Philobiblon

That a play written in 1920 should still feel entirely fresh and relevant 85 years later is either the sign of a great drama, or of a failure of the human race to progress. In the case of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, both statements are true.

When The Emperor (Paterson Joseph) swaggers muscularly into the Gate Theatre, revealing within seconds the nature of his regime, built entirely on brutality and bombast, recent parallels are obvious. Robert Mugabe sweeps into mind, then Ceascescu, Mobutu … the list could go on and on.

And as America struggles to find “leadership material” in Iraq, O’Neill’s play presents a society entirely corrupted by the exercise of absolute, violent power. There are no heroes here – it is the power of the Emperor’s own conscience that will really get to him.

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Having survived the weekend cycling adventure without the knees falling apart (at least entirely) today managed to cycle to Old Street and back, and play squash in between.

That left me musing at how – despite false starts and occasional disasters – (trying to follow route signs on the ground is definitely NOT recommended) cycle routes in London are improving. Knowing the route and the areas pretty well, I could avoid – except for a slightly hairy run along Clerkenwell Road – busy roads, and frequently have my own dedicated, separated from the road, route.

I was also checking out the Transport for London route planner, and found that it has a dedicated cycle option. I’m not sure that I always agree with its suggestions – it seems to go for the direct route sometimes, rather than seeking out the quieter routes – but it certainly offers a place to start when you’re not sure of a route.

(It also covers Tube, bus and train travel.)

Germany awoke this morning to its first full day under a female Chancellor. After much tooing and froing, much talk, the Bundestag finally voted her in yesterday (although with 51 less votes than her coalition is supposed to have).

Given the general conservatism of German society, its still extremely rigid gender roles, I get the feeling it is going to be a shock all around. (And it is going to mean that there will, finally, again be a woman at the table of big international summits.)

What makes it even more amazing is that she is the first former East German to hold the post, and was elected on a platform of radical social change, very approximately along the model of Thatcherism, although she is now in a “grand” coalition that has already ruled out much of that.

There’s a lot of reasons why she might not succeed, but then all of logic would have said she wouldn’t get where she is now.

The Der Spiegel article I’ve linked to above describes Germany as suffering from a “pathological pessimism about our future prospects”. I was talking to a German friend (admittedly an expat who can’t imagine going back) who also feels that Germany is just stuck in a deeply destructive rut. Several of her female friends, highly educated, one a doctor, have given up paid work and have no intention of going back. She’s deeply disappointed in them, but it seems that they are only following the norms of their society, which surely can’t stay that way.

Lily Silberberg’s story might be that of the 20th century – the good side of the period, not its darker hue. She was born in London in 1929, to Jewish parents whose had fled Russia after the Revolution. Her father was a “journeyman tailor”, her mother an outworker spending her evenings sewing buttonholes late into the night by the light of a gas lamp.

Yet by the time Lily retired, well into her seventies, she had a full, satisfying, successful career behind her. She’d been a respected higher education lecturer, published a book, The Art of Dress Modelling, and spent the last years of her working life teaching her skills to the Bangladeshi community in Tower Hamlets.

Not bad for a girl who’d at the age of 13 had been sent by her parents – no doubt scraping hard for the fees – to the then Barrett St Technical College (now the London College of Fashion) for a two-year course “intended to take the place of an apprenticeship”. (Gentility came with an optional course in French, two hours a week.)

She’d been a star pupil, yet Lily speaks of the shock of going on to the factory floor. “The standards I’d been taught were of the highest haute courture, the standard of the Queen’s coronation robe. But there had been a war and a revolution in the garment industry. … They would shout at me in the factory: ‘Time is money.’ Can you imagine a bit of confusion?”

Some of her earliest efforts, tremendous labour for such small results, are on display in the British Library’s Fashion Lives exhibition. There’s a neat bunch of red roses embroidered on a handkerchief, made with, we are told, “material of a nightdress that belonged to her mother”. But there’s a lot more to the exhibition than objects, books and pictures, fabulous as some of those are.
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I borrowed a copy of Mistress of the House: Great Ladies and Grand Houses 1670-1830 by Rosemary Baird because I found via an Amazon.com search (one more of the many useful bibliographic tools out there) that it was one of the few books listed containing a reference to my 19th-century “blogger”, Frances Williams Wynn.

I can only be in sympathy with its general thesis, that many of the grand country houses of England, Scotland and Wales are primarily the result of their vision and organisational skills, while their husbands – who my limited studies in the area would agree – tended to be usually either away in London on business or politics, or tearing around the hunting field from dawn to dusk. But the men got the credit anyway.

In truth, however, it is one of those studies of aristocratic ladies that I find hard to be in sympathy with. There’s a few too many descriptions of grand drawing rooms, and too few descriptions of real lives, to really hold my interest. And the author does seem to have something of a Daily Mail attitude towards the proper behaviour of women. Sarah Jennings, Duchess of Marlborough, as “unattractively aggressive” (p.44) is only one of such descriptions that grate.

But there was the hoped-for bit about the Williams Wynns, in particular Charlotte, Frances’s mother:

“When Sir Watkins Williams Wynn died in 1789, he left his widow Charlotte to administer all his estates in Wales during the minority of their eldest son. He had enough confidence in her not to appoint anyone else to the task, whether as administrator, executor, guardian or trustee. His trust was well placed: when, in 19819, Charlotte handed over the finances of her youngest son Henry, not only were they intact, but she was able to tell him from memory and with great precision what he would have, namely ‘somehat over £5,700 stock in your 3 per cents, which at £70 per cent (the price they bore the day it was settled) is worth £3,900 & I have a further sum of £71 to be placed in your Account with Coutts.’ She also discussed whether he should have the money in exchange bills or stocks.” (p. 39)

[The reference supplied is Rachel Leighton (ed) Correspondence of Charlotte Grenville, Lady Willims Wynn & Her Three Sons (1795-1832), John Murray, 1920, a letter of 20 March 1801.)

And I did learn lots of other interesting snippets – the gardens at Kew owe their origins to two royal women, Princess Augusta, the wife of the shortlived Frederick, Prince of Wales (died 1751) and Queen Caroline, her mother-in-law. George III combined them. (p. 48)

And the Gunning sisters, about whom Miss Williams Wynn had much to say, also make an appearance, at a ball in 1757 held by Mary Blount, Duchess of Norfolk (1701-73). “The normally shy Duke appeared particularly relaxed: he danced all evening (it was the custom not to change partners very often) with Lady Coventry, one of the beautiful Gunning sisters. Mrsy Delany commented ‘… there was at least one happy woman for three or four hours.’ The elderly Duke must have been happy too.”

I was reminded too of my recent Women Latin Poets review (do please read it if you haven’t already – it is a book that deserves to be celebrated and talked about) with Elizabeth Howard, Duchess of Rutland (1780-1825). Baird says: “letters between her and Colonel Frederick Trench, a close family friend, show the COlonel commending her on Latin translations and discussing music with her. In 1819 she accompanied the Duke on another foreign tour, this time to Brussels and the Rhine. By then she was especially interested in cathedrals and churches, commenting on the architecture with assurance in Tournai Cathedral, where she disliked the mixture of Gothic and Grecian, and admiring that at Ghent … in Brussels she though that John Nash, the great classical architect of the Regency period ‘should certainly be sent here, to get some better ideas in his Head, how to improve London’.” (p. 243)

I’m listening as I write to Five Live Radio, listening to some bloke mouthing off about women not being interested in science. He obviously hadn’t heard of Margaret Portland’s “museum”. When it was sold off after her death, 30 days were spent, Horace Walpole reported, on selling shells, ores, fossils, birds’ eggs and other items of natural history. (p. 60)

A special, one-week-only event: the Britblog Roundup will be visiting Philobiblon on Sunday. If you’ve seen any of the other carnivals here you’ll get the general idea: the best of the blogosphere – in this case the blogophere written by Britons or Irishmen or women, or bloggers living in Britain or Ireland – collected in one post.

So nominate early, nominate often, to the usual address: britblog AT gmail DOT com. (But only one post from each blog please – either your own or other great posts you’ve read.)

I’ll follow Tim in closing the nominations at midday on Sunday. Posts should have been in the week before that, but since this is a special case, perhaps reaching different corners of the blogosphere – I’ll stretch that rule back a couple of days for blogs that haven’t previously been on the roundup.

You’ll find the last two weeks’ here and here.

And if you’d rather read the book of the roundup (out now – although my copy hasn’t arrived yet; you’ll see the review when it does) – the Amazon UK link is in my sidebar. (Sorry American cousins, you’ll have to import it from there.)