dovegreyreader scribbles

Two Temple Place... Astor and Morris

2012-01-28T00:15:00+00:00

Fran and I continued our London Day of Culture to Perk Up the Spirits in Dismal January (and which we enjoyed so much we might make into an annual event) with a short stroll from the Museum of London, along the Embankment to Two Temple Place and the William Morris exhibition. This had been in my sights on my last two London trips but William and I just couldn't co-ordinate our dates no matter how hard we tried... closed on Tuesday ...closed again for a private function on the Wednesday I had planned to visit a few weeks later, so I was relieved to get there just before Story, Memory, Myth closes.

The rest of London, if not the country, if not the world had had the very same idea, and on that day too would you believe it, so the place was heaving.

No party thrown by original owner William Waldorf Astor can ever have involved so many people trying to get up and down the staircase at any one time, and what the famously flamboyant carved Four Musketeers gracing the newel posts must have thought was anyone's guess. I don't know about you but I am fine in crowds until my 'elf and safety' lobe kicks in and I think 'what if there was a fire?'. I don't panic, I just want to clock the exits and start to make my way out quietly.

It happened to me once at a Boden Sale; those pop-up bargain days they used to hold in rural venues and for which they would send out about 10,000 invitations and 9,999 people would turn up. Powderham Castle near to collapse under the weight of loaded baby buggies being passed over heads in order for people to get a foot nearer tables piled high with...well, what looked like a load of jumble. I actually rang Bookhound from the corner I was trapped in to ask him to contact someone at Boden HQ, report the mayhem and send in the troops, and to tell him I may be some time making my escape so don't put the dinner on yet.

Fortunately common sense prevailed at Temple Place and as Fran and I burst out of the doors, carried in the general direction of the exit on a sort of mosh pit of Morris-mania, admission had been stopped and was being ticketed for later in the day. We did manage to get a glimpse of some fabulous tapestries, sketches, paintings, wallpapers and also the Astor house, the perfect setting. I would love a closer look at the house another day, so much carving and panelling, all very sumptuous and Fran and I were both drawn to this wonderful stained glass window.

A closer look reveals really intricate detail but having settled down on the surprisingly empty window seat to study it, only to find ourselves surrounded by the hordes on the guided tour, we quickly moved on and then bought postcards in the shop.

It was all enough to fire me up for the read of Fiona McCarthy's biography, Edward Burne-Jones, The Last Pre-Raphaelite as there was plenty of EBJ in evidence, but I also hot-footed to the shelves when I arrived home to find the book on the Astor family. I read When the Astors Owned New York by Justin Kaplan on a seven hour flight back from Houston a few years ago and it was good to remind myself of this excellent read whilst swotting up on the background... death of cousin Jack on the Titanic and dear old William Waldorf, described by Justin Kaplan as every Englishman's nightmare...

'the American invader who bought his way into society, bought estates that were part of the nation's heritage, denied the public access to them...and could outspend, outcollect, outentertain, and outbuild anyone in England.'

Two Temple Place was bought and renovated with added crenellations as William Waldorf Astor's London pied-a-terre and business HQ in the dying years of the nineteenth century.

Serving as a private museum for his art and books collection, apparently including Shakespeare folios, the house was a place where he could also escape his family back in the Carlton Square residence and entertain who he pleased. H.G.Wells who interviewed him there revealed the partial extent of the Astor wealth...

'he was drawing gold from New York - perhaps $6 million a year in rents...as effectually as a ferret draws blood from a rabbit...'

In fact William's inheritance from his parents was estimated at between $150 million and $300 million, give or take the odd million which all meant he could afford a really flamboyant weather vane for the roof as well...

Always fearful of kidnappers and theft, Astor kept a loaded pistol to hand and the building was apparently equipped with a state-of the art security system which at the press of a button would lock and bar all windows and entrances ..which always feels like another fire hazard to me. Of course the wealth also stretched to the purchase of Cliveden followed by Hever Castle, and you can't knock it, at one point he was keeping 840 workers employed in renovations.

Anyway the exhibition was fabulous in every sense, the tapestries especially breathtaking and it was thankfully possible (with elbows) to look at them very closely and see the intricate and complex stitching, as well as brushstrokes and pencil workings for the wallpapers and their designs, and whilst I don't want to be the insitigator of a stampede, if you do live nearby it is the final day of the exhibition today.

Dickens and I... Stanley Wells

2012-01-27T00:15:00+00:00

Professor Stanley Wells is a Shakespeare scholar and Chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and my grateful thanks to him for sharing his Dickens and I contribution today.

Although I’ve devoted most of my life to Shakespeare, Dickens was my first literary love, and provides my earliest bookish memory. It must date back to around 1940, when I was ten years old, a primary school child in Yorkshire. I remember spending much of a weekend sitting behind a sofa reading The Pickwick Papers to myself, constantly erupting into laughter and giggles, to the complete bemusement of the rest of the family. It was a pretty well bookless home, and I’ve no idea where the copy I was reading came from. But I do remember afterwards that a friend of my father’s, the editor of the local newspaper, offered to sell us a set of the novels for £5, and I suppose my father must have bought it for me.

Since then I’ve read, and sometimes re-read, all the novels and much of the miscellaneous prose, and enjoyed them in a variety of ways. I remember writing an essay on Dickens and the drama when I was an undergraduate. In it I made much of the theatrical quality of Tulkinghorn’s melodramatic death: ‘Mr. Tulkinghorn's time is over for evermore, and the Roman pointed at the murderous hand uplifted against his life, and pointed helplessly at him, from night to morning, lying face downward on the floor, shot through the heart.’ Joining the RAF for my National Service I packed Nicholas Nickleby in my knapsack along with Keats’s poems as consolatory reading. When I became a schoolteacher I often read extracts from the novels to my pupils. Sometimes I drew on the anthology compiled by the actor and playwright Emlyn Williams for
his dramatic readings. Again Pickwick came in especially handy - the skating episodes were great favourites - useful particularly for Friday afternoons when I no less than the pupils was too tired for clause analysis and parsing and comprehension exercises. And more seriously I taught the whole of Great Expectations for their Ordinary Level exam, reading it aloud with them, to the greater pleasure of some than of others.

When I became a university teacher, though I never lectured on Dickens I gave tutorials on some of the novels. Once the BBC invited me to record a conversation about one with Edward Blishen, then a popular broadcaster and autobiographer, and again I chose Great Expectations. I suppose this has to count as my favourite, though over the years I have continued to read unsystematically through the canon, especially for my winter reading, sometimes at the same time as a friend has been reading the same novel, for the sake of sharing the pleasure. And of course I have often seen films and television dramas based on Dickens. James Hayter seemed a definitive Pickwick in the 1952 film; just to read its cast list, which includes such great performers of the past as Donald Wolfit, Joyce Grenfell, Hermione Baddeley, Hermione Gingold, and Kathleen Harrison is to be reminded of the wonderful opportunities Dickens gives to character actors. Now Simon Callow – a joyous Micawber on television - follows in Williams’s footsteps – and, of course, in those of Dickens himself as a solo reader. I have read biographies - Edgar Johnson’s, and very recently Clare Tomalin’s, as well as her book about Ellen Ternan. I supervised a Ph. D. dissertation on Dickens and Shakespeare, by Valerie Gager, published by C U P, which reveals well over a thousand quotations and allusions. Writing about Shakespeare in the nineteenth century in my book Shakespeare: For All Time (2002) I discussed the performances of The Merry Wives of Windsor that Dickens organized (and took part in - as Justice Shallow) in the hope of establishing Sheridan Knowles as curator of Shakespeare’s Birthplace. I have used extracts from the novels and the essays – especially from Sketches by Boz - for party readings, and I’ve taken part in readings, most recently a jovial pre-Christmas occasion when a group of us read the whole of A Christmas Carol, fuelled by mulled wine and hot sausages. And on a visit to New York last year, I had the pleasure of examining the precious original manuscript of the book, marvelling at the sense of a creative mind working at white heat revealed by the author’s cancellations and interlineations and substitutions. So far as I know, no one has ever undertaken what would admittedly be the heroic task of trying to trace his creative processes by unravelling them.

Dickens can be sentimental, diffuse, sententious, preachy, muddly in his plotting, overlong. But I value him for the abundance of his imagination, the variety and warmth of his characterization, his inconsequentialities, digressions and irrelevances, the resonance of his prose, the vitality of his dialogue, the piquancy of his observation, his depth of human feeling. When all is said and done, for me he’s second only to Shakespeare.

A bit of fun today...

2012-01-26T00:15:00+00:00

Thanks to Harriet for posting this over on Facebook yesterday, just what you need in January when it's cold, wet and raining, and we all had such a giggle over it I had to share it with you all here...

I am coming to terms with my alter ego Pretty Gumbo Rivers nee Hopkins but wait until you hear who I am married to, I won't spoil his moment but do look out for Bookhound in comments... it's hilarious.

Over to you, and I'm also really hoping we have a Hollerin' Hips Hawkins in our midst.

Happy Birthday Virginia...

2012-01-25T00:15:00+00:00

Celebration number two this week, and I'm not sure why January 25th and Virginia Woolf's birthday always sticks in my mind, but it always seems like a good day to reflect on her writing and her life a little.

Perhaps it is because each year I have just emerged from that really fulfilling reading phase that is Christmas and New Year. A mid-winter solstice break to stoke the boilers for whatever is to come until the spring and it usually involves some Virginia reading.

This year was no exception with Virginia Woolf by Alexandra Harris twinned with yet another trip To the Lighthouse which seems to have become the book I start every new year with. In fact my Forth Bridge painting book probably, because every time I get to the end, which is usually about August, I'm ready to start at the beginning again. And for those that may not know of the Forth Bridge (in Scotland) it is one of those jokes that has entered the every day here in the UK, so huge that by the time one complete coat of paint has gone on, the place where they started needs doing again.

Firstly To the Lighthouse and thank heavens you all told me how best to read this a few years ago, when I was struggling. Let the words happen, slow down and as Alexandra Harris says of any reading The Waves...

'Several of her key breakthroughs in the book came while listening to music. Because it is written to a rhythm, Woolf's readers have to beat time. It is no good trying to go too fast: Woolf slows us dwon to the pave of her characters' acute observations of the world. They watch and perceive with a childish wonder, long after they have grown up...'

And I am always amazed at the different threads I home in on with each read. Mrs Ramsay has my full attention this time and with Alexandra Harris's words and Virginia Woolf's own echoing in my mind...

'This novel was a laying to rest of ghosts from her family past... 'I wrote the book very quickly,' she said later, 'and when it was written I ceased to be obsessed by my mother. I no longer hear her voice; I do not see her.'

She has altered her memories of her father as well: 'now he comes back sometimes but differently....'

And a fascinating premise argued by Alexandra Harris, that this was Virginia Woolf confronting her parents as an adult, not as the child and younger woman she had been when she lost them.

Mrs Ramsay's sock knitting always fascinates me too. These socks for the son of the lighthouse keeper that she keeps measuring for size against her own son's legs (I just mis-typed that as 'lighthose' and almost left it in) and the anguish of young James who is so desperate in that way only children can be, to keep alive a glimmer of hope that the weather will hold off and the trip to the lighthouse will really happen. And in comes Mr Ramsay to ...well, with apologies to sensibilities, we'd call it 'p*****g on a bonfire here and Mrs Ramsay's work of nurturing that child-like hope is unravelled by forthrightness. I can almost imagine it, might Mrs R sacrifice one of her sock needles to poke him in the eye... she's certainly upset enough.

Meanwhile Alexandra Harris's book supplied the steady bass line that I love, some complementary reading that is adding richly to the mix, and whilst we might all argue that the world surely doesn't need yet another book about Virginia Woolf I would hope that it does and will continue to get them. It surely needs one that offers an interpretation of the books and the life within a new and updated social and cultural framework every so often. It is fifteen years since Hermione Lee's edition and Alexandra Harris offers a 2011 perspective on a life that still seems endlessly facinating and interesting (well I don't tire of it) as well as an appraisal of more recent books, plays and films since then.

I'm intrigued to that The Years, despite being the best-selling of all Virginia Woolf's books on publication, is now the least read and the least studied, me included, so I might rectify that this year. But I loved reading yet again about the printing press and the painstaking process of teaching herself to set type that Virginia embarked on, and the freedom of expression it gave her ...and the fact that she adored gossip ' a precious currency to be banked' and 'wisely spent' when she met with Vanessa...

'I always keep a sort of pouch of gossip for you in my mind...'

The book itself is the thing of beauty you would expect from publishers Thames & Hudson who always win me over with paper quality and production values, (oh alright then...and the silver book ribbon) and at £14.95 full price no more expensive than a read-once hardback fiction book these days. Whilst we all know that any self-respecting bibliophile and fan of all things Woolfian like me will have to have the book regardless, we can at least hope that it adds 'something extra' in the way of beauty to the shelves, and
this one most certainly does. There is a shade of pink that features large in Vanessa Bell's work, often alongside a shade of yellow with some grey mixed in.

It's a soothing, non-irritating shade that features on this book jacket too... something very calming about it, very gentle on the eye and the mind, so I wasn't in the least surprised to find it listed as Calamine on the Farrow & Ball shade chart. I was relieved it wasn't Ointment Pink or Dead Salmon truth be told or I might not have mentioned it. And yes I have so much time to waste I get the shade chart out to try and match the colours on book jackets, but Snake River Press use it on their little Bloomsbury in Sussex book, and it works... and makes my shelves look nice...

Book vanity, there are worse sins and it matters in these days of e-book competition where I don't even really 'own', and can't actually 'see' the book I pay money for.

What would Virginia have had to say about all that...who can know ... but happy birthday anyway Mrs Woolf.

Happy Birthday Edith...

2012-01-24T00:15:00+00:00

So many big anniversaries to celebrate this year it's catching me out a bit. You know when you turn over the page of the diary and there's a birthday you've nearly forgotten...or worse do you stand in the card shop thinking...'January...right..who has a birthday/anniversary/important date in January...' and then I look at the price of cards and decide to go home, sit at the kitchen table and make them myself instead a la cheapskate.com.

But in the literary world I did feel I wanted to mark two birthdays this week, so today it is a happy 150th to Edith Wharton, born this day in 1862, died in 1937, and whilst looking for pictures of her it occurred to me how strange it may have seemed to have dressed like this in your younger days..

to this much more relaxed style in later days...

Can there be any greater shift in fashions for women towards freedom of movement and through any single lifetime than the one Edith Wharton may have experienced in hers, and in that time from 1862 to 1937.

To celebrate our Edith's birthday I have read Ethan Frome for the umpteenth time, and out of my copy fell a 2004 newspaper clipping from a series Book of a Lifetime, in which Anita Shreve credits this book as the start of her life as a writer. Started grudgingly for a school assignment and quickly hooked in Anita Shreve recognised that moment, on reflection, as the beginning of a lifelong addiction to reading

Ethan Frome is my most favourite of winter novellas, whilst in contrast in the summer, rather than choosing the more obvious Summer by Edith Wharton, I may turn to The Awakening by Kate Chopin; neither guaranteed to cheer for subject matter, but for geographical immersion in place and season and mood I'm not sure I can think of better, though I will await your suggestions....perhaps I could do with some new ones??

The sense of place is profound and almost hushed in Ethan Frome as the tragedy plays out and told by an unnamed narrator, an engineer who is piecing the events together when severe weather finds him taking shelter at the Frome farmstead. Edith Wharton tips the reader into the novel via a prolonged ellipsis which looks like this in the book,

It was that night that I found the clue to Ethan Frome, and began to put together this version of his story ................................................................................................................... ....................................................................................................................................
..................................................................................................................................

Edith Wharton apparently fought hard with her publishers Scribner's to keep that extended ellipsis in place, she wanted an important break, immediately apparent to the eye and signifying a flashback of twenty-four years. That said the story is so convincingly told it became easy to forget this was flashback as I shivered to keep warm under the influence of Edith Wharton's wonderful 'snow' writing. An isolated community and a world muffled by some relentless New England weather which seems to intensify with every page ...

'The cold was less sharp than earlier in the day and a thick fleecy sky threatened snow for the morrow. Here and there a star pricked through, showing behind it a deep well of blue. In an hour or two the moon would push up over the ridge behind the farm, burn a gold-edged rent in the clouds, and then be swallowed by them. A mournful peace hung on the fields, as though they felt the relaxing grasp of the cold and stretched themselves in their long winter sleep.'

In the next line Ethan is, for reasons various, 'alert for the jingle of sleighbells' and that's me smitten and there listening and watching with him.

The landscape already offers the potential for some deliciously atmospheric cover designs ...

Poor Ethan, only twenty-eight, ambitions of education and travel thwarted by bereavement and the inheritance of the failing family farm, trapped for the past seven years in a loveless marriage with the older Zeena. Zeena equally trapped, by a state of chronic hypochondria, perhaps better known as hysteria in the nineteenth century but a martyr to her 'troubles'. Into this dull and monotonous arc of misery comes young Mattie Silver, Zeena's orphaned cousin, who is taken in as a maid and whose name perhaps suggests that potential to bring a glimmer of a shine to life... maybe.

Ethan's growing attraction to Mattie, though covert and barely acknowledged between them, does not go unnoticed by the eagle-eyed Zeena and you would not believe the trouble that can be caused by a broken pickle dish. When, after a visit to a distant doctor Zeena returns with news that her 'troubles' have become 'complications', she seizes her chance to oust Mattie from the home to be replaced by a more capable carer, which she will will surely need because when you have 'complications' you 'succumb'.

That resume gives very little away as always, and thus barely gives credence to the flesh that Edith Wharton adds to the bones here and yet, even knowing this story so well, I never cease to be shocked by the ending of Ethan Frome. Perhaps I almost revisit that first reading each time and the sense of growing tension as I realise 'something' is going to happen, and it is unlikely to be good. Hermione Lee, in her probably excellent biography of Edith Wharton, which I still haven't read, suggests that the ending of Ethan Frome is...

'one of the most quietly horrifying moments in all fiction...cruelly effective.'

Repeated readings never dull the impact or dilute the power of that cruelty either, yet on each reading something else glides off the page too, surely the sign of a brilliant book. This time around I felt some shreds of sympathy for Zeena...wondered what a book entitled Zeena Frome might reveal. Why has Zeena resorted to the world of hysteria... what has she been trying to escape from...what is the secondary gain involved...why has she stayed there, and the irony mixed in with the ending is equally powerful. Perhaps that's just me and a heightened sense that when I listen to someone's narrative in the real world I always have to remember I am only hearing one side of the story, yes... it's far too easy to loath Zeena, I'd love to know more.

Henry James applauded Ethan Frome for its 'kept-downess', no mean feat and Hermione Lee highlights the brushstrokes seemingly touched into Edith Wharton's novella that allude to the wintry romance of Keats's The Eve of St Agnes (actually January 20th) so all very seasonal and perhaps Keats offers a perfect note on which to end this post ...

St. Agnes' Eve - Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limp'd trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold:
Numb were the Beadsman's fingers, while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious incense from a censer old,
Seem'd taking flight for heaven, without a death,
Past the sweet Virgin's picture, while his prayer he saith.

Well, almost end, because I need to know...have you all read Ethan Frome ??

And if you haven't and you have an e reader, it is free to download to Kindle or in formats various from girlebooks which I hope those of you with e-readers have all discovered and raided by now... you'll find Ethan Frome here and links to other free books here.

London calls again...

2012-01-23T00:15:00+00:00

Thank you for all the Team Middlemarch discussions over the weekend. We are off to a flying start with our year-long read conducted at Victorian instalment speed. Some of us are loving it, others are persevering and if you fancy joining us on board the virtual brougham it is never too late so here are a few housekeeping arrangements.

'Joining' only involves getting a copy of the book, either real or digital, reading Part One Miss Brooke and leaving a comment with your thoughts, or discussing what others have written on this weekend's post here, and to read any previous posts in the build up just click on this Team Middlemarch tag. Part Two Old and Young arrived through Victorian letter boxes on February 1st 1872 so we will start reading that on the same day 140 years later and then gather here over the weekend of March 24th - 25th to share our thoughts.

So back to the real world and the training days last week were actually not as terrible as even the optimist in me had feared.

The course leaders were excellent; engaging, assertive, clear and unequivocal about the issues which is exactly what you need where child protection is concerned, and nicely terrifying enough for me not to even think about taking the prolonged blink which then has you falling off your elbow in the post-lunch session.

I was in a 4* hotel nearer Bedford then Luton so that could have been much worse, and working from home and online I only meet up with my work colleagues twice a year, so it was lovely to see them all.

I found myself sitting opposite a consultant gynaecologist on the way to London. Well the briefcase advertising a world conference suggested as much (unless he'd bought it on eBay of course) ... and his diary, though impossible to read upsidedown looked very full indeed. He was reading Colm Toibin's The Master just for your information, and making copious notes. I did take The Virgin in the Garden by A.S.Byatt and it was perfect reading, both on the train and at 4am in a hotel room with an inaccessible wireless signal and strange pillows that just refused to meet my exacting standards of comfort. Needless to say I dropped off at about 6.50am ready to be woken by the 7am alarm, but only a hundred fifty pages to go.

I had planned an overnight stop in London on the way home rather than arriving in Plymouth towards midnight and had scheduled in an evening of browsing in Foyle's and a day of exhibitions before catching a late afternoon train home the following day and it all went nicely to plan.

Undaunted by the weather on Wednesday morning...

The secret is to go with someone who has been sensible enough to bring a large-scale map which won't need glasses, and to have looked up the bus numbers beforehand...

And so it was lovely to spend the day in Fran H-B's company as we headed for the Dickens exhibition at the Museum of London, passing the London Wall, which to my chagrin I don't think I have ever really noticed before...

Early for our 10 am tickets we nipped into Postman's Park just opposite the museum and behind St Botolph-without-Aldgate Church (the other secret is to go with a professional 'Nanny' who has prammed her way around most of the city and knows these little tucked away corners)
A neat little pond...

and there, surrounded on all sides by the towering City of London, the G.F. Watts's Memorial to Heroic Self Sacrifice...

Everday heroes immortalised in a plein-air gallery of exquisite, Arts and Crafts-like tiles...

No pics allowed in the Dickens Exhibition but well worth a visit if you are interested, and especially if you want to pay homage to the famous desk and the chair. Given to Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital in 2008 to auction for funds and now in a private collection but on loan for this exhibition. The commentary of Dickens's essay Night Walks, narrated to a film playing on a loop in a side gallery, provided an interesting backdrop to the viewing, the occasional words would float up and out into the air... houselessness...Newgate... are not the sane and the insane equal at night as the sane lay dreaming... and it would seem completely relevant to whatever I was looking at.

From there we were headed for the William Morris Exhibition at 2 Temple Place (more of which soon) and walked via St Paul's to get there. I pass no judgement whatsoever on the Occupation or the reasons for its existence, but suffice to say we were slightly dubious about a large container of very yellow-brown liquid outside one tent. Fran suggested it was beer, the nurse in me thought more a by-product of consumption.

Anyway here's a picture of the dome with a leafless wintery accompaniment and always a splendid sight.

Team Middlemarch - Book One ~ Miss Brooke

2012-01-21T00:15:00+00:00

'Things which have a constant relation to the same thing have a constant relation to each other'

Herbert Spencer thanked George Eliot for that phrase, describing her as '...the most admirable woman, mentally I have ever met.' Which seems like a bit of a back-handed compliment that obviously does not take looks into account. They were rumoured to be engaged apparently and George Eliot's letters to Spencer, only made public in 1985, reveal a woman 'passionately and self-abasingly attached, begging for crumbs of attention if not love.' This according to A.S. Byatt in a piece about George Eliot. Spencer spurned her affections and made no secret of the fact that this was because she was ugly, and it is to her credit that George Eliot remained on good terms with Spencer when this became apparent. Me...I'd have done damage, but I thought it might be something to keep in mind as I read Miss Brooke with its accounts various of women various.

So the Brougham is in the coach house, the horses are blanketed and stabled, the groom has nipped off to do whatever grooms do and it's time for us to take tea and talk about our first instalment of Middlemarch, Miss Brooke.

How are you all doing Middlemarchers??

As on previous team reads I will offer a few reading moments that have chimed with me and be warned it won't be a deep and meaningful resume, and I usually let my thoughts jump all over the place so there will be plenty I miss, but hopefully all enough to trigger your own thoughts about favourite moments and wider thoughts too. I tend to jot down a few as I read to start the ball rolling and please do add your own in comments here, so that we can have an ongoing natter, and not only today but perhaps bookmark the Team Middlemarch link and come back to this post until the next one arrives (schedule at the end)

I've had a lovely time since the arrival of Book One, primarily because in the past I have only ever read Middlemarch with a view to having to write an essay on it and then sit an exam, but with all that consigned to the mud at the bottom of the pond what has risen to the surface as I read Miss Brooke is how funny and dry is George Eliot's humour. Small unobtrusive moments I know I never spotted during those intense and pressured reads ten years ago, this is subtle humour unlike Dickens who, dare I suggest and by comparison, does a lot of look-at-me arm waving to draw attention to his funny moments, and then eggs the comedy pudding to the limits, and how much I am enjoying getting to know the community that is Middlemarch and in this very different frame of mind.

Dear earnest Dorothea, no time for 'guimp and drapery' and not to be found stitching a sampler but head down over some architectural designs for worker's cottages, whilst sister Celia is far more focused on dishing out Mama's jewellery. I never drive past these old cottages in Tavistock (built for the workers by the Duke of Bedford in 1850) without thinking of Dorothea, she would have been as thrilled with these, as I am with my little ceramic tile depicting them.

I love Celia this time around, especially that moment when she hurls the 'light javelin' of disparagement about Mr Casaubon's noisy soup-eating in Dorothea's direction, having already said that she can't bear his moles with hairs. Dorothea's feelings meanwhile 'gathered to an avalanche.'

And Mr Casaubon, that 'ghost of an ancient' with the 'smile like pale wintery sunshine', whose entreaties of love in Dorothea's direction resemble the 'cawing of an amorous rook.'

I was constantly smiling at George's (I'm sticking with George) humour... what about that hilarious moment when Sir James Chettham, courting Dorothea's attentions, arrives with a lap-dog 'one of nature's most naive toys' under his arm. Clearly meant as a gift for Dorothea but consigned to the groom when Dorothea professes to hate them

'I am so glad I know that you do not like them...here John, take this dog, will you...'

And Mrs Cadwallader and the matriarches of the community discussing their medical symptoms and offering their scathing verdict on the engagement...

'Really, by the side of Sir James he looks like a death's head skinned over for the occasion. Mark my words: in a year from this time that girl will hate him...'

And so the scene is set. George Eliot has started to populate her community. Rosamund Vincy and her mirror, Tertius Lydgate and his ideals, Mary Garth and Mr Featherstone and his money, Fred Vincy and his debts and the community elders, Bulstrode et al with their opinions and their resistance to change.

As a nod to serious comment I had treated myself to a read of A.S.Byatt's essay in her collection Passions of the Mind entitled George Eliot: A Celebration and to remind myself why I chose this book when everyone else might more appropriately be reading Charles Dickens in this bicentenary year. A.S.Byatt outlines her own encounters with Middlemarch...

'I taught it with a passion because it I perceived it was about the growth, use and inevitable failure and frustration of all human energy - a lesson one is not interested in at eleven, or eighteen, but at twenty-six with two small children, it seems crucial. George Eliot's people were appallingly ambitious and greedy - not always for political, or even exclusively sexual power...they were ambitious to use their minds to the full. to discover something, to live on a scale where their life felt valuable from moment to moment...'

A.S.Byatt goes on to argue with admiration and respect for George Eliot...

'She had no real heir as a 'novelist of ideas' in England...her heirs are abroad, Proust in France, Mann in Germany. Which brings me to another reason for loving her: she was European, her roots were Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Balzac...not just Jane Austen. She opened gates which are still open.'

It is evident as I am reading A.S.Byatt's novels, and as she herself admits, that she has imbibed those lessons about populating a novel with a wide variety of interrelated people,

'whose processes of thought, developments of consciousness, biological anxieties, sense of their past and future can be made most scrupulously available to readers...'

to say nothing of the technicalities and scope offered by George Eliot's speciality, the intervention of the authorial voice, all things I am noticing whilst marvelling at the serendipitous way all these reading planets have aligned.

But that's for another day, now it's over to you Team Middlemarch, settle down and make yourselves comfy and do converse in comments while I hand around the napkins, the dainty china and the comestibles, today a receipt from Mrs Beeton's for Honey Cake.

If you are reading to the nineteenth century schedule we start Part Two Old and Young on February 1st

Next Brougham halt :: W/E of March 24th-25th