Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood
Commentary
Period Piece is Gwen Raverat’s memoir of her childhood. Raverat (artist and writer, b.1885) was a granddaughter of Charles Darwin, and her father a Cambridge academic. This image shows her grandmother, Darwin’s widow, in her eighties, at home by the fire at Down, the Darwins’ country house in Kent. Elsewhere Raverat describes her arrival at the house:
‘And as soon as the door was opened, we smelt again the unmistakeable cool, empty, country smell of the house, and we rushed all over the big, under-furnished rooms in an ecstasy of joy. They reflected the barer way of life of the early nineteenth-century, rather than the crowded, fussy mid-Victorian period. The furnishing was ugly in a way, but it was dignified and plain.’ (p.142)
Themes
Human Relationships
Identities
Time
Dominant Representational Strategies
Detail
Dwelling
- Type
- Residential
- Detail
- Country House
- Historical Terminology
- Specified Social Level
- Unspecified
Activities
- Type
- Physical States and Actions
- Detail
- Sitting
Rooms
- Type
- Social and Sitting Spaces
- Historical Terminology
- drawing-room
Inhabitants
- Type
- People
- Detail
- Elderly
- Female
Objects
- Type
-
Furniture
Equipment
- Detail
-
Seating
Heating
Bibliography
Direct Cross-References
Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood
Raverat, Gwen 1952; 1883
Book, CG1
Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood
Raverat, Gwen 1952
Book, CG1102
Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood
Raverat, Gwen 1952
Book, CG1103
Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood
Raverat, Gwen 1952
Book, CG1104
Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood
Raverat, Gwen 1952
Book, CG1105
Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood
Raverat, Gwen 1952
Book, CG1106
Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood
Raverat, Gwen 1952
Book, CG1107
Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood
Raverat, Gwen 1952
Book, CG1108
Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood
Raverat, Gwen 1952
Book, CG1109
Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood
Raverat, Gwen 1952
Book, CG1111
Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood
Raverat, Gwen 1952
Book, CG1112
Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood
Raverat, Gwen 1952
Book, CG1113
Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood
Raverat, Gwen 1952
Book, CG1114
Indirect Cross-References
- Names
- Raverat, Gwen
- Date(s)
- 1952
- Country
- United Kingdom
- Historical Region
- Description
- Format
- Book
- Type
- Genre
- Other Non-Fictional Prose
- Publication
- Faber and Faber, 1987, p.145
- Copyright
- Reproduced by permission Sophie Gurney
- Location
- Record ID
- CG1110
