text:
Julia Pastrana
A “Monster to the Whole World”
By Bess Lovejoy
November 26, 2014

Julia Pastrana, a woman from Mexico born with hypertrichosis, became one of the most famous human curiosities of the 19th century, exhibited the world over as a "bearded lady" while both alive and dead. Bess Lovejoy explores her story and how it was only in 2013, 153 years after her passing, that she was finally laid to rest.

When Julia Pastrana was born, in the mountains of Western Mexico in 1834, her mother worried that her looks were the result of supernatural interference. The local native tribes often blamed the naualli, a breed of shape-shifting werewolves, for stillbirths and deformities, and after seeing her daughter for the first time, Julia’s mother is said to have whispered their name. She fled her tribe — or was cast out — not long after.
Two years later, Mexican herders searching for a missing cow found Julia and her mother hiding in a mountain cave. They took them to the nearest city, where Julia was placed in an orphanage. Sweet, intelligent, and almost totally covered in black hair, she became a local celebrity. After hearing of her unusual looks and charming disposition, the state governor adopted Julia to serve as a live-in amusement and maid. She stayed with the governor until she was twenty, when she decided to return to her own tribe. But she never completed the trip home: an American showman known as M. Rates met her somewhere on her journey back to the mountains, and persuaded her to take up a life onstage.
Julia would go on to become one of the most famous human curiosities of the nineteenth century, variously known as “the Ape Woman,” “the Bear Woman,” or “the Baboon Lady.” She made her debut in December 1854, at the Gothic Hall on Broadway in New York City. She wore a red dress, sang Spanish folk tunes, and danced the Highland Fling. Huge, appreciative crowds flocked to see her, although it wasn’t really the singing and dancing they were after: they came to gawk at her hairy face and body, her jaw that jutted forward, her unusually large lips, and her wide, flat nose. The advance publicity billed Julia as a “Bear Woman from the wilds of Mexico!” while others said she looked like an ape. In his book A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities, Jan Bondeson records a contemporary newspaper account:
The eyes of this lusus natura beam with intelligence, while its jaws, jagged fangs and ears are terrifically hideous . . . nearly its whole frame is coated with long glossy hair. Its voice is harmonious, for this semi-human being is perfectly docile, and speaks the Spanish language.
It’s worth noting that the idea that Julia was half-human didn’t originate with the press. Physician Alexander B. Mott, son of renowned New York surgeon Valentine Mott, examined her during a private back-room viewing and declared her a hybrid, half-human and half-orangutan. Other doctors agreed. At the time, orangutans were the biggest and most fearsome primate most Americans knew, a symbol of wild, primitive nature and dangerous sexuality. The rampaging orangutan of Poe’s 1841 story The Murders in the Rue Morgue, who slits a beautiful woman’s throat with a straight razor, helped cement the associations of these creatures with horror, fascination, and sex. But the link wasn’t new: two hundred years earlier, Dutch doctor Jacob Bontius wrote that orangutans were “born from the lust of Indian women, who mix with apes and monkeys with detestable sensuality.”
And while Julia’s promotional material emphasized her femininity, in keeping with other representations of nineteenth century bearded women, it also underlined her animalistic, racialized otherness. Her promotional material referred to her tribe of “Root-Digger Indians” as “spiteful and hard to govern,” living in animal caves and enjoying intimate relations with bears and apes. The implications were clear: Julia was both a symbol of our repressed animal natures and the literal product of sex with beasts.
In England, where Julia ventured with a new impresario after successful tours of the eastern US and Canada, this otherness continued to be a useful promotional strategy. A poster advertising Julia’s show at London’s Regent Gallery, where she appeared three times a day in 1857, portrayed her with exaggerated, reddened lips and a large nose, much like contemporary racialized images of African-Americans. (This despite the fact that at least one doctor declared she had “no trace of Negro blood.”) The twelve-page promotional booklet that Theodore Lent, Julia’s new showman, prepared advertised her as “the Baboon Lady,” and again described her parents’ close contact with wild animals. But it also assured audiences that in Julia “the nature of woman predominates over the ourang-outang’s,” and described her as sociable, clever, and kind.
While Julia’s promotional package included certificates from scientists attesting to her hybrid nature, from the start there were those who knew she was entirely human. Anatomist Samuel Kneeland Jr, former curator of comparative anatomy for the Boston Natural Historical Society, examined Julia and declared her all human, and “a perfect woman, performing all the functions of her sex.” In 1857, the zoologist Francis Buckland visited her London hotel room and described her “hideous” facial features but “exceedingly good” figure, adding that she “had a sweet voice, great taste in music and dancing, and could speak three languages.” He added: “I believe that her true history was that she was simply a deformed Mexican Indian woman.”
The most famous English scientist of the day, Charles Darwin, did not go to see her in London, but learned of her existence and of a cast taken of her teeth, which was supposed to show an irregular double set in both upper and lower jaws. In his Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Darwin compared Julia to hairless dogs, theorizing that skin disease in the animal world could be connected to excess teeth. Julia, however, didn’t have extra teeth, just thickened gums that made misleading impressions on the casts. Had anyone bothered to ask her about her mouth, she would have explained that she had the usual number of teeth. But almost all the doctors who examined her directed their questions to Lent, while Julia kept silent.
Silent but lucrative, which was how Lent liked it. Exhibiting Julia had made Lent a wealthy man, but by then rival showmen, possibly even including P.T. Barnum, began to take an interest in her. Lent decided to make the arrangement with his living, breathing, investment more permanent; he proposed to Julia.
We don’t know exactly what Julia thought of Lent, although Bondeson believes she was in love and “touchingly devoted” to him. Certainly, Julia’s entire world revolved around her showman: she was not allowed to go out during the day, in case being seen on the street would diminish her earning power, and only travelled to the circus at night wearing veils. She had very few friends, although she did develop a rapport with the Viennese actress and singer Friederike Gossman, who later said that a “light fog of sadness” always hung over Julia. Nevertheless, Julia accepted Lent’s proposal. She once told Gossman, “[my husband] loves me for myself.”
Aside from Gossman, one of the few who took Julia seriously as a person was German circus owner Hermann Otto. He visited Julia in Vienna and had a long conversation with her, later recording his impressions in his book Fahrend Volk (Travelling People). He wrote that Julia seemed:
a monster to the whole world, an abnormality put on display for money, someone who had been taught a few artistic turns, like a trained animal. [But] for the few who knew her better, she was a warm, feeling, thoughtful, spiritually very gifted being with a sensitive heart and mind. . . and it affected her very deeply in her heart with sadness, having to stand beside people, instead of with them, and to be shown as a freak for money, not sharing any of the everyday joys in a home filled with love.
In the winter of 1859, the couple travelled to Moscow, where crowds flocked to their exhibition at the Circus Salomansky. That August, Julia discovered she was pregnant. The baby, which arrived in March 1860 after a difficult birth, was unusually large, covered in hair like his mother, and had the same pronounced lower facial features. Julia was said to have held him and cried.
The baby lived only thirty-five hours, and Julia, who had been lacerated with forceps during the birth, survived for just a few more days after that. The official cause of death was metro-peritonitis puerperalis (inflammation of the peritoneum about the uterus), but more romantic sources say she died of a broken heart. Lent admitted spectators to her deathbed, where she is supposed to have said “I die happy, because I know I have been loved for my own sake.” This fits nicely into the nineteenth century predilection for grand last words, but it seems a little too perfect to be true.
By impregnating his wife, Lent’s plan to secure his investment through marriage had backfired—or so it seemed. At the hospital where Julia gave birth, Lent met a Professor Sokolov of Moscow University. Sokolov was an expert on embalming, and had recently pioneered a technique that blended mummification with taxidermy, creating corpses that still looked rosy and alive. He and Lent struck a deal, in which Sokolov would buy the bodies of Julia and her son, preserve them, and put them on display at the university’s Anatomical Institute. Sokolov kept the details of the embalming to himself, although we know the process took him six months. When the bodies were sufficiently infused with decay-arresting chemicals, Sokolov posed both mother and child standing up, the baby perched on a rod with an alert expression on his face, his mother standing with hands on her hips, feet wide apart, face turned to one side. The confident pose makes it possible to imagine Julia, just for a moment, as being like any self-possessed young woman standing on the corner waiting for a friend, a bus, a taxi, the end of the day to come.
But Julia had a far more unusual story. Her body stayed at the Anatomical Institute’s museum for only six months, before Lent, hearing how good she and her son looked, took advantage of an escape clause in his contract and returned to take them back. Evidently he realized that Julia could be a money-maker dead as well as alive.
Lent put the bodies on display in London in 1862, where they could be seen for a shilling—less than he charged when Julia could sing and dance, but at least now he could display her for longer periods of time. Again the scientists weighed in: Buckland visited and said “the face was marvelous, exactly like an exceedingly good portrait in wax,” while The Lancet declared the embalming “completely successful.” The bodies went on to tour, and when they visited Vienna, Hermann Otto described seeing his old acquaintance in a “red, silk-like harlot’s dress with a frightening rictus across her face.”
A few years later in Karlsbad, Lent heard of another woman, Marie Bartel, who suffered from conditions similar to those of his late wife. (Today the official diagnosis for Julia’s maladies is generalized hypertrichosis lanuginosa, which produced the hair covering her face and body, and gingival hyperplasia, which thickened her lips and gums). Determined to add Marie to his show, Lent threw a bag of plums over a wall and into the garden where she spent her days. A little while later, he persuaded her father to let him marry her. He promised to never exhibit Marie, but the oath was short-lived. Soon she was singing and dancing onstage as “Zenora Pastrana,” Julia’s “little sister,” with the embalmed mummies of Julia and her son behind her for an added macabre touch.
But perhaps “Zenora” had the last laugh. After further exhibitions throughout Europe and America, the pair retired in St. Petersburg, where Lent began to go insane. At least once, he showed up nearly naked on a bridge over the River Neva, shrieking incomprehensibly, tearing up bank notes and throwing them into the water. Marie had him committed to an asylum, where he died shortly thereafter. As for Marie, she moved back to Germany and sold the embalmed bodies of Julia and child, which then shuttled among fairs, amusement parks, museums, and chambers of horror throughout Europe for decades.
In 1921, Haakon Lund, manager of Norway’s then-biggest carnival, purchased the bodies of Julia and her son from an American in Berlin. They arrived as part of a cabinet of curiosities that held 8,000 other objects, including body parts submerged in giant glass jars, preserved heads, deformed fetuses, Siamese twin embryos, two-headed calves, an entire human skin nailed to a plank, and other choice items. Lund exhibited selections from the cabinet alongside a wax museum of venereal diseases, calling it the Hygienic and Anatomical Exhibition. The show toured through Norway in the 1920s with the slogan “Humanity, know thyself.”
By then, however, the culture around exhibiting human oddities had started to change. As the nineteenth century progressed, “freak” exhibitions fell more and more out of favor, and Lund took pains to present his exhibition under the guise of popular education. He hired medical students wearing white lab coats to serve as guides, and displayed posters that at least gave the pretence of providing medical and scientific background information. However, during World War II the Nazis deemed the exhibit obscene, and ordered the wax models melted down for candles — an order which Lund managed to avoid.
After surviving the war, the bodies went into storage in the 1950s. By the 1970s, when the bodies emerged for small tours, they were frequently greeted by outrage in the newspapers. In 1973 Sweden banned their presence, saying corpses could no longer be exhibited for profit. This marked the end of their touring days, and Lund stashed the mummies in the carnival’s storehouse near Oslo. Three years later, teenagers broke in and ripped off Julia’s arm, thinking she was a mannequin. The police later recovered the bodies, but Julia’s infant was damaged beyond repair. He ended up in the trash.
Julia’s body re-emerged in the public consciousness in 1990, when journalists at the Norwegian magazine Kriminal Journalen discovered her languishing in the basement of  Oslo’s Institute of Forensic Medicine. From then on, the fate of Julia’s body became a fixture of Norwegian newspaper reports and government committees. Journalists, academics, and other officials spilled a great deal of ink debating the merits of burying her versus keeping her body above ground so that scientists might one day study her conditions. In the end, Norway’s Ministry of Church, Education and Research decided to keep the remains above ground, and they were moved to the Institute of Basic Medical Science at the University of Oslo in 1997.
In 2005, Laura Anderson Barbata, a Mexico City-born, New York-based visual artist then on a residency in Oslo, began petitioning the university for the repatriation of Julia’s body. Barbata had become aware of Julia’s plight two years earlier, after her sister produced a play called The True History of the Tragic Life and Triumphant Death of Julia Pastrana, the Ugliest Woman in the World, which is conducted entirely in the dark.
While the initial replies from the university were disappointing, Barbata persisted, placing a death notice for Julia in an Oslo newspaper and arranging for a Catholic Mass to be said for her. In 2008, Barbata was allowed to make her case before Norway’s National Committee for the Evaluation of Research on Human Remains, which agreed that “it seems quite unlikely that Julia Pastrana would have wanted her body to remain a specimen in an anatomical collection.” The governor of Julia’s home province of Sinaloa got involved, as did the Mexican ambassador to Norway, and an official petition for Julia’s return to Mexico was lodged.
In February of 2013, Julia’s body—encased in a white coffin covered in white roses—was finally buried in a cemetery in Sinaloa de Leyva, a town near her birthplace. Despite all she endured, Julia’s story had something of a happy ending. It’s a pity she wasn’t alive to see it — and to know she was remembered as more than a monster.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: November 26, 2014

author: ess Lovejo


text:
Neanderthals in 3D
L’Homme de La Chapelle
By Lydia Pyne
February 11, 2015

More than just a favourite of Victorian home entertainment, the stereoscope and the 3D images it created were also used in the field of science. Lydia Pyne explores how the French palaeontologist Marcellin Boule utilised the device in his groundbreaking monograph analysing one of the early-20th-century's most significant archaeological discoveries - the Neanderthal skeleton of La Chapelle.

On August 3, 1908, French prehistorian Jean Bouyssonie, his brother, Amédée Bouyssonie, and their colleague Louis Bardon found a Neanderthal skeleton in a system of caves near La Chapelle-aux-Saints in south-central France.  The discovery was exciting for the newly-emerging field of paleoanthropology because the Neanderthal was found in its original, undistrubed archaeological context —  in situ — and excavations of the skeleton revealed that it was more complete than anything else in the fossil record.  La Chapelle quickly became an iconic fossil within scientific and popular circles and went on to inspire everything from dioramas at the Field Museum of Natural History to science fiction’s A Guerre du Feu (Quest for Fire.)
After the skeleton was excavated, the Bouyssonies sent the remains to the eminent Marcellin Boule, the Director of the Laboratory of Palaeontology at the prestigious Musée d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris.  Boule conducted a two-year detailed anatomical study of the fossil that culminated in a hefty monograph, L’Homme Fossile de La Chapelle-aux-Saints, published in 1911.  L’Homme was the first and most comprehensive publication of Neanderthal skeletal anatomy in scientific literature, establishing the La Chapelle skeleton as the most complete fossil reference for early paleo-studies.  Boule’s detailed anatomical description of the skeleton provided a framework for any new Neanderthal fossils discovered and the 1911 reconstructions of La Chapelle became the basis for all subsequent Neanderthal research. It is filled with chapters of anatomical descriptions, careful measurements, photographs of the skeleton in the ground, prior to excavation, as well as sketches of geomorphic cross-sections from the cave.
The book was and is a masterpiece: a complete anatomical and cultural summary of the La Chapelle Neanderthal, opening with the story of the fossil’s excavation and ending with comparisons to the few other turn-of-the-twentieth-century discovered Neanderthal specimens from across Europe.  In addition to the tables of metrics and photographs of the La Chapelle fossil, Boule included another type of media that gave readers of L’Homme a way to interact with the fossil for themselves.  At the back of the book, Boule included six stereoscopic plates of the Neanderthal skull.
By the time L’Homme was published the stereoscope would have been a familiar object, one of the many optical toys — along with kaleidoscopes, zoetropes and cameras — through which the nineteenth-century eye had peered in wonder. The stereoscope’s particular trick was to give a a two dimensional image an illusion of depth. Gazing through its viewfinder, the two slightly offset images of the stereoscopic plate, or stereogram, positioned in front would combine to create an illusion of three dimensions.
The stereoscope’s powers of replication enchanted a public enamored with what historian of technology Robert Silverman calls “philosophical toys.” “The stereoscope is now seen in every drawing room; philosophers talk learnedly about it, ladies are delighted with its magic representations, and children play with it,” noted Robert Hunt, a British photo-chemist, about the ubiquity of stereoscopes in 1856.1
The device, however, was much more than just a toy or illustrative distraction — it developed also into an important tool for laboratory and scientific work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Just as telescopes and microscopes expanded what is visible, the stereoscope expanded what and how researchers were able to see different specimens.
The three dimensional stereoscopic images were a different type of text to be read and imbued with scientific and cultural meaning.  For anatomists at the turn of the twentieth century, stereograms enabled bones to be examined in all dimensions, without having to handle the actual, physical bone. The Edinburgh Stereoscopic Atlas of Anatomy, for example, announced the publication of its first set of stereoscopic cards in 1905:  “In looking over these illustrations, what strikes one first is the excellent way in which they have been reproduced.”2
What worked for anatomists also worked for paleoanthropologists such as Boule. Indeed, early-twentieth-century paleoanthropology borrowed heavily in its method and theory from anatomy, and most researchers who studied fossils had a background in anatomy.  In order to properly describe the anatomical characteristics of fossil material, researchers published tables of published tables of metrics and measurements which aided in comparisons between different groups of modern humans and great ape populations.  Publications included photographs, sketches, and references to casts, any number of things that would let researchers see the fossil and how it compared with other anatomical specimens.  As fossils were themselves too rare and important to send between researchers, proxies — casts, measurements, sketches, photographs, and highly detailed descriptions — were needed to provide accurate and sufficient information.3  Drawing from a tradition of stereoscopic anatomical atlases, the La Chapelle-aux-Saints Neanderthal plates gave the reader a first-person experience of interacting with the fossil in three dimensions.
Under Boule’s careful direction, Monsieur J. Papoint of the Laboratoire de Paleontologie at the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle, contributed dozens of pen-and-ink illustrations to L’Homme — sketches of the skeleton as well as drawings of stone tools that were found in the original excavations.  The six sterograms show the La Chapelle skull  in every anatomical position: superior, anterior, lateral, everything.  All of the stero cards were stamped with the publishing house (Masson & Cie Editeurs), and the plates credit Heliog L. Schutzenberger as the photographer.  At 278 pages, Boule’s L’Homme was comprehensive, his anatomical comparisons thoughtful, and his research judiciously in keeping with other lengthy then-contemporary tomes of prehistory.
In the stereo cards, the skull is carefully situated on a shiny platform — the skull’s reflection gleams off the surface — and the fossil itself rests on a small metal and wood pedestal.  The skull, however, is the only part of the Neanderthal skeleton to be photographed in stereoscopic view and the only element to have additional “props” (a pedestal and table.)  Although the props would have been necessary to precisely line up the two images, they introduce a subtle laboratory rhetoric to the Neanderthal plates and L’Homme writ large.  In this context, the Neanderthal skull is a scientific object that is seen only when it is propped up by other objects — a tableau which must be captured by the stereoscope to be read as an evolutionary text.
The stereoscopic plates included in L’Homme Fossile de La Chapelle-aux-Saints were in complete keeping with the instrumental value of the  stereoscope and these images went a long way toward creating and legitimizing the La Chapelle Neanderthal as a taxonomic icon and “classic Neanderthal” in scientific and popular circles.
In the decades after Boule’s publication of the La Chapelle Neanderthal, his interpretation of Neanderthals was quickly co-opted into the popular caricature of a slouchy, barbaric troglodyte.  The Neanderthal, according to Boule, was a sad specimen of nature — an evolutionary dead-end, to put it most kindly.  (This view was first put forward in L’Homme Fossile de La Chapelle-aux-Saints and solidified in later decades through Boule’s additional research.)  Near the mid-twentieth century and on into the twenty-first, however, Boule’s research and interpretations of Neanderthals came under massive criticism and even ridicule.
The stereo cards of the Neanderthal skull gave readers of the L’Homme Fossile de La Chapelle-aux-Saints the opportunity to see for themselves the complexity of the Neanderthal crania.    This added dimensionality of the stereo cards helped bring the La Chapelle skeleton to the forefront of paleoanthropological research in the early twentieth century — the stereo plates deepened viewers’ connections to the fossil. (L’Homme’s beautifully detailed stereoscopic prints of each bone from the skeleton were the 1911 version of data sharing.)  While it is easy to think of 3D rendering of fossils as a recent technological phenomena, stereograms offer a glimpse at the explanatory power of stereoscopic images and highlight the connections three-dimensional viewing made between viewer and object.  Including stereoscopic images of the La Chapelle Neanderthal helped solidify the fossil’s iconic status in the early-twentieth-century paleoanthropology.

Scroll through the whole page to download all images before printing.Animated GIFs of the skull. An approximation for how the image would have looked in 3D.

Animated GIFs of the skull. An approximation for how the image would have looked in 3D.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: February 11, 2015

author: Lydia Pyne

source: public-domain-review

type: essay

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


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The Mystery of Lewis Carroll

By Jenny Woolf
July 1, 2015

The author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which sees its 150th anniversary this year, remains to this day an enigmatic figure. Jenny Woolf explores the joys and struggles of this brilliant, secretive, and complex man, creator of one of the world's best-loved stories.

When Charles L. Dodgson was born in January 1832, his paternal aunt wrote a letter to his parents, welcoming the “dear little stranger” and begging them to kiss him on her behalf. His clergyman father, already “overdone with delight” whenever he looked at his family, put a notice in The Times to announce the arrival of his much-wanted first son.
The baby would grow up to become Lewis Carroll, author of two of the most famous children’s books in the world. Mystery, and even controversy, would surround him in later life, but one thing that never changed was his deep attachment to the members of his family, or theirs to him.
For his first eleven years, the Dodgsons lived in a small parsonage in the midst of fields, in the scattered village of Daresbury, Cheshire.  The parsonage burned down over a hundred years ago, but its site still remains, marked out in bricks and enclosed in a decorative iron fence, with countryside all around.
Its rooms are tiny, for Charles’ father was only a poor curate, and he had to take in pupils and grow some of his own food. But Charles remembered Daresbury Parsonage as a happy spot, an “island farm, ‘midst seas of corn.” He and an ever-growing number of brothers and sisters roamed in the surrounding countryside, and his sisters remembered him as a typical boy, climbing trees and playing in local ponds. After his father was promoted, the family moved to a large rectory in the village of Croft-on-Tees, in Yorkshire, and soon grew to eleven children.
Charles was very young when he seems to have decided to become the family’s main entertainer.  He amused his brothers and sisters tirelessly, creating elaborate games for them to play in the garden, telling them stories and creating magazines for them.  His own youthful contributions to these magazines occasionally show hints of what was to come. Alice’s Duchess, who saw a “moral” in everything, echoes his poem “My Fairy”, written at the age of thirteen, in which he gently criticises the explicit moralizing of contemporary children’s books.
I have a fairy by my sideWhich says I must not sleep. When once in pain I loudly cried It said, “You must not weep”.

. . . When once a meal I wished to taste It said, “You must not bite” When to the wars I went in haste It said, “You must not fight”.
“What may I do?” at length I cried, Tired of the painful task. The fairy quietly replied And said “You must not ask”.
Moral: “You mustn’t.”
From all accounts, Charles relished the role of older brother, and his siblings are reported to having thought a lot of him; they certainly stayed in close touch all his life.   It seems that he was markedly protective, for as a schoolboy he was known for getting into fights in defence of smaller boys. Later in life, friends sometimes commented on how well he looked after them — one niece even affectionately compared him to a “mother hen”.
He had much in common with some of his sisters, and was less keen on the countryside sports that his brothers liked. An early anti-vivisectionist, he shared a concern for animal welfare with his youngest sister, Henrietta.
Schooling was not compulsory at the time, but it was better for a boy to attend school if he wanted to have a professional career. Charles was mostly educated at home, but when he was twelve he was sent to a little school in nearby Richmond, where he boarded with the headmaster, his wife and family, and was very happy.
By contrast, he loathed the three years he spent at boarding-school in Rugby. He did well, and won prizes, but he hated the school’s lack of privacy, uninspired teaching, and savage bullying.   Years later, he admitted it had not been totally bad, for he had made some friends, but he added that “no earthly considerations” would ever induce him to repeat the years he had endured there.
At nineteen, he went up to Christ Church, Oxford, his father’s old college. He did very well, and before long was appointed a Fellow, known as a “Student”, and was engaged in teaching mathematics.  As he moved further into his twenties and got more involved in the job, he remained close to his family, making the long trip back North during vacations, and socialising with his brothers and sisters at other times.
It is hard to know what he really thought about Christ Church.  It did offer opportunities to read, reflect, and use his mind, and, in making a success of his life there, he was doing what both he and his family expected. It also offered him the chance to meet many of the well known figures of the time, and his circle of friends does include large numbers of famous people. And he needed  a decent salary, for his father had little money, and, as the eldest son, he knew he would assume responsibility for everyone after his father died.
On the other hand, the college was almost all-male and child-free, and may have seemed emotionally rather bleak. In order to comply with the college’s archaic rules, he most reluctantly took Holy Orders, and knew he would be obliged to remain unmarried and celibate as long as he stayed in the job.
Teaching the undergraduates did not suit him, for with his quiet voice, gentle manner and troublesome stammer, he found it hard to keep order. Some of his rougher contemporaries made fun of his speech difficulty, and many of the undergraduates were rich young men who did not want to learn and considered themselves better than him. He seems to have coped with the emotional discomforts of his life by presenting a cold, remote face to those he did not know well.
He wrote his brothers and sisters long, entertaining letters, got involved in college politics and spent as much time as possible with the Liddell children, Harry, Ina, Edith and Alice, who lived in the college Deanery. With them, he could be more like his real self, the person he showed to his family. He took the children out, helped them with all kinds of projects, and made up stories for them.
So this was the outward appearance of the man who created the story of “Alice in Wonderland” in 1862, when he was thirty years old. The famous story is said to have been told during a boating trip on July 4, when Charles, his friend Duckworth and the three Liddell girls rowed to the village of Godstow.  Actually, the story may have taken shape over two or three trips that summer — but in any case, the children loved it.
Alice Liddell was ten at the time, three years older than the “Alice” of the story.  She was a clever, artistic little girl, with short, dark hair, and a bold confident gaze, and Charles was very fond of her. When she pestered him to write the story out for her, he did, although it was over two years before he arrived at the Deanery with his pretty handwritten volume of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground.
It has sometimes been suggested that Charles was in love with Alice, or wanted to marry her as she grew older, but there is no evidence for this at all.  In fact, he may only have named the character “Alice” to please his little friend, for he later took pains to point out that Alice the child was not the “Alice” he’d imagined in the story.  His own contemporary illustrations, too, show Alice with long, fairish hair, quite unlike Alice Liddell’s dark bob.
He stayed friends with Alice’s older sister Lorina for the rest of his life, and in fact gossip did circulate that he might have had his eye on her.  It was unusual for a man in his position to seek out children’s company so publicly, and many people thought that he must have had hopes of either the oldest girl or the governess.   No evidence exists to back this up, but it is known that the friendship with Alice withered as she left childhood behind.  He was not an important part of her family’s social circle, and there are hints that she did not particularly like being world-famous because of someone else’s book.
Charles did not record Alice’s reaction to his gift, but many other people who saw the story loved it; so many, indeed, that he  had already decided that he would publish it by the time he’d presented it to Alice. The publisher Alexander Macmillan agreed to work on it,  although the agreement was that Charles would have to pay most of the cost of production.
Charles boldly committed over a year’s salary to the project. Then, he scrapped the whole first edition of 2000, because Tenniel disliked the quality of the printing.  Fussiness was one of his personal characteristics, as were a certain impetuousness, boldness, and a determination to do what he felt was right, however inconvenient and difficult it might be.
When the book first appeared, Charles was not optimistic about its prospects. He thought he would lose about £200, which was a huge sum then.  He might recoup the loss if sales were exceptionally good, “but that,” he concluded grimly, “I can hardly hope for”.
Famous last words! Eventually, Alice enabled him to retire early, although it did not make a fraction of the money that such a bestseller would generate today.  Within a decade, Charles’ pseudonym of “Lewis Carroll” was a household name, and when he died in 1898, the book and its sequel, Through the Looking Glass were world-famous.  They are now available all over the world, both in the original unaltered mid-Victorian texts and in numerous rewritings and adaptations, movies, artworks, musicals, and animations.
As the books’ fame grew, people naturally wondered about the man who had written them, but Charles had no intention of revealing himself to the public. Writing a children’s book did not particularly enhance his professional career, and he flatly refused to acknowledge in public that he was “Lewis Carroll”.
In fact, as far as his daily life went, “Lewis Carroll” was a complete non-person.  Charles was always known personally only by his real name, letters directed to the pseudonym were returned unanswered, and he would walk away if strangers dared to mention “Alice” in his presence.
As the years went on, interest in him did not lessen, and he presented an ever more off-putting, grave, moralistic image to the outside world, and indeed, to many of his colleagues at Christ Church.
It has sometimes been wondered why he went to these lengths. Part of the reason seems to have been a need for privacy. After all, he lived in a semi-communal setting, and often spent time with his large extended family, as well.  He dreaded being accosted by strangers, and he treasured periods of solitude in order to work on the mathematics which fascinated him.
He also wanted freedom from outside scrutiny. Within the circle of family, children and his many bohemian and artistic friends, he was teasing, humorous, sometimes emotional, occasionally reckless and iconoclastic. These were not qualities expected of staid, clerical academics in the restrictive world of the Victorian middle class. In this way, perhaps the sentiments of “My Fairy” applied to him, even in adult life.
In particular, his love of the theatre and his passion for theatrical people created a problem so far as his public image was concerned. Theatres were not respectable in the mid-nineteenth century, and the plays they presented were often trivial and frivolous.  Even though their reputation improved during his lifetime, his parents and most of his sisters never attended one in their lives.
But for him, the theatre was a whole fantasy world, and the actors were its inhabitants. He was a perceptive, knowledgeable critic of their work, and he was also a most gifted and dramatic storyteller himself.  In different circumstances, he might have become professionally involved with the stage, but this was impossible in the life which he actually had.
The few adults to whom he told stories remembered him as a remarkable raconteur with a funny story for every occasion and the ability to reduce a listener to helpless laughter.  He could also gather an audience with great ease, when he chose, as Ruth, daughter-in-law of the Victorian architect Alfred Waterhouse, described in a memoir.
As a little girl, she once arrived at a children’s party and saw a pale old clergyman in black clothes. She glumly assumed that he would spoil everything. Yet, “the party soon became Mr. Dodgson’s party,”  she said, and he talked so fascinatingly, that “I remember how exasperating it was to be asked whether I would like another piece of cake, when I was trying so hard to hear what he was saying”.
Although he had several child friends who were boys, he made no secret of the fact that he preferred female company, and his nephew biographer also took the unusual step (for the time) of pointing out that most of his friends were ladies.
He relaxed in the presence of females across all ages, and his bachelor rooms at Christ Church contained hundreds of books of poetry, myth, magic, and legend, and toys and fancy dresses.  At a time when the line between the sexes was firmly drawn, he had no interest in sport and war, but enjoyed fairies, animals, dressing up, art, and beauty, as well as puppets, dolls, and stuffed toys.  Even when he was an old man, his niece Irene remembered what fun it was crawling with him on the floor, playing with a toy bear. And it is perhaps significant that the only toy from his childhood that he bothered to photograph was a boy doll or puppet called “Tim”.
As well as his passion for the theatre, he was also a keen photographer, mostly of people and particularly of children. Some of his young models remember how successfully he kept them interested and occupied during what was then a long and boring process, and parents sometimes commissioned him professionally to photograph their children.  His nude images of children seem controversial today, but nudes of both sexes and all ages were acceptable as valid artistic subjects then, and in fact, some of the child images of his respectable contemporary, Julia Margaret Cameron, seem far more startling to the modern eye.
However, his love of children and his admiration for child nudity are sometimes taken to be evidence that he was a paedophile. It is impossible for anyone to know the definite truth about the sexual life of another, particularly someone long dead and from a different culture. But again and again, children who knew him, including those photographed nude by him, remember him with real love and affection, in recollections that indicate he did not in any way behave like a paedophile. As Evelyn Hatch, who he photographed nude as  “Odalisque” recalls,  “What I remember most about Mr. Dodgson was his kindness. . . . his aim was to give happiness and to make life richer. . . he was an ever-welcome guest.”  Dozens of other recollections of little girls echo views like this.
In general, he seems to have had a positive, constructive attitude, and he made the best of his life. But in some essential ways, he could not be himself,  and his family said that he suffered periodically from black depression. At these times, they felt that the sincere love of his child friends kept him going.
His affection, in turn, meant a great deal to many of them. Time and again they report that he took them seriously when nobody else did, and understood their points of view. Among many touching memories are those of Ethel, niece of Matthew Arnold, who recalls how “the hours spent in his dear and much-loved company, [were] oases of brightness in a somewhat grey and melancholy childhood”.
He never married, and apparently never wanted to.  Victorian marriage (with the prospect of many more dependants) would certainly have been a heavy addition to the constraints under which he already lived.   It would have lost him what independence he had, and the mere fact of being married at all would have presented him with serious practical problems for many years.  His closeness to his siblings might also have been a contributing factor to the decision.  Only three of the eleven ever wed, and the remaining seven remained under his care for the rest of his life.
However, as he grew older, he acquired many lady friends. This sometimes led to mild controversy.  Victorian social life was highly formal, and it was thought improper for eligible men to have unchaperoned adult female friends.
During his youth he had been unable to spend time alone with respectable women, but after he passed what Victorians considered to be the age of “romance,” he openly went on holiday with woman friends, and gathered a sizeable circle of admiring ladies around him. As author Laurence Hutton recalled in 1903, shortly after his death, “he liked young women, who all liked him, and Oxford is now full of women, mature and immature, who adore the gentle memory of the creator of ‘Alice’”.
In later life, although he was kind, generous and involved to those close to him, he became increasingly difficult, eccentric and annoying to outsiders.  He also began spending considerable time fretting about tiny moral points  and examining finer points of his own conscience. As he saw his own death approaching, he became very anxious not to offend God in any way.  Much of his later fiction — self-conscious, badly structured, and over-moralistic — reveals this anxiety.
It was a relief to him to escape into the intellectual study of logic, which increasingly gripped him.  But he still relaxed and seems to have gained strength from the company of the children he loved, and he continued to tell them original, funny, startling, and brilliant tales to make them happy.  Adults rarely heard them, but his close friend Gertrude Thomson described them as being “like rainbows” — unique, beautiful, and evanescent.
He never wrote any of these tales down, and in a rare burst of confidence not long before he died, he told Gertrude Thomson that he didn’t know what people saw in the “Alice” books.  Yet although he apparently chose to regard them as unimportant fairy tales, we know that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its companion Through the Looking Glass were both created at times of great personal stress for him. It is reasonable to assume that they were in some way therapeutic, and perhaps he did not want to think too deeply about what they represented.
Although he never wanted to discuss them with adults, he always wanted them to reach the widest possible child audience. And over the last 150 years, millions of children have grown up on “Alice”. Many of these have gone on to produce their own works of art inspired by the curious little girl. To many of us, the wonderful variety of these cultural works makes a fascinating study — one that is nearly, though not quite, as interesting as the study of Charles Dodgson himself.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Jenny Woolf


text:
Ghostwriter and Ghost
The Strange Case of Pearl Curran & Patience Worth
By Ed Simon
September 17, 2014

In early 20th-century St. Louis, Pearl Curran claimed to have conjured a long-dead New England puritan named Patience Worth through a Ouija board. Although mostly unknown today, the resulting books, poems, and plays that Worth "dictated" to Curran earned great praise at the time. Ed Simon investigates the curious and nearly forgotten literary fruits of a “ghost” and her ghostwriter.

Many moons ago I lived. Again I come. Patience Worth my name. Wait, I would speak with thee. If thou shalt live, then so shall I. . . Good friends, let us be merrie.
On July 8th 1913, after months of experimentation, a St. Louis housewife named Pearl Curran finally had a breakthrough with her Ouija board. From this initial correspondence, Pearl Curran wrote (or depending on your perspective, transcribed) millions of words she attributed to a seventeenth-century poet who called herself Patience Worth. Historical novels, religious tracts, and lyric poems were published and embraced by mainstream scholars as authentic examples of early American literature mediated from beyond the grave. The figure of Patience Worth was commended as an exemplary writer by organizations such as the Joint Committee of Literary Arts of New York. She was included in journals alongside such future canonical authors as Edna St. Vincent Millay and she appeared in collections such as the Anthology of Magazine Writing and the Yearbook of American Poetry. All the more amazingly, readers and critics agreed that this was new work by a woman who claimed to have been dead for more two and a half centuries.</span
These writing were either authentic documents that provided astounding evidence of humanity’s survival after death, or an intricate and impressive hoax that hoodwinked scholars, critics, and editors. There is also another possibility, that these works were the improvisational literary productions of a prodigy who believed herself to be a conduit of some muse from the hereafter. Questions of authorship and intention aside, what remains are the books, plays and poems — once popular literature, and now forgotten. Curran’s output prompts us to ask some fundamental questions about history, genre, intention, affect, authorship, and why we choose to read what we read. Furthermore, her writings are a fascinating curio of an era in American literary history when academics and quacks, the rational and the occult, scholarship and magic all mingled together in popular discourse.
Pearl Curran was born in 1883, towards the end of a century that saw the national landscape and the Unites States’ position in the world radically altered. She and her audience were inheritors of the sometimes bizarre religious diversity of the American nineteenth century. It was a century that began with the religious anarchism of the Second Great Awakening, was defined by an apocalyptic Civil War, and which moved into the bourgeois and respectable spiritualism of the late Victorian era. Occult experimentation was embraced by leading thinkers and writers like William James who with other leading scientists founded the American Society for Psychical Research. Curran was enmeshed in a culture of esoterica that she would have encountered during a Victorian adolescence. And the figure of Patience Worth “revealed” herself at a perfect time, just as the rising international power that was the United States began to critically re-evaluate its seventeenth century Puritan origins.
Colonial American writings were long dismissed as embarrassing anti-intellectual relics by great nineteenth-century authors like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In the early years of the twentieth century however, scholars began re-evaluating the seventeenth-century canon. Pearl Curran supplied a perfect model in her creation of Patience Worth, who was included alongside actual poets as an example of colonial American artistic genius. As the United States began to assert itself on a global stage it looked back towards its then agreed upon New England origins and began to refine its creation myth, extolling the virtues of Puritan thrift, industriousness, and individuality. Importantly for Curran the colonial period was also one where women’s voices were surprisingly not ignored. In early American poetry the seventeenth-century poet Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672) dominates as the single most exemplary and important literary figure. Other women writers like Mary Rowlandson (1637-1711) were the Puritan equivalents of best-sellers.
This new found enthusiasm for colonial American letters arrived at a perfect time for Curran. Indeed, the relative respect that colonial women writers like Bradstreet received dovetailed well with the feminine realm that was the early Twentieth century séance. As Gioia Diliberto makes clear in her excellent introduction to the Patience Worth phenomena, “Patience Worth: Author from the Great Beyond”: “Soon, scores of self-anointed mediums. . . burst on the scene, most of them women, whose passivity and purity, it was believed, made them ideal vessels to receive news from the Other Side.” It’s possible to view Curran as a native literary genius who, unable to promote her own authentic voice, is forced to invent a fictional persona that operates as her literary mask. Indeed, this is often how the case of Patience Worth is read. It’s not without precedent. From the Fox sisters of upstate New York to Madame Blavatsky, the séance has often been a woman’s game, able to supply a distinctly feminine voice when the larger society would not otherwise listen.
It is certainly possible to see Patience Worth in these terms. But it’s limiting to exclude other possible interpretations of this strange corpus. Curran cannot be seen as just another literary-minded medium. Her case was different. Mediums like Blavatsky strongly delineated between their own writings and the short passages attributed to spirits. Curran however produced an incredible number of writings, all of which were attributed to Patience Worth. There are scores of poems, letters, and novels including Telka, The Sorry Tale, Hope Trueblood, The Pot upon the Wheel, Samuel Wheaton, An Elizabethan Mask among other works. How should one consider the sheer amount and breadth of such works? If a hoax, it is still a hoax that is anything but simple, or easy.
Although we do not need to explain such a prolific career framed in such a bizarre manner by suggesting that Patience Worth was a real person, there exists the possibility that Curran understood authorship in a more unconventional way than the wider culture frequently does. Between the possibilities of Patience Worth’s reality and Pearl Curran’s duplicity there exists a third option: that Pearl Curran transcribed these works believing Patience Worth to be real, a creation of her own mind communicating these words back to her. An internal muse if you will, whose existence serves to reevaluate the simple individual models of authorship we conventionally hold to. As such, her corpus provides an occasion for thinking about where inspiration comes from, how authors generate their writings, and the ways in which something as seemingly well understood as writing still contains a kernel of mystery at its core.
Outside of occult circles, the embarrassing metaphysical nature of Patience Worth has relegated her to complete obscurity in the academic world for a century. There is not much respectability in the academic study of something that seems to be a hoax. This is an unfair fate for writings that, though not as technically proficient as works deemed canonical, still deserve study and attention, not just because of the way they illuminate an unusual period of American literary history, but also because the writings themselves are arguably more aesthetically proficient than one might expect. The critics who extolled the quality of Worth/Curran had their reasons for doing so, some of which still hold up. It should be emphasized again, that these are not just short lyric poems that one could see a Ouija-using author writing in a few minutes. The sheer length of some of her books is astounding in itself, to say nothing of their literary quality. One need only flip through The Pot upon the Wheel, a verse play whose dialogue sometimes reminds one of the spiritual urgency of a classical religious text like the Bhagavad-Gita. Or take A Sorry Tale, a more than six hundred page esoteric account of the life of Christ that at points reaches a prophetic pitch calling to mind the theology of William Blake.
Thankfully, this critical blind-spot is beginning to be rectified, with scholarly books like Daniel Shea’s The Patience of Pearl: Spiritualism and Authorship in the Writings of Pearl Curran published in 2012, and the aforementioned Diliberto article in 2010. They provide an excellent overview on the particulars of the Patience Worth case, analyzing not just biography, but also the context that produced these writings, and their reception and their loss.
When dipping into the voluminous corpus of writings one of the first things you notice is that they don’t bare the haphazard stream-of-consciousness style so common in the automatic writing practiced by Dadaist poets and other Avant-Garde groups. But they also don’t read like seventeenth century American prose and poetry, despite what early critical advocates of Pearl Curran like Casper Yost may have claimed. At most, one could say that the works exhibit qualities of pastiche in their depiction of how American Puritans wrote and talked — though none of this should diminish the very real personality that seems to come through the communications of Patience Worth.
She appears as variously smart, pious, sentimental, feisty, and sarcastic. She doesn’t read as a mere echo of Curran herself. As artistic creation, the idea of Patience Worth rather than her words are what is central. In reading her verse, one encounters a persona that, while three-dimensionally vibrant, doesn’t seem to match our expectations of how a seventeenth century New England woman would write. While syntax and phrasing can seem largely “authentic” there is little of the orthodox Calvinism one finds in actual early American poets like Bradstreet, Edward Taylor or Michael Wigglesworth. Rather, she seems to offer a broadly spiritual, new age philosophy in keeping with the circumstances of her “discovery.”
In terms of theme and language she is broadly “American” in the way we think of, say, Dickinson or Frost as being particularly American. She seems to mimic Dickinson (who was only really being rediscovered at the time that Pearl Curran was working) in her poem “Who said that love was fire?” Curran writes:
Who said that love was fire?I know that love is ash.It is the thing which remainsWhen the fire is spent,The holy essence of experience.

Admittedly, she departs from Dickinson’s distinctive ballad meter which conjures the structure of hymn, but at least visually the poem calls to mind the short lyrics of the “Bard of Amherst”. While not particularly sophisticated, there are some notable elements: the rhetorical question that she leads with, the images of fire and ash, and the line, “It is the thing which remains” (particularly evocative of Dickinson). The most unfortunate aspect of the poem is its last line which reminds one of particularly poor translations of Rumi or Hafez, and also reflects so much of the orientalist theosophical milieu that Pearl Curran traveled in — certainly much more than it does seventeenth century Puritan American religious lyric.
In another poem, “Child’s Prayer,” she takes as her theme the sort of sentimental subject that would not be out of place in Bradstreet, while still mimicking the style of nineteenth century American poets who were influenced by the Second Great Awakening:
Ah, Emptied Heart:Ah, emptied Heart! The Weary o’ the path!How would I to fill ye up o’ love!
With its declarations and its exclamation points she reminds us of Walt Whitman, even if she does not share his recognizable mighty lines.
An example of one of her more sophisticated lyrics is in the poem “The Earth the Fields Lay Stretched in Sleep.” She writes:
Dead, all dead!The earth, the fields, lie stretched in sleepLike weary toilers overdone.The valleys gape like toothless age,Besnaggled by dead trees.The hills, like boney jaws whose flesh hath dropped,Stand grinning at the deathy day.

In her depiction of an autumnal melancholy, she conflates nature with skeletal corpse images, a gothic personification similar to the memento mori tradition of the Puritanism she was supposedly an adherent of. Later, a lily is compared to a “brown-robed nun,” an entirely un-Puritan image in this strangely ecumenical religious world of Patience Worth. This same heterodox antinomian faith is evident in the title to her poem, “Predestined Love,” where one of the sternest doctrines of Calvinism is tweaked into one of universal love.
As this brief reading has shown, there is much literary merit in Curran’s work - so why then this neglect? The bizarre origin of the writings shouldn’t be an impediment to a reasoned study of their structural qualities. After all, William Butler Yeats attributed several of his lyrics to a spirit named Leo Africanus whom he encountered through the use of a Ouija board while a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Without suggesting that the writings of Curran and Yeats are of similar artistic value, it would seem that dismissing them entirely on the grounds that there is a connection to the occult is unfair if a similar standard isn’t applied to Yeats. In both of these cases it might be helpful to think of the mediated personalities as being complex heteronyms of a type exemplified by the Portuguese modernist poet Fernando Pessoa (a contemporary of Curran and one also fascinated by automatic writing and the occult). A heteronym is a particularly complicated pen-name; in addition to a false name there is an entirely false identity, a fictional writer where literariness is extratextual to the poem or book itself. These concepts, of the heteronym and the muse, inspiration and authorship raise interesting questions about the epistemology and ontology of literature. Where does literature ultimately come from? What is legitimate as an object of reading and study? Can a literary hoax still be read as literature?
The Patience Worth case complicates questions of authorship. While it seems clear that Curran is the literal author, the fictionality surrounding the very productions of authorship helps to complicate our conceptions of creation and interpretation. Since the French philosopher Roland Barthe’s 1967 essay “The Death of the Author,” both formalists and historicists have become increasingly comfortable with the idea that authorship itself is a sort of fiction. Patience Worth/Pearl Curran makes this fictionality all the more obvious. As such, it seems that she is more than overdue for a critical rediscovery.
In the long view of cultural history, her place becomes even more interesting. Biography and history become compressed and the relationship between who is a real person and who is a fictional person becomes more ontologically uncertain. I’m going to break any sort of pose of objectivity and say emphatically that I do not believe that Patience Worth was anything more than a full-bodied creation of Pearl Curran. It’s worth pointing out that there are no records of any actual Patience Worth having lived either in New England, or Dorsetshire where Curran claimed the poet was born. Yet, imagine someone reading Curran a millennium from now. Would such distinctions as whether Worth is “real” or not matter to this imagined reader? For classicists there are arguments about the “reality” of an author named Homer, ones that scholars working on much later periods don’t have to consider in the same way. Philosophically, if a heteronym’s words seem as full and real as an actual person, why can’t they be treated as such? The fullness of the fictionality of Patience Worth is that it is a fictionality which imposes itself on the real world, and that in itself is a fascinating act of literary creation.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: September 17, 2014

author: Ed Simon


text:
The Price of Suffering
William Pynchon  and The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption
By Daniel Crown
November 11, 2015

William Pynchon, earliest colonial ancestor of the novelist Thomas Pynchon, was a key figure in the early settlement of New England. He also wrote a book which became, at the hands of the Puritans it riled against, one of the first to be banned and burned on American soil. Daniel Crown explores.

On October 16, 1650, the General Court of Boston summoned the town executioner. Like his name, the executioner’s thoughts as he made his way to the marketplace that afternoon, far from the gallows at Boston Common, remain lost to history. Still, reason dictates that even a man inured to the grisliness of the execution racket must have worn a smile of relief on this, such an odd and unprecedented day. A typical workday for the professional death-dealer, when pressed into duty, would have usually entailed dusting off an old ladder, uncoiling a good bit of rope, and eventually sliding a noose around the neck of a prisoner. Not today. Today, the General Court, ever aware of the affecting power of symbolism, had charged the executioner of Boston with a comparably breezy task. He was to conjure a torch, listen to a town official prattle off a public proclamation, and then, with theatrical gusto, set fire to a pile of William Pynchon’s The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption.1
“Derogatory!” the Court had called the book the previous day.
“Erroneous”.
“Unsound”.
“Heretical”.2
Pithy denunciations, certainly, but ones with both immediate and lasting ramifications. Indeed, The Meritorious Price, written by the earliest colonial ancestor of the novelist Thomas Pynchon, had the lifespan of a Boston mayfly. A London publisher issued the first and only edition of the “small quarto volume of a hundred and fifty-eight pages” early in 1650.3 It made its way to Boston by summer. Mere months later, the book’s detractors had all but wiped it out of existence. What the Boston executioner had started, general disinterest finished with aplomb over the ensuing centuries. Only four copies of the book remain extant.
The Meritorious Price, of course, reads today harmlessly enough. Truth be told, a modern reader need only fear boredom from Pynchon’s exegesis on the origins of Grace. To leading officials in the government of Massachusetts Bay, however, this was an insidious text, an exercise in heresy—one the Puritan clergy believed capable of throwing their young and vulnerable colony into irreversible chaos. Pynchon, a prominent layman with a devoted constituency, was charismatic enough to inspire a movement similar to the Antinomian debacle that had nearly brought the colony to its knees in the previous decade. Notwithstanding his lofty place in New England society, Pynchon and his book simply had to go. The ensuing controversy, placed within the context of Pynchon’s life, perfectly encapsulates the tenuous relationship between colonial New England’s people, its Church, and its State.
In many ways, William Pynchon is the forgotten founding father of colonial New England. Though largely unheralded today, there is no refuting he had his hands all over the enterprise from its very inception. Born around 1590, Pynchon came from an old and prestigious family. He owned a sizable amount of land in Springfield, Essex, where he served as a churchwarden — a lay position, typically held by prominent parishioners, which represented the laity at official meetings of the Anglican Church.4 It is unknown when Pynchon began to associate with Puritans, though it is widely held that by the 1610s he had befriended numerous influential reformers5,  more than a few of whom advocated removal to America.
Soon after arriving in 1630, Pynchon helped found and govern a settlement at Rocksbury—now Roxbury, Massachusetts. On May 14, 1636, he, along with a handful of pioneering Puritans, abandoned the colony to establish the Plantation of Agawam. From the start, he served there as a magistrate, overseeing local disputes and legal matters.
It was not long before Agawam began to run afoul with its neighboring English settlements. Situated between the borders of Massachusetts and Connecticut, Pynchon’s colony had been affiliated with the latter since its foundation in 1636. During the Pequot War (1636–1638), Pynchon refused to jeopardize his lucrative trade agreements with nearby Native American tribes, putting him at odds with those in charge of the war effort. This was particularly true in Connecticut, which hosted many of the war’s fiercest battles. Ultimately, the animosity between Pynchon and Connecticut led to Agawam — which was soon renamed Springfield — becoming a part of Massachusetts when the two colonies redrew their lines in 1638.6 Taking full advantage of the distance between Springfield and Boston, Pynchon soon bolstered his rogue reputation by openly questioning the authority of the Massachusetts government.7
Four years before the publication of The Meritorious Price, seven members of the Plymouth Colony took a public stand against the Bay colony’s stranglehold on local politics. Though New England’s Church and State remained technically separate, only members of the predominate Puritan churches were eligible for governmental positions.8 This stripped many members of the colonial community — particularly Presbyterians — of any sense of agency in their home colonies. Not only did these men, all of them English citizens, have to pay taxes to support Puritan ministers with whom they fundamentally disagreed, but they were also forced to agree to restrictive citizenship regulations, which they believed blatantly defied English law.9 In response to this, Robert Child and six others presented the General Court with a Remonstrance and Petition in 1646.
In March 1647, Pynchon, seemingly unrequested, wrote to Gov. John Winthrop with advice on the matter. His words heavily hinted at what would become one of the implicit themes in The Meritorious Price. Noting a contemporary controversy in Scotland, Pynchon not only reminded the governor that American colonies remained subject to English law, but he also championed the merits of reasonable religious tolerance:
For the parliament doe not hould any certaine fourme of Church government to be commanded in the particulars thereof as the only way of Christ . . . But truly where zeale of gods glory and godly wisdome are joined together: a world of good hath bin don by godly ministers even in England that have held no certain fourme of discipline.10
For obvious reasons, Pynchon’s criticism of the colonial government proved immediately controversial. His true troubles began, however, the moment he turned his attention to the failings of the Massachusetts clergy.
Historians are not sure when, exactly, Pynchon began to write The Meritorious Price. The spiritual and intellectual growth processes behind the book also remain a mystery, though Pynchon later admitted he wrote it as a synthesis of sorts, combining sermons and books crafted by a handful of controversial, but non-heretical English Puritans: chiefly Anthony Wotton and Hugh Broughton. As the historian Michael Winship argues in his essay, “William Pynchon Reexamined,” The Meritorious Price is an incredible accomplishment for a man who likely did not have access to a comprehensive theological library in the colonies. It brims with references to esoteric texts, suggesting Pynchon spent his last years in England gathering sources to augment the gestating arguments of his controversial book. Lest anyone misunderstand his intent for The Meritorious Price, he sums up the crux of these long-brewing arguments in a single paragraph on the book’s title page:
The Meritorious Price of Redemption, Justification, &c., Cleering from Some common Errors; And proving: 1. That Christ did not suffer for us those unutterable torments of God’s wrath, that commonly are called Hell-torments, to redeem our soules from them. 2. That Christ did not bear our sins by Gods imputation, and therefore he did not bear the curse of the Law for them. 3. That Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of Law (not by suffering the said curse for us, but by a satisfactory price of attonement; viz. by paying or performing unto his Father that invaluable precious thing of his Mediatroiall obedience, whereof his Mediatoriall Sacrifice of attonement was the master-piece. 4. A sinners righousnesse or justification is explained, and cleared from some common errors.
According to a letter written in the following months by five prominent New England ministers as a response to a group of Pynchon’s English supporters, this paragraph alone proved enough to raise the ire of the General Court. The letter states that the Court first received the book during its quarterly meeting in October 1650. “At the same time,” they write, “a Ship in the Harbor was ready to set sail for England.” The Court, they continue:
perceiving by the Title Page that the Contents of the Book were unsound, and Derogatory, both to the Justice and the Grace of Christ, [worried that] this Book being published under the name of a New English Gentleman, might occasion many to think that New England also concurred in the allowance of such Exorbitant Aberrations.11
It is likely, then, the Court did not read the entirety of Pynchon’s book before having it burned. In their eyes, its opening pages were rife enough with heresy to merit immediate action. With this in mind, the Court ensured the aforementioned ship left Massachusetts without The Meritorious Price. Instead, it sent a letter of repudiation. In it, the Court did not merely rebuke Pynchon; they committed to paper a wholesale abjuration of the controversial conversations then occurring within the native Anglican Church and its growingly abundant offshoots. Old England had let its ecclesiastical leash go slack. New England would not make the same mistake.
To understand why, exactly, the Court reacted this way, one cannot avoid diving headlong into the debates that largely defined mid-17th-century Puritanism. Puritans of the era, both in the homeland and the colonies, lived and worked within an at times suffocating paradox. One of the major draws to the faith involved its emphasis on a personal relationship with the Bible. The Puritan clergy, then, had to figure out a way to encourage people of the faith to read the text without reading too much into it.
While the Church taught and promoted very specific interpretations of scripture — particularly those defending the tenets of predestination — this did little to satiate the most curious and defiant in their ranks. As more and more fringe theologians grew in prominence, new and controversial exegeses soon proliferated across the Atlantic community. Given that England was currently winding up a ten-year civil war — one caused at least in part by controversial doctrinal issues  — the colonial clergy was perhaps justifiably sensitive to what it deemed divisive ideas and innovations.
When considering potential heresy, clergy members kept an eye out for a series of red flags. Pynchon’s book rose just about all of them. First, he openly and defiantly questioned the nature and origin of God’s Grace. Most Puritans of the era believed that God had gifted his spiritual elect with salvation by “imputing” his son with their sins on the cross. In effect, these sins were wiped clean the moment Jesus died and descended into Hell where he “suffered the extremity of [God’s] wrath”. To Pynchon, Christ was not so much a sacrifice as a mediator. According to the historian Philip F. Gura, Pynchon believed that “since sin had come into the world through Adam’s archetypal transgression, Christ’s perfect obedience to the Father’s will — evidenced by his passion and death — and not the Father’s imputation of men’s sins to him, redeemed the elect from Adam’s curse”. In other words, mankind inflicted its wrath upon God (in the form of man), and not the other way around. The elect, then, earned salvation through the example of Christ’s perfect life, which culminated on the cross. Obedience, not Jesus’ suffering, ultimately served as the wellspring of Grace.12
While Pynchon does not explicitly say so, The Meritorious Price nonetheless put the millennia-old idea of “works” back on the table — a belief that flew in the face of Grace-based redemption. Though Pynchon in effect doubled down on predestination by denouncing Antinomians and other troublesome Anabaptist groups (which had advocated for universal Grace in the past), the Court likely did not read these contentions when it made its initial ruling. Based solely upon the nutgraph printed on the title page, the Court seems to have inferred from the text that anyone, should they live piously, might earn Grace rather than receive it. This constituted Pynchon’s second major offense. Many who read The Meritorious Price saw this belief as incongruent with the notion of a spiritual elect.
Finally, Pynchon’s motives themselves came under fire. During the court process, it became clear the author did not believe the Massachusetts clergy held a monopoly on biblical interpretation. As Gura writes, Pynchon believed ardently in “the latitudinarian principle that no man — be he minister or magistrate — was infallible and thus [no man had the right] to impose ecclesiastical or doctrinal norms on an individual otherwise directed by his conscience”.13 According to the historian Michael Winship, this particular stance is what ultimately damned Pynchon’s book. The Meritorious Price spoke directly to what the Massachusetts clergy saw as “the problematic involvement of laity in professional theological quarrels”.14
None of Pynchon’s arguments, after all, were new. Pynchon admitted as much in future works. Wotton and Broughton, Pynchon’s greatest influences, both promoted similar theologies years earlier; yet, thanks in large part to their professional status, neither saw their respective books summarily rejected as did the founder of Springfield. Though a prominent member of Massachusetts’ society, Pynchon was nonetheless a theological layman. When he published his work, he crossed a line.
Governor John Endicott and his council made this abundantly clear in a letter written on October 20, 1652, to one of Pynchon’s defenders, Henry Vane. Pointing out that “ministers in all the four jurisdictions” had deemed the book heretical, the Council nonetheless regretted having to publicly embarrass Pynchon, a man held in such high regard in Springfield. He likely would have avoided censure, the letter continues, “had he kept his judgment to himself, as it seems he did above thirty years”. However, when Pynchon “[published and spread] his erroneous books amongst us, to the endangering of the faith of such as might read them . . . we held it our duty, and believe we were called of God, to proceed against him accordingly”.15
In addition to the burning of Pynchon’s book, the General Court also commissioned a theologian named John Norton to write an official rebuttal. They then summoned Pynchon to appear before the General Court in May 1651.16 There Pynchon offered the Court a half-hearted apology. “I have not spoken in my book,” he relented, “so fully of the price, and merit of [Christ’s] sufferings as I should have done”.17 The General Court accepted the man’s contrition, though the magistrates did demand he appear before them again the following October. They set bail at £100. This time, Pynchon absconded.
As it turned out, he’d already made plans for a permanent return to England. It was there that Pynchon’s gloves truly came off. No longer held back by Massachusetts’ restrictive policies on lay-theology, he quickly published another book in 1652. In this work — titled The Jewish Synagogue — Pynchon took the New England clergy to task for veering too far from accepted doctrine with its foundational ideas about  “visible saints”.18 In doing so, Pynchon joined a growing chorus of dissenters who took issue with the restrictive nature of church membership in the colonies. And Pynchon was just getting started. By the time he died in 1662, he had published numerous further works, including an official response to Norton’s rebuttal under the cheeky title of The Meritorious Price of Man’s Redemption. Though Pynchon polished his original arguments in this work, he nonetheless used the book to reaffirm the most controversial of his views, including those for which he had publicly apologized at the General Court.19
In the end, Pynchon’s ideas about imputation and atonement never gained much traction. For all of its failures as a theological text, however, The Meritorious Price did live on, if only in the shadows of America’s earliest self-spun history. From the early-19th century onward, historical societies began to use Pynchon’s text as a literal and figurative footnote — often referencing The Meritorious Price as America’s “first banned book”. It is also worth noting that Pynchon’s equally enigmatic descendent, Thomas, has brought occasional attention to the book over the past five decades, making multiple references to his family history in his short stories, as well as in his classic novel Gravity’s Rainbow.
This is not, however, to say that the impact of The Meritorious Price was entirely limited to future eras. In the decades following William’s death, the New England clergy’s staunch defense of restrictive church membership eventually softened as new and evolving viewpoints among the laity threatened to damn their church into irrelevancy. Though there is no direct link between Pynchon’s work and this radical shift in the colonial paradigm, historians have recently elucidated the fact that the father of Solomon Stoddard, one of the key figures in the reformation of the Church’s membership policy, once went to prison for his support of Pynchon’s book. This gives “the strong indication” that The Meritorious Price and Stoddard’s important innovations “grew from the same New England roots”.20 If so, then this stands as yet one more important facet of Pynchon’s lost legacy — a record paradoxically consumed and invigorated within the cleansing light of the executioner’s flame.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: November 11, 2015

author: Daniel Crown


text:
Copying Pictures, Evidencing Evolution

By Nick Hopwood
May 18, 2016

Copying — unoriginal, dull, and derivative by definition — can be creative, contested, and consequential in its effects. Nick Hopwood tracks Haeckel’s embryos, some of the most controversial pictures in the history of science, and explores how copying put them among the most widely seen.

New images are flooding the world, and the sciences contribute more than their fair share. But open a textbook, turn on the TV, or visit a webpage and look at the pictures. There among the recent entrants from laboratories, clinics, and field sites, a few golden oldies jostle for attention. While most images fade away fast, a minority represent knowledge for long periods — even in science, where we might have expected constant updating. The checkered history of one extraordinary image family can illuminate these afterlives.
Striking comparisons of vertebrate embryos debuted in the books by the anticlerical German zoologist Ernst Haeckel that took a Darwinist system to the reading public in the 1860s and ’70s. The Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (Natural history of creation) went through eleven editions between 1868 and World War I and was translated into a dozen languages; it was “perhaps the chief source of the world’s knowledge of Darwinism”. The more embryological Anthropogenie managed six editions between 1874 and 1910 and was twice Englished as The Evolution of Man. With fossils in short supply, comparative embryology offered compelling evidence of common descent. Haeckel arranged this in vivid visuals for the first time.
Haeckel’s embryos come in grids. The “columns” correspond to vertebrate species, in the lithograph from the Anthropogenie members of the four lower classes: “fish”, salamander, turtle, and chick, and four mammals: pig, cow, rabbit, and human. The rows stand for stages, here “early”, “fairly early” and “late”. We see the embryos begin very similar and diverge towards their adult forms. Look harder and there is also evidence for Haeckel’s dictum “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”: we climb our evolutionary tree in the womb. For example, the top row corresponds to an ancestral stage equivalent to the jawless fish. But differentiation from a near-identical origin is the more obvious point, and provocative enough, especially when surrounded by liberal rhetoric and swipes at religion. Let the “church militant” damn “the naked facts of human germ history” as “diabolical inventions of materialism”, Haeckel thundered, “embryology is the heavy artillery in the struggle for truth”.
The Schöpfungsgeschichte had not been out a year when a researcher sympathetic to evolutionism, but hostile to Haeckel’s approach, accused him of various pictorial misdemeanours. Infamously, Haeckel had had single woodblocks printed three times to represent the embryos of a mammal, a bird, and a reptile. He corrected this sharp practice in the second edition and eventually admitted his “extremely rash foolishness”. More debatable are the plates, on which he was charged with skewing the evidence by drawing the embryos more similar than they really are. These allegations came to a head in the mid-1870s, when Haeckel’s Anthropogenie put embryology in the eye of a storm over Darwinism, not to mention major confrontations between the state and the Catholic Church, and between evolutionists and physiologists in biology. The “German Darwin” countered that his figures were schematics, appropriate simplifications that legitimately expressed his view; would his critics have him draw without thinking? With the theory of evolution underpinning ideologies of progress, enough people took his side that the plates could stay in his books, but the fraud allegations never went away. In 1908–10, they flared up in a larger, nastier battle that made front-page news in Germany and was reported internationally, including in the United States, then taking over as the powerhouse of science.
Haeckel’s diagrams still became standard textbook illustrations of comparative evolutionary embryology in twentieth-century American high-school and college textbooks. Until another intense controversy, that is. By the mid-1900s embryologists had largely abandoned Haeckel’s questions, but from the 1980s some became interested in evolution again, and in 1997 one accused him of fraud — in ignorance of the long history of forgery charges. Many biologists now rejected the pictures, and the neo-creationist advocates of so-called intelligent design forced some publishers to take them out. Putting “Haeckel’s embryos” into google takes you to websites like Answers in Genesis and Darwinism.refuted.com. But Darwinism should not be at stake: the molecular homologies discovered in the last few decades confirm the fact of evolution more persuasively than Haeckel ever could. Where his embryos do excel, however, is in providing food for thought about how images succeed and fail.
The controversies generated by the forgery charges help make assumptions explicit. That certain groups repudiated the pictures in certain places at certain times also pushes us to explain how they could have been so warmly embraced or blithely taken for granted by others and elsewhere. But the potential of the case has long been buried under the more obvious but less interesting question: “Did he forge them, then?” I can answer: compared with the standard practice of his day, Haeckel’s drawing was unconventional, reckless even, but there was no intent to deceive and he had little interest in cheating. Even to give Haeckel a fair trial, however, we would have to consider how friend and foe negotiated what would count as fraud. To grasp how his images became taken for granted and caused trouble, we must cast a still wider net.
It might seem frivolous to devote attention to popular pictures that Haeckel scrawled on the back of an envelope in five minutes. It is worth it, because his embryos mediated between cutting-edge research, the general press, and classroom teaching during the decades when a mass audience saw science illustrated for the first time. These images are strategic because they played such varied roles — puzzling, beautiful, inaccurate, forged, classic — for so many different people. They enthralled a “secret league” of schoolboys drinking in the “hidden back room” of a “fairly disreputable” Cologne pub, for whom Haeckel’s evolutionism solved the mystery of life and replaced the Christian faith. They also engaged the most expert comparative vertebrate embryologists who ever lived. Reconstructing the genesis and copying of the pictures, the launching and repetition of the charges, and the way pictures and charges circulated among scientists and laypeople shows how alleged forgeries could become textbook illustrations and even icons. Along the way, the story reveals how developing embryos, which few people had ever seen when Haeckel started out, were made objects we can compare and debate. The rest of this essay focuses on copying, and how it made Haeckel’s grids, and made them known, while generating a fascinating series of variations on a theme.
Copying was at issue from the beginning: Haeckel’s first accuser said his plates manufactured false identities by miscopying standard illustrations from the literature. Haeckel insisted privately that his own specimens had informed his drawings too, and stressed that he had allowed himself — as was not standard then — to depict all the embryos in the same view, at the same size, and in the same dramatic style. Those googly eyes perhaps owed more to the tricks of the popular lecturer than university professors usually committed to print. More positively, and less remarked, the arrangement of the figures created the innovative grid design. The plate in the first edition of the Schöpfungsgeschichte offered three pairwise comparisons, of dog and human embryos at an early stage, and of dog and human, turtle and chick, at a later one. “During the first two months of development”, Haeckel thundered, even “nobles . . . are scarcely distinguishable from the tailed embryos of the dog and other mammals”. But the pairs did not yet make a grid.
Only in the second edition, when all captions moved to the back of the book, did Haeckel and the lithographer take advantage to set up a grid that powerfully aligned the embryos for easy comparison at each stage. It was challenging enough to construct a developmental series for one species: material was scarce — the earliest human embryos were unknown till the mid-twentieth century — and it took much cutting, drawing, and interpreting to turn the nondescript contents of eggs or clumps in blood into clear and comparable images. To coordinate such series for multiple species was harder still, but the grid created an inviting space.
Later editions of Haeckel’s books revised and expanded the plates. The early ones had drawn on the German farmyard, heath, and forest, but as embryologists exploited networks of empire Haeckel added such exotics as ostrich, spiny anteater, koala, and gibbon. The grid structure encouraged him to fill with “deductions” some cells that a more prudent zoologist might have left empty pending further research. That would damage his reputation when these late editions, which themselves accounted for a small fraction of the copies in circulation, were the basis for plates in cheap pamphlets that kindled controversy on the eve of World War I. Most translations amplified the early grids, but Haeckel’s extraordinary fame around 1900 justified a second English version of the Anthropogenie and this carried the full imperial parade.
Yet an image does not become iconic through publication in books by a Haeckel or even a Darwin alone; it needs to be copied further. Haeckel’s embryos were reproduced in other evolutionary works as evidence of common descent. Authors and illustrators either did not know about the forgery charges or discounted them. But there are significant absences: no German professor used Haeckel’s drawings for decades and some of his staunchest defenders played safe by assembling their own embryo groups instead. In the 1890s, his embryos, first published in books printed a thousand or two at a time, nevertheless entered encyclopaedias with runs of a quarter million per edition.
Copying not only makes images known, it may also simplify or modify them as users select a canonical form. Today, “Haeckel’s embryos” are almost synonymous with reproductions and adaptations of the double plate in the first edition of the Anthropogenie, but it took many years for this one to win out. Two limit scenarios represent the range of early copies from both Schöpfungsgeschichte and Anthropogenie. At one extreme, authors treated the grids in academic lectures by a distinguished German professor as authoritative sources of figures, and raided them for individual drawings. This made simpler illustrations, more suited to more popular books, and cheaper, especially when they had to be re-lithographed or re-engraved. The most unusual is an art nouveau chapter header from Das Liebesleben in der Natur (Love life in nature), the bestselling eroticization of evolutionism by Haeckel’s ally and friend Wilhelm Bölsche.
At the other extreme, expert evolutionists implicitly accepted the criticism of Haeckel, keeping the grid structure but replacing every figure to provide impeccable evidence for largely Haeckelian conclusions. These accurate arrays were rather unsuccessful, however, and by the early twentieth century books increasingly borrowed Haeckel’s plates as redrawn and engraved in an uncontroversial secondary source, George John Romanes’s “exposition of Darwinian teaching” in the first volume of Darwin and After Darwin. Via photomechanical printing it was now straightforward to reproduce the whole grid.
All this time, the forgery charges had been continually rewarmed. As an outcome of the battles over Haeckel in the 1870s, Darwinism was effectively banned from German schools, but this added an extra frisson of transgression to viewing these forbidden fruits. Religion teachers, catching children reading Haeckel under the desk, denounced his pictures as “outrageous forgeries”. Traditionalist parents warned their daughters that such horrible illustrations were unsuitable for girls. The embryos conducted ideological sparks across the generations and between milieux. Then Haeckel became an even bigger target through his role in creating a mass audience for science. The Riddles of the Universe, his (unillustrated) primer of scientistic anticlericalism, sold some 400,000 in German alone and was translated into a dozen languages. The most famous and notorious German scientist, the greatest living evolutionist, was a lightning rod for controversy and a target for legions of enemies, especially on the Christian right. (Haeckel moved rightwards himself, but had more supporters among liberals and on the left, a fact that became awkward when some Nazis celebrated this advocate of eugenics or “racial hygiene”.)
Fearful of working-class atheism, in 1908 right-wing populists levelled new charges against plates in pamphlets after big public lectures by Haeckel. Newspapers whipped up a scandal for the people. Biologists rallied round the figurehead of German Darwinism and against the threat of political interference, without condoning the drawings. But after he died in 1919 his reputation declined further, as physiological approaches made the running in embryology and highbrows looked down on his popular philosophy. American textbooks saved his pictures.
Textbooks notoriously recycle images as well as errors, but for lack of direct evidence specific cases can be difficult to explain. Patterns of use help. Haeckel’s diagrams were introduced into the United States much earlier than Germany because high schools taught more evolution-based elementary biology and Americans knew less about the accusations. Even after 1925, when the state of Tennessee outlawed human evolution in the public schools and tried John Scopes for teaching “that man has descended from a lower order of animals”, the embryos stayed in schoolbooks, albeit in bowdlerized form.
College textbooks reproduced the drawings from around 1930 because they “excel in emphasizing essential agreements and ultimate differences”. Expansion of the books and the bureaucratization of the industry established the general conditions for recycling. Specific factors explain how these images survived big threats: the modern evolutionary synthesis (which at mid-century ousted Haeckel’s, by implication, unmodern one) and the curriculum modernizations of the 1960s. Creationists, the most dogged critics, were marginal, and few evolutionists realized what a question mark hung over the pictures. Their use was favoured by the confused legacy of comparative evolutionary embryology. (Was recapitulation simply wrong, or was there a core of truth? Did embryos recapitulate adult forms, or only embryonic ones?) Use was stereotyped. Take a mid-century college textbook, turn to the chapter on “Evidences of organic evolution”, find no. 3: “Comparative embryology”, and chances are the most readily available image will illustrate a few formulaic paragraphs in a stable combination or “imagetext”. The pictures were also protected by crediting Romanes not Haeckel. The text might say that Haeckel was wrong, or at best overzealous; that recapitulation was false, or at least an exaggeration; and that the embryos did not march in parallel, but rather diverged — and point to his drawings to prove it. This could happen because the images were never a readout of the recapitulation theory, but primarily display similarity and divergence, and so were open to alternative evolutionist interpretations.
These embryos had nevertheless been all but absent from one whole class of book: those devoted to embryology. The images were imported from more general works only in the early 1980s, when interest in “evolution and development” revived. They structured knowledge even in advanced reviews that renovated the idea, elaborated from Haeckel’s grids, that there is a stage — his top row — on which vertebrates converge from different beginnings and from which they then diverge. This set the scene for the latest round of forgery charges. In 1997, a London developmental biologist denied that there is a sharply defined common stage, and the rise of creationism, fraud-busting, and the internet amplified his claim. The diagrams were expunged from the textbooks, but creationists did not want to remove all trace. In a typical irony of iconoclasm, they ensured that the embryos were more reproduced than ever before — as negative icons of Darwinist infamy.
For a while it looked as though the pictures would be used only where distancing was understood, such as by creationists or historians of science. But at the end of 2010 they occupied the most sought-after space in science publishing, the cover of the leading journal Nature. Illustrating articles that used genomic methods to confirm the conserved stage, Haeckel’s grid took the form of a mosaic generated by sampling a database of gene expression patterns in fruit-fly embryos. The drawings had not just hung on; they were still involved in innovation after 140 years. Who would bet that they will not one day be more fully rehabilitated, and if they are, that they do not start a major controversy again?
There is another irony. Haeckel’s embryos could spread because they were effectively in the public domain. German copyright law allowed reproduction with acknowledgement; permission to reproduce from Romanes was readily granted; and publishers redrew the figures. But in the early 2000s, when critics and defenders of evolution contested the history on blogs, it became clear that specific copies from Haeckel and Romanes could be hard to find. One library rarely held all editions and few of the relevant textbooks were online.
Many of Haeckel’s embryos are freely available all the same. Their histories show how copying produced an image family and how the differences mattered. From the making of the first grid through the variations that adapted it to a host of other books, copying has been creative. In the accusation that Haeckel miscopied standard images, it has been contested. And, from the battles of the 1870s to the recent dispute over the conserved stage, it has been consequential. That is the shock of the copy.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Nick Hopwood