Some more monuments and stories from St Pancras graveyard. Sir John Soane designed his own family monument. He was an architect who designed the Bank of England, and whose house, packed with sculptural treasures picked up on his travels, is one of the hidden marvels of London. The central part inspired Sir Giles Gilbert Scotts design of the telephone kiosk in the 1920s. A magpie stands sentinel over the two recumbent tombstones. The grave of Mr William Jones, Charles Dickens teacher at the Wellington Academy in Hampstead. Dickens hated him, and he became the model for the grotesque headmaster Mr Creakle, who torments David Copperfield at the Salem House school. Thus this tombstone, which now bears a plaque declaring him to be Dickens teacher, commemorates him in a way which wholly refutes the Victorian pieties of its inscription. Dickens called him by far the most ignorant man I have ever had the pleasure to know...one of the worse-tempered men perhaps that ever lived. The table top tomb is that of Mary Wollstencraft and William Godwin. They were the parents of Mary Godwin, and it was here that she first made love to Percy Shelley, whom she would later marry (William Godwin was still alive at this point). As Mary Shelley, she wrote the gothic classic Frankenstein, of course. The Beatles also stopped off in the graveyard on their mad day out, taking publicity shots on 28th July, 1968 (this also features in Christopher Fowlers Bryant and May On The Loose). The inside gatefold pictures on the red and blue compilations are from this shoot. The shots were taken by Don McCullin, famed for his war photography.
Posted on: Fri, 19 Sep 2014 20:59:14 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015