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George Washington Williams’ History of the Negro Race in America (1882–83)
Text by Dorothy Berry
Sep 12, 2023

George Washington Williams (1849–1891) lived the sort of picaresque life not often imagined possible for nineteenth-century African Americans. At the age of fourteen he falsified an identity and joined the Union army for the last battles of the Civil War. He continued his military career, serving in Mexico under General Espinosa and in the Indian Wars, until he was honorably discharged due to an injury. His life then moved to a series of firsts, accomplishments, blunders, setbacks, social networks, and burnt bridges. He briefly enrolled at Howard University, then left to eventually become the first Black graduate of the Newton Theological Seminary in Massachusetts, an ordained Baptist pastor, the founder of a Black newspaper in Washington D.C., a lawyer and then elected legislator in Ohio — all before beginning to work on his first major publication, History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880.
One thing Williams was not, however, was a trained historian. A pure autodidact in the field, he forged a historiographical process through dedicated study of primary sources, exhausting the resources of the Ohio State Library, and traveling east to the Library of Congress and New York Historical Society. Perhaps Williams was dedicated to comprehensive documentation because he lacked formal credentials. He not only reviewed official government records, but also pamphlets and newspapers, going so far as to conduct interviews with members of Black military regiments in the Southwest when his requests for information through official channels were denied. His evidentiary enthusiasm is clear from the preface of the first volume where he recounts the genesis of his work:
I was surprised and delighted to find that the historical memorials of the Negro were so abundant, and so creditable to him . . . I became convinced that a history of the colored people in America was required, because of the amply historically trustworthy material at hand.
That passionate study led to the 1882–83 publication of the two-volume History. Divided into three major parts, “Preliminary Considerations”, “Slavery in the Colonies”, and “The Negro During the Revolution”, the first volume actually begins far before 1619, with the Book of Genesis (a historical bound that speaks to Williams’ encyclopedic vision). The initial chapter of the book is thus more biblical history than scientific, calling on theological studies to counter popular dehumanizing theories about Black people based on scriptural arguments. Next comes “The Negro in the Light of Philology, Ethnology, and Egyptology”, which moves forward some centuries, tracing ethnographic and linguistic understandings of whom is referred to with the term “Negro”. Williams continues onward with geographic and historical overviews of various West African tribes and societies. Unfortunately, this first part is Williams’ most creatively non-factual, full of imaginative language that reads more like an adventure tale than historical study, as seen in this excerpt about battles between the English colonial army and the Ashanti:
All the native and British forces were compelled to retire to the forth; while the Ashantee troops, inspired by the dashing bearing of their new king, closed in around them like tongues of steel. . . . The screams of fainting women and terrified children, the groans of the dying, and the bitter imprecations of desperate combatant,- a mingling medley - swelled the great diapason of noisy battle.
History of the Negro Race in America evens out once we reach the 1619 arrival of enslaved Africans in the Virginia colony, and the first volume’s latter parts are bolstered by the author’s ability to more directly access primary sources and references. He delves into legal and legislative rulings around slavery and freedom in each of the twelve colonies, comparing and contrasting the situations for enslaved people before the American Revolutionary War. His second volume, published a few months after the first, kicks off with “Negroes in the Army and Navy” at the start of the nineteenth century and continues through the Civil War into Reconstruction, concluding with a “Retrospection and Prospection” on the “Negro Power of Endurance”.
Perhaps due to his own extensive military history, Williams thrives when writing about the Revolutionary War, devoting one of his longest chapters to “Military Employment of Negroes 1775-1780”, which details all aspects of the conflict — from the shooting of Black and Indigenous sailor Crispus Attucks at the Boston Massacre, widely regarded as the first American to die in the war, through the cessation of hostilities. The chapter contains transcriptions of military rulings and correspondence, charts, tables, and some glimpses of Williams’ innovative use of newspapers as primary sources. The mixture of directly quoted and fully reprinted documents and Williams’ opinionated authorial voice make his history a unique contribution, a view into African American history as well as into one African American’s idiosyncrasies.
After years of research and relationship building, Williams’ debut was subject to reviews and critique across the major periodicals of the day. Some reviewers gave shallow praise, simply impressed that a Black man could accomplish a task of this magnitude, while others had severe critiques of Williams’ style and methodology, especially regarding the early speculative chapters. Perhaps the larger issue that brought out reviewers’ red pens was his tone. With a background in both clergy and the law, Williams indulged in the sort of affected prose that was common in the 1880s but that reviewers seemed to find issue with when coming from a new Black historian. There were also complaints that he did not have enough professional respect for colleagues. Throughout History of the Negro Race, Williams harshly critiqued historians that he thought were citationally lax or faltering in their professional objectivity. He felt comfortable correcting the historical record definitively, as in this footnote relating to Benjamin Banneker, an eighteenth-century polymath and, most famously, publisher of almanacs:
William Wells Brown, William C. Nell, and all the Colored men whose efforts I have seen, have made a number of very serious mistakes respecting Banneker’s parentage, age, accomplishments, etc. He was of mixed blood. His mother’s name was not Molly Morton, but one of his sisters bore that name.I have used the Memoirs of Banneker, prepared by J. H. B. Latrobe and J. Saurin Borris, and other valuable material from the Maryland Historical Society.
The chiding tone of this footnote is among his more gentle reproofs, and certainly was not something as obvious as Williams claims. In the Houghton Library copy of the History, there is a handwritten annotation from Alonzo Rothschild, jeweler and previous owner, showing that Latrobe himself disagreed with Williams.
In spite of the somewhat-excusable errors in methodology and irreverence for his peers, even Williams’ most critical reviewers noted that they were being exacting out of respect for the work itself. An Atlantic Monthly review begins with the following note:
If we frankly point out its defects as well as its merits, it is because its author has honestly aimed to place it on that high plane where it can be judged by the standard of its absolute worth, without any sort of reference to “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” To criticise it thus impartially is a recognition of its value.
Condescending as that reads today, and it was certainly condescending at the time, the fact that major intellectual venues treated this self-taught historian’s first book as a serious text worthy of detailed review is almost as impressive as Williams’ endeavor itself. The publication and subsequent press attention made Williams a national figure. To the surprise of no one, Williams’ life did not slow down. He went on to publish a major volume of Black military history, lecture around the United States, travel to Europe where he met with King Leopold of Belgium, and then to Egypt and the Congo, where his earlier illusions about the benefits of African colonization were resoundingly shattered. He reported his concerns back to Leopold, causing him to promptly disassociate from Williams, who died in Blackpool, England, in 1891 on his way back from that eye-opening journey.
Despite his national prominence, it would take more than fifty years for John Hope Franklin to begin excavating Williams’ legacy after his death, and he is still far from a household name. His vision for the serious undertaking of Black history has enduring relevance, however, and illustrates the longevity of Black history as a scholarly topic, one that remains under debate across the United States. Though he was often harshly critical of other Black historians, Williams dreamed of a rich community stewarding the material and intellectual history of their people. In 1883, the same year his first book was published, Williams wrote a letter to the editor of the Boston Herald, titled “An American Colored Historical Society Proposed”. His historical society was never realized, but his description reveals how his imagination shirked every contemporary bound of racial possibility:
I am now earnestly endeavoring to organize an American negro historical society. The negroes of this country are making very credible history now, and it should be preserved. My object is to have 25 of the most intelligent colored men of the country organize with a charter; hire a room in a fireproof building in Boston; secure all works written by negroes; preserve all pamphlets, orations and speeches of negroes; correspond with Hayti, Liberia and Jamaica; hold semi-annual meetings, when a historical paper would be read; have the proceedings of the society published every year, and, in time, preserve every thing of historic interest relating to the negro. . . . I have learned by experience the necessity of such an organization.

author: Dorothy Berr


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Pantographia: A Specimen Book of All the Alphabets Known on Earth (1799)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Oct 10, 2023

There's a radical tradition in Jewish mysticism that thinks we are missing a letter of the alphabet. In our current cosmic cycle, the letter is either invisible, or present to our eyes in a faulty, corrupted form. This is why the Torah contains negative logic structures — when every letter appears as it should, there will be no need for apophatic theology. In Genesis, God fragments the single language shared by all humans, scattering their humpty-dumpty tongues abroad, but in Kabbalistic thought, the Lord looks more like Raymond Queneau and his fellow Oulipo, writing a lipogram that uses every letter but one. Both cases place a profound power in putting the pieces back together again, reassembling the total in its original form. A related Jewish tradition claims the psalms are out of order to keep humans from assuming divine power: "if [the psalms] were arranged in their proper order, and any man so read them, he would be able to resurrect the dead", says the Midrash. When the Talmudic scholar Joshua ben Levi began to number these hymns differently, a booming voice from heaven intervened: “Do not rouse that which slumbers!”
In 1799, the same year that the Rosetta Stone was unearthed in Egypt, the type-founder Edmund Fry published Pantographia, his attempt to gather back together every known alphabet on earth. Containing 405 alphabet specimens from 164 languages, the book is a treasure chest for the epigraphical imagination. There are the expected alphabets that influenced the shape of Latin — Greek, Semitic, Phoenician, Etruscan — and mysterious and magical alphabets, such as the twenty variations of Chaldean, an occult writing system that has no extant original sources. (Fry reports that it may have been transmitted directly to Adam; others believe it stems from a medieval cipher, whose creators couched the shapes in antique lore.) Indigenous languages without alphabets such as “Virginian” and “Esquimaux” are given phonetic approximations in Roman characters. And Domesday, Ethiopic, Poconchi, Sclavonian, Tartaric, Walloon, and dozens of other alphabets have been arranged to spell out the Lord's Prayer. As your eyes trace the thousands of distinct kinds of line that have made meaning for humans across the world, script can indeed feel like a kind of scripture — the rudiments of spelling become an incantation, a spell. Yet there is also something mournful about Pantographia, especially for a modern reader. We might learn to intone and live in a few of the linguistic landscapes encrypted in these writing systems, but the rest will always remain empty runes before our eyes, from which a vital force has fled. And as languages continue to be lost each year to mute extinction, Fry's book begins to look more like a mausoleum than agora.
Genesis framed our fallen state as a problem of space: people can no longer unite to build towers unto heaven because they have to shout incomprehensibly across continents. Yet Fry hints in his introduction that imperial alphabets might offset this punishment. "By this happy mode of communication, distance is, as it were, annihilated, and the merchant, scholar, and statesman, become present to every purpose of utility, in the most remote regions." And like James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, who sets up a phone call to Eden by dialing the alphabet — “Hello! Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one” — Fry believes the study of alphabets might also solve the problem of time. Namely, questions concerning the origins of language. In a bizarre argument, he claims that alphabets must have divine origins because certain civilizations have failed to develop these phonemic systems. Written Chinese grows "more intricate and voluminous every day", but will never “terminate in so clear, so comparatively simple, an expedient, as that of alphabetical characters". But Fry also declines Pliny's "conjectures and fables” about letters being eternal, the notions of "cabalistic doctors", who believed alphabetic writing was created during the sabbath, and anyone who dare suggest that letters were breathed down to the Egyptians by their god Teuth. Instead, it all goes back to Babel, when one tongue — and presumably one alphabet, although here Fry seems unsure — shattered into uncountable quantities.
Aside from theological claims made by Fry in his introduction, there is also a kind of secular miracle present in this work. The sublimity of craftsmanship. To get these letters into print, Fry carved each one onto a steel punch, which could be pressed into a copper matrix for printing. It took him sixteen years, four thousand punches, and an estimated ten thousand hours of labor. According to alphabet historian Johanna Drucker, Fry's Pantographia "provides an overview of the state of linguistic knowledge in the British Empire" and is the key transitional work between two modes of knowledge production: eclectic, antiquarian compendia and specialized, professional research. In Fry's own estimation of the project, Pantographia is a meeting ground, an incomplete but working commons for all those in need of a “centre of communication”.

source: public-domain-review

author: Hunter Dukes

type: collection

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


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Aftershock of the New: Woodblock Prints of Post-Disaster Tokyo (1928–32)
Text by Erica X Eisen
Oct 17, 2023

The shockwave struck at lunchtime. Witnesses would later state that tremors rocked Tokyo for ten full minutes, igniting fires across the city as lit stoves and cooking oil were thrown together in the chaos of the magnitude-7.9 earthquake. With water mains severed, the resultant blazes spread unchecked across the largely timber cityscape, consuming everything in their wake as the winds whipped them onwards. By the time the aftershocks petered out and the last flames were extinguished, the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, as it would come to be known, had claimed over 100,000 lives — including thousands of ethnic Koreans and others murdered amidst xenophobic rumors of sabotage — and the face of Japan’s capital had been altered forever.
Yet in the aftermath of this tragedy, the tone of many bureaucrats and public planners in Tokyo was one of optimism, almost cheer, at the vast expanses of burnt-over nothingness that now provided them with space in which to lay out broad new roads and grand civic buildings in imported styles. This is the vision put forward in One Hundred Views of New Tokyo (Shin Tokyo Hyakkei), a collection of prints by eight artists published between 1928 and 1932. The artists who contributed to the series were part of the sōsaku hanga (creative print) movement, which brought new techniques and aesthetic vocabularies to the Japanese woodblock. “Sofar as the classical ukiyo-e artists are concerned, I feel positively no relation to them and no debt to them whatever”, said Onchi Kōshirō, one of the movement’s most famous exponents and a leading contributor to the New Tokyo series. “Today our attitudes toward art are completely different.”
One can detect in Onchi’s declaration something of the functionary’s heady glee at the leveled quakescape’s infinite potential — that “forceful reiteration of modernity’s logic of creative destruction,” in Gennifer Weisenfeld’s words, “aimed at legitimating urban development and renewal.” Yet despite the artist’s strenuous disavowals, parallels to prints of centuries past are not hard to spot. The series participates in a long lineage of ukiyo-e celebrating (and skewering) vistas of the so-called Eastern Capital — taking as its most direct point of reference Hiroshige’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo Hyakkei, 1856-9). Pagodas are traded for church domes, the pine-needle fires of tile kilns for a smokestack’s laminar effluent, and a fisherman’s net is replaced by the protective mesh screening fans at a baseball field. Like Hiroshige, who set many of his series’ prints during ombré hours, the artists of Shin Tokyo were also interested in exploring the play of light, though in their case it is not the firelit congress of foxes that interests them but the splayed image of a film projector in a darkened theater.
One of the cardinal visual effects of Hiroshige’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo is its recurring, often winking inclusion of foreground elements that loom over and even eclipse whatever well-known site the print in question is supposed to be elegizing: a suspended turtle, a boatman's hairy arm, the groin of a straw-shod horse. Against the calligraphic swish-swish of a black koi banner, does anyone even notice the diminutive arc of Suidō Bridge, whose celebration is the image’s pretext for existing in the first place? This is the crux of Hiroshige’s message: an Audenesque affirmation that these great and exalted places exist amidst — and indeed owe the great force of their vitality to — the quotidian moments that they stage and that here upstage them. But the views of New Tokyo exhibit neither Hiroshige’s stylistic preference nor the sentiment that undergirded it. No person, no animal, and not a single thing can rival the city itself, which is the protagonist above all else. It’s notable how many of the series’ people look away from the viewer, into the distance or out at the great capital that has already opened its mouth to consume them. It’s noteworthy, too, that the later series drops Hiroshige’s word meisho (famous places) from the title. Many of its views — the Shell station, the thronged dance hall — could be from nearly anywhere at all, speaking little to Tokyo but a great deal to the shin, the new, the now.
If the earthquake shook the city loose from the particularities of space, it also disjointed it from time: Shin Tokyo’s artists did not, as Hiroshige did, divide their series according to the march of the seasons, and in the enclosed worlds of the subway station and the gleaming department store, who can tell if it is day or night? Time is no longer cyclical, per Hiroshige’s vision — instead we have only the great forward tilt toward modernity, which like sugar on the tongue entices only to dissolve once you have finally gotten a taste. Indeed, less than two decades later, when a number of the prints were reissued in the wake of Japan’s surrender to the United States, it was under the self-consciously wistful title Tokyo Kaiko Zue, often translated as Scenes of Lost Tokyo. Yet in another sense the prints had lost their shin even before they were first published. “Yesterday’s Tokyo has already changed, and there are many prints in the early part of the series showing places that have changed. So they are really ‘Old’ Tokyo and not ‘New’ Tokyo”, wrote the artist Maekawa Senpan, who contributed twelve prints, in an article on the occasion of the series’ completion. “Indeed, we could [already] start on another series of Shin Tokyo Hyakkei!” This is Audenesque too, in a sense, though perhaps transposed into a different key: how everything turns away quite leisurely from the disaster.

author: Erica X Eisen


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Books Fatal to Their Authors (1895)
Text by Sasha Archibald
Jan 4, 2024

At the very end of P.H. Ditchfield’s 1895 compendium Books Fatal to Their Authors, the priest, historian, and prolific author argues that a just society would create a refuge specifically for aging writers — a place where they can live in peace, enjoying the same repose as a retired racehorse deserves. The existence of such a sanctuary would signal gratitude for a lifetime of cerebral labor, and protect those “maimed and wounded warriors” who have suffered “in the service of Literature”.
If you’re not convinced, skim your way through Books Fatal to Their Authors and see if your mind is changed. Writers have been punished with more variety, more frequency, and more severity than you might expect. Ditchfield catalogues hundreds of authors who were banished from their homeland, languished in prisons and castles and monasteries, and spent decades on the run. Their right hands were cut off and their children executed; fines were levied and reputations destroyed. In one case, a gang of hit men found a fugitive satirist, Trajan Boccalini, resting on a couch in Venice and beat him to death with sandbags. In another, the writer was presented with a choice: either be beheaded or eat his book. Theodore Reinking wisely chose the latter, which he accomplished by somehow “converting [the book] into a sauce.”
The most common writerly punishment was to be burned at the stake. This practice extended at least four centuries, and Books Fatal to Their Authors provides dozens of examples. There was Lucilio Vanini, a sixteenth-century Italian philosopher who advocated atheism and changed his name to Julius Caesar — burned alive; Giordano Bruno, a Renaissance scholar who, among other heresies, suggested that the Bible was perhaps a work of dream interpretation — burned alive; Francois de Stabili, an Italian poet who used poor judgement in reading the horoscope of the Duke of Calabria’s wife — burned alive; and Savonarola, a beloved fifteenth-century Florentine preacher and revolutionary — strangled, then burned. The religious iconoclast Simon Morin was burned alive at the entrance to Notre Dame Cathedral while his followers were branded and enslaved. Jacopo Bonfadio was comparably lucky — his friends negotiated down the punishment, such that the philosopher was kindly beheaded, and then burned. The chemist Joseph Francis Borri fled Rome just in time, so that he was only burned in effigy, an experience that psychically transmitted a great chill: “Borri declared that he never felt so cold, [as] when he knew that he was being burned by proxy.”
While the fires were stoked, the writer was often strangled or whipped, and sometimes dressed in special clothes. Usually, the offending books were burned at the same time. When it was over, the ashes were thrown into a river, so that they didn’t become treasured relics, though at least once, an author’s ashes were shot from a cannon, as was the fate of poor Cazimir Liszinski.
What heinous things did these writers write? Occasionally the crime is as clear as day. Authors who criticized the spending of the Church, mocked the manners of the French Court, or suggested assassinating a tyrant king must have expected blowback. Same goes for the printers who messed with the Bible. The printer who surreptitiously removed the Seventh Commandment — “Thou shalt not commit adultery” — was heavily fined; another printer, a woman, tweaked Genesis’ “He shall be thy lord” to “He shall be thy fool” and was sentenced to death.
But in most of Ditchfield’s anecdotes, the insult is not particularly intelligible, and his glosses barely help. Taking offense is culturally specific, and needs to be explained with some weedy detail. Ditchfield offers only tiny vignettes, shorn of context. What is clear, however, is that punishment does not correlate to a book’s popularity, or its truthfulness, or the quality of its scholarship. An author’s madness is rarely taken into account when offense is perceived, and neither is haplessness. It’s upsetting how many writers seem to have become fatalities entirely by accident.
The unluckiest of Ditchfield’s unlucky subjects is the poet Pierre Petit. A gust of wind blew a few unpublished poems from Petit’s table to the street below, where they were immediately snatched up by a passing priest. The priest scanned the drafts and demanded the poet dead. It was done. The story puts the lie to Ditchfield’s title: tyrants, not books, kill authors.

author: Sasha Archibald


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Coney Island at Night (1905)
Text by Adam Green
Nov 21, 2023

Before the cotton-candy and mechanical thrills, Coney Island was known for its thriving rabbit population — hence the name, the Dutch for rabbit being konijn: or so goes one of numerous etymologies for the area. Earlier the Lenape had named it Narrioch, meaning “land without shadows” or “always in light”. While thought to be a reference to its sunlit beaches, the name also speaks somehow (more than rabbits at least) to the dazzling electrical displays which would light up the peninsula after dusk at the turn of the twentieth century.
It’s these illuminations which are the subject of Coney Island at Night, an Edison Studios short from 1905 directed by Edwin S. Porter. Bringing together two of Thomas Edison’s “inventions” — the light bulb and the motion picture — the film offers a dreamy four-minute glimpse of the amusement district at its peak. Two years prior, Luna Park had opened, full of lavish electric landscaping and a futuristic “dark ride”, A Trip to the Moon, in which passengers left Earth to cavort with moonlit maidens and Selenites. And a year after that, the ribbon was cut at Dreamland, home to lagoons, towers, and one million electric lights. These venues, along with Steeplechase Park, built in 1897, formed the trio of iconic parks that competed during Coney Island’s heyday.
For the darker side of early film at Coney Island, see Ross Bullen’s essay on Jumbo’s ghost, featuring a filmed electrocution of Topsy the elephant on the site of Luna Park’s construction. For Coney Island’s acoustic heritage, see our post on Cummings’ Indian Congress too.

author: Adam Green


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Charles H. Bennett’s Shadows (ca. 1856)
Text by Kevin Dann
Oct 3, 2023

“Coming events cast their shadows before”, reads the caption for Charles H. Bennett’s frontispiece; it shows a young child dipping into a pot of preserves as a raised hand foreshadows punishment. The twenty-two other portraits in Shadows (1856) paint human nature in strokes nearly as dark, the cleverly manipulated silhouettes revealing drunks, killjoys, gluttons, fools, and minor monsters. Christened “Cheerful Charley” by his Savage Club compatriots — and recalled (after his early death at thirty-nine in 1867) by his fellow Punch men as “the kindlest and gentlest of our associates” — Bennett’s satirical sensibility in Shadows is relentless, even if intended as light-hearted moralism.
Originally published as individual graphics for Fleet Street bookseller David Bogue’s Illustrated Times, Bennett’s caricatures were reprinted in a number of expanded editions, popular due to a simple and ingenious magic-lantern conceit: that the shadow thrown by a spotlit individual can reveal her inner character.
Born and raised on the Covent Garden piazza, where Samuel Pepys observed the first recorded performance of a Punch & Judy show in 1662, Charles Bennett instilled his finest drawings with the antics of puppetry, bursting with frantic noise and movement in a tightly controlled space. In the title-page illustrations for his books, and in most of the more than two hundred drawings he did for periodicals, the characters spill out beyond the margins. Many of Bennett’s shadow satires rely on the visual vocabulary of animals to cast shade on his subjects. A vain old woman is rendered into a self-admiring parrot; a young woman is belittled by the shadow of a “Little Duck”; a leering man projects the menacing shadow of a greedy crocodile.
A gifted storyteller as well as artist, Bennett wrote a number of children’s books — The Faithless Parrot (1863), The Frog Who Would a Wooing Go (1864), The Nine Lives of a Cat (1860) — whose animal protagonists were far more sympathetic than the humans lampooned in Shadows. More often, however, as in Fables of Aesop (1857), which pairs up animals in Victorian garb to make thinly-veiled digs at London’s fashionable class, Bennett’s animals are mere beasts of rhetorical burden to castigate their two-legged cousins.
Below you can browse Bennett’s shadows. For their equally monstrous but inkier cousins, see our post on blottograms.

author: Kevin Dann


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A Careful Selection of Whisk Ferns (1837)
Text by Erica X Eisen
Sep 19, 2023

Of the aesthetic imperfections to be avoided by any serious practitioner, the 1989 guide Classic Bonsai of Japan lists kuruma-eda (“branches that originate from a single point”) and karami-eda (“branches . . . whose lines cross each other”), as well as vessels that are too-showy, attempts to make species like the gingko curve as they grow, and improper balance in the “twin-trunk style”. Such modern handbooks find their ultimate antecedents in the Tokugawa Period, when fans of these miniature trees included even the era’s namesake warlords — indeed, a five-needle pine said to have been nursed by the shōgun Tokugawa Iemitsu himself is still living to this day (despite its near-totally hollow trunk) and has been declared a national treasure by the Japanese state. Robert J. Baran, researcher and historian for the Phoenix Bonsai Society, writes that the earliest catalog of bonsai was likely Chōseisha Aruji’s Manual on Arboriculture (Kinsei jufu), published in 1833. The appearance of these books on the market accompanied both a terminological and a categorical shift: from hachi-no-ki (literally, tree in a pot) to the name we now know today, and from a merely decorative role to something that took on the physical and philosophical rigors of artistic practice.
Contemporary books on the subject were accompanied by delicately rendered illustrations of thick foliage, curved branches, and rugged trunks, with particular care lavished on the exquisite ceramic pots from which bonsai itself (the first character of which means tray) takes its name. In contrast, this curious two-volume illustrated book on bonsai from 1837 dispensed not only with the vessels but with the trees themselves. That set, A Careful Selection of Whisk Ferns (Seisen Matsuranfu), is devoted instead to the cultivation of the titular rootless, branchless, leafless genus, whose smooth stems are stippled here and there with globular yellow outgrowths called enations. The images dedicated to these minimalist beings, in lime and emerald green, seem to reduce bonsai to its sparest visual elements. The result is something alien, algal — hardly recognizable as a plant at all.
Whisk ferns — Psilotum to botanists, matsubaran in Japanese — belonged to a category of plants called kihin, curious and rare specimens for which there was a fad among collectors during the latter part of the Tokugawa Shogunate. Printed illustrations could forever freeze these unique cultivars in the moment of their highest flowering or fullest leaf. But publishers of books who fed into the kihin craze sometimes ran afoul of the period’s harsh sumptuary laws, which strictly regulated the consumption and display of luxury items according to one’s social status. Such is the case for Catalogue of Extraordinary Plants (Sōmoku Kihin Kagami), whose unfortunate editor, Kinta the Gardener, had his property seized and his woodblocks burned before being banished from the capital forever — fitting punishment, so it was apparently thought, for promoting such dangerous indulgences.


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The World's First Costume Book: François Desprez's Collection of Various Clothing Styles (1562)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Dec 6, 2023

These woodcuts by François Desprez come from 1562’s Recueil de la diversité des habits (whose full title translates as “a collection of the various styles of clothing presently worn in the countries of Europe, Asia, Africa, and the savage isles”), published in Paris and sometimes cited as the world’s first costume book. As Europeans encountered and conquered new worlds during the Age of Exploration, they not only took an interest in novel geography, biological specimens, and exportable resources but also in the customs and dress of unfamiliar peoples. Desprez’s 121 engravings illustrate garbs found the world over, accompanied by anonymous quatrains describing the sartorial behavior of Desprez’s subjects. The typeface is civilité, an imitation of the style of handwritten letters found in children’s book and etiquette manuals of the period, making the woodcuts look almost as if they are annotated with a traveler’s observations. Indeed this book was not meant to inspire innovation in the boudoir but served instead as a kind of anthropological atlas, marketing itself as a proto–National Geographic: “If you’re not eager a voyager to be, / To reach the places where other people dwell, / Escaping travelers’ woes, here you can see / A Hungarian man’s dress just as well.”
Just as early travelogues blended observation and folklore in their accounts of natural history — birthing mythical creatures and all sorts of hybrids — the dress on display here is a bizarre mélange of documentation and fantasy. Viewed in rapid succession, the woodcuts feel like trading cards for exoticized humans and extinct humanoids. Turks, Tartars, and Spaniards rub shoulders with a droopy eared cyclops, a monkey using a walking stick, and the so-called sea bishop: a bipedal, piscine creature, first spotted in the early 1500s, who cosplayed a Catholic priest and could communicate with clergy. It is not surprising that scholars believe Desprez was also the artist behind The Drolatic Dreams of Pantagruel (1565), a series of grotesque hallucinations after Rabelais that were published, like this book, by Richard Breton. The images in Recueil de la diversité des habits portray fashion in the oldest sense of the word: a fabrication or act of creation as well as a habit and way of life. If clothes make the man, however, different clothes, seen through imperial eyes, can also make the man a monster. For his part, Desprez insisted on the truthfulness of the images, many borrowed faithfully from “the late Roberual, Captain for the King, and a certain Portuguese [sailor] who visited several different countries.”
At least twelve costume books were produced in Europe between 1550 and 1600, exemplifying “the period’s confidence in dress as a signal of kinship and identity”, how costumes were thought to be imbued with the “typologies of national character”, writes Katherine Bond. If the nude “savages” and muscular barbarians are somewhat expected in a book published in the 1560s, the decade that saw the establishment of West Indies Fleets, it is perhaps more disorienting to view the funhouse refractions of people who lived, not across the Atlantic, but on the other side of the Channel (Desprez finds savages aplenty in Scotland) or a few days trek across the Alps. The quatrain for “The Englishwoman”, for example, portrays clothing not as fashion but as obligatory costume, by which one can successfully identify a foreign species: “Thus dressed is an English woman, / On top her bonnet is fur-lined. / We can recognize her easily . . . By her square bonnet.” Other national costumes prompt the Frenchman to reflect on his own people’s vanity. The “German” does not change outfits “as often as we do / because the French ask for new clothes / changing them like the wind”. This was a bugbear for Desprez, who lambasted “curieux” clothing, the fast fashion of his time, casting a new light on his assertion that foreign peoples’ dress stays fixed. Where we might expect to find only crude stereotypes — and there certainly are some of those — we also happen upon a critique of the homeland, grounded in praise (albeit misinformed) for the cultural stability of foreign lands.
We will leave you with the address to the reader from Recueil de la diversité des habits, which — in a moment of seeming cultural relativity — acknowledges that sartorial difference can make other people look strange, no matter where they hail from:
If you want to see portraits of girls, men, and women,Without leaving their gestures or clothing behind,Depicted from life at the time that we live in,For the sake of delightfully enlivening your mind,Read through this book with attention and care.Over these images let your gaze range.You’ll come to know well the clothes humans wear,Which make them all, one to the other, seem strange.


text:
A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words (1860)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Sep 26, 2023

Could you have learnt to patter flash the argot of costermongers, hawking sanguinary James and other belly-timber? You might recognize these types by their Newgate knockers, those aggerawators tucked behind a lug on the nuddikin. Hear them shout their prices: saltee, madza poona, exis-evif yeneps! Or you may prefer the rapping of beaker hunters, needy mizzlers, and such — all Dutch uncles now, but common when pudding snammers were wido in the push. This was an era of shivering jemmy on the high fly munging for a bit of cagmag, when pure finders collected danna amid fencers of cakey-pannum. At night, on London’s streets, stallsmen and the doxies cooled the esclop for their buz-bloaks. And those who missed their tip, like nibblers done for a ramp, climbed the vertical-care-grinder stunned on skilly. Yet it was all Yorkshire Estates compared to drummers caught with hocus: that wretched lot cried hookey walker as they lumped the lighter to dance on nothing. In other words, stiff’uns, cold meat, burked.
This is a small sample of the lexicon offered by the expanded second edition of John Camden Hotten’s Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words (1860). A lexicographer of the “fast” and the “low” in London, he is most interested in the kind of language that can be heard at unsavory hours on steamboat piers, amid knots of “semi-decayed cabmen”, and plucked from “the refined word-droppings of magniloquent flunkies”. To compile this dictionary, he also scoured “popular” writing, “fashionable and unfashionable” newspapers, and sought a high-standard of orthographic correctness — each word and phrase was confirmed by multiple groups of chaunters and tramps.
He was attuned to the politics of compilation. Dictionary makers like Charles Richardson, whose New Dictionary of the English Language (1836–37) first featured the kind of historical evidence that would later set the OED apart from its competitors, were “exceedingly crotchety in their choice of what they considered respectable words”, thought Hotten. If the English language in the mid-nineteenth century contained thirty-eight thousand words, as contemporary philologists calculated, Hotten conservatively claimed to have enlarged the language by almost ten percent, and that wasn’t even counting all the filthy and obscene entries that he deemed unfit for print. This censorship evidently required some restraint on Hotten’s part. He is perhaps better remembered as a publisher who not only popularized American writers such as Mark Twain and Walt Whitman in England, but also delivered a series of erotic and sometimes pornographic titles to market, including Exhibition of Female Flagellants (supposedly written in 1777), The Romance of Chastisement (1869), and a comic opera, Lady Bumtickler’s Revels (1872).
Morally progressive, Hotten was nevertheless influenced by the typecasting racial sciences of his era. He often talks of rascals and vagabonds as distinct in physiognomy. On one hand, there is something almost profound about his formulation that every society gives rise to an underclass of thieves and crooks who speak their own cryptolect — a kind of linguistic subconscious maintained by the socially subaltern. On the other hand, the people he refers to as pickpockets and cat burglars are rarely thieving guilds, but simply racial or ethnic others. “In Finland, the fellows who steal seal skins, pick the pockets of bear-skin overcoats, and talk Cant, are termed Lappes.” He maintains a distinction between “cant” and “slang”, which a modern-day reader might have trouble reconstructing. For him, cant is an economic argot that arose among beggars, tramps, and other kinds of street walkers who invented a way of street talking. Meanwhile “slang” represents “that evanescent, vulgar language, ever changing with fashion and taste, which has principally come into vogue during the last seventy or eighty years, spoken by persons in every grade of life, rich and poor, honest and dishonest.” He also includes glossaries of “back slang” — words created from reversal — and “rhyming slang”, the Cockney dialect whereby “table” becomes “Cain and Abel”. Hotten is fascinated both by how countless foreign and antiquated words ended up in the adaptive mouths of English speakers on London’s streets and by how newly-invented language continues to trickle upward and downward in English society.
Unlike some of his peers, who believed that the first dictionary of vagabond tongues was Richard Head’s Life of an English Rogue (ca. 1680) or dramatist Thomas Decker’s Bellman of London series (1608), Hotten traces the tradition back to Thomas Harman’s Caveat or Wareningfor Commen Cursetors (1567), which he reproduces at length. (For more on this tradition and its fictions, see Julie Coleman’s excellent article.) Preserving these words was not only a matter of novelty for Hotten — he thought vulgar language itself was an agent for “the retention and the revival of sterling old English words, long since laid up in ancient manuscripts.” In addition to word lists, he also includes an “account of the hieroglyphics used by vagabonds”, a variation of the “hobo signs” still occasionally employed near railways in the United States and other places by migrant worker subcultures. Here too he treats this linguistic system as a storehouse of cultural knowledge, wondering if one can glimpse “in these beggars’ marks fragments of ancient Egyptian or Hindoo hieroglyphical writing”.
It’s a romantic enterprise to assemble a dictionary of slang and cant, and to bundle these two terms together. The former is faddish, everchanging: fixity makes a quick death for slang. The latter’s words are taken from purposely secretive languages. They are meant to enact verbal handshake protocols, establish trust and maintain safety within the earshot of hostile parties. Cant “goes one step further than jargon”, argues Daniel Heller-Roazen while quoting a historian of language in his study Dark Tongues, “its primary purpose is to deceive, to defraud, and to conceal.” Once exposed, it can no longer function. At the same time, there is a democratic tendency at play in mixing together, in a single volume, the specialized language of people who may have never exchanged words in the street. Alongside his thieves and vagabonds, Hotten includes religious slang, public schoolboy slang, pirate slang, equine stable slang, phrases coined by Dr. Johnson, the slang of softened oaths, workmen’s slang, stagehand slang, shopkeeper’s slang, and dozens of other argots.
Find a brief selection of entries from the Dictionary, one for each featured letter of the alphabet, below. If your “mince pies” aren't tired, you can also enjoy our other posts on A Dictionary of Victorian Slang (1909) and A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1788).

Autumn — an execution by hanging
Breaky-leg — a strong drink
Chive-fencer — a street hawker of cutlery
Dublin packet — to turn a corner
Earwig — a person who prompts another maliciously
Flymy — knowing, cunning, the quality of a rogue
Gadding the hoof — going without shoes
Hoxter — an inside pocket on clothing
Inside lining — dinner, etc.
Jessie — a sound beating
Kisky — drunk
Lump the lighter — to be transported
Multee kertever — very bad
Nose em — tobacco
Old gown — smuggled tea
Pitch the fork — tell a pitiful tale
Quean — a strumpet
Rag splawger — a rich man
Star the glaze — to break the window of a jeweler
Unbetty — to unlock
Vardo — to look
Wido — wide awake, not a fool
Yay-nay — someone without conversational power
Ziph — a secret dialect spoken by students at Winchester College


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Modernity in the Rainforest: Man and his Desire (1917)
Text by Hugh Aldersey-Williams
Nov 16, 2023

Where do you go to find the modern? For the French composer Darius Milhaud, the answer would lie in the rainforest of Brazil. In January 1917, having agreed to act as secretary for the poet Paul Claudel, who had just been appointed as France’s minister plenipotentiary in the country, he embarked from Lisbon on a steamer bound for Rio de Janeiro. He docked in the Brazilian capital on February 1st and disembarked into a summer heat wave.
As they worked together over the next two years, the two men began a long-term artistic collaboration that would set the seal on Milhaud’s unique brand of musical modernism. Brazilian melodies and rhythms explain the character of such relatively popular compositions as Le Boeuf sur le toit (the ox on the roof) and Scaramouche. But before these came a more radical and daring work, now hardly ever programmed in concerts, a ballet with the title L’Homme et son désir, with a scenario by Claudel, a beautiful edition of which is featured above. Milhaud’s unusual score calls for a small orchestral ensemble backed up by four vocal parts and nineteen percussion instruments. In later life, he considered L’Homme to be one of his most important works.
They were unlikely artistic collaborators on the face of it. Claudel was nearly fifty, with more than two decades of diplomatic service already behind him, conservative, Catholic, Parisian, and conventionally anti-Semitic. Milhaud was twenty-five years old and, as he would characterize himself in his autobiography, “a Frenchman from Provence, and, by religion, a Jew.”
But, brought together in this stimulating new environment, they shared a wish to create art. Europe and its war were far away. Here, there was time. There was quiet. And there was noise. New for Milhaud were the sounds of the forest that would suffuse his work. Claudel was one of his favourite authors, and he had sought the collaboration, feeling that “the extraordinary pounding of Claudel’s language” could lead him toward his own distinctive musical style. The rhythms of Claudel’s verse and the wild rhythms of the forest would clash and blend in L’Homme et son désir.
There was also a third partner in Audrey Parr, the half-French wife of a British diplomat, whom Claudel had met on a previous posting, who would design the ballet’s sets and costumes. Parr’s set took the nighttime forest as its stage. Horizontal layers of green, blue, purple, and black depicted the sky with the moon and cloud, the verdant growth and creatures of the forest, and the waters of the primeval swamp reflecting the moonlight. Positioning the instrumentalists and singers in small groups on each tier made them seem like the staves of a musical score. The unconventional placement anticipated later modernist compositions in which the players are spatially separated for acoustic effect, and added to the dramatic impact of the music. The double bass was moved away from the other strings and put with the woodwinds, which some musicologists have suggested shows that Milhaud was already absorbing ideas from the jazz that would colour his later works.
Before sets could be built and dancers hired, the artistic collaborators laid out their vision with ink. Claudel and Parr produced fifty-three handmade books, concertina-folded in Japanese fashion with gilded endpapers, comprising four pages of Claudel’s handwritten scenario for the ballet surrounded by cutouts of naked dancing figures by Parr, together with a few more drawings in blue ink based on scenes. The figures invite comparison with Matisse’s famous painting, The Dance, of 1910, and anticipate Picasso’s The Three Dancers of 1925. The verso sides of these pages fold out into a long collage created by Hélène Hoppenot, the wife of another French diplomat, who later achieved fame as a photographer. It shows the positions of the instrumentalists and dancers on the stage, pasted above a strip of manuscript paper with fragments of Milhaud’s score drawn on it in stylized notation. The resulting book, like the ballet itself, was a deeply collaborative affair, the creation of friends who, as Claudel wrote, “held a picnic of ideas, music, and drawings every Sunday on the Sierra overlooking Rio de Janeiro. This little plastic drama is a product of the atmosphere of the Brazilian forest in which we were somehow submerged.”
Milhaud found few pieces so enjoyable to write. “We were in constant contact with the virgin forest and its mysteries”, he recalled later. “At sunset, the nocturnal sounds of the forest burst forth suddenly, the simple life-noises of little animals of all kinds: toads, birds, insects, vibrating together in a richness of undreamed-of tonalities.” Milhaud’s unpitched percussion — including two types of castanets, a whip, and a siren, as well as drums of all sorts — aims to evoke this natural chaos with complex overlapping rhythms. The score also calls for a hammer and plank, which are used to recreate the resonant banging call of the cooper-toads that infested the forest floor.
Milhaud immerses us in nature, but nature as it has never before been heard in music. L’Homme et son désir begins with a quiet, insect-like clicking. A piping theme is heard, a small creature’s fanfare. Background strings slowly build an atmosphere, with calls across from one side of the stage to the other, gradually blending into a sustained aural world. Suddenly, voices break in, loud and frightening, with unintelligible words. They fade away, and a new kind of pulsing starts, a bird calls, is answered . . . and so it goes for some sixteen minutes of scratching, shrieking and strumming, interrupted by odd human invocations, terrifying and alluring all at once. The rhythmic complexity makes this the most modernistic piece in Milhaud’s prolific output and invites comparison with Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring.
Claudel’s scenario explains the origin of these strange sounds. It depicts “Man taken over by primitive powers and from whom Night and Sleep have stripped all name and countenance.” He is first led by two figures representing Image and Desire, Memory and Illusion, who tease him before they disappear to leave him sleeping under the glare of the tropical moon as the forest animals all come to look at him. He awakens to see a vision before him, dancing “the eternal dance of Nostalgia, Desire and Exile, that of captives and abandoned lovers, that which for entire nights causes people to pace feverishly all night from end to end of their verandas tormented by insomnia, that of the animals in the menageries who throw themselves, and throw themselves again and again and again once more against the impassable bars.”
L’Homme et son désir did not receive its premiere until June 1921 when it was put on by the Ballets Suédois in Paris. Milhaud — whose name was by now associated with the frivolities of the group of composers known as Les Six, which included Francis Poulenc and Arthur Honegger, and counted Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau as its guiding lights — had feared that critics would not take the work seriously. In the event, he need not have worried. The critics acknowledged its originality, although public audiences reacted with a “tempest of animal cries and rude laughter”, according to Milhaud’s biographer Paul Collaer, for whom the occasion recalled the famous near-riot provoked by The Rite of Spring eight years before. Milhaud himself noted varying reactions, “ranging from restlessness to solemn attention”. By the time that Milhaud’s more famous jazz-inflected work, La Création du monde, was premiered two years later, also by the Ballets Suédois, he no longer cared. “The press is vile”, he noted. “I rejoice”.
Many Europeans dreamed of bringing modernity to the Brazilian rainforest — the telegraph, the railway, the opera house at Manaus. The folly of such projects is the subject of Werner Herzog’s famous film, Fitzcarraldo. But the modern was already there, waiting. And Milhaud and Claudel found it.

author: Hugh Aldersey-Williams


text:
Käthe Kollwitz’s Peasants’ War Series (ca. 1901–1908)
Text by Sasha Archibald
Oct 5, 2023

The German Peasants’ War of the sixteenth century might seem an unlikely topic for a young artist. The War was fought three centuries before the artist in question, Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945), was born, and it was not a triumph, but a series of skirmishes that ended badly: the landowners had horses and artillery, the peasants did not.
Kollwitz, however, was no ordinary artist. It was the failure of the rebellion that attracted her, the underdog farmers, outmatched by every measure, who yet valiantly defended their rights. Across a vast and masterful oeuvre, this was Kollwitz’s constant interest: the innate dignity, courage, and strength of the poor.
At the time Kollwitz made the seven etchings that comprise her Peasants’ War series, she had completed her studies in art, and was living in pre-Weimar Berlin, active in radical leftist circles. Born to a Socialist family, she had recently married a doctor who worked in a clinic for the poor. The newlyweds chose to live in the same neighborhood as the clinic; Kollwitz liked to sit in the waiting room, and observe.
The first etching Kollwitz completed in the series, the etching from which the others stemmed, was “Charge” in 1902. “Charge” depicts a woman raising her arms as if at a starting line, while a morass of bodies plunge forward, their mouths stretched with screams. The image is smudgy and raw — Kollwitz pressed in various fabrics for texture. Seen from behind, the woman is balanced on the ball of her left foot, her knobby fingers rising high above the chargers’ knives and bayonets, like a conductor signaling the violins. Kollwitz called this commander-in-chief Black Anna, and said she was based on a real person, though the artist was known for taking imaginative license with her source material.
Together, the etchings form a disjointed narrative, each depicting a different moment of the War. Black Anna appears just once more, in “Battlefield”. Now she’s looking for her son’s corpse, with a lantern in her hand, and seems to have finally found it. She stoops down with a leg on either side of his body, more bodies all around, and reaches to touch a finger to her son’s chin. Whereas in “Charge” Black Anna’s sleeves are pushed up above her elbow, workmanlike, in “Battlefield”, the sleeves have unraveled, and hang in finely-etched limp threads.


text:
Wreathed in Pastiche: Max Beerbohm’s Christmas Garland (1912)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Nov 30, 2023

In a 1903 letter to E. F. Spence, the critic, artist, and humorist Max Beerbohm set forth a theory of caricature:
When I draw a man, I am concerned simply and solely with the physical aspect of him. I don’t bother for one moment about his soul. I just draw him as I see him. . . . It is because (and only because), or, let us rather say, when (and only when) my own caricatures hit exactly the exteriors of their subjects that they open the interiors too. Do I make myself plain? (I don’t mean, do I caricature myself? I never do: I am much too sensitive: the bully is always a coward.)
Here we encounter the artistic philosophy that informed not only Beerbohm’s caricatures of fin-de-siècle characters, published in The Strand Magazine and other popular periodicals, but also his literary parodies, best exhibited in his 1912 collection, A Christmas Garland. The exterior of a person, or the style of his prose, becomes a portal into the wells of interiority, if carefully observed. (Critics thought that Beerbohm had been given “temporary loans of [his subjects’] very minds”.) There is perhaps a riff on dandyism here. Like the dandy (and by all accounts this man was one from the get-go, having celebrated his tenth birthday with a coupe of champagne), Beerbohm achieves what Baudelaire describes as “a personal form of originality, within the external limits of social conventions”. Yet the external limits for this parodist are the visages of others, or the signature qualities of their voices on the printed page. Just as Elmyr de Hory, the art forger in Orson Welles’ F for Fake, did not duplicate preexisting images but painted “new” works by Renoir, Dufy, and Derain, Beerbohm aped so well that his imitations became individual, original.
A Christmas Garland comes with the subtitle “woven by Max Beerbohm”. And there is indeed an Arachne-like quality to these masterful imitations that Beerbohm composed with few visible flaws. He styled himself as a kind of latter day Robert Louis Stevenson, who, by his own account, “played the sedulous ape” to writers of the past. Finding himself afflicted with a “disability” in his adolescence — the inability to read any author earlier than Thackery — Beerbohm became, instead, the voice imitator of his living peers. The table of contents itself is a parody of nineteenth-century fiction’s nominal censorship, pretending to anonymize the “contributors” to this collection: “H*nry J*m*es”, “H. G. W*lls”, “Th*m*s H*rdy”, “J*s*ph C*nr*d”, “G**rge B*rn*rd Sh*w”. Each short story and poem is set around Christmas, and in each, Beerbohm positively nails his subject matter. To take just one example, consider how he renders the syntactic and psychological opacity of “late James”:
But his sense of the one thing it didn't block out from his purview enabled him to launch at Eva a speculation as to just how far Santa Claus had, for the particular occasion, gone. The gauge, for both of them, of this seasonable distance seemed almost blatantly suspended in the silhouettes of the two stockings. Over and above the basis of (presumably) sweetmeats in the toes and heels, certain extrusions stood for a very plenary fulfilment of desire. And, since Eva had set her heart on a doll of ample proportions and practicable eyelids—had asked that most admirable of her sex, their mother, for it with not less directness than he himself had put into his demand for a sword and helmet—her coyness now struck Keith as lying near to, at indeed a hardly measurable distance from, the border-line of his patience.
It's all fun and games to play the ape, but how did Beerbohm’s contemporaries feel about seeing their efforts sent up in a simian mirror? Surprisingly flattered. After hosting James for Christmas dinner, Edmund Gosse reported back to Beerbohm that his guest thought A Christmas Garland was “the most intelligent [book] that has been produced in England for many a long day”. James caveated the praise with his own sense of humor: “you have destroyed the trade of writing”. But Beerbohm got the last laugh. He modified the title page of his personal copy of James’ Terminations with a caricature that makes it appear as if an acorn, the printer’s device, dangles from the author’s mouth, and the final piece Beerbohm wrote in his life, “An Incident” (ca. 1954), recalls how he declined an invitation to walk through London with James, for he found it preferable to spend the day reading him. The jabs were mostly good natured — and Beerbohm could always return to his claim that any bullying was a front for cowardice. “I cannot conceive how any artist can be hurt by remarks dropped from a garret into a gutter”, he once confessed in a letter.


text:
A Melting Cauldron: The Book of Hallowe’en (1919)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Oct 24, 2023

“How many times the Church has decanted the new wine of Christianity into the old bottles of heathendom”, writes Ruth Edna Kelley at the outset of The Book of Hallowe’en (1919), considered the first book-length history of this celebration. She is quoting, almost verbatim, James George Frazer’s vast work of comparative religion, The Golden Bough, which, in turn, reworks Jesus’ parable from Mark 2:22: “And no man putteth new wine into old bottles: else the new wine doth burst the bottles, and the wine is spilled, and the bottles will be marred”. But Christ could not anticipate the craftiness of his followers. The triduum of Halloween, All Saints’ Day, and All Souls’ Day were brewed within recycled pagan casks — the Celtic festival of Samhain, Egyptian solar superstitions, devotions to Pomona, the Roman goddess of plenty — and overlaid onto older spiritual calendars that marked when the dead were unusually close to the quick, when “the gods whom Christ dethroned joined the ill-omened throng”.
The Book of Hallowe’en begins its history with Celtic druids, first referenced by the historian Herodotus in the fifth century BC, who “worshipped spirits of forest and stream, and feared the powers of evil”. The druids believed that on October 31st, the last night of the old year, “the lord of death gathered together all the souls of those who had died in the passing year and had been condemned to live in the bodies of animals, to decree what forms they should inhabit for the next twelve months.” According to Kelley, the familiar imagery that adorns the plastic shlock and costumes of Big Halloween today — a market estimated by statisticians to see $12.2 billion of consumer spending in the United States this year — is sourced from these older rites. The druids, we are told, held black cats sacred, sacrificed enemies in wicker frames set ablaze, and carried magical glass balls crafted from the spittle of snakes. As Christianity spread across Britain, the sacred oak groves of the druids were felled to build churches, and their festivals hollowed out to serve as vessels for monotheistic rites. Saint John’s Eve was mixed with the dregs of Midsummer; Lammas filled the sterilized bottle of Lughnasadh, a Gaelic harvest festival progressively shorn of pagan reference. Like her contemporaries across the Atlantic involved with the Irish Literary Revival or the Scottish Renaissance, Kelley believes that the old magic was buried but not lost: it simply went underground, finding safe passage into modernity in rustic landscapes inhabited by “Scotch, Irish, and Welsh peasantry”, who still believe that “brooks, hills, dales, and rocks abound in tiny supernatural beings”.
Modern Halloween — the costume-clad, decoration-heavy, trick-or-treating variety — is younger than it might seem. In her 2012 history of the celebration, Lisa Morton argues that American Halloween was a product of the mass immigration from the British Isles following the Irish potato famines and Scottish economic depressions in the nineteenth century. Shortly after Queen Victoria participated in a widely publicized 1869 Halloween party at Balmoral Castle, reports of children’s Halloween festivities in the United States began to appear in newspapers and magazines, as newly arrived immigrants sought to keep up with their homeland. Sticking to her comparative mythological method, Ruth Edna Kelley notes the same phenomenon but casts it in the light of authentic reenactment.
While the original customs of Hallowe’en are being forgotten more and more across the ocean, Americans have fostered them, and are making this an occasion something like what it must have been in its best days overseas. All Hallowe’en customs in the United States are borrowed directly or adapted from those of other countries.
It’s a phenomenal vision — the American melting pot metaphor taken to such extremes that novelty and originality become unimaginable. America is literally haunted here: not by ghosts and demons, but by the inescapable traditions stowed away in cultural baggage smuggled over from the Old World.
Accordingly, The Book of Hallowe’en is most alive when recounting the customs, rituals, celebrations, games, and other forms of merrymaking carried out in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, England, Brittany, and the Isle of Man. There are respects paid to the dead and acts of divination. Bretons, says Kelley, stay up late, until “mysterious noises begin to be heard about the house”, and then honor the deceased with tales and memories. The actions of cats can be read like tea leaves on Halloween — a jump in the lap is double good luck; if a kitten yawns your way, you are not alert to the opportunities offered by life. Salt before bed induces prophetic dreams, and other forgotten uses of food abound. We learn about “lambswool”, a drink made from milk and roasted apples, and the extant Irish tradition of hiding a ring in colcannon, a cabbage mash. Similar to the fève baked into French galletes des rois, finding the ring heralds luck for the married, or imminent marriage for the young and single. Other traditions repurpose food, namely root and cruciferous veg. In Ireland, cabbage stalks were named for everyone present at a party, “then pulled up, and the guests were asked to come out, and ‘see their sowls.’” In Scotland, children made terrifying jack-o’-lantern turnips and piled cabbage stalks around doors and windows, baiting fairies to bring them new siblings. There is a surprising amount of snack-fueled matchmaking. Boys walking with oats in their mouths would hear the name of their future wives on the wind. Girls with nine slices of apple, who look into moonlit mirrors, may see the image of a lover, asking for the final bite. And Welsh women who stick “a knife among leeks”, while walking backward out of the garden, will return to find the knife plunged into the earth by a future beau.
Published when Kelley was just twenty-six years old, five years after she graduated summa cum laude from Radcliffe College, The Book of Hallowe’en was composed between shifts at Lynn Public Library in Massachusetts, where she would work for much of her life. Kelley ends her book with a vision. “May there not be written and presented in America a truly Hallowe’en pageant, illustrating and befitting its noble origin, and making its place secure among the holidays of the year?” Halloween is certainly secure in the United States and many other countries today, but do our contemporary celebrations befit the day’s noble origins? Few would be able to answer this question better than Kelley. And on the evening of October 31st, when your floorboards begin to creak beneath the weight of unseen forces, perhaps she will share her thoughts.


text:
John H. White’s Photographs of Black Chicago for DOCUMERICA (1973–74)
Text by Erica X Eisen
Feb 1, 2023

It’s hard not to read John H. White’s DOCUMERICA series as a love letter to Black Chicago. Whether capturing protesters or checkers players, concerts or chores, White’s work feels animated by a wonder and curiosity for the great breadth of stories and characters he encountered while exploring his adopted home city — “life”, as he put it in the captions to several of his images, “in all its seasons”.
While still in his twenties, White (b. 1945) was contracted by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as part of DOCUMERICA, a project that sought to produce a visual record of the nation and its people with a particular — but not an exclusive — focus on ecology. The program made use of local photographers around the country and generally provided little in the way of guidelines or restrictions on subject matter; collectively, White and the rest of the DOCUMERICA cohort produced over 20,000 images, often using the openness of their assignment to create a body of work that shines not just with environmental urgency but with artistic vision too.
In its ambition to present as capacious an account of contemporary American life as possible, DOCUMERICA was a spiritual successor to the Farm Security Administration’s Great Depression-era photography, which project director Gifford Hampshire cited as a major source of inspiration. Indeed, White is often spoken of alongside Gordon Parks, whose photographs for the FSA and the Office of War Information constitute crucial documents of Black American life in the mid-twentieth century.
Originally from Lexington, North Carolina, White was interested in photography from a young age. In an interview with NPR, he recounted buying his first camera at the age of thirteen with ten Bazooka bubble gum wrappers and fifty cents from his grandmother; his father later gave him his first “assignment”, that of documenting the ruins of their church in the wake of a fire. The numerous accolades White has received over the course of his career include the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography in 1982, making him one of only a few Black photographers to have been so recognized. Extraordinarily, the committee awarded him the prize not for a single photograph or series, as is typical, but for “consistently excellent work on a variety of subjects”. Clarence Williams, who studied photography under White before also winning the Pulitzer, characterized his former mentor’s photographs of Chicago as “an earnest visual stream of consciousness that is tightly edited and that explores a city and its people through various moods that span what it means to be alive.”
It is notable that even White’s snapshots of joy and play are often paired with captions (composed by the photographer himself) that frame the scene within larger economic realities: elevated unemployment rates, wage discrimination, and the difficulties Black business owners faced opening and keeping afloat their stores amid racial prejudice from white clientele. In several of his photographs, children in the foreground are dwarfed by the looming husks of abandoned housing blocks behind them — largely salvageable buildings that White notes “have been systematically vacated as a result of fires, vandalism or failure by the owners to provide basic tenant services” before being “razed and replaced with highrise apartments which appeal to few members of the Black community”. By placing these subjects within the framing of an EPA-funded project, White and the directors of DOCUMERICA drew an implicit connection between suburbanization and divestment from cities, on the one hand, and environmental racism on the other — analysis that rings with enduring resonance today.
But by far the dominant impression that White’s portraits of Black Chicago exude is of life and liveliness. Genuine care for his subjects comes through in the way his experimentation with angles monumentalizes the workers he photographed. White’s DOCUMERICA work exhibits a talent for picking out moments of individual emotion amid crowds — whether the tears of a woman listening to a speech by Elijah Muhammad or the rapt concentration of a little boy executing drill team moves at a talent show. Yet in interviews White generally frames himself as a humble conduit, someone who captures more than he composes. “I don't really take pictures”, he said at one point. “Moments come when pictures take themselves.”
Below you can browse a selection of John H. White’s photographs for DOCUMERICA with his original captions, presented in all caps as they appear in the National Archives Catalog.


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Martin Frobenius Ledermüller’s Microscopic Delights (1759–63)
Text by Kevin Dann
Mar 22, 2023

Novel and astonishing as they may have been for Enlightenment readers, it is difficult for us to comprehend how the magnifications of lice, fleas, houseflies, and other vermin might have been conceived as amusements for the mind and eyes. In full hand-colored clarity, stingers, pincers, biting mouthparts, and other irksome insect organs become menacing monsters thanks to the powers of the microscope in Martin Frobenius Ledermüller’s three-volume Mikroskopische Gemüths- und Augen-Ergötzung (Microscopic Delights of the Mind and Eyes).
For all of their scientific verisimilitude, microscopes were first and foremost instruments of wonder, and Ledermüller (1718–1769) — a German polymath, physician, and keeper of the Margrave of Brandenburg’s natural history collection — extolls their virtues in illustrating the marvels of God’s Creation and also as pure entertainment. Along with the vermin, Ledermüller gave state-of-the-art descriptions of plant, animal, and human organs, fungi, plankton, and crystals that accompany more than 150 attractive colored plates, produced by Nuremberg publisher, artist, and engraver Adam Wolfgang Winterschmidt.
Ledermüller’s own delight at the scenes beneath the lens shines through in many of his descriptions. While washing some sand collected from a beach on Rimini’s Adriatic shore, Ledermüller notices unidentified “globules” (he guesses that they are snail eggs), and places them beneath his “Oeconomical Glass”: “It is by this means that I discovered a real Firework on Water; that is to say that my Globules made on Water the same Effect as lit Grenades do, with the only Difference, that instead of Sparks of Fire, it was only Vapors & Particles of Water that they vomited.” Lederüller is similarly enchanted by all manner of Nature’s prodigies — a bee’s tongue, fish spawn, a drop of urine, the scales of insect wings. Examining the ocellus on a butterfly wing, he finds that “no painter, however skilful he may be, will ever succeed in rendering with his Brush, the Radiance & the Fire of the red, which this Mirror spreads”.
Much of the microscope’s allure was communicated to the public through salon demonstrations coupling the new solar microscope — whose improved imaging capacity came from a rotating mirror that directed light into the eyepiece — with the camera obscura, transforming the (formerly) private affair of observation into a social event. Accordingly, the visual power of microscopy raised both scientific and social questions in the late-eighteenth century. Based on the evidence given by the microscope, Ledermüller dismisses the theory of spontaneous generation; he also argues that microscopy is a suitably edifying occupation for young women. Occasionally Ledermüller’s observations lead him to claim even the authority to name new species:
Among the swampy water insects, there is a creature, which resembles in many respects the grotesque figure of a Harlequin. His black head, his body of various colors, his jumps, his bounces, his swings, his ridiculous tricks, have much in common with those of this jester of the Italian theater. For sometimes he stands on his Head, or rather on this red Tongue or Valve, which one sees appearing underneath; sometimes he stands perfectly on his Tail furnished with two large Fins; sometimes he stretches out quietly all the way, then gathering himself all of a sudden, he springs forward by a Snake’s Jump. Sometimes he puts himself in a Peloton, looking maliciously like Scapin from under his Coat, & then makes a Leap in the air; finally he bends like a banded Bow, & swims in this Posture on Water with the step of a Caterpillar; knowing as well how to keep his Balance as a Fish, so much so that he is as able on the surface of the water as in its depth. All this has led me to compare it to a Harlequin & to give it the Name.
Across the three volumes, Ledermüller graciously concurs with the scientific opinions of a wide range of aristocratic correspondents, yet the final volume concludes with a testy reply to a German naturalist who had pointed out his error in mistaking the female housefly’s ovipositor for the male’s reproductive organ. Coming to Ledermüller’s defense, the artist Winterschmidt contributes a magnificent engraving of the housefly as the work’s final plate.
Below you can browse images from a later French edition (1764–68) of Ledermüller’s work, courtesy of the Smithsonian Libraries and Biodiversity Heritage Library.


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Mighty Mikko: A Book of Finnish Fairy Tales and Folk Tales (1922)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Dec 6, 2022

With the assistance of his Finnish speaking friend Lydia Tulonen, Parker Hoysted Fillmore (1878–1944) wandered “through the byways of Finnish folklore”, glossing his volume Mighty Mikko as “the traveler’s pack I have brought back home with me filled with strange treasures”. Rather than translating the folklore in a manner faithful to their original language, which, he thought, could sound “stiff, bald, and monotonous” to English ears, Fillmore retells these stories in his own idiom. Like Russian formalist Vladimir Propp, who would author his “Morphology of the Folktale” six years after Mighty Mikko appeared, Fillmore recognized that these tales shared a deep structure with stories told the world over. They are nevertheless “dramatic and picturesque”, colored “with a wealth of charming detail which is essentially Finnish”. Yet unlike, for example, the European literary cycle of Reynard the Fox, where beasts are substitutes for political and legal figures, Fillmore believes that his creatures are “plain downright Finnish peasants, sometimes stupid, often dull, frequently amusing, and always very human”.
Mighty Mikko contains twelve stories loosely based on Finnish tales, concluding with the hundred-page “Mikko the Fox: A Nursery Epic in Sixteen Adventures”. All, it seems, were gleaned by Fillmore from the work of Eero Salmelainen (1830–1867), namely his 1852 Suomen Kansan satuja ja tarinoita (Fairy tales and stories of the Finnish people), which collected tales told across Finland. Thanks to vibrant contributions from the abstract artist Jay Van Everen, Fillmore’s text is intercut with more than a dozen full-page block prints, numerous ornaments and miniature illustrations, and a magnificent color frontispiece.
Among the stories, we find a perennial theme of youth shepherded across the threshold of adulthood by animal guardians. To leave the house and traditions of her forefathers, Ilona of “The True Bride”, based on “Merestä-nousija-neito”, must outsmart Syöjätar with the help of her dog Pilkka, and marry the King’s Son; in the eponymous “Mighty Mikko”, based on “Madon linna”, a huntsman mourning his deceased parents uses inherited traps to snare a crafty fox, who, in turn, helps him wed a princess and capture a castle. There are Bluebeard-like figures, such as the aged Vetehinen in “The Three Barrels” — a variation of the Grimm’s “Fitchers Vogel” — who beheads a farmer’s daughters for looking into a forbidden room in his aquatic kingdom. And there are stories of hygiene, like “The Little Sister”, that seem quintessentially Finnish: to banish Syöjätar, an ogress associated with disease in Finnish mythology, make sure the sauna stones are red hot.
Despite Fillmore’s belief that faithful translations would sound bald and monotonous, some of his choices — made to sanitize the stories for children — are no less stiff. In a stumpily-titled “Log”, his truncation of “Leppäpölkky eli Sininen risti” (Leppäpölkky or the Blue cross), a many-headed monster emerges from the dark ocean to utter an evil incantation: “Fee, fi, fo, fum! / I smell a Finn! Yum! Yum!” The original has a more adult mood: “Huh-huu! ohan täällä ihmisen veri haisee; jopa tääll' on miehen luita syödäkseni” (Huh-huu! here the blood of man reeks; and here too are the bones of men to eat). Elsewhere, Fillmore adds a welcome bit of slapstick. In “The Partners”, when the Fox secretly eats the Wolf’s share of butter and then denies it, the animals decide to have a trial by fire: each will lie in the sun and see if fat runs from the other’s mouth. Assured of his innocence, the Wolf falls asleep in the warm light, which allows the Fox to smear his lips and frame him. In Salmelainen’s original, the Fox wakes the Wolf by crying: “Nouse katsomaan, kuoma, miten suustasi rasva valuu kalliolle!" (Rise friend, see how the fat drips from your mouth onto the rock!) Fillmore, seizing an opportunity, modifies the channel of delivery: “‘Wake up, Pekka! Wake up!’ the Fox cried. ‘There’s butter running out of your nose!’”  ※※Indexed under…Butterrunning from the nose of a wolf
Little remembered today, Parker Hoysted Fillmore was something of a children’s literature wunderkind in the first decades of the twentieth century. A 1909 profile in Hampton’s Magazine, for example, written when Fillmore was thirty years old, lauded his “wonderfully varied career” and “unusual success as a writer”. After graduating from the University of Cincinnati in 1901, the young man of letters was nominated by his college president to spend three years in Tigaon, Philippines working as a schoolteacher, part of a colonial mission to export American education to the country recently purchased by the United States from Spain. He supposedly taught himself Spanish during the voyage at sea and was installed as local postmaster not long after disembarking. It was here he became interested in the imagination of children, writing stories set in regional landscapes as pedagogical aids.
After returning to Cincinnati, Fillmore went into investment banking with his brother, but soon suffered from exhaustion. (The diarist Winfield Townley Scott recalls hearing his contemporaries speculate that Fillmore “would never write another good book, because he had used himself up in the first”.) To recover, he slept outdoors in the Berkshires for a full year, and then set off for a series of long walks across England, France, Switzerland, Spain, and Italy. In the later period of his career, Fillmore turned to folklore, retelling stories he heard from his Czechoslovak friends in New York during Czechoslovak Fairy Tales (1919), The Shoemaker’s Apron (1920), and The Laughing Prince (1921), which a critic from the Evening Mail described as so brilliant that “Czecho-Slovakia is likely to be annexed by our nursery autocrats immediately”. His final works looked toward colder climates, with Mighty Mikko followed by a retelling of the Finnish Kalevala, titled The Wizard of the North: A Tale from the Land of Heroes (1923).
Special thanks to Emma Vehviläinen.


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Atlas of the Munsell Color System (1915)
Text by Kevin Dann
Mar 7, 2023

Before publishing his Atlas in 1915, painter and art teacher Albert Henry Munsell (1858–1918) had spent decades seeking to compress the totality of human color experience into a simple and elegant three-dimensional graphical model. In 1879, after reading physicist Ogden Rood’s Modern Chromatics, he devised a pair of twirling triangular color pyramids joined at the base. In 1898, he painted a child’s globe in subtly shifting shades, only to find that the globe’s perfect symmetry could not sufficiently map the differences in strength — which he called “chroma” — between colors or “hues”. By 1905, in his A Color Notation, Munsell had moved to a tree as model, since its unequal length branches could accommodate different hues, chroma, and “value”, the third axis of his system, which ran vertically from the pure white crown of the tree to its pure black roots.
In the Atlas, the Color Tree and Color Sphere give way to cross-sectional charts by which the user is meant to imaginatively assemble a “realistic” system of alphanumeric notation. Each individual color square represents the intersection of hue, value, and chroma, denoted by a three-part code. Munsell’s system turned Vermilion into “5R4/10” — “5R” denoted the fifth step in the red scale (R as one of five color initials); “4” denoted the fourth step in the value scale, and “10” indicated that the color had the maximum chroma/strength. Vermilion’s complementary color, Viridian, was expressed as BG4/5.
Besides “Red”, “Yellow”, Green”, “Blue”, and “Purple” — Munsell’s five principal hues, which overturned the prevailing dogma of three “primary” colors (red/yellow/blue) — “Vermilion” and “Viridian” are the only two specific color names that appear in the Atlas. Indeed, Munsell’s motivation for creating his system lay largely in his animus against the mushrooming chromatic vocabulary impelled by the fin-de-siècle commercial expansion of colors employed in advertising, manufacturing, fashion, and home décor. “Baby blue, peacock blue, Nile green, apple green, lemon yellow, straw yellow, rose pink, heliotrope, royal purple, Magenta, Solferino, plum, and automobile”, protested Munsell, “are popular terms, conveying different ideas to different persons and utterly failing to define colors.” Munsell envisioned a system akin to musical notation, which conveyed a sound’s pitch, intensity, and duration “without dragging in loose allusions to the endlessly varying sounds of nature”.
Munsell was hardly alone in this initiative: Milton Bradley’s Color Wheel (1893) earned the toymaker a place on the Smithsonian Institution committee formed to devise a new system of color naming for scientific purposes; ornithologist Robert Ridgway sought a standardized system of color in his campaign to promote amateur natural history practice; drawing on Goethe’s color theories, Rudolf Steiner developed a spiritual scientific phenomenology of color; and painter Emily Noyes Vanderpoel created a color manual “to classify the study of color in individual eyes, in light, in history, and in nature”.
None of these color crusaders were as evangelical as Munsell, who closely chronicled his two-decade-long quest for an “objective” color terminology and grammar across six journal volumes. Presenting his system to hundreds of artists, educators, scientists, and businesspeople, Munsell constantly encountered the objection, “Why should the old Red-Yellow-Blue system be given up?” Munsell was adamant that this commonplace three-pigment theory was harmful to children, who were led to believe that red was the complement of green, yellow the complement of purple, and blue the complement of orange — all of which, he thought, were untrue. The spectrometer or photometer showed that each pigment reflects nearly the entire spectrum, a part of it in enough excess that the eye recognizes only this dominant hue. Munsell found the explosion of commercial color photography and printing disturbing due to its reliance on R-Y-B, complaining that “like the crash of a brass band, there sprang up great billboards in red, yellow, and blue, with their chromatic shrieks for Harvard Beer, Hunter’s Rye, and Gorton’s Codfish.”
Boston-bred Munsell’s chromatic snobbery exposes the main limitation of his and other attempts at color systematization, for perhaps more fundamentally than any other attribute of Nature, color will ever be a matter of “each to his own”, rather than the province of scientific certainty.


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“March of Intellect” Cartoons (1828–29)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Mar 2, 2023

What did the future look like in 1820s Britain? Poking fun at liberal ambitions for education reform, the rapid pace of industrialization, and a fashionable interest in applied knowledge, William Heath’s March of Intellect series offered a satirical vision of the wonders and potential cost of progress. While extravagantly dressed ladies window-shop for pastel finery and forgo stairwells in favor of belt-driven slides, a child is moments away from being paved into the road by a carriage at full gallop. The automation of domestic labor — through a device called the “Grand Servant Superseding Apparatus for doing every kind of household work &c &c &c &c” — leaves women more time for recreation (or idle folly): smoking shisha in public, riding horsy hovercrafts, and traveling effortlessly to South America, Bengal, and Cape Town through the use of vacuum tubes, accelerator bridges, and pedestrian tunnels. Men gorge themselves on pineapples and guzzle bottles at the Champagne Depot. Postmen flit around with winged capes; a clocked-in shoeshiner has the time to read a newspaper in French, thanks to his boot-cleaning engine. Even convicts have it better: they embark for New South Wales on a gargoyle zeppelin, but still have panoramic views.
In their imagination and satire, Heath’s prints reflected debates about the early-nineteenth century “March of the Intellect” or “March of the Mind”. For those who championed progress, this period roared with possibility. Encyclopædia Britannica first became available to the British public in 1771; by the early nineteenth-century, at least fourteen major encyclopedias, and reams of subject-specific dictionaries, were passing through all kinds of British hands. Magazines, reference books, and lending libraries rapidly circulated knowledge beyond the portered gates of elite institutions. Organizations like the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge promoted mass education as a mode of political reform. If knowledge was truth, then trustworthiness and moral action could be inculcated in the middle and working classes by providing autodidacts with affordable materials. That was part of the worry. Not only did the democratization of learning threaten an old cultural regime and potentially stoke the kind popular unrest seen in the Spa Fields riots and Peterloo Massacre, its liberal gloss was marred by suspicions about the machinations of political economy: “many believed that knowledge was foisted by the powerful and wealthy on the working classes in order to indoctrinate them into a culture where knowledge validated a simple work ethic”, writes Alan Rauch in Useful Knowledge.
We find a more apocalyptic vision of the future in Robert Seymour’s 1820s The March of the Intellect, where a jolly automaton stomps across society. Its head is a literal stack of knowledge — tomes of history, philosophy, and mechanic manuals power two gas-lantern eyes. It wears secular London University as a crown. The machine smokes while crusading, blowing hot-air-balloon follies from a pipe bowl, carried on the breath of its menacing exhalation: “I Come I Come!!”. Wielding a straw broom, capped with the head of reformer Henry Brougham, it sweeps away all potential encumbrances. Gone are the pleas, pleadings, delayed parliamentary bills, and obsolete laws. Vicars, rectors, and quack doctors are turned on their heads. Like Frankenstein’s creature, birthed from a pick ‘n’ mix of exhumed organs and ossified science, the monster in this satirical cartoon is patchwork knowledge itself, practically applied and made widely available for the very first time.
Fifty years after these prints appeared, Shanghai merchant guilds would attempt to prohibit silk filatures driven by steam to protect handicraft workers. A half-century later, John Maynard Keynes forecasted a future of “technological unemployment”. Fifty years after that, the General Motors Corporation announced a lights-out “factory of the future” to be run by robots in Saganaw, Michigan. And, in 2023, artificially intelligent chatbots have fueled ongoing anxieties about the mechanization of intellectual labor. In an era when “full automation” seems to mean anything but “less work”, the projections of these images — whether earnest or caustic — let us glimpse what the future might have looked like, and what it could still be.
Below you can browse a selection of cartoons related to the March of the Intellect by William Heath, Robert Seymour, and other artists.


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A Treatise Concerning the Properties and Effects of Coffee (1792)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Feb 2, 2023

How did coffee become so popular in the Middle East, turning the Yemeni port city of Mokha into a global marketplace of beans for nearly three centuries? Benjamin Moseley, eighteenth-century physician and early anti-vaxxer, offers an origin story for coffee culture in the expanded fifth edition of his Treatise Concerning the Properties and Effects of Coffee (1792). Noting that the account is a “ludicrous tale”, he nevertheless reproduces it in full. One night a Yemeni goat herder found his flock restless. They would not sleep, but “jumped and frisked about as if they had been infatuated”. The herder summons a religious official from the local mosque, who notices that the goats had foraged on “shrubs and berries [that] had always been considered among the wild and useless productions of the earth”. Intrigued, the holy man goes home and steeps himself a cup, which he “supped off hot”. Soon he too “began to dance and frisk about as the goats had done”. After the jitters wane, the man’s thoughts turn back to God, and he realizes that this concoction would “be an excellent thing to keep the Dervishes awake, when their duty obliged them to pray after dinner”. The experiment was an “utmost success” and soon the drink spread through every nearby nation and “among all the religious of the East”.
Moseley was the eighteenth-century precursor to today’s third-wave connoisseur. He had strong opinions on roasting that might still hold water — “the closer it is confined at the time of roasting, and till used, the better will its volatile pungency, flavour, and virtues, be preserved” — and high standards of taste: following François Bernier, he relates that only two people in 1650s Cairo were capable of making a proper brew. As a practicing physician, Moseley's interest in coffee was mostly medical and, although these debates still continue, he had little time for the uncaffeinated. In a terribly-aged analogy, he compares coffee alarmists to those who raise “declamations against mercury” and “nonsense against tobacco” — equally bunk. Some of the proclaimed benefits of coffee are familiar. It combats “lethargy, catarrh, and all disorders of the head”. It “accelerates the process of digestion”, affects “the gastric powers”, and “diffuses a genial warmth that cherishes the animal spirits, and takes away the listlessness and languor”. It also helps hangovers: that “disorderly condition brought on by drinking bad fermented liquors, and new rum, to excess”. Other benefits are perhaps less well-known today. If bedridden with “bloody flux” or dysentery, drink four cups of hot coffee and cover yourself with heavy bed clothes — you will soon be cured through perspiration; for messengers commuting long distances, “the alternate effects of opium and coffee” can sooth “their tedious journies”. Aside from a caution to pregnant women and those with serious illnesses, the only negative account of coffee in this hundred-page treatise comes from a person Moseley met in Leyden: he “seldom drank much coffee, or continued the use of it for several days successively, without having a hæmorrhage from the nose.”
When the first edition of Moseley’s treatise appeared in the 1780s, Europe’s urbanites had been hooked on coffee for more than a century. London’s original coffee house opened in 1652; the French, who “knew nothing of it until 1645”, could enjoy a public café in Marseilles come 1671. As Matthew Green details, these were intoxicating spaces where strangers mingled and discussed news, politics, scholarship, and everything in between. Part of Moseley’s polemic takes aim at those who charged coffee with inspiring treasonous activity in the veins of its stimulated sippers, such as the 1675 proclamation, under Charles II, that the “retailing of coffee might be an innocent trade; but as it was used to nourish sedition, spread lies, and scandalize great men, it might also be a common nuisance.” Moseley was writing against the backdrop of an unfolding neurochemical revolution in Europe. As Wolfgang Schivelbusch argued in his heady Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants (1992), after centuries of imbibing alcoholic beverages as their main source of potable water, European’s new fondness for boiled drinks — coupled with the psychoactive properties of caffeine — swapped societal tipsiness with a mindstate primed for the Enlightenment’s intoxication with reason. (In a nonchalant aside, Moseley mentions how Voltaire once told him that he practically lived on coffee, for it “refreshed the brain, oppressed by study and contemplation”.)
Unfortunately, the raison principale behind Moseley’s treatise was far from enlightened. Most of the defense of coffee serves his argument that the British Empire should fund plantations in the West Indies and lighten taxation to drive down market competition. In Jamaica, for instance, the would-be overseer will find “an easy employment; the labour light, and many parts of it performed by children.” When Moseley justifies this exploitation in his final paragraph as a way to ensure that “the [British] poor would be supplied with an wholesome ingredient for improving their diet”, we are left with only bitter grounds.