John Drinkwater

John Drinkwater is on the list for his play Abraham Lincoln, first produced in 1918 when he was 36 years old. Lincoln himself should doubtless be a category; however I think I will go through and record all of the authors first, and then go back and do the pages for the various special subjects, places, and so on referenced in the selected literature.

Drinkwater was born at Dorset Villa, 105 Fairlop Road in Leytonstone, London (the British, and the Europeans generally, are much better at recording this kind of information than Americans are, who just want you to read the books and not try to make any personal connection with where they came from). This address is very near Leytonstone tube station on the red line at the edge of zone three and zone four, which means it was pretty far out in 1882 when Drinkwater was born. His grave is in the churchyard of the village of Piddington, in Oxfordshire. Without a car you would probably have to catch a bus there from Oxford, which is 10 miles away; or course if you had time you could walk. As I will probably never make it there I will link a picture of the grave, which is an attractive one, Drinkwater dying in 1937, which was a period when people had an appreciation for both the solemnity of dying and the fragile beauty of their cultural tradition.

Abraham Lincoln was apparently made into a silent film in 1924, but there is as yet no clip of it circulating on the internet, if indeed it still exists. There is a brief recording from 1929 of Drinkwater reading or more likely reciting his poem, "The Vagabond" with the incomparable Edwardian-era diction:

Drinkwater was the son of a schoolmaster who became an actor, so it is not surprising that he would have learned how to speak with some dash. The family was not evidently upper-middle class enough to give him much formal education however, as he does not seem to have attended university and worked from ages 16 through 19 at the Northern Assurance company in Nottingham. I am not sure how he managed to become an author, though by age 27 the "Vagabond" had been written, and by 31 (1913) he was established enough to form one of the social and literary circle of Rupert Brooke, Lascelles Abercrombie and others of the so-called "Georgian Poets", who specialized in a kind of doomed traditional, pastoral, safe brand of poetry in the brief few years between the ascension of George V to the British throne and the outbreak of World War I, at the same time as the early thrusts of full-fledged modernism were thrusting themselves into the collective consciousness of the age.  

The Encyclopedia Brittanica describes him as "remembered as a typical man of letters of the Georgian age of the 1910s and 1920s." This is an age, in literature and the other arts, that even in its minor achievements seems to be growing ever more attractive with the passing of time. Drinkwater is not yet entirely forgotten.