Ada Lovelace - by Sue Purkiss

 On a recent stay on Exmoor, I came across an article about someone called Ada Lovelace. I had vaguely heard of her, but if you'd asked me why, I wouldn't have been able to tell you. Yet she turns out to have been a fascinating and significant character - in a number of different ways. 

Born in 1815, she was the only legitimate child of Lord George Gordon Byron, who was famous as much for his scandalous, buccaneering lifestyle as for his status as one of the Romantic poets. His shadow would loom over her life - she called her sons Byron and Gordon; yet she never met him: he and her mother, Anne Isabella Milbanke (known as Annabella), separated a month after Ada was born, and he subsequently left England for Europe, never to return. He died in Greece eight years later. Part of the reason for his departure was the amount of scandal surrounding his love life - in particular a probable relationship with his half-sister Augusta. These were the things that pushed him, but there was also something that pulled him: an irresistible craving for adventure, and for a life unshackled by the mores of English society.

Ada Lovelace

Annabella, left with her child, does not seem to have been a particularly affectionate mother, largely handing over the care of Ada to her own mother; but she did have strong views about how the child was to be brought up. Disturbed by Byron's behaviour and black moods, she had come to believe he was insane, and she determined to protect her daughter from insanity by means of education: Ada was to be taught mathematics and logic, and kept away from the dangerous possibilities of literature. One of her tutors was eminent mathemetician and astronomer Mary Somerville - after whom Somerville College in Oxford was later named - and the two became good friends. Ada seemed to have a natural propensity for science: when she was twelve, she decided she was going to learn to fly, and she went about her project methodically and seriously, deciding on suitable materials for wings and studying the anatomy of birds.

Her interest in mathematics continued, and she became friends with the eminent scientist Charles Babbage, working with him on his Analytical Engine, which is often said to be the first computer. Another eminent scientist, Michael Faraday, was impressed by the scientific papers she wrote on the workings of the engine; she saw possibilities as to how it might be used in a way which was over a hundred years ahead of her time. This was a time, remember, when new ideas were bubbling up in all sorts of different spheres: technology, botany, agriculture, ballooning, astronomy, the use of electricity - and, of course, in literature too. Byron himself was one of a group of successful poets including Shelley and Keats, with Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey at a slight remove, all of whom, to a greater or lesser degree, plundered the worlds of science for imagery and ideas.

Ashley Combe House (now demolished)

In 1835, Ada married William, the eighth Baron King, later to become the Earl of Lovelace. The main family home was in Surrey - but they honeymooned at another family house on Exmoor, near Porlock Weir, called Ashley Combe. The house was on the steeply wooded slopes of the north coast, with dramatic views of the Bristol Channel. It's a stunningly beautiful area, and it's no surprise that Ada came to love it. She returned there frequently, and she and William redesigned the house, turning it into an opulent Italianate mansion - and they also improved the woodlands, planting exotic trees and creating dramatic viewpoints and a network of paths: she and Babbage discussed their ideas as they walked along these paths, perhaps ending up at the tiny Anglo-Saxon Culbone Church. These woods are a focus of interest again now: along the cliffs are pockets of temperate rain forest, where trees are hosts for lichens and mosses and ferns, thanks to the damp air which sweeps in from the west. Like many other nature-rich habitats in Britain, temperate rain forests have declined, so any remnants are doubly precious - and Ada played her part in protecting them.

She died young, at only 36 - the same age as her father. Like him, she had a life which didn't follow the expected pattern for her time and milieu. Her name is less well-known than his - yet arguably, she achieved far more. Sadly, she became estranged from her husband just months before her death; her mother swept in to care for her. Rather poignantly, she requested to be buried beside the father she had never known, in Nottinghamshire, near his ancestral home, Newstead Abbey.

Wilkie and "that all-potent and all-merciful drug" by Karen Maitland

Wilkie Collins in 1874, aged 50

Photographer: Napoleon Sarony

Today, 8th January, is the birthday of the Victorian novelist and playwright, Wilkie Collins, born in 1824 and famous for the enduring classics The Woman in White and The Moonstone. He was a very successful writer, earning £10,000 in just one year in 1863. Many modern novelists would envy him, given that, 154 years later in 2017/18, the average income for a full-time professional writer in the UK was less than £10,500. (Compare this to average annual salary for a clerk in the 1860's of around £100, and the average clerical salary today of around £21,000.)

But behind the success, he was battling illness which was diagnosed as ‘rheumatic gout,’ which cause his eyes to become ‘bags of blood’ and agonising pain in his legs and feet. He also developed neuralgia and arthritis, which meant that for the last 20 years of his life, he was often confined to bed and his famous novel, The Moonstone, was dictated from his bed between bouts of pain. 

His physicians tried all manner of medication until he finally sought pain relief in what he called divine laudanum, which he took in ever increasing quantities, becoming hopelessly addicted, as is the character, Ezra Jennings, in The Moonstone. Both author and character paid the price for the relief of their pain with terrible nightmares and hallucinations.

At this time, Laudanum was a mixture of opium and alcohol and was sold under names such as Godfrey's Cordial and Mother Bailey's Quieting Syrup. Wilkie’s own father had taken Battley's Drops for his pain, which contained opium, sherry, and alcohol.

Engraving by Franz Muller-Munster (1867-1936)

Wilkie began to be unnerved by the movement of shadows in his gas-lit study, thought that ghosts followed him through the house and a green woman with tusks, waited for him on the stairs or in his bedchamber. On one occasion he was convinced she was biting chunks of flesh from his shoulder. Wilkie introduced the drug to his friend and patron, Charles Dickens, who also used it though not in such quantities as Wilkie.

‘Laudanum’ was originally the name for Cistus ladanifer a beautiful flowering plant found in western Mediterranean, also known gum rockrose and common gum cistus. Paracelsus, a 16th-century Swiss-German alchemist, combined this with opium and other ingredients such as crushed pearls and musk to produce a pain-relieving medicine. The name stuck, even when Cistus ladanifer was no longer included as an ingredient. In 1618, the London Pharmacopoeia describes laudanum as a ‘pill made from opium, saffron, castor, ambergris, musk and nutmeg’.

Cistus ladanifer or Laudanum

Photo: Juan Sanchez

Laudanum was not widely known until in the 1660’s, when the English physician Thomas Sydenham (1624–1689) produced a tincture of opium that he also named laudanum, although the only ingredient it had in common with laudanum of Paracelsus was the opium. By the 18th century, the name laudanum was being given to any combination of opium and alcohol. George Young was one of several leading physicians who recommended the drug for all sorts of ailments including neuralgia, coughing, or diarrhoea, and to ease the symptoms of ague, rheumatism, consumption and cholera. 

In the early 19th century, there were laudanums containing a tincture of opium mixed with all kinds of other ingredients from the fairly innocuous such as cayenne pepper, brandy, whiskey, and wine, to the downright dangerous – belladonna, mercury, hashish, ether and chloroform. Laudanum was being prescribed for everything from colds to heart disease for adults and children, and was used widely during the yellow fever epidemic. It must have seemed like a miracle drug for patients racked with pain or fever, because it relieved the pain, helped them sleep and even dried up excessive mucus.

Victorian women of all classes, plagued by ‘women’s problems’ which they were not supposed to mention much less seek help for, could buy a bottle of laudanum to ease their pain without having to consult a male physician, and, in any case, many could not afford a doctor’s fees. That was both the attraction and danger of laudanum – it was cheaper than a bottle of spirits or wine because, being medicine, it was not taxed as alcohol, but it gave the same kind of escape from the stresses and miseries of life.

Photo: Cydone

Until 1908 in Britain, Laudanum or tincture of opium was also included in a number of baby’s ‘soothing’ syrups. Grandma’s Secret, Mother’s Treasure, Morrell’s Teething Syrup, Godfrey’s Cordial and Mrs Winston’s Soothing Syrup were just some of the brands a desperate mother or nursemaid could buy and, especially in the hands of parents or wet-nurses who either couldn’t read well or might think an extra dose would ‘do baby good’, these syrups could be lethal. Koop’s Baby Friend killed 11 infants in two years, and those were only the infant deaths that were investigated. There were probably many others that weren’t.

Wilkie Collins was not the only writer to become addicted to laudanum, Lord Byron took it in the form known as Black Drop, which is four times the normal strength, as did Coleridge. Somehow Coleridge managed to keep his addition a secret, though he could imbibe up to a pint in one day.

The poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning first took laudanum at the age of 15 after suffering a spinal injury, and at the time of her engagement to Robert Browning was taking 40 drops a day, which was large dose. Florence Nightingale also took it for medical reasons.

1781, 'Nightmare' by Henry Fuseli (1741-1825)

A number of prominent people took laudanum to calm their nerves before a public speech, including John Hunter, the ‘Father of Anatomy’ (1728-93) who took 30 drops before giving lectures; William Wilberforce, the slavery abolitionist; and the Prime Minister William Gladstone who took it to steady his nerves before addressing parliament. I imagine there are days when modern Prime Ministers might sympathise with that.

Wilkie Collins tried many times to break his addiction through hypnosis and other means. On 26th February 1869, he wrote a letter to Mrs Benzon, 

‘… forgive me if I am absent tomorrow night. My doctor is trying to break me of the habit of drinking laudanum. I am stabbed every night at ten with a sharp-pointed syringe which injects morphia under my skin - and gets me a night's rest without any of the drawbacks of taking opium internally. If I only persevere with this, I am told I shall be able, before long, gradually to diminish the quantity of morphia and the number of nightly stabbings - and so emancipate myself from opium altogether.’ 

Sadly, he was never able to do that.

1863, Advert for 'Wolcott's Instant 

Pain Annihilator'

A few weeks ago, my wisdom teeth erupted. I couldn’t open my jaws more than half an inch. My cheeks swell up like a hamster with mumps and I discovered that sucking soup for Christmas dinner doesn’t make you feel festive, especially when soup is all you’ve been able to eat for a fortnight. It was massively painful and if I could have travelled back in time, I would have been snatching bottles of ‘Morrell’s Teething Syrup’ from any Victorian baby I could find.

Trying to stick to my daily writing routine whilst grizzling like an infant, I found a renewed admiration for Wilkie Collins. Since my teens, I’ve been captivated by his novels, but thinking about what he was battling when he wrote them, makes them seem even more amazing. He was able to turn the pain and nightmares that tormented him into great stories. Now that really is the stuff of fairy tales – spinning the nettles of life into pure gold. Happy Birthday, Wilkie!

Byzantium’s Attila or her Spiritual Heiress? – Michelle Lovric

I have previously interviewed Gregory Dowling about Ascension, his historical mystery set in Venice.

When I heard he had a new book out, I asked if we might speak about it. To sweeten the bait, I promised that I, for my part, would not indulge in another extended catfight about Byron. Graciously, Gregory agreed. His publishers kindly sent me the book, and I took it Venice to read – the perfect book for a rare day of dense rain gurgling down the drainpipes into pewter-grey canals.

In The Four Horsemen, Gregory Dowling’s protagonist Alvise Marangon is set to investigate a secret society that has suddenly manifested unpleasantly with the murder of a scholar so eccentric and impoverished that it’s a mystery as to why he was worth killing at all.

This novel is about spy-circles that overlap and clash. It is also about a clash of beliefs … the chief characters believe that Venice was either an Attila to the ancient of city of Constantinople, or the rightful heiress to its holy leadership. Some people believe in one or the other so strongly that they must murder, commission murder, or die.

Alvise Marangon is one of those indispensable uncomfortable-in-his-own-skin characters. He straddles two worlds, being Venetian but brought up in England. He’s a cicerone, a learned guide to English Grand Tourists, so he knows the city inside out – a useful knowledge base for a novel about Venice recounted in the first person.

The discomfort of Marangon’s position is that he is not quite one thing or the other. He’s a poor man who sometimes moves in the most elevated society and the most elegant of spaces, like the Querini Stampalia palace, pictured below. Alvise is clever, but not so clever as to evade a constant stream of deadly troubles. He is a last-minute merchant, an excellent device for keeping readers on the edges of their seats. being the son of an actress, his sense of theatre enlivens the novel. He’s endowed with a few failings, including an over-fondness of wine. And he indulges in one reprehensible moral lapse that I found shocking, mostly because I was so engaged with the character.

So here are my questions to Alvise's creator ...

Those of us who write about Venice in the eighteenth century find ourselves using the vocabulary of the time. For me, it is always interesting to hear another writer explain the terms that are the currency of our books. Could you give me your personal definitions of 

1. A ‘confidente’
A paid informer. Their reports can be found in the state archives and make fascinating if often depressing reading. A great deal of what one reads amounts to little more than local gossip, but (or perhaps “and so”) it helps to give one an idea of Venetian society. Alvise finds himself forced into this role.

2. As did one Giacomo Casanova, thirty years after your story. What about a ‘sbirro’?
A law-enforcer at the humblest level; the term is almost always derogatory, as they were generally reputed to be corrupt and/or violent.

3. A 'bravo'?
A hired thug.

4. A 'cisisbeo' (without mentioning Byron, if possible, or just a little bit)?

The semi-official “gallant” of a married woman, often but not always actually her lover, also referred to as “cavalier servente”. Difficult not to quote from Byron’s Beppo:

 


Byron by George Henry Harlow,
courtesty of Wikimedia Commons

But “Cavalier Servente” is the phrase
Used in politest circles to express

This supernumerary slave who stays

Close to the lady as a part of dress –

Her word the only law which he obeys –

His is no Sinecure, as you may guess;

Coach, Servants, Gondola, he goes to call,

And carries fan and tippet, gloves, and shawl.

  And he wrote the poem before he actually found himself playing the role to his lover, Teresa Guiccioli, a noblewoman from Ravenna. With the benefit of this inside knowledge he described the behaviour of Italian noblewomen to his publisher, John Murray:

 

Their system has it’s [sic] rules—and it’s fitnesses—and decorums—so as to be reduced to a kind of discipline—or game at hearts—which admits few deviations unless you wish to lose it.——They are extremely tenacious—and jealous as furies—not permitting their Lovers even to marry if they can help it—and keeping them always close to them in public as in private whenever they can.——In short they transfer marriage to adultery—and strike the not out of that commandment.—The reason is that they marry for their parents and love for themselves.—They exact fidelity from a lover as a debt of honour—while they pay the husband as a tradesman—that is not at all.—— You hear a person’s character—male or female—canvassed—not as depending on their conduct to their husbands or wives—but to their mistress or lover.——[…] It is to be observed that while they do all this—the greatest outward respect is to be paid to the husbands—and not only by the ladies—but by their Serventi—particularly if the husband serves no one himself (which is not often the case however) so that you would often suppose them relations—the Servente making the figure of one adopted into the family.—Sometimes the ladies run a little restive—and elope—or divide—or make a scene—but this is at starting generally—when they know no better—or when they fall in love with a foreigner—or some such anomaly—and is always reckoned unnecessary and extravagant.

Palazzo Mocenigo where Byron did some of his cavalier servente-ing

5.       A 'casino'?
A room or set of rooms kept by Venetian men or women of high rank for purposes of pleasure; often but not always the pleasure consisted in games of chance (hence the modern meaning of the word), but a casino could also be used for sexual liaisons or just for refined conversation and social gatherings.

Can you explain the background to your premise that Venice should be regarded as the end of Byzantium or the heiress to its spiritual hegemony? What kind of people would have espoused each of these views?

Well, I wouldn’t say it is my premise but that of certain characters in the novel. Venice grew up in its early years in the shadow of Constantinople; it never fell under the aegis of the Holy Roman Empire of the West, precisely because it was under the protection of Constantinople. This gave it a certain independence as compared with other Italian cities and states. And then as it grew in wealth and power it came to rival Constantinople and this culminated in the Fourth Crusade, in which Venice led the assault on its old protector, sacking the city and basically assuming for itself the role that Constantinople had always had, as the leading power in the Eastern Mediterranean.

One only has to look at the great paintings celebrating the event in the Doge’s Palace to see that this event was considered a foundational moment in Venetian history. Venice, which had no classical past, having been founded in the fifth century, now took upon itself the heritage of imperial Rome – with all the additional prestige conferred by the religious status of Constantinople, as the city created by the first Christian emperor.

Of course, that is not how it was seen by victims of that assault – which is to say, by the Greek-speaking world of the Eastern Roman Empire, the inhabitants of which suddenly found themselves under the rule of the Franks and the Venetians. And so in the novel it is primarily the non-Venetian characters, specifically the Greeks, who bewail and fiercely resent the end of Constantinople – because the eventual fall of the city to the Turks in 1453 can also be attributed to the fatal weakening of the city in that Crusade two and half centuries earlier. Venice, so to speak, sowed the seeds of its own decline.

And can you tell us how you use the symbolism of the four famous horses that can be seen in replica above the doors to the basilica of San Marco? (with the real ones safely inside) And how they relate to your story?
The four horses are considered the greatest trophy looted from Constantinople. The general theory is that they once stood in the hippodrome of Constantinople, even though we have no definite evidence of this. The important thing is that they are clearly a symbol of Roman-ness (to translate the word romanità); it’s certainly difficult to see any religious symbolism in them, unless one drags up the idea of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (obviously hinted at in my title), and so it may seem rather odd that they should have been placed on the front of Venice’s most important church. But, of course, they were a clear statement of Venice’s imperial ambitions; the city was thus proclaiming itself as having assumed the leadership of the Roman Empire of the East. It’s interesting that they came to be closely identified with Venetian power, so that in the fourteenth century a Genoese admiral, for example, talked about bridling the horses of St Mark, rather than taming the city’s winged lion.

And about the association of the Venier family, from Venice’s Golden Book of nobles, with Venus? And how the birthplace of the goddess is transposed from one island to another?

That was clearly just a piece of wishful or opportunistic etymology on the part of the family, wanting to justify their possession of the island of Kythira, birthplace of Venus. Cyprus, too, claims to be the birthplace of Venus (or Aphrodite). My knowledge of classical mythology is not extensive enough for me to make any pronouncements on this dispute. But it’s another example of how the interpretation of history and mythology depends very much on the intentions and desires of the interpreter. One thing Alvise learns from his experiences is a certain fundamental scepticism.

The story focuses on outrages committed against ‘Turkish’ – Muslim – visitors to Venice. Were current East-West relations in your mind when writing this book?

Yes, inevitably. Also because these relations are all part of a continuous history, which we really need to know. If George W. Bush had known a little more about such things then he might have avoided talking about the need for a new Crusade after 9/11. That is a word that has very different connotations, depending on which side of the great divide you are speaking from.



Sultan Mehmet II,
portrait by unknown artist
clearly influence by Bellini
courtesy of Wikimedia
Commons

Having said that, there is no doubt that Venice played an important role as a bridge between these two worlds. To the great scandal of many in the Christian West, Venice continued to trade with the city of Constantinople, or Istanbul, as it would become, after it had fallen to the Turks. In the sixteenth century more than half of Venice’s grain came from lands under Ottoman rule. Sultan Mahomet II even invited the artist Gentile Bellini to his court, where he spent two years, which furnished him with exotic backgrounds for his paintings for years to come; it’s thank to him that we know what the Sultan looked like. (Something I've written about on this site).

And just as Venice had been the first place in western Europe to adopt the Byzantine table-fork, so it became the first to start drinking Turkish “black water”, or coffee.

And speaking of religious matters, it’s worth remembering that the first printed copy of the Koran was produced in Venice. The historian Niccolò Contarini, who became Doge in 1630, studied the cohesion of the Ottoman Empire and concluded, with all the practicality of a Machiavelli, that Mahomet had succeeded better than anyone else “in organising religion to bring the multitude to himself and to extend the state”. So perhaps it isn’t surprising that Pope Clement VIII said to a Venetian envoy in the sixteenth century: “We would be happy if you behaved with as much respect to the Apostolic See and the person of the Pope as you do to the Turks.”

One of your characters is a sexually rapacious noblewoman. I have heard it said that the 18th century was the most feminine of times – when women enjoyed more equality, freedom and power than at other periods. Is your Isabella Venier a metaphor for Venice of the 18th Century?

Well, I don’t like to think of my characters purely in terms of metaphors or symbols. I hope she comes across first of all as a living, breathing person. Of course, there had been women of influence and prestige before the 18th century (Gaspara Stampa, Veronica Franco, Sarra Copia Sulam, to name just a few – and anyone who is interested should get hold of Kathleen Ann Gonzalez’s book A Beautiful Woman in Venice), but probably it did become easier for women, at least of a certain rank, to play a public role in the 18th century – and not only in Venice, of course.

The Casino Venier:: infinite luxury in
a small room,
ideal site for seduction

Under the circumstances, do you think readers will forgive Marangon for his lapse?

I hope so. I can’t really say more than that. He certainly isn’t perfect and knows it.

I see that this may not be the last Alvise Marangon mystery. Are you prepared to say more?

The third mystery is under way. This time the Venetian scuole will come into the story – particularly the Scuola di Sant’Orsola, for which Carpaccio created the marvellous cycle of paintings now in the Accademia.

Thanks for the interview – and thanks especially for your description of Alvise at the beginning, which is exactly how I hope readers perceive him. Apologies for having dragged in Byron yet again …

You're forgiven. Thank you for a fascinating conversation ...

Gregory Dowling’s The Four Horsemen is published by Polygon. His website

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.

James Bond meets Goldoni, and more musings on the Byron question - Michelle Lovric

Gregory Dowling’s new historical novel, Ascension, is set in Venice in the 1749. By coincidence, my current WIP is set in La Serenissima in 1740, so I devoured his book with particular voracity. It’s also a fine read – pacy, humorous and well supplied with edge-of-seat factor. So I asked Gregory, whom I’ve known for far too many years, if he would agree to being interviewed. Very kindly, he did.

First, a little background.

Gregory Dowling – novelist and academic – is Bristol-born. He read English at Oxford. It’s now more than thirty years since he moved to Venice, where he is Associate Professor of American Literature at Ca' Foscari University. He has published four novels, co-edited two anthologies of poetry, written various non-fiction books and academic articles on Italian, British and American literature. He has a special interest in British and American writers in Italy, from the Romantic age onwards, and has written extensively about Byron in Venice. From the last fact, regular readers will know that Gregory and I have something to argue about.

But let us not dive head-first into controversy, and begin with the basics.

How did your personal and professional relationship with Venice begin?

First of all, thank you, Michelle, for offering me this chance to talk about my book – and thanks for your kind words on it. I’m very glad you enjoyed it; that means a lot to me.

 I first saw Venice in 1979, after four months teaching English in Naples. I came up to the north of Italy in June to visit an old school-friend who was working at a language school in Treviso and we went to Venice on a day-trip. And then I went back again by myself the next day. And the next day… And I knew I would be going back often. After Naples I did a stint at a language-school in Siena; and then, in January 1980, I got a job at a language school in Verona and while living there (for the next year and a half) I used to spend almost every weekend pottering about in Venice. In summer 1981 I was beginning to think I ought perhaps to go back to England and get a “proper job”—but then I said to myself if I could just have one year living in Venice… And I moved to a language school in Venice. And one year turned into another, and then I was offered the chance to start teaching at the university. And here I still am, now teaching American literature as well as English language. So I never got that “proper job”.

the view from Sant-Elena - Gregory's part of Venice

In a sentence or two, tell us what Ascension is about.

It’s a spy-story set in 18th-century Venice, with a hero, Alvise Marangon, who finds himself, against his will, inveigled into the Venetian secret service. Alvise was born in Venice but brought up in England in the world of theatre and so a certain amount of make-believe comes naturally to him. It is intended as a thriller, with, I hope, some elements of comedy. James Bond meets Goldoni, perhaps…

Why did you choose 1749 for the setting of this novel?

 Well, my choice was originally a little vaguer. It’s still there as an epigraph to the novel: “Venice, under the Dogeship of Pietro Grimani (1741-52).” As I wasn’t tying myself to any specific historic event I was quite happy with that general indication—rather like the old-fashioned convention you find in Victorian novels of leaving the last digit in the date as a dash. Those years attract me as a historical setting for a number of reasons: the final decline of the city is still several decades off; great art, music and literature are still being produced, and—should I so choose in future novels—I can bring in such figures as Casanova and Goldoni, who were very much part of the scene. However, the publisher decided that the “shout-line” on the cover needed a specific date, so after some hemming and hawing I opted for 1749, which seemed right.

Arsenale, setting of one of the climactic scenes of the new novel

One of your characters says, ‘In this city, everything is connected with everything else.’ Can you explain how this applies especially to Venice.

It still seems true to me. Perhaps it is just that Venice, despite its glittering cosmopolitan image, is also at heart a village, where people tend to know what everyone else is up to—and who they are related to.

 Another observation that caught my attention: ‘this city does bring out the histrionic in everyone’. Do you think that this is as true in 2015 as in 1749?

 Well, I suppose we can still point to carnival. However, there is something a little forced and artificial about carnival today (I used the contemporary carnival for the climax of my previous thriller set in Venice, Every Picture Tells a Story, St Martin’s Press, 1991). Or, to put it in another way, the artifice doesn’t seem to come quite so naturally today. Nonetheless, there’s still a good deal of performance in Venetian life, whether at the Rialto market or at faculty meetings at the university.

How do you make use of your locations? Do you physically go to write in the settings of your scenes? Do you superimpose a map or diagram of how things were then over how they are now? I am particularly thinking of your description of the Piazza San Marco at night, which well illustrates how things were different then. I also loved your description of the cheese shop in the middle of the fishiest bit of Dorsoduro.

I don’t feel the need to actually be in the place while writing a scene. Sitting down with my laptop in the Doge’s Palace would be a little inconvenient, after all. But I do try to remain faithful to the city’s geography as it was then, which essentially means remembering that streets like Via 22 Marzo, the Strada Nova, and Via Garibaldi did not exist; that there was just the one bridge over the Grand Canal; that Venice itself was a true island… Obvious things like that, for a start. It’s possible that a real expert might find I’ve allowed my characters to cross a bridge that wasn’t there at the time and I’ll be happy to accept correction on such points. However, I won’t lose too much sleep over it, since it’s the overall faithfulness to the period that counts, I feel. And I hope I captured that in such things as my descriptions of Piazza San Marco at night.

 I’m glad you liked the cheese shop; that, of course, is purely imaginary. I’m not drawing on any records of such an establishment in the archives.

Sant'Isepo, one of the little-known corners of Venice explored in the novel

Were you able to go inside the Palazzo Garzoni to research the scenes you set there? Was that during its recent restoration?

Actually, the department I belong to at the university was situated in Ca’ Garzoni for many years, until the university sold the building. So I know the palace well. I allowed myself a little licence in describing its attic, mind you. And I never climbed on to the rooftop either…

The Missier Grande is inevitably part of the crime-and-punishment scenario of all novels set in Venice. But your book offers the first time I can remember him being an actual character with a personality. How did you come up with your particular and charismatic Missier Grande, in the context of his political role?

I was drawn to the character precisely because he is usually such a vague figure. I imagine that at the time a certain anonymity was considered desirable, in order to instil the necessary awe among the populace. That gave me some scope to make what I wanted, more or less, of the figure. I was also intrigued by the fact that the post was held by figures for fairly long periods, amid a context in which most positions of authority had very strict time-limits. So I was interested in how this would affect relations between such figures.

How do you deal with the issue of info-dumping – trying to get on with the story while accommodating the need to explain the strange workings Venetian life in the 18th century? Lately I have been shucking off history in favour of character in my books, but that doesn’t mean I don’t do the research. However I find that I increasingly discard explanations of Venice from the novel I submit, partly to avoid the editor’s red pen. What is your attitude to the balance between educating the reader and entertaining him/her?

Well, the particular position of my hero-narrator helps here. He is Venetian by birth but not by upbringing, and that means he has had to learn most of the strange workings of the city for himself. Also he is a professional cicerone, so it isn’t too unnatural that he should occasionally feel the need to explain things as he narrates. And I also imagine that a reader who chooses such a novel will have a certain amount of curiosity about the city and the period and thus a certain degree of toleration for such information. Having said that, I will always tilt the scales in favour of entertainment over education.

I understand that you, your wife and children were charmingly inserted by your father into a copy he made of a Francesco Guardi painting of the Bucintoro, the Doge’s ceremonial boat, which features at the climax of the novel. I am envious of that picture! I guess this is what historical novelists do – we insert ourselves into history. Do you agree? And can you tell me more about the painting?

 

My father, after he retired as a G.P., took up painting, something he hadn’t done since schooldays. He regularly attended an art-class for years and did countless view-paintings, as well as portraits. Occasionally he did copies of famous paintings. One of these is of the Francesco Guardi painting you refer to, and in the bottom right-hand corner he included my own family: myself, my wife Patrizia and our two sons, Christopher and Alessandro.

 

Judging from the fact that Patrizia and I are holding the boys in our arms, the painting must have been done about 24 or 25 years ago. The painting now hangs in my father’s bedroom, just one of numerous Venetian views that cover three of the walls of the room. It is possible that when I began thinking of a plot for the novel, I was unconsciously influenced by this painting, since, as you say, we have been inserted into history—into a particularly splendid moment of history.

It’s hardly a secret after my novel Carnevale that I fail to admire Byron. I find much of the poetry facile, and even brilliant poetry could not make up for the cruel way he treated his mother, daughter Allegra, and nearly every woman who passed through what I cannot even bring myself to call his ‘romantic’ life. As far as I am concerned, Byron’s only big love affair was with himself. I enjoy his letters, but only because I like the dark, vicious humour there. I still pity his targets. Those letters are rampantly self-conscious, knowingly destined for publication. So they are only half letters; other half is posing with curlicues. Well, I got off the fence! I think you would defend Byron, would you not? Tell us what about your own writings on him. 

Byron by George Henry Harlow,
courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Well, now here is where I could wear out your and your readers’ patience, since I could bang on about Byron for pages and pages (if we can refer to a blog having pages). The first thing to say, of course, is that Byron’s behaviour is at times indefensible. The story of Allegra is a terribly sad one and Byron comes out very badly from it. (People might be interested in this half-hour BBC Radio 4 programme by Michael Symmons Roberts that was made about her short life a few weeks ago, in which I feature briefly: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b064ygl5 ) And I won’t try and defend his behaviour towards his wife, either, just as I wouldn’t try and defend that of Charles Dickens or that of Graham Greene towards their wives. But it is worth saying that not all women had such negative experiences with him; you only have to read Teresa Guiccioli’s adoring account of his life to see that. And another interesting case is that of Mary Shelley, an extremely intelligent and sensitive woman who had every reason to have a very negative view of him, since she was so closely tied to the story of Allegra, but who after his death had to admit to the enduring fascination he exerted over her.

And if you want to get a much more positive view of Byron it is well worth reading accounts of his last year, the year of the so-called Greek adventure. A very good book on it came out two years ago by Roderick Beaton, Byron’s War. It’s a period that is extremely well-documented, since almost everyone who came into contact with Byron during his time in Greece wrote their own accounts of the story and of his death. And it is clear that Byron made a strong and favourable impression on most of these people, who are extremely diverse in character and background. Particularly touching is the account by Teresa’s brother, Pietro Gamba, who accompanied Byron to Greece and also died there; before meeting Byron he had tried to warn his sister against associating with him, influenced by the tales he had heard of Byron’s behaviour; after meeting him he became one of Byron’s most loyal friends.

Another book that is a passionate defence of Byron the man as well as Byron the poet is the recent L'estate di un ghiro - Il mito di Lord Byron attraverso la vita, i viaggi, gli amori, le opere by the Italian critic Vincenzo Patanè, who lives and works in Venice, the first full-length Italian biography of the poet. A very good book.

 But of course the real reason we continue to be fascinated by Byron is his poetry and here I have to disagree vigorously with your opinion—while at the same time acknowledging that there is a nugget of truth in what you say about it. There is a lot of Byron’s poetry that is “facile”, as you put it; it’s the stuff that made Byron famous: much of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the Oriental Tales etc. The kind of stuff that created the Byronic legend, and made him famous throughout Europe. The kind of poetry that Byron himself said had “corrupted the public taste”. It’s enjoyable enough, in its own rather undemanding way, but it is not what keeps Byron’s reputation so high today. Byron’s greatest works are the poems he wrote in ottava rima, the Italian stanza form he encountered in Italy: Beppo, The Vision of Judgement, and, in particular, Don Juan. Beppo gives us a delightful picture of Venetian society, in a story that works as a parody of his own oriental romances. The Vision of Judgement is one of the greatest satirical poems in the language, and is also highly imaginative. Don Juan is an extraordinary work, varying in tone and register from canto to canto, ranging from tender love poetry to bedroom farce, from epic adventures to literary parody, from scenes of war to humorous reflections on religion, politics, high society… While his poetry in the “Byronic” style had a huge and immediate influence on so many of the other European Romantics of the day, in all fields of art, from Turner to Delacroix and Gericault, from Tchaikovsky to Berlioz and Schumann and Verdi, Don Juan had a long-lasting but even more powerful influence on such great works as Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Auden’s satirical poetry and, to come up to our own days, Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate. In fact, I’d leave the last word on Byron to Auden, by far and away the best critic on Byron.

“Whatever its faults Don Juan is the most original poem in English; nothing like had ever been written before. Speaking for myself, I don’t feel like reading it very often, but when I do, it is the only poem I want to read: no other will do.”

 Which writers, in your opinion, do Venice justice on the page? (I’d love to ask you who doesn’t deliver, but let’s not be uncharitable, shall we? At least to the living.)

Well, I’ll start with Beppo, then. And in fact I could remain with Byron to make a distinction between those writers who are good at the Childe Harold vision of the city—describing Venice in terms of sheer romantic spectacle—and those who are good at the Beppo mode—describing Venice in terms of its daily life, depicting it, one might say, from a more intimate point of view, the point of view of the long-term Venetian resident. Some, like Byron, can do both, but in general writers tend towards one or the other.

The best of the former kind is Anthony Hecht in his extraordinary poem The Venetian Vespers, which contains some of the most moving descriptions of the city’s beauty in all literature: I’m thinking of the end of the second section and the beginning of the third, with the description of the interior of San Marco, or the final section, with its sunset description. All as part of a great psychological portrait of a tormented American exile in the city. Other poets I admire on the city are James Merrill and John Drury.

Henry James also has some wonderful descriptive passages; perhaps not so much in the novels (although the storm and its aftermath in The Wings of the Dove are wonderful) as in his essays in Italian Hours.

Remaining more or less in that period, I would say that the best of the “Beppo”-type writers is William Dean Howells, in his wonderful book Venetian Life, a great account of everyday life in 19th-century Venice.

My favourite essayist on the city is Mary McCarthy, whose book Venice Observed contains some of the most acute and brilliant descriptions of different aspects of Venice, but most particularly its art.

Novels I’ve enjoyed that are set in the city are Miss Garnet’s Angel by Sally Vickers, with its wonderful pictures of Dorsoduro and the Guardi paintings in the church of Angelo Raffaele. Vikram Seth’s pages in An Equal Music are brilliant; there’s a wonderful range in them, from the magnificent descriptions of the Carpaccio paintings in S. Giorgio degli Schiavoni and the mosaics of Torcello to the homely depictions of life in S. Elena, my own part of town. So he manages to do both Childe Harold and Beppo.

And to turn to fiction in my own genre, Donna Leon is always reliable for pictures of Venice today (even if the city is, of course, rather less crime-ridden than one might expect from a reading of her novels). Rather more melodramatic, but enormous fun, is the crime novel Lucifer’s Shadow by David Hewson.

I have a guilty fondness for the novels of Simon Raven, and two in particular have well-drawn Venetian settings: Brother Cain and The Survivors.

Andrea Molesini, among Venetian writers, is extremely imaginative in his children’s novels set in the city, particularly Tutto il tempo del mondo.

Fruttero and Lucentini wrote a strange but very atmospheric novel set in Venice, L’amante senza fissa dimora, which I translated for Chatto and Windus; however, for some reason, after publishing two other books of theirs that I had translated they decided not to proceed with this one, which was a pity, since it was perhaps the best of the three.

For my own purposes—that is, to get the sense of 18th-century Venice—Andrea di Robilant’s books have proved invaluable, particularly A Venetian Affair. As, of course, have the works of Goldoni and Casanova.

And that brings me to your own novels, which I have greatly enjoyed. I particularly love the imaginative extravagance of your children’s books. I may even have got the idea of putting the story of Marino Faliero at the heart of my book from the use that you made (although very different) of the figure of Baiamonte Tiepolo.

Thank you so much, Gregory, for this tour around your literary Venice. You have almost swayed me about Byron. Almost.  I too love the Hecht and the Howells, different as they are.  And you have added to my books-to-buy-list, very expensively.

Michelle Lovric's website
Photographs of Venice by Gregory Dowling.
Portrait of Gregory Dowling, and photograph of the Guardi painting, by Barnaby Dowling.