Chiswick Timeline of Writers & Books: A quick guide
From the Writers Trail:
J) Anthony Burgess 1917-1993. Poet, Playwright, Novelist: A Clockwork Orange. Lived in Chiswick in the 1960s, where he wrote Nothing Like the Sun and Tremor of Intent.
24 Glebe Street, W4 2BG (Private house, no access)
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1. Fresh bid to secure blue plaque for the house where Anthony Burgess lived: The Chiswick Calendar, March 2020
New Campaign Launched To Get Blue Plaque For Former Home Of Anthony Burgess: ChiswickW4.com, March 2020
Academics, historians and local residents are backing a fresh bid to secure a blue plaque for the house in Chiswick where the writer Anthony Burgess lived in the 1960s. The author and composer, best known for his dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange, lived for five years at 24 Glebe St, between 1964 and 1968. Click links above for full story.
2. No Blue Plaque For Anthony Burgess’ Chiswick Home: ChiswickW4.com
Clockwork Orange author spent 5 years in Glebe Street (photo, above)
The following report is from ChiswickW4.com in 2015. Click link above.
The Glebe Street home where writer Anthony Burgess spent the 1960s will not receive a commemorative plaque this year, English Heritage has decided.
Burgess is most famous for his novel A Clockwork Orange, a dystopian take on teenage delinquency which was adapted into a controversial film by Stanley Kubrick.
He moved with his first wife Lynne to 24 Glebe Street in 1963, the year after Clockwork was published, and stayed there for five years, writing 6 novels, 3 books of criticism and several translations in his Chiswick period. A few months after Lynne’s death in March 1968, Burgess left West London and England for good.
The period of his residence in W4 was a time of great creativity for Burgess. He wrote several of his most important novels in Chiswick, including Nothing Like the Sun (a fictional life of Shakespeare, written in Elizabethan English), Tremor of Intent (a spy thriller in the style of Ian Fleming) and Enderby Outside, a comic sequel.
He was also composing piano music at this time, and in 1968 he wrote the script, lyrics and music for an unmade Hollywood musical about Shakespeare, under the working title “The Bawdy Bard”. Finally, Burgess began work on a slang dictionary in 1967, commissioned by Penguin Books. The incomplete manuscript of this work has recently been discovered in Manchester, but is yet to be published.
Burgess often wrote about the places where he lived, and Chiswick is no exception. Glebe Street is one of the locations used by Burgess in Tremor of Intent, while Burgess also included an affectionate account of his years here in the second volume of his autobiography. Burgess formed part of a lively literary circle in W4, and frequented local pubs with the likes of Kingsley Amis.
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Last December, the Manchester-based Anthony Burgess Foundation received news from English Heritage that its Blue Plaques Panel had decided not to shortlist the writer for commemoration. It was deemed that Burgess’ legacy, 20 years after his death, was not yet strong enough to receive a blue plaque.
However, the Panel did not discount the possibility of Glebe Street receiving a commemorative roundel for its famous resident in the future. Indeed, the Panel added a recommendation that Burgess could be re-nominated after only five years, rather than the usual ten, in the expectation that new work on Burgess would be published ‘in the interim’.
Professor Andrew Biswell, Director of the Anthony Burgess Foundation, commented: “Anthony Burgess was a true giant of twentieth-century literature and music. His books are still read all over the world. In his lifetime, Burgess was awarded public honours by France and Monaco, but he received no honours from the British state.”
He continued, saying that though the Foundation was “very pleased” that Burgess had already been given a plaque in Manchester, the city where he was born and raised, “it is disappointing that there is no memorial” to the writer in London. Biswell also expressed a hope that the schedule for the 2017 centenary of Burgess’ birth, including new editions of his poetry and music concerts, will make English Heritage reconsider their decision.
April 1, 2015
3. Travels on the Timeline.
Chiswick writer Graham Holderness , author of Nine Lives of William Shakespeare and Black and Deep Desires: William Shakespeare Vampire Hunter reveals his indebtedness to Anthony Burgess.
Anthony Burgess lived in Chiswick at a particularly productive time in his life and writing career, 1963-8. Burgess’s move to Chiswick was connected with two great national institutions: the BBC, and Shakespeare. His wife’s father died, he explained, and they inherited some money.
Lynne received a few thousand pounds (Burgess wrote), and she proposed spending them on a house in London. There was a professional need for my going to the capital: on Shakespeare’s four hundredth birthday the BBC was to open a second television channel unbeamed, for some time to come, to East Sussex. My articles for The Listener would require that I saw its programmes. But Lynne dreamed rather of London pubs: the country life was beginning to pall … I studied the estate agents’ advertisements and found a terraced house in Chiswick that would meet our, her, purse. There was a long lease and the property would cost less than £3,000.
Burgess was writing regular articles for The Listener, and needed to be able to see BBC TV programmes. The new channel, BBC2, launched in April 1964, wouldn’t be available where he was living in East Sussex. And you could get a house in Chiswick for less than £3000!
1964 was the quatercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth in 1564, and Burgess’s major contribution was the publication of his novel Nothing Like the Sun. He’d rushed to finish it the previous autumn it so it could be published in April 1964 to coincide with the Shakespeare anniversary; and he wanted to be in London to promote the novel. So Chiswick was closer to the BBC, handier for a lot more pubs, and ironically nearer to Shakespeare. And you could get a house in Chiswick for less than £3000!
Read the whole story at http://grahamholderness.com
4. Anthony Burgess in Chiswick – International Anthony Burgess Foundation
Chiswick Timeline Writers Trail
Read more stories via the Writers Tales page.
The Chiswick Timeline of Writers & Books lists around 425 writers who have written a book and lived in Chiswick W4, or written books about the area. See A Quick Guide.