week three: memorializing and remembering

One of the purposes of my field study has been to not only study the words of London essayists but to see how they interacted with the city, and to see how the city remembers and memorializes them. I've more than enjoyed reading their essays (I've finished with two of Lamb's essay collections and am in the middle of Hazlitt's), and have tried to explore the city through an essayist's eye. I want to spend time looking for memorials to these authors, because I think it's interesting to see how London remembers these writers. I had read of a few sites in London associated with Lamb and Hazlitt, and I've gone to see a couple of them (there are some outside of London a bit, so I'll need to travel probably an hour or so one day to see them). Anyway, the picture below is a fountain dedicated to Charles Lamb, and is situated in the Inner Temple Gardens right off of Crown Row Lane, which is where Lamb was born. The fountain, flanked by the statue of a small boy, is––as you can see––very understated less than grandiose. There is no plaque dedicating the fountain to Lamb, but the boy is carrying a book with the quote, "Lawyers I suppose were children once," inscribed on it (one of Lamb's more well-known quotes). In the park there were a lot of people in business suits eating lunch and chatting, but they trickled out as the lunch hour came to a close. There were people sitting on benches around the fountain, but no one paid heed to the fountain or statue itself; I wondered, how many of these people know that this fountain is actually dedicated to Lamb? how many of these people know who Charles Lamb is? There are many more popular writers, like Charles Dickens, whose names are widely recognized and remembered with larger statues and museums and graves in Westminster. Lamb might not have achieved the fame and success during his lifetime as many of these great writers, but still it seemed sad to me that he is less remembered and memorialized. 

But fame doesn't always mean genius, and while we celebrate writers like Wordsworth and Shelley–and rightly so–we miss out on so many writers that might not have been as published or recognized in their time, thus not standing the test of time. Still, we judge great literary works by how they stand the test of time, but how much we might miss! How many beautiful sentences sat on a desk, unpublished, in their time and were thrown away after the unknown writer died? We put so much trust in publishers to filter and sift through literature, but how much certainly must slip through the cracks, to stay sitting in the slush pile while other essays or poems or novels are published. 

It's kind of a dizzying thought. 

Maybe my point is that it doesn't really matter that Charles Lamb or William Hazlitt don't have grand statues or graves in Westminister because it doesn't really change how much I enjoye and learn from their writing. One thing my project is teaching me is that public memorials matter less than the writing itself, that the words of the essayists I'm studying are more important than how they are remembered (or forgotten) by others.  

This is Lamb's memorial in the Inner Temple Gardens

And this is the church, St. Andrews, where Hazlitt was married with Lamb acting as best man. St Andrews was a Christopher Wren church, but was unfortunately bombed and gutted in WWII, and all that remained were the outer walls and tower. The public, however, decided to restore it to its original state. It's in the middle of busy London, sandwiched in between new buildings and thousands of businessmen and women rushing to and from work. The inside was, despite its central location, quiet and nearly empty. 

learning journal 4: thoughts on babbie

I had to employ a bit of extra-creative critical thinking as I was relating Babbie's readings to my own project, so I hope I can relate some of that thinking in a clear and concise way. I plan to focus this post on Babbie's section "The Various Roles of the Observer."

In this section, Babbie describes the difference between and a complete participant and a complete observer. A complete participant obviously participates in whatever he or she is observing; a complete observer, though, is more of a fly on the wall. I wondered, because I am going to be studying writers of the classical British essayist, how can I be anything but a complete observer because the men and women I'm going to be researching are all DEAD? Certainly, there are contemporary essayists that write in the tradition of the classical essay, but my studies will be focused on the deceased. But then I realized that studying deceased essayists will only be half of my project: the other half will be to incorporate their writing style into my own writing. So as I write, what will my role be?

The actual act of writing, of course, involves sitting down with pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. But, especially for a nonfiction writer, eventually the writer has to stop reading books and actually getting out and living. Which, for me, means that as I writer I will have to live while I'm in London, and to do that I will have to be more than a complete observer. But the beauty about being an essayist is that it doesn't matter what exactly I do, I will always be able to find topics to write about. As essayist Alexander Smith says,

"The essay-writer has no lack of subject-matter. He has the day that is passing over his head; and, if unsatisfied with that, he has the world’s six thousand years to depasture his gay or serious humour upon."
<---- Alexander Smith


So, according to this, I suppose I could be a complete observer and write essays. But better than this will be an attempt to participate in London life--in experiencing the history of the place, in interacting with people (people in bookstores, people in markets, people on the Tube, people who catch my fancy in any way), in eating the food, in walking across the bridges over the Thames at sunrise or sunset. Being a complete participant, in a way, doesn't necessarily mean that I will have to interview people, but it does mean that I will have to live life in London as Londoners do--and it will be my mission to find out how I will do that.

I think that's it.

learning journal 3: thoughts on history

There is one dilemma that we discussed in class as we discussed the history of England:

How do you summarize London's history into such a short time? 

It's impossible, surely, to summarize thousands of years of London's history into a few class periods--I'm not entirely convinced that it could happen thoroughly in a semester.

That aside, the most important question I came away considering is this: how I will connect the history of London with my own project? I don't know that I've entirely figured out the answer, but I know that the most important way that history will interact with my own project is by studying the history of the essayists that I will be reading. In literature courses, we typically turn to authors' lives and the times they lived in to get an idea of the context in which the text was written. So by studying the history of the essayists I'll be reading, I can connect their personal history with events and happenings that were occurring as they lived and worked and wrote. The ways that these authors intersected with general history of London (and England in general) will be good ground for analysis and discovery.

For example, studying the life of Charles Lamb will tell you that he was was born in 1775 and died in 1834. His parents had seven children, only three of which lived to adulthood. When Lamb was twenty, he experienced a horrible tragedy in his family life: his sister Mary, in a bout of temporary insanity, stabbed to death their mother and critically wounded their father. Because of her mental illness, she was released from prison, and Charles ended up taking care of her his whole life. Because of the shock, Lamb ended up having a mental breakdown himself and spending time in the asylum. What would be interesting to study historically with this specific story from his life is to look at how mental illness was treated and handled during that time period. Because my project is to write in the style of the classical British essay, this information may not seem completely vital, but it's interesting to get a larger picture of the authors I'm going to be studying. 

Especially considering the fact that with all Charles Lamb wrote about his life, he never once mentioned his family tragedy.

Interesting.

why am i doing this?

That's a good question. When I question my motivation for participating in a field study, I can trace my train of thought back to the moment I received the email from Dave Schuller encouraging former study abroad students to participate in field studies. First, I jumped at the chance to go back to London--I love London, and I haven't stopped thinking about going back since the study abroad I went on in 2010. I realized, as I learned more about field studies, that it was an independent, almost completely autonomous experience where I can study what is most relevant to what I want and need. This was an important turn of mind for me; I realized that I could make this field study entirely relevant to my studies in a creative writing master's program.

First, the classical British essay is fundamentally important to my studies in the genre. Essayists like Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, GK Chesterton, and Virginia Woolf all published in London and interacted with the city and culture. What better way to gain an experience in the classical essay than to study in the place where many of the canonical personal essays were created? London is also hub to so many of the subjects and topics that interest me--food, travel, family history, to name a few--and exploring these subjects in the context of learning about the classical British essay is nothing short of a magical possibility to me.

I don't know if this is completely answering the prompt, but to zoom out to a more general motivation, I want to participate in this field study because I want to learn from the culture of London, of England, and I want to gain experience through receiving insight into different viewpoints and perspectives. I admit, when I did the study abroad to London, I was more concerned with seeing London than I was with much else. There is, indeed, much to see. But this time I hope to not only see, but learn from London and to make it a part of myself.

And that's why I'm going.