Displaying items by tag: Arts
THE KIBWORTH THEATRE
The Kibworth Theatre is believed to have been situated on the turnpike road in Main Street, Kibworth Harcourt during the 18th and 19th centuries. The exact location has not been confirmed but is baelieved to have been to the rear of 25 Main Street. This location would have been convenient to entertain passengers taking a rest break when journeying through the village on the many coaches travelling along the turnpike route. Indeed,travelling theatre players would also have also used the coaches and taken advantage of the theatre to perform plays. In addition, local residents particularly from the Dissenting Academy and the Grammar School in Kibworth Beauchamp may well have been patrons of the theatre.
Copies of two posters advertising productions at the theatre are shown below. The first on Wednesday evening 29th September 1790 was a production of the celebrated comic opera ‘INKLE and YARICO’ followed by ‘ALL THE WORLDS a STAGE’ The second was on Friday evening October 1st 1790 when a production of ‘RICHARD 111 Or, The Battle of Bofworth Field’ followed by ‘The Agreeable Surfrise’ was performed.
Attendance was not cheap, the posters shows prices for both productions at 2s for the Pit and 1s for the Gallery. Possibly these prices would have been unaffordable many local residents.
On the evening of 28th October 1802, the theatre produced the plays ‘School for Scandal’ a 1781 comic opera to music by Samuel Arnold and a libretto by John O'Keeffe along with an American romantic comedy ‘Gretna Green’ written by Grace Livingston Furniss.
It was believed that no poster for this production had survived until one was recently discovered in the papers of Rev. Thomas Thomas at the Northamptonshire Record Office.
The Kibworth Theater (Theatre) is believed to have been situated on the turnpike road in Main Street, Kibworth Harcourt during the 18th and 19th centuries. The exact location has not been confirmed but is believed to have been to the rear of 25 Main Street. This location would have been convenient to entertain passengers taking a rest break at the many inns when journeying through the village on the many stage coaches travelling along the turnpike route. Indeed travelling theatre players would also have also used the coaches and taken advantage of the theater to perform plays. In addition local residents particularly from the Dissenting Academy and the Grammar School in Kibworth Beauchamp may well have been patrons of the theater.
Copies of two posters advertising productions at the theater are shown below. The first on Wednesday evening September 29th 17890 was a production of the celebrated comic opera ‘INKLE and YARICO’ followed by ‘ALL THE WORLDS a STAGE’ The second was on Friday evening October 1st 1790 when a production of ‘RICHARD 111 Or, The Battle of Bofworth Field’ followed by ‘The Agreeable Surfrise’ was performed.
Attendance was not cheap, the posters shows prices for both productions at 2s for the Pit and 1s for the Gallery. Possibly these prices would have been unaffordable by many local residents.
Although a poster is not available on the theater bill for the evening of 28th October 1802 was the comedy play ‘School for Scandal’ a 1781 comic opera to music by Samuel Arnold and a libretto by John O'Keeffe.
Acknowledgements:
British Library
BBC
Kibworth is the birthplace of two people who changed the course of English literature and English education: Anna Letitia Aikin, who published mostly under her married name, Barbauld, and her brother, John. They were born here, in 1743 and 1747, because their father, the Reverend John Aikin, kept a school in the house now known as the Old House. His son was one of his pupils. Anna Letitia, being a girl, could not enroll in her father’s school, but she learned much on the side, foraging in her father’s library and picking up knowledge from her brother. Eventually she persuaded the Reverend Mr. Aikin to teach her some Latin. She and her brother were very close from childhood until his death in 1822. In a poem addressed to him she remembered that “hand in hand with innocence we stray’d / Embosom’d deep in Kibworth’s tufted shade.” It was in Kibworth too, probably, that Anna Letitia developed a deep lifelong love of History. The passion for History, she wrote many years later, is awakened by curiosity about our own surroundings. One bit of her surroundings that she must have seen many times from her front door was the Munt, a local mystery. Was it Roman? Medieval? A fort? A tomb?
In 1758 the Aikin family removed to Warrington in Lancashire, for the Reverend John had been invited to join the faculty of a new Dissenting academy there. At Warrington Anna Letitia began to write, and from there she published her first book, Poems (1773). The book made her famous overnight. But it might not have come to print without her brother’s urging and aid. John Aikin, having taken a medical degree at Edinburgh, set out to have a literary career and brought his sister along. After her Poems, brother and sister collaborated on a volume of essays, Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose (1773). The two of them went on to be leading names in the literary world of London - and Anna Letitia became a famous name in the early United States as well. She did so through her books for children, published under her married name, Mrs. Barbauld: Lessons for Children (1778-79) and Hymns in Prose for Children (1781), written while she was teaching school with her husband in the village of Palgrave in Suffolk. Lessons initiated treating the child reader as the main character in a story that is completely realistic because it is based on the child’s life. Hymns in Prose encouraged the child reader to love Nature as the work of a loving divinity. Both books are set in country villages like the village of Palgrave where they were written – and like the village of Kibworth, where Anna Letitia herself had learned to love Nature.
Anna Letitia went on to write further poems and essays, to engage in political controversy (a daring move for a woman in the 1790s) on the liberal side, and to work as a reviewer and editor. She could be called England’s first woman of letters, something like the Virginia Woolf of her time. Her brother, John, practiced as a doctor but moved over into literature. He published on many subjects — medicine, poetry, politics, natural history - but was most influential as the editor of a national magazine in the 1790s, The Monthly Magazine, and a multi-volume biographical dictionary, a predecessor of today’s DNB. He and Anna Letitia continued to collaborate; she contributed to his most popular work, a collection of tales and dialogues for young readers, Evenings at Home (1792-96, and many later editions on both sides of the Atlantic).
Anna Letitia and John were one generation older than the writers who are known today as the first of the Great Romantics, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. They knew Wordsworth and helped Coleridge get started: Anna Letitia was among the first to recognize Coleridge’s genius, and John was among the first to publish his poems. John also hired young Robert Southey, Coleridge’s friend and a poet, to write for his magazine. Young Walter Scott avowed that he owed to Anna Letitia his inspiration in poetry. So between them, Anna Letitia and John played midwife to British Romanticism.
Late in life Anna Letitia published her longest poem, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812), a lamentation over the horrors and human waste of the Napoleonic Wars. The poem was badly received by a public that had learned to view war as glorious and the war against France as necessary; today, however, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven enjoys the admiration of literary historians on both sides of the Atlantic. It is respected as one of the major poems of its time.
In 1800 John Aikin revisited Kibworth on a holiday trip, but Anna Letitia never saw her birthplace again after leaving it at age fifteen. After Warrington, John lived in Suffolk and the London suburb of Stoke Newington; he died there in 1822. After Warrington, where she married Rochemont Barbauld in 1774, Anna Letitia lived in Suffolk and the London suburbs of Hampstead and Stoke Newington; she died in Stoke Newington in 1825. She and John are buried there in the graveyard of St. Mary’s Church on Church Street.
Article kindly provided William McCarthy, professor emeritus of English at Iowa State University. He is the author of 'Anna Latetia Barbauld:Voice of the Enlightment' and co editor of 'The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld'
On Saturday 11 May 2013 a blue heritage plaque dedicated to Anna Letitia Barbauld and John Aikin was unveiled at the Old House, Main Street, Kibworth Harcourt.
On Saturday 11 May 2013 a blue heritage plaque dedicated to Anna Letitia Barbauld and John Aikin was unveiled at the Old House, Main Street, Kibworth Harcourt. The plaque was unveiled by William (Bill) MaCarthy, Professor Emeritus of English at Iowa State University, and author of Anna Letitia Barbauld-Voice of Enlightenment and co- editor of 'The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld'.
Below is his address at the unveiling ceremony:
“Today we discharge a long-overdue debt. In this house, in the years 1743 and 1747, were born two people who changed the course of English literature and English education: Anna Letitia Aikin, who published mostly under her married name, Barbauld, and her brother, John.
Anna Letitia could be described as England’s first woman of letters, something like the Virginia Woolf of her time. She was famous as a poet, an essayist, a writer for very young children, a political writer, an editor, a commentator on poetry and fiction. Her Lessons for Children (that is its title) and her Hymns in Prose for Children revolutionized the teaching of reading and religion internationally, here in England and in the United States. Her brother, John, trained as a doctor but moved over into literature: he published on many subjects, but was perhaps most influential as the editor of a leading magazine in the 1790s and a multi-volume biographical dictionary, a predecessor of the DNB. He and she collaborated on occasion; their most popular joint work was a collection of tales and dialogues for young readers, Evenings at Home. Evenings was reprinted throughout the 19th century and into the 20th, also on both shores of the Atlantic.
Anna Letitia and John were one generation older than the writers who are remembered today as the first of the Great Romantics, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. They knew Wordsworth and helped Coleridge get started: Anna Letitia was among the first to recognize Coleridge’s genius, and John was among the first to publish his poems. Walter Scott also claimed that he owed to Anna Letitia his own inspiration in poetry. So between them, Anna Letitia and John played midwife to British Romanticism.
It was a chance encounter with her political pamphlets—works of great ethical power—that introduced me to Anna Letitia’s writing, thirty years ago. At that time, around 1983, her and John’s names had been almost entirely forgotten for decades. Literary history, like most history really, has a way of thrusting some names forward into fame and thrusting others back out of it. Literary history promotes and demotes for reasons of fashion and prejudice that have, often, no relation to the real worth of the names that are moved up or down. And so it came about that the place where Anna Letitia and John Aikin were born was forgotten; Kibworth knew them not. That we now know this house to be their birthplace is the result of a series of investigations: first by Peter Burfoot, resident and restorer of the Old House in the early 1990s, and afterwards of research in 2001 in which I and Simon Martyn were greatly aided by Dr. Christine Vialls, historian and late resident of Kibworth Beauchamp. I wish she could have been with us now. For designing and mounting the plaque that will from now on identify the house, we owe thanks to David Adams, Dr Kevin Feltham and the Kibworth Improvement Team, and to Steve and Clare Langan, through whose kindness and historical interest we are welcomed here today.
Anna Letitia was a strong and wonderful poet in her own right. The poem of hers that I first encountered and fell in love with is titled “Washing-Day.” Both humorously and seriously, it recalls and records scenes from Anna Letitia’s childhood in this house. Naomi Lightman will read from it, so that you may hear Anna Letitia’s voice for yourselves”.
Naomi Lightman then recited Anna Letitia Barbauld’s poem Washing-Day
The Muses are turned gossips; they have lost
The buskined step, and clear high-sounding phrase,
Language of gods. Come, then, domestic Muse,
In slip-shod measure loosely prattling on,
Of farm or orchard, pleasant curds and cream,
Or droning flies, or shoes lost in the mire
By little whimpering boy, with rueful face —
Come, Muse, and sing the dreaded washing day.
Ye who beneath the yoke of wedlock bend,
With bowed soul, full well ye ken the day
Which week, smooth sliding after week, brings on
Too soon; for to that day nor peace belongs,
Nor comfort; ere the first grey streak of dawn,
The red-armed washers come and chase repose.
Nor pleasant smile, nor quaint device of mirth,
Ere visited that day; the very cat,
From the wet kitchen scared, and reeking hearth,
Visits the parlour, an unwonted guest.
The silent breakfast meal is soon despatched,
Uninterrupted, save by anxious looks
Cast at the louring, if sky should lour.
From that last evil, oh preserve us, heavens!
For should the skies pour down, adieu to all
Remains of quiet; then expect to hear
Of sad disasters — dirt and gravel stains
Hard to efface, and loaded lines at once
Snapped short, and linen-horse by dog thrown down,
And all the petty miseries of life.
Saints have been calm while stretched upon the rack,
And Montezuma smiled on burning coals;
But never yet did housewife notable
Greet with a smile a rainy washing day.
But grant the welkin fair, require not thou
Who callest thyself, perchance, the master there,
Or study swept, or nicely dusted coat,
Or usual ’tendence; ask not, indiscreet,
Thy stockings mended, though the yawning rents
Gape wide as Erebus; nor hope to find
Some snug recess impervious. Shouldst thou try
The ’customed garden walks, thine eye shall rue
The budding fragrance of thy tender shrubs,
Myrtle or rose, all crushed beneath the weight
Of coarse-checked apron, with impatient hand
Twitched off when showers impend; or crossing lines
Shall mar thy musings, as the wet cold sheet
Flaps in thy face abrupt. Woe to the friend
Whose evil stars have urged him forth to claim
On such a dav the hospitable rites;
Looks blank at best, and stinted courtesy
Shall he receive; vainly he feeds his hopes
With dinner of roast chicken, savoury pie,
Or tart or pudding; pudding he nor tart
That day shall eat; nor, though the husband try —
Mending what can’t be helped — to kindle mirth
From cheer deficient, shall his consort’s brow
Clear up propitious; the unlucky guest
In silence dines, and early slinks away.
I well remember, when a child, the awe
This day struck into me; for then the maids,
I scarce knew why, looked cross, and drove me from them;
Nor soft caress could I obtain, nor hope
Usual indulgencies; jelly or creams,
Relic of costly suppers, and set by
For me their petted one; or buttered toast,
When butter was forbid; or thrilling tale
Of ghost, or witch, or murder. So I went
And sheltered me beside the parlour fire;
There my dear grandmother, eldest of forms,
Tended the little ones, and watched from harm;
Anxiously fond, though oft her spectacles
With elfin cunning hid, and oft the pins
Drawn from her ravelled stocking, might have soured
One less indulgent.
At intervals my mother’s voice was heard,
Urging dispatch; briskly the work went on,
All hands employed to wash, to rinse, to wring,
Or fold, and starch, and clap, and iron, and plait.
Then would I sit me down, and ponder much
Why washings were; sometimes through hollow hole
Of pipe amused we blew, and sent aloft
The floating bubbles; little dreaming then
To see, Montgolfier, thy silken ball
Ride buoyant through the clouds, so near approach
The sports of children and the toils of men.
Earth, air, and sky, and ocean hath its bubbles,
And verse is one of them — this most of all.
