The Forgotten Patron

September 28, 2018 Comments Off

With the start of Literary Footprints 2018 only a few days away, our series of special blog posts continues as Tina Baxter walks us around Bloomsbury in the company of TS Eliot’s J Alfred Prufrock. You can discover more on Tina’s TS Eliot – Bloomsbury and Prufrock walk, dates and booking details on Tina’s walks page.

And don’t forget our great value Literary Footprints season ticket which allows you free access to over 60 London literary-themed walks throughout the month of October for only £49!

“Let us go then, you and I”

TS Eliot by Lady Ottoline Morrell

I will be walking and talking the ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ by T S Eliot, which is the first poem Eliot published here in England, and before he started writing his “little poem” The Waste Land.

Bloomsbury is an exciting patch for all things literary and artistic. you cannot turn a corner without a Blue Plaque appearing, often several in row! Several appear at stops on this walk specially created for this year’s Literary Footprints and a follow up to the Waste Land walk in The City which also features this year.

I will of course include as many of the Blue Plaques as TVPs (top visual priorities in guiding parlance!) en route but will only stop to discuss the most relevant to Mr Eliot’s beginnings and endings, as the the in between bit is covered in the City walk.

Lady Ottoline Morrell by Adolf de Meyer

My favourites are those involving the Bloomsbury Group and Lady Ottoline Morrell in particular. Tom Eliot was a guest at her country home, Garsington Manor, the place of infamous parties, masked balls and picnics in the gardens.

We are going to view two of her London homes where she offered lodging and food to hard-pressed writers, authors and publishers. Lady Ottoline was not an artist but a great hostess, and believed “those who could not make art should be art”. This was something she was very good at and focused her creativity on her look, her dress and her role as patron.

Lady Ottoline was an aristocrat, and supposedly as such was considered to have boundless funds, sadly this was not the case, her expenses were so excessive, not on herself but on others, that they slowly ruined her. We discover on the tour her relevance to the young Mr Eliot, where she lived and how she appears as the subject of numerous works of art and works of fiction.