Veteran followers of this blog will know that my estimates of how long it is going to take to complete any given piece of writing connected with my biography of George and Kittie Calderon are usually out by a factor of at least three (O fallacem hominum spem! — see post for 27 July). Nevertheless, I cannot resist the temptation to say that I think I am now half way through my preparation for writing the Afterword and might write it swiftly in the first ten days of October.
Since I completed the body of the biography (i.e. 1867-1950) months ago, and basically know what I think about George (the subtitle of the Afterword is: ‘Who George Calderon Was’), you could be forgiven for wondering why the 4000-word Afterword is taking me so long. The answer is: I am reading the entire typescript yet again, noting relevant quotations and highlighting forty facts for re-verification, I have to go over meticulously and internalise what George’s friends said of him in their memoirs (commissioned by Kittie), I need to reconstruct meticulously the narrative of his revaluation in the media through the 1920s, I need to complete the theatrical and radio history of his plays from 1950 to the present, and above all I must understand/evaluate him in the context of Edwardianism (1897-1916) as a whole
The latter has involved identifying all the possibly relevant books about the Edwardians that I had not read already. I found fourteen. There were only three or four that I felt I needed to read extensively, although in nearly all of them I noted something potentially quotable. If anyone would like to recommend a book about the Edwardians that they have found particularly enjoyable or profound, please do!
Generalising terribly, I have found that the drawbacks with most British books about the Edwardians from my point of view are that they are either concerned with the ‘thick’ political and cultural history of the period, or they focus on key personalities like Baden Powell or Marie Lloyd, or they are polarised towards the uppermost class and the working class, when I want to know more about the mores of the upper middle class. Thus Anita Leslie’s Edwardians in Love (1972 etc) or Juliet Nicolson’s The Perfect Summer [1911]: Dancing into Shadow (2006), or George Cornwallis-West’s Edwardians Go Fishing (1932) are highly readable and revealing, but almost restricted to the highest echelons of Edwardian society, which is not surprising given the aristocratic pedigrees of their authors.
What really interests me is attempts to identify the constituents of the Edwardian psyche or character and suggest what conditioned them. For example, I know about George’s obsessiveness, ‘amateurism’, adventurism, or love of paradox, but how typical were these of the Edwardians generally, and what were their causes? Nearly fifty years after it was first published, the best ‘diagnostic’ study of this kind, in my view, remains Samuel Hynes’s The Edwardian Turn of Mind. My own favourites to set beside it would be Paul Thompson’s The Edwardians: The Remaking of British Society (1975 etc), Roy Hattersley’s The Edwardians (2004 etc), and Yvonne Bell’s The Edwardian Home (2005 etc). Obviously, I have read many biographies of individual Edwardians and even more studies of special subjects (theatre, suffragism, Gallipoli etc). These are very instructive. But what I am really after is psychology. How do the Edwardian mind, and the minds of George, Kittie and their set in particular, compare with our own?
At the risk of ‘spoiling’, over the next few weeks I will look at a few psychological facets of George and Kittie that I touch on in my Afterword, and how they might relate to the Edwardians as a species of people-in-time, our own forefathers, our semblables. Meanwhile, in this month’s guest post my wife will spill the beans about living with George and Kittie for thirty years…
Related
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
George Calderon, 1912
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
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
Captain of the 11
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
George Calderon c.1901
Afterword ‘spoilers’?
Veteran followers of this blog will know that my estimates of how long it is going to take to complete any given piece of writing connected with my biography of George and Kittie Calderon are usually out by a factor of at least three (O fallacem hominum spem! — see post for 27 July). Nevertheless, I cannot resist the temptation to say that I think I am now half way through my preparation for writing the Afterword and might write it swiftly in the first ten days of October.
Since I completed the body of the biography (i.e. 1867-1950) months ago, and basically know what I think about George (the subtitle of the Afterword is: ‘Who George Calderon Was’), you could be forgiven for wondering why the 4000-word Afterword is taking me so long. The answer is: I am reading the entire typescript yet again, noting relevant quotations and highlighting forty facts for re-verification, I have to go over meticulously and internalise what George’s friends said of him in their memoirs (commissioned by Kittie), I need to reconstruct meticulously the narrative of his revaluation in the media through the 1920s, I need to complete the theatrical and radio history of his plays from 1950 to the present, and above all I must understand/evaluate him in the context of Edwardianism (1897-1916) as a whole
The latter has involved identifying all the possibly relevant books about the Edwardians that I had not read already. I found fourteen. There were only three or four that I felt I needed to read extensively, although in nearly all of them I noted something potentially quotable. If anyone would like to recommend a book about the Edwardians that they have found particularly enjoyable or profound, please do!
Generalising terribly, I have found that the drawbacks with most British books about the Edwardians from my point of view are that they are either concerned with the ‘thick’ political and cultural history of the period, or they focus on key personalities like Baden Powell or Marie Lloyd, or they are polarised towards the uppermost class and the working class, when I want to know more about the mores of the upper middle class. Thus Anita Leslie’s Edwardians in Love (1972 etc) or Juliet Nicolson’s The Perfect Summer [1911]: Dancing into Shadow (2006), or George Cornwallis-West’s Edwardians Go Fishing (1932) are highly readable and revealing, but almost restricted to the highest echelons of Edwardian society, which is not surprising given the aristocratic pedigrees of their authors.
What really interests me is attempts to identify the constituents of the Edwardian psyche or character and suggest what conditioned them. For example, I know about George’s obsessiveness, ‘amateurism’, adventurism, or love of paradox, but how typical were these of the Edwardians generally, and what were their causes? Nearly fifty years after it was first published, the best ‘diagnostic’ study of this kind, in my view, remains Samuel Hynes’s The Edwardian Turn of Mind. My own favourites to set beside it would be Paul Thompson’s The Edwardians: The Remaking of British Society (1975 etc), Roy Hattersley’s The Edwardians (2004 etc), and Yvonne Bell’s The Edwardian Home (2005 etc). Obviously, I have read many biographies of individual Edwardians and even more studies of special subjects (theatre, suffragism, Gallipoli etc). These are very instructive. But what I am really after is psychology. How do the Edwardian mind, and the minds of George, Kittie and their set in particular, compare with our own?
At the risk of ‘spoiling’, over the next few weeks I will look at a few psychological facets of George and Kittie that I touch on in my Afterword, and how they might relate to the Edwardians as a species of people-in-time, our own forefathers, our semblables. Meanwhile, in this month’s guest post my wife will spill the beans about living with George and Kittie for thirty years…
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