Shopping malls and modern architecture just don't make my typing fingers itch. I prefer musing on old atmospheric places and about things that might have happened in the past. These plots have a special advantage in that my child characters don't have to go to school.
Last week I was in London, meeting my agent and a couple of publishers, but did some indulging in settings. I almost wore my feet out striding to the Dickens House Museum in Doughty Street on Thursday's cold wet afternoon. The small poorly-lit rooms held displays about Dickens life, manuscripts and publications among oddments of Dickensian furniture. It was not the most astonishing experience, but I did enjoy the original basement kitchen windows from which Dicken's idler servants could gaze up at the various feet passing along the pavement, even though the room is now a library. I also liked the reconstructed period washroom, and the waste-paper basket overflowing with faux crumpled drafts. Small sights that help the writing mind to do its own time-travelling. I also came away with an 1843 London map, showing the size of the city at that time, the northern fringes then edged by Regents Park Cannal.
Monday brought another step back in time when I led a Storytelling Training Day at the Workhouse you can see above, at Southwell, Nottinghamshire. Great people and great stories! But the style of the architecture - separate yards for each category of male and female inhabitant, the outdoor privies, many windows a little too high to see the world outside, painted brick and plaster walls - all reminded me of the dour four-storied school I once attended, and that you can still find in thankfully modified use today.
You see, the past lives on longer than one thinks.
I love the Dickens house at Doughty street....amazing place, isn't it? And this is going to be a good blog to follow. I've bookmarked you, Penny!
ReplyDeleteThanks, Adele, especially for the bookmarking! Late last year, as part of my 19C wallowing (aka research) I read Peter Ackroyd's biography of Dickens. He makes it clear that CD was an interesting but not an easy man, especially towards his family. Soon after I read the semi-autobiographical "David Copperfield", which I enjoyed all over again, but found the sweetly sentimental Dodie of the novel in rather strange contrast to Ackroyd's DC. Writerly delusions & inventions, eh? And to add to the growing mix of light and darkness, Claire Tomalin's biog of Nelly Ternan is waiting on my shelves.
ReplyDeleteI must have told you the story that has been attached to my great grandmother Penny, whose second husband was a barrister in London, one of the founders of the North London Polytechnic. She met Mrs Dickens several times at small, genteel gatherings. Apparently at one tea party the talk turned to Mr Dickens and his latest book. When asked her opinion of the story the estranged Mrs Dickens snapped "I have renounced the devil and all his works!" Who knows how true this is, but if it is I applaud such quick wittedness! I shall follow this blog with interest Penny. Thanks for alerting me to it!
ReplyDeleteNo, Cindy, you hadn't ever told me that story. Thank you very much for that most crisp image of a woman wronged - it certainly fits the face I've seen in the pictures of the older Mrs Dickens at the museum and elsewhere. Suspect I'd want to say something like that too, and am rather glad she still had some fight remaining after the old devil went on his way. (Actually, it's the sort of phrase one might want to keep about one's person just in case . . .)
ReplyDeleteThat's a great story! Good luck with the new blog, Penny!
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