Category: ABC Wednesday

ABC Wednesday J is for …

Published on by Margaret11 Comments

… the Jabberwock

From Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, illustration by John Tenniel.

This was a great favourite of mine as a child and I still love the poem, Jabberwocky which begins:

Twas brillig and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogroves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

Beware the Jujub bird, and shun

The frumious Bandersnatch.

I had no idea what the words meant but I loved the sound of them and learned them off by heart. Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice that ‘brillig’ means ‘4 o’clock’, ‘slithy’ means ‘lithe and slimy’ and ‘toves’ are something like badgers  and lizards and corkscrews, to ‘gyre and gimble’ means to go round and round like a gyroscope and make holes like a gimlet and the ‘wabe’ is a grass-plot around a sundial – as shown in this illustration also  by John Tenniel:

An ABC Wednesday post.

ABC Wednesday – I is for Irises

Published on by Margaret13 Comments
Irises by Vincent Van Gogh, 1889

Van Gogh painted Irises after he committed himself to the asylum at Saint Paul-de-Mausole in Saint-Remy, France. He began the painting only one week after he entered the asylum. He was probably influenced by Japanese woodblock prints; the black outlines in Irises is typical of the Japanese prints.

Irises is on the list of the most expensive paintings ever sold, selling for 54 million dollars in 1987.

It’s beautiful.

ABC Wednesday – H is for Hunt

Published on by Margaret17 Comments

William Henry Hunt (1790 – 1864) was an English watercolourist. This is one of my favourite paintings – Primroses and Bird’s Nest.


Hunt specialised in still life compositions, mainly fruit, flowers, nests and eggs – he was known as ‘Bird’s Nest’ Hunt. This is one of his bird’s nest paintings, measuring just 7½ inches by 10¾ inches. I saw a variation of this painting at the Royal Academy of Art ofThe Great Age of British Watercolours 1750 – 1880 exhibition several years ago. The catalogue describes Hunt as an outstanding technician. His work was admired by many, including John Ruskin who took lessons from him in 1854 and 1861.

There are a few details about Hunt in The Pre-Raphaelites by Timothy Hilton, including a reproduction of this painting. Amazingly, Hunt said:

I feel really frightened every time I sit down to paint a flower.

I think his paintings are just so beautiful. For more information on Hunt’s method of painting see Craig’s comment below.

See more ABC Wednesday posts.

ABC Wednesday – G is for George VI

Published on by Margaret12 Comments

We went to see The King’s Speech on Monday, a BAFTA Award winning film based on the true story of how King George VI overcame his stutter.  This had me reaching for an old book that I used to look at as a child – The Coronation Book of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. It’s full of sepia photos and gives details of the coronation on May 12 1937 together with a short history of the ceremony and accounts of the lives of George VI (Prince Albert) and Queen Elizabeth (Lady Elizabeth Lyon) up to the coronation.

The only mention I can find in the book about George VI’s stutter is below this photo of him taken when he was 25, then the Duke of York, stating that ‘he fought, with remarkable courage, his only handicap – a slight hesitancy in speech. Though five years were to pass before complete mastery was achieved the task was well begun.‘

I love this photo taken in 1898 of the Royal family showing Queen Victoria in the centre of a family group on the lawn at Osborne in the Isle of Wight. (Click on the photos to enlarge) George VI who was at that time Prince Albert is  to the right of Queen Victoria standing in front of his father, then the Duke of York.

What is not shown in the film, because it focuses on George VI’s speech problems leading up to his brother’s abdication and his ascension to the throne, is that he was had entered the Royal Navy in 1909. His destiny as the second son of the Prince of Wales was to remain in the Navy for his whole career. He served in HMS Collingwood which was a battleship that took part in the battle of Jutland in 1916. The Collingwood escaped damages and Prince Albert was mentioned in dispatches for his coolness under fire.

After the war he went to Trinity College  Cambridge University. As the son of George V he didn’t take a full-time degree course but took courses in special subjects, in his case Prince Albert took history, economics and civics. He was also a keen sportsman and played tennis, golf and polo. He won the Royal Airforce Lawn Tennis Doubles Championship at Queen’s Club in 1920

As a child I spent hours looking at the photos in this book but I don’t think I actually read much of except for the captions. It begins with these words:

Destiny has had a strange errand for Albert Frederick Arthur George, Prince of the Royal House of Windsor. Within eleven months he served two kings and became himself a king.

All this was history to me, not history I learnt at school, but at home. I don’t know whether the book originally belonged to one of my grandparents, but I have a feeling it could have been my mother’s mother as she was a staunch Royalist. It was the photos of George VI’s children that interested me most as a child – Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret, now I’d like to know more about George himself.

The only colour illustrations are the end papers – a painting of the coronation carriage:

See more illustrations of the letter  G at ABC Wednesday and on my other blog where I’ve written about Gauguin and his relationship with Van Gogh.

ABC Wednesday – E is for …

Published on by Margaret14 Comments

184709… Enid Blyton

I seem to be going back to my childhood with my ABC Wednesday posts, but I make no apologies for writing about Enid Blyton, whose books gave me so much pleasure as a child going right back to her Noddy and the Magic Faraway Tree books. I also had a few of the little magazines she wrote called Sunny Stories. I could never decide which of her books I liked the most:

  • The Naughtiest Girl series
  • The Famous Five
  • The Secret Seven
  • Malory Towers
  • The St Clares books
  • The Five Find-Outers
  • The Adventure series

I thought they were all marvellous.

Later when I worked in a library I discovered that not everyone thought like me and that some libraries banned her books – not the one I worked in though! The Wikipedia article on Enid Blyton also relates how her work was also banned by the BBC, criticising her work as being ‘stilted and longwinded’. I have to say at the time I was reading them I certainly didn’t  find them so. Other criticisms are that the books are formulaic, xenophobic and ‘reflected negative stereotypes regarding gender, race, and class.’ Her books are very much of their time – she was born in 1897, died in 1968, her books dating from the 1920s, most of the series dating from the 1940s, when lives and attitudes were very different from those of today. I never noticed any class, racial or sexist prejudices when I read her books. I haven’t read her books for many years but I dare say I could very well do so now.

She wrote about children whose lives were very different from mine and that was one reason I liked them. I loved the fact that her books took me to magical places, places of adventure where children could solve mysteries, thwart criminals, be independent of adults and have great fun, a world of mysterious castles and islands, exploring secret passages and hidden chambers and finding buried treasure.

There are a number of websites with information about Enid Blyton – the Enid Blyton Society and Enid Blyton.net to name but two. By all accounts her life was not always a happy one – as the 2009 TV film about her portrayed. Enid with Helena Bonham Carter as Enid, shows her as a mother who ignored her own daughters, an arrogant, selfish and insecure woman. Sometimes it’s not a good thing to know too much about an author’s personal life. I’d rather just enjoy her books.

I don’t have a photo of the real Green Hedges in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire the house where Enid Blyton lived for many years, but the Bekonscot Model Village in Beaconsfield includes a model of the house complete with Noddy in his little car parked at the front.

Enid Blyton's House in Bekonscot Model Village

Noddy at Bekonscot

ABC Wednesday – D is for …

Published on by Margaret22 Comments

… Charles Dickens

What follows are merely my thoughts on the few Charles Dickens’s books that I have read.

The first book of his that I read as a child was A Christmas Carol. It was a small book with the original illustrations and I read it many times. It has a great opening paragraph:

Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. the register of his death was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to, Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

It’s clear and to the point and it has to be because this is a ghost story and unless you are certain that Marley was dead, as Dickens goes on to say: ‘nothing wonderful can come of the story’. The story is well structured with Scrooge visited by the three Ghosts of Christmas, Past, Present and Yet to Come. The pathos of the story of Tiny Tim has stayed with me over the years and the transformation of the miserly Scrooge into a jovial, kind and happy man seemed to me a perfect Christmas story.

Following on from that I didn’t read any more of Dickens’s books until I read A Tale of Two Cities for ‘O’ level GCE, but I knew of so many of his books from watching them serialised on TV. In my mind Sunday afternoon tea time was the classic storytime, but I could be wrong. In any case Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, Great Expectations and David Copperfield come to mind from that period.

A Tale of Two Cities has one of the most memorable opening sentences:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

and a unforgettable ending when Sydney Carton goes to his death on the guillotine:

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.

I remember very little more about the story except that it was a wonderful love story set against the backdrop of the French Revolution. I’m thinking of re-reading it soon – I’ve downloaded it onto my Kindle – to see how much of it I remember and if I still think it as good as I did when I was 15!

Skip forward a few years and I read Hard Times whilst taking an Open University course. By that time in studying Hard Times I was more aware of Dickens’s social criticism than I had been before. There are some powerful scenes and characters portrayed, although to some extent I think of them as caricatures – Gadgrind and Bounderby – whose personalities are described by their names.

More recently my reading of Dickens has been after watching TV adaptations. I read Bleak House a few years ago, after being captivated by Charles Dance as Mr Tulkinghorn, Gillian Anderson as Lady Dedlock and Dennis Lawson as John Jarndyce.  It was a most impressive performance and cast, so many well known actors, not forgetting Johnny Vegas as Krook who was almost unbelievably good in the part.

This post is getting very long, so I’ll just add I’ve recently read The Mystery of Edwin Drood and The Holly-Tree Inn (the links go to my posts on those books).