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Richard Spruce and the Trials of Victorian Bryology

By Elaine Ayers
October 14, 2015

Obsessed with the smallest and seemingly least exciting of plants — mosses and liverworts — the 19th-century botanist Richard Spruce never achieved the fame of his more popularist contemporaries. Elaine Ayers explores the work of this unsung hero of Victorian plant science and how his complexities echoed the very subject of his study.

Lying prostrate in his bed in Yorkshire in 1869 just five years after returning from an expedition through South America, Richard Spruce — one of Victorian England’s top botanists, collectors, and explorers — found himself contemplating his gradual transformation into the object of his fervent study: moss. “One day last week a dentist relieved me of four teeth”, Spruce joked to a friend, “and I now belong to the genus Gymnostomum; but by the time you come over I hope to have developed a complete double peristome”. As his health declined dramatically in the following years, Spruce retreated into his beloved collections, spending what little energy he had left by working for just a few minutes at a time on classifying microscopic specimens into meticulous arrangements of sporophytes and peristomes.
From 1849 to 1864, the botanist trekked along the Amazon and its tributaries, ending up in the Andes of Peru and Ecuador on a successful collecting mission for Kew Gardens and the English East India Company. Today, Spruce is mostly remembered for this final leg of his expedition — under the orders of the famous Sir Clements Markham, he studied, cultivated, and eventually smuggled out young cinchona trees to plant in India as potential treatment for malaria. This swashbuckling story of botanical espionage, though, obscures what Spruce spent most of his life obsessed with: those most minute and mundane specimens of the plant world — bryophytes, or mosses and liverworts. Although bryophytes actually thrive in cooler environments (like England), Spruce’s livelong mysterious bodily afflictions prevented him from living comfortably in these same conditions. Years of inexplicably coughing up blood and suffering from debilitating headaches forced the botanist to conduct his work in warmer, more tropical climes. This, then, is the story of how one of Britain’s most promising, skilled explorers struggled to find a place in Victorian science, unable to shake his love for the underdogs of the plant world.
Born in Yorkshire in 1817, the tall, thin, and handsome Richard Spruce had always been drawn to nature’s most unassuming plants. After building unparalleled botanical collection and classification skills in England’s countryside and then in the Pyrenees, Spruce joined his good friends Alfred Russel Wallace and Henry Walter Bates in Brazil at the age of thirty-two, backed and brokered by prominent botanists at Kew Gardens. Reflecting on his Amazonian collections, Spruce described his unusual, and perhaps debilitating, draw to hepatics (liverworts), in particular. “I like to look on plants as sentient beings,” he wrote,
which live and enjoy their lives — which beautify the earth during life, and after death may adorn my herbarium. . . It is true that the Hepaticae have hardly as yet yielded any substance to man capable of stupefying him, or of forcing his stomach to empty its contents, nor are they good for food; but if man cannot torture them to his uses or abuse, they are infinitely useful where God has placed them, as I hope to live to show; and they are, at the least, useful to, and beautiful in, themselves — surely the primary motive for every individual existence.
Indeed, despite his later reputation as a smuggler of cinchona, Spruce had little personal interest in utilitarian plants. Nor was the botanist particularly interested in the tropical species that we usually associate with floral beauty — orchids, palms, birds of paradise, and the like, that made other naturalists famous. Dismissing the picturesque image of the Amazon filled with “gay flowers, butterflies, and birds”, Spruce argued that popular naturalists (like Wallace and Bates) would “utterly mislead” readers, “if they were thereby led to suppose that even a tithe of those beautiful objects were ever to be seen all together, or in the space of a single day”. The beauty of the Amazon, to Spruce, lay in the humble, Godly mosses and hepatics that hearkened back to his botanical ramblings back in Europe, providing respite from the rainforest’s apparently underwhelming — albeit dangerous — daily existence. In a passage scrawled in his journal, and later reprinted in nearly all of his obituaries because it seemed so inherently characteristic, Spruce revealed his innermost botanical leanings. After years of trekking through thick forests, dealing with overturned canoes and lost collections, outwitting a mutinous attack by his native porters, and, as always, dealing with unceasing illnesses, infections, and his usual bloody cough, the botanist “found reason to thank heaven which had enabled me to forget for the moment all my troubles in the contemplation of a simple moss”.
Mosses and hepatics, in the nineteenth century as now, were — perhaps unsurprisingly — relatively unpopular plants. Lacking roots, flowers, and seeds, bryophytes require tedious, trained microscopic observation in order to study their intricate characteristics. Examining them in the field involves crawling around on hand and knee, dissecting complicated colonies growing on rocks and stumps with a hand lens and tiny forceps. While preserving bryophytes is relatively easy — usually only a single cell thick, they can be dried and pressed even in the dampest and most inhospitable environments — bryological collections seem divorced from any verdant aesthetics usually associated with flora. Piled up herbarium sheets appear uniformly brown and amorphous, their hidden natural beauty only revealed under more careful, time-consuming microscopic study. The sets of mosses and hepatics that Spruce collected in South America (which, when sold to subscribers back in Europe, supplied most of his meager income while travelling) only appealed to serious plant scientists with bryological interests. Rather than providing any insight into the Amazon’s vast biological diversity or potential imperial economic holdings, Spruce’s bryological collections spoke to very specific, disciplinarily bounded discussions about plant reproduction and speciation.
Bryophytes mattered to mid-nineteenth century botanists primarily because of their role as primeval beings, plants that predated almost all other vegetative life amidst a growing scientific fever for evolutionary studies. Spruce’s most popular, oft-quoted journal entry described his realization of the “idea of a primeval forest” upon reaching Brazil, a rich depiction of “enormous trees” that were “decked with fantastic parasites, and hung over with lianas, which varied in thickness from slender threads to python-like masses . . . now round, now flattened, now knotted, and now twisted with the regularity of a cable”. Writing to the director of Kew, William Jackson Hooker, from Ambato in 1858, Spruce appealed to this sense of evolutionary interest while sending back a beautifully complete set of moss specimens. Although he had suffered a period of particularly bad health while travelling through a damp and cold region, the botanist came across a scene rich in bryophytes, delighting him to no end. After listing all of the mosses and hepatics that could be found growing in “shady rivulets”, Spruce wrote that “I had never seen anything which so astonished me”. Taken by the botanical riches, he went on that “I could almost fancy myself in some primeval forest of Calamites, and if some giant Saurian had appeared, crushing its way among the succulent stems, my surprise could hardly have been increased”. The mosses and hepatics that he collected in this “primeval” area brought him a large sum of money, one of the most valuable collections of his fifteen-year expedition.
Beyond their small role in Victorian botany in an evolutionary sense, bryophytes had a way of working themselves into art and literature as signifiers of privacy and secrecy. Pushing against its scientific reputation as downright boring, moss in particular served to create some botanical, aesthetic sense of a setting that allowed for illicit sexual encounters and for primal yearnings. The reasons for this strange dual identity of bryophytes as both mundane and as primal are relatively clear: realistically, moss provided a soft bed for sexual romps that had to take place outside of stuffy Victorian homes. Serving, perhaps predictably, as a slang term for pubic hair, moss was understood to be consistently moist and jewel-like, glittering like emerald colonies under light. One need only look to the climax of Elizabeth Gilbert’s recent historical novel, The Signature of All Things — a long-coming sexual awakening that takes place in a hidden moss-covered grotto in Tahiti — as evidence for the strength and longevity of this Victorian plot device. Although tropes of sexual encounters occurring in gardens and forests far predated the nineteenth century, both realistically and literarily, these hidden moss grottoes conjured up an image of something semi-religious, some secret refuge from the trials of urban — and overwhelming imperial tropical — life.
Despite eschewing the topic of sex altogether in his Amazonian journals and letters, Spruce wrote excitedly about coming upon one of these hidden grottoes in 1855, just off of the Rio Taruma. After climbing for hours on end to reach a picturesque waterfall, Spruce snuck behind the fall into a space that he remembered as an overwhelming high point of his expedition. Finding naturally produced steps embedded in the cliff, it was:
thus easy to walk under the cataract without being wetted, though the rocks drip here and there and are everywhere thickly clad with ferns and Hepaticae, but especially with Selaginellae, of which I gathered four species not found in adjacent forests. The water falls into a deep trough, from which spray dashed out and is borne downward by the rush of the cataract. The water winds away among mossy blocks and then is lost beneath them for a considerable distance . . . The whole aspect of this mossy cirque, with its broad riband of falling water, embosomed in dense luxuriant forest, in which was visible no palm, was something of an admixture of tropical scenery with that of temperate climes.
Spruce’s reaction to this mossy grotto was nothing short of sublime. Never one to exaggerate the beauty of the tropics, the botanist (whose health was on a brief upswing in 1855) had a private, almost religious reaction to this bryological setting. This day in the “mossy cirque” was one that Spruce seemed unable to forget even after returning to England’s more “temperate climes”.
Back in Yorkshire after his fifteen years in South America, Spruce’s health continued to decline. Although he dedicated most of his time to compiling and writing his bryological masterpiece, Hepaticae of the Amazon and Andes of Peru and Ecuador (published in 1885), a more than five hundred page list of all the region’s liverworts and their characteristics, the botanist suffered increasing attacks of intense bodily pains and even routine paralytic seizures. The saddest irony, perhaps, is that Spruce’s illness rendered it incredibly difficult to work with the bryological specimens that he had spent his life accumulating. Writing to a colleague in 1889, Spruce lamented that unbearable headaches prevented him from using the microscope for more than a few minutes at a time. His collections of thousands of mosses and hepatics remained unclassifiable except in brief spells of good health, and Spruce was forced to rely heavily on other bryologists to examine the peristomes and sporophytes necessary for serious study.
Although Spruce lived to be seventy-six — a remarkably old age for such a diseased and decrepit man in the 1800s — he never wrote the travel narrative of his time in the Amazon that could have secured his fame and fortune. At the time of his death, the botanist had accumulated a massive bryological herbarium, thousands of pages of specimen lists that tracked floral biogeographical distribution, travel journals that described his daily habits in the Amazon and Andes, and countless letters to Europe’s and America’s foremost scientists. His early notes were, and are, considered nearly flawless examples of botanical record keeping. Spruce’s handwriting was impeccable; precise locations, dates, and environmental conditions marked every specimen he collected. His descriptions of mosses and liverworts continue to be some of the most specific and accurate ever recorded. Botanists, even now, regard Richard Spruce as a true “botanist’s botanist”. Hepaticae of the Amazon and Andes remains a usable and useful guide to South American liverworts, and Spruce’s herbarium sheets are some of the most carefully arranged and beautiful specimens of mosses ever created. So why, then, is the naturalist missing from most histories of Victorian science?
The answer, it seems, lies in Spruce’s unceasing love for the meticulous and the mundane. Although these qualities made him a respectable, credible source to his colleagues in the mid-nineteenth century — Spruce, for example, was never accused of exaggerating the geographical range of his expedition, unlike most explorers — everyone seemed to recognize that his work just wasn’t interesting to the general public. His good friend Alfred Russel Wallace certainly tried to popularize Spruce’s work, compiling his journals and letters into the two massive Notes of a Botanist volumes, published by Macmillan in 1908. Indeed, although Wallace believed that the volumes would “take their place among the most interesting and instructive books of travel of the nineteenth century”, he was careful to print the longer, more detailed botanical passages (mostly bryological in nature) “in smaller type, so that they may be readily skipped by those who are chiefly interested in the actual narrative of Spruce’s travels”. Rather, in introducing the volumes to readers, Wallace emphasized the smallest sections of Spruce’s work — his quick and conventional references to the Amazon’s more sensational stories, ranging from naked warrior women to gold and vampire bats. Spruce’s long, detailed, and almost obsessive passages about mosses and hepatics shrank into the shadows.
Richard Spruce, along with his favorite bryological specimens, occupied tenuous, almost dual identities in Victorian science. Both the botanist and his bryological colleagues struggled with how “popular” their work could aspire to be. Although he generally fits into the category of masculine, sensationalist Victorian explorer (along with Wallace and Bates), Spruce was far from the strong, resilient model of conqueror of nature; for most of his life, the naturalist was too sick to work, and spent his favorite days in the Amazon sitting quietly on the ground, examining the miniscule plants that reminded him of home. These miniscule plants, too, fit uneasily into broader botanical categories. While they represented something clandestine, sexual, and primeval in literature, bryophytes were considered relatively uninteresting and even unimportant in a rapidly expanding British botanical empire. Although he never fully transformed into a species of moss, Richard Spruce’s uncommon affinity with the plants relegated his work to the depths of the botanically obscure, wildly useful to other bryologists, but unread and uninteresting to the broader public.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: October 14, 2015

author: Elaine Ayers


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Divine Comedy
Lucian Versus The Gods
By Nicholas Jeeves
March 23, 2016

With the twenty-six short comic dialogues that made up Dialogues of the Gods, the 2nd-century writer Lucian of Samosata took the popular images of the Greek gods and redrew them as greedy, sex-obsessed, power-mad despots. Nicholas Jeeves, editor of a new edition for PDR Press, explores the story behind the work and its reception in the English-speaking world.

Lucian of Samosata, who lived from ca. AD 125 to ca. AD 200, was an Assyrian writer and satirist who today is perhaps best remembered for his Vera Historia, or A True Story — a fantastical tale which not only has the distinction of being one of the first science fiction stories ever written, but also is a contender for one of the first novels.
A True Story is a stylish and brilliantly conceived work of the imagination, and readers may still delight in its descriptions of lunar life forms and interplanetary warfare, its islands of cheese and rivers of wine, and its modernistic use of celebrity cameos. But by the time of its writing, Lucian was already several years into a period of literary adventurism that had brought him considerable fame — and infamy — as one of the sharpest, funniest, and most original comic writers of the age. With the quartet of works consisting of Dialogues of the Courtesans, Dialogues of the Dead, Dialogues of the Gods, and Dialogues of the Sea-Gods, Lucian would not only scandalise some of the most influential and celebrated figures of the empire, but in what is perhaps the best known of these, Dialogues of the Gods, he would also furnish the permanent decline of belief in the gods themselves.
In Dialogues of the Gods Lucian conjures a series of short comic scenes in which we find the Greek gods domesticated. Here is Zeus, bluff and irritable, squabbling with Hera over his latest infidelity; there is Aphrodite, reprimanding Eros for making an old lady fall madly in love with a teenager. In Apollo & Dionysus, the adolescent god of wine frets about the over-endowed Priapus’ “growing” interest in him; in Pan & Hermes, Hermes tries to duck the issue of his paternity — “how should I come by a son with horns, and with such a shaggy beard and cloven feet, and a tail at his rump?” — until, that is, Pan tells him about the harem of nymphs he keeps in Arcadia. “Indeed. . . well — son — come hither and embrace me!”
With these twenty-six peeks behind the curtain of the great Hesiodic myths, Lucian draws up a sensational image of Heaven and the legends of its tenants, variously recasting them as impotent, venal, needy, irresponsible, opportunistic, sex-obsessed, and power-mad — hardly immaculate, but just like those made in their image, permanently insecure and just as prone to lowering thoughts and deeds.
These “closet dramas” would deliver a stinging blow to Greek polytheism. While philosophy was now the religion of state for Athenians, the ancient beliefs, so obviously rural in origin, were undergoing a minor resurgence in popularity. For Lucian this was intolerable. As one of the most gifted and popular satirists of his time, at the peak of his powers, and having just survived an attempt on his life by a gang of religious zealots, the gods of his forebears were ripe for his attentions.
*
Born in Samosata on the banks of the Euphrates in Assyria, Lucian lived for the early part of his life under the Roman emperor Hadrian, and then as an adult under Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius, and Commodus. Because there are no contemporaneous accounts of his life, not much more is known about him other than what little can be gleaned from his collected writings. We know that he spent the early part of his adulthood educating himself as he wandered in and around Ionia, Italy, and Gaul, all the while developing his skills and reputation as a rhetorician. At this he would become successful and quite wealthy, speaking in court on behalf of paying clients, writing speeches for high-standing citizens, and publicly demonstrating his ingenuity with improvised riffs in response to suggestions called out by audiences.
He wrote extensively throughout this period — generally arch, philosophical works, composed in stylish Attic Greek, and drawing on his formidable skills as a rhetorician. Yet in his early forties he seems to have suffered what we would now call a midlife crisis — or at least, a crisis of conscience. As Henry Fowler puts it in his introduction to The Works of Lucian of Samosata, “Rhetoric had been left to the legal persons whose object is not truth but victory.” This idea would certainly become one of the underlying themes of Lucian’s writings, and he learned to despise the self-righteous. But whatever triggered the crisis, he felt sufficiently moved to abandon the respectable life of the rhetorician and relocate permanently to Athens, where he would devote himself completely to the writing and performing of comic satires.
The journey to Athens would prove both eventful and portentous. Along the way, accompanied by his elderly parents, Lucian encountered the fraudulent priest Alexander of Abonoteichus, leader of the newly emerging cult of the snake god Glycon. Alexander claimed that a snake in his possession was the reincarnation of the god Asclepius, and that only he, Alexander, could channel and interpret its divine prophecies. Lucian was simultaneously disgusted by the influence wielded by Alexander and by the credulity of his followers, whom he described in Alexander the Oracle-Monger as having “neither brains nor individuality. . . with only their outward shape to distinguish them from sheep.”
Having identified the manifestation of the snake god as nothing more than a cleverly manipulated puppet, Lucian was determined to expose the puppet master. The attempt nearly cost him his life. When his turn came to ask Alexander for a prophecy, Lucian’s question was as rash as it was amusing: “When will Alexander’s imposture be detected?” Alexander responded with a characteristically cryptic answer, and then had Lucian followed. Discovering that Lucian was about to make a sea crossing, Alexander paid the captain of the vessel to have Lucian and his family slain and thrown overboard. Only the captain’s last-minute desire to meet his impending retirement with a clean conscience prevented the murder.
Lucian would never forget the experience, and it is to be supposed that it galvanised him, honing his innate sensitivity to duplicity. With the satires that followed he began to dismantle the pillars of hypocrisy wherever he saw them. With Dialogues of the Courtesans, he sketched a merciless portrait of the hetaerae — the high-status prostitutes of Athens — and their puffed-up clients. He built on these with Dialogues of the Dead, in which he ridiculed the vain expectations of a host of recently departed celebrities arriving in the afterlife, including the eminent philosophers Diogenes and Polystratus, the warrior Hannibal, and Kings Philip and Alexander of Macedon. Having dealt with the rich, the famous, and the mighty, he turned his gaze upwards, to the very peaks of Mount Olympus. With Dialogues of the Gods and Dialogues of the Sea-Gods, he would visit his wits on Heaven, and taunt the gods themselves.
*
While Lucian is treasured by classicists, today his extensive talents seem hardly to rank at all in the wider public consciousness. In contrast with his venerable forebears, he has slipped into relative obscurity.
It was not always like that. From the middle Renaissance into the late 1800s, Lucian was among the most widely read of the “Greeks” in Europe, largely thanks to the efforts of the great Dutch theologian Erasmus and his English friend Thomas More. Sharing an appreciation for Lucian’s amusing scepticism and the elegance of his prose style, together they produced, in the early 1500s, the first major translation of his works into Latin. The project, which took several years to complete, would become a publishing sensation, going through more than thirty editions in Erasmus’ and More’s lifetimes alone.
Not everyone was pleased to see it. Thanks to the international appeal of the Erasmus-More translations, by 1590 Lucian’s entire canon had been placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the Vatican’s catalogue of texts considered to be too salacious for public consumption. Yet despite such prejudices, Lucian’s popularity continued to grow rapidly — not least of all in England, where his dialogues found their way on to school curricula. Thomas Linacre, Thomas More’s old teacher, believed that “Your toil will become light and amusing and your progress sure, if you will only read a little Lucian every day.” And so it proved, as Lucian was endorsed by a new generation of schoolmasters, each in agreement that his sharp wit, broad humour, and matchless style provided the perfect means by which a young lad might be encouraged to attend to his Latin.
A number of English translations soon followed. First was Francis Hickes’ Certaine Select Dialogues of Lucian of 1634, updated and republished in 1664 to include Jasper Mayne’s Part of Lucian made English from the Originall. Ferrand Spence’s more extensive Lucian’s Works of 1684 was the first to make use of vernacular English, a decision which infuriated the esteemed poet and translator John Dryden. In his essay “The Life of Lucian”, which would preface the subsequent four-volume Works of Lucian of 1711, Dryden remarked of Lucian that “No Man is so great a Master of Irony, as our Author” — but of Spence, thought it “not worth my while to rake into the filth of so scandalous a Version. . . he makes [Lucian] speak in the Stile and Language of a Jack-Pudding, not a Master of Eloquence. . . for the fine Raillery, and Attique Salt of Lucian, we find the gross Expressions of Billings-Gate, or More-Fields and Bartholomew Fair.”
For the next sixty years or so, “Dryden’s Lucian”, as it became known, would serve as the standard. Yet as Lucian became ever more popular, and as the demand for new editions grew, so the translations kept coming — and with them a series of alternating editorial visions. John Carr’s Dialogues of Lucian of 1773 succeeded in being vivid, earthy, and companionable, directed as it was towards the general reader rather than the classical scholar. Thomas Francklin’s Works of Lucian of 1780 took a more academic approach, a rebuke to Carr that resulted in a more respectable, but considerably less fun, translation. William Tooke’s Lucian of Samosata of 1820 might be thought of as a “Goldilocks” edition — pitched just right, with Tooke allowing Lucian’s schoolboy humour, his sly philosophy, and his elegant prose to shine through just as he found it in the Greek, untroubled by any notions of incongruity.
Yet as the eighteenth century drew to a close, Lucian slowly began to fall out of favour. Victorian attitudes towards propriety prevailed, and schoolboys had their Lucian substituted with Ovid, Horace, and Virgil. The story might have ended there, had relief not come from the unlikeliest of places — a small tomato plantation on the island of Guernsey.
*
By 1903, at the age of forty-two, Henry Fowler found himself at a low ebb. Behind him lay an undistinguished academic career at Balliol College, Oxford; this was followed by ungratifying and only moderately successful employment as a schoolmaster, and then occasional freelance work as an essayist for Punch and The Spectator. His brother Frank, twelve years his junior, had found himself similarly disappointed: he had graduated with a third-class degree from Cambridge, and was now making plans to farm tomatoes in the Channel Islands.
Despite their relative lack of academic achievement, the two brothers were altogether devoted to the Greek and Roman classics, and shared a great passion for, and facility with, language. Throughout Henry’s time as a schoolmaster, teaching both Latin and Greek first at Fettes in Edinburgh, and then at Sedburgh in Yorkshire, he would visit Frank during the holidays at his rooms in Cambridge. There they would talk enthusiastically about their plans to one day write together.
Having decided to accompany Frank to Guernsey, Henry began to think seriously about the writing project. In between their labours among the tomato plants, they hatched a plan — a lively new translation of the complete works of Lucian.
There were a number of good reasons for choosing Lucian. First, the most recent translation, a concise edition compiled by the Cambridge scholar Howard Williams in 1888, was not only out of print but considered to be unsatisfactory by the Fowlers. Second, they felt that the great satirist had been neglected for too many years, having slowly fallen out of fashion, and that a mass-market revival was due. Third, Henry had learned that Oxford University had recently begun publishing a series of translations of Greek and Roman classics under the Clarendon Press imprint, and felt that a complete Lucian would make an ideal addition to the catalogue.
But there was also another, more carefully concealed reason: Henry saw some interesting parallels between his own lack of religious faith and Lucian’s questioning of the religious authorities of his day. Henry had little time for religion and the “airs of intellectual superiority” he felt it engendered. As Jenny McMorris quotes in her excellent biography of Henry, The Warden of English (Oxford University Press, 2001), “Thirty years ago I thought religious belief true; twenty years ago doubtful; ten years ago false; and now it is (for me, of course) merely absurd.” It is doubtful that Henry shared any of this with his publishers when he pitched the idea of a new edition. He was canny enough to sense that it would not only prove an unhelpful confidence, but that there were enough good reasons to persuade Oxford to fund the book’s publication anyway without invoking dangerous personal ones.
The commission to translate Lucian agreed upon, Henry and Frank divided the Lucian workload between them. The pieces which Henry translated are marked in the books with an “H”; Frank’s with an “F”. Those translations they found more challenging, and on which they thus found it necessary to collaborate, were marked “H. F.”  By this method they were, by the close of 1904, able to present to Oxford their complete works of Lucian.
Well — not the complete works. During their initial proposal to Oxford, Henry had noted that several of the dialogues might need to be expunged so as not to offend the decency of their readership (who were not, after all, only scholars or students, but also more general readers). Not wishing to pre-empt which pieces would be acceptable to Oxford and which not, the Fowlers  willingly handed over the job of censor to the university Vice-Chancellor William Walter Merry. On this occasion at least Merry was quite liberal with his blue pencil. In Dialogues of the Gods alone he excised seven of the twenty-six.
These seven expurgated dialogues deserve some particular attention, for they are among the most interesting of the set — though this is quite possibly because of their lewdness (which is rather a lowering thought in itself, but there we have it).
Of these, Zeus & Ganymede and Hera & Zeus would have been the most obviously problematic for Merry. In the first of these, Lucian sets the familiar mythological scene in which Zeus takes on the appearance of an eagle so that he may swoop down on the comely shepherd-boy Ganymede and carry him up to heaven forever. “Kiss me, you fine little fellow!” says Zeus on their arrival. “You are now an inmate of Heaven. Instead of milk and cheese you will eat ambrosia and drink nectar.” Ganymede is understandably distraught. “But where am I to sleep at night?” he asks innocently — to which Zeus replies, “Little numbskull, I brought you away that you may sleep with me!”
In Hera & Zeus, Zeus tries to justify the presence of his new erômenos to his furious wife. She is having none of it. “Zeus! I hope never to proceed so far in condescension as to let my lips be contaminated by a Phrygian shepherd-boy—and such an effeminate stripling too!” To which Zeus replies, “Mind your language, madam — this effeminate stripling, this Phrygian shepherd-boy, this delicate youth. . . Ah, goodness, I had best say no more, lest I overheat myself!”
Four of the remaining five dialogues on the blacklist are not nearly so contentious, though one can still see why Merry might have been nervous about allowing their inclusion. Hermes & Helios is a bit of racy tittle-tattle in which Zeus sends orders to Helios, the sun god, to stay in for a few days so that he can spend an unnaturally long night copulating with Alcmene. Merry would only have seen fit to censor it due to its bawdiness, a highlight of which is when Helios chunters about how, in his day, “such things did not use to happen. . . Whereas now, for the sake of one graceless woman. . . poor mankind must live miserably in darkness all the while, and — thanks to the amorous temperament of the king of the gods! — there they must sit waiting in that long obscurity, till this great athlete you speak of is finished!”
Apollo & Hermes is similarly risqué. Here Hermes relates to his companion the story of how Hephaestus has managed, at last, to catch his wife Aphrodite in bed with Ares, the god of war. Trapping them in a magical net like a pair of eels, he calls all the gods to witness the adultery for themselves. Despite this highly embarrassing situation Hermes confides that, even so, “I could not help thinking that Ares, when I beheld him so entangled with the fairest of all the goddesses, was in a very enviable situation.”
In Pan & Hermes, Pan claims Hermes as his father. Again it is easy to see why Merry drew a line through this. Not only is Pan boastful of his many sexual conquests, but there is an uncomfortable moment in which we try to figure out quite how goat-like Hermes was when he made love to Penelope — a touch of bestiality that did not go unnoticed.
Apollo & Dionysus begins with Dionysus raising the seemingly harmless subject of Aphrodite’s variously natured children. However, it soon emerges that this is merely a preamble to an embarrassing tale in which he confesses to having been cornered by Priapus and his giant penis. He is clearly worried about this encounter and what it means but, like a schoolboy wanting to ask a friendly uncle about girls, tries to approach the subject from another angle so as to make his enquiry seem rather more casual, and therefore less excruciating. Regarding Merry’s blue pencil, this one rather speaks for itself.
As to why the seventh, Poseidon & Hermes, was excised is a bit of a mystery. The dialogue deals with the birth of Dionysus from Zeus’ leg. There is nothing in it that is particularly shocking even to delicate sensibilities, and the story of how Dionysus was born would already have been known to anyone with even a casual familiarity with the Greek myths. Perhaps it was the idea that a man might give birth on behalf of a woman that bothered Merry; perhaps it was the passing references to adultery and hermaphroditism — though one imagines that these could easily have been removed without damaging the text too severely. Whatever his reasons, it seems we will never know exactly what he saw in it that so exercised him. ※※Indexed under…Birthof Dionysus (from Zeus' leg)
In 1905, the four-volume set The Works of Lucian of Samosata was published to great critical acclaim, and remained in print until 1939. The Fowlers capitalised on their successful partnership the following year with their first bestseller, a book of English usage and grammar they called The King’s English. Frank died in 1918 aged forty-seven from tuberculosis; Henry died in 1933 aged seventy-five, and would be remembered by The Times as “a lexicographical genius” thanks to his work on the first Concise Oxford English Dictionary.
As for Lucian himself, the details surrounding his death remain something of a mystery. The story that he was torn to pieces by dogs is a well-known myth propagated in the tenth century by the compiler of the encyclopedic Suda, a Christian who was unimpressed with Lucian’s perceived mockery of the faith. Lucian was largely, but not entirely, innocent of the accusation: his Death of Peregrinus had made characteristic fun of the newly emerging religion, and it remains one of the few first-hand accounts of its earliest expressions. He saw out his days in Egypt, having been pastured by the emperor Commodus into an easy and well-paid legal post. We know that he performed his dialogues there, and that he suffered badly from gout, an affliction about which — naturally — he wrote a play, featuring the goddess Gout herself. As Henry Fowler writes in his introduction to The Works of Lucian of Samosata, “whether the goddess was appeased by it, or carried him off, we cannot tell.”
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Nicholas Jeeves

source: public-domain-review

type: essay

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


text:
“Unlimiting the Bounds”
the Panorama and the Balloon View
By Lily Ford
August 3, 2016

The second essay in a two-part series in which Lily Ford explores how balloon flight transformed our ideas of landscape. Here she looks at the phenomenon of the panorama, and how its attempts at creating the immersive view were inextricably linked to the new visual experience opened up by the advent of ballooning.

Until the late eighteenth century, the predominant mode of landscape representation was the bird’s-eye view. This type of image offered the onlooker a high viewpoint outside the subject depicted within the frame of representation, whether a city, a coastline, or a pastoral scene. The aim to show as much as possible outweighed the concern for true perspective and straight sight lines. Robert Harbison captured the dynamic of the bird’s-eye view when he commented, of Wenceslaus Hollar’s 1648 “Long View” of London, “This is not exactly London as anyone experiences it, but London laid out neatly in the mind’s eye, where one can enumerate its features and remind oneself of many separate things at once”.1
The panorama — patented by the Scottish portraitist Robert Barker in 1787 — was a new method of displaying a landscape image. Barker’s proposal was to exhibit a painted landscape in a 360-degree view on a circular canvas strip surrounding the viewer. This was not really a new kind of image: the manipulation of perspective, with multiple viewpoints made to appear visually consistent, was already a constituent feature of bird’s-eye views. Barker’s innovation was rather in the viewer’s interface with the image. The panorama was an apparatus that would isolate and control what it was possible to see. His specifications included lighting from above, an isolated central viewing platform exactly halfway up the height of the canvas, restrictions on the viewer getting too close to the picture, entrance from below, and ventilation without windows. The edges of the image were covered by a canopy that, at the top, also hid the source of light. Barker wasn’t taking the picture out of the frame, he was making the frame big enough to include the spectator as well.
To audiences anticipating a conventional bird’s-eye view, it must have been strangely thrilling to walk through a tunnel and up onto a viewing platform and find themselves entirely surrounded by an illuminated scene. Initial responses to Barker’s inaugural panorama in 1792, a view of Edinburgh from Calton Hill, compared it to recent feats of illusion and visual trickery, such as Philippe de Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon.2 But Barker was emphatic in his wording when defending the show against these comparisons:
There is no deception of glasses, or any other whatever; the view only being a fair sketch, displaying at once a circle of a very extraordinary extent, the same as if on the spot; forming perhaps, one of the most picturesque views in Europe. The idea is entirely new, and the effect produced by fair perspective, a proper point of view, and unlimiting the bounds of the Art of Painting.3
Barker’s insistence on the “fair” (twice), “proper” and artistic character of his panorama painting was a counterweight to the startling sense of hyperreality that must have been experienced by visitors. Barker and subsequent proprietors (after his patent lapsed in 1802) emphasised the verisimilitude of the scenes they presented, whether of cities or of battles, and invited verification from figures who had visited the places or witnessed the events (Altick 188; Wilcox 37). Panoramas began not only to serve as a means of satisfying curiosity about the wider world when travel was difficult or impossible, but also to represent current affairs — The Battle of the Nile, the Coronation of George IV — in a time before illustrated newspapers had made up-to-date imagery cheap and accessible (Altick 181-2, 176). Modifications of the viewer-scene relationship established by the panorama were also essayed. The moving panorama — a long painting revealed horizontally or vertically on rollers — became popular in the 1820s. Here the audience stayed in their seats and the image moved. Theatregoers in 1824 at the Theatre Royal watched Grimaldi the clown “ascend” in a balloon against a scrolling vertical panorama backdrop designed by Thomas Grieve (Hyde 1988:131). A different kind of movement was achieved by the “diorama”,  invented in 1823, which worked by moving audiences between two different “sets” showing scenes from nature in changing time and seasons, the transitions effected by lighting (Altick 1978:165).
With the viewer at the centre of the view, the frame was dissolved. No longer was the experience of landscape representation mediated by the baroque perspectival constructions of traditional city views. The visitor was invited to encounter the landscape directly. Of course, this was still an image, but every effort was made to support the illusion that the visitor had been transported to the very point from which the image had been captured. Barker claimed the view was “the same as if on the spot”. Sometimes this “spot” was actually physically recreated in the panorama’s rotunda to form the viewing platform, as is the case in the 1829 Colosseum Panorama of London from St Paul’s Cathedral. The structure of the model of the cathedral tower is evident in a contemporary engraving by Rudolph Ackermann.
But many of those entering the rotunda to admire the view found themselves disoriented, and it was not unusual for a first-time visitor to a panorama to be sick.4 The disruption of the conventional relationship between viewer and canvas — the removal of the frame, the legends, the hierarchy that reminded the viewer where they stood — could induce a powerful sense of dizziness and nausea. Visitors encountered the limits of their own bodies by being immersed and yet unable to see everything at once.5
The use of a conventional linear perspective both projected and demanded an observer situated at an exterior, elevated point; it was a way of making sense of the large space and depth of a city view. The viewer of the picture needed to occupy this ideal viewpoint and imagine themselves into the landscape while they read the image. From the late eighteenth century, the panorama modulated this scopic regime by immersing the viewer within the image while maintaining a certain separation and elevation of viewpoint. The impossibility of seeing the whole canvas at once, and the emphasis on verisimilitude in what was evidently an illusion, generated a new awareness of the limits of vision. The panorama inaugurated a mode of vision that was more subjective and self-reflexive, in which the beholder described not so much what there was in the image, but what they saw there and what it looked like to them. It was a peculiarly appropriate mindset with which to experience the newly elevated view enabled by the hot air balloon, which made its first manned ascent in France in 1783.
The fact that the balloon and the panorama were invented within five years of one another, and the similarity of the 360-degree views they offered, is remarkable. In his The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, Stephan Oettermann argued that the new visual experience gained in the balloon led to the development of a format for recreating the immersive view.6 He qualifies this claim with the suggestion that the panorama responded indirectly to more sophisticated demands on vision and representation, by no means all to do with the balloon.7 It is not, I think, a simple case of cause and effect, with the balloon coming first, nor did both devices emerge from the same set of circumstances; for example, the balloon’s uptake depended on the availability of hydrogen that had only just been successfully combined.8 But the panorama undoubtedly schooled its visitors in a mode of viewing that was compatible with ballooning. And though the balloon was five years older than the panorama, far fewer people directly experienced balloon travel than the tens of thousands who visited a panorama. Before 1836, a total of 313 people had ascended in a balloon in England by one contemporary compiler’s reckoning; in contrast, as an example, the Colosseum’s Panorama of London received more than that number in a single day during its 1829 season.9 In the first fifty years of these two technologies, the idea of the “panoramic” view was far more widely disseminated than the idea of the balloon view.
The impact of the panorama can be traced in balloonists’ accounts. Those trying to describe their airborne experiences found the panorama and its related devices to be a useful point of comparison. Before its appearance in 1792, authors of balloon accounts struggled for analogies to describe their experience. “I can find no simile to convey an idea of it”, wrote Vincent Lunardi of his elevated view of London.10 Thomas Baldwin was never lost for words, but flitted through analogies — fairyland, Lilliput, a table-top model of Paris, an “elegant Turkey-Carpet” — the only one bearing repetition being that of a “coloured Map”.11 Another 1780s balloon narrator also referred to “a coloured map or carpet” — the apparent flatness of the landscape was a new and unimagined feature of the aerial view.12 Both Lunardi and Baldwin related their views at one point to bird’s-eye views, mentioning “oblique” and “common” prospects or perspectives.13 But they insisted on the newness and difference of the view, and, in deference to Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756), professed a sublime-inflected inarticulacy at the vastness and beauty of the vista.
By contrast, in the first half of the nineteenth century, the heyday of the panorama, balloonists did not need to look far for an appropriate analogy. “We found ourselves. . . the motionless spectators of a vast panorama” wrote Dr. Forster of his first ascent.14 Henry Mayhew, the journalist and social reformer who wrote about his first balloon experience for the Illustrated London News in 1852, drew heavily on this new vocabulary:
And here began that peculiar panoramic effect which is the distinguishing feature of a view from a balloon, and which arises from the utter absence of all sense of motion in the machine itself. The earth appeared literally to consist of a long series of scenes, which were being continually drawn along under you, as if it were a diorama beheld flat upon the ground, and gave one almost the notion that the world was an endless landscape stretched on rollers, which some invisible sprites were revolving for your especial enjoyment.15
The first sentence suggests that by the middle of the century balloon views were often described as “panoramic”. His references to a diorama and a moving panorama show these contemporary entertainment technologies providing a shorthand for the expansive scope and numerous points of interest available in a balloon view. They also presage the comparison between the aeroplane view and the cinema in the twentieth century. Both the balloon and the panorama educated observers in techniques of engaging with the image that anticipated cinematographic techniques such as tracking, where the camera moves through space, and panning, where the camera swivels on a stationary point.16
Mayhew flew in Henry Green’s balloon, the Royal Nassau, on its five hundredth ascent.17 A professional balloonist with a mind for business, Green had constructed a giant balloon which could be inflated with coal gas (much cheaper than hydrogen) and begun a residency at Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens in 1836. His long-distance balloon journey in the same year, an unprecedented eighteen-hour drift across Europe with two passengers (one of whom, Thomas Monck Mason, wrote a lengthy and fascinating account of the trip), brought welcome attention to the venture.
The ascents constituted a spectacle in themselves, drawing the attention of passers-by within the Gardens as well as providing the passengers with an exciting new experience — Mayhew noted “a multitude of upturned faces” as he ascended.18 As Richard Holmes notes, the cultural associations of the balloon changed in the 1830s, from the pioneering and dangerous image of its first fifty years to a more accessible “recreational” object.19 With a “passenger” balloon regularly ascending at Vauxhall, it became easier for the general public to experience flight. For a moderate fee, anybody could go up in the Royal Nassau and see the capital city from the air. Balloons joined panoramas on the London entertainment circuit; both types of view offered up the metropolis — the whole at once — to the gaze of the casual spectator. In 1839, it was even possible to go to Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens to experience, in a moving panorama, a simulacrum of the very balloon ascent made from the same site.20
By the middle of the nineteenth century, the balloon experience had been well and truly disseminated. A map of London produced for visitors to the Great Exhibition was (inaccurately) named a “balloon view” to give it more appeal. The professional balloonist Henry Coxwell recalled that he was able to prepare for his first ascent, in 1844, simply by reading widely.
This, then, was my first real ascent; but such was the amount of thought I had bestowed on the subject in previous imaginary flights, built upon the descriptive accounts of others, that I seemed to be travelling an element which I had already explored, [. . .]. In most respects I found the country beneath, including the busy humming metropolis, the River Thames, shipping, and distant landscape, pretty much as I expected, and had been tutored to see in the mind’s eye.21
An important shift had occurred in the experience of landscape. The panorama and the balloon disrupted the previously rigid interface between spectators and their surroundings by dissolving the frame of representations and bringing possibilities of height and movement to the viewing subject. Thomas Baldwin’s ballooning pictures were a rare attempt to reflect these possibilities, but were too strange and too new to make much impact. Some fifty years on from Baldwin’s pioneering ascent in 1785, many more people had experienced being at the centre of the view, in a static panorama, and a great deal more had been written to convey the visual rewards of aerial mobility. “[T]he aeronaut quits the earth to assume a station in the zenith of his own horizon”, wrote Thomas Monck Mason after the Nassau flight, where “all the most striking productions of art, the most interesting varieties of nature, town and country, sea and land, mountains and plains, mixed up together in the one scene, appear before him as if suddenly called into existence by the magic virtues of some great enchanter’s wand.”22 He brings to mind both a panorama and a diorama in his invocation of artifice. The new bounds of reality, visible from this suspended vantage point, were best articulated using the vocabulary of virtual reality.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: August 3, 2016

author: Lily Ford


text:
Worlds Without End

By Philip Ball
December 9, 2015

At the end of the 19th century, inspired by radical advances in technology, physicists asserted the reality of invisible worlds — an idea through which they sought to address not only psychic phenomena such as telepathy, but also spiritual questions around the soul and immortality. Philip Ball explores this fascinating history, and how in this turn to the unseen in the face of mystery there exists a parallel to quantum physics today.

William Barrett was puzzled by flames. As the young assistant of the eminent John Tyndall at the Royal Institution in London in the 1860s, he noticed that flames seemed to be sensitive to high-pitched sounds. They would become flattened and crescent-shaped, as Barrett put it, like a “sensitive, nervous person uneasily starting and twitching at every little noise”. He was convinced that this “unseen connection” was mediated by some immaterial intangible influence — it was, he admitted, an effect “more appropriate for a conjuror’s stage than a scientific lecture table”.
Certain people, Barrett decided, were analogues of the sensitive flame, exquisitely attuned to vibrations that others could not perceive, to “forces unrecognized by our senses”. He considered these persons able to receive messages from supernormal spirit-beings existing in an intermediate state between the physical and the spiritual — a phenomenon that might account for telepathy.
This sounds like a strange and surprising conclusion for a scientist to reach. But in the late nineteenth century, with invisible phenomena such as electromagnetic fields becoming central to physics, unexpected new discoveries of “emanations” such as X-rays and radioactivity causing much head-scratching, and radio proving that invisible telecommunication was possible, it wasn’t easy to distinguish the plausible from the fantastical. Some researchers forecast a new union of science and religion: a kind of theoretical proof of beliefs such as the immortality of the soul. Others began to suspect that ours was not the only universe — that others might stretch away unseen in other dimensions or on “spiritual” planes. The ether, a tenuous and all-pervasive medium that all physicists considered to be the carrier of light waves, was regarded as a potential bridge between these worlds.
It is commonly asserted today that physics at the fin de siècle was believed by scientists to be on the point of completion. But that could not be further from the truth. On the contrary, at that moment almost anything seemed possible.
Psychic Forces
Barrett was no marginal figure: he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1899, and knighted in 1912. In 1881, while Professor of Physics at the Royal College of Science in Dublin, he published his findings on thought transference in the journal Nature. The ensuing controversy motivated him to convene a group of like-minded individuals who would conduct “psychical research” as a systematic science. After Barrett met with Edmund Dawson Rogers, vice president of the Central Association of Spiritualists, in 1882, the two men formed the Society for Psychical Research.
The society’s first president, Henry Sidgwick, was Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge and doubtful about the claims of spiritualism. Other presidents have included William James, Lord Rayleigh, and the later British prime minister Arthur Balfour; and its members have included J. J. Thomson, Lewis Carroll, Alfred Tennyson, John Ruskin, and the former prime minister William Gladstone. The society still exists today, and its output is an odd mixture of scholarly historical studies of the field of the paranormal and reports and theories that are strange, vague, speculative, and most definitely on the scientific fringe.
Barrett suspected that some psychical phenomena might be explained as the interventions of invisible, immaterial beings — not souls or ghosts, but natural, living creatures. In On the Threshold of the Unseen (1917) he wrote that “it is not a very incredible thing to suppose that in the luminiferous ether (or in some other unseen material medium) life of some kind exists”. He imagined such beings to be “human-like, but not really human, intelligences — good or bad daimonia they may be, elementals as some have called them”. But where, then, did they dwell?
One answer was proposed by the Irish physicist Edmund Edward Fournier d’Albe, who, like Barrett, taught in Dublin until moving in 1910 to the University of Birmingham in England. Fournier d’Albe was interested in electromagnetic phenomena and conducted experiments in radio and nascent television technology. He merged these interests with a belief in invisible beings and worlds with which we stood on the verge of making contact.
In Two New Worlds (1907), Fournier d’Albe argued that the recent discoveries in radioactivity and atomic structure implied the existence of an unseen spiritual universe continuous with ours. The material universe must now properly be regarded as an infinite series of worlds within worlds, which Fournier d’Albe considered to differ “only in the size of their elementary constituent particles.” He discussed two of them: the “infra-world” of atoms and electrons, and the “supra-world” of cosmic proportions. Both are, like our own world, teeming with purpose and life.
Fournier d’Albe expanded on these views in New Light on Immortality (1908), where he tried to come to terms with what the notion of a human soul could mean in the atomic age. To pronounce on immortality, he said, who now was better placed than the physicist, who understood the most about energy and matter? He supposed that what we call the soul might be a real substance, albeit more tenuous than vapour, composed of particles called “psychomeres” that possess a kind of intelligence and ability to act together via telepathic contact.
Fournier d’Albe claimed to deduce something of the nature of psychomeres, although in truth it was sheer guesswork. To estimate the number of psychomeres in a single human soul, he plucked a figure of ten trillion out of thin air. From this he calculated the mass of a soul as about fifty milligrams, and asserted that, were the soul-matter of a person to be condensed into a body just six inches high, it would have the same density as air and would float freely in it. Such a concentration of psychomeres might border on visibility: it could resemble a will-o’-the-wisp. “And thus it comes about that all the fairies, pixies, sylphs, and gnomes fly before the flaring light of science”, Fournier d’Albe proclaimed triumphantly. “They are not so much sent away as explained away”.
If, once this soul has left the mortal body, its “earth memories. . . should be awakened, and become dominant”, then it might gather again into its remembered earth-form: “first, a fine mist, then a cloud, a tall pillar of filmy vapour, from which a complete form, moulded and clothed to suit the character assumed, would then emerge, to walk the earth as before for a little while”. In other words, it would be what we have traditionally called a ghost.
There was not a shred of real scientific evidence in support of these wild speculations. But wasn’t Fournier d’Albe in the end doing no more than what science has always done: to reduce complex, puzzling phenomena to a minimal set of propositions that could rationalize them? Besides, the invisible world that Fournier d’Albe was invoking could offer consolation for the increasingly barren picture of the world that modern science seemed to insist on. From natural history, he wrote,
theology has been ruthlessly evicted. The visible world being henceforth closed to it, it has taken refuge in the invisible world, where it feels free to make what declarations it likes. And that invisible world continues to be the ‘home’ towards which the weary heart turns from a world that has become indeed clean and bright and sanitary, but utterly hopeless and empty, if not unjust and cruel.
Theological Thermodynamics
The idea that there might be an entire immaterial yet populous realm of existence was emboldened by the new discoveries of the late nineteenth century, particularly the mysterious X-rays first described in 1895 (and invoked by H. G. Wells in The Invisible Man two years later). Although these speculations might seem now to be an extraordinarily elaborate way to “explain” questionable events reported at séances and attested to by mystics like the theosophists, we should remember that the Christian faith already supposed such things. If some nineteenth-century scientists, such as Tyndall and Thomas Henry Huxley, started to question them, most people considered them unexceptional. As a scientific understanding of the world advanced, some scientists still felt a need to reserve a space for God, the soul, and the afterlife. No telescope or microscope was going to locate these things; they would have to be invisible.
Perhaps the most notable and thorough effort to provide a scientifically plausible account of invisible spirit worlds within a Christian context was made by the distinguished Scottish physicists Balfour Stewart and Peter Guthrie Tait in their book The Unseen Universe (1875). Although Stewart became president of the Society for Psychical Research during the 1880s, both men were sceptics of spiritualism, seeing in it nothing more than evidence of human suggestibility. Tait attacked spiritualists at the British Association meeting of 1871, bracketing them alongside “Circle-squarers, Perpetual-motionists [and] Believers that the earth is flat”. Yet he and Stewart were eager to understand how the “invisible order of things” that the Bible seemed to demand — the existence of immortal souls — might be consistent with the laws of physics. They aimed to refute Tyndall’s attack on religion in his address to the British Association in Belfast in 1874, in which he asserted that religion should not be permitted to “intrude on the region of knowledge, over which it holds no command”. On the contrary, Stewart and Tait insisted, science and religion were fully compatible. Yet their version of Christianity, on the evidence of The Unseen Universe, was starkly materialistic: they fit within a long tradition of both advocates and opponents of religion who insist on making it a set of beliefs about the physical world that may either be rationalized or disproved.
“We are forced to believe that there is something beyond that which is visible”, they wrote: “an invisible order of things, which will remain and possess energy when the present system has passed away”. This unseen realm need not be remote, but is present right alongside us — within reach, if only there were anything to touch. Its fabric might lie at the extreme of the gradual dematerialization of substance we already see in the physical world, where solid, liquid, and vapour were deemed to be followed by the “semi-material” existences of electricity, magnetism, heat, light, and gravity.
Life itself, Stewart and Tait argued, is a “peculiarity of structure which is handed over. . . from the invisible to the visible”. This transfer relies on interaction between the two realms: something enabled by the rainbow bridge of nineteenth-century physics, the ether. This ether-mediated communication is vital to the authors’ theory of the immortality of the human soul. We each possess a spiritual body in this invisible world, they said, which becomes energized by our actions and impulses in the tangible world. “Certain molecular motions and displacement in the brain” are in part “communicated to the spiritual or invisible body, and are there stored up” as a kind of latent memory. This accumulated energy makes the spiritual body “free to exercise its functions” even after bodily death. By living, we store up immortality.
There was, however, a problem. In 1850 the German physicist Rudolf Clausius formulated the first and second laws of thermodynamics: the conservation of energy and the irreversibility of heat flow from hot to cold. A year later William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) pointed out that such a flow of heat inevitably dissipates energy, which flows into random motions of molecules and can never be recovered. This process, he said, must eventually create a universe of uniform temperature, from which no useful work can be extracted, and in which nothing really happens. But how can this “heat death” of the universe be consistent with immortal souls?
Here Stewart and Tait fell back on an idea proposed by their mutual friend, the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, who worried about the implications of the inexorable second law of thermodynamics for human free will. Maxwell’s solution was first articulated in a letter to Tait in 1867. What if, he said, there exist invisibly small beings — later dubbed “demons” by Thomson — that could cheat the second law by identifying “hot” atoms and separating them from “cold” in a random mixture, creating a reservoir of heat that could be tapped to do work? Such beings, Stewart and Tait now proclaimed, might “restore energy in the present universe without spending work”. It isn’t clear that Maxwell ever intended his demons to be more than hypothetical. But for Stewart and Tait they were essential agents of eternal life.
The unseen universe could account for almost any article of faith. “The scientific difficulty with regard to miracles will, we think, entirely disappear, if our view of the invisible universe be accepted”, Stewart and Tait claimed. “Christ, if He came to us from the invisible world, could hardly (with reverence be it spoken) have done so without some peculiar sort of communication being established between the two worlds”.
This, then, is where invisible forces and rays pointed for some scientists in the late nineteenth century: towards what we might regard as a thermodynamic theory of God, Christ, the afterlife, miracles, and an eternal Hell. Perhaps concerned about how far they had gone, Stewart and Tait published their book anonymously.
The Hidden Reality
Physics has never looked back from this dematerialization of the world that began a century and a half ago. The speculations of Barrett, Fournier d’Albe, Stewart and Tait, and others (such as the prominent English scientists William Crookes and Oliver Lodge) were proposals that our visible world is not the only reality. That is just what physicists still assert today with their notions of the multiverse, 11-dimensional string theory, extra dimensions (“brane worlds”), and quantum-mechanical “many worlds” where parallel versions of ourselves go about their business. Contemporary metaphors such as a “hidden reality” (see physicist Brian Greene’s popular book The Hidden Reality [2011]) recommend themselves precisely because they have a history. Can there be any doubt that spiritualists would have delighted in “dark matter” and “dark energy”, these unseen particles and forces that supposedly dwarf the meagre quantities of visible matter in the universe and propel it on a trajectory that opposes gravity? When, in describing such concepts, cosmologists speak of “unraveling the mysteries of the invisible universe”, they are unwittingly invoking a long legacy.
History teaches us that attempts to patch over gaps in understanding by inventing invisible phenomena are both useful (they prevent science from stalling in the face of mysteries) and usually wrong. The echoes between contemporary fundamental physics and cosmology and the late-nineteenth-century visions of unseen worlds — extra dimensions, invisible intelligences, matter as knots of pure energy, atomized constituents of immeasurably small extent — should alert us to the territory we are entering, in which traditional tropes are informing the pictures we create. They are a reminder that science is constantly resurrecting old dreams in new guises. It seems inevitable that some of the current ideas about the “hidden universe” will one day appear as quaint and archaic as Fournier d’Albe’s soul-particles or Stewart and Tait’s thermodynamic immortal soul. If our descendants are fair-minded, they won’t laugh at that, but will recognize the well from which such ideas were drawn.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: December 9, 2015

author: Philip Ball


text:
The Calcutta Pococurante Society
Public and Private in India’s Age of Reform
By Joshua Ehrlich
August 17, 2016

Joshua Ehrlich on an obscure text found on the shelves of a Bengali library and the light it sheds on the idea of the "public" in 19th-century Calcutta.

Lurking on the shelves of the Uttarpara Jayakrishna Public Library, in the Indian state of West Bengal, is a most unusual text. Prefixed to the Calcutta Quarterly Magazine for 1833, this sixty-page supplement bears the insignia pictured above and the title “Calcutta Pococurante Society”. It begins with some scraps of verse and a manifesto to “investigate and discuss the following subjects”:
Firstly.—Three courses and a des[s]ert.
Secondly.—An additional course.Thirdly.—Cant, Humbug, and Absurdity in all their branches whether Tory, Whig, Radical,
Ultra, or Liberal, Medical, or Literary, Martial, or Civil, National, or individual . . . (p. 3).
The proceedings which follow are a mixture of light humor, literary chatter, and armchair philosophy, all dripping with booze. “My dear compatriots and I,” one member sets the scene, “are scribbling in Calcutta, the ruling caste, and tippling our Hock and Champaigne round this table” (p. 22). Another notes “how much the art of preparing the necessaries of life has advanced in Calcutta”, referring specifically to “the modus operandi of cooling wines” (p. 33). Elsewhere a full page is taken up by a wine list. Evidently, this is “a club where the mind can throw off its coat, and put its legs upon a chair if they are tired” (p. 7). The members’ wandering dinner chat, peppered with lines of poetry and elements of the occult, is not the kind of thing modern readers are used to seeing in print. Nor is it obvious why past readers should have wanted to.
Early nineteenth-century Calcutta (now Kolkata) has long held particular fascination for historians. In older tellings, this was the setting of a “Bengal Renaissance”, which saw ambitious attempts to synthesize eastern and western philosophical traditions, and gave an early (if abortive) impulse to Indian nationalism. Recent studies have situated Calcutta’s intellectual and political ferment in the larger context of a British-imperial or global age of reform. Bengal’s capital was the second city of Britain’s empire and a major commercial hub, home to a cosmopolitan population of some half a million. By the 1820s, Calcutta boasted meeting halls, a flourishing press, and numerous voluntary associations — not to mention collegiate institutions predating London University by up to a quarter-century. For many contemporaries, these were signs of an emergent “public” analogous to that which had come to shape social and political life in Britain.
Views of Calcutta and its Environs (1848) — Source.
Views of Calcutta and its Environs (1848) — Source.
Yet the situation of Calcutta’s “public” differed markedly from that of its metropolitan counterpart. Its very claim to the title was denied by the government, on the theory that acknowledgment would lay the ground for revolution. As “public opinion” acquired ever-greater status in Britain, it remained highly contested in British India. Assemblies and the press were tightly regulated for much of the period, and newspaper editors who ran afoul of the authorities faced sanction or embarkation. Even at its most inclusive, meanwhile, Calcutta’s would-be public retained sharp divisions. Indian and European reformers came together around certain political questions, notably freedom of the press, but it was not at all clear that they shared the same long-term interests. The European population comprised mainly officials in the East India Company’s civil or military service, few of whom had any intention of settling permanently in India. While some immersed themselves in local culture and society, a greater number clung determinedly to the comforts of home. And while calls for responsible government resonated from the 1810s–30s, it was uncertain how far the city’s European population would pursue them if it meant relinquishing cherished privileges and emoluments. To this color divide might be added others running along lines of caste, class, and religion. It was thus a matter for debate among contemporaries — and has remained so among historians — whether a “public” on the British model existed in Calcutta, and, if so, how far it penetrated indigenous society. Could “public” institutions take root on Indian soil?
A point of entry to such questions can be found in the aforementioned proceedings of the fictional “Calcutta Pococurante Society”. According to its rules, the Society is dedicated to “Cant, Humbug and Absurdity” in their “public” branches; “private Cant and private Humbug” are avowedly off limits (p. 3). Yet notions of public and private, openness and closedness, are played with and blurred throughout the text. “Public Dinner”, one member declares, is a misnomer: at such events, “A wise man dines before hand, and goes to make speeches or gain ‘his private end’ out of the public” (p. 30). The Society’s constitution marks another exercise in parsing such distinctions. “The number of members”, one rule states, will “be strictly limited to such as apply for admission, or are asked to join the Society or who are neither asked to join [n]or apply for admission” (p. 4). While the group would thus by comic implication seem open to all, another rule provides “that a Secret Committee be appointed . . . to eat, drink and think for the rest” (p. 4). As one member puts it, “Perhaps the public would like to eat drink and think for itself — but this would never do. . . We must be particular as to whom we admit into our circle or it will not long be worth entering” (p. 7). Such exclusivity is reinforced by the cultlike forms and observances of the Society, notably its alligator insignia, whose “mysterious meaning” is reserved for the Committee members: Zegri De Rohan, Glengyle, Wilfred, Lincoln, Berkeley, and Candide (p. 4).
Annotations in the Uttarpara Library’s copy of the text dispel some of the mist surrounding this upper echelon. On page four, next to the printed handles of the Secret Committee members, someone has scrawled the names of prominent figures in Calcutta’s European community. “Wilfred”, for instance, is identified as David Lester Richardson, a writer and editor of publications including the Calcutta Quarterly. Also identified are the lawyer Theodore Dickens, the merchant William Cobb Hurry, and the administrator Henry Meredith Parker. Assuming the identifications are accurate, these were “public” eminences, whose depiction as soused aesthetes lends the “Pococurante” text the character of an extended joke. To be in on the joke, however, would have required a fairly intimate knowledge of the real-life personalities involved. That a work with so apparently narrow an audience could have found its way into print thus suggests something of the clubby parochialism of Calcutta’s would-be public. In a sober moment, Hurry’s character describes the British in India as “a limited society, where every body almost is personally known to every body else” (p. 54). Elsewhere, Parker’s stand-in opts to recite a piece formerly intended for the press, “as this circle is sufficiently extensive in its ramifications to supersede all necessity of publication” (p. 34). If Calcutta reformers had long envisioned the press as a conduit to the wider world, the proliferation of the medium seems instead to have fixed the attention of the city’s European elite upon itself. With few “matters of engrossing general or public interest to occupy men’s minds”, they gossiped about acquaintances or reminisced about home (p. 54).
It is striking, meanwhile, how little the text is concerned with India or Indians. Most coeval groups, like the Calcutta School Society or Agricultural and Horticultural Society, included Bengali elites, and even English-language journals featured “native” contributors. The “Prefatory Remarks” which follow in the Calcutta Quarterly note “the rapid advance in knowledge, made by the Natives of India within these few years past”, and avow as one of the publication’s objects “to ameliorate the condition of the subject millions of this country”.1 Yet there is scant discussion among the pococuranti of these “subject millions”. The aloofness of the British transplants, their dislocation from their surroundings, seems part of the satire. (“Pococurante”, taken from a major character of Voltaire and a minor work of Thomas Moore, means “little-caring”.) At the Society’s dinner, even local ingredients are rendered in French on the menu. The members discuss almost exclusively western politics, philosophy, and literature. On the rare occasions when the east enters the scene, it does so obliquely and fancifully, for instance in the decoration of the Society’s meeting-place: “a Turkish tent of white silk . . . Ottomans of pale Blue and Gold . . . a profusion of Purple Velvet drapery” (p. 5). The everyday experience of life in India is relegated to outside the tent-flaps.
It is ironic that a document with so little to say to Indian readers should have been preserved in one of the first libraries freely open to them. The Uttarpara Library, just upriver from Calcutta, was founded by the wealthy reformer Jayakrishna Mukherjee in 1859. In its early days, this “remarkable institution” featured a reading room with thousands of works in Bengali and Sanskrit as well as English; upper rooms for meetings, lectures, and other town hall functions; and “‘a garden of choice fruits and flowers . . . for the resort and recreation of the community’”.2 Conceived with the aim of widely diffusing knowledge, the library circulated volumes in the surrounding area and offered a gold medal to anyone who could pass an advanced reading examination. It embodied a far broader, more sanguine view of the Indian public than that found in the annals of the Pococurante Society. Historians have typically seen the early 1830s as the heyday, not to say the last gasp, of Calcutta’s early reform “public”. Yet works like the one explored here remind us just how small this “public”, for all of its aspirations, was. The Indian public imagined later in the century, built on popular, nationalist foundations, was a far cry indeed from one which could be summed up as a handful of alienated British transplants.
An inkling of the fragility and decadence of that early-modern formation runs throughout the “Pococurante” text. And in the final pages a series of disasters befalls the Society. First, several members are seized by the poisonous effects of mushrooms consumed at dinner. Then Parker’s character observes, “Do mine eyes deceive me or does that Chandelier above our heads, and half a ton in weight, sway to and fro in the intrenchant and the slumbering air, as if’t were moved by some mighty but invisible hand?” (p. 58). Richardson’s character has just enough time to compose a sonnet “pro bono publico” before a final earthquake brings everything crashing down (p. 60).
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author: Joshua Ehrlich