Cultural history Archives - Page 11 of 23

Modern Architecture: a critical history

August 12, 2010 by Roy Johnson

an illustrated history of architecture 1900-2000

This is a scholarly history of modern architecture which has gone through a number of editions and has been kept up to date with obvious enthusiasm from the author, who is an authority on the subject. Peter Frampton starts with three short chapters that give the historical background to the modern era. That is, the architectural thinking, urban planning, and the technological developments after 1750 that led to the twentieth century, when what we call modern began.

The narrative proper begins with the Arts and Crafts movement in England, then moves on to the Americans Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. Both of them started their careers in Chicago, which was rebuilding itself as a city following the Great Fire of 1871. Next comes Gaudi, who I had not realized was influenced by Ruskin, Richard Wagner, and the French architectural theorist Viollet-le-Duc.

I rather like Frampton’s approach of devoting one short chapter to each style or designer, because there is just enough to assimilate without being over faced, and the succinct form encourages comprehension of the subject.

The celebrated James Rennie McIntosh went from spectacular early success to a very sad late career decline and an end in near obscurity. This is surprising, given the enduring popularity of his work. It would seem that even architecture has its shooting stars.

There are chapters on the Vienna Secession and Italian futurism, and in addition to these movements he includes studies of individual designers such as Adolf Loos, Henry van der Velde, Tony Garnier, and Auguste Perret. Some of these movements produced more designs than finished buildings, but Frampton includes their plans on the grounds that some were more influential than completed projects.

It is interesting to note that almost all the architectural visionaries he discusses were politically radical and leftist of one stripe or another. But none of them was able to reconcile the fact that their most celebrated products as artists were beautifully luxurious homes for rich bourgeois patrons.

The Bauhaus and Neue Sachlichkeit movements generated some amazingly innovative designs and buildings, until the Stock Market collapse of 1929 and the political swing to the right caused many of its stars to flee both east and west (only the latter survived). It’s quite surprising that many of their buildings look remarkably similar to those being built in major western cities today, almost one hundred years later.

Frampton sees Le Corbusier as the most important figure of mid century modern architecture, though it should be kept in mind that many of the high-rise social housing projects built under his influence (with their disastrous elevated walkways, vandalized lifts, and rubbish-strewn communal areas) have since been demolished, not long after they were first built.

A chapter on Soviet architecture does its best to show radical ideas emerging from the early years of the Proletkult, but finally has to admit that all creativity was crushed by the dead hand of Stalinism from 1930 onwards.

The latter part of the book plots the development of those people he sees as seminal influences – Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Phillip Johnson, and Buckminster Fuller. And although he includes a chapter called ‘The New Brutalism’ which largely features the work of Alison and Peter Smithson in the UK, it’s fairly clear that this is precisely the sort of work which has given architecture and publicly commissioned work a bad name in the latter part of the last century.

For this fourth edition Kenneth Frampton has added a major new chapter that explores the effects of globalization on architecture in recent years, the rise of the celebrity architect, and the way in which practices worldwide have addressed such issues as sustainability and habitat. The bibliography has also been updated and expanded, making this volume more complete and indispensable than ever.

The book has a comprehensive critical apparatus and huge bibliography, but it would also benefit from a glossary of architectural jargon. I had to look up the meaning of terms such as trabeated. atectonic, entasis, celerestory, oneric, lithic and phalantsery. Be warned: it’s not an easy read, but it’s excellent value.

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Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: a critical history, London: Thames and Hudson, 4th revised edn, 2000, pp.424, ISBN: 0500203954

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Modernism – a very short introduction

September 1, 2010 by Roy Johnson

radical developments in the arts 1900-1930

As a critical term ‘modernism’ needs careful use and understanding. For it refers not to things that are modern, but to the general movement of experiment in the arts that took place in the period 1900-1930. Modernism is the loose term we use for discussing Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Christopher Butler offers as background reasons for these radical artistic developments the loss of religious belief, the growth of science and technology, the spread of mass culture, and radical changes in gender roles and relationships.

He starts his survey of the period very wisely by presenting and analysing three iconic modernist works – James Joyce’s Ulysses, Fernand Leger’s La Ville, and Berthold Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, explaining how they ‘work’ in terms of their use of new techniques including fragmentation, collage, strange juxtapositions, abstraction, parody, allusions, and referentiality.

Then he looks at the theories that were advanced as attempts to underpin these developments. This is a tricky area, because what artists say or claim about their own work is not necessarily to be taken at face value. There are other problems too. Picasso and Braque for instance invented cubism without writing a single word explaining the process.. Many other artists on the other hand wrote manifestos full of complex notions and theories that turn out to be entirely unconnected with the works of art they produced.

Schoenberg thought his twelve tone system would assure the dominance of world music by Germany for the next one hundred years [sounds familiar?] but within a short time most listeners had tired of atonality. Writers such as Joyce, Woolf, and Eliot fared better in explaining their methods because literature is a medium which must faux de mieux be articulated via language.

The range of Butler’s references and examples discussed is enormous – though I was not persuaded by his attempts to recruit Wallace Stephens and William Faulkner into the Pantheon of Significance. It’s surprising how quickly some artistic reputations fade or in some cases are revealed as completely bogus – Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Herman Broch, Andre Gide, and Gertrude Stein spring to mind as candidates.

He devotes an entire chapter to the creation of a subjective point of view and its counterpart in modern fiction, the Epiphany. Literature naturally dominates here, but he compensates for this by including a section on surrealism, in which painting is the main art form. Interestingly enough, even though it was a short-lived phenomenon, it still lives on in occasional appearances in the visual arts, whereas in literary forms it is as dead as the dodo.

He brings all his arguments together with a quite refreshing examination of modernism and politics. This starts with the surrealists who half-heartedly tried to ally themselves to the Communist Party, then passes on to show how the communist orthodoxy of Socialist Realism chimed exactly with the Nazi policy on the arts. He also includes a lively critique of Berthold Brecht, who often escapes censure for his Stalinist propaganda, disguised as it often is beneath historical allegory.

He concludes with arguments that are quite contemporary in their scepticism. No matter which critical approach we take for instance, it is simply not possible to say which parts of Women in Love, The Firebird, or Guernica are ‘progressive’ or contribute to social development or enrichment. But what is more interesting is that these great modernist works still speak to us as vibrant examples of artistic achievement long after the historical and political events that provide their context have passed.

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Christopher Butler, Modernism: a very short introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, pp.117, ISBN: 0192804413

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Nancy Cunard

July 13, 2018 by Roy Johnson

socialite, rebel, poet, publisher, activist

Nancy Cunard (1896-1965) was heiress to the Anglo-American Cunard shipping line. She was a glamorous and notorious figure in fashionable society of the 1920s and 1930s in both London and Paris. She flouted convention by taking multiple lovers, including in particular one black American jazz pianist. She also espoused left wing causes, was close to the Communist Party, supported anti-racist movements, and ran her own publishing company which produced the works of modern poets.

She was born in 1896 at Neville Holt in Leicestershire, a country house that dates back to the thirteenth century. Her family were super-rich anglicised Americans, owners of the Cunard shipping company. Her father pursued a traditional country gentleman lifestyle, with a favourite hobby of metalwork. Her mother hated the countryside, and covered the Tudor oak panelling of her husband’s walls with white paint.

Nancy’s childhood was typical for the upper class – forty servants in the house and her parents completely absent. When her mother was at home she filled the house with musicians and writers, including the Irish novelist George Moore, who it was thought might have been Nancy’s genetic father. Nancy had a precocious taste in literature and read widely in English and French.

In 1910 her mother began an affair with the conductor Thomas Beecham, left her husband, and moved to London, taking Nancy with her. They lived in Cavendish Square in a grand house rented from Herbert Asquith when he moved into 10 Downing Street as prime minister.

Nancy was a gifted student who finished off her education in Munich and Paris. In 1914, on the eve of war, she befriended Iris Tree and was presented at Court as a debutante. She and Iris set up their own studio in Bloomsbury, and Nancy began writing poetry. She met Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, and became a much-admired figure at the Cafe Royal.

During the following year she suddenly got married to Sydney Fairbairn, a handsome young soldier of whom her mother disapproved. The marriage lasted twenty months, which she later described as the unhappiest of her life. Nancy went to live with Sybil Hart-Davis, who was to have a strong influence on her. She fell in love with another soldier, but he was killed in 1917.

In London she lived an aimless, dissipated life and became a regular at the Eiffel Tower in Fitzrovia where she got ‘buffy’ with various drinking companions. She began preparations to separate herself legally from her husband, then in 1920 emigrated to Paris.This marked a turning point in her life and was the start of her becoming the archetypical ‘Bright Young Thing’. She was vividly attractive, dressed well, smoked and drank to excess, and exercised her sexual independence with gusto.

Her first major conquest around this time was Michael Arlen (real name Dikran Kouyoumdjian) the Armenian writer who was to make his name shortly afterwards with his novel The Green Hat. The next of her many lovers was Aldous Huxley, though she found him physically repellent. Being in bed with him, she said, was like being crawled over by slugs.

In 1921 she published (at her own expense) her first collection of poems – Outlaws. It received favourable reviews, largely written by her friends or by her mother’s influential contacts. She moved restlessly between England, the south of France, and Venice, where she had an affair with Wyndham Lewis, which he described in distinctly unflattering terms in his own memoirs.

She made friends with the Dadaist Tristan Tzara and English travel writer Norman Douglas, and eventually set up her own flat in Paris. In 1925 she produced a long narrative poem Parallax which was published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press,

The following year the next of her amorous conquests was the French surrealist and communist Louis Aragon. His influence reinforced her natural rebelliousness and she began to espouse a number of popular left-wing causes.

When her father died he left her all his money. She bought a house in Normandy sixty miles from Paris. There she set up her own printing press which was dedicated to producing modern poetry in limited editions – though she also published some pornography.

In 1928 she met Henry Crowder in Venice. He was the pianist in an all-black American jazz band led by the violinist Eddie South. At the end of the ‘season’ she took him back to Paris, at the same time adding the English poet and novelist Richard Aldington to her roster of lovers.

She re-established the Hours Press in Paris and published her first real literary discovery – Samuel Beckett. On a trip back to London she organised a private viewing of Bunuel’s surrealist film L’Age d’Or, which at that time was considered shocking to the point of illegality.

Meanwhile Nancy’s mother Lady Cunard was incandescent with rage, having learned that her daughter had a black lover. There were all sorts of anguished racist enquiries regarding the degree of his blackness. In fact Crowder had an African-American father and a Native American mother. There was a rift between mother and daughter, and Nancy’s allowance was reduced, but she spent the rest of her life (as she had spent the first part) living off her parents’ money.

Following this rupture she paid for Crowder’s ticket back to America and went to live in Cagnes with her latest lover, the nineteen year old Raymond Michelet. In 1931 her sympathy for the black cause was fired up by the Scottsboro Boys case, and when Crowder reappeared in Europe she persuaded him to take her to America. She stayed in Harlem for a month and met figures such as Marcus Garvey, Langston Hughes, and W.E.B. Du Bois.

On return to Europe she wrote an essay Black Man and White Ladyship which was partly an apologia for what would later be known as ‘negritude’ and partly a savage attack on the racism of her mother. She had the work privately printed and sent copies to everyone she knew – including her mother’s friends. It caused a sensation and tarnished her reputation, though many would now see it as a brave and prescient work.

In 1932 she conceived the idea of publishing an anthology celebrating black culture and history called Negro (a perfectly acceptable term at that time). More trans-Atlantic crossing were made for ‘research’ and there was controversy wherever she went with the project. She was joined in this endeavour by the young English communist writer Edgell Rickword.

When the book finally appeared in 1934 it was an enormous production – 855 pages, 12″ X 10.5″ format, and two inches thick. In terms of its content, the book was fifty years ahead of its time, with contributions from writers who are now regarded as the fathers (and mothers) of black identity. Commercially it was a flop, partly because of the high cover price (two guineas) and partly because it was ignored by the left-wing press in the UK and the USA because it didn’t toe the party line. Original copies are now collectors’ items, currently retailing at just below twenty thousand Euros.

The relationship with Crowder came to yet another but this time decisive end. Nancy threw herself into politics, visited Moscow, and became a journalist for the Associated Negro Press, reporting from Geneva on the crisis in Abyssinia. When the fight against Mussolini’s aggression failed in 1936 she immediately joined the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War.

In Madrid she met the young Chilean poet (and consul) Pablo Neruda and later collaborated with him in compiling the now famous anthology Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War (1937) which was entirely her own initiative.

In 1939 she joined the thousands of Spanish refugees fleeing from Franco’s troops across the border into southern France, where the reception there was far from friendly. People were herded into a concentration camp in Argeles, from where she helped rescue a small group of intellectuals, all the time filing copy for the Manchester Guardian. Then as the lights went out all over Europe in September 1939 she escaped (as did many others, with the help of Varian Fry) to the safety of Latin America.

Her first refuge was in Santiago, Chile, then she moved on to Mexico (where Leon Trotsky found brief asylum). She dallied with relatives in the Bahamas for the next two years, then in 1941 made her way back to London, living in a borrowed flat in one of the Inns of Court. During the remainder of the war she worked in various secretarial jobs, translating and writing reports. She also produced another anthology – Poems for France. As soon as Paris was liberated in 1944 she went back to live there.

Her house at Reanville had been vandalised and looted, not only by the occupying Germans but by local villagers who resented her bohemian lifestyle. She applied for compensation but got nothing. Eventually the property was sold and she bought an old farmhouse in Souillac in the Dordogne.

Still travelling restlessly around Europe (a tax exile, only allowed three months maximum residency in Britain) she produced in the early 1950s a book on her friend Norman Douglas (omitting his paedophilia) and received news of the death in Washington of Henry Crowder. She also produced a memoir of George Moore, but failed in an attempt to generate the autobiography which everyone wanted her to write.

As she reached her sixties her health got worse, as did her public behaviour. She got into fights, was in trouble with the police in England and France, and was finally expelled from Spain after being jailed for several days in Valencia.

Back in England, she was arrested for soliciting and being drunk and disorderly in the King’s Road, remanded in Holloway for a medical report, and certified insane. She remained in a sanitorium for several months, then was released to stay with friends. As soon as her passport was returned she went back to the Dordogne.

The last years of her life were divided between the house which was deteriorating with neglect and the homes of loyal but exasperated friends in the South of France. Predictably, she argued with them and suddenly left for Paris.

There, weighing only twenty-six kilos, pumped full of drugs (after a broken leg) and fuelled by her favourite tipples of rum and cheap red wine, she fell into another seizure of near-insanity, was certified by a local doctor, and died three days later under an oxygen tent in a public ward. She was cremated and her ashes were placed in Pere Lachaise Cemetery.

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Ann Chisholm, Nancy Cunard, London: Penguin, 1979, pp.480, ISBN: 014005572X

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Natural Selection

June 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Gary Giddins on Comedy, Film, Music, and Books

‘A critic,’ Philip Larkin once declared, ‘is a man who likes some things and dislikes others, and finds reasons for doing so and for trying to persuade other people to do so.’ Gary Giddins has been doing this for many years. In several collections of jazz journalism (including the recent Weather Bird) Gary Giddins has conveyed his enthusiasm for and devotion to the music and its practitioners. This latest book Natural Selection includes pieces on jazz, but also illuminating essays on silent movies, film noir, TV shows, DVD and CD releases, Norman Mailer, Ralph Ellison, Classics Illustrated, Friedrich Durrenmatt and the Jewish novelist Soma Morgenstern.

Giddins’ firm conviction is that ‘jazz and film have much in common, beyond parallel births, changing technologies, and competing bids as America’s pre-eminent cultural love child. They are resolutely manipulative arts. Music continuously mines emotional responses; movies are structured around emotional releases, whether musical, comic, tear-jerking, shocking, pornographic, or suspenseful. Musical works and movies usually exist in concise units of time, their effectiveness dependent on tempo, rhythm, contrast, style, and interaction’.

He proceeds to apply this apercu to (among others) Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis and the Marx Brothers. Chaplin he suggests ‘ruined numerous comedians who wanted our tears but didn’t possess his equilibrium (Jerry Lewis, Jackie Gleason, Steve Martin, Robin Williams, and Billy Crystal for starters’). The Marx Brothers ‘were grown-ups pretending to be children, pretending to be grown-ups.’

Jerry Lewis (‘Idiot Semi-Savant’) might be adored by the French, but they are mercifully unaware of ‘the sanctimonious talking head who sapped the affection of a generation with horrific television appearances.’ Bob Hope, a comic movie actor to be taken seriously, became dated as a glib and increasingly unfunny comedian, ‘increasingly sanctified as the rich, conformist, golfing buddy of every White House duffer.’ Jack Benny (not widely known in Europe, but a household name in America) ‘may be the only great comedian in history who isn’t associated with a single witticism’.

Various iconic screen stars receive their succinct dues. Greta Garbo ‘reminds us that the cinema is the ultimate expression of voyeurism: her close-ups are her money shots’. A young Marlon Brando ‘gave American actors new modes of being racked with ambiguities’. Of the latter-day Brando, Giddins asks: ‘Excepting Orson Welles, has any other actor cloistered himself in so much fat?’

Bing Crosby (Giddins is his biographer) ‘is the most conspicuously neglected of the Golden Age of Hollywood stars’. So far, so good, but the critical faculty seems alarmingly absent from Giddins’s claim that Doris Day (‘Blond and Beaming’), was ‘The coolest and sexiest female singer to achieve movie-musical stardom’. Moreover, many of the film/DVD reviews collected here are bogged down in often tedious technical detail.

Not surprisingly, Giddins is at his considerable best in jazz reviews – which include refreshing reassessments of Glenn Miller, and Billie Holiday. Miller has long been dismissed by critics as ‘a humourless purveyor of diluted swing, banal novelties and saccharine vocals’ but is now being celebrated as the creator of ‘a sound that clings remorselessly to the collective memory.’

Both Miller (and Fats Waller) ‘humble critical stereotypes and show ways that jazz and pop once enriched each other, and might still’. But reviewing The New Grove Dictionary of American Music, Giddins finds it almost totally worthless, with entries on jazz – ‘which one might argue is the essence of American music’ – only found after much searching.

Elsewhere, he suggests that ‘there is a correct way to sing Cole Porter, much as there is a correct way to act Shakespeare’ and commends Fred Astaire, Frank Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney and Ella Fitzgerald as ‘accomplished Porterphiles’. Giddins confesses to be a life-long admirer of Duke Ellington. ‘People often describe their first time with Duke Ellington in terms of losing their virginity, and for me it seemed like the next best thing’.

In an excellent piece on ‘Jazz for the Eyes’ (The Sound of Jazz/Jazz on a Summer’s Day), Giddins writes of Lester Young’s single-chorus, 39-second tenor solo on the TV (not studio) version of Fine and Mellow, that it is ‘so sublimely constructed that after you’ve heard it a couple of times, it becomes part of your nervous system, like the motor skills required to ride a bicycle’. As for the vocalist on this number, Billie Holliday: ‘if it is possible for two people to make love while one partner is playing the tenor saxophone 10 feet away from the other, that is what Young and Holliday were doing.’ And ‘Billie’s pantomime of pure pleasure embodied a sensual appreciation of the music in a way no actor has ever succeeded in doing’.

Jazz on a Summer’s Day also had its share of ‘indelible jazz images: Anita O’Day ‘in a feathered hat and black sheath dress with white fringes, thrusting her glottis at Sweet Georgia Brown‘; trombonist Jack Teagarden ‘grinning as though he’d crashed an unexpected party while Chuck Berry rocks Sweet Little Sixteen‘, and Louis Armstrong recounting his unlikely answer to the Pope, when asked if he had children – ‘No, Daddy, but we’re still wailing’.

Giddins is particularly mischievous at posing and then answering questions. One example must suffice. In a review of the movie White Palace, Giddins ponders the prevalence of oral sex in recent films and asks: ‘What’s with all these blowjobs?’ His answer: ‘They represent Hollywood’s latest code for breaking the ice, for reaching out and touching someone, for initiating a sincere and meaningful relationship. No more kissing on the mouth, no more ‘What was your major?’ Just cut to the fly, followed by a shot of an actor faking instantaneous ecstasy.’ Partly autobiographical, Natural Selection is also an artful work of ‘intelligent design’. Giddins persuades us to revisit some of the movies and books, and all of the jazz performances he so obviously enjoyed reviewing – and sharing.

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Gary Giddins, Natural Selection: Gary Giddins on Comedy, Film, Music, & Books, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, pp.432 , ISBN: 019517951X

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Nerds 2.0.1 – A Brief History of the Internet

June 13, 2009 by Roy Johnson

TV programmes of interviews with Internet personalities

Robert Cringely’s Triumph of the Nerds won legions of computer-skeptical and computer-naive viewers with its mix of minutiae and hip techniques. Going one step further into the digital maze, Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet operates as a sequel of sorts to the surprise docu-hit. Just as its precursor chronicled the rise of empires built on computer software, Nerds 2.0.1 collects interviews from key players in the development of the Internet.

Fashionably hip in its visual feel, the film begins by amassing data on the net’s crowning, collaborative irony: conceived in the Pentagon during the counterculture’s smokiest high point by members–dare it be said–of the military industrial complex, the Net developed on the axis of university research networks and Deadhead (as in the Grateful Dead) electronic bulletin boards.

Much of the rest has become history, but Internet and computer industry pundit Robert X. Cringley makes the narrative a jumping, attractive embrace of being a nerd. Interviews with Bill Gates, Mark Andreesen, and Steve Case make these three hours (three tapes slipcased in a nice box) fly by.

This video series is an excellent addition to the material available on computer history. It moves at a fast pace and provides interviews with many of the key people in the industry. It does not cover every aspect of computer history, but it does fill in some gaps that other references missed. I encourage anyone interested in computer history to add this video series to their library. Excellent footage, nicely put together.

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Robert X Cringley, Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet, VHS Video (3 tapes) ASIN: 6305128235

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Nina Berberova

October 27, 2018 by Roy Johnson

Nina Berberova (1901-1993) was a prolific Russian writer who chronicled the lives of her fellow countrymen living in exile in Berlin, Paris, and New York. She was a contemporary of Vladimir Nabokov, who she greatly admired and who followed the same route of exile. Her memoir traverses three continents and three different cultures, and she was both sympathetic to and critical of them all.

She was born in 1901 into an upper-middle class family of mixed origins. Her father was northern (Russian) and her mother southern (Armenian). As a child she had a precocious ambition to establish a profession that would last her for life. Since nothing else seemed suitable, she decided to be ‘a poet’.

The memories in her autobiography are linked by their associations rather than by strict chronology. She describes her childhood in the early years of the twentieth century, then her father as a civil servant during the revolution, his appearance as a film extra in the 1930s, then her watching the film as an exile in Paris. It is something of a scatter-gun approach to history.

One moment she is playing with dolls, the next, fifty years later, she is liberated by the realisation that what appear to be contradictions within the Self are what constitute the complexities of individual personality. In the same paragraph poor, semi-naked peasants are wallowing in nineteenth-century rural idiocy and sophisticated writers are being shot in Stalin’s purges of the 1930s.

One thing remains constant no matter what the circumstances or the period in her life – finding joy in the smallest events of everyday life. She enjoys the precious moments of childhood with people who in the next sentence disappear into the concentration camps of the GULAG, never to be heard of again

Even as a teenager she inhabited an incredibly rich cultural world. She lived on the same street as Mayakovsky and attended readings by poets Blok and Akhmatova, both of whom she knew personally. But suddenly all her youthful dreams of an aesthetic life were swept aside by the February revolution – the causes of which she lays firmly at the feet of Tsar Nicholas II. Her family were forced to move to Moscow then to Rostov in the south. With the country in the grip of civil war, she experienced hunger and deprivation for the first time.

In 1921 the family returned to Petersburg where she was ‘permitted’ to join the Poet’s Union by Gumilev (first husband of Anna Akhmatova). He paid court to Berberova (unsuccessfully). Later the same year he was arrested and shot by the Checka as a counter-revolutionary.

The next year she met Vladislav Khodasevich, the poet who was to become her first husband. At the same time the threat of political repression was increasingly apparent. It became necessary to ‘survive’ – as many did not. In the early 1920s, whilst it was still miraculously possible to obtain passports, she and Khodasevich left for Europe – never to return.

They settled in the first centre of emigration – Berlin – alongside Andrey Bely, Boris Pasternak, and Vladimir Nabokov. For a while they formed part of the ‘family’ surrounding Maxim Gorky. Her initial phase in Berlin is dominated by the figure of Bely, the erratic genius (and author of the masterpiece, Petersburg) who eventually decided to go back to Moscow.

There are soirees with the celebrated but talentless Gorky and his mistress/secretary, the spy and double agent Moura Budberg. Nina Berberova was very friendly with Gorky and goes out of her way to present him as an appealing character – but without much success. His fiction was third rate, and he was an abject apologist for Stalin. There are also detailed character sketches of poets Boris Pasternak and Maria Tsvetaeva.

Berberova and Khodasevich went on to Prague then Venice. This is very much a memoir of cultural history and even aesthetic philosophy. There are no details of how they earned a living – until they made their way to the second centre of emigration – Paris. There, poverty gripped them so fiercely that Khodasevich thought of attempting suicide, and wanted Berberova to join him.

She recalls bitterly how whilst the Russian intelligentsia were being strangled by censorship and physically exterminated with ‘a bullet in the back of the neck’, the Western democracies made no protest and did nothing to alleviate the plight of their fellow writers. Indeed, the likes of George Bernard Shaw, H.G.Wells, and Romain Rolland gave active support to the USSR – completely blind to the lies and the myths of ‘democracy’ promulgated by the Stalin regime.

Her account of the 1920s and 1930s in Paris are filled with petty literary rivalries, feuds, and character sketches of the largely doomed expatriates. Curiously enough, she makes little mention of her own enormous productivity. She produced one of the first biographical studies of Tchiakovsy that took account of his homosexuality.

This was the Paris of writers Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, artists Larionov and Natalia Goncharova, musicians Nikolai Medtner and Igor Stravinsky. But her account also includes political figures such as former Prime Minister Kerensky clinging tragically to life in the dustbin of history, still believing he was the legitimate head of the Russian state. (He shows up again in America in the 1960s.)

She gives a very touching and very honest account of her relationship with Khodasevich. They are comrades, collaborators, lovers, and partners in poverty – yet she concedes to his superiority (though I suspect that more people now read her work than his). Yet she also documents the decline in their relationship.

She left him in 1932 and celebrated her single state. Khodasevich took up with another simpler woman, whom Berberova adopted as a sympathetic project even after Khodesevich’s very painful death from cancer. She found her own comfort with painter and writer Nikolai Makeyev with whom she moved to live in a barn on the outskirts of Paris.

During the war years she reproduces the brief thoughts and observations she made in a ‘black notebook’ at the time. All is fragmentation, shortages, betrayals, and a reminder that American and English planes bombed (German occupied) Paris. There are also unpleasant reminders of wartime behaviour such as denunciations by neighbours and the looting of unattended properties.

Her continuous narrative resumes in 1949 when she reports on the celebrated Viktor Kravchenko affair in which a Russian attache defected and published I Chose Freedom. Shortly afterwards she felt she had reached a low point in her personal life and in her relationship with European culture. She made a completely fresh start by emigrating to America.

She had no money and didn’t speak English, but she was befriended and helped by Alexandra Lvovna, the youngest daughter of Leo Tolstoy who ran a relief organisation for expatriates in New York. Berberova worked as a multi-lingual typist and secretary, then later was appointed as Professor of Russian Literature at Princeton. But she skates lightly over her American years on the grounds that at the time of composing her memoir (the early 1960s) many of her friends were still alive. She herself still had thirty years left to live, and she admits that the memoir is ‘cautious’.

However, she does end her account on a wonderfully elegiac note. Returning to visit the Paris that had nurtured her for more than two decades, she comes across an ageing Simone de Beauvoir in a restaurant and reflects rather critically on illusions perdues. Then, whilst seeing off a friend at the Gare du Nord, she meets Anna Ahkmatova who is returning to Moscow for the last time. The two women have not met for almost forty years, but two generations and half a lifetime are summed up in the brief gestures of symathy that pass between them.

The Italics Are Mine is not on the scale nor is it pitched at the soul-piercing ferocity of Nadeshda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned, but it does represent a fascinating and amazingly well-informed account of literature and politics during the European emigration that followed the Russian revolution.

The Italics Are Mine – biography – Amazon UK

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Nina Hamnett biography

November 30, 2010 by Roy Johnson

artist, modernist, and the Queen of Bohemia

Nina Hamnett (1890-1956) was born in Tenby, south-west Wales. She endured a largely unhappy childhood, but her skill at drawing enabled her to escape her miserable life at home (rather like her near-contemporary Dora Carrington). She studied at the Pelham Art School and the London School of Art between 1906 and 1910.

In 1911 she launched herself into the London art world on the strength of a fifty pound advance on an inheritance from her uncle and a stipend of two shillings and sixpence a week from her aunts. There she socialised in the Cafe Royal with the likes of Augustus John, Walter Sickert, and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. She became very popular as a result of her high spirits, her devil-may-care attitude, and her sexual promiscuity. Like other women at the time revelling in a newfound independence, she had her hair cut short in a ‘crophead’ style (what we would now call a basin cut) and she wore eccentric clothing:

I wore in the daytime a clergyman’s hat, a check coat, and a skirt with red facings … white stockings and men’s dancing pumps and was stared at in the Tottenham Court Road. One had to do something to celebrate one’s freedom and escape from home,

It was said that at this phase in her life Nina Hamnett had the knack of being in the right place at the right time. In 1914 she went to live in Montparnasse, Paris, immediately meeting on her first night there the Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani. He introduced her to Picasso, Serge Dighilev, and Jean Cocteau, and she went to live at the famous artist’s residence of La Ruche which housed many other Bohemian artists and modernist writers. It was there that she met the Norwegian artist Roald Kristian, who became her first husband.

She rapidly established herself as a flamboyant and unconventional figure. She was bisexual, drank heavily, and had liaisons with many other artists in Bohemian society, often modelling for them as a way of earning a (precarious) living. She established her reputation as ‘The Queen of Bohemia’ by such antics as dancing nude on a cafe table amongst her drinking friends.

Her reputation as a Bohemian and an artist eventually filtered back to London, where she returned to join Roger Fry and his circle working on the application of modernist design principles to fabrics, furniture, clothes, and household objects as part of the Omega Workshops. She acted as a model for the clothes along with Mary Hutchinson, Clive Bell‘s mistress, and she mingled with other members of the Bloomsbury Group, such as Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant.

Nina Hamnett (left) and Winifred Gill (right) in Omega dresses

Her paintings were exhibited at the Royal Academy and the Salon d’Automne in Paris. She also taught at the Westminster Technical Institute in London. Around this time she divorced her first husband and lived with the composer and fellow alcoholic E.J. Moeran. They were part of a circle that included the composer Peter Warlock (Philip Heseltine) who who established a very bohemian circle in Eynsford in Kent, along with other composers such as Constant Lambert and William Walton.

During the 1920s (and for the rest of her life) she made the area in central London known as Fitzrovia her home and stamping ground. This new locale for arty-Bohemia was centred on the Fitzroy Tavern in Charlotte Street which she frequented along with fellow Welsh artists Augustus John and Dylan Thomas, making occasional excursions across Oxford Street to the Gargoyle Club in Soho.

After this glittering debut into the glamorous world of modernism and the artistic avant-garde, the remainder of her life was a no less spectacular descent into poverty, squalor, and alcoholism. She lived in a sleazy bed-sit in Howland Street, which was infested with lice and littered with rat-droppings. The flat was furnished only with a broken-down chair, a piece of string for a clothes line, and newspapers instead of proper bedding.

Dolores Courtney by Nina Hamnett

In 1932 she published a volume of memoirs entitled Laughing Torso, which was a best-seller in both the UK and the USA. Following its publication she was sued by Aleister Crowley, whom she had accused of practising black magic. The ensuing trial caused a sensation which helped sales of the book, and Crowley lost his case.

Her success in this instance only fuelled her downward spiral, and she spent the last three decades of her life propping up the bar of the Fitzroy trading anecdotes of her glory years for free drinks. She took little interest in personal hygiene, was incontinent in public, and vomited into her handbag.

Her ending was as spectacular as had been her previous life. Drunk one night she either fell or jumped from the window of her flat and was impaled on the railing spikes below. She lingered miserably in hospital for three more days, where her last words were “Why don’t they let me die?”

Bloomsbury Group – web links

Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, featuring designs by Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, and others.

The Omega Workshops
A brief history of Roger Fry’s experimental Omega Workshops, which had a lasting influence on interior design in post First World War Britain.

The Bloomsbury Group and War
An essay on the largely pacifist and internationalist stance taken by Bloomsbury Group members towards the First World War.

Tate Gallery Archive Journeys: Bloomsbury
Mini web site featuring photos, paintings, a timeline, sub-sections on the Omega Workshops, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant, and biographical notes.

Bloomsbury: Books, Art and Design
Exhibition of paintings, designs, and ceramics at Toronto University featuring Hogarth Press, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Quentin Bell, and Stephen Tomlin.

Blogging Woolf
A rich enthusiast site featuring news of events, exhibitions, new book reviews, relevant links, study resources, and anything related to Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf

Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search the texts of all Woolf’s major works, and track down phrases, quotes, and even individual words in their original context.

A Mrs Dalloway Walk in London
An annotated description of Clarissa Dalloway’s walk from Westminster to Regent’s Park, with historical updates and a bibliography.

Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Annotated tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury, including Gordon Square, University College, Bedford Square, Doughty Street, and Tavistock Square.

Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
News of events, regular bulletins, study materials, publications, and related links. Largely the work of Virginia Woolf specialist Stuart N. Clarke.

BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
A charming sound recording of a BBC radio talk broadcast in 1937 – accompanied by a slideshow of photographs of Virginia Woolf.

A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephens’ collection of family photographs which became known as the Mausoleum Book, collected at Smith College – Massachusetts.

Bloomsbury at Duke University
A collection of book jacket covers, Fry’s Twelve Woodcuts, Strachey’s ‘Elizabeth and Essex’.

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Twentieth century literature

Nina Hamnett memoirs

January 21, 2014 by Roy Johnson

the autobiography of ‘the Queen of Bohemia’

Nina Hamnett memoirs is the record of a an artist, a Bohemian, a fringe member of the Bloomsbury Group, and towards the end of her life a woman who was more-or-less professional alcoholic. This is her interim life story, written around two thirds the way through her career when she was forty-two. Don’t expect chronological coherence or a disciplined narrative. She adopts a scatter gun approach, with famous names coming off the page in rapid succession. And she seems to have known (or met) just about everyone who was anyone in the birth of modernist art 1910-1930.

She was born in Wales in 1890 into an upper middle-class army family, and was educated at public – that is, private schools. She seems from the outset to have rebelled against the strictures of convention, and her account of her largely unhappy childhood emphasises the tomboy nature of her early years – in a way that reads like a girl’s version of Just William crossed with Adrian Mole. She only encountered the world of art when her father (who she disliked) was posted to Dublin. In her teens she attended a variety of art schools, and very rapidly began to establish contact with the people who were to form an entrée into the world of Bohemia where she felt free to breathe. Arthur Ransome, Hugh Walpole, and Aleister Crowley were early (and slightly dubious) influences.

After inheriting fifty pounds she set herself up in Fitzrovia, and from that point onwards her connections with the artistic world developed at an astonishing pace. Mark Gertler, Dora Carrington, Wyndham Lewis, Jacob Epstein, and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska were all friends by the time she was in her early twenties. They bought each other’s paintings, often shared food, clothing, and shelter – and certainly didn’t stint themselves on whatever drinks were available.

She made a conscious effort to lose her virginity, and ended up doing so in the same rooms in Bloomsbury where Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud had lived in the 1870s. Her life at this stage appears to have been permanently blessed with good fortune. A friend gave her thirty pounds, which paid for a trip to Paris, where she met Modigliani on the first night out. There followed fancy dress parties, all night drinking, and naked dancing. Zadkine, Archipenko, and Kisling flit through the pages, and she eked out her savings by working as an artist’s model – which seems to be almost an excuse for taking her clothes off, which she was given to doing at the end of a night’s drinking.

Suddenly the indulgence of la vie boheme was shattered by the outbreak of war. She limped back home with just twopence to spare for the final tube fair. Yet after what seems like a miraculous escape from danger, she rather perversely returned to Paris to be with the man she loved – who she calls Edgar but whose real name was Roald Kristian. They returned to England, got married, and joined Roger Fry in his Omega Workshops. The subsequent war period is an odd mixture of the first bombing raids on London, Zeppelins bursting into flames, and scrounging drinks in the Cafe Royal. Her husband was arrested as an unregistered alien, spent time in jail, and was then deported to France, from which he never returned.

She moved into Fitzroy Square and befriended Walter Sickert. At this point her class of patrons and admirers seems to go up a notch: she met and painted portraits of the Sitwells, and yet all the time she was tempted to return to Paris, which she felt to be her spiritual home. For a time she took over Sickert’s old position of teaching at Westminster Technical Institute, but as soon as she had been paid at the end of the term and had enough for the fare, she returned to Paris.

There she rejoined her old friend Marie Wassilieff, who had become Leon Trotsky’s mistress during the war. She dined with Brancusi (a good chef) and fell for a romantic Pole who absconded with all her money and her best friend (who was better-looking). Then it was off to the south of France, staying with another Pole and visiting Tsuguharu Foujita, the Japanese artist. There were trips to Collioure, Cerbère, and Port Vendres, an illegal excursion to Port Bou in Spain, picnics, a little painting, and a lot more wine. But strangely enough she felt that the work she produced there was amongst her weakest and she concluded that she and the south of France were not truly compatible.

It’s difficult to tell the exact year or even the rough period in which many of these events take place – but the drinks are recorded with never-ending enthusiasm – including cider laced with Calvados, stout with champagne (at that time known as ‘Turk’s Blood’) and a mixture of absinthe, gentian, and brandy which sent one of her friends into a catatonic spasm and even she admits she could not choke down. Despite the all night parties and the rivers of champagne, the element of bohemianism continues with living in unheated flats where the water freezes in the sink at night.

Dolores Courtney by Nina Hamnett

At one point Aleister Crowley introduced a new cocktail containing laudanum, and Hamnett fills in his background, including the practice of Black Magic on a Greek island. For this accusation he sued her in court when the memoirs were published – and lost his case. The resulting scandal sent sales of the book soaring. She met Ford Maddox Ford and Gertrude Stein, then smoked hashish with Cocteau and Raymond Radriguet who opened a new restaurant called Le Boeuf sur le Toit (immortalised by the Darius Milhaud composition).

Parties start off late in the evening, go on from one night club to another, and end up in Les Halles around 8.00 am with breakfast and more drinks. There was another more successful visit to the south of France – St Juan les Pins and Nice which was then becoming fashionable where she sang with Rudolph Valentino (full name Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Pierre Filibert Guglielmi di Valentina d’Antonguolla) who she later introduced to James Joyce. As the memoirs go on, the characters become more and more eccentric – including a lady acrobatic dancer who travelled with two pet monkeys and a snake. Feeling an exhibition coming on, Hamnett returned to London, where her travelling companion managed to set fire to a friend’s flat. The exhibition was a disaster, but she returned to Paris and ended up singing to an audience of Stravinsky and Diaghilev.

The memoir ends with a quite moving account of the funeral of Raymond Radriguet (Cocteau’s lover) who died at only twenty years old, and an idyllic further stay in Grasse in the south of France where she sang songs for fellow guest Francis Poulenc. The account stops abruptly some time around 1926, when she returned from France to take up residence permanently in Fitzrovia, where she became known as the ‘Queen of Bohemia’. There is actually a follow-up volume to these memoirs entitled Is She a Lady? published in 1955, a year before she threw herself out of the window of her flat and was impaled on the area railings below. She lingered painfully in hospital for three days, where her last words were “Why don’t they let me die?”

Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Nina Hamnett, Laughing Torso, London: Virago Press, 1984, ISBN: 860686507

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Nineteenth Century – literary timeline – part 1

September 29, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a chronicle of events, literature, and politics

1789. French Revolution

1790. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France

1791. Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man

1792. Denmark is first country to abolish slavery. September
massacres in France; royal family imprisoned. Coal gas used for lighting. Mary Wollstencraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

1793. Louis XVI beheaded. France becomes a republic and the National
Anthem La Marseillaise is composed. The Napoleonic Wars begin. Godwin, Political Justice.

1794. First slave revolution led by Toussaint L’Ouverture in Haiti. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho; William Godwin, Caleb Williams; Robert Burns writes Auld Lang Syne; Blake, Songs of Experience.

1795. First horse-drawn railroad appeared in England. Revolt in Ireland.

1796. British doctor Edmund Jenner performs the first vaccination against smallpox. Fanny Burney, Camilla, Mathew Lewis, The Monk.

1798. Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads. First draft of Northanger Abbey written. T.R. Malthus, Essay on Population

1800. Parliamentary union of Great Britain and Ireland.

1801. Walter Scott, Ballads.

1802. Formation of the Society for the Suppression of Vice in response to concern over obscene literature and pictures – it conducts several prosecutions under the Obscene Libel Law. Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads.

1803. Insurrection in Ireland. Britain at war with France. General Enclosures Act permits enclosure of common land. Thomas Chatterton, Works (posthumous).

1804. Napoleon declares himself Emperor. Spain declares war against Great Britain. Blake, Milton and Jerusalem.

1805. Battle of Trafalgar – Nelson’s victory and death. Walter Scott, Lay of the Last Minstrel.

1807. Slave trade abolished in British Empire. Occupation of Portugal by the French.

1808. Occupation of Spain by the French. Goethe, Faust – Part I.

1809. London exhibition of paintings by William Blake.

1810. Scott, The Lady of the Lake.

1811. George III is declared insane and The Prince of Wales becomes regent. ‘Luddite’ disturbances in Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire. Jane Austen publishes first novel, Sense and Sensibility.

1812. Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow.

1813. Austen, Pride and Prejudice. Shelly, Queen Mab.

1814. Stephenson’s steam locomotive. Copyright Act extended the period of copyright to 28 years from date of first publication or the length of the author’s life. Scott’s Waverley begins his career as Europe’s most celebrated novelist [largely unread today]. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

1815. Battle of Waterloo. Napoleon is defeated. Corn Law passed setting price of corn at 80s per quarter.

1816. Jane Austen, Emma; Coleridge, Kubla Khan; Scott, The Antiquary.

1817. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine founded; Coleridge, Biographia Literaria. Keats, Poems.

1818. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey; Persuasion (published posthumously); Mary Shelly, Frankenstein; Scott, Rob Roy. Keats, Endymion.

1819. Peterloo massacre. Seditious Publications Act (copy tax on periodicals containing news). Savannah is the first steamship to cross the Atlantic. Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe; Byron, Don Juan.

1820. George IV becomes king. Shelley, Prometheus Unbound.

1821. Mechanics Institutes formed in Glasgow and London. Death of John Keats. Shelley, Defence of Poetry, Thomas DeQuincey, Confessions of an Opium Eater.

1822. Famine in Ireland. Shelly drowns in Italy. Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia.

1823. Charles Macintosh develops a new fabric for making raincoats. William Webb Ellis, a boy at Rugby school, unwittingly starts the development of the game that was to become known as ‘rugby’.

1824. The National Gallery is opened; G. Combe, Elements of Frenology. Death of Byron.

1825. Stockton-Darlington railway opened; Trade Unions are legalized.

1827. University College London founded. Constable paints The Cornfield.

1828. The Duke of Wellington becomes Prime Minister.

1829. The Governesses’ Mutual Society is founded in response to public concern over the situation of unemployed governesses. Catholic Emancipation Bill sponsored by Sir Robert Peel is passed – Roman Catholics in the UK are relieved of the oppressive regulations, some of which had been in force since the time of Henry VIII. Catholics now able to sit as Members of Parliament. Invention of the first steam locomotive. Founding of the Metropolitan Police Force. Thomas Carlyle, Signs of the Times.

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Nineteenth Century – literary timeline – part 2

September 29, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a chronicle of events, literature, and politics

1830. Death of George IV; William IV becomes King. Petitions to both Houses of Parliament on the abolition of slavery. William Huskisson, a former cabinet minister, is killed at the opening of the Liverpool – Manchester railway. Tennyson, Poems Chiefly Lyrical.

1831. Unsuccessful introduction of the Reform Bills. Darwin’s voyage on The Beagle.

1832. The First Reform Act extends the franchise to those owning property rated at 10 a year or more.

1833. Shaftesbury’s Factory Act limits hours of children’s employment. Slavery abolished in the British Empire. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus.

1834. First colony established in South Australia. Tolpuddle martyrs exiled there. Emancipation of British West Indian slaves declared – though it takes four years for this declaration to be fulfilled. New Poor Law Commission establishes workhouses. Fire breaks out in the Palace of Westminster – much of the Houses of Parliament destroyed.

1835. Municipal Corporation Act gives votes for local government to men only.

1836. Balzac begins La Comedie Humaine novel cycle. Pickwick Papers launches Dickens’s career. London University is formed. Newspaper tax reduced.

1837. Fox Talbot experiments with photographic prints. Queen Victoria ascends the throne. Dickens, Oliver Twist. Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution.

1838. Chartist petitions published. Full emancipation of British West Indian slaves. The London to Birmingham railway is opened.

1839. Custody of Infants Act. (For the first time a woman living apart from her husband was able to apply for custody of children under seven.) Chartist riots. Daguerre patents photographic technique. Shelley, Poetical Works (posthumous)

1840. Beginning of a decade of considerable social and economic turbulence in England. Marriage of Victoria and Albert. Penny post established in UK. Start of a decade which saw a rise in so-called ‘condition of England novels’. Opium War – Chinese ports are besieged to force free passage of English narcotics. Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby.

1841. Governesses’ Benevolent Institute founded (see also 1829). Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes and Hero-Worship.

1842. Mines Act forbids use of children and women in mines. New Chartist riots. Copyright Act extends the life of copyright to 42 years from publication or 7 years after the author’s death. Mudie establishes the circulating library. Browning, Dramatic Lyrics; Tennyson, Poems.

1843. Colonization of Africa includes Gambia, Natal, Basutoland. Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit. Sara Ellis, The Wives of England: Their relative duties, domestic influence and social obligations. Ruskin, Modern Painters; Dickens, A Christmas Carol. Wordsworth appointed Poet
Laureate.

1844. Factory Act restricts working hours for women and children. First telegraph line, between Paddington and Slough. Engels, Condition of the Working Class in England. Royal Commission of Health in Towns. Co-Operative movement begun in Rochdale.

1845. Potato famine in Ireland. Boom in railway building speculation. Bronte sisters invest. Disraeli, Sybil, E.A. Poe, Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Franklin’s expedition to the Arctic to find ‘north west passage’.

1846. Repeal of the Corn Laws (legislation designed to protect the price of domestic grain from foreign imports). Famine in Ireland. Introduction of the ‘Marriage with a Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill’ (this is finally passed in 1907). C. Bronte, The Professor; George Eliot translates Strauss’s Life of Jesus; Ruskin, Modern Painters II.

1847. The first use of chloroform as an anaesthetic. Ten Hours Factory Act. Bronte sisters publish Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Agnes Grey in same year. Tennyson, The Princess. Thackery, Vanity Fair.

1848. Revolutions throughout Europe. Queen’s College for Women founded in London. Discovery of nuggets in California starts ‘The Gold Rush’. Introduction of a Public Health Act to try to tackle cholera. A. Bronte, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall; Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton; Dickens, Dombey and Son; Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto; Kingsley, Yeast. Dante Gabrielle Rosetti, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais form the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

1849. Bedford College for Women founded. Dickens, David Copperfield; C. Bronte, Shirley

1850. Pope Pius IX restores the Roman Catholic hierarchy in the UK – for the first time since the 16th century Catholics have a full hierarchy consistent with Catholic countries. The Public Libraries Act – first of a series of acts enabling local councils to provide free public libraries. Parliament imposes a sixty hour week. Death of Wordsworth. Tennyson becomes Poet Laureate; In Memoriam. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese, Wordsworth, The Prelude, Dickens begins publishing Household Words. Thackeray, Pendennis.

1851. Great Exhibition in Hyde Park. Religious Census. Mrs Gaskell, Cranford, Harriet Taylor Mill, The Enfranchisement of Women. Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach. Ruskin, The Stones of Venice. Mayhew London Labour and the London Poor

1852. Dickens, Bleak House. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Florence Nightingale, Cassandra. New Houses of Parliament open. First free public library opens in Manchester.

1853. Trollope, The Warden. C. Bronte, Villette

1854. Britain and France declare war against Russia to begin Crimean war. Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava. The British Medical Association is founded. Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception promulgated. Dickens, Hard Times, Gaskell, North and South. Coventry Patmore begins The Angel in the House (sequence of poems about female domestic responsibility).

1855. Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit. Repeal of stamp duty on newspapers; death of Charlotte Bronte. Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South; Robert Browning, Men and Women; Tennyson, Maud and Other Poems. Livingstone ‘discovers’ the Victoria Falls.

1856. Ruskin, On the Pathetic Fallacy; William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine.

1857. Indian ‘Mutiny’. Matrimonial Causes Act facilitates divorce for those who can afford it. The Obscene Publications Act is passed. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh. Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Bronte; Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays; Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers; Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary.

1858. ‘Big Ben’ is installed in the Houses of Parliament clock tower. India ‘transferred’ to the British Crown. Abolition of property qualification for MPs, enabling working-class men to stand.

1859. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species; Eliot, Adam Bede; Samuel Smiles, Self-Help; J. S. Mill, On Liberty; George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel; Tennyson, Idylls of the King. Samuel Smiles Self-Help. Mrs Beeton Book of Household Management

1860. Lenoir invents the first practical internal combustion engine.
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations; George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss; Wilkie Collins, The Woman In White; Ruskin, Unto this Last

1861. American civil war begins with eleven states breaking away to form southern confederacy. Emancipation of serfs in Russia. Italy united under King Victor Emmanuel. In England, daily weather forecasts begin. First horse-drawn trams are used in London. George Eliot, Silas Marner; Mrs Beeton, The Book of Household Management; Hans Christian Andersen, Fairytales

1862. George Eliot, Romola; George Meredith, Modern Love; Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

1863. Polish rising against Russian occupation. American Civil War – to 1865. Opening of the first underground railway in London. George Elder Hicks’ triptych of paintings entitled Women’s Mission are exhibited at the Royal Academy. Charles Kingsley The Water Babies

1864. Contagious Diseases Act. Formation in London of the International Working Men’s Movement (influenced by Marx); Matthew Arnold, ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’

1865. Slavery abolished in United States. Assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Lister develops antiseptic surgery. Cholera epidemic kills over 14,000. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace; Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies. Lewis Carrol Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

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