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Bodleian Library Publishing AUTUMN 2021 Bodleian Library Publishing AUTUMN 2021 Founded in 1602, the Bodleian Library is one of the oldest libraries in Britain and the largest university library in Europe. Since 1610, it has been entitled to receive a copy of every book published in the British Isles. The Bodleian collections, built up through benefaction, purchase and legal deposit, are exceptionally diverse, spanning every corner of the globe and embracing almost every form of written work and the book arts. With over thirteen million items and outstanding special collections, the Bodleian draws readers from every continent and continues to inspire generations of researchers as well as the wider public who enjoy its exhibitions, displays, public lectures and other events. Increasingly, its unique collections are available to all digitally. Bodleian Library Publishing helps to bring some of the riches of Oxford’s libraries to readers around the world through a range of beautiful and authoritative books. We publish approximately twenty-five new books a year on a wide range of subjects, including titles related to our exhibitions, illustrated and non-illustrated books, facsimiles, children’s books and stationery. We have a current Cover image Victoria Crowe, Landscape with backlist of over 250 titles. Hidden Moon, 2018, oil on linen, 127 x 127 cm. Private Collection, photographer: John McKenzie. All of our profits are returned to the Bodleian Taken from The Lighted Window, page 2. and help support the Library’s work in curating, Image opposite Radcliffe Camera conserving and expanding its rich archives, helping © Fetherstonhaugh Associates to maintain the Bodleian’s position as one of the pre-eminent libraries in the world. All prices and information are correct at time of going to press and may be subject to change without further notice. Design by Sue Rudge Design & Communication www.bodleianshop.co.uk INTRODUCTION 1 The Lighted Window Evening Walks Remembered Peter Davidson I … turn on one light, or all the lights when my father has gone to bed and go out to the end of the garden to see the golden shafts shining through latticed windows and stretching over the grass to where I stand by the dark yew hedge listening to the soft splashing of our stream, my feet in the dead leaves.1 The image of yellow, welcoming light in the vast blue dark of winter is a repeated motif of Scandinavian romantic painting, the sheer scale of the northern landscape emphasised by the sparse lights of the dwellings scattered across its hills and islands. In a different mood, the single lighted window, or the lonely streetlights in rural or urban darkness, became a defining motif of American art in the years during and after the second world war, and remains so to this day, particularly in the work of contemporary American photographers. From the turn of the twentieth century, the lighted window is also a motif repeated with infinite subtle variation in Japanese prints. These nocturnes are beautifully rendered in superimposed blocks of cobalt, turquoise and shadow, in points of brilliant yellow and white. The motif of the lighted window also appears in those optical devices Windows glimpsed through mist at nightfall: James Whistler, Nocturne in Grey and Gold: and models in which painters have delighted since the eighteenth Chelsea Snow, 1876. century: transparencies and glass-paintings, like Gainsborough’s Show Box, with its reverse-lit slide of a lamplit cottage by a moonlit pond. away from the observer, as with Eric Ravilious’s haunting Train Going This technique continues with the varnished transparencies often over a Bridge at Night, his paintings of ferries and piers between the wars. depicting lit buildings at night, designed to be viewed with a lamp But the image of the lighted window has also an unequivocally or candle behind the paper, which were a passing fashion of romantic positive aspect, an opposite mood by which it represents the security Germany and England. This fashion manifests itself later in small of home, a promise of domestic happiness towards which the traveller devices of wonder: toy theatres and Christmas lanterns, innocent lights hastens at nightfall, especially the traveller returning after a long and diversions for the depths of the winter. absence. Perhaps one of the most distinguished artists in this mode is the Victorian ruralist Samuel Palmer, who conveys a blessed and * exceptional security in his images of lighted cottage windows folded My mind circles back to the Oxford Elegy, to Arnold’s wanderer on about by small hills and orchard trees bowed down with fruit. There is the snowy hill as an image expressing belatedness and regret for the a moment in a letter from the young Cyril Connolly to a friend where life abandoned or relinquished, belated arrivals, chances not taken. he describes lighting lamps in December so that he may contemplate Variations of this scene became for me a talisman of nineteenth-century his home shining out through the winter dusk English poetry and experience. So much so that I set out from Oxford 12 the lighted window chapter head 13 Homecoming, haunting, nostalgia, desire: these are some of the themes evoked by the beguiling motif of the lighted window in ONE literature and art. In this innovative combination of place-writing, Winter Cities The Augustijnenkaai in Ghent was silent except for the faint stir of the willows along the water. The streetlights had come on early on memoir and cultural study, Peter Davidson takes us on atmospheric a winter evening: lights trailed in the canal, glowed behind sparse leaves, glimmered over wet cobbles. Elegant, substantial houses of all eras from the late middle ages to the nineteenth century lined the quay, and all were unlit in this early evening, dark as the apparently deserted villages seen from the train from Brussels at dusk the day walks through nocturnal cities in Britain, Europe and North America, before. Stepped gables, a palace front with a central carriage entrance, the long blank wall of a convent. We walked to the bridge at the corner and turned back down through the cobbled square on the other side, its houses lightless also – handsome, renaissance houses with stepped and carved gables. Then a light kindled between the willow leaves, reflected in the dark and revisits the field paths of rural England. canal, and yellow lamplight shone out from a ground floor window in the only small house on the quay. Then the gap between hanging branches gave us a glimpse into a comfortable room, the corbelled beams of the ceiling painted yellow, a standard lamp beside a green sofa. A fair-haired young man was standing by the lamp, reading the newspaper. The moment was both haunted and haunting, seeing the Houses of dreams by the still canal: René Magritte, L’Empire des Lumières (The Empire of Surveying a wide range of material, the book extends Lights), 1954. chronologically from early romantic painting to contemporary fiction, and geographically from the Low Countries to Japan. It features familiar lighted windows in English literature (in the works of poets such as Thomas Hardy and Matthew Arnold and in the novels of Virginia Woolf, Arthur Conan Doyle and Kenneth Grahame) and examines the painted nocturnes of James Whistler, John Atkinson Grimshaw and the ruralist Samuel Palmer. It also considers Japanese prints of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; German PETER DAVIDSON is Senior Research romanticism in painting, poetry and music; Proust and the painters Fellow of Campion Hall, University of of the French belle époque; René Magritte’s L’Empire des Lumières; Oxford. His previous books include and North American painters such as Edward Hopper and Linden The Idea of North (2005) and The Last Frederick. of the Light (2015). By interpreting the interactions of art, literature and geography around this evocative motif, Peter Davidson shows how it has 224 pp, 234 x 156 mm inspired an extraordinary variety of moods and ideas, from the 66 colour illus romantic period to the present day. 9781851245147 Image left Takahashi Shōtei, Mount Fuji seen from Mizukubu, woodblock print, HB £25.00 1930s (detail). Image courtesy of Sanders of Oxford, Antique Prints & Maps. October 2021 www.bodleianshop.co.uk NEW 3 The Secret History of English Spas Melanie King English spas have a long and steamy history, from the thermal ALSO BY THE AUTHOR baths of Aquae Sulis in Bath to the stews of Southwark, and from the elegant pump rooms of Cheltenham and Buxton to the Victorian mania for hydrotherapy and Turkish hammams. The Secret History of English Spas is an informative but light-hearted social and cultural history of our obsession with drinking and bathing in spa waters. It tells the stories of the rich, the famous, the poor and the sick, all of whom visited spas in the hope of curing everything from infertility to leprosy and gonorrhoea. It depicts the entrepreneurs who promoted these resorts – often on the basis of Tea, Coffee & Chocolate: How We Fell the most dubious scientific evidence – and the riotous and salacious in Love with Caffeine 9781851244065 illus HB £9.99 social life enjoyed in spa towns, where moral health might suffer even as bodies were cleansed and purged. MELANIE KING is the author of The And yet English spas also offered an ideal of civility and politeness, Lady is a Spy: The Tangled Lives of Stan providing a place where social classes and sexes could mingle and Harding & Marguerite Harrison (2019), enjoy refined entertainments such as music and dance – all part of Tea, Coffee & Chocolate (2015) and the fashionable pastime referred to as ‘taking the waters’. Can Onions Cure Ear-ache? (2012).

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