Enthusiasms

Does a neglected masterpiece by Jane Austen enshrine her first love affair? Who was Vita Sackville West's real grandfather? What clues are there to the identity of 'Walter', doyen of Victorian pornographers? When and why did P.G. Wodehouse mutate from hack to genius? Was Oscar Wilde really down and out in Paris? Was Brideshead really Madresfield?



These and other excursions into literary or social history have developed out of Mark Girouard's spare time enthusiasms, as diversions from his main occupation as an architectural historian. In nine essays he calls attention to points that have not been noticed before, corrects fallacies that have got into general circulation, suggests, identifies, redates, refutes, or pours a little cold water on unjustified romanticisms. Three further essays sample another enthusiasm, his own family background, and introduce characters such as the dwarf who had to stand on a bench to address the South African Parliament, the colonial governor who fell in love with his niece, and the dowager duchess with whom he spent his childhood on the edge of the park at Chatsworth.

Contents



Introduction

1. Jane Austen: re-dating Catherine

2. The myth of the Tennyson disinheritance

3. Up and down with Oscar Wilde

4. Yonghy-bonghy-Wilde

5. Walter wins: a hunt but no kill

6. Drooling Victorians: the strange story of Pet Marjorie

7. The wrong castle: a Charlotte Mew correction

8. Horrors made harmless: Masefield and The Midnight Folk

9. Glossing over the seamy side: Pepita and the Sackville-Wests

10. P.G. Wodehouse: from hack to genius

11. How to write a bestseller: Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford

12. Waugh on Girouard: a correction

13. The Solomons

14. My grandparents

15. Aunt Evie

6. Drooling Victorians: the strange story of Pet Marjorie



Among the curiosities of biographical dictionaries the pseudonymous Walter can be matched with Marjory Fleming, the only eight-year-old in the DNB. I owe my knowledge of her to a chance pick-up in the local Oxfam bookshop: The Complete Marjory Fleming: her Journals, Letters and Verses, transcribed and edited by Frank Sidgwick, 1934. Below the title on the dust-cover was a quotation from Robert Louis Stevenson: 'Marjory Fleming was possibly - no, I take back possibly - she was one of the noblest works of God.' On opening the book and discovering that she had died of measles in 1811, shortly before her ninth birthday, I was sufficiently intrigued to buy it.



Marjory Fleming was born in Kirkcaldy, Fifeshire, in 1803. Her father was a Kirkcaldy accountant, her mother came from a family of Edinburgh surgeons who were friends of, or at least friendly with, Sir Walter Scott. Her journals, poems and letters were kept by her family, but remained unknown until a London journalist, H.B. Farnie, came across them and wrote an article on her, which was published in 1853 as a booklet entitled Pet Marjorie: A Story of Child Life Fifty Years Ago. He claimed, without justification, that 'Pet Marjory' was what she was called by her family.



Farnie's pamphlet would have sunk without a trace if it had not been unexpectantly written about by Dr John Brown in the North British Review in 1863. His article was turned into a book, Marjorie Fleming: A Sketch, and became a bestseller. His sentimental account of a bull-terrier, Rab and his Friends, had been another bestseller when it was published in 1861, so an expectant public was ready to take 'Pet Marjorie' to its heart. Brown gave his readers everything they could wish for about his 'warm, rosy, little wifie.' The existence of an inscribed copy of Maria Edgeworth's Rosamund and Harry and Lucy given to her by Walter Scott encouraged him to invent several pages of nauseating twaddle about the two of them: 'Marjorie! Marjorie!' shouted her friend, 'where are ye, my bonnie wee croodlin doo,' and so on. He quoted copiously from her work, not hesitating to, in his view, improve it where necessary, and provided the essential end, a tear-jerking death-bed.



It was Brown's presentation that elicited Stevenson's praise, and got Marjorie a mention in a poem by Swinburne and tribute from Mark Twain: 'she was made out of thunderstorms and sunshine'. In 1889 Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf's father and a formidable person in his own right, gave her an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, which he edited, and wrote it himself. A full-scale biography by Lachlan Macbean, with many illustrations, followed in 1904, and was reprinted in 1905, 1914 and 1928. For some years Marjory's house in Kirkcaldy was opened as a museum dedicated to her. In 1930 her manuscripts were presented to the National Library of Scotland. A collotype facsimile of them, edited by Arundell Esdaile, was published shortly after. Frank Sidgwick's book followed in 1934, compete with introduction, family tree, copious notes, appendices and index.



And what were her writings like? They are charming, especially as presented by Sidgwick in a typescript version of the manuscript, complete with wide spacing, crossings out and corrections. Her lessons, naughtiness, friendships, readings and all the events of each day, along with pious reflections and maxims evoked by her Presbyterian family, are mixed up together and expressed in language half-grown up and half-childish. A couple of quotations may give their flavour:



I am not going to tell you about the horrible and wretched plaege that my multiplication gives me you cant conceive it - the most Devilish thing is 8 times 8 & 7 times 7 is what nature cant endure.



I confess that I have been more like a little young Devil than a creature for when Isabella went up the stairs to teach me religion and multiplication and to be good and all my other lessons I stamped with my feet and threw my new hat which she made on the ground and was sulky and was dreadfully dispassionate…



Her prose is much better than her verse, of which one of the few good couplets can suffice. They start off a poem on her pet monkey:



O lovely O most charming pug

Thy gracefull air and heavenly mug.



But to call her, as Macbean does, a child genius is ridiculous. She is no better or more delightful than other precocious children of character, writing or drawing before self-consciousness sets in to destroy their directness.



Most of the publications on her include a watercolour portrait by her cousin and patient teacher, Isabella. It is hard to read her character from this as Dr John Brown did: 'looking straight at us - fearless and full of love, passionate, wild, wilful, fancy's child'. She looks a tough little nut, but non the worse for that.



Having looked up what Leslie Stephen had to say on her in the DNB, I was naturally intrigued to see whether she had made it to the new ODNB. So I went to the London Library to check and there she was, with her portrait reproduced this time, and a new entry:



The general revaluation of juvenile and adult perception of childhood has led in the 1990s to a new consideration of Marjory as a socially situated early nineteenth-century child and Victorian mythic appropriation. Her status seems assured.