Marvelous is my word. The word most often used by her contemporaries in the 17th century was mad. Mad Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, was a marvel of contradictions. Painfully shy yet hungry for fame, barely educated yet a prolific author whose complete works fill twenty volumes, given to fits of melancholy yet possessed of a supreme self-confidence.
My ambition is not only to be Empress, but Authoress of a whole world.
She published poetry, fiction, plays, and essays on philosophy, science, and government. One of the most notorious and colorful characters of her day, she was renowned for her satirical wit and eccentric dress. In an age when women revealed a great deal of bosom Margaret went further. Attending the theatre in 1667 she wore a dress so low-cut that “her breasts were all laid out to view” according to one breathless report, with “scarlet trimmed nipples.” Among her favorite accessories were nipple tassels and black velvet philosopher’s hats. She “took delight in singularity” wrote an admirer. Samuel Pepys mentions her in his famous diary:
The whole story of this lady is a romance and all she do is romantic… her dress so antik.
By happenstance this month I watched a Flemish TV series about a family in World War I and read a book by a Flemish author who discovered his house was occupied by an SS officer in World War II. Both were set in Ghent, my mother’s home town, where I spent many happy childhood times and have visited often throughout my life. Both offered a fuller context to the stories passed down to me about my own family’s experiences in the World Wars.
I watched the ten episodes of In Vlaamse Velden on PBS Passport, in Flemish with English subtitles. It was lovely to hear Flemish, a language that surrounded me in my childhood. I felt good when I was able to pick up familiar words and expressions, even some entire sentences, but I did need the subtitles. The series tells the story of Dr. Boesman, a gynecologist, his wife Virginie, sons Vincent and Guillaume, and daughter Marie. Each experiences the war in a different way, illustrating the complex and divided loyalties of the Flemish people during German occupation.
Dr. Boesman believes the Germans will win and that he may at last gain a professorship at the University of Ghent, till now denied to Flemish speakers. The class divide between Flemish and French speaking Belgians is exploited by the Germans who claim a cultural kinship with the Flemish Independence movement. The language divide also compromises the effectiveness of the Belgian Army. The officer class are French-speaking while most of the enlisted men are Flemish and cannot understand their orders. Vincent Boesman plays a crucial role in his unit, translating for the officers and winning promotion. A scene where Vincent’s unit travels towards the front on bicycles underscores the inadequacy of the Belgian forces. Meanwhile free-spirited younger brother Guillaume deserts the army, but is captured by the French and pressed into service. His war experiences will profoundly change him.
On My Bookshelf the biography of Maria Branwell Bronte, mother to genius.
So much has been written about the Bronte sisters, their brother Branwell, and father Patrick, that we can easily imagine we know them intimately. But one member of this extraordinary family, their mother Maria, remained a shadowy figure until the publication of this first full biography in 2019. In earlier books we glimpsed Maria on her deathbed in the Haworth parsonage crying out in despair “Oh my poor children!” Then she conveniently slipped away, leaving her children to endure the motherless youth that inspired their genius writings. What would Jane Eyre be, after all, without Charlotte’s miserable experience at Cowan Bridge School, the inspiration for Lowood. As far as literary history was concerned, Maria had served her purpose.
So it is revelatory to meet the lively, intelligent, capable young woman who won Patrick Bronte’s heart. And the young Irish curate himself is very different from the severe elderly parson, seen always bent over his books, who lived out a long lonely widowhood.
Maria Branwell’s early life was more Jane Austen than Bronte. As a member of the gentry she enjoyed a life of festive balls in the Assembly Rooms, theatre in the Playhouse, fine dining, fashionable clothes, and afternoon visits for tea with her many friends. Instead of the bleak Yorkshire moors there was the bustling seaport of Penzance in Cornwall, a scenic little town known for its festivals, smugglers, and mild climate. Sea breezes perhaps, but no wuthering.
I used to love watching Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood when my children were small. So calm, so soothing, so… well, neighborly. Sometimes I even watched when the children weren’t around. A restful oasis in a stressful day. In Mr. Rogers’ world all the neighbors were nice and friendly and helpful. Ever ready with a kind word or a helping hand. None of them yelled “get off my lawn!” If only it were so.
Today Mr. Rogers is a sweet memory. If you spend any time on the Nextdoor app, which purports to bring neighbors together, you will find yourself in a dark dystopian world where every teenager in a hoodie is a potential carjacker, every delivery man a potential home invader, and every dog walker intent on spreading dog poop over your lawn. Fear and loathing stalk the posts on Nextdoor, the comment threads a cesspool of complaints, anger, stereotypes, and often outright racism. An occasional lone voice bleats for civility.
On My Bookshelf I find a favorite history book about a very strange painting…
Edward VI and the Pope, unknown artist, oil on wood, c1575
At first glance, maybe even a second or third, this is a mess of a painting. It’s busy with awkwardly positioned figures and decorative elements; there’s nowhere for the eye to rest. The viewer’s eye darts about the various unrelated parts trying to make sense of it all. Then there are the blank squares and the puzzling scene in the upper right, a picture within a picture. The artist is obviously trying to say something, but what?
As Margaret Aston explains in The King’s Bedpost it is best to think of it, not as a painting, but as a comic strip or political cartoon. The blank squares were intended to hold text, just like the speech bubbles of today. For unknown reasons they were not all filled in. The book turns that old saying, a picture is worth a thousand words, on its head, for it takes many thousands of words to explain this one. The painting may be no masterpiece but, Aston says, “undistinguished art can make interesting history.”
Explaining the painting takes us on a journey through the Old Testament Kings, sixteenth century Dutch art, crucial decades of the English Reformation when much of the medieval heritage of religious art was destroyed by iconoclastic reformers, and even into Elizabeth I’s private chapel. The painting is visual propaganda for the reformers’ view that all religious images and devotional objects were “Popish abominations” akin to pagan idolatry. Once thought to have been painted during the reign of the boy King Edward VI, seen seated in his Chair of State mounted on a dais, Aston shows that it actually reflects the religious conflicts and anxieties of Elizabeth I’s reign. She also details evidence that the source materials for the painting date to the 1570’s. For the unknown artist’s skills were limited, note the unconvincing size and position of the hands, so he copied much of the painting from other works. This dating is confirmed by the modern science of dendrochronological analysis; the wood panel comes from a tree that was cut down between 1574 and 1590.
Aston begins by identifying the people in the painting, recognizable because they are copies of portraits by various artists produced in the 1560’s and 70’s.. She draws our attention to a horizontal line following the base of the king’s dais dividing the painting into upper and lower sections, upper being good and lower bad. Fashion also divides the groups. In the lower section several of the men sport tonsures, the monastic hair style, branding them as Catholics. In the upper section there are no tonsures but copious beards, the style favored by the Protestant reformers.
Remember, remember, the 5th of November, Gunpowder, treason and plot. I see no reason Why gunpowder treason Should ever be forgot. Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, ’twas his intent To blow up the King and the Parliament Three score barrels of powder below Poor old England to overthrow By God’s providence he was catch’d With a dark lantern and burning match Holler boys, holler boys, let the bells ring Holler boys, holler boys God save the King!
I’ve written about Guy Fawkes Day in a previous post, but this time I want to follow up on a clue that the Catholic plot might have been hatched in a house near where I grew up. While reading Lines on the Underground for my September post I came upon this quote from Daniel Defoe, written over a hundred years after the foiled plot:
On My Bookshelf I discover the weird and wonderful history of English Place Names.
If you spend enough time in Great Sinns, Cornwall, you may find yourself on the road to Purgatory, Oxfordshire. Don’t take the fork to Pity Me, Durham, but seek forgiveness in Come-To-Good, another picturesque Cornish hamlet. Concocting imaginary itineraries like this is one of the pleasures of reading English Place Names by H. G. Stokes published in 1948. My copy shows its age, a bit tattered and worn. Stokes writes like a rather stuffy pedantic local history enthusiast, but his book is full of fascinating facts about the origin of English place names, many of them downright Rhude (Durham) like Mucking (Essex), Spital-in-the-Street (Lincolnshire), and Stank (Yorkshire).
English place names, according to Stokes, originated as simple colloquial descriptions, word pictures of a place. Before the age of maps or GPS people found their way from place to place by carrying the word pictures in their heads. By studying the original meanings of the words we can see a picture of what England looked like as much as 2,000 years ago. The words describe a rural landscape of woodland and heath, marsh and fen, hills and valleys, rivers and streams, dotted with dwellings and small settlements. Most of the oldest names are Celtic and Anglo-Saxon. Here are some of the most common name fragments and their meanings:
On this day in 1814 the tiny Maryland town of Brookeville was the Capital City of the United States.This article was first published in The Dabbler in 2014.
The charming little town of Brookeville is nestled in the suburban sprawl of Washington D.C. as it once nestled in the green and pleasant Maryland countryside. But suburban sprawl maintains a discreet distance, the better to sustain the illusion that here time stands still. Just a few minutes drive from my home in Gaithersburg, the epitome of unfettered suburban sprawl, I turn down a narrow country road that winds uphill and down dale through cornfields, woods, and farmhouses. Puffy white clouds float in a summer sky and if I blink it is just possible to ignore the asphalt and the road signs and imagine I am in a horse-drawn wagon instead of a car, traveling back to Brookeville’s one brush with history. Unlikely as it may seem standing amid the tiny cluster of eighteenth century buildings that comprise the old town, Brookeville was once the capital city of the United States of America. For just one day, and entirely due to the British.
I was treated to a dramatic display of facial expressions recently when my youngest grandsons tasted raw oysters for the first time. I can report that they both succeeded in bravely swallowing one down, while the teenagers passed on the experience. Conversation at the table of course turned to the Oyster Wars! Here is my account of that forgotten episode in local history, first published in The Dabbler in 2016.
Pirate oyster dredgers on the Chesapeake
It was like slurping up a gob of phlegm. I swallowed as quickly as possible to get the awful thing out of my mouth. But then the flavor hit, delicate with a hint of brine. Absolutely delicious.
My first taste of a raw oyster, or as Marylanders on the Eastern Shore say, orster. My husband, descended from a long line of Chesapeake Bay watermen, had insisted I try the regional delicacy at least once. Though oysters are also a traditional London food I had never had one. That first taste cured me of any reluctance based on the phlegmy texture. Now I bite into the squishy things with relish.
In fact I might have turned into a bit of an oyster connoisseur, even a snob. When we order raw oysters we question the waiter as though we are ordering fine wine. Sweet or briney? From the Chesapeake’s Maryland or Virginia waters? (Of course there is a rivalry, of which more later). The varieties even have creative names and pretentious descriptions just like wines: Chesapeake Golds, Skinny Dipper, Choptank Sweets, and, I swear this is true, Sweet Jesus. The latter have “a clean, sweet taste that’s reminiscent of cucumber with light hints of salt,” according to Baltimore magazine. The other day we were sampling some Holy Grails, “their initial saline burst finishes up smooth and slightly buttery,” when my husband casually mentioned the Chesapeake Oyster Wars as though they were common knowledge, like the Civil War. He grew up hearing the tales of his Crisfield ancestors but the rest of us drew a blank on this historical episode. I had to learn more.
On My Bookshelf for National Poetry Month I find a book on a film of a play by a poet, the verse drama Murder in the Cathedral by T. S. Eliot. It is a story of faith, conscience, power, and murder.
I first saw this film decades ago when I was a student. Of all the films one sees in a lifetime only a few leave indelible images in the memory. I think of the first appearance of Death in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. And just as powerful, the chorus of women in Murder in the Cathedral who kneel in prayer and intone the sonorous words:
Since golden October declined into sombre November And the apples were gathered and stored, and the land became brown sharp points of death in a waste of water and mud, The New Year waits, breathes, waits, whispers in darkness…
Now I fear disturbance of the quiet seasons: Winter shall come bringing death from the sea, Ruinous spring shall beat at our doors, Root and shoot shall eat our eyes and our ears, Disastrous summer burn up the beds of our streams And the poor shall wait for another decaying October..
Some malady is coming upon us. We wait, we wait.
It is easy to discern the voice of the poet who wrote “April is the cruelest month,” the famous first line of The Waste Land. The chorus chant of the sufferings of the poor and set a tone of anguish and foreboding for the event to come.
Dispatches From the Former New World 