Mrs. Disney Leith: bibliography

Another annotated bibliography with an Isle of Wight connection: Mrs. Disney Leith is one of the several names in the literature for the Scottish author Mary Charlotte Julia Leith (née Gordon, 1840-1926) a.k.a. Mary Gordon a.k.a. "M. C. J. L." a.k.a. Mary Leith. Her chief route into history is as the first cousin of the poet Swinburne, who she corresponded with, and later recalled in memoirs.

Bonchurch: and a singer asleep

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Continuing our exploration of Bonchurch on Monday.

After descending The Chimney, we followed The Pitts to the road called Bonchurch Shute ("Shute" is a local term for steep roads off the escarpment) and by the junction is a gate to the footpath (here) into the churchyard of the parish church of St Boniface (aka Bonchurch New Church), which is itself fitted into a niche in the hillside.

The most prominent tomb in the churchyard is this Egyptianate mausoleum - the Leeson Mausoleum - commissioned by Henry Beaumont Leeson.

Leeson, Henry Beaumont, 1803-1872, M.D., Oxon., F.R.C.P., Lond., F.R.S., M.R.Inst. Senior Physician and Lecturer in Forensic Medicine, St. Thomas’ Hospital, London. He was here in 1855, was a J.P. and land owner in Bonchurch. He held courts in the Justice Room over the Maples Stables at the corner of Madeira Road and Trinity Road. He lived and died at the Maples but owned and developed, Pulpit Rock, Rosemount, Orchardleigh, Mountfield and other properties in Bonchurch as a speculative builder. He held a Masonic Lodge in a cave in his garden (now in Pulpit Rock) He was buried in Bonchurch Churchyard under an immense obelisk tomb near the gate.
- Early Ventnor Doctors, Alan Champion, www.iwhistory.com

The novelist Henry De Vere Stacpoole, author of The Blue Lagoon, is also buried here at Bonchurch, but I didn't find the location.

(Update, 20th April 2014: I must have been in stupid mode that day. Ray Todd e-mailed me with the location: it's right next to the Swinburne plot. Thanks! - RG)

However, I found the grave I came to see, that of the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne. It's an unremarkable ground-level slab, immediately visible from the main path to the church, in a railed plot with other members of the Swinburne family.

Clare's opinion on the grave is that "the best thing about it is that he's in it; he was a dirty little blighter". I guess she shares the widely-held Victorian view that Swinburne's poems were obscene - and they had a point. Many of his works are overtly sexual: erotic-religious imagery such as Nature moaning in rapture as God lifts up his rod; flora and fauna bursting and squirting and dripping liquid; and various allusions to multifarious forms of desire (see pp 69-, Chapter 4: Poetic Perversities of A.C. Swinburne, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism, Richard Dellamora, 1990).

But any perceived offensiveness may well have been compounded by his rejection of Christianity, and although he was some flavour of masochist, his works didn't necessarily reflect anything more than his mindset. Oscar Wilde said that Swinburne was "a braggart in matters of vice, who had done everything he could to convince his fellow citizens of his homosexuality and bestiality without being in the slightest degree a homosexual or a bestialiser".

Nevertheless, he remains a significant Victorian poet whose works contain powerful and complex imagery that's still the subject of critical study: see Algernon Charles Swinburne at VictorianWeb.  In his lifetime and shortly after, he had sometimes surprising fans. Thomas Hardy tends to be perceived as a bit of a stiff, but he admired the lyricism of Swinburne's poetry, and was highly impressed by Swinburne's rejection of Christianity and its liberating effect of putting on the table views of sexuality and morality that went counter to Victorian sensibilities. Ralph Pite's Thomas Hardy: The Guarded Life has an extended account, evidenced by his notes, of the powerful revelatory effect Swinburne had on Hardy (see pp127-).

Hardy visited Swinburne's grave on 23rd March 1910, and composed this elegy (originally titled A South-Coast Nocturn:

A Singer Asleep

I

In this fair niche above the unslumbering sea,
That sentrys up and down all night, all day,
From cove to promontory, from ness to bay,
The Fates have fitly bidden that he should be
Pillowed eternally.

II

-- It was as though a garland of red roses
Had fallen about the hood of some smug nun
When irresponsibly dropped as from the sun,
In fulth of numbers freaked with musical closes,
Upon Victoria's formal middle time
His leaves of rhythm and rhyme.

III

O that far morning of a summer day
When, down a terraced street whose pavements lay
Glassing the sunshine into my bent eyes,
I walked and read with a quick glad surprise
New words, in classic guise, --

IV

The passionate pages of his earlier years,
Fraught with hot sighs, sad laughters, kisses, tears;
Fresh-fluted notes, yet from a minstrel who
Blew them not naïvely, but as one who knew
Full well why thus he blew.

V

I still can hear the brabble and the roar
At those thy tunes, O still one, now passed through
That fitful fire of tongues then entered new!
Their power is spent like spindrift on this shore;
Thine swells yet more and more.

VI

-- His singing-mistress verily was no other
Than she the Lesbian, she the music-mother
Of all the tribe that feel in melodies;
Who leapt, love-anguished, from the Leucadian steep
Into the rambling world-encircling deep
Which hides her where none sees.

VII

And one can hold in thought that nightly here
His phantom may draw down to the water's brim,
And hers come up to meet it, as a dim
Lone shine upon the heaving hydrosphere,
And mariners wonder as they traverse near,
Unknowing of her and him.

VIII

One dreams him sighing to her spectral form:
'O teacher, where lies hid thy burning line;
Where are those songs, O poetess divine
Whose very arts are love incarnadine?'
And her smile back: 'Disciple true and warm,
Sufficient now are thine.'...

IX

So here, beneath the waking constellations,
Where the waves peal their everlasting strains,
And their dull subterrene reverberations
Shake him when storms make mountains of their plains --
Him once their peer in sad improvisations,
And deft as wind to cleave their frothy manes --
I leave him, while the daylight gleam declines
Upon the capes and chines.

The reference to "she the Lesbian, she the music-mother" is to Sappho and the most likely fictional story that she threw herself off a cliff due to unrequited love (see A Sapphic Leap in Dorset?).


- Ray

Keats at Dawlish

Wayland Wordsmith just featured a nice poem - The Rosy bosom'd Hours - by the little-known Coventry Patmore, which tells of the rail journey of the newly-wed Patmore his second wife from somewhere in southern England (probably from East Grinstead, where Patmore had an estate) via Havant, Salisbury and Dawlish, down to Penzance.

Over Culver to Shanklin

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About a year ago - see Swinburne, Culver climber - I mentioned Culver Cliff, at the eastern end of the Isle of Wight, and its literary connection: Swinburne claimed to have climbed it. On Friday 28th October, Clare and I walked from Whitecliff Bay round Sandown Bay to Shanklin (first visit for Clare, the first since the mid-1970s for me): a route of some six miles that starts by going up over Culver Down.

Culver Cliff from Whitecliff Bay

Whitecliff Bay from Culver Down

You start at the caravan park at Whitecliff Bay and walk generally south-west. It's geologically interesting, as you're walking over a steeply-folded succession of older and older rocks: Tertiary at Whitecliff Bay, on to the Cretaceous chalk of Culver, then down through the Cretaceous succession of Upper Greensand, Gault, Lower Greensand and Wealden. It was a slightly hazy day that got increasingly and dismally overcast, but from Culver Down we could see across the eastern end of the Island over Bembridge harbour, with Portsmouth's Spinnaker Tower on the skyline.

Panorama, looking across Bembridge to Portsmouth

Yarborough monument

Culver Down itself has several points of historical note. Left, the Earl of Yarborough monument: "To the memory of Charles Anderson Pelham, Earl of Yarborough, Baron Yarborough, of Yarborough, in the county of Lincoln, Baron Worsley, of Appuldurcombe, in the Isle of Wight, D.C.L., P.B.S., F.S.A., whose benevolence, kindness of heart, and many virtues endeared him to all who knew him, this monument was erected, as a testimony of affection and respect, by public subscription.

As the owner of large estates he was one of those most conspicuous for the qualities which peculiarily adorn that station, and as the first Commodore of the Royal Yacht Squadron he was eminent in fostering and encouraging by his example and liberality all that was calculated to improve the science of naval architecture and the maritime interests of his country. He died on board his yacht the 'Kestrel' in the port of Vigo in Spain, September 5th, 1846, aged 65."

This is, incidentally, the same Earl of Yarborough that the Newport Oddfellows lodge was originally named after.

WW2 gun emplacement

Sandown, from Culver

Culver and Red Cliff

Somewhat inland, there's a small Palmerston fort (Fort Bembridge) that we didn't look at (I'd used up my day's geekiness allowance by looking at the WW2 gun emplacement). As I mentioned in an earlier post, the end of Culver Down appears to be a single headland, but the headlands from Whitecliff Bay and Sandown are actually different points, separated by a scary concave overhang (see page 66, Wight Hazards, and this excellent aerial photo by Ashley Middleton on Flickr).

From the summit of the down, the path goes downhill to reach sea level at Yaverland Beach, near the Dinosaur Isle museum, and from there it's a level walk by promenade or beach all the way round Sandown Bay, via Sandown, to Shanklin. There you can get to the town centre either by the lift up from the beach or via various footpaths; the most scenic - subject to opening times - is the commercial one up Shanklin Chine.

Sandown frontage

"Lester Pighutt" Blue Plaque

I found Sandown, like many resorts, deeply dismal out-of-season. Nevertheless, it has some quaint features: the rather baroque architecture of the Victorian villas that are now beachside cafes and restaurants; and the Strollers beach huts and cafe at the western end of Sandown, whose decorations and comic captions amount to a coherent piece of folk art (all the huts have spoof Blue Plaque signs and punning names, such as "Pier Huts of the Caribbean", and the dogs' water bowls outside the cafe have sizes and captions appropriate to different breeds, including one with a jagged bite out of it for Rottweilers). Shanklin beach too was in winter renovation mode, but the clifftop Keats Walk (where Keats wrote Ode To Autumn and revised The Eve of St Agnes) and Rylstone Gardens (above the Chine) are a pleasant oasis from the more seaside-y side of Shanklin whatever the time of year.

Shanklin

Left: view from Keats Walk, Shanklin, overlooking Shanklin promenade and cliff lift, with Culver Down in the distance.

It's quite interesting to compare the walk with the descriptions in the 1879 Jenkinson's Smaller Practical Guide to the Isle of Wight (Internet Archive ID jenkinsonssmall02jenkgoog) - see pages 46-52. Developments have mostly been unobtrusive; it's still remarkably similar to when Jenkinson saw it.

- Ray

Swinburne, Culver climber

Following on from The Alabaster Coast previously, it'd be an omission to write about anything involving chalk cliffs and the poet Algernon Swinburne without exploring the factoid that he was the first to climb Culver Cliff. (some 500 feet up the chalk cliff face from beach level). I say "factoid" because although it's near-universally and uncritically repeated, the story lacks any reasonable standard of proof: the sole primary source for this exploit is a letter written years later by Swinburne himself.

Swinburne tells how at 17, after having been told by his family that he wouldn't be allowed to join the army, he set out to prove himself not a coward.

It was about the middle of the Christmas holidays, and I went out for a good hard tramp by the sea till I found myself at the foot of Culver Cliff; and then all at once it came upon me that it was all very well to fancy or dream of 'deadly danger' and forlorn hopes and cavalry charges, when I had never run any greater risk than a football 'rooge'; but that here was a chance of testing my nerve in face of death which could not be surpassed. So I climbed a rock under the highest point, and stripped, and climbed down again, and just took a souse into the sea to steady and strengthen my nerve, which I knew the sharp chill would, and climbed up again, thinking how easy it would be to climb" the whole face of the cliff naked—or at least how much more sure one would feel of being able to do it—if one did not mind mere scratches or bruises; but to that prehistoric sort of proceeding there were obviously other objections than the atmosphere of midwinter. So I dressed and went straight at it. It wasn't so hard as it looked, most of the way, for a light weight with a sure foot and a good steady head; but as I got near the top I remember thinking I should not like to have to climb down again. In a minute or two more I found that I must, as the top part (or top story) of the precipice came jutting out aslant above me for some feet. Even a real sea-gull1 could not have worked its way up without using or spreading its wings. So of course I felt I must not stop to think for one second, and began climbing down, hand under hand, as fast and as steadily as I could, till I reached the bottom, and (equally of course) began to look out for another possible point of ascent at the same height. As I began again I must own I felt like setting my teeth and swearing I would not come down again alive —if I did return to the foot of the cliff again it should be in a fragmentary condition, and there would not be much of me to pick up. I was most of the way up again when I heard a sudden sound as of loud music, reminding me instantly of 'the anthem' from the Eton Chapel organ, a little below me to the left. I knew it would be almost certain death to look down, and next minute there was no need: I glanced aside, and saw the opening of a great hollow in the upper cliff, out of which came swarming a perfect flock of 'the others,' [his idiolect for seagulls] who evidently had never seen a wingless brother so near the family quarters before. They rose all about me in a heaving cloud—at least, I really don't think the phrase exaggerates the density of their 'congregated wings'—and then scattered. It did flash across me for a minute how nasty it would be if they flew at me and went for my indefensible eyes; but, of course, they never thought of anything so unnatural and unfraternal. I was a little higher, quite near the top or well within hail of it, when I thought how queer it would be if my very scanty foothold gave way; and at that very minute it did (I assure you on my word of honour that this is the exact truth, strange as it sounds and is), and I swung in the air by my hands from a ledge on the cliff which just gave room for the fingers to cling and hold on. There was a projection of rock to the left at which I flung out my feet sideways and just reached it; this enabled me to get breath and crawl at full speed (so to say) up the remaining bit of cliff. At the top I had not strength enough left to turn or stir; I lay on my right side helpless, and just had time to think what a sell (and what an inevitable one) it would be if I were to roll back over the edge after all, when I became unconscious—as suddenly and utterly and painlessly as I did many years afterwards when I was 'picked up at sea' by a Norman fishing boat upwards of three miles (they told me) off the coast of Etretat, and could just clutch hold of the oar they held out; 'but that is not in this story—which I only hope is not too long for the reader.' On returning to conscious life I found a sheep's nose just over mine, and the poor good fellow creature's eyes gazing into my face with a look of such kindly pity and sympathy as well as surprise and perplexity that I never ought to have eaten a mutton-chop again.

- Algernon Charles Swinburne, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Mrs. Disney Leith, Putnam, 1917

I don't dismiss it entirely. As can be seen in this Flickr image by Ian Johnston - Culver Cliff - Spring Low tide - Close up and personal (5) - on the Sandown Bay side Culver is steep but not vertical, and its crumbly chalk somewhat stabilised by vegetation. But I wouldn't care to try it.  Swinburne doesn't say where this (alleged) climb took place, but the "great hollow in the upper cliff" sounds extremely like Hermit's Hole, a feature repeatedly mentioned in historical Isle of Wight travelogues.  It was accessed by a notch in the clifftop:

At the eastern part of these Cliffs, about a hundred feet below the summit, is a natural cave fourteen feet deep in the rock ; the width of it being ten feet, and the height six feet. The prospect from this cave, varies but little from that of the Cliff above it, which is given in the plate entitled Path to Hermit's Hole. This describes the path by which alone it is possible to get at the cave; and commands the whole sweep of Sandown Bay, with Shanklin, Horseledge, and Dunnose, in the distance.

The path to Hermit's Hole, is fit only to be explored by those who are in the habit of climbing these tremendous Cliffs; for, besides the narrowness of the path, which in many places is not more than a foot wide, a dreadful precipice of five hundred feet beneath, presents to the eye a fearful prospect, which may so bewilder the imagination of the person who ventures to tread these dangerous passes, that he may miss one necessary step, and then no return of recollection can save him from destruction. Nor is this the only danger that awaits him : the Cliff affords no other footing than small projections of its tender substance, and these will frequently give way under the pressure of the unskilful traveller.

- image and text from A tour to the Isle of Wight: illustrated with eighty views, drawn and engraved in aqua tinta, Volume 2, Charles Tomkins, pub. G Kearsley, 1796

Hermit's Hole was, according to Helge Kökeritz's 1940 The place-names of the Isle of Wight, Issue 6, called Harmwood Hole in 1759 - it mutated to Hermit's Hole on the map in Richard Worsley's 1781 History of the Isle of Wight. It becomes a fixture of Isle of Wight handbooks for over a century, often with embellishments. The account in The Gentleman's Magazine for January 1816 (page 25) tells how the cavern is a refuge for sheep, and the path so narrow that if you meet an oncoming one you have to fall flat and let it run over you. A later account tells a more fanciful version:

Those who utilise this narrow path should remember that sheep often stray down it. The boatmen tell us that this fact bears with it an unexpected danger, for the sheep, frightened by the sound of footsteps, will rash up the path and would readily thrust a man over the edge into the sea. They say that the course which they invariably adopt is to open the legs wide and to allow the sheep to get past in that way.

- The zones of the white chalk of the English coast, Dr Arthur W Rowe, Proceedings of the Geologists' Association, Volume 20, 1908

Folksy stories apart, I found in the British Library 19th Century Newspapers archive two instances of deaths at this location. One was accidental: The Hampshire Advertiser for June 13, 1874 reported on HORRID DEATH OF A FERN GATHERER, when an old man, Isaac 'Matt' Cooper, who collected ferns and gulls' eggs and had made a temporary home in the cave, was found dead at the cliff foot. The other was suicide: the Isle of Wight Observer for March 02, 1878 tells of the death of a servant girl, Louisa Staite, who left her outer clothes on the path to Hermit's Hole and presumably threw herself from the cliff.

Hermit's Hole disappears from the guidebooks at the beginning of the 20th century. A look at Old Maps shows its location to have been about here - it persists on OS maps until 1973 - which agrees with the view in A tour to the Isle of Wight . However, nowadays there's no sign even of the notch in the cliff leading down to it - see the high-res aerial shot by Ashley Middleton - so we can assume it has been long since lost to erosion. It's probably just as well: it sounds a health and safety nightmare, and I have a bit of a weakness for scary paths.

Culver Down is, incidentally, the eastern outcrop of the Isle of Wight's chalk 'backbone' running east-west. Unlike the western outcrop that terminates in The Needles, the headland is not, contrary to appearances from either end, a single point but a pair of concave faces with a frightening overhang.  As shown in A Druid Thurible's Whitecliff post and page 66 of Wight Hazards, these are only visible from sea or air.

Of further related interest to this and the previous post: England and France aren't the only places with such scenery. I'd never made the connection before, but the illustration of the cliff above Hermit's Hole reminded me of Caspar David Friedrich's painting Chalk Cliffs on Rügen. The location is now what is the Jasmund National Park on the Baltic island of Rügen, where the chalk cliffs of the Stubbenkammer promontory, with a capping of mature beechwood, create a scenery with its own take on the familiar-yet-strange - in this case, a bleakness compared to the cosiness of the English and French landscapes with the same geology. These cliffs too are in a constant process of erosion, as evidenced by the collapse of the features called the Wissower Klinken early in 2005.

Addendum: for another lost Isle of Wight cave, see Micah Morey's Cave.

- Ray

The cup that cheers ...

Misattribution corner: in Maxwell Gray's A Costly Freak (see previous post) this exchange over a cup of tea rang my alarm bells:

'It cheers but not inebriates,' as Mr. Swinburne so beautifully observes," replied his cousin.

This sounds very unlike Swinburne; for the last 30 years of his life he was a reformed drunk, but not so reformed as to come out with such a platitude. No, Googling finds "the cup that cheers but not inebriates" - a widespread aphorism about tea beloved of the 19th century temperance movement - is a cliché of largely forgotten attribution, almost invariably misquoted from William Cowper's A Winter Evening, Book IV of The Task (which I first identified via William Shepard Walsh's 1909 Handy-book of Literary Curiosities).

Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast,
Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa around,
And while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn
Throws up a steamy column, and the cups
That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each,
So let us welcome peaceful evening in.

As The Literary Encyclopedia explains, this 1785 epic of blank verse was written for a challenge:

according to his prefatory “Advertisement”, “A lady [Lady Ann Austen], fond of blank verse, demanded a poem of that kind from the author, and gave him the Sofa for a subject”. The opening line proclaims, “I sing the Sofa”. But the poem soon expands in scope and subject matter far beyond that beginning, to embrace, as Vincent Newey suggests, “practically the entire spectrum of contemporary English life” (Cowper’s Poetry 93).

- William Cowper: The Task, The Literary Encyclopedia

The Task is, essentially, a verse essay on Cowper's experience of English landscape, culture and Englishness. It's online in full - Project Gutenberg EText-No. 3698 - and begins thus:

I sing the Sofa. I, who lately sang
Truth, Hope, and Charity, and touched with awe
The solemn chords, and with a trembling hand,
Escaped with pain from that advent'rous flight,
Now seek repose upon a humbler theme:
The theme though humble, yet august and proud
The occasion--for the Fair commands the song.

Swinburne does, it turns out, have some connection with the Cowper quote. A few Victorian publications quote him as snarking about it, tracking back to this article:

I suppose that it was these descriptions of the tea-table which drew from Mr. Swinburne the sneer, "Happy is the country that is fed with the tea-pot pieties of Cowper."

- Tea, Once a Week, July 31 1869

But this too seems a product of the powerful editorial urge to rehash quotations into epigrams their supposed authors never said. Swinburne - writing about the inability of both the English religious mainstream and English non-religious radicals to accommodate a maverick religious mystic like William Blake - actually wrote:

What could be made of such a man [Blake] in a country fed and clothed with the teapot pieties of Cowper and the tape-yard infidelities 1 of Paine?

- Algernon Swinburne, William Blake: A Critical Essay, 1868

Swinburne may not even have been referring to the "cups that cheer" quote but to the overall cosiness of Cowper's works; but this trail of increasingly flexible attribution explains how the quote came to be pinned to him in Maxwell Gray's mind.

1. A tape-yard is a histrorical term for a tape measure; I can't imagine what this phrase means. Any thoughts?

Addendum: upgrade from comments. Fuchsoid has rightly pointed out that

"Cheers but does not inebriate" seems to have first been used by Bishop Berkeley (the one refuted by Dr Johnson) about tar-water, a rather nasty-sounding remedy of this day, now happily supplanted by real tea.

I stand corrected. Googling finds that it appears in section 217 of his book in praise of tar-water, Siris (of which more later):

... whereas the luminous spirit lodged and detained- in the native balsam of pines and firs, is of a nature so mild and benign and proportioned to the human constitution, as to warm without heating, to cheer but not inebriate ...

Cowper, however, popularised the phrase in relation to tea. Fuchsoid adds:

Might the "tape-yard" remark have been a reference to Paine's early apprenticeship to a stay-maker?

That sounds a highly plausible explanation.

- Ray