Tag Archives: Coleridge

A Haunted Regency Setting

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In my neighborhood, the residents spend weeks in advance of Halloween erecting elaborate displays at great expense and effort to attract trick-or-treaters. Adjoining neighborhoods grumble that their simple pumpkins and baskets of candy are forsaken, year after year, for elaborate treat dispensing displays, adults in mid-century throwback costumes and a recreational vehicle converted into a walk-thru haunted house.

Setting is key.

Two years ago this blog posted a Halloween discourse on the Regency’s rising infatuation with the supernatural. As my last post playfully points out, the popularity of wild, haunted settings in works of early Romantic literature was largely responsible for this trend.

Sir Walter Scott was probably the first well-known writer to tap into the power the untamed, natural setting had on readers at the time:

“….the living I fear not, but I trifle not nor toy with my dead neighbours of the churchyard. I promise you, it requires a good heart to live so near it: worthy Master Holdforth..had a sore fright there the last time he came to visit me..”  — Kenilworth, Sir Walter Scott (1821)

Long before Kenilworth sparked the Regency’s penchant for ghost hunting, there was Scott’s Rokeby. By the time of its publication in 1813, the poet’s work was beginning to pale. The readers of the Regency saw it as an ill-disguised marketing ploy for English country house tourism. Nevertheless, Scott once again turned to setting for inspiration in a work that was highly anticipated, with the potential to topple even Childe Harold.

The titular name of Rokeby comes from a real country house once owned by Regency-era antiquarian J. B. S. Morritt, a particular friend to the Wizard of the North. His Rokeby Park was and remains a perfect gem of Palladian architecture.

Rokeby Park’s neighboring river, The Greta. Another noted Romantic, Coleridge, called it Loud Lamenter for the distinctive sound its waters make running over the rocks. Photo via RokebyPark.com

A dobie, or dobby, is said to walk the ravine of the Greta. Much like a brownie or fairy, this spirit is rooted to the place and yet capable of startling passersby. Some traditions say it is the ghost of a murdered heiress to the nearby peel tower of Mortham, an earlier residence of Rokeby’s builders.

“Others say it was a Lady Rokeby, the wife of the owner who was shot in the walks by robbers, but she certainly became a ghost and under the very poetic nom de guerre of Mortham Dobby, she appeared dressed as a fine lady with a piece of white silk trailing behind her, without a head indeed though no tradition states how she lost so material a member, but with many of its advantages for she had long hair on her shoulders and eyes nose and mouth in her breast.”

 

—  Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott: In Three Volumes, Volume 1’ John G. Lockhart

Morritt was understandably gratified by the poet’s determination to give his home such splendid notoriety, living as he did in the age of Romanticism. Perhaps he was less gratified  when he discovered Scott looked elsewhere to beef the thing up.

Old Littlecot Park as printed in Views of the Seats of Noblemen, vol. V — by John Neale (1820)

The contributing setting was Littlecote House in Wiltshire, as revealed in Scott’s notes to the fifth canto. Scott visited the Elizabethan house and was struck by a particular bedroom there, whose furnishings were done up in blue, much tattered and worn by the Regency. Its hangings in one place were marred by a hole deliberately made, and clumsily patched again with the cut-out material.

The reason for the patch concerned a midwife during the latter part of Elizabeth I’s reign. She was summoned late in the night (an appropriately stormy one in November), blindfolded, to a location unknown to her. Once her eyes were uncovered, she saw that the bedchamber she’d been brought to was clearly of some wealth and consequence. A masked man of terrifying aspect ordered her to minister to a woman in disguise, giving birth.

In a most horrific act, the man grabbed the newborn baby from the midwife. After several torturous attempts, he finally dispatched it in the room’s blazing fireplace.

Upon her return home, the midwife made a deposition before the local magistrate, ‘strongly agitated by the horrors of the preceding night.’ Blindfolded during departure, she was able to identify the mysterious house of murder by taking away a swatch of the bed hanging.

Such a small piece of setting served to damn a man already consigned to the devil.

He was “Black” Will Durrell, the owner of Littlecote, his activities devoted to amorous and litigious interests. He escaped the gallows by bribing the judge of his case. He couldn’t bribe justice, however. Again it was the story’s setting that served as the instrument of revenge.

Black Will’s own horse threw and killed him, spooked by the dead infant’s ghost.

Happy Halloween!

 

 

 

Regency Critics: the Leopard

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John WilsonBlackwood’s Magazine, or “Maga,” first appeared in 1817, “breaking upon the startled gaze of Edinburgh Whigdom.” It soon gained a notoriety for being, more than anything, an affront to the Edinburgh Review, subject of this blog’s previous post.

This rivalry served to give Blackwood’s popularity a boost throughout Regency Britain, along with the curious way its writers adopted numerous pseudonyms; a practice that probably began with one John Wilson.

He was born a gentleman, with a comfortable fortune and had only dabbled in writing because of crippling self-doubt about his literary abilities, bringing himself to publish only a few of his poems. Then one day he discovered that his inheritance, made from the manufacture of paisley, had been speculated away, thanks to the efforts of an unscrupulous uncle.

With a wife and children to support, Wilson was forced to move into his mother’s house on Queen’s Street in Edinburgh and seek employment. Blackwood’s was hiring writers–the previous ones having been sacked by Mr. Blackwood for producing a dull first volume. Reluctantly, Wilson accepted the job, girding himself against his old insecurities by assuming a pseudonym, an alter ego that would serve as a cloak once he sallied forth with his fellow literary critics to assail (some called it assassinate) the characters and careers of those beloved by the Review and its editor Francis Jeffrey.

Wilson became known as the notorious Christopher North, that “beautiful Leopard from the valley of the palm trees.” The power of his criticism, some said, was like a force unleashed by “animal spirits:”

Of Coleridge and his Biographia Literaria: “a most execrable performance” by someone who possessed both “egotism and malignity.”

On Leigh Hunt: “a profligate creature..without reverence either for God or man.”

It must have felt positively delicious, this new-found freedom that came from masquerading as another. Indeed, the other critics at Blackwood’s adopted Wilson’s penchant for fake names, if for no other reason than to “perplex the public.” Some of these appellations were mystical, some were just ridiculous–Timothy Tikler, Baron Lauerwinkle, William Wastle and Dr. Ulrick Sternstare.

The pretension was carried even further when writers adopted the real names of ordinary Edinburgh citizens, preferably those far removed from the literary scene, and made them father articles of great distinction. One dentist became very well-known as a respected contributor to Blackwood’s, to his friends’ amazement. Even the doctor himself began to believe those clever jokes and observations were his, for they very often contained his own expressions and identified many of his acquaintances:

“The doctor’s fame when far beyond Edinburgh. Happening to pay a visit to Liverpool, he was immediately welcomed by the literary society of the town as the glorious “Odontist” of Blackwood’s Magazine, and received a complimentary dinner.”

— Christopher North: a Memoir of John Wilson, by his daughter, Mary Gordon  the Odontist

Pretense became deception, in the manner of a very wicked joke on poor Leigh Hunt. Blackwood’s was fond of targeting this darling of the Review and often accused the poet of badgering the Whig periodical to include favorable reviews of his work in its pages. This might have gone unnoticed by Hunt had he not received letter from one John Dalyell apologizing for the terrible things he’d written about the poet in Blackwood’s. Hunt scratched his head, perplexed, wondering who the devil Dalyall was. He sought the advice of the Review’s editor, who instantly recognized the name of the apologist.

Dalyell was appalled and furious. Of course he hadn’t written any such thing about Leigh or his poetry. He hated Blackwood’s. He had to sue them for libel once.

“Oh, the villainy of these fellows!” he declared. He’d been made a figure of fun. Everyone in Edinburgh knew John Dalyell–he was the most  prominent Whig in Edinburgh. Now they knew him as a contributor to a wretched Tory magazine.

As amusing as Blackwood’s was, John Wilson eventually wearied of writing as someone other than himself. Escape came in the form of a professorship of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh University.

He was happy to leave the hurly-burly world of literary society to a place, however dull, where his insecurities could be soothed–the ivory tower.

 

 

 

 

 

Regency Poetry: Nuances of Sensibility

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Speaking of Downton Abbey, Violet’s character is so very rich, is it not? Her remarks are cleverly acid and yet illuminating as well. Certainly we know what her ladyship thinks of Byron. We probably can guess what she thinks of Regency poetry in general, with its idealism and “sensibility:”

Edith: “..am I to be the maiden aunt? Isn’t this what they do? Arrange presents for their prettier relations?”

The Dowager Countess: “Don’t be defeatist, dear, it’s terribly middle-class.”

No pining about and no nonsense.

"Oh, Anne."

“Oh, Anne.”

I like to speculate what poets my favorite Regency-set characters favor. As dear Anne from Austen’s Persuasion famously says, “We are living through a great age for poetry, I think.” In the next few posts, this blog will consider some characters from Regency fiction and what poets they might find appealing.

Which of the following would Heyer’s Kitty Charing like?

“..Shelley’s ‘silver music,’ Coleridge’s ‘wings of healing,’ Wordsworth’s ‘wild unpeopled hills’ and above all..Keats.”

from  Byron in Love: A Short Daring Life by Edna O’Brien

Hang on–wasn’t it Anne who advised caution against too much poetry? Her companion, Captain Benwick, was:

“..intimately acquainted with all the tenderest songs of the one poet (Walter Scott), and all the impassioned descriptions of hopeless agony of the other [Lord Byron]; he repeated, with such tremulous feeling, the various lines which imaged a broken heart, or a mind destroyed by wretchedness, and looked so entirely as if he meant to be understood, that she ventured to hope he did not always read poetry.”

— Persuasion by Jane Austen (as presented by Janet Aikens Yount in Eighteenth Century Life, Winter 2010)

It must be recalled, however, that Anne Elliot is a masterfully drawn character. She is so nuanced in her beloved, practical way that it is a beautiful serendipity to find in her a great capacity for the “sensibility” vital to Romantic poetry. That capacity was hidden, in a:

“..heart large and expansive, this seat of deep, kind, honest and benevolent feelings–a bosom capacious of universal love, but through which there flowed a deeper stream…” — The Retrospective Review, Vol. 7 Part 1 (1823)

Still waters run deep, as they say.