

Their praise this beauteous morning…

…A tiny dingle is Milk Wood

By Golden Grove ‘neath Grongar,

But let me choose and oh! I should

Love all my life and longer

To stroll among our trees and stray

In Goosegog Lane, on Donkey Down,

And hear the Dewi sing all day,

And never, never leave the town.

And his sunset poem:

… every evening at sun-down

I ask a blessing on the town,

For whether we last the night or no

I’m sure is always touch and go.

We are not wholly bad or good

Who live our lives under Milk Wood,

And Thou, I know, wilt be the first

To see our best side, not our worst.

O let us see another day!

Bless us all this night, I pray,

And to the sun we all will bow

And say, good-bye – but just for now!

The radio play was Dylan Thomas’ last work, completed only months before his death in New York in 1953. Recounting twenty-four hours in the life of the town and its inhabitants, it reads like a fairy tale, at one moment all bawdy, exuberant Chaucerian humour, the next tender, melancholy and lyrical. The torrent of language and imagery, the alliteration and assonance, is unequalled. And the grace and humanity of the acknowledgement that “we are not wholly bad or good” is a sentiment which I know appealed to my friend whose inclination was always to see the best side of anyone.

The transience of life, death, and mortality, were recurring themes in the poetry of Dylan Thomas, and while Eli Jenkins prayed for another day, an earlier poem, And Death Shall Have No Dominion, published in 1933, described death as part of Life’s Cycle:

And death shall have no dominion,

Dead men naked they shall be one

With the man in the wind and the west moon;

When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,

They shall have stars at elbow and foot;

Though they go mad they shall be sane,

Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;

Though loves be lost love shall not;

And death shall have no dominion.

Physical bodies may perish but they become one with the cosmos, moving into a future beyond death as part of a life force, embedded in plants or the sun, at one with the wind and the moon, with nature, the stars and the sea, so that death is a union rather than a division, in fact life only gets meaning from death, with death a guarantee of immortality.

In his 1946 collection of poems, Deaths and Entrances, Thomas returned to the same theme with his Poem in October, recounting the walk he took on his thirtieth birthday: “It was my thirtieth year to heaven.” As he describes his physical walk along the shore and up the hill, the seasons shift, and he recalls his childhood and youth. Ageing then is not a matter of getting older and mourning for a lost youth, not a one-way journey to death, but a chance to revisit the past and be enriched by it, rediscovering a child’s sense of wonder and an intimate connection with all of nature and life. Life is impermanent but humanity and nature are woven together, and individuals ultimately become part of the natural order.

But it is another of Thomas’ poems, the villanelle, Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night, containing a rather different message, which is frequently read at funerals and memorials.

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rage at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Published in 1951, the poem is commonly interpreted as a call to defy death and not to waste any opportunities, live life as best you can before it is too late. Moreover, although death is inevitable, life is precious and worth fighting for, death should not be accepted passively or in a spirit of resignation, rather we should resent and abjure death, resist our fate, and fight to live. But if the poem were merely flailing against the inevitable it would be an odd choice for funerals when it is too late for resistance or indeed for correcting life’s errors and omissions. The burning anger, the rage, is surely that of those who are left behind when those they love die. In the last stanza Thomas drops the discussion of mortality in general and the poem moves to his father’s imminent death, and a more personal expression of grief. Here is the personal despair, the desperate visceral plea, – don’t go, don’t leave me:

And you my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night

Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.

Different poems speak to different people: though I admire the writing, I am uncomfortable with the sentiments of And Death Shall Have No Dominion and Poem in October, for they sound like sophistry to me, desperate attempts to deny death without recourse to conventional religion, but no more credible than the latter. I prefer the frank and simple honesty of Eli Jenkins, who for all his belief, longs and begs for one more day. And it is with the hopeless rage at the dying of those we have loved that I empathise most strongly; it may be a little odd to ask people, when they are old or ill, tired and wanting to rest, to keep up the fight, a little selfish, but understandable.

Dylan Thomas himself was only thirty-nine and on his fourth reading tour in the United States when he died from a cocktail of bronchitis, pneumonia, emphysema, and asthma exacerbated by heavy drinking- though his widely quoted claim to have “just drunk eighteen straight whiskies” was questionable. His body was shipped home to Wales to be buried in the churchyard at Laugharne.

Grave of Dylan Thomas, St. Martin’s churchyard, Laugharne

Caitlin Thomas, remembered on the reverse side of the same cross.

The estuary at Laugharne viewed from the Boathouse where Dylan Thomas lived

Afterthought

If too much reflecting on death has engendered a little despondency, let me cheer you up with the response of Kenneth Tynan, not a man who was easily impressed, to early critics of Under Milk Wood. He delineates the charges made against the play: “that it approaches sex like a dazzled and peeping schoolboy. And that Llaregub, so far from being a real village, is a “literary” village that Thomas had adorned with a false moustache of lechery – “Cranford” in fact, with the lid off… To all these accusations Thomas must plead guilty. Yet we, the jury, rightly acquit him. He talks himself innocent: on two dozen occasions he gets past the toughest guard and occupies the heart.” Tynan went on to praise the “manic riot of his prose,” and, in quite a manic riot himself, continued, “He conscripts metaphors, rapes the dictionary, and builds a verbal bawdy-house where words mate and couple on the wing, like swifts. Nouns dress up, quite unselfconsciously, as verbs, sometimes balancing three-tiered epithets on their heads and often alliterating to boot.”

Kenneth Tynan on Under Milk Wood: a true comedy of errors, reprinted in The Observer 28 February 2014, originally published 26 August 1956.

The Tale of Charles and Mary Lamb

By Gravedigger

On July 7, 2024

In Writers

A particularly pretentious estate agent, more than usually given to hyperbole, is currently offering for sale the “former home of Charles and Mary Lamb.” The sixteenth century Clarendon Cottage located on the quaintly named Gentleman’s Row in Enfield was never the Lambs’ home, but they spent their summer holidays in the then rural location between 1825-27. The house they actually bought in Enfield in 1827 was The Poplars at Chase Side.

The siblings were born and spent their early lives in the Inner Temple where their father was employed as a lawyer’s clerk. Charles (1775-1834) became a clerk to the East India Company, a job he held for twenty five years, alongside publishing poetry and prose. His sentimental poetry, even The Old Familiar Faces, the most celebrated of the poems, is little read today, but the Essays of Elia still have their admirers. Familiar to a far wider audience however are Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. Designed to introduce children to Shakespeare’s plays they are clear, readable prose summaries, which nonetheless retain much of the Shakespearian language, while leaving out subplots, violence, and sexual references. The approach is reverential, reflecting Lamb’s strange belief that the plays should be read rather than staged to avoid misinterpretations. Charles tackled the tragedies and Mary the comedies, although they were all originally published under Charles’ name. The history plays they avoided. The Tales were published and sold by William Godwin and his second wife who specialised in juvenile literature, also publishing a children’s version of the Odyssey and volumes of poetry for children. And, despite their limitations, the Tales were an immediate best seller and have never been out of print.

Moreover, the Lambs held a weekly salon attended by literary figures including Southey and Coleridge with whom Charles had been at school. Through Coleridge they became friends with Wordsworth although the latter clashed with Charles who did not share his romantic fascination with nature and the countryside. In a letter to Wordsworth Charles wrote,

Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don’t much care if I never see a mountain in my life. I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments, as any of you Mountaineers have done with dead nature. The Lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street, the tradesmen, and customers, coaches, wagons, playhouses, all the bustle and wickedness about Covent Garden, the very Women of the town, the watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles, coffee houses, steams of soups from kitchens, the pantomimes, London itself, a pantomime, a masquerade. The wonder of these sights impels me into night-walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fullness of joy at so much Life.

How then did Charles Lamb come to buy a property in the former market town of Enfield in Middlesex, reduced to little more than a village surrounded by green meadows in the years that he lived there, far from the sounds, shops, and entertainments of London? A family tragedy lies behind this, the penultimate of many moves which the siblings made.

Both Charles and Mary had periods of mental illness throughout their lives, Mary’s the more severe and more likely to lead to aggression. Charles had spent six weeks in an asylum in 1795. Mary meanwhile was caring for their senile father and incapacitated mother, while supplementing their income with dress making. One day she lost her temper with her young apprentice, treating her roughly. When her mother reproached her, Mary responded by stabbing and fatally wounding her with a kitchen knife. Following their mother’s death Charles took responsibility for his sister, refusing to have her committed to a public mental institution. She was released into his care, and they remained together for the rest of their lives, she caring for him during his bouts of drinking, he for her during her recurring illness. The burden must have been considerable: when they travelled, they took a straitjacket, and Mary was periodically confined to an asylum. Yet it was during the early years of the nineteenth century that their writings became successful, their financial position improved, they expanded their literary and social circle, and established their salon.

But with Charles’ drinking and Mary’s madness they were not popular tenants, often subject to malicious gossip, and easily evicted from their accommodation. They moved from Holborn, back to the Inner Temple, to Covent Garden, and to Islington, before Charles decided that although he would miss London, rural Enfield with its fresh air and quiet would be better for Mary’s health.

Their final move from Enfield in 1833 was to Bay Cottage, Church Street, a private asylum in the nearby village of Edmonton where Mary was the sole patient. Her brother moved into the cottage with her, but following a fall a year later, he developed a streptococcal infection in a cut and died. He was buried in All Saints churchyard, Edmonton where his stone bears an epitaph composed by Wordsworth at Mary’s request. Mary lived on until 1847 when she was buried beside her brother.

The cottage in Edmonton, today bearing a blue plaque and renamed Lambs’ Cottage, still stands, as does the fifteenth century church. And lingering in the precincts of the verdant churchyard I found it easy to imagine that the stout tower and the graves drowsing under a mantle of ivy still lay at the heart of the village which Charles and Mary knew.

But it is long since the sprawl that is Greater London engulfed both Enfield and Edmonton. After the railways and the trams reached the former villages in the 1840s industrialisation followed and they became part of the conurbation of north London. New housing in the interwar period led to their merging with other towns to form the London Borough of Enfield. So, in the end Charles Lamb was surrounded by his beloved London albeit an outer suburb, not the glamourous, raucous heart of it that he loved so much.

By the 1970s the industry and manufacturing had gone again, and today estate agents try, with dubious veracity, to reinvent the small conservation areas in the tired, rundown suburbs as the villages they once were, enlisting the help of famous names to make their properties seem more desireable.

One Date, Three Graves; Tales of Myth, Manipulation and Mescalin

By Gravedigger

On November 26, 2023

In Politicians, Writers

I do not remember where I was when I heard that the Thirty Fifth President of the United States of America had been assassinated, but I do remember the subsequent media coverage of the death, the funeral, the arrest and shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald, the conspiracy theories, the conjuring of Camelot, and the strange outpourings of public adulation and grief. No wonder that two other notable deaths on 22 November 1963 passed virtually unnoticed.

John F. Kennedy (1917-63) was the son of Joseph Kennedy who had amassed a fortune through stock market manipulation, property deals and bootlegging. It was trust funds set up by his father that provided Jack Kennedy with financial independence and enabled him to run his successful campaign to become president, notwithstanding an undistinguished record in the Senate. His father’s contacts, including the mafia boss, Sam Giancana, allegedly provided support following a deal with Joseph that if his son were elected he would “lay off organised crime.” Giancana’s control of the Teamsters’ Union and their votes, and judicious use of threats and fraudulent voting, helped deliver Kennedy’s narrow Presidential victory.

JFK’s time as president (1961-63) was defined by the fiascos and iniquities of a foreign policy engendered by Communist paranoia combined with arrogant Imperialism. In April 1961 he unleashed the Bay of Pigs invasion led by CIA paramilitary officers who tried to foment an uprising to overthrow Castro’s government in Cuba. They were defeated in two days. There followed the equally unsuccessful Operation Mongoose characterised by terrorist attacks on civilians, the destruction of crops, mining of harbours and farcical assassination attempts directed against Castro. Abortive efforts were made to keep this operation secret to avoid repercussions from the United Nations.

On Kennedy’s watch American involvement in Vietnam built up: military advisers were sent to the country along with political and economic support for the Diem regime whose forces were funded and trained by the CIA . Under the crude social engineering of the Strategic Hamlet Programme peasants were forcibly relocated away from Viet Cong influence and subjected to brainwashing and surveillance with no freedom of movement. In January 1962 Operation Ranch Hand introduced herbal warfare including the use of Agent Orange. This aerial defoliation not only destroyed land and ecology but also led to cancers, birth defects and other long term health problems in Vietnam.

In April 1963 Kennedy cynically recorded: “We don’t have a prayer of staying in Vietnam. Those people hate us. They are going to throw our asses out of there at any point. But I can’t give up that territory to the Communists and get the American people to re-elect me.”

It was an abhorrent record and, although still a child in 1963 with only a hazy knowledge of the full horror of American foreign policy, I sensed something wrong in the sycophantic media coverage and the deferential tributes. Though unfamiliar with the concept of establishment propaganda, the constant repetition of the Camelot myth raised my suspicions, and the uncritical public effusions of distress seemed fabricated. So I was surprised when, years later, accompanying more worldly Politics Students on an annual trip to Washington, they invariably showed enthusiasm for crossing the Potomac to Arlington to see the Kennedy grave. Challenged, they proved themselves well informed as to the noxious nature of the Presidency yet remained susceptible to the contrived allure of the Camelot myth.

The Kennedy Grave at Arlington Cemetery, Washington. Alongside Kennedy lies Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis and two of their children.

The Grave looks out across the Potomac towards the Washington Monument

The second death on that November day was that of the academic and writer, CS Lewis (1898-1963). Amongst his sizeable output of fiction and nonfiction it is his children’s books The Chronicles of Narnia, seven fantasy novels which have sold over 120 million copies and been translated into forty-seven languages,for which he is best remembered. Like most small children I was once enchanted by the world of Narnia; what imaginative child would not be thrilled at the prospect of entering a large wardrobe full of fur coats to discover a secret exit at the back leading to a magical kingdom of ice and snow, mythical creatures, and talking animals. It is a cleverly woven story of wonder, mystery, and adventure. Lewis began to write it in the 1940s when children came to his house in Oxford as evacuees from London, and the four siblings who discover the world of Narnia were based on them.

But it did not take me long to realise that behind the richly imaginative narrative lay a manipulative allegory, a Christian subtext with the lion Aslan a Christ like figure sacrificing himself to torture, suffering and humiliation to redeem Edmund who has betrayed his siblings to the White Witch. Aslan’s sacrifice vanquishes death, and he returns to life but only the trusting and unquestioning Lucy can see him; the message at the heart of this proselytising text is the importance blind faith, obedience to an authoritarian moral system, and an acceptance that there are things one is “not meant to know.”

I may not share Philip Pullman’s view that this is “one of the most poisonous things I have ever read” but alongside the Christian propaganda aimed uncomfortably at young children, there is also a pernicious defence of established hierarchies and a tacit acceptance of violence. The racist disparagement of the Calormenes, and the unquestioning acceptance of class and gender stereotypes is disturbing. The female character of the White Witch, responsible for its being “always winter and never Christmas,” personifies evil, and when Susan becomes too interested in nylons, lipstick, clothes, and boys she can no longer return to Narnia. Worse, as Pullman says, is the terrible myth that death is better than life, the idealised view of an afterlife upholding a reactionary idealised theocracy.

But just as the Camelot myth drew my students to Kennedy’s grave, so the magic I remembered in his stories enticed me to that of CS Lewis. I did not have high expectations for the graveyard of a Victorian church, located in an old quarry in an Oxford suburb, but Holy Trinity churchyard in Headington is a delightful place. I visited on the eve of springtime as the soft green shoots of snowdrops and hellebores were emerging, and it resembled more a country churchyard than a suburban one. The gnarled roots of an ancient yew circle the honey-coloured stone marking the grave of Lewis and his brother which bears a quotation from King Lear.

The Grave of CS Lewis At Holy Trinity Church, Headington

“Men Must Endure Their Going Hence”
Lewis’ mother had a calendar with quotations from Shakespeare, his father kept the leaf from the day she died, Lewis’ brother Warren had the quotation inscribed on the grave.

And I was reluctantly charmed by the Narnia window in the church

My third grave however houses someone who was aware and wary of the power of indoctrination and conditioning, the uncritical conformity which media myths and social engineering, fairy stories and brainwashing can engender.

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), writer and philosopher, had published his most famous work the dystopian Brave New World in the early 1930s but it was still very popular when my school friends and I discovered it in the 60s. Eagerly we debated his vision of an establishment controlling a docile population through a combination of drugs and entertainment, maintaining economic and social divisions with neither alphas nor epsilons questioning their status but accepting a caste system, convinced that all was right with their world.

Paradoxically Huxley’s own experiments with mescalin recorded in The Doors of Perception (1954) led him to believe that the consciousness altering drug could also promote enlightenment, and that drug taking could be a legitimate expression of intellectual curiosity, removing inhibitions and increasing awareness. In the 1960s this chimed with a youth subculture seeking social change and experimenting with psychedelic drugs and the hallucinogenic power of LSD, and Jim Morrison’s rock group – The Doors – took their name from the title of Huxley’s book. (He in turn had taken it from the visionary poet and artist William Blake: “if the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”)

Ostentatiously clutching our copies of The Doors of Perception was as close as we came in our provincial girls’ school to the drug subculture of the sixties. And if we perceived it then as a more glamorous world than our own and lauded Huxley for his avant-garde views yet when I reread his book recently I confess that I found it dull. Worse, it contradicted the scathing indictment of mindless acceptance and unquestioning obedience which he had wrought in Brave New World. Yet though this may have been disappointing, his grave was nonetheless the one which I approached with most respect for the memory of its occupant.

Huxley is buried in the Watts Cemetery, home of the Watts Mortuary Chapel, at Compton near Guildford in Surrey.

Alongside him are other members of his illustrious family including his father Leonard, biographer and editor.