September 29

1725, 1758


Heroes


Yes, heroes - that much devalued concept of antiquity which today is either firemen or supermen, or more generally pop and film and sport stars, but no longer the ordinary men and women who rise above the banality of daily life and provide the rest of us with a valiant role-model.

Among the many themes that have emerged in this blog is that of the men and women upon whom we look back as heroes, the ones who laid the foundations for our history, or our culture, or our values – but who now, in retrospect, may not have merited that status after all; and not because their lives were other than was recorded, but because our own perspective has changed so much that what was once heroic is no longer so, may even be the very opposite of heroic now. The same, of course, is true of those once branded with ignominy, but now recognised as something rather different; they too occupy many an entry in this blog.

Today's date celebrates the birthdays of Robert Clive in 1725, and Horatio Nelson in 1758, the latter thirty-three years after the former, though somehow the atmosphere of their lives makes us feel that Clive belonged to an epoch somewhat later, perhaps as much as a century later – another of the vagaries of time. Clive feels like he belongs with Kipling and Gordon in the Victorian age, with Gunga Din in the Raj, or with Livingstone and Stanley at Lake Tanganyika, where Nelson clearly inhabits an aristocratic world before the revolutions of the Enlightenment, in France first, then in America.

Clive and Nelson, if you are English, occupy primary positions in the national hall of fame, though the reality is that one was a colonialist and imperialist adventurer, whose main objective was the establishment of both the military and the political supremacy of the East India Company in Bengal; while the other bought every post he ever held, all the way to Vice-Admiral, and perpetrated atrocities (in Naples especially, but there were many others), for which he would find himself on trial in Den Haag today, and not the man voted "the 9th greatest Briton of all time" in a BBC television poll in 2002.

Clive died in 1774, while the young Nelson was making an early voyage to the East Indies, from which he returned so invalided that it might have ended his career before it had begun. That it did not is something for which history may be grateful - a cliché offered only as a segue to the other notorious mariner of his day.



Four years and twenty days older than Nelson was one Captain William Bligh, of the HMS Bounty. The cruelty that inspired the mutiny against him, on April 28th 1789, is well-known, but not the circumstances. In 1774, the year of Clive's death, Bligh accompanied Captain Cook on his second voyage around the world; in 1787 Cook sent him to Tahiti to collect bread-fruit and prepare a base for further scientific research. His men were demoralised and mutinous even before they boarded ship.

Also little known is Bligh's survival. While the mutineers settled on Pitcairn Island, he beached his twenty-three foot open boat at Timor on June 14th 1789, 3618 miles beyond its despatch on April 28th of the previous year - a truly heroic achievement, however ignominious the reason for it. Cook then sent him off in search of still more bread-fruit, and in 1805 he was appointed Governor of New South Wales, where his harshness was no less than on Tahiti. Nelson died that year, but Bligh outlasted him. Arrested for cruelty in 1808, he was released, and the arresting officer cashiered (it's not what you know, it's who you know!). In 1811 he acquired the Nelsonian rank of Admiral, but seems to have played no active part in the conflict with Napoleon. He died in his bed, in London, on December 7th 1817, and no, there is nothing on this date to place him on this page, except for the connections with both Clive and Nelson.






So much for heroes - the number of men listed as heroes who turn out to be the very opposite is simply staggering - but what about the heroines? Mostly unlisted, unremembered, unknown to people who set quiz questions; yet how often does it transpire that something positive in the male world had its origins among the women. So let us turn our attention to 

Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson - Mrs Gaskell on her books, Lily to close friends like the Brownings and Anna Brownell Jameson, born today in 1810. 

In Lindsey Row, Chelsea, at the house which is now 93 Cheyne Walk - a fact I only mention because Cheyne Walk (and the streets imemdiately adjacent, but especially the Walk) has long been a favourite address for writers and artists, with George Eliot spending her last years at number 4; James Whistler inhabiting number 96 for several decades (it was also where Willie Whitelaw held a secret meeting with Gerry Adams and Martin McGuiness of the IRA in 1972); Marc and Isambard Brunel father-and-sonned at number 98; T.S. Eliot leased flat 29 of number 12 at one point, Ian Fleming wrote the first James Bond novel "Casino Royale" at number 24, Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithful occupied number 48 through most of the 1960s, with Ronnie Wood down the street at number 119 (JMW Turner's home a few years previously)... you can find the full list here, and more on the Kensington & Chelsea page of Prashker's London [and another one added at the foot of this page]

But I was supposed to be writing about Lizzie Stevenson, daughter of William Stevenson, a treasury official and journalist, and Elizabeth Stevenson - but mum died when she was barely a year old, and she was raised by her aunt Hannah Lumb in Knutsford in Cheshire, in a house that was then named "The Heath" but is now "Heathwaite House", on a street that has been renamed in her honour as Gaskell Avenue. Knutsford plays a central role, fictionalised as "Cranford", in her novel of that name, and then as Hollingford in her unfinished "Wives and Daughters".

Dad remarried when she was four, and her stepmother, Catherine Thomson, was a sister of the Scottish miniature artist, William John Thomson. He painted the famous portrait of Elizabeth that is at the top of this entry; in 1832, the year of her marriage to William Gaskell, the assistant minister at Cross Street Unitarian Chapel in Manchester.

It was "Mary Barton, a Tale of Manchester Life", published anonymously in 1848, that brought her to the the attention of Charles Dickens, who invited her to publish in "Household Words" and "All the Year Round", both under his editorship.

Not Cheyne Walk, alas, but 121 Upper Rumford Street, and later 84 Plymouth Grove, both in Manchester, were the homes where she hostessed her salon. The latter is now a museum - click here.

Her full-length books are: Mary Barton (1848); The Moorland Cottage (1850); Ruth (1853); Cranford (1853); North and South (serialised in "Household Words", 1855); The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857); My Lady Ludlow (serialised in "Household Words", 1858); Sylvia’s Lovers (1863); A Dark Night’s Work (serialised in "All the Year Round", 1863); Cousin Phillis (serialised in "Cornhill Magazine", 1864); Wives and Daughters (the unfinished text published as a tribute in "Cornhill Magazine" the year after her death). And all can be found where they belong, among the Penguin Classics, with all her short stories listed here. She died on 12 November 1865.

And a true heroine - someone who embarked on the positive side of life, achieved an enormous amount, and left no sunken ships or bullet-riddled corpses in her wake. Why isn't she on the English Literature curriculum?








Amber pages
Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, Roman statesman and military commander, born today in 106 - and known as Pompey the Great, for reasons that I will challenge when I return to this in a longer evaluation: what "greatnesses" did Pompey actually achieve, beyond brutal war in Spain, the ending of Spartacus' slave rebellion against Roman tyranny, and then still more brutal occupation? It was Pompey, to open a circle that will close at the foot of this page, who completed the conquest of Judea, including the "cleansing" of the Temple in Jerusalem, in 63 BCE, a full hundred years of occupation before General Titus' soldiers concluded the destruction of the Jewish homeland?


Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo, writer, born today in 1864


Enrico Fernando Fermi, nuclear physicist, born today in 1901


And today in 1923, Britain took up its self-granted mandate from the League of Nations, to govern Palestine - and virtually their first act was to hand over the entire Trans-Jordanian territory to an exiled Saudi prince. Palestinian land, and they should be given it back. Click here.


Meanwhile, back on Cheyne Walk... or Cheyne Row on this occasion, the one I presume for pedestrians the other for boat-users... Anne Burrows, but remembered by her married-name as Anne Gilchrist (born February 25 1828; died November 29 1885): an English writer, she is best known for her connection to the American poet Walt Whitman - you can read all of their letters here. Husband Alexander Gilchrist wrote the pioneering biography of William Blake - the Blakes were married at the church just across the bridge - though sadly he died before finishing it, so she did. They were next-door-neighbours of Jane and Thomas Carlyle, whose number 24 is now a lovely museum, with a magnificent fig tree in the back garden, and literary figs in the form of letters of enthusiasm posted everywhere, from Dickens and the pre-Raphaelites especially; my favourite was a letter that Jane wrote to George Eliot, thanking him for the "Scenes of Clerical Life", and expressing hopes to meet him soon, entirely unaware that GE was that ghastly woman Mary Ann Evans, who lived around the corner, unmarried, with that man Lewes, and had aspirations, just like Jane did, to make her living as a writer; and she had met her, countless times, which is why (Jane expressed her bewilderment about this in the letter) she had sent her neighbour and wife of the writer she herself admired more than any other, a copy of her book.


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