Steve Muhlberger has been more prolific in his blog, lately, and it has featured some fine pieces on the psychology of historians. Entries such as “Is the past another country?” among many, are well worth reading. I’m reminded of them when I re-shelve a nice little book that I recently found in a second-hand shop ― an 1882 edition of Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome. It’s just the sort of thing that delights anyone who is fascinated by the past. It’s inscribed twice by early owners. The first inscription reads: “Dorothea Thorpe, from Hughey Jnr., March 20, 1884″ The second reads: “Lavinia Mary Ford, from Dorothea’s Husband and in memory of her. Charnwood 18th October 1934, St. Luke’s Day”. These excite the historical imagination in me.
Dorothea must have been a young girl when she received it as a gift from Hughey Junior. But who was this Dorothea, and can any trace of her be found by a 21st century Torontonian equipped with the Genie of the Internet? Well, there is indeed a Dorothea Thorpe known to history.
She was the subject of a portrait (shown above) by the renowned Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais, painted two years before the inscription in the book. The portrait shows a pretty girl of about, I would guess, ten years of age. Dorothea Mary Roby Thorpe grew up and became the wife of Godfrey Benson (1864–1945), a Liberal politician and man of letters. In 1911, Benson became Baron Charnwood and his wife was then styled Baroness Charnwood, and thus she can be accurately traced through Burke’s Peerage, which is conveniently online. Since the book is clearly inscribed “Charnwood,” underlined and without surname, which is the manner in which English Lords customarily signed, there seems no doubt that it belonged to her. How it ended up in Toronto is anybody’s guess. This city has never been a place that Barons and Baronesses have chosen to hang around, let alone dispose of their heirlooms in bookshops for ready cash. Dorothea had a son, who died without issue, extinguishing the title, and a daughter, who married Cyril John Radcliffe, 1st Viscount Radcliffe (a lawyer who devised the Radcliffe Line, which partitioned India and Pakistan). The Radcliffes had no children, so there are no surviving descendants. Lavinia Mary Ford, the object of the second inscription, appears as an entry in the Almanach de Gotha, the registry of Europe’s royalty, but this supplies nothing but a birthdate of 1913. None of these people appear to have spent any time in Toronto, or any part of Canada.
Dorothea was an author and wrote the book An Autograph Collection and the Meaning of It, published in 1930. The University of Toronto possesses a copy, entombed in a compact storage warehouse. I have placed an order for its exhumation. Who knows, it may yield some clue to the identity of the mysterious Hughey Junior.
Now, for the book itself. Thomas Babbington Macaulay was a historian, poet, and Whig politician of Victorian England. He was the driving force behind reforms expanding the franchise, abolishing legal impediments for Catholics and Jews, and in general advancing the interests of England’s lower classes against the privileges of the higher. Lays of Ancient Rome is a collection of three narrative poems set in the Roman Republic. The three “lays” were published in 1842, so they were already old stuff when Dorothea got them as a gift.
The first poem, Horatius, was for generations a standard item in school texts:
Lars Porsena of Clusium
By the Nine Gods he swore
That the great house of Tarquin
Should suffer wrongs no more.
By the Nine Gods he swore it,
And named a trysting day,
And bade his messengers ride forth,
East and west and south and north,
To summon his array.
and so on, to the lines which doubtless shamed many a guileless subaltern into facing down attacking Afghans:
Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
“To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his Gods
A modern reader is bound to dismiss this as naive Victorian bombast. But it’s a common error to imagine that people in the past were dumber than ourselves, and to imagine ourselves blessed with a special subtlety that they knew not. This is a particular fault of those who trot out the term “modernity” at every opportunity. Macaulay’s career as a political reformer and his prodigious learning make it unlikely that his motive was to bang out pleasant-sounding verse for schoolboys to recite for prizes.
In fact, reading the whole set of poems for the first time, I find that they constitute an incredibly sophisticated exercise in historical imagination.
Macaulay believed that every successful nation had, deeply embedded in its psyche, a cycle of traditional ballads. We know that the early Romans had such ballads, from numerous references in the works of the Augustan age, but they are lost. What Macaulay was trying to do was to recreate, in English, a sort of hypothetical re-incarnation of these lost ballads. Their “naive” quality is intentional. They are meant to duplicate the effect of popular songs composed by anonymous Romans before the Empire. What is more, they’re supposed to have been composed at different times, by different hands, under different political and social circumstances.
The first poem, Horatius, recounts events around 500 B.C., when the early Republic was at war with the Etruscan Kings. But Macaulay intends its fictitious author to have been a Roman composing orally, more than a century later, and it is full of oblique references to that later time. The imagined author is revealed as a plebe by his critical allusions to the unfair allotment of public lands, and the poem is meant to reflect plebeian discontent with the dictator Marcus Furius Camillus, after Rome’s war with Vei, when he sided against the interests of the plebes. At that time, the Gauls had occupied the ancient Etruscan city of Clusium, and its citizens looked to Rome to help them. All this is reflected, albeit indirectly, in the poem. Macaulay’s English prose, inspired by Scottish ballads, is meant to suggest the rude style of Latin before Greek culture had much influence on it.
The second poem, The Battle of the Lake Regillus, betrays a thin patina of Greek learning. The imagined author makes clear, but unnamed references to Homer and Herodotus. It’s putative date of composition is during the joint consulship of Publius Decius Mus (a plebe) and Quintus Fabius Maximus Rullianus (a noble), and it is imagined to have been recited during the religious ceremonies that accompanied the reform of the equestrian orders.
The third lay, Virginia, is set in 449 B.C., and recounts the tale of the virtuous plebeian maiden Virginia (or Verginia), who was abducted by the patrician decemvir, Appius Claudius Crassus. This was relevant to yet another struggle of the classes in the early Republic. Macaulay imagines it composed seventy years later, by a plebeian satirist celebrating the election of the reformers Caius Licinius and Lucius Sextius. By this time the Latin verse is strongly influenced by Greek conventions, and the English style reflects this.
The three poems, together, constitute a multi-layered text that would please the most ardent hermeneutic deconstructivist. Not only does the “simple folk poetry” document the complexities of the political, social, and economic conflicts of the Roman Republic, but it is clearly meant to be taken as relevant to the reform issues of Victorian England in which Macaulay was deeply embroiled. The work expects of the audience a deep understanding of Classical history and literature, and an equally keen interest in the politics of the day (which Victorian intellectuals saw as intimately linked). With the waning of Classical education, this all became unintelligible, and eventually invisible, to subsequent generations. The carefully crafted simplicity of the poems came to be seen as mere doggerel.
All in all, it seems a peculiar gift for a little girl, and more peculiar still that she would have cherished it for a lifetime ― which she evidently did, if it was still in her possession in 1934, and her husband attached such importance to it. I find myself tempted to create, at least in my mind’s eye, as elaborate a construction as Macaulay’s to explain the journey of this little volume from the hands of the golden-haired girl in Millais’ painting, through its years on the shelves of aristocratic homes in Europe, and then by some dramatic and tortuous route to Toronto, to finally find its way into my distinctly plebeian hands. (You can’t get any more plebeian than me).
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