Big discovery: I found another Claribel byline!!
Hi!! I missed y’all. And boy, do I ever have a find to share with you today…
One of the things I tried and failed to track down during my giant England escapade last summer was a specific issue of the musical magazine Exeter Hall, because of - oh, I’ll just let Phyllis explain this part:
A new Musical Magazine Exeter Hall was being published by Metzler and Co. and Mrs. Barnard was asked to contribute something in writing for its first edition:
“It was Christmas Eve. The great feast was coming near with its gift of love and holy memories. So said the bell’s voices. How heartily their sound rushed forth from the old grey tower of the village church; […]”
Written for Metzlers’ Album, Christmas 1867.
[The Story of Claribel, pages 145 and 146]
Musical magazines were pretty much exactly what they sounded like — magazines full of sheet music. Sometimes their contents were reprinted, and other times they had original content. Exeter Hall was just one of several musical magazines to emerge in this general time period. I don’t even know how long Chappell and Co. (the same folks who organized the Monday Popular Concerts) had their musical magazine going; another firm called Ashdown and Parry started their own rag called Hanover Square in approximately this same time frame; and even Boosey had an extremely short-lived set of publications called The Weekly Vocalist and The Monthly Vocalist (the former is where Claribel’s 1863 song “Alexandra,” written about/to the new Princess of Wales, was first published). Exeter and Hanover had original contributions from a pretty wide range of contemporaneous composers, including Claribel’s peers Virginia Gabriel and Maria Lindsay. I suspect Claribel’s exclusive contract with Boosey would have prevented her from contributing songs to these other publishers’ magazines… but clearly that didn’t affect her legal ability to provide something in plain ol’ writing.
So when I was at the British Library, I hunted down every copy of Exeter Hall that they had, in search of whatever the heck Claribel had contributed. And I found absolutely nothing. Now, if you’re sharp-eyed, when you read that extract from Phyllis above, you probably noticed the attribution at the end was a bit different from the source listed at the beginning — “Metzlers’ Album.” Plenty of music publishers would put out annual Christmas albums, often big fancy gift books like Boosey’s The St. James Album, so accordingly I’d combed through WorldCat and Jisc (sort of a UK-focused WorldCat analogue) looking for Christmas albums or annual albums from Metzler. Nada. Inconveniently enough, too, though Phyllis got her mitts on a lot of primary sources that ended up with her assembled papers in the Lincolnshire Archives, this mysterious magazine was nowhere among them.
Then, just last week, I had a thought: Phyllis did quote at least some fragment from this piece, so she clearly saw The Thing that Claribel had written, even if she didn’t get ahold of it permanently. So what if I Googled some small fragment of the bit that she included, some exact phrase, to see if it turned up elsewhere? Maybe there was a scan of Exeter Hall on the Internet that I’d missed.
Friends, I may not have found this mysterious Exeter Hall issue itself, but I did find The Thing. Behold:
As it turns out, The Thing — “The Peace-Maker” — isn’t just a short meditative essay, like I’d expected based on her extant prose in Fireside Thoughts &c. Oh, no.
No, it’s a whole THREE-CHAPTER SHORT FRIGGIN STORY.
Look, bold and italics and capslock might seem like overkill, but I cannot emphasize enough that this is the first and only short fiction I’ve ever, ever seen from Claribel’s pen. I was, and am, gobsmacked.
Anyway: this lil tome is one volume of a serial publication called Good Stories. This might actually be the first volume; if I’m remembering right from my WorldCat trawlings, this issue can at least be dated to 1867. As it’s presented here, “The Peace-Maker” doesn’t have an authorial attribution, but I’m 99% confident it’s Claribel’s writing. Not just because it matches what Phyllis quoted — I’ve seen too many errors in The Story of Claribel to trust it without question at this point — but for a couple other big reasons:
Good Stories was edited by J. Erskine Clarke - the same guy who edited Chatterbox, as you may remember from a couple previous newsletters. Claribel’s Chatterbox-exclusive song “My Good-For-Nothing” had been published at the tail end of 1866, so she and Clarke had already worked together in a business capacity by the time this story was published.
Thematically, it dovetails super well with a lot of her other works and opinions, in particular vis-a-vis parent-child relationships. The plot centers around an embittered old man who essentially kicked his son out of the house for marrying a woman he didn’t like, and the story’s whole emotional arc hinges on this guy realizing he was wrong and trying his best to make amends. Claribel’s life was absolutely shaped in a few important respects by strife with parents, fathers in particular, even before we get to the Great Henry Alington Pye Embezzlement Disaster of 1868. Back in 1851 or 1852, Henry Alington Pye had apparently objected to Claribel’s engagement to John George Hollway, and I don’t know exactly what sort of meddling happened but the engagement got broken off. I’ve also mentioned in a previous newsletter that Claribel’s father-in-law, the Rev. Charles James Barnard, had steered/forced Charles Cary Barnard towards a career in the church that Charlie Did Not Like, At All. So like, there’s a reason that Claribel argued to John Ruskin in 1867 that parents don’t always understand their children, and in fact it was that exact encounter I thought of at multiple points when I read this story. It makes perfect sense that she’d say all that to Ruskin, and that she’d write about the same ideas in this story.
The full story is here, if you want to read it for yourself. I’ve waited till this point to link to it, because I do want to include a major content warning, for (spoilers, sorry) the death of a young child. Yes, sure, that’s an extremely common trope in Victorian literature, but especially given how central it is to the plot of this particular story, I suspect it could still hit hard if you’re sensitive to it.
As for how the story stacks up on a literary level: look, I’m fundamentally uninterested in being an arbiter of value judgments here, but I’ll say these 3 things.
It’s immensely valuable in a historical sense, as a window into Claribel’s creative activity.
It seems pretty typical for its period in a literary/stylistic sense, so not especially distinctive or seismic.
That said, though, the story has a few absolutely raw lines, of which this has to be my favorite: “‘Maybe he wouldn’t,’ said his wife, in the calmness that is the worst kind of grief.” Emphasis mine. I think I may have actually muttered “oh gurl.” aloud when I read that.
I’d still love to find the original Exeter Hall or Metzler Album or whatever where Phyllis claims this story was printed, don’t get me wrong. But I feel incredibly lucky that I was even able to make this connection, that I’ve got multiple massive full-text corpuses of historical materials (Google Books, HathiTrust, the Internet Archive, &c &c) to root through in search of Claribel.
I’ll wrap this up here. I’m on the trail of another poem, though, and hopefully I’ll have a dispatch for y’all on that subject soon. Bye for now, mes chers!
P.S. As you may have guessed from the multiple Internet-Archive links to pre-Buttondown newsletters in this installment, I do in fact have those links saved in a couple different formats (Wayback Machine and PDFs). Hopefully soon I’ll be able to figure out the best way to share them more permanently.
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