Tag Archives: England

February 23, 2012

Patriotic Publishing: Britain in Pictures

By daseger

I had very little time last weekend but still found myself rearranging bookshelves, a typical procrastination tactic.  Yet more time disappeared when I started opening up the slim volumes of the Britain in Pictures series, published by Collins (the forerunner of HarperCollins) in the 1940s when Great Britain was facing the imminent threat of German invasion.  Over 100 volumes were issued from 1941, each one covering a basic and essential aspect of British civilization, ostensibly in case it disappeared.  The volumes feature a colorful cover with standardized type, lots of illustrations to record the institutions, places and customs that were threatened with annihilation, and equally illustrious authors:  Cecil Beaton on English Photographers, Edith Sitwell on English Women, John Betjeman on English Cities & Small Towns, and (the most amazing pairing of all), George Orwell on The English People.


Much to my shame, I have to admit that I first bought a few of these books when I was looking for PINK and RED books to decorate the bookcases in my double parlor:  you will notice the preponderance of pink below.  This is a mortifying admission, as an English historian, as an Anglophile, as a reader.  I just loved the way these books looked, never mind the content.  But after they went on the shelf, I started (occasionally) pulling them off and reading them, and then I wanted more, never mind the cover color.  They are written in the most accessible way, almost blog-like, and definitely with the mission of capturing the essence of every single topic, whether it is British fashion, clubs or trade unions.  So now I have quite a few titles, most of which I bought from a used book store in Concord, Massachusetts owned by a woman who always seemed to be able to get more.  No longer; I notice they are fetching higher and higher prices on Ebay and AbeBooks, and there is even a book on collecting them:  Michael Carney’s Britain in Pictures:  A History and Bibliography (1995).

The categories of the series are on the back of each volume, encouraging collection in the 1940s and today:  Art and Craftsmanship, including both the visual and performing arts, History and Achievement (lots of military topics, like the book above, but also books on mountaineering and polar exploration), Social Life and Character (including my three favorite books, British Rebels and Reformers by Harry Roberts, Life among the English by Rose Macaulay, and The English at Table by John Hampson), Natural History, Education and Religion, Literature and Belles Lettres, Topographical History, Science, Medicine and Engineering, and Country Life and Sport (lots of lords and ladies made contributions here).  The back cover of one of the first books to be published also describes the rationale for the entire series:  The English have never been good at describing themselves or their ways, either for their own benefit or for the benefit of others.  It is, therefore, not surprising that no comprehensive series of books, at a popular price, illustrating, in print and picture, the life, art, institutions and achievements of the British people has ever been issued, either for British or for foreign readers.  At this time, when it has become essential for citizens throughout the Empire to take stock of themselves and their ideas and to express them to others, it is desirable to fill this gap.

A few observations about the series title:  Britain in Pictures.  You can tell from the quote above that while the goal was to capture British civilization, an English bias would emerge.  The majority of the titles focus on English life, although there are volumes on Wales, Scotland, Ireland and Commonwealth countries.  All of these books are illustrated histories in every sense of the word:  images were culled from libraries and museums but also commissioned from contemporary artists. The past and the present come together in these little British books, just in time.

Random illustrations from British Historians by E.L. Woodward, The English at Table by John Hampson, British Clubs by Bernard Darwin, and British Garden Flowers by George M. Taylor.

7 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Culture

December 31, 2011

Years of Protest

By daseger

The last days of the year are always a time for reflection and assessment, perhaps personally but certainly by the media.  So far, all of the pieces that I have seen on television and in print characterize 2011 as a “year of protest”, following Time magazine’s “Protester” Person of the Year.  Like all historians, I find agitation attractive because it signals a time of (exciting) change rather than (boring) continuity, but I’m not certain that this is the case with 2011 yet.  Everyone seems so distracted by their various electronic devices, and protesting (and change) takes real engagement.  Perhaps this is too American a view, but 2011 doesn’t look quite like 1968, or 1789, or the 177os, or the 1640s, or the 1520s, or the very rebellious period of 1378-1381.

This last (or first) era of rebellion, culminating in the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, did not really result in change but was exiting nonetheless for its novelty:  the 99 percent seldom rebelled against the 1 percent in the Middle Ages.  But the fourteenth century changed everything, bringing forth famine, plague, war and schism in intense degrees and leaving its survivors with nothing left to lose and everything to gain.  Abandoned by their Church and very conscious of their bargaining power in a world that had lost over 30% of its laborers to the Black Death, the peasants of England marched on London to seek an audience with King Richard II after the imposition of what they perceived as unfair taxes and wage restrictions.  With the charismatic Wat Tyler and John Ball leading them onwards, they got their audience with the young King (slaughtering the Archbishop of Canterbury along the way), but were defeated soon afterwards.

The preacher John Ball leading the peasants, the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and King Richard confronts the peasants, all from the Chronicles of Jean Froissart, British Library MS Royal 18 E I, circa 1483.

In retrospect, the English Peasants Revolt illustrated, rather than caused, change, but its message, articulated best by a speech attributed to Ball in which he speaks of “liberty” and asks the rhetorical question when Adam delved and Eve span who was then the Gentleman survived and was revived in the modern era, when it reflected even more change.

Edward Burne-Jones illustration for William Morris’s Dream of John Ball, 1888.

9 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in History

November 5, 2011

Guy Fawkes, Then and Now

By daseger

Remember, remember, the Fifth of November.  Today is an important British holiday:  Guy Fawkes Day, commemorating the foiling of the 1605 plot hatched by a group of Catholic conspirators to blow up the House of Lords upon the occasion of the opening of Parliament, when King James I and his family were in attendance.  Even though the plot was led by a zealous English Catholic named Robert Catesby, his accomplice Guy Fawkes somehow became more identified with the conspiracy.  The unsuccessful plot (and its holiday), along with the earlier attack of the Spanish Armada and the machinations of the later Stuarts, fueled English anti-Catholicism for quite some time.

Two early seventeenth-century broadsides from the British Museum:  the Conspirators and their fate; God points out Guy Fawkes as he approaches the House of Lords.

The Gunpowder Plot (along with its Day and Bonfire Night) have strict historical associations but have also been used in more metaphorical (and secular) ways in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to raise a collective patriotic awareness of any attack on Britain.  No one could have been more threatening to Great Britain than Napoleon in the early nineteenth century, and so here he is strung up alongside “Guy Faux” in a Thomas Rowlandson print from 1813.

Two centuries later, Guy Fawkes seems to have evolved from a seditious conspirator against Britain to a rebellious liberator for Britain, or at least the British people (and even the global 99% around the world).  This remarkable development is largely due to the V for Vendetta comic books in general and 2006 film in particular, which broadcast the “Guy Fawkes mask” around the world and made it a symbol of popular movements.  Guy Fawkes masks are clearly playing a prominent role in Occupy London, and not only on Guy Fawkes Day.  It certainly is an interesting time to be a historian!

Occupy London protesters with their masks in October, from the Time Out blog and Ed London Photography.

6 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in History

September 19, 2011

Giles Corey

By daseger

The long life of Giles Cory, the only victim of the Salem Witch Trials to die as a result of torture, ended on September 19, 1692.  Cory suffered from a rare colonial application of the medieval peine forte et dure (“strong and hard punishment”), in which accused persons who “stood mute”, or refused to enter a plea, were pressed to do so literally:  increasingly-heavy weights or stones were placed on the body until the victim complied (or died).  Cory, whose wife Martha would hang three days later, was generally cantankerous, over eighty years old, and a wealthy landowner who had deeded his property to his sons-in-law weeks before.  He had nothing left to lose  and therefore refused to cooperate with his torturers and is even said to have asked for “more weight”. (The few times I’ve been FORCED to attend the show at the Salem Witch “Museum”, which basically consists of a diorama plus audio thrown together around 1972, I’ve been horrified to hear laughter by the crowd at these words).

The Howard Street Cemetery, near the site of Corey’s torture/death.

Even though Cory’s death by pressing is unique in the American experience, there were several English precedents of the previous century.  The most notorious case involved a Catholic woman from northern England, Margaret Clitherow, who was accused of harboring priests in her household during one of the most fevered moments of the English Reformation.  Clitherow refused to participate in the proceedings against her as she did not want to implicate members of her family, consequently she was subjected to a particularly harrowing process of peine forte et dure that brought about her death (and martyrdom) on Good Friday, 1586 and canonization shortly thereafter.


The Torture/execution of Margaret Clitherow, 1586

There was definitely a judicial reaction to the Clitherow case, and in the seventeenth century pressing was used sparingly and only as a death sentence for convicted murderers like George Strangwayes (1658) and Henry Jones (1672).  So the Corey case is conspicuous in the relatively late use of peine forte et dure as judicial torture.  But then again, everything about the Salem Witch Trials is late from the European perspective.

To me, it seems rather obvious that Cory’s passive resistance to the proceedings of 1692 was motivated by disgust rather than fear of forfeiture of his considerable estate upon conviction:  in July of that year he had already deeded his lands in Salem Farms (now West Peabody) to his sons-in-law William Cleaves and Jonathan Moulton, “being under great troubles and affliction…and knowing not how soon I may depart this life”.

Because of his defiance, Corey has been among the most revered of Salem victims in both literary and historical interpretations of the trials after 1800, including two nineteenth-century plays, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Giles Corey of the Salem Farms (1868) and Mary Wilkins’ Giles Corey, Yeoman (1893). In Arthur Miller’s Crucible, the Giles character is irascible and independent, a characterization that is somewhat supported by the historical evidence.  Like the death of  Margaret Clitherow over a century before, Corey’s horrible death went a long way towards ending the circumstances that produced it.

The Giles Cory Marker on Crystal Lake in West Peabody, Massachusetts, in the midst of  what was previously Corey’s 150-acre property.

8 Comments   |  tags: , , | posted in History, Salem

August 1, 2011

Tiny Street People

By daseger

I’ve received quite a few emails about a photograph of an installation of bronze bathers in the Hartley Mason Park in my hometown of York Harbor in a post from about a month ago, and I’ve been thinking (and looking) at those figures quite a bit myself.  Here are a few more images as a reminder.

One of the reasons I’ve been thinking about these little figures is that I neglected to mention the artist, Sumner Weinbaum, who has been active in the Seacoast arts scene for some time.  Another reason is that they remind me of a photograph I purchased about a decade ago of another little bronze figure, placed on a McIntire fence here in Salem.  The artist (who was local and whose name I cannot remember!  It is nowhere to be found on the photograph; if anyone knows please tell me) cast the figure, took the photograph, and (of course) made the placement.  Here’s an image, not very good, because it is a photograph of a photograph.

There’s something about really small human figures placed in real-sized settings that is quite captivating.  I like the York Harbor bathers both because they are small and active, engaged in familiar human activities, but the little Salem figure (not quite as detailed) also look alive even though he’s not doing anything.  This piece is also interesting because it’s kind of the reverse of the Renaissance man-is-the-measure-of-all-things ideal.

Two London-based artists have really run with the little-people-in-a-big-world theme.  An anonymous artist who goes by the name of  Slinkachu creates images of sequenced street scenarios with the miniature figures used in architectural models, and Isaac Cordal places his cement street figures on streets all over Europe.  Here is a sample of Slinkachu’s work entitled Boys Own Adventures; you can find lots more at The Little People Project (Abandoning little people on the streets since 2006).

Cordal’s work has a strong environmental theme, as illustrated by these images (Remembrances  from Nature) from his recent book, Cement Eclipses:  Small Interventions in the Big City.

8 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Design, Home

April 28, 2011

Wedding Flowers

By daseger

 Yes, flower bells rang right merry that day,        

When there was a marriage of flowers, they say

In honor of the royal wedding, I’m featuring a charming Art Nouveau picture book, Walter Crane’s A Flower Wedding.  Described by Two Wallflowers.  Originally published in 1905 by Cassell & Company in London, the book has recently been republished in a facsimile edition to mark the Victoria & Albert Museum‘s current exhibition The Cult of Beauty:  the Aesthetic Movement, 1860-1880 (and perhaps another big occasion?)  I snatched up a first edition years ago, long before I knew what I had.

Walter Crane (1845-1915) was a well-know children’s book illustrator as well as an Arts & Crafts designer of wallpaper, textiles and other decorative arts. I suppose that A Flower Wedding is a children’s book, but it is quite a sophisticated one.  There’s a simple plot line narrating the wedding of “Lad’s Love” (another name for Sweet William)  and “Miss Meadowsweet” in which all the participants and guests are flowers drawn in human form .  Here are the bride’s attendants and mother, along with a very prominent guest, “Good King Henry” (one of my favorite herbs).

And before all of London, they were wed.

3 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in History

April 27, 2011

Salem Chests

By daseger
I’m finishing up my Tudor-Stuart course this week at Salem State, and while doing the course prep for a class on the reign of William and Mary (1689-94/1702) I became bored with the rather mundane political narrative (at least compared with the Tudors!) and turned to the style of the era.  Then I became a lot more interested, particularly in following the transmission of material culture traditions and motifs from the Continent to England and ultimately to Salem. 

Like its maritime heritage and architecture, the furniture of colonial and Federal Salem serves as a powerful counterweight to its Witch City reputation.  There seems to be two periods of Salem furniture production that are particularly prized by collectors and scholars:  the late seventeenth-century William & Mary era as represented by the Symonds Shops in Salem (c. 1670-1700) and the Federal era, when Salem had some sixty cabinetmakers working to produce furniture for both the domestic and export markets.

The Symonds business was established by joiner John Symonds (c. 1595-1671) who emigrated to Massachusetts from Norfolk, England in the 1630s and carried on by his sons James and Samuel. A Salem street is named after the family.  Their chests have done very well at auction in the past decade or so, with the Pope  “valuables cabinet” selling for 2.42 million dollars in 2000 (and back to Salem it came, to the Peabody Essex Museum).  This chest is pictured below in a photograph from Christies, along with another Symonds cabinet from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  The initials of the married couples who owned these chests (Joseph and Bathsheba Pope of Salem Village and Ephraim and Mary Herrick of Beverly), interwoven with the year (1679) of their creation, is carved on the front in the midst of the characteristic Symonds sunburst.

Another Salem Symonds chest, the “Putnam Family Cupboard”, was photographed by Salem’s famed photographer-entrepreneur Frank Cousins and sketched by Edwin Foley in a fanciful “colonial” environment a century ago.  Both images are below, along with one of a so-called “Witch Bureau”, from the Pageant of America series, with the accompanying caption “from the middle drawer of which one of the witches jumped out who was hung at Gallows Hill in Salem.”

The "Witch Bureau", NYPL Digital Gallery

I’m not quite sure about this piece–very square legs compared to the other examples of the era—(and what a provenance!) although somewhat similar to the most recent Symonds piece to be auctioned off, at Sotheby’s this past January, the 1690 “Trask Chest”.

As I finish up my course with Queen Anne, the last of the Stuarts, I can’t help but dwell on the dramatic change in furniture style (again, because the narrative history is pretty boring, and all about the War of Spanish Succession):  from solid squares to graceful curves.  Edwin Foley, the author-illustrator of The Book of Decorative Furniture (1909-11), made his way right into the Queen’s bedroom so he could capture her colorful bedhangings and “Queen Anne” highboy and one of Frank Cousin’s interior photographs of the Peirce-Nichols house from the 1890s captured a similar chest.

Frank Cousins and the other advocates of Salem and its colonial architecture, furniture, and decorative arts created a brand that was almost as strong as “Witch City” in the early and mid-twentieth century.  As proof, I offer two advertisements for newer models of Salem chests.

 

5 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in History, Salem

March 30, 2011

Witchcraft Schools

By daseger

Sorry–my title does not refer to Hogwart’s School of Witchcraft and Wizardry but rather to two elementary schools on either side of the Atlantic Ocean:  the Witchcraft Heights Elementary School here in Salem and the Warboys Community Primary School in Cambridgeshire, England.  There has been some discussion in Salem about renaming Witchcraft Heights after a recently deceased city councillor, during which the School Committee member who proposed the change commented that the term “witchcraft” could cause confusion about “what type of school it is”.  Never mind that the proverbial cat has long been out of the bag regarding witchcraft terminology and iconography in Salem and the fact the school is situated in the city’s Witchcraft Heights neighborhood, this little flurry reminded me of a somewhat similar debate in Warboys.  Here are logos for the two schools in question, first Salem’s, then that of Warboys:

Look familiar?  Well, both communities are products of their history, and the marketing of that history.  A century before the Salem Witch Trials there was another sensational trial involving apparently possessed adolescent girls throwing fits and naming names.  The sensational “Witches of Warboys” case began in 1589, when the five daughters of local baronet Sir Robert Throckmorton demonstrated signs of a hysterical demonic affliction, and cast blame for their states on a poor neighbor, Alice Samuel, and her family.  The Samuels were powerless to prove their innocence, and found guilty and executed for witchcraft in 1593.  The circumstances of the trial, involving the lurid testimony of the girls, captured the attention of the kingdom and ultimately led to the publication of a very popular pamphlet and the passage of a much stricter English Witchcraft statute in 1604.

 

Sound familiar?  Well, there are lots of similarities between the Warboys and Salem witch trials but that is not the subject at hand.  Flash forward to the twentieth century, when both towns began employing witchcraft emblems for some (or in the case of Salem, ALL) of their public institutions.  Warboys, which is much smaller than Salem, certainly did not turn itself into Witch City, but the witch logo above was adopted for the primary school in 1946, and 60 years later the school governors began to question it, fearing that it might have been “putting off” prospective teachers and students.  A counter-campaign to keep the witch ensued, with the end result of a newly designed logo incorporating several aspects of Warboys’ history:  the witch, the tree for which the village was named, an open book (and crossed pencils) representing learning, and the village clock tower.  The children of Warboys designed and approved the new symbol for their school, which might be a good solution for Salem.

2 Comments   |  tags: , , | posted in History, Salem

March 22, 2011

Springing into the Seventeenth Century

By daseger

Despite the fact that it’s not exactly New England’s shining season, I love spring.  It’s my favorite season by far; I even get a little glum when it turns into summer.  It’s just such a hopeful time, and so dramatic; one year I watched the grass turn green in an afternoon. There are signs of spring in the garden (goldfish awakened from their states of hibernation, little green buds on shrubs and trees), but we sustained so much tree damage this past winter that I kind of dread going back there for long, yet.  I did put a pot of hellebores—my harbingers of spring–on the front stoop, but that’s the extent of my spring “gardening” so far.

Instead of tending to my garden, I’m going to welcome spring in my closet by indulging in a biannual ritual:  the changing of the clothes.  I’m also putting together a series of lectures on the “consumer revolution” of the seventeenth century this week, and am consequently indulging in another passion:  perusing the works of  Bohemian artist Wenceslaus Hollar (1607-77).

Hollar escaped war-torn central Europe and ventured to England with Thomas Howard, the Earl of Arundel, to document the “Collector Earl’s”  large and growing collection through his amazingly-detailed etchings.  Hollar’s work did not end with Lord Arundel’s collection; he went on to document many aspects of his adopted country’s society and culture in over 2700 etchings, most of which were printed.  Hollar’s focus and images are so varied that he really transcends the role of artist and becomes a “photographer” of sorts, capturing the street life, architecture, and events of his age.  It’s not just Hollar’s range, though, it is the details, and the texture,  that he infuses into every work that makes his images so captivating.  My students love them, and so do I. 

Hollar’s skill at capturing surface detail is particularly apparent in his depictions of clothing, which two of his print collections, The Severall Habits of English Women and The Seasons, do so vividly.  So here is Spring, represented by a fashionable young noblewomen in mid-seventeenth century England and several seasonal pastoral scenes, all from the Wenceslaus Hollar Digital Collection at the University of Toronto:

2 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in History

February 15, 2011

Save Sherlock’s House

By daseger

Actually it’s the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose country house is endangered. Undershaw House, built by Doyle in the Surrey countryside south of London in 1897 for his  invalid wife and family, is threatened by partition and “redevelopment” and an energetic preservation effort has emerged to secure its protection: the Save Undershaw Preservation Trust.  Photographs of the house in 1900 and today are from the Trust’s website and the BBC, along with one showing the Doyle family in residence at the height of a Surrey summer from the New York Public Library. 

Historic Preservation must be a local effort, but often a national, or even global, focus can really help.  Salem has certainly confronted its preservation challenges in the past, from the threatened “Witch House” (which I still prefer to call the Jonathan Corwin House) in the 1940s to urban renewal 20 years later.  Local preservationists were on the front line in both cases, but a timely article by famed architectural writer Ada Louise Huxtable in the New York Times (“Urban Renewal Plan Threatens Historic Sites in Salem, Mass.”, October 13, 1965) certainly helped to prevent the total levelling of downtown.  More recently, Walmart abandoned its plans to build a store on the Wilderness Battlefield in Virginia under pressure from a coalition of local and national preservation organizations, including the Civil War Trust.  I imagine there are voices in Britain saying we have so many old, Edwardian, authors’, country, etc….houses, we can’t save them all  but it looks like a pretty special house to me.

Arthur Conan Doyle sold Undershaw after the successive deaths of his wife and son, but in the two decades that the family was in residence he published several Sherlock stories and novels, including the Hound of the Baskervilles, serialized in the Strand Magazine from 1901-4.  A Strand cover is pictured below, along with one of Sidney Paget’s illustrations from Baskervilles, a sketch of Arthur Conan Doyle at the height of his fame, and–just to establish our Salem interest and connection–the box for Parker Brothers’ Sherlock Holmes Game from 1904.

2 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in History, Houses