The Eagle 1966 (Michaelmas)

). ( ? \ rHE EAGLE ! I rANUARY 1967 \ The Eagle A MAGAZINE SUPPORTED BY MEMBERS OF ST JOHN'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY Editorial page 1 Competition 2 Headlines 3 Isabella Fenwick by Hugh Sykes Davies 7 Poem by C. Gill 19 I am going away for good by Pete Atkin 20 Transparent Woman by Ke vin Lewis 30 Story by K. T. Linley 32 Reviews 38 The Commemoration Sermon, 1966, by the Master 41 "Marriage ?" Sermon by Mrs M. Bulman 47 Obituaries: J. W. Millen 53 George Humphrey 58 College Chronicle 60 College Notes 72 Editorial Committee Mr BROGAN (Senior Editor), Mr HINSLEY (Treasurer), ROGER NOKES (Junior Editor), W. A. KUMAR, M. B. MAVOR, and JOHN ARMSTRONG. CONTENTS PAGE College Notes . 131 Editorial 137 �" The JCR Survey 139 VOL. �I JANUARY 1967 NO. 267 Christmas 149 Winter Words . 150 Perfect for Sound 151 Behaviour of a Hedgehog 153 W. H. R. Rivers 156 Photograph of the new lighting in Hall fa cing 160 Portrait of Rowland Hill fa cing 161 An EAGLE Crusade! ! Letters of Rowland Hill . 161 WE take our editorial duties seriously. The Flame of Baverstock 171 Among them is that of being the Big Johnian Booster. 173 Welcome to John's . It is our duty to boost John's because we are the Johnian The Burnaby Girl 176 periodical. The Falkland Islands Today 184 We believe this, and we act upon it. Ifwe do not boost John's, Book Review 188 who will ? Answer: a paid firm of public relations. College Chronicle 190 We do it for free, being part of the free British Press. College Notes . 207 Let others point the finger of scorn. They languish under Editorial 213 totalitarian yokes. They know not freedom. We do. The Eagle Questionnaire : Results 214 We also know which side our bread is buttered. The Combination Room and 'D' Day . 218 How unlike totalitarian regimes, where all they know is fe ar, Poems by Clive James 223 hunger, and the knock in the night. Headlong Hall . 227 We therefore feel free to congratulate John's on the biggest building of its kind, the finest, the newest. Honour to the men Escalation . 235 whose courage, vision, and money made it possible. Hedgehog Supplement Can Russia show us a better advertisement for its way of life ? Behaviour of a Master 237 Do its power stations and underground railways rival the Johnian Light Fantastic 240 achievement? Letters 241 Of course not. The School of Pythagoras (Merton Hall) 243 But a free press must feel free to criticise. And we at Th e Poems by John Elsberg and Pete Atkins 254 Eagle are entirely free, like our readers (except in respect of Gust of Gomorrah . 257 their compulsory subscription to the magazine). Poems by Bernard Metcalfe 258 We therefore Denounce. Who ? The purblind bureaucrats Reviews 259 who have not seen what we see. College Chronicle 267 From the roof of Cri pps Building we see it in our minds' eye. College Notes . 273 What ? An open-air swimming pool in the garden of Merton House. Let Johnians bathe! THE EAGLE Such is the cry of the latest Eagle crusade ! Already we anticipate the exhilarating trample of numerous feet running to our support. Democracy has never failed yet, nor will it fail now. HEADLINES Up, fainthearts ! PHOTOGRA PHIC COMPETITION "The Eagle" will award a prize of a May Ball ticket, supper included, and one bottle of champagne, to the competitor who, in the opinion of the judges, submits the best photograph of a pretty girl suitable fo r publication in the May Week issue of "The Eagle". Th e photograph, of course, to be the competitor's own work; and all entries to be submitted to the Junior Editor by March 13th. The Editorial Committee will be sole judges of the entries. Un successfu l entries will be returned (with a regretful sigh) if re quested. Parson imprisoned for passion perverse 2 Such headlines have none of the saddening shock of Actress assaulted while entering hearse The "Fenwick Notes": a Note on Miss Fenwick THE" Fenwick Notes" are familiar to everyone who has read W ords worth in an annotated edition, and two assumptions about them are commonly made without much ado :-that the grand old man, well on in his seventies, and pretty far gone in the notorious Wordsworthian egotism, took a fancy to annotate his collected works; and that, with his usual luck in such matters, there happened to be on hand a willing female amanuensis, Miss Isabella Fenwick, who fe lt honoured to make herself useful. Neither of these rather careless assumptions turns out to be right; the facts of the matter-and there is a wealth of fact bearing on it-reveal something altogether more complex. Those who have pursued Wordsworth's biographers even down to his declining years will have met Miss Fenwick as the last friend added to the most intimate and inward circle of the Wordsworth family, and they will know that she played a great part in the arduous and terrible drama of Dora Wordsworth's marriage to Edward Quillinan. But even so they may not have carried away the full, the detailed impression of her relationship with Wordsworth, or of her own character, for a biography of a man who lived for eighty years of real life has problems of scale, and it is impossible to treat everything with the same elaboration -or where would the grand design have gone ? Something still remains to be said about Miss Fenwick, the Notes, her part in Dora's marriage, her relations with Wordsworth himself. Throughout his life, Wordsworth lived among remarkable women-his sister Dorothy, his sister-in-law Sara Hutchinson, and-the most remarkable of them all, and by a very long way the most under-rated-his wife. Of his feeling for such women, he spoke with his usual candour. Henry Taylor wrote to Miss Fenwick herself in 1831: "I wish you were in London now, when you might see as much of him as you liked. He spends his time wholly in society, mixing with all manner of men, and Admiral's daughter drowned in dock delighting in various women, for he says his passion has always been for the society of women." A few years later, Aubrey de -THE TIMES, Vere gave his biographer, Wilfred Ward, an account of Words 3 June 1966. worth's praise of his wife: "After enumerating her many virtues, the Bard of Rydal went on slowly, gravely, and emphatically, 'And it was, perhaps, her greatest quality that she never molested me 7 THE EAGLE ISABELLA FENWICK in my affection for other women.' De Vere's broad smile fr ailty. She did not, however, leave any writings by which she (he told us) was not lost on the poet, who continued seriously, would be remembered, nor did she achieve any wide fame-or and almost combatively, 'If she had, Mr de Vere, let me tell you, notoriety-in her own time. All that remains of her is a handful it would have been in the highest degree offensive to me'." of letters, and the remarkably fu ll and vivid records of the De Vere was careful to add that these "other women" were impression she made on a number of distinguished people in the not youthful beauties, but such friends as Miss Fenwick, who Wordsworth circle. was about sixty years old when W ordsworth first came to know Her introduction to this circle was through Henry Taylor, her well. another person of note in his own age, now all but forgotten. What distinguishes Miss Fenwick, from all the other women, Born in 1800, he served with some distinction in the Colonial save one, whose society meant so much to him was that he was Office from 1824 to 1872, and enjoyed a brief burst of literary not only very fond of her, but also in some awe of her. Some fa me in 1834 because of his verse-drama, Ph ilip van Artevelde aspects of the Fenwick notes can only be judged fairly if it is which deserves to be forgotten as much as its Preface, a re remembered that they were dictated, not to a chance amateur markably penetrating survey of the state of English poetry, amanuensis, but to a woman of remarkable and powerful deserves to be remembered. In 1836, he published a little personality, whom he was very anxious to please, and whom he study of English political life, as seen by a Civil servant, entitled knew to be very hard to please. The Statesman, and this just manages to survive, as a minor The most vivid introduction to her person and personality is document of some value in its field:-and of some entertainment that given by Aubrey de Vere in a letter to Henry Taylor immedi value even outside it, for it is written in that rather subfusc, but ately after her death in 1856: "in some things how much she urbane and occasionally mordant prose which seems to have resembled Wordsworth ; but then how free she was from that been the characteristic style of the higher Civil Servants of the day: alloy of egotism which commonly clings to the largest masculine -Trollope had it too, but used it with a subtler and more per nature ! There was another point of difference. His was pre vasive irony. Taylor was but rarely ironic. For the most part, eminently a happy and, in the main, a satisfied life. Hers, I am he was merely impressive. Coleridge, who met him in the 1820's, convinced, never was so; certainly never from the hour I saw and Aubrey de Vere, who encountered him a decade later, were her first, as she rose, with her languid reluctant form and nobly both much impressed by his "remarkable handsomeness"-it sorrowful face, from the sofa in your back drawing-room at was one of the weaknesses in early Victorian democracy that Blandford Square, to shake hands with your new friend.

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