More on Mary's manifestation and Stewy's streetart

Just over a month ago,  Mary manifested!  Overnight Wollstonecraft appeared outside Newington Green Unitarian Church, courtesy the street artist Stewy.

Mary on the Green, the group campaigning for a statue, and Andy Pakula, the minister of the church at the heart of the village that changed the world* (and expanded Wollstonecraft's life), both bask in the reflected glory of the rather lovely life-sized image.

In the weeks since International Women's Day, the stencil on the wall has attracted a lot of publicity, as well as pilgrims and visitors. Here's a round-up (including interviews with yours truly):


There’s something about Mary, Hackney Post, Rachel Bayne

On a Stoke Newington corner, astride the New Unity Church railings, a banner proclaims ‘The Birthplace of Feminism’. In this small, Unitarian congregation beats a radical heart. Here, amongst the pews more than 250 years ago, sat Mary Wollstonecraft.

Last weekend, a mysterious portrait of the radical feminist appeared on the wall of the Church. The stencil, designed by graffiti artist Stewy was put there on International Women’s Day to celebrate the palpable influence Wollstonecraft made on the Newington Green community and far, far beyond.
Stewy’s painting also acts as a ghost-like trace, spearheading the path for a more lasting tribute in Stoke Newington. Roberta Wedge, local activist and member of the ‘Mary on the Green’ campaign, represents that hope with plans to build a statue of the feminist on Newington Green.
“I always say to people, if you were raised by a woman who could read and vote and work, then you owe something to Mary Wollstonecraft,” says Wedge.


Mysterious Banksy-style graffiti welcomed by Newington Green statue campaigners, Islington Gazette

The mural, which is the work of street artist Stewy – whose identity is unknown – emerged as events were staged in Newington Green to raise money for the statue and to celebrate International Women’s Day, which was last Friday.

Andy Pakula, minister of the New Unity congregation based at the chapel, said: “I hope we can leave it here because we think it’s fabulous. There’s different issues about street art, but she’s our guiding spirit. You’ve seen in the US where images of Jesus appear on toasted cheese sandwiches, well for us this is about the best that could happen to have Mary show up. She’s inspired us to work for justice in the world and we absolutely support the campaign for a statue. We would like to see a Mary Wollstonecraft centre for feminist studies in Newington Green one day.”

Writer Bee Rowlatt, 41, who is backing the campaign and recently published a chapter about Wollstonecraft in a new book titled 50 Shades Of Feminism, said: “It’s just unbelievable that there’s no permanent memorial to this incredible woman. The mural is really inspiring. She’s right there life-size on a building where she used to go. We feel like she’s appeared among us and we hope this is a small step towards getting the memorial.”


‘Apparition’ of 18th-century women’s rights campaigner Mary Wollstonecraft appears on church, Islington Tribune, Amy Smith

A MYSTERIOUS apparition on the side of the New Unity church in Newington Green caught the eye of passers-by when it appeared overnight. But it is not the “Mary” that some might expect. Instead, it’s a graffiti stencil of Mary Wollstonecraft, the influential 18th-century author and staunch advocate of women’s rights who was inspired by sermons at the church.

As a young school­mistress Wollstonecraft used to attend the New Unity church and its radical sermons were integral in shaping her political stance. Street artist Stewy was inspired by her message to create the piece. “I’ve been aware of Mary Wollstonecraft’s connection with the Unitarian Church for many years,” he said. “The placing of the image, where she may have walked, was important to me and I decided to make a small edition of 25 screen prints taken from the stencil to help raise money for ‘Mary on the Green’.” 

Mary Wollstonecraft "appears" in street art on her 18th C spiritual home! N16 magazine

New Unity Minister Andy Pakula said ‘This is a mysterious apparition of the mother of feminism - a daring figure who continues to inspire us in the fight for freedom and justice for all people. Without her spirit, it is unlikely that we would have stood forward so boldly for equal marriage, as we have in recent years. Mary's spirit has been with us always. Now her image is as well!’


Newington Green graffiti celebrates Wollstonecraft, Islington Now, Sarah Graham

Fans of famous feminist Mary Wollstonecraft are celebrating her surprise appearance in the form of graffiti on the side of a church in Newington Green. The stencilled image of the 18th century “mother of feminism”, by street artist Stewy, is a bonus for a local campaign to get a statue of Ms Wollstonecraft erected in the borough.

Islington-based movement Mary on the Green tweeted a photo of Stewy’s artwork, saying: “What a boost to the campaign! Mary manifests on NG church @newunity.” Newington Green Action Group set up the initiative in 2011 to make her life and work more accessible to local people.

Campaigner Bee Rowlatt said: “[Ms Wollstonecraft] is an internationally renowned champion of women’s rights and there’s no statue to her anywhere." Ms Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, lived locally and attended the “radically-inclusive” New Unity church during her lifetime.


and even in the the newsletter of the National Museum Directors' Council: 

Street art evens up London’s representation of famous women: The image is clearly based on the John Opie picture of Wollstonecraft, which is on display in the National Portrait Gallery.  Mildmay’s Labour councillor Kate Groucutt says “I absolutely want it to stay. We’ve had confirmation from Hackney Council and they can’t remove it without checking with the owner, and that’s the church.  It’s not going to be painted over, we have secured that.” There are only a handful of statues to women among the hundreds in London. 


And the image is to be found as far afield as the United States UU World magazine: 
British Unitarians rally to save faith from extinction  by Donald E. Skinner

Unitarians in London gathered next to an image of 18th century Unitarian writer Mary Wollstonecraft. The image was created recently on the side of the Unitarian Chapel in Newington Green in north London, where efforts are underway to raise money for a statue of Wollstonecraft.

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*The Village that Changed the World is the title of the beautifully illustrated little history produced by the Newington Green Action Group. It's available directly from the charity and no doubt from the online mega-retailer of your choice.

The photo above is, for a change, by me, of a pair of warm churchgoers on a cold day.

A round-up for International Women's Day

Time for a round-up of International Women's Day events that feature Mary Wollstonecraft.

There's "The Two Marys: A Conversation Piece", created by American writer Judith Chernaik, founder of Poems on the Underground. This one-off performance is sponsored by Camden Council, representing the place that embraced the end of the mother's life and the beginning of the daughter's. In a neighbouring borough there is a multifaceted celebration with a lot of music and an hour on Mary Wollstonecraft, by historian Clare Midgley, performance academic Anna Birch, and myself, reprising my IGNITE story-telling. That's organised by the Islington Unitarians in their post-Blitz hidden edifice on Upper Street. Their sister congregation in Newington Green, the church that nurtured Mary as a young schoolteacher, will be opened for the beginning of the Feminist (Or Is It?) walk by Hackney Tours. Simon Coles has chosen to offer the event as a fundraiser for Mary on the Green, the campaign for a statue, as has Hilary King, who is running an Alexander Technique taster session that afternoon. Stand tall, Mary Wollstonecraft fans!

Most of these are listed on Internationalwomensday.com, the corporate-sponsored "global hub for sharing International Women's Day news, events and resources". (Banner ad: "Discover BP's feminine side".) They provided the logo above, and straplines such as "The advancement of women is of prime importance to the economy, business and society. The support of corporate organisations supporting women is critical." I would argue that the support of copy editors is also critical, but I digress....

There are well over 1000 events on the IWD database, with more still being added; hundreds are happening in Britain. The search facility seems to be broken, so I can't see if any others list Mary Wollstonecraft as an inspiration, but one that intrigues me is a walking tour of "sculptures of remarkable women ... from Louisa Blake to Emmeline Pankhurst", led by the UNWomen UK London Committee:

We are the local representative, voice and champion for UN Women (formed in January 2011 from the amalgamation of UNIFEM and three other UN gender bodies) and support the work of UN Women in its mission for gender equality and the empowerment of women.

If only the tour could end up at a commemoration of England's first feminist!

Perhaps the most significant event will be the launch of Fifty Shades of Feminism, a compilation brought together by Lisa Appignanesi, Rachel Holmes and Susie Orbach. It features a chapter entitled "There's Something About Mary" by none other than Bee Rowlatt, no stranger to this blog. The launch is part of the three-day extravaganza on the Southbank, WOW, the Women of the World festival. Sometimes there are good reasons to love London.

Last year for International Women's Day I wrote on the importance of education and on maternal mortality, in the eighteenth century and now, here in the Wealthy West but also in the Wider World. The year before that, on the 100th anniversary of IWD, Mary Wollstonecraft got yet another non-blue plaque, situated most fittingly on a school. Islington Council was behind that nod of appreciation.

If you need more inspiration, have a look at these wonderful posters for IWD 2013.

Mother of feminism, mother of Parliaments

Mary Wollstonecraft illuminated the Houses of Parliament on Wednesday evening, and London didn't know what had hit it. Mary on the Green, the campaign to raise a fitting memorial to the foremother of English feminism, was out in force, leafletting on Westminster Bridge.

I think I'll let the pictures tell the tale. NB there were two images, which the projectionists cycled between. Is the caption clear enough? That's www.maryonthegreen.org.

Photos by Neil Wissink, who says he's "happy for anyone to use the photos with due credit". 

Mary on the Houses of Parliament

This is a mock-up! Reality will be even better.

There is so much going on that I hardly know where to start. Mary Wollstonecraft will be beamed across the Thames onto the Houses of Parliament in the early dusk of November 16. The rumour that I quashed about the abseiling lesbians and the whisky chocolate cake is as nothing to the glorious truth: a giantic projection will wow the crowds from 4-6pm on Wednesday, and will pop up all over the media in the days to come. This is the kick-off to serious fundraising for the Mary on the Green campaign I wrote of last month.

Another piece of good news is that the NatWest CommunityForce scheme has, as a result of your support, awarded £6275 to the campaign to raise a memorial to Our Lady. That is a serious kick-start.

My address to the Fawcett Society last week went well, and next week will be adapted for the Newington Green Action Group's annual Friends Evening. All welcome! As indeed all are welcome to the Girlie Show, a Mary on the Green fundraiser to be held at Snooty Fox, a pub in Newington Green. Somehow I think the overlap between the two events will be ... choice. Possibly only me. That's OK.

If you recognise Mary Wollstonecraft's contribution to the life you lead now, I invite you to consider whether and how you might wish to get involved in the campaign to create a sculpture in her honour.  Remember, there is no substantial memorial to her, anywhere in the world.  (There is a lecture, a lecture hall, a hidden house, and several plaques, but nothing really big and tangible.) Your contributions would be valuable. If you can, please donate. Aside from money, there is much else to do: we need lots of people to spread the word, for example. (On Twitter, look out for and use the hashtag #marybigben.)  If you have other ideas of how you might help, please let me know, in the comments or by email.

Image from http://maryonthegreen.org/latestnews.html 

Formal Fawcetts fall for first feminist

The Fawcett Society wishes to find out more about Mary Wollstonecraft, and you are all invited: a week today, Tuesday 8 November, 7pm at Newington Green Unitarian Church, where Mary was radicalised. Dress warmly. The official announcement of this free, open, public meeting is here.

Technically, it is not Fawcett itself that will be soaking up the Wollstonecraft atmosphere that evening, but the East London branch, possibly with their North London sisters. (No doubt they will all take turns, sitting in Mary's pew.) Why do I call the Fawcetts "formal", aside from my woeful weakness for alliteration and allied alphabetical amusements? (And MW wasn't strictly speaking the first feminist.) Because they are the respectable face of British feminism, so much so that they don't even use the f-word. "Fawcett is the UK’s leading campaign for equality between women and men. Where there's an inequality gap between women and men we're working to close it." They lobby Parliament -- effectively. They wear suits and ballgowns, metaphorically and for all I know literally, and they Get Things Done. All power to them. 

As consummate campaigner and secular saint (enough already! - Ed.) Peter Tatchell pointed out, street activists recognise the value of committed negotiators who can get inside the establishment and talk to the power brokers in language they understand. What those who risk arrest don't like is when the besuited intermediaries ignore or belittle their contribution. Without OutRage! noisily and creatively demonstrating, Stonewall wouldn't have had its phone calls to MPs returned, or so went his argument. OutRage! acknowledged this interdependence but Stonewall didn't, or so he said, way back when. See Animal Liberation Front and RSPCA; see Black Power and the civil rights movement; see toffee-hammer-wielding suffragettes and patriotic patient persistent (I said stop! -Ed.) suffragists. I don't know the precise parallel to gender issues -- Riot Grrrls got co-opted into commercial music*, Guerrilla Girls never made it to the National Gallery -- but at any rate, Fawcett is the Stonewall of feminism, and they do what they do very well. "We make real differences in women’s lives by creating awareness, leading debate and driving change. Our lobbying power means we have real influence right at the top of UK politics and among those who make decisions."

The Fawcett ethos is one of liberal reform: "Our vision is of a society where women and our rights and freedoms are equally valued and respected and where we have equal power and influence in shaping our own lives and our wider world." I like to think its members would sit well with the Rational Dissenters of Newington Green, the ones who opened a young schoolteacher's eyes not to the injustices of the world -- she was well acquainted with them already - but with the political dimensions to these injustices. "We campaign on women’s representation in politics and public life; on equal pay, on pensions and poverty; valuing caring work; and the treatment of women in the justice system."

I'll do my show and tell (as I did a year ago at Ignite -- so sad to be missing this autumn's version! -- but if you haven't got tickets by now, you have no chance anyway, so might as well come along to Newington Green). We'll certainly cover the latest developments with Mary on the Green, and perhaps trade campaigning tips. The quiz on Mary (and democracy, and wonderful women worldwide) which I devised for my visit to the neighbouring Stoke Newington WI will not, after all, be reprised -- or not on this night. There is another event coming up, however...stay tuned.

The final reason for my fondness for the Fawcett Society is historical: "We trace our roots back to 1866, when Millicent Garrett Fawcett began her lifetime’s work leading the peaceful campaign for women’s votes."  This was the woman who wrote the introduction to the centenary edition of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, cleansing Mary's memory and claiming her as a forerunner of the suffrage movement:

The remarkable degree in which she was ahead of her time is shown on almost every page of "The Vindication." She claims for women the right to share in the advantages of representation in Parliament, nearly seventy years before women's suffrage was heard of in the House of Commons. She knows that few, if any, at that time would be found to sympathise with her, but that does not prevent her from claiming for women what she felt was simple justice. She also perceives the enormous importance of the economic independence of women, and its bearing on social health and disease.

I claim MGF as a Lost Daughter.


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*Oh. Oh no. Riot Grrrls has had its domain squatted by a lifestyle brand, with stockists. Don't look. Oh if you really have to look. Whereas the Guerrilla Girls were media savvy from 1985, and keep a firm hold of their brand name.

The 1891 intro is here. This version (held by Keele) seems to start mid-essay, 

and I can't find anything better at the moment.  Images from the Fawcett Society , 

One War Art for the Riot Grrrl Manifesto, John Gray's blog for the stamp, 

and Guerrilla Girls for the satirical movie poster.

Votes for women! Vote for Mary!

Friends, a request: please vote for the Mary on the Green project, to get a statue to Mary Wollstonecraft on Newington Green. If you haven't already done so, please visit http://communityforce.natwest.com/project/2478, register, and vote for us. It is free, will only take a couple of minutes, and could net the project £6000. This will pay for several abseiling lesbians slices of whiskey cake.

It has been a good Wollstonecraft week:

• an interview with another local journalist, in Mary's pew, no less (awaiting publication); 
• a recce to Parliament, with Mary on the Green collaborators; 
• a surprise seminar (the convenor said, "You were in the Islington Tribune!"); 
• mutual-admiration-society coffee with the StokeyLitFest originator, Liz Vater; 
• a random friendly photographer; 
• several books (purchased: a solid 1976 edition of the Scandinavian Letters; borrowed: Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer; read: Ariel, last perused in deepest adolescence); 
• too much time on Twitter....

And I also note that the Google Doodle for Friday was of the Disney animator Mary Blair, which I hope augurs well for her namesake.

Image: That is one of the logos for Natwest Communityforce. Yes, really, with 1970 decor. But we can imagine it as Mary, Fuseli, and Mrs F.

Rumour quashing

The mixture of absinthe and HP sauce, in the presence of lesbian activists, does not automatically lead to abseiling. Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder*; if it leads you - alcoholicly and alliteratively - to abseiling, that is not my fault. If devoted best friends Mary and Frances, living and loving and working together, strike you as lesbians within the current remit of the term, well, that is a subject for a future essay. If abseiling and lesbians give you a frisson of radical nostalgia for protests of yore, then I congratulate you on your knowledge of recent Parliamentary history. But I can categorically assure you that Mary on the Green is not an abseiling type of organisation. The rumour is quashed here, as dead as those foxes Otis Ferry likes to hunt.

(If you dream tonight of Mary abseiling into the Commons, or of her as a suffragette smashing windows - "Votes for Women! Justice for one half of the human race!" - , or of her gigantic statue the size of both Buddhas of Bamiyan rolled into one, with pilgrims abseiling off her thoughtful nose, blame your dream on intellectual indigestion, literary late-night snacking on Ben Gunn's toasted cheese. Blame not this blog for your imaginings. I wash my hands of you.)

_______________________________________________
*If, with the literate, I am
Impelled to try an epigram,
I never seek to take the credit:
We all assume that Oscar said it.

Dorothy Parker, of course. Credit where credit is due, and cash when they really get anxious. (I said that.)

What the heck is that picture about, I hear you asking? When I did a Google Image search (I was going to write "when you do a Google search", but sadly (?) those impersonal days of stable shared search results are over, and without even knowing it, we wear the goggles of the Filter Bubble) on "abseiling lesbian", I got three categories of images: nothing NSFW; a few pictures of people abseiling, who on inspection of the source pages could not be guaranteed to be lesbians, and thus the use of these images might contaminate the carefully guarded honour of this blog; and a photo of some gingery-looking dark cake, sliced. So I went to Wikimedia Commons, was not surprised that "abseiling lesbian" turned up nothing, and looked for "cake slices" instead. This is how my mind works, slipping sideways by association. Some call it genius; some, madness. Frankly, I'd just like a slice of that chocolate-whisky concoction. By FotoosVanRobin, CC-BY-SA-2.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0).

Wine, Wollstonecraft, and Women's Institute

"Wine, women, and Mary Wollstonecraft" was the title that the Stoke Newington Women's Institute chose to bill me under, retrospectively. A good time was had by all, except possibly the WI hedgehogs (cheese & pineapple variety). The quiz that I'd spent ages devising was brutal. Four rounds: Mary; democracy; inspiring women worldwide; significant British women. When we got to the Nobel Prize winners, one woman said - in tones I interpreted as halfway between accusatory and plaintive - "We make jam, you know." I think that was a joke.

One fun thing today was writing a twelve-tweet love-life mini-bio of Mary, stimulated by an exchange with visionary Cory Doctorow. Who knows what may come of it.

This post is too short. The previous one, the update on Mary on the Green, was probably too long. Oh well.

Mary on the Green

It's time for an update on Mary on the Green, the campaign to get Mary Wollstonecraft a statue on Newington Green. We got an article in the Islington Tribune on Friday, the hook being that this hyperlocal campaign is soliciting funds from a big UK bank. Here's how it works: you go to Community Force Project 2478, register (hint: all they ask for is an email address; it doesn't have to be your main one), and vote. It's free, it takes less than a minute, and I see no sign that it geolocates. If Mary on the Green gets enough votes, NatWest will donate £6000, which would certainly boost the project. If you love Mary like I love Mary...isn't that a song? Go on, do the decent thing, wherever you live: express your support for the campaign by voting, and tell your friends about it too - Facebook, Twitter, blogs, you know the drill.

Other publicity is bubbling along nicely. Student radio wanted an interview the same day as the local paper; the promised .wav might yet show up. I'll be addressing the new-look and zeitgeisty Stoke Newington Women's Institute this evening, rattling the tin. Three questions to get out of the way first.

Why Mary Wollstonecraft? I hope readers of this blog can provide answers aplenty: England's first feminist (well, close enough) - and so much else besides - lacks any substantial memorial anywhere in the world.

John Betjeman, I love you .
Wikimedia Commons, ILYT.

Why a statue? If you care to argue for some other form of public art, go ahead, but I have my heart set on a representational and recognisable statue, not an abstract reference to her such as a pile of books. Don't get me wrong; I like some pieces of conceptual art very much, but not for this project. Mary on the Green, as a group, has no official view on this; we want to give the artists a free hand and see what they come up with. But I know where my campaigning energies, such as they are, lie.

And why Newington Green? True, there are many other locations associated with Mary, including quite a few in central London (her birthplace in Spitalfields, her garret on the South Bank, her publisher at St Paul's, her chipped teacup lodgings in Bloomsbury, her happy last months in Somers Town and St Pancras). Newington Green was where she lived as a young woman, with her beloved. She arrived an unknown and unpublished schoolteacher; she left a couple of years later, having had her world enlarged by hanging out with well-read, high-minded, hard-working neighbours. Most of them were Rational Dissenters, associated with the little chapel of which Richard Price was the minister. That great and gentle man was kind and generous to her, as was Mrs Burgh, widow of an educationalist, and truly a fairy godmother to Mary. The chapel still says Newington Green Unitarian Church, and is still radical - in fact, it has just rehung on the outside railings the banner that says Birthplace of Feminism (in Mary's honour, and in place of the previous one, 300 Years of Dissent). So Newington Green has a strong claim to Mary.

But the reason that this part of London, as opposed to any other, is going to become the world centre of pilgrimage to Our Lady (this is my blog; let me dream) is because some twenty-first century neighbours care enough to make it happen. I have written before of the formidable team of the Newington Green Action Group, who brought the green itself back to life within the last decade, and who now wish for a cherry atop their cake. NGAG has registered charity status, elected officers, a bank account, a track record, contacts across the borough, kosher paperwork, the whole lot. Mary on the Green had a soft launch of sorts on International Women's Day, with the unveiling of the council's un-blue plaque to Mary, high up on Newington Green Primary School, followed by a children's choir in the church, from that school. We got our letter in the Guardian, signed by all those peers and MPs. (Stop! I'm having flashbacks of those hundreds and hundreds of hideous handmade emails. I've been trying to block it out. More absinthe, please)  The Mary on the Green website went live: cannily and simply maryonthegreen.org. I appeared on Woman's Hour and Jenni Murray called me "besotted". That was half a year ago.

In the intervening months, Mary on the Green has been solidifying its structure and plotting its big splash of publicity to entice the money. The former is fairly dry and tedious, but of course necessary: laying the groundwork so that the best, i.e. most suitable, artist and art work will be chosen. What are the criteria for the sculpture? What needs to go into the brief? Who gets to choose the long list, the short list, and the successful candidate? Has anyone thought about pigeonshit and vandalism? (The art world isn't all canapes, I can tell you.) The attention-grabbing splash is rather more juicy. I can't say too much just yet, but think HP sauce, not ketchup!

Photo of Newington Green by Vicky Ayech. Photo of bottles by Jonathan Brodsky. 

Both CC-BY-2.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0) via Wikimedia Commons 

Advanced Twitter for beginners

Yesterday I attempted to back up the claim made in my previous post "A Flurry on Twitter". However, my enthusiasm leaps ahead of my technical know-how. The sharp-eyed will have spotted that yesterday's screenshot showed a request from me, not a response from Margaret Atwood, about Mary on the Green, dated 9 May. Via the @maryonthegreen account I created last year, I had asked the international best-selling author and celeb-Tweeter to spread the message to her 200 000 followers about "our campaign for a London statue to Mary Wollstonecraft". I saw my error this morning, and thought about deleting the post, but that seems shady. So, instead, mindful that one of the purposes of setting up this blog is to teach myself blogstuff, I'll explain what I did next.

First of all, I went to Margaret Atwood's Twitter page. Her account is @MargaretAtwood, and the home page has that reassuring blue tick on it, the imprimatur of official verification. Besides, we all know that Canada's favourite septagenarian enjoys running her very active account, because she wrote most amusingly last spring on The Guardian's Comment is Free about "How I learned to love Twitter" and the New York Review of Books (foot note) about much the same thing -- "At first I thought it was for kids, but I was soon hooked. It's like having fairies in your garden". Or, it's "like having 33,000 precocious grandchildren" -- except now there are 200 000 + of them, most of whom we can assume to be "fairies", helpful invisible well-wishers. 

On that page I scrolled down endlessly and tediously, for more than a month (and it felt like it), to find the tweet in question. CTRL + F doesn't work, and I don't know of a specific search tool that would do the job; all the tip pages start with the assumption that the desired message has already been found. Eventually I got this, below: the shaded message is the one we're concerned with, in the left-hand list, with a larger version of it in the right-hand pane.  (On the real Twitter page, though not on this static screenshot, when you click on a message, the bigger one is triggered to open.) There are two indicators that MA did indeed forward my request. Look first at the ordinary sized tweet in the left-hand column. The pair of square-circular arrows, followed by the words "by MargaretAtwood", mean "retweeted by". So that's all right then. But there is another way of ascertaining the same thing. Look now at the right-hand pane. Underneath the message, it says "Retweeted by MargaretAtwood and 48 others", with nine avatars. Again, in the live page, you can mouse over the thumbnail images and see who they all are; on this static page, you can at any rate be sure of the number.

Now here's another way of confirming the same thing, in theory, although not in this precise case. You can go to my campaigning account, @maryonthegreen, and find my request. (Again, tiresome scrolling. There is a better option that we'll get to later.)

Well, @MargaretAtwood, would you tell the world about our campaign for a London statue to Mary Wollstonecraft? http://www.maryonthegreen.org

The full image is below. At its bottom, you'll see it says "Retweeted by kakennedy and 48 others". As far as I can tell, @kakennedy just happens to be the last person to forward my request, and as such her name appears, and her avatar is the one to the extreme left. Again, we can only see a small proportion of the whole number of avatars, and again, in the real web page you can mouse over them to see more names, but not in this static image. Because so many people quickly followed MA's excellent example (48 divided by 200 000 -- let's not think about it), her avatar is no longer visible, buried under the later-comers.  Had there been 14 or fewer retweeters, they would all have remained on the top page.

Notice that in the address bar appears a URL identifying this particular tweet within the @maryonthegreen account. You can't copy it from the screenshot, of course, but you can type it into another browser or session, and find the tweet again from anywhere. Or, you can use Google. Ah yes, that great search engine in the sky! Finally we come to Google.

Below is the Google search result for "Twitter maryonthegreen MargaretAtwood". My tweet to MA shows, first up, which is great; but her retweet, not at all, weird. A couple of Twitter accounts I've never heard of are #2 and #3. Another of my accounts is at #4, which I guess is good. Media stuff about MA is #5-7, which is weird again, because I can tell you, there is no mention of Mary on the Green in the NYRB: would that there were. The last entry we will cover at the end of this too-long post. So, the moral is, you would think that Google Is Your Friend, and any old tweet you've misplaced, or remember reading a couple of months ago, must just be lying around waiting to be jumped on and tickled by California algorhythms: not so, dear reader, not so. Google provides no quick proof that MA did RT my request. (True, I haven't trawled through the other 150 results for that three-item string.)

Now, the last item, below. This is a bizarre work-around. A site called Poptweets sort of archives Twitter. I say "sort of", because it found  MA's RT, i.e. the particular piece of ephemera for which I want proof, but then when I tried to go to the permalink: "Move Along, Nothing to See Here! You may have followed a bad link or a gremlin may have gotten into the system." So, there is screenshot proof, but not URL proof.

We're almost there.

Notice that in none of these examples am I signed in to any account or any service (e.g. see the top right-hand corner of the Twitter pages). All of this is open to everyone. Twitter is, by default, a public conversation.

One last thing I tried, on what has for me been a tiringly techy day: Blackbird Pie, an experimental service to bake a tweet into a blog, to set before the Margaret King, or something. But again, it starts by assuming that the URL is to hand. It wasn't, at the point when I needed it, so Blackbird Pie did me no good. Maybe another day.

All that, to get a flicker of attention from a celebrity? All that, merely for a potential supporter of Mary on the Green? No, I tell myself: all this is in quest of self-education. Our Lady would approve, I think.

Bonne nuit, Mary Wollstonecraft. Bonne nuit, Margaret Atwood. Bonne nuit, tout le monde.

Photo: By Lesekreis (Own work) [CC0 (creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons

Footnote: 7 April 2010  -- I'm starting to write dates in, as a Good Habit, in case digital artifacts later vanish.

Margaret Atwood helps out

One small sign was getting Margaret Atwood to re-tweet our campaign, Mary on the Green.Traffic jumped.

Review of Stokey Lit Fest

What a great weekend! Who needs to traipse all the way from London to Hay-on-Wye, when such a panoply is laid out like a tempting Clissold Park picnic?

Mary Wollstonecraft got top billing on the website:

2011 is the second Stoke Newington Literary Festival, created to celebrate the area’s long and influential literary history and to keep the spirit of radical thinking, debating and story-telling alive.This year, we’ll be shining the spotlight on some of the people that have helped put Stoke Newington on the cultural map, in particular Edgar Allen Poe and Mary Wollstonecraft.

How fantastic is that? And then the description of our event:

Mary Wollstonecraft moved to Newington Green in 1782 where she published books on girls’ education and civil rights and wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a keystone in the history of women’s rights. Come and find out about local projects celebrating Britain’s first feminist, hear the ‘Fragments & Monuments’ artists talk about their new book and participate in Strangers in the Neighbourhood, a collaboration between Anna Birch and Taey Iohe and meet Roberta Wedge, Mary Wollestonecraft blogger. 

When I first saw their website more than a month ago, I wrote to the organisers and suggested they correct the spelling -- such a difficult name. So now the front page is fine, but the event description still contains the typo, and doesn't list the name of my project (this blog title) or even Mary on the Green per se. Oh well.

The event itself went well. My various Twitter publicity may have had some effect: I believe the tickets were sold out, and certainly the gallery space looked full. Close to 100 people, I'd guess. It was Anna Birch's initiative, so she and her collaborator Taey Iohe got most of the time, which is fair enough. They have a new book to flog, which is what literary festivals are usually all about.

Joe Caluori

There were two Mary-actors in the big white square petticoat structures, representing cages and confinement. They served the tea, mostly. Anna described her projects and read some letters with Taey, Anna in the voice of Mary and Taey in that of a Korean artist whose life bears certain similarities. I reprised my IGNITE talk -- that is, I provided a brief illustrated biography -- and spoke for another five minutes on my Twitter adventures, this blog, and projects going on around the world. (In fact, in the audience we had a woman about to embark on a Mary-pilgrimage, with baby and book contract. More on her another time [update: Bee Rowlatt is here].) Joe Caluori, the Islington Labour councillor, spoke about Newington Green Action Group and the Mary on the Green project. I circulated a sheet for email sign-ups. Hilary King sold books and collected donations for NGAG afterwards. No time for Q&A from the audience, alas, but aside from that, everything went without a hitch. Roll on, next year.

Hidden photomontage at Museum of London

With the kind permission of the artist himself, Red Saunders.



I wrote previously of the large photomontages of Red Saunders, at the Museum of London until 6 April. Mary Wollstonecraft and the Dissenters of Newington Green is the fourth in the series Hidden, and was added only a couple of weeks ago to the three that had been hanging in the foyer since November: Wat Tyler and the Peasants' Revolt, very bloody, like a full-stage production of Macbeth; Tom Paine, alone on horseback in the woods and looking quite the gentleman; and William Cuffay and the London Chartists 1848, a huge set piece like a Renaissance history painting, of an organising committee that led to the extension of the (male) suffrage. 



Saunders describes his work on his site, Red Dog:



Red calls HIDDEN a photographic 'chamber epic' (a description suggested by the playwright Trevor Griffiths) which recreates events in the long struggle for parliamentary representation and democracy in Britain. Not the history of Kings and Queens, but of the 'Hidden' neglected scenes of working class history. This was no smooth gradual transition; many actions in this long struggle were of life and death intensity, as working people fought for their rights while struggling to keep alive the history made by mass movements of dissenters, non conformists, radicals and revolutionaries.



Museum of London foyer. Thanks, Chihiro!



Mary Wollstonecraft and the Dissenters of Newington Green, or, for shorthand, Mary on the Green.....There's a snapshot of the day of the January shoot, a few of the models chatting while they wait outside the Geffrye Museum, on the winter-green lawn embraced by the arms of the almshouses. Roland Denning put together a Vimeo video -- actually a four-minute slideshow with a voiceover consisting of general explanation and interviews with several of the key players, most notably Red himself.

The photomontage is available on the Geffrye Museum site as well as the Museum of London one (but MoL has broken the link, let's hope temporarily, with their website redesign). Looking at the image, I see what Deyan Sudjic, director of the Design Museum, means when he refers to the "painterly quality" of Red's work. 

Hidden has been reviewed, and Saunders interviewed, by the Camden New Journal (Picture perfect snapshots of English history) and the Socialist Worker (History you don't learn at school). Tony Benn is a patron of the project, which works primarily with volunteers. There's a Facebook group to sign up to, if you wish to keep informed, and possibly volunteer for a future shoot.

Many thanks to Red for coming through with the image file today, thanks to Chihiro for her on site inspection, and a hat tip to Sophie Woolley (@Mrs_Evil) for alerting me on Twitter to the arrival of the image in situ.

Mary in Somers Town

A few days ago I went exploring, with Chihiro Umegaki, the Japanese historian mentioned earlier, and the Swedish performance designer Asa Norling. (Åsa had read the Scandinavian letters, and commented that Mary hadn't much liked the Swedes. I reassured her that she didn't think much of the Portuguese or Irish either, from her sojourns in those countries, and when she was in France hung out mostly with Americans.) Our little tour was mainly a Wollstonecraft pilgrimage, but I used it as an excuse to look at sculptures and other public art as we passed them, comparing good and bad examples that might feed in to Mary on the Green. This post is the first in a series describing what I shall call Wednesday walks.

The three of us met under the skirts of the goddess in St Pancras Station, that is, at the feet of the biggest and ugliest statue to have disgraced London in the last decade at least. It has its plus points: there are benches, it is right at the head of the station, it is a convenient place to gather -- especially to arrange to meet people who might not know London all that well. Anyone can find it: no one could miss it: I, however, wouldn't miss it at all. In terms of aesthetic appeal, I give it nil.

If you look closely, and use a little imagination, you'll see that the speech bubble above Brief Encounter says "Welcome to London, home of heteronormativity!" Fortunately, you don't actually have to look at the embracing couple, as they are too high to peer at without serious neck craning (unless you *really* want to look up her skirt, and be disappointed). At eye level, on the frieze around the base, are much more interesting figures, small, rich, detailed. (NB not shown on this photo, as they were added later.) Not really bas relief -- maybe medium relief? They are somewhat of a relief from looking up. Hard to believe the two works are by the same artist, Paul Day. There's a long explanation of the statue by him, archived on the BBC site; the comments from the punters are polarised, to say the least. OK, it's quite a feat of engineering, as The Evening Standard photos show, but that isn't what it is being judged on. It's supposed to be a work of art.

[Addendum: that indefatigable London explorer IanVisits has written up the frieze of commuters.]

A few steps away is the charming statue of John Betjeman, which is so utterly appealing. This bronze, by Martin Jennings, is just over life size, and sits on the ground rather than a pedestal, so that tourists are often to be seen photographing themselves with him. The poet is clasping his hat in a breeze, his coat billowing, looking up at the station he campaigned to save; I am reminded of Sir Christopher Wren's epitaph in St Paul's Cathedral: "Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you." There's an article by Jennings in The Guardian, setting Betjeman and the project in context, and a description of the process of its creation, with photos along the way, at the artist's website, with various quotes.

Jennings's Betjeman - the best statue I've seen of a well-known figure - is so bright, so visually striking, that it's possible to believe that he actually embalmed the poet in bronze. Betjeman is so realistic that you think he's about to walk down the platform.

Duncan Hamilton, Yorkshire Post.

There is a trail of the poet's words leading up to his statue, carved into slate discs set into the floor and forming its base. It is definitely site-specific art, and also that most traditional of forms, a representational statue of an individual. I could wish for nothing better as a tribute to Mary.

We leave the station and walk along the noisy Euston Road, or the New Road as Mary would have known it. The M25 of its day opened in 1756 as a bypass around the amalgamation of the City of London and Westminster, and all their accretions up to that date. We pass the British Library, which was then housed within the British Museum; Mary lived within spitting distance of it on Store Street, but, I believe, would have been forbidden access on grounds of being a woman. Perhaps we will get to Bloomsbury on a future walk. On the other side of the Euston Road is St Pancras New Church, "new" only in the English sense of being almost 200 years old. Godwin would have seen its contentious and expensive rise.

Just past Chalton Street Market we turn into Churchway, its wiggliness a good indicator that the road pre-dates the grid layout around it. The name for this immediate area is Somers Town, as in the recent film made in honour of the Eurostar arrival. Somers Town stretches north towards Camden Town, but most Londoners know the area simply as St Pancras, originally after the church, or as St Pancras/Kings Cross, after the adjacent train stations. A couple of minutes' walk takes us to Polygon Road, named after the buildings in which Mary spent her last months, happy with Godwin and her work, and where she died.

We pause to gaze at a large mural on the side of a school. It is hard to appreciate the detail of the painting, as it is obscured by a high chain fence, but here's an image. Claire Tomalin, author of The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (2004),  lobbied in1992 for its retention, calling it "probably the finest in London":

...in 1980 the GLC [Greater London Council, abolished by Thatcher] commissioned the London artist Karen Gregory to paint a mural on the wall of a school to celebrate the history of the district and its famous residents...It offers a journey through time, drawing on the styles of many artists; Stubbs, Constable, Gainsborough, Ford Madox Brown, Sickert and Gilman. Old St Pancras church is in the background, surrounded by hay fields. The Fleet river runs by under an elm tree. Beneath it are seated the figures of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, who belong to the earliest period of Somers Town's history. Their daughter Mary is shown as a young woman, with her husband Shelley, sailing paper boats from the bridge over the Fleet, while behind them appears the head of Frankenstein's monster.

Her campaign was successful in raising funds for its restoration; it was moved in 2007, according to the London Mural Preservation Society, and its amended version includes not only the head teacher but Tomalin herself.

Opposite the mural is Oakshott Court, more or less where Mary's last home would have stood. An engraving of the Polygon depicts the circle of buildings, a speculative development in the middle of Clarenden Square, as very attractive. The church on the right hand side might be the one that Churchway leads to, but I see no sign of it on Greenwood's 1827 map. By that point the area had gone downmarket; Charles Dickens lodged there as a boy, and put the Polygon into Bleak House in 1852, as the home of a down-at-heel eccentric. The 1952 English Heritage survey says "Horwood's map of 1799 and Tompson's map of 1803 show the Polygon built in the fields with a circular road round it." That would accord with Godwin's description of walking home across fields, to what were then buildings only a couple of years old: desirable, purpose-built residences just outside the pollution of London, but conveniently close. This was still an age when everything needed to be within walking distance, unless you were rich enough to keep a horse.

After walking all the way around Oakshott Court, we find the brown plaque to Mary, erected by Camden London Borough Council, prodded by Claire Tomalin. "In a house on this site..." In the London Review of Books in 1989, Tomalin says:

‘Mary Who?’ is still the common form of her name, outside a small circle of specialists and enthusiasts. People stumble over the three simple syllables; its awkwardness has stood in the way of her fame. Pankhurst has an easy ring to it, and Mrs Pankhurst got a statue. When I set about organising a modest plaque on the site of the house in which Mary Wollstonecraft died in Somers Town, there was talk of naming flats or even a street after her: but again, those three syllables defeated too many people.

Next Wednesday's installment: to St Pancras Church (and tea).

All images Wikimedia Commons, except Polygon Road, courtesy Asa Norling.

A Japanese historian muses

Last week we had the thoughts of a French philosopher in Turkey; this week, those of a Japanese historian on a research visit to London.  Chihiro Umegaki specialises in the history of the English Enlightenment and women writers in the 18th century; no surprise, then, that she has written extensively on Mary Wollstonecraft, bringing her to a Japanese audience. She came across this blog, and I promptly invited her along on my jaunt to Oxford to commune with Shelley's Ghost (which closed yesterday). Chihiro was the ideal companion; our obsessions tally nicely. We got out our maps and plotted where exactly Mary's dwelling places would have been, and how many of them might be visitable in a week in London. Plaques, and places without plaques, and Newington Green for the church as well, and the Museum of London for Hidden, not forgetting the National Portrait Gallery....I'll describe our peregrinations in several future posts. For now, let Chihiro introduce herself, and how she came to work with Mary.

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Mary Wollstonecraft has been my idol for more than 15 years. I came across her Vindication when I was an undergraduate student in Tokyo. Of course there were a lot of phrases and expressions which I could not understand fully, but I found her arguments very authentic, and fancied that she personally supported me, unsure of my own future academic career in the still male-dominant society of Japan.

My first visit to London was in 2000, when I took my MA course in history in York. I remember how disappointed I was to learn that there were no proper memorial spots of Mary Wollstonecraft. I tried to find her plaques on buildings, but in vain. As an overseas student who spent only one year in Britain, I would be happy enough if I could take a picture of me standing side by side with her statue, and imagine that I was connected with her real life in London…

After finishing my MA, I came back home, and published some articles (in Japanese) about Mary Wollstonecraft and contemporary women writers. I have been teaching British history at a women's junior college in Tokyo for 8 years, and now I am writing an introductory book to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman for Japanese readers. We do have a Japanese translation (published in 1980), but I think ordinary readers still need some guidance to understand the full context of her arguments. My book is intended to be such a guide.

I came to London in March this year partly because I needed some fresh inspiration for the final phase of my writing. Unexpectedly, the Mary on the Green project caught my eyes. It was a very happy surprise, and convinced me that Mary Wollstonecraft’s voice is still heard. I will encourage my Japanese readers to support this project, and hope that some day I can take a picture of me holding my book, standing next to Mary's statue in Newington Green.