Desk Notes No.20

Virginia Woolf, The Years & The Devil's Acre

Nov 26, 2023

Dear friends,

I’ve been spending a lot of time with a picture by Simon Palmer, Two Women of Integrity.

There’s often a path leading towards the back of a Simon Palmer landscape. On this particular path, two women meet, one dressed in a coat of vibrant jade, the other in cerise. A palladian mansion stands in the distance, a cottage for workers to the right. All are dwarfed by elongated trees whose sculptural trunks and arm-like branches reach all the way to the top of the frame. Everything is bathed in golden light. It feels like autumn but the leaves have not yet dropped. The pale blue sky is chill.

This picture is everything that’s special about an autumn walk in the English countryside. It has me yearning for National Trust parkland, the aroma of crisp air and peaty earth. It feels like home, the landscape of north Derbyshire, the reassuring scenery of Chatsworth with its tea rooms and farm shops. Meanwhile I watch from my window as one of the grandest, oldest trees in the neighbourhood is scalped, unlikely to see another summer. My heart retreats into the painting.

Architecture aside, the picture is historically anonymous. The women, in their trousers and hats, could belong to our own age or that of Virginia Woolf. They are meeting with purpose. That Palmer painted the scene in aid of the Marie Collins Foundation (which supports victims and survivors of child abuse), empowers these miniature figures, elevating them to the status of suffragettes or pioneers; women whose determination will change lives in the face of all the forces railed against them. Hope as the sun sets and the harvest is reaped.

Print - The Years by Virginia Woolf (1937)

Places - The Devil’s Acre, Old Pye Street, and the Peabody buildings, Central London

Print

The Years by Virginia Woolf (1937)

Since finishing Virginia Woolf’s The Years earlier this month I’ve been thinking a lot about its origins. The book began life as a form-twisting ‘Novel-Essay’. Woolf intended to juxtapose the fictional lives of the Pargiter family with factual commentary, focussing on the sexual lives of women between 1880 and, rather serendipitously, 2023. A sort-of sequel to A Room Of One’s Own. Woolf put pen to paper in 1932 but by February the following year the essays had been dropped. They would eventually be reshaped into The Three Guineas.

It would be another five gruelling years before the novel’s publication in 1937, with the story ending in that ‘present day’. What fascinated me most about the novel, at the time I was reading it, were its omissions. Following the lives of the Pargiters and their extended family, there are at least fifteen major characters to keep track of. Half-way through, I bit the bullet and drew myself a family tree. Unable to trace each in detail, Woolf’s characters fall in and out of the action, heard of (perhaps for decades) only in passing. People get married, have children, go to prison, all in the novel’s gaps.

With so much happening — so much that could be presented to the reader — why does Woolf choose these particular incidents, from the perspective of these particular characters? 1918, the end of the First World War, is awarded just three pages and is presented entirely from the perspective of the Pargiters’ retired, somewhat decrepit servant, Crosby. There’s a sense of irrelevance — the war’s and her own — which suggests both human resilience and futility:

“The war was over — so somebody told her as she took her place in the queue at the grocer’s shop. The guns went on booming and the sirens wailed.”

Life goes on. And will keep going on. Society, dances, youth is explored in 1907 entirely from outside, through the perspective of Sarah Pargiter trying to sleep in a hot attic room while the sounds of the ball waft in through the open window. While seemingly crucial episodes are left out — Eleanor’s sojourn in India or Delia’s relocation to Ireland — peripheral observations take hold creating a rich impression of London life:

“The omnibus moved on. She found herself staring at an old man in the corner who was eating something out of a paper bag. He looked up and caught her staring at him.
‘Like to see what I've got for supper, lady?’ he said, cocking one eyebrow over his rheumy, twinkling old eyes. And he held out for her inspection a hunk of bread on which was laid a slice of cold meat or sausage.”

What is inside the frame? What isn’t? How might the effect have been different had other choices been made? These are the questions I ask when thinking about cinema. I found myself asking them, almost constantly, when reading The Years. Woolf was asking them too. Her 1936 galley sheets for the novel are full of crossing-out and re-writing. Sharing an excerpt in her piece for the Bulletin of the New York Public Library in 1977, Grace Radin writes that:

“The careful changes Virginia Woolf made in this passage are typical of what one finds throughout, so that in a page-by-page comparison of the galley proofs and the published novel, the re-working of the text emerges as a remarkable accomplishment, achieved in less than two months.”

She goes on to share “two enormous chunks” that Woolf cut from the novel shortly before its publication:

“The first question that arises from the discovery of these lengthy deletions is how it could be possible for a novel to survive such an amputation and still retain its integrity as a coherent work. But The Years is not a highly plotted novel, with a clear-cut relationship between the action of one scene and what happens in the next. Rather, it is developed through a reverberative structure, with a continuity that works through a series of repetitions and reflections on past events, so that phrases and situations recur again and again, seeming the same, yet each time a little different. Thus, even the deletion of entire episodes can go almost unnoticed.”

A lesser writer might have been tempted to give us all the moments we crave and more — an early draft of her novel came in at 740 pages - but not Woolf. No, she lets us do the imaginative work ourselves, giving us characters with privacies and mysteries. It seems fitting for a novel which seems, to me at least, to be about our inability to really know each other; or to express ourselves with clarity. A novel about the fear of being truly, outwardly, ourselves.

Places

The Devil’s Acre, Old Pye Street, and the Peabody buildings, Central London

The theme of class is coded into the very geography of Woolf’s The Years. Women who lose their patriarchs find themselves on the wrong side of the river, living in flats in less salubrious parts of town. Grand houses are repurposed as bedsits, while new apartments spring up for “middle-class people of limited incomes.” The built landscape of London changes and reshapes.

Reading The Years together, a friend and I began speculating about the location of the sordid encounter at the start of the novel. In 1880, the patriarch of the family, Colonel Abel Pargiter, distances himself from his dying wife with a visit to his mistress in “a street of dingy little houses” in Westminster, “under the huge bulk of the Abbey.” We decided to have a walk around the location of the old Victorian slum, The Devil’s Acre which occupied the nearby area surrounding Old Pye Street.

According to the Londonist, in 1850 Cardinal Wiseman became the first to describe The Devil’s Acre as a slum, the first time, in fact, that the term was used in this way. Journalist Alexander Mackey was also writing about the area in 1850:

“The square block comprised between Dean, Peter, and Tothill Streets, and Strutton Ground. It is permeated by Orchard Street, St. Anne's Street, Old and New Pye Streets, Pear Street, Perkins’ Rents, and Duck Lane. From some of these, narrow covered passage-ways lead into small quadrangular courts, containing but a few crazy, tumble-down-looking houses, and inhabited by characters of the most equivocal description. The district, which is small in area, is one of the most populous in London, almost every house being crowded with numerous families, and multitudes of lodgers…
“There are other parts of the town as filthy, dingy, and forbidding in appearance as this, but these are generally the haunts more of poverty than crime. But there are none in which guilt of all kinds and degrees converges in such volume as on this, the moral plague-spot not only of the metropolis, but also of the kingdom. And yet from almost every point of it you can observe the towers of [Westminster] Abbey peering down upon you, as if they were curious to observe that to which they seem to be indifferent.”

Many of these streets still exist and, certainly, Strutton Ground still has the feel of old London about it. But by 1880 when Woolf sets the first part of her novel, plans were in place to demolish the slums. In their place, the Peabody buildings would be raised. London’s first housing association, the Peabody Donation Fund was committed to the building of ‘model dwellings’ for London’s poor. In the process of the demolition, 1,700 people were displaced. The impressive buildings of the Abbey Orchard and Old Pye Street estates now stand on the site, part of a historic conservation area.

By the end of the century, when Charles Booth was working on his poverty maps, the Peabody buildings were categorised as ‘mixed: some comfortable, others poor,’ while an area slightly to the south, around Chadwick Street continued to be categorised as of the ‘lowest class: vicious, semi-criminal.’ Even then it seems the contrast between the area and that of Westminster Abbey, which Alexander Mackey noted in 1850, continued to be striking:

“There are multitudes who believe that Westminster is a city of palaces, of magnificent squares, and regal terraces; that it is the chosen seat of opulence, grandeur and refinement; and that filth, squalor, and misery are the denizens of other and less favoured sections of the metropolis. The error is not in associating with Westminster much of the grandeur and splendour of the capital, but in entirely dissociating it in idea from the darker phases of metropolitan life. As the brightest lights cast the deepest shadows, so are the splendours and luxuries of the West-end found in juxtaposition with the most deplorable manifestations of human wretchedness and depravity. There is no part of the metropolis which presents a more chequered aspect, both physical and moral, than Westminster. The most lordly streets are frequently but a mask for the squalid districts which lie behind them… There is no district in London more filthy and disgusting, more steeped in villany and guilt, than that on which every morning's sun casts the sombre shadows of the Abbey, mingled, as they soon will be, with those of the gorgeous towers of the new ‘Palace at Westminster.’”

Dispose of the Victorian class prejudice that is woven through this quotation and we are reminded of modern day wealth inequalities. There was a public outcry in 2018 when two homeless people died in an underpass in Westminster. Journalists Simon Hattenstone and Daniel Lavelle wrote a staggering article on the, “widespread horror that people were dying on the streets of one of the wealthiest boroughs of one of the wealthiest cities in the world.” “There is something rotten in Westminster,” said Labour MP David Lammy, “when MPs walk past dying homeless people on the way to work.” Statistics from the charity Shelter, revealed that, “in 2017, Westminster had more rough sleepers than any borough in the country.”

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this month’s issue and what you’ve been doing this November. Let me know in the comments.

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