Happy Christmas and a Mea Culpa to All My Followers

 

Apologies for my recent neglect, apologies for not having been around to reply to lovely comments, and then catching up a bit late in the day to respond ... I have been a bit overwhelmed by work (and life) just lately. That'll teach me to have overseas exhibitions at Christmas time at the same time as an online shop selling Christmas cards ...

And having a hugely reduced screen so I miss out on blogging interaction since Blogger changed its design.

 

Will try to do better in 2013.

Promise!

Dickens in Doughty Street

Charles Dickens lived in this Georgian terrace in Holborn, at number 48,  from 1837 to 1839, with his wife Catherine and (possibly more artistically significantly) his sister-in-law Mary. Two of his novels, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby were written here and his career was taking off.

But in the midst of success came tragedy when 17-year-old Mary died suddenly after a night's illness, possibly of heart failure. Just how attracted the 25-year-old Dickens had been to Mary during life is debatable. After her death, in his arms Little Nell style, it became nothing short of what might be called an unhealthy obsession:

"From her lifeless fingers Charles took a ring which he was to wear in memory of her his entire life. He dreamt of her every night for months after her death."

As Dickens himself said:"She died in my arms, and the very last words she whispered were of me ..."

Mary Hogarth is buried in Kensal Green Cemetery. On her headstone is inscribed the epitaph he composed: "God numbered her among his angels".

Mary was the prototype of the saintly and virginal (some might say insipid) young women who populate so many of the novels of Charles Dickens.

So here he is, in later life with one of his dogs, revisiting the scene of his early years, the place where the angelic Mary had lived and died and there in the window are his younger self and the object of his obsession...
I don't think it is a coincidence that it is very much a rose-coloured image - though I have refrained from giving Mr Dickens a pair of spectacles!

Mary Shelley - in the Gulf of Melancholy

Mary in the Gulf of Melancholy

This little image had been kicking around in the back of my head for ages - it's a kind of follow-on from doing the sea storm in the picture of Shelley's Surrey birthplace last year. So I took a break between the houses of Dickens to do this imaginary portrait of Mary Shelley using magazine scraps, cuts from a photpcopy of pages from an old book about Byron and Claire Clairmont with nicely yellowed pages and an inked monoprint I pulled and then cut out

A widow aged just 26, she had experienced more life, joy and tragedy by that age than most of us in a lifetime. The rebellious daughter of a rebellious mother (feminist Mary Wolstonecraft), she had eloped with a married genius, buried three of their children and suffered several miscarriages. On the plus side, as you might say, she had written the definitive Gothic novel and an enduring masterpiece. Frankenstein has never been out of print since its publication.

Already plunged in a deep depression following a miscarriage, the death of Shelley in a sailing accident when his boat was engulfed by a storm, left her bereft and (more practically) rather less than penniless in a foreign land in what she described in her journal as "a gulph of melancholy".

So here she is in her gulph (I must say I prefer her spelling for some reason) and I can now turn my refreshed attention to Dickens's Doughty Street home.

Fiddly stuff which as you see requires lots of soothing cups of tea to aid the old concentration ...
Mary, meanwhile, is now in my online shop at www.etsy.com/shop/AmandaAWhite
(sorry the link defeats me!)