The Poetry of George Markham Tweddell 1823 - 1903

 

I am working alongside Paul Tweddell to collate and present a new free download book with the full poetical works of George Markham Tweddell. This is my intro to the book as a taster. More information on this fascinating Stokesley printer / publisher / people's historian / poet and author / chartist can be found at -  http://www.tweddellhistory.co.uk/

 

 

 

 

The new E book is NOW downloadable FREE from

 

http://www.tweddellpoetry.co.uk/.

 

A Poet's View by Trev Teasdel followed by a bio of George Markham Tweddell by Paul Tweddell -

 

 

 

A Poet’s view of George Markham Tweddell (1823-1903)

“What is a modern poet’s fate?

To write his thoughts upon a slate:

The Critic spits on what is done,

Gives it a wipe – and all is gone!”

Thomas Hood 1826 (as quoted by Tweddell’s Bards and Authors)

BARD FROM STOKESLEY

For the first time in history, we present the full collection of poetical works by George Markham Tweddell (or GMT for short by his own wish). A good many of these poems were published during GMT’s lifetime but this collection includes many from his notebooks that remained unpublished until now. With the recent acknowledgement on the internet of various forgotten heroes of the radical tradition we think this new collection provides an ideal opportunity for a reassessment of both GMT’s poetry and his life’s work, which coupled with the recent development of the Tweddell website and relocation of GMT’s extensive notes and correspondence in Cleveland County archives, facilitates a range of resources not previously available.

It is both fitting and a pleasure to publish this collection (albeit 105 years after his demise) because this man spent a lifetime rescuing from obscurity so many of Cleveland’s poets and authors who had passed on.

Indeed without GMT’s dedication to this task, we would now have little or no knowledge of the range of literary figures that lived and wrote in our area. This is no small thing for an area often viewed by literary analysts as a ‘cultural desert’, especially as elements of GMT’s work (and the later author inspired by GMT – William Burnett) alleged that instead of the area being a ‘desert’, the basis of the English literary canon was formed in this general area. A bold claim indeed, but this general area can lay claim to associations with Cademon (Whitby and Lealholm), Beowulf (Boulby and Hartlepool), the Celtic bard Anuerin (Catterick), John Gower, poet and Chaucer’s mentor (Sexhow, Stokesley and Stittenham), and many more. His book (now sadly only available in the local reference libraries and antiquarian shops), along with William Burnett’s book Old Cleveland are beacons of literary enlightenment for an area marginalised as a cultural backwater.

In terms of Tweddell’s own poetry, like many writers, he suffered his share of hack critics who had little understanding of his life’s work and less of the full range of his poetic works. While GMT welcomed objective critical appraisal, he lashed out at some of the mindless reviews he often received. In the dedication to the Bards and Authors of Cleveland and South Durham (1875), GMT says of his critics:

 

 

 

i

 

 

“The ill-natured Critics, – those who dip their pens in gall, – are growing fewer, in proportion to the number of their craft, everyday, and are generally the men with the least grasp of thought. Perhaps some of them may have glanced over my books when suffering from an overflow of bile. I don’t want puffs: all I desire from any Reviewer is candid criticism, to state fairly the object of the book under notice, and to express his own opinion how far that object has been accomplished.”[i]

Recently Paul Tweddell, my fellow editor, showed me some of GMT’s unpublished handwritten note books Sonnets on Trees and Flowers, etc. and (for want of a title from the poet) Rhymes (in Manuscript),[ii] in which, about 1892 in the twilight of his life, GMT had attempted to collate some of his best poems and annotate them with details of where they were written or published. There was no doubt in my mind that GMT was intending these to be published at some stage, even if posthumously.

I was impressed with the range of styles GMT had embraced, from the gentle sonnet to the finger-pointing rants against the ‘Tyrant Oppressors’ who imprisoned Chartist leaders. I suggested to Paul that many of his critics would not have seen many of these poems or have had any idea of this poetic range. It was decided then and there that we should endeavour to publish the complete collection for the sake of history and in the hope of a critical reappraisal of his poetic works.

In recent years, too, there have been judgements made of GMT’s poetry. In 1989 Andy Croft (then lecturer in Literature at Middlesbrough’s Leeds University Adult Education Centre) referred to GMT’s poetry, in the Cleveland Local History Society’s Journal, as being ‘Arcadian’ and not addressing itself to the concerns of the workingman in the newly developing Ironopolis that was Middlesbrough. Andy quotes GMT’s ‘Rosebury Topping’ (p. 28 below):

“Not among smoke of busy, crowded town,

Where manufactures for the world are made,

And man’s best nature seems all trodden down,

To suit vile necessities of trade,

Has my life’s Spring been past: ……”

and was clearly looking for poetry that supported his valid thesis that Middlesbrough never produced the working class writers that other industrial areas produced such as Gaskell, Dickens etc. and that Middlesbrough was only ever represented in literature in a negative way as “a hole like that”. Perhaps GMT, in the poem, was trying to identify himself with the poor workers who spent as much of their spare time contemplating that very view as they could. Indeed his son-in-law was to die prematurely in a house barely yards from the smoke of the North East railway’s locomotive sheds in Middlesbrough leaving six young children fatherless. Ebenezer Elliot, with even more impeccable credentials for radicality than GMT, also wrote about the same vista in John Walker Ord’s History of Cleveland (1846):

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“When Cook, a sailor's boy, with aching eye,

Gazed from the deep and oft-climbed Roseberry;

While trembling as she listened to the blast,

The anxious parent sea-ward wishes cast,

And fervent prayer was mute, but not surpressed

Though love was resignation in her breasts.

Why did thou not—thou happiest name of joy—

Bid her cheered spirit see that that deathless boy

Bear round the globe Britannia's flag unfurled,

And from the abyss unknown call forth a world.”

 

Andy’s poem on the same subject, with a very different but telling slant, includes the verse:

On Roseberry Topping you can see for miles

Of shining streets – the Golden City

In an Ironmaster's jangling dreams.

This high up, who could tell the pity

Of a place without choice, without all

But men and women, a life that seems

Windily unwanted, exposed to the fall

Of a sticky rain, a yellow, nuclear smile?[iii]

However, it is only fair to say that Andy never had access twenty years ago to the range of poems by GMT, the growing knowledge of the Tweddell family nor the knowledge of nineteenth century radical history now being made available.

Paul Tweddell has since revealed that GMT, besides producing the city’s best history at the end of the 19^th century, indeed lived and worked in the developing ‘Infant Hercules’ for a decade. His concern for the rural proletariat was strong throughout his life as evidenced from the editorials of the radical newspaper that he produced when he was 19 against the oppressive Corn Laws, to the poem written in his last years and sympathetic to travelling workers, ‘The Poetry of an Old Besom’,[iv] (pp. 52 et seq.) Nor must be forgotten his work as one of the Stokesley Chartists or his support for the Cleveland Ironstone miners’ union in the 1870s.

Between 1842 and 1845 GMT produced his radical newspaper, The Stokesley News and Cleveland Reporter, and, not surprisingly his poems served to reinforce his political purposes as ‘The Muses’ Bower’ (p. 3), ‘Death’ (p. 6), ‘An African Slave’ (p. 6), ‘Superstition’ (p. 11), ‘Oddfellowship’ (p. 11), etc. On Sunday January 1^st 1843 in issue No 3, GMT reacted to the conservative backlash of his time (see the next section for details) by writing an editorial in language that echoes Shelley’s invective in the Masks of Anarchy and predates Marx’s introduction to the Communist Manifesto, A Spectre is Haunting Europe, by 6 years:

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“Notwithstanding the base attempt to crush our little periodical, by the vilest and most ungenerous means, yet we again pay our monthly visit to our subscribers, to amuse and instruct…”

“When The Stokesley News, and Cleveland Reporter first made its appearance in the political and literary world, it was with a firm determination to lash every species of vice, with an unsparing hand; and to be the unflinching advocate of civil and religious liberty. Fearlessly to tear the mask from the sinister deeds of unprincipled legislators and trafficking politicians, of every party……”[v]

Chartism

In defence of one of the Chartist leaders, John Frost (sentenced to decapitation but later commuted to transportation to Australia for his part in the Newport riots), GMT wrote ‘Lines to Tyrants’ of which this is a snatch:

Think not because taxation robs us

Of most the wages that we earn;

Think not because tyrants oppress us

And cause the nation sore to mourn,

That we will ever cease demanding,

The rights that are to us most dear:

The justice of the “People’s Charter”

Does Frost e’en in his dungeon cheer.

[The full poem can be seen on p. 225 et seq. below]

Education

In the following poem extract, written in the 1800’s, GMT’s views on education wouldn’t be out of place in Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1972) where he talks about the ‘Banking Concept of education’ in which the student receives, memorises and repeats ‘deposits of knowledge’ rather than develops a ‘critical consciousness and spirit of enquiry’.

“To educate does not mean pumping in

Knowledge, even to cramming in the brain;

But, by judicious efforts, so to train

The virgin mind, that it must surely win

Wisdom from all it reads or hears or sees;”

(page 158 below)

In his poem ‘A Model Female’ GMT offers what might be seen as a kind of early feminist poem:

“For she is no gay butterfly, but true

To all that elevates humanity;

And much intelligence behind that brow

Dwells in her brain; and none will e’er receive

Unkindness from her, or have cause to grieve.”

[page 170 below]

 

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Andrew Prescott – former Director of the Centre for Research into Freemasonry at Sheffield University – has recently taken GMT’s published book of A Hundred Masonic Sonnets to be the standard of his writing. Written in later life during ill health (published after the persuasion of his friends) these poems are more didactic; instructive to others in the ‘Craft’.[vi] It is clear that this new work containing all the known poems of GMT will provide a more substantial basis for judgement than was hitherto possible.

However an initial look at the Masonic poems shows that they are:

·           Clearly didactic (in accordance with the style of the time) and suited to his intended purpose in instructing his fellow Masons and in the words of the second Masonic poem (p. 99 below)“to elevate his vision...help to warm [at least] one frozen mind to life; show the plan of Masonry to be no useless maze to puzzle fools”.

·           Have a recognisable form – that of the Sonnet. It is clear that GMT is well acquainted with the form and its variants and there’s evidence to suggest that he might even be innovating with the form if you consider the wide variations of the rhyme schemes over the 100 poems including a few with a non-standard number of lines (these are identified after each poem).

·           The diction may not be as ‘elevated’ as in other of his poems however, considering it is a didactic work, the language seems appropriate and nonetheless still contains persuasive imagery with some extended metaphors, etc.

·           Indeed the poems employ a range of Masonic emblems such as ‘The All-Seeing Eye’, ‘The Great Architect’, ‘The Gavel’, ‘The Compass’ and more. Furthermore some of the poems refer directly to the emblematic and symbolic function of his poetry but more on that later!

·           These sonnets treat a wide range of themes both close to his heart and life’s work as well as being pertinent to being a ‘good Freemason’. Among the themes we find ‘justice’, ‘truth’, ‘love’, ‘sincerity, ‘charity’, ‘freedom from ignorance and superstition’, ‘wisdom’, ‘spiritual development’, ‘prudence’, ‘equality’, ‘friendship’, ‘silence’, ‘tyrants’, ‘oppressors and slavery’, ‘symbolism’, ‘Robbie Burns’, the ‘spiritual temple of the soul’ and many more.

A few of the poems read almost as if he is writing alternative (or Masonic) prayers. Sonnet No. 6 in the collection [p. 100 below] certainly seems to read that way, as could the last, prayer-like four lines of the previous sonnet [p. 100 below], ‘Truth, No I’:

“With joy will welcome in the glorious time

When truth alone will reign. Then, as in heaven

God will be truly served; all wars will cease

And Love and Charity for aye increase”?

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In Bards and Authors of Cleveland and South Durham GMT comments, in a chapter on Great Ayton’s poet, William Martin, himself a Freemason, with lines that might explain the purpose of his later A Hundred Masonic Poems:

“Save poor Burns’s ever famous “Farewell to the Brethren of the St. James Lodge, Tarbolton”, …… and few other glorious exceptions, the things miscalled Masonic songs are mere bombast, doggerel, or drunken staves, scribbled by men who have been totally unable to comprehend the beautiful system of Morality, “veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols,” which they have profanely professed to defend and illustrate.”

I think, therefore this work clearly attempted to address those concerns. One might therefore look at this work to see to what extent (in compliance with his wish to be judged by the aim of the work) he achieved those aims. Of course GMT exempted William Martin himself from the above!

The Masonic poems illustrate the point that GMT’s full range of poetry functioned in different ways for his various purposes. Here are some pointers in consideration of this that might be useful to keep in mind while reading the full works.

GMT’s poetry was just one aspect of his wide-ranging work that Paul Tweddell refers to later. Some of the poems are written to supplement other types of work as illustrated below and falls into a number of categories:

·           Poems written to supplement his early editorials in his radical Newspaper Cleveland News and Stokesley Reporter, which fought against the oppressive Corn Laws. GMT would quite wittily add another perspective to his editorial in the form a short poem under the pseudonym Peter Proletarius. These poems are clearly functional, serving the greater political cause rather than poetic affectations.

·           Poems that introduce chapters and themes in some of his books such as the Bards and Authors of Cleveland and South Durham and some of his Cleveland geographical works. These poems are again functional in introducing authors or themes and not meant to be inspired works of art.

·           Poems that are didactic in nature and intended to ‘instruct’. The Masonic poems fall into this category. Again he is employing his skills in the service of a greater cause.

·           Poems that I would consider more personal, sonnets that denote important family occasions. These might employ more poetic conceits and Tweddell is documenting his family history as it evolves, via his poetry.

 

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·           Poems of invective, full of passion, that come from the heart. His early poems hitting out at the tyrants of oppression, against the imprisonment of his Chartist comrades would come under this category.

·           Poems, mainly sonnets, written as a poet rather than as a passionate activist although Tweddell is never far away from his greater concerns even if presented symbolically. His ‘Arcadian’ style poems may be included here and the collection he called Sonnets on Trees and Flowers which are, I believe, symbolic in nature.

·           Biographical poems often (but not always) written as obituaries, usually about Locally Eminent People, friends or acquaintances or well known to GMT through his correspondence.

A RADICAL CANON OF POETS: EBENEZER ELLIOT[vii]

I’d long considered GMT a one-off until a recent discussion Paul Tweddell and I had with the historian Malcolm Chase, of the History Department of Leeds University, whose expertise on Chartism made a valuable contribution to our understanding.

I had a hunch that there was a link between Corn Law Rhymer Ebenezer Elliot and GMT. Both had had work published in the Chartist paper The Northern Star and so at the very least would possibly have seen each other’s work. I thought that if some further connection could be established this might be a more relevant bard with which to establish a comparison. I fed this notion back to Paul Tweddell and Malcolm Chase and Paul searched his Tweddell database and immediately came across the following poem by GMT written in response to Elliot showing a clear awareness of Elliot’s work. Paul also found evidence of correspondence between the two shortly before Elliot passed away in 1849. On p. 186 is GMT’s poem (p. 185):

The Bramble (Rubus Vulgaris)

Brave Elliot loved "thy satin-threaded flowers,"

Dear Bramble! All who appreciate those things

Of beauty which Nature as largess flings

So freely over valleys, plains, and moors,

Must share the Corn Law Rhymer's healthy love.

And who in Autumn does not like to taste

Thy pleasant Dewberries? There is no waste

Throughout the universe; for all things move

In strict obedience to the unchanging laws

Wisely laid down by Him who cannot err;

And He alone is His true worshipper

Who studies to obey them. The Great First Cause

Adorns our very brakes with fruit and flowers,–

As if to teach us all that happiness may be ours.

George Markham Tweddell

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Here is the relevant poem from Ebenezer Elliot:

To the Bramble Flower

Thy fruit full-well the schoolboy knows,

Wild bramble of the brake!

So, put thou forth thy small white rose:

I love it for its sake.

Though woodbines flaunt and roses glow

O’er all the fragrant bowers,

Thou needst not be ashamed to show

Thy satin-threaded flowers;

For dull the eye, the heart is dull,

That cannot feel how fair,

Amid all beauty beautiful,

Thy tender blossoms are!

How delicate thy gauzy frill!

How rich thy branchy stem!

How soft thy voice, when woods are still,

And thou sing'st hymns to them;

While silent showers are falling slow

And, 'mid the general hush,

A sweet air lifts the little bough,

Lone whispering through the bush!

The primrose to the grave is gone;

The hawthorn flower is dead;

The violet by the moss'd grey stone

Hath laid her weary head;

But thou, wild bramble! back dost bring,

In all their beauteous power,

The fresh green days of life's fair spring,

And boyhood's blossomy hour.

Scorn'd bramble of the brake! once more

Thou bid'st me be a boy,

To gad with thee the woodlands o'er,

In freedom and in joy.[viii]

Interestingly, Malcolm Chase commented on the suggested comparison between GMT and Elliot:

“I think Trevor’s right, Ebenezer Elliot is the point of reference against whom GMT should probably be read - rather than the better known chartist poet Ernest Jones who wrote in a more obviously Gothic style. Another point of reference - again replete with classical allusions and similarly very deferential to Shakespeare - is the Chartist Thomas Cooper, whose epic poem Purgatory of Suicides (1846) circulated very widely. There is a very sophisticated but readable LitCrit of chartist poetry by Anne Janowitz, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 1998). But she never notices Tweddell!”

GMT’s use of nom de plumes such as Peter Proletarius, also intrigued me, whilst Malcolm Chase suggested:

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“Nom de plumes and modelling: there may be links and given the overlap of their views and rough geographical proximity, Watkins, Tweddell and Elliot may well have consciously borrowed from each other. On the other hand they could be responding to a common earlier source. "Junius" was an important radical political writer of the third quarter of the C18th, while William Cobbett (who visited Stockton, but that's another story) famously used the pseudonym Peter Porcupine - so Peter Proletarius may well be intended as a silent but knowing reference to Cobbett.”

GMT also created his own ‘national canon’ in the poem on p. 186 below, ‘The Daisy (Bellis Perennis)’, which reinforced his wish to be judged alongside the ‘radical’ poets in the widest sense. These were Chaucer, Burns, Wither (1588-1667)[ix], James Montgomery (1771-1854), with Southey added later as a poet, but not for his politics (see the poem ‘Robert Southey’ – p. 50 below) and ‘William Wordsworth’ (p. 63 below). Montgomery, although a Scot, was a campaigning reformist especially against slavery, spending much of his life in Yorkshire and was imprisoned in 1795 and 1796. Later he responded to Ebenezer Elliot’s request for advice on his poetry, information that strengthens GMT’s links to like-minded poets.[x]

JOHN WATKINS[xi]

Malcolm Chase sent me an article he had written about Whitby Chartist, poet and playwright John Watkins who was imprisoned for sedition after promoting Chartism in Stockton. I felt sure there might be another connection here given the geographical closeness. So far no evidence has come to light in GMT’s work, although Whitby library or the Whitby Philosophical Society archives might have some references of course. However the article did reveal that Watkins married Elliot’s daughter. Nothing conclusive can be judged on this fact, but we have established a trail back to Elliot who knew Tweddell!

More fruitful was a link Paul made with Montgomery, finding a poem that may have influenced GMT’s poem in the Stokesley News and Cleveland Reporter. (Ebenezer Elliott knew James Montgomery who lived mostly in Wakefield.). Compare Montgomery’s poem with GMT’s later poem below:

A Cry from South Africa

On building a chapel at Cape Town

For negro slaves of the colony, in 1828

Britain not now I ask of thee

Freedom, the right of bond and free;

Let Mammon hold, while Mammon can,

The bones and blood of living man;

Let tyrants scorn, the tyrants dare,

The shrieks and writings of despair

An end will come – it will not wait

Bonds, yokes, and scourges have their date,

Slavery itself must pass away,

And be a tale of yesterday.

                               James Montgomery (1771-1854)

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          An African Slave

Ye tyrant fiends! who dare usurp

   Power o’er your fellow man.

You fill all earth with misery,

   The grave you never can.

There ‘tis your pow’r stops short,

   You can no further go:

The tomb’s the last, but sure, retreat

   From tyranny and woe.

Even kings must rot like common men,

   And will return to clay;

And, cheek by jowl, tyrant and slave

   Will by each other lay.

                                     ‘Georgius’ 

[One of GMT’s nom de plumes, see p. 6 below]

JOHN CRITCHLEY PRINCE

John Critchley Prince, (mentioned further in the next section) could also have been a strong influence on GMT, for they shared similar radical opinions. For a while in the early 1840s Prince worked on a newspaper, The Herald of the Future, that espoused Corn Law repeal and the 1833 10 hour Factory Act. He also worked with the Manchester Odd Fellows in Blackburn. Tweddell and Prince corresponded from 1842 firstly concerning the publication of some of Prince’s poems in GMT’s newspaper (Stokesley News and Yorkshire Miscellany). It continued through their shared circumstances and increasingly warm friendship until 1851 when Prince wrote to GMT, “Your fortunes and mine are very much alike,” referring particularly to their shared poverty. They met up finally in 1855 when the Tweddells moved to Bury. Compare the styles:

The Primrose (Primula vulgaris).

Sweet, modest flower, so gentle in its mien,

I ever love to gaze upon its form.

Full oft in childhood I’ve the Primrose seen,

Hiding its fragrant head from Borean storm,

In sheltered copse, by side of verdant hill,

On where to crystal river whimples still

Through scenes as lovely as the banks of Rhine;

What time the blackbird whistled till the green

Old gnarlêd woods re-echoed back the strain

And I have felt a glory truly mine

When I in primrosed walks have loitering been;

For earth seem’d free from every spot or stain

Of Sin and Care, which make the world a Hell,

And demons roam where angels fain would dwell.

                                    George Markham Tweddell

[This poem was written c. 1849. See p. 179 below]

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Spring.

I pause and listen, for the Cuckoo's voice

   Floats from the vernal depths of yonder vale,

        Whose aspect brightens at the gaze of morn.

Green woods, free winds, and sparkling waves rejoice—

    Sweet sounds, sweet odours freight the wanton gale,

        And April's parting tear-drops gem the thorn.

Through field and glade the truant school-boy sings,

And where in quiet nooks the primrose springs,

        Sits down to weave a coronet of flowers;

From hill to hill a cheering spirit flies,

Talks in the streamlet—laughs along the skies,

        And breathes glad music through the forest bowers:—

God of Creation! on this mountain shrine,

I praise, I worship thee, through this fair world of thine!—

John Critchley Prince [in The Poetic Rosary, 1850]

Praise to John Critchley Prince.

Hail, Prince 'mongst modern Poets! Thou whose song

So oft hath cheered me in dull Sorrow's hour;

To grasp thy gifted hand I ofttimes long,

As few, like thee, have gained the magic power

Of charming heart and mind. It is a dower

Which Nature only on a few bestows,

For fear that she the honour due should lose

Which from her sons she claims. For Poets are

Nature's first favourites; and their only care

Is for their mother; knowing well that she

Is no cross step-dame, but a parent kind,

For ever striving to endow mankind

With Peace; and Love, and Health, and Liberty,

Whose pioneers are Poets—such as thee!

George Markham Tweddell

[Written in 1846 (see p. 30 below) and also appears in The

Life of John Critchley Prince, R.A. Douglas Lithgow, 1880]

EMBLEMS AND SYMBOLS

After reading GMT’s poem for Elliot ‘The Bramble (Rubus Vulgaris)’ (on p. 185 below) I wondered why many of these radical poets also had a strong interest in flowers and plants. Was it purely botanical or was there some kind of esoteric symbolism going on? This was reinforced by finding a Masonic reference in the GMT poem about The Great First Cause (‘The Volume of the Sacred Law’, p. 107 below). In the Alchemist book The Secret of the Golden Flower, the golden flower is thought by some to be the Emerald Tablet and in the spiritual side of Alchemy part of the process of purifying the spirit. Symbols of flowers, colours, suns and moons are part of the symbolism. Freemasonry derives is symbolism from the Hermetic tradition and has its own path towards spiritual enlightenment. Could there be a deeper level to some of these poems, especially in GMT’s sequence of sonnets under the heading Sonnets on Trees and Flowers I wondered?

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A clue came when Paul sent me a link to some poems by Wither whom GMT had mentioned in his sonnet The Daisy ‘(Bellis Perenis)’ on p. 186 below. Wither’s ‘Marigold’:

When with a serious musing I behold

The graceful and obsequious marigold,

How duly every morning she displays

Her open breast, when Titan spreads his rays.

took my attention as GMT had a poem called ‘The Marsh Marigold (Caltha Palustris)’ immediately before ‘The Daisy’. The Wither poem seemed to be using natural imagery in a symbolic way. Scrolling down I found a footnote that gave the first clue to the mystery:

“The first Emblem book (or book containing pictorial representations whose symbolic meaning is expressed in words) was the Emblematum Libellus of Alciati 1522. This was widely imitated, Quarles and Wither being the best known English emblem writers.”

Since then I’ve found plenty of evidence of GMT’s knowledge and use of emblems in his work. He mentions it in Bards and Authors of Cleveland and South Durham in relation to the work of poet John Riley Robinson and both the word and the technique is used in some of the 100 Masonic Poems and Sonnets on Trees and Flowers at least. The Masonic poems are replete with known Masonic emblems such as the two poems, ‘The All-Seeing Eye’ (p. 119 below), ‘The Gavel’ (p. 108 below), ‘The Compasses’ (p. 118 below), as mentioned above, but the symbolism in the Sonnets on Flowers and Trees is more naturalistic and it’s possible the poems also symbolically reflect a spiritual path of development, that can be understood by those who can read the signs. Soon after I found these poems among the 100 Masonic Poems that may add credence to that thesis. First was ‘Symbols’, (p. 118 below):

Nature abounds in Symbols for the Wise!

Sunset and sunrise; Phoebus in his pride;

Luna, as she does in her glory ride,

With all her starry train; the watchet skies,

Fleckt with all-gorgeous Clouds; the whimpling Rill,

The rushing River, and the booming sea;

Birds of all hues and songs; all seems to me

Pregnant with potent Teachings. Every hill

And Valley, Tree, Flower, Grass, Moss, Lichen; all

The Insect tribes that there have their brief day;

The very Dust we tread on; each, all may

Form Symbols to a thinking Mind, and call

On Masons here to read them. Oh, that we

May think and Work with God through all eternity!

Then, in ‘The All-Seeing Eye No 1’, there were further significant lines (p. 119 below):

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To picture forth the Great All-Seeing Eye,

As symbol meet of watchful Deity

‘Twas used in Egypt's far antiquity

Greece, Rome and every ancient mystery.

Wisely preserved the Emblem ....

The poem ‘Skillet’ (p. 109 below) talks about stone masons, building temples, “Lets build our spiritual temple…” while in ‘Legends of the Craft’ the closing lines read (p. 117 below):

But we must have the key

To Unlock Symbolic teaching in the mind

Or allegories ne'er can benefit

The sluggish brain of country clown or cit.

He who knows how to search, will surely Find

Truth hidden in her well; but they who boast

Sole love of literal facts, too oft Err the most.

However the imagery is far more naturalistic and poetic in the Sonnets on Trees and Flowers, with some of the flowers (perhaps like Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’) possibly symbolising the sun and gold is mentioned quite a lot too. Could Wordsworth, who had forged a new attitude in poetry towards nature, favouring the more intuitive and non-mechanistic outlook, have influenced Sonnets on Trees and Flowers? Certainly GMT mentions him a few times in relation to flowers such as The Daisy for instance.

In Alchemy the aim is to transmute base metals into gold. In spiritual Alchemy (or its embodiment in the rituals of Freemasonry), the chemical process is a symbolic and spiritual path and the sun (or flowers that look like the sun) are emblematic and reflect the precipitation of the spirit to the ideal.  GMT could  also be thinking of the Cabbala (The Tree of Life), which is the spiritual path to God in his reference to trees in these poems. In the following poem (which follows on from Wither’s Marigold) imagery such as ‘Burnish’d gold’ are interesting in this context I think. And here too is GMT’s ‘The Marsh Marigold (Caltha Palustris)’ (on p. 187 below):

Bonnie Marsh Marigold adorns the brook

In clumps like burnish’d gold. The earth is now

Not vile, but fit for angels. We must sow

The seeds of virtue broadcast, and may look

For happiness when we obey the laws

Of Nature, which are God’s: when we rebel

In our own minds we carry the real hell,

Which burns to punish all who may oppose

The great Creator’s will. ‘T was never meant

Mankind should be unhappy. Earth and sky

Unite to ask us the real reason why

Such misery is ours: for God has sent

All that is needful for our happiness,—

Only we hate each other when we should caress.

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Hopefully this all serves to indicate that there might be more going on in GMT’s poems than may have been previously suspected by some of his past critics and this new full collection will hopefully help to transform our understanding of his work. The poems all together tell the story of his life, his quest for justice, peace and enlightenment, his joys and sorrows, his wit and cunning and much more besides. This commentary only takes into account a small proportion of the poems here. What might a proper in-depth study find in these poems?

Trevor Teasdel, 2008, Great Ayton

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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An Outline of the Life of George Markham Tweddell

“On Saturday last was laid to rest in Stokesley cemetery nearly

the last of the veterans of Cleveland.”

So wrote the writer of the obituary in November 1903 of George Markham Tweddell in the North East Daily Gazette about one of the prominent representatives of the literary network that spanned the North of England during the nineteenth century. This group of writers, printers and publishers, their patrons and supporters embraced a wide range of interests and a diversity of social backgrounds. It has only recently begun to receive its justifiable attention, as Tony Nicholson the Teesside University historian comments: [these] ‘cultural encounters’ …… played a key role in shaping a new sense of place [for Cleveland and the North].[xii] It is likely that research into Victorian intellectual activity in Yorkshire and the North East would find Tweddell’s life and work serving as a paradigm for its study. Tweddell's work in North Yorkshire and South County Durham, for example, is part of a network of interlinking clusters of radical thinkers (or men sympathetic to their ideology) and interested in literature. Tweddell could be a candidate for Cleveland’s representative; Andrews in Hull, Elliot in South Yorkshire, Montgomery in West Yorkshire, Prince and Swain over the Pennines in North East Cheshire and South East Lancashire (respectively), Burnett in Blackburn; all of whom could be shown to know each other. Nor would it be surprising to find one in Newcastle upon Tyne, perhaps Joseph Cowan (1831-1901)[xiii], the local newspaper owner and radical M.P. who harassed Gladstone about the unsatisfactory agreement between his administration and politically-aware working-class men toward the end of the 19^th century.

Despite personal difficulties, Tweddell established and maintained his position amongst this group by:

·           corresponding extensively with friends and colleagues;

·           keeping a large number of notes on local matters. (Towards the end of his life, he stored them in the basement of his house and office, Rose Cottage, 3 Bridge Street, Stokesley and some of these are still extant in the Tweddell Collection of Teesside Archives. But many were destroyed after his death during one of the town’s frequent floods);

·           receiving guests at his home and visiting friends, who respected him for his knowledge, enthusiasm and reminiscences of past acquaintances, as well as access to his notes;

·           offering encouragement to fellow writers and, in return, accepting their support for his endeavours, even their money, too, when he needed it (see the poem ‘Snilesworth’, p. 67 below);

 

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·           serving on the committees of many worthy organizations, including his local branch of the Freemasons and Odd Fellows, sometimes serving as a regional representative;

·           advocating the works of fellow writers who shared his proud vision of the region through his writings and publications on local history, dialect, and, particularly, poetry. He also often embedded political issues in the commentaries he submitted to newspapers;

·           involving himself in national discussions that aimed to bring about constitutional change. When young he supported the Chartist movement, and, towards the end of his life, articulated the disappointment felt with the failure of Gladstone’s Liberal administration to live up to the expectations of working people and their middle class supporters after the expansion of the vote in 1884 (see p. 41 below in Note 6).

·           being a paid-up member of a large number of literary and learned societies, the total of which printed on his title pages at its zenith about 1870 was twelve.[xiv]

As Trevor Teasdel has already demonstrated above, Tweddell’s dominant purpose in writing his poetry for his Victorian audience was to use its most persuasive and popular method to disseminate his ideas and principles. But the other means he used, commentaries he made in local newspapers, await publication and they should soon become available with the completion of an electronic version in progress by the Humanities Department of Teesside University. In the meanwhile his poems may help to understand why Ebenezer Elliott held Tweddell in such high esteem writing:

“I declare I feel honoured by receiving a letter from such a man.”[xv]

*  *  *  *  *  *

George Markham Tweddell was born in March 1823 into a local family of yeoman farmers and shopkeepers in Stokesley, North Yorkshire, and baptised as George Tweddell. He was the illegitimate son of Elizabeth Tweddell (1800-1841), and George Markham (1797-1834), a lieutenant in the Royal Navy and probably on leave in 1822 after being seriously injured during an affray on board a ship the previous year. He was staying with his father, also George Markham (1763-1822), who had been rector of Stokesley since 1791 and, as an able administrator, added the duties of looking after the personnel and fabric of York Minster as Dean of York in 1802. Dean Markham was the third son of William Markham, Archbishop of York (1719-1807), who is now remembered best for saving the city walls of York from destruction, along with the author Sir Walter Scott. George Tweddell never met any of these three Markham ancestors although one of his father’s younger sisters, Frederica Haviside (1798-1863) kept up a correspondence with her nephew before her death.

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Although most of Elizabeth Tweddell’s siblings lived in relative comfort, she in contrast was expected to work as an assistant in her father’s shop. When George was young much of her free time was spent wandering the fields with her boy at her side, for George was unquestionably the favourite and brightest of her three sons. She had an extensive knowledge of country lore, especially about plants, which she imparted to her son, as well as the family’s recent ancestry, that hints at his paternity in his poem ‘My Mother’ (p. 162 below). Although George was put forward as a scholar to Stokesley’s Preston Grammar School, the governors refused him a place. This disappointment proved to be  a  great  advantage  to  the  boy,  for  his school days, coincided with the brief period when the inspirational teacher, William Sanderson (c.1796-1864), held the post of head teacher at the National Board School in Stokesley. In the 1820s, Sanderson had left his native Hutton Rudby (three miles west of Stokesley) to set up a private school in Whitby. During the 1832 Reform Parliament election he had voted for the radical, but unsuccessful candidate (Sanderson’s choice inevitably being widely known, there being no secret ballot at this time) and, in revenge, another failed candidate persuaded the parents to withdraw their children thus forcing the closure of the school. Taking up the Stokesley vacancy, Sanderson soon recognised George’s abilities, and set about extending the formal learning of the school by introducing discussions with George over a wide range of subjects, either on long walks during the summer or at his fire in winter. In particular he inculcated a deep love of poetry. The boy’s earliest poem found identifying a date was ‘Lines written early in Spring in 1837’ (p. 141 below). Sanderson’s account of his treatment in Whitby was an powerful influence on his student’s adoption of radical-leaning politics, although the boy may have already had a predilection in this way as his grandfather, John Tweddell (1770-1850), had supported the Liberal candidate in the 1805 election. A few years later, hearing Peter Bussey, the Chartist missionary who used Stokesley as a base for his work in spring 1839 when George was 17, could have reinforced these opinions, although there is no documentary evidence for this.

In 1836, at the earliest opportunity and much to his disappointment, George was taken away from school and joined his mother as an assistant at his grandfather’s shop. In contrast, his younger cousin was sent to a private school and was extremely indulged, so much so that in 1844 this difference in treatment between branches of the family seems to have created tensions mentioned in the poem ‘Address to a Cousin’ (p. 14 et seq. below).

 

 

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The year 1841 was an important one in Tweddell’s life. On 19^th February, to his great distress, his mother died of consumption aged 41, which he immediately made the subject of a poem, detailing the circumstances of her death in ‘On the Death of my Mother’ (p. 9 below), one he was to revisit poetically throughout his life. On 7^th June Tweddell paid half a guinea to join the Stokesley branch of the Loyal Cleveland Lodge of the Manchester Oddfellows, (technically an illegal organisation until 1850, like all mutual friendly societies, but from the 1830s officially tolerated), and the next day, 8^th June, was elected a committee member. By the 24^th December he was recorded as the corresponding secretary to the local Chartist Society in the national Chartist newspaper the Northern Star. The next year, in November, ‘Brother Tweddell’ had also joined the Cleveland Lodge of the Freemasons. These were the earliest of the many praiseworthy organisations on which he served, many of which received commendation in poetic form.

Sometime in 1841, Tweddell began to acquire skill in what was to become his life’s work. A local printer and publisher, William Braithwaite (c.1810-1873), who was noted for encouraging local talent, took on Tweddell as an apprentice. Braithwaite had also been a long-serving governor of the grammar school, and may have been redeeming his involvement years earlier in his refusal to accept Tweddell as a pupil. Whilst working there, Tweddell took the opportunity to make the acquaintance of many of the prominent authors whom Braithwaite published.  One of these, John Walker Ord (1811-1853), became a close friend, and, despite their differing political opinions (Ord was a Conservative), offered material for George’s later literary enterprises. Through Ord, Tweddell probably started corresponding with the well-known radical poet, Ebenezer Elliot, and the poem of that name (p. 62 below) expresses Tweddell’s sorrow that Elliot died in 1849, before they could meet.

All started well, with Braithwaite supporting George in setting up and printing a monthly newspaper, The Stokesley News and Cleveland Reporter, the first edition of which appeared in November 1842. As well as writing trenchant editorials, Tweddell filled the pages with poems, many his own – albeit using a variety of pen names, and was one of the earliest persons outside the north west of England to publish poems of the Lancashire poets, John Critchley Prince (1808-1866) and Richard Wright Proctor (1816-1881) who wrote under the name of “Sylvan”. Unfortunately the local Tory establishment soon took offence at the radical stance of the editorials of The Stokesley News and persuaded Braithwaite to withdraw his support and sack Tweddell after only two editions. Tweddell was able to find alternative funding, so Braithwaite then commenced the production of a rival paper, The Cleveland Repertory and Stokesley Advertiser, with editorials more in keeping with his colleagues’ own political views. Thus for the next two years the news-

 

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papers rivalled each other until Tweddell’s paper folded in September 1844, and the other, its purpose completed, folded in 1845. Even before the collapse of his project, Tweddell was planning a new one, which proved to be the first of the two major books by which he is best remembered, Tweddell’s Yorkshire Miscellany (the second was Bards and Authors). It was published in monthly parts during 1845 and 1846 in magazine format and contained essays written by diverse authors, including a few poems. It created, too, the earliest of the many financial problems that littered his life. His loss at this time was further worsened by a month’s imprisonment in autumn 1846 and provoked the defiant ‘Sonnet Written in York Castle’ (p. 227 below and for details of the circumstances see p. xxv, bullet #1.)

On the last day of 1843, George had married Elizabeth Cole, one of the daughters of the Stokesley parish clerk and artist, Thomas Cole (1787-1867), who had helped set up the Odd Fellows in the town as well as proposing Tweddell as a member. The long partnership between Elizabeth and George Tweddell was to prove a creative one, for, besides being interested in literature, Elizabeth had a firm but sympathetic personality  upon  which  her husband was to rely through- out his many tribulations. (See ‘The Love to His wife Lady Love’, p. 8 below.) During the early years of their marriage she undertook a number of editorial roles on behalf of her husband, but it was only later, when their older daughters had become old enough to supervise the younger ones, that she was able to write on her own behalf. This development took place around 1862 when one of Tweddell’s best friends, walking companion and benefactor, John Reed Appleton (c. 1825-1889), persuaded Elizabeth to develop her poetic skills. The results were to bring her local fame as a regional writer with poems and stories in the Cleveland dialect under the name of Florence Cleveland. The equality with which they treated each other, so contrary to the conventions of the time, suggests it may be an early example of feminism. Interestingly, this feature in their partnership was remarked upon at the time. For example, William Andrews (c.1854-c.1920), instigator of the Hull Literary Club, a freemason, local historian and author, wrote in 1884:

“The common, but erroneous idea, that a woman of literary habits must be thereby unfitted for her domestic duties, is best corrected by an intimate knowledge of the life of such a woman as the wife of George Markham Tweddell, whose devotion to all that is womanly, as daughter, sister, wife, mother, grandmother, and friend – if those who know her best may be allowed to judge – has through life been as marked as the purity of her writings, a subject on which all agree.”[xvi]

In the following ten years the principled standpoint adopted by Tweddell in  the  books  he  wrote  and   edited  brought  his  reputation  to  a  wider

 

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audience. In 1855 the Government Inspector of Reformatories, Rev. Sidney Turner (fl.1840-60), and the prison philanthropist, Thomas Wright (1789-1875), invited him to be the pioneering headmaster of a new-styled ‘Industrial School’ in Bury, Lancashire, with his wife acting a s matron. This move, with the opportunity to attend the Manchester Literary Club, brought him into direct contact with three of the poets with whom he had previously published but so far only corresponded, John Critchley Prince (1808-1866), Richard Wright Proctor (Sylvan) (1816-1881) and Charles Swain (1803-1874). Prince stayed with the Tweddells in Bury and intrigued his hosts with eccentric behaviour when saying his bedtime prayers. The last poet, Charles Swain, besides being one of the wealthy, local-landowner members of the Society and a generous patron of the arts, was also an admired poet. The Romantic poet, Robert Southey (1774-1843), observed that, “He was born to be a poet”, whilst a reviewer of the Yorkshire Miscellany (1845), “Liked especially the song of Charles Swain” [i.e. ‘Stanzas for Music’], and Tweddell himself wrote of him, “The ever-treasured Memory of my beloved old friend, who lived Poetry as well as wrote it.”[xvii]

Obviously Tweddell made new acquaintances too, one of the most prominent being Mark Philips (1800-1874), who for 15 years had been the radical Liberal Member of Parliament for Manchester and manager of  a  factory  that  manufactured the then universally known ‘Philips’s Tape’. Tweddell had been particularly interested in the charitable origin of this business. Mark’s father, Robert (1760-1844), had set up the first mill in the Staffordshire village that his family owned in order to give the village farm workers an income when times were hard. The naming tape, used on clothes, was sold in the locality but not really commercially viable. To make it so, he had expanded the business with a factory in Manchester, but still run on benevolent lines. The son took over the company on his father’s retirement and maintained its charitable policy, or, as Tweddell wrote ‘In Memoriam of the Death of Mark Philips, Esq.’, quoting what had been said of Tennyson, “He dared be honest in the worst of times” (p. 42).[xviii] It was in the Bury period that Philips first welcomed Tweddell to his manor near Stratford on Avon, these visits being times of good meals and intense conversations.

In 1860 the industrial school reached a crisis when its key supporter left Bury and the governors lost their initial enthusiasm when funds became difficult to find. Although the couple had found their roles at the school satisfying, albeit extremely arduous, especially for Elizabeth who had found the work had weakened her constitution. Nevertheless, they must have had mixed feelings when the governors closed down the school in August 1860, for, even then, Tweddell was sufficiently unhappy to make a bid to take over the school at his own financial risk. His proposal, however, received no local support and by September the family was back in Stokesley.

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Shortly after arriving in Bury, Tweddell took the opportunity to add Markham as his middle name; the first recorded mention being written in his hand: ‘Bury, December 15th, 1855’,[xix] (and from then on often appears abbreviated to ‘GMT’). Despite publicising the change in the national Freemason newspaper and what it signified, the Markham family seems to have accepted it. The reason why was to appear shortly after his return northward.

By 1861, as soon as he could set up a new printing and publishing company, the family moved into premises in Commercial Street in the nearby, rapidly expanding town of Middlesbrough. Fortuitously then, in 1863, a younger sister of GMT’s father, Frederica Haviside (née Markham), died leaving him a generous annuity, which gave him the opportunity to move the business into a better location at 87 Linthorpe Road. Between 1864 and 1876 the company of Tweddell & Sons reached its apogee and expanded with a branch opened in Stokesley before 1870. He put his second son and apprentice, Horatio John Tweddell (1848-1918), in charge of the long-established printing press his father had bought. This was situated on the north side of the High Street in Stokesley but is now demolished.

This period saw the publication of a series of impressive literature works. The first was a combined magazine and directory for his new town, Tweddell’s Middlesbrough Miscellany of Literature and Advertisements (1870-71), a useful facility for the townspeople.[xx] Around the same time he started to publish a series of booklets called The North of England Tractates, in order to print:

“a collection of small Treatises . . . relating to the North of England; offering them to the general Public at the lowest Prices which will clear the necessary expenses of Publication.”[xxi]

This series became one of the most important places in which regional writers could put their works before the public, including Tweddell’s own in particular. The series reached No. 36 by the time it ended in 1890. No. 1 commenced with a poem by Appleton in pride of place, followed by one by GMT, a grateful obituary to Frederica Haviside (née Markham) as ‘Cleveland Sonnet No. X’ (p. 37). Soon, too, was begun A People’s History of Cleveland and its Vicinage,[xxii] taking a new, radical stance, but ceased after only four completed instalments of the 16 planned. His notes, set out by location and historical aspects, exist in Teesside Archives.[xxiii]

GMT’s second major book, mentioned earlier, was Bards and Authors of Cleveland and South Durham (1872),[xxiv] but only the first volume of the three intended appeared. The lack of its two unpublished volumes or their notes is still regretted as a lost source for further literary research.

 

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This period also saw GMT honoured by the Royal Old North Germanic Language Society, Copenhagen that awarded him a diploma in 1867, probably for his work on the Cleveland dialect, signed by its president, the King of Denmark.[xxv]

As early as the end of 1871 financial problems resurfaced and new ways were tried to find more income without compromising the quality of the work published. At this time the Middlesbrough office was closed down and GMT with his wife and their younger children returned to live and work in Stokesley. They chose Rose Cottage in Commercial Street (now known as 3 Bridge Street), using the ground floor as an office, the back cellar to store books, stationery, notes, etc, and with the living quarters above. Horatio John Tweddell’s growing family (he had married Jane Elizabeth Clark (1850-1934) from Thirsk in Middlesbrough during 1870) lived in an apartment across the road. Associated with the family business was a shop somewhere in the Market Square area in direct competition with the shop of Tweddell’s half-brother, Thomas. The young Jane Elizabeth brought her skills to the business as a dressmaker employing assistants and attempted a short-lived employment agency for domestic servants. An advertisement for the Tweddell shop, reprinted in the 1982 book, Stokesley Selection (edited by A. Wright & J. Mawers) shows: “George Tweddell, Hatter & Bookseller, Commercial Row; Books, Stationery, Teas, Coffees, Snuff, Patent Medicines, gloves, brushes, hats etc.” and also an agency for a fire insurance company. Slaters Yorkshire Directory (in both 1876 & 1879) identifies Jane Elizabeth Tweddell as managing a bakers and confectioners shop in Market Square, and Horatio John Tweddell as a newsagent and bookseller besides a printer.

By 1876, despite these efforts, Tweddell & Sons remained in financial crisis and was bailed out a second time, this time by numerous admirers with a Purse of Gold arranged by William Andrews. These funds, however, were soon lost after being invested in ill-advised shares, as the introduction to A Hundred Masonic Sonnets explains. Inevitably, financial  stress  remained  and  Horatio  John  Tweddell’s need for a greater income to support his growing family became a serious burden on the company’s costs and from 1878, the younger Tweddell sought alternative employment further and further away from Stokesley. It took him four years to find it, first briefly in Goole (further south in Yorkshire), then as a compositor in Mold, North Wales. Fortunately, the esteem he lost in Yorkshire was soon retrieved in Wales when he became one of the few Englishmen to be crowned a Welsh bard in 1886. He adopted the name ‘Efrogid’ (in English meaning ‘Man of York’).

For the older Tweddells, now into their late 50s, illness and tragedy began to stalk  them  causing the  postponement of a number  of  projects.

 

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The first event was caused by the typhoid fever that struck down both their first grandson followed by their oldest daughter, Elizabeth Georgina Hodgson (1845-1880), a minor poet, at the age of 33 within the month of March 1880. GMT’s grief lasted many years for eight years later he was still writing to assuage his distress with the poem ‘My First Grandchild’ (p. 216 below). Inevitably, with death becoming increasingly frequent among his ageing colleagues, GMT wrote a considerable number of obituaries at this time often as poems. Sometimes he sent them uninvited, as with The Royal Leamington Spa Courier, January 3^rd 1874, with one to celebrate Mark Philips’ life. In other cases he was commissioned (probably by a local newspaper in Batley, West Yorkshire) for the death of Isaac Binns (p. 214 below), the Borough accountant who died on August 6^th 1884. The Hanley Directory invited GMT to open its 1889 edition with an obituary to Alderman Matthew Wardaugh (1813-1888), actor manager and a recent mayor of Longton, Staffordshire. GMT will have taken on this request with a particularly strong sense of duty, for Wardaugh had materialized in his life at a number of crucial times. The first time was when the impressionable George was a youth in Stokesley and Wardaugh arrived as a travelling actor playing various Shakespearean roles and helped to inculcate a love of the bard in the young boy. Wardaugh’s Travelling Theatre turned up again in Bury shortly after the family had moved there. It is thought, too, that Wardaugh’s support gave two of Tweddell’s artistic sons the opportunity to flourish in the theatre. Unfortunately, GMT’s obituary task proved difficult though, as his health continued to decline after a blood vessel in his brain had broken in 1885. (An apology for the late publication of A Hundred Masonic Sonnets appears giving the precise date of the event on p. viii – “15th October, 1885”. He was 62 years old at the time.) Evidence of this can be observed in the loss of his writing’s former precision, and sentences now became even longer than previously. He also suffered increasingly from may have been rheumatism, what he called “paralysis”.

Another example of his difficulties can be seen in the Hundred Masonic Sonnets of 1887. With one eye almost blind, he had turned to writing poetry during long evenings when sleep did not come easily. Being without his printer son, GMT was obliged to be his own compositor, an awkward task to set up type for someone with arthritis.

During this period two visitors turned up at Rose Cottage. The first, on 29^th September 1878, was the author, R. A. Douglas Lithgow who was preparing a biography of GMT’s departed friend, John Critchley Prince. Lithgow must have been delighted to glean more than GMT’s reminiscences, for he was able to make copies of the letters Prince had sent to his host.  These would complete the correspondence from GMT to

 

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Prince, which Lithgow had received from Prince’s surviving relatives. This was placed side by side in the biography two years later. In gratitude Douglas gave his interviewee a copy of his Pet Moments, signing it “with the author’s kind regards”.[xxvi]

About ten years later another biographer, John Horsfall Turner of Bradford, turned up to feature Tweddell at the beginning of his second volume of the Yorkshire Genealogist . Horsfall Turner sat opposite his interviewee by the fire in Rose Cottage making notes about GMT’s long life and ancestry.

1892 signalled the final act of Tweddell & Sons, closing with a second edition of Elizabeth Tweddell’s Dialect Poems as illness overwhelmed both poets. They had the help of a female neighbour who tended Elizabeth when bed-ridden while two granddaughters handled daily domestic duties (one being the daughter of their oldest daughter who died of typhoid fever in 1880) under the oversight of the old couple’s only offspring who had stayed in Stokesley, Thomas Cole Tweddell. Money was still a problem, as the value of their annuity must have become considerably deflated, so a number of sons contributed to their parent’s upkeep, especially the childless George (Junior), by this time a successful scenic artist in London.[xxvii]

Sadly GMT wrote nothing for his wife’s death in 1899 (at least nothing survives). At his burial, Oddfellows & Freemasons followed the family in a long cortège to lay his body to rest next to his beloved Elizabeth in Stokesley new cemetery. Although there are two extant obituaries of his death, neither mentions this gathering, but is only available from the Tweddell family tradition.

Posthumously, it was only Tweddell’s historical works that were valued during most of the 20^th century. It was only in the 1980s when interest in him revived with the publication of Stokesley Selection[xxviii], which contains a trail of GMT documents, and Daphne Franks’ 1984 Printing and Publishing in Stokesley[xxix], where Tweddell has his own chapter. Even later, another compendium of local history, etc, Roseberry Topping (Great Ayton Community Archaeology Project), published in 2006, quotes him quite frequently including the story that may explain why GMT went to prison in 1846 for contempt of court for carrying beer to the Trinity Fair against the magistrates’ express instructions.[xxx]

As for GMT’s poems, tastes were changing and Tweddell’s poetry was judged pedantic and old fashioned. As early as 1908 opinions were being expressed publicly that his poetry was ‘boring’ and his son Horatio John wrote from Canada to challenge the idea,[xxxi] quite the opposite to that of his wife’s poetry that was often favourably quoted, often in travel guides and the works of the Yorkshire Dialect Society. Cowley (Honarary Treasurer of the Society[xxxii]) for example, commented in 1963: “She stuck

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to the easy rhythms, genuine dialect and a sound homely social philosophy”, whereas he wrote of Tweddell: “[His poetry] was neither – most of his writings are tedious in the extreme”.[xxxiii] When the internet became widely available in the 1990s it was Elizabeth’s poems that were first given an airing there, but recently, GMT has caught up with his wife.

Finally, Tweddell’s contemporaries held conflicting opinions about him, which caused the grief mentioned above. His professional and mostly middleclass friends admired him, but many of his fellow citizens of Stokesley found him troublesome and his opinions ambiguous, an opinion which may still be active in the twenty first century. Whereas William Andrews, GMT’s Hull friend, preferred to describe him as: ‘A many-sided man—poet, historian, public speaker, and a painstaking collector of local lore’,[xxxiv] the anonymous author of a recent brief guide to Stokesley neatly sums up the attitude of many of George Markham Tweddell’s 19^th century neighbours with an adaptation of Andrew’s portrayal: ‘A man of many interests, poet, historian, stirrer-up of controversy and publisher’.[xxxv] Some reasons for the penultimate description would still be obvious today:

·           He was very antagonistic to capital punishment and hunting (e.g. Halifax Gibbet, p. 64 below and Poetry of an old Besom, “…… poor grouse which sportsmen seek/ to slaughter for amusement”, p. 52 below, line 34);

·           His own family life-style, so admired by his professional colleagues, made a strong challenge to those who adhered to conventional views of family life;

·           He opposed corporal punishment supporting what now would be known as ‘pupil-centred education’, even less understood then than at present. It appears in a number of poems (e.g. The Birch–Betula Alba p. 192 below), whilst Tractates No. 30 (a prose pamphlet) outlines his educational principles and recounts a fierce argument between him and some anonymous townspeople about his suitability as a school governor of the National School (which, incidentally, he, his wife and his children had attended);

·           He occasionally expressed fierce comments about marriages among the upper classes:

“But as long as these mock-marriages continue in vogue – these weddings of wealth, not of heart, of rank and title, not of mutual love, will undoubtedly prevail, for legal prostitutions are they and not true marriages, where two hearts are melted into one”;[xxxvi]

·           Although slavery had been banished in the British Empire, Tweddell continued to criticise the British cotton industry, especially the port of Liverpool. He recognised that this city’s trading supported slavery indirectly by ignoring New York’s exploitation of the slaves of the South of the United States.

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Other issues lying behind Tweddell’s motives may have been too ambiguous for ‘the man in the street’ to understand: how could he have:

·           Served on the committee that opposed the Stokesley, agricultural hiring fair (a notoriously drunken affair),[xxxvii] and made a close friend (John Appleton), who traded as a wholesaler in drinks. Yet he carried alcoholic drinks to the top of Roseberry Topping for the long-standing Trinity Fair to challenge the authorities who wished to close down a similar event that they felt had developed into alcoholic disorder. For this act of defiance GMT was imprisoned.

·           Supported the publication of the broadly humanistic, religious beliefs held by Freemasons, but disliked the Established Church, for its support for the wealthy and the Methodists for their excessive sobriety (in his introduction to the poems of John Castillo), yet counted many clergymen among his friends. What moved GMT spiritually, according to one of his obituarist, was a Unitarian service;[xxxviii]

·           Counted as friends a number of the yeomen who had benefited from the agricultural Enclosures, which had caused great distress to ordinary agricultural labourers, a change still in the memory of many older people in Cleveland at Tweddell’s time. (See the conflict between The Poetry of an old Besom [p. 52 et seq.] and the introduction to his edition of the poetry of John Castillo, which he dedicated to a prominent yeoman farmer – p. 205.)

Finally, here is a quotation from a 17-year-old boy in Edwards Blishen’s 1969 book, The School that I'd like, which GMT would have surely approved:

“If I am studying a book by Molière, I ought to be able to place it in its social, historical, literary and artistic context; I should study it not only in the light of Moliere's other work but in the light of the social and political pressures and artistic and philosophical ideas that formed it. A work of art may be universal in its application, but it is temporal in its expression; to understand it completely I must understand the epoch that formed it. A knowledge of four books does not make up a knowledge of French literature; a study of four books, and their authors taken in their literary and historical context, may at least help to.”

Paul M. Tweddell, 2008, Canterbury

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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