Edith Sitwell - Victoria of England

Dame Edith Sitwell was a British poet and critic and the eldest of the three literary Sitwells (three siblings who formed an identifiable literary and artistic clique around themselves in London in the period roughly 1916 to 1930). She never married, but became passionately attached to the gay Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew, and her home was always open to London's poetic circle.

The poems she wrote during the war include Street Songs (1942), The Song of the Cold (1945), and The Shadow of Cain (1947), all of which were much praised. "Still Falls the Rain" about the London Blitz, remains perhaps her best-known poem.

Alongside her poetry, Sitwell published four books of prose, which she always claimed were written simply for money. These include two books about Queen Elizabeth I, as well as Victoria of England and English Eccentrics.

Sitwell lived from 1961 until her death in a flat in Hampstead in London, which is now marked with an English Heritage blue plaque.

T he little dry leaves are blowing against the windows of a house near the sea, with a sound like the whispering of small pale ghosts; they are blowing along the parade, over the edge of the century, they are floating away and away into the far-off plantations where the country gentlemen are rooted in the mould.

Here they come, these small ghosts left over, drifting over, from the eighteenth centurydry ghosts like the Beau and Beelzebub or Wicked Shifts, Bogey and Calibre, Gooserump and King Jog, Mouldy and Madagascar and Snipe, and Mr Creevey himself brushing those leaves together with his old hands. Soon there will be no leaves left.

On the 22nd day of January in the year 1820, whilst the threadbare-looking sea beat thinly upon the shore, a man of fifty-two years of age, his once robust and reddish face now yellow, his thin dyed black hair, that had once been shining and carefully brushed (where any remained), now dull with sweat, and with the grey showing through the black and with the skull showing through the hair, lay dying upon a hired bed in Sidmouth.

Downstairs, a damp whining wind drifting aimlessly through an open window blew hundreds of unopened bills across the floor, with a rattling noise like that of rain upon a window-pane; but in the room upstairs there was no sound excepting that of the dying mans breath, struggling now for regularity like the beat of the clocks he had been so interested in makingfluttering unevenly, slowing down. Soon time would stop for him, and all mathematical precision. Turning restlessly with a half-conscious movement towards the stout and usually voluble, apple-cheeked woman, grown so strangely pale and silent, who sat at his bedside, he breathed with some last effort, who knows if produced by that affectionate nature which was at least partly genuine, by his habit of what had been half-unconscious hypocrisy, or by that gift for self-pity which had always been so strong a comfort and excuse, Do not forget me.

So loud was now the sound of that struggling breath, that there was little room for memory, there was nothing left but that sound, and that last pitiful burst of egotism or affection. There was no place now, in those last moments that were left to him, for the discipline and regularity that had been the gods of his life. Long forgotten in his bloodstained grave lay the soldier whom the Duke of Kent, his commander-in-chief, had ordered to receive nine hundred and ninety-nine lashes as a punishment for some minor offence. Long forgotten was Private Draper,1 who, because of his desertion and mutiny, had been sentenced by the Duke to execution. Long past was that funeral procession, marching for two long miles to a place outside Quebec, with the Duke at the head, and Private Draper marching behind the soldiers and his coffin, marching upright in his grave-clothes whilst the military band played funeral dirges behind him. When this procession had arrived at the gallows, the Duke stepped forward and, after informing Private Draper that he was now at a very awful moment and within a few minutes of being judged by his Maker, in the peroration of an extremely long speech, pardoned him. But, as the Dukes biographer, Mr Roger Fulford, remarks, this was an expensive lesson, as the coffin and the grave-clothes were presumably a slightly gruesome addition to the Princes debts.2

I do not know what was the subsequent fate of Private Draper, if he developed epilepsy or was confined to a madhouse; but now, within a few hours, the bloodstained ghost of one soldier, and perhaps many othersthe terrible figure of one marching upright in his grave-clothes, endlessly marchingwould rise to denounce this outworn effigy lying upon the bed.

But of these he did not think. Only the clock in his breast counted.

Forgotten was his odd championship of Mr Owen, with his schemes for the bettering of mankind and his cotton-mills on the banks of the Clyde where the workers lived in decent surroundings and where was made some attempt to educate them and to ameliorate the horrors of child-labour. I know, the Duke is reported to have said in reference to Mr Owens socialistic theories, that there will be a much more just equality of our race and an equality that will give much more security and happiness to all. And he added, on a later occasion: I am fully satisfied with the principles, spirit, and practice of the system which you advocate for new-forming the human character, as far as human means are concerned, and for new-forming the human race, and I acknowledge myself to be a full and devoted convert to your philosophy, in principle, spirit, and practice. But, he continued characteristically, we must act with prudence and foresight. The English are emphatically a practical people and practice has great influence over them.3