GE Journal, Jersey, 28 June 1857
Title
GE Journal, Jersey, 28 June 1857
Title
GE Journal, Jersey, 28 June 1857
Sender
Ge Journal
Recipient
U
Date(s)
- 1857-06-28
Place
Jersey
Letter Content
GE Journal, Jersey, 28 June 1857
MS: Yale. Extracts published: Cross, I, 436-439.
Recollections of the Scilly Isles. 1857
It is now the 28th of June, and it seems a long, long while since we said goodbye to kind-looking Charlotte, 906 at the Richmond Station on Sunday evening, the 15th of March. G. had a fixed idea that it would be supremely delightful to be at the Scilly Isles at the Spring Equinox, and so we set off in all the certain uncertainty of March weather. A comfortable night at the Paddington Railway Hotel and a bright morning, made an auspicious beginning of our journey, and it was still fine when we reached Plymouth, so that we could walk out on the Hoe, and get a view. But Mount Edgecumbe was leafless then, and the distances were clad in smoky haze. The Globe Hotel, where we put up, was very comfortable, but I was suffering from headache, and general malaise, and was unable to enjoy anything. In the morning we walked out to buy a basket for zoophyte hunting and learned that the excitement we saw in the town was owing to the expectation of Mr. Spurgeon, 907 who was going to preach for the benefit of an indebted chapel. At 10 or half past, we mounted the coach that was to convey us to Truro and had a cold but not unpleasant journey. I have described our companions in my journal, as well as our week's sojourn at Penzance while we waited for the weather, and our first glimpse of the Scilly Isles as we ascended sick and weary from our berths in the Ariadne. Captain Tregarthen recommended us to take lodgings at the Post Office, kept by Mrs. Scadden, "a very nice woman," so to the Post Office we went, and were very well pleased with the rooms, which were clean and well-sized. We had not formed a very brilliant conception of Scilly lodgings, so that there was not much room for disappointment. A little damsel about twelve, came in to attend to the fire, and turning with a smile to me, said, "Please, my name's Joyce if you want anything." Joyce, however was not our usual attendant, but a nice-mannered girl of eighteen. Poor little Joyce was an orphan and had been taken into service from the Union by our landlady Mrs. Scadden, whom we liked very well for the first day or two, when we discovered no other qualities than blandness and honesty, which do not always go together. A nearer acquaintance made it evident that there were great resources of stupidity in her, which, with the difficulty of getting meat at Scilly, made the victualing department a matter of considerable anxiety. After one desperate effort at luxury -- sending for a loin of mutton, which turned out to be all fat, and a couple of fowls, which were of patriarchal toughness, from Penzance -- we resigned ourselves to the monotony of beef and fried polack, 908 the only flesh easily procurable. Partly from the food perhaps, partly from the weather and climate, we were not well at Scilly and I had a further cause for physical depression in the deep trouble and anxiety I was in on Chrissey's account. We had not been at St. Mary's a fortnight, I think, when the news came of her illness and little Fanny's death 909 -- sweet little fair Fanny -- and the sad struggle of feeling I had for weeks between the wish to be with her and the impossibility of going to her without renouncing other duties more important, made the time pass painfully in spite of the constant love and mutual occupation that filled the days. This will always make the remembrance of Scilly half painful, though the sight of its unique scenery is really an acquisition.
I had never before seen a granite coast, and on the southern side of the island of St. Mary's one sees such a coast in its most striking and characteristic forms. Rectangular crevices, the edges of which have been rounded by weather give many of the granite masses a resemblance to bales of wool or cotton heaped on each other; another characteristic form is the mushroom-shaped mass often lying poised on the summits of more cubical boulders or fragments; another is the immense flat platform stretching out like a pier into the sea; another the oval basins formed by the action of the rain water on the summits of the rocks and boulders. The colouring of the rocks was very various and beautiful; sometimes a delicate greyish green from shaggy byssus which clothes it, chiefly high up from the water; then a light warm brown; then black; occasionally of a rich yellow; and here and there purplish. Below the rocks on the coast are almost everywhere heaps of white boulders, sometimes remarkably perfect ovals, and looking like huge eggs of some monstrous bird. Hardly any weed was to be seen on the granite, except here and there in a rock pool green with young ulva; and no barnacles encrust the rock, no black muscles, 910 scarcely any limpets. The waves that beat on this coast are clear as crystal, and we used to delight in watching them rear themselves like the horses of a mighty sea god as they approached the rocks on which they were broken into eddies of milky foam. The most striking points of the coast were Peninis, a grand promontory where the granite is broken into many separate piles; the Pulpit Rock; Porthelik, a bay where there are huge boulders scattered about the sands, so that at low water, it looks like a giant's play ground; the Giant's Castle; and a jutting wall of rock coloured of the richest yellow ochre tint, towards the eastern end of the island -- of which I could not learn the name. Along a great part of this southern coast, there stretch heathy or furzy downs, over which I used to enjoy rambling immensely; -- there is a sense of freedom on those unenclosed grounds that one never has in a railed Park, however extensive.
Then, on the north side of the island, above Sandy Bar; what a view we used to get of the opposite islands and reefs, with their delicious violet and yellow tints -- the tall ship or two anchored in the Sound changing their aspect like living things -- and when the wind was at all high the white foam prancing round the reefs and rising in fountain-like curves 'abbeyond'bb above the screen of rocks. Sandy Bar was one of our frequent objects in our walks -- a long stretch of fine pale sand where the large roots of the laminaria were thrown up in abundance. It was here we found our first comatula, which looked small and insignificant when we first set eyes on it clutching the root of the laminaria, but expanded like a red and white fern when we put it into the bottle.
Many a wet and dirty walk we had along the lanes, for the weather was often wet and almost always blustering. Now and then however, we had a clear sky and a calm sea, and on such days it was delicious to look up after the larks that were singing above us, or to look out on the island and reef-studded sea. I never enjoyed the lark before as I enjoyed it at Scilly -- never felt the full beauty of Shelley's poem on it before. On wet days the most convenient walk was the Garrison hill, which was in its highest beauty when we arrived. It is covered with splendid furze, with here and there an opening where you see a little rabbit trotting from bush to bush or a deer making haste to get out of your sight. The hill is a good height and from its highest part, one gets a curious view of St. Agnes with its light-house and its far-stretching chain of reefs. Four pyramidal reefs at the extremity of the chain have been named by the imaginative Scillonians the Great and Little Smith, and the Haycocks! On the other side lies Trescaid with its sister islands enclosing the sound, for ever changing in the loveliness of their aspect, with the changing sky and sea.
A spot we became very fond of towards the close of our stay was Carne Lea, where between two fine jutting piles of granite there was a soft down gay with the pretty pink flowers of the thrift, which on this island carpets the ground like greensward. Here we used to sit and lie in the bright afternoons, watching the silver sunlight on the waves -- bright silver, not golden -- it is the morning and evening sunlight that is golden.
A week or two after our arrival we made the acquaintance of Mr. Moyle, 911 the surgeon, who became a delightful friend to us, always ready to help with the contents of his surgery or anything else at his command. We liked to have him come and smoke a cigar in the evening, and look in now and then for a little lesson in microscopy, but we were quite determined for a long while to have no other acquaintances at Scilly. At length, however, he persuaded us to see our next door neighbours the Buckstones, and we dined with them once -- a fine old Father, deaf and paralytic, but still intelligent, a silly, ill-bred woman without the slightest presentiment of anything in existence superior to herself, and a stupid, good-natured, unaffected husband. The husband took us one day to see the new light-house being prepared for erection on one of the outer reefs near St. Agnes -- the Bishop's Rock, I think. Every morsel of the structure is prepared and fitted before it is carried to the spot, and the light-house is thus temporarily built up and taken to pieces again.
The little indications of the social life at Scilly that we were able to pick up were very amusing. I was repeatedly told, in order to make me aware who Mr. Hall was, that he married a Miss Lemon. The people at St. Mary's imagine that the lawyers and doctors at Penzance are a sort of European characters that every one knows. We heard a great deal about Mr. Quill, an Irishman, the controller of the customs, and one day that we called on the Buckstones, Mr. Buckstone said two or three times at intervals, "I wish you knew Quill!" At last, on our farewell call, we saw the distinguished Quill, with his hair plaistered down, his charming smile, and his trowsers with a broad stripe down each leg. -- Mr. Buckstone amused us by his contempt for curs -- "O, I wouldn't have a cur -- there's nothing to look at in a cur."
Our readings aloud were Cromwell's Letters, Aurora Leigh (for the 2d time), Life of Charlotte Bronte, Maury's Physical Geography of the Sea, 912 Twelfth Night and Macbeth, and Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. I read the '8cdipus Tyrannus and the '8cdipus Coloneus, De Quincey's Glories of Stage Coach Travelling and Revolt of the Tartars, and the greater part of Shelley's poems.
We left St. Mary's on the 11th of May about 2 o'clock in the windless afternoon; but after a while a little breeze sprang up and the good little sailing yacht Ariadne carried us into Mount's Bay, Penzance about 10 o'clock at night. We went to Dingley's, a quiet comfortable family hotel, and remained there all the next day, enjoying very much our walk through the Penzance lanes and fields, "fed full of noises" by streams not "invisible" but beautifully visible in their clearness as they leaped or rippled over the brown stones. The next morning we went on the top of the omnibus to Falmouth, and after resting and lunching walked through the town to the castle, from which we had a fine view of the pretty harbour. The evening passed by pleasantly reading Emma, and early the next morning we set off by the "Sir F. Drake" to Plymouth. The fog was so dense, that the vessel was stopped repeatedly in order to ascertain how far we were from the shore; but at length it cleared away, and we got into Plymouth Harbor safely under a broiling sun. After dining and resting on shore we returned on board the same vessel at 5 o'clock, and after a night of misery in my berth, I came on deck yellow and frowsy to look at the shores of Jersey. We went to Jenne's Hotel in Royal Square, 913 and were very comfortable there. A walk to St. Aubin's in search of lodgings filled up the time till dinner, but we determined not to decide on our residence till we had seen and considered more, so we remained at the hotel that night and in the morning set out by omnibus to Gorey, which G. thought would be more likely to suit his zoological purposes than St. Aubin's, where there are no fishermen. Gorey proved to be just what we wanted and to Gorey we came, with our traps filling our fly inside and outside, on Saturday evening, the 16th of May.
MS: Yale. Extracts published: Cross, I, 436-439.
Recollections of the Scilly Isles. 1857
It is now the 28th of June, and it seems a long, long while since we said goodbye to kind-looking Charlotte, 906 at the Richmond Station on Sunday evening, the 15th of March. G. had a fixed idea that it would be supremely delightful to be at the Scilly Isles at the Spring Equinox, and so we set off in all the certain uncertainty of March weather. A comfortable night at the Paddington Railway Hotel and a bright morning, made an auspicious beginning of our journey, and it was still fine when we reached Plymouth, so that we could walk out on the Hoe, and get a view. But Mount Edgecumbe was leafless then, and the distances were clad in smoky haze. The Globe Hotel, where we put up, was very comfortable, but I was suffering from headache, and general malaise, and was unable to enjoy anything. In the morning we walked out to buy a basket for zoophyte hunting and learned that the excitement we saw in the town was owing to the expectation of Mr. Spurgeon, 907 who was going to preach for the benefit of an indebted chapel. At 10 or half past, we mounted the coach that was to convey us to Truro and had a cold but not unpleasant journey. I have described our companions in my journal, as well as our week's sojourn at Penzance while we waited for the weather, and our first glimpse of the Scilly Isles as we ascended sick and weary from our berths in the Ariadne. Captain Tregarthen recommended us to take lodgings at the Post Office, kept by Mrs. Scadden, "a very nice woman," so to the Post Office we went, and were very well pleased with the rooms, which were clean and well-sized. We had not formed a very brilliant conception of Scilly lodgings, so that there was not much room for disappointment. A little damsel about twelve, came in to attend to the fire, and turning with a smile to me, said, "Please, my name's Joyce if you want anything." Joyce, however was not our usual attendant, but a nice-mannered girl of eighteen. Poor little Joyce was an orphan and had been taken into service from the Union by our landlady Mrs. Scadden, whom we liked very well for the first day or two, when we discovered no other qualities than blandness and honesty, which do not always go together. A nearer acquaintance made it evident that there were great resources of stupidity in her, which, with the difficulty of getting meat at Scilly, made the victualing department a matter of considerable anxiety. After one desperate effort at luxury -- sending for a loin of mutton, which turned out to be all fat, and a couple of fowls, which were of patriarchal toughness, from Penzance -- we resigned ourselves to the monotony of beef and fried polack, 908 the only flesh easily procurable. Partly from the food perhaps, partly from the weather and climate, we were not well at Scilly and I had a further cause for physical depression in the deep trouble and anxiety I was in on Chrissey's account. We had not been at St. Mary's a fortnight, I think, when the news came of her illness and little Fanny's death 909 -- sweet little fair Fanny -- and the sad struggle of feeling I had for weeks between the wish to be with her and the impossibility of going to her without renouncing other duties more important, made the time pass painfully in spite of the constant love and mutual occupation that filled the days. This will always make the remembrance of Scilly half painful, though the sight of its unique scenery is really an acquisition.
I had never before seen a granite coast, and on the southern side of the island of St. Mary's one sees such a coast in its most striking and characteristic forms. Rectangular crevices, the edges of which have been rounded by weather give many of the granite masses a resemblance to bales of wool or cotton heaped on each other; another characteristic form is the mushroom-shaped mass often lying poised on the summits of more cubical boulders or fragments; another is the immense flat platform stretching out like a pier into the sea; another the oval basins formed by the action of the rain water on the summits of the rocks and boulders. The colouring of the rocks was very various and beautiful; sometimes a delicate greyish green from shaggy byssus which clothes it, chiefly high up from the water; then a light warm brown; then black; occasionally of a rich yellow; and here and there purplish. Below the rocks on the coast are almost everywhere heaps of white boulders, sometimes remarkably perfect ovals, and looking like huge eggs of some monstrous bird. Hardly any weed was to be seen on the granite, except here and there in a rock pool green with young ulva; and no barnacles encrust the rock, no black muscles, 910 scarcely any limpets. The waves that beat on this coast are clear as crystal, and we used to delight in watching them rear themselves like the horses of a mighty sea god as they approached the rocks on which they were broken into eddies of milky foam. The most striking points of the coast were Peninis, a grand promontory where the granite is broken into many separate piles; the Pulpit Rock; Porthelik, a bay where there are huge boulders scattered about the sands, so that at low water, it looks like a giant's play ground; the Giant's Castle; and a jutting wall of rock coloured of the richest yellow ochre tint, towards the eastern end of the island -- of which I could not learn the name. Along a great part of this southern coast, there stretch heathy or furzy downs, over which I used to enjoy rambling immensely; -- there is a sense of freedom on those unenclosed grounds that one never has in a railed Park, however extensive.
Then, on the north side of the island, above Sandy Bar; what a view we used to get of the opposite islands and reefs, with their delicious violet and yellow tints -- the tall ship or two anchored in the Sound changing their aspect like living things -- and when the wind was at all high the white foam prancing round the reefs and rising in fountain-like curves 'abbeyond'bb above the screen of rocks. Sandy Bar was one of our frequent objects in our walks -- a long stretch of fine pale sand where the large roots of the laminaria were thrown up in abundance. It was here we found our first comatula, which looked small and insignificant when we first set eyes on it clutching the root of the laminaria, but expanded like a red and white fern when we put it into the bottle.
Many a wet and dirty walk we had along the lanes, for the weather was often wet and almost always blustering. Now and then however, we had a clear sky and a calm sea, and on such days it was delicious to look up after the larks that were singing above us, or to look out on the island and reef-studded sea. I never enjoyed the lark before as I enjoyed it at Scilly -- never felt the full beauty of Shelley's poem on it before. On wet days the most convenient walk was the Garrison hill, which was in its highest beauty when we arrived. It is covered with splendid furze, with here and there an opening where you see a little rabbit trotting from bush to bush or a deer making haste to get out of your sight. The hill is a good height and from its highest part, one gets a curious view of St. Agnes with its light-house and its far-stretching chain of reefs. Four pyramidal reefs at the extremity of the chain have been named by the imaginative Scillonians the Great and Little Smith, and the Haycocks! On the other side lies Trescaid with its sister islands enclosing the sound, for ever changing in the loveliness of their aspect, with the changing sky and sea.
A spot we became very fond of towards the close of our stay was Carne Lea, where between two fine jutting piles of granite there was a soft down gay with the pretty pink flowers of the thrift, which on this island carpets the ground like greensward. Here we used to sit and lie in the bright afternoons, watching the silver sunlight on the waves -- bright silver, not golden -- it is the morning and evening sunlight that is golden.
A week or two after our arrival we made the acquaintance of Mr. Moyle, 911 the surgeon, who became a delightful friend to us, always ready to help with the contents of his surgery or anything else at his command. We liked to have him come and smoke a cigar in the evening, and look in now and then for a little lesson in microscopy, but we were quite determined for a long while to have no other acquaintances at Scilly. At length, however, he persuaded us to see our next door neighbours the Buckstones, and we dined with them once -- a fine old Father, deaf and paralytic, but still intelligent, a silly, ill-bred woman without the slightest presentiment of anything in existence superior to herself, and a stupid, good-natured, unaffected husband. The husband took us one day to see the new light-house being prepared for erection on one of the outer reefs near St. Agnes -- the Bishop's Rock, I think. Every morsel of the structure is prepared and fitted before it is carried to the spot, and the light-house is thus temporarily built up and taken to pieces again.
The little indications of the social life at Scilly that we were able to pick up were very amusing. I was repeatedly told, in order to make me aware who Mr. Hall was, that he married a Miss Lemon. The people at St. Mary's imagine that the lawyers and doctors at Penzance are a sort of European characters that every one knows. We heard a great deal about Mr. Quill, an Irishman, the controller of the customs, and one day that we called on the Buckstones, Mr. Buckstone said two or three times at intervals, "I wish you knew Quill!" At last, on our farewell call, we saw the distinguished Quill, with his hair plaistered down, his charming smile, and his trowsers with a broad stripe down each leg. -- Mr. Buckstone amused us by his contempt for curs -- "O, I wouldn't have a cur -- there's nothing to look at in a cur."
Our readings aloud were Cromwell's Letters, Aurora Leigh (for the 2d time), Life of Charlotte Bronte, Maury's Physical Geography of the Sea, 912 Twelfth Night and Macbeth, and Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. I read the '8cdipus Tyrannus and the '8cdipus Coloneus, De Quincey's Glories of Stage Coach Travelling and Revolt of the Tartars, and the greater part of Shelley's poems.
We left St. Mary's on the 11th of May about 2 o'clock in the windless afternoon; but after a while a little breeze sprang up and the good little sailing yacht Ariadne carried us into Mount's Bay, Penzance about 10 o'clock at night. We went to Dingley's, a quiet comfortable family hotel, and remained there all the next day, enjoying very much our walk through the Penzance lanes and fields, "fed full of noises" by streams not "invisible" but beautifully visible in their clearness as they leaped or rippled over the brown stones. The next morning we went on the top of the omnibus to Falmouth, and after resting and lunching walked through the town to the castle, from which we had a fine view of the pretty harbour. The evening passed by pleasantly reading Emma, and early the next morning we set off by the "Sir F. Drake" to Plymouth. The fog was so dense, that the vessel was stopped repeatedly in order to ascertain how far we were from the shore; but at length it cleared away, and we got into Plymouth Harbor safely under a broiling sun. After dining and resting on shore we returned on board the same vessel at 5 o'clock, and after a night of misery in my berth, I came on deck yellow and frowsy to look at the shores of Jersey. We went to Jenne's Hotel in Royal Square, 913 and were very comfortable there. A walk to St. Aubin's in search of lodgings filled up the time till dinner, but we determined not to decide on our residence till we had seen and considered more, so we remained at the hotel that night and in the morning set out by omnibus to Gorey, which G. thought would be more likely to suit his zoological purposes than St. Aubin's, where there are no fishermen. Gorey proved to be just what we wanted and to Gorey we came, with our traps filling our fly inside and outside, on Saturday evening, the 16th of May.
Citation
Ge Journal, GE Journal, Jersey, 28 June 1857, Complete George Eliot Letters(2026), George Eliot Archive, edited by Beverley Park Rilett. https://GeorgeEliotArchive.org, Accessed September 7, 2026. https://georgeeliotarchive.org/items/show/91885