Sketches, Dispatches, Hull Tales and Ballads - University of Hull

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10 else (Book the First: Chapter 5). The Hull workhouse – that archetypal Dickensian symbol of social protest – had existed since 1698. Though Victorian Hull had its fair share of distinguished visitors, including Queen Victoria, who in 1854 stayed (like Dickens) at the Station Hotel, and was moved by the sight of hundreds of loyal Sunday School children assembling to greet her, it was, by all accounts, essentially an earnest workaday kind of place, sustained economically by the whaling and fishing industries, and spiritually by more than its fair share of churches and chapels – not unlike Coketown’s chapels built by members of eighteen different religious sects. Though cotton mills briefly existed in Hull 2 the Coketown of Hard Times conveys the sense of a more mechanical and deadening industrial landscape than Dickens would have found here. Even Coketown has its off-duty moments, however, in the form of Sleary’s Horse-Riding, which shares features with the Victorian version of Hull Fair: an assembly of market stalls, freak-shows, and circus acts as well as the new steam-driven roundabouts. Displays of horsemanship, such as those performed by Mr Sleary and his troupe, are known to have been staged in the Market Place in Hull, where visitors might also be treated twice-daily to shows of ‘Dancing, Singing, Tumbling, Learned Ponies, Feats on the Wire.’ 3 Dickens was always a great advocate of popular entertainment, epitomised in Mr Sleary’s famous lisping insistence that ‘“People must be amuthed, Thquire, thomehow,”’ and ‘“can’t be alwath a working, nor yet they can’t be alwayth a learning”’ (Book the First: Ch. 6). Hence the Gradgrind children’s desperation to escape from the ‘mineralogical cabinets’ of their great square lecturing-castle of a house, and peep inside the circus tent for a glimpse of ‘but a hoof of the graceful equestrian Tyrolean flower-act’ (Book the First: Ch. 3). When the novel ends with another secret mission to ship a criminal abroad (this time the hapless Tom Gradgrind who has robbed a bank), the circus people conceal him first in comic livery, and then disguise him afresh as a carter, so that he can escape without attracting notice. One of Dickens’s shortest, most succinctly-written novels, Hard
Times starkly contrasts the monotonous routines of the factory with the bizarre unreality of the circus: a wild zone on the edge of the town where for a brief spell the imagination can be indulged and the workplace forgotten. The greatest satisfactions, for many Dickensian characters, come from imaginative reading, such as the nursery rhymes and fairytales the little Gradgrinds are forbidden to read, or from the real-life experiences of going to fairs, circuses and Punch and Judy shows, which feature in so many of Dickens’s novels – but these are only intervals in a life of work, poverty and aspiration. Together, Hard Times and Great Expectations create landscapes of frustration for their leading characters. Monotony and limited opportunity in each place crush the life out of anyone who wants more from existence than the rhythms of routine, or an education that never recognizes the individual potential of every child. In crazy Miss Havisham, jilted at the altar and determined for evermore to have her revenge on men, or Stephen Blackpool, the dogged factory worker saddled with a drunken addict of a wife he can never divorce, or Louisa Gradgrind, married for convenience to the bumptious banker, Mr Bounderby, Dickens acknowledges the hopelessness of the mundane domestic tragedies which afflicted Victorians of all classes and in all parts of the country. Every life is important to Dickens, just as each piece of maritime flotsam catches his eye. The people on the bridge matter, as do those rowing down the river to another life, and those staying at home to spin cotton, or carve something wondrous out of whalebone brought home from the distant seas. 1 James Sibree, Fiy Years’ Recollections of Hull, or Half-a-Century of Public Life and Ministry (Hull: A Brown & Sons, 1884), p. 8. 2 David and Susan Neave, Hull (Pevsner Architectural Guides) (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010) , p. 15. 3 See http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/v/victorian-circus/ 11
Page 6 and 7: A Humber Mouth Special Commission 2
Page 8 and 9: 2 Painting: Nude with Top Hat 1 by
Page 10 and 11: 4 Maurice Rutherford Apology for Ab
Page 12 and 13: 6 Reaching Barton after an exhausti
Page 14 and 15: 8 Oliver Twist. Despite its grandeu
Page 18: 12 Mary Aherne Imp ‘I saw the ang
Page 21 and 22: the shuddering, the rasping then th
Page 23 and 24: shops formed a horseshoe shape unde
Page 25 and 26: Newcastle, York, Edinburgh and, no
Page 27 and 28: No, not so. He had given recitation
Page 29 and 30: forbidden regions where I still del
Page 31 and 32: highly indignant. ‘There’s been
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Page 35 and 36: Image: Malcolm Watson 29
Page 37 and 38: ‘What if the peregrine’s nest o
Page 39 and 40: Your nose is trimmed, your breasts
Page 41 and 42: while Nazi Nature’s Final Solutio
Page 44 and 45: 38 David Wheatley Cat Head Theatre
Page 46: 40 David Wheatley Wanna Come Back t
Page 49: Cliff Forshaw Ingerland An Angelic
Page 52: Outside in Sticksville, garyboys bu
Page 55 and 56: Gerald from his hotel to the Univer
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and chucked it onto the passenger s
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Trucanini, Truganner, with Robinson
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The Ballad of Trucanini’s Husband
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So, to stop the pommie Surgeons Get
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Our shadows are shortening behind u
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David Wheatley Northern Divers The
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74 Carol Rumens Beware this Boy (A
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76 accounts, merchantmen, and ledge
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78 on the green, and drew letters o
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80 nine years, two months, and a da
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82 ‘Will you shut up at last,’
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84 Kath McKay After the Silk Stocki
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86 inside him he did not want to th
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if Dickens lasted out the year. All
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90 When I show him his eyes go all
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92 Scaffolding Dirty windows. Two m
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94 Malcolm Watson A Christmas Carol
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96 David Wheatley Visitors’ Centr
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98 Jane Thomas Charles Dickens and
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100 The Hull and Yorkshire Times re
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102 The readings were timed to begi
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104 Mary Aherne Hope on the Horizon
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106 in Poland in my father’s book
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108 loved to use but the mangled wo
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110 Mary Aherne birds she is on the
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112 Maurice Rutherford Second Thoug
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114 Contributors Mary Aherne is com
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116 Acknowledgements All photograph
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