When London meets Japan

The author Douglas Sladen - writer of the May 1895 Windsor Magazine piece "Odd Scenes in Japanese Streets" - rang bells, though I've never written about him on JSBlog. It eventually dawned on me that I'd mentioned him in A Wren-like Note as a neighbour of Maxwell Gray after she moved to Richmond.

Maxwell Gray in Sanatogen ad shock

Cross-posted from A Wren-like Note: the odd bit of detail on the Newport-born author Maxwell Gray (Mary Gleed Tuttiett) continues to surface, often via researching something else. A sidetrack on patent medicines while writing the ATURFUQIL piece brought something of a surprise: Maxwell Gray giving a celebrity endorsement for the patent remedy Sanatogen.

An Isle of Wight New Year

I've posted this previously at A Wren-like Note, but I very much like Maxwell Gray's atmospheric description of a New Year party in an Isle of Wight village in the 1860s. Best wishes for the New Year to JSBlog readers.

The Statue in the Block

A nice piece of Christmas Eve Gothic from Maxwell Gray's 1893 The Last Sentence. In this episode from the novel, the protagonist - the respected barrister Cecil Marlowe - isn't much enjoying a jolly village Christmas with upper-crust friends who include his fiancée Cynthia Brande. He's a worried man, as a secret from the past has caught up with him: his existing marriage to the Breton peasant Renée Kérouac. While he knows she has sought him out, having recognised her at an ice-skating party, he is unaware that she has been stalking the happy gathering from the garden, during the overnight blizzard.

The Primrose Way

Cross-posted from A Wren-like Note: Maxwell Gray's 1898 essay The Primrose Way. It's an interesting mix once you dig into the references: an evocative recollection of a lane (recognisably on the north of the Isle of Wight's downs); a treatise on flowers in 19th century poetry; an appreciation of the primrose; and an indictment of the despoliation of the flowers on the now-defunct 'Primrose Day' commemorating Disraeli's death.

Alma Lee found

A fascinating development arising from the Isle of Wight County Press feature on A Wren-like Note: a correspondent has sent me a clear identification of the original for the wronged coachman's daughter Alma Lee, a central character in Maxwell Gray's 1886 The Silence of Dean Maitland.

A Wren-like Note: IWCP piece

I'm very pleased to see that the Isle of Wight County Press, after a few months' delay, just ran a piece on A Wren-like Note: "Secret life of a Victorian novelist" (Richard Wright, IWCP, 11 Apr 2014, Weekender section, p7).

A Wren-like Note: officially launched

Just to make the news official: my biography A Wren-like Note: the life and works of Maxwell Gray, went ahead with the planned launch on December 3rd. The sales page is now online - here - and gives a preview of the book.

maxwellgray.co.uk is both a support site for the book and a general resource page about the Isle of Wight author Maxwell Gray (Mary Gleed Tuttiett). You'll find a brief biography (abridged from the first chapter of the book); links, where findable, to her major works, related reading including minor works and articles about her; the only known interview; a live map of places in her life and works; a gallery of scans from an illustrated edition of The Silence of Dean Maitland; and an ongoing series of blog posts on Maxwell Gray topics.

- Ray

Dean Maitland locations

Cross-posted from A Wren-like Note:

While I managed to source most of the Maxwell Gray books as e-texts on the Internet, I did want a print copy of The Silence of Dean Maitland, and was pleased to find the 1897 Kegan Paul, Trench & Trübner illustrated edition with line drawings by Frederick Hamilton Jackson (1848-1923). The book itself is undated, but it's listed in The Publisher, Volume 12, Issue 65, 1897. Jackson clearly took the trouble to go to the relevant locations, in the Isle of Wight and Winchester, since the scene pictures are mostly very identifiable.

 

This is Alma looking over a gate as she climbs the hill from Chalkburne (Carisbrooke) towards Malbourne (Calbourne). The view is of the western end of St Mary's church, Carisbrooke, somewhere on the steep ascent up the present B3401 called Alvington Shute, though trees and building obscure this view nowadays.

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The village of "Malbourne" - in fact Calbourne. This is more or less the view from the Sun Inn, on the present B3401, looking down Lynch Lane (the Isle of Wight Family History site has a couple of similar views - see particularly the first image at Photo Gallery : Isle of Wight - Calbourne). The British Listed Buildings Entry - Church of All Saints, Calbourne, #392986 - doesn't say why and when the church lost the stubby spire that formerly topped its tower.

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This is St Mary's church, Carisbrooke, viewed from the northern rampart of Carisbrooke Castle:

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Alma with her baby; Carisbrooke church, with its small turret, is visible on the horizon.

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This shows the wrongly-convicted Everard escaping from Portsmouth. The arch behind him is the Unicorn Gate, Portsmouth, then the entrance to the dockyard (there's a nice early 20th century photo here at Rootsweb, (detail below) ...

... and a British Listed Buildings record #476642). Due to general redevelopment, it now sits isolated on a roundabout on a ring road within the HM Naval Base.

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This shows Winkle Street (aka Barrington Row) Calbourne, from the NW end. The Isle of Wight Family History Society site has a similar photo: see Photo Gallery : Isle of Wight - Calbourne, second row down, middle image.

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This - "Belminster" in Dean Maitland - is the Bishop's House, Winchester Cathedral.

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This is where Everard talks to Dean Maitland's blind son, also called Everard; it's supposed to be in one of the doors of Winchester Cathedral, but I can't find any such view; and no building is so close to the cathedral (even on contemporary maps). Any ideas?

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This is the scene where Maitland, realising his guilty secrets have finally come back to bite him, says goodbye to his family. The view is of Winchester Cathedral from the east, from a location around what's now Abbey Gardens.

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This is the much-photographed Cheyney Court, Winchester Cathedral Close.

- Ray

"The Baby was an anachronism"

Mirrored from A Wren-Like Note, as potentially of geeky interest:

A while back I mentioned the versatile and prolific Scottish writer Andrew Lang - see Andrew Lang: a sampler - and in particular his 1890 Old Friends: Essays in Epistolary Parody (Internet Archive ID oldfriendsessay00langgoog) which imagines correspondence between various literary characters.

In the light of the current MG project, I re-read "From Mr. Paul Rondelet to the Very Rev Dean Maitland" (see pages 121-125). Dean Maitland we know from The Silence of Dean Maitland: the cleric who gets a young woman pregnant and accidentally kills her father in a fight, his guilt only revealed a couple of decades later. Paul Rondelet is a major character in a distinctly forgotten novel, the social satire The Monks of Thelema (Walter Besant and James Rice, Chatto & Windus,1878, Internet Archive monksthelemaano00ricegoog). Lang has Rondelet - an aesthete turned hack journalist, and apparently based on Walter Pater - escape his responsibilities by doing a runner to a Pacific island, and his letter advises the disgraced Maitland to do the same.

The bit that intrigued me was this footnoted sentence:

[Rondelet writes to Maitland] "And, in your time, no doubt you have loved?" 1

1 Alas, not wisely! But any careful reader of "The Silence of Dean Maitland" will see that the Baby was an anachronism. —Ed. 

Lang is presumably referring to some problem with the chronology of the conception and birth of Alma Lee's baby by Cyril Maitland, and I thought I'd check this out. It wasn't wildly difficult, but nevertheless takes close reading; Maxwell Gray is an author prone to subliminal chronologies that take some piecing together from details chapters apart.

The novel starts with Alma Lee hitching a wagon ride to Malbourne on an autumn day. We know it's autumn by the cold weather and the clematis being in seed:

the high tangled hedges, draped with great curtains of traveller's joy, now a mass of the silvery seed-feathers which the country children call "old man's beard"

On this day, Cyril Maitland first meets Alma Lee in Malbourne - they're mutually attracted (in his case, despite his engagement to another woman) - and offers to escort her home from his sister's regular Bible class. Then:

Rather more than a year after Alma Lee's evening ride in the waggon

Maitland (after some months away) returns to Malbourne, where the general gossip is that Alma Lee is now pregnant. It's a few days before the New Year, and another character thinks:

" I shall long remember sixty-two," he thought ; "it has been a good year ..."

We're then told the chronology of Maitland's temporary break-up with his fiancée Marion in that year.

Cyril wrote back to release her from an engagement which he said he perceived had become distasteful to her ... This was in March. At Whitsuntide, Everard spent some time at Malbourne, whence Cyril went to Belminster for ordination at Trinity ... and got himself placed on a mission staff in the East of London, where he led a semi-monastic life in a house with his fellow-curates ...

On New Year's Day (referred  to as that of "sixty-three"), Alma gives birth to a son.

So this connects up to place Alma's first meeting with Maitland as autumn 1861; Maitland's split with his fiancée as March 1862; his leaving Malbourne as Whitsun 1862 (Google finds this to be June 8th); and the birth as January 1st 1863. Thus, given a normal 40ish weeks pregnancy, this timeline easily accommodates Alma's son being conceived in early April 1862. Unless I've missed something, the baby doesn't seem to be an anachronism; I'll probably never know what precisely Lang meant.

- Ray

None so fast as stroke

An out-take from the Maxwell Gray work: I just ran into a MG reference in a 1923 article, Novelists' sporting blunders, which concerns sporting bloopers in novels.

Ouida's classic hero, who rowed twice as fast as his fellows in the Boat Race, is the supreme example of the errors into which authors who venture to deal with a phase of sport of which they are ignorant may fall.
...
Maxwell Gray's Boat Race
Maxwell Gray, the author of "The Silence of Dean Maitland," makes a curious reference to the Boat Race in "The Great Refusal," published in 1906.

Once he remembered — on a boat-race day — when every coster cart fluttered light or dark blue ribbons and the colours were in shop windows and ladies' dresses, and expectation was on tiptoe for the result of that five minutes' swift sweep over Thames waters — he remembered thinking that the sixteen god-like youths smiting the river with strokes too swift to count were, after all, of real flesh and blood like himself.

These inaccuracies are the more inexplicable as it does not require a knowledge of rowing to know that about twenty minutes is the average time for the race from Putney to Mortlake, and that it is perfectly easy to watch and count the strokes of the oars as they are seen rowing past.
- Novelists' sporting blunders, page 580, T.P.'s and Cassell's Weekly, Volume 1, 1923

The Maxwell Gray error is verifiable. The Ouida one is not. A little Googling finds that its attribution to Ouida (the novelist Maria Louise Ramé) seems to have been a popular meme of the early 20th century. The quotation generally took the form"All rowed fast, but none so fast as stroke" ("stroke" being the rower at the stern who sets the pace for the whole crew), and it seems to be an abbreviated paraphrase of this passage ...

The word sounded clear from the mouth of the 'Varsity captain of boats, and at once Ralph exerted the full force of Herculean arms. His blade struck the water a full second before any other; the lad had started well. Nor did he flag as the race wore on… as the boats began to near the winning-post, his oar was dipping into the water nearly twice as often as any other.

... which comes from Desmond Coke's 1903 Sandford of Merton. Written under the pseudonym Belinda Blinder, it's a comic novel of Oxford university life, a pastiche of The History of Sandford and Merton - and the howler is of course a deliberate joke.

I can't find any precise origin of the accretion of the story to Ouida. The first citation I can find for the "... none so fast as stroke" line is 1908 ...

In one way and another, however, the crowds which watch the practice of the crews have come to know more about rowing than any earlier generation. ...  And there is certainly not a novelist left who could write with a grave face that "all rowed fast and furiously, but none so fast as stroke."
- The Boat-Race, The Spectator, 28 March 1908

... and in the same year, it was ascribed to a female novelist (for no reason I can see beyond sheer sexism):

We do not know whether or not it was a lady novelist who wrote gravely that "all rowed fast and furiously, but none so fast as stroke," but we suspect it was.
 - 'Varsity Howlers, The Press (Canterbury, NZ), 14 Hōngongoi 1908, Page 6

By the 1920s, the story was solidly attached to Ouida (see Google Books hits). Probably the connection was forged because of the female pseudonym of the author of Sandford of Merton, and the easy target that Ouida made as an eccentrically florid stylist known for such inaccuracies. The misattribution has been repeatedly debunked - notably via the correspondence column of The Spectator in 1937, and by Elizabeth Knowles on page 21 of What They Didn't Say: A Book of Misquotations (OUP, 2006) - but it refuses to die, and has been given new currency by the usual quotation websites.

Addendum: I find a clue in a contemporary review of Sandford of Merton:

"The Oxford Magazine" once published a delicious chapter on the Eights extracted from an imaginary novel by Ouida ...
- Reviews,  The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, page 817, Volume 95, 27 June 1903

If this is accurate, it might be identifiable as the source that kicked off the meme.

- Ray

The Dean down under

Poster from www.nfsa.gov.au

In aid of consolidating Maxwell Gray material, I've moved this post - largely focusing on Ken G Hall's 1934 Australian film adaptation of Maxwell Gray's The Silence of Dean Maitland - to my dedicated Maxwell Gray site, A Wren-Like Note.

See The Dean down under.

- Ray

After the Crash (1923)

In November 2012 (Muriel ... and After the Crash) I posted a brief critique of Maxwell Gray's short story After the Crash, "written about 1908 or 1910" but not published until her final book, the 1923 story collection A Bit of Blue Stone.

After the Crash, while I think it has weaknesses, is an interesting story, both as an example of the "Where London Stood" genre, and as a personal milestone for Maxwell Gray. She'd spent her whole career writing mainstream fiction - chiefly melodramatic romances with a certain amount of social commentary - but in her 60s broke out of that frame and wrote a single post-apocalyptic SF story that powerfully crystallises her own fears (expressed in earlier works) of disastrous consequences of the social changes brought by the 20th century.


I've posted a scan - see After the Crash - at the official site for my biography of Maxwell Gray, A Wren-like Note.

- Ray

Calbourne - WH Long

Finally, on Saturday June 8th, we got to Calbourne - the core location, fictionalised as "Malbourne", of Maxwell Gray's The Silence of Dean Maitland.

It wasn't easy. This is a village in the core of the 'West Wight' that, for a very touristy island, is still surprisingly inaccessible if you don't drive. We could have walked the couple of miles from the nearest bus route, as we did in March (see To see Swainston), but my brother-in-law Steve kindly gave us a lift out to Calbourne, and we took the eastern third of the Tennyson Trail back to Newport (of which more later).

One of the first cool things about the visit was seeing this plaque on Grants Cottage commemorating William Henry Long:

This is not the American mycologist of the same name, nor even the Sundance Kid, but the Calbourne-born writer I briefly mentioned in the post about the Maxwell Gray novel Ribstone Pippins. He's an interesting chap who got the break to rise from illegitimate birth and majorly poor roots to become a writer, bookseller, and member of the English Dialect Society.

There's a detailed account of him here - About W. H. Long - at the website of the Isle of Wight folk group The Dollymopps, particularly commemorating his contribution to the folk tradition in recording the lyrics of Isle of Wight folk songs. Here are his books online:

• A Dictionary of the Isle of Wight Dialect, and of provincialisms used in the Island, with illustrative anecdotes and tales; to which is appended The Christmas Boys' Play, An Isle of Wight "Hooam Harvest" and songs sung by the peasantry, forming a treasury of insular manners and customs of fifty years ago (William Henry Long, pub. Reeves, 1886, Internet Archive ID adictionaryisle00longgoog).
• The Oglander memoirs: extracts from the mss. of Sir J. Oglander, kt. (pub. Reeves & Turner, 1888, Internet Archive ID oglandermemoirse00oglaiala)
• Memoirs of Emma, Lady Hamilton: With Anecdotes of Her Friends and Contemporaries (pub. Gibbings, 1891, Internet Archive ID memoirsemmalady00longgoog)
• Medals of the British Navy and how They Were Won (pub. Norie & Wilson, 1895, Internet Archive ID medalsbritishna00longgoog)
• Naval Yarns (pub. Gibbings, 1899, Internet Archive ID navalyarnslette00longgoog).

There are a couple of points arising. I mentioned a while back - see Ribstone Pippins - that I very strongly suspect Maxwell Gray's Isle of Wight novel Ribstone Pippins to have been written with a copy of A Dictionary of the Isle of Wight Dialect to hand - the spellings and vocabulary choice were so similar. But there's another possible Maxwell Gray connection. William Henry Long was the illegitimate son of William Warne, a chaise driver in the employ of Sir Richard Simeon at nearby Swainston Manor, and Eliza Long, a farmer's daughter. With a  bit of juggling of roles, could this have been the inspiration for the situation in Gray's The Silence of Dean Maitland, when Alma, the daughter of a coachman on the "Swaynestone" estate, gives birth to an illegitimate child?

As I said, more later. It was an extremely nice weekend. Quite apart from going to one of my sisters' 40th birthday party, we got in some good walking, and (on my part) a bit of photography and some major closure on a couple of my Isle of Wight topographical obsessions. I'll blog about these these non-chronologically: some need more background research than others.

- Ray

To see Swainston

Swainston Manor

This weekend Clare and I visited The Silence of Dean Maitland territory. Our original plan was to go to Calbourne - "Malbourne" in Maxwell Gray's novel - but we had a rapid rethink on discovering there's no bus off-season. A bit of intuitive calculus (as you head west from Newport, the extant Yarmouth bus route and Calbourne roads diverge) found the nearest bus-accessible point to be a place called Lower Watchingwell, some 2km north. Check out Google Maps Street View; you might get the impression they're not keen on advertising that this is a public footpath. From there, we struck out cross-country across some seriously muddy footpaths and bridleways, and went to Swainston Manor first.

Swainston Manor

Swainston Manor - the chapel

 Swainston Manor ("Swaynstone", the home of the local landowner Ingram Swaystone in Dean Maitland) is now - intermittently, it seems - a hotel, but was originally the seat of an extensive estate. Its immediate scenery is distinctly geology-driven: a few hundred yards north of house, which is on Tertiary clays, is the boundary with the Cretaceous chalk downs that form the backbone of the Island; this creates a spring-line that feeds Swainston's ornamental lake (the same copious spring-line that feeds the streams at Carisbrooke, a few miles to the east).

Vaulted well or spring - one of many issues below the Calbourne Road ...

... feeding the lake (view south from road)

The grounds of Swainston are beautifully landscaped, undoubtedly organised to include the view of the Temple, the 18th century Doric-style folly built as part of the estate on the chalk hillside to the south.

The Temple - the narrow window of view from the Calbourne road

Edmund Venables' 1860 The Isle of Wight, a Guide calls it "The Temple of Boreas", but this is the sole occurrence of the name I can find. The listed building entry says:

Ornamental garden building, being converted to dwelling at time of survey. c.1790 but possibly reusing the foundations of an existing estate building of the Swainston estate. Built in the form of a Doric temple. Front has very deep plinth of stone rubble. 3 steps. 6 ashlar Greek Doric columns surmounted by entablature with pediment and triglyph frieze. Plain entrance in plinth. Side walls of coursed stone rubble. At time of survey part of a side wall and the rear wall was not present. Cellar has blocked in round-headed arch, probably the remains of an earlier estate building.
- listed building entry (English Heritage Building ID: 393011)

In the novel, the Temple is the family home of Alma Lee, the coachman's daughter made pregnant by Maitland, and the copse behind it is where Maitland accidently kills her father.

They have just passed the entrance-gates of Swaynestone — lonely gates, unfurnished with a lodge — and the waggon stops with interrupted music at some smaller gates on the other side of the road, where the upland still rises, not in bare down, but in rich meadow, to a hanging wood, out of which peeps dimly in the dusk a small white structure, built with a colonnade supporting an architrave, to imitate a Greek temple — Alma's home.
...
Now they passed Swaynestone, where Sir Lionel reigned no more, having been gathered to his fathers; and there, on the left, stood the sham Greek Temple, its colonnade gleaming white in the sunlight, and its architrave sharply outlined against the fatal green coppice cresting the hill behind it.
- The Silence of Dean Maitland

Being a bit of a Goody Two-Shoes when it comes to "Keep Out" signs, and having failed so far to track down the owner for access permission, I made do with a photo from the adjoining field. Only these guys seemed interested in us.

However, the fence being down in places, I did check out the well-trodden path into the woods below the Temple, where there's a memorial obelisk, in appropriately Classical style, to "Andrew Wyld 1949-2011" (the other three sides are carved ΧΡΗΣΤΟΣ / ΜΕΓΑΛΟΦΥΗΣ / ΓΝΩΜΩΝ).

 

The name didn't ring bells with me, but a quick look in NewsBank finds this to refer to the late owner of the Temple, Andrew Wyld, an eminent art dealer who specialised in English watercolours.

One of Wyld's greatest loves was the Isle of Wight, where in the mid-1980s he acquired a ruined Doric folly. This he stabilised without rendering it habitable, preferring to sleep in comfort at The George at Yarmouth and enjoy The Temple by day and for parties.
- Andrew Wyld - Dealer in watercolours and one-time Agnew's expert whose cultivated eye identified a Turner and several works by Peter de Wint, obitary, The Times, November 19, 2011

To take in Calbourne itself would have added a couple of miles to a soggy walk that already promised to be about 7 miles, so we left it for another day and walked back to Carisbrooke, via a set of farm tracks and footpaths that partly follow the route of the old railway line. Interesting how things have come full circle; in the mid-Victorian era as portrayed in The Silence of Dean Maitland, the only way to get to parts of the central Island was to walk or have your own transport - no change, then.

- Ray

F Hamilton Jackson's Dean Maitland illustrations

I just found a very inexpensive copy of the Kegan Paul, Trench & Trübner illustrated edition - 1897, I think - of Maxwell Gray's The Silence of Dean Maitland, and thought the illustrations, by Frederick Hamilton Jackson (1848-1923), might be of interest/amusement. I've no doubt of FH Jackson's credentials and general competence as an artist (see Wikipedia) but some of these illustrations are distinctly strange in proportions and style. He has done his homework, however, and some of the locations are identifiable. The Internet Archive has a number of books by him. Also out of interest - an example of the general Victorian small world - Jackson married a Fanny Boole, a niece of the mathematician George Boole.

title page

part 1

Alma, looking down to 'Chalkburne' (Carisbrooke)

Alma and Maitland, the guy who'll get her pregnant

Mark Anthony, the cat, gets cute

Him again

Lilian, the protagonist's sister, does a bit of horse-whispering

Cyril Maitland preaches

Lilian and Everard, who'll take the rap for Maitland's crime

OMG - Maitland feels guilty

At the pub - Ben Lee's murder is reported

The guilty Maitland swoons

Villagers at the pub

A very girly Maitland christens his own son

'Malbourne' - recognisably Calbourne

part 2

'Chalkburne' - this is identifiably Carisbrooke Church

Alma and her baby

Ingram tries it on with Lilian, while her boyfriend is in prison

Everard escapes Portsmouth

Everard escaped

probably Winkle Street, Calbourne

part 3

'Belminster' - the picture shows the Bishop's House, Winchester Cathedral

Everard meets young Everard

Maitland is confronted by his illegitimate son

Maitland (left) is freaked to see Everard (right)

Maitland, knowing the game's up, takes leave of his family

Lilian, the falsely-accused Everard's girlfriend

Lilian and Everard dig the garden

Everard contemplates the dead Maitland

'Granfer'

Happy ending

The End