On 23 February I posted that my essay on the poet Oliver Style had been accepted for publication by the journal The Seventeenth Century. It has now been published online (open access) at
Sir Oliver Style, his Verse, and the Smyrna Earthquake of 1688
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On 10 November 1928, while living in Yamagata, Japan, Ernest Pickering and his family took the opportunity to join in the celebrations for Emperor Hirohito’s official enthronement, which were taking place that day in Kyoto.
This newspaper piece, published in the Manchester Guardian on 10 December 1928, describes three different experiences of the occasion: the writer’s attendance at the wholly formal ceremony at the high school where he taught; his wife Eleanor’s presence at the huge gathering in the city centre, where the formal shout of ‘Banzai!’ was followed by a flag-waving procession through the streets; and their son Denis’s visit to a Japanese friend’s house, where the latter’s mother knelt and prayed in front of a photograph of the emperor.
Oliver Style (c. 1656-1703), son of Sir Thomas Style Bt., had been trading in Smyrna, Turkey (present-day Izmir), when in 1688 the city was largely devastated by an earthquake and subsequent fire. Style survived, though injured, but thousands of people perished, including some of his close friends.
On his return to the family home in Wateringbury, Kent, he wrote a detailed personal poem about the catastrophe. To structure it, he used the genre known as ‘Advice to a painter poems’, in which the poet, at various times in the narrative, gives instructions to an imagined painter as to how a scene should be depicted. For example, in this case:
But painter, now to finish our disgrace,
Let greedy flames march o’re the town apace,
And in proud triumph thro’ the ruines goe
To make this place a perfect scene of woe.
But Style’s poem about the earthquake is only one of more than twenty of his poems that are preserved in manuscript form in the Special Collections department of Leeds University Library. That is to say, they were never printed in his lifetime, and have remained largely unknown. He can be classified, therefore, as an amateur poet, though his confident use of pentameter couplets and the range of his allusions show that he must have read widely.
Perhaps as a consequence of his life-changing experience in Smyrna, including an apparently resulting physical deformity, Style’s verse is often preoccupied with suffering and death, and he writes bitterly – with detailed examples – about the folly and cruelty of mankind. Another factor in what appears to have been in the end an unhappy life was the death of all three of his older brothers, followed three months before his own death by that of his father. His poems show that he never wanted to inherit the latter’s baronetcy, but in the end, for a very short period, he had no choice.
I’m pleased to say that my detailed essay entitled ‘Sir Oliver Style, his Verse, and the Smyrna Earthquake of 1688’ will be published this year in the academic journal The Seventeenth Century. It includes a full edition of Style’s earthquake poem.
One of Ernest Pickering’s most evocative newspaper articles was ‘Sunrise and an Eruption: An Adventure in Japan’, which was published in the Manchester Guardian on 19 September 1930 as ‘From a correspondent’. The piece recounts how the author and his son Denis, on holiday in the resort of Karuizawa, set out to climb the active, but generally dormant, volcano Mount Asama, in order to witness the sunrise. All went well until they were briefly caught in an unexpected eruption as they were about to make the final ascent. I have added a few footnotes to explain quotations.
My grandfather Ernest Pickering (1881-1957) was variously Unitarian minister, professor of English, Liberal MP, expert on Japan, would-be peacemaker, and amateur journalist – for during his first years in Japan he was active in sending articles about life in that country to newspapers and journals in the UK and elsewhere. He also wrote two books:
- A Brief Survey of English Literature (1932), based on lectures given in Japan, which was briefly but sympathetically reviewed in the TLS of 18.3.1932 (the chapters on the Victorian age and the twentieth century ‘might well be read by all’);
- Japan’s Place in the Modern World (1936), based on a fact-finding visit for some months across 1934-35 during his time as an MP. The book was reprinted in its entirety in Japanese Propaganda: Selected Readings, series 1, vol. 8 (2004); ‘propaganda’ because the book is sympathetic to Japan.
After university in Oxford, followed by seventeen years as a Unitarian minister, Ernest Pickering made a sudden change of direction: he moved to northern Japan to teach English in a pre-university high school in Yamagata (Yamagata Koto Gakko). With his wife Eleanor and his son Denis he lived there for four years, 1927-31. He returned to Japan in 1936 after a single spell in Parliament (1931-35), this time as Professor of English at Tokyo Imperial University. He was imprisoned after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, and was subsequently held in Urawa civilian internment camp. He returned to England in 1946 and eventually died in Paris in 1957.
Articles on life in Japan
Ernest Pickering, in the period 1927-31, wrote numerous articles on aspects of life in Japan for the English-language press, these based on his own experiences as one of very few foreigners living in northern Japan. Copyright having now expired, I plan to make a number of these available online, as will be detailed in separate blog posts.
Following my earlier post about Henry Hall of Hereford (c. 1656-1707), I’m pleased to say that my book about his prolific and largely oppositional verse-writing is due for publication soon, probably in August. Please see the publisher’s recent announcement:
Oliver Pickering, The Poems and Songs of Henry Hall of Hereford: A Jacobite Poet of the 1690s, Legenda, general series (Cambridge: MHRA, 2022). 242 pp.
Sadly, it being a specialist academic publication, the retail price is high, but I hope some recommendations for library purchase may result from this publicity.
As the blurb says, Henry Hall of Hereford was ‘a compulsive writer of lively and irreverent verse, a notably convivial local personality, and a fiercely Jacobite opponent of William III and Mary II’. My book about him has three main components:
An account of his life, his writings, and the circulation of his work in manuscript and print;
A selected edition of twenty-five of his c. 150 poems and songs;
Appendices providing full bibliographical details of his poems, their manuscripts, and their early printed editions.
The first of these – the discursive part of the book – has chapters as follows:
1. Hall’s Life and Milieu; 2. The Nature of Hall’s Verse-Making; 3. Posthumous Manuscript Collections of Hall’s Verse; 4. Poems and Songs with Wider Circulation in Literary Manuscripts; 5. Hall and Print Publication; 6. Songs with Music; 7. Political Satires, 1689-1701; 8. Political Satires, 1702-05; 9. Hall’s Contemporary Poetic Reputation.
The edited poems showcase in particular the conversational and often outspoken verse epistles he sent to like-minded friends, not least his close correspondent Dr Broughton of Kington; and his political satires, written during an era of wars with France and very often scathingly critical of the ruling elite and their conduct of affairs. The selection ends with three short love poems, to illustrate Hall’s lighter side.
Meanwhile here is a short Henry Hall drinking song, wishing for the return of the exiled James II:
To our monarch’s returne we our glasses advance,
Whilst one is in Flanders and t’other in France.
In this Catholick circle I’m sure there are none
But wishes to kings and to each man his owne.
Here here’s to that king, let him come, let him come,
Send one into England and both are at home.
(from Leeds University Library, Brotherton Collection, MS Lt q 5)
More than four years since I last blogged about Henry Hall of Hereford (reporting that I had resumed work on this long-delayed project) it’s very pleasing to be able to say that this first study of Hall’s poetic output has been accepted for publication, under the above title. It will appear in the Modern Humanities Research Association’s book series, Legenda, and is expected to appear in 2022.
Henry Hall (c. 1656-1707), Organist of Hereford Cathedral and a well-known composer of church music, was also a compulsive writer of lively and irreverent verse, a notably convivial local personality, and a fiercely Jacobite opponent of William III and Mary II. After placing Hall in context, including characterizing him as essentially a social poet, the body of the book comprises a detailed investigation of the manuscript and printed circulation of the c. 150 mainly unpublished poems and songs attributable to him. Political satires feature prominently, but his output also included confidential epistles to like-minded male friends, local satires, drinking songs, love poems, riddles, and tributes to certain national figures, among them John Dryden and Henry Purcell. There then follow edited texts of twenty-five of Hall’s poems, chosen to demonstrate the variety and attractiveness of his verse.
I am indebted to the Governing Body of Christ Church, Oxford, and to the National Library of Wales for permission to reproduce manuscripts in Henry Hall’s own hand, and to the numerous friends and colleagues (literary scholars, musicologists, librarians, and archivists) who have gladly provided advice and assistance over many years.
Next Saturday, 2 October, I’m looking forward with pleasure to delivering the 2021 presidential address to the Friends Historical Society, with the title as above.
Surprised by the invitation, as my contributions to Quaker history are scarcely numerous, I decided the subject I could best talk about was possible links between early Yorkshire Quakers and Grindletonianism – an antinomian (anti-legal) and perfectionist set of beliefs inspired by the minister Roger Brereley (or Brearley), who in the early seventeenth century was curate of Grindleton, a village near Pendle Hill not far from the Lancashire / Yorkshire border.
As I said in a blog post in 2018, Josiah Collier, Grindletonian | oliver pickering (wordpress.com), the doctrines characterizing Grindletonianism have mainly come down to us through the writings of Brereley’s disciple Josiah Collier (1595-1677), who lived in Yeadon, north-west of Leeds. My address to the Friends Historical Society illustrates Grindletonian beliefs through summaries and quotations from Collier’s writings, particularly his verse, and then identifies similar doctrines in published pamphlets from the early 1650s by three Yorkshire Quakers, James Nayler, William Dewsbury, and Richard Farnworth. While I do not claim the direct influence of Josiah Collier, who appears not to have been ordained, I draw attention to an apparent network of West Riding clergy of a Grindletonian persuasion, who may have preached along similar lines.
I show finally that Josiah Collier, by the 1650s, appears to have been the leader of an Independent congregation, combining Grindletonian spirituality with adherence to external sacraments, especially the communion of bread and wine – marking a clear difference from Quakerism, which in turn changed, moving away from preaching antinomian and perfectionist doctrines in favour of a more temperate position centring on the inner light.
The address will be published in the 2021 volume of the Journal of the Friends Historical Society.
Seventeen years ago, in 2004, the University of Leeds celebrated the centenary of its royal charter, but the celebrations did not, as had been planned, include the publication of a volume reviewing those hundred years. A collection of essays was prepared, but the book never appeared. My own commissioned contribution was a survey of developments in the university library from 1975 onwards, this starting date partly determined by the scope of Studies in the History of a University, 1874-1974 (Leeds, 1975), where the centenary in question had been that of the Yorkshire College of Science, from which the university developed.
I am publishing the essay now, online, as a small contribution to the academic library history of the final quarter of the twentieth century. As the occasion demanded, it is descriptive and celebratory rather than reflective or critical (many organizational decisions could no doubt have been different), but it retains value, I believe, as a historical record. For much of the period in question I worked as a subject librarian. At the time of writing I was Deputy Head of the Special Collections department.
The Quaker Family History Society will be holding an online event on Tuesday 20 April 2021 on the subject of Quakers and Politics.
There will be two speakers:
- Kathryn Rix, ‘Petitioners, pioneering women, and parliamentarians: Quakers and the House of Commons in the nineteenth century’
- Mark Frankel, ‘T. Edmund Harvey (1875-1955), politician of conscience’
The meeting will start at 7 pm BST, and each talk is expected to last between 30 and 40 minutes, with time for questions. If you would like to join the online meeting, please email secretary@qfhs.co.uk .
oliver pickering 