Westminster Abbey Wreath-laying- June 18th 1988

In June 1856 George and Marian Lewes (for it would not yet be right to call her \u27George Eliot\u27) were staying in North Devon. While George was collecting specimens on the beach, Marian was preoccupied with work for the Westminster Review, her \u27Belles Letters\u27 column and her famous article on W. H. Riehl, \u27The Natural History of German Life\u27, which, she wrote, \u27I worked at considerably a contretemps, despairing of its ever being worth anything\u27, But by this day, the 18th June, she was enjoying a splendid sense of freedom and a desire to turn to a different world, as she explains in her journal; \u27When at last, by the 17th June both my articles were dispatched, I felt delightfully at liberty and determined to pay some attention to sea-weeds which I had never seen in such beauty as Ilfracombe.’ She describes, with a sense of excitement, and with typical attention to detail and to the processes of change and growth, the beautiful forms of algae in the rock pools, which were new to her, for she had previously explored only chalky or sandy shores. Now, having finished her work, she was at last able to look deeper, beyond the commonplace, \u27I had not yet learned to look for the rarer Rhodospermiae under the olive and green weeds at the surface. These tidepools made one quite in love with sea-weeds, in spite of the disagreeable importunity with which they are made to ask us from shop-windows Call us not weeds , so I took up Landsborough\u27s book and tried to get a little more light on their structure and history.’ But even while she had been tied to her article, seaside scrambles were interspersed with \u27delicious inland walks\u27. Marian\u27s favourite walk was across the hills to Lee with its spreading views of crouching tors, golden furze, cliffs, moors and sea. But almost more fascinating than the broad sweep of skyline was the enclosed lane leading down to the hamlet nestling in its deep valley, \u27the great charm of this road, as of all Devonshire lanes, is the springs that you detect gushing in shady recesses covered with liverwort, with here and there waving tufts of fern and other broad leaved plants that love obscurity and moisture. Springs are sacred places for those who love and reverence Nature\u27. This tiny passage is like a foretaste of her fiction, with its accuracy, sensitivity and awareness of living organisms clustered together, dependent on their habitat and, beyond that, on deeper, mysterious springs. Her novels too were to widen out from tales of \u27unfashionable families\u27 living, like the ferns in relative obscurity, and crying out, like the sea-weeds Call us not weeds . In Ilfracombe she took pleasure in learning the names of each plant, of probing into the history of species, and examining their relationship within a wider pattern

Book Review: George Eliot

When I first heard that Virago were to pubIish a book about George Eliot (the author sought my help in locating certain photographs) I was a Iittle apprehensive. I feared that this might be a militant feminist view of a lady who concerned herself deeply about the \u27Woman Question\u27 but who did not align herself with the growing Victorian feminist movement. But a first reading allayed my fears, for Jennifer Uglow treats her subject with sympathy and understanding and does not try to prove that George Eliot was an active feminist when she was not. The book opens with a useful chronology linking George Eliot\u27s life and work with events and publications which affected the position of women in society - the passing of the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act, the formation In 1859 of the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women and, in 1866, the presentation of the first Women\u27s Suffrage Petition. G. H. Lewes \u27s publications are also included, showing his own output while he was so successfully nurturing hers. George Eliot did not make a defiant claim for independence and personal fulfiIment although she was keenly aware of sexual exploitation and the low status of women. In the 1850\u27s she knew many of the leading Victorian feminist campaigners and Jennifer Uglow devotes a most Interesting chapter to this gallant band of women who were trying to obtain recognition for their sex

Understanding Museum Heritage Estate Management

A mixed method of an online survey and depth telephone interviews was used to collect information from a sample of ACE Accredited museums in England with a listed estate. The research was steered by a partnership of HE, ACE, NLHF and DCMS. The information concerned the challenges and competing pressures faced by museums in maintaining their listed estate, the value and nature of recent and planned maintenance, and the scale of the backlog. In total, 101 museums participated with cases studies developed based on nine of those museums