Tennyson’s physician, Dr Dabbs, posted a bulletin recording the death to the gates of Aldworth House, vividly picturing the poet’s last hours:
Nothing could have been more striking than the scene during the last few hours. On the bed a figure of breathing marble, flooded and bathed in the light of the full moon streaming through the oriel window; his hand clasping the Shakespeare which he had asked for but recently, and which he had kept by him to the end; the moonlight, the majestic figure as he lay there, ‘drawing thicker breath,’ irresistibly brought to our minds his own ‘Passing of Arthur’.
All poets should have such a physician at their deathbed.
The actual marble statue would, of course, be raised in Poet’s Corner. The interment in the Abbey was arranged for 12 October. It was decided that he should lie for eternity (or until the final judgement) alongside Browning. The coffin (cased in lead, as regulations on intramural burial required) was closed on 8 October. A copy of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, with its funerary lines, was slipped into it by a well-meaning house servant:
Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
The grave was dug in the Abbey at night, by gaslight. The coffin, draped in a Union Jack, was brought to London, also at night, by special train to Waterloo station, where a small crowd awaited. It was then taken by hearse to the Abbey, where it lay among a mass of floral tributes.
There were insufficient tickets available for those wishing to view the coffin, lying in poetic state, and crowds massed outside the Abbey. Tennyson’s son, Hallam, noted that many attending could be seen reading the poet’s ‘In Memoriam’ before the service.
The papers printed handy maps, indicating where the dignitaries would be sitting. The queen herself was not present but ‘represented’ during the short service, during which the coffin rested on a purple-clothed trestle. The service itself was dominated by the musical version of the poem that Tennyson had composed three years earlier for his own death, ‘Crossing the Bar’ (inspired, in fact, by a bout of seasickness on the trip to his holiday home in the Isle of Wight). Its last stanza forecasts what was currently happening in the Abbey:
For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.
The national flag was removed, and the body was lowered into the earth, sacred to God and English literature, decked with a few ‘wreaths of honour’ – foremost that of Queen Victoria: laurels, with an inscription ‘in the monarch’s own hand’.
13 October
Sonia Brownell marries George Orwell in his room in University College Hospital, London, the hospital chaplain officiating
1949 The author of Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-four (1948) was critically ill with tuberculosis but his doctor, the distinguished chest specialist Andrew Morland, thought the disease might be damped down to a chronic state, allowing the author to work quietly.
Orwell himself was full of hope and ideas for future projects, including a book on Joseph Conrad’s political fiction. He was happy at his marriage to his beautiful young wife, and now for the first time well-off, thanks to the success – in the United States as well as Britain – of Nineteen Eighty-four.
At first the book’s popularity in the West owed something to the accelerating Cold War, since its dystopian satire was so apparently aimed at the Soviet Union, what with the manipulation of information through constant erasure and rewriting of the newspaper of record, and with ‘Big Brother’ and Goldstein (the regime’s fantasy hate figure) so obviously resembling Stalin and Trotsky.
But Orwell insisted that his target was not socialism or communism, but the totalitarianism into which parties of either left or right could harden. He set the book in England to suggest that ‘the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else and that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere’.1 Another reminder that the book was not just about Russia lay in the totalitarian regime’s practice of turning allies into enemies overnight, just as Britain and America had done with the Soviet Union.
By 1989 Nineteen Eighty-four would be translated into more than 65 languages, and phrases like ‘newspeak’, ‘doublethink’, ‘thought crime’ – not to mention ‘Orwellian’ (to suggest the insidious control of a whole population) – have entered the language.
Not that Orwell himself would live to see any of this. He never left the hospital. Just three months after his wedding there, on 21 January 1950, he died of a massive lung haemorrhage. The editor of the Observer and long-time supporter David Astor found him a grave plot in an Oxfordshire village. Another friend, Malcolm Muggeridge, noted in his diary that Orwell dying on Lenin’s birthday and being buried by the Astors, ‘seems to me to cover the full range of his life’.2
1 Letter to Francis A. Henson of the United Automobile Workers, dated 16 June 1949; The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume 4: In Front of Your Nose, 1945–1950, London: Secker & Warburg, 1968, p. 502.
2 D.J. Taylor, ‘Last Days of Orwell’, Guardian, 15 January 2000.
14 October
The Normans defeat the English at the Battle of Hastings, changing the English language for ever
1066 The newly married couple were lucky. In their first two months together they’d known an endlessness of new feelings, and felt the bliss of being enoughly happy. What hearthotness (mania)! What fleshbesmittingness (carnal attraction)! Now, after a summer that was beweepingly (lamentably) short, they were in a sound house, had sound friends, and a sound working life.
According to a recent book on the subject, this is how we might talk if the Battle of Hastings had gone the other way – as it nearly did.1 After the Norman Conquest, ordinary people continued to speak English, since begengness of wordhoard (the application of vocabulary) is down to folk, but the governmental and social elites spoke French, while contracts and the courts were conducted in Latin.
In time this official vocabulary infiltrated the vernacular, in some places displacing perfectly good English words, but in others settling alongside them, so that eventually ‘English’ had almost as many loan words drawn from French and Latin as it had words originating in Old English. This is one reason why English has such a huge wordhoard (the other is the need for new words to accommodate the science done predominantly in English-speaking countries – see 10 June).
Where French- or Latin-derived words have survived alongside English words meaning at least roughly the same, what’s the result – pointless redundancy or expressive enrichment? Guides to good style often favour English over ‘French’, because since 1066 the latter has been the voice of officialdom. So (to take an actual example from the Plain English Campaign’s website): ‘High-quality learning environments are a necessary precondition for facilitation and enhancement of the ongoing learning process’ could be stated more simply in English as: ‘Children need good schools if they are to learn properly’.
The limit to this argument is that where the English word has survived alongside, and not been displaced by the French or Latin loan word, it’s usually for a reason. ‘Sight’ and ‘vision’, for example, don’t have exactly the same meaning; the latter often implies moral, intellectual or aesthetic values – invisible things that (on one level) are out of sight. The same goes for ‘till’ and ‘cultivate’, ‘win back’ and ‘redeem’, ‘beginning’ and ‘origin’, and thousands of other such binaries in the expanded language.
In ‘Politics and the English Language’ (1946) George Orwell offered five rules for clear composition, among which was: ‘Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.’ Yet who re
cognised the limits of plainness better than he? In Nineteen Eighty-four (1949) the Party is working on a form of English in which synonyms are being erased in order to extinguish ambiguity and make ‘crimethink’ impossible. Push plain English too far, and you may wind up with Newspeak.
3 David Cowley, How We’d Talk If the English had Won in 1066, Sandy, Bedfordshire: Bright Pen Books, 2009.
15 October
Winston Churchill, novelist
1953 On this date Winston Churchill, serving prime minister of England, was elected winner of the annual Prize for Literature by the Nobel committee. The practice of giving warmongers (such as Henry Kissinger) the Peace Prize had not yet been established: and he was no scientist. The committee was, of course, stretching a point in their rather desperate desire to honour the greatest Englishman of the century. Their ‘rationale’ for awarding the literary prize to Churchill was ‘for his mastery of historical and biographical descriptions as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values’.
Oddly, Churchill did indeed have a work of literary fiction to his name, though it was never mentioned either in the award speech or the acceptance speech at a banquet given in his honour in Stockholm (Churchill was unable to be present, and the speech was read by his wife: it was a somewhat deflated occasion).
Savrola, a Ruritanian romance, was serialised in Macmillan’s Magazine, May–December 1899. It was a scrappy period in the 25-year-old Churchill’s life. He had failed to win a seat in parliament and was not yet fully engaged (as he soon would be) in the South African war, where his exploits (notably his capture and escape from the Boers) would make his name.
He was, in the late 1890s, picking up journalistic commissions and whatever other bits and pieces of remunerative work he could (Macmillan paid a handsome £100 for the serial rights to the novel). The action of Savrola opens on the day of a great parade in the capital of ‘Laurania’. An old republic, the country has been a dictatorship under the presidency of Antonio Molara since the civil war of five years earlier (1883, we are told). Savrola, a brilliant philosophical soldier in his thirties (clearly based on Disraeli’s omnicompetent Sidonia in Coningsby), has formed a radically conservative party to restore Laurania’s ‘ancient liberties’. Romance, revolution, and the overthrow of international socialism follow.
The fascination with supreme power clearly took root in Churchill early. The novel earned handsomely and, had public life not opened a path for him, he could well have gone on to be a novelist in the Anthony Hope and, conceivably, even in the Conan Doyle class. He would certainly have made a better novelist than Hitler would have made a landscape painter, had both stuck to their respective lines of early work.
16 October
Abraham Lincoln deconstructs ‘the sacred right of self-government’
1854 As more and more conquests or frontier settlements added to the American dominion, their inhabitants pressed to be admitted to the Union – first as territories, then in time, if they progressed and prospered, as states. In the years leading up to the Civil War this business grew more and more politically charged over whether slavery was to be allowed in the new territory or state. In 1820 and again in 1850, southern and northern congressmen reached compromises that drew a northern limit to slave-holding – the 36°30' parallel, the boundary between Arkansas and Missouri.
Then in 1854 the chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, the prominent Democrat Stephen Douglas, introduced the Kansas–Nebraska Act to admit those two territories to the Union. All very uncontroversial, so far as slavery went, since both territories were above the 36°30' waterline. But there was a sting in the tail. Under southern pressure, Douglas drafted the Act so as to allow the inhabitants of the new territories to choose for themselves whether or not to hold slaves. Though practically speaking, the climate and terrain of the territories made them unsuitable for plantations, Douglas thought, he argued that ‘the sacred right of self-government’ ought to prevail in principle.
Abraham Lincoln, already a rising star in the Republican party, saw this for what it was – an attempt to repeal the hard-fought compromises that had so far preserved the Union. So he fought Douglas and the Act in a series of speeches, of which the longest and best-remembered was given at Peoria, Illinois, on this day. As for ‘the sacred right’, etc., ‘The doctrine of self-government is right – absolutely and eternally right’, he said, ‘but it has no just application’ here, because those claiming that right are also denying it to their slaves. ‘When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself, and also governs another man, that is more than self-government – that is despotism.’
Then, citing the Declaration of Independence almost as scripture (our ‘ancient faith’, he called it), he reminded his audience that:
The just powers of governments are derived from the consent of the governed. Now, the relation of masters is, PRO TANTO, a total violation of this principle. The master not only governs the slave without his consent; but he governs him by a set of rules altogether different from those which he prescribes for himself. Allow ALL the governed an equal voice in the government, and that, and that only, is self-government.
The Act passed, despite Lincoln’s oratory. But Lincoln would confront Douglas again – in their great campaign debates over the Illinois seat in the US Senate in 1858, and in the struggle for the presidency in 1860. In electoral terms Lincoln lost the first and won the second. In terms of great American rhetoric he won both, and a great deal more.
17 October
A St Louis newspaper interviews Walt Whitman on the future of American literature
1879 America’s most expansive, most inclusive poet was prone to prophesy about a literature that would somehow embody the whole country. In his Preface to Leaves of Grass (1855) he went as far as to say that ‘The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.’
This may have been cribbed from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous remark – in ‘The Poet’ (1844) – that ‘America is a poem in our eyes’, but its meaning is quite different. Emerson was talking about contemporary, native raw materials for the creative imagination that might equal the impact of the fall of Troy and the Delphic oracle on classical literature – things like ‘our logrolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians’.
As he writes in the Preface, by ‘The United States’ Whitman means the sum total of the country’s progressive institutions and its common people:
[T]heir manners speech dress friendships – the freshness and candor of their physiognomy – the picturesque looseness of their carriage … their deathless attachment to freedom … the fluency of their speech … their good temper and openhandedness – the terrible significance of their elections – the President’s taking off his hat to them not they to him – these too are unrhymed poetry.
Nearly a quarter century on, his interview on the subject published on this day suggested that the literary millennium might be delayed. The country had endured a horrific civil war, yet no American War and Peace had emerged. Asked, ‘Do you think we are to have a distinctively American literature?’, he answered, in the version reprinted in his prose collection, Specimen Days (1892):
It seems to me that our work at present is to lay the foundations of a great nation in products, in agriculture, in commerce, in networks of intercommunication … materialistic prosperity in all its varied forms … are first to be attended to. When those have their results and get settled, then a literature worthy of us will be defined.
This reason for the delayed development of American literature had been advanced for over a century. But Whitman still had his hopes for the power of the demotic. ‘Our American superiority and vitality are in the bulk of our people, not in a gentry like the old world.’ And this was true. Trouble was, America needed to find a way to allow its citizens the security and leisure to write without encouraging the snooty elitism of the Old World gentry. But wouldn’t that
mean letting some people take a holiday from agriculture and commerce? Not easy.
18 October
Bosavern Penlez hangs, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time
1749 The legal control of brothels was a matter of some contention for London magistrates, such as Henry Fielding (the novelist). A particularly contentious case arose during Fielding’s period on the bench. As Dan Cruikshank records, in The Secret History of Georgian London:
Bosavern Penlez was executed on October 18, 1749, for having been involved in an assault on, and theft from, a building in the Strand during a period of rioting caused by the mistreatment of sailors at a bawdy house. Three sailors had been robbed of their watches and over £50 in cash and, when they demanded their possessions back were ejected from the house by the bawd’s gang of bullies.
The Newgate Calendar offered some colourful details as to what happened next:
[W]hereupon they went away, denouncing vengeance; and, having collected a number of their companions in the neighbourhood of Wapping, they returned at night, broke open the house, turned the women almost naked into the streets, ripped up the beds, threw the feathers out of the window, broke the furniture in pieces, and made a bonfire of it.
Having proceeded to behave in a similar manner at another house of ill fame, a party of the guards was sent for, and the mob for the present dispersed.
As Cruikshank records, this ‘bold attack against private property … sent a chill through the London middle classes’. Henry Fielding shared the shock. On the evidence of the brothel-keeper, he committed to Newgate a peruke-maker, Bosavern Penlez, on charges of rioting – a crime that carried capital punishment. The luckless Penlez was duly hanged.
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