Eastbound and Down

5 September 2008

Today started very, very early for me--at six-fifteen, to be precise. Like many of the people in our program, Greg watched a great deal about London on the Travel Channel this summer; and last night, he decided that he wanted to have a traditional English breakfast at one of the places he saw on the television, a little restaurant near Smithfield Market called "The Cock Tavern." Of course, the English are not renowned for their culinary prowess or their impeccable taste; I don't know of any other people who are born with an appetite for, or who raise their children on, blood pudding, liver, or cooked kidneys. It's not natural. Additionally, most people, particularly if they are young, vigorous, and members of Dickinson's Norwich Humanities Program, don't like to rise much before nine or ten o' clock in the morning--which is when one should go to the Cock Tavern, that is, according to the sages at the Travel Channel. So, Greg had problems recruiting many people who wanted to join him on his little excursion. Rob and I, in the end, were the only ones who manned up.

We encountered a measure of difficulty in finding the Cock Tavern from Farringdon Station, but after ten to fifteen minutes of searching, we finally stumbled on it, nestled comfortably in a corner of the Smithfield Market along East Poultry Avenue. In terms of the decorum, it resembled a pool hall back home; the walls were concrete and painted copper-red and white, and the tables were made of unadorned wood and metal pipe. The bar stretched the length of the room, and behind it, there were all manners of beer, liquor, and other beverages. Though it was pretty early in the morning, there was a middle-aged couple already earnestly engaged in a game of billards. Except for the fact that the news analysts were discussing the recent resignation of Kevin Keegan the manager of Newcastle United, you might have thought you were at a bar in downtown Chicago or Milwaulkee. Well, there was that, and then there was the menu.

We ordered our food in addition to three pints of Guinness from the bar. Around ten or fifteen minutes later, we received three piping plates loaded with bacon, eggs, sausage, blood pudding, baked beans, liver, cooked kidneys, and (in Greg's case) a small steak. On the whole, it was one of the best breakfasts I ever had. It certainly had more meat than I've ever had at a breakfast. And while I'd like to say that I fell in love with cooked kidneys as soon as the first one touched my lips, that would be a lie. A bald-faced, unequivocal, undeniable, inescapble lie. I felt like I was going to die--or I wanted to, anyway--but still, I slogged my way through it till I finished almost everything I was served. When we left the Cock Tavern, there were one or two kidneys and a half-piece of liver on my plate, but nothing more. The meal was very good, but the experience is what matters, ultimately. It was definitely worth the early morning and the eleven-pounds-thirteen I had to hand over to the bartender. (So much for making my budget for the day).

Returning to the Arran House a little before nine o' clock, I talked with Shannyn for a while in the breakfast room, and then I worked to complete my journal entry for the 4th of September before a classroom session we had scheduled for ten o' clock. Professor Rudalevige didn't lead today's classroom session, unfortunately; instead, it was a Professor Hamburger from the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich. She really didn't impress me. She provided a brief historical background concerning poverty in Victorian London and the well-to-do population's efforts to combat it, which was pretty complete, but unspectacular. I could have had it from a textbook and saved her the expense of a train ticket to London. She also didn't furnish us with much of an opportunity for input, asking a question and then pausing perhaps one or two seconds before promptly giving the answer. She even distributed a handout, a photocopy of a semi-satirical sketch depicting social divisions during the Victorian period; she said we were supposed to see if we couldn't unpack what it said about Victorian culture--and then with hardly a word from anyone in the class besides Shannyn, she proceeded to tell us what it meant.

Her worst offence, though, was that she was so unoriginal, making contentions that really didn't qualify as such since they were as closed to universally recognised within the community of intellectuals as skin to a potato. Here's a great case in point. After a prolonged exposition on how Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and others depicted poverty and reform efforts in the Victorian Era, she concluded: "I would argue then that these authors tried to affect social reform through their writing." Gee, do you really think so? I know that this all seems excessively critical on my part, but generally, I prefer my special lecturers to lecture about something truly special, not something I've read in tens of articles or heard from my father when I was a boy on his knee. Moreover, arguing that Victorian authors used their writing to affect social reform is problematic, since it was pretty evident that this "conclusion" was something of an assumption which underlied her entire argument.

(Of course, in the poor woman's defence, I should say that the topic on which she was supposed to lecture was somewhat outside of her academic specialty, which she admitted was how Victorian society approached the problem of lunacy. We were expecting her to discuss schools, railways, factories, and coal mines when she was best prepared for a conversation about lunatic asylums and psychological diagnoses.)

Mercifully for her and for us, the classroom session ended at eleven o' clock. A troop of us then went to a nearby baguette shop where we bought lunch, afterwards boarding the Underground at Euston Square Station for East London. We visited the Ragged School Museum, which is located on the site of what once was London's largest "ragged school" between 1870 and 1900. For those of you whom are unfamiliar with the concept, a ragged school was a private school that were operated by various churches, charities, and philanthropists during the Victorian Era to educate the thousands of half-starved poor children whom lived in London. Just to give you an idea of how large these institutions could be, it was not uncommon for there to be more than one hundred students crunched into a single, poorly heated classroom. Hard to imagine. The displays of the Museum itself were nothing too spectacular. In many regards, it reminded me of Cross Orchards, a so-called living history museum in Grand Junction, a place where primary schools bring children to provide them with rudimentary image of the past. There were interactive displays, such as a station where one could put on replicas of the rags that most children wore to school. The language on the placards for the exhibits was direct and painfully simple. And one of the officials at the Museum mentioned that they ordinarily had performers dressed in full Victorian garb and imitating the manners and speech of the period. (We fortunately had our run of the place, unencumbered by such silliness and frivolity). It was excellent as an introduction to the realities of life in the poorer parts of London during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I hadn't ever heard of the "ragged schools" till today. However, it was nowhere near extensive in its collection as the Imperial War Museum or even the Soane Museum.

After dinner, which we prepared using the kitchen facilities at the Arran House, we went to the Tate Britain Museum. I enjoyed it far better than I did the Tate Modern, which we visited a few days ago. (Sadly, I haven't posted an account for it. My bad.) Interestingly, I enjoy it more, largely because its collection was more diverse than that of the Tate Modern, which seems a little surprising to me since I seem to associate variety more with the present than the past. There were paintings by Rubens from the seventeenth century, landscapes by J.M.W. Turner and John Constable from the early nineteenth century, bizzarre sketches and drawings from the last two or three decades, and so much more. Even if you weren't inclined toward modern art--a category of humanity which includes yours truly--, there was something in the Tate Britain that you would be able to enjoy. For me at least, John Constable was a remarkable discovery. I hadn't heard of him before, but I relished the freedom to stand in the middle of the gallery in which his paintings were located and enjoy.

And what then? Well, I left the Tate Britain not more than one-and-a-half hours ago. I grabbed some food from KFC on my way back to the Arran House and here I sit on my bed typing away on my computer. God willing, I will be able to catch up on my remaining journal entries and perhaps do a little research for my group presentation. Who knows, really, if I will be able to do so? We'll see. Whatever befalls, it has been a good day.