Virginia Woolf's Good Housekeeping Essays

Christine Reynier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429841187
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In the mid-twentieth century, Virginia Woolf published 'Six Articles on London Life' in Good Housekeeping magazine, a popular magazine where fashion, cookery and house decoration is largely featured. This first book-length study of what Woolf calls 'little articles' proposes to reassess the commissioned essays and read them in a chronological sequence in their original context as well as in the larger context of Woolf's work. Drawing primarily on literary theory, intermedial studies, periodical studies and philosophy, this volume argues the essays which provided an original guided tour of London are creative and innovative works, combining several art forms while developing a photographic method. Further investigation examines the construct of Woolf's essays as intermedial and as partaking both of theory and praxis; intermediality is closely connected here with her defense of a democratic ideal, itself grounded in a dialogue with her forebears. Far from being second-rate, the Good Housekeeping essays bring together aesthetic and political concerns and come out as playing a pivotal role: they redefine the essay as intermedial, signal Woolf's turn to a more openly committed form of writing, and fit perfectly within Woolf's essayistic and fictional oeuvre which they in turn illuminate.

Part I
The Good Housekeeping Essays as Intermedial Essays

1 The Humble Art of Description in the ‘Six Articles on London Life’

Introduction

Reading Woolf’s ‘Six Articles on London life’ is a most rewarding experience. Indeed, we discover the London of the 1930s that Woolf knew so well: a busy modern town thriving on trade and the time-old seat of the cultural, political and religious power of Britain; a town of contrasts where silence can still prevail in the middle of the daily bustle, where stately buildings stand next to ordinary shops and the famous live next to ordinary citizens. Through Woolf’s sparkling style and lively rhythm, London comes alive in each essay much more successfully than in any guidebook. Its activity, harsh business-mindedness and modernity come out together with its memories of the past and quiet reverence for famous figures. If the ‘forcing house of sensation’ (284)¹ that Oxford Street is may be reminiscent of Mrs. Dalloway’s London, the overall contrasted picture of London that Woolf paints points to the London she describes in Flush which, tellingly enough, she began writing in August 1931.

Starting from the East End and the Docks, the narrator takes the reader to the West End – Oxford Street, Chelsea and Hampstead – before moving back to Westminster Abbey and the House of Commons and reaching again the East End where the house of Mrs. Crowe, a Cockney, is supposed to be. The movement of the description is clearly from the then unattractive poor outskirts of London to busy affluent Central London and back again. Such a movement from the margins to the centre and from the centre to the margins is an interesting one. It refracts a desire to encompass the whole of London, the affluent areas that the readers of Good Housekeeping magazine may be familiar with and the less affluent, more seedy ones they may not know.

As such, Woolf’s six London essays seem to follow the tradition of the London sketch, which explores the divide between the West End and the East End. As Craig Morehead points out, ‘“slumming” the East End by upper- and middle-class writers and tourists became a way to know the “other half” of London, closed off to a large number of London’s population’, from Henry Mayhew’s mid-Victorian London Labour and the London Poor (1861–62) to early twentieth-century W. W. Hutchings’s London Town Past and Present (1909) or The Daily News and Star’s Star Rambles series (1922, 1930).² For Morehead, Woolf’s essays make the ‘other half’ of London known to her readers, just as her Victorian forebears’ sketches did: ‘These essays typify the genre of the London sketch as they bring to light and to life a London that many Londoners – the middle and upper classes, including the readers of Good Housekeeping – might not know firsthand’.³

This would be true if Woolf had not published her essays in a certain order that creates the specific geographical movement delineated above. As a consequence, Woolf does not so much expose the East End to the West End reader as decentre the reader’s gaze. The West End, the centre of London, is neither the starting point nor the final destination of the narrator; it is simply a place the narrator goes through but does not aim at, as if the narrator’s origins and final destination were in the East End. Woolf thus offers a defamiliarizing tour of London, at odds with the London sketch tradition. It is not so much meant to ‘open […] up the field of vision to the nearby unknown’⁴ as to create a form of circulation and connection between the East End and the West End. If the ‘Six Articles on London life’ draw on the tradition of the London sketch, they certainly reinterpret it.

Throughout the six essays, Woolf focuses on various areas of London, describing them in detail and connecting them. Her aim is clearly not to provide ‘a descriptive and historical account of the cities and boroughs that make up the Administrative county of London’, as W. W. Hutchings, for instance, does in London Town, Past and Present (1909).⁵ If she practices the art of description in a seemingly traditional way, drawing on her Victorian predecessors’ favourite technique and yielding to the same documentary impulse, Woolf also radically renews it: first, as will be seen in this chapter, by anchoring description firmly in modernity and creating a web of connections with the content of Good Housekeeping magazine, its immediate context; then, by endowing it with intermedial qualities, as will be seen in the next chapters. Reading the essays in a sequence, we shall discover that the art of description gradually fades into the art of photography and the art of architecture, turning the texts into creative intermedial essays that both nod to the past of London and celebrate its modernity.

The Documentary Impulse

Woolf first mentions the six articles that she is to write for Good Housekeeping magazine in her diary on February 17, 1931, a few days after completing The Waves and on the day after the Huxleys had dined with Leonard and herself.

And I feel us, compared with Aldous & Maria, unsuccessful. They’re off today to do mines, factories… black country; did the docks when they were here; must see England. […] Lord, how little I’ve seen, done, lived, felt, thought compared with the Huxleys – compared with anyone. […]

And I am to write 6 articles straight off about what?⁶

From this entry, it seems obvious that Woolf felt envious of Aldous Huxley’s travelling and of his grip on life: compared to her, he was in touch with industrial Britain, the heart of the country and its modernity.

Woolf’s desire to visit the Docks of London and write about them may have been spurred by Huxley’s own interest in them; it may also partly be attributed to her own wish to be in touch with the modern British economic world. In any case, emulating Huxley, she visited the Docks in a Port of London Authority launch on 20 March 1931, together with Leonard Woolf, Vita Sackville-West and the Persian ambassador; on March 24th, she went back a second time with Harold Nicolson, Vita’s husband.

A few days before, on March 9, 1931, she mentions in her diary: ‘I should have been sketching the Houses of the Great this morning, but that I have not the material. This afternoon I shall try to see Carlyle’s house and Keats’ (sic) house’;⁷ as a matter of fact, Leonard drove her there in the afternoon. Three weeks later, on March 30th, the Woolfs went to the House of Commons and attended a debate. On the next day, they attended a memorial service for Arnold Bennett at St. Clemens Danes.⁸ Within the space of a month and before retiring to Monks House on April 2nd to work on her essays, Woolf had visited most of the places she had selected for them.

That Woolf should have visited the sites she meant to describe and collected material about them suggests that on that occasion, she may have been tempted to subscribe to the documentary impulse of the naturalist writer. At that time, perhaps as a result of finishing The Waves, she seems to have yearned for facts and wanted, as she notes in her diary on 17 February 1931, to take ‘life in hand’ as Huxley did or to have ‘direct contact with life’ as, on the very day of his death, on 28 March 1931,⁹ she acknowledged that Arnold Bennett had done. The London essays may thus first appear as atypical texts in which Woolf may have adopted the mimetic aesthetic that she usually rejected and associated with the ‘materialist’ writers – H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy – whom she criticized so harshly in her early essay ‘Modern Novels’ (1919)¹⁰ and went on disparaging in a letter to Vita Sackville-West of 8 January 1928 as ‘our mediocre wishy washy realists’.¹¹

Could it be that Woolf tailored her writing to the Good Housekeeping readers who could discover essays by Arnold Bennett or chapters by John Galsworthy in their magazine? For instance, the December 1931 issue of Good Housekeeping where ‘The Docks of London’ was published also contained the concluding chapters of John Galsworthy’s Maid in Waiting. This sequel to the much acclaimed Forsyte Saga is the first volume of the trilogy End of the Chapter, which also includes Flowering Wilderness and Over the River and deals with the Cherrells, cousins of the Forsytes. It describes young Dinny Cherrell’s attempts at protecting her family from public scandal, her brother from extradition to South America and her cousin from her demented husband. In this satirical narrative, Galsworthy extends the Forsyte family saga and draws a picture of an old impoverished English family at grips with the aftermath of World War I and the changing values of a new world. The London Mercury wrote that the novel was ‘a museum of the period’,¹² but Galsworthy’s work was far too conventional in the eyes of Woolf who dismissed the author as a ‘stuffed shirt’, just as D. H. Lawrence thought him ‘sawdust bore’.¹³

Is Woolf demeaning her talent in essays that are in no way ‘archetypal pieces’, in Emma Cahill’s words,¹⁴ or is it that the six London essays indicate a turning-point in her writing career and, as such, play a crucial role? Indeed, they were written at a time when Woolf was experimenting not so much with internal monologue, as she had done so far in Mrs Dalloway or To the Lighthouse, but with description and a type of writing that was more obviously grounded in the economic and social reality, as McVicker points out. Flush, begun in August 1931 about five months after the essays were written, is a good example of this. The contrast between Wimpole Street, where Elizabeth Barrett Browning lives, and Whitechapel, where Flush is detained by his kidnappers, points at the ‘two nations’ England had become in the mid-nineteenth century, according to Disraeli, and may signal the danger of such a divide resurfacing in the 1930s. The Years, which was conceived in January 1931, about two months before the essays were written, and begun in October 1932, belongs to the same vein. The narrative explores the rise and fall of the various members of the large affluent Pargiter family and how they gradually, if unwittingly, fade into the various social classes and penetrate the different geographical areas of London, from the West End where Lady Lasswade gives her renowned parties to the poorest parts of the city where Sara, in her final impoverished condition, has her lodgings. The whole spectrum of London and British society is thus exposed.

The two options may not be exclusive of each other and may simply be in keeping with Woolf’s own apparent contradictions. Indeed, as her diary of 11 April 1931 points out, she can declare while putting the finishing touch to her essays: ‘Oh I am so tired of correcting my own writing’ and in the same entry, hint at the pleasure she takes in writing articles, ‘For ever I could write articles’.¹⁵ Similarly, in a letter written on 22 March 1931 to her friend the composer Ethel Smyth Woolf records her experience in the Docks in a disparaging tone and with a touch of self-confessed snobbism:

I’m being bored to death by my London articles – pure brilliant description – six of them – and not a thought for fear of clouding the brilliancy: and I have had to go all over the Thames, port of London, in a launch, with the Persian ambassador – but that I liked – I don’t like facts though.¹⁶

Referring to her London articles as boring and ‘pure brilliant description’ suggests how dismissive Woolf was of the art of description, an art based on facts. However, she had been gathering nothing but facts on her recent visits of the Docks, Carlyle’s house, Keats’s house and the House of Commons. And it must be acknowledged that facts have always fascinated...