Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Victorian Harringay Novelist to be remembered with blue plaque
This article from the Independent has a wee mention at the end that renowned Victorian authour Charlotte Riddell is to be remembered with a blue plaque. Though not born in Harringay, Riddell lived in St. John’s Lodge on St Ann's Road (then called Hangar Lane) for about ten years until 1873.
I added a very short entry to Wikipedia about her a couple of years or so ago. I also added a small entry about Shadbolt, the main subject of the Independent article (clearly had too much time on my hands in 2007!). You can see a great Shadbolt picture taken over Harringay in the 1860s here.
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by StephenBln on
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The burning question for me is
- was she a Riddell ... just like jimmy or was she like the english born CNN presenter Don Rid-dell :o)
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Permalink Reply by Dick Harris on
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I was prompted by the information given here and in connection with the unveiling of a blue plaque to read one of the works by the Victorian writer Charlotte Riddell (aka Mrs J H Riddell, and as F G Trafford). After some delay, I obtained a paper-back edition of “George Geith of Fen Court” reissued in the Classic Reprint Series of Forgotten Books. The original from which the reprint was taken was printed in Boston, Massachusetts 1865 under her Trafford pseudonym, when the author would have been 33 and about the time that she and her husband moved to what is now St Ann’s Road.
The 555 page book does contain a few references to Crouch End and Hornsey as being pleasant country areas surrounded by fields and woods beyond the built up areas of North London ie before the late 19th century building boom that covered Harringay with housing. There are many more references however to the actual streets and parishes of the City of London – Fen Court, for instance, still actually exists just off Fenchurch Street.
This novel is a melodramatic tragedy that derives its tension mainly from a terrible secret that is not disclosed until near the end of the book. The social backdrop is the contempt of the landed/leisured classes for those who had to work for a living and the increasing stresses caused as successful members of the commercial class displaced those living on inherited wealth especially those incapable of managing their own affairs properly or given to wasteful spending. Some assumptions are here, familiar to readers of Trollope, about the church being a natural partner of landed families in supplying security to second sons of the gentry and much more about the plight of daughters who must marry for money or face penury. The then laws of inheritance and of marriage are often important to the story (if opaque to me - for example the law of entail) and the author displays her own knowledge of city business matters, especially accountancy, banking, investment and bankruptcy and the scope that these growing means of making money provide for unscrupulous as well as honest people.
Although the story is ultimately a tragedy, the eponymous figure is an intelligent man of good family and education and of high moral standing who just about survives his transition from a life of relative privilege to a life of work. There is, of course, an equally attractive heroine too but the authoress creates a lot of unpleasant female characters in all layers of society and is especially critical of those aspiring to distinguish themselves socially among their betters.
Although there is much here to make a good and often amusing story, the writing can only be described as dreadful. She rarely uses a simple sentence when five over-blown repetitions can be provided. This could be partly the result of writing to deadlines. The fact that there are fifty chapters of precisely similar length suggest that the work was first prepared for publication in a periodical. I am glad to have finished the book but it has not told me much about 19th century society that hasn’t been told better by Dickens, Austen and Trollope.
We don’t have much around here in the way of local ancient landed families to sympathise with (or to condemn). I suppose the relevance of the book to Harringay is that the builder of Harringay House was one of the City nouveau riche and Charlotte herself moved here as the independently successful wife of a successful professional engineer. This may be sufficient to justify her blue plaque but, as literature, I would say that this book fully justifies its status as “forgotten”.
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