Popular Culture
The house was used as a location for the 1948 film version of the George Moore novel Esther Waters. The film, directed by Ian Dalrymple and Peter Proud, starred Kathleen Ryan (in the title role), Dirk Bogarde (as William Latch), Cyril Cusack, Ivor Barnard and Fay Compton. The story of an unmarried housemaid who becomes pregnant and is abandoned by her footman lover, the subject-matter of Esther Waters was the most "English" of his novels. Moore had just returned to England after abandoning his brief interest in the Irish Renaissance theatre movement in 1901, in which he was a founder of the Irish Literary Theatre.
Accounts of life at Folkington Manor appear in the book Violet: The Life and Loves of Violet Gordon Woodhouse by Jessica Douglas-Home. Violet Gordon Woodhouse was the sister of Rupert Gwynne and one of the century's most gifted musicians, her salon at Wooton Manor was a rural match for London's Bloomsbury gatherings. The first chapter of the book details the long and stormy engagement between Violet's parents, James Gwynne and the musical May Purvis, there was strong opposition from the Gwynnes to James marrying someone of "questionable" descent. James and May set up house in Harley Street in London and at Folkington Manor in Sussex giving birth to Violet and her six brothers and sisters.
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“The press is no substitute for institutions. It is like the beam of a searchlight that moves restlessly about, bringing one episode and then another out of darkness into vision. Men cannot do the work of the world by this light alone. They cannot govern society by episodes, incidents, and eruptions. It is only when they work by a steady light of their own, that the press, when it is turned upon them, reveals a situation intelligible enough for a popular decision.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“The second fundamental feature of culture is that all culture has an element of striving.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)