The Postcard
An Attwell Series postcard that was published by Valentine & Sons Ltd. of Dundee and London. The card was posted in Newquay, Cornwall on Friday the 21st. July 1933 to:
Miss Paddy Guillern,
'Avonhurst',
Blaenavon,
Mon.
The message on the divided back of the card was as follows:
"How are you darling?
Still a good girlie?
We will soon be with
you now.
We have enjoyed
ourselves very very
much,
Lots of love to you
and Granny from
Mummy xxx"
Mabel Lucie Attwell
Mabel Lucie Attwell was a British illustrator and comics artist. She is known for her cute, nostalgic drawings of children, inspired by her daughter. Her drawings are featured on many postcards, advertisements, posters, books and figurines.
Mabel Lucie Attwell - The Early Years
Mabel was born on the 4th. June 1879 in Mile End, London, the sixth child of butcher Augustus Attwell and his wife Emily Ann.
She studied at Saint Martin's School of Art, but left to develop her own interest in imaginary subjects, disliking the emphasis on still-life drawing and classical subjects.
After Mabel sold work to the Tatler and Bystander, she was taken on by the agents Francis and Mills, leading to a long and consistently successful career.
In 1908, she married painter and illustrator Harold Cecil Earnshaw (d. 1937) with whom she had a daughter, Marjorie, and two sons.
Attwell's initial career was founded on magazine illustration, which she continued throughout her life, but around 1900 she began receiving commissions for book illustrations.
Mabel illustrated children's classics such as Mother Goose (1910) and Alice in Wonderland (1911).
During the 1910's Attwell produced a number of posters for London Transport featuring children to promote travel to Christmas pantomimes and other events.
Mabel Lucie Attwell - The Later Years
From 1914 onwards, Mabel developed her trademark style of sentimentalised rotund cuddly infants, which became ubiquitous across a wide range of markets. These included cards, calendars, nursery equipment and pictures, crockery and dolls.
Mabel illustrated Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales (1914), The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley (1915), and an edition of J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan and Wendy.
Shelley Potteries
In 1926 Shelley Potteries commissioned Attwell to produce designs for children's china ware. Attwell’s first six designs portrayed scenes involving children, animals and small green elves in green suits – these were called 'Boo Boos' and were featured on cups, mugs, bowls etc.
The Death of Mabel Lucie Attwell
Mabel died at her home in Fowey, Cornwall on the 5th. November 1964, after which her business was carried on by her daughter.
The Lucie Attwell Annual, which was first published in 1922, continued to be published for a further ten years ten years after Mabel's death. This was made possible by extensive re-use of earlier images.
Al Jolson
So what else happened on the day that the card was posted?
Well, on the 21st. July 1933, Al Jolson punched nationally syndicated gossip columnist Walter Winchell before a crowd of 4,000 people in Hollywood.
Jolson felt that Winchell's screenplay for Broadway Through a Keyhole, to be made into a film, had been based on Jolson's romance with Ruby Keeler.
A United Press writer acknowledged talk that it was a publicity stunt, but added, "If it was, it was a painful one for Winchell," who was knocked down after being punched in the neck.
'The Stranger's Return'
Also on that day, the drama film The Stranger's Return starring Miriam Hopkins, Lionel Barrymore and Franchot Tone was released.
Father Charles Uncles
The 21st. July 1933 also marked the death at the age of 74 of Father Charles Uncles, the first African-American Catholic priest.
His death left only two black Catholic priests in the U.S., Norman Dukette and Charles Logan.
John Gardner
The day also marked the birth in Batavia, New York of the American novelist John Gardner. John was killed in accident in 1982.
John Champlin Gardner Jr. was an American novelist, essayist, literary critic and university professor. He is best known for his 1971 novel Grendel, a retelling of the Beowulf myth from the monster's point of view.
John Gardner - The Early Years
Gardner's father was a lay preacher and dairy farmer, and his mother taught third grade at a small school in a nearby village. Both parents were fond of poetry, and would often recite their favorite poetry and poetry they wrote about life on the farm at friends' homes.
Gardener was active in the Boy Scouts of America and achieved the Eagle Scout rank. As a child, Gardner attended public school and worked on his father's farm, where, in April 1945, his younger brother Gilbert was killed in an accident with a cultipacker.
Gardner, who was driving the tractor during the fatal accident, carried guilt for his brother's death throughout his life, suffering nightmares and flashbacks.
The incident informed much of Gardner's fiction and criticism - most directly in the 1977 short story "Redemption," which included a fictionalized recounting of the accident as an impetus for artistic inspiration.
Gardner began his university education at DePauw University, and received his undergraduate degree from Washington University in St. Louis in 1955. He received his M.A. (1956) and Ph.D. (1958) from the University of Iowa. He was Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Detroit in 1970.
John Gardner's Fiction
Gardner's best-known novels include:
-- The Sunlight Dialogues, about a disaffected policeman asked to engage a madman fluent in classical mythology.
-- Grendel, a retelling of the Beowulf legend from the monster's point of view, with an existential subtext.
-- October Light, about an embittered brother and sister living and feuding with each other in rural Vermont (the novel includes an invented "trashy novel" that the woman reads).
October Light won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976.
Teaching and Controversies
John Gardner was a lifelong teacher of fiction writing. He was associated with the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. His two books on the craft of writing fiction -The Art of Fiction and On Becoming a Novelist - are considered classics.
John was famously obsessive with his work, and acquired a reputation for advanced craft, smooth rhythms, and careful attention to the continuity of the fictive dream. His books nearly always touched on the redemptive power of art.
In 1978, Gardner's book of literary criticism, On Moral Fiction, sparked a controversy that excited the mainstream media, vaulting Gardner into the spotlight with an interview on The Dick Cavett Show on the 16th. May 1978, and a cover story in The New York Times Magazine (July 1979).
John's judgments of contemporary authors - including John Updike, John Barth and other American writers - harmed his reputation among fellow writers and book reviewers.
Gardner claimed that lingering animosity from critics of his book Mickelsson's Ghosts led to unflattering reviews of what turned out to be his last finished novel, although literary critics later praised the book.
Gore Vidal found the book, as well as Gardner's novels, sanctimonious and pedantic, and called Gardner:
"The late apostle to the lowbrows,
a sort of Christian evangelical who
sees Heaven as a paradigmatic
American university."
John Gardner inspired and, according to Raymond Carver, sometimes intimidated his students. At Chico State College (where he taught from 1959 to 1962), when Carver mentioned to Gardner that he had not liked the assigned short story, Robert Penn Warren's "Blackberry Winter," Gardner said, "You'd better read it again." "And he wasn't joking", said Carver, who related this anecdote in his foreword to Gardner's book On Becoming a Novelist.
In that foreword, Raymond Carver makes it clear how much he respected Gardner, and also relates his kindness as a writing mentor.
Scholarship
In 1977, Gardner published The Life and Times of Chaucer. In a review in the October 1977 issue of Speculum, Sumner J. Ferris pointed to several passages that were allegedly lifted either in whole or in part from work by other authors without proper citation.
Ferris charitably suggested that Gardner had published the book too hastily, but on the 10th. April 1978, reviewer Peter Prescott, writing in Newsweek, cited the Speculum article and accused Gardner of plagiarism, a claim that Gardner met "with a sigh."
John Gardner is associated with a truism that holds that, in literature, only two plots exist: someone taking a journey, or a stranger arriving in town. However, Gardner's documented words on the subject, from The Art of Fiction, were simply exercise instructions to "Use either a trip or the arrival of a stranger (some disruption of order—the usual novel beginning)."
John Gardner's Family Life
John Gardner married Joan Louise Patterson on the 6th. June 1953; the marriage, which produced children, ended in divorce in 1980.
Gardner then married poet and novelist Liz Rosenberg in 1980; this marriage also ended in divorce, in 1982.
The Traumatic Death of John Gardner
Gardner was killed at the age of 49 in a motorcycle accident about two miles from his home in Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania on Tuesday, September 14, 1982.
State Police said that at about 2:30 pm Gardner completed a curve on Route 92, approximately 3 mi (4.8 km) north of Oakland.
Passing the home of photographer Jim Wood, he lost control of his 1979 Harley-Davidson, went into the dirt shoulder, struck the guard rail, and was thrown from the motorcycle, suffering blunt force trauma to his body from the handlebars.
John was pronounced dead at Barnes-Kasson Hospital in Susquehanna. Gardner's fiancée, Susan Thornton, said that Gardner had been drinking the night before the accident.
An autopsy revealed Gardner had a blood alcohol level of 0.075; the legal limit for driving at the time was 0.08. Thornton also mentioned exhaustion from overwork as a contributing factor, and that the curve on Route 92 had been freshly oil-graveled.
The crash occurred four days before John's planned marriage to Thornton.
John was laid to rest next to his brother Gilbert in Batavia's Grandview Cemetery.
