E.S. Turner wrote his first article for the Dundee Courier in 1927. He contributed to Punch for 53 years, and wrote more than eighty pieces for the London Review. His last social history was Unholy Pursuits: The Wayward Parsons of Grub Street. He died in 2006.
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Vol. 16 No. 11 · 9 June 1994
pages 18-19 | 3101 words
Shopping in Lucerne
E.S. Turner
- Addicted to Romance: The Life and Adventures of Elinor Glyn by Joan Hardwick
Deutsch, 306 pp, £20.00, June 1994, ISBN 0 233 98866 1
- Mother of Oscar: The Life of Jane Francesca Wilde by Joy Melville
Murray, 308 pp, £19.99, June 1994, ISBN 0 7195 5102 1
Making love on a dead cat was a fantasy of the Belle Epoque. The much-quoted squib by Anon went:
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Letters
Vol. 16 No. 13 · 7 July 1994
From Terence Hegarty
It is a pity E.S. Turner did not take a few minutes to read up on Irish events in 1848, ‘the Year of Revolutions’, before framing his rash and rather offensive sentence, ‘Erin did not rise’ (LRB, 9 June). At the very least, his imagination and intellectual curiosity might have been kindled by the sad little fracas that shipped several notable Protestants to Van Diemens Land, exiled a future Canadian prime minister, sent a man to (eventually) drown in the Missouri on his way to assume the governorship of Montana, and established the still vibrant Irish colony in New Orleans (Kate Chopin was born Kate O’Flaherty). Turner might have wondered, was John Mitchel a significant Early Victorian proto-Fascist? Or he might have enjoyed speculating on the classic ideological conflict of revolutionary action v. parliamentary method (the late Daniel O’Connell) as exemplified in the wee Irish rebellion of 1848. Is Turner by any chance attracted to Yeatsian byways? Then the names Thomas Davis (dead in 1845, but a major force in the memory of 1848) and Charles Gavan Duffy might have gained clarity. But most important of all, Turner might have begun to understand why Lady Wilde, in spite of all her faults, was so movingly mourned by her heartbroken son in De Profundis.
Terence Hegarty
Melrose, New York
