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More than most contributors to
Dollie Radford (nee Caroline Maitland) grew up in London, where her father worked as
a tailor. The oldest of six children, she suffered at the age of ten the death of her
mother, followed by her father’s series of separations with his second wife. Educated
at Queen’s College, she was a close friend of Eleanor Marx (1855-1898), reading
Shakespeare with the Dogberry Club in Eleanor’s home, playing charades with Karl Marx
(1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895), and providing care for Marx’s wife
(Comyn 163). She published her earliest poems as “C.M.” in the radical
Each of Radford’s books includes a sequence of gentle love-lyrics, written “in tender
measures” (“The Little Songs”), usually addressed to a lover, but sometimes to
children from their mother. She interrupts these conventional sequences with a number
of poems that startle with their unpredictably decadent, feminist, or socialist
views. The first two of her four poems in
Decadent poets of the 1890s often pursue the exquisite expression of a fleeting
impression that emphasizes a tension between the permanence of artifice and the decay
of life. While some address the effects of decay in the breakdown of language,
Radford belongs with those who explore the effects of decay in the social order of
urban culture. Arthur Symons (1865-1945), for example,
depicts the banality of London nights at the music hall. But Radford is more
political than Symons with her critique of the suburban hell of subways and
cigarettes. “From the Suburbs” depicts the London underground where tired husbands
return from the daily bustle of business to a quiet evening of suburban leisure far
removed from the romance of armoured knights treasuring a lady’s glove (
Her third poem for
Her most ironic poem of radical protest is a dramatic monologue, a plea to the next generation. “From our Emancipated Aunt in Town” is addressed to nieces embarrassed by their eccentric aunt who dallies with the avant garde, “all that is weird and wild and new.” The old regime wherein ladies lived like Cinderellas devoting their lives to a fairy prince is a patriarchal dream now gone. But failing to push beyond the desire to appear daring, the aunt feels too old to scale the heights of the New Woman question. Radford clearly worries that the next generation may merely join the young nieces who smile condescendingly in quiet lanes far from public meetings, shunning “their place as future leaders” (Songs 87-93).
Radford also wrote five books for children, a novel, a book of short stories, and a verse play. She wrote little while coping with her husband’s dementia during the last dozen years of her life, but she completed “The Ransom” for a successful stage-run at the Little Theatre. It features a remarkable choral exchange between prostitutes and housewives feeling equally dead to the world. As the Prostitutes cry, “We are dead ere the dawn of our dying,” the Unloved Women reply: “We are ghosts growing sick of our life. / Oh, Love, hear the sound of our crying / That breaks through the waste of our strife.” Radford’s collected Poems adds a new sequence that turns from gentle love to a Gothic imagery of unrequited lust: a torrent on the heath (“At Night”), an angel “veiled in grey..., wrapt in fire..., outcast from heaven” (“My Angel”). Though not prolific, Radford ranged widely in her interests from playful nursery verse to conventional love songs and from decadent disaffection to feminist rebellion and socialist revolution.
© 2011, David Latham
David Latham is a professor of English at York University and the editor of