The journey to Tintagel

"Tintagel.  Black cliffs and caves and storm and wind, but I weather it out and take my ten miles a day walks in my weather-proofs."  Alfred, Lord Tennyson,   25th August 1860

Tintagel Castle   Wiilliam Trost Richards, a Philadelphia artist, who visited in 1878  (wikimedia, et.al.)

Many families will be making for the Cornish coast this weekend, searching for sandy beaches, rock pools, ice creams, Cornish pasties and exhilarating cliff walks (preferably in sunshine).

Alfred, Lord Tennyson visited Cornwall many times, finding inspiration there for his great Arthurian suite of poems, The Idylls of the King, with its tales of King Arthur's court, based at Tintagel, according to the legend.

Edryn travels to King Arthur's Court   Gustav Dore engraving for Idylls of the King 1868

It was some ninety years later that our family first made the long journey down to Cornwall.  Maybe Tennyson would have visited Stonehenge - where we could just park by the road then and cross the meadow to touch the stones in awe and wonder. 

Victorian visitors at Stonehenge 

 He would know that Queen Victoria expressly wore Honiton lace on her wedding dress to support the  local industry, where we smiled at "Ye Olde Honitone Lace Shoppe":

Queen Victoria in her Wedding Dress (of 1840)  Anniversary portrait by Franz X. Winterhalter 1847

and perhaps he was also kept awake on his journey by town clocks striking every quarter all night long, as we once were at Okehampton.

In late August, we climbed the tortuous path to Tintagel's ancient ruins, returning decades later with my own young children, too nervous for their safety on the precipitous slopes to enjoy it fully, but the mystique of the ancient site and its spectacular views remains. A new footbridge now links the two parts of the headland, and excavations have unearthed ancient slates, one with a mysterious Latin inscription: "Artignou father of a descendant of Coll has had (this) made".  (see english heritage.org.uk)

And when I think of Tintagel's cliffs and the seas around it,  I am reminded of Tennyson's 1851 poem The Eagle:

"Ring'd in the azure world he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls,

He watches from his mountain walls

And like a thunderbolt he falls."

Tintagel, the birthplace of King Arthur     William Trost Richards

Twelfth Night: from cakes to crackers

In 1849, the Illustrated London News featured Queen's Victoria's Twelfth Night Cake, celebrating the the Epiphany, the coming of the Three Kings, developed from the pagan Roman Feast of Saturnalia.  Early cakes  contained a bean and a pea, to determine who should be King and Queen of Misrule for the night.  By the later eighteenth century, chefs learnt to use eggs as raising agents, and rich fruit mixtures replaced the old fashioned yeast or batter type, fruit decorated cakes, growing ever larger and elaborately iced.    The first printed Twelfth Cake recipe* is that of John Mollard, of the London Tavern in Bishopsgate Street, in 1803,  and he seems to have been the inspiration for this description from R.H.Horne's Memoirs of a London Doll of 1846:

"Sir, said he, "this is a Twelfth-cake of very superior make.  It was made by my grandfather himself, who is known to be one of the first makers in all Bishopsgate street: I may say the very first.  There is no better in all the world.  You see how heavy it is; what a quantity of plums, currants, butter, sugar, and orange and lemon-peel there is in it, besides brandy and caraway confits. See! what a beautiful frost -work of white sugar there is all over the top and sides!  See, too, what characters there are, and made in sugar of all colours! Kings and Queens in their robes, and lions and dogs, and Jem Crow, and Swiss cottages in winter, and railway carriages, and girls with tambourines, and a village steeple with a cow looking in at the porch; and all these standing or walking, or dancing upon white sugar, surrounded with curling twists and true lover's knots in pink and green citron, with damson cheese and black currant paste between.  You never saw such a cake before, sir, and I'm sure none of your family ever smelt any cake at all like it.  It's quite a nosegay for Queen Victoria herself; and if you were to buy it at my grandfather's shop you would have to pay fifteen shillings and more for it."

Another part of the fun and games was the allotting of "characters". They were sold in sets, and could be comic:  

or even political:

This cartoon by Isaac Cruikshank of 16th January 1779 refers to Sir Francis Burdett's campaign to reform the dreadful Coldbathfields or Middlesex Prison, known as the English Bastille.

By 1866, the Queen herself pronounced the Twelfth Night celebrations as un-Christian, and Mrs Beeton's recipe book omitted the Bean and Pea.  Gradually the  outrageous antics and traditional rituals were  tamed and transformed  (helped along by commercialism) into  the iced Christmas cake, the silver coins or charms in the Christmas pudding, and the jokes and paper hats in the crackers. 

I  am not superstitious, but I still feel compelled to take down the last of my Christmas decorations before midnight tonight!

*see bjws.blogspot.com for Mollard's recipe

The Crystal Palace resurrected -' a paradise for children, and a world full of sound'

The Crystal Palace in Hyde Park,  from the north east  ( pub. Dickinson Bros 1852)

Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace - a pioneering wonder of prefabricated iron and cast glass - was taken down after the 1851 Great Exhibition and re-erected in the former grounds of Penge Place in Sydenham, opening in June 1854.

1886 engraving from Cornelius Brown's book, True Stories of the Reign of Queen Victoria

It was a fairytale place surrounded by gardens, fountains,  amusements, a maze, and many statues, including 33 life-size images of prehistoric dinosaurs and extinct creatures, and flanked by two giant water towers to supply the  many fountains.  There were concerts and exhibitions, a menagerie and firework displays, and popular entertainments.

The dinosaurs survive today and are very popular. They were moulded in concrete by Benjamin Waterhouse  Hawkins, a natural history artist who had worked on the 1851 Exhibition, and were based on scientific knowledge of the time.  They are now Grade I listed and undergoing a full conservation programme (and see cpdinosaurs.org)

One late Victorian writer remembers the Park's glories from his childhood, including the living animals on display:

" Several following years of early childhood were spent at Norwood, with the Crystal Palace an entrancing playground.  In the early 'seventies the place was rich with the scent of the beds for tropical vegetation, stale buns, and new paint; and in the more rapturous end - where the parrots were kept - came unmistakable gusts and shrieks from the monkey-house, entrancing to the infantile mind, but deemed unhealthy and too exciting by parents and governess alike. "

Pop-up Christmas card,  Benjamin Sulman 1873 © the Crystal Palace Foundation

" The Crystal Palace was at that time a paradise for children and one of the most comprehensive art museums in the world (this I knew later); it was also the home of music in England of that decade, with daily concerts, a small local opera, crashing brass bands, great Saturday classical concerts, and huge Handel Festivals.  The place was not only an appeal to the imagination, from the toy stalls to great intimidating groups of statuary, it was a world full of sound.  The loud strains of a symphony might burst from the closed concert-room, interrupting the musical whiz and purring of a top spun by a toy-stall assistant; simultaneously would come the scarlet cries of a cockatoo and the persistent cadences of a popular valse played by a mechanical piano, and, most delightful of all, the tinny sounds of clockwork toys,  which moved if a penny were dropped into them by an indulgent elder.  Thereupon glass waterfalls would trickle in landscapes of Virginian cork;  whilst a train, with cotton-wool smoke, darted over a Lilliputian bridge, and small Swiss peasants valsed, all too briefly, to the sound of a tired musical box."

Self Portrait  Charles Ricketts, 1866-1931



The grand May opening by Queen Victoria was delayed
until June, but this Stevens' silk commemorative
bookmark  is part of the Crystal Palace Foundation's
museum collection.  © Crystal Palace Foundation

Flaming June

Flaming June  Frederick Leighton  1895

Museo de Arte de Ponco, Puerta Rica

This is the famous painting by Frederick, Lord Leighton, probably of his favourite model, the actress Dorothy Dene, who also sat for George Frederic Watts and John Everett Millais.  These were among the rich and socially ambitious painters who built houses for themselves in Kensington, close to the homes of their wealthy patrons like the Ionides family, the Prinseps or Lady Holland.

Leighton's house on Holland Park Road was designed as a Palace of Art, with six eye-catching public rooms, including his large studio/gallery, the scene of soiree's and concerts as well as actual painting.  His single bedroom is small and almost spartan in contrast.

He came to fame early, when Queen Victoria purchased his painting Cimabue's Celebrated Madonna in Procession in Florence when it was shown at the Royal Academy in 1855;  his work follows this classicizing Renaissance revival style.

Cimabue's Celebrated Madonna by Frederick Leighton 1855

On loan to the National Gallery London, from the Royal Collection

 Many of his paintings are widely dispersed in public and private collections (there are several large murals by him at the V&A Museum), but the Leighton House collection now includes many important paintings, drawings and sculpture by Leighton and his circle of artist friends.

Leighton House  © Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

The star of Leighton House itself is the Arab Hall, based on a twelfth century palace in Palermo, with its gentle fountain and pool.   It was created to display his glowing collection of early Syrian and Isnik  tiles and ceramics,  acquired on his travels, and on a visit to Damascus in 1873, with marble,  mosaics and carving. Here he was helped by the Consul,  explorer Sir Richard Burton:

 "My wife and I will keep a sharp look-out for you, and buy up as many [old tiles] as we can find which seem to answer your description.  If native inscriptions -- white or blue, for instance -- are to be had, I shall secure them, but not if imperfect.  Some clearing away of rubbish is expected at Damascus; the Englishman who superintends is a friend of mine, and I shall not neglect to get from him as much as possible (1871)."  Other friends added to his collection and  fellow artists Walter Crane, William de Morgan, Edgar Boehm and Randolph Caldecott collaborated on the finished design,
"quite the 8th wonder of the world, including a Moorish cupola palace, with a fountain, all lined with precious Persian tiles and mosaics by Walter Crane, as good almost as a Ravenna church;" ( Mrs Vernon Lee 1883).

I am sure my small daughter cannot be the only past visitor gazing up at the amazing golden frieze who has found themselves ankle deep in the pool.     Today Leighton House is one of London's less familiar public treasures, a quiet oasis just off Kensington High Street,  where you can soak up the atmosphere of artistic life in the late nineteenth century,  preferably keeping dry feet.

Quotations from Caroline Dakers' The Holland Park Circle.