The Lent Jewels by David Hughes

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In one spring month of 1856 Archibald Campbell Tait (later to be Archbishop of Canterbury) and his wife Catharine suffered the loss of five daughters, aged between two and ten, to an epidemic of scarlet fever. In a memoir she wrote later, Catherine refers to these beloved children as 'the lent jewels'. The couple bore their bereavement with a fortitude that could be sustained only by faith. Without similar convictions, but in the hope of laying bare a comparable belief for himself, David show more Hughes explores the themes of love and loss, intermingling his own experience, both as child and father, with the story of another of Tait's contemporaries, someone with a different focus on life, a man known only as 'Walter', author of the erotic memoir My Secret Life. At the same time Catharine was drowning her grief in words by writing an eloquent account of her children's deaths. All these presences haunt the chapters of this many-layered documentary. With all the style and insight that have made him such an appealing writer, David Hughes considers matters of life, death, sex and love in a book which is both moving and ultimately uplifting. show less

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"Lent Jewels" has at its centre an account of the death from scarlet fever of five daughters of Archibald Campbell Tait, when Dean of Carlisle. The children died in quick succession in 1856, an event recorded in a stained glass window in Carlisle Cathedral, a few steps from where the lives of the children had ended.Tait and his wife's response to their tragedy is contrasted, in a slightly weird way, with the story of a London pornographer. Tait would later become Bishop of London, and then Archbishop of Canterbury. Along with exploring the history of this family tragedy. the book is an essay on the author's lack of faith, his awakening sexuality and experiences, and his love of pipe organs.

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