60 years of ‘Dumbing Down’?

Found in the bookseller's magazine Desiderata from September 1955 this piece reprinted from Atticus in the Sunday Times.

Teenagers may care to try to name the authors of the following 12 books:

An American Tragedy,
Babbitt,
The Canterbury Tales,
Gulliver's Travels,
Leaves of Grass,
The Old Wives' Tale
Utopia,
Vanity Fair,
The Origin of Species,
The Wealth of Nations
The Rubaiyat
Tom Jones

...then compare their standard of education with that of the average American college graduate, aged 21. According to a recent Gallup poll, 9% of graduates could not give the author of a single one, 39% could not name more than three, and 52% could name only four.

At least three titles may have dated too much since 1955 - An American Tragedy, Babbitt and The Old Wive's Tale - they could be replaced, say, by The Hobbit, To Kill a Mockingbird and Ulysses. It was a slightly odd list to start with (no Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen, Poe) but you have to start somewhere. Surely there must have been the occasional bright spark who could name the lot? 60 years on people constantly lament 'dumbing down' but it would be interesting to see if figures have greatly changed for the worse…

Coventry Patmore rejects his uninspiring ‘vegetables’

The poet who composed the long love poem, The Angel of the House, which appeared in four volumes from 1854, became, like many of his generation, a convert to Catholicism, and so his remarks, voiced in a letter to the editor of the Spectator regarding a bust of Cardinal Newman by the pre-Raphaelite sculptor Thomas Woolner, come as no real surprise.

The original letter, written from Hastings, was discovered in a pile of similar autographed material.

‘It may interest some of the readers of a Paper which has shewn so special an interest in and affection of Cardinal Newman, that by very much the finest likeness of him in existence is the bust which was made of him some ten or fifteen years ago by Thomas Woolner…I was once in a room containing first-rate busts of all the most famous men of the past generation. That of Newman made all the others look like vegetables, so wonderfully was it loaded with the great Cardinal’s weight of thought and character.’

We don’t know who the sitters for other busts were, or the identity of the sculptors, but we do know that as a friend of Woolner, as indeed he was of Dante Rossetti, W. Holman Hunt, and other Pre-Raphaelites, Patmore was bound to defend the merits of the Newman bust over perhaps some more conventional works of art. As a child, Patmore himself wanted to be an artist and at the age of fifteen won the Silver Palette of the Society of Arts. The poverty of his father made such an ambition impossible and Patmore ended up in the British Museum library. In later life, spurred on by his association with the Pre-Raphaelites, he wrote on Art, but he is best known today as the author of The Angel of the House, although it is generally recognised that his best poems, which have strong spiritual qualities, were written towards the end of his life. [R R]

Etching of Farringdon Road bookstalls in the 1930s

Photographs exist of the famous bookstalls in Farringdon Road, dating from the nineteen forties and fifties, and the one by Moholy-Nagy that illustrates the excellent London Street Markets, was taken in the thirties. But as far as I know, the stalls were never the subject of an etching, of whatever date. Here, dated 1934, is an etching by the brilliantly talented Nathaniel Sparks (1880 – 1956), one of the most popular masters of this art, which of course became moribund almost overnight as a result of the Wall Street Crash.

During the American-led collecting craze, which began just before the First World War, Sparks produced a huge number of etchings, many of them of notable London landmarks such as Westminster Abbey and Tower Bridge, and it is surely a sign of its fame in the thirties that Sparks regarded Farringdon Road as a fit subject for an etching. At that time he was doubtless a customer at the stalls himself, and it is known that in his last sad months, when poverty and illness had him holed up as a lodger in Somerton, he comforted himself by collecting old books. It is also likely that in the last half of a largely peripatetic life, which saw him living with gypsies and farmers in Somerset and the New Forest, he was forced to jettison many of the books he had picked up over the years, in favour of his paints and paper.

Naturally shy, physically slight, and all too aware of the severe rhinophyma which disfigured his face, Sparks sometimes cut a pathetic figure. He could not help compare his ill luck with the fame and fortune that attended his much older cousin, Thomas Hardy, and recorded his resentment in an unpublished satire. Things came to a head in 1940 when an enemy bomb smashed his printing press and he was forced to abandon etching entirely and eke out a living producing pellucid watercolours of scenery in his beloved Somerset.

[R.M.Healey]

The author is grateful for the excellent Nathaniel Sparks Gallery for allowing him to reproduce the two etchings.

Now have proof positive that the etching is of Exmouth Market! (ed.)

General Jan Christiaan Smuts

From the L.R. Reeve* collection- this (partly) eyewitness portrait of Jan Smuts, South African and British Commonwealth statesman, military leader and philosopher (1870 - 1950.) His fame may have significantly lessened since Reeve wrote this (about 20 years after Smuts' death).Probably he would no longer be up there with Darwin and Milton..

GENERAL SMUTS

At least half a dozen books have been written about the late General Smuts, and I am certain that more will continue to be published not only in South Africa, but in England, the United States of America and other countries.
Due to his early, unusual environment and a formidable, but attractive personality, Smuts possessed a unique quality and became one of the most remarkable men of his generation. No one will ever be able to render a comprehensive account of his notable service to mankind. The most that can be done will be to collect the evidence of many writers, and portray a composite figure.
I would select for personal interest, the biographies A Sight of General Smuts at Cambridge, and Sarah Gertrude Millen's Life. He was a brilliant scholar, and certainly brought distinction to a great university. I emphasize brought because I find that college guides quite understandably remember to inform visitors of the distinguished men who have graduated.
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Dolf Wyllarde—crazy name, crazy gal

The actress Annie Schletter had a number of enthusiastic correspondents not all of whom were necessarily connected with the theatre. One of these was Dolf Wyllarde (1871 – 1950), whose real name was Dorothy Margarette Selby Lowndes . A prolific author of adventure and romance novels, she was popular in her day, but is largely forgotten now, though her books turn up regularly in secondhand bookshops and online at Abebooks. Wyllarde appears to have done well through her writing and at least one of her novels was filmed. By 1927 she was living in some splendour at the seventeenth century Oldmixon Manor, near Weston-Super-Mare. Why Lowndes chose her particular pseudonym will probably never be known. Perhaps she thought a masculine name might attract more readers. However, she could well have been interested in the ramifications of sexual identity. In The Lavender Lad (1922) a talented actress disguises herself as a ‘ragged urchin’ in order to work on a lavender farm.

We should remember that this was the period when female impersonators were a common sight on the English Music Hall stage. Interestingly, she doesn’t appear to have used her real female name when creating her ‘ romance’ stories. She even uses her pen name when writing to friends, as in this chatty epistle to Schletter, which is dated 12 December 1927. In it she describes domestic life at Oldmixon, which seems idyllic and very far from some of her swashbuckling fiction. She begins by announcing that she plans to send her friend a turkey through the post for Christmas —a practice, incidentally, performed by middle class country folk from at least the eighteenth century onwards—but warns her friend that this might be the last she receives from them.

‘…I am afraid we shall have none to send next year as we are thinking of giving them up. They are so difficult to rear, and my gardener’s wife has to get up at five o’clock in the spring to feed the chicks…We are very busy and very domestic ! I have an energetic little cook who positively likes using my grandmother’s recipes and I find myself involved in old-fashioned jams (crab apple is really delicious) and hams pickled with things that remind me of the White Knight’s pudding in “ Alice through the looking glass “. I am not sure that gunpowder and blotting-paper are not among the ingredients. We are all supposed to rub the ham in turn. I went and looked at it in its pickle, but the treacle and juniper berries, the old beer and the black pepper, were so awful that I fled !...’

Wyllarde features in a few reference works on popular Edwardian fiction, but little or anything is known about her personal life. She died in 1950, aged 79. Her former home, Oldmixon Manor, has survived, but is now divided into apartments. [R.H]

Post-war British pulps

Found - part of a letter to Peter Haining from W.O.G. ('Bill') Lofts about an intended book on post-war British pulps. Neither WorldCat or Copac show such a book among Lofts's oeuvre.The manuscript could possibly be among Haining's papers which we are still sifting through. Almost all of the authors mentioned can be found at the Sf Encyclopaedia site but even there details can be quite scant. Some of these pulps are now quite valuable - There Were No Asper Ladies, for example, features an occult detective (Lucian Carolus) and is a full blown vampire novel.

Dear Peter,

Many thanks for your list of fifties books. An interesting little list as well. As I said, I'll return the favour at the top of the list and work my way down (so expect some jumping about!).

I don't; know anything about David Scott-Moncrieff, apart from the act that he had a second collection of horror stories. They were published in 1948 and 1949.

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Harold P. Webber – bowls king

Found in the papers of L.R. Reeve (see A.J. Balfour and many others) a piece, from about 1970, about the life of a bowls champion Harold P.(Percy) Webber. One of Reeve's more minor characters and well beneath the Wikipedia radar but a sort of 'village Hampden' in the world of bowls and the author of a notable book on the subject, written with Dr John William Fisher: Bowls - How to Improve your Game (Pitman, London 1934.) Apart from his sporting skills ('his length bowling was uncanny') Webber was a fine orator…

H. P. WEBBER

Harold Webber's recent sudden death, left the members of his club in a state of bewilderment and shock, and had there been a Wailing Wall like the well-known meeting place in Jerusalem, his departure would have caused a record assembly among the mourners. At the time I was very impressed moreover not only by bowlers of other clubs, but by non-players who never went near a club. One acquaintance declared that he couldn't get the deceased celebrity out of his mind. At last his wife said, "It's no use dwelling on his death; it won't bring him back."
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Edwin Chadwick on sewage farms

Today, it is Joseph Bazalgette, father of the revolutionary sewage system for London that gets most attention from the press. But Bazalgette was really building on the earlier pioneering work done by the lawyer Edwin Chadwick (1800 -90), who pushed for sanitary reform from the 1840s, not just in London, where perhaps it was needed most, but in the non-metropolitan centres, and continued to work for the principle of clean water up to and beyond the 1880s, long after he had retired.

Here we have a letter from Chadwick, dated August 21st 1884, to a James Blackburn, who turns out to be the man who in the 1870s was dealing with the sewage coming from Aldershot Army Camp. Blackburn, who was then Ranger of Windsor Forest, had used the effluvia on 100 acres of mainly heather-strewn land, and so successful was he in growing crops on it that in 1879 he entered the Camp Farm for the Agricultural Society’s £100 prize for the best sewage farm in the United Kingdom. He didn’t win it, but Chadwick, evidently impressed by Blackburn’s methods, wrote to him from his home in East Sheen asking if he could visit him to discuss the latest thinking on metropolitan sewage disposal.

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A. J. Balfour

A good piece from the papers of *L.R. Reeve on A.J. Balfour, as a former U.K. Prime Minister he is the highest ranking subject so far (along with Lloyd George.) As usual Reeve is good on his subject's voice and oratorical skills. Reeve's frequent presence at congresses and symposiums of 'leaders of thought' shows him as an almost Zelig-like figure...He ends on a joke, that if not true, ought to be.

Despite his deceptively ornamental appearance, the late Earl Balfour was a worker. Although his attractive manner was unperturbed and casual, he must have experienced periods of unremitting labour through many months; otherwise he could never have written so many theses and philosophical books, added to political publications, parliamentary labours, constituency engagements and university visits.

His career as a statesman, philosopher and eminent speaker, is too well known to need emphasizing in great detail, but a few outstanding phenomena regarding his life should never be forgotten.
In appearance he was probably the most aristocratic representative of his period, and was the greatest asset to the perpetuators of the class system. When in his seventieth year he was the leader of a mission to America in 1917, he was one of the most popular visitors England could have sent at any time, because he increased our prestige and disarmed criticism. I mention "perpetuators". Let me make it clear I am not suggesting that Balfour was a determined fighter to maintain the contemporary status quo. He seemed to be fully aware that in this world of fluctuations, there must be modifications of the class system, and an acknowledgement that injustices should be eliminated until the rights of all people are recognized.
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William McDougall, F.R.S.

From the L.R. Reeve papers (see A.J. Balfour).

William McDougall*

I repeat my belief that H. G. Wells is the most quoted writer in my reading life, but the late William McDougall, F.R.S., must surely be the most mentioned author in the realms of British psychology. The great Lancastrian's name is also prominent in educational and social psychology, not only in Great Britain but in Europe, America and Australia.
The well-known behaviourist Watson may be in the running for supremacy in America, for I believe his reputation is growing, and probably Freud's profile is becoming blurred. McDougall however, has a substantial following in the United States, partly because he was lured across the Atlantic to Harvard University, then to Duke University, Durham, N.C., and due to his authoritative well-written publications. Moreover he was a magnificent lecturer: a man whose attractive voice, commanding presence and deductive powers were irresistible to most people. When I wrote about W. H. R. Rivers and his two assistants, William McDougall and C. S. Myers joining an expedition to the Torres Straits in 1898, I could have added that each of the three men deserved first-class honours in Elocution.
Having asserted that McDougall's reputation is so strong I have to admit that in 1969 Professor Hearnshaw of Liverpool, stated that the great psychologist's influence has almost if not completely vanished. I have no figures to fortify my theory, but if Hearnshaw is right how is it that recently one of McDougall's publications, An Introduction to Social Psychology once out of print, has been reprinted and re-published? Besides, did Hearnshaw forget America? Furthermore, did any other Englishman do more to establish British psychology on an experimental and physiological basis? Before I leave the three young adventurers I must refer to the fact with which I agree, that Rivers and McDougall were both critical of some of Freud's conclusions on the human race. Although I saw Myers scores of times in London, I never knew his opinion of the notable Viennese psychoanalyst. Usually his contributions in my hearing concerned industrial psychology.
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Teddy Edward bears

Found among the boundless Peter Haining papers - this definitive piece about Teddy Edward bears:

TEDDY EDWARD

Most people want to know how the Teddy Edward story began. The original teddy bear belonged to Sarah the then two-year-old daughter of Patrick and Mollie Matthews. Patrick Matthews, one time manager of Vogue Magazine Studios, had taken a photograph of Cecil Beaton's cat sitting in a flower bed and a framed enlargement was hanging in Sarah's bedroom. One day Mollie suggested that it might be a good idea to take photographs of several soft toys for children's nurseries - or even better do a book about Teddy Edward and his friends.

The present Teddy Edward is not the original bear, who in the early days acted as Sarah's constant companion as well as photographic model ; like all well loved teddy bears the original teddy began to show signs of wear. And so a new bear was found but visually he didn't look exactly like the original Teddy Edward. So the two of them were taken off to the doll's hospital where Teddy Edward Mark 11 had his face lifted so that you couldn't tell the difference between the two of them. The original Teddy Edward is still much loved and lives in cosy retirement in Sarah's room.

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The fate of the Sangorski Omar 2

The second and last part of an article on Sangorski's ill-fated Omar Khayyam binding. It was found in Piccadilly Notes: an occasional publication devoted to books, engravings and autographs (1929). A contemporary eyewitness account talks of Sangorski's Omar with its 'gold leaf blazing and the light flashing from hundreds of gemstones studding the tails of the peacocks on the cover..' Less commonly known is the odious role played by New York customs officials in the affair and that the magnificent book was, in fact, making its second trip across the Atlantic when it was lost forever beneath the waves. J.H. Stonehouse writes:

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Thomas Raymont (1864 – 1953)

From the papers of L.R. Reeve* - this profile of Thomas ('Tommy') Raymont, an unsung educationalist. His Principles of Education is still in print with the bald declaration on the cover 'b. 1864.' He died in 1953 and the book he appears to have written in old age was Modern Education (1935). Reeve, a native of Newton Abbot, refers to him as 'the great Devonian'...

THOMAS RAYMONT

It is a good many years since Thomas Raymont, M.A., wrote the Principles of Education, one of the standard books of its kind, but even today no one could read it for the first time without feeling that he had learned some immutable laws on child guidance; and if any earnest student asked me whether there was one sound book on the market for students in training I should suggest Raymont's sensible contribution which was written when the author was an exceedingly busy educational giant.
Shortly after he ended his two years as student at the Borough Road Training College and was top at the final examination, I believe he was appointed as lecturer at his old college, and there is no need to stress the fact that such an appointment to a young man is rare.
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The Red Priest and the Architect

It might perhaps be guessed that Conrad Noel (1869 - 1942), the 'Red Priest' of Thaxted, whose Socialist views once outraged the Tory faithful of his North Essex parish, would be sympathetic to the Art and Craft movement, whose guru was the Socialist poet and designer William Morris. But an inscription, dated April 1906, in a copy of The Country Cottage, presented to him from its co-author, George Llewellyn Morris, confirms it.

Amazingly, I found this inscribed copy of the little book, a hymn to the virtues of both the humble thatched labourer’s cottage and its much more sophisticated Arts and Crafts imitations in brick, plaster and tile, profusely depicted in photographs, in 2006 among the trashy novels in the ten pence box outside a well known bookshop in Saffron Walden. The book had been given to Noel four years before he became Vicar of Thaxted, and it had somehow found its way from here to that bookshop, just 12 miles away, in the intervening years.

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The fate of the Sangorski Omar 1

The Great Omar*

Found in an offprint from Piccadilly Notes (circa 1930) this article about (possibly) the most lavish binding the world had ever seen. The magazine billed itself as 'an occasional publication devoted to books, engravings and autographs.' it was edited by J.H. Stonehouse and this article is by him…

It was in 1907 that I first met Sangorski, when he brought a letter of introduction from a church dignitary, and asked to be allowed to show me a lectern bible which the Archbishop of Canterbury had commissioned his firm to bind, previous to its presentation by King Edward VII to the United States in commemoration of the tercentenary of the established church in America. I recognised at once the justice of his contention that there was something more in the design and execution of the work than was usually to be found in an ordinary piece of commercial binding and that the appreciation of it which had been expressed in the press was fully justified.

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New Movements in Art 1942

Found - a folding 6 page art catalogue/ booklet for an exhibition in wartime Leicester June 1942. Artists included John Tunnard (who provides the image on the cover) John Piper, Ivor Hitchens, Graham Sutherland, Frances Hodgkins, Edward Wadsworth, Ben Nicholson, Naum Gabo, Barbara Hepworth, Hans Erni, Paul Nash, Kurt Schwitters, Eileen Agar, Ithell Colquhoun, Ceri Richards, Michael Ayrton, John Buckland Wright ,Cecil Collins, Leslie Hurry. Top price was £150 for Two Serpents by Paul Nash. The 3 Schwitters were all less than £30..The curator and writer of the introduction (below) was Trevor Thomas - the subject of another Jot entry, as 21 years later he was the last person to see Sylvia Plath alive. He wrote a slim book on this called Sylvia Plath: Last Encounters (Privately Published, Bedford 1989.)

New Movements in art exhibition: 23 May to 21 June 1942: Leicester Museum and Art Gallery

Trevor Thomas, Curator.

By way of introduction.

The contention that "every picture tells a story" is now recognised as a popular fallacy, just as, Hollywood excepted, nobody now believes that "every story makes a picture." In this way free from the necessity for literary associations, we can approach such an exhibition as this with unfettered intelligence and liberated imagination.

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A Short Cut to Ventriloquism

Found -an old booklet A Short Cut to Ventriloquism (London: L. Davenport 1934) by one Maurice Hurling. Apparently ventriloquism has had a slight revival due to reality TV talent shows. The book gives various exercises to improve ventriloquial skills but starts with the basics which we post below. The two major problems are the 'plosives' that cause the lips to move (B M P V) and the awkward W. Also developing a second voice for the dummy/ figure is essential. Hurling recommends starting with a 'Cheeky Chappy' voice, he also notes that the ventriloquial smoker has an advantage because 'a cigarette placed between the lips will help to keep them perfectly still.'

Preliminary Exercise

Stand in front of a mirror, not too close, and let your lips be slightly apart.

Now try to say each letter of the alphabet without any movement of the lips. With very little practice you will soon find you can do this quite easily except for the letters B, M, P, V and W.

For these:
B is pronounced "ge"
M is pronounced "EMG"
P is pronounced "Key"
V is pronounced "VHEE" (breathe it)
W is pronounced "Duggle-you"

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