{"id":88,"date":"2020-01-10T11:11:24","date_gmt":"2020-01-10T16:11:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/exhibitions.lib.udel.edu\/we-will-remember-them\/?page_id=88"},"modified":"2020-04-21T14:35:08","modified_gmt":"2020-04-21T19:35:08","slug":"perspectives-on-and-from-the-homefronts","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/exhibitions.lib.udel.edu\/we-will-remember-them\/home\/perspectives-on-and-from-the-homefronts\/","title":{"rendered":"Perspectives on and from the Homefronts"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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Henry Howard, 1843\u20131934<\/strong>
The diary of Henry Howard of Stone House \u2013 Kidderminster autograph manuscript signed, 1883-1926<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Would anyone today know the name of Samuel Pepys, if it weren\u2019t for the diary he left behind? Henry Howard\u2014a late-Victorian industrialist, inventor, sportsman, and an amateur musician and artist\u2014has attained no equivalent fame, but he did keep a diary for much of his adult life and dutifully recorded each day\u2019s public and private events, as they affected him. His wartime entries are brief, but telling, as he reports on the declaration of war on 5 August 1914; his involvement with the \u201cTerritorials\u201d and the \u201cyeomanry\u201d (elements of the volunteer army reserve organized by county and region); the progress of various battles; the challenges of rationing; and the military career of his eldest son, Geoffrey\u2014who, after his war service in France and Italy, was promoted to lieutenant general and knighted. Howard himself oversaw war production at Stewart and Lloyd\u2019s, the British steelworks firm, while holding the rank of colonel in the local yeomanry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Adrian Stokes, 1854\u20131935
Autograph letter signed to Wilfrid Meynell, 26 April 1915<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For artists who were accustomed to leading cosmopolitan, peripatetic lives and traveling across Europe unimpeded, the outbreak of war presented unexpected hazards. Both the English-born Adrian Stokes and his wife, the even better known \u201cNewlyn School\u201d painter Marianne Stokes, who was Austrian by birth, found themselves trapped in Munich as the conflict began and had to flee by way of Switzerland. This letter to Wilfrid Meynell, the critic and poet, gives an account of their travels (and travails), while also mentioning that their friend, the American painter John Singer Sargent, had successfully made his way back to England. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Century<\/strong><\/em>, May 1916
New York: The Century company, 1916<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Arnold Bennett asked him in 1914 to do official work for the national effort, Max Beerbohm\u2014who was well known as a late-Victorian caricaturist, wit, and dandy\u2014refused. His talents, he said, were unsuited to propaganda. \u201cThe war,\u201d he told Edith Wharton, \u201cis not a subject for comedy.\u201d (Beerbohm did draw a few cartoons of topical subjects, notably for Edith Wharton\u2019s The Book of the Homeless<\/em> and for John Galsworthy\u2019s magazine, Reveille.<\/em>) Exiled from Italy, where they had been living since 1910, Beerbohm and his wife Florence, an American actress, spent the war years at Far Oakridge, the Cotswolds home of his dear friend, the painter William Rothenstein. While there, Beerbohm escaped into the past, focusing on the fin de si\u00e8cle<\/em> and on the Pre-Raphaelite painters and poets of an earlier generation.  One result was the series of watercolors later exhibited and published as Rossetti and his Circle. <\/em>Another was his most famous story, \u201cEnoch Soames\u201d\u2014about an imaginary, time-traveling Decadent of the 1890s\u2014which first appeared in the Century<\/em> magazine, placed somewhat incongruously next to an article on army training. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Sir Max Beerbohm, 1872\u20131956
<\/strong>War-experts Discussing Mr. Kennington’s Prophecy<\/strong><\/em>
ink and watercolor on paper, 1916<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The figures depicted here are in fact the writers H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett, and Beerbohm\u2019s reference to them as \u201cwar experts\u201d is meant ironically, though both authors weighed in often with their opinions about the conflict. The title of Wells\u2019s 1914 polemic, The War That Will End War<\/em>, likely gave rise to the First World War being known as \u201cthe war to end all wars,\u201d while his novel, Mr. Britling Sees It Through<\/em> (1916), explored the challenges of dealing with life on the home front and with the deaths of loved ones in battle. Bennett, who had been living in France for ten years before the war began, joined the Ministry of Information, in charge of propaganda for France. Beerbohm knew both Wells and Bennett\u2014he had done earlier caricatures of them and parodied their writing styles in A Christmas Garland<\/em> (1912)\u2014but the joke about \u201cMr. Kennington\u201d remains obscure. The reference is probably to the painter and sculptor Eric Kennington (1888\u20131960), best known today for his illustrations to T. E. Lawrence\u2019s Seven Pillars of Wisdom.<\/em> Kennington fought on the Western Front and painted the men of his own unit in a work on glass titled The Kensingtons at Laventie, Winter 1914,<\/em> which became one of the best-known images of the war. He was later appointed an official war artist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Wilfrid Meynell, 1852\u20131948
<\/strong>Aunt Sarah & the War: A Tale of Transformations<\/strong><\/em>
London: Burns & Oates ltd., [1914?]<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although primarily a journalist and critic, Meynell wrote occasional verse and fiction. With his wife, the far-better-known poet Alice Meynell, he was also the center of a circle of English Catholic writers. This volume of imaginary letters exchanged among a group of fictional characters\u2014Captain Owen Tudor (who is fighting in France), his aunt, and a female cousin\u2014ends with the heroic death of the Captain at Ypres. Both this book, which was a surprise bestseller, and its sequel, Halt! Who Goes There?<\/em> (1916), were issued by Burns and Oates, the Roman Catholic-focused publishing firm owned by Meynell\u2014hence the anonymous publication. This copy is inscribed \u201cWith the affection of the Author, and all good wishes to R. & M. Z. for the year of fate 1914.\u201d The recipients were Rufus Ferdinand Zogbaum, Jr., an admiral in the U.S. Navy, and Margaret Montgomery Zogbaum, American friends of the Meynells. Their eldest son, Wilfrid Meynell Zogbaum (1915\u20131965) was a painter and sculptor. In the accompanying letter from Buckingham Palace, the King\u2019s private secretary, Lord Stamfordham, acknowledged the gift of Aunt Sarah & the War<\/em> to George V.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Alice Meynell, 1847\u20131922
<\/strong>The Last Poems of Alice Meynell<\/strong><\/em>
London : Burns, Oates and Washbourne Ltd., 1923<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alice Meynell, who was one of the most important late-Victorian women poets, produced her own lyrical meditations on the war in the volume Poems on the War<\/em> in 1916. Throughout the war, she endured air raids and German bombing, but also conflict within her family, when her son Francis declared himself a conscientious objector and refused to fight. After her death, her husband inscribed this presentation copy: “To her dear John Drinkwater From Wilfrid Meynell 1923.\u201d Drinkwater was part of the circle known as the \u201cDymock Poets\u201d and was a close friend of the famous soldier-poet, Rupert Brooke. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cQuiz\u201d [Powys Evans] 1899\u20131982
<\/strong>Rebecca West<\/strong><\/em>
Pencil on paper, [ca. 1925]
Margaret D. Stetz Collection, on loan to the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The writer born with the name Cicely Fairfield\u2014who called herself \u201cRebecca West,\u201d after a character in Ibsen\u2019s play Rosmersholm<\/em>\u2014made her reputation at a young age through her outspokenness. In leftist periodicals before the war, she wrote forthrightly about social injustice and British politics from a pro-suffrage, feminist perspective. She also took on the literary establishment in a series of book reviews, including one that brought her to the attention of H. G. Wells. Though he was much older and married, they embarked on a ten-year-long relationship that produced a son, Anthony West, who was born just as the war began. Forced to keep a low profile during the war, while hiding the existence of her child, she wrote admiringly of women who were active in doing war work, such as those who risked their lives in factories that made cordite (a highly incendiary component of explosives). Meanwhile, she produced a minor explosion of her own with a short and irreverent study of Henry James, published in 1916. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Sir Max Beerbohm, 1872\u20131956
<\/strong>Miss Rebecca West as I Dimly and Perhaps Erroneously Imagine Her<\/strong><\/em>
Pencil, ink, and watercolor on paper, [ca. 1917]<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the accompanying letter addressed to George Bernard Shaw, Max Beerbohm explained that he had \u201cdone this drawing a year or two ago . . . the result of having read in the Star,<\/em> now and again, some very brilliant articles by Miss West,\u201d whom he had never met. The depiction shows Rebecca West\u2014the feminist and suffragette, who in fact wore extremely feminine, glamorous clothes\u2014as a clone of Shaw, dressed in one of his characteristic Jaeger suits, merely because she, too, was a socialist. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Rebecca West, 1892\u20131983
<\/strong>The Return of the Soldier: With Illustrations by William Price<\/strong><\/em>
New York: The Century company, 1918<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

West\u2019s novel was one of the first to discuss the newly diagnosed condition of shell shock and to represent the devastating consequences for themselves and others, when soldiers came back from the battlefield with what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder. Her narrative was set during the war in an English country house occupied by women\u2014the soldier\u2019s wife and cousin\u2014who must confront the fact that everything from the past fifteen years has been erased from his memory, and that he remembers only his former attachment to a woman of a lower social class. In the crisis that ensues, it is up to the three women who love the soldier to decide how and whether to make him \u201cwell\u201d again, knowing that to do so will mean sending him back to the Front, where he is likely to die. West portrayed war not as a glorious enterprise for men, but as the source of profound moral dilemmas for women, which also shattered or solidified their bonds with one another. For its publication in the United States, however, this deeply philosophical meditation was given an inappropriately conventional set of illustrations, making it look like light romantic fiction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Mrs. John Lane, 1856\u20131927
<\/strong>War Phases According to Maria: Illustrated by A. H. Fish<\/strong><\/em>
London: John Lane, 1917<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1898, the American author Annie Eichberg King married the London publisher John Lane (co-founder, with Elkin Mathews, of the Bodley Head firm). Continuing a transatlantic existence and publishing under the name \u201cMrs. John Lane,\u201d King enjoyed considerable popularity with her series of comic sketches about the upper-class London world of \u201cMaria,\u201d a society figure who responds to the daily challenges of life in ways that show her at once silly and admirably indomitable. Throughout War Phases, <\/em>Maria modeled a very British kind of unflappability, as well as a sense of fun, whether she was dealing with rationing and food shortages or perching on a torpedo, during her visit aboard a submarine. The illustrations for this volume, by Annie Harriet Fish (1890\u20131964), show the artist\u2019s admiration for the distinctive black-and-white style of Aubrey Beardsley, who had been the art editor of the Yellow Book,<\/em> the avant-garde magazine published by John Lane in the mid-1890s. This copy was presented by the author to Thomas A. Edison.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[UD_EXHIBITION_ITEM] Henry Howard, 1843\u20131934The diary of Henry Howard of Stone House \u2013 Kidderminster autograph manuscript signed, 1883-1926 Would anyone today know the name of Samuel Pepys, if it weren\u2019t for the diary he left behind? Henry Howard\u2014a late-Victorian industrialist, inventor, sportsman, and an amateur musician and artist\u2014has attained no equivalent fame, but he did keep […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"parent":81,"menu_order":1,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"page-exhibition.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-88","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.lib.udel.edu\/we-will-remember-them\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/88"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.lib.udel.edu\/we-will-remember-them\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.lib.udel.edu\/we-will-remember-them\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.lib.udel.edu\/we-will-remember-them\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.lib.udel.edu\/we-will-remember-them\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.lib.udel.edu\/we-will-remember-them\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/88\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":145,"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.lib.udel.edu\/we-will-remember-them\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/88\/revisions\/145"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.lib.udel.edu\/we-will-remember-them\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/81"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.lib.udel.edu\/we-will-remember-them\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}