Girl-Power in Great Ormond Street

On February 24th, we continued this term's focus on the latter part of the century with a discussion of the last novel of 'Mark Rutherford' (William Hale White), Clara Hopgood (1896), in which a pair of extraordinarily independent sisters embark on an uncertain adult life in lodgings in Great Ormond Street. We found this text's historical frame often sensitively done but sometimes unconvincing, though we all agreed that setting the text in the 1840s provoked some fascinating friction between contrasting cultural norms. The depiction of proto-New Women, the treatment of dissenting religion, the form of the narrative and its literary style, the representation of the relationship between sprawling city and still-distinct countryside, the inclusion of Italian nationalism and the figure of Mazzini, and the novel's autobiographical imperative, all resulted in lively conversation and the occasional contention. Reviews from the time of its first publication were thought by some of us to be rather harsh, and by others, spot on. Whether Hale White's 'rambling' way of writing a novel deserves disapprobation for its 'clumsy construction' or praise for anticipating the modernism of figures like D. H. Lawrence seems set to remain up in the air for the foreseeable future...

William Morris's News from Somewhere

On Thursday January 27th 2011 we turned to William Morris's News from Nowhere which features an utopian post-revolutionary Bloomsbury, in the form of a surviving relic of the past: the British Museum. We found the book particularly interesting in the way it married a genuinely rigorous interest in abstract ideas with an autobiographical dimension that was clearly palpable throughout, and indeed discernable in the text's geography as much as anything else. We discussed the book's proto-ecological aspects, and also turned to its rather problematic relationship to the aesthetic, especially when discussing the human (and more often than not, female) form, which led to the rather fascinating query whether this book can be seen within a social-Darwinist (and possibly fascist) tradition as much as a Marxist one...