The D. H. Lawrence Heritage Trail, Eastwood, Nottinghamshire

I shall cover the D. H. Lawrence Blue Line Trail, published by Broxtowe Borough Council, for most of this post. The blue line is much like the yellow parking restriction lines on roads, only this is on pavements, and stretches from Durban House Heritage Centre at the junction of Greenhills Road and Mansfield Road, Eastwood, to The Three Tuns pub on Three Tuns Road.

There are fourteen plaques entitled 'The D. H. Lawrence Literary Trail', all of which  are gathered outside the square by Eastwood Library, and most of which don't relate to a specific feature of the Blue Line Trail. This one, however, relates to the Durban House Heritage Centre, and as with all the others, contains a quotation by Lawrence:

'These offices were quite handsome: a new, red-brick building, almost like a mansion, standing in its own well-kept grounds at the end of Greenhill Road. The waiting room was a hall, a long, bare room paved with blue brick, and having a seat all round, against the wall.

Sons and Lovers'

'Suffering the tortures of the damned'

Barber, Walker & Co. were principal colliery company owners around Eastwood, and this house was built in 1876. Lawrence frequently went there to collect his father's wages, and felt intimidated by the experience. In Sons and Lovers, Lawrence fictionalizes life in 'Bestwood' through Paul Morel, and the colliery is owned by Carston, Waite & Co. Durban House is now an information centre and exhibition house of Lawrence's life and work.

Lawrence's phoenix symbol appears in many places throughout Eastwood. This is one of a number of badges, and is next to the plaque on the pavement outside Durban House.

'Great quadrangles of dwellings on the hillsides'

The colliery company built the houses for the miners to live in, and as Lawrence writes in Sons and Lovers, these were large quadrangles. This is Princes Street, a few hundred yards up Mansfield Road from Durban House.

'The library was open in the two rooms in the Mechanics Hall, on Thursday evenings from 7.0 till 9.0. Paul always fetched the books for his mother, who read a considerable amount, and Miriam trudged down with five or six volumes, for her family. It became the custom for the two to meet in the library.

Sons and Lovers'

Miriam Leivers is in part modelled on Lawrences' girlfriend Jessie Chambers of Haggs Farm.

'The outstanding event of the week'

The Mechanics Institute was similar to an adult education college for the working classes, and had a lending library. This would have been one of young Lawrence's outlets to explore literature.

It is now a snooker and pool hall called, ahem, 'Phoenix Cue Sports. Note the picture of Lawrence next to the function room advert.

'The flat fronted red brick house in Victoria Street'

This is the first house in Eastwood where the Lawrences lived, and where David Herbert Lawrence was born on 11 September 1885, Arthur and Lydia's fourth child.

'I liked our chapel, which was tall and full of light, and yet still; and colourwashed pale green and blue, with a bit of lotus pattern. And over the organ-loft: "O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness," in big letters.

'Hymns in a Man's Life'

'Three years savage teaching of collier lads'

This plaque is placed at the site of the former Congregational Chapel on Nottingham Road where the Lawrence family went, and where Lawrence first met Jessie Chambers. It was demolished in 1971.

Immediately behind the chapel was the British School where Lawrence went to readings and literary society meetings. And where he taught between 1902 and 1905, hence the title of the plaque.

An Iceland supermarket is now on the site.

'It was a little less common to live in the Breach'

Each house move the Lawrences made in Eastwood was to more superior property. This is in 'The Bottoms' in Sons and Lovers, or the current 28 Garden Road.

'D. H. Lawrence lived here 1887–1891'.

'D. H. LAWRENCE HOUSE

A MEETING PLACE FOR

THE ARTS, INDUSTRY

AND EDUCATION

THE LAWRENCE FAMILY

LIVED HERE

1887–1891'

'It is finished'

The Lawrences lived here from 1905 to 1911. This was their only semi-detached house, and had a garden with a field at the back. In this house Lydia died in 1910.

'The country of my heart'

'Bleak House'

The Lawrences lived on Walker Street from 1891–1905, and although this plaque is on number 10, it is uncertain if this is the actual house where they lived: it may be number 8. In 1910 Lawrence's brother Ernest died here. This is a pretty awful shot of the house, but the sun was shining almost directly at the camera.

'Moon and Stars'

This was the name of the Three Tuns in Sons and Lovers, which was Lawrence's father's preferred pub, where he would stop off on the way home from Brinsley Colliery. It was also the site of the 'wakes' mentioned in the novel.

Yet another phoenix, this time one of a number on the railings at the junction of Nottingham and Mansfield roads.

In the background of the photo above is this structure, which one website calls the 'D. H. Lawrence Memorial', although the information bureau didn't recognize it by that name. Nevertheless, there is an obvious Lawrence connection, as there's a phoenix on the dome.

Outside Eastwood Library is Neale Andrew's 1989 relief sculpture entitled 'D. H. Lawrence 1885–1930', showing – among other things – a naked couple embracing with miners working underneath, with headstocks and a church in the background.

Also in the square by the library – another phoenix.

And in front of the phoenix, the fourteen plaques showing quotations from Lawrence. Three of them have been mentioned already, but here are the remaining eleven:

'They came near to the colliery. It stood quite still and black among the corn-fields, its immense heap of slag seen rising almost from the oats.

"What a pity there is a coal-pit here where it is so pretty," said Clara.
"Do you think so?" he answered. "You see I am so used to it I should miss it."

Sons and Lovers'

'Mrs Morel loved her marketing. In the tiny market-place on the top of the hill where four roads, from Nottingham and Derby, Ilkeston and Mansfield meet, many stalls were erected.

Sons and Lovers'

'The curtain was down [...] it represented a patchwork of local adverts. There was a fat porker and fat pork-pie, and the pig was saying: "You all know where to find me. Inside the crust at Frank Churchill's".

The Lost Girl'

'Paul [...] crept up the stone stairs behind the drapery shop at the Co-op, and peeped into the reading room [...]. Then he looked wistfully out of the window [...]. The valley was full of corn, brightening in the sun.

Sons and Lovers'

'It was a vast square building – vast, that is, for the Woodhouse – standing on the main street and highroad of the small but growing town.

The Lost Girl'

'The wide valley opened out from her, with the far woods withdrawing into twilight, and away in the centre the great pit streaming its white smoke and chuffing as the men were being turned up.

"The Christening"'

'Now Eastwood occupies a lovely position on a hilltop, with the steep slope towards Derbyshire and the long slope towards Nottingham.

"Nottingham and the Mining Country"'

'The string of coal-mines of B. W. & Co. had been opened some sixty years before I was born, and Eastwood had come into being as a consequence. It must have been a tiny village at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a small place of cottages...

"Nottingham and the Mining Country"'

'I was born nearly forty-four years ago, in Eastwood, a mining village of some three thousand souls, about eight miles from Nottingham, and one mile from the small stream, the Erewash, which divides Nottingham from Derbyshire. It is hilly country...

"Nottingham and the Mining Country"

'The church was away on the left, among black trees. The car slid on downhill, past the Miners Arms. It had already passed the Wellington, the Nelson, the Three Tunns and the Sun [...] and so, past a few new "villas," out into the blackened road between dark hedges and dark-green fields, towards Stack Gate.

Lady Chatterley's Lover'

'To me, it seemed, and still seems, an extremely beautiful countryside, just between the red sandstone and the oak trees of Nottingham, and the cold limestone, the ash trees, the stone fences of Derbyshire.

"Nottingham and the Mining Country"'.

Other blog posts I've made about D. H. Lawrence are linked below.

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
The Breach House: D. H. Lawrence in Eastwood
 

D. H. Lawrence in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire

D. H. Lawrence and the University of Nottingham, England

Anne Tyler: Digging to America (2006)

Reviewing Anne Tyler's Digging to America in The New York Times here, Michiko Kakutani finds the coincidence of the two separate adoptions of Korean babies at the same time, arriving on a plane to Baltimore, is 'contrived in the extreme', and certainly it's glaringly evident that the baby contrivance is designed to bring the Iranian Yazdan family and the American Donaldson family together, serving as the sine qua non of the plot.

OK, fine, but what I find truly impossible to believe is that the mother Bitsy Donaldson couldn't find an image of a pacifier (British English: baby's dummy) online: this book is a few years (although only a few) old, but I keyed in 'pacifier', clicked on 'images' and found over 6,000,000 pacifiers. (The internet tempts you to do some very strange things at times.) There's a whole chapter on pacifiers in Digging to America too, culminating in masses of them being disastrously launched into space on balloons.

Tyler, of course, is noted for the absurd, so her previous novels perhaps don't render this event quite as surprising as it might have been. The pacifier launch happens at the time of a get-together between the families, and very often the novel seems a little like a long (even occasionally tediously long) string of social occasions, rather similar to  Back When We Were Grownups in this respect.

The blurb on the front flap says: '[Digging to America is] about belonging and otherness, about outsiders and insiders, pride and prejudice, young love and unexpected old love, families and the impossibility of ever getting it right, about striving for connection and goodness against all the odds...'. I agree, although I think this paints a rather darker picture than this novel gives out: here, things are very much softer than Tyler's other novels, differences exist but are often smoothed over if not positively worshipped, and life in general is not anything like as difficult as in most of her other novels.

I get the idea that Tyler wanted to fictionalize her married life with an Iranian doctor and their children, although any resemblance between the characters in this novel and any persons in real life, of course, is purely coincidental.

 

The links below are to Anne Tyler novels I've written posts on:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Anne Tyler: If Morning Ever Comes (1964)
Anne Tyler: The Tin Can Tree (1965)
Anne Tyler: The Clock Winder (1972)
Anne Tyler: Celestial Navigation (1974)
Anne Tyler: Earthly Possessions (1977)
Anne Tyler: Morgan's Passing (1980)
Anne Tyler: Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982)
Anne Tyler: The Accidental Tourist (1985)
Anne Tyler: Breathing Lessons (1988)
Anne Tyler: Ladder of Years (1995)
Anne Tyler: A Patchwork Planet (1998)
Anne Tyler: Back When We Were Grownups (2001)
Anne Tyler: The Amateur Marriage (2004)
Anne Tyler: Noah's Compass (2009)
Anne Tyler: The Beginner's Goodbye (2012)
Anne Tyler: A Spool of Blue Thread (2015)

Ruth Catherine Britton, 1798-1862by Robert Hughes

The inscription on this stone in St Nicholas’ churchyard in Kenilworth, Warwickshire, reads as follows:-

IN
AFFECTIONATE REMEMBRANCE OF
RUTH CATHARINE
WIFE OF
JAMES BRITTON
and Eldest Daughter
OF THE LATE
JOHN WADDAM[S]
of Handsworth
[Who?] Died Febry 3rd 1862
Aged 62 Years

She was 63, although she seemed to have knocked off a year somewhere between the 1851and 1861 censuses.

The grave location is at GB Ordnance Survey grid ref.
SP 28537 72439.

It is particularly easy to find, directly facing you coming out of the main (West) entrance to St Nicholas’ church.

It seems unusual for a memorial of this kind to mention the father of the deceased, although a very kind thought.

What it seems to indicate is that this was commissioned by Alfred Waddams, who after all was the man on the spot, (he was buried in this same graveyard on 9 Jun 1865, although his exact grave location is not yet established). The mention of John Waddams, the father of Ruth Catherine and Alfred is compelling evidence; while if John James Britton, the only known child of Ruth Catherine had commissioned this, surely he would have said something like "Beloved mother of John James Britton"!

Irza Thomas born in Rue St Denis, Parisby Robert Hughes

The detailed birth records from Paris seem very recently to have appeared on the internet.

Irza Thomas, the mother of Lionel Britton, was born at 168 Rue St Denis, in what was then the 1st Arrondissement of Paris, on 21 May 1866.

The above picture is a close-up of part of the entry. It shows that the registrar was perhaps slightly pickled at the time, as he makes her 'fils' of her parents while conceding that she is of 'sexe feminin'. The recorded middle name Marie is not otherwise known, and the records available elsewhere state consistently that she was Irza Vivian Geraldine. Perhaps he mixed up her middle name with that of her mother, Antoinette, who is more familiar to us as Marie Antoinette.

Anne Tyler: Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982)

Pearl Tull is an old woman who's dying, although she doesn't do so until the end of the ninth section of this ten-section novel, because the narrative of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant moves through a long flashback.

One day, itinerant salesman Beck tells his wife Pearl that he's leaving her and their three children – Cody (14), Ezra (11) and Jenny (9) – and tells her that he won't be coming back. Pearl doesn't understand, and she never will, but mother and children remain in Baltimore just carrying on. As Beck only sends her $50 a month, she adds to this by working as a cashier, although she never says anything to anyone – not even the kids – about her husband's desertion.

The second section, 'Teaching the Cat to Yawn', is seen through the point of view of Cody, who is the family prankster, the teenager with a bad reputation, a petty thief, he takes fabricated photos to make his brother look bad, he's a smoker, and he cheats at monopoly to boot. He also sees himself as an outsider to Baltimore, a person who's not accepted.

The third section belongs to Jenny. It begins when Cody is away at college, and Ezra, just before going off to fight in Korea, asks her, in his absence, to visit two town outsiders: Mrs Scarlatti, whose restaurant he's been working in, who lives on her own, and whose son has been killed in action; and Josiah Payson, the scarecrow people make fun of because they think he's a dummy, although he may well be brighter than Jenny and Ezra.

So Jenny and her mother Pearl have the house to themselves for a short time, but they communicate by not communicating: 'Their talk was small talk, little dibs and dabs of things, safely skating over whatever might lie beneath.' But Ezra soon returns, discharged because of his sleepwalking. (Incidentally, it's amazing how many of Tyler's characters figuratively sleepwalk through life.)

Medical student Jenny grows into a beauty and ill-advisedly marries student prodigy and socially inept control freak Harley Baines, Cody becomes an efficiency expert, and Ezra moves into a partnership with Mrs Scarlatti in the restaurant trade, going on to inherit the business.

The fifth section resumes Cody's story and lingers on his annoyance with the 'sissy pale goody-goody Ezra', who captivates the girls without trying, and without even noticing, as he'd prefer to play his recorder: the good-brother bad-brother scenario unfolds through adulthood, culminating here in Cody stealing Ezra's girl Ruth. (And I may be wrong, but surely this is the first time in the ten Tyler books I've read that a person uses such a strong word as 'shit'; later in the novel, she uses 'bastard' and 'crap': gosh!). This section highlights the dysfunctions of the family once again, and dinners (where people are socially captive – a favorite trick of Tyler's) frequently tend to accentuate faultlines.

The 'Beaches on the Moon' section continues the depiction of the damaged family, with Cody becoming increasingly suspicious of (even paranoid about) Ezra in relation to Ruth and his son Luke, and his consequent movement away from Pearl.

Cody has an accident at work and becomes nastier still, even to the point of claiming that Luke is Ruth and Ezra's child. What can Luke do? Well, the very thing that Tyler's characters are noted for – he takes flight. But as he's only 14 years old, Cody soon brings him back. (For Tyler, road trips (along with the dinners mentioned before) are excellent ways to bring long-nurtured ill feelings to the fore, but here Luke's hitchhike is an opportunity for the narrator to introduce light relief through eccentric characters.)

In the final section, Beck returns on the day of his wife Pearl's funeral and (at dinner!) sees what he thinks is 'one of those great big, jolly, noisy, rambling [...] families', but big bad Cody (who of course has his good points too) tells him it's not like that, that hardly any of the kids are related to him, that Cody hasn't seen these people in years, that the family is 'in particles, torn apart, torn all over the place', and that his mother was an excessively violent witch. Yes, Anne Tyler is playing happy families again.

This is one of the best of her novels I've read so far.The links below are to Anne Tyler novels I've written posts on:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Anne Tyler: If Morning Ever Comes (1964)
Anne Tyler: The Tin Can Tree (1965)
Anne Tyler: The Clock Winder (1972)
Anne Tyler: Celestial Navigation (1974)
Anne Tyler: Earthly Possessions (1977)
Anne Tyler: Morgan's Passing (1980)
Anne Tyler: The Accidental Tourist (1985)
Anne Tyler: Breathing Lessons (1988)
Anne Tyler: Ladder of Years (1995)
Anne Tyler: A Patchwork Planet (1998)
Anne Tyler: Back When We Were Grownups (2001)
Anne Tyler: The Amateur Marriage (2004)
Anne Tyler: Digging to America (2006)
Anne Tyler: Noah's Compass (2009)
Anne Tyler: The Beginner's Goodbye (2012)
Anne Tyler: A Spool of Blue Thread (2015)

John Cullen in Bottesford, Leicestershire

I first learned of the existence of the poet John Cullen from the Bottesford Living History Project here. He was born in Newport, County Tipperary, Ireland, and left Trinity College, Dublin, before taking a degree. He had married the German Leontine Dordinger (or Derdinger) before he became curate at Bottesford, Leicestershire, from 1867 to 1869. He would have lived at The Manse on the corner or Rectory Lane and Chapel Street.

From Bottesford he became the vicar of St Mary's parish church, Radcliffe-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire in 1874, where he stayed until his death in 1914. He initiated the restoration and enlargement of St Mary's in 1877, which included rebuilding of the tower, whose unusual saddleback roof has been said to be influenced by Leontine to remind her of her native home.

Cullen supported women's suffrage and his poetry was well received in the USA. Illinois Wesleyan University, Bloomington, awarded him a doctorate in Divinity in 1893.

Cullen's son Frederick died in 1872 at the age of six months and was buried in the churchyard of St Mary the Virgin, Bottesford.

Cullen died at the vicarage in Radcliffe-on-Trent, although he was buried with his wife (who died in 1906) in Bottesford. He has an entry in the DNB written by Pamela Priestland.

'IN SACRED MEMORY OF
Leontine Eugenie Cullen
WHO DIED ON SEPT. 16 1906,
AGED 66 YEARS.

"Wir seh'n den Himmel offen
Und nicht das Grab allein."

"VERILY, VERILY, I SAY UNTO YOU, IF A MAN KEEP MY

SAYING, HE SHALL NEVER SEE DEATH." JOHN 8: 51

"I KNOW WHOM I HAVE BELIEVED." 2 TIM 1. 12.

ALSO REV. John Cullen, D. D.,
DIED MAY 6TH. 1914, AGED 77 YEARS,
40 YEARS VICAR OF RADCLIFFE-ON-TRENT.'

The full 1893 edition of Cullen's Poems and Idylls is here.

The British Library lists a number of John Cullen's publications, of which these are examples:

Horae Poeticae, New ed., rev. (London: William Macintosh, [1869]

The Life after Death, and the Things to come (London: Hatchards, 1876)

Confirmation: Its nature and obligations (London: Hatchards, 1881)

In What Way Can Romeward Tendencies Be Most Effectually Counteracted and Suppressed? (London: John Kensit, [1888])

Pen Pictures from the Life of Christ (London: R. D. Dickinson, 1889)

Poems and idylls (London: S.W. Partridge, 1893)

Songs of Consolation (London: S. W. Partridge, 1893)

The Fruit of the Spirit, 2nd ed. (London: S. W. Partridge, [1895])

Three Christian Virtues: Faith, Hope, Love, these three (London: Marshall Brothers, [1903]).

Ann Taylor (1782–1866)

Ann Taylor (1782–1866) and her sister Jane (1783–24) were writers of children's poetry, and the representation above is by their father, the Rev Isaac Taylor, also a writer, and an engraver whose own father (also Isaac) had worked with the engraver Thomas Bewick. The Rev Isaac's son (also Isaac) was a writer too, as was his wife (also Ann, née Martin), and they came to be known as 'The Taylors of Ongar', a village in Essex, England.

The Rev Isaac's daughter Ann married the minister Joseph Gilbert in 1813 and they moved to Nottingham in 1825. As her Wikipedia entry (which probably provides more readily accessible biographical information about her than any other site) says: 'She died on December 20, 1866 and was buried next to her husband in Nottingham General Cemetery':

Most of the inscription is badly flaking off, although 'Joseph Gilbert' is quite clearly visible, 'Minister of the Gospel' a little less so.

The Autobiography and Other Memorials of Mrs Gilbert, (Formerly Ann Taylor) (London: Henry S. King, 1874), edited by her son Josiah Gilbert, is here. Below is a representation of Ann at 75, by her son.

Her sister Jane Taylor's famous poem of 1806:

'The Star

Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are!
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky.

When the blazing sun is gone,
When he nothing shines upon,
Then you show your little light,
Twinkle, twinkle, all the night.

Then the trav'ller in the dark
Thanks you for your tiny spark,
He could not see which way to go,
If you did not twinkle so.

In the dark blue sky you keep,
And often thro' my curtains peep,
For you never shut your eye,
Till the sun is in the sky.

'Tis your bright and tiny spark,
Lights the trav'ller in the dark.
Though I know not what you are,
Twinkle, twinkle, little star.'

Writers and literary associations in Nottingham General Cemetery:
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Robert Goodacre (1777–1835)
Ruth Bryan (1805–1860)

Sarah Ann Agnes Turk (1859–1927)
Annie Matheson (1853–1924)
Josiah Gilbert (1814–1892)
Anthony Hervey (c. 1796–1850)
Charles Bell Taylor (1829–1909)
James Prior's Parents
Robert Millhouse (1788-1839)
Henry Hogg (1831-74)

Rose Fyleman: The Rose Fyleman Fairy Book (1923; repr. 2010)

I've only just come across the children's poetry of Rose Fyleman (1877–1957), but this relatively recent publication (Nottingham: Bromley House Editions/Five Leaves, 2010), which is based on the Methuen first edition of 1923 and includes a number of illustrations by Hilda T. Miller, is a delight. Fyleman is perhaps almost forgotten now, but the first line of her poem 'Fairies', which opens this collection, certainly isn't forgotten: 'There are fairies at the bottom of our garden!'.

As there doesn't appear to be much information about Nottingham-born Fyleman available online, I'm forced to fall back on her Wikipedia entry here, although her book Fairies and Chimneys (1918), which also begins with the poem 'Fairies', is here. It is dedicated

'TO
THE REALEST FAIRY
OF MY CHILDHOOD
MY MOTHER'.

Humphrey Carpenter and Mari Prichard's The Oxford Companion to English Literature (1984) states that Fyleman, making the acquaintance of A. A. Milne through her contributions to Punch, first made the suggestion that he write children's verse, and that his first published children's poem, 'The Dormouse and the Doctor', appeared in Fyleman's monthly The Merry-Go-Round (which had its origins in the annual Joy Street).

Anne Tyler: Ladder of Years (1995)

When Delia and Joel are talking about the absence of words to express subtleties, Joel regrets that there's only one word to describe the various hues of freckles. He is of course expressing his love, his desire, for Delia, but in a tangential, restrained, although highly eloquent manner. This is typical of the whispered art of Anne Tyler: there is never any mention of penises or clitorides, vaginas, or ever nipples.

Sometimes, however, her restraint, her deliberate avoidance of saying things seems to fall flat, becomes unrealistic, particularly with her characters' use of interjections: expressions of disgust, anger, frustration, are always covered over by words like 'Cripes!', 'Hot dog!', 'Jiminy!', 'Gosh!', 'Sheesh!', 'Compost happens!', etc, all quaint euphemisms that have a hollow ring, that in no way match the gravity of the situation. Yes, this is (most probably) the early nineties and still Dr Samuel Grinstead rebukes his son for saying (gasp!) 'for Christ's sake!'. Compared with movie language (and we've moved light years away from the shock of the word 'damn' in Gone with the Wind), Tyler's novels are stuck in a distant past as far as interjections go. (Perversely, this can be as charming as it is annoying.)

And yet she's no wilting, schoolmarmish writer, she can be (and indeed often is) caustic, and her characters can lash out at the aural anesthesia of smalltalk or the safety valves of religion that automatically annihilate any attempts to delve into troubling, complex thoughts by their soothing, readymade, robotic reflexes.

Living with Sam and the kids, Delia sometimes felt 'like a tiny gnat, whirring around her family's edges', and certainly the bizarre newspaper article that announces her disappearance and that serves as an introduction to Anne Tyler's Ladder of Years strongly indicates someone almost incidental to the lives of her family: neither her husband nor her children can decide for sure on her height, weight, the color of her eyes or what she was wearing. So who can be surprised that, without a word, she has walked out of their lives. After about a year she walks into the life of Joel and his son Noah, but then in a few months walks out again, back into Sam's. I suppose I saw the end coming, but I can't say I'm too happy with it: so like other characters of Tyler's, was Delia trying on another life, or stepping outside of time a while? Sheesh!

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Anne Tyler: If Morning Ever Comes (1964)
Anne Tyler: The Tin Can Tree (1965)
Anne Tyler: The Clock Winder (1972)
Anne Tyler: Celestial Navigation (1974)
Anne Tyler: Earthly Possessions (1977)
Anne Tyler: Morgan's Passing (1980)
Anne Tyler: Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982)
Anne Tyler: The Accidental Tourist (1985)
Anne Tyler: Breathing Lessons (1988)
Anne Tyler: A Patchwork Planet (1998)
Anne Tyler: Back When We Were Grownups (2001)
Anne Tyler: The Amateur Marriage (2004)
Anne Tyler: Digging to America (2006)
Anne Tyler: Noah's Compass (2009)
Anne Tyler: The Beginner's Goodbye (2012)
Anne Tyler: A Spool of Blue Thread (2015)

The Arkwright Building, Nottingham, and Its Statues

The Arkwright Building of the the former Nottingham University College (later to become the University of Nottingham) on the corner of South Sherwood Street and Shakespeare Street dates from 1881 by Lockwood and Mawson, and it is here that D. H. Lawrence studied, gaining his teaching certificate in 1908. Four other notable people are represented as statues at the Shakespeare Street side:

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) himself,

John Milton (1608–1674),

Francis Bacon (1561–1626)

and Isaac Newton (1643–1727).

The building now belongs to Nottingham Trent University.

Anne Tyler: Earthly Possessions (1977)

Elements of the Southern Gothic are plentiful in Anne Tyler's Earthly Possessions. Charlotte says of her grotesquely obese mother: 'In some way, she'd grown separate from the rest of the town – had no friends whatsoever.' Added to that, her father 'Hung about as if he didn't own his own body [...] he looked like an empty suit of clothes'. And her mother said she didn't believe Charlotte was her real daughter, thought there'd been a 'mix-up' at the hospital. As a child, Charlotte's two principal fears were that she'd be rejected because she was not the real daughter, or that if she was the real daughter she wouldn't ever be able to escape.

Once again with Tyler, in this novel there's a statement that normalizes the abnormal, or abnormalizes the normal: 'Maybe all families, even the most normal-looking, were as queer as ours once you got up close to them.' What do you expect: this is Anne Tyler, who specializes in dysfunctional families and the weirdness of everyday life, who paints a world where the bizarre is an ordinary part of living. Several of Tyler's novels begin where a person walks out of a relationship, but in Earthly Possessions Charlotte Emory not only walks away from Saul to draw out money out of a bank for her escape, but at the same time walks into the clutches of bankrobber (and bad driver) Jake, whose almost consenting hostage she becomes, which begins an absurd road trip into Florida involving a mismatched couple, turning into a mismatched trio.

All this is told in two alternating first person narratives in the past tense by Charlotte, which are in fifteen sections – from the bank robbery through to the end of the road trip, and from Charlotte's early life up to the end of the road trip where the narratives converge – with a sixteenth section as a presentday coda. But Charlotte is still stuck in her past life, and things still happen to her without her being able to make anything happen for herself.

A criminal driving to Florida, a cat in a car? Isn't there just a teensie sniff of Flannery O'Connor's 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find' here? Tylerized, of course.The links below are to Anne Tyler novels I've written posts on:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Anne Tyler: If Morning Ever Comes (1964)
Anne Tyler: The Tin Can Tree (1965)
Anne Tyler: The Clock Winder (1972)
Anne Tyler: Celestial Navigation (1974)
Anne Tyler: Morgan's Passing (1980)
Anne Tyler: Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982)
Anne Tyler: The Accidental Tourist (1985)
Anne Tyler: Breathing Lessons (1988)
Anne Tyler: Ladder of Years (1995)
Anne Tyler: A Patchwork Planet (1998)
Anne Tyler: Back When We Were Grownups (2001)
Anne Tyler: The Amateur Marriage (2004)
Anne Tyler: Digging to America (2006)
Anne Tyler: Noah's Compass (2009)
Anne Tyler: The Beginner's Goodbye (2012)
Anne Tyler: A Spool of Blue Thread (2015)

Henry Kirke White in Nottingham

'HERE ON THIS SITE STOOD THE BIRTH
-PLACE OF HENRY KIRKE WHITE
POET – – BORN MARCH 31ST 1785
DIED AT CAMBRIDGE OCT 19TH 1806'

This plaque is inside the Exchange Arcade at the Cheapside side of the Council House.

Born in Nottingham the son of a butcher, White went on to publish Clifton Grove in 1803, which made an impression on Robert Southey. However, he died in Cambridge at the age of 21 after excessive study. He is remembered in the names of several streets and in two memorials in St Wilfrids Church, Wilford, Nottingham.

A 1906 article from Transactions of the Thoroton Society on Henry Kirke White, by J. C. Warren, is here.

Graham Greene in Nottingham

The plaque on the Express Offices, Upper Parliament Street, Nottingham, tells most of the story:

'Commemorating the Centenary of Cinema 1996 –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
GRAHAM GREENE
Screenwriter – Film Critic – Novelist
Apprentist Sub-Editor The Journal 1926
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
"I have happy memories of this
bizarre old building..."
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
In association with the British Film Institute'.

And here is the 'bizarre old building', which is now closed and looks a little forlorn.

There was an informative Facebook site devoted to Graham Greene in Nottingham but it migrated, although Greene's address at All Saints Terrace, Nottingham models for his future novels, and his conversion to Roman Catholicism, among other things, are briefly mentioned via a link from Facebook.

Hans Christian Andersen in Nottingham

Not far from J. M. Barrie's old lodgings on Birkland Avenue is the pub the Gooseberry Bush on Peel Street: an acknowledgement that the street once had a maternity hospital. Anyone familiar with Wetherspoons pubs will be aware that this gives them a perfect excuse to hang things on their walls.

Such as a photo of Hans Cristian Andersen, who wrote a short story called 'The Storks'. A note underneath this states that the expression 'gooseberry bush' replaced the legend of the stork delivering a baby in a sling hanging from its bill, which it says was popularized by Andersen's story. (It notes that the stork has long been a symbol of 'happiness, fertility and prosperity'.)

 

Also on the wall is a representation of a scene from the story by Anne Anderson. The link here is to M. R. James's English translation of 'The Storks'.

'The
Gooseberry Bush

These licensed premises were built
in 1984, on part of the site occupied by
Nottingham Women's Hospital. The hospital had
replaced a Victorian mansion, called Sandfield House.
The first patients arrived in January 1930. The last baby
born here was in November 1981. The hospital
closed, with the site then partly cleared for
The Gooseberry Bush, named after the place
where babies are said to arrive.

These premises were refurbished
by J D Wetherspoon
in June 2011.'

J. M. Barrie in Nottingham

Shortly after earning an MA from the University of Edinburgh, J. M. Barrie (1860–37) found a brief post as a journalist with the Nottingham Journal on Pelham Street, Nottingham. He stayed at 5 Birkland Avenue.

There's a reference to Nottingham in My Lady Nicotine (1890) concerning, er, the lace trade: 'It happens that I have a connection with Nottingham, and whenever a man mentions Nottingham to me, with a certain gleam in his eye, I know that he wants to discuss the lace trade.'

'J. M. Barrie, author

of "Peter Pan",

lived here

1883–4'.

Local newspapers like to conjecture that Peter Pan was born in Nottingham, quoting George Basil Barham saying that the idea sprang from the sight of a boy while he was walking with Barrie in Clifton Grove, Nottingham.

And there's a portrait of Barrie in the Joseph Else pub in South Parade, Nottingham.

There's a link below to another post I made.

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Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens: London #26

George Green in Sneinton, Nottingham

The grave of the mathematical physicist George Green (1793–1841), whose influential work An Essay on the Application of Mathematical Analysis to the Theories of Electricity and Magnetism, was published in 1829.

'[...] George Green Esq. B A
Fellow of Caius College Cambridge
(Son of the above George and
Sarah Green) who departed this
life on the 31st. of May 1841
Aged 47 years.'
The grave is in St Stephen's Church, Sneinton, which is incidentally where D. H. Lawrence's parents Arthur and Lydia were married on 27 December 1875.

This is Green's Mill, a few paces from the churchyard and built on land bought in 1807 by Green's father, a wealthy Nottingham baker. This is a link to a YouTube account of Green's work by a breathless Professor Roger Bowley, who – of Green's relationship with Jane Smith, the windmill manager's daughter and Green's commonlaw wife – says 'they had a good time, having seven children'! But I don't think his geography's spot on: Sneinton 'in the middle of Nottingham'? Well, not exactly.

Below is a link to a related post.
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Clara Green in Sneinton, Nottingham

Karl Wood and Louis Oram Trivett in Nottingham

My biography of the eccentric artist and unsuccessful writer Karl Salsbury Wood (1888–1958)* is here, and it gives a brief mention of the lace manufacturer Louis Oram Trivett (1864–1933), known as 'The Orchid King' by many because he usually wore the flower in his buttonhole. Wood lived in Nottingham from 1902 to 1914, and spent some time working as a packer for Trivett at his premises in Trivett Square in the Lace Market in Nottingham.

Trivett's tower, the pinnacle of the factory, and still a local landmark.

*Wood wrote many detailed if highly idiosyncratic articles for the Gainsborough News about his cycling trips around the UK, during which he painted many architectural features, and windmills and their remains in particular. His burning ambition was to write a book titled 'The Twilight of the Mills', although I suspect that the (sometimes laughable) zeal with which he promoted this unwritten work made the quality of it a little questionable, and it's perhaps fortunate that the book was never published because some articles of Wood's on the subject render his research rather dubious: his knowledge of the location of the mills was excellent, although his knowledge of a mill's working was distinctly less so.

Plus, it may well have developed into a right-wing tract as opposed to a serious study.

Ann Tyler: The Accidental Tourist (1985)

This is the story of Macon Leary, whose wife Sarah leaves him not very long after their son Ethan has been shot through the head for no reason. He eventually gets together with Muriel, then goes back to Sarah, then back with Muriel again. In between we meet Macon's siblings, learning about their missing compasses, and about their absurd reluctance to use the telephone.

The absurd raises its head early in The Accidental Tourist, and page three plunges us into almost Beckettian territory when the Learys cut short a week at the beach to drive back to Baltimore, and on the way Sarah recalls saying to her husband, 'Macon, now that Ethan's dead I sometimes wonder if there's any point to life', and Macon had replied: 'Honey, to tell the truth, it never seemed to me there was all that much point to begin with'. But then, as a writer of travel guides who hates travel, absurdity for Macon more or less comes with the territory.

Macon's idea of smooth travel is being at no risk of communicating with anyone while traveling, of making the journey seem seamless. Books can serve as protection against strangers, and he has for years taken on his professionally necessary travels the novel Miss MacIntosh, My Darling by Marguerite Young, which the Dalkey Archive Press describes as a book 'of the road, a journey or voyage of the human spirit in its search for reality in a world of illusion and nightmare', adding that 'in prose of extraordinary richness [Young] tests the nature of her characters—and the nature of reality'. It also favorably compares the novel to Melville's Moby-Dick.

Macon, along with his two brothers and his sister — and also Tyler herself — all suffer from 'geographic dyslexia', and it now seems to me that probably Macon is the character the author has said she 'donated' this affliction to rather than Jeremy Pauling in Celestial Navigation (see my post here. Nevertheless, the differences and the similarities between Macon and Jeremy are very striking. Jeremy has a very advanced case of geographical dyslexia, which manifests itself in an inability to step beyond the block, or even answer the door or the phone, without experiencing some (often very profound) degree of anxiety, whereas Macon travels the world but at the same time screens himself from it by essentially ignoring it, by retreating into habit, cosiness, the familiar. As the title The Accidental Tourist suggests, the journey is peripheral to the purpose, just a necessary but loathesome burden between two points. Macon abstracts, or absents, himself from unfamiliar aspects of the outside world as a coping mechanism. It's significant, after his temporarily incapacitating fall, that he wonders if he's engineered it so that he can return to the comfort zone of his siblings.

When Macon's sister Rose thinks that she doesn't know a family more conventional than the Learys, the narrator, responding through Macon's thoughts, says: 'This was perfectly true, and yet in some odd way it wasn't. Macon couldn't explain it.' I feel much the same way about Tyler's novels, which seem normal on the surface, but lurking underneath are all kinds of strange creatures.

The links below are to Anne Tyler novels I've written posts on:

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Anne Tyler: If Morning Ever Comes (1964)
Anne Tyler: The Tin Can Tree (1965)
Anne Tyler: The Clock Winder (1972)
Anne Tyler: Celestial Navigation (1974)
Anne Tyler: Earthly Possessions (1977)
Anne Tyler: Morgan's Passing (1980)
Anne Tyler: Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982)
Anne Tyler: Breathing Lessons (1988)
Anne Tyler: Ladder of Years (1995)
Anne Tyler: A Patchwork Planet (1998)
Anne Tyler: Back When We Were Grownups (2001)
Anne Tyler: The Amateur Marriage (2004)
Anne Tyler: Digging to America (2006)
Anne Tyler: Noah's Compass (2009)
Anne Tyler: The Beginner's Goodbye (2012)
Anne Tyler: A Spool of Blue Thread (2015)