Country House Research Articles

Squire, shopkeeper and staple food: the reciprocal relationship between the country house and the village shop in the late Georgian period

Rural communities have historically been viewed as synonymous with agricultural processes and a dependence upon the land. This tendency to filter rural life through the perspective of agricultural interest has obscured the vital role of rural retailers within such communities who have been similarly overlooked in studies of retailing in favour of their urban counterparts. The notion of rural self-sufficiency disguises the role of the village shopkeeper in the provision of necessities, particularly perishable goods like food and drink, the purchase of which is too often presumed and rarely expanded upon or quantified. Therefore very little is known about rural supply networks and, more specifically, the interaction and flow of goods between the country house and the village shop. Drawing on a wealth of evidence on the purchasing habits of a rural lesser gentry family in Bedfordshire, themselves a rather neglected social group, this study aims to reveal the mutually beneficial relationship between the country squire (in the daily process of sustaining a large household) and his village suppliers (eager to fulfil his requirements and retain his patronage) at the end of the Georgian period. The findings shed light on village life and society, providing a valuable insight into the complex, intimate and often mutually beneficial relationships that existed in rural communities.

Creatures Enshrined: Wild Animals as Bearers of Heritage

In 1976, Patrick Cormack published a book entitled Heritage in Danger. The Conservative MP, who founded the All-Party Parliamentary Arts and Heritage Group a few years later and chaired it for thirty years, included chapters on the country house, the village, the church, and the city. His first chapter, however, was devoted to what he characterized as ‘at once the most obvious and enjoyed and also the most neglected aspect of our heritage’: the countryside. In fact, Cormack greatly exaggerated the extent to which the rural landscape has been neglected within understandings of heritage and initiatives for historical preservation. Since the mid-nineteenth century, in Britain, as elsewhere in Europe and North America, places primarily associated with nature have acquired value as ‘visible symbols of an invisible past’—whether in the guise of picturesque countryside, outstandingly beautiful scenery, or ‘pristine’ wilderness. The remit of the National Trust (1895) was to protect places of natural beauty in England and Wales as well as historic buildings: at a meeting to plan the new organization, founder Octavia Hill appealed to those ‘to whom historic memories loom large, who love the wild bird, butterfly, and plant, who realise the natural value of the hill slope lighted by sun or shadowed by cloud’. And by the early twentieth century, many preservationists considered the heritage value of exceptional places (the ‘natural beauties of rural districts’, to use Baldwin Brown’s phrase) equal to that of the most esteemed material products of human creation. As explained by Brown, a professor of fine arts, the fundamental basis for comparison was the similar ‘effect on the mind’:

That Little Room Which They Have Taken For Her

That Little Room Which They Have Taken For Her Rachel Hadas (bio) Early last summer, I had occasion to consult the episode in Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past in which the narrator revisits Balbec after the death of his grandmother. This well-known passage describes a rush of tears to the narrator’s eyes—tears whose source he has to search his memory to find. What he realizes is that he has just been belatedly mourning the grandmother whose death hadn’t really hit him until now. Even after I’d found the specific passage I’d been looking for, it wasn’t easy to close the book and (as a phrase nearly as annoying as the word “closure” would have it) move on. Soon, in the vicinity of the account of these tears, I came upon a longer passage I hadn’t remembered as well. In a haunting sequence, the narrator, still reeling from the shock of his belated grasp of the fact that his grandmother has died, dreams about her. In his dream she is both dead and not dead. This unsettlingly apt description (I’ll quote it soon) of the way a dream presents an indigestible reality was still much in my mind a few weeks later, when I found myself in my country house rummaging through papers. I was sifting through some folders of work I’d discarded or left unfinished—poems twenty years old, from the late 1980s and early 1990s. One short poem stopped me. It had neither title nor date, but I could easily tell more or less when I had written it, for the poem recorded a dream that had clearly presaged my mother’s death. Her cancer had been diagnosed in November 1990, and my dream preceded the diagnosis by only a few days or weeks. Indeed, the dream’s timing may well have been occasioned by some tests my mother was undergoing. I remember that when, after the last of these tests, the doctor informed me that my mother had a tumor, I told him I’d dreamed she was dying of cancer. As I recall, he seemed more interested than surprised or skeptical. Perhaps such prescient dreams are not so uncommon. Somehow, brought to light about twenty years after I had first written it, my little poem seemed more worth preserving than some of the others I’d turned up in the same folder. I gave it a title and tightened its original eleven lines to nine. Subterranean A gate that had been open closed behind me. Light was streaming into a low-ceilinged bedroom bare but for the bed and a sort of throne [End Page 70] on which I sat to hear the news from the recumbent figure calm in the face of oblivion, hands folded. She told the end herself. The gate, the tunnel, the dark dais, all had been leading toward the one conclusion. All her life, my mother was a composed, reticent, and dignified person. The dream, as preserved in the amber of the poem, has a static, formal, almost hieratic quality; emblematic or heraldic are other adjectives that come to mind. The recumbent figure recalls funerary sculpture—knights and their ladies lying in effigy, or Greek grave steles, or Egyptian statues. In keeping with the paradoxical pairing of feelings that such representations of the dead all seem to evoke—feelings about death that all people probably share—my mother, in the poem as in the dream, is somehow both alive and not alive. In order to reach her, I have to go underground, passing through a tunnel (not mentioned in the poem) and then a gate to reach the dim, low-ceilinged chamber where she is lying. Yet lying as if entombed, she is also able to receive me as a visitor and talk to me calmly and cogently—which was precisely how my mother nearly always talked. Her hands are folded heraldically across her chest; she seems almost like a statue of herself—and yet she is still my (barely) living mother. Here now is the Proust passage: But as soon as I had succeeded in falling asleep...

The Theatre Career of Thomas Arne by Todd Gilman

Reviewed by: The Theatre Career of Thomas Arne by Todd Gilman David J. Golby Todd Gilman. The Theatre Career of Thomas Arne. Newark: Delaware, 2013. Pp. xix + 623. $120. As I sit writing, I am some 20 kilometers from Cliveden, the English country house where the premier of Arne’s Alfred took place. This masque features his most famous composition by far: the song “Rule, Britannia.” The open-air, landscaped amphitheatre where the song was first performed is still in evidence, but it is very easily missed among the more spectacular and ostentatious sights of the estate. This is perhaps entirely appropriate, as the originator of this tune has also slipped almost entirely from view over the years, while the euphuistic jingoism of the creation itself retains prominence in the British consciousness. And even if it reaches a global audience of many millions every year at the Last Night of the Proms, it is possible that the people who could name its composer are a tiny fraction of those [End Page 109] who could whistle its first few bars. British Prime Minister David Cameron was famously castigated for mistaking Arne for Elgar as the composer of this celebrated ode when interviewed by David Letterman on U.S. television (2012). While it is easy to scoff at Cameron’s ignorance, I wonder how many British musicians would have given the correct answer. Arne is surely in need of a twenty-first-century champion, and Mr. Gilman assumes this role. His book is highly readable. Arne’s reputation has been paid an enormous disservice, and Mr. Gilman is well placed to tackle the question of his neglect head-on. In the “Polemical Introduction,” he asks if he has been the victim of “Handel-mania” and conventions of taste among the social elite and learned who have judged his music mainly on the basis of contemporary aesthetic prejudices rather than on intrinsic worth—prejudices promulgated in subsequent centuries up to the present day. Is Arne’s reputation and standing still the victim of his being perceived among contemporaries and others as “Handel-lite,” his “beautiful” music considered in British critical circles as inferior to Handel’s “sublime” offerings? This perception of gravitas and seriousness in an artist, whether composer or performer, is crucially important in the confirmation of relative merit and longevity. Critics were particularly receptive to the “sublime” in the (often sacred) work of foreign musicians. Unlike the Handel-obsessed majority, as represented by composers such as William Boyce, Arne was forward-looking, experimented with the galant style, and most often put himself at the mercy of the notoriously fickle middle-class theater and pleasure garden audiences—not the first or last native musician to suffer the consequences of showing much greater ambition as an artist than the play-it-safe norm, risking the almost inevitable unfavorable comparisons with the nonnative elite. Despite this “glass ceiling,” Arne accomplished a great deal and enjoyed commercial success, particularly for his stage music. His gift for melody, the cultivation of a highly influential vocal style, and his combination of “English” grace, elegance, and simplicity with “Celtic mellifluousness” were rewarded with great successes during his career. Charles Burney, his articled apprentice from 1744, is crucial in assessing Arne’s reputation among his contemporaries to the present day, and persistently supports Arne’s “light” style and preeminent position among native composers. Working chronologically, the minutiae of Arne’s life and dealings with the theatrical world reveal gems, including his connections with Drury Lane, Vauxhall Gardens, and the long-term and fluctuating collaborations between Arne and Garrick (it is clear that Arne’s respect for Garrick was not reciprocated, and relations between them were often strained). The machinations of the life of a successful native composer and the shenanigans, intrigue, infidelities, business dealings, and politics (including the “calamitous” Licensing Act of 1737), that went on behind the scenes give this story life. The rich tapestry of personal and professional allegiances, including the coming together of musical families through business, marriage or both, all enrich the drama. The circumstances surrounding the composition and performance of Arne’s most celebrated piece, “Rule, Britannia,” are a case in point...

Claims of Heritage: Restoring the English Country House in <em>Wide Sargasso Sea</em>

Since the publication of Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), two critical positions have persisted: one that considers the novel in the context of Jane Eyre (1847), ignoring the way it represents English identity and history in its own right; and another that focuses on the novel’s West Indian contexts and divorces it from the English traditions that inform its structure and plot. However, the novel sutures these dual inheritances through a critical representation of the English country house that adopts mid-century preservationists’ nostalgia for such historic sites in order to problematize this nostalgia. Wide Sargasso Sea represents Thornfield Hall as a space in which post-imperial racialization takes place. Examining the text as a country-house novel allows one to rethink its position in both a British and a postcolonial canon, as well as considering the political possibilities and perils of preservation in English fiction.

‘Spurious Articles’

By the penultimate decade of the nineteenth century, the Dukes of Hamilton, premier peers of Scotland, had amassed a superb collection of fine and decorative art. However, in 1882, with over £1 million of debt, William, 12th Duke of Hamilton (1845–1895) and his astute Commissioner, Henry Padwick (1804–1879), exploited an apparent loophole in the Duke’s deeds of entail which enabled them to consign the renowned ducal art collection to Christie Manson & Wood. The auction occurred just months before the British government introduced the Settled Land Act 1882, which thereafter enabled the sale of entailed property and opened the flood gates to a deluge of country house sales which radically transformed the dynamics of the British art market. Following a second round of sales in 1919, the family’s principal seat, Hamilton Palace, ten miles south of Glasgow, was demolished. Many of the most significant items from both the 1882 and 1919 sales are now in the great museums, galleries and libraries of the world or in important private collections. This article considers the success of the Department of Science and Art in furnishing its London, Edinburgh and Dublin museums with acquisitions from the landmark sale of 1882, and identifies further objects with a Hamilton Palace provenance that have subsequently entered their collections.

Forming History, Inhabiting Form in Marvell's "Upon Appleton House"

Andrew Marvell's “Upon Appleton House” meditates on when and how forms and events become meaningful. The poem reveals the limitations of criticism that assumes rather than questions what constitutes history. Drawing on the literary-historical conventions of its inherited country house form while also engaging its immediate historical context of 1651 northern England, “Upon Appleton House” offers a dynamic, relational model of how history, form, and interpretation articulate one another's conditions of possibility. This suggests that criticism should acknowledge form as an element of history: that we should understand forms as hermeneutic and heuristic practices that can influence historical experience in addition to recording or mediating it. The poem's multiple timescales—which range from topical political crisis, to multigenerational dynastic heritage, to the life spans of birds and trees, to apocalyptic temporality—render history polychronic: individual moments achieve full historical significance when superimposed upon one another. The allegories of relationships between readers and the things they read in “Upon Appleton House” limn a contingent, supple interpretive practice charged with linking plural histories and textualities without reducing any to a mere index, foreshadowing, or figure of another. Reading forms in multiple ways and considering individual moments as intersections of different historical frameworks complicates relationships between history and literary history.

Slavery and the British Country House. Edited by Madge Dresser and Andrew Hann. Swindon: English Heritage. 2013. Pp. xv, 180. $100.00, hardcover.

Slavery and the British Country House. Edited by Madge Dresser and Andrew Hann. Swindon: English Heritage. 2013. Pp. xv, 180. $100.00, hardcover.

Slavery and the British Country House. Edited by MADGEDRESSER and ANDREWHANN. Swindon: English Heritage. 2013. xv + 180 p. 225 col. and b. and w. illus. £50 (hb). ISBN 978‐1‐84802‐064‐1.

Journal for Eighteenth-Century StudiesVolume 37, Issue 4 p. 552-553 Book review Slavery and the British Country House. Edited by MADGE DRESSER and ANDREW HANN. Swindon: English Heritage. 2013. xv + 180 p. 225 col. and b. and w. illus. £50 (hb). ISBN 978-1-84802-064-1. Professor ALAN RICE, ALAN RICE University of Central LancashireSearch for more papers by this author Professor ALAN RICE, ALAN RICE University of Central LancashireSearch for more papers by this author First published: 06 November 2014 https://doi.org/10.1111/1754-0208.12133Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume37, Issue4Special Issue: Clair-obscur. Guest edited by Mark Darlow and Marion LafougeDecember 2014Pages 552-553 RelatedInformation

Georgians revealed: life, style and the making of modern Britain

For over a hundred years (1714 - 1830) a King George sat on the British throne. It was a time of transformation, as cities grew, industry thrived and trade expanded round the world. New prosperity was celebrated in great country houses and beautifully landscaped gardens, while taste and elegance drove social etiquette and fostered a new consumer boom. Travel became easier, from Grand Tours for the rich to journeys by stagecoach or private carriage for others, encouraging the spread of fashions and ideas. An explosion in print culture also brought new horizons, as an increasingly literate society devoured newspapers, satirical pamphlets, magazines and the newly emerging novel form. Yet what do we really know about the people of this Augustan age, whose beliefs and preoccupations have so influenced our own? Georgians Revealed explores the realities of their daily lives through a fascinating variety of objects, from playbills to porcelain, architects' plans to fashion plates. The compelling selection traces the Georgians' famous love of shopping and celebrity, gambling and domestic design, and navigates the rules that governed behaviour from ballrooms to the sporting world. It shows how a passion for entertainment created innovations such as the circus, pantomime and modern ballet, as well as the pleasure gardens and masquerades that brought the spice of intrigue and danger to their clientele. Spanning high culture and business, consumerism and crime, Georgians Revealed unravels the contradictions and concerns that link the Georgian era so closely to our own. Accompanies a major exhibition at the British Library, opening 8 November.

The Impact of Tourism Development on the Structure of Agricultural Landscape of the Dongshan River Basin, Taiwan

After the establishment of the Dongshan River Scenic Area of Yilan County in Taiwan, land use in the Dongshan River Basin has undergone dramatic change, from agricultural areas to recreational settings, in the past decades. The pur- pose of this study was to apply the approach of landscape ecology to analyze the spatiotemporal transition of the agricultural landscape of the river basin after tour- ism development. The study aimed to examine the landscape change in the river ba- sin and its ecological implications. Maps of the Dongshan River Basin in 1987 and 2003 were generated, and the land uses were grouped into six land-use types: paddy fields, high-density vegetation, low-density vegetation, water, built-up land, and sandy beaches. A set of landscape metrics were computed with FRAGSTATS. The results showed that, from 1987 to 2003, the major change in the river basin land- scape was a rapid increase in the area of built-up patches, while the areas for all other land use decreased. As for paddy fields, although their overall structure was not significantly altered over the study period, 5% (301 hectares) of the paddy fields had been replaced by urban settlements, which included the river park, the booming country house scene, and a traditional arts center. These changes were the main con- tributors to the increasing patch edge of paddy fields. Viewing paddy fields in Dong- shan River Basin as unique man-made habitats, attention is then given to both the dispersion of built-up patches and the increase in size of the patch edge of paddy fields.

Fashion, Heritance and Family

ABSTRACTThis article explores the material culture of the eighteenth-century aristocracy through a detailed analysis of the Leigh family of Stoneleigh Abbey. Drawing on a succession of detailed inventories and a large collection of receipted bills, the article explores changes and continuities in the spatiality of material culture at Stoneleigh and, in particular, the ways in which old and new coexisted through the differential construction and use of domestic space. On the basis of this evidence we argue that conspicuous consumption and positional goods were only one aspect of methodologies of distinction in the complex semiotics of status expressed through country house interiors. Rank, dignity and lineage were also expressed through older goods and goods with ‘patina’ value.

Values of property (properties of value): capitalization of kinship in Norway

This paper examines the multiple forms of value invested in holiday properties among some Norwegian families. Holiday homes – summer houses, mountain cabins and country houses – are common in Norway, as are many of the practices through which they are inhabited, shared and inherited. Within the legal practices of testaments and handovers can be found a wealth of kinds of value, some of which can be translated into each other. For example, the capitalization of ownership and use for the purposes of inheritance concretize the relations between family members in both financial and emotional terms. In exploring these relations, this paper considers the connections between people, property, landscape and movement through time.

Houghton Revisited: The Walpole Masterpieces from Catherine the Great’s Hermitage

Sir Robert Walpole (1676–1745) doubtless owes his fame to his career as an influential politician. After entering parliament in 1701 at the age of twenty-five, he reached the climax of his political career in 1721 when he became Britain’s first serving Prime Minister. His official term of office still partially overshadows his more private activity as an assiduous art collector. The first acquisition in the show Houghton Revisited (held at Houghton Hall in Norfolk, 17 May – 24 November 2013), Jan Griffier’s Landscape with Ruins of c. 1690, was made in 1718. The collection grew quickly and by 1736 it included notable paintings by Van Dyck, Rembrandt, Rubens, Velázquez, Jordaens, Poussin, Murillo and Maratta. Walpole’s dozen London residences – 10 Downing Street included – eventually could not offer enough display space so, from the early 1720s, Walpole commissioned a country house, Houghton Hall in north-west Norfolk, built by architects James Gibbs and Colen Campbell with the inter ior designer William Kent. Here, from about 1730, he amassed and displayed first a selection and, after his retirement in 1742, his entire collection.

Bernard Berenson’s Silent Conversations

Bernard Berenson’s Silent Conversations Ben Downing (bio) How very different were J. Alfred Prufrock and Bernard Berenson! Where the former impotently watched the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo, the latter drew them like bees to pollen, held them rapt with dazzling discourses on not just Michelangelo but a thousand lesser-known painters, and sometimes even persuaded them to buy whatever masterwork he happened to be lauding, with a nice little commission for himself. No “one-night cheap hotels” or “sawdust restaurants” for Berenson—he slept on and dined off the best Continental linens, whether at a St. Moritz hotel, Edith Wharton’s country house, or his own Florentine villa. Far from being prey to “a hundred indecisions,” he was vehemently decisive, and far from being fixed “in a formulated phrase…pinned and wriggling on the wall,” it was he who did the fixing, whether skewering his enemies with epigrams or nailing down the attribution of a painting with a few choice and seemingly inarguable phrases. Whereas Prufrock was tormented by the mermaids’ singing and a vision of them “riding seaward on the waves,” whenever Berenson looked at Botticelli’s Venus surfing on her scallop shell—even as a teenager he spent entire afternoons gazing at a copy of the painting in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts—he was filled with an almost orgasmic ecstasy. He measured out his life not with coffee spoons but espresso cups and dared to eat the juiciest peaches. This comparison between a real-life art historian and T. S. Eliot’s invented wallflower is of course perfectly absurd, and I’m ill equipped to defend it. (The fact that both Berenson and Eliot, after graduating from Harvard, moved permanently to Europe and became preeminent [End Page 302] in their fields hardly seems relevant.) But after reading Rachel Cohen’s wonderfully nuanced and suggestive study of Berenson, I found Prufrock popping into my head with surprising insistence. At first he merely seemed Berenson’s opposite, a figure thwarted in all the ways that Berenson was fulfilled. Yet the longer I sat with “Love Song”—which, incidentally, strikes me with renewed force each time I read it: the poem’s languorously coiling music and crushingly sad frivolity are unique—the more I began to notice similarities. For Berenson, despite his success, was gnawed by Prufrockian doubt and self-recrimination. Like poor J. Alfred, he was disgusted by “all the butt-ends of my days and ways” and oppressed by the sense of an “overwhelming question” that he could never quite answer. Again, it was Cohen’s short biography that sent me off on these dubious musings. While the book itself isn’t the least bit loopy or self-indulgent, it has the effect of putting Berenson before us as a person of exceptional complexity, split down the middle by contradictions that made him hell on himself and those around him—he could be a true monster of peevishness—yet fascinating to contemplate from a safe distance. Admittedly, the few other books I’ve read on Berenson have had some of the same effect. But Cohen’s, by concentrating on his essential character rather than the hectic surface of his life, manages to bring him into an especially tight and revealing focus. It makes a perfect adjunct to Ernest Samuels’s justly celebrated two-volume biography, with its hundreds of names and minute unraveling of Berenson’s countless dealings, intrigues, quarrels, and amours. Samuels’s double-barrel treatment was warranted not only by the scale of Berenson’s interactions but by his longevity and multiple phases, and at this point a quick review of his ninety-four years seems in order. Born Bernhard Valvrojenski in Lithuania in 1865, he immigrated ten years later to Boston, where his father scraped by as a tin peddler. After Harvard, he was sent to Europe on a traveling fellowship by a group of philanthropic Bostonians impressed by his genius. In an astonishingly short time he made himself an expert in Italian [End Page 303 ] Renaissance art, writing five books on it by 1907 and serving as a scout, adviser, and buyer to, among others, Isabella Stewart Gardner, who...

"Eu quero uma casa no campo": a busca do verde em Belo Horizonte, 1966-1976

A expansão de condomínios horizontais esteve diretamente relacionada às condições históricas que acarretaram a deterioração e o abandono do centro urbano de Belo Horizonte, entre meados das décadas de 1960 e 1970. Nesse contexto, alguns tiveram o privilégio de escolher o sonho da casa no campo, atraídos por promessas de uma vida renovada, mergulhados nos paradoxos do desenvolvimento e dos dramas sociais, políticos e ambientais em curso no Brasil durante a ditadura civil-militar. Cientistas e técnicos realizavam as primeiras avaliações dos dilemas da poluição ambiental urbana. Entretanto, temas ambientais se configuravam como assunto extemporâneo e distante da política, subestimados por setores brasileiros de direita e esquerda. A perda de qualidade de vida em Belo Horizonte recebeu soluções individuais, por vezes com aspectos comunitários. O caráter simultâneo desses processos na capital mineira esclarece casos históricos similares em outras grandes metrópoles brasileiras e latino-americanas.

Arqueología virtual en una estancia colonial argentina

This is a first approach to the application of virtual reconstruction techniques of a colonial house. In Argentina it is still uncommon to perform 3D modeling of archaeological sites and especially in historical archeology. As a first step, we used the Google SketchUp to model the country house located on the banks of the Río de la Plata (Buenos Aires). It has historical significance because it belonged to a Spanish councilman, housed hundreds of slaves and was the place where stayed the troops that carried out the Second British Invasion of Buenos Aires. In this case, the 3D modeling was useful for evaluating the future excavationa and activities of preservation of cultural heritage.

THE RHODES COLLECTIONA NATIONAL ASSET

Virtually all of the biographies which discuss Cecil Rhodes' private life, as opposed to his political and business career, record that his favourite reading was Marcus Aurelius' Meditations and Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I His fascination with the latter led to a project which could have been Southern Africa's greatest contribution to Classical scholarship. The scheme was some time in its formulation, as the original idea was conceived on his lengthy to England in 1888 (before his return in August 1889) when he was chiefly occupied with securing a Royal charter for the British South Africa Company.2 It was not until around 1893 that the plan was put into action.J In discussing Gibbon during a country house visit (Williams 1921:223) Rhodes regretted that he could not read in the original Greek and Latin the ancient authorities quoted by Gibbon and that there were no good translations readily available; he was advised to consult Mr. Arthur Humphreys of Hatchards. The following is Mr. Humphreys' account of what happened:...

Memory and Private Mourning in an English Country House during the First World War: Lady Alda Hoare’s Musical Shrine to a Lost Son

Considered in the context of contemporary, upper-class mourning practices on the British home front, Lady Alda Hoare’s annotated sheet music collection symbolized a shrine to her son, who was killed in the First World War. Such use of material objects as sources of consolation became substitutes for the normal ritual of a burial, since soldiers’ bodies were not sent home. Departing from the existing literature’s focus on the public and professional musical responses to the War, Lady Alda’s music reveals an alternative, intensely private way in which music, as a symbol of memory, aided in the grieving process.

The Children of the King by Sonya Hartnett (review)

Reviewed by: The Children of the King by Sonya Hartnett Deborah Stevenson Hartnett, Sonya. The Children of the King. Candlewick, 2014. [272p]. Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-7636-6735-1 $16.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-7636-7042-9 $16.99 Reviewed from galleys R* Gr. 5-8 See this month’s Big Picture, p. 347, for review. When German bombs begin to fall on London, Cecily Lockwood, her older brother Jeremy, and their mother leave the city for the safety of the family’s country seat, Heron Hall. On the way there, Cecily impulsively insists they also take in an evacuee child, and so calm, intrepid May, more grown at ten than Cecily is at twelve, joins them at the Hall. The country peace can be deceiving, however: Cecily frets that May proves to be an independent being rather than a grateful toy, Jeremy seethes at being forced to flee when he wants to help defend his home and country, and the girls are intrigued but troubled by the strange boys they find hiding in the ruins of nearby Snow Castle. As Uncle Peregrine, owner of Heron Hall, spins the tale of the fallen stronghold, it becomes clear that centuries-old stories and centuries-old savagery have surprising relevance to the children’s current lives. The scenario here is familiar and even cozy: a country house, well-heeled children, a mid-century adventure, and possible ghosts, and even the wartime atmosphere is pleasantly adventurous at the Lockwoods’ safe distance. With skilled layering, though, Australian author Hartnett embraces this scenario in a way that its fans will appreciate but also subtly tweaks it, making classic pleasures and contemporary judgment strangely comfortable partners. Her writing is superb, carrying echoes of Austen but also touched with a perceptive yet incisive wit that recalls Muriel Spark, and the book stealthily alludes to the Lockwoods’ considerable privilege and shades its dismantling. Cecily (blessed with “well-fed certainty”) has never encountered a situation that her beloved father can’t solve and sees no reason why the war will be any different; Jeremy both struggles against the luxury of safety (and the “agony of being insignificant”) and the threat to his future enjoyment of the life he has expected; Jeremy’s eventual break with parental control shatters his mother not just because of maternal anxiety but also because this is the first time she’s failed to get her way. Similarly, the third-person narration focalizes through Cecily but wryly and persistently observes her limitations (“Cecily had taken to the role of instructor with ease, and found it hardly any bother to be constantly criticising and instructing”), a technique that heightens her contrast with self-possessed May, whose inner thoughts remain uncatalogued, and whose secret remains hidden (from Cecily, at least) until just before the end. An underlying theme of humanity’s lust for power and its terrible consequences plays out most overtly in Uncle Peregrine’s story: told in episodes, with archetypal terms for characters rather than names, it’s actually the tale of Richard III and the young princes in the Tower, who are rumored to have ended their days at Snow Castle. The interpolated tale becomes gripping in its own right, and it [End Page 347] converges with the World War II story in places both expected and unexpected, with the long-gone victim princes perhaps able to make their final peace with the help of Cecily and May, and possibly providing one last connection for May with her beloved late father. Yet other themes rise strongly as well: Cecily and Jeremy begin to realize the human limitations of their parents; Cecily begins to reach just a little past her comfortable complacency; all of the characters face the reality of change in both their loved ones and the world they know. Together, it’s an atmospheric concoction, haunted in the nicest possible ways, and readable at various levels of sophistication (and also suitable for an ongoing readaloud). Fans of classic children’s literature will delight in seeing a familiar plot so richly interpreted, and sharp readers will appreciate the provocative new resonance under the old story. (See p. 360 for publication...