text:
The Nightwalker and the Nocturnal Picaresque

By Matthew Beaumont
June 3, 2015

The introduction of street lighting to 17th-century London saw an explosion of nocturnal activity in the capital, most of it centring around the selling of sex. Matthew Beaumont explores how some writers, with the intention of condemning these nefarious goings-on, took to the city's streets after dark, and in the process gave birth to a peculiar new literary genre.

At the end of the seventeenth century a new literary genre or subgenre emerged in England, one that might be characterized as the nocturnal picaresque. Its authors, who were moralists or satirists or social tourists, or all of these at the same time, and who were almost invariably male, purported to recount their episodic adventures as pedestrians patrolling the streets of the metropolis at night.
These narratives, which often provided detailed portraits of particular places, especially ones with corrupt reputations, also paid close attention to the precise times when more or less nefarious activities unfolded in the streets. As distinct from diaries, they were noctuaries (in his Dictionary of the English Language [1755], Samuel Johnson defined a “noctuary” simply as “an account of what passes at night”).1 These apparently unmediated, more or less diaristic accounts of what happened during the course of the night on the street embodied either a tragic or a comic parable of the city, depending on whether their authors intended to celebrate its nightlife or condemn it as satanic.
The nocturnal picaresque, composed more often in prose than in verse, was a distinctively modern, metropolitan form that, with several other literary genres that emerged in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, comprised a response to the dramatic social and architectural transformations of the metropolis after the Great Fire of 1666.
This was the epoch when both the West End, which the aristocracy colonized, and the suburbs to the south and east of the City, where the poor were exiled, expanded exponentially. By 1700, when its population reached approximately 550,000, London had outstripped Paris to become the largest city in Europe. Its concentration of imperial trade, industry, and government made it the most advanced and most energetic metropolitan centre in the world. Leo Hollis has even speculated that “the true ‘English Revolution’ was seen not in the 1640s, or in 1688, but in the 1690s”, when the expansion and recomposition of London “shattered the traditional urban space into enclaves and modern neighbourhoods” and “the city at large became a fluid mixture of anonymous and closely knit communities formed by new relationships dependent on work, status, religion and gender”.2
These social and topographical changes, especially this segregation, reshaped people’s psychogeographical relationship to the metropolis and its proliferating, increasingly complex forms. A number of different types of publication mapped and explored London after the Fire. These included guidebooks, street directories, topographical surveys, urban instruction manuals and antiquarian tour-books. They also included anti-pastoral poems, or “urban georgics”, such as Jonathan Swift’s “Description of a City Shower” (1710) and John Gay’s Trivia (1716). And, most prominently, pioneering instances of the novel, as practiced in particular by Daniel Defoe — “probably the first writer to grasp the exotic possibilities of city life with its unpredictable energies tempting the urban adventurer into ever new situations.”3
The nocturnal picaresque, which provided a moral map of the metropolitan night, was related to all these genres. But it was above all a type of “ramble or spy narrative”, a form that structured its account of the daily life of the city in terms of the adventures its narrator experienced in the course of a pedestrian stroll through its precincts.4 The ramble narrative claimed to record these scenes, which were at once sensational and typical of everyday life in the metropolis, as if they had momentarily occurred, at a particular time of day, in precisely located streets.
Like the ramble narrative, the nocturnal picaresque was rendered possible by the fact that, in spite of its rapidly rising population, which leapt by at least 200,000 in the first half of the eighteenth century, London was still not too immense to be circumambulated. The anonymous author of The Ambulator; Or, the Stranger’s Companion in a Tour Round London (1774) measured the metropolis, which included Westminster and Southwark as well as the City itself, as being five miles from east to west and three miles from north to south.5 It was still a pedestrian’s city, in spite of the rising levels of horse-drawn traffic.
The nocturnal picaresque was also rendered possible by the constantly flickering play of light and dark characteristic of the metropolis at night in the era of public street lighting initiated in the mid-1680s. For this technology, inconsistent and intermittent as the oil-burning street lamps were, provided the ideal theatrical conditions for staging the city’s social contradictions. The sooty, smutty industrial smoke that thickened and blackened the air in the day — especially in the City, where bakers, brewers, glassmakers, potters, and blacksmiths burned quantities of coal in the labyrinthine back streets — intensified these conditions at night.
The pioneering example of the nocturnal picaresque was John Dunton’s The Night-Walker: Or, Evening Rambles in Search after Lewd Women, with the Conferences Held with Them, which appeared in 1696, roughly a decade after public lighting was first introduced in London.
An author and bookseller who insisted that “Life is a continued Ramble”, Dunton had founded the Athenian Mercury, Britain’s first successful periodical, in 1691.6 A committed Anglican whose father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had all been ministers in the Church of England, Dunton published Proposals for a National Reformation of Manners in 1694 as part of a moral crusade led by Queen Mary. The Night-Walker, another periodical, which declared on the title page of its October 1696 issue that it was “To be publish’d Monthly, ’till a Discovery be made of all the chief Prostitutes in England, from the Pensionary Miss, down to the Common Strumpet”, was a supplementary contribution to Mary II’s campaign, albeit one whose crusading ambition was somewhat compromised by its scurrilous content.7 It folded in 1697 after eight issues — though not, presumably, because it had successfully recorded the identity of every prostitute in London.
The Night-Walker comprised a series of tracts against whoring and whore-mongering among the metropolitan nobility. It was inspired in part by anxieties about the degeneration of aristocratic bloodlines:
Some of you value your selves as being the Representatives of Ancient and Noble Families; but by the Methods which you take, you will deprive your Posterity of those Pretensions, for you give your Ladies occasion to repay you in your own Coin.
As the Dedication in its first issue indicates, it reserved especially vituperative feelings for clergymen, judges, and other hypocritical members of the upper class who, though “mighty Pretenders to impartial Justice, and zealous Asserters of Liberty and Property”, had debauched “poor Maids” and exposed both them and the “spurious Issue” they have had by them to “Poverty, Reproach and Punishment”. The Night-Walker detailed Dunton’s attempts to pursue these upright representatives of Society, and the “Suburb Strumpet[s]” with whom they consorted, through the streets of London, which he bemoaned as “a second Sodom”.8 The periodical’s title thus referred both to the activities of the prostitutes and their clients — and to Dunton’s identity as a noctambulant.
Dunton’s modus operandi entailed rambling in places like Chancery Lane, Cheapside, Farringdon, Fleet Street, Holborn, St James’s Park or the Strand, generally between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. He pursued this vocation throughout the winter of 1696-97. In addition to the streets, he visited coffee houses, music houses, playhouses, and pleasure gardens in pursuit of his victims. He liked to take his cue from the coded invitations of prostitutes, as when they pretended to stumble into him or drop their handkerchiefs on the pavement. In order to be morally and socially effective, as he saw it, Dunton masqueraded as the corrupt and sinful individuals whose behaviour he was determined to expose. So on his first night’s noctambulation, for example, traversing Pall Mall, he propositioned prostitutes, sequestered them in a convenient tavern, and only then, after several glasses, lectured them on their licentiousness.
This approach, predictably, did not appeal to all his readers, and in the periodical’s fourth issue, in December 1696, he was compelled to respond to critics of the enterprise who complained that he acted “first the part of a Devil to tempt and then the part of a Parson to Preach”. In response, he insisted that “The Night-Walker cannot any other way prove the Crime upon each Person with whom he Confers but to sound their Inclinations”.9
Dunton is a splendid embodiment of the contradictory but symbiotic relationship between
puritanical impulses and satanic ones in the nocturnal city. The moral kicks he got from the streets at night cannot be extricated from his sexual kicks. In him the night-watcher and the nightwalker were in an uncomfortably close relationship. As the historian Joachim Schlör remarks of the “missionaries” who patrolled the nineteenth-century city at night, “they too ‘penetrate’ into the nocturnal city, they too seek the extraordinary experience, they too participate in the cycle of chance encounters, they too see how far they can go.”10
Middle- and upper-middle-class men such as Dunton were, of course, far freer in their movements at night than women. In the eighteenth century as in the nineteenth, “the suspicion of prostitution fell upon women who were about at night unaccompanied and without justification”.11 Picaresque accounts of the streets at night in the eighteenth century are therefore predicated on a male subject, one that is physically mobile and, more often than not, both patrician in his attitude to the poor and patriarchal in his attitude to women.
The partial exception to this rule, which in the end it probably reinforces, is The Midnight-Ramble: Or, the Adventures of Two Noble Females: Being a True and Impartial Account of their Late Excursion through the Streets of London and Westminster (1754). For this intriguing fiction, published by an anonymous author who is presumably male, features two gleeful female protagonists that explore the streets of London at night in disguise.
The narrative opens with an account of the reasons for the heroine’s social (and perhaps sexual) frustration. Lady Betty, a virtuous young woman, has been married off to Dorimant, a dissolute nobleman who spends “his Evenings in riotous Mirth and Debauchery at the Taverns; and most commonly passe[s] the Remainder of the Night, in the Arms of some Courtezan at a Bagnio.” She befriends Mrs Sprightly, the wife of Dorimant’s best friend Ned, and the two women resolve to disguise themselves as monks in order to monitor their husbands’ nocturnal activities in the city. In prosecuting this plan, they commission their milliner, Mrs Flim, whose name signals that she is adept at idle deception, to bring them “ordinary Silk Gowns, close Capuchins, and black Hats”. And, having taken care “to exhilerate their Spirits with a Bottle of excellent Champain”, the three of them set off in pursuit of the men.
After spying on their husbands at the playhouse, the three women are frustrated in their attempt to follow them by coach to a tavern at Temple Bar because there are so few vehicles on the street. Instead, though it is past 10 p.m., they determine “upon following their Chace on Foot, at all Hazards”.12 At a spot between Somerset House and the so-called New Church on the Strand (St. Mary le Strand), they meet “four Street-Walkers, that had been long used to tramp those Quarters”. These prostitutes assume that, because of “the Oddness of our Ladies Disguise”, Lady Betty and Mrs Sprightly are “some Strangers of their own Occupation, that were come thither to trespass upon their Walks”. So they jostle and curse their rivals.
At this point, Mrs Flim intervenes, vociferating with them “in their own Stile of Language”. For her pains, she is punched in the face and has her false teeth pushed “directly down her Throat”. The three women promptly call for the Watch, and “a decrepid old Fellow, with his Staff and Lanthorn” appears. But this “Midnight Perambulator” is “in Fee with the Street-Walkers”, and, in any case, he too assumes that the women are prostitutes competing for this lucrative spot. An even more violent dispute is only averted when three “rakish Bucks” who have been drinking in a nearby tavern ascertain that Lady Betty and her companions are not of common rank and draw their swords against the prostitutes. Once the streetwalkers have fled, and since it is a wet night, these men invite the women into the tavern to drink wine and get warm, which they half-reluctantly do.13
Later, at Temple Bar, Mrs Flim happens to see Dorimant and Sprightly climbing into a coach bound for Covent Garden with two conspicuous courtesans. The three respectable women, who already seem morally and socially compromised, consequently decide to track it at a distance. They lose sight of it because the coach they have commandeered clips a post and end up walking to Covent Garden instead. By the time they reach this centre of eighteenth-century London’s nightlife — Vic Gatrell has identified it as “the first of the world’s bohemias” — the men have disappeared.14 They therefore decide to return to their houses, “once more, obliged to go on foot”. “However”, the author adds, “as the Moon was by this Time rose pretty high, they had Light sufficient to conduct them to their Habitations”.15 It is a reminder that nighttime illumination was, at best, limited even in the eighteenth-century West End.
As they amble home, a foreign gentleman hears their footsteps and takes them for prostitutes returning from the bagnio. He accompanies them “for some Streets Length”, though for scarcely innocent or benign reasons, and the result is that, when they run into a constable, he too assumes that they are “three of the bettermost sort of Street-Walkers”. This constable, who announces that it is “his Duty to keep the Streets clear of People, that had no real Business in them”, threatens to put them in the Roundhouse for the remainder of the night. But the street-smart Mrs Flim bribes him. Finally, resuming their journey home by coach, they pass a couple of men “pretty much in Liquor, staggering along Arm in Arm together”.16 It is Dorimant and Sprightly. The two men stop the coach, climb into it, and immediately start kissing the two women, whom they have failed to recognise as their wives. They realise their embarrassing error once the coach has deposited them all at the same address.
The pamphlet’s official intention, as its stentorious conclusion indicates, is to serve as “a Warning to the Female Sex, not to trust themselves abroad on any Frolicks, in this lewd and wicked Town, at unseasonable Hours”. But, until this moment, the tale’s moral assignment seems gloriously irrelevant. The women’s adventures are so mischievous, and they prove so successful, that it seems unlikely that the effect on them of “these Adventures of the Night”, as the author disingenuously professes to hope, will be to “prevent their undertaking any more Midnight Rambles, lest they should meet with worse Disasters than they experienced in this.”
To the contrary, by the end of the tale, Betty and Mrs Sprightly, like the dubious Mrs Flim from the start, might be said to be “perfectly acquainted with the Streets” and to know “the Ways of the Town”.17 Certainly, the Monthly Review remained unconvinced by the pamphlet’s official moral: it observed in nervous tones that “probably this pretended piece of secret history is altogether fabulous” and righteously dismissed it as “a low, ill-written tale, bearing the usual marks of a catch penny job”.18 This response is a clear indication that, in spite of The Midnight-Ramble’s claims to rectitude, its account of cross-dressing female aristocrats who spend the night slumming it in the streets is a little bit bent.
The Midnight-Ramble’s alternative subtitle, given on the first page of the narrative, is “The Adventures of Two Noble Night-Walkers”. The juxtaposition of the adjective “noble” and the noun “night-walker” is surely designed to transmit an almost inadmissible frisson to the reader. This is, after all, the period when, in the popular imagination as well as in the discourse of Bridewell and other penal institutions, the term “night-walker” became increasingly associated not so much with images of maleficent men as with those of “prostitutes moving along dark streets, gathering on corners, loitering in alleys, touting trade”.19
The phrase “noble night-walkers” in the subtitle of The Midnight-Ramble might distinguish its aristocratic protagonists from all the common kinds of streetwalker — from the “Jilts, Cracks, Prostitutes, Night-walkers, Whores, She-friends, Kind Women, and others of the Linnen-lifting Tribe” listed in a 1691 broadside against Bartholemew Fair.20 But it makes them seem morally unreliable at best. It is telling that the “noble females” in the tale are not once mistaken for monks, in spite of their costumes, but on at least three occasions are mistaken for prostitutes. In their disguises, they are highly ambiguous figures, at once masculine and feminine, aristocratic and common, virtuous and perfidious.
According to a predictable formula, the author of The Midnight-Ramble thus has it both ways: he contrives a daring fantasy of female independence and, at the last minute, presses it into the service of a patriarchal doctrine. As in the “Evening Rambles” described in Dunton’s Night-Walker and other nocturnal picaresques, hedonistic and moralistic impulses cannot be dissociated in The Midnight-Ramble. Perhaps the importance of the Protestant ethic to the spirit of capitalism, as the latter materialized in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London, meant that these impulses were necessarily complicit.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Matthew Beaumont


text:
When the Birds and the Bees Were Not Enough
Aristotle’s Masterpiece
By Mary Fissell
August 19, 2015

Mary Fissell on how a wildly popular sex manual — first published in 17th-century London and reprinted in hundreds of subsequent editions — both taught and titillated through the early modern period and beyond.

John Cannon, a teenaged agricultural laborer, bought a book called Aristotle’s Masterpiece for a shilling in 1700. He usually read chapbooks like Fortunatus and Dr Faustus, but he bought the Masterpiece in order to “pry into the Secrets of Nature especially of the female sex” — to find out about sex. What he learned was so intriguing that he took to spying on the family maidservant when she went to the privy; he bored a few holes in the wall so he “could plainly see” the parts discussed in the book.1
The book that Cannon read so eagerly was neither by Aristotle nor usually considered a masterpiece. It is, however, one of the best-selling books ever produced in English on sex and making babies. First published in London in 1684, it went through hundreds of editions in England and America. It was still for sale, largely unchanged, into the 1930s and beyond. References to the work pop up in the historical record like some kind of Zelig figure, often on the margins of unexpected moments. The huge numbers of editions and the frequency of references to it suggest that this book provided a kind of sex education to the masses long before the concept of sex education was invented.
Such popularity makes us question assumptions about how people in the pre-modern world learned about sex. Often we suppose that rural people like John Cannon did not need to consult books to learn about sex; they lived “closer to nature”, and could abstract what they saw in the barnyard to the bedroom. The most common euphemism for sexual knowledge, “the birds and the bees”, was first used by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1825, at the very moment at which England’s population became more urban than rural for the first time. But Cannon’s experiences, and those of a host of other readers, show us that for centuries English and American readers turned to this cheap book eager for information that was not, in fact, easily inferred from the natural world.
The book itself was pasted together in 1684, a mash-up of earlier works on midwifery and natural philosophy.2 It was an almost immediate bestseller. While John How, its first publisher, obediently registered the work with the Stationers’ Company, the book soon slipped the traces of any form of regulation; it was pirated in its very first year of publication. It was produced in multiple versions by a host of printers and publishers, only some of whom were willing to put their names on the title pages of the works. (For the most popular version, see a 1728 edition here). By the middle of the eighteenth century, there were more editions of the Masterpiece than all other popular works on reproduction combined. It continued to sell steadily until the 1870s in North America, when its publication was curtailed by the Comstock Acts. In Britain, it was still being reprinted into the 1930s.
Perhaps the work was attributed to Aristotle in an attempt to provide a cloak of learned authority, but more likely the name was an allusion to Aristotle’s popular-culture reputation as a sex expert. This unlikely role derived from an earlier pseudo-Aristotle text, Aristotle’s Problems, first published in English in 1595.3 The work contains some of the most explicit discussions of the mechanics of sex and reproduction available in English at the time, in an easy-to-read question and answer format, including “What is carnal copulation?” and “How are hermaphrodites begotten?”. Within a decade, the name Aristotle was used as a joking reference to sexual knowledge in plays performed upon the London stage. To many a browser upon a bookstall, the name Aristotle in the title meant — nudge nudge wink wink — a book about sex.
And it wasn’t just the title. The work was almost always accompanied by a frontispiece image of a near-naked woman, implicitly promising the reader titillating information. The most popular version of the book contained a racy poem, ostensibly provided for a husband to read to his bride to get her to bed, with lines like, “Now my infranchis’d Hand on every Side, Shall o’er thy naked polish’d Ivry Slide”. Like much else here, the poem isn’t an original, but rather re-arranged lines from an earlier work by Thomas Carew. The book valorizes sexual pleasure, for both women and men, explaining that mutual delight is needed for conception. Each chapter is summed up in brief verses,
Thus Man’s most noble Parts describ’d we see; (For such the Parts of Generation be;)And they that carefully survey’t, will find,Each Part is fitted for the Use design’d:The Purest Blood we find, if well we heed,Is in the Testicles turn’d into Seed;
and so on, assuring readers that the design was intended to excite “the more delight” in the “amorous combatants”.4 Such rhyming doggerel was reminiscent of teaching strategies in early modern primary education.
Undoubtedly, the racy poem, the woodcut of the near-naked woman, and the promise of sexual knowledge must have appealed to many a teenaged male reader like John Cannon. But the book also provided a solid framework of contemporary knowledge about the basics of pregnancy, childbirth, and infant health, detailing topics such as the signs of pregnancy, how to tell false labor from true, the various positions the baby might present in, etc. Not surprisingly, since it was plagiarized from another midwifery book, this information was largely unexceptional.
The book’s prose style promised readers that medical knowledge was not difficult. For example, in discussing barrenness (what we’d call infertility) the text assured the reader that if the fault were a malformation of the male partner, “this is plain and easily discern’d, that it needs must be obvious to both Parties”. By the early eighteenth century, the most common version of the text also included dozens of recipes for household remedies and a guide to physiognomy. From this perspective, the book was a distant ancestor of those such as What to Expect when You’re Expecting that crowd the shelves of today’s bookstores.
In the mid-eighteenth century, the British radical Francis Place read the Masterpiece whilst a schoolboy. In his memoirs, he explains that reading about the mechanics of conception made him doubt the Biblical account of the conception of Jesus.5 Like John Cannon, Place was an eager consumer of sexual knowledge; he used to go to London’s secondhand bookstalls and page through medical works, looking for anatomical pictures that he found exciting, until shooed away by irate booksellers.
But the Masterpiece was not just read by teenaged boys. In a copy of the first edition held by the University of Pennsylvania, there is a series of inscriptions that tells a different tale.6 First is what appears to be a courtship vow, a promise between a George Hoare and Elizabeth Vincent, living in rural Somerset. Evidently they pledged themselves to each other in 1684, the year the Masterpiece was first published. The vow wasn’t written down, however, until December 12, 1685, with each partner promising, “I do wish that I may never prosper if I be the cause of breaking of it”. A few years later, on June 29, 1687, they pledged again on the next page of the book, and this time the vow seems to have been accompanied by a gift of pieces of silver, probably from George to Elizabeth. Such courtship gifts were not uncommon guarantors of fidelity. Nine years after their first promise, George and Elizabeth were wed on Boxing Day in the small village of Dowlish Wake; ten months later their son William was baptized in the same parish. For this couple, the book, with its implicit promise of marital sexual pleasure, became the tangible form of their commitment to each other.
For others, the book functioned more like a family bible. In the back of the very same copy in which George and Elizabeth had inscribed their promises, one Sarah Fackerall recorded the births of her children: William (1805); sadly, another William (1806); John (1808); Ann (1809); and Charlot (1812). Sarah noted that the book had been given to her by her aunt, who lived in Curry Rivel, a mere ten miles from Dowlish Wake. Fackerell was not the only person to use a book about making babies to record a family’s births. In 1832, Edward Wiett went to court in Tennessee to try to get a pension connected with his military service in the Revolutionary War. He had lost his discharge papers and therefore needed to prove his age. As the court noted, “he has a record of his age in a book called Aristotles Masterpiece”, suggesting that his family also recorded births in their copy of the book.7 Evidently the court was persuaded, for he was paid a pension until 1843.
The book continued to garner readers, both well-known historical figures and unknowns. In 1761, a sailor used his copy of the book to record a series of purchases from the purser: a jacket, two caps, breeches, and a pair of shoes, totalling to £1.3.6. And a copy now held by the British Library proclaims that it was owned by none other than William Bligh, the captain at the center of the mutiny on HMS Bounty. In 1872, the widow Belle Gordon pleaded with an Indiana court for custody of her daughters, but the girls’ guardian claimed that she was not of good moral character, evidenced by her ownership of a book on birth control and a copy of the Masterpiece.8
By the later nineteenth century, the book seems to have moved downmarket, but it still attracted a range of readers. Often it included crude chromolithographs, with images of babies in the womb colored bright red (see image below). In Joyce’s Ulysses, Leopold Bloom looks at a copy of the Masterpiece on a Dublin bookstall, and describes images of “infants cuddled in a ball in bloodred wombs like livers of slaughtered cows”. Molly Bloom already had her own copy, which she called “Aristocrat’s Masterpiece”.9
A fourteen-year-old Manchester girl, Mary Bertenshaw, first encountered the Masterpiece while working in a cap and hat factory during the First World War. Her friend Gladys brought in a copy, which Mary described as a “secret book”. She and her workmates pored over the book at lunchtime in fits of giggles, until one day their boss caught them reading, much to their shame. Afterwards, they “felt dubious” about men and assiduously avoided walking anywhere near to what they knew to be the local venereal disease clinic. Historians have claimed that working-class girls like these demonstrated their virtue by remaining conspicuously ignorant of the facts of life.10 This story suggests that girls were certainly eager for knowledge, even if they might pretend innocence. A year later, Mary’s mother fell pregnant again. Mary recalled that she visualized the growing fetus inside her mother’s body from what she remembered of the Masterpiece illustrations. So for Mary Bertenshaw, the Masterpiece functioned in multiple ways: as a kind of entertainment; then a source of shame; and finally a source of biological knowledge.11
It wasn’t just city girls like Mary who reached for the book. When the noted Shakespeare scholar A. L. Rowse went up to Oxford in the early 1920s, he never mentioned to his mother that he was studying Aristotle, because, as he explained, the name Aristotle “would have meant to my mother, as secretly to Victorian women, his book on child-bearing: unmentionable”. But Rowse knew that the book was tucked away in her chest of drawers back in his home in rural Cornwall.12
The work remained an iconic symbol of sexual knowledge for generations. In Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies (1930), when a Customs Officer, his office walls “lined with contraband pornography”, inspects Adam Fenwick-Symes’ books to make sure he is not bringing any forbidden works into the country, he does so with the help of a printed list, headed by “Aristotle, Works Of (Illustrated)”.13 In the mid-1950s, copies of the Masterpiece were for sale in a Charing Cross Road bookshop, piled high next to Marie Stopes’ Married Love (1918).14 In the 1970s, an East Anglian agricultural worker told an oral history interviewer that she knew about reproductive matters from what she called “Harry Tottle’s little book”.15
Although little-known today, Aristotle’s Masterpiece was the go-to book for generations of British and American readers, male and female, who wanted to know about sex and making babies. Long after medical theories about reproduction and childbirth had changed, the book continued to promise readers access to hidden secrets and titillating details, a promise whose luster seems to have remained bright until almost yesterday.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Mary Fissell

source: public-domain-review

type: essay

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


text:
The Poet, the Physician and the Birth of the Modern Vampire

By Andrew McConnell Stott
October 16, 2014

From that famed night of ghost-stories in a Lake Geneva villa in 1816, as well as Frankenstein's monster, there arose that other great figure of 19th-century gothic fiction - the vampire - a creation of Lord Byron's personal physician John Polidori. Andrew McConnell Stott explores how a fractious relationship between Polidori and his poet employer lies behind the  tale, with Byron himself providing a model for the blood-sucking aristocratic figure of the legend we are familiar with today.

A vampire is a thirsty thing, spreading metaphors like antigens through its victim’s blood. It is a rare situation that is not revealingly defamiliarized by the introduction of a vampiric motif, whether it be migration and industrial change in Dracula, adolescent sexuality in Twilight, or racism in True Blood. Beyond undead life and the knack of becoming a bat, the vampire’s true power is its ability to induce intense paranoia about the nature of social relations to ask, “who are the real bloodsuckers?”
This is certainly the case with the first fully realized vampire story in English, John William Polidori’s 1819 story, “The Vampyre.” It is Polidori’s text that establishes the vampire as we know it via a reimagining of the feral mud-caked creatures of southeastern European legend as the elegant and magnetic denizens of cosmopolitan assemblies and polite drawing rooms.
“The Vampyre” is a product of 1816, the “year without summer,” in which Lord Byron left England in the wake of a disintegrating marriage and rumours of incest, sodomy and madness, to travel to the banks of Lake Geneva and there loiter with Percy and Mary Shelley (then still Mary Godwin). Polidori served as Byron’s travelling physician, and played an active role in the summer’s tensions and rivalries, as well as participating in the famous night of ghost stories that produced Mary Shelley’s “hideous progeny,” Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.
Like Frankenstein, “The Vampyre” draws extensively on the mood at Byron’s Villa Diodati. But whereas Mary Shelley incorporated the orchestral thunderstorms that illuminated the lake and the sublime mountain scenery that served as a backdrop to Victor Frankenstein’s struggles, Polidori’s text is woven from the invisible dynamics of the Byron-Shelley circle, and especially the humiliations he suffered at Byron’s hand.
John Polidori (1795-1821) was born in Soho, the eldest son of an English mother and an Italian writer, translator, and literary jack-of-all-trades. Raised to great precocity in a multi-lingual and hyper-literate home, he was sent to board at the Catholic Ampleforth College at the age of eight. Then just a remote and drafty lodge housing twelve boys and twenty-four Benedictine monks, Ampleforth provided instruction in history, languages, and the minutiae of Catholic devotion. Given this intense and closeted environment, it is no wonder that John should dream of entering the priesthood, but his father had chosen a different path for his son, pulling him from school at the age of fifteen to attend the university of Edinburgh to study medicine.
Medical education in the early nineteenth century was largely based around the study of “antiphlogistics”– learning how to master the various ways of ridding the body of noxious substances in the quickest way possible — and so John became skilled in blood-letting, vomiting, enemas, blistering, and plunge-baths. But Polidori hated medicine. A restless loner, he rejected his classmates as “automatons,” while he himself dreamt of achieving glory, first on the battlefield fighting on behalf of Italy as it sought to repel the invading armies of Napoleon, and then through a growing attachment to literature. Thanks to the success Byron had achieved with the publication of his poem Childe Harold in 1812, it was only natural that young men in the early nineteenth century should conceive of poetry as not only a creative outlet, but as an avenue to fame, riches and sexual plenty. Under the long-distance mentorship of William Taylor of Norwich, a once notable, but now near-derelict essayist who was attracted to John’s remarkable good looks, Polidori began to dabble in literature. His father, who knew the more likely privations of a literary life, ordered him to stick to his studies, and John obeyed, fulfilling a family dynamic that remained unchanged throughout his life — bowing to his father’s wishes while inwardly caviling at the restraints they placed upon him.
Where most students wrote dissertations on the circulation of the blood or assorted fevers, John concluded his education by writing a dissertation on the uncanny phenomenon of sleep-walking that was heavily influenced by the French encyclopedists, before returning to London a newly-minted doctor at the tender age of twenty. Unfortunately, in order to practice in the capital it was necessary to be at least twenty six years old. It was while contemplating this stalling impediment that John was offered the job of physician to Lord Byron. John’s father, who had once been the secretary to the vain and splenetic Italian tragedian, Vittorio Alfieri, ordered him not to take the position, while across town, Byron’s friend John Cam Hobhouse counseled the poet against employing the vain young man with the funny name. Neither warning was sufficient, and together Byron and Polidori left for the Continent on St. George’s Day, 1816.
Their relationship got off to an uneasy start in Dover as they awaited a convivial tide. Over dinner, John had invited Byron to read from a play he had written, and Byron obliged, but in the company of garrulous friends who had come to see him off, found it impossible to resist the urge to make them laugh one last time. Polidori, an outsider, an employee, was forced to sit and listen as Byron lampooned his sophomoric efforts and reduced the table to fits of giggles. Furious, John stormed off to pace the streets of Dover.
Away from Byron’s friends, things improved a little, with John writing to his sister from Brussels to say that “I am with him on the footing of an equal.” The democratic idyll did not last long, however, with Byron quickly losing patience with his doctor’s bouts of travel sickness, and John resenting his employer’s undemocratic arrogance. “Pray, what is there excepting writing that I cannot do better than you?” John asked Byron while stopped at an inn overlooking the Rhine. “There were three things, answered Byron, calmly. ‘First,’ he said, ‘I can hit with a pistol the keyhole of that door — Secondly, I can swim across that river to yonder point — and thirdly, I can give you a damned good thrashing.’”
These feelings of resentment only grew, as John felt increasingly overshadowed in the famous man’s company, with those they met instantly gravitating towards celebrity while he remained “like a star in the halo of the moon, invisible.” At the same time, the doctor’s petulance provoked Byron, whose wit was often cruel and rarely let an opportunity pass to mock his employee or put him in his place. In time, John began to feel that his own sense of self was being drained by his proximity to the poet. Increasingly, he sought to distance himself and in mid-June, made a half-hearted attempt at suicide.
It was no great leap for Polidori to believe that Byron was sucking the life from him, just as others had accused Byron of possessing a charismatic power that eclipsed their own identities. Amelia Opie, one of the many women Byron had charmed, described him as having “such a voice as the devil tempted Eve with; you feared its fascination the moment you heard it,” a mesmeric quality that critics also found in his verse, which had, according to the critic Thomas Jones de Powis, “the facility of . . . bringing the minds of his readers into a state of vassalage or subjection.”
But the most overt example of Byron as the devourer of souls was a novel John read over the course of the summer — Glenarvon by Lady Caroline Lamb. Byron and Lamb had enjoyed a brief and transgressive affair until he, somewhat rattled by the vivid expanse of her erotic imagination, had called it off. The novel is a thinly veiled portrait of the relationship set in a lonely castle during the Irish Rebellion of 1798, that interweaves breathless Gothic fiction with the wayward love of Calantha for the Irish rebel Lord Glenarvon. Glenarvon is a brooding anti-hero who dresses as a monk, stalks ruined priories, and howls like a wolf at the moon. His face glowers “as if the soul of passion had been stamped and printed upon every feature,” possessing the ability to enslave her. “Weep,” he cries, binding her ever tighter to him, “I like to see your tears; they are the last tears of expiring virtue. Henceforward you will shed no more.” Calantha is powerless. “My love is death.”
That Polidori took inspiration from Lamb is revealed in the name he gives his villain — Lord Ruthven, one of Glenarvon’s various ancestral titles. Polidori’s Ruthven also inhabits Glenarvon’s aristocratic milieu as a member of the bon ton. He is a pale and fascinating nobleman who appears in London “more remarkable for his singularities, than for his rank,” and who incites awe amongst the ranks of fashionable ladies by virtue of his melancholy air and “reputation of a winning tongue.”
In “The Vampyre,” Ruthven befriends a young gentleman named Aubrey, whom he invites to accompany him on a journey to Greece. Once there, Aubrey falls in love with Ianthe, a beautiful peasant girl who recounts the legend of the vampire but is brutally murdered soon after. Aubrey comes to suspect Ruthven, but the mysterious aristocrat is shot by bandits before the truth can be revealed. As Ruthven lays dying, he manages to extract a promise from the young man, asking him not to announce his death in England for a year and a day. Aubrey agrees, and Ruthven literally dies laughing.
After a long and meandering journey home, the sad and raddled Aubrey is finally able to return to society, where he is horrified to discover Ruthven alive and well. “Remember your oath,” whispers the man who has died in his arms, thus driving Aubrey so far from his wits that he succumbs to a protracted illness. In the meantime, Aubrey’s sister is engaged to be married, and though he has yet to meet the groom, it slowly dawns on him that it must be Ruthven. Impatient for his oath to expire and growing weaker by the day, he finally sends his assistants to her rescue only to discover they are too late: “Lord Ruthven had disappeared, and Aubrey’s sister had glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE!”
Knowing the context of Polidori’s story, it is hard not to read “The Vampyre” as an allegory of the doctor’s relationship with Byron, a text that is seamed with the mocking laughter of a man possessed of the power to debilitate through the force of personality alone. Furthermore, it rewrites the well-known story of Byron’s success since the publication of Childe Harold, wherein a young nobleman goes abroad and returns filled with capacious understanding of himself and the world, by showing that his melancholy air is a deceit, a mendacious con perpetuated on a gullible claque of fools for the purpose of their exploitation. As a meditation on the degeneracy of a society that has encouraged the excesses of celebrity to such an extent that it has been allowed to dwarf the higher values and enable the abuse of the virtuous and the innocent, it damns absolutely the superficial lure of fame.
Rather than providing a creative outlet for Polidori, the publication of “The Vampyre” only served to compound his humiliation. Although the text was similarly prompted by the ghost story competition that inspired Mary Shelley so ably, John only completed his story for the pleasure of a friend outside of the Byron-Shelley circle. The manuscript lay forgotten for three years until finally coming into the hands of the disreputable journalist Henry Colburn, who published it in his New Monthly Magazine under the title “The Vampyre: A Tale by Lord Byron.”
The response was predictably lively. Goethe proclaimed it Byron’s greatest ever work, and popular hardback editions went through numerous reprintings, leaving Polidori scrambling to assert his rights as its author in the face of accusations that he was either a plagiarist or misusing Byron’s name to further his own reputation. John tried to take control by preparing his own edition, but the public was not interested, and disgusted with the literary life, he attempted to rejoin Ampleforth and train as a monk. Still “The Vampyre” plagued him as his application was denied because of “certain publications which I have seen,” wrote the Prior, “and of which I must tell [you] as a friend, I wish you had not been the author.” Polidori enrolled to study law using his mother’s maiden name, but, finding no appetite for it, fell into gambling. With the shadow of Byron making everything he did seem paltry and derivative, and the weight of rejection impressing itself on him like a judgment on his being, John Polidori took his own life at the age of twenty five by drinking a beaker of cyanide.
“Poor Polidori,” wrote Byron when he heard the news, “it seems that disappointment was the cause of this rash act. He had entertained too sanguine hopes of literary fame.”
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: October 16, 2014

author: Andrew McConnell Stott


text:
Machiavelli, Comedian

By Christopher S. Celenza
August 5, 2015

Most familiar today as the godfather of Realpolitik and as the eponym for all things cunning and devious, the Renaissance thinker Niccolò Machiavelli also had a lighter side, writing as he did a number of comedies. Christopher S. Celenza looks at perhaps the best known of these plays, Mandragola, and explores what it can teach us about the man and his world.

“Comedian”, admittedly, isn’t the first word you associate with Machiavelli.  And “funny” is not a word normally applied to Lucretius.  And yet, through some strange alchemy of time, circumstance, and the rhythms of Renaissance life, those seemingly discordant elements came together in a remarkable way. You could argue that Machiavelli’s entire worldview was comic, but comic in a peculiar way: ironic, wry, a little melancholy, punctuated by an earthy vulgarity that, these days, would get him thrown off a university faculty in a minute.  More than this, the central premises of what was funny have changed so significantly that it invites us to think about how comedy works and when it’s time to say that a comedy, however venerable, just isn’t funny anymore.
Take his play, Mandragola, or, in English, “The Mandrake Root.”  The odd title (and it would have been odd in Machiavelli’s day, too) has to do with fertility.  The plant appears in the Bible, in contexts where carnal knowledge is in question, like when Leah, one of Jacob’s two wives, wants to convince him to lie with her (Gen. 30:14-16), or when, in the Song of Songs, a woman sings a song of her own seductiveness  “I am my beloved’s, and his desire is toward me . . . The mandrakes give a smell, and at our gates are all manner of pleasant fruits . . . .” (Song of Songs, 7:10-13). If the lasting biblical associations of the plant had to do with love, the herb also had magical and spell-like connotations. It could be thought to induce a great and powerful sleep, and in some accounts was even thought to cry out when pulled from the earth.
Machiavelli’s title enfolded many of these meanings.  The play concerns a young man, Callimaco, who though Florentine in origin spent much of his youth in France.  From clues in the play we learn he is about thirty years old and that the action is set in the year 1504.  At a gathering of friends, all male of course, a debate breaks out over who has the more beautiful women, France or Italy.  Though the debaters give the palm to French women, one of his Florentine friends says he has a relative, Lucrezia, whose beauty is unequalled anywhere.  Callimaco becomes curious to the point of leaving France and going to Florence.  There his curiosity escalates to passion, as he is all but driven mad by love after finally laying eyes on Lucrezia.
As it happens Lucrezia is married to a slow-witted lawyer named Messer Nicia.  They have been trying unsuccessfully to have children. Ligurio – a matchmaker and, not coincidentally, a friend of Callimaco – suggests that the couple’s troubles may allow Callimaco to get close to Lucrezia.  At first, Ligurio suggests that the couple go to the baths, known to improve fertility.  Callimaco says he will go, so that he can see Lucrezia and because di cosa nasce cosa – “one thing begets another”. He is ready to trust his instincts and improvise as need be to find a way to be with Lucrezia.  But then another plan is hatched.  This one involves an elaborate scheme whereby Callimaco, posing as a doctor, convinces dull-witted Nicia to have Lucrezia take a special potion to help her conceive.
The catch? The first person to make love with Lucrezia after she takes this potion will die.  But thereafter, she will be fertile, children will follow, and all will be well, so the concocted story goes.  Nicia agrees to this “solution”. Lucrezia’s mother agrees to help, as does a corruptible friar named fra Timoteo, and of course Lucrezia is never to know of the fatal consequences of her one-time, absolutely necessary, extra-marital coition.
And who lines up to play the role of that sacrificial, lovemaking lamb? Callimaco (in costume), with Ligurio’s eager help. Ligurio tells Callimaco how to break the news of all this to Lucrezia:
Explain the trick to her, show her the love you bring her, tell her how much you love her and how she can be your lover with no dishonor and how she can be your enemy, but with a great loss of her honor.  Once she spends the night with you, she won’t want it to be the last.
Everything goes according to plan. Lucrezia, having had Callimaco with her for a night and realizing that her honor would be lost if she blew the whistle, as it were, agrees to take Callimaco as a lover in the expectation that, when Nicia (older as he is) eventually passes away, she and Callimaco will marry.  Poor old Nicia is fooled into accepting “doctor” Callimaco as a close family friend, and the play closes with Lucrezia being “introduced” to this wonder-working doctor.
And here is where things get complicated.  Because the truth is that what is being described in the play is, essentially, a kind of date rape. I had never been quite comfortable with the text for precisely this reason. True, there have been some feminist scholars who have argued that it was Lucrezia’s choice to go forward, so that it is really she who has “agency”. But we know what the story is: Callimaco and Ligurio found a way to get pure, naïve Lucrezia into bed, laughing all the way.
This comedy, as well as Machiavelli’s other comedic works, possesses in many ways a formal unity with the rest of his (better known) oeuvre.  All formed part of what we can call the “comedy of life”, in which life’s randomness, unpredictability (di cosa nasce cosa), and indecipherability take pride of place.  Machiavelli himself had suffered outrageous slings of fortune.  He went from being a respected public official who participated in over forty diplomatic missions for Florence (from 1498–1512) to coming under unwarranted suspicion for conspiracy, suffering jail time, and being forced into house arrest. The circumstances of his life taught him all he needed to know about life’s unpredictability.
But there was more to the story.  Some time around the year 1498, when a relatively young Machiavelli had not yet entered public life definitively, he took the time to hand copy two texts into a manuscript (that today resides in the Vatican Library).  The texts were: Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things and Terence’s Eunuch.
It is a strange juxtaposition, at least on the surface.  Lucretius had become popular in the fifteenth century after Poggio Bracciolini discovered a full version of On the Nature of Things during the Council of Constance.  The first-century BCE thinker had written a meditative poem in six books. Its overriding theme was Epicureanism, and the excellence of its Latin entranced Renaissance thinkers always on the alert for stylistic models.  As an Epicurean, Lucretius adopted “atomism” as a basis of his natural philosophy. He believed, that is, that all things were made of particles. When the formal unity of any given thing ended — when a tree died, say, or when a human being passed away – the constituent particles then dispersed into the void, to combine and recombine endlessly into other things.  This process was totally natural: “. . . nature is free and uncontrolled by proud masters and runs the universe herself without the aid of gods”.  And though gods exist, they live in their own realm, utterly unconcerned with human affairs: “. . .All their wants are supplied by nature, and nothing at any time cankers their peace of mind”. Human beings are on their own, and if there is a purpose behind human life it is not obvious: randomness is all.
Lucretius is a lot of things. One thing he is not, is funny.  But Terence is, at least by the standards of pre-modern Florence.  In fact Renaissance thinkers liked Terence quite a bit, both as a model of how to write Latin as people spoke it day-to-day and as a model for comedy.  Convoluted plots, love stories, witty servants, love causing “madness” in youth: these things and more served as basic elements of comedy in the ancient world, as they did in the Renaissance.
As to the Eunuch itself, it set fashionably in Athens, where a young man, Phaedria, is madly in love with a foreign-born courtesan and is given hard-nosed advice on love by his wily servant. Sub-plot after sub-plot emerges, and other love struck characters come into play. These include Phaedria’s brother posing as a eunuch who uses his feigned status to be alone with a woman with whom he is madly in love and on whom he then forces himself. He runs away but then is forced to come back, whereupon he declares his love for the woman he raped, and they wind up together.
We do not really know why Machiavelli copied those texts by Lucretius and Terence, one after the other, joining them in a single manuscript.  We have only the artifact itself. And of course it would be unwise to make too much of the fact.  But the juxtaposition is noteworthy, inviting us as it does to look at what the two ancient texts shared and how they may have contributed to Machiavelli’s views on the “comedy of life”.
Returning to Mandragola, we can ask: is it funny?  The best I can come up with is . . . sort of. If it were performed and set well, the many comic asides could make an audience laugh.  In their parody of pious religiosity, Timoteo’s attempts to convince Lucrezia to go through with what she believes will be a deadly act of extra-marital sex are funny. And the various times fra Timoteo is portrayed as less than pious can engender a wry smile.  Example:
LIGURIO TO CALLIMACO: Your friar will want something beyond prayers.CALLIMACO: What?LIGURIO: Money.
But then there is that other thing: not only the date rape, but also the sense that Machiavelli and his male cohort had never once sat down and had a real, person to person conversation with a woman.  Take fra Timoteo’s monologue in Act 3, scene 9, where he is musing out loud on the plan.  The real reason he thinks it will work: “. . . in the end all women are pretty slow” (tutte le donne hanno alla fine poco cervello). It is like watching a comic slapstick film from the 1940s, laughing at all the perfectly executed pratfalls, and then coming up against that one cringe-inducing scene of a racial caricature, say, or anything else that for its time and place was acceptable but today is so out of bounds that it tends to taint the whole enterprise.  Even Lucrezia’s decision to sleep with Callimaco is related indirectly.  We learn of it only through Callimaco’s boastful recounting the day after to his friend Ligurio.  Lucrezia is a device, not a person.
In the end the value of Machiavelli’s comedies resides not so much in their original purpose – to make people laugh – but in what they can teach us about him and his world.  It is striking that despite the manifold differences between Machiavelli’s surroundings and ours, there are such similarities between his environment and that of ancient Rome.  A comedy like Terence’s Eunuch not only spoke to Machiavelli and his cohort, it also served as a source of imitative inspiration. That fact reminds us that, despite the many times we can find traces of ourselves in Machiavelli’s work – of the Realpolitik that he helped create, say, or the tendency to observe human motivation shorn of traditional morality – he was also living in a world gone by.
It was a place where it was assumed that women simply were not part of the conversation, where the post-enlightenment notion of universal human rights (imperfectly realized as those have been) was only a dim adumbration, and where a lot of what might have made one laugh was differently situated.  None of this is to praise or blame Machiavelli or his ancient Roman sources for what seem to us today like failings.  Comedy serves as a kind of retrospective indicator of blind spots.  It is our fate not to know what posterity will make of our own age’s comic strivings. But wouldn’t one like to be a fly on the wall in five hundred years?
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: August 5, 2015

author: Christopher S. Celenza


text:
Cat Pianos, Sound-Houses, and Other Imaginary Musical Instruments

By Thomas Patteson and Deirdre Loughridge
July 15, 2015

Deirdre Loughridge and Thomas Patteson, curators of the Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments, explore the wonderful history of made-up musical contraptions, including a piano comprised of yelping cats and Francis Bacon's 17th-century vision of experimental sound manipulation.

And as the instruments of the hand either give motion or guide it, so the instruments of the mind supply either suggestions for the understanding or cautions.Francis Bacon
Numerous museums are dedicated to musical instruments. In Berlin and Brussels, Paris and Phoenix, one can wander rooms lined with musical artifacts from many times and places. Strolling through these rooms, one might admire the exquisite craftsmanship of a Stradivarius violin or the opulent artistry of a French harpsichord. One might linger over forgotten curiosities like the tromba marina or abortive experiments like Adolphe Sax’s seven-bell horn. One’s path might follow changes in the instrumentarium from Renaissance woods and metals to modern plastics and electronics, and the experience might lead one to wonder at the diversity of species born from the physics of vibrating strings, air columns, and resonating bodies.
Missing from such collections, however, is the peculiar class of what we like to call “fictophones”: imaginary musical instruments. Though these instruments, due to some measure of impracticality and impossibility, did not take sounding form, they were nonetheless put forth in the various means available to conjure objects in our minds: in writings, drawings, sometimes even in detailed schematics. One might suppose that imaginary musical instruments, deprived of physical reality, have no place in the cultural histories and heritages that a museum of musical instruments aims to illuminate and preserve. Yet in their own strange ways, imaginary musical instruments exist. What’s more, they have not merely shadowed or paralleled musical life; they have formed a vital part of it, participating in ways that show the fragility of the distinction between imaginary and real. No less than instruments you hold in your hand, imaginary instruments act as interfaces between mind and world, limning the edges of what we may think and do.
Take, for starters, Francis Bacon’s “sound-houses”. Bacon described these spaces for manipulating sound in his New Atlantis (1626), a utopian work in which a European traveller, lost at sea, happens upon a society living on the mythical island of Bensalem. The “sound-houses” represent the acoustic branch of Bensalem’s state-sponsored research program, which seeks both to produce knowledge of how nature works, and to translate that knowledge into real-world applications for human benefit. In the following passage, the director of Bensalem’s scientific endeavors explains to his foreign guest:
We have also sound-houses, where we practice and demonstrate all sounds and their generation. We have harmonies, which you have not, of quarter-sounds and lesser slides of sounds. Divers instruments of music likewise to you unknown, some sweeter than any you have, together with bells and rings that are dainty and sweet. We represent small sounds as great and deep, likewise great sounds extenuate and sharp; we make divers tremblings and warblings of sounds, which in their original are entire. We represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices and notes of beasts and birds. We have certain helps which set to the ear do further the hearing greatly. We also have divers strange and artificial echoes, reflecting the voice many times, and as it were tossing it, and some that give back the voice louder than it came, some shriller and some deeper; yea, some rendering the voice differing in the letters or articulate sound from that they receive. We have also means to convey sounds in trunks and pipes, in strange lines and distances.
Bacon’s sound-houses are hypothetical, an exercise in imagining what could be. Many readers today find them prophetic, and it is tempting to read the line about “divers instruments of music likewise to you unknown” as if its author had a foreknowledge of synthesizers and tape. But to read the sound-houses in this way displaces them from their own time, and from the experiments with pipes, bells, and string instruments from which Bacon extrapolated. By reducing their role to one of prediction, furthermore, it sets the imaginary at a powerless remove from the real. Rather than prophetic, Bacon’s sound-houses are emblematic of the power of imaginary instruments to act upon the world — of the magnet-like force they exert, attracting (or repelling) certain modes of thought and action.
One of the first to explore the musical possibilities of electronic instruments, Daphne Oram, was familiar with Bacon’s New Atlantis. In 1958, she posted the passage about sound-houses on the door of the Radiophonic Workshop, the newly founded department within the BBC dedicated to electronic music, which she helped establish. At this early moment in electronic music, it was far from clear what techniques and sounds would prove valuable, what aspects of past musical practice would translate. Oram’s invocation of Bacon’s sound-houses suggests that such moments create openings for the imaginary to flood in — not just from the creative minds of individuals, but from a collective storehouse of fantasies. Imaginary instruments help ideas circulate together with the desire for (or fear of) their realization. As Bacon himself observed, “instruments of the mind supply either suggestions for the understanding or cautions.”
Bacon’s sound-houses illustrate one era’s technological imaginary becoming a later one’s reality — the course of things we’d likely expect. But the process can run the other way around as well. The tubo cochleato, for example, was described by Athanasius Kircher in his treatise on acoustics, Phonurgia nova (1673), as a device for amplifying the voice. Kircher’s student Filippo Bonanni also discussed the device in his book, Gabinetto armonico pieno d’istromenti sonori indicati e spiegati (Musical cabinet full of sounding instruments, shown and explained, 1722), where it appears among musical instruments both of common European use and from other parts of the world. As Bonanni explained, the tubo cochleato would amplify the voice much more than a straight tube; the evidence came from nature, from the fact that the ears of hares and other timid animals were formed in the spiral shape. But since it was extremely difficult for man to make a spiral so perfect as nature, it was near impossible to construct the tubo cochleato, and no one in Bonanni’s day used the device.  ※※Indexed under…Spiralform of imagined musical instrument
In fact, the tubo cochleato was purely speculative. But only in light of later theories of sound propagation would the design appear fundamentally flawed, the concept out of line with basic physics in addition to human craftsmanship. For Kircher and Bonanni, the instrument was real. Kircher’s reality, indeed, included many things we would consider fantastic (dragons, for instance, as John Glassie has discussed). As a measure of the gap between our reality and Kircher’s, the tubo cochleato (like the dragon) attests to the power of research and experiment to debunk the fabulous. At the same time — perhaps more disconcertingly — Bonanni’s book reveals the power of images and texts to define the real through a blend of speculative and empirical elements.
Similarly hovering between the speculative and empirical is the curious device known as the cat piano. The earliest known image of a set of cats arrayed as sound-producing elements to be activated by the fingers dates to the late sixteenth century, that is, over a hundred years before the invention of the piano, at a time when it would more properly be called a cat harpsichord or clavichord. The image comes from an emblem book, Johann Theodor de Bry’s Emblemata saecularia mira et iucunda uarietate saeculi huius mores ita exprimentia ut sodalitatum symbolis. . . (1596), and shows a motley ensemble of animals and confused musicians. A subtitle to the scene, “There is no music sweeter to Midas’s ears”, alludes to the Phrygian King whose punishment for preferring Pan’s pipe to Apollo’s lyre was to have his ears turned into those of a donkey. ※※Indexed under…Catsas musical instrument
From a comical image of cacophony, the cat piano underwent a series of unexpected functional transformations. By the 1650s it was a legendary music therapy: supposedly, an Italian prince was cured of his melancholy by the device when he found its meowing cats, triggered by driving spikes through their tails, irresistibly funny. The early-nineteenth-century medical theorist Johann Christian Reil offered a different account of the cat piano’s therapeutic powers. In his treatise on psychological cures for the mentally disturbed, Rhapsodieen über die Anwendung der psychischen Curmethode auf Geisteszerrüttungen (1803), he presented the cat piano as a hypothetical fix for dreamers unable to focus attention on the external world. As he vividly explained, the cats would
be arranged in a row with their tails stretched behind them. And a keyboard fitted out with sharpened nails would be set over them. The struck cats would provide the sound. A fugue played on this instrument — when the ill person is so placed that he cannot miss the expressions on their faces and the play of these animals — must bring Lot’s wife herself from her fixed state into conscious awareness.
In yet another thought-experiment with the instrument, the eighteenth-century Parisian Louis-Bertrand Castel invoked it to prove his contention that what mattered in music was the combination of sounds, not sounds in their own right. The fact that one could make music from the individually ugly plaints of pained cats proved that “sounds on their own possess no beauty, and that all the beauties of music come not from sound, but from the melodic sequence and the harmonic combination of these sounds, multiplied and varied in proportion.”
The absurdity of a cat piano has no doubt contributed to its appeal across the centuries. But the license granted in the space of the imaginary points to illicit aspects of the real. The cat piano unearths an uncomfortable connection between music and abuse, between the artistic control of sound and the heartless treatment of sounding bodies. Both artistic control and heartless treatment are abetted by the keyboard interface, which gives players access to numerous pitches but only at a remove from their sources. That keyboards facilitate cruelty is a notion hardly evident in the history of realized instruments (a rare hint is found on an eighteenth-century spinet inscribed, “intactum sileo percute dulce cano”: “untouched, I am silent; strike me, I sing sweetly”). But it is front and center in the history of imaginary instruments. Jules Verne demonstrated the connection by substituting humans for cats: in his short story “M. Ré-dièze et Mlle Mi-bémol” (“Mister Ray Sharp and Miss Me Flat”, 1893) a musician outfits an organ with a special register of children’s voices. From the perspective of the child assigned to the pitch D-sharp (or re sharp, in solfége), we learn the appalling truth:  ※※Indexed under…SilenceSpoiled desire for
then an air-current inflates my chest, a current skillfully controlled, which carries the Ray sharp out of my lips. I want to be silent, but I cannot. I am nothing but an instrument in the organist’s hands. His touch upon the keyboard is like a valve opening in my heart.
The keyboard finds yet more sadistic form as a species of organ in the film The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988). Called the “Torturetron”, the instrument sends spikes into people’s sides so as to add their moans to the tones of its more conventional ranks of pipes.
Verne’s organ and the Torturetron exemplify the capacity of imaginary instruments to serve as “cautions” — cautions we would do well to heed in this age when so much of what we do takes place through keyboards and other interfaces that remove us from the carrying-out of our commands. The note of warning is one imaginary instruments have sounded with growing regularity since the nineteenth century, as the wonders of new technologies have stoked fears about their consequences for humanity. Amidst the rise of industrial machinery, for example, the French caricaturist J. J. Grandville envisioned a fantastic “steam concert” of intelligent, steam-powered instruments. The program, described in his book Un autre monde (1844), features such pieces as L’explosion, mélodie pour 200 trombones (The explosion: A melody for 200 trombones) and La locomotive, symphonie à basse pression, de la orce de trois cents chevaux (The locomotive: A low pressure symphony with 200 horsepower) and Le moi et le non-moi, symphonie philosophique en ut (The self and the non-self: Philosophical symphony in C). At once fascinating and disturbing, Grandville’s anthropomorphic instruments express a fundamental ambivalence about the development of increasingly powerful and autonomous technologies.
“Ask any good Frenchman . . . what he understands by progress”, Charles Baudelaire observed in 1855, “he will tell you that it is steam, electricity, and gas lighting.” Today, one might say that what we understand by progress is digital networks, mind-machine interfaces, and biotechnologies. These have been prime stimuli to twentieth- and twenty-first-century inventors of imaginary instruments such as Pat Cadigan, who detailed brain-sockets for music video production in the cyberpunk novel Synners (1991), and Richard Powers, whose Orfeo (2014) envisioned music encoded in DNA.
Grandville, Cadigan, and Powers illustrate not only a cautionary strand in imaginary instrument design, but also a distinct temporal orientation: each places his or her inventions in the not-too-distant future. In the history of imaginary musical instruments, the emergence of a futuristic orientation can be dated quite precisely. The turning point occurs with Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s novel L’An 2440 (The year 2440), published in 1771. The utopian premise of the novel is reminiscent of Bacon’s New Atlantis. Here too, an outsider encounters a society where experimental research is undertaken for the benefit of mankind; in the field of acoustics, a device made of springs is capable of imitating all manner of sounds, and is used to dissuade the King from going to war by letting him hear the horrors and grief it would cause. But where Bacon’s sound-houses were found in a contemporaneous foreign land, Mercier’s springs exist in their author’s home city seven hundred years in the future (Paris in 2440). The novel, generally considered the first significant example of fiction set in the future, promptly inspired other futurological visions, such as the fantastic image of a twenty-fifth-century postal balloon shown below, which would deliver mail via the air and have a pipe organ built into its bow.
The imagination is often figured as a site of infinite possibility, free to create without regard to material limitations. But touring the museum of imaginary musical instruments suggests that there are in fact certain grooves that form over time to channel the course of fantasy. Futuristic imaginary instruments flow along one such groove. The future orientation of the imagination directs its energies to the technologies synonymous with “progress” in the present — an effect that starts to show its peculiar limitations when one looks back at projections like the hot air balloon of 2440. This particular channel for technological fantasy was not always so deep. Before the eighteenth century, imaginary instruments typically appeared either in a contemporaneous foreign land (like Bacon’s sound-houses) or in the past, as devices that existed but had been lost (like the tubo cochleato). The museum of imaginary musical instruments thus illuminates not only the intersection of reality and fantasy, but also the unknown history of the imagination. It reveals numerous paths of inventive thought not taken — paths covered up by years of “progress”, but which, when cleared off, might yet lead us back to something new.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Thomas Patteson and Deirdre Loughridge


text:
Illustrations of Madness
James Tilly Matthews and the Air Loom
By Mike Jay
November 12, 2014

Mike Jay recounts the tragic story of James Tilly Matthews, a former peace activist of the Napoleonic Wars who was confined to London's notorious Bedlam asylum in 1797 for believing that his mind was under the control of the “Air Loom” — a terrifying machine whose mesmeric rays and mysterious gases were brainwashing politicians and plunging Europe into revolution, terror, and war.

In 1810 John Haslam, a London apothecary, published the first ever book-length description of a mad person’s delusions. Until this point most medical case histories of what we now refer to as mental illness had amounted to a line or two at most, and more often just a single word such as “frenzied” or “melancholy”. But the opinions of James Tilly Matthews resisted any such summary. He described a previously unimagined world of futuristic machines, “magnetic spies” and mass brainwashing, woven into a bizarre but undeniably well-informed narrative of the high politics behind the Napoleonic Wars.
Haslam titled his book Illustrations of Madness, and it was full of lessons for the nascent profession of “mad-doctoring”, later to be known as psychiatry. But it was also written to settle a personal score. Haslam was the apothecary at the Royal Bethlem Hospital — in popular slang, Bedlam — where James Tilly Matthews had for the previous decade been confined as an incurable lunatic. Not everyone, however, believed that Matthews was mad. Haslam’s diagnosis had been contested by other doctors, and the governors of Bethlem had distanced themselves from it. He wrote his book in retaliation against his superiors; but as it turned out, his patient would have the last word.
Although Haslam has been relegated to a footnote in the history of psychiatry, his account of Matthews’ inner world is still cited as the first fully described case of what we now call paranoid schizophrenia, and in particular of an “influencing machine”: the belief, or delusion, that a covertly operated device is acting at a distance to control the subject’s mind and body. For everyone who has since had messages beamed at them by the CIA, MI5, Masonic lodges or UFOs, via dental fillings, mysterious implants, TV sets or surveillance satellites, James Tilly Matthews is patient zero.
Over the ten years they had spent together in Bedlam, Matthews revealed his secret world to Haslam in exhaustive detail. Around the corner from Bedlam, in a dank basement cellar by London Wall, a gang of villains were controlling and tormenting him with a machine called an “Air Loom”. Matthews had even drawn a technical diagram of the device, which Haslam included in his book with a sarcastic commentary that invited the reader to laugh at its absurdity: a literal “illustration of madness”. But Matthews’ drawing has a more unnerving effect than Haslam allows. Levers, barrels, batteries, brass retorts and cylinders are rendered with the cool conviction of an engineer’s blueprint. It is the first ever published work of art by an asylum inmate, but it would hardly have looked out of place in the scientific journals or enyclopaedias of its day.
The Air Loom worked, as its name suggests, by weaving “airs”, or gases, into a “warp of magnetic fluid” which was then directed at its victim. Matthews’ explanation of its powers combined the cutting-edge technologies of pneumatic chemistry and the electric battery with the controversial science of animal magnetism, or mesmerism. The finer detail becomes increasingly strange. It was fuelled by combinations of “fetid effluvia”, including “spermatic-animal-seminal rays”, “putrid human breath”, and “gaz from the anus of the horse”, and its magnetic warp assailed Matthews’ brain in a catalogue of forms known as “event-workings”. These included “brain-saying” and “dream-working”, by which thoughts were forced into his brain against his will, and a terrifying array of physical tortures from “knee nailing”, “vital tearing“ and “fibre ripping” to “apoplexy-working with the nutmeg grater” and the dreaded “lobster-cracking”, where the air around his chest was constricted until he was unable to breathe. To facilitate their control over him, the gang had implanted a magnet into his brain. He was tormented constantly by hallucinations, physical agonies, fits of laughter or being forced to parrot whatever words they chose to feed into his head. No wonder some people thought he was mad.
The machine’s operators were a gang of undercover Jacobin terrorists, who Matthews described with haunting precision. Their leader, Bill the King, was a coarse-faced and ruthless puppetmaster who “has never been known to smile”; his second-in-command, Jack the Schoolmaster, took careful notes on the Air Loom’s operations, pushing his wig back with his forefinger as he wrote. The operator was a sinister, pockmarked lady known only as the “Glove Woman”. The public face of the gang was a sharp-featured woman named Augusta, superficially charming but “exceedingly spiteful and malignant” when crossed, who roamed London’s west end as an undercover agent.
The operation directed at Matthews was only part of a larger story. There were more Air Looms and their gangs concealed across London, and their unseen influence extended all the way up to the Prime Minister, William Pitt, whose mind was firmly under their control. Their agents lurked in streets, theatres and coffee-houses, where they tricked the unsuspecting into inhaling magnetic fluids. If the gang were recognised in public, they would grasp magnetised batons that clouded the perception of anyone in the vicinity. The object of their intrigues was to poison the minds of politicians on both sides of the Channel, and thereby keep Britain and revolutionary France locked into their ruinous war.
Matthews’ beliefs had their roots in his implausible but true story. A political activist and peace campaigner, he had become involved during the French revolution in clandestine efforts to head off the looming war between France and England. Shuttling between London and Paris, he had remarkable success in persuading the moderate faction of the French government to commit to a peace plan, and he had met several times with Pitt and Lord Liverpool, his secretary of war, to propose an alliance with them against the Jacobins and the Paris mob.
But the execution of King Louis XVI in 1793 set Britain and France on an inexorable course to war, and Matthews was eventually arrested in Paris by the Committee of Public Safety on suspicion of being an English spy. He remained under arrest during the height of the Terror, in constant fear of the guillotine. When he was released three years later, he limped home to England and accused Pitt and Liverpool of abandoning a loyal patriot. His letters were ignored, and his accusations became more florid: Pitt’s government were secretly in league with the Jacobins, and prolonging the war for their own corrupt ends. Finally he confronted his betrayers in the public gallery of the House of Commons on 30 December 1796, loudly accusing Lord Liverpool of treason. He was arrested, judged to be of unsound mind and sent to Bedlam.
All Matthews’ convoluted tales of espionage and conspiracy were considered by Haslam merely as a symptom of his madness, and dealt with accordingly. His treatment of lunatics, as described in his earlier book Observations on Insanity (1798), stressed the need to “obtain an ascendancy” over the patient, a process comparable to training a dog or breaking in a horse. To debate with lunatics about their beliefs was to enter a “perplexity of metaphysical mazes”. Matthews in turn refused to acknowledge Haslam’s authority, maintaining that he was merely a stooge of the Home Secretary, yet another bit-player in the international conspiracy to silence him.
Confined and neglected, Matthews’ persecutory fantasies intensified. But his family refused to accept that he was mad. To them he still appeared his lucid, intelligent and gentle self: it was tragic but understandable that his traumatic experiences had left him with some cranky political views. Haslam’s theory of insanity, however, allowed for no such generosity. As he put it in Illustrations of Madness, “Madness being the opposite to reason and good sense, as light is to darkness, straight is to crooked &c., it appears wonderful that two opposite opinions could be entertained on the subject”. Matthews was mad: no-one who believed they were controlled by an Air Loom could be otherwise, and “there are already too many maniacs allowed to enjoy a dangerous liberty”. He banned Matthews’ wife from visiting him in Bethlem.
Matthews’ family persisted with their case that he was sane, and offered to guarantee his good behaviour if he were released. Finally, in 1809, they were permitted to engage two physicians named Henry Clutterbuck and George Birkbeck to examine Matthews independently. Both concluded that he was in his right mind, and that his alleged symptoms of madness — hostility to authority and insistence that he was being conspired against — could equally be seen as the responses of a sane man unjustly confined.
On the basis of this testimony Matthews’ family served Bethlem with a writ of Habeas Corpus, forcing the governors to state their legal reasons for holding him. Haslam wrote a lengthy affidavit on Matthews’ case, detailing his delusions and claiming that he had made violent threats against the life of George III. In the end, however, the case turned on a short letter from the Home Secretary recommending “that you do continue to detain in your hosp[ital] as a fit and proper subject James Tilly Matthews a lunatic who is at present under your charge”. The Bethlem governors justified Matthews’ detention on the basis that he was “in the Hospital by the order and with the knowledge of Government”, and the writ of Habeas Corpus was rejected. Matthews, it seemed, was not a lunatic but a political prisoner, just as he had always maintained.
Having his medical opinion dismissed in this way spurred Haslam to publish a full account of the case. Illustrations of Madness opened with a withering attack on Clutterbuck and Birkbeck: “how they failed to detect his insanity is inexplicable”. He paraded Matthews’ delusions like a ringmaster in the circus of lunacy, advertising on the title page ‘a singular case of insanity, and a no less remarkable difference in medical opinion’, and tantalising the reader with the prospect of “a description of the tortures experienced by bomb-bursting, lobster-cracking and lengthening the brain”. All this was “embellished with a curious plate” — Matthews’ drawing of the Air Loom — and accompanied by excerpts from Matthews’ own notes on the “mischievous and complicated science” that lay behind it.
Although Illustrations of Madness was an extended argument for his permanent detention, Matthews managed to turn its publication to his advantage. His drawing of the Air Loom was admired by visiting doctors, and he began to teach himself draughtsmanship and engraving. The following year he submitted architectural plans for a new Bethlem hospital which so impressed the governors that they awarded him a prize of £30. In 1814 his family succeeded in transferring him to a more congenial private asylum, Fox’s London House in Hackney. Dr. Samuel Fox, the proprietor, regarded him as entirely sane, and he was soon helping out with book-keeping and gardening.
Matthews died the following year, but he had his revenge on Haslam from beyond the grave. In 1815 a House of Commons committee was set up to investigate conditions in madhouses, including allegations of mismanagement and cruelty at Bethlem. When examined, Haslam blamed the hospital staff: they were incompetent and frequently drunk, and the resident surgeon was “so insane as to have a strait-waistcoat”. In response, the head keeper testified that Haslam, frustrated by Matthews’ refusal to accept his authority, had kept him in handcuffs “to punish him for the use of his tongue”. Chaining non-violent patients had become emblematic of the evils of the old madhouse system, and indeed Haslam had criticised the practice in his own books. When the Committee’s report was published in 1816, he was dismissed by the Bethlem governors.
Haslam’s career was ruined. He sold everything he owned, doggedly retrained as a physician and eventually took his M.D. at the age of sixty. He became a specialist legal witness in trials involving criminal lunacy, giving his opinion on questions such as imbecility and “lucid intervals”. But Matthews’ case seems to have destroyed his certainty that the mad could be unfailingly distinguished from the sane. In his old age, when asked in court whether a defendant was of sound mind, he replied: “I never saw any human being who was of sound mind”. Pressed further by the judge, he simply added: “I presume the Deity is of sound mind, and He alone”.

Mindcraft from the Wellcome Collection

The above animation from Beakus is part of of the Wellcome Collection’s new online and digital exhibition titled Mindcraft, which explores a century of madness, murder and mental healing, from the arrival in Paris of Franz Anton Mesmer with his theories of ‘animal magnetism’ to the therapeutic power of hypnotism used by Freud. Learn more here.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: November 12, 2014

author: Mike Ja