Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
George Calderon c.1901
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Captain of the 11
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
George Calderon, 1912
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Basic form of the Calderon coat of armsRecent Comments
- John Pym on Two anniversaries We are all, followers and occasional contributors, beholden to you, Patrick, for reminding us for ten years that the past is worth remembering and for keeping alive the... (August 17, 2024 at 1:06 pm)
- Patrick Miles on A second Family Bible Very many thanks for fleshing that point out -- and so entertainingly! (I love your reference to creative writing courses, which are a phobia of mine.) Although several... (August 2, 2024 at 11:03 am)
- Laurence Brockliss on A second Family Bible When I say that the British Republic of Letters was dead by 1880, I don't mean to imply that thereafter there were no men and women outside universities, institutes and... (August 2, 2024 at 9:19 am)
- Patrick Miles on A second Family Bible Thank you for devoting valuable time to writing this fascinating Comment. If I may say so, it is awe-inspiring to see the author of a monumental work standing back from that... (July 31, 2024 at 5:32 pm)
- Laurence Brockliss on A second Family Bible Male Professionals in Nineteenth Century Britain was a new departure for me. For most of my adult life I have worked on seventeenth and eighteenth century France. It is also... (July 24, 2024 at 11:31 am)
Category Archives: Edwardian literature
Tahiti: The book’s reception (1921)
Katy George’s discovery of Kittie’s letter to Gladys Raikes of 31 March 1923 (see Comments and my post this coming Monday), in which Kittie talks about Percy Lubbock’s ‘Life’ of George, has reminded me that Percy also played a vital … Continue reading
The return to Tahiti
Calderon arrived in London from Tahiti on 30 October 1906 and started writing his book about the island in November 1907. However, he soon gave it up to concentrate on his plays The Fountain and Cromwell: Mall o’Monks. Meanwhile, as Kittie put … Continue reading
‘Black Pot’ and black holes
For the first two years that I was writing George Calderon’s biography, its working title was Black Pot: The Mysterious Life of George Calderon. The reason for this was not just that several people before me had failed to find significantly … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian literature, Personal commentary
Tagged biographies, biography, Brothers Grimm, Charles Frohman, comments, Gallipoli, George Calderon, Kum Kale, Mabel Dearmer, Martin Shaw, Percy Lubbock, Peter Pan, Sedd el Bahr, Tahiti, The Brave Little Tailor, The Great War, The Lamp, William Caine, World War I
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The Edwardian turn of language
If George’s translations are ‘quirky’ and Constance’s ‘bland’, what is it they have in common that qualifies them both as ‘Edwardian’? A certain kind of logorrhoea combined with loose sentence structure and genteelism. Garnett, it has to be said, is … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged Anton Chekhov, comments, Constance Garnett, George Calderon, Harold Pinter, Kittie Calderon, Michael Frayn, Michel St-Denis, Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, The Cherry Orchard, The Seagull, Theodore Komisarjevsky
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Mews, hues, and wonkers
So (see ‘Two anniversaries’, 29 January), save perhaps for a few lost manuscript versions of Chekhov’s one-act plays made throughout the British Empire for amateur performance, Constance Garnett was the first person to translate a Chekhov play into English (The … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged Anton Chekhov, comments, Constance Garentt, Elizaveta Fen, George Calderon, Glasgow Repertory Theatre, John Galsworthy, John Russell Brown, Larus ridibundus, Laurence Senelick, Lydia Yavorskaya, Ronald Hingley, Royal National Theatre, The Cherry Orchard, The Seagull, The Stage Society
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Two anniversaries
Today is Anton Chekhov’s birthday. It is also the anniversary of the publication of George Calderon’s translations of The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard on 29 January 1912. Was this a coincidence? Probably not. The publisher, Grant Richards, was making a risky investment … Continue reading
They have wonderful editors
Hilary Mantel is an excellent writer. But when it was announced in January 2013 that Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies were going to be adapted for the RSC and a media maelstrom broke out, I felt uneasy. It wasn’t as though Thomas … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian literature, Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged Bring Up the Bodies, Cromwell: Mall o'Monks, David Cameron, editors, George Calderon, George Osborne, Hilary Mantel, Lloyd George, Nick Clegg, Rachel Sylvester, RSC, The Times, Thomas Cromwell, Thomas More, Victor Hugo, Wolf Hall
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The next week
There is no documentary evidence for what George did between 17 and 23 December 1914, when he and Kittie left for what she described as ‘a delightful Christmas at Foxwold [Brasted, Kent] with the Pyms’. But we can be pretty … Continue reading
Polymaths, or dilettantes?
It is intriguing that in his memoir Sturge Moore should refer to George only as a ‘scholar’ (see yesterday’s post). They had both written plays, George rather more successfully than Moore, and they had both been active in 1910 in … Continue reading
Visitors and ‘victory’
The fact that Calderon wrote to Daniel and Henriette Sturge Moore on Sunday 22 November 1914, but not, as far as we know, to their parents, implies that their parents actually visited George in hospital. This is in any case … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian literature
Tagged Belgium, Daniel Sturge Moore, Dr Albert Tebb, George Calderon, Henriette Sturge Moore, Inns of Court Regiment, Kittie Calderon, Louise Rosales, Manolo Ordoño de Rosales, Max Hastings, Nina Astley, Reginald Astley, Royal Horse Guards, Sir Roland James Corbet, The Blues, The Great War, Thomas Sturge Moore, William Caine, World War I, Ypres
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‘Alle Strassen münden in schwarze Verwesung’
Apparently it was in November 1914 that Edward Thomas, with the encouragement of Robert Frost, began to write modern poems. I have known the ‘anthology poems’ of Thomas since I was a teenager, but now I am reading all his … Continue reading
14 November 1914
Kittie must have brought newspapers and new books into hospital for George, because today at ‘Far End’, Kingham, Chipping Norton, the novelist Anne Douglas Sedgwick was writing him a long letter thanking him for one from him that congratulated her … Continue reading
5 November 1914
Today a long advertisement appeared in the Times Literary Supplement for Chapman & Hall’s ‘Latest List’. Top of the column was ‘The Final Word on Tolstoy, the Man: REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY. By His Son, Count Ilya Tolstoy’. The book had been … Continue reading
Tahiti: an imagined world?
It must have taken great self-control for George to concentrate on making a full synopsis of his book Tahiti when he was home on weekend leave, rather than simply keep writing it. But it was certainly the most rational approach. … Continue reading →