Drawing from Flora Nicholson’s Teaching School Portfolio. This is from her ‘nature diary.’ Nature study was deemed important in the new curriculum as too many city kids knew nothing about nature. Flora liked to draw and painted in her later life. I have two of her paintings.
Now, as I watched Pygmalion the other day on Turner Classic Movies, I couldn’t resist listening to the play on BBC Radio 7 (produced a few years ago) Mrs. Warren’s Profession.
Then, before I even finished, I paused the play to scope the web for information on this play. I mean, it’s pretty conventional today, but gee and it has such relevance to Flo in the City, my novel in progress based on the letters of http://www.tighsolas.ca/.
Well, it was written in the 1890′s and a London Premiere was closed down in 1902 (I think I read) and I managed to find articles on line about a 1905 premiere in Connecticut, closed first night (the article said everyone, theatre patrons, police, thought it indecent) and then I read the man who put it on went bankrupt, what with legal fees, then it was played again in New York in 1907 and ‘had a successful tour.’ I found a bit about the 1907 premiere that said there was no expectation that the show would be closed by police. But I found nothing about a tour. (In 1905, the production was deemed immoral, although the play was deemed a sociological tract and therefore not immoral. )
The Canadian premiere was in Ottawa in 1950. Margaret and Marion had died by then. It played in Britain only in 1950.
How can I stick this into my story then. It is very unlikely Mrs. Warren’s Profession played in Boston in 1908 when Flo was there, but since the play was on tour, I might be able to stick something about it in that scene in Boston. Maybe I can fake it and have Flora see a protest in front of a theatre… Maybe the theatre can be one in a chain, and the people will be protesting that another theatre in the chain is mounting a production of the play. Say in Chicago. Chicago was a very progressive city from what I have read in 1910.
Anyway, got to go listen to the rest of the play. In my first year of university, before I transferred into Communications, I was in Drama and Theatre so I read most of Shaw’s plays, and likely read this one. Certainly, no ideas in the play are foreign to me.
I know in the blog about Pygmalion, two blogs ago, I said the Nicholsons liked George Bernard Shaw. But they would not have liked this play. They were very prudish. I know for a fact that they never talked about pregnancy, to unmarried women, let alone about sex. I know, because when Marion is pregnant in 1914, Flora writes in a letter about being ‘left out’ of all the woman talk. They wouldn`t discuss this matter with her, even though she was 22. And my mother in law, Marion’s second daughter, also Marion, always claimed that no one in those days mentioned pregnancy, until the woman was ready to burst. A delicate matter, it was. Now people post ultrasounds of their fetuses on social networks. Times have changed.
