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The Secret History of Holywell Street
Home to Victorian London’s Dirty Book Trade
By Matthew Green
June 29, 2016

Victorian sexuality is often considered synonymous with prudishness, conjuring images of covered-up piano legs and dark ankle-length skirts. Historian Matthew Green uncovers a quite different scene in the sordid story of Holywell St, 19th-century London's epicentre of erotica and smut.

Tentative warning: the essay includes some mildly explicit content, both text and image, which may not be suitable for all ages and dispositions!
At the eastern end of the Strand, opposite the Royal Courts of Justice, William Gladstone stands atop a plinth. Four times Queen Victoria’s Prime Minister, this eminent, emblematic Victorian is flanked by four female effigies testifying to the virtues of education, inspiration, courage, and brotherhood. Gladstone himself looks stately and solemn, as is fitting, but also mildly outraged, all clenched fists and frowns.
Well might he: he’s staring straight down what was, in his day, variously described as “a foul sink of iniquity”, “a place where dirt and darkness meet and make mortal compact” and, in the words of the Times, “the most vile street in the civilized world”. This was Holywell Street, the meridian of London’s booming pornography trade and, throughout the century, a byword for the dirty book trade long before Soho. It was the very antithesis of the noble and apparently rock-solid values embodied by Gladstone’s effigy companions and an affront to his own Christianity, which saw him scouring London’s streets late at night to rescue fallen women.
Today, the street has vanished. If you rest your back against Gladstone’s plinth and look down the Strand you have colossal Australia House in front of you; the grimy Church of St Mary Le Strand a little further down, lost amidst swirling tides of traffic; and to your right, dreary Aldwych curving towards Holborn. But from exactly the same vantage point in Gladstone’s day the scene would have been very different: two narrow, rambling streets squirrelling into the distance. One, to the right, was Wych Street; the other, tucked directly behind the Strand, was Holywell Street.
If, when it comes to the pleasures of the flesh, we are accustomed to think of the Victorians as a prudish and repressed breed, a trip down Holywell Street in the late nineteenth century would be an eye-opening experience. It was unusual in appearance. There were crooked timber-framed houses with gables lurching over the street, blocking out the light, as though caught in a time warp from medieval London. In some senses this gave it an antique, picture-postcard charm. But many of the old wooden-fronted, deep-bayed buildings were grimy and semi-dilapidated — sleazy, even. Books abounded, stuffed into sooty shop windows, spilling onto trestle tables on the pavement, and being forever unloaded from horse-drawn carts. Above one second-hand bookshop, at number 37, was a golden crescent moon with pouting lips, thick eyebrows, a fine nose, and sad, sulky eyes — reportedly the oldest shop sign in London, one that features prominently in contemporary paintings. It guarded the entrance to Half-Moon Passage, a dark alley reeking of urine, down which pedestrians could see swarms of vehicles and people on the Strand framed in a piercingly bright aperture as though caught in the lens of a camera obscura.
Situated on the cusp of Fleet Street, the nerve centre of the biggest publishing industry in the world, Holywell Street was originally the terrain of radical pamphleteers and printmakers. But following a government crackdown on subversive print in the 1810s, maverick publishers diverted their revolutionary impulses from radical politics into lucrative pornography, and the street became a powerhouse of the dirty book trade.
One denizen of Holywell Street was William Dugdale, one of the most prolific publishers of dirty books. He was a wily man, full of subterfuge. Some of his favourite tricks included passing off very old books as brand new simply by changing the title, or sometimes claiming new books were vintage, giving them an unjustified kudos. He also liked to rip chapters out of other people’s books and pass them off as original short works, add racy and suggestive subtitles to completely innocent novels, and write his own advertising copy, praising the brilliance of works he had himself written.
In 1857 the government passed the Obscene Publications Act, threatening pornographers with ruinous prison sentences and transforming Holywell Street into a wellspring of illicit erotica. Dugdale had to operate under at least four fake names and from several different addresses. He had managed to evade custodial sentences for some time (brazenly threatening a jury with a knife at one point) but a decade later, his luck ran out. Finally convicted, he died a lonely death in the Clerkenwell House of Corrections in 1868 having received a sentence of hard labour which, at his age, was tantamount to a death sentence.
But in spite of the draconian law, shopkeepers proved resourceful and Londoners could still find, dotted among the clothes-men’s stalls and the more respectable second-hand bookshops, dollops of pornography. “At present the sale of [illicit books and prints] is only partially suppressed”, declared the authoritative Survey of London in 1878. Of a typical day on Holywell Street, there would have been swarms of men — sometimes women too — hovering outside certain shop windows and occasionally vanishing inside to sink their teeth into the forbidden fruit of Victorian London. Suggestive title pages and obscene engravings in the window were indicative of a pornographic presence within. A mid-century Daily Telegraph article decried members of the weaker sex “furtively peeping in at these sin-crammed shop windows, timorously gloating over suggestive title-pages, guiltily bending over engravings as vile in execution as they are in subject”.
And what kind of scene would have greeted customers? A dark and musty interior. The obligatory quotient of youths snout-deep in greasy books, a faint sheen of perspiration on their upper lips. A hawker arriving every so often to buy or sell. The shopkeeper eying each new customer with suspicion lest they be an undercover policeman, the bane of their existence.
Say you visited in the 1890s: staring down at you would be a range of titillating titles like The Power of Mesmerism: A Highly Erotic Narrative (1891), The Seducing Cardinal (1830), and The Lustful Turk (1864). You might also find, a little further into the shop, Captain Stroke-All’s Pocket Book! (1844), An Experimental Lecture by Colonel Spanker (1878), and The Amatory Experiences of a Surgeon (1881). Customers wouldn’t want to miss, either, The Autobiography of a Flea (1887) and Revelries! and Devilries!! (1867). The latter has a lascivious frontispiece showing two naked women with birches ready to lash a pair of bare buttocks.
To get hold of the most illicit publications, a discreet word with the bookseller might have been necessary, and even then it may have depended on whether he was on good terms with the porn king of the day. Some, like The Story of a Dildoe! — privately printed in 1880, obscenely illustrated (you can imagine how) and limited to a print run of 150 — were very rare, passing from hand to hand much like illuminated manuscripts in medieval London. Others, like Randiana, or Excitable Tales; Being the Experiences of an Erotic Philosopher (1884), were so salacious they were kept behind the counter. In this, readers are treated to a potpourri of sexual encounters featuring orgies, ecclesiastical buggery, and lesbian sex scenes complete with gutta-percha dildoes brimming with warm oil and milk.
We know about these books which were readily available in Holywell Street thanks to the existence of the first pornographic bibliography in the English language, which can stake a claim to being one of the most thrilling — and longest — bibliographies ever compiled. It was published in three parts in the 1870s and 1880s by pornography connoisseur Henry Spencer Ashbee under the pseudonym Pisanus Fraxi. Ashbee was the biggest collector of pornography in nineteenth-century Europe; he would have been on first-name terms with many of the booksellers of Holywell Street. The first volume of his bibliography, published in 1877, is called the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, mocking the Catholic Church’s Index of Banned Books and fittingly so, for most of the works featured were printed privately or secretly — they were just the kind of books the police would destroy. The word bibliography doesn’t really do justice to the originality and brilliance of Ashbee’s endeavour. Part précis, part review, part critical analysis with absurdly long footnotes giving it an illusory academic quality belying the sheer filth of many of the titles, it was patently designed to stimulate as much as to inform, and is striking testimony to late Victorian London’s booming pornography industry.
The kinds of books available on Holywell Street, as listed by Ashbee, range from the fairly innocuous to the downright obscene. Ashbee describes An Experimental Lecture by Colonel Spanker, for instance, as “the most coldly cruel and unblushingly indecent of any we have ever read”. It is a sadistic account of the whipping of a young girl for the edification of the Mayfair Flagellation Society. The passages in which the victim is tied up, whipped, and penetrated tread a thin line between masochistic sex and outright assault. The self-avowed theme of the colonel’s live-action lecture was “the pleasures to be derived from crushing and humiliating the spirit of a beautiful and modest young lady”. Flagellation looms large in Victorian erotica as though a fitting punishment for protagonists so flagrantly breaching the moral codes of society.
Another striking book — not least because the writing seems so modern — is The Horn Book, or A Girl’s Guide to the Knowledge of Good and Evil (1899). Like much erotica, it takes the form of a dialogue, in this instance between a bored housewife, Maud, and her sexual tutor, Charlie, a “brilliantly healthy” and libidinous twenty-eight-year-old, and is at once a tale of sexual awakening and a vivid sex manual for practical use. It is divided up into instructive sections on the male and female sexual organs, intercourse, masturbation, sodomy, “gamahuching” (oral sex), and of course “how to fuck without danger of fecundation”. Charlie and Maud demonstrate sixty-three different sex positions including “dog-fashion flying”, “the sack of corn backwards”, “the cock horse”, and “the elastic cunt”. It contains some great pillow talk. “I should like, my angel,” says Charlie, “to crush my whole being into your sweet body; in your velvet mouth; your pretty rose-pink cunt; your delicious chocolate bum-hole, and I would squirt therein countless jets of thick, rich seed”.
In other books, it is the woman who is the sex monster, reflecting the traditional idea that women were intrinsically more lustful than men. The Delights of Love takes a “female rake” as its protagonist, an Italian widow who gives free reign to her passions and perversions after the welcome death of her impotent husband, and in The Story of a Dildoe!, “three young American ladies resolve to procure a dildo for their mutual gratification . . . then they all meet and deflower each other with this ladies’ syringe”. ※※Indexed under…Yellowskin due to excessive masturbation
If this veers into lesbian territory then The Sins of the Cities of the Plain (1881) is one of the first pornographic works to focus exclusively on male homosexual experience in which hardly anything is left to the imagination. At no point in this work — or in any of the works mentioned above — are the sexual escapades of the protagonists frowned upon; even the most depraved form of sexual activity is presented as licit, open-minded, and liberating, and the pacey, picaresque style in which many of them are written is suggestive of a certain playfulness and harmlessness much at odds with mainstream attitudes towards casual sex. Colonel Spanker, in his sordid lecture, invokes the Garden of Eden to prove that “a luscious indulgence in the arts of love” is the most natural thing in the world despite being “condemned by a hypocritical world as wicked and obscene”.
As this suggests, the Victorian establishment hailed pornographic books as evil incarnate, a corrosive threat to the very fabric of society. Ashbee describes society as being “at war” with the books; in 1856 Punch magazine wishes Holywell Street would be swallowed up by an earthquake; and one police inspector thought the “blackguard purveyors” of Holywell Street should be “taken and nailed by the ears to the nearest gatepost”. We have already noted too the deadly sentences meted out to some of the principal pornographers.
To understand why erotic novels engendered such outrage, we need to get our heads around Victorian sexuality. Male readers: imagine thinking of your body as a physiological economy with a finite amount of resources to “spend” (the most commonly used word for ejaculation in this era). Imagine being taught that every youthful sexual indulgence is an unmitigated evil which wastes your vital force and stunts your physical growth and mental development. Any kind of incontinence is dangerous, you believe, but none more so than masturbation, which will lead to jaundiced skin, eruptions of acne, a slouching gait, clammy palm, leaden eye, and the inability to look anyone in the eye. The fate of a compulsive masturbator is to become a drivelling idiot or insufferable hypochondriac. Even within the presumed safety of marriage, you will have to walk a tightrope between abstemiousness and gratification — have no sex and you’ll be ruined, but have too much and you’ll melt into a goo of despondency as the symptoms of “spermatorrhoea” (an umbrella term for diseases caused by a loss of semen) take hold, leading to heart disease and death.
It’s even worse for women. Female readers, imagine thinking of yourself as a sexless baby-producing machine, almost entirely devoid of any erotic desire and actually incapable of it during pregnancy when your baby will suck away your vital force from within. You will surrender to your husband’s desires only occasionally. Like men, you believe that sex serves a practical purpose — the population of the earth — but beyond that it is profoundly dangerous. Continence is the key. Your sex life is likely to be a sore and bitter trial.
These ideas, so farcical and objectionable to twenty-first-century eyes, are lifted — sometimes word for word — from Dr William Acton’s Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs (1857), no radical polemic but mainstream medical opinion. Anyone deviating one iota from his worthy advice (memorably described by historian Steven Marcus in The Other Victorians [1966] as “part fantasy, part nightmare, part hallucination”) is either indifferent to their health or just plain low. It is only after we get our head around Dr Acton’s alien sexual precepts that we can begin to understand the hysterical tone that united police, press, and politicians in lambasting pornography. For Victorian pornography was not just a foil to Dr Acton’s belief system but its antithesis, presenting as it does a world of sexual riches where women are game for anything and men are “limitlessly endowed with that universal fluid currency which can be spent without loss”, as Marcus puts it. Even Ashbee calls pornographic works “poisons” in the preface to his bibliography, warning that they must be distinctly labelled and “confined to those who understand their potency”. They are also, of course, an incentive to dreaded masturbation. That is why men like William Dugdale had to be destroyed in hard-labour camps.
The perversions of Holywell Street pornography sometimes spilled over into real life. “This literature amused me much, as did the pictures of fantastic combinations of male and female in lascivious play and coition”, writes “Walter”, a pornography connoisseur and pseudonymic author of My Secret Life. “I began to see that such things are harmless, though the world may say they are naughty, and saw through the absurdity of conventional views and prejudices as to the ways a cock and cunt may be pleasurably employed”. My Secret Life was an Odyssean sexual memoir privately printed from 1888 and running to four thousand pages across eleven volumes. With its vivid descriptions of deviant sexual behaviour, it reveals that not everyone adhered to middle-class sexual ideals, to put it mildly. The memoir is so frank that a British printer was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for supplying it — in 1969! It still has the power to shock today with sentences like “while I fucked her, I hated her — she was my spunk-emptier” and “her cunt constricted . . . and sucked round my prick from tip to root moistening both itself and occupant, and my sperm shot out and filled it”.
Over the course of a million words, Dr Acton’s sexual worldview is capsized. In the text, men can philander away to their hearts’ content — they will suffer no adverse effects unless they catch a sexually transmitted disease, which is always a risk for men like Walter. Nor are women passive and sexually submissive in the least; all you need to do, in Walter’s world, is fill them up with wine and meat, “let the grub work”, and they’re anyone’s. And they enjoy it, women, as the many sex scenes ram home. Nor are men, contrary to Dr Acton, in their uninhibited state always sex machines. My Secret Life addresses the taboo of impotency. “My God! It was not standing, not a bit of swell or stiffness was in it”, writes a horrified Walter at one point, finding his genitalia reduced to “a sucked gooseberry, a mere bit of dwindling, flexible, skinny gristle”. Overall, Walter’s memoir is a violent reaction against the repressed nature of Victorian sexuality and a striking manifestation of the sort of sexual freedom glimpsed in pornography. The problem, it seems to be saying, lies with society not pornography.
In the latter part of the century, if customers wanted to get hold of pornographic prints or even stereoscopic slides (giving the illusion of depth to indecent images), they usually had to have a discreet word with the bookseller.  Even then, they were likely to have been treated with suspicion. In 1880, a police inspector went undercover in search of a family-run mail-order enterprise that was corrupting Eton pupils by sending them indecent images unsolicited in envelopes marked “art studies”, in the hope that they would order more. The trail led straight to a Holywell Street bookshop. The officer found that risqué photographs could be purchased easily enough but to get his hands on some “choice specimens”, as he puts it in his Stories from Scotland Yard (1890), the police officer had first to earn the keeper’s trust before being led upstairs into “a dirty little place, which was part bed-room, part workshop . . . as filthy a hole as I have ever been into”. Here, he purchased some expensive hardcore pornography (for two guineas) — and left a shilling for the “little wretched piece of forlorn humanity” that was the shopkeeper’s baby. The pornographer’s suspicious wife followed him to the train station. The next day, the shop was raided, five thousand indecent photographs seized, and the man arrested. He was given two years’ imprisonment and the inspector rejoices in ending his “revolting trade”.
If the sight of the pornographic prints and slides aroused customers, they could walk to the end of Holywell Street and double back into Wych Street. In appearance, it was similar to Holywell Street: grimy, narrow and with gables toppling over the street, but here many of the buildings were brothels — some flagellation brothels. Holywell Street was not known for its houses of ill repute but many of its chemists stocked sex toys.
In spite of repeated police and government crackdowns, the pornographers of Holywell Street proved resilient. Every time one head honcho of the porn trade was arrested, another simply popped up in his place; the street’s shopkeepers were ever alive to the enormous commercial potential of smut. It began to look like the only way to suppress Holywell Street for good was to wipe it off the map. There had in fact been, throughout the course of the nineteenth century, a series of proposals to demolish Holywell Street and Wych Street, ostensibly to make the Strand wider and grander — it could become horribly congested between the churches of St Clement Danes and St Mary le Strand. But the prospect of exterminating the pornography trade gave the proposals added piquancy.
And, right at the end of the nineteenth century, that is exactly what happened. By 1901, both Holywell and Wych Street would be gone, flattened to make way for soulless Aldwych, which was completed just after the First World War. London’s pornography trade didn’t vanish with them of course; its centre of gravity simply shifted to the other end of the Strand, to Charing Cross Road, which became the new nucleus of erotic books, and, after that, to Soho where sex bookshops can still be found to this day.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Matthew Green


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Francis van Helmont and the Alphabet of Nature

By Jé Wilson
June 1, 2016

Largely forgotten today in the shadow of his more famous father, the 17th-century Flemish alchemist Francis van Helmont influenced and was friends with the likes of Locke, Boyle, and Leibniz. While imprisoned by the Inquisition, in between torture sessions, he wrote his Alphabet of Nature on the idea of a universal “natural” language. Je Wilson explores.

In the frontispiece to his father’s book, The Origin of Medicine, published in 1648, there’s an engraving of a young Francis van Helmont. Tucked into a bizarre overlapping portrait, he peeks out at the reader from behind his famous father’s head, his right eye entirely obscured by the elder Van Helmont’s left ear.
Francis’ father was Jan Baptist van Helmont, the Flemish chemist, doctor, and alchemist who is credited with founding the study of gases, and who claimed to be the first to use the word “gas” scientifically. After an early clash with the Inquisition, which didn’t like some of his nuttier medical ideas, Jan opted to play it safe and asked his son Francis to publish the bulk of his writing after his death. Dutifully complying, Francis squeezes into the picture. Orbited by the heraldic shields of his ancestors, he cozies up to Dad as if ready to take on this intellectual bequest: he will be the Van Helmont, his father’s true heir, for the rest of the seventeenth century.
In some sense, this was accurate. Born in Brussels in 1614 and dying at the end of the century in 1699, Francis left his mark on the era — no less a luminary than Gottfried Leibniz wrote his epitaph — but his historical influence was slight and he is now largely forgotten. He makes an appearance, here and there, thanks mainly to his role in editing his father’s work. As late as 1911, an encyclopedia entry on Jan acknowledges that debt, but in mentioning Francis only scoffs at the “wilder confusion” of “mystical theosophy and alchemy” in his writings.1
And yet Francis, in his own day, was a celebrated physician, innovator, diplomat, and religious thinker, who was friends with the philosopher John Locke and the chemist Robert Boyle, and about whom Leibniz wrote: “If such a man had been born among the Greeks / He would now be numbered among the stars”.2 Leibniz actually ghostwrote Francis’ last book, Thoughts on Genesis, while Francis himself contributed to Leibniz’s metaphysical idea of the monad.3 Although it’s somewhat hard, after four centuries, to see the younger Van Helmont’s “stellar” substance, he was the type of person whose sphere of influence is local and immediate. His ideas generated more excitement in person than they did on paper. Friends found his conversation inspiring and original, and they admired his moral fiber. One, Henry More, even wept at the thought of his “goodness”, saying that Francis van Helmont could “draw moisture from flint”.4 Over the centuries, his influence has seeped down without notice, only to surface unexpectedly here and there. His religious ideas and translations were, for instance, instrumental in shaping the theologian and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, whose own writing profoundly affected people as various as Emerson, Jung, Balzac, Strindberg, and Henry James, Sr.5
As for Francis’ own intellectual training, he was indebted to his father. He never attended a regular school; instead, Jan homeschooled the boy, spoon-feeding him alchemical, scientific, and mystical ideas along with his pabulum. (Francis’ baby food actually included a “Tree of Life” herbal supplement distilled from the cedars of Lebanon.)6 Jan, a follower of the physician Paracelsus, instilled in his son a reverence for the ancient occult Hermetic beliefs, along with those of the Renaissance Neo-Platonists; this meant that Francis grew up believing in the idea of one true antique theology inherent to all religions, whose divine teachings needed to be recovered. He also learned that man was a complete microcosm of the macrocosmic world, and that the only true knowledge came through divinely inspired intuition. At the same time, since such things coexisted, Francis was taught to respect an empirical scientific method, meaning that his education blended an objective approach to chemistry and medicine with a heavy larding of mysticism.
Such schooling, directed at a boy who displayed a natural bent toward rebellion, would turn Francis into a freethinking misfit, always searching for answers regardless of danger or ridicule. In keeping with his early Lebanese cedar dosing, he became a health-conscious vegetarian and teetotaler at a time when such behavior was considered oddball to the point of insanity. (He did, in fact, live to the age of eighty-four when the average life expectancy was decades younger.) In the autobiographical preface to his father’s work, Francis describes how his relatives looked down on him for his strange ways and thought he would “at length become mad”:
[F]or the preservation of my health, and increasing of my strength, I lived soberly for many Years together, I also abstained from fleshes, like as also from Fishes, Wine, and Ale or Beer; and that so far, that I incurred the contempt and disdain of my kindred, who upbraided me as I conjecture, from a good zeal: What unwonted thing doth he again begin?7
His unwonted leanings persisted all his life. A Christian kabbalist, Francis published translations of kabbalistic writings — the most comprehensive collection of the time. His interest in the Jewish kabbalah, which had acquired its enclave of Christian adherents during the Renaissance, stemmed from his desire to find a common ancient (ancient Christian, of course) source for all religions. It was an unorthodox pursuit, but he was, in general, devoted to unconventional and often liberal ideas: he translated a book advocating the reform of prisons, published writings that promoted religious tolerance, briefly became a Quaker, and established a short-lived work commune in Germany. Meanwhile, he kept busy as a political, economic, and medical advisor to princes, princesses, and other nobility — finding time between his doctoring and diplomacy to devise a mechanical cure for scoliosis, design a new kind of spinning wheel and a more efficient wheelbarrow, learn carpentry and weaving, and invent running shoes with springs. He also figured out how to temporarily preserve the corpse of his good friend Anne Conway (he pickled her in wine inside a lead coffin with a glass window) until her husband could return home from abroad and gaze at her features one last time.8
One of Francis’ more fascinating areas of study is a peculiar book he wrote on the subject of Hebrew. He formed his ideas about the language while being held and tortured by the Inquisition for a year and a half. In 1661, before he had published anything at all, the Catholic Church arrested and charged him with “judaizing” or of being a Jew, a catch-all charge in the seventeenth century that, in Francis’ case, appeared to mean “you have liberal ideas”.9 They were right about that — though, ironically, he would far rather have converted the Jews to Christianity than become a Jew himself — and he had every reason to expect he might be burned at the stake. Regardless, he took his imprisonment in stride, and between trips to the torture chamber he conceived his theory of language.10 Usually referred to as the Alphabet of Nature, the small book outlines Francis’ concept of Hebrew and his scheme for teaching deaf-mutes to speak it. The frontispiece to the book shows Francis sitting at a table in his cell in Rome; facing a mirror, he is scientifically measuring his lips with a pair of calipers.
The theory he propounds is that the ancient and therefore uncorrupted Hebrew characters are actually diagrams illustrating how the lips and tongue should be positioned when uttering the sounds they make. A series of woodcuts in the book show cross sections of heads in profile with the speech organs exposed to reveal how they are shaped exactly like Hebrew letters. This resemblance — a kind of pronunciation guide — means that people who are deaf can easily learn to sound out Hebrew because the tools for speaking it are innate, rooted in the very bones and muscles of our bodies; our organs for speech match this wholly (and of course holy) “natural” language. Francis van Helmont, a whimsical proto Noam Chomsky, believed not that we are born with a mental template or apparatus for learning grammar but that we are born with the shape of the Hebrew characters literally written (or at least easily writable) in our mouths and throats.
Though his theory was eccentric, Francis’ preoccupation with the idea of a natural language formed part of a long historical debate, still active in the seventeenth century, over whether language was natural or artificial. Since antiquity, two schools of thought had grown up around the question, with some believing that language was made of random symbols — a view Aristotle held — and some thinking words and letters accurately represented nature, an idea Plato was drawn to but which he ultimately found impractical and unlikely.11 Despite Plato’s misgivings, Neoplatonists and alchemists of later centuries embraced the idea of a purely natural language that had an innate connection to reality, as did Jewish and Christian kabbalists. For Francis van Helmont and those who thought like him, the abstract signs of language, especially the divine language of Hebrew, were firmly concrete. Words, letters, and symbols carried an innate power that not only corresponded intrinsically to the things they represented but could also reveal the invisible spiritual truths and secret symmetries of the universe.12
As for ancient Hebrew, it was of course the most natural language since it was the one God had specially given to Man, something you believed if you were similar to Francis, though this idea was of course hotly debated among philosophers and Christians, as were other related points about language.13 Do thoughts precede words or is language the prerequisite for thinking? Do things in the world exist before they are named? Which came first, the chicken or the word “chicken”? Francis would have said that the word came first. God had the word, and then made the chicken that corresponded to it; as each animal was created, it stepped into an already existing word-coat that perfectly expressed its essence. Adam, who later in Genesis names the animals, is therefore (from Francis’ perspective) being divinely inspired to name the animals with their real names, and not with randomly invented words. Given Francis’ belief that all true knowledge is latent in our microcosmic bodies — accessible through divine revelation — it is not surprising that his model of language imagines the Hebrew characters as being almost engraved inside us, physically wedded to our mouths.
Taken to its limit, however, this faith in intuition and the innateness of knowledge could become dangerously democratic at a time when hierarchies were strictly enforced. Martin Luther, after all, founded Protestantism on such egalitarian bedrock: that any reader of the Bible had direct access to God. Even though Christian kabbalists thought their pursuits wholly in keeping with religiosity — “there is no department of knowledge that gives us more certainty of Christ’s divinity than magic and cabala” wrote Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in 1486 — the Church begged to differ.14 Although tolerant to some extent, it considered the occult problematic, and to believe too strongly in the power of words could lead to trouble. For the Church, the idea that words could conjure,  or that they held the means to some deep well of unsanctioned knowledge, undermined ecclesiastical authority. And if God wasn’t officially involved, then the supernatural force at work must be demonic.
Had they known about it, his jailors would have considered Francis’ incipient work on language heretical. But long before it was published, they were already trying to condemn him for his unconventional behavior. Being tolerant and ecumenical at a time when Christian sects were killing each other on a daily basis, Francis was not popular with either Catholics or Protestants, and was in fact almost killed by a mob of Lutherans for trying to encourage compromise.15 His own description of himself in the preface to his father’s work might give an idea of what people didn’t like. Here, he says, is what is being said about him:
[H]e is no where seen except in the company of most unconstant, strange, and uncouth persons, of whatsoever profession and employment; he will also incur a misfortune, for he knows not how to dissemble, he spareth none, neither great nor small, when he discerns that which is unjust.16
Others were right to think he’d get in trouble. His interest in justice, reform, and plain speaking did not endear him to the Catholic Church. Shortly before he was arrested, he made himself unpopular by working for a German prince who had asked him for advice on how to boost a region still economically depressed from the Thirty Years’ War. Francis suggested farming and skilled work for peasants and the “sons of citizens” alike.17 The result was a collection of workshops whose students included gentlemen and at which everyone learned how to weave, cook, cobble, and work the anvil, and where even the prince himself was invited to eat, work with his hands, and walk rather than ride. Hebrew was taught to all. The Inquisition fumed at the idea of such socialist class leveling: the nobility and the upper classes were being degraded. In its report, it was especially disgusted with Francis’ suggestion that the prince raise pigs (in “filthy pig pens”) on palace grounds.18 Francis was eventually released from the dungeons of Rome, but only because he had powerful friends who pleaded on his behalf, including that pig-tolerating prince himself.
Like many books on the idea of a universal language, the Alphabet of Nature was a utopian work. Francis believed that discord would end if everyone could speak the same divinely inspired language and no longer disagree over the meaning of the scriptures. In the 1600s, the idea of a universal language appealed to many who thought there was room for improvement in the world’s ability to communicate.19 Many were invented, though none of those seventeenth-century languages became as successful as Esperanto, developed in 1887. One of the few to gain a following was that created by John Wilkins, who published his scheme  in 1668, only a year after the Alphabet of Nature. In Wilkins’ “philosophical language”, every word contained its own definition, a dizzyingly rational design whose preposterousness appealed to Jorge Luis Borges: “children could learn this language without knowing it was artificial; later in school, they would discover that it was also a universal key and a secret encyclopedia”.20
To Francis van Helmont, though, ancient Hebrew already was the ideal universal language, the key that unlocked us and whose codes we held within; he would have considered the invention of a new and secular one counterproductive. St. Jerome might have called Hebrew the “language of hissing and broken-winded words” in contrast to the elegance of Latin, but for Francis ancient Hebrew was the bodily inscribed answer to perfect knowledge and harmony.21
It is hardly surprising that being isolated in prison made Francis think about being stuck on an island of deaf-mutes. Apart from the seclusion, he was also perhaps thinking of his torturers, who for a year and half were deaf to his reasoning. How could he communicate with these people, how could he make himself understood? He looked in the mirror, looked at himself as a source of knowledge, and his reflection told him everything: if you started with the smallest footnote of a man from the seventeenth century, you could end up with the book of the universe; if you examined the tongue and glottis, you might discover how easy it was to utter the natural words of Hebrew. Connection and understanding were possible, he believed: we could all speak the same language. In a time of raging violence among religious sects, this was indeed a hopeful attitude.
In 1699, the year Francis died, Jonathan Swift’s fictional character Gulliver set off on his travels. In the story, Swift satirizes the idea of a universal language when he has Gulliver visit scholars hard at work on “a scheme for entirely abolishing all words whatsoever”, in which it is proposed that people carry around objects instead of speaking: “if a man’s business be very great, and of various kinds, he must be obliged, in proportion, to carry a greater bundle of things upon his back”.22 Ironically, a scholar has recently suggested that the supposedly made-up nonsensical words of a Lilliputian language Gulliver encounters are actually closely derived from Hebrew, which Swift studied at Trinity College.23 These Hebraic words actually lend a measure of sense to what the Lilliputians are saying, meaning that Swift, in trying to invent a new foreign tongue, found himself borrowing, either consciously or not, from Francis van Helmont’s most natural and ideal “universal” language. Francis, too courteous to take the last laugh, would hardly have been surprised.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Jé Wilson

source: public-domain-review

type: essay

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


text:
“For the Sake of the Prospect”
Experiencing the World from Above in the Late 18th Century
By Lily Ford
July 20, 2016

The first essay in a two-part series in which Lily Ford explores how balloon flight transformed our ideas of landscape. We begin with a look at the unique set of images included in Thomas Baldwin's Airopaidia (1786) — the first "real" overhead aerial views.

Although it is often dismissed as a comedy moment, an amusing episode in the history of flight, ballooning had a profound effect on the epistemological model of being in the world and viewing landscape. That balloons are innately comic is undeniable, and their physical attributes were a gift to satirists of the late eighteenth century, who riffed delightedly on the graphic and semantic associations of this new and somewhat unlikely technology.1 Furthermore, in the first few decades of ballooning, its utility was unclear. Although flight had been achieved, the power to navigate had not, so balloons could not be used as aerial transport. Once airborne, balloonists were dependent on the mysteries of the upper air and its currents to carry them along. In this captive state, aeronauts set about conducting experiments with a full array of scientific instruments, their own senses and perception being among these. Tasting ginger to see if it was as spicy, or undertaking a complex mathematical equation to test mental acuity at altitude, went alongside checking height and air pressure.
In some cases, science funding had got the aeronauts up there in the first place. The first successful manned balloon flights were conducted in France with state support. The ascents themselves became known as “experiments”, and were concerned with an exploration of the upper air. In Britain, the Royal Society withheld support from such endeavours, so the first British ascents were underwritten, in the words of one early balloonist, by “a tax on the curiosity of the public”.2 This affected the cultural profile of ballooning in England: it was always more of a spectacle than a science. In 1785, Tiberius Cavallo, a member of the Royal Society and author of the first English history of ballooning, concluded that:
many, if not the greatest number of the aerial voyages, though said to be purposely made for the improvement of science, were performed by persons absolutely incapable of accomplishing this purpose; and who, in reality, had either pecuniary profit alone in view, or were stimulated to go up with a balloon, for the sake of the prospect, and the vanity of adding their names to the list of aerial adventurers.3
As Cavallo’s words suggest, there was a performative element to ballooning. Balloons were highly visible objects; Vincent Lunardi, who first brought the balloon to Britain, incorporated eye-catching colours and decorative flourishes to the already impressive forms of the balloon’s envelope and gondola.
Anybody prepared to step into the gondola had to be ready to be seen, watched, and indeed documented. Balloon launches were highly public events, in part because of financial necessity. Michael Lynn documents many instances between 1783 and 1820 of crowds erupting into violence if the balloon failed, through caution or defect, to rise.4 Balloonists suffered from performance-related anxiety; they were all too aware of their spectators as they prepared for an ascent and, presumably were rather relieved to leave them behind. They then needed to be prepared to greet the astonished witnesses of their landing, wherever that might be, with enough charm to ensure their help in packing up the balloon and getting home. In a way, they also carried on performing long after that by writing up their voyages for publication.
These accounts are a fascinating example of extreme travel writing, of efforts to communicate an utterly new experience to the reader. Lunardi published volumes of letters; as Clare Brant has pointed out, the conventions of the epistolary form invited  readers to relive the sensations of the author in their imagination.5 Thomas Baldwin, an early balloonist who hired Lunardi’s balloon for an ascent over Chester in 1785, inscribed a long book about his one day in the air to “the principal inhabitants of Chester” who had covered his costs. Uniquely in this period, Baldwin attempted to describe his experience not only verbally, but using images: three expensively produced plates depicting the view from the balloon, the balloon in the view, and the charted passage of the balloon over the landscape.
The first image in his Airopaidia, “A Circular View from the Balloon at its greatest Elevation”, departs from established conventions of landscape representation.6 At a quick glance it resembles an eyeball in its spherical regularity. In case it does not succeed in visually conveying his experience, Baldwin offers an explanation in words. “The Spectator is supposed to be in the Car of the Balloon, suspended above the Center of the View” (Baldwin:iv). The ground is visible in the “iris”, a central roundel which contains, upon inspection, the plan view of a town and its river. This is Chester, fondly placed at the centre of this entirely new kind of view. The town is framed by a thick “Amphitheatre, or white Floor of Clouds” (Baldwin:iv). Drawing clouds was clearly not one of Baldwin’s strengths. They are crudely worked, knobbly protuberances, signs for clouds (the first classification of clouds was made sixteen years later by Luke Howard7). The concentric circles formed by these rings of clouds, together with the blue ring at the edge, are meant to suggest depth. “The Breadth of the blue Margin defines the apparent Height of the Spectator in the Balloon (viz. 4 Miles) above the white Floor of Clouds, as he hangs in the Center, and looks horizontally round, into the azure Sky” (Baldwin:iv).
Baldwin is trying to convey in one image both his sense of space and height and his view of the ground. The execution is not entirely successful. Nevertheless, the attempt is significant. In combining phenomenological and visual sensations, Baldwin is responding to the extraordinary new conditions of flight. The experience he is communicating is as much about the feeling of moving upwards and occupying a vast space as it is about perceiving the world from above. He invites readers to imagine themselves in the balloon at the apogee of the ascent, where they can look down at the earth, and out into the sky. He even advises they assume a physical position over the image, by placing the book “flat on a Table or Chair, and rather in the Shade: the Eye looking directly down upon the Picture” (Baldwin:v).
With the “Balloon-Prospect” (Baldwin:154), Baldwin again departs from convention. It is a coloured map, accompanied, upon unfolding the page behind it, by a key which moors the elements of the image to more recognizable, and labelled, cartographic features. The city of Chester is once again included, this time in the bottom right-hand corner. As in the “Circular View”, the colours correspond to those Baldwin claims to have seen. The waterways are represented with all their twists and turns — Baldwin notes in the book that rivers appear “twining in Meanders infinitely more serpentine than are expressed in Maps” (Baldwin:41, also 81–2). The picture field is dominated by clouds over which, on closer examination, the erratic route of the balloon is plotted with a thin black line. The “Track of the Balloon” is marked on the key with a type and font matching that which spells out “River Mersey”; information about the journey (“Breeze”, “Balloon alighted here”) is printed in text matching that of the place names. The clouds still obscure the land below. It is as if the temporal and topographical information inscribed in the key are of equivalent value; the experience Baldwin had travelling over the landscape is as important to record and depict as the landscape he viewed. The observations of the journey and the observations of the landscape take equal weight.
Having prepared the reader by presenting them, in the “Circular View”, with a picture of looking — an eyeball that turned out to be a radically different view from above — Baldwin demands a little more of them with this second aerial image. He includes two levels of time along with  the strangely coloured landscape. Firstly, the atmosphere is represented by a “snapshot” or moment of the cloud form and distribution. Then a narrative unfolds along the winding black line that squiggles over the page. It is meant to be followed carefully: Baldwin asks the reader to use a rolled-up paper or their hands to form a kind of peephole when looking at the image, in order to “form a very accurate Idea of the Manner in which the Prospect below was represented gradually in Succession, to the Aironaut; whose Sight was bounded by a Circularity of Vapour” (Baldwin:v). In other words, the viewers themselves are to impose the frame in their interaction with the image. Baldwin’s inclusion of a sense of motion in his instructions (“gradually in succession”) suggests that the viewer should move this improvised viewfinder along the line, in a recreation of the journey.
The images included in Airopaidia cater to Baldwin’s concern to record the ascent in as comprehensive a way as possible: they show the view from above, the view from below, and a map of the time and space of the journey. His choice of title gives an indication of his ambitions for the book. Though it chronicles his own experience, it also attempts to offer a more general, and exhaustive, account of aerostation, referencing in his portmanteau construction the newest literary form of definitive information (the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica was published in 1768). In it, the sensation of flying is treated on an equal footing with the mechanics of ascension and the details of the journey. As seen in the text, Baldwin’s concern for the spectator is real, not just perfunctory. With respect to the images, Baldwin makes every effort to situate the viewer in the “correct” viewpoint, using graphic means to funnel their vision, and suggesting a particular physical engagement with the page. Not only does he supply short captions for the images, he also places them among extensive passages of description of his mental and visual impressions. As an ensemble of text and image, Airopaidia is intended to give readers the most vivid impression possible of the experience of flight, so that they might imagine themselves up in the balloon.
Baldwin’s extraordinary presentation of his ascent experience provoked a rethinking of the conventions of landscape depiction and charting a journey. It led him to engage with what we might label aerial visuality, in writing and depicting vision and motion together. His practice raises several points that inform later representations of the experience of seeing and flying. Firstly, he does not draw in any respect upon the convention of a bird’s-eye view to represent his aerial views. They are vertical views; they lack horizons and a vanishing point, and the order that these features usually bring to the composition of an image. There is no foreground figure, no portrait of Baldwin in the gondola; indeed, the images contain no visual clue as to the apparatus of ascension. He has invented a new framing of the landscape, a vertical view that is nonetheless not quite a map in the contemporary sense.
Secondly, the viewer’s interface with an aerial image is directed. They must assume a particular position and distance to see the image correctly, even restricting their view. Helen Wickstead and Martyn Barber suggest that with his “improvised ‘telescope’ or ‘microscope’” (the hand-as-viewfinder), Baldwin is “[t]ransporting the world into an interior where it can be contemplated outside the body”, an act “redolent of the camera obscura”.8 Not only is he the first to produce a “real” aerial view, he also sets a precedent for the considered positioning of the viewer of the image. Where seventeenth-century city views used framing and perspective to fix the viewer outside the image and in their social place, Baldwin is beginning to find ways of letting the viewer in — after all, many of his readers had paid a subscription to fund his ascent. His instructions for both aerial images are involved, exhaustive.
Baldwin seems to me, and to other twenty-first-century historians, to have been unique, and outstanding, in attempting to convey the sensory and visual aspects of flight to his readers.9 It is striking that no other balloonist produced an image of the aerial view until the 1830s. There are two possible reasons for this. On one hand, Baldwin’s images may have been deemed failures of representation. Although only one edition of Airopaidia was printed, it must have been widely distributed by Baldwin, given the ubiquity of the book now in British academic libraries. Yet there is a critical silence, insofar as this can be judged given the limitations of documentary evidence — no contemporary reviews of the book have been found, and later references to it are scant. On the other hand, only a few years later, another viewing technology appeared which would furnish balloonists with a whole new reference point for their experiences of synoptic vision and visual immersion in landscape: the panorama.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Lily Ford


text:
Frankenstein, the Baroness, and the Climate Refugees of 1816

By Gillen D’Arcy Wood
June 15, 2016

It is two hundred years since "The Year Without a Summer", when a sun-obscuring ash cloud — ejected from one of the most powerful volcanic eruptions in recorded history — caused temperatures to plummet the world over. Gillen D’Arcy Wood looks at the humanitarian crisis triggered by the unusual weather, and how it offers an alternative lens through which to read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a book begun in its midst.

Deep in our cultural memory, in trace form, lies the bleak image of a summer two hundred years ago in which the sun never shone, frosts cruelled crops in the fields, and our ancestors, from Europe to North America to Asia, went without bread, rice, or whatever staple food they depended upon for survival. Perhaps they died of famine or fever, or became refugees. More likely, no record remains of what they suffered, except a faintly recalled reference in the tattered Rolodex of our minds. The year 1816 has, for generations, been known as “The Year Without a Summer”: the coldest, wettest, weirdest summer of the last millennium. If you read Frankenstein at school, you probably heard some version of the literary mythology behind that year. Mary Godwin (later Mary Shelley), having eloped with her poet-lover Percy Shelley, joins Lord Byron on the shores of Lake Geneva for a summer of love, boating, and Alpine picnics. But the terrible weather forces them inside. They take drugs and fornicate. They grow bored, then kinkily inventive. A ghost story competition is suggested. And boom! Mary Shelley writes Frankenstein.
Given this terrific story behind “The Year Without a Summer”, how strange that interpretations of Shelley’s novel almost entirely avoid the subject of 1816’s extreme weather. Call it English Department climate denial. More tellingly, our too-easy version of Frankenstein — oh, it’s all about technology and scientific hubris, or about industrialization — ignores completely the humanitarian climate disaster unfolding around Mary Shelley as she began drafting the novel. Starving, skeletal climate refugees in the tens of thousands roamed the highways of Europe, within a few miles of where she and her ego-charged friends were driving each other to literary distraction. Moreover, landlocked Alpine Switzerland was the worst hit region in all of Europe, producing scenes of social-ecological breakdown rarely witnessed since the hellscape of the Black Death.
Shelley’s miserable Creature, in the context of the 1816 worldwide climate shock, appears less like a symbol of technological overreach than a figure for the despised and desperate refugees crowding Switzerland’s market towns that year. Eyewitness accounts frequently refer to how hunger and persecution “turned men into beasts”, how fear of famine and disease-carrying refugees drove middle-class citizens to demonize these suffering masses as subhuman parasites, and turn them away in horror and disgust. Two hundred years on, in a summer of more record temperatures, and worldwide droughts, when refugees once again stream across the borders of German-speaking Europe, can we really afford to ignore this reading of Frankenstein as a climate change novel? The novel is a cultural treasure, but it doesn’t belong behind a glass case. It’s alive, like the monster itself. It’s on the loose in our world and our minds, stoking our darkest terrors. Shelley’s untameable tale of human pathos, suffering, and destruction is headline news: on the TV and internet, in a million images, filling well-fed, well-housed citizens with horror.
“The Year Without a Summer” is actually a misnomer. It criminally understates the agricultural calamity that engulfed Europe, North America, and the globe for three full years after the monster eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in April 1815 spun a veil of volcanic dust around the Earth, blocking the sun. “Years Without a Summer” is at least more accurate, if not exactly hard-hitting as world-historical headlines go. 1816, 1817, and 1818. Three years of a global climate system gone haywire; floods and drought; storm tracks re-routed; ocean currents gone rogue; ruined crops; rampant disease; and a dull, meagre sun that seemed ready to fizzle out any moment. Historically speaking, the climate crisis  was a “perfect storm” for Europe. It could not have come at a worse time. Twenty years of Napoleonic warfare had only just concluded on the bloody field of Waterloo. Economies were drained, trade relations in chaos, and now millions of demobilized soldiers were returning home, needing to be fed and put to work. A death toll is difficult to calculate for this immediate post-Waterloo period, but certainly tens of thousands perished from starvation and disease across Europe and the transatlantic zone, and perhaps a million worldwide.
The experiences of Shelley’s Creature in the novel make for an unforgettable psychological account of what it meant to be an environmental refugee in that period: full of fear, consumed with rage and despair, racked with hunger, empty with loneliness. That said, Shelley renders the 1816 climate crisis in implicit, symbolic form, leading us to wonder what Switzerland (and Europe) was really like that year and the two years following. Of the many accounts that survive, none is more compelling, or resonant with Shelley’s novel, than the extraordinary history of the Baroness de Krüdener.
The so-called “Lady of the Holy Alliance”, Krüdener was born in Livonia, married a Baron, wrote a popular romance novel called Valerie, then, after her religious conversion, became a close confidante of Czar Alexander during the post-Waterloo negotiations between the victorious allies. By the summer of 1816, this remarkable person had transformed herself from a giddy socialite into the leader of a travelling millennialist cult, and public enemy of Swiss authorities. She fueled her popularity through end-of-the-world sermonizing and munificent handouts to the starving refugees who followed her in droves.
A reverent memoir of the Baroness de Krüdener was published in 1849. It contains excerpts from her private and public letters, and includes eyewitness accounts of her two-year ministry to the climate refugee hordes of France, Switzerland, and Germany along the banks of the Rhine near Basel. This was a key traversal point for refugees heading west along the river toward the port of Rotterdam, hoping for passage to North America — also for those who, unable to pay for passage, had been expelled from Holland, and were now enduring the unimaginable horror of a return journey to their abandoned villages. Looking at the Swiss map, the following scenes from Baroness de Krüdener’s one-woman humanitarian aid crusade took place barely a hundred and fifty miles from where our young Romantic tourists passed their sorry summer trading horror stories around the fireplace at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva. The relationship between the Baroness de Krüdener memoir and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is more than uncanny, it’s ecological. Both are testaments of the direful times.
June 1, 1816. Baroness de Krüdener has been drawing large crowds in Basel. Women, young and old, have been drawn to her example of piety, while the city fills with beggars, for whom she runs a sort of travelling soup kitchen. Fearful of her popularity and her rabble-rousing, apocalyptic message, the Basel authorities expel the Baroness from the town. She is once again homeless and without funds. But God will provide. Money flows to her from wealthy admirers, and a friend offers her a small house above the banks of the Rhine, called Hoernlein. There, on the morning of June 1, she opens her bedroom window to admire the picturesque view, only to be confronted by the soul-crushing spectacle of a refugee mass in rags, in a mile-long column, stretching from the town of Grenzach to her door.
Three months of bad weather has reduced the countryside to misery and chaos. The rain never stops beating down. The wheat rots in the fields, so too the grapes on the vine. A loaf of bread costs ten sous. The Grand Duke of Baden, the German territory north of Basel, has ordered public prayers, twice daily, in every church of the kingdom. Anxiety is everywhere. Panic builds. The refugee numbers in the fields outside Basel grow day by day, from the hundreds to the thousands.
Enemies of the Baroness infiltrate the crowd, mocking her with blasphemies while she preaches. The Basel police, too, have followed her. Sometimes they surround the house to keep the refugees at bay. Other times, they beat them furiously with their swords and drive them away into the fields and the forest. “Marche! Marche!” they yell. For the authorities of Basel, the greatest fear is that this army of beggars, having camped here, might stay and further deplete their own grain stocks.
As winter approaches, the Baroness sells the jewels and fine clothes from her previous life as a salon belle to raise money: thirty thousand francs, all to feed the poor at her door, who now number four thousand a day. “If you only knew how my life is,” she writes to a friend, “the hundreds of suffering, miserable beings who cling to me: misery, misfortune, despair in a thousand forms, in a land of ruin and desolation.” Pale, skinny children and exhausted women, bereft even of clothing necessary to preserve modesty, pass under the windows of Baroness de Krüdener. Their fellow citizens look upon these refugees with hatred, afraid that a growing population will drive the price of bread in the region still higher, and drag them all into the black hole of famine. For this, they blame the Baroness, who is harassed by local thugs, and condemned in the newspapers. They call her “Devil Woman”.
The new harvest has failed utterly, and now even the tradesmen and merchants in the towns are feeling the pinch of food shortages, on the brink of winter. Day after day, the starving poor come from miles around to Baroness de Krüdener’s little house on the Rhine for a ration of soup. In the heart of this worst of winters, the Baroness writes an open letter to Baron Berckheim, Interior Minister of nearby Carlsruhe, who has viciously attacked her in the press, impugning her motives and Christian sincerity: “If only you knew, Monsieur,” she writes in her indignant reply,
the calamities that have destroyed these lands, you would easily understand my situation. Judge for yourself: ask yourself if in this desolate time, when thousands wander from place to place without work or food, when mothers exhausted by hunger and sorrow come to me, laying their pitiable children at my feet, and confess their temptation, in the depths of their despair, to drown them in the Rhine, ask yourself, should I refuse them shelter? . . . I well understand that governments are powerless in this time of distress. But to answer your charges against me, when the Rhine is clogged with corpses, the Black Forest echoes with the cries of the needy, and the cantons of Switzerland are ravaged by famine, I need only appeal to the tribunal of the Lord, whose authority is far greater than yours.
As the winter of 1816–17 lapses into another cold, wet spring, the Baroness de Krüdener has spent a total of 120,000 francs in feeding an estimated 25,000 refugees, climate victims who would otherwise have died of hunger and cold. These desperate poor come from far beyond the Basel region, drawn by rumors of her largesse. Then, unbelievably, conditions worsen. It snows the entire month of April 1817, the harvest fails again, and all Switzerland teeters on the brink of collapse. The desperation on the faces of the refugees turns to a kind of dumb, inhuman stupor. From four in the morning, before the sun has risen, their groans and cries of hunger wake the Baroness from her bed. To the kitchen she goes in the darkness, where her small band of devoted followers is already preparing soup for another day in Hell.
But by the summer of 1817, the burghers of Basel have had enough of the messianic posturings of the Baroness de Krüdener. She is ejected from Hoernlein, and escorted by police to the border. Word of the Baroness’s movements travels ahead of her. No one will take her and her refugees. In the town of Rheinfeld, her carriage is surrounded by armed townsfolk. She and her entourage face certain massacre but for the intervention of the police. It is the same at Moehlin, where only sanctuary in the house of the local priest rescues her from being stoned to death. In Zurich, the newspapers report that a young girl — in a waking trance — has foretold the imminent arrival of the Baroness de Krüdener, to be announced by a terrible storm. Once in Zurich, she draws massive crowds to hear her speak, and all are struck by “the living spirit in her words, her intimate knowledge of the human heart, and, most of all, by the irresistible charity in the tone of her voice and exhortations.”
So, a celebrity evangelist is in the town. But outside of town, in the exposed and devastated countryside, horrors continue to mount, and the Baroness rejoins the epic human struggle for survival there. The summer of 1817, it turns out, is more dire even than 1816. A faithful remnant of seven hundred refugees follows the Baroness on her wandering route east. Every day, she provides each of them with a bowl for their subsistence ration. It’s a wrenching spectacle to see the voracity with which they consume their meager portion of soup. Hunger is their only thought, their sole preoccupation. Every natural sentiment has been extinguished. Even familial bonds are broken. One day a woman, having received her ration, snatches her child’s portion from his mouth and eats it herself. The same day, while the Baroness and her companions are at table eating their own frugal meal, a hideous apparition appears at the door. It is a young girl, reduced to a skeleton. Famine has caused her hair to fall out, and her belly is prodigiously swollen. She throws herself under the table to lick up crumbs, as if unaware of the people around her. The Baroness seizes hold of the child, and questions her. But the starving girl is not capable of speech, only a raucous, guttural sound. Hunger is her only language.
By this time, in the canton of Appenzell, where the Baroness now finds herself, thirty or more die every day of hunger, victims of western Europe’s last ever famine. Beggars who venture outside their villages are assaulted with sticks. Those who try to help them are threatened and fined. The starving poor are reduced to dying in their homes alone. The Baroness, on the road through Saint Gall, comes upon a refugee tide stretching as far as the eye can see, four thousand at least in number. They stagger across the muddy fields, scrounging for grass and roots to stuff into their mouths, or picking at the carcasses of long-devoured dead animals. Dysentery, the famine’s accomplice, devastates their ranks. The death toll spikes again. The Baroness continues to preach wherever she goes: “Turn to God. Time is short. Death and famine ravage the land. Be warned, I beg you!” At last, in October, in Fribourg, the road ends for the Baroness de Krüdener. The authorities break up her entourage and repatriate her to Russia. Her two-year-long humanitarian aid train, her remarkable ministry to the suffering masses of central Europe in the “Years Without a Summer”, ends with a whimper.
Scenes from the suffering world in extremis of Juliane de Krüdener in 1816 and 1817 are drawn from the same disaster landscape as Shelley’s Frankenstein. For this human tragedy that they witnessed in different degrees first hand, both the Baroness de Krüdener and Mary Shelley exhibit their own forms of creative sympathy. Frankenstein, no less than the soup kitchen at Hoernlein House, is a humanitarian composition.
Like the hordes of refugees following the Baroness de Krüdener in 1816–17, Shelley’s Creature, when he ventures into the towns, is met with fear and hostility, while the privileged families of the novel, the De Lacys and the Frankensteins — like Krüdener’s burghers of Basel — look upon him with horror and abomination. The experience of Mary Shelley’s Creature embodies the degradation and suffering of the homeless European poor in the Tambora period; the violent disgust of Frankenstein and everyone else toward him mirrors the utter want of sympathy shown by bourgeois Europeans toward Tambora’s peasant army of climate victims suffering hunger, disease, and the loss of their homes and livelihoods. As the Creature himself puts it, he suffered first “from the inclemency of the season”, but “still more from the barbarity of man”.
The summer of 2016 marks the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s first sitting down to write Frankenstein, one of the great cultural artifacts of modernity. It’s the bicentenary, too, of the so-called “Year Without a Summer”, which impacted her writing of the novel more than we ever guessed. In her masterpiece of science fiction-cum-disaster journalism, Shelley connected herself, psychologically, to the experience of the starving and diseased thousands in the neighbouring countryside, climate victims who never enjoyed proper representation in the press and parliaments of Europe but mostly sank into oblivion, unmourned. In Frankenstein’s Creature, Mary Shelley offers us the most powerful possible incarnation of the loathed and dehumanized refugee. The “Year Without a Summer”, with its ghost story competition by the lake, remains one of the best-loved biographical vignettes of the Romantic period. But now, as we commemorate that direful year, it is no longer the story it was. With drastic climate change as context, and by adding the likes of the Baroness de Krüdener to its celebrity cast list, we unveil a true myth still grander, more totemic, and more urgent. The monster is back. He’s on the loose. And because we are all of us Doctor Frankensteins, this rampant Creature, full of rage and hurt, is our responsibility now.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Gillen D’Arcy Wood


text:
Notes on the Fourth Dimension

By Jon Crabb
October 28, 2015

Hyperspace, ghosts, and colourful cubes — Jon Crabb on the work of Charles Howard Hinton and the cultural history of higher dimensions.

*
Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal. . . — H.P. Lovecraft, The Tomb (1917)
*
La Belle Époque, a beautiful term for a Beautiful Age, as Light and Understanding replace Fear and Superstition, and Science and Art join hands in unholy matrimony and set out to discover the world anew. Trains become underground worms burrowing through the city, displacing medieval graves in the name of modernity; the Aéro-Club de France sends men into the heavens, amazing the public; Muybridge proves horses fly too and wins a bet; Edison floods the world with light; biologists discover germs and defy Death; botanists grow tropical plants in Parisian glass-houses and affront Nature with hot-house orchids; the phonograph and the cinema fold Time and Space for the masses. And for some reason bicycles become rather popular. The world was getting smaller every day and the discoveries were getting bigger every week. How very diverting it all was. . .
*
In the land of Sona-Nyl there is neither time nor space, neither suffering nor death. — H.P. Lovecraft, The White Ship (1920)
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During the period we now call the fin de siècle, worlds collided. Ideas were being killed off as much as being born. And in a sort of Hegelian logic of thesis/antithesis/synthesis, the most interesting ones arose as the offspring of wildly different parents. In particular, the last gasp of Victorian spirituality infused cutting-edge science with a certain sense of old-school mysticism. Theosophy was all the rage; Huysmans dragged Satan into modern Paris; and eccentric poets and scholars met in the British Museum Reading Room under the aegis of the Golden Dawn for a cup of tea and a spot of demonology. As a result of all this, certain commonly-accepted scientific terms we use today came out of quite weird and wonderful ideas being developed at the turn of the century. Such is the case with space, which fascinated mathematicians, philosophers, and artists with its unfathomable possibilities.
Outside of sheltered mathematical circles, the trend began rather innocuously in 1884, when Edwin A. Abbott published the satirical novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions under the pseudonym A. Square. In the fine tradition of English satire, he creates an alternative world as a sort of nonsense arena to lampoon the social structures of Victorian England. In this two-dimensional world, different classes are made up of different polygons, and the laws concerning sides and angles that maintain that hierarchy are pushed to absurd proportions. Initially, the work was only moderately popular, but it introduced thought experiments on how to visualise higher dimensions to the general public. It also paved the ground for a much more esoteric thinker who would have much more far-reaching effects with his own mystical brand of higher mathematics.
In April 1904, C. H. Hinton published The Fourth Dimension, a popular maths book based on concepts he had been developing since 1880 that sought to establish an additional spatial dimension to the three we know and love. This was not understood to be time as we’re so used to thinking of the fourth dimension nowadays; that idea came a bit later. Hinton was talking about an actual spatial dimension, a new geometry, physically existing, and even possible to see and experience; something that linked us all together and would result in a “New Era of Thought”. (Interestingly, that very same month in a hotel room in Cairo, Aleister Crowley talked to Egyptian Gods and proclaimed a “New Aeon” for mankind. For those of us who amuse ourselves by charting the subcultural backstreets of history, it seems as though a strange synchronicity briefly connected a mystic mathematician and a mathematical mystic — which is quite pleasing.)
Hinton begins his book by briefly relating the history of higher dimensions and non-Euclidean maths up to that point. Surprisingly, for a history of mathematicians, it’s actually quite entertaining. Here is one tale he tells of János Bolyai, a Hungarian mathematician who contributed important early work on non-Euclidean geometry before joining the army:
It is related of him that he was challenged by thirteen officers of his garrison, a thing not unlikely to happen considering how differently he thought from everyone else. He fought them all in succession — making it his only condition that he should be allowed to play on his violin for an interval between meeting each opponent. He disarmed or wounded all his antagonists. It can be easily imagined that a temperament such as his was not one congenial to his military superiors. He was retired in 1833.
Mathematicians have definitely lost their flair. The notion of duelling with violinist mathematicians may seem absurd, but there was a growing unease about the apparently arbitrary nature of “reality” in light of new scientific discoveries. The discoverers appeared renegades. As the nineteenth century progressed, the world was robbed of more and more divine power and started looking worryingly like a ship adrift without its captain. Science at the frontiers threatened certain strongly-held assumptions about the universe. The puzzle of non-Euclidian geometry was even enough of a contemporary issue to appear in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov when Ivan discusses the ineffability of God:
But you must note this: if God exists and if He really did create the world, then, as we all know, He created it according to the geometry of Euclid and the human mind with the conception of only three dimensions in space. Yet there have been and still are geometricians and philosophers, and even some of the most distinguished, who doubt whether the whole universe, or to speak more widely, the whole of being, was only created in Euclid’s geometry; they even dare to dream that two parallel lines, which according to Euclid can never meet on earth, may meet somewhere in infinity. . . I have a Euclidian earthly mind, and how could I solve problems that are not of this world?— Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamzov (1880), Part II, Book V, Chapter 3.
Well Ivan, to quote Hinton, “it is indeed strange, the manner in which we must begin to think about the higher world”. Hinton’s solution was a series of coloured cubes that, when mentally assembled in sequence, could be used to visualise a hypercube in the fourth dimension of hyperspace. He provides illustrations and gives instructions on how to make these cubes and uses the word “tesseract” to describe the four-dimensional object.
The term “tesseract”, still used today, might be Hinton’s most obvious legacy, but the genesis of the word is slightly cloudy. He first used it in an 1888 book called A New Era of Thought and initially used the spelling tessaract. In Greek, “τεσσάρα”, meaning “four”, transliterates to “tessara” more accurately than “tessera”, and -act likely comes from “ακτίνες” meaning “rays”; so Hinton’s use suggests the four rays from each vertex exhibited in a hypercube and neatly encodes the idea “four” into his four-dimensional polytope. However, in Latin, “tessera” can also mean “cube”, which is a plausible starting point for the new word. As is sometimes the case, there seems to be some confusion over the Greek or Latin etymology, and we’ve ended up with a bastardization. To confuse matters further, by 1904 Hinton was mostly using “tesseract” — I say mostly because the copies of his books I’ve seen aren’t entirely consistent with the spelling, in all likelihood due to a mere oversight in the proof-reading. Regardless, the later spelling won acceptance while the early version died with its first appearance.
Hinton also promises that when the visualisation is achieved, his cubes can unlock hidden potential. “When the faculty is acquired — or rather when it is brought into consciousness for it exists in everyone in imperfect form — a new horizon opens. The mind acquires a development of power”. It is clear from Hinton’s writing that he saw the fourth dimension as both physically and psychically real, and that it could explain such phenomena as ghosts, ESP, and synchronicities. In an indication of the spatial and mystical significance he afforded it, Hinton suggested that the soul was “a four-dimensional organism, which expresses its higher physical being in the symmetry of the body, and gives the aims and motives of human existence”. Letters submitted to mathematical journals of the time indicate more than one person achieved a disastrous success and found the process of visualising the fourth dimension profoundly disturbing or dangerously addictive. It was rumoured that some particularly ardent adherents of the cubes had even gone mad.
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He had said that the geometry of the dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidian, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours.— H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu (1928)
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Hinton’s ideas gradually pervaded the cultural milieu over the next thirty years or so — prominently filtering down to the Cubists and Duchamp. The arts were affected by two distinct interpretations of higher dimensionality: on the one hand, the idea as a spatial, geometric concept is readily apparent in early Cubism’s attempts to visualise all sides of an object at once, while on the other hand, it becomes a kind of all-encompassing mystical codeword used to justify avant-garde experimentation. “This painting doesn’t make sense? Ah, well, it does in the fourth dimension. . .” It becomes part of a language for artists exploring new ideas and new spaces. Guillaume Apollinaire was amongst the first to write about the fourth dimension in the arts with his essay Les peintres cubistes in 1913, which veers from one interpretation to another over the course of two paragraphs and stands as one of the best early statements on the phenomenon:
Until now, the three dimensions of Euclid’s geometry were sufficient to the restiveness felt by great artists yearning for the infinite. The new painters do not propose, any more than did their predecessors, to be geometers. But it may be said that geometry is to the plastic arts what grammar is to the art of the writer. Today, scientists no longer limit themselves to the three dimensions of Euclid. The painters have been led quite naturally, one might say by intuition, to preoccupy themselves with the new possibilities of spatial measurement which, in the language of the modern studios, are designated by the term: the fourth dimension. [. . .]
Wishing to attain the proportions of the ideal, to be no longer limited to the human, the young painters offer us works which are more cerebral than sensual. They discard more and more the old art of optical illusion and local proportion, in order to express the grandeur of metaphysical forms. This is why contemporary art, even if it does not directly stem from specific religious beliefs, none the less possesses some of the characteristics of great, that is to say religious art.
Whilst most suited to the visual arts, the fourth dimension also made inroads into literature, with Apollinaire and his calligrammes arguably a manifestation. Gertrude Stein with her strikingly visual, mentally disorienting poetry was also accused of writing under its influence, something she refuted in an interview with the Atlantic Monthly in 1935: “Somebody has said that I myself am striving for a fourth dimension in literature. I am striving for nothing of the sort and I am not striving at all but only gradually growing and becoming steadily more aware of the way things can be felt and known in words.” If nothing else, the refutation at least indicates the idea’s long-lasting presence in artistic circles.
Some critics have since tried to back-date higher dimensions in literature to Lewis Carroll and Through the Looking-Glass, although he was, by all accounts, a fairly conservative mathematician who once wrote an article critical of current academic interest in the subject entitled “Euclid and his Modern Rivals” (1873). As a side note, Hinton once invented a game of three-dimensional chess and opined that none of his students could understand it, so perhaps Carroll would have appreciated that.
If anything, the connection between Carroll and hyperspace was the other way round, and the symbolic language employed by Carroll — mirrors, changing proportions, nonsense, topsy-turvy inversions and so on — was picked up by later artists and writers to help prop up their own conceptions of the fourth dimension, which, as we can see, were starting to become a bit of a free for all. Marcel Duchamp, for instance, coined the rather wonderful phrase “Mirrorical return” in a note about the fourth dimension and the Large Glass.
In the same period that Hinton’s ideas of the fourth dimension were gaining currency among the intellectuals of Europe our “secret sense, our sixth sense” was identified by neurophysiologist Charles Sherrington in 1906. Proprioception, as he called it, is our ability to locate where a body part is when our eyes are closed — in other words, our ability to perceive ourselves in space. And yet the sixth sense means something completely different to us nowadays, associated with another fin-de-siècle obsession: mediumship, the ability to perceive things in the same space but in different dimensions. It is worth noting that in those days, scientists — real, respected, working scientists — apparently looked towards spiritualist mediums for experimental evidence. At the same time, Hinton’s cubes were used in séances as a method of glimpsing the fourth dimension (and hopefully a departed soul or two). Hinton himself published one of his very first articles on the fourth dimension with the sensational subtitle “Ghosts Explained”. In defence of the era’s more eccentric ideas, though, so much was explained or invented in so very few years, that it must have seemed only a matter of time before life’s greatest mysteries were finally solved. In any case, the craze over a mystical fourth dimension began to fade while the sensible sixth sense of proprioception just never really caught on.
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But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?– H.P. Lovecraft, “The Street” (1919)
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By the late 1920s, Einsteinian Space-Time had more or less replaced the spatial fourth dimension in the minds of the public. It was a cold yet elegant concept that ruthlessly killed off the more romantic idea of strange dimensions and impossible directions. What had once been the playground of spiritualists and artists was all too convincingly explained. As hard science continued to rise in the early decades of the twentieth century, the fin-de-siècle’s more outré ideas continued to decline. Only the Surrealists continued to make reference to it, as an act of rebellion and vindication of the absurd. The idea of a real higher dimension linking us together as One sounded all a bit too dreamy, a bit too old-fashioned for a new century that was picking up speed, especially when such vague and multifarious explanations were trumped by the special theory of relativity. Hinton was as much hyperspace philosopher as scientist and hoped humanity would create a more peaceful and selfless society if only we recognised the unifying implications of the fourth dimension. Instead, the idea was banished to the realms of New Age con-artists, reappearing these days updated and repackaged as the fifth dimension. Its shadow side, however, proved hopelessly alluring to fantasy writers who have seen beyond the veil, and bring back visions of horror from an eldritch land outside of time and space that will haunt our nightmares with its terrible geometry, where tentacles and abominations truly horrible sleep beneath the Pacific Ocean waiting to bring darkness to our world. . . But still we muddle on through.
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What do we know. . . of the world and the universe about us? Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed to see them and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos. — H.P. Lovecraft, From Beyond (1920)
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The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: October 28, 2015

author: Jon Crabb