The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Volume 2: Reader’s Guide PART 1. Christina Scull

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СКАЧАТЬ later that September rented a small house at 214 Alcester Road, Moseley, near a tram route into the city. According to Humphrey Carpenter, however, ‘no sooner had [the family] settled than they had to move: the house was to be demolished to make room for a fire-station’ (Biography, p. 25). At the end of 1900 or the beginning of 1901 Mabel, Ronald, and his brother *Hilary moved once again, to 86 West-field Road, Kings Heath. Mabel chose their new home because it was close to the Roman Catholic church of St Dunstan, then a building of wood and corrugated iron on the corner of Westfield Road and Station Road. Tolkien now first came into contact with the Welsh *language, in names on passing coal-trucks.

      Readers of Carpenter’s Biography, or of later *biographies which closely follow Carpenter, will have a mental picture of the Birmingham of Tolkien’s youth as purely an industrial city. Writing of Tolkien’s brief time in Moseley, Carpenter says:

      Home life was very different [in the second half of 1900] from what [Ronald] had known at Sarehole. His mother had rented a small house on the main road in the suburb of Moseley, and the view from the windows was a sad contrast to the Warwickshire countryside: trams struggling up the hill, the drab faces of passers-by, and in the distance the smoking factory chimneys of Sparkbrook and Small Heath. To Ronald the Moseley house remained in memory as ‘dreadful’. [p. 25]

      It is true to say that Birmingham was a centre of the Industrial Revolution, known for its metal-working, and that it was a focus of the railways. A contemporary observer called it ‘a metropolis of machinery … exceedingly interesting as a consistently developed exemplification of the nineteenth-century spirit’ (Harry Quilter, What’s What (1902), p. 236). Inevitably there was pollution and traffic, and substantial development was underway. But in residential suburbs such as Moseley factory smoke was less pronounced, and local industry supported the city’s excellent schools and museums, including an art gallery with works by the Pre-Raphaelites (see *Art). As Maggie Burns has pointed out (‘“… A Local Habitation and a Name …”’, Mallorn 50 (Autumn 2010)),

      maps of the time [of Tolkien’s youth], in addition to contemporary descriptions by people living in Birmingham suburbs, give a different picture. The parts of Birmingham where Tolkien lived had parks, streams, gardens and trees. Birmingham was and is a city of trees. …

      The Birmingham described as wasteland by Carpenter in the 1970s was not the Birmingham that Tolkien knew around 1900. Much of the town had been rebuilt during the 20 years before Tolkien arrived there as a three-year-old in 1985. There were many new and imposing buildings. …

      The countryside was not distant from the city as implied in some Tolkien biographies. Sarehole was [only] four miles from the centre of Birmingham. … Horses were in the city as well as in the country.

      In 1900 trams were still drawn by horses and cars were a rarity. [pp. 26–7]

      Moseley in fact, situated on high ground, was relatively free from factory smoke – as a contemporary guidebook description put it, even more so than Edgbaston, which was considered the most fashionable suburb of Birmingham – and it was on the edge of the countryside, not far distant from Sarehole. In his poem *The Battle of the Eastern Field (1911, a parody of Macaulay) Tolkien writes of ‘Mosli’s [Moseley’s] emerald sward’ (and of ‘Edgbastonia’s [Edgbaston’s] ancient homes’). Kings Heath was to the south of Moseley, and although the Tolkiens’ home there was in a noisy and undoubtedly smoky location, near the railway with its coal-powered engines, the slopes of the cutting behind the house were covered with grass and flowers, and (as today) there were fields on the other side of the line.

      Dissatisfied with St Dunstan’s, Mabel looked for a new place of worship and found the *Birmingham Oratory in the suburb of Edgbaston. In early 1902 she and her sons moved to 26 Oliver Road, Edgbaston (the house no longer exists), conveniently near the Oratory church and its attached grammar school, St Philip’s. There they stayed until April 1904, when Mabel was taken into hospital suffering from diabetes. Her boys lived for a while apart from their mother, until they were reunited in the hamlet of *Rednal, a few miles from the centre of Birmingham to the south-west, and were together until Mabel’s death on 14 November 1904.

      Immediately after the loss of their mother Ronald and Hilary stayed with Laurence Tolkien, one of their father’s brothers, at Dunkeld, Middleton Hall Road, Kings Norton. By January 1905 *Father Francis Morgan, the priest whom Mabel had named her sons’ guardian, placed them instead with their Aunt Beatrice Suffield at 25 Stirling Road, Edgbaston, not far from the Oratory. Their room was on the top floor.

      Early in 1908, life with Aunt Beatrice having proved unhappy for the boys, Father Francis moved them to 37 Duchess Road, Edgbaston, the home of the Faulkner family. Ronald and Hilary had a rented room on the second floor; on the first floor was another lodger, Edith Bratt (*Edith Tolkien), with whom they became friends. Edith played the piano and accompanied soloists at musical evenings given by Mrs Faulkner, but was discouraged from practising. Gradually Ronald and Edith fell in love. When their clandestine relationship came to the attention of Father Francis late in 1909 he took steps to end it. Ronald and Hilary were now removed to new lodgings with Thomas and Julia MacSherry at 4 Highfield Road, Edgbaston, at which address Tolkien lived until going up to Exeter College, *Oxford in October 1911.

      During his years at King Edward’s School Tolkien became familiar with central Birmingham and with some of its merchants. Among these were Cornish’s bookshop in New Street, which Tolkien explored for books on *Philology; E.H. Lawley & Sons at 24 New Street, a jeweller at which Ronald and Edith bought each other presents in January 1910 (see Life and Legend, fig. 25); and Barrow’s Stores in Corporation Street (north from New Street), until the 1960s a flourishing grocer’s which had its origin in a shop founded in 1824 by John Cadbury (of Cadbury’s cocoa). An engraving of Barrow’s Stores is reproduced in The Tolkien Family Album, p. 26. Tolkien and some of his friends at King Edward’s School, having formed a Tea Club, met regularly in Barrow’s Tea Room. *Christopher Wiseman recalled that ‘in the Tea Room there was a sort of compartment, a table for six, between two large settles, quite secluded; and it was known as the Railway Carriage. It became a favourite place for us, and we changed our title to the Barrovian Society after Barrow’s Stores’ (quoted in Biography, p. 46). The group ultimately combined the names Tea Club and Barrovian Society, abbreviated as *T.C.B.S.

      On 9 November 1916, having contracted trench fever during military service in France, Tolkien was admitted to the First Southern General Hospital, a converted facility of over one thousand beds at the then newly built Birmingham University in Edgbaston. He was a patient there until 9 December 1916, when he was able to take sick leave. During these few weeks in hospital he may have begun to write *The Book of Lost Tales.

      Referring to Sarehole, Tolkien wrote in a draft letter to Michael Straight that he had been ‘brought up in an “almost rural” vilage of Warwickshire on the edge of the prosperous bourgeoisie of Birmingham’ (probably January or February 1956, Letters, p. 235). Maggie Burns has suggested that some of Tolkien’s relatives, many of whom lived in Moseley, could be described as ‘prosperous bourgeoisie’. Arthur Tolkien’s sister Mabel lived with her husband, Thomas Mitton, in ‘Abbotsford’, a large house with a garden in Wake Green Road in Moseley. His grandparents on his mother’s side lived off Wake Green Road in Cotton Lane, from 1904 to 1930; and on his father’s side, his grandparents lived in Church Road, also off Wake Green Road, until 1900. Mabel Tolkien’s sister’s family, the Incledons (*Incledon family), had what Maggie Burns describes as ‘a luxurious new house’ in Chantry Road, Moseley, ‘with a garden running down to a private park’ (‘“… A Local Habitation and a Name …”’, p. 27).

      At least in the period 1913–15, Tolkien occasionally visited his friend *Robert Q. Gilson at his family home in Marston СКАЧАТЬ