Essays virginia woolf vo.., p.80
Essays Virginia Woolf, Volume 6, page 80
fn5 – I.e. balloons.
fn6 – In October 1933 the portrait of Henry VIII from Castle Howard was exhibited at the galleries of Messrs Spink and Sons, 5–7 King St, St James’s. Its attribution to Hans Holbein (c. 1497–1543), rather than to his ‘school’, aroused much discussion and controversy: see, e.g., The Times, 15 November 1933, pp. 15, 18. In November there was an exhibition of recent etchings and drawings by Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and Henri Matisse (1869–1954) at the Zwemmer Gallery, 26 Litchfield Street, off Charing Cross Road. In October Katharine Church and Henning Nyberg exhibited at the Werheim Gallery, 3–5 Burlington Gardens.
fn7 – See Room, ch. iv, p. 89: ‘Pope, it is thought, remembered and appropriated … “Now the jonquille o’ercomes the feeble brain; / We faint beneath the aromatic pain”’ (Anne Finch, Lady Winchelsea [1661–1720], ‘The Spleen’ (1701), ll. 40–1). On 5 April 1934 VW wrote on a postcard to her nephew Julian Bell: ‘For Heavens sake tell me where does “Die like a rose in aromatic pain” come from? Pope? And what is the right quotation?’ (V VW Letters, no. 2870). Alexander Pope (1688–1744), An Essay on Man, Epistle 1 (1733), l. 200: ‘Die of a’.
fn8 – An Essay on Man, Epistle 1, ll. 193–4: ‘Why has not man a microscopic eye? / For this plain reason, man is not a fly.’
fn9 – For a reproduction of ‘Charles Bradlaugh at the Bar of the House of Commons’ (1891), no. 48 in Agnew’s Catalogue, 1933, see Wendy Baron, Sickert: Paintings and Drawings (Yale University Press, 2006), p. 191, no. 60 (Manchester Art Gallery); for ‘The Right Honourable Winston Churchill, M.P.’ (1927), no. 13, see ibid., p. 520, no. 682 (National Portrait Gallery, London); for ‘Rear-Admiral W. Lumsden, C.I.E., C.V.O.’ (1927–8), no. 43, see ibid., p. 521, no. 686 (Minneapolis Institute of Arts); and for ‘Dr. A. S. Cobbledick’ (c. 1930), no. 50, see ibid., p. 525, no. 695.1 (private collection).
fn10 – For ‘Mrs. George Sitwell Swinton’ (c. 1906), no. 49, see ibid., p. 313, no. 254 (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge). Shone comments that VW ‘invents a story completely at odds with the facts of Mrs Swinton’s life: she was a well-known singer and hostess who had sat to Sickert at no. 8 Fitzroy Street and had never been to Venice’ (Introduction, p. 9).
fn11 – Cf. ‘Sickert has asked me to foreword his show … I am very much set up to think how a writer can be of use in your sublime silent fish-world’ (IV VW Letters, no. 2145, 17 February 1930, to Quentin Bell). Cf. also Christina Rossetti (1830–94), ‘Remember’, OBEV, no. 787, p. 953: ‘Remember me when I am gone away, / Gone far away into the silent land;’.
fn12 – Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), ‘Kubla Khan’, OBEV, no. 550, pp. 650–1.
fn13 – For ‘Rose et Marie’ (1906), no. 22, see Sickert: Paintings and Drawings, p. 319, no. 264 (Portsmouth City Museums); for ‘Christine buys a house’ (1920), no. 32, see ibid., p. 472, no. 541 (location unknown); and for ‘A Difficult Moment’ (date unknown), no. 11, see ref. ibid., p. 512, no. 642.
fn14 – For ‘Ennui’ (c. 1916), no. 45, see ibid., p. 408, no. 418.4 (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford). Shone comments that VW’s ‘interpretation of Ennui, still Sickert’s most famous painting, has gained classic status … The subject has become indissoluble from Virginia Woolf’s reading of it … It is, of course, an improbabl[e] situation – what landlord would be smoking a cigar, his wife slouched in boredom, during opening hours with a customer “tapping his glass impatiently on the bar counter”?’ (Introduction, p. 9).
fn15 – I.e. ‘Yvonne’ (c. 1917), no. 19; see Sickert: Paintings and Drawings, p. 437, no. 463.1 (private collection). For ‘Nuit d’Amour’ (c. 1920), no. 1, a painting of Vernet’s café-chantant seen from the street, see ibid., p. 498, no. 584.
fn16 – The Adelphi was a riverside development of terraced houses built by the Adam brothers. The vaults underneath raised it to the level of the Strand; they were notorious in the nineteenth century for ‘the most abandoned characters’. Cf. The Voyage Out (Hogarth Press, 1929), ch. xxv, pp. 404–5: ‘Rachel again shut her eyes, and found herself walking through a tunnel under the Thames, where there were little deformed women sitting in archways playing cards, while the bricks of which the wall was made oozed with damp, which collected into drops and slid down the wall’; see also ch. v, p. 86.
fn17 – Charles Dickens (1812–70); George Meredith (1828–1909); Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850); George Gissing (1857–1903); Arnold Bennett (1867–1931).
fn18 – Designed by Thomas Sheraton (1751–1806).
fn19 – In Berwick Street, Soho.
fn20 – For VW on Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–83), see ‘The Novels of Turgenev’ above.
fn21 – I.e. ‘Victor Lecour[t]’ (1921–4), no. 7; see Sickert: Paintings and Drawings, p. 481, no. 559 (Manchester Art Gallery).
fn22 – Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822); William Blake (1757–1827).
fn23 – There were three paintings of San Marco in the exhibition: nos 8, 39 and 46; for no. 46 (c. 1895), see Sickert: Paintings and Drawings, p. 216, no. 99.1 (Loyd Collection, Betterton House, Lockinge, Berks).
fn24 – I.e. ‘Bath’ (c. 1917–18), no. 33; see ref. ibid., p. 452, no. 493.1 (Tate Gallery, London).
fn25 – George Crabbe (1754–1832); William Wordsworth (1770–1850); William Cowper (1731–1800).
fn26 – Hogarth Press has: ‘himself | how’.
fn27 – Julius Caesar, II, i, 285: ‘As dear to me as are the ruddy drops / That visit my sad heart.’
fn28 – Robert Herrick (1591–1674), The Hesperides & Noble Numbers, ed. Alfred Pollard, preface by A. C. Swinburne (Lawrence and Bullen, 1891), ‘Hesperides’, no. 105, ‘To Electra’, p. 40.
fn29 – Alexander Pope, ‘Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady’, OBEV, no. 441, pp. 504–7.
fn30 – John Keats (1795–1821).
fn31 – Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–92).
fn32 – John Dryden (1631–1700); Charles Lamb (1775–1834); William Hazlitt (1778–1830).
fn33 – I.e. ‘Miss Katie Lawrence at Gatti’s Hungerford Restaurant: Tom Tinsley in the Chair’ (c. 1903), no. 26; see Sickert: Paintings and Drawings, p. 329, no. 279 (Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney).
fn34 – ‘It’s a Bit of a Ruin that Cromwell Knocked About a Bit’ was the last song Marie Lloyd (stage name of Matilda Alice Victoria Wood, 1870–1922) sang in public, at the Edmonton Empire on 3 October 1922. See II VW Diary, 8 April 1921: ‘We went to the Bedford Music Hall last night, & saw Miss Marie Lloyd, a mass of corruption – long front teeth – a crapulous way of saying “desire”, & yet a born artist – scarcely able to walk, waddling, aged, unblushing. A roar of laughter went up when she talked of her marriage. She is beaten nightly by her husband.’
fn35 – Cf. Between the Acts (Hogarth Press, 1941), p. 68: ‘“Thoughts without words,” her brother mused. “Can that be?”’
fn36 – See n. 1.
fn37 – Sickert was born in Munich; his father, Oswald Adalbert Sickert (1828–85), was a Danish painter and illustrator born in Schleswig-Holstein; his mother, Eleanor Louisa Moravia Henry (1830–1922), was the illegitimate daughter of the English astronomer Richard Sheepshanks (1794–1855). The treaty of 1864 between Germany and Denmark decreed that from January 1867 natives of Schleswig-Holstein were citizens of Prussia, and the family settled in England in 1868. At various times, Sickert lived in France (including at Dieppe 1898–1905).
fn38 – Aeschylus (525/4–456/5 BC).
fn39 – ‘In April 1925 [Sickert] decided to call himself by his full name, Walter Richard Sickert; by the autumn he often dropped the Walter and Richard Sickert was born’ (ODNB).
Royalty
fn1 – A signed review in Time and Tide, 1 December 1934, (Kp4 C345), for which VW was paid six guineas (WSU), of The Story of My Life by Marie, Queen of Roumania (2 vols, Cassell, 1934); a third vol. was published in 1935. Marie (1875–1938) was the granddaughter of Queen Victoria, daughter of the Duke of Edinburgh (1844–1900) and consort of Ferdinand I (1865–1927), King of Roumania. Also in this issue: ‘The Frozen Earth’, a poem by Winifred Holtby; and G. [Gwen] Raverat on ‘Art’, concerning current exhibitions (including eighteen recent paintings by Walter Sickert at the Leicester Galleries). On 24 October 1934 VW wrote: ‘I have been toiling at an article on the Queen of Roumania: by way of a rest’ (IV VW Diary). See also III VW Diary, 27 December 1930: ‘Oh & I’ve read Q.V.’s letters; & wonder what wd. happen had Ellen Terry been born Queen. Complete disaster to the Empire? Q.V. entirely unaesthetic; a kind of Prussian competence, & belief in herself her only prominences; material; brutal[?] to Gladstone; like a mistress with a dishonest footman. Knew her own mind. But the mind radically commonplace[;] only its inherited force, & cumulative sense of power, making it remarkable.’ See also ‘Royalty’, Appendix II below. Reading notes (1 page) on royalty, which can be dated to November 1934, but are not concerned with The Story of My Life (Berg, RN 1.26) (VWRN XXVI, B30). Reprinted: Mom (incorrectly dated ‘Written in 1939’), W&W, WE.
fn2 – George (1902–42), 1st Duke of Kent, fifth child and fourth son of George V, married Princess Marina (1906–68) of Greece on 29 November 1934. See V VW Letters, no. 2958, 5 December [1934].
fn3 – The Story of My Life, vol. i, p. 42. King Edward VII (1841–1910) reigned from 1901.
fn4 – Ibid., p. 31, which has: ‘Mamma had an old maid called Kitty Renwick’ and ‘especially castor-oil pills that looked’.
fn5 – Ibid., p. 26, which has: ‘little squares of skin, which was simply the top part of the bouillie slightly burnt’.
fn6 – Ibid., p. 248.
fn7 – Ibid., vol. ii, p. 277.
fn8 – Ibid., vol. i, p. 40; the Swiss Cottage museum, Osborne, Isle of Wight.
fn9 – The Letters of Queen Victoria, Third Series, A Selection from Her Majesty’s Correspondence and Journal Between the Years 1886 and 1901, ed. George Earle Buckle (3 vols, John Murray, 1930–2), vol. i, 1886–1890, Queen Victoria to Sir Henry Ponsonby, 3 March 1886, p. 70. The Serbo-Bulgarian War of November 1885 had been concluded by the peace treaty signed on 19 February 1886 in Bucharest.
fn10 – Ibid., Queen Victoria’s Journal, 26 April 1889, p. 497.
fn11 – The Story of My Life, vol. ii, pp. 322–3.
fn12 – Elizabeth of Wied (1843–1916), Queen Consort of King Carol I of Roumania (1839–1914), was widely known by her nom de plume of Carmen Sylva.
fn13 – The Letters of Queen Victoria, Third Series, vol. i, Queen Victoria’s Journal, 2 October 1890, p. 643, which has: ‘read in German’; the square brackets are VW’s.
fn14 – The Story of My Life, vol. ii, p. 292; cf. p. 56: ‘a touch of the absurd’.
fn15 – See ibid., pp. 241–3.
fn16 – Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949), La Vie des abeilles (1901). Queen Emma (1858–1934) of the Netherlands, Queen Consort of William III (1817–90). The secretary was Dal’Orso. The incident is described in The Story of My Life, vol. ii, pp. 258–9: ‘Holland’s dowager, in sober grey, lace cap and all, was demurely drawing a prosaic thread through something which looked useful’ (p. 258).
fn17 – Louis de Louvroy, duc de Saint-Simon (1675–1755), diplomat and memoirist; Marcel Proust (1871–1922).
fn18 – ‘Onkel’ was King Carol I, the uncle of ‘Nando’, Ferdinand, Crown Prince of Roumania.
fn19 – Whipsnade Park Zoo, near Dunstable in Bedfordshire, opened in 1931 as the Zoological Society’s country outpost.
fn20 – Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), Prometheus Unbound, a ‘lyrical drama in four acts’ (1820); Emily Brontë (1818–48), Wuthering Heights (1847). In 1934 the order of succession to the throne was Edward, Prince of Wales (1894–1972), Albert, Duke of York (1895–1952), and Princess Elizabeth (b. 1926); although they succeeded in turn as Edward VIII (reigned 1936), George VI (1936–52) and Elizabeth II (from 1952), no one in 1934 would have known that the Duke of York would adopt George as his regnal name.
The Roger Fry Memorial Exhibition
fn1 – An opening address on 12 July 1935 at the Roger Fry Memorial Exhibition, Bristol Museum and Art Gallery (published as a pamphlet on 18 September, Kp4 A21; see IV VW Diary, 16 July). Shortly after Fry (1866–1934) died, ‘his family and friends started to discuss the need for a biography’; ‘gradually, Virginia Woolf became not just contributor to, and coordinator of the proposed volume of reminiscences’, but ‘it remains unclear precisely when and how she committed herself to more than an essay’: see Diane F. Gillespie’s introduction to Roger Fry: A Biography (1940; Shakespeare Head Press, Blackwell Publishers, 1995), pp. xiii, xvi, xviii. On 20 June 1935 VW wrote: ‘Margery Fry rang up to ask me to open an Ex[hibitio]n of Roger’s paintings at Bristol; to speak for 15 minutes. Oh we should all love it! she said’ (IV VW Diary). On 21 June she wrote to her sister Vanessa: ‘I’ve just let myself in for rather an awful, and I daresay unnecessary undertaking – to go down to Bristol and open a show of Rogers pictures next month. Ha [Margery Fry] rang me up, and as she was very considerate and said I mustn’t do it, but of course it would make the Exhibition known etc; I felt I must. It only means speaking for 15 minutes, and we shall go on to Weymouth for a treat. I gather it has been got up entirely by the Frys’ (V VW Letters, no. 3031). After the event she recorded that ‘the Bristol speech was weighing on me … so I … wrote it, learnt it, said it & went to Bristol, the hottest day of the year on Friday [12 July] & said it, dripping, to a large, but not I think very appropriate audience. It puzzles me why such displays, using up so much nerve power, should be needed. There was Roger’s face on the canvas, smiling at me, & them. But oh the heavenly relief when we drove off in the hot evening’ (IV VW Diary, 15 July 1935; see also V VW Letters, nos 3046–7, July 1935). VW told her nephew Julian: ‘its purely formal and not at all satisfactory; one always lies when one speaks in public’ (V VW Letters, no. 3085, 1 [6th, p.m.] December 1935). See also ‘Vision and Design’ below. Typescript draft (Smith College Library, Rare Book Room). Reprinted: Mom, CE.
fn2 – ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ (8 November 1910–15 January 1911) included paintings by Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), Henri Matisse (1869–1954) and Pablo Picasso (1881–1973); see VW’s discussion in Roger Fry: A Biography (Hogarth Press, 1940), ch. vii, ‘The Post-Impressionists’, sec. i, pp. 151–62. Ramsay MacDonald (1866–1937), Prime Minister 1924, 1929–35, formed a National Government in August 1931 to deal with the economic crisis, thereby splitting the Labour Party; he resigned on 7 June 1935. Adolf Hitler (1889–1945), Führer of Germany from 1934. David Lloyd George (1863–1945), Prime Minister 1916–22.
fn3 – Edgar Degas (1834–1917). VW also describes this incident in Roger Fry, ch. xi, ‘Transformations’, sec. xiv, p. 296, as does LW in his autobiography, but with a Poussin painting: see Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911–1918 (Hogarth Press, 1964), p. 96.
fn4 – The Woolfs together with Roger and his sister Margery Fry (1874–1958) travelled to Greece via Venice in April–May 1932. Without mentioning Roger’s companions, VW refers to this holiday in Roger Fry, ch. xi, ‘Transformations’, sec. xi, pp. 280–1. See also Beginning Again, pp. 97–8.
The Captain’s Death Bed
fn1 – An unsigned leading article in the TLS, 26 September 1935, (Kp4 C346), for which VW was paid £25 10s. (WSU). The issue also contained reviews of Rachel the Immortal … by Bernard Falk, The Life of Charles Gore by G. L. Prestige and Middle Age, 1885–1932 by [Gladys Ellen Easdale]. On 27 July 1935 VW wrote: ‘I’ve got such a mass of writing and reading to do down here [at Rodmell] and can only sit on the terrace and look at a swarm of bees, and read Captain Marryat’ (V VW Letters, no. 3053). On 3 August she wrote: ‘I took a flight into Marryat’ (IV VW Diary) and on 22 August she ‘[f]inished Marryat’ (ibid.). On 13 September she recorded that ‘[Bruce] Richmond [editor of the TLS] accepts my Marryat & thanks me for his poor little knighthood!’ (ibid.). After publication she told Nelly Cecil: ‘being horribly bored by [the Italian invasion of] Abyssinia I took down the first book I saw that looked unlike the state of things in the Times, and I rather liked the story of the roses and the looking glasses’ (VI VW Letters, no. 3064a). Reading notes (Berg, RN 1.10) (VWRN X). Reprinted: CDB, CE.
fn2 – See Florence Marryat (Mrs Ross Church) [1837–99], Life and Letters of Captain Marryat [1792–1848] (2 vols, Richard Bentley, 1872), vol. ii, ch. v, pp. 129–30, which has: ‘Columns’ (p. 130; similarly in ch. x, p. 287).
fn3 – Ibid., ch. x, pp. 299–300, which has: ‘… opened the window … no sensation of hunger …’; the square brackets are VW’s.
fn4 – Ibid., ch. vi, p. 152.
fn5 – Ibid., p. 151.
fn6 – Prince Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex (1773–1843), son of George III.
fn7 – See Life and Letters, vol. ii, ch. x, p. 265. See also DNB: ‘The refusal of the admiralty to entertain his application [in July 1847 for service afloat] exasperated him, and in his anger he broke a blood-vessel of the lungs.’ George Eden, Earl of Auckland (1784–1849), politician, governor general of India 1835–42, and First Lord of the Admiralty 1834–5 and 1846–9.
fn8 – See Life and Letters, vol. ii, ch. iii, pp. 74–6.
fn9 – See ibid., vol. i, ch. i, p. 15. Thomas Cochrane, 10th Earl of Dundonald (1775–1860).
fn10 – Ibid., ch. iii, pp. 46–7; VW omits the entry for 30 July: ‘Attacked and took the Castle of Mongat; received ninety-five prisoners.’
fn11 – ‘To surprise and carry off (a ship) from a harbour, etc., by getting between her and the shore’ (OED).
fn12 – First Anglo-Burmese War, 1823–6. For the gilt war-boat, see Life and Letters, vol. i, ch. viii, p. 150.
fn13 – See John Marshall, R.N., Royal Naval Biography: or, memoirs of the services of all the Flag Officers, Superannuated Rear-Admirals, Retired-Captains, Post-Captains … on the Admiralty list … (8 vols, 1823–35), vol. iii (Longman …, 1831), pt i, ‘Captains of 1825’ (running head), ‘Frederick Marryat, Esq.’, pp. 261–70: ‘In November 1830, his private affairs obliged him to resign the command of the Ariadne, since which he has not been employed’ (p. 270).
