Perhaps Lancashire's most exciting find yet! 

Leonora Carrington (photographed on the right with E.L.T. Mesens, Max Ernst, and Paul Élouard, 1937) was born in Westwood House in Clayton Green (just a few miles from Chorley Library); later the family moved to Crookhey Hall near Lancaster.  Her father was a very wealthy industrialist and her mother was a free thinking Irish Catholic, the family were thoroughly upper class and Carrington found this life style to be very restrictive on her creative and eccentric character.  She was expelled from various convent schools, on one occasion for exposing herself to a nun, before later going to study art in Florence and London.

At the age of 19 she met the famous Surrealist artist Max Ernst in London; he was to be a huge influence on her life.  They left for Paris together and Carrington became fully involved in the flourishing Surrealist movement there.  She mixed with the likes of Picasso, Salvador Dali, and Joan Miro; the Surrealists became her adopted family and under their influence she really found her voice.   All this, however, was brought to an abrupt end with the outbreak of World War II and like so many artists of the time she fled across the Atlantic to New York and then Mexico where she settled.

Today if Carrington is remembered at all in this country it is mainly for her paintings, but she was also a keen writer.  She had short stories published in Surrealist volumes by Andre Breton and was encouraged greatly by Ernst, who always considered her writing to be superior to her painting.  Her most famous work is The Hearing Trumpet, a hilariously strange and wonderful account of an elderly lady being sent to a care home.  It has been described as a Surrealist masterpiece; Luis Bunuel (the famous film director) has said "Reading The Hearing Trumpet liberates us from the miserable reality of our days."  I think the influence of Lancashire on Carrington's writing and art has been largely overlooked; she spent her formative childhood years in the county and her interest in witchcraft, catholic symbolism, and the northern landscape can all be associated with her Lancashire upbringing.  More specifically, the symbol of a daunting overbearing house is a reoccurring theme in her work and it seems is explicitly linked to her memories of both Westwood House and Crookhey Hall.

Today Carrington lives and works in Chicago, she has received very little attention in this country but worldwide her importance is constantly growing.  She is undoubtedly Lancashire's greatest Surrealist and a fantastic literary find.

Reading Detectives team member wrote this:

 Excellent, truly excellent!  Not simple a plot, but an exploration of the human mind and the worlds unkindness to the main innocent character, George.

 He is rescued as a child from a cellar in Preston then moved to a farmhouse on the grounds of Hoghton Tower.  He can neither escape nor forget his time in the cellar in Preston and is marked by his solitude at Hoghton Tower.  There is love and romance but these are thwarted, leaving only a reasonably happy ending.

After reading Dickens' grim, Lancashire classic, Hard Times, I felt uplifted reading this short story.

Clarke himself is an interesting, though largely forgotten writer.  He wrote very popular dialect poetry under the name Teddy Ashton and (less popular!) philosophical works under another name, Ben Adhem.  In his time Clarke was hugely popular writing under his many pseudonyms, Tolstoy was a particular fan of one of Clarke's essays on factory conditions and had it translated into Russian.

The Lancashire Reading Detective's team were lucky enough to have the author Paul Salveson (an expert on dialect poetry and Allen Clarke) come along to one of our meetings and he gave a brilliant account of Clarke the radical thinker and writer.

Francis Thompson was born in Preston to devout middle-class Catholic parents.  This religious upbringing was to remain a continuing influence throughout his life and work.  As a child he absorbed himself in the works of Coleridge and Shakespeare, finding solace away from the main house and his siblings on the quiet of the staircase.

It was Thompson's fervent religious beliefs that would play the first part in his adult life.  He made an attempt to enter the Church, studying at Ushaw in the North East, but found himself wholly unsuited to this life.  A second attempt at study, this time following his father into the medical profession, was also unsuccessful. However, this time spent in Manchester was not wasted as it was here that Thompson was to develop his third great love, cricket. He spent much of his time at Old Trafford cricket ground, storing up memories that would later be relived through his verses.

The Lancashire Red Rose, o the Lancashire red Rose!

We love the hue on her cheek that shows:

And it never shall blanch, come the world as foes,

For dipt in our hearts in the Lancashire Red Rose!

(Excerpt from, Sons, who have sucked stern nature forth)

Sadly, in 1879 Thompson fell ill, and it was around this time that he first used laudanum, a combination of opium and ethanol, initially as pain relief but soon after for more recreational purposes.  It was also whilst he was ill that his mother gave him a copy of Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater, a text that would prove to be catastrophic in its influence. In a move that paralleled de Quincey's own, Thompson left Manchester and moved to London to pursue a literary career.  In London Thompson spent three years living on the streets as a vagrant and drug addict.  He failed to make money from his writing and was reduced to menial jobs such as selling matches or holding horse reigns for people.  Eventually in 1888 Thompson sent some of his poetry to an editor called Wilfrid Meynell who took a great interest in them.  Sadly Meynell couldn't track Thompson down as he had no fixed address but he published his poems anyway hoping it might attract his attention.  This had the desired effect and Thompson appeared in his office destitute, malnourished, and barefoot.  The friendship that flourished was to ultimately save Thompson and help him to produce his greatest work.  Thompson spent time living with the Meynell's as well as prostitute he had befriended whilst living on the streets, he also stayed in monasteries trying to kick his drug dependency.  Sadly this wasn't to be and a very ill Francis Thompson died of tuberculosis aged just 48.

Catholicism would always remain a driving influence throughout Thompson's life and work and a great many of his poems are filled with religious fervour. His most famous poem 'The Hound of Heaven' sees Thompson being pursued by god who despite his attempts to lose him through drugs and vagrant life still remains a lasting and undeniable influence.  Although the influence Thompson's writing was to be greatly felt by writers such as J. R. R. Tolkien and Robert Browning he is largely forgotten in his hometown of Preston, where only an old unkempt plaque marks the house in which he lived.

In recent years Thompson has attracted more interest as a murder suspect.  Thompson has been put forward as a suspect in the infamous Jack the Ripper case of the late 1880's.  He was certainly in the right (or wrong) place at the right time, living as a drug addict and vagrant in Whitechapel at the time of the murders.  He also had a medical background and Jack the Ripper was famous for the surgical removal of his victims' organs.  Other circumstantial evidence has been put forward as a case against Thompson but like so much of this enigmatic character's life it will remain a mystery. 

Francis Thomson: Catholic, poet, cricket enthusiast, drug addict, serial killer?