The Writer's Almanac from Saturday, December 16, 2006
The Writer's Almanac from Saturday, December 16, 2006
"The Lift Man" by John Betjeman, from Collected Poems. © Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
It's the birthday of Jane Austen, born in Steventon, Hampshire, England (1775). Austen is the only novelist published before Charles Dickens whose books still sell thousands of copies every year. Although she never got married herself, but she is best known for books about women who do get married, including Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Pride and Prejudice (1813). She did fall in love as a young woman, but the man she loved had no money for marriage. Later, she got a proposal from an older wealthy gentleman. She said yes, but then found herself unable to sleep that night. In the morning she did something that was almost unheard of at the time: she told her fiancé that she had changed her mind, because she did not love him.
Austen's first two books, Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Pride and Prejudice (1813), were great successes in her lifetime, but after that her readers grew less enthusiastic. Neither Mansfield Park (1814) nor Emma (1816) was as popular. It was only after her death that she became one of the most popular novelists from the 19th century. After the First World War, Jane Austen novels were prescribed to shell-shocked British soldiers for therapy, because the psychologists found that Austen helped them recover their sense of the world they'd known before the war. Rudyard Kipling said, "There's no one to touch Jane [Austen] when you're in a tight place."
It was on this day in 1653 that Oliver Cromwell became the lord protector of England, Scotland, and Ireland. It was the only time in British history that a man ruled as absolute dictator over the United Kingdom without wearing the crown of a king. To make money for the government, he sold off all the works of art that had been owned by the king. He shut down all the theaters. And he outlawed the celebration of Christmas, calling ivy, mistletoe, and holly "ungodly branches of superstition."
But Cromwell wasn't all bad. He helped revitalize the educational system, and though he was a passionate Puritan, he instituted greater religious freedom that any British ruler before him, allowing Christians to practice however they desired, as long as they did not create unrest. And the stronger form of Parliament that he put in place has endured in more or less the same form ever since.
It's the birthday of Sir Noël Coward, born in Teddington, England (1899). He wrote Private Lives (1930) and Blithe Spirit (1941). He had many successes during the '30s, but when the war started and London was under air attack, the British weren't in the mood for frothy entertainment. Coward wrote Blithe Sprit, a darker comedy about a man whose second wife is done in by the ghost of his first; it ran for nearly 2,000 performances. The program said, "If an air-raid warning be received during the performance, the audience will be informed from the stage. ... [T]hose desiring to leave the theatre may do so, but the performance will continue."
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®
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