Clancy Tucker's Blog: HISTORIAN

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10 March 2017 - MARCUS CLARKE

MARCUS CLARKE

G'day folks,

Welcome to some very interesting details about a man well known in this part of the world. Marcus Andrew Hislop Clarke FRSA was an English-born Australian novelist and poet, best known for his novel For the Term of His Natural Life.

Marcus Andrew Hislop Clarke (1846-1881), journalist and novelist, was born on 24 April 1846 at 11 Leonard Place, Kensington, London, the only child of William Hislop Clarke, a Chancery lawyer, and his wife Amelia Elizabeth, née Matthews. His grandfather, Dr Andrew Clarke, a retired military medical officer, made a fortune in the West Indies and settled in Ireland. Several of his family distinguished themselves in the army, the colonial service or the law. His father had a flourishing practice in London and Marcus regarded his future as assured. In circumstances never made quite clear the whole structure collapsed. The father was removed to Northumberland House in 1862 after a physical and mental, as well as financial, breakdown and died there about a year later.

The boy was thus forced to give up the life of dilettante literary frittering which at 16 had been his expectation. He was not prepared for any career. He spoke loftily of prospects at the Foreign Office and of living for a year or two in France to perfect his French; but this was vague. Earlier an attempt was made to get him into the army but he was turned down for physical disabilities. All that is certain is that he was spoilt, conceited and aimless; clearly his view of life was much coloured by the novels which he avidly read. Probably under persuasion from relations who could see no solution for him in England, he chose to go to Australia.

In his impressionable years Clarke's home associations had been both brilliant and drab; his father, alternately a bon viveur and a recluse, entertained extravagantly, introduced the boy too early to a life of sophistication and for the rest neglected him. His mother's death when he was 4 exacerbated his loneliness. A sickly infant with an anchylosed left arm, his health improved although the arm remained permanently shrunken; he retained through life a slight stammer, probably a residue of childish insecurity, which, however, was not thought unattractive. What he lacked physically he made up in charm, fortified with wit, his one practical talent since in the end it made a journalist of him.

In 1858-62 Clarke attended the Cholmeley Grammar School, Highgate, where he fell foul of the headmaster for lack of application and as a senior was deprived of the poetry prize as a discipline. Afterwards, however, he recalled Dr Dyne's severity with a rueful respect. His contemporaries at Highgate were the two Hopkins brothers, Gerard Manley and Cyril, and E. H. Coleridge; the grave of S. T. Coleridge was in the school grounds, for the chapel then also served as parish church. Nesfield, the grammarian, was a master at Highgate.
After his father's collapse, his cousin, (Sir) Andrew Clarke, then in London, arranged to send the youth to Melbourne where an uncle, James Langton Clarke, a County Court judge at Ararat, could keep an eye on him. He arrived on 6 June 1863 with something like £800 scraped together from his father's mysteriously dissipated resources.

On Andrew Clarke's recommendation employment was found for him in a bank, but he proved totally unfitted for it. He later wrote some amusing impressions of the experience. In his first year in Melbourne he gathered many observations which afterwards served as literary material, the product of a lively mind and a perceptive eye.

Presently, however, like one of his own 'new-chums', he disappeared up-country to try out station life. His uncle had an interest in the twin stations of Swinton and Ledcourt with headquarters at Glenorchy where Clarke appears to have been reasonably happy and contemplated taking up land himself. His plans came to nothing after a disastrous expedition into western New South Wales in search of land, a journey in time of drought which cost him heavily in money and in which a companion lost his life. Back at Swinton he was persuaded by a visitor, Dr Robert Lewins, an amateur scientist and Comtean philosopher who prided himself on 'discovering' the young genius, to return to Melbourne and join the Argus. From this point his bent was clear, although Clarke was too mercurial in temperament to remain a staff writer.

Late in 1867 he began contributing a column of topicalities under the heading 'The Peripatetic Philosopher', purporting to be the observations of a kind of Melbourne Diogenes inhabiting a gas pipe on Cole's Wharf. He was at once established. The first notable victim of his witty impertinence was the Duke of Edinburgh, then on a state visit to the colonies. Clarke's association with the Argus lasted a number of years, but he eventually quarrelled, transferring his allegiance to the Melbourne Herald, the Daily Telegraph and finally the Age. He retained a schoolboy humour: for example, in parting from the Argus at a time when all the papers were fighting a battle of principle with the Victoria Racing Club, he published a high-spirited 'spoof' in the 'scurrilous' rival Herald, holding the Argus up to ridicule and pretending to report the running of the Melbourne Cup by direct observation from a camera obscura set up on the roof of the Herald office.

Clarke from the first lusted after editorial power, for which he never had the necessary steadiness. Whatever remained of his patrimony seems to have gone, along with other funds contributed by a group of literary friends, to buy the Australian Monthly Magazine, which he edited under the altered title of the Colonial Monthly in 1868-69. For it he wrote his novel 'Long Odds'; two instalments in July and August 1868 were contributed by his friend G. A. Walstab when Clarke was seriously incapacitated by a fall from a horse. When the novel ended, his energies flagged; the magazine passed to J. J. Shillinglaw and soon failed. Clarke put what he could recoup from it into the comic weekly Humbug, but it also quickly collapsed; Melbourne Punch ascribed its demise to morbus clerici.

At the beginning of 1870 he was certainly the editor of the Australian Journal, where his major novel, 'His Natural Life', began to appear in February; but when it concluded two years and a half later the patience of the proprietors had long been exhausted. He clearly did not last long as editor. Instead he sought and obtained a position at the Public Library of Victoria, first becoming secretary to the trustees and later sub-librarian. He appears to have carried out these duties with reasonable efficiency, but levity pursued him and in the end brought about his downfall. One notable example was shown in a controversy sparked off by his article in the opening number of the Victorian Review, November 1879, in which he argued that the advance of science had led to the abandonment of belief in the miraculous and that Christianity was moribund as an intellectual and moral force.

The article provoked Bishop Moorhouse into reply and Clarke was accused of atheism. His last word, published in the Melbourne Review, April 1880, cleverly exposed the weaknesses in the bishop's argument and scored a notable victory. These exchanges aroused enormous public interest in Melbourne. Later that year Clarke had a hand surreptitiously in the presentation of 'The Happy Land', a satirical operetta on a tinder-dry political subject: the row between the Berry government and the Legislative Council. This caused another furore and probably contributed to his later downfall. Apart from this work of mischief he was very active in the theatre both as an original author and as a translator. However, he wrote nothing for the stage that made any lasting impression. His liveliest dramatic writings were pantomimes, sometimes in collaboration with R. P. Whitworth.

By disposition excitable, he worked hard, for he did not much reduce his contributions to the papers when he entered the Public Library. It may be suspected that he drank heavily; very early in his career he complained of dyspepsia and a disordered liver. He lived extravagantly, somewhat after his father's style, and ran hopelessly into debt. Anxiety and overwork led to sickness. He was forced into insolvency in 1874 and again in 1881, so much to the disapproval of the library trustees that on the second occasion he barely escaped dismissal. The real position, however, was obscured since the disappointment he experienced at this time in being refused the post of chief librarian led to a sudden collapse of his powers and he died, officially of erysipelas, on 2 August 1881. There were rumours of suicide but they must be discounted.

In 1869 Clarke married the actress Marian, daughter of John Dunn, an Irish actor. Of their six children, at least two married in Victoria and survived him.
After Clarke's death his friend Hamilton Mackinnon assembled the Marcus Clarke Memorial Volume (Melbourne, 1884), a selection of his most popular journalism with a biographical introduction. The witty, often malicious, ephemeral humour which colours the greater part of these writings contrasts strangely with the dark, powerful imagination exhibited in His Natural Life, the revised, shortened and best known version of which appeared in book form in 1874 and 1875. The title, For the Term of His Natural Life, was applied by publishers to this work after Clarke's death.

Whether the light and trivial social journalist, the literary butterfly, or the serious author of this great, if defective, novel is the true Marcus Clarke, who is to say? The best defence of his journalism is that, viewed in its context, it still seems extraordinarily alive and vivid, providing a brilliant index to a very vigorous period of colonial literary life. His Natural Life, with all its shortcomings, in the end redeems him abundantly from the charge of mental trifling. A novel in the grand tradition, it places him with Charles Reade, Victor Hugo and Dostoevsky among the great nineteenth-century visionaries who found in the problems of crime and punishment a new insight, especially relevant in the convict-founded Australian colonies, into the foundations of human worth. This book has outlasted all his other writings, and is the one work of fiction produced in the whole first century of Australia's history to justify description as monumental.

Clancy's comment: I read his most famous book as a kid and was enthralled by his descriptions.

I'm ...

15 June 2014 - JARED CADE - AGATHA CHRISTIE

JARED CADE

- AGATHA CHRISTIE -

G'day folks,

Welcome to some background on Jared Cade and his work on Agatha Christie. So, who is Jared Cade and what is his connection with Agatha Christie?

Jared Cade is a biographer, historian and researcher. His biography Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days: The Revised and Expanded 2011 Edition has been a number one bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic and is currently optioned as a film by two Hollywood production companies. It was also the subject of a 2002 BBC television documentary. It holds the distinction of being the only biography to be officially endorsed by relatives from the famous crime writer's brother-in-law's side of the family.

If you’ve ever wondered what the reasons were behind Agatha Christie’s real-life disappearance for eleven days in December 1926, you can find out by reading Jared Cade’s biography of the famous crime writer, which was written with the co-operation of family, friends and people who were there and know what really happened.

Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days was first published in 1998 and made into a television documentary in 2002. This newly expanded 2011 edition offers the discerning Christie fan a wealth of new information about the Queen of Crime’s life and works.

In December 1926 Agatha Christie disappeared in bizarre circumstances from her home in southern England. The discovery of the crime writer's abandoned car led to the biggest manhunt in British history for a missing person. Eleven days later she was found in a northern spa town claiming to be the victim of amnesia.

Until the publication of this book in 1998 none of her biographers had come up with conclusive evidence as to what Agatha Christie did within the first twenty-four hours after she disappeared or whether her memory loss was genuine. Although the newspaper headlines made her famous, the private anguish that surrounded the episode ensured that she made no reference to it in her memoirs.

Jared Cade’s riveting biography – on which a BBC television documentary has been based – provides the answers to the mystery, including Agatha Christie’s long forgotten explanation of the notorious episode, along with startling accounts by her surviving relatives that reveal for the first time why she staged the disappearance with the help of a co-conspirator and how it all went terribly wrong. His sympathetic investigation reveals the incidents that shaped her character and how the fall-out from the episode affected the rest of her life.

Lavishly illustrated with 48 photographs, many of them from private albums, this fully expanded 2011 edition draws on a newly discovered cache of family papers, diaries and letters, to which Jared Cade was given exclusive access, and reveals even more fascinating secrets about her life and works. Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days is a must for all Christie devotees.

Jared Cade was born in 1962 and lives in London. A life-long fan of Agatha Christie, in 1993 he appeared on The 64,000 Dollar Question, correctly answering all questions on his specialist subject of Agatha Christie’s novels and winning what was then British television’s biggest cash prize of £6,400.

While researching his biography about Agatha Christie’s life he located several short stories she had written in the 1920s: ‘While the Light Lasts’, ‘Within a Wall’, ‘The House of Dreams’, ‘The Lonely God’ and ‘The Edge’. These stories had escaped detection by scholars for decades. In 1997 they were published for the first time in the collection While the Light Lasts. During this period Jared Cade traced copies of two missing and unpublished Agatha Christie plays: Chimneys and A Daughter’s a Daughter. Both plays have since been performed in Great Britain. He also acted as a research consultant in 1997 for the BBC documentary series Mysteries with Carol Vorderman which featured a segment on the writer’s disappearance.

Jared Cade was drawn to the subject of Agatha Christie’s disappearance because initially it appeared to be the one time in her cosy, genteel life when she faced considerable adversity. What lessons had she learned about herself? Eleven days after she went missing from her home in southern England she was identified in a luxurious hotel in a northern spa town reading newspaper accounts of the search for herself. Her husband, Colonel Archibald Christie, asked the police at the time to believe his wife was suffering from amnesia when she registered under the surname of his mistress, Nancy Neele.

It was a bizarre episode made more curious by the fact that Agatha Christie had not mentioned it in her autobiography. Just what exactly did she do in the first twenty-four hours after she disappeared and how did she reach the Harrogate Hydro after abandoning her car over two hundred miles away?

Jared Cade soon found that claims by all previous biographers and commentators that Agatha Christie never spoke of her disappearance during her lifetime were in error. He located her explanation of the episode in the obituary box on her life in the archives of the British library. In it was her extraordinary account of her eleven-day ordeal that had gone undisturbed for over seventy years.

Next Jared Cade obtained a driver and a vintage Morris Cowley car and restaged her journey from her home in Berkshire to Newlands Corner in Surrey, where her car was found abandoned, only to find that her journey could not possibly have occurred under the circumstances described by herself and latter-day theorists.

He diligently traced witnesses who were alive at the time of the disappearance, including family, police and civilians who had searched for her; he also spoke to her friends and other people who had come into contact with her, both professionally and personally, during her long and eventful life.

Jared Cade’s big break-through came when Air Commodore Dame Felicity Peake, founding director of the United Kingdom’s Women’s Royal Air Force, put him in touch with Judith and Graham Gardner, the daughter and son-in-law of Nan Watts. Nan’s brother Jimmy was married to Agatha Christie’s sister Madge, and following the couple’s wedding in 1902 Agatha and Nan became life-long friends. Judith was raised along-side Agatha’s daughter Rosalind and has known the crime writer’s family intimately all her life. Moreover, Judith’s uncle Humphrey Watts (Nan’s brother) was the father of Dame Felicity Peake.

There was no attempt at subterfuge when Jared Cade met Judith and Graham Gardner. They readily welcomed him into their home and gave him access to their memories, private family papers, and photograph albums, revealing the hitherto undisclosed secrets of Agatha Christie’s extraordinary life.

Agatha was devoted to Nan’s side of the family all her life; indeed, Nan’s ancestral home, Abney Hall, in Cheshire featured many times in Agatha’s murder mysteries, lightly disguised with a name change. The Secret of Chimneys (1925) was dedicated to Agatha’s and Nan’s nephew Jack Watts; Agatha’s sister Madge, who was married to Nan’s brother Jimmy, was the dedicatee of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926); The ABC Murders (1936), Hercule Poirot’s Christmas (1938) and After the Funeral (1953) were all dedicated to Nan’s brother Jimmy (Agatha’s brother-in-law); The Body in the Library (1942) was dedicated to Nan; and in her foreword to The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding (1960) Agatha paid tribute to Nan’s mother and Judith’s grandmother, Anne Watts, who had always made Christmas such a special day for her and the rest of the family.

According to Judith Gardner, ‘When Jared Cade came to see us he was so well briefed on all of our family history we were astonished. He had been to Abney Hall and knew so much detail of our family. It was then that I decided with my husband Graham that I would break my silence about the disappearance and put the matter into perspective once and for all so that the mystery would be cleared up for her fans.’

Before the publication of Jared Cade’s biography, Judith and Graham Gardner read and liked it so much that they offered to publicly endorse it. ‘He gained our trust completely,’ says Judith Gardner. ‘He was so professional we told him everything about Agatha’s life and the disappearance. There was never a time when we wondered if we should because our mutual respect for him was so strong.’ Other members of Judith’s family have also been wonderfully helpful in contributing to Jared Cade’s research and supplying family photographs for inclusion in his book.

Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days was first published in 1998 by Peter Owen Ltd and still holds the distinction of being the only biography to be officially endorsed by relatives from her brother-in-law’s side of the family. Jared Cade’s biography became the basis of a documentary for the BBC in 2002 featuring interviews with some of Agatha Christie’s surviving relatives. The revised edition was released in 2011.

Serena Films, in conjunction with Animus Films, have just renewed their option on Jared’s biography. They’ve worked with the like of Jeremy Irons of Brideshead Revisited fame, and who won the Oscar for Reversal of Fortune; Sharon Stone of Basic Instinct fame, and Sarah Jessica Parker of Sex in the City. All going well, the film on Jared’s biography should be released around 2015/6. Watch this space.