The river side of Newnham Grange, by Gwen Raverat (Period Piece, 2002, p. 33)
‘This is a circular book,’ the artist Gwen Raverat, aged 62, explains at the start of her memoir Period Piece. It was her first book and she had wondered how to structure it, until she decided on the idea of thinking of it as like the wheel of a bicycle. ‘It does not begin at the beginning and go on to the end; it is all going on at the same time, sticking out like the spokes of a wheel from the hub, which is me. So it does not matter which chapter is read first or last.’ Published by Faber & Faber in 1952, Period Piece: A Memoir of a Cambridge Childhood is Gwen Raverat (née Darwin)’s account of growing up as a member of the extended Darwin clan in Victorian Cambridge, where her father and two uncles were attached to the University. Told with droll humour and observational astuteness, this little book has never been out of print in the UK, and as the winter solstice approaches it makes perfect, nostalgic reading, with a promise of spring around the corner. So my own circular post here is a tribute to Period Piece, sketching Gwen Raverat’s life through six ‘mini-chapters’, beginning and ending with her house by the river.
The house by the river
Maud DuPuy, a twenty-one-year-old woman from Philadelphia who was passionate about drawing and painting, was spending the summer of 1883 seeing the great sights of Europe. She began her continental tour by visiting Cambridge, staying with her aunt Caroline Jebb (the ‘exceedingly beautiful’ Aunt Cara of Period Piece). Cara/Caroline was the wife of a Classics don and she introduced her niece to 38-year-old George Darwin, the second son of Charles Darwin and a professor of astronomy at the University. It was not love at first sight on Maud’s part, but the normally reserved George was smitten and followed her to Italy where the couple became engaged a few months later. Cara was delighted for her niece, but anxious that the Darwin family might suspect (quite rightly) that she had engineered the match. ‘If there is a suspicion of my being a matchmaker,’ she told George, ‘I utterly and entirely repudiate it...’ (letter, March 13 1884).
After their marriage Maud put away her paintbrushes, as her aunt predicted. George hired the architect J.J. Stevenson to turn a rundown house by the river into a well-appointed family home, which they called Newnham Grange. Their first child, Gwendolen Darwin, was born there in 1885, and three siblings soon followed (one brother died as a baby). From a very young age Gwen was fascinated by her surroundings.
‘The river flowed deep into her consciousness and later became a recurrent motif in her work,’ her biographer Frances Spalding writes.
As one of the ‘first hatching’ of university children (until 1882 Fellows had not been permitted to marry), Gwen grew up in close contact with a sociable clutch of her Darwin cousins in Cambridge. Today’s Darwin College (Cambridge's first graduate college, founded in 1964) incorporates both of Gwen Raverat's former riverside homes, Newnham Grange and the neighbouring Old Granary, which she would move into in 1946, following the Second World War.
The family's much put-upon dog Sancho and the 1890s craze for cycling are among the highlights of Period Piece. ‘My mother had the first lady's tricycle in Cambridge’ Raverat writes. ‘Our dog Sancho was horrified to think that anyone belonging to him would ride such an indecent thing.’ There are comic escapades on punts and rain-sodden picnics on Grantchester Meadows. Bicycles, the river and playing with her beloved cousins gave Gwen great happiness, as did visiting her grandmother Emma Darwin at Down House and experiencing there, as nowhere else, an intense feeling for the spirit of place. As she recalled in later life:
‘Long after I have forgotten all my human loves, I shall still remember the smell of a gooseberry leaf, or the feel of the wet grass on my bare feet; or the pebbles in the path’.
But her mother Maud never stopped trying to make this child of nature fit the mould of a good Victorian daughter, demure, conventional and squeezed into corsets; the rage the adolescent Raverat felt about being forced to attend dance classes and observe ‘propriety’ ripples through the book she wrote fifty years later.
‘Humour, tenderness and affection are the keynotes of Period Piece,’ Hazel Woods writes, ‘but if you look closely there is a fierce and passionate undercurrent that tells you something about the artist Gwen became.’
A struggling artist
Almost every page of this book features one of Raverat's sunny, nostalgic drawings, but in her teenage years clouds gathered over her life. Frances Spalding’s Gwen Raverat: Friends, Family and Affections reveals her long and lonely struggle to become an artist. For all her privilege and connections as the granddaughter of Charles Darwin, Gwen could not fit in with her family, and Period Piece hints at this unhappiness. Her kindly parents had ‘hands that understood nothing’ and neither of them understood her artistic drive and craving for independence.
In 1908 her long campaign to be given permission to study art in London finally succeeded and she enrolled at the Slade School of Painting and Drawing in Gower Street. Soon her prints and wood-engravings began to be commissioned and to make her money: ‘The little woodcuts by Miss G. Darwin, throwing back to the days of Bewick and Blake, are quite excellent’, wrote The Times critic in 1910.1 It was the beginning of a lifelong career as a wood engraver and book illustrator.
In London Gwen made friends among the Bloomsbury set including Virginia Woolf (then Stephen). When Virginia came to Cambridge for a visit the two young women sat in Newnham Grange's garden overlooking the river together, Virginia daringly smoking one of George Darwin’s cigars.
