October Beginnings: "see thy treacherous guile outreach, And perish in the pit thou mad'st for me" *

 Passage du Pont-Neuf,  illustration by Horace Castelli, 1870

"At the end of the Rue Guenegaud, when you come up from the river, you reach the Passage du Pont-Neuf, a sort of narrow, gloomy corridor running from the Rue Mazarine to the Rue de Seine.  Thirty paces long and no more than two wide, this passageway is paved with yellowish flagstones, loose and worn, constantly oozing an acrid damp: the glazed roof that shields it, peaked at a right-angle, is black with grime.

On fine summer days, with a torpid sun scorching the streets, a  whitish brightness falls from the soiled panes and lingers miserably in the passage,  On nasty winter days, on foggy mornings, the panes of glass cast nothing but darkness on the sticky flagstones - a vile, sullied darkness.

Dug into the left-hand side are some dingy shops, sordid and squat, venting the cold breath of cellars,  Here there are dealers in old books, toy-sellers and pasteboard makers, whose dust-grey displays laid dim and sleepy in the shadows; the windows glazed in small panes cast a strange, shimmery green light over the wares; past the displays, the gloom-laden shops are so many mournful holes restless with fantastical shapes."

Thérèse Raquin   Émile Zola, 1866  © trans. Adam Thorpe

This description of the Passage du Pont-Neuf runs like a dark thread of desperation all through the psychological story of Thérèse Raquin. It is here that she lives above their damp haberdasher's shop with her Aunt, Madame Raquin, and the sickly cousin she has grown up with, now her husband,  Camille.  Into this repressing existence comes Camille's friend, the brutish lazy peasant, Laurant,
who  is painting Camille's portrait. Laurent and Thérèse,  a creature of  "burning blood and tensed nerves", develop a passionate affair, with daily assignations.

Une Olympia moderne - Le Pacha,   Paul Cezanne  1870 (wikimedia commons)

No longer able to meet, their thwarted desires drive them to murder Camille on a boating trip, planning to marry after a suitable time has passed, and to live off Madame Raquin's money. But both the lovers are haunted day and night by the drowned body of Camille, which Laurent had seen rotting in the Paris Morgue, and their physical passion turns to consuming fear and violence.

.

"Camille's ghost, thus conjured up, came to sit between the newly-weds…"  (wikimedia image)

Zola traces each tortured mental and physical stage of the depraved lovers' consuming guilt, in grotesque details, until the inevitable violent end is reached, with only the paralysed, silent Madame Raquin as witness.

He vividly presents the lives and mental torments of the characters in a cinematic, or painterly way, with multiple repeated adjectives, (such as brutal, nervous, abyss, yellowish glimmers, burning, foul, speechless, fearful)  but  described his novel as a portrayal of temperament, not character.  It was a forensic study of "the deep-seated disturbances of a sanguine nature brought into contact with a nervous one",  as they struggle to restore their daily equilibrium, and the murderous events which follow must take their course.

"the equilibrium was broken"

Still Life with Black Clock,   Paul Cezanne  1869-70  (wikimedia image)

 Zola  and Cézanne, both from Aix-en-Provence, were friends of long-standing, both looking for a new realism in their work. This still life painting shows Zola's black marble clock and the china inkwell, and Cézanne painted it for his friend, although later they fell out over Zola's critical portrayal of an artist (thought to be based on Cézanne) in The Masterpiece.

*  Christopher Marlowe, A Massacre at Paris,  possibly written 1593
For images of the Passage du Pont-neuf, see thecinetourist.net

September beginnings: 'And I would love you all the day…' John Gay 1728*

"When Francis, fourth Viscount  Castlewood, came to his title, and presently after to take possession of his house of Castlewood, county Hants, in the year 1691, almost the only tenant of the place besides the domestics was a lad of twelve years of age, of whom no one seemed to take any note until my Lady Viscountess lighted upon him, going over the house with the housekeeper on the day of her arrival.

Clevedon Court, Somerset   Thackeray's model for Castlewood House, after staying there

"The boy was in the room known as the book-room, or yellow gallery, where the portraits of the family used to hang, that fine piece among others of Sir Antonio Van Dyck of George, second Viscount, and that by Mr Dobson of my lord the third Viscount, just deceased, which it seems his lady and widow did not think fit to carry away, when she sent for and carried off to her house at Chelsey, near to London, the picture of herself by Sir Peter Lely, in which her ladyship was represented as a huntress of Diana's court.

"The new and fair lady of Castlewood found the sad lonely little occupant of this gallery busy over his great  book, which he laid down when he was aware that a stranger was at hand. And, knowing who that person must be, the lad stood up and bowed before her, performing a shy obeisance to the mistress of his house.

"She stretched out her hand - indeed when was it that that hand would not stretch out to do an act of kindness, or to protect grief and ill-fortune?  'And this is our kinsman,' she said;  'and what is your name, kinsman?   'My name is Henry Esmond,' said the lad, looking up at her in a sort of delight and wonder, for she had come upon him as a Dea certe, and appeared the most charming object he had ever looked on.  Her golden hair was shining in the gold of the sun; her complexion was of a dazzling bloom; her lips smiling, and her eyes beaming with a kindness which made Harry Esmond's heart to beat with surprise."

The History of Henry Esmond, Esq.  
'A Colonel in the service of Her Majesty Q. Anne  Written by himself.'    W. M.  Thackeray 1852

Thackeray's story of family loves and loyalty is set in the period of political upheaval from the 'Glorious Revolution' of  protestant William III and his wife Mary II (daughter of James II) through to the death of Queen Anne and the succession  of Hanoverian George I.  Henry Esmond's father  was the 3rd Viscount Castlewood, who died fighting in the Jacobite cause against William III at the Battle of the Boyne, although the orphaned Henry is believed for very many years to be his illegitimate son.  From the beginning Henry falls in love with the whole family:  he is devoted to the 4th Viscount and his Lady, he mentors the Castlewood's young son Frank like a brother,  and is completely dazzled by their precocious daughter Beatrice.

Portrait of a Lady with flowers    Sir Godfrey Kneller 

Compared with Thackeray's satirical novel Vanity Fair, this is a more moral tale about the vanities of being in love and the ardent beliefs of the Catholic Jacobite supporters, who would bring back James II's exiled son James Stuart (the 'Old Pretender') as James III.  It is about the values of honour and constancy, of love versus sentiment.  As  Henry lives through duels, scandals, battles and conspiracies in the first decades of the 1700s,  he grows older and wiser, but still follows his heart despite what his head tells him.
He fights in the War of the Spanish Succession (from Blenheim to Malplaquet) under General John Webb (a distant ancestor of Thackeray) and sees the venalities of the leaders, particularly the Duke of Marlborough; in London he is befriended by the writers Richard Steele and Joseph Addison.  Now Colonel Esmond, he is reunited with the widowed Lady Castlewood and her wilful ambitious daughter Beatrix;  he is in love with Beatrix still, though she 'has no heart'.

Through loyalty to the family and his lifelong love and devotion to them, Esmond, although become more Whig than Tory,  joins in young Frank's conspiracy to smuggle the exiled Pretender, Prince James Stuart into England:

James Francis Edward Stuart, as a young man c. 1715 : coloured portrait from a Jacobite broadside     (National Library of Scotland)

 "twas a scheme of personal ambition, a daring stroke for a selfish end  -- he knew it.  What cared he in his heart who was king? Were not his very sympathies and secret convictions on the other side -- on the side of People, Parliament, Freedom? and here was he, engaged for a prince, that had scarce heard the word liberty; that priests and women, tyrants by nature both, made a tool of".

The Jacobite supporters plan to present Prince James Stuart to his dying half-sister Queen Anne, so that through family loyalty and sentiment,  she will announce him as her heir to the throne, but the coup is thwarted through the Prince and Beatrix's philandering at the critical moment.  The scales fall from Henry Esmond's eyes and he and his Lady Castlewood leave for a new life in Virginia - 'Over the Hills and far away'* .

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

August beginnings: "A faire field ful of folke fond I there between "*

  Animas, Hidalgo County, New Mexico  (Hidalgocounty.org wikimedia)

"When they came south out of Grant county Boyd was not much more than a baby and the newly formed county they'd named Hidalgo was little older than the child.  In the country they'd quit lay the bones of a sister and the bones of his maternal grandmother. The new country was rich and wild. You could ride clear to Mexico and not strike a cross fence.  He carried Boyd before him in the bow of the saddle and named to him features of the landscape and birds and animals in both spanish and english.  In the new house they slept in the room off the kitchen and he would lie awake at night and listen to his brother's breathing in the dark and he would whisper half aloud to him as he slept his plans for them and the life they would have.

One winter's night in that first year he woke to hear wolves in the low hills to the west of the house and he knew that they would be coming on to the plain in the new snow to run the antelope in the moonlight.  He pulled the breeches off the footboard of the bed and got his shirt and his blanketlined ducking coat and got his boots from under the bed and went out to the kitchen and dressed in the dark by the faint warmth of the stove and held the boot to the window light to pair them left and right and pulled them on and rose and went to the kitchen door and stepped out and closed the door behind him."

The Crossing,  Cormac McCarthy 1994

Most of the key elements of this novel are here in the beginning paragraphs, the characters of Billy Parham and his brother Boyd, the landscape, the details of a spare practical daily life, of youth and loss.  This was a country where men needed to work with nature.

Mexican Grey Wolf,   National Wildlife Refuge Society, New Mexico

Billy was then still a child, but  "an hour later he was crouched in the dry creek bed where he knew the wolves had been using by their tracks in the sand of the washes, by their tracks in the snow... ..They were running on the plain  harrying the antelope and the antelope moved like phantoms in the snow and circled and wheeled and the dry powder blew about them in the cold moonlight and their breath smoked palely in the cold as if they burned with some inner fire and the wolves twisted and turned and leapt in a silence such that they seemed of another world entire."

He makes three crossings into Mexico, the first alone aged sixteen, to set free in the Sierra de la Madera mountains a wounded shewolf he has captured in a trap; people help him despite themselves.  "People hear about me givin first aid to a damn wolf I won't be able to live in this county." 

 All through this first journey, his youth and dogged integrity sustains him through hardship and danger, and he meets much kindness.

On his second crossing into Mexico Billy goes with his younger brother Boyd, after their parents are killed by Indians, determined  to find the family's stolen horses.   In this wild border country, the teenagers meet danger from nature and from men, hardship and evil, but most people they meet on their travels, despite extreme poverty, share what they have with the brothers.

The Chihuahua Desert, Mexico  (wikimedia)

Boyd finds a girl and stays in Mexico, leaving his brother, while Billy goes home to the States to enlist for WWII, but is rejected.  In his final border crossing many years later, a widely travelled and much older Billy, now a homeless solitary man, returns to Mexico to find his brother's grave and bring his body back to Animas.

South of Animas,  Hidalgocounty.org

"He slept that night in his own country and he had a dream wherein he saw God's pilgrims labouring…When he woke in the round darkness about, he thought that something had indeed passed in the desert night and he was awake a long time but he had no sense that it would ever return again."

 The border today: "The soul of Mexico is very old, said Quijada.  Whoever claims to know it is either a liar or a fool. Or both."

[All quotations from The Crossing,  Vol. 2 of the Border trilogy © Cormac McCarthy]

* Piers Plowman, William Langland's medieval allegory: "Of alle manner of men, the mene and the riche, Working and wandring as the world asketh."

Part 2. "The Moon takes up the wondrous tale" *

Galileo's first refracting telescope, in the Museo Galileo, Florence

The early telescopes were not perfect.  When  a founder member of the Royal Society,  Sir Paul Neale (or Neile) enthusiastically claimed to see a giant elephant on the Moon, it proved to be a mouse which had crept in between the tubes, along with gnats and insects, which were interpreted as Lilliputian armies.   These Royal Society virtuosi were duly mocked by Samuel Butler as:

 "learned men who greedily pursue,

Things that are rather wonderful than true."

He attacked their aims and their methods as they

"... grew distracted, whether to espouse,

The party of the Elephant or Mouse.

 Some held there was no way so orthodox

As to refer it to the ballot box".*

Samuel Butler, The Elephant in the Moon, c. 1670

Fortunately sense and the empirical method prevailed, and the telescope was taken apart to reveal the mouse.   [Maybe our politicians today should read Butler's poem.]

The early lunar romances were popular with the educated.  Before Bishop Godwin's flying swans, Ariosto in his Orlando Furioso, 1532, sends his hero, Astolfo, a knight of Charlemagne, flying around on a hippogriff, half eagle and half horse (as described in Virgil).

Contemporary wood engraving with hippogriff  for "Orlando Furioso",  (wikimedia commons)

Reaching Paradise, Astolfo is then sent to the Moon in Old Testament Elijah's flaming chariot, where he discovers mad Orlando's lost wits, for according to myth, everything lost or wasted on earth is found on the moon.  How prescient were these writers from antiquity?

The twentieth century American novelist, Herman Wouk, wrote a strange little Utopian journey to the moon in The Lomokome Papers in 1949.  A US. Naval astronaut crash-lands and is captured and taken down to a subterranean (sublunar?) world.  The story is pieced together from fragments of his log, found near the crash site, interspersed with sections of government reports of their findings.

As in other Utopias, the hero discovers the failings of the Lomokome system:  -- "All the Hydrogen Belongs to All the People" -- and their chilling Law of Reasonable War and Death Day, which "reduces a foolishly chaotic arrangement, which threatens our total destruction, to a sane, safe, workable process".

The Lomokome Papers, with haunting illustrations by Harry Bennett  

1968 edition © Herman Wouk

Interestingly, by 1967 Wouk is "sobered by the speed with which truth is overtaking my grim fiction", but thought that, "the moon voyage as a literary form, approaches total eclipse".

1956 Film Poster  (wikimedia commons)

Where it has blossomed of course is on the screen, whether based on existing novels, or created by directors and authors now writing screenplays.  The Forbidden Planet, of 1956, based by its original writers Irving Block and Allen Adler on Shakespeare's The Tempest, is regarded as the forerunner of the genre, which took off in the 1960s with many notable films and TV series.  

To mention just two, 1968 sees Kubrick's unforgettable 2001: A Space Odyssey, based on a story by Arthur C. Clarke: 

Film still from Stanley Kubrick's  "2001: a Space Odyssey" (wikimedia commons)

and perhaps my favourite -- Silent Running, in 1972:

Film still from "Silent Running", with Bruce Dern and Huey,  1972 (wikimedia commons)

* from Joseph Addison's hymn, 1712

Part 1. "Who announces the ages of the moon?" (Amergin, from the 12th century Irish Book of Leinster)

We will all be moon gazing on 20th July, 50 years since the first man stepped onto the moon, that "mythical " body watched in the night skies for  thousands of years.  Just 360 years ago, like Galileo and other contemporary astronomers,  Thomas Harriot, mathematician and navigator, with his splendid new telescope drew this map of the surface of the moon, although unlike Galileo, author of Sidereal Nuncio (or Starry Messenger)  in 1610, he never published his discoveries.  His friend and patron Sir Walter Raleigh  ended in the Tower, so maybe Harriot was being circumspect in uncertain political times.

Thomas Harriot's map measures just 6 ins across, and shows the 5-day-old moon's surface, 

as observed on 26th July 1609      © Petworth House Archives.

In 1679, the best map of the moon's surface for many years was compiled by Giovanni Domenico Cassini, the Director of the Paris Observatory, using a 34 ft telescope, and this was engraved for publication by Claude Mellan and widely copied.  

Cassini's Map of the moon, showing Cape Heraclides  and Sinus Iridium,   c. 1679

(wikimedia commons)

The light from the moon itself also contributed to the sciences from which the capacity for travel into space developed.  In eighteenth century Britain, the full moon lit the way for men of ideas to travel to meet together,  like the "Lunar Society" of Birmingham.  Its key members were Erasmus Darwin, Matthew Boulton, James Watt, Josiah Wedgwood and Joseph Priestley (discoverer of oxygen);  there must have been many such meetings elsewhere and on other continents, made practicable by moonlit nights. 

In seventeenth century Europe, the moon became not just a worldwide focus of ancient myth and legend in different cultures, or a universal practical guide to time and navigation, but now, as seen through the  astronomers' new telescopes, an intriguing subject of space travel stories, another aspect of this new spirit of scientific  exploration.  It becomes another New World, often a distant Utopia. 

One of Ben Jonson's court masques for James I in 1620 was News from the New World discovered in the Moon, (based on a classical Greek tale), but the bestseller of its day, The Man in the Moone, 1638, was written probably in the late 1620s by Francis Godwin, the Bishop of Hereford using a pseudonym.    

An early astronaut is transported to the moon by flying geese.  

 Bristol Delft plate c. 1740  Glaisher collection  © Fitzwilliam Museum 

It is also in the later seventeenth century that sees the discovery of the elephant in the moon --  but more of that and other tales in my next blog.

  

July beginnings: "Dancing to Time's tune"

"Through the Looking Glass, and what Alice found there" ,   illus. John Tenniel 1871

"When, at the start of the whole business, I bought an Army greatcoat, it was at one of those places in the neighbourhood of Shaftesbury Avenue, where, as well as officers' kit and outfits for sport, they hire or sell theatrical costumes.  The atmosphere within, heavy with menace like an oriental bazaar, hinted at clandestine bargains, furtive even if not unlawful commerce, heightening the tension of an already novel undertaking.  The deal was negotiated in an upper room, dark and mysterious, draped with skiing gear and riding-breeches, in the background of which, behind the glass windows of a high display case, two headless trunks stood rigidly at attention.  One of these effigies wore Harlequin's diagonally spangled tights; the other, scarlet full-dress uniform of some infantry regiment, allegorical figures, so it seemed, symbolising dualisms of the antithetical stock-in trade surrounding them . . . Civil and Military  . . . Work and Play . . . Detachment and Involvement . . . Tragedy and Comedy . . . War and Peace . . . Life and Death . . ."

British Army WWII officers' greatcoat, recreated from Crombie archive  © Crombie Ltd

"An assistant, bent, elderly, bearded, with the congruous demeanour of the Levantine trader, bore the greatcoat out of a secret recess in the shadows and reverently invested me within its double-breasted, brass-buttoned, stiffly pleated khaki folds.
… In a three-sided full-length looking-glass nearby I, too, critically examined the back view of the coat's shot-at-dawn cut, aware at the same time that soon, like Alice, I was to pass, as it were by virtue of these habiliments, through its panes into a world no less magic."

The Soldier's Art, Vol. 8,  A Dance to the Music of Time  Anthony Powell 1966  (© the author)

A Dance to the Music of Time,  Nicolas Poussin c 1634-36  ©Wallace Collection London

Anthony Powell's revered twelve-volume series presents a tapestry* of British society and events over some fifty years, as seen through the eyes of Nicholas Jenkins, its narrator. The first volume,  A Question of Upbringing, introduces Nick and his friends at public school in 1921, and subsequent volumes chart the passing years with a vast cast of recurring characters, from the Spring to the Winter of their lives;  just as Nick muses on the dancers in Poussin's painting:

 " The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outwards like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure, stepping slowly, methodically, sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take a recognisable shape: or breaking into seemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance." (Vol. 1)

Each volume has a leitmotif, set out in its title and opening paragraphs. Some introduce a major character, others propel the reader along with Nick (our observer and narrator), into a whole new environment; in volume six the opening - a childhood memory recounting a servant problem in an English country house - might serve as a short story in itself.   As well as the many recurring characters and overlapping events in their lives, themes are carried throughout in frequent references to books and paintings.  This quotation from Byron's Childe Roland comes in the last pages of volume 8.:

"I asked one draught of earlier happier sights

 Ere fitly I could hope to play my part.

Think first, fight afterwards -- the soldier's art;

One taste of the old time sets all to rights."

(and see the Anthony Powell Society, anthonypowell.org)

*  I am reminded of Grayson Perry's tapestry sequences.

Chaos theory: "French truth, Dutch prowess, British policy"

Cassiopeia A, supernova fragment   © NASA

Here are some apposite lines for politicians and voters today,  quoting from a poet writing over 340 years ago:

  "Nothing! thou elder brother even to Shade:
Thou hadst a being ere the world was made,
And well fixed, art alone of ending not afraid.

Ere Time and Place were, Time and Place were not,
When primitive Nothing Something straight begot;
Then all proceeded from the great united What.
……

Is or Is Not, the two great ends of Fate,
And True or False, the subject of debate,
That perfect or destroy the vast designs of state --
…..

But Nothing, why does Something still permit
That sacred monarchs should in council sit
With persons highly thought at best for nothing fit,

While weighty Something modestly abstains
From princes' coffers, and from statesmen's brains,
And Nothing there like stately Nothing reigns?

Nothing! who dwellst with fools in grave disguise,
For whom they reverend shapes and forms devise,
Lawn sleeves and furs and gowns, when they like thee look wise:

French truth, Dutch prowess, British policy,
Hibernian learning, Scotch civility,
Spaniards' dispatch, Danes' wit are mainly seen in thee;

The great man's gratitude to his best friend,
Kings' promises, whores' vows -- towards thee they bend,
Flow swiftly into thee, and in thee ever end."

Upon Nothing,  John Rochester c. 1678

John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester  c. 1665-70  © National Portrait Gallery London

On the lending and losing of books: "how many more of your books I daily make use of:"

I have written before about John Locke's long friendship with James Tyrrell from his time at Christ Church, Oxford, who lived at nearby Oakley.    I knew Tyrrell's maternal grandfather was James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh and revered as a biblical scholar, by both King James I and Oliver Cromwell.  He was best known for his Latin history, Annals of the Old and New Testaments, which dated the creation of the world from 4004 BC.  

James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, 1641    Cornelis Janssens van Ceulen

© Jesus College, Oxford

But  I gave Archbishop Ussher no further thought until I was reading about the Book of Kells in Christopher de Hamel's "Meetings with  Remarkable Manuscripts".  It was Ussher who first studied Ireland's world-renowned late 8th century Latin manuscript of the four Gospels as a key historic book, and not just as a monumental religious icon of Ireland.  (It is now on the Unesco Memory of the World Register.)

Illuminated page from the  Book of Kells  

© Trinity College Library, Dublin

His grandson James himself was a respected Whig historian (e.g. Bibliotheca Politica 1694). It is not surprising then that the Tyrrells were a family of serious readers, lending and borrowing books amongst themselves and friends.  

Locke entrusted Tyrrell with the storage of his furniture and books from Christ Church when he had to move abroad in 1683.  Back in England seven years later under William III,  by 1691 he  was moving from London lodgings to a more permanent home with Sir Francis and Lady Masham at Oates in Essex, and asked for his Oxford belongings to be returned to him.  This took a long time,  because of the problems of transporting safely furniture, household goods, and valuable items as well as numerous heavy books.  Much was sent by the newly restored river-barge route between Oxford and London:

 A Victorian photo of the new style pound lock at Culham
Originally built by the 17th century Oxford-Burcot Commission; the first commercial barge from London for centuries reached Oxford in 1635, after work to add gated poundlocks and improve the passage over the many weirs and sluices (i.e. flashlocks). 

Even this was not easy:  

"John could not get a Cart before last week to bring them hither [from Shotover to Oxford], nor was there ever a barge ready to carry them till today….I hope they will come safely to your hands for I have given the bargeman great charge of your chair."  Tyrrell to Locke, 15th October 1691

A week later Tyrrell writes, "Your boxes layn here this fortnight waiting for a passage, for the locks being at fault the barges could not passe till they were mended."

This consignment included six large boxes,  two smaller and a trunk, plus a large bundle of linens, and a cane chair.  Locke's goods from Christ Church included a very large number of books as well as items awkward to pack (two carpets were too big to go in the bundle). 

Christ Church College, Oxford   Frederick Nash 

The other problem was that over the years the Tyrrell family had dipped in to Locke's library and used his trunks and boxes, furniture and other items: "having taken the books; and other things out of it, I lent my wife the box to put some linen in:"  30 June 1691

Tyrrell's difficulties sound familiar to anyone who has moved house and had to store belongings with friends or relatives for a long time, or vice-versa.  He has constant problems finding overlooked items at the family homes at Shotover and Oakley and then packing them for transport.

"I would have sent you your telescope if the box had been long enough….I find since the writing of the Catalogue [of Locke's Oxford books] that I have omitted some books which I left at Oxford: and were among my books there, and so were forgot till now….I have bin forced to take the second part of the 'State of France' out of the box: because it would not hold it and the bottle."  

I have sent you all your bookes, except…such bookes (he lists over a dozen) as I have made bold to borrow of you for some longer time.…your Telescope is on top of the bookes in one of the boxes;" 
15 October 1691

"I have also sent you up the 2 first Tomes of your French Herodotus; and the last [Volume III] which I lent my daughter, is come as far as Oxford, but I cannot have it to send up this returne, but you shall have it the next week; when I send up some other things to James:" [Tyrrell's son]  November 1691 

His despatches continue into 1692 with an insight into family life at Oakley:  "as for books not medicinal, James had in his keeping unknown to me Oglebyes Japan, and my Father had borrowed Africa of the same Authours but they shall both be sent to you with the boxes". 

  John Ogilby's Africa 1670  (Photo Bauman Rare Books)

"..the little hair trunk  I lent to my daughter into Wales...Besides your Carpets, I have an old terrestrial Globe of yours, which would not go well into the trunk…...  2 pair of [your cases for books] were at Shotover, with some books of mine, and I could not prevail with the carter to go out of the way." [from Oakley to Oxford] 30th January 1692

And in August: he sends a book "which my Sister had borrowed;"  but not  "an old Terrestriall Globe which would not got into the box … . and my son desires the use of it a little longer;   I have allso your weather glasse at Shotover which was too long to goe into any of the boxes",  nor another book and a cushion which his son still had. 

John Patrick's Weatherglass: Directions   (see SIS Bulletin 80)

Tyrell entrusts a friend to send this 'last' consignment  to Locke:  Mr: Thomas … haveing first sent all your things together with his owne to Mr: Rushes barge, which I suppose sets out on Thursday "  9th August 1692

Eventually, in slow succession, Locke's precious boxes of books and other belongings arrived in London and were then transported by carrier  (i.e. horse and cart) via Bishop's Stortford to the Masham's home at Oates, High Laver in Essex.

Several items were still missing or remained 'borrowed' by the Tyrrell family.  In the summer of 1701, Locke makes a last attempt to trace the missing volume III from his French edition of Herodotus, which may have gone with James's daughter Mary to Wales and was said to have been returned in November 1691 - it was she who had irretrievably lost the key to one of Locke's small trunks, which caused everyone a deal of trouble in her absence.  Tyrrell replies, "my daughter assures me she never saw more than those 2 volumes of it….which way the third came to be lost I know not….my son may perhaps have borrowed it unbeknownst to me.." August 1701

Pierre du Ryer's French translation of Herodotus' "Histories"  (Photo Sequitur Books) 

Locke's Herodotus Volume III was never found, so is it perhaps buried in some old Welsh library archive, or given the difficulties of transport then, lost forever in a Thames mill pond?

 The Mill at Mapledurham,  part 15th century, the oldest surviving mill on the Thames

Quotations from The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. E.S. De Beer, Clarendon Press Oxford

Hetty Dorval - " a woman of no reputation"

Let us put all the continuing travails of Brexit and Europe into a wider historical context.
Hetty Dorval, a coming of age story by the Canadian writer Ethel Wilson, published just two years after the end of World War II, has one of the most chilling endings to a novel I have come across.

A young Canadian teenager, Frankie Burnaby just twelve, relates how her quiet family life in rural British Columbia is transformed by her secret friendship with a new arrival from Shanghai:  Hetty Dorval, a glamorous young woman with a mysterious past.  Hetty is to turn up again at  key moments in Frankie's life.

 Frankie is too innocent to realise what Hetty is until her parents explain that this visiting must end, for Mrs Dorval is regarded as "a woman of no reputation", ugly stories having followed her across the Pacific.

"In my mind, seeing Hetty's pure profile and her gentle smile, I said to myself that Father couldn't have believed these things if he had seen her himself. But a sick surprised feeling told me it might be true."

When Frankie is sixteen her mother takes her to England  to complete her education. Among the ship's passengers is Hetty, now engaged  to marry an elderly General, and she appeals to the Burnabys' generosity not to mention rumours of her past and destroy her chance of real security.

Frankie then lives with her uncle and cousins Richard and his young sister Molly in Cornwall for two happy years of growing up.  "As I look back, I  don't know where my liking for Richard began or ended.  I accepted my liking or love for him without question.  It was all natural and completely young and happy. Nothing spoiled the confidence and harmony of our lives together whether we were apart or whether we were all together in Cliff House by the sea."

But Hetty, now widowed, turns up again in London and charms Frankie's cousins completely, just as she had bedazzled young Frankie.  

"I thought of others in whom goodness was as visible as green, but it was not visible in Hetty."

(Dancing figurine,  Stephan Dakon for Goldscheider Vienna, 1936-7)

Frankie, finally grown up, and learning the truth of the emotional wreckage Hetty caused in Shanghai, confronts her, determined to protect the cousins she loves.  True to form, Hetty simply walks away from an unpleasant "complicated" situation.  When Frankie sends her packing, she goes off to Vienna with a rich admirer.   The ending is quite sudden:

"As I watched with satisfaction Hetty going down the narrow stairs I knew that before she had taken three steps she had forgotten me and she had forgotten Richard.  She was on her way.
Six weeks later the German Army occupied Vienna.
There arose a wall of silence around the city, through which only faint confused sounds were sometimes heard."

Hetty Dorval,   Ethel Wilson 1947  ©  British Columbia University Library, quotations from Persephone Books edition 2005