Charles and I went to the last Australian test match at the Oval.
Fearfully hot day.
It was the hottest summer since 1868. There was also a drought, leading to the 8th driest summer on record, at that time.[1]
George and Malcolm came in the afternoon and Malcolm took me home via Brixton, a place of magnificent streets where we had tea.
Brixton: Charles Booth’s map and key 1889
‘The small settlement of Brixton underwent a huge transformation between the 1860s and 1890s, as railways and trams linked Brixton with the centre of London. In 1880, Electric Avenue was so named after it became the first street in the area to be lit by electricity. Large, expensive houses were constructed along the main trunk routes into Brixton, attracting the middle classes. Only a few years after Antonia and Malcolm’s visit the area underwent a great social upheaval as the middle classes moved out to be replaced by a huge working class population. Many of the big houses (Antonia notices) were converted into flats or boarding houses which proved very popular with theatre people working in the West End theatres, marking the start of Brixton’s close association with the arts.’[2]
Harry Fletcher came for the night and we persuaded him to come back tomorrow.
Father came home.
Harry left in the morning.
George went to Ireland
Malcolm was here all day.
I went to London to see Urith who arrived on Sunday. Captain Perrott is very ill with dysentery. They go to Harrogate on Wednesday. Urith looks wonderful. I saw Mrs Coltman and Ella.
Father sails to America in the Campania[3].
Here is Charles Booth on the passenger list of the Campania arriving back in England from New York three years earlier.
Meg, Imo and George came back from Ireland. Mother began an attack.
Mother in bed all day.
September 1899
Mother in bed, a little better in the evening.
Malcolm stayed here all day.
I spent the morning in bed and wrote out beautiful legal documents at his dictation.
George and Meg to Chiddingfold.
Malcolm didn’t go to London.
M. and I sat in the garden all morning and wrote letters.
George and Meg came back.
Mother seemed extraordinarily tired. I put her to bed before lunch.
Mr Bowen came for the night.
Mr Bowen left.
George went to Kingussie[4] to the Freshfields.
It would seem that George had gone to Kingussie in Scotland to watch the Badenoch and Rothiemurchus Highland games with the Freshfields as ‘Douglas Freshfield and party’ are reported as attending on the 29th August 1899 by the Elgin Courant, and Morayshire Advertiser.
Mother much better.
Connie Garnett[5] and David came for the day.
David Garnett was 7 years old when he and his mother Connie visited Antonia. Years later he became a successful writer and publisher. As a child, he had a cloak made of rabbit skin and thus received the nickname “Bunny”, by which he was known to friends all his life. A prominent member of the Bloomsbury Group, Garnett received literary recognition for his novel ‘Lady into Fox’ and ‘A man in the Zoo’.
He ran a bookshop near the British Museum with Francis Birrell during the 1920s. He also founded (with Francis Meynell) the Nonesuch Press. He wrote the novel Aspects of Love, on which the later Andrew Lloyd Webber musical of the same name would be based. Garnett was bisexual and he had affairs with Francis Birrell and Duncan Grant. In 1942he married Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant’s daughter Angelica, she was in her early twenties and he was fifty and her parents were horrified. She did not find out until much later that her husband had been a lover of her father.[6]
‘David was the only child of Constance and Edward Garnett, who lived in a large draughty neo-medieval farmhouse, The Cearne, on the High Chart in Kent. He grew up precocious in a peculiar political atmosphere. Edward was a publisher’s reader and pioneer literary agent who discovered Joseph Conrad. Constance, a classicist who taught herself Russian, translated Tolstoy and Dostoevsky for posterity. Russia fascinated both parents and their home was a refuge for nihilist exiles, with one of whom Constance fell in love. This man, who went by the nom de guerre Stepniak, had killed a tyrannical figure from the Tsarist military in cold blood on a St Petersburg street and was lucky to get out of the country. In London left-leaning literati adopted him. When the Garnett parents opposed the Boer War, Edward clashed fiercely with his father Richard, Keeper of Books at the British Museum Reading Room, who supported the Empire. David remembered being taunted at school for adopting his parents’ anti-war view. Anti-imperialism coupled with Russian nihilism primed him for misadventure ahead…. Step by step, hardly intentionally, David got to know activists who would take the place of his parents’ Russian protégés. He met men whose cause was Indian independence. As he recalled, aged 50: “I had been brought up to accept acts of political murder and violence with sympathy bordering on admiration; I had known and respected at least two eminent assassins, and I should have thought it particularly disgraceful to resent the murder of Englishmen by Indians, since I was myself English and to some extent shared the guilt of British imperialism. Of course I took for granted, without investigation, that British rule in India must be bad, exactly as most British boys of my age took for granted that it was good.”… When police arrested David’s friend and fellow activist Savarkar in 1910 and put him in Brixton jail David identified weaknesses in the prison routine and decided he could free him. He had a Winchester rifle, a present from “uncle” John Galsworthy, future Nobel laureate for literature, which he had passed on to Indian volunteers who had gone to Morocco to help local forces repel the Spanish. Confiscated in Gibraltar, the rifle came back to Garnett along with a second weapon, a Browning automatic with the serial number shaved off. …A couple of bags of pepper and a truncheon would do to overwhelm the Brixton prison guards. A car would then take Savarkar to the coast and from there his supporters would sail him to France. David went to Paris to organise a team of helpers but the Nationalist representative there refused to cooperate. David’s intense personal adventure began when he realised he didn’t care a fig for their cause, or any cause, only for his friend. He took a train to the French coast to charter a yacht, but the weather blew up and no ship could put to sea. It was his third night without sleep, and he realised what a fool he was. “Then my intoxication and vainglory vanished suddenly.” ..David’s father travelled to France to bring him home… When the police..discovered David’s aborted plan, they tightened up their procedures but no officer interviewed the 17-year-old student from Hampstead. The well-known family escaped unscathed, as they never could today.’[7]
When David’s literary agent father Edward first discovered Joseph Conrad he asked Charles Booth to find him a job and this was the reply:
Of course, there is one way of looking at it that is if Charles Booth had found Jospeh Conrad a job he might not have had time to write some of the most significant works of English literature.
[1] Wikipedia
[2] http://www.urban75.org/brixton/history/history.html
[3] One of the many ships that carried BHC, was The Cunard- HMS Campania, which later
served with the Admiralty right up until 5 Nov. 1918, just six days before the armistice was signed. An accident during high winds,
dragged her anchor in a sudden squall & struck the bow of the battleship Royal Oak & then dragged along side of the battle cruiser
Glorious. She began to sink stern first. A few hours later an explosion (presumed to be a boiler) sent her to the bottom. https://beyondthename.weebly.com/booth-charles.html
[4] Kingussie is the capital of Badenoch in the Highlands.
[5] As mentioned before ‘Constance Clara Garnett née Black was an English translator of nineteenth-century Russian literature. She was the first English translator to render numerous volumes of Anton Chekhov’s work into English and the first to translate almost all of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s fiction into English. She also rendered works by Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Goncharov, Alexander Ostrovsky, and Alexander Herzen into English. Altogether, she translated 71 volumes of Russian literature, many of which are still in print today. Through her sister, Clementina, she met Dr. Richard Garnett, then the Keeper of Printed Materials at the British Museum, and his son Edward Garnett, whom she married in 1889. Edward, after working as a publisher’s reader for T. Fisher Unwin, William Heinemann, and Duckworth, went on to become a distinguished reader for the publisher Jonathan Cape. In the summer of 1891, then pregnant with her only child, she was introduced by Edward to the Russian exile Feliks Volkhovsky, who began teaching her Russian. He also introduced her to his fellow exile and colleague Sergius Stepniak and his wife Fanny. Soon after, Garnett began working with Stepniak, translating Russian works for publication; her first published translations were A Common Story by Ivan Goncharov, and The Kingdom of God is Within You by Leo Tolstoy. However, Garnett also has had critics, notably prominent Russian natives and authors Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Brodsky. Nabokov said that Garnett’s translations were “dry and flat, and always unbearably demure.” Nabokov’s criticism of Garnett, however, may arguably be viewed in light of his publicly stated ideal that the translator be male. Brodsky notably criticised Garnett for blurring the distinctive authorial voices of different Russian authors: “The reason English-speaking readers can barely tell the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky is that they aren’t reading the prose of either one. They’re reading Constance Garnett.” David Foster Wallace criticized Garnett’s translations as ‘excruciatingly Victorianish’. In her translations, she worked quickly, and smoothed over certain small portions for “readability”, particularly in her translations of Dostoyevsky. In instances where she did not understand a word or phrase, she omitted that portion. Wikipedia and https://timeline.com/constance-garnett-russian-translation-e8e4871810fe
[6] Summarised from Wikipedia.
[7] Shortened from the account here: https://standpointmag.co.uk/tag/david-garnett/
Antonia and Mary 