GD MEMBER FLORENCE WYNNE FFOULKES AS POET AND LYRICIST

 

Florence ffoulkes, Stanley Jast and Aleister Crowley were the GD members who wrote most poetry.  Of those three, only Florence ffoulkes and Crowley had volumes of poetry published during their lifetime.

 

I do not ‘get’ poetry.  Consequently, so as not to expose my ignorance and do Florence ffoulkes less than justice, I shall not do a ‘lit crit’ of the poems she wrote.  Instead I shall talk a bit about the influences on her poetry; the kind of poems she wrote; and the other women poets she knew.  I’ll start, though, by saying that Florence’s poetry has been almost completely forgotten since her death.  She doesn’t come off well in Catherine Reilly’s Late Victorian Poetry 1880-99 because she had only published the one volume by 1899; Reilly’s researchers also got some of the biographical details wrong .  But she’s also not included in volume 240 of the Dictionary of Literary Biography (2001) which was dedicated to Late 19th and Early 20th Century British Women Poets and rescued quite a few other writers from oblivion.  It’s a pity.

 

Perhaps I should say here that Florence didn’t put dates on any of the poems she published.

 

 

SHORT POEMS IN SUNLIGHT AND SHADE

This volume was published in 1887, when Florence was in her early 30s, though it may contain poems that had been written many years before.  Unlike in Florence’s later books, in this early work some of the poems are dedicated to particular people though only by initials so I haven’t been able to identify all the people referred to; and there are quotes above a lot of the poems from a variety of sources of inspiration, giving some clues as to the poets Florence admired and other works that inspired her to write.  From some of the dedications, I cautiously deduce that Florence may have begun writing poetry while at school in the early 1870s, under the influence of a fellow-pupil who became a much better-known author than Florence: Florence’s “first-found friend” Margaret Louisa Bradley, known as a writer by her married name of Woods.  

 

Tennyson brought Florence and Margaret together.  There are quotes from several of his works

above poems in Short Poems in Sunlight and Shade and Florence’s title for one poem, Past and Present, is a quote in itself, from Tennyson’s The Miller’s Daughter.  Idylls of the King (The Last Tournament) and Nothing Will Die are quoted by Florence.  However, the work that influenced her most was In Memoriam, a series of verses written while Tennyson was struggling to recover from the death of his friend Arthur Hallam; one of the poems in Short Poems in Sunlight and Shade is even called In Memoriam. 

 

Surely it is not at all surprising that friends at a girls’ school in 1870s England should read Tennyson.  It would be more surprising if would-be poets had not read his works.  However, Margaret Bradley’s family knew Tennyson personally.  Perhaps Florence even met Tennyson through Margaret’s family, if she went to stay with the Bradleys during the holidays - holidays the Bradleys often spent on the Isle of Wight, where Tennyson lived. 

 


To judge by the number of quotes from Tennyson above Florence’s own poems, he was Florence’s favourite.  However, several other poets are quoted by Florence above her own poems.  A very religious girl from a high church background, Florence also read the works of the 17th century poet George Herbert.  A quote from Herbert’s The Church Porch is above Florence’s poem Heart Strife.  The title of Florence’s poem The Desire of the Moth for the Star is another quote, this time from Shelley’s To----.  To---- is a second title that Florence bestowed on a poem of her own in conscious homage to a great poet.  Florence’s To---- has above it a quote from Wordsworth’s Ode - Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.  And though there must be many poems called ‘spring’, Florence’s own poem Spring quotes Christina Rossetti’s poem of that name. 

 

Tennyson.  Shelley.  Wordsworth.  Christina Rossetti.  All poets still widely appreciated today.  Florence’s poems, however, also quote from poems by two men and one woman whose poetry has suffered quite as much as Florence’s own since their deaths:

 

Hamilton Drummond, whose Sir Hildebrand and Other Poems was published in 1882;

 

Louisa Sarah Bevington, of whom more below; and

 

Frederic Myers, whose long poem St Paul was enormously popular during the 19th century but is completely unknown now.  Frederick Myers became a convinced spiritualist, although not an uncritical one - he was one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research.  Florence was not a member of the SPR but her mother was.  Myers’ book Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death was published in 1903 and Florence definitely read it; a quote from it is above one of her later published poems. 

 

Although extracts from poems she admired feature most in Short Poems in Sunlight and Shade, Florence also chose quotes from a wide range of other works including Jessie Fothergill’s novel First Violin; Deuteronomy chapter 4 verse 29 in which Moses urges the Israelites to keep the Commandments even after he’s no longer there to check; the translation by Walter Herries Pollock of the French writer Musset’s Nuits; the Life of George Eliot; and an issue of the Proceedings of the Liverpool Literary and Philosophical Society.

 

Florence’s friend Margaret Bradley didn’t need encouragement to start composing her own poems: biographies of her suggest that she always intended to be a writer.  However, Florence probably did need encouragement.  I was going to suggest that the example of Christina Rossetti may have inspired her; but it might equally well have deterred her.  Florence’s husband, Rev Henry Wynne ffoulkes, was her most important supporter in her poetry writing: two poems in Short Poems in Sunlight and Shade are dedicated to him and he seems to have been the inspiration behind the basic idea of Florence’s Poems of Life and Form.  That might mean that Florence didn’t start writing poetry on a regular basis until after she and Henry were married, in 1881.  Florence’s mother, Clara Jeffreys, also urged her on.  Florence’s A New Year’s Wish was dedicated to her and the saddest poem in this early volume, the one called In Memoriam, is words of spiritual comfort for a woman whose infant child has died - as Clara Jeffreys’ eldest daughter had done, aged five months.

 

The theme of poems dedicated to particular people runs through Short Poems in Sunlight and Shade and some of the dedicatees are easy enough to identify: “H” is husband Henry; C.J. is Clara Jeffreys; “L.S.B.” is Louisa Sarah Bevington.  Two poems are dedicated to Margaret Bradley, one as still unmarried - “M.L.B.” and one after her marriage (1879) as “M.L.W.”  However, I’ve been defeated in my attempts to figure out the other dedicatees, “H.B.” - who may be a child - and “E and A”.  It’s a pity about E and A especially, as Florence dedicated her poem Gold Must be Tried by Fire to them.  The poem’s title refers to One Peter, chapter 1 verse 7, about the testing of Christian faith, but the phrase has an alchemical ring about it and I really would have liked to know who those dedicatees were.

 

In the tradition of George Herbert, many of Florence’s poems in Short Poems in Sunlight and Shade are spiritual in nature, if not Christian, and that is how they were seen by reviewers in the Cambridge Review and the Saturday Review.  The Saturday Review was edited at that time by Walter Herries Pollock, whose translation of Musset Florence had read; perhaps they knew each other.  The Saturday Review described the poems as having a “refreshing unaffectedness of utterance”.  The Cambridge Review was less generous, saying that Florence’s metaphors suffered from an “innocent banality” and that there was “a certain charm” in her poetry’s “immaturity” - definitely a touch of praising with faint damns.

 

SWEET EYES

The Saturday Review said that Florence’s work had a “sweet tunefulness”; and the Nottingham Daily Guardian (Florence and her husband lived just outside the city) thought that some of the poems in the volume would be good set to music.  So it’s not surprising that the songwriter Mary Augusta Salmond should set to music one of Florence’s poems.  This was not a new work, written specially for the purpose.  Although the sheet music calls the song ‘Sweet Eyes’, the words are Florence’s poem “To L.S.B.” from Short Poems in Sunlight and Shade.

 

Mary Augusta Salmond was a few years younger than Florence.  She was the daughter of a barrister and had married Walter Salmond, an army officer and mining engineer.  In the 1880s and 1890s they and their five children lived near Mansfield in Nottinghamshire, so it’s possible that Mary Augusta and Florence knew each other.  However, they needn’t have met for Mary Augusta to use words by Florence for her first published song - the earliest in the British Library catalogue, that is - Mary Augusta may just have bought a copy of Short Poems in Sunlight and Shade.  Mary Augusta composed a small number of other songs over the next 20 years; the latest work by her in the BL catalogue is an anthem, published 1909.  However, ‘Sweet Eyes’ was the only poem by Florence that Mary Augusta used.  She set poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Coleridge and Kingsley but the only poet whose works she used more than once was Helen Marion Burnside; Mary Augusta used several of Burnside’s poems for compositions she called ‘plantation songs’.

 

QUESTIONS

Florence’s poem Questions was published in Lucifer: A Theosophical Magazine in its issue of 15 February 1888.  It’s the only poem she published in its own right, rather than as part of a larger volume.  I’ve talked in my other file about the crisis of faith that Florence was going through at this time, which led to her joining the Theosophical Society and being initiated into the Golden Dawn.  Here I want to print the poem and say that clearly, Florence found it a great deal easier to express doubt in poetry than in prose. 

 

            What can we do in temptation’s hour?

            How shall we conquer its fiery power?

            How can we master it - standing alone,

            Just on the threshold of things unknown?

 

            Strong is its power as Death and Hell,

            Led by its lure, even angels fell!

            Dazed by the glare of a rising light

            How shall poor mortals see aright?

 

            Tempted we were in the morning of life,

            With earth’s simple joys that are ever rife,

            To idly bask in the sun’s warm beam

            And to care no jot for a holier dream.

 

            Tempted again in the heyday sun,

            To choose fair paths and in gardens run,

            Claiming as ours, all joy - all love,

            Flowerets of bliss from the Heavens above.

 

            Temptings come now, in life’s later prime,

            Deeper and stronger than in past time,

            To feed with fuel the inward fire,

            The passionate dream of the Soul’s desire

 

            Two feet are creeping on paths unknown,

            Weary and mournful sad, and alone;

            Two eyes are looking and longing for light,

            Two hands are locked in a desperate fight.

 

            A heart is breaking with pain and grief,

            A soul in strong agony cries for relief;

            Echoes no kindred chord above?

            Stretcheth no Hand in responsive love?

 

            Is our Great God, but a God of stone?

 

            Are we - His people - dazed and alone?

            Is there no Ear that can hear us cry?

            No Christ, - to succour us e’er we die?

 

The italics are hers.  Florence always used a great deal of extra emphasis in her poems - phrases in italics, exclamation marks, words in capitals - as if her feelings at particular points in the writing demanded more than just the words.  Her reviewer in The Cambridge Review actually criticised her for that and hoped that as she gained confidence, she wouldn’t need to do it any more; but she never gave it up.

 

Over twenty years passed between Questions, and Florence’s next publication.  A lot happened in during that long period: she had reached some kind of resolution to her crisis of faith; her husband and her father had both died; she and her sister had inherited the family lands in North Wales but had decided to sell them rather than take up residence and run the estates.

 

TO THE ARABS.  ALLAH’S MESSAGE

I haven’t been able to find a single copy of this work.  I didn’t even know it existed until I was working through Poems of Life and Form and noticed an advert for it in the unnumbered pages at the back.  It was a pamphlet, published in 1911 with poems by Florence and translations of them all into Arabic.  It was being circulated not like a normal volume of poetry but like a religious tract.  It had an introduction by Princess Frederica of Hanover, so Florence may have been asked to write the poems by the RSPCA, of which Princess Frederica was a patron.  I did find one other reference to To The Arabs, via the web; apparently some of Florence’s poems had been set to music for it.

 

POEMS OF LIFE AND FORM

One set of poems later published in Poems of Life and Form had been in print already.  In 1908 Occult Review published Florence’s The Seven Principles.  The principles were theosophical, and Florence wrote one sonnet for each: Sthula Sharira; Prana; Linga Sharira; Kama Rupa; Manas; Buddhi; and Atma.  In her introduction, Florence explained that she had been trying to give as clear an outline of each principle as she could manage, while keeping within the sonnet form.  She urged her readers to use the sonnets as a basis for expansion on the “Dominant Chord” the sonnets are giving them.  The sonnets could have been written at any time between the early 1890s and 1908, but it’s likely that they had been written since about 1895: since Annie Besant had taken charge of the Theosophical Society in England, she had led it away from the Buddhism that was favoured in the 1880s and early 1890s, and towards Hinduism, her own preference.  The sonnets show Florence keeping up her reading, and following where Besant was leading.  I  have to say I thought the sonnets looked a bit odd, on the printed page.  There are a lot of exclamation marks and words in capital letters and I wonder if Florence wasn’t thinking of the poems as something to be read aloud in a ritual context - a concept she would have been familiar with both from high church services and from Golden Dawn rituals, but not from theosophy as the TS dealt with theory only, not practice. 

 

Florence clearly saw rendering these basics of theosophy as a set of sonnets as a real test of her poetry-writing skills, and the idea of poetry as challenge runs through Poems of Life and Form.  It seems that someone - almost certainly Florence’s husband Henry - had challenged her to write poems in as many of the old forms of poetry as possible.  Florence had picked up the gauntlet and her struggles with these unfamiliar forms had become quite a joke between her and her challenger - she wrote the leg-pulling she was getting into some of the poems.  Preparing the results for publication, she arranged the poems in groups according to their form.  The old forms she was using - some of which were first used in the time of the troubadors - included the triolet; ballade; rondeau; villanelle; kyrielle; sestina; and lai (which is not the same, apparently, as a lay). 

 

Poems of Life and Form differed from Short Poems in Light and Shade in several ways.  There were fewer devotional poems, and some of those that are included in the volume are more theosophical than Christian in tone.  The sources for the poems are more wide-ranging.  One set is based on Greek myths Florence may have heard discussed if she and Henry ever went to stay with Margaret Woods - Margaret’s husband was an Oxford University classicist.  In one poem, Sleep, there’s a reference to God as “the Holy Architect”, a concept of the deity Florence must have picked up from her husband, who was a freemason. There are two ballads written as if told by working men, with Florence perhaps trying to catch the lilt and dialect spoken by her husband’s parishioners in rural Nottinghamshire.  The ballad is an old poetic form but My Pal: A Modern Epic is right up-to-date in its theme: an ex-soldier remembers a comrade who died while they were both stationed in the Middle East.

 

One noticeable difference between Short Poems in Light and Shade and Poems of Life and Form is that Poems of Life and Form has hardly any dedications or quotes above the poems.  Although, as a result, there are no dedications to Florence’s husband, his presence - alive and later dead - is marked in many of the poems, in jokes, and in poems on love and on loneliness.

 

It is so sad that the only review I could find of Florence’s Poems of Life and Form was a sneering one by the young Australian poet James Griffyth Fairfax, in Poetry Review.  I think Florence’s publisher, Methuen, made a mistake sending the Poetry Review a copy.  The magazine was a new one, still on its first volume and anxious to make a name for itself.  Its editor, Harold Munro, made no bones about his intention to wage “a just and righteous war against formalism...and all kinds of false traditionalism”.  Poems of Life and Form might have been put together to encompass all that Munro was against, though that does not excuse Fairfax’s description of Florence’s volume as containing “no more poetry than a Bradshaw’s Railway Guide”. 

 

Munro wanted Poetry Review to be in the vanguard: in the same issue as the review of Florence’s book, Munro published a set of poems by Rupert Brooke including The Old Vicarage Grantchester; and announced his intention of reviewing Aleister Crowley’s The Winged Beetle when the magazine had room.  Modernism was on its way, and even to me, Florence’s poems did look dated - not so much in their form but in their use of language.  But it’s up to the poet to decide how she wants to write poetry; and if she doesn’t want to follow fashion why should she?

 

After a review like J G Fairfax’s Florence couldn’t be blamed for never publishing anything again; and she did only publish one more small volume.

 

THE LIVING WAY

This is a tiny volume, as it had to be, being published in 1918 with paper in short supply.  Once again, Florence had been asked to contribute some poems to raise money for charity.  This time, the charity was the Sacramental Society of Inner Light.  Florence’s set of seven poems, all written with the same rhyming scheme, either show her returning to her high church roots with a vengeance, or were written many years before she allowed them to be printed.  The seven are meditations on the high church sacraments: baptism; confirmation; the eucharist; penance; orders (that is, men in holy orders); matrimony; and unction (which Roger tells me is particularly high church).  The language Florence uses is old-fashioned - she was probably consciously imitating the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible.

 

Between 1918 and her death in 1936, Florence published nothing more.

 

 

I’ll end by printing a couple of extracts from Poems of Life and Form.

 

Firstly, a poem about trying to write a poem:

            A rondelet!

            How shall I build, in form and tune,

                        A Rondelet?

            I’faith, I very much regret,

            I cannot lop, and trim, and prune

            My words, so that I can commune

                        A Rondelet.

 

Secondly a set of three rondelets, headed “Song passes not away”:

            Had I but wings,

            Soon I would soar, and take my flight,

            Had I but wings,

            To realms wherein the glad lark sings,

            Thence I would rise, far out of sight,

            Into the pure, etheric Light,

                        Had I but wings.

 

            Oh, give me rest,

            Morpheus, thou bounteous god of sleep,

            Oh, give me rest;

            Take me to regions, fair and blest,

            There may I lift the Veil, and peep

            Into the vast and mystic Deep,

                        Oh, give me rest.

 

            Take thou my heart,

            I give it utterly to thee,

            Take thou my heart;

            My soul is thine, where’er thou art,

            And what I find to love in thee,

            That shall I love eternally,

                        Take thou my heart.

 

And the last poem in the book, a quatrain, expressing some rather un-Christian beliefs:

            I am a fighter, battling for the Right,

            I love our Master, and His striving Men;

            When death shall call me unto Heaven’s Light,

            If God so wills - I would return again.

 

 

TWO WOMEN POETS FLORENCE KNEW

 

Louisa Sarah Bevington

 

Florence’s poem “To L.S.B.” begins “Sweet eyes! Which gaze in mine with tender glow”.  The whole poem is addressed to a special ‘other’ and there actually isn’t anything in it that indicates the ‘other’ was a woman, it could have been a man.  However, such strong emotions expressed for a woman friend were not unusual in Victorian England and I’m assuming that Florence’s poem is addressing its dedicatee personally; and that she knows her personally, she hasn’t just read Bevington’s work.

 

On the face of it, it wasn’t an obvious friendship and I can’t think how they met unless one of the two - most likely Florence as Louisa Sarah’s work was published first - wrote to the other in praise of her work.  Louisa Sarah was several years older than Florence and they came from very different backgrounds.  Louisa Sarah was the eldest of the eight children of Alexander and Louisa Bevington, Quakers who lived in Battersea.  No high church upbringing in a remote colony there, quite the reverse - Louisa Sarah’s father encouraged her to study science, which led to her meeting Herbert Spencer, inventor of ‘social Darwinism’.  In 1881 at Spencer’s request, Louisa Sarah published an article in the Fortnightly Review defending science against critics who accused it of lacking any moral principles. 

 

Louisa Sarah’s first volume of poetry, Key Notes, was published in 1876 under the pseudonym Arbor Leigh, a clear reference to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh.  Barrett Browning doesn’t seem to have been a favourite of Florence’s; I also wonder what she made of the article in Fortnightly Review if she read it and knew that Louisa Sarah had written it.  However, despite these differences in background and outlook, poetry enabled Florence and Louisa Sarah to became friendly. I think their friendship was in the late 1870s and/or early 1880s, while Louisa Sarah was writing some of the poems that were published in 1882 in her Poems, Lyrics and Sonnets, and Florence was getting married and perhaps trying her own hand at poetry. 

 

In 1883, however, the friendship was interrupted if not ended when Louisa Sarah went to Germany to study, a decision that divided her life starkly into two phases.  She met and married the artist Ignatz Felix Guggenberger and lived in Munich for some years; but the marriage failed and she returned to London on her own, in the early 1890s, immediately immersing herself in anarchist politics.  She joined the Autonomie Club whose female members wore short skirts and even cut their hair.  She translated Louise Michel’s Commune de Paris into English. She still wrote poetry, but now she focused on human suffering and social issues.  She knew Peter Kropotkin and his wife; and knew of the French revolutionary Bourdin, who killed himself while trying to blow up Greenwich Observatory.  When she died in 1895 obituaries were published in the anarchist journals Liberty and The Torch of Anarchy. 

 

Further from lyrics and sonnets Louisa Sarah Guggenberger could hardly have gone, and it boggles my mind that she and Florence ffoulkes - devout and devoted wife of a high church clergyman living in the suburbs of Nottingham - could have anything to say to each other any more.  However, they may have kept in touch in the 1880s and 1890s.

 

 

Margaret Louisa Woods née Bradley

 

Margaret Bradley and Florence Jeffreys met at school.  I don’t know how long their friendship lasted.  In some ways their lives after school were similar: they were poets; they were high church Anglicans who married clergymen.  But in other ways, they were very different.

 

Margaret Woods (1855-1945) was from a privileged - though not necessarily wealthy - family.  Her father, Rev George Granville Bradley was a teacher at Rugby school when she was born; he went on to be headmaster of Marlborough School; and principal of University College Oxford; before ending his working life by being appointed Dean of Westminster in time to be in charge of the funerals of Gladstone and Darwin and the coronation of Edward VII.  I’ve said already that the Bradleys knew Tennyson; but they also knew Matthew Arnold, Julia Margaret Cameron, Lewis Carroll...  They moved in the kinds of circles Florence could only read about.

 

Virtually all Margaret’s siblings became writers though Margaret was the most prolific and the best-known of them.  In 1879, Margaret married Rev Henry George Wood of Trinity College Oxford.  For the next 18 years she lived in Oxford while her husband’s academic career prospered.  Margaret’s first published work was a poem.  It appeared in 1881 in a volume collected and printed by a family friend.  She continued to publish poetry but also wrote several novels, children’s stories, a verse-play and articles. 

 

Margaret’s views may give a clue as to Florence’s attitude to the some of the big socio-political questions of her day - attitudes which only appear in one of Florence’s poems.  People on the high church end of the Church of England spectrum tended to be conservative and Margaret was no exception - Mrs Humphrey Ward was a close friend of hers.  Though Margaret didn’t campaign actively against votes for women like Mrs Ward did, her 1907 novel The Invader took the view that the intellectual demands of an undergraduate course were beyond a woman’s capabilities and could lead to women graduates neglecting their duties as wives and mothers, and even to sexual immorality.  Margaret’s heroine used hypnotism to help her cope with her course work and found herself overtaken by an alternative personality who demanded sexual freedom - leading in due course to marital breakdown, remorse, suicide of the heroine and all the other things you would expect in a story by someone watching with disapproval as women demanded equal rights.   1907 seems very late to be making these arguments but Margaret’s opinions were still widely held (especially amongst men, of course) and perhaps Florence agreed with them.  Margaret’s use of hypnotism as a feature of her plot is interesting - perhaps she had discussed altered mental states with Florence though she was never a member of the Theosophical Society or the Golden Dawn.

 

In 1913, Margaret was elected a member of the Royal Society of Literature, a rare honour for a woman and perhaps some kind of establishment stamp of approval for her conservative views.  But those views caused her work to cease to be read even during her own lifetime and I certainly had never heard of her before I started to research Florence’s dedications in her Short Poems in Sunlight and Shade.

 

 

 

SOURCES FOR THIS FILE

 

British Library.  Though one book of poems published by Florence is missing and the four items that the BL does have are not catalogued consistently.   The British Library has:

 

1887    Short Poems in Sunlight and Shade.  London: Field and Tuer. 

            An edition of this was also published in New York by Scribner and Welford.

?1890  Sweet eyes, a song.  Florence supplies the words.  The music is by Mary Augusta C Salmond

1912    Poems of Life and Form.  London: Methuen and Co.  This one is catalogued under the name “L ffoulkes”.

1918    The Living Way.  A Set of Verses on the Sacraments.  London: C M Dobson

 

Late Victorian Poetry 1880-99: An Annotated Biobibliography by Catherine W Reilly.  Mansell Publishing Ltd 1994: p165. It’s a companion volume to Reilly’s earlier work which covers mid-Victorian poetry and is too early for Florence.

 

The all-important book that I used to find out more about the kind of poems Florence chose to write: The Poet’s Manual and Rhyming Dictionary by Frances Stillman.  Published Thames and Hudson Ltd originally 1966: p27, pp51-67.  My friend Helen Ash lent me her 1996 edition.

 

SHORT POEMS IN SUNLIGHT AND SHADE

Review: Cambridge Review vol VIII Supplement dated 20 June 1887 pcxiv.  The other reviews are quotes, in Poems of Life and Form on an unnumbered page at the end of the book. 

 

The TENNYSON quotes:

Via archive.org to the full text of In Memoriam with analysis and notes by H M Percival. London: Macmillan and Co 1907; the web copy is now in University of Toronto. 

The full text of the Miller’s Tale, with some notes, can be seen on ebook, Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson at www.gutenborg.org/files/8601/8601-h/8601-h.htm#section39. 

Tennyson’s Nothing Will Die can be seen at website poetry.rapgenius.com which also prints other early works.

Florence’s quote from the Idylls of the King: The Last Tournament is often printed without the rest of the poem eg in Love Songs from Tennyson selected by Edith Harris.  New York and Chicago: Rand McNally and Co 1907 p93.  I saw the Library of Congress copy online via archive.org.

The full text of Shelley’s To— is at www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174412.

 

For further information on Jessie Fothergill, see ODNB volume 20 p533.

 

Hamilton Drummond is listed in  Late Victorian Poetry 1880-1899: An Annotated Biobibliography by Catherine W Reilly.  Mansell Publishing Ltd 1994 p146.  Florence must be quoting Sir Hildebrand and Other Poems published Dublin by Hodges Figgis and Co 1882.  Drummond’s only other volume of poetry was published in 1893.

 

The Wordsworth quote: see a complete set of poems by Wordsworth at www.bartleby.com,

 

For the full text of Myers’ St Paul, see www.sermonindex.net. 

Myers is also in Late Victorian Poetry 1880-1899: An Annotated Biobibliography by Catherine W Reilly.  Mansell Publishing Ltd 1994 p344.

 

The quote from the Proceedings of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Liverpool is from volume 31.   Some further information on the Society is at www.scholarly-societies.org website sponsored by University of Waterloo Library.

 

The full text of Christina Rossetti’s poem called Spring can be see at  www.gutenborg.org/files/19188/19188-h/19188-h.htm#p_34A.

 

Via google to The Works of George Herbert p4.

 

For information on Walter Herries Pollock and on Alfred de Musset, see wikipedia.

 

Florence’s Gold Must Be Tried By Fire is from 1 Peter 1:7.  I found it at www.biblestudytools.com.

 

SWEET EYES

The British Library catalogue gives 1890 as the date of publication of Salmond’s song, but with a query so it might be a year or so either side.  London: W Morley and Co.

 

More information on Mary Augusta Salmond:

Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Landed Gentry volume 3 Burke, 1937 edition p1975

Medical Times and Gazette volume 2 1878 p366 a marriage notice for Mary Augusta’s sister Geraldine says their father was “of Lincoln’s Inn”.

Plantagenet Roll of the Blood Royal: The Clarence Volume by Melville Henry Massue Marquis de Ruvigny et Raineval p187 entry for Walter Salmond.

Whitaker’s Peerage, Baronetage etc 1925 edition p726 says that Mary Augusta Compton Salmond had been awarded an OBE.

 

QUESTIONS

Lucifer: A Theosophical Magazine Volume 1 number 6 issue of 15 February 1888, p485.

 

TO THE ARABS.  ALLAH’S MESSAGE

The reference I found was in Poems of Life and Form unnumbered page at the end.

Via the web I found it mentioned in The Athenaeum issues p4366-4392 1911 p489 in a list of recently published poetry and drama.  Florence ffoulkes’ friend, GD member Hugh Elliot, was a member of the Athenaeum Club and grandson of one of its founders: I expect he persuaded the Club’s magazine to take the advert for Florence’s pamphlet. 

 

POEMS OF LIFE AND FORM

Poems of Life and Form with Florence’s name given as L F Wynne ffoulkes possibly in an attempt to hide her gender.  Methuen and Co Ltd 1912.  It’s dedicated to HRH Princess Frederica of Hanover “who has written with generous favour of my verses”. 

For Princess Frederica of Hanover, see wikipedia.

 

The Poetry Review volume 1 number XI November 1912.  Published London: St Catherine Press Strand: p496; p504-09; p514. 

There are biographical notes on James Griffyth Fairfax in The Bibliography of Australian Literature compilers John Arnold, John A Hay, Sally Batten.  Published Kew Victoria: Australian Scholarly Publications 2001-08.  Volume 1 p4

 

THE LIVING WAY

The Living Way (A Set of Verses on the Sacraments) printed by C Maurice Dobson of 146 Kensington High St.  There’s no date anywhere in the booklet and even the British Library stamp doesn’t have a date on it, though the booklet is listed in the catalogue as having been published in 1918.  The booklet has no introduction or preface.

 

LOUISA SARAH BEVINGTON see ODNB volume 5 p613.

 

MARGARET LOUISA BRADLEY WOODS

I based my piece of Margaret Woods on the article about her life and work by Martha W Vogeler in the Dictionary of Literary Biography volume 240: Late 19th and Early 20th Century British Women Poets.  Editor William B Thesing of the University of South Carolina.  Farmingon Mills MI: Gale Group 2001. In her lifetime Margaret was a far better-known figure than her husband.

 

George Granville Bradley 1821-1903 is in ODNB and you can read his entry online.

 

Julia Margaret Cameron: A Critical Biography by Colin Ford 2003 p62.

 

Both Margaret and her husband have letters in Selected Letters of Robert Bridges by Robert Seymour Bridges, Lionel Muirhead and Donald Elwin, published Stanford University 1984.  There are some brief biographical notes on p1019.

 

Copyright SALLY DAVIS

27 December 2013

 

 

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