Desk Notes No.10
Yearning for the past: Mrs Dalloway, British Manufacturing and the eccentric fifth Duke of Portland
Dear friends,
It’s already the end of January, the first check point in the condition of our new year’s resolutions. In many ways January is an odd time to make promises about giving things up or breaking bad habits. With its icy cold, short days and long, gloomy nights, January is already difficult enough. Much admiration for those of you who can make these sorts of resolutions work but, for me at least, they are always doomed. Rather than cutting things out, I have more success making positive commitments: promising to doing more of the things I enjoy, to keep going with hobbies and pursuits that made last year a happy one. If nothing else, it makes the bleak winter months more bearable.
Last year I signed up for the Art Pass. I’ve already made lists of the museums and galleries I’d like to visit (watch out industrial museums of the Black Country!) and, after finally coming to terms with it’s heaving crowds, I’d like to spend more time in London. Having been inspired last year by a few of you who are doing online learning with universities around the country I’d also like to spend more time engaging with the craft of writing.
As print newspapers and online magazines struggle to make ends meet, making a financial investment in yourself as a writer can feel like a false economy. But stagnating at your desk and suffering in silence doesn’t get you anywhere either. They say you have to, “speculate to accumulate,” and I believe that’s almost as true for writers as it is for businessmen. In the past I’ve found the Arvon Foundation’s two-hour, online Masterclasses good value for money, and I’m hoping to find a local group that welcomes non-fiction writers.
In the meantime I’ve signed up to the London Review of Books’ ‘Close Readings’ series, ‘The Long and Short’ - a year long podcast series exploring the craft of short stories and long poems. First up is Alfred Tennyson’s Maud. Rather than doing a quick course and moving on, I’m hoping that a year long series will keep the ideas at the forefront of my mind. I hope to share my progress with you throughout the year. In February I’ll also be starting an intensive course on the lyric essay. I’ll learn about fragmentary writing, collage essays that assemble different pieces of writing, and the political uses of the essay form. I’m excited to get stuck in!
Meanwhile, you might notice that a new section has appeared at the top of the website, ‘Letters & Libations’. This is an exclusive space for our book club - a year long read of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. We’re reading the novel in ‘real time’ - reading each of the novel’s letters on the date it was penned. If you’d like to follow, head over to your Substack settings and make sure the ‘Letters & Libations’ tab is checked. With a break in the letters until 20th February, there’s still time to join in and catch up.
In this January edition of Desk Notes you’ll find:
Print - Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Places - The 5th Duke of Portland: Tunnel Vision an exhibition at The Harley Gallery and Welbeck Estate until 31 December 2023
Pictures - Maurice Bloomfield: Industrial Sublime at the Victoria and Albert Museum until 5 February 2023
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
At the end of last year I was going through a terrible reading slump. I tried books I’d wanted to read for years - Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, Desperate Remedies - and books by modern writers I love, like Rachel Cusk. Nothing would stick. In the end I realised it was me. I was frazzled, burnt out, fed-up. An antidote came from the most unexpected of places, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. Famed for its stream of consciousness narrative, I’d tried and failed to read it half a dozen times before, barely getting beyond the fifth page. I wanted to read it years ago, when writing about the film adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s Dalloway inspired novel, The Hours. I stalled and the article never got written.
One December afternoon, when a friend said he was reading Mrs Dalloway and enjoying it, I picked it up. I had a glance at the first page. With little intention of actually finishing it, I read on. There was a romance to Woolf’s London that my friend seemed to share, and I could see him living inside it. The novel became less terrifying. We were thinking the same things, that the book had an intimidating aura around it, the result of decades of intellectualising. I love a bit of literary geekery (why else would I sign up to a year of LRB podcasts!), I enjoy the rabbit holes, the excessiveness of it. But intellectualising literature comes with the real risk that readers will be put off; will think the book is beyond them. That’s certainly how I felt approaching Mrs Dalloway.
I soon realised that I couldn’t read it in snippets. I had to dive in and let the prose pull me along, wash over me. I had to switch off the part of my brain that was trying to see two things at once; that was trying to figure out whose consciousness I was occupying, or grasp the geography. I relaxed and I was transported by Woolf’s poetry. After reading big chunks, I returned to passages I’d enjoyed and re-read them. It’s some of the most evocative and beautiful prose I’ve ever read.
“Since it was a very hot night and the paper boys went by with placards proclaiming in huge red letters that there was a heatwave, wicker chairs were placed on the hotel steps and there, sipping, smoking, detached gentlemen sat. Peter Walsh sat there. One might fancy that day, the London day, was just beginning. Like a woman who had slipped off her print dress and white apron to array herself in blue and pearls, the day changed, put off stuff, took gauze, changed to evening, and with the same sigh of exhilaration that a woman breathes, tumbling petticoats on the floor, it too shed dust, heat, colour; the traffic thinned; motor cars, tinkling, darting, succeeded the lumber of vans; and here and there among the thick foliage of the squares an intense light hung.”
As the novel’s parallel narratives ebb forward - the married Clarissa Dalloway preparing for a party, her former lover Peter Walsh returning from India, the trauma of a shell shocked First World War veteran - the narrative becomes incredibly rich. In the margins I made notes about colonialism, empire, war, patriotism. The London that Peter returns to is not the same as the one he left. And, as these ageing characters ache for times past (summer nights at Bourton when their passions overflowed), the chiming of Big Ben reminds us of the unstoppable, forward thrust of time. The road not taken is so close you can almost touch it. The characters face living with their choices, wondering if they were the right ones.
Meanwhile, the novel’s shifting perspective reveals how they wound each other through misunderstandings. Condemned as the flimsy and shallow hostess, what Clarissa wants more than anything is to bring down the walls that go up as we age; to conquer our separateness by bringing people together in one room. It’s a more noble endeavour than any of her friends could ever understand.
Places
The 5th Duke of Portland: Tunnel Vision an exhibition at The Harley Gallery and Welbeck Estate until 31 December 2023
You might know him as ‘the burrowing Duke.’ Or perhaps ‘the underground man,’ from Mick Jackson’s novel of the same name. In the 1860s and 70s, Lord John, the 5th Duke of Portland ordered the building of two and three quarter miles of tunnels (often ornately decorated) beneath his land at the family estate of Welbeck, Nottinghamshire. Railway engineering was rapidly developing, but it was a pioneering act to go to such lengths at a private residence. It seems Lord John was fascinated by the possibilities of underground space, constructing entire rooms below ground, including an impressive 15,000 square foot ball room (pictured) with a 63 foot floating roof (being inventively constructed without any supporting pillars, the widest of its kind in the world).
The Duke was notoriously reclusive, an eccentric who shut himself away from the world. An underground ballroom seems a contradiction in terms - just one of the peculiar details that make the Duke so fascinating. In his book, Tunnel Vision: The Enigmatic 5th Duke of Portland, Derek Adlam suggests the ballroom and its associated tunnels were the work of an, “obsessive personality.” But also that the cloistered Duke enjoyed the detailed work and buzz of building projects, using them to maintain, “extensive contact with both family members and his circle of agents, managers, foremen and servants,” if only by letter, but employing thousands of men onsite. His subterranean world has been the source of much speculation, but the Duke was just as busy above ground too: building the second largest riding school in the world; along with elaborate dairy and poultry houses; and adding a 22 acre walled garden which kept his staff in good eating all year round. In a remarkable feat of engineering, he had the roof of Welbeck Abbey lifted, and an entire new floor inserted beneath.
None of this genius stopped the Victorian rumour mill churning and many of the myths and tales about Lord John are still perpetuated today:
That the tunnels allowed his staff to travel around the estate without being seen, allowing him to look out of his windows without seeing a single person;
That any servant who was seen, was sent to skate on the outdoor rink;
That he only ate roast chicken;
That he wore three pairs of socks;
That he communicated to his staff in writing through a letterbox in his bedroom door.
The claim about the letterboxes is true, but lighthearted speculation about the Duke’s eccentricities masks a sadder reality. Adlam finds he was likely suffering from severe psoriasis, which brought on arthritis in later life:
“[The Duke] wrote that he obtained relief by sleeping between wet sheets, and by bleeding with a lance. It is perhaps significant that his small private apartment at Welbeck Abbey was provided with a bathroom next to his bedroom, so enabling him to immerse himself in water drawn from various parts of his estate to ease the irritation… Rumours that he was facially disfigured are untrue, as we have the evidence of Elizabeth Butler, a young laundry maid who worked for the Duke during the last ten years of his life, that his complexion was completely clear. ”
In light of this, the fact that the Duke spent his youth, “tall, handsome and an excellent horseman… seeming to have no concerns in life other than riding, racing, and hunting,” is particularly touching.
Today, the mystery and romance of his underground world is only heightened by the fact it is rarely opened to the public. I’ve spent much of my adult life thinking about it. And so, in the lazy days between Christmas and New Year, I made my way to the Tunnel Vision exhibition at Welbeck’s Harley Gallery (a gem of the Nottinghamshire arts scene). Here, an interactive video let me explore the empty, eerie tunnels, if only vicariously, for the first time. It has only intensified my desire to pace them one day.
Pictures
Maurice Bloomfield: Industrial Sublime at the Victoria & Albert Museum until 5 February 2023
Factories and industry are in my blood. Hailing from the Nottinghamshire-Derbyshire border, I come from a long line of miners and hosiery workers. While I was growing up in the 1980s and 90s, these industries were collapsing, hollowing out our beloved communities. I narrowly missed the heyday of British manufacturing and I’m susceptible to their nostalgia. During the 1950s and 60s, Derby born photographer Maurice Broomfield documented factory life in a series of commissions for adverts and company reports. The curators of Maurice Bloomfield: Industrial Sublime at the Victoria & Albert Museum explain that:
“Rather than emphasising the mechanical or repetitive qualities of modern labour, Broomfield illuminated the strength and sensitivity of individuals. His optimism and pacifism meant that he avoided the reality of the often brutal and dangerous working conditions, presenting the factory like a stage set.”
As the exhibition’s title suggests, the curators draw parallels with the eighteenth century concept of the sublime: “a combination of thrill and fear we can feel when confronted with vast scale, of things and events at the edge of our understanding.” Broomfield’s photographs are nothing short of mesmerising. The image of a man working on a taper roller at the British Timken Works in Daventry, is surreal - worthy of Stanley Kubrick’s science fiction - the light bouncing off a giant, metallic wheel, framing the action within. Walking through the exhibition it’s easy to see the connection between Broomfield and Joseph Wright of Derby, who painted equivalent manufacturing scenes at the cusp of the industrial revolution. Impressed by the intense drama of Wright’s lighting, Broomfield made many visits the The Museum of Derby, where he was inspired by the fires and furnaces illuminating Wright’s energetic subjects:
“Broomfield sometimes asked workers to return to a factory at night so that he could better direct the lighting in darker surroundings,” write the curators, “He usually brought three assistants and packed his car with powerful lights, tripods, an array of cameras suited to distant and close-up work, overalls, ladders and industrial boots. He often chose precarious or dangerous positions to capture an image.”
Working women played a vital role in Broomfield’s art - bottling salad cream at Crosse and Blackwell in Bermondsey, a scientist working at Shell, a machine operative at British Nylon Spinners in Pontypool. A striking image from the latter shows an impeccably dressed woman in high heels and a red headscarf operating machine rollers, hinting at workplace pride and the important social aspect of factory life. In an extract from his film, My Father and Me, documentarian Nick Broomfield introduces his father’s life and work, from his beginnings as an employee at Derby’s largest private employer, Rolls Royce, to recent job losses at the firm. He describes Maurice’s photographs as, “a historic record of Britain’s industrial achievements.” You can watch the eleven minute film below, an ode to the pride, love and care of Britain’s forgotten factory workers.
Wishing you all a lovely, snowdrop filled February. If you have any thoughts on this month’s post, please get in touch in the comments, I’d love to hear from you.
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Featured image is the underground ballroom at the Welbeck Estate, taken from Tunnel Vision: The Enigmatic 5th Duke of Portland courtesy of Welbeck and The Harley Gallery.
Desk Notes No.10
Another tour de force. I love the eclectic nature of Desk Notes.
I wish I'd have a 'snowdrop filled February', but instead I'll have to make do with a 'scorching sun' filled one. Anyway, I love this installment of Desk Notes. So many interesting topics! I see what you mean by intellectualising books. There is such 'intellectual hype' around authors like Woolf that some people might even feel like they are not intelligent enough to read them (many people actually feel the same about history in general). I'm not afraid of Virginia Woolf; not even of Shakespeare. Portuguese author José Saramago, however, I find daunting. I'm fascinated by the story of the 5th Duke, and I've saved the Harley Gallery link to listen to the online talks later. I also love the video on factory workers. The photos do look like something out of a scifi film.