Under The Glass: On Renovating a House

 “I pity wretched Strephon blind 
To all the charms of female kind; 
Should I the queen of love refuse, 
Because she rose from stinking ooze?”
Jonathan Swift - ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’

The above quote is from a poem about a man called Strephon who is distressed when he goes into the dressing room of a woman he idolises and sees all the work that has gone into making her beautiful. He discovers, to his dismay that the woman he loves is just as human as the next person, “Repeating in his amorous fits, Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!” 

Swift’s conclusion is to pity Strephon’s either/or attitude to women’s beauty, and to say that he should appreciate the work and effort that goes into, “Such gaudy tulips raised from dung.” In some ways, it’s a lesson I’ve had to learn from my house. 

When this posts, I shall be moving into that house. As I write, it’s the Sunday before. Yesterday I was cleaning up the front room, ready for carpets to go down on Tuesday and I discovered that one of the walls was damp. This was after more than five-thousand pounds of damp-proofing being done. The day before, one of the radiators in the back room started squirting water and the ceiling is hanging on out of nothing but habit. Needless to say, when I do move in, most of the downstairs will not be liveable. I only hope the radiator is fixed soon so I can get the boiler going again and have hot water.

I knew the house was old, probably turn of the century, and that it hadn’t been very well looked after. It had been empty for almost two years and before that was owned by a landlord who obviously had a habit of hiding problems rather than fixing them. A shop round the corner informed me that the owner before that was an old lady and I think I found some of her wallpaper, she was very fond of geometric shapes and lines with small flowers over the top in some pretty dingy colours.

At first I thought that all I needed to do was have the damp-proofing done and fill in a little gap in the back room floor. However, big chunks of the floor in that room simply came off. It turned out someone had put screed on it on top of vinyl floor tiles and it was just peeling off. I could simply pull parts off with my hands which were roughly the thickness and consistency of cracking an old easter egg. Where the concrete was nearer the damp parts, it was this stubborn sludge, which probably took me more than thirty hours to chip, scrape and knock off. Then I pulled the vinyl tiles up.

Upstairs, there was this creepy poem on the wall. I didn’t recognise it at first until I showed it to someone and they sung some of the Aerosmith song that was in Independence Day.

 I pulled some of that off, then saw a loose bit of anaglypta wallpaper. I didn’t much like the texture and planned to paint the wall so I tugged at it and it peeled all along the wall, all along the ceiling and back down the other wall. I did this a few more times until I was in a sea of wallpaper. 

Of course, the bits that were left (which were mainly old wallpapers going back who-know how long) were stubborn and needed twenty-odds hours of chipping and scraping each. These revealed walls that were more polyfilla than wall, weird bodge jobs and plaster dating from before this millennium. 

I followed this process in the other bedroom, the back room and the hallway. I couldn’t face doing the stairs - and nor could I reach all of them. Every room I’ve stripped has shown holes, cracks and various dodgy things. The plasterers had to wrap the rooms they’ve plastered with a gel mesh to make them plasterable.

There were tiles in the kitchen and bathroom which stopped doors from closing and were coming up. They were plastic and glued onto white porcelain tiles that had been there before. The wet from the dampness had got into the glue and they were pinging up all over, so I pulled the rest up. I liked the porcelain tiles more, but the glue needed scraping off them. As I pulled the tiles up, I smelt bleach where people had presumably mopped the floor placed on them, soaked through and trapped between the layers.

The biggest headache has been power. As a tenanted property, the electricity and gas meters are ones needing a plastic stick and a card. They are old and bulky and very ugly. The gas one is low down in the front room, the electricity is high up in the hallway. So high up I couldn’t reach to even see the information screens. I had to borrow a ladder from a nearby lumberyard before I got my own stepladder.

 What’s more, being left for years, they’d both accumulated large debts, which were extremely difficult to write off. When I sorted that out, I scheduled someone to install smart-meters so I could switch to a better company, he couldn’t do it because the current electricity meter is installed so unsafely.

The very first job I did was the easiest. Mine is a red brick house and people have scraped and carved their names in the bricks. I don’t mind those names, I sometimes wonder who ‘Roy’ was. I did mind the swastika though. I picked up a red brick that was laying around and scraped that symbol off the wall. Still the easiest and most satisfying job I’ve done.

Yet, through it all, I’ve grown to love my house, even as it throws problem after problem at me. I’ve named her Jane, after Calamity Jane. Today I found out the area I’m moving to is the second most deprived ward in the country, there’s a whole youtube genre of people taking their cameras and filming poverty porn around the streets I’m soon to call mine. I feel a bit sorry for poor old Jane, old and unloved as she is and peculiarly, each set back seems to make me more determined to create the cosy, productive hideaway I’m after. I’ve worked hard on Jane, three hours after every work day and another eight on Saturdays. It's been difficult.

 Although she won’t be totally ready when I move in, I’ll still have access to bedrooms, heating and hot water, a washing machine and more space than I ever had in my London attics. She might not be home yet, but she will be. Like Strephon in Swift’s poem, I’ve seen the stinking ooze, but like the narrator of the poem, I’ll appreciate her beauty all the more for that. 

Under the Glass: On Houses

 

"To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends.” - Samuel Johnson, Rambler 68, November 10th 1750

There’s a reason I called this site The Grub Street Lodger besides my interest in Grub Street. I was a lodger, one of those strange, single men who pay to live in someone’s spare room or attic, which  I then filled beyond bursting with books. I have had six addresses since setting up this site, and one of those was for almost ten years. 

I wasn’t the only one. My three big Grub Street heroes were all lodgers. 

Oliver Goldsmith never owned property. Famously, it was whilst lodging in Wine Office Court when he was dunned by his landlady and called on his near neighbour, Samuel Johnson for help. Johnson then rooted through Goldsmith’s papers, found a finished novel, The Vicar of Wakefield and sent it out, selling it to John Newbery’s nephew for sixty pound. (Despite not thinking it worth printing for two years, it ended up being a steal, becoming a highly successful work). Goldsmith also lived in Arbour Court, where there are stories of him helping the landlady hang up the washing and entertaining the children with magic tricks. Another time, he lodged with John Newberry himself in Cannonbury House, where he strode the fields of Islington, seriously trying to think of funny things for his comedies.

Another lodger of Cannonbury House was Christopher Smart, who remembered those days as a time of domestic bliss with his wife and children. He remembered this in less salubrious lodgings in Mr Potter’s private mad house, which was a lodging paid for him. Whilst there, he felt himself emasculated because he had to formally renounce his future claims on his mother’s property and any future property of his wife. He later died in another rented dwelling in the Liberty of the Fleet Prison, where he lived as a debtor.

Samuel Johnson himself has two house museums dedicated to him, the on in Gough Square and his birthplace of Breadmarket Street in Lichfield. He did own the Lichfield house for a short while but had to put it in trust when he couldn’t pay the upkeep. When he visited, he never stayed there but put himself up in guest houses. 

Owning a house wasn’t the aspiration in the eighteenth century it is now, but I found comfort in being like them, and so many other fascinating people and writers who had no place to call their own. I am, however, no longer in their number. I am a homeowner (as long as I keep up mortgage repayments, but my name is on the deed). 

It’s a phrase that sits strange with me. I never exactly did a moonlight flit, I’ve carried too many books around with me to do that but I could be gone within a weekend, and had to a couple of times. Now  am fixed, tied to a place and address in a way that I never have before. It’d feel an odd thing to say that the house has become part of my identity, I haven’t even moved into it yet, but I am a part of its identity, another name in a long list of owners. 

My new house is not an eighteenth century house, built, probably at the beginning of the twentieth century (or a smidge before), but there was something about it that appealed to me. Pretty narrow, the house reminded me of a London town house in miniature, with red bricks that put me in mind of Gough Square. Rather like Gough Square when Lord Harmsworth bought it, my house has been neglected for the past few years and I have been working incredibly hard to make it a comfortable place for me and my books, because, as Johnson said, “

To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends.

Was My Writing MA Worth It?

 Just a little video where I talk about my MA, why I did it and what I got out of it. In true click-bait terms, the answer may surprise you.

Review: Mothers of the Novel by Dale Spender

Mothers of the Novel was published in 1987 with a specific polemical purpose, to re-establish the crucial role women played in the novel’s early life. What was originally supposed to be a chapter on the few progenitors to Jane Austen opened the door to whole generations of women who deserve to be better known and appreciated in the literary canon.

This strength of purpose gives the book vigour and bite but it also can make the book a little repetitive. It’s an important point to repeat, and I wouldn’t want the book to be lighter or more diplomatic, but it can get a little wearing. Writer after writer is brought up, discussed and analysed but each chapter ends with the same point, that the writer is not better known or respected because she was a woman. Some women were to scandalous to survive in the canon but some too demure, some women wrote too fast and others too slow, some wrote books that followed trends and some were too experimental, some were too political and some too domestic - whatever reason given, it boils down to the fact the writer was a woman.

This alone would have made this a powerful book but what makes it enjoyable, thrilling even, is the desire to introduce the reader to new writers and new works. It’s like being cornered by a friend who’s just got into something and wants to share it with you. The enthusiasm and glee to share all these new works and writers is what gives the joy to balance the anger.

I don’t know how much impact the book at series had when it came out, I was only two and my favourite books were Ladybird fairy stories (The Magic Porridge Pot was a banger) but I hope it made a splash. Certainly, in 2025, there has been some shift. Authors who were still a little remembered, like Aphra Behn and Fanny Burney are more central to the general, popular story of the novel. Fanny Burney even featured in a mid 2010s documentary about the birth of the novel, though she was described as the progenitor of ‘chick-lit’ and example of all women’s writing being forced into the same genre. I know that Eliza Haywood is getting much more love (as she deserves) with some of her works being figured in early novel courses… there’s some shift, but not much.

One of my overriding interests are books written in the eighteenth century (and I’m prepared to stretch into the long century when the occasion requires) and I had heard of many of the writers and read a chunk of them, but there were still authors I’d never heard of, books I’ve not tracked down.  I want to find some writing by Anne Fanshawe now, I’m doubling my efforts to find Fielding and Collier’s The Cry, I’m looking forward to reading my Amelia Opie and my Eliza Fenwick. Even to an old hand like me, this book has opened up new roads to explore. 

I didn’t realise Aphra Behn wrote 13 novels, I’ve only read two of them. I knew that Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World is supposed to be good but I never realised how forthright and interesting she was. I had always assumed Delreviere Manley’s New Atlantis was a simple compendium of gossip but I didn’t know she worked with Swift, that they wrote journalism and satire together. Hearing about one character in that book, a gossipy midwife called Mrs Nightwork, I can’t help but draw links with Christopher Smart’s Mary Midnight - and I look forward to reading it to see if he may have got inspiration from there. 

There were so many women writers towards the end of the eighteenth century, and they were so successful, that male writers began to publish under female pen names. A newer crop of women writers in the second half of the twentieth century may have felt they were carving out something new, with women’s literary journals and prizes - but they were only recreating a network that women writers had before. Jane Austen didn’t write in a vacuum, she was part of a full literary tradition. Even thirty-odd years after this book was published, I think that tradition is largely unknown and unsung.

Spender is quite contemptous of the two main histories of the novel, Ian Watts’s The Rise of the Novel (still in print) and Walter Allen’s The English Novel - both of which I’ve got but not read yet (I want to as a soon as I find the boxes they are in though). She gives Watts a little more credit for adding some women novelists in his telling, but as supporting parts to the five big men. Allen, according to Spender’s account, doesn’t even seem to realise that women might have had something to say through history. 

I don’t agree with everything Spender argues. I’m not convinced that Anne Radcliffe should be heralded as the founder of the Romantic Movement, though I have to admit ignorance about the Romantics in general. I’m also not convinced that the erasure of women should be seen as an active attack by men, that it’s more a byproduct of men getting the last word every time and not even considering women. I don’t think Walter Allen left women out of his history because of an animus to women as much as his having a huge blind spot. I hope this book has reduced a blind spot of my own, even as a try to make women and male writings even throughout a year, I do read more men. It also challenged me to think about the book I’m writing and introduced a new chapter where one of the female characters gets to have her own say in a way I hadn’t thought of before.

I’ve read other books about women novelists of the same period but this one had a clarity and strength of argument that made it feel pretty vital. I think anyone looking into books of the period should read this - and it’ll prompt them to want to read a whole range of new stuff in the future. 

Review: Edmund Curll - Bookseller by Paul Baines and Pat Rogers

Back in 2015, I read The Unspeakable Curll by Darin Strauss, the life of a much maligned eighteenth century bookseller. Ten years later (and where does the time go?) I read Edmund Curll: Bookseller by Paul Baines and Pat Rogers. The books themselves were written over seventy years apart, and a lot has been found out about Grub Street since then.

Strauss’s was a joyful book to read, declaring itself not a proper biography and admitting that he didn’t know where Curll came from or where he was buried. He adopted a scampy, playful attitude to his telling and often characterised his subject based on his own feelings about Curll than any definite facts. Baines and Rogers are far more factual. The digitisation of libraries and scholarship has meant they can track down Curll’s work in far more detail, provide painstaking evidence for their conjectures and treat the bookseller far more as a historical fact than the bogeyman of legend or the almost Del Boy figure portrayed in Strauss. They admit that Strauss’s is the more entertaining book but their more serious, sober, reportage probably brings the reader closer to the truth.

They pin down Curll’s birthday (14th of July, 1683) but can’t find a certain location. Whats more, Curll was never officially apprenticed into the book trade, nor ever served in the Stationer’s guild. There are suggestions of him working in stalls around Covent Garden, which inveigled him into bookshops that merely sold works before beginning to produce his own.

In some ways, Curll was not a joiner. Aside from never joining the guild, he very rarely published as one of the congers, the large groups of booksellers used to fund prestige projects. Despite that, he did often collaborate with other people, though these seemed to be looser, more ad-hoc affairs. He’d work with other booksellers for the occasional work, often to hide his own involvement. He also had writers he worked with. He often fell in and out with them, but there were those he worked with for years and years.

He became infamous for quick cash-grab books. He was very good at digging up old texts, giving them new title pages and tying them in with some old scandal or newsworthy topic. He had certain ‘go-to’ texts that he’d rename, retitle, repackage or bundle up with other works multiple times over decades. His real skill was marketing, and he was a master in shining up something a little old or past its sell-by-date. If he had something by a reputable name, a casual work passed between friends that ended up with him, or a letter he’d been passed, he could reuse it in a hundred ways.

His instant biographies became famous. He’d throw out a hastily written account of a life, bundle it with any other material he had found or had lying around (when it often only has the faintest relation to the subject) and finish it off with the person’s will, which could be had on public record. As the authors note, “Curll could do more with an et-cetera than anybody”. He’d advertise for the public to send things to him about the forthcoming subject, an almost user-generated content model.

The name that sold best was Alexander Pope’s. Pope was incensed that this tradesman would publish things under his name, especially when Curll got hold of some indiscreet satires meant to be passed about in private. Curll’s response was to point out that if writers didn’t want their satires printed by him, they shouldn’t write them. The war between them benefitted them both, with Pope even managing to manipulate Curll into giving him an excuse to publish his own very polished versions of his letters. Curll, on the other hand would slap Pope’s name on all sorts.. one collection included a poem by Pope, a few essays and the love letters of Henry VIII - it wasn’t the content he sold, it was the cover page.

As well as this, Curll had a pseudo-pornographic range, with some naughty translated stories and some works described as medical textbooks. One work on masturbation included the story of Peter Anthony Motheux, a scholar who INXS-d himself. Yet he had a solid line of religious books, essays, sermons and devotionals.

Baines and Rogers also pursue a line of antiquarian books, which do seem to have been an interest of Curll’s. As he was selling all the other stuff, he never quite gave up on publishing lavish accounts of cathedrals and their plaques.

This is a book laden with detail. There are hundreds of Curll publications named, traced and described. How Curll repackaged his works is minutely detailed, as are all the other works he had a hand in. It does make this a dense book. An interesting one, because it shows exactly how Curll, operated which makes it easy to see exactly why a certain kind of writer hated him but also to see what a modern attitude he had to material. A modern Curll would be flogging AI generated cookbooks through Amazon Marketplace - not a noble work, but one which understands what the market wants and the easiest way to give it to them. The Curll in this is not someone who is standing up for the guileless writer, he’s a chancer.

The book ends by sketching out his strange impact on culture. Many of the practices he developed died out as bookselling became more respectable and regulated (and are whizzing their way back into the online wild west). His mythic figure is such that any image of a Grub Street writer has a Curll somewhere in the background (literally in the case of Hogarth’s ‘The Distressed Poet) and this book does a good job in creating his as a realistic person. 

Near the end, the book quotes a big chunk of The Life of John Buncle, where Curll appears as an ugly but skilful businessman. Of course the book ends with his Will, it’s what Curll would have done.

Playing With History: 2 (The Plot)

 In writing something intended to be a respectful piece of historical fiction, there are some really strange limits and freedoms. Last week I talked about how the tussle between history and narrative worked in producing characters, this week I want to talk a little about the plot.

According to Natty doesn’t follow any strict ‘heroes journey’ or anything like that. None of my books have really, it seems a very restrictive way of understanding a story. Partly, the book is modelled on Beryl Bainbridge’s According to Queeney, in its use of year-defined chapters adding events and layers to the central characters through a series of mostly self-contained scenes and vignettes, but my recent re-re-read has also shown me how I’m a different writer from her and do want a little more narrative force. I’m most inspired by Margaret Atwood’s ‘Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, where the novel is a handy receptacle for useful, interesting and nourishing things and, as they roll about with each other, they rub up and recontextualise each other.

This means I have to make a criteria of what things will be useful, interesting and nourishing for the book I am trying to write. The central conflict in the book is between the inner self and the outer world - it’s a theme I find myself constantly going back to, most of the books I have written have an underlying warning about getting lost in the internal realm and losing connection with others. In this book Nat has his desires, for connection with those around him and connection to the physically beautiful. His desires are impeded and thwarted by his relationship with his brother Samuel, his relationship with his family, with his town and with wider society in general. His wish to be connected pulls him to succumb and acquiesce to their wishes but his desire for the beautiful encourages him to pull away. 

In the very first chapter of the book, the four-year-old Nat is put into a very beautiful frock. He admires it and loves it but is worried, this is Samuel’s London frock, it has particular significance to him and Nat knows Samuel will not appreciate him wearing it. He goes downstairs, tries to get the attention of his father who is busy (as he often is), goes to the kitchen and tries to get attention from his mother, who half-listens as she fusses. He’s eating his breakfast (of oats) as Samuel appears at the top of the stairs and goes down into the kitchen. 

As expected, Samuel is furious about Nat wearing his frock. It doesn’t matter that he’s now of an age when he’s not expected to wear one and that it’s functionally useless to him, the frock is the special outfit bought for him when he went to London to meet Queen Anne and be touched for scrofula. It doesn’t matter that his memories are fuzzy, he feels that Nat is appropriating his own disabilities and memories, he demands Nat change. Here is the first pull between Nat’s desire to have a good relationship with his brother and his desire for beauty. It’s only a small thing, but Nat is a small boy, and those conflicts will grow bigger as he does. Nat gives in and goes up to change, his desire for connection wins this time.

This simple, domestic chapter uses all sorts of historical influences. One of the first is the geography of the house. The boys are located in separate rooms up top, their father in the bookshop on the ground floor and their mother in the kitchen in the basement. Of course, they will penetrate each other’s spaces, especially as they grow older, but the geography of the house help differentiate their characters and spheres of influence. 

The London Frock, an important part of this first chapter, was an item brought back from London a few years before. As Sarah says to Nat, it was not a trip that she and Samuel made, but one all three of them did. Sarah was pregnant with Nat at the time and did not tell Michael in case he forbid the journey due to it. So, Nat has the notion that he was part of this expedition, even if Sam sees him as an intruder who came later.

Sam pursues his argument about the frock in a pseudo-legal way. He’s only a young boy, but precocious, and he uses slips of latin to bolster his argument. The older Samuel Johnson was certainly argumentative, he ghostwrote an entire series of law lectures and was always interested in the law. All parts of the older Sam showing through in his chapter.

As well as this, there’s the fact that they eat oat porridge for breakfast, something they did, which puts Johnson’s later definition of oats into a different perspective. Sam himself has coffee with his breakfast, which no one else has, this suggests a favouritism towards him but is also one of the things he remembers being most affectionate to his mother for.

So, the history sparks with the characters to create a scene which probably never happened but could have. It encapsulates Nat’s twin desires and the tension between them. It sets up the characters and their relationships with each other. I said at the beginning that I was going to talk plot, but find myself talking character, because in this sort of book plot is character. I hope for all its smallness, it’s not a dull start. If it is, the next chapter is more dramatic. The reason Nat’s been put into the special frock in the first place is because it’s Easter day and the Easter service of 1716 was interrupted by some masonry falling down, causing chaos.