Today people in the UK are celebrating the 200th birthday of the great author Charles Dickens.
Dickens himself explained an aspect of his ingenious creative process when he said:
An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.
Mr. Dickens Collects
Speaking of harvesting ideas, I bought a book many years ago that showed the lists that he kept, including unusual names that he noticed as he was walking around. At times he used some of this material for his books.
As John Camden-Hotten explained in his book Charles Dickens: The Story of His Life published in 2001:
It is said that when he saw a strange or odd name on a shop-board, or in walking through a village or country town, he entered it in his pocket-book, and added it to his reserve list.
Bah Humbug!
For example, considering the unusual names that Dickens used in his novels – who can forget ‘Ebenezer Scrooge’ featured in A Christmas Carol which was first published by Chapman & Hall only six days before Christmas in 1843.
We featured a quotation from that book here on one of our Christmas ecards:
Charles Dickens - A Christmas Carol
Today’s Memorial Service at Westminster Abbey
Back to our celebration today for Mr. Dickens: Jill Lawless reported for the Associated Press that Prince Charles and his wife Camilla joined the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, many of Dickens’ descendants, a group of dignitaries, and the actor Ralph Fiennes at a memorial service today in London’s Westminster Abbey.
Prince Charles also laid a wreath of white roses and snowdrops on the writer’s grave in Poet’s Corner, while two of Dickens’ youngest descendants added two small white posies to the floral tribute.
Dear Mr. Dickens
Claire Tomalin who wrote a biography of Dickens published in 2011 called Charles Dickens: A Life wrote the novelist a letter for this special day.
Called A letter to Charles Dickens on his 200th birthday it was published in the Guardian today and you can find it here.
Many thanks for your letter, Ms. Tomalin, and for this ending of yours with which so many of us agree:
Mr Dickens, you are still, and always will be, the Inimitable.
Many happy returns.
REFERENCES
Books Charles Dickens: The Story of His Life by John Canden Hotten 2001, University Press of the Pacific
Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin 2011, Viking Press
It was a sweet view – sweet to the eye and the mind. English verdure, English culture, English comfort, seen under a sun bright, without being oppressive.
– from ‘Emma’, Jane Austen’s novel published in 1815
Jane Austen had lived for six years in this redbrick 18th century house called Chawton Cottage when she had her character Emma air these observations about the estate belonging to the character Mr. Knightley in her novel Emma.
My husband David took this photo when we visited Jane Austen’s House Museum in Chawton, Hampshire in southern England last summer. So I hope you enjoy this dose of summer as you read this in the depth of winter!
It is often said that authors write best about the realities that they know, and so I think that Jane might well have been referring to her own home located in the quiet English countryside when she wrote this description in Emma.
Called Chawton Cottage during Jane’s lifetime, Jane moved to the village of Chawton in the summer of 1809 when she was 34 years old.
Finding Jane in the 21st Century
The Arduous Path To Chawton
Four years before she arrived to live in relative peace at Chawton that summer, however, Jane and her family experienced first hand what dependency on a male head of a household meant in her era when her father Reverend George Austen died at the age of 74 in January 1805.
The family was living in Bath at the time. After her father died, however, the family had to leave Bath and Jane moved two more times with her mother and sister, each time to lodgings that were less expensive than the last.
Following this they stayed in several other locations including Clifton, Adlestrop, Stoneleigh, Kent, and Southampton, and small seaside places.
I would think that the cumulative effect of this dislocation also added to Jane’s sensitivity as an author since she learned first hand what it was like to live in ‘reduced circumstances’, as the euphemism of the time termed it.
Unsettling Times
Biographers have claimed that during this destabilizing period of her life when she and her family moved about (getting rid of all of their furniture as well along the way), Jane seemed unable to write.
She must have dealt with her writing block to some degree, however, because as Elizabeth Proudman explains in her booklet called The Essential Guide to Finding Jane Austen in Chawton, the novelist “always carried with her the manuscripts of three unpublished novels, Elinor and Marianne, First Impressions, and Susan.”
Refuge At Last
Finally in July 1809 which was four-and-a-half years after her father died, the Austens moved into Chawton Cottage.
Jane had effectively moved back home because the small village of Chawton is in the same county of Hampshire as the village of Steventon where Jane spent the first 25 years of her life. Her family only left the county in 1800 to move to Bath because her father wanted to retire there.
After traipsing about to different locations, the family finally went back to a neighboring part of the county that they had first left years earlier.
You can see this illustrated (and nifty!) map that my husband David made:
Where Jane Austen Lived
A Sharp Observer Who Did Not ‘Marry Well’
During Jane Austen’s lifetime, women’s social standing and economic security were intricately bound up with the men that they married.
So because she focused so centrally on this pressure to ‘marry well’ in her classic novels, I find it ironic that both Jane and her sister Cassandra themselves never married, either ‘well’ or otherwise.
However, perhaps precisely because she never tied the knot, Jane gained objectivity on such an important social element in her times that might have been impossible otherwise.
Pride and Prejudice‘s Famous Beginning
Surely Jane’s circumstances influenced her writing, as you can see reflected in this very famous beginning of her classic novel Pride and Prejudice which was published when she had lived in Chawton for four years:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.
The Quill, The Inkwell, The Desk!
When we visiting Chawton, I found it exciting to be in Jane’s physical space, to be in the room where she wrote her ingenious novels.
For example, here is Jane’s writing table that she used in Chawton – including the quill and inkwell that she used to write all of her wonderful novels.
Jane’s Writing Desk
A Room With A View
And from where Jane’s chair and this little table were located in the room, she could look outside through this window:
A Room With A View
A Gentleman’s Daughter
Like her heroine Elizabeth Bennet in her novel Pride and Prejudice, the woman who wrote her classics on that desk and looked out that window in Chawton was a gentleman’s daughter.
Her father George Austen was descended from a family of woollen manufacturers who had risen to the lower ranks of the landed gentry.
However, she wasn’t always assured this status since her father’s branch of the family went through difficult times when her father was a boy.
That was why it was his wealthy uncle Francis Austen who paid for his education. Then when when he was 16, George received a scholarship to Oxford to study for ordination.
A Lady’s Daughter
George continued his association with Oxford when he became engaged to Cassandra Leigh.
Branches of her Leigh family had academic connections with Oxford and included all classes of gentry.
And in terms of status, this intelligent woman was descended from a Lord Mayor of London during the reign of Elizabeth I.
The Austen Crew
This importance of family loomed large in Jane’s life.
As I read on the site of the Jane Austen Society of Australia (JASA), Claire Tomalin reflected in her biography Jane Austen: A Life that the author “lived with a perpetual awareness of cousinage extending over many counties and even beyond England.”
And along with this very large extended family, her nuclear family included eight children with Jane herself being the seventh born.
Here is the line-up of the Austen siblings – all of whom along with her mother outlived Jane: Her six brothers were James (b.1765), George (1766), Edward (1767), Henry (1771), Francis, or Frank (1774), and Charles (1779).
Her one sister named Cassandra (after their mother) was born in 1773, and Jane herself was born in 1775.
Reflections Of Reality?
As far as how her one sister figured in her life, Cassandra was Jane’s closest friend throughout the author’s lifetime.
Could it be that the sisters Elizabeth and Jane Bennet who are the main characters in Pride and Prejudice and who also are very close in fact echo the author’s real-life relationship with her own sister Cassandra?
Life In The Austen Family
Not surprisingly considering her parents’ backgrounds, another biographer of Austen named Park Honan pointed out that life in the Austen home was lived in “an open, amused, easy intellectual atmosphere.”
Perhaps this accounts for the fact according to Le Faye’s A Family Record that Jane “never again lived anywhere beyond the bounds of her immediate family environment” after returning from school in 1786.
Across The Grass To Chawton Cottage
Little Brother Saves The Day
The Chawton Cottage to where Jane and other family members went to live after their wanderings was a residence owned by none other than Jane’s third brother Edward.
How did her sibling have such means?
What happened was that when he was about 16 years old, Edward was adopted by Thomas and Catherine Knight of Godmersham Park in Kent who were wealthy and childless relatives of the Austens.
The Knights’ stipulation was that Edward would have to take the family name of Knight.
Arranging all of this was a practical way of ensuring that the inheritance would remain in the family, and gradually Edward was entrusted to the affectionate care of these relatives.
Edward Austen Knight eventually took over management of the estates at Godmersham and Chawton in 1797. He lived at Godmersham, and let the Great House (as it was called) at Chawton to gentlemen tenants.
By 1809 he offered the house in the village – i.e., Chawton Cottage – to his mother, Cassandra, and Jane.
Coping With The Reality Of Life In Georgian Times
Why would supposedly loving parents put one of their children up for adoption? I have wondered about this since I read this fact years ago about Edward.
In other words, even though it turns out that it was a generous gesture on the part of wealthy relatives as I have just explained – I still find the situation a bit unusual.
That’s why I was happy to read an explanation for this as put forth by Michael Giffin in his article called The people in Jane Austen’s life – The quintessential Georgian parents: George & Cassandra Austen featured in the JASA site.
An author, editor, and Anglican priest, Giffin in his article on the JASA site claims that too many biographers, historians, and critics fail to look at the Austen family in the context of the Georgian times in which they lived – which he summarized as follows:
…the Georgians… lived in the shadow of the Reformation, Civil War, Restoration, and Glorious Revolution. Their way of life was dominated by an unregulated capitalism …. Agrarian change threatened their economic security…. Their social life was determined by property and patronage…. Every class was restless and insecure and under threat.
Giffin further points out the following with particular reference to Edward’s adoption by the Knights, and the effect that this ultimately had on Jane’s life considering that her father had died:
…the adoptive and biological parents of Edward Austen had a series of socially-constructed and genetic expectations… for their mutual benefit,…. One by-product was an environment that supported Jane during her most brilliant and productive years… Austen’s life… would have been rendered much more difficult without the support of her brother….
The History of Chawton Cottage
As Elizabeth Proudman details in her pamphlet called The Essential Guide To Finding Jane Austen In Chawton, Chawton Cottage was built in around 1700. It then served as an ale house beside the coach road near by for some years.
Following that, it was the home of the farm bailiff who worked for the Knights, the wealthy relatives who adopted Jane’s brother Edward.
Later when Edward took over management of Godmersham and Chawton, he improved the house for his mother and sisters.
Designed With The Family In Mind
Because the house is so close to what was considered a busy road in that Georgian era, Edward had a window in the front closed and he had another Gothic one looking into the garden:
Chawton Cottage, Side View Leading To Garden
Then Edward added three bedrooms at the back. This was also to accommodate the Austens’ good friend Martha Lloyd who lived with the family.
Cassandra Lives On Alone
After Jane died in 1817 and her mother died in 1827, her sister Cassandra lived alone at the cottage until 1845.
When Cassandra died, the house was partitioned to accommodate living space for three families.
A Tribute To A WWII Casualty
As you can see in this stone plaque that is on the front wall of the house, Thomas Edward Carpenter bought Chawton Cottage to be a museum in memory of his son Lieutenant Philip John Carpenter.
Philip served with the East Surrey Regiment, and he was killed during WWII in action in 1944 in Lake Trasimene in Italy.
You can see a portrait of Philip on the stairs in the house.
Killed In Action
Praise, Jane Style
Chawton Cottage became Jane Austen’s House Museum in 1949, the same year the Jane Austen Memorial Trust was founded.
I wonder what Jane and her family would think about this.
However, historians do believe Jane was delighted with Chawton Cottage as evidenced from this little ditty ‘tribute’ of sorts that she wrote to her brother James to tell him how she felt about the place:
Our Chawton Home, how much we find
Already in it to our mind;
And how convinced that when complete
It will all other houses Beat
That ever have been made or mended,
With rooms concise or rooms distended.
Concealed Forever?
So here’s hoping that Jane herself would be content and happy to see how her and her family’s life has been preserved in this lovely museum of a home.
Beyond that, however, we do know for certain that an amazing wealth and blossoming of the imagination took place in Chawton Cottage.
For this was the place where Jane revised earlier manuscript novels Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Northanger Abbey, and where she also wrote Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion.
Still, I like to think for the sake of her and her family’s privacy that Chawton Cottage holds many other secrets beyond what we can see today from the remnants of her and her family’s lives in this quietly beautiful country cottage museum.
Ah, Frank Capra’s 1946 Hollywood movie ‘A Wonderful Life’: Nothing like snuggling down to watch it during the winter festive season yet one more time.
And no matter how many times I have done so – I always wait in anticipation for Clarence Odbody to make his appearance.
As you may well know, Odbody played by the actor Henry Travers is a guardian angel who has been assigned to save George Bailey, the lead character played by James Stewart.
Angel Second Class
“Ridiculous of you to think of killing yourself over money!” Odbody says to Bailey when Bailey asks him who he is. Then tells Bailey that he was sent to save him when he tried to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge in town into icy waters.
As the snowflakes cascade down thick and fast outside, the two of them are resting in a little wooden hut trying to dry off themselves and their soaking clothing.
Bailey frowns and growls in response to Odbody’s admonitions about his trying to take his life due to money problems. Then he asks Odbody in amazement how he knows such personal facts about his life – and just exactly who he is.
“Clarence Odbody, AS-2,” Odbody responds.
“Odbody AS-2. What’s that AS-2?” Bailey asks somewhat disapprovingly.
“Angel Second Class,” Odbody responds chirpily.
Earning One’s Wings
Bailey asks for an explanation about this and says sneeringly after hearing Odbody’s explanation,
“Well, you look about the kind of angel that I would get. Sort of fallen angel, aren’t ya? What happened to your wings?”
“I haven’t earned my wings yet, that’s why I’m an angel second class,” Odbody responds, standing there in his damp, long ruffled shirt that men wore as in the 19th century – an odd site indeed to the 20th-century Bailey.
Turns out that the angel Odbody lived and died during that previous century, so the garb is certainly in keeping with how he was dressed at the time of his death.
Seeing Angels, 21st-Century Style
Speaking of angels that one can see during the holiday season, I’m here to recommend an angel of a highly different sort to visit at any time of the year.
I am referring to the Angel Of The North.
You can see its red-rust silhouette high above the trees while traveling in northern England on the A1 near Gateshead near Newcastle Upon Tyne.
You can also see its location on this nifty map that my husband David put together:
The first time we saw the huge structure, we were on our way to Scotland and we didn’t have time to stop to have a closer look at it.
However, we made a promise to stop on the way back south to take a closer look which is what we finally did.
175 Feet From Wingtip to Wingtip
It’s quite a long detour off the highway to get to the grassy hillside where the Angel stands.
And its outline is mighty different than that of the human-turned-angel Clarence Odbody.
Weighing 200 tons and from wingtip to wingtip it is 175 feet (54metres), the Angel of the North is an astonishing vision standing on a hilltop against the skies as you can see here in our photo:
Angel Of The North With People
Aside from the sheer enormity of the structure, close up you can see that the welded steel from which the Angel is constructed is more than two inches (50mm) thick.
And of course, there is that lovely, autumnal rust-red color.
Gormley Revisited
The internationally acclaimed sculptor Antony Gormley who created the Angel of the North also made this figure that we saw at the Scottish National Gallery Of Modern Art Gallery One (formerly known as the Dean Gallery) here in Edinburgh where we live:
Antony Gormley – Man Half Underground
To read more about Gormley and his sculpture in Edinburgh, you can check out my husband David’s article I Spy Modern Art In Edinburgh.
Standing On The Site Of An Old Coal Mine
Back to the Gateshead area, during the early 1990s: Through a commission of the Gateshead Council and the backing of the Gatehead Council’s Art in Public Places Panel who wanted to mark the site of coal mining in the area, an artist was sought to create something special to mark the spot.
The artistic image was to be undertaken to commemorate the work and times of the miners of the Team Colliery who worked at the site from the 1720s onwards.
Mining continued throughout the centuries, and in fact it was only discontinued on the site not too long ago during the late 1960s.
Weathering Steel
In 1993, a shortlist of international artists was drawn up and by the next year Gormley was selected to make his proposed creation.
By September 1997, work had begun on the foundations of the Angel by Thomas Armstrong (Construction) Ltd. according to Gormley’s design. And by February 1998, the Angel was completed.
The Angel was fabricated from 200 tons of weathering steel, which is a special kind of steel alloy designed to eliminate the need for painting. This steel creates a stable, rust-red appearance when exposed to the weather.
The Angel rises 65ft (20m), and its wing span of 175ft (54m) that I noted here previously is almost as wide as that of a jumbo jet!
Angling To Embrace
The Angel’s wings themselves are not planar or flat. Rather, they are angled 3.5 degrees forward.
Why was this done?
The sculptor Gormley explained what motivated this choice of his:
The effect of the piece is in the alertness, the awareness of space and the gesture of the wings – they are not flat, they’re about 3.5 degrees forward and give a sense of embrace.
You can see more of what this enveloping gesture feel like through this close-up image of ours:
Angel Of The North
Wondering As Jimmy Stewart’s Character Did
Like Jimmy Stewart’s character George Bailey who was dubious about Clarence Odbody’s mission to save him and get his own wings in the bargain, some people were similarly wary of the Angel of the North at first.
This resulted in some controversy in British newspapers, including a campaign called “Gateshead stop the statue” along with a local councilor named Martin Callanan who was especially opposed to the project.
However, just as Bailey was eventually won over by Odbody – these days the Angel is considered by many to be an outstanding, iconic landmark for the Northeast of England.
Personally speaking, we thought it was jaw-droppingly striking and beautiful in its own very particular way.
A Steel Angel Viewed By 33 Million Every Year
The Angel is one of the most viewed pieces of art in the world.
As the information plaque at the bottom of the hill leading to the enormous seraph says, this piece of art is “seen by more than one person every second, 90,000 every day or 33 million every year.”
Gormley On His Angel
What is it about angels that appeals to something deep in us?
Gormley had this to say about his Angel of the North creation:
People are always asking why an angel? The only response I can give is that no one has ever seen on and we need to keep imagining them.
The angel has three functions – firstly a historic one to remind us that below this site coal miners worked in the dark for two hundred years, secondly to grasp hold of the future expressing our transition from the industrial to the information age, and lastly to be a focus for our hopes and fears.
Others on Gormley’s Creation
A controversial statue, here are what several people have said about this otherworldly winged statue of Gormley’s:
Antony’s huge talent has produced a piece of public art unique in the history of this country, and in time I think it may only compare with the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty. I think it is one of the masterpieces of 20th-century sculpture.
(Lord Gowrie, chairman of the Arts Council, on the day the Sculpture was erected on site.)
I think it is probably the emptiest, most inflated, most vulgar of his (Antony Gormley’s) works. Gateshead is a self-inflicted wound. Bomb it, then you will change it. It is an awful place – most of the North is awful.
(Brian Sewell, Art Critic for the London Evening Standard)
I think the greatest thing for the Angel is that Brian Sewell has classed it as rubbish, which must mean it’s good.
(Eamonn McCabe, Picture Editor, The Guardian)
Flash Gordon with wings and the feet of the Beast from the Black Lagoon.
(M. Fiddes, of Scotswood, in the Evening Chronicle)
It is a witness to life at the end of the 20th century. The car is a human body isolated in a bubble, not communicating with anyone else. The Angel is trying to ask, is that all we can be?
(Lord Gowrie)
Maybe the Angel of the North will embrace travellers with those wings and tell them that, wherever they live, here is homecoming.
(Beatrix Campbell, The Guardian)
Odbody’s View Of Things
Homecoming is a major theme in It’s A Wonderful Life, of course – and so after trials and tribulations, all turns out well in the movie for George Bailey, his wife Mary (played by Donna Reed), and their passel of children.
In this celluloid vision of angel wisdom, Clarence Odbody as Bailey’s guardian angel gives Bailey this advice and thanks as an inscription in a copy of Tom Sawyer, the 19th-century novel that Odbody had on him when he jumped into the waters to save Bailey earlier on in the story:
Remember no man is a failure who has friends.
Thanks for the wings!
Love, Clarence
This One’s For You
Way to go, Clarence, I say, that’s wonderful advice indeed – and it’s also our way here at Quillcards to wish a wonderful holiday season to one and all.
