Is
the age of the true believer over? Read Hugh Whelchel at Faith, Work &
Economics for an interesting answer. And the Christian Post reports that a panel of a Christian pastor, a
liberal author and an atheist agrees that modern liberals have turned free
speech into tribal argument, and are turning universities into places of
cultural inquisition.
Good
poetry, a story about America’s forgotten missionaries, what Peggy Noonan’s
worried about, and a wonderful doodle about The
Screwtape Letters.
My
entire understanding of Peter
Pan came from the 1952 movie by Walt
Disney. I have vague memories of the television version starring Mary
Martin in the title role (same as the Broadway production), but it was Disney
who introduced me to the boy who refused to grow up and all his cohorts –
Captain Hook, Mr. Smee and the rest of the pirates, Tiger Lily and her Indian
tribe, the Lost boys, the crocodile, and the Darling children – Wendy, John and
Michael (and don’t forget Nana, the nursemaid dog).
The Peter Pan statue in Kensington Gardens
I’ve
now gone back to the original children’s story, Peter
Pan by J.M. Barrie,
and I have to say I’m completely charmed by a children’s story that’s more than
100 years old. And kudos to Mr. Disney for following the original story so
closely in the animated movie version.
J.M.
Barrie was a popular novelist and playwright, originally from Scotland and living
in London. In 1902, he wrote an adult novel called The Little White Bird that for several chapters had a character
named Peter Pan – a baby who flew into Kensington Gardens in London (which is why the gardens today has a statue of
Peter Pan). Two years later, he wrote the play Peter Pan, and it was a box-office hit. His publisher took the
Peter Pan chapters from The Little White Bird and published them as a separate
work. In 1911, Barrie wrote the novelized form of the play, calling it Peter and Wendy.
This is the story we know today as Peter
Pan.
The
plot is familiar: Peter gets separated from his shadow at the Darling home in
London, and comes back. Wendy sews it back on – and she and her two brothers
fly off to Neverland with Peter (and Tinkerbell). In the book, they are gone
for a considerable period of time, and Mr. and Mrs. Darling are heartbroken. After
various adventures with Indians and pirates (and Peter’s duel with Captain
Hook), Wendy and her brothers return home.
J.M. Barrie in 1892
The
story is about being a child and an adult, and the wonder we let go of when we
become that adult. And it’s a thrilling adventure, too, and I suspect written
to be read aloud – Barrie includes a number of asides about the plot and
character that might go over the head of small child but which an adult reading
the story aloud would chuckle over. But the Indians and pirates and flying and
living underground and that crocodile that swallowed the clock chasing Captain
Hook – that’s the stuff for children’s ears, and children’s imaginations.
Disney
still releases Peter Pan now and then, and you can buy the DVD, of course, and
the legend continues. In 2004, Johnny Depp and Kate Winslett starred in a movie
about J.M. Barrie and the creation of Peter Pan called Finding Neverland.
And it was quite a good movie, nominated for a number of Academy Awards
including best picture.
The
edition of Peter Pan that I read was published by Collector’s Library in 2014,
and it included the original illustrations from the 1911 novel done by F.D. Bedford.
Peter Pan is a delight to
read, and I am plotting to read it aloud to my two oldest grandsons in the
not-too-distant future.
Related:
The trailer from Finding Neverland.
Top illustration by
F.D. Bedford from "Peter and Wendy" by James Matthew Barrie,
published 1911. Public domain.
This
month at Tweetspeak
Poetry, the featured poetry prompts are based on math, science, and
technology. See
the post for more poems. I’m sure there are at least two people who liked geometry.
Illustration: The Theorem of Pythagoras,
colorized by Dany Jack Mercier via Public
Domain Pictures. Used with permission.
I
was in high school when I first read Josephine Tey’s The
Daughter of Time, originally published in 1951. Tey’s detective,
Inspector Alan Grant, is laid up in the hospital, and avoids boredom by reexamining
what is likely the most serious charge ever laid against a British sovereign –
the murder of the young princes in the Tower of London by Richard III,
the last of the Plantagent kings. Tey’s mystery is fascinating and rather
pointedly suggested that history could well be?
But
then, what academic would take a mystery novel seriously?
Four
years later, an American historian named Paul Murray Kendall did academically
what Tey had done novelistically. He wrote a
biography of Richard III that relied exclusively on contemporary sources
instead of the later accounts like that of Sir Thomas More (Shakespeare used
More’s account for the basis of his play Richard
III.) What Kendall discovered was that there was a world of difference
between what Richard’s contemporaries said and what later (and rather obviously
biased Tudor) accounts said.
In
1998, film writer Philippa Langley stopped briefly at a Waterstone’s bookstore
in Edinburgh, to find something to read while on holiday. She saw an old book,
thought it looked interesting, and bought it. She later said she spent less
than minute picking it out. The book was Kendall’s biography of Richard III.
Her
selection changed history, figuratively and literally. After reading the book,
she became convinced that Richard’s reputation has been deliberately blackened
by writers seeking to flatter the Tudors, not to mention the Tudors themselves.
Richard had been turned into a monster, while contemporaries had a very
different perspective.
Portairt of Richard III ion the Nationakl Portrait Gallery, London
Langley
would play a critical role over the next 14 years in what became one of the
marvels of modern archaeology – the discovery of “Skeleton X’ during a dig in Leicester
in central England, the skeleton confirmed as that of Richard III. In fact, she
played a critical role in the questioning, badgering, motivating , fundraising
and undertaking the dig at the site of Greyfriars Friary.
Or
at least it was thought to be the site; no one was quite sure. The friary, which
contained Richard’s tomb, had been destroyed during the dissolution of the
abbeys, monasteries and convents by Henry VIII after the English Reformation
(Henry was less interested in theology and church matters and more interested in
the divorce the Pope wouldn’t grant and the wealth that the various Catholic
institutions held in England). The story was that at the time of the friary’s
destruction, an angry move had destroyed the tomb, exhumed Richard’s remains, and
tossed them in the nearby Soar River.
Mike Pitts
The
story of the discovery and confirmation of Richard III’s skeleton is
wonderfully told in Digging
for Richard III: the Search for the Lost King by Mike Pitts, first published in 2013
and updated and expanded earlier this year to cover the reburial earlier this
year. Pitts was well-suited to write the story – he’s the editor of British Archaeology Magazine and
the author of several archaeological works, including Hengeworld,
the account of the discovery of a large prehistoric temple in Somerset.
Digging for Richard III is a full and
fascinating account of how the king’s remains were discovered – the role of
Philippa Langley, the assembling of the team at the University of Leicester,
how Richard III societies around the world contributed to the funding of the
project, and how the goals of the archaeological team often conflicted with
those of Langley and her supporters. The team was trying to identify the site of
the friary, with the finding of Richard III’s remains somewhere down the list
of objectives. In fact, the archaeological team didn’t really think finding
Richard’s remains was all that likely.
Facial reconstruction from the skeleton's skull by the University of Dundee
This
was a project that did not go as archaeology projects usually go. As Pitts
quotes the members, typically a team will find a few pottery shards “you can’t
even sell on eBay.” In the case of the
dig at Leicester, what was labeled “Skeleton X” was found the very first day of
the dig. But it was simply a skeleton, until a forensic specialist began to dig
the skeleton out of the compacted dirt and discovered it had scoliosis, or a
severe curvature of the spine. Just like the reports of Richard III. Four
months later, DNA testing with descendants of the king confirmed it was indeed
Richard III.
The
findings sparked an international sensation, and, no surprise here, the
inevitable lawsuits. All kinds of organizations and cities wanted Richard’s
remains (think tourist dollars). There were online votes and lobbying, with
Queen Elizabeth II giving a dignified nod to the cathedral at Leicester, a few
short miles from where Richard was born and the nearby field where Richard died
in the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. This past spring, Richard was reburied in
the cathedral.
Not
all archaeological projects happen as thrillingly as this one, but Pitts tells
a great story. It’s all about Richard III, yes, but it is also how forensic
science, DNA testing, and good old intuition played critical roles in finding
the body of a long-lost king.
At
the reburial service, actor Benedict Cumberbatch read a poem written for the
occasion by Carol Ann Duffy, Britain’s Poet Laureate (you can watch the reading
here). This is the
poem:
Richard
My bones, scripted in light, upon cold soil,
a human braille. My skull, scarred by a crown,
emptied of history. Describe my soul
as incense, votive, vanishing; your own
the same. Grant me the carving of my name.
These relics, bless. Imagine you re-tie
a broken string and on it thread a cross,
the symbol severed from me when I died.
The end of time – an unknown, unfelt loss –
unless the Resurrection of the Dead …
or I once dreamed of this, your future breath
in prayer for me, lost long, forever found;
or sensed you from the backstage of my death,
as kings glimpse shadows on a battleground.
Related: Highlights of
the reburial service earlier this year.
We’re
standing on the sidewalk outside the Hampstead tube station north London, right
on the southern edge of Hampstead Heath. We’ve taken the tube from near our
hotel in Westminster to the Embankment station, and changed to the Northern
line. We find ourselves this busy Saturday morning at the major crossroads of
Hampstead – the intersection of Hampstead High Street and Rosslyn Hill.
More
precisely, we’re waiting for Anita Miller, our guide for
the monthly Keats Walk in Hampstead. We booked our tickets online through what
is today the John Keats House (also known as
the Wentworth House) in Hampstead. The tour will end at the house, but we have
about two hours of walking, stopping and listening before we arrive at the
house. My wife would want me to point out that it’s less a walk and more a hike
– Hampstead and the Heath are hilly, and some areas are more suitable for
mountain goats.
Our
group is eclectic, with one exception – most of the 12 of us are female. I’m
one of two men, and the other looks like he’s come along at his girlfriend’s
request. Our ages range from high school to Baby Boomer.
He
was 25 when he died. In his lifetime, he published all of 54 poems, and wrote a
total of 150. He was seen by many as something of a radical, abandoning the
poetry written by John Dryden and Alexander Pope and instead loosening poetic
forms, and thus inviting massive cultural and societal change (they took poetry
rather seriously in the early 1800s). Upon his death, he slipped into a
shallow obscurity, and it would take Alfred, Lord Tennyson to resurrect his
poetry and his reputation.
We
usually meet Keats and his fellow Romantic poets in high school English
classes, and we wonder why anyone would write a poem about a Greek pot. Or a
nightingale. Love poems we understand, but this other stuff seems a little
strange. It often takes a gifted teacher to help us understand what poems like
“Ode to a
Nightingale”
and “Ode on a Grecian
Urn”
are really about.
In
September, my wife and I had the opportunity to join a “Keats Walk” in
Hampstead and Hampstead Heath in north London, led by the able guide Anita Miller. Hampstead is the
area most associated with Keats, the area where he lived for a time, and many
of his greatest poems were written there. (Starting tomorrow, I have a series
of four articles at Tweetspeak
Poetry
in November that explore the walk, the poetry, and the impact and influence of
Keats). The walk ended at Keats House, almo known as Wentworth House, and it
was there I bought the 2012 biography of Keats by Nicholas Roe, simply entitled John Keats.
A
number of good biographies of Keats have been published, including ones by W. Jackson Bate, former British
poet laureate Sir Andrew
Motion,
Sidney Colvin (an older
biography free on Amazon Kindle under public domain), and the pre-Raphaelite
writer William Rossetti (also free on
Amazon Kindle). Nicholas Roe’s biography likely exceeds them all – meticulously
researched, exploring both Keats’ life and his poetry, documenting what is and
isn’t known about the poet, his family, and his poetry.
His biography of Keats is that of an
academic, yes, but an academic who has broadened his writing style to embrace a
more general interested reader. And the picture of Keats he presents is more of
a complete one, that of a rising poet conscious of what it takes to succeed in
poetry, dealing with family tragedies and illness for almost all of his young
life, and a poet who could quickly dash off a beautiful poem while more experienced,
practiced poets would agonize. Keats was also the poet somewhat sneered at by
critics; he did not arise from the gentlemanly, educated classes but from a
more middle-class commercial one (Keats, Roe points out, was often cited by
contemporary critics as a “Cockney poet”).
Well-researched and extensively
footnoted, Roe’s John Keats provides
tremendous insight into the poet who almost fell into obscurity but whose
poetry would influence Tennyson, the pre-Raphaelites, Pound, Yeats, Eliot,
Derek Waldcott and Seamus Heaney, and the poet who wrote some of the most
beautiful poems in the English language. It’s an excellent biography.
To see the start of the series on Keats in Hampstead and the Keats Walk, please visit Tweetspeak Poetry tomorrow.
Painting: John Keats on Hampstead Heath by Joseph Severn.
