Thursday 18 May 2023

From Ripley to the Gate of Angels

 Slow reader that I am, I'm still with Penelope Fitzgerald's biography of Edward Burne-Jones.
I was intrigued to come across this passage on page 230: 
'When, during the nineties, bicycling divided the nation into those who could and those who couldn't, Burne-Jones, like Whistler (but unlike Balfour and Henry James), gave up the attempt to learn; but he did so with some regret, having heard of two young bicyclists, a man and a woman, perfect strangers, who "crashed at Ripley, were picked out of a hedge, and woke up to find themselves in the same bed".'
The quoted passage is from the studio diaries of Thomas Rooke, Burne-Jones's studio assistant – and the incident described is an exact pre-echo of the opening of Fitzgerald's penultimate novel, The Gate of Angels (though the location is changed from Ripley to Cambridge). The idea must have been fermenting in her mind for the 15 years between the publication of the Burne-Jones biography and that strange and wonderful novel. (Sensational reports of bicycling accidents – preferably involving the fair sex – were apparently a staple of 1890s journalism, much to the annoyance of the cycling fraternity.)

And here's a footnote on Lawrence Alma-Tadema, a painter who keeps popping up on this blog (here, here and here, for example). Fitzgerald mentions 'Alma-Tadema's cheerful concerts, where "Tad" had frightened Paderewski [the distinguished pianist] terribly by letting off a clockwork tiger under his chair'. They were a boisterous lot, those Victorian artists, much given to silly games and practical jokes. Burne-Jones was happy to join in the silly games, but of practical jokes, surely the lowest form of humour, he was the long-suffering butt rather than the practitioner. He was no Alma-Tad.

2 comments:

  1. Is the notion that the bicyclists were removed unconscious by the local emergency service, and placed in one bed by others, or that once removed from the hedge, they found their to one bed while dazed but apparently conscious? I suppose the latter.

    More than a century later, and with some knowledge of bicycle accidents, I wonder whether a crash into a hedge could give one a concussion. I would think it much more likely that a couple, previously acquainted, managed controlled crashes to excuse finding their way to the same bed.

    Perhaps Alma-Tadema could have painted the scene--a couple of beat-up bicycles leaning against the wall, in a rumpled bed an affectionate couple with a few scratches from the hedge.

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  2. Thanks George. Yes, it would make quite a picture – and the story does sound a little fishy. In the novel, as I recall it, the two cyclists crash into each other on the road, are both knocked out, and are put in the only available bed by kindly locals.

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