Eclipse 1927
Eclipse madness, 1927
The excitement and anticipation associated with this year’s total solar eclipse are no new phenomena:
the eclipse of 1927 swept across the public life of Britain, touching even Virginia Woolf
and the Bloomsbury Set, as Holly Henry recounts.
U
nder the eerie and haunting sky of the
total solar eclipse of 1927, Virginia
Woolf witnessed a dramatic 24 seconds
when darkness swept over Barden Fell and the
Yorkshire Dales – an event that would have a
shaping effect on her life and her literary work.
An explosive popular fascination with cos-
mology and telescopic technologies erupted in
the 1920s as the discoveries of Edwin Hubble
and Albert Einstein radically reconfigured the
structure, size and age of the material universe.
Popular audiences were amazed at the new vis-
tas of intergalactic space captured by emerging
telescopic and photographic technologies. As a
result, astronomy became the rage both in the
US and in Britain. In June 1927, when a total
solar eclipse was to be visible in England, the
event was so widely celebrated by
the British public that special
overnight train and bus services
from London to Yorkshire, Lan-
cashire and other locations within
the belt of totality were provided.
It was the first, and probably only,
time that most living in England
would have the opportunity to see
a total solar eclipse. Bloomsbury
novelist Virginia Woolf, along
with her close friend, author Vita
Sackville-West, were among
those fascinated millions who
flocked to the path of totality to
witness the event.
Media madness
During the week prior to the
eclipse, The Times (London) ran
multiple articles on predicted
weather conditions, designated
scientific observing posts, spe-
cial train schedules, tips for safe
observation, as well as detailed
maps of motor routes to areas
of totality. Advertisements and
editorial cartoons that
appeared in daily newspapers Caller (to eminent official
and weekly publications THOUGHT IT MIGHT BE
demonstrate the extent to
ABLY BE AN ECLIPSE OF
which this particular eclipse
was celebrated. Distributors of
Barclay’s Lager, for instance, cashed in on the
widespread popular interest with a full-page
advertisement which read: “Light or Dark? For
August 1999 Vol 40
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he media attention on the
T forthcoming total solar eclipse is
nothing new. A similar eclipse 72
years ago brought solar astronomy
into the public domain, with
newspaper reports, cartoons, and
tours to the zone of totality. Among
the eclipse tourists in 1927 was
Virginia Woolf, whose experience of
seeing the eclipse subsequently
informed both her fiction writing
and her aesthetic vision.
of Astronomical Society).
“EXCUSE ME SIR, BUT I
OF INTEREST TO YOU TO
KNOW THAT THERE WIL
L PROB-
THE SUN ON THE TWENT
Y-NINTH OF THIS MONTH
A Punch editorial cartoon appearing in the 15 June
issue caricatures the widespread popular interest
in the solar eclipse of 1927.
those who dwell outside the area of teetotality
there is no drink to eclipse Barclay’s Lager.”
The Barclay’s advert appeared in a June 1927
issue of Punch, which ran several cartoons that
month parodying the intense public focus on
the event. One editorial cartoon depicted a
gentleman dropping in on an “eminent offi-
cial” at the Royal Astronomical Society to
inform them of the imminent eclipse (Punch 15
June 1927). In another, titled “The Eclipse”, a
woman reprimands her unruly son: “If you
don’t behave yourself, Osbert, I shan’t bring
you next time” (Punch 29 June 1927). It was
well known that this was the first total solar
eclipse visible in Britain for more than 200
years, and that, as Woolf noted in her diary,
another would not be seen here until 1999.
Entertainments
“[T]he word ‘eclipse’ was the
Hail and Farewell of every
conversation,” observed the
writer Sylva Norman (1927).
At Richmond, located very
near the central line of totality,
a week-long list of entertain-
ments was planned to include
“a lecture; a dance in the castle
grounds ... competitions; whist
drives; fetes; [and] a cricket
match” (“Corrected Path of
Eclipse” The Times 21 May
1927: 9).
Celebrations on the eve of the
eclipse were widespread. For
those travelling to England’s
western coast, The Times report-
ed: “Southport will carry out its
elaborate arrangements for enter-
taining the visitors during the
small hours. Cinemas, cafes, and
dancing places will be open
besides the sands” (“In the Totali-
ty Belt” 27 June 1927: 14). From
Blackpool, the Brickerstaffe
steamer was “to leave the pier for
a cruise into the centre of the belt
of totality” (“In the Totality Belt”
27 June 1927: 16). Many towns
.”
and villages arranged all-night
“eclipse dances” scheduled to con-
clude with the eclipse itself (“Sunshine at
Southport” The Times 29 June 1927: 16; Nor-
4.17

man, “Eclipse Madness” The Nation &
Athenaeum 9 July 1927: 477). And in London,
“there was the Crystal Palace, with room on its
terraces for thousands of people ... The Palace
was open at 4 o’clock and the caterers had
made provision for a big crowd of hungry
observers” (“Plans of London Public” The
Times 29 June 1927: 16).
Virginia Woolf, like a host of others, eagerly
anticipated the solar eclipse of 1927. Tele-
scopes and astronomy had been a life-
long passion, and in her diary and
writing journals she recorded her
observations of the stars and planets.
In August of 1907, at the age of 26
and while on holiday in Sussex, she
reported “seeing the moon close at the
end of a telescope, like a globe of
frosted silver”, and noted what
appeared to be “strange wrinkles &
corrugations on the surface” (A Pas-
sionate Apprentice 368). Much later, in
1929, Woolf observed that the craters
of the moon she had glimpsed through
Vita Sackville-West’s telescope looked
as though “made by water dropping
into plaster of paris” (Diary 3: 222).
To the observatory
On at least one occasion, Woolf visited
the observatory at University College
London to view the Moon through an
observatory telescope. Her good friend
Elizabeth Williamson, great-niece to the
composer and Woolf devotee Ethel
Smyth, assisted students in practical
classes at UCL and had invited Woolf to
the observatory. “[W]ent to see the
moon at Elizabeth Williamson’s observa-
tory,” she noted in her diary in December
1938, “& did not see it” (Diary 5: 190).
Derek McNally, senior lecturer at UCL,
reports that although University College
London built a substantial observatory at
Mill Hill in 1929, it is most likely Woolf visit-
ed one of the three small rooftop observatories
or domes then existent at UCL’s Gower Street
site. Williamson, a Fellow of the RAS from
1924 through 1977, was appointed Honorary
Assistant in Astronomy in the Department of
Applied Mathematics and Mechanics in Febru-
ary of 1927, and held this post until 1933. She
was appointed Assistant in Astronomy and
remained there until 1946.
Williamson helped the Woolfs to obtain their
own telescope which they set up at their home
Monks House in Rodmell in 1937 (Killen
1984). Virginia noted her husband Leonard’s
“brilliant idea of converting half the library
into an open air veranda with glass doors, in
which we can sit on a hot night & survey the
stars” (Diary 5: 159). Even in the final months
of her life, Woolf recorded their astronomical
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Eclipse 1927
observations. On a moonlit night in 1941, she
jotted in her diary: “L[eonard] looking at the
comet. Rather a strong moon, & so cant iden-
tify the constellation”(Diary 5: 351).
So intense was Woolf’s fascination with
astronomy that Vita Sackville-West investigat-
ed the possibility of installing a planetarium at
her home, Long Barn – that is, until she learned
it would cost roughly £20 000. Sackville-West,
too, “was interested in the night skies”
Barclay’s Lager cashed in on the eclipse, with this
full-page advert in the 29 June issue of Punch.
(Glendinning 1983). Nigel Nicolson, Vita’s
son, recalls (in a letter to the author) that his
mother “was also caught up with the fascinat-
ed love of astronomy, and [that] she did meet
[Sir James] Jeans”, the popular cosmologist
who was launched into the public eye in the
late 1920s through his BBC broadcasts and
popular publications on astronomy. Jeans, in
fact, gave Nicolson one of his first non-techni-
cal astronomy books: “I forget where it was,
but he gave me a copy of The Universe Around
Us in 1930, when I was 13, and I have it still.”
Woolf, too, read and owned Jeans’ non-techni-
cal astronomy publications.
On the eve of the June 1927 solar eclipse, Vir-
ginia and Leonard, along with Vita’s
immediate family and cousin Eddy Sackville-
West, Virginia’s nephew Quentin Bell, Saxon
Sydney-Turner and Ray (Rachel) Strachey trav-
elled overnight on the London and North-East-
ern Railway with hopes of witnessing the
event. Equipped with smoked glass to observe
the Sun’s phases, the party departed King’s
Cross at about 10 p.m. and arrived in Rich-
mond at around 3.30 the next morning. From
there, they took an omnibus to the top of the
moors at Barden Fell, north of Ilkley.
From their vantage point, the cloud cover
that morning was considerable. “We began to
get anxious,” wrote Woolf. “We saw rays
coming through the bottom of the clouds.
Then, for a moment we saw the sun, sweeping
– it seemed to be sailing at a great pace &
clear in a gap; we had out our smoked glass-
es; we saw it crescent, burning red; next
moment it had sailed fast into the cloud
again; only the red streamers came from it;
then only a golden haze” (Diary 3: 143).
Woolf clearly knew the details of the event
she was observing. Those “red streamers”
she glimpsed were probably coronal stream-
ers or solar prominences.
One of the poignant aspects of this partic-
ular eclipse was the sheer element of chance,
due to the unsettled weather, in catching a
glimpse of the eclipsed Sun, and particularly
the 23 or 24 seconds of totality. “The
moments were passing,” wrote Woolf. “We
thought we were cheated ... Nothing could
be seen through the cloud. The 24 seconds
were passing. Then one looked back again
at the blue: & rapidly, very very quickly, all
the colours faded” (Diary 3: 143).
Jane Goldman (1998) offers a detailed
study of Woolf’s eclipse accounts appearing
in both her diary and in an essay titled
“The Sun and the Fish” published in Time
and Tide (1928). Goldman contends that
Woolf’s descriptions of the eclipse, espe-
cially her use of colour and light, indicate
her interest in suffrage art and in English Post-
impressionism. Yet equally impressive is the
similarity of Woolf’s various accounts to so
many published reports of the 1927 eclipse.
Special correspondents for The Times at Gig-
gleswick, Southport, West Hartlepool, Swan-
age, and on board an Imperial Airways plane
chartered by the news firm, also offered
detailed reports on the strangeness of the pale,
eclipsed light. Headlines for one Times article
ran, “The Eclipse... Darkness that Could be
Felt” (The Times 30 June 1927: 17). The Times
correspondent at West Hartlepool, where total-
ity was obscured by clouds, commented on the
silence of the crowds as they stood in the
Moon’s shadow: “As there was no spectacle to
watch in the sky, the darkness was all the more
impressive. There was a strange eerie stillness in
nature and in the vast gathering of men. No
sound was heard but the breaking of the small
August 1999 Vol 40

waves on the sands” (“On the North-East
Coast” The Times 30 June 1927: 18).
At Southport, where totality was observed
through mist, another Times correspondent
recounted: “Then, without warning, came the
darkness ... as a menace, swelling and deepen-
ing ... The wide sands grew a solid rim of
blackness ... and with a startling suddenness
the light went out” (“From the Sands at South-
port” The Times 30 June 1927: 18). However,
at Giggleswick, totality was clearly visible. It
was reported that, “many thousands of peo-
ple saw an astounding and thrilling specta-
cle ... The shadow rushed at us and
enveloped us. We turned and found the sun
blotted out in a sky akin to that of a full
moon” (“The Eclipse” 30 June 1927: 17).
The correspondent dramatically reported,
“[W]e had been allowed our vision” (“The
Eclipse” 30 June 1927: 17).
Watching in Wharfedale
Despite the cloud cover at Barden Fell, Vir-
ginia Woolf, too, had been afforded an
extraordinary moment of insight. Under
the pale light of the blackened Sun, the
world seemed to her on the verge of
extinction. The sudden darkness suggested
to her the fragility of life on Earth.
The skies, wrote Woolf, “became darker
& darker as at the beginning of a violent
storm; the light sank & sank: we kept say-
ing this is the shadow; & we thought now
it is over – this is the shadow when the
light went out. We had fallen. It [the
earth] was extinct. There was no colour.
The earth was dead. That was the aston-
ishing moment” (Diary 3: 143). Jane “IF YOU DON’T BEHAVE YOURSELF
Goldman reads these lines by Woolf “as BRING YOU NEXT TIME.”
symbolic of the extinction of human con-
sciousness” (Goldman 1998).
But it is also clear that Woolf understood the
very real possibility of a catastrophic and actu- another total solar eclipse in England until 1999.
al human extinction. The failed light of the
eclipsed Sun evoked for her a sense of humans
“at the mercy of the sky” in an ancient strug-
gle for survival (Diary 3: 144). “I thought how
we were like very old people, in the birth of the recalled, “with a great sense of relief ... like
world – druids on Stonehenge” (Diary 3: 143).
She was not alone in associating the event
with our primitive past. Sylva Norman’s
account of the eclipse, published in the Nation
& Athenaeum (Norman 1927), is remarkably
similar to Woolf’s diary entry, though they
sketched their accounts separately. Both
women noted identical motifs and images,
including the sense of the Earth withering
under the strange, silver light of an eclipsed
Sun. Norman wrote, for instance: “Glum
cloud-layers swallowed the half-eaten sun; a
leaden opacity trod over from the West; from
the North a half-tangible suffocation was
dragged down. The grass at our feet was all
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Eclipse 1927
grey-black – discoloured increasingly with
each half-second like a choking man. We had
been warm; we were abominably cold” (Nor-
man 1927).
For Norman, as well, the eclipse evoked
images of humans’ primitive past. She com-
pared the “credulous savage beat[ing] drums
to scare off the devourer of the sun” to rev- over the moor was like the heeling over of a
ellers at a local Wharfedale “eclipse dance”
who “use[d] drums and saxophones to herald
THE ECLIPSE.
, OSBERT, I SHAN’T
This Punch cartoon (29 June issue) suggests that it
was generally known that there would not be
[the eclipse’s] approach and celebrate its swal-
lowing”.
They watched the Sun’s reappearance, Woolf
recovery. We had been much worse than we
had expected. We had seen the world dead ...
Then – it was all over till 1999” (Diary 3:144).
Through her observation of the Moon and
stars, and even the eclipse, Woolf had formu-
lated a global aesthetic. Humans, she knew,
existed on a globe, whirling through the inter-
stellar depths. In her novel The Waves, the
main character, Bernard, states: “I feel myself
carried round like an insect on top of the earth
and could swear that, sitting here, I feel its
hardness, its turning movement” (The Waves
185). Another character, Susan, describes how
in the autumn of the year, “[t]he earth hangs
heavy beneath [her]” (The Waves 98).
Echoes of the eclipse
In her essay “The Sun and the Fish”, Woolf
reflected back on her eclipse excursion and her
sense, as she watched the Moon blot out the
Sun, of our ephemerality in a universe known
to exist aeons prior to humankind:
“The shadow growing darker and darker
boat, which, instead of righting itself at the
critical moment, turns a little further and then
a little further on its side; and suddenly
capsizes ... It [the earth] hung beneath
us, like a cage, like a hoop, like a globe
of glass. It might be blown out; it might
be stove in.” (Collected Essays 4: 181.)
This sketch of the eclipse poignantly
acknowledges the possibility of human
extinction. Likewise in her novel The
Waves, Bernard recalls the moment of
totality of a solar eclipse and remarks
how the earth not only “rounds itself,
hangs pendant; settles and swings
beneath [his] feet”, but is also fragile
“like a glass cage” which might be “frac-
tured by a tiny jar” (286).
Woolf’s fascination with astronomical
phenomena, including the total solar
eclipse of 1927, afforded her a sense of
community with not only those millions
she joined in watching that event, but
also with human communities across
Earth’s globe. As Jane Goldman points
out, it is the “sense of shared experience
which comes across most powerfully in
Woolf’s description” (Goldman 1998).
Perhaps more importantly, the solar
eclipse reminded Woolf of the imperma-
nence of life on our “globe of glass”.
Indeed, her vision for a “new world” in
the novel The Years (1938) and in her anti-
war polemic Three Guineas (1938) called
for breaking down barriers of nationality and
desisting from human aggression. It was a
vision grounded in what she described as the
“liberating and freshening” vistas of the stars
(Diary 5: 276), both as she saw them through
her telescope, and during a turbulent dawn in
1927 through a small bit of smoked glass. ●
Dr Holly Henry is a lecturer in English in the
Department of English, 119 Burrowes Building,
The Pennsylvania State University, PA16802, USA.
Her research investigates the interconnections
between British literature and space sciences.
References
Glendinning V 1983 Vita: The Life of V. Sackville-West.
Goldman J 1998 The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf.
Killen J 1984 Virginia Woolf in the light of modern physics
dissertation, University of Louisville.
Norman S 1927 ‘Eclipse Madness’ The Nation & Athenaeum 9 July
477–78.
Woolf V 1928 Time and Tide.
Woolf V 1990 A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals
1897–1909 ed. Mitchell A Leaska, The Hogarth Press, London.
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