A VISION OF THE ARTIST AT WORK by Penny Dolan

Imagine.

The ancient abbey is vast and, in later centuries, will be crowded with ornate memorials. Nevertheless, now – in London, in 1771 – a few historic effigies and tombs can be seen in the shadowy aisles, their carvings worn and their paint faded.  

The newly-reformed Society of Antiquaries is eager to have a record of these treasures for surely their own nation’s history is now as worthy of study as the classical world? 


A series of careful engravings are required, and that is why the boy sits in the hallowed gloom, pencil in hand, drawing the long dead. His master, James Basire, the foremost architectural line engraver in London, has chosen this fourteen year old apprentice specifically for this stage of the commission.  
 
First of all, the boy has been copying casts of classical statues since he was ten. He has the ability to draw a good foot, a hand, a torso, a head, a detail and more. Secondly – and maybe this is just as important a reason – Master Basire knows the boy has a passionate, argumentative nature and that he is easiest when left to work alone. Certainly, the lad’s brain seems fit to burst with his tales of biblical visions and lines from scripture and Milton’s poetry. 
 

 

Time passes. The boy works. The tall windows let in little daylight so he lights a candle stub or two. The small flames make the tombs look like great four-poster beds: the stone slabs in place of soft mattresses and the hard, carved canopy instead of curtains overhead.

His task, in drawing each tomb, is to demonstrate it from every angle and produce a record of every important detail and inscription. 

Down below, under the fine stonework, he knows the bodies are waiting. Once or twice, where stones have been cracked and shifted, he spied bones and breathed dust from the darkness within.Now he raises his head and stares. 
Up there, high up on their stony beds, the strange elongated effigies of old kings and queens face upwards, heavenwards, God-wards. The royal features are not for common, everyday eyes to view - and yet the Society has asked for a true record of all that is there, have they not?

Fortunately, the boy is determined, as well as small for his fourteen years. When the abbey is quiet, he climbs right up on to the tombs and stands there, just below the carved canopies. Leaning forward, he draws the human figures at his feet, reaching out to measure the features as he does so. Some of the tombs are so low that he is forced to kneel or crouch almost nose to nose with the cold, dead faces. He does not mind: his imagination feeds on these moments. 

He works. Now and then, he hears voices echo in the sacred air and once ghostly monks passed in a procession. He does not mind. Such spectres are better than the flesh-and-blood schoolboys who visit the abbey, mocking him and his work. He glances down at his marked knuckles, his eyes still alight with righteous anger. Master Basire was correct about that temper.

Imagine the boy, working. Imagine what patterns this particular work must be forming in his mind. 

All his youthful energies are bound up with the spirits of this place: the sense of history, of worldly and godly glory, of living words cut into stone, of the eternal victory of death - and of his own dreams, eagerly calling him on to great things. All he sees, hears and feels while working alone in that place will go into his own work. He pauses, stretches his shoulders, bends over and draws again.

The building is Westminster Abbey.

The boy? His name is William Blake.

As I began reading Peter Ackroyd’s excellent biography of Blake, I came across his account of this stage in the boy’s apprenticeship and, startled by the scene conjured up, used it as a starting point for my own writing, above.

Adolescent experiences can be intense enough to imprint perceptions that persist long afterwards - especially if you are an imaginative young apprentice working twelve hours a day, six days a week, and with a head constantly spinning with new thoughts and half-biblical visions.

Reading about Blake standing on the tombs, I felt as if a half-recognised aspect of Blake’s work had suddenly become understandable. 

There is, of course, the strongly sculptural nature of many of his figures, but I also wondered – and this is only my thought which you can take or leave – whether the young artist, leaning over the effigies on the tombs, had so absorbed the physical and bodily memory of that encounter that he recreated that stance over and over again in the form and shape of his paintings and artwork.

Is this idea possible? Did the familiar "Blake" shape of the bending deity or spirit, leaning over the human come from something remembered in his own body? What do you think?

Meanwhile, I must see more and read more of Ackroyd’s William Blake - and maybe more elsewhere, including Blake’s own account - and see what I discover.

 

Penny Dolan

Maps and Chaps - Celia Rees

When I was at school, this was how one of my teachers defined Geography and History. Of course, the scope of both subjects expands far beyond this narrow definition (what about Chapesses?) and neither are they mutually exclusive. I don't know about other History Girls, but I spend an enormous amount of time poring over maps. I have them in my notebooks, pinned to my noticeboard. They allow me to track my characters' journeys and to get to know the places where they are living. 

In Sovay, the journey was from the English Midlands (it was possible to us a modern map for this - avoiding the M40) to 18th Century London and then to Revolutionary Paris. 

Just looking at the maps is exciting, an adventure in itself. The lettering, the illustration, the way the maps are set out, give a feeling for the time when they were created. The maps differ from period to period, just as countries and counties change and cities grow and develop. The 18th Century maps I referred to for Sovay, are very different from those that I looked at for The Fool's Girl, set two hundred years earlier.

Vissher Panorama

Agas map

The Agas map gives a unique bird's eye view of the Elizabethan city and the Vissher Panorama is just that, a panorama in almost photographic detail. A magnifying glass reveals tiny, accurate  visual details, not just of landmarks but of the everyday life of the people going about their business, where they would be going, what they would have seen and witnessed, all this is a priceless resource to the writer.


Useful as maps are, there is really no substitute for visiting a place, following the streets and alleyways of the old cities makes it much easier to imagine your character there, to bring the place and the period to life. Much of what was marked on the historical map will have been swept away by the intervening centuries, by fire, war, continuous and continuing development, but some things remain. When I'm walking a town or a city, or travelling though a landscape, I remember fellow History Girl, Adele Geras' advice to write about what is still there, rather than what has disappeared. It is always possible to find an old building, a cobbled courtyard, a narrow alleyway that holds something of the period that you are hoping to discover.

In Peter Ackroyd's London: A Biography, he describes a continuity of use that can stretch back for many centuries. A walk along modern Bankside won't show much that is left from Shakespeare's day but there are pubs, theatres, restaurants, street performers and beggars, the vibrant life of the river, different vessels on the choppy waters, the rubble strewn foreshore, a cormorant drying its wings. Much has gone, but some things are still there.

A page from The Fool's Girl Notebook

Celia Rees
www.celiarees.com

Seeing Angels - Katherine Langrish

The Ancient of Days

Reading Peter Ackroyd’s biography of William Blake (‘Blake’, Vintage) I found a marvellous account of how Blake saw the Archangel Gabriel in his study. Blake was reading Edward Young’s ‘Night Thoughts’ when he came to a passage where the poet asks ‘who can paint an angel?’ Blake shut the book and mused aloud:

Blake: Aye! Who can paint an angel?
Voice: Michel Angelo could.


He looked about but saw nothing except ‘a greater light than usual’.


Blake: And how do you know?
Voice: I know, for I sat to him: I am the arch-angel Gabriel.
Blake: Oho! You are, are you? I must have better assurance than that of a wandering voice; you may be an evil spirit – there are such in the land.
Voice: You shall have good assurance. Can an evil spirit do this?


And then Blake saw a shining, winged shape, which ‘dilated more and more: he waved his hands; the roof of my study opened; he ascended into heaven; he stood in the sun, and beckoning to me, moved the universe.’

As is well known, Blake saw visions all his life. As a child of about four he was frightened (his wife reminded him) by a vision of God who ‘put his head to the window and set you a-screaming’; as a slightly older child he saw a tree bespangled full of angels, and met the Prophet Ezekiel out in the fields. As a man, he saw, conversed with and drew ‘Spectres of the Dead’, angels, Jesus, ‘the ghost of a flea’. He saw ‘the Ancient of Days’ hovering at the top of his narrow, dim staircase.

The Ghost of a Flea

None of this did him any favours in practical real-life terms. Some friends revered him, but a much larger proportion considered him eccentric and odd, if not outright mad. Blake was one of those artists and poets who are not much appreciated in their own lifetimes. He always struggled to make a living, and financial and social success eluded him. And yet he was rightly convinced of his own genius, so much so that one can’t feel the pity for him that one feels for Vincent Van Gogh or John Keats, dying before they could know of their own undying fame. Blake was so certain of the worth of his work, the truth and grandeur of his visions, that public recognition – though doubtless it would have been welcome – was not essential to him.

But what would we make of William Blake today? I don’t know about you, but if a neighbour buttonholed me one day and began to tell me that he’d recently been talking to John Milton – ‘I have seen him as a youth. And as an old man with a long flowing beard. He came lately as an old man’ – well, I might tend to back off. It is eccentric and odd to see angels, and it’s hard to blame Blake’s acquaintances for their scepticism which in turn fostered their general sense that he was a man who should not really be taken seriously.

The Great Red Dragon & The Woman Clothed in the Sun

We make exceptions for genius with the benefit of hindsight. With the weight of a century or so of bolstering critical opinion, we all now recognise that William Blake was a genius, and so we suspend our disbelief about his visions. Who knows what a genius may or may not see? Perhaps we consider that, as an artist as well as a poet, Blake’s visual imagination produced images so vivid, so concrete, that in some way they did indeed ‘appear’ before him. Perhaps, as Peter Ackroyd suggests early in his book, the faculty of eidetic imagery, fairly common in children who see hallucinatory images as genuine sensory perceptions, was retained by Blake throughout his life.

Or perhaps he did see angels? What does it mean to say you see angels?

At any rate, this is a man who sang – and drew a picture of his wife – on his deathbed. “‘Stay Kate,’ he said, ‘keep just as you are – I will draw your portrait – for you have ever been an angel to me.’” His friend George Richmond (the artist who later drew the flattering portrait head of Charlotte Bronte) wrote to Samuel Palmer,

“He died on Sunday night at 6 Oclock in a most glorious manner. He said He was going to that Country he had all His life wished to see and expressed Himself Happy, hoping for Salvation through Jesus Christ – Just before he died His Countenance became fair. His eyes Brighten’d and He burst out Singing of the things he saw in Heaven.”

Or, as Blake himself wrote in ‘The Four Zoas’,

‘…he shook his aged mantles off
Into the fires Then glorious bright Exulting in his joy
He sounding rose into the heavens in naked majesty
In radiant youth.’

Albion

A Trip to the Sir John Soane’s Museum

by Linda Buckley-Archer

In last Saturday’s post Dianne Hofmeyr described how a dozen or so History Girls met up to push our primarily ‘virtual’ relationships into the real world. And what a lovely day we had. Do take a look at Dianne’s photographs if you haven’t viewed them already.

Our excuse was a group visit to the home of architect Sir John Soane – which has been preserved and renovated to appear as it would have done at the time of his death – and it is my personal take on the museum which is the subject of today’s post.

Ten years ago I told a friend that I was starting work on a children’s novel set in eighteenth-century London. She immediately said: I will take you to the Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields – you will LOVE it. So she did, and I did, and I have done ever since. In fact, the dates didn’t quite fit in with my fictional narrative but Lincoln’s Inn Fields itself became a setting which I returned to in all three volumes of The Gideon Trilogy. When I subsequently found both a literary agent and a publisher within minutes walk of the museum, visits to the S.J.S.M. became a regular event and it won a firm place in my subjective London atlas. As a novelist rather than an historian, it is less the detail (and heaven knows there’s enough detail here to satisfy anyone) than the spirit of the place that keeps drawing me back. It is a unique space, a London gem, a step back into the home and mind of a great English architect and inveterate collector of artefacts.

As far as I am concerned, London is a never-ending source of wormholes to the past: to walk this city’s streets is to be part of an historical continuum that in varying degrees fascinates, illuminates, humbles and occasionally disappoints (though, as that great biographer of the capital, Peter Ackroyd, asserts, London always survives). So, in the midst of such riches, why should you divert from your path in order to visit the Sir John Soane’s Museum? In no particular order, here are some of the reasons why I suggest that you should: its perfect situation, on the north side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields; the iconic yellow drawing room with its delightful views over the square; the astonishing folding Picture Room (Soane’s ingenious solution to running out of space for his paintings was to insert some extra ‘walls’ and put them on hinges); Soane’s collection of Hogarths (The Rake’s Progress and The Election) and his Canalettos (views of Venice); the Crypt crammed with treasures from the ancient world; Soane’s use of glass, of convex mirrors, and his opening up of dark spaces in order to create effects with light; the juxtaposition of the domestic with the astonishing, cluttered legacy of one of the world’s great collectors of artefacts, ancient and modern. The house is such a tardis: so packed with fascinating objects you always leave vowing to come back, yet it is small enough for you to appreciate properly in one visit. Here is a link to the museum’s website which will give you a taste of the delights contained within its walls – although is absolutely no substitute for going there in person:

http://www.soane.org/

Photograph of Lincoln's Inn Fields by Stephen Craven for the Geograph project.

Lincoln’s Inn Fields has to be one of the loveliest green spaces in London. The square is, to use a hackneyed but in this case appropriate term, a small oasis situated between busy Kingsway, Holborn, Chancery Lane and Lincoln’s Inn itself. But you don’t have to be a lawyer to eat your lunch under a giant plane tree and admire the architecture. First developed in the seventeenth century, it used to boast a theatre (demolished in the mid-nineteenth century) and has long been home to the comfortable professional classes, particularly, of course, the legal profession. The pitiless lawyer, Mr Tulkinghorn, of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, had his offices in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and the brass plates of law firms still abound. On the south of the square, opposite the Sir John Soane’s Museum, you can see evidence of another gentlemanly profession: the headquarters of the Royal College of Surgeons. This fine edifice also incorporates the Hunterian Museum (a museum of surgery) which certainly deserves another post all to itself.

This benign and kindly face belongs to Sir John Soane (1753-1837). Apprenticed to the architect George Dance, he studied architecture at the Royal Academy and won a travelling scholarship that allowed him to spend two years in Italy which engendered his lifelong appetite for collecting all things classical. His commissions included the Bank of England, the Dulwich Picture Gallery and the Holy Trinity Church at Marylebone. Over the course of his lifetime he acquired and rebuilt three adjacent houses, 12,13 and 14 (in 1792, 1813 and 1823 respectively), and constantly reworked his home and reconceived his displays of artefacts. Before his death he established his home as a museum by Act of Parliament. As Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy, he used his displays to teach and test his pupils’ knowledge of classical art and design.

Aside from the extensive collections which Sir John Soane amassed (Greek, Roman and Egyptian antiquities, terracotta and bronze artefacts, reliefs, stucco fragments, sculpture, death masks, paintings, sketch books, etc, etc, etc – pity the poor archivist), the museum gives a wonderful insight into domestic life at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in the early nineteenth century. Susan Palmer, of the museum, has written an excellent account of this in her book: The Soanes at Home (a volume to which I have turned in my research and would highly recommend). Drawing on and reproducing original documentation from the museum archives, it is a wonderful source for understanding just how a house was run at this period: the servants, the plumbing, the heating, the cooking, the laundry, mealtimes, the delivery of coal and milk, and so on. (Incidentally, for younger visitors, Fanny, Mrs Soane’s dog, gives a charmingly illustrated account of life at numbers 12 and 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields in her book, The Journal of Mrs Soane’s Dog Fanny, by Herself, written by Mirabel Cecil and illustrated by Francesca Martin. Both books are available from the museum.)

Scaffolding currently envelops Sir John Soane’s home and this is because the museum is undertaking a major project – due to be completed in 2014 – which will restore the entire 2nd floor of no. 13. Visitors will be able to view Soane’s private apartments: bedroom, bathroom, oratory, Mrs Soane’s morning room and her husband’s architectural models room. These exciting renovations will cost £7M. £6.5M has already been raised. If anyone would like to help with the remaining £0.5M, follow the link:

http://www.soane.org/opening_up_the_soane/donate_to_outs/

You can visit the museum in the evening, by candlelight, on the first Tuesday of the month, and, for a princely sum, you can also hire the museum for events. I must admit that my ultimate venue for a book launch has long been Sir John Soane’s dining room and library by candlelight. Future publishers kindly take note...

Timelines and Peter Ackroyd

When I still lived in London, there was a term when I was Writer in Residence in five Primary schools in a North London borough. I was trying to get children to find their way back into the past. One year was easy; ten years took them back to babyhood. Even a hundred years had some resonance for them because the schools were Victorian buildings which had recently celebrated centenaries, with children and teachers dressing up.

But five hundred years?

Tudors, Vikings, Romans - even dinosaurs were offered. They simply had no sense of how different periods of history fitted together, even English history. OK, they were only ten. But I actually wanted to take them back thousands of years to the people of pre-history. I was specifically trying to get them to imagine a time before houses, cars, electricity, books, in order to think what stories such people might have invented to explain the phenomena of the Sun, Moon and Stars, as they sat round their fires at night.

We got there in the end and their ideas were wonderful. What they were doing was inventing their own myths, which was what I had hoped for. But I kept remembering those contemporary Vikings and Tudors. For me, a timeline of history is the framework into which I slot each new piece of research and detail of knowledge. If you don't know that Tudors came after Plantagenets, it's hard to fit in each new fact or date or fascinating story.

This is a "ruler of rulers" of which I used to have one which  I seem to have mislaid. It was a very useful quick fact-checker for someone who finds it hard to remember dates. But it also exemplifies what those who spurn timelines hate most: it implies that History, particularly English History, is all a matter of the dates of the reigns of monarchs. Which, of course, it isn't.

But the reaction to that perceived view of the subject has brought about the kind of topic-based teaching that makes it difficult for students to link things up.  And in fact, the man or woman on the throne does have an enormous effect on ordinary people. If you are being subjected to a Poll Tax or having to give up the profits from selling the wool from your sheep to finance an expensive war with France, it really does make a difference to your daily life.

And as a novelist I find timelines make an enormous difference to mine. I make one for every novel, just to avoid things like having children in school on Sundays or parents going to work on Bank Holidays. If it's a historical novel it's even more important; there will be two simultaneous timelines - the one of what is known to have happened as events in time  and the one I have invented for my fictional characters. The two will entwine and inter-connect and I make much use of the Net to find out what the phases of the moon were in any given month of a specific year in the Middle Ages, for example, and when there were eclipses.

So I've been thinking about how to bring timelines back into fashion and then along comes Peter Ackroyd. He is releasing this month a book called Foundation, which is the first in a six volume series of the History of England (published by Macmillan).

Foundation begins where I wanted my Primary school children to travel back to: tens of thousands of years ago. It finishes with the death of Henry Vll, the first Tudor monarch. That's a lot to cram into 450 or so pages but it does leave roughly one century for each of the remaining volumes.

There are no actual timelines in the book, nor any family trees - indeed there are not even any notes, though there is a chapter by chapter bibliography. Ackroyd is approaching History not as a Historian but as a writer, perhaps the first since Macaulay wrote his History of England in the late nineteenth century . "The first historians after all were poets," Ackroyd reminds us.

First and foremost, his book is wonderfully readable. There are enough dates and monarchs to satisfy traditionalists but chapters about the Hundred Years' War or The Wars of the Roses or intercalated with ones on feudal customs or how other countries viewed the English.

Birth and death rituals, the role of the Parish church and all sorts of domestic details are here. What people wore and ate and drank, their animals, their cooking pots, their weapons. It's like finding small archaeological digs in between all the gorgeous detail of what kings spent their money on: £4,784 on clothes and furs in the case of Edward lV - in 1461!

"He draped himself in cloth of gold and crimson velvet, in tawny silk and green satin. He owned hundreds of pairs of shoes and slippers, hats and bonnets; he wore amethysts and sapphires and rubies in abundance."

(The pedant in me wants a footnote and sources but the reader and writer just says "ooh!")

And then there is the odd statement that resonates long after the book is shut, such as that the invention of the clock marked the demise of the feudal and seasonal world, as did the longbow and the decline of the serf.

Reading about the Peasants' Revolt in 1381, we hear a contemporary chronicler say that the teenage Richard ll, after reneging on the deal he had made with the rebels, who had been rioting and looting in the street, told them, "You seek equality with the lords but you are unworthy to live. Give this message to your fellows: rustics you are and rustics you will always be. You will remain in bondage, not as before but incomparably harsher. For as long as we live we will strive to suppress you, and your misery will be an example to posterity."

That has an awful topicality about it.

I can't wait for the remaining five volumes and Ackroyd is such a workhorse that we might well get one a year. I hope so; it will really help with the timelines.

Update: We have two signed copies of Foundation to give away (UK only, I'm afraid) to the commenters with the best answers to this question:

"What is your favourite period of history between 15,000 BC and 1509 AD (the time covered in Foundation) and why?"

Deadline September 16th

Writing Shakespeare - Celia Rees

I didn't make a conscious decision to begin writing Historical Fiction, but once I'd written Witch Child and its sequel, Sorceress, then other ideas popped up for further books set in the past. Like all writers, I found my own way of working, ways of researching, my own answers to the problems with voice and language that writing in this particular genre throws up. I also made some rules for myself.

1. Not to write about real people (to easily held to account).
2. To avoid the 16th Century (too well trammelled).

Then I saw a production of Twelfth Night. The viewing was accidental. The kind of serendipity that often accompanies the best ideas. A group of students were handing out fliers in Stratford for an outdoor performance down by the river. It was a lovely summer's day, so we stopped to watch. All through the play, I couldn't stop thinking, one idea sparking another: What if Illyria was a real place? What could happen there? And what happened after the end of the play? It never struck me that they were all going to live happily ever after. Three of the main characters leave, not happy at all, and the couples seem at best uneasy with each other. How did Shakespeare come across the story in the first place? The received wisdom is that he got it from an Italian source Gl' Ingannati, The Deceived One, but what if it didn't happen like that. What if someone told him the story some time after the main events? By the end of the performance, I could see Feste, the Fool, and a girl. Not Viola, but it could be her daughter. Let's call her Violetta. They are in London performing in the street, when Shakespeare stops to watch...

It was such a strong idea, I could see it so vividly, I had to do it even though I would be writing about a) the 16th Century and b) William Shakespeare, one of the most famous people ever. My rules had to go, but it was still a daunting prospect. How would I dare to do it? I had to get past my fear and find a way into him. First of all, I had to re-cast him in my head. I discarded all the portraits (disputed anyway) and decided that he would look like Joseph Fiennes in Shakespeare in Love (see above) a little older, maybe thinning a bit on top.

I had to be able to approach him as a person, so I decided to make him plain Will from Warwickshire trying to establish himself in the cut-throat world of the Elizabethan Theatre as part-time playhouse manager, writer and sometime actor, before he was that famous. Once I got started, I found the research rather re-assuring. There are whole libraries full of opinion and speculation but there are very few verifiable, known facts about his life because he wasn't important enough to leave much of an impression on the historical record - apart from his plays, of course, and there are plenty who would deny that he even wrote those. I was free to make him into my Shakespeare.

I followed the line of recent biographers, like James Shapiro in 1599; Peter Ackroyd, Shakespeare the Biography; Jonathan Bate, Soul of the Age; Germaine Greer, Shakespeare's Wife, and set him into his time, his context. Above all, I saw him as a writer. There might be a quantum difference in talent, but he was a writer just like me. The Elizabethan theatre was hungry for plays. He must always have been on the look out for a likely tale to turn into drama, so when he sees a Fool and his girl performing in the street, he thinks: Where are they from? What are they doing here? He knows there is a story there. He stops to watch, his curiosity aroused, but there is a trade off. They will tell him their story, part of which will become the play, Twelfth Night, but it is not a free exchange. They will want something in return...