Solomon Eagle: re-reading Defoe in the time of Coronavirus

In which I resolve to spend this period of enforced isolation writing letters by hand, re-reading Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year and re-starting my blog.

You’d think that self-isolation and social distancing offer plenty of opportunities for reading and writing. And so, of course, they do. I have made a list of the friends and others to whom I owe long-overdue letters, and have even made a start at writing them, by hand and using a fountain pen. The last study day I conducted before such events were proscribed was on Seamus Heaney; my audience of students (people, like me, at risk from Covid-19 by virtue of our age) especially enjoyed his poem The Conway Stewart with its loving description of the ‘Three gold bands in the clip-on screw-top’ and the ‘spatulate, thin / Pump-action lever’ in the pen’s ‘mottled barrel’. The poem recalls how Heaney’s parents bought him a fountain pen to take to boarding school, the pen with which he would write his first letter home –

     my longhand

‘Dear’

To them, next day.

No poet I have ever come across has written more movingly about the life of a bewildered child at boarding school.

I have made a list of the books I want to read or reread, starting with Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722). It isn’t a journal at all: he himself was only six when the Great Plague devastated the population of London:

1665 - No-one left alive

1666 - London burnt to fiddlesticks

(as I learned in my first term at my own boarding school). Defoe’s first-person narrator claims to have reconstructed his ‘journal’ from notes he made at the time in his ‘memorandums’, together with extracts from oral accounts, public documents, official records and other sources, but really it is as much a work of fiction – an event ‘witnessed’ by a man who never existed – as Peter Ackroyd’s 1985 novel of the Plague and its aftermath, Hawksmoor. Still, Defoe’s account resonates strongly: it is all about self-isolating, social distancing – people walking down the centre of the Whitechapel Road to avoid getting too close to those standing on the pavements – and the difficulties of shopping:

People used all possible precaution. When any one bought a joint of meat in the market they would not take it off the butcher’s hand, but took it off the hooks themselves. On the other hand, the butcher would not touch the money, but have it put into a pot full of vinegar, which he kept for that purpose. The buyer carried always small money to make up any odd sum, that they might take no change. (p.88)

The strange ways in which Londoners started to behave during the Plague, and Defoe’s comments about them: the book is worth reading for these alone. The Guardian Review used to run a quirky weekly column, Ten of the Best….’ and Solomon Eagle topped the list of ‘Ten of the Best Religious Zealots in Literature’, even though he gets only a glancing mention by Defoe:

I suppose the world has heard of the famous Solomon Eagle, an enthusiast. He, though not affected at all but in his head, went about denouncing of judgement upon the city in a frightful manner, sometimes quite naked, and with a pan of burning charcoal on his head. What he said, or pretended, indeed I could not learn. (p.116)

By one of those odd coincidences that gladden the heart, I discovered on the very day I read about him in Defoe, that ‘Solomon Eagle’ was the pen name adopted by the poet and literary editor JC Squire, when he was book reviewer for The New Statesman before and during the First World War. In his heyday, Squire was possibly the most influential bookman in London: among his greatest claims to fame, he founded and edited the new London Mercury from 1919 to 1934. Although he fell spectacularly out of favour with writers such as TS Eliot and Virginia Woolf, and out of fashion altogether by the 1940s, he was a formidable, fascinating figure who is today all but forgotten. So it’s good to report that the writer John Smart, a specialist on London literary life (his biography of John Hayward is a key work on the subject) is completing a biography of Squire. A reassessment of this contradictory and complicated man is certainly overdue.

What I most want to do during these weeks of enforced inactivity is not only to read more and to write more letters, however. I want to return to writing this blog, which I began in August 2011 and which stuttered to a halt after 113 posts in 2018. The stutter developed not because I had grown tired of blogging, but because I was focusing more and more on writing about stained glass; eventually the effort of researching and completing two books* on that subject absorbed all my energy. After the second one was published early last year, I tried a few times to start again but struggled to produce even a stutter. Meanwhile, writing and speaking about stained glass have continued to take up much of my time.

Now, though, seems the moment to try again, always remembering Beaumarchais’ admonition: ‘La difficulté de réussir ne fait qu’ajouter à la nécessité d’entreprendre’  (The difficulty of succeeding only adds to the necessity of undertaking). As before, I shall aim to range across books, writers and readers, with occasional digressions onto people and places, even stained glass perhaps. Already I think I know one book I shall be writing about soon: Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting, just published and very well reviewed. I have only started to read it; but I’ve also skimmed through the bibliography at the back. To my astonishment, Imagism and After: a Study of the Poetry of Richard Aldington, is listed there – my MA thesis, deposited in Durham University Library in 1975 where, I had always assumed, it had lain unread and gathering dust ever since. Evidently not, but you’ll have to wait until I have read and written about this book centred on Mecklenburgh Square, on the edge of Bloomsbury, to learn why not.

Adrian Barlow

27 March 2020

* Kempe: the Life, Art and Legacy of Charles Eamer Kempe (2018)

   Espying Heaven: the Stained Glass of Charles Eamer Kempe and his Artists (2019)

Illustrations: 

(i) 'Solomon Eagle’ drawing by EM Ward (1848); Wellcome Institute, reproduced under Creative Commons licence. 

(ii) The London Mercury: cover. This journal was cherished as much for the quality of its typography and illustrations as for its content.

Kempe’s Bells - a Postscript

Describing himself as ‘a pedantic old palaeographer’, a friend of mine who had just read Ring Out, Wild Bells! (my previous post) suggested tactfully that I had misread the last word of the telegram sent to Charles Eamer Kempe on 21^st June 1887. He was right, of course: what I had too hastily transcribed as ‘all three’ is actually the name ‘Attree’. It makes quite a difference.

I had assumed that the telegram referred to the three bells Kempe had donated to his local church, All Saints Lindfield, Sussex, where he was churchwarden. He had given these to enable a full peal to be rung in celebration of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. I admit that the word, as written out by a Telegraph Office clerk, looked more like ‘alt[h]ree’, but I had made the mistake of underestimating the clerk’s accuracy. The transcription error was mine, not his. What’s worse, I’d failed to notice that the word began with a capital ‘A’, albeit in the old-fashioned script form I was taught at my own primary school. So, on all counts my misreading was an egregious error, and I must apologise – not least to Mr Attree, whoever he was.

But I think I can identify him. Attree, I’ve discovered, was (is) a widespread Sussex name. In Kempe’s own immediate neighbourhood and in his own time, there were plenty of Attrees listed in the census returns of 1881 and 1891: a blacksmith at Bolney, an innkeeper at Cuckfield, gardeners, carriers and so on – all indispensible members of a rural community in those days. But Kempe’s family came originally from Brighton and in the late 18^th - early 19^th centuries both the Kemps*and the Attrees were property speculators. However, in Brighton in the 1880s perhaps the most well-known Attree was George F Attree, who combined two important businesses. As both undertaker and auctioneer, he provided what was doubtless a useful, two-in-one service, dispatching not only the deceased themselves but their belongings too. Indeed, George was a man of parts, with a keen interest in promoting bell-ringing. It was through his endeavours that the Sussex County Association of Change Ringers (SCACR) was founded in 1885, and he was its first Secretary.

So I think it likely Kempe would not only have known George but would have consulted him about his plans for the Lindfield bells. What’s more, I suspect Attree himself was one of the ringers of the Jubilee peal: already an experienced change ringer, he would have been a valuable addition to what might otherwise have been a team of novices: this was the first peal rung from the Lindfield tower – and ringing a full peal requires stamina, practice and terrific concentration. It may even be that this peal was rung not by local Lindfield men but by SCACR ringers brought in for the occasion.

I’d love to know if the name ‘Attree, GF’ appears on a board in the All Saints ringing chamber, recording this memorable first peal. If it does, then it should be no surprise that, after the peal was successfully completed, George sent Kempe a telegram on his way home, telling him the ring had been completed in precisely three hours seven minutes and reporting that the bells were ‘good and go well’.

In addition to my friendly palaeographer, I have had a number of responses to ‘Ring Out, Wild Bells’. Some sided with Ezra Pound; but for my own part I always enjoy the sound of a peal of six, eight or even twelve bells going like the clappers – a campanological simile, as it happens. In Tydd St. Mary, the Fenland village where I lived in the 1950s, the bells were rung every Sunday morning. My father, the Rector of Tydd, always regretted that the bell ringers, having come down from the tower, sat at the back of the congregation so that they could sidle out when his sermon began, to enjoy an early pint at the nearby Six Bells.

Even more vivid, however, than the Sunday peal, is my memory of the Nine Tailors being rung to announce a death: nine solemn strokes and then, at half-minute intervals, one stroke for each year of his life. The whole village stopped to count: men and women weeding between the emerging rows of peas would pause, unstoop and lean on their hoes until the bell ceased tolling – this I have not forgotten. ‘Never send to know for whom the bell tolls’, warned John Donne, from whom Ernest Hemingway later borrowed the phrase; ‘What passing bell for these who die as cattle?” demanded Wilfred Owen, and Thomas Hardy wondered

… will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom,

And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings,

Till they rise again, as they were a new bell's boom,

"He hears it not now, but used to notice such things"?

It was this verse – and in particular the second line – that Seamus Heaney recalled when writing ‘Chanson d’Aventure’, the remarkable love poem addressed to his wife in which he relived the trauma of the stroke he suffered and from which he nearly died. As the ambulance hurtles him along familiar Irish roads the fear of being separated from his wife makes him recall at once Keats and a famous line from ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, the bell-ringer of a staunchly republican Irish village and his own efforts ringing the chapel bell as a student at St. Columba’s College:

Apart: the very word is like a bell

That the sexton Malachy Boyle outrolled

In illo tempore in Bellaghy

Or the one I tolled in Derry in my turn

As College bellman ….

that last word even summoning ‘the owl that shriek’d, the fatal bellman’ from Macbeth.

All of which is a long way from Charles Kempe and George Attree, if indeed it was George who sent the telegram. But it just shows how powerfully bells resonate – across time and poetry.

Adrian Barlow

[Illustration: the Kempe arms, used as a mark to identify the S transept window of Hereford Cathedral, 1895

* It was Charles Kempe himself who added the final ‘e’ to the family name, seeking to revive a connection to the old family line that included Cardinal Kempe (c.1380-1454), Archbishop of Canterbury.

The Thomas Hardy stanza quoted above concludes his poem ‘Afterwards’ in Moments of Vision (1917). The lines by Seamus Heaney are from ‘Chanson d’Aventure’ in Human Chain (London: Faber and Faber, 2010) p.15.

I have written about Tydd St Mary once before, in Cuthbert, Dibble, Grubb.

I have also blogged about Heaney before:

   World and Time: Heaney’s penwork

   World and time: Heaney's Human Chain

   Heaney and the conversation of poetry

   Seamus Heaney full face

   History, Heaney and Hilary Mantel