text:
Human Forms in Nature
Ernst Haeckel’s Trip to South Asia and Its Aftermath
By Bernd Brunner
September 13, 2017

An early promoter and populariser of Darwin's evolutionary theory, the German biologist and artist Ernst Haeckel was a hugely influential figure of the late 19th century. Bernd Brunner looks at how a trip to Sri Lanka sowed the seeds for not only Haeckel's majestic illustrations from his Art Forms in Nature, for which he is perhaps best known today, but also his disturbing ideas on race and eugenics.

Ernst Haeckel and his sixteen steamer trunks arrived at the harbor of Colombo “in the glorious light of a cloudless tropical morning” on November 21, 1881, after a four-week journey via Trieste, Suez, Aden, and Bombay. The zoologist had high hopes: during the coming four months in Ceylon — now Sri Lanka — he planned to get to know flora and fauna in “that highest and most marvellous variety of form” which existed on the island. Haeckel’s enthusiasm was understandable: he was literally entering the promised land of his naturalist dreams.
Admittedly, Ceylon at that time was not defined by dream beaches, a devastating tsunami, or decades of conflict between the country’s Sinhalese and the Tamil inhabitants — all topics we commonly associate with Sri Lanka today. In Haeckel’s era, the teardrop-shaped island nation off India’s southeastern coast embodied the concept of “the tropics”. It was a place of paradisiacal plenty bursting with things that were unfamiliar and often brilliantly colored: animals, plants, fruit, spices, and even gemstones. The realm of riches seemed like a dream world from another time. It was also a land of extremes, where the heat and humidity provided fertile conditions for a host of dangers — little-understood diseases that could quickly turn life-threatening, plagues of insects, predatory animals stalking through the thick vegetation, sharks swimming offshore, and torrential downpours.
As he later recalled in his book A Visit to Ceylon, Haeckel planned to trade “the restraint of our artificial social life” for an existence “in the midst of the simple children of nature . . . forming some conception of that visionary primeval paradise into which the human race was born.” After all, he believed that humanity had originated near Ceylon on the hypothetical continent of “Lemuria” in the Indian Ocean. This conviction certainly influenced his decision to travel to Ceylon — along with the fact that his role models, Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin, never made it to that corner of the world.
For Haeckel, at the time forty-seven years old and the most important champion of Darwin’s theory of evolution on the European continent, the journey to Ceylon represented the fulfillment of a long-held but initially vague desire that took concrete shape over many years. “As an eight-year-old boy, I loved no book more than Robinson Crusoe,” he once recalled, “and a lonely life in nature on a distant island played a large part in many of my childhood fantasies.” It’s clear that he caught his tropical fever early, and that it intensified over decades.
But his journey was also motivated by immediate scientific concerns. Five years earlier, Britain’s Challenger expedition had ended. Despite its global aspirations, this trailblazing contribution to marine research neglected the Indian Ocean. Haeckel did not take part in the voyage, but he was later commissioned to study and classify the Radiata specimens — such as jellyfish and starfish — that had been collected. Haeckel wanted to add several chapters to the resulting report. In the end, he had a range of reasons for traveling to Ceylon: a longing for adventure he had nourished since childhood, scientific ambition, and — when we keep the illustrations he would later create in mind — artistic ambition as well.
Once Haeckel reached Ceylon, however, it was the island’s rich gardening culture that first drew his attention. “Often I have fancied myself in some beautiful wild spot with tall trees on all sides, wreathed and overgrown with creepers”, he wrote. “But a hut shrouded under the branches of a bread-fruit-tree, a dog or a pig trotting out of the brushwood, children at play and hiding under the caladium leaves, have betrayed the fact that I was in a native (Sinhalese) garden.” The ecology of these practical gardens, known as gewattas, has only been investigated closely in recent decades. The seemingly chaotic mixture of trees, bushes, vines, and herbaceous underbrush is actually a symbiotic system in which each element has a place and fulfills a purpose. Cultivated using low inputs of labor and fertilizers, they are amazingly productive, especially when the full range of their bounty is considered: from firewood to food and spices.
Sri Lanka is home to a surprisingly diverse array of environments: from dense tropical rainforests to coral reefs, from tidelands to savannahs, from mangrove forests to sand dunes. Haeckel set to work familiarizing himself with almost everything they contained. He was especially impressed by the palms, those “princes among plants”. In the hills whose lower stretches were covered with meadows and rice fields, he discovered thick brushland where the trees “have grown up without any kind of order, and in such wild confusion — so tangled with creepers and climbers, with parasitic ferns, orchids and other hangers-on, every gap closed with a compact network of bush and brake — that it is quite impossible to unravel the knot and distinguish the closely matted stems.” According to Haeckel, simply taking a few steps into this tangled growth was a dangerous undertaking. He recalled being attacked by mosquitos, bitten by ants, and plagued by all the nettles and thorns deployed by the plants to “bar the way into their mysterious labyrinth”. It was here that Haeckel first glimpsed the magnificent Gloriosa superba, “the poisonous climbing lily of Ceylon, with its golden-red crown”. Large black apes and swarms of green parrots surrounded him, and he killed “an enormous lizard above six feet long (the singular Hydrosaurus salvator)” — a creature resembling a crocodile — with a shot to the head. He also encountered the talipot tree or “century palm”, with its tall trunk like a slender marble column. The talipot blooms just once, usually between the ages of fifty and eighty, when a pyramidal bush composed of millions of yellowish-white flowers emerges from its crown.
When Haeckel spent four days at the botanical garden of Peradeniya — located near the center of the island, on the outskirts of the former royal city of Kandy — he recognized the place as “an admirable natural forcing-house” and considered it the heart of the horticultural paradise that was Ceylon. But while the garden was and is a remarkable place, Haeckel’s most surprising experience on the island took place outside its confines. Setting up a zoological laboratory in Weligama, on the island’s southern tip, Haeckel set off to explore the nearby waters. Some of these excursions were short trips to cull specimens from the ocean’s surface, but at times he also sailed out for up to four hours in a traditional boat. Once he arrived at his destination — a point forty or fifty nautical miles from the shore (south, towards “Lemuria”) — he busily collected jellyfish and larvae. His supply of specimen bottles was quickly exhausted. But despite the wealth of sea life he found, his study of the specimens strengthened his conviction that the life forms existing in the earth’s various oceans resembled one another much more closely than the land creatures from continent to continent.
Haeckel set aside the last month of his stay to explore the island’s high-altitude regions. His goal was to visit “the wildest parts of the primaeval forest” beyond the reach of human civilization. One spring morning he climbed through thick forests and past rushing streams and waterfalls to the top of the eight-thousand-meter Pidurutalagala, the highest point on the island. There were surprises in store, including five-foot-long sky-blue earthworms, the brilliantly colored woodcock, and a type of ash-gray monkey. On the Horton Plains, a primarily jungle-covered area that is now a national park, fresh piles of dung signaled that wild elephants were nearby. During the days that followed, Haeckel and his companions traveled through the tangled brush along so-called elephant trails. Unfortunately — or perhaps fortunately — they never actually encountered an elephant herd.
Although plants and animals were the main objects of Haeckel’s interest during his journey, descriptions of the local people recur throughout A Visit to Ceylon, creating a kind of leitmotif. Even though his gaze upon nature was perhaps never purely apolitical, it is here in his reflections on the human population that we encounter a side to Haeckel much more challenging, if not to say disturbing, to today’s readers. During a stopover in India, Haeckel was already taking note of the naked brown bodies “of the members of the poorest class”, who were clad in nothing but “a loin-cloth or apron-like swimming-drawers”. “Thus the naked figures of the Hindoos”, he wrote, “give a strange and strong impression of their being real savages, though, in point of fact, they are descended from the same ‘Mediterranean’, or Aryan, stock as the various races of Europe.”
In Ceylon he became aware of the complex mixture of the population. In addition to the Buddhist Sinhalese and the Hindu Tamils — the largest groups — the island was home to Indo-Arabs, Malays, Chinese, Africans, and Englishmen, along with descendants of the Portuguese and Dutch settlers, who were known as “Burgers”, and the indigenous people, the Veddas. He mentioned the latter briefly — and almost in passing:
The Veddahs, or Vellahs, are commonly regarded as being the dispersed remnants of this race (hindoo); a few wild hordes still linger in the remotest parts of the interior and in the most primitive state. But, according to others, the Veddahs are, on the contrary, debased and degenerate descendants of the Cinghalese, outcasts that have reverted to savagery, like the Rodiyas.
Some of these ethnic groups lived together creating what Haeckel saw as “very interesting problems to the anthropologist who should try to classify them.” He claimed that he detected a “singularly slender and feminine character of the limbs” in the older Sinhalese men, which set them apart from the much shorter Tamils. In general, Haeckel resisted classifying the Tamils among the “lower races of man”, although his justification for this generosity of spirit was purely an aesthetic one. His hikes through the tea plantations on the high plateaus provided plenty of opportunities to admire what he perceived as the Tamils’ unspoiled physical perfection. According to Haeckel, a sculptor would do far better to
study the true beauty and proportion of the human form among these naturally developed models, than in the life-schools of European academies, where some model, found with difficulty among the degenerate sons of civilization and forced into some unwonted attitude, is but a poor substitute for the genuine child of nature.
On the other hand, Haeckel dismissively claimed that the “finely cut mouth” and “very dark, inspired-looking eyes” of the typical Tamil were deceptive, “promising much more than the brain within fulfills.” Wherever he was able to give his own preferences free rein, he indulged his weakness for classical Greek clichés. For example, he gave one of his four servants in Weligama the name Socrates. The lower-caste boy who opened coconuts for him each morning and fanned him with palm branches was dubbed Ganymede — after the youth who had the honor of serving the Olympian gods. We may ask ourselves why Haeckel did not use the boy’s real name, Gamameda. Wouldn’t it have been a matter of respect? Could he not see his young servant for who he “really” was? Or does today’s reader attribute too much weight to this question? That said, Haeckel can be credited with having formed closer relations with natives than with the European colonials — though this may in part have just been due to the fact that there were not many of the latter around.
Haeckel returned to Europe in March 1882, taking thirty crates with him. He later claimed that his triumphant arrival back in Europe could “only be compared with that of a soldier returning after a victorious campaign.” Although this first voyage to tropical lands did not lead to any research breakthroughs as such, his contact with its flora and people surely inspired Haeckel in the two main branches of activity for which he is known today.
On the one hand, in the botanical and zoological bounty of Ceylon we can see the seed for the work by which he is perhaps best remembered, the splendid Art Forms in Nature, which he began publishing in 1899. The book’s complex, ornamental lithographs and halftone prints bridge art and science and continue to exert a particular fascination. Glowing with color, they brought the exotic and the remote to libraries around the world and were the culmination of decades of work for Haeckel. On the other hand is Haeckel’s work relating to race and eugenics, a side to his output certainly less palatable to a modern audience.
Indeed, no matter how colorful and lively the descriptions of Haeckel’s travels may be, a shadow lies over A Visit to Ceylon. Haeckel’s legacy is not simply an appreciation for the beauty of nature. In light of the views that he later propagated — either in his writings or at his popular lectures — his travelogue seems tame and nearly innocent. But the complex constellation of attitudes that he developed over time and embodied does not fit easily into current categories of left and right and deserves a closer look. In political terms he was what may be called a liberal nationalist. At the same time, he made isolated anti-Semitic statements. Even more disturbingly, he was also a proponent of racial inequality and believed that the races he understood as “inferior” were dying out in response to their contact with the more “civilized” races.
The hardening of his views on the hierarchy of races that took place during the last two decades of the nineteenth century must be understood in this broader context. It was a period when the sciences were undergoing intense development and specialization. Haeckel was not working in a vacuum: racial anthropology was a popular area of inquiry and had a number of champions. The tremendous economic success of certain societies due to industrialization and colonialism provided scientists with a seemingly convincing argument for claiming the superiority of the “favoured races in the struggle for life” (Darwin) and cementing it in the public consciousness. At the same time, these circumstances do not absolve Haeckel of his personal responsibility. He was a man of his time, but he also bears a measure of blame. After all, he was far more than just a cog in the machine. As an extremely popular author — his The History of Creation was translated into all the major European languages — he played an active role in helping concepts regarding the inferiority of certain “races” to spread and have an impact.
In his view, “cultural value” determines the value of human life itself: he saw an unbridgeable chasm between the “thinking soul of the cultured man and the unthinking brutish soul of the savage, natural man” — a soul he compared to that of a dog. In his lecture on the origins of humankind at the Fourth International Zoological Congress, held in Cambridge in 1898, he discussed the Veddas as “Ceylon’s dwarf-like indigenous people”, who in his view were one step beyond humanoid apes. He even claimed that the distance between advanced European peoples and “savages” was greater than that between the latter and apes. His views later found an enthusiastic following among scientists who expounded racial theories to support National Socialist ideology.
Equally troublesome is his stance on eugenics, which is light years removed from any ethically defensible standard today. His beliefs in this area transgress the purely descriptive limits of evolutionary theory to embrace the philosophy of the social Darwinists. Yet he did not merely echo their literal, limiting interpretation of the notion of “survival of the fittest” but took this chain of reasoning a fatal step further. Haeckel repeatedly cited the ancient Spartans in his defense of the killing of disabled infants, whom he considered to be of little or no value.
Eugenics and euthanasia were embraced by many secular social reformers at the time, including some socialists. However, most of these thinkers advocated reproductive control for those they considered “inferior”, not their murder. But Haeckel did support killing, and he had a clear idea about where to draw the line between who was “worthy of living” and who was not. After his death, others followed who were no longer content with mere intellectual games. Adolf Hitler later claimed that it was actually more humane to kill disabled individuals than to allow them to live. To kill the disabled was seen as morally good, even though it overturned Judeo-Christian attitudes which protected the disabled. Haeckel’s works were widely read in the early twentieth century, and many eugenicists, racists, and anti-Semites absorbed the ideas they contained.
Close to two decades after his trip, in 1900, Haeckel set off for the tropics once again. Art Forms in Nature had just been published. This time, Ceylon was just a stop along a much longer route. Haeckel’s real destination was Southeast Asia: Java and Sumatra. It was unavoidable that this voyage lacked the excitement of his first trip, and it was no longer motivated by scientific ambitions. His observations in the resulting account of his travels read like the dutiful report of a researcher who, while he still had some capacity for wonder, was very set in his ways. His thoughts gravitated to humanoid apes and ape-like humans, leaving him little time for strolls through the coral gardens.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: September 13, 2017

author: ernd Brunner


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George Washington
A Descendant of Odin?
By Yvonne Seale
February 8, 2017

Yvonne Seale on a bizarre and fanciful piece of genealogical scholarship and what it tells us about identity in late 19th-century America.

George Washington: first President of the United States, father of his country, crosser of the Delaware, and descendant of Odin. This, at least, was the claim put forward by the late nineteenth-century genealogist Albert Welles. In the floridly titled, four-hundred-page tome The Pedigree and History of the Washington Family Derived from Odin, the Founder of Scandinavia. B.C. 70, Involving a Period of Eighteen Centuries, and Including Fifty-Five Generations, Down to General George Washington, First President of the United States (1879), Welles created a family tree for Washington of truly mythical proportions, and one which shows just how useful nineteenth-century Americans found the Middle Ages to be when it came to shaping their understandings of their country’s origins.
Welles stopped short of claiming that Washington was of semi-divine ancestry — likely because of his own devout Christianity. He therefore took his cue from the thirteenth-century Icelandic author and fellow Christian, Snorri Sturluson, who had proposed that Odin and the other Norse gods of his ancestors should be understood merely as venerated, mythologized versions of particularly successful war leaders. This meant that Odin was not the god of healing and death and the foremost of the Æsir, or Norse pantheon. He was instead a flesh-and-blood man who had lived almost two thousand years ago, ruling over a Turkic people in central Asia called the Aesir. Over time, Odin’s conquests took him further and further west until he finally settled in Scandinavia and declared himself king of all its peoples in the early first century BCE. Welles sniffed that previous historians had not come to this very obvious conclusion because they — unlike him — were “unable to separate the real from the mythological history”.
Yet Welles was keen to engage in some myth-making of his own, stressing the similarities between the Odin he conjured up and George Washington. Though separated by eighteen centuries — and though no one knows what even a human Odin might have looked like — Welles writes that both men were of “wild, massive, manly” stock. If Odin, the first king of a united Scandinavia, were “the Mars as well as the Mohammed” of the region, then surely the first president of the United States had to hold a similarly elevated position.
From Odin, Welles traced thirty-two generations of descent down to about the year 1000 which encompassed figures both historical and legendary. In doing so, he gave George Washington further links — which even allowing for their fictional status were sometimes highly tenuous or collateral — to people like the Viking king Ragnar Lodbrok, or the brothers Hengist and Horsa who purportedly led the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain in the fifth century. Welles also claimed that Washington was related to the eleventh-century Icelandic explorers Thorfinn Karlsefni and his wife Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir, who sailed across the Atlantic to Greenland and Vinland, the coastal region of eastern America which was briefly colonized by the Vikings. There, Thorfinn and Gudrid had a son, Snorri — the first known child of European parentage to be born in the Americas, long before Martín de Argüelles or Virginia Dare in the sixteenth century. Ragnar, Hengist, Horsa, Thorfinn, Gudrid, Snorri: these are all tangential figures in Welles’ imagined Washington family tree. But by taking the time to include brief biographies of them, and by linking them to George Washington, Welles was in a sense extending Euro-American history back into the far past. Rather than a nation which could trace its origins back only a hundred years or so from the time of Welles’ writing, or a continent whose colonization could be traced back to the voyages of an Italian Catholic, Anglo-American Protestants were cast as heirs to a long northern European tradition of exploration, conquest, and colonization.
Even America’s grand democratic experiment had a medieval Scandinavian ancestry, in Welles’ eyes. He conceded that the Washingtons of the fifteenth century may have taken opposite sides during the Wars of the Roses, but wrote that he attached “no credence to reports of the Cavalier sentiments of the Washington family”. In other words, it was impossible that any ancestor of George Washington could have harbored royalist as opposed to republican sympathies during the English Civil War of the seventeenth century, because no member of the extended Washington clan could ever display a love of “power without principle”. The Washingtons were, after all, almost entirely of Germanic descent — untainted by the continental European influences of Norman blood — and throughout the centuries, “Saxon opposition to the Norman rule in England took the form of liberalism”.
Albert Welles wrote in an America whose aesthetic and moral sensibilities were informed to a great extent by medievalism. The Gothic-revival churches which were springing up across America were thought to be representative of an authentic “Teutonic” style, modified by civilizing Protestant influence. Mass-market consumer products married nineteenth-century inventions with often wildly inauthentic “Gothic” flourishes. In 1876, Henry Brooks Adams — a grandson and great-grandson of American presidents — published the first academic history of medieval Europe to be produced in the United States. Architecture, home decor, textbooks, and lecture series: they all promoted the idea of the European Middle Ages as a time of white racial purity and valor.
George Washington himself seems not to have been unduly interested in the intricacies of his own lineage beyond his immediate family, writing in a letter that “this [his family tree] is a subject to which I confess I have paid very little attention”.1 It does not seem that he spent much time contemplating who his ancestors in the Middle Ages might have been. And yet he made copious use of a very medieval symbol: the Washington family coat of arms, which dates back to at least the fourteenth century. He emblazoned it on his personal seals, silverware, bookplates, the interior of his home at Mount Vernon — in 1790, Washington even had it added to the doors of his personal carriage.2
Yet despite this evidence of pre-existing popular interest in such mythologizing, American-style medievalism, The Pedigree and History was overwhelmingly dismissed by Welles’ contemporaries, often in very forthright terms. In a letter to the editor published in a July 1889 issue of The Nation magazine, the genealogist W.H. Whitmore declared that “it is only fair to suppose that Mr. Welles was not in a sound state of mind” when he put pen to paper. The book was a “rank and stupid forgery”, “a mere rambling collection of useless notes.”
In fact, it took until the early twentieth century for Welles’ work to gain any traction at all — and then it was because it suited quite a different set of political needs. The short-lived Northern Review: A Cultural Magazine for the Northwest was published in Minneapolis during the First World War. Unsurprisingly, given the ethnic heritage of a large proportion of Minnesota’s population, the magazine took a distinctly pro-German stance about the conflict. In promotional material about the magazine, Germans and Scandinavians were called “Teutonic twin brothers” whose settlement in the Midwest had “made the desert to blossom”. A 1918 issue of the magazine reprinted a summary of The Pedigree and History under the title “Washington: A Scandinavian”. How could he be anything else, the anonymous epilogue to the summary concluded: George Washington’s ancestry was additional proof that his character was clearly that “of the ancient Vikings of the North”. He too believed in the values of independence, liberty, and patriotism and was possessed of a “powerful frame”. The thrust of the article was clear: the peoples of the United States, Germany, and Scandinavia shared a common ancestry and a set of values which should prevent them from going to war with one another.
A similar kind of article cropped up in a 1925 issue of the Nordmanns-forbundet (Norsemen’s federation) magazine.3 The goal of this Oslo-published magazine was to encourage cultural and linguistic unity among the Norwegian diaspora, something which was felt to be increasingly necessary amid the heightened nativist environment of the United States in the post-war years. The article’s Norwegian-born American author, Simon Johnson, took Washington’s purported Scandinavian ancestry as fact. In doing so, Johnson was attempting to promote the idea of Scandinavians — and so Norwegian immigrants — as “true” Americans, something which wasn’t always accepted by other white Americans of nativist inclinations.
As for the originator of all of these claims, Albert Welles himself is a rather shadowy figure. He was born in Palmyra, New York in about 1818 to George Wells and Mary Babcock, both natives of Connecticut (the second E in his surname seems to have been a later affectation). In 1844, he married Catherine Beckwith; they swiftly had a daughter, Katharine (b. 1845) and moved to New York City. In his writings, Welles was keen to present himself as a man of letters and leisure, but census information shows that he had a far more prosaic occupation: insurance agent.
He was a man of some ambition: in 1860, he founded the American College of Heraldry and Genealogical Registry, housed in the New York Society Library. Speaking to the group’s members in 1879, Welles stated that “[t]his institution promises to become one of the most important and popular in the country. It is destined to become the great depository of Family Registers and Family History.” The ACH briefly published a genealogical magazine with the aim of nationwide circulation, The Chronotype: An American Memorial of Persons and Events (W.H. Whitmore’s verdict on this endeavor was “the mere ravings of a would-be genealogist, full of errors and contradictions.”) Life membership could be obtained for the sum of $50, and members’ family trees were to be entered into the “Domesday Book of New York”. Welles’ hopes for the institution were proved false — the ACH didn’t outlast his death in the early 1880s — but during its brief existence it boasted honorary members including such well-known figures as Senator Hamilton Fish, Secretary of State William Seward, and the romantic poet William Cullen Bryant.
As one might imagine, Albert Welles was also interested in his own family’s history. He published History of the Welles Family in England and Normandy (1876), which was riddled with about as many errors as was The Pedigree and History, though he made no claim to quasi-divine heritage. Instead, Welles constructed a family tree — almost entirely inaccurately — that gave him connections to a grab-bag of medieval nobility, including Sir Lionel de Welles, a combatant in the War of the Roses and step-father of Lady Margaret Beaufort; the princely house of Orange; several bishops; and assorted signatories of Magna Carta. Welles could therefore take comfort in the fact that like his hero George Washington, like all proper Americans, he was descended from a medieval lineage full of manly valor and civic virtue.
Shortly after Albert Welles’ death in 1883, his books, papers, and correspondence were auctioned off, including “thousands of manuscript genealogies of American families, and quite a large number in book form, expensively gotten up, with portraits, coats of arms and crests” — perhaps even including the notes from which Welles had concocted George Washington’s family tree.4 A newspaper account of the auction noted that the true value of all of these goods could be estimated from a single example — a genealogy drawn up on behalf of one William Augustus Martin of New York, showing that he and all the other American Martins were descended from the seventh-century Pope Martin I. “Who would not be a Martin?” the reporter wrote wryly — just as surely, in the mind of Albert Welles, who could envision an America founded by anyone other than a descendant of Odin?
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: February 8, 2017

author: Yvonne Seale

source: public-domain-review

type: essay

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


text:
Rescuing England
The Rhetoric of Imperialism and the Salvation Army
By Ellen J. Stockstill
August 16, 2017

Ellen J. Stockstill on how William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, placed the ideas and language of colonialism at the very heart of his vision for improving the lives of Victorian England's poor.

The first sight to greet the reader upon opening William Booth’s In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890), his book on poverty in Victorian England, is a striking and elaborately detailed “chart”. The sprawling image, a lithograph which folds out of the book like a small poster, is part graphic representation and part statistical record — both an illustration of the country’s plight and Booth’s model for salvation. At the bottom of the image, the artist depicts “3,000,000 in the sea” drowning under the weight of a wide range of sins and states of depravity, flailing amidst waves labelled “drunkenness”, “slavery”, “rape”, “infanticide”, “prostitution”, “murder”, “illegitimacy”, “divorce”, “wife desertion”, “suicide”, “betting”, “homelessness” and, somewhat curiously, “sweating”. From the rocks either side Salvation Army Officers help people from the water and usher them towards the “City Colony”, where they will have opportunities at “rescue homes”, “bakeries”, and “cheap food depots”; where they will find permanent work, and live in homes for “married people”, “girls”, “inebriates”, “single women”, “children”, and “the homeless”.
From here clear pathways guide the way to the peaceful, green, and spacious “Farm Colony”, and then still farther on to the more distant “Colony Across the Sea”, with routes shown to British colonies, the United States, and “all parts of the world”. Flanking this utopian image of social reform stand columns bearing numerical data about “prostitutes” (over 30,000 in London, 100,000 in Great Britain); “criminals” (32,000 in prison); “drink” (“There are half a million drunkards in Great Britain”) and “drink traffic” (120,000 “Licensed Drinks Shops”); “destitution” (993,000); “the poor” (100,000 homeless); and “misery” (190,000 in workhouses). The bases of these columns inform viewers that 2,297 people died from suicide and 2,157 were found dead the previous year. On the plinths below are carved a litany of sins, from “reviling” and “fornication” to “lying” and “avarice”.
This depiction of communal blight and remediation traces a move from oppression to liberation not only in the shift away from sin but also in the shift from dark enclosure to bright, wide open space. In many ways, it mimics Michelangelo’s The Last Judgement and other works of Christian art that juxtapose the struggling bodies of the damned with the heavenly bodies of the saved and the glory of such an ascension. This salvific movement is echoed too in the structure of the book: Part I is entitled “The Darkness” and Part II “Deliverance”. It is a movement that speaks also of the colonial model — the drowning souls are plucked from the sea so that they can enjoy a better life in a colonized space specially designed to educate, reform, employ, and civilize them.
A quarter of a century earlier, in 1865, William Booth (1829–1912), together with his wife Catherine Mumford Booth (1829–1890), founded the Christian Mission in Whitechapel — an organization that would later become the Salvation Army. Harold Begbie, who wrote a 1920 biography of William Booth, said that “at the beginning of his career in London, it is quite clear, William Booth had one remedy, and only one remedy, for the distresses of mankind, and that the Gospel.” According to Begbie, Booth did, however, later acknowledge “how economic conditions can so oppress and bear upon the soul that its natural functions of love, worship, and aspiration may be almost completely inhibited.” Although Booth ultimately came to promote a combination of religious teaching with sweeping social reform as the way to save England’s poor, he still prioritized the saving of souls as key to his “Army’s” work. This emphasis on salvation from social ills such as poverty and addiction is nowhere better encapsulated than in his 1890 bestseller. Although largely written by William T. Stead (1849–1912), the newspaper editor responsible for the controversial “Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” investigations into child prostitution, In Darkest England and the Way Out was published under Booth’s name alone. And the idea at the heart of the work — this unusual image of an England in need of “colonizing” — is also very much his.
By portraying England as a place full of violence, sexual deviancy, and addiction, Booth equates it with Africa, which at this time was seen by many of his compatriots as a place of darkness in need of salvation. This image of Africa as “the dark continent”, and indeed the title of Booth’s book itself, draws on explorer H. M. Stanley’s highly popular and melodramatic account of his doomed trip through Africa published earlier that year, In Darkest Africa. Booth explicitly pairs his text with Stanley’s, describing an “African Parallel” and encouraging his audience to apply their entrenched views of African people and culture to the poor of England. After quoting Stanley’s descriptions of the landscape and people of the Congo at length, Booth presents his position: “It is a terrible picture, and one that has engraved itself deep on the heart of civilisation. But while brooding over the awful presentation of life as it exists in the vast African forest, it seemed to me only too vivid a picture of many parts of our own land. As there is a darkest Africa is there not also a darkest England?” He highlights similarities between the two places, arguing that while Africa “is all trees, trees, trees”, impenetrable and dark, London “is all vice and poverty and crime”, and while “ivory raiders . . . brutally traffic in the unfortunate denizens of the forest glades . . . publicans . . . flourish on the weakness of our poor.” He continues, conjuring emotional images to connect the two distant lands:
Hard it is, no doubt, to read in Stanley’s pages of the slave-traders coldly arranging for the surprise of a village, the capture of the inhabitants, the massacre of those who resist, and the violation of all the women; but the stony streets of London, if they could but speak, would tell of tragedies as awful, of ruin as complete, of ravishments as horrible, as if we were in Central Africa; only the ghastly devastation is covered, corpse-like, with the artificialities and hypocrisies of modern civilisation.
Darkest Africa and England, according to Booth, “are alike” in “monotonous darkness . . . malaria . . . gloom” and “dwarfish de-humanized inhabitants.” Booth, an astute rhetorician, admits that his “African parallel” has limits, but he asks readers to examine their interests and biases in supporting the work of imperialism overseas:
An analogy is as good as a suggestion; it becomes wearisome when it is pressed too far. But before leaving it, think for a moment how close the parallel is, and how strange it is that so much interest should be excited by a narrative of human squalor and human heroism in a distant continent, while greater squalor and heroism not less magnificent may be observed at our very doors.
In these lines, Booth seeks to unite differing attitudes to poverty under an overarching imperial ideology that his readers, he assumes, have already accepted as rational and worthy of support. His vision for a better England is folded into an already established energizing myth of empire that maintains the ability, and even the duty, of the British to reform and civilize “degenerate” subjects. The message is clear: there is a need for missionary work in the very capital of the empire itself. Evangelical fervor and ardent desire for reform here meet the rhetoric of imperialism.
Of course, colonialism in Booth’s ideas was not limited merely to the realm of metaphor or rhetoric: the British colonial project provided the very mechanism by which these ideas were to be realized. Having established England as a site of darkness, Booth puts forward his “scheme” for “Deliverance” to the light — a project that links moral and religious reformation with worthwhile employment in carefully constructed colonies at home and abroad. His interdependent model was meant to provide “work for all” through a “scheme” that “divides itself into three sections, each of which is indispensable for the success of the whole.” Booth calls this three-part scheme a “patriarchal family” and describes how each part leads into the next, creating a funnel of sorts that ultimately moves across the sea:
The Scheme, in its entirety, may aptly be compared to A Great Machine, foundationed in the lowest slums and purlieus of our great towns and cities, drawing up into its embrace the depraved and destitute of all classes; receiving thieves, harlots, paupers, drunkards, prodigals, all alike, on the simple conditions of their being willing to work and to conform to discipline. Drawing up these poor outcasts, reforming them, and creating in them habits of industry, honesty, and truth; teaching them methods by which alike the bread that perishes and that which endures to Everlasting Life can be won. Forwarding them from the City to the Country, and there continuing the process of regeneration, and then pouring them forth on to the virgin soils that await their coming in other lands, keeping hold of them with a strong government, and yet making them free men and women; and so laying the foundations, perchance, of another Empire to swell to vast proportions in later times. Why not?
Booth’s closing question in the passage, “Why not?”, subtly reveals confidence, not only in progressive reforms, but also in the imperial project. If one can take advantage of other spaces as places for new opportunity, why not? Thus the imperial power of the British Empire proves central to providing the “way out” of “Darkest England”.
The frontispiece and text of In Darkest England and the Way Out, of course, assume that mass areas of the world are blank spaces that the British are entitled to occupy and use for their own purposes. Booth writes, “All who have given attention to the subject are agreed that in our Colonies in South Africa, Canada, Western Australia and elsewhere, there are millions of acres of useful land to be obtained almost for the asking.” Booth cites South Africa as an ideal space to set up an emigration funnel with the Salvation Army because it “presents to us great advantages for the moment. There is any amount of land suitable for our purpose which can be obtained, we think, without difficulty.” His assessment of the landscape involves analysis of the amount of land and how easily it could be “obtained”; he does not detail how the land would be acquired or how colonists would interact with current inhabitants. Booth’s assessment also ignores other colonial powers like the Dutch who would challenge British expansion in South Africa. He assumes that the British are fit to rule over any native population and that they would be more justified than other nations in doing so.
Booth’s scheme of In Darkest England and the Way Out also assumes that established British colonies offer a continuation of British life. He emphasizes the compatibility of life between England and her colonies by describing how boundaries have collapsed in an era of technological advancement: “The world has grown much smaller since the electric telegraph was discovered and side by side with the shrinkage of this planet under the influence of steam and electricity there has come a sense of brotherhood and a consciousness of community of interest and of nationality on the part of the English-speaking people throughout the world.” Here technology and language have made it possible to travel and communicate more effectively between distant regions, and Booth claims that it is “absurd to speak of the Colonies as if they were a foreign land. They are simply pieces of Britain distributed about the world, enabling the Britisher to have access to the richest parts of the earth.” A few pages later, he describes his ideal emigration process “as the unmooring of a little piece of England, and towing it across the sea to find a safe anchorage in a sunnier clime.” The presentation of these destinations (with different climates, cultures, and people) as little Britains allows Booth to position colonies as approachable sites full of opportunity. While other tales of exploration and adventure might make a British audience understand the colony as an exotic space, Booth hopes to make his audience see the colony as welcoming and familiar — familiar enough to seem survivable, but different enough to seem like a place where a person can begin anew.
It may not be too surprising to hear that Booth’s model for England’s salvation never fully came into being as it exists on the colorful lithograph that begins In Darkest England, with its ambitious promise to ensure “work for all”. His book was, however, incredibly popular, selling hundreds of thousands of copies, and Booth’s ideas persisted, with the Salvation Army going on to facilitate the voluntary emigration of thousands. For several decades after Booth’s book was published, the Salvation Army, according to their website, “was the United Kingdom’s largest voluntary migration society, helping around 250,000 people to emigrate from the British Isles to the British Empire Dominions”. For many years it had a department devoted to emigration, and it did establish some farm colonies, including three in the United States in Colorado, Ohio, and California, through the American branch of the organization. While much of the material detailing the Salvation Army’s global mission vanished when its international headquarters was destroyed in the Blitz, some surviving artefacts indicate how the spirit of Booth’s colony scheme for England’s poor was followed. Such artefacts include copies of The Social Gazette, a weekly periodical that for three years at the beginning of the twentieth century featured a column called “Our Emigration Advice Bureau”, which counseled those who intended to emigrate; and Salvation Army Year Books that detail the workings of the organization’s Emigration Department from 1906 to 1981.
The idea that impoverished people living in urban centers could find opportunity in British colonies was not a notion held only by religious organizations like the Salvation Army. Many secular reformers and politicians also believed emigration to be a viable way to alleviate poverty, made possible by British imperial power that privileged white settlers over native residents. Indeed, as British imperial ideology embraced the notion of the civilizing mission, which emphasized colonizing as a process of reform and redemption, Christian missionaries could not help but be linked with a secular imperial project in terms of rhetoric. They shared a lexicon, even if at times they did not share faith or the same kind of concern over the colonized person’s soul.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Ellen J. Stockstill


text:
Voltaire and the Buddha

By Donald S. Lopez, Jr.
March 8, 2017

Donald S. Lopez, Jr. looks at Voltaire's early reflections on Buddhism and how, in his desire to separate the Buddha's teachings from the trappings of religion, the French Enlightenment thinker prefigured an approach now familiar in the West.

After Ignatius Loyola formed the Society of Jesus in 1539, he required that his missionaries send back detailed letters describing their activities and the peoples and places they encountered. In France, over the course of the eighteenth century, these were gathered together and published as Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, thirty-four volumes of which appeared between 1702 and 1776. The Jesuit accounts of far-flung lands were widely read during the Enlightenment, serving, for example, as important sources for Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s seminal Encyclopédie. The contents of the letters were various, but the Jesuits’ mission being what it was, it is perhaps not surprising that religion figured prominently, with many accounts of what would one day be called Buddhism.
Well into the nineteenth century, Europeans divided the population of the world into four nations, based on their religion: Christians, Jews, Muslims (often called Mahometans), and Idolaters. For centuries, Buddhists fell into this last category. The process of their elevation to having an “ism” of their own is too long to tell here. However, one chapter in that story would be about those Jesuits, the intrepid travelers who set out from Europe to spread the Gospel across Asia. St Francis Xavier arrived in Japan in 1549, first imagining a kinship with Buddhists; later he would condemn them. In China, Matteo Ricci first dressed as a Buddhist monk before adopting the guise of a Confucian scholar, writing works in Chinese condemning the “religion of Fo” (fo is the Chinese word for Buddha). Early reports on the Buddhism of Thailand came from delegations sent to the court of Siam by Louis XIV, delegations that included Jesuit priests.
The term “Buddhism” would not appear in English until the early nineteenth century. The Jesuits who wrote the reports and the scholars who read them did not recognize that the religions they encountered in China, Japan, Vietnam, and Thailand were somehow the same.  Each had its own indigenous term for “Buddha” and each had its own artistic conventions for representing him.  His portrayal as an idol and as a purveyor of idolatry did not change substantially over the course of the eighteenth century but much more information about him and his teachings began to accumulate.
The Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert was certainly the most famous of the compendia of knowledge of the Enlightenment, but it was not the only one. Inspired by it, in 1764 Voltaire published his own, which he called Dictionnaire philosophique. Like so many of his works, it was hailed by some and condemned by others. In it, he criticized the Roman Catholic Church and offered negative portrayals of Judaism and Islam. He also criticized Buddhism (although he did not use the term), but he praised the Buddha, seeking, as others would do in the centuries that followed, to separate the teacher from what would be represented as his teachings. Indeed, he devoted an entry in his dictionary to the Buddha, referring to him by the French rendering of one of his Thai epithets, Sammonocodom, that is, the śramaṇa (mendicant) Gautama.
He begins, “I recall that Sammonocodom, the god of the Siamese, was born from a young virgin and was raised on a flower.” He goes on to list, not without irony, other famous cases of miraculous birth from other cultures.  Immediately seeking to separate the man from the myth, he observes that, “The religion of the Siamese proves to us that never did a lawmaker teach bad morals,” noting that the rules that the Buddha made for his monks are just as severe as those of St. Benedict. Voltaire goes on to provide a somewhat idiosyncratic but not inaccurate list of these rules. It includes, “Avoid songs, dances, assemblies, everything that might soften the soul,” “Do not have gold or silver,” “Speak only of justice and work only for justice,” “Sleep little, eat little, keep only one robe,” Never mock,” and “Meditate in private, and reflect often on the fragility of human affairs.”
This leads him to lament that in all religions “such a holy and necessary morality” has been sullied by all manner of ridiculous and risible stories. “Why is there not a single religion whose precepts do not come from a sage and whose dogmas are not of a madman?” He lays the blame for this at the feet of the disciples, who fear that their founder will not be respected if he is not somehow divine. The consequences of this deception, however, are dire.  Reasonable people are attracted to the precepts of the founder but are repelled by the doctrines invented by the disciples. As a result, they inevitably come to reject the original precepts. “So they shake the yoke, since it had been put on badly; they no longer believe in God, because they see well that Sammonocodom is not god.”
In the latter half of the entry on the Buddha, Voltaire demonstrates that he has read the reports of the French Jesuits closely. He enters into a discussion of a relatively arcane story in the life of the Buddha, reported by several members of the French delegation to Thailand, including the Jesuit Guy Tachard (1651-1712).
In traditional accounts of the life of the Buddha, he has an evil cousin named Devadatta. When the Buddha grows old, Devadatta, himself a monk, urges the Buddha to retire and turn leadership of the order of monks over to him.  When the Buddha refuses, Devadatta tries to assassinate him on three different occasions. The weight of these sins is so great that he is swallowed by the earth, descending to the most horrific of the several Buddhist hells, where he is impaled on three iron spikes, one from his head to his feet, one through his chest, and one through his shoulders. When Buddhist monks at the Siamese court saw the crucifixes around the necks of the French Jesuits, they assumed that it was Devadatta, that the foreign priests worshipped the Buddha’s nemesis. Several members of the French delegation reported that this dashed any hopes of conversion.  When they tried to explain that this was not Devadatta but God, the Buddhist monks doubted that someone as powerful as God could succumb to such a punishment.
Voltaire reports all of this, describing Devadatta (whom he calls Thevatat) as “a badly behaved rascal,” although he mistakes the sequence of events, imagining the Devadatta was crucified on earth and then went to hell.  What is noteworthy, however, is that rather than seeing the great irony in the Jesuits’ despair, as this famous apparent atheist might be expected to do, he comes to their defense, noting that Jesus, the true God, had given Pontius Pilate the power to crucify him. Thus, if God can be crucified, his brother certainly can; Voltaire notes that St. Jacques, the brother of Jesus, was stoned. In the case of Devadatta, he could have been hanged rather than crucified, and his punishment may have been unjust. If he was executed for a crime he did not commit, he might have gone to heaven rather than hell.  Voltaire concludes, “All of this is extremely delicate.”
Voltaire’s assent here to the theology of the crucifixion would seem at odds with his often rude remarks about Christianity. However, what is perhaps of greater interest is Voltaire’s prescience in his comments about the Buddha.  It would not be until well into the nineteenth century that European scholars, all sons of the Enlightenment, sought to turn the founders of religions from gods into men, to separate their precepts from church doctrine. For Jesus and the Buddha, this transformation entailed not debasement but exaltation. One thinks immediately of David Strauss’ Das Leben Jesu (1835), Eugène Burnouf’s Introduction à l’histoire du Buddhisme indien (1844), and Hermann Oldenberg’s Buddha: Sein Leben, seine Lehre, seine Gemeinde (1881).  Over the course of the nineteenth century, the European portrayal of Buddhism underwent a profound metamorphosis: from a form of idolatry practiced by pagans, to a religion, and a world religion, finally to something beyond the category of religion.  Today, scholars of Buddhism are often asked: Is Buddhism a religion, a philosophy, or a way of life?  Such a question is impossible without the work of disciples of a different Enlightenment, who believed that the founder could somehow be separated from the faith.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Donald S. Lopez, Jr.


text:
The Long, Forgotten Walk of David Ingram

By John Toohey
June 28, 2017

If three shipwrecked English sailors really did travel by foot from Florida to Nova Scotia in 1569 then it would certainly count as one of the most remarkable walks undertaken in recorded history. Although the account's more fantastical elements, such as the sighting of elephants, have spurred many to consign it to the fiction department, John Toohey argues for a second look.

In the autumn of 1569 the Gargaryne, a French trader, was moored off Cape Breton in present day Nova Scotia when its captain M. Champaign was alerted to a commotion outside.1 Three English men sitting in a native canoe were asking to be let on board. Their names were David Ingram, Richard Brown, and Richard Twyde, and they told him a story that began in Mexico the year before.
In September 1568, they’d been involved in the battle of San Juan de Ulúa (present day Veracruz, Mexico), between a fleet of English privateers, led by John Hawkins and Francis Drake, and Spanish forces under Francisco Luján. After Hawkins’ ship, the Minion, was damaged, he sailed across the Gulf of Mexico where he put the crew on shore. European settlements along the Atlantic coast were sparse and some of the men decided to walk back to San Juan while others including Ingram, Brown, and Twyde intended to follow the coast north in search of English communities. After some died and others returned south, the three remaining sailors, after more than a year wandering up the eastern coast of North America, reached the fishing village at Cape Breton, Canada, unintentionally becoming, if the story is to be believed, the first Europeans to cross North America.
There are two ways to approach the story of Ingram and his shipmates’ journey. If you believe the account that Sir George Peckham recorded years later then it marks the end of a strange and little known story in North American history. If you have doubts, it becomes the beginning of another that is even stranger in the ways it invokes the visions of empire in Elizabethan England and how they played out in North America.
Ingram existed. We can say that because several people independently stated they met him and they had no reason to make that up, but we know nothing else about the man save he was born in Barking, Essex. If he was typical of Elizabethan sailors however we can make some assumptions. He was probably illiterate.2 This meant that when he later gave his story to Peckham he didn’t write it down but answered Peckham’s questions, all of which had a specific purpose Ingram may not have been wise to. He was religious; most likely protestant, and this meant that his contacts with indigenous people were filtered through a mindset that most probably didn’t allow for their belief systems while his own was wracked with peculiar superstitions.
Compared to many Elizabethans he was also widely travelled. He would have likely seen the Atlantic coasts of Europe and the Mediterranean, and the African and American coasts. But if his ship anchored in the harbour at Constantinople this didn’t mean he disembarked and went into the city. International negotiations were delicate and it was often safer to keep the crew on board. He only experienced some places from a distance, and he had very little to compare what he saw in North America to what he’d seen elsewhere, which helps explain some of his more fantastic claims.
Drake and Hawkins’ fleet of five ships was moored in the harbor of San Juan de Ulúa when Luján attacked, by surprise according to some reports, though given Drake and Hawkins were privateers they could hardly have complained that was unfair.3 The Minion badly damaged, Hawkins retreated across the Gulf of Mexico before running aground at a point on the west coast of present day Florida and ordering the crew off. This was where Ingram’s account began, or more accurately, the account that he gave nearly twenty years later to Peckham and Queen Elizabeth’s secretary Francis Walsingham.
Both men were heavily invested in the case for England colonizing North America. As such they were only interested in the physical descriptions, the topography, the people, and the flora and fauna that Ingram encountered. The emotional experiences of three sailors entering an unknown world were irrelevant.
The sections quoted below are from the best surviving version of Ingram’s account, the opening chapter to Documents Connected with the History of South Carolina, published in 1856.4 Written in the third person, once Ingram and his two friends are introduced their presence is fairly low key. We pick it up a couple of paragraphs in, after Ingram, Brown, and Twyde have been introduced and the circumstances under which they found themselves in Florida explained.
The first kings that they came before dwelte in a countrye called Gizicka who caused them to be stripped naked and woundering greatlie at the whiteness of their skin let them dparte (without) further harm.
In 1539, Hernando de Soto had explored the Florida region and encountered people living on the Withlacoochee River he called Guazoco.5 If these were the same people Ingram met then contact with Europeans had taken place within living memory. They may not have been surprised at the whiteness of the Europeans’ skin, but also, that might not have been why they stripped them naked. Ingram was no cultural anthropologist; Walsingham and Peckham even less so. Nevertheless, the statement gives us a location and a germ of credibility to Ingram’s story.6
Ingram describes the societies he meets as kings, short for kingdoms, and in his travels through the south east especially, he repeatedly refers to the wealth of the people and the cities they inhabit. The Gizicka typically wear “Rubyes, beinge sixe inches longe and twoe ynches broade.” The rulers are carried about in a “Sumptuous Chayer (chair) of Sylver or Christall.”
A constant problem with his account is that the credible and the fantastic often inhabit the same sentence. A crystal sedan chair sounds like something out of a fairytale but because copper, silver, and gold were worked in pre-Columbian America this statement needs only a slight shift in perspective to be plausible, although it isn’t clear what he meant by rubies, especially of that size. More important is his constant reference to cities, a term that in the sixteenth century equated with civilization and advanced technologies.
Midway through the account, Ingram says he and his companions seldom stayed anywhere more than three nights. An exception was the city of Balma, “a ritche cyttie a mile and a half long” where they stopped about a week. Other cities he named were Ochala, Bega and Gunda;
A small towne and a ryver boathe of that name, and this is the most northerlie pte that this Ex was att. They have in every house scoupes, buckettes and dyvers other vesselles of massive sylver.
From the period of colonization beginning in the early seventeenth century until very recently, the argument that the indigenous inhabitants of North America lived in cities was considered suspect, at best. We now know from work being carried out at Cahokia and other sites that into the fourteenth century there were settlements the size of many in Europe.7
It seems pedantic then to question whether when Ingram spoke of cities he really meant towns or even villages. What he is actually describing as he travels northwards is a network of established communities with sophisticated social structures. Unfortunately, Ingram couldn’t provide locations. Was Gunda on the Mississippi or one of its tributaries, or, when he says it was the most northerly, does he mean present day Canada?
The three sailors were in regular contact with the local people, though Ingram only describes their communications briefly. One of his more contentious descriptions reads:
. . . they doe honor for there god a devell (which) they call Collochio, who speakethe unto them sometimes in the liknes of a blacke dogge, and sometimes in the liknes of a blacke calfe. And some doe honor the sonne, the mone and the stares . . . he and his twoe fellowes . . . wente into a poore man’s house and there they did see the saide Collochio, or devell (with) very great eyes like a blacke calfe. Upon the sighte therof, Browne said “There is the Devell!” and theruppon he blessed him selfe, In the name of the Fathe! and of the Sonne and of the Holy Ghoste and Twide saide verye vehementlie, ‘I defye thee and all thy works!’ and presently the Collochio shranke awaye in a stealinge manner, furth of all the doors, and was sene noe more unto them.
In the 1830s George Catlin painted the Mandan, Pawnee, and other people living along the Missouri River in Missouri and (present day) North Dakota. In some of his paintings men are wearing buffalo heads. It doesn’t take a great leap of imagination again to think that the three sailors witnessed a religious ceremony, or that they would think the performers were dressed as devils.
The account frequently reads as though Ingram is answering questions rather than telling the story in his own term. There is no chronological narrative, rather descriptions of the people, the flora and fauna are set out in discrete sections. It is impossible in parts to tell whether he is talking about the south soon after they land, the mid-Atlantic, or the northern regions. When he says that, “there is a clowde somtyme of the yeare sene in the ayer (which) comonlye turnethe to great tempests”, he is talking about tornadoes, which he was more likely to have seen in what is present day Kentucky than Florida or Maine, though tornadoes can strike across the US and in any month.
He also talks about a beast twice the size of a horse, with tusks, that was a “natural enimyes to the horse”. The interesting detail here is not the beast — Ingram describes several unlikely creatures — but that it apparently preys on horses. Standard histories of the horse in North America posit its return, after becoming extinct in the area between 8,000 and 12,000 years ago, as beginning with Cortes in Mexico in 1519. There are alternative Indigenous histories that say it was a domesticated animal before the arrival of Europeans. Ingram appears to be saying he saw horses north of Florida, which could support the Indigenous histories or equally indicate how rapidly the horse population spread once it turned feral.8
When Ingram claims to have seen a bird, “thrice as big as eagle, very bewtyfull to behoulde . . . (with) a creste or tufte of feathers of sundrye colours on the toppe of the heade”, he could feasibly be describing a condor, a bird Lewis and Clark later observed on the Columbia River. One of his most infamous claims however beggars belief. “He did alsoe see in that countrye boath Eliphantes and ounces.”
Ounces are lynxes, sometimes bobcats or pumas, but there is nothing ambiguous about his use of the word elephants. Because he may never have seen one in the flesh and knew only that they were big animals, it sounds possible that he assumed a distant bison was an elephant, except that elsewhere he clearly identifies bison. More likely he made it up, either to please Peckham, to affirm an idea Peckham had put in his head, or because in the years since the journey Ingram had forgotten details and tried to compensate. Whatever the case, the sentence sits there in the middle of the text as grist for anyone who wants to claim the whole journey was an invention.
Ingram and his friends expected that they would inevitably reach European settlements along the coast. It is easy for us to forget that although England’s first formal attempts at colonization were still more than a decade away, its privateers had been making regular unofficial visits. For most of the century French and Spanish fleets had been frequently turning up on the coast, which had appeared on maps since the 1530s in recognizable form to us today. The three men probably imagined they would be out of contact with Europeans for a few weeks, not a year. However, eventually,
After long travayle the foresaid David Ingram (with) his two companions Browne and Twyde came to the head of a ryvar called (left blank) . . . 60 leagues west from Cape Britton where they understode by the people of that countrye, of the aryvall of a Christian.
This was M. Champaign and the crew of the of the Gargayne.
Peckham and Walsingham interviewed Ingram in 1582, some thirteen years after he made his journey. Their account appeared in the first edition of Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation in 1589, but not the second, which came out in 1598. Hakluyt removed it because he thought it wasn’t credible, though he didn’t give his reasons as to why he now thought that.
They probably had little to do with Ingram’s more fantastic descriptions of elephants and other strange creatures. Though the coast had been charted the inland remained mysterious and even if Hakluyt did think some of Ingram’s claims were fanciful he had no way of disproving them.
A more likely explanation is that by the time of the second edition Hakluyt’s campaign for the colonization of North America had hardened. With the French colonizing the north and the Spanish the south, England’s plans took on a sense of urgency as it risked being squeezed out. Hakluyt was very much a pragmatic advocate for colonization; much more interested in arguing from facts than speculation. The first edition had also included sections from John Mandeville’s very fanciful Travels (1356) but if once he had been willing to accept any account, now he had no time to waste with claims that couldn’t be established.
The word of an ordinary, uneducated sailor like Ingram was not to be trusted, not because he would make things up so much as he couldn’t tell the difference between fact and fiction. For Hakluyt, trying to construct a rational case for imperial expansion, there were enough people with strange ideas surrounding Queen Elizabeth without adding an itinerant sailor. One in particular, John Dee, had some of the most eccentric ideas about colonization and he had been very keen to meet Ingram back in 1582.
Dee is best known today as an Elizabethan astrologer, the man who invented a language for communicating with angels and who was convinced by his assistant as to the merits of wife-swapping. Wise man or fool, it is often hard to know which one you are dealing with in Dee’s writings and it is often overlooked that during the 1570s he was part of Elizabeth’s innermost circle, and constructing the intellectual framework for colonizing North America. Dee is also considered the first to use the term “British Empire”.9
If Hakluyt regarded the colonization of North America as fundamental to the expansion of power, Dee sought the moral and justification through Elizabeth’s genealogy. He had traced a line from Elizabeth through her father Henry VIII to King Arthur, a proposed lineage that gave her an unquestioned right to rule the New World. As Elizabethan expansion developed pace, two legends, supposedly ancient but suspiciously difficult to trace, took hold. One was that King Arthur had sailed across to America and conquered it. The other was that the Welsh Prince Madoc, sailed to America in the twelfth century and lived there some years. Depending upon the sources, Arthur had been a Welsh king. The case could be made therefore that, as a descendant of Arthur and through Madoc, Elizabeth had rights to North America.10
On November 1, 1582, Ingram travelled in the company of a Mr Clement to Mortlake to have an audience with Dee.11 Though Dee kept a diary and noted the visit he didn’t record the conversation. We can be sure, however, that one thing he was very interested in was whether Ingram had heard any Welsh in his conversations with the inhabitants. A few words would have been enough.
Hakluyt’s decision to remove Ingram’s story from the second edition would ultimately lead to it being largely deleted from the historical record. When it was occasionally recovered, his statements such as seeing elephants ensured it was as often as not dismissed. There are, however, enough plausible statements scattered among the inventions in Ingram’s narrative to make the case that the three men did actually cross North America in 1569.
What matters today is not whether they were the first Europeans to do this but what value can be found in Ingram’s account. The immediate impact has gone unrecorded but if we accept that the journey took place, Ingram left one of the earliest accounts of indigenous societies along the north Atlantic corridor. Most notable are his repeated assertions of large, settled communities, similar perhaps to Hochelaga that Jacques Cartier described at present day Montreal in 1535. If these communities did exist in the 1560s but not in the seventeenth century when French and English explorers began charting the interior, it is likely to be further evidence (if needed) of the devastation European diseases wreaked.
This would not be the first case in which towns were described that would in a short time disappear. In the 1540s the Spanish conquistador, Francisco de Orellana, described extensive communities along the Amazon.12 By the time Pedro Texeira travelled up the Amazon in the 1630s, the part that Orellana had described as heavily populated was largely deserted. The assumption was that Orellana had invented details to encourage settlement (not uncommon). Recent aerial and archaeological surveys, however, have revealed a long hidden network of roads and field systems where Orellana said he saw so many people.13 Ingram could have seen something very similar along the tributaries of the Mississippi.
Ingram did leave one lasting legacy:
There is alsoe another kynde of fowle in that Countrye (which) hantethe the (rivers) near unto the islandes, they are of the shape and (deleted) of a goose, but their wynges (have) callowe feathers and cannot flye . . . They have white heads, and therefore the Countrye men call them penguins.
Etymologies of the word “penguin” indicate it was first used to describe the auks of the northern hemisphere and not the penguins of the south. Anxious to please, perhaps, Ingram was the first on record to claim its origin was a word used by Indigenous North Americans that sounded similar to the Welsh for “white head” (pen gwyn). The now extinct great auk could be immediately identified by the white spot on its head.14
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: John Toohe


text:
Inventing the Recording

By Eva Moreda Rodríguez
July 12, 2017

Eva Moreda Rodríguez on the formative years of the recording industry, focusing on the culture surrounding the gabinetes fonográficos of fin-de-siècle Spain.

To the question “When were recordings invented?”, we might be tempted to answer “1877” — the year when Thomas A. Edison was first able to record and playback sound with a phonograph. But what if we think of recordings not as mere carriers of sound, but as commodities that can be bought and sold, as artefacts capable of capturing and embodying values and emotions; of defining a generation, a country or a social class? The story then becomes one that unfolds over three decades and is full of many layers and ramifications. Without Edison’s technological innovations, recordings would have certainly never existed — but hammering out the concept of recording were also a myriad of other inventors, musicians, producers, and entrepreneurs from all over the world. Most of them were enthusiastic about being part of a global revolution, but they worked in close connection with their milieu too, shaping recording technologies and their uses to relate to the needs, dreams, and desires of the audiences they knew.
The tenor Florencio Constantino was one of these now-forgotten pioneering individuals. Born in 1868 in Ortuella, a mining village miles from the Bilbao estuary in the Basque Country, Constantino was one of the first musicians in history to develop a recording career worth the name. In fact, his life and career interlock with the early history of recorded music in fascinating ways. He was part of a generation of Spaniards who discovered recorded sound in their teenage and early adult years, found himself in high demand as a recording artist in local studios in Spain at the end of the nineteenth century, and went on to record internationally as multinationals decimated Spain’s indigenous industry.
Edison initially believed that the phonograph would be most in demand in offices and companies: recorded sound, he thought, would make business communication easier by doing away with the ambiguities of written language. However, the Improved Phonograph and Perfected Phonograph, both of which he launched in 1888, took recording technologies in a different direction. Audiences turned out not to be interested in the phonograph because of its practical uses, but because it entertained them: the first phonograph parlor opened in San Francisco in 1889, and was soon followed by thousands others all over the United States. In Constantino’s native Spain — more rural, less industrialised — phonographs were instead paraded around cities and towns and temporarily installed in civic centres, schools, hotels, and churches. For a modest fee, locals from all social classes were able to acquaint themselves with the latest discoveries of science. Some of the names and endeavours of these Spanish phonography pioneers have found their way to us today through advertisements and reports in local newspapers. Many of them were agents of Edison’s or funfair impresarios, and we know of a cornet player and entertainer by the name of Lorenzo Colís who in the summer of 1894 toured a phonograph around the Basque Country and La Rioja, and visited the Ortuella area.
It was not the thrill of listening to internationally famous performers and speakers that drew audiences to these phonographic sessions. Accounts suggest that phonograph operators were most successful when they recorded local musicians and speakers in front of the audience and then immediately played back the impressed cylinder. It was this, the act of recognising familiar voices, that ultimately astonished audiences and persuaded them that the phonograph could reproduce reality as it was. A writer for the Madrid newspaper La correspondencia de España wrote after attending a phonographic session in November 1892 that: “We were truly surprised to hear several pieces that the phonograph reproduced with incredible accuracy and purity. . . . Not even a single note or chord is lost. Even the most delicate fioriture are repeated.”
And yet, if we were to listen to some of the surviving examples from this era, we would probably find it hard to believe that anyone could have mistaken what is in them with live sound, even accounting for deterioration of the cylinder. While it is true that some such claims simply echoed Edison’s publicity (or transcribed it to the letter), one can imagine that an unfamiliar audience, shocked by the experience of hearing recorded sound for the first time, would be willing to forgive shrillness, blurriness, and lack of definition, and accept what they heard as an accurate representation of reality. Moreover, most audiences would not be particularly interested in hearing a particular recording again and again after they had established that it was, indeed, true to reality. In any case, most would not have been able to do so unless a phonograph was in residence in their town: phonographs were expensive and difficult to manipulate at the time, hardly appropriate as a home appliance. Although some recordings from that era have survived to the present day, most were intended to be as ephemeral as the sound they recorded: played back in phonographic sessions but seldom treasured in households or collections.
The phonograph became a domestic appliance with the successive launches of the Spring Motor Phonograph, the Edison Home Phonograph, and the Edison Standard Phonograph between 1896 and 1898. With this came the need for a constant supply of professionally produced, well-crafted recordings that could lure upper- and middle-class phonograph owners back to the shops again and again. The recording as a commodity was born — but it still had to be embedded with values and meanings potential buyers could relate to; values and meanings that resonated with ideas they might have had about themselves, but also connected them to the powerful narrative of the global revolution brought over by recording technologies. In Constantino’s native Spain, the task was undertaken by some forty gabinetes fonográficos (phonography studios) scattered across the country — a Spanish phenomenon in some respects, relatively independent of Edison’s commercial enterprises in more industrially developed countries. The gabinetes sold phonographs imported from the United States, but the wax cylinders were recorded and produced by the gabinetes themselves.
The gabinetes not only produced the first recordings to be made in Spain, they also produced the first Spanish recordings — that is, recordings shaped by the culture they were part of. This is immediately obvious in the choice of repertoire. Theatrical culture thrived in turn-of-the-century Spanish cities: the upper and established middle classes flocked to opera houses; the working and lower middle classes, to zarzuela theatres and café cantantes where flamenco was performed — although the latter two still managed to attract a few members of the wealthier social classes who longed for authenticity. Soon, opera, zarzuela, and flamenco were filling the gabinetes’ catalogues. Not all cylinders were equal though: recording opera for Hugens y Acosta, Constantino was one of the few singers able to command 30 pesetas per aria in 1899, shortly after returning to Spain from Latin America to debut at the Teatro Real. A well-established zarzuela soprano would normally command between 10 and 15 pesetas, while flamenco recordings could be bought for as little as 3 pesetas.
A glimpse at Madrid’s urban geography also suggests that the nascent recording industry and theatrical culture interlocked in more profound ways. Several gabinetes opened in the surroundings of opera and zarzuela theatres. One of them, Viuda de Aramburo, was a mere few yards from the Teatro de la Comedia; it originally sold scientific and technical equipment and started marketing its own wax cylinders in 1898. We know from El cardo, a phonography magazine published in Madrid between 1899 and 1900, that Viuda de Aramburo employed a rather astute apprentice, and so it is not out of the realm of possibility that the young man, having observed theatre-goers walk past his shop, figured out that they might welcome the opportunity to buy recordings of their favorite zarzuela arias as a sonic memento of what, by all accounts, was a lively and highly entertaining experience encompassing music, acting, and dancing. Álvaro Ureña — a soldier who left the army to dedicate himself to science and technology — might have followed a similar reasoning when he opened his luxurious gabinete fonográfico in 1897 in the prestigious Barquillo street in the centre of Madrid, not far away from the Teatro de la Alhambra.
Ureña’s and other gabinetes were luxurious indeed; their recordings were only affordable to the upper and middle classes. Gabinete owners, however, made sure to emphasise, sometimes in the same breath, that they were as committed to disseminating the latest discoveries of science and technology as they were to providing a sumptuous experience to their customers. Of Ureña’s gabinete, the newspaper La correspondencia militar wrote that: “There cannot be more luxury, art and wealth in this establishment. Large rooms, and elegant electric lamps hanging from the ceiling; the golden and bronze-coloured filigree interlocks artistically and contrasts with the power of the very modern voltaic arcs; phonographs of all sorts are laid out very tastefully around the place.” In turn-of-the-century Spain, buying a wax cylinder meant identifying as a member of an emerging middle class who was no longer interested in indulging in luxury for luxury’s sake, but was committed to the country’s economic and social advancement through the dissemination of science and technology. Many owners of gabinetes were themselves part of this emerging middle class, such as electrician Julián Solá in Madrid, and opticians José Corrons in Barcelona, Obdulio Bravo-Villasante in Madrid, and Pablo Lacaze in Zaragoza.
In the era of the gabinetes, though, wax cylinders still differed from modern recordings in one crucial aspect: they could not be duplicated in a reliable and effective way. Most surviving recordings from that time are one-offs. If a gabinete was faced with an unprecedented demand for, say, recordings of “La donna è mobile” by Constantino, the only way to satisfy customers would be to hire Constantino to record several takes of the aria, all different from each other. It was unrealistic for the Spanish industry to rely on a few outstanding or well-known performers to meet the demand, and so, alongside with Constantino, a multiplicity of lesser known, jobbing singers ventured into the recording industry with a modicum of success. Some singers of the era, in fact, are only known to us in connection with the recording industry. Their names are Amparo Cardenal, Luisa Alarcón, and Francisco Cervera; there is no evidence that they ever graced a professional stage, and they might have even been talented amateurs who found an opportunity of making money out of their singing thanks to the gabinetes. The gabinetes, on the other hand, turned technological limitation into a virtue and some of their owners routinely proclaimed that they were artisans rather than mass producers, carefully crafting each cylinder and making Spanish recordings superior to those coming from any other country in the world.
The gabinetes’ enthusiasm and commitment, though, did not help them survive when the gramophone, which recorded on reproducible discs, took hold in Spain after Compagnie Française du Gramophone opened a Spanish branch in 1903. They resisted for a couple of years, but by 1905 many had closed down and the rest were operating as subsidiaries of the Compagnie or other multinationals such as Pathé and Odéon. Constantino, who had by then embarked on an international career in Eastern Europe and America, recorded zarzuela arias for the Barcelona branch of Pathé in 1903, followed by G&T in Berlin, Edison Records in Italy, Pathé and Odéon in Paris, and Victor and Columbia in the United States. Many of his colleagues who had thrived during the era of the gabinetes found themselves unable to compete against better or more established singers and went back to the stage.
Constantino died in poverty in Mexico City in 1919 after a series of artistic fiascos. Seven years later, the invention of electrical recording revolutionised the industry again; one of the many technological advances in the capturing of sound that would occur throughout the twentieth century and on into the present. Despite these changes, the recording itself has — with its ability to travel the world, shape culture, and connect the listener to a community of performers and other listeners — still kept to this day most of the defining traits it acquired thanks to Constantino and his contemporaries.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Eva Moreda Rodríguez


text:
A Queer Taste for Macaroni

By Dominic Janes
February 22, 2017

With his enormous hair, painted face, and dainty attire, the so-called "macaroni" was a common sight upon the streets and ridiculing prints of 1770s London. Dominic Janes explores how with this new figure — and the scandalous sodomy trials with which the stereotype became entwined — a widespread discussion of same-sex desire first entered the public realm, long before the days of Oscar Wilde.

It has sometimes been thought that the figure of the homosexual man only emerged to widespread visibility at the end of the nineteenth century with the sensational revelations that attended the trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895. It is true that the term “homosexual” was not invented until the mid-nineteenth century, and indeed was not widely used in Britain until around the time of World War II. But, of course, that does not mean that in previous centuries same-sex desire was unknown and its practitioners unremarked. That this was particularly the case for the eighteenth century is something that can be seen from the art and visual culture of the time.
Georgian Britain’s vibrant tradition of satire — played out in the prints and pamphlets of the day, and some of it downright crude — enjoyed an important role in political life. Compared with many other European countries, there was a surprising degree of latitude in Britain to be rude in public about prominent figures. All this was celebrated as representing the liberties of the free-born Briton. Mockery mostly relied upon popular perceptions of deviance not only from political but also from cultural norms of behaviour, and men who allegedly aped the tastes and mannerisms of women came in for particular abuse. It has long been argued that such figures — known as fops, beaux, and dandies, among other terms — were mocked because of a hostility to effeminacy. While this no doubt has some truth to it, one particular term newly coined in the 1760s, “macaroni”, also became associated with sodomy.
The dandified man of fashion was no stranger to rumours of vice. As “Ferdinand Twigem” wrote in The Macaroni: A Satire (1773), “what pigmy monsters teem / what crowds of beaus effeminate are seen”, who first blush at their acts of dissipation but afterward give way to all indulgence. Earlier in the century it had been the aggressively masculine “rake” who was associated with vices such as excessive drinking, gambling, and whoring. Effeminate “fops” in the Restoration and earlier Georgian periods were vapid, enervated men who were likened to weak and feeble women. Both the rake and the fop were characterised by their repeated attempts to gain the confidences of respectable women but were mocked for being, respectively, over- and under-achieving in their endeavours. Susan Staves is one scholar who has been notably keen to assert that the allegedly effeminate fop was not some sort of proto-homosexual but rather a kind of “new man”: “the so-called effeminacy of these old fops was an early if imperfect attempt at the refinement, civility, and sensitivity most of us would now say are desirable masculine virtues”.1 A queer quality had, however, crept into some uses of the word “fop” by the mid-eighteenth century, particularly when employed in association with the term “macaroni”.
Yale University houses an excellent collection of the furniture, objets d’art, books, and prints once owned by the prominent connoisseur, writer, and politician Horace Walpole, the son of the man generally referred to as Britain’s first prime minister, Robert Walpole. Horace, who was not a married man, presented himself as something of an old-school fop and it was he who first recorded the existence of a “Maccaroni club” in 1764 which consisted of “all the travelled young men who wear long curls and spying-glasses”.2 This trait of being “travelled”, or of at least adopting certain Continental affectations, was particularly salient for the identity of the macaroni, and indeed lies behind the slightly peculiar label itself. Whilst British patriots rejoiced in roast beef, some of those recently returned from the Grand Tour flaunted their newly acquired tastes for Italian cuisine — with a supposed penchant for macaroni pasta in particular.3
As with food, so it was with the wardrobe — a certain flair for Continental fashion being an essential aspect of macaroni life, and one mocked in hundreds of satirical prints. One such print, A Macaroni Dressing Room, published in 1772, shows a group of affected, fashion-obsessed men. At the centre of the print an individual wearing facial beauty patches has his wig attended to by a flamboyant hairdresser and his black assistant. Another man practices fencing and a third plays with a pet cockatoo.
The implication was not merely that they had fallen prey to the supposed vanity that was held to characterise women of fashion, but also that they were in thrall to French-derived notions of the elite lifestyle. Dandyism, therefore, was equated with a treasonous flirtation with the nation’s luxury-obsessed enemy across the Channel. Furthermore, so scholar Peter McNeil argues, this flair for outlandish styles can be coded in terms not simply of effeminacy but also of sexual preference: “by the 1760s when the macaroni emerged, such attention to fashion was read as evidence of a lack of interest in women, or as potentially unattractive to women”.4 The macaronis in their dressing room were, from this point of view, dressing up for the benefit of each other, and so snubbing the ladies. Indeed, permeating all these late eighteenth-century notions of the macaroni is the idea that strange cuisine and dress were not the only unconventional customs these travelled young men brought back from abroad. Italy, in particular, was associated by the Protestant British with perversity because of the influence of an unmarried Roman Catholic priesthood which, it was thought, expended its sexual energies on cuckoldry and sodomy. The further implication was that British aristocrats might also bring a taste for such vices back with them from their travels.
The early 1770s saw a series of scandals in fashionable circles of London society that further wedded the term of macaroni to a queer inclination and truly placed the figure of the homosexual man into the public realm. Perhaps the most prominent of these events concerned a certain Captain Robert Jones who, in July 1772, was convicted at the Old Bailey for sodomizing a thirteen-year-old boy and was sentenced to hang. In October, however, he obtained a royal pardon on the condition that he left the country after new evidence suggested that the boy’s testimony may have been unreliable. The pardon was greeted with accusations of an establishment cover-up since Jones was well known in the fashionable world (being noted for having popularised skating and fireworks). The tone of the abuse that was directed towards Jones is clear from sources such as a letter that was published in the Public Ledger on August 5. The letter alleged that “this MILITARY MACCARONI” was “too much engaged in every scene of idle Dissipation and wanton Extravagance.” Sodomy, it was insinuated, was not just the secret vice of an individual but a defining characteristic of a recent type of dandy. Such men were warned: “therefore, ye Beaux, ye sweet-scented, simpering He-She things, deign to learn wisdom from the death of a Brother”.5
These events were recalled in an undated diary entry made in late March or early April 1778 by a certain Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi (1741–1821):
In the Year 1772 one Captain Jones was convicted of Crimes against Nature, and sentenced to die: He was a Gentleman famous for his Invention in the Art of making Fireworks, and adapting Subjects fit to be represented in that Genre; & had already entertained the Town with two particular Devices which were exhibited at Marylebone Gardens & greatly admired: viz: the Forge of Vulcan in the Cave of Mount Etna, & the calling Eurydice out of Hell — If he is pardoned says Stevens, He may shew off the Destruction of Sodom and Gommorrah; it will have an admirable Effect.6
Piozzi was a friend of the encyclopaedist Samuel Johnson and a member of his literary circle. After her first husband, the brewing magnate Henry Thrale, died in 1781, she was left independently wealthy and three years later wed the Italian musician and composer Gabriel Piozzi. She was prolific in her letter writing, and in 1776 began to keep a diary in which she commented on, amongst other things, people she knew or thought might be sodomites or “Sapphists” (i.e., lesbians). She wrote, for instance, the following on March 29, 1794, after talking with a friend about men such as Horace Mann, who had been a close friend of the aforementioned Horace Walpole:
Mrs Greatheed & I call those Fellows Finger-twirlers; — meaning a decent word for Sodomites: old Sir Horace Mann & Mr James the Painter had such an odd way of twirling their Fingers in Discourse; — & I see Suetonius tells the same thing of one of the Roman Emperors “nec sine molli quadam digitorum gesticulatione [with eloquent movements of his fingers].”7
The public furore around the disgrace of Captain Jones appears to have seen the linkage of two previous stereotypes: the libidinous rake who would prey on both the wealthy and vulnerable of both sexes, and the effeminate fop whose nature was akin to that of a woman. These two stereotypes have informed popular perceptions of male same-sex desire through to the present day. In the nineteenth century a new medicalised conception of the homosexual person as a psychological deviant established a quasi-scientific basis for thinking about such individuals, but this did not replace older notions which were based on combined transgressions of gender and sexuality. These ideas underpinned public understanding of the most sensational sodomy trials of the Victorian period — those of Oscar Wilde in 1895. He too was seen both as perversely effeminate in his fashionable posing and, at the same time, as aggressively predatory towards male youths. But as shown by the case of Captain Jones, and the figure of the macaroni with which he was aligned, there was a complex history of queer dandyism long before Oscar and his lover Lord Alfred Douglas became the most notorious sodomites in Victorian Britain.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: February 22, 2017

author: Dominic Janes