Philobiblon

I may have been a bit quieter than usual last week, as I spent Thursday and Friday the Literary London 2006 conference. It was the first of these I’ve attended (although it probably won’t be the last), for it is a fascinating combination. Basically focused as the name suggests on literature, it is however, highly welcoming to interdisciplinary approaches, and ranges widely in timeframe, from current, very current, technological “art” back to, well the earliest paper this year was on Chaucer and the “shitty” place of Southwark in his London.

I also presented, for the first time, a paper myself, entitled “Exercises in rhetoric or genuine laments? Four accounts of a ‘bounteous Ladies large beneficence'”, about Dame Helen Branch. The session worked out rather nicely, since one of my fellow panel members, Adam Hanson, from Queen’s University Belfast, was speaking about “William Haughton’s London in Englishmen for my Money,” a play written in 1598, only four years after Dame Helen died, so the two papers were quite complementary, and I was able to refer to his map handout. (Thanks Adam! and thanks to all the commenters on this blog – particularly Clanger and Sharon – for all their help in the research that went into my paper.)

I’m not posting the paper here because I would like to get it published some time and posting might complicate that, but if anyone is interested I’d be happy to send you a copy.

The following is a short collection of notes from the sessions I attended. (Note, these are my thoughts and collected snippets, and should not necessarily be taken as a full reflection of what the speaker said. And I think they are accurate, but it was an intense two days. Caveat rector.)

“John Milton, London writer”: Patrick J. Cook, Washington University
He’s more of a London writer than you think, was the basic thesis. Women and London are both alluring and frightening – the combination explains why London starts as the source of all beauty and ends up as Circe’s cave. (Logical enough for a boy just up from a male-dominated Cambridge.)

Milton was a great walker, but became much more a walker in London after going blind he “became a blind version of John Stowe”. (And when you think about it walking about early modern London – the smells, the noise – manufacture, horses, carts, itinerant traders singing out their wares – must have been pretty amazing, and frightening.)

An interesting comment that there is a rhyme scheme in Paradise Lost, just that so far only one reader (God) has worked it out. But some computer probably eventually will.

“Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, In London”, Yvonne Noble
A sign of how, despite the publishing industry telling me there’s “too much” women’s history, so much remains to be done, Dr Noble noted that there’s still no sound textual edition of the works of “probably the best woman poet of the 18th-century”.

She was thought of as a poet of retirement, but also had a London life that was important to her. From a royalist family (born 1661) she was a maid of honour to Mary of Modena, which was how she met and married Heneage Finch, second son of a royalist family. She was already writing poetry at court in 1680 but was cautious about letting it be known, although this was a poetical environment – Rochester et al. Her marriage was profoundly happy through years of tribulation, because Heneage refused to swear loyalty to William of Orange, so they spent many years living with relatives without a settled residence, unil in 1712, unexpectedly, he became Earl of Winchelsea, and they finally got a settled residence.

She wrote about 250 poems and two plays, with about two-fifths of these being published in her lifetime. The earliest are often songs, often set the music.

In her later years London is in her poems a place of friendship where not too much attention had to be paid to dignity and status. Her last completed poem was a contemplation of Wolsey and Whitehall as examples of inflated ambition and ego. It also portrays her ideal city.

She died in London at her house in Cleveland Row.

Alex Murray (University of Melbourne) “The Ice Age is Coming”: Commodification, Gentrification and the New East End
Switching gears rather, to The Clash and Iain Sinclair, who attempts to recall London through political rejection of commodifiable histories. The Clash was the most politically radical mainstream band of the Eighties, but in 1993 it allowed “London Calling” to be used for a Jaguar car advert – nuclear armegeddon replaced by cultural armegeddon, as reflected in the commodification of Spitalfields, which was a privileged site for Sinclair, the dark side of the city, one of its most feared and disrupted areas being tamed.

Now everything is visible, self-consciously opened to the property developers, even though the fiction of secrecy is maintained, as in a Tower Hamlets walking tour leaflets which says it is providing “insights not instructions”.

The possibility of an alternative history — its ability to challenge official hegemonic history — has been seriously compromised. What is needed are new cultural practices to produce a new fiction of London.

“London’s Great Starfish: The Construction of Mid-Victorian Suburban Gothic”
Trollope’s Three Clerks is where the image comes from – it features the most positive suburban home in Victorian fiction.

The suburban commuter was frequently confused with/or compared with the imperial conqueror – his reward the slippers, dinners on the tables, the women, to which he came home each evening.

But still everyone wants to get out, as in the novels of Charlotte Riddell, best known for her ghost stories and the autobiographical A Struggle for Fame but in her own time most known for her realist city novels, such as City and Suburb, 1861, in which absorption by London is a measure of decline and Home Sweet Home (1873) in which suburbia is a transitional spave and there is a longing for rural prosperity. Surburbs are rarely the destination for the protagonist in Victorian fiction – they either go back to the country or redevelop the suburban site for lots of money.

MTC…