Today we went to Westminster Abbey, and I thought that the entire place was one of the prettiest we’ve seen yet. The architecture inside the church was beautiful, featuring tall gothic elements that created such a presence in the space. Beyond just the architecture it was fascinating to get a taste for just how deep the history of the church goes. It’s so old, and that’s something that has been a constant on this trip, but it is still hard to wrap my head around. It was really interesting walking into one of the rooms surrounded with stained glass because within the glass design there was a written history of not only the church but that specific room, even referencing the specific wall of stained glass that broke after firebombing in the Second World War.
The other main feature of Westminster Abbey is the many famous historical figures who are for the most part buried within the church, and if not are honored there with plaques or statues. The disciplines of the people celebrated had so much variety, ranging from architects to scientists and then, where I was most interested, writers. Seeing the tomb of Elizabeth I was definitely interesting, but finding the Shakespeare statue was still cooler. That being said, there was something about the writers section in particular that annoyed me, and that was the lack of any spectacle awarded to both Jane Austen and the three Brontë sisters. Jane Austen, the writer of Pride & Prejudice as well as several other famous novels, was born in 1775 and died in 1817, and if her plaque at Westminster was my only source of knowledge then that is all I would know about her. The same situation was there with the Brontë sisters. Between the three of them so many massive works of writing were created, like Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre, but in Westminster they were all forced to share a single plaque with their birth and death years. Granted, most every person honored there was only given a plaque with their name and lifespan – and some fancy ones had Latin – but still many of them had accompanying sculptures or ornate decor. It was just disappointing to see such monumental female authors not receive the same treatment as the several male authors.
Anyways, I’ll close out this post by mentioning what was probably my favorite plaque dedicated to a historical figure within the whole church: the FDR plaque. It was just something I was completely not expecting, and funnily enough it even had more explanation than Shakespeare’s memorial, as this plaque said “To the Honored Memory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1882-1944, a Faithful Friend of Freedom and of Britain, Four Times President of the United Stats. Erected by the Government of the United Kingdom”.
Theatre in London U of A 