A Literary Mystery: Who was Elizabeth Charlotte Webster?

 

More than 60 years ago, while browsing the shelves of the Johannesburg City Library (in the days when Johannesburg actually had a city library) I came across a book with the rather odd title Expiring Frog, so I pulled it from the shelf, and discovered that it was written by Elizabeth Charlotte Webster, and was about a (fictional) community of Anglican nuns in the (fictional) City of Geldersburg, which could have been the whole Witwatersrand or any town or city within it. 

I knew of two communities of Anglican nuns in Johannesburg at that time: the Order of the Holy Paraclete (OHP), who ran the St Benedict's Retreat House, and whose mother house was at Whitby in England; and the Community of St Mary the Virgin (CSMV). who ran St Mary's Diocesan School for Girls in Waverley (and another similar school in the Diocese of Pretoria). The CSMV mother house was at Wantage in England, and they were sometimes known as the Wantage Sisters. 

The Anglican chaplain at Wits University, where I was a student, was Father Tom Comber, and he was also the chaplain of St Mary's School. Father Comber recruited male university students who lived in the vicinity of the school to function as altar servers in the school chapel on Sundays. Back in those days in the Anglican Church the girls could carry candles in processions as acolytes, but they could not serve within the altar. As servers, we were chastely clad in white albs and amices, and black shoes were obligatory, so our appearance was largely uniform, other than the fluorescent orange or green socks we wore, to the tittering of the girls in the congregation.

In reading Expiring Frog, however, I pictured neither the CSMV nor the OHP sisters, or their dwellings, but rather the Roman Catholic Convent of the Good Shepherd, whose grounds formed the view from our flat in Cheltondale. Expiring Frog begins with Sister Lilian who fed the fowls at the Convent of Serapha of Sicily, and the view from my desk was over a green field on which Friesland cows grazed, which were fed, and for all I knew, milked, by an ancient sister bent over double like the Greek capital letter gamma, carrying two buckets of feed for the cows. The sisters there also ran the Good Shepherd Home, a kind of orphanage, and that seemed closer to the function of the Convent of St Serapha of Sicily in providing a home for fallen women.

I read the book and thought it was OK, but nothing outstanding. I occasionally thought about it and the quite at the beginning, from The Pickwick Papers

Can I view thee panting, lying
On thy stomach, without sighing
Can I unmoved see thee dying
On a log
Expiring frog!

And clearly, in the book, the "expiring frog" was a symbol of the Anglican Church.

The book belongs in a general category of novels about the Anglican Church, its clergy and monastics, by authors like Anthony Trollope, Ernest Raymond and Susan Howatch. One of the best written in a South African setting is one I recently reviewed, A Sin of Omission by Marguerite Poland.

A few years ago I saw a street bookstall selling second-hand books, and found there a copy of Expiring Frog, and bought it, just in case I should ever want to read it again, because I'd never seen another copy anywhere. And it's sat, unread, on my shelves for the last 20 years or so. A previous owner was R.J. (or R.G.) Jabobs. There appears to have been another owner before that. but it has been rubbed out, and I can't read the name. But having the book, with publication details, I was able to enter it into GoodReads, and mark it as read.

But in GoodReads there is no information  about Elizabeth Charlotte Webster. She apparently wrote a couple of other books, one of which could be a different edition of this one, with a different title, and possibly other changes as well, but there seems to be no biographical information about her. Web searches reveal nothing. So who was she? That is something of a literary mystery.

There was an Elizabeth Charlotte Webster who married Richard Anthony Hulley in Trinity Church in Grahamstown, Cape Colony, on 17 November 1880, and her signature in the marriage register looks quite similar to that of the author of the book, and the differences could be explained by the gap of 46 years. But the Elizabeth Charlotte Webster who married Richard Hulley appears to have died in Southern Rhodesia in 1901.

There is also a Wikipedia article:

Mary Morison Webster (1894 – 1980) was a Scottish-born novelist and poet who came to South Africa with her family in 1920. She lived in Johannesburg, where she was an influential book reviewer for The Rand Daily Mail and Sunday Times for 40 years. She wrote five novels, including one in collaboration with her sister, novelist Elizabeth Charlotte Webster, and several collections of poetry.

Into an Old Room: Edward FitzGerald

Into an Old Room: The Paradox of Edward Fitzgerald by Peter De Polnay

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Peter de Polnay lived for a couple of years in a house that had once been occupied by Edward FitzGerald, a minor Victorian literary figure known mainly for his translation of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, which I haven't read. I'm not even sure how it got on our shelves, though I suspect that my mother may have bought it an auction about 65 years ago. But in this time of "social distancing", when bookshops and public libraries are closed for fear of the corona virus, I've been scanning our bookshelves at home for books I haven't read, or might want to read again.

FitzGerald was a country gentleman of independent means, and so had the leisure for literary pursuits, and some of his friends and contemporaries, like Alfred Tennyson and William Makepeace Thackeray, achieved more literary fame than he did.

Perhaps the best comment on FitzGerald comes from Tennyson's son Hallam, who wrote after a visit to FitzGerald in his old age,

The views that Fitz expressed to me on literature were original and interesting, but the old man never got off his own platform to look at the work of modern authors. He had always wanted men like Thackeray and my father to go along with his crochets, which were many. He had not been carried away by their genius out of himself and out of his own of Cambridge critical groove, and had not, like them, grown with the times...

Into an Old Room is not really a biography, however, but rather a criticism of biographers for portraying FitzGerald as a less interesting character than de Polnay thought he was.

I am learning some things from it, one of which is that I am gaining an inkling of the meaning of the word "snob". I had never really understood it properly. At school we used it of a person who held himself aloof from others and would not speak to them, because he thought them beneath his notice. My friend John Bolton used the word in that way, and so he taught it to me, and it meant someone who had withdrawn into a slightly offended silence. Then at the University of Natal we had English writing classes and Professor Christina van Heyningen asked our group to come up with definitions of a snob, a prude, a prig and a bourgeois. I was reasonably clear about the last three, but found it difficult to grasp the meaning of "snob". It clearly meant more than simply retreating into an offended silence. I got even more confused when Sir Garnet Wolseley (in his diary) referred to my great great grandfather, Richard Vause, as "an offensive snob", who like most of those he had met in Durban, was inclined to be "weak in his aitches". Rather than being offended, it seemed that snobs were the ones who gave offence. Now I read Into an Old Room and it describes Thackeray as a snob because he liked rubbing shoulders with those of high social status. When someone invited him to dinner, he couldn't go because he had promised to go home, and the person who invited him thought he had turned it down because there wasn't going to be a lord there. At last I begin to get the idea. But some years ago I bought a book on a sale, homing to gain enlightenment on the topic. It was called The Book of Snobs, but unfortunately it was by none other that William Makepeace Thackeray. No wonder I was confused.

Another word I leaned about from reading this book was "crotchets". I was rather surprised to learn that a "crochet" means "a whimsical fancy". I  know of the word as referring to musical notation, or a kind of knitting with one needle, and tended to think of it in this context as meaning something like a pet peeve, from association with the adjective "crotchety". But a whimsical fancy is something different.

A third thing I learned fits with my missiological interests. Peter de Polnay observed that in late Victorian times the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám seems to have been regarded as the agnostic's Bible. De Polnay noted:

It is, I believe, less read today than it was twenty years ago. Too many people have quoted it for their own purposes and too many ribbons of too many colours have been attached to it. It might at some not quite distant date find a temporary obscurity. The trend today is towards Christianity, the stand-by of troubled ages, and nowadays, having so proudly strayed from it, man finds himself an a pretty deep morass. The cross in a Scottish mist will become preferable to the sun on the Ganges.

De Polnay was writing immediately after the Second World War, when it had become rather more difficult to believe in the perfectibility of man by secular means.

Another contemporary book, long out of print, that dealt with that theme in more depth, was The Good Pagan's Failure by Rosalind Murray. I wonder whether, in this age of the corona virus, we might see such thinking come full circle again.

I'm not sure if the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám experienced an increase in popularity as World War 2 faded from living memory but if the decline of Christianity in the late 19th and early 20th century was fuelled by works like Rubáiyát giving expression to popular agnosticism, its decline in the late 20th century was fuelled by Christians themselves, who hi-jacked the charismatic renewal of the 1970s contextualised to fit the secular neo-liberal ideology of the 1980s, by producing the prosperity gospel, which has profoundly influenced the popular image of Christianity. So as we enter another troubled age, perhaps Christianity will make a comeback, if it can be found among the dross.


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Cakes and ale (book review)

Cakes and Ale: Or, The Skeleton in the Cupboard by W. Somerset Maugham

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Alroy Kear has been asked by the widow of Edward Driffield to write her late husband's biography, and he asks the narrator, fellow writer Willie Ashenden, for some information about obscure parts of Driffield's life that Ashenden knew something about. But Kear also makes it clear that he plans to censor any stories, since it was well known that Driffield's first wife was unfaithful to him.

The request sparks of Ashenden's own reminiscences of Driffield and his first wife Rosie, and the story jumps back and forth between the 1890s and the 1930s.

The thing that struck me most about it was the class-consciousness and snobbery that pervaded English literary circles and society generally, especially in the earlier period, set in the 1890s. The narrator is roughly the same age as Somerset Maugham himself, and there is no reason to suppose that in writing of these things he is not writing from his own experience. I was aware of the class-consciousness, though what Maugham writes seems totally over the top. That a schoolboy spending his holidays with his uncle and aunt at a Kentish vicarage should be faced with such deeply-felt dilemmas about who he could and could not talk to beggars belief. Yes, as I say, Maugham lived through that period, and so must be writing from experience. I had always had the impression that the clergy, and especially vicars and below, were always rather looked down on by the gentry, but perhaps that only made them, or some of them at least, more determined to look down on all the rest.

Driffield's second wife, who was originally his nurse after an illness, was very much a managing type, and also appeared to want to manage her husband's memory and biography. On reading the book I was reminded of Alan Paton's second wife, who had been his secretary, and seemed to be similarly managing, though not to quite the same extent. She kept him isolated from other people, ostensibly so that his writing time would not be interrupted by numberous callers, but whatever the motive, he certainly became far less accessible after his second marriage.

Some have seen Driffield as modelled on Thomas Hardy, and Alroy Kear as modelled on George Meredith, though Maugham himself insisted that they were composites. That I can believe, because of the echoes in the life of Alan Paton, whom Maugham can hardly have known, and was not a published author when Cakes and ale was written.




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I write like WHO?

I think I've tried this before, but the previous time I tried it with text from my journal. This time I thought I would try it with some text from a novel.

I write like
George Orwell

I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!

That was with fairly straightforward text.

With more action oriented text, it said I wrote like Harry Harrison (who's he?) or James Joyce.

Well, let's try with another sample, also action oriented. Again it says that I wrote like James Joyce. Well, I suppose it's at least consistent.

Third time lucky. A bit more pedestrian this time, the opening paragraphs, setting the scene. So what does it say?

I write like
James Joyce

I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!

OK, scratch George Orwell and Harry Harrison, james Joyce it is. Stay us wherefore in our search for tighteousness, O Sustainer!

That, in case anyone didn't recognize it, is a quote from Finnegan's wake

Still, I'm not sure it's a compliment. I ploughed my way through Ulysses a couple of years ago, and one of my English profs told an honours student not to read it, as it would blunt his critical faculties. But the English department thought that English literature began and ended with D.H. Lawrence, with just one exception, one of their own number, Cake Manson, who was indubitably the greatest playwright since Shakespeare. Even Harry Harrison was easier to find with a Google search than Cake Manson.

Perhaps I should send my unpublished novel to Joyce's publishers, and see if they are impressed.

Beware artists, authors, photographers -- Americans want to steal your work

It seems that American lawmakers are planning a new copyright scam, which will allow people who steal your work to sue you for using it without their permission.

clipped from mag.awn.com I find nothing funny about the new Orphan Works legislation that is before Congress. An Orphaned Work is any creative work of art where the artist or copyright owner has released their copyright, whether on purpose, by passage of time, or by lack of proper registration. In the same way that an orphaned child loses the protection of his or her parents, your creative work can become an orphan for others to use without your permission. Currently, you don't have to register your artwork to own the copyright. You own a copyright as soon as you create something. International law also supports this. Right now, registration allows you to sue for damages, in addition to fair value. The only people who benefit from this are those who want to make use of our creative works without paying for them and large companies who will run the new private copyright registries. These registries are companies that you would be forced to pay in order to register every single image, photo, sketch or creative work

And if you live outside America, any American will be able to register your work and claim it as their own -- remember the scammers who tried to copyright rooibos tea?

I hope this is just an April fool's joke that's past its sell-by date, as it's not from an official source, but the rooibos tea incident shows that it's just the kind of thing the Americans would do.