Some time ago a reader asked me whether I thought George Calderon subscribed to Thomas Carlyle’s theory of the ‘great man’ in history. This theory was certainly popular with the Victorians and, as the reader pointed out, George’s extreme individualism could have been underpinned by belief in the ‘great man’ as the driving force of events. For instance, when George decided to travel all over the country at his own expense during the Coal Strike of 1912 addressing thousands of people, it was suggested that he wanted to thrust himself forward as leader of the strike-busting movement (an ambition he denied). Was he driven by a secret desire to be a hero or ‘great man’ himself?
I was startled by this reader’s suggestion, as I had not even mentioned Carlyle in my biography. Yet George owned nine of Carlyle’s books, including the key text Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, and it occurred to me that when he wrote to Grant Richards on 17 September 1911 that Chekhov was ‘a great man’, but did not explain what made him great, he was simply using the phrase in the Carlylian sense and Richards would have known how he meant it.
When I catalogued George and Kittie’s library over ten years ago, I flipped through each book and recorded whether it was annotated. Except when reading a book for review, George was a sparing annotator, but when he did intervene his comments were exceedingly fine and significant. I suddenly had a worry that I might have overlooked something in his copies of Carlyle. I therefore arranged to revisit his library in store and go through every copy of his Carlyle again, page by page. There was no evidence that he had even read the copy of Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History. As I had recorded before, only his copies of two books bore a few annotations, viz. The French Revolution (3 vols, 1889) and Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (3 vols, 1903).
However… When going through George and Kittie’s library I had come across photographs, greeting cards, visiting cards, and even letters, that had been used as bookmarks. Sometimes these were biographically significant. They were all removed from the books and filed in the appropriate part of the archive. But plain pieces of paper used as bookmarks were left where they were. There was an octavo sheet of laid white paper stuck in a volume of The French Revolution, but it had nothing on the front except a deep brown stain of time across the top where it protruded from the book; so I left it where it was and kept turning the pages. But this time as I turned the bookmark I noticed that it had three lines of writing on the back in very faint pencil. They were in George’s hand, but his own ‘cipher’, as Kittie called it. Having no camera, I attempted a facsimile:
Transcript of note in George’s hand on back of bookmark
Most of this was easily decipherable using George’s key, but the remaining words have taken me eight weeks to crack! I am confident now that the note means:
Jesus cannot have been without sin else he would not have been baptised. For the baptism of John was for the remission of sins and was accompanied by confession.
The handwriting in my opinion is late, around 1912. So why did George jot this thought down at least five years after he had abandoned his fundamental examination of ‘the canonical books of the Christians, in chronological order’ (see p. 200 of the biography)? Was he still as doubtful about the ‘divinity of Jesus’ as he had told Kittie in a letter on 11 February 1899 (see p. 39) and had suddenly been struck by a piece of evidence?
It’s an argument of characteristic Calderonian ingenuity. I have had a look at the accounts of Christ’s baptism in the gospels. They certainly agree that John baptised people only after they had confessed their sins and repented, but John refuses at first to baptise Jesus because he is ‘the Lamb of God’ — presumably without sin. Jesus however insists, ‘for thus it becometh us to fulfill all righteousness’ (Matthew 3, verse 15), and John does baptise him. Why? What does ‘to fulfill all righteousness’ mean?
I asked scientist-theologian John Polkinghorne whether Jesus could have been baptised if he had no sins to confess. Yes, was his answer, because the purpose of his baptism was to express his complete solidarity with human beings, to demonstrate that he was ‘with’ John and all those John was baptising. Thus whereas George concluded the baptism of Christ disproved Christ’s divinity, for a modern theologian it proves Christ’s humanity!
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’ Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘It is bound to remain the definitive account.’ Laurence Senelick, Fletcher Professor of Drama, Tufts University
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.‘ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
Related
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Captain of the 11
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
George Calderon c.1901
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
George Calderon, 1912
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
George’s thought for the day
Some time ago a reader asked me whether I thought George Calderon subscribed to Thomas Carlyle’s theory of the ‘great man’ in history. This theory was certainly popular with the Victorians and, as the reader pointed out, George’s extreme individualism could have been underpinned by belief in the ‘great man’ as the driving force of events. For instance, when George decided to travel all over the country at his own expense during the Coal Strike of 1912 addressing thousands of people, it was suggested that he wanted to thrust himself forward as leader of the strike-busting movement (an ambition he denied). Was he driven by a secret desire to be a hero or ‘great man’ himself?
I was startled by this reader’s suggestion, as I had not even mentioned Carlyle in my biography. Yet George owned nine of Carlyle’s books, including the key text Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, and it occurred to me that when he wrote to Grant Richards on 17 September 1911 that Chekhov was ‘a great man’, but did not explain what made him great, he was simply using the phrase in the Carlylian sense and Richards would have known how he meant it.
When I catalogued George and Kittie’s library over ten years ago, I flipped through each book and recorded whether it was annotated. Except when reading a book for review, George was a sparing annotator, but when he did intervene his comments were exceedingly fine and significant. I suddenly had a worry that I might have overlooked something in his copies of Carlyle. I therefore arranged to revisit his library in store and go through every copy of his Carlyle again, page by page. There was no evidence that he had even read the copy of Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History. As I had recorded before, only his copies of two books bore a few annotations, viz. The French Revolution (3 vols, 1889) and Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (3 vols, 1903).
However… When going through George and Kittie’s library I had come across photographs, greeting cards, visiting cards, and even letters, that had been used as bookmarks. Sometimes these were biographically significant. They were all removed from the books and filed in the appropriate part of the archive. But plain pieces of paper used as bookmarks were left where they were. There was an octavo sheet of laid white paper stuck in a volume of The French Revolution, but it had nothing on the front except a deep brown stain of time across the top where it protruded from the book; so I left it where it was and kept turning the pages. But this time as I turned the bookmark I noticed that it had three lines of writing on the back in very faint pencil. They were in George’s hand, but his own ‘cipher’, as Kittie called it. Having no camera, I attempted a facsimile:
Transcript of note in George’s hand on back of bookmark
Most of this was easily decipherable using George’s key, but the remaining words have taken me eight weeks to crack! I am confident now that the note means:
The handwriting in my opinion is late, around 1912. So why did George jot this thought down at least five years after he had abandoned his fundamental examination of ‘the canonical books of the Christians, in chronological order’ (see p. 200 of the biography)? Was he still as doubtful about the ‘divinity of Jesus’ as he had told Kittie in a letter on 11 February 1899 (see p. 39) and had suddenly been struck by a piece of evidence?
It’s an argument of characteristic Calderonian ingenuity. I have had a look at the accounts of Christ’s baptism in the gospels. They certainly agree that John baptised people only after they had confessed their sins and repented, but John refuses at first to baptise Jesus because he is ‘the Lamb of God’ — presumably without sin. Jesus however insists, ‘for thus it becometh us to fulfill all righteousness’ (Matthew 3, verse 15), and John does baptise him. Why? What does ‘to fulfill all righteousness’ mean?
I asked scientist-theologian John Polkinghorne whether Jesus could have been baptised if he had no sins to confess. Yes, was his answer, because the purpose of his baptism was to express his complete solidarity with human beings, to demonstrate that he was ‘with’ John and all those John was baptising. Thus whereas George concluded the baptism of Christ disproved Christ’s divinity, for a modern theologian it proves Christ’s humanity!
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’ Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘It is bound to remain the definitive account.’ Laurence Senelick, Fletcher Professor of Drama, Tufts University
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.‘ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
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