Reports

South Tyneside Meeting - January 2005 "Victorian Literature" by Malcolm Grady A Report by Margaret Stafford

Tonight's report is short-we are recovering from an evening of poetry-and much of Victorian poetry has a high moral tone or is a gloomy reflection of how hard life was-all part of Malcolm Grady's plan of course as he gave us an idea of how poetry can enhance the understanding of what the social conditions were like for those elusive ancestors of ours.

We dipped into the Book of Victorian Verse and the Penguin book of poetry of the Romantics and readings ranged from Rowland Edgerton Warburton through Christina Rossetti via Robert Louis Stevenson, Coventry Patmore and Joseph Skipsey.

We went from imagining what it must have been like to experience the explosion of progress as illustrated by images of travel home from school via carriage in the 1840s to the arrival of the train reducing the journey from 2 days to a few hours to looking at poems heavy with underlying messages about life and lust (this is Malcolm after all-he of the sex in south shields fame!) with double entendres for stale currant buns, or the attraction of the serving maid for Arthur Munby (see Diaries of Hannah Cullwick, Victorian Maidservant) and joined the old man described by Wordsworth on his journey to say farewell to his dying son.

We experienced the perils of the sea and the plans to eat "little billee" (Thackeray), we saw the way the Chartist movement could be seen as a threat to government though Ernest Jones' "factory town".

We felt the contrasting emotions of Skipsey's young boy about to start work in the pit and the fear of his parents who knew all too well the dangers therein.

We were uplifted by Stevenson's evocation of childhood-the unfairness of going to bed in day light and getting up by candle light, the problem of manners for children (nothing new under the sun!) and the journey to the land of Nod.

Back to the pain and duty of a loveless marriage from the work of Coventry Patmore, to the supreme sacrifice via the suicide of during the Indian mutiny portrayed by Rossetti.

As usual we came away with a whole new set of options for getting closer to the experiences our ancestors would have had.