Where do the Ansells live?
May. 24th, 2026 02:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regshoeThe 'ugly little town' where the Ansells live is oddly non-specific in comparison to the rest of the book's locations. I think here it's the household rather than the town that counts, but also I can't resist a geographical puzzle, and so:
Necessary background: Cadover and its surroundings are, as Forster says in his introduction, a fictionalisation of the Bourne valley northeast of Salisbury, and the Cadbury Rings in particular are Figsbury Ring (this name does seem to be singular, although there are multiple rings). This is relevant to identifying where the Ansells live because a lot of the clues to the latter involve travel routes between it and Cadover.
This question seems at first to have a very simple answer: in a draft of the novel the town was named as Andover, so it's probably still Andover, it's just no longer named in the final version. Right? The problem with this is the railway journey to Cadover, which involves changing trains at Salisbury (chapter 3); Andover is further along the same railway line out of Salisbury as the stations of the Bourne valley, so this description doesn't fit with the town being Andover. On the other hand, to get to Cadover by road one travels 'no great way ... over Salisbury Plain', which does more or less work for Andover.
The train described at the start of that railway journey—'the Salisbury train always backed out of the station and then returned' (chapter 33)—seems like, firstly, probably a real detail taken from real experience, and secondly, like it ought to be identifying: that's a fairly unusual thing for a train to do and given the constraint of a direct train to Salisbury from not very far off, surely a knowledgeable railway enthusiast ought to be able to identify it. So I asked a railway enthusiasts' forum and they concluded that, while there are various places that might sort of fit that description if you squint, there isn't any single obvious candidate that really works*.
So I decided I was probably going wrong with the train. There is, after all, a clear plot reason to include the backing manoeuvre—it provides a way for Stephen to get onto the train after it first sets off—and Forster might have taken it for that reason from a train he'd ridden or observed in some completely different place. Perhaps he always intended the town to be Andover, but didn't like to be too obvious in the published version of the novel exactly who he was calling ugly. But we're still left with the problem of the change of trains at Salisbury, for which there isn't such a clear plot reason; there is some meaningful setting description there in chapter 33 and it gives Rickie and Stephen a longer time to talk, but that doesn't seem important enough to move Andover around the map for.
But I think there is a solution, and to work it out we must return to Cadover.
Elizabeth Heine in the notes to the Penguin Classics edition of the novel points out that, while the area is indeed clearly based on the Bourne valley northeast of Salisbury, the names may have come from Codford (cf. Cadford), in the Wylye valley northwest of Salisbury. Now, there is one detail around Cadover that doesn't fit the Bourne area: the fatal railway crossing. There is a crossing located pretty much as Forster describes—where the Roman road to Londinium crosses the railway near Figsbury Ring—but it is and, as far as I can tell, always has been a bridge, not a level crossing. There's also a modern main road crossing both of them in the same place†, and it's odd that Forster doesn't mention that. And one of the railway enthusiasts from that forum pointed out that there is a level crossing over a Roman road in the area... at Wylye, a few miles from Codford. And even more neatly, there is or was another circular earthwork, Bilbury Rings, just a little way further south along the road.‡
So my proposal is that the Ansells do live in Andover, which hasn't been moved after all; but that in the course of fictionalising the Winterbournes into the Cads, Forster disguised them a little by taking some inspiration from Codford and Wylye, borrowing the former's name, the latter's level crossing and their location on a different railway line out of Salisbury. This does increase the distance from Andover, making Mr Ansell's road route less easy; but it's not a huge increase (~25 miles rather than ~20), and it's still definitely a more direct route than taking the railway via Salisbury.
Here there's a possible objection to address. They are on different lines out of Salisbury, but in the present day there is a through train (London Waterloo to Yeovil Pen Mill) that stops at Andover and continues along the line through Wylye and Codford (neither station exists anymore, but this train stops at the extant stations along the line). However, the two lines were built separately by different railway companies, and a perusal of the 1896 Bradshaw suggests that there was no through train at this time. There remains one small problem, which is that the connection between the Andover-Salisbury and Salisbury-Codford trains would not have been an hour, as it is in chapter 33, but only about ten minutes; but this also has a plausible plot justification, in that a longer time is required for the cart incident and the characters' resulting decision not to take the train to C[a/o]dford.
*Possibilities suggested included a manoeuvre between the three separate stations within Salisbury at this time; Templecombe in Somerset, where the backing might not be through the station and which is a village rather than a market town big enough to be a successful draper in; and Amesbury, which is in Wiltshire (the Ansells' town is not; the description of the train journey makes it clear that one enters Wiltshire on the way from Cadover) and mostly had military trains rather than regular passenger services. It was also pointed out that there was a big rebuild of the lines in the area going on at this time, and various strange manoeuvres might have been temporarily necessary without being typical enough to identify.
†The bridge is formed by the modern road, and the Roman road briefly diverts up onto it; this arrangement is shown on the Ordnance Survey map of 1887, well before the book is set and not all that long after the railway was built.
‡The rings are shown on the Ordnance Survey maps of 1889 and 1901; they're just about visible on modern aerial imagery and LiDAR, but are a lot less prominent than Figsbury Ring, and I can't find much information about them online, so perhaps they've been partially destroyed by modern ploughing.
Necessary background: Cadover and its surroundings are, as Forster says in his introduction, a fictionalisation of the Bourne valley northeast of Salisbury, and the Cadbury Rings in particular are Figsbury Ring (this name does seem to be singular, although there are multiple rings). This is relevant to identifying where the Ansells live because a lot of the clues to the latter involve travel routes between it and Cadover.
This question seems at first to have a very simple answer: in a draft of the novel the town was named as Andover, so it's probably still Andover, it's just no longer named in the final version. Right? The problem with this is the railway journey to Cadover, which involves changing trains at Salisbury (chapter 3); Andover is further along the same railway line out of Salisbury as the stations of the Bourne valley, so this description doesn't fit with the town being Andover. On the other hand, to get to Cadover by road one travels 'no great way ... over Salisbury Plain', which does more or less work for Andover.
The train described at the start of that railway journey—'the Salisbury train always backed out of the station and then returned' (chapter 33)—seems like, firstly, probably a real detail taken from real experience, and secondly, like it ought to be identifying: that's a fairly unusual thing for a train to do and given the constraint of a direct train to Salisbury from not very far off, surely a knowledgeable railway enthusiast ought to be able to identify it. So I asked a railway enthusiasts' forum and they concluded that, while there are various places that might sort of fit that description if you squint, there isn't any single obvious candidate that really works*.
So I decided I was probably going wrong with the train. There is, after all, a clear plot reason to include the backing manoeuvre—it provides a way for Stephen to get onto the train after it first sets off—and Forster might have taken it for that reason from a train he'd ridden or observed in some completely different place. Perhaps he always intended the town to be Andover, but didn't like to be too obvious in the published version of the novel exactly who he was calling ugly. But we're still left with the problem of the change of trains at Salisbury, for which there isn't such a clear plot reason; there is some meaningful setting description there in chapter 33 and it gives Rickie and Stephen a longer time to talk, but that doesn't seem important enough to move Andover around the map for.
But I think there is a solution, and to work it out we must return to Cadover.
Elizabeth Heine in the notes to the Penguin Classics edition of the novel points out that, while the area is indeed clearly based on the Bourne valley northeast of Salisbury, the names may have come from Codford (cf. Cadford), in the Wylye valley northwest of Salisbury. Now, there is one detail around Cadover that doesn't fit the Bourne area: the fatal railway crossing. There is a crossing located pretty much as Forster describes—where the Roman road to Londinium crosses the railway near Figsbury Ring—but it is and, as far as I can tell, always has been a bridge, not a level crossing. There's also a modern main road crossing both of them in the same place†, and it's odd that Forster doesn't mention that. And one of the railway enthusiasts from that forum pointed out that there is a level crossing over a Roman road in the area... at Wylye, a few miles from Codford. And even more neatly, there is or was another circular earthwork, Bilbury Rings, just a little way further south along the road.‡
So my proposal is that the Ansells do live in Andover, which hasn't been moved after all; but that in the course of fictionalising the Winterbournes into the Cads, Forster disguised them a little by taking some inspiration from Codford and Wylye, borrowing the former's name, the latter's level crossing and their location on a different railway line out of Salisbury. This does increase the distance from Andover, making Mr Ansell's road route less easy; but it's not a huge increase (~25 miles rather than ~20), and it's still definitely a more direct route than taking the railway via Salisbury.
Here there's a possible objection to address. They are on different lines out of Salisbury, but in the present day there is a through train (London Waterloo to Yeovil Pen Mill) that stops at Andover and continues along the line through Wylye and Codford (neither station exists anymore, but this train stops at the extant stations along the line). However, the two lines were built separately by different railway companies, and a perusal of the 1896 Bradshaw suggests that there was no through train at this time. There remains one small problem, which is that the connection between the Andover-Salisbury and Salisbury-Codford trains would not have been an hour, as it is in chapter 33, but only about ten minutes; but this also has a plausible plot justification, in that a longer time is required for the cart incident and the characters' resulting decision not to take the train to C[a/o]dford.
*Possibilities suggested included a manoeuvre between the three separate stations within Salisbury at this time; Templecombe in Somerset, where the backing might not be through the station and which is a village rather than a market town big enough to be a successful draper in; and Amesbury, which is in Wiltshire (the Ansells' town is not; the description of the train journey makes it clear that one enters Wiltshire on the way from Cadover) and mostly had military trains rather than regular passenger services. It was also pointed out that there was a big rebuild of the lines in the area going on at this time, and various strange manoeuvres might have been temporarily necessary without being typical enough to identify.
†The bridge is formed by the modern road, and the Roman road briefly diverts up onto it; this arrangement is shown on the Ordnance Survey map of 1887, well before the book is set and not all that long after the railway was built.
‡The rings are shown on the Ordnance Survey maps of 1889 and 1901; they're just about visible on modern aerial imagery and LiDAR, but are a lot less prominent than Figsbury Ring, and I can't find much information about them online, so perhaps they've been partially destroyed by modern ploughing.
no subject
Date: May. 24th, 2026 04:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: May. 24th, 2026 06:01 pm (UTC)I'm not sure the specific identification gives much more insight than the generic 'market town somewhere in the south of England' that we get in the book, to be honest. Someone who knew the area might be able to make some use of local details, but I don't, I'm afraid. So I'll go on a speculative tangent instead!
One potentially interesting thing (but again something that would also be true of most similar places) is it's a pretty unusual place to be Jewish; British Jews are very geographically concentrated, and I can't immediately find relevant historical data but the most recent census recorded the current Jewish population of the area around Andover as rounding to 0.0%. That combined with the fact that Ansell isn't a particularly Jewish name and the mention of Stewart's uncles (mentioned alongside his father, so probably meaning his father's brothers) being farmers makes me think Stewart is probably ethnically Jewish on his mother's side only and that she came from somewhere else. Which raises several alternative options for the religious situation of the family.
His first name is also interesting, actually: he's named after his father, who would have been born around the mid-nineteenth century, and I don't think Stewart, which of course originated as the surname of the Scottish Clan Stewart, was at all common as a given name then. So Mr Ansell has a surname as a given name, and the most common reason for that to happen would be that it's his mother's maiden name (though it could be after someone not related to his parents; Wilkie Collins apparently got his Scottish-surname given name from his godfather), and therefore she was probably Scottish.
So on the one hand our Stewart is growing up in this small provincial town, a) belonging to an ethnic/religious group that's a rounding-error minority in the area and b) with at least three-quarters of his recent ancestry not from anywhere nearby, which I think would be quite unusual at this time. You could certainly imagine that producing a sense of being different/not fitting in that might influence someone to want to do things like go off to Cambridge and become a philosopher. And yet I think the way the family are described suggests they do fit pretty well into their surroundings: the shop is an institution of the High Street, they're moderately successful and very comfortably homely, there's not much sense of them as outsiders or atypical of their class. Mr Ansell—who acts in all the usual ways one might expect someone in his social position to act, but who also 'had what no education can bring—the power of detecting what is important' and 'liked money and social position. But he knew that there is a more important thing'—is looking like really rather an interesting sort of person sociologically (I disagree with Forster's statement that he ought to be classed among the phenomena with no real existence!), and that mix of influences is an interesting background for Stewart to have, I think.
no subject
Date: May. 24th, 2026 07:36 pm (UTC)Stewart’s Jewishness is one of my favorite parts of the character—I love that Forster gave us that. And your estimation that his Jewishness might come from solely his mother gives an interesting perspective on why he might feel outsiderish while having a seemingly comfortable middle-class home life.
no subject
Date: May. 24th, 2026 07:59 pm (UTC)It's more usual as I understand it in Sephardi tradition for children to be named after their living grandparents than directly their parents, unless the intergenerational pattern repeats to that effect. Not arguing that it's impossible, especially in a mixed-assimilated family of any origin. (Ashkenazi speaking, named for my great-grandmother on account of living grandparents at the time of my birth.)
no subject
Date: May. 24th, 2026 07:49 pm (UTC)*crashes through the wall of this conversation*
If the marriage was mixed that way round, Stewart would be halakhically Jewish by right of matrilineality, although the naming for his living father (curly gold letters that seemed to float in tanks of glazed chocolate) would confirm that the household overall was as assimilated as the Christian motto in the guest room suggests ("Watch and pray" was written on the harp). Ansell is a not uncommonly Jewish name, however, so I would suspect it was the draper who came to town on business and married into the family of farmers, in which case Stewart would not have counted as Jewish according to any beit din in the late nineteenth century but would have grown up with that simultaneous sense of continuity and difference. I agree with you that his father is an entirely credible phenomenon. The Ansells as a family are a statistical anomaly either way.
Anyway, I love your mapping of this novel.