A Visit to Thornhill Gardens

Today, I’m visiting Thornhill Gardens in Islington. Other boroughs surrounding Islington have large open spaces: to the north, Hampstead has Kenwood and the Heath; to the south, the City of London offers you the spires of numerous Wren city churches and the dome of St Paul’s cathedral. Two hundred years ago, Islington itself scarcely existed, except as a village with a small spa attached and it was viewed by City dwellers as a pleasant place to take a walk. It sits on a hill, well above the City of London smogs.

Map of Thornhill Gardens 1940-1960s

Continue reading A Visit to Thornhill Gardens

Please share this page...

FacebooktwitterredditpinteresttumblrmailFacebooktwitterredditpinteresttumblrmail

Get Stuffed: ‘Animal Furniture’, 1896

Last October, I looked at some articles from the monthly illustrated Strand Magazine which was launched in 1896: Child Acrobats and Stage Dancers; Educating the Blind; and The Battersea Dogs’ Home, 1891, and wrote posts about them.

A couple of days ago, I discovered a further copy of the Strand Magazine. It’s not in a good state; it lacks the back and spine covers and the last few pages have come unstuck – but it is complete. And it contains an extraordinary article: ‘Animal Furniture’

Albatross beak paper clip

Continue reading Get Stuffed: ‘Animal Furniture’, 1896

Please share this page...

FacebooktwitterredditpinteresttumblrmailFacebooktwitterredditpinteresttumblrmail

The Launch of ‘The Cabochon Emerald’ in e-books

The Cabochon Emerald, my 7th Elizabeth Hawksley historical novel, which comes out in e-books on Monday 2nd August, owes its existence to a lucky find in a second-hand bookshop: The French Exiles 1789-1815 by Margery Weiner. Weiner’s book absolutely grabbed me: she follows the lives of the some of the 25,000 émigrés who fled the French Revolution and came to England: who were they? Yes, there were aristocrats and members of the clergy (in 1793, the French Government abolished Christianity), but those fleeing for their lives also also included artisans who worked in luxury industries, like jewellers or couturiers, which made them more vulnerable to being arrested. Why did they choose to come to London – a Protestant country, after all; how did they get here; where did they live; and how did they manage to make a living?

The French Exiles 1789-1815 by Margery Weiner 

Continue reading The Launch of ‘The Cabochon Emerald’ in e-books

Please share this page...

FacebooktwitterredditpinteresttumblrmailFacebooktwitterredditpinteresttumblrmail

Historical Writers Association and a Regency Hamper

Back in April, I wrote a blog about my good fortune in being invited to be one of the judges for the Historical Writers Association Gold Crown Award, and this week I’m writing an update. We have been busy! As soon as I’d said ‘Yes’, dozens of books thudded down onto my doormat, and this is what my study floor now looks like:

My study has turned into an Art Installation of books! There are about ninety Historical novels in alphabetical order, and the books standing upright are there to stabilize them. 

Continue reading Historical Writers Association and a Regency Hamper

Please share this page...

FacebooktwitterredditpinteresttumblrmailFacebooktwitterredditpinteresttumblrmail

Commemoration and Dissent

I visited the Museum of London this week – the first time for quite a while and, as I wandered round,  I found myself thinking that it might be interesting to look at how ordinary people chose to commemorate what was going on in their lives – for good or ill. So I shall begin in 1600 in London with a Delftware plate celebrating the long and prosperous reign of Queen Elizabeth I.

Elizabethan Delftware plate, 1600

Continue reading Commemoration and Dissent

Please share this page...

FacebooktwitterredditpinteresttumblrmailFacebooktwitterredditpinteresttumblrmail

British Museum: The Sutton Hoo Ship Burial

One of the most splendid exhibits in the British Museum is undoubtedly the Sutton Hoo Ship Burial and its astonishing treasures, dating from the 7th century A.D. which was excavated 1938-9, as the country prepared itself for war.

The Bronze Helmet – fit for a King?

Continue reading British Museum: The Sutton Hoo Ship Burial

Please share this page...

FacebooktwitterredditpinteresttumblrmailFacebooktwitterredditpinteresttumblrmail

My Mother’s Choice: Six Ornaments

Back in the 1950s, my mother found herself kitting out a small modern London flat from scratch. She decided to go for modern and went straight to Heals, the place for the best modern furniture and fittings. Once she’d bought the essentials, she decided that the flat (bedroom, sitting-room, bathroom, small kitchen, and a small entrance area) needed a few ornaments. At the time, Mr Heal prided himself on buying top quality items from across the world to sell in his famous shop.

Ceramics chosen by Mr Heal

Continue reading My Mother’s Choice: Six Ornaments

Please share this page...

FacebooktwitterredditpinteresttumblrmailFacebooktwitterredditpinteresttumblrmail

The e-book launch of ‘Crossing the Tamar’

I’m thrilled to announce that the e-book of Crossing the Tamar is due out on Monday – it’s one of my favourite Elizabeth Hawksley novels – and it did well. Not only was it reprinted, it went into large print both in the States and in the UK, and was translated into German as Jenseits des Stromes by Wunderlich Taschenbuch. I was also invited to talk on Radio Cornwall about it; I had to go to BBC Broadcasting House (exciting!) where I was ushered into what looked like the cockpit of a space rocket  – (scary – it was full of knobs and buttons which I didn’t dare touch) – and  eventually a voice from someone in Cornwall came over the air waves (this was in 1998) to interview me.

E-book cover for ‘Crossing the Tamar’ by Elizabeth Hawksley

Continue reading The e-book launch of ‘Crossing the Tamar’

Please share this page...

FacebooktwitterredditpinteresttumblrmailFacebooktwitterredditpinteresttumblrmail

St Thomas Becket: Murder in the Cathedral

On a cold winter’s day, 29th December, 1170, three knights: Reginald Fitzurse, William de Tracy and Hugh de Morville arrived at Canterbury Cathedral. They were King Henry II’s loyal men and, time and again, they had heard him fume against the Archbishop Thomas Becket’s wilful refusal to obey him and side with the church instead. They vowed to ride to Canterbury Cathedral, capture Becket, and drag him back to face the King, so that the long and bitter quarrel between them could finally be settled.

They did not, at this point, mean to murder Thomas.

A reliquary casket showing the martyrdom of Thomas Becket. At the bottom, three knights, swords raised, are about to attack Thomas who stands in front of the altar. Two monks on the right raise their hands in horror

Continue reading St Thomas Becket: Murder in the Cathedral

Please share this page...

FacebooktwitterredditpinteresttumblrmailFacebooktwitterredditpinteresttumblrmail

Books my Brother Gave Me.

My historian brother has the rare gift of giving me books which I never knew I needed and which, if non-fiction, have proved to be invaluable or, if fiction, have almost instantly become one of my favourites.

Richard Holmes’ Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer

I want to look at some of them today because I think that they all have something special – and I’d like to convince you that they are books that you might like to read yourself.. I’m starting with Richard Holmes’ Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer. It’s his first book and it opens with his first literary adventure, when he was 19, retracing Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous journey through the Cevennes with a donkey – though, alas, Holmes had no donkey. Still, he did have a suitably Stevensonian hat, which he christened Le Brun and it helped to break the ice when meeting strangers.

Later, caught up in the Parisian riots of the 1960s, Footsteps dives back in time to look at the terrors the poet William Wordsworth and writer Mary Wollstonecraft had to face when in Revolutionary Paris.

I loved the way that Holmes developed a romantic attachment to Mary Wollstonecraft and imagined himself saving her from ‘some fatal escapade in the Luxembourg prison’ …’Your faithful biographer, Ma’am, come to extricate you in the next paragraph, which has a secret trapdoor …’

In his late twenties, Holmes took another trip following the strange, tortured world of Gerard de Nerval; and finally he went on a pilgrimage through Italy, pursuing the poet Shelley and his band of Romantic Idealists, including Claire Clairmont – with whom he, quite obviously, fell in love.

Holmes was, as he himself said, a child of the 1960s, a period very similar in many ways to the Byron-Shelley set up in Italy with its passionate belief in Free Love and Free Thinking – not to mention the resulting children with pitifully short lives – and, inevitably, the painful emotional fallout. He understood that sort of ménage from the inside.  And this makes his  account of what happened there particularly convincing.

I fully echoed one of the reviewers’ comments: ‘I found myself reading it (the book) continuously and with enormous admiration and pleasure.’  I do so agree; it’s a book I have re-read many times.

The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street by Charles Nicholl

The Lodger opens in 1612 with William Shakespeare giving evidence to the Court of Requests at Westminster concerning a case that went back to when he was living in Cripplegate eight years earlier. It’s the only time his spoken word was ever recorded and what follows is a sort of detective story about Shakespeare’s time in Silver Street living with a family of French immigrants.

I don’t know how Charles Nicholl does it, but he gives his readers an immensely exciting dissection of life in London at that date; we know exactly where Shakespeare’s house was, (there are contemporary maps) we know what he could see from his window, we meet his landlady. We also meet the people he was working with – like the dodgy brothel-keeper/ playwright, George Wilkins; and, at the end of the book, Nicholl gives us the transcripts of the relevant Belott-Mountjoy papers so that we can follow the case for ourselves. It like time-travelling crossed with being a fly on the wall. I was completely gripped.

One of the book’s reviews said: ‘Part biography, part detective story, Nicholl’s latest work ranks among the finest books ever written about Shakespeare’s life.’

If you want to know about everyday life and work in early 17th century London, this book is a must!

A Month in the Country by J. L .Carr

The cover shown above is from my new copy of J. L. Carr’s book. The original fell apart from having been read and re-read so many times. It’s a slim book of only 135 pages but it stays with you and when my first copy began to shed pages, I couldn’t bear the thought of not having a copy.

The Spectator called this book: ‘Unlike anything else in modern English Literature.’  and I agree. It is a haunting tale: Tom Birkin, a survivor of the First World War, a man deeply traumatized by PTSD finds a temporary job uncovering a wall painting of the Apocalypse in a Medieval church in the Yorkshire village of Oxgodby. I can’t describe it any further – you’ll have to read it for yourself.

The book won the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1980 and was short-listed for the Booker Prize. In 1987, it was made into a film with Kenneth Branagh, Colin Firth and Natasha Richardson.

It is one of my favourite books.

The Hanging Tree by V. A. C. Gatrell

This book explores how English people at all social levels reacted to the awesome spectacle of public execution between 1770-1868. For small crimes as well as grave, over 7000 men and women  were choked painfully to death, watched by crowds in their thousands. What did people feel about these strangulations? What led to the abolition of public executions?’

I’ve read many books about the prison system in the 18th and 19th centuries, but I’ve never read one which gets close to what actually went on. How poor people frantically tried to find someone who would write to the judge, the home secretary, or even the monarch on their behalf to get a royal pardon. How the condemned actually felt and behaved: crying, screaming, urinating, defecating, choking, and the pain and terror the hanging itself caused. You can almost smell it.

Gatrell unearthed thousands and thousands of documents. As he says in the Preface: ‘the tone of these appeals matched my own incredulity at the fates which befell these obscure people and at the slap-happy justice which sent them to scaffolds or exile  for puny as well as casually tried crimes.’

This book won the Whitfield Prize of the Royal Historical Society – and quite right, too. It is a gripping, horrific and moving read. – I can’t imagine anyone who reads it ever forgetting it. Part of what makes it so moving is that the evidence comes from those who suffered, not from those who administered the law. These are voices crying out from the underbelly of society; voices which have been all too rarely heard.

The book, a Christmas present, arrived with a card which read ‘With best wishes for a happy (if not exactly merry) Christmas – with love.’

Crowns of Glory, Tears or Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823 by Emilia Viotti de Costa

The book covers, in detail, one of the biggest slave rebellions in the British Empire: the uprising in the British Colony of Demerara (now Guyana) in which nearly 12,000 slaves took up arms against their masters.

One of the book’s reviewers wrote of Emilia Viotti da Costa’s study of the complaints brought by slaves to the office of the Protector of  Slaves and her analysis of the experience of slavery  through the eyes of the Demerara slaves themselves: I know of no other study that goes so searchingly and movingly into the ideological heart of a slave revolt.’

The author draws on eyewitness accounts, official records and private journals.  There are also a number of figures and tables recording the age distribution of slaves; their births and deaths; sugar prices in the British Market and so on.

This book was essential reading when I was writing Frost Fair and it told me things which I hadn’t found anywhere else, like how a slave plantation actually ran: I learnt that, in Demerara, slaves had to build their own houses, and grow their own food. The aged slaves looked after the children, grew the food and cooked the meals. Infant mortality was high, disease was rife and punishments were savage. My copy is full of pencil underlinings and notes in the margins.

It also told me how sugar was processed – in graphic detail: it was dangerous: the temperature needed to turn the sugar cane into sugar was high, and accidents were frequent and horrific.

The Slave Trade itself had been abolished in Britain in 1807 but the  slaves themselves were not freed. As a result of the Demerara uprising, the Anti-Slavery Society was formed in 1823 but it took another ten years before slavery itself was abolished throughout the British Empire.

I don’t normally mention books I’ve used in research in my novels but I made an exception in the case of Emilia Viotti Costa’s Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood and thanked her. I could not have written Frost Fair without it.

What’s Bred in the Bone by Robertson Davies

As I said, my brother seems to have the gift of giving me exactly the right book. I, alas, don’t have it – though I’ve tried. I have only ever, to my knowledge managed to give him one book which he has devoured, thoroughly enjoyed, and immediately searched out other books by the same author. And that is the book above: Robertson Davies’s What’s Bred in the Bone which is the middle book in his Cornish Trilogy.

It’s impossible to describe a Robertson Davies novel. On the back of the book it says: Encompassing all the glory and madness of heaven and hell, Robertson Davies’s newest masterpiece is thick with Gothic secrets, cosmic furies, sex, love, art and a wicked worldly wit.’

One either thinks ‘Wow! I must read this’ or ‘It sounds like hell!’

High Spirits: A Collection of Ghost Stories by Robertson Davies

Fortunately, my brother liked it, and a few years later he gave me the book above which I thoroughly enjoyed. I particularly likes Davies’s take on Frankenstein:  The Cat Who Went to Trinity.

Well, there we are; six books you might enjoy.

I am delighted that I now have six of my Elizabeth Hawksley novels out in e-books, the latest of which is Tempting Fortune.

Elizabeth Hawksley

 

Please share this page...

FacebooktwitterredditpinteresttumblrmailFacebooktwitterredditpinteresttumblrmail