#catherine marryat

[clove-pinks]

Luckily, I have not witnessed any of the alleged discourse about how you shouldn't read the personal papers of historical figures because it's prying too much into their lives and invasive ("me when I have no idea what historians do and also have never spoken to one ever," as @werewolfetone said).

I don't feel any embarrassment for prying when I'm reading archived correspondence and diaries... but there is one exception to the rule.

In Alan Buster's book Captain Marryat: Sea-Officer, Novelist, Country Squire, he reproduces the deed of separation that dissolved Marryat's marriage in facsimile. Divorce wasn't legal in Britain in 1839, but it's a divorce in all but name, stipulating that Frederick Marryat has to pay alimony and child support. It also looks like it has been ripped in half at one point, and taped back together?!

It's written in an astonishingly neat and legible clerk's handwriting, and I can easily read every embarrassing word. Marryat and his wife both have to pledge to leave each other alone and not interfere with each other's lives; and while Marryat usually signed his name FMarryat, here he writes out Frederick in a very neat and careful hand—his handwriting looks uncharacteristically miserable and subdued. I AM SO SORRY CAPTAIN MARRYAT.

[marryat92]

Poor Jack, the wrap-up

Poor Jack seems to have the most to say about marriage, family, and fatherhood of any Marryat novel I’ve read so far. The narrator is from humble circumstances, far from Marryat’s privileged background, and he follows the general trend of being older than Marryat and thus closer to the glory days of Nelson’s Navy. Tom “Jack” Saunders is born in 1786, and while he never takes the King’s shilling, his father (also named Tom Saunders) sees considerable action, eventually losing a leg at the Battle of the Nile in 1798. 

Relatedly, I feel like a major preoccupation of Marryat fanboys and scholars is reading autobiographical content into the Captain's novels. Marryat's Victorian biographer David Hannay was one of the first to do so. Here's Hannay on gleaning evidence for Frederick Marryat's childhood from the body of his fiction:

As no detailed life of Marryat was written until long after his death, when no witnesses were left who could speak with knowledge, there is an almost absolute want of evidence as to the character and probable influence of his family life. If we are to argue from his stories, it was hardly to be called happy. These guides may not be entirely safe, and yet they afford evidence of a kind not to be lightly dismissed. A writer whose pictures of home and school life are habitually disagreeable, cannot have had many pleasant memories of his own to look back on. [...] That is not how men write when they look back kindly on their first years.

Christopher Lloyd, Oliver Warner, and Tom Pocock all make speculations about Marryat from his writing, and sometimes quote from his novels as if they were statements from Marryat about his own life. (Admittedly, some passages from Frank Mildmay in particular are undoubtedly Marryat's own experiences.)

I think that sometimes this interpretive tradition doesn't give enough credit to Marryat as a storyteller. As much as his writing was clearly influenced by his lived experiences, he was quite capable of creating pure fiction. His characters are not him, not even Frank Mildmay. That said, I'm as guilty of this as anyone, and it’s difficult for me to not see a lot of Marryat’s own views on marriage and family reflected in Poor Jack.

Poor Jack was written at a time in Marryat's life when he was legally separated (but not divorced) from his wife. Alan Buster reproduces the entire deed of separation in Captain Marryat: Sea-Officer Novelist Country Squire, written in a very legible clerk's hand (not, thank goodness, a 19th century law hand.) Dated July 4th 1839, it establishes that Frederick and Catherine Marryat are living apart, “from incompatibility of temper an absolute separation of Bed Board and cohabitation hath by mutual agreement actually taken place between the said parties.” Marryat agrees to pay his wife £500 yearly in four quarterly payments (made out to her brothers, who are also in her Majesty’s navy), additional money for the support of his children living with her, and it includes language that both Catherine and Frederick will leave each other alone. 

This situation is echoed in Poor Jack, which sees Tom Saunders Sr. and his wife Araminta living separately by mutual agreement; and it’s a surprisingly functional, beneficial solution to their unhappy marriage. Louis Parascandola writes, “Although Araminta and her husband have grown to understand each other during the course of the novel, Marryat refuses to have them live happily ever after. Instead, they separate amicably, probably a surprise to his audience.” (Puzzled Which to Choose)

One scene that stands out to me is when Araminta and Tom Sr. encounter their wealthy patrons, putting on an act before Tom’s former captain Sir Hercules Hawkingtrefylyan and his wife (who is also Araminta’s former employer.) “Lady Hercules first obtained from my mother a short history of what had happened since they had parted,” Marryat writes, “And really, to hear my mother’s explanation, it would have been supposed that she and my father had always been the most loving couple in the world.” Araminta’s quick thinking also saves her husband from an awkward question about his changed appearance, and Marryat remarks, “How true it is, that married people, however much they may quarrel, like to conceal their squabbles from the world.”

(That last line carries weight with me, since there is a virtual wall of tight-lipped Victorian reticence when it comes to finding out information about Frederick Marryat’s marriage and personal life. As much as he can seem chatty and confessional in his books, Marryat knew how to play his cards close.)

Until his father returns home as a disabled pensioner Tom Saunders is essentially fatherless, and at the mercy of his abusive, vindictive mother. But his father makes every effort to make up for lost time, and Tom soon acquires a bounty of father figures in his life. His own father is there for him, his mentor and educator Peter Anderson acts as a father figure, and other old pensioners like Ben the whaler protect and nurture young Tom. When he is finally apprenticed to Philip Bramble, his new master outright states, “I like to be called father” as he vows to be “good as a father” to his charge.

Philip Bramble has his wishes solemnized when he officially becomes Tom’s father-in-law. (Even his daughter Bessie is adopted— Bramble just can’t get enough of being a dad.) This opens up an interesting window on 19th century family arrangements. Multigenerational families were the norm (often full of unmarried siblings still living at home), and Bramble has every expectation of continuing to live with Bessie and Tom. The happy couple oblige him, but in a clever arrangement that allows Bramble to live in a separate building with Tom’s natural father: literally a Dad Shack where they can entertain each other and smoke pipes without getting in the way of Tom and Bessie’s growing family. (“He will be a very good companion for Bramble, and they will get on well together.”)

The book’s finale suddenly moves to the present day: the year 1840, when Poor Jack was published. Tom Saunders is now 54 years old— Marryat not far behind him at age 48. Tom reflects on his successful marriage and life and it’s difficult to not see a bittersweet contrast with his author. Marryat’s marriage has officially disintegrated, his family has been wracked with death and loss. The fictional Tom Saunders has three adult sons with maritime careers, a loving wife, and an abiding faith that all is well. 

In one sense, he still has something in common with Marryat. Both Marryat and Saunders have lived lives full of accomplishment, but as Tom remarks, “I am still considered as having been a seafaring man.”

[the-literata-letters]

reading list - gothic

CLICK HERE TO ACCESS MY OTHER READING LISTS.

✵ ACTIVELY UPDATING ✵

☐  ALDERMAN, Naomi – The Lessons ☐  ATWOOD, Margaret – Lady Oracle ☐  AUSTEN, Jane – Northanger Abbey ☐  AZEVEDO, Álvares de – Noite na Taverna ☐  BECKFORD, William Thomas – Vathek ☐  BIERCE, Ambrose – The Death of Halpin Frayser ☐  BIERCE, Ambrose – The Spook House ☐  BLACKWELL, Anastasia – The House on Black Lake ☐  BLACKWOOD, Algernon – The Listener and Other Stories ☐  BRONTË, Charlotte – Jane Eyre ☐  BRONTË, Charlotte – Villette ☐  BRONTË, Emily – Wuthering Heights ☐  BROWN, Charles Brockden – Wieland ☐  BROWN, Charles Brockden – Ormond ☐  CAPOTE, Truman – Other Voices, Other Rooms ☐  CARTER, Angela – The Bloody Chamber ☐  CATHER, Willa – My Ántonia ☐  CAZOTTE, Jacques – Le Diable amoureux ☐  CHAMBERS, Robert W. – The King in Yellow ☐  DANFORTH, Emily M. – Plain Bad Heroines ☐  DANIELEWSKI, Mark Z. – House of Leaves ☐  DICKENS, Charles – Oliver Twist ☐  DICKENS, Charles – Bleak House ☐  DICKENS, Charles – Great Expectations ☐  DICKENS, Charles – The Mystery of Edwin Drood ☐  DOSTOYEVSKY, Fyodor Mikhailovich – The Double ☐  DOSTOYEVSKY, Fyodor Mikhailovich – The Landlady ☐  DOSTOYEVSKY, Fyodor Mikhailovich – Bobok ☐  DOSTOYEVSKY, Fyodor Mikhailovich – The Brothers Karamazov ☐  DOYLE, Sir Arthur Conan – Lot No. 249 ☐  du MAURIER, Daphne – Jamaica Inn ☐  du MAURIER, Daphne – Rebecca ☐  du MAURIER, Daphne – My Cousin Rachel ☐  du MAURIER, George – Trilby ☐  FARING, Sara – The Tenth Girl ☐  FARRELL, Henry – What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? ☐  FAULKNER, William – The Sound and the Fury ☐  FAULKNER, William – As I Lay Dying ☐  FAULKNER, William – Light in August ☐  FAULKNER, William – Absalom, Absalom! ☐  FLAMMENBERG, Ludwig – The Necromancer ☐  GARSHIN, Vsevolod Mikhailovich – The Red Flower ☐  GAUTIER, Theophile – The Mummy's Foot ☐  GILMAN, Charlotte Perkins – The Yellow Wallpaper ☐  GOGOL, Nikolai Vasilievich – Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka ☐  GOGOL, Nikolai Vasilievich – Mirgorod ☐  GOGOL, Nikolai Vasilievich – Arabesques ☐  GOGOL, Nikolai Vasilievich – The Nose ☐  GRACQ, Julien – Au château d'Argol ☐  HAWTHORNE, Nathaniel – Young Goodman Brown ☐  HAWTHORNE, Nathaniel – The Minister's Black Veil ☐  HAWTHORNE, Nathaniel – Edward Randolph's Portrait ☐  HAWTHORNE, Nathaniel – The House of the Seven Gables ☐  HAWTHORNE, Nathaniel – Rappacini's Daughter ☐  HILL, Susan – The Woman in Black ☐  HOFFMANN, E. T. A. – The Devil's Exilir ☐  HOFFMANN, E. T. A. – The Entail ☐  HOFFMANN, E. T. A. – Gambler's Luck ☐  HOGG, James – The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner ☐  HOLT, Victoria – Mistress of Mellyn ☐  HOLT, Victoria – Kirkland Revels ☐  HUGO, Victor – Notre-Dame de Paris ☐  HUYSMANS, Joris-Karl – Là-bas ☐  INGOLDSBY, Thomas – The Ingoldsby Legends ☐  IRVING, Washington – The Adventure of the German Student ☐  IRVING, Washington – "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" ☐  JACKSON, Shirley – The Lottery ☐  JACKSON, Shirley – A Visit ☐  JACKSON, Shirley – The Haunting of Hill House ☐  JACKSON, Shirley – We Have Always Lived in the Castle ☐  JACOBS, W. W. – The Monkey's Paw ☐  JAMES, Henry – The Turn of the Screw ☐  JELINEK, Elfriede – Die Kinder der Toten ☐  LATHOM, Francis – The Midnight Bell ☐  le FANU, SHERIDAN – Uncle Silas ☐  le FANU, SHERIDAN – In a Glass Darkly ☐  le FANU, SHERIDAN – Carmilla ☐  LEE, Harper – To Kill a Mockingbird ☐  LEIGH, Julia – The Hunger ☐  LEROUX, Gaston – Le Fantôme de l'Opéra ☐  LEVIN, Ira – The Stepford Wives ☐  LEWIS, Matthew Gregory – The Monk ☐  LEWIS, Matthew Gregory – The Castle Spectre ☐  MACHEN, Arthur – The Great God Pan ☐  MARRYAT, Florence – The Blood of the Vampire ☐  MARRYAT, Florence – The Phantom Ship ☐  MATURIN, Charles – Melmoth the Wanderer ☐  MEANEY, John – Bone Song ☐  MÉRIMÉE, PROSPER – La Vénus d'Ille ☐  MOORE, John – Zeluco ☐  MORRISON, Toni – Beloved ☐  NERVAL, Gérard de – Les Filles du feu ☐  OATES, Joyce Carol – Bellefleur ☐  OATES, Joyce Carol – Night-Side ☐  OATES, Joyce Carol – A Bloodsmoor Romance ☐  OATES, Joyce Carol – Mysteries of Winterthum ☐  OATES, Joyce Carol – My Heart Laid Bare ☐  O'CONNER, Flannery – Wise Blood ☐  ODOEVSKY, Vladimir – Russian Nights ☐  PARKER, Gilbert – The Lane that Had No Turning, and Other Tales ☐  PARSONS, Eliza – The Castle of Wolfenbach ☐  PARSONS, Eliza – The Mysterious Warning ☐  PEACOCK, Thomas Love – Nightmare Abbey ☐  PEAKE, Mervyn – Gormenghast ☐  PHILLIPS, Arthur – Angelica ☐  POE, Edgar Allan – "Berenice" ☐  POE, Edgar Allan – "Ligeia" ☐  POE, Edgar Allan – "The Fall of the House of Usher" ☐  POE, Edgar Allan – The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket ☐  POE, Edgar Allan – "The Masque of the Read Death" ☐  POE, Edgar Allan – "The Oval Portrait" ☐  POE, Edgar Allan – "The Pit and the Pendulum" ☐  POE, Edgar Allan – "The Black Cat" ☐  POE, Edgar Allan – "The Tell-Tale Heart" ☐  POTOCKI, Jan – The Manuscript Found in Saragossa ☐  PUSHKIN, Alexander – The Bridegroom ☐  PUSHKIN, Alexander – The Undertaker ☐  PUSHKIN, Alexander – The Queen of Spades ☐  RADCLIFFE, Ann – A Sicilian Romance ☐  RADCLIFFE, Ann – The Romance of the Forest ☐  RADCLIFFE, Ann – The Mysteries of Udolpho ☐  RADCLIFFE, Ann – The Italian ☐  RAY, Jean – Malpertuis ☐  ROCHE, Regina Maria – Clermont ☐  ROCHE, Regina Maria – The Children of the Abbey ☐  ROSTOPCHINA, Yevdokia Petrovna – Poedinok ☐  SETTERFIELD, Diane – The Thirteenth Tale ☐  SHELLEY, Mary – Frankenstein ☐  SHELLEY, Percy Bysshe – Zastrozzi ☐  SHELLEY, Percy Bysshe – St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian ☐  SLEATH, Eleanor – The Orphan of the Rhine ☐  STEVENSON, Robert Louis – Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde ☐  STEWART, Mary – Nine Coaches Waiting ☐  STOKER, Bram – Dracula ☐  STOKER, Bram – The Lair of the White Worm ☐  STORM, Theodor – Der Schimmelreiter ☐  TARTT, Donna – The Secret History ☐  TARTT, Donna – The Little Friend ☐  THOMAS, Elisabeth – Catherine House ☐  URBAN, Miloš – Sedmikostelí ☐  WALPOLE, Horace – The Castle of Otranto ☐  WILDE, Oscar – The Picture of Dorian Gray ☐  ZAFÓN, Carlos Ruiz – La sombra del viento

[nellygwyn]

BOOK RECS

Okay, so lots of people wanted this and so, I am compiling a list of my favourite books (both fiction and non-fiction), books that I recommend you read as soon as humanly possible. In the meantime, I’ll be pinning this post to the top of my blog (once I work out how to do that lmao) so it will be accessible for old and new followers. I’m going to order this list thematically, I think, just to keep everything tidy and orderly. Of course, a lot of this list will consist of historical fiction and historical non-fiction because that’s what I read primarily and thus, that’s where my bias is, but I promise to try and spice it up just a little bit. 

Favourite fiction books of all time:

The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock // Imogen Hermes Gowar

Sense and Sensibility // Jane Austen

Slammerkin // Emma Donoghue 

Remarkable Creatures // Tracy Chevalier

Life Mask // Emma Donoghue

His Dark Materials // Philip Pullman (this includes the follow-up series The Book of Dust)

Emma // Jane Austen

The Miniaturist // Jessie Burton

Girl, Woman, Other // Bernadine Evaristo 

Jane Eyre // Charlotte Brontë

Persuasion // Jane Austen

Girl with a Pearl Earring // Tracy Chevalier

The Silent Companions // Laura Purcell

Tess of the d’Urbervilles // Thomas Hardy

Northanger Abbey // Jane Austen

The Chronicles of Narnia // C.S. Lewis

Pride and Prejudice // Jane Austen

Goodnight, Mr Tom // Michelle Magorian

The French Lieutenant’s Woman // John Fowles 

The Butcher’s Hook // Janet Ellis 

Mansfield Park // Jane Austen

The All Souls Trilogy // Deborah Harkness

The Railway Children // Edith Nesbit

Favourite non-fiction books of all time

Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman // Robert Massie

Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King // Antonia Fraser

Madame de Pompadour // Nancy Mitford

The First Iron Lady: A Life of Caroline of Ansbach // Matthew Dennison 

Black and British: A Forgotten History // David Olusoga

Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court // Lucy Worsley 

Young and Damned and Fair: The Life of Katherine Howard, the Fifth Wife of Henry VIII // Gareth Russell

King Charles II // Antonia Fraser

Casanova’s Women // Judith Summers

Marie Antoinette: The Journey // Antonia Fraser

Mrs. Jordan’s Profession: The Story of a Great Actress and a Future King // Claire Tomalin

Jane Austen at Home // Lucy Worsley

Mudlarking: Lost and Found on the River Thames // Lara Maiklem

The Last Royal Rebel: The Life and Death of James, Duke of Monmouth // Anna Keay

The Marlboroughs: John and Sarah Churchill // Christopher Hibbert

Nell Gwynn: A Biography // Charles Beauclerk

Jurassic Mary: Mary Anning and the Primeval Monsters // Patricia Pierce

Georgian London: Into the Streets // Lucy Inglis

The Prince Who Would Be King: The Life and Death of Henry Stuart // Sarah Fraser

Wedlock: How Georgian Britain’s Worst Husband Met His Match // Wendy Moore

Dead Famous: An Unexpected History of Celebrity from the Stone Age to the Silver Screen // Greg Jenner

Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum // Kathryn Hughes

Crown of Blood: The Deadly Inheritance of Lady Jane Grey // Nicola Tallis

Favourite books about the history of sex and/or sex work

The Origins of Sex: A History of First Sexual Revolution // Faramerz Dabhoiwala 

Erotic Exchanges: The World of Elite Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century Paris // Nina Kushner

Peg Plunkett: Memoirs of a Whore // Julie Peakman

Courtesans // Katie Hickman

The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in mid-Nineteenth Century England

Madams, Bawds, and Brothel Keepers // Fergus Linnane

The Secret History of Georgian London: How the Wages of Sin Shaped the Capital // Dan Cruickshank 

A Curious History of Sex // Kate Lister

Sex and Punishment: 4000 Years of Judging Desire // Eric Berkowitz

Queen of the Courtesans: Fanny Murray // Barbara White

Rent Boys: A History from Ancient Times to Present // Michael Hone

Celeste // Roland Perry

Sex and the Gender Revolution // Randolph Trumbach

The Pleasure’s All Mine: A History of Perverse Sex // Julie Peakman

LGBT+ fiction I love*

The Confessions of the Fox // Jordy Rosenberg 

As Meat Loves Salt // Maria Mccann

Bone China // Laura Purcell

Brideshead Revisited // Evelyn Waugh

The Confessions of Frannie Langton // Sara Collins

The Intoxicating Mr Lavelle // Neil Blackmore

Orlando // Virginia Woolf

Tipping the Velvet // Sarah Waters

She Rises // Kate Worsley

The Mercies // Kiran Millwood Hargrave

Oranges are Not the Only Fruit // Jeanette Winterson

Maurice // E.M Forster

Frankisstein: A Love Story // Jeanette Winterson

If I Was Your Girl // Meredith Russo 

The Well of Loneliness // Radclyffe Hall 

* fyi, Life Mask and Girl, Woman, Other are also LGBT+ fiction

Classics I haven’t already mentioned (including children’s classics)

Far From the Madding Crowd // Thomas Hardy 

I Capture the Castle // Dodie Smith 

Vanity Fair // William Makepeace Thackeray 

Wuthering Heights // Emily Brontë

The Blazing World // Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle

Murder on the Orient Express // Agatha Christie 

Great Expectations // Charles Dickens

North and South // Elizabeth Gaskell

Evelina // Frances Burney

Death on the Nile // Agatha Christie

The Monk // Matthew Lewis

Frankenstein // Mary Shelley

Vilette // Charlotte Brontë

The Mayor of Casterbridge // Thomas Hardy

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall // Anne Brontë

Vile Bodies // Evelyn Waugh

Beloved // Toni Morrison 

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd // Agatha Christie

The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling // Henry Fielding

A Room With a View // E.M. Forster

Silas Marner // George Eliot 

Jude the Obscure // Thomas Hardy

My Man Jeeves // P.G. Wodehouse

Lady Audley’s Secret // Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Middlemarch // George Eliot

Little Women // Louisa May Alcott

Children of the New Forest // Frederick Marryat

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings // Maya Angelou 

Rebecca // Daphne du Maurier

Alice in Wonderland // Lewis Carroll

The Wind in the Willows // Kenneth Grahame

Anna Karenina // Leo Tolstoy

Howard’s End // E.M. Forster

The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4 // Sue Townsend

Even more fiction recommendations

The Darling Strumpet // Gillian Bagwell

The Wolf Hall trilogy // Hilary Mantel

The Illumination of Ursula Flight // Anne-Marie Crowhurst

Queenie // Candace Carty-Williams

Forever Amber // Kathleen Winsor

The Corset // Laura Purcell

Love in Colour // Bolu Babalola

Artemisia // Alexandra Lapierre

Blackberry and Wild Rose // Sonia Velton

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories // Angela Carter

The Languedoc trilogy // Kate Mosse

Longbourn // Jo Baker

A Skinful of Shadows // Frances Hardinge

The Black Moth // Georgette Heyer

The Far Pavilions // M.M Kaye

The Essex Serpent // Sarah Perry

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo // Taylor Jenkins Reid

Cavalier Queen // Fiona Mountain 

The Winter Palace // Eva Stachniak

Friday’s Child // Georgette Heyer

Falling Angels // Tracy Chevalier

Little // Edward Carey

Chocolat // Joanne Harris 

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street // Natasha Pulley 

My Sister, the Serial Killer // Oyinkan Braithwaite

The Convenient Marriage // Georgette Heyer

Katie Mulholland // Catherine Cookson

Restoration // Rose Tremain

Meat Market // Juno Dawson

Lady on the Coin // Margaret Campbell Bowes

In the Company of the Courtesan // Sarah Dunant

The Crimson Petal and the White // Michel Faber

A Place of Greater Safety // Hilary Mantel 

The Little Shop of Found Things // Paula Brackston

The Improbability of Love // Hannah Rothschild

The Murder Most Unladylike series // Robin Stevens

Dark Angels // Karleen Koen

The Words in My Hand // Guinevere Glasfurd

Time’s Convert // Deborah Harkness

The Collector // John Fowles

Vivaldi’s Virgins // Barbara Quick

The Foundling // Stacey Halls

The Phantom Tree // Nicola Cornick

The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle // Stuart Turton

Golden Hill // Francis Spufford

Assorted non-fiction not yet mentioned

The Dinosaur Hunters: A True Story of Scientific Rivalry and the Discovery of the Prehistoric World // Deborah Cadbury

The Beauty and the Terror: An Alternative History to the Italian Renaissance // Catherine Fletcher

All the King's Women: Love, Sex, and Politics in the life of Charles II // Derek Jackson

Mozart’s Women // Jane Glover

Scandalous Liaisons: Charles II and His Court // R.E. Pritchard

Matilda: Queen, Empress, Warrior // Catherine Hanley 

Black Tudors // Miranda Kaufman 

To Catch a King: Charles II's Great Escape // Charles Spencer

1666: Plague, War and Hellfire // Rebecca Rideal

Henrietta Maria: Charles I's Indomitable Queen // Alison Plowden

Catherine of Braganza: Charles II's Restoration Queen // Sarah-Beth Watkins

Four Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Romanov Grand Duchesses // Helen Rappaport

Aristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox, 1740-1832 // Stella Tillyard 

The Fortunes of Francis Barber: The True Story of the Jamaican Slave who Became Samuel Johnson’s Heir // Michael Bundock

Black London: Life Before Emancipation // Gretchen Gerzina

In These Times: Living in Britain Through Napoleon’s Wars, 1793-1815

The King’s Mistress: Scandal, Intrigue and the True Story of the Woman who Stole the Heart of George I // Claudia Gold

Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson // Paula Byrne

The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England // Amanda Vickery

Terms and Conditions: Life in Girls’ Boarding School, 1939-1979 // Ysenda Maxtone Graham 

Fanny Burney: A Biography // Claire Harman

Aphra Behn: A Secret Life // Janet Todd

The Imperial Harem: Women and the Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire // Leslie Peirce

The Fall of the House of Byron // Emily Brand

The Favourite: Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough // Ophelia Field

Night-Walking: A Nocturnal History of London // Matthew Beaumont, Will Self

Jane Austen: A Life // Claire Tomalin

Beloved Emma: The Life of Emma, Lady Hamilton // Flora Fraser

Sentimental Murder: Love and Madness in the 18th Century // John Brewer

Henrietta Howard: King’s Mistress, Queen’s Servant // Tracy Borman

City of Beasts: How Animals Shaped Georgian London // Tom Almeroth-Williams

Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion // Anne Somerset 

Charlotte Brontë: A Life // Claire Harman 

Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe // Anthony Summers

Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day // Peter Ackroyd 

Elizabeth I and Her Circle // Susan Doran

African Europeans: An Untold History // Olivette Otele 

Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron, and Other Tangled Lives // Daisy Hay

How to Create the Perfect Wife // Wendy Moore

The Sphinx: The Life of Gladys Deacon, Duchess of Marlborough // Hugo Vickers

The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn // Eric Ives

Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy // Barbara Ehrenreich

A is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie // Kathryn Harkup 

Mistresses: Sex and Scandal at the Court of Charles II // Linda Porter

Female Husbands: A Trans History // Jen Manion

Ladies in Waiting: From the Tudors to the Present Day // Anne Somerset

Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country // Edward Parnell 

A Cheesemonger’s History of the British Isles // Ned Palmer

The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine // Lindsey Fitzharris

Medieval Woman: Village Life in the Middle Ages // Ann Baer

The Husband Hunters: Social Climbing in London and New York // Anne de Courcy

The Voices of Nîmes: Women, Sex, and Marriage in Reformation Languedoc // Suzannah Lipscomb

The Daughters of the Winter Queen // Nancy Goldstone

Mad and Bad: Real Heroines of the Regency // Bea Koch

Bess of Hardwick // Mary S. Lovell

The Royal Art of Poison // Eleanor Herman 

The Strangest Family: The Private Lives of George III, Queen Charlotte, and the Hanoverians // Janice Hadlow

Palaces of Pleasure: From Music Halls to the Seaside to Football; How the Victorians Invented Mass Entertainment // Lee Jackson

Favourite books about current social/political issues (?? for lack of a better term)

Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power // Lola Olufemi

Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Worker Rights // Molly Smith, Juno Mac

Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race // Reni Eddo-Lodge

Trans Britain: Our Journey from the Shadows // Christine Burns

Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism // Alison Phipps

Trans Like Me: A Journey For All Of Us // C.N Lester

Brit(Ish): On Race, Identity, and Belonging // Afua Hirsch 

The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence, and Cultural Restitution // Dan Hicks

Things No One Will Tell Fat Girls: A Handbook for Unapologetic Living // Jes M. Baker

Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women White Feminists Forgot // Mikki Kendall

Denial: Holocaust History on Trial // Deborah Lipstadt

Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape // Jessica Valenti, Jaclyn Friedman

Don’t Touch My Hair // Emma Dabiri

Sister Outsider // Audre Lorde 

Unicorn: The Memoir of a Muslim Drag Queen // Amrou Al-Kadhi

Trans Power // Juno Roche

Breathe: A Letter to My Sons // Imani Perry

The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment // Amelia Gentleman

Happy Fat: Taking Up Space in a World That Wants to Shrink You // Sofie Hagen

Diaries, memoirs & letters

The Diary of a Young Girl // Anne Frank

Renia’s Diary: A Young Girl’s Life in the Shadow of the Holocaust // Renia Spiegel 

Writing Home // Alan Bennett

The Diary of Samuel Pepys // Samuel Pepys

Histoire de Ma Vie // Giacomo Casanova

Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger // Nigel Slater

London Journal, 1762-1763 // James Boswell

The Diary of a Bookseller // Shaun Blythell 

Jane Austen’s Letters // edited by Deidre la Faye

H is for Hawk // Helen Mcdonald 

The Salt Path // Raynor Winn

The Glitter and the Gold // Consuelo Vanderbilt, Duchess of Marlborough

Journals and Letters // Fanny Burney

Educated // Tara Westover

Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading // Lucy Mangan

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? // Jeanette Winterson

A Dutiful Boy // Mohsin Zaidi

Secrets and Lies: The Trials of Christine Keeler // Christine Keeler

800 Years of Women’s Letters // edited by Olga Kenyon

Istanbul // Orhan Pamuk

Henry and June // Anaïs Nin

Historical romance (this is a short list because I’m still fairly new to this genre)

The Bridgerton series // Julia Quinn

One Good Earl Deserves a Lover // Sarah Mclean

Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake // Sarah Mclean

The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics // Olivia Waite

That Could Be Enough // Alyssa Cole

Unveiled // Courtney Milan

The Craft of Love // EE Ottoman

The Maiden Lane series // Elizabeth Hoyt

An Extraordinary Union // Alyssa Cole

Slightly Dangerous // Mary Balogh

Dangerous Alliance: An Austentacious Romance // Jennieke Cohen

A Fashionable Indulgence // KJ Charles

[pilferingapples]

Romanticist Werewolves Reading List

this is just an ongoing TBR  of Romantic or Gothic Werewolf novels! Short stories are good too! 

Online: 

The Wolf Leader by Alexandre Dumas

Hugues, the Wer-Wolf by Sutherland Menzies

A Story of a Weir-Wolf by Catherine Crowe

The Were-wolf  by Clemence Housman

Wagner the Wehr-Wolf, by George W.M. Reynolds

ETA: The Man-Wolf, by Leitch Richie 

The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains,by Frederick Marryat

Looking for:  The Wolf Bride by Aino Kallas-- I can’t find this online anywhere, and the out-of-print English translations are wildly expensive!  If anyone can point me to an online, readable English edition, I’d appreciate it!

The Wehr-Wolf, a Legend of the Limousin, by Richard Thompson

if anyone has other suggestions that fit the definition (Romantic era/Gothic werewolf stories/novels) , let me know! 

[angel-princess-anna]

Downton Abbey - References to Historical Figures + References to Other Fictional Characters and Works

The following are two lists; one are real people who where mentioned on Downton Abbey, and the other is fictional characters and works that were also mentioned in the show. I complied these two lists together (because sometimes I had to research what was indeed being referenced!). As I didn’t know if I’d ever been sharing these lists, I don’t have the episode numbers listed out, but they do go in order by mention.

Real Historical Figures Mentioned in Downton

* means that the person was not contemporary of the characters and there for famous or well-known to them. Others without it may not be known personally by them, but are their contemporaries. Some of these have made it to the character list, if for sure they did indeed know the Crawleys, or other any other major character.

- Lucy Rothes (Titanic survivor, friend of the Crawleys) - John Jacob "JJ" Astor (business man who died on Titanic, friend of the Crawleys) - Madeleine Astor (not mentioned by name, but as JJ's wife, Titanic survivor, Cora did not like her) - Sir Christopher Wren* (architect, designed the Dower House) - David Lloyd George (politician and Prime Minister starting in 1916) - William the Conqueror* - Mark Twain* (author) - Queen Mary (wife of King George V) [mentioned in S1, appears in S4CS] - Queen Catherine of Aragon* - Oliver Cromwell* - Bishop Richard de Warren* - Anthony Trollope* (author; he would have been somewhat contemporary, died in 1882) - Piero della Francesca* (painter) - Franz Anton Mesmer* (scientist) - Thomas Jefferson* (politician, inventor, third president of the United States) - Léon Bakst (Russian painter and scene- and costume designer) - Sergei Diaghilev (another Russian artist) - Edith Vane-Tempest-Stewart, Marchioness of Londonderry (sounds like the Crawleys did attend her parties from time to time) - Emily Davison (suffragist) - Herbert Henry "H.H." Asquith (politician and Prime Minister until 1916) - Kaiser Wilheim (ruler of Germany; Sir Anthony personally visited him a few times) - Vincenzo Bellini* (composer) - Gioachino Rossini* (composer) - Giacomo Puccini* (composer) - Karl Marx* (philosopher) - John Ruskin*  (social thinker and artist; he would have been somewhat contemporary, died in 1900) - John Stuart Mill* (philosopher) - Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria - Guy Fawkes* - Gavrilo Princip (member of the Black Hand and Franz Ferdinand's assassin) - H.G. Wells (author) - Major General B. Burton - Heinrich Schliemann* (German businessman archaeologist, died in 1890; deleted scene mention) - General Douglas Haig (later a field marshal) - Belshazzar* (King of Babylon) - Mabel Normand (actress) - Plantagenets* - Eugene Suter (hair stylist) - Alexander Kerensky (Russian political leader) - Vladimir Lenin (Russian communist revolutionary) - Florence Nightingale* (nurse; died 1910) - Czar Nicholas II and the Romanov family (ruler of Russia) - Jack Robinson (footballer; he stopped playing in 1912) - Frederick Marryat* (author) - George Alfred "G.A." Henty* (author; he would have been somewhat contemporary, died in 1902) - Maximilien Robespierre* (French revolutionary) - Marie Antoinette* (French queen) - Erich Lundendorff (German commander) - Sylvia Pankhurst (suffragist) - Jack Johnson (boxer) - Commander Harold Lowe (Fifth Officer of the Titanic; if P. Gordon was really Patrick, he would have known him personally) - Theda Bara (actress) - Robert Burns* (poet, read by Bates; name is not uttered on screen, but it is clear on book cover) - Jules Verne* (author; he would have been somewhat contemporary, died in 1905) - Marion Harris (singer of "Look for the Silver Lining"; name is not uttered on screen) - Edward Shortt (Home Secretary from 1919-1922) - Cosmo Gordon Lang, Archbishop of York (one of the first actual historical figures in the show; married Matthew and Mary, visited Downton Abbey for dinner) - King George V (king of England) [mentioned in S3E1, appears in S4CS] - Charles Melville Hays (president of the Grand Trunk Railway that Robert invested in; died on the Titanic) - Robert Baden-Powell (founder of the Boy Scouts) - Lady Maureen Dufferin (socialite, friend of the Crawleys) - Georges Auguste Escoffier (famous chef and restaurateur) - Marie-Antoine Carême* (famous chef) - Queen of Sheba* - Napoleon Bonaparte* - The Bourbons* - The Buffs* (famous army regiment; "steady the Buffs" popularized by Kipling) - Croesus* (king of ancient Lydia; mention several times starting in S3 and through S4) - Thomas Edwin "Tom" Mix (Wild West picture star) - Dr. Samuel Johnson* (English writer; quote paraphrased by Carson) - Jean Patou (dress designer; maker of Edith's S3 wedding dress in-show) - Lucy Christiana, Lady Duff-Gordon (dress designer of "Lucille"; a survivor of the Titanic) - The Marlboroughs (famous family; mentioned like the Crawleys knew them personally, Sir Anthony did) - The Hapburgs* (rulers of the Holy Roman Empire) - Maud Gonne (English-born Irish revolutionary) - Isabella Augusta, Lady Gregory (Irish revolutionary) - Constance Georgine Markievicz, Countess Markievicz (Irish revolutionary and politician) - Lady Sarah Wilson (née Churchill) (female war correspondent) - Gwendolen Fitzalan-Howard, Duchess of Norfolk  (real person and friend of Violet's) - Pope Benedict XV - Lillian Gish (actress) - Ivy Close (actress) - Alfred the Great* (9th century ruler of England) - Oscar Wilde* (author; he would have been somewhat contemporary, died in 1900) - Nathaniel Hawthorne* (author) - Charles Ponzi - Walter Scott* (author) - Charles Dickens* (author) - Virgina Woolf (author, one of the first actual historical figures in the show, was not actually mentioned though, just a background guest at Gregson's party) - Roger Fry (artist, one of the first actual historical figures in the show, was not actually mentioned though, just a background guest at Gregson's party) - Sir Garnet Wolseley* - Phyllis Dare (singer and actress) - Zena Dare (singer and actress, sister to Phyllis) - Maurice Vyner Baliol Brett (the second son of the 2nd Viscount Esher, Zena Dare's husband) - King Canute* (Cnut the Great, norse king) - Nellie Melba (opera singer, one of the few actual historical figures in the show) - Al Jolson (singer) - Christina Rossetti* (poet) - Marie Stopes (feminist doctor and author of Married Love) - George III* (ruler of England) - Lord Byron* - Arsène Avignon (chef at Ritz in London, actual historical figure in the show) - Louis Diat (chef at Ritz in New York) - Jules Gouffé* (famous chef) - King of Sweden (whoever it was when Violet's husband was alive) - Rudolph Valentino (actor) - Agnes Ayres (actress) - Lord Robert Henley, 1st Earl of Northington* (Lord Chancellor and abolitionist) - Albert B. Fall (US senator and Secretary of the Interior) - King Ludwig* (I’m assuming of Bavaria) - John Ward MP (liberal politician, actual historical figure in the show) - Admiral John Jellicoe, 1st Earl Jellicoe (Royal Navy, Blake and Tony served under him) - Benjamin Baruch Ambrose (bandleader at the Embassy Club, his band appears on-screen but it's not pointed out who he is) - The Prince of Wales (David, who became Edward VIII when King) - Freda Dudley Ward (socialite and mistress of the above) - The Queen of Naples* - Wat Tyler* (leader of the 1381 Peasants' Revolt in England) - Edmond Hoyle* (writer of card rules) - Ramsay MacDonald (Prime Minister Jan-Nov 1924) - Archimedes* - Boudicca* (Queen of the British Iceni tribe) - Rosa Luxemburg (Revolutionary) - Charles I* - Douglas Fairbanks (movie star) - Jack Hylton (English band leader) - Edward Molyneux (fashion designer; Cora has a fitting with him in S5E3) - The Brontë Sisters* (Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, all authors. Anne's work The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was the charade answer in S2CS.) - Leo Tolstoy* (author) - Nikolai Gogol* (author) - Elinor Glyn (author of romantic fiction) - Czar Alexander II - Prince Alfred (son of Queen Victoria) - Grand Duchess Maria (wife of Alfred, daughter of the czar) - Peter Carl Fabergé (Russian jeweller) - Ralph Kerr (officer in the Royal Navy; Mabel mentions a man by this name as a friend) - Keir Hardie (Scottish socialist, died in 1915) - The Moonella Group (formed a nudist colony in 1924 in Wickford, Essex) - John Singer Sargent (American painter, died in 1925) - Rudyard Kipling (author and poet - often quoted starting in S1, but first mentioned by name in S5) - Mary Augusta Ward (Mrs. Humphrey Ward - author; I'm not adding her to the character list, died in 1920) - Adolf Hitler - Pola Negri (film star) - John Barrymore (actor [Drew Barrymore's grandfather]) - King Richard the III (of England)* - Hannah Rothschild and Lord Rosebery (British socialites Violet knew; Hannah died in 1890) - General Reginald Dyer - Lytton Strachey (supposedly was at Gregson's party) - Niccolo Machiavelli* - Adrienne Bolland (aviatrix) - The Fife Princesses (as listed by Sir Michael Reresby) - Duke of Arygll (as listed by Sir Michael Reresby) - The Queen of Spain (as listed by Sir Michael Reresby) - Lady Eltham (Dorothy Isabel Westenra Hastings) - King John* - Neville Chamberlain (Minister of Health in 1925, later Prime Minister; appears on-screen in S6E5) - Anne de Vere Cole (Neville Chamberlain's wife. Fictitiously, she is Robert's father's goddaughter. Her father is mentioned has having served in the Crimean War with Robert's) - Horace de Vere Cole (Anne de Vere Cole's brother) - Joshua Reynolds* (painter) - George Romney* (painter) - Franz Xaver Winterhalter* (painter) - Sir Charles Barry* (real architect of Highclere, cited here as one as Downton Abbey) - Tsar Nicholas I* - Teo (or Tiaa)* - Amenhotep II* - Tuthmosis IV* - King Charles* - Clara Bow (actress) [To my knowledge, the Ripon election candidates in S1E6 were not real people, as were not always the case for military personnel Robert referred to.] Fictional Characters and Works Mentioned in Downton - Long John Silver (referenced by Thomas) - Andromeda, Perseus, Cepheus (Greek mythology) (referenced by Mary) - Sydney Carton (A Tale of Two Cities) (referenced by Robert) - Princess Aurora, and later Sleeping Beauty (the ballet I presume) (referenced by Robert) - Horatio (Hamlet; Thomas quotes a line in a deleted scene) - "Gunga Din" (poem by Kipling; quoted by Bates and later quoted by Isobel) - Little Women (referenced by Cora) - The Lost World - Elizabeth and her German Garden (book given to Anna by Molesley) - Wind in the Willows (referenced by Violet) - "If You Were the Only Girl in the World" (sung by Mary, Matthew and cast) - "The Cat That Walked By Itself" (short story by Kipling; quoted by Matthew) - Iphigenia (Greek mythology, may be referenced in The Iliad but I cannot confirm) - Uncle Tom Cobley ("Widecombe Fair") (referenced by Sybil) - Alice and the Looking Glass - "The Rose of Picardy" (only a few strains played, possibly the John McCormack version which was out in 1919) - Zip Goes a Million and "Look for the Silver Lining" (song played by Matthew) - The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (title used in The Game) - Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Angel Clare (referenced by Mary) - Lochinvar (from Sir Walter Scott) (referenced by Martha) - "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" (played at Mary and Matthew's wedding) - "Let Me Call You Sweetheart" (sung by Martha and cast) - "Dashing Away with the Smoothing Iron" (English folk song sung by Carson) - Way Down East (film) - The Worldings (film) - "Molly Malone" (Irish song) - The Scarlet Letter (referenced by Isobel) - Lady of the Rose (musical) - The Lady of Shalott (ballad) - The Puccini pieces from S4E3 - The jazz pieces from S4E4 sung by Jack Ross ("A Rose By Any Other Name") - The Sheik (film) - The jazz pieces from S4E6 sung by Jack Ross ("Wild About Harry") - "The Second Mrs Tanqueray" (play and films) (referenced by Edith) - "The Sword of Damocles" (Greek myth) - Dr. Fu Manchu - Mrs. Bennett (Pride and Prejudice) - A vague allusion to Wuthering Heights (talking about the Brontë sisters and moors) (referenced by Rose) - Vanity Fair and Becky Sharp (Molesley reads this with Daisy) - "It's a Long Way to Tipperary" (sung by Denker) - "The Fall of the House of Usher" (short story by Edgar Allen Poe) - Madame Defarge (A Tale of Two Cities) - Ariadne (Greek mythology) - "Cockles and Mussels" (Spratt sings a few bars in S6E5; this is also called "Molly Malone") - Elizabeth Bennett and Pemberley (Pride and Prejudice) (referenced by Violet) - Mr Squeers (Nicholas Nickleby) (referenced by Bertie) - The Prisoner of Zenda (adventure novel by Anthony Hope) (referenced by Tom) - "The course of true love never did run smooth" (quote from A Midsummer Night's Dream) Not included are proverbs or sayings (which Anna says a lot of), nor Biblical references. Do note that there's a lot of scenes with the characters reading, but we don't know exactly what.

[winsonsaw2003]

Family Of Thomas Church (1798-1860) Singapore

I am looking for  descendants of Thomas Church (1798-1860) to share some information. Son of Thomas Church & Elizabeth Dixon.He married Elizabeth Scott Of Penang. His issue:- i) Harriet Georgina Church (1827-1898) married Walter Stuart Mann. Their issue:- ai) Annie Florence Mann (1850-1941) married Thomas Vincent Fegan. aii) Horace Butterworth Mann (1851-1909). ii) Robert Church (1828-1904) married Sarah Church Waller. iii) Thomas Ross Church (1830-1926) married Florence Marryat(1833-1899).Their issue:- ai) Eva Florence Ross Church (1855-1887) married Alfred Stevens. aii) Ethel Maude Church (1857-1952) married Edmund Nicholas Alpe and Ernest Walter Russell Barry.Their issue:- bi) Ethel Mary Florence Alpe(1876-1958) married Edwin Chappell. bii) Edmund Francis Ross Alpe (1879-1944). aiii) Frederick Francis Marryat Church (1859-?) married Elizabeth H. Spiller.His issue:- bi) Catherine Mary Church(1904-1979) married Reginald Sidney Crabb. Their issue:- ci) Paul Crabb (1926-?) married ?. His issue:- di) Colin Crabb. cii) Reginald B Crabb (1927-1928). bii) Patricia Marguerite Joan Church (1906-1990) married Frank Henry Bailey Fyfe. Their issue:- ci) Dorothy Marryat Fyfe married ? Stewart. aiv) Florence Charlotte Henrietta Church (1860-?). av) Voilet Theodora Church (1863-1953) married Stanley Locker Dobie.Their issue:- bi) Marryat Ross Dobie (1888-1973) married Grace Vera Patmore. His issue:- ci) Alison Roxburgh Dobie married Anthony Allan Montgomery. bii) Beatrice Shedden Dobie (1900-?) married Allan D. Macdonald. Their issue:- ci) Robert D Macdonald(1929-?). avi) Sybil Catherine Florence Church (1866-1958) married 1stly,Gerald Edward Lyon Campbell & 2ndly, Wentworth Vernon Cole. Their issue:- bi) Mary Hamilton Campbell (1888-?) married Alfred Thomas Duncan Anderson. Their issue:- ci) Ian Duncan Hamilton Anderson (1916-?) cii) Alec Vernon Anderson(1921-?). avii) George Marryat Ross Church (1868-1940) married Emily Whymper.His issue:- bi) Robert Henry Ross Church(1904-1975) married Barbara Joyce Byers. His issue:- ci) Armorel Barbara Church married Fergus David Hanham. ci) Marryat Ross Church(1936-1941). cii) Martin Byers Church(1939-2008) married  Diane C Perry. His issue:- di) Alexander Philip Ross Church. dii) Daniel Thomas Ross Church married Olivia Stockdale His issue:- ei) Felix James Ross Church. ciii) Valentine Ross Church(1941-2008) married Anne E Mouland.His issue:- di) Marryat Frederick Ross Church. dii)Benjamin Robert Ross Church married Jessica Groves. bii) Barbara Theodora Church(1910-?) married Hugh Joseph Gray. Their issue:- ci) Brigid Penelope Gray married 1stly Anthony Bart Nesburn & 2ndly,Carl M Leventhal. aviii) Marguerite Ross Church (1872-1951) married Harry Oliver Whymper. iv) Hannah Church (1834-1852) married Samuel Gordon. Their issue:- ai) David Birdwood Gordon(1849-?) aii) Elizabeth Catherine Gordon(1851-?) married William Charles Hilditch. Their issue:- bi) Edith Mary Ann Hilditch (1870-1871). v) Charles Wright Church (1835-1890). vi) Sarah Scott Church (1837-1909) married Captain Malcolm Kemp Bourne.Their issue:- ai) Robert Kemp Bourne (1863). aii) Mabel Frances Bourne (1866-1950). aiii) Malcolm Stuart Bourne (1867-1940). aiv) Percy Trevor Bourne (1867-1893). vii) William Marryat Church (1841-1842). viii) Edward Winter Church (1843-1875). Please contact me at :- winsonsaw20032000@yahoo.com

[bookmonsterzero]

January 2019 in Letters and Pictures

01. A Man Without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut

02. Wild Seed by Octavia E. Butler

03. Mind of my Mind by Octavia E. Butler

04. Clay's Ark by Octavia E. Butler

05. Patternmaster by Octavia E. Butler

06. Anton Chekhov: His Life by Donald Rayfield

07. Hermann and Dorothea by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

08. Acharnians by Aristophanes

09. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution by Bernard Bailyn

10. Peter Simple by Frederick Marryat

11. Catherine De' Medici by Honoré de Balzac

12. The Absentee by Maria Edgeworth

13. ® Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen

14. Against the Grain by James C. Scott

15. ® How it is by Samuel Beckett

16. Poetry, Language, Thought by Martin Heidegger

17. I Hate You, Don't Leave Me by Jerold J. Kreisman 

18. ® Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

19. James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl

King of New York (1990)

The Moon Is Blue (1953)

Johnny Apollo (1940)

® Abigail’s Party (1977)

Justice League (2017)

Early to Bed (1936)

The Bride Came C.O.D. (1941)

The Street with No Name (1948)

Waltz with Bashir (2008)

Raw (2016)

The Big Sick (2017)

Gambit (1966)

Murders in the Zoo (1933)

No Way to Treat a Lady (1968)

Lonely Wives (1931)

Paris Bound (1929)

Paddington 2 (2017)

Will Penny (1967)

® Woman on the Run (1950)

Kizumonogatari Part 1: Tekketsu (2016)

Kizumonogatari Part 2: Nekketsu (2016)

Kizumonogatari Part 3: Reiketsu (2017)

The Entertainer (1960)

The Nutty Professor (1963)

Dear Diary (1993)

High School (1968)

The Great Lie (1941)

Mexicali Rose (1929)

Sunnyside Up (1929)

The Locked Door (1929)

Half Marriage (1929)

New York Nights (1929)

The Canary Murder Case (1929)

Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951)

The Happiest Days of Your Life (1950)

Miss Potter (2006)

Far from the Madding Crowd (1967)

Cloverfield (2008)

The Saint In London (1939)

The Omega Man (1971)

Bull Durham (1988)

The Kennel Murder Case (1933)

The Death of Stalin (2017)

® The Invisible Man (1933)

® The Invisible Man Returns (1940)

Invisible Agent (1942)

The Invisible Man’s Revenge (1944)

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)

Gangs of New York (1938)

The Cool World (1963)

The Slender Thread (1965)

The Portrait of a Lady (1996)

The Clovehitch Killer (2018)

King Solomon’s Mines (1937)

A Question of Silence (1982)

Deseret (1995)

Bus 174 (2002)

Surfwise (2007)

Boom Town (1940)

Scorpio Rising (1963)

A Movie (1958)

Box (1977)

Song at Midnight (1937)

When Ladies Meet (1933)

War Horse (2011)

The Quiet Earth (1985)

Heat Lightning (1934)

Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2018)

Broadway Bill (1934)

10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)

Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016)

Two Lovers (2008)

Hacksaw Ridge (2016)

The Red Turtle (2016)

A Passage to India (1984)

Red Salute (1935)

® The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

Once (2007)

The Host (2006)

The Prisoner (TV 1967-1968)

Olympia Part One: Festival of the Nations (1938)

Olympia Part Two: Festival of Beauty (1938)

® A Trip to the Moon (1902)

Man of Marble (1977)

Man of Iron (1981)

The Best of Friends (1991)

The Spider and the Fly (1949)

The Gospel According to Matthew (1964)

sex, lies, and videotape (1989)

® Trading Places (1983)

Lilith (1964)

Meantime (1983)

The Good Fairy (1935)

Blowing Wild (1953)

The Saint Strikes Back (1939)

® Over the Top (1987)

The General Died at Dawn (1936)

Outland (1981)

Ninja Scroll (1993)

Best experiences in bold, other recommended ones are linked. ® revisited.

[marryat92]

Captain Marryat sketched by George Cruikshank, and Florence Marryat photographed c.1870.

Catherine Pope's biography Florence Marryat makes father and daughter sound very much alike: their heavily autobiographical fiction, spirited defiance of convention, somewhat scandalous personal lives, and apparently, being perceived as physically intimidating.

Tom Pocock wrote of Frederick Marryat's "formidable physical presence – broad shoulders, deep chest – and a hint of lurking violence", and at one point stated that one of Marryat's commanding officers was "wary of Marryat, who was strongly built and had a dangerous glint in his eye." (Pocock, Captain Marryat: Seaman, Writer, and Adventurer)

In comparison, here's Pope on the Captain's daughter:

She was an imposing figure, both physically and professionally, and letters from her male contributors show deference and respect. Edmund Downey, assistant to Marryat's publisher William Tinsley, was warned: "She is a tall, striking-looking woman, and she'll talk to you just like a man."

— Catherine Pope, Florence Marryat.

It's a wonderful glimpse at the talented, determined writer who assembled the most important primary source of her father's biographies, The Life and Letters of Captain Frederick Marryat.

[marryat92]

With Halloween today, which calls for the annual recollection of that time Captain Marryat ran into the ghost of the Brown Lady of Raynham Hall, I have been thinking a lot about Florence Marryat—who was the source of that story about her ghost-busting father, and famous for her spiritualist writings in general. For studies of Captain Marryat, her Life and Letters of Captain Frederick Marryat is an invaluable primary source.

I have started to read Catherine Pope's new (published in 2020) biography of Florence Marryat. Pope wrote her PhD thesis on feminism in Florence Marryat's fiction, and she's the premier scholar of her life and works. I feel a little bit guilty for not having read any of Florence Marryat's novels or short fiction, but I can still enjoy this biography because Florence led a pretty wild and scandalous life (truly, she was her father's daughter).

Pope also thinks that Florence Marryat's association with supernatural lore detracts from her novels: "This foregrounding of Marryat's spiritualist activities is one of the reasons, I propose, why her fiction is often ignored." Her personal life was also shocking for her time period, and even for today—Pope mentions her "openly adulterous" behaviour early on. (I think of this whenever one of Captain Marryat's biographers is complaining that Florence's life of her father is overly Victorian and demure).

I felt an immediate kinship with Florence Marryat when I started reading her father's Life and Letters. Despite some censorship that was absolutely required in the early 1870s, and the difficulty of writing and assembling this memoir, I think she did a credible job with her father's surviving correspondence and biographical sketches. Florence was a skilled writer and editor, and I could relate to her determination to put together a proper biography of her father since no one else was going to do it.

[marryat92]

I think that Florence Marryat genuinely loved and respected her father, but she was also very much like him (as her biography by Catherine Pope makes clear), and not above roasting him at a gentle simmer in his Life and Letters.

There's this zinger, for one: "Captain Marryat prided himself on possessing common sense, and would have been very much hurt if any one had hinted to the contrary; but his proceedings did not bear testimony to the idea."

The nicest possible way to say your father gets into stupid fights all the time and can't maintain relationships: "Like most warm-hearted people he was quick to take offence, and no one could have decided, after an absence of six months, with whom he was friends and with whom he was not."

After a bit of family history: "Captain Marryat (whom no one would have suspected to have been of Puritan descent) was the second son of the late Joseph Marryat,"

[marryat92]

I am having another moment where I reflect on what a wild journey it has been, embarking on this project of reading Marryat's complete works and studying his life, and I've been doing it for over three years now. A broader picture is starting to emerge for me.

Marryat was truly my introduction to all things Napoleonic Wars, even though I loved the movie "Master and Commander" before I picked up his books, and the greater awareness I have of the history of imperialism and colonialism is also largely due to studying his world. I expected to learn more about certain topics—other things took me by surprise.

I didn't expect to become fascinated with the War of 1812, but that's a direct result of my interest in Frederick Marryat. He even had family connections in southern New England, where I'm from, as well as in Atlantic Canada. Likewise, Marryat's role as an observer/participant in the Rebellion of 1837 has ignited my interest in that obscure conflict.

I am increasingly fascinated with what's called the "Atlantic World", and which is often at the heart of Marryat's novels and their regular stops in the West Indies and Caribbean, with many references to the slave trade and enslaved people. The entire Marryat family was caught up in this world, with patriarch Joseph Marryat being noted as an enslaver and anti-abolitionist.

Biographers of Frederick Marryat don't bring up the unsavoury connections of his father very often, which is understandable, but it gives a lot of insight into the racism and racial themes of his books. Frederick Marryat eventually renounced slavery, in the strongest language, but his earliest works are more ambivalent, suggesting that "good", kindly enslavers might exist (and one of them argues his case in Newton Forster).

I continue to read Catherine Pope's biography of Florence Marryat, and was surprised to learn about an illegitimate daughter of Joseph Marryat—a half-sister to Frederick—who was born to an enslaved woman on his West Indian plantation.

While racism was prevalent in the nineteenth century, [Florence] Marryat's prejudice was particularly vehement and stemmed from an episode in her family's history. Her grandfather Joseph Marryat was best-known as an MP, but he was also a wealthy slaveowner. [...] Apart from the considerable wealth the Marryats had amassed from forced labour, they were left with another, more tangible, legacy: Ann Marryat. As research by Catherine Hall shows, Ann was the illegitimate daughter of Joseph and one of his slaves on a West Indian plantation. Although he did not recognise her formally, Joseph manumitted Ann, her brother, and her mother before returning to England. Astonishingly, Ann later held an investment in her own slaves, for whom she was compensated a total of £547/4/6d after the abolition of the trade. Ann Marryat possibly provided an uncomfortable reminder of the family's shameful past. She remained in her native Grenada but she is likely to have been a source of family gossip, and anxiety.

— Catherine Pope, Florence Marryat p. 109-110

WELL! That is something I haven't seen in biographies of Captain Marryat! There is absolutely this very dark side to his world, and it naturally flows into his novels, which are full of war and exploitation. The press-gang and the profits of enslaved labour kept the imperial machinery going, even as the Royal Navy turned to fighting the slave trade (and enslavers are some of the most depraved villains in Marryat's books).

Marryat was of the early British Empire—grouped into the "Dawn" section of Patrick Brantlinger's Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914—and in many ways I find his writing refreshingly honest and direct, as much as the subject matter and attitude can be horrific. Marryat ultimately did not want to radically change his world, but he was highly critical of it. He loved to point out inequities and abuses as much as he seemed to defend and embrace the status quo. (There's a reason a major study of Marryat had the title "Puzzled Which to Choose").

[marryat92]

Hello,I'm a historian from Penang,Malaysia.Looking for any picture of Thomas Church,Resident Councillor of Singapore.Florence Marryat who married one of his son.

Hello! Oh yes, Florence Marryat—also known as Mrs. Ross Church.

I wish I could help you, but I don't have a picture of Thomas Church, and I am unable to find one. You might have more luck reaching out to a scholar of Florence Marryat, the preeminent one being Dr. Catherine Pope who runs florencemarryat.org. (There is a contact form on her site). In 2020 Dr. Pope published a book about Florence Marryat, and there is a possibility she might have more information on Florence's father-in-law.

[marryat92]

Captain Marryat: 'Among the first in Dickens’s liking'

Marryat in 1841, the year he met Charles Dickens

Inevitably, when some lesser-known person is associated with Charles Dickens, that connection will be advertised as loudly as possible, since Dickens is one of the few 19th century writers and public figures who still enjoys widespread recognition in the English-speaking world. Such is the case with Frederick Marryat. A biographical blurb about Marryat will often bring up his friendship with Dickens before any of Marryat's own accomplishments are mentioned.

Despite their age difference —Marryat was 20 years older than Dickens— the two men were certainly friends. I have tried to puzzle out exactly how close they were with sometimes sketchy evidence (not helped by the fact that both men tried to burn or destroy large amounts of their correspondence.) I don’t know if the young Charles Dickens was keenly interested in meeting Captain Marryat; but Marryat was clearly aware of him. Dickens and Marryat didn’t meet each other in person until 1841, but Marryat recorded the wild popularity of Dickens’ first novel, The Pickwick Papers, as he traveled to America in 1837: “Dinner over; every body pulls out a number of ‘Pickwick’; every body talks and reads Pickwick; weather getting up squally; passengers not quite sure they won’t be seasick. [...] for many days afterwards, there were Pickwicks in plenty strewed all over the cabin, but passengers were very scarce.” (Diary in America)

As for who was influencing whom, that question is easy to answer. Marryat was first on the scene, writing in a Dickensian vein with picaresque heroes and colorful characters sketched from life before Dickens was a household name. Marryat published his nonfiction travelogue Diary in America years before Dickens’ equivalent American Notes (which was clearly inspired by Marryat.) According to the English professor Louis Parascandola, Marryat “was the first nineteenth century writer to publish his novels serially in his own magazine, the Metropolitan, an important precedent for later authors like Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray.”

The first meeting between Marryat and Dickens was arranged by their mutual friend, the artist Clarkson Stanfield. Stanfield wrote to Dickens at the beginning of 1841, “I have before told you that my friend Captain Marryat is very anxious to have ‘what all covet’, the pleasure of your acquaintance and, if therefore you have no objection to meet him, will you come and take a beef steak with me on Wednesday 27.” Dickens replied, “I shall be delighted to join you and know Marryat.”

Dickens and Marryat seem to have immediately hit it off, enjoying each other’s wit and theatrical personalities. As Marryat’s biographer Tom Pocock describes it:

The two men took to each other at once. They shared a recognition of the absurd and could present it entertainingly, sometimes mixed with pathos and even tragedy. But while Marryat re-created the world that he himself had experienced in his books, Dickens’s imagination erupted with cavalcades of characters and panoramas of widely varied scenery. Dickens did not see Marryat as a rival but recognised his skill in presenting the world of the sea and seamen, which he himself could only try to imagine. Thanking Marryat for sending him his latest novel, Dickens wrote, ‘I have been chuckling, and grinning, and clenching my fists and becoming warlike for three whole days past.’

It seems clear that Dickens and Marryat would be close friends, and Marryat himself might be a less obscure writer in the present day, except that his association with Dickens was so brief. By 1843 Marryat had sequestered himself at his country estate in Langham, Norfolk, far from the literati of London with the transportation methods of the day. Marryat’s biographies and Florence Marryat’s Life and Letters of Captain Frederick Marryat are full of entreaties from his friends begging Marryat to return to London to socialize with them and attend various events. He rarely agreed to travel, and by 1848 he was dead.

John Forster, Dickens’ friend and biographer, writes in The Life of Charles Dickens: “There is no one who approached [Dickens] on these occasions [dancing at parties with the Dickens children] excepting only our attached friend Captain Marryat, who had a frantic delight in dancing, especially with children, of whom and whose enjoyments he was as fond as it became so thoroughly good hearted a man to be. His name would have stood first among those I have been recalling, as he was among the first in Dickens’s liking; but in the autumn of 1848 he had unexpectedly passed away.”

For all the brevity of Dickens’ relationship with Marryat, they were close enough for Dickens to share some juicy gossip. In a letter to Forster, Dickens shines a rare light on Marryat’s rocky marriage. There is an anecdote about Marryat, “as if possessed by the devil,” teaching “every kind of forbidden topic and every species of forbidden word” to the overly sheltered sons of a baronet, and the “martyrdom” he suffered with his wife. Catherine (Kate) Marryat, as described by Dickens, is a violent, temperamental woman who beats her maid and has “no interest whatever in her children.” 

Although Victorian propriety omitted names, as Marryat’s biographer Oliver Warner notes, “The reference might be considered vague enough— except to those who knew Marryat. To them, it must have been so clear that in later editions Forster left out all references by which Kate might identify herself.” Dickens’ 20th century biographer Walter Dexter also names the troubled couple as the Marryats.

Charles Dickens is the only person whose documented, surviving correspondence mentions the fact that Marryat spoke with a lisp. Marryat’s daughter Florence mentions no such thing, and Marryat never gave a speech impediment to his leading characters, but Dickens quips about an old fresco, “I can make out a Virgin with a mildewed Glory round her head and … what Marryat would call the arthe of a cherub.” (A few online articles about Marryat make a lot of hay over this sole mention of a lisp, and they can all thank Charles Dickens for spilling the tea.) Poor Marryat, who reminisced in a laudanum haze about all of his old friends in his final months, including “Charlie Dickens”, did he anticipate this reveal? He really should have known that Dickens had a wit that could be as mocking and caustic as his own.

Principal References (not including Marryat’s own books):

Life and Letters of Captain Frederick Marryat, Florence Marryat (1872)

Life of Charles Dickens, John Forster (1872-1874)

Captain Marryat: A Rediscovery, Oliver Warner (1953)

Puzzled Which to Choose: Conflicting Socio-Political Views in the Works of Captain Frederick Marryat, Louis J. Parascandola (1997)

Captain Marryat: Seaman, Writer, and Adventurer, Tom Pocock (2000)

[marryat92]

The Marryats: a "Happy Family"

The naval historian Tom Pocock's biography of Frederick Marryat, Captain Marryat: Seaman, Writer and Adventurer, draws heavily on previous works (especially Oliver Warner's Captain Marryat: A Rediscovery) and does not reveal much new information. The charm is mostly in the way Pocock weaves together old material.

Perhaps the most interesting part of his book is the inclusion of this previously unpublished drawing by Frank (Samuel Francis) Marryat, one of Captain Marryat's many children. It’s an anthropomorphic caricature of the Marryat brood, and the centerpiece is Frederick Marryat vs. his wife Kate Marryat. Marryat is drawn as a dog, and his wife is an angry cat with her back arched for an obvious “fighting like cats and dogs” joke that gives Frank’s title a snarky edge.

This is hardly a flattering image of Frederick Marryat (even if he’s still sporting a magnificent cravat in his canine form), but it reveals many things — from Marryat’s appearance as a fifty-something man in the 1840s to the company he was keeping in his home.

Florence Marryat wrote of her father, “As a young man, dark crisp curls covered his head; but later in life, when, having exchanged the sword for the pen and the ploughshare, he affected a soberer and more patriarchal style of dress and manner, he wore his grey hair long, and almost down to his shoulders.” (The Life and Letters of Captain Frederick Marryat) This “long hair” is actually a fairly typical 1840s male style; I want to say that decade had some of the longest hair on men in the 19th century.

Then there is the tantalizing glimpse of the Marryat home that was published anonymously in The Cornhill Magazine in 1867 (Pocock plausibly suggests an old friend of Marryat’s, fellow Royal Navy captain and novelist Frederick Chamier, as the author). This article, “Captain Marryat at Langham,” was clearly referenced by Florence Marryat, who was only 15 years old when her father died. Visiting the Marryat home at Langham, Norfolk in the 1840s, the writer describes Captain Marryat’s appearance:

At the time I now speak of him he was fifty-two years of age; but looked considerably younger. His face was clean shaved; and his hair so long that it reached almost to his shoulders, curling in light loose locks like those of a woman. It was slightly grey. He was dressed in anything but evening costume on the present occasion, having on a short velveteen shooting-jacket and coloured trousers. I could not help smiling as I glanced at his dress —recalling to my mind what a dandy he had been as a young man.

If you have studied pictures of fashionable English women of the 1840s, their hair is often styled into bunches of curls at the temples, and Marryat indeed has this look. The figures grouped around him, labeled “Capt. Marryat + family” by Frank, are possibly his eldest daughters Blanche (Charlotte Blanche), Augusta, and Emily (Emilia.) The male figure with a cigarillo might be Captain Marryat’s son Frederick, who tragically drowned on HMS Avenger in 1847. His portrait in the National Maritime Museum depicts him with a similar hairstyle (but no beard), and his hair is dark blond. I suspect that Frank Marryat is the monkey.

Aunt Ellen and Aunt Maria are Captain Marryat’s sisters (Aunt Maria’s husband Henry Lindsay also makes it into the picture). Ellen seems to have been a favourite of her brother, from the amount of correspondence that mentions her in Life and Letters, and she helped care for Frederick in his last days (Warner, Captain Marryat). The presence of Mrs. Marryat in this picture is probably more of a wry joke to Frank than anything else. The complete deed of separation for Frederick and his wife is reproduced in Alan Buster’s Captain Marryat: Sea-Officer Novelist Country Squire and it includes very specific language that both husband and wife will leave each other alone and not interfere with each other’s lives. 

I’m unclear who is supposed to be “Horace” in the drawing (the bird facing the monkey?), but that’s the name of Frederick Marryat’s youngest sibling. There was an astonishing 26-year age gap between second-born Frederick and Horace, which is a thing that can happen when your parents have fifteen children, but by the 1840s Horace would be a young adult and possibly spending time with his famous brother.

The balding man next to Henry Lindsay is labeled “Joe” —could this be Joseph Marryat II?! He appears to have a snub-nosed profile similar to Frederick. There was no love lost between Joseph and Frederick, going by the number of times hated older brothers are killed off in Marryat’s novels, but this “Happy Family” tableau obviously includes an antagonist.

Most amusing to me is the scurrying little dog wearing a cocked hat:

That’s Sir Edward Belcher, most famous for leading the huge Admiralty expedition with a squadron of ships in search of the lost Franklin expedition, and Frederick Marryat’s first cousin. Belcher was close to Frederick, and there’s an anecdote in Robert McCormick’s memoirs about meeting Belcher and Marryat together on shore, at the time Belcher was HMS Terror’s commander in 1836. (Thanks to @handfuloftime​ for bringing that to my attention!) The “Kate Belcher” dog may be his sister Catherine, who married Frederick Marryat’s brother Charles.

Between Frederick Marryat being depicted as a dog by his son, and his receiving the title “Great Water Dog” from a Burmese leader in the First Anglo-Burmese War (”which pleased his simple tastes,” according to Warner), I think it’s possible to conclude that his fursona was a dog that he struck others as having a dog-like nature. He was, in fact, a dog person who loved his spoiled pets. Florence Marryat describes Zinny the King Charles spaniel and Juno the Italian greyhound in Life and Letters: “two very beautiful, but utterly useless, creatures” who are allowed to scamper over Captain Marryat’s papers and flop around without much rebuke.

[marryat92]

I think father and daughter look alike in profile:

I've been so focused on Frederick Marryat's birthday tomorrow, the 10th of July, that I only just noticed that today the 9th is Florence Marryat's birthday! Happy 187th Florence! (It's still her birthday in my time zone, okay.) I was looking it up because I had read a funny quote from Florence, who deliberately mislead a few reporters with different dates for her birth year (which was 1833). Even Oliver Warner had Florence's birth year wrong in his well-researched Captain Marryat biography.

Florence Marryat is chiefly on this blog as a chronicler of her father, but she was an accomplished person in her own right. She wrote something like 70 novels, including the classic female vampire story The Blood of the Vampire.

Florence Marryat scholar Catherine Pope has an excellent web page about her: Florence Marryat – Eminent Victorian.