Location, location: Scenes from Ten Things I Hate About the Duke

In a previous post, I showed you the Green Man Inn as it was. It’s still there, not quite the same, but easy to recognize.

Litchfield House aka deGriffith House, is the building on the left with the trees on the balcony.

Also still in existence is the house I turned into deGriffith House. Currently known as Litchfield House, No. 15 St. James’s Square, it stands in a corner of the square next to the London Library. You can see some interiors here.

You can read more about the house here at Patrick Baty’s blog.

St. James’s Square in 1812, image from Ackermann’s Repository.

St. James’s Square looked very different in the time of my story.

“In the centre is a large circular sheet of water, six or seven feet deep, from the middle of which rises a fine equestrian statue of William III. Erected here within these few years.” Thomas Allen, History & Antiquities of London, Westminster, Southwark ... Vol 4 (1829).

Apparently, the pool was still there in the 1839 edition.

Another, much later writer has this to say about the pool: “The basin of water was not even then removed, and is still remembered by many persons now living, the stagnant slimy pool having only been finally drained within the last fifty years, after one of our periodical panics of cholera, when the existing garden was laid out and planted with trees.” Arthur Irwin Dasent, The History of St. James's Square and the Foundation of the West End of London: With a Glimpse of Whitehall in the Reign of Charles the Second. (1895)

Images L-R:

Furnival's Inn, Holborn was demolished in the 1890s.

Lord Grosvenor's Gallery, Park Lane - Shepherd, Metropolitan Improvements (1828)—Grosvenor House was my model for Ashmont House. It was demolished sometime about 1926-27. A hotel now stands on the spot.

The Hanover Square Rooms, where the fancy fair takes place in my story, was demolished in 1900.

The Adelphi (the image dates to when it was the Sans Pareil) theater, which has been renovated and rebuilt and enlarged over the years, remains in active use.

Charles Cotton’s Fishing House, photo by Neil Gibbs 2 August 2006. Attribution Neil Gibbs

And this is the Fishing House, which I moved from Derbyshire to Surrey for story purposes. You can see other images here at Derbyshire Life.

Rediscovering an American Community of Color

William Bullard, Portrait of the Thomas A. and Margaret Dillon Family, about 1903, courtesy of Frank Morrill, Clark University and the Worcester Art Museum

William Bullard, Portrait of the Thomas A. and Margaret Dillon Family, about 1903, courtesy of Frank Morrill, Clark University and the Worcester Art Museum

A little over a hundred years ago, a white photographer named William Bullard took hundreds of pictures of people in central Massachusetts. Among these were more than 230 portraits of people of color who lived within easy walking distance of my home. I had no idea this community existed until early 2018, when I saw Rediscovering an American Community of Color: The Photographs of William Bullard at the Worcester Art Museum.

The Beaver Brook neighborhood became a new home when the Ku Klux Klan and white backlash, combined with a national depression and the end of Reconstruction, destroyed the lives that former enslaved people had been making for themselves in the South. They came north to start again, and some came to Worcester, “a city with a deep abolitionist tradition and influential white residents sympathetic to their plight.”*

William Bullard, William Bullard’s Camera Reflected in a Mirror, about 1911 (detail), courtesy of Frank Morrill, Clark University and the Worcester Art Museum

William Bullard, William Bullard’s Camera Reflected in a Mirror, about 1911 (detail), courtesy of Frank Morrill, Clark University and the Worcester Art Museum

The collection’s existence is a rare and wonderful confluence of circumstances. Somehow, the glass negatives survived for over a century and ended in the hands of Frank J. Morrill, a retired history teacher and collector, who was also a devoted Worcester historian. Somehow, the photographer’s logbook also survived, and stayed with the photographs. Because of this, it became possible to identify the people in the photographs. This in turn made it possible for the Clark University students who researched the photographs to contact many of photo subjects’ descendants, one of whom I met during one of my visits to the exhibition.

A little more about the photos, from the website gallery. Image at top: “Virginia-born coachman Thomas A. Dillon and his wife, Margaret, a domestic servant and native of Newton, Massachusetts, pose in the parlor of their home at 38 Tufts Street with children Thomas, Margaret, and Mary. A poster on the wall commemorates President Theodore Roosevelt’s visit to the Worcester Agricultural Fair in 1902.” (The website gallery of images includes another photograph of Mr. Dillon.) Image at bottom: “James J. Johnson, of Nipmuc, Narragansett, and African American descent, and Jennie Bradley Johnson, a migrant from Charleston, South Carolina, pose with their daughters Jennie and May. James worked as a coachman and belonged to the King David Masonic Lodge. He died soon after this portrait was taken. Jennie later worked as a laundress.”

William Bullard, Portrait of James J. and Jennie Bradley Johnson Family, 1900, courtesy of Frank Morrill, Clark University and the Worcester Art Museum

William Bullard, Portrait of James J. and Jennie Bradley Johnson Family, 1900, courtesy of Frank Morrill, Clark University and the Worcester Art Museum

But in this case it’s probably best to let the pictures do the talking, and there are a great many to study. Most appear on the Bullard website, where you’ll find a gallery of the photos, a page about the collection and the photographer, a map of the neighborhood in 1911, essays connected to the images, and a chance to add information and/or comment on individual photos.

This Maureen Taylor podcast is loaded with fascinating insights into the photographs’ history, the photographer, the collector, the researchers, the project, and more. This article offers a sampling of large scale photographs from the collection. And here are scenes from the 2018 exhibition at the Worcester Art Museum.

**quote from the beautiful exhibition catalog

Cruikshank's Prints in "Ten Things I Hate About the Duke": Jealousy

“Jealousy” by George Cruikshank, 1 November 1825, courtesy Lewis Walpole Library.

Once again, I recommend you click on the link, in order to zoom in on the image and enjoy the details. Apparently, the letter signed “Anonymous,” under the gentleman’s hand, suggests that his lady is untrue, and several images suggest that her lover is an officer. At least two of the imps wear cuckold’s horns, one pointing to the lady who’s climbing down the rope ladder to run off with an officer, while the night watchman . . . watches the proceedings. The other is offering green spectacles, suggesting that Our Hero see more clearly? Or view through the lens of jealousy?

The wigged men in black are apparently lawyers, probably suggesting a “criminal conversation” or crim con case. A pistol is introducing itself, as a weapon for a duel (the outcome of that is suggested on the mantel), murder, or suicide, while hanging is another option (aided by another imp). The two books on the floor are Byron’s Don Juan, the long poem about the famous lover (well worth reading, it’s witty and brilliant) and the Cuckoo Song Book (another cuckold reference). The painting on the right portrays Othello smothering Desdemona. The one above the gentleman’s head appears to be titled “Horn Fair,” another cuckold warning.

If we search online, we find some slightly different interpretations of the details in Cruikshank’s prints. Do you see anything I’ve missed? Or would you interpret some of the details differently?