A Fire in the Frumious Grinch

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After our night in Stratford, and some difficulty finding a place for dinner without prior reservations, we set out early to see the Shakespearean sights.

There is evidence of Roman settlements in the general area of the town, and then subsequently the area was inhabited by the Britons and then the Anglo-Saxons. It was an important place to ford the Avon River (Stratford = street ford). In 1196 the king granted the town the right to hold a regular market, and this designation as a market town allowed it to assume greater local prominence. Located on the north fringe of the Cotswolds with its large sheep production, Stratford naturally became a center for tanning. A side effect was the emergence of various trades using the tanned hides. One such trade was glove-making, and one of the prominent practitioners of the trade in the mid-16th century was John Shakespeare. In 1547 he married Mary Arden, and together they had 8 children, one of whom would go on to become a writer who is widely recognized as the greatest in the world. Between about 1589 and 1613 he wrote 39 plays, 154 sonnets, 3 long narrative poems, and scattered other pieces. Much of this output is recognized as among the finest works of literature in the English language. He also acted in many, perhaps most, of the plays, and his output made him very wealthy. He retired back to Stratford at age 49, and died at age 52. He married the 26 year old Anne Hathaway when he was 18, with evidence the marriage was rushed, possibly explained by the birth 6 months later of a daughter. His genetic line did not get paste next generation, and no descendants exist.

Shakespeare's plays were continually performed, but he was not revered until 1769 when the actor David Garrick stage a festival in Stratford to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth, albeit 5 years late. This revived interest, and Shakespeare is now the epochal figure that he is. Obviously, I could go on forever about Shakespeare, but countless others have done that much better than I could hope to.

We visited the Shakespeare birthplace museum, which has largely been preserved, and has been outfitted with props that illustrate the glove making trade among other things. One interesting exhibit is a window which has been removed and replaced, with the older windows showing names of previous visitors scratched into the panes, including such personages as Sir Walter Scott and Thomas Carlyle. There is also reproduction furniture and furnishings of the mid-16th century. All in all, only moderately interesting. We then visited the cottage of Anne Hathaway, a couple of miles distant.

Although the term "cottage" is used, it is actually a significantly larger home than that term would imply, comprising 12 rooms and an attached 90 acres of arable farmland. Anne's father was a yeoman farmer, meaning he owned his land and farmed it, rather than being a tenant farmer. Hathaway married Shakespeare at age 26, and was already pregnant at the time of the marriage, and delivered their first child 6 months after the marriage. Much has been made of this fact, but this was commonplace at the time. The couple may have handfasted prior to the marriage. Handfasting was a legally binding form of betrothal. Some biographers have made much of the fact that Shakespeare chose to leave Hathaway behind in Stratford while he went to London to pursue his career as an actor and playwright. However, others have pointed out that when he retired he chose to return to Hathaway and Stratford rather than staying in London, and that he returned to Stratford at least annually in the meantime. Whatever the relationship between the two was, there is no evidentiary reason to think it was other than a normal marriage, and continued until his death. Hathaway died 7 years later and is buried beside him. The "cottage" remained in the ownership of the family until 1846, when financial problems forced the family to sell it after more than 300 years of ownership. They remained as tenants in the house until 1892, at which time it was turned over to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. The house is furnished with reproduction furniture and furnishings, and is frankly a more interesting place to visit than the Shakespeare birthplace museum. It is surrounded by lovely gardens with plantings that would have mostly been available at the time Hathaway grew up there.

Due to the press of other interests, we did not take time to visit Shakespeare's burial place.

Our journey next took us to Coventry. During World War II Coventry was subjected to one of the most horrific bombing raids by the Germans on England. There has been a frequently repeated trope that the attack on Coventry was a deliberate fire-bombing aimed primarily at the Cathedral, and that Coventry has no military significance. This is completely untrue. Coventry was the location of considerable munitions and equipment manufacture. It was subjected to repeated bombing throughout the war as a legitimate target. That said, the bombing of November 14-15 1940 was particularly gruesome. Smaller German bombers were used to drop smaller bomb loads, with the same bombers returning to France to refuel and re-arm repeatedly to repeat their bombing. The first wave was pathfinders that dropped marker flares, then bombers came over and deliberately bombed roads that would first responders access to the city center as well as water mains so that firefighting became impossible. High explosive bombs were used, accompanied by aerial mines dropped by parachute to explode as fuel-air bombs. These burned roofs so that later bombs could fall into buildings unimpeded. Then magnesium and petroleum bombs were used to ignite the whole city on fire. Part of the purpose of the raid was reportedly to burn the preserved medieval old city, and the bombing was heavily concentrated on the city center. As a result only limited damage occurred to the war production capacity of the city. There were reports that Hitler ordered the bombing as a reprisal for the British bombing of Munich 6 days earlier. The bombing operation was chillingly given the name Operation Mondscheinsonate (Operation Moonlight Sonata). There were rumors that Churchill had been warned in advance of the bombing by the decryption of the Enigma transmits, but the best evidence is that he knew a major raid was coming but was warned of multiple possible targets and it was believed that London was the principle target.

One almost immediate consequence of the Coventry blitz was that the British high command began moving from attempts at precision bombing to more indiscriminate area bombing, including increased use of incendiary bombing. This approach, taken to its logical conclusion, led to the horrific fire-bombing of Dresden, witnessed by young POW Kurt Vonnegut.

The bombed out remains of Coventry Cathedral stand as a stark reminder of the horror of war. The spire survived as well as the walls. Scorch marks are still visible. A pair of charred beams lying in the shape of across was discovered in the burned wreckage, and the beams were tied together. For a time the makeshift cross stood in the wreckage, but eventually the relic was moved into the new cathedral that was built as a replacement, and a reproduction was placed in the ruins that were maintained as a place of remembrance. The replacement cathedral was deliberately built in a very modern style immediately adjacent to the ruins of remembrance.

Leaving Coventry (not as easily done as said due to construction etc) we headed directly to Oxford.

Oxford has some manufacturing and other industries, but it is known primarily as a university town. The University of Oxford is the oldest continuously operating university in the English- speaking world, and the second oldest overall (after University of Bologna, which became a university in 1088 and thus beat Oxford by 8 years). It does receive some public funding, but is heavily endowed (aggregate of >£6 billion in the colleges and the central university), and is completely self-governing. It is currently recognized as the best university in the world. Luminary figures in numerous disciplines have either been educated or taught there, including 69 Nobel prize winners, 12 saints (probably quite a larger number of sinners), 4 Fields Medal winners (the Nobel Prize for mathematics), and numerous other.s It is particularly known for its large library system, it large university press, and for the large number of writers who have called it home. These include poets such as T.S. Eliot, who is probably turning over in his grave knowing that today he is probably better known for some hastily written verses about his cats than for The Wasteland. Other well known authors include Joseph Heller, Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, J.R.R. Tolkien, Evelyn Waugh, Oscar Wilde, Percy Bysshe Shelley, W.H. Auden, John Fowles, John Donne, and A.E. Housman.

Theodore Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, studied here before bringing us The Grinch and one of my own favorite characters, the elephant named Horton. "I meant what I said, and I said what I meant. An elephant's faithful, one hundred percent." But in this blog we won't be hearing a Who, or wondering about blue fish, or marveling at the rottenness of The Grinch while Thurl Ravenscroft rings in our ears. Instead we shall focus on the creator of a more dangerous creature, the frumious bandersnatch.
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. “Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch!”

Jabberwocky was a nonsense poem by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll. It was first published in 1855, and later incorporated into the second of his Alice books, Through the Looking-Glass. I read it as a fairly young child. The tradition in our family was that you were not going to be given knowledge - you were expected to go find it. Asking the meaning of a word inevitably got a response of "Go ask Dick", meaning the dictionary. I tried looking up the nonsense words in Jabberwocky and could not find them in the largest dictionary I could locate. I did not at that time realize that they were purely neologisms. I spent several years in dictionarial (this neologism thing a appears to be contagious) disgust before finally learning that the words really had no particular meaning. Although he was asked to explain the words, Carroll gave inconsistent answers. Perhaps it is best summed up by these words from Through the Looking-Glass:

“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more, nor less.”

Carroll was the descendant of a line of Anglican clerics and army officers, but declined religious orders or military service himself. He studied at Christ Church College in Oxford, and remained there for the better portion of his life. He was a skilled and gifted Mathematician and logician, and that was his primary duty at Oxford.

In 1856 a new dean arrived at Christ Church College. Henry Liddell had 10 children, with three daughters including young Alice. After a chance meeting with the new dean, Carroll started taking various of the children rowing. He would often tell them his made up stories. One day he told a tale to Alice and she asked him to write it down. That was the start of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, followed later by Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. During the writing Carroll drew on various familiar objects in Oxford to inspire details in the Alice stories, such as the long-necked firedogs in the great hall of Christ Church College that were the inspiration for Alice's elongated neck when she grows suddenly taller after eating the magic mushroom. Now Oxford has returned the steal, with Alice references everywhere

When we got to Oxford we just wandered around, taking it all in. The Radcliffe Camera is one of the most classical buildings I have ever seen. It was graduation time, and young students were wandering around in their gowns. It made finding a place to eat dinner more difficult. We tried to go to the Eagle and Child, a pub which had been the gathering point for the Inkling writers' group, including C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, but unfortunately it has permanently closed and is being remodeled for a new concept.

The next morning we decided to tour the Natural History Museum, primarily to see the most complete dodo Skelton that is known. Naturally, it was missing for just that week. Never could find out where it had gone. The museum reminded us of the old Charleston Museum, including a baleen whale skeleton hanging from the ceiling. We also toured the History of Science Museum which specializes in scientific machines. Our final event in Oxford was a tour of Christ Church College. The Great Hall and the Grand Staircase will be familiar to anyone who is an aficionado of Harry Potter.

Much more could be written about Oxford - its great scientists, mathematicians, logicians, philosophers, and clerics. And yet, the thing that perhaps sticks with my perverse nature more than anything else was something I saw on a previous visit. With friends teaching at Brasenose College, I was invited to tour the Brasenose library, and there they proudly had displayed a 15th century copied text in which some poor monk, tired of endless copying of old manuscripts, had written the words "F**k the Abbot", the earliest know written expression of that word. I really need to examine my soul.

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Comments

[Home and Away]

You forgot C.S. Lewis...
in the list of Oxford well known authors.

[buddymedbery]

correct
You are right. I should have included him in the list, although I did mention him later. It is difficult to do justice to all the greats of Oxford.