2/09/15. If you haven’t seen the latest cracker of a Comment from Clare Hopkins, I recommend that you do (top right)…and contribute to the discussion! Clare is absolutely right that in ‘laying out George and Kitties daily lives’ I have invited readers to ‘subject an Edwardian character to 21st century scrutiny. This is fruitful. In fact, of course, it is why I am writing the biography.
(By the way, my chapter on George’s opposition to women’s suffrage is available on my website at ‘Recent Writing’.)
Katy George has emailed me with some very interesting observations on this device that Kittie Calderon designed for the cover of Percy Lubbock’s book about George, and all the subsequent volumes of George’s works:
I had suggested, based on Edwardian emoticons used in letters, that the two intersecting circles were George and Kittie, the letters perhaps stood for ‘George’ and ‘Catherine’ as well as ‘George Calderon’, and that the ear of barley referred to Christ’s words ‘except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit’. However, this doesn’t explain why it is specifically an ear of barley and not wheat (and we know from Percy Lubbock’s correspondence with Kittie that it is barley).
Katy has suggested that the barley is a reference to the Robert Dwyer Joyce ballad ‘The Wind That Shakes the Barley’ — and I find this very plausible for two reasons. First, the ear is still a symbol of immortality because in the ballad the barley springs up every year on the graves of the Irish rebels who carried grains in their pockets as food, but who also died for their country like George and left their loved ones in order to fight. Second, Kittie was born and brought up in Ireland, was a member of the Irish Literary Society, and I think we can presume that she knew Joyce’s ballad.
Katy has also suggested that the circles might be ‘mandorlas’. If you Google on ‘mandorla’, you will discover what a rich subject this is. I am not myself convinced that the circles in Kittie’s design are mandorlas in the religious sense (roughly, enclosing haloes round figures of Christ and the Virgin Mary). Nor, clearly, are they examples of the most famous geometrical form of mandorla, the vesica piscis, as their perimeters do not pass through each other’s centres. However, in effect the circles on the book cover are a form of this. Perhaps, quite simply, they symbolise George and Kittie’s (larger and smaller} wedding rings. Whichever, I am extremely grateful to Katy for her stimulating contribution.
A fascinating new biography has just come out, Amazing Grace: The Man Who Was WG, by Richard Tomlinson. It is a biography very much after my own heart, because it not only presents the fullest account of Grace’s life to date, it has an overriding theme: the ‘amateur’ (i.e. ‘gentleman’) / ‘professional’ divide in cricket which led to ‘shamateurisrn’ and in the words of Peter Wilby ‘turned English cricket into a joke from which it has never quite recovered’. This is an Edwardian subject, of course, and crops up periodically in my biography because Calderon believed in the ‘amateur’ both on the cricket field and in his many other life pursuits. However, the theme of my own book could perhaps best be summed up in a new title such as George Calderon: The Case For Edwardian Genius.
As always, if you have any ideas about plausible publishers, please email them me through my Website http://patrickmiles.co.uk. Thank you for reading!
Related
Captain of the 11
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
George Calderon, 1912
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
George Calderon c.1901
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Watch this Space
2/09/15. If you haven’t seen the latest cracker of a Comment from Clare Hopkins, I recommend that you do (top right)…and contribute to the discussion! Clare is absolutely right that in ‘laying out George and Kitties daily lives’ I have invited readers to ‘subject an Edwardian character to 21st century scrutiny. This is fruitful. In fact, of course, it is why I am writing the biography.
(By the way, my chapter on George’s opposition to women’s suffrage is available on my website at ‘Recent Writing’.)
Katy George has emailed me with some very interesting observations on this device that Kittie Calderon designed for the cover of Percy Lubbock’s book about George, and all the subsequent volumes of George’s works:
I had suggested, based on Edwardian emoticons used in letters, that the two intersecting circles were George and Kittie, the letters perhaps stood for ‘George’ and ‘Catherine’ as well as ‘George Calderon’, and that the ear of barley referred to Christ’s words ‘except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit’. However, this doesn’t explain why it is specifically an ear of barley and not wheat (and we know from Percy Lubbock’s correspondence with Kittie that it is barley).
Katy has suggested that the barley is a reference to the Robert Dwyer Joyce ballad ‘The Wind That Shakes the Barley’ — and I find this very plausible for two reasons. First, the ear is still a symbol of immortality because in the ballad the barley springs up every year on the graves of the Irish rebels who carried grains in their pockets as food, but who also died for their country like George and left their loved ones in order to fight. Second, Kittie was born and brought up in Ireland, was a member of the Irish Literary Society, and I think we can presume that she knew Joyce’s ballad.
Katy has also suggested that the circles might be ‘mandorlas’. If you Google on ‘mandorla’, you will discover what a rich subject this is. I am not myself convinced that the circles in Kittie’s design are mandorlas in the religious sense (roughly, enclosing haloes round figures of Christ and the Virgin Mary). Nor, clearly, are they examples of the most famous geometrical form of mandorla, the vesica piscis, as their perimeters do not pass through each other’s centres. However, in effect the circles on the book cover are a form of this. Perhaps, quite simply, they symbolise George and Kittie’s (larger and smaller} wedding rings. Whichever, I am extremely grateful to Katy for her stimulating contribution.
A fascinating new biography has just come out, Amazing Grace: The Man Who Was WG, by Richard Tomlinson. It is a biography very much after my own heart, because it not only presents the fullest account of Grace’s life to date, it has an overriding theme: the ‘amateur’ (i.e. ‘gentleman’) / ‘professional’ divide in cricket which led to ‘shamateurisrn’ and in the words of Peter Wilby ‘turned English cricket into a joke from which it has never quite recovered’. This is an Edwardian subject, of course, and crops up periodically in my biography because Calderon believed in the ‘amateur’ both on the cricket field and in his many other life pursuits. However, the theme of my own book could perhaps best be summed up in a new title such as George Calderon: The Case For Edwardian Genius.
As always, if you have any ideas about plausible publishers, please email them me through my Website http://patrickmiles.co.uk. Thank you for reading!
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