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Iconology of a Cardinal
Was Wolsey Really so Large?
By Katherine Harvey
May 3, 2018

Characterised as manipulative, power-hungry, and even an alter rex, Henry VIII’s right-hand man Cardinal Thomas Wolsey has been typically depicted with a body mass to rival his political weight. Katherine Harvey asks if he was really the glutton of popular legend, and what such an image reveals about the link between the body, reputation, and power in Tudor England.

Robed in cardinal’s red and of considerable bulk, Thomas Wolsey’s is one of the most enduring images of the Tudor period. Over the past five centuries, he has been consistently represented as a corpulent churchman, in art, on stage and screen, and in popular culture.
Yet this familiar version of Wolsey (1470/1–1530) comes not from a contemporary likeness, but from a portrait painted towards the end of the sixteenth century, at least six decades after Wolsey’s death. It may be based on a contemporary portrait of him, but if so the original has not survived. Not only is there a lack of visual evidence for Wolsey’s appearance, we also lack detailed written descriptions. One Venetian ambassador, Sebastian Giustinian, judged him to be “very handsome”, and another described him as “hale and of good presence” —  neither description helps to answer the question of the cardinal’s physique. Hostile biographers have typically assumed that Wolsey was indeed a very fat man; more sympathetic historians have been more sceptical, with Peter Gwyn arguing that “there has to be a suspicion that since his death the poor cardinal’s girth has increased, even as his fame has diminished!”1 The truth is, we don’t know (and almost certainly never will know) what Wolsey actually looked like.
Whatever the reality, the image of the fat cardinal was a potent one. As Henry VIII’s chief minister and the most powerful churchman in England, Wolsey was always a divisive figure: he had many critics during his lifetime, and the criticism continued for many years after his death. In the decades after the English Reformation, he became a symbol of everything that was wrong with the late medieval church: it was greedy, corrupt, and self-serving, with no interest in caring for the souls it was meant to save. His fat body, which proved to the world that he was gluttonous and self-indulgent, hinted at his deeper and more damaging flaws.
Wolsey’s contemporaries had a strong idea of what a priest’s body was supposed to look like  and how he should behave around food. The ideal churchman was an ascetic, or at least was austere: he ate little, took scant interest or pleasure in food, and had a correspondingly slender physique. In theory, Wolsey should have modelled himself on his saintly predecessors —  men such as Thomas Becket, who apparently fasted so much that he nearly died of starvation and had to be forced by his confessor to relax his diet in order to save his life. Although such extreme behaviour was rare in early Tudor England, fasting remained an important religious practice. Wolsey’s fellow bishops included William Warham, archbishop of Canterbury, and John Fisher, bishop of Rochester — men who were renowned for their piety and strict living, and who were depicted by Holbein as elderly, distinguished, and gaunt.
When compared to such men, the corpulent cardinal appeared as a symbol of decadence, and this impression was reinforced by contemporary ideas about overeating. In pre-Reformation Christianity, gluttony was widely viewed as a gateway sin: a man who overindulged in food and drink would be prone to many other vices. In particular, gluttony was thought to breed lechery. In theological terms, the association was rooted in the Garden of Eden — it was only after Adam and Eve had eaten the forbidden fruit that they began to experience sexual desire, and thus fell prey to the sin of lust.
This cultural link between gluttony and sexual sin was supported by medical theory. The proximity of the stomach to the genitals meant that the latter would be warmed by the food and drink contained in the former, providing the heat which was the defining characteristic of the male body and necessary for the production of semen. Furthermore, semen was thought to be a product of completely digested food, with particularly nourishing foods such as meat and eggs being especially conducive to its production. As Thomas More declared in Utopia (1516), there were two types of people: those who lived unmarried and chaste and abstained from meat, and those who married, had children, and ate flesh.
This association between gluttony and lechery was problematic for fat priests because the pre-Reformation clergy were supposed to be celibate, and obesity implied that a cleric was not keeping his vow. When, in the 1520s, the poet John Skelton wrote a series of satirical verses about Cardinal Wolsey and the Tudor court, he made full use of such associations to make insinuations about his target. Skelton’s verses make only vague allusions to Wolsey’s love life, but he leaves us in no doubt that Wolsey is a glutton, with all that implied. In Collyn Clout, he describes the lavish manner in which certain contemporary prelates dined:
Thus they make theyr boostThrough every coost,Howe some of you dothe eateIn lenton season flesshe meat,Fesauntes, patryche and cranes;Men call you therfore prophanes.Ye pyke no shrympes nor pranes,Saltfysshe, stockfyssh nor herynge,It is not for your werynge,Nor in holy lenton seasonYe wyll neyther beanes ne peason.But ye loke to be let loseTo a pygge or to a goose,Your gorge not enduedWithout a capon stuedOr a stewed cockeUnder her surfled smockeAnd her wanton wodicocke.2
And in Why Come Ye Nat to Courte?, a vicious attack on Wolsey’s court, he adopts a similar tone — and here segues straight from gluttony to lechery:
Welcome dame Simonia,With dame Castrimergia,To drynke and for to eateSwete ypocrus and swete meate.To kepe his flesshe chastIn lent, for a repast,He eateth capons stewed,Fesaunt and patriche mewed,Hennes, checkynges, and pygges.He foynes and he frygges;Spareth neither mayde ne wyfe.This is a postels lyfe.3
Is it coincidence that Wolsey (and some of his fellow bishops) are accused of existing almost entirely on the meat-based dishes which were believed to increase semen production and to promote lechery? Possibly, but it seems much more likely that Skelton was deliberately using the contemporary connotations of gluttony to imply further sins and to raise questions about the conduct of certain individuals. In Wolsey’s case, such suspicions were justified: he is known to have had at least one liaison, with a certain Mistress Lark, which produced two children.
Nor was lechery the only unfortunate side effect of overindulgence at the table. Throughout the later Middle Ages, it was taught that it was the Christian duty of wealthy households to give vast quantities of alms to the poor. These alms often took the form of food left over from the household’s own meals. One of the benefits of fasting, or even moderation, was that there would be more leftovers, and thus more alms for the needy. On the other hand, a man who ate everything put in front of him left nothing for those who needed it most: he was literally condemning the poor to starvation. Wolsey’s fat body thus proved what so many critics had claimed: he was a greedy, grasping man who had enriched himself at the expense of the English people.
In the pre-Reformation world in which Wolsey lived, fat bodies were problematic chiefly as emblems of sin — gluttony, lechery, and a want of charity — rather than in their own right. But during the course of the sixteenth century, the fat body began to revolt in a recognisably modern way, and consequently Wolsey’s critics increasingly described his body in ways which were designed to disgust the reader. John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (1570) describes the cardinal’s corpse, which was “blacke as pitch, and also was so heavy that vi could scares beare it. Furthermore, it did so stincke above the ground, that they were costreyned to hasten the burial therof.”4 And in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, Buckingham wonders
That such a keech can with his very bulkTake up the rays o’th’beneficial sun, And keep it from the earth.5
The image of the “keech” (a lump of animal fat), like that of the black, stinking corpse, is a deliberately repulsive one, making use of the disgusting body to shape the reader’s view of the long-dead man.
But despite the prevalence of such images with their emphasis on Wolsey’s ever-increasing bulk, the cardinal was not without his defenders. Foremost amongst his champions was George Cavendish (1494–1562), who wrote a biography of Wolsey in the mid-1550s. As his former gentleman-usher, Cavendish offered a first-hand account of life in Wolsey’s household during the 1520s, including intriguing insights into his employer’s relationship with food.
Cavendish’s Wolsey stands in stark contrast to the popular image of him: if not a saintly man, he is at least a good one. His hospitality (an important clerical virtue) is much celebrated: he hosts lavish meals for his royal master and various important guests, including “great banquets and solemn feasts” at which Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn were present. Moreover, his generosity is not limited to the great and good: at York, after his fall from grace, “he kept a noble house and plenty of meat and drink for all comers, rich and poor.”6 Yet, strikingly, Wolsey does not join in the overindulgence on such occasions. For example, at one Hampton Court banquet, he toasted the king, but then retired to his private chamber where he took “a very short supper, or rather a small repast” before rejoining his guests.7
Cavendish is also the source of an anecdote which is often used to demonstrate Wolsey’s formidable work ethic, but which also hints at a less-than-expected capacity for food. During the negotiations with France, the biographer reports, Wolsey rose at 4 a.m. and went straight to his desk, where he stayed until 4 p.m., “all which season my lord never rose once to piss, not yet to eat any meat.” Only once his letters were dispatched did he allow himself a drink. He then went to mass, walked in the garden, said evensong, then “went to dinner and supper all at once. Making a small repast, he went to his bed to take his rest for the night.”8
Such restraint — hours without food or drink followed by a single small meal — echoed the self-denial of Wolsey’s saintly predecessors, men who supposedly ate only once a day and restricted their intake of fluids (even water) as well as of foodstuffs. These men were also celebrated for their refusal to relax their strict regimen even as death approached, and Cavendish similarly adopts this motif for his life of Wolsey. On his deathbed, the life claims, Wolsey wanted meat in order to strengthen himself for confession. When the food was brought to him, he took a spoonful or two of chicken broth and then realised that it was a fast day. The doctor said that Wolsey’s illness made him exempt, but he refused to take any more, and made his confession. Cavendish’s account of Wolsey’s final hours presents him not as the glutton of legend, but as a man for whom the needs of the soul took precedence over the desires of the body.9
Although Cavendish, a Catholic sympathiser who retired to live in rural obscurity after Wolsey’s death, did not attempt to present his beloved master as a potential saint, his decision to record something of his food practices suggests that he was well aware of how bodies and bodily behaviours shaped Tudor reputations. Fewer than two decades after Cavendish’s death, his work was copied and illustrated with scenes from the cardinal’s life. This manuscript (now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford), shows Wolsey riding to Westminster and to France on horseback and travelling by barge to Greenwich; he is also depicted delivering the great seal to the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, and lying on his sickbed. In all five of these images, he is unrecognisable to the modern eye. Why? Because, rather than the corpulent cardinal of legend, he is a depicted as a thin, black-robed man with a long, somewhat straggly beard.
Like the famous portraits, these sketches probably bear little resemblance to the real Wolsey. They are symbolic images, designed to represent a character rather than to provide an accurate likeness. In the sixteenth century, as today, most people did not know what Wolsey actually looked like, and few cared. Instead, they were concerned with what he stood for, so they reimagined his body in ways which reflected their version of the cardinal’s character. Whatever truth was contained in George Cavendish’s life of Wolsey, his efforts to rehabilitate his former master were probably doomed to failure from the beginning. Amidst the religious upheaval of the sixteenth century, it was inevitable that the grotesquely obese image — complementing as it did the Protestant stereotype of Wolsey as a symbol of everything which was wrong with the pre-Reformation Church — came to dominate the popular imagination.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Katherine Harve


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Yvette Borup Andrews
Photographing Central Asia
By Lydia Pyne
January 10, 2018

Although often overshadowed by the escapades of her more famous husband (said by some to be the real-life inspiration for Indiana Jones), the photographs taken by Yvette Borup Andrews on their first expeditions through Central Asia stand today as a compelling contribution to early visual anthropology. Lydia Pyne looks at the story and impact of this unique body of images.

When reporters quizzed Yvette Borup Andrews about her honeymoon, which followed her high society marriage of 1914, the account she offered up was unusual to say the least.
We traveled 35,000 miles.  We did 2000 of those miles on horseback.  Mostly we slept in sleeping bags.  The wolves howled about us, the wild dogs threatened, sometimes we followed a tiger to its lair and waited until it returned and shot it, so that a dangerous marauder might no longer threaten us at night.  We were shot at by bandits, but neither of us were hurt. And we brought back 3000 specimens from the interior of Asia.1
The “honeymoon” was in fact the American Museum of Natural History’s First Asiatic Zoological Expedition — a pioneering exploration of China, Tibet, and Burma led by Yvette, as official photographer, and her naturalist husband Roy Chapman Andrews. Yvette’s photographs from the trip and the Second Asiatic Expedition two years later — published in Camps and Trails in China and Across Mongolian Plains respectively — not only offer a fascinating glimpse into the lives of Central Asians in the early twentieth century, but also give valuable insight into the world of ethnographic photography and how the American Museum of Natural History used the medium to connect its scientific expeditions with its interested public.
An American citizen born in Paris — her father was an American military attaché stationed in France and later in Berlin — Yvette grew up among the European intelligentsia and aristocracy before the outbreak of World War I. Years before the fame her Asiatic adventures would garner, Yvette would frequently make headlines back in the US due to her glamorous party lifestyle, socialising with the likes of Princess Victoria Louise, the daughter of Kaiser Wilhelm. In 1914, as Europe fell headlong into bloody war, she met and married Roy Chapman Andrews, a rising star at the American Museum of Natural History.
After their wedding, the couple promptly set about the business of embarking on the ambitious eighteen-month First Asiatic Zoological Expedition to China, Tibet, and Burma to collect zoological specimens and photograph the peoples and landscapes of Central Asia.  At the beginning of the twentieth century, Central Asia piqued serious scientific curiosity across a plethora of disciplines from biology to paleoanthropology.  Indeed, Roy had finagled funding for the First Asiatic Zoological Expedition in no small part because, in addition to collecting the zoological specimens, he promised to look for fossil hominin sites in Central Asia, an activity which aligned nicely with the pet theory of the American Museum of Natural History’s director, Henry Fairfield Osborn, about the origins of Homo sapiens being traceable to China.  Yvette and Roy’s 1914 wedding announcement in the New York Times built up the romantic thrill of their upcoming adventures, declaring, “Within a year, Mr. Andrews plans to have his bride accompany him on an exploring expedition.”
Yvette, however, did more than merely accompany her husband to Asia — she was the expedition’s photographer and amateur ethnographer. She had learned the basics of photography from her father while living in Europe, and then perfected her art through study in France, Germany, Italy, and New York.  She was not only proficient in creating black-and-white prints, she was also adept at the then-relatively new color techniques like using Paget color plates; and she was also able to create motion pictures.
Her compelling series of images from the First Asiatic Zoological Expedition was published in 1918 in the extremely popular Camps and Trails in China. In addition to being formally credited as the expedition’s photographer, she was the author of six of the book’s chapters, including “The Women of China”, “Stalking Tibetans With a Camera”, and “Chinese New Year at Yung-Chang”. Roy relied heavily on Yvette’s journals and photographs in publishing his own popular accounts of their travels as well as establishing scientific credibility for ensuing expeditions to Central Asia in the following decade.  When Roy published his immensely successful Across Mongolian Plains in 1921, there was little doubt that Yvette’s work was the backbone of the book. “My wife, who is ever my best assistant in the field,” he wrote, “was responsible for all of the photographic work of the expedition and I have drawn much upon her daily ‘Journals’ in the preparation of this book.”2
The photographs and swashbuckling tales of scientific escapades made for popular reading in the press and Yvette and Roy quickly developed a devoted paparazzi that saw them off whenever they left port in San Francisco and waited for them upon their return. On April 6, 1916, the Charlotte Observer ran a blurb about the couple with the subheading, “While Husband Is Shooting Wild Beasts With Rifle, Mrs. Chapman Andrews Will Take Her Chances With a Camera in the Interior of China and Tibet.”3  Newspaper accounts of the expeditions described in breathless detail how the couple survived wild dog attacks in Tibet and were ambushed and shot at by bandits in China.
The First Asiatic Zoological Expedition was a huge success. It amassed thousands of specimens for the American Museum of Natural History’s growing collections and the thrilling stories of Yvette and Roy’s adventures published so soon after the expedition guaranteed that donors would continue to sponsor the museum’s future expeditions to the region. And so in 1918 came the Second Asiatic Zoological Expedition, and again Yvette was to be the expedition’s photographer. Focusing its interest and collecting efforts in Mongolia and North China, this second expedition, and its ensuing success, would itself in turn lay the groundwork for the American Museum of Natural History’s famous fossil-hunting expeditions to Mongolia and the Gobi in the 1920s. Central to this success of both the First and Second Asiatic Expedition was the way in which Yvette’s arresting images acted as a conduit between the distant excursions and the public back home — through her photographs the expedition felt that much more real.
The subjects of Yvette’s photographs from the trips to Central Asia were varied — landscapes, animals, people, and places — a broad impression that sought to show how the people lived, how they worked, and what their livelihoods depended on.  Her written descriptions tended to emphasize the non-Western-ness of the indigenous communities encountered and were peppered with stories about her attempts to successfully photograph reticent subjects.
Of all natives whom we tried to photograph the Tibetans were the most difficult.  It was almost impossible to bribe them with money or tin cans to stand for a moment and when they saw the motion picture camera set up beside the trail they would make long detours to avoid passing in front of it. . . . What we could not get by bribery we tried to do by stealth and concealed ourselves behind bushes with the camera focused on a certain spot upon the road.4
In addition to depicting the camels, antelope, and vast expanse of the Central Asian steppe, her lens turned to human stories. She showed her readers what she called the cruelty of foot-binding with portraits of women who could barely balance upright on their tightly bound feet. She also captured images of the animals shot by Roy and the expedition in their quest to provide the museum with provenanced zoological specimens. In short, her photographs introduced  European and American audiences to Central Asia, offering readers a chance to become acquainted with the lives, cultures, economies, and politics of peoples living very different lives on the other side of the world.
Her photographs also show the demands, complexities, and technologies associated with early twentieth-century field and expedition photography.  The expeditions’ photographic equipment included a variety of cameras — two 3A Kodaks, a Graphic 4 x 5 tripod camera, as well as a Graflex 4 x 5 for rapid work.  These were standard cameras for travel, expeditions, and scientific work; standard enough in their popularity and manufacture that, at a pinch, the expedition would most likely be able to purchase additional film or plates. Yvette opted to use plates almost exclusively for any fine-grained photographic work, although she conceded that these were much heavier and more difficult to handle than films; for the scientific detail the expeditions required, however, she considered the plates vastly superior.
Photography plates and negatives were developed in-field, with the use of a collapsible rubber dark room made by Abercrombie & Fitch Company that was about seven feet high and four feet in diameter.  The dark room was incredibly versatile and built to deal with tough field conditions as it “could be hung from the limb of a tree or the rafters of a building and be ready for use in five minutes.”5  Yvette set up her “little rubber darkroom”, as the press called it, “in any convenient tree branch, wherever she pleased, and developed [the expedition’s] pictures in temperatures of 105 in the shade, with a humidity of 150.”6
In addition to the still photography, the expedition packed a Universal camera for motion pictures. To develop the motion picture negatives, Yvette utilized a special collapsible darkroom made of red cloth that could be attached to the inside of any tent, designed by the famed conservator Carl Akeley when he worked at the American Museum of Natural History.
At the end of the First Zoological Expedition, the team came home with 150 Paget color plates; 500 photographic negatives; and 10,000 feet of motion picture film. (As well as over 3000 zoological specimens acquired for the museum.)
The Second Zoological Expedition was Yvette’s final stint as an official expedition photographer.  She traveled with her husband on the later Central Asiatic Expeditions of the 1920s, but her photography of indigenous Mongolians is merely a passing comment in Roy’s 700-page-tome, The New Conquest of Central Asia, published in 1932.  However, it is worth noting that this “passing comment” refers to the images that she and James Shackelford shot on April 21, 1922, of the Maidari Festival in Urga, Mongolia — images which turned out to be of incredible historical and ethnographic significance as it was the last Maidari Festival ever enacted due to growing political issues between China and Mongolia.  It’s perhaps not totally outlandish to see Yvette’s scant mention in Roy’s 1932 book as connected to the fact they’d divorced a year earlier.
Today, Yvette’s work with the Asiatic Zoological Expeditions remains largely uncategorized and unrecognized — even systematically written out of some historical accounts of Roy’s life. Although her  photography from the first two zoological expeditions may have become overshadowed by Shackelford’s photographs from the much more famous fossil-based Central Asiatic Expeditions of the 1920s, the images she captured offer an important frame for understanding the world of early ethnographic photography.  Her unique photographs act as still-life narratives of peoples and places that captivated audiences, and stand as a testament to the oft-overlooked aspects of twentieth-century scientific exploration.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: January 10, 2018

author: Lydia Pyne

source: public-domain-review

type: essay

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


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Brief Encounters with Jean-Frédéric Maximilien de Waldeck

By Rhys Griffiths
November 22, 2017

Not a lot concerning the artist, erotic publisher, explorer, and general enigma Count de Waldeck can be taken at face value, and this certainly includes his fanciful representations of ancient Mesoamerican culture which — despite the exquisite brilliance of their execution — run wild with anatopistic elephants and suspicious architecture. Rhys Griffiths looks at the life and work of one of the 19th century’s most mysterious and eccentric figures.

I first encountered the Count de Waldeck at the ancient Mayan ruins of Palenque. There, in a guide book, I read that from 1831 to 1833 an old European aristocrat, “crazy Count de Waldeck”, lived on top of a ruined pyramid, now known as Templo de Conde, or “Temple of the Count”, with two Mayan brides. While there he drew the Mayan ruins for posterity and was among the first Europeans to do so. Later, I read, he published “a book of fanciful neoclassical drawings that made the city resemble a great Mediterranean civilisation”, a crime for which he has since been condemned as a pioneer of the pseudohistory known as Mayanism. Tens of thousands of tourists visit Palenque each year, many from English-speaking countries, and the ubiquity of the guide in which I read the above makes it safe to assume that plenty of others will have made a similar acquaintance with the “crazy Count”. Knowing him as I think I do now, I think this fact would have wounded him immeasurably.
In the eighteenth century, Spanish colonists “rediscovered” Palenque. The ancient city – abandoned some time after 800 AD – was subsumed by jungle, which, it was not unreasonably hoped, might hide lost Mayan gold as well as palatial ruins. Around a century later – at the advanced age of fifty-nine – Jean-Frédéric Maximilien de Waldeck travelled to Mexico from London with similar financial motives. Waldeck saw an opportunity to make money through drawings. He lived in what the art historian Esther Pasztory describes as the second great age of exploration, one concerned with “conquest through knowledge of the world”, rather than the old-fashioned military kind. But he was also an artist, a good one, and though he took artistic licence — archaeologists have taken issue with the elephant heads which populate some of his Mexican illustrations — that, surely, is the prerogative of his trade. Waldeck drew for posterity because he cared about his place in it: the afterlife of his work and reputation provides an unambiguous lesson for those who would see their names writ in marble not water.
At Palenque, a sign by the Count’s Temple — a pyramid structure supporting a stone building of three rooms — confirmed that the Count de Waldeck was in Palenque, but claimed that he actually lived at the foot of the nearby Temple of the Cross, and for only two months.
The count’s Wikipedia page clarifies that he was, in fact, probably no such thing (a count, that is). Waldeck was possibly born on March 16, 1766, was a self-appointed count, duke, or baron depending, presumably, on his audience, and, at various times, he claimed to be French, Austrian, Czech, or British (his name indicates one, or possibly a fusion, of the former options). Where Waldeck is concerned, it is notoriously difficult to tell truth from self-aggrandising myth; little biographical fact about the man exists before 1822 when, aged fifty-seven, he worked producing theatrical lithographs in London. He redrew and published a famous book of Renaissance erotica, I Modi, in 1856 and claimed that he had been a student of the painter Jacques-Louis David in Paris, served with Napoleon in Egypt, travelled the world to an extent that remains impressive today, and lived to the age of 109 years and 45 days. Waldeck’s publication of I Modi definitely exists, but as for his time with Napoleon and the artistic apprenticeship, we only have his word which is not usually held in high regard. There is also an eye-raising, but almost certainly fictional, story regarding the circumstances surrounding his death: he supposedly died of a heart attack while eyeing a beautiful woman near the Champs-Élysées in Paris.1
I thought the count might make a good protagonist in a picaresque novel and took to looking for his name in the index of any books I came across relating to Mexico or pre-Hispanic people. I tracked him down to two locations:  Paris, where he is interred in the Père Lachaise Cemetery, and where  a large collection of his work resides in the Bibliothèque nationale, and Chicago, whose Newberry Library houses another large collection of his oeuvre. As for details about his life, a great source of information was what is probably his first biography, Recollections of Two Distinguished Persons: La Marquise de Boissy and the Count de Waldeck, written by a wealthy, well-connected American writer from Philadelphia, Mary Rebecca Darby Smith, and published in 1878. Smith’s book spans her introduction to the count, on a trip to Europe in 1867, and their friendship thereafter. It is fair to describe Recollections as a hagiography. Here, for example, she describes Waldeck stoically accepting news that a diorama of world history he had been working on was not of interest to the American circus titan P. T. Barnum:
It was not for thee, brave man, to succumb to ill fortune — steady as an oak of the forest thou hast borne the blasts of adversity; and when thy exit comes, from “the alpine heights of affliction,” thou mayest find thyself in green pastures, at rest and satisfied evermore.
Arriving in Europe, Smith is advised to visit Waldeck in Paris. Later, after his death, she recalls reading a letter which stated that “among the many interesting objects of Paris, nothing appeared more remarkable than the aged Count de Waldeck, in his hundred and second year”. Waldeck was clearly a well-known fixture in the city, at least among a certain class of traveller. She finds Waldeck, on the Rue des Martyrs, an “amiable and manly character”, and is soon enthralled by his incredible anecdotes. These include (but are not limited to) his having dined with King George III, fished with Lord Byron in Scotland, painted Marie Antoinette shortly before her execution (a commission by the wife of an Irish MP), and lived, by his own calculation, through forty-two revolutions. The best of Waldeck’s stories concerns his time serving Napoleon in Egypt (a claim military archives do not corroborate). Even if fiction, it is brilliant. Smith writes,
He related to me that he had the power to copy the handwriting of anyone perfectly; that upon one occasion he wrote the name of Napoleon so like it that it was a facsimile. Unfortunately Bonaparte found out and sent for the Count. “I hear you can imitate the handwriting of anyone, and that you imitated my signature?” “Yes sire,” replied the Count. “Now,” continued Napoleon, “write it here and then look at the top of the paper before you”, which the Count did and, to his dismay, read “Condemned to three months’ imprisonment at Vincennes.” He bowed his head and went to the prison. Two weeks later, Napoleon sent for him, and said: “You will not do it again? It is bad practise and dangerous. I had to make an example of you, though I know that you are a friend to me and of my dynasty.”
Thus the count’s first Napoleonic tussle. His second — with the “Napoleon of the West”, Antonio López de Santa Anna, the soldier and politician who dominated Mexican history in the first half of the nineteenth century — is no less serious in consequence. In an obituary published shortly after Waldeck’s death, the London Illustrated News reports how, having spent three years studying the ruins, flora, and fauna of Palenque with the encouragement of the Mexican government, he was eventually — after being suspected of espionage  — “deprived by Santa Anna of the greater part of his drawings and MSS”. He returned to Europe with what he had kept shortly afterwards, though it is entirely possible that this was, in fact, everything.
Smith’s account of the count’s remarkable life is a biography in which the author, rooting for her subject, hopes desperately to write a happy ending, but is forced to conclude with tragedy. Anxiety spreads from the aged count to the young writer that his work has not reached the audience it deserves. Of his Palenque oeuvre he opines that “it is not worthwhile to think of my great work of Central America unless I can publish it in New York.” Waldeck’s wife — several decades his junior — confides to Smith that she is “greatly in hopes he will live long enough to see crowned with success the drawings he commenced”. The count decides to travel to New York and, on arrival, there present P. T. Barnum with the aforementioned glass diorama which will “make my fortune”. He sets upon this resolution at the age of 104.
When the famous Barnum sees my spectacle he will not fail to speculate on its profits . . . for never before has any artist of merit occupied himself in reproducing upon glass the history of all countries, and the science of all people, since the heroic age to this date. My age, my journeys, and my long experience become a guarantee of the archaeological, geological, astronomical, etc. perfection, which will teach the people what they do not know.
Smith agrees to plead the count’s case to Barnum but, in doing so, is met with a reasonable rebuff: “I assure you I feel too old, and certainly your friend is, to engage in a new speculation.” “Thus,” she writes, “perished the ardent hope of the Count for the realization of his efforts. He had to mourn talent unappreciated, hope frustrated, and the enterprise of his brain all lost as far as he was concerned.”
In their last meeting, the day before his death on April 29, 1875, she visits the count who is a bedridden invalid, effectively rubbishing the story of his lusty demise on the Champs-Élysées.
The best assessment of the count I have read is Esther Pasztory’s Jean-Frédéric Waldeck: Artist of Exotic Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010). Her focus on Waldeck’s art differentiates her from most writers for whom “Waldeck as a character has overshadowed Waldeck as a visionary” (it was amusing to learn, for instance, that, following a popular biography by Claude Baudez in 1993, the count became a superhero in a French comic strip). Waldeck’s work drew ire, Pasztory convincingly argues, because he was attempting science by means of art. He was typical of a type of eighteenth-century traveller artist whose work was scientific in that it observed and recorded the natural world but who was also acutely conscious of their audience. As Pasztory writes, circa 1800 such work “needed to be presented in a way that was comprehensible yet emotionally resonant”. Waldeck excelled at this latter requirement; his “Hollywood imagination” is evident in his additions and modifications, which range from altering the location of certain ruins to the inclusion of figures from classical mythology. A good example of the latter is his Ariadne and Theseus Inside the Temple of the Sun at Palenque, a painting displayed at the Salon in 1869, which depicts Ariadne and a Mayan Theseus walking inside the Temple of the Sun, Waldeck and a naked Mayan woman following behind.
Waldeck’s artistic flourishes, argues Pasztory, constitute “an entirely intentional redesigning of the monuments for the sake of attracting attention”. And there was certainly motivation for that: Waldeck arrived in Mexico to find rather more competition from other travel writers and artists than he had expected. So he drew Palenque through the prism of who he was: a European, from a continent in thrall to the classical world (like Waldeck, neoclassicism was born in the mid-eighteenth century), the exotic, ancient Egypt, and erotic nudes. This idiosyncratic approach made Waldeck’s vision difficult for his contemporaries to understand, but, despite this, he had absolute conviction in the importance of what he was doing — a quality which prompted Pasztory to compare Waldeck favourably with Andy Warhol.
Unfortunately for Waldeck, after the 1850s, photography played a more dominant role in exploration and reportage and, writes Pasztory, “this blending of art and science came to an end, much to the relief of scientists”. Because he grew up in the eighteenth century, such a hybrid approach seemed possible to him. By the middle of the nineteenth century it made little sense. It is certainly difficult to capture the zeitgeist when you belong to a different century: I doubt history offers many clearer examples of this truth than the count.
In her Recollections, Smith concludes that “the life of patient and persevering artistic labour led by Count de Waldeck is without parallel and should not be forgotten”. I read similar phrases regularly at the history magazine where I work, as writers pitch to resuscitate historical events and, more frequently, people overlooked, misunderstood, or simply forgotten.
Waldeck has a centuries-old temple named after him, which is certainly an  enduring “I was here” statement. I wonder, though, whether the curators at Palenque might consider adding Mary Darby Smith’s tragic, if damning, assessment of the count’s life to the explanatory sign by his temple: “Talent unappreciated, hope frustrated.” “Crazy” Count de Waldeck, vandal of Mayan history, might then become the eponymous hero of a monument to noble failure, a laureate of the underappreciated or misunderstood. Surely the majority of those who first encounter the count at Palenque would consider themselves members of that unhappy group, at least occasionally.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: November 22, 2017

author: Rhys Griffiths


text:
Defining the Demonic

By Ed Simon
October 25, 2017

Although Jacques Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire infernal, a monumental compendium of all things diabolical, was first published in 1818 to much success, it is the fabulously illustrated final edition of 1863 which secured the book as a landmark in the study and representation of demons. Ed Simon explores the work and how at its heart lies an unlikely but pertinent synthesis of the Enlightenment and the occult.

There, between the entry for a seventeenth-century Anglican theologian named Assheton and one for the Levantine goddess Astarte, is the demon Astaroth. As depicted by the French artist Louis le Breton for his fellow countryman Jacques-Albin-Simon Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire infernal, Astaroth is a skinny man with reptilian claws punctuating long hands and feet, hobbled over on the back of a lupine demon sporting a massive pair of bat wings and a serpentine tail. His face — described by Collin de Plancy as that of a “very ugly angel” — is rendered by le Breton as thin and effete, almost equine, with eyes dismissive and uncaring, a slight sneer of cold command. Ignoring Astaroth’s claws and demon mount, his look of calculated intelligence could easily be that of one of the armchair intellectuals who dined with the philosophes of the Enlightenment Paris of Collin de Plancy’s youth.
Not an entirely inappropriate connection, for the Dominican inquisitor Sebastian Michaelis, who classified the demons he encountered as an exorcist at the infamous monastery of Loudun in the seventeenth century, associated Astaroth with the new rationalist philosophies that were just being born in France. Michaelis’ Astaroth was a kind of hellish René Descartes, who drew the nuns and priests of Loudun astray with the pernicious promises of Epicureanism and invitations to “Do what thou wilt”. Perhaps for Collin de Plancy, born almost two centuries later amidst the convulsions of revolution, the thin, reptilian demon with the aristocratic bearing still represented some of the dangers of the new learning, for Astaroth “willingly answers the questions he is asked about the most secret things, and . . . it is easy to have him talk about creation”.
Astaroth is a convenient symbol for the oddity of Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire, for the demon represents a muddle of cultural forces: rationalism and superstition, systematization and the occult, the Enlightenment and the Romantic movement. When the Dictionnaire was first published in 1818, Collin de Plancy was a dutiful student of the new rationalism who set out to catalogue what he called “aberrations and germs or causes of errors”. As he labored at subsequent editions, however, the secular folklorist found himself more and more pulled in by the lure of demonology, a passion which would eventually lead him, by the 1830s, to enthusiastically embrace Catholicism. By the Dictionnaire’s final edition of 1863, the publishers could assure the reader that the “errors” previously highlighted had now been eliminated, the catalogue now fully congruent with Catholic theology. The preface authoritatively claimed that Collin de Plancy had “reconfigured his labors, recognizing that superstitious, foolish beliefs, occult sects and practices . . . have come only from deserters of the faith.”
All together, across nearly six hundred pages, Collin de Plancy provided entries for sixty-five different demons, including favorites from the pages of Dante, Milton, and others, such as Asmodeus, Azazel, Bael, Behemoth, Belphégor, Belzebuth, Mammon, and Moloch. The most interesting edition of the text is the final one of 1863, illustrated with creepy exactitude by le Breton, whose brilliant Doré-esque engravings elevate the work beyond the relative staidness of previous editions.
It’s both edifying and frightening to consider the magnificence of some of these illustrations. For example, among the more minor demons there is “Adramelech, great chancellor of the underworld, steward of the wardrobe of the sovereign of the demons, president of the high council of the devils”, who “showed himself in the form of a mule, and sometimes even that of a peacock”. Le Breton’s illustration portrays him in full pompous glory as an ass-headed version of the Yazidi’s “Peacock Angel”. Or there is Amduscias, in “the form of a unicorn”, to whose voice “the trees bow”, and who “commands twenty-nine legions.”
A few pages later there is Amon, a horrific hell beast with globular pitch-black eyes, a “great and powerful marquis of the infernal empire” who appears as a “wolf, with a serpent’s tail . . . [whose] head resembles that of an owl, and its beak shows very sharp canine teeth.” As if le Breton’s rendition of the beast wasn’t terrifying enough, Collin de Plancy reminds us that this nightmare creature “knows the past and the future”.
And then there is Ephialtes — a pug-faced, bird-winged, wild-eyed little gremlin perched atop the chest of a man, like Fuseli’s Nightmare — who Collin de Plancy describes in just a single sentence, explaining that he derives from the “Greek name for the nightmare . . . a kind of incubus that stifles sleep.”
There is Eurynome, who has “long teeth, a frightful body full of wounds, and a fox skin for clothing.” Le Breton depicts Eurynome as a caprine, saw-toothed creature on bended knee, grimacing at some unseen victim, “showing his great teeth like a starving wolf”.
And then there is my favorite, Belphégor, who is associated with the deadly sin of sloth and is shown sat hunched with pinched brow, straining atop a toilet, holding his tail from harm’s way, trying to take a shit.
Of course, Collin de Plancy’s concern in the Dictionnaire infernal wasn’t just the defecation of minor demons. He also aimed to provide instruction on both the history and the practical utility of the more exalted among Satan’s minions. There is Asmodeus, who the Talmud claimed was born of a succubus who slept with King David, but who Collin de Plancy argued was “the ancient serpent who seduced Eve.” Associated with lust, Asmodeus is presented as a fearsome three-headed monstrosity, though not one above doing the bidding of King Solomon (regarded by the occult tradition as having had a special ability to control demons), who “loaded him with irons and forced him to help build the temple of Jerusalem.”
Or reflect upon that “heavy and stupid demon” Behemoth. Calling to mind his appearance in the Book of Job, Collin de Plancy wrote that some “commentators pretend that it is the whale, and others that it is the elephant”. Le Breton chose to depict Behemoth as a bipedal version of the latter, clutching his hairy, engorged belly like some sort of malevolent Ganesh.
Then there is Bael, “the first king of hell” who has “three heads, one of which has the shape of a toad, the other that of a man, and the third of a cat”, to which le Breton made the fine addition of a number of fur-covered arachnid legs.
The Phoenician god Ba’al, from whom Collin de Plancy’s Bael derives his name, was associated with all manner of idolatries and blasphemies, and is also the inspiration for that other lieutenant of hell, Belzebuth (or Beelzebub), the trusted advisor of Lucifer whose name appears in the records of exorcists from Loudun to Salem. As Belzebuth literally means “Lord of the Flies”, le Breton decided to depict this demon as a startlingly biologically accurate insect, with long pinching mandibles, weirdly human eyes, and a skull and crossbones upon his paper-thin wings. If anything, the strange verisimilitude of the insect-like creature makes le Breton’s image all the more terrifying. His segmented thorax and spindly arms recall the flea magnified by Robert Hooke two centuries earlier, the English polymath’s Enlightenment monstrosity demonstrating that the nightmares of reason and superstition are not always as divergent as we might think.
This connection between the ideals of the Enlightenment and the old world of magic and superstition from which these demons sprung was, in many ways, made literal by the figure of Collin de Plancy himself. He was born in 1793, only four years after the crowning (or most condemnatory) event of the Enlightenment: the French Revolution. Perhaps in reaction to that affair, he added the aristocratic “de Plancy” to his otherwise plebeian name. Indeed it was not just a plebeian name, but one with positively republican associations, for Collin de Plancy’s maternal uncle was none other than George Danton, the radical president of the Committee on Public Safety who, like so many of his fellow Jacobins, ultimately found his severed head looking up at the guillotine blade one morning in the month of Germaine.
Like his uncle, Collin de Plancy was originally a partisan of liberty, equality, and fraternity, an enthused reader of Voltaire and a zealous rationalist and skeptic; also like his uncle, he would ultimately see himself reconciled to that Church he had rejected, though with a detour through the darker corners of demonology. As with the many demonic chimeras that populate his dictionary, Collin de Plancy was a mélange of disparate parts. He combined the rectilinear logic of men like Voltaire and Diderot with the chthonic visions of the symbolist and decadent poets of a generation later — Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and Verlaine, who drunkenly stomped through the rainy streets of Paris clutching their fleurs du mal. Collin de Plancy did not just convince himself that demons were real, but indeed he developed a wish to control them through language, a desire as fervent as that of his Enlightenment forebears to categorize and define words and ideas in dictionaries and encyclopedias. The demonologist was a man stuck between logic and faith, the salon and the Hellfire club, who heard the screams of horrific monsters while writing with the sober pen of a naturalist.
Like its creator, the Dictionnaire spanned the interests of two eras. It recalls such grimoires (practical manuals of magic) as Johann Weyer’s sixteenth-century Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, or the seventeenth-century Lesser Key of Solomon, as much as it does the Enlightenment’s systematized compendiums of knowledge, such as Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie. There is ambiguity in the book’s project itself, for what could be more modern than the dictionary, and yet what could be more antique than the knowledge collected in this particular dictionary?
Despite ancient and medieval precedents across several different cultures (one can think of Aristophanes of Byzantium, who compiled a type of dictionary called the Lexeis two centuries before Christ), the dictionary and especially the encyclopedia were products of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For Dr Johnson and his Dictionary of the English Language, or James Murray, who, in the Bodleian’s scriptorium, assembled the testament to humanity that is the Oxford English Dictionary, positivist knowledge could be found in the process of collection and measurement. The dictionary was sober, rational, and practical. Etymology was like dissection, another Enlightenment innovation, and the dictionary a sort of dissection theater. For Johnson, the dictionary was a reaction to “speech copious without order, and energetick without rules”, it served to tame vocabulary, for its approach to language was one “reduced to method”.
But what then of Collin de Plancy’s infernal version? Is it a dictionary by name only, or could the affinities touch a deeper vein? In his Grimoires: A History of Magic Books, the historian Owen Davies writes of how grimoires are marked by a “desire for knowledge and the enduring impulse to restrict and control it”, a description that could certainly be applied to the projects of Johnson and Murray. “Grimoires exist”, he goes on, “because of the desire to create a physical record of magical knowledge, reflecting concerns regarding the uncontrollable and corruptible nature of . . . sacred information.” While it’s true that the grand experiment of the Enlightenment was supposedly to shine the light of rationality upon the shadows of superstition, the desire to assemble all possible information is one which the grimoire and the dictionary share. And this yearning towards completion and the all-encompassing is not just a superficial similarity, for in their obsessions with words and language, the grimoire and the dictionary share a common faith — that mere verbal pronouncements have the ability to rewrite reality itself. Both kinds of book are partisans of a Platonist philosophy that sees a type of word magic as being able to enact transformations in real life. For the rationalist lexicographer this means that mastery of rhetoric and syntax can affect our lives through the ability to explicate and convince; for the wizard this means that the magic of words can conjure alteration. In both cases, words have the power, if they’re properly organized, to change the world for better or for worse.
At the heart of this shared mission is the fact that both magic and reason have a motivating belief in the inherent explicability of reality: that there is a given order to the world and that human minds can comprehend and control this order. Whether that order is supernatural or natural is somewhat incidental; that there is structure to the system is what is important. Collin de Plancy’s dictionary may be a grimoire, or his grimoire may be a dictionary, but fundamentally the distinction between them is less stark than might be supposed.
Ilan Stavans writes that “dictionaries are like mirrors: they are a reflection of the people who produced and consumed them.” If this is true, then the Dictionnaire infernal is not just a reflection of Collin de Plancy, a man who dwelled among shadows yet desired to illuminate, but also a reflection of our own modern world. With their words listed like demons, their concern with proper order and grammar (lest our spells don’t work), dictionaries can be seen as modern, secular grimoires. The Dictionnaire infernal, far from being an archaic remnant, reminds us that sharp distinctions between antiquity and modernity ultimately mean little. Ours has always been, and always shall be, a demon-haunted world. But, with apologies to C. S. Lewis, what grimoires prove is not that demons exist, but that they can be tamed. If there is any consolation to be found, it’s that controlling our demons is possible if we’re able to name them, whether they are of the supernatural or of the rationalist variety — and in either case, a dictionary is what we shall need.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: October 25, 2017

author: Ed Simon


text:
The Poetry of Victorian Science

By Gregory Tate
July 26, 2018

In 1848, the mineralogist, pioneer of photography, and amateur poet Robert Hunt published The Poetry of Science, a hugely ambitious work that aimed to offer a survey of scientific knowledge while also communicating the metaphysical, moral, and aesthetic aspects of science to the general reader. Gregory Tate explores what the book can teach us about Victorian desires to reconcile the languages of poetry and science.

In a review published in The Examiner in December 1848, Charles Dickens heaps praise on the scientific study of natural phenomena.
To show that Science, truly expounding nature, can, like nature herself, restore in some new form whatever she destroys; that, instead of binding us, as some would have it, in stern utilitarian chains, when she has freed us from a harmless superstition, she offers to our contemplation something better and more beautiful, something which, rightly considered, is more elevating to the soul, nobler and more stimulating to the soaring fancy; is a sound, wise, wholesome object.1
Despite the lavish terms in which it celebrates science, Dickens’ prose also reveals the tensions that permeated attitudes to scientific knowledge in Victorian Britain. Admiration for its clear-sighted objectivity and analytical precision is mixed with a fear, inherited partly from Romanticism and partly from Christianity, that experimental science is destructive, reductive, and degrading; that it diminishes nature to a quantifiable and soulless mechanism. But this view of science as the “stern utilitarian” oppressor of natural beauty and of the imagination is, Dickens assures his readers, groundless, and the “sound, wise, wholesome object” of disproving it has been successfully attained in the book which he is reviewing: Robert Hunt’s The Poetry of Science.2
Dickens’ endorsement of The Poetry of Science is not unequivocal. In his view, the book is let down by its ornamented and long-winded style: “We might object to an occasional discursiveness, and sometimes we could have desired to be addressed in a plainer forms of words.”3 And it is true that Hunt, in his efforts to show that science is neither mechanistic nor utilitarian, sometimes overcompensates, indulging in flights of expostulation that are even more grandiloquent and sentimental than those of Dickens’ novels. In the introduction to The Poetry of Science, for instance, Hunt announces that:
To rest content with the bare enunciation of a truth, is to perform but one half of a task. As each atom of matter is involved in an atmosphere of properties and powers, which unites it to every mass of the universe, so each truth, however common it may be, is surrounded by impulses which, being awakened, pass from soul to soul like musical undulations, and which will be repeated through the echoes of space, and prolonged for all eternity.4
Hunt presents an analogy between nature itself and the study of nature. Natural processes, he argues, are simultaneously material and immaterial, directed both by the motions of atoms and by the operation of powers and forces (light, gravity, magnetism, electricity) that cannot be reduced to matter. Similarly, the interpretation of those processes must find room both for science, the empirical and experimental investigation of factual “truth”, and for poetry, the expression of the aesthetic, moral, and spiritual “impulses” which surround that truth. This analogy may seem loose and not especially convincing, but it proved popular among Victorian readers. When the first edition of The Poetry of Science sold out, Hunt wrote that “a Second Edition of this work being demanded within a twelvemonth of the publication of the first, convinces the author” that “he was not mistaken in believing the generalizations from mechanical experiments to be capable of assuming a poetic aspect.”5
Hunt’s goal in The Poetry of Science is to reconcile the experimental with the poetic, terms which denote not just two different perspectives on natural knowledge but also two competing kinds of cultural authority. Although poetry steadily lost readers over the course of the nineteenth century to the novel and the press, it retained its exalted status, at least in theory, as the highest form of imaginative expression. At the same time, by 1848, the capacity of the sciences to explain natural processes, and to harness those processes through the development of new technologies, was starting to secure them a more prominent place in British culture. It was easy to see poetic imagination and scientific knowledge as mutually antagonistic, but, as Robert Hunt’s career demonstrates, it was also possible bring them together.
Hunt started his working life as a surgeon’s apprentice before making a living, at different times, as a chemist and druggist, a statistician with the geological survey, and a professor at the School of Mines in London. He was a pioneering photographer and published research on photography in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions. He also regularly wrote and published poetry and tried in the 1830s to pursue a career as a playwright. Hunt’s diverse interests were not exceptional: several more famous nineteenth-century figures — the astronomer John Herschel, the physicist John Tyndall, and the mathematician James Clerk Maxwell — also combined specialist research with the writing of poetry and of popular expositions of their scientific theories. Their polymathic careers were made possible by the open borders between disciplines in Victorian Britain; there were no rigid barriers of education or language, as there would be in the twentieth century, between scientific research and science communication, or between science and literature.
The exchanges between these different disciplines are encapsulated in the style and structure of Hunt’s writing in The Poetry of Science. Together with probably the majority of Victorian science writers, he regularly quotes lines and stanzas of verse in the course of his explanations of scientific experiments and theories. The uses of poetic quotation in Victorian science are numerous, varied, and often difficult to pin down: authors deploy the language of poetry sometimes as supporting evidence for particular scientific theories, and sometimes as a kind of eloquent ornamentation to their prose. Some quotations are used to summarize the inductive reasoning characteristic of science, which moves from the observation of a particular natural phenomenon to a broader conclusion about that phenomenon’s significance or meaning; and some are employed to gesture beyond the inductive method, to hint at the emotional or spiritual effects of a scientific fact. Perhaps surprisingly, Victorian science communication shares its interest in poetry with more recent popular science writing. Even such a pugnacious and controversial proponent of scientific rationalism as Richard Dawkins, for example, is happy to use poetic quotations to convey what he terms the “wonder” of scientific knowledge. But while this practice of quotation suggests that science and poetry are in some ways complementary — both are necessary parts of a full and nuanced understanding of the physical universe — it also imposes a distinction between them, separating the factual and objective knowledge of science from the exclusively emotional or subjective remit of poetry.
This duality is evident in Hunt’s discussions of Shakespeare, which manage to be both laudatory and dismissive. After quoting the song “Full fathom five” from The Tempest (“Those are pearls that were his eyes”), he suggests that Shakespeare “little thought how correctly he painted the chemical changes, by which decomposing animal matter is replaced by a siliceous or calcareous formation.”6 The lyrical language of Shakespeare’s verse and the technical terminology of Hunt’s prose describe the same phenomenon, but they do so from fundamentally distinct perspectives. Poets, according to Hunt, “have revelations more wonderful than even those of the philosopher, who evokes them by perpetual toil and brain-racking struggle with the ever-changing elements around him.”7 Natural philosophers or scientists acquire their insights through a painstaking and disciplined investigation of the facts of nature. Shakespeare’s poetry, in contrast, expresses a kind of sublime ignorance, an intuitive knowledge of the truth, but not of the causes or details, of a natural process. Dickens disapproved of this backhanded compliment — “Why Mr Hunt should be of opinion that Shakespeare ‘little thought’ how wise he was, we do not altogether understand”8 — and Hunt altered it in later editions, commenting, still with some equivocation, that Shakespeare “painted, with considerable correctness, the chemical changes” involved in the formation of pearls.9
For Dickens, this quotation risks patronising Shakespeare, reducing his poetry to an eloquent decoration of scientific wisdom. Elsewhere, though, Hunt suggests that poetry can actively support and possibly supplement the knowledge gained through experimental science. He sets out this argument by directly juxtaposing two different kinds of language: on the one hand, his own poetry, which he inserts into his prose at several points throughout The Poetry of Science, as if it were the work of a canonical poet; and, on the other hand, the detailed description of experiments which was a prominent feature of nineteenth-century science writing. In a chapter on gravity Hunt recounts an experiment in which drops of olive oil are suspended in a mix of water and alcohol that has the same specific gravity as the oil: instead of being “flattened” by the “earth’s gravitating influence”, as they would be “under any other conditions”, the drops retain their “orbicular form.” “Simple as this illustration is,” Hunt writes, “it tells much of the wondrous secret of those beautifully balanced forces of cohesion and of gravitation; and from the prosaic fact we rise to a great philosophic truth.” He then documents a means of extending the experiment:
If we pass a steel wire through one of those floating spheres of oil, and make it revolve rapidly, thus imitating the motion of a planet on its axis, the oil spreads out, and we have the spheroidal form of our earth. Increase the rapidity of this rotation, and when a certain rate is obtained the oil widens itself into a disc, a ring separates itself from a central globe, and at a distance from it still revolves around it. Here we have a minute representation of the ring of Saturn.10
In these experiments, he concludes, “we produce results resembling, in a striking manner, the conditions which prevail in the planetary spaces.”11 For Hunt, the relation between experiment and nature is fractal: experimental processes represent natural processes in miniature. In this case, from the starting point of the “prosaic fact” of the olive oil’s motion, “we rise” in scale to an apprehension of sublime astronomical phenomena, and we also rise, through inductive reasoning, “to a great philosophic truth,” a theoretical understanding of the forces that shape matter across the universe.12
In the next paragraph Hunt refers to the force of gravity as “a ruling spirit” in nature, and its importance is emphasized again, but in markedly different terms, in the lines of verse which immediately follow, and which form the peroration to his chapter on gravity:
The smallest dust which floats upon the wind    Bears this strong impress of the Eternal Mind.    In mystery round it, subtile forces roll;    And gravitation binds and guides the whole.    In every sand, before the tempest hurl’d,    Lie locked the powers which regulate a world,    And from each atom human thought may rise    With might, to pierce the mystery of the skies,⎯    To try each force which rules the mighty plan,    Of moving planets, or of breathing man;    And from the secret wonders of each sod,    Evoke the truths, and learn the power of God.13
In contrast to recent writers such as Dawkins, and to Victorian agnostics such as Tyndall, who quote poetry to articulate a sense of secular awe at the natural sublimity revealed by science, Hunt employs verse to promote natural theology, the mode of reasoning which uses observations of nature to demonstrate the existence of the Christian God. He announces that the study of matter, and of the forces that act on matter, launches the mind towards truths which are not just theoretical but theological: “each atom”, through the agency of “human thought”, is capable of illuminating “the mystery of the skies.” The rhymes of his verse set out a series of antitheses (the “dust” on the “wind” and “the eternal mind”, “sod” and “God”) which turn out to be continuities, as the apparent gap between them is closed by an inductive ascent which is comparable to that made possible by experiment.
This connection between science and poetry established by Hunt must have been reassuring to Victorian readers troubled by the potentially unsettling truths of science: both, his writing suggests, can use seemingly mundane and insignificant phenomena to make sense of the universe. As a whole, though, The Poetry of Science echoes the conflict present in Victorian society regarding poetry’s relevance to the increasingly influential scientific worldview. Hunt’s use of poetic quotation indicates that poetry is best used as an ornamental illustration of scientific knowledge, which is inevitably more accurate and detailed than the kind of knowledge conveyed in poems. But the sentiment of his own poetic writing reverses this hierarchy, suggesting that verse has the power to reconcile the natural with the divine. Poetry communicates a spiritual and transcendent understanding of the universe, which can be supported, but which cannot be overturned or usurped, by the evidence of experimental science.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Gregory Tate


text:
Bringing the Ocean Home

By Bernd Brunner
June 21, 2018

Bernd Brunner on the English naturalist Philip Henry Gosse and how his 1854 book The Aquarium, complete with spectacular illustrations and a dizzy dose of religious zeal, sparked a craze for the “ocean garden” that gripped Victorian Britain.

The popularization of observing the interaction between marine animals and aquatic plants in glass tanks can be attributed to the Englishman Philip Henry Gosse, who was the first person to resolutely use the word “aquarium” for such objects. In his 1853 book A Naturalist’s Rambles on the Devonshire Coast, the term “vivarium” was used interchangeably with “marine aquarium”, but one year later the die was cast for the latter variant in his book The Aquarium: An Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Sea. As Gosse stated in its pages, the word should be “neat, easily pronounced and easily remembered”.1  The term “vivarium” was designated for tanks containing mainly snakes and amphibians; “aqua vivarium” was a step in the right direction, but the term was not yet perfect. Gosse understood “aquarium” as the neutral form of “aquarius”. He must also have known that to the ancient Romans an aquarium signified only a reservoir of water and that botanists had already been using this term for plant tanks for quite some time. For him this was not contradictory, but a justifiable linguistic expansion. He affirmed ceremoniously:
Let the word AQUARIUM then be the one selected to indicate these interesting collections of aquatic animals and plants, distinguishing it as Freshwater Aquarium, if the contents be ﬂuviatile, or a Marine Aquarium, if [the contents are salt water-based].2
Gosse was born in 1810 in Poole in the south of England, the son of an impoverished travelling miniature painter. As a young man Gosse made his way across the Atlantic to Newfoundland, where he dealt with seal and cod ﬂeets in the Carbonear harbour. In his early twenties he bought a copy of the book Essays on the Microscope at an auction and thenceforth devoted himself wholeheartedly to collecting insects. For two years he documented every insect he could get hold of. Along with some of his friends, he decided to move to mainland Canada in hopes of establishing a rural commune and opening a museum of stuffed birds. After both ventures failed, Gosse returned to England, where he found work as a teacher in Hackney until he received an invitation from the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge to write An Introduction to Zoology. His research for the book inspired him to write another, The Ocean, published in 1844, on the findings of the explorer Sir James Clark Ross, who since 1818 had travelled throughout the Pacific and Arctic discovering a wide variety of marine ﬂora and fauna. The book was an unexpected success and Gosse’s newfound notoriety led to an invitation to Jamaica later that year  — a trip financed by an avid seashell collector in return for specimens to add to his collection. Gosse’s time in the Caribbean gave birth to three further books, all successes, and the author established himself as an important voice among the publishing naturalists of the period.
Upon his return from Jamaica, Gosse became a devout Christian, a faith that would shape much of his subsequent work. Through his wife, Emily Bowes, he became involved with a sect called the Plymouth Brethren Movement. His life was dictated by the monotony of seemingly endless prayers. Reading novels and poems as well as going to the theatre or singing temporal songs was forbidden — even social contacts outside the brotherhood were not permitted. Gosse strongly believed that Jesus Christ would return to Earth before his own death, and, under this sense of urgency, he set about to work on several book projects, all of which dealt with life on the coast. Gosse could either be found sitting behind his desk or working outside, where, dressed in his black suit, he fervently poked around in the silt of the tidal shallows or — even during heavy surf — meticulously examined the waterholes in rocks for any living creature. He became an authority for everything connected to coastal fauna, and his frequent speeches in London were always met with acclaim and adoration.
Of all Gosse’s works, the most successful was The Aquarium, in which he described his observations of coastal life and — a year after establishing the first public aquarium at the London Zoo — gave his readers instructions on how to build a miniature ocean of their very own. A saltwater aquarium, he asserted, was the perfect way to get acquainted with the peculiar creatures of the ocean without having to descend into the depths using complicated diving equipment. He was amused by a French zoologist, Henri Milne-Edwards, who stalked around at the bottom of the Mediterranean wearing a “water-tight dress, suitable spectacles, and a breathing tube” in order to take a closer look at the submarine world. All this was so much easier to achieve, Gosse proclaimed, in the safe environment of one’s own four walls.
In his many long-winded reports about his coastal excursions, Gosse told his readers that the aquarium was the objective, but that many obstacles still had to be overcome. One’s relation with nature required a cautious and respectful approach, for its exploration was, in Gosse’s mind, a spiritual exercise. For Gosse, religion and natural science went hand in hand: “it brings us, in some sense, into the presence of God”, he said, “or rather it gives us cognizance of Him, and reveals to us some of his essential attributes.”3  The aquarium was the perfect arena in which to witness the wondrous creations of Thomas Paley’s “Watchmaker God”. In A Naturalist’s Rambles, published the previous year, Gosse described how in the rock pools of the coast can be seen a glimpse of the prelapsarian bliss that reigned before the fall, and so also an insight into the state of nature that shall reign when Christ returns. In The Aquarium he went on to directly compare coral to the city of “heavenly Jerusalem”:
Is it fanciful to discern a faint shadow of these glories in a poor Polype? . . . When I look on the multitudes of Polypes inhabiting such a structure as I have alluded to, each bearing his starry crown, and all engaged in harmony, building up, wall by wall and cell by cell, an edifice whose walls are of crystalline clearness, often studded with what look like gems, and whose cells are closed with pearly doors ; if when I watch the building growing up into a City, a commonwealth, of myriad individuals ; when I know that, besides the separate life of each, there is a common life, a bond of identity, that constitutes the vast assemblage but one Being — One though Many — I cannot help thinking of the heavenly City, the Jerusalem which is above.4
As Jonathan Smith remarks in his Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture, it is in light of such a vision that we must see the illustrations which populate Gosse’s books on coastal life. The mesmerising full-colour plates present “a sort of aquatic peaceable kingdom”, the scenes bustling with different species, all coexisting free from competition or want. The rock pools were pictured as having “the same qualities as the unfallen Garden of Eden . . . a visual glimpse of the millennial kingdom that awaits the true believer”.5
Gosse’s pioneer aquarium contained an impressive abundance of marine fauna and ﬂora. Prior to finding the animals, it was important to gather the plants, which were responsible for the oxygen in the tank. For this, Gosse recommended the day after a full moon or new moon, as the tide is then as far out as possible and areas usually covered with water become visible. Armed with a covered collecting basket, stone and glass jars, two or three smaller vials, and some hammers and chisels, he ventured out to the ledges of rock at the edge of the sea. He was especially drawn to rough and sharp crevices — those which any intelligent hiker would try to avoid at all costs — because it was here that the desired plants tried to hide:
We lift up the hanging mass of olive weed (Fucus) from the edge, and find the sides of the clefts often fringed with the most delicate and lovely forms of sea-weed; such for example, as the winged Delesseria (D. alata), which grows in thin, much-cut leaves of the richest crimson hue, and the feathery Ptilota (P. plumosa) of a duller red. 6
The plant had to be removed together with a piece of the rock on which it grew; only this way did it have a chance of survival. After skilful chiselling (often under water), each piece of grass found its temporary home in a receptacle that had been brought along. It was even more important to have a suitable transport container handy when collecting animals. According to Gosse, a collector should always be watchful and alert, as strange creatures of various forms and shapes could appear at any moment.
Upon returning from his seaside excursion, Gosse would begin the process of transferring his findings from the temporary tanks into his marine aquarium. The exterior of Gosse’s aquarium already resembled the familiar rectangular glass tank with birchwood beading. It was 61 × 30 × 30 cm (2 × 1 × 1 ft); the sides and ends were panes of glass and the bottom was slate. The panes were puttied between the birchwood, which was a tremendous improvement over earlier prototypical aquariums, as the even glass surfaces did not cause the optical distortions that round glass did. Gosse covered the bottom of the aquarium with an insulating layer of clay, pebbles, sand, and, finally, small pieces of rock, which formed mini-bridges and overhangs that gave the swimming creatures shelter. After adding the plants, Gosse poured 76 litres (20 gallons) of salt water over the miniature landscape. During the first night, Gosse would observe the tank by candlelight and see that numerous tiny shells and micro-organisms were already bustling around inside.
The animals were added the following day. Among the specimens were one 15-spined stickleback, seven grey mullet, one black goby, three common periwinkles, one anomia, two common cockles, two ascidia, two hermit crabs, four sand shrimp, one prawn, three crown worms, two thick-horned anemones, and many others. All in all, around one hundred animals found a new home in the tank. Although the tank could handle even more, and two or three gallons of saltwater per day were constantly dripping into the aquarium from another vessel suspended over the tank as “artificial aeration”, it dawned on Gosse that the consumption of oxygen would soon exceed its supply. The first week of his experiment proved to be successful (apart from one or two attacks on weaker animals by predatory species). But three days into the second week a number of animals died, and the water developed an unpleasant smell from those that had died in the sanctuary of the stones. After thoroughly cleaning the tank, Gosse carried on his experiment with the remaining fauna and ﬂora.
Since there was as yet little possibility for the general populace to experience many of the creatures Gosse and others had collected, it fell to Gosse to bring them to life on the pages of his books. In his descriptions he concentrated on those animals that best embodied the mystery of the submarine world. He repeatedly used analogies to land animals — combining human and animal forms to create clear pictures in the readers’ minds. Gosse referred to one creature, with its long silky hair adorning it like a fur coat, as the “sea mouse”, which he called “the most gorgeously clad of all the creatures that inhabit the deep”.7  Linnaeus, the great taxonomist of biology, who established a new system for naming, ranking, and classifying organisms, had referred to it as “Aphrodite” as early as the eighteenth century. According to Gosse, the “Aphrodite aculata, reﬂecting the sun-beams from the depths of the sea, exhibits as vivid colours as the peacock itself, spreading its jewelled train”.8  In the aquarium the sea mouse attracts attention due to its restless movements and a jet of water that spurts every twenty-four seconds. The splendour of its changing colours made it an object of admiration: red and orange reﬂections usually appeared under candlelight, while during the day they changed to green and blue. Gosse also adored prawns, which he considered “particularly pleasing inhabitants of the aquarium”:
There is a certain lightness in the slender filiform appendages of the head, which are continually thrown into the most graceful curves, that resembles in character ‘the light tracery of ropes and spars’ so much admired in a trimly rigged ship. Their bodies are so pellucid that a lady who was this moment looking at the tank compared them to ghosts, and their smooth gliding movements aid the similitude.9
The submarine world is a place where definitions are loose — the alter ego of our world on dry land. Coral, starfish, anemone, jellyfish, sea horse: are they mineral or animal, living or dead, fauna or ﬂora, male or female? Gosse was particularly fascinated by those creatures that build some sort of relationship but can hardly be differentiated as individuals. The alliance between whelks, hermit crabs, and sea anemones is, in Gosse’s view, simply brilliant:
Many persons who know a Whelk as well as possible, hesitate when they see the familiar shell tenanted, not by the great black-spotted Mollusk, but by a mongrel between Crab and Lobster, with stout, red, pinching claws, and long, jointed, and pointed legs. And still more mysterious does the thing look, when two thirds of the shell itself is enclosed in a thick mass of purple-spotted ﬂesh, through the midst of which the busy Crab his poking his head and limbs. In truth it is a strange affair, this threefold alliance of Whelk, Hermit-crab, and Cloak-anemone.10
In fact it is a relationship between only two living creatures, because just the whelk’s shell remains, no longer inhabited by the original mollusc. Gosse defined crabs as “the scavengers of the sea” which, like wolves and hyenas, devour everything alive or dead.11  The sea anemone — also known as the animal ﬂower, polyp, or by its scientific name, Actinia — with its colour-changing tentacles, can often be found sitting on stones on the ocean bed, expanding to great lengths before shrinking to a tenth of its size. Equally fascinating, pieces of the creature could break away and develop into new animals. Due to its ﬂower-like appearance, the sea anemone was for a long time mistakenly considered to be the “missing link” between plants and animals.
The symbiosis of hermit crab and sea anemone is — according to Gosse — open to all possible speculation and interpretation. Who is actually in control? Is it the crab, pulling the anemone along the ocean bed, striking it with scattered stones? Or has the sea anemone devoured the shell together with the crab, and has the crab then managed to ﬁnd a way out through the stomach and skin of the sea anemone? Has the sea anemone released a special membrane which, while allowing the crab a suitable home, prevents it from ever leaving? With the help of the aquarium, Gosse hoped to discover the principle of their opposite attraction and the secret of the apparent melding of bodies and identities.
However, it was not until the 1920s and 30s that biologists were able to offer plausible explanations for this interaction, which is now regarded as a prime example of biological symbiosis. Sea anemones use their nematocysts to keep octopuses away from the crab and in return are able to gain a much bigger habitat due to the host’s movements. Additionally, the sea anemone can ingest some of the crab’s prey as its mouth directly faces the masticatory organs of the crab. This relationship can, however, end in tragedy: if the hermit crab cannot ﬁnd enough food, it will eat the sea anemone.
For Gosse the aquarium was a living museum, a curious inversion of Noah’s Ark — all species of marine fauna and ﬂora, safely held amidst a dry environment. Comparable to the zoological gardens that brought the animal kingdom to cities or the botanical garden hothouses that showcased tropical ﬂora — living compendiums through which nature lovers and ﬂâneurs alike could wander — the aquarium encapsulated the submarine world into a “see-through” form, the paradox of an ocean journey within one’s own home.
Gosse had a way of expressing his enthusiasm in his books and articles that positively stirred the bourgeoisie. His numerous lectures on oceanic subjects always caused a sensation. According to the Literary Gazette, a Victorian magazine published in London, Gosse had “dived into all those decorated palaces which had unassertively been kept under lock and key by old Neptune for such a long time”;12  another chronicler wrote that “all the world wanted to possess an aquarium to verify his assertions and repeat his experiments”;13  the magazine Blackwoods even recommended that children should not see the book, otherwise there would be no peace and quiet in the house until the children were ﬁnally allowed to have an aquarium. But the burgeoning fad needed more than Gosse’s contagious enthusiasm to be a success: it also had to please the eye.
High-quality illustrations, which were quite rare at the time, played an important role in the success of most of Gosse’s books. He had inherited his father’s artistic talents and is credited with providing the drawings for many of the beautiful lithographic plates that accompany his texts. According to the scholar Barbara T. Gates, it was, however, his wife Emily — a talented artist trained by popular landscape painter John Sell Cotman — who made the drawings for the stunning plates found in The Aquarium.14  Although her images proved so integral to the book’s popularity, she is entirely uncredited on its pages, her husband’s name inscribed below the images instead. While it was general convention at the time for picture credits in scientific publications to default to the text’s author, one does wonder why Henry failed to mention his wife’s contribution at all in his preface, despite finding room to acknowledge the lithograph printers.
The Aquarium was more than a cultural sensation: it was also a financial success, with earnings of about £805 (roughly £40,000 today). A year later, a smaller Handbook to the Marine Aquarium was published for those who had not been able to afford the first book. From the collecting of ferns, the Victorian bourgeoisie now turned their attention toward the exploitation of the coastal regions. The rapidly expanding middle class found this new fad a topic suitable for conversation as well as education. As Henry D. Butler retrospectively wrote about the British aquarium mania in his book The Family Aquarium — “The aquarium was on everybody’s lip. The aquarium rang in every body’s ear. Morning, noon, and night, it was nothing but the aquarium.”15
A shop on Portland Road in London, owned by William Alford Lloyd, established itself at the beating heart of the fad. Fifty large tanks and countless smaller containers held some 15,000 marine specimens. The emporium sold salt water over the counter by the pint, quart, or gallon. Aquariums were manufactured in a nearby factory, and Lloyd employed more than a dozen people for the purpose of collecting plants and animals from the coasts and purchasing lots from amateur collectors. Before the existence of Lloyd’s shop, people had to make excursions out to the coast, and transportation was often expensive and dangerous, which made the whole undertaking quite unappealing. Once Lloyd went into business, aquarium lovers could obtain everything they needed easily and frequently.
The aquarium craze of the 1850s, however, was just that: a craze. According to the British social historian David Elliston Allen in his fascinating study The Naturalist in Britain, the wave of nature enthusiasm in the 1850s was “sloppier, less intelligent, more given to hysteria” than in the preceding decades.16  Only a few years later, “aquarium mania” was already a thing of the past, at least in Britain. Nine out of ten aquariums had been either dumped or simply left to their own devices. The individual experience of the parlour gave way to the collective experience of the large public aquariums found in Brighton and other coastal resorts.
Though short, the intensity of this aquarium fad was sadly not without its environmental cost. Along the coastline the hunt for plants and animals caused real devastation, and by the beginning of the twentieth century the coastal landscape had completely changed. James Hamilton-Paterson in Seven-Tenths explicitly holds “zoology allied to a strong religious bent” responsible for this development.17  In 1907, Gosse’s son Edmund — in contrast to his father, a convinced Darwinist — put matters straight in his memoir Father and Son:
The ring of living beauty drawn about our shores was a very thin and fragile one. It had existed all those centuries solely in consequence of the indifference, the blissful ignorance of man. These rock-basins, fringed by corallines, filled with still water almost as pellucid as the upper air itself, thronged with beautiful sensitive forms of life – they exist no longer, they are all profaned, and emptied, and vulgarised. An army of ‘collectors’ has passed over them, and ravaged every corner of them. The fairy paradise has been violated, the exquisite product of centuries of natural selection has been crushed under the rough paw of well-meaning, idle-minded curiosity. That my father, himself so reverent, so conservative, had by the popularity of his books acquired the direct responsibility for a calamity that he had never anticipated, became clear enough to himself before many years had passed, and cost him great chagrin.18
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: ernd Brunner