Dickens Part V

After his separation from Catherine, Dickens’ life took a new turn. He seems to have spent a lot of time with Ellen Ternan abroad. He visited Paris frequently and it is possible that she had gone to live there. There have been rumours also that they had a child who died in infancy. Georgina Hogarth looked after his family home and children. The Hogarths felt that she was betraying her sister by staying with Charles, after the separation. Charley, Dickens eldest son, seems to have taken his mother’s side. But the younger children were a trial to him. He found that most of his sons were not very clever or hard working – rather like his own father. He seems to have been irritable and resentful of the need to help them get started in careers and very cross when he found that he had to bail them out financially or that they did badly in the jobs he had put them into. He began to seem like a selfish and harsh father, complaining that he had so many children, when he had been the one who produced such a large family… It was as if he blamed Catherine for saddling him with them. In 1865, Dickens was involved in the Staplehurst rail crash. He was coming back from France with Ellen and her mother, when the train plunged off a bridge and hung there. Dickens’ carriage was still on the rail and he was saved, but he had almost been “caught” with his mistress. She and Mrs. Ternan were discreetly gotten away. He must have been concerned about the possibility of scandal. He had been very determined to put the blame on Catherine for their separation. He even said she didn’t get on well with her own children. In the last 12 years of his life, Dickens did less direct charity work, and wrote less. He gave reading tours, travelling around reading shortened versions of the exciting scenes in his novels. It was lucrative and he enjoyed it because he had always wanted to act and this gave him a chance to do so. He threw himself into the work, but it was hard work and he “gave his all” during his performances. It also meant that he had less time for writing his novels and he only wrote 2 more books.

Dickens Part IV

Dickens and his wife separated in 1858. Divorce at the time was very rare. In spite of the separation being due to his affair with Ellen Ternan, he tried to put the blame on his wife. He alienated some of his friends. They felt that he had been very selfish, quite unlike the “supporter of families and virtue” that he claimed to be. Catherine had been his wife for many years, and borne several children to him, yet Dickens just cast her off. He claimed that she was an inefficient housekeeper, not a great mother and that she and he had nothing in common. Most of the children remained with Dickens, except their eldest son Charley, who lived with his mother. Dickens turned angrily on friends whom he regarded as “not supporting him”. He fell out with Thackeray, an old friend, because the other novelist had said at his club that “Dickens was having an affair with an actress”. Rumours had gone around that Dickens had split up with his wife because of an affair with her sister Georgina, who remained with the family as housekeeper; She lived with the family for the rest of her life. Dickens was angrily self-justifying in his behaviour. He was very anxious, as the novelist of “family life” and a campaigner for various social reforms, to conceal his affair.

Dickens Part III

Dickens became increasingly successful as a writer, and his work became more complex. He was a hard worker, and edited journals as well as writing. He worked well within the Victorian style of publishing. He was good at producing instalments for a magazine. His books were long, full of thrilling incidents and cliff hangers. When Elizabeth Gaskell became a professional writer, she was a lot less comfortable with the demands of writing for magazines, of dragging out the story. She struggled with the idea of inserting thrills and cliff hangers- like a modern TV soap opera. She and Dickens clashed at times over how she wrote her novels. Dickens and Catherine produced a large family of children, which meant that he was under pressure to provide for them. His wife was not a very clever woman and as time went by, she and Dickens grew apart. In 1842, he and Catherine had visited America, where Dickens found that the new republic was not to his taste in spite of his usually radical views. He condemned slavery, but was in many ways conservative, as he grew older. In the 1860's (unlike other progressive writers) he did not condemn the Governor of Jamaica, Eyre, in his harsh crackdown on Jamaicans during the Morant Bay Rebellion. He also annoyed Americans by complaining that his works were being sold in pirated editions in America, thus robbing him of income. His sister in law, Georgina Hogarth, moved into the Dickens house after the American visit, to help Catherine. Dickens was always working very hard, involved in charities, urging reform of laws that bore heavily on the poor. With the philanthropist millionairess, Angela Burdett Coutts, he set up a reformatory for “fallen women”, which was meant to be less harsh than the ones in existence and which was to help penitent girls who had been seduced or been prostitutes, to a new way of life. As well as his charities, Dickens was an ardent amateur actor. He loved plays and had wanted to act as a boy. He was putting on a performance of the play “The Frozen Deep” -a play he had co-written with Wilkie Collins, in 1857. One of the actresses he hired was Ellen Ternan…She was only 18 and he was 45, but he fell deeply in love with her, and his wife found out about the relationship.

L M Montgomery Part I

I still like some “children’s books” and I re read the ANNE series. Although it is overly sentimental, I still get enjoyment out of it. I also find the author very interesting. I’ve also read most of her adult novels and her other “girls” series, the Emily books but they never have the same charm for me as Anne. Lucy Maud (called Maud) Montgomery was born in Prince Edward Island in Canada in 1874. Her mother died when she was a baby and she was cared for by her grandparents, while her father went away out west to recover from his grief. He had run a general store, but it didn't do well and he wanted to go out West to live. Her grandparents, who lived in Cavendish, were strict and “ultra-Victorian” so she had an unhappy childhood. Her grandfather, in particular, didn't seem to care for her at all. She was very lonely. Maud was a dreamer and made up stories. During her childhood, her father remarried and she visited him out West. However, she didn’t get along with the stepmother and said that her father’s second marriage was not a happy one, though the couple had children. She received a good education. She was able to go to University, which enabled her to become a teacher. She didn’t care much for teaching but it gave her time to write- and she began her career. She wrote short stories, and was able to secure a good income by so doing. In time, she also took on proof reading work for a newspaper. In 1898, she moved back to Cavendish to look after her elderly and widowed grandmother. She lived with the old lady until 1911, when her grandmother died. It was a difficult time for her. She wrote her first book, Anne of Green Gables, which became a runaway success. But she was lonely, still as her grandmother was not a companion for her. She had various admirers but she didn’t find anyone who was a suitable husband. She was tied to home by her duty to her grandmother. This situation comes up quite often in her books, where a daughter is expected to look after an elderly mother, or where a domineering Mother (or occasionally father) makes it difficult for an adult daughter and sometimes a son to marry. In one of the Anne books, a lady called Janet finds that her admirer has not proposed to her, because his mother made him promise not to bring another woman into the house until she had died. In 1897, Maud accepted a proposal from Edwin Simpson, because she wanted to be married. Marriage was considered a necessary rite of passage for women. Even though she was earning her own living, she felt she needed the status of being a married woman. She has some of her child characters remark in her books that “If you were married, your husband bossed you around, but you were single, people looked down on you as an old maid", so the best thing was to be a widow. However, she wasn’t in love with Simpson. She met a young farmer, Hermann Leard, whom she did find physically attractive. She knew that he wasn’t likely to be a suitable husband as he shared none of her intellectual interests. She broke off her engagement to Edwin Simpson and settled at home. She seems to have given up hope of finding a man whom she loved, who was marriageable. But she was courted by Ewen McDonald, who was a Presbyterian minister. In 1911, she married him. Ewen was not a particularly clever man, but he was a minister and that had a certain status. Maud was eager to have children and she wanted to be married, so they got married and moved to Ontario where he had taken a job. Her Anne story, is about a middle aged couple (brother and sister) in Prince Edward Island, who want to adopt a boy to help them on their farm. By mistake a girl is sent, the red headed Anne Shirley. She is an imaginative child, who has never had a real home. Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert come to love her. A lot of the humour in the story comes from Anne’s imagination clashing with the hard headed narrow minded (but often eccentric) farming folk. And some of Anne’s life is drawn from Maud’s. The childhood loneliness, the resentment of “Victorian strictness” and the emotionalism. Maud's marriage proved a mistake and while it gave her 2 sons, she must have regretted it. Ewen was very very difficult, constantly depressed and out of touch with reality and she had to cover up for him. She soon discovered that he had a religious mania, believing at times that he and his family were damned to hell for eternity. At such times he dissolved into a terrible mess, sitting at home gazing foolishly... and she was repelled by him. She devoted herself to her writing. Ewen became pretty hopeless, and Maud, who had never been in love with him, was very unhappy. She also found that her son Chester was a difficult boy and young man. He got into trouble a lot, and his marriage broke up. She was ashamed of how he had turned out. Maud found World War Two almost as terrible as World War One had been for her and there is a possibility that she deliberately took an overdose which killed her.

Dickens Part II

Dickens had a troubled boyhood, due to his father’s financial problems. John Dickens was sent to the Marshalsea Debtors' prison in 1824, because of his debts. Charles was forced to leave school and get a job in a blacking factory, which he hated. He was humiliated by having to take a menial job and be put on the level of working class boys. He wasn’t in the factory long and he met a boy called Bob Fagin, who protected and helped him. Still, the experience was dreadful for him, and he ended up giving the name Fagin to the “villain” of Oliver Twist. After a while, John Dickens inherited some money which allowed him to pay his debts. He never told his family of his time in the factory. After the factory, he returned to school. When he left school, he found a clerical job in a law office but he became a shorthand reporter for Parliament. He washard working reliable fast and good at the job. He reported on parliamentary debates. Then he began to write fiction and his first work to appear was “Sketches by Boz” which was published in 1836. At that stage, he met the Hogarth family, and was invited to their house. He fell in love with Catherine, one of the daughters. Her father George was a music critic for a newspaper. Charles got a job as editor of Bentley’s Miscellany. His next novel, appearing in serial form, was the Pickwick Papers. He married Catherine, and they moved to a house in Bloomsbury. He was very fond of his wife’s younger sister Mary, who moved into their house to help Catherine with her housekeeping. Mary was young and unspoilt by marriage, and Dickens idealised her. She collapsed one evening and died in his arms. He was so shattered by his grief that he had to stop working on Oliver Twist, the novel he was writing at the time. He based the character Rose Maylie on Mary, and also many other “pure young girls” in his fiction, sexless and greatly idealised, owed something to his dead sister in law.

Charles Dickens Part I

Charles Dickens was born in Kent in 1812 where his father was working as a minor civil servant. John Dickens was a clerk in the Royal Navy pay office and was the model for “Mr Micawber” in David Copperfield. He was a good natured man but not very good at managing money. So the young Dickens knew a great deal of insecurity. He was at the lower end of the middle classes. Because of his father’s lack of responsibility, the family were much poorer than they should have been. Charles felt in danger of slipping from the middle class into the working class. His father got into debt and ended up in a debtors’ prison, where he moved with his family, until the debt was paid off. As a result, Dickens highly prized the middle class values of honesty about money, prudence in financial matters, and an ethic of hard work and reliability. As a young man and even in his later years, he worked incredibly hard. He was always eager to earn as much as he could, by producing his work regularly and “giving value for money”. He disliked the upper classes who had a tradition of "not trying too hard" and prizing graceful behaviour and nonchalance over hard work. He had great sympathy for the poor, but was afraid, having been very poor himself, of falling into the working class and losing the status of being middle class.

Country Music

Country music developed mostly in the Southern states of the USA… born out of a mixture of Irish and Scottish and English folk music. The southern lands were settled by English, Scottish and Irish settlers, who brought their music with them They played fiddles, banjos, piano, tin whistles, mouth organs, even jugs and washboards. The music was simple, with easy to learn lyrics and the melodies were also simple. During the 1920s, the Carter family of Virginia, began to collect and record folk and country songs, and began to sing and perform publicly. They broadcast from radio stations down near the Mexican border, and the music became better known and listened to all over the South and West. Nashville became “Music City” where country singers and musicians moved to, in order to try their luck in the business. (Though the city has several other industries as well). In the 1950s, a number of song writers came along, mostly young men who were particularly talented... and had striking voices, or who were very skilled at playing guitars, banjos etc. Johnny Cash (1932-2003) was probably the best known, with numerous brilliant songs to his credit and a distinctive and wonderfully strong deep voice. Other singers-songwriters of the time were Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings, Hank Williams Junior and Merle Haggard, to name a very few. During the 1960s, country singers, usually from conservative backgrounds, whose music spoke to the rural community, became more open to new ideas and their songs became more varied and raunchier. The demands of touring and the stress of performing often led to broken marriages, affairs and drinking and drug use. They began to have crossover hits which did well on the pop or rock charts. Most of the singers of the 1960s came from poor backgrounds. The sudden arrival of wealth in their lives and the particular strains of traveling and touring, led them to use drugs, or have affairs to cope with the loneliness and stress. I’ve always been a big country fan, and have visited Nashville. From childhood, I have listened to all the great singers, Johnny Cash in particular. I read up about the history of country music and tried to go to concerts as much as I can. Nashville is not architechturally brilliant but it is a nice city, with a lot of history. For someone who loves the music, a great place to be. So I wanted to write a story or 2 about people who work in the small bands, who are often trying to do the job they love and play the music that feels right for them, while trying to make a living. It's a hard life, living on tips and selling CDs and hoping that one of the established singers will like one of their songs and record it. There are the conflicts between keeping one’s musical integrity and trying to get taken on by a record label, or “make it big”. And there are conflicts in marriages when the musicians are often away from home. That’s why I have taken to writing in the band “genre”..