Selected Publications of George Calderon
- ‘A Russian Tavern’, Pall Mall Gazette, 10 December 1895, p.2.
- ‘On and Off in Petersburg’, Pall Mall Gazette, 7 January 1896, p.4.
- ‘A Russian Bath’, Pall Mall Gazette, 7 April 1896, p.3.
- ‘Laughing Aspen’, Cornhill Magazine, December 1897, p.759-68.
- ‘Lipa Sidorovna’, Temple Bar, February 1898, p.269-74.
- ‘The Academy of Humour’, Cornhill Magazine, April 1899, p.459-71.
- ‘Russian Ideals of Peace’, Proceedings of the Anglo-Russian Literary Society, October–November–December 1900, p.66-87.
- ‘The Wrong Tolstoi’, The Monthly Review, Vol.III, May 1901, p.129-41.
- ‘Tolstoy’s Novels’, Literature, Vol.IX, No.202, 31 August 1901, p.197-202.
- ‘Korolenko’, The Monthly Review, Vol.IV, September 1901, p.115-28.
- ‘Dobrynia: A Russian Bŭilina’, The Monthly Review, Vol.V, December 1901, p.148-61.
- The Adventures of Downy V. Green, Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, London, Smith, Elder & Co., 1902.
- ‘The Obstinacy of the Romanoffs’, The Monthly Review, Vol.IX, April 1903, p.85-91.
- Dwala: A Romance, London, Smith, Elder & Co. 1904.
- 1907-1912: 53 reviews in The Times Literary Supplement.
- Woman in Relation to the State: A Consideration of the Arguments Advanced for the Extension of the Parliamentary Suffrage to Women, London, The Priory Press, 1908.
- ‘The Post-Impressionists’, The New Age, 24 November 1910, Vol.VIII, p.89-90.
- The Organisation of Buying: A Policy for Women, London, The Priory Press, 1911.
- The Fountain: A Comedy in Three Acts, London-Glasgow, Gowans and Gray, 1911.
- ‘The Russian Ballet’, The Times, 24 June 1911, p.13.
- Two Plays by Tchekhof: ‘The Seagull’, ‘The Cherry Orchard’, London, Grant Richards Ltd, 1912.
- ‘Cambridge and the Coal Strike’, The Cambridge Magazine, 20 April 1912, p.229-30.
- ‘The Russian Stage’, The Quarterly Review, Vol.217, No.432, July 1912, p.21-42.
- ‘The Four Walls’, Manchester Playgoer, Vol.1, No.2, December 1912, p.45-48.
- [With St John Hankin] Thompson: A Comedy in Three Acts, London, Secker, 1913.
- The Little Stone House: A Play in One Act, London, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1913.
- ‘Slavonic Elements in Greek Religion’, The Classical Review, May 1913, Vol.27, No.3, p.79-81.
- Reminiscences of Tolstoy by his son Count Ilya Tolstoy, translated by George Calderon, London, Chapman and Hall, 1914.
- The Maharani of Arakan: A Romantic Comedy, London, Francis Griffiths, 1915.
- Tahiti, London, Grant Richards Ltd, 1921.
- Three Plays and a Pantomime, London, Grant Richards Ltd, 1922.
- Eight One-Act Plays, London, Grant Richards Ltd, 1922.
- [With William Caine] The Brave Little Tailor, or Seven at a Blow, London, Grant Richards Ltd, 1923.
- The Two Talismans: A Comedy in One Act, London, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1928.
Hi, I recently purchased some items from a charity shop in Deal and amongst them found an original letter in it’s original envelope to a Mrs Raikes from Katharine Calderon. In it there are references to ‘Percy’,(on doing some research, I believe to be Percy Lubbock) and George. There is also a reference to Earlham. If you are interested in the letter, please send me an email. I really enjoyed researching the letter and finding out all about the life of George and Katharine.
Katy George.
Katy, this is SENSATIONAL! It would have been worth running the blog for the last eight months just for this, and I’m so glad you found us when you were researching Katharine (Kittie, as we call her)! Letters from Kittie are very rare, because all her letters to her best friend Nina Corbet were burned bar one, she herself destroyed all her letters to George (why???) bar one, and her voluminous letters to Percy Lubbock seem to have been lost in WWII. It’s utterly amazing: a new letter of Kittie’s has not come to light for, I think, four years! I really cannot thank you enough or admire your proactivity enough in tracking us Calderonians down. Mrs Gladys Raikes was a friend of the Pyms at Foxwold (to find out all about Foxwold, where the Calderons spent Christmas 1914, tap it into the search box on the blog), and possibly also of Nina Corbet-Astley’s, as the address on the envelope that you have sent me a scan of is near where Nina lived. Gladys Raikes’s address at Ashwell, near Baldock, is in both of Kittie’s address books (i.e. 1895-1942 and 1942-50). She may have been born in 1877, making her ten years younger than Kittie. Her husband, Arthur Whittington Raikes, died in 1921. Her son was a hero of the defence of Calais in 1940. I see from the Web that she also designed a garden at Yalding in Kent, so perhaps that is how this letter came to be in your part of the world. Designing gardens would be another thing she had in common with Kittie. The scans of the letter itself also show that it is INVALUABLE to this biographer, because it confirms that William Rothenstein gave a talk about George, probably in Oxford, in 1923, and because in the letter Kittie compares Percy Lubbock’s ‘Life’ of George (in other words she regarded Percy’s ‘Sketch from Memory’ as George’s first biography!) with Percy’s second book, ‘Earlham’. Ab-so-lut-ely fascinating and so fantastic a discovery by you that I must post about it next week when the War allows me to. Meanwhile, though, I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you. It seems almost uncanny that your full name, I gather from your emails, is not just KATHARINE, but GEORGE! Patrick
I recently came across a work by Calderon which is not on your list, though perhaps you merely did not consider it worthy of inclusion! But if not, perhaps it will be of interest –
https://www.kickery.com/2019/10/basilisk-1897.html
This is amazing! I assure you I consider ALL works of George worthy of inclusion — in the Bibliography of my book, that is; the one on Calderonia is highly selective. Can you tell us more about how you came across this story? Did you see it first in the New-York Tribune? It certainly looks authentic! I wonder whether he wrote it whilst he was still in Russia, or just after he got back. I don’t think it was known before that he had published non-fiction in the Pall Mall Gazette: all his correspondence from Russia for them was unsigned, and in a different part of the newspaper. This might even be his first signed publication as a professional writer. Anyway, thank you a million, and thank you for the link which will enable Calderonia’s followers to read a ‘new’ work of George Calderon!
I am a dance historian, so I was searching for mentions of dances in nineteenth century periodicals. I found it first in the Tribune, where it was credited to the Pall-Mall Gazette and searched through the Gazette to find the original publication. When I went looking for information on Calderon, I came across your very helpful website.
Coincidentally, I spend most of my time in Russia, so the Russian connection is personally intriguing. When I have time, I will seek out more of his works written in Russia and your biography as well.
If you know of any other works of his that have ballroom scenes or discuss dance, I’d be delighted to know about them.
What a terrific short story by George Calderon! The hot, heady atmosphere of intoxication is wonderfully realised, and the final twist decidedly disturbing.
I was reminded of this delightful photograph in the Trinity College Archive. It was preserved in the album of one Robert Arnold, an undergraduate two years junior to George, and I am posting it here by kind permission of Robert’s grandson. The occasion is the College Ball of 1890, and George Calderon is seated cross-legged on the far right of the front row. He is wearing his dancing pumps, and – with characteristic flamboyance? – a pair of stripy socks. Ahead of the dance he wrote to his mother about it (see page 102 of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius) and mentioned that his ‘best girl’ would be a ‘fair American’.
What a shame she is not in the photograph, but we must assume that the women have departed with their chaperones, and these men are the ‘survivors’, photographed at dawn. Most of them are pretty pie-eyed. George looks sober enough to strike a pose and focus his gaze on the camera, although is that posy simply a bunch of other chaps’ buttonholes? It probably seemed a good idea at the time.
There is a detailed description of the occasion in the Oxford Magazine of June 26 1890.
It certainly sounds like a lovely event, and I hope George enjoyed himself. Did he get to “go it” on the dance floor, or behave indiscreetly in the garden?
P.S. As so often in undergraduate photographs, George’s hair is markedly shorter than that of his contemporaries. Was there a particular reason for this, or just a general desire to stand out from the crowd?
Dear Clare, it’s very good to have you Commenting again! May it continue? And thank you for all the time and expertise you have spent on this one, which is fascinating.
I agree, it’s a terrific story by the young George, one of his best. I am darned annoyed that I never came across it! On the other hand, I rather blame George himself, as this story could have gone into a jolly good little collection, like the young Chekhov’s first published bouquet, but that wouldn’t have been ‘George’, of course: he’d ‘done it and had to move on’.
Perhaps we are influenced by the fact that for us he is the centre of attention of the photograph, but he certainly comes across as, well, individual if not Odd Man Out, with his striped socks, penetrating look, crewcut and posy… I have never really understood the role of flowers at Commemoration balls in those days. Were the buttonholes that many of the chaps are wearing presented to them by their ‘best girls’? Certainly George’s ‘best girl’ seems to have made his — and he writes to his mother that he also presented to Trinity’s Bursar ‘a wreath of daisies’ made by the same ‘fair American hands’, to ‘wreathe his brow withal’. The possibility occurs to me that the flowers Archie Ripley displays in his buttonhole in the youthful photograph that Kittie particularly treasured and which I describe on p. 1 of my biography, could be his Commem. one, following the ‘Oxford ball’ at which they met. Incidentally, I had never noticed before, but Archie is actually in the photo, eighth from the left in the second row, leaning over the the left arm of the tall, erect chap and directly above Harold Dowdall. Is the famous Hugh Legge there, too — President of the Rowing Club and model for ‘Bill Sykes’ in Downy V. Green?
Both the photograph and the magazine account are so evocative! Thank you again.
I think George may have favoured the en brosse hairstyle throughout his life as he had trouble with his black ‘Spanish’ hair: it probably went lank in our climate and he couldn’t ‘do anything with it’. It was another reason, perhaps, that abroad people thought he was American.
I love your website, and you’re a very serious researcher! The reason I missed this story of George’s when I was searching for them in the literature 1895-1915 is that he wasn’t known to have written fiction for the PMG, only news and features from Russia until the summer of 1897; so when I searched the PMG I only looked at those pages, and found what I wanted. Thanks to you, I am certainly going back to the library to look for more stories published in the PMG.
George was, I am sure, a very good ballroom dancer himself. There are many references to society balls in his works and letters, but (as far as I can remember) no description of one in action.
In later life (1911-14) he worked closely with Michel Fokine during the visits to London by Ballets Russes and he even wrote five ballet libretti for them, but the outbreak of War disrupted all that and they were never performed.
Good luck with everything, and thank you again!