London Letter Research Articles

Markenzeichen Exil und OrientMoritz Hartmann als Auslandskorrespondent der Kölnischen Zeitung 1852–1862

Abstract The liberal pre-March poet and Paulskirche deputy Moritz Hartmann (1821‒1872) earned his living in exile after 1848, not least thanks to the publication of his Paris and London letters, travel features and stories in Joseph DuMont’s Kölnische Zeitung. Of fundamental importance for his reputation as a foreign correspondent was his rumour-ridden stay as a Crimean War correspondent in Turkey in 1854/55, which he himself repeatedly recalled as a trademark.

Marketing Masks and Makeup in Mollie Panter-Downes’s “Letter from London”

Abstract Over the span of almost fifty years the British author Mollie Panter-Downes contributed 852 pieces to the New Yorker; this included 153 London Letters during World War II alone. In these Panter-Downes reported on the “everyday” aspects of the British home front experience, including fashion accessories such as the gas-mask case and lipstick. This essay argues that Panter-Downes’s inclusion of these wartime commodities served two purposes. First, she shows how fashion was part of the “total war” culture in Britain, where war equipment (like the gas mask) was sold to British women, but also how a domestic purchase (like lipstick) became a weapon of war. The second and purposely camouflaged result of Panter-Downes’s descriptions of wartime capitalism was to market the war to New Yorker readers to garner American sympathy for, and support of, Britain’s ongoing struggle.

Place and the postcolonial poetry of Nigeria

ABSTRACT This article examines postcolonial engagements with place in modern Nigerian poetry. By foregrounding the mutual implication of text and place, it attends to the transnational struggles over spatial representations and alterity. It also explores how similar tensions are replicated on a smaller scale in terms of nation, region, and ethnic geography. Such a focus on the literary articulation of both the local and the global demonstrates the fractal dimensions of colonialism, as well as the spatial consequences of coloniality within the (Nigerian) postcolony. Four works – Tade Ipadeola’s A Time of Signs, Odia Ofeimun’s London Letter and Other Poems, Niran Okewole’s The Hate Artist, and Niyi Osundare’s The Eye of the Earth – provide the basis for the analysis. The article also sets out the importance of poetry, which tends to be marginalized in studies of modern African literature, as a crucial dimension of the African postcolonial interrogation of place.

Elucidating the relationships between two automated handwriting feature quantification systems for multiple pairwise comparisons.

Recent advances in complex automated handwriting identification systems have led to a lack of understandability of these systems' computational processes and features by the forensic handwriting examiners that they are designed to support. To mitigate this issue, this research studied the relationship between two systems: FLASH ID® , an automated handwriting/black box system that uses measurements extracted from a static image of handwriting, and MovAlyzeR® , a system that captures kinematic features from pen strokes. For this study, 33 writers each wrote 60 phrases from the London Letter using cursive writing and handprinting, which led to thousands of sample pairs for analysis. The dissimilarities between pairs of samples were calculated using two score functions (one for each system). The observed results indicate that dissimilarity scores based on kinematic spatial-geometric pen stroke features (e.g., amplitude and slant) have a statistically significant relationship with dissimilarity scores obtained using static, graph-based features used by the FLASH ID® system. Similar relationships were observed for temporal features (e.g., duration and velocity) but not pen pressure, and for both handprinting and cursive samples. These results strongly imply that both the current implementation of FLASH ID® and MovAlyzeR® rely on similar features sets when measuring differences in pairs of handwritten samples. These results suggest that studies of biometric discrimination using MovAlyzeR® , specifically those based on the spatial-geometric feature set, support the validity of biometric matching algorithms based on FLASH ID® output.

Medieval Historical Writing: Britain and Ireland, 500–1500. Edited by Jennifer Jahner, Emily Steiner, and Elizabeth M. Tyler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xvi+581.

<i>Medieval Historical Writing: Britain and Ireland, 500–1500</i>. Edited by Jennifer Jahner, Emily Steiner, and Elizabeth M. Tyler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xvi+581.

On Twentieth-Century Literature’s Andrew J. Kappel Prize in Literary Criticism, 2020

The winner of this year’s prize is Annabel Williams’s “Fantasias on National Themes: Fantasy, Space, and Imperialism in Rebecca West.” The judge is Wai Chee Dimock, William Lampson Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University and editor of PMLA. Her books include Residues of Justice: Literature, Law, Philosophy (1996), Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (2006), Shades of the Planet (2007), and a team-edited anthology, American Literature in the World: Anne Bradstreet to Octavia Butler (2017). Other writings have appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Chronicle of Higher Education. Her new book, Weak Planet: Literature and Assisted Survival (2020), was just published.This year’s winning essay, “Fantasias on National Themes: Fantasy, Space, and Imperialism in Rebecca West,” is exemplary in more ways than one. It makes a wide-ranging and richly historicized claim on behalf of an undertheorized genre: fantasy. It does so by redrawing the architectural as well as geopolitical maps of literature, putting London and Belgrade in each other’s orbit, linking the Georgian mansions of Portland Place to Emperor Diocletian’s palace in Split, Dalmatia. And it puts at the center of modernism two overlooked works by Rebecca West: Harriet Hume (1929) and Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), using these as entry points to a literary network at once populous and phantasmagoric, utterly familiar yet thrillingly off-key. Feminism here crosses paths with imperialism, and characters from E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf mingle with those from Katherine Mayo and Sylvia Townsend Warner as gendered witchcraft and statecraft collide, in the UK and in India and Yugoslavia.Jacqueline Rose, Tzvetan Todorov, Michel de Certeau, and Edward Said frame these discussions. But the essay is most striking in its granular engagement with the entire West corpus, often drawing on her reviews of other authors to cast light on her own works. West’s definition of fantasy as “the medium which just at this moment” enables authors to be “true children of our age” is taken, for instance, from the 1929 “London Letter” she wrote for the New York–based Bookman, praising David Garnet’s Lady into Fox (1922), Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The True Heart (1929), and Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando (1928). This conception of fantasy as grounded in geopolitics made it possible for West to invoke the 1389 Battle of Kosovo—sealing the fate of the Serbs in the hands of the Ottoman Empire—as a template for understanding British colonialism as it grappled with the demand for self-rule in India. It also allowed her to set herself apart from the Bloomsbury intellectuals, who, according to her, tended “to use the words ‘nationalism’ and ‘imperialism’ as if they meant the same thing.” For West, “There is not the smallest reason for confounding nationalism, which is the desire of a people to be itself, with imperialism, which is the desire of a people to prevent other peoples from being themselves.”Still, the essay makes it clear that West herself is not altogether immune from imperialist urgings. Even as Harriet Hume makes fun of a gullible British public embracing a fictitious “Mondh” as the crown jewel of the British Raj, it names the Indian prince who exploits that gullibility “Caramalzaman,” a name taken from One Thousand and One Nights, popularized in the 1920s by the Ballets Russes’ adaptation of Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. The stylistic extravagance of Harriet Hume, like the stylistic extravagance of Woolf ’s Orlando, is steeped in the cultural medium that it dissects. It is a modernism that is “part conflict, part dance.” Even as it “deflates the colonizing impulse,” it “plunders its tropes to enrich the novel’s fantastic backdrop.” Tracing this contrapuntal dynamics, the essay gives us a genre saturated by the world and overflowing in its excess, a genre as alive in our own time as it was a century ago.The Andrew J. Kappel Prize in Literary Criticism, named for the late critic and esteemed deputy editor of Twentieth-Century Literature, is awarded annually to the author of a work submitted to the journal during the preceding year that is judged to make the most impressive contribution to our understanding and appreciation of the literature of the twentieth century. Nominees are chosen by the editor of Twentieth-Century Literature and members of the editorial board. A different prominent literary critic serves each year as judge.

Estimation of Age through Handwriting Characteristics in Female Writers

Objectives: To study the estimation of age through handwriting Characteristics in Females. Handwriting changes progressively according to the passage of time, these changes depends on various factors: the writing experience, physical and mental health, gender and age. Methods/Statistical Analysis: In the present study 100 handwriting samples from 5 different age groups of females (Indian) from 20 to 60 years and above were collected. The individuals were asked to write London letter on Blank A-4 sheet. The analysis of handwriting samples were done to extract out some specific class and individual characteristics. A coding system is followed for class characteristics to simplify the research. Percentage proportions of the class characteristics were calculated. Findings: Results discussed individually for each group. The class characteristics such as slant, speed, tremors, hesitation marks has varied in percentage for different age groups which is helpful in understanding a fine demarcation between ages of different groups. A probable assessment can be done of age of female writers from the findings of this research. After considering the out puts of this study it can be easily estimated a rough idea about the age of female writers. It would be helpful for document examiner to proceed and take initiative in case related to determination of age in females in forensic question document examination. This research work can also be useful to exclude the innocent one with the help of other corroborative evidences. By analyzing above data it is easy to estimate up to some extent the approximate age of the writer from the handwriting samples. Some characteristics are found to be really valuable and helpful for age determination such as alignment, spacing, hesitation marks, tremor and speed . Application/Improvements: These characteristic of handwriting showed significant correlation with the age of the writer, it can be considered as a corroborative evidence in questioned document and helpful to identify a tentative age of a person.

The royal entries of Henry VI in a London civic manuscript

ABSTRACTLondon Metropolitan Archives, Archives of the Corporation of London, MS Letter Book K, contains descriptions of Henry VI's royal entries into both Paris (1431) and London (1432). Their placement one after the other in a London Letter Book was likely the work of the city's common clerk, John Carpenter, who was the author of the description of the London entry. The royal entry descriptions' textual contents and manuscript context demonstrate a conscious effort to compare the two events and the king's two capitals, and to promote the city of London over Paris.

Forty Years On: The 40th Anniversary of The London Journal

When The London Journal first appeared in May 1975, the first volume opened with an Editorial Statement of intent. ‘This volume will present London history, society, arts and letters from a new app...

Broadcasting to the ‘last outpost of the British Empire’: Anthony Lejeune, the man behind the SABC's English Service London Letter (1965–1995)

Anthony Lejeune, the son of an acclaimed British film critic, was born in 1928 and after attending the University of Oxford made his career as a London-based professional journalist, writing for the weekly intellectual journal Time and Tide and later for the Daily Express among others. He also wrote detective novels and in later life penned some very readable histories of the gentlemen's clubs of London. A chance meeting in London in the mid-1960s with Dewar McCormack of the English Service of the SABC led to Lejeune beginning to broadcast a weekly radio London Letter to South Africa every Sunday evening after the six o'clock news bulletin. London Letter was to last for nearly 30 years. The article chronicles Lejeune's career and looks at the background to the London Letter, exploring its contents and evaluating the nature of Lejeune's conservatism and his personal connections with much of the subject matter which he discussed.

Canada and the End of the Imperial Dream: Beverley Baxter’s Reports from London through War and Peace, 1936-1960 by Neville Thompson (review)

Reviewed by: Canada and the End of the Imperial Dream: Beverley Baxter’s Reports from London through War and Peace, 1936-1960 by Neville Thompson Daniel Gorman Thompson, Neville – Canada and the End of the Imperial Dream: Beverley Baxter’s Reports from London through War and Peace, 1936-1960. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. 394. In a 1931 BBC radio broadcast entitled “That Commonwealth Feeling,” the British diplomat, politician, and writer Harold Nicolson declared that the dominions had recently “began to emerge above our horizon as something unaccountable, as something forlorn and strange and powerful; as something mysterious, compelling, imminent”(Harold Nicolson, People and Things: Wireless Talks, London, 1931, pp. 145-6). The same year as Nicolson’s wireless talk, the Statute of Westminster gave the dominions legislative equality with the United Kingdom by granting them autonomy in foreign affairs, a symbolic “end” to the imperial relationship. Yet imperialism, or more accurately an attachment to Britons, British affairs, and things British, remained centrally important for many English-speaking Canadians for another generation. Indeed, as Neville Thompson demonstrates in this wide-ranging and elegantly written book, the “imperial dream” of a shared Anglo-Canadian identity and purpose survived, if in a diminished form and for fewer and fewer people, into the early 1960s. Thompson’s medium for tracking this development is the bi-weekly London Letters column written by the Canadian journalist and British Member of Parliament Beverley Baxter for Maclean’s magazine between 1936 and 1960. [End Page 837] Beverley Baxter had a Methodist upbringing in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Toronto. The British Empire exerted a strong imaginative pull for the young Baxter. After work selling pianos and service in Europe during the First World War, Baxter stayed on in London and successfully lobbied the most famous Canadian expatriate in Britain, Lord Beaverbrook (Max Aiken), for a job in journalism. He went on to make his fortune, and never again returned full-time to live in Canada. Baxter even published an autobiography in 1935, telling the story of how he had ascended to a position of influence in the imperial metropole. Canada and the End of the Imperial Dream is a hybrid, part biography of Baxter, part analysis of the high British political history which Baxter observed from the margins as a Conservative Member of Parliament from 1935 until his death in 1964. The books’ central themes are symbolized by the two figures represented in the cover photograph, neither of whom is Baxter. Instead, we see Beaverbrook, then British Minister of Supply, and Winston Churchill standing on the deck of HMS Prince of Wales in 1941 during the Allied conference off the coast of Newfoundland which resulted in the Atlantic Charter. Far from a case of false advertising, the cover depicts the two figures whose imperial visions Baxter spent his career advancing. Beaverbrook was the more direct influence, giving Baxter his start in journalism at the Daily Express. As Baxter wrote of himself and Beaverbrook when looking back on his career in his final London Letter in 1960, they had “beat the Empire drum on all possible and even impossible occasions” (p. 355). While they sometimes fell out over other political questions, Baxter and Beaverbrook always remained simpatico over the importance for Canada of the imperial tie. It was only the debacle of the Suez Crisis and the subsequent promise of entering the European Community that finally persuaded Baxter that the imperial dream was over. In his politics, Baxter was a journalistic weathervane. Always a conservative, he variously supported and opposed the successive grandees of the British Conservative party, from fellow Canadian Andrew Bonar Law through Stanley Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain, Churchill, Anthony Eden, and Harold Macmillan. The central message he propagated throughout the period, however, was that of closer imperial union. This meant the old Joseph Chamberlain vision of imperial preference, as well as during the Second World War an imperial war cabinet and overseas conscription for Canadians. Beyond such formal manifestations of imperialism, even then somewhat dated, what Baxter really wished to convey to Canadians was the allure of English sophistication and culture. It is tempting to see Baxter’s imperial arias as simple chauvinism...

At home? Discoursing on the Commonwealth at the 1965 Commonwealth Arts Festival

The Commonwealth Arts Festival was staged in Britain in 1965. With the working title of “The Commonwealth At Home”, the Festival was designed, ostensibly, to bring together far flung lands, connected by the legacy of empire, to establish goodwill through culture and the arts. This paper explores the cultural work to which the 1965 Festival was put by advocates and detractors. Looking at archival sources from proposed plans for the London events, committee minutes, festival programmes, and letters, to the staging of the “Verse and Voice” festival of Commonwealth Poetry at the Royal Court Theatre in London, the paper fleshes out some of the rationales and motivations for the event, examines tropes and metaphors used, and also situates the events within the context of recently passed British anti-immigration laws. The paper argues that who the Commonwealth was for — its locus and its meaning — can be excavated from the geo-political tropic deployment of space in its discoursing. In particular, the depiction of what was imagined as being at home and what was represented as distant lands tells revealing stories of disavowal for an empire (and a colonial legacy) that occurred somewhere else and to someone else; in this manner, Britain’s “fit of absence of mind” also became a way of disposing of unwanted histories.

The London Letters of Samuel Molyneux, 1712–13. Edited by Ann Saunders. Pp 168. London: London Topographical Society. 2011. £20.

The London Letters of Samuel Molyneux, 1712–13. Edited by Ann Saunders. Pp 168. London: London Topographical Society. 2011. £20.

The London Letters of Samuel Molyneux, 1712–13 – Edited by Paul Holden

The London Letters of Samuel Molyneux, 1712–13 – Edited by Paul Holden

Lost for words on hearing of opposition to seacole statue.

When I read Lynn McDonald's letter informing us of the opposition to the siting of Mary Seacole's memorial statue on the sacred soil of St Thomas' Hospital in south east London (letters May 16), I was so astonished that, for the first time in my life, I was absolutely speechless.

On Meeting Stanley Cavell

On Meeting Stanley Cavell Michael Fried In the marvelous book that we are celebrating today, Little Did I Know, Stanley Cavell devotes two pages—two absolutely thrilling pages, in my opinion—to our first encounter in Cambridge, Massachusetts one evening in the fall of 1962. For my contribution to this symposium, I thought it would be appropriate to describe the lead-up to that occasion from my point of view and then to go on and say something about the not quite immediate aftermath, by which I mean about what transpired between Stanley and me in the weeks and months that followed his definitive move to Cambridge one year later, in the fall of 1963. But first that original, enchanted evening. As Stanley mentions, I had been an undergraduate at Princeton (where I was a contemporary of the painter Frank Stella, studied with the literary critic R. P. Blackmur, and also made early contact with the art critic Clement Greenberg), and then spent two years at Oxford (where I studied with no one, barely kept myself sane, played a lot of tennis on grass, and developed some important friendships). I went on to spend the following year in London as a special student in philosophy at UCL, where I studied with Stuart Hampshire and Richard Wollheim, began my career as an art critic by writing a monthly London Letter for the New York magazine ARTS (which exactly paid the rent), and entered into a lifelong critical engagement with the work of the British sculptor Anthony Caro, who had recently broken through to absolutely major achievement. I should mention that I was also writing poems, most of which were published in a new journal called the review, edited by one of the copains I made at Oxford, the strongest British poet of his generation, Ian Hamilton. At the end of the summer of 1962 I returned to this country and began graduate study in [End Page 937] the History of Art at Harvard, interspersed with monthly excursions to New York where I went around galleries and museums with Frank Stella and then returned to Cambridge to write a monthly New York Letter for Art International. I was in the first months of this demanding but exhilarating routine when Stanley and I met. As Stanley explains, this came about largely through the mediation of Stanley’s friend and contemporary, also a philosopher, Marshall Cohen. Stanley and Marshall had been Junior Fellows together in the Harvard Society of Fellows, and when Stanley left Cambridge for a first position at Berkeley, Marshall stayed on at Harvard as an Assistant Professor (or Instructor, whatever they called starting positions at that time). Marshall’s specialty was esthetics, specifically the nature of metaphor, but in the end he was rejected for tenure; at that same moment Stanley submitted his dissertation, written under dramatic circumstances and completed at the last possible instant (as Stanley narrates in his book), and he was offered the open position. So in effect Stanley went directly from pulling countless all-nighters in an effort to hold onto his job at Berkeley to accepting a chair as the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard—a dramatic transition, to say the least. That had happened the previous year (1961–62), and in 1962–63, again as Stanley explains, he had a year’s fellowship to the Institute in Advanced Study at Princeton, officially to turn his thesis into a book (two decades later, of course, it Aufhebunged into that philosophical masterpiece The Claim of Reason). From Princeton it was no big deal to visit Cambridge, and that was what he did on this occasion (but on no other that year that I recall). For my part, at Oxford I had got to know several former Harvard undergraduates who had returned to Cambridge; in addition a particularly close friend of mine at Oxford, John Womack, Jr., was training himself in Latin American History at Harvard (he would spend his academic career teaching the subject there); which meant that when I arrived in Cambridge I had a small community of contemporaries waiting for me. And at the center of...

Another Tale of Two Cities: Contestation of Globalization in Odia Ofeimun’s "London Letter and Other Poems"

Globalization, as a process and not yet a state, in all its social, economic and cultural aspirations, coupled with its trappings of contradictions, depends largely on the centrality of the city. Whether from London to New York, the Asian Tigers to Lagos and Johannesburg, the image of the city looms large in such a way that suggests how the conceptual agenda dates back to history, reminding us of the roles of various cities as veritable sites of operation for the various previous Euro-American imperialist activities, be they in the form of colonialism or neocolonialism in the Third World. However, the current postmodern agenda does not only implicate the cities, but also critically operates in such a manner that creates a split betweenthem; that is, the deviation between the global and non-global cities. This paper, therefore, seeks to study London Letter and other Poems (2000), a poetry collection by Nigeria’s Odia Ofeimun, as a direct response to the challenge of globalization, as it contextualizes the challenging experience of Lagos migrants in a global city like London, is against Lagos, their non-global city of nativity. It also examines the implication of this for the emergent concept. It will specifically explore the contradictions and odds against the operation of globalization, besides the fact that it impoverishes some cities to enrich others in terms of financial and human resources. Beyond this, the paper will highlight the devaluation of the status of the migrants in the global city of London as they operate from the fringe as a result of such issues as capitalism, race, nationality, identity and nativity.

After Horsemonger Lane: Leigh Hunt's London Letters to Byron (1815–1816)

After Horsemonger Lane: Leigh Hunt's London Letters to Byron (1815–1816)

Lydgate matters: poetry and material culture in the fifteenth century

Lydgate Matters L. H. Cooper and A. Denny-Brown Lydgate and London's Public Culture C. Sponsler Lydgate's Golden Cows: Appetite and Avarice in Bycorne and Chychevache A. Denny-Brown Sovereignty and Sewage P. Strohm Lydgate's Worse Poem M. Nolan 'Markys...Off the Workman': Heresy, Hagiography, and the Heavens in The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man L. H. Cooper Lydgate, Lovelich, and London Letters M. R. Warren St. George and the 'Steyned Halle': Lydgate's Verse for the London Armourers J. Floyd Lydgate, Location, and the Poetics of Exemption J. M. Ganim Lydgate's Refrain: The Open When D. Vance Smith

The margins or the metropole? The location of home in Odia Ofeimun's London Letter and Other Poems

This paper reads Odia Ofeimun's London Letter and Other Poems (2000) in light of contestations with regard to the conception and location of home in postcolonial travel writing. The collection is seen as preoccupied with the burden of self-location and the associated problem of self-definition in this tradition. The migrant postcolonial writer is understood as almost always caught in a dilemma once a choice has to be made between identifying with the original homeland (which in most cases also coincides with the margins) and the colonial “mother country”, the metropolis. This necessitates either appreciating the burden of self-definition in a simplistic manner or realistically affirming the complexity that the heritage of colonial history introduces to problematise it. Ofeimun's collection is read as presenting a blunt appraisal of the postcolonial condition and an acceptance of the challenges it poses for people in the postcolonial world: the inevitability of affirming an alternative space which is in-between the metropole and the margins. Keywords: travel writing; postcoloniality; marginality Tydskrif vir Letterkunde • 43(2) • 2006: 107-121