Charlotte Mew Chronology with mental, historical and geographical connections linking with her own words, and listing her essays, stories, poems and friends.

Introduction: life - inference - intensity - history - science - Chicks - evolution - dissolution - sensual - God - language - madness - faerie - spirit

Charlotte Mew was born in 1869. Her father was an architect and her mother the daughter and granddaughter of architects. Charlotte was the second of four children who survived early childhood. Their nursery and their childhood was watched over by Elizabeth Goodman, the servant who stirred their imaginations even though she did not value their writings. Charlotte wrote about her in An Old Servant (1913). Charlotte's first published work was a short story, Passed in 1894. The journey in Passed was through Clerkenwell. The Country Sunday , published before The London Sunday, in 1905, has been interpreted as an account of her childhood holidays on the Isle of Wight. Charlotte's best known work is a collection of poems, The Farmers Bride, in 1916. This includes the poem In a Nunhead Cemetery relating to her brother, Henry Herne Mew, who died in an asylum in 1901. Her sister, Freda, was also a patient in an asylum. On the Asylum Road and Ken are two of Charlotte's poems that explore her thoughts and feelings about insanity and asylums. Charlotte died from swallowing disinfectant in 1928. Freda lived in the mental hospital until she died in 1958.

Inference: Charlotte Mew published stories, essays and poems. She was very determined not to provide anyone with even the briefest of autobiography. I think we should be cautious about inferring her life from her writing. Even the most biographical of her essays could, in theory, be complete fiction; and poetry has a structure and content of its own, unconstrained by any relation to the life that generated it. One of the reasons for constructing a life and works of Charlotte Mew in this inter-linked web form, is to allow any speculation about the relation of her writing to her life to be tested against other sources of information. Her writing in Passed (fiction), An Old Servant and The Hay Market (New Statesman articles) reveal close links to the life of Elizabeth Goodman and the geography of Clerkenwell and Cumberland Market and this may be grounds for inferring links in other works where relationships cannot be so firmly established. It is not, however, intended to obscure the creative insight of Charlotte's art by reading it as a diary. Ken, for example, is a poem, and should not be read as a description of Freda Mew - Anymore than the old town with its nuns and priests is a description of Carisbrooke - Knowing about Freda, however, does allow us to think more about the issues on which Ken gives us insight. Without, in any way, distorting the internal unity of the art, we can say that Charlotte's writing maintains a remarkable relationship to her life and experience. This is so much so that Mary Davidow was convinced that E.V. Knox's parody of Charlotte's poetry revealed an insider's information about Charlotte's secrets. I do not think it does. Without his knowing it, the one short book of poems had revealed to him the architecture of the poet's life. No wonder Charlotte was upset.

Intensity: There is a concentrated intensity to Charlotte's perception. Twice, she suggests she shares her vision with the blind. (See The Country Sunday and Men and Trees). It is sight that hears and feels and smells every dimension of the immediate, imminent, reality and all its passion and energy. Her essay The Wheat, first published in 1954 shows how the soul of a bank worker is revealed in one delirious utterance. In this essay, she writes about "the throb in the breasts of things that ought to be flying". A few years before her suicide, she wrote in Domus Caedet Arborem about the city crouching, waiting to spring on living things. In her poem Madeleine in Church Charlotte describes how (from childhood?) Madeleine suffered an intensity of being and seeing that was, at once, mystical and sensual.
I could hardly bear
The dreams upon the eyes of white geraniums in the dusk,
The thick, close voice of musk,
The jessamine music on the thin night air,
Or, sometimes, my own hands about me anywhere -
The sight of my own face (for it was lovely then) even the scent of my own hair
In A Country Book she explains, quoting Richard Jefferies, that there are no words to describe the colours of a dandelion - But quoting Byron she exclaims "Oh that my words were colours". How she conveys the immediacy of her perception, naming but not describing the colours, can be seen in her description of the flowers In the Curé's Garden.This, like much of Charlotte's writing, from Passed onwards, is about a dialogue between a spiritual and material reality: "God's parle with dust". In Passed she had discovered in a kiss "a page of gospel" that the priest facing the spiritual, with his back to the material, "might never read". In The Forest Road, the intensity of love is too much for her. She hears her soul singing amongst the trees, and escapes.

History: Usually quietly, many of Charlotte Mew's writings explore issues of the history she lived through. Her first publication, Passed reflects on her journeys into the slums of London, in the late 19th century, at the time when sociologists and religious leaders were making the same exploration. The significance of the century's turning is recorded in her poems on the death and funeral of Queen Victoria. In Notes in a Brittany Convent (1901) the new sciences approach old religion. Mary Stuart in Fiction, written during the miltant suffragette protests, argues her passion for victory. Men and Trees is not quiet comment. It attacks the destruction of the Congo, the Amazon and the people who live there, and defends the "barbarian" against the "culte du moi". Her censored poem Ken picks up on the theme of relations with people of "poor wits" that she raises in Passed, and may be her personal protest against the ideas behind the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act. The Great War for Civilisation is commemorated in two 1915 poems, and reflected on in The Cenotaph in 1919. She is present at the birth of Labour, with the article on the life of Elizabeth Goodman and on the life in Cumberland Market, published in The New Statesman in 1913 and 1914, (poosibly) reviews in the Daily Herald in 1919, and her poem "Old Shepherd's Prayer" in the first edition of The New Leader in 1922. As she herself approches death, she sees in the destruction of the trees by her home, to make room for more buildings, something symbolic.

Science: Charlotte Mew's prose and poetry has in it reflections of the development of natural and social sciences. Natural scientists figure prominently amongst her circle of friends: notably Harriette Chick, the Tansleys, the Brownes and Francis Wall Oliver. In 1901, when Charlotte's brother died of tuberculosis, the new science bacteriology, that Harriette Chick had made her speciality, was reflected in Charlotte's writing. The germ theory of disease, applied to cancer, may even have been an element in the ideas that led to Charlotte's suicide. Brittany, where Charlotte stayed and whose mythologies she studied, was also the location of Francis Wall Oliver's pioneer field trips in the even newer science of ecology. Charlotte's interest in what we might now call "green issues" is evident throughout her writing, but reaches a manifesto peak in her (1913) Men and Trees essays. Charlotte regarded herself as an urban being, but with nature beneath her, in what we might call her subconscious. The Society for Psychical Research would have called it her subliminal self. This duality of being is reflected in many of her poems, including The Changeling, where the fairy call of nature draws the child away from the noise and urbanity of the nursery. This occupation with another consciousness is present in Charlotte's writing from the beginning and may partly explain the new interest in her work that appears to coincide with the interest in psychoanalysis and associated ideas that developed about the time of the first world war. The complexity of levels of consciousness may be strongest in her unfinished story Aglaë about the passions of a spinster aunt.

Chicks In the world that Charlotte Mew wrote about, science was not isolated from art and literature: And sociology was related to the natural sciences in a way that it no longer is. To recognise Charlotte's world we must recover these relationships. We are helped to do so by her friendship with the Chick sisters. The Chick sisters, and their descendants, were active in the arts and the sciences and it is clear from Harriette's diary that conversation flowed easily across all areas. The science of evolution was embedded in literature in the bookplate that Arthur Tansley (Edith's husband) designed. Similarly, Tansley's friend botanist Frederick Frost Blackman (Elsie's husband) was a patron of the Fitzwilliam Museum. Tansley's ecology might be regarded as a development of the biology of Herbert Spencer. Spencer sought the most general laws with the widest application and his evolutionary biology lay at the heart of his social science.

Evolution Before Herbert Spencer's evolutionary biology there was Georg Friedrich Hegel - Henri Saint Simon and Auguste Comte - with the concept of the evolution of mind in history that Comte formulated as a progress from religion (theology) through philosophy (metaphysics) to science (positivism). Edward Burnett Tylor's application of these ideas to the development of empirical anthropology in Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom (1871) was published when Charlotte Mew was one or two years old. William Robertson Smith's application of anthropological thought to the Bible had been published by the time she was twenty one and James Frazer's application of anthropological thinking to the crucifixion of Christ was published when she was thirty. Her detailed analysis of these ideas, in Men and Trees, was published when she was in her early 40s. Men and Trees is an anthropological study that makes full use of Tylor's concept that present culture incorporates survivals of the past. The sacrifice of Christ on a tree, as analysed by Frazer, is central to Charlotte Mew's moral commentary on her times.

Dissolution The first part of Charlotte Mew's life was shaped by her family's objective of perpetuating itself. She and her brothers and sisters carried forward the names of relatives that would otherwise have been lost, and, with the names, endowments. The rest of her life, and that of her sister Anne, was shaped by their decision to extinguish the family line, to exterminate its taint. Whilst accepting the constraint that she should not have children, Charlotte took issue with other implications of the dominant sciences of evolution and dissolution; eugenics and social hygiene. Those sciences she leaves unnamed, but she battles explicitly with the related philosophy of the cult of selfishness and the omnipresence and omniscience of the market place. In Men and Trees, she argues that civilisation has replaced the old gods and devils by the worship of self. Civilisation is shocked by the blood sacrifices of the old religions, but it has its own blood sacrifices in the commercial exploitation of the rubber trees of the equatorial forests and the destruction of the barbarian cultures of their inhabitants. In Herbert Spencer's language of science, evolution is fuelled by the survival of the fittest and civilisation is the victory of the individual. Its opposite is dissolution, the degeneration of races and individuals - a dissolution that includes insanity in the individual as well as the degeneration of races. In Passed, in Ken and in On the Asylum Road, Charlotte describes the degenerate in terms that discover virtues in their being. In The Cenotaph, the empty tomb of the son or lover testifies against the cult of selfishness. It stands in the market place asking who will buy and sell those things that should not be bought and sold.

Sensual Charlotte's world is sensual. It is her sensuality that unites materialism with spirit. Like William Blake, who she much resembles, she sees [the] world in a grain of sand. Some of her writing pivots on death. Through death, she brings life to life. This is apparent in her comparison of this life with the idea of heaven in her poem In the Fields
Can I believe there is a heavenlier world than this?
And if there is
Will the heart of any everlasting thing
Bring me these dreams that take my breath away?

Two other striking death images are materialist ones. The first is one of death being like a candle going out. It is taught her by Miss Bolt, the agnostic needlewoman whose worldly wisdom tutored her childhood. As a young woman, in her poem An Ending, Charlotte uses the same metaphor to confront the religious judge (Samuel Chick?) who thinks she has missed her way. Her soul is "just a spark alight for her". In death it goes out. But the beauty of the sensual is heaven you would go to hell to experience again: A golden street? Give me the yellow wheat!. But this is not a spiritless or irreligious materialism, nor is it the materialism of the culte du moi. The golden wheat of her youth is the same experience of the spirit of sensual reality that enlightens grieving lovers and mothers at The Cenotaph and the delirious bank worker in The Wheat

The second death image is of a body rotting to a skeleton, whilst the hair continues to grow. This can be seen as part of Charlotte's exploration of the phenomena, the experience, of life and death. It is an image in her "mad-woman" poem The Forest Road in which the soul or spirit of the woman struggles with her body. In In Nunhead Cemetery the experienced contrast is emphasised by the word THAT:
There is something horrible about a flower;
This, broken in my hand, is one of those
He threw it in just now: it will not live another hour;
There are thousands more: you do not miss a rose.
One of the children hanging about
Pointed at the whole dreadful heap and smiled
This morning after THAT was carried out;
There is something terrible about a child.
We were like children last week, in the Strand;
That was the day you laughed at me ...
Life and death are experiences for the living. Requiescat says it would be "strange" if the dead had memories. In the experience of the living, however, life penetrates death (as in the growing hair) and death penetrates life (as in the living becoming something terrible in the face of the clay of death). Blake's Innocence and Experience comes into my mind as I read these images. The child becomes experienced by death, as Charlotte had. In The Fête, where only a woman's hair belongs to God, the adolescent becomes experienced through sex. In this poem, sex experience is not only development, it is also has elements of dying.
There is something new in the old heavenly air of Spring -
The smell of beasts, the smell of dust - The Enchanted Thing!
All my life long I shall see moonlight on the fern
And the black trunks of trees. Only the hair
Of any woman can belong to God.
The stalks are cruelly broken where we trod,
There had been violets there,
I shall not care
As I used to do when I see the bracken burn.

God In Charlotte Mew's writing, making one (atonement) appears more of a problem than even our all-knowing - all-suffering - all loving creator fathoms. Fallen flesh has questions that God does not answer. His arms are full of broken things. The world is fractured and, in its fracturing, we see, not only its cruelty, but its beauty. The trees murdered to make way for the Quaker temple, recall that even a rat should be alive in the spring. And heaven cannot equal the beauty that passes as the shadows of leaves on growing grass. The gift of Charlotte's writing is it problems. Even as she writes that only a woman's hair belongs to God, one realises that her hair has become the centre of sensual desire.

Language The language of Charlotte Mew's writing frequently includes the combined use of French and English, usually in dialogue; sometimes just in titles. There is occasional use of Latin and Spanish, but no German. At times, dialect is also used (English and French - See Pêcheresse). These features can be related to her analysis of culture and its relation to social relations and the nature of being. It is not just that she speaks more than one language at once, she also explores more than one world at once.......... In 1921, Punch depicted Charlotte as a precocious English school girl adding simple French phrases to her poems. One poems that it appears to parody, uses French to capture a children's street game. "'Tiens! que veux-tu acheter?' Renée cries, 'Mais, pour quat'sous, des oignons,' , Jean replies. And one pays down with pebbles from the shore." (The Narrow Door)

Madness E.V. Knox's parody of Charlotte Mew's poetry begins
The moonlight drips on the parlour floor;
I shall go mad if no one wipes it up.
When I was one year old Nurse used to say,
"It's no more use to cry when milk is spilt
Than cry about the moon." There were big bars
Across the nursery window
Knox conveys the image of a writer threatened with madness, and confinement, whose poetry uses the experience. Her poems also communicate to him that her visions are fashioned by her life and her family. To steal words from Freda Mew's casenotes, the "predisposing cause" of Charlotte's "madness", and her poetry, is "probably heredity", but not in the biological sense. In the sense that it is steeped in the experience of her family, her childhood, and her intimate relations. Madness in Charlotte's writing is softened or romanticised: She seeks to "obscure the tragic side by a gentleness of treatment". As is common for her time, her image combines elements of mental illness and retardation or learning disability. There are also similarities of form between her pictures of madmen (for example, Ken) and her pictures of fairies (for example, The Changeling), and between her pictures of these and her depicting people and cultures in contact with nature (for example Arracombe Wood). Madness is sometimes another world cut of from sanity by clouded glass, but sometimes her own being. More often, sanity and madness are two worlds between which we pass as in the same way that we pass from the nursery floor to fairyland.

Faerie - The word faerie can be used for the mythical land of fays (fairies), its inhabitants, and its enchantment. When Charlotte Mew was writing, the theosophists were drawing on many religions and mythologies to create their own world vision. Their sources including belief in elementals, faerie forces or spirits of the elements, from which races of humans and gods could have evolved. Charlotte was sufficiently close to theosophist circles in 1914 to have a story about a woman with supernatural communication published in The Theosophist. The death in 1895 of Bridget Cleary, an Irish labourer's wife , illustrates the relation in (some) popular cultures of the world of faerie and changes in human personality. I have argued that this theme of changing being and changing consciousness runs through much of Charlotte's writing. It is what Baring- Gould would have called a "radical" (motif) to her stories. The word and the motif that symbolises this most effectively, in relation to fairies, is changeling. The Farmer's Bride (1911/1912) is a fay, or fairy - The Changeling, a children's poem, (1912/1913) was published at the same time as Men and Trees, which finishes with Joan of Arc, as a child, dancing round a fairy tree. In The Smile, the child (then woman) who can see the enchanting smile without climbing to the enchantress, as others have to, had, as a baby, the characteristics that might have been interpreted as indicating a changeling.

In Men and Trees, Charlotte partly explains the significance of fairies to the twentieth century. She says

"The Renaissance revered the ancient world, the nineteenth century was moved and lit by the Renaissance; we have no patience even with the nineteenth century. The past is a stupid corpse. The inspiration of the woods, the forest voices, the fairy dancers ... these are 'of old time' ... We must not speak in the marketplace of what happens to us in the forest, says Hawthorne - [nowadays] Everything happens in the market-place. Where else? But the market-place is not real: the real things are happening in the forest still."

Spirit The spirit that animates Charlotte Mew's writings appears accesible to agnostic and believer alike, and disturbing to the proconceptions of all of us. Siegried Sasson wrote to, and of, Charlotte that poets "carry the world on their shoulders... And in their eyes the future of civilisation struggles to survive". Charlotte, he said, was "intensely" aware of her "responsibility" and sustained it "nobly". The world that is carried in Charlotte's writing is the material world of flesh and death, of life and grief, of desire and reverence. The spirit that animates it is "Everything there is to hear in the heart of hidden things".

eighth century AD Dream of the Rood carved in runes on a cross in Ruthwell churchyard in Scotland. Used by Charlotte Mew in Men and Trees (1913)

24.9.1541 Death of Paracelsus. His Liber de nymphis, sylphis, pygmaeis et salamandris et de caeteris spiritibus [Latin title, but German text] was published after his death. In it he associated sprit people with air, earth, fire and water. Nymphis, nymph, undina or undine is the water spirit. Sylphis, sylph, or sylvestris is the air spirit. Pygmaeis, pygmy, gnomus or gnome is the earth spirit. Salamandris, salamander or vulcanus is the fire spirit. This is the main source of the idea of "elementals", linking science and fairie in the theories of theosophists and others (late 19th century onwards). African pygmies were perceived by some as real descendants of the earth elementals in an evolutionary process. Charlotte Mew published one story in The Theosophist (1914) and drew on the idea of elemental races in Men and Trees (1913).

1648

6.9.1648 - 30.11.1648 the "Treaty of Newport" between Parliament and King Charles

"During the negotiations the king and his friends occupied the grammar school and the Parliamentary Commissioners the Bull Inn, while the meetings took place in the town hall. The subject of the negotiations related chiefly to the governance of the church and the militia, but the treaty led to no satisfactory results." From: 'Parishes: Newport', A History of the County of Hampshire: Volume 5 (1912), pp. 253-65. available at British History Online

In Isle of Wight dialect, a young or wild bull is a "bugle". The Bull Inn of 1648 is the Bugle Inn that the Mew family acquired.

1650

Son-Days
by Henry Vaughan

Bright shadows of true rest! some shoots of bliss;
Heaven once a week;
The next world's gladness preposses'd in this;
A day to seek
Eternity in time; the steps by which
We climb above all ages; lamps that light
Man through his heap of dark days; and the rich
And full redemption of the whole week's flight!

The pulleys unto headlong man; Time's bower;
The narrow way;
Transplanted Paradise; God's walking hour,
The cool o' th' day!
The creature's jubilee; God's parle with dust;
Heaven here; man on those hills of myrrh, and flowers;
Angels descending; the returns of trust;
A gleam of glory after six-days-showers!

The Church's love-feasts; Time's prerogative,
And interest
Deducted from the whole; the combs, and hive,
And home of rest.
The milky way chalk'd out with suns; a clue
That guides through erring hours; and in full story
A taste of heav'n on earth; the pledge and cue
Of a full feast; and the out-Courts of glory.

The London Plane: Platanus x acerifolia (Aiton) Willdenow is a hybrid of the oriental and occidental planes, first described in writing, in Britain, in the Oxford Botanical Gardens in 1670. The London Planes were important to Charlotte Mew throughout her life. See Doughty Street - Gordon Street Map - Men and Trees - 1922. For some other planes in London see Bunhill and Wick Woodlands. In her poems, the house sparrow Passer domesticus:, lives in the trees, the London pigeon sits on the houses and seagulls visit the town.

About 1731 Thomas Mew of Newport, Hampsire, born. He married Elizabeth Hains (born about 1735, of Newport) on 16.10.1756. Their (14?) children included Thomas christened 23.3.1757 - William christened 17.12.1758 - John christened 14.1.1761 - James christened 25.1.1763 - Richard (born 1764), a great grandfather of Charlotte Mew - Mary christened 27.1.1769, died 31.12.1770 - Mark christened 15.3.1771, died 7.5.1810 - Mary christened 14.7.1773 - George (baptised 1775), from whom Charlotte's grandfather took over the Bugle Inn in 1829, Anne, born about 1777, died 8.4.1781 - Joseph Haynes christened 20.5.1782 - William christened 2.1.1784 - and Benjamin (baptised 19.10.1786), who founded Mew's brewery. The evidence suggests to me that the whole Mew family were involved with one another and that the various businesses in the Isle of Wight and Lymington were family concerns, at least whilst fathers survived to hold the unit together.

1754 William Borlase (1695-1772) Antiquities of Cornwall published at Oxford. Used by Charlotte Mew in Men and Trees (1913)

1.10.1764: Richard Mew, the son of Thomas, christened Newport, Isle of Wight. He married Ann Coleman on 31.7.1787. One of their sons was Henry Mew, paternal grandfather of Charlotte Mew, and licencee of the Bugle Inn, in Newport.

All but one of Richard and Ann's known children were born in Newport. The children are: Edward born about 1789, died 26.4.1789 - Henry and Edward both christened 28.12.1792 - Richard christened 19.3.1794, died 9.2.1821 - Charles born 17.4.1795, christened 28.6.1795, died 24.1.1796 - Sarah, born 19.7.1797, christened 19.12.1797, married Robert Yele of Newchurch 3.1.1822 (no children traced) - Stephen born (Carisbooke) about 1804, died 23.1.1806.

Richard died at Newchurch on 25.5.1830, aged 63, and was buried at Newport. Ann died 28.1.183something, aged 71 and was buried at Newport

25.8.1775 George Mew (son of Thomas and Elizabeth) christened Newport. He may have married Christian Ceser in Newport on 10.11.1799. Alfed Ceser Mew was born 21.11.1802 in Newport and christened 25.9.1803 - Kate Mew born 1.11.1807, Christened 13.1.1808

23.3.1776 Henry Edward Kendall (senior), one of Charlotte Mew's maternal great- grandfathers, born. Although he is said to have been born York (Colvin, H.M. 1995), the census for 1841, 1861 and 1871 shows him as born in Middlesex (Marylebone - 1861, 1871). Colvin says that he married twice and had a son and two daughters. I have traced two sons and a daughter: The eldest son is Henry Edward Kendall (junior) (born 1805). Both Henry Edwards were architects. The daughter is Sophia Kendall (later Cubitt) (born 1811) - These are the two mentioned by Colvin. In 1822, Kendall senior married Ann(e) Lyon. (see 1841) . They had a son Charles Kendall, born 1829. Henry Edward senior died in 1875.

Mary Herne, Charlotte Mew's maternal great-grandmother on her grandmother's side, was born about 1784. She married Thomas Cobham in 1801. She was living with Kendalls in 1841 and died in 1855. The Cobham and Herne names reappear in children's names and inheritances. See Edward Herne Kendall, Thomas Cobham Kendall Henry Herne Mew, Richard Cobham Mew, will of 17.4.1883 and Caroline and James Herne and T.A. Cobham.

1786 Benjamin Mew (son of Thomas) born. The Mew/Cull brewery in Crocker Street was established about 1814 (about age 28). Benjamin married Mary Ann Parker on 11.11.1818, in Norwood, London. Their children included - Thomas Parker Mew, christened 6.10.1819, who may have married Mary Julia Willslead, in Newport, in the October/December quarter of 1837 - William Baron Mew, christened 7.11.1820, Newport. - Mary Ann Mew, born 30.9.1821, christened: 23.1.1822 Newport - George Owen Mew, born 3.3.1824, christened 2.4.1824 Newport - James Alfred Mew, born 13.2.1826, christened 15.3.1826 Newport. He married Mariane Hooper at Alderbury, in Wiltshire, about 1852 - Ann Agnes Mew, born 3.9.1827, christened 3.10.1827 Newport - Joseph Parker Mew, born 2.4.1829, christened 29.4.1829 Newport - Sarah Jane Mew, born 29.4.1831, christened 1.6.1831 - Arthur Parker Mew, christened 9.1.1833 Newport. Benjamin Mew died 1850

Kevin Mitchell's website says that in the later part of the eighteenth century, Benjamin "apparently" began to collect inns and formed a partnership with his brother [which?] under the name of Mew and co., Brewers of Newport and Lymington. But Benjamin was only 14 in 1800 and the Lymington brewary appears to be after 1828].

26.3.1790 Henry Mew (son of Richard), paternal grandfather of Charlotte Mew, born. The son of Richard and Ann Mew. Henry and his younger brother, Edward (born 1.3.1792), were both baptised on 28.12.1792 at Newport. Sometime married Ann Norris of Lymington. In 1828, Henry Mew was licencee of the Anchor and Hope in Lymington. In 1852 (See also 1851) this was run by Henry Ackland, but the Angel Hotel, 108 High Street, Lymington was run by William Bay Norris

Their children (survivors highlighted) were:
Ann Mew, born about 1821, who died, aged 11, on 8.1.1832
Henry Mew born Lymington 5.7.1824 who died 15.5.1881 at Newport
Richard Mew, born Lymington about 1826
Frances Mew, born Lymington 1827?, who married Daniel Barnes, Proprietor (1859 or earlier) of Pier Hotel, Ryde, Isle of Wight. One of their children was Walter Mew Barnes.
Edward Mew, born about 1829, who died, aged 11, on 4.4.1840
Frederick Mew born Newport 1832: See 1843 for character.
Walter Mew, born 7.7.1834 in Newport

They appear to have lived in Lymington until becoming licensee of the Bugle Inn in Newport about 1829. Frederick Mew (Charlotte's father) was born in 1832. Henry Mew died in 1859. His wife, Ann, lived to 1878

About 1793 Birth of Anne Esther Lyon, who became the second wife (1822) of Henry Edward Kendall senior ( Charlotte Mew's maternal great- grandfather). See 1841 - 1861 - 1871. The year of birth is suggested by the 1861 and 1871 data (between about 1792 and 1794). I do not know the name of the first wife - One can guess her first name was Sophia. Ann(e) Kendall's son was Charles Kendall.

About 1796 Ann Norris (who married Henry Mew) paternal grandmother of Charlotte Mew, born Lymington. Following the death of Henry Mew (November 1858) Ann Mew was living with Richard Mew in Newport in 1861. In 1871 she ("Anne Mew") was living as a lodger in Ryde. With her was Maria Anne Norris, unmarried, age 29, no occupation, born Lymington. Relationship not shown, but possibly a niece. Maria Anne was the daughter of William B. and Henrietta Norris who (1861) ran the Angel Hotel, 108 High Street, Lymington. Ann Mew died in October 1878.

About 1800 Birth in Lymington of William Bay (or Benjamin) Norris, who married Henrietta. See 1851 Census - 1861 Census - 1871 Census -

1801

With the consent of her father (Thomas Herne) Mary Herne, a minor, married Thomas Cobham, of St Mary le Bone, at Whitechapel.

July/August 1805 Henry Edward Kendall (junior), Charlotte Mew's maternal grandfather, born Westminster (died 1885) [Dates in RIBA archive. Years in Colvin, H.M. 1995. The 1881 online Census calculates 1811 as his date of birth, but this is inconsistent with the 1841 census.] He trained as an architect in his father's office. By 1841, they had separate practices. Kendall junior's practice built three lunatic asylums - Essex in Tudor style, Sussex in the Italian style and a new one for Dorset. He married Mary Cobham in 1836. Charlotte Mew's mother seems to have been their oldest child. [See family listing 1861] He died in 1885

1811: Sophia Kendall, Henry Edward (junior)'s sister, born at Suffolk St, Westminster. In 1830 she married Lewis Cubitt, one of her father's architecture pupils. She died in 1879.

A sprig of Chick lace - probably late 19th century - from a photograph in Margaret Tomlinson's book See 1863 - 1867 - 1887 - See dialect

17.6.1811 Samuel Chick, grandfather in the Chick family Charlotte Mew knew, was born in Branscombe, Devon. He was christened on 7.7.1811. His father, also Samuel, had married Abigail Tutcher. Abigail Chick founded the Chick's Honiton Lace business in the early nineteenth century. She set up a shop in Dean (now called Street - north west of Branscombe) where the sprigs of lace were collected from the cottage workers, made into finished items and marketed in Sidmouth and elsewhere. (External link Branscombe Parish. Lace Industry - map). Charlotte Mew gave a poem in dialect called An Ending to Edith Chick. The scenery seems relevant to this part of Devon and the dialect is the same as that in The China Bowl. The poem was not published until Margaret Chick sent it to Mary Davidow in 1958 - But it is said to have been written in the early 1890s and is, therefore, one of the earliest, if not the earliest, Charlotte Mew poem we have. [Although "mazed" is in a Cornish dialect list, and in the BBC's Devon list, John Weyell, from Sidmouth, says "Mazed was in common use for daft 'Er be mazed' - he's daft". when he was a child (he is now retired). On the same page: Richard Longridge from Starcross, Exeter "My maid be prapper 'mazed" Translation: "My daughter is off her head/confused/silly". See also Edmund Forte "Ee Bee Proper Mazed = He is really daft", in relation to Dawlish Warren (south of Exmouth) and Exeter] Honiton Lace Museum

About 1812 Mary Cobham [Kendall] Charlotte Mew's maternal grandmother, born St Pancras. She married Henry Edward Kendall (junior) in Sussex in 1836. Penelope Fitzgerald 1988 calls her "Maria Kendall". See 1841 - 1861 (fullest view of family) - 1871 - 1881 and 1891 Census. Her will was written in 1883 and she died in Brighton in 1892. Anna Maria Kendall, Charlotte's mother, was born in 1837 and Mary Leonora Kendall (Charlotte's maternal aunt) about 1847.

The Mew Brewery The Brewery History by Kevin Mitchell http://www.insula.vecta.btinternet.co.uk/Mews1.html Also on the same website: Newport Pubs - An Illustrated History by Kevin Mitchell http://www.insula.vecta.btinternet.co.uk/NP1.html An Isle of Wight Records Office summary of the Mew Brewery History says "The connection of the Mew family with Crocker Street dates at least from 1814, when Benjamin Mew and his partner James Cull, brewers, were jointly occupying premises there." [The partnership with James Cull was over by 1816] The Records Office summary also says that "Small scale brewing and malting were carried out at various premises in Crocker Street, Newport by a succession of individuals and partnerships from the 17th century down to Regency times". Kevin Mitchell's web story that breweries are recorded in Crocker Street from 1643. See Bugle Inn 1816 - New Fairlee Farm 1816 - Mew family business 1828 (my earliest original reference to the Crocker Street brewery - Benjamin brewer) - 1841 Census (Thomas brewer in Sea Street, Newport, Benjamin brewer in Brading) - Benjamin Mew died in 1850. The Kevin Mitchell website says that Lymington Brewery was left to Thomas and the Newport business to William. In the 1851 Census Thomas is shown as both a wine and spirit merchant and a brewer in Lymington. [Also in an 1852 Trade Directory] - William is the brewer at Crocker Street. - The Records Office summary says that in 1854 the Newport interests William Baron Mew (including the Crocker Street brewery) and the Lymington, interests of Thomas Parker Mew, were combined. In the 1861 Census, both William (newly widowed) and Thomas are brewers in Newport. The birth places of Thomas's children suggest he had been in Newport for at least seven years The Kevin Mitchell website says that (at some date) William bought out the Lymington business from Thomas. The 1865 Trade Directory has W. B. Mew and Co. Brewers to Her Majesty, Crocker Street, and at Esplanade, Ryde" [No mention of Lymington] and "W.B. Mew and Co., wine and spirit merchants, Crocker street, and at West Cowes, Ryde and Lymington" - At the 1871 Census William Mew is at Crocker Street and Thomas Mew at Medham Farm, near Cowes. At 68 Sea Street, Newport, Joseph Parker Mew is "Brewer's Manager" - In 1861 he was a "Brass and Iron Founder" in Cowes. - The Records Office summary says that Walter Langton, late of Lambeth, injected £20,000 capital into the business in 1873 which then became W. B. Mew, Langton & Co. - William Baron Mew, Joseph Parker Mew and Charles Edward Templeman Mew of Newport, brewers, maltsters and spirit merchants, traded in partnership as W. B. Mew, Langton & Co. At the 1881 Census William Baron Mew was living at Polars. Thomas, age 61, was at Wallhampton, outside Lymington, Brewer "retired". Joseph Parker Mew was the brewer at Crocker Street and at St James Street his son Herbert Mew (Brewer) is living with William Baron Mew's brewer son, Charles. - [1887?] Fourteen years after W. B. Mew, Langton & Co. was formed it became W. B. Mew, Langton & Co. Ltd. The death of William Baron Mew was registered in the January/March quarter of 1887. His brother and son continued trading under the name "W.B. Mew [etc]" 1891 Census - The death of Joseph Parker Mew (age 66, born about 1829) was registered Alderbury, Wiltshire in the January/March quarter of 1895 "Control of the new company remained in the hands of the Mew family throughout its life. It passed to William Baron Mew's son, Francis Templeman Mew and, after the latter's death in 1922, to his son Francis Joseph Templeman Mew. By 1965 two hundred public houses and twenty off- licences on the Isle of Wight, around Lymington and in Southampton and Portsmouth were controlled and annual sales amounted to more than œ1.5 million. In that year, however, a take-over by Strong & Co. of Romsey was accepted and Mew, Langton's independent existence came to an end. In 1968 Strong's itself was bought out by Whitbread. Part of the Crocker Street brewery site is still used by Whitbreads as a depot but the major part, including most of the buildings, has been adapted and redeveloped as sheltered housing."

Ryde Pier 1814: Opening of the pier at Ryde, Isle of Wight. (external link) - Ryde addresses related to the Mews are the Royal Pier Hotel (below) - 9 Barfield (Barfield Lodge) and 75 Union Street

In 1828 no "Pier" hotel is listed in the Trade Directory - but Daniel Hale is at the Bugle, Ryde. The "Royal Pier Hotel", Pier Street is in the 1841 Census, with George Rendall, age about 30, Hotel Keeper, not born in Hampshire, and his wife, Caroline, age about 25, born in Hampshire - It is the "Pier Hotel" (a posting inn) in an 1844 Trade Directory. - The 1851 Census has the "Pier Hotel", with Caroline Rendell, wife (no husband shown) age 38, born Ryde, as Hotel Keeper. She is living with Martha Hale, mother, widow, age 67, Annuitant, born Kingston? Dorset (died December quarter 1852?) and Daniel Barnes, nephew, unmarried, age 29, clerk, born Somerset - 1852 Directory: Royal Pier Hotel, Pier Street, posting and family, George Rendell - 1859 Royal Pier Hotel, Pier Gates, Daniel Barnes. - The 1861 Census - The 1871 Census - The 1881 Census - The 1881 Census - 1898 Trade Directory: Royal Pier, The Gordon Hotels Limited, (Louis Henry Claridge, Manager) Pier Street - The 1901 Census - The Royal Pier Hotel Ryde was demolished in the early 1930's to allow better traffic access from the bottom of Union Street onto the Esplanade. (external link)

1815

1816

26.11.1816 "Bargain and sale" - reference JER/OSBORNE/2 "New Fairlee Farm with barns, stables and outhouses lately erected on Fairlee Common and Fairlee Common Fourgrounds (18 acres 1 rood 7 perches), lying together near road from Newport, towards East Cowes, with Middle Field (18 acres) and close on west side of it (12 acres), both part of Fairlee Common Lower Ground. Also Barn Ground Closes: the Thirteen Acre Close (13 acres), the Ten Acres (10½ acres), the Seven Acres (7½ acres), Ilems and Tilsons Close (5 acres), one close (17 acres), parcel of Heathy Ground (42 acres), parcel of lands called Blakes Heath (above) lying on east side of highway leading to East Cowes, together with so much ground, part of Brick Kiln Close (alias Sixteen Acres), part of the said Blakes Heath as shall be marked out for a way from Lower Blakes Heath to pond in or near Brick Kiln Close." (Isle of Wight Record Office - Deeds and Documents of Osborne Estate: Catalogue Ref. JER/OSBORNE. Creator(s): Blachford family of Osborne) - See 1841 Census New Fairlee Farm 1843 - Newport 1865 - Isle of Wight Holidays - 1881 South Fairlee Farm - 4.2.1899 - 1901 New Fairlee Farm (and South Fairlee Farm distinct) - 1936 Fairlee House and South Fairlee Farm - 1963 change of ownership - 2006 New Fairlee Farm.

1819: Birth of Victoria who was to become Queen. Elizabeth Goodman was born about five years later and may have celebrated 25 years of domestic service about the time that Victoria celebrated 50 years of being Queen.

6.10.1819 Thomas Parker Mew, son of Benjamin, christened

1820

Sometime about here, Henry Mew married Ann Norris of Lymington. Their first child, Ann, was born about 1821. This is the earliest connection I have for the Mew family and Lymington.

I do not know where Ann Mew was born, but her older siblings, Henry, Florence and Richard, were born in Lymington. Henry (the father) was landlord of the Anchor and Hope, Lymington, in 1828, at a time when the brewery business appears to have been limited to Newport. Thomas Parker Mew was a brewer in Newport in 1841, but appears to have moved to Lymington between the biths of a child in 1843 and 1845. In 1851 he is listed as a a Wine and Spirit Merchant on the Quay at Lymington. In 1865 the Trade Directory has "W.B. Mew and Co., wine and spirit merchants, Crocker street, and at West Cowes, Ryde and Lymington", but the brewery is only at Crocker street and Ryde.

7.11.1820 Christening of William Baron Mew, who inherited the Newport brewery and bought the Lymington one (see his father). He is shown (unmarried) as Maltster and Brewer in Crocker Street in the 1851 Census. He married Frances Mary Templeman in the April/June quarter of 1854, at Chard in Somerset. Charles Edward Templeman Mew (birth registered Isle of Wight July/September quarter 1856) was William Baron Mew's eldest son. Francis (Frank) Templeman Mew (birth registered Isle of Wight October/December quarter 1857) was his second son. Henrietta Bernard Mew's birth was registered Isle of Wight in the April/June quarter or 1859. The birth of Amy Bernard Mew and the death of her mother, Frances Mary Mew, were both registered on the isle of Wight in the October/December quarter of 1860.

1821

1822

about 1822 Daniel Barnes born Somerset - marrried Frances Mew - died 1881

Henry Edward Kendall senior married his second wife, Anne Esther Lyon, at St Andrew's church, Holborn. He already had two children: Henry Edward Kendall junior (17) and Sophia (11). Ann(e) and Henry's son, Charles Kendall, was born in 1829.

1823 Henry Edward Kendall (senior), Charlotte Mew's maternal great- grandfather, became District Surveyor for the Parishes of St Martins in the Fields and St Anne's, Soho. He had previously worked for the Barrack Department of the War Office. He was about 47 years old, and held the post of District Surveyor for over 50 years.

5.7.1824: Henry Mew, son of Henry and Ann, and a paternal uncle of Charlotte, born. In 1841 (aged 15) he was with a group of men in St James, Westminster (I do not think it is a school) being looked after by mainly female servants. In 1851 he is shown as "Wine Merchant" living with his parents at the Bugle Inn. He married Mary Toward in 1854. Henry succeeded his father at the Bugle Inn/Hotel. He was the mayor of Newport three times: in 1864, 1865 and 1870. The Bugle Hotel. is still a Mew family business in the 1875 Trade Directory, but, by 1881, Henry and Mary were living in Ventnor. He died 13.5.1881. The Bugle Hotel may have left the Mew family when Henry and Mary left.

In 1824-1826, A Sessions House and a House of Corrections were built at Spilsby. They were designed by Henry Edward Kendall (senior). ["The stately Sessions House of 1826, where quarter sessions for the area of Lindsey were held until 1878, is now home to the Spilsby Theatre"] [The House of Correction occupied about two acres. It was enlarged in 1869 to accommodate 85 cells]

About 1825: Birth of Elizabeth Goodman, the "Old Servant" of Charlotte's essay, born at Barton On Humber, Lincolnshire. (link to GENUKI website). The life story of the real Elizabeth Goodman, traced through the censuses, is very close to that of the Old Servant described by Charlotte. "That grey remote village on the hillside" does not describe Barton, which is a market town on the Lincolnshire bank of the river. It could be a village outside Barton in the Yorkshire Wolds. Charlotte wrote that it as a village none of the Mew children ever saw, but "all the ways of which we knew so well by hearsay". The census descriptions show the Goodman's district (from 1841) as mixed farms, brickworks and potteries. Their street, "Newport", appears to have been on the edge of Barton in an area that was being absorbed - The "new road" (Queen Street) was opened "in 1827... It cuts across the former gardens of the great house which stood on the site of the present police station. Its grounds originally occupied most of the area bordered by High Street, Finkle Lane, Newport, Catherine Street and Marsh lane" (Barton on Humber virtual Victorian Walk). Elizabeth's mother, also Elizabeth Goodman, was born at Horkstow in Lincolnshire about 1782. She was a widow by 1841. In the 1861 census she is shown as a "farmer's widow". Living with her in 1841 were William Goodman, age 20, an agricultural labourer, and our Elizabeth, age 16, shown as a female servant. By inference from Charlotte Mew's story, Elizabeth came to London in 1845, 20 years old, and became a servant in the Kendall grandparent's house. In the 1851 census she is shown (26) as the children's nurse. The Kendall household had high care needs. There were three nurses in 1851: a "nurse" who may have cared for Mary Cobham, Charlotte's great grandmother, Elizabeth, who is the "children's nurse" and a "children's nursemaid". It seems likely that the nursemaid cared for Arthur (2) and Mary (4) and that Elizabeth cared for Anna Maria (14), Thomas (10) and Edward (6). There was no live-in governess. By 1861 Elizabeth had returned to her mother's residence in Barton. Her profession as "quilter" suggests this is more than a visit. Perhaps she stayed with her mother until her death in 1866. If so, this means she was not with the Mew family until after their marriage, in 1863, and after the birth of Henry Herne Mew in 1865. But, this is not the impression given by Charlotte's story, which says [Elizabeth] was "chosen to follow her young mistress on her marriage". In the 1871 census Elizabeth is shown as "cook". But she was the kind of cook that takes care of children when they are ill: She recorded the deaths of baby Frederick in 1867, and Christopher and Richard in 1876. See 1841 census - 1845 - 1851 census - 1861 census - 1865 - 1866 - 1867 - 1871 - 1874 (Chapel) - 1875 - holidays - 1876 - 1881 census - 1891 census - 1892 - 1893.

The Every-Day Book by William Hone appeared in weekly instalments in 1825 and 1826. Bound volumes appeared in 1826 and 1827. Kyle Grimes has created an online version. The blessing of the apple tree takes place on January 5th (see index)

Here's to thee, old apple-tree,
hence thou mayst bud, and whence thou mayst blow!
And whence thou mayst bear apples enow!
Hats full! caps full!
Bushel-bushel-sacks full,
And my pockets full too! Huzza!"

A very similar "jolly couplet" is quoted by Charlotte Mew in Men and Trees

About 1826: Birth of Richard Mew, Charlotte's paternal uncle (older than her father) who was to farm New Fairlee Farm. He was born in Lymington, as was his sister, Frances. Their father, Henry Mew was ran the Anchor and Hope Inn in Lymington in 1828, before moving to the Bugle Inn about 1829. In 1841, Richard appears to be in charge of New Fairlee Farm. (Charlotte's father, Frederick, and uncle Walter are also there). A letter Richard wrote in 1843 survives. At this time, Frederick had just returned from a trip to London. In 1851 Richard is shown as "bailiff for his father". In 1861, Richard Mew is shown as a wine merchant living with his widowed mother, Ann Mew (aged 65, born Lymington), plus a female general servant and a groom, in Lugley Street, Newport (external link) and Walter was in charge of the farm. An 1865 trade directory shows Richard as the farmer and also lists the family business as Henry Mew, farmer - and sons, Bugle Inn. and wine importers. Richard married Fanny Read in 1866. He is shown as the farmer in subsequent censuses. Charlotte Mew spent time, as a child, with Richard's family on the Isle of Wight and Fanny's family in Somerset. Richard acted in the place of father to Freda Mew after the death of her father in 1898. He died in 1903, but I suspect his family would have continued with some responsibility for Freda in the Isle of Wight Asylum. Charlotte remained in contact with this part of the family throughout her life and they were a major source of information for Mary Davidow's biography.

About 1827: Birth, in Lymington, of Frances (known as Fanny) Mew, Charlotte's paternal aunt (older than her father). In 1841, "Fanny Mew", age 14, was living with fifteen other girls ("pupils") of about the same age, in a house on the south side of Neport High St - In 1851 she is shown as "housekeeper" at New Fairlee Farm - She married Daniel Barnes of Ryde in 1853 - see 1861 - 1871 - 1881 - She may have died on the Isle of Wight in the April/June quarter of 1911, but that Frances Mew as age 87

23.10.1827 The consecration of St George the Martyr, Ramsgate. Designed by Henry Hemsley and H E Kendall and constucted between 1824 and 1827, it seats 1,300 people and has a lantern tower (placed at the request of Trinity House) as a navigational aid to passing ships. Described as one of the two "most architechturally distinguished" Kent churches in the first half of the nineteenth century. However it is in a "free versions of Gothic". This style became "unacceptable" after the launching of the Cambridge Camden Society and ecclesiology in the 1840s. "The ecclesiologists wanted to return the Church of England to an idealised version of the Middle Ages, both for the architecture of its buildings and the arrangements for public worship." [Detailed discussion in Jonathan Smith's (1994) Architecture and Induction: Whewell and Ruskin on Gothic ]

1828-1829 Henry Edward Kendall senior and junior were the architects of the esplanade and tunnel for Kemp Town, the fashionable new eastern extension to Brighton.

"the principal feature is an extensive crescent and square, the opening between the wings of which is 840 feet, and the wings, each 350 feet in extent, present a frontage towards the sea of 1,540 feet: the glacis is terminated by an esplanade commanding a beautiful and sheltered prospect of the ocean: beneath this, at the base of the cliff on which Kemp Town stands, a road is carried to the west end of the Marine-parade and is united with the gardens and lawns in the centre of the crescent by a tunnel." (Kelly's 1867 Directory - GenUKI website)