Customer Reviews

Period Piece (Ann Arbor Paperbacks)

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Wood-cut artist Gwen Raverat was associated with the Bloomsbury group, and grew up with the Keynes children in nineteenth-century Cambridge. Here, she tells the story of growing up amid the fads and fetishes not only of academic and Victorian England, but of her extremely individual family, children and grandchildren of Charles Darwin. Raverat's wood-cut illustrations are as illuminating and funny as her text.

Darwin fanatics and Jane Austen fans will gobble up this delicious dessert. Written by Darwin's grandaughter (Raverat was George's daughter born too late to know her illustrious grandfather personally)PERIOD PIECE contains both a wealth of Family Stories that helps humanize the usual image of the Great Victorian Sage and some real (although often tongue-in-cheek) insights into Late-Victorian/Edwardian Society. As Raverat says in the Preface, the book doesn't really have a beginning or an end, it is easily dipped-in-to at any point & you will have to be totally lacking in a sense of humor not to come away both charmed & informed.

This is a really lovely book, perfect for reading at bedtime or in the garden under the apple tree on a summer's afternoon. Gwen Raverat writes vividly with chapters by theme rather than chronologically and and gives a rounded view of her childhood experiences and the Darwin family of uncles and aunts.

An absolute masterpiece of comic writing. Ms. Raverat drawings mesh perfectly with her loving, but not pious, treatment of her eccentric aunts and uncles. A deft ironist, a great memoir of late 19th century Cambridge. I promise you will force this book on everyone you love and they will thank you for it.

The short of it is, the author was born in England in 1885 and these are her memories of growing up. But the long of it is, the corner of England she grew up in was Cambridge, on the edge of one of the world's great intellectual centers, and the family she grew up in was the Darwins. Her grandfather was Charles, author of _On the Origin of Species,_ and her father, George, was an astronomer and mathematician of note in his own right who was made a Knight of the Bath for his work. Though she makes light of her artistic abilities throughout the book, the author became a renowned wood-cut artist and book illustrator. (She later married a French painter and was part of the Bloomsbury Group and a friend of Virginia Woolf.) Moreover, her same-age cousin, Frances Darwin, became Frances Cornford, the poet, her little sister, Margaret, married the brother of John Maynard Keynes, and her little brother, Charles, became a physicist who worked under Rutherford and later ran Britain's National Physical Laboratory and worked on the Manhattan Project. And, just to touch all the bases, her second cousin was Ralph Vaughn Williams. That's quite a family! The author's mother was from Philadelphia and was accounted a beauty and loved the social whirl, while Gwen knew she wasn't, and never would be, a beauty and even when young she had no use for fashion or appearances. She wasn't especially social, did not enjoy parties, couldn't dance, and hated going away to school. But she loved her large, extended family, saw most of them nearly every day because her five surviving uncles and aunts all lived nearby, and spent much of each summer of her childhood with her crew of cousins at Down, her grandfather's country house. She never knew her famous grandfather, who had died three years before her birth, but she tells many stories of Grandmama, Emma Wedgwood Darwin -- who was something of an intellectual, too, but Gwen remembers the licorice she kept in her sewing basket for her grandchildren. And while she describes the life she led as a child of the time, and the things she saw and the games she played and the famous people she occasionally met, she saves her most affecting and insightful writing for a long, discursive chapter on all her uncles and aunts, every one of whom comes across as an entirely human and entirely fascinating figure, and not nearly as distinguished in Gwen's young view as they were in the grown-up world. And the chapter in which she recounts her developing views on religion is both very funny and quite serious. It's a very successful book, almost a group biography, and it's no wonder it has remained in print for nearly sixty years. A truly engaging and beautifully written -- and wittily illustrated -- piece of work.

First off, I notice I've been using the word "charming" in a few reviews lately. So I will not refer to this book as being charming. It is, however, delightful, appealing, winning, and entrancing. It is a memoir of the author's childhood in the late Victorian period, and though her grandfather was Charles Darwin, and most of the relatives she profiles are Darwins or Wedgwoods, several of whom had quite distinguished careers, one doesn't read the book to find out about the lives of famous people. In fact, no one does anything particularly noteworthy in the book at all. What delights is rather the affectionate picture of a time and place, and the wonderful wonderful voice of the writer: "The first religious experience that I can remember is getting under the nursery table to pray that the dancing mistress might be dead before we got to the Dancing Class." "By all accounts I was a charming baby. As I have never been considered particularly charming since then, I think it only just to myself to set this on record...How I have gone off since then!" The book is illustrated thoughout with the author's own line drawings, with captions which quite often made me giggle with glee. A great escape from the tumult of one's own hurried life.

Book was in excelllent condition. A wonderful memoir of the childhood of Charles Darwin's granddaughter. I already owned it and bought it as a birthday present for a close friend. Nice to know that it is still in print. Ilustrated by the author, Gwen Raverat. Charming and very amusing to contrast her upbringing with priveleged children of today.

I read this book years ago when I shockingly came upon information about my probable relationship to the Darwins through marriage, specifically through the American family of the author's mother Maud, and that information sent me on a quest for all things Darwin -- familial, not so much scientific. That quest may never end since it turns out that the family of Charles Darwin contains an endless number of writers, artists, scientists, statesmen, and just regular people, most of whom have written books! I am thrilled to belong to such a clan, no matter how peripherally.

Gwen Darwin Raverat, the author of this book, was a very talented and famous artist who was a member of The Bloomsbury Group and who ultimately had a sad life which makes it all the more remarkable that she would write this charmer about her childhood with her large extended family. She was born into such a fascinating group of people and she was able to write about them with clarity and an amazing amount of grace and humor which I realized more and more throughout the book was no small accomplishment. Although I read Period Piece some years ago it remains fresh as I thumb through it now and observe again the hilarity of so many situations and customs seen through the eyes of the adult child, Gwen. It is a reminder to us all that the only constant in our lives is change, and that we shouldn't take ourselves so seriously.

Gwen Reverat's loving portraits, drawn from her Cambridge childhood late in the nineteenth century, feature her wonderfully eccentric Darwin aunts and uncles (not grandpa Charles- she was too young for him) and delicious tales of her American mother. She describes without rancor, but with intelligence, the limitations women lived with, including, from the skin up, the clothes of a Victorian lady. My favorite line: "When my granddaughter Anne was about five, she said to me one day: 'Grandmamma, when I am grown up, I think I shall be a witch. There are too many ladies, don't you think?'" Reverat's own illustrations of the stories she tells are charming.

Four or five anecdotes save Gwen Raverat's "Period Piece" from being so sweet it gives you tummy ache. It is no surprise that this charming memoir has remained in print for nearly 60 years. It has the "Upstairs" cachet, relieved by the Whiggery of Raverat's family -- she was the daughter of Charles Darwin -- which fits comfortably with both American and English tastes now.

Raverat was born in 1885 and her childhood ended about the same time the Boer War did, so there are plenty of horses, tea parties, country house theatricals and such to appeal to the romantics. Socially, the Darwins were middle class except for the snobbery and religion. Gwen's mother excepted, who was the type of ignorant American puritan who made H.L. Mencken's fortune.

Thus, the aunts went in for prudishness (especially in front of the servants) and silly dress codes, which Raverat can play against, giving the important sense of superiority that appeals to secret snobs.

In his memoirs of English society, a generation later, Peter Medawar alleged that Americans were wrong to imagine that P.G. Wodehouse country life really existed. But it did. There are no Georgian silver cow creamers in "Period Piece," but Raverat's aunts were every bit as dotty as Bertie Wooster's.

For me the most memorable episode, because like the book as a whole it captures the confusion of childhood so well, was Raverat's understanding of J.M.W. Turner's "The Fighting Temeraire." She and her cousins thought the little black tugboat was the Temeraire.

Raverat led a sheltered childhood and young ladyhood, but on occasion the grim features of the Victorian/Wilhelminian era intruded. It is these -- brutality to a peasant servant in Hamburg, animal torture in Cambridge, the lower depths of drunkenness in the alleys around the Slade School -- that raise "Period Piece" from idle gossip to seriousness.

The book is illustrated with Raverat's line drawings, very much in the style of the slighter travel books of her time. They are not charming.

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