Thoughts of a Gothic nature - Michelle Lovric

 One of my poems has just been awarded a ‘Highly Commended’ in the Bridport Prize.

Judge Lemn Sissay, kindly wrote of my ‘Niece comes out of the attic’: ‘I was gripped by the gothic in this poem. And by what was not said. It’s beautiful. Powerful. Evocative.’

 Lovely to read, of course, but the word that excited me the most was ‘gothic’. My brain is, at the moment, in a fever of gothic for a new, experimental piece of work, in which I am trying to reconcile a sense of the gothic with some incidents of apparent modernity.

Gothic (henceforth I’ll give the word its deserved capital letter): I come to the conclusion that never, or hardly ever, has one word suffered its meaning to be stretched so far and into so many dimensions.

Here, with apologies, is an uncomfortably rushed and creaky whistle-stop tour of the Gothic, simply to signal its pervasiveness. (I am not going to illustrate it, so as not to impede its speed. I see the reader hurtling alone and by night, in a coach drawn by black horses across vast and empty terrains where wolves howl.)

We started with Goths – Visi and Ostro – ‘barbarian’ tribes of the north, whose rise is associated with the fall of the Roman Empire, including the sacking Rome in 410AD. This first Goth manifestation gave us a language, and alphabet and a script, also known as ‘blackletter’.

Then came ‘Gothic’ art and architecture, generally thought to have seen the light first in 12th century France but spreading in all directions. The architecture was despised by the early art-historian Giorgio Vasari, who saw infidel barbarity in its sinuous lines, pointed arches and ribbed vaults (the same elements, perversely, were adored by John Ruskin, a promulgator of Neo-Gothic in the 19th century. Apart from the 'virtue' inherent in each craftsman's creative contribution, Ruskin favoured what he saw as properly pious love of Creation’s flowing, soaring, irregular shapes over Renaissance man’s sterile geometry.)

Before Ruskin & co came to revive the Gothic in our built environment, the term had lurched into a new form. Literature appropriated ‘Gothic’ to describe the kind of fiction that creates a frisson of ‘sublime’ terror in the reader. Screeching away from the restrained formality of the classical, this literature feasts on heightened emotions, death, unnatural life-forces, secrecy, ghosts, the interplay of irresistible attraction and terrified repulsion. Other tropes: ancient curses, brooding anti-heroes, forbidden loves, the torture, slaughter or corruption (moral murder) of innocent victims, often young. Sometimes the horrifying mystery is resolved as ‘explained supernatural’. Other times, the horror is generated by the darkest sides of human nature. If a journey is taken, it is (forgive me) alone and by night, in a coach drawn by black horses across vast and empty terrains where wolves howl.

Horace Walpole is thought to have started it in England with his novel The Castle of Otranto (1764), which was initially published as an authentic rediscovered mediaeval romance. Gothic writers fed on one another’s Gothic imaginings. William Beckford’s Vathek, also originally published as a ‘found’ manuscript, was a favourite of Lord Byron. Another early classic of the genre was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, drafted during a ghost story competition in which Byron himself participated

A generalized Gothic architecture – rich in complicated shadow, beset with ancient dark towers, secret tunnels and dungeons – is often the backdrop. Providing the rib-vaulted settings for evil acts, Gothic architecture seems to exert the dark power Vasari saw in it: monstrous and barbarous, a kind of disorder. As at Hogwarts, both ancient and supernatural mischiefs stir in the very fabric of the castles, abbeys and monasteries where the characters are confined in feverish proximity with all that terrifies them. These buildings are sometimes in a ruined state, redolent of moral, physical or emotional collapse in its inhabitants. Nature relentlessly, even cruelly, takes back what man, in his arrogance, thought he had set in stone immortally. Buildings, like human bodies, can rot. This is the ‘Gothic picturesque’ – the sublime beauty to be found in something that can otherwise connote horror.

Victorian Gothic gave us Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Bram Stoker’s Dracula and countless other novels, often played out in three thick volumes. Meanwhile, Gothic Revival or Neo-Gothic architecture delivered monumental markers like St Pancras Station. Any commuter can still get his or her daily dose of Gothic there, even now.

 Gothic was not confined to English literature. German had its Schauerroman ('shudder novel') and French its roman noir, all accessorized with similar tropes and settings. Nor was it confined to hardcover. Magazines started embracing the Gothic in Victorian times and have continued to this day.

Then came Hollywood, happy to draw on the Gothic model refined in literature, starting with movies based on the famous texts and then going on to develop its own language and iconography, which often associates young sexuality with violent death. The ruined castle or abbey backdrop is optional.

I find it quite extraordinary how many writers of the 20th century have been labelled ‘Gothic’. There are of course the obvious, like H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King, but also William Faulkner (‘Southern Gothic’), Joan Aiken (‘New Gothic’) and Margaret Atwood (‘Southern Ontario Gothic’).

Moving on to the late twentieth century and beyond, we have Gothic video games, Goth music (Black Sabbath and their ilk) and the Goth fashion subcultures, which drew its aesthetics both from Gothic novels and poetry, as well as horror movies. Black prevails, with white for gaunt contrast: black nail-polish on pale hands; hair dyed profoundly black framing white faces with lips and eyes picked out in black. Trimmings and silhouettes are borrowed from a least a hundred years before: corsetted waists and lace.

For a while now, the Gothic seems to have moved away from a specific obsession with corpses, decay, curses, judgements and settings that contributed much to a sense of loss, dread and terror. We have moved away from a codified horror with specific visual elements, from innocents sacrificed to darkness, paying the price of ancient curses and hatreds that have festered for centuries.

Or have we? Where we’ve been shows Goth associated with the emotional and decorative paths of complicated and wild darkness. Where are we now? Well, this is what I’m working on and it’s not ready to share. Instead, here’s my ‘Gothic’ poem to be getting on with. Its vintage is April 2017.


                                  Niece comes out of the attic

in my red velvet wedding dress, that old sore rash of silk
shamed into horripilation just like the hairs
that tiptoe up my nape at the sight of her,
thirteen, with no idea.

I thought that tongue of threads had long since gone to die.
But all this time it cooled its heat on the rack
of harmless jumble upstairs,
fever-red undimmed.

Watching zipper trace her bones, the cold clicks down my spine.
The past, that wolf, half-eats tall tousle of brown-eyed niece.
It grips her, neck to calf, in the thousand teeth
of its greed-red maw.

Yet niece is not its rightful prey. The past may brush those narrow ribs
but she must not taste its carnivore breath nor gag its rankling.
So when the graceful gangle comes dancing
out of the attic

I smile with velvet teeth at niece in my red wedding dress.
I chew the truth, gulp down what’s gone, praise
the prance and ripple of her kin kid-limbs
beneath the long-shed skin.


Michelle Lovric’s website

Victoria's voice, the fiction of Caro and other thoughts, by Gillian Polack

Right now I’m revelling in different readings of historical periods. Normally I do this with my historian’s hat on and the different views are the different interpretation s of vast amounts of data and close and careful reading of sources by historians. Today, that’s not what’s happening at all.

I borrowed the TV series Victoria from the library and have watched just one episode. When I finish my writing, I’ll watch some more. It’s addictive.

I’m seeing early Victorian England from the view of the TV series and also from the view of the actors. Jenna Coleman’s accent isn’t even close to Victorian (I want to haul out my late Victorian dictionary of how to pronounce English to check, but really, it’s too late both the date of the dictionary and the time of night) but it does show us the way she feels Victorian English should be presented. She used the same accent when she was a governess in an episode of Doctor Who. It’s mostly her everyday accent, but not quite. Victorian England then, is like us but not quite to those who take their feel for the period from popular television.

The choice of actors gives us a view of the period and place that is quite different to the actual period and place. I took a break to check this one out, too, for everyone looked wrong. Lord Melbourne and Rufus Sewell both don’t ring true. I was trying to think of why and it strikes me that Sewell doesn’t look like the person whose physical presence was so great that he dominated Victoria’s life for several years. Sewel has plenty of presence, so it isn’t lack of presence that’s the problem. It’s more that his body language in a crowd works quite differently to the body language from contemporary caricatures of important people. That is to say, when he is surrounded by other politicians, he doesn’t use his body language like the politicians of that time. We have some knowledge of their body language (although I’m very rusty on it) because there were publications that mock it. 

These aren’t right history or wrong history, good history or bad history, but they are different ways of seeing and presenting history. This is very much with me today.

Modern work is important to the way we think about the past. Thanks to Regency novelists (not English novelists of the late Georgian period, but modern novelists who use Regency settings) I’ve a picture of Lady Caroline Lamb that focusses on the exotic and the daring and the Byron side. I always have to stop and remember that she was involved in the political side of things through her husband, who, after her death, loomed large in the life of Queen Victoria. She was a lot more than Byron’s failed affair and the centre of gossip. She was a mover and a shaker in her own right. There often a lot more to history than we see on television. When I say this to a class, I often hand round a cup to make my point. Let me give you a photo of it.

I have yet to see a moustache cup as part of a TV series.

Given I’m adding more ways of seeing historical figures to my mental collection tonight, I need to add one for this woman. The one that needs to be added is the most important. It has nothing to do with society and everything to do with society. It’s the way I would enter into her life if I were writing a novel about her. 

I wouldn’t start with her husband or her lover or her public arguments or the shocking things that some people liked to explain about her: I’d start with her fiction.

The best element of her fiction to begin with is Glenarvon. It links all the elements we think we know about Lady Caroline Lamb and turns them into a Gothic novel, mocking them. She wrote a best-seller that laughed at the attitudes of people to her. I could move from the novel itself to what it did to her reputation, and be back on traditional grounds, or I could go from one work of fiction she wrote to all the others, and to the material she wrote to Byron that was apparently good enough to confuse Byron’s publisher. (I say ‘apparently’ because I need to check sources for this!)

There’s a detective novel in Caro’s life. It consists of finding out who she actually was as a person. She’s left popular history littered with evidence and false leads. This is why we write about her a lot. And Victoria. And Lord Melbourne.

Different views for different moods and different moments. This to me, is an evanescent form of history, resting on popular versions of stories of famous people. It’s a lot of fun, and, as long as we know we’re living in a temporary interpretation, we can take Jenna Coleman’s voice as true for Victoria and admire how Lord Melbourne has got over the loss of his novelist wife and become … whatever  the writers and actors make him become in Victoria’s life. Impermanent truths, full of charm and emotional understanding.

This is how we read and how we watch. We immerse ourselves in a story and follow it. I love this. I love the way I can follow and yet not trust. I love pulling it to pieces and finding out where all the components come from and what other stories are told with them elsewhere.

It’s more related to historiography (the study of how history is written) than to history proper. It’s understanding how complex our knowledge of the past can be, through seeing how people interpret history from as many angles as we can.

Why am I thinking along these lines? There is a reason. I have a conference paper to work on and masterclasses to prepare for the Historical Novel Society of Australasia’s biennial event. I’ll report on the weekend itself next month. This month, though, I’m living the dream. I’m trying to see how many ways of envisaging history I can fit into my mind at once and what makes them come alive for me.

Fitting everything in and understanding them is what I do while wearing my historian hat. Making them come alive for me myself is step one in making them come alive for other people and that’s for my teaching and, of course, for my own fiction.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s time to return to the young Queen Victoria.

Literary-historical dogs I have known, by Y S Lee

As the child of Southeast Asian immigrants, I grew up feeling somewhat appalled by the idea of sharing a house with a dog. Yes, our family had dogs when we lived in Singapore, but the dogs' place was in the garden, where they had plenty of shade and water and space to run around. They didn’t come inside the house, much less curl up on sofas or beds. As far as my parents were concerned, dogs were outdoor pets.

I’ve been thinking about this recently because several months ago my children, aged 7 and 4, mounted a vigorous and sustained campaign for a dog. And I’m about to concede defeat. I’ve accepted that our dog that will live in our house and shed on our furniture and need lots of training and exercise and brushing and bathing and veterinary visits and dear god, possibly also tooth-brushing and ear-cleaning and nail-clipping? (Maybe I’ll tackle the history of pet care in a different post.) My point is simply that all this domestic dog chat has me thinking about dogs in literary history.

The first literary–historical dogs I remember noticing was the litter of puppies in Wuthering Heights. They’re never named or numbered, of course; they’re mere props for the vivid illustration of Hareton Earnshaw’s character. As Hareton hangs the puppies (one by one? In a batch? It’s never clearly described) "from a chair-back in the doorway", we readers realize the extent to which Hareton’s own moral growth and intellectual development were strangled from birth.

Branwell Brontë's circa 1834 sibling portrait, with his own image painted out.

What’s most striking to me (as a contemporary reader) about this scene is that Hareton’s sadism towards animals does not expel him from the moral world of the novel. Emily Brontë herself disciplined her beloved dog, Keeper, with physical violence. In 1848, it was a fact of life that puppies (and kittens) were often too numerous and must sometimes be killed at birth. (This practice is relatively recent: my father-in-law had a childhood memory of his father dropping a sack of newborn puppies into a canal in 1950s Manchester.) And Hareton, with the help of Cathy Linton, eventually redeems himself. Together, the young lovers hold the promise of a happy ending for Wuthering Heights – with or without animal companions.

The next fictional dog to make a deep impression on me was Shock, Belinda's indulged pet in Alexander Pope’s mock-epic poem, “The Rape of the Lock”. For me, the poem is a full-on olfactory assault. Let me break it down for you:

1. There’s a crush of people at Belinda’s house. Their combined body heat will heighten the ripeness of early eighteenth-century bodies.

2. This bodily funk will, in turn, be overlaid by the liberal use of perfumes.

3. The room will be lit by beeswax candles, which add their own sweet, thick scent to the air. (In a poorer household, the candles would be made of tallow and thus smell strongly of animals.)

4. As part of the ceremonial serving of coffee, Belinda’s family roasts coffee beans in the drawing room before grinding and brewing the expensive imported drink. Coffee-roasting novices expect the process to smell delectable but the toasting of green coffee beans actually produces a strong burnt aroma as the husks burn off; the roasted coffee smell emerges only at the end of the process. As a result, the smells of body musk and perfume would intermingle with the strong, acrid smell of burning.

Aubrey Beardsley's 1897 illustration of "The Rape of the Lock". At left, the Baron is about to snip off Belinda's curl.

5. The pampered, yipping, little dog Shock (whose name strikes me as a joke about the English pronunciation of “Jacques”), who fails to protect her from assault. I’m not sure how often pet dogs were bathed in 1717. However, in her biography of Samuel Pepys, Claire Tomalin describes the general domestic atmosphere of the 1650s: "Every house, every family enjoyed its own smell, to which father, mother, children, apprentices, maids and pets all contributed, a rich brew of hair, bodies, sweat and other emissions, bedclothes, cooking, whatever food was lying about, whatever dirty linen had been piled up for the monthly wash, whatever chamber pots were waiting to be emptied into yard or street. Home meant the familiar reek which everyone breathed." "The Rape of the Lock" takes place only 60 years or so later.

My third literary dog was a Newfoundland breed named "Boatswain". Having once read it, who could forget Byron’s "Epitaph to a Dog"? It's engraved on this monument at Newstead Abbey, Byron's family estate.

Near this Spot
are deposited the Remains of one
who possessed Beauty without Vanity,
Strength without Insolence,
Courage without Ferosity,
and all the virtues of Man without his Vices.
This praise, which would be unmeaning Flattery
if inscribed over human Ashes,
is but a just tribute to the Memory of
BOATSWAIN, a DOG,
who was born in Newfoundland May 1803
and died at Newstead Nov. 18th, 1808.

When some proud Son of Man returns to Earth,
Unknown to Glory but upheld by Birth,
The sculptor’s art exhausts the pomp of woe,
And storied urns record who rests below:
When all is done, upon the Tomb is seen
Not what he was, but what he should have been.
But the poor Dog, in life the firmest friend,
The first to welcome, foremost to defend,
Whose honest heart is still his Master’s own,
Who labours, fights, lives, breathes for him alone,
Unhonour’d falls, unnotic’d all his worth,
Deny’d in heaven the Soul he held on earth:
While man, vain insect! hopes to be forgiven,
And claims himself a sole exclusive heaven.
Oh man! thou feeble tenant of an hour,
Debas’d by slavery, or corrupt by power,
Who knows thee well, must quit thee with disgust,
Degraded mass of animated dust!
Thy love is lust, thy friendship all a cheat,
Thy tongue hypocrisy, thy heart deceit!
By nature vile, ennobled but by name,
Each kindred brute might bid thee blush for shame.
Ye! who behold perchance this simple urn,
Pass on, it honors none you wish to mourn.
To mark a friend’s remains these stones arise;
I never knew but one—and here he lies.

Byron’s anger and disgust with human hypocrisy here is all the more powerful because he practised it so well: “Thy love is lust, thy friendship all a cheat,/Thy tongue hypocrisy, thy heart deceit” is a cri de coeur from a restless artist who spent much of his life at the centre of a bubble of scandal.

Byron originally posed for this portrait in 1813, about 5 years after railing against the "vain insect" that is Man. Image courtesy of a Creative Commons license from the National Portrait Gallery.

There’s so much more I could say about dogs in literary history - and in social history, for that matter. But for the time being, I’ll return to my own practical dog research and continue to battle my residual squeamishness about dog odour and dog hair. Wish me luck!

---
Y S Lee is the author of the award-winning Mary Quinn Mysteries/The Agency Quartet (Walker Books/Candlewick Press). She blogs every Wednesday at www.yslee.com.

And they call it puppy love? - the history of boy heartthrobs - by Eve Edwards

I had a shock this afternoon.  I was singing along to Disney (yes, I know - sad) because my children have been playing the excellent song from the Chinese fairytale Mulan called 'To be a Man'.  (If you don't know it - listen to it for me as it makes me laugh every time - the joke being that they have sent a woman to do a man's job).  I digress.

Imagine my shock when I noticed who had sung the original track for the film: Donny Osmond.  What!  The Donny of my girlish infatuation - big brown eyes and luxurious dark hair? The Donny of 'Donny and Marie'?  How I used to croon 'Paper Roses' as if my heart was breaking (I was about six so please give me a break).  The Donny with the host of less hunky brothers who all thought they were rock stars (remember 'Crazy Horses' anyone?).  Donny was up there on my bedroom wall with the other gorgeous guy of the time - David Cassidy.  (I hope in the comments you are all going to confess similar infatuations; I don't want to be alone here, girls and boys.)

Reminded of this 70s hottie, I of course had to google him.  He is still going strong in Vegas (where else?) but I now noticed that his youthful photos showed him to be a dead ringer for today's Justin Bieber.  I promise on my hamster's grave that I will no longer mock the teeny boppers' love for this baby faced pop star - I now completely understand the attraction.

Justin Bieber?  No, it's Byron c. 1802
by Marie Louise Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun

My trip down memory lane led me to think about the history of girlish adoration of lovely young men - not something that makes it in to the history books but, come on, isn't it more interesting than Corn Law Reform?  Is there a connection between the development of mass media, leisure and girls' reading with the rise of the hottie?  That's my thesis anyway.  The first serious contender I could think of was Lord Byron. Other stars had briefly had their day on the stage, mainly in London, but he was the one whose countenance graced the equivalent of bedroom walls nationwide.  He even reached international fame in his lifetime.  We all know Caroline Lamb's quip that Bryon was 'Mad, bad and dangerous to know' - but she was on to something, wasn't she?  Even with the scandal attached to his name, every red blooded young lady wanted to know Byron and dreamt of his Corsair.  He was more a Mick Jagger than a Donny, but his image was arguably as famous as his work.  Just look at the iconic pictures of him and the stories that attached to his legend.  One I remember was that he was said to keep a bear while at Trinity College, Cambridge because it was not disallowed in the rules against pets. Eat your bat heart out, Meat Loaf.   Byron went on extreme diets then binged.  He abused various substances and slept with all sorts.  He was exiled for bad behaviour.  He died young(ish) in a semi-heroic way - of fever but while fighting for Greek independence. He, m'lud, anticipated rock-stardom.

The commentators of the late eighteenth century coined a word to describe what happened to these literary rock gods - to lionise.  Accounts talk of these writers coming into the saloons as lions coming among the ordinary folk - hence the word.  Walter Scott - NOT a hottie in my book - was perhaps the most celebrated one. Worship of him reached the period's equivalent of screaming, panties-throwing crowds yelling for Tom Jones - odd to think of now that Scott had fallen out of fashion. The key development was the rise of mass media to publicise their works.  The old patronage system had been replaced by commercial publishers who had an interest in puffing their authors' reputations, building excitement for the next new work.  The (male) authors became the story.

Harriette Wilson - a lady of experience

There's an interesting contrast here to the experience of female writers who did everything in their power to remain anonymous.  The most famous woman writer of this period in terms of celebrity status was not Jane Austen but the notorious Harriette Wilson, courtesan, whose memoirs inspired another most famous quote, this time from Wellington: 'publish and be damned!'.  To be known as a female writer was a very mixed blessing; safer to take on a male pseudonym as many did.

You will have spotted the weakness in my argument.  Byron was really an older girl's infatuation.  He would have despised an Osmond or a Bieber, I fear.  So when did the teeny ones get their chance to languish over portraits?  I'm wondering if they had to wait until they were allowed out to the pictures, children's literature and music being heavily policed in the Victorian era.  Maybe they had to wait for the likes of Creighton Hale who starred in Snow White - the 1916 version. According to Wiki, after playing the prince, he went on to a porn career (innocently I didn't imagine there was such a thing as a silent movie porn star).

So my question to you: does anyone know when pre-teen infatuations began?  I'd love to know your thoughts.

www.eve-edwards.co.uk

There goes the neighbourhood – Michelle Lovric

San Samuele is a quiet part of Venice. The only tourists who pass my street door are lost ones. Our one big attraction is the Palazzo Grassi, now devoted to promoting the modern art collection of zillionaire Francois Pinault. We don’t have a single mask shop. Our restaurants are few, the busiest being the dim café where local workmen go for their lunch.

What we do have, however, is a bit of a reputation.

Here’s a popular verse about my part of town:

Contrada piccolo, grande bordel;
Senza ponti, cattive campane,
Omini becchi e donne putane.
A small quarter, but a big brothel;
No bridges, bells that jangle,
The men are cuckolds and the women whores.

I don’t know for sure what my antecedent neighbours did to deserve this, but it may be something to do with the fact that I live in Casanova-ville. He was born (in 1725) just around the corner, in what is now the Calle della Commedia: a small plaque marks that fact, though no one knows the exact address. His mother was an actress in the San Samuele Theatre, torn down in the 1860s. His grandmother lived a few hundred yards away. Casanova, who originally planned a church career, preached his first sermon in the church of San Samuele. There were love letters in the offertory tray afterwards. By the time his second sermon came around, success had gone to the young Casanova’s head. Arriving at the pulpit after an orgy of food, he lost his thread and was obliged to pretend a faint to save face. He lost his virginity to a pair of sisters in the Salizzada San Samuele. His first patron was a noble Malipiero, of the eponymous palace on Campo San Samuele. Casanova was forced to jump out of a window after being caught in flagrante with Malipiero’s young protégée. Clearly not destined for the clergy, he was soon playing the violin in the San Samuele theatre, where his mother had trod the boards.

In his memoirs, Casanova would write of his contemporary, a certain Sebastiano Mocenigo, of San Samuele, condemned for homosexual practices.

Two libertines do not a brothel parish make. However, the next famous denizen of the Mocenigo palace was George Gordon, Lord Byron. Where Byron excelled was not so much in poetry as in self-publicity, and his carefully nurtured myth included a great deal of sexual boasting, particularly of his exploits during his Venetian sojourn, 1816–18. Personally, I’ve never understood how Byron came to epitomize the tender ‘Romantic poet’ in the public’s mind when his only true love affair was with himself. With everyone else, he was anything but romantic. In evidence, I offer a sample of his correspondence, the first being a letter to James Wedderburn Webster, dated September 8th, 1818:

‘In the two years I have been at Venice I have spent about five thousand pounds, and I need not have spent a third of this, had it not been that I have a passion for women … the sum of five thousand pounds sterling is no great deal, particularly when I tell you that more than half was laid out in the Sex;— to be sure I have had plenty for the money, that’s certain.’

And four months later, he was boasting again:
‘ … since last year I have run the Gauntlet; – is it the Tarruscelli – the Da Mosti – the Spineda – the Lotti – the Rizzato – the Eleanora – the Carlotta – the Giulietta – the Alvisi – the Zambieri – the Eleanora da Bezzi – the Theresina of Mazzurati – the Glettenheimer – & her Sister – the Luigia & her mother – the Fornaretta – the Santa – the Caligari – the Portiera Vedova – the Bolognese figurante – the Tentora and her sister – cum multis aliis? – some of them are Countesses – & some of them Cobblers wives – some noble – some middling – some low – & all whores – which does the damned old “Ladro – & porco fottuto” mean? – I have had them all & thrice as many to boot since 1817...’

In between the women, Byron did manage some verses – Beppo, the first part of Don Juan and a part of the tragedy Marin Faliero. He also wrote quite a lot of letters talking about his poetry, and his women, including this one, dated January 19th, 1819, in which he tells his friend John Cam Hobhouse not to pay his long-suffering debtors with his publishing earnings:

‘Whatever brain-money you get on my account from Murray, pray remit me. I will never consent to pay away what I earn. That is mine, and what I get by my brains I shall spend on my b***cks ...’

In the same complex of Mocenigo palaces, the Countess of Arundel was two centuries earlier involved in an intrigue with a Venetian noble. It cost Antonio Foscari his life. He was executed on April 21st, 1621, on a charge of mingling with foreigners. The Countess was furious, and told the Doge so. On January 16th, 1623, the Venetian state belatedly issued an apology.

There too lived the scandalous Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and later her son, who was reputed to wear an iron wig.

Peeling back the years, I find more records of vice in San Samuele. Giuseppe Tassini, the Venetian historian, tells of a certain Orsa Diedo committing adultery with a local clergyman while her husband was away in Corfu in the 1380s. The same clergyman soon after seduced a Lucia Barbarigo. In 1468, Tassini notes, it was necessary to take legal action against the whores who had invaded the streets between San Samuele and Santo Stefano.

And it wasn’t just sex. 'Money makes money and lice make lice' is one of the many pleasurably earthy Venetian proverbs. Moneymaking and bad behaviour seem to have hand in hand in this area. So much so that the city powers also felt obliged erect a handsome marble plaque on the Santo Stefano church wall in 1663. It warns of prison or exile for those who persist in gambling, in etting up illegal stands to sell merchandise and in blasphemy.


I’m relieved to report that my own home appears pretty much devoid of scandal – so far. (I cannot, regrettably, make the same claims for blasphemy). Our palazzo hosted a couple of eminently respectable Doges, Vitale and Ordelaffo, who enriched the built environment of Venice. William Dean Howells lived here in the 1860s as a newly married man and astoundingly young American consul. He was forced to leave by the depredations of his venal housekeeper.

San Samuele has perhaps definitively shifted from venery to venality. The only scandals are financial these days … a local hotel and our vigile have been implicated in a big bribery case. As for cuckolds, whores, gamblers and blasphemers –I’m now surrounded by respectable large families and a honeycomb of dark warrens on the debatable land of the ground floor, inhabited by Enrico the electrician and various plumbers and other tradesmen.

But a reputation like San Samuele’s dies hard. The gondoliers passing under my study window have only one thing to tell their passengers – that Casanova lived here. Often, they’ll point to my house when they say so. Cue the snapping of cameras and this generation’s resident writer bestowing an unbecoming frown and mumbling, ‘No he did not! We run a nice palazzo here!’



Picture of angel with tarnished halo from San Vidal church in our parish

Michelle Lovric’s websiteByron and Casanova feature in her novel Carnevale, as do the Mocenigo palaces.