Happy Christmas! For #TimeTravelAdvent #Day25 it's Zaffar Kunial's wonderful poem 'The Groundsman', from England's Green. It takes us to the overgrown edge of a cricket pitch in the lush greenery of high summer - a surprising and beautiful place to spend a few moments amid the busyness of today. 1/2
#TimeTravelAdvent #Day24. Grace Nichols' poem 'Hurricane Hits England' takes us inside the 1987 Great Storm - and stories of migration, diversity and cultural enrichment from HMS Empire #Windrush to the present day. Here, Grace Nichols reads her poem: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tuqn... 1/3
Match the 5 objects to book chapters... If you've joined us for #TimeTravelAdvent or have been reading #AHistoryOfEnglandIn25Poems, have a go at this mini quiz! Happy Christmas, everyone.
An England's Glory matchbox
#TimeTravelAdvent #Day23. So, what's your preferred brand? Do you pick 'England's Glory' ('a man's match'), or are you a southern softie, favouring a Bryant & May 'safety match'? Fleur Adcock's poem takes us inside Thatcher's Britain, the Miners' Strike, & England's perennial North-South divide 1/2
#TimeTravelAdvent #Day22. A perspective on WW2 and the Holocaust: Geoffrey Hill's 'September Song'. It's painful to return to these words in December 2025, so soon after the atrocity at the Hanukkah celebrations in Sydney. Here's Geoffrey Hill reading his poem:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=70sH...
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John Hannah reads the poem in Four Weddings and a Funeral
#TimeTravelAdvent #Day21: a story from the archive! Today, we've discovered the surprising back story to Auden's 'Stop All The Clocks', known and loved from Four Weddings and a Funeral. The original poem is a biting satire against the cult of the Great Man and rising totalitarianism... 1/5
2/2 Today, Edward Thomas has helped us explore the #history of the Great War. The poem captures a moment of peace & stillness at a railway station in June 1914. Written January 1915. Published April 1917, just after Second Lieutenant Edward Thomas was killed at the Battle of Arras. #TimeTravelAdvent
Book chapter illustration: the Adlestrop station sign. By Edward Bettison
#TimeTravelAdvent #Day20. I hope Edward Thomas brings you a moment of stillness today, amid the hectic activity of the season. Alongside his words: his cherished birdsong (a blackbird, from the BBC Sound Effects Archive).
sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/search?q=NHU...
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Me holding a small stone with tiny fossils at Kimmeridge
Kimmeridge Bay
A personal association for #TimeTravelAdvent #Day19. I live in #Dorset, and love it when I find #fossils on the beach at #Kimmeridge or #LymeRegis. Tennyson's 'In Memoriam' is wrestling with this new testimony 'from scarped cliff and quarried stone', and what it means for personal faith. 1/3
#Day18 of our #TimeTravelAdvent and we're on Chapter 18 of #AHistoryOfEnglandIn25Poems: 'Rules and Regulations', written by Lewis Carroll when he was still Charles Dodgson - just 13 years old (1845). What did this poem and its pictures look like in his original home-made 'magazine'? Take a look...
More of the early coverage of the violent rainstorm which caused the Huskar Pit Disaster: damage to the great house at Wentworth, and a man struck by lightning at Elsecar.
Names and ages of the children killed. John Simpson's age is shown as '9 and a half' - just as a child or a doting parent might give it
2/2 More of the early press coverage of the Huskar Pit Disaster. Side by side: damage to the grand house at Wentworth, and the names of the 26 children who died in the coal mine - the youngest aged just 7. The age given as '9 and a half' just simply breaks my heart. #TimeTravelAdvent
Early press coverage of the Huskar Pit Disaster, in which 26 children were drowned in a drift tunnel of a coal mine.
#TimeTravelAdvent #Day17. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem 'The Cry of the Children' was written in response to the Huskar Pit Disaster (1838) and the Royal Commission on the Employment of Children & Very Young People which followed. Reading these historical sources & testimonies is harrowing. 1/2
Front page of the London Evening Post, October 10-12 1775
Astonishingly, Barbauld wasn't the first writer to imagine this ravaged future London as a cautionary tale. In this front-page 'news' from 1775, American tourists visit a now-ruined London in... 1944... #TimeTravelAdvent #Day16 #ruins #future
#TimeTravelAdvent #Day16 with #AHistoryOfEnglandIn25Poems: Anna Laetitia Barbauld's fearless reformist poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, 1812. The reviews were savage: she was cancelled. This tattered first edition in Senate House Library reminds us of the precarity of this vilified text's survival.
Chapter illustration by Edward Bettison. A hand breaking chains.
2/2 Wheatley was trafficked from West Africa to America as a child. In her poem, she presents powerful rational and religious arguments for freedom. But ultimately her case rests on her own lived experience and emotion: the authority of 'feeling hearts'. #TimeTravelAdvent #AHistoryOfEnglandIn25Poems
Phillis Wheatley at her writing desk. Picture via Wikipedia. This image is available from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID cph.3a40394.
#TimeTravelAdvent #Day15. An astonishing poem written by an enslaved Black African woman, Phillis Wheatley, addressing a senior British politician and advocating for freedom. Here's the frontispiece illustration I discuss in the chapter, sometimes attributed to Scipio Moorhead. 1/2
3/3 It's a powerful reminder that many of our cherished 'green and pleasant' spaces are artifical and invented - however much we treasure them today. Mary sees the landscaping of Edgcote / Crumble-Hall as loss, destruction, 'ravaging'... #TimeTravelAdvent #AHistoryOfEnglandIn25Poems
A still from the 1995 BBC Pride & Prejudice, showing Netherfield Park (Edgcote House)
#TimeTravelAdvent #Day14. Today we're below stairs in an 18th-century country house, with the poem 'Crumble-Hall' by the housemaid Mary Leapor. Did you know that Edgcote House in Northamptonshire - real-world inspiration, where Mary worked - was used as Netherfield in the BBC Pride & Prejudice? 1/3
Stanzas 300 - 305, from 'The wealthy Tagus...'
2/2 The first edition of #Dryden's Annus Mirabilis is open here on the passage we explore in #AHistoryOfEnglandIn25Poems - right at the very end. A strangely otherworldly imagining of London as it rises from the ashes... #TimeTravelAdvent #readalong with #AHistoryOfEnglandIn25Poems
Title page of the book
Title page of the book
Book illustration by Edward Bettison
#TimeTravelAdvent #Day13. The Great Fire of #London. A pivotal moment in the #history of the city we know today: powerful, wealthy, voracious. John Dryden's astonishing poem transforms a year of horrors - war, plague, fire, into 'wonders'. I consulted these first editions in Senate House Library 1/2
#TimeTravelAdvent #Day12. I think you all know that 'Bum-fodder' is one of my favourites! This chapter takes us onto the streets of London in early 1660 - and a fabulously scatological broadside ballad mocking the arse-end of the Republic's failed 'Rump Parliament'. #AHistoryOfEnglandIn25Poems 1/2
2/2 As your extra #TimeTravelAdvent content today, I wanted to share this brilliant compilation I found online: 3 different performances of the speech, from 1960 to 2012. A slippery text, which has been used historically as praise, condemnation and rebellion...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQQy...
On #TimeTravelAdvent #Day11, we've reached one of the most iconic texts of England & English identity - 'this sceptred isle' from Richard II by #Shakespeare. The book chapter finds its way into Shakespeare via a hidden detail in the Wilton Diptych - here I am visiting it earlier this year. 1/2
Collage of pictures: a contemporary woodcut showing Askew's execution; Anne Askew; the chapter illustration by Edward Bettison
#TimeTravelAdvent #Day10. Fearless, defiant, looking ahead to burning at the stake with... joy and delight? Anne Askew is an inspiration, speaking truth to power and holding onto her faith with integrity. But I found it hard to get close to her, to empathise with that incredible strength & joy. 1/2
Book illustration by Edward Bettison
#TimeTravelAdvent #Day9. So, is the poem the smoking gun? Did Thomas Wyatt have an affair with Anne Boleyn? As I write in the chapter, that might not even be the most interesting question to ask. Is sex the dangerous truth of this poem, or just another of its cloaks and guises? 1/2
#TimeTravelAdvent #Day8 and we're at the Battle of Agincourt, 1415. Today, I wanted to share this link to a version of the Agincourt Carol by William Walton, composed as part of the score for Olivier's film version of Shakespeare's Henry V. #AHistoryOfEnglandIn25Poems www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvFY...
The Dreamer lies down on the flowery grass, under trees, and falls asleep BL_Cotton_MS_Nero_A_x_ 41 recto
The Dreamer sees the Pearl Maiden, dressed in a white gown and wearing a crown, on the other side of the river BL_Cotton_MS_Nero_A_x_ 42 recto
The Dreamer gazes at the Pearl-Maiden on the other side of the river, in the beautiful city (the heavenly Jerusalem). BL_Cotton_MS_Nero_A_x_
#TimeTravelAdvent #Day7, and we're inside the #BlackDeath, with the poem Pearl. I wanted to share these illustrations from the medieval manuscript (British Library): the Dreamer lying down to sleep, and seeing the Pearl-Maiden across the river (look at those fish!). How did this poem make you feel?
What do women want? In our #TimeTravelAdvent today we're exploring women's lives in #medieval England - and meeting Alison, Chaucer's Wife of Bath. Listen to some Middle English read aloud - and see if you can answer the knight's question... #Day6
#Day5 of our #TimeTravelAdvent with #AHistoryOfEnglandIn25Poems, and I know what you really want is... #Bagpuss! Yes, the #medieval song 'Sumer Is Icumen In' was the inspiration for the song of those adorable mice! Watch a clip here: www.facebook.com/watch/?v=458...
#TimeTravelAdvent #Day4, and we're inside the 12th-century civil war or 'Anarchy'. I wanted to share another perspective on Henry of Huntingdon's vision of the earth ripped open and hell broken loose. In civil war, even the ground beneath your feet is torn apart... #AHistoryOfEnglandIn25Poems 1/3
