Summertime Adventures...

Louisa May Alcott gave her mother a copy of her published book one year for Christmas and said that she was presenting her with her ‘first grandchild’. That’s kind of how I feel about my dissertation. I turned in my form last week, officially declaring my topic and am torn between a panic attack over whether anyone will like it and wanting to run up and down the street and tell everyone about how amazing my topic is. Like most proud parents, however, I tend to think that I see my little dissertation as a far more interesting topic of conversation than most.

I was really interested in an article written by Joanna Bourke at Birkbeck about how Irish soldiers with shell-shock were perceived, and thus treated differently than English soldiers. She says that the construction of the Irish as a ‘martial race’ affected the way psychological casualties were viewed, and existing pre-war prejudices against the Irish as ‘childlike’ and prone to hysteria likewise meant that their suffering carried a different stigma. And I was really interested at how different these two constructions were and the implications that both of them carried for the understanding of the Irish—how did they affect (or were affected) by the Easter Rising in 1916, or the later War for Independence? Would Irish soldiers in 1914-5 have received better, or at least less prejudiced treatment than soldiers after April 1916? Could the ideas of a ‘childlike people’ and a ‘martial race’ exist together? So basically, I am using Joanna Bourke’s article as a jumping-off point, and using her view that the perception and treatment of Irish soldiers was different, I am trying to find out why. In 15,000 words. It’s going to be a long summer….

(Hampton Court Palace Gardens)

My parents were here for a week, and I showed them the sights—Abney Park Cemetery and the Organic Market on Stoke Newington Church Street, along with my favorite used bookstore and coffee shop—all the great stuff you won’t find in a tour book, let me tell you! We also went to Cornwall for a few days and climbed all over Tintagel Castle, which is purportedly where King Arthur was born. It was great to bring back pictures to my rental brother. On “Horrible Histories” (his favorite show on CBBC), they had said that the story of King Arthur “wasn’t true” and never happened. Which made me angrier than it rationally should have, but I have an enormous respect for cultural myths and histories. Just because John Henry didn’t actually beat a steam-shovel to dig a railway tunnel (my favorite American legend) doesn’t mean that I don’t feel a little better by knowing that human ingenuity will beat industrial might with enough willpower. Just because some kid didn’t actually pull a sword out of a stone and traipse around with a Welsh Wizard doesn’t mean that story didn’t have a major historical impact. I don’t think Rental Brother was quite as keyed-up as I was, but it did get him excited enough to pick out a book about King Arthur at the library the other day.

(Merlin's Cave, Tintagel)

But by no means boring! Outside of school and home, I am still working at the Imperial War Museum, and just finished a really fascinating collection by the wife of a military attaché to Poland and Rumania form 1934 – 1937. I catalogued her husband’s First World War letters earlier, and this gives me a chance to see what he did after the war, which is something I almost never get a chance to know. She was only 20 when they moved and was really fascinated by all the intricacies of live in Eastern Europe and in her husband’s political dealings, all of which made for some great reading for me! I was a little bowled over by her description of 9-course lunches followed by 12 course dinners and dancing until 4am, but it’s an amazing chance to view a world that was trying to make as much noise and as much light as possible before ‘the gathering storm’ broke. So all in all, it’s still quite the adventure, if not physically for me, then certainly vicariously!

(More graffiti, this time in Stoke Newington)

"Enter freely, and of your own free will!"

One of the most time-consuming problems of being—well, with being me—is that I can’t simply find something interesting without devoting weeks, if not months (if not years in the case of the First World War) to learning positively everything I can about said topic.  To my own surprise, and my mother’s bemused chagrin, that current obsession is Vampires.  After some deliberation, I finally decided to look into ‘reverse colonization’ theories for my Dominions essay (I know you were beside yourself with anticipation to hear about that).  However, my original plan to look at Collins' The Moonstone, Rider Haggard’s She, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula in terms of creepy quasi-fantastical creatures who attempt to overthrow Britain turned into an evaluation of the fears expressed in The Moonstone and Dracula over the true effects of imperialism on the British, and the extent to which they were physically and morally capable of maintaining control over the world.  Basically, in both novels, foreign powers from a land currently in jeopardy (India during the 1857 Rebellion and Eastern Europe at the end of the 19^th century) and bring out the worst in the British protagonists, as well as wreaking physical havoc.  Both these books imply that, no matter how far the British might travel, or how many maps and census reports they may make, no matter how far the light of understanding might be shone, there would always be an element of the mysterious and unknowable in every culture, as well as in the British themselves; and to these writers, the unknown is equated with mortal (and moral) danger.

While I love Wilkie Collins in general, I had never read Dracula with an eye to its historic value, or as a product of a particular culture.  In doing so, I rediscovered the book all over again.  I was completely intrigued with the battle of modern technology and primitive folklore, with the novel’s treatment of women and the highly ambiguous relationship between Mina and the Count, and, most of all, Stoker’s ability to pinpoint—and subvert—elements of ‘civilized’ society that, even now, have the ability to chill.  I went to Dublin to do some research for both this essay to get some ideas for my dissertation, and was fortunate enough to attend a reading of Dracula at St. Patrick’s Cathedral—about which I could write an entire entry—and watching the expressions of the audience was fascinating.  When they heard the description of Dracula and his diabolically beautiful associates and especially when they heard the description of Dracula’s attack on Mina, there was a reaction not at all dissimilar to the kind of shivering you see at a modern-day horror film.  Just goes to show that quality literature still has the ability to captivate and to unsettle, even now.

(One of the readers, who sounded amazingly like Vincent Price)

During my stay in Dublin, which coincided with their City Council’s “One City, One Book” project, focusing on Dublin-born Stoker’s masterpiece, I read all the information I could find on the history of vampirism in literature, different regional and religious variations on vampire lore and worked on the foundation of at least two more essays, dealing with the role of vampires in Irish and Anglo-Irish literature, and the confluence of religion and superstition in terms of the propagation of vampire legends. 

(One of the posters for the Dracula-fest, photographed while walking through an Irish downpour)

Later, when I got back to London, I took some further inspiration from Stoker and have made myself one with furnishings at the British Library’s reading room and am working on both topics.  I am writing this from Boston, having returned home for a few weeks for some family issues.  While here, I met up with my best and oldest friend who is a recently-graduated anthropologist studying folklore and fairytales.  As if I needed any more encouragement!  We've already decided that we need to take a tour of Eastern Europe and study the folk culture and religious superstitions, which I'm sure will also yield many tales of erstwhile adventures...

The moral of this story: There is inspiration to be found everywhere.  Also, never assume you know what your dissertation topic will be, because it might change on an hourly basis.  Finally, don’t ask me what I’m studying.  You’ll be listening for at least half an hour.

(I also have a passion for interesting graffiti. See above.)

Springtime in the City

And just like that, classes are over and there are two essays and an exam separating me from my ultimate destiny….the dissertation. The final weeks of class were probably the most fun I’ve had all year, since I finally got it into my head that I knew what I was talking about and had something to say that might be worth hearing. A lot of the reading from these last classes are forming the basis of my essays: from my Dominions class, I am trying to decide between looking at fears about 'reverse colonialism' in late 19th-century British literature (how the conquered or primitive people are always coming to conquer Britain), how the British Empire is described to ‘untouched natives’ in 19th century adventure novels and Arthur Conan Doyle’s construction of history in his History of the Boer War (which was published while the war was being fought and went into 17 editions before it ended, with each edition containing a bit more of the story); for my Australia War and Society class, I am comparing the language of trauma and identity in Australian memoirs from the First World War and Vietnam, stemming from a theory that the two wars were not very different for the men who experienced them, but that in 1914, the language to describe such horrors and disillusionment didn’t exist as it did in the late 1960’s. If you can’t tell, all of these topics are a shameless ploy to read a lot of swashbuckling tales in the sunshine and to enjoy even the rainy days with some reading at the British library. History is everywhere and you might as well have fun studying it, after all.

(On the wall in the Stoke Newington Library. He was from Boston, too!!)

We had a fascinating discussion during our final class of ‘Concepts and Debates’ about the nature of history itself and what precisely we were all doing as historians (apparently to be followed up with the meaning of life, the secret to eternal happiness and the formula for cold fusion). I held that human beings are unique because of their self-awareness, and because of that trait, every human being has some desire to leave his or her mark; to declare its own existence. The earliest cave drawings are witness to this. And consequently, every human somehow constructs his or her own history, that then becomes part of a larger story, perhaps tribal, perhaps national, and that it is the job of a historian to take all this noise and to make a kind of symphony that can make all these stories into some kind of comprehensible whole. Not an easy task, but I can’t imagine one I’d rather be doing.

(Newport Castle, Bridgend, Wales)

My academic and existential crisis aside, the world continues to spin beneath my feet. I was fortunate enough to be in Cardiff with my father for the weekend and thus avoided the protests and riots surrounding the G20 meetings. My bus took me by the Bank of England on Thursday morning and I got a good look at the graffiti that was scribbled on the walls. I couldn’t help but think of my advisor from my undergraduate days. He taught a class on the riots in Paris in 1968, and used as his major text a list of the slogans and sayings he noted that were painted across the city. Is this how we will be remembered? Are these the words that will be heard in forty years when someone comes around to tell our tale? Regardless, it’s not every day that you are made so acutely aware of your historic moment as I was reading the headlines over the past few days. I hope all this optimism leads to something good. I hope we end up as more than some clever words in chalk on a crumbling wall…

"I was born to use my eyes / Dream with the sun and skies..."

I went to a speaking and book signing by Iain Sinclair, author of Hackney: That Rose Red Empire last night at the Stoke Newington Bookshop. My first reaction was that my neighbors are, on the whole, utter eccentrics (to put it gently). Coming from a community back home that doesn’t concern itself with its own history, to be in a place where people get up on chairs to argue over the role of Stoke Newington in the borough of Hackney was, after being somewhat terrifying, really quite charming. There is a kind of belief that Stoke Newington is the last bastion of civilization in Hackney, which is shown in the ‘N’ of its postcode, rather than the ‘E’ that graces most of Hackney. In some kind of strange blend of geopolitics and spiritualism, people are very proud to be neighbors with Daniel Defoe, Joseph Conrad and Edgar Allen Poe (who was born it Boston, it must be pointed out) and will argue very passionately that, without Stoke Newington (or, grudgingly, Hackney), they could never have created the works that they did.

My second reaction was to notice how seamlessly the layers of history are interlaid, in Stoke Newington and, to a large extent, in London in general. On Church Street, a breath or two away from my house, the library itself is a First World War memorial, with an entire wall in the entryway devoted to listing the names of Stoke Newington residents who were killed in the war, along with a memorial book, listing the civilian casualties of the Blitz. Over the door leading to the library-proper is a sign that warns: “All Ye Who Pass In Quest Of Happy Hours, Behold The Price At Which Those Hours Were Bought”. Which might take the prize as most Depressing War Memorial Epitaph In Western Europe, but still has the effect, both through its urgency and its placement—directly over the door through which anyone desiring to have any dealings with the library—to physically involve visitors in the history it is commemorating.

Outside, you can still see the advertisement on the building across the way that proclaims that it was, once, the supplier of quality fountain pens to North London. The building itself is now a flower store and a vintage clothing store, but the walls carry that history, a visual memory of all the other customers who walked this street with errands to run and budgets over which to worry and children who would insist on putting their hands and noses on all the shop windows they could conceivably reach. As the vintage clothing store might imply, fashions change, but the people wearing them aren’t so different, underneath it all.

I made myself into an echo of all this by buying an appallingly tacky men’s shirt from the 1960’s—deep emerald green with some sort of modernist-pseudo-paisley pattern all over it—at the vintage shop last weekend. I adore it, not only for its absurd ability to be both hideous and ultra-cool at one and the same time, but because it carries a story with it. Whoever wore it before me no doubt thought that he was quite The Limit in fashion. I wonder if his father had watched the Library being built, or his mother took him for walks in Victoria Park as a child. Maybe he owned a fountain pen. So now the shirt becomes a part of my life and I, in turn, become a part of its. We are travelers together, each in our own ways, as complicated and comfortable in our own histories as Church Street itself.

And So It Begins...

Name: Bridget Keown

Studying: MA, Imperial and Commonwealth History

Scholarship: Friend's of King's College US Master's Scholarship

Greetings!  

My name is Bridget, and I am currently working towards my Master's in Imperial and Commonwealth History at King's, with a focus on the First World War.  I am honored to have received the US Master's Scholarship funded by the Friend's of King's College, the US Alumni Organization.  The opportunity that this scholarship has afforded me has unquestionably changed my life and I will never forget the generosity of those kind people who have helped to make all this possible.

As the name of this blog will most probably suggest, I come from just north of Boston, Massachusetts from a city called Peabody (which is right next to Salem, of the Witch Trial fame).  I really love London, but my heart will always be in Boston and with our local baseball team, the Red Sox.  Spring training games start in a few short weeks, proof that New England winters can't last forever... 

I did my undergraduate work at Smith College, in the western part of Massachusetts, where I double-majored in History and Russian Language & Literature.  I spent my Junior Year Abroad at King's, working in the War Studies and History Departments, and, believing the world is too big to stay in one place for long, I decided to come back.  After graduation, I was lucky enough to get a job at Harvard University's rare book and manuscript library and Theatre Collection, and saved up enough money to make the move to London this past September.

I'm currently renting a room from a family in Stoke Newington, which I am delighted to report genuinely feels like home.  I love walking through Abney Park on Saturday mornings (I recently found out that the plan for it was based on Mount Auburn Cemetery in Boston!), and, with the recent snowstorm, was able to build an enormous snowman on the Common with the kids in our neighborhood.  No one believed me that there were four feet of snow back home and that it took quite a great deal more than six inches to phase Bostonians!).  I also have a job at the Imperial War Museum where I help catalogue the First World War acquisitions, which is quite literally a dream come true for me.  Not only are the collections phenomenal, but I also work with some really remarkable people.

At King's, I am taking a course on the Dominions, looking at the colonies of white settlement in the British Empire, their sense of identity and place within the Empire, as well as their interaction with each other and with England; a course called 'Australia: War and Society in the 20th Century', which is fairly self-explanatory, at the Menzies Center at Australia House; and a course that focuses on concepts and debates in the historiography of the British Empire.  In the first term, I was also taking a course on the transition to colonialism in late 18th-century India, which was held at the British Library, using the materials of the East India Company.  Right now, I am thinking of writing my dissertation on the self-identity and racialization of Irish in the British Army during the First World War, but the details of the theory change on an almost daily basis, so stay tuned for further details...

London offers an almost overwhelming amount of opportunities for learning and exploring, and I feel duty-bound to take advantage of as many of these as I can.  Lately, this has involved becoming intimately familiar with the British Library, but I have managed a few adventures.    Having been involved in music and acting for years back home, my tastes usually tend toward theatres and concert halls over here.  I had the insane good-fortune to see David Tennant in A Midsummer Night's Dream in Stratford, which the rational part of my brain still refuses to accept as having actually happened. More recently, I saw Rowan Atkinson in Oliver! at the Theatre Royal--having grown up adoring Blackadder, he could have read the phone book and I would have been delighted, but the show really is fantastic. I was also able to catch a preview of Three Days of Rain, starring James McAvoy (student discounts really are amazing things), which has one of the most impressive sets and lighting design I've seen in a long time. I am going to try to get to the Barbican Center at the end of the month for a performance of Shostakovich's 1st Violin Concerto...details to follow!