Book covers: vanishing bodies, trapped butterflies and symbolic teddy bears

Everyone knows that there are fashions in book covers, as in everything else, but the echoes and similarities between book covers seem almost obsessive at the moment, with various 'tropes' following each other's tails and threatening to spiral into parody.
     Where shall we start? Let's start with trees, a common enough image on covers, with their useful symbolism of roots, shelter, family, complexity. Then add a beguiling figure, in silhouette, so as to leave the reader's imagination a bit of space.

Here are some related covers. The cutout trees, the silhouetted figure, often with an inspiring light either behind them or for them to make their way towards. I like the Jane Gardam cover (she's also been been one of absolute favourite authors since I was about fourteen): no trees, but it picks up on the silhouetted figures, on their way somewhere beguiling.

Children playing in trees, or, even better, reading books in or under trees, are a further refinement of this theme.

But this cover, for The Water Seeker (designed by April Ward), I really love. I've included the whole cover as the tree part of the 'trope' is on the back. I think the wheel in the foreground galvanises the whole thing -- it puts me in mind of an illustration by Claire Leighton or C. F. Tunnicliffe.
    Now let's use the silhouettes on the cover of this Lionel Shriver novel as a bridge to our next theme:

It's the part-person. There's the half-person, as above, and below, sliced vertically:

Or sometimes they're sliced horizontally:

Wriggly hemline and skinny legs obligatory. Sometimes you get almost the whole person, just minus their head:

I think the idea is that if the face of the real model is removed, the reader will more easily be able to put herself into the book. But it's quite funny to see the headless theme carried over into non-photographic covers, as with the Marian Keyes novel above.
     But I like this version, which I think is very stylish:

     A further variation is the torso shot:

Holding significant item obligatory.
     As the theme gets more and more common, designers get bolder, cropping off more and more of their models' bodies...

Just legs -- dipping them in water is very popular.

So popular that you get the same image used more than once.

Swimming pools form an entire subset of their own, taking in the 'below the knees' theme and the hand only' theme. These pop up elsewhere as well:

There are refinements of the basic themes to look out for too: wooden boards are very popular (very Instagram) -- see the Steinbeck cover above and these variations below:

And what's that? A teddy? Ah, the universal symbol of the vulnerable child, used far too often for a treacly sentimental effect:

Some authors' books have appeared more than once in this very unscientific survey: Heather Gudenkauf (who I hadn't heard of previously), and, in particular, Diane Chamberlain. Her publishers win the prize for including every current cliche of book cover design on her series of novels. Yes, she definitely wins the prize -- she even has the cliche of cliches, the butterfly trapped in a jar:

Here is a whole collection of butterflies in jars:

Notice that several of these tick other boxes as well: headless child, wooden boards. I guess publishers want to achieve a current, Instagrammy feel on their covers and perhaps also want to signal that a new book can be bought on trust because it's 'just like' that Jodi Picoult novel you enjoyed so much last summer. Hmmm.
     Finally, just to reassure us that not all book covers are following the same rule book, two covers that I've been strongly drawn to every time I've been in a bookshop recently: different, more original (though pastiches, I guess):

And two more covers just because I like them. It really does make me want to read them.

Next time you're browsing in a bookshop, see if you can spot more headless bodies and severed limbs... 

Who was Miss Lea Winter?

A postcard sent to Lea Winter from her friend Sal Hatch, c 1905

 Last weekend I bought five old postcards from a local secondhand shop. I chose these particular cards because I liked the images and messages on them but also because they were all addressed to the same person: Miss Lea Winter.
     Who was Lea Winter? I thought I'd try to 'bring her to life'. All five cards are addressed to Lea at the Three Counties Asylum. This was a huge 'lunatic asylum' not far from where I live which was built to house psychiatric patients from the three counties of Hertfordshire, Huntingdonshire and Bedfordshire. It opened in 1860 and only closed in 1999, having gone through a name change as well as notable changes of approach to mental illness.

Nurses walking in front of Three Counties Asylum in 1912

All the postcards seem to date from 1905 and by that date the asylum was running at full capacity with hundreds of patients of both sexes. At first I thought that Lea might have been a patient at the asylum but it's clear from the messages written to her on the postcards that that was not the case. The messages indicate someone who still had their freedom, who could make plans and have relationships with people 'on the outside'.
     The message on the back of the postcard at the top of this post (sent from Arlesey, the village closest to the asylum) reads:

Dear Lea
Just a snap-shot of Sal Hatch and her friends from Leister Square [sic], having afternoon tea upstairs on the bricks. I should be very pleased if you would call for me about 6am in the evening.
Yours to a cinder,
Sal Hatch from the Bone Yard

 I like the way Sal goes to the trouble of specifying the time of her next meeting with Lea as 6am in the evening. Apart from meaning 6pm, I don't suppose the friends were in the habit of meeting at daybreak. Is Sal Hatch in the photo of the waitresses taking afternoon tea or is it a joke? I'm not sure and I haven't been able to identify Sal (or Sarah) Hatch. Hatch is a more common surname than I realised.

 

But to find Lea Winter was the challenge. At first I just couldn't track her down in the usual places (census returns and birth, marriage and death records), so I looked instead for 'Miss Sansbury', with whom Lea seems to have lodged or perhaps shared a room. 

     I soon found Kate Sansbury, who from at least 1901 to 1911 was employed as a dairy maid at Three Counties Asylum. She is listed in both the 1901 and 1911 censuses. I find it fascinating to trace people back through their records so couldn't resist doing a quick bit of research on Kate (jump to the next paragraph if you just want to know about Lea). Kate's family came from Warwickshire and Oxfordshire. Her mother was Sarah Holtom, born in 1836 to a farm labourer's family. Sarah was recorded as a domestic servant in both the 1851 and 1861 censuses -- the latter for a household in Banbury but in 1863 she married Thomas Sansbury, a local blacksmith, and by the 1871 census they were living in Castle St, Banbury and they had two children, one of whom was Kate, born in the winter of 1869. Interestingly she seems to have been baptised Kate rather than Catherine. By 1881 the family had moved to Ashwell in Hertfordshire but although Thomas is still recorded as married (as opposed to being a widower), his wife Sarah is not recorded, nor is she recorded on the 1891 census, even though she didn't die until 1903 (in Headington, Oxford). She vanishes from all records for the last decades of her life, so perhaps she left Thomas and was living as the commonlaw wife of another man, using his name. Meanwhile, Kate was perhaps hindered in her passage through life by the demands made on her by her mother's absence: in 1891, when she was 20, she was still living at home and listed as 'housekeeper', looking after her father and her brother. But by 1901 she had got herself a job at the Asylum some six miles away. 

     Now to hazard a guess as to how Kate Sansbury and Lea Winter ended up sharing lodgings at the Asylum. Back in 1881, when Kate was ten, the Sansburys were living in Ashwell End, just outside Ashwell, next door to the family of Samuel Winter, a shoemaker. Lea is not one of Samuel's children but perhaps Samuel and his wife were relatives (an uncle and aunt, perhaps) and Lea met Kate when she visited them?

Lea Winter was born in 1880 in Melbourn, a village in Cambridgeshire near the border with Hertfordshire, about ten miles from Kate's home in Ashwell (she was 11 years younger than Kate). She was ultimately one of a family of ten or eleven children. Lea was named as Liza Winter in the 1881 census return and for most of her life she was known as Lizzie, but all the postcards are addressed to'Lea' and perhaps this was a youthful affectation, a name that made her feel more glamorous... Her beginnings weren't very glamorous: her father, Joseph Winter, had been born in Melbourn and her mother Eliza had only come from Meldreth, a nearby village. (Eliza's mother had apparently given birth to her two children out of wedlock -- Eliza was the younger of the two -- so this may have carried something of a stigma as she grew up.) Lea's father was a 'fossil washer' by trade, which sounds very exotic but turns out to be a role in the coprolite industry.

Coprolite miners in South Cambridgeshire, mid-19th century

In the mid-nineteenth century coprolite mining was a shortlived boom industry which exploited a seam of coprolites that ran roughly from Royston in Hertfordshire to Soham in Cambridgeshire, on a south-west/north-east axis. Coprolites are nodules of fossilised dung (some scientists believe they are also fossils of material other than dung) which, when washed (Joseph's job), ground into powder and dissolved in sulphuric acid, are a rich source of phospates, an important component in fertilizer. The home-sourced coprolites were a cheaper source of phosphates than guano (bird droppings) which had previously been imported at great expense. The coprolite industry made landowners whose land was on the seam very wealthy for a few decades until the coprolites began to grow scarce and, not only that, but a bad agricultural depression at the end of the nineteenth century dampened the market for fertilizer as well. By the 1890s the industry had more or less died out.

     Lea must have needed a job. The Asylum would have been an obvious place to try -- it was a massive employer in the area. Her sister Minnie had a job at the Three Counties Asylum as a Ward Attendant and Kate Sansbury worked there as a dairy maid. The hospital employed hundreds of people in many different capacities, including those who grew food for the patients in the extensive grounds, clerks and other administrators, laundrywomen and dozens of kitchen staff. In both the 1901 and the 1911 census, all the staff are listed first, in descending order of importance, followed by the patients (over 1000 of them), who are identified by their initials, their previous occupation (or, in the case of women, their father's or husband's occupation) and whether they were a 'lunatic', 'imbecile' or 'idiot'. Lea (or Lizzie, to give her her real name) and Kate are the last two members of the staff listed before the patients -- they are the two lowliest employees on the payroll -- and their job titles haven't altered in ten years.

Top page of the 1901 census return for the Asylum

Lizzie and Kate's entries in the 1911 census return. One inmate is identified by name before all the others are listed by initials only.

Lizzie/Lea was 25 when she received the postcards I now have in 1905. Definitely marrying age, in those days, but you get a sense that she was living a carefree and possibly rather heady existence. One of the postcards is from one of her siblings in Felixstowe (possibly her brother Albert, who I think may have been in the Royal Artillery Regiment based in Suffolk from 1904). It has a rather gloomy photo of the sea front shelter and gardens in Felixstowe and the message reads, 'Dear sister sorry couldn't write a letter that gives me the pip writing perhaps this will do as well'. I can't make out the signature -- 'Your B A W'? (Your brother Albert Winter, perhaps?). This non-message amuses me.

The remaining three postcards hint tantalisingly at Lea's romantic life. First this one:

The message reads:

Dear L
Should like to come and have another look around sometime, when convinent [sic]. Please let me know and bring a friend, male.
From C Hundall, Russell St, Woburn Sands, Beds

In the corner it says 'One of my moonlight walks'. The picture on the postcard is of Apsley Guise Woods, near Woburn Sands, which is where the card has been sent from.

 I guess there was a degree of titillation to be had from a visit to the lunatic asylum. I see Mr or Ms Hundall has misspelt 'Asylum' in the address. Is he a he? Were women relatively unlikely to be taking midnight walks  in 1905? Also, the slightly pompous way he signs off -- I don't think a female friend would give their name and address in this way. Or is this a Miss Hundall who hankers for male company? Perhaps her midnight walks were with gentlemen? I wish I knew!
     The next card is a copy of Greuze's wonderfully over the top painting 'Un Souvenir', also known as 'Fidelity', in which a maiden clutches a little dog to her breast and rolls her eyes heavenwards.

 On the back is just the message, 'Semper Fidelis', no doubt from a beau. The postmark is local to the asylum.

 Finally -- and I've kept the best one till last -- this fantastic card of an Edwardian coquette resisting the attentions of a young man. The caption is 'What a tease' and the rather sinister woods look just like the ones in the postcard of Apsley Guise:

And the message on the back, in pencil, reads:

Don't do it cause I don't like it

With just initials as to the sender! Oh Lea, whose approaches had you rebuffed? Whoever he was, I don't like him! His message sounds curt and sulky. 

     I bet Lea and all the other members of staff at the asylum lived an unusually free life there. It was like a town in its own right and you would have been quite independent of family, with a corresponding level of freedom. I would love to know more about life there. 

     Lea reverted to Lizzie eventually and she married a clerk at the asylum, Herbert Lester, in 1914 when she was 34 -- quite old for the time, I think. Perhaps she thought she had better settle down. They had at least two children, Dorothy and Geoffrey, and they ended up living in a very nice street in Hitchin where Herbert died in 1946. Lizzie lived on until 1964 in the same house. 

     I wish it really was possible to bring people to life but I have done my best to tease a life out of these five postcards. 

 

The Clowns' Grimaldi Service

This afternoon I went to the Clowns' church service at Holy Trinity Church, Dalston, London. I've been wanting to go for three years but only got it together for the first time today.

It's a unique occasion with clowns in full 'slap' and costumes joyfully turning up and making the most of the huge interest in them -- there were dozens of photographers there -- possibly more photographers than clowns! The clowns were charming, patient, very happy to engage with anyone who wanted to talk to them or just say hello. I really enjoyed photographing them.

There were old clowns and young clowns, male and female clowns. The clown below was from Denmark:

The service is dedicated to the memory of Joseph Grimaldi (1778-1837), the Regency clown. There was a case of Grimaldi objects and a lot of clown history in panels on the walls. This case of eggs records well-known clowns' individual faces:

They also have the last costume worn by Coco the Clown. He died in 1974. While I was looking at this, a clown came up and said that he'd been inspired to take up clowning by Coco, who he loved as a child.
Coco's suit had badges that I coveted:

The service was very joyful, with individual clowns reading poems and singing songs as well as a very jolly sermon by a vicar in a red nose. One clown, Mattie, read out the lyrics to 'Be A Clown' as sung by Gene Kelly in The Pirate. Terrific. All the clowns joined in on the chorus.

This rather lovely young clown was actually dressed as Grimaldi, I think, if you compare him to the print below:

 

 It was fascinating to attend the service and very interesting to see how the clowns, en masse, were able to step over the line of what is normally expected behaviour in church without offending anyone but, on the contrary, collectively generating joy. I won't forget it for a long time.

Claremont -- can anybody identify this house and children?

I found this photograph of a house called Claremont among my mother's things. I'm posting it here on the chance that someone may come across it and be able to identify either the house or the children. I'd love to know where it is and what the connection is to my family. I think there must be one. Thanks!

No-Net Christmas Day

I hope everyone had a lovely day yesterday. Somehow or other, perhaps not quite by mutual consent, it was decided that we would spend yesterday entirely 'off Net'. Our internet connection was switched off at the hub and although it had been mooted that all phones, iPads, tablets and gizmos would be collected in a box and locked away, we decided to take it on trust that we would all stay away from the internet for the day.

For breakfast we had smoked salmon on slices of brown bread that had been made in the breadmaker overnight -- what a wonderful thing the breadmaker is and yet we hardly ever use it. Then the 'children' played games while David made all these lovely things for our 'elevenses': Bucks Fizz, parmesan biscuits, fruity cousins of 'pigs in blankets' (I don't know of a name for apricots in bacon -- 'apes in anoraks'?), Nigella's nuts (WARNING: do not eat Nigella's delicious nuts for breakfast on Boxing Day as I have just done, giving myself indigestion as a punishment for being greedy and trying to find all the pecans), and homemade focaccia with oil and balsamic vinegar to dip it in.

The 'children' were in inverted commas just above as I'm afraid I became the third child of the family yesterday, playing Continuo and Cranium Ziggity and loads of other games from our long-neglected games cupboard. David has become very keen on cooking and insisted on doing everything -- who am I to spoil his fun? So it was picture consequences for me and the kids:

Then, while Christmas dinner was cooking, we all did Dora's amazing quiz which included a picture round where we had to identify places round the house and special rounds on family enthusiasms: I was gutted to do so badly in the Breaking Bad and Sweden rounds. Gutted.

In fact I came last overall in the quiz, which I just couldn't believe. Had to hide my humiliation after a brief howl of defeat escaped my lips.
     Part of the 'analogue' day was that each of us should devise an activity. Dora did her quiz, Charlie arranged Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer for guitar (him), ukelele (Dora), shaker (David) and electronic xylophone (me -- appallingly. It seems all my music skills have completely left me -- hardly surprising when I've barely touched an instrument for about thirty years). That was fun.
     Oh dear, my activity was a disaster! The other three were sitting round the table in their blindfolds and I had only just spooned the first teaspoonful of sardines into David's mouth when his protestations made the other two refuse to play 'What's the food?' -- so my plans for preserved ginger, Brie, garlic at al had to be abandoned.
    After that we played 'Whatto Lotto', the game I invented when the kids were little and which I would love to get manufactured. It works! It's fun! And you can learn about the thingness of things from it. Maybe in 2014...
     My second try at an idea for something to do was a bit hit and miss too -- find something to read out to everybody else. Dora read a great bit from Morrissey's autobiography about his schooldays, Charlie read a funny poem by John Agard, David did a comic recitation from the Popular Comic Reciter of 1890 and I tried to read a bit from The Young Visiters by Daisy Ashford, which didn't go well. 'But she was only nine!' didn't cut it.

Does this day sound like your idea of heaven or hell? It was heaven, honestly. The day passed in a flash and we sat down to our lovely dinner at about 5.30pm. The telly wasn't verboten so after that we watched the tail end of 'Call the Midwife', just so we could see Miranda looking awful in a wig and twin set.
     Not long after that I retired to bed to read my book. It was a lovely day, even if I turned out to be the naughtiest child.

Ah Morrissey...

With Morrissey's autobiography high in the bestseller lists, I can't help looking back wistfully to 1987 when I was working as an editor at Bloomsbury. Keen to make my mark, I would fire off letters to all sorts of people, expressing my (genuine) interest in commissioning them to write a book. One such person was Morrissey. I have a copy of the letter I wrote to him -- it's too embarrassing in its plangent sincerity to reproduce here. I described the book I had in mind for him to write: 'Nothing so linear as an autobiography', something which would draw on his 'influences and obsessions'.
     Almost by return of post I received an A4 envelope emblazoned with animal-welfare stickers:

Inside was a large photocopy of the arm-wrestling scene from The Family Way, a 1966 British film starring Hayley Mills and Hywel Bennett (with an original score by Paul McCartney):

On the back was a wonderful note from Morrissey, written in his beautiful handwriting and with a drawing at the end.

The book he mentions was a signed copy of Terence Stamp's memoir, which we had just published.

Even better, he professed himself keen on the idea I'd proposed and wanted to meet up. Here's where it all goes a bit blurry, 26 years on. I know I went to meet him somewhere -- I think it was in a very smart Chelsea hotel, but I didn't actually get to meet him. Did he cancel at the last minute or just stand me up? -- I don't recall. Nothing ever came of the book, anyway, and the world has had to wait until 2013 for Morrissey to bring forth 480 pages of his life.
     This whole business of trying to coax famous people into writing books turned out to be a vale of tears, culminating in the utter humiliation of attending a recording of French and Saunders' show (with their agent) and seeing them do a sketch based on the meeting I'd had with them a couple of days earlier, when I'd tried to persuade them that doing a Christmas stocking filler book wouldn't be too onerous (let's not even mention the huge amount of money that was on offer). My fairly straight explanation that a 64-page book with lots of pictures in it wouldn't take too long to write was turned into a toe-curlingly twee speech about how the book would fit into a matchbox and take three seconds to put together (I'm paraphrasing). It was a very weird sketch, possibly born out of a need to fill thirty minutes of the show with material, some of which was put together at the last minute. Perhaps, if you're a fan, you'll remember it. I'll never forget it! Needless to say, I didn't get to publish their book either.
     I treasure my letter from Morrissey and have been showing it to my daughter's friends only this week, as they are now second-generation Morrissey fans. They were nice enough to make excited noises.

Man of glass

My dad's birthday is coming up and I've been trying to think of something interesting to get him. Recently I researched his side of the family, which he was fascinated by, so I thought I'd try to bring somebody from his family's past to life for him. This is easier said than done, but you never know what Google will turn up.
    I wrote out a list of various places and surnames that had cropped up in his family tree and then I started searching fairly randomly. Tyne and Wear Archives (my Dad's family are from Newcastle and thereabouts, going back) have some wonderful early mugshots of criminals from Newcastle Gaol dating from 1871-1873.

screen grab of some of the mugshots -- hands had to be in shot as certain characteristics were believed to indicate criminality

One of the criminals shared a surname with one of our relatives -- or rather our relative had the same name for his middle name: Jobling. Here is the naughty fellow: James Augustus Jobling...

James was 26 and unmarried when he was sentenced to one month in prison for malicious wounding in 1873. Here's his entry in the big book of crime:

A month doesn't seem a very long sentence for malicious wounding, although by the 1870s (judging from the details in the criminal registers) it was no longer the case that people were transported to Australia for stealing a handkerchief or a lamb, as in the late 18th and early 19th centuries (transportation to Australia ended in 1868 although it had become a rare punishment by then). Still, crimes against property seem to have been punished more severely than crimes against the person at the time of James Jobling's misdemeanour.
     James' clothes seem rather fine in the photograph and his whiskers, though wispy, seem to betoken a person of some standing. In fact, James' family was one of the most powerful in Newcastle. His father, Mark Lambert Jobling (born 1806), who had died three years previously, had been Sheriff of Newcastle upon Tyne, as well as a solicitor, 'coal owner', glass manufacturer and ship owner. James was the fourth of Mark's five children and they grew up in homes on one of Newcastle's main thoroughfares, Percy Street.
     Although James had studied theology in London in the early 1870s, he was destined to follow his father into manufacturing. Notwithstanding his criminal record, by 1881 he owned the Tyne Oil and Grease Works, and in 1885 he bought out a local glass manufacturing firm, Greener & Co, which was going under. Jobling was one of its chief creditors as he also supplied the raw materials for the pressed flint glass that the company specialised in. Renaming the company James A. Jobling & Co, James doesn't seem to have made much of a success of it until his nephew (his sister Julia's only son out of six children) Ernest Jobling Purser joined the company in 1902.

Ernest Jobling Purser

He seems to have been a born businessman (he looks as though he belongs to a completely different era from his uncle James), and in 1921 he managed to acquire the European licence for Pyrex ware. The heatproof glass was a massive success and continued to be made at Jobling's Sunderland factory until it closed in 2007. Both James and Ernest must have become massively wealthy. Ernest got a pilot's licence and lived in this large house, Hylton Grange in North Hylton, near the factory:

The Grange, North Hylton

He ended his days in Rathmines Castle, Dublin (he was Irish by birth) whilst James Augustus' last address was Sonachan House in remote Argyll, Scotland.

Sonachan House, Argll

I've never been a massive fan of Pyrex (beyond its practical use), but I love pressed glass. Jobling's glassware became the closest thing this side of the Channel to Lalique glass and it was thinking about this that finally made me remember that when David and I were on our honeymoon back in the Nineties we actually bought a beautiful Jobling glass bowl. Our honeymoon was a collectors' tour around the North of England culminating in a night at the amazing Art Deco Midland Hotel in Morecambe, and we bought the bowl in Hexham. I can't photograph the actual bowl as, alas, it's stored in our loft at the moment, but I found an image of it online:

It has fish swimming around it and is really beautiful, opalescent.
     But that may be my only link with James Augustus Jobling, for better or worse. When I went back to the Jobling in my Dad's bit of our family tree, I began to suspect that he was probably there in error. Children were often given their mother's surname as their middle name, so it might suggest that this person's mother had been a Jobling. However, his father, Henry Carr, was married to a Mary Faddy and many of his siblings had Faddy as their middle name. I think Richard Jobling Carr crept into the family tree because another Henry Carr married a Margery Jobling at around the same time. On Ancestry.co.uk (which I am addicted to), it's possible to hoover up great tracts of other people's family trees, thus enlarging your own very quickly, but if there's an error in another person's tree then it will transfer to your own and may only be discovered after hours of diligent checking.
     So, after all, I don't believe we're related to James Augustus Jobling, a bit of a wrong'un in his twenties (who knows what the story was there?) and the owner of the most important glass factory in the country.

One final note is that one of Ernest Purser's cousins was the Irish artist Sarah Henrietta Purser.

Sarah Henrietta Purser, self-portrait sketch