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As a Lute out of Tune
Robert Burton’s Melancholy
By Noga Arikha
May 1, 2013

In 1621 Robert Burton first published his masterpiece The Anatomy of Melancholy, a vast feat of scholarship examining in encyclopaedic detail that most enigmatic of maladies. Noga Arikha explores the book, said to be the favorite of both Samuel Johnson and Keats, and places it within the context of the humoural theory so popular at the time.

Robert Burton might well have loved the Internet. His Anatomy of Melancholy, whose first of six editions published during the Oxford clergyman’s lifetime appeared in 1621, is the apogee of Renaissance scholarship — at once the summa of classical learning spliced and rendered in the vernacular for the delight of its early modern audience, and a dense network of embedded quotations, a seemingly infinite set of hyperlinks. This never-ending gathering of scholarship could seem a testimony to the ultimate vanity of human knowledge, as melancholy as the endless sea of information that our screens indifferently project to our digital onlookers’ tired eyes. One would be hard-put to read the entirety of this enormous tome online, but online and public it needs to be, because it is one of the greatest works in the English language, because it is a good book to browse via a search word, and because it addresses a theme that is still dear to our late modern civilization.
Melancholy is an old concept; in ancient Greek, melan means black, and hole is the word for bile. Melancholy literally means black bile: however ancient, we still know what that means. One can imagine black bile running through unpleasant states and negative emotions, from existential malaise and bitterness to common depression and despondency. Earlier, melancholy also covered madness and mania. Anyone could be afflicted — lovers, scholars, rulers. Monomaniacs were melancholics. And poets of course: melancholy at its best was a fount of inspiration and creativity. There are many famous melancholics — the author of Ecclesiastes was one, so was Hamlet (Shakespeare probably had read an earlier treatise on the subject, published in 1586 by the physician and clergyman Timothie Bright).

Burton was a deeply literary man who wanted to show how the words of others had described the melancholy aspects of the human predicament. As he warns in his book-length preamble, Democritus Junior to the Reader:
So that take melancholy in what sense you will, properly or improperly, in disposition or habit, for pleasure or for pain, dotage, discontent, fear, sorrow, madness, for part, or all, truly, or metaphorically, ‘tis all one. Laughter itself is madness according to Solomon, and as St. Paul hath it, Worldly sorrow brings death. The hearts of the sons of men are evil, and madness is in their hearts while they live, Eccl. ix. 3. Wise men themselves are no better. Eccl. i. 18. In the multitude of wisdom is much grief, and he that increaseth wisdom, increaseth sorrow, chap. ii. 17.
The book is a catalogue of passions as well as a compendium of quotes and stories — not so much a medical treatise, even though there are, and must be pages on anatomy and physiology. For black bile was a medical concept, one of the four bodily humours or fluids that coursed through the organism and determined its constitution, and along with it, our appearance and character, our strengths and weaknesses, our tastes, propensities and illnesses. To talk about melancholy was to engage in and endorse humoural theory. In its terms, black bile was a “cooked” version of yellow bile, or choler. The other two humours were phlegm, and blood. Mooted by the Hippocratics in 5th-century BC Greece on the basis of the view of the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles that all matter was composed of the four elements, the humoural system that developed in the West (China and India each have their own humoural systems as well) had been systematized in the 2nd century by the Roman physician Galen, who associated humours with temperaments. Black bile might be noble, in some of its manifestations. But it was at first a crass outcome of digestive processes. Burton explained: “The gall, placed in the concave of the liver, extracts choler to it: the spleen, melancholy; which is situate on the left side, over against the liver, a spongy matter, that draws this black choler to it by a secret virtue, and feeds upon it, conveying the rest to the bottom of the stomach, to stir up appetite, or else to the guts as excrement.” (I, 12,4)
All humours arose in the liver out of the stomach-based concoction of so-called chyle from food, before being further refined with their spirits in the heart, then the brain. The melancholic would have a preponderance of black bile, the choleric, of yellow bile, the phlegmatic, of phlegm, the sanguine, of blood. To each of these humours was associated a corresponding element, along with its qualities: earth, cold and dry; fire, hot and dry; water, cold and humid; blood, warm and humid. In turn, these were in correspondence with the stars — one could be born under a constellation that conditioned one’s bodily constitution, astral and terrestrial bodies in close, one-way causal correspondence. And how we lived, what we ate, how much we drank, moved, studied, slept, loved; where we lived, in hot or cold or dry or humid climates; what gender one was, what age — all this influenced the humoural balance. One was born with all the humours in a certain proportion, whose constancy guaranteed psychical and physical health; any change in that proportion could signify the fall into a state of holistically conceived ill-health. Balance was all. In itself, black bile did not warrant any more attention than the other humours.
But its excess bred the states catalogued in Burton’s book. As he put it, “[T]he tower of Babel never yielded such confusion of tongues, as the chaos of melancholy doth variety of symptoms” (I-3 1-II). Melancholy brought forth a plethora of words in the Anatomy just as it had triggered authors before him to try and account for this powerful state — from the “pseudo-Aristotle” who first honoured its particular, potentially noble nature in the so-called “Problem XXX”, to Rufus of Ephesus and the 11th-century Constantinus Africanus, who translated at the Montecassino monastery near Naples the text, itself a translation of Rufus, written at the Tunisia court by the 9th-century Jewish Baghdadi physician, scholar and translator Ishâq ibn ‘Imran. Many others participated in enriching this tradition that Burton so ravenously plundered. Geographically and chronologically extended, the long lineage of humoural knowledge guaranteed its authority: humours were imagined entities that were general enough to explain everything about the interlocked body and psyche, but too general to correspond to any real bodily substances. We emitted tears, blood, mucus, saliva, sweat, urine, sperm or milk, but those were not humours per se. No one had ever seen humours on either side of skin; only their purported effects on complexion, and on bowel movement, urine colour, temperature, pulse, mood. That partly explains their hold on popular and learned imaginations alike.
By the time Burton was writing, though, humoural theory, such as it had developed in the West, was in jeopardy: his book pre-dates by just seven years the publication in 1628 of William Harvey’s An Anatomical Essay Concerning the Movement of the Heart and the Blood in Animals, the Royalist physician’s revolutionary account of blood circulation, based on lectures he gave in 1616 to the College of Physicians. The humoural system was grounded in anatomical assumptions derived from Galen, who had never dissected a human being — such as that of a vascular connection between heart and liver. These assumptions had begun to be overturned in the 16th century thanks to advances in anatomy by the likes of Andreas Vesalius ; and they simply did not cohere with the notion of blood circulation via the lungs. Yet it still made perfect sense to Harvey to write that people afflicted with melancholy or mania manifested symptoms “according to their temperament or krasis, which they had from the stars and those celestial influences, variety of wits and dispositions”, and these symptoms proceeded “from the temperature itself and the organical parts, as head, liver, spleen, meseraic veins, heart, womb, stomach, etc., and especially from distemperature of spirits (which, as Hercules de Saxonia contends, are wholly immaterial), or from the four humours in those seats, whether they be hot or cold, natural, unnatural, innate or adventitious, intended or remitted, simple or mixed, their diverse mixtures and several adustions, combinations. . .”.
One could not forget such a sophisticated corpus of established knowledge from one day to the next. The process that led to the demise of humours was halting. It took time, and in some ways humoural culture is still with us. We are not foreign to the notion that melancholy can be a positive as well as a nefarious force. Some years before Burton, Reverend Thomas Walkington had distinguished the two in a treatise entitled Optick Glasse of Humors, or the Touchstone of a Golden Temperature, or the Philosophers Stone to make a Golden Temper. Wherein the four Complections, Sanguine, Choleriche, Phligmaticke, Melancholicke are succinctly painted forth  (1607): so melancholy could be a “precious balme of witte and policy: the enthusiasticall breath of poetry, the foyson of our phantasies, the sweete sleepe of the senses, the fountaine of sage advise and good purveiance”; but it also “causeth men to bee aliened from the nature of man, and wholly to discarde themselves from all societie, but rather heremits and olde anchorets to live in grots, caves, and other hidden celles of the earth”.
Today just as in Burton’s, or indeed Galen’s day, we seek remedies for our most troubled states. We might forget how embodied are our “mental” disturbances and think it best to dope our brains with targeted pills, but in most cases and in our ordinary daily lives we know that our states of mind are deeply affected by the condition of our whole bodies, by what we eat, by how much we exercise or sleep — and by how well we are loved.
Love-melancholy was an important category of melancholy, and Burton devoted a long chapter to it. It had an ambivalent reputation — bad if one leaned toward stoicism or aspired to chastity, but good if one believed that a capacity for strong passions was the mark of a fine soul that recognized beauty and goodness. It was the foundation of chivalry, the source of sonnets, the harbinger of creativity and the promise of fertility. In its long-studied negative form, it could be an illness at worst whose consequences could be devastating and called for medical treatment. That sort of love-melancholy was condemnable as blind lust, the product of painfully unrequited love, of desire unfulfilled. It was a state in which humoural flows ruled the brain, and whose “symptoms are either of body or mind; of body, paleness, leanness, dryness, etc” — the cause of extreme joys and fears, of “fire” and “ice”, in Burton’s words. It had been the reason for Dido’s suicide, and, as Burton reports, the fount of rash, mad behaviour, such as Medea’s, in whom “Reason pulls one way, burning lust another, / She sees and knows what’s good, but she doth neither”. (III-2 3)
Pure reason is as unlikely to exist as a brain in a vat. We are embodied through and through, and our thought processes are not immune from our physiology. “For as the distraction of the mind, amongst other outward causes and perturbations, alters the temperature of the body, so the distraction and distemper of the body will cause a distemperature of the soul, and ‘tis hard to decide which of these two do more harm to the other”, writes Burton. “Now the chiefest causes proceed from the heart, humours, spirits: as they are purer, or impurer, so is the mind, and equally suffers, as a lute out of tune; if one string or one organ be distempered, all the rest miscarry, Corpus onustum Hesternis vitiis, animum quoque praegravat una [By yesterday’s excesses still oppressed, The body suffers not the mind to rest]”. [I-2V-I]
Humoural theory did not accommodate dualism. And nor does modern psychology. Except for those who still believe in rational choice theory, we know how deeply emotional we are. Hormones and neurotransmitters are the new humours, mysteriously conditioning our emotional responses and, to an extent, our decision-making. No one understands yet how substances and actions are connected, how our newly identified, chemically mapped humours help make up our consciousness, how the mind is an instance of the body-brain. Those questions remain at the heart of Burton’s infinite book and its countless stories of human endeavours, battles, miseries, and hopes.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Noga Arikha


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Henry Morton Stanley and the Pygmies of “Darkest Africa”

By Brian Murray
November 29, 2012

After returning from his disastrous mission to central Africa to rescue a German colonial governor, the explorer Henry Morton Stanley was eager to distract from accusations of brutality with his 'discovery' of African pygmies. Brian Murray explores how after Stanley's trip the African pygmy, in the form of stereotype and allegory, made its way into late Victorian society.

On 28 October 1888 the Welsh-American explorer Henry Morton Stanley was entrenched deep in the unexplored Ituri rainforest of the Congo. He had been hacking his way back and forth through the jungle for months in his attempt to relieve the colonial governor Emin Pasha, whose province in the southern Sudan was under siege by a coalition of Sudanese and Arab insurgents under the command of the messianic cleric Muhammad Ahmad. Famished and exhausted, Stanley sent his East-African porters out to pillage what they could from native farms. On this occasion they brought back an unusual prize: a “couple of pygmies”. These “pygmies” were most likely one of several diminutive ethnic groups (including the Aka, Twa, Mbuti and Efé) that still inhabit the forests in the upper Congo Basin. But for Stanley these Africans did not merely represent intriguing ethnographic specimens; they were also tokens of a rich historical and mythological heritage, a literary tradition stretching back to Homer and the Old Testament.</span?
Not one London editor could guess the feelings with which I regarded this manikin from the solitudes of the vast central African forest . . . That little body of his represented the oldest types of primeval man, descended from the outcasts of the earliest ages, the Ishmaels of the primitive race . . . Even as long ago as forty centuries ago they were known as pigmies, and the famous battle between them and the storks was rendered into song . . .  they reigned over Darkest Africa undisputed lords; they are there yet, while countless dynasties of Egypt and Assyria, Persia, Greece and Rome, have flourished for comparatively brief periods, and expired.
Even though Stanley’s soliloquy is couched in racist European assumptions about the “primitive” nature of Africa and Africans, he nonetheless credits these “manikins” of the forest with an auspicious imperial history of their own. (His reference to the “Father of Poets” alludes to a mythical battle between pygmies and storks mentioned in Homer’s Iliad.) Stanley’s pygmies are venerable ancients who predate and have outlasted all the great empires of antiquity.
Although Stanley and the British press would later claim that he was the first explorer to come face to face with African pygmies, this was untrue. A French Admiral, Fleuriot de Langle, photographed members of a pygmy tribe he labelled the Akoa in Gabon in 1868, and the Latvian-German traveller and botanist George Schweinfurth recorded and measured seven pygmies just north of the Ituri forest in 1870. Schweinfurth also saw these ‘Akka’ as the ancestors of the pygmies of Greek mythology and the “living embodiment of the myths of some thousand years!”
Stanley’s own melodramatic account of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, In Darkest Africa, sold 150,000 copies in 1890 alone and was translated into ten European languages. There were numerous spin-offs and pirate editions in circulation on both sides of the Atlantic before Stanley had even completed the manuscript. The expedition itself, a quasi-military enterprise co-funded by the Egyptian Government and several wealthy individuals, was initially pitched as a sequel to Stanley’s famous mission to find the Scottish missionary David Livingstone in 1870. However, the “search and rescue” narrative did not go to plan on this occasion.
Emin Pasha was the adopted name of Eduard Schnitzer, a German-Jewish doctor born in Silesia who had entered Ottoman service in 1865 and subsequently converted to Islam. Neither Stanley nor Emin were particularly fond of each other and the “rescue” ultimately descended into farce when Emin fell over a balcony and fractured his skull at a celebratory dinner in Zanzibar in December 1889 and Stanley was forced to return to Britain without his prize. Much to Stanley’s dismay, on his recovery Emin took up a post with the German colonial service and soon after the “rescued” governor was making his way back to his province with the intention of annexing it for Germany.
Accusations that Stanley and his officers had resorted to brutality, violence and plunder were widespread in the British and American press. By Stanley’s own admission the expedition was directly and indirectly responsible for the deaths of approximately one thousand individuals, mostly African soldiers, porters and sundry “belligerent natives”. Many also questioned Stanley’s wisdom in leaving the ill-tempered and mentally unstable Edward Barttelot in command of a “rear column” at Yambuya on the Aruwimi river. Stanley had commanded Major Barttelot to await the arrival of supplies and men from the Arab merchant and slave-trader Tippu-Tip (Hamid bin Muhammad el Murjebi) while his own advance column powered on to Emin’s camp on Lake Albert.  However,  when Stanley finally returned to Yambuya, he found that the strength of the rear column had dwindled from 271 to 132 individuals through death and desertion. The dead included two officers, Barttelot and James Sligo Jameson.
Barttelot had been shot by one of his own subordinates after badly beating the African soldier’s wife in one of his frequent fits of violent rage.  Jameson, an heir to the Anglo-Irish Jameson Whiskey fortune, who had paid £1000 for the privilege of joining the expedition, died of an uncontroversial fever.  However, other members of the expedition suggested that the young officer had developed an unhealthy obsession with cannibalism; this pathological curiosity led him to purchase a ten-year slave girl whom he reportedly handed over to a group of local cannibals to be stabbed, dismembered, and eaten. A budding ethnographer, Jameson was said to have recorded the grizzly proceedings in a series of calmly-executed watercolours. The controversy reached its peak in December 1890 when a group of London philanthropists and humanitarians — the Aborigines Protection Society — voted to condemn the atrocities perpetrated by Stanley’s “filibustering and quixotic” expedition. The shambolic and shameful history of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition did much to discredit the notion that European explorers were engaged in a noble quest to shed the light of Christianity and civilisation upon the benighted ‘Dark Continent’.
Yet during the summer of 1890 Stanley himself still received largely positive coverage in popular newspapers and magazines.  His image also featured in advertisements for tents, tea, Congo Brand soap and Bovril. George Bernard Shaw would later complain that the nation had succumbed to “Stanley worship”.  The explorer was even given the royal stamp of approval at the Stanley and African Exhibition — patronized by Queen Victoria and King Leopold II of Belgium — which opened on Regent’s Street in March 1890 in advance of Stanley’s return in Britain. In May, Stanley’s scheduled debriefing to the Royal Geographical Society was moved to the Royal Albert Hall to accommodate an audience of 8,000 spectators.
When compared with Stanley’s previous journeys, the expedition had contributed little in the way of new geographical data. Yet mindful of controversy, Stanley was now eager to emphasise the passage through the previously unexplored Ituri rainforest and his encounter with the pygmies as the expedition’s primary contribution to geographical and ethnographic knowledge. In his book, Stanley identifies two distinct “racial types” of pygmy in the Ituri: the first is pretty, proportioned and intelligent, while the second is “fitly characteristic of the link long sought between the average modern humanity and its Darwinian progenitors, and certainly deserving of being classed as an extremely low, degraded, almost a bestial type of a human being”. In this period many races were classed as “missing links” and human sub-species by European scientists and anthropologists, and such classifications often anticipated the inevitable extinction (or extermination) of these races. Thus for Stanley and his contemporaries, colonial expansion and imperial aggression were to some extent justified and naturalised through the rhetoric of this pseudo-Darwinian racism.
But although the pygmies had, for Europeans, just recently emerged from the realm of fable, in the midst of Stanley-mania they were soon re-mythologised and repackaged in all manner of ways. There were pygmy-related music hall and variety shows such as “Stanley and His African Dwarfs: A New and Unique Entertainment” in which Stanley was portrayed as side show exhibitor, leading his troop of blackface dwarf minstrels through a routine of comic sketches and musical numbers. In 1904 the traveller and big-game hunter James Harrison brought a group of six Mbuti pygmies to Britain, exhibiting these “volunteers” nightly on an eighteen-month tour of British music halls. The African pygmy also entered popular culture in a figurative guise. One radical pamphlet of 1890 alleged that the ruling Tory party were “like the black dwarfs Stanley found in the great forest of Central Africa”.
All the people around them are tall and robust, but they have been made what they are by unfavourable conditions . . . Cut down the forest, let in the light, cultivate the soil, and a better race of men will take their place . . .  In this opportune illustration read the history, and the end of Toryism.
The pygmies proved a convenient political allegory and their anticipated extinction via natural selection became a favourite metaphor for all manner of commentators. The most famous allegorical appropriation of Stanley’s “dwarfs” appeared in the reformist manifesto In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890), written by the Salvation Army-founder William Booth and the sensational journalist W.T. Stead. Booth takes Stanley’s two races of pygmy — which he labels the “human baboon” and the “handsome dwarf” — as an allegory for two distinct types of urban poor: “the vicious, lazy lout, and the toiling slave”. Booth reads the degradations of darkest England, where the honest and desperate poor were being exploited and enslaved by the “barbarians” of industrial capitalism, as equivalent to the horrors “which Stanley had found existing in the great Equatorial forest”. If there is a darkest Africa, asks the reformer, “is there not also a darkest England? Civilisation . . . can breed its own barbarians, does it not also breed its own pygmies?” Indeed, Stanley too saw the Darwinian “struggle for existence” replicated in the heart of the imperial metropolis, where “pale, overworked, dwarfed, stoop-shouldered” individuals struggled amidst “the human tide flowing into the city over London Bridge”.
In an atmosphere of such anxiety it took no great leap for H. G. Wells to imagine a future society in which humanity had evolved into two distinct species. In The Time Machine (1895) the Time Traveller explores a forest world inhabited by two dwarfish races (the effete Eloi and the bestial Morlocks), perhaps an echo of Stanley and Booth’s distinction between the “handsome dwarf” and the “human baboon”. However, these pygmies are not the degenerate progeny of some obscure African race; they are the direct descendants of nineteenth-century Londoners, and the cause of their degeneration is the modern industrial civilisation which was meant to ensure British imperial dominance. Stanley’s story of the decline and fall of the once “undisputed lords” of Africa would have set alarm bells ringing in the imperial metropolis and raised the prospect that the British empire might join “Egypt and Assyria, Persia, Greece and Rome” in the litany of dynasties which “have flourished for comparatively brief periods, and expired”.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: November 29, 2012

author: rian Murra

source: public-domain-review

type: essay

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


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Joseph Banks
Portraits of a Placid Elephant
By Patricia Fara
April 4, 2013

Patricia Fara traces the changing iconography of Joseph Banks, the English botanist who travelled on Captain Cook's first great voyage and went on to become President of the Royal Society and important patron for a whole host of significant developments in the natural sciences.

Benjamin Robert Haydon, the artist who helped bring the Elgin marbles to the British Museum, was scathing about portraiture. It is, he declared in 1817, ‘one of the staple manufactures of the empire. Wherever the British settle, wherever they colonise, they carry and will ever carry trial by jury, horse-racing, and portrait-painting.’ His list of imperial products might also have included Joseph Banks (1743-1820), who is celebrated as one of Australia’s founding fathers. Although this eminent botanical collector sailed with James Cook to the South Seas and was President of London’s Royal Society for forty-two years, he was pushed into obscurity by his Victorian successors. Towards the end of the twentieth century, Antipodean historians restored Banks’s reputation by showing his crucial role in persuading the British government to invest in scientific exploration.
Banks is important not for his research legacy, but because he was a canny operator who knew how to promote himself as well as making sure that money flowed into science. Despite living before the era of cheap publishing, he excelled at controlling his public image. At six feet and thirteen stone, Banks was an imposing man. James Boswell described him as ‘an elephant, quite placid and gentle, allowing you to get upon his back or play with his proboscis’, although some of his intimate friends regretted that ‘his manners are rather coarse and heavy.’ Whatever the reality, Banks made sure that influential colleagues saw him how he wanted them to. Disingenuously insisting that ‘I do not feel as if Vanity was a Prominent trèe [sic] in my character’, he adopted different guises for his portraits, negotiating with the artists about which engravers should be hired and ensuring that copies were widely distributed.
Banks cannot have been happy with the earliest pictures of him that appeared shortly after his return from Australia. Part of a series parodying foppish young gentlemen, they mocked him as a Botanic Macaroni. A Macaroni, explained a gossipy journal, is ‘a kind of animal, neither male nor female, a thing of the neuter gender . . . It talks without meaning, it smiles without pleasantry, it eats without appetite, it rides without exercise, it wenches without passion.’ In Figure 1, Banks sports a redundant sword and an old-fashioned wig, while the accompanying couplet demeans the value of his extensive travels. His inelegant stance, uneasily straddling the hemispheres, parallels verbal satires denigrating the naivety of his sexual activities in the South Pacific. Gossip about Banks’s encounters with Tahitian women raced round London society. However, an entry in his journal suggests that, whatever their boasts, European men did not always find conquest easy; after being offered the bed of a local queen he awoke in the morning to discover that she had stolen his trousers, leaving him to retreat shame-faced back to his fort half-naked.
During the following decades, Banks manoeuvred himself into a powerful position. First he converted himself into the prominent adventurer esteemed by Samuel Johnson as ‘Banks the traveller’, and later in life became an eminent government advisor as Britain’s overseas empire expanded. Banks’s own visual propaganda helped to establish two new male role models: the scientific explorer, and the scientific administrator.
Within a few months of the Macaroni caricatures, Banks had arranged for two of his flattering portraits (Figures 2 and 3) to be engraved and circulated as black-and-white versions. The American artist Benjamin West portrayed him as a romantic young explorer, recently returned from his voyage on Cook’s Endeavour, wrapped in a Pacific cloak and surrounded by exotic objects. In some ways, this is a conventional portrait, painted in a studio with a rich curtain of bark material looped back from an artificial exterior. Although intended for Banks’s family home, it contrasts strongly with the traditional Grand Tour portraits being brought back from Italy as souvenirs. West has created an international scientific traveller rather than a European tourist, replacing classical ruins with rare Pacific artefacts. Pointing to his New Zealand cloak, fringed with the finest dog-hair and made of flax — highly sought after for making canvas sails — Banks presents himself as a young imperial adventurer with a keen eye for trading opportunities. Near his left foot, an unusual Tahitian adze and the expedition’s book of botanical drawings, open to show flax, proclaim him to be a collector of human as well as natural curiosities.
The other portrait from this time is by Joshua Reynolds, who depicted him as a man of action also engaged in intellectual studies: the terrestrial globe emphasizes the extent of his travels, while the pen and books signify a scholar. Half rising in welcome from his chair, Banks displays the restrained manners of a convivial, well-bred Englishman. Borrowing his technique from Rembrandt, Reynolds has sympathetically painted the shiny fur of his collar, the rich red of the sumptuous velvet jacket in the style worn by Italian travellers, and the brocaded waistcoat which stretches over a belly whose rotundity mirrors the globe’s. Banks was literally a man of the world, neither abstemiously dedicated to solitary pursuits, nor prey to the effeminate continental vogue for Macaroni thinness. Conforming to the sporting ideal being constructed, this hearty Englishman evidently enjoyed his food and wine, yet spent his days in virtuous contact with nature. The image’s visual messages are reinforced by the Latin text under Banks’s determinedly clenched left hand, a well-known polemical motto from a Horatian ode: ‘tomorrow we will again cross the immense ocean.’
During his long reign as President of the Royal Society, Banks made himself indispensable to the state and to science. Banksian iconography altered significantly in 1795, when the King awarded him the Red Ribbon of the Order of the Bath. Only a few days later, James Gillray published a cartoon lampooning Banks, the South Sea caterpillar, for his transformation into a Bath butterfly (Figure 4). Recalling the earlier pornographic satires of Banks, Gillray emphasized the corrupt sexuality and phallic qualities of this Banksian caterpillar rising from the Tahitian soil, although his prime target was the scientific community which Banks had come to represent. Formulated in the wake of the French Revolution, this caricature articulated conservative fears of the dangerous political implications of philosophical experimentation. The shell by Banks’s left shoulder is a bonnet rouge of the French revolutionaries. Parodying the language of the Society’s journal, Gillray described how this ‘New Bath Butterfly . . . first crawl’d into notice from among the Weeds & Mud on the Banks of the South Sea . . . it is notic’d and Valued Solely on account of the beautiful Red which encircles its Body, & the Shining Spot on its Breast; a Distinction which never fails to render Caterpillars valuable.’
Membership of the Order of the Bath, an honour normally reserved for diplomats and soldiers, signified immense prestige, and the red sash and star feature prominently in Thomas Phillips’s portrait of Banks (Figure 5). Here he is a solid statesman of British science, wearing decorations bestowed by the king and sitting amidst the ceremonial trappings of the Royal Society. Although it had been commissioned by a Spanish astronomer, Banks ensured that this portrait’s details conformed to his own specifications. To celebrate the picture’s purchaser, the pamphlet in the bottom centre describes an astronomical instrument. However, Banks insisted that the far more prominent paper in his hand should be the recent Bakerian Lecture by Humphry Davy, the electrical and chemical experimenter who strongly opposed Banks’s hegemonic rule at the Royal Society and who succeeded him as President. At this time of dissent amongst disparate factions, this portrait reinforced Banks’s authoritarian control over what historians now call the Banksian empire. Appropriately for a botanist, Banks is wearing a waistcoat embroidered with flowers, but he is presenting himself as Davy’s patron, the learned sponsor of research into the physical sciences. By visually uniting electrical chemistry, astronomy and botany in a single image, he symbolically asserted his all-embracing domination of the Royal Society in the face of bids to create smaller, specialized groups.
Through his portraits, Banks helped transformed the stereotype of the English male traveller from the foppish aristocrat degenerating on his Grand Tour to the masculine hero risking his life for the sake of England and of science. In the 1770s, he fashioned himself as an energetic yet learned voyager, the gentlemanly participant in a characteristically English male metropolitan culture. By the time he died, he had manoeuvred the Royal Society into an influential position, and had restyled his own image as the authoritative organizer of British scientific expeditions.
By persuading the government to fund international voyages, he ensured the perpetuation of this new male heroic role of scientific explorer, one articulated two years before his death by Mary Shelley. At the beginning of Frankenstein, Captain Walton reminds his sister of their childhood library, packed with exciting tales of earlier voyages, almost certainly including the exploits of Cook and Banks. Walton epitomizes the romantic heroic explorer, the Banks portrayed by Reynolds who combines physical stoicism with intellectual fortitude: ‘I voluntarily endured cold, famine, thirst, and want of sleep; I . . . devoted my nights to the study of mathematics, the theory of medicine, and those branches of physical science from which a naval adventure might derive the greatest practical advantage’. By representing himself first as a scientific traveller and then as a statesman organizing scientific exploration, Banks promoted English imperial possession of the world in the name of the new disciplinary sciences.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Patricia Fara


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Robert Baden-Powell’s Entomological Intrigues

By Mark David Kaufman
July 10, 2013

In 1915 Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the worldwide Scouts movement, published his DIY guide to espionage, My Adventures as a Spy. Mark Kaufman explores how the book's ideas to utilise such natural objects as butterflies, moths and leaves, worked to mythologize British resourcefulness and promote a certain 'weaponization of the pastoral'.

Upon the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, the fifty-seven-year-old Lieutenant-General Sir Robert Baden-Powell, K.C.B., contacted Lord Kitchener and offered to come out of retirement to serve Britain in its hour of need. The War Secretary, however, believed that the veteran officer had a far more crucial part to play on the home front, training and mobilizing the organization he had founded six years earlier and that now constituted an army in itself: the Scouting Movement. Under the auspices of their beloved Chief Scout, Boy Scouts and Girl Guides were soon working in a variety of capacities and taking up key positions left vacant by soldiers and nurses who had gone to the front lines. In the wake of air-raids, while the Zeppelins still hummed in the distance, Scouts dug survivors out of the London rubble, tended to the wounded, and pedaled through the streets blowing the “All Clear” on their bugles. Compulsorily cheerful, 20,000 Sea Scouts patrolled the east and south shorelines in the absence of the Coastguards, watching for mines and practicing signals to be used at the first sign of the invading Hun—pausing only to observe the mating rituals of seahorses, help an elderly matron hang her washing, or sing a rousing rendition of Play up! Play up! And Play the Game! More furtively, Scouts kept vigil over railways, bridges, and telegraph lines; others kept tabs on local German immigrants, who (their leader was convinced) were inevitably plotting sabotage. All the while, Baden-Powell, with his signature cane and campaign hat, visited parade grounds throughout the Allied bloc, reviewing formations of eager young Wolf Cubs like Wellington on the eve of Waterloo.
In addition to marshaling this children’s crusade, Baden-Powell’s other wartime duty was to maintain his self-created legend through publications and appearances. Having commanded and held the British garrison during the seven-month Siege of Mafeking from October 1899 to May 1900, Baden-Powell had returned from the Boer War a national hero, a symbol of ingenuity-in-crisis and a living embodiment of that most mystical of English qualities: pluck.
But even before his apotheosis, the young officer had spent the last quarter of the nineteenth century pursuing a romantic persona, taking part in a bewildering array of military engagements and intelligence operations throughout India, Africa, and the Mediterranean. A prolific writer, talented artist, and sport-enthusiast, Baden-Powell recorded and illustrated his experiences in eminently readable books with eclectic titles like Reconnaissance and Scouting (1884), Pigsticking or Hoghunting (1889), The Downfall of Prempeh (1896), and Sport in War (1900). After his return to England, the officer discovered that lads of all ages were enthusiastically devouring his army scouting manuals, and he surmised that the time was ripe for a youth movement designed to revitalize the ailing empire. In 1908, Baden-Powell published the first edition of Scouting for Boys: A Handbook for Instruction in Good Citizenship, a volume whose overall sales would soon rival both Shakespeare and the King James Bible. As its title suggests, Scouting for Boys was not only a practical guide to tracking deer and dressing wounds, but a compendium of “civilised” ideals drawn from a variety of historical and literary sources. Reinscribing his own initials as a code of conduct, the hero of Mafeking enjoined his Scouts to “Be Prepared” for any contingency and to uphold the law of chivalry passed down (quite literally) from the Knights of the Roundtable. In an era of modernization and increasing political turmoil, this message had tremendous appeal; by 1910, the movement boasted 100,000 adherents in Britain, as well as offshoots in North America, Europe, and elsewhere. Baden-Powell was an international celebrity.
The ideological and propagandic valence of Baden-Powell’s project reached its zenith during the Great War, and his writings at the time worked to mythologize British resourcefulness. In 1915, he published My Adventures as a Spy, an account of his varied experiences in the field of military intelligence, primarily in the Mediterranean region between 1890 and 1895 (he gives few dates and is often vague about locations). Half memoir, half manual, this slim, loosely-organized volume reinforces the crucial correspondence between “scouting” and “spying” that Baden-Powell established in his earlier handbook, thereby underscoring for a wartime audience that scouting was not only defensive but potentially offensive, a means of gathering intelligence and sabotaging the enemy’s operations. Essentially writing as an apologist for the spy, whom he believed was unjustly maligned in the popular culture of the time, the Chief Scout interlaces personal anecdotes with advice and illustrations concerning proper methods of disguise, surveillance, and encryption. Highlighting the training-potential of play-acting and games like “Hide-and-Seek,” the author yarns about how he successfully put these skills to the test, duping foreign officials from North Africa to the Balkan Peninsula.
My Adventures as a Spy is possibly Baden-Powell’s most quixotic work — which is saying quite a lot. Most curiously, the former military intelligence officer includes a section titled “The Value of Being Stupid,” in which he contends that the best way to navigate enemy territory unnoticed (in peace time, presumably) would be to play the daffy Briton — specifically, to pose as an eccentric artist or naturalist out for a jaunt with brushes and easel, seemingly oblivious to the strategic military base that just happens to be blocking his view of the coastline. For Baden-Powell, the entomologist is a particularly useful cover, for who would suspect a scholarly gentleman sketching the antennae of turf ants to be secretly observing the construction of a hydroelectric dam? While Scouting for Boys limits its discussion of insects to their being tasty treats and examples of good citizenship — bees, the Chief Scout remarks, “are quite a model community, for they respect their Queen and kill their unemployed” — My Adventures as a Spy takes the bug to a whole new level, graphically illustrating that entomological drawings themselves may be used to conceal maps and diagrams of enemy fortifications. “Once I went ‘butterfly hunting’ in Dalmatia,” Baden-Powell recalls; tasked with investigating a series of mountain-top batteries, the spy pretended to be one of those “harmless lunatics” out for a bit of amateur lepidoptery: ※※Indexed under…Concealmentof messages
I went armed with most effective weapons for the purpose, which have served me well in many a similar campaign. I took a sketch-book, in which were numerous pictures—some finished, others only partly done—of butterflies of every degree and rank, from a ‘Red Admiral’ to a ‘Painted Lady.’
Carrying this book and a colour-box and a butterfly net in my hand, I was above all suspicion to anyone who met me on the lonely mountain side, even in the neighbourhood of the forts.
Upon inspecting the sketch-book, foreign officials failed “to notice that the delicately drawn veins of the wings were exact representations, in plan, of their own fort, and that the spots on the wings denoted the number and position of guns and their different calibres.”

Butterflies were only one of Baden-Powell’s wingèd agents; even the most mundane of moths could veil the blueprint of an enemy compound.
In addition to the insects themselves, the author advocates using sketches of leaves to mask the profiles of hilltop fortresses.
Reading My Adventures as a Spy, one wonders how hard Baden-Powell really needed to work at playing the dotty Englishman on these Balkan excursions. His outlandish feats of intelligence gathering — if they happened at all — most likely succeeded through a felicitous combination of blind luck and the incompetence of local officials. Indeed, Baden-Powell’s commentators have consistently questioned the authenticity of his entomological intrigues, usually ascribing them to the great man’s need to cultivate his own greatness, particularly at a time of national crisis. As his biographer, Tim Jeal, has pointed out, Baden-Powell’s prolific diaries from his military years bear very little evidence in support of his claims, and what evidence there is may have been added at a later date — the Chief Scout was known to “amend” his diaries in anticipation of biographical enquiries. If spying, as Baden-Powell admits, “teaches one to trust no one,” that same aura of suspicion inevitably redounds to the hero himself.
However, we need not concern ourselves with the truth of these spy yarns to see their cultural significance in an era of social and political change. Within that heady alchemy of imperialism, individualism, social Darwinism, and romantic fantasy that also characterizes Scouting for Boys, we find what is arguably the constitutive thesis of the early Scouting Movement and one of Baden-Powell’s chief preoccupations: the paradoxical notion that democratic equality must be achieved through the dissemination and cultivation of upper-class values. It is no mistake that the writer refers to spies as a “much abused gentry”; for Baden-Powell, the honorable secret agent correlates with the gentleman of leisure, who — like John Buchan’s contemporaneous “clubland” heroes — utilizes his superior breeding and public-school education in the service of King and Country. At one point, Baden-Powell observes that the German espionage network, though extensive, is lacking in “men of a higher education and social position,” and so doomed to misadventure and treachery. While he grants that there are such things as “traitor spies,” the officer assures his readers that “we are not much troubled with them in England.” “Fortunately,” he explains, “the Briton is not as a rule of a corruptible character.” Such a statement may strike us as laughably naïve in our more cynical, post-Cambridge-Spy-Ring era— Malcolm Muggeridge once referred to Kim Philby as a “boy-scout who lost his way” — but this unwavering faith in the integrity of the elite persisted throughout the first decades of the twentieth century and clearly informs the writer’s valorization of the spy.
From this class-oriented perspective, Baden-Powell’s privileging of genteel pursuits as covers for espionage— butterfly-collecting, landscape-painting, play-acting, fly-fishing, partridge-shooting, and so on — comes to serve a function that is not only political, but strangely elegiac. Invariably referring to spying as a “sport,” “art,” or “game,” the Chief Scout reveals that these aristocratic activities “spent largely in enjoyment” are, in fact, the keys to a desperate strategy: the weaponization of the pastoral. In contrast to the horrors of modern warfare, the barbed wire and poison gas that so appalled him on his visits to the front, Baden-Powell offers what seems to us now an idyllic Nabokovian childhood as a training regime for a more “civilised” conflict that never truly existed, save in his own recollections and in the daydreams of his faithful Scouts. In a sense, My Adventures as a Spy is a last-ditch effort to resuscitate — or perhaps to preserve, like a butterfly pinned under glass — a mortally wounded world.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Mark David Kaufman


text:
The Last Great Explorer
William F. Warren and the Search for Eden
By Brook Wilensky-Lanford
September 6, 2012

Of all the attempts throughout history to geographically locate the Garden of Eden one of the most compelling was that set out by minister and president of Boston University, William F. Warren.  Brook Wilensky-Lanford looks at the ideas of the man who, in his book Paradise Found, proposed the home of all humanity to be at the North Pole.

The quest to find the Garden of Eden sounds like an occupation that should have fallen by the wayside well before the nineteenth century. No longer did the fanciful medieval geographies of Prester John, or Columbus, allow for the existence of an exotic, unspoiled earthly paradise. This was a newer, wiser age. We had conquered the wild regions of the world. And Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, published in 1859, was slowly proving that man and, say, the birds of the air, were not created all at once in a single spot on the globe.
Darwin himself dismissed the search for a geographical point of origins in his 1871 Descent of Man. He allowed that: “It is somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent than elsewhere.” But, he declared, there was also a large ape that roamed Europe not so long ago, and anyway the earth is old enough for primate species to have migrated all the way around it by now. So, “It is useless to speculate on this subject.”
Victoria Woodhull, feminist radical and free-love advocate, was less diplomatic in her epic speech “The Garden of Eden,” which she delivered frequently in the 1870s. Eden on Earth was nonsense: “Any school boy of twelve years of age who should read the description of this garden and not discover that it has no geographical significance whatever, ought to be reprimanded for his stupidity.” (Perhaps she was referring to the missionary-explorer David Livingstone, who had declared, while mad with malaria in 1871, that paradise existed at the source of the Nile, which he judged to be in the Lake Bangweulu region of Zambia.)
Livingstone was not the only one still looking for Eden. This brave new world was turning time-honored beliefs upside down. Evolution was suggesting that man had ascended over time from our less-intelligent, animalistic primate origins. But Christianity had been insisting for centuries that man had descended, through original sin, from near-divine heights in the Garden of Eden to the miserable, depraved society of the late nineteenth century. What was a modern, faithful person to believe? Enter William Fairfield Warren, distinguished Methodist minister and educator. As the president of Boston University, he knew science was going to define the future. But he was unwilling to give up his theology to the new discipline. How to knit the two perspectives together?
Counter-intuitively, Warren looked to Eden. He set about translating the Bible into science: Eden was “the one spot on earth where the biological conditions are the most favorable.” Genesis says Eden contains “every tree that is pleasant to the eye or good for food”; Warren posited “flora and fauna of almost unimagined vigor and luxuriousness.” He took note of a newly discovered fact: millions of years ago, the earth had been much warmer. He followed the uncovering of fantastic creatures at once familiar and mythical, like the woolly mammoth, the dinosaur, and the giant sequoia. He knew there was still one blank spot on the world map, a place where nobody had been. And he arrived at the inevitable conclusion: The Garden of Eden is at the North Pole. It made sense, in a way. Both Eden and the Pole had frustratingly resisted attempts to discover and claim them, despite centuries of dangerous, expensive expeditions.
Warren published this theory in 1881 as Paradise Found, The Cradle of the Human Race at the North Pole. The tome positively reeked with academic authority. There were long passages in French, German, and ancient Greek in the footnotes. He drew on his specialty, comparative mythology, which he described as “the science of the oldest traditional beliefs and memories of mankind.” He knew the great epic folklore of the Hindus, the Celts, the Chinese, the Persians. In the nineteenth century, this was a rare, esoteric body of knowledge, full of metaphorical echoes of Bible stories, objective “evidence” of Christian facts. The index of “authors referred to or quoted” in Paradise Found lists 580 sources — for 495 pages of text. Right next to Darwin there’s Ignatius Donnelly, who claimed that the lost continent of Atlantis was real; it was destroyed by the near-collision of the earth with a comet. His 1882 book Atlantis was wildly popular. (Donnelly had another theory — that Shakespeare’s plays might actually be written by Francis Bacon — but at the time that was considered too ridiculous to be taken seriously.) Some reviewers felt that Warren’s wanton citation did his argument no favors, but apparently many readers weren’t bothered.
The second printing of Paradise Found, released only months after the first, was peppered with testimonials. Warren wrote proudly of a “plain unschooled Bible student”, Mr Alexander Skelton, a machinist and blacksmith of Paterson, New Jersey, who had independently arrived at his own “remarkably comprehensive and cogent” argument for a North Pole Eden. Warren bragged that one Professor Heer, a haughty Swiss paleontologist, claimed that Warren was plagiarizing him. He also published a testimonial from the British archaeologist, and faithful Anglican, Archibald Henry Sayce: “Provisionally, I may say that your view seems to me eminently reasonable . . .” (No matter that Sayce was actually referring to an earlier work of Warren’s, about the cosmology of Homer’s Iliad.) Warren’s theory was “rapidly superseding every earlier hypothesis” on both sides of the Atlantic— even if Warren did say so himself.
So it was a matter of confounding frustration for him that other Eden theories continued to appear. A German archaeologist, Moritz Engel of Leipzig, had the gall to publish The Solution To the Paradise Question simultaneously with Paradise Found. Engel’s Eden was an oasis in the desert outside of Damascus. His four rivers were flood torrents that disappear in the dry season, come May or June. Warren fought back: Engel’s Eden was ugly. It was as if Mr. Engel had never even read Genesis, with its picture of abundance and plenty! It was also narrow-minded, as if he never even noticed that there were “myths of the Happy Garden” found in dozens of other ancient traditions! Worst of all, Engel’s Eden was unscientific, making no effort to incorporate “the facts and theories of ethnologists and zoologists as to the beginnings of human life . . . . The time for studies of such narrowness as this is past.”
Warren’s insistence that the North Pole Eden was the overriding, authoritative account was sincere. But it may have been a little naïve, given the secret that Warren himself revealed on the very last page of his book: he didn’t actually think his paradise could be found. He writes, mournfully: “Long-lost Eden is found, but its gates are barred against us. Now, as at the beginning of our exile, a sword turns every way to keep the Way of the Tree of Life . . .” Arriving at Polar Eden, we could do nothing “but hurriedly kneel amid a frozen desolation and, dumb with a nameless awe, let fall a few hot tears above the buried and desolated hearthstone of Humanity’s earliest and loveliest home.” The only way to get back to Eden was in death, if we accept the sacrifice of Christ. Follow Jesus in life, and in death you can walk right past the cherubim with their flaming swords.
And just like that, despite his best efforts to be the last word on Eden, Warren had inadvertently opened the door for a whole new generation of Eden-seekers. They began to pop up almost immediately, and many even cited Warren as authoritative evidence for their own claims, just as Warren had done with his 580 sources.
It started with Warren’s own colleagues in the Methodist church. Reverend E. D. Ledyard announced to an audience of 5,000 at a retreat in upstate New York that Eden was rather closer to home. “In Chautauqua we see one place where Edenic privileges have been restored. Christ is the central figure here. Through the second Adam paradise is being regained.”
In 1890, a three-part editorial in the San Jose, California evening paper entitled “Garden of Eden: Its Position on the Globe Has Been Definitely Located” explained that California’s Santa Clara Valley had all the characteristics of an Eden—pristine state, perfect climate, and the giant sequoia. If Warren was so enthused about the sequoia, the writer notes, why didn’t he choose California? “In coming so near the truth it seems strange that the able scientific writer did not receive the true light as to the location of the original home of man.”
Warren can’t have been happy to find his work praised by Wyoming novelist Willis George Emerson, in the preface to his 1908 science fiction novel The Smoky God. The book claimed to be the true account of a Norwegian fisherman who in 1829 had fallen through a hole at the North Pole into the interior of the Hollow Earth — where the Garden of Eden is reachable by monorail. “In his carefully prepared volume, Mr. Warren almost stubbed his toe against the real truth, but missed it seemingly by only a hair’s breadth.”
Dr. George C. Allen, a Boston University philologist, took his colleague Warren’s word for it that Eden was at the North Pole. But he made one important modification. In 1921, he claimed that the North Pole moves entirely around the world every 25,000 years, so “careful mathematical computations bring the original paradise where Ohio now is.”
Warren himself, who died in 1929 at the age of 96, remained utterly, evangelically convinced of his original theory’s veracity. The North Pole Eden “has shown itself the supreme and inevitable generalization from all the facts of modern knowledge respecting man and the world. It has harmonized the oldest traditions of religion and the latest achievements of science . . .”
But a dead Eden and the promise of a more perfect afterlife did not satisfy the same kind of itch for a living paradise — an itch that had turned out to be peculiarly modern after all. Invisible paradise after death was too remote to be believed. And so a surprising number of twentieth-century thinkers continued to try to bring Eden down to earth. Reverend Landon West, an Anabaptist minister in Ohio, insisted in 1901 that the giant earthwork known as the Serpent Mound, outside Chillicothe, marked the site of man’s first transgression. Hong Kong Christian revolutionary Tse Tsan Tai believed that placing Eden in Outer Mongolia could help bring about an end to World War I. Libertarian lawyer Elvy Edison Callaway used numerology to prove that God had made man in the Florida Panhandle; in 1956 he opened a park for all to visit. And like William Warren, each of these seekers were working to synthesize their time-honored religious beliefs with the requirements of modern science. That’s a quest that continues to this day.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: September 6, 2012

author: rook Wilensky-Lanford


text:
Trüth, Beaüty, and Volapük

By Arika Okrent
October 17, 2012

Arika Okrent explores the rise and fall of Volapük - a universal language created in the late 19th century by a German priest called Johann Schleyer.

Johann Schleyer was a German priest whose irrational passion for umlauts may have been his undoing. During one sleepless night in 1879, he felt a Divine presence telling him to create a universal language. The result was Volapük. It was designed to be easy to learn, with a system of simple roots derived from European languages, and regular affixes which attached to the roots to make new words.  Volapük was the first invented language to gain widespread success. By the end of the 1880s there were more than 200 Volapük societies and clubs around the world and 25 Volapük journals. Over 1500 diplomas in Volapük had been awarded. In 1889, when the third international Volapük congress was held in Paris, the proceedings were entirely in Volapük. Everyone had at least heard of it. President Grover Cleveland’s wife even named her dog Volapük.
Though Schleyer was German, a large part of the Volapük vocabulary was based on English. “Volapük” was a compound formed from two roots, vol (from “world”) and pük (from “speak”). However, it was often hard to spot the source of a Volapük word because of the way Schleyer had set up the sound system of the language. “Paper” was pöp, “beer” bil, “proof” blöf and “love” löf. He had rational reasons for most of the phonological choices he made. For simplicity, he tried to limit all word roots to one syllable. He avoided the ‘r’ sound, “for the sake of children and old people, also for some Asiatic nations.” The umlauts, however, were there for löf.
“A language without umlauts,” he wrote, “sounds monotonous, harsh, and boring.” He decried the “endlessly gloomy u and o,” the “broad a” and the “sharp i” of umlautless languages. Though many members of the growing Volapük community may have agreed with his aesthetic judgment, many others thought that for Volapük to have a serious chance at being a world language, the umlauts had to go.
Indeed, in the United States especially, those umlauts added a threatening and/or ridiculous air of foreignness to the language. Much fun was had at the expense of Volapük on account of those umlauts in local papers such as the Milkaukee Sentinel:
A charming young student of GrükOnce tried to acquire Volapük    But it sounded so bad    That her friends called her mad,And she quit it in less than a wük.
By 1890 the Volapük movement was falling apart due to arguments about umlauts and other reforms. Schleyer left the Volapük Academy and formed his own academy of loyalists. Other Volapükists created their own versions of the language — Nal Bino, Balta, Bopal, Spelin, Dil, Orba — all of which immediately fell into the obscurity that soon swallowed Volapük itself.
Meanwhile Esperanto, another language that had been rapidly growing since its introduction in 1887, was scooping up all the new recruits to the universal language idea. Esperanto had no umlauts, nor problems with embracing ‘r’. Its roots, though less based in English, were instantly recognizable. “World” was mondo and “to speak” paroli. “Paper” was papero, “beer” biero, “proof” pruvo, and “love” amo.
Schleyer decried Esperanto as “an ugly-sounding hodgepodge.” He criticized its use of “unnecessary” and “difficult to pronounce” sounds like “sh“ and “ch.” He scoffed at it for allowing dipthongs (“Ugly!”),  “harsh sound combinations,” and the “rattling, hard, bony ‘r’”. Also, it had no umlauts. According to Schleyer, if you compared Esperanto to Volapük it was clear that one “was created by a Pole” (the Bialystok-born Ludovic Zamenhof), and the other by “a music connoisseur, composer, and poet.”
Esperanto went on to become the most successful invented language of all time, but it too suffered from criticism, infighting, and its own schism. In 1907 a group of Esperantists backed a reform project called Ido, which did away with some of the awkward elements of Esperanto.  They changed affixation rules that resulted in phrases like belajn semajnojn (beautiful weeks) so that they would instead produce bela semani. They got rid of the accented characters ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, and ŝ, and replaced some of the challenging root words: pilko (ball) became balon and ŝtrumpo (stocking, pronounced shtrumpo) became kalzo.
But Ido died out and Esperanto marched on through to the current day without making the suggested changes. Today, Esperantists (some tens of thousands of them) are still happily enjoying belajn semajnojn at the parko, kicking around a pilko in their sandaloj and ŝtrumpoj. The little infelicities turned out not to matter all that much to the survival of the language. Every language has its lumpy bits, and beauty is in the ear of the beholder. You like potato; I like potahto, and Schleyer preferred pötet.
It wasn’t really the umlauts that killed Volapük, but a combination of factors, the most important probably being that the chances of any artificial language gaining a following are slim to none. There were hundreds of invented languages that came before Volapük and hundreds that came after, and almost no one has heard of any of them. Esperanto is the rare exception, but its success (relative as it is) has less to do with its linguistic features than with the luck of timing and circumstances.
Volapük didn’t die out completely. It has a bit of life today; there are a few online lessons and discussion boards. There is even a Volapük Wikipedia with over 100,000 articles. And its name lives on in the Danish expression det er det rene volapyk — “It’s pure Volapük,” or, in other words “It’s Greek to me.”
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: October 17, 2012

author: Arika Okrent


text:
Athanasius, Underground

By John Glassie
November 1, 2012

With his enormous range of scholarly pursuits the 17th-century polymath Athanasius Kircher has been hailed as the last Renaissance man and "the master of hundred arts". John Glassie looks at one of Kircher's great masterworks Mundus Subterraneus and how it was inspired by a subterranean adventure Kircher himself made into the bowl of Vesuvius.

Just before Robert Hooke’s rightly famous microscopic observations of everything from the “Edges of Rasors” to “Vine mites” appeared in Micrographia in 1665, the insatiably curious and incredibly prolific Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher published what is in many ways a more spectacular work. Mundus Subterraneus (Underground World), a two-volume tome of atlas-like dimensions, was intended to lay out “before the eyes of the curious reader all that is rare, exotic, and portentous contained in the fecund womb of Nature.” There is an “idea of the earthly sphere that exists in the divine mind,” Kircher proclaimed, and in this book, one of more than thirty on almost as many subjects that he published during his lifetime, he tried to prove that he had grasped it.
As a French writer put it some years later, “it would take a whole journal to indicate everything remarkable in this work.” There were extended treatments on the spontaneous generation of living animals from non-living matter, the unethical means by which alchemists pretended to change base metals into gold, and the apparent tricks of nature we now recognize as fossils. The book included detailed charts of “secret” oceanic motions, or currents, among the first ever published. The author’s more or less correct explanation of how igneous rock is formed was also arguably the first in print. According to one modern scholar, Kircher “understood erosion,” and his entries “on the quality and use of sand” and his “investigations into the tending of fields” had their practical use.
Mundus Subterraneus identified the location of the legendary lost island of Atlantis (something that modern science hasn’t been able to accomplish) as well as the source of the Nile: it started in the “Mountains of the Moon,” then ran northward through “Guix,” “Sorgola,” and “Alata” and on into “Bagamidi” before reaching Ethiopia and Egypt. Kircher offered a lengthy discussion of people who lived in caves (their societies and their economy). He reported on the remains of giants (also mainly cave dwellers) found in the ground. And he went into detail on the kinds of lower animals who belong to the lower world (including dragons).
In short, Mundus Subterraneus covered almost every subject that might relate to the realm of earth, as well as many that wouldn’t seem to, such as the sun and “its special properties, by which it flows into the earthly world” and the “nature of the lunar body and its effects.” These correspondences and influences were nothing new, though perhaps only the always-inclusive Athanasius Kircher would choose to publish a series of moon maps in a book about the world below.
All these other subjects notwithstanding, it was Kircher’s theory about the interior of the earth that captured, or at least deserved, the most attention. As he explained, “the whole Earth is not solid but everywhere gaping, and hollowed with empty rooms and spaces, and hidden burrows.” Deep down, it holds many great oceans and fires, interconnected by a system of passageways that reached all the way to its core. In his view, volcanoes, however awful and awe-inspiring, “are nothing but the vent-holes, or breath-pipes of Nature,” and earthquakes are merely the “proper effects of subterrestrial cumbustions” that are sure to go on constantly. The “prodigious volcanoes and fire-vomiting mountains visible in the external surface of the earth do sufficiently demonstrate it to be full of invisible and underground fires,” he wrote. “For wherever there is a volcano, there also is a conservatory or storehouse of fire under it . . . . And these fires argue for deeper treasuries and storehouses of fire, in the very heart and inward bowels of the Earth.”
According to Kircher, “the fire and water sweetly conspire together in mutual service.” The tides, caused by the nitrous effluvia of the moon, push “an immense bulk of water” through “hidden and occult passages at the bottom of the Ocean” and thrust it “forcibly into the intimate bowels of the Earth.” The resulting winds “excite and stir up” and otherwise feed the subterraneous fire like a huge bellows. The seas, which would stagnate and freeze without the fires, keep the fires from getting out of hand, preventing “unlimited eruptions,” which would “soon turn all to ruins.” The “secret make-up of the mountains” is that they are hollow and serve as reservoirs. Hot baths, hot springs, and fountains are produced where underground water passageways come near or interconnect with the fire channels.
More than once, Kircher compares the movement of the earth’s water to the circulation of the blood in the body as described by William Harvey. The water of the oceans follows its “secret motions” up and around the globe toward the North Pole. Somewhere off the coast of Norway (the actual site of a major whirlpool system called the Moskenstraumen), he declared, is a giant maelstrom through which the water enters the earth — as if passing through a great drain — and runs through it, cooling it down, providing it with nutriments in particulate form before being eliminated through a nether opening at the South Pole. Sometimes the analogies referred more to the continuing process of the digestive system than the cycling of blood, but no matter: “You see therefore the manner and way of the Circulation of Nature.”
Kircher didn’t just (or didn’t entirely) make up his ideas about the interior of the earth. He’d first “learned the great secrets of Nature,” as he put it, almost thirty before, under circumstances of “great danger.”
Kircher was about thirty five years old, and had been based at the flagship Jesuit college in Rome for about three of four years — attempting to decipher the hieroglyphics of the ancient Egyptians — when in 1637 he was assigned to accompany a young German prince on an extended visit to Malta. If he was initially upset about being dragged away with an immature prince to some rocks in the middle of the Mediterranean, his curiosity quickly kicked in. He made magnetic and astronomical readings, and studied geological formations. There were four-hundred-foot cliffs, natural arches, and a place where the tides had carved human-looking shapes into the earth. He explored Malta’s megalithic temples, catacombs, and grottoes, and was especially fascinated by its inland seas and underground passageways: how far down did they go?
After about a year, Kircher was finally allowed to return to Rome, but he took his time getting there and lingered in Sicily for a long while. “I found such a Theater of Nature, displaying herself in such a wonderful variety of things, as I had with so many desires wished for,” he wrote later. “Whatever thing occurs in the whole body of the Earth that is wonderful, rare, unusual, and worthy of admiration, I found contracted here.”
He was especially intent on exploring Sicily’s outcroppings, cliffs, and volcanoes. And he wanted to look into stories about a type of fish that lived in the Straits of Messina, the body of water that flows between Sicily and Calabria on the Italian mainland. The fish was supposed to be susceptible to a certain kind of song “by which,” Kircher wrote, “mariners are wont to allure it to follow their vessels.” But those plans had to be put aside because of the earthquakes that devastated much of Calabria in the spring of 1638.
Kircher recalled that the earthquake began as he and some others crossed the straits in a boat. The sea was “raging beyond what is usual” and began “stirring up huge whirlpools.” The island volcano of Stromboli was “throwing up huge billows of smoke,” and there was “a certain subterranean lowing, if you will, which we were reckoning to be the cracking of the earth and which seemed to conspire with the odor of sulfur to insinuate the complete, fatal and funereal destruction of Calabria and Sicily.”
Despite a “cracking racket” and a “noisome odor,” and the fact that the “sea itself was boiling,” Kircher and his party made it across to the mainland side. But soon enough came “a subterranean racket and din, similar to chariots driven at top speed.” The earth “leapt up from below with so forceful a motion that I, no longer able to stand on my feet, was laid low, suddenly dashed down with face flat on the ground.”
Kircher experienced “the intolerable frenzy of the earth,” and at one point even the feeling of his soul being “loosened from its corporeal fetters,” but survived to witness the resulting devastation. Through subsequent days of walking, his group “came upon nothing but cadavers of cities and the horrific ruins of castles,” he remembered. “Considering the men straggling through open fields as if extinguished for their fear, you would have said that at that very moment the day of final judgment was looming.”
Kircher’s firsthand experience of this earthquake, which killed something like ten thousand people, might have put him off his investigations into the “miracles of subterraneous nature.” But these horrible occurrences had also presented him with an opportunity for study. “After having diligently searched out the incredible power of Nature working in subterraneous burrows and passages,” he wrote, “I had a great desire to know whether Vesuvius also had not some secret commerce and correspondence with Stromboli and Aetna.”
There was only one way, in his view, to find out. Vesuvius at that time was merely smoking. But its first major eruption in centuries had occurred seven years earlier, in 1631. Kircher hired “an honest country-man, for a true and skillful companion,” and the two began hiking their way up to the forty-two-hundred-foot summit at midnight. (Perhaps the reason for leaving at that hour was to be able to see in the dark anything that might be molten. Or maybe the idea was to allow for a full day of exploration once they got there.) The way was “difficult, rough, uneven, and steep.”
When they finally reached the top, Kircher looked down into the crater. “I thought I beheld the habitation of Hell,” he wrote, “wherein nothing seemed to be much wanting besides the horrid fantasms and apparitions of Devils.” He heard “horrible bellowings and roarings” and there was “an unexpressible stink.” The smoke and fire and stench “continually belch’d forth out of eleven several places, and made me in like manner belch, and as it were, vomit back again, at it.”
When the morning light came, Kircher recalled, “I chose a safe and secure place to set my feet sure upon, which was a huge Rock, of a plain surface, to which there lay open an avenue, by a descent of the mountain very far . . . . And so I went down unto it.”
The inside of the volcano was, “all up and down everywhere, cragged and broken.” But there was no gradual decline; the volcano’s chamber was “made hollow directly and straight.” The bottom was “boiling with an everlasting gushing forth, and streamings of smoke and flames, and employed in decocting Sulphur, Bitumen and the melting and burning of other kinds of Minerals.”
Because the vapors and gases “know not how to be contained” within the molten matter, they did so “scatter the burden that lay upon them, with such great force and violence, accompanied with horrible cracklings and noises, that the mountain seemed to be tossed with an earthquake or trembling.” Those spewings caused “the softer parts of the Mountain,” made of, Kircher suggests, ashes, cinders, rains, and “the refuse of minerals,” to be shaken to pieces and loosened; they fell “like Hills, into the bottom of the Hellish gulph.” And that made the kind of sound that even “the stoutest and most undaunted heart would scarce venture to suffer.”
It was within this hollow mountain that Kircher really began to develop the theories he set down so many years later in Mundus Subterraneus, to envision what it might be like even deeper within the earth, and how the mountains and fires and rivers and oceans might somehow all be connected. Calculating the significance of that moment in the history of science is a lot harder than mentioning what appear to be two direct influences on culture: The creation of Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers in Rome was certainly informed by Kircher’s ideas about the interior structure of the earth as well as his ideas about the mystical nature of the universe (that’s another story). And the spirited, bumbling polymath-dreamer of Jules Verne’s A Journey to the Center of the Earth, who leads a subterranean descent through an old volcanic crater, certainly seems to be based on Kircher himself.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: November 1, 2012

author: John Glassie


text:
The Erotic Dreams of Emanuel Swedenborg

By Richard Lines
January 24, 2013

During the time of his "spiritual awakening" in 1744 the scientist and philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg kept a dream diary. Richard Lines looks at how, among the heavenly visions, there were also erotic dreams, the significance of which has been long overlooked.

Among  the many works of the eighteenth-century Swedish scientist, philosopher, religious teacher and visionary Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) his private Drömbok (variously translated into English as Journal of Dreams or Dream Diary) has attracted and continues to attract special attention.  Unlike the works he published in his lifetime, or intended to publish, which were all written in Latin, the Journal of Dreams was, in the words of a present-day Swedish Swedenborg scholar, written in ‘rather crude but expressive Swedish’ (Jonsson, 16).  It has been described as a ‘difficult and obscure notebook’ (Jonsson, 130) which ‘reflects a profound psychical crisis’ (Jonsson, 150).
The Journal covers a period from July 1743 until October 1744, a time when Swedenborg was going through a  transition from life as a scientist and mining engineer to one as a ‘revelator’ and seer.  As he was to put it himself:
I for my part. . . had never expected to come into that state in which I am now; but the Lord selected me for this, and for revealing the spiritual meaning of Scripture, which he had promised in the Prophets and in the Book of Revelation.  My purpose previously had been to explore nature, chemistry, the science of mining, and anatomy, etc’  (Robsahm, 6).
It begins as a factual travel diary, describing how he leaves Sweden by the port of Ystad (famous today as the home base of the fictional detective Kurt Wallander), crossing the Baltic to Stralsund and then journeying through Hamburg and Bremen to the northern provinces of the Netherlands (then known as the United Provinces), Groningen and Friesland, where the diary breaks off abruptly on his arrival at the town of Harlingen in the latter province. After some undated fragments it resumes at the end of March 1744. A week or so later during Easter weekend, in what is probably the most significant part of the Journal, Swedenborg describes in detail a vision of Christ he had while staying in Delft (just three miles from The Hague). In late May Swedenborg travelled on to London where he became involved for a while with the congregation of the Moravian Church in Fetter Lane. In total, one hundred and fifty dreams are described, of which about one third involve science, not surprising in view of Swedenborg’s professional interests at the time. Indeed, his purpose in travelling to the Netherlands was to complete and deliver to his printer in Amsterdam the manuscript of his work Regnum Animale (‘The Animal Kingdom’ or ‘The Soul’s Domain’, the latter a much better English rendering of the Latin) — a book which aimed  to explain the soul from an anatomical point of view. As well as the scientific, the Journal contains mostly dreams of a religious nature. Among the heavenly visions come other scenes both mundane and fantastical: a cast of various dogs, Kings, an executioner with his heads, dragons, a talking ox, and an abstract apparition of an oblong globe. There are also many women and, as we shall see, some dreams that are erotic in content.
After his death in 1772, the manuscript of the Dream Journal was preserved by Swedenborg’s family, but in 1858 it was bought by the Royal Library in Stockholm.  The following year the Royal Librarian GE Klemming published it in a limited edition of ninety-nine copies as Swedenborg’s drömmar (‘Swedenborg’s Dreams’).  Klemming had been shocked by the highly erotic descriptions in some of the dreams and to avoid prosecution had kept within the legal limit of one hundred copies, sending it only to ‘enlightened thinkers and those interested in the subject’.  One of the recipients was the Englishman James John Garth Wilkinson, a doctor who had already translated and published Swedenborg’s manuscript De Generatione (‘The Generative Organs’).  Wilkinson was to translate the Dream Journal into English in 1860. This translation was not immediately available and it was a slightly later one by RL Tafel which gained currency when it was published in the second volume of his book Documents Concerning Swedenborg in 1877. However, Tafel omitted the erotic material and it wasn’t until C.Th. Odhner’s translation published in 1918 that the offending passages were reinstated, albeit in the guise of Latin. Despite its age, this translation has been described as the ‘linguistically most faithful of the English editions’ (Bergquist, 7). Odhner, a minister of a Swedenborgian ‘New Church’ congregation in the USA, explained that he had translated the passages omitted by Tafel into Latin ‘as the students of the Church certainly should have an opportunity to judge of their character and contents’. ※※Indexed under…Concealmentof erotic words (by Latin)
Although only a portion of the Dream Journal is erotic in content, to a modern eye in a post-Freudian age it is perhaps one of the most striking aspects. Further interest is added by the fact that Swedenborg was later to write an important book, Conjugial Love (1768), sometimes translated as ‘True Marriage Love’, in which physical sexual love between man and woman at its best is raised to spiritual heights and represents the union of wisdom and love, the two essential attributes of the divine.
Quite early in the Journal Swedenborg noted that after arriving at The Hague ‘. . . the inclination for women, which had been my chief passion, so suddenly ceased’.  Swedenborg never married, nor is it recorded that he ever had a long-term mistress, but later entries reveal a man with strong heterosexual feelings who, in modern parlance, had been ‘sexually active’.  While the Journal shows him to be a man who felt guilty and full of sin, this sense does not seem to have extended to sexual matters and in this regard he was very much an eighteenth-century ‘man of the world’.  In one vivid dream, no. 171, Swedenborg finds himself in bed with a woman. She touches his penis with her hand and he has an erection, bigger than he has ever had. He penetrates her, reflecting that a child must come of this, and writes that he got off en merveille.  (He uses the French expression in the original.)  In the next paragraph, no. 172, Swedenborg explains that this dream signifies the ultimate love of the holy and that the ejaculation of semen represents the love of wisdom.  Worldly reason considers this to be impure, but in reality it is pure.  This is something that Swedenborg would develop in his later books, above all in Conjugial Love, where he insists that erotic love is of divine origin, although human beings may pervert it to selfish, and therefore evil, ends.
In another dream he is unable to control his desire for a woman and finds himself in the company of his friend Professor Niklas Oelreich (among other things the censor of the Swedish press from 1746) in visiting brothels, although without, apparently, the intention of having sexual intercourse.  In a remarkable dream (no. 120) he is lying with a woman who was not beautiful but who pleased him.  He touched her vagina and discovered that it had a set of teeth. Suddenly this woman assumes the form of a man, the politician Johan Archenholtz, a friend and ally of Swedenborg’s. The image of the vagina dentata (vagina with teeth) appears again in no. 261 where he sees in a vision a fiercely burning coal fire that represents the ‘fire of love’.  Then he is with a woman whom he wants to penetrate, but the teeth prevent him entering her.  We know now that the image of the vagina with teeth is found in folklore, notably in Japanese folktales and also in the mythology of the Chaco and Guiana tribes in South America.  They may be cautionary tales warning men of the dangers of sex with strange women.  Erich Neumann, the pupil of Carl Gustav Jung, relates the myth of the ‘Terrible Mother’ in his book The Great Mother (1955).  The hero is the man who breaks the teeth and restores the woman’s femininity.  In her book Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990) Camille Paglia explains that the toothed vagina is ‘no sexist hallucination’ — every penis is diminished by every vagina, ‘just as mankind, male and female, is devoured by mother nature’. ※※Indexed under…TeethSwedenborg’s dream of vaginal
It is remarkable that Swedenborg, presumably ignorant of the presence of the myth in folklore and unacquainted with modern psychology, should dream quite spontaneously of the toothed vagina. Yet Lars Bergquist, the contemporary editor of the Journal of Dreams (called Swedenborg’s Dream Diary in this edition), makes no reference to the presence of the phenomenon of the vagina dentata in folktales or its significance in modern psychology.
The Victorian translators of the Journal of Dreams — with the exception of Garth Wilkinson who regarded his translation of The Generative Organs as ‘one small step on the way to a greater liberty of thought and knowledge on sexual subjects’ (in a letter to his friend Henry James senior) — were shocked by the erotic content of the Journal and either omitted it (Tafel) or hid it from the eyes of the uneducated and presumably prurient reader (Odhner). Even today, commentators on Swedenborg tend to play down those passages in the Journal and in other works. But for the modern reader these passages show Swedenborg as a heterosexual man subject to ordinary sexual urges and desires. They ‘humanize’ a man who might otherwise be considered an austere scientist and seer.  Given the later emphasis that Swedenborg gave to sexual love between men and women, an analysis of the eroticism of his dreams at a crucial turning point in his life would seem to be an important and worthwhile subject of further study.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: January 24, 2013

author: Richard Lines


text:
Mother Goose’s French Birth (1697) and British Afterlife (1729)

By Christine Jones
May 29, 2013

Christine Jones explores the early English translations of Charles Perrault's 1697 collection of fairy tales and how a change in running order was key to them becoming the stories for children which we know today.

Unlike the Brothers Grimm, who recently metamorphosed from children’s story collectors to godfathers of gore for the fairy-tale series, Grimm, Charles Perrault’s name remains generally unrecognizable. Yet, his stories, first published in 1697 as the Histoires ou Contes du temps passé (Stories or Tales of The Past) are anything but. Characters he immortalized, such as Cinderella with the glass slippers, the beauty who sleeps one hundred years, and the puss in boots, were destined for centuries of translation and revival. If he did not invent all of them — some appear in different guises in older folklore traditions — he did invent many of the particularities of their stories as we know them today.
That said, most readers no doubt know these titles in English, not French and, in that sense, are familiar not with Perrault’s stories per se, but with the healthy tradition of English translation, inaugurated in 1729. Precious little has been said about those published words — the language of the eighteenth century that turned Cendrillon into Cinderella.1 One basic reason for this oversight in scholarship no doubt comes down to a long-standing premise about the 1697 fairy tales: that they fell out of favor in the early eighteenth century and disappeared for a spell.2 According to this argument, they reemerged in the nineteenth century with the recovery tactics of publishers interested in hooking a younger audience for these tales and with the Grimms, who credited Perrault with inspiring their work.3
Yet, when one looks into the early reception of the tales in Britain, extant editions tell a different story about Perrault’s fate during the Enlightenment. Libraries such as the Toronto Library, Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books, Princeton University’s Cotsen Chidren’s Library, the Pierpont Morgan Library, and the British Library are home to myriad eighteenth-century editions of the tales: large, small, fancy, cheap, and all of them delighted by their subject matter. Pirated French editions in Amsterdam and rapid-fire translations from London rolled off the presses every few years. Copies of copies slid down the social ladder and made their way into chapbooks. Woodcutters busily carved variations of earlier images for their publishers, leaving posterity with dozens of illustrations of stories credited to M. Perrault. If France abandoned her native son in the early years of the century, French-speaking publishers in Amsterdam and their eager British counterparts gave him a glorious afterlife.
Furthermore, these early editions of Perrault’s stories are as illuminating as they are voluminous. Two inaugurations in that century of Enlightenment and francophilia are worthy of note. First, Amsterdam publishers flooding the market with French editions exerted surprising influence over England’s, and even France’s, eighteenth-century reception of the fairy tales. Second, the Histoires’ very first British translator, Robert Samber of London, found catchy language for these exciting young heroes and heroines in 1729 that immediately turned into classics for the English-speaking world. Before I detail these changes, a word about the stories as they appeared in print from 1697 until about 1720.
The first hands that held and read the Histoires ou contes du temps passé belonged to adults, not children. Written in a poetic style with myriad cultural references, the stories embody the style of their age: a blend of the intellectualism found at the Académie Française and the fashionable splendor of Louis XIV’s Versailles. Knowing Perrault had an adult readership may explain why the volume begins and ends with long, complex tales in a narrative style that we no longer associate with fairy tales today.
Readers of the earliest editions had to slog first through “La Belle au bois dormant”/”Sleeping Beauty” the longest tale in the collection, rich in detail and also violent in its themes. To take one example, the prince’s Ogress mother orders that her grandchildren and the princess be cooked for her in a Sauce Robert (a staple of classic French cuisine). Owing to the tale’s length, however, the plot has time to resolve the problems it sets up, notably by feeding the Ogress — a cruel irony for a gourmand — to a vat of vipers and snakes. Similarly, the volume ends with the second longest story, “Le Petit Poucet”/“Hop o’ my Thumb”, which sees a diminutive young man through a family drama that repeatedly thwarts his success and sends him on many adventures. Sandwiched in between is the kind of short story Walt Disney Studios prefers: “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Cinderella,” and “Puss in Boots.”
If we no longer relish lengthy, tediously detailed fairy tales, it is in part because eighteenth-century editors made a series of decisions that privileged the shortest ones and, as the century reached its end, increasingly aimed the collection at children. Even the earliest choices made seem to have had lasting impact. In 1721, a major publisher in Amsterdam, the family Desbordes, changed the order of the texts in a French-language edition whose impact was subtle and enduring: “Petit Chaperon rouge” (Little Red Riding Hood) was placed first, followed by “Les Fées” (The Fairies).4 Desbordes kept “Barbe bleue” (Blue Beard), of middling length, in its traditional third spot and followed it with “Belle au bois dormant” (Sleeping Beauty) in fourth place.
In the wake of this idiosyncratic change, something extraordinary happened: from the first translation by Robert Samber in 1729 onward, British editions copied the Desbordes order of tales.5 Along with the pithy names Samber chose for their protagonists—Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderilla (with an “i”), Puss in Boots—this order of stories stuck. Because editors tended to reprint and tweak earlier translations—the one by Samber and another very similar one credited to Guy Miège6—rather than start from scratch, it was already difficult by 1750 to flout these convention. Of 30 extant editions from Paris, Amsterdam, and London between 1721 and 1800, all but one followed the Desbordes 1721 order and Samber’s names; and all claim to translate from the 1697 Paris edition and credit the book to M. Perrault. Thus, the order of stories with “Little Red Riding Hood” first and “Sleeping Beauty” in the middle quickly and seamlessly became the original edition to which subsequent editors referred. That small change created the conditions for a seismic shift in the volume’s identity. Through the course of the century, it was increasingly associated with simplicity of style and a young readership.
Now, Little Red Riding Hood’s fate, to be eaten alive by a wolf, is not on the surface a more youthful theme than the long rest of Sleeping Beauty. Yet, in terms of length and complexity of plot, they represent opposite examples of the genre. In “Sleeping Beauty,” the tale Perrault put first in 1697, the young girl grows up to a teen, pricks her finger, falls asleep for a generation until her prince can be born and find her, elopes, has lots of sex with him, bears two children, and then lives out her life at his mother’s castle. For Little Red Riding Hood, by contrast, death cuts her down in the bloom of youth. Her narrative hardly affords her time to think, much less grow up. Desbordes privileges “Little Red Riding Hood” and pairs it with “The Fairies,” another mini-story about talking to people whose motives and rank the heroine does not fully understand. In first and second place in the volume, they form a neat package of apparently simple caution about behavior, balancing each other out with dystopian and utopian endings: Young girl talks nicely to wolf and dies vs. young girl talks nicely to fairy and wins (her reward is to spit gemstones whenever she opens her mouth to speak).
What happens when the text leads off with the shortest stories in the corpus? Readers are set up to read fairy tales a certain way. The short plots encourage us to look for a simple point—the nugget of action or “moral of the story” that teaches a lesson. Readers who approach the collection this way will logically seek out a similarly small nugget buried in the much longer stories to follow instead of relishing their narrative complexity. We can see in that perception of the genre something very close to popular ideas today about what a fairy tale should look like and do for children. Imagine if “Sleeping Beauty” with all its adult drama had stayed in first place. Then Little Red Riding Hood would have come through history as she was born: swallowed up between a story of sex and an Ogress mother-in-law, and Blue Beard’s bloody conjugal nightmare. If this had been the case, the collection probably would not have appeared to target children. Second, we might well have a different vision of the genre today as a form that works out social, rather than moral, complexities. Instead, when Walt Disney animators created the filmic Sleeping Beauty, they made it look like a chaste short story, ending the movie plot where Perrault’s story really begins: the marriage between the prince and the princess. (Spoiler alert: there is also no kiss in Perrault’s version. The princess wakes up and the trembling prince falls to his knees in amazement. Disney added the heroism for dramatic 1950s effect.)
Eighteenth-century editors began a slow transformation of this small French book into a pithy classic for children two centuries before Disney got a hold of it. British editions, in particular, helped to canonize a specific vision of the stories. Simply put, eighteenth-century translations are many and relevant to our modern perception of Perrault’s 1697 French fairy tales. Editors reiterated their titles and line-up so often that they ceased to need the French antecedent to be veritable icons and legends of the literary past. No longer translations, they became English-language originals. With her position in first place, Little Red Riding Hood emerged from the century a ubiquitous heroine and the very definition of what a fairy tale should be.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Christine Jones