Sarah Waters - Celia Rees

Last week, I went to see Sarah Waters at the Cheltenham Literature Festival. I was there purely as a punter, a fan, no magic access to the Green Room this time. Just like any other reader, I like to go and see my favourite authors and hear what they have to say about their writing. As a writer, I go to see if there are any tips I can pick up - you never know - and as a sometime performer, I like to see how other authors present themselves on the platform or stage. I've appeared at Cheltenham a few times myself and I like both the town and the Festival. One tiny gripe about the latter. I was there in the evening. Waterstone's Book Tent in full swing. I looked in vain for Children's and Y.A. titles, however. Then I noticed another, smaller tent, shut and darkened. 'The Children's Books are in there,' I was told, as if any fule should know, delivered with a look that seemed to say: why would the Children's Bookshop be open at 7:30 in the Evening? Children will be in bed, for goodness sake. 

That apart, it was a very rewarding evening. Sarah Waters has a quiet, unassuming way about her which readers warm to immediately but which speaks to me of enormous assurance and confidence. She is not afraid to use self deprecating humour or to admit to problems, confusions, worries and concerns about her books as they are being written. With that, she's won over the writers in the audience (well, me, anyway).  Not that I needed winning over. I've been an avid fan since I first picked up a copy of Tipping the Velvet in 1998. 

I was flying to Belfast and was looking for something to read in W.H. Smith's in Birmingham Airport, which I feared might be a fruitless task, when I saw Tipping the Velvet. I have a passing knowledge of Victorian Underworld slang and was intrigued. I'd never heard of Sarah Waters but the title was enough for me. I started reading on the plane and went on reading when I got to my hotel. I tried to slow down, to make the book last, but just couldn't stop. I recognised immediately that here was a story teller of rare power, writing about a 'hidden' history, exploring a world that seldom appears in period fiction or non fiction.  Better than that, I'd discovered a new writer and I've followed her ever since.

She said at Cheltenham that she makes 'an imaginative leap into [her characters'] perspective', and that the story comes from 'what the characters need to do and how they feel about it.' Her knowledge of her period, the period in which her characters live, is immaculate.  It is built up through intense research, using the writing of people who lived at the time: letters, diaries, novels. This seems a good model for any historical writer. It seems a simple idea. If you are going to write about people living in a particular period then that's where you need to go to find out what they thought and felt, but what they did actually think and feel is often surprising. Our ideas about what it was like to live in wartime or post war Britain, as in The Night Watch, or The Little Stranger, are often coloured by hindsight, filtered through modern pre-perceptions or the distorting glass of memory. Waters' unearths the unexpected, continually confounding lazy, cliched views of the past.

She never allows her research to overburden the text. She uses it to make her period come alive to the modern reader and to give validity to her characters as they move through it. Her extensive reading of contemporary sources imbues her writing with a feeling of the times she is describing, not pastiche, more authenticity, and her plots work with the precision of a swiss watch. Her latest novel, The Paying Guests, the subject of her talk at Cheltenham, is just as clever, accomplished and absorbing as the others, a kind of Suspicions of Mr Whicher from the inside out.  

I'm just left thinking, 'How does she do that?'

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

REFLECTIONS ON TWO DIFFERENT MUSIC HALL ACTS

By Essie Fox


My novel, The Somnambulist, opens up in a Victorian music hall – in Wilton’s to be precise – a hall which is situated in Grace’s Alley in London’s East End and which still opens its doors for productions today. I really do recommend a visit, especially for one of the conducted tours which tell all about the hall’s history. And do prepare to be utterly charmed by the crumbling beauty of the place in which you can very almost ‘taste’ the glamour and 'bang’ of a bygone age.

The entrance doors to Wilton's hall

When I entered Wilton's entrance doors for a performance of Handel’s Acis and Galatea, I was entirely seduced by such an intimate theatrical space, where the frieze-fronted balcony of papier mache is supported by brass sugar-barley-twist posts.

Inside Wilton's music hall

Sitting in the darkened hall and seeing those metal posts sparkle when reflecting the glint of the stage lights, I imagined them as mirrors into the past, and however blurred and distorted those reflections might happen to be, I wondered what stories they might have to tell – what glorious pictures they might have to show from Wilton’s in its heyday.

One of Wilton's most famous faces - and one who appears in my story too - was the singer George Leybourne whose career really took off when he co-wrote That Daring Young Man on his Flying Trapeze, a song based on the acrobat Jules Leotard who was also quite a star, and after whom the item of sports clothing - the leotard - was named.

Jules Leotard

But it was the song, Champagne Charlie that really brought George Leybourne fame, when he appeared as a West End swell, very elegant in his topper and tails and carrying a silver-topped cane in his hand. Soon he was being sponsored by the champagne producer, Moet and Chandon – thereafter almost always seen with a bottle of Moet in his hand. which probably did more harm than good as George died in his early forties from what might well be described as a surfeit of the ‘the high life’ and 'the phizz'.

Wilton’s would have hosted many different kinds of act – from performing dogs to acrobats – and to continue with this month’s blog theme of ‘cross-dressing’ I’ve no doubt there would also have been ‘Drag Kings’ – acts in which women dressed up to imitate men such as Leybourne which (despite the sense of the Victorian age being one of repression and prudery) was always a popular turn – as were many of the songs  performed, full of 'sauce' and double entendre.

Two of my favourite Victorian male impersonators, or ‘mashers’, are the fictional Nan King and Kitty Butler from Sarah Waters’ wonderful novel, Tipping the Velvet which, whilst being very entertaining and providing a vivid picture of the Victorian music halls, is a fascinating commentary on gender and sexual acceptance, as well as the politics involved on the road to social justice and suffrage.

Vesta Tilley in drag costume 

One such real life character was Vesta Tilley who was born into a theatrical family in Worcester, England, in 1864. Vesta often appeared on stage as a child and from very early in her career preferred to play a boy or a man, saying, ‘I felt that I could express myself better if I were dressed as a boy.’ Vesta’s attention to the detail of her stage costume was such that she became a fashion icon for men. But, the females in her audience also adored her – enjoying the wry nods to illustrate men’s foibles and eccentricities to which her songs often alluded. 

She performed as a swell, a judge, a clergyman and a soldier – and to such acclaim that when she retired in 1920, nearly two million people signed the People’s Tribute as a mark of their thanks and respect. 

I think it both ironic and somehow rather touching that this woman who preferred to act as a man had a husband who went on to receive a knighthood, which meant that Vesta Tilley was thereafter known as 'Lady’.

Vesta Tilley as 'herself'




www.essiefox.com
www.virtualvictorian.blogspot.com