New year, new house

First of all the very best wishes to everybody for the year ahead and I hope it is a peaceful and creatively plentiful one for all of us, wherever we are.

And to celebrate the atart of a new year, what else but the completion of my new house? 2012 is definitely going to be the year of Charles Dickens, it being the bicentenary of his birth and already, here in the UK we have had, in the past few days, a TV adaptation of Great Expectations and a radio rendering of A Tale of Two Cities.

As it happens both books were written at Gad's Hill Place.

As you see, I strayed from that original intention of including lots of garden ... the memories of the shawl and that wonderful quilt exhibition at the V&A last year kind of took over. I loved those old bedcovers appliqued with little domestic shapes which held significance for the embroiderer and the embroiderer's family. Like this one, made around 1850 and donated by the West Kent Federation of Women's Institutes to the museum.

So I have put in hearts to indicate Dickens's love for his garden (certainly not, by 1856 when he purchased the property, his love for his long-suffering and mentally abused wife which by then amounted to pathological hatred). There are quill pens and books, teapots, cats and dogs (which were a particular feature of the successive Dickens homes) and glasses of port.

And here, as promised, is a photo of my beautiful cashmere Paisley shawl which dates from around the same time, bought by me in a junk shop for about 5 shillings (yes, it was THAT long ago) in a Croydon junk shop when I was an art student and a gang of us would comb the surrounding junk and charity shops during lunch hour.

In the good old days when real bargains and very old stuff could be bought for a song.

Dove Cottage finished

Done, dusted and stuck down:

Though this image loses about a half inch on either side.

Now on with Gad's Hill Place, which is already straying from my original intention, colour-wise, in the sky at least. 

While browsing through my scrap boxes I came across bits that reminded me of something else that was current in the 1850s and 60s: Paisley shawls, an example of which I have and a photo of which I will upload in my next post. 

Anyway, into the mix they go ...

The inescapable Charles Dickens

Well, he's everywhere isn't he? Wall-to-wall 200th anniversary celebrations all over the media, so how could I resist? Not that I am a big fan or anything, his heroines are a bit too insipid, his stories a tad too sentimental for my taste and as for his treatment of his poor wife - abominable. I think being force-fed David Copperfield at school has a lot to do with it too.

But having embarked on this Writers' Houses project I could hardly ignore him and I have to say I am rather taken by the story of his Kentish home, Gad's Hill Place, which he had first seen as a young boy, and after which he had always dreamt of owning. In 1856 his wealth enabled him to realize that dream. He enjoyed it for the fourteen years remaining to him until his untimely death from a stroke on June 9 1870.

Doodles

"It was," said one quote I came across while researching the house, "one of those comfortable old-fashioned mansions which seem to have taken root nowhere but in the most picturesque parts of rural England, and are the brick-and-mortar embodiment of the idea of Home."

There is going to be plenty of garden in this picure and plenty of colour (as a contrast to the wintery tones of Dove Cottage). My first thought was Dickens's purchase of the property coincides with that astonishing burst of colour brought about in Europe by the discovery (or do I mean the invention?) in London of aniline dyes. There are Berlin woolwork samplers of the period that still retain the depth and intense vividness of those mauves, purples, lime greens, carmines and fucshias.

My swatch of clippings for Gad's Hill Place

What a contrast to the old faded sepia photographs of Gad's Hill Place.

And an excellent lead-in to concentrate my mind's eye  ....