Among Tigers and Panthers...

Part Two

Anti-heroine or victim?

FRIDERIKA VON MECKLENBURG STRELITZ by Schadow

Terracotta bust, 1794, by Schadow. Nationalgalerie, Berlin. Image source: Web Gallery of Art

  

The younger sister of Queen Louise had a tarnished career compared to the Prussian Madonna, in a much longer life circumscribed by unlucky marriages of convenience and necessity. Aged 15, she drew the short straw in the double marriage of the princesses of Mecklenburg Strelitz to two Prussian princes, the virtuous, strictly monogamous heir to the throne, Frederick William, and his more brilliant but dissolute younger brother, Louis Charles, who died three years later.

Amid the usual double standards about male and female adultery, there were salacious rumours that during her marriage, Friderika, instead of meekly suffering her unfaithful husband's neglect, retaliated by having an affair with one of his uncles, Louis Ferdinand, who was only a year older than him, and six years her senior.......

National mourning

RETURN WITH SHAME

 TO THE PLACE FROM WHICH [YOU] CAME

 

No, all taxpayers should not have been forced to pay their contribution to Thatcher's funeral, not morally nor financially. Those who think it is appropriate to pay respects should pay the rest of us respect, too. We are mourning, too, not her, but our "lost country, bought and sold", a collective soul murdered by the State, too blinded by greed to see the price of gold, in her name. Nothing could be more provocative or than the penalty of paying for this embarrassing ceremonial, confounding transient political personality with lasting national identity, when so many people are living on "the wine of desolation".
There is no point ranting further here, I'm just registering my own silent scream, hoping that all the screams and laments will rage like a torrent on the heads of colluders and collaborators, drowning out their funeral orations and that the only music heard will be the sound of Drake's drum calling sleeping Britain to arms, not against a foreign enemy, but the one within. Let all divisive politicians have unmarked graves. Let us shake our chains till tyrants quake with fear. Come, poets like Shelley, come Danny Boyle, give us the anti-Masque to this "ghastly masquerade".

(Every quote from Shelley's The Mask of Anarchy, 1819 - proving yet again that under different clothes and names, the nature of tyranny does not change.)

Romantic despite herself

PART THREE

"I fly with HORROR from such a passion"

 

Sarah Martha Siddons, in a print made by Robert Graves in 1832 after Lawrence, mid 1790s. © The Trustees of the British Museum

Jane Austen was revising the first version of Sense and Sensibility (called Elinor and Marianne) in 1797-98, while the sisters Sally and Maria Siddons’ lives were being “embittered and disturbed”[4] by the portrait painter Thomas Lawrence, who could not decide which of Sarah Siddons' daughters he should love, and transferred his attentions from the elder to the younger and back again, all the while confiding in his close friend, their famous mother....

Romantic despite herself

PART TWO

"no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck..."

Charlotte Brontë's accusation that there is “no open country, no fresh air”1 in Austen’s polite world is untrue. Austen incorporates the natural world as her characters would see it, and their perceptions change over the years under the influence of Romanticism. Elizabeth admires Pemberley’s woods hanging over a winding stream with an 18^th century appreciation of the picturesque; she is not emotionally uniting with nature; but a few years later, in about 1816, Anne Elliott, thinking of her own lost happiness, walks through the November fields quoting poetry about autumn to herself, glutting her sorrow on the mellow beauty around her, three years before Keats’ Ode to Autumn was published.

Painting, even the most familiar of places and weather, is another word for feeling: 

The Close, Salisbury oil by Constable,  

Victoria & Albert Museum. Image source: Web Gallery of Art

Constable, for whom painting was "but another word for feeling”2, was put on table mats...