Virginia Woolf - A Dog's view of London (& Robert Browning of New Cross)

One of Virginia Woolf's lesser known works is Flush (1933), a biography of Eizabeth Barrett's spaniel. It's partly a whimsical parody of Victorian biography, but it does include a dog's eye (or rather dog's nose) perspective of London:

'For the first time he heard his nails click upon the hard paving stones of London. For the first time the whole battery of a London street on a hot summers day assaulted his senses. He smelt the swooning smells that lie in the gutters; the bitter smells that corrode iron railings; the fuming, heady smells that rise from basements - smells more complex, corrupt, violently contrasted and compounded than any he had smelt in the fields near Reading; smells that lay far behind the range of the human nose'.

The dog is stolen and a ransom demanded, leading to a disagreement between Barrett and Robert Browning about how to respond: 'What would Mr Browning had done if the banditti had stolen her: had her in their power; threatened to cut off her ears  and send them by post to New Cross?'

The reference to New Cross comes from the fact that the poet Robert Browning was living in New Cross at the time he and Elizabeth Barrett exchanged romantic letters prior to their marriage and elopement to Italy in 1846. A plaque on Haberdashers' Aske's school at the bottom of Jerningham Road is near to the site of  Browning's 'Telegraph Cottage'.

photo from London Remembers

See previously: Virginia Woolf and the Elephant and Castle

Shakespeare's Sister

Tlon is a fantastic second hand bookshop in the Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre where I have discovered many treasures. I noticed today that there is a bust of Virginia Woolf in the shop, which I thought was highly appropriate given the author's imagining of a fictional Shakespeare's sister who 'killed herself one winter's night and lies buried at some crossroads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle' . The context, in her book A Room of One's Own, was a reflection on the difficulties a woman writer would have faced at that time and were still facing in her time.

Virginia Woolf would have known the area as she used to teach English literature and history at Morley College, just up from the Elephant and Castle, before the First World War. Towards the end of her novel Orlando, the heroine, having undergone multiple transformations over several hundred years, drives through the area: 'The Old Kent Road was very crowded on Thursday, the eleventh of October1928. People spilt off the pavement. There were women with shopping bags. Children ran out. There were sales at drapers' shops'.

Whatever the future holds for the Elephant & Castle will it include a cool bookshop with a Virginia Woolf statue?