Over on Comment is Free I’ve a piece expounding on why Mary Beale’s house should be preserved. I might modestly claim that it contains some rare pieces of original historic research (from the British Library and National Gallery libraries), which is probably not something you often see on CiF… together with a name check of some prominent characters of 1660s London, of which ditto.
The usual description of Mary Beale is “the first professional female painter in Britain”, is correct – but there’s a lot more to her than that – a lot of material – including her husband’s notebooks, a long letter she wrote on friendship (in the British Library, which I’ve actually held), and of course lots of her very fine paintings.
She certainly deserves to be remember by more than those paintings, however, and some of her champions have been trying to preserve her country home, Allbrook Farmhouse near Eastleigh, Hampshire. But developers want to “eight ‘executive-style homes with double garages’ in the grounds surrounding the farmhouse, ending plans to preserve the building and open it to the public”.
The Mary Beale Trust is seeking help to fight the plans – the deadline is June 28 for letters. Please write!!
… the good news is that most of her oeuvre is being reprinted. This is the TLS verdict:
whereas Allingham’s earlier works swelter under concert-party lights, rarely deviating, even at their most bloodthirsty, from a jaunty Cluedo-ish idiom – could it be “Poppy in the middle of the night in a cornfield with a dagger†(The Case of the Late Pig)? Was the weapon “a length of lead pipe, possibly stocking covered†(Traitor’s Purse)? “Surely Uncle Andrew didn’t go to church with a coil of rope, a revolver and a clock weight concealed upon him?†(Police at the Funeral) – the later novels revolve around recognizably modern, even prosaic, concerns. Indeed, they have some very twenty-first-century preoccupations: pensions, tax allowances, inheritance law and the fate of the “New Useless†– the “generation which would die of want and neglect†because “the young would be too overworked to look after them†(The Beckoning Lady).
Margery Kempe is an entertaining woman, a strong woman, a clear-minded woman, but you’ve got to sympathise with the travelling companions who, as she criss-crosses Europe, try at every turn to dump her and flee on to a bit of peace and quiet. For Margery not only weeps, sobs and beats her breast with great passion at every religious opportunity, she also has the habit of arriving at the court of an important man, a bishop say, and immediately denouncing it as a haven of wordly sin. That’s when she’ not making deals with her husband to leave her alone in bed, in return for which she’ll pay off his debts.
Yet there’s also a blunt honesty in her discourse – as recorded by the scribe who wrote it down to become what is arguably the first autobiography in English – that feels as though it might be typical of her medieval times. And you can’t but admire her single-minded strength of character. I started reading her “booke”, that autobiography, wondering how long I’d stick with it, but she’s such a strong presence its almost as enveloping as a good novel.
Margery was born in the prosperous wool port of King’s Lynn (then Bishop’s Lynn) in about 1373, the daughter of one of its leading burgher, but after the birth of her first child suffered what sounds very like post-partum psychosis, that leads to her going mad – “she pitilessly tore the skin on her body near her heart with her nails, for she had no other implement, and she would have done something worse, except that she was tied up and forcibly restrained both day and night”. (p. 42)
Eventually, starting at around age 40, after having had 14 children, she took to a life a pilgrimage, touring all of the great European pilgrimage routes, going to Jerusalem, Rome (where she spent quite a lot of time) and Spain. Yet she gives frustrating little detail of this – only the occasional side comments hints at the difficulties of her journeys, as in this report from her old-age journey, with her daughter-in-law, to Germany: “When they were outside the towns, her companions took off their clothes and, sitting about naked, picked themselves for vermin … This creature [she always so refers to herself in the third person] was afraid to take off her clothes as her fellows did, and therefore, through mixing with them, she caught some of their vermin and was dreadfully bitten and stung both day and night…” (p. 281, Penguin, 1994.)
All of this is a spiritual journey, for her. She’s very medieval in this of course- it is God that gives her strength and passion and support – yet from the perspective of today it is clear this is one tough cookie. When she visits the archbishop of Canterbury: “there were many of the Archbishop’s clerks and other heedless men, both squires and yeomen, who swore many great oaths and spoke many thoughtless words, and this creature boldly rebuked them and said they would be damned unless they left off their swearing and the other sins they practiced”. (p. 71)
She only ever speaks of one of her children, an unnamed son “involved in business as a merchant and sailing overseas, whom she desired to draw away from the perils of this wretched and unstable world … so much so that he fled and company, and would not gladly meet her.”
As befits such a character, she’s got an excellent website setting out her life and times, and the complete text of the book.
As so often is the case, the survival of her story was a pure stroke of luck. The ODNB explains:
Only one manuscript survives, now in the British Library (Add. MS 61823), and previously in the possession of the Butler-Bowdon family of Lancashire. It was copied about 1450 by an East Anglian scribe named Salthows, and later in the century was owned by the Yorkshire Carthusian priory of Mount Grace. Until the manuscript was identified by Hope Emily Allen in 1934, Kempe’s Book was known only from excerpts printed by Wynkyn de Worde c.1501, and by Henry Pepwell in 1521 …
You wonder how many other such formidable middle-aged women pilgrims were trudging around Europe whose stories haven’t been preserved. (For it was a time of recorded strong women – Margery meets Julian of Norwich, shows signs of having been inspired by St Bridget of Sweden , St Elizabeth of Hungary and Mary of Oignies.
An interesting compliment to an architect, but an article (PDF) in a new edition of the online French/English history journal Cercles explores how visitors to London in the 18th and 19th centuries assessed it architecture in this way. Rome had produced great ruins; would Britain’s stack up when it too inevitably lost its imperial grandeur?
So… “In 1800 Elizabeth Lady Holland recorded in her journal,
I have been reading Le Brun’s journey to Persepolis in 1704, the ruins of which (Persepolis) seem equal to anything in antiquity in point of solidity, size, and extent. In future times when this little island shall have fallen into its natural insignificancy, by being no longer possessed of a fictitious power founded upon commerce, distant colonies, and other artificial sources of wealth, how puzzled will the curious antiquary be when seeking amidst the ruins of London vestiges of its past grandeur? Acres now covered by high, thin walls of brick, making streets tirés à cordon, divided into miserable, straitened, scanty houses, will, when decayed, crumble into a vast heap of brick-dust. No proud arch to survive the records of history, no aqueduct to prove how much the public was considered by ye Governt., no lofty temples, no public works! St. Paul’s anywhere would be a grand edifice; finer as a ruin than in its present state, disfigured with casements, whitewashed walls, pews, etc. The bridges alone would strike the eye as fine remains; they are magnificent.
(More about Lady Holland, who was a major character of the city that she was contemplating.)
There’s also a piece on Flora Tristan’s view of London, PDF, in French. It concludes, in a rough translation, that in 1840:
“What she saw in London would not make it possible for anybody to affirm that Great Britain was a country where freedom had triumphed. Admittedly, there was a Parliament, but there was no representative of the working class, or any elected official of female sex. She met women with inadequate education, completely subject to their husband, prostitutes humiliated by the upper classes, and workmen who were victims of the indifference of their owners who treat their horses better, plus humiliated prisoners given no chance to redeem themselves.”
(There’s an English account of her here.)
For a bit of fun – life seems a big of a slog at the moment – I’ve added to my sidebar a little poll about which famous woman you’d like to have been in a previous life: you could if you wish draw all sorts of psychological conclusions from which you choose – I couldn’t possibly comment.
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