We arrived in Portsmouth after an uneventful trip, but ended up at the wrong campus! Still, we were put right by a groundsman there, who gave us good direction to Rees Hall. Our room in on the 6th floor, which is pretty well into the roof, but we have fantastic views across the Solent to the Isle of Wight. That is if the fog does not come down. Last night we could barely see the street lights from our window the fog was so thick. But today has been a perfect English summer day—in fact much too good to be stuck indoors listening to lectures on various aspects of Charles Dickens’s “Barnaby Rudge”! Fortunately, the afternoon programme was a bus ride around Portsmouth, visiting various Dickens-related places, including the house where he was born, and the graves of Ellen Ternan and Maria Beadnel—two very significant women in his life.
To unwind before dinner, we went for a stroll across the common to the beach, which was very pleasant. It was interesting to see many family groups with small disposable BBQs in the park. These BBQs are aluminium dishes, about 20cm X 30cm, preloaded with heatbeads and a grill, and used directly on the grass. The result is that the park is dotted with small rectangular scorched patches. Presumably the local council approves of this, as there are a number of BBQ disposal bins scattered around the periphery of the park.
It was also interesting to see that they still run a hovercraft ferry service across the Solent—long after the cross channel services from Ramsgate and Dover gave them up as unviable. When there is no fog, we can see the ferries coming and going to and from France, as well as the hovercraft.
In the evening we went to see a performance of Barnaby Rudge, dramatized by a local playwright, and performed by an amateur company in the King’s Theatre. It was very well done, considering the very complicated nature of the book. The theatre itself was very old-fashioned and impressive, with three very steep balconies towering above the stalls.
The rest of the formal part of the conference was good. There were some excellent presentations, but very little time for discussion or questions—except for the penultimate presentation on the final day. This presentation had the title “The impact of invention on Dickens”, and I think everyone thought that as the presenter was a physicist who had worked on various engineering projects such as radar stations, the talk was to be about invention during the 19th century. It turned out that the presenter is a bit of an iconoclast, and lambasted many very highly regarded Dickens scholars for ‘inventing’ various aspects of Dickens’s life and personality—particularly in relation to his marriage to, life with, and separation from, Catherine. As his views are very different to those of most scholars (in the same way as my views about Dickens’s relationship with Ellen Ternan differ from the great majority of scholars), he prompted a vigorous outburst of heated indignation from many in the audience which was very interesting to see. This was perhaps one of the highlights of the conference! Having had a paper on Ellen Ternan accepted for publication in the ‘Dickensian’, I expect I shall be greeted with a similar outburst in due course! There is no doubt that anyone who sticks their head above the parapet of conventional thinking in Dickensian scholarship, gets it severely shot off!
Enough of the conference itself. There was a wonderful trip to nearby Roman ruins, the Fishbourne Roman palace. This was the largest Roman palace known to have existed in the whole of the European Roman Empire. Built in the very early years of the Roman occupation of England, about 45-50 AD, it was eventually destroyed by fire, and the ruins discovered in 1963 when workmen were digging a trench for the installation of a new water main to service a housing estate that was to be built. Fortunately a millionaire amateur archaeologist living in the area bought the entire site (that part not already built on), and it has now been fully excavated and preserved in a huge hangar-like building. There are a large number of very well preserved mosaic floors, bits of hypocaust etc. From the palace we went to the Saxon church at the tiny, very quaint village of Bosham for a picnic lunch before moving to the castle on at Porchester on the outskirts of Portsmouth. This has the highest Norman keep in the UK (second only to Rochester), and is a very good state of repair—(considering it is a ruin!), and was quite awe-inspiring to wander through. It has the largest space enclosed by a Roman wall anywhere in the British isles, with enough room for two full sized cricket fields, a small church and a burial ground. Originally right on the edge of deep, navigable water, it is now surrounded by little more than marshland and very shallow sea.
In general, the food, both at the conference and at our accommodation, was of a very high standard, but they were a little stingy with the nibbles at the opening reception, and with the wine at the official banquet. Despite that, and a few minor hiccups which seemed to annoy some of the delegates, overall I think the organisers did a very good job.
As a town, Portsmouth appears to have little to recommend it. It was severely damaged in the war, but the rebuilding appears to be somewhat characterless. Apart, that is, from around the harbour, where recent development has been much more successful that, say Docklands in Melbourne.
That is enough for this blog, I think. I shall continue with our last few days at Portsmouth in the next instalment.
Slingsby's Miscellany 