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The Lancashire Witches 1612-2012

By Robert Poole
August 22, 2012

Not long after ten Lancashire residents were found guilty of witchcraft and hanged in August 1612, the official proceedings of the trial were published by the clerk of the court Thomas Potts in his The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster. Four hundred years on, Robert Poole reflects on England's biggest witch trial and how it still has relevance today.

Four hundred years ago, in 1612, the north-west of England was the scene of England’s biggest peacetime witch trial: the trial of the Lancashire witches. Twenty people, mostly from the Pendle area of Lancashire, were imprisoned in the castle as witches. Ten were hanged, one died in gaol, one was sentenced to stand in the pillory, and eight were acquitted. The 2012 anniversary sees a small flood of commemorative events, including works of fiction by Blake Morrison, Carol Ann Duffy and Jeanette Winterson. How did this witch trial come about, and what accounts for its enduring fame?
We know so much about the Lancashire Witches because the trial was recorded in unique detail by the clerk of the court, Thomas Potts, who published his account soon afterwards as The Wonderful Discovery of Witches in the County of Lancaster. I have recently published a modern-English edition of this book, together with an essay piecing together what we know of the events of 1612. It has been a fascinating exercise, revealing how Potts carefully edited the evidence, and also how the case against the ‘witches’ was constructed and manipulated to bring about a spectacular show trial. It all began in mid-March when a pedlar from Halifax named John Law had a frightening encounter with a poor young woman, Alizon Device, in a field near Colne. He refused her request for pins and there was a brief argument during which he was seized by a fit that left him with ‘his head . . . drawn awry, his eyes and face deformed, his speech not well to be understood; his thighs and legs stark lame.’ We can now recognize this as a stroke, perhaps triggered by the stressful encounter. Alizon Device was sent for and surprised all by confessing to the bewitching of John Law and then begged for forgiveness.
When Alizon Device was unable to cure the pedlar the local magistrate, Roger Nowell was called in. Characterised by Thomas Potts as ‘God’s justice’ he was alert to instances of witchcraft, which were regarded by the Lancashire’s puritan-inclined authorities as part of the cultural rubble of ‘popery’ — Roman Catholicism — long overdue to be swept away at the end of the county’s very slow protestant reformation.  ‘With weeping tears’ Alizon explained that she had been led astray by her grandmother, ‘old Demdike’, well-known in the district for her knowledge of old Catholic prayers, charms, cures, magic, and curses. Nowell quickly interviewed Alizon’s grandmother and mother, as well as Demdike’s supposed rival, ‘old Chattox’ and her daughter Anne.  Their panicky attempts to explain themselves and shift the blame to others eventually only ended up incriminating them, and the four were sent to Lancaster gaol in early April to await trial at the summer assizes. The initial picture revealed was of a couple of poor, marginal local families in the forest of Pendle with a longstanding reputation for magical powers, which they had occasionally used at the request of their wealthier neighbours. There had been disputes but none of these were part of ordinary village life. Not until 1612 did any of this come to the attention of the authorities.
The net was widened still further at the end of April when Alizon’s younger brother James and younger sister Jennet, only nine years old, came up between them with a story about a ‘great meeting of witches’ at their grandmother’s house, known as Malkin Tower. This meeting was presumably to discuss the plight of those arrested and the threat of further arrests, but according to the evidence extracted form the children by the magistrates, a plot was hatched to blow up Lancaster castle with gunpowder, kill the gaoler and rescue the imprisoned witches. It was, in short, a conspiracy against royal authority to rival the gunpowder plot of 1605 — something to be expected in a county known for its particularly strong underground Roman Catholic presence.
Those present at the meeting were mostly family members and neighbours, but they also included Alice Nutter, described by Potts as ‘a rich woman [who] had a great estate, and children of good hope: in the common opinion of the world, of good temper, free from envy or malice.’ Her part in the affair remains mysterious, but she seems to have had Catholic family connections, and may have been one herself, providing an added motive for her to be prosecuted. She was, along with a number of others named by the children, rounded up, and by the time of the trial in August the Pendle accused had been joined in the dungeons of Lancaster Castle by other alleged witches from elsewhere in the county.
All nineteen were tried in the space of two days, amid dramatic courtroom scenes. Ten of them were hanged the next day on Lancaster Moor, high above the town and overlooking Morecambe Bay. It was probably the first time any of them had seen the sea.
Alice Nutter and several other defendants defied convention by refusing to offer any confession on the gallows. To many of those present at the hanging this would have seemed like proof of innocence, and it may have been such rumblings about the trial that prompted the trial judges to ask the clerk of the court, Thomas Potts, to take the unusual step of publishing an account of it. In truth Potts had already had a large hand in organising the trial itself and may well have suggested the publication in the first place. He certainly used it to curry favour with King James I, whose book Demonology he cited several times, proclaiming how the authorities had followed the King’s advice on uncovering cases of witchcraft in the Lancashire trial. The Lancashire trial was then cited from the 1620s onwards as the legal precedent for using child and ‘supergrass’ evidence in witchcraft cases. Indirectly, the trial of the Lancashire witches may have influenced the notorious ‘witchfinder-general’ trials of the 1640s and even the Salem witch trials of the 1690s in New England.
The modern fame of the Lancashire witches is down to the publication in 1849 of an imaginative novel by Harrison Ainsworth, a friend of Charles Dickens with local connections and one of the bestselling Victorian novelists. His novel The Lancashire Witches has never been out of print, and it was successful in part because to drew on an edition of Potts’ original book published in 1848 by Ainsworth’s friend James Crossley, the Manchester antiquarian. Ainsworth has in turn inspired many other publications and theories. The trial began to receive serious academic attention in the 1990s, pulled together in a book of essays which I edited for Manchester University Press, The Lancashire Witches: Histories and Stories. In 2012 an international conference at Lancaster University, Capturing Witches, will bring together the latest work, both factual and fictional. No fewer than five new novels have appeared, most notably Jeanette Winterson’s At Daylight Gate, as well as a book of verses by Blake Morrison, A Discovery of Witches, and a BBC documentary, The Pendle Witch Child.
The remarkable range of new work testifies to the richness of historical themes thrown up by the trial, but I would like to single out one in particular: children and witchcraft. Much of the key evidence in the trial of 1612 was given by two children, James and Jennet Device, aged about nine and twelve. Caught up in a terrifying web of charges and arrests they panicked, and their stories, designed to clear themselves, ended up in the deaths of most of their own family members, and indeed of James himself. In some parts of the world, children continue to be accused of witchcraft and to suffer horrific maltreatment as a result. A case of a Nigerian child in London, tortured and murdered by their own family for being a witch, recently hit the national headlines. Lancaster, home of the 1612 trials, is also home of Stepping Stones Nigeria, a campaigning charity dedicated to protecting children from accusations of witchcraft and other abuse. It has been adopted as the charity of the Lancashire Witches 400 programme. There could be no better way of marking the anniversary of the Lancashire witches trials than to visit their website and learn more about how witchcraft remains a live issue, four hundred years on.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Robert Poole


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The Forgotten Tales of the Brothers Grimm

By Jack Zipes
December 20, 2012

To mark the 200th year since the Brothers Grimm first published their Kinder-und Hausmärchen, Jack Zipes explores the importance of this neglected first edition and what it tells us about the motives and passions of the two folklorist brothers.

The greatest irony of the numerous world-wide celebrations held in 2012 to honor the 200th anniversary of the first edition of the Grimms’ Kinder-und Hausmärchen, published in two volumes in 1812 and 1815, involves the discovery that most people really don’t know the original Grimms’ tales or much about their lives. That is, most people have no clue that the Grimms’ first edition of 1812/15 is totally unlike the final or so-called definitive edition of 1857, that they published seven different editions from 1812 to 1857, and that they made vast changes in the contents and style of their collections and also altered their concept of folk and fairy tales in the process. Even so-called scholars of German literature and experts of the Grimms’ tales are not aware of how little most people, including themselves, know about the first edition, and ironically it is their and our “ignorance” that makes the rediscovery of the tales in the first edition so exciting and exhilarating. Indeed, there is still much to learn about the unique contribution that the Grimms made to folklore not only in Germany but also in Europe if we return to take a closer look at the first edition, for it was this edition that sparked the pioneer efforts of folklorists throughout Europe and Great Britain to gather tales from the oral tradition and preserve them for future generations.
To explain why I believe that a rediscovery of the Grimms’ first edition can be not only exciting but also illuminating I would like to share some important background information that will place the Grimms’ collection in a socio-historical context and shed light on their remarkable accomplishment. Here we must bear in mind that their collecting was only a minor part of their research and scholarship and that they would be surprised to know that they are more famous today for their tales than for their superb philological work. When Jacob (b. 1785) and Wilhelm (b.1786) began collecting all kinds of folk tales and songs at the beginning of the nineteenth century, they were  very young precocious students at the University of Marburg, still in their teens.
By 1805 their entire family had moved from their small village of Hanau to the nearby provincial city of Kassel, and the Brothers were constantly plagued by money problems and concerns about their siblings. Their father had been dead for some years, and they were about to lose their mother. Their situation was further aggravated by the rampant Napoleonic Wars. Jacob interrupted his studies to serve the Hessian War Commission in 1806. Meanwhile, Wilhelm passed his law exams enabling him to become a civil servant and to find work as a librarian in the royal library with a meager salary. In 1807 Jacob lost his position with the War Commission, when the French occupied Kassel, but he was then hired as a librarian for the new King Jérome,  Napoleon’s brother, who now ruled Westphalia. Amidst all the upheavals, their mother died in 1808, and Jacob and Wilhelm became fully responsible for their three younger brothers and sister. Despite the loss of their mother and difficult personal and financial circumstances from 1805 to 1812, the Brothers managed to prove themselves to be innovative scholars in the new field of German philology by publishing articles and books on medieval literature. Still in their twenties, they were about to launch the collection of tales that was to become second in popularity to the Bible throughout Germany and later throughout the western world by the twentieth century.
What fascinated or compelled the Grimms to concentrate on old German literature was a belief that the most natural and pure forms of culture —  those which held the community together —  were linguistic and were to be located in the past. Moreover, according to them, modern literature, even though it might be remarkably rich, was artificial and thus could not express the genuine essence of Volk culture that emanated naturally from people’s experiences and bound the people together. Therefore, all their energies were spent on uncovering stories from the past. This is why their friend, the romantic poet Clemens Brentano, asked them in 1808 to collect all types of folk tales that he wanted to revise in a book of literary fairy tales. In 1810 they sent him 54 texts that they fortunately copied. Fortunately, I say, because Brentano proceeded to lose the manuscript in the Ölenberg monastery in Alsace and did not use the Grimms’ texts.  Meanwhile the Grimms kept collecting tales from friends, acquaintances, and colleagues, and when they realized that Brentano was not going to use the tales from their manuscript, they decided, upon the advice of a mutual friend and another romantic author, Achim von Arnim, to publish their collection that had grown to approximately 86 tales, which they published in 1812 and then another 70, which they published in 1815. Both collections formed the first edition and included footnotes to the tales as well as scholarly prefaces. Before I discuss the unusual quality of the tales in these two volumes, I want to comment briefly on the idealistic intentions of the young Grimms. That is, I want to summarize the ideological stance they took by publishing the tales they had collected.
Although the young Grimms had not entirely formalized their concept of folklore while they worked on the publication of the first edition, and even though there were some differences between Jacob and Wilhelm, who later was to favor more drastic poetical editing of the collected tales, they basically held to their original principle: to salvage relics from the past from the beginning to the end of their work on the Kinder-und Hausmärchen.  Broadly speaking, the Grimms sought to collect and preserve all kinds of ancient relics as if they were sacred and precious gems that consisted of tales, myths, songs, fables, legends, epics, documents, and other artifacts — not just fairy tales. They intended to trace and grasp the essence of cultural evolution and to demonstrate how natural language, stemming from the needs, customs, and rituals of the common people, created authentic bonds and helped forge civilized communities. This is one of the reasons why they called their collection of tales an educational manual (Erziehungsbuch), for the tales recalled the basic values of the Germanic peoples and also other European groups and enlightened people about their experiences through storytelling. Remarkably, the Grimms at a young age wanted to bequeath the profound oral tales of the people to the German people not realizing that they were about to bequeath unusually striking tales to people of many different nations, and that these tales assumed relevance in all cultures. To understand the role that the tales played in their bequest to western civilization if not the world, we must bear in mind what they stated in the preface of the first edition:
It is probably just the right time to gather these tales, since those who have been making an effort to preserve them are becoming even harder to find (to be sure, those who know them still know a great deal, because people may die, but the stories live on) . . . . . Where the tales still exist, they live on and no one worries whether they are good or bad, poetic or vulgar. We know them and we love them just because we happen to have heard them in a certain way, and we like them without reflecting on why. Telling these tales is an extraordinary custom — and this too the tales share with everything immortal — that one must like it no matter what others say.
The Grimms sought to celebrate and argue for the necessity of storytelling to create bonds among people that share their experiences through stories. They believed that the tales and all their variants were distinctive and kept cultural tradition alive. They respected difference and diversity, and at the same time they argued that “The aim of our collection was not just to serve the cause of the history of poetry. It was our intention that the poetry living in it be effective, bringing pleasure wherever it could, and that it therefore become an educational manual.”
Although there were some other German collections of folk and fairy tales, that preceded the Grimms’ Kinder-und Hausmärchen, none were as diverse or driven by a the Brothers’ cooperative and collective spirit that spurred them to embrace all kinds of tales from German-speaking principalities. As early as 1811, Jacob even composed an appeal, “Aufforderung an die gesammten Freunde altdeutscher Poesie und Geschichte erlassen” (“Appeal to All Friends of Old German Poetry and History”), which was never sent but laid the groundwork for his later more fully developed “Circular wegen der Aufsammlung der Volkspoesie” (Circular-Letter Concerned with Collecting of Folk Poetry) printed and distributed to scholars and friends in 1815.  It is worth citing the initial part of this letter because it outlines the basic principles and intentions of the Grimms:
Most Honored Sir!    A society has been founded that is intended to spread throughout all of Germany and has as its goal to save and collect all the existing songs and tales that can be found among the common German peasantry (Landvolk). Our fatherland is still filled with this wealth of material all over the country that our honest ancestors planted for us, and that, despite the mockery and derision heaped upon it, continues to live, unaware of its own hidden beauty and carries within it its own unquenchable source. Our literature, history, and language cannot seriously be understood in their old and true origins without doing more exact research on this material. Consequently, it is our intention to track down as diligently as possible all the following items and to write them down as faithfully as possible: . . . .           1) Folk songs and rhymes,           2) Tales in prose that are told and known, in particular the numerous nursery and children’s fairy tales about giants, dwarfs, monsters, enchanted and rescued royal children, devils, treasures, and magic instruments as well as local legends that help explain certain places.          3) Funny tales about tricks played by rogues and anecdotes; puppet plays from old times with Hanswurst and the devil.          4) Folk festivals, mores, customs, and games.          5) Superstitions.          6) Proverbs, unusual dialects, parables, word composition.It is extremely important that these items are to be recorded faithfully and truly, without embellishment and additions, whenever possible from the mouth of the tellers in and with their very own words in the most exact and detailed way. It would be of double value if everything could be obtained in the local live dialect. On the other hand, even fragments with gaps are not to be rejected. Indeed, all the derivations, repetitions, and copies of the same tale can be individually important . . . . Here we advise that you not be misled by the deceptive opinion that something has already been collected and recorded, and therefore that you discard a story. Many things that appear to be modern have often only been modernized and has their undamaged source beneath it. As soon as one has a great familiarity with the contents of this folk literature (Volkspoesie), one will gradually be able to evaluate the alleged simplistic, crude and even repulsive aspects more discreetly.
This circular letter along with the first edition of Kinder-und Hausmärchen went on to inspire numerous German, Austrian, and Swiss folklorists to begin collecting tales, and gradually the Grimms’ example and their other editions animated folklorists throughout Europe and Great Britain to collect and preserve oral folk tales. If any of the editions that the Grimms published best represented their intentions and ideals that they kept reiterating until 1857, it was their first edition because they did not hone the stories the way they honed and refined the tales in later editions. In fact, you can hear the distinctive voices of the storytellers from whom they received the tales, and to this extent, the tales in the first edition, some in German dialect, are more authentic folk tales and have more integrity to them despite the fact that they are not as aesthetically pleasing as those in later revised versions. In other words, the Grimms let the tales speak for themselves in a very blunt if not awkward manner that lends them a sense of unvarnished truth or the educational value that the Grimms sought.
Turning to the tales of the first edition the first thing a reader might notice is that many of the stories such as “The Hand with the Knife” (“Die Hand mit dem Messer”), “Herr Fix-It-Up” (“Herr Fix und Fertig”) “How Some Children Played at Slaughtering” (“Wie Kinder Schlachtens mit einander gespielt haben”), “Puss in Boots” (“Der gestiefelte Kater”), “Bluebeard” (“Blaubart”), and  “Simple Hans” (“Hans Dumm”) were deleted in the following editions for various reasons, not because they were poorly told but because they did not meet some of the requirements of the Grimms, who at first sought primarily to publish tales that were Germanic in origin. For instance "Puss in Boots," “Bluebeard,” “Princess Mouseskin” (“Prinzessin Mäusehaut”), and “Okerlo” (“Der Okkerlo”) were considered too French to be included. They later learned that this was a mistaken notion because it was and is impossible to know the exact origins of folk tales. Though it is impossible to know fully why certain tales were omitted or placed in footnotes we do know that “Death and the Goose Boy” (“Der Tod und der Gänshirt”) was omitted because of its literary baroque features; “The Strange Feast” (“Die wunderliche Gasterei”), because of its close resemblance to “Godfather Death”; “The Stepmother” (“Die Stiefmutter”), because of its fragmentary nature and cruelty; “The Faithful Animals” (“Die truen Tiere”), because it came from the Siddhi-Kür, a collection of Mongolian tales. As the Grimms continued to collect variants sent to them by friends and colleagues gathered from oral and book sources, they either improved the tales of the first edition by combining versions, omitted tales in favor of new versions, or moved  tales to their footnotes.
The second thing a reader might notice about the tales in the first edition is that most of them are shorter and strikingly different than the same tales edited in the later collections. They smack of orality and raw contents. For instance, Rapunzel reveals that she has become impregnated by the prince; Snow White’s mother, not her stepmother, wants to kill the beautiful girl out of envy; the wild man is not Iron John and plays a different role in helping the boy who liberates him, just as the devil plays a more unusual role in “Der Teufel Grünrock,” later replaced by “Bärenhäuter.”
Thirdly, a reader will recognize immediately that all these tales are blunt and have little or no description. The emphasis is on action and the resolution of conflict. The storytellers do not beat about the bush. They are prone to tell the truths they know, and even though magic, superstition, miraculous transformation, and brutality are involved, the storytellers believe in their stories. Metaphor maps out the reality of listeners and engages people to learn from symbols how to engage their realities.
Lastly, it is important to note that the tales in the first edition were collected mainly from literate people whom the Grimms came to know quite well. For instance they were well acquainted with the members of the Wild and Hassenpflug families in Kassel and the von Haxthausen family in Münster; Wilhelm knew the minister’s daughter Friederike Mannel in a nearby town. Dorothea Viehmann, a tailor’s wife, provided many tales, and in some instances, the Grimms took tales from books or received tales in letters. The literacy of the informants, however, did not diminish the folk essence of the tales that, as the Grimms and other folklorists were to discover, were widespread throughout Europe and told more often than not in dialect. The tales came to the tellers from other tellers, or they read tales, digested them, and made them their own. Indeed, we always make tales our own and then send them off to other tellers with the hope that they will continue to disseminate their stories.
The Grimms have often been criticized, especially by critics in the last 50 years, for having changed and edited the tales from the first to the seventh edition. That is, they never lived up to their own words that the task of the collector is to record the tales exactly as they heard them. In other words, various critics have complained that the Grimms’ tales are inauthentic folk tales. But this is a ridiculous if not stupid argument, for nobody can ever record and maintain the authenticity of a tale. It is impossible. And yet, the Grimms, as collectors, cultivators, editors, translators, and mediators, are to be thanked for endeavoring to do the impossible and to work collectively with numerous people and their sources to keep traditional stories and storytelling alive. In this respect their little known first edition deserves to be rediscovered, for it is a testimony to forgotten voices that are actually deep within us. Hence, the irresistibility of the Grimms’ tales that are really not theirs, but ours.

The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: December 20, 2012

author: Jack Zipes

source: public-domain-review

type: essay

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


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Athanasius Kircher and the Hieroglyphic Sphinx

By Daniel Stolzenberg
May 16, 2013

More than 170 years before Jean-François Champollion had the first real success in translating Egyptian hieroglyphs, the 17th century Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher was convinced he had cracked it. He was very wrong. Daniel Stolzenberg looks at Kircher's Egyptian Oedipus, a book that has been called “one of the most learned monstrosities of all times.”

In 1655, after more than two decades of toil, Athanasius Kircher published Egyptian Oedipus. With his title, the Jesuit scholar characteristically paid honor to himself. Like Oedipus answering the riddle of the Sphinx, Kircher believed he had solved the enigma of the hieroglyphs. Together with its companion volume, Pamphilian Obelisk, Kircher’s magnum opus presented Latin translations of hieroglyphic inscriptions — utterly mistaken, as post–Rosetta-Stone Egyptology would reveal — preceded by treatises on ancient Egyptian history, the origins of idolatry, allegorical and symbolic wisdom, and numerous non-Egyptian textual traditions that supposedly preserved elements of the “hieroglyphic doctrine.” In addition to ancient Greek and Latin authors, Kircher’s vast array of sources included texts in Oriental languages, including Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, Coptic, Samaritan, and Ethiopian, as well as archeological evidence. The resulting amalgam is, without doubt, impressive. But it can also bewilder.
Egyptian Oedipus promised a complete “restoration of the hieroglyphic doctrine,” all the lost secrets of religion and science that ancient Egyptians supposedly encoded on their monuments. The massive final volume gathered almost every hieroglyphic inscription known to Europeans at that time, as well as other ancient artifacts, including mummies, sarcophagi, Canopic jars, sphinxes, idols, lamps, and amulets, found in Rome, other Christian cities, Istanbul, and Egypt. Kircher glossed each object with a learned explanation of its ancient significance. Without a Rosetta Stone, he translated the hieroglyphic inscriptions, character by character, into Latin prose.
But Egyptian Oedipus hardly confined itself to matters Egyptian. Kircher interpreted the hieroglyphs by comparing Egyptian inscriptions with evidence from other traditions that supposedly preserved elements of the “hieroglyphic doctrine.” The book contained extensive discussions of topics such as pagan religion from Mexico to Japan, ancient Greek esoteric texts like the Orphic hymns and Pythagorean verses, Jewish Kabbalah, Arabic magic, ancient alchemy, astrology, and astral medicine. To harmonize the “sacred history” of the Bible with the “profane history” of pagan civilizations, Kircher had recourse to symbolism and allegory. Properly interpreted, the seemingly “absurd” myths of the Greeks, Egyptians, and other heathens express a monotheistic theology that prefigures many of the tenets of Christianity. Among the many levels of meaning contained in the story of Isis and Osiris, for example, Kircher detected the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.
At the dawn of time, Kircher, explained, Adam, instructed by God and the angels, and guided by experience acquired during his centuries-spanning life, possessed perfect wisdom, which he passed on to his children. Noah and his sons preserved antediluvian knowledge from destruction by the Flood, which Kircher placed 1,656 years after the creation of the world and 2,394 years before the birth of Christ. But Noah’s son Ham polluted the Adamic wisdom with magic and superstition. Eventually the great Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus recovered the pure antediluvian wisdom and invented hieroglyphic writing to preserve it for posterity. But later Egyptian priests mixed the Hermetic wisdom with magic and superstition, creating, yet again, an ambiguous legacy, which was passed on to other nations.
Kircher undertook his investigation almost two centuries before Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832) famously solved the enigma of hieroglyphic writing, using the bilingual Rosetta Stone as his key. Modern Egyptology reveals that ancient obelisks were memorials whose inscriptions record the identity of the kings who built them and the gods to whom they were dedicated. For example, the obelisk that now stands in the private garden of the Villa Celimontana in Rome was originally erected in Heliopolis in the thirteenth century BC by Ramesses II and dedicated to the god Horus. We know this because its inscription reads, “Horus, strong bull, beloved of Maat, Usr-Maat-Ra Setep-en-Ra (Ra-strong-in-truth-chosen-of-Ra), king of Upper and Lower Egypt, son of the Sun, Ramesses II.” Kircher, who scoffed at the idea that obelisks recorded such mundane details, interpreted the same hieroglyphs as symbols of esoteric wisdom. He arrived at a somewhat longer translation:
Supramundane Osiris, concealed in the center of eternity, flows down into the world of the Genies, which is the most near, similar, and immediately subject to him. He flows down into the divinity Osiris of the sensible World, and its soul, which is the Sun. He flows down into the Osiris of the elemental World, Apis, beneficent Agathodemon, who distributes the power imparted by Osiris to all the members of the lower world. His minister and faithful attendant, the polymorphous Spirit, shows the abundance and wealth of all necessary things by the variety that he brings about and oversees. But since the beneficent power of the polymorphous Spirit may be impeded in various ways by adverse powers, the sacred Mophto-Mendesian table, which acquires the moist strength and fertility of the Nile, in order for the flow of good things to be performed without impediment, must be worn for protection. But since the polymorphous Spirit is not capable of thoroughly completing this task, the cooperation of Isis, whose dryness tempers the moisture of Mendes, is needed. To obtain it, the following sacred table of Osiris is composed, on which are taught the things to be done in sacrifices and the way to perform the Komasian rites. Through this table and the sight of it supramundane Osiris shows the desired abundance of necessary things.
Faced with Kircher’s relentless mobilization of erudition in the name of such nugatory results, one may be tempted to dismiss him as a learned charlatan or a crank. More than a few readers have done so, from the seventeenth century to the present, usually referring to his unwavering faith in dubious sources of Egyptian wisdom like the Corpus Hermeticum. In 1614 the Protestant scholar Isaac Casaubon convincingly demonstrated that these texts, long esteemed as the authentic teachings of Hermes Trismegistus, had in fact been composed in the early Christian era. Kircher notoriously gave them credence a generation after Casaubon. As a result most modern scholars have viewed him as an eccentric throwback to a Renaissance Hermetic tradition that had supposedly lost credibility by the mid-seventeenth century. But this view misjudges both Kircher and his age.
Kircher’s monomaniacal and uncommonly ambitious determination to wring a solution from the hieroglyphic monuments led him to play loose with the evidence. But he was not unique in thinking that esoteric traditions offered valuable aid to the investigator of ancient paganism and the earliest ages of history. Behind Kircher’s great failures—his incredible translations and his reliance on spurious documents—lay principles about symbolic communication and the transmission of ancient knowledge that were widely accepted. Most of Kircher’s seventeenth-century critics agreed with him about many things that, from a post-Enlightenment perspective, seem equally ridiculous. Literal biblical history, which set the ultimate parameters of Kircher’s research, went virtually unchallenged before the second half of the seventeenth century and retained favor with most scholars long afterward. That an inquiry into ancient Egyptian wisdom should focus on the transmission of antediluvian knowledge and genealogies linking all nations to Noah and his sons was fully in accord with principles shared by most of Kircher’s contemporaries, his critics included. The idea that the first human beings, such as Adam, Seth, and Enoch, had been scientists, philosophers and theologians, was the prevalent understanding of the history of knowledge throughout the Renaissance and remained popular in the seventeenth century. Proving that Hermes Trismegistus had not written the Corpus Hermeticum was not the same as proving that the Egyptian sage and his esoteric wisdom had not existed. The idea that hieroglyphs were symbols encoding sacred mysteries remained the dominant theory at least until the early eighteenth century, even if most scholars doubted that Kircher had found their key.
Understandably, posterity has not esteemed Kircher as one of the seminal figures in the genealogy of modernity—a Galileo or a Descartes. But in his day he was, without question, one of Europe’s most successful scholars. He embodied the contradictions of a moment when recognizably modern ways of thinking about the past had become available, yet older and conflicting models remained appealing and, to many, persuasive. As such, he allows us to explore a side of history too often lost to view. Without this view we cannot fully grasp the work of thinkers like Galileo or Descartes, much less understand the age on its own terms.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Daniel Stolzenberg


text:
The Strangely Troubled Life of Digby Mackworth Dolben

By Carl Miller
November 14, 2012

In 1911 the soon-to-be poet laureate Robert Bridges published the poems of Digby Mackworth Dolben, a school friend who had drowned to death at the age of 19 almost half a century earlier. Carl Miller looks at Bridges' lengthy introduction in which he tells of the short and tragic life of the boy with whom fellow poet Gerard Manley Hopkins was reportedly besotted.

Popular success came late in life to Robert Bridges — not that he much cared.
When the journalists finally descended on his house in the summer of 1913 he responded first with indifference; and then not at all, leaving their importuning knocks unanswered. One might suspect that he had learned to hate the press from Tennyson, whose grand performance as Poet and Sage had burdened the Victorians of Bridges's generation with an interpretation of the role whose hoary magic they could never quite forget, however much they'd come to hate the trick; but Bridges's own reserve was deeply felt and honestly acquired.
He was born in 1844 into a wealthy family of the Kentish gentry, and as such he had no need of ever living by his pen. He loved poetry but studied medicine, believing that a physician's practice would ground his literary efforts in what a platitudinous friend would later call “a knowledge of men.” He intended to retire at the age of forty to a life of writing; but he found after all that a little knowledge of men goes a long way; and following a serious illness he decided to pack in his doctor's kit ahead of schedule. Raised as he had been among a tribe of rentiers whose arbitrary privilege was dignified by time and the speciousness of heraldry, he had a certain grandeur of manner, which his success as a college oarsman had only reinforced. Physically imposing, he was in his later years likened to Olympian Zeus, with white luxuriance of beard, and fingernails that had been hardened into talons by his unwillingness to bathe in water that was anything but cold. If he seemed imperious from a distance, he was among his friends good-natured, frank, and easy: his lordliness remained confined to the domain of literature, where it was ironized by the almost total apathy with which his work was publicly received.
His poems he had privately printed in small editions, austerely designed but sumptuously made; and costly. His eccentric publishing program was part of a more general revival of interest in the craft traditions of bookmaking that was then in the air. Connoisseurs, aesthetes and antiquarians hunted stalls and attics for forgotten treasures and rejected masterpieces; and small presses sprung up to produce new volumes that could be shelved with justice among those vellum bindings in the private dusk of any velvet-curtained study. Bridges's own books were of this species, printed on handmade paper and set in the obsolescent type that a friend had found at the Clarendon Press in Oxford under a century of dust. Their very limited impressions tended to sell out; they were even profitable; but the demand for them was not so great that any avaricious publishers came calling. And he grew old in this career: esteemed by some, but never in fashion, even as the fashion swung from the overripeness of the 1890s to the jaded sobriety that marked the century's end.
But soon Bridges found himself in a new position. An editor at the Oxford University Press plumped for his inclusion in the “Oxford Poets” series: the result, published in 1912, gathered together for the first time into an inexpensive volume the fruit of Bridges's lonely and uncompromising art; and in its first year sold an astonishing 27,000 copies. On this swelling wave of approbation he would be appointed Poet Laureate. At the age of 69 Robert Bridges was famous.
If he had thought that his eighth decade on earth would afford him dignified repose, he had been mistaken. It brought only a war; and as the Imperial Poet it fell to him to invoke the muses as young men went to slaughter by the millions. When the war was over he turned from civic work to The Testament of Beauty, a book-length poem in which he laid out his philosophy of life. It was not a Christian philosophy. Though he never joined the small number of embattled public atheists, he had by the end completely discarded the religious enthusiasm of his youth and discovered in its place a mild sort of pagan spirituality shaped by the writings of Plato and Lucretius. But he had once been Christian; and he had once been ardent; and even if the experience had failed to furnish him with any lasting faith it had at least given him lifelong friends.
As a boy Bridges experienced the power of a strain of romantic Christianity peculiar to his time. The direction of the Church of England was then heavily disputed; from below by evangelicals who pushed for protestant austerity, and from above by a movement that sought to emphasize the Anglican Communion's share in the medieval traditions of the Catholic Church. In Oxford in the 1830s these high church Anglicans had hammered their theology into a fine gold leaf: they were dazzled by the beauty of their work but failed to see that it was far too fragile to survive the ecclesiastic contest it invited. Where delicate theology failed, bold aesthetics would have a trial. As doctrinal points receded into the background the high church Anglicans began to indulge a taste for pageantry and ritual shared by their Pre-Raphaelite contemporaries. They dreamed of jeweled chalices and samite robes; the aromatic haze of incense; and at times the livid traces of the scourge.
Bridges fell in with the high church set at school. As boys they had no opportunity to test their radical spirit, no chance to strike it against the hard surfaces of life, to watch the sparks and see whether its cutting edge grew sharp or dull: but they were earnest in their fantasy. In later years their paths diverged. Some, like Bridges, lost their zeal and woke up from the dream, while others submerged themselves more deeply in it, drifting steadily towards the Catholic church. But before this happened Bridges met two important friends. They shared his love for poetry, a passion which would abide even after religious enthusiasm ceased to offer any common ground. For just as Bridges was abandoning his high church scruples these two friends were planning, quite independently of one another, to join the Church of Rome. They both died young, though decades apart; and in old age Bridges looked back on them, flush with his own unexpected success, remembering the literary sustenance that these friendships had given him in his youthful ambitions and in his middle-aged obscurity. As Europe sleepwalked towards the Great War this elderly Victorian neo-pagan gathered the old manuscripts of his two intensely Christian friends for publication.
It was not only an exercise in nostalgia. One of these friends was Gerard Hopkins, who had died as a failed Jesuit priest in 1889. Bridges's 1918 edition of the Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins revealed in time that Hopkins's stunted life had been a chrysalid state from whose cramped walls a broad-winged poet would emerge into the open air. Bridges's tribute to the other writerly friend of his youth, published seven years earlier, could hardly be anything but negligible in comparison. But The Poems of Digby Mackworth Dolben does have a curious interest of its own. The poems themselves are indifferent; at best the juvenilia of an artist whose promise had been thwarted by an early death; but Bridges introduced them with a lengthy memoir that depicts Dolben's strangely troubled life with understated skill. Henry James was intrigued by the story and wrote that it was “very beautifully and tenderly, in fact just perfectly, done.”
Robert Bridges and Digby Dolben met in the early 1860s at Eton, then as now the most celebrated of England's public schools. Bridges was older and heartier than Dolben and as a distant cousin felt a duty to look after him. The two were drawn together by similar inclinations and a shared outlook on life, being determined, artistic, and “terribly serious.” Bridges introduced Dolben to his circle of high church friends; Dolben took to them; and before long he outdid them all in his enthusiasm for the cause. He crossed himself at meals, read improper religious tracts, and eventually made forbidden pilgrimages to consult with certain priests on the prospect of his immortal soul. To his friends he seemed dreamy, abstracted, other-worldly, even saintly: to the head master he was an agitator, dangerously misguided.
After Bridges went up to Oxford Dolben's eccentricities increased. He became a novice in the English Order of St. Benedict, signed his letters Dominic, and was furnished with a monk's habit which he wore in public, delighting in the provocation, wearing it on one occasion through the streets of Birmingham, walking barefoot, surrounded by a mob. More and more he seemed to live in dreams, hoping to ignite his friends with embers of his fervency and planning the creation of a mystic Anglo-Catholic Brotherhood at a monastery of their own establishment. Meanwhile his health deteriorated; he left Eton for good; and lived between illnesses with a series of private tutors whom his parents hoped would raise his Greek and Latin to Oxford standards. While sitting his entrance exam at Balliol he fainted midway through and was disqualified. While preparing for a second try at Christ Church, he died: drowned in the River Welland where he had been swimming with the young son of his tutor. He was 19 years old.
These are the circumstances of the last years of his life as Bridges gives them: but his technique as a biographer is subtle. His brief life of Dolben is composite and many sided, gaining a range of textures from the incorporation of other voices, including that of Dolben himself, whose letters are excerpted and whose poems are called on to illuminate the recesses of his inner life. And it is here in the biographical application of Dolben's poetry that Bridges is at his most suggestive.
He identifies two strands that run through Dolben's poems. The first is his mystic and medievalizing Christianity, which came to dominate his writing in the last two years of his life. The second is his ardent affection for another of his Eton classmates, a particularly attractive (if in Bridges's estimation somewhat vacuous) member of their high church circle. Bridges calls this an “idolization” but infatuation is a better term; the poems are plainly homoerotic. While editing the book Bridges refused the suggestion put forth by mutual friends that he rewrite Dolben's poems to read as though they had been written for a girl: but he did agree to suppress the identity of Marchie Gosselin, the seemingly oblivious young man who had so enamored Dolben and who had himself died a few years before Bridges began his memoir, as the British Minister to Lisbon and a knight. (His widow requested the suppression after denying access to his diary.) Bridges does not ignore this part of Dolben's life — in a way he seems to ruminate it deeply — but his expression is hesitant, extremely guarded, couched in an almost Jamesian aversion to any direct, conclusive statement. Was he grasping for an acceptably oblique means of treating what was still an impossible subject? Or did he only dimly see the subtext that is so evident today? His account of Dolben's death presents similar ambiguities; and one wonders in the end whether Bridges intended to raise the possibility that Dolben committed suicide.
To the extent the book is ever read today, it is by Hopkins scholars looking to shed some light on that poet's own frustratingly elusive inner life. For Hopkins and Dolben knew each other, wrote letters to each other, and read each other's poetry: though they met on only one occasion, in Oxford, at Bridges's instigation. The suggestion made by many biographers that Hopkins was in love or at least infatuated with Dolben is eminently credible, though not undisputed. After he heard the news of Dolben's death Hopkins wrote to Bridges that “there can very seldom have happened the loss of so much beauty (in body and mind and life) and of the promise of still more as there has been in his case” — and wondered whether Dolben's family had thought of publishing his poems.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: November 14, 2012

author: Carl Miller


text:
Mary Toft and Her Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbits

By Niki Russell
March 20, 2013

In late 1726 much of Britain was caught up in the curious case of Mary Toft, a woman from Surrey who claimed that she had given birth to a litter of rabbits. Niki Russell tells of the events of an elaborate 18th century hoax which had King George I's own court physicians fooled.

In September 1726, news reached the court of King George I of the alleged birth of several rabbits to Mary Toft (1703-1763) of Godalming, near Guildford, in Surrey. Mary was a twenty-five year old illiterate servant, married to Joshua Toft, a journeyman clothier. According to reports, despite having had a miscarriage just a month earlier in August 1726, Mary had still appeared to be pregnant. On September 27th, she went into labour and was attended initially by her neighbour Mary Gill, and then her mother in law Ann Toft. She gave birth to something resembling a liverless cat.
The family decided to call on the help of Guildford obstetrician John Howard. He visited Mary the next day where he was presented with more animal parts which Ann Toft said she had taken from Mary during the night. The following day, Howard returned and helped deliver yet more animal parts. Over the next month Howard recorded that she began producing a rabbit’s head, the legs of a cat and in a single day, nine dead baby rabbits.
Howard sent letters to some of England’s greatest doctors and scientists and the King’s secretary, informing them of the miraculous births. The curious King dispatched two men to investigate to see what they could ascertain about this case: Nathaniel St. André, Swiss surgeon-anatomist to the King, and Samuel Molyneux, secretary to the Prince of Wales.
By now, news had spread and Mary was a local celebrity which necessitated moving her from Godalming to nearby Guildford so that she could be monitored more closely by John Howard. On November 15th St. André and Molyneux arrived at Howard’s home in Guildford and were immediately greeted with the news that Mary was in labour with her fifteenth rabbit. Toft gave birth to several more dead rabbits in their presence. The doctors conducted examinations on the lungs and other internal organs of these rabbits, the results of which showed that they probably did not develop inside Mary’s womb. St. André, however, still seemed convinced that her case was genuine. He believed that these were indeed supernatural births, and took some of the rabbit specimens back to London to show the King and the Prince of Wales.
As the story of Mary Toft quickly spread through London, the King decided to send a German surgeon, Cyriacus Ahlers, and his friend Mr. Brand to Guildford to investigate the matter further. Ahlers examined Mary and witnessed several of her rabbit births; however, he was not convinced. On examination of the rabbit parts he had taken back to London, Ahlers found that the dung pellets in the rectum of one of the rabbits contained corn, hay and straw, which proved that it could not have developed inside Mary. Ahlers reported back to the King on November 21st that he suspected a hoax with Mary Toft and John Howard in collusion and showed these rabbit specimens as evidence.
Meanwhile, Sir Richard Manningham (1690-1759) — an eminent doctor and midwife among upper class society in London — was contacted by St André to attend upon Mary Toft. After observing her and seeing her give birth to what he believed was a hog’s bladder, he also seemed unconvinced. But he was persuaded to keep his doubts to himself by Howard and St. André until there was proof of any fraud. It seems Howard and St. André were trying to save their reputations in the light of what Ahlers had concluded.
On November 29th, Mary Toft was brought to Lacy’s Bagnio (bath house) in London’s Leicester Fields, where she could be observed more closely. St André contacted Dr. James Douglas, the respected anatomist and man-midwife, and asked him to come to the bagnio to observe Mary’s rabbit births.  By the time Douglas arrived, he found himself in the company of a large crowd of doctors and medical men who had been summoned by St. André. Unfortunately for St. André, who was desperate to have Douglas validate the rabbit births, Douglas believed the whole affair to be a fraud.
Between 30th November and 3rd December, opinion was divided among the medical men gathered there. Mary produced no more new rabbits, but continued to appear to go into labour. She was also badly infected and had fits which made her lose consciousness. Shortly thereafter, a porter at Mr. Lacy’s bagnio was caught trying to sneak a rabbit into Mary Toft’s room. He confessed to Douglas and Manningham that Margaret Toft (Mary’s sister-in-law) had asked him to procure the smallest rabbit he could find. Manningham and Douglas were determined to obtain a confession of guilt from Mary but decided to see if she would incriminate herself. They didn’t have long to wait as she went into labour on 4th December but produced nothing. On that evening they called Sir Thomas Clarges, Justice of the Peace, to the bagnio. The porter, Thomas Howard, swore a deposition before him and Clarges immediately took Mary into custody for questioning but she would admit nothing. Over the next two days, much pressure was put upon her to confess but Mary held out until Sir Richard Manningham threatened to perform painful experimental surgery on her to see if she was formed differently from other women. Toft was forced to admit on 7th December 1726 that she had manually inserted dead rabbits into her vagina and then allowed them to be removed as if she were giving birth. In several different confessions, she implicated a mysterious stranger, the wife of the organ grinder, her mother in law, and John Howard. On the 9th December, Mary Toft was charged with being a “Notorious and Vile Cheat” and sent to Bridewell prison where, allegedly, she was exhibited to large, curious crowds by her warders.
The timing of Toft’s confession proved extremely awkward for St. André, who only 4 days earlier, on the 3rd December, had published his forty-page pamphlet A Short Narrative of an Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbets, in which he gives a detailed, non-sceptical, account of events. In the pamphlet he describes Mary’s explanation of events: how, in April 1726, she had been working in a field and was startled by a rabbit. She, and another woman, ran after it, and but could not catch it. They also failed to catch another rabbit that they had chased. “That same Night she dreamt she was in a Field with those two Rabbets in her Lap, and awakened with a sick Fit, which lasted till Morning; from that time, for above three months, she had a constant and strong desire to eat Rabbets, but being very poor and indigent cou’d not procure any.”
If one assumes St Andre was not complicit in the hoax (though Ahler believed him to be) it was most likely this explanation of Toft’s which had him so convinced, tying in as it did so neatly with the theory of ‘maternal impression’, an idea popular at the time, which explained the existence of birth defects and congenital disorders. The theory proposed that an emotional stimulus experienced by a pregnant woman (such as Mary’s rabbit dreams and her desire for rabbit meat) could influence the development of the foetus. Mental problems, such as depression or schizophrenia were believed to be a manifestation of similar feelings in the mother. For instance, a woman who experienced great sadness whilst pregnant might imprint depressive tendencies onto the foetus she was carrying.
The case of Joseph Merrick (1862-1890), the so-called Elephant Man, is perhaps one of the most famous instances of the theory of “maternal impression” being applied. Merrick wrote in his autobiographical pamphlet “The deformity which I am now exhibiting was caused by my mother being frightened by an Elephant; my mother was going along the street when a procession of Animals was passing by, there was a terrible crush of people to see them, and unfortunately she was pushed under the Elephant’s feet, which frightened her very much; this occurring during a time of pregnancy was the cause of my deformity”. Five months after the Mary Toft affair was exposed as a hoax, James Blondel published his The Strength of Imagination in Pregnant Women Examin’d in which he challenged the belief in the prenatal influence of the imagination. The debate he started continued well into the next century.
Indeed, in the aftermath of the hoax, the medical profession suffered a great deal of mockery for what the public viewed as its gullibility. On December 9th, St. André had an advertisement (shown below) published in the Daily Journal to try and vindicate his own behaviour. Doctors responded to the Toft affair in print as many were concerned that the episode had damaged the reputation, not only of the doctors involved, but of the profession as a whole. One of the many tracts and pamphlets that appeared during the saga was The Anatomist Dissected by a certain Lemuel Gulliver, “Surgeon and Anatomist to the Kings of Lilliput and Blefescu, and Fellow of the Academy of Sciences in Balnibarbi” — a pseudonym of Jonathan Swift’s and allusion to his satire Gulliver’s Travels published in 1726.
Part of the reason the Mary Toft case generated so much interest and discussion was the fact that, although babies had been traditionally delivered by female midwives, the rapidly growing field of medical science had recently begun to dominate the area of obstetrics among the upper classes. Men were being promoted as experts on the theory of reproduction, although they were often viewed with mistrust due to the access they had to women’s bodies. Female midwives were now being thought of by some as part of a superstitious past that had no place in the new scientific age. The fact that an illiterate woman like Mary Toft had fooled many eminent doctors, some with royal connections and patients, put the debate between science and the old traditions sharply in focus. Mary herself didn’t seem particularly impressed by at least one of the doctors who attended her — she called Dr Ahlers a ‘fumblefisted fellow as was never cut out to handle gentlewomen’.
The case also proved to be irresistible to contemporary artists. In the satirical print shown below, William Hogarth pokes fun at the incompetence of the early 1700s medical profession. All the main characters in the Toft saga are featured, the doctors being shown as ignorant and credulous fools. Many Britons were angry about the Hanoverian King’s preference for German speaking courtiers and physicians. This is amply demonstrated by the plethora of pamphlets and drawings that appeared in the wake of the Toft scandal, ridiculing St. André and the German court physicians and depicting them as gullible or, even worse, as charlatans. The Prince of Wales was singled out for a great deal of mockery too. Public interest in the case died out by around January of the following year, but the repercussions continued for those involved. For Sir Richard Manningham and James Douglas there had been temporary embarrassment regarding their close connection with the affair but their careers and reputations were secure.
St André, however, lost favour with the court and, as his reputation plummeted, his patients deserted him. He retired from London and eventually died in poverty in an almshouse in Southampton. John Howard had to answer charges of being concerned in the ‘Cheat and Conspiracy of Mary Toft’ but the case against him was dropped and he remained a respected figure in Guildford.
As for Mary Toft, the case against her was dismissed, not for lack of proof of guilt, but probably because of the further embarrassment to the establishment that would ensue if the case were pursued any further. She spent a few months in jail then returned to relative obscurity. The question as to why she and her family went to such extraordinary lengths to convince the nation that Mary had the ability to give birth to rabbits is perhaps not too hard to answer. Monstrous or deformed people had been exhibited, at a price, all over Europe for hundreds of years, with poor and wealthy alike equally fascinated. Ironically for Mary, although the hoax was not successful, she did succeed for a while in becoming an object of curiosity. In the years that followed the scandal, the Duke of Richmond (who had a residence near Godalming) sometimes showed her at dinner parties for the curiosity of his guests. In April 1740 Mary was charged with receiving stolen goods and committed to the House of Correction in Guildford but was later acquitted by the jury. She died on 13th January 1763. The London papers’ obituary columns announced her death alongside those of peers and statesmen.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Niki Russell


text:
Sir Arthur and the Fairies

By Mary Losure
June 12, 2013

In the spring of 1920, at the beginning of a growing fascination with spiritualism brought on by the death of his son and brother in WWI, Arthur Conan Doyle took up the case of the Cottingley Fairies. Mary Losure explores how the creator of Sherlock Holmes became convinced that the 'fairy photographs' taken by two girls from Yorkshire were real.

In the winter of 1920, readers of the popular British magazine the Strand found a curious headline on the cover of their Christmas issues. “FAIRIES PHOTOGRAPHED,” it said. “AN EPOCH-MAKING EVENT DESCRIBED BY A. CONAN DOYLE.” The Strand’s readership was well acquainted with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; most of his wildly popular Sherlock Holmes stories had appeared for the first time in its pages. The great man’s claim that fairies –real fairies — had been photographed in the north of England by two young girls was greeted with wonder, but unfortunately for Conan Doyle, most of it was of the “what can he be thinking?” variety. How could the creator of the world’s most famous, least-fool-able detective have convinced himself that “fairy” photographs were real? Let us proceed, Holmes-like, to examine the question.

Mistake Number One: Misinterpreting the Evidence
To his credit, Conan Doyle made what was (to him) a thorough, scientific, step- by- step investigation of the “fairy” photographs. For his first step, he consulted experts at the London offices of the George Eastman Kodak Company. They examined prints of the first two “fairy” photos and told Conan Doyle they could find no evidence of photo-doctoring; still, they insisted someone who knew enough about photography could have faked them.
In Conan Doyle’s mind, that ruled out the two Yorkshire village girls who had taken the photographs, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths. “I argued that we had certainly traced the pictures to two children of the artisan [working] class, and that such tricks would be entirely beyond them,” he wrote. Working class girls, surely, would not be able pull off such a hoax . . . .

Mistake Number Two: Our Man Not on the Spot
Conan Doyle’s next step was an on-the-scene investigation — but Conan Doyle himself did not go. Instead, he enlisted a far-from-impartial surrogate -- an ardent believer in fairies named Edward Gardner -- to carry out the mission. Gardner had already talked to several people who had assured him the girls had played with fairies and elves since babyhood. He had already written to Elsie Wright’s mother begging her to get her “little girl” to take more photos. “I know quite well that fairies exist,” Gardner wrote in one of several letters to Elsie’s mother, “and that they are very shy of showing themselves or approaching adults, and it is only when one can obtain the help of their ‘friends’ that one can hope to obtain photographs and hence lead to a better understanding of Nature’s ways than is possible otherwise.” Gardner explained to Elsie’s mother that he had long been anxious to obtain photos of “fairies, pixies, and elves, and if possible of brownies and goblins.”
So it is perhaps not surprising that when he actually visited the Wright family in the Yorkshire village of Cottingley, Gardner found no reason to suspect there was anything amiss in the photographs. He talked to Elsie’s parents, who (not knowing themselves whether or how the photos had been faked) gave him sincere and honest answers. They told Gardner all they knew: that the two girls had borrowed Elsie’s father’s camera and gone down to a little hidden valley behind the house where the younger girl, Elsie’s cousin Frances, believed she saw fairies. The girls had returned a just short time later with the negative that Elsie’s father developed in his home darkroom: the first fairy photo.
As part of his investigation, Gardner walked with Elsie to the exact spot, in front of a waterfall, where the photo had been taken. He was glad to have a chance to question the girl alone, he later reported back to Conan Doyle. He asked Elsie what colors the fairies were and she told him they were “the palest of green, pink, mauve,” Gardner wrote to Conan Doyle. Elsie also told Gardner the gnome in the second photo had been wearing black tights, a reddish brown jersey, and a red pointed cap. In answer to Gardner’s questions about the markings on the gnome’s wings — both Conan Doyle and Gardner thought they looked like a moth’s wings — Elsie explained that they weren’t wing markings at all, but musical pipes. She added that on still days, you could hear the faint, high sound of gnome music. After that, Gardner reported back to Conan Doyle that the family’s “transparent honesty and simplicity” had convinced him, Gardner, that the photographs were entirely genuine.
Mistake Number Three: Conan Doyle’s and Gardner’s misperception of Elsie Wright
To Gardner, Elsie seemed a “shy pretty girl of about sixteen.” But at the time they met, she was really eighteen, going on nineteen, and for years had cherished the dream of becoming an artist. It was Elsie who had painted watercolor fairies, stuck them to hatpins, and arranged them in the foliage in front of Frances. It was Elsie who, using a complicated, old-fashioned camera to take her first-ever photo, managed to capture the strange, haunting image that would go down in history as the first Cottingley Fairy Photograph. Gardner had seen a number of Elsie’s watercolors displayed on the walls of her parents’ house. Still, he insisted that she was not a good enough artist to have drawn the fairies in the photos, and Conan Doyle believed him.

Mistake Number Four: Creating the Evidence
During his visit to Cottingley, Gardner implored Elsie’s parents to get her to take more fairy photos. Elsie insisted that wasn’t possible because Frances had to be there, too, for the fairies to appear. (By that time, Frances had moved away from Cottingley to the seaside town of Scarborough). Undeterred, Gardner arranged with Frances’ parents for Frances to spend part of her summer holidays in Cottingley. There was nothing either girl could do — the pressure was on. So when Frances arrived in Cottingley and the two were alone, Elsie told her she’d prepared two more cutout fairies, one for each girl. In the hidden valley, the two girls took two more photos. Then they both agreed, in secret, they would never take another fairy photo.
Gardner was delighted to get the two new photos, but even more thrilled with a third photo, one which Elsie had not faked. Both girls thought at the time it was just a bird’s nest, some rainwater, some shapes and shadows--but Gardner insisted it showed fairies. Conan Doyle thought so, too.
A second Strand article, published in March of 1921, announced “The Evidence for Fairies by A. Conan Doyle, With New Fairy Photographs.” In the article, Conan Doyle quoted Gardner’s assertion that the third and most amazing photo was a “fairy bower.” Conan Doyle also included Gardner’s remark that “We have now succeeded in bringing this print out splendidly.” The article did not say what Gardner meant by “bringing out” the print.
The man who had created the world’s greatest detective never knew how badly astray his own investigation had gone. In part to avoid embarrassing him, Elsie and Frances did not reveal the secret of the paper cutouts until long after his death. Elsie had once seen what she remembered as “cruel” cartoon of Conan Doyle in a magazine, and perhaps by then she realized, too, how desperately he wanted the fairy photographs to be real. If the photos were real, Conan Doyle wrote in The Coming of the Fairies, a book that included both Strand articles, they would provide the first solid evidence that whole new orders of invisible beings existed in our world.
“There is nothing scientifically impossible, so far as I can see, in some people seeing things that are invisible to others,” Conan Doyle wrote. He did concede that it would take some time before “the ordinary busy man” realized that “this new order of life is really established and has to be taken into serious account, just as the pigmies of Central Africa.”
“Victorian science would have left the world hard and clean and bare, like a landscape in the moon,” Conan Doyle wrote, but now -- with the coming of the fairies -- everything had changed. “One or two consequences are obvious,” he wrote. “The experiences of children will be taken more seriously. Cameras will be forthcoming. Other well- authenticated cases will come along. These little folk who appear to be our neighbors, with only some small difference of vibration to separate us, will become familiar.”
Conan Doyle’s belief in spiritualism, séances, and “the spirit world” is well known, yet his steadfast belief in the Cottingley Fairies is sometimes glossed over or even ignored by biographers. It shouldn’t be; it’s a telling glimpse into the character of a man too often confused with his cold, rational hero.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Mary Losure


text:
Simple Songs
Virginia Woolf and Music
By Emma Sutton
January 9, 2013

Last year saw the works of Virginia Woolf enter the public domain in many countries around the world. To celebrate Emma Sutton looks at Woolf's short story "A Simple Melody" and the influence which music had upon the writer who once wrote that music was "nearest to truth".

As Virginia Woolf’s letters and diaries amply record, music was a central part of her social life as it was for many of her contemporaries and she was at her best as a humorist writing about these occasions. She records with glee the various mishaps that befall musicians and audiences — a prima donna throwing down her music in a rage; a button popping off the plump Clive Bell’s waistcoat during the slow movement of a piano sonata; an elderly man crashing loudly but astonishingly unhurt down the stairs at Covent Garden. The social conventions, artifice and pretensions governing these performances intrigue her and allow her to sharpen her wit, but music wasn’t only an occasion for slapstick humour or social satire. It played a central part in the political vision of Woolf’s writing, shaping her understanding and representations of feminism and sexuality, pacifism and cosmopolitanism, social class and anti-Semitism. And it informed, too, the formal experiments of her prose. Woolf learned many of her astonishing literary innovations from music — adopting from Wagner’s operas, for example, the technique of shifting from one narrative perspective to another in order to represent the unspoken thoughts and feelings of her characters.
The short story ‘A Simple Melody’ (c.1925) encapsulates her acute interest in music and its resonant but discreet place in her work. In it, the principal character masks his discomfort at a formal party by studying a landscape painting hanging on the wall:
Mr Carslake, at least, thought it very beautiful because, as he stood in the corner where he could see it, it had the power to compose and tranquillize his mind. It seemed to him to bring the rest of his emotions — and how scattered and jumbled they were at a party like this! — into proportion. It was as if a fiddler were playing a perfectly quiet old English song while people gambled and tumbled and swore, picked pockets, rescued the drowning, and did astonishing — but quite unnecessary — feats of skill. He was unable to perform himself.

The difficulties of communication and the importance of the unspoken are central themes of Woolf’s brief sketch. This is a story about language, about communication. The inhibitions restricting the conversation among the party’s guests, and the difficulty of finding ‘pure new words’ in which to express his feelings, frustrate Mr Carslake. As he looks at the painting of a heath Mr Carslake imagines walking on it with a variety of companions, longing for the intimacy and social equality that he sees as characteristic of al fresco conversation in contrast to polite small talk:
Why, very likely they would talk about their own habits for a whole hour; and all in the freest, easiest way, so that suppose he, or Mabel Waring, or Stuart [. . .] wanted to explain Einstein, or make a statement — something quite private perhaps — (he had known it happen) — it would come quite natural.
His association of the landscape with song suggests that music, like these imagined outdoor exchanges, represents a more direct or ideal form of communication than language, an idea that Woolf’s writing repeatedly explores. She was fascinated by, but wary of, the idea that music was a form of total expression, a model that writing could aspire to or imitate. Here, Mr Carslake’s comparison of the painting to an ‘old English song’ celebrates music’s expressivity and capacity to confer order on its listeners, but also evokes the extensive contemporary nationalist writing about English folk song, landscape and early music by the composers and teachers of the English Musical Renaissance. Mr Carslake remarks that he has recently attended the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley, at which English folk songs and military marches were performed: he found it ‘very tiring’ and ‘believed it was not being a success’. These bathetic details undercut nationalist and military music, suggesting that he, like Woolf herself, was repelled by it. Yet Mr Carslake’s belief that music confers ‘proportion’ on the listener echoes the catchphrase used by the unfeeling doctors treating shell-shocked war veterans in her contemporary novel Mrs Dalloway, using music to suggest a more troubling aspect to his fantasies about communication: his ‘desire [. . .] to be sure that all people were the same’ and ‘very simple underneath’ is both crudely reductive, as he partly recognises, and indicative of empathy and a wish for real connection with others.
The allusion to music also allows Woolf to flesh out aspects of her character’s inner life that could not be addressed directly: the story draws on music’s contemporary association with homosexuality, which is further implied through the description of Mr Carslake as a ‘queer fish’ whose ‘affections’ for his butler are the subject of speculation by his friends. These details hint at a more unconventional and warmer private life than is apparent through his conversation at the party — or through his slightly sinister wish for human homogeneity and simplicity. Similar uses of music pepper Woolf’s fiction: in her first novel, The Voyage Out, her heroine plays a Beethoven piano sonata usually perceived as ‘unattainable’ for women, augmenting the references to her growing feminism. In Night and Day, references to Mozart’s operas criticise the power of patriarchal society and in Jacob’s Room a performance of Tristan contributes to the numerous allusions attacking the war mongering of Edwardian society and its imperial activities. In The Years, Woolf’s account of a performance of Wagner’s Siegfried resists the composer’s notorious anti-Semitism, using the opera to embed more sympathetic attitudes towards Jews in the novel.
In a famous letter of 1940, Woolf wrote that ‘I always think of my books as music before I write them’; recent criticism has started to explore the implications of the relationship between music and writing in her work. And although music has often been seen as the art in which Bloomsbury was least interested, Vanessa Bell’s work as a set designer for ballets, Bell’s painting (with Duncan Grant) of a music room for the Lefevre Gallery in London, and the central place of musical terms in Roger Fry’s art criticism all illustrate music’s importance to Woolf’s family and friends. Woolf shared a passionate interest in ‘intermediality’ with the Modernists, including T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Katherine Mansfield, too. She spoke, then, for many of her contemporaries when she wrote in a letter of 1899 that music, rather than literature, seemed to her the ‘nearest to truth’.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: January 9, 2013

author: Emma Sutton


text:
The Curious World of Isaac D’Israeli

By Martin Spevack
February 6, 2013

Marvin Spevack introduces the Curiosities of Literature, the epic cornucopia of essays on all things literary by Isaac D'Israeli: a scholar, man of letters and father of British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli.

What may be most curious about Isaac D’Israeli’s Curiosities of Literature is the title itself. For D’Israeli curiosity was a blend of the original denotation, “investigation . . . characterized by special care,” and that of his own day, “inquisitive, desirous of information,” as in his reference to the grammar in Johnson’s Dictionary as being “curiously illustrated by the notes and researches of modern editors” and his regarding his friend Francis Douce’s library as being “curious”. Suitably for D’Israeli, the man of letters, literature meant even more than just “literature generally, the humanities”; it meant knowledge in the widest sense, without formality and restriction.
A collection of essays, Curiosities of Literature — as the full title of the first edition of 1791 makes explicit, Consisting of Anecdotes, Characters, Sketches, and Observations, Literary, Critical, and Historical — has been rightly called “that library in miniature”. It is a library which evolved through a vigorously evolutionary process — a veritable sea change of selection, addition, omission, and revision — its fourteenth and last edition in 1849, a year after D’Israeli’s death, consisting of 276 essays (the version in the first three volumes of the six-volume standard edition of his works edited by his son Benjamin in 1881). That number may appear stable when measured against the 279 of the first edition, but it is by no means indicative of the flexibility of the process or the nature of the topics. Both are strikingly evident in the titles of some of the fifty essays from the “Literature and Criticism” section of the first edition which were excluded from later editions: “Tartarian Libraries,” “The Turks,” “The Law and the Prophets,” “Republic of Letters,” “Esdras,” “Aristotle,” “Gregory the Seventh,” “Fair-Sex having no Souls,” “Physicians write little on Professional Subjects,” “Guy Patin,” “Adam not the first Man,” “Saints carrying their Heads in their Hands,” “On the Adjective Pretty.” Among the twenty-seven “Historical Anecdotes” which dropped by the wayside are “Marriage Dispensations,” “English Ladies,” “Spanish Monks,” “The Virgin Mary,” “Protestants,” “Coffee,” Transubstantiation,” “America,” “Enchanted Tapestry,” “Great and Little Turk,” “The Body of Caesar.”
In a preface dated March 1839 D’Israeli described his ever-evolving work as a “voluminous miscellany, composed at various periods . . . a circuit of multifarious knowledge [which] could not be traced were we to measure and count each step by some clinical pedometer.” It would, however, be a misjudgment to regard the miscellany as a jungle of whimsical impressions or fanciful thoughts. Rather, it is a man-made woodland landscaped, cultivated, and manicured by an urban if not urbane gentleman. D’Israeli derived most of his knowledge from books — the first essay is on “Libraries” — for he himself was unabashedly bookish and bibliophilic. But in the range and variety of its topics D’Israeli’s curious world was not hermetically sealed off from the world outside the library, else it would never have had so widespread a popularity over so long a period.
If Curiosities of Literature did not directly reflect contemporary social, political, and literary matters, or rely on current gossip or scandal, it did in any case deal with them as recognizable features and phenomena of human existence in recurring clusters unrestricted by time or place. As might be expected, the most prominent is that of literary personalities, productions, and attendant concerns. Of the numerous authors who are subjects of individual essays, although they are drawn from Roman times to the eighteenth century, none are contemporaries of D’Israeli and no particular genre is dominant. English authors receive their due share: Milton, Pope, Dr. Johnson, Ben Jonson, Shenstone, Prior, Spenser, Shakespeare, Butler, Richardson. But continental authors may receive even more individual attention. The French are well represented by Saint-Evremond, La Rochefoucault, Bayle, Scarron, Madeleine and Georges Scudéry, Corneille, among others; the Italians by Vida, Ariosto, Tasso, Dante, Politian. In addition, there are essays dealing with Martial, Cervantes, Aristotle, Plato, and Cicero. As may be inferred from these names and others, D’Israeli gives relatively much attention to what might be called marginal literary figures, many of whom are lesser known humanists, scholars, bibliophiles, bibliographers, antiquaries, men of letters, editors, or philosophers, such as Grotius, Magliabechi, Anthony à Wood, Marolles, Annius of Viterbo, Bodley, Camden, Costar, Fabroni, Hearne, Leland, Naudé, Bentley, Lenglet du Fresnoy, George Steevens, and Oldys.
Along similar lines of extension is D’Israeli’s consideration of institutions and families deriving from or in the service of literature, such as “A Glance into the French Academy,” “An English Academy of Literature,” “The Port-Royal Society,” “The History of the Caracci,” as well as his inclination to give more detailed attention to clusters and genres than to single works, such as the essays “Spanish Poetry,” “Romances,” “The Early Drama,” “Poetical Imitations and Similarities,” “Extemporal Comedies,” “Diaries,” “Songs of the Trades,” “Parodies,” “Masques,” among others. While although countless works are cited, only relatively few are found in titles as subjects in themselves: among them “The Turkish Spy,” “Love and Folly,” “The Lover’s Heart,” “The Talmud,” and “Robinson Crusoe.” D’Israeli did not even neglect the fundamentals of such products of literature, as evident in such essays as “Origin of the Materials of Writing,” “Autographs,” “Minute Writing,” “Numerical Figures,” and “Literary Composition”; nor the features and mechanics of their production and dissemination, as in his essays “Early Printing” and “A Secret History of Authors Who Have Ruined Their Booksellers”. He was also interested in the elements of books, as in “Titles of Books,” “Dedications,” “Prefaces,” “Quotations,” “Indexes,” and “Errata,” as well as some of their concomitant practitioners and practices, as in “Patrons,” “Bibliomania,” “Abridgers,” “Imitators,” “Professors of Plagiarism and Obscurity,” “Of Literary Filchers,” “Literary Forgeries,” “Literary Impostures,” “Critics,” “Destruction of Books,” and “Licensers of the Press”.
To the implicit historical dimension of the “literary” essays D’Israeli provided an explicit one as well, and, as was his wont, one not restricted to a particular time or country. English royalty was the primary subject. There are essays on “Charles the First,” “Duke of Buckingham,” “Edward the Fourth,” “The Death of Charles IX,” “Elizabeth and Her Parliament,” The Secret History of Charles the First, and His Queen Henrietta,” “The “Secret History of the Death of Queen Elizabeth,” “Buckingham’s Political Coquetry with the Puritans,” and “Secret History of Charles the First and His First Parliaments,” not to mention such accompanying concepts and practices as “Nobility,” “Monarchs,” “Royal Divinities,” “On Royal Promotion,” “Royal Proclamations,” “Political Religionism,” “Toleration,” and “Of Palaces Built by Ministers.” Beyond England, there are essays on “Popes,” “The Minister–The Cardinal Duke of Richelieu,” “Usurers in the Seventeenth Century,” “The Italian Historians,” “Apology for the Parisian Massacre,” “Secret History of an Elective Monarchy,” “The Sources of Secret History,”
and even “Of a History of Events Which Have Not Happened”.
A further dimension takes the form of a kind of wide-ranging cultural sociology which concentrates on manners and materials. “Feudal Customs,” “Spanish Etiquette,” “Female Beauty and Ornaments,” “The History of Gloves,” “Medical Music,” “Virginity,”“Modes of Salutation and Amicable Ceremonies in Various Nations,” “Fire and the Origin of Fireworks,” “Anecdotes of European Manners,” “On the Custom of Kissing Hands,” “Ancient Cookery and Cooks,” “Ancient and Modern Saturnalia,” “Drinking Customs in England,” “Introduction of Tea, Coffee, and Chocolate,” and “Psalm-Singing”. Socio-psychological touches are to be found in “Solitude,” “Anecdotes of Abstraction of Mind,” and “Cause and Pretext”.
The sheer sweep of subjects may be bewildering, their arrangement somewhat scattered. Still, there can be little doubt that there is something for every one in this tastefully conceived and cultivated library in miniature. And beyond the pleasure and information of this essay or the other is the panoramic view of a charmingly curious cultural landscape.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: February 6, 2013

author: Martin Spevack