Enjoyed a great evening at Keswick’s Theatre by the Lake on Thursday, for an on-stage conversation with Eric Robson about classic Keswick author Hugh Walpole.

The Theatre will be premiering its new dramatisation of Walpole’s novel Rogue Herries on 23 March (full details from http://www.theatrebythelake.com/) and they kindly invited us over to talk about Walpole, his work, and why the reputation of this once leading novelist has faded, so that he’s now remembered, if at all, almost entirely for his Cumberland tetralogy.

Eric is a Walpole enthusiast and expert, with an impressive collection of rare volumes of his work. He has made a fine film, Herries Lakeland  introducing Walpole by way of the Cumbrian places he wrote about and lived in. Eric has also written the introductions to the recent reprints of the novels. He suggested that Walpole’s death in 1943 had been badly timed: writers who died during the war tended to be quickly forgotten and the paper shortage meant books weren’t reprinted. Walpole was also ridiculed in Maugham’s novel Cakes and Ale as a selfish social climbing opportunist – an unfair caricature of a far more complex (and generous) man.

I made the suggestion too that Walpole, as above all a teller of rattling good stories, doesn’t fit in with the Modernist narrative of the English novel – even though Virginia Woolf and Henry James were both his close friends. Walpole is a descendant of Scott and akin to Buchan – unpretentious but highly readable, a storyteller above all, with a cinematic imagination that made him a natural when he went to Hollywood in 1934 for a spell as a successful screen writer.

Read the witch-drowning episode in Rogue Herries, the burning of Fell House in Vanessa  or the bleakly terrifying duel between Uhland and John Herries in The Fortress if you want to see Walpole at his dark and terrifying greatest. Or order Tarnhelm: The Best Supernatural Stories of Hugh Walpole from Tartarus Press.

I think we gave a lively and balanced view of Walpole, and we had great fun doing it, and meeting old friends and new upstairs in the Theatre bar afterwards. Do come if you can to see Rogue Herries at Keswick’s Theatre by the Lake. And if anyone from BBC or Granada TV is reading this, why don’t you think about a full-scale dramatisation of the Herries novels? The world’s best locations are there waiting for you, and you could have a Lakeland Downton on your hands.

Most of my posts about the Lakes have been celebratory. This one isn’t. We are facing a risk that a huge dump for nuclear waste will be created in the Lake District, specifically in and under Ennerdale, the quietest and one of the most beautiful valleys in the Lakes.

The plan is to dig a vast underground cavern in which massive quantities of lethal waste will be stored, which will remain immensely dangerous for the next million years or so. Even the plans put forward by those in favour show that the foothills of Great Gable and Scafell will be permanently scarred by construction and maintenance buildings.

Other counties have already turned down the idea of becoming the world’s nuclear dustbin. The nuclear industry hopes that the lack of jobs in Cumbria will persude the local authorities to give in.

But Bill Jefferson, Chair of the Lake District National Park authority, warns of ‘potentially disastrous effects’ on both landscape and tourism.
He said: “Tourism brings in far more than Sellafield [nuclear processing complex] ever would, and let’s face it, there are going to be more than enough jobs in dealing with the clear-up and improvement of above-ground storage which is happening there.
“We have 15 million people coming to the park every year, and the prospect of having the world’s largest nuclear waste dump could make that considerably fewer.”
On 30 January, three Cumbrian councils will decide whether to agree a full preliminary planning proposal for an underground storage facility four times larger than the vast Sellafield complex from where the waste will be transported.

This lunatic scheme needs to be stopped now for everyone’s sake and for the sake of the future. What you can do at once is to sign the petition at

http://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/no-nuclear-dump-in-the-lake-district

We need signatures, and we need them right now. It will take about a minute.

And if you are able to be in the Lakes, please join the protest walk at Ennerdale on Saturday 26 January. The organisers say:

“Ennerdale Protest Walk – 12:00hrs Saturday 26th January 2013
We have organised a protest walk in Ennerdale on Saturday 26th January 2013.
This is the potential route that heavy lorries and site equipment could take through the Ennerdale valley. The walk will start at Bowness Knott Carpark and continue beside the lake and end at the River Liza Delta just below Ennerdale Fell. This would be the anticipated site for the temporary Drilling HQ if seismic testing is to be carried out in MRWS Stage 5.
The closing sequences of the movie 28 Days Later (2002), directed by Danny Boyle, were filmed around the Ennerdale area and people will remember the message laid on the grass and viewed from above. We have arranged for the walk to be photographed from the air, weather permitting. It is our intention to recreate the final scene and provide footage and stills for use by the media.
The proposed walk will be a gentle stroll of 1.5miles each way and is easy enough for families and walkers of all ability. Please make sure all your friends, family, colleagues and anyone else who will listen comes along and supports this protest. We need as many people as possible to create media interest.”

Delighted to say that I’ve just brought out my first e-book! The Opium-Eater, my biography of Thomas De Quincey, the great Romantic essayist and author of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, is now out from Crux Publishing, an independent publisher specialising in high quality non-fiction e-books. It’s been well-recived, as you can see from the reviews on amazon.com and amazon.co.uk, which are all 5*.

Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) is world-famous for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, the first book to explore the experience of addiction and the states of mind – both alienated and visionary – to which it gave rise.

The archetypal bohemian, at seventeen De Quincey was living penniless on the streets of London. Later, as a pioneering journalist, he spent a wandering life of poverty and debt whilst writing for the great magazines which were the mass media of his day.

A close friend of Wordsworth and Coleridge, he shared the lives of the Romantic poets in the Lake District and wrote vivid personal accounts of them which caused a storm of controversy.

Recognised as a genius by authors as diverse as Virginia Woolf and William Burroughs, De Quincey analysed the alienation of the city, the aesthetics of murder, and the paradoxical nature of the self at the very dawn of the modern age. He is a founder of modern biography, a subversive thinker, an innovative crime writer and above all a master of English prose.

I’ve been able to incorportate in my biography of this remarkable figure, all the new discoveries that where made when I was General Editor of De Quincey’s collected works. My book traces him from the affluent Manchester childhood which he fled for poverty and the streets, then through addiction, literary success, and the dramatic tensions of his later debt-ridden years in Edinburgh when he produced his last masterpieces. The book has been fully revised and updated for this new edition.

To order, just put one of the following into your browser:

Crux publishing:
www.cruxpublishing.co.uk/books/opium.html

Apple iBookstore:

http://bit.ly/XpWvR8

Kobo:

http://bit.ly/QsTTz7

Amazon.co.uk:

http://amzn.to/TdmrAK

Amazon.com:

http://amzn.to/REcRBx

With the recent news that M&S have chosen Seb White, a little boy with Down’s Syndrome, as a model for their children’s clothes, it seemed a good time to draw attention to the likelihood that William Wordsworth probably wrote one of his finest poems about a Down’s Syndrome child.

His beautiful sonnet ‘Surprised by Joy’ was written after he had lost two children, but its most likely subject is Catherine Wordsworth, who was especially dear to her father and used to delight him by playing in his study as he wrote. Here’s the poem:

SURPRISED by joy–impatient as the Wind
I turned to share the transport–Oh! with whom
But Thee, deep buried in the silent tomb,
That spot which no vicissitude can find?
Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind–
But how could I forget thee? Through what power,
Even for the least division of an hour,
Have I been so beguiled as to be blind
To my most grievous loss?–That thought’s return
Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore, 10
Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn,
Knowing my heart’s best treasure was no more;
That neither present time, nor years unborn
Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.

Sadly, Catherine (1808-12) had died at less than four years old and the poem records a painful moment when Wordsworth instinctively turns to the child and then realises, a split second later, that she is no longer there – something anyone who has suffered a bereavement will be able to identify with.

But how do we know that Catherine had Down’s Syndrome? It’s not certain but it is extremely likely. I noticed the evidence when I was researching the life of the essayist Thomas De Quincey, and a couple of years ago pointed it out to Muriel Strachan, who is writing a book on the Wordsworth children, and suggested she examine the evidence systematically. She did so and the case seems very clear.

Catherine was born when the poet and his wife were both 38. A loveable and delightful child, she was said by Dorothy Wordsworth to have ‘not…the least atom of beauty’, but a wonderful sense of humour and ‘something irresistibly comic in her face and movements’. Wordsworth used to call her ‘my little Chinese maiden’ – probably relating to the epicanthic fold of skin which gives some Down’s children an unusual shape to the eye. She seems to have had heart problems and suffered from convulsions and some problem with swallowing. All these symptoms point very strongly to Down’s Syndrome.

The whole Wordsworth Circle was fond of her, and Thomas De Quincey, author of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, loved her especially: so much so that when she died he was heart-broken, and claims to have slept out on her grave in Grasmere churchyard for six summer weeks in passionate grief. It was probably depression following her death that tipped him into full-blown opium additicion, for his addiction took hold soon after she died.
Wordsworth wrote two poems about Catherine: the other, lesser-known poem is ‘Characteristics of a Child Three Years Old:

LOVING she is, and tractable, though wild;
And Innocence hath privilege in her
To dignify arch looks and laughing eyes;
And feats of cunning; and the pretty round
Of trespasses, affected to provoke
Mock-chastisement and partnership in play.
And, as a faggot sparkles on the hearth,
Not less if unattended and alone
Than when both young and old sit gathered round
And take delight in its activity; 10
Even so this happy Creature of herself
Is all-sufficient, solitude to her
Is blithe society, who fills the air
With gladness and involuntary songs.
Light are her sallies as the tripping fawn’s
Forth-startled from the fern where she lay couched;
Unthought-of, unexpected, as the stir
Of the soft breeze ruffling the meadow-flowers,
Or from before it chasing wantonly
The many-coloured images imprest 20
Upon the bosom of a placid lake.

Muriel Strachan presented an outline of her findings at the Wordsworth Museum last autumn. For full details we shall have to wait for her book on the Wordsworth children. Meanwhile, in the new edition of my book The Opium-Eater: A Life of THomas De Quincey (Crux Publishing, forthcoming) I’ve been able to point to the likelihood that Catherine was a Down’s baby, and to explore the part she played in De Quincey’s life.

Down’s Syndrome was not identified as a medical condition until John Langdon Down described it in 1866, so the Wordsworths and their friends simply saw Catherine as a lovely and somewhat unusual child.

Odd coincidence. I was just writing a chapter on Hugh Walpole, the Lakeland novelist, for the forthcoming third volume of Keswick Characters, edited by Patricia Howell and Brian Wilkinson, and I clicked on Google to find an image of Walpole’s house, Brackenburn, above Derwentwater. What came up was an estate agent’s picture: the house has just gone on the market. http://www.findaproperty.com/for-sale/property-12240824

Built in 1909 of local stone and perched on the fellside near the south end of the lake, Brackenburn is a beautiful place, even if its design (like Walpole himself) has a slight touch of suburbia about it. Walpole moved there in 1923, and wrote his famous family saga, the Herries Chronicle, there – in between frquent trips to London to enjoy theatre and parties.

He enlarged the house and developed its fabulous gardens, which have been well cared for by the present owners, who I gather have had the house for 22 years.

Walpole’s reputation has flagged since his death in 1941, but his Herries novels are still worth reading. They have big faults, certainly: there is virtually no plot: the passage of generations of farmers, merchants and landowners with their accompanying feuds, obsessions and antagonisms generate a semblance of motivation, and that suffices. Historical accuracy is flouted: Walpole lacked the patience for research, consoling himself during the writing of Rogue Herries that ‘no one knows very much about the eighteenth century really, or only a few do. I can be venturous.’ But Walpole is a dab hand at fantasy, the horrific, the bizarre. In this realm his imagination is of splendid fertility, and he has a masterful gift for the visually grotesque.

One of his finest opassages is the horribly convincing crowd-scene in Rogue Herries, where Mrs Wilson, a mentally-confused and infirm old woman servant from Herries’s household, tries to visit a dying friend in a nearby village and is taken for a witch.

‘Men and women, close together as though for protection, were gathered together at the end of the cobbled path. They stood, huddled together, not speaking, staring at her. Although she could not see well and was so deeply frightened that it was though her heart were beating in her eyes, yet certain faces were very distinct to her.’

She is stripped, stoned and thrown into a river, where she dies. The episode is seen from the victim’s point of view and is cinematic in its constant restless movement and shaky, off-balance shifts of vision. Walpole was a natural screen-writer, enjoying a successful stint in Hollywood scripting David Copperfield and Little Lord Fauntleroy for David O. Selznick.

He demonstrates it repeatedly in the Herries novels, in both crowded set-pieces (feasts, fights, markets, travelling-theatre shows) and episodes of fast-moving, claustrophobic horror like the burning of Fell House in Vanessa, where Adam Paris, confused by smoke, searches on the wrong floor for his daughter’s room until the fire traps him.

Perhaps the finest scene in the Herries tetralogy is also the grimmest. It occurs in the third novel, The Fortress, where John and Uhland Herries, cousins who have cherished a lifelong loathing, make their separate ways through dense mist to meet at Skiddaw House, a desolate shepherd’s bothy on the north slope of the mountain. Uhland is lame, John crippled by an obsession with his own cowardice, which he overcomes to confront Uhland. Uhland shoots John, then turns the gun on himself. Walpole heightens the scene to a painful vividness by the use of banal detail – the dusty wax fruit on the windowsill of the neglected room, the child’s drawing on the back of the crumpled scrap of paper which is all Uhland can find for his suicide note. The result is a scene worthy of Conrad or Hardy.

Walpole still deserves to be read. And if you have £1,750,000 to spare you might like to buy his wonderful house and garden too. It really is quite a special place.