On 2 December Dr Anne-Marie Evans, Dr Jo Waugh and Dr Adam stock accompanied students taking our Writing the 20th Century module (3EN300) to Castle Howard in North Yorkshire.
Castle Howard was an inspiration for the ancestral seat of Sebastian Flyte and the Marchmain dynasty in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited (1945). But as our guide from the Castle Howard Estate Stephen pointed out, the novel was by no means faithful to all of Castle Howard’s features or geography. Not only did Waugh transpose the location from North Yorkshire to Wiltshire in the novel, but as our guide Stephen told us, the paths which characters take around the house and grounds in the novel are fundamentally incompatible with the topography of the house as it is. Waugh did visit Castle Howard in 1937, but when he sat down to write about a Baroque house with a dome and an “artsy chapel” (as the hapless Hooper puts it) seven years later he was inventive and creative in his approach.
Neither are the Howards the inspiration for the residents of Brideshead. Notwithstanding Waugh’s curious disavowal on the inscription page, “I am not I: thou art not he or she: they are not they”, the dubious honour of providing some of the family dysfunctions at the heart of the narrative goes to Waugh’s friends the Lygon family, whose country estate was near Malvern.
Picture perfect? The way we view Castle Howard in relation to Brideshead Revisited
has been framed by the 1981 ITV series and the 2008 Miramax film
But Castle Howard does remain an important place to improve our understanding of the novel. Inside the short frame narrative the entire story is told by a process of reconstructing memories, and the sub-title of the novel, The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder alludes to the two key themes of religion and memories. Brideshead is a means of anchoring these memories to solid and material spaces. Just as Charles’ Ryder’s career as an architectural painter is spent trying to capture the majesty of stately homes before they are lost to ‘progress’ and social change, so too the fountain, the chapel and other key places around the house give Charles’ memories a real depth of perspective.
Spending a day at Castle Howard was a great way to think about how novels engage with space, place and memory. We all thoroughly enjoyed walking around the house and grounds and taking a little bit of time out from the busy end-of-semester period to think about key ideas from the module from a different perspective.
Storify of the day
