I’ve just spent a few days in the Lake District, staying only a few doors away from the Wordsworth House in Cockermouth, where Richard, William, Dorothy, John and Christopher Wordsworth were born. In 1937 the house was due to be demolished to make way for a bus station, but luckily it was rescued from the clutches of the bus company when the Wordsworth Memorial Fund bought it and gave it to the National Trust. The NT have done a good job of recreating a 1770s style house, complete with costumed servants. In 2009 it was rescued from yet another peril when Cockermouth was hit by floods, when its dedicated staff moved the house’s contents to safety on the upper floors and afterwards cleaned up the debris and floodwater (a horrible mucky job judging by the photographs).

I also went to Grasmere and visited the Wordsworth graves; my thoughts were with John particularly who died in a shipwreck only three days out from Portsmouth en route to India and China. The tragic story is well-told in Al…

Emma Taylor of Accreditedonlinecolleges.com has drawn my attention to a blog on their website (16 March 2011) listing 50 Quintessential British Novels. I know nothing about accredited on line colleges, but I did enjoy reading the list which includes many of my own favourites, and one book that I had never heard of but now plan to read – Flatland by Edwin A Abbott. I particularly enjoyed the breezy outlines – Darcy’s “legions of screaming fangirls” in Pride and Prejudice especially springs to mind. If you want to compare it to your own list of Quintessential British Novels the blog is at

http://www.accreditedonlinecolleges.com/blog/2011/50-quintessential-british-novels/

With thanks to Emma for taking an interest in my literary ramblings!

Yesterday (2 April 2011) was the anniversary of the women’s boycott of the 1911 Census and I marked the event by joining historians Jill Liddington and Tara Morton on their “Artists and Evaders” walk around Kensington. As a suffrage demonstration, the refusal of many militant and non-militant suffrage campaigners to fill in their Census forms was far from being the most spectacular or successful of the protests made by disenfranchised women. According to the Registrar in a letter to The Times on 1 April 1911, if the suffragists hoped that the Census would be seriously affected they would be proved wrong. Even if 100,000 women were “bold enough to defy the law”, he said, in an overall population which “will no doubt be found to exceed 40 millions” (in fact he overestimated by half a million) their absence would make little difference. In the event, many evasion attempts simply did not work: women were counted anyway.

Even so, Christabel Pankhurst hailed the demonstration as a success, …