JANE AUSTEN'S REGENCY WORLD MAGAZINE: AN INTERVIEW WITH CHIEF GURU TIM BULLAMORE

Victoria here, catching up with the owner/publisher/editor of JARW.

Jan-Feb 2016 issue out now!

The magazine’s website is here. To Subscribe, click here.

Tim Bullamore, the publisher of Jane Austen’s Regency World, is a charming friend and entrepreneur in journalism.  I had the good fortune to interview him at the Jane Austen Society of North America’s Annual General Meeting held recently in Louisville, Kentucky.

Tim’s recent Telegraph obituary of composer/conductor Pierre Boulez is here.
 Nov. Dec. 2015 issue
Tim must have to consult his calendar every day to see where he has to be, for his schedule sounds amazingly complicated to a person like me who just sits in front of a computer most of the day.  He is a busy journalist, spending several days a week in London as the copy editor for the London Times.  He write obituaries for the Daily Telegraph about classical musicians. And, in addition to various teaching assignments, he is the editor and publisher of Jane Austen’s Regency World Magazine, which comes out six times a year. And just to provide more variety, his wife holds a university teaching position in Scotland.
Are you surprised this is my favorite of all Tim’s excellent cover images?

We chatted in the busy emporium at the Louisville AGM where Tim manned a table covered with back issues and subscription forms. He told me how his friends were running the Jane Austen Centre in Bath a few years ago. They confided that their magazine, then part of the Centre’s program, was becoming difficult for them to manage. Being a lifelong admirer of Jane Austen, Tim looked into the financial aspects of running the operation and bought it.  In the eight years of his leadership, the magazine has excelled in providing interesting and entertaining articles about all aspects of the English Regency and new insights into our favorite author.  Not to forget the colorful illustrations — and news of JA-related events.  He is proud of the quality of the printing and binding as well, indeed every aspect of the magazine’s production.

The Sept. Oct. 2015 issue, with a cover caricature from James Gillray in 1801:
 using science to treat disease; Article by Penelope Friday.
The content of the magazine ranges among academic and historical subjects, Jane Austen’s life and times, the mania for Regency dancing, Jane Austen in popular culture, including fan fiction, thus appealing to a variety of audiences.
Tim gets a few moments of relaxation in between interviews and courting prospective subscribers.
He spends about a day and a half each week on JARW, working with a small sales staff and editorial consultants. including the renowned Maggie Lane who has written many articles and books on myriad Jane Austen topics.  Time says that as a niche produce JARW has reasonable advertising rates, providing about 20% of income. The rest relies upon subscriptions.

Tim has attended Jane Austen Society events in England, Australia, around Europe, and across the U.S. and Canada.  His first JASNA AGM was in Chicago where he was delighted to receive a warm and enthusiastic welcome from North American Austen fans. He has spoken at several events, including a talk on obituaries in the time of Austen, and a thoroughly tongue-in-cheek “Defense of Mr. Wickham,” (in Minneapolis, 2013) which to his surprise, several listeners took quite seriously. I found it hilarious, casting Mr. Wickham as the victim of Georgiana Darcy’s unsuccessful seductions.
Tim summed up his description of the magazine with an ‘elevator’ pitch: “It has everything you need to know about Jane Austen, the Georgian period and Regency times, full of news, views, and information, an indispensable guide.” 
Who could say it better than that?  Thanks for an engaging chat, Tim.  I look forward to another year of reading pleasure.

WATERLOO DIARY: WOMAN BATTLE ARTIST IN TRAINING

The Juvenilia Press has published selections from the Waterloo Diary of ElizabethThompson, Lady Butler (3 November 1846 – 2 October 1933), who had a distinguished career as a painter, mainly of battle scenes.   Victoria here. At the October 2015 JASNA-AGM in Louisville, KY, our friends from the Juvenilia Press were on hand with their many editions of Jane Austen’s early writings, and this new book. which immediately caught my eye.

2015

For more information and the order form, click here.

The official description: Elizabeth Thompson (Butler), Waterloo Diary: Woman Battle Artist in Training:

‘inspired by a visit to the field of Waterloo, “that inexhaustible battle”, and determined to become a painter of battle scenes, young Elizabeth Thompson (later Butler) records her training and the prejudices she faced as a woman painter: until she scores a huge success at the Royal Academy with what Ruskin called “the first fine Pre-Raphaelite picture of battle”.
Edited by Juliet McMaster and Others.’

The painting of the Scots charg

Elizabeth Butler’s tour of Waterloo, which The most famous painting of the battle of Waterloo is probably “Scotland Forever” by Lady Elizabeth Butler. The key to the famous lady battle painter’s was that her work struk a chord with the British public, if she had been a TV producer her ratings would have been off the charts. Waterloo, like the Crimea, held a special place in Victorian National conciousness.

Self-Portrait 1869

Born at Villa Claremont in Lausanne, Switzerland, she specialized in painting scenes from British military campaigns and battles, including the Crimean War and the Battle of Waterloo. The Roll Call (purchased by Queen Victoria), The Defence of Rorke’s Drift, and Scotland Forever!, showing the Scots Greys at the Battle of Waterloo, (Leeds Art Gallery) are among her better-known works. She wrote about her military paintings in an autobiography published in 1922: “I never painted for the glory of war, but to portray its pathos and heroism”.[2][3][4]
She was the daughter of Thomas James Thompson (1812–1881) and his second wife Christiana Weller (1825–1910). Her sister was the noted essayist and poet Alice Meynell. Elizabeth began receiving art instruction in 1862, while growing up in Italy. In 1866 she went to South Kensington, London and entered the Female School of Art. She became a Roman Catholic along with the rest of the family after they moved to Florence in 1869. While in Florence, under the tutelage of the artist Giuseppe Bellucci (1827–1882), Elizabeth attended the Accademia di Belle Arti. She signed her works as E.B.; Elizth. Thompson or Mimi Thompson (she was called “Mimi” from her childhood).[2][3][4]
Initially she concentrated on religious subjects like The Magnificat (1872), but upon going to Paris in 1870 she was exposed to battle scenes from Jean Louis Ernest Meissonier and Édouard Detaille, and switched her focus to war paintings. With the painting Missing (1873) a Franco-Prussian War battle scene, depicting the common soldiers’ suffering and heroism, she earned her first submission to the Royal Academy. After Th
e Roll Call was shown in 1874 at the Academy, she became a nineteenth-century celebrity, due to the paintings’ immense popularity. As the paintings toured Europe, along with photographs of Elizabeth, she gained even more notice because people found out that she was both young and pretty, something normally not associated with painters of battle scenes. It also helped that during this time there was an incredible amount of Victorian pride and romanticism for the growing British Empire.[2][3][4] Lady Butler’s topics reflected such romanticism but her paintings were generally realistic in detail with aspects such as confusion, mud and exhaustion being accurately portrayed. Her works tend to focus on British troops shown in action, or shortly after it, but avoiding moments of close hand-to-hand combat. They are often shown as their opponents might have seen them, but relatively few of the opponents themselves are shown.
Her career and fame peaked with her 11 June 1877 marriage to Sir William Francis Butler (1838–1910), a distinguished officer of the British Army, from Tipperary in Ireland. Not only was she now married, breaking the heart of many young men, but now she would travel to the far reaches of the Empire with her husband and raise their six children. During this time Lady Butler came under the influence of her Irish husband’s belief that the colonial imperialism of the United Kingdom and other European powers might not be in the best interest of the natives in colonial lands. However she continued to paint scenes showing the valour of the ordinary British soldier. Butler also did some black and white illustration, including of poems by her sister, Alice Meynell, and of works by Thackeray.

On her husband’s retirement from the army, she moved with him to Ireland, where they lived at Bansha Castle, County Tipperary. She showed pictures at the Royal Hibernian Academy from 1892. Among the paintings that she took with her to Co. Tipperary was a set of water-colours that she had painted while with her husband in Palestine. During the Irish Civil War they were transferred to her daughter in Gormanston Castle for safe keeping, but were almost all destroyed later by German bombs in London during World War II.
Lady Butler was widowed in 1910, but continued to live at Bansha until 1922, when she took up residence with the youngest of her six children, Eileen, Viscountess Gormanston, at Gormanston Castle, County Meath. She died there shortly before her 87th birthday and was interred at nearby Stamullen graveyard.[2][3][

DUKE OF WELLINGTON TOUR: WRAPPING UP OUR ADVENTURE

At long last we come to the end of our posts on The Duke of Wellington Tour, but fear not – Victoria and Kristine stayed on in England and have got plenty of after tour posts to come. In the meantime, here is wrap up of the highlights of our Tour.

Above, photos of our London hotel, the Grosvenor Victoria
Our fantastic group at Apsley House
The Wellington Arch
The Tower of London, with the Poppy Installation in full bloom
Horse Guards
Dinner at the Grenadier Pub
Afternoon tea at Richoux, Piccadilly
Walmer Castle
Dover Castle
Er . . . . a really neat doorway
Prinny’s Royal Pavilion, Brighton
Stratfield Saye
Reading
Downton Abbey, aka Highclere Castle
Basildon Park
Windsor Castle
The Guildhall, Windsor
Windsor Castle

Frogmore House

And the final photos of our tour group. Miss you all, many thanks for joining us on our tour through Wellington’s England. Stay tuned for details regarding our next tour!

2016: THE YEAR OF EMMA

Victoria here, on a favorite subject — my favorite author. Jane Austen’s fourth novel, Emma, was published in late December, 1815, but listed on the title page as 1816. Therefore, the Jane Austen Society is officially celebrating the novel’s bicentenary in 2016.

Many Austen experts regard Emma as the author’s masterpiece, written in 1814 and 1815 when she was at the height of her mature powers, though any of the six complete novels she published has its supporters as the best of all.

In the famous opening sentence of Emma, she is described as  “handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition…and…very little to distress or vex her.”
Nevertheless, Jane Austen wrote, “I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like” — a character who perhaps could be afflicted with “affluenza”?  Emma is generally considered to be self-centered and snobbish, though many readers are convinced she has understood her faults and learned to overcome them by the conclusion of the story — and in the light of Mr. Knightley’s love.
One of several excellent tv/film versions of Emma
Indeed, Laura Miller, in Slate, calls Emma A Perfect Novel (here).
And Austen Scholar John Mullan gives us an excellent view of how Emma created new novelistic directions, here.
The Jane Austen Society of North America will have many meetings and presentations devoted to Emma this year, including the AGM in October in Washington D.C. (Most of the politicians will be off campaigning leaving the lovely city to us history and literature buffs).
For everything Emma, all the time, click here for JASNA’s special page.