The non-ancestral Verrall turns out to have been an eccentric.

This was Jacob Verrall, who owned Monk’s House in Sussex before Virginia and Leonard Woolf bought it from his estate. (That’s a photo of the sitting room above.) As I wrote last time, my husband is descended from a long line of Verralls living in Sussex, many of them eccentrics and gamblers. I couldn’t find any documented connection to Jacob, but looking for it sent me down a rabbit hole of research, even though I should have been working on my ongoing house purge, getting rid of stuff we’ve accumulated over the years.

The problem is, the Verralls are so much more interesting. In a BBC TV interview of Leonard done by Malcolm Muggeridge in 1967, Woolf says that Jacob Verrall “was a very strange old man. He used to lie in bed with a rope attached to his toe, and at the other end of the rope there was a bell placed in a cherry tree down the garden. When the birds came to eat the cherries he gave his toe a jerk, rang the bell and scared the birds away. It was typical at Rodmell village, I should think, in those days.”

In a diary entry from 1921, Virginia Woolf writes of a visit from a Dr. Vallance of Lewes, who told her that Jacob Verrall had “starved himself purposely to death.” Dr. Vallance also told her that during one of his house calls, they’d been forced to draw close to the chimney to feel any degree of warmth, and that he’d tried to convince Verrall to play chess as a distraction from both the cold and his impending death. This makes the doctor sound rather like Death in Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal, leaving the whole incident feeling a bit fictionalized. Not surprising, since it was relayed to a writer by someone who might have wanted to impress her.

And there’s this: according to Leonard Woolf’s biographer Victoria Glendinning, on August 14, 1919, there was an auction of the late Jacob’s stuff in the Monks House garden in which Leonard bought “curtains, blankets, table linen, a table and chairs”–later painted by Vanessa Bell–“cutlery and crockery, glassware, an oil stove, a mincing machine, apple trays, a wheelbarrow, a garden roller, garden tools and the contents of the garden shed…”

I bring up the list after reading a book published in 2012 about two houses: Monk’s House, which became a museum in 1980, and Charleston, which was owned by Virginia’s sister, Vanessa Bell. 

And yes, I’ve grown obsessed. 

Charleston and Monk’s House, by Nuala Hancock, is a short academic treatise which examines “the corporality of our encounter with artefacts and the importance and productiveness of multi-sensory response to their interpretation,” as well as quoting some very cool observations about stuff from the two sisters and their friends.

In her essay, Sketch of the Past, Virginia writes about her parents’ bedroom at 22 Hyde Park Gate in London, the house where she was born. “It was not a large room; but its walls must be soaked, if walls take pictures and board up what is done and said, with all that is most intense, of all that makes the most private being, of family life.”

She continues, “The house images move in both directions; they are in us as much as we are in them.”

I think this is true, as well, of the stuff that our houses contain, which isn’t always new, but often comes to us secondhand, like the curtains and blankets that Leonard bought at auction from Jacob Verrall’s estate.

So when our stuff evokes—that word I like—surely it isn’t only our own pasts we sense, but the jumbled histories of the people who formerly owned what we choose to have around us. Verrall remained in the house long after he died, permeating the linen and cutlery, a string tied to his toe, playing chess with Death by the inadequate fire. Virginia and Leonard sought out stories about him as they used his things—some of which probably came from the Glazebrook family, which had owned the house before him.

I wonder if that’s why some stuff can almost vibrate; why it can feel so deep. As Virginia says in another essay: “For it is true of every object—coat or human being—that the more one looks, the more there is to see.”

Nuala Hancock notes that Vanessa Bell brought a dressing table to Charleston which she had grown up with in Hyde Park Gate. “A further cupboard, a heavy Dutch cabinet in walnut, belonged to William Makepeace Thackeray” (who was the father of Vanessa’s father’s first wife) “is housed in the main studio…

“They are, in this sense, palimpsests, inviting contact not only with the material worlds of Charleston… but also with the layered materiality of Woolf’s and Bell’s earlier lived past—the tangible trappings of the Victorian interiors of their childhood. The poetics of these pieces is expressed through their presentation as containers—as though the past were stored on the deep shelves behind their glass doors, or held unseen within the shadowy recesses of their locked drawers.

“If space, as (Gaston) Bachelard suggests, is ‘compressed time,’ then the interior spaces of containers house the remembered past of Woolf and Bell.”

A paragraph I had to re-read. But once I did, I liked the idea of those objects we carry through our lives as being palimpsests; the idea of closed drawers holding the past, of space being compressed time.

Which might be one reason it’s so damned hard to throw things out.

Hancock’s book ends, by the way, by admitting that this is precisely what the curators did at both Monk’s House and Charleston before opening them as museums. They threw out a lot of the clutter and mess in which the Woolfs and Bells actually lived, turning the museums into neatened constructs, much like the staged interiors of houses up for sale.

Despite being a writers’ house, the Monk’s House museum doesn’t hold the Woolfs’ extensive library, which was sold to Washington State University. When they lived there, books were stacked on the stairways, on windowsills, in piles on the floor. Nigel Dickson called Monk’s House “a hugger mugger of a house… It was rambling, it was untidy.” Leonard called Virginia’s working methods “not merely untidy but squalid,” with “filth packets” littering her desk. Pen nibs, crumpled bills, ash from her ash tray.

So Monk’s House was redolent for the Woolfs, but I wonder what we can get from a visit to the carefully-staged museum.

A feel, perhaps, for the way they would have liked to have been seen, rather than the way they actually were?

As I continue thinking about stuff—and get back to recycling it—I also wonder if that’s part of the impulse behind purging. By tidying our houses, we’re creating a self we want others to see. We’re this clean, this tidy, this transparent.

Isn’t it pretty to think so?

Alison Light’s book remains on my shelves, Mrs. Woolf and the Servants. That’s what started me down this rabbit hole of inquiry into the Woolfs, possessions, and ancestors. I meant to write a review of the book and I haven’t. So let me say briefly that it’s a wonderfully detailed examination of real, unstaged life, not tidied up by either curators or Marie Kondo-esque purgers. 

Virginia Woolf could be difficult, the people she employed could be difficult, and they lived in claustrophobic proximity. The book makes for gossipy reading, and probably tells us more about the Woolfs than they would have liked us to know. It also spoke to my current obsession with stuff, and will likely speak to the different obsessions of other readers. As I said at the start, a writer always publishes multiple books when she releases a title, since every reader will read it differently.

This is the book I read, and it proved fruitful.

Last of four parts.