"Literary Links" - T.S.Eliot in Oxford

"Literary Links" is a series of posts celebrating Britain's wonderful links with great authors, dramatists and poets.

T.S.Eliot

·         Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) was American born but arrived in Oxford in 1914 with a scholarship to study philosophy.  He was based at Merton College.

Merton College Library

  Oxford did not win him over and he was gone within a year claiming “I hate university towns and university people, who are the same everywhere, with pregnant wives, sprawling children, many books and hideous pictures on the walls… Oxford is very pretty, but I don’t like to be dead.”  However, England did win him over for in 1927 he became a British citizen.  His most famous works are The Love Song of Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, The Hollow Men and Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.  The latter was adapted by Andrew Lloyd Webber into the musical Cats.  

This is an excerpt from the tour Oxford’s Noble and Great Ones - Part 1  which explores around the southern part of Oxford.  The full tour is found on www.obelisktours.co.uk

"Literary Links" - Jacob Tonson

"Literary Links" is a series of posts celebrating Britain's wonderful links with great authors, dramatists and poets.

Jacob Tonson (1656-1736) is buried in this Ledbury graveyard.   

His name is probably unfamiliar to you, but he published the works of the literary greats of his time such as John Milton (1608-1674),  Joseph Addison (1672-1719), Alexander Pope (1688-1744),  Richard Steele (1672-1729), Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), and John Dryden (1631-1700).    He revived the works of Shakespeare and published The Spectator. 

Jacob Tonson

John Milton's masterpiece, Paradise Lost, never brought Milton much of a return during his life.  His political leanings made him a hot potato and publishers were reluctant to invest in him.   After his death the monarchy and the political scene had shifted and Tonson, who now owned all publishing rights to Milton's epic poem, was able to cash in making him a small fortune.

He served as Secretary of the Kit-Kat Club which was both a political and literary club in London.  Why Kit-Kat?  The answer is unclear, but one contemporary gave this reason: 

"Whence deathless Kit-Kat took his name

Few critics can unriddle

 Some say from pastrycook it came

 And some from Cat and Fiddle.

 From no trim beaus its name it boasts

 Grey statesmen or green wits

But from the pell-mell pack of toasts

 Of old Cats and young Kits."

Tonson spent his working life in London, but he chose Ledbury as his retirement place.   Here he spent the last sixteen years of his life and here he is buried. 

This is an excerpt from the tour Ledbury which explores this medieval market town.  The full tour is found on www.obelisktours.co.uk

"Literary Links" - Mr Scrooge

 "Literary Links" is a series of posts celebrating Britain's wonderful links with great authors, dramatists and poets.

St Mary de Crypt, Gloucester

The Church of St Mary de Crypt in Gloucester is the burial spot for James “Jemmy” Wood (1756-1836) - one of four ‘misers’ claimed as the inspiration for Charles Dickens’ well known character Ebenezeer Scrooge.  The four skinflints are:

• Contestant number one was Gabriel de Graaf a cruel19th century gravedigger from the Netherlands who disappeared one Christmas Eve and resurfaced years later a reformed man.
• Our second contestant is the Londoner John Elwes (1714-1789) who was orphaned at an early age, and inherited around £100,000 from his father's estate.  Years later his rich uncle bequeathed £350,000 to him (1763) and he acquired over 100 London properties.  Despite his huge wealth he was frugal to the extreme looking more like a poverty stricken debtor than a man of means. 
• The next contestant is a generous Edinburgh merchant called Ebenezer Lennox Scroggie (1792-1836).   Their story goes that in 1841 Dickens was lecturing in the city and visited the Canongate Kirk graveyard where he saw Ebenezer's tomb describing him as a - "meal man" referring to his trade as a corn merchant.  Dickens mistakenly read it as "mean man". Two years later (1843) Ebenezer Scroggie a "mean man" was resurrected by Dickens as Ebenezer Scrooge.  This version is disputed as no more than an urban legend. 
• And finally, Gloucester’s contestant was our very own James “Jemmy” Wood (1756-1836), owner of the Gloucester Old Bank and possibly Britain’s very first millionaire.  He is buried here in St Mary de Crypt.   He was nationally renowned for his stinginess, and Dickens actually mentions “Jemmy Wood of Gloucester” in Our Mutual Friend.  

  

  James 'Jemmy' Wood

Maybe Dickens did a bit of cut and paste editing from all of these contestants to create his  wonderful character:

“Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. ….External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he…”

St Mary de Crypt

However, our James Wood from Gloucester is also claimed to influence another of Dickens’ novels – Bleak House.

Wood’s will was very obscure which resulted in years of legal wrangling over who was entitled to his remaining £900,000.  The court case dragged on for so long that most of the funds disappeared in legal fees.   In the preface to Bleak House Charles Dickens explained “At the present moment there is a suit before the Court which was commenced nearly twenty years ago…”     In Bleak House the very first chapter introduces us to the court case of Jarndyce vs Jarndyce which,  

“…drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. …. Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit. The little plaintiff or defendant who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world. Fair wards of court have faded into mothers and grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and gone out; the legion of bills in the suit have been transformed into mere bills of mortality; …but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the court, perennially hopeless.”

This is an excerpt from the tour Gloucester City Tour - Part Two which explores the streets around the Cathedral.  The full tour is found on  www.obelisktours.co.uk

"Literary Links" - Samuel Johnson in Oxford

"Literary Links" is a series of posts celebrating Britain's wonderful links with great authors, dramatists and poets.

·         Samuel Johnson’s (1709-1784) student days at Pembroke College in Oxford were cut short due to a shortage of funds.  He said, “Ah, Sir, I was mad and violent… I was miserably poor and I thought to fight my way by my literature and my wit: so I disregarded all power and authority.”   He was devastated at having to leave, but found his life’s calling as a writer.  His most notable work was A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) - a massive undertaking which took him nine years.  It would be another 150 years before the Oxford English Dictionary was introduced to take its place. 

This is an excerpt from the tour Oxford’s Noble and Great Ones - Part 1  which explores around the southern part of Oxford.  The full tour is found on www.obelisktours.co.uk

"Literary Links" - London is hell !!

"Literary Links" is a series of posts celebrating Britain's wonderful links with great authors, dramatists and poets.

The southern bank of the River Thames became a real den of vice and dissent.  The outcasts from the city gravitated to this area – some by choice to rub shoulders with other criminals and religious dissenters and others by force to spend time in squalid prisons like the Clink.

The Welsh Poet Tomas Prys (1564-1634) wrote a charming little poem called ‘London is Hell’ in which he compares Wales to Heaven and London as hell.   In his description he mentions these foul Southwark prisons by name and talks of the destitute inmates whose souls have been sucked out of them.

“there was no fear of hell but one: it is London”

A similar comparison was made by the poet Percy Shelley (1792-1822) who begins his poem Peter Bell the Third with the lines:

“Hell is a city much like London -  

A populous and a smoky city”

In another poem Shelley repeats this hell like theme with: 

“You are nowIn London, that great sea, whose ebb and flowAt once is deaf and loud, and on the shoreVomits its wrecks, and still howls on for more.”

This is an excerpt from the tour London River Walks - South Bank which explores the southern bank of the River Thames.  The full tour is found on  www.obelisktours.co.uk

"Literary Links" - John Ruskin in Oxford

"Literary Links" is a series of posts celebrating Britain's wonderful links with great authors, dramatists and poets.

John Ruskin (1819-1900) attended Christ Church College, Oxford as an undergraduate and like many of his fellow students came from a privileged background.  He showed early signs of talent even before he arrived here.

Christ Church College, Oxford

His influence was enormous.  He became an accomplished poet, writer, artist and critic and an invaluable patron to the arts.   His thoughts on social issues were often ahead of their time and continue to inspire today. For instance, his book Unto This Last (1860) inspired Mahatma Gandhi who said, “I determined to change my life in the light of this book.  My belief is that I discovered some of my deepest convictions reflected in this great book of Ruskin’s…”

Ruskin was a generous benefactor to Oxford and founded The Ruskin School of Drawing in 1871 using the rooms and art in the Ashmolean Museum.  It continued there for a century where it was renamed The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in 1945.  In 1975 it found its new home here on the corner of the High Street and Merton Street.  In 2014 it became known as the Ruskin School of Art.  

This is an excerpt from the tour Oxford’s Noble and Great Ones - Part 1  which explores around the southern part of Oxford.  The full tour is found on www.obelisktours.co.uk

"Literary Links" - John Betjeman in Oxford

"Literary Links" is a series of posts celebrating Britain's wonderful links with great authors, dramatists and poets.

John Betjeman

·John Betjeman (1906-1984) came from a middle class family selling furniture.  As a boy he was taught briefly by T. S. Eliot and gained a love for words.  In Oxford his tutor was C.S. Lewis which sounds like a match made in heaven – but neither thought highly of the other.  But… supported by his travelling companion – a teddy bear called Archibald Ormsby-Gore – and armed with his love of the English language he acquired a growing appreciation of architecture and fell in love with Oxford.  Academically he failed, but his subsequent career was a delight.  He wrote guidebooks, co-founded the Victorian Society, composed poems, campaigned to save buildings, and became a television personality. 

This is an excerpt from the tour Oxford’s Noble and Great Ones - Part 1  which explores around the southern part of Oxford.  The full tour is found on www.obelisktours.co.uk