Wise Children
The Wise Childen story is based on The twin Chance girls, who are music hall performers as well as the daughters of the legendary Shakespearean actor Sir Melchior Hazard. The novel is set at the time of the 75th birthdays of twins identical to each other Dora Nora and Nora Chance.
It happens to be Shakespeare’s birthday as well as the 100th birthday celebration of their father Sir Melchior Hazard along with his identical twin brother Peregrine Hazard.
Wise Children is a novel that is based on contradictions. It draws on a rich variety of high and low culture – music hall, cinema and Hollywood, theatre and Shakespeare – and features central themes of doubling (or twinning), identity, fatherhood and legitimacy/illegitimacy.
It’s quick-paced funny and engaging and as such it is considered to be more accessible than her earlier work by the artist.
Carter, Shakespeare and London
Carter was a resident of south London for a large part of her youth and her later years in south London in addition to Wise Children is a mourning for the past of Lyons tea houses, but it is also a celebration of amazing linguistic diversity of the Londoners. The book’s metaphorical power comes by the geographic location that London has to offer.
Wise Children will also serve as a novel about opposites. Dora our protagonist starts her tale by describing the rich/poor London divide. “Welcome to an unintentional side’ she writes, ‘the left-hand side, which is the side that tourists rarely see and the shabby portion of old father Thames’ (p. 1).
This geographical polarity is a complement to the distinctions between high and low society (music halls and Shakespeare) as well as legitimacy and legitimacy (the Chance twins and the Hazards).
Shakespeare as well as London are at the center of this novel which aptly begins and ends with the ’49 Bard Road, Brixton, London, South West Two’ (p. 1) which is the residence of twins and characters Nora as well as Dora Chance. As this Atlas shows, there’s an actual Shakespeare Road in Brixton, south London.
The critics have suggested it is possible that Angela Carter, who lived near Clapham might have used the road as a source of inspiration to write the character of her Bard Road (Shakespeare has often referred to as the Bard’).
Wise Children was Carter’s final work. She passed away in 1992, aged 52. It’s an appropriate tribute to her to have an Angela Carter Close in Brixton.
Angela Carter’s Notebook
This is the journal that Angela Carter used to record ideas and research to write Wise Children. The notebook is divided into sections like Hazards/High Life plus people Screen + stage The notebook shows Carter designing characters and plots from her research before she wrote a first manuscript of the book.
In the notes there are also some longer prose pieces – basically the first draft fragments in Wise Children.
As with the novel’s conclusion it brings together the worlds of high and low for an engaging and often loud reading. Filled with intricate and rich detail, we witness Carter taking inspiration and ideas from a range of materials.
The material ranges from Max Reignhardt’s Hollywood production A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Walter Benjamin’s essay on ‘The Art of the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ and biographical sketches of Victorian Shakespearean actors and many tales from the world of the music hall and pantomime.
What unites the content is Carter’s enduring eye for the funny and the ridiculous as well as the bizarre and kitschy. Thus, a note about World War Two irreverently details the escape of a zebra following the London Zoo was bombed, and also tells tales of nightclubs in which it was claimed that the boots of the army were damaging the dance floor’.
It’s fascinating to observe how Carter weaves real, often bizarre tales into the story, transforming the absurdity of carnivalesque events. In the page. 5r, for instance, Carter records how in 1936, the Stratford-upon-Avon Festival Company received a cable from Dallas, Texas, requesting an amount of earth from Shakespeare’s gardens as well as waters from the River Avon to consecrate a production.
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